To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Ah, gentle reader. As the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a category simply labeled “Funny” and as I laid my hands upon this volume of Ogden Nash poetry which I bought in 2021, I thought it would do. After all, I have found Nash amusing over the years. As I recount in my last book […]
Aside from the (then) complete works of Emily Dickinson that I started to read in 1994, this might have been the book that took me the longest to read from beginning to end. I started this book probably nine years ago, back when I read other Ogden Nash collections and other poetry to my toddlers […]
This is a later volume from Nash, and it shows. His preoccupation with his children has passed onto his preoccupation with his grandchildren. His poetry is more gloomy amid the humor as he recognizes he’s aging and won’t be the young man again. Hence, it really doesn’t exhibit the playful nature of his earlier works […]
This book collects some of Nash’s work in an around the World War II era, complete with mocking tones about Mussolini and Germany. However, it includes some gems of zingers and whatnot and amusing enough poetry to read aloud to a couple of children who don’t get the point but like to chant when they […]
Many Long Years Ago by Ogden Nash (1945) Reflections on Our Friendship by American Greetings Corporation (1975) Old Possum’s Practical Book of Cats by T.S. Eliot (1939, 1982) If laddie reckons himself to be a poet, laddie really ought to read diverse styles of poetry and, yes, sometimes even poetry that is not very good. […]
It took me some time to read this book, because I’m reading poetry volumes aloud these days and although one child cannot flee from the poetry, the other one can, so it has been slow going. Still, they like Ogden Nash. Or perhaps I like reading Ogden Nash to them. Nash’s silly verses are laden […]
Ogden Nash didn’t take poetry too seriously; the verses are light things with rhymes and runon lines used to comedic effect. I don’t know what else to say about it; they were fun to read aloud and amusing, which is what Nash was no doubt going for. He tortures spellings to get rhymes and tacks […]
I bought this book fourteen years ago during an especially gluttonous trip to a book sale not long after my youngest was born. It would have been the autumn after my mother’s diagnosis and but, what, four months before her death? Eleven months before our move to Springfield? A long time ago, to be sure, […]
I know, I know; you saw my post about albums I bought this weekend, and you said, Who cares about the cheap, obscure easy listening records you buy in an attempt to find something of yours on Lileks’ Thrift Store Vinyl feature on Fridays?. Well, my bibliophile friend, it’s your turn to feast your eyes […]
I got this book at ABC Books. When I got it home, I did put it directly on the read shelves in the poetry corner, where I discovered that although I do indeed have a volume with Tennyson Illustrated on the cover, they are not, in fact, in the same set nor are they by […]
As you might know, gentle reader, I used to sit and read poems to my child and then children while they played. This book, along with Ogden Nash’s I’m A Stranger Here Myself, represent probably the last two I started to read with them before they were resigned to the nightstand book accumulation point. So […]
This BRY (Book Reading Year, roughly Christmas to Christmas), I completed, what, 111 books? The Hungry Ocean Linda Greenlaw Death Valley Scotty: The Man and the Myth Hank Johnston Taekwondo Kyorugi: Olympic Style Sparring Kuk Hyun Chung, Kyung Myung Lee, Sang H. Kim Whatever Became Of? Second Series Richard Lamparski You Can Tell You’re A […]
So I’ve been reading the Ogden Nash poetry collection that’s been spotted on a book accumulation point, and I carried it to church in St. Louis this week. I read a couple, and I took a break to read the Ace of Spades HQ Book Thread and then to read the Ogden Nash Wikipedia entry, […]
My first exposure to Baxter Black was a folksy column that ran weekly in the Republic Monitor, the weekly paper in the next town over, when I first moved to southwest Missouri. He talked about being a cowboy and humorous anecdotes about the same. However, the paper dropped the column some years ago, likely as […]
I might have mentioned in my recent book reports that I’m working my way through the stack of books beside my sofa that I’ve stacked up to browse during football games. Some of them prove to be harder to browse than others, and they will sort of fall to the bottom of the stack and […]
I’ve reached an age where decades are a drop in the sink beneath the mirror in which my face suddenly sags. You know, a couple years ago (six being “a couple,” where ten is “a few”), I started a category on this blog called DeRooneyfication, which covers projects I’ve completed after the passage of time. […]
I took a quick look at an old post (Good Book Hunting: August 27, 2007, and I zoomed in on the picture of my to-read shelves in Old Trees, and I thought, Man, I need to get to reading some of those books. Click for full size I see a bunch of them on the […]
This is a chapbook from a little old lady who wrote poems about her home, her friends, and her family in the 1970s and 1980s. Its pages are typewritten (and, in some places, corrected with correction fluid and hand printing), and it’s bound by a comb binder, probably something provided by Kinko’s or the like […]
As you know, I buy my books in bulk at book fairs and often end up with duplicates. A recent cleanup of my bookshelves has yielded the following: They include: Isaac Asimov’s The Robots of Dawn and Foundation and Earth. John Sandford’s Hidden Prey and Mortal Prey. Classic Club editions of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel […]
Yesterday, we hit the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library’s semiannual book sale. On a full price day, but we were without children. Since it was not half price day or bag day, I found myself restraining myself and putting down books that I would have picked up in other circumstances. Which is good, because […]