Author: Brian J. Noggle

I picked this book up last weekend at ABC Books because I hoped it would have a time travel element in it, as the back of the book indicates that it tells the story of a ship that went back in time to make some astronomical observations, and on the way back, the astronomer on the crew of three went mad and killed the captain of the vessel. And I thought I was it would fit into the set in two times category of the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, especially as the first bit of it is set on the ship in the past (which is still our future a bit). However, at the end of the prolog, it says it’s an excerpt from the surviving mate’s log. Uh oh.

So: The first part of the book is the mystery as to why the astronomer went mad. Well, apparently, in their trip to the past, they discovered from their position not only in the past but 100 light years over from Earth’s position that the galactic core had exploded a long time ago, and the shockwave of radiation would reach earth 20 years after their own time. That alone wasn’t quite enough to make the astronomer mad–he also had some “hallucinations” that they were being followed on their return to earth for months in the starless void of their hyperspeed (from which they dropped periodically to take additional measurements to make sure they were not mistaken).

When they return to Earth, the mate reveals the story to the head of the international science agency–and then they discover that the astronomer was right–they were followed by aliens who land at Kennedy Spaceport and offer their help, which would involve turning the planet into a ship, but that would not only put the inhabitants into hardship as they hardened domiciles and whatnot but would also use up most of earth’s mass as fuel, rendering it not like it is now when they eventually reach the M31 galaxy (some time in the future). So the middle part is a boggy bit of bureaucratic stuff while they try to make the decision politically appealing and the head of the UN tries to pawn off ultimate responsibility to the head of the science agency. And the big mystery is why are the aliens helping? And that do they want in return? The middle comprises months of interactions, public reactions, and ruminations. But I guess it’s hard to write an emergency that is seventeen years in coming.

The end is pretty quick, though, when the aliens force a decision and reveal the reason they’re helping–their forefathers accidentally triggered the explosion, and they’re traveling to safety at near-light speed so they can find and help along other civilizations that they might find. And they want the humans’ help because they’ve become dependent upon a “coordinator,” a hive mind intelligence (via computer) which has guided them for thousands of years and which is going to “die” because they won’t have energy to run it–so they need humans who are closer to nature to be able to help them survive on wild planets they find. And, finis.

I hope you don’t mind that the book report here as spoilers, but, c’mon, man; the odds of you finding this book and picking it up in the wild are pretty low, and I would not go ordering it off of the Internet. It has a bit of a 70s vibe to it, not the eternal Soviet vs. US thing you get out of many books from the era, but the other, more “optimistic” one where international bodies kind of rule (although it’s worth noting that the book does not shy away from describing the human nature of those who run the organizations). But the thought of the UN being a unifying force for humanity is so 1900s, man.

So the book is not a direct ancestor of the movie Event Horizon (the novelization of which I read in 2008), but I can see how it might have been an inspiration. Someone takes the base conceit–a ship went somewhere extra-dimensionally/extra-timely and its occupants went mad–that someone put their own spin on. You know, if I were more of a writer instead of just a twee little blogger, maybe I would mine the 1970s midlist fiction I read from time to time for ideas. Ah, but that’s effort, and I’m not giving up nap time or time to try to finish the Winter Reading Challenge for actual productivity of any sort. Perish the thought!

Ah, gentle reader. I combed my stacks for something “Inspiring” to read for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge. You might remember, gentle reader, that I also had trouble with the “Feels Good” category last year, settling for Hope Always Wins. Which might have made a good entry this year for this category, but, alas, I’d already read it. I had one of the small poetry collections I get bundled for fifty cents at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale with “Inspirational” in the subtitle, but I’ve already got two poetry collections on this list. So I found this book, which I bought…. I dunno. No book sale marks on it, no ABC Books sticker on it–I think I received this as a gift. Someone gave me a book. Probably my beautiful wife. Its subtitle is The Teachings of Bruce Lee, and the author is his daughter (who was four when he died).

So, inspiring? Well, it made me want to practice martial arts (which, of course, I haven’t, because that would not be wasting my time like writing twee little apps) and to watch the Bruce Lee movies I bought a year ago (soon, now that I’m about a book and a half away from completing the Winter Reading Challenge). This book is really three books in one:

1. A biography of Bruce Lee’s adult years, studying philosophy, working in Hollywood, starting his martial art (jeet kune do), and writing.
2. A memoir of the daughter as she works through some of her issues, seeking knowledge from a variety of thought sources and practices, and landing on her father’s writing as she takes the reins of Bruce Lee’s enterprises in adulthood.
3. A self-help book, nominally based on the works and writings of Bruce Lee (paraphrased), but run through a corporate-speak blender. At several points in the book, I lost the thread of thought because I was counting variations on to be as the verb in a sentence. In some places it was over fifty percent. Maybe sixty. It’s just not compelling writing, although it improved later in the book where it got punchier.

It was definitely a slow read for its subject matter, better in the spots where she’s exegesisating on something of her father’s, and I did get one or two things out of it, particularly the way the book differentiates react versus respond. Also, she documents one day of his workout regimen which includes hundreds of punches, which reminds me (as so much does) that I have a heavy bag which I rarely use–and I should, especially since a martial arts class yesterday showed me again how my left side kicking strength has withered. So the book inspired me to watch Bruce Lee movies and to work out more, especially in my martial arts skills.

The book could have benefited from an editing to trim the corporatese language and to punch it up with some action verbs. Did I use “punch up” and “punchier” in a book report on a book about Bruce Lee? You betcha. It’s my blog, and I do what I want.

For the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Genre New To You” category, and given how voraciously, profligately, widely, and not very wisely read, I definitely had to go narrow and niche. So I thought of an Amish romance because I read Lewis’s blog (Rural Revolution). Which is good, because the only other thing that might qualify as some of the more modern monster erotica, and, well, let’s just say I’d only go 14 of 15 on the Winter Reading Challenge if that were my only choice.

So I ordered this book new from Amazon as part of the $10 in padding I needed to get the spare oven heating element I ordered after replacing it yet again in our tiny oven. Ah, gentle reader. I had to return that heating element because it was mailed in a plastic bag and had, strangely enough, gotten bent in transit. A couple days later, I sat down to read a copy of this book, but I discovered that it, too, was no good–someone has spilled coffee or something on it in the bindery, on the pages, before it was bound. The cover was pristine, but the first forty pages were completely unreadable–I mean, the paper quality on this little throwaway are pretty thin, but spilling coffee on them made them translucent and washed much of the print off of them. And some employee let this go through rather than stop the line. I guess I cannot say anything–when I ran a printing press, I let some prescription blanks of questionable quality pass because I was already attracting attention for my waste. Fortunately, Amazon took the second return from three items ordered that day and sent a replacement post haste ergo post (he said, trying to make a pun in Latin because he’s been listening to lectures on Roman authors recently). And I got to read a legible copy. Although, I must note that the replacement copy had light damage, dinging and whatnot, to the edges of the book. Probably as much from the cheap materials as Amazon mishandling, but my Amazon tweehad continues.

So: Well, the characters are all Amish–no Englisch (that is, non-Amish Americans) have speaking roles. Olivia has just moved to a settlement in Montana from Ohio after her father’s death. She is settling into her rental cottage and life as a spinster–she’s almost 30, and, as she and other remind us, she is awfully plain in appearance. One morning, she hears something on her doorstep, and she discovers a baby and a note. Her estranged wild-child sister is off with yet another man and has left her months-old baby for her sister to take care of. Olivia doesn’t know much about children, and when a local handyman appears at the door, she turns to him for help. And he’s handsome, unattached, and also new to the settlement. They’re both kind of starting over after losses–she took care of her father until he died; the handyman is looking for a new start after a relationship ends. They decide to buy a farm together, and to get married to do so–but they encounter some opprobium and a little resistance from the community–and when the sister returns, Olivia is worried she will tempt the handyman–or take the baby away.

The book has rather few events in it, instead padded out a bit by the interior thoughts of the main characters, each wondering at length if the arrangement will end up in a love match, but, no, the other person couldn’t love me. And the book recounts the initial arrival of the baby several times as they recount the story to different people in the settlement.

And it had a couple of things that didn’t seem right to me. The Amish people talk a bit more modern than I would expect despite the interjection of German into the dialog. In the first two chapters, the setup–the baby on the doorstep–is called cliche twice. A couple of different speakers use “literally” when describing something–they use it correctly, but “literally” is a speech tic that not everyone shares. That sort of thing, a speech tic shared by multiple characters, has been something I’ve watched out for ever since college, where one of my colleagues wrote a play where all of the characters exclaimed the name of the person they were talking to when surprised–something she did, but not everyone else did. She, too, probably called a lot of things cliche as was the style at the time. But I guess I could be mistaken–maybe the Amish do say “Whatever” and stuff. My experience with the Amish is avoiding their buggies on regional highways and reading occasional books about Englisch encounters with them. Maybe I should go to some of the localish Amish shops to do my own research.

Eh, not really my genre. I’m sure Mrs. Lewis knows her market and what she’s doing. She’s sold more copies of this book than I have all of my books and my apps put together. Of course, as I read her blog, I can see some parallels to her life in it–like building a pantry into their farmhouse–her husband did that when they moved to their new place a couple years ago–so when I say “I can see,” I mean I sorta can–I remember the pictures she posted.

At any rate, probably a serviceable entry in the genre, but I feel like my boys when they were younger: It would have been better with guns in it (like the genre paperbacks available by subscription that I generally read). I mean, I liked the movie better.

For the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Science Fiction/Nonfiction” category, I just grabbed this relatively thin hardback. I picked it up with the great haul at the Fairfield Bay, Arkansas, Library in 2023 (almost three years ago? Already?). I thought it might be a Pip and Flinx book, like Mid-Flinx since I bought a lot of them at that time, but like Slipt, it is a stand-alone novel. Again, I am going to pause to admire the career of Alan Dean Foster: Multiple series, movie and television adaptations, and many standalone novels. He definitely got into the writing racket at the right time.

So: An insurance adjuster with a particular set of skills, his sexy, semi-alien counterpart, his “Minder” (a self-propelled mobile computing device), and a sort-of humanoid robot go to Juarez El Paso’s space port to find out who is stealing very expensive pharmaceuticals from the ultra-secure storage facility where they are stored before being lifted into orbit on their way to ports across the, I dunno, galaxy. Much of the book is their investigation, including some attempts on their lives by the unknown thieves–and they eventually discover who’s behind it, saving the reputation of the company and the sanity of the police in JeP.

It’s a bit of a loose narrative. It features monospaced commentary by the “Minder” who is constantly slagging on humanity along with some humor from the robot who the adjuster has “reprogrammed” to be a little more human-like. But the investigative episodes and other set pieces don’t lead anywhere, and when we get to the climax, in kind of drags on an extra scene or two–I mean, I kind of get why, but it still drags on for that little pat payoff at the ultimate end.

But for its slight flaws, it’s not a bad bid of midlist/semi-pulp science fiction. Its 216 pages move along fairly quickly, and fortunately the Minder’s intrusions, which start pretty early in the book, taper off to traditional narrative as it goes on. And at 32 years young, it’s not dated–as a mater of fact because they book talks about the Minder and various robots as powered by AI, so it seems timely (and although not on a Segway, the humanoid robot is on a ball or wheel which limits some of its mobility–no stairs, for example). Also, Foster uses different terms for things like computer workstations, so he’s not dating the material that way, but he does use physical media more than we do now–WiFi is computer telepathy, ainna? But, again, not bad.

So it’s my 11th book for the year. I am in progress on two other books, which means I just have to find an inspiring book and a book set in two time periods to hit the Whole 15. If this book had any time travel whatsoever (like, say, Time & Again), I would have used it in that category instead like I put The Pride of Chanur in the non-human character category. Could I have put this book in that category as well, making this a two-fer? I guess. But, fortunately, I’ve read enough science fiction this year to cover all these bases separately.

I bought this book not long after Neo announced it, but it didn’t arrive until the last week of the year. So it wouldn’t count for 2025. And if I started it before January 2, I wouldn’t be able to count it toward the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge which has a “Short Story / Poetry” category (ah, gentle reader, you knew this category would not be an issue for me). As a matter of fact, it’s not the first book of poetry I’ve completed this year–Native American Songs & Poems was–and it might not be the last–a little poetry collection with “Inspire” in the subtitle is my fallback for the “Inspiring” category unless I get, erm, excited about another book (that is, I find an inspirational book of some sort in the stacks).

This book was not a particularly quick zip-through; van Der Leun’s poetry features some longer lines that I favor and some longer, multi-page poems that I had to slow down for, and some probably would get better with a re-read or dwelling on. However, the poet often layers descriptions upon descriptions (with prepositional phrase-based rhythms, so I cannot fault that) into poems. And, thematically, some of the poems explore the impermanence of individual life and, indeed, all human life and civilization, and they seem almost Lovecraftian in their descriptions of primitive/pre-human and post-human life. Also, since I’m airing grievances, the poet says in many different poems that water “plash”es instead of splashes–which honestly might be a better word for strict onomatopoeia purposes, but it is atypical–so one instance of it would be novel, but repeated in numerous poems in the course of a short collection, it was distracting.

It’s probably a sampling of his work over many years, some that he selected and some that Neo selected. So he might have only used “plash” every decade, but they’re all in this book.

Ultimately, the poems overall are pretty good–certainly better than a lot of the grandma poetry I read and more engaging than, say, Pindar. He’s not Robert Frost or Edna St. Vincent Millay, and, to be honest, he probably suffers by comparison because I’m reading the complete works of one of America’s finest poets (of whom you’ve probably never heard, name to be revealed within the next decade when I finish the 600 pages).

And it’s one more book down in the reading challenge; I shall (probably) have 11 complete by the beginning of February, which will put me in pretty good shape. If only I could find something “Inspiring” and “In Two Time Periods”.

Oh, yeah, and, as a reminder, I read van Der Leun’s book of essays, The Name in the Stone, last month.

Well. I’m not sure when I got this book; the ABC Books signing event was on November 5, 2022, and the book is inscribed to me, so that was probably it, but I did not buy enough for a Good Book Hunting post, apparently. I think I remember talking to the author, but I’ve been to so many book signings over the last decade…. I had to go to ABC Books’ Facebook posts to find the date, anyway. Since the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge has an “About Family” category, now was the time to read it.

So: The named author is the wife of the person who’s, uh, telling the story. Basically, the man’s father was inducted/drafted into the Army during World War II right before the man was born, and he died in World War II when the boy was about two. So the father only saw his son two or three times whilst on liberty stateside, and then he got sent to Europe in March 1945 and died a month later, a month before Germany surrendered. After spending a year and a half stateside and going through basic training twice, mechanic’s school, and M.P. school once or twice.

The man’s mother remarried a year or so later to a man who was not kind to the boy, who spent as much time as possible with his other relations. Around the turn of the century, the mother sent the father’s effects, including his military records, medals, and these letters to him.

So the book is largely a collection of excerpts from the letters that the father sent to the mother during his service with a little bit of commentary or explanation. The book includes some family and service photos and records as well. Apparently, the father was interred in Germany, moved to Holland, and then repatriated to Nebraska, his home, at the behest of his parents, not his widow.

So, what to make of it? Well, I am not impressed by the wife much–many of the letters include reminders and eventually admonishment and threats that she should go to the dentist as she had one or more problems with her teeth who needed correcting; she’s always going out with her sister-in-law/roommate whose husband is also away at war, and sometimes it seems like it bothers him; and she often buys new shoes and stuff, including a fur coat whose price he asks about many times over the course of many months (apparently, it cost $96 in 1940s money–the author says it would be over a thousand dollars today, in 2022 dollars–which might not be today today’s money). Of course, the hero of the story is the father, so the excerpts of the letters might craft a certain point of view and clean up some of his rough edges. The daily letters, though, declare his undying love (with a little impatience) and fidelity and include details of camp life, the training he’s going through, and whatnot. The book footnotes some of the military jargon and anachronisms, but as a child of military parents and a reader of pulp, I didn’t need them. The book also takes a moment to explain that the father might prefer that a white man win in a boxing competition over a Negro, might mention when people are Jews or Japs (and Polish, and anything besides Nebraskan-American), if the father had lived, his thinking would likely have evolved to match modern sensibilities–maybe, or maybe this is just something the actual author, a former teacher, had to insert as a matter of course. Odds are that someone reading letters sent by a relatively unimportant soldier in a war eighty years ago might already have known he was a product of his time.

At any rate, an interesting book for its look at Army life in the time period from a private (later PFC) perspective.

I hope the man got some solace from this exposure to his father whom he never knew. He, the man whose wife wrote the book, went into the Marine Corps early in the Vietnam era, and he mentions going through El Toro MCAS (although it’s misspelled in the text) and visiting Okinawa. He might have been a couple years ahead of my folks, but maybe not. Also, I couldn’t help but note that the father was stationed one or more times with a fellow named Lum; I just read a book by a woman named Lum. Probably no relation, but who knows.

This is the ninth book from the Winter Reading Challenge; I have 6 more to go in February, and I’ve started a science fiction book and a translated quality textbook, and I will likely finish a collection of poetry tonight. So I am in good shape for the Whole 15, but the “In Two Time Periods” category might be tricky unless I stumble a time-traveling science fiction story. Which I probably will.