Author: Brian J. Noggle

I got this book in Sparta in October as part of a minor bag-day binge along with a couple of other loft design books. I mean, I liked the HGTV show Small Space, Big Style (example) about how people decorated their small apartments in the big city (often New York). So I thought I would really like this book. But….

The book is Euro-centered with a couple of “lofts” in South America and in the United States. But the aesthetic is basically European: Lots of white walls (finished walls for the most part) with minimalist furniture in them. Many of them are not “lofts” in revitalized industrial or warehouse buildings but rather repurposed other businesses. Some of them exceed 1000 square feet, which is not especially “small”–not that I think lofts must be small, but the book title has the word in it (although perhaps not in the original language–this book is a translation, which might explain its non-American focus and preferred aesthetic).

So, I dunno. Not my bag. My style is more Ethan Allen than Euromoderne, and I fully expect my lofts to have unpainted red brick walls (or maybe painted cinder block) and I presume that they will not be on the first floor. I dunno why: probably because that’s what I have in my head as a loft based on its origins, not that it’s a condo by another name to appeal to people too cool to own a mere condo.

So it was almost a quick flip through, but I definitely have some quibbles with the book. First, it had some blatant copy errors: One, the verb fomd which I could not actually guess what they meant. A pair of chapters covering two halves of the same building were out of order, so that the second of the two referred to the other chapter following it. And so on. Secondly, some photo captions were in something like six point font–I mean, it was tiny. I don’t want to go all old man here, but I had to angle the light just right on the book and damn near squint to read them–I even tried my beautiful wife’s cheaters and they didn’t help much. Third, the book lapses into the argot of interior design–which I suppose is fitting since this is clearly an inspiration book for designers, but, c’mon, man, if every liminal space is diaphanous, what does that even mean to distinguish it from every other instance of transition and example of natural light?

So I was not impressed by the lofts depicted nor the book itself.

Which likely will not put me off on reading the other loft design books I got in October. A man has to make his annual reading goals even if it’s just browsing pretty pictures.

This collection is a collaborative effort by two people who worked for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune before Lileks was there. Ed Fischer was a cartoonist, and Jane Thomas Nuland was books editor. So this collection is about aging, one page a cartoon and the facing page a quip, a gag, a little story, or a little poem by Ms. Noland.

So: I dunno, about the same as you’d get from, say, a collection of Saturday Evening Post material (ye gods, have I reported on three? 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, yes indeedy–but in my defense, this blog is coming up on 22 years old now, so I am reading other things in between). Not as quotable nor retellable as what you would get out of a collection of jokes or Reader’s Digest every month, but amusing. Presumably, a lot of these were given as birthday gifts for someone turning 40, 50, or 60 back in the day where people photocopied cartoons to tack onto their cubicles or tape to the walls of their workspaces.

So an hour or so browsing, one more book on the annual list, and not a great expense–it was stuffed into a $3 bag amongst other gleanings in Sparta in October.

It’s funny to think, though, that this sort of thing (and Reader’s Digest) might have been the equivalent of TikTok for the pre-Internet generation. A series of short, unrelated things for amusement that passed right through the eyes and through the brain, presumably, but not retained. I guess the main difference is the lack of infinite scroll, so eventually you come to the end of the book or the end of the magazine and have to get up and do something in real life for a bit before picking up another one. Or maybe not; perhaps I am tweely pronouncing whatever little thought comes into my little mind at any time.

So after reading Gideon’s Gift and Sarah’s Song, of course I ploughed right into this book simply so I could spell plough the British way yet again. Also, what better time to finish the set than when rushing through them all at once (Heigh, Brian, how’s the ‘Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies’ series coming? you ask, and I salute you for your British spellings as well as I avoid the question).

This book is better than the previously mentioned books because they don’t have a wrapper prologue nor, really, a bifurcated story, although some of it is told in flashback, but not a whole lot. The titular Hannah is a freshman in an exclusive high school in Washington, D.C., who keeps very busy with extracurricular activities because her parents are away for most of the year–her father, a former Senator, is the ambassador to Sweden and her mother is quite the social butterfly. Hannah lives with her maternal grandmother in a big house and does not have much in terms of companionship outside of those activities. Her driver, though, prays for Hannah all the time, and when he asks her for what he should pray for, she asks for a Christmas miracle–and later, when her parents tell her they won’t be home for Christmas, she narrows her miracle into hoping her parents will be home for Christmas. To take her mind off of the daughter’s loneliness and to keep her from pestering them during the party season in Sweden, the mother reveals a secret: the ambassador is not her real dad–the mother had been with a surfer type out in California in her salad days before returning home with a 4-year-old daughter to marry into her position in society. So Hannah reaches out to Congressmen and the press to help find her father who enlisted in the Army a decade ago and might be in Iraq. He is, but he’s going on One Last Mission, a dangerous one, because the other helicopter pilots have wives and families. So there’s a bit of tension as to whether he will Make It Home Alive, much less in time for Christmas (and the mother jets back from Sweden to quell the noise her daughter has made).

So it was a more straightforward narrative without the double-effect, the half-the-story-in-flashback, method used by the other two books I read. It did have some head scratchers that made me go, “Really?” like the fact that the mother brought the box of mementoes from her California fling to Sweden with her instead of leaving it in the mansion which was their pied-à-terre in the United States–ah, well, it served to move the plot, such as it was, along.

The best of the three I read and more on par with a traditional Christmas novel. No real unreal ending where the mother and the biological father rediscover their passion for one another–that would be a different kind of book, ainna?–but still the best of the lot (unless the second in the series was the best).

So now I have most of the month of December left. Will I read a Christmas novel by a different author? Can I even find one in the stacks even though I stock up on them through the year? Stay tuned!

After I read Gideon’s Gift, I was a bit divided over whether to plow through the other two volumes that I own in the Red Gloves series (which only has four books in it, so I have 75% of the whole series). I mean, yeah, they’re short and quick reads, but Gideon’s Hope was just a touch off, even for a Christmas book. Still, I finished Walden in the interim (which I suppose I could write up even though I cannot count it as a complete book as the version I read is in a three book omnibus edition) and have plucked at a couple of other books, but I picked up this book for a single-night read.

And because I thought Gideon’s Gift was a bit….off, I went into it looking for things that were wrong. Which I found, even if they weren’t wrong.

The book has a similar double-story going on and a bit of a contrived frame. An elderly woman has held on for one more Christmas so that she can share her special story (and song) with someone who needs it. She is Sarah, obv., and a worker in her old folks home, Beth, is the one who needs it. Beth has decided to leave her husband because…. well, the modern “because,” which is because she wants to get her groove back, to eat, pray, love, and just because she’s not living her best life with her husband. In short, she’s bored. But she agrees to not leave until after Christmas so as to not ruin the holiday for their little girl. So Sarah tells her the story of her youth, her love, and her song: She loved a local boy in her hometown, but she wanted bigger things, to be a singer, so she went off to Nashville, works as a secretary/receptionist at a recording label while trying to make it, got picked up by a womanizing country star who takes her on tour with promises of making her a star, but he’s not faithful to her, so she returns home only to find the boy has moved on, so she writes a song which captures her feelings for him which her Nashville bosses discover and make a hit, and he hears it on the radio and comes back to their hometown, and they live happily for five plus decades. After she finishes the story and sings the song for Beth, she gives Beth the red gloves and dies like Yoda. And Beth reconciles with her husband. Happy ending! Except, I suppose, for Sarah, although I guess she goes to heaven to be with her husband after fulfilling her last mission on earth.

Ah, twee.

The first anachronism I found was in 1940, teens (Sarah and her friend) were listening to records in their bedroom. That seems a little early for that particular trope. Also, the girl goes to Nashville in 1940 for a “record deal” which seems a little early for that particular development as well. And as she is struggling in Nashville, she is calling her parents long-distance twice a week. C’mon, man. In 1940, inexpensive apartments did not have telephones in them, and even in the 1980s, we weren’t calling someone long distance twice a week. That was expensive. Some of us can remember it. One presumes that many of the people who read Karen Kingsbury novels would know it, too, if they stopped to think of it.

But probably this book is not designed for thinking. It’s designed for quickly reading and feeling, and I’ve quickly read it and felt that I was not really the target audience. Not for any Christmas novel, actually, but yet I read them around this time of year when I can find them in the stacks.

I don’t know where I came up with this book–I have three such titles in the Red Gloves series, which is not a series with the same characters but rather different Christmas-themed books which Kingsbury wrote to raise money for some charitable organization. After a Christmas-themed trivia night where we led all night only to lose in the final round to a team using “mulligans” for free points (which we do not as we are trivia night purists), I thought I would pick this book up for my Christmas novel this year since I knew where it was–atop the bookshelves in the office.

So: Earl was a family man who enjoyed Christmas with his wife and daughter and his parents and siblings, but he was not a believer. His wife and daughter are killed on their way to or from church, and Earl goes into a downward spiral until he’s homeless for five years when the book begins. He’s trying to be heartless, and the only things he cares about are the red gloves his wife made him (I get the sense red gloves are a motif that all the books will share). When they’re stolen, Earl starts thinking about ending it all.

Meanwhile, Gideon is an eight-year-old girl living with leukemia whose parents are living hand-to-mouth. The mother is working two jobs, and the father is only getting 12 hours a week at “the mill,” but that allows him to take his daughter to the doctor and whatnot. Gideon goes into remission long enough to move the plot forward, which is that she wants to help serve at “the mission” (her parents volunteer a lot even though they’re poor). Where she meets Earl and wants to make him believe again, so she gives him a present which he eventually opens–and it’s the red gloves! Which she bought at a second hand shop since the thief sold them or something?

At any rate, she gets sick again, and it’s dire, but Earl believes now, and it turns out he’s a rich homeless man who pays for her bone marrow transplant and reconciles with his family. And finis!

Oh, and the book has a wrapper story thirteen years later at Gideon’s wedding, so a lot of possible suspense is lost. But I guess you’re not reading this for suspense.

So it was a quick read–I ploughed through the 146 pages in an evening–but.

I mean, it’s not my first Christmas novel, so I know to expect a bit of unreality, some magic or divine intervention, but this book, this short story or novella, really, made me raise my eyebrow. I mean, the experience of the homeless guy–let’s be honest, I can too easily picture myself in that situation, as the whole year I have known my job situation was tenuous and my continued employability questionable and knowledge of the cash flow situation led me to conclude that if I lost my wife and kids and job, I would be in a perilous situation indeed–but this homeless guy has both his parents alive in a single household and one or more siblings, and he has a big payout from the accident that claimed his wife and kid, and he lived with his parents for a while after, but then he gave that all up to just live on the streets in a different city. I mean, that seems…. contrived. I don’t know. Perhaps I was just disappointed in the character whose path to homelessness did not involve having no money and no family.

Also, the father is only working 12 hours a week at “the mill”? What is he doing there, and what kind of shift or shifts is that? A single twelve hour shift? Two sixes? Is he a part time janitor or food service worker? It just clangs.

And the remission of the little girl lasting just long enough to make the events of the book happen…. Eh.

I get the sense that I am going to be harsher on these books than others–I’ve already started the next one I have of the series, and I’ve already encountered my first Oh, really? in the first chapter. But my beautiful wife, who has read many Karen Kingsbury books, asked me if this was the one with the homeless guy and said it was not one of her better books. So after ploughing through these three Christmas novellas, I won’t necessarily shun any other Kingsbury books I find on my to-read shelves. Unless the next two are also rather Oh, really?

I guess it has been seven years that this book has floated near the top of the paperbacks stacked horizontally on the broken bookshelves as I bought it and some others in Branson in 2017. What, I have not repaired or replaced those bookshelves which broke ten years ago? Ah, gentle reader, no. And probably not soon given our current lack of means of visible support.

So this book is a bit of pure rocket-jockey stuff like you would get out of vintage Heinlein. Pournelle extrapolated a world from the middle 1970s which is strangely not so hard to extrapolate from ours: The government has become paternalistically totalitarian, but it lets juveniles commit crimes without consequences. Universities are overbooked and overadministrated into Kafkaesque hellscapes. The best the students can hope for is a union job that will get them out of the squalid megacities. Meanwhile, a couple of entrepreneurs and corporations fancy themselves the saviors of humanity want to mine asteroids. In this world, Kevin, a university engineering student accidentally kills a juvie gang member as they plan to rob him and/or torture him to death. As the gang’s attacks escalate and police are powerless, Kevin discovers some of his credits won’t transfer, so he would have to attend two extra years of college if he survived.

But he’s put in touch with an outfit that can employ him on Ceres, the asteroid, so he heads out with an attractive young woman, and adventures ensue including intrigue as to who might be trying to keep them from reaching Ceres and why and what to do when they get there.

I flagged a couple of things: In one spot, a computer nerd pets a simple computer and says he’ll teach it to play Star Trek–which is fresh in mind because I read about it in 50 Years of Text Games (and I remember playing the Commodore 64 port back in the 1980s). I also flagged a spot where a man in his fifties was described as elderly; clearly, that’s from the perspective of a college student–Pournelle himself could not have held that view as he was 45 when the book came out.

I also noted that the last page was an ad for a play-by-mail game called StarWeb; 50 Years of Text Games also mentioned play-by-mail games, so I was familiar with it. Apparently, StarWeb lived on until 2021 at least (its Web site looks like it might now be defunct, but the page for StarWeb says it was updated in 2004 and probably didn’t need updating after that). Still, it intersects with what I’ve been reading, partly because I’m elderly and because I read old books and books about old things.

At any rate, a nice little read amidst all the other things I’m reading. You know, I did not really read much Pournelle when I was younger. I guess when I went through science fiction phases, I was getting Del Rey paperbacks-in-library-binding and then the big names. And Pournelle wasn’t really on the pantheon. Which is unfortunate, as I think I would have enjoyed them. I’ll pick them up as I come across them, though.