Author: Brian J. Noggle

When I bought this book at a group book signing at ABC Books in 2022, I said I picked up all the first books in Ms. Keene’s multiple series that I found. And although that was true for Finding Lizzy Smith which I read in 2023, shortly after the purchase, this is the second book in the Arizona Summers mystery series (which might actually be set in Missouri, as this one is, in the summer). Who knows what Tattered Wings, the third of her books I bought that day, might hold?

At any rate: This book is set in a small, fictional town on a lake in mid or southwest Missouri called Moonstone Lake (in Catoosa County, a fictional county) where the main character, Ary, is the (adopted) daughter of a popular 80-something (the new 60) proprietor (retired) of a popular restaurant. The plot is that a friend of Ary’s comes home one night to find that her ex-husband, who has been missing or in prison for five years, has been stabbed outside her apartment. The friend turns to Liz for help, but the body disappears. And the man’s last words indicate the money is his. So they try to figure out what he meant before the murderers strike again.

To be honest, the plot is a little contrived, but this little cozy of a mystery (with recipes from the restaurant in the back) really is more about the relationships of the main character and her adopted mother and aunt and the townspeople. She’s getting serious with a town cop, and her friend is getting serious with a deputy. Her adopted mother gets arrested for running an illegal gambling ring–she and some other octagenarians were playing poker, but one man lost big and his wife dropped the dime on them. Also, she’s about to celebrate her 81st birthday which is always a big production in town.

So most of the book’s 200+ page run time describes this, and the actual murder is secondary. And, boy howdy, the book could have used proofreading. Some extraneous punctuation, some missing punctuation, spelling a main character’s name (Lewis versus Louis) differently including a switch in successive paragraphs…. The things I criticize in James R. Wilder’s books are also present here. But:

The four of us left Moonstone Lake at noon. The Catoosa County Sheriff’s office agreed to patrol for the weekend.

The author knows the difference between town police and county sheriffs and how they sometimes help each other.

At any rate, I have one more book by this author which I have already picked up to complete the set I bought. But, boy howdier, I bought a lot of books by local authors that day.

Well, I found this book on my stacks four years later; I said when I bought this book with a couple others:

At any rate, it should give me a couple of handy collections of poetry to read out back in the evening. If I can find them again easily once I move them off of my desk and into the stacks of the Nogglestead library, where books just disappear.

Well, one of the other two books was Milk and Honey, which I read later that year. The other was 100 Bill Harvey Poems which I held in my very hand a couple of days ago when trying to pick a collection of poems to read while watching a football game.

I’d brought this book down from my bedroom reading chair because I’d been working on it for a while, but it was not really good browsing material. For one, it’s a loving edition of poems published posthumously by the founder of the Christian Science movement. This book is a former library edition, but its stamps are illegible and its checkout pocket has been removed; one presumes it was in a Christian Science Reading Room (I think there’s still one in Springfield; I’ll have to look to see if it’s still there when I go down Glenstone again). But it’s got gilded pages and drop capitals on each poem, and they’re…. Well, they’re mid-18th century poems harkening back to older forms. She’s imitating older styles, and she uses “ye” incorrectly.

I mean, it’s a cut above most of the 20th century grandmother poetry that I read and surely above Milk and Honey because of its decent rhythm and poetic sensibility. But I won’t remember anything of it once I put this book on the shelf. I didn’t flag anything, and I don’t remember any lines making me think they were especially well done. I mean, Riley and Dunbar are almost contemporaneous, and their vernacular poems are fun and their serious poems are markedly better.

Ah, well. In 100 years, nobody will be reading my poetry from 1990, so who am I to judge?

Ah, gentle reader, I have done it. Again. After three years, I have completed The Life Of Greece, the second volume in The Story of Civilization series, most of which I picked up in 2019 (I finished the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, in August 2023). At this rate, I will finish the eleventh volume in 2053 and will be able to move on to Churchill’s history series or Summa Theologiae.

The book covers the history of Greek civilization from roughly 3500 BC to the mid-first century BC. Early chapters deal with early civilization on Crete and the legendary period of Greece, including the events that would have triggered Homer’s epics and whatnot. The book really gets going with the formation of the city-states and the machinations of Athens and Sparta and the other states that rose and fell with some peaks only being decades–a lifetime. It talks a lot about individual personalities and their contributions, and a lot of the material overlaps with An Introduction to Greek Philosophy which I just listened to and the current, almost complete history of the philosophy of science course I’m listening to now. Plus I know some of the players from reading some Plato, not enough Aristotle, and as far into Copleston’s The History of Philosophy. So some of it was review. Not that I’ll remember too much of it except for that which was reinforced by the other things I’ve listened to recently, particularly the philosophical distinction between being and becoming which is something that has traded predominance in philosophy and science for decades.

The same thing I said about the first book I shall repeat here: Durant (or Durants) is (are) old school leftists, so a lot of asides in favor of socialism and throwing off the shackles of religion (in the Greeks’ case the old gods of mythology, but sometimes Christianity as well, but not the Greeks, although he does draw a line from Stoicism in its Greek roots to Christianity). He also has a tendency to go back and forth in time as he breaks eras and epochs into different silos, such as science, philosophy, painting, sculpture, and so on, so he’ll exhaust one silo and start back in another. Undoubtedly, this will become less of a problem when the individual volumes of the series compress into decades or centuries–the next one is Caesar and Christ which might only be a couple of hundred years (although who knows how far it might stretch if it includes the Byzantine empire), and others collapse into even smaller chunks of time. But in these first two books, where he covers millennia (and, in the first, the same or similar millennia spread across several cultures), the reader gets a little whiplash. Maybe the scholarly reader, or the merely educated before the 1970s reader, would not have the issue. But compared to educated men a hundred years before my birth, I’m a dunce.

So I have already placed Caesar and Christ on my chairside table, which defeats the purpose of my drive to finish off some of the thicker books on that table which have languished there for a long time. How long will Caesar and Christ remain there? I know, we’re all in suspense, gentle reader. Time will tell. But I will read some other books, or perhaps a couple of hundred, in the interim.

Oh, and I did flag some things for comment which I will displense periodically as From the Durant posts. Except this one:

Carneades of Cyrene, coming to Athens like a Greek Abelard about 193, made like bitter for Chrysippus and his other teachers by arguing with galling subtlety against every doctrine that they taught.

I bring this up because after I read Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” recently, I have seen or heard references to him several times, culminating in my picking up a biography of him last month. Which I might read before I finish Caesar and Christ or, at least, The Story of Civilization.

I guess I reclaimed this book from my youngest’s bedroom in January as it was on the top of the stack, relatively, and I don’t have it mentioned in any Good Book Hunting posts. By on the top of the stack, I mean that I have again begun stacking the books atop the books atop by bookshelves, blocking view of my bladed weapons collection again, which means maybe I should actually finish books instead of working through really long books in the beginning of long series of long books. Which I am generally good at, which means I have lots of long series of books which would be good to read which I will probably never get to. But collections of cartoons? I can browse that while watching part of a football game (the first quarter of the Chiefs game since we can get those on one of our streaming services).

So: This is a collection of Far Side comics which were all the rage in the 1980s, right up there with Dilbert as to things you were likely to see cut out of the newspaper and posted on a teacher’s bulletin board, classroom door, or cubicle wall. The humor was zany, often absurd, and dealing with anthropomorphic animals, aliens, and sometimes weird people. I associate it with the 1980s, but this collection came out in 1992, so it has some George H.W. Bush jokes in it or things from that time. Maybe Desert Shield/Desert Storm?

At any rate, the daily cartoon was pretty high quality for its time and provided some amusement, but in reading them all at once in an evening, I only got a couple of actual chuckles, and I only flagged one:

As I am purportedly studying multiple martial arts at two schools (when I can drag my carcass into them, which does not coincide when classes are cancelled, when I am traveling, when I’m having contractors over for a few or many thousands of dollars’ worth of work, when I have no car because my beautiful wife is out of town, or because I am plumb lazy), that struck me. Only one of the schools features board breaks, though.

At any rate, it’s a book down (70 so far this year), and I’ve also discovered I have a Superman collection/graphic novel to browse during football games or as interludes between chapters/sections of long books in long series.

As I mentioned, I streamed part of the Kansas City Chiefs football game yesterday because apparently we have streaming subscriptions to CBS and to NBC along with Spotify (at $35 a month now!) and, I guess, some other things that do not include football games (not that Spotify does, but it went from $12 a month to $35 a month awful damned fast for a family subscription). “Watching” the game gave me an opportunity to page through one of my recent poetry-and-monograph purchases.

This book is a 45-year-old collection of pencil sketches by an artist born in 1902 (see this bio if you are so inclined). Some of them were made from old photographs, but they generally track to the early part of the 20th century based on the cars and whatnot. Some are just scenes from a particular corner, but others are of St. Louis landmarks, and these contain a bit of text about the landmark. Just a couple paragraphs.

Interesting to look at, and because of the early 20th century topic matters, I thought about the James R. Wilder books set in the first part of that century; although the books are not set in St. Louis, in many of them the characters come to St. Louis for one reason or another.

Also, it became a bit of a quiz at least as far as the landmarks goes. Which ones have I been to? Well, the Arch features in a couple of them. I’ve been there a couple of times and even went up it once as an adult. I’ve been to the Admiral riverboat when it was a casino and the Goldenrod Showboat when Todd had a brief, non-speaking role in a revue. I might have been on the Becky Thatcher–the book brought to mind that my mother, brother, and I took a cruise on the Mississippi in one of the Mark Twain themed boats once, and my brother and I got to handle the wheel for a bit because we were kids and that’s what they let kids do. I’ve been to Union Station a number of times, although the number of times my beautiful wife and I went to Landry’s behind it might exceed the times I was in the building myself. I’ve been to the Public Library a couple times–once to do some geneology research with a family friend and once professionally when I was writing documentation for library software to see how the company’s first client did things. I’ve been over the Grand Avenue Viaduct. I have been to either the New Cathedral or the Basillica for a funeral for the father of one of my wife’s co-workers. I’ve been to the Art Museum many times, but not in 20 or 25 years. I’ve visited both Grant’s Cabin at Grant’s Farm and the Hawken House in Old Trees; I do not think I’ve been to the Sappington House, but I’ve driven past it. And I’ve been to Lambert field a couple of times. Not as often as the Springfield-Branson National Airport, though.

Well, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t treat it like a full quiz because it’s 158 pages divided by two for a total of 79 sketches, and I’ve not been to that many of the places after all.

Still, and interesting browse during a football game. And another book towards my annual (stretch) goal of 100 read.