Author: Brian J. Noggle

Actually, the Capitol with ‘o’ means the building where Congress meets, at least until the new administration dismisses them (I kid, I kid–but it’s gallows humor). This book does not deal with Congress, so it should probably be Capital Hit, but that does not clearly indicate Washington, D.C., on the cover. So we get a possibly intentional mistake. In the 1990s, I suppose we could give adults the benefit of the doubt. Ignorance as the default is yet to come in the 21st century.

Mack Bolan returns to Washington after a plane containing a Vietnamese actress is shot down with a Chinese-provided anti-aircraft missile. I think the point is that the Chinese are providing materiel to a Jamaican drug gang in exchange for a couple favors, such as killing a Vietnamese actress because. Mostly, though, that’s a reason given to put the city on the brink of a war not only between the emboldened Jamaican gang and other Jamaican gangs but also law-abiding Jamaican vigilantes and CIA-connected Vietnamese vigilantes. So The Executioner must thread the needle of conducting his operations often with a member of one or both of the ethnic communities along.

So, again, we have a more complex plot outlined which could have built a more modern thriller but executed with the touch of someone experienced in writing straight ahead men’s adventure novels. So, again, we can see how some things were stubbed out that were not exploited fully. Of course, exploiting all of the potential plots and subplots would probably push the book to a modern thriller’s 300 or 400 page length, so it’s just as well that we don’t get the full treatment on all of them. If only the author could have toned down or eliminated some of the groups, though, the book would have been tighter. But perhaps part of the contractual obligation is to follow the provided outline completely, so much like in modern software consulting, you get a result that meets the contract but not the best possible outcome.

Still, my march through the Executioner series continues, sometimes more doggedly than others.

The last Executioner book I read was Hawaiian Heat, #155, so my collection has jumped ahead seventeen. My collection has a couple of near runs left–a handful in the 170s to about 182, then a dozen or so in the low 200s, and then 305–but these gaps are going to be a little jarring considering that I’ve read a fair number before now in relative proximity. Also, I look back at when the books were on the rack at the grocery store and think about what I was doing at the time. We’ve leapt ahead here to the second semester of my junior college. What was I doing? Working a pile at the grocery store, writing still decent sonnets about my college crush, but not wearing the trenchcoat and hat yet nor doing open mics–those would come senior year.

Oh, well. You’re here, gentle reader, to hear what Mack Bolan was doing. Or, more likely, you’re kind of scrolling by to get to the amusing things I sometimes post. Carry on, then.

Mack Bolan is sent to Germany as it’s unifying as someone or some group is killing spies, businessmen, economists, and other people who support reunification. So he’s got to navigate the shadowy world of many different powers working together and against each other, including a woman who is simultaneously working for the Stasi, the French secret police, and the CIA–will she be Mack Bolan’s ally or doom? Spoiler alert: She’s beautiful, so of course she’s less doom and more boom chaka chaka.

The book is paced with a more modern thriller sensibility: Bolan is dropped right into the maelstrom and the set pieces come quickly, with Bolan not sure what’s going on or who the real players are. The book also features car phones and lap-top computers, so the stories are catching up with modern times as well–although in 1993, the laptops were pretty clunky as I recall. I bought a refurbed Windows 3.11 laptop which I still have around here somewhere in 1996 or 1997, and it’s a chonker. I remember seeing a portable 286 from the early 1990s, and it was the size of a small suitcase. But from here on out, I guess the books will have a more modern sensibility–and it’s probably only a couple of years before Bolan starts using the Internet himself.

So it was a pretty good entry in the series, and I am looking forwardish to the next couple in the series from the time when I was graduating college.

And given how few of them I have left and how much I have been tearing through them this year, it’s entirely possible I will finish the paperbacks purely in the Exeuctioner series in the next year or so. Although I guess I’ve only read seven this year, so if I have a couple dozen left, it’s probably three years off. Or more.

Well, consider my enthusiasm curbed. It wouldn’t be the same as reading The Story of Civilization or The History of Philosophy or even The Complete Works of Shakespeare, but it would be something.

It seems like it took me a lot longer to read this book than it did. As you might remember, gentle reader, I bought this book along with two others (Divine Fruit and Four Gates to Health: Eastern Ideas and Techniques for Vital Living) last May at an ABC Books book signing. I read the collection of poetry soon after I bought the books, and I am pretty sure that I started this book in the beginning of June last year.

It has the word devotional right in the title, and that’s what it is: A Hindic yoga-based devotional with 365 entries ranging from a couple sentences to a couple of pages. Each is designed to make you think, to let go, and perhaps, if you’re an active yoga practitioner, something to think about when you’re sitting. Although in Buddhism, you’re supposed to try to empty your mind as you sit, perhaps you’re allowed to think in yoga. Or maybe these are things to think about at other times.

The daily bits range from stories about people she meets and how they inspire her to simple little aphorisms about recognizing beauty around you in everyday things. Some are a bit twee, and some of the stories seem a bit self-congratulating about helping others.

At any rate, as I mentioned, it took me a while to read it. Partly because it’s typeset in an italic font, which slows one down when it comes to reading. Perhaps that’s the intent. The other was that I was not doing it in a steady day-by-day fashion–I would go in read a couple of days’ worth of these devotions to end a night of reading fiction for a couple days, and then I would set it aside for a while, and then I would read a couple more.

I enjoyed it and grokked it a bit more last year when I started it. Looking back, I really haven’t steeped myself in Buddhist and Hindu thought much this year–maybe they haven’t spoken to me following a year of losses. As I finished it over the last couple of weeks, though, the message did not speak to me as much.

So I probably enjoyed it overall more than the poetry and probably more than I’ll enjoy the nutrition book when I get to it. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it and gotten more out of it in a more receptive frame of mind.

Okay, wow, now that is impressive. I have recently read a book on Windsor Castle and was not that impressed. But Versailles? Oh, my.

In Windsor Castle’s defense, it is almost six hundred years older than Versailles and started out as a military fortification, where Versailles started out as a hunting lodge but turned into a château (literally smell of cat) for entertaining, holding court, and then living for the seventeenth century French monarchs, built and expanded at the height of the French monarchies, republics, and empires.

The book has a blueprint for each floor of the main building followed by a description of each room as you would take a walking tour and a lot of large, lavish pictures. Even if they were small, the pictures could be nothing but lavish. The rooms are large, with high ceilings (modern homes have great rooms with high ceilings as a selling feature; in Versailles, all rooms are great rooms). They have great original works hanging above the giant doors, not to mention on select walls and with painted ceilings.

You know, normally I see something like this and say, that must be hell to heat, but the book mentions that the temperature at Versailles rarely gets down to freezing–they have orange and palm trees that they bring out in the spring for the gardens.

Oh, and the gardens–the book also includes walking tours of the vast gardens behind Versailles and Trianon, the “little” getaway cottage(s) that are within walking distance of Versailles.

When my beautiful wife say this book on my desk prior to my writing this report, she asked if that was the place I didn’t have to go since I’ve seen the book (that, remember, is Marseille.).

Versailles, though: I wouldn’t mind seeing that.

This is the third of Munroe’s books I read. I read What If? in 2018 and How To earlier this year. And my enjoyment has declined in that order. The first dealt with interesting hypothetical physics questions in a whimsical but physics-oriented fashion. The second dealt with how to make common problems or procedures unnecessarily complicated with Rube Goldbergish answers and the physics behind them. And this volume tries to explain complex things using only the 10,000 most common words and Munroe’s illustrations.

Unfortunately, that leads to some oversimplification that was frustrating to read and, at times, hard to comprehend. He covers appliances, computers, nuclear reactors, submarines, ships, and so on (and the United States Constitution) and really does break them down into comprehensible bits, sometimes using metaphors instead of actual jargon, but, again, the over simplification makes it hard to read and to comprehend.

Munroe is trying to be amusing as he’s explaining, but unfortunately, I was not amused and not as informed as I would have been with a more straightforward explanation.

Basically, this conceit didn’t work.

Still, based on the weight of What If?, I’ll probably pick up other books he has yet to publish if I see them. Whether I pay extra for two signed copies or order them on Amazon (as I did with this book, which is saying something for me) remains to be seen.