Author: Brian J. Noggle

I got this book at LibraryCon last year and read it over the course of two days (vacation makes that possible).

Well, this book is pretty good. I actually just ordered it and its sequel for my nephew for Christmas, and if DeVore is again at LibraryCon this year, I’ll buy both inscribed by for my nephew/godson and give the ordered set to my cousin-once-removed whom I think likes fantasy (but I haven’t asked for sure because I wouldn’t know what to get him for Christmas if not fantasy). So last year’s trip to LibraryCon was especially fruitful, as everyone got A Blade So Black.

In the distant past, elves lived on Earth. It wasn’t their home world, but they lived here and built large cities and did their magic until the technologically and militarily advanced Urlowens conquered the planet and exterminated the Earthborn elves. One manages to make it to a stasis chamber, an experimental device designed to preserve a life; she hopes to only stay in stasis for ten years.

Meanwhile, after the fall of the Elves, apparently the Urlowen withdraw because ten thousand years later Humans have risen, and the Urlowens return. Although the nations of the planet have formed an Alliance to defend against space-borne threats, they’re not much of a match for the Urlowen–who seem to have lost the ability to do magic themselves. But a member of the ragtag resistance stumbles upon the stasis chamber and releases the Earthborn Elf, and maybe the Humans have a chance.

The book weighs in at 326 pages, but it moves very well, drifting between the points of view of an elite team of Urlowen and the resistance members. The Humans get some help from the newest member of the Urlowen Council Guard, but it’s related to intrigue among the Urlowen rather than benevolence.

As I said, I read it in two days and will probably read the second book in the series, Earthborn Alliance, before long. According to the author’s Web site, the third book is not yet out. Maybe by LibraryCon 2020 should such a thing occur.

Oh, and although the author is self-published, he thanks/acknowledges a professional editor. Man, perhaps I should give that a whirl. This book is pretty professional in design and in its content. His Web site also talks about the business of self-publishing. Perhaps I should pay attention if I ever come up with another novel.

I bought this book last weekend before our getaway (given how often I’m using that phrase in book reports this week, I should make a macro out of it). This, however, was the first of the books I read.

It’s the first in a series, and it reads more young adult than adult thriller. It weighs in at 144 pages total which includes the title/copyright pages, a list of characters, and a couple of pages of information about the guns in the book as well as the about the author pages, a sample of a later book, and promotional pages for other books in the series. So it’s not very long at all. The prose is very simple. The set pieces are set, but also simple. You can see that the author is kind of patterning the books after men’s adventure thrillers.

In this book, agent Zackary Rock Rogers is called to rescue the stepson of a Senator who’s being held in northern Africa by bad guys for a ransom. Other agents in the area have died suspiciously, and it becomes clear that someone on the inside is a double-agent. But he must effect rescue before the kidnappers realize the ransom isn’t coming.

As I said, some set pieces connected a little more simply than in a Mack Bolan book. So it’s a little better than the worst of the Executioner novels but not as good as the best of the line.

I note that the book has a prologue that comes from an exciting moment later in the book. If I had to guess, I’d say someone told him that it started out too slow and he should start it off with a bang. I say that because someone told me that about John Donnelly’s Gold, and for one draft, I did the same thing–pulled a dramatic scene (the break-in scene to the point of entering John Donnelly’s house) as a prologue, which made the first chapters of the book a flashback, I guess. I thought it a cheat and removed it from my book. I’m not sure it really works in this book, either.

I won’t write the series off–I’ll maybe try another at some future time to see how the author might mature. But not anytime soon. I’ve got plenty of other things to read, including a couple dozen of those lesser entries in the Mack Bolan series.

I must be some kind of racist since this is the third book I’ve read this year that features the word nigger in it. In this book, a black woman who is seeing a white man calls herself that in a heated moment, using it to characterize her race from his perspective. So it’s not really used by a person in anger calling a black person it. But even into this century, playwrights whose works appeared on Broadway and who won big awards used the word without fearing what would happen to them for using it. Which is why so many of them are having things happen.

At any rate, I got this ABC Books just before my trip down to Branson this week. And it’s one of the three books I read there, albeit not the first.

As I mentioned when I got it, the book centers on a man who comes from some wealth who is starting a publishing house and figures he can publish one book. He is seeing an older jazz singer, the aforementioned black woman, whose memoirs he can publish. Also, his best friend from college has a manuscript, a mammoth like in Wonder Boys. So the lover and the best friend from college pressure him to publish the book whilst his assistant flits in and out providing some comic relief. As he is talking to either the lover or the friend–who is hoping to impress a Chicago heiress’s father with the book’s publication–a machine arrives. In the second act, the machine is spitting out pages from books and papers in the future that describe what has happened in the future, including to the characters, based on whichever way the publisher is leaning in the moment. Also, he might be a closeted homosexual with feelings for his friend from college. And possibly consummation in the future.

Well, it’s an interesting conceit, and it moves along well enough. It doesn’t have a stage full of characters in a bar unlike some things I’ve read lately (if you count, as I do, March of last year as ‘lately’). The playwright does emphasize pronunciations by capitalizing some syllables, particularly for the assistant, and italicizes some words for other characters. I think that takes a little from letting the actors interpret the roles, but I guess some impositiion of vision can be called for in some cases.

This might have been an interesting play to see live, but we probably won’t see a revival of it any time soon. And certainly not in its original form.

I got this book at LibraryCon in 2019. It’s the first of a series of graphic novels retelling the story of the Trojan War. It takes 200 pages to get to the launching of the 1000 ships–almost; we have not gotten to Iphegenia yet.

The 200 pages tell about the run-up. We get the story of the young Paris, raised as a cowherd away from the palace because of the prophesy that he would bring doom to Troy. We get the story of Odysseus feigning madness because of the prophect that he will wander for twenty years after the war ends. We get Achilles hidden amongst an obscure king’s daughters until Odysseus tricks him into revealing himself as a boy. We get machinations on both side and a pretty good fleshing out of the characters.

The book takes a human-centric approach, consciously as the afterword says, because the author wanted to make it more realistic. The afterword also goes into detail about the sources the author/artist drew upon (buh-DUM-sh) for both the story and the drawings of the period, including the clothing, weapons, palaces, galleys, and so on.

The books is well-illustrated, but not with a look-at-the-comic-art way you get in a lot of comics and graphic novels these days (like this). It tells the stories, not just shows you widely disparate images from the story.

So I will look for the others in the series should we ever have a thing like a con again.

I am on a streak of sorts: This is the second book of poetry in a row that I’ve read and enjoyed (the other was 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda).

Mrs. Adelman didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature (and she wasn’t a communist, either, which probably helped Neruda with his). Instead, she fits into the World War II generation of grandmother-poets who kept several magazines afloat with their literary reading and writing even though many of them didn’t have much formal education.

The poems in the book are a cut above a lot of the grandmother poetry I’ve read. The book called them ballads, and they are longer, lyrical lines with end rhymes–and some internal rhymes–with a good sense of rhythm that is not regularly iambic. The topics are concerns of mid-20th-century housewives: Family, home, church, and patriotism. Although she writes about church, the poems themselves are not religious- or Christian-themed like you find in some similar works. Well, you would find them there if you read similar works. Sometimes I think I’m the only one reading these books decades later.

This is not a chapbook, by the way. Mrs. Adelman published this through Vantage Press, which was the bigest vanity press “publisher” of the latter half of the 20th century. Basically, you paid them a bundle (thousands of dollars) up front and provided them with a manuscript. They laid it out for you, designed the book cover, and printed a couple hundred or a thousand copies for you to distribute. So when she published her collection, Mrs. Adelman invested in it.

And a nice collection it is.