Author: Brian J. Noggle

If you read only one 1973 European Presbyterian summary survey / critique of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche this year, well, it’s probably this one.

Actually, I don’t know if van Riessen is actually Presbyterian (the publishing house is Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing), but he is a European Calvinist of some stripe, so as you can imagine, socialism is praised. As long as it’s democratic.

At any rate, this book explores a little of Nietzsche’s biography and then runs through his written work. van Riessen identifies an evolution in Nietzsche’s thought as he goes through rationalism, positivism, and pragmatism on his way to what he (Nietzsche) hopes is active nihilism.

From time to time, the book contrasts Nietzsche with Christian thought, but the Christian lines of thought are just presented briefly without much detail, so this guidebook probably works best if you’re already steeped in Reform theology. The author also presents Nietzsche as struggling with Christ and his message personally in a way that I’m not sure I would infer, but I have not read all that much of Nietzsche primary sources much less in the original German. So I’ll have to accept this with a raised eyebrow.

So it’s a pretty good summation of Nietzsche from the perspective of a mid-twentieth century academic philosopher and theologian. More approachable than primary source Tillich or whatnot, but, again, it’s an explanation and not the primary source.

I don’t have any other titles from this An International Library of Philosophy and Theology Modern Thinkers line, and they’re not necessarily something I’ll seek out as this volume is a pamphletesque paperback whose spine from time to time made sounds like it was going to turn into a pile of leaflets.

Hey, who’s in the mood for a post-apocalyptic book? And the apocalypse I’m talking about is not the middle 1990s collapse in Kevin Costner’s career after the twin post-apocalyptic Waterworld and The Postman (which I rented and watched on the same night in the 1990s, gentle reader).

Twenty years (roughly) after a series of calamities (EMPs, bio-warfare, nuclear winter, and insurrection by augmented former soldiers and survivalists), a traveling troubador performs remembered bits from pre-collapse plays, television shows, and commercials in scattered communities for food and shelter as he wanders westward from Montana seeking some semblance of civilization. After he’s robbed of his supplies, he tries to track the thieving band of survivalists but instead stumbles upon a mail truck with a decades-dead postal carrier inside.

Donning the uniform and coat, Gordon reaches a settlement, and they think he’s actually a postal worker, so he invents a story about the Restored United States of America based in St. Paul that is sending out emissaries to set up post offices. He uses this con to survive and delivers actual letters written by townspeople to other towns, eventually actually setting up a post office system. He settles in a prosperous community held together by the myth of an all-knowing supercomputer and tries to get them to train up before the augmented former soldiers march on their homeland and impose a brutal fuedalism on it.

The plot differs from the film quite a bit, as they couldn’t fit whole elements, subplots, and side quests from the book into a single two or three hour film. Although I don’t remember the film that well–I might have actually seen it in the last 20 years–I didn’t dislike it as much as the Clinton-era critics did.

The book was a pleasant enough read for the most part, but wandered a bit and then jumped into an ending that seemed a little rushed. But, overall, pretty good. Not as wide-open in possibilities as a pure mid-century science fiction novel like Project Pope, but that is to be expected.

You know, I read three volumes in this series (2, 6, and 8) about ten years ago when I was all hopped up on watching Creative Juice. Even then, I was not really impressed with them.

I mean, basically, you’re “recycling” some household by-product like coffee cans, plastic restaurant clamshell containers, spools/toilet paper cylinders, and so on into crafts by taking this piece of trash and bundling it with about $30 worth of supplies from a craft store to make something cheap and country-crafts looking. Kind of like things our great-grandparents had and we remember fondly. Although they made these kinds of crafts, minus the craft store expenditure, because it was the Depression and/or because they lived on a farm and had to make use of every little thing, for Pete’s sake.

I’d be embarrassed to give most of these projects as gifts or to put them around my house. Although perhaps I’ll change my opinion and will find these books as valuable resources after the apocalypse.

The best part about them is some of the furniture projects and in using the volume as a Look Book, but the step-by-step project text is a little compressed. So this is supposed to be mostly a photo book.

Which means I used it correctly.

At any rate, I don’t think I’ll bother with others in the series–I am pretty sure I checked the others out from the library, but this particular book was on my to-read shelves (purchased in 2017). I am pleased to see I only bought one.

It’s been almost ten years since I read The Lord of the Rings. At that time, I said:

This is not a comic book nor a 20th century American thriller.

This, on the other hand, is a graphic novel adaptation of the one book that became three movies in the 21st century. It is a prequel of sorts to the Lord of the Rings, as Bilbo Baggins very early gets the ring and meets Gollum as part of a dwarf quest to slay a dragon (Smaug, come on, you already know the story) and reclaim their ancestral lands.

I probably have the actual text around here somewhere and will get to it one of these decades; however, this does provide a little context to the overall story kind of like I had to read the Cliff’s Notes version of A Tale of Two Cities back in high school.

I was a little surprised, though, that the death of the dragon comes two-thirds of the way through the book, and the remainder is the dwarves trying to hold off other groups who want to get the dragon’s loot. I wondered if the movies captured this, but given that it ends in a great battle that would have been very cinematic, I will guess they did. It’s not like they would have trimmed any material to make it into a trilogy.

At any rate, I read it over the course of a couple nights and enjoyed it enough. It’s funny; it’s been on my to-read shelves for a long time–I didn’t find it listed in my Good Book Hunting posts which I’ve been doing for a long time–awaiting the moment when I would want to read it, and that came up this month. I have not had comic books on my side table in a long time–I’m mourning the closure of the Comic Cave last summer, and after a short play that had also been languishing on my (Deathtrap), it was the time to read the book. I seem to go through cycles of knocking out thin, quick reads to move them from the to-read to the read shelf and then I feel the need to read one of the thick books on my shelf. I’m still coming down from Barnaby Rudge and will probably focus on thinner books for the nonce.

I saw the film version of this in a high school class. What was it? Drama? Media? I forget. What I do remember, though, is that it was a two day event, and the first day ended at almost the end of the first act, and I explained what I thought the trick was, and my friend and locker partner thought I had seen it. So I will spare you the spoiler and will just mention the basic plot.

A thriller playwright who sometimes does playwriting seminars hasn’t had a hit in a while, and although he doesn’t explicitly lament writer’s block, he’s really not cooking anything up. He receives a play in the mail from a student at one of these seminars and discovers it’s quite good, so he invites the student to his house down in Connecticut to–co-write the play? Murder the student and take it for his own? The playwright’s wife is unsure.

So it’s a thriller with twists and whatnot, and it’s only a two act play, so it’s pretty quick reading. I enjoyed it even though I knew the twist. And I seem to recall enough from the movie to know it departs some from the play. Which is pretty good. I’m not sure if I’ll pretty instantly remember much in thirty years of what I’m reading in 2020.

I bought this collection of poetry earlier this month at Main Street Books in St. Charles on the date weekend my beautiful wife and I shared. When we go somewhere on vacation, as you know, gentle reader, we like to visit used book stores in the area. However, St. Charles has but Main Street Books which is mostly new books but has a couple of shelves of used books upstairs. I did not buy any used books this trip, but I did buy three new books at full price.

This is one of them, and it’s the first I have read as I could read it while watching football. The XFL and St. Louis Battlehawks have extended my browse-a-book-whilst-watching season, and this book was good for that.

The book collects poems from across almost fifty years (I believe the earliest is 1973), but most of them come from 2015 and 2016. It describes, fairly narratively, betrayal of a lover/spouse, a brush with death, and some basic slice-of-life narratives.

However, they poems are not very good. They tend toward straightforward narratives or laundry lists of words that have no real depth nor metaphor behind them. I mean, I feel for the poet, but mostly it’s sympathy for the things he’s expressing rather than anything the poetry itself evokes. The poems are often free verse, with only a few employing end rhymes, so I don’t feel the sort-of affection that I have for Grandma poetry you find in Ideals magazine.

Still, it’s better than Collections of Madness.

Your mileage may vary.