Author: Brian J. Noggle

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.

After I listened to Augustine: Philosopher and Saint, I thought about picking up some of the primary texts I have lying around. Instead, I picked up this science fiction book because it was on the shelves where I thought I had last seen the Augustine, and it has a little bit of religious theme to it. So almost the same.

In it, a doctor on the run joins a journalist on a trip to End of Nothing, a planet way out of the way that features Vatican-17, a research center/church built by robots a thousand years ago where they find room for themselves amongst the human partners in the endeavor. The robots, inspired by their human creators, are looking for one true faith and have created a super computer they call the Pope to crunch the data provided by many alien races and human “listeners” who are mystics or projectors who travel to other places outside their bodies. Over the centuries, factions have developed between those who favor promulgating the faith and those who seek knowledge as the stepping stone to true faith.

When one of the listeners visits “Heaven”–a location that matches common but not biblical depictions of heaven–everything comes to a head as the rival factions vie for power.

You know, when I read classical science fiction–not the modern stuff, and not so much the late Cold War US vs the Soviets in Space–I experience a sense of wonder that I don’t get from other genre fiction, including fantasy. Anything can happen, and I feel transported in a way I don’t with men’s adventure paperbacks, thrillers, or even historical fiction or literature. So I should really read more science fiction–it’s not as though I lack it on my shelves–but somehow I end up grabbing a different kind of book, and I lose that sense of wonder.

Perhaps I should read more science fiction. Please, someone, remind me of this in a week or so.

So, yeah, recommended.

I haven’t read much Simak (City and Mastodonia in the last decade), but he’s a fallen Wisconsin boy (fallen because he was born in Wisconsin but ended up in Minneapolis). In researching this post, I did learn that I bought two copies of Mastodonia over the years (one in October 2010 and another a year later in October 2011). So I’ll have to be careful not to pluck the second copy from my shelves in 2029 and read it again. Because, by that time, I expect to have about 20% more books on my to-read shelves than I do now. Please, someone, if you see me picking Mastodonia up again, remind me.