Author: Brian J. Noggle

This comb-bound book has a 1981 copyright date, but the author’s autograph on the title page is dated 1990, so nine years later, she’s still signing them for people. At poetry readings/open mics? For friends? For the little bookstore down the block? I cannot tell, as it’s just a signature and the date, but that makes it seem like it was a less personal occasion and something more formal. Still, working it nine years later. I wonder if she printed that many of them in 1981 or was reprinting them as needed. It’s a lot to speculate about on a simple chapbook.

At any rate, it was a pleasant read after At the Mountains Collections of Madness. As you might recall, I didn’t care for that previous volume very much. It’s too modern, where the poems are mainly free verse which, at their worst, are inscrutible verbiage (sometimes) and, at their best, are brain dumps with little apparent craftsmanship. I also saw that the editor of the Marshfield Mail, the current Missouri Poet Laureate, posted a piece of free verse in the paper and defended it a bit as poetry a week or so back, and I thought, “Meh.”

So some better-than-average Grandma poetry was in order. Well, some Grandma poetry, which I am taking to calling the poetry written by housewives in the middle of the 20th century. The sort that filled Ideals magazine. The kind of thing Leah Lathrop and Bobbie J. Lawson, amongst many other examples scattered over this blog, wrote. Formal, rhythmic, and sometimes with an insight or two into the human condition.

This collection was written by a Long Island housewife and deals with tending to children, continuing to be in love with your spouse (and working at it), and other mid-life (that is, the bulk of life) concerns. Some are quick little hits, bits of humor about phone use back when the family only had a single phone connected to the wall and family members contended to talk on it. Some are longer reflections about family and long-term romantic relationships. Some drop contemporary references to movies and soap operas whose titles and players are forgotten in the 21st century.

Overall, a better than average collection of Grandma poetry. Some workmanship and some insight, but it doesn’t rise to the level of high art. But better than most of the dreck produced by professionals, who will also be forgotten in the ages, wherein “ages” might mean “couple of years.”

It’s been two years since I read The Tao of Pooh, and I mentioned I had this book around somewhere, maybe. I’m not entirely sure if I found it or if I bought it in the interim, but its absence on the Good Book Hunting post in the interim suggests the former.

Like the predecessor, this book seeks to illustrate Taoist thought through a whimsical mash-up with Winnie-the-Pooh stories. The title character in this case is Piglet, who is small but Taoism would suggest (as the book asserts) that he is the right size. So we get a little of the author interacting with the Pooh characters, a little bit of text from actual Pooh stories, and chapters on different personality types demonstrated by the Pooh characters and how they’re not properly Taoist (Eeyore is too negative, Tigger is too positive, and so on). We get helpful quotes from other sources, such as Henry David Thoreau as well as actual Taoist thinkers.

It’s okay; a little less informative than The Tao of Pooh and a little more, erm, practical and contemporary in its descriptions of kids these days and how modern life isn’t very Taoist. He foreshadows a bit when he laments about the government whipping up a frenzy to remove the foreign tyrant of the day. Looking at the publication date, we can tell that this was Saddam and the first Gulf War (Desert Shield/Desert Storm).

Then we get to page 214, and we get completely into how the Republicans are going to cause the Taoist apocalypse through their rapacious greed and desire for profit/conquest. No, really. The harms done by Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and their supporters were going to cause Nature, the Tao, or the Nothing to violently respond and swing the pendulum back the other way towards harmony. Perhaps that was the election of Clinton later in the year. Maybe we’re still due for a reckoning, since we had George W. Bush. Friends, the narrative sucker-punch gained precedence in the early 21st century when authors dropped in unwarranted political commentary in books to prove they hated Bush like any right thinker would. This one comes from a decade and a whole Bush earlier.

So, yeah, I can see why this book would not have been as popular as its predecessor.

An easy enough read, but the author’s interactions with the Pooh characters detracted from it in spots, such as the introduction of a, what, mob-connected hardman, into an otherwise engaging exploration of Taoism. Well, engaging when it wasn’t completely off-putting with a misplaced and misguided tirade.

I thought I might browse this book of photography during football games, but it’s more than a book of photography. Although it does have a lot of great photos of native animals and landscape around Missouri, it also offers photography tips and discusses various habitats and geographical types we have in Missouri, from the different types of forests (and what constitutes an actual forest as opposed to a woodland).

So I enjoyed it. Every once in a while, I think about getting into photography, but books like this might daunt me as I learn how much effort a professional photographer puts into it.

Although he did admit that for some wildlife, he puts them into an enclosure designed to look like their habitat and then gets pictures of them doing their thing there instead of out in the wild. Which probably makes sense when you’re on a deadline. And it tells me if I want to become a nature photographer, I should start at the zoo.

At any rate, I enjoyed this book more than a simple book of photography. Like The World of the Polar Bear, it informed me about the process as well. Which is more interesting sometimes than the mere photos.

After I finished Killing Floor, I went to Barnes and Noble and plunked down a couple of bucks for the next book in the series. Actually, I almost plunked down a couple of bucks–wait, they’re actually ten bucks for paperbacks now?–for Make Me because the end of The Killing Floor says “Jack Reacher returns in Make Me“, but apparently that was a new book when this paperback edition was published and it was not listing the next in the series.

So, yeah.

Well, I clearly did not like the book as much as I “liked” the first one. I mean, it starts out with Jack Reacher accidentally stumbling (literally) into an attempted kidnapping, and he thinks he can take the kidnappers but that innocent people might get caught in the cross-fire. I am pretty sure even I by 1998 had attended a self-defense seminar that said give an attacker your money, but never get in the car. So this would have been a much shorter Brian J. Noggle-as-hero book because I would have been killed by the gunmen in chapter one. But hyper-competent Jack Reacher should have ended it early, but we would not have had a whole 552 page novel to go through to get to the end.

So the actual kidnapping victim is the FBI agent daughter of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the kidnappers are a right wing militia (ripped from recent events in 1998, but still a trope twenty years later) who are declaring their own nation in Montana and are using her as a hostage to keep the military from attacking. Or something.

You know, the plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and the pacing is awful. Child has discovered the jump cut third person narration, where we get to see lots of extraneous things going on from different perspectives, and in most cases, they really don’t increase the tension. We get the same events sometimes from three different characters’ perspectives, and then the resolution is simple and underwhelming. And Jack Reacher vacillates between the hyper-competent and pretty passive as events overtake him.

You know, I flagged a lot of things as silly. Like:

“We’re in some sort of a barn,” Reacher said. “With the doors closed.
Holly nodded impatiently.
“I know that,” she said. “I can smell it.”

A dairy barn, I guess, since the beef cattle around here don’t have cow barns.

The guy with the shotgun tore his attenion away from Holly’s breasts. He raised the weapon to his hip. Pointed it in Reacher’s direction. It was an Ithaca 37. Twelve-bore.

We’re in America, Jack. Talk American. Twelve gauge.

He [Jack Reacher] walked fast for twenty minutes. More than a mile.

I should hope more than a mile. The average walking speed of a human is three to four miles an hour. I should hope that Jack Reacher’s walking fast would be better than average. (Although he is carrying a dead body at this point, but still.)

“I don’t have many facilities available,” he [the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] said in turn. “It’s the holiday weekend. Exactly seventy-five percent of the U.S. Army is on leave.”

Oh, come on.

The parade ground was full of people. All standing in neat ranks. Reacher guessed that there were maybe a hundred people there. Men and women. All in uniform. All armed. Their weapons formed a formidible array of firepower. Each person had either a fully automatic rifle or a machine gun sling over their left shoulder.

A fully automatic rifle or a machine gun! Do tell. Even if we’re going to argue about whether some had M2s over their shoulders, we’re already outside the story, ainna? Trying to make the text somehow conform to our experience and think maybe the author was winging it a bit?

He kept close to the road, all the way back to Yorke. Two miles, twenty minutes at a slow, agonizing jog throuh the trees.

Friends, six miles an hour is a comfortable run for me. Not a slow, agonizing jog. Of course, I’m not in the peak of human conditioning, and I know the military expects more of its recruits, but it’s not how I would characterize six miles an hour.

Where the earth had fractured and fallen, the edges had broken up into giant boulders. The scouring of the glaciers had tumbled those boulders south….

Blah blah. Here, have a page or so history of the ice age that created the topography of this particular obstacle. My old fiction professor would talk about nice little moments in short stories, but too many of these nice little moments, and I hearken back to another professor of philosophy who admitted one day that all the amusing stories he told in class were simply because he had to fill the time and couldn’t let us go too early or it would reflect bad upon him (and this was the 3:30 to 5:00 class that finished up my semester of two days of classes, 8:00 to 5:00, so I could work instead on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so I was pretty tired of classes by then and didn’t want to listen any more to stories just padding time).

The nearest sentry was still on his feet. Not heading for the shed. Just standing and staring toward the rock Reacher was behind. Raising his rifle. It was an M-16, same as Reacher’s. Long magazine, thirty shells. The guy was standing there, sighting it in on the rock. A brave man, or an idiot. Reacher crouched and waited. The guy fired. His weapon was set on automatic. He loosed off a burst of three.

Sweet Christmas, even I know that the common pew! selector on an M-16 was single, burst of three, and fully automatic. So in saying that the guy had it set to automatic and only fired a burst of three “shells,” well.

Never mind. I flagged a lot in this book and shook my head at a lot of nice little moments that were not so little and a plot that, well, why did they do what they did? Because, BOOK!

If this were an Executioner novel, it would not have been a particularly good one. And it would have been 300 pages shorter. So I’ll stick with them and perhaps Rogue Warrior titles when I fancy something longer.

So maybe I’ll pick up more Lee Child books at book sales for a dollar, but likely not for a while.

I am interested in seeing the other Tom Cruise Jack Reacher movie, though.

And if you ask me, I would say I prefer the metal band.

But I would. I actually do own that album. I picked it up at a garage sale sometime.