Author: Brian J. Noggle

I picked up this book just this summer at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale. It’s a chapbook, for which I would have paid a buck at the Friends of the Springfield County Library Book Sale (or got in a bundle for a buck), but as this was the Christian County Library which sells books by the bag, I probably paid a nickel for it. But it’s definitely worth more than that. The book is inscribed to the Christian County Library by the author in 2015, which must be an interesting story as the poet is from the upper penninsula of Michigan and the inscription is dated seven years after the chapbook was published (by a chapbook publisher, perhaps not by the poet herself).

I enjoyed this book more than other collections I have read for two reasons: The poet is someone around my age, reminiscing and navigating relationships in middle age, so it’s not grandmother poetry nor is it instapoetry written by the very young who have not read much actual poetry and cannot dialog with tradition by extending it or defying it. Also, the poet often uses a simple declarative sentence as the first line of the poem, which I’ve been doing a lot with my recent poems. I half-remember an adage that a poem is a descent into hell, and the first line tells you how far you’ll go, but I cannot find it on the Internet. I attributed to Frost, but I cannot confirm that via Internet search.

Thematically, it’s a lot of reminiscing about past relationships but not in the college professor enumerating body count way that you get too often in professional male poets. Also, some reflections and musings on current relationships thrown in. Some depth to many of them, some good line length and rhythm, but a couple are the short line breaks that are self-consciously poems.

So, yeah, a cut above other poetry I’ve read. It flags a little in the middle poems–enough that I thought I might need to read the first poems again to make sure my previous judgment of not bad was still correct, but later poems returned to form. So some filler material, but some good poems within.

Strangely enough, the author only seems to have come out with this single chapbook of poetry (and a collection about Michigan cherries, as the author is from the upper penninsula). Of course, I cannot knock it, as my output aside from twee blog posts and extensive documentation for losing causes has been thin in recent years as well.

Still, this is what I hope for when I pick up a cheap chapbook (redundant, I know): Something that I really enjoy in spots rather than merely read.

Well, after reading the Horatio Alger book, I snatched up this book which was shelved by it on the top of the bookshelves in my office. I bought the books two different times, the Alger in 2021 and this book in 2022, and the books came out fifty to sixty years apart (the Alger mid- to late- 19th century, this book in the height of the Great Depression), but they’re both books for young men with applicable life lessons.

In this book, Jimmy Arch, the young son of a widow, struggles and acts out in school and needs to work to supplement his mother’s income. When his mother dies, the shopkeeper where he works takes him in, and Jimmy helps the store to thrive when he discovers he has pinpoint control pitching baseball from his pastime of throwing bricks at things in the alley outside his meager apartment. The headmaster of the school he attends recognizes Jimmy’s intelligence even though his boredom in school leads him to underachieve and lends him books for self-study. Jimmy watches the construction of a bridge to The City and becomes interested in engineering. As a result, Jimmy gets first a job in the city when an engineer at the big engineering firm that built the bridge tells the boss that the kid can pitch for the company team. Later, Jimmy gets into the big engineering college and almost works himself to death trying to support himself until he is rediscovered as a pitcher who might be able to help the team win against its biggest rival–and get a plum engineering job if he does.

So the book is similar to the Alger novels in Strive and Succeed, but: Jimmy Arch rises not only because he’s good and industrious, but he also has the talent of being a good pitcher. Although this is a talent he develops–and the book does mention how hard he practices–it might be the first step on the slide towards all young adult protagonists being special in a way that the Alger heroes were not.

Still, a quick read and not bad for what it was. The cover looks like it could be a retelling of The Fountainhead, but with engineering and baseball and help from other people (and adult male figures provide guidance for the young man growing up). At no point, though, does Jimmy Arch ever stand on a girder being lifted into place. Maybe someday.

It has been three years since I bought this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale, but it seemed to fit thematically with the audio course The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and re-reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, so I picked this two-book collection from the top right corner of the stacks in my office.

It contains:

• Julius, or the Street Boy Out West (1874), wherein an orphan who lived with a burglar is out on his own after going to the authorities when the burglar and an accomplice plan a burglary at the home of someone who has done Julius a turn. Julius resettles “out West” (in this case, Wisconsin, near “Milwaukie” [sic]) with the help of an aid society in New York (a real concern that Alger promoted in a number of his books), gets an education, earns the trust of the family that accepts him into their home, becomes successful, averts tragedy when the burglar accomplice who has broken out of Sing Sing comes looking for him.
  
   
• The Store Boy, or the Fortunes of Ben Barclay (1887), wherein the son of a widow works in the local grocery store, but the local money man is going to foreclose on her mortgage unless they can come up with the $700 in a couple of months. It seems impossible, but the boy made friends on a buying trip to New York and has a chance to work for a wealthy woman whose distant cousins try to sabotauge the relationship, fearing he will inherit. He gets the drop on them, and a menacing tramp turns into an ally who helps them not only pay the morgage but to put the local money man and his ne’er-do-well son in their place.

So they both tell rags-to-riches story, but in both cases, the urchins have help from people who appreciate that they’re honest and hardworking. So it’s definitely not akin to an Ayn Rand novel where the protagonists succeed despite how much the world is against them. In Alger’s world, bad people do oppose the young heroes, but other good people help them. Which might have represented a shift in the zeitgeist between the mid- to late-ninteenth century to the post-World War I world.

The books also feature a couple of interesting duplicated scenes; in both, the protagonist spots a pickpocket at work, and calling him out leads to a rewarding situation beyond a monetary reward. And in both, the young men are given nice watches. It’s a small sample size from Alger’s work, but one wonders if it’s a common element or if the books just happened to have the repeated scenes which were so similar.

At any rate, the language was approachable–the books were written for young people, after all–back in the time where boys read books and when the heroes of books were like better versions of the readers themselves or certainly encouraging peers. Unlike much of the YA you see talked about these days, where the protagonists are all special or superhuman or who have to deal with dystopias unlike what the readers will encounter (hopefully) or where the protagonists represent something in Proper Contemporary Thought and who have to navigate the patriarchy that wants to keep the faddishly different down.

I flagged something in one of the books, and it’s true of both of them: Alger has a city sense of scale. He talks about something a mile and a half away being distant. He talks about Ben Barclay picking up someone to give her a ride for a half mile. That might seem like a long way off if you’re used to living in the city, but here in the country, a mile off is…. visible. Not that far at all. You can always tell someone lived entirely in cities and maybe visited the country when they talk like that. Although, to be honest, when Thoreau in Walden talks distances, they’re not that great, either, so maybe it’s more of an East Coast/New England thing where the sense of scale is different.

So not as inspirational as the Franklin, but better than what you might get from the 20th century.

I got this book in Sparta in October as part of a minor bag-day binge along with a couple of other loft design books. I mean, I liked the HGTV show Small Space, Big Style (example) about how people decorated their small apartments in the big city (often New York). So I thought I would really like this book. But….

The book is Euro-centered with a couple of “lofts” in South America and in the United States. But the aesthetic is basically European: Lots of white walls (finished walls for the most part) with minimalist furniture in them. Many of them are not “lofts” in revitalized industrial or warehouse buildings but rather repurposed other businesses. Some of them exceed 1000 square feet, which is not especially “small”–not that I think lofts must be small, but the book title has the word in it (although perhaps not in the original language–this book is a translation, which might explain its non-American focus and preferred aesthetic).

So, I dunno. Not my bag. My style is more Ethan Allen than Euromoderne, and I fully expect my lofts to have unpainted red brick walls (or maybe painted cinder block) and I presume that they will not be on the first floor. I dunno why: probably because that’s what I have in my head as a loft based on its origins, not that it’s a condo by another name to appeal to people too cool to own a mere condo.

So it was almost a quick flip through, but I definitely have some quibbles with the book. First, it had some blatant copy errors: One, the verb fomd which I could not actually guess what they meant. A pair of chapters covering two halves of the same building were out of order, so that the second of the two referred to the other chapter following it. And so on. Secondly, some photo captions were in something like six point font–I mean, it was tiny. I don’t want to go all old man here, but I had to angle the light just right on the book and damn near squint to read them–I even tried my beautiful wife’s cheaters and they didn’t help much. Third, the book lapses into the argot of interior design–which I suppose is fitting since this is clearly an inspiration book for designers, but, c’mon, man, if every liminal space is diaphanous, what does that even mean to distinguish it from every other instance of transition and example of natural light?

So I was not impressed by the lofts depicted nor the book itself.

Which likely will not put me off on reading the other loft design books I got in October. A man has to make his annual reading goals even if it’s just browsing pretty pictures.

This collection is a collaborative effort by two people who worked for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune before Lileks was there. Ed Fischer was a cartoonist, and Jane Thomas Nuland was books editor. So this collection is about aging, one page a cartoon and the facing page a quip, a gag, a little story, or a little poem by Ms. Noland.

So: I dunno, about the same as you’d get from, say, a collection of Saturday Evening Post material (ye gods, have I reported on three? 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, yes indeedy–but in my defense, this blog is coming up on 22 years old now, so I am reading other things in between). Not as quotable nor retellable as what you would get out of a collection of jokes or Reader’s Digest every month, but amusing. Presumably, a lot of these were given as birthday gifts for someone turning 40, 50, or 60 back in the day where people photocopied cartoons to tack onto their cubicles or tape to the walls of their workspaces.

So an hour or so browsing, one more book on the annual list, and not a great expense–it was stuffed into a $3 bag amongst other gleanings in Sparta in October.

It’s funny to think, though, that this sort of thing (and Reader’s Digest) might have been the equivalent of TikTok for the pre-Internet generation. A series of short, unrelated things for amusement that passed right through the eyes and through the brain, presumably, but not retained. I guess the main difference is the lack of infinite scroll, so eventually you come to the end of the book or the end of the magazine and have to get up and do something in real life for a bit before picking up another one. Or maybe not; perhaps I am tweely pronouncing whatever little thought comes into my little mind at any time.

So after reading Gideon’s Gift and Sarah’s Song, of course I ploughed right into this book simply so I could spell plough the British way yet again. Also, what better time to finish the set than when rushing through them all at once (Heigh, Brian, how’s the ‘Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies’ series coming? you ask, and I salute you for your British spellings as well as I avoid the question).

This book is better than the previously mentioned books because they don’t have a wrapper prologue nor, really, a bifurcated story, although some of it is told in flashback, but not a whole lot. The titular Hannah is a freshman in an exclusive high school in Washington, D.C., who keeps very busy with extracurricular activities because her parents are away for most of the year–her father, a former Senator, is the ambassador to Sweden and her mother is quite the social butterfly. Hannah lives with her maternal grandmother in a big house and does not have much in terms of companionship outside of those activities. Her driver, though, prays for Hannah all the time, and when he asks her for what he should pray for, she asks for a Christmas miracle–and later, when her parents tell her they won’t be home for Christmas, she narrows her miracle into hoping her parents will be home for Christmas. To take her mind off of the daughter’s loneliness and to keep her from pestering them during the party season in Sweden, the mother reveals a secret: the ambassador is not her real dad–the mother had been with a surfer type out in California in her salad days before returning home with a 4-year-old daughter to marry into her position in society. So Hannah reaches out to Congressmen and the press to help find her father who enlisted in the Army a decade ago and might be in Iraq. He is, but he’s going on One Last Mission, a dangerous one, because the other helicopter pilots have wives and families. So there’s a bit of tension as to whether he will Make It Home Alive, much less in time for Christmas (and the mother jets back from Sweden to quell the noise her daughter has made).

So it was a more straightforward narrative without the double-effect, the half-the-story-in-flashback, method used by the other two books I read. It did have some head scratchers that made me go, “Really?” like the fact that the mother brought the box of mementoes from her California fling to Sweden with her instead of leaving it in the mansion which was their pied-à-terre in the United States–ah, well, it served to move the plot, such as it was, along.

The best of the three I read and more on par with a traditional Christmas novel. No real unreal ending where the mother and the biological father rediscover their passion for one another–that would be a different kind of book, ainna?–but still the best of the lot (unless the second in the series was the best).

So now I have most of the month of December left. Will I read a Christmas novel by a different author? Can I even find one in the stacks even though I stock up on them through the year? Stay tuned!

After I read Gideon’s Gift, I was a bit divided over whether to plow through the other two volumes that I own in the Red Gloves series (which only has four books in it, so I have 75% of the whole series). I mean, yeah, they’re short and quick reads, but Gideon’s Hope was just a touch off, even for a Christmas book. Still, I finished Walden in the interim (which I suppose I could write up even though I cannot count it as a complete book as the version I read is in a three book omnibus edition) and have plucked at a couple of other books, but I picked up this book for a single-night read.

And because I thought Gideon’s Gift was a bit….off, I went into it looking for things that were wrong. Which I found, even if they weren’t wrong.

The book has a similar double-story going on and a bit of a contrived frame. An elderly woman has held on for one more Christmas so that she can share her special story (and song) with someone who needs it. She is Sarah, obv., and a worker in her old folks home, Beth, is the one who needs it. Beth has decided to leave her husband because…. well, the modern “because,” which is because she wants to get her groove back, to eat, pray, love, and just because she’s not living her best life with her husband. In short, she’s bored. But she agrees to not leave until after Christmas so as to not ruin the holiday for their little girl. So Sarah tells her the story of her youth, her love, and her song: She loved a local boy in her hometown, but she wanted bigger things, to be a singer, so she went off to Nashville, works as a secretary/receptionist at a recording label while trying to make it, got picked up by a womanizing country star who takes her on tour with promises of making her a star, but he’s not faithful to her, so she returns home only to find the boy has moved on, so she writes a song which captures her feelings for him which her Nashville bosses discover and make a hit, and he hears it on the radio and comes back to their hometown, and they live happily for five plus decades. After she finishes the story and sings the song for Beth, she gives Beth the red gloves and dies like Yoda. And Beth reconciles with her husband. Happy ending! Except, I suppose, for Sarah, although I guess she goes to heaven to be with her husband after fulfilling her last mission on earth.

Ah, twee.

The first anachronism I found was in 1940, teens (Sarah and her friend) were listening to records in their bedroom. That seems a little early for that particular trope. Also, the girl goes to Nashville in 1940 for a “record deal” which seems a little early for that particular development as well. And as she is struggling in Nashville, she is calling her parents long-distance twice a week. C’mon, man. In 1940, inexpensive apartments did not have telephones in them, and even in the 1980s, we weren’t calling someone long distance twice a week. That was expensive. Some of us can remember it. One presumes that many of the people who read Karen Kingsbury novels would know it, too, if they stopped to think of it.

But probably this book is not designed for thinking. It’s designed for quickly reading and feeling, and I’ve quickly read it and felt that I was not really the target audience. Not for any Christmas novel, actually, but yet I read them around this time of year when I can find them in the stacks.