Author: Brian J. Noggle

I got this book for my birthday this year, and after kinda sounding like I was slagging on the gifts, I decided I’d prioritize reading the books. So I picked up this book, the first of the two Grishams; my son thought I was a Grisham fan, and although I listened to one of the early books–A Time To Kill? It’s the one with the attorney in it. You know, aside from reading Perry Mason books from time to time and in bulk in my youth, I never really got into legal thrillers. I mean, I probably have read some Scott Turow, too, but I’d be hard pressed to remember, and it would have been a long time ago.

So: A woman on the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct is getting bored with the job which is getting starved of funds. The BJC investigates judges suspected of wrongdoing–and in a previous book, she’s nailed one such judge for corruption, but not without cost. An attention-averse woman approaches her with knowledge and some circumstantial evidence that a local judge is a serial killer with a list of victims going back several decades. As they begin to investigate, the judge kills again, but makes a mistake. Which leads them to more investigating, and going to proper investigators in the FBI, but….

Okay, so the first part of the book deals with the investigator’s doubt about the woman bringing her the information, but eventually she gets going on looking into it. The second part of the book introduces the judge as a character, so we get into his mind as he prepares his crimes–he’s hopped up on bennies, a hacking genius, a compulsive type who cleans enough to make the guy from Gattaca look like a slob, and kind of unbelievable. Then, after he makes his kill and has to kill a witness (which I guess is the turning point?), he figures out who the woman who intially discovered him is, and he gets the drop on her even though she’s supposed to be almost as paranoid as he is (his super hacking helps), and he sets a trap for the investigator. But deus ex machina thwarts the trap, deus ex machina saves the kidnapped girl, unsatisfying resolution to the pursuit of the judge, and a denouement which includes the winding down of the team (not an unexpected twist to the unsatisfying resoluton to the pursuit of the judge which would have been unsatisfying in itself, but it’s somehow worse without) and a lot of jibber jabber, talking to families of victims to offer them resolution, which is jibber jabber and not a shoot-out where the good guys triumph.

Ach, this is a chick book. Not sure if JG has a girl ghost writer or if he just knows the market that gets him forty-something consecutive bestsellers, but the book has a lot of talking, self-doubting, other-doubting, and then more talking as though the talking and overcoming self-doubting were heroic in themselves. But, uh, yeah. Not making me want to delve into the backlist (except where gifted).

But, ya know. He’s sold more books than I have books, apps, t-shirts, related CafePress sundries, blog traffic (including bots), and social media impressions that I’ve gotten in a comparable time. So take it for what it’s worth, but in my opinion, he’s no John D. McDonald.

This book was sitting on my chairside table, and I thought I might read it for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Inspiring” category if Be Water, My Friend bogged down too much (not quite). And when I finished the reading challenge, I ran through it pretty quickly.

I bought it sight unseen in a bundle of chapbooks only last spring, and although the name of the editor sounded familiar, I don’t have anything else by her or edited by her. However, I might well have a poem by her in a similar collection–and I well might have. The publishing house is SPS Studios, and one of the poems is by Susan Polis Schutz–a poet who has been editing and publishing poetry since the 1980s (her first company for self-publishing was Blue Mountain Press, which later turned into BlueMountain.com which did electronic greeting cards which sold for $780 million in 1999, and that, children is how you get Governor Jared Polis of Colorado) If anyone wants to buy my publishing company, it’s far less expensive and comes with 7 unused ISBN numbers at no additional charge! Plus a couple of apps, presuming that the clankers companies don’t come from them. Sorry, where was I?

Oh. Inspiring? Meh, not really. A bit of lightweight mindfulness musing. Poetry? Again, no, not really. Sentences with line breaks. Not quite as good as heartfelt grandma poetry, albeit more spiritual than Christian–definitely a California-and-crystals vibe with 0 mentions of God and the only faith is the faith in yourself.

Still, with the number of copies that turn up in Springfield book sales, SPS has definitely had more reach than either my publishing company or my publications which recently have only paid in electronic presence which is lasts as long as the university keeps paying hosting fees. So….good?

For the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Translated” category, gentle reader, you might have expected me to pick up a martial arts book of some sort as that is my wont. But, ah! My translated martial arts books are getting a little thin, and the adjacent material that I have is pretty deep and dense for the final charge through the winter reading challenge. So I decided to pick up a Japanese manufacturing quality textbook from the 1970s!

So that’s what this is: It’s a manufacturing quality book, which means that its focus is on testing lots or examples of repeated machine work or chemical work. And it was designed as a textbook: It’s for quality circles, which were little afterhours learning groups at Japanese factories at the time when they were about to surpass the United States in reputation for quality. It relies on a lot of data collection and statistical analysis to look for places to improve. Which is not like software quality assurance at all.

I’ll be honest, though: I only skimmed a lot of the formulae within the book, and I did not diligently, as the book recommends, work through them to fully grok how to do the different analyses. The first half of the book is the explanation of the different types of analysis and, mostly, how to present the information in graphs and charts to make useful decisions based on the bars, lines, and points and figures. The second half is practice problems which the book recommended you work out individually or in your study group. I guess, in the 21st century, the next step (not depicted here, of course) would be to get a certificate of completion or other certification (and spend a lot of money to take the test, if not to take the training as well). I rather only scanned the problems to refresh the concepts in them. So did I really read this book? It took me several nights despite not working out what the square root of the x with the bar over it divided by pN means.

You know, I sometimes “work” in the software quality assurance field, and there was some effort to make SQA more like physical quality control a long time ago. I was even a member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) around the turn of the century, and the bulk of the magazine was like this–and they had a cartoon called Mr. Pareto-head. Well, this book helped to cement what that diagram really is–a bar chart with the values in descending order with a line chart atop it which shows those values as they add up to total percentage as you move to the right. Also, I learned a bit about the different types of charts, about the Ishikawa fishbone cause-and-effect diagram (named after the book’s author sometime perhaps between the first edition and this, a translated multi-printing American edition). But, really, the most directly applicable (sideways) chapter is the one on samples and sampling techniques because that could be an interesting way to describe/conceive of sets and subsets of tests to run.

At any rate, it closed out the fifteen categories for the Winter Reading Challenge, so I am eligible for a mug when I can be arsed to get up to a library branch for it in the next week.

And now you’re wondering if this will be the year where Brian J. works on reading all the quality assurance textbooks which he has accumulated over the course of the 21st century. Or even merely another. Prediction markets are leaning toward no.

I got this book in 2011, three years after I bought its sequel, 1633, in 2011, when Tam K. visited and commented from time to time, and a VftPlanche was the next best thing next to an Instalanche (which was over the course of a couple hours, but VftPlanches, although, smaller, stretched over days, and I still sometimes get a click from deep in her archives). We were bloggers once, and young. These days, the only ‘lanches I get are when a new Asian LLM comes scraping content.

Ah, well. The 2026 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “Set in Two Time Periods,” and although The Sins of the Fathers has a reprinted log entry set 100+ years in the past, I could not count it in the arbitrary good conscience I use when making up the actual rules for the contest. This book, however, starts in then-modern West Virginia before the town of Grantville is transported to 1632 Germany. It’s only a chapter, and then we’re in the second time period for the rest of the book. One presumes that 1633 takes place exclusively in one time period, so I’ve glad I found this one first.

So: A group of union mine workers are at a wedding of one of their own to the daughter of some uptight YUPPIE types when “The Ring Of Fire” takes the high school where the wedding is taking place from the West Virginia mountains along with several miles, including the town, to 1632 in the region now known as Germany. As they’re all good old boys, they’re armed to the teeth, which gives them an advantage as they try to remake their portion of the plains into America.

The book kinda has several threads in it: The pairing off of transplanted Americans with the attractive members of the locals; politicking as they talk about how they would like to govern themselves and the new nation they hope to bring forth; and some battle scenes where the Americans have to defeat the local powers of the day and work with their growing allies, which includes Jews.

To be honest, I kind of thought some groundwork was getting laid for some intrigues where pairs might start working at odds with each other, vying for power, but that had not really happened by the end of the novel–although the book has several sequels, so who knows what might be to come.

I found the politicking parts the most dragging, because a lot of it was mere speechifying. It’s a pretty big cast of characters, too, who are sometimes referred to by their first names and sometimes their last names, which made me sometimes think, “Which one is this again?” But it was an all right read. And it did bring the Thirty Years’ War into a little more familiarity and perspective. I read a book about Swedish history in 2013, and I remember tweeting at the time about how the Swedish leader at the time, Gustav Vasa, was interesting only to have a Swedish woman say, “Ackshually….” However, he’s presented sympathetically here (as are guns and a lot of the concepts of the Founding Fathers’), so no sucker punch ever came.

So if you like your alt-historical fiction, a blend of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (which I read in college), Puck of Pook’s Hill, a Kipling novel I read in 2010), some more modern alt-history people like Turtledove and Stirling, you could probably do worse.

As the book was over 500 pages, it counts as a two-fer (a book that could have filled two categories in the Winter Reading Challenge).