Author: Brian J. Noggle

I guess it’s been two years since I’ve read an Andy Rooney book (see also Years of Minutes ca 2004). I’ve had a couple on my to-read shelf for about a year now, maybe a year and a half. Perhaps there’s even an Rooneyesque essay in how long books remain on my to-read shelves. As a matter of fact, most have tenures far longer than the Andy Rooney books, even if it takes me another two years to read the (currently) remaining volume.

This book collects some of his paper columns instead of his 60 Minutes things, so it’s (slightly) longer pieces and a period piece to some extent. Rooney’s got his normal pecadilloes, and when he’s griping about a United States president, it’s Reagan. If you want to pigeonhole his politics, it’s a bit Libertarian in its distrust of some institutions, but liberal in its desire to do something for the downtrodden. But the politics are so very simply presented that you can overlook them. As a matter of fact, Rooney lets on that his life is different from ours. He’s a television/media personality with an office in Manhattan, a house in Connecticut, and a summer home. But his essays and musings focus so much on the minutiae of life that one focuses on them, too, and doesn’t worry about the differences. Instead, we focus on our similarities.

Or we would. I imagine Rooney’s falling out of fashion because he brings a WWII generation view on things that have left the WWII generation behind. Still, he’s not a bad guy, and he shares a certain amount of worldview with me. Enough that I read his essays and I want to write some of my own, much like them. To share in the conversation and to make some normal guy nod his head in comprehension and understanding.

That’s not how Joseph Epstein makes me feel.

You know, I’ve put these links on my site for some time now, and I’ve only “made” 8 cents. I put quotation marks around made because Amazon doesn’t cut no checks for 8 coppers and no doubt bleeds the pennies away in fees of some sort or another. You all are some of the cheapest gentle readers in the world, or the most illiterate.

Buy a book and show me you care.

Bloody heck, show Andy Rooney you care.

Back in my eBay seller days, I bought a first edition hardback written by Manly Wade Wellman at a garage sale for next to nothing and sold it for quite a bit of scratch. So when I found another paperback by the author and tried to turn that one for some bucks. No dice. So I still have it, and here it is. So much on my to read shelves follows this pattern (see also the Chronicles of Counter Earth series and numerous Stephen King and John Saul titles). So it’s here, and now it’s read.

Manly Wade Wellman was an author in the science fiction pulps. This book includes a novel originally published in 1940 (the eponymous Twice in Time) and a bonus short story called “The Timeless Tomorrow”. It also has a brief introduction, which I thought I’d read, but I got to the point where it said “If you like surprise endings, don’t read any further.” I mean, come on, you’re going to give me the ultimate twist in the introduction because you take this author seriously as literature enough to strip that enjoyment from readers? Where does that mean you fall on the self-esteem scale, or where do you think the audience does?

So I stopped reading it, but I knew there was a surprise twist coming, so I figured out the surprise fairly early. I don’t know if I would have otherwise, but the names and the very cover gave the game away.

A modern (ca 1940) man builds a time reflector to go back to Renaissance Florence. He does and falls into the clutches of an ambitious courtier who wants to use his new “friend” in his lust for power. Together under duress, they take on the d’Medicis.

The additional short story also deals with time travel, as Nostradamus learns he cannot only see the future, but can participate in it.

The writing style is the simplistic of the pulps, but without the transcendence of Hemingway or Hammett. It reminds me of much of my early fiction and probably too much of my contemporary fiction, probably. It’s not bad, but the not bad is not a synonmym for good. And it’s really not worth an introduction that talks about the book as though it was a literary triumph with which everyone is familar, even if they haven’t read it.

That said, click the link below to buy it and send me a couple pennies for my effort.

I found a pile of Ed McBain books at the Carondolet Y book fair this year, and I bought them. This book clocks in at 147 pages, so it’s more like a novella than a novel, but it was a quick read.

The book deals with Bert Kling’s marriage to the model, Augusta, and her kidnapping on their wedding night. The detectives of the 87th, along with Fat Ollie Weeks, beat the bushes, grasp the straws, work the informants, and ultimately find her just in time.

Even though I know the longer story arcs of these characters, I can still enjoy individual books pulled from the middle of the 87th Precinct series. It would be a neat endeavor to read them all in order. Someday, perhaps, when I get them all.

Sure, it’s a short review. It’s a short book. And you don’t read these anyway.

Mark Steyn has been talking about the old James Bond books and a new book about James Bond books, so I was inspired to draw this old paperback from my shelf. It had been a while (at least two years, since there are no book reports) since I read the first three Signet paperbacks in my library (Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Diamonds Are Forever), but I liked them enough to buy a couple more when I found them at garage sales.

Thunderball is based on the screenplay of the same name, so it’s not a straight James Bond novel, I suspect. Still, the author has a lot of fun making cracks about the plot being like a B movie plot, so Fleming didn’t take it too seriously. Much like the movie Never Say Never Again didn’t take it too seriously when they remade it.

The story, for those of you who don’t know and probably don’t care, is that SPECTRE (not Spectra, that was Battle of the Planets, silly!) has stolen a plane with a couple of nukes on it and they’re going to blow them unless they get ransom. The West looks for SPECTRE and thinks about paying, but Britain sends James Bond to Bermuda just in case it’s there. It is.

A quick read (188 pages) and, apparently, a piece of British history. Shorter and more engaging than a Clancy, anyway.