Author: Brian J. Noggle

This is a relatively recent (2020) hardback from the Salesian Missions collection of poems which I just bought in (May 2025, so just three months ago). Since I’ve gotten through my stack of Poetry magazines (and, finally, the complete works of Keats), I brought it up into the bedroom for the poetry nightcap.

And, gentle reader, you know I like Ideals magazine, and that’s what you’re getting in a collection like this. Poetry about seasons and about the relationship with God–moreso in this collection, as it’s produced by a Catholic organization as a fundraiser–but I get that in the grandma poetry chapbooks I also accumulate. These collections and Ideals are generally a cut above the self-published chapbooks (my own included?). It seems we get some overlap between the two, poets whose work appears in both (Grace E. Easley? Steven Michael Schumacher?)–but maybe I just read enough of these little collections that the names are just familiar only from Salesian publications.

So I enjoyed it as a light bit of a snack before bed, a ritual that winds me down for sleep.

The back flap had a long list of 128-page collections like this and regularly published pocket-sized books which I thought might be a checklist I could use to see how well my collection is going. But it might not be a comprehensive list–books I have reported on from the 20th century do not appear to be represented. Is it possible that they’ve published so many this century that they didn’t even have room for decades’ worth from last century? I guess someone knows, but not me.

At any rate, I recommend them. Perhaps I should send them some money as well to get the freshest works. It’s odd; subscribing to First Things and The New Oxford Review and, briefly, Touchstone have gotten me onto a lot of Catholic mailing lists, but not Salesian Missions.

It seems like I just read a Hornblower or O’Brian book, but I might have been thinking of Sharpe’s Trafalgar which mostly took place at sea and which I just read in January 2024. The last Hornblower title I read was Beat to Quarters in 2017, although I did pick up two last year: Lieutenant Hornblower at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in April and this book at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale in June. So maybe that makes for why it seems fresh; after your first half century, anything in the last decade is just.

This posthumous collection is not actually a full novel; it has the incomplete novel Forester was working on when he passed away and two short stories in it. In Hornblower and the Crisis, Hornblower is between ships and helps to seize a French ship that spotted and pursued the little hoy he was taking back to port from the Hotspur, his previous command. He manages to capture the captain’s papers and return them to London, including an official dispatch from Boney, who has just made himself emperor. When conferring with the Lordships, he blurts out a plan to deliver forged orders for the French fleet to sail out, and they put him on the mission since he has some experience with the land area in which the operation will need to be conducted. And as he is about to become a spy, Forester dies, so we get a summary of the notes left behind. “Hornblower and the Widow McCool” explains how an Irish rebel is captured amongst French forces, and he asks Hornblower to deliver his sea chest to his widow. Hornblower suspects something is up and discovers the secret of the rebel’s last poem for his wife. “The Last Encounter” tells the story of an elderly Hornblower at his estate when a seeming madman arrives, thinking he’s Bonaparte. He is about to dismiss him when his wife (a different wife than in Hornblower and the Crisis, I note) intercedes and helps him on his way; later, they receive a thank-you note from Louis Napoleon Bonaparte who has established himself as ruler of France.

This 158 page Penguin book was a far quicker read than Shōgun for sure (but both historical paperbacks set but about two hundred years or so apart). It’s too big for the new mass market paperback shelf in my office which I have the inclination to fill by reading a bunch of paperbacks. But not big paperbacks like this.

Also, I did flag something in “The Last Encounter”:

The stranger made a low bow, and advancing, took Barbara’s hand and stooped low over it again to kiss it. Barbara was woman enough to be susceptible to a kise on the hand–and any rascal could find his way into her good graces if he could perform that outlandish ceremony in the right way.

Time for a Coffee House Memory^TM:

In 1996 or thereabouts, I remember a trio of Austrian au pairs (although the Germans and their cousins might have their own word for it, as au pair is clearly French and hence the enemy (at least in the context of this book–in modern times, the French are not even French)). A blonde and two brunettes; I can only remember the name of Marlena, which was one of the two brunettes and not even the one I thought was prettiest. They showed up at the Grind late at night, probably after the children they were responsible were in bed, and they drank coffee until some of the other expats (Indian or Pakistani, back when that was still a bit exotic) would invite them to go to the clubs, most likely Velvet (see also The Various Clubs I Have Attended from 2019), and they would dance and whatnot and somehow be up to take care of their charges in the morning. We were all young then and could do stuff like that–it was before my print shop days, when I was still working retail and might not have had to work until afternoons sometimes. I do remember that months later that the brunette whom I thought to be the prettiest was looking a little ragged.

At any rate, on the night that my friend Scott (he’s still alive, which puts him far ahead of many of my friends from the middle 1990s) introduced me to the three, I bowed and kissed their hands in turn. The blonde was quite miffed about it and recoiled whilst I did it, and throughout the evening, I understand she kept returning it and asking Scott why I did it.

Clearly, I did not perform that outlandish ceremony the right way.

So, back to the book. More to my taste than O’Brian and even Cornwell when you get down to it because the language is punchier and although it does talk about elements of naval warfare and operation, it does not go to the distance where you think that the author just wants to show off his research.

So I’m hoping I can find Lieutenant Hornblower sometime in the near future. And when you get past your first half century, you’re comfortable that “near future” might be nine years from now (should I live that long–most of my matrilineal side did not).

As I mentioned when I bought this book in April 2023, I might be the biggest collector of Leah Lathrom Wallace in the country since I have now read both The Best of Wheat and a Little Chaff and this second volume.

So I picked this up for my upstairs poetry book. I’ve taken to reading a little poetry right before bed every night as part of my wind-down ritual. For some months, I made my way through the stack of Poetry magazines that I bought last October.

And, you know what? I prefer the grandmother poetry in this volume. It’s got rhythm, and it’s got rhyme. Its contents are about trusting in God and home considerations–including some poems for friends and family members and personal history. Actually, this volume has a number of poems by family members, which reinforces the fact that everyone with the better education system of the early 20th century wrote poems (see my own father’s poem here).

So it was a quick read, relatable (more so than modern message poetry which is about speaking the poet’s truth and not shared humanity, so the reader might be excluded from the truth at all), and it helped me wind down.

Given that the back part of the book is relative’s poetry to fill this chapbook out, I have to assume that I now own the whole set. I’ll find other works like it, though; the poetry tables at the book sales are still full of these little chapbooks by somebody’s grandma. And I’ll pick them up and get to them eventually. And, eventually, they will disappear from the poetry tables, replaced by Print on Demand works by contemporary poets. If anything at all. Ai, I am leading to a dark and depressing meta-conclusion even though this particular book was anything but.

After I read the first of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet), I thought I would pick up something short as a palate-cleanser. Brother, did I go wrong: This 1200+ page book, which I just bought in June (not long before I started reading it), took the better part of a month to read.

This particular volume is the tie-in to the original television miniseries and has a picture of Richard Chamberlain on the back (what, he was more than Allan Quatermain?). As you might know, gentle reader, a new miniseries was released last year, so strangely enough, if I get down verbally with the kids these days about Shōgun these days, they’ll know it from the recent television experience, whereas I read the doorstop book (see also Dune).

So:

An English pilot/navigator is aboard a ship, the Erasmus, the only remaining vessel from a small contingent set to circumnavigate the globe circa 1600 is shipwrecked on the coast of Japan with a small number of his crew. They’re captured and are going to be killed, but the local warlord, Toranaga, takes an interest in him. He, Blackthorne, the pilot, is called Anjin-san (“Anjin” is nihongo for pilot). He falls in love with a married woman, Mariko, vows revenge on a brutal samurai (that’s redundant, but Yabu is extra brutal and does not like Blackthorne), and, after saving the life of Toranaga (twice) is made hatamoto and samurai. Meanwhile, above and beyond all this, the last military leader died, leaving a council of regents. A rival on the council, Ishido, is maneuvering to ostracize/expel Toranaga. And the Jesuits have started making inroads into Japan, converting a number of people, including some provincial leaders, but they think Blackthorne, as an Englishman and Protestant, is a heretic and must be eliminated. So we’ve got a bit of a fish-out-of-water story as Blackthorne comes to appreciate the Japanese way of life–or elements thereof; a love story between Blackthorne and Mariko; and a hella lotta political intrigue. And it has 1200 pages in which to do it.

The narrative has an interesting bit of flashbackery to it; often, we get an action or situation, and then the story flashes back to the events leading up to the action or situation. Which turns out to be almost how the whole story is laid out (spoiler alert?) We do get some chatty spots where characters discuss events or situations for a couple of pages to set up context or intrigue, and these spots are a bit boggy. And although he is the Western readers’ intro into the story and the one we’re supposed to root for, ultimately, at the end, Blackthorne’s real importance kind of falls off (the book is not entitled An Englishman in Japan or Anjin-San). And the climax comes around page 1000, runs a relatively long time, and then we have a bit of a dénouement for over one hundred pages with an ending that leads not to the great battle between the rivals for the shogunate–the book ends with preparations for the war. So a bit underwhelming to a modernish reader who expects more of a payoff at the end.

So it’s very similar to The Last Samurai, although set at opposite ends of the shogunate: A Western Larry Sue comes to Japan and ends up at the domicile of a samurai, falls in love with a Japanese woman with complications, and comes to appreciate the samurai way of life. Both are a bit hagiographic on the samurai way of life with living in the moment and composing poems and whatnot, but this book does show its inherent brutality and disdain for peasants, merchants, and Christians whereas the film did not (as I have not seen either filmed rendition of this book, I cannot say how brutal they were depicted, although the Wikipedia entry for the 1980 miniseries indicates it broke many network television taboos).

At any rate, I felt a little smart reading it as I was already familiar with some of Japan’s history, Buddhism (c’mon, I know who the Amida Buddha is), and geography, but at times I was a little annoyed with the exposition until I realized that most people were not.

It’s a long book. And I definitely finished it. But I’m not eager to run out and gather Clavell’s other work.

Although I did make an allusion to the film The Fly while reading this book, and in looking into Clavell’s career (reading Wikipedia), I discovered he wrote the screenplay for the original 1958 film. So, clearly, the books published in 1980 are listening to me. Be careful! Think and say nothing!