Author: Brian J. Noggle

You might remember, gentle reader, I read a couple of golf books last October (The Downhill Lie by Carl Hiaasen and The Bogey Man by George Plimpton). So I came across this book and thought it’s too bad I didn’t read it then, but the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a Sports category, so it’s game on (although it does not actually clarify when I might get to the Bob Hope golf book I’ve also uncovered while combing the stacks for prospects for the Winter Reading Challenge).

So: The book comes out not quite in-between the other golf books (seventeen years after The Bogey Man, 21 years before The Downhill Lie), but the book reads a lot more like the former rather than the latter. Dobereiner was a golf writer for British papers and Golf Digest, so he covered a lot of tournaments before this, his third book, came out. He was also steeped in the history of the game, so he refers to a lot of the old timey players from the early part of the 20th century (although not necessarily that old timey in 1986). We get mentions of Sam Snead. Arnold Palmer is still very big in the game along with Jack Nicklaus. Names that still resonate, I suppose, but as old timey now.

The book has several chapters that collect small anecdotes about bad shots, errors, bad luck, and that sort of thing grouped by…. Well, the chapters are “Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory”, “On the wrong side of the law”, “Bundles and bunches”, “One of those days”, “All God’s creatures”, “The law according to Murphy”, and “Just whose side are you on?” Okay, I guess the chapter titles are not that descriptive, but they’re grouped by mistakes that cost tournaments, rules violations or rulings, animal encounters, and that sort of thing. Each anecdote is maybe a couple of paragraphs with some connective tissue philosophizing.

It clocks in at 180 pages, and it’s somewhere between the two books topically as well. The Downhill Lie is mostly about Hiaasen’s personal experiences; The Bogey Man is Plimpton’s experience on the Tour leavened with stories about golf history and the books about golf he’s reading; this book pretty much omits any personal experience, certainly golfing, and goes right to the stories about others. Of course, that was to be expected as the author is a golf writer, not a writer golfing.

A quick enough read, and something that got me ever closer to my goal of completing all 15 categories of the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. At this pace, I’ll be done sometime at the end of the month, which will leave my February reading open for maybe the Bob Hope golf book (and other Bob Hope books, of which I seem to have several).

When I started reading this book, it felt familiar: A book by a man who was the son of a noble family on Okinawa who became a teacher and then brought karate to Japan proper. I thought Oh, crap, I just read this!. But it was Karate-dō Nyūmon by Funakoshi which I read for the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge (the author of Different Race/Religion Than Your Own category). The books are in different editions, so they look different, and I actually bought them a week apart (this book July 23, 2022, and the other July 30, 2022, at ABC Books) during my periodic clearing of the martial arts section. So they were, in all likelihood, shelved in different locations in the stacks here. In the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, this book goes into the Asian Author category. Although I could have set it in the Set Somewhere You’d Like To Visit category. So perhaps it’s a two-fer.

At any rate, this book is an autobiography by the author (obviously), so perhaps it goes into greater detail about his life than the previously read volume (which had enough about his life to make it familiar). And, well, actually, looking over the summary of the book I read a year ago, it was:

So this book is part history of Karate (and Okinawa and the southern part of Japan by extension), autobiography, and the description of a particular kata that the author’s school emphasizes (and briefly compares it and the other kata it uses to other schools and the evolution of kata). It has a number of static images from the kata, including the steps that feature a partner, but it’s hard to get the flow from a kata from text description and pictures.

So I guess the difference lies in the fact that this book does not have the photos of the kata and talks a little more about how karate as a way of life fits in the Buddhism and Zen Buddhism in particular as well as perhaps shinto. It doesn’t go a lot into texts or sutras or theory in that regard–instead it just goes into peace, nonviolence, and a little Confucism in the heirarchy of authority. Perhaps it goes into greater detail into about his life story and experiences, but the familiarity I had with the basic outlines indicates maybe not much.

So also a quick read at 127 pages. Most interesting to the students of martial arts such as I fancy myself (wish me luck on testing for a third degree black belt later this month and as I consider perhaps joining another school to learn another form). And, most importantly, progress towards my next mug.

Ah, gentle reader. I thought this Robert E. Howard book, one of the paperbacks upon which I blew all my cash in Berryville, Arkansas, in 2021, would slot into the Fantasy category in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, oh, but no.

The book is a mere adventure story, a pulp version of Kim after a fashion dealing with The Great Game in Afghanistan (so it couldn’t fit in the Set Somewhere You’d Want To Visit category). An American adventurer who works for the British, sort of, a legendary swordsman and shot, investigates a series of attempts (some successful) on leaders in the region. It leads him and some retainers to a hidden city in the mountains where a descendent is trying to build a new caliphate based on the Assassins order, but apparently a Russian is funding it and pulling the strings from behind the scenes.

A couple of action scenes lead to fisticuffs, skulking around the city, intrigue, and whatnot, and all the while I’m hoping for some magic or a demon or something. There’s a dungeon and a door to a mysterious place where the tortured and sometimes babies are thrown, and I was all right! Here we go!. But the adventurer, El Borak, as he is known, (real name: Francis Xavier Gordon) discovers it’s just a labyrinth with a yeti in it. I mean, a touch of cryptozoology does not make it a fantasy book. Or Harry and the Hendersons would be a fantasy movie, ainna? Maybe it is, but I’m making the arbitrary Rules up as I go, so no to this.

Apparently, it started out as a short story and first came to the light of day (publishing) in the middle 1970s (according to Wikipedia) which says it came in various flavors and with various revisions in the 1970s. So I was going to say that this book is a direct ancestor of mid-1960s pulp such as Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels, where the hero is known by many names and who uses ruses to get into the hard sites he’s going to hit. But given that most of the text here is likely later than 1960s pulp, perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that things written forty years after Howard’s death influenced this book attributed to him.

Although I could not, due to the impartial judge’s (my) ruling on the yeti thing, count it as Fantasy, and I could not count it as Set Somewhere Where You’d Like To Visit, I did decide to slot this as Chosen Based on the Cover. I mean, it’s not like I was likely going to be able to choose a book from the stacks based on the front cover as they’re jammed tightly into the shelves. But I did choose this one which I judged to be a fantasy book based on Howard’s name and the cover which features a domed citadel, a man with a sword, and a damsel. So let this also be an illustration, again, about how you should not judge a book based on its cover.

It’s only the second entry in the reading challenge, and I am almost a week in. I’d better lock in, as the kids say these days.

So of course I picked a picture book for the first entry in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. As you know, gentle reader, I have accumulated a number of monographs as I used to flip through them whilst spending my Sundays watching football (that is, having football on so I could sit and browse art and poetry books). However, I haven’t had the expensive football package for a couple of years now, but I’ve still picked up inexpensive art books when I can. Like this book, which I bought in October at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library, whose sales are pretty much all bag day sales–so this book was under a dollar and probably closer to twenty-five cents given how I can pack a bag.

This is a hardback with a dust jacket, and it kind of falls between an exhibition catalog and a monograph. It contains an intro essay by oceanographer Sylvia Earle and an outro by art writer Joan Seeman Robinson, both a couple hundred words of overly vivid prose designed to sell the work, but if you’re familiar with Chihuly and a fan, you don’t need the selling. And if not, prose ain’t going to do it. The book was published in Seattle, home of Chihuly’s workshop, and you can imagine the gift shop of his museum/workshop is its natural habitat.

This book covers one series/set of his work from the 1980s. Blown glass bowls, essentially, with floppy sides and inspired by/designed to represent, sort of, aquatic life. Aside from the two essays, the book is essentially photographs of the work against dark backdrops. And unlike, say, images of paintings in monographs and art books, the photos do not do the work much justice. For one, you lose a sense of scale. Some of the work takes up a cubic yard in volume, but you don’t get that even if the photo spans two pages and the photos are the same size as 10″ works.

But, again, if it’s something designed for the gift shop, it’s more to remind you of what you’ve seen. And, you know, I can see it. Actually, I wonder if I did see it, or at least some of it. I think the Milwaukee Art Museum has or had a lot of his work or an exhibition in the early 1990s when I was at the university up the road and went to the museum a couple of times a year. So I have seen a bunch of his work in person. And now I’m wondering why I haven’t really been to the art museums since. I hit the St. Louis Art Museum a couple of times in the middle 1990s, and I’ve only been to the Springfield Art Museum three or four times since I moved to Springfield. I wonder why that is–I’m no longer trying to impress girls with a relatively cheap date, or my beautiful wife does not particularly favor art museums (she prefers botannical gardens), or because I’ve become a homebody as I’ve gotten older. Ah, well–the Springfield Art Museum is closed for a number of years for expansion and renovation, so I’m not going to revitalize my official art appreciation anytime soon.

And the easiest book is knocked off of the category list. Easier, even, than Graphic novel or comic.

This is the third of these little Salesian Missions booklets I’ve read this year; I read The Way in June and Priceless Gifts in August. Given that I bought another booklet when I got this book and The Way in April 2023, I have at least one more floating around the stacks here in an unread state. They tend to get jammed into narrow slices between larger books only to pop out at strange times, like when I’m not hoping to start a larger book before the Winter Reading Challenge begins on January 2.

So: a booklet small enough to fit into a #10 envelope with poems by Whittier and Whitcomb Riley which won’t help me to keep them straight (although remembering Riley is the Little Orphant Annie and Old School Day Romances guy helps me to remember that Whittier was the more serious of the two). Several poems by Helen Steiner Rice back when she was a going concern (I just read her Wikipedia entry, and an interesting but brief story which is told with greater detail on her Web site–she died in 1981, and she has a Web site, so let that be an indicator of what a big deal she was to some).

At any rate, you could do worse than to read these little booklets with their focus on inspirational messages and mixtures of greeting card scribblers and major poets and to read old Ideals magazines which are mixtures of the same with some grandmothers’ poetry included as well. I recently bought a stack of a major poetry magazine issues from the last year, and I’m telling you that they are, in fact, much worse. So don’t laugh at me for picking some of these up and wondering if I should start actively collecting them (given that they were published many per year for decades, probably not). And enjoying them for the little literary charcuteries that they are. Designed to be disposable but with indispensible literary merit within. What a culture we once were.

I picked up this collection in September at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. It’s a fairly nice little hardback collecting poems and aphorisms grouped by topic (Beauty, Music, Love, Friendship, Brotherhood, Inspiration, Courage, Achievement, Truth, Happiness, Faith, Patriotism). The collection includes a number of poems from classics such as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Pope, and even a poem by Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton (the “It was a dark and stormy night” guy) so on, but also some quotes from other famous leaders and a couple of anecdotes that are a couple paragraphs at length. Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” makes an appearance, as do a couple of poems by the author and an anecdote of visiting the house of a Japanese school employee after a death. Running 87 pages with multiple pieces per page, it’s heavier than a Hallmark book and definitely several nights reading. I found myself reading the name to which each piece was attributed (below the piece) first as I guess I am a snob.

So a nice relatively quick bit of edification, but you know what’s even more interesting? The editor.

He has a Wikipedia page because he was a college football (and baseball and basketball) in the 1920s and 1930s. Just as he was finishing up his doctorate in education (according to his obituary) he was called to run a school for the children of American servicemen during the occupation of Japan. After which he returned, published this book when he was 80, got his doctorate finally at age 84, and passed away in 1987 at 94. The obit indicates he wrote about his experiences in Japan for the equivalent of the dissertation. You know what? I would like to read his biography and/or that work about occupied Japan as much as this book. Ebay has dozens of copies of this book in several editions listed, but nothing else by the author. More the pity.

At any rate, my reading for the year is winding down. Most years about now, I call it early for the year–my reading list generally runs the last week of the year to the last week of the year, and not January 1 to January 1. However, the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge starts on January 2, so I am reluctant to start anything that I won’t finish before then. This is my 95th book this year, but it might not be my last. I guess we will find out in the coming week.

I got this book this summer in an attempt to stuff my stacks with Christmas novels so that I would easily find one, surely, when it came time to read my annual Christmas novel. As it happens, I read three Christmas novels already this year from Karen Kingsbury’s Red Glove series (Gideon’s Gift, Sarah’s Song, and Hannah’s Hope), but they did not impress me nor help my heart grow three sizes, so I grabbed this one as well since it was nearby on the stacks (that being lying atop the ranks of books atop my bookshelves in the office where so many recent acquisitions go until I can fit them onto actual bookshelves). And, you know what? This might be the best modern Christmas novel I’ve read in the thirteen years I’ve made this a personal tradition.

So, the setup: A former war correspondent has been put on the no-fly list for an outburst at an airport. After his retirement of sorts from overseas journalism, he has written feature material for women’s magazines and other pieces like that. He gets a chance to do a story on traveling by train during the Christmas season, which also will allow him to join his casual, on-again/off-again opposite coastal lover for a trip to Lake Tahoe. But their phone conversations indicate something is off–is the wealth voice actress getting tired of him? Coincidentally, the One Who Got Away, a lover who left him some years ago when he would not commit or give up his exciting and dangerous lifestyle, happens to be on the train as the writer for a Hollywood director who is thinking about doing a movie about trains. So will they/won’t they? On the ride along the Capitol Limited and the Southwest Chief, they meet a couple who want to marry on the train as they elope; a retired priest; a former railroad employee who rides the trains because he misses it; and a variety of colorful employees and regular passengers–and, apparently, a thief who steals a single item from every sleeper compartment several times.

I won’t give away the bit of the twist at the end, but it’s a pleasant book, and it has depth and richer writing than I found in most of the other Christmas novels I’ve read. It might be the best of the lot, although Lloyd C. Douglas’s Home for Christmas from 1937 might hold onto the top spot simply because it hits upon the nostalgia notes that so many Christmas songs do from the early part of the 20th century and the transition from rural to urban lifestyles.

Also, the book is a bit of a love letter to Amtrak (along with some asides that the government should fund it more even though rail remains a fairly limited and highly inflexible travel option). I mean, I recognized the names of the longer lines listed (the Capital Limited, the Southwest Chief, and the Texas Eagle). No mention of the Anne Rutledge, which ran from Chicago to Kansas City, the Hiawatha Service (Chicago to Milwaukee) or Empire Builder (Chicago to the northwest), but I traveled back and forth between Missouri and Milwaukee many times during college, so I got to learn all the names. I even rode the Texas Eagle from St. Louis to Chicago early on Sunday mornings on my trips home (the Anne Rutledge was an afternoon train, and I wanted to get back to Milwaukee early in the afternoon since I was taking a city bus home). So the book made me want to take a cross-country trip on a train just to see what it’s like, but it’s unlikely to be as good as it’s presented in this 20-year-old book.

Still, a good read and a good way to wrap up my Christmas novels for the year. It looks like this might be Baldacci’s only departure from thrillers and detective stories into Christmas novels, so I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere for Christmas novels next year. Of course, by this time next year, I will have found and lost again several Christmas novels which I buy to seed the stacks here at Nogglestead so that I can find at least one Christmas novel in December, and I will have bought and lost several others that I buy throughout the year for the purpose. But with enough seeding, I should be able to find something. Although knocking off four of the Christmas books in the stacks doesn’t help the effort.