Category: Book Report

I bought this book over the weekend in Davenport, and I asked “Which one will I read first? You know.” Of course it was the shorter book of poetry. I did not take a stack of books with me–I remember from my trip last year and similar trips that I don’t tend to read a bunch in hotel rooms, so I only brought two paperbacks that I did not touch and a couple of magazine which I did. And, of course, I started reading this collection of poetry. I’ll often jump on a new acquisition instead of what I brought (see also The Marriage of Bette and Boo which I bought in Leavenworth in 2017 and started in the hotel that night).

At any rate, this is a book report and not a Brian’s reading habits report (who am I kidding? Book reports on this blog are often just that), so let’s talk about this. Aline Kilmer, as the cover says, was Joyce Kilmer’s widow, and topically, many of the poems in the book actually deal with that lost (with a title like Vigils? Who would have guessed?). The verses are pretty light, with decent rhythm and some end rhymes. Nice, I guess. Nothing earth-shattering, but okay. To be honest, that’s what I remember of Joyce Kilmer, too. I thought I’d read a volume of his work, but I was probably thinking of the time when we covered the poem “The Trees” during our Coronavacation Homeschool Supplementing in 2020.

So, well, nice. The cover is wrapped in mylar, and I guess this book is over a hundred years old now. I see that one sold on Ebay without the dust jacket for $15 this month, so someone is interested in them. I won’t be ordering her other work online, although I might pick them up if I find them in the wild. A quick read to pump up the annual total (currently: 72).

Ah, gentle reader, this is the best book with two peepees on the front cover that I have ever read. Hopefully, gentle reader, this is the only book with two peepees on it that I own, but given that I own a lot of classical Greek and Roman literature, one cannot be sure.

This book, which I bought earlier this year, contains poems praising the victors at assorted Greek game festivals circa 2600 BC, including the Olympic games but others of across (what would become) Greece. Many of them include some lineage of the victors, some tracing their past to gods, and in doing so, Pindar includes some bits of myths and stories as he name checks gods, heroes, and ancient leaders in the fashion of a rap track calling out or calling out to other rappers. The book itself has end notes in the, well, end, but without any markers for end notes in the poems themselves. It made for easier reading in the moment as one was not constantly dropping eyes to the footnotes or flipping to the back, which made things smooth for me as I just let the things roll over me, but they were there if I needed to look things up to make connections to other works or for a paper.

I’m not sure what liberties the translator might have taken with the text–probably not too much, as we’re not steeped in 2007-era slang (although someone does, indeed, have some truck or not with something), but the poems in addition to praise for athletes and gods, includes some insights into the human condition which I noted and will henceforth have quoted.

From “Olympian 2”:

But when some deed has been done, right or wrong,
not even Time the father of all things can undo its outcome;
yet with the help of good fortune men may forget it.
Grief dies when confronted with noble joys,
and its enduring bitterness is beaten down
when fortune sent from a god
lifts a man to prosperity’s heights.

From “Olympian 5”:

If a man waters healthy prosperity
and is content with a sufficiency of possessions,
and adds to his good repute,
he should not strive to become a god.

From “Olympian 6”:

Success without labour is not honoured among men,
either on land or in hollow ships;
but if noble deeds are accomplished through toil,
many people remember them.

From “Pythian 1”:

If you should speak in keeping with the occasion,
plaiting the threads of many matters into a brief whole,
men will find less fault with you;
for wearisome excess blunts the edge of keen expectancy,
and in their secret hearts men are especially oppressed
when they hear praise of other citizens.
Nevertheless, since it is better to be envied than pitied,
do not deviate from your noble course.
Steer your people with the rudder of justice,
and forge your tongue on the anvil of truth.

From “Pythian 3”:

If a man holds to the path of truth in his mind
he must be content with whatever the blessed gods send him.
Gusts of soaring winds blow now this way, now that;
lasting prosperity does not visit men for long,
even when it has attended them with all its weight.
I shall be small when times are small, and great when they are great.
Whatever fortune comes my way I shall respect it with my mind
and nurture it according to my powers.

From “Nemean 3”:

It is by inborn distinction that a man gains authority,
while he who has only been taught is a man of shadows;
he veers further and thither, and never enters the arena with a confident step,
trying out thousands of exploits in his futile mind.

From “Nemean 4”:

And yet, though the deep salt sea grips you by the waist,
hold out against its scheming; we shall enter the contest
in full daylight, far stronger than our adversaries,
while another man, with envy in his eyes,
pours out his empty opinions in darkness,
and they fall to the ground.

Honestly, it’s almost proto-stoic. I’d have to dig into my notes from the part of the first of the volumes of Copleston’s The History of Philosophy (being I only got a couple of chapters into the first paperback in the series, I only have notes on the early Greeks) to see who might have influenced Pindar.

Of course, were I that sort of fellow, I probably would have read the end notes. Or more of The History of Philosophy for that matter. Or even The Story of Philosophy by the Durants which I have around here somewhere.

Also, I want to share that I know what pankration means; it’s ancient Greek MMA. You can be sure that I am working this into conversations as often as possible. This behavior might explain why so few have conversations with me.

I read Yogi Berra’s It Ain’t Over last month, and when I came across this book, I picked it up.

Ted Williams is seven years older than Berra and played with the mostly unsuccessful Boston Red Sox for his career. This book delves into his life story, especially his early years, a little deeper than Berra’s book. His family life was a bit troubled when he was young, but Williams found an outlet in baseball and played pick-up games, and then some organized games at the neighborhood park, and then into high school and a minor league team before breaking into the majors very young–one of his nicknames was “The Kid.” He always had a good eye, and he worked at hitting, and he became very good at it (in case you needed me to say it, gentle reader). He talks about his troubles with the Boston press, and even in this, his own book, he comes across as a character who was a little prickly at best.

Like the Berra book, it’s almost an oral history more than an organized autobiography. It came out at a different time in his career as well: Williams played until 1960 and was mostly away from baseball for a decade until he got an opportunity to manage the Washington Senators. The book was written/told to at that moment: he’s about to embark on his role as manager. Berra’s book came out after he had over a decade of work as a coach and a manager and after he was a national celebrity for being Yogi Berra. So perhaps it’s not fair to compare them, but one cannot help it.

So, a good read with a ballplayer’s insight into the first half of the 20th century. Williams holds a bunch of records yet, and he lost several years of playing time as he was called up for both World War II and the Korean War. I probably have a bunch of other such books seeded amongst my stacks. I won’t dodge them now that baseball season is over.

I bought this book at ABC Books in 2022, and I paid $7.95 for it. Clearly, I was jonesing for some art books to browse during football games, as I was watching a lot of them back in those days. As it stands, though, this weekend’s two football game Sunday is probably an abberation in my current watching habits, but it did give me a chance to pad the annual reading statistics.

This is a large oversized coffee table book about an artist and illustrator who was most active during the early decades of the 20th century. Fred Maxfield Parrish was the son of an etcher/engraver/artist and was brought up in those circles. He had talent of his own and absolutely was in the right place and the right time. Whereas his father might have still been working on the Currier and Ives paradigm, but changes in printing technology allowed color, and the need for color illustrations for magazines exploded, and Parrish was right there to take advantage of it. He became a known name in the industry and by the public, and he got certain concessions in his contracts: The magazine could run the illustration one time, and he would then have reprint rights and he could sell the original. So he was making bank until radio and television came along and the long decline of magazines began, at which point he turned to watercolors for a couple of decades in retirement.

A good story, and as for the art–well, definitely what would come to be known as middlebrow stuff. Linear colored illustrations with some depth and thought behind them–he studied architecture and worked extensively to block his works to use the Golden Ratio. Better than the “high” art you get now, but they’re illustrations and prints, so more like watercolors than oil paintings.

Still, an enjoyable book and perhaps leading to some understanding about the business of mass art transitioning from the 19th into the 20th centuries. But it’s not like I’ll be able to use that in conversation as my cats have heard it all before.

This, too, is a fairly recent acquisition (May) which I flipped through during the Bears game on Sunday. Unlike the Okinawa book, the other languages used in the captions use the Roman alphabet, so I recognize them as Danish, French, Spanish, and German (and I can almost suss out the captions in some of them). And all the photos have the captions, and an end notes-type section includes further information about some of the photographs, although I admit I did not flip back to look at the photos as I read the extra material.

So: Denmark. Sounds interesting. It’s a relatively small country, a collection of islands and penninsulas between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. North of Germany, across the water from Sweden and Norway. It punched above its weight in history due to its location. It’s not a very tall country, as its highest point is only a couple hundred meters above sea level, and it has a variety of topography in spite of that. The photos focus on some of the more touristy old town areas and some of the rural areas. It looks interesting, but I do wonder how much it has changed since 1984 especially as Malmo, Sweden is just across the bridge.

I am starting to imagine that I will never have to choose whether to travel to Europe, but if I did, I might want to see Denmark.

Oh, and as a reminder, I must be on a Denmark kick as I did a little research on it in May when I found a Christmas card with a return address of Sundby, Mors, in a book.

Undoubtedly, Facebook will use this to surmise I like Danishes. And it would be right!

On Sunday, I did something I really haven’t done in a while: I watched a couple of football games. And since the one was the Chicago Bears game, which they won not because they deserved to win it but because the Raiders deserved to lose it, I had the opportunity to flip through some art and touristy books between plays (which is most of the three hours of the televised football game).

The first book was the book on Okinawa that I picked up on Saturday because it was still on my desk (as are the swords).

As I mentioned, it’s a set of glossy photo pages bound with an iron comb and with a thin plastic front cover. It’s designed for tourists and dates probably from the 1990s (as one of the photos has the date 1992 attached to it).

English captions are really an afterthought, as the book is written probably primarily in Japanese, but looks to have two other alphabets in the mix (Mandarin and Korean?) Not all of the photos have English captions, so although I could look at the photos, I didn’t know where most of them were taken or what I was looking at–a lot of stone monuments and shrines, but little to explain them.

So this was a quick browser for sure, and it shows the wide variety of topography that Okinawa has. Including white sand beaches which were quite stained when my grandfather visited. I often mention, either because I want to bask in reflected glory or because I respect what the other men of my family did, that three generations–my grandfather, my father, and my brother–were stationed on Okinawa during their time in the Marine Corps. I was thinking about giving this book to my brother for Christmas, but I will probably keep it and stack it atop the precarious pile of art books atop a couple of my bookshelves in the common area.

So that must be some kind of record; I bought it on Saturday, and I browsed it on Sunday. Maybe not–I probably did that plenty when I watched multiple football games the day after book sales in the past. But I will likely not watch multiple games again.

I picked up this book in June, and since I’ve been reading a lot of Westerns this year (The Man from Skibbereen, Westward the Tide, Homicide Near Hillsboro (sorta), and Once More with a .44, which is only four books this year, but it seems like more), I thought I would read a real history book about a character in the old west. Probably because I watched a lot of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. concurrently.

And, well. This book is more a history of the towns where Joe Lowe visited and some of the stories based on what people said about him than a true biography. He left no diary or journal, and this pre-Internet book relies on the authors, one of whom is in England, relied on historical societies to provide news clippings containing the title character–and they would have had to rely on whatever indexes they had at hand to find them.

So we get the story of Ellsworth, Kansas; Witchita, Kansas; Newton, Kansas; San Antonio, Texas; Leadville, Colorado; and Denver, Colorado. Joe Lowe lived in and often operated dance halls in this cities, which often brought him into conflict with other dance hall owners, cowboys, gamblers, and the police. As I mentioned, much of the coverage is quoting newspaper articles about his court cases or public recrimination for dance halls, prostitution, and whatnot with some connective tissue in it. Many of the articles mention him as having a great reputation for being a bad man, but I don’t know if it’s borne out by the text–I have no real insight into how other such personages were described in the papers of the day. But Joe Lowe did apparently know some of the other more recognized names from the era, including Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and others. So maybe the book really is talking about a legend about whom I’d never heard.

Still, a good read and interesting because I’ve somehow become interested in the old west in my dilettante fashion. Looking at the front matter, I see Roda wrote The Gunfighter: A Man or Myth?. Which I have seen and passed over many times on my to-read shelves since I bought it seventeen years ago. In a post my sainted mother commented on. At any rate, I might not pass over it the next time that I see it.

I don’t remember when I got this booklet. By “remember,” I mean I did not list it on the Web site in a Good Book Hunting post. But it is the size of something that would have come in a dollar bundle at a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale.

It contains four short stories:

• “A Chess Problem” by Agatha Christie, a Hercule Poirot story involving a murder during a chess game.
• “Back for Christmas” by John Collier about a man who murders his wife before leaving on a holiday only to be undone (probably) by plans she made while they were away.
• “The Border-Line Case” by Margery Allingham about a gangland hit made incomprehensible and unsolvable by the police actions.
• “Sredni Vashtar” by Saki about a boy and his secret pet ferret whom he worships and an overbearing maiden aunt who would have none of it. I probably “just” read this story in 2023 when I read The Best of Saki.

So, yeah, four short stories, 40 pages total, and I’m counting it as a book.

Man, I am glad I was born when I was, before the ubiquity of computers and mobile devices. I can read and appreciate stories from 100 years ago without being jarred by how different they are. Because they were not as different in my formative years when we did not have them. Fifty years ago. Half the distance to the original copyright date on “A Chess Problem”. I can even relate to things like not having air conditioning (not that it comes up in this particular story) but, you know. I even find historical fiction approachable because I’ve lived in cabins unhooked to the power grid or running water.

I “just” got this book in the spring of 2024 where it was in a dollar bundle with The Yellow Wallpaper which I just read last month. I might make it a twee goal to read all the books from that bundle, but unfortunately, they’re scattered amongst the stacks, and I probably won’t even see them before the end of the year.

Although the title indicates it’s a memoir and the author’s name starts with a P, it looks to be a fictionalized account, as the Ms. P in the book says her last name is Pepperdine and says she does not have a boyfriend–and the back cover indicates Ms. Petrus is married. I guess it’s possible that the author was née Pepperdine, and she didn’t have to change her monogram when she got married. Sure, and it’s possible Petrus is a pseudonym, and she put her real name in the book text. I’m overthinking it, but I’d like to think it’s a fictionalized account with some amalgamation of anecdotes and personalities.

So: It’s a series of short vignettes taking place throughout the school year. Ms. P. teaches third grade. It starts with the first day of school and cycles through different things like parent-teacher conferences, recess duty, the Halloween parade, Christmas, and then the last day of school. And by “short,” I mean that the chapters are two pages or so. The writing is wry, maybe a touch world- or school-weary (even though the Ms. P. of the book is only a couple of years into a teaching career), and I expect teachers, and elementary school teachers especially, can relate.

A quick read, and worth whatever portion of a quarter I paid for it. If you want a copy, though, gentle reader, it might be harder for you to find.

So much wrong with that Amazon listing. But they spelled the author’s name, if that is her real name, correctly.

I said I was going to read enjoyable books for a bit, and I thought I’d pick up some of the thin saddle-stitched books that I buy by the dollar bundle at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sales to pad my annual stats.

I knew this book was prose instead of poetry, but I didn’t look to closely at it until I sat down with it. Published by Hospice of Huntington and with a The Hospice of Southwest Missouri sticker in the front cover, I discovered I was not in for a comfortable read.

Basically, it’s a set of fictional letters (presumably, as they’re not particularly personal) from a woman who is caring for her father who is in hospice care to her brother who does not live in the area. They demonstrate a gamut of emotions and kind of how the feelings change over the course of hospice care to provide an example for those dealing with it in the now (which was then–a later edition might have emails or social media posts instead of letters).

The book uses the metaphor of redwoods, which it says have shallow root systems, so they have to grow together and entangle their roots to survive–like, I guess, caregivers and their non-profit helpers. Also, I’m not clear whether this is just one entry in a series or if the letters in the book are the series in the title. I guess I could do an Internet search, but, eh. CBA.

You know, I’ve never really had to be a caregiver like this–when my sainted mother was sick, she stayed in her house, alone (jeez, I did that whole thing badly). I remember when my aunt died from cancer twenty years ago visiting her a couple of times while she was waiting to die (my aunt who died six years ago from cancer moved in and took care of her, much like my youngest aunt did as she, my St. Charles aunt, was dying). So the book lightly ruffled my unmitigated guilt for not being a caregiver (but not so rawly as Love’s Legacy did).

Given how small my close family is, I don’t think I’ll ever need to deal with caring for someone at the end of life–I’ll probably be the one needing the caring, and if my matrilineal line is any indicator, not too long from now. But should that befall me, gentle reader, remind me that resources like these are available, or I’ll go crazier eating the emotions on my own.

I picked up this book last year Sparta (home of the Trojans) because I had some room in the bag-for-three-bucks and I’ve been working some Westerns into the rotation. I read this book in between chapters of Perelandra, the Venus book of C.S. Lewis’s Space trilogy, and I am likely to cull the stack of books on the chairside table because I’m finding that I’m reading more and more of these enjoyable little in-between-chapter books rather than the others, and I do want to make quota this year.

So: Apparently, this is the third(?) book in a series, and it rehashes a bit of the previous business in spots. A small town is growing due to the influence and spending of a rough rancher and his collection of hired hands, and they turn to a retired lawman who had previously taken care of another badman in town. He brings his tough but genteel wife along, and he hires a deputy barman who is black to help him clean up the town and to serve a warrant for the murder of a mentally disabled man in a put-up shootout.

The text of this 25(!)-year-old book moves along pretty well. It has some sex scenes in it which are not as explicit as a Gunsmith book, but definitely describes what goes where in a manner you would not find in Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. It spends some time with the setup, but ultimately devolves into a couple of set pieces and questionable decisions that lead to a dramatic staged climax. I mean, not a bad book, but it’s light popcorn reading and nothing more.

Also, I must comment that the main character plus black sidekick staying at the Boston made me wonder if it’s supposed to be a holla to Spenser and Hawk. Dunno.

So if I find any more of this writer on bag day at the Christian County book sales, I won’t avoid them. At the Springfield-Greene County book sale (running now), I won’t make it to the Westerns section, so I won’t be seeking them out. As it stands, I have enough backlogged Westerns for the pace at which I read them, even as I am reading them more frequently these days.

I just picked this book up a couple weeks ago at Hooked on Books, and I brought it up to my bedroom to be the book of poetry I read before bed. Actually, I already had one of those, Pindar’s odes, but I wanted something a little lighter in case I did not want to read six pages of poorly footnoted 2500-year-old name-checks. So now my upstairs dresser, the one by the chair under the lamp, not the book accumulation point dresser, often has two books of poetry on it: The book I’m reading, and the book that I’m reading because the book I’m reading is kinda long and I’ve run out of steam on it momentarily. (The chairside book accumulation point has this progression nested deeply, where I’m reading a western and a business self-help book because I lost momentum on The Space Trilogy because I lost steam on the second book of The Story of Civilization which was to be a little light reading while I await the urge to continue with Pamela–and I think there are a couple of other long-suffering books in there.)

At any rate, this is a gift book circa 1980. Something you’d give to a friend, or something that your great-grandmother would give to a friend. Idealsesque with illustrations, paragraphs of prose, and a mix of poetry from then-contemporary light poets and some of the heavy weights from the classics. I mean, it’s a nice book, a nice bit to read a couple of poems from before bed. And I cannot help but contrast it with the gift books that would come within the decade, where paperbacks took over and got smaller and cutesy.

These books are catnip to me, which is why I pick them up when they’re on the buck cart or sight unseen in bundles at the library book sale. And any Ideals magazines themselves that I can spot in the wild, which is not that many these days and in southwest Missouri.

I got this book a week ago Saturday at ABC Books, where it was the entirety of the martial arts section (wow, has it been over a year since I was last at ABC Books? That cannot be right, but it might–it has been a while–no, I got the latest Wilder book around Christmastime, but apparently did not note it with a Good Book Hunting post). And I jumped right into it.

So: This is a bit of an apologetic that says you can be a Christian and do martial arts. It starts by saying that thirty years ago (which is not forty-five years ago) that a number of people thought that maybe the martial arts were a gateway to Zen Buddhism or Taoism–as a matter of fact, one of the other students at the seminary with the author reported him to the dean for being a martial artist.

The book starts out by defining a martial art, which then leads to the inclusion of Greco-Roman wrestling, boxing, and other non-eastern Asian forms. It offers a high level history of the development of martial arts in China, Japan, and Korea. It also goes into Biblical passages which encourage Christians to be able to defend themselves.

All in all, it’s a pretty good book that makes a compelling case for defending martial arts from being demonic, or at least not being a bad influence. I would have thought that this issue was well-settled before the 21st century, but I guess some dojos and schools might still have a Zen element to them. Mine is taught by a seventh degree black belt (three gold stripes fewer than the author) who is an active member of his church. So perhaps this book relitigated the past a little.

But it does make one (me) reconsider how much I defend, or at least understand, the perspective of some Christians who remind everyone that yoga comes from a Hindu background (see this and this).

As a matter of fact, a friend reposted a similarly themed post just last week:

So although the martial arts are the devil! cultural battle has been won, the yoga one rages on.

Oh, and as a scholarly book, it has a number of references and end notes. And one of them is to Zen in the Martial Arts which I read in 2022. More of a popular book than a scholarly work, but I’m starting to see some cross-referencing in my martial arts reading. Ain’t I smart? Maybe I should drag my carcass to a martial arts class and prove that it’s not so.

I just picked this book up last weekend, and after finishing I’ve Seen It All In The Library, I had a bit of time before retiring for the evening, so I took the opportunity to browse this little gifter.

It’s basically a panel from Peanuts cartoons with the opposite page exhorting you to Be something good. Be dependible. Be endearing. Be polite. Be helpful. And so on.

So I browsed it. I don’t think it helped me to be any more of any of the adjectives depicted than I was already. But I was not the target audience for the book, which I presume was Peanuts fans who got the book as a gift from someone who couldn’t think of anything else to give. I have to wonder if both of those target audiences are dwindling: Both Peanuts fans and people who give or receive books for Christmas.

At any rate, I counted it in my annual total, of course. Which was the goal. Normally, I’d fill the gap with poetry, but I’ve got a book of fairly tedious grandma poetry by the chair and two books for right-before-bed reading upstairs, and I did not want to stack another book on the chairside table.

I got this remaindered library book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in 2021, which would have meant that its presence in the library system was only five years and change. Is that a lot? I don’t have a lot of insight into the circulation policies and average item duration in libraries even though I worked for a library software company back in the day and even though I’ve read this book.

I bought it, thinking it might be akin to some of the book collector or book dealer books I’ve read and accumulated over the years (see also Slightly Chipped, Warmly Inscribed, Books: A Memoir, A Pound of Paper, etc.). But, no. This is more of an autobiography of the author’s career as a librarian. The amount of “all” that he has seen is secondary.

I mean, I don’t want to slag on the book too much since it was obviously a labor of love, but although the guy makes sure to tell us that he was reading at the sixth grade level in kindergarten, I don’t get the sense that he likes books all that much. The book is shot through with movie and television show references, but not many book ones–and those sound like they come from his college classes in library science more than the Great Books. I mean, when he describes someone’s beard, he mentions nicknaming the fellow Dumbledore because the Harry Potter movies had come out. And some of the things he breezes over–the first chapter on library history, says, “The Chou Dynasty gave way to the Ch’in Dynasty of 221BC and they took a slightly differing view of learning and reading.” Which is true in the second part of the compound sentence, but kind of elides over the Warring States Period which was about 250 years. A blink in history (especially Chinese history), but, c’mon, man. Maybe I’m just well-read and seeking to quibble.

But, yeah, the kinda disjointed book talks about his youth and falling into a library job in college; the history of libraries summarized from his textbooks; the story of moving the library from one location to another while the library building underwent renovation; some anecdotes about working in the library; a couple of fiction/drama pieces the author wrote; and his getting a job in a supervisory position with another library. It did bring forward to mind the enormous undertaking that it was to switch over from the cards-in-pockets circulation system to the computers-and-barcodes system. Tagging the library holdings in a quick fashion must have been crazy. Not only did I work for a library software company, but prior to that, I spitballed with a friend about building a suite to do that for used bookstores, including having a team of people who would come in and catalog/apply barcodes to the stock overnight or over a weekend. That would have been quite an endeavor for a larger bookstore.

So the book was not especially compelling. It could have been improved with more discrete anecdotes. The writing was passable, but only that. And the cover is not actually the author; it’s made from iStock clip art. I dunno why, but that disappointed me. And although I have checked the local library’s job site from time to time as I contemplate my retirement unemployability in IT as an old man, I have to wonder if I would really like it that much since my experience and this book indicate librarians are more into being librarians and government employees/bureaucrats and not so much people who love books. And the patrons are not people who love books either. Maybe bookstores and especially used bookstores are the direction I would enjoy more.

Sometime on or after seeing my aunt Mary on a recent trip to Wisconsin (How recent? Ten years ago), I learned that she spent time in India as a girl (her parents were missionaries?). I thought that was interesting, and I did some Internet stalking (I’m not close enough to most of my paternal family to, you know, just ask about it), and I spotted this book on Amazon and ordered it (in 2019). So it’s been sitting on my to-read shelves for six years for a moment just like this, where I would be still trying to work up the gumption to jump back into the C.S. Lewis Space trilogy.

I was not sure whether this book was by my aunt or not. The Amazon page for it is not helpful. My aunt and other family members never mentioned it. And as I got into it, I realized: No. Not my aunt, so not a close relation but probably somewhere in the distant chain (probably not as close as my rich cousin who died).

So: This book is a story of her faith journey told through journal entries and connective writing. Ms. Noggle had a tough life. She was orphaned early, raised by a grandmother until the grandmother, too, died when Ms. Noggle was fifteen. She was raped by a carnie in her youth. Her brother died in Vietnam. She had a lot of distrust and anger in her, but she eventually found her way back to (the Catholic) church. But even though she started going to church and praying in her 20s, she still had ups and downs in her relationship with God (and Jesus), especially when her close sister dies in the 1980s from breast cancer.

It would be oversimple to say that the book is but a litany of hardships interleavened with letters (to God, to therapists), journal entries, and prayers, although that is the basic structure of it. But it’s a strangely compelling account, a testament and testimony, about the ups and downs of faith in hard times. And even with the ups and downs, she makes progress to a better and stronger faith through the book. I expected her to become a nun at the end of the book, but that wasn’t the case.

The self-published book is 208 pages, but the text is double-spaced throughout and prayers and letters are indented, so it’s really far shorter than that. A quick read and inspirational in its way.

But, yeah, not my aunt.

I mentioned that I was reading a book by Yogi Berra, and not one I’d read before (well, I searched my blog, and I’ve only read When You Come To A Fork In The Road, Take It and The Yogi Book). I liked them well enough that I bought this book at ABC Books in 2023 for $5.95. Baseball books are right above the martial arts section (when ABC Books even has a martial arts section–it sells out quickly even when I’m not buying them all).

Both of those books came out a decade later than this book, which came out when Berra was still coaching (not managing) the Houston Astros or shortly thereafter, which means parts of the book might have been written whilst he was still coaching and parts after. Still, it does impact the scope and flavor of the book, which is almost an oral history from Berra about his years playing (almost 19) and managing/coaching (almost 25 after his playing days). So it reads a little as a transcription of a stream of consciousness with history and life lessons kinda bound up and then grouped into chapters which have topical titles that are only tangentally related to what Yogi talks about in each. And the chapters are broken by “Other Voices” which is, again, fairly unstructured reminisciences about Berra by other baseball people–with, sometimes, as much stage information about where the reminisciencer was when talking to the unnamed interviewer (Tom Horton, probably) or how difficult it was for the interviewer to get a couple quotes about Berra from the other figure. Berra repeats a couple of bits/facts and drops the name Milton Friedman because he had dinner with him once (which is recounted at the beginning of the “Milton Friedman” chapter)–apparently he was very proud of their conversation. Was that the mythical parenthetical with parentheses followed by a parenthetical with an em-dash? You betcha! Bask in it, gentle reader. Bask in it.

So: This is a mid book in his career. He had a couple in the early 1960s as his playing days were winding down. This book as his coaching/managing days were winding down. And then around the turn of the century and beyond, his later books which are more enjoyable as they’re structured better.

If I see the other books in the wild, I’ll pick them up. Because he was an interesting figure: A native St. Louisian, a participant of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, a winning ball player, a winning coach, and a public figure who was probably misunderestimated for much of it (but appreciated as a scamp in his dotage).

Not long after we saw Herb Alpert in concert last month, I asked my beautiful wife what trumpeter living or dead she would like to see or have seen in concert (Wynton Marsalis was her answer, and as he’s still touring with the Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra, we might have the chance to see him sometime–preferably if they bring Ashley Pezzotti along as a vocalist–oh, and my answer to the question is Maynard Ferguson). So as I read this book, I asked her what baseball players she has met or would like to meet. She hasn’t met a baseball player although she was quite the Tigers fan in the early 1980s. I think the only one I’ve seen in person officially was Pete Vukovich, the Brewers pitcher, who has at a table at some convention I attended in my college years (although we did see Willie McGee at the box office of a movie theater once, but we didn’t bother him as he was trying to pick a film to watch). She really didn’t have an answer to someone she would like to see or meet, and I guess my choice would be either Berra or Ozzie Smith (who’s still around, so you never know).

At any rate, I will definitely keep my eye out for the Berra books I am missing, although I bet it will be hard to find the early books in the wild without ordering them. And is it so weird that I think I can hear his voice? Or maybe I’m hearing George Burns voice and thinking it was Yogi Berra.

No, it’s his voice. Probably cemented by the AFLAC commercials.

I picked up this book in a bundle of chapbooks in April 2024. These little chapbooks, especially the non-poetry ones, have to fit in a certain place in my reading schedule: Mostly, when I finish a book with a couple of hours before bed and when I don’t want to dive back into the growing stack of my incompletely read books beside the chair. As it happens, this week I had just such an opening after finishing National Lampoon’s Jokes Jokes Jokes.

This story–it is a short story in a single volume, saddle-stitched–originally appeared in The New England Magazine in January 1892. The fact that it has been reprinted in 2018 indicates that it has some value to professors somewhere, and apparently, according to my research (reading Wikipedia) indicates it’s “is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards the mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. It is also lauded as an excellent work of horror fiction.”

Re-eee-ally.

I mean, it is a horror story: A doctor takes his wife to a quiet home for three months because she’s exhibiting some, I dunno, depression, and she’s in a big old house with him and someone to help, and she stays in a large room on the top floor that looks kind of like a nursery but with some scarring and damage. The room has the eponymous yellow wallpaper, which disturbs the woman further. Although they tell her she’s doing better, she feels more lethargic as the story goes on, and she starts seeing people in the gardens below and a woman trapped in the wallpaper, and as they are readying to depart, she embraces her madness.

There you go: Embracing madness as female empowerment.

My research (reading Wikipedia) indicates that this story might be a little autobiographical (presumably without the embracing madness part), and that the author was speaking against “The Rest Cure” which I guess what they did when well-to-do women in the late 19th century showed some of the less florid mental illnesses (meloncholy, lethargy, and so on). So the author was probably dinging something near to her heart and very contemporary, and somehow that has spoken to over a hundred years’ worth of feminists.

Not a half bad period horror piece. Not as almost inaccessible as Lovecraft. More akin to Poe. Or Algernon Blackwood (whose collection I abandoned and will likely not pick up again). So if you’re into that sort of thing, I guess this is a book for you. Or source material for a college paper on women’s mental health in literature or something.

I guess you can expect to see me find other books that “fall into” this evening reading gap as I’m only at 54 books for the year, and it’s almost September.

I bought this book this spring, which meant it was piled high on my existing office bookshelves until I put it on the single unread shelf on my new office bookshelf. And when it comes to dodge reading the increasing pile of meh or long (and sometimes meh) books beside my reading chair, I have recently turned to this shelf for my next book since it’s right there and it’s not an overwhelming selection.

At any rate, you might recall, gentle reader, that I’m a sucker for National Lampoon-badged movies such as Dirty Movie, Adam and Eve, and Holiday Reunion, and Black Ball (some more than others). I might have had a subscription to the magazine in the late 1980s, but I was less impressed with it.

This, though, was a bit of a breath of fresh air.

It’s grouped by the, what, butt of the jokes? Women, Men, Cats, various nationalities, and so on. It’s got its share of dirty jokes, Dirty Johnny jokes, and things that play upon old stereotypes (but are funny if you replace Polack with Cletus–as a matter of fact, one of the longer chapters is Rednecks). And, to emphasize their versatility, a couple of jokes are actually repeated in different chapters with the nouns changed.

Basically, it’s Dirty Movie in its original form.

Not all of the jokes are dirty or offensive; several of my favorite talking dog jokes make an appearance (and I’ve seen them in Readers Digest as well). But for the most part, not something you’re going to drop into your speech in the 21st century, even if you’re speaking to a Fraternal Order Of of some sort.

So I was amused with it in places and had a couple of chuckles. Because I’m probably every ist in the book except resist, and I grew up on The Official Frank O. Pinion Dirty Joke Book, Blazing Saddles, and my own father’s crude at times sense of humor. So I was not offended. Your mileage may vary. But if you are offended, you’re probably not the type to be reading books anyway.

The back matter of the book lists a large number of National Lampoon Books titles, which I will pick up if I can. And the very last page is a promo for a movie coming out in 2007: National Lampoon’s Bagboy. Bloody heck, I might have to order that.

How timely is this book even today? After I wrote up this post, Baldilocks shared one of the jokes from the Asians chapter on Facebook:

When I bought this book in 2018, I mentioned that my beautiful wife loved the books. To prove her point, she recently re-read this book (not this copy, which is mine, but her copy which is a well-re-read hardback). So when I was looking for another “short” book to read in between chapters of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandria (which has been very, very slow to start), I settled upon this paperback which has images from the Matt Damon movie on the cover. Judging by the uncracked binding, this book was not read and re-read by its original owner. I also mentioned when I bought the book that I had listened to one of the original books on audiocassettes back when I was commuting a lot to Columbia, Missouri, and back. But I was not familiar with the way the book began, so I think it might have been The Bourne Supremacy.

So: Well, this certainly is the longest Executioner book I’ve ever read.

This is the first of the Bourne series, and it starts with an unnamed man get thrown into the Mediterranean Sea just before a boat explodes. He is recovered by fishermen and is nursed back to health by an alcoholic doctor. But he has amnesia and does not know who he is. The doctor finds a piece of microfilm on him that gives him a way to access money from a Swiss bank. When he’s feeling well enough, he goes to Zurich to claim the money and finds that some people want to kill him. He hooks up with a Canadian economist who helps him, and his memory comes back in plot-helpful fits and starts. He might be a killer named Cain! He might be Carlos, the most notorious assassin in Europe! He might not even be named Jason Bourne! Set pieces, he plays cat and mouse with Carlos’s employees, and then suddenly a black ops organization in the United States government wants to pull him in, and the book pivots to him running from them, and….

Well, meh.

I mean, it’s awful damn wordy. We get pages of different players talking to each other to lay out plot points or to speculate on plot point to somehow build tension through gasbaggery. I complained about the same thing in Shōgun. And then we get the protagonist wigging out when memories and sensations coming flooding back. A bit overused and overdramatic.

I mean, it’s a long book, but the writing is not especially deep with description or characterization, although modern thrillers I’ve read like Lee Child tend to be thicker writing but not any more real depth to it, just words. Somewhere there’s a sweet spot, and I probably don’t write that way myself. Probably because the same voice critical of these books is critical of my writing while I’m writing. “How’s that next novel coming?” you might ask. It is not, thanks.

But I read one of my mother-in-law’s favorite books this year (A Tale of Two Cities), and I slagged on it. Now I’m slagging on one of my wife’s favorite books. Maybe I just don’t have anything nice to say about anything. But that’s what bloggers are, ainna?