Category: Book Report

I picked this book up in Florida in May and put it into the stacks, hoping that by seeding the stacks with a bunch of Christmas books in various locations that I would be able to find a Christmas book when I was in the mood for my annual Christmas book reading. I suppose I could organize the stacks, but…. Nah, I would need a lot more stacks for that. Kind of like the extra space we had to organize my library when we moved to Nogglestead, which was then overrun by things I have bought since. At any rate, since I have decided to read shorter books while my lower level, spot of my nightly reading, is torn up and tented off, I went looking for the Mannheim Steamroller Christmas book which I had just had in my hands last week when selecting one of the shorter books I have already reported on. But, of course, the Mannheim Steamroller (sorry, Chip Davis) book is lost in the stacks for another couple of years, and this book came to hand. I recounted how I heard of Rodrigue and the Blue Dog in the linked post about how I bought the book, but I’d been in his gallery before this book came out.

The book is a tie-in to a series of…. Prints? Featuring the Blue Dog in Christmas settings, including as the angel atop the tree, in the snow, and so on. The art itself is very simple and pop-art–I know I mark myself as hoi polloi or bourgeoisie when I say I prefer Kinkade or Hargrove’s more realism. Here’s a sample of Blue Dog I posted in 2012 when I mentioned misstating his name in a conversation with my beautiful wife (note that the sample is not from the Christmas series):

Not really my style of art. But I remember it and the artist.

The text is not fiction; rather, it’s a bit of memoir about the artist’s Christmases in his youth in rural Louisiana and the joy he felt, underlining that he had two dogs at the time. But then he grew up, went to school, the dogs died, and as an adult he lost the feeling of Christmas until he became a successful artist, his adult dog died, and he found Christmas joy in being able to put Blue Dog in a bunch of paintings. That’s the arc of the story, but really it’s about putting some text and dog memories beside prints in the then-contemporary series.

A quick read upstairs away from the rustling plastic and masonry dust. I don’t think I’ll count it as my Christmas book, but we will see if I can find another one in the next two months.

Although this book was on top of the stacks, I did not just buy it–I bought it in September 2024 at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. It’s not quite a self-published book, or at least not how we do it now; it says it was printed by Standard Printing. So maybe this is a self-published of the variety where you order 1,000 copies of your own book to be printed. It’s definitely a little less onerous to self-publish your work now, but that lack of friction has made it so that anyone can, and just because you’ve published a book, that doesn’t mean anyone is going to see it. Especially if you’re a bit of a misanthrope. Perhaps if I had 920-some copies of John Donnelly’s Gold sitting in my closet I would be more inclined to move them. Actually, I do have several copies of John Donnelly’s Gold and Coffee House Memories lying around. I guess I will have to trot them up to ABC Books for their shelves since they looked like they were about out last time I was up there.

So: Becker was a regionally successful poet in Topeka, Kansas, in the first part of the 20th century. She wrote and published (in papers and magazines, not just self-published books) poetry and plays and contributed to several operettas. And, you know: The poetry is pretty good. It’s not purely grandmother poetry, not re[etitively focusing on Christian themes. She touches on relationships, lost relationships, nature, and, yes, eternity with reference to Christ and God. But the breadth of the topic matter was refreshing. The poems themselves had varied styles, from free/blank verse to tightly iambic and rhymed poems. It was actually a joy to read, and when I’m up in Kansas again, I’ll remember to look for more of her work in used book stores.

Probably not as likely here, though. This particular book was a gift to the “Little Hults” and has the local address of what one presumes is or one of the Little Hults. And as it was a gift to children in 1955, it has pencil scratchings and whatnot in the first pages.

Amazing in this 21st century to think that people gave children the gift of poetry in the middle of the last century, but that was probably the beginning of the decline in American education. Not because of the poetry, of course, but the decline led to not giving the kids poetry and Captain Underpants books instead. At any rate, I probably have similar books from the 1970s given to me. And one final desecration note: The poem on page 35 or 36 must have been the best of the book because it was torn from the book.

So: A cut above grandmother poetry and the stuff you find in Ideals magazine (not to mention most modern poetry magazines). If you find one of her books in the wild, snag it; they look to be listed at $30 and up on Ebay with first editions going for hundreds of dollars. And they’re full of pleasant poetry.

I got this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale last month as something to browse in the event of watching football games. I have not, in fact, had the opportunity to watch many football games, but I am finding that the shorter, snippet-sized books are easier to focus on (that is, they do not require much focus) while my family room is bisected by increasingly porous plastic sheeting (coming up on three weeks and maybe going into four or five).

So: This book is a collection of famous paintings from the classical and Renaissance with parenting advice text on them. Kind of like the classic are memes you see on the Internet these days. Amusing in spots, but I’m past most of the parenting advice these days. To be honest, I didn’t get a whole lot that I remember even though I was the primary caregiver and urchin squire from the time the oldest was toddling. Maybe it’s a woman-to-woman thing, some social thing where the advice giver is trying to assert higher status over a peer by offering the advice which is sometimes subtly damning and sometimes is often judgmental.

It probably doesn’t help that I read this on Saturday night, and on Saturday one gets Powerline’s The Week in Pictures and Sarah Hoyt’s weekly meme post.

But this book is one of those small gift books that you give on small gifting occasions. Collections of cartoons, poetry, and now printed memes. One has to suspect this is the final form of the little gift book, and perhaps one that won’t be around for long. This was a library book which was in circulation in the library for under two years. I think that might underline my point, but I really don’t know how long things stay in circulation these days.

I cannot find this book in a good book hunting post, which probably means it came from the culling of my youngest son’s bookshelves earlier this year. After finishing Pleasures of the Porch, I really wasn’t eager to jump back into one of the other, longer books I’m working on (Caesar and Christ, the Edna St. Vincent Millay collection I just picked up, and Susan Keene’s Tattered Wings which I am not finding compelling) whilst half of my family room remains tented off and depressing. So I grabbed this book.

It’s a youth-based novelization of an animated film. In it, a mysterious figure styling herself as the Batwoman is interfering with a triumvirate of Gotham City’s underworld figures (the only badged one being The Penguin) who are building sophisticated and science-fictiony arms to export to a middle-European country in conflict. She blows up a rolling truck, she blows up their factory. The real Batman tries to pin down her identity but just when he thinks he’s got it, he sees the Batwoman and his suspect at the same place. The triumvirate summons Bane to take care of the Batwoman, but he cuts himself into the action.

So it’s maybe just a touch simpler than a men’s adventure paperback, but not a bad read. A comic book story, which you don’t find in modern comic books (in my experience) which are all about the comic art and not so much plot. So….Yay? And it counts as a book in my annual list, so I’ve got that going with me.

When I was tossing my stacks for something like this, I came across a Superman title and several collections of cartoon books which look familiar. I’ll have to double-check to make see if I’ve already read/reported/added them to the book database. Or…. I can read them and find out afterwards. Books is books. They all count in pursuit of the annual total.

I got this book in September, and although I started to browse it during one of the Kansas City games I watched on a Sunday evening or afternoon (when I had an intact lower level, which I will have again, maybe, maybe in 2027). However, the text-to-photo ratio made it too wordy for football games. So I’ve been working my way through it on evenings in my bisected family room.

At any rate, this is a coffeetable book about decorating porches and enjoying them once you’ve done so. It’s broken into chapters covering the types of porches, good porch furniture, what to do on a porch, decorating porches, and planting on or around them. The chapters are laden with text describing, generically, and each page has one or two small (well, mostly small but sometimes medium sized) photos to illustrate. So it’s a strange combination, text-heavy, and seemingly anachronistic. Most modern builds have decks in the back instead of porches, but it did make me think back to the homes in Old Trees and Lemay, the houses which were a hundred years old and such, where porches were more prevalent. And it made me think back to porches I have mostly not known.

• The first apartment complex: No porch, maybe a concrete pad. We moved from that place when I was four, so I only remember a couple of glimpses, like drawing on a metal green sedan with a rock and the talking to I got after that.
• The projects: A concrete step/platform shared with the Whites and later the Johnstons next door. Not enough for a “porch” but enough brick wall between the doors to throw a tennis ball and catch it when it came back or to use as a backstop for games of strikeout.
• We lived with the family friends that my sainted mother inherited in the divorce in a ranch house with maybe a concrete slab out front?
• When we lived in St. Charles with my aunt, the house had a little concrete slab out front, but not a “porch.” (I checked my seven-year-old now photo of the house to be sure.) It did have a deck out back, though, not that I remember anyone sitting on it–although I am sure my brother and I lounged on the hammock out there once or twice.
• The trailer had a little “deck” which was about, what, 10 by 10 feet? That would be 100 square feet, and that doesn’t seem right. Maybe 7 by 7. No furniture, maybe a little grill, and a place to sell Tim C. Vince Coleman rookie cards for fifty cents per. I wondered if I was getting taken, but it seemed to be a good trade at the time. Fifty cents in 1986 or 1987 is like $80 now, and you’re all saying, “Vince who?”
• Down the gravel road, the house had a concrete slab; I remember putting a lawn chair out one Hallowe’en, stuffing some clothing around a five gallon bucket, and putting a jack o’lantern atop the bucket. But it wasn’t a “porch.”
• My father’s house in Milwaukee, where I lived with his family while I was at the university, had a set of concrete steps to his front walk. I did spend some time on those steps early in my college career, trying to learn harmonica in the darkness. It was early in my college career, before Dave went Airborne. But, mark it: The first time I spent out of the house nearby. Like, on a porch.
• When I lived with my sainted mother in my aunt’s house in Lemay, it had a bit of a porch which was a couple square feet of concrete up some steps which led to the front door and the kitchen door (which were adjacent but turned ninety degrees).
• My first apartment opened to a breezeway.
• Our first house, the one my beautiful wife and I rented as we married, had two porches: An open porch on the front and a screened-in side porch. We used the side porch for storage and probably did nothing on the front porch but accept deliveries. Not from Amazon, child.
• Casinoport (the house I called Honormoor, sweet Christmas, after “To Lucasta, On Going To The Wars”, a poem I’d forgotten that I remembered in 2020 but recently exhumed evidence indicates was true had a concrete slab out front behind pillars, and we put a bench out there (did we?) and some plantings, but we did not spend time out there except working on it. We had a small deck out back, and we might have had something on it, but we did not spend time out there, either–I traversed it grilling or taking the garbage out. Ai de mi, I spent more time underneath it, bailing water from the bottom of the walkout basement steps or sweeping and clearing it daily so I wouldn’t have to bail. But Pleasure? No.
• Old Trees: Ah, now, we’ve got a front porch that we used. Even though it was within shouting distance of an interstate. We had a porch swing we used. My wife had plants out there. We had a stroller staged for our young son because we walked him all over Old Trees. We even had the painted porch improved with staining and grinding into the appearance of flag stone. Ah, were we getting older?
• Nogglestead has a slab out front with a step outside the front door. Ah, and, oh!, but my oldest has decorated the “porch.” When we were in Alton, Missouri, at a fundraiser for a marriage-cousin with cancer, he bought a birdhouse/craft thing and put it on the brick stoop (the two I bought are on the mantel–one is next to the Christmas Intruder 2026 and the other is just to the left of the frame). And, at some point, he dragged the rocking chair which his grandmothers painted and placed in his bedroom before he was born so that we could rock him out there. And he might have sitten there a couple of times, but, ah, brothers and sisters, it is my go-to for reading First Things and New Oxford Review. I sit out there, sometimes in the middle of the day (which is, you know if you’ve been paying attention, scandalous behavior). Nogglestead has also featured a robust deck (past tense, and maybe future tense if the fireplace does not cost us our small fortune and burn the house down) and a bit of a “patio”–a concrete slab below the deck. I’ve enjoyed them in turns over the last seventeen years. Because I’ve changed to enjoy outside time, I guess.

You know, the house my grandmother rented the last years of her life had a front porch with a swing and a screened-in back porch that was mostly storage. My aunt had sunrooms on the back of her houses–when my sainted mother and I were living in her rental house, I slept in that sunroom for a time. But aside from the sunrooms, none of the porches were as elaborately done up as the ones in this book.

So I kinda enjoyed the book, but more I enjoyed the reminisciences it spurred.

This book came out of the last box of books that I received from my mother-in-law when she downsized, what, four years ago? At any rate, I shelved it as part of cleaning my closet last week, and I thought it would make a good football game browse. As most of our lower level is still tented off for firebox replacement (two days of work over five calendar days has turned into, maybe, if it all goes right–which it hasn’t so far–, five or six work days over almost four weeks, followed by a possibly lasting fear of ever using it), I watched part of the Packers game with the Roku and its streaming apps hooked up to a computer monitor. And although Nogglestead is chock with extraneous, smaller-than-we-have-hooked-up-now monitors as well as auxilliary/second monitors and even primary monitors that are larger than most televisions I had growing up, apparently, we have not bought monitors with speakers. After all, we have actual speakers for computers we want to make noise and internal speakers on the computers we have that do not. So I got to watch the first half of the Packers game without any sound which, as we know, is how Friar prefers to watch Sunday night football games. So, I flipped through this book without interruption by the commentators and commercials and replays.

So, at any rate, allow me to continue this book report which ultimately might have as many words as the book itself. I would tell you how long the books is or how many cartoons it contains, but I’ve have to count as the pages are not numbered. But it’s a fair number. Some are amusing. Some are conceits which would have been, maybe, amusing 40 years ago but are just the way we do things today (one panel is a book, and the people in the panel explain it’s a book of what one family ate every day for a year–as we know now, you can find many, many Web sites, blogs, social media feeds, and video channels that do just that in real time).

Okay, amusing. Probably a gift to my mother-in-law at some point from a student or colleague. I am not sure books like this get into hardback form in the 21st century, and I’m sure that most people would not have gotten many of the gags. But I did well enow as a person who recited “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to his future mother-in-law on our first meeting (ah, like an old man, I repeat my stories, but I will not repeat the link to where I repeated the story at this time).

So: Good?

When I bought this book at a group book signing at ABC Books in 2022, I said I picked up all the first books in Ms. Keene’s multiple series that I found. And although that was true for Finding Lizzy Smith which I read in 2023, shortly after the purchase, this is the second book in the Arizona Summers mystery series (which might actually be set in Missouri, as this one is, in the summer). Who knows what Tattered Wings, the third of her books I bought that day, might hold?

At any rate: This book is set in a small, fictional town on a lake in mid or southwest Missouri called Moonstone Lake (in Catoosa County, a fictional county) where the main character, Ary, is the (adopted) daughter of a popular 80-something (the new 60) proprietor (retired) of a popular restaurant. The plot is that a friend of Ary’s comes home one night to find that her ex-husband, who has been missing or in prison for five years, has been stabbed outside her apartment. The friend turns to Liz for help, but the body disappears. And the man’s last words indicate the money is his. So they try to figure out what he meant before the murderers strike again.

To be honest, the plot is a little contrived, but this little cozy of a mystery (with recipes from the restaurant in the back) really is more about the relationships of the main character and her adopted mother and aunt and the townspeople. She’s getting serious with a town cop, and her friend is getting serious with a deputy. Her adopted mother gets arrested for running an illegal gambling ring–she and some other octagenarians were playing poker, but one man lost big and his wife dropped the dime on them. Also, she’s about to celebrate her 81st birthday which is always a big production in town.

So most of the book’s 200+ page run time describes this, and the actual murder is secondary. And, boy howdy, the book could have used proofreading. Some extraneous punctuation, some missing punctuation, spelling a main character’s name (Lewis versus Louis) differently including a switch in successive paragraphs…. The things I criticize in James R. Wilder’s books are also present here. But:

The four of us left Moonstone Lake at noon. The Catoosa County Sheriff’s office agreed to patrol for the weekend.

The author knows the difference between town police and county sheriffs and how they sometimes help each other.

At any rate, I have one more book by this author which I have already picked up to complete the set I bought. But, boy howdier, I bought a lot of books by local authors that day.

Well, I found this book on my stacks four years later; I said when I bought this book with a couple others:

At any rate, it should give me a couple of handy collections of poetry to read out back in the evening. If I can find them again easily once I move them off of my desk and into the stacks of the Nogglestead library, where books just disappear.

Well, one of the other two books was Milk and Honey, which I read later that year. The other was 100 Bill Harvey Poems which I held in my very hand a couple of days ago when trying to pick a collection of poems to read while watching a football game.

I’d brought this book down from my bedroom reading chair because I’d been working on it for a while, but it was not really good browsing material. For one, it’s a loving edition of poems published posthumously by the founder of the Christian Science movement. This book is a former library edition, but its stamps are illegible and its checkout pocket has been removed; one presumes it was in a Christian Science Reading Room (I think there’s still one in Springfield; I’ll have to look to see if it’s still there when I go down Glenstone again). But it’s got gilded pages and drop capitals on each poem, and they’re…. Well, they’re mid-18th century poems harkening back to older forms. She’s imitating older styles, and she uses “ye” incorrectly.

I mean, it’s a cut above most of the 20th century grandmother poetry that I read and surely above Milk and Honey because of its decent rhythm and poetic sensibility. But I won’t remember anything of it once I put this book on the shelf. I didn’t flag anything, and I don’t remember any lines making me think they were especially well done. I mean, Riley and Dunbar are almost contemporaneous, and their vernacular poems are fun and their serious poems are markedly better.

Ah, well. In 100 years, nobody will be reading my poetry from 1990, so who am I to judge?

Ah, gentle reader, I have done it. Again. After three years, I have completed The Life Of Greece, the second volume in The Story of Civilization series, most of which I picked up in 2019 (I finished the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, in August 2023). At this rate, I will finish the eleventh volume in 2053 and will be able to move on to Churchill’s history series or Summa Theologiae.

The book covers the history of Greek civilization from roughly 3500 BC to the mid-first century BC. Early chapters deal with early civilization on Crete and the legendary period of Greece, including the events that would have triggered Homer’s epics and whatnot. The book really gets going with the formation of the city-states and the machinations of Athens and Sparta and the other states that rose and fell with some peaks only being decades–a lifetime. It talks a lot about individual personalities and their contributions, and a lot of the material overlaps with An Introduction to Greek Philosophy which I just listened to and the current, almost complete history of the philosophy of science course I’m listening to now. Plus I know some of the players from reading some Plato, not enough Aristotle, and as far into Copleston’s The History of Philosophy. So some of it was review. Not that I’ll remember too much of it except for that which was reinforced by the other things I’ve listened to recently, particularly the philosophical distinction between being and becoming which is something that has traded predominance in philosophy and science for decades.

The same thing I said about the first book I shall repeat here: Durant (or Durants) is (are) old school leftists, so a lot of asides in favor of socialism and throwing off the shackles of religion (in the Greeks’ case the old gods of mythology, but sometimes Christianity as well, but not the Greeks, although he does draw a line from Stoicism in its Greek roots to Christianity). He also has a tendency to go back and forth in time as he breaks eras and epochs into different silos, such as science, philosophy, painting, sculpture, and so on, so he’ll exhaust one silo and start back in another. Undoubtedly, this will become less of a problem when the individual volumes of the series compress into decades or centuries–the next one is Caesar and Christ which might only be a couple of hundred years (although who knows how far it might stretch if it includes the Byzantine empire), and others collapse into even smaller chunks of time. But in these first two books, where he covers millennia (and, in the first, the same or similar millennia spread across several cultures), the reader gets a little whiplash. Maybe the scholarly reader, or the merely educated before the 1970s reader, would not have the issue. But compared to educated men a hundred years before my birth, I’m a dunce.

So I have already placed Caesar and Christ on my chairside table, which defeats the purpose of my drive to finish off some of the thicker books on that table which have languished there for a long time. How long will Caesar and Christ remain there? I know, we’re all in suspense, gentle reader. Time will tell. But I will read some other books, or perhaps a couple of hundred, in the interim.

Oh, and I did flag some things for comment which I will displense periodically as From the Durant posts. Except this one:

Carneades of Cyrene, coming to Athens like a Greek Abelard about 193, made like bitter for Chrysippus and his other teachers by arguing with galling subtlety against every doctrine that they taught.

I bring this up because after I read Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” recently, I have seen or heard references to him several times, culminating in my picking up a biography of him last month. Which I might read before I finish Caesar and Christ or, at least, The Story of Civilization.

I guess I reclaimed this book from my youngest’s bedroom in January as it was on the top of the stack, relatively, and I don’t have it mentioned in any Good Book Hunting posts. By on the top of the stack, I mean that I have again begun stacking the books atop the books atop by bookshelves, blocking view of my bladed weapons collection again, which means maybe I should actually finish books instead of working through really long books in the beginning of long series of long books. Which I am generally good at, which means I have lots of long series of books which would be good to read which I will probably never get to. But collections of cartoons? I can browse that while watching part of a football game (the first quarter of the Chiefs game since we can get those on one of our streaming services).

So: This is a collection of Far Side comics which were all the rage in the 1980s, right up there with Dilbert as to things you were likely to see cut out of the newspaper and posted on a teacher’s bulletin board, classroom door, or cubicle wall. The humor was zany, often absurd, and dealing with anthropomorphic animals, aliens, and sometimes weird people. I associate it with the 1980s, but this collection came out in 1992, so it has some George H.W. Bush jokes in it or things from that time. Maybe Desert Shield/Desert Storm?

At any rate, the daily cartoon was pretty high quality for its time and provided some amusement, but in reading them all at once in an evening, I only got a couple of actual chuckles, and I only flagged one:

As I am purportedly studying multiple martial arts at two schools (when I can drag my carcass into them, which does not coincide when classes are cancelled, when I am traveling, when I’m having contractors over for a few or many thousands of dollars’ worth of work, when I have no car because my beautiful wife is out of town, or because I am plumb lazy), that struck me. Only one of the schools features board breaks, though.

At any rate, it’s a book down (70 so far this year), and I’ve also discovered I have a Superman collection/graphic novel to browse during football games or as interludes between chapters/sections of long books in long series.

As I mentioned, I streamed part of the Kansas City Chiefs football game yesterday because apparently we have streaming subscriptions to CBS and to NBC along with Spotify (at $35 a month now!) and, I guess, some other things that do not include football games (not that Spotify does, but it went from $12 a month to $35 a month awful damned fast for a family subscription). “Watching” the game gave me an opportunity to page through one of my recent poetry-and-monograph purchases.

This book is a 45-year-old collection of pencil sketches by an artist born in 1902 (see this bio if you are so inclined). Some of them were made from old photographs, but they generally track to the early part of the 20th century based on the cars and whatnot. Some are just scenes from a particular corner, but others are of St. Louis landmarks, and these contain a bit of text about the landmark. Just a couple paragraphs.

Interesting to look at, and because of the early 20th century topic matters, I thought about the James R. Wilder books set in the first part of that century; although the books are not set in St. Louis, in many of them the characters come to St. Louis for one reason or another.

Also, it became a bit of a quiz at least as far as the landmarks goes. Which ones have I been to? Well, the Arch features in a couple of them. I’ve been there a couple of times and even went up it once as an adult. I’ve been to the Admiral riverboat when it was a casino and the Goldenrod Showboat when Todd had a brief, non-speaking role in a revue. I might have been on the Becky Thatcher–the book brought to mind that my mother, brother, and I took a cruise on the Mississippi in one of the Mark Twain themed boats once, and my brother and I got to handle the wheel for a bit because we were kids and that’s what they let kids do. I’ve been to Union Station a number of times, although the number of times my beautiful wife and I went to Landry’s behind it might exceed the times I was in the building myself. I’ve been to the Public Library a couple times–once to do some geneology research with a family friend and once professionally when I was writing documentation for library software to see how the company’s first client did things. I’ve been over the Grand Avenue Viaduct. I have been to either the New Cathedral or the Basillica for a funeral for the father of one of my wife’s co-workers. I’ve been to the Art Museum many times, but not in 20 or 25 years. I’ve visited both Grant’s Cabin at Grant’s Farm and the Hawken House in Old Trees; I do not think I’ve been to the Sappington House, but I’ve driven past it. And I’ve been to Lambert field a couple of times. Not as often as the Springfield-Branson National Airport, though.

Well, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t treat it like a full quiz because it’s 158 pages divided by two for a total of 79 sketches, and I’ve not been to that many of the places after all.

Still, and interesting browse during a football game. And another book towards my annual (stretch) goal of 100 read.

Ah, gentle reader. I’ve mentioned that I have read a couple of books of recent acquisition (The Art of Emily McGee and Sheer Poetry, both of which I bought last weekend) whilst reading The Life of Greece–ah, given that it’s been on my chairside table in progress for several years, you can surmise all of my reading since Our Oriental Heritage in 2023 has been breaks from reading the second volume of the Durant. So this book, which I bought within that interim (in May 2025), is no big deal except that it’s the only book where I’ve read a couple poems and then thought, “Hey, how’s Greek history going?” and picked up the Durant again to end the night.

I mean, you know I love me some Ogden Nash, gentle reader; this blog has, what, seven (now eight) book reports on his poetry, the most recent being The Old Dog Barks Backwards in January 2025 and the oldest being Versus in September 2007, when I would read the collections to my young children whilst they played (although in 2007, I only had a young child). But somehow I rate-limited this book to a couple of poems a night until last night when I powered through the last of them.

The book might be a topical compilation from other works, as the original copyright dates range from 1931 to 1970 (with some renewed because, gentle reader, in the olden days, copyrights lapsed before Disney got tired of them). The topic: Illness and growing older. Since I’m generally a pretty healthy guy, not suffering a lot from colds or flu, and, because of the vaccine schedule in the 1970s, neither measles or mumps either, although I remember Cracked magazine making light of the swelling associated with mumps, so it was in living memory then–since I’m generally a pretty healthy guy, I did not get a whole lot from the illness/hypochondria poems, but I did feel a twinge from the growing older posts–although he puts that turn into old man in the middle 40s when I still felt pretty young, back when I would not pull a hammy doing a head-high round kick with pop to it (which I recently did, dang it).

A couple bits worth quoting, including “A Man Can Complain, Can’t He?” where he repeats, “Another day, another dolor.” I myself have said this, so either I read this in a collection almost 20 years ago and have been inadvertantly quoting it ever since or the two of us came up with the pun independently.

From “This Is Going To Hurt A Little Bit”:

Because some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.

Ah, gentle reader. I was afraid of dentistry for a while until I got my teeth cleaned up twenty-five years ago, and now I go thrice a year for cleanings. But once you’ve lived with a filling rubbing on a dental nerve for weeks thanks to a sedation dentist who went a little deeper than he thought and only after picking a new dentist got emergency surgery where the numbing shot brought the first real peace in a month, after that, there’s little pain a simple dental visit can bring. Although my latest trusted dentist just retired. Perhaps I’ll go back to fearing it or avoiding it if the new guy seems eager to bill.

From “Let’s Not Climb The Washington Monument Tonight”, we get this then-contemporary allusion:

It is when you wouldn’t visit Gina Lollobrigida or the Aga Khan if it meant sleeping on a sofa or a cot

Ah, gentle reader. I understand the allusion not because I have a degree in English and Philosophy and continue to read them as I age but because I read Kim du Toit (link maybe NSFW depending upon your work).

At any rate, I have to wonder if Ogden Nash set out to lightly parody the vernacular poets popular in his youth, such as James Whitcomb Riley and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then he got stuck in the wordplay because he, too, discovered that’s what audiences wanted. I suppose a real Nash scholar who has read all his papers and letters would know, but I am not that guy.

I might have a collection or two of his still floating about, but I probably won’t jump right into it even if I discover it. After all, I re-seeded my stacks last weekend with small collections of poetry that I will likely get to first. But: Maybe not before I finish The Life of Greece–I have determined that the volume contains almost 100 pages of notes, bibliography, and index, so I am doner than I thought–so I might power through it in the near term.

I got this book at the Friends of the Library book sale last weekend, and it wasn’t the first book I picked up (The Artwork of Emily McGee was), it was the second I began on Sunday night whilst watching the football game. And, to be honest, it’s not the collection of poetry that I picked up recently as a break from The Life of Greece. But because it is poetry interleavened with photos, so it was a faster browse and….

You know, the poetry is pretty good in it.

I might want to build out a rubric for how I score poems. The poems in this volume have pretty good rhythm; have line lengths that vary between the shorter, couple of words lines and the longer, near-sentence complete thought lines I tend to favor; have a little of the small-i thing going on, but not so much “i did this” or “i went there” as opposed to just a way to start a poem–which is how I’d like to think I do it (but probably don’t); don’t have end rhymes or formal structure; and evoke rather than tell. This book would score pretty highly.

Or I guess what I’m saying is that I enjoyed it. Probably my second favorite collection of poetry so far this year after the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. But I guess “second favorite for the year” is not a high bar given that I really only read one or two collections of poetry that I actually enjoy in a given year.

The photography is okay, too; black and white landscapes, still lifes, and closeups.

I’ll have to try to remember the name Toler and look for their work in the future. Although, sadly, when looking for information about them just now, I learned that she passed away last week. Kind of a downer to end a book report on, but I can do worse; I also discovered a scam site that mimics the official funeral home Web site and collects money in the name of the deceased, and if you’re a family member, you can “make a request” that they give some of the money to you.

What a fooking world. I actually looked at filing a complaint with the state attorney general’s office, but this has not affected me personally, so they will not take it seriously. And when it does affect me personally, I’ll be too preoccupied to be incensed then.

I picked this book up over the weekend. You know, I used to load up at the autumn Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale on art monographs, brief humor/joke books, and poetry for browsing during football games. Since the NFL has optimized its revenue by requiring almost all possible streaming subscriptions to watch a bunch of football at the casual viewer’s, well, expense–which means the casual user such as me is not watching two or three football games on Sundays and maybe another one or two during the week–well, since the financial wizards made that optimization and since a cynical viewer might think that the games are now optimized for billions in sports betting (The Bears scored how many in week one? Wow, a lot of money to be made on the over. They scored how in week two? Wow, a lot of money to be made on the under. Is it me, or are more games going to overtime or won at the last second now? And if not, does reality make a difference?), my football watching has fallen off the cliff. Still, you would not know by what I bought on Saturday, and since the Sunday night game is streaming on Peacock, one of the handful of such subscriptions scattered amongst Nogglestead that cost what cable or DirecTV did before we cut the cord–well, since it was on, I put on a bit of the Chiefs game if only to hear Friar saying, “Shut up, Colinsworth!” in my head, and I picked up this book.

As I mentioned, this is not really a monograph; although it does include a number of Ms. McGee’s works, more importantly or interestingly, most of them show stages of their development, from tracing to working region to region. And she does not put in hard outlines and then work from them; instead, she does maybe part of the head and then works out from there.

She is a local artist who does (or did–the Web site in the book is not longer active, and a quick Internet searches led to a Facebook page that was active until 2022) commissions, and she’d work from photographs, which is where the light tracing comes in. I’ve seen artists like this with booths in Relics–some samples for sale and information about how to have your own photo turned into art. The book itself might be promotional material as well, as it does include information on how to commission work.

I hope that has not fallen off of a cliff as much as it probably has with the new AI-generating tools because being able to create works like these from scratch is amazing (said the oft-attempting poetaster).

At any rate, I only made it to the half, so it will be a day or so until I complete the other book I started on Sunday night. But even without football, I’ll probably work in a lot of the books I bought this weekend. If I can find them in the stacks. Because The Life of Greece is long, and the next volume in The Story of Civilization ain’t short, either.

I am not sure where I picked this book up–it does not show in any Good Book Hunting post, but it’s a Hallmark hardback, so I suppose it could have been in a book sale bundle. Hallmark issued this little gift book edition following the release of the film in 1965, when I guess Zhivagomania was at its peak? I bought a videocassette copy of the film last year, and I would not be surprised to discover a copy of the book from this era in the stacks since I know I picked up a copy of it in my Ebay peddling days. How soon I will get to them, I have no idea; I’ve seen mention of the film on a Substack somewhere in the recent past, but I’m not sure how eager I am to tackle a Russian novel these days.

The poems in this collection, 61 pages long, fall into three categories, broadly (with some overlap, of course). Poems about the seasons, mostly autumn and winter (being set in Russia, lots of winter amongst the poems). Love poems–given that the poems come from a novel which was a love story and that the poems were attributed in the novel to the title character, not the author, one wonders how much more meaningful they would be in the context of the story. And Christian poems dealing with the life birth and life of Jesus.

The poems are translated into quatrains with rhymes on lines two and four. No idea how much the translator had to alter the work to make it fit, but certainly some. Which is always the risk with translations, especially poetry, which I pretty much point out every time I read poetry in translation.

At any rate, better than the grandmother poetry I like to read. More approachable than the Pope I’ve saturated myself with over the last half of a year. Maybe on par with the Larsen I read before it. Which could be good news for Larsen: After all, Pasternak won the Nobel Prize, which I believe is a bigger deal than the Pushcart prize or even a Rattle prize. Neither of which I have won, to be clear.

I got this chapbook, the winner of the Rattle magazine Chapbook of the Year prize, because I entered a poetry contest with a reading fee that came with a subscription to Rattle. Not sure when I will get to reading my new subscription–I have a great number of literary magazines to which I subscribed over the years or older copies that I’ve picked up at book sales in the past, and I have a desk drawer in the parlor full of old history magazines, Renaissance festival magazines, and beer magazines that I subscribed to around the turn of the century and years of First Things I will get to when the topical articles are history. But I had just finished Treasures of Truth as my night-ending poetry (The Rape of the Lock being a reading chairside table book, not the collections and magazines containing shorter poems that I prefer to read right before bed), so I read this book over the course of a couple of nights before lights out.

And…. Well, I guess Lance Larsen is one of my favorite poets from the second quarter of the 21st century, maybe even of the 21st century, but that’s not a high bar to clear. The work is better than Rupi Kaur and most of the self-published work that I read and pretty much all of the grandmother poetry I read. Unfortunately, though, I read the work after encountering the phrase “small i poetry” somewhere, and although the research I’ve done (a Google search) indicates this definitely (as far as an LLM knows) refers to ee cummings and his lack of capitalization to indicate wonder, contextually (if I remember), it meant how poets insert themselves into their poems. And I saw this meme again:

I know, I know, it’s been this way at least since the romantic poets, and my favorite poet (Edna St. Vincent Millay) does this consistently, and I know, I know, I do this all the time (see also). The latest poem I sent to the very contest which brought this chapbook to my door is almost two pages of me me me. So perhaps I was too harsh in my reading of this fellow’s work. Perhaps I was jealous; he’s certainly made more of a go of it than I have; poems in this volume previously appeared even in the hometown(ish) Missouri Review.

That being said: The poet-narrator of these particular poems often makes note of physical places where he is, cities and states and whatnot, and they acted as an abstraction layer–I was reading a poem, I was not in the poem. I hope I’m not doing too much of that, but, probably I am. A couple of the poems feel like filler–a list of thoughts from a hammock, for example–perhaps a good blog post, but a poem? Nah.

So: Better than average, but not on the pantheon of the best ever. Which, I suppose, is the best I can hope for, too.

I mentioned after reading Bastion of Darkness last month that I had only one book left from my son’s birthday present of three paperbacks. This was the final one of the trio, not the trilogy. He got me two John Grisham legal thrillers (The Judge’s List being the other) and the third book of an R.A. Salvatore fantasy trilogy (Bastion of Darkness). It’s a twee little goal, to have read all three of the gift books, but my life is made of twee goals.

This book, pretty early in Grisham’s career (he’s still writing, but I’m not sure that his current books are quite as boffo as his earlier work, but I haven’t been paying attention to the best seller lists). In it, a lawsuit against a tobacco company goes to trial in Biloxi, Mississippi, and both the plantiff’s pool of bought-in lawyers but especially the defense funded tobacco companies and their undefeated fixer go to work on the jury to persuade or otherwise convince them, against judge’s orders, of course, to vote their way. They run into an unexpected fly in the ointment as one member of the jury, a former law school student, is apparently a drifter who has found is way into the jury pools of many such trials, but this is the first time he’s been seated, and he and a beautiful, also seemingly pastless, woman have their own agenda.

So it’s 550 paperback pages of the maneuvering with the agenda of the two coming into focus at the very end. I found it interesting for several reasons: I have been to Biloxi (and know how to pronounce it) in the time period when the book takes place; I have family nearby to this day, and a couple from church have just announced they’re relocating there; and recently, a trial has captured the headlines with a holdout juror.

A pretty good read, albeit a little long for my taste–it’s probably slightly less daunting in hardback.

But you know what it brings to mind? In the middle 1990s, we almost had a subgenre of legal fiction dedicated to lawsuits against tobacco companies, ainna? They’re still around, though, not bankrupted or banned as they hoped in the 1990s. Are there such legal thrillers about lawsuits against tech companies or social media companies? If not, why not? To be honest, as I mentioned, I don’t follow contemporary fiction much. Maybe the best seller lists are rife with them and I just don’t know it. Or is it something more sinister?

At any rate, I’ve got a copy of Skipping Christmas around here somewhere which I might read eventually, but I’m not jonesing for more legal thrillers of this type. Did Grisham and Turow really reshape the landscape in the last bit of the 20th century legal fiction world? I mean, Perry Mason was big, but that was pretty episodic and formulaic. Did these guys mark a sea change? It’s a rhetorical question of a sort. I’m not digging to find out.

I thought this was the third of the small century-old textbook editions of Alexander Pope’s that I read this year, the first being a 1901 Riverside Literature Series volume that included “The Rape of the Lock”, “An Essay on Man”, and “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”. I remembered another volume, but it turns out that the Maynard’s English-Classic Series volume including only “An Essay on Man” I found and moved directly to the read shelves and did not count it amongst my reading total because it only contained “An Essay on Man” and not a single other poem that I could have read and thus counted the book (and could have written a book report on that single poem). If only I had read the previous book report before going looking, I would have seen that I explained this all then. But June was a long time ago, man.

At any rate, this century-old textbook is from the MacMillan’s Pocket Classics series and includes:

• “The Rape of the Lock”
• “An Essay on Criticism”
• “An Essay on Man”
• “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”
• “Address to the Goddess of Dullness, From The Dunclad”
• “The Triumph of Dullness, From the Dunclad”
• “Ode for the Music on St. Cecilla’s Day”
• “On Sir William Trumball”
• “To Mr. Gay”
• “On Mr. Gay”
• “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady”
• “Eloisa to Abelard”
• “Messiah”
• “Ode on Solitude”
• “On the Grotto at Twickenham”
• “Universal Prayer”
• “Windsor Forest”

So I did get to read “An Essay on Criticism” which was mentioned prominently in the Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition audio course, and I thought I was home free–that the other poems would be shorter. For the most part, they were, although “Eloisa to Abelard” and “Windsor Forest” were both several hundred lines of small print long. I bogged down in “Eloisa to Abelard” for a couple of weeks and finished a couple of other books in the interim, but, here is where my larnin’ intersects: In the audio course I am currently listening to, a course on the history of the philosophy of science (or maybe those words transposed somehow), the lecturer talks about Abelard and makes an aside that another of his troubles was Eloisa, and I had this dot to connect it to. Also, the title of the 2004 film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film I really enjoyed after seeing in the cinema and at least once since, comes from “Eloisa to Abelard”. Don’t I feel smaht? Sometimes.

At any rate, reading the old, classic literature poets in depth like Keats and Pope here really make me appreciate some more recent poetry more. Much of the poetry they wrote relies on knowing contemporary personages and allusions to contemporary events in addition to the allusions to even more classical (that is, older) works and myths. Blooming heck, even Pindar is this way. And because they were patronized, the poets could and too often did go on at length, leading to the archaisms that I was accused of (and was probably guilty of) pursuing when I was younger (that is, in college). So, okay, I’ve read these guys. But Riley, Longfellow, Millay, and Dunbar? I re-read them.

At any rate, I think I am finally out of these little textbook editions of Pope (although the paperback complete works lurks somewhere in the stacks). But I do have a couple or three of these old green-bound textbooks of Longfellow (not including The Courtship of Miles Standish and Elizabeth which I read in 2024) and not including the really nice sixty-year-old reprint of an older edition of The Song of Hiawatha (which I read in 2018) facing out in the poetry section of ABC Books because Mrs. E. knows I’m a sucker for pretty editions of things I have already read (see also my most recent read of The Book of Five Rings). Hey, wait a minute: The Song of Hiawatha which I read in 2018 is a later reprint of the same book (featuring the illustrations of Frederic Remington). So there’s a slight chance that this edition only differs in the cover. And a slight chance that it’s enough of a difference that I’ll buy it next time I’m at ABC Books anyway.

I got this book in May 2025, and I picked it up sometime last year to read in the main reading chair. As you might know, gentle reader, I will often have a poetry book or chapbook beside the chair for times when I’ve reached a stopping point in a prose book (end of a chapter, end of a book), and I’ll read a short poem or two before heading up. Over the course of the last year, though, I’ve started reading poetry in the bedroom immediately before turning in, so chapbooks and the like have languished on that side table downstairs. It did not help that the material in this book is rather repetitive. But instead of returning it to the unread stacks when clearing the side table, I moved it upstairs and read it in between copies of Ideals magazine since the stack I have up there is mostly Mother’s Day issues and that, too, can be repetitive.

The poems are very Christian, with definite references to Christ, salvation, the crucifiction, and so on. It’s 156 pages’ worth of them, mostly three eight-line stanzas each, and only a couple of them do not deal directly with seeking or helping others find salvation. A couple of interesting metaphors in them, and a few of them might seem almost hymnal–I am going to share the book with my beautiful wife who would like to write some hymns in case she can get any ideas about them. The book is inscribed (but not to anyone), and a second cursive hand has a couple of notes at the end of a couple of poems describing how the poet got the idea for the poems. So perhaps she gave talks or readings as well.

The little wingdings marking the end of each poem kind of look like QR codes to 21st century eyes. The paper is a little shiny/inexpensive, and the typography looks more typewritten than National Guard memos leaked to CBS News (22 years ago, gentle reader! 22 years ago, when this blog was young) and includes some bold type which, as you remember, we made by backing up and typing over the same letters a second time (done almost 40 years ago, gentle reader, when I turned in freshman college papers typed on a Smith Corona because the Commodore 801 printer I brought to college was dot matrix without Near Letter Quality mode).

At any rate, pleasant enough when read kinda like a devotional, a couple or four poems at a time. Lyle has a pretty good sense of rhythm, but imperfect–a couple of times, I would have thrown in another syllable to make an iamb–and some end rhyming.

I do not think I will seek out her other work avidly. Well, I won’t order them; but I see that she self-published poetry starting in the 1930s, so antiquarian grandmother poetry is catnip to me, and I’ll pick it up if I can see it priced a buck. And who knows? She was born in Michigan and is buried in Oak Brook, Illinois, (and her grave marker says Poetess, Author of “Treasures of Truth) but at least one book made its way to southwestern Missouri. Even if I put Poet on my marker (or my kin do it for me), I will not have had that reach. Also, I see her work appears on a record (Devotions In Poetry With Stan Cook, Vol. 1, recordings from an old radio program). Jeez, Louise. With any chance (and perhaps but a single other purchase), I’ll be the biggest collector of Lyle (married name: Melone, but she seems to have been known by her maiden name professionally) in Missouri.

I thought completing this book meant that I was 3/4 of the way through my birthday present of almost random paperbacks, but I guess I was counting the Heathcliff comic book in it as well; as it stands, I am 2/3 of the way through the paperbacks having already read John Grisham’s The Judge’s List. I have John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury to go, and it’s entirely possible I will get through it before I finish The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate, perhaps the slender volume of Alexander Pope I’ve bogged down in, and certainly before The Life of Greece.

It’s been a while since I’ve read R.A. Salvatore. I read The Sword of Bedwyr in 2012 and The Servant of the Shard in 2006, and I know I’ve read the first two parts of the Icewind Dale trilogy (and reclaimed an omnibus edition of the trilogy in January so I can re-read the first two parts and finish the whole thing which I could not in my initial collegiate reading of it because my brother only gave me the first two books in the set). Have I read anything else by R.A. Salvatore? Not in the last twenty years, apparently (according to the blog here). He was absolutely huge in the fantasy space in the 1990s, but after college, I guess my mainline reading tastes moved from fantasy to detective stuff. I mean, I read both of them interchangeably. And maybe I’m mistaken. It was thirty years ago, you know. But Salvatore was huge back then, and I think I missed most of it.

Within this book, the forces of good have defeated the forces of darkness at some cost. The main baddie, who has summoned a powerful wraith to do his bidding, is not sure he can control it in his diminished state and withdraws to his distant stronghold. A ranger and the witch daughter of the main green/nature witch in the world are conducting mop-up operations on the orcs talons, but the witch daughter feels the presence of the wraith and goes looking for him. The ranger follows, and the wraith defeats them and brings the daughter to the stronghold. And vast armies of the good guys, including ranger bands, an elf army, and the main body of the human kingdom, march out to the bastion of darkness (the bad guy’s stronghold) just as he discovers he can raise an undead army which grows each battle.

So much of the book is the events leading up to that march and the battle at the stronghold. If you’re familiar with the preceding two books, which took place hundreds of years or decades or maybe just a little while before (or both), and if you just read them, you probably get a head start on keeping the characters straight, especially as the main ranger characters (three different guys in three different places with three different goals) all have similar names. But I did all right with it anyway.

I did read the thin Wikipedia entry on the series (The Chronicles of Ynis Aielle) to pick up what I could on the lore, especially as the main magic users had Earth names as well. I guess some people on a submarine (?) survived an apocalypse/were hurled into the future after the apocalypse and became the main magicians in this world? And some of the magicians were already there, which is why they’re hundreds of years old but the others were not. That was definitely an 80s trope, ainna, the normal people or, better yet, gaming group were hurled into a fantasy world? Maybe I’m making too much of the Guardians of the Flame series and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.

So: An all right bit of pastiche or homage to Lord of the Rings mixed with other bits. Salvatore’s writing is pretty good and moves along all right, but with trilogies and series, it pays to already be invested in the world.