Category: Book Report

Ah, gentle reader. As you know, I am a fan of Bill Cosby even now. I’ve read his books (Time Flies in 2004; Love and Marriage in 2004 and in 2011; Cosbyology in 2010; Fatherhood in 2010) and ‘ve watched his videos (including :49 last year, which indicates that the copy of Himself which I purchased in 2024 awaits viewing). And I know it is contemporinternetguache to still appreciate Cosby’s work, but I have expressed my concern about decades-later accusations of sexual impropriety in an post on Brett Kavanaugh when he was a nominee–therefore but for the grace of God go I, and you, too, gentle male reader.

So: This book tackles some stories from Cosby’s youth in the projects of North Philadelphia, when he ran with a group that those of us of a certain age would recognize as the models for the characters in Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. The book was written after the long run of the cartoon series and after some of the stories likely appeared on Bill Cosby’s comedy records, so I guess in 1991, it might have seemed like recycled material. The anecdotes and their lessons deal with family, siblings, kids playing on the street and amusing themselves, and growing up. Cosby compares his youth to that of the contemporaneous kids (of the 1980s) who get bored and play a lot of Nintendo instead of roaming the streets, inventing their own games with their friends, and improvising amusements. His parents might have said it, but I am sure every generation since has said it, and it’s probably truer now than even in Cosby’s curmudgeonly parenting days.

One chapter, though, is a little, erm, poignant given his 21st century woes: It’s about the pubertyish proto-Junkyard Gang trying to score some Spanish Fly and to dose some of the young ladies of the neighborhood with it. It turns out they’ve bought cornstarch from a Navy sentry, so no hanky-panky occurs, but although in the 20th century, this bit would have been a boys-being-boys story, especially as the ploy did not work, in the 21st century it’s doubleplus ungood wrongthink–and, probably, such spirited hijinks have been trained out of our youth. But, Brian J., they could have poisoned and/or sexually assaulted those girls! Yeah, but they did not. And their failure to do so and the fact that they were taken advantage of makes it funny. Well, amusing.

Ah, never mind. If you’re offended, you’re probably not reading this anyway.

So I’ll watch Himself someday, and I’ll pick up his other books if I see them–it looks like I’m halfway through his written oeuvre, and the 21st century books might be lesser sellers and harder to come by. This particular book is a paperback, but it’s a Deluxe paperback, which means it has a stiffer cover. I thought it had flaps simulating dustjacket flaps for extra copy (as did Hour of Lead), but I was mistaken. Also, note the cover: Emmanuel Lewis, another 1980s sitcom star (Webster, which was an Alex Karras vehicle re-written and re-titled to focus on the adopted son, clearly to piggyback on the success of Gary Coleman’s similar show Diff’rent Strokes). He’s still alive, by the way, but his height and young looks have limited his options in acting, so he has become an entrepreneur over the years.

I got this book two years ago in a bundle for a buck at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. So I didn’t pick it specifically, but the book was facing out, so I did not ignore the bundle on account of it.

As such, it is a 32-page gifting excerpt from an earlier, full-length book called Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead. This excerpt deals with handling grief; the title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, one of the ones in my repetoire when I was doing open mic nights. I presume it is–this excerpt never mentions it, but Anne Morrow Lindbergh is a poet. A poignant story behind this particular book is that the space for gift-giving inscription is to Mom for Mother’s Day from Tracy in 1987, which might indicate a loss in the family in the spring or a little earlier.

Lindbergh, in addition to being a poet, was Mrs. Charles Lindbergh, and her 1973-ish musing on grief is based on the kidnapping of their child and discovery of its body. Hope, then dashed, and then the aftermath. The author find her journals from those days decades later and produced Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead from it.

A quick read, a bit helpful if you’re dealing with someone’s death. Better than A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir, maybe not as good as Love’s Legacy by Stephanie Dalla Rosa–but this book is but an excerpt, so maybe the whole thing is better or more broadly focused than these two.

But as a gift. On Mother’s Day. Man, I feel that.

After listening to the fifth part of the Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition lecture series, which included a lecture on Pope, and specifically on “The Rape of the Lock”. And, brother, did that come in handy.

Ah, Pope. The man is more the parts than his sum.

This collection has three poems: “The Rape of the Lock”, which is a poem in five cantos totaling almost 800 lines that depicts an aristocrat who takes a lock of hair from a young woman for his collection, but the poem seems given over to a very detailed description of a card game which is not a game I’m familiar with; “An Essay on Man” which is written to a Henry Bolingbroke (not the Shakespearean Henry Bolingbrokes, though, as Pope was writing in the first part of the 1700s which was 100 years after Shakespeare who himself was writing 200 years after the Henrys in question) and comprises about 1500 lines in four “epistles” which describe man’s nature, nature, and God and the interrelationships and proper places of each, including reason and instinct/passion/what have you; and “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” is a shorter piece, 419 lines, and covers some of the same themes.

Pope writes in couplets, and many of them are eminently quotable. But the individual poems themselves are long, and you might wonder where it’s going–which is why the lecture helped. Pope helps himself by including a summary of the contents of each epistle in “An Essay on Man”, and footnotes by Pope himself and editors of various editions (the original and this edition, presumably) tell us the names of the contemporaneous people Pope is talking about, but that’s not exactly a help or driver into reading large stretches at a time. I exercised some discipline in reading sections, cantos, or epistles completely, much of the time, but this is mostly drawing room poetry to amuse or irritate aristocrats of the time. So while one might want to and actually quote Pope on occasion, it’s not something that many in the 21st century will read for pleasure (see also the complete works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the second and longer part of The Complete Works of Keats and Shelley, set in a holding pattern behind a stack of literary magazines and Ideals).

At any rate, let’s see what I flagged during my slog.

• Trough worlds unnumber’d though the God be known,
  ‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
  He, who through vast immensity can pierce,
  See worlds on worlds compose one universe.

  From “An Essay On Man”, early in Epistle I. Given all the headlines about UFOs in government files recently, one question is how religion would adopt. In the 18th century, Pope was nonplussed by it. I imagine the Judeo-Christian religions would adapt.

• Who wickedly is wise, or madly brave,
  Is but the more a fool, the more a knave.

  I think I will put this on my business cards. If I ever order any again. The last batch has lasted almost 17 years, and the box is still half full, which is how a pessimist describes his box of business cards.

• One from Grubstreet will my fame defend,
  And more abusive, calls himself my friend.
  This prints my Letters, that expects a bribe,
  And others roar aloud, “Subscribe, subscribe!”

  Shades of the modern Internet culture in penny publishing in the 1700s.

I had a couple other things flagged, but I didn’t remember what I wanted to say about them.

As you can see, the couplets are generally a little epigramatic, flow together, and as I was reading along, I was following; however, at the end of a piece, I was like, “What’s that all about” even though at a high level I knew what and I enjoyed a couple of couplets along the way, the whole did not strike me as greater than the sum of some of the couplets.

Ah, well, I am a product of my times, prefering short, punchy, and pointed poems.

After I read this book, I came upon, shelved just a couple of similar Riverside Literature Series down, “An Essay on Man” in a similar Maynard’s English-Classic Series edition. Unlike the Walter J. Black Classics Club editions, which were marketed to middle class adults, these editions were college textbooks, and it shows. The book I read has faded pencil notes on the front flyleaf, and “Rape of the Lock” has underlining and margin notes. Which, gentle reader, probably means that more than one student used this as I’m pretty sure “dialoging with the text” was not an early 20th century thing. An LLM indicates it was mentioned in an influential 1940 volume called How to Read a Book and became widespread in the 1960s, and this tracks with my experience–editions of classics I have starting in the 1960s start showing this juvenalia marginalia about then. Essay on Man, this other edition, does not indicate such.

I will just move this second book to the read poetry shelves with the one I read, and I’ll put it in by the old and mylar-wrapped complete works of Pope. I have a paperback copy of the complete works of Pope as well around here somewhere, but I won’t be in a real rush to read the rest now.

Like Look Who’s Here, the Family Circus collection I read before this book, I could not find the book listed in a Good Book Hunting report, and it is in really good shape, so I think I bought it for my boys a decade ago and they didn’t read it a bunch. Which is a shame: Heathcliff was fairly big in the 1980s–I remember watching the cartoon series, and we took the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which included it. So perhaps it was just big for me in that moment of my youth. Apparently, it’s still in syndication, although not in The Licking News, the only paper I took until recently which had a comics page.

Ah, gentle reader. Unlike The Family Circus, I’ve read a lot of Heathcliff collections over the years, including:

• Sweet, Savage Heathcliff in 2008
• Heathcliff Strikes Again in 2009
• Heathcliff At Home in 2012
• Heathcliff Round 3 in 2013
• Heathcliff Tresure Chest in 2013
• Heathcliff Smooth Sailing in 2015

And the Heathcliff comic book I received for my birthday this year (not reviewed).

Although this book was published in 1984, the copyright dates and the dates on the comic panels themselves indicate 1976 and 1977, and we even have a couple bicentennial-themed panels. Which means that they’re fifty years old now, but aren’t we all?

If you know Heathcliff, you know what you’re going to get: He’s going to dump trash cans (which is what we used back then instead of wheeled bins); he’s going to woo Sonya; he’s going to fight Spike; he’s going to sing on the back fence; and so on. According to Wikipedia, the comic only started in 1973, so it’s very early in the run, so everything feels fresh and not dialed in. Of course, I’ve not read a collection of the paper cartoons in eleven years, so all the tropes would seem kinda fresh just because I’m older than the cartoon itself (aren’t we all? If not, do not taunt in the comments). I probably mentioned before in one of those other book reports that I favor Heathcliff over Garfield (although I have read a Garfield collection in my time) because Heathcliff is more of a Byronic hero than Garfield. Well, perhaps I’m trying too hard when I say “Byronic,” but he definitely was more dynamic.

Ah, gentle reader. That’s really all I have to say about that, and, good news/bad news: I have several more collections I will probably knock off in short order, which is good for the annual book count but I’ll probably have as little to say about them as I do about these last two.

I might as well macro this bit: I claimed this book when we culled the bookshelves in my youngest’s bedroom in January because I’ve delved into this well–which is a spot on my bookshelves where I’ve put all the cartoon books from that gleaning–several times (book reports forthcoming) and will indubitably do so in the future (to be clear: the book reports are coming, because I need to pad my book total for the year as we are in the month numbered 6, and I’m not in the book total of 50ish).

Sorry. Where was I? Oh, yes. Reporting on a book of cartoons. You know, this looks like it’s only the third Family Circus book I’ve read (the others being When’s Later, Daddy? in 2009 amd I’m Taking A Nap in 2013).

For those of you who don’t know or don’t remember, Family Circus is a daily single-panel cartoon which, Wikipedia informs me, is still running and is the most widely syndicated cartoon in the world. Although it’s a single panel with a single gag daily, some story arcs appear as the family travels to see family, Billy’s birthday is coming, Christmas is coming, et cetera.

And, you know what? I’m of a generation who can still appreciate the warmth and humor of the book, coming at that tail end of the middle century where although the nuclear families were disintegrating, they still dominated popular culture. So I get the tropes, even though these panels would have come out before I was born, but maybe my son would not have. Given how good of condition I found the book, it was not one that they read over and over again like some Lego titles.

So a pleasant couple of minutes. And another book entry for the annual total, which was looking a little anemic before I started knocking out cartoon books.

You know, gentle reader, for a long while the contents of ABC Books’ martial arts section included (and merely was often) two books on Chi Walking. I mention it on many occasions, and I have even mentioned buying/owning two books on Tai Chi walking, but history indicates that I bought the two remaining books in the martial arts section in 2022, which were this one book on Tai Chi walking and a book on mixed martial arts (Raw Combat) which I have yet to read. Which leaves a bit of a mystery: Do I have another book on Tai Chi walking in the stacks, or do I have two more that I bought later? Come to my estate sale early to find out!

So I started this book a couple years back because it could fill a category for a Winter Reading Challenge, but I bogged down for a long time in it (it was on the decommissioned living room book accumulation point for years). As part of a recent project to finish some of the books I’ve started (and which have accumulated on side tables), I decided to power the rest of the way through it.

Yeah, it’s a couple hundred pages of mindful walking practices. And although they have different names and “goals,” basically it’s monitor your breathing and walk. I’m not really the target market for the book–presumably, it was targeted to older or inactive people who had seen tai chi in the news or in the park or whatnot and wanted to get something out of it but didn’t fancy themselves martial artists. Man, do you remember when Tai Chi was a thing? It was everywhere for a while, what, twenty-five or thirty years ago? And now I don’t see it anywhere, in any news stories, et cetera. Did China actually finish stomping it out? I posed this question on Facebook for my friends, but I’m not sure my Facebook contacts have seen it.

I did get something out of this book, lo, those many years ago when I started reading it. It talks about posture when running, you know, leaning forward a bit (fun fact: I used to lean too far forward when sprinting, in college, which led to me perfecting my shoulder roll before studying bujitsu–I would run, topple over, roll over my shoulder, and come up still running until I learned not to do that). I mean, I do this when running outdoors (or did, when I ran, and ran outdoors). But when running on treadmills, I would keep my body vertical, maintaining distance from the controls of the treadmill, which was suboptimal. So I corrected that before an indoor triathlon–which also indicates this book was started but incomplete for years. I have not done a triathlon, indoor or out, for over a year now (the indoor ones are drying up, I think, and the outdoor ones are sprint length or longer). So: Maybe I am rapidly growing into the target market for this book after all.

I claimed this book when we culled the bookshelves in my youngest’s bedroom in January. I actually thought I was reclaiming the book because it looks like the kind of thing I would have bought and reported on, only to have my young boys poach the book from my shelves and put it into their rooms. But, maybe not: I don’t see a mention of the book in either a Good Book Hunting post or a previous book report, so maybe it was one of the things we picked up for them at ABC Books when I dragged them up there before they got phones. Well, it’s mine now.

So: This is an official ICanHasCheezburger.com book. You know, I first mentioned that site on this blog in May 2007, so not quite twenty years ago. Clearly, I was or am the target market for the content: Pictures of cats with captions. Although this book is about kittens specifically.

Okay, amusing. I have to admit that I’ve not hit that Web site in a long time, even though in 2007, the olden days, I hit it several times a week. Maybe the modern stream of memes on social media and in meme posts on blogs have taken their place.

But this cute little book was a quick browse, and as I said, amusing. And the authors/proprietors have had better luck than I have trying to capitalize on kittens and cats (of Nogglestead), which include a soon-to-be defunct line of t-shirts at NicoSez.com (ah, gentle reader–am I giving up by planning to not renew for a third year of Web hosting and expensively provided SSL management? Yes, yes I am; although my intentions and my actions often do not coincide) and two apps (Nico’s Kitty Translator and Feline Fly Assassin, both featuring my cats). So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.

And I have 39 books read this year. 100 is within reach!

Ah, gentle reader: As I mentioned when I bought this book in 2020 with a gift card, I had read about Dunbar somewhere and had bookmarked his Wikipedia entry for later use when writing an essay or something. Back when I thought I was an essayist. I guess it’s only been 20 years since I had a piece in History magazine and a couple in Writer’s Journal. Could I have bookmarked it that long ago? Ah, gentle reader, I have exported my then-Firefox and now-Brave bookmarks every time I’ve upgraded computers, so…. Maybe.

As I might have mentioned, I have returned to reading in my bedroom immediately before bed–some time ago, I had a full-sized lamp beside the bed, and I read in bed for a while before sleeping, but we moved a small chair into the bedroom because my beautiful wife has always favored the idea of a “reading nook.” She doesn’t read there frequently, but I’ve taken to having a stack of literary magazines handy there to transition to bedtime. I’ve also read poetry books there, including the first part of The Complete Works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Odes of Pindar, and some Salesian Missions things. For the last couple of months, I’ve had this 479 page long collection.

I don’t remember where I first came across his name, but I’ll definitely say that (in my opinion), Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of America’s best poets, certainly of his time (the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th). Much of his poem has rhythm and rhyme and is eminently approachable and readable and has actual substance to it, sometimes unexpected but plausible takes and metaphors. But.

But, and this is something that can be used to ding and to dismiss James Whitcomb Riley (Dunbar’s contemporary). Dunbar wrote a lot in the vernacular, and in his case, as his speakers were former slaves and black, the vernacular probably triggers modern readers. But even within the poems in the vernacular have depth and poetic sensitivity. Another thing that separates him from modern poetry, well, a couple of things: One, his poems not in the vernacular are rather formal in structure, so they’re not authentic enough. And the other thing modern professionals might think is a sin is that some of the former slaves who miss their lives as slaves. You know, when they were freed, they lost a lot of social structure, comraderie, and suddenly had to live a completely different life. Which led to some complexity in human emotion, ainna? But that would be doubleplusungood thought expressed in the 21st century. I guess I should add here because it is the 21st century that I am not advocating slavery, but I can imagine some counterintuitive and conflicted emotions on the part of the freed slaves.

So, yeah, I liked this book. Over the months of working through it, I flagged a number of poems. I’m not going to recount them here for you, gentle reader–I’m thinking I might at a later time pull this book from the shelf and re-read what I have flagged. I also bought a later edition of his first work, Lyrics of Lowly Life in 2023. When I bought it, I pointed out to the volunteer counting my books that he was an important black poet and one of the first to achieve fame from it, and she thought it was great that I knew it. I think it a failure of our collective society that nobody else does.

Dunbar died at 33; how unfortunate, but like Keats, he burned brightly. And wrote more poetry by that age than I can have been arsed to write with a couple of extra decades. But I’m working on it.

Like Mother Tried To Tell Me… And I Wouldn’t Listen, I got this book last May at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale. It is a short collection of poems dated June 2015 through March 2019, and the Print on Demand date in the back indicates the book was printed in May 2021.

The subtitle is “a tribute to living life on the open road”, and the first poem is about a van she named Frida, and it sounds like she’s planning to live in it, an early representation of Van Life or perhaps homelessness, but the poems are not exclusively about travel. They’re about relationships, et cetera. And although they hint at some poetic sensibility, some underdeveloped moments, most of them are not very good–they’re just prosaic thoughts broken into lines, sometimes lines with only a word or two on them, and not especially descriptive or evocative.

Sadly, in reading a lot of lesser poets (and modern magazines), I’m still concluding that the changes in education over the last, what, century and a quarter? have really diminished the depth of poetry across all levels of skill and professionality. Some of the grandmother poetry, or, heck, the poetry my father wrote (which I’ve posted on the blog, somewhere, but I cannot find it now), has depth that the casual poetry writer today lacks. Because they’ve not been fed the classics as input, so all they have is tweets and insta-poetry to learn from. And it shows. Even the college-trained poets these days suffer from it.

Ai.

At any rate, this is book 37 for the year (and the third on the night when I also read browsed Up Close! and Mother Tried To Tell Me… And I Wouldn’t Listen). Annual book count: PADDED.

I got this book last May at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale, and it was shelved close to Up Close!, so when looking for something to read in between epistles in Pope’s “An Essay on Man”, I pulled it as well. As I have only read 35 books so far this year, I have to pump my numbers up.

This is a little gift book, not very long, which is bound at the top. Each page contains a truism or quip, advice that I suppose your mother might have given you. And by “each page,” I mean one per sheet of paper–the “top” page of the book/back of the “bottom” pages, are blank. The individual quips are things like “Tact is the ability to close your mouth before someone else wants to.” and “You can give without loving… but you can never love without giving.” In cursive, as though someone just wrote them down on a notepad.

So, yeah, it took me a couple of minutes to read it. But I am counting it as a book. Because I make the rules around here.

After thinking about Gary Coleman, I thought about this book. Which I had knocked akimbo on the to-read shelves whilst dusting on Monday, so its location was fresh in my mind.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I have picked up these elementary school book fair celebrity bio books before (see also TV Superstars ’81, TV Superstars ’82, TV Superstars ’83, TV Now: Stars and Shows, and any number of similar books about sports figures). The difference, though, it that the aforementioned book covers a period 40 years ago when I watched network television and new who the people in the books (like Gary Coleman) were.

This book, though, is from 13 years ago. So these child stars–and they’re all child stars–I guess some of them are in their 20s, but, c’mon, man, to someone who was down with the celebrities 40 years ago, anything under 35 looks like a child, ainna?–come from an era where I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to television. Especially Nickelodeon, where many of these stars matriculated. Some, of course, I’m familiar with because they’re still around. But some not.

The book includes brief bits with lots of exlamation points! about:

• Big Time Rush, a boy band from a Nickelodeon show
• Victoria Justice
• Rachel Chow
• Andrew Garfield
• Jennifer Lawrence
• Josh Hutchinson
• Chloë Moretz
• Lily Collins
• Cody Simpson
• Bella Thorne
• Zendaya Coleman
• Justin Bieber
• Selena Gomez
• Taylor Swift
• One Direction
• Willow and Jaden Smith

So, yeah. About half are still relevant? I’m not sure I’ve seen a film with any of them except the Spider-Man film which had Zendaya and Andrew Garfield in it. The one thing I’ll take from this book is Zendaya’s last name since she’s dropped it. And the book describes Taylor Swift as the Queen of Country, although in 2013 should would still have been princess-aged, and the last line, punctuated with an exclamation point! says she’ll be the Queen of Country forever. I am from the future, and I have some startling news for you.

At any rate, I’d say it’s good fodder for trivia nights, except:

1. At thirteen years old, this book is likely outside the range of the questions at trivia nights we’ve been to in recent years: Questions written by college kids who were too young to pay attention 14 years ago when this book was compiled or questions about very contemporary things. Also, when it comes to pop culture, Disney categories rule more than Nickelodeon television shows do.
2. I’m likely to forget everything except Zendaya’s last name after I schedule this blog post. It helps that she has the same last name as Gary Coleman, to be sure.

Still, the passage of time, neh? I am not sure where I got this particular volume, but I’m likely to dabble in others like it in the future.

Wow, it’s been eight years since I bought this book at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale back when they only had it twice a year in Ozark. One would think I would have jumped on this book sooner. But one would also have thought I’d also jump on Chuck Norris’s autobiography, too, but yet it languishes here, somewhere, amid the stacks.

I’ve got to say: I’ve read my Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind in 2017), and I have read my Joko Beck (Everyday Zen in 2020), and I have read other non-Zen Buddhists including Thich Naht Hanh (various), but this book is maybe the best book on mindfulness I’ve read. Not true Zen, but mindfulness.

The book is not a true biography, but it has enough biographical elements and anecdotes to be interesting. But its focus is on what we now call mindfulness which Norris was introduced to in his various dealings with the inscrutible Orientals in Korea where he learned tae kwon do and later in California where he had a chain of martial arts schools before he got into acting. He talks about emptying the mind, focus, breathing, et cetera, and, again, it’s leavened with the anecdotes and name drops. He mentions Bruce Lee, of course, and even includes a story/koan/sutra of the empty cup that was in Shannon Lee’s Be Water, My Friend. He mentions that Steve McQueen recommended he try acting when he was at a crossroads (being open to those pivotal points is a lesson taking a chapter).

So it’s a little like Joe Hyams’ Zen in the Martial Arts, but, to be honest, better. Because it’s Carlos Ray Norris, man. And I say this even though I’m only slightly afraid that if I posted a bad word about him that he would spin kick me from beyond.

And I’m kinda encouraged to find his autobiography. More inclined to do so than to watch The Jimmy Stewart Show based on reading the latter’s book of poetry.

Having run out of Readers Digest magazines on my recent Florida vacation, I delved into this book, which I bought in Daytona Beach during the trip. It took me less time to read it than a Readers Digest because it’s 31 pages long.

It features four (4) poems total plus an introduction telling about how he started writing poetry on a bit of a lark and an introductory couple of paragraphs about how he came to write each poem. We have a poem about a step in a hotel in Junín, Argentina, that trips guests; a poem about how cold it is in the Aberdares mountain range in Kenya; a poem from the point of view of a movie camera nipped by a hyena also in Kenya; and an eulogy for a not particularly well behaved dog.

It’s not high art; it’s a bit of doggerel, although it has decent rhythm and rhyme to it. But what’s most telling, and a bit sad, about it is that it reminds us that people, normal people and celebrity, tried their hands at poetry in the middle of the twentieth century before the practice was completely turned over to the priests of academia, and that people, normal people and celebrity, would read it. Would read at all might be the case, although a woman next to me on one of the flights had a book when the most of the rest of the people were left to their own devices. Also, it’s kind of bittersweet to find a hardback priced under ten dollars.

At any rate, it reminds me that I have a DVD version of The Jimmy Stewart Show around here somewhere. Maybe I’ll give it a watch sometime soon. But I often say that here on the blog, and then I do not.

I just got this book in January when spending a gift card at Hooked on Books. So I came across it while taking a break from “An Essay on Man” by Alexander Pope (itself a break from That Hideous Strength, which is a break in the complete works of Shakespeare…).

So: This comes from the middle part of Leary’s career, although I guess he’s continued to work since 2008. But it’s in the middle of Rescue Me which was his dramatic fireman series which ended in 2011, fifteen years ago. He’s been busy with other television shows, films, and voice-over work, but because I associate him mostly with the MTV ads in the 1980s, No Cure for Cancer which I listened to over and over in the middle 1990s driving to Milwaukee and back, and his roles in 1990s films like National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I, The Ref, and Demolition Man, I think of anything past the turn of the century as part of his later work even though most of his career has happened after that arbitrary point.

So, what do we have? Well, Denis Leary schtick. He rants about the importance of hard work, families, and gores some sacred cows about our softening society (eventually having to walk back some bit about autism). Being it is 2008, he takes some shots at George W. Bush and lauds Obama; I wonder whether he feels any differently eighteen years on–and whether he could or would admit it if he does.

So I flagged a couple of bits:

• On page 25, he mentions Donald Trump making a vodka when he doesn’t drink.
• On page 90, he mentions Paris Hilton who was a thing back then before the onslaught of the Kardashians. I just watched Paris Hilton in National Lampoon’s Pledge This!.
• Here’s a long and slightly vulgar bit:
  

  I could update that bit [a bit from Lock’n’Load about coffee-flavored coffee] this very second with my thesis on how Starbucks may be responsible for the pussification of America–I reresearch the subject once or twice a week when I stand in line there and listen as some limp-wristed, yellow-Lance-Armstrong-bracelet-wearing, metrosexual-har-goo-sporting, Hillary-Clinton’s-tired-old-ass-worshipping puke spends twelve minutes trying to decide between the Orange Cranberry Vagina muffin or the Pumpkin Cream Tampon Cake while fingering a Save the Rainforest Compilation CD featuring Sting, Sheryl Crow, Joni Mitchell, Sting’s Abs, That Hot 19-Year-Old Blonde White English Chick Who Sounds Like Janis Joplin, and Sting’s Penis–who apparently pops out of his master’s yoga pants to sing his new single “How I Have Tantric Sex With Trude Styler For Seven Straight Hours.”

  He means Joss Stone. I was there in 2008. It was so long ago, but not that long ago.

• Donald Trump again on page 191. I mean, for late boomers coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, he was quite a touchstone. Especially after his television show.
• Talking about memory in male/female relationships, he says “Unless we’re talking about sports or The Godfather Part One and Two or the Vanessa Williams issue of Playboy magazine.” ACKSHUALLY, the photos that toppled her reign as Miss America appeared in Penthouse. My brother had a copy back in the day.
• He says: “Here’s hoping that–two decades from now when perhaps another twenty-million Mexicans have settled in here and begun to legally prosper, vote, work, and play–racists will have at least five or six more slurs to shout at them during an altercation.” Well, here we are twenty years later (almost), and whole swaths of other populations have arrived on these shores, and Americans of all stripes have indeed updated their dictionary of derogatory ethnic terms. And, yet, somehow anti-semitism is the sentiment of the day.

So: It’s slightly a product of its time, with the political jabs at Bush and whatnot, but it’s also notable for how some of the things he identifies are still relatively timely–and that’s not just the parts about where he talks about the importance of family. The seeds for current sociopolitical concerns were already germinating in 2008. And were fertilized by the administration Leary welcomed.

I got this book in Sparta in 2024 with a couple of other loft interior design books. I read the others, Small Lofts and Minimalist Lofts, not long after I got them. This one, however, languished partially complete beside the reading chair for quite some time before I recently finished it as part of my drive to finish up (or reshelve) books that have been there for a long time.

It’s because it has a high copy-to-photo ratio. It has these chapters:

• the loft look
• space
• light
• materials
• color
• styling
• outside in

Yeah, not capitalized, because that’s stylish.

Each two-page spread has three photos, generally a larger one and two smaller ones, but a lot of gushy, purple, catalog-style prose. Each chapter has a “case study” which is slightly more specific, more of the same. Although the book did not depend upon the word liminal quite as much as the others.

So, to underline (as this book does), the loft style of the early 21st century (and maybe beyond) is to create open floor plan condos that look like Scandinavian museums with their light and neutral colors and simplistic furniture and art presentation (a limited number of things per room), objects chosen for how well they conform to the contempraneous concepts of style and nothing else. Architectural elements like floating steps which look like they might last a decade, but don’t most loft dwellers, especially those buying bespoke lofts like those depicted in books, make me wonder what they’ll be like in five or six years. To say nothing of twenty. But, again, I imagine lofts turn over a lot, and everyone who’s buying a pied-à-terre is going to pay designers and architects to redo it in their vision anyway.

You know, I prefer craftsman to almost lodge design, so for me, a loft has exposed brick and industrial elements but also thick wood accents and tend toward the dark colors. And as for décor, the chapter “styling” opens with:

The key to styling urban spaces is balance. Balance between personal treasures and cohesive, clear and contemporary home style. With our choice in furniture, fabrics, and a hundred other details, we stamp our personality upon a room, we make it ours.

I mean, if you cannot trust a philosophy described with a missing serial comma and a comma splice, what can you trust?

So much of interior design, it seems to me, is self-referential and artificial within the industry itself. Making spaces look like other spaces, with external indicators substituting appearance for meaning. Of course, when I look around Nogglestead, I see things and decorative items with meaning. Going along the mantel on the oversized brick fireplace in our family room, for example, we have a needlepoint girl which was a gift to my beautiful wife; a pair of replica dueling pistols which belonged to her uncle; her acryllic plaque for being on the park board; a shadowbox containing duck and goose calls belonging to her father; a time/thermometer/barometer bit which was a gift; the flag from my mother’s casket; the little crystal lamp I bought in 2018; the cartridges from the salute fired at my father-in-law’s funeral in a triangle flag shadow box; a scale that belonged to my sainted mother; a shadow box containing three garrison caps from my mother’s veterans organizations; a mirror which belonged to my favorite aunt; a marble chessboard that belonged to my grandfather and then my mother; a tin cat garden decoration I bought for my wife; two cat sculptures that belonged to my godmother aunt, including one I bought for her; a fireplace tool set which was decorative at my mother-in-law’s house but is functional (some times) at Nogglestead; and a porcelain cat sculpture I’ve named Darla which belonged to my favorite aunt. I look around the rooms, and I can tell you why the things are here. Some elements do not scream Brian J. did this–mostly gifts consumer art from my godmother aunt or chosen by my beautiful wife (although we have one set, down from two, of cheap consumer art I bought in my Ebaying days). So no balance between personal treasures. All personal treasures.

Should I someday have a loft, it will not look like this. It will look like Nogglestead but probably with a more open floor plan. And I will invent industrial lodge cluttercore.

Ah, gentle reader. I have picked this short book to be a mild distraction whilst I work through That Hideous Strength, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Pamela, and the second book in the Story of Civilization set by the Durants. Well, mostly, That Hideous Strength right now, which I thought might go better/go faster after reading the Gothickish mess of The Unloved, but, oh, no. Still slow going there–a couple of segments of a chapter or a chapter of it a night. So: This book, which I acquired at ABC Books in 2023 (along with two books on how to play guitar, strangely enough–clearly this is a sign that I need to learn to play guitar).

So: It is a rather recent book as the books I acquire goes. It is a basic instruction book on Kendo, Japanese swordfighting techniques for a hand-and-a-half sword, focusing on fighting armored opponents. It has a list of exercises and drills and a couple of illustrations, but mostly it directs the user to YouTube videos for actual demonstrations. Which is atypical for the books I read on martial arts–most of them are old enough that they precede YouTube. I haven’t watched the videos, though, as I’m still a fencer more than a kendo guy, and that will be all right until people start wearing armor again. Good enough for duels, anyway.

And, as I mentioned, or meant to, it’s a slash and chop martial art, designed to cut through samurai armor. Try this on full plate, and you’re probably in a world of hurt. So some stepping and chopping from overhead strikes. I wonder how well I could pick it up from some of the diamond footwork drills I’ve learned (and included in Boxing Drill Companion, available on the Apple App Store!). Simple research indicates there are three kendo dojos in Missouri, none in Springfield, and my dojo only trains sticks these days (in the past, we did some sword work, other weapons, and other styles, but that was a long, long time ago).

I’m thinking about going through some of the thinner martial arts books I’ve got to continue with the breaks from the homeworkish reading. It makes me feel like a martial artist in a period where I’ve gone through a little lull in my studies due to many circumstances, only one of which is that I’m lazy and feeling old at the same time.

I don’t know where I got this Book Club edition; as it does not show up on any Good Book Hunting reports, I’ll assume that I inherited from my aunt who passed away 20 years ago whose few bookshelves were packed with 70s and 80s horror and thrillers. You know, in my Ebay peddling days, she came along to estate sales a time or two and tried the Ebay thing for a while as well–at least, she listed, sold, and shipped a few things from what she picked up, mostly the collectible statuary of the era. She did better than Pixie, who more frequently accompanied me, who collected items but didn’t generally get around to listing them on Ebay.

At any rate, I read Creature in 2019, and I thought it was okay. But this book? Absurd. Absurd. I did not like it.

So: A prodigal son is called back to his childhood home, Sea Oaks, as his mother is dying. So he brings his nuclear family to the island and its antebellum mansion off the coast of the southern United States. His mother is a harridan who has been hard on his sister who wanted to be a dancer but fell down the stairs and broke a hip which put off her dreams, which to be honest were as much her mother’s dreams. The old woman dies, and then the daughter goes crazy (again) and begins to kill everyone one-by-one. The wife. Her dance students. Her housekeeper. Her brother. And so on. Somehow, the fact that these deaths are piling up on Sea Oaks in a relatively short time (like a couple weeks) doesn’t draw any attention, and somehow, this middle-aged woman with a pronounced limp can get the drop on a whole bunch of people and can handle corpses like a professional coroner, and….

Oh, for Pete’s sake. I have recently dinged authors for having their plots too informed by video games; this book’s plotting seems ripped from contemporary (then) direct-to-video slasher films. Eesh, one of the first video cassettes we owned in 1985 was Alice, Sweet Alice, and this book is right on par with it.

I mean, Saul is an adequate writer. He spends a little too much time, perhaps, setting up the tropish Southern Gothic setting (the first hundred pages of the 300 page book are setting the scene, it seems). But.

Yeah, you know, I’ve often, at least in person, commented on how some writers of the past who are wildly successful in their time are forgotten now. When I was hitting the estate sales around the turn of the century, as the, what, Silent Generation and maybe Greatest Generation were cleaning out, I saw a hella lotta Frank Yerby novels. A lot of Harold Robbins novels. Probably my share of John Saul novels. But you don’t hear much about them now, and reading this book written and published in my lifetime, I can kind of see how it happens. Wildly popular, a product of its time, but not timeless in any sense.

I don’t know how many other Saul novels I might have floating around here; however, I can say that it will probably be another seven years before I get to one. Unless I decide I must read all the John Saul books right now like I sometimes do. But I hope not.

I kind of thought that I’d bought this book with the collection of books on Korea that I bought in 2014 in Clever, where I speculated that the previous owner might have served in Korea (during the war or after) and returned as a tourist later. But I actually bought this book in in 2024, also in Clever, and notes indicate that a previous owner visited Thailand in 2004; a World War II vet would be getting up to almost eighty, so perhaps not someone who directly served. But most likely someone with an interest in the subject. Which is not to say there are not many; this book is a product for tourists put out by a company in Thailand.

It tells the story of the Western POWs who the Japanese empire made to construct an ill-advised railroad from Thailand to Burma to help the Japanese with their Asian land-based operations after their Pacific naval advance was stopped at the Battle of Midway six months after Pearl Harbor. I mean, I read The Battle Off Midway Island in 2014, but this book (under review) gave a timeline of the Japanese explosion in 1941 and early 1942, when they captured a bunch of southeast Asia and knocked on Australia’s doorstep but their Pacific campaign was basically nullified after the Battle of Midway, so they turned their eyes towards the land mass of Asia and maybe thought about invading India after this rail line was in place. But that was not to pass, happily.

The book details the conditions the prisoners (mostly British and Australian) and Asian slave labor faced–back-breaking work in the heat, working on a rail line that the British and Germans had surveyed decades before but said was too difficult, the deaths, and the constant need to repair problems and handle damage from Allied bombing (and prisoner sabotage) meant that it never performed like the ill-informed Japanese imperial powers thought it would.

So the actual building and destruction did not line up with the film (The Bridge over the River Kwai), but the film stirred interest, I guess.

The text of the book looks to be translated, as it features a number of, erm, ill-developed bits of English, and the typography and layout are a little faulty. It includes a lot of small, ill-reproduced photographs of the era, but dayum, man, they’re photos of the history. Some of the text repeats itself a bunch–the book is “Organized by J.P.”, so maybe it’s sourced from a bunch of pamphlets cut-and-pasted without altering and smoothing the text.

But it’s lightweight and informative for people who did not know about the Asian land front in World War II. Which does not probably align with people going to Thailand to see it. But as a man approaching middle age who is not sure whether he is on team World War II or team Civil War for old man history interests, it’s making its case for Team World War II.

Oh, and as I mentioned when talking about the record with marches that belonged to my grandfather (in 2012, gentle reader; I forgive you if you’ve forgotten), the record includes the whistled march tune from the film. Which I can depict now, although probably not whistle accurately as I am tune-deaf. So I knew kinda about the story, if not the real history (I have not seen the film, but will undoubtedly look for it now).

And I could place when the previous owner visited the site because the book and a paper pamphlet included at no cost to me both say Sept 24 2004 on them. The included paper is not part of the book, and it’s too big for a Found Bookmark post, but I read it as well. It’s entitled “History of the Thailand-Burma Railway”.

But only counted the whole as one book in the annual total. A quick read whilst dodging the quick read in between Shakespeare plays and while I dodge the remainder (most of) That Hideous Strength.

The artist of this book is the son of someone we knew from church in Old Trees, and when their Christmas letter indicated that he’d done a comic book, a book of comic art that is and not a saddle-stitched comic book, I ordered it on the pretense of giving it to my children, and I took possession when I culled my youngest’s bedroom of books and children’s books earlier this year.

This particular volume is mostly comic art; it lists heroes (men and women) of the Bible and has a comic art portrait of them. A few selected heroes have a portion of their stories in a single page of related panels, but mostly it’s portraits.

So, yeah, much like a modern comic book. But it’s a quick palate cleanser after Love’s Labour’s Lost, the most recent Shakespeare play I read (thoughts forthcoming), and A Deadly Shade of Gold.

Now, about the arbitrary rules: I will count it as a book I’ve read this year, and I will put them on the bookshelves instead of comic boxes (unlike the Bongo Simpsons comics, which have a flat spine and more actual content than this book). Why? Because I wanna.

I see Boggs has not only produced more similar (and probably with actual plotting) Biblical comics, a Western-looking comic book, and a book about being a business artist in the AI-world. Ah, gentle reader! If I ever get a job and have disposable income again, I shall consider buying more of his work if I can avoid Amazon.com (I’m back fighting my tweehad against it).

I guess this is a re-read; I did a book report on it not long after I picked it up in Clever in 2012. So I must have re-patriated it to my bookshelves when I culled the youngest’s book shelves earlier this year. Which means I should probably not add it again to my book database program from 2000 when I finish the re-book report.

The cover of the book indicates this collection is not drawn from the daily strip and instead is original material. Man, Dilbert was part of that fin de siècle zeitgeist (he said, mixing two foreign languages to show you how smart he is), ainna? (The south Milwaukee slang killed that vibe, ainna?)

So, basically, it’s Dogbert giving etiquette advice for people who lack it. Each page is four panels dealing with an individual boorish behavior, and the cartoons are grouped thematically. Amusing in (a lot of) spots, and the jokes are of a sort you could make in 1993 that would be problematic in the latter part of the first quarter of the 21st century. As with so many things, Scott Adams, who was on the naughty list for a while and was pop-culturally cancelled for…. Oh, some transgression; aren’t they all the same? And one wonders whether it was because he shifted or because the culture did.

The book is in pretty good shape, which means that my children didn’t sleep with it, so perhaps they, 21st centurians, didn’t get it. The oldest has an office job these days. Perhaps he’s better primed for Dilbert and Office Space than he was when he was six.