Category: Book Report

I got this book in Sparta in October as part of a minor bag-day binge along with a couple of other loft design books. I mean, I liked the HGTV show Small Space, Big Style (example) about how people decorated their small apartments in the big city (often New York). So I thought I would really like this book. But….

The book is Euro-centered with a couple of “lofts” in South America and in the United States. But the aesthetic is basically European: Lots of white walls (finished walls for the most part) with minimalist furniture in them. Many of them are not “lofts” in revitalized industrial or warehouse buildings but rather repurposed other businesses. Some of them exceed 1000 square feet, which is not especially “small”–not that I think lofts must be small, but the book title has the word in it (although perhaps not in the original language–this book is a translation, which might explain its non-American focus and preferred aesthetic).

So, I dunno. Not my bag. My style is more Ethan Allen than Euromoderne, and I fully expect my lofts to have unpainted red brick walls (or maybe painted cinder block) and I presume that they will not be on the first floor. I dunno why: probably because that’s what I have in my head as a loft based on its origins, not that it’s a condo by another name to appeal to people too cool to own a mere condo.

So it was almost a quick flip through, but I definitely have some quibbles with the book. First, it had some blatant copy errors: One, the verb fomd which I could not actually guess what they meant. A pair of chapters covering two halves of the same building were out of order, so that the second of the two referred to the other chapter following it. And so on. Secondly, some photo captions were in something like six point font–I mean, it was tiny. I don’t want to go all old man here, but I had to angle the light just right on the book and damn near squint to read them–I even tried my beautiful wife’s cheaters and they didn’t help much. Third, the book lapses into the argot of interior design–which I suppose is fitting since this is clearly an inspiration book for designers, but, c’mon, man, if every liminal space is diaphanous, what does that even mean to distinguish it from every other instance of transition and example of natural light?

So I was not impressed by the lofts depicted nor the book itself.

Which likely will not put me off on reading the other loft design books I got in October. A man has to make his annual reading goals even if it’s just browsing pretty pictures.

This collection is a collaborative effort by two people who worked for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune before Lileks was there. Ed Fischer was a cartoonist, and Jane Thomas Nuland was books editor. So this collection is about aging, one page a cartoon and the facing page a quip, a gag, a little story, or a little poem by Ms. Noland.

So: I dunno, about the same as you’d get from, say, a collection of Saturday Evening Post material (ye gods, have I reported on three? 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, yes indeedy–but in my defense, this blog is coming up on 22 years old now, so I am reading other things in between). Not as quotable nor retellable as what you would get out of a collection of jokes or Reader’s Digest every month, but amusing. Presumably, a lot of these were given as birthday gifts for someone turning 40, 50, or 60 back in the day where people photocopied cartoons to tack onto their cubicles or tape to the walls of their workspaces.

So an hour or so browsing, one more book on the annual list, and not a great expense–it was stuffed into a $3 bag amongst other gleanings in Sparta in October.

It’s funny to think, though, that this sort of thing (and Reader’s Digest) might have been the equivalent of TikTok for the pre-Internet generation. A series of short, unrelated things for amusement that passed right through the eyes and through the brain, presumably, but not retained. I guess the main difference is the lack of infinite scroll, so eventually you come to the end of the book or the end of the magazine and have to get up and do something in real life for a bit before picking up another one. Or maybe not; perhaps I am tweely pronouncing whatever little thought comes into my little mind at any time.

So after reading Gideon’s Gift and Sarah’s Song, of course I ploughed right into this book simply so I could spell plough the British way yet again. Also, what better time to finish the set than when rushing through them all at once (Heigh, Brian, how’s the ‘Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies’ series coming? you ask, and I salute you for your British spellings as well as I avoid the question).

This book is better than the previously mentioned books because they don’t have a wrapper prologue nor, really, a bifurcated story, although some of it is told in flashback, but not a whole lot. The titular Hannah is a freshman in an exclusive high school in Washington, D.C., who keeps very busy with extracurricular activities because her parents are away for most of the year–her father, a former Senator, is the ambassador to Sweden and her mother is quite the social butterfly. Hannah lives with her maternal grandmother in a big house and does not have much in terms of companionship outside of those activities. Her driver, though, prays for Hannah all the time, and when he asks her for what he should pray for, she asks for a Christmas miracle–and later, when her parents tell her they won’t be home for Christmas, she narrows her miracle into hoping her parents will be home for Christmas. To take her mind off of the daughter’s loneliness and to keep her from pestering them during the party season in Sweden, the mother reveals a secret: the ambassador is not her real dad–the mother had been with a surfer type out in California in her salad days before returning home with a 4-year-old daughter to marry into her position in society. So Hannah reaches out to Congressmen and the press to help find her father who enlisted in the Army a decade ago and might be in Iraq. He is, but he’s going on One Last Mission, a dangerous one, because the other helicopter pilots have wives and families. So there’s a bit of tension as to whether he will Make It Home Alive, much less in time for Christmas (and the mother jets back from Sweden to quell the noise her daughter has made).

So it was a more straightforward narrative without the double-effect, the half-the-story-in-flashback, method used by the other two books I read. It did have some head scratchers that made me go, “Really?” like the fact that the mother brought the box of mementoes from her California fling to Sweden with her instead of leaving it in the mansion which was their pied-à-terre in the United States–ah, well, it served to move the plot, such as it was, along.

The best of the three I read and more on par with a traditional Christmas novel. No real unreal ending where the mother and the biological father rediscover their passion for one another–that would be a different kind of book, ainna?–but still the best of the lot (unless the second in the series was the best).

So now I have most of the month of December left. Will I read a Christmas novel by a different author? Can I even find one in the stacks even though I stock up on them through the year? Stay tuned!

After I read Gideon’s Gift, I was a bit divided over whether to plow through the other two volumes that I own in the Red Gloves series (which only has four books in it, so I have 75% of the whole series). I mean, yeah, they’re short and quick reads, but Gideon’s Hope was just a touch off, even for a Christmas book. Still, I finished Walden in the interim (which I suppose I could write up even though I cannot count it as a complete book as the version I read is in a three book omnibus edition) and have plucked at a couple of other books, but I picked up this book for a single-night read.

And because I thought Gideon’s Gift was a bit….off, I went into it looking for things that were wrong. Which I found, even if they weren’t wrong.

The book has a similar double-story going on and a bit of a contrived frame. An elderly woman has held on for one more Christmas so that she can share her special story (and song) with someone who needs it. She is Sarah, obv., and a worker in her old folks home, Beth, is the one who needs it. Beth has decided to leave her husband because…. well, the modern “because,” which is because she wants to get her groove back, to eat, pray, love, and just because she’s not living her best life with her husband. In short, she’s bored. But she agrees to not leave until after Christmas so as to not ruin the holiday for their little girl. So Sarah tells her the story of her youth, her love, and her song: She loved a local boy in her hometown, but she wanted bigger things, to be a singer, so she went off to Nashville, works as a secretary/receptionist at a recording label while trying to make it, got picked up by a womanizing country star who takes her on tour with promises of making her a star, but he’s not faithful to her, so she returns home only to find the boy has moved on, so she writes a song which captures her feelings for him which her Nashville bosses discover and make a hit, and he hears it on the radio and comes back to their hometown, and they live happily for five plus decades. After she finishes the story and sings the song for Beth, she gives Beth the red gloves and dies like Yoda. And Beth reconciles with her husband. Happy ending! Except, I suppose, for Sarah, although I guess she goes to heaven to be with her husband after fulfilling her last mission on earth.

Ah, twee.

The first anachronism I found was in 1940, teens (Sarah and her friend) were listening to records in their bedroom. That seems a little early for that particular trope. Also, the girl goes to Nashville in 1940 for a “record deal” which seems a little early for that particular development as well. And as she is struggling in Nashville, she is calling her parents long-distance twice a week. C’mon, man. In 1940, inexpensive apartments did not have telephones in them, and even in the 1980s, we weren’t calling someone long distance twice a week. That was expensive. Some of us can remember it. One presumes that many of the people who read Karen Kingsbury novels would know it, too, if they stopped to think of it.

But probably this book is not designed for thinking. It’s designed for quickly reading and feeling, and I’ve quickly read it and felt that I was not really the target audience. Not for any Christmas novel, actually, but yet I read them around this time of year when I can find them in the stacks.

I don’t know where I came up with this book–I have three such titles in the Red Gloves series, which is not a series with the same characters but rather different Christmas-themed books which Kingsbury wrote to raise money for some charitable organization. After a Christmas-themed trivia night where we led all night only to lose in the final round to a team using “mulligans” for free points (which we do not as we are trivia night purists), I thought I would pick this book up for my Christmas novel this year since I knew where it was–atop the bookshelves in the office.

So: Earl was a family man who enjoyed Christmas with his wife and daughter and his parents and siblings, but he was not a believer. His wife and daughter are killed on their way to or from church, and Earl goes into a downward spiral until he’s homeless for five years when the book begins. He’s trying to be heartless, and the only things he cares about are the red gloves his wife made him (I get the sense red gloves are a motif that all the books will share). When they’re stolen, Earl starts thinking about ending it all.

Meanwhile, Gideon is an eight-year-old girl living with leukemia whose parents are living hand-to-mouth. The mother is working two jobs, and the father is only getting 12 hours a week at “the mill,” but that allows him to take his daughter to the doctor and whatnot. Gideon goes into remission long enough to move the plot forward, which is that she wants to help serve at “the mission” (her parents volunteer a lot even though they’re poor). Where she meets Earl and wants to make him believe again, so she gives him a present which he eventually opens–and it’s the red gloves! Which she bought at a second hand shop since the thief sold them or something?

At any rate, she gets sick again, and it’s dire, but Earl believes now, and it turns out he’s a rich homeless man who pays for her bone marrow transplant and reconciles with his family. And finis!

Oh, and the book has a wrapper story thirteen years later at Gideon’s wedding, so a lot of possible suspense is lost. But I guess you’re not reading this for suspense.

So it was a quick read–I ploughed through the 146 pages in an evening–but.

I mean, it’s not my first Christmas novel, so I know to expect a bit of unreality, some magic or divine intervention, but this book, this short story or novella, really, made me raise my eyebrow. I mean, the experience of the homeless guy–let’s be honest, I can too easily picture myself in that situation, as the whole year I have known my job situation was tenuous and my continued employability questionable and knowledge of the cash flow situation led me to conclude that if I lost my wife and kids and job, I would be in a perilous situation indeed–but this homeless guy has both his parents alive in a single household and one or more siblings, and he has a big payout from the accident that claimed his wife and kid, and he lived with his parents for a while after, but then he gave that all up to just live on the streets in a different city. I mean, that seems…. contrived. I don’t know. Perhaps I was just disappointed in the character whose path to homelessness did not involve having no money and no family.

Also, the father is only working 12 hours a week at “the mill”? What is he doing there, and what kind of shift or shifts is that? A single twelve hour shift? Two sixes? Is he a part time janitor or food service worker? It just clangs.

And the remission of the little girl lasting just long enough to make the events of the book happen…. Eh.

I get the sense that I am going to be harsher on these books than others–I’ve already started the next one I have of the series, and I’ve already encountered my first Oh, really? in the first chapter. But my beautiful wife, who has read many Karen Kingsbury books, asked me if this was the one with the homeless guy and said it was not one of her better books. So after ploughing through these three Christmas novellas, I won’t necessarily shun any other Kingsbury books I find on my to-read shelves. Unless the next two are also rather Oh, really?

I guess it has been seven years that this book has floated near the top of the paperbacks stacked horizontally on the broken bookshelves as I bought it and some others in Branson in 2017. What, I have not repaired or replaced those bookshelves which broke ten years ago? Ah, gentle reader, no. And probably not soon given our current lack of means of visible support.

So this book is a bit of pure rocket-jockey stuff like you would get out of vintage Heinlein. Pournelle extrapolated a world from the middle 1970s which is strangely not so hard to extrapolate from ours: The government has become paternalistically totalitarian, but it lets juveniles commit crimes without consequences. Universities are overbooked and overadministrated into Kafkaesque hellscapes. The best the students can hope for is a union job that will get them out of the squalid megacities. Meanwhile, a couple of entrepreneurs and corporations fancy themselves the saviors of humanity want to mine asteroids. In this world, Kevin, a university engineering student accidentally kills a juvie gang member as they plan to rob him and/or torture him to death. As the gang’s attacks escalate and police are powerless, Kevin discovers some of his credits won’t transfer, so he would have to attend two extra years of college if he survived.

But he’s put in touch with an outfit that can employ him on Ceres, the asteroid, so he heads out with an attractive young woman, and adventures ensue including intrigue as to who might be trying to keep them from reaching Ceres and why and what to do when they get there.

I flagged a couple of things: In one spot, a computer nerd pets a simple computer and says he’ll teach it to play Star Trek–which is fresh in mind because I read about it in 50 Years of Text Games (and I remember playing the Commodore 64 port back in the 1980s). I also flagged a spot where a man in his fifties was described as elderly; clearly, that’s from the perspective of a college student–Pournelle himself could not have held that view as he was 45 when the book came out.

I also noted that the last page was an ad for a play-by-mail game called StarWeb; 50 Years of Text Games also mentioned play-by-mail games, so I was familiar with it. Apparently, StarWeb lived on until 2021 at least (its Web site looks like it might now be defunct, but the page for StarWeb says it was updated in 2004 and probably didn’t need updating after that). Still, it intersects with what I’ve been reading, partly because I’m elderly and because I read old books and books about old things.

At any rate, a nice little read amidst all the other things I’m reading. You know, I did not really read much Pournelle when I was younger. I guess when I went through science fiction phases, I was getting Del Rey paperbacks-in-library-binding and then the big names. And Pournelle wasn’t really on the pantheon. Which is unfortunate, as I think I would have enjoyed them. I’ll pick them up as I come across them, though.

Ah, gentle reader, this certainly might be the most I’ve paid for a reading book so far. I mean, maybe I spent a similar amount on Homage to Catalonia when I bought it last year or The Gallic and Civil Wars when I bought it in 2014. But since I didn’t write down the exact price I paid for the books (and I’m too lazy to dig out the receipts because of course I still have them), I will just say that this is the most expensive set of books I’ve ever bought for reading since I backed the publication on Kickstarter for $125 (back in the days when I had a job and spent money on things like this and CDs by bands I’d only seen in a single YouTube video). To date, this is the only Kickstarter project I’ve backed. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

So, you say, “What is it?” Well, it is a long (623 pages including index) semi-scholarly look at the history of text-based games. It has a bit of a roll-up chapter leading to 1971, and then it has a chapter that gives a summary of the history of each decade (1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s). It then selects a single game from each year in each decade and gives a well-researched and written essay on that game not unlike you’d find on a Substack like The Lake of Lerna or The Librarian of Calaeno when they delve into popular culture or something you might have found on DamnInteresting.com back in the day (it looks like that site is still around, albeit more into podcasting these days–as you might remember, gentle reader, I tried out for that site in 2006). The essays touch upon the history of companies working in the space (Infocom, natch, but a couple of others), the technologies behind them (not only in discussing at a high level the parsers and whatnot but also including some sample code or data file extracts), and some of the people behind the games.

So, heck, yeah, it was quite a nostalgia kick. For a while. Because I played a number of the games listed in the first two or three decades if you include things ported to the Commodore 64 (I had a Commodore 128, gentle reader, but I downloaded a lot of things from BBSes for the Commodore 64).

I mean, I played Eliza. I played Super Star Trek. I played many Infocom titles–I still have Zork, Zork II, Suspended, and Deadline not in the original packaging but later folder packages. I played TradeWars 2001 on several WWIV BBSes (and I actually have downloaded the source code for TradeWars 2002 and have it somewhere around here). The latest of the games listed by name (but not covered in depth) that I played would have been Gemstone Warrior 3 around 1997–I remember introducing it to a friend from the print shop at the time, and he got into it, but his dialup access was long distance, so it amongst other things led to his declaring bankruptcy sometime shortly thereafter. After that, I didn’t really play games but the Civilization series past that (and up to now, as you know).

But:

One, as text games faded from the forefront, it seems to have become more of a community, with its proponents, academics, and development of games to satisfy the community more than the public. Many of the selections in this book are explicated more because they’re interesting to someone steeped in the culture of text games. Kind of like how art criticism and art itself in many cases has turned inward, pleasing artists and critics more than the public at large. It doesn’t make the essays about the games less interesting per se but it does make one wonder. Often, I read two or three chapters/years of essays in this vein and then got a chapter about an interesting game that was interesting to read about in itself.

Second, well, the book does have its political moments. I mean, it does talk a lot and choose several queer games (his word as he is academically minded), and it does celebrate/elevate trans and nonbinary representation. It made me muse about the nature of outsider community–in my day (sonny), playing on computers and reading comic books and science fiction and fantasy were an outsider community, whereas today, that is mainstream pop culture–so do people who consider themselves outsiders gravitate toward the current self-reinforcing outsider communities that trans and nonbinary life (and, somehow, certain political viewpoints which are almost 50% of the electorate apparently)? That’s outside the scope of this book and this blog. But back to the actual political elements: It gets all the way to 1985’s chapter on Infocom’s A Mind Forever Voyaging before slagging on Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump (president when the book was written, and soon to be president again). And not just slagging, but vituperating. And we get more sucker punch vituperation in the chapter on AI Dungeon because Trump is a lying liar who lies!!!!! (my words, but the spirit is there). For the most part, the book is even-tempered in its disposition, but the little political slaps are there, unfortunately. Also, GamerGate gets a couple of relitigations from the defense of the gamewriter who slept with game reviewers (or something), although that’s not the crux of the matter as it’s presented: it’s mouthbreathers who buy games versus the community (of text game writers and perhaps only those who think correctly).

One does wonder, though, if the author was just too darn young to realize how much Hitler George W. Bush was, too. Is it just me, or does he get overlooked in the pantheon of the worst presidents EVAR!!!!? Millenials filling the Internet are too young to remember, I guess.

Overall, though, those two bits only slightly diminished my enjoyment of the book, although I have to admit that I really got more out of the earlier years where I had first hand experience of the games. Heck, I can even see in my mind’s eye the advertisements for some of them. I could probably re-read the ads and the reviews in my stash of mid-to-late 1980s Commodore magazines (Run and Power Play which would become Commodore Magazine and Ahoy! and maybe Compute’s Gazette). I flagged a sidebar note about Little Computer People–I still have a copy with Bradley, my Little Computer Person, on it. I flagged his mention of a book called Pilgrim in the Microworld by David Sudnow, a book about a guy who got obsessed with the Atari game Breakout!. Man, I picked that up used or remaindered around 1990 and read it. When the book was less than 10 years old (I was there, Gandalf). But it seemed twee to me at the time because technology had changed so much in that decade.

As I got in on a mid or upper tier of the Kickstarter, I got a shorter companion volume entitled 50 Years of Text Games: Further Explorations which has another couple of games called out and brief essays on some text-adjacent game genres. It’s only 57 pages including a timeline of text adventure games at the end, but it’s a nice contiuation of the book. And I counted it as a whole book in my annual total (82 so far, and I’m feeling good–I might make it all the way if I start ripping through some poetry collections).

At any rate, a nice nostalgia trip despite clear signs that the author would vigorously and probably unkindly disagree with my political views.

And it really makes me want to unbox one of my Commodore 64s and run through some of these games that I was not patient enough to appreciate when I was fourteen. Only to discover that I am probably still not patient enough for Suspended.

I bought this book in Davenport, Iowa, last month, and the author signed it for me. He was the only author at a cybersecurity convention, and his table took the whole end of the single cul-de-sac of the vendor area. He has a lot of books available, including three in this series, and several other multi-volume series to choose from and a couple of one-offs. That many quells my temptation to buy one of each, so I bought the first two in a couple of series and a one-off Western. I was tempted to buy a children’s book, briefly, but I remembered then with a start that my children are too old for children’s books. As they’re old enough to carry phones to high school and college now (what?), they’re too old for books as all their handheld entertainment comes from what tech companies feed them.

So: I picked this book up first because it has a mystery element to it. A mining company re-opens a mine three years after an accident claimed the lives of all the miners in a particular sector. Because it’s a profitable mine, they reopen it with some questions in place and with maybe a ghost in the old sector. The book starts with a new miner, Justin, coming to the planet with his friend Keontae. Justin vomits on re-entry, embarrassing himself in front of an attractive woman and the mine’s bully and his buddies.

Meanwhile, strange things are afoot at the Circle K. A hacker is lured into the mine and disappears. When Justin is out of his quarters at night, a mysterious green light leads him into the mines and the mysterious Sector 6 which is still closed. And the cold, half-cyborg (can one be half-cyborg? One is either a cyborg or not, I guess) a FULL cyborg scientist who was the only survivor three years ago brings Justin into a conspiracy. And Justin cannot keep from running afoul of security for the mining corporation and the bullies at the mine.

So the book has a lot of interesting plot getting set up, and then….

Well, I won’t be ordering the next two in the series.

The writing is a bit…. sterile, I guess. It’s not bad writing. It’s not full of grammar errors or misspellings or anything, but it lacks depth and soul.

I had been reading a book about text games for a while when I started this book, so I perhaps too easily compared the first part of the book to a text adventure, with the way it mapped out the mining complex and described entrances and exits and things that might be useful (the last is probably more in how I was reading the book after weeks of reading about text adventures). The main character, Justin, is a bit of a cipher–we don’t know from where he’s coming and going, and the plot carries him along as he mostly follows the mysterious light or follows the actions or guidance of others (NPCs) in the book. About half way through the book, though, it turns from slow text adventure mapping and buildup to watching someone else’s Twitch stream of a Doom knock-off. We have a party led by space marines but which includes the main character (now with a cybernetic arm), a few of the named miners with a couple sentences’ of characterization, the CEO of the corporation who was compelled to come in person to the mine, a couple members of corporate security, and the CEO’s body guard go marching through ranks of bloodthirsty mutated corporate minions and murderous androids. A couple, and that is more than one twists of family melodrama, too, amidst all the gore and finis via a deus ex machina whose twist I’d spotted early on. And beyond the finis a bit of a…. well, not cliffhanger, but a tip to the mystery and the twist that might come in the next book.

The author signed it “Read this with the lights on!” along with Joshua 1: 5-9 (in which God tells Joshua to be courageous). To be honest, it was not that suspenseful. Oh, and the last line is:

And Justin never saw her again.

Easy, son. You’re not Raymond Chandler. None of us is.

So: I mean, it’s okay. But too much influenced by video games and related cinema. The third person narration doesn’t give us a lot of depth to any of the characters.

The book is seven years old; I’m not sure where it came in this writer’s cannon-like canon (best I can tell from his bio is that he started around 2009 and by 2019 had about ten books, so it’s not that early). Still, he’s clearly comfortable in writing and his output, so who am I to criticize? Given that he looks to work the con circuit in the Midwest, I might run into him again sometime. And perhaps I’ll pick up the next book in the series.

Like Bad Monkey, I got this book down in Clever in June, and I read them back to back, which is just as well as they feature the same characters. Well, a couple of them.

In this one, the agent of a cable television star who stars in a knock off of Duck Dynasty is in the keys to perform at a comedy club. But he’s an accordian player from Milwaukee (well, Whitefish Bay) only playing a redneck on television, and when his agent is accidentally kidnapped when a woman rear-ends his car whilst shaving her bikini area (we discover where the title comes from very early), the television star causes a near riot with, erm, jokes about gays and disfavored colloquialisms for black people in a club featuring many black gay men. So he, the television star, goes into hiding, and the agent is eventually helped out by the Razor Girl, but a big fan of the television star who wants to be more bigoted than his redneck hero kills a swarthy fellow on the tourist tram and ends up kidnapping his hero to become his friend. Meanwhile, there are some subplots about mobsters and recycled sand scams. Andrew Yancy’s girlfriend the coroner-turned-ER doctor flies to Europe to leave him behind. Yancy investigates the situation while trying to keep an attorney who is addicted to the hazardous aphrodisiac deodorant that he’s running television ads for class action lawsuits from building on the lot next to his house.

Again, a crash of various threads, characters, and zany situations where the mystery is solved in the middle of the book and the rest of it is resolution amongst the whacky characters.

Amusing; not a waste of time, but not high literature, and it has not overtaken in my heart the things I’ve read of his long ago from long ago.

But I know what you’re wondering:

• Trump? Yes, of course, but only a mention that someone has Trumpish lips. This book might have been written before he ran for president or during. Not when he somehow won.
• The baddest word? I thought that Hiaasen had given it up because he uses the N-word early in the book, but the redneck antagonist does, in fact, invoke the whole badness.

He has a later book, but it does not appear to be a Yancy title.

Apparently, Bad Monkey was turned into a television series just this fall and stars Vince Vaughn as Yancy. So it might be worth a watch when it comes out on DVD. Which is likely never, as most streaming does not.

After reading The Downhill Lie, Hiaasen’s nonfiction golf book, I gave myself permission to read this book, a recent acquisition. I have read many, many fine Hiaasen books in the past (see also Skinny Dip, Strip Tease, Nature Girl, Lucky You, Stormy Weather, Basket Case, and even the YA novel Hoot). Still, this is a 21st century book, so I was looking for a sucker punch, but the book came during the holy interregnum of the Obama administration, so none was forthcoming (spoiler alert!).

At any rate, the story focuses on Andrew Yancy, a former police detective in the Florida Keys who has been busted from the force for publicly sodomizing with a cordless handheld vacuim the husband of a woman with whom Yancy was having an affair. His allies on the force help to get him a food inspector gig which he talks reluctantly. A tourist on a fishing charter catches the arm of a swindler about to be taken down for a Medicare scam, and Yancy is given the job of pawning it and the case off on the Miami police. He does not succeed and pursues a murder investigation on his own time. Was it the wife and her mystery man? Meanwhile, Yancy is trying to scare off a real estate speculator who has bought the lot next to his and wants to build a large home which will block Yancy’s view. Also, he is trying to woo the medical examiner in Miami while trying to determine what to do with the woman with whom he is having an affair, whom he learns is a fugitive teacher who seduced a student fifteen years ago. Oh, and someone is building a resort on a Bahaman island, the homestead of a simple fisherman who won the titular bad monkey and who commissions the local woodoo woman to curse the resort builder.

All these threads come together, of course. The book makes the Big Reveal about half way through the book, and then we get another half where the characters deal with the ramifications of the big reveal and a gradual denouement that probably goes on a little too long.

But you’re not reading the book for the plot, per se. Instead, you’re reading the book for the characters and the zany situations and…. Well, I was kinda meh. Yancy’s a bit of a slacker, and he smokes a lot of pot, and one wonders how it is he gets these attractive women to throw themselves at him. And it might have a couple too many situations and characters to be truly compelling. Or maybe I’ve outgrown Hiaasen and Dave Barry (maybe not–my review for The History of the Millennium (So Far) last year doesn’t indicate meh, but perhaps it was the nostalgia for a simpler time–2008–talking).

Two things:

• Does Trump make an appearance? You betcha! This is a pre-presidency book, though, so it’s not hateful. A character says:
  

  “Showin’ off is all. He said he come into serious money, but that could mean he won eighty-five bucks on the Lotto scratch-off. Now all of a sudden he is Donald fucking Trump.”

• The baddest word appears. This came out in the first year of the second Obamanency, which is far later than you find it in other writers. In the dark age of the 20th century, as in this book, it appears to show how backward the person using it is, but that petered out somewhere around 2005 in most books, or at least most books I’ve read after that (which is not that many, I admit). But it was noticeable mostly for the copyright date of the book.

Just things you can comment on and notice about books and how just the asides can date them. Or not.

So the book was all right. It didn’t drive me away from Hiaasen, but it looks as though I’ve read most of his ouevre already anyway.

Oh, and the titular monkey? I’m really not sure why he got the title slot, honestly. Perhaps Hiaasen had bigger plans for him.

I picked this book up in Davenport, Iowa, earlier this month, and when I sought a book of poetry to leaven my evening reading, I grabbed it. As I mentioned, this is a lavishly illustrated 1909 book that makes me want to buy some Mylar to wrap it. It’s in fine condition and was only $10. I guess Riley fans are few and far between these centuries.

As it stands, this is not a collection of poems, but a single poem lavishly illustrated. Pages with text have a series of borders with color illustrations of schoolday activities rotating at the top, and the book also features 10 slick full page illustrations woven throughout. The poem itself is a nostalgic look back at school days and a bit of the first romances you have at school, which leads to a bit of a question as for whom the book was made. Children still in school? They would like the pictures, I guess. Older people reminiscing? Perhaps it’s designed for parents and grandparents to read to children.

The poem itself is not something I’ll memorize, but the book is beautiful, and I’m glad to own it.

I’m also still a James Whitcomb Riley fan, although apparently Little Orphant Annie and Other Poems remains the only other book I’ve read. Maybe I’ll get that 10-volume set from ABC Books yet.

It seems like I just read Hondo, but I guess it has been a couple of weeks. Which is a very short “just” in terms of the passage of time in my head, but it’s still been a couple of weeks. This book first appeared only a couple of years after Hondo, which was apparently his L’Amour’s first, but it actually reads more like a men’s adventure paperback or later work than the straight forward Hondo.

In this book, wandering gun Matt Brennan comes to a small town in Utah and falls in love at first sight with a young woman. He learns that there’s a bit of trouble between two large cattle operations squeezing a single man building a ranch in the canyon between them, and violence is breaking out. Turns out that the girl whom he decides he will marry is the daughter of one of the big boys. He has trouble with a man who thinks he’s courting the girl (the guy beats the tar out of him), and he (Brennan) signs up with the man in the middle ranch. But that ranch owner is killed but before he does, he gifts the ranch to Brennan, who vows to defend it. The girl’s father dies of a gunshot wound on the ranch, and Brennan is briefly considered a suspect. His name is still Mudd, but he discovers a third party plot to stir up the violence between the ranches for what might be a silver strike initially found by another courter of the girl who left suddenly. Or was he murdered?

Compared to Hondo, it is a very busy novel with the intra-human intrigue coming to light slowly and with the characters, particularly Brennan, spending paragraphs or pages mulling over not even so much the possibilities but how much he cannot figure it out. So a bit more like the Pendleton Mack Bolan books in that regard.

Which is probably why this book is not considered in conversations about L’Amour’s best works. Not that I am privy to those conversations. I’m just a guy on the Internet, providing elementary school-level book reports and hoping not to get asked tough questions about them. Because I’ve read a couple of books since this one and only dimly remember it outside of the brief summary I’ve listed above. And the thought that gunslingers in the old West should not really punch men in the face a couple of times and expect to close their hands around a gun butt anytime soon.

I just read Carl Hiaasen’s golf book The Downhill Lie, so I figured that there would be no better time to read George Plimpton’s golf book as now. I’ve previously read his Paper Lion (in 2016) and Open Net (just last year). At some point when I was moving books on the shelves, I put this book right next to Open Net so I knew where it was exactly. Which meant I had no reason not to read it at this time, especially as I am not a golfer, so I’m not reading golf books all the time.

The conceit is similar to Paper Lion: George Plimpton joins the PGA Tour for a number of tournaments, although he plays in the Pro-Am events and not the actual professional tournaments. And, as is his fashion, he drops a hella lot of names even when they’re not golfers. He meets Bing Crosby at the Bing Crosby tournament; Andy Williams calls him over to give him some golf advice; and Samuel F.B. Morse, not that one, his relation who was wealthy on his relation’s inventions; and so on. He relates numerous heresay stories, including one about Bobby Riggs who was a notorious gambler even in 1969 and older golfers who retired decades before.

The chapters break on two things: First, topical stories which discuss things like the “yips” (nerves) which afflict golfers, the life of a caddy and stories they tell of golfers, superstitions of pro golfers, and so on, and second, the events and people he meets on the tour. He is not as good of a golfer as even Hiaasen, and he ruminates and marinates in that an awful lot (and says at the end of the book that he probably did too much of it instead of enjoying the experience).

The book climaxes with a locker room interview with Arnold Palmer where Plimpton is a bit awed by the professional and does not get the information out of him that he wanted and suspects he did not impress the legendary golfer (extra legendary because he was retired when I was a kid and is now known mostly for his soft drink). Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino are mentioned in passing, and they’re the only golfers whose names I recognize.

I enjoyed the book far more than the Hiaasen book. Plimpton provides real insight into the pro tour in the 1960s, such as how much a pro had to make in each tournament to cover the cost of travel (they generally drove from tournament to tournament in their own cars) and lodging, the lives of caddies (in the summer, professional caddies were essentially laid off so that country clubs could use local teens), the rise of the driving ranges just off of the highway (what, Top Golf and Big Shots Golf were not 21st century inventions?), and others. His writing style is definitely richer as he’s a long form writer writing a book, not just a columnist trying to stretch a couple of essays and a diary into a book. Also, Plimpton is a generation or two ahead of Hiaasen so he probably has a better-rounded education, and his upbringing in New York gives him a wealth of stories and names to drop (which bothered me less than in Paper Lion, apparently).

Plimpton has quite a bibliography. I should look for more of his books in the wild as I seem to be running low (as far as I can tell). But who knows what I might find in the wild if I actually look in the P section?

I am not sure why I picked this book up so soon after buying it and thought it would be a quick read. Perhaps because the collection of the complete works of Shakespeare which I have been ignoring on my chairside table starts with his comedies which are rather quick reads. But this book is a history play and one about a monarch with whom I was not familiar. So it was a little slow going, made a little slower by the fact that the characters call each other by their first name sometimes instead of their titles, which are the names that precede their dialog. So it was a bit of a Russian novel in that regard: Oh, Edmund is Kent and vice versa. That sort of thing.

So the plot of the play is that the King, Edward II, wants his pal Gaveston who was apparently elevated from less-than-noble status, and the real nobles think he’s a frivolous wastrel spending all the king’s money (which he gets from them) and diverting the king’s attention from kingly things. So he, Gaveston, is exiled, recalled, exiled again, recalled again, and then civil war breaks out. The king suspects his queen is having an affair with a Mortimer, while she pleads her innocence–come on, who outside of fiction dallies with someone named “Mortimer”? Crikey, I am having BBS flashbacks because one of the people in St. Louis signed himself as Mortimer, but I doubt that he read this play or history. Although it was the 1980s. People were better schooled then. Perhaps he had. But that’s neither here nor there. The nobles do not like Gaveston, so eventually they send him away and recall him, kill him, and then depose the king, placing his son on the throne–to Mortimer’s ultimate ill luck.

The play covers a long actual timespan in history, condensing it into five acts and adding a number of speeches on how much the king likes Gaveston (turned into many, many fine papers about latent homosexuality), the relationship of the king to the titled nobility, and whatnot.

But it lacks a little something compared to Shakespeare. Nothing is really stirring nor memorable except for the easy win of the they’re gay! for English majors in the past. I guess the Wiki says that it’s been staged even in recent past, probably again not so much for the monarch versus aristocracy themes.

I have Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which I read in 2020, better.

You might be asking, “Brian J., why did you pick up a book on golf?” You know, I’m asking myself the same question; after all, I have played maybe seven or eight holes of golf in my life (when Iron Maiden Dave and I hit the local park’s nine-hole course, we abandoned the game far later than the other two guys who wanted to join us to make us a foursome abandoned us). I suspect my thinking was this: I saw Razor Girl by the author which I purchased this summer and thought I should read this book before I read the novel. A “how can you eat your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” sort of thing. So I picked this book up and worked my way through it with some other books in the interim (which should tell you what I thought of it).

The schtick of it is that Carl Hiaasen, who played a little golf in high school and college with his old man, decides to pick up the sticks (as I’ve picked up the lingo) again in his middle age. Which is about the same age as I am now (so I am pleased to think I am not old). So I guess the theme might be the struggle to recapture one’s youthful glory or or man versus himself in trying to improve on a skill game (at a certain age). But I think the book is poorly executed.

Most of it is a diary of the first 577 days of his return to golf; numbered days (not all 577, just ones where he did golf things) give a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs of his golf experience for the day which might be playing a round or buying some new golf product he purchased and maybe tried. These little italicized bits are leavened with longer internally coherent pieces about other rounds of golf he’s played or the golf academy he attended or lessons he might have had. These longer pieces seem internally coherent, as I said, and I cannot help but wonder if they were individual columns or essays placed elsewhere, and they’re unrelated to one another. Case in point: One such essay talks about Hiaasen attending Leadbetter Academy for a day-long seminar, and then a later chapter mentiones playing on a course beside the Leadbetter Academy in Florida without mentioning he’d attended it–explaining it as though this was the first time the reader heard about it. Then, I guess the book feels the need to build to a finish which is bifurcated: Hiaasen plays in a tournament, and Hiaasen completes the book. No fooling; a couple of times whether he would finish the book is questioned and whether he could gut it out after getting discouraged.

So a bit slapped together, and one guesses that the draw is that it’s a Hiaasen golf book. Of course, since it’s a 21st century Hiassen book, it certainly slaps around the boogeyman of the day, George W. Bush. If it was written in the present day, undoubtedly it would be even meaner in its asides about the devil Trump. As it stands, Trump is mentioned on page 129, but only in reference to his rumored 300-yard drives which the author, about the same age, cannot match. A new edition, not that anyone would bother, would not be so laudatory.

So I was not impressed, but I’m not exactly the target audience, which is a golfer who would read anything about the sport and maybe relate to some of the author’s experiences. The title page and dust jacket do not indicate whether one should consider this a humor book or a sports book, but you should consider it the latter.

As you might remember (because it’s only been a week or two, which is at the outer edge of my memory, gentle reader, but I expect more from you), I bought a stack of old Edna St. Vincent Millay hardbacks at the Friends of the Library book sale two weeks ago, and I have already (re)read Renascence.

This is a later edition of her second book (first edition is 1920) and includes four sonnets at the end and poems not found in the first edition. You know what? If I had to pick a volume of her poetry to call my favorite, it would be this one (although ask me again when I get further into the stack and you might get another answer). After all, I know two of the poems by heart (“First Fig” and the sonnet which begins “Love, though for this you riddle me with darts…”) Not only did I memorize the latter, but I used it to open up my set at poetry open mics when I played a new venue; I’d approach the mic like a normal shy poet who hadn’t read much before with a sheaf of papers, and I’d leap from the stage or in front of the mic, reciting this poem angry and throwing the papers and sometimes my hat as I did so. I also recall the other sonnets from the book (although I don’t think I ever performed them).

The other poems are pretty good to great; they have rhythm and they have rhyme, but not so much the inner- or inter-line wordplay that I use these days (although I’ve mostly abandoned the end rhyme).

Some thirty-some couple of years after I’ve read the book for the first time, I still enjoy re-reading it. I’ll probably re-read it again as I’ll be tempted to buy any other copy of it I see in the wild, and if I end up in a good place financially, I might look for a proper first edition/first printing for my real library in those days. Otherwise, I’ll have to look forward to grabbing whatever copies I find in the wild. Now that I’ve gotten ahold of the other Millay collector in Springfield’s copies, I guess it will have to be when I travel.

And note that I will probably finish another of these Millay collections before I finish another Louis L’Amour book as they’re shorter.

This is the first of the Louis L’Amour paperbacks that I picked up in Clever in June but the second overall that I’ve read this year (Last of the Breed being the first). And, you know what? It wouldn’t surprise me if I picked up another one or two before the end of the year.

This book centers on the title character, Hondo Lane, a frontiersman who spent five years living with the Apache and who has worked as a scout and a dispatch carrier for the United States Army. He has lived alone for a long time except for a mostly wild dog that accompanies him. A spot of trouble costs him his horse, and he happens upon a ranch in a valley populated by a woman and her son. Trouble is brewing with the Apaches as they’re raising all of their tribes/lodges for war after the white man breaks another treaty. He looks to buy a horse from her, and although she says her husband is away for the day, he sees that some things are falling into disrepair which indicates the husband has been gone for a long while. He fixes up the place a bit, and sparks fly between them. Hondo has to return to the fort/camp with his dispatches warning of war, though, and the woman and the boy wonder if he will return. When he gets to the fort, he encounters the husband, a gambler and all around not good guy, and gets on his bad side. The man accuses him of being a horse thief, since the horse has the man’s brand on it, but the authorities let Hondo go since he says he is returning to the ranch with the horse. Meanwhile, the Apaches approach the ranch, and they are ready to attack even though the woman reminds them they have lived in peace for so long. When the six-year-old boy fires a pistol and grazes a subchief, the big chief and the tribe are amused, so the big chief becomes a blood brother to the boy and offers his protection to the ranch. But, eventually, he says that if the woman’s husband does not return, she will have to take an Indian brave as a husband. As Hondo heads out, the husband follows him with a partner, as they hope to rob and kill him, but through the timely intervention of Apaches who also want to ambush him, Hondo kills the husband, complicating his relationship with the wife for whom he has developed feelings. One Apache escapes, and then they hunt and capture Hondo, and….

Well, all right, I don’t want to give the whole plot away–there is some more to it than that. But it’s a good book. Mid-century westerns are definitely a cut above men’s adventure fiction or modern westerns like the Gunsmith or Longarm which are basically men’s adventure novels with horses. Given that L’Amour and John D. MacDonald came up about the same time, one can see the benefits of an early 20th century education in the writing styles. Or maybe they did not have monthly deadlines. Regardless, the writing and characters have more depth; perhaps they’re built from imaginations fired by books and stories and not movies/television and comic books.

The book also presents the Indian characters, at least as personified by Vittorio, the head chief, as wise and almost heroic and has a nuanced view of the cowboys and Indians dynamic. Hondo speaks highly of the Indian way of life and that they do not have a word for “lie” in their language and so on. So it’s entirely possible that the Boomer’s parents, those squares, were more enlightened than the gave them credit for. Certainly moreso than modern “thinkers” give them credit for. And even though he has rough edges, Hondo is a hero, and not an immoral one. He does not preemptively kill people, and he does get softened with his contact with a woman.

So, yeah, you know what? I might pick up another such book before long. I do have several more, you know, right on top of the stack.

Also, note the years in the title. The book was first published in 1952 and was still in print and in racks in the drugstore in 1985. Can you imagine a writer of the last part of the 20th century or the first part of the 21st who would remain in print that long? Stephen King, I guess. Maybe some back list Koontz and whatnot. But it’s a very short list.

I picked this book from the shelves on September 10, along with Dogs and Cats Unleashed as a palate cleanser after almost making it through a single lopsided question in the presidential debate that evening. As you might recall, gentle reader, I bought a stack of this fellow’s books at Rublecon this year and have already read his short novel Hang Me If I Stay Shoot Me If I Run and collection of poetry Loot the Bodies.

The subtitle of the book is “Poems for The Golden Girls“, so that should give you an idea of what you’re in for. The author/poet used the episodes in the seven seasons of the show with Bea Arthur as springboards/writing prompts, and this is the result. You know, I never was a fan of the show–it was on when I was in high school, when I still watched some television, but I was not the target demographic. In this part of the 21st century, for some reason it has become a cultural touchstone for members of my generation–I’ve seen Facebook images of a slightly younger cousin, her husband, and another couple dressed up as the quartet of the Golden Girls for some event or another. I mean, cosplaying the Golden Girls? Not something that even comes close to interesting me. And even though I’m watching some old series (The Streets of San Francisco and Red Dwarf, for example), I am not tempted to buy DVDs of this particular series. So perhaps I’m not the target audience for this book, either.

At any rate, the book breaks the series into its seasons and then has a poem for each episode. Most of them deal with the events of the episode and rely heavily on that knowledge of the series and the particular episode. I flagged one poem as being good standing on its own–Season 1 Episode 23 “I want to be the person I used to be”. I flagged another, Season 3 Episode 2, “I need a favor” because it kind of alludes to O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”–or maybe the episode itself did the heavy lifting from American literature. Another one, Season 6 Episode 15, “Miles to go” riffs on a Frost poem (“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”, in case it wasn’t obvious). I get the sense that the poet kind of patterned other of his poems on different poetry styles and/or other particular poems as well. As I mentioned, it’s really a bit of poetical doodling more than a serious attempt at meaningful poetry (I hope).

HOWEVER, the poet does go out of his way several times to make clear that gun owners are bad, that people who are not fans of state-run schools are right wing nut-jobs, that Donald Trump is a bad, bad man (if not the devil), and that the series had too many jokes about communists back in the day when this was laughing defiantly in the face of what we were told was an existential threat and that we were on the verge of extinction by nuclear warfare (one wonders if the poet ever had to do an actual duck-and-cover drill in school like 80s kids did). Which is sad: Although he seemed like a pleasant guy at the con, he would dislike me if he knew I am all of those things he does not like in the abstract. Maybe he would not want me to buy his books. Maybe he won’t be the one deciding next time I see him at a con should I pass him by. And for what? Petty self-expression? Bah.

I know, I know, you’re saying, Brian J., haven’t you taken some arch and snarky little shots at political opponents over the years? Well, yes, but this is a blog which is the medium for that sort of thing. And you’ll noticed I’ve tempered those kinds of posts and whatnot over the years as the atmosphere has become rather toxic. But I’d never (I’d like to think) do it in my poetry or fiction or even personal essays, gentle reader, because I’d like to make something that appeals to many people and gives people something to reflect on in the universal human condition, not what’s on the television or Internet right now. That ages like milk in a sippy cup left in the car in August.

I got this book a week ago at the Friends of the Library book sale. Again, I am not excited about the stack of books piled on my chair side book accumulation point, so I picked a couple of short books to read as I glacially move through those books I am compelled to read (or eventually throw back into the stacks). This promised to be a quick read, and it was.

It really is nothing more than a set of Web site listicles in print; one could easily imagine this as a blog posted over the course of time with a lively comment section, but looking on the Internet does not show anything blog about it. Blogs are so 2006 (but this book is from 2009, so coming out of the blog era). It features sections on Arts & Literature, Sports & Leisure, History & Politics, Entertainment, and Science & Nature (which makes it one Geography chapter short of a lawsuit from the Trivial Pursuit people). Some of the individual face-offs include the 80s vs the 90s, summer games vs winter games, Gandhi vs Mother Theresa, Smurfs vs Care Bears, and so on. Each has a set of snarky bullet points for each side, sometimes obvious in its preference, and it has some pages where it just lists challenges for discussion. This would probably be a good book for reading aloud during road trips–and back in the day, that was the sort of thing my beautiful wife and I did. But now everyone has headphones on and a personal device leaving the driver to listen to lectures and audiobooks unless driving on the narrow roads in Arkansas.

Some of the challenges have aged poorly and might seem in poor taste, but then again in 2009 contenders like Amy Winehouse and Eddie Van Halen were alive then. And the author doesn’t inject politics too much, although the contenders for Worst President are Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush (boy, do we have some new entrants for you). Does Donald Trump make an appearance? Oh, boy, mister, you bet he does: but as it is before his political career as the devil, it’s in the category of Balding vs Extreme Anti-Balding Measures.

Still, a quick and amusing read and perhaps worthwhile for a road trip if you can get your family from under the hood.

This would be Millay’s first book of poetry; she won a contest for her poem “Renascence” which brought her to the big city (New York) and let her be the phenomenon that she would become, both as a poet and as a young woman having experiences that would lead her to be the Taylor Swift of the Twenties. Well, not that much, but it did put her on track to professional poetry.

The book starts out with a couple of long poems, “Renascence”, “Interim”, and “The Suicide” which are heavily influenced by the long lyrics of the Romantic poets except that they have meter and rhyme. They’re not her best work, of course; I am partial to the sonnets, of course. This book contains “Bluebeard”, a sonnet that influenced me such that I wrote a dramatic monologue when I was in college with a similar theme (a lover pries into her hidden spaces and learns that she has fled him; in my monologue, a lover wants to know what is held in her lover’s closed hand only to discover it contains nothing, but that little bit of closing the hand kept a part of the speaker independent).

So I’ve read the book before, and I already have a copy (although a later edition from 1924). But I really was due to read it again, and buying this copy for only $2.00 gave me just the excuse I needed. As I mentioned, the book sale earlier this month had a number of Millay’s works, so I likely will be revisiting a number of her works in the near term. And by consolidating the previous owner’s collection with mine, I might well have the best collection of Millay in Springfield, if not Missouri.

This particular version has a previous owner’s name inside the cover: Priscilla Metcalf Glendora, 1930. The title page indicates it might have been a gift–I think it says Priscilla from with an illegible name following. However, the book is also stamped (former) property of Nathaniel Hawthorne College in Antrim, New Hampshire, which has a brief but interesting history–which begins with the college’s founding in 1962. So the book must have been donated or bought as part of a collection and hung out in the library there until maybe 1988 when the college closed its doors. How would it have gotten to Springfield? Well, Ebay or something. After all, a collector has got to have the first book by the author, ainna? And this is a nice edition with cloth pages. A fourth edition to go along with my sixth edition. I’ve taken a moment to look at Ebay to see what first editions run for, and they’re not terrible, but I probably won’t be shopping for them soon.