Category: Book Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, so this is not the first of the books that I’ve read from the April 2018 Friends of the Christian County Library Book Sale–I’ve read Iroshi in 2018, the two Sally Forth books, A Woman’s Work Is Never Done and Sally Forth in 2018, and Naked Came The Manatee last year. But this year, I have read two books from that book sale: This book and The Secret Power Within: Zen Solutions to Real Problems by Chuck Norris. Wow, I’m almost done with that book sale, although I have been dodging the sequels/latter two thirds of the trilogy after Iroshi and Rex Stout’s Death of a Doxy, all of which are facing out on the book shelves in the library, for several years.

But, about this book: Wow, is it an artifact of its time. The author apparently made a franchise of this topic and based it on a series of seminars he ran, presumably for upper middle class businessmen and strivers (and their wives). So although the book came out in 1993, it definitely has a 1980s sensibility to it, which is why businessman is probably an accurate depiction–the 80s women from 9 to 5 and Helen Reddy and Ronnie McDowell songs (geez, did I have to listen to those an awful lot when I was growing up)–and, I guess Trisha Yearwood‘s poet-narrators were coming up in 1994, women were hitting management positions, but, again, this book was just coming out with its sensibilities from the previous decade. Wow, that’s a lot of exegesis on an off-hand assessment that the book was geared to businessmen and spouses, but I guess I did get to dump a number of music links from way back.

A lot of the individual items are pointers to catalogues or 1-800 numbers where you can get different types of gifts; in just a couple of years, that advice which would have worked for thirty years would be out-of-date as the Internet replaced everything. Some of the ideas are definitely for the successful businessman, as they involve international travel, cruises, and riding the Concorde (also, soon to be dated). Maybe they’re just targeted to businessmen who did not buy fractional ownerships in brief periods when they were feeling flush (successful businessmen would probably have parlayed that capital into further success). The book encourages men to look for inspiration in numerous women’s magazines of the day (mostly now folded). It encourages women to look for inspiration in both Playboy and Penthouse(!) magazines.

The author favors Earl Klugh and Yanni as mood music–and I have a lot of Earl Klugh records (no Yanni, though–you don’t tend to see him in the wild, or I would probably buy it–I have Kenny G, for cryin’ out loud).

And, dig this: Books. I was a little surprised by how many of the books I’d read (poetry by Susan Polis Schutz, Chocolate: The Consuming Passion by Sandra Boynton, The Prophet by Khalil Gibran). I was surprised by the number of books in it by Ayn Rand’s inner circle (well, an excommunicated member, Nathaniel Branden’s The Psychology of Romantic Love). And I had a little flashback when I came across the title I’m OK – You’re OK by Thomas A. Harris. This book was everywhere in the 1980s, but mostly in paperback. I think my sainted mother had a copy. Which means I might very well have a copy around here somewhere, although I do not remember seeing one.

So I did flag a couple things for individual snarkiny:

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Have you made your plans for the New Year’s Eve celebration to end all New Year’s Eve Celebrations? I’m talking about the next millennium! It’s less than 10 years away! When the calendar changes to the year 2000, and then to 2001, the planet’s going to party like never before! Start planning!

As it would turn out, I was newly happily married, but I was working in tech, so I had to carry the beeper that week in case the Y2K bug required a documentation update. And, as it turned out, I was laid low with the flu the whole week.

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For sensual, silly time:

• Blindfold her.
• Sit her on the floor next to the refrigerator.
• Feed her a variety of delicious foods: Strawberries, Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses, cherry tomatoes, cheese, ice cream, Cheerios, cookies, popcorn, yogurt, watermelon, leftover chicken, pickles, olives, maple syrup, etc.
• (There’s a great scene like this in the movie 9½ Weeks.)

You know, I’ve seen bits of 9½ Weeks late at night on Showtime with the volume off when we lived in the trailer park, but I’ve not seen the film in its entirety. I have, however, seen 9½ Ninjas many times which features a similar scene.

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You could update his entire album collection! Convert his aging album collection of beloved Beatles albums, Moody Blues tunes, and Rolling Stones records to compact discs. Converting a lifetime collection of 500-some albums would cost about $6,500.

You can see about how some of the ideas are spendy. Plus, this has not aged well: The records would have been worth more in the long run. In 2026, you would probably want to go the opposite direction, but only for Gen-X or older–so many albums of this millennium were never released on vinyl.

Oh, and 500-some? My beautiful wife wishes I were sane enough to be that limited.

549
How about a custom-made brass bed to give your bedroom an extra-personal touch?

Holy stars and garter snakes. Brass beds. Now that was a piece from that time, ainna? I’m not sure I’ve even seen those in estate sales any more. I know my favorite aunt had one, but I have not see one of those since…. Well, the 1990s, when they were passing so far out of fashion that they never made a comeback.

Or maybe they did and I missed it.

At any rate, mostly interesting as an artifact of its point in time. I guess I did get a couple of ideas from it, but a lot of things that would have been romantic for a breadwinner to do for his stay-at-home wife at the end of the 20th century, I already do. Do a chore to relieve her of it? I do most of the housework (those who will tell you women think it’s sexy are probably women who like the thought of it more than the execution of it). Make her a sweet treat? I bake pies most weeks these days, and I’m told I should make less as she is dieting. Get her chocolate? As the primary shopper in the household, I made sure that she always had dark chocolate on hand (but she’s dieting now, so don’t do it!).

I’ve gotten a few ideas and have thought of reviving some of our past traditions, however: She knows I’ve read the book, and I might be accused of getting the ideas from the book. Which might diminish it somehow.

Well, I said in my report on The Builders of the World that, now that I have found this little collection of Instructor Literature Series pamphlets from the beginning of the century that I would probably tear through them in a hurry to pad my annual book total numbers since I’m in the middle of some longer works which will take a while to finish (okay, mostly The Life of Greece)–and I am also watching some training for people who are planning to take the Network+ certification exam in the evenings with my beautiful wife who is collecting certifications because unless your name wraps into three lines on LinkedIn, are you even a person? That’s not why she’s watching them with me–it’s a bit for self-improvement, the continual (professional) learning beloved of the corporate world. Will I take that exam and maybe re-A+ certify (my A+ certification is over 25 years old, so that doesn’t exist in the former COMP-TIA world)? Depends upon how exactly bored I get–I’m working on certifying a new rank in my martial arts.

At any rate, where was I? Oh, yes. This is a little pre-Soviet era bit of educational material. I say pre-Soviet for two reasons: One, it’s from 1911, so it was before the Russian Revolution. And it’s also before educational materials became more, erm, Sovietsticated. So the Christians are the good guys in this book, although the different personalities of the four main army leaders differ in their goals and motivations. Some seem to be acting out of Christian piety (or at least the papal promise that previous sins would be forgiven), some were looking for glory, and some were looking for loot. Which led to disagreements in strategy and even in whether to go onto Jerusalem (the stated goal) or get fat in Antioch.

A brief primer on the topic, ending with the capture of Jerusalem and the establishment of a couple of Christian kingdoms in the area. It was not to last, though, as we know. But perhaps that comes in a sequel to this volume which I probably don’t have.

When I said I was going to tear through them, though…. The pamphlets are in varying degrees of completeness. Some might lack covers. Some have covers that are separated from the volumes in the stack. So I really am going to have to buy some poly bags to protect them. I guess I’ll be stopping by Hobby Lobby one day soon rather than order them from a big online seller who’ll algorythmically overcharge me for them. This particular pamphlet was in lesser shape than The Builders of the World with some tearing, staining, and cover loosening. I might end up reading them not in stack order or interest order but in order of their condition, best to worst. Time will tell. But I am almost onto 60 books this year, so I should be in good shape to hit 70, the minimum, but pressed to hit 100, the stretch goal.

So I’m a little bogged in my disciplined reading these days–I try to do a section or chapter of The Life of Greece, a couple or twenty things in the giant listicle 1001 Ways to Be Romantic, and a chapter in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate (somehow, trying to clear books from my chairside table has in fact added these last two books to the pile). So I thought I would prowl my stacks for some of the pamphlet-sized single short stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper“, some short fiction that I could use to break up the current stream of nonfiction without committing myself to a full book and which I could count as a “book” for the annual total. But I came across a stack of “Instructor Literature Series” booklets from the early part of the 20th century. And this book was on the top, so I grabbed it.

It’s a 29 page (including a quiz at the end) treatment of geology at the macro scale. The book talks about the then-contemporary understanding of the formation of the earth and its processes. I say then-contemporary because it only mentions igneous and sedimentary rock types, and although it does talk about slate and whatnot, it does not break these rock types into metamorphic rock like we do today. And, the book has, if not overtly Christian, then certainly a Deist perspective as it mentions that God put this all into motion.

I looked a little into the history of this series, and it was a New York (state) guy who made, eventually, 350 of these titles available for school teachers. Inexpensive, compact, and a ready-made lesson (of various difficulty levels). Remember, in the days when these were published, one-room schoolhouses were still common and Horace Mann’s acolytes had not destroyed schooling. I imagine those hard-pressed teachers treasured these little books, and the search engine AI tells me they’re sought after by collectors, but Ebay indicates they’re not that rare.

So I’ll probably work my way through the stack so that I can refresh myself to 1910s-era knowledge as a break from The Story of Greece which is 1940s-era knowledge (although history has not advanced as science might have). As a break from my little early 20th century hardback textbooks like the Riverside Literature Series and MacMillan’s Pocket Classics which I’m also using as a break from other things, although in the case of Alexander Pope’s longer poems, I’m taking a break from them by reading thousand page eighty-year-old history books.

But I assure you that the stack of books on the side table is slowly diminishing. Glacially slowly.

Huh. I thought I’d mentioned it, but The Complete Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, which I read in June, mentioned this book on the back flap or back of the dust jacket. I had the urge to read it, expecting it to be more than the Wikipedia entry which I have had in my browser’s bookmark since time immemorial (which is a short period of time these days, sometimes). I spotted a copy on Ebay, “signed,” and I wanted it. So for a long time (only a couple of months, I guess), I demurred, but I guess I was in the mood for some shopping therapy recently, and I bought it. It’s actually an incribed copy with a little message to John and George Bohnert–the inscription seems to indicate that they’re young brothers at the time of the inscription and not old friends of the author. Ay, me–I spent $25 on this book. I need to get some mylar to wrap it before I shelve it, or take it to ABC Books for them to wrap it (although Pam is gone, and I think she was the pro), or…. Never mind, I’ve lost it in the read stacks, which are almost as disorganized as the unread shelves, now.

So: As a juvenile narrative biography from the middle of the 20th century, the book is designed to appeal to younger readers to give them a model to emulate. And, brother, Paul Laurence Dunbar is a good one. Born to a freed slave and the youngest of several children that a single mother kept together, Dunbar was a bookish and sickly young man with a facility for academics and wordcraft. He worked hard, attended high school (a rarity), but had to repeat his last year because he was not so good at mathematics. His young friends included Orville and Wilbur Wright, and they helped to publish his first book with their print shop before they went into bicycle repair and aviation. Dunbar met a lot of helpful people along the way, and he sold copies of his first self-published book and worked at a variety of jobs before landing steady work as an elevator boy which allowed him a lot of time to read, study, and craft poems. He had sort-of successful runs in London (before being abandoned there by his manager’s daughter who was supposed to be his shepherd on his English trip but apparently lived it up and left him in meager accomodations when she went on to the continent) and in New York, and then, bam, his sickliness is revealed to include tuberculosis, and he dies at 32, leaving several volumes of poetry and several hundred pages of mostly good poems.

The book does confirm a couple of things: First, his vernacular poems were wildly popular in his day, even amongst black people and freed slaves who might have been pleased to see not only poetry written like they spoke but also capturing some of the stories and traditions they knew. Although he did not meet James Whitcomb Riley, they did correspond (I mention this in this paragraph because Riley also wrote in vernacular, that is, in misspelled and accented English, albeit different vernaculars for the most part).

A bit of a ding on the book is that its school days take up the bulk of the book, and when we get to Dunbar as an adult, it gets a little more terse and a little more “six months later.” One does notice, however, that when being at about the poverty line, one can easily pick up and go to Chicago for months to attend the World’s Fair or move around a little more easily. You know, I’ve known this from some of the vagabonds I’ve known in my life. Couch surf for years at a time, rotating amongst friends, or just being able to pick up and move to chase a slightly better job with but a truck full of stuff (or less, probably, in Dunbar’s case). Being an early collector of books definitely has made this lifestyle impossible for me (I hope, but one never knows). But: To get back to the thesis sentence, the book is targeted at school kids, so perhaps that’s why the book is weighted to the school days.

At any rate, an interesting read. And, an unfortunate one: Because now I’m perusing Ebay for old and/or original editions of Paul Laurence Dunbar books which I cannot afford. At least, not until one of my damned apps goes viral or sells at least more than one copy.

As I mentioned when I bought this book two weeks ago that I had already read this book in 2021, but this pretty edition (only $8) was tempting. So I bought it, and I’ve read the book again. Note that this “pretty” edition is a Barnes & Noble edition from thirty years ago. You know, when they took books out of copyright and packaged them into discounted hardbacks not unlike Dover Publications did with paperbacks basically printed on newsprint. What a time to have been alive–this was seen as a profitable endeavor! I’ve been in Barnes & Noble recently, and I’m not sure any brick and mortar new book store has any profitablity path. Ai, what a time to be alive.

At any rate, as with the paperback edition, this book collects not only The Book of the Five Rings, a book of five “scrolls” dealing with the lessons of Musashi’s martial arts school training in sword combat but also A Hereditary Book on the Art of War by Yagyū Munenori which is a similar book but more steeped in Buddhist and Confucian thought (I said in my previous review that it was more Confucian, but it’s really more Buddhist).

So, what did I take away from this reading?

Well, Musashi favors fighting with two swords; I can visualize this better since I acquired the wakizashi and tachi pair in 2025 (and I can sort of see them behind all the other clutter on my desks).

In retrospect, the books are kind of like modern martial arts books in that they’re better understood if you have trained in the martial art described. You’re not going to learn swordsmanship from either of these books as you’re not going to learn karate from reading Complete Karate, tae kwon do from reading Tae Kwon Do Basics, or boxing from Boxer’s Start-Up. The Book of Five Rings and A Hereditary Book on the Art of War don’t even have photos or illustrations to capture a single point in motion, a strike, or a drill. They’re maybe most helpful with some pointers if you’ve already studied the art just a little bit. And these books (the ones I’m reporting on) don’t even go into strikes but more philosophy.

That said, in this reading, I got more out of the back-of-the-book filler book (A Hereditary Book on the Art of War) than The Book of the Five Rings. Its Buddhist mindsets and metaphors–probably the first half of the book deals in these metaphors for how the martial art should eventually flow through you without thought, and how thinking while martial arting will trip you up. Gee, mister, does it! I speak from experience. I think too much while I should be stick fighting.

At any rate, it might be worth re-reading every once and again since it’s a short book. I’m not sure why it was in the philosophy section as it is more martial arts than Buddhist or Zen (and I think those would be in a different section altogether at ABC Books anyway). But I will likely not re-read it any time soon, although in five years, who knows what kind of edition I might find.

Well, of course, I bought this book after finishing To Rise Again at a Decent Hour and jumped right into it. And, as I mentioned, I finished it a week ago but am just now getting around to reviewing it. Which, if you’re sussing things out, means I have not finished a book in the interim as I mentioned it was still on the scanner. Hopefully, soon, I will have something else on the scanner, or I am not going to make 100 books this year. I guess I have only done this seven times in the last fifteen years, so it’s not that common, and the “goal” listed on the inherited spreadsheet is to finish 70 books a year, which I am better at.

ANYWAY, this book is part of the Harbison series, but only in a cousinary way. The first seven books, ending with The Killing at Cottage Farm, which I finished in January, deals with Chet Harbison in northwestern Jefferson County where I grew up (albeit seventy and more years before the Noggle boys ever hit Murphy or House Springs). This book is set several decades later in Cape Girardeau and features Reese “Red” Harbison, who was mentioned in the previous book as a boy who moves with his family when their farm fell on hard times. Now grown up, he’s a World War II veteran coming home for his mother’s funeral and to take over the auto body paint and supply company where he used to work. After he finds a stolen car using the tag from an abandoned and neglected dog, he decides to also be a private investigator. But he’s accused of a murder which harms his business, and he discovers that one of the high school teachers has short eyes and has been drugging and taking advantage of high school students, and he resolves to take care of the latter while kind of investigating the former.

Wilder shifts from the third-person perspective to the first-person with this book, and between that and his greater experience with novels make for a bit better of a read. The book still focuses a lot on setting the stage, talking about the characters, and capturing the sense of southeast Missouri in 1961 which makes the resolution of the plots a little quick and pat. And, boy howdy, I might have mentioned previously that the books could have used another set of eyes on them, and this goes doubly true for this book. In addition to frequent problems with quotation marks, such as breaking in quotations at nouns of direct address, the last chapter misspells two of the main characters’ names. I offered in 2024 to act as a proofreader for him. I need to reach out to him again with the same offer, making clear I’m not looking to charge him corporate rates.

Our conversation at the book signing led me to a couple insights about publishing. He mentioned that his covers and typesetting cost him about $400 a book (I hope that was not a trade secret). Boy, howdy. The cover of John Donnelly’s Gold cost me $300, and I ordered 50 print copies to send to bloggers, papers, and magazines when I first published it. I will never make that out no matter how many authors I sell them to when I’m ostensibly at ABC Books to buy their books–and Wilder, I believe, bought a copy of John Donnelly’s Gold (or so he said he would–I guess I will see when I go to buy the copy of the Frankl book I couldn’t find at Barnes & Noble).

But, despite its typos and seeming occasional anachronisms, I like the Harbison series and will pick up the next. In December, maybe?

Wow, it’s been almost twenty years since I read Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came To The End, which describes a failing ad agency and the rounds of layoffs leading to its closure. I liked that book quite a lot–as you know, gentle reader, I had just finished a couple years’ service at a digital marketing agency about that time, so it really spoke to me. That was his first book; seven years after, this was his first book. I’m not sure where I got it; it’s not on a Good Book Hunting post. It’s even possible I got it at Barnes and Noble on the discounted shelves as the price tag indicates. We will never know. An event in history, lost, unimportant except for its loss.

At any rate: This book deals with a dentist with mental illness, whose father committed suicide before the narrator reached double digits in age. Forty years later, he’s a dentist with a small but successful practice in Manhattan who lives in Brooklyn, alone and deeply lonely even though he ends up pushing people away. In flashback, he talks about relationships he’s had in college and after–one with a Roman Catholic girl with a conservative Catholic family, another with an Jewish woman with a big family–a relationship he started with a temp he hired and who still works with him after the relationship ends. In both cases, he gives himself unhealthily, hoping to join a big, loving family that he never had. But, ultimately, he admits to being an atheist to both families, which drives a wedge between them. The MacGuffin is that someone starts to impersonate him on the Internet, creating a Web site for his practice, commenting on news posts, and starting a Twitter feed in his name and to post some “apocrypha” from a people mentioned briefly in the Bible, where the distant descendents have been persecuted worse than the Jews. A member of that tribe has started reaching out to these descendents and is teaching them about their heritage–and the dentist meets a couple of others in the line and a researcher who is trying to bring them together to visit their homeland in Israel.

But: This is really more of an atmospheric book than anything else. We’ve got parallel stories, where a billionaire financier meets with the narrator. Also a member of the descendents of the hidden-from-history people, he, too. The researcher also has a parallel story, as decades ago he wooed an Orthodox Jewess, going so far as to start the process of converting to Judaism and wanting to become a rabbi, but ultimately rebuffed by the girl’s rabbi father because he, the researcher, admits he does not want to believe in God, but wants to be part of a family and a persecuted tradition. And I guess the climax of the book is the billionaire and the dentist hearing the story of the researcher and maybe discovering it’s all probably invented, a way for him to find meaning and to impart it to others who are in his situation?

I dunno. I was waiting for some resolution, some twist to it. Is the whole thing in the narrator’s head? Is he just crazy? Definitely some indicators that it’s the case–in one episode, he has a meaningful conversation with someone in the know, and one of his employees asks him who he was talking to that might indicate such. But even though the–maybe this is the climax?–the numbered chapters end with him visiting a new patient at home to floss for him, something he does daily now (he reveals)–and we get a climactic play-in game for the Red Sox (the dentist so much a fan, it’s almost crazy)–we don’t get any resolution or change in the narrator. There’s an epilogue where he goes on a mission trip with his lead hygenist, a widow who is very Catholic but does not have a large family, but he does this annually or so with her. And the last paragraph is him agreeing to a pick-up game of cricket with local children. Is this supposed to represent a real change on his part, or is it all supposed to represent more of the same: hope for change, but not forthcoming.

So, as I said, a vibe book, too much effective writing for the story and theme it holds. There’s not a lot of bio of Ferris on the Internet that I could see, but something about his pace of output and the too much good writing made me think he’s a creative writing professor by day. My own creative writing professor and academic advisor whose total career to my college years was a collection of short stories, a novel, and editing a book (The Boundaries of Twilight, which I ordered and read whilst in college) and his career since then has been another collection of short fiction and another novel (which I have around here somewhere, along with his first collection of short fiction which I read in college but only borrowed from the library and whose acquisition I remember even though I don’t have a Good Book Hunting post on it).

I actually sat up from my reading recliner at one point most of the way through this book and thought, “Do I even like to read?” I’d spent months complaining to my beautiful wife on how much I was not enjoying That Hideous Strength and then a week or so saying the same thing about this book. Most of my book reports are not snarky, but they are kind of down on the books I read. But I read a lot of books that are not the core of what I like to read–junk genre fiction and the occasional headier work which I either enjoy and feel pleased to have read or I slag on them. So do I like to read, or do I just do it out of habit? I guess that is a very ringing disrecommendation of this book.

I am less likely to pick up a Ferris book I find in the wild, but he was not so much of a best seller that you see them strewn widely about. Which is good as I have thousands of books to read already, including a new James R. Wilder book to read, four from Dodge Merrin, as well as, I guess, two from C.J. Hribal. If I ever read again, which is “I will” since I’ve already started on the Wilder book and have continued to read old Ideals magazines throughout.

After finishing The Space Trilogy after a year of working on it, I wanted something quick and easy to read to pad my annual reading total before diving into the other long-term and lengthy tomes on my chairside table. And, boy, mister, was this book quick and easy.

It weighs in at 137 pages of large print, double-spacing, and pages with chapter titles and blank pages before each chapter. So it’s really more novella length and young adult in tone and depth; it has a good plot, sparse and moving prose, but not a lot of umami; the main character is good, the people who help him are good, and here are the events/set pieces for the plot. Better, but shorter, than the worst of men’s adventure paperbacks (including Westerns) and probably heavily influenced by television and movie tropes.

So: After recovering from a long bout of pneumonia, the main character, “Red” Weathers, goes hunting for the people who stole his herd of 35 cattle and his really good horse while he was will. He watched them do it, but when he tried to make an effort to stop them, he passed out from the effort before leaving his house. His first stop is a town up the way where he learns that the thieves sold the horse to the local hardman or bad rancher, so he goes to buy his stolen horse from said rancher–who immmediately goes to the gun, and some of the rancher’s gun hands get shot–and Red frees a squaw, the wife of an Indian he has met, from captivity. The rancher gets his friend the sheriff on the case, and Red, the Indian, and the town blacksmith, goes on the run, sets a trap, and kills some of the other gunhands but get captured. After a trial that turns from corrupt to fair–and where Red is freed and the bad rancher is booked, Red goes on to gather his horses from a crooked gambler and to settle scores with those who have wronged him before a happy epilogue where he’s back to ranching and living with a new wife.

So: Well-written, but not very deep. The author is/was a Pentecostal professor/speaker, and a list of his other books includes what looks to be a number of other westerns plus some nonfiction, Christian, motivational, and/or memoirs. I won’t seek the author out, but if I see some of his other books in the wild, I might pick them up.

I bought this book at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library in 2024. In years past, I’ve kinda gamified hitting all four of the Friends of the Christian County Library book sales in a year at the rotating libraries (Ozark, Clever, Nixa, and Sparta). This year, though, I’ve missed the Ozark sale and the Clever Sale (I could not parse the markings on the calendar for a while, and when I figured it out, somehow I managed to forget what Saturday it was even though it was, semi-scrutibly, upon the calendar). That leaves Nixa’s three day sale in August and Sparta’s one-day bag sale in the autumn. Will I go? I dunno. I seem to be making slight progress on my stacks, or at least my chairside table, so I don’t want to maybe overfill them. HOWEVER, on an autumn day, with a $3 bag (or two) in my hand, who knows to what levels of gluttony I might descend.

I got this book last year for Father’s Day. At a May potluck, I spotted some friends’ son reading some C.S. Lewis, and I asked if it was the Space Trilogy–maybe Perelandra? But it was not. I admitted then that I’d read Out of the Silent Planet in middle school–maybe it was on Mrs. Pickering’s paperback rack with When Worlds Collide (I recounted that when I later read the sequel After Worlds Collide), but that I’d not read the others. So my beautiful wife ordered a used copy for me, and I started reading it right away. Last June.

In Out of the Silent Planet, we’ve got an almost rocket jockey story, but it’s British and it’s Lewis, so it’s setting a Christian allegory. A university professor, Ransom, is kidnapped by two men who have built a rocket to go to Mars, where they plan to sacrifice him to some martians. He escapes with the help of the Martian life forms who live in the valleys and gorges where air remains. It’s 158 pages. Rocket jockey-sized. Also, Ransom learns about the powerful beings who rule the planets and angel-like creatures who exist, but Earth’s equivalent has been quarantined because he’s turned bad.

In Paralandra, Ransom is later summoned to Venus (called Paralandra by the extraterrestrial powers) where he finds a beautiful, but green, woman who is looking for her King, and they’re going to start a humanish race on Venus. One of the kidnappers from Out of the Silent Planet shows up, possessed by demonic forces, and Ransom must do battle with him to prevent him from tempting the Queen from violating the one rule she has–not to avoid eating an apple, but to avoid sleeping overnight on dry land (sorry, dry land is Waterworld) fixed land (most of Venus, er, Paralandra is covered in floating islands). He does, but at personal cost: A wound on his heel which does not heal. He then returns to earth. Paralandra weighs in at 190 pages–a little longer, and a bit talkier–so much of the early part of it is just lush descriptions of the strange world with not much happening.

I have mentioned in book reports over the last year that I was having trouble digging into That Hideous Strength. It weighs in at 380 pages, and not rocket jockey stuff. It’s like a British Christian Ayn Rand novel with a guest appearance by Gandalf. In it, a Scientific Organization moves in on a bucolic college and its town, first offering to buy an undeveloped wood and then muscling into the town with its private police force. The book focuses, as much as it does on any characters, on a married couple: The man is a professor at the university who is tempted into a position with NICE, the invading Scientific (and ultimately demonic forces); the woman is a modern (ca 1940s) woman who starts having vivid predictive or clairvoyant dreams and ends up reluctantly joining up with the saintly crowd, led by The Director, a saintly figure with a wounded foot that won’t heal (revealed to be Ransom later in the book, and to be honest, it had been so long since I read Paralanadra before I got to the character, I’d forgotten the foot thing). Eventually, we get a sense of the demonic forces behind NICE amid some expository text, and then a bang up climax. Apparently, the MacGuffin ultimately is that NICE wants to dig up Merlin, who is in a state of suspension beneath the wood they bought and/or the university, but he lets himself out first and joins the saintly side to defeat the forces of darkness. All the almost-characterized bad guys get what’s coming to them, and the book ends with a rather long denouement where couples are united in love matches, including the main couple who are to rediscover their marriage in a more Christly fashion, and Ransom goes back to Venus.

I mean, I say British Christian Ayn Rand novel because it’s wordy with long philosophical conversations and interior monologues, especially as the professor worries about whether he’s in the out group or the in group at the university and NICE. The first part of the novel seems swamped by university intrigue, and then we get instruction as the head of NICE police and various officials tell him how to navigate the Party, or allude to how to navigate the Party, and…. Well, it’s awful wordy. But, I guess, it’s a novel of ideas. I have seen allusions to it here and there before I mentioned it at the potluck last year and as late as…. what, last week?

But I think I will prefer Lewis’s nonfiction work. When I was a kid, I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, but even though I checked The Voyage of the Dawn Treader out of the Milwaukee Public Library, I don’t think I got through the first chapter of it.

So I’m glad to have read it, although I did not rather enjoy the reading of it. And I had to apologize to my wife for repeatedly saying what a chore it was to finish the book; after all, this was slagging on a gift, and it was definitely in poor taste.

OH: And Lewis alludes to other fantasy works; I guess the Numinor talk alludes to Tolkein’s Númenor, so I didn’t get it (I’m also not that into the Middle Earth stuff, although I did read the The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2011).

But I did get this reference in the long denouement:

That same afternoon Mother Dimble and the three girls were upstairs in the big room which occupied nearly the whole top floor of one wing at the Manor, and which the Director called the Wardrobe. If you had glanced in, you would have thought for one moment that they were not in a room at all but in some kind of forest–a tropical forest glowing with bright colours.

It would be an allusion to The Chronicles of Narnia–but they were published a couple of years later.

As would be the source of an allusion on the following page:

“Gor!” she said.

Probably not–that series would not start for 20 years–but it was funny to note.

At any rate, the book side table is looking almost bare now with only the Complete Works of Shakespeare (started in 2018), the second book of The Story of Civilization (started in 2023), the first volume of the Masterplots series (started last year), and another small hundred-year-old collection of Pope that I have discovered after I found this additional copy and wherein I will read the additional poems not found in the hundred-year-old textbook I finished last month (including “Essay on Criticism”) and count as a whole book since The Space Trilogy only counts as one book, and I have some catching up to do since I’m only at 51 books for the year.

I have no idea where I got this book–I don’t see it listed on a Good Book Hunting post, and they date back to March 2007. The library markings indicate it came from the University City Library, so I definitely probably bought it in the St. Louis area before then.

It’s a book targeted to the youth, or that is the youth of 1965 who read books and might have to do a report or paper on Aristotle. For school. Without construction paper, glue sticks, and scissors. Or, maybe, sometimes those kids were interested in the life of the mind. The past is a different place, even for those of us who came along not that long after.

The book is 109 pages, and it’s about half biography and then half digging into (as a survey or summary dig, which is not really digging, but let me sum up:) his thought and works–what we have of them as well as talking about some of the the mentions of other works of his which did not survive. So, you know, not a bad survey, reminding me that although I listen to audiocourses about him (see The Ethics of Aristotle, Aristotle, and Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition), I’m not sure I have a lot of Aristotle source material available in the Nogglestead stacks. Certainly not multiple copies like I have of Alexander Pope (believe it or not, I have found another collection of Pope in the past two weeks) or Augustine. I’ll have to look for them.

Also, given that the other titles in this series deal with Charles Darwin and Mohammed, yeah, the set is probably left in nature. But you don’t get the straight-up Marxism of the comic books in the For Beginners series (Einstein for Beginners, Sartre for Beginners) or the modern Taylor-Swift-Loving British Pseudo-Stoic books. They were more even-handed in those days. Maybe even interested in knowledge for its own sake instead of as a tool to use to lever themselves to power (or to keep from the young so they, the They, could lever themselves to Marxist power).

At any rate, it is a decent primer akin to the aforementioned single-tape Aristotle (read by Charlton Heston) as an introduction. And it has a good bibliography for additional reading. For me, I need to look for anything in the wild, but where I go cheap book hunting these days, Aristotle is not.

Ah, gentle reader. When I saw ABC Books’ Facebook post about the author having a Thursday night book signing. When I bought a copy of Superstar 2020, I noted his book signings are generally on weeknights, and I learned it’s because he’s from around here but does not live in Springfield these days. As a matter of fact, when he lived in Springfield up until his early teens, he lived in a neighborhood not far from where my beautiful wife and her family would live in a decade later (and, yes, he does include a Brad Pitt story).

The book stems from a series of columns he wrote for an Internet site, basically reviews of old records that he finds at flea markets, garage sales, and other places–including a couple that he has ordered.

He leavens the columns with anecdotes of his life, from his time working in a record store to owning a record store to being a personal assistant on a couple of rock tours, his time in Springfield, his youth in Florida, and so on. He also tells (sometimes) about his purchase or acquisition experience of getting the records, a bit of history of the record’s production, and/or some approving critical appraisal of the tracks.

His tastes tend to run toward classic rock that he first heard new on vinyl when he was a kid: The Cars, Alice Cooper, The Beatles, and so on. Stuff I would have heard on album-oriented rock stations when the songs were but a decade old. He does have a Tony Bennett record, and I do own two records on his list of fifty (Sweet Talk by Boots Randolph and Heart Like a Wheel by Linda Ronstadt, both of which I purchased on May 4, 2019).

I expect our differing tastes in records we collect accumulate (in my case, anyway, as you know, gentle reader, I will buy a lot of things sound unheard for fifty cents, especially if it has a Pretty Woman on the Cover (PWoC)). First, we came up in different eras; although my sainted mother and my father had a few records, by the time I was buying albums, it was on cassette and not on vinyl. Although I did have a brief run on picking up Billy Joel, Pink Floyd, Tin Tin, and Marian Segal with Silver Jade records in college because they were cheap as older collectors moved from vinyl to CD, most of my experience with new music of my growing up would be on cassette. Many of the titles didn’t sell as many copies on vinyl, so they’re not available easily at garage sales, book sales, or even your cheap crates at antique malls or used media stores. And most of the titles he mentions in this book and the classic rockers of the 1970s and 1980s are the very ones that collectors in that Generation Jones and Generation X are snapping up.

SO: My collecting has been buying what’s available, cheep! And that’s been big bands and easy listening music that our grandparents (and some of our parents) would have bought in the 1940s through the 1960s. As I mentioned to the author, most people don’t remember that the charts were dominated by the easy listening artists in the 1960s–Herb Alpert and the had a string of giant records, sometimes several on the charts at the same time. So I’ve been able to find a lot of Andy Williams, Tony Bennett, Boots Randolph, Eydie Gorme, and even older Big Band acts for fifty cents a throw. I’ve also picked up some non-Miles Davis or Ella Fitzgerald jazz–a lot of Dave Brubeck (!), George Shearing, Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan, Diana Washington, and so on. AND! I’ve had the chance to pick up a number of international artists–the Brazilian records I bought in 2016, Mireille Mathieu, Özel Türkbaş, and so on. And when I come across a new artist that has several records available for fifty cents, I buy them all just in case I like the artist.

So, where was I? Oh, yes, this is an interesting book and a good read. I liked it, and although I might have found to enthusiasm a bit forced, I did meet the guy, and I think it’s probably how he really is.

Spread over a year’s worth of columns, the enthusiasm and calling a record a “stinger” would not have seemed quite so rote. But that’s maybe the only knock I could make against the book except noting a few typos.

So I’ll have to dig out that copy of Superstar sooner rather than later. I kinda know where it is in the book stacks which are just as disorganized as the record library which is fuller than it was in 2024.

I bought four of Billy Pearson’s books at a book signing at ABC Books seven years ago. As I mentioned then, Billy Pearson started writing when he was 80 years old and had nine books in print by the time of his book signing. So I have to admire that and to look upon his works with a certain affection even though they’re not very good. I previously reported on his novel The Chemistry of Love in 2019, not long after I bought them. The gap is as much because I have so much to read as more than I’m avoiding them.

At any rate: You know I read a lot of grandma poetry. This is the equivalent grandpa… short stories? The book title says Short Story Adventures, but I’m not 100% sure these are not just reminisciences and memories jotted down. As I said previously, I think he dictates these in text-to-speech and does not read/edit the result. So they’re in the vernacular but also the unproofed vernacular. I didn’t have trouble reading them having just gone through The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, half of which were in a different vernacular, but I got used to reading phonetically and not based on words.

So the… stories… in this book cover a lot about growing up in rural Missouri in the middle part of the last century, so you know that’s catnip to me anyway. A couple of pieces are clearly nonfiction as they lament the current state of the country and particularly one past president (unnamed) who apparently does not love the country. Heaven help us that we don’t come to a time where someone could read the book and think “Which one?” but if that comes to pass, we probably won’t have a country anyway.

So: Okay, quick read, 158 pages of pretty good print. A quick Internet search indicates the author might still be alive. Good on’ ‘im, and I bet he’s still writing if he can.

This book marks the fifth and completing one of the Summer Reading Challenge. I picked it up from the free book cart at church which again has some books on it–the powers that be emptied and closed the library at the satellite church campus and had a mega-free-book giveaway a couple months ago, and that emptied the free book cart as well when the remainder got donated to whereever they went after the tables in the narthex. After I picked it up, it lay on my desk for a couple of weeks because I couldn’t be arsed to shelve it. Which made it easy to pick up.

I called this book a Christian self-help whitepaper, and that’s not far off. The author is a pastor of 13 years, and he has led some research in how congregants characterize their “gifts” from God. So the book is equal parts generic self-help Bible quoting, not far off of what you would get from Joyce Meyer followed by a set of charts and text explaining what the surveys said when the researchers asked churchgoers about their gifts.

The book has a couple of personal anecdotes: One is about how he misjudged the man his mother would marry; about a man who was important as a liason for students on mission trips in Argentina, a large guy with a neck tumor; and a Russian who has been a gangster, but turned his life around (and somehow ended up “running” his Russian town). The anecdotes are pretty high-level and impersonal and don’t necessarily reflect well on the author. And they’re just not that punchy or real like you would get from, say, Norman Vincent Peale whose little personal narrative asides and examples were far more effective.

I mean, I did get some good ideas from the book. He distinguishes “spiritual” gifts from “common” gifts and says that churches tend to over-emphasize and target the former rather than celebrate and share the latter. So I thought about some ways that our church could do some fellowship and neighborhood outreach by focusing on skills-based seminars and knowledge sharing.

But this book, ah, this book, is a pointer to a complete non-profit sales funnel, and wants you to complete its EveryGift survey itself (even before the author whipped out the first chart, I could tell where we were going because it talked about “research” and came up with a copyrightablemanteau for its program). And here’s the Christianeagram where you’ll find yourself:

You have one category for “technical” gifts which, presumably, would cover a hella lotta gifts from woodworking, carpentry, good with animals, gardening, understanding motors and mechanical things, and so on. But most of them are white collar or academic-style gifts, and most of the time when he talks about using your gifts, he talks about art and making music, and going to conferences. Not so much about serving at the food bank or vacuuming the sanctuary.

I dunno. Seems a little upper middle class consultant comfortable to me.

So I got a couple things from it, I guess, but probably not what the author wanted. I did pass it on to my beautiful wife who is more into this sort of thing than I am. AND! I get to take my completed Summer Reading Challenge form to the library to see what my free gift is. I wonder what it will be?

I got this book from the diminished (in more ways than one, apparently) philosophy stack (not plural, and not much of a stack) at the Midtown Carnegie branch of the library recently. Oh, my. I am not sure if it’s a step up or a step down from the British Marxist comic book biographies I’ve read (Einstein for Beginners and Sartre for Beginners). Maybe a step up because it has quotations from the original sources, but maybe a step down because it–I was going to say “just misses,” but it misses on the side of Marxism and embrace of contemporary policies of a certain idealogical (and culturally suicidal) persuasion.

The book has chapters on a variety of topical matters, including life, money, work, happiness, beliefs, you, health, feelings, love, education, politics, and death. Each chapter is mostly the author’s summation of Stoic thought on the topic along with some compare/contrasts with other philosophies and/or religions, but without any actual quotes or citations to back up the assertions. The chapters are leavened by a couple of quotes from Stoic sources, almost exclusively Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca, with several paragraphs of the author explaining what the quote means. The chapters conclude with “Think About” thought exercises and “Going Further” which are ways to put (the author’s view on the) Stoics’ insights into practice.

I considered doing a thoughtful response to it, but I can’t be arsed, so here are some of the quibbles I have.

Ancient Athens was an intellectual melting pot, a Mecca for those who sought to imbibe philosophy at its source, and so drew students from far and wide.

Using Mecca as a metaphor for melting pot where all students are welcome seems, erm, dumb because in reality, Mecca is not those things. Only in common, uninformed idiom is (was) it viewed as a good thing, and generally as a point to aim for, like a North Star.

In her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Japanese author Marie Kondo askes that we apply the simple criterion (the KoriMari method) to each thing we own: is it either useful or does it ‘spark joy’? If neither, then we should discard it.

This is probably a useful exercise for us all, especially book hoarders (yes, I’m looking at you! Ahem…)….

Ah, the Marx/Kondo connection. Prepare your mind for having less. Not what he meant here, but, no, my books remain until a tragic fire or my estate sale, mate.

One of the benefits of wealth is that it allows us to help others. In 2009, the philosopher Peter Singer (1946-) published The Life You Can Save, which argued that people living in affluent Western countries have a moral duty to help those living in poverty around the world.

Again, the Stoic direction to non-attachment means send your money to nonprofits, have less, and Elon Musk should not be a trillionaire (implied, and probably on his Twitter feed even now). Citing Peter Singer is a nice touch.

Utilitarianism (at least, in its original form) is mainly concerned with happiness in terms of how certain outcomes make us feel.

Okay, cog. Serve others and die when your utility is spent. That should make you happy.

We should try to treat others fairly and live within established legal codes (justice).

Legal codes != justice. C’mon, man.

I don’t want to presume as to what views you currently hold as to the nature of life, the universe, and everything, and nor do I want to prescribe what those should be.

42, of course. But I’m pretty sure if he doesn’t want to prescribe justice via legal codes, he’d be happy to nudge you in a behavoral economics way to his preferred viewpoint.

But what do we do when we feel overwhelmed, or sense the creep of unwelcome anger, lust or depression [sic–he is so egalitarian that he doesn’t use the Oxford comma because it’s elitist, one presumes]? Aside from false judgements [sic–have an extra E in that word since there’s no room for a U], we should do our best to avoid, prevent or suppress the growth of the harmful passion. Your partner has left the toilet seat up (again) or done a shoddy jb with the dishes; your boss continues to ignore your worthwhile contributions while favoring the pretty new recruit; your racist auntie has again outlined her views on asylum seekers… you get the idea.

Strangely enough, like Marx, asylum seekers are mentioned more than once in a positive light. Stoics should love them!

The problems most of us face in the matters of love is that they often stir up negative emotions. Drawing upon and developing existing Greek concepts, Christianity divided love into four main types: érōs (sexual love), storgē (parental and familial love), philía (love for one’s friends), and agápē (unconditional love for God and one’s fellow humans). As you can see, apart from agápē, all the other forms involve potential conflict. Sexual desire can lead to lust, deviancy, jealousy and envy; familial relations between children and parents can lead to grief, betrayal, coercion, resentment; even friendship or a feeling of communal belonging can create rifts and internal disputes or animosity towards those we consider ‘other’ or outside our group or tribe. It is only selfless universal love that avoids these issues.

So, basically, a good Stoic is a liberal who prefers asylum seekers to his auntie.

What fooking balderdash, mate. Also, someone press him on what he defines as deviancy, and we’ll see whom he offends.

Applying this in more practical terms, we may break it down into two main concerns: conmtrolling the passions and eradicating prejudice. We must guard against the power of erotic love to overwhelm our reason and will, and we must try to extend our concern beyond the borders of our own family, tribe and nation.

You see, he meant it.

This wonderful quote reminds me of a Zen Buddhist parable, where the teacher is pouring a cup of tea for his student. When the tea reaches the top of the cup, the teacher continues to pour, causing the student to point this out. “It’s a bit like you, isn’t it?” says the teacher.

I came not to say “What an intellectual yob,” but to point out this is the third book this year that has included this parable. The other two were Be Water, My Friend and The Secret Power Within: Zen Solutions to Real Problems.

There are countless small ways in which a citizen might do this [help out in the polis]. Neighborliness is a good one–offering to mow the lawn of the old coule who live nextdoor, or pick up their prescriptions, helping someone mend a fence or move furniture. The same obviously applies to colleagues, friends, and family. You might write a letter of recommendation for your boss’s niece to help with her application to university, or volunteer to help an asylum seeker deail with intimidating government bureaucracy.

No, seriously, fook you auntie, mate.

All these incidents [Stoics falling on their swords] emphasize not only the Stoic belief that death is nothing to be feared, but also the idea that, if done at your own time and choosing, it is possible to have a ‘good death’ (which is the actual meaning of the modern term ‘euthanasia’).

All righty, then. Stoics thing Canada’s MAID idea is a good idea (perhaps especially for your auntie to make room for some asylum seekers).

Ah, gentle reader. This book almost let my passions rule me in my, erm, disagreement with the author (but, as he does not know me, he loves me more than I love him, I must acknowledge).

This book is unnecessary and probably counterproductive, seeking to introduce people who are curious about Stoicism into Stoicism as Liberal political thought. The original sources, at least in good translations, are easily accessible and don’t need exegesis, especially of this sort.

On the other hand, it did make me want to go back to the primary sources. My oldest and my mother-in-law have started working their ways through the Marcus Aurelius. And I did “just” (three years ago) score a paperback copy of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. I should definitely look for that once I get my current chairside accumulation of in-progress books under control.

And it did make “Taylor-Swift-Loving British Pseudo-Stoic” into my new go-to insult, and when I use it here in the United States, I fully expect it to be fighting words.

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.