Category: Book Report

I picked up this book last year during the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge, but it did not slot into any of those categories. This year, though, it could slot into either of two categories: Author of a Different Race/Religion Than Your Own (which I already filled with Karate-dō Nyūmon) or Featuring Music. So I have slotted it into the latter, but I do like the additional thrill of reading books that can fit into more than one category.

The book looks like it might have been, at inception, an oral history or a family history that Bedell put together of his musical family, his grandparents, parents, and uncles as well as he and his siblings (a family of eleven siblings) for the next generation–his younger siblings and his grandchildren. As such, the books layout is lacking–it looks to be simply a dumped word processor document whose formatting was lost in the translation to whatever print-on-demand service the author used. Photos are laid out oddly, their captions are misplaced, section headings are widowed (they appear at the bottom of the page and the section starts on the next page). Additionally, the text repeats itself in several places, sometimes a phrase, sometimes a sentence, and sometimes a couple of paragraphs as though in editing, the author copied and pasted instead of cut and pasted. Listen to me on this point, gentle reader; recall, it has been said that my books suck but they look professional whilst sucking.

So it’s an unpolished work, and it does seem a bit voyeurish to look this closely at another person’s family, but the author has some interesting stories to… well, allude to. Born into a musical family, the author, some siblings, and neighborhood kids form a touring band (the Fabulous Elites) in high school in the 1960s (1950s? The book jumps around a lot and does not often root one into the exact time). After a couple of years of performing, the group winnows to a smaller group that tours regionally into the 1970s (The KC Express). When that band’s members starts to settle down, some of them buy and run a club on Commercial Street.

I say that the stories are alluded to because, for the most part, the author just dumps names and some events without building them into fully fleshed-out stories. It kind of reminded me of Danny Mile’s Twice a Week Heroes in that regard except with fast-pitch softball players swapped out for musicians.

Still, I’m glad I read it, and I’ll have to keep an eye out for the author and his current band, ABS Band. I’ll also watch for his bands’ records and recordings when I am out and about.

The last bit of the book has a roll call of the current generation of musicians and artists (again, the book has a bit of a family album feel), and you might have been wondering, is Gary Bedell, artist/author of Thawed a member of the family? Of course!

But what really made me go “Hmmm…” was this bit talking about the author’s grandfather:

I remember my mother’s father, Harry Piggee, was a jolly person full of spunk and who always had a smile on his face. His military background included both Navy and Army amd my grandfather “Piggee” loved the military.

* * * *

My mom was a housewife who took care of us kids. She was a woman who had a love for poetry and a gift for writing it.

Hmmm… Military. Poetry. Could Ronald E. Piggee, author of As Autumn Approaches, be a distant part of this family? It would explain how that small-run book would have found its way to Springfield.

At any rate, the book has promise, but I’d wait for the second edition if I were you.

The 2024 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “Author of Different Race/Religion Than Your Own” because of course it does. To a librarian, the common library user around these parts only read Karen Kingsbury, James Patterson, and other white authors (probably Assemblies of God church members at that), so compelling patrons to read something else will elevate those patrons to the level of identity box-checking librarians everywhere.

I started out looking from something of a different religion. I wanted to avoid having to read a fat tome by Mencius or Confucius or Aristotle or Plato. I pulled The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam in the Classics Club edition, figuring the fellow was probably Muslim, but I discovered that the book was translated and “refined” by an Englishman probably so much that it was not “by” Omar Khayyam much at all. Then I uncovered The Broken Spear, the Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico, but it, too, was so clearly that would fall under the rubric of a different religion, but it, too was compiled by a Mexican historian in the 20th century, so I could not be sure.

Ah, the heck with it, I would go with race then. In lieu of looking at the authors’ pictures on the dust jackets (where available), I figured I would just grab one of the martial arts books I have that are written by someone from Japan. And here we are.

I bought this book last year 2022 (although I write 2024 on my checks, I am still thinking of 2022 as “last year”) at ABC Books and note that I read another of the six books I bought that day, A Beginner’s Guide to Glass Engraving, as part of the Winter Reading Challenge last year (in which “last year” is actually 2023, but not by much). So if I keep up this pace, I will have read all six books I bought that day by 2028. A daunting deadline to be sure.

At any rate, this is the translation of a 1943 work by Karate master Funakoshi who learned the art form back when it was still a hidden practice on Okinawa and then demonstrated it and opened a school in Tokyo. If you’re doing the math correctly, you will notice that this book first appeared in Japan during the war, which made me feel a little like a traitor in reading it. This book appeared not long after the Durants’ Our Oriental Heritage, for crying out loud, although this translation/edition came out in 1994. Past the 1980s martial arts cultural explosion, but there’s continued to be a market for them as the Martial Arts section at ABC Books and its barrenness continues to attest.

So this book is part history of Karate (and Okinawa and the southern part of Japan by extension), autobiography, and the description of a particular kata that the author’s school emphasizes (and briefly compares it and the other kata it uses to other schools and the evolution of kata). It has a number of static images from the kata, including the steps that feature a partner, but it’s hard to get the flow from a kata from text description and pictures. Heck, in my experience, it’s hard to get the flow of a kata from repeated demonstrations and practices (and, apparently, it’s hard to teach them as well, which is probably why my school moved away from them when it tried to introduce them 6 or so years ago).

At any rate, a quick read, more informative on the history of Karate than anything else. And an entry for the Author of Different Race/Religion Than Your Own which could almost be part of the Published Before You Were Born category, as it appeared in Japanese presumably before my parents were born (and before the author’s countrymen shot my grandfather on the author’s home island of Okinawa) but this particular edition is from 1994, so as a pedant, I can’t use it in that category. Besides, I’ve already started a different book for that category (thankfully, not a volume of The Story Of Civilization–I am not that optimistic, and I still have to finish The Greek Life).

I said when I bought this book in 2021 that I thought this was a children’s book. It’s an ex-library (Springfield-Greene County Library’s Brentwood branch) book with pouches for cards and no computer markings, so it was likely removed from circulation when I was a boy. But event though the dustjacket, in its protective mylar, looks a little like a library binding, it’s not. This would have been a fairly inexpensive hardback western. Apparently, there were over a hundred of them, but not all by Bill Gulick.

The book deals with an attorney in Portland, Oregon, who works with a Chinese importer who has his hand in some shady businesses, but the attorney, Walt, tries to keep him as legal as possible. When the authorities get wind that the importer is bringing in several young women for sale, a friendly cop asks Walt to dissuade the importer. Walt does so at their regular poker game, but ends up winning one of the young ladies in the poker game. She has been taught to please a man, and she does end up pleasing him both as a housekeeper and as a lover, but anti-miscegenation laws don’t permit marriage, and anti-Chinese sentiment, particularly among the Irish, cause trouble for the couple.

Meanwhile, his brother, a prospector, has not only found gold (in Hell’s Canyon) but has legitimate English investors who want to develop it. He would like Walt’s help making it all legal, albeit retroactively.

After a near riot and shooting leave Walt almost dead, the girl nurses him to health, but he decides he must send her back to the importer who arranges a marriage with a laborer. Walt goes to Hell’s Canyon to help his brother, and the girl and her husband join a work team heading inland. Which just happens to end up in Hell’s Canyon as some bad men are planning to rob the mine–and the workers’ camp.

Probably not for modern audiences as although it features anti-Chinese sentiment and bad words, the book itself has a nuanced view of it, defending the Chinese and probably trying to portray the actual friction objectively (the author was a regional historian with other nonfiction tomes in his oeuvre). The imported young ladies are also young to the modern legal framework–the one Walt wins is fifteen–but young marriages were more of a thing in the past, and this is not a book about the perils of human trafficking–it portrays Walt’s relationship with the girl as mature and loving. Still, probably not something one would encounter in a modern book, but I guess I would have to read a modern book to find out.

A short bit, definitely a bit of a pulp feel although this was a Doubleday (Double D) hardback. Less meat to it than a L’Amour or Grey book, but the writing has a bit of knowledge and depth that you don’t get from real, paint-by-the-numbers, publish-a-book-a-month pulp or men’s adventure books.

The author did not have a series of books in the Double D Western line, and I’m not sure I’ve seen another in the wild. But the book sales I go to these days is large, and I don’t tend to hit the fiction sections much at all, much less the Westerns section. So maybe they table(s) is/are lousy with them. Maybe I’ll find them if I ever attend the Christian County or Polk County library fundraisers again, but I don’t get to small, one-room, browse-them-all book sales any more.

You are not mistaken, gentle reader; I have written a book report on this 87th Precinct novel before (in 2006). I picked this copy up at the Friends of the Library book sale in May 2022, and as I noted then, I will pick up mid-career McBains when they’re cheap just in case I don’t already have them. This one has a mylar cover on it to protect the book jacket, but it is only a Book Club edition, so not that collectible. But nice nevertheless.

At any rate, this book is very focused on a single crime, unlike some later books which blended a number of plots, sometimes bringing them together but not always. A girl shows up at the 87th precinct with defensive knife wounds, and her cousin has been stabbed. As they were on the way home from a party, they stopped to outwait a downpour in a tenement/construction site when a man with a knife appeared and wanted the older (17-year-old) girl to perform unspeakable acts. So Carella and Kling investigate, finding a man sleeping off an evening drunk which matches the description, but he is not picked out in a lineup, and the blood on his shirt is not the victims. They look at the dead girl’s boss at the bank where she worked, who matches the description. Then the living cousin fingers her older brother for the crime, and the eventual discovery of the dead girl’s diary indicates it was probably not him.

When I re-read it in 2006, I remembered mostly a memo that appeared as an aside in the book–a police superintendent says that orders using rubber stamps should not be obeyed, but the order is signed by a rubber stamp. Carella puzzles over this for a page or two, and that’s all I remembered from a previous reading. But I remembered the plot, or at least whodunit, this read around.

The book is a brief 151 pages and makes use of the pasted-in interview notes, memos, and documents style where these appear in a different font. They pad out what might only have been a novella to short book length. I can see why McBain would later include more than one plotline in later books: He was moving from a paperback sensibility to a $25 hardback value-in-length mindset.

Still, I like his old stuff as much as the new, and I’m always happy to find them in the wild. Even if I come home to discover I already have it.

This book will fit into the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge Suspense category. It’s only a one-fer, though, as it doesn’t look as though it fits in other categories.

I bought this book in May 2008, when I was young and life was good. Little did I know I would be reading it in the hellscape of 2024 almost sixteen years later. Did I say, “hellscape”? Damned autocorrect! I started typing “2024 Winter Reading Challenge.”

Originally, I’d planned to use this book in the Historical Fiction Outside the U.S. category as it was slightly historical fiction when it was published in 1928. Set in World War I France, it tells the story of a group of school boys who enlisted in the German army together and who end up on the front lines in France. The first-person main character, Paul, has a bit of a poetic soul, and one can imagine him keeping this as sort of a diary although the book doesn’t mention that–but I seem to remember that the 1979 television movie adaptation had John Boy writing in a little book (but I could be mistaken, as I saw that film in school while it, the adaptation, was fairly new).

The book details how the group goes through training with a sadistic leader, and then they go off to the front. The book details the conditions on the front, in the trenches, and how the soldiers lived. It zeroes in on a couple of incidents: A charge over the top; Paul’s month-long liberty, when he visits his home and family a changed man; Paul’s presence on a reconnaisance which traps him in a shell hole when an attack comes, leading to his stabbing a French soldier and watching him die; an interlude where the group guards a supply depot in an evacuated village and get to live well until the French advance; Paul’s trip with a comrade to a hospital after they’re wounded, and then finally the return to the front, where the group dies one-by-one until Paul dies right before the armistice.

So the book kind of blends themes from The Red Badge of Courage along with Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist. Anti-war with insights into German deprivations during the war.

Paul demonstrates enough admiration and affiliation with an older soldier to likely have kept students in homoeroticism theme papers for decades, but not enough to slot the book into the LGBTQ+ Character category, so I’ll put this into Made Into A Movie/TV Show, although ever the pedantic, I feel like I’m cheating because this has not been adapted into a movie, but it has been made thrice into films or a television movie. None of which I have seen in over thirty years.

This, of course, was the first book I read for the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge. Although I could try to slot it into the Western Setting category, it is a Western, albeit one set in the thirties and actually northeast of here. So, no, definitely Published in 2023, and perhaps the first book that I’ve read from 2023. Perhaps the last, although I will likely pick up other works by local authors published last year. So perhaps I should not be melodramatic.

Like previous books, this book picks up immediately after the events in Murder at Morse Mill. The same scene. The bad guy from an even more previous novel has interrupted Christmas dinner with revenge on his mind. As he holds a knife to Chet Harbinson’s daughter’s neck, her boyfriend, whom the bad doctor coshed outside, comes in and kills the intruder with an Indian war axe but loses consciousness from the coshing. Uh, spoiler alert for Murder at Morse Mill there. Chet and his family try to load the boy up into his truck to take him to St. Louis in a blizzard for medical care. They cannot, but the German man who owns the mill comes by with his stronger truck and takes him.

So Chet is wracked with self-doubt and worries that the doctor must have had an accomplice to help escape Leavenworth, where he was incarcerated. So he’s a wreck when a working man laboring for a mean cattle rancher dies one night–well, it’s murder, as the book shows us whodunit: the ne’er-do-well son of the rancher who wants the property promised to the working man and his family to give to a mob-connected man to settle gambling debts. The mob man wants it to build a slaughterhouse he can use to launder mob money. When someone kills the ne’er-do-well son, Harbison and his deputies try to find out who–and the laborer’s son admits to the crime to protect his mother, whom he suspects did it.

The book has other subplots and series business, and it’s a pretty good read. I’m not fond of the book picking up immediately like it’s the next chapter of the last book, as sometimes time passes between reading books in the series (although I read this book but a month after the previous installment). It still takes a bit for the reader to get back into where the last book left off exactly. And, unfortunately, this book ends on a cliffhanger note. Actually, it’s not a cliffhanger–if you didn’t know there was a DUN DUN DUH! coming, you would just expect the book denoued.

I picked this book up from the free book cart at church; it has the name of our former pastor’s father in it, which probably means that this book has made it through two trips through the seminary before coming to rest on my read shelves. I picked the book up and started reading it before a service where my beautiful wife was early to warm up either her horn or her pipes, and it (the book, not her horn) never landed on my to-read shelves. Although it did take me a while to go through it as it was lost in the car or a bag for a couple of weeks, and later I left it at a different campus of the church after arriving early so my wife could practice with the choir before a cantata, and I stuck it under my chair (the newer campus does not have pews) and forgot it after the cantata. So that’s a nice story. Have you noticed I’ve stopped stuttering?

This book, one of a series, collects a number of essays/papers on the history of the Old Testament. It talks about how some of the stories match or mirror stories in other Mesopotamian cultures (such as the flood story appearing, for example, in the the epic of Gilgamesh). It talks about different kinds of Jewish literature, including poetry forms and wisdom literature. It talks about other books that do not appear in the official canon, but how they inform it a bit. They talk about the Septuagint (the translation of the Jewish canon into Greek) and how it influenced the Jewish canon itself (and the canon that would be part of the Christian bible).

The book is part history, part literary criticism (it talks a bit about how different types of literary criticism and interpretation have informed the canon) as well as part theological practice as it talks about both Jewish and Christian worship uses the various parts of the Old Testament.

So I ate it up, of course. I find this sort of material fascinating (see also On The History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon and On Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication by Professor Bart D. Ehrman (2002)). Sometimes I almost wish I studied this rather than read it and forgot most of it soon after (although the same is probably true of things that I studied in college). Have I ever told you that I was almost a triple major in college, including theology with the English and Philosophy? No? I’d say it’s a long story, but it is not.

I picked up this book in Wisconsin last year in 2022. One would have thought I would have picked it up before now, but it was lying atop books double-stacked on a shelf and pushed back. I am pretty sure it resurfaced when I pulled out the books on Brett Favre and Danica Patrick which were in a similar position (if not actually stacked with this book).

The book is a product of its time: Nick at Nite was hitting its peak, perhaps as older people retreated from the encrassinating sitcoms of the 1990s. The author made appearances on the network starting in 1992 with “Why We Watch” segments and appears on the Bob and Tom Show. But he appears to be a real therapist and his Web site has material on other subjects. So make of it what you will. But one could not as easily find common cultural representations in television after that era as the explosion in cable (which made Nick at Nite possible) led to a diffusion and fragmenting (try not to imagine both metaphors at once, gentle reader, as it might cause you to need therapy) of characters and television shows so you might talk about Blossom and someone who watched Sister, Sister might not understand (although I pulled those examples of 1990s sitcoms out of the air and didn’t look it up, so it’s entirely possible that they aired consecutively on the same network, immediately demolishing the point I was trying to make, but you’ve probably learned by now that I write these book reports quickly, on-the-fly mostly, and sometimes a week or more after I read the book, but you’re not here for deep insight into the book, but my asides and parentheticals, ainna? Hello? Hello?). Friends aside, what might remain a touchstone for current and preceding generations? Come to think of it, are current generations watching television at all? So, yeah, not a book that would be written in 2013 much less 2023.

Amazon reviewers aren’t sure whether to take the book seriously or not, and I can see why. The book has a light tone to it, as it is a pop culture book, but it has just enough actual therapy-style talk to make you wonder if maybe it’s serious (the classification on the back cover is HUMOR/TELEVISION, so probably not too much). Its chapters include “Television and Self-Esteem: Herman Munster or Mary Richards”, “Television and Codependence: Lassie’s Disturbed Unconscious”, and “Television and Dysfunction: We Are All Jethro” (to name a few, that is, the first three past the introduction). Each describes some personal problems and then riffs a bit on them, framing them in the terms of shows that would appear on Nick at Nite (they probably extend whatever bits he might have done on the network). My boys are unlikely to know who Mary Richards and Jethro are. They might know Lassie. And although they probably do not know who Herman Munster is, they can sing Rob Zombie’s “Dragula.” But Rob Zombie, too, is an old man.

So I can see how the metaphors of the different characters might be useful in some sort of Jungian analysis, perhaps, as the myths and stories we tell ourselves or to which we gravitate reinforce the internal stories we live by. Which is how the book can look serious. But it constantly refers to tele-therapy institutes, papers, and research studies with outlandish addresses or locations to underscore that this is not to be taken seriously, and certainly people who cite these papers should not be made presidents of prestigious universities.

It’s not Make Room for TV (which I read 20 years ago–how long have I been doing this?)–but that’s good, as that serious scholarship was a slog. This book, though, carries the joke of teletherapy, the gag which probably worked in short doses on television and on the radio, too long. But it was built to capitalize on that one gag at that one moment in time, and it must have, since I am at least the third owner of this book as it appears to have two separate used bookstore prices inside the front cover–I presume someone bought it at full price and then turned it in for store credit–although the first sticker is for Half Price Books which today is a chain handling unsold leftovers from first-run book stores, so perhaps this copy was never sold at full price.

At any rate, I am enjoying idle speculation on the provenance of this book as well as nostalgia/speculation on the time when it was published than reading the book itself. So take that as you will.

I got this book at ABC Books at the first (I think) of the writers’ group group signings I went to in November 2022. I don’t mind telling you that those are the expensive book signings, as I buy one or more books from all of the authors present. Plus often other books. So I definitely prefer the single author signings.

This book has a healthy display at ABC Books, or has in the past–I’ve often seen it and thought about picking up a copy, and eventually I did. I thought it would be about the author’s dog or a novel about a dog, but it’s actually about a real dog who amazed parts of Missouri with his intellect. Not tricks; the owner would tell the dog to find the man with the red hair, and the dog would; the owner could spell out words in the request, and the dog seemingly understood; and if asked in French to go to the Ford automobile, the dog would. He was examined and tested by members of the University of Missouri staff, and they could not determine how he might be doing it. They never mention whether the dog could do it without the owner present, which would have certainly ruled out responding to cues from the owner, but perhaps they didn’t think of that, or perhaps that was the trick and not part of the legend.

Jim the Wonder Dog is still the pride of Marshall, Missouri, with a Web Site which includes a shop where you can buy this book, a museum, and a park with a statue of Jim.

It’s a short book–60 pages plus end matter including photos and references. To be honest, it kind of inspires me to write similar, short form popular history books on a single subject. Heaven knows when I wrote my piece for History magazine fifteen years ago (!), I thought I could mine the compendia that I read (or read) for tidbits, research them, write about them, and make a living at it. Of course, I was still thinking in print in those days–today, I would be thinking I would do short videos or podcasts on them and make a living at it, but somehow the video form seems cheap and easy and ultimately uninformative, but perhaps I’m just tangentally exposed to what my kids watch. Still, it might have inspired me to try my hand at it.

The book has copious sources listed for each chapter of the book, and it helped clear up something for me. I thought I had just read about Jim the Wonder Dog somewhere, and the probable source appeared: Rural Missouri magazine, which my electrical co-op sends to me every month, had two “recent” articles on him noted in this book: one in 2010 and one in 2014. So it’s possible I read one or both of those articles and thought I read them recently; it’s possible that I did read one of those articles recently because I pulled the old magazine out of the depths of the old magazine drawer (some of whose back issues arrived new around the turn of the century to my home in Casinoport or Old Trees before being moved to Nogglestead); it’s also possible that Rural Missouri, keeping with its schedule, published a more recent article on Jim the Wonder Dog which I read in a more timely fashion. Instead of speculating, I did a little research, and an article entitled Pawprints on Our Hearts indicates the magazine had a story on Jim the Wonder Dog in the May 2020 issue. So I could have read the articles when they first came out, in reprint, and recently.

So a nice little book. Suitable for young readers, but it’s not really a kids’ book. Or maybe it is and it’s just suitable for older readers, too, but that thinking leads to Harry Potter, which I am trying to avoid.

As you know, gentle reader, the year is winding down, and I tend to cut my annual reading list off the week after Christmas sometime. So I thought that this book, which I purchased in 2021, would make a fitting fin de siècle. However, I have previewed the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge, and it begins on January 2, so I might as well count the books that I finish before then as 2023. It will help pad my anemic total for the year if nothing else.

Long time readers will know I have been a big fan of Dave Barry since I seemingly stained a borrowed copy from Smurphy in high school. Although those keeping track would say, “If you’re such a big fan, Brian J., why haven’t you delved into his work since that audio book in 2020?” Maybe I’ll allude to that a bit by-and-by.

In my defense, I have also reviewed:

• Best. State. Ever. (in 2020).
• Insane City (in 2016).
• Dave Barry Does Japan (in 2011).
• Dave Barry Turns 40 (in 2011).
• Homes and Other Black Holes (in 2009).
• The Shepherd, The Angel, and Walter the Miracle Dog (in 2009).
• Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need (in 2009).
• Dave Barry’s Gift Guide to End All Gift Guides (in 2007).
• Big Trouble (in 2006).

Suffice to say, I’ve been a fan for a long time. Although I do not remember the last words my father spoke to me, I remember the last thing Barry’s father said to him (he, the father, wanted some oatmeal). So take it for a given that I’m a Dave Barry fan, okay?

Well, that’s a lot of pixel inches in self-defense. What of this book?

This book starts with a preface which abbreviates history in Dave Barry fashion (a longer treatment of American history appears in Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, Smurphy’s book that I might have soiled with snack food when it was brand new) and then reprints Barry’s year-in-review columns/articles from 2000 to 2007 (skipping 2001, as the events of September were too recent for him to be funny). Read fifteen years on, the book astonished me both with “That was twenty years ago already?” (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Kelly Clarkson wins American Idol in 2002, and so on) as well as “That was twenty years ago?” The latter stems from how many names from the headlines today appear in gags from the turn of the century. I counted 7 jokes about Donald Trump whose role on The Apprentice kept him in the cultural zeitgeist back then. But, like so often happens, I found 6 jokes about Joe Biden late, presumably based on his performance in the Senate when confirming Bush appointees in the latter’s second term. We have gags about Vladimir Putin and Robert Mueller, the iPhone, and other things as familiar today as they would have been when the jokes were fresh.

As I have mentioned (just recently–see above) that I am a Dave Barry fan from way back, I have to wonder how he “hits” with the younger generations. I mean, he spends the preface goofing on history, and I appreciated the jokes, but I wonder how much of an outlier I am because I was a bit of a nerd in school with a great degree of retention and speed of recall that led me to dominate the chapter-review Jeopardy!-style quizzes in the Western Civilization class that Smurphy and I shared. I know a lot of history that my boys do not and probably won’t ever. Plus I am not sure that the style of humor has wide appeal in 2023. Dave Barry actually retired as a regular columnist in 2004 (continuing to do his annual reviews and gift guides, though). That long ago.

I probably wonder about this every time I read a Dave Barry book, but he might well be the last American humorist with wide reach. I mean, I know that Roy Blount, Jr., is still churning out monthly columns and Doug Larsen is still working–or they were the last time I had subscriptions to magazines where they plied their trade–but Barry had reach, and eventually had a television show based on his life. Starring Harry Anderson, for crying out loud. I am not sure anyone could ever recreate that. Certainly not in print.

It looks as though Barry, like many other authors (Hiaasen, Pearson, and so on), turned to young adult books in the 21st century, which was a good business move as the YA market was just about the last refuge of big-selling books. It also means that I probably won’t find them at book sales since I don’t hit the children’s books sections (and the old, unsorted book sales for the Friends of the Christian County Library and Friends of the Clever Library seem to have gone by the wayside). But I still have plenty of other Barry titles to discover in the adult humor sections because he was pretty prolific in the 80s and 90s.

I picked this book up right after Brett Favre: The Tribute. Actually I pulled them from the Nogglestead to-read stacks at the same time, which is appropriate: I bought them together in an online order from ABC Books during the big No-No of March 2020.

Like the Favre book, this book comes out in what would turn out to be the middle part of Patrick’s racing career. She has moved up the ranks and placed fourth in the Indianapolis 500 as part of her open-wheel racing career, but she has not peaked (she later placed third in the Indianapolis 500) nor yet moved to NASCAR nor appeared on the GoDaddy home page or Super Bowl commercials.

The book clocks in at 128 pages with index, and it does not focus exclusively on Patrick. I mean, it does talk a bit about her youth, some success she had in kart racing that led her to go to England to a minor league racing team and then back to the states and to 2005. It talks about her media success and the attention given to her when she does the Indianapolis 500 for the first time. It mentions her fiance (didn’t last) and has numerous photos of her at the time when she was 23 or younger.

However, the book is also an introduction to open-wheel racing as a sport. It delves some into the history, the classifications of the races, and most of all the business of it–individual racers apparently have to get their own sponsors, and they have to know how to schmooze (and develop a media persona) to succeed in addition to the technical skill in racing. As a matter of fact, the book does not actually get far into describing the technical elements of racing–one gets more hanging around Jack Baruth’s Avoidable Contact for any length of time.

But the book is an interesting mix of Patrick’s life story until then (when she was, what, 23?) and that introduction to Indy-style racing (and we’re not talking outrunning rolling boulders in ancient temples).

Definitely something worth picking up for a buck or for ordering at used book store prices during the next Great Enshackling.

Sports Illustrated must have had this book ready to go, as it was published in that brief period in which Brett Favre had retired as a Green Bay Packer but before he did his little thing and got traded to the New York Jets, for whom he would actually play (unlike his predecessor). Favre announced his retirement on March 4, 2008; the book was published March 31; and Favre started making unretirement motions on July 2. I presume that book sales cratered in summer and autumn. I bought this book as my first ABC Books online order during the great national time-out in 2020 and picked it up last week when I could not watch the football game on television (reading this book was probably better for me anyway).

When I picked up the book, I mentioned to my beautiful wife that I’d read another book on Favre earlier in the year. I am correct if I did not specify the year; I read Life After Favre in May 2021 (which led me to ask was it that long ago?)

The book is composed of numerous stories about Favre’s career from the magazine–perhaps these were all his cover stories. At the outset, it looked like it was going to be a pretty comprehensive retrospective, as the first articles are on his background, his drafting by the Falcons, his trade to the Packers, and the Packers’ playoff return and two Super Bowl appearances in the mid-1990s. Then we get a story about his painkiller addiction around the same time, and then…. Well, a gap, until it starts talking about his pending retirement (the first noises the first year he thought about it) resulting in a moving tribute followed by another article the next year about how he did not retire. Then half the book is given over to Sports Illustrated photographs not only of Favre but also other Packers of his time.

I must admit I became an active Packers fan during the later Favre years. Although I went to a couple of Packer games at Milwaukee County Stadium in the early 1990s, it was before Favre’s time, and I did not follow football then. I really started following in the early part of the century after the Packers lost to the Rams in the playoffs, buying and wearing Packers apparel to shine on my co-workers. So I missed the mid-1990s Super Bowl years, but some mentions of the early 21st century Packers teams and players resonated with me (and led me to ask was it that long ago?)

The articles are feature stories, which have a depth and richness to them that you don’t get from reading modern sports Web sites. I guess the 90s represented the swan song of magazine writing much like the 2020s might represent the swan song of human writing at all. But the sports photography–I don’t get that. Although they have crazy depth of field, everything is flattened to the foreground. Blockers a couple of yards down field? The crowd at the back of the end zone? Right there with Favre on the 20 yard line. Not my bag.

Also, for posterity, I would like to note this: In my whole life, I shall probably only read two books that mention that Leslie Nielsen had a “fart machine” that he used to make sounds of flatulence at unexpected times. The first was Surely You Can’t Be Serious. The second was this book, where the Sports Illustrated writer mentions that Nielsen had it when he and Favre played in a golf tournament together (although the journalist here mistakenly calls it a “whoopee cushion”). Friends, I will in all my life only read about this in two books, and I read those books one after the other. That’s some sort of cosmic kismet, and probably the best kind of luck I can hope for (all these losing lottery tickets piling up on my desk affirm it). Which might not be true, as I think I have Leslie Nielsen’s “autobiography” around here somewhere which might mention it depending upon how surely serious it is.

Gentle reader, after reading the story about it in the New York Post, I ordered this book immediately from Amazon. And it got hung up somewhere in, what, East St. Louis? So I requested a refund and ordered it right away again, when it got hung up again in shipping in East St. Louis. Where did these books go? I requested another refund from Amazon, but Amazon’s process got a little pissy, telling me I would have to return the copy I ordered at my own expense if it arrived. Which it did not, but thank you, Amazon: You’re rapidly falling out of being my go-to site for ordering, with your Prime membership now meaning “Sometime, Maybe Shipping” benefit. Ah, but gentle reader, after a month passed (and I got my second refund), I ordered it again, and the roving gangs stopped looting Amazon trucks as they traveled through Illinois apparently (how do you know that didn’t happen? It would be in the news? Which news? The local television station manned by four interns and two people who thought they would be good enough for the networks someday or the local daily which is down to four pages, including the comics?). For I got this copy in a couple of days, and I jumped right into it after A Knight’s Bridge Christmas.

So this book tells, in interview-style snippets from Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker and various associates, including several stars from the film and studio people, the history of the making of the film from the beginning of their collaboration together with Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison and then in Los Angeles, where they wrote Airplane! and faced rejection before they put some of their multimedia clips from the comedy theater together and got a group of theaters in California to finance Kentucky Fried Movie. Even though that film was a modest success, they still had trouble getting movie professionals to grok what they were trying to do with Airplane! which was a comedy where everyone played it like they were in a drama, no matter how ridiculous the lines were.

At any rate, I enjoyed the book. I don’t really think I’m that much of a celebrity nor fame chaser, but sometimes I do like a behind-the-scenes look at the making of movies or television shows, particularly ones I enjoy (see also Star Trek Memories). Also, as you might know, Zuckers/Abrahams/Zucker are from Milwaukee (well, Shorewood, but that’s Milwaukee enough for me), and they return frequently to their old school (unlike Steely Dan, although I guess it was Steely Dan’s college). And although I just watched Airplane! (well, a year and a half ago, which is “just” at Nogglestead), I will probably pull it out to watch again soon.

And I bought this movie at full price. Only once, but it took me three tries (and a trip to Barnes and Noble to see if it was in stock, which it was not). So let that be my endorsement.

As you know, gentle reader, I like to read a Christmas novel around Christmas time, and I generally pick them up at various places throughout the year, maybe one or two a year (I bought this one in Arkansas this summer). But when they go into the Nogglestead to-read stacks, well, they’re often lost for a very long time and especially hide well during November and December. A couple of nights I went to the stacks specifically looking for a Christmas book and could not find one. So when we were preparing to go to ABC Books for a book signing, I told my beautiful wife that I hope Mrs. E. had Christmas books. At which point she swiveled in the chair she was sitting in and said, “What about this one?” This book was there all along!

At any rate, the book is one of a series which deals with the town of Knights Bridge, Massachussetts. A new librarian moves to town from Boston with her precocious and abnormally adult-like six year old son six years after the death of her husband in an automobile accident. She meets the hard-charging emergency room doctor grandson of a longtime Knights Bridge resident who has moved into an old folks’ home when the doctor returns to help with the grandmother’s move. She (the librarian) promises to help the doctor decorate the grandmother’s house one last time. Could they–fall in love?

C’mon, man, this is a holiday romance. That’s exactly what happens!

The book really has absolutely no conflict though. I mean, the townsfolk look down on the doctor a bit because they think he neglected his grandmother. The librarian wonders if she’s ready for the romance or if she would be just a conquest for the doctor who would leave her life forever. But it’s all unserious internal conflict that gets mentioned in the protagonists’ interior monologues fairly briefly. There’s no antagonist to speak of. Just some set pieces with a bit of idealized small-town Christmas season scenes and a bit of an underdeveloped back story about how the grandfather helped the great-grandfather get over his experiences in World War II, but….

Well, if you’re looking for a simple confection with holiday themes, here you go. It has less depth than most of the Christmas books I’ve read, and the six-year-old boy is really wise beyond his years.

So I’m not likely to charge out and get others in the series, but I am not the target audience anyway.

It did not take me long (relatively) after reading Sheriff Without A Badge to pick up the fourth Harbison Mystery Western, which was the last of them that I owned at the time.

In this installment, Sheriff Harbison deals with a variety of side quests as per the usual, but the main storyline is that a man who had worked on a local farm years ago has become a successful Western novelist with a character based on Chet Harbison as the main character, and it recounts the events of Terror Near Town but with extra salaciousness and sleaze. So the townfolk start to look at him and his wife with a bit of a jaundiced eye. Meanwhile, he and his deputy and friend Pete capture a well known repeat offender as he was stealing a pig from a local widow, and they hold the dangerous miscreant without bail until his trial, but a slippery lawyer gets him off. And the man might have more thievery or revenge on his mind.

The actual murder at the Morse Inn doesn’t take place until, what, more than half way through the book? But, again, these books are westerns and now whodunits, so it works.

I finished this book last week, and last Saturday, James R. Wilder was back at ABC Books to sign his newest book. So I dragged my poor but beautiful wife up there, and apparently I made her wait whilst I talked to Wilder for an hour, leaving her starving for lunch to the point where she devised a plan to walk to a restaurant without me.

Wilder mentioned that he participates in a couple of writing groups, and that he (and they) think his writing is improving. And I have to agree, although I previously thought that the books were just growing on me. Probably they’re getting better. Undoubtedly, I will read his latest before long and maybe concur. Aside from the hunger and the pain in my underdeveloped retail muscles which screamed at me for a couple of days for standing pretty much still on carpeted concrete for an hour, the conversation with Wilder inspired me. Perhaps in 2024 I’ll actually spend some time trying to write another book instead of banging my head against modern programming paradigms in pursuit of an application that no one would use. I mean, I can write books nobody reads in my native tongue much easier.

But I bought the next book in the series and the first two for my brother for Christmas (don’t tell him), but nothing else at ABC Books, which explains why no Good Book Hunting post. I mean, the martial arts section is practically empty–just a set of martial arts flash cards of some sort that I will eventually buy because I’m a completist (I have, after all, bought two books on Tai Chi walking and a video on tae kwon do forms because that’s all they had)–and I have numerous unread books here. I glanced at the music books and found they have three books on learning to play the banjo, but I have not actually bought the banjo I saw at Relics Antique Mall. So I’ll wait until a windfall lets me make another foolish purchase before foolish book purchases in support of a potential foolish purchase.

Maybe I’m growing up.

Oh, sorry, where was I? Oh, yes, a book report. I liked it. I bought more in the line. Which is the best recommendation I can give.

Not long after I read The Barrabas Fire, I picked this up, the last volume in the series. I mean, I have only read a handful of them and have not seen them in the wild recently–not that I’ve been looking–so it’s not as satisfying as reading the last of The Executioner novels on my shelves. But it’s a little sad to reach the end, although I have plenty of books in the gaps in my collection if I am so inclined.

At any rate, I had thought that the book would not wrap things up or address the ending of the series as I expected that the books/stories would have been farmed out in such a fashion that the writer would not know this was the end, but I might have been mistaken. In this book, Barrabas wonders whether he’s getting to old or if he’s lost his focus, and he considers retirement. But first, one last job: to reclaim a Soviet scientist who defected but was snatched from a safe house in the Ozarks and whisked away to Scotland by a tech millionaire with communist sympathies who wants to return him to continue work on Icefort, a Soviet space weapon.

Barrabas assembles the remaining elements of his team, and, well, does that thing they do. Set pieces, assaults on heavily defended positions, and finis. In this case, finis finis.

The book was dated whilst it was still on the book stands. It mentions going back and forth across the Berlin Wall, and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The collapse of the Soviet bloc must have had a crazy impact on these monthly subscription thrillers with that international flavor. The ones in the actual printing pipeline–what would you do with them? The ones already on spec–do you have them re-written, or do you just pump them out there and hope for the best? Perhaps it explains why non-international thriller series like The Executioner and The Deadlands would continue on for another decade or two.

But this one does feel a bit like the end of an era, which is probably just me retconning my own midlife crisis onto it.

Oh, gentle reader. I confused this author with V.J. Schultz, whose book Truth or Dare and Other Tales I read in August. I thought it might be another book by the same author, but it is not. One could perhaps easily make the mistake as both write short stories with a little paranormal twist to them set in southwest Missouri, and the authors undoubtedly know each other as members of the same writing groups in Joplin and attendees of the same book signings (as they were in in July when I bought both books). They’re similar in those regards.

This book collects fifteen stories:

• “Clean Heist” wherein a woman discovers her boyfriend has stolen several cases of sanitizer for COVID-era profiteering. Quite a product of its time, and easily the most dated story in the bunch. COVID-era concerns dated very quickly, did they not?
• “Aunt Rose’s Cabin” in which a woman inherits her aunt’s cabin, hidden armory, and a secret that can put several government bad actors away–if she can survive their onslaught.
• “Gold Grand Prix” wherein a woman walking home after a bad date is picked up by a strangely familiar man in a Grand Prix.
• “A Bigfoot’s Dreams” wherein a freespirited female Bigfoot rankles against her traditional male counterparts.
• “Silver’s Curse” wherein a woman is saved from her abusive ex by the werewolf of her dreams.
• “Aunt Ida” wherein a woman inherits her aunt’s cabin, hidden armory, house and a secret that can put several government bad actors away is keeping Aunt Ida’s ghost from moving on.
• “Devil Rooster” about a family with a rooster that attacks them until they eat it. To be honest, it started like it might be a more horror story like Cujo or something, but instead it’s a slice of chicken life vignette.
• “One Foggy Night” wherein a woman has a car accident and is rescued by someone who looks vaguely familiar.
• “Grandma Dottie’s Secret Recipes” wherein a woman receives a collection of recipes from her disinterested cousin and wins a cooking contest/publishes a cookbook based on the overlooked recipes.
• “A Terrible Neighbor” wherein a woman detective looking for a missing person visits her neighbor and hears that the missing woman is a terrible neighbor with men coming in and out of her house in what was a respectable neighborhood. But DUN DUN DUH! The respectable neighbor being interviewed is the real terrible neighbor.
• “Gwen’s Used Books” where a used bookstore owner, upon receiving books from an estate, opens an old book and releases a ghost. Or is it a demon?
• “Yellow Bicycle” wherein a woman receives a gift of a yellow bicycle from an older neighbor whose son is moving her into assisted living, and the bike comes with a ghost.
• “Lost Sheep” wherein Little Bo Peep goes looking for her sheep. A modern mash-up of nursery rhymes.
• “Ashes in the Evening” wherein a woman becomes the victim and protector of a child-sized vampire until she is rescued by the werewolf of her dreams.
• Runaway Asses” wherein a woman calls the police because of some donkeys in her yard and earns the handsome responding officer’s respect when she steps between them and her little dog.

A little better written than the Schultz stories and a little less formulaically DUN DUN DUN! than Caroline Giammanco’s Into the Night. At 148 pages, definitely a quick read. I am pretty sure this author and Schultz are in some of the same writing groups, so it’s not surprising to see some cross-pollination. Perhaps even with Giammanco.

A pleasant read, not unlike the stuff the other members of Marquette Writers Ink and I would bang out in college. Well, more like I would as topically the other writers in the group were more less interested in genre writing.

I got this book at ABC Books in June 2021 when it must have been fresh off of the presses. Heaven knows that it had numerous typos in it, but that did not really impair my enjoyment of it. This series–I’ve already read Terror Near Town and Tough Times in Grubville–has rather grown on me.

This book takes place right after the events of Tough Times in Grubville. Chet Harbison has taken the deputy sheriff’s position in Jefferson County, but he gets a field promotion when the current sheriff has a heart attack and can no longer run the department. He stands for election and narrowly defeats a DeSoto barber / county commissioner, but as he learns, politics ain’t beanbag. He has to deal with a near-lynching of a pedophile held in his jail along with attempts to paint him as corrupt.

The book, like the others, is more of a Western in the Louis L’Amour tradition than a mystery, although the cover says they’re “A Harbison Mystery”. You get a fair amount of detail in raising cattle and farming during the Great Depression than a whodunit, but that suits me fine.

As I mentioned, the book has some typos in it, which lead to some false positive ackshuallys on my part. It mentions the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I verified that the Post-Dispatch papers were combined before the 1930s. It mentions Eagan’s Rats, and I thought, aha! I’ve got you now because I know the St. Louis gang was Egan’s Rats, but apparently the first mention was a typo as the secon mention spells it correctly. There’s a spot where he mentions a quarter mile hike into the woods that might be taxing to an old doctor, and I was going to call that out, but then I recalled when my elderly friend “Roberta” came to Nogglestead, and we went to the Battlefield Park for its Independence Day festival, she had trouble with far less level ground. I am a little less forgiving in him saying that someone is going fishing for perch. Perch, as native Wisconsinites know them, are not found in Missouri. Not walleye, not yellow perch. They have a couple species down here classified as perch, but they’re not really the eating fish we know up north.

Still, I liked the book, the pacing, the style of writing which is more Hemingway than Faulkner (or L’Amour) suit me well. I bought the fourth book in the series last August, and I will probably pick it up before long. And probably before I have to go to ABC Books to buy newer entries in the series.

I’ve also decided to pick up one or more of these books for my brother for Christmas. So don’t tell him if you see him.

Sweet Christmas, gentle reader, but sometimes these book reports, or at least the “research” in them, makes me feel old. In this case, I have discovered that the last time that I read a book in this series was in 2014 (The Barrabas Hit, #29 in the series). And, in my research (which means my trip to Fantastic Fiction), this entry, the 32nd in the series, is the penultimate one–the other that I have on my shelf, #33, is the last. Which kind of fits my general fin-de-siècle mood. Everything is coming to an end.

But enough about me: Let me briefly talk about me reading this book. Barrabas and his team (the same one from The Barrabas Hit) are hired to help a deposed president/king of a tourist-attraction archipelago in the Indian Ocean recover his throne. They face off against the new leader and his army of mostly untrained African mercenaries and a big boss French mercenary. So they come ashore, set up some guerrila ops, and then have the big battle with the tower defense of a particularly nice resort.

So a set of, well, set pieces and finis. Not a whole lot of threat, really, to the main characters, not a lot of character development, but it is a men’s adventure paperback. The literary equivalent of the 80s action film. If you’re into that sort of thing–as I am–you’ll enjoy this book and its type for a quick read amidst heavier books (well, not that Wizard or Wizard were particularly weighty, but…)

I will probably pick up the last of the series before long. But do not worry: I have plenty of other Gold Eagle paperbacks mostly from Executioner spin-off titles which I have not really gotten into since I finished the last of my Executioner paperbacks last June.

Well, after reading Wizard by Ozzie Smith, of course I immediately picked up Wizard by John Varley. As it happened, they were close together, relatively, on the to-read shelves in the hallway which we just turned over as we painted the hall.

It turns out that this book is the middle book in a trilogy–I did not know that when I started it, as it does not seem to pick up en media res but instead introduces us to a couple of characters who will factor into the story and establish some world building. It starts with Chris, a schizophrenic in California who goes into the embassy of Gaea and meets some Gaeans–well, Titanides, who are centaur-like except that they have both sets of genitalia on the horse-part at the back but a single set of human genitalia on the front–heaven help us, this will be explored later. Chris seeks to visit Gaea, the god-like computer running a small Ringworld-lite space station in the outer part of the solar system as Gaea can cure his condition. Meanwhile, a woman raised in a woman-only society on a space station at a LaGrange point seeks a similar audience with the computer to heal her epilepsy.

They both make their way to Titan, the space station, and climb the kilometers-long cable to the hub where Gaea, represented by an old woman avatar, resides. She’s grown bored, having created and destroyed civilizations and races on her habitat over the millions of years, and she in recent millenia has started to have to deal with insubordinate local computer systems which run different regions of the planets. So Gaea encourages “pilgrims” to come try to visit her, and they can choose to live in her hub without their diseases or they can go out and do something “heroic” to earn a permanent cure. Both pilgrims decide to try something heroic, and they link up with Rocky, the titular Wizard, and her associate Gaby who is an engineer doing contract work for Gaea.

Turns out that Rocky and Gaby were the stars of Titan, the first book in the series, but they’re kind of introduced as individual characters, so early on it does not require a lot of knowledge of that book to get into this book.

So the party sets off, nominally to do something heroic, but easy heroic quests have already been done. Few dragons remain; the idols have lost their jeweled eyes; and so on. But Gaby and Rocky use the journey, nominally a survey of the regions and interviews with the sometimes rebelious, sometimes obsequious, regional computers, to determine what allies they might have in an attempt to overthrow Gaea.

So it’s kind of like Ringworld with some fantasy elements to it. In addition to the centaur-like creatures, the book features “angels” who have wings and a variety of other beasts, all created by Gaea for amusement or to set the stage for later heroics. As the party goes along and encounters difficulties, members die, so one does not know who might make it through the journey–and the actual point of the journey, from Gaby and Rocky’s intent, only becomes clear later as one lies dying and explains why the odds were so stacked against them.

And although the book starts off as though it were not part of a trilogy–with a good intro to the world (well, space station) and characters new and old, the ending makes clear that the story is To Be Continued. Although some survive and find resolution (abruptly), it ends with a vow of vengeance.

So it was an okay read; a bit disappointing in that it leads into the next book, Demon (and when I checked out the science fiction shelves at ABC Books last weekend, they only had a copy of Wizard–no first or third book available).

I did mention that the Titanides have both male and female horse genitalia in the rear and one set of human genitalia up front. The book goes into detail about how Titanides procreate, and it’s complicated, starting with the fact that the Wizard has to put the unfertilized egg in her mouth to activate it, and then it has to be fertilized both in the back and in the front and…. Well, okay, it’s weird. But a helpful appendix shows you the many ways it can occur between female and male Titanides. Also, Titanides and humans, as it turns out.

Also, I flagged a couple things in this book on a common theme. When we did our recent trivia night, one of the categories was words without the vowels. One of the questions was MSM, and my beautiful wife and I had the same answer: miasma. Cooler heads amongst our team realized that this word was more likely museum. But right after that, I found the word miasma in the book. Then, one night at dinner, I asked my boys if they knew what portage meant. They did not, so I explained it. And then I found the word in the book. On a later evening, my wife said the word offal, which would fit right into the book and…. Well, that word was not in it. But talking about two words that showed up in this book shortly thereafter probably speaks to the belief that the AI and algorithms are listening to us because we spot patterns about what we talk about and what ads we see on the Internet. And that lesson is: The AI in this forty-year-old Book Club Edition is smart enough to not also display offal to establish the pattern and make me suspicious. Truly, truly, I say to you, the world is magic and duplicitous. Which might also be the lesson of this trilogy.

So in looking back at the two other books of Varley’s that I’ve read–Millennium and The Ophiuchi Hotline, I’ve found them kind of meh, but I remember them fondly. If I had found one or the other of the books in this series this weekend, I would have bought it. And I have one or more books by John Varley on my bookshelves, and I’m not likely to recoil from them when I come across them in the future. Perhaps the next time I paint. In 2035 or so.