Category: Book Report

This is the first book I’ve completed in the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge. I have applied it to the Female Detective category. The main character is a detective, a former police officer, and the action is more urban action than I think the Cozy category would allow. The two are kind of redundant, although from what I have read in the genre definition somewhere on the Internet, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot series would be cozies. But we will see–Cozy might be the last category I read if I make it through all fifteen.

In the book, a former police officer turned private detective after her husband was murdered is scheduled to meet a college friend in Forest Park, but when she waits for the friend who does not show, a laser dot appears on her. Another friend saves her from gunshots, and so she has to wonder where her no-show friend, the Lizzy Smith of the title, is. She starts to investigate, and others in their close circle of college friends start to die–and her husband might have been the first. Eventually, she discovers that it might be tied to a dance club fire that killed several people and left a potential Olympian without legs. And Lizzy might be part of it.

It’s an okay book, paced well enough and well-written. As the book takes place in St. Louis and was written by someone from Southwest Missouri, I was watching for little gotchas. In one instance, the protagonist and another woman go to a strip club on the corner of Euclid and Kingshighway. When I lived in Old Trees, I remembered Euclid nearby–and I guess it’s in the Central West End, too, but running parallel with Kingshighway. It actually does intersect with Kingshighway far north of the Central West End–in an area where two small white women (the main character is 5′ 1″) would probably not go. The book has some misspellings and misnomers that spellchecking would have missed–Kingshighway appears as two words, for example–that a closer proofreading by a native would have caught. On the other hand, she talks about a 40-caliber Glock, and I thought that was a mistake–but I heard it a second time, so I double-checked, and the Glock 23 is chambered for that round, so it’s not wrong, but I’m not sure how common they are outside of women-generated detective fiction. Also, the rifle with the laser site is identified as chambered in .243, but I’ve always seen that as .243 Winchester. But that’s just from rifle magazines, not real conversations.

At any rate, I bought a number of her books in November (that long ago already?), and I don’t dread reading the next one. I can’t say when I’ll get to the others, though, as I do have this Winter Reading Challenge to tackle yet.

Two and a half years ago, I picked up this book ABC Books after having read about the author in Garden and Gun magazine–a 2016 issue, which I was then four years late in reading. When I did my Good Book Hunting post, I said I’d get to the author eventually, and that was only two and a half years, which isn’t bad comparatively.

At any rate, this book is in the mystery section, but it is not a mystery. It’s in the mystery section because the author later became known for one or more mystery series, and the publisher who put this book back into print wanted people to buy it, too. So, voilà! A “mystery.”

But the book is more a serious, perhaps literary, novel about a Texan Korean War veteran whose service was briefly as a corpsman and less briefly as a prisoner of war, a member of a longstanding line of Texas heroes and businessmen starting with an ancestor who was a legendary lawman and a father that was thought to be a shrewd businessman. The protagonist, such as he is, is now an attorney serving an eccentric oilman and industry clients. He’s running for Congress and deals with a senator who looks forward to welcoming him to the fold and a mysterious power broker/fundraiser who is seemingly appended to the senator. He, the protagonist, is also a raging alcoholic who spends all day drinking whiskey, and he cheats on his wife with Mexican prostitutes–the first scene in the book is leaving his home and his oil wells for a trip to a cheap motel with one such on his way to a political event. He’s got an older brother trying to keep him on track, perhaps for his own purposes, and a cold wife. Just when you’re wondering if the alcohol or the whoring is going to do him in, an old army buddy calls from a small town jail in an agricultural area. He’s been working with some of the workers to unionize the agricultural workers, and the strike breakers and the local law enforcement have just about killed him. When the protagonist gets him out, they do kill him, and the protagonist takes up the cause of the farm workers–it doesn’t hurt that they drink a lot, too, and one of them is an absolute babe from back east. This allows him to work out his demons from the war (as a POW, he was eventually broken) and to find more meaning than coasting on his family’s wealth and fame.

So it’s a bit of Ross Thomas meets Larry McMurtry as well as a commentary on Texas, noble unionizers, and the change from Democratic political dominance to Republican political dominance and the Viet Nam war taking place about the time of the book’s writing. The text is a little bit lush, with again a lot of color being thrown around to describe things (I noticed this in The Red Badge of Courage as well). A little slower paced than a mystery, but not a bad book. Its political leanings are there, but it doesn’t hit you over the head with them as later authors might.

So not a bad read. I finished this book at the beginning of the month (well, all right, New Year’s Eve, but the Book Reading Year starts early), so it’s not eligible for the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge. I’m not sure where I could have slotted it anyway–it’s certainly not a page turner, and it’s 226 pages long. But it hasn’t dulled me on the author, which is good as I still have a couple of his other books which might actually be mysteries somewhere. Probably close in the stacks to where I got this one, but I have forgotten where that is.

Ah, gentle reader, I had a hard time writing this particular book report. For this young woman is a New York Times best-selling author, and she has appeared on numerous television programs and many venues, reading her poetry to large live audiences. And, as you might know, I have self-published a collection of poetry (Coffee House Memories–surely you have not forgotten even as you have not bought it!) that sold dozens of copies. Or at least a dozen. Perhaps.

So you might consider anything negative I have to say sour grapes. You might even be right! However, here’s what I thought.

I bought this collection of poetry in August, and although it is not my wont this year to read poetry or artists’ monographs during football games, but this would have been one I could have browsed as the poems are generally short.

According to a quick Internet search, the author is a more modern InstaPoet who wrote and illustrated this book when she was 21, and she’s a perfomance poet, although meta tags from various Web sites don’t indicate this is the rough-and-tumble poetry slam/open mic world or more genteel events where she is the featured poet given in small rooms or auditoriums at universities. Probably the latter, although in interviews she says she came up through the open mic circuit. They might be friendlier in Canada than the Wabash or the Venice Cafe, though.

So what of the poetry? Most of it is only a couple of lines, a lot like a thoughtful tweet. Some of the sentiments thematically resonate with me, or at least with where I would have been in my twenties–I mean, look at much of the material in , particularly the reproductions of Unrequited (released when I was 22) and Deep Blue Shadows (released when I was 23). They share a bit of the cynical romanticism, the hardened vulnerability….

But some, not so much, as they rely a bit on modern feminist celebrations:

the goddess between your legs
makes mouths water

That are really not for me. That is a whole poem, so you can see what I mean by being tweet-length. What is it? Does it somehow describe the vagina as a deity separate from the vagina-bearer that somehow causes a salivary response akin to good food or a conditioned response to Russian bell-ringing, or is a simplistic and twee feminist self-affirmation or reclamation of sexual power? I’ll take Occam’s razor to it: The simplest answer is probably true.

So some of the shorter poems have a good sentiment but are undeveloped, and when the pieces are longer, they’re unrefined. Overall, the work reminds me of Pierre Alex Jeanty whom I read earlier in the year and who is also more of an Internet “influencer” than a true poet.

The volume I have has some poems or lines therein highlighted–I’m not sure whether this means the books was used as a textbook or if the previous owner marked bits from favorite poems that way. It’s not how I do it, of course–if I like a poem a lot, I memorize it. And have been known to recite them at open mics. Including Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which is, what, 20 pages? Yeah, you don’t uncork those too often at open mic nights. Certainly not at the Wabash or the Venice Cafe.

So, overall: Some promise, but a lot of emotion dumps that express but do not evoke. Still, if I see one of her later volumes at ABC Books, I’ll probably pick it up.

I thought this might be the last of the manga that I bought at the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton garage sale in 2015, but extensive studies have determined that although I have read Shaman King #17 and Warriors: The Rise of Scourge, I don’t see a book report for Naruto #15. So I guess I will find that seven years hence.

At any rate, this is early in the series. An alchemist, which is kind of a magician, has lost his arm and has a robotic one to help him with his alchemy/spellcasting. The attack that left him in such a state also destroyed his brother’s body, so he, the fullmetal alchemist, infused a suit of armor with the brother’s soul. A serial killer–well, we would call it a serial killer in a modern suspense thriller, but really it’s an unknown supervillain of some sort–is hunting down the government alchemists. As the story develops, they learn that it’s a survivor of a government suppression of a religious sect, the suppression which used government-sponsored alchemists to perform a genocide on the sect. Pardon me, but what is the verb for genocide? “Perform” seems tame.

So we get four chapters in the saga, where the brothers and other government alchemists battle the unknown assailant and discover his reasons, but not why he is so powerful. Four out of many, many such chapters, and of course it’s comic book form, so a lot of comic art for little story.

So I’ve not really gotten into manga, although I have read a comic book or two. But they don’t count toward the annual total, unlike graphic novels or manga. So I will eventually read that remaining volume when I find it.

I bought this nice looking (well, better than the scan, and probably better than I started it) paperback from sixty-five years ago at the Friends of the Christian County Libary book sale in October 2019, and it came with its own little story:

Double Star, a Robert Heinlein juvie that earned me a book sale friend. Another guy saw it and asked where I got it; I mentioned it was mixed in, and that there were not others, or I would have them in my hands. He told me of the collection he’d received as a gift, a trash bag full of classic science fiction, and I envied it. Later, he approached me to offer me the copy of Friday that he’d found, but, come on: The later Heinlein hardbacks are easy to come by. At any rate, I’ll hit this one up sometime; I’d say “Soon,” but I’m surprised to see how many Heinlein books I come across in the library here that I have not yet read.

Spoiler alert: It was not really soon unless you’re counting in Nogglestead to-read time, in which a little over three years is actually soon.

The book was stacked amongst some of the paperbacks I bought in Berryville, Arkansas, which includes Diagnosis: Murder: The Silent Partner (can one put two colons in a title) and Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer–when I came across it, I moved it to the top of the stack and started it shortly thereafter.

But, ah, gentle reader–although this book is only 128 pages, it took me a week to read it. Some nights I gave over to watching films, including Highlander, Die Hard, and Die Hard 2, but that’s not the only reason. This book is in tiny print, and the text is in full midcentury paragraphs, where even the dialog is dense. Coupled with a cat and a couple of kittens who hop onto my lap and demand attention by sitting at my reading focal point, and suddenly it takes me days to read essentially a mid-century juvie rocket-jockey book.

So it’s a pretty simple plot: A two-bit actor is down on his luck and is down to his last dime when he tries to befriend a spacer on the run, presumably, who comes into the dive bar where the actor is drinking. As it happens, the man pretends not to be a spacer but has a job offer for the actor. While discussing the matter in private, they’re interrupted by some opposing forces whom our heroes dispatch–and once they are off Earth and on their way to Mars, the situation becomes clearer: a Parliamentary politician, currently out of power, has been kidnapped, and his people need the actor to stand in for the missing man to participate in a delicate ceremony while they search for the missing man. Complications arise, and the actor must determine how much further the show must go on.

So it’s an interesting story, but the pacing was a little slower than I’d prefer, and the blocks of tiny text made for a less enjoyable reading experience. Still, it is a very old paperback, designed to be affordable by young people (and to be put into library bindings). I suppose if I am going to complain about it, I could pick up one of the many, many hardbacks with larger print in them that I have available–including some large print editions, no doubt.

Still, I look forward to the other Heinleins I uncover here in the stacks or find in the wild. Even if I’ve already read them. So let that be my endorsement.

As you might know, gentle reader, I like to read a Christmas novel around Christmas. And although I pick them up here and there over the year at book sales and garage sales in anticipation of Christmas to come, once they’re in the disorganized to-read shelves of Nogglestead, they’re gone for years.

I mean, I looked. I have a number of Lloyd Douglas (author of Home for Christmas) novels in Collier’s editions, but they’re not Christmas novels. I have another Thomas Kinkade/Katherine Spencer Cape Light novel, but unlike A Christmas Promise, it’s not Christmas-themed. And so on.

Well, I found this book which is not a novel. Instead, it’s a collection of poems, short stories, devotions, and personal essays recounting events that seem custom-made for personal essays about Christmas. That last, of course, is out-of-step with the Christmas spirit, but I’m a bit out-of-step myself. I have not gone gonzo on the gift-giving. Of course, it has not really snowed–a dusting, almost an imagining, which resulted in measurable snowfall at all points of the compass but not here.

So: It’s a collection of things you might have found, well, not in Ideals magazine, but collected in many mid-century general interest magazines (one of the pieces previously appeared in Reader’s Digest) along with a couple more modern things like Max Lucado.

The short fiction is probably the best; many of the essays are also probably short fiction, and they’re okay. The poetry is akin to grandmother poetry, although the perpetrators might not have been grandmother aged at the time of the writing. The devotional-kind of bits are a bit rote.

Actually, in looking at the end matter which points out where the items originally appeared, the best of the lot comes from the mid-century, and much of the lesser bits come from the 1990s. Which, gentle reader, was 25 years ago–about the age now that the “old” stuff in the book comes from. And it’s sad to see the decline to that point.

At any rate, it’s 156 pages with the end matter. Most of the stories are only a couple of pages, shorter than the things in the contemporaneous Dark Love, and I enjoyed it more.

Although I wish I had found a proper Christmas novel.

I have, however, found an Ideals magazine compendium of Christmas things. The kittens knocked down an old Christmas Ideals magazine from the vintage magazine shelf in the Sauder printer stand serving as the end table in the den, but it looks like I have not mentioned it on this blog. Perhaps I have not read it–I have not read many of the vintage science fiction magazines I got–somewhere, perhaps in my estate sales days. So perhaps I have not read that one wall the way through.

Will I read the compendium I have found recently before Christmas? Before the end of the year? That’s the cliffhanger in this book report. I will say I have not yet started it, although I might carry it to the chairside book accumulation point if I can find it again.

When I read Monk book by this author in February, I said:

I don’t think I have any more Monk titles by Goldberg in my library, but I do have several in the Diagnosis: Murder series that I will get to before too long (but I am more likely to finish other series/sets that I’ve started recently).

Well, that prophesy has proven true for sure. I completed a number of series, or at least the volumes I had (the Doubleday children’s books, the Executioner book, the James Blish Star Trek books, etc.), and after I read the Conan movie tie-in books that I bought in Berryville, Arkansas, in July 2021, I thought I might enjoy some of the other paperbacks I bought at that time. So far, so good.

I am only aware of the Diagnosis: Murder program whose canon this book extends. My mother liked the show, and I sometimes caught bits of it when visiting her. I knew Scott Baio was in it, but was replaced (or replaced) the other guy. I knew Dick van Dyke, depicted on the cover, was a doctor who wore roller skates at times (actually, Heelies shoes), and his son was the cop. But that was not it. So when the action started in the book, I was not sure whether to think of Dr. Travis as Scott Baio or the other guy, but Scott Baio’s character, Dr. Stewart, makes an appearance, and the book describes him as looking like a grown-up Chachi, which not only identified the characters for me but also captured a bit of the show’s side jokes as well as Goldberg’s style.

At any rate, the book has two murders: a wealthy, type-A restaurant chain owner needs a new kidney, and his son volunteers one of his. So the two junior doctors played by Scott Baio and the other guy perform the operations, but the kidney recipient dies of a penicillin allergy that might have been caused by a near-pharmaceutical antibiotic administered by the cocky Dr. Stewart–but Dr. Sloan had given him the same antibiotic without a reaction some weeks before. So who wanted to kill the man–or to frame Dr. Stewart for negligence?

In the other, Dr. Sloan is added to a cold case task force by a deputy chief trying to neutralize his meddling in homicide. But Dr. Sloan uncovers what might be a serial killer who is killing by mirroring the methods of other serial killers. Officially, the police want this theory to go away, as it might throw into doubt the conviction of the actual serial killers, but investigation seems to be proving Dr. Sloan right, especially when he is the target of a drive-by attempt that would have filmed wonderfully (but didn’t translate as well to the page).

I mean, the book is almost 300 pages, but I knew who would turn out to be the killers very early. Still, it was an enjoyable read to the finish.

I did flag a couple things:

It was a pricey, and exclusive, stretch of sand. Most of the houses on Broad Beach belonged to actors, directors, big-shot producers and a few over-compensated, perk-fat CEOs.

Wow, okay, but some of those outside of Hollywood might have heaped opprobium on people who work in Hollywood, too.

“What about the bullets?”
“We’ve recovered some shells,” Rykus said. “They’re on the way to the lab.”

Oy, vey. I am not sure if I am out-of-touch with actual gun owners or if Goldberg (or Lee Child), but I don’t know anyone who calls rounds or casings shells. Shells go into shotguns, and they’re what’s left after the shot has gone down range or into fowl (or, depending upon the gunner, near the fowl–all right, all right, all right, also slugs/deer, but that’s rare).

So I am pleased with this other series of Goldberg, which is good as I have several. I’d like to think he’s written them himself, but he’s a big-shot producer, so it’s possible, maybe probable, that someone else wrote them for him. But he’s not quite the brand of James Patterson or Tom Clancy to farm the work out quite that much, ainna?

Regardless, I’ll pick up the other Diagnosis: Murder books by and by. Probably too late to clear all the books I own the series in 2022, though, as I have four more to go.

I bought these books and a couple of other Conan/Robert E. Howard paperbacks last summer in Berryville, Arkansas, and as I just watched the films in July, I thought I would pick them up. I am spending a lot of reading time this year on paperbacks, so why change now?

These books differ from some movie novelizations in that the authors were already steeped in the Conan mythos as they’d written original Conan short stories and/or novels in decades before the movies appeared. So you get a lot of depth in the books that you don’t get in a lot of cases where the novelizinator works quickly from a script.

I summarized the plots of Conan the Barbarian in the movie post thus:

In Conan the Barbarian, young Conan sees his father and mother killed before him when a raiding party strikes their undefended village, and he is taken as a slave. He grows up, becomes strong from his labor, and then ends up as a gladiator traveling with Mongol-types, still a slave, until he is released. He flees to a dead area where he finds Mako playing a sorcerer of questionable ability and seeks his revenge on the leader of the band who killed his family and razed his village, Thulsa Doom played by James Earl Jones. Of course, the man is now the leader of a spreading cult of snake-handlers. Oh, and Sandahl Bergman plays Valeria, a fighter-thief that Conan loves.

It’s as good of a read as the movie is a good movie, if that makes sense–it reads like a standalone novel, not something that simply recaptures the film so you can remember it. And it does not include photos from the movie. Perhaps the intent was to make this a backlist book that outlasted the movie.

I described the plot of this film also in that movie post:

In Conan the Destroyer, Conan is given a quest to escort the virgin niece, played by Olivia d’Abo, of a queen who is destined to restore the horn of a sleeping god. So Conan and a thief start off with the girl and her bodyguard, played by Wilt Chamberlain. They rescue Mako and a female warrior, played by Grace Jones, from a hostile tribe and they go do some sidequests and then the main quest and discover they’ve been played, and the queen is going to sacrifice the virgin to resurrect the god. So Conan has to slay the tall bodyguard and then the resurrected god.

Actually, in the case of this book, it’s a good thing that I just watched the film as this first printing has an erratum in the binding. After page 256, when Conan and his party are storming the castle, the frontspiece, title page, and the first 31 pages of the book appear again instead of the climactic showdown and end matter. I would think this might be collectible, but, c’mon, man, collecting, paperbacks, errata, and all that are so 20th century. You can find copies of this book on Ebay for $10 without mention of the errata (well, perhaps that means not all of the first printing was botched). However, if I find another copy in the wild, I might have to pick it up if it finishes the story, and perhaps I will read it again–or just the end of it. Time will tell if I count that as a complete book–but I sure counted this one as a whole book.

I shall probably delve into those other Conan paperbacks by and by–and I have already started one of the Diagnosis: Murder paperbacks I picked up on that trip.

I got this book at a book signing last month whereupon I got not only a copy for me but also for my horse-loving aunt who lives with my grandmother in Wisconsin. As I have finally gotten around to finishing a letter to my grandmother and mailing the book, I thought I would delve into it just so I can say I’ve read it if it comes up in a Facebook conversation.

Which is kind of funny: The copy of the book I sent to Wisconsin lie upon the table for a couple of weeks until I sent the letter, and now my copy has rested upon the table for several days since I read it and before I wrote this report on it, and it’s a large book, consuming a lot of real estate on the desk. So with this report, I’ll be able to clear a little space.

At any rate, it is what you would expect: some text about the photographer’s introduction to the wild horse herds while camping over a decade ago. Shannon County apparently supports four herds, but the herds are not very big–ten or so horses roughly–so they’re not like herds of buffalo from horizon to horizon. They very in levels of shyness, which means there are more from the Shawnee Creek herd than the Broadfoot, Rocky Creek, or Round Spring herds. The photographer has caught them in a variety of seasons, dispositions, and poses, from running across a river to emerging from a fogbank.

So it’s a cool book, not a long read, but an interesting look into the places nearby which are still a bit wild. As I mentioned, well, probably explained to my grandmother, I pass through Shannon County not far from these herds when I drive to Poplar Bluff. The book gives the history of the herds and the attempts to preserve them as well as the photographer’s story–the book raised money for the organization founded to protect them–and one of the headlines reproduced is from the front page of The Current Local, a paper out of Van Buren which was one of the first of my adopted hometown newpapers to which I subscribed.

Or maybe I’m just getting old that I’m relating to local books more acutely these days, especially the ones related to local history (see also Buff Lamb: Lion of the Ozarks). I’ve lived at Nogglestead for 13 years, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, and the experience of having lived somewhere for a while might be altering my perception of time and my place in the world. Or perhaps I’ve had too much coffee today.

As I mentioned when I spoke of the audiobook version of Pure Drivel, I had already picked up another Steve Martin work. This book is that work–I picked it up in between short stories in a collection that the kittens suggested by knocking it off of the shelves, but I was not powering through the collection in one go. This book, though, I read in a couple of nights even though it is longer than Shopgirl.

It is basically a memoir of the early parts of his career, from his teenaged years when he worked at Disneyland and Knotts’ Berry Farm learning magic, standup comedy, and whanot through his taking his show on the road and kind of trailblazing a new wacky style of comedy and then through his movie successes of the 1980s, although he only touches on that. He doesn’t get much into his personal life except to say that he had a rocky relationship with his father when he was younger, and it does not go a lot into his later relationships. It’s definitely through the lens of the standup work and how it evolved and how it went from fulfilling to feeling like he was just playing the role of Steve Martin in his larger arena tours after his career took off.

It’s an interesting read both as a time capsule of being a young man who wants to embark on an entertainment career as well as a glimpse into being young a couple of decades before I was young. And it’s written with Martin’s characteristic intelligence and grace with a touch of self-effacement that endears the writer to the reader.

So worth looking for more, although Martin has only written a handful of books in his time.

This was the second book suggested to me by the kittens who were sequestered in my office for a time, and they suggested books for me to read by knocking them off of my to-read bookshelves. But they might as well have knocked this book into their cat litter, for I did not like it very much, and I am no longer taking recommendations from the kittens.

The front cover bills it as Twenty Two All-Original Tales of Lust and Obsession. Given that it’s headlined by Stephen King, I thought it would be a horror collection, but really, it’s a more crime fiction with a lot of wetwork and a bunch of sex (deviancy is a plus to the editors). It’s not horror but horrific. Many of the stories try to get into the minds of the insane, who then have deviant sex and murder people.

It took me a while to get through the book, reading several others in between the stories. Because many of the stories were very similar. Breaking it up kept it a little fresher.

And as this book is from 1995, it does contain the two baddest words in the universe: Trump and, you know, the other one. Which could be used in print in living memory as a marker that whomever spoke it was backward and not a good person. But no more.

Well, make this my year of completing sets, or at least groups of books that I have. I mean, I finished all of the books in the Executioner series that I own; I finished the set of James Blish Star Trek books I had on my to-read shelves; I finished the Doubleday children’s books I’d picked up, perhaps for my children but never shared with them. Since I only had three books in the six-book Ashton Ford series, why not?

Okay, so I did not know what to expect when I read the first in the series, Ashes to Ashes, in 2018. And when I read Life to Life in October, I thought maybe the series had an arc it was completing–after all, in it, Ashton impregnated a televangelist while she was in jail and they were getting it on in the astral plane, so I expected something to come of that. Maybe in the fifth book, but not here.

In this book, Ashton follows an unidentified flying object into the hills above town and discovers a nude woman. It’s an acquaintance of his, an actress of some reknown, and he helps her. He discovers that she’s involved with what might be some extraterrestrials and might be an alien.

So basically, that’s the schtick of the books: a pedestrian suspense plot with an overlay of woo-woo. In this case, it’s an alien civilization advanced of ours, monitoring ours and hoping to have us rejoin them in the future, but right now, it’s dolphins (the original heirs to this world), rebirth, and UFOs.

We get pages of Ashton thinking these things through again. Whereas Mack Bolan sometimes would go a couple of paragraphs or a page or so into philospophy or morals; however, in these books, Pendleton gives Ashton a lot of room to muse on the paranormal, and it detracts from the mundane plot or even the woo-woo.

You know, when reading these books, I cannot help compare them to the later Heinlein, where he turned toward free love and whatnot. Both Pendleton and Heinlein were Navy men in World War II, and their books took a different tone when they got older and as they faced their own mortality. I should like to say my books might take a similar turn, but I don’t have a body of work from my youth the mark any differences as I age.

At any rate, I can understand why this series did not go very far. It’s a little wordy, and Pendleton does not balance or blend the woo-woo with the normal plots very smoothly. But perhaps he pioneered the way, a bit, for modern urban fantasy. He certainly didn’t hinder it.

As I mentioned, gentle reader, we have taken in some kittens, which means that they spent the first couple of weeks at Nogglestead sequestered in my office while the other cats got used to their smell and presence and until the veterinarian could pronounce them with a clean bill of health. As such, it has been quite an adventure, as they scamper and romp, most excitingly among the cords and cables that power my QA laboratory–many mornings, I would come into the office and have to troubleshoot what they turned off or unplugged overnight before I could get to work. They’ve also made some book recommendations by knocking the books off of the bookshelves, so I have started to take their advice and read what they’ve knocked down, starting with this book.

This book is the middle of a trilogy, apparently–and the first book, At The Little Brown House, ends in the moments before this book begins, so it took me a minute to figure out who the people are. The story centers on Peace Greenfield, a middle child in a set of six orphaned sisters. As the book begins, they’re adopted by a university president who is grandparent aged, and they go to his house and learn various and sundry lessons there.

Peace likes to give to the poor, and she’s often duped by ragamuffins and hoboes who show up for a handout, but she learns that some individuals who arrive are not in desperate straits but want the money to fund their non-working lifestyle or for alcohol. So her adopted father explains she should give to charities that can filter and follow-up on giving.

She meets the Lilac Lady, an injured and dying former singer from a well-to-do family who lives next door but behind vast hedges. The Lilac Lady shut herself off from the world after her accident that left her invalid, but Peace comes over and gets her to open up. Peace meets kids at the local orphan home and gets an inside view after briefly changing places with a resident who looks like her. She then gets the Lilac Lady to host a party for the orphans to the benefit of both.

When she returns to her old town to visit old friends, a scarlet fever outbreak at her new home forces her to live with her friends for a number of months, and she makes friends and has adventures there, too.

So it’s not a single plot piece, but some of the elements come together at a big Independence Day party at the end (as I assume happened in the first book, as they are leaving a party early on). But it’s a series of smaller adventures with little life lessons in them an examples of a child having a good heart. She’s like an older generation Ramona Quimby.

So this is a children’s book, presumably geared to little girls, perhaps even to be read to little girls. But let’s look into the language used, ainna?

Having a naturally light-hearted, merry disposition, Peace did not find it hard work to “smile and talk,” but it was hard, very hard, to restrain her generous impulses to give away everything she possessed to those less fortunate than herself, and it soon became a familiar sight to see her fly excitedly into the house straight to the study where the busy President spent many hours each day, exclaiming breathlessly as she ran, “Oh, grandpa, there is a little beggar at the door in perfect rags and tatters! Just come and look if she doesn’t need some clothes. And she is so cold and pinched up with being empty. Gussie has fed her, but can’t I give her some things to wear? I’ve more than I need, truly!”

This is not diction from a children’s book in the 21st century.

So a good book to read to your kids, but also a good artifact of the way we were.

The book itself only bears the copyright date, 1914, but not a printing/publishing date–but it doesn’t look as though this would have been in print for decades. So the pages are a bit brown, but the binding is tight, and it’s not disintegrating like The Saint Meets His Match. So that’s kind of nice. And helpful considering how it was suggested to me.

Well, I seasoned this book well enough. I bought it in October 2012 at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale. It must have been on the shelves at the Christian County Library for a while, as it has pockets for the cards they used to use for checkouts and it has the bar code for computer checkouts, which meant that it was probably on the bookshelves in a small southwest Missouri library for nearly forty years. Hopefully, they put it into the book sale to make more room for books, albeit by 2012, books were well into being pushed aside for computers.

I have to admit that I’ve confused this book with The Broken Spears, a book about the Spanish conquest of the vulgar Aztecs that I bought in 2008. I’ve gone looking for that book a time or two on my shelves, but did not find it. I must have found this book at one point, as it had one of my bookmarks in it (no Found Bookmarks post–it was a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale whose date was after I owned the book), but I abandoned it as a bit dry. Which must mean I delved into it last before I went through the Little House books in, what, 2018-2019? Maybe those children’s books prepared me for this volume.

So, the “plot”: A Canadian, his urban English wife, and two young boys (later joined by a much younger sister) homestead out in the western part of Canada. The father finds a nice valley where he can stake a claim, and they build a ranch over time, which starts with living in tents but culminates in a cabin. It also goes into the accumulation of cattle, which is less dramatic than in Bendigo Shafter–the cattle and horses are built over time, dealing with local “horse traders” who are probably also horse thieves. And the book also changes point of view to two anthromorphized animals: a cow moose bearing young and an old wolf with a three-pawed wife who bedevil the family known as “The Man”, “The Woman”, “The Kid”, “The Boy”, and eventually “Small.”

So some of it is clearly fictional and some is not, but the actual balance is unclear–if you look for the author on the Internet, you don’t get a big presence–remember, this book was from when ARPANET was three or so–but you do get stories about his impact on art and the west (akin to Charles Russell, which is to say significant among people who knows who he is), but you also get comments from people who knew him as a park ranger or in his other pursuits. So, again, like Buff Lamb: Lion of the Ozarks, we have some history overlapping with the present, or with people you know in the present.

But: In spite of this book containing horses, pack mules, and eventually cars and bulldozers, this book takes place 50 years(!) after the little house books. I mean, the book mentions the Depression in passing, but when The Kid decides to join the military, he goes to the Korean War. By that time, my elderly church associate had already stopped trick-or-treating at the elderly Laura Ingalls Wilder house in Mansfield.

At any rate, an interesting read, and proof that sometimes I have to be ready to read a book when I read it. The previous time, I was not, but I read it through this time. Not at a great rate like an old timey (less than 300 pages) suspense novel which I could read in a day (this book, at 224 pages, took me a bit), but still interesting, and a connection to a past that I would say is forgotten, but it’s a past that’s unimagined by kids today.

I got this book at ABC Books during a book signing in August, and I delved right into it. Well, relatively–sometimes books go into the Nogglestead stacks for decades (I have a couple of books I bought in college that I still have not read, so within a couple of months is instantly when it comes to reading a book I bought).

So Buff (short for a longer nickname Buffalo) was a circus rider and driver who ended up a town marshal in his early 20s who parlayed that into becoming a sheriff’s deputy and then getting elected sheriff of Christian County, Missouri, for a long time and in non-consecutive terms. He served at the same time as Mickey Owen (former big league baseball player turned Greene County sheriff whose reelection notepad I still have on my desk, albeit not on the surface but in a cubby with notepads). He was a bit of a womanizer, married many times, and had a couple of children from whom he became estranged. He was a larger than life character, but his bluff and bluster and occasional brutality made Christian County safer, but it took a toll on the man and his family.

I have probably mentioned before, gentle reader, that I only went on one travel vacation in my youth (I did mention our trip to Rockaway Beach in a post about a vacation in Wisconsin). The trip to Rockaway Beach would have been when I was in middle school or high school, so the middle 1980s; my mom and my brother stayed at some cabins where my mother had stayed with her family at one time. Rockaway Beach, although it is close to Branson and is on Lake Taneycomo, one of the three lakes that gives the Tri-Lakes area its nickname, was deserted. And one of the proprietors of the few amusements on the main road through town said that in the 1970s, within recent memory, the town was taken over by bikers and had not recovered. Although Rockaway Beach is in Taney County, when the Taney County sheriff called for help when one of the biker parties got out of hand and turned into a riot, Buff Lamb and his deputies joined in the clearing of town. So that account connected up with something I knew.

So this book straddled a line between history and current events (well, events current to my lifetime) in a way that history books generally don’t. Another connection was that a deputy whom Buff promoted and backed but then turned on when he wanted to be sheriff again was appointed interim sheriff in 2012 when the then-current sheriff was ousted for corruption. I remember that. And I’m surprised that it was ten years ago already.

I guess that’s how it happens: The older you get, the more you’ve lived becomes history.

It looks as though the author has been making a lot of appearances in support of the book, including talks here and there. It’s a pretty good book. A couple of typos, including a passage where a person’s name is spelled both Francis and Frances (prompting this post). But he’s fair in his treatment of the subject, and it was an enjoyable read.

It makes me hope that the kittens soon knock down the other book of his that I bought at the same time.

This might have been only the second Saint book (or is it The Saint book?) that I’ve ever read. The first would have been a modern paperback (well, then modern) that I read in high school or thereabouts. It was one passed onto us by my Aunt Dee right about the time we moved into the house down the gravel road. We got a small stack of books from her–less than I would buy if I went hog wild at a church or friends of the library book sale–but my aunt introduced me to Ed McBain, Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire, which is the only Anne Rice I’ve actually read), and, perhaps The Saint. So it’s been a while.

In this book, which was apparently published originally as She Was a Lady and then as Angels of Doom before appearing with this title, The Saint pursues a woman who runs a gang who help criminals, but the woman is actually the daughter of a disgraced and deceased policeman wrongfully accused of corruption. She’s using her life of crime to go after those who set her father up, and Simon Templar, the Saint (or is it The Saint?) joins her in her quest. The Saint himself is a roguish, doing good but outside the law, figure himself, but he briefly joins the police force to get some information he needs. And they fall in love, of course.

It’s an interesting bit. It’s from the Depression era, but it’s set in England, and urban England at that, so it feels more hardboiled than an Agatha Christie book, with fights and a little gunplay here and there. The pacing, though, is more British than pulp, and it took me a longer time to read it than it would have a comparable hard boiled pulp. Although the density of the language probably mirrors Chandler more than Hammett, the argot is just foreign enough. So I won’t go out of my way to grab other books of the sort.

This edition is a late World War II hardback (I think). It is in an inexpensive binding similar to a Walter J. Black or other book club edition–and it’s possible that The Saint even that early had a Saint-of-the-month club (Remember, gentle reader, Doc Savage had a monthly “magazine” with a short novel every month). But this was an inexpensive edition even then–the title on the cover and on the title page are The Saint Meets His Match, but the tops of the pages say Angels of Doom. It’s a Triangle Books edition from the U.S., and the edges of the pages flaked off as I read it–I’ve never seen a book do that, and the pages are very dark. Probably inexpensive paper, anmd perhaps the book got wet at some point.

Still, better than a Jack Reacher novel.

Well, there you go again, you might say, but in my defense this is only the second time I’ve read my novel since I published it in 2011 (the first book report on it appeared in 2016, eight years ago.)

So, unless you’re new here, you know the plot: Four laid off tech workers decide to stage a heist and steal the gold bar that their vainglorious CEO bought and put into his house with a live video feed. The tech is slightly dated, but not too bad, and the zeitgeist might just be circling around as tech company layoffs are on the rise again.

It’s got funny moments–after eight years, some of them still catch me by surprise and I chuckle–but about three quarters through I just trudged to the ending and the humor kind of leaks out of the book. Still, I like reading it more than many of the other books I read.

But what gets me, eleven years after I published it and almost twenty years after I wrote it: How easily the writing came to me then. Even more so when I was in my 20s. I could, with confidence that arose out of, I dunno, youthful ignorance, I wrote piles of prose and poems effortlessly. These days, when I sit down to write a short story, it’s excruciating, the second guessing and the wondering if it’s worth it and whether anyone will read it anyway. As John Donnelly’s Gold and the light traffic to this blog indicate, the answer is probably no.

I remember when I was in my Existenialism class, and the discussion came around to careers, and the S.J. running the class said that our vocation would be to serve others, and I, hopped up on the Ayn Rand, demurred. He asked what I wanted to do, and when I said, “Write,” he asked if I would be happy sitting somewhere and writing without others. I said no, because you need an audience. And I still think that’s true.

I think perhaps I would have been more successful as a writer if I were compelled to write, and I would be happy to have written even suspecting that I would burn all my writings before death. Or maybe I just think that because I’m not, and I’ve not had a lot of success otherwise. But, hey, I wrote a poem the other night that is okay, not that anyone will ever see it.

At any rate, I did get this book off of my desk and onto the shelf with the collection of proofs of this and other books I’ve published to no fanfare.

Well, having just finished the Doubleday children’s books I own with 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, I might as well move onto polishing the books in this series I have on my to-read shelves. So I read this, the penultimate volume I have of James Blish’s series of books that present the original Star Trek episodes as short stories. As I have mentioned, I also have several of the Star Trek Log books where Alan Dean Foster does the same with Star Trek: The Animated Series, but I’m not sure if I will jump right into that series after I finish Star Trek 13 someday in the near future.

At any rate, when I started this book, I noted that it was in exceptional shape. The spine is not cracked, the cover is cherry, and this despite the fact that previous owners(?) have written their names in the front and back cover. The front cover has Richard S. Musterman (?) Dec 2 1979, and the back cover has Steve Laube (?). How they wrote their names without cracking the spines… a mystery for the ages.

This book collects the following episodes as stories:

• “What Are Little Girls Made Of”, the one where the Enterprise beams down to an inhospitable planet to find Nurse Chapel’s former flame has discovered technologies of an ancient civilization to build androids–and the Enterprise team learns that Korby, the aforementioned flame, is an android himself with the consciousness of the human transferred to it.
   
• “The Squire of Gothos”, wherein the Enterprise encounters a rogue planet and investigates. Kirk and Sulu disappear from the Enterprise, and when an Enterprise away team beams down to the planet, they find an old castle with a seemingly omnipotent figure there. So it’s a bit of “Catspaw” and “For the World Is Hollow, And I Have Touched The Sky” from Star Trek 8 blended with Under the Dome, but that came later.
   
• “Wink of an Eye”, the one where the crew beams down to a planet that had an advanced civilization, but the people are gone, and the crew hears an insect like buzzing. When they beam up, they hear the buzzing on the Enterprise, and something seems to be taking over the ship. Kirk learns, as he is accellerated by the former residents of the planet, they have been “sped up” so that they move faster than humans–and the queen of the planet has sped-up Kirk to make him her mate. But an ordinary injury will kill him, as all the time he has spent sped-up will cause him to rapidly age with any wound. I actually remembered this episode.
   
• “Bread and Circuses”, wherein the Enterprise finds the wreckage of a merchant ship and are kidnapped by residents of the planet where they found it. A planet where the Roman Empire did not fall, and the Enterprise landing party will fight the gladiators. Kirk discovers a friend of his, a crewman on the merchant ship, has been elevated to leadership by the real powers in the Empire, and that a small group of Christians have arisen later that will change the planet forever.
   
• “Day of the Dove”, wherein the Enterprise responds to a distress call but finds no sender–and then a damaged Klingon battle cruiser appears, believing the Enterprise responsible for the damage. Everyone, Klingons and all, end up on the Enterprise, and they eventually discover an alien form that feeds on hostility–not unlike the alien that feeds on terror in “The Wolf in the Fold” which I read, again, in Star Trek 8.
   
• “Plato’s Stepchildren”, wherein the Enterprise finds a seemingly omnipotent group of humans whose leader has developed a simple infection that they cannot treat because they’ve spent their lives improving their mental powers, but they’ve lost their understanding of the physical world–so they compel the Enterprise people to tend them and to entertain them. Which includes Nurse Chapel’s declaring her love for Spock and That Interracial Kiss between Uhura and Kirk.

So I remembered clearly one of the episodes, but by this time and through repeated viewings in my youth, it’s easy to understand why so many were immemorable: they shared so many tropes and shuffled similar concepts and conceits.

Well, as I might have mentioned, I have but one to clear from my to-read shelves that I know of, the last, Star Trek 13. Blish died in the middle 1970s, so this series proved to be his most lasting contribution to science fiction. I’m not knocking it–as you might know, gentle reader, I have published a couple of books and have sold maybe 150 total. So I cannot cast aspersions upon any writer, especially writers with big house contracts who sold piles of books.

This book, unlike Star Trek 8, had a table of contents and a preface by the author. I must wonder if these features come from later printings and not the originals.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about Sherry Jackson.
Continue reading “Book Report: Star Trek 11 by James Blish (1975, 1977)” →

Wow, has it been five years already since I read The Best of Jules Verne (Around the World in 80 Days, Robur the Conqueror aka The Clipper in the Clouds, and Journey to the Center of the Earth). I guess it has been that long. Man, time passes.

At any rate, the book starts out a little like The Clipper in the Clouds, wherein the news contains stories of various sightings of a great crusteacan in the sea causing damage among other ships. WHen an American schooner goes a-hunting for it, the crew brings along a French undersea biology naturalist, his servant, and a Canadian harpooner join them. When they find the beast, they–the trio last mentioned–go to attack it, only to find themselves cut off from the schooner–and they discover that the beast is actually a submarine piloted by Captain Nemo, a man who has quit the world above the sea along with his crew of similarly minded men. The trio are taken prisoner, basically, and travel 20,000 leagues around the oceans–to be honest, I thought up until reading this book that they went 20,000 leagues deep–but they went 20,000 leagues east to west and north to south, mostly not that deep.

They have a series of adventures, which are mostly visits to exotic and often underseas locations. They visit Atlantis, are attacked by giant squid, visit the wrecks from various sea calamaties, and make their way to the South Pole. After the attack of the giant squid, though, Nemo goes a little mad and the submarine wanders until it is caught in a whirlpool off of Norway just as the dry landers escape–which is convenient and a bit abrupt as Verne was meeting his word count or number of episodes to serialize account.

It’s an okay book. It understood submarine travel, although the dimensions of the Nautilus do not represent the dimensions of any actual submarine–too spacious. And the book relies an awful lot on the main character going into catalogues of undersea life that add nothing but word count to the story–this book appeared after Moby Dick, so I wondered if it had some sort of deeper meaning to the verbosity like Melville tried with his work, but I suspect Verne was only trying to make word count.

This book is the last of these Doubleday editions that I’ve read this year–Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Alice in Wonderland, Black Beauty, and Heidi being the other four). I bought these at some point, perhaps thinking I would read them to my children, but I did not. Ah, well, at least I have read them before my children have left me. Which is some small consolation.

You know, I did not have this particular volume of the series before I picked this one up, unlike so many of the others for whom I wrote book reports in 2005. So I don’t have to add appendixes to the filenames for the image or the book report text file on my desktop. Which I did anyway out of habit.

This book was first published when I was but months old, fifty years ago come November (the book’s publication, not my enumerated rings). The paperback is read and worn, with some tears on the cover and a broken spine, but it’s in readable shape. I wonder if those who produced it during the first Nixon administration (spoiler alert: He would be re-elected the month the book appeared) ever thought of those of use who might read it five decades hence, earthbound, but that the stories that it spawned would still be made fresh and new. Probably not: It was just a job to them.

At any rate, the book collects:

• “Spock’s Brain”, the one where the women who are the Morlocks to the men’s anti-Eloi steal Spock’s brain to power their supercomputer that runs their underground society–the men live on the surface of the brutal ice world after the high civilization collapses–and Kirk and an away team (they called them “landing parties” in the swinging 60s) try to get it back.
   
• “The Enemy Within”, the one where a teleporter malfunction splits Kirk into two, one the brutal, decisive, id-driven half of his personality and one that’s, well, not. The crew first has to discover the two Kirks and then figure out a way to fuse them before the rest of the landing party remaining on the surface of another inhospitable frozen world die.
   
• “Catspaw”, the one where the Enterprise landing party encounters aliens whose science is sufficiently advanced enough to seem magic, and they have to rescue Sulu and McCoy from servitude. You’re forgiven if you think this sounds a lot like…. wait, no, it doesn’t sound like something from the first seven Star Trek books, it sounds like something from the one I’m reading now.
   
• “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, where the Enterprise tries to go through the “galactic barrier” with dangerous results, including madness. Somehow, this became canon, the “galactic barrier”–or at least it was canon in a text-based Star Trek game I played in the last century.
   
• “The Wolf in the Fold”, the one where Scotty, on shore leave, is accused of killing a prostitute woman of a pleasure-seeking planet. It turns out that an alien that feasts on terror did it. Which also sounds like a story/episode in the volume I am currently reading
   
• “For the World is Hollow, And I Have Touched the Sky”, wherein McCoy diagnoses himself with an incurable disease, and they then land on a rogue planet built by an advanced civilization, but it’s a generation ship taking the remnants of a civilization to a new home, but it’s on a collision course with an occupied planet. The Enterprise crew has to contend with the super computer controlling the ship, and McCoy wants to live out his short remaining life by marrying the high priestess. It sounds a lot like many other episodes, including not only “The Apple” in Star Trek 6 and “The Paradise Syndrome” in Star Trek 7 but also “Spock’s Brain” that kicked off the book.

Below the title of each chapter, we see the writer credited with the script, including Robert Bloch, who wrote the “spookier” stories in “Catspaw” and “The Wolf in the Fold”, and if you get one of the screenwriters like Gene Coons, you know it’s going to be more planned for television.

I’ve also noted in compiling these book reports that some of the volumes have tables of contents, but others, like this one, do not, which makes it a little harder to come up with these brief summaries as I have to basically page through the book to get the episode/story titles and to review the content of each. Ah, but I will put that effort in for you, gentle reader, for you.

So although the volumes have been contiguous to this point, I do not have the whole set, so we’ll be skipping ahead to volume 11 in a book report in a couple of days. I do have 9 and 10 on my read shelves, but I shan’t be going through them again for purity and completeness’ sake. That effort, gentle reader, is beyond me. Besides, they’re not on my to-read shelves, and I have too much to re-read books on my read shelves. Although I will re-read if I get another copy, at which point the duplicate is on my to-read shelves. Yes, gentle reader, my rules are arbitrary, but they are my rules, and not universal moral statements.