Category: Book Report

I had not heard of John Ciardi before, but he was a thing in the early middle 20th century, poetry editor for Saturday Review (ask your great grandma during a seance), director of a major writers’ conference, and host of a CBS television show. Of course, he is mostly forgotten now as poetry has fallen from public consciousness and before that because he was a “formalist” which meant his poetry was pretty good, and although he lived until 1986, the crap Beats and everything thereafter artists who infested poetry after the 1950s toppled his status.

I actually read the title poem to my beautiful wife as well as another (“For My Son Jon”, I think). So if I’m reading the poems out loud to a pretty girl, you must accept that I really, really liked it.

You can find a sample from this book, “Most Like An Arch This Marriage”, at the Poetry Foundation, and you can use it as an example of what I like: Long lines, complete thoughts, rhythm, rhyme, some interesting turns of phrase. Not as much interline wordplay as I do these days and it has the pacing and punctuation that can lead to a pompous Poet Reading instead of a street poet/poetry slam performance (although like some works by Edna St. Vincent Millay, some of these pieces could lend themselves to theatrical delivery).

I picked this book up at ABC Books at some point, and it not only rewarded me enough to continue to take five dollar fliers on poets I don’t know and might come to love, but also makes me want to find more of his work. But sixty-some years later, it’s probably hard to come by, although this hardback is in good shape with a mostly intact but inkly defaced dust jacket. Ciardi, Brian J., remember Ciardi.

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I read Kung Fu: The Way of the Dragon; I read Kung Fu #2: Chains; I read Kung Fu #3: Superstition. So it would make sense for me to pick up this book, Kung Fu #4, ainna?

Oh, but no: The first were tied into the David Carradine television series, as demonstrated by his picture on the cover. This book, however, is not that Kung Fu, it’s Kung Fu featuring: Mace, although they’re happy if you made that mistake and bought this book.

Joe at Glorious Trash started his review of the book thus:

Joseph Rosenberger turns in another installment of the Mace series, and thank god there’s only one more Rosenberger volume to go. Seriously, The Year Of The Dragon is a straight-up beating of a novel, mercilessly pounding the reader into a lethargic stupor of boredom. Now let me tell you all about it!

Seriously, that poor fellow is quite the scholar of mid-century men’s adventure fiction; he has even read all the books in this series and has written lengthy essays on each. So if you want smaht, go read that. I echo his sentiments.

You can see from the edge, where I purposefully cropped wide, that I flagged a lot of stupid things in the book. The ethnic slurs: Oh, my, yes, the most baddest word appears, but so do slurs for different ethnicities and nationalities–according to Joe, this is standard practice for the author, Joseph Rosenberger, whose The Death Merchant #7: The Castro File and COBRA #2: Paris Kill-Ground I did not like either.

Okay, okay, okay, here’s a bit about the book: The Kung Fu Master, Mace, a Shaolin monk sort of helping the CIA helps the CIA and the Red Chinese when an art treasure stolen from mainland China is brought to Seattle to move to a collector in Argentina. Two local brokers pair with a connected longshoreman to try to ship it on a freighter, but Mace and the Communist Chinese forces go through a series of set pieces looking for the art object and a series of chapters of discussing what they should do next. So it’s slow reading punctuated by very turgid “fight” scenes replete with a number of italicised Oriental-sounding strikes that the author might have looked up in a martial arts book of the era, and a whole lot of exclamation points! (I picked this book up as I was reading Patty E. Thompson’s books which also feature a lot of exclamation points–brothers and sisters, I think I am done with my annual reading quota of exclamation points through 2022!)

But, yeah, the fight scenes are turgid and unbelievable. The Kung Fu Monk kills a lot of people with a single blow, and although he ends up in a pile of corpses, there’s no mention of stumbling or stepping around the piling bodies. He kills a man with the Tao te Ching at one point–maybe even Tai Chi Walking somewhere–but throughout the word Tuh appears, which I suspect is the phoneticish spelling of Tao. Which is spelled Tao a couple of times. Oh, and it mentions Mace, the Kung Fu monk, taking out a bunch of bad guys quickly–in a minute and a half. Gentle reader, a minute and a half in a fight situation is a long time. My dojo’s sparring rounds are about a minute and a half, and when that time slows down when you’re advanced enough, it’s a lot of time. Of course, I’ve never killed anyone with a single strike before, and I’ve only been killed by a single strike twice (I got better).

And the set pieces, oh, geez. They have fight scenes, but they do not advance the plot except that they provide another place where the MacGuffin is not. But they are inclusive! When Mace and the Red Chinese sidekick attack a freighter, it’s a multi-ethnic crew of the sort of stereotypes that do no actually serve on freighters. Ach.

So, oh, yeah, this book is awful. But I read the whole thing. Because I’m hard up for completed books in my annual list (this is the only my 90th book this year so far), but mostly because I am a sadist.

Not as much of a sadist as Joe at Glorious Trash. Or not as much of a serious student of the genre.

I will say, though, that when searching “Death Merchant” book report, I came up with two recent Good Book Hunting posts. I was relieved to discover that I bought Lee Goldberg’s novel in the Diagnosis: Murder series, The Death Merchant, both at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library spring book sale and on our trip to It’s a Mystery book store in Berryville, Arkansas this summer.

Yeah, Joseph Rosenberger books: Do not want.

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Normally, I would post a link to the Amazon item here, but can you believe that this naughty book is not available on Amazon or Ebay? C’mon, man. I am probably on a watch list for reading it. And you read this review. Don’t try to say you didn’t “Download” hate material; every time you visit a Web site, you “download” its contents regardless of whether you meant to, whether it was what you sought, or whether it was even visible to you.

In what might become a tradition for a couple of months here at Nogglestead, I have read these two book which I bought at an ABC Books book signing not long after I bought them. Nobody tell Billy Pearson (I am only at 25% of his books read after two years) or Julian Lynn (67% complete after two and a half years).

The first book, Look What God Did!, is a woman’s spiratual biography from a wild youth when she got off the farm in Mansfield and went to California in the early 1970s. She married a musician, divorced a musician, stayed in the church, and ended up marrying a good guy and became a mother and later a leader in her church and in her child’s school. She shares these lessons along with appropriate scripture lessons for each.

It reminded me a bit of Joyce Meyer’s Eat the Cookie, Buy the Shoes except without the polish of having done it a million times before.

The author favors exclamation points. A lot! I mean, she’s got one right in the title of the book, and she uses them frequently. Including a rare appearance of the triple-banger:

We boarded a boat behind the hotel that first morning and went out into the Sea of Galilee where we stopped out in the water to sing praise songs and listen to a devotional by one of the pastors. What an incredible sense of awe settled over us…to know that our Lord Jesus had been right there with His own disciples!!!

She also uses quotes from a variety of translations, including a spot where she gives verses from three different translations in three subsequent paragraphs:

He said, “Be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves.” Matt. 10:16 (NIV)

He said, “God has not given us a spirite of timidity, but of power, and love, and discipline (self-control).” II Tim. 1:7 (NASB)

He said, “Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other.” John 13:34b (NLT)

I will leave it to you to speculate, gentle reader, whether she is that much of a biblical scholar, whether she collected different verses on notecards as she came across them elsewhere and collected them here, or whether she has a side-by-side translations bible.

At any rate, a short, pleasant read. Perhaps more targeted to women than promiscuous male readers.

She told me this book, her second book, or perhaps her first (but I read it second, and they do not have copyright dates inside to help me out here), dealt with the workplace and people who don’t think something is their job. Which I thought I might relate to better since I’m a worker if not a woman, but this book has only one or two anecdotes that are new and instead recounts again her work in the women’s ministry in her church and becoming a parent organization leader in her child’s school–as well as a workplace-based anecdote where she offered to pray for an employer’s lost horses–that she told in Look What God Did!.

So it was a bit of a repeat. Although each chapter ends with a Lessons learned tidbit instead of Bible verses. I suppose it would not have been as stark if I hadn’t read them back to back.

Quick reads, anyway, and my purchase both supported a self-publishing author and my friends at ABC Books.

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I bought this book because it’s in the sidebar at Bayou Renaissance Man because he, the BRM, has a story in it.

It is a collection of military sci fi stories set in the Kratmanoverse, where the UN has settled undesirables on a planet called Terra Nova; the colonies are created by nation/ethnicity in different places, so they sometimes come into conflict (Muslim wars of conquest) but mostly the colonists resist the United Nations who runs the colonies corruptly. The colonists are not supposed to be armed, and they live near sustenance level in many cases, as technology is too expensive to import to the colony–and the UN wants to keep it restricted.

So even though the macro story has been decided elsewhere (in the novels in the series), the setting provides a fertile ground for smaller short stories in the millieu. We get murders and factionalism on a multi-year colony ship; we get a cleric who helps a fishing colony escape Muslim raiders; we get a helicopter pilot who defects; we get black mercenaries who come to help pacify an Asian province but come to sympathize with their fellow colonists; we get a couple of hackers who help a drug lord break UN smugglers’ hold on him; and more. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of room between the broad strokes of the novel series for interesting stories. It’s a little like how I was introduced to Dragonlance in the old days, although the collections of short stores I got my hands on mainly still focused on the main characters of the stories, and these stories likely deal with people who don’t show up in the Big Picture at all. Although I cannot say that for sure.

So the stories have different perspectives, styles, and themes, but they share a certain realistic outlook as to human nature and societies. It is a Baen book, after all, and if you’ve read any of the author’s blogs, you’d know they’ve got their heads on straight.

I wanted to read something in the military sci fi genre since I’ve got a military sci fi novel started around here somewhere. So it was research, and a pleasure.

I did not flag a lot of things, but I did mark this one:

“I was entirely comfortable with his questioning,” retorted Champlain. “I rather obkect to the murder of noncombatants. Sir.”

His last syllable rhymed perfectly with “curr.”

C’mon, man, that’s right out of the Marcinko.

So, as I said, I liked it, which is good, since I paid full price for it. I’ll even think about getting some of the other modern military sci fi as I mess around with it myself. Maybe some Kloos, maybe some Kratman. Or maybe I should just read the Ringo and Drake and other books I already have on my shelves. What a novel idea that is!

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This short book of poetry, 39 pages, contains, what, a single poem or prayer spread over the 39 pages with a spiritual theme that presents the One as a female figure, so it’s not a Christian spiritual collection. Given that each page or poem faces a mandala, the poetext might be to support the mandalas instead of the other way around.

A mandala, as you might remember, gentle reader (not that I’ve ever mentioned it here before), is an Eastern art form that uses geometric shapes and whatnot designed as a meditation aid for Buddhists, Hindus, and whatnot. The mandalas in this book are not so geometric as much as abstract art with an Eastern flavor. I guess the author would make mandalas for people–her bio says that she was divinely guided after a near death experience and that she wants to help everyone just get along like Susan Polis Schultz. The author’s Facebook page was active until 2015, so she was probably creating mandalas for people well into our century.

So, the poetext, meh, but the mandalas are interesting. Given that I got this book in one of the dollar bundles of chapbooks available at the at the library book sales, I think it was worth the 18 cents I probably spent on it. After all, I counted it as a whole book in my annual goal of reading 100 books.

This is a large-sized Crescent book covering the design styles of art deco which were early 20th century design and architectural movements around the world, but notably the United States. I say styles and were in the plural because really Art Deco includes subdesign styles called the Aztec, zigzag, and streamlined styles. The book breaks things up into sections on Architecture, Furniture, Art, and whatnot. Each chapter has a page of text that name drops people who popularized the style, and then includes photos and illustrations.

You know, I like Art Deco, at least in the design and the architecture–we have some Fiestaware at Nogglestead–but not the art-art, which has a bit of Sovietism to it. A lot of it comes from the WPA and NRA programs coming out of the New Deal, so that’s probably appropriate.

However, Fiestaware aside, I like to look at it, but when it comes to design that I like to have around Nogglestead, I go more for classical looks and cheap pressboard. Not stylized modern things, or at least how modern was envisioned a hundred years ago. Even though it’s cooler than what a hundred years later would generally produce, particularly in architecture.

So that’s what comment you get from me in this regard. You want depth in discussion of design, go seek your Lileks and Driscoll.

These are two more chapbooks, or short books of poetry, that I bought bundled recently. Actually, the Shultz book was in a bundle, but I bought the Javan book alone for a buck. It seems that I’ve seen a lot of books by Schultz and Javan around, and then I thought it might just be at ABC Books, but my recent trip showed that the poetry section there was not rife with either of these poets. So I don’t know where I’ve seen so many of them before that I thought I should finally give them a try.

I have grouped them together because they both suffer from the same thing: Too much abstraction with line breaks, announcing a feeling or thought without poetic imagery to back them up.

Javan’s poems are of a personal nature, with musings on relationships and some “Hey, Girl” kinds of poems. The Schultz book deals with macro themes of reconciliation between different peoples and “Can’t we all just get along?” More than that, though–can’t we all just love one another for our differences? Reading them together is a little like listening to a U2 song: First, we get the personal, which is more relatable (although U2 is generally more poetic), and then all of a sudden in the third or fourth verse the personal relationship morphs into a song about feeding the world or something.

The stories of the poets is more interesting: Javan self-published his books in the days before computers, and he didn’t have the Internet, so he drove around, bookstore to bookstore, to get his works carried. Given that I’ve seen and now bought one of his works far away from his native Georgia, it seems to have worked. Schultz, on the other hand, is a mommy poet of some note who then put this book out as a public service such as it was. She and/or her husband founded Blue Mountain, whose early Internet greeting card company they sold to Excite in 1999 for $780,000,000, so she had some money and time to write a bunch of poetry, and she’s the mother of the current governor of Colorado. So she probably did not have to drive widely to disseminate her work.

At any rate, they both come out of that 70s poetic tradition like, say, Rod McKuen or Jon Francis or James Kavanaugh. The wording is conversational and not very self-consciously poetic. Which is probably to say not poetic at all. But, hey, some people might go for it. I prefer more poetic, but perhaps not self-consciously “We’re doing poetry!”

UPDATE: I discovered when I was entering this book into my library database that I’ve read something edited by Susan Polis Schultz before: A Friend Forever also published by Blue Mountain–which means they’ve been at this for a while.

 

This book is from Faith over Fear Productions, so I expected some faith-based poetry, but there’s nary a mention of Jesus in it. Instead, it’s a collection of street poems, almost raps, dealing with relationships and whatnot. The poems have short lines with a bunch of chatter and not the distinct imagery but rather rhythmic, sometimes, abstract conversation. Less formal than grandmother poetry or decades-old greeting cards and not quite as poetic as more literary poetry of the 21st century, but probably not the poets’ goal.

Each poem is paired with a vivid abstract or abstactish piece of painting in color with full bleed to the edge of the pages–kind of like the cover image–and the layout is very good. As one reviewer said of my collection of poetry, the poetry is meh but the design is very good.

So not my bag, but your mileage may vary.

I got this book from one of the bundles of chapbooks I bought at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale (he repeated).

This book is a more modern entry in the series (compared to these decades-old cards). They mostly deal with, of course, being young and a woman in the 21st century, relationships and the like. Growing older, learning, and so on. A cut above most of the things I read, actually, with longer lines and some good imagery, but some inchoate images and poems that didn’t speak to me.

A number of the entries are erasure poems, wherein she took another text and eliminated words, sentences, and presumably paragraphs to carry elison (ahut) into a new work with meaning. It’s an interesting exercise, but somehow seems less than writing something from scratch. However, I am sure it keeps the creative juices flowing, and here I am waiting for the muse to strike me at the exact moment I’m sitting at a coffee shop for thirty minutes with a notepad. Which happens sometimes, but not often. Perhaps I should get to coffee shops more.

At any rate, this chapbook was all right. Of course, Ms. Anderson doesn’t need my validation; her copyright page indicates she’s getting her work out without my blog’s linking to her work, which is just as well since it’s not on Amazon, and you guys don’t use the handy links when I provide them anyway.

These two slim volumes came in the bundles of chapbooks that I bought at this autumn’s Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. As I have mentioned often and will continue to mention every day or so for a couple of weeks, they bundle a small stack of chapbooks and pamphlets together for a buck, and I cannot help but buy many of them. Something about a grab bag appeals to me–it’s like when the old record store would bundle ten 45 rpm singles fresh from jukebox duty or remainders and mark them $1.99; I bought a lot of such bundles and sometimes found something interesting (such as Madhouse). So it is with the chapbook bundles. Plus, it gives me something to look at between plays whilst watching football on Sundays–and, let’s be honest, watching football on Sundays is a pretext for me to read during the day, not purely to watch football.

At any rate, these two slim volumes are not so much chapbooks as they are holiday cards with several pages of poetry in them. The first is by Ideals magazine (See also here and and was given as a Thanksgiving greeting from Mother and Daddy in 1970. It collects a lot of poetry and photography with harvest, autumn, and Thanksgiving themes with some Christian content thanking God, not just being mindful and grateful. Given that I have Ideals magazines dealing with Autumn and Thanksgiving, I have to wonder if I’ve read some of this material before.

Prayers and Meditations is a Christmas card signed by Norm and Jan in 1988; it collects nine poems by Helen Steiner Rice, religious-themed prayers and musings about the meaning of Christmas. It’s an exclusively religous card, with thoughts and prayers about the birth of Christ and its meaning, and nothing about sleighs and family. Handy, I suppose, if you can’t find only one card with a single poem that expresses what you want about Christmas. Less expensive than a full little gift book, perhaps, and a keepsake a little more than a card. I mean, thirty years later, I read it and counted it toward my annual total.

The two of them remind me how far we are into the year already, another year almost passed, and the fact that they’re fifty-one and thirty-three years old, respectively, reminds me how far I am into life already. Bittersweet, for sure.

I bought this in one of the three packets of chapbooks that I got for a dollar each at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale this autumn. The three sets of chapbooks and another volume of poetry are about all the books I got, instead focusing on albums as you might recall, gentle reader.

Well, about this book. Apparently it’s a chapbook of “poetry” from 1972. That’s what I gather from limited Internet searches for the book and the poet on the Internet. The first poem, or perhaps the section, is called “Nightmares in the Dark”, and the whole collection with its dated poems ranging from 1968 to 1972 read like a Vietnam veteran working through his PTSD or perhaps a patient in an institution working through some things. The prose poems are reflective of nightmares, where the poet-narrator is in the jungle, or meeting with a woman whom he gores or who gores him, and there’s a clown that keeps reappearing.

Most of them are in paragraph form, not verse, and some themes repeat. But it’s not very poetic, and it’s not compelling reading. I finished it, not browsing during football–the prose is too dense to glance down and glance up–but in the chair just for completeness sake. And to add to my annual tally easily.

So far, no nightmares of my own on account of it, which is nice.

So probably something to avoid.

But I get the sense that the story behind the book is better than the book, and that’s quite probably lost.

I picked up this Scholastic book to browse during a football game, and I thought, a collection of poems about the life of George Washington Carver for kids? Who needs that? Who would read that?

But, you know what? I kind of got into it eventually. The book builds poems, not very poetic poems but rather poetry-prose with line breaks and distinct phrases instead of full sentences–to talk about Carver’s incidents from Carver’s life. From his early years as a slave and his early attempts at formal education to his eventual work with the Tuskogee Institute and, yes, peanuts.

So perhaps a good intro to an amazing life, but you would definitely want to follow it up with something more weighty, such as George Washington Carver and/or a trip to Diamond, Missouri.

Also, you know George Washington Carver was a black American. This book, coming from the turn of the century, makes a couple of references to our people, and the poet’s father was one of the Tuskogee Airmen, but the book is not an especially racially themed book. One wonders whether the poems were written twenty years later would differ greatly from the interesting and straightforward presentation of a fascinating figure of American history we have here. Sadly, one thinks so.

Oh, but this children’s book has the baddest word ever in a poem called “My People” about the envy the other instructors and staff at the Tuskegee Institute felt toward Carver. But it’s further proof of my latent white supremacism that I read books with the baddest word in them. That is, books written in the dark past of twenty years ago.

As you might know, gentle reader, I consume a lot of what I call “Grandma Poetry.” These are usually chapbooks published by older women with themes of family and God; the authors are not professional poets and probably don’t even have a magazine credit on their copyright pages. Most of it is not sublime or exhilirating; some of it is nice. If you read the collected works of a Great Poet, you’ll find their works are limited to the really, really good once in a while and maybe nice most of the time.

This collects presumably the best poems and some artwork from residents in nursing homes owned by Beverly Enterprises. So the tone and shape of the poems varies. Some are about youth, some are about being your best self in a nursing home, but more than one are about being lonely and forgotten–even if it’s only in the subtext of a poem lauding volunteers who come to visit.

So it’s uneven and lacks a single voice, and some are poems by committee–classes where several people put a poem together. You can actually tell these poems apart from others as they lack internal consistency and voice.

Man, I remember nursing homes in the 1980s. Two of my sainted mother’s aunts ended up in a couple of different facilities, and the facilities were as cold and efficient as hospitals but with less care. It depressed me to go visit those old ladies–I was young then, and impatient. Times have changed now, though; one local senior living facility has been running ads showing a tatted up, goateed and mohawked pierced grandpa with big headphones on taking a selfie. One expects the new facilities are more fun, but then again, the ones that advertise in 417 are probably the nicer ones anyway; one would probably find my relations in more traditional centers.

At any rate, something to flip through during a football game, but not something to emulate in one’s own poetizing.

So as I mentioned when I reported on Lake Honor and Gone in the Night, I was going to pick this book up next, which means I read all the books I bought from Brian Brown at his book signing in rather short order which is probably the best endorsement by my actions rather than quibbles I post in my book reports.

This book does without the frame story present in the other two books, where the authors insert themselves and listen to or work with Booger McClain to “solve” an unsolved mystery–but whose resolution is not actually the solution of the crimes, perhaps an allusion or a theory that cannot be acted on.

Instead, this is a more straightforward story: An old friend comes to Booger to find his estranged wife and daughter who were last known to have been living in a trailer park in Pea Ridge, Arkansas. So Booger and his new wife Rose move into the trailer park to figure out what’s going on. Well, Rose does: A couple of injuries land McClain in the local hospital, which takes him out of the action for much of the book, so he acts mostly as a sounding board for what Rose is doing and as comic relief. So Rose uncovers a prostitution ring running in the trailer park, and that the shadowy Branson organized crime types behind it are dealing with the introduction of cocaine trade in the same area. Two guys in a blue truck make shadowy appearances, including perhaps killing the wife and daughter, and the sheriff of Pea Ridge is one of McClain’s former deputies. So they manage to depose the sheriff and get him to turn state’s evidence, so they take out the drug ring. But they don’t really solve the case they started with except for allusions and some speculations, perhaps.

So maybe that’s thematic, then, and not just how a quickly written book turns out.

As with the previous two, this one could have used a copy edit to catch things like:

• Again referring to the Sheriff of a town; McClain was sheriff of Branson, this book also mentions, and another town. But sheriffs are county officials and the law enforcement for unincorporated parts of a county. In cities and metropolitan areas with cities whose boundaries run right up to each other, such as the St. Louis area, the sheriffs and their deputies mostly serve papers. It’s probably no help that St. Louis County, where the Browns live, has a St. Louis County Police force which handles law enforcement and differs from the St. Louis County Sheriff.
• Talk about the trailer park and living in a trailer. At one point, someone is a couple hundred yards away from a trailer; in general trailer park sizes, a couple hundred yards is clear on the other side of the trailer park. The lot sizes are not generous. The book mentions going into the cellar under a trailer; okay, that’s rare in a trailer park; sometimes you can put them on foundations, but that’s more permanent than a trailer park. But at the end of the book, the trailer is towed away, but when trailers are placed on foundations and can have cellars, the wheels are generally removed.
• Rose goes to a neighbor’s trailer during a power outage; the trailer is lit with a lot of candles because the neighbor is used to this. Rose learns that the neighbor has security cameras, so they go back to another room to look at the computer monitors that show the view from the cameras. That would be a lot of batteries to power monitors.
• The wife and daughter are named Tammy and Carly, and I had some trouble keeping them straight in my head. At one point, too, the book says Tammy sold her stocks and bonds and moved back to Little Rock–but that’s the daughter’s name, not the wife. So I was not the only one having trouble keeping the names straight!

I also flagged a couple of things to comment on:

• At one point, while driving down to Pea Ridge, one of the characters said “Maybe we should have stopped in Berryville.” As you know, gentle reader, Berryville earlier this year, and I mentioned to my beautiful wife (but did not post on the blog) every time that I have seen Berryville mentioned in the news–although I think one of the other mentions of Berryville that I encountered might have been in Lake Honor.
• Somebody calls the local paper the Tri-Lakes News; however, last year or the year before, the paper changed its masthead to emphasize it’s the Branson (Tri-Lakes) News. As I boasted recently, I get that paper twice a week.
• At a wedding at the end of the book (See? It is a comedy!), they play a Shania Twain song (“You’re Still the One”). I can reveal to you, gentle reader, since it’s not the security question on any Web site that I am aware of, that at my wedding, our first dance as husband and beautiful wife was to a Shania Twain song–it was “From This Moment On”, and I forgot to get the CD back from Ernie, the owner of Occasions, when we left. When we were in town this summer, it looked like Occasions was still there and maybe open.

Also, it had typos and wrong word substitutions–instead of alter for altar which appeared in a couple of places in Lake Honor, we got conscience for conscious a couple of places here.

So it was a fun bit of reading that could have used a bit of copyediting. Kind of like Elton Gahr’s books. I’ll pick up more of them if I bump into Brown or Brown in person again, but they’re not so compelling that I’ll go out and order them. After all, I have many, many fine stacks of books to get to in the interim.

I’m going to do a dual book report on two of the three books I bought at the book signing at ABC Books last month because they have some similarities that I’ll talk about at the end.

After reading a chonking Stephen King book and a shorter palate cleanser on Descartes, I thought, wouldn’t it be something if I read the author-signed books from ABC Books soon after buying them instead of years later? So I picked up what is the first chronologically in the series, although the author I met (the son of the father and son duo) says you can read the three books in any order, but I went with the first one first.

The book deals with a fictionalized version of a real case: In the 1970s, two young men were found floating in the fountain pond on the School of the Ozarks, now the College of the Ozarks, campus. They were fully clothed, and the authorities pretty quickly said it was death by misadventure or drugs, maybe, and kind of swept it under the rug. A student at the school ends up re-evaluating his attendance there and quits, only to come back a year later to interview people about the killings for a story. He meets a private investigator, Booger McClain, who tells the story. So this book has two frame stories, really: In the present day, the former student is thinking about the case and comes back to town; and the second, which dominates the book, is the private investigator telling the story of his investigations along with some scenes with the principals in the action, including the boys who died. So the narrative takes place in real time, sort of, as events unfold, but it’s partially told by a private investigator a year later. And the now frame around the whole thing really doesn’t add anything.

The book, like the one that follows, has some typos (altar is spelled alter a couple of times) and a couple of little problems that factchecking would solve, like:

In fact, when I first watched the movie “Halloween,” and saw the mental hospital where Jason escaped, I immediately thought about that dorm.

C’mon, man, we can tell our Jason from our Michael Myers, ainna? We can even spell Myers right on the first try. You know, a dilligent fact-checker would have found this, but when writing and editing our own work, we check on things we’re uncertain of, but not the things we know (that just ain’t so). It’s always the one little throwaway that goes awry.

“Where are you staying?” he asked after a few seconds.

“The Bel Air Motel on 67,” I said.

Highway 67 runs along the eastern part of the state, not the western part, although I understand why it would be top of mind to the authors–it runs through south St. Louis County where they live (and where I once lived).

There are some other anachronisms and things that make one wonder–one of the dead young men played football for Kickapoo; I had thought Kickapoo opened in 1972, which would have made this iffy, but Kickapoo actually opened in 1971, which would make this more plausible. Coupled with the typos, though, one wonders if it was really that way.

This Booger McClain mystery takes place in the present day, but again it deals with a crime that occurred decades ago. In this case, it’s the disappearance of three women, two recent high school graduates and a mother of one of them, in 1992. This story still resonates in the Springfield community–every so often, it pops back into the news when it is featured on a podcast or in a book such as this one. My beautiful wife informed me that she had already bought this book during its initial publicity burst. She was in Springfield when this happened (and an attractive young woman), and she went to school with the two recent graduates who disappeared. So this story resonates with her, and it’s one of the top two defining crimes that really shook Springfield (the other was the 1904 lynching on the square for which Springfield is only now seemingly emerging from self-flagellation).

Like Lake Honor, the book centers on a writer coming to Booger McClain to the story of his investigation. McClain has a war room with evidence in a seemingly abandoned warehouse on the north side of town, and he lets the writer review it. Someone tries to break into the evidence room, though, which leads McClain to believe he’s close to solving the mystery. So this book has a little more action in it, but it’s very similar to Lake Honor in its storytelling and resolution.

I flagged a couple of things in this book as well.

“Pull into the next parking lot,” the man in the back ordered his partner. That parking lot was a 24-hour Wal-Mart grocery a few miles from the Levitt home.”

It’s a quibble, but in those days, the Walmarts were Walmarts; the Walmart Neighborhood Market was a ways off, and the Walmarts of the day were more department stores. It’s only later that they would expand their grocery offerings.

“I was a sheriff for a time in Branson back in the 60’s.”

McClain would not have been a sheriff for Branson. Sheriff is a county office; he would have been Taney County Sheriff, which is an elected position by the way. But city folk can be forgiven for thinking that sheriff is what you call the police in a small town.

Again, some anachronisms and errata that one might overlook if it weren’t for the typos.

Also, I recently read a post on Mad Genius Club about whether authors were including the Malingering Unpleasantness in their works; this book mentions the Wuhan Flu conditions, as a business slowdown gives the writer in the story time to come to Springfield to interview McClain. It’s mentioned, but not doted upon.

At any rate, the books were very similar in the following:

• They’re both rather expository. The stories are told, often by McClain, rather than experienced or shown. Which is to be expected. Although both have elements of contemporary action where McClain is not present, but even those passages are telling more than vivid creations of a scene.
• Which is probably explained a bit by the fact that the crimes occurred decades before the actual setting of the books. Lake Honor has more of recreations of scenes contemporaneous to the crime; Gone in the Night has one, and it’s one that thwarts McClain’s assumptions of the case.
• Neither book “solves” the case. Lake Honor alludes to possible solutions. Death in the Night offers a section where McClain presents his theory of the case–which, as I mentioned, is counter to the one contemporaneous scene (quoted above, where the perpetrator has a partner, whereas in Booger’s theory of the case, a suspect acts alone).
• The authors Asimov themselves into the story. In the first, “Alan” is Alan, the author. In the second, the writer is “Brian,” the author, and the biographies of the characters in the story kind of match the authors’ stories. I’m not sure why to choose such a frame–perhaps to keep the writing interesting for the authors themselves?
• In both books, some information is repeated, almost in the same words, as though they were in the process of moving it, but forgot to remove it from the initial location in the narrative.

That said, I found the books readable and a bit compelling–I read them right after each other, and I started the third book, which is an original, already. So let that be my endorsement as it is: The books are clearly self-published, with the typos to attest, but they’re not the worst of the self-published I’ve seen and put down.

The books affected me so much that when I saw the headline Branson family hires high profile private investigator to join search for missing son, I immediately thought of Booger McClain.

It’s been a while since I read Discourses on Method—four years. Wow, the teenager I mentioned in that post moved away, came back to Springfield to go to the university, worked at the dojo briefly, and has moved on to a realer job whilst studying. Tempus fugit, ainna?

At any rate, this book is a brief overview of Descartes’ life and work. It clocks in under 90 pages in fairly large print, so you might have to be a slow reader to squeeze 90 minutes out of it. It leans heavily on the bio and on broad themes in Descartes writing instead of details of his arguments, but I’m sure this book is supposed to be a gateway to the other books, kind of a starter for people thinking of getting into philosophy–or who have a brief paper to write, I suppose.

So a nice quick read after a chonker of a King book.

You might have noticed, gentle reader, a dearth of book reports here at MfBJN over the last couple of weeks (what? Poems was almost a month ago?). A number of factors play into this. I have a new client on the West coast, a startup whose participants have day jobs, so meetings sometimes occur in the evenings during reading time. Also, I have been working on longer works (no, not just longer comic books). I still have Pamela on the chairside table, and I read a letter in it from time-to-time. A recent interest in writing again led me to pick up a collection called On Writing Horror. And since I was reading about writing horror, I decided to venture to my Stephen King shelf, choosing this volume which includes four shorter novels/novellas instead of one 1000+ page extravaganza. Still, the book took me several weeks to finish, and at several points I looked at the shelf of remaining King works, mostly his later, 1000+ page opii, and thought there’s no way I’m going to read all of those in my lifetime. Sadly, gentle reader, I am getting to an advancing age where I realize that I will not read all of the books I now own. Will that keep me from buying more, whether at ABC Books or the library book sale coming up in two weeks? Shut your mouth!

This book contains for, erm, stories, but most of the stories are novel length. Or would have been before the inflation of the 1980s made it so bestsellers had to be 600 pages to be worth the suddenly expensive cover price.

As I was reading, I came up with a term to describe King’s work: Pulp gothic. Or maybe Gothic pulp. Perhaps this is not an original term, but I really think it captures King’s style, especially as it developed in the middle 1980s and onward. The tone and style are modern and conversational and move along fairly well; however, the scope of the works runs really long as I mentioned. So gothic and not unlike some works of classical literature. Except that when I have finished Wuthering Heights or David Copperfield, I feel like I’ve accomplished something and am a bit proud of it. When I finish a Stephen King book, I don’t get that sense of accomplishment. I get a sense of relief that it (not the book, and not the book of that title, but the reading of the book) is over. And, sometimes, disappointment at how it ends.

The book contains these works:

• The Langoliers
• Secret Window, Secret Garden
• The Library Policeman
• The Sun Dog

I will go into some detail about each below the fold.

Continue reading “Book Report: Four Past Midnight by Stephen King (1990)” →

I was in the mood for a chapbook, so I picked up this recent purchase. I got it at a garage sale here in Springfield for fifty cents at a garage sale whose proprietrix said they had a great selection of books, but which looked to be mostly college Spanish and English literature textbooks. I think I came away with two books: this book and another piece of classical literature in the expensive but cheap college paperback edition–it’s lost in the stacks already, so I cannot tell you what it was.

This book, though, is a signed, numbered chapbook, number 159 of 300 published fifty-one years ago in California. How it got to the garage sale of a recently enfamiliated college grad in Springfield, Missouri, I cannot tell you, either, but I always find these books’ travels interesting.

It collects poems of two people with the same last name. The first section is Chris, and it’s the better section. Medium-length lines, but definitely a rhythm that said Chris read the works aloud. The second set, by Harold, is less good, but, still, overall, the collection was pleasant to read.

A quick search of the Internet does not yield a lot of information about either of the authors or them together, although one can find the book on Amazon for $17.50, which is not very chap at all.

This book is kind of similar to Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby (and pretty much every I Can Haz Cheesburger-style Web site from the 21st century). A picture and a caption that’s supposed to be funny. This book collects images of really old people (thankfully, not merely old people like me) and has a sentence like “I’ve got those falling down arches, can’t see without my glasses, I hate gravity blues.” which is paired with a woman wearing bifocals playing a harmonica). Fun fact: I was given bifocals in 9th grade because I had trouble with the aligned text test while getting a new strength for my glasses. So I was wearing bifocals in high school, standing all of five foot something and weighing under a hundred pounds. So, yeah, I was very low on the pecking order, brah.

Another caption has a pair of elderly twins in matching outfits with the caption “Mary Kate and Ashley, consider this a warning.” Seventeen years later, you’d need a footnote on that in the 2nd Edition of this book. My boys don’t know who they are. Of course, my boys didn’t know who John Wayne was until recently, so maybe that’s more accusing my failures as a father than dated pop culture references in this book.

At any rate, I guess these things are designed to give as a gift to someone as a gag on an advancing birthday. So maybe my buying it at a garage sale and reading it really doesn’t keep with its intended spirit and purpose.

You know, I have kind of enjoyed the last couple of Executioner novels (all right, mostly Rescue Run and Death Whisper), but this book is a real clunker.

To start with, the plot involves helping China. A group of Chinese rebels working with a Chinese American entrepreneur hope to bring China’s Communist government down by causing an accident at a nuclear plant in southeast China, which will also poison Hong Kong. Bolan has to track them through a couple of set pieces to Malaysia, where he works with a Chinese-American CIA agent and eventually the only remnant of a Chinese “secret service” team that tried to kill Bolan on a couple of occasions. They have to attack an enemy stronghold with a maze-like structure that can serve as a training room for various nuclear plants, which means of course we’ll have a shoot out in a maze.

Yeah, well. You know, when I read Lee Child’s Killing Floor, I mentioned that he (Child) was an Englishman trying to write in the American, and the author of this particular paperback leads me to believe he, too, might be English. But some of the same kinds of things: Calling cartridges ‘shells’ (I think) and especially the mistake in measuring distances. The mistake is this: Americans tend to measure things in terms of feet until they start getting pretty large, at which time we talk about yards. So talking about three yards is ludicrous unless you’re talking about an American football game. At one point, it goes on about how Bolan prepares himself to jump two yards and then barely caught the edge of the precipice/building as though that was a great distance–but if Mack Bolan fell that two yards, he would hit his head on the edge.

I was working myself up to a thesis that this was Lee Child in another early pseudonym, but apparently the author is a guy who lists his Gold Eagle work in his LinkedIn bio. Welp, I guess I am not as clever as I think.

Aside from the British-sounding bits, the book has some clunkers, some misplaced verbiage that could have been cut, as well as some mistakes as to which gun Bolan is holding at any given time (he fires the Beretta, then he fires the Desert Eagle, without mentioning that he’s changed weapons). Maybe that’s not a mistake, as he later goes two-handed, firing one of the pistols in one hand and a Chinese assault rifle in the other. With deadly accuracy.

So I was glad to be done with the book; apparently, it’s early in this author’s work. Hopefully, he got better.

But now that I’m down to four books in The Executioner series on my to-read shelves, suddenly I look upon them with trepidation. I was hoping to finish the series soon and feel some sense of culmination or something for having read almost 100 of them over the last decade. But it will probably be later in the year or early next that I finish the series as I’m going to look for something else for the nonce. Pamela? you say. Let’s not go to extremes, gente reader.