Category: Book Report

I got this remaindered library book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in 2021, which would have meant that its presence in the library system was only five years and change. Is that a lot? I don’t have a lot of insight into the circulation policies and average item duration in libraries even though I worked for a library software company back in the day and even though I’ve read this book.

I bought it, thinking it might be akin to some of the book collector or book dealer books I’ve read and accumulated over the years (see also Slightly Chipped, Warmly Inscribed, Books: A Memoir, A Pound of Paper, etc.). But, no. This is more of an autobiography of the author’s career as a librarian. The amount of “all” that he has seen is secondary.

I mean, I don’t want to slag on the book too much since it was obviously a labor of love, but although the guy makes sure to tell us that he was reading at the sixth grade level in kindergarten, I don’t get the sense that he likes books all that much. The book is shot through with movie and television show references, but not many book ones–and those sound like they come from his college classes in library science more than the Great Books. I mean, when he describes someone’s beard, he mentions nicknaming the fellow Dumbledore because the Harry Potter movies had come out. And some of the things he breezes over–the first chapter on library history, says, “The Chou Dynasty gave way to the Ch’in Dynasty of 221BC and they took a slightly differing view of learning and reading.” Which is true in the second part of the compound sentence, but kind of elides over the Warring States Period which was about 250 years. A blink in history (especially Chinese history), but, c’mon, man. Maybe I’m just well-read and seeking to quibble.

But, yeah, the kinda disjointed book talks about his youth and falling into a library job in college; the history of libraries summarized from his textbooks; the story of moving the library from one location to another while the library building underwent renovation; some anecdotes about working in the library; a couple of fiction/drama pieces the author wrote; and his getting a job in a supervisory position with another library. It did bring forward to mind the enormous undertaking that it was to switch over from the cards-in-pockets circulation system to the computers-and-barcodes system. Tagging the library holdings in a quick fashion must have been crazy. Not only did I work for a library software company, but prior to that, I spitballed with a friend about building a suite to do that for used bookstores, including having a team of people who would come in and catalog/apply barcodes to the stock overnight or over a weekend. That would have been quite an endeavor for a larger bookstore.

So the book was not especially compelling. It could have been improved with more discrete anecdotes. The writing was passable, but only that. And the cover is not actually the author; it’s made from iStock clip art. I dunno why, but that disappointed me. And although I have checked the local library’s job site from time to time as I contemplate my retirement unemployability in IT as an old man, I have to wonder if I would really like it that much since my experience and this book indicate librarians are more into being librarians and government employees/bureaucrats and not so much people who love books. And the patrons are not people who love books either. Maybe bookstores and especially used bookstores are the direction I would enjoy more.

Sometime on or after seeing my aunt Mary on a recent trip to Wisconsin (How recent? Ten years ago), I learned that she spent time in India as a girl (her parents were missionaries?). I thought that was interesting, and I did some Internet stalking (I’m not close enough to most of my paternal family to, you know, just ask about it), and I spotted this book on Amazon and ordered it (in 2019). So it’s been sitting on my to-read shelves for six years for a moment just like this, where I would be still trying to work up the gumption to jump back into the C.S. Lewis Space trilogy.

I was not sure whether this book was by my aunt or not. The Amazon page for it is not helpful. My aunt and other family members never mentioned it. And as I got into it, I realized: No. Not my aunt, so not a close relation but probably somewhere in the distant chain (probably not as close as my rich cousin who died).

So: This book is a story of her faith journey told through journal entries and connective writing. Ms. Noggle had a tough life. She was orphaned early, raised by a grandmother until the grandmother, too, died when Ms. Noggle was fifteen. She was raped by a carnie in her youth. Her brother died in Vietnam. She had a lot of distrust and anger in her, but she eventually found her way back to (the Catholic) church. But even though she started going to church and praying in her 20s, she still had ups and downs in her relationship with God (and Jesus), especially when her close sister dies in the 1980s from breast cancer.

It would be oversimple to say that the book is but a litany of hardships interleavened with letters (to God, to therapists), journal entries, and prayers, although that is the basic structure of it. But it’s a strangely compelling account, a testament and testimony, about the ups and downs of faith in hard times. And even with the ups and downs, she makes progress to a better and stronger faith through the book. I expected her to become a nun at the end of the book, but that wasn’t the case.

The self-published book is 208 pages, but the text is double-spaced throughout and prayers and letters are indented, so it’s really far shorter than that. A quick read and inspirational in its way.

But, yeah, not my aunt.

I mentioned that I was reading a book by Yogi Berra, and not one I’d read before (well, I searched my blog, and I’ve only read When You Come To A Fork In The Road, Take It and The Yogi Book). I liked them well enough that I bought this book at ABC Books in 2023 for $5.95. Baseball books are right above the martial arts section (when ABC Books even has a martial arts section–it sells out quickly even when I’m not buying them all).

Both of those books came out a decade later than this book, which came out when Berra was still coaching (not managing) the Houston Astros or shortly thereafter, which means parts of the book might have been written whilst he was still coaching and parts after. Still, it does impact the scope and flavor of the book, which is almost an oral history from Berra about his years playing (almost 19) and managing/coaching (almost 25 after his playing days). So it reads a little as a transcription of a stream of consciousness with history and life lessons kinda bound up and then grouped into chapters which have topical titles that are only tangentally related to what Yogi talks about in each. And the chapters are broken by “Other Voices” which is, again, fairly unstructured reminisciences about Berra by other baseball people–with, sometimes, as much stage information about where the reminisciencer was when talking to the unnamed interviewer (Tom Horton, probably) or how difficult it was for the interviewer to get a couple quotes about Berra from the other figure. Berra repeats a couple of bits/facts and drops the name Milton Friedman because he had dinner with him once (which is recounted at the beginning of the “Milton Friedman” chapter)–apparently he was very proud of their conversation. Was that the mythical parenthetical with parentheses followed by a parenthetical with an em-dash? You betcha! Bask in it, gentle reader. Bask in it.

So: This is a mid book in his career. He had a couple in the early 1960s as his playing days were winding down. This book as his coaching/managing days were winding down. And then around the turn of the century and beyond, his later books which are more enjoyable as they’re structured better.

If I see the other books in the wild, I’ll pick them up. Because he was an interesting figure: A native St. Louisian, a participant of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, a winning ball player, a winning coach, and a public figure who was probably misunderestimated for much of it (but appreciated as a scamp in his dotage).

Not long after we saw Herb Alpert in concert last month, I asked my beautiful wife what trumpeter living or dead she would like to see or have seen in concert (Wynton Marsalis was her answer, and as he’s still touring with the Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra, we might have the chance to see him sometime–preferably if they bring Ashley Pezzotti along as a vocalist–oh, and my answer to the question is Maynard Ferguson). So as I read this book, I asked her what baseball players she has met or would like to meet. She hasn’t met a baseball player although she was quite the Tigers fan in the early 1980s. I think the only one I’ve seen in person officially was Pete Vukovich, the Brewers pitcher, who has at a table at some convention I attended in my college years (although we did see Willie McGee at the box office of a movie theater once, but we didn’t bother him as he was trying to pick a film to watch). She really didn’t have an answer to someone she would like to see or meet, and I guess my choice would be either Berra or Ozzie Smith (who’s still around, so you never know).

At any rate, I will definitely keep my eye out for the Berra books I am missing, although I bet it will be hard to find the early books in the wild without ordering them. And is it so weird that I think I can hear his voice? Or maybe I’m hearing George Burns voice and thinking it was Yogi Berra.

No, it’s his voice. Probably cemented by the AFLAC commercials.

I picked up this book in a bundle of chapbooks in April 2024. These little chapbooks, especially the non-poetry ones, have to fit in a certain place in my reading schedule: Mostly, when I finish a book with a couple of hours before bed and when I don’t want to dive back into the growing stack of my incompletely read books beside the chair. As it happens, this week I had just such an opening after finishing National Lampoon’s Jokes Jokes Jokes.

This story–it is a short story in a single volume, saddle-stitched–originally appeared in The New England Magazine in January 1892. The fact that it has been reprinted in 2018 indicates that it has some value to professors somewhere, and apparently, according to my research (reading Wikipedia) indicates it’s “is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards the mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. It is also lauded as an excellent work of horror fiction.”

Re-eee-ally.

I mean, it is a horror story: A doctor takes his wife to a quiet home for three months because she’s exhibiting some, I dunno, depression, and she’s in a big old house with him and someone to help, and she stays in a large room on the top floor that looks kind of like a nursery but with some scarring and damage. The room has the eponymous yellow wallpaper, which disturbs the woman further. Although they tell her she’s doing better, she feels more lethargic as the story goes on, and she starts seeing people in the gardens below and a woman trapped in the wallpaper, and as they are readying to depart, she embraces her madness.

There you go: Embracing madness as female empowerment.

My research (reading Wikipedia) indicates that this story might be a little autobiographical (presumably without the embracing madness part), and that the author was speaking against “The Rest Cure” which I guess what they did when well-to-do women in the late 19th century showed some of the less florid mental illnesses (meloncholy, lethargy, and so on). So the author was probably dinging something near to her heart and very contemporary, and somehow that has spoken to over a hundred years’ worth of feminists.

Not a half bad period horror piece. Not as almost inaccessible as Lovecraft. More akin to Poe. Or Algernon Blackwood (whose collection I abandoned and will likely not pick up again). So if you’re into that sort of thing, I guess this is a book for you. Or source material for a college paper on women’s mental health in literature or something.

I guess you can expect to see me find other books that “fall into” this evening reading gap as I’m only at 54 books for the year, and it’s almost September.

I bought this book this spring, which meant it was piled high on my existing office bookshelves until I put it on the single unread shelf on my new office bookshelf. And when it comes to dodge reading the increasing pile of meh or long (and sometimes meh) books beside my reading chair, I have recently turned to this shelf for my next book since it’s right there and it’s not an overwhelming selection.

At any rate, you might recall, gentle reader, that I’m a sucker for National Lampoon-badged movies such as Dirty Movie, Adam and Eve, and Holiday Reunion, and Black Ball (some more than others). I might have had a subscription to the magazine in the late 1980s, but I was less impressed with it.

This, though, was a bit of a breath of fresh air.

It’s grouped by the, what, butt of the jokes? Women, Men, Cats, various nationalities, and so on. It’s got its share of dirty jokes, Dirty Johnny jokes, and things that play upon old stereotypes (but are funny if you replace Polack with Cletus–as a matter of fact, one of the longer chapters is Rednecks). And, to emphasize their versatility, a couple of jokes are actually repeated in different chapters with the nouns changed.

Basically, it’s Dirty Movie in its original form.

Not all of the jokes are dirty or offensive; several of my favorite talking dog jokes make an appearance (and I’ve seen them in Readers Digest as well). But for the most part, not something you’re going to drop into your speech in the 21st century, even if you’re speaking to a Fraternal Order Of of some sort.

So I was amused with it in places and had a couple of chuckles. Because I’m probably every ist in the book except resist, and I grew up on The Official Frank O. Pinion Dirty Joke Book, Blazing Saddles, and my own father’s crude at times sense of humor. So I was not offended. Your mileage may vary. But if you are offended, you’re probably not the type to be reading books anyway.

The back matter of the book lists a large number of National Lampoon Books titles, which I will pick up if I can. And the very last page is a promo for a movie coming out in 2007: National Lampoon’s Bagboy. Bloody heck, I might have to order that.

How timely is this book even today? After I wrote up this post, Baldilocks shared one of the jokes from the Asians chapter on Facebook:

When I bought this book in 2018, I mentioned that my beautiful wife loved the books. To prove her point, she recently re-read this book (not this copy, which is mine, but her copy which is a well-re-read hardback). So when I was looking for another “short” book to read in between chapters of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandria (which has been very, very slow to start), I settled upon this paperback which has images from the Matt Damon movie on the cover. Judging by the uncracked binding, this book was not read and re-read by its original owner. I also mentioned when I bought the book that I had listened to one of the original books on audiocassettes back when I was commuting a lot to Columbia, Missouri, and back. But I was not familiar with the way the book began, so I think it might have been The Bourne Supremacy.

So: Well, this certainly is the longest Executioner book I’ve ever read.

This is the first of the Bourne series, and it starts with an unnamed man get thrown into the Mediterranean Sea just before a boat explodes. He is recovered by fishermen and is nursed back to health by an alcoholic doctor. But he has amnesia and does not know who he is. The doctor finds a piece of microfilm on him that gives him a way to access money from a Swiss bank. When he’s feeling well enough, he goes to Zurich to claim the money and finds that some people want to kill him. He hooks up with a Canadian economist who helps him, and his memory comes back in plot-helpful fits and starts. He might be a killer named Cain! He might be Carlos, the most notorious assassin in Europe! He might not even be named Jason Bourne! Set pieces, he plays cat and mouse with Carlos’s employees, and then suddenly a black ops organization in the United States government wants to pull him in, and the book pivots to him running from them, and….

Well, meh.

I mean, it’s awful damn wordy. We get pages of different players talking to each other to lay out plot points or to speculate on plot point to somehow build tension through gasbaggery. I complained about the same thing in Shōgun. And then we get the protagonist wigging out when memories and sensations coming flooding back. A bit overused and overdramatic.

I mean, it’s a long book, but the writing is not especially deep with description or characterization, although modern thrillers I’ve read like Lee Child tend to be thicker writing but not any more real depth to it, just words. Somewhere there’s a sweet spot, and I probably don’t write that way myself. Probably because the same voice critical of these books is critical of my writing while I’m writing. “How’s that next novel coming?” you might ask. It is not, thanks.

But I read one of my mother-in-law’s favorite books this year (A Tale of Two Cities), and I slagged on it. Now I’m slagging on one of my wife’s favorite books. Maybe I just don’t have anything nice to say about anything. But that’s what bloggers are, ainna?

This is a relatively recent (2020) hardback from the Salesian Missions collection of poems which I just bought in (May 2025, so just three months ago). Since I’ve gotten through my stack of Poetry magazines (and, finally, the complete works of Keats), I brought it up into the bedroom for the poetry nightcap.

And, gentle reader, you know I like Ideals magazine, and that’s what you’re getting in a collection like this. Poetry about seasons and about the relationship with God–moreso in this collection, as it’s produced by a Catholic organization as a fundraiser–but I get that in the grandma poetry chapbooks I also accumulate. These collections and Ideals are generally a cut above the self-published chapbooks (my own included?). It seems we get some overlap between the two, poets whose work appears in both (Grace E. Easley? Steven Michael Schumacher?)–but maybe I just read enough of these little collections that the names are just familiar only from Salesian publications.

So I enjoyed it as a light bit of a snack before bed, a ritual that winds me down for sleep.

The back flap had a long list of 128-page collections like this and regularly published pocket-sized books which I thought might be a checklist I could use to see how well my collection is going. But it might not be a comprehensive list–books I have reported on from the 20th century do not appear to be represented. Is it possible that they’ve published so many this century that they didn’t even have room for decades’ worth from last century? I guess someone knows, but not me.

At any rate, I recommend them. Perhaps I should send them some money as well to get the freshest works. It’s odd; subscribing to First Things and The New Oxford Review and, briefly, Touchstone have gotten me onto a lot of Catholic mailing lists, but not Salesian Missions.

It seems like I just read a Hornblower or O’Brian book, but I might have been thinking of Sharpe’s Trafalgar which mostly took place at sea and which I just read in January 2024. The last Hornblower title I read was Beat to Quarters in 2017, although I did pick up two last year: Lieutenant Hornblower at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale in April and this book at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale in June. So maybe that makes for why it seems fresh; after your first half century, anything in the last decade is just.

This posthumous collection is not actually a full novel; it has the incomplete novel Forester was working on when he passed away and two short stories in it. In Hornblower and the Crisis, Hornblower is between ships and helps to seize a French ship that spotted and pursued the little hoy he was taking back to port from the Hotspur, his previous command. He manages to capture the captain’s papers and return them to London, including an official dispatch from Boney, who has just made himself emperor. When conferring with the Lordships, he blurts out a plan to deliver forged orders for the French fleet to sail out, and they put him on the mission since he has some experience with the land area in which the operation will need to be conducted. And as he is about to become a spy, Forester dies, so we get a summary of the notes left behind. “Hornblower and the Widow McCool” explains how an Irish rebel is captured amongst French forces, and he asks Hornblower to deliver his sea chest to his widow. Hornblower suspects something is up and discovers the secret of the rebel’s last poem for his wife. “The Last Encounter” tells the story of an elderly Hornblower at his estate when a seeming madman arrives, thinking he’s Bonaparte. He is about to dismiss him when his wife (a different wife than in Hornblower and the Crisis, I note) intercedes and helps him on his way; later, they receive a thank-you note from Louis Napoleon Bonaparte who has established himself as ruler of France.

This 158 page Penguin book was a far quicker read than Shōgun for sure (but both historical paperbacks set but about two hundred years or so apart). It’s too big for the new mass market paperback shelf in my office which I have the inclination to fill by reading a bunch of paperbacks. But not big paperbacks like this.

Also, I did flag something in “The Last Encounter”:

The stranger made a low bow, and advancing, took Barbara’s hand and stooped low over it again to kiss it. Barbara was woman enough to be susceptible to a kise on the hand–and any rascal could find his way into her good graces if he could perform that outlandish ceremony in the right way.

Time for a Coffee House Memory^TM:

In 1996 or thereabouts, I remember a trio of Austrian au pairs (although the Germans and their cousins might have their own word for it, as au pair is clearly French and hence the enemy (at least in the context of this book–in modern times, the French are not even French)). A blonde and two brunettes; I can only remember the name of Marlena, which was one of the two brunettes and not even the one I thought was prettiest. They showed up at the Grind late at night, probably after the children they were responsible were in bed, and they drank coffee until some of the other expats (Indian or Pakistani, back when that was still a bit exotic) would invite them to go to the clubs, most likely Velvet (see also The Various Clubs I Have Attended from 2019), and they would dance and whatnot and somehow be up to take care of their charges in the morning. We were all young then and could do stuff like that–it was before my print shop days, when I was still working retail and might not have had to work until afternoons sometimes. I do remember that months later that the brunette whom I thought to be the prettiest was looking a little ragged.

At any rate, on the night that my friend Scott (he’s still alive, which puts him far ahead of many of my friends from the middle 1990s) introduced me to the three, I bowed and kissed their hands in turn. The blonde was quite miffed about it and recoiled whilst I did it, and throughout the evening, I understand she kept returning it and asking Scott why I did it.

Clearly, I did not perform that outlandish ceremony the right way.

So, back to the book. More to my taste than O’Brian and even Cornwell when you get down to it because the language is punchier and although it does talk about elements of naval warfare and operation, it does not go to the distance where you think that the author just wants to show off his research.

So I’m hoping I can find Lieutenant Hornblower sometime in the near future. And when you get past your first half century, you’re comfortable that “near future” might be nine years from now (should I live that long–most of my matrilineal side did not).

As I mentioned when I bought this book in April 2023, I might be the biggest collector of Leah Lathrom Wallace in the country since I have now read both The Best of Wheat and a Little Chaff and this second volume.

So I picked this up for my upstairs poetry book. I’ve taken to reading a little poetry right before bed every night as part of my wind-down ritual. For some months, I made my way through the stack of Poetry magazines that I bought last October.

And, you know what? I prefer the grandmother poetry in this volume. It’s got rhythm, and it’s got rhyme. Its contents are about trusting in God and home considerations–including some poems for friends and family members and personal history. Actually, this volume has a number of poems by family members, which reinforces the fact that everyone with the better education system of the early 20th century wrote poems (see my own father’s poem here).

So it was a quick read, relatable (more so than modern message poetry which is about speaking the poet’s truth and not shared humanity, so the reader might be excluded from the truth at all), and it helped me wind down.

Given that the back part of the book is relative’s poetry to fill this chapbook out, I have to assume that I now own the whole set. I’ll find other works like it, though; the poetry tables at the book sales are still full of these little chapbooks by somebody’s grandma. And I’ll pick them up and get to them eventually. And, eventually, they will disappear from the poetry tables, replaced by Print on Demand works by contemporary poets. If anything at all. Ai, I am leading to a dark and depressing meta-conclusion even though this particular book was anything but.

After I read the first of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet), I thought I would pick up something short as a palate-cleanser. Brother, did I go wrong: This 1200+ page book, which I just bought in June (not long before I started reading it), took the better part of a month to read.

This particular volume is the tie-in to the original television miniseries and has a picture of Richard Chamberlain on the back (what, he was more than Allan Quatermain?). As you might know, gentle reader, a new miniseries was released last year, so strangely enough, if I get down verbally with the kids these days about Shōgun these days, they’ll know it from the recent television experience, whereas I read the doorstop book (see also Dune).

So:

An English pilot/navigator is aboard a ship, the Erasmus, the only remaining vessel from a small contingent set to circumnavigate the globe circa 1600 is shipwrecked on the coast of Japan with a small number of his crew. They’re captured and are going to be killed, but the local warlord, Toranaga, takes an interest in him. He, Blackthorne, the pilot, is called Anjin-san (“Anjin” is nihongo for pilot). He falls in love with a married woman, Mariko, vows revenge on a brutal samurai (that’s redundant, but Yabu is extra brutal and does not like Blackthorne), and, after saving the life of Toranaga (twice) is made hatamoto and samurai. Meanwhile, above and beyond all this, the last military leader died, leaving a council of regents. A rival on the council, Ishido, is maneuvering to ostracize/expel Toranaga. And the Jesuits have started making inroads into Japan, converting a number of people, including some provincial leaders, but they think Blackthorne, as an Englishman and Protestant, is a heretic and must be eliminated. So we’ve got a bit of a fish-out-of-water story as Blackthorne comes to appreciate the Japanese way of life–or elements thereof; a love story between Blackthorne and Mariko; and a hella lotta political intrigue. And it has 1200 pages in which to do it.

The narrative has an interesting bit of flashbackery to it; often, we get an action or situation, and then the story flashes back to the events leading up to the action or situation. Which turns out to be almost how the whole story is laid out (spoiler alert?) We do get some chatty spots where characters discuss events or situations for a couple of pages to set up context or intrigue, and these spots are a bit boggy. And although he is the Western readers’ intro into the story and the one we’re supposed to root for, ultimately, at the end, Blackthorne’s real importance kind of falls off (the book is not entitled An Englishman in Japan or Anjin-San). And the climax comes around page 1000, runs a relatively long time, and then we have a bit of a dénouement for over one hundred pages with an ending that leads not to the great battle between the rivals for the shogunate–the book ends with preparations for the war. So a bit underwhelming to a modernish reader who expects more of a payoff at the end.

So it’s very similar to The Last Samurai, although set at opposite ends of the shogunate: A Western Larry Sue comes to Japan and ends up at the domicile of a samurai, falls in love with a Japanese woman with complications, and comes to appreciate the samurai way of life. Both are a bit hagiographic on the samurai way of life with living in the moment and composing poems and whatnot, but this book does show its inherent brutality and disdain for peasants, merchants, and Christians whereas the film did not (as I have not seen either filmed rendition of this book, I cannot say how brutal they were depicted, although the Wikipedia entry for the 1980 miniseries indicates it broke many network television taboos).

At any rate, I felt a little smart reading it as I was already familiar with some of Japan’s history, Buddhism (c’mon, I know who the Amida Buddha is), and geography, but at times I was a little annoyed with the exposition until I realized that most people were not.

It’s a long book. And I definitely finished it. But I’m not eager to run out and gather Clavell’s other work.

Although I did make an allusion to the film The Fly while reading this book, and in looking into Clavell’s career (reading Wikipedia), I discovered he wrote the screenplay for the original 1958 film. So, clearly, the books published in 1980 are listening to me. Be careful! Think and say nothing!

Wow, the past was a different country. Especially this genre of humor.

As I said when I bought this book last month, this book is akin to 101 Uses For A Dead Cat. I mean, a direct inspiration. Both are single panel comics with a simple caption of what the use is. In this book, the captions are in alphabetical order from “10 Pin Bowling” (politicians’ heads as the pins) to “Wood chips” (politicians run through a wood chipper). The final panel is a gag that says there are really only 166 cartoons, but what do you expect except lies when dealing with politicians.

Definitely reminiscient of the underground comics photocopied and photocopied and passed around to tack or tape to workplace walls. I’m pretty sure I still have a collection of the things my mother retained from the era. This book, from 1993, was about the end of it. Soon after, Dilbert and the Internet made passing around memes a whole lot simpler. I’m not saying our modern humor or memes are funnier than what you find in these books, but it’s hard to do worse.

You know what it made me long for, though? When I was in elementary school, the funniest thing going was A Comic Book of Sports by Arnold Roth. When someone got this from the book order, we’d all crowd around it. Eventually, I got my own copy which is sadly lost in the intervening decades–and probably shortly after I thought it was the height of humor. Ah, well. Better than this book, surely.

I got this book this May, and I guess it was atop the stack of poetry books to leaven my evening reading. Actually, it would be far too organized of me to group my unread poetry books together–they get jammed into the bookshelves or in an ever-growing stack atop the bookshelves, where they fit. But I found this book and picked it up. It had a bookmark already in it, but I think that’s because the book sale staffers jammed one in it. I don’t think I picked it up this summer and then reshelved it.

At any rate, this book is a collection of modern poetry written by a (recent?) divorcée with bipolar disorder. Some of the poems address that head-on, and others deal with the aftermath of failed relationships or the highs of new relationships (sometimes through the filter of the bipolar disorder). A couple others touch on then-contemporary political themes and support for the troops overseas.

Attention to rhythm and some bright moments, but overall only meh. Better than typical grandmother poetry, although she would have only been in her fifties when this book came out. But she was writing poetry, so good on ‘er. Not a professional nor an English major–she was a nurse by trade then a mother.

She passed away in 2024 at 71. She would have been of my mother’s generation, roughly, but clearly lived longer.

I got this book in 2019 when I was still buying art monographs to watch during football games. Since then, we’ve given up DirecTV which we mostly used on Sunday afternoons through the winter, and the Sunday Ticket package has gone to YouTubeTV, and I’m loath to buy that package. But I’ve still bought art books from time-to-time since.

It took me a while to pick this book up because it’s kind of an art book, but it’s put out by a gallery doing a show of the artist. It includes a price list of works in the front, and they’re not bad, I guess; a couple thousand dollars per, but it’s for an artist whose work was shown in New York. So.

At any rate, it took me a while and a couple of attempts to get into the book because it is mostly a text book, not an art book. It has two essays in it about the significance of the artist and his role in the American Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements. Originally from Ohio, he ended up in a couple of towns / artists colonies in Massachussetts and knew a number of other regional artists.

Most of the book is given over to the text, with some black-and-white small reproductions of his work alongside the text (and a portrait of the artist done by another artist), and after the essay we get 14 color reproductions of his work which are not too greatly reduced–the fellow worked in pastels and in oils on fairly small canvases, and…. Well, Impressionist scenes of Ohio winters and seascapes with boats, docks, and shacks. The Impressionism and probably work with pastels leads to long, broad strokes piled upon one another to make the scenes, which tends to make the look very primitive and indistinct.

Too much so for my taste. But looking at the works, one can see how the primitivism of various early 20th century artists like Frido Kahlo or the country craft styles of Grandma Moses became the new hotness, and from then onto the real madness.

So I won’t be spending the $6,000 for Rocky Coast. Well, that’s what it went for thirty-five years ago. I’m almost afraid to see what it would go for today.

Like Rated R, I saw this new book mentioned on the Internet–in this case Glorious Trash, and I ordered it based on the PWoC and the promise of a modern men’s adventure paperback.

Boy howdy, this is even more lurid than Rated R or even a The Gunsmith book. It starts out in the present, where the titular (that means from the title, gentle reader) character has spent four years training to seek revenge on those who raped her and a friend, prostitutes in a high-end Manhattan cat house, and killed the friend–and would have killed her, too, if a protector had not emerged to save her. In this present day, she finds one of the men, a pimp who has moved up in the world, and has graphic sex with him before dispatching him.

Then we get a flashback of her life before, including how good of a prostitute she was because she’s beautiful and really, really likes sex (the author continues to point out). The rape scene is pretty graphic, too, but after that we settle down for the most part and cover how the man who saved her takes her under his wing, and he’s a Vietnam veteran with a set of special skills which he passes on to her. Then she gets down to the business of tracking down the other five men who killed her madame and her friend and ended her idyllic life. We get flashbacks of her training over the last four years, and then we find out the reasons the protector found her that night, and then we get a friendly cop, explicit sex with the friendly cop with the intensity and frequency which is probably physically impossible outside feverish books, and then the Black Angel and the friendly cop uncover a plot involving dirty cops, politicians, and a rising crime figure. All of whom are dispatched, and finis!

The front has a copyright date of 1975 and 2025, but I think it’s really a new book that’s trying to catch the blaxploitation and men’s adventure vibes of the era. My suspicion is triggered by three things:

1. The book is 292 pages long, which is long by the standards of the era.
2. The book really, really likes to throw around racial epithets in a fashion that I’ve not seen in books of the era, either. You get a couple to indicate that a character is bad, but in this book, well, all the bad guys use them all the time. Maybe I’ve only read the highest quality, most pure paperback pulp of the era. But it seems a little much, as though someone is being a little naughty under the cover of “it’s from the 1970s.”
3. The book seems to have some confusion as to the difference between the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC) in places where it talks about the protector and the friendly cop, who knew each other in a prison camp.

So I think this book, and the other books by the imprint, are probably new books set to have the feel of the most excessive of the 1970s men’s adventure books.

At any rate, it’s a decent enough plot and story hidden amongst the florid coupling.

But I’m not likely to order others in the line.

I guess after reading a couple volumes of Thoreau, I was in the mood for some additional nature-themed reading. And I prepared for just that occasion seventeen years ago when I bought this book at the book sale at the Jewish Community Center in St. Louis.

So this is a late 1960s naturalist, well, novel I guess. It talks about the life of a Kodiak bear from its birth to its death on Kodiak Island in Alaska some years later after it has grown to legendary size and is sought by hunters. It talks about the biology of the island, its history, and goes into detail but narratively unlike the Thoreau catalogs. It’s got a materialist, circle-of-life vibe to it but it presents Nature as red in tooth and claw (literally) in a nonjudgmental fashion. It does tut-tut hunters who come to the island to kill the big bears (and a couple get what’s coming to them courtesy of Monarch). And although it does say not to anthopomorphize animals, it does with Nature herself.

Written in the 21st century, the book would have been unreadable likely with the Message, but it’s not a bad read as it is.

The Bass Pro Shops headquarters here in Springfield has a stuffed Kodiak bear that is a bit of a photo op for visitors. I wondered if this was, indeed, Monarch of Deadman Bay, but it turns out he was not taken by a hunter (scientists tranquilize him to test him and tag him, and a rival bear attacks while he’s incapacitated–the ultimate irony that do-gooders did him in instead of hunters). I had thought of having my picture taken with it and this book, but, c’mon, man, you’re not here to see pictures of me. You’re here to see pictures of random actresses, not me. So no fun in that.

I guess Caras was a known animal/naturalist journalist with many television appearances (including being a regular host of the Westminster dog show) and has a pile of books to his credit, and some look to be in this line. If I see them, I will pick them up. Let that be my recommendation to you then.

Clearly, I sometimes go Last-In-First-Out when it comes to selecting books. In this case, for the poetry collection that I keep beside the readin’ chair, I picked out a book I just bought last month (well, actually, I brought out a couple when I was stacking them up) and of the couple, I started this one first. At some point, I thought “Isn’t this the guy who translated Beowulf?” Yes, it is, and I’m not sure how I knew that. It’s been a while since I read Beowulf–probably college–and Heaney’s version did not come out until 1999 to some fanfare. Perhaps I have a copy of it that I’ve been avoiding. But I delved into this book, and….

Well, it was all right. Some of the poems were interesting. The style tends to feature longer lines and completing thoughts, not just a couple of words dropped ponderously which the reader can imagine the poet saying and then pausing and looking around as though the two or three word lines were profound enough to warrant a pause much less a poem. But, gentle reader, I slag on modern poetry like that all the time.

Themeatically, he talks about love and whatnot, but half of the book is given over to The Troubles as he is Irish after all. So they didn’t speak to me as much as they would an Irishman or as much as they would to a literati who wanted to claim they speak to he/she/it.

But, some interesting rhythm wordplay and rhyme. Not a bad collection, and it makes me wonder how his earlier works were. By the time he published this book, he was teaching at Harvard and had a number of other books under his belt. One wonders if his earlier work was better, more real, than what might have come after he was a cause célèbre in poetical circles such as they were in the 1980s which is a far, far cry from what they might be in he 21st century.

Ah, gentle reader, I won’t be taking the crown from Joe Kenney for the longest time between getting a book and reading it since I only got this book probably 31 or 32 years ago whilst in college and when I had a class for which I had to read Walden (although I cannot remember exactly which class that would have been–a philosophy class? A middle American literature class?). So I would have bought this at Waldenbooks (which would have been meta, would it not?) or B. Dalton’s at the Northridge mall (and not the university bookstore where it would have been for a few dollars more). So I read Walden in it and I started A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers judging by the era-appropriate bookmark, but since I just read The Maine Woods / Walden / Cape Cod, I figured I might as well knock out this book as well. Originally, I’d thought that I’d pulled it from my read shelves when I tried to encourage my son or sons to read this book, but it is not in my read book database, so perhaps it has been on my to-read shelves for these thirty years.

At any rate, it contains a couple of things which I had not read before, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers which Thoreau self-published. He had 1000 copies printed in the days way before print on demand, and he did not sell them all–this is the book about which he quipped about having a library of over 1000 books, 700 of which he wrote himself. It chronicles, in Thoreau’s fashion which means several years after the fact cherry-picking some bits from his journals and inserting some philosophy in them. It describes, theoretically, a boat trip he and his brother made down the local river to the port on the ocean (I was going to say sea, but can one ever pair those two in prepositional phrases again?), but it’s laden with his philosophical asides. I can see it as a precursor to Walden where he blends to two better. It’s not too long, though, and it was what Thoreau wanted to publish unlike posthumous works which were culled from his journals and not pored over or refined by Thoreau himself.

The book also contains, in addition to Walden (which I did not read in this volume this time, but I read it in this book in college and I read it in the other volume earlier this year, so no double-dipping), “On Civil Disobedience” and “Life Without Principle” as well as excerpts from The Maine Woods, Cape Code, and Thoreau’s journals. I read the essays and the excerpts from the journals, but not the excerpts from the things I’d already read.

So: “Civil Disobedience” is his diatribe against an overarching government that takes from citizens to do things that are not in their interests. Based on a single night he spent in jail for not paying a tax that supported the Mexican-American War (although his refusal to pay the tax was longer than the war itself), it really only documents that one night in a couple of pages near the end. The rest of it is pretty free-wheeling anti-government abolitionist almost stream of consciousness.

“Life Without Principle” is described as a talk or lecture he gave on several occasions but only was published the year after his death. I guess it sums up his philosophy as succinctly as possible where Walden did not. Basically, it’s about living life according to the individual’s needs, according to nature, and with minimal interference from government and society. It denigrates people who, getting and spending, lay waste their hours (to be honest, it does read a bit like Wordsworth themeatically) by actually earning a living and making money–which would provide for families, a problem Thoreau didn’t have, of course. He argues against many contemporaries and their tracts/books, but all the names are unfamiliar to us now (and given this is 2025 and not 1993, perhaps the name Thoreau is lost to most)

And the entries from Thoreau’s journal are a couple of paragraphs each, some nice little poetic moments capturing a bit of nature with the flair and philosophizing that is Thoreau at his best and are mercifully briefer than The Maine Woods.

So, now, at the end, what do I think of Thoreau?

As I have mentioned (I think), I can see why he hit differently in the mid-to-late 20th century, when the Baby Boomers were coming up through the college ranks. Thoreau was a Harvard man himself who never really grew up–he did not really have to work for a living nor support a family, so he was enabled to live the “life of the mind” and continue his concordance with nature up until his early death in his early 40s. His themes of non-conformance and the loss of the wild areas (which would have also, been metaphorically, youth to professors who did end up with families to support by professing) aligned with that fin-de-middle-siecle sense of the 1960s turning into the 1970s turning into the 1980s which would have been the lives my professors had known.

But aside from Walden, Thoreau is…. meh. “Civil Disobedience” wanders a bunch as does “Life Without Principle”. We get that Thoreau didn’t like the Mexican-American War. Or slavery. Or the Irish. Or most human development. And the other books and presumably the journals are really just fairly wordy catalogs of daily experience in great detail with some flourishes of interest but mostly just lists of flowers and trees seen in the wild.

So I won’t be getting the complete journals any time soon (unless they’re at the Clever branch of the Christian County Library later this month on bag day).

Ah, but Brian J., you might say. Are you not just slagging on Thoreau as a man-boy who never grew up and had to “adult” as the kids say these days who play-acted at living off the land but really just wanted to make a living from the “life of the mind” by writing his own ill-informed, twee sentiments and lightweight experiences as though they were profound, and that pretty much describes you with a blog twenty-two years on now? A fair cop, gentle reader. Perhaps even true: What I least like about Thoreau might be what I fear I share in common with him. But I’m not boring in detail of flora and fauna. I’m too dull to even know what those birds are in the tree in my back yard that seranade me evenings when I am in the pool. So I don’t even rise to the worst of Thoreau. Thanks for asking.

Oh, and lest I fail to mention it, this book provided me a Found Bookmark of my own. Stuck in the middle of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, I found an index card with three names on it and the words, “Dues From.” This would have been my senior year, ainna, when I was the treasure of Marquette Writers Ink, the writing club at the university. One of the names is a girl (woman, I guess, but a young woman) who might have had a crush on me that I never suspected until the president of the club asked me if there was something going on, as she always came to me first at any event or gathering. Strangely enough, she’s the only one I’m nominally connected to as she showed up as a suggestion on LinkedIn some years ago, and I connected with her–she’s a copywrighter in Minnesota these days. Another, I had been thinking of because he would have been the only Indian-American I knew at the time, thirty-some years ago. Over at a blog I read, commenters disparagingly refer to Indians especially in the ever-growing number in the tech industry as Jeets, as this guy actually went by Jeet. He was at least second generation, though, as he had no accent. And he was a poet in English. I cyber-stalked him and found that he might be living in St. Louis these days. It didn’t catch me by surprise–so I might have looked him up before. I wonder if we overlapped there. I feel bad for JenBen, though, the other woman whose name is on the card: I don’t really think of her at all.

And: I have to say that this might not be the last of my collegiate acquisitions that I read. So I might read the book I picked up on the Chinese tradition of Buddhism sometime. I might actually finish George Steiner’s Real Presences, a textbook for Dr. Block’s class, on my third attempt (the last being about a decade ago). So I might very well have more Personal Records in laziness in reading books I buy to set yet.

I mentioned, gentle reader, that I’d started reading a book about cats on the aborted vacation last month, and this is that book. Apparently, I got it at Redeemed Books over on Republic Road in 2021, and that might have been the last time I was in that store. I’ve even been not going to ABC Books that much these days, which is definitely atypical. But I am getting pretty topped up on books with nowhere to go with new arrivals but the floor or the tops of the shelves in my office where they’re already blocking the cool bladed weapons and are getting a little precarious, where an exploring cat will likely knock a stack of them to the floor. So maybe I should be building the stacks on the floor so that the books atop the have less far to fall. But that is neither here nor there.

At any rate, this is a collection of stories about people adopting or finding cats. Given that it’s from Revell Publishing, it has just a blush of Christianity to it, with several of the writers mentioning God (but not Jesus). All of the stories have happy endings, especially the kittens-gone-missing stories. And most of them are anachronistic–although they don’t all talk about the eras in which the stories occurred, those that do mention it having been in the mid-20th century.

So: Well, you’re not going to get the “couple paragraphs of analysis” twee insights that I reserve for, say, Thoreau. But it was a pleasant read and almost led me to adopting a couple other rescue kittens. If you like cats and reading about cats, you’ll like the book. But it’s not as deep as Willie Morris or (probably) Cleveland Amory might try to be.

I was thinking that I was tearing through these Louis L’Amour books that I bought a year ago in Clever (watch for the Good Book Hunting post for this branch’s book sale later this month!), but I guess I’ve only read three others: Hondo in September; Silver Canyon in October; and The Man from Skibbereen last month. Although four books by the same author in six months is, at the Nogglestead pace, tearing through.

In this book, a scout/gunslinger type, Matt Bardoul, sees the girl of his dreams in Deadwood, South Dakota. Her father is bringing her along on a wagon train planning to start a new town by Big Horn mountain where gold might have been discovered, but Bardoul has his doubts as other power brokers in the proposed trip are amassing a group of desperadoes, and Bardoul thinks that they’re up to something, perhaps killing and looting the wagon train when it’s out of the reach of civilization. Some events back this up, and then….

Well, the narrative differs from the other books for sure. L’Amour builds up some characters and develops some cross-purposes, but about two-thirds through the book, Bardoul is left for dead, and then he pursues the wagon train which has been completely hijacked by the bad guys, and he finds those developed characters and allies dead along the trail which seems an abrupt end to them. We get Bardoul’s dogged pursuit even after greivous wounds that would have left him dead or unable to operate but for his being the main character in a men’s adventure novel. We get a couple page monologue from an Indian decrying the white man that has no real purpose in the story. And…. Well, finis, eventually.

You know, I was probably influenced by the whole The World’s Best Selling Frontier Storyteller, the commercials for the book club back in the day, and A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, and the fact that I started reading L’Amour with stronger titles (The Last of the Breed and Bendigo Shafter) which were heavily quoted in A Trail of Memories. But these books were just men’s adventure books set in the West, and L’Amour a talented workman, but he was churning them out at a great pace probably at least partially dictated by contractual obligations. So they’re all not going to be the pick of the litter. And this one is not.

Still, I might not seek out additional titles from what I already have accumulated. Aw, who am I kidding? If it’s bag day, they’re going in the bag.

Also, a housekeeping note: Although originally a paperback, this is in the library binding (it, too, a discard from the Nixa High School library thirty-some years ago). So it goes on the shelves with my hardbacks, not my mass market paperback read shelves. Which is good, as these last are now overflowing. Which, hopefully, will induce me to read more hardbacks or trade paperbacks amongst the cheap genre fiction.