Category: Book Report

For the first book for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I picked up this book. I had thought that I bought it from the Quality Paperback Club around the turn of the century, but a blog post from 2007 indicates I bought it at a garage sale or a book sale in the waning months of that year. Presumably a used book store or a yard sale, as one of the pages has a stain on it and the bottom of the pages has a marker’s mark on it. Maybe I just thought about buying it from the Quality Paperback Club. Maybe not–I don’t remember how late into the century I might have dabbled in that particular mechanism for expanding one’s library rapidly.

So, the setup is this: Right before his wedding in 2000, the author’s fiancé calls it off. But he’s already paid for the honeymoon, a trip to Costa Rica, as well as the venue and reception. So he goes ahead with a party for the guests who were coming, apparently mostly his friends, and then he convinces his brother to come on the honeymoon with him–which gives him the idea, since he’s just been demoted or sideways assigned at work, to quit his job and spend a year traveling the world with his brother.

I mean, that’s the setup. He goes into flashback a bit about his relationship and his job and does a bit of self-reflection. He seems to come from money, and his job out of school was in the political realm, so about ten years into his career, he’s a highly paid and very connected Californian (Republican) lobbyist for the Irvine Corporation which is the major developer behind Irvine, California. He met his fiancé in Washington when he was working for a member of Congress and she was a graphic designer. From the flashbacks, it seems like he was always in the driver’s seat of the relationship, making plans for the both of them–moving them to Seattle and then California and then pushing. When she began having panic attacks, he proposed, and she separated from him for a while, but when they got back together, the wedding was on again until it was not. He reflects, eventually, that he really had a template for life and she was a part of it, but he doesn’t express remorse, really.

So: They go to Europe; his brother, a part-time but successful realtor with a number of rental properties, buys a Saab because they will let you pick it up at the factory and insure it for six months if you want to take it on a tour of Europe with it. So they do, staying with friends in Prague and Moscow and then driving through Turkey to Syria, gaining entry with a photo of the author with George W. Bush (he also has one with Gore just in case–the election had not yet taken place). Then! They take a tour of southeast Asia with stops in Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other places. Followed by a tour of the southwest United States, briefly (not really depicted). Then a tour of South America, including Brazil, Venezuela, Peru (and Machu Picchu), and Trinidad. Then, wow, they’re famous, apparently, for the dispatches that the author has been sending to his ninety-seven-eight-nine-year-old step-(great?)-grandmother, who has been sharing them with the other residents of her nursing home–and they’ve appeared in the local papers and whatnot. So he gets a chance to go on a junket without his brother all paid for, and then he and his brother go to Africa, where they can go on safari and slag on white South Africans before wrapping up the book. The book interleaves interactions with the step-grandmother, and at the end, she dies and leaves he and his brother a bundle. He goes on to become a travel writer, and the back cover of this book says his brother and he are traveling for a new book.

I intended to, and I’m going to, count this book in the Vacation category because it’s somewhere between that and memoir–it’s not a travel book, for although it does talk about the places he goes, the places are a little in the background to him being in those places, reflecting on his life and the world in those places, and trying to reconnect with his younger brother in those places. I cannot say that I can really identify with the fellow–he’s traveling the world from a place of fiscal security and, to be honest, confidence that I presume is borne of being positioned for and enjoying success at a high level. I mean, I would not try to talk my way across a border in the Middle East. Maybe I’ve ended up like a dog that’s been beat too much–not sure what percentage of my life just covering up, but it’s probably measurable. But I digress.

At any rate, an interesting book, at any rate. A bit rushed in the ending–the Africa trip is given pretty short shrift–but I’m not likely to seek out the sequels.

And, oh, how the world has changed in 25 years.

I’m counting this book, which I picked up in Davenport, Iowa, in 2024, as my first book read for 2026 even though I finished it on December 30, 2025. As I mentioned, I flip that particular calendar sometime the week after Christmas, and these days, finishing a book right before the turning of the year puts me in a bit of a spot because the library’s Winter Reading Challenge starts on January 2, so I can’t use books I started before January 2 for it. So what do I read for the next two days? I’m leery of picking something up that I cannot finish within the two days, so I guess I’ll nibble at some of the books on the chairside table which I won’t be finishing any time soon.

At any rate, this is a one-off Western from an author whose other works are fantasy, science fiction, or a blend of the two, so it is a departure. Dalton Phillips comes to Spider Rock, Arizona, in 1848, and he’s a bit of a Perry Sue in that he’s formally educated, a great piano player, the fastest gun in town, and a very good gambler. He has come to live with his uncle, the local preacher, but they conflict because of the aforementioned talents the man has. But he has a couple of fatal flaws or drawbacks, including consumption (one of the reasons he came to Arizona, the other being he’s a hellraiser), and he likes to drink and to carouse with the ladies of the saloons in which he likes to play piano, to drink, and to gamble. So he guns down a couple of people, develops a reputation, and then….

Well, he is unlucky in getting caught with the daughter of the Big Boss Man in town, and he is unlucky in trying to defend one of the ladies of the saloons to whom he feels a special connection. The latter leads him to being bested by a number of banditos and taken into the desert, shot, and left for dead, but brought in by a tribe of Apaches, including one he’d humiliated in town–and who remembers and resents. But Perry Sue, I mean, Dalton, is adopted by the chief, woos and weds the chief’s daughter, only to see them slaughtered by US Calvary led by a particularly odious colonel….

Well, afterwards, Dalton returns to town and sinks even lower, drinking with his last coins, and….

Well, I thought that part of the point of the book was to build a “protagonist” or merely main character whose fatal flaws led from promise to an ultimate wasted demise (a la Vienna Days and the kid from Running Scared, almost), but….

The self-destructive and “Unlucky” things that happen to the protagonist put him in a position to ultimately help (save) the people of town from an impending assault, and he redeems himself a bit, but the story finishes tragically (unluckily, and because the character grew and showed mercy).

The twist certainly makes the book a little more interesting, but the characterization is a little flat. I still look for the influences from popular culture which informed or inspired the writer–but whatever thoughts I had when reading the book are lost to me as I type this. So I continue to rate Ben Wolf above most self-published authors and some of the house pulp writers, but lacking a bit in the umami that makes someone like Don Pendleton pop.

So I have one more book of his to read before October (Winterspell) when I return to Davenport (perhaps) and buy one or more of his other books (probably, if perhaps comes true). So far, it’s the next in the Santa books that I’ll pick up and maybe what he’s written since unless Winterspell is really good.

As you might know, gentle reader, if you’ve been around blogs for any period of time, Gerard Van der Leun was a long-form blogger from way back who recently passed away, and Neo, with whom he had become romantically involved, put out a couple of books of his work as she had promised him she would. You know, I didn’t read his work all that much when he was alive and blogging–it looks like I linked to American Digest twice in 2004 (here and here, two consecutive posts in October 2004). Which is a shame, since the essays in this book are quite good. I cannot check to see what it was like now since it redirects to a payday loan site, showing again how ephemeral our life’s work on blogs will be. Fortunately, these books will survive.

At any rate, it’s a 250+ page book with 45 or 46 essays in it (the last, 46, is an epilogue, so I don’t know whether to count it as an essay per se). The topics range from light-hearted humor to rather detailed family-based life lessons tinged a little with regret at times. They’re proper and good essays, not blog posts. Van der Leun was born in the 1940s, spent some time as a hippie, got into publishing, lived in Europe for a while, and lived a proper writer’s life.

Man, it’s the life I’d hoped for, but I took turns into the mundane with a tech career and then working-from-home for decades which left me with little interesting to write about and but a blog to write it. So I feel called out a bit by the book, too, but that’s just my year-end mood talking.

So neo has done a good job putting this book together, and it’s worth a read. I’ve also just received the collection of his poetry that she put together as well, but I’m not going to dive into that until January where it will fit into the Short Story or Poetry category for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge.

Well, this book (which I just bought in October) is kind of a Christmas book. I mean, it stars Santa Claus, and he’s trying to save Christmas, so….

Okay, here’s the deal: Santa Claus’ marriage is in trouble because he looked at a Victoria’s Secret catalog a couple of decades ago. On Christmas Eve, as he’s preparing his trip, the reindeer, zombified, attack. After he dispatches them, he discovers only young Rudolff is unaffected. He seeks help from a cantankerous but inventive elf recently fired for drinking who provides him with an engine he developed and which NASA and SpaceX are interested in. They outfit the sleigh with it, but then Santa finds that the MacGuffin is missing. It’s a Timepiece, a time and space device that allows him to deliver all packages around the world in time. Father Time has taken it and offers it back in exchange with a night with Mrs. Claus. Santa says no, and Father Time sets a couple of zombie polar bears on the elves.

Santa looks to find Father Time and to save Christmas and heads into the blizzard with the inventive elf, whose dark elf cousin comes along to protect him. Then booby-trapped puffins attack; they join up with their weapons expert Vladimir Putin (this being before the current war made him into the tabloid supervillain he has since become); they fight zombies but are saved by mermaids; dinosaurs attack; et cetera.

So it’s a bit of a romp where you never know what might happen next. It’s chock full of allusions to pop culture, including Indiana Jones, Die Hard, Frozen, and others. It’s the kind of thing I would have written in high school, kind of reminiscient of Samurai Cat and not unlike Rickshaw Riot.

So I am down to two Ben Wolf titles…. Will I make it through them both this year? Tune in and find out!

This is the third of the three local history books I picked up in our trip up north in 2018 which featured a brief visit to Mackinac Island, a famous resort island more famous because it does not allow cars, so people traverse the island in horse-driven conveyances or bikes. In the summer. I have to wonder if they use snowmobiles in the winter and presume so.

I read Mackinac Island: Its History in Pictures in 2018 and We Live on Mackinac Island in 2021.

This book, of course, is more like the former than the latter. A high-level history of the region chronologically, with a paragraph for various years starting in 1624 and continuing to the present day, although the story thins out toward the end “continued being a resort, basically” was the history. In its history section, it also goes far afield, talking about some of Schoolcraft’s trips in the upper Midwest and some of Pere Marquette’s trips which were outside Mackinac Island.

But it’s sprinkled with historical photos and starts with Indian legends and ends with touring information, so definitely a tourist take-away. Which I was and did.

We only visited the island for a couple of hours on a summer day. What did we do? Took a tour in a horse-drawn carriage. Walked around the fort. Walked around the lower commercial area a bit. And took the ferry back to the UP where we crossed the bridge back to the LP where we were staying.

When I showed my beautiful wife what I was reading, she started to daydream about places we could visit: Sanibel Island again, maybe the keys, Mackinac Island (staying on the island, perhaps)…. But, you know, that’s interesting and all, but when I do that sort of thing or when I’m on vacation, I think, “What would it be like to live there?” Like, for a period longer than a week? Wintering on Mackinac Island? Spending a year on Sanibel Island? I would still be an outsider–hell’s bells, I still feel like an outsider in Southwest Missouri even though I have ancestors from the area and I’ve lived here for sixteen years. Probably I’d feel like an outsider anywhere, and I would probably adjust and get bored living anywhere.

Perhaps it’s just best to visit places for a little bit and to read up on their history from the comfort of my own home.

I don’t know when I got this book, but I picked it up with a couple of other shorter books not so much because I’m looking to pad my annual stats (although I am), but because they were on the collapsed bookshelves where I last think I spotted Time and Again by Jack Finney which I wanted to pick up since I just finished Time & Again by Clifford D. Simak. I didn’t find the book I was looking for, but I did find this little Scholastic sports bio.

Bo Jackson was a big deal in the late 1980s, ainna? He played baseball and football and had a huge Nike ad contract–remember the Bo Knows commercials?

This book, written in 1990, was at the peak of his career. It’s kind of read that kind of bio, brimming with optimism. In 1991, a football injury caused him to miss time in the football season and the whole baseball season; he came back to baseball, won comeback player of the year, but retired in 1994. So he probably did not play long enough to get into either sport’s Hall of Fame–although he is the only athlete so far to have been a two sport all star. But that’s beyond the scope of the book.

The book itself tells about his youth, 8th of 10 chlidren and a bit of a J.D. but not a gangbanger or anything (apparently). It talks about him taking up sports after he straightened out and being a natural athlete who didn’t like to practice, but got through on sheer athleticism, much to his coach’s chagrin. He did multiple sports in college and completed his four years despite being drafted his junior year.

So the book’s a bit of a hagiography, of course, and geared to kids, although perhaps Jackson would not be the best inspiration for them, at least in how practicing and study of a particular sport go. However, he seems a standup guy. He’s remained married to his college sweetheart and has done charitable work after his retirement.

The book mentions, in passing, Deion Sanders, who was just coming into the leagues then. I mention this because I read a similar biography of Sanders in 2012.

So the hunt for the Finney continues after a couple of other books.

Whenever I read Clifford D. Simak’s books (such as City, Mastodonia, or Project Pope), I think they’re…. interesting. But not compelling, which is why they are spaced so far apart in the archives (2010, 2017, 2020, and now 2025). They all feature great sweeps of time or time-travel or distant futures and big questions and although the characters are not bad, they’re do not make for heroes or compelling reading.

At any rate, in this book, a spacefarer who has been missing after going to an isolated and potentially dangerous planet returns after twenty years, but before he does, an unknown person or entity approaches an agent of Earth’s security forces to explain that they should kill Sutton, the traveler. The unknown person is from the future, and he wants to make sure that Sutton does not write a book. Because Sutton, who died in a crash on the planet but was revitalized by the aliens there and put in touch with the entity paired to him, his Destiny, which all living things have. And Sutton will write his reflections in a book which will become a religious text at the core of a inter-time war between a faction that wants Man to be the supremest being in the galaxy and to conquer and rule through a corporation that lasts a million years and one that wants to recognize the dignity of all life, particularly androids, which are not robots but rather are humans who are built organically but are sterile.

So that’s the setup, but it’s not the setup–it’s the story as it is revealed two and experienced by Sutton, the main character, who is approached by both factions and others and struggles with his Destiny–well, not the entity he calls Johnny, but he tries to wrap his head around how it’s all going to come to pass, whether he’s in real danger since he has not yet written the book, and discovering the non-human abilities he has been given by the aliens–including the ability to die and to then revive from the power received from twinkling stars–or a ship’s engine.

So it’s a lot of hopscotching and cogitating on the questions about destiny and the paradoxes of time travel, but events just seem to happen to Sutton, and although he’s a sympathetic character, a stranger both to the future where the factions are sending him back in time and to the past (1981, which is 30 years after the book was written, so the future from the book’s present but closer to the book’s publication date than to today), the alien abilities which are revealed as the book progresses makes him a bit of a Mary Sue, and the ending indicates how one faction has successfully nudged Sutton to fulfilling his destiny. So it smacks a bit of nudge and behavioral economics which I find unpalatable.

So I might have a couple of more Simaks lying around, but it is likely to be another half-decade or more until I get to it if I find it.

I do think I have a copy of Time and Again by Jack Finney around here somewhere, a 1970 book with the same title which also involves time travel. Maybe I’ll pick that up sometime soon (when I find it) just because it would seem to be just the right time to do so.

Of all the sets of authors’ books which I would complete in 2025, the smart money would be on the Ben Wolf books I bought in 2024 and 2025 especially as I have stated my goal to read them in case I am again in Davenport, Iowa, in October. But it turns out I have completed the three books I bought from Julian Lynn at ABC Books in 2019–I previously read Divine Fruit in 2019 and Yoga’s Devotional Light in 2020. This book took me a while because the title sort of seemed like it would be hints at diet and whatnot, but that’s not what it is at all.

First, though, a story from the ABC Books book signing. I guess I was talking to Mrs. E., who used to attend our church, about church or other people from church before picking up the three Hindu-influenced books by Ms. Lynn (which are unsigned for some reason, or at least this one is). After I left, Ms. Lynn expressed surprise that a church-going person would pick up her books, and I guess Mrs. E. eventually gave the author an answer she could accept: He is a poet. Given that Divine Fruit is a collection of poetry, maybe she thought I bought them all in solidarity with a fellow poet. Truth be told, I buy too many of these books both to help out ABC Books and to encourage the authors.

At any rate, this book is not a dietary guide. Its basics are that the Four Gates are considering:

1. The short term affect on my vitality
2. The long term affect on my vitality
3. The short term affect on society’s vitality
4. The long term affect on society’s vitality

It comes in an early chapter, so it’s not like I am spoiling the whole book for you.

It focuses a lot on the concept of vitality, which is the, I dunno core energy of your person, breathing exercises, and self-improvement the yoga and Hindu way.

So it’s not as deep as say post-sesshin talks from Shunryu Suzuki or Joko Beck, but I suppose it’s helpful if you’re into yoga. The book doesn’t smell like essential oils, but the target audience probably has some handy even today.

One thing I did dispute, though, was a couple of exhortations to leave behind toxic or unuplifting relationships once you start your journey. I bet this eat pray love-styled advice blew up a lot of families when some wives started taking yoga and got this message, and ultimately led to unhappier lives and less vitality for those involved, including the women. But I espouse stoicism, which is not far off of these teachings but definitely differs in vital ways.

Ah, gentle reader. I bought this book in the swirling mists of pre-history where by “pre-history,” I mean before I started tracking book purchases on the blog–probably not long before, as the real book sale frenzies would have not begun before the 21st century–well, not much–although it might come from my Ebay days where I bought books like this for a buck or less each and listed them for a couple of bucks a throw on Ebay. I did come up with boxes of books then, and when I gave up on them, I put them in my sainted mother’s yard sale, and she once set up the night before, and several hundred dollars’ worth of books, or at least books I paid several hundred dollars for, were ruined.

But not this book. It remained in my to-read stacks, most recently (and maybe for 16 years) in the hall between the offices. I must have pulled it out and put it back many times, as I remembered that mid-70s cover with the, what, sasquatchish creature on the cover? The back of the book looked interesting, but not compelling, but eventually the time came to read it, and that time was last week.

So: On a cold planet which has a narrow habitable band between a sun-blasted side and a side where the sun never shines–and where the narrow band has a year of sun and a year of darkness–a species called the Onhla are dying out from a disease which sickens but does not kill the last, Hult. He’s on his way to human settlements with invaluable furs from the starside of the planet where only the Onhla can travel. They’re stolen when he’s sick, though, but they create a sensation as traders from a galactic corporation want more. Hult agrees if the traders will help him to another planet where some Onhla were taken centuries ago so he can find a mate. They do, but the senior trade delegate dies on the return trip, and the more militant and haughty junior member of the group “renegotiates” the deal by demanding additional furs, but Hult renegotiates by killing the two troopers and breaking the back of the now-senior trade manager. Who comes back to the planet generations later (space travel, you know) seeking revenge on the Onhla race and helps the grandson of the previous tyrant to track down a renegade band who can remember the old ways to Starside. The expedition goes bad for everyone.

So, I’m pretty sure I’ve said it before, but some of the midlist (Midlist! The copy I have is a book club edition, which meant people were buying stuff like this in enough quantities to print book club editions, although perhaps this was the bulk of the print run at the time.), the midlist (he repeated so you could remember where we were in the sentence) the midlist science fiction was far more speculative than what you would get later. I guess in 1977, you could find the James Blish Star Trek books, and Star Wars was about to hit big, meaning science fiction would suddenly be awash in space opera. But with these little midlist books, you never knew where they would go. This one skips generations, but with the main character evolving into almost a god amongst the creatures on the planet including the humans whose settlement grows over time (but will probably decline, as the epilogue is the trading company abandoning its contact with the planet).

So perhaps I should not have dodged this book for decades. It made me want to try out more of the era, but maybe not that boxed set whose first volume I picked out the night before last but will likely put back the next time I pass by the chair. I will continue to dodge that boxed set for another decade or maybe forever.

Unlike The Last Christmas Show, this is a Christmas novel, one I bought in September 2024 to spread among my stacks so when the season rolled around I would be able to find a Christmas novel to read as is my wont.

This short book (181 pages, but the print surface of them is small) is a fantasy novel wrapped in a frame story. In the frame story, a father of a family whose children have become teenagers tries to get them to participate in the family Christmas traditions, but they resist, so he tells them the story that is the bulk of the book. In that story, a young man with little Christmas spirit (much like the family in the frame story) cuts across a wood in the snow so he’s not late home falls into the snow globe he’d received as a gift. Within it, the meaning of Christmas is lost; he comes upon a city with the craziest enforced holiday cheer and consumerism (lots of puns about Christmas traditions abound, making it not unlike Rickshaw Riot in that way). To get home, the boy must befriend a young lady whose relation lives in the castle on the hill who provided the spirit of Christmas but has given up. And, doncha know it, he saves two or three Christmases that way (in the snow globe, in the boy’s own family, and in the frame story by serving as an example–and it is the dad from the frame story who had this adventure in the first place).

I mean, it’s nice and all, what you expect from a Christmas novel. I guess it didn’t take off–it didn’t become a series as so many other titles like it did–and it did come with a CD sampler of Mannheim Steamroller Christmas songs. It was sealed, and I started to unseal it, but I realized it was a sampler and had no new music on it, and I already have most or all of it on CD, so I preserved the collectibility of the book. Which is not likely to be that collectible at all. Apparently they’re five to ten bucks on Ebay.

Still, by getting started early, I might get in more than one Christmas novel this season. Or I’ll clutter my reading with the rest of the Ben Wolf books I have. Maybe both.

Rest assured, gentle reader; this is not my annual Christmas novel–but it does have Christmas right in the title, so it seemed a timely read. When I picked this book up eight years ago, I must have wanted to save it for a season such as this.

At any rate, this is partially a picture book which explains its large size, but it’s basically the story of Bob Hope’s Christmas tours to various bases between World War II and Vietnam. As I mentioned, it has lots of photos of the celebrities that he brought with him and photos of different environments/bases where they performed. He includes a number of gags and quips, often self-deprecating, and the final chapter is actually a transcript/script of the final show he put on–although they were not probably that big of a deal at the onset, by the 1960s, a film crew came along and cut the shows down for broadcast television in the U.S.

The tours took place over Christmas and were often whirlwinds where they would hit multiple bases in multiple countries and sometimes on different continents and ships at sea. The troupes put on several shows a day and then had formal dinners at night with the brass or with royalty (Hope and crew often visited the King and Queen of Thailand when in Bangkok).

You know, I kind of give Bob Hope a bit of short shrift in my memories of the comedians who were old when I was young–I remember his later television specials in the 1980s, but that’s about it. Contrasted with George Burns, who had contemporary movies out at the time, I guess. And I’ve watched Burns’ television shows and read many of his books, so he seemed younger and more vital. But I’ve seen some of Hope’s movies, and it’s easy to overlook what he did for troop morale in three wars (in some situations, for different generations of soldiers with the same family). And the shows were broadcast on television. I cannot think of a contemporary who had the same impact–Gary Sinise, maybe?

Oh, and researching this post (reading the Wikipedia entry) indicates that this might have been the last television program, he continued on USO tours up until the first gulf war.

I have another Hope book around here probably very similar–I Owe Russia $1200 is somewhere–so I’ll have to pick it up sometime soon.

I picked this book up after reading The Turquoise Lament because I have a twee goal of reading all of the Ben Wolf books I own if not this year then before I find myself in Davenport, Iowa, again.

When I read his Tech Ghost series, most recently The Ghost Pact and The Ghost Plague, I said that his plotting and pacing seem to have been heavily influenced by video games. This book absolutely leans into it. In it, a techbro CEO who steps all over the little people, which is everyone else, pushes ahead to launch an immersive online video game universe over the concerns of a very attractive underling and his brother’s objections. He straps himself into a pod for the launch, and he’s then in the game with a billion other players. Loot boxes from the sky drop initial classes, and he lands a good one–until a woman comes and steals his class information, leaving him alone to take on the only thing left–a rickshaw driver. He becompanions a space octopus NPC and goes on a series of sidequests as he tries to find a way out.

He comes to learn that the woman who stole his class is actually the woman who tried to stop him in the real world. A programmer/analyst, she built in some extra features into her avatar for troubleshooting, but it seems like the AI in charge wants to keep them in the game forever–or to kill them, which might or might not be permanent.

The authors clearly had a lot of fun with it. They make puns on a variety of video game properties, make light of a lot of the conventions, and because of the game world’s child-friendly rating, they get to throw in a lot of fake-swearing where the bad words are replaced by innocuous equivalents.

So a fun read, a little more smooth than Wolf’s earlier work. As he has a co-author here, I’m not sure if it’s the other author’s influence or if his own writing has improved. Probably a bit of both.

That said, I’m not sure how fast I want to delve into other 300+ page books in the series. Fortunately, he probably won’t have too many more available next October, and its novelty might reset by then–and I’ll remember I had a good impression from this book.

The FTP client didn’t sqwauk at me when I uploaded the cover image, so I thought maybe I’d not written a book report on this book before. But, no, I did read it and report on it in 2011–but in the days before I posted cover images of the books (because I wanted to link them to my Amazon Associates page, but a couple program changes later, and I’m too much of a backwater to participate). I bought this, a second printing copy, in September, and I dived into it to serve as a contrast with the other video-game-based fiction I’ve been reading lately.

I’ll give you the synopsis from 2011 because I’m to lazy to resynopse:

Within this book, McGee reunites with a former acquaintance he had known when she was a teenager. Now she’s a well-to-do heiress to a comfortable living from her treasure-hunter father, and she’s sailing around the world with her new husband. She thinks her husband is trying to kill her, so McGee flies out to Hawaii. He decides she’s just unnerved and not in love with her husband and that, hey, she’s all grown up now and they’re perfect together. So she’s going to sell the boat the newlyweds have been sailing on and live with McGee.

So McGee returns to Florida, but other events lead him to wonder. An intermediary tries to get an expedition going based on the lost research of the treasure-hunting father, which leads to the realization that maybe the husband is trying to kill her. Or make her think she’s going mad.

So the story arc is going to Hawaii, meeting the girl-now-woman, convincing her she’s not mad and that her current husband is not the man for her after all. When McGee returns to Florida, an acquaintance comes to him and tries to determine if McGee is the person who came into possession of the treasure-hunter father’s notes and plans for further expeditions–the man had accompanied the treasure-hunter father, McGee, Meyer, and others on a promising but incomplete recovery operation before the father died. McGee doesn’t have the books, but when he starts looking into the offer, he discovers two things: That the people handling the estate might have left them out of the estate, and second, that the man who married the daughter is probably a psycho with a long list of murders behind him in “accidents” which have befallen people whom he thinks have wronged him.

MacDonald goes to Pago Page (American Samoa) where the girl and her husband were going to take the boat, and, honestly, I remember that the girl dies in one of the books, but it’s not this one or, apparently, The Lonely Silver Rain. When they arrive, McGee foils the plan to have the allegedly suicidal woman “jump,” and the husband dies in a cinematic fashion–the book came out after the first, and only, movie adaptation (so far) of a McGee title (Darker than Amber, 1970)–so maybe MacDonald was writing for that. His work never went totally Hollywood like Robert B. Parker’s did.

The book contains all the usual McGee-esque things: Asides lamenting industrialization/pollution/despoilation of nature and soul-searching about aging. A sad coda indicates that McGee did not marry the rich daughter as he thought he intended, as she found someone more her own age, a psychiatrist from one of her therapy programs for recovering from her ordeal.

I flagged a couple of things. One, an ackshually where Meyer is hospitalized with a viral infection, so they’re pumping him full of antibiotics; an ackshually about how many horses and other livestock an acquaintance has on five acres (too many); and a quote from Meyer about how sickness makes you turn inward and how you wonder if any other things are related to the progression of your own mortality. I also looked up a musician MacDonald mentions (he mentions Eydie Gorme in A Tan and Sandy Silence) just in case I might look for the artist’s records at book sales and whatnot. But Julian Bream is an English classical guitarist, so LPs might be thin on the ground in southwest Missouri.

So, yeah, a good read. With depth lacking in a lot of modern works, even the doorstoppers. And I’m happy to read more MacDonald–I still have a couple of paperbacks of his that I have not yet read in my stacks, and I’m always happy to revisit McGee books. Which I have to buy again to read again as it is not my wont to dig through the books on my read shelves to revisit things. The MacDonald books are altogether somewhere, buried by a mishmash of more recently read things. I will try to pigeonhole this one somewhere near them and to determine of I have a first printing of the book already. Probably not.

It’s funny: I could have picked up this book new at the mall after watching The Mask of Zorro (which I did see in the theatre with my beautiful girlfriend or beautiful fiancée–the film came out a couple of weeks before I proposed, so we probably saw it right around the day of the big question). Although I get the sense that this book might have had a more regional reach than national distribution–the author has (or had–lord, that was almost 30 years ago now) a boxing gym in Washington.

As the cover might atest, the everyone in the title might be more aimed at women than men–not only the pretty woman with makeup and earrings and boxing gloves, but also the new-fangled-then URL www.girlbox.com (not an ongoing convern, it seems). The book emphasizes that women can box, whether to compete or just to improve physical fitness, just like boys can. So in addition to chapters on proper alignment/balance, guard stance, basic punches, working the heavy and the speed bags, skipping rope, shuffling (called slide-and-glide here), stretching, adding strength, sample workouts, and listening to your body, you also get some reassurances geared to women–several times, it mentions not worrying about how you look. Although, to be honest, this also can apply to men as well. I know the first time I put on a gi and stepped onto the mat, I thought I looked funny, but mostly I looked like everyone else there.

So I’m not sure who is the target audience, though. It’s not detailed enough, I don’t think, to be something to remind you of techniques or things to try if you already know something of boxing. Perhaps geared toward someone interested in the sport who is thinking about joining a gym. So maybe it did have distribution outside the boxing gym of the author.

Still, I found Boxer’s Start-Up: A Beginner’s Guide to Boxing and Boxing: The American Martial Art to be a little more relevant for me. But if you’re thinking about starting boxing in 1998 but have not yet made the leap, I guess this could get you started.

I bought these books in Iowa in October (I read the first of the series, The Ghost Mine, last year). And I said of the first:

I had been reading a book about text games for a while when I started this book, so I perhaps too easily compared the first part of the book to a text adventure, with the way it mapped out the mining complex and described entrances and exits and things that might be useful (the last is probably more in how I was reading the book after weeks of reading about text adventures). The main character, Justin, is a bit of a cipher–we don’t know from where he’s coming and going, and the plot carries him along as he mostly follows the mysterious light or follows the actions or guidance of others (NPCs) in the book. About half way through the book, though, it turns from slow text adventure mapping and buildup to watching someone else’s Twitch stream of a Doom knock-off.

I thought since I just finished a book about an actual video game (Brute Force: Betrayals), I thought it might be a good idea to read them to do a little internal compare-and-contrast.

So: Remember, the plot of The Ghost Mine is that a space miner named Justin Barclay takes a job at an ACM mine, and strange happenings are afoot. It’s supposed to be a creepy space mystery of sorts as he finds out what happened in the abandoned mine where an accident took the lives of many. He finds that exposure to the valuable reactive gas that the company is mining caused an accident and killed the miners, but that some space magic had embedded the personality of one of them in the mine’s computer systems which led to the final dungeon crawl wherein Justin escapes as his best friend sacrifices himself, but he, the best friend, gets the space magic and is embedded in the prosthetic arm that Justin earned during the course of the book’s events.

These two books are a single story spread over two books, and the thematic feel of them differ from the first kind of like–oh, gods, here I am saying it–Alien and Aliens. This one is a more straight ahead action/thriller kind of pacing without the mystery and horror, although there is some horror in it.

So: Justin and his tech ghost have taken a position on an asteroid-mining ship, but a problem on an unstable asteroid damages the ship, and they land on a ship carrying thousands of colonist and a complete colony-in-a-box for repairs. At the same time, a scientific vessel is pursued by an advanced warship owned by ACM corporation trying to capture a small parcel it’s carrying. Neither of the vessels is a fan of ACM, and they end up teaming up along with a band of escaped prisoners from the Avarice, the ACM ship, and they try to escape as ACM captures the ship. However, when they’re backed into a corner, the attractive scientist opens the case and releases the weapon–a collection of self-replicating nanobots which capture humans and turn them into sharp-bladed zombies. But ACM has a secret weapon of its own: a bio-engineered super-soldier.

So it’s then a series of set pieces and shifting missions to destroy the nanobots or to escape the ship or destroy the ship. It wasn’t bogged in the “mystery” as the first was. In the almost six hundred pages between the books, it has a number of subplots so that you never knew what might happen next. It also had a varied cast of characters, and they for the most part were really at risk (perhaps except for the main character). The characterization and writing lacked real depth, though. I mean, it’s no worse than men’s adventure fiction, but it’s not John D. MacDonald.

From my limited exposure, I’d also say that Wolf seems to be improving as a writer. I’ll not dodge his other books as I have other writers (such as, say, Cary Osborne, whose book Iroshi I read in 2018, and I’ve quite passed over the other two books of the trilogy in the years since). I do so hope that his imagination broadens so all of the plots are not torn from today’s video games. Although given one is Santa versus Zombies and another is a developer gets trapped in his own video game, perhaps not.

I have no idea where I picked up this slender volume of poetry to check to see if I paid close to the cover price for it. I don’t know if you remember seeing these out and about around the turn of the century (that is, the end of the 1900s), but Dover Thrift Editions came out with a long line of classic (and out of copyright literature) printed on cheap (but not quite newsprint) paper and priced only a dollar. New. They cannot have been making a mint on it, but they were certainly doing the world a service up until the world, or at least the American public, couldn’t be arsed to spend a buck to read classic literature.

The book’s title does not overstate its case or selection criteria; it is not the best poems, and it does not include anything modern–we get to the middle of the 20th century with Auden, and we’re done–of course, the poems most likely had to be out of copyright in 1998 to make a dollar book possible. It’s got your Broadstreet (1 poem), it’s got your Longfellow (5 poems), it’s got your Poe (3 poems), it’s got a fair share of Whitman (7), one by Abraham Lincoln, 10 by Emily Dickinson, a couple by Stephen Crane, 3 by Paul Laurence Dunbar, 9 by Frost, and then we get into the 20th century hucksters including Carl Sandburg (3), William Carlos Williams (5), Wallace Stephens (4), and only two by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The book pays maybe oversized attention to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance with two by Langston Hughes and a couple by poets whose names I did not recognize.

A good smorgasbord, though; although I’ve read some Longfellow, Millay, and James Whitcomb Riley (not included in this book) recently (for MfBJN values of “recently”), I’ve been away from Frost for too long (over twenty years? Oh, my god).

I flagged a couple poems as being especially good, including:

• William Cullens Bryant’s “Thanatopsis“–or at least I flagged some lines in it, but I’m not really sure why.
• Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” which I will read again when I get to his complete poems which I bought in 2020 and maybe in Lyrics of Lowly Life which I bought in 2023. The poem includes the line “I know why the caged bird sings, ah me” which is the source for the title of Maya Angelou’s autobiography. Shame that she eclipsed Dunbar, but she came into prominence when that was possible.
• Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night“.
• Vachel Lindsay’s “The Leaden-Eyed“. Geez, is this a poem that the world grew into. I am not sure I’ve heard of this poet before; I’ll have to keep an eye out for his works.

By its nature, even with the lesser lights thrown in, still better than most of the poetry I tend to read. Which I shall now return to.

Wow, okay, I bought this book seven years ago. You know, I know that books languish on the shelves here at Nogglestead for decades, but sometimes it catches me by surprise. Perhaps I would have expected to pick it up before now. Especially since a while back, Facebook decided I liked Dorothy Parker and started showing me groups that posted quotes from her. That came and went, and likely once this post goes live, it will come again.

So: The intro, which I read because it was by Dorothy Parker, a bit she wrote for The New Yorker in 1927 called “The Short Story through a Couple of Ages” where she slags a bit on genre fiction and the kind of wholesome stories that one would have found in Grit or Good Housekeeping even into the waning days of the 20th century and a whole hecka lotta magazines and monthlys in 1927. Instead, she swore she would do something different. And…. Well, okay, she wrote a pile of “literary” stories featuring the doxies and their admirers in New York in the flapper era. And although she was lightly mocking them, they would come some seventy years later to be celebrated in Sex and the City and various other things which probably did not solely ruin women’s expectations in relationships, like Dorothy Parker probably did not herself ruin people’s reading of short stories for pleasure, but they’re part of the deluge that did.

So: Yeah, 21 stories. Slice of city life monologues, most about going out and partying and the results thereof, although a couple married couples living the stifling married life, which contrasts with…. the stifling doxy/party life, I guess. A couple, three, or more of the stories are monologues, whether an interior monologue or someone talking to another person for the whole story, sometimes a dozen pages, which does not ratchet up tension even as it reveals a story. But they’re certainly not like the genre or short stories for the plebes. They’re targeted to a certain class, dear (and not one who would say char instead), even as they satirize probably the same class.

It took me a while to read it at 386 pages–I thought I’d breeze through it because it was witty short stories, but I found myself reading a story or two a night and then reading video-game-based science fiction or watching movies for the remainder of the evening.

I did flag a couple of things:

• I did not flag the use of no truck with slang construction as I noted. This instance comes from, what, 1925? 1930? It appears periodically throughout the whole 20th century apparently, although I associated it with the mod squad era.
• I actually related to the story “The Little Hours” which is an interior monologue of an educated woman perhaps in the party scene anyway who awakens in the middle of the night, and it’s a stream of consciousness bit about how she thinks about French novels and whatnot as she tries to go back to sleep. Lately, I’ve been awakening and thinking about projects I’m on, projects I don’t have, where I’m getting firewood this winter, and other practical concerns. I thought I might reproduce a little of it here for you, gentle reader, but I’m not sure anyone gets anything out of the blockquotes. If you’re really interested, it looks like a PDF collection that includes the story is available at the Internet Archive. It looks to contain all the stories in this volume, actually.
• “The Little Hours” also contains, in a montage of poetical quotes near the end, I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. I just bought and read Vigils by Aline Kilmer, Joyce Kilmer’s widow, and when I bought the book, I told the shopkeeper whom Joyce Kilmer was and that that poem was quoted in two movies. Two old movies now I guess. If only I had read this volume before, I could have added a ninety-year-old short story to the list along with a thirty-year-old movie and a forty-year-old movie. To show the kids how “hep” I am.
• A short story has a character say that New York show business is run by Jew bastards. In 1930, this was probably the equivalent of using the baddest word to highlight that the speaker is a, erm, flawed person (if not outright bad). In the 21st century, this might very well mark the opposite in New York Society–whatever is left of it.

So with Dorothy Parker, you’re better off with the bon mots, I guess. Or maybe the poems. Which include one called “The Small Hours”, I learned whilst searching for “The Little Hours” on the Internet. I am sure I have run across her poems from time to time. Maybe I even have a volume of them around here. Or maybe I will someday. Maybe I’ll pick up a volume of her nonfiction. But Collected Stories Volume 2 (if it exists)? Well, probably that, too, because I am indiscriminate in my purchases, and seven years later I might read it.

Wow. I bought this little paperback eleven years ago. I don’t even remember the church where the garage sale was held–it’s probably turned over a couple times since then as it’s a large space on the end of a building with a Subway and fusion Chinese restaurant in it. I’m not sure if it’s a business or church these days–I will have to give it a passing glance when I’m passing by next time.

At any rate, this is a prequel to the XBox game Brute Force which is a squad shooter. Those days were before the Internet-connected games really took off, so it’s one player switching between the characters, and you don’t get to choose the characters. You get a tank, a sniper, a thief, and the other guy. I presume. I haven’t played it, and it does not look to have spawned a franchise like Halo did.

So the book starts off with two different special ops teams handling two different assignments on two different planets; Hawk and Flint are taking down some rebels on a planet, and Tank is inserted to take down some space pirates. Each is on a team of four, but I name the people who apparently make it into the game (again, this is a prequel about how they meet). Each finds evidence that high-ranking officials might be working with the space pirates and/or a religious cult, including high-ranking officials in the special operations heirarchy. So you get a lot of intrigue amongst those corrupt officials and then some set battles with a video game flavor. Game mechanics are nodded to, as the operatives can have a share of the “treasury” of the mission target and buy better armor. So part of the plotting is unraveled, the operatives go on a mission that is set up to eliminate them but emerge triumphant, and then they’re sent on another mission and the book ends unsatisfyingly as it sets the story up for the game. Maybe they were hoping to set up a franchise, but did not for some reason. Apparently, the game was very big in the day, but it never got a follow up.

I know, I know; I dinged Ben Wolf’s book The Ghost Mine for being too informed by video games (and I just bought the others in the series because I didn’t want to hurt the kid’s feelings). So this is a book based on a video game, but its writing is informed by other books–that is, the writing has a little more depth to it maybe than the Wolf books (although I have started on the second in the series immediately upon finishing this book, so I will better be able to speak to that in a week or so). Kind of like old movies were informed by stage plays and books, but modern movies are based on older movies and television shows, so we’re getting photocopies of photocopies now. Maybe I’m painting with too broad of a brush (sorry, Ben, if so).

But I’ve found that older books based on video games are just better than modern self-published books. Perhaps mine included, although I do laugh at John Donnelly’s Gold when I re-read it. Perhaps I should actually write something else to see how I would measure up. But I’m afraid I would find my writing informed by twee blog book reports and one line “ha, ha!”s at modern events.

I bought this book over the weekend in Davenport, and I asked “Which one will I read first? You know.” Of course it was the shorter book of poetry. I did not take a stack of books with me–I remember from my trip last year and similar trips that I don’t tend to read a bunch in hotel rooms, so I only brought two paperbacks that I did not touch and a couple of magazine which I did. And, of course, I started reading this collection of poetry. I’ll often jump on a new acquisition instead of what I brought (see also The Marriage of Bette and Boo which I bought in Leavenworth in 2017 and started in the hotel that night).

At any rate, this is a book report and not a Brian’s reading habits report (who am I kidding? Book reports on this blog are often just that), so let’s talk about this. Aline Kilmer, as the cover says, was Joyce Kilmer’s widow, and topically, many of the poems in the book actually deal with that lost (with a title like Vigils? Who would have guessed?). The verses are pretty light, with decent rhythm and some end rhymes. Nice, I guess. Nothing earth-shattering, but okay. To be honest, that’s what I remember of Joyce Kilmer, too. I thought I’d read a volume of his work, but I was probably thinking of the time when we covered the poem “The Trees” during our Coronavacation Homeschool Supplementing in 2020.

So, well, nice. The cover is wrapped in mylar, and I guess this book is over a hundred years old now. I see that one sold on Ebay without the dust jacket for $15 this month, so someone is interested in them. I won’t be ordering her other work online, although I might pick them up if I find them in the wild. A quick read to pump up the annual total (currently: 72).

Ah, gentle reader, this is the best book with two peepees on the front cover that I have ever read. Hopefully, gentle reader, this is the only book with two peepees on it that I own, but given that I own a lot of classical Greek and Roman literature, one cannot be sure.

This book, which I bought earlier this year, contains poems praising the victors at assorted Greek game festivals circa 2600 BC, including the Olympic games but others of across (what would become) Greece. Many of them include some lineage of the victors, some tracing their past to gods, and in doing so, Pindar includes some bits of myths and stories as he name checks gods, heroes, and ancient leaders in the fashion of a rap track calling out or calling out to other rappers. The book itself has end notes in the, well, end, but without any markers for end notes in the poems themselves. It made for easier reading in the moment as one was not constantly dropping eyes to the footnotes or flipping to the back, which made things smooth for me as I just let the things roll over me, but they were there if I needed to look things up to make connections to other works or for a paper.

I’m not sure what liberties the translator might have taken with the text–probably not too much, as we’re not steeped in 2007-era slang (although someone does, indeed, have some truck or not with something), but the poems in addition to praise for athletes and gods, includes some insights into the human condition which I noted and will henceforth have quoted.

From “Olympian 2”:

But when some deed has been done, right or wrong,
not even Time the father of all things can undo its outcome;
yet with the help of good fortune men may forget it.
Grief dies when confronted with noble joys,
and its enduring bitterness is beaten down
when fortune sent from a god
lifts a man to prosperity’s heights.

From “Olympian 5”:

If a man waters healthy prosperity
and is content with a sufficiency of possessions,
and adds to his good repute,
he should not strive to become a god.

From “Olympian 6”:

Success without labour is not honoured among men,
either on land or in hollow ships;
but if noble deeds are accomplished through toil,
many people remember them.

From “Pythian 1”:

If you should speak in keeping with the occasion,
plaiting the threads of many matters into a brief whole,
men will find less fault with you;
for wearisome excess blunts the edge of keen expectancy,
and in their secret hearts men are especially oppressed
when they hear praise of other citizens.
Nevertheless, since it is better to be envied than pitied,
do not deviate from your noble course.
Steer your people with the rudder of justice,
and forge your tongue on the anvil of truth.

From “Pythian 3”:

If a man holds to the path of truth in his mind
he must be content with whatever the blessed gods send him.
Gusts of soaring winds blow now this way, now that;
lasting prosperity does not visit men for long,
even when it has attended them with all its weight.
I shall be small when times are small, and great when they are great.
Whatever fortune comes my way I shall respect it with my mind
and nurture it according to my powers.

From “Nemean 3”:

It is by inborn distinction that a man gains authority,
while he who has only been taught is a man of shadows;
he veers further and thither, and never enters the arena with a confident step,
trying out thousands of exploits in his futile mind.

From “Nemean 4”:

And yet, though the deep salt sea grips you by the waist,
hold out against its scheming; we shall enter the contest
in full daylight, far stronger than our adversaries,
while another man, with envy in his eyes,
pours out his empty opinions in darkness,
and they fall to the ground.

Honestly, it’s almost proto-stoic. I’d have to dig into my notes from the part of the first of the volumes of Copleston’s The History of Philosophy (being I only got a couple of chapters into the first paperback in the series, I only have notes on the early Greeks) to see who might have influenced Pindar.

Of course, were I that sort of fellow, I probably would have read the end notes. Or more of The History of Philosophy for that matter. Or even The Story of Philosophy by the Durants which I have around here somewhere.

Also, I want to share that I know what pankration means; it’s ancient Greek MMA. You can be sure that I am working this into conversations as often as possible. This behavior might explain why so few have conversations with me.