Category: Book Report

This book is a trifecta in the Winter 2021 Reading Challenge. I could count it in any of three different categories: Memoir/Biography, Book About Books, or One-Word Title. As I have already entries for the first two (Sid Meier’s MEMOIR!, Book Lust). So One-Word Title it is, which means I don’t have to read Linda Greenlaw’s Seaworthy out-of-order. But, Brian J., you read The Hungry Ocean and The Lobster Chronicles out of order, you might point out, but that’s different. Back when I got The Lobster Chronicles from the book club, I did not have her later work–and now I have All Fishermen Are Liars around here somewhere–so I have the luxury of reading them in order. If I ever do, that is.

Wait a minute, whose book memoir is this–mine or Larry McMurty’s? Both, gentle reader, both.

You might know Larry McMurtry as the author of any number of books, such as Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, or Lonesome Dove–I say that because those books were adopted to films sometimes by McMurtry himself. Or you might know him as the guy whose shirts got pinched by Robert Clark Young.

In this book, McMurtry collects a number of musings and recollections about receiving books as a young man, buying books, and then becoming a book scout and a book seller in the 1950s. He ran a book store, first in Georgetown and then in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, until 2012 (after this book was written), so he offers insights into the secondhand and antiquarian book business through the mid-to-end of the twentieth century when it was a going thing. He also talks about the changes to the industry with the advent of the Internet, and how he was a throwback–which lasted only a little longer than after this book was published.

The chapters are short–the book has 109 in 258 pages–as the topical reminisces sometimes only last a couple of paragraphs. The book has no structure or flow, either, as the memories go backwards and forwards in time, with anecdotes of his youth following stories set later in his bookbuying (he prefers the experience of buying to selling). They drop a lot of names in the business but without a lot of character for most of them–just names, what store they were with, and maybe what they did once–but he somewhere says that’s intentional, as many of them have passed on and he doesn’t want to tell stories about people who cannot defend themselves. And the book ends not with a real conclusion, but a list of booksellers with whom he’s done business, including whether they’re out of business or not. He only lists two in St. Louis, Anthony Garnett and Lost Generation, neither of whom I’d heard of–and I was in the St. Louis area at the time. But McMurtry dealt in antiquarian books, not the cheap stuff I tend to buy.

So this book did not dissuade me from wanting to buy books and to read books and maybe even buy and sell books. As you might know, gentle reader, around the turn of the century, I spent my Saturday mornings at estate sales and garage sales looking for books and old games to sell on eBay–so I remember the thrill of that hunt and the triumph of a good find. I also marvel at how much McMurtry seems to read–he talks about re-reading certain books every couple of years, but I can’t make headway against my library without re-reading.

So I did flag a couple things for comment here.

A New Personal Goal

I now own Mr. Taylor’s mansion and have filled it with about twenty-eight thousand books, which took a while.

I don’t know where I am–I have about 2500 books in my book database, but that’s books I’ve read and reference sets. I have no idea how many books I have on the to-read shelves–probably that many or a little more–so I have a ways to go. Although I will probably get a boost from collecting volumes in a set–say Reader’s Digest World’s Best Reading editions–whose individual entries I have already read. I know, the sets I collect are very middle-class tastes. But they’re currently affordable, and they’re something, and I’m accumulating them more than collecting.

Dismissive

I read these comics with shock, but I didn’t really become interested in comics until I was an adult, investigating the Yellow Peril panic, which in essence had the Mongol Horde riding agin. The various Fu Manchu movies starring Christopher Lee are the modern-day Yellow Perilism; and our current worries about being crushed by China’s economic might is an extension of the syndrome.

Well, that very glibly dismisses policy concerns by calling them racist without using the word itself, ainna?

I wonder if McMurtry feels differently twelve years later? Probably not.

Brian Feels Smart

A dealer in Wichita Falls made a big paperback purchase, and was happy to sell the vintage stuff to me. These numbered several hundred books, and contained at least eighty percent of the titles I sold to Greg [McMurtry collected the first five hundred titles from five early paperback publishers but sold his first collection]. When Booked Up [McMurtry’s store] purchased Barber’s Bookstore, in Fort Worth, I siphoned off a few hundred more, all of which now ring the shelves of what once, long ago, was Mr. Will Taylor’s servants’ quarters, a plain two-story brick house which we nicknamed the Petit Trianon.

I know what that is not because I lived near Trianon Parkway in the St. Louis area, but because I read a book about Versailles and the original Trianon last year.

Almost The Second Book In A Row with De Sade

The book I got at Second Story that day was Marquis de Sade’s Justine, the first edition of which is an easily acquired book. But this wasn’t the first edition. It contained a few erotic engravings, meant to be dirty but not likely to raise much heat today. The book was priced $350–with my dealer’s discount I got it for $280.

I suspect a de Sade book is the one alluded to in The Picture of Dorian Gray but is unnamed in that book. It’s not finding the word brougham in two books in a row–and I have read a book between this and The Picture of Dorian Gray, but I like to find connections between my bibliowanderings.

Reminds Me Of A Bookseller I Knew

Ought dealers to collect? A good many dealers just don’t seem to want to. Leo Weinstein of the Heritage Book Shop (now gone) once showed me his collection of first American editions of famous books. My polite view is that Lou Weinstein’s heart is not really in acquiring books that he can’t sell.

I once said to Sheldon, the proprietor of A Collector’s Book Shop in University City and later Maplewood, he who was notorious for gigging people by pulling books out of the bookshelves by putting their fingers on the top of the spines and pulling them out that way–I said to him, “I can’t imagine what your collection is like.” He responded by saying, well, chided me that his business is buying and selling books; he did not collect them.

And I am serious about his notoriety for gigging people–when I took people to the shop for the first time, I would tell them to watch for it, and surely enough, Sheldon would chide someone for putting their fingers atop the spines while we were there. My goodness, I have not thought about A Collector’s Book Shop in a while, but right now, I am walking through it–going upstairs and then into the other rooms above the shop next to his on the ground floor.

Not Unlike My Experience

Underlying all these adventures was one motive: I never wanted to be without books I wanted to read, and if I could be reading four or five books at the same time, so much the better. With books pouring into the shop almost daily, this was not a hard thing to achieve.

I do pretty well without running a book shop with the biannual library book sales and frequent trips to ABC Books. I could probably lose half my unread books–maybe two-thirds–and I’d still have enough to read for a lifetime. But let’s not take that risk.

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At any rate, I thoroughly enjoyed this book which I have in a fine first edition with mylar over the dustjacket that I ordered from ABC Books during the great stay-at-home of 2020 (how’d that work out?), although I have personalized it with Cheeto dust and pizza grease. Which is just as well–I might be of the last generation, and perhaps a throwback amongst my generation–who loves books this way and who would really enjoy this sort of book and the attitudes contained within.

Which has a silver lining: cheap books in the near future, and plentiful kindling for my succeeding generations.

Amongst that future kindling, I have a copy of The Last Picture Show and maybe the movie book for Hud, the film version of Horseman, Pass By. Perhaps I shall pick them up after the reading challenge ends at the end of this month (and I finish the interrupted David Copperfield).

This book actually includes two works. The title work and A Hereditary Book on the Art of War by Yagyū Munenori circa 1632. Each work runs under a hundred pages, so just having one would be a very thin book indeed.

The title work lays out the basics for Musashi’s martial arts school. He became a prominent sword fighter, clearly having defeated all his enemies until he retired from the sword-fighting life and founded a school. The five rings in the title are Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and No Scroll. In Earth Scroll, he discusses the science of martial arts; in the Water Scroll, he discusses his own school and its practices; in the Fire Scroll he talks about battle–whether it’s one-on-one or a battle between armies, the principles are the same; in the Wind Scroll, he discusses the other schools and why they fall short; and in Emptiness Scroll, he talks about embracing the teachings so much that one leaves the teachings behind, which is a very Buddhist thought, but it’s blended a bit with Taoism.

His martial art is swordfighting, so everything is geared to that end–not empty hand stuff, although that is mentioned briefly. Mushashi favors fighting with two swords, a katana in the dominant hand and a short sword in the off-hand, but the book does not really go into drills for it–for that, you would have to join the school, of course. He also says a couple of things that go counter to what my school teaches–he mentions putting the weight on your heels (which I do too often anyway–I shall have to attribute this to the teachings of Mushashi instead of bad habits if called out on it) and not making a sound when striking (which I don’t do, either, I don’t picture myself as a “Hai-ya!” kind of man).

Also, the book is deadly serious. Everything you do should be focused on killing your opponent. I picture the school as something like the bad guys’ training programs in kung fu films: make a mistake, and the headmaster kills you.

After many of the lessons, such as they are, he tells you to dwell upon what you have learned. So even this translation from seventeenth century Japanese seems to be, like the other martial arts books with pictures that I read, something for existing students to take away and use for review.

The second piece, A Hereditary Book on the Art of War only a bit dwells on the work from Sun Tzu. Instead, it’s a bit of a mishmash of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and lessons from Musashi (although this work was written earlier). So it talks about swordplay, but it also talks about emptying the mind, following The Way, and obeying authority–the author himself was high in one of the Shogunates, so of course he would blend in some Confucian thought.

At any rate, it does not hold together as well as The Book of the Five Rings as it kind of wanders and is chock full of stuff like this:

Voidness is the eye of Buddhism. There is a distinction between false voidness and real voidness. False voidness is a simile for nothingness. Real voidness is genuine emptiness, which is the emptiness of the mind. Although the mind is like empty space insofars as it is formless, the one mind is the master of the body, s the performance of all actions is in the mind.

So a lot more, erm, philosophical than practical.

I don’t know that I learned a whole lot practiceable from this book–I mean, most of my actions already were directed to crushing my enemies, driving them before me, and hearing the lamentations of their women, so that’s not a new thing. But if I’m going to slowly get into Nipponophilia (one book in 2018, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, and one book in 2020, Samurai Warriors, is definitely a slow burn indeed, although I can spell samurai right the first time consistently now), I need to read the seminal texts.

Also, this book counts as the Translated category in the Winter 2021 Reading Challenge. And, having read the source, perhaps I can complete The Martial Artist’s Book of the Five Rings which I started reading at stoplights on the way home from ABC Books in October 2018 but did not finish. I read Stephen Kaufman’s Zen and the Art of Stickfighting last December, which probably brought these books to the top of my mind recently. That and the need to read something translated for the reading challenge.

So, in summation, a good book if you are into Japanese history, the history of martial arts, or eastern thought (especially the blending of philosophical/religious traditions). Not a hard read, not a long read (166 pages which includes end notes for each work and a bibilography for further reading). But, although the cover says “Embraced by many contemporary readers as a manual on how to succeed in life.” —Library Journal, that’s overstating it by quite a margin. A couple pages on footwork on different terrain requires a lot of analogous thought to apply those lessons to everyday life. Maybe the emphasis on strike-and-return–don’t spend time inspecting where you’ve struck, don’t leave your sword (or striking appendage) extended after the strike itself, and don’t watch and admire your home runs–run the bases like it’s a bloop single-maybe-a-double. But most of the lessons are either geared to swords or teaching swords or so nebulous that they’re not discrete lessons at all.

Well, it’s clear where I should slot this book on the 2021 Winter Reading Challenge. I mean, it’s contemporary to its time–the 1890s–so it’s not historical. It is set in and around London, so it could be In a Different Country, but come on. This is an LGBTQ+ author even though the author himself would have probably thought the whole thing rubbish, and it’s not an LGBTQ+/- novel because it does not really celebrate those themes as the subject of the book.

As you probably know, the story is about a picture of the eponymous character hidden in the attic that ages while the title character does not. To be honest, I misremembered the name as The Portrait of Dorian Gray. And, SCENE!

Okay, so I had enough from my classical education to know that much. Now that I have read it, I know much more about it. And I rather liked the book. I’m going to give some heavy spoilers below the fold–tell you the whole story, abbreviated, actually–so leave of here if you want (I am just kidding. I have three kinds of readers: 1. Those who hit the blog and probably skip over the book reports; 2. Those of you who come in from RSS feeds and get the whole post without a fold; and 3. Those of you who have a book report due tomorrow and did a quick Internet search for something clever to say and don’t mind the spoilers anyway).

However, come on, you had to know the traitor in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was Dorian Gray, didn’t you? Oops, perhaps I should have put that spoiler beneath the fold. Continue reading “Book Report: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891, 2007)” →

I thought I first heard about Susan McBride because she was the first winner of the Mayhaven Publishing prize for fiction which came with a publishing contract. I entered my novel John Donnelly’s Gold in the same competition (well, a later one–not the same as Ms. McBride) and did not win. But that’s not exactly how it went down. Thanks to this blog’s waybacking, I can see that I read And Then She Was Gone in 2006 because I’d discovered the author as a local author on the Big Sleep Books Web site and then learned about the Mayhaven Publishing contest from her. So. You know, I have nobody left who can tell me what I was like when I was younger. Which is why I keep on blogging even on days when this blog gets readers in the single digit.

At any rate, perhaps I will now remember that I have read something by this author. Likely, though, I will remember this book because it’s part of the Debutante Dropout series, of which I hear from time to time. And it’s got a blurb by Elaine Viets on the back, and I am pretty sure Viets was the last decent metro columnist in St. Louis. But enough about that.

So, about this particular book:

Andy, the first-person narrator of the book, is a Web designer. Her widowed mother is a society woman, and her parents raised Andy to be a princess, but Andy rebels against all that, working for non-profits as a Web master. Her mother hooks her up on an emergency basis with a Martha Stewart type of personality whose local show has just been syndicated, and her former Web master quit right before the big launch party because the hostess is a diva. So Andy navigates this millieu, the hostess, her boytoy trainer (who is a bit of a sugar sonny who glomps onto wealthy widows), the hostess’s daughter (also a partner of the boytoy trainer) who the hostess has ignored on her climb to success and who has a host of mental problems and a history of addictions, the company chef who does not feel he is appreciated, and various hangers-on in that retinue. She also deals with her mother’s pressures, the story of the black family moving in down the block, and her relationship with a defense attorney that her mother set her up with.

Finally, on page 262 of 353, someone dies. It’s a small thing, I know, but when you have murder in the title, one expects a dead body before long. Instead, the book focuses on the main character drifting through scenes with these people until, after a disaster at the launch party, the next day the hostess drops dead at a party hosted by the main character’s mother to welcome the new black neighbors to be filmed as an episode of the new show casting light on the ladies’ club having the party. So the main character drifts along with a reporter friend, who uncovers the family secret (the adopted daughter of the new black family is actually the natural daughter of the hostess, given for adoption thirty years ago and recently hired as the hostess’s personal assistant because she wanted to be closer to her mother). Whodunit? The daughter, accidentally, who just wanted to make her mother sick and need her (the daughter’s) help to recover, but a shared genetic defect made her predisposed to dying from a dose of ephedra–as the daughter herself almost did the day before (?).

At any rate, the book has a plot and group of characters worthy of a Chandler or a Ross MacDonald book. However, the first-person narrator kind of drifts through the scenes within it, and most of the scenes and verbiage deal with the narrator’s responses to her mother and the other characters in the book. Although she is present at the major events, she’s only a witness to many of them, and other characters (the reporter friend, a police detective, also women) conduct much of the investigation. The subplot of the adopted daughter is really just tacked on, and the ending is very quick (after the murder, the scenes include a trip to a small town to uncover the family secret, and discovering where the boytoy disappeared to–the pond behind the hostess’s house).

So it’s a bit like a Jane Austen book’s sensibility applied to a rich-people-doing-bad-things mystery a la Chandler or Ross MacDonald. But it didn’t work for me as it prioritized wordy reflection on personal relationships over investigation and action. Not my bag, baby.

I flagged a couple of things (including the exact page where the murder occurred because I was starting to think that no murder would actually take place).

Trump Sighting:
When the author is chiding herself, she says:

Sure, Andy, sure. And Ivana Trump shops at Wal-Mart.

I am thinking about starting to actively track mentions of Trumps in books from the 1980s through the early part of the century, where Trump was shorthand for ostentatious and gaudy. Perhaps it will illustrate how prevalent he was in popular culture for thirty-five years before running for President–a feat that modern “celebrities” like Kanye West will have a difficult time replicating. Plus, it will make it easier for the authorities to identify wrong thinkers in the past who mentioned the name of He Who Must Be Scrubbed/He Who Must Be Forgotten and places where the Unholy Name must be expunged.

Misquoting Alanis:

The author misquotes a (then) nine-year-old (now 26-year-old, old man) Alanis Morissette song when she says “Life is a funny thing…isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?” The song never says “Life is a funny thing.” The song says:

Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
Life has a funny, funny way of helping you out

Heaven help me, but I remember that song. I think Jagged Little Pill might have been the first CD I bought. And possibly the only non-duplicate CD I have ever sold or donated.

Blogs Educated Me To:

My daddy used to drive a Caddy. A Brougham d’Elegance that he often bragged was inches longer than the Lincoln Town Car.

I know what brougham means because I read Riverside Green, frequent contributor Tom Klocktau often posts about this particular body style.

And, fun fact: When I was in college and finally getting a driver’s license, my father asked me to move my great-grandmother’s Lincoln from the driveway to the street, saying that it would probably be my car someday. I had trouble parking the thing because I could not see the curb across that great expanse of blue hood. Also, my great-grandmother lived several years after I finished school and moved back to Missouri, by which time I had gotten my red old yellow car–and probably one or two others that I drove into the ground besides.

Memories of What I Once Was:

There was even a shot of her [the hostess] in a yoga pose that had me wondering if someone had not done a bit of airbrushing to get that foot behind her head.

You know, I used to be able to do that, when I was a kid. I don’t know why it was a thing for us to compare in 1981, but we did. Maybe it was an episode of Three’s Company where Jack gets his legs stuck in the lotus position. I could sit in the lotus position, even swinging my legs into position without using my hands, and I could put my foot behind my head. My mother and brother could, too. I can’t any more–I have been a little leary of stretching the groin since I tore a muscle in it stretching a couple years ago in martial arts class–but my boys and wife can. I have a book of stretching, and maybe I will get into it and get there. I can kick head high, though, and really, who needs more than that?

Wrong Punch:

Amber Lynn swung at her husband, catching him with a right hook beneath the chin.

I know, I read one book on boxing, and suddenly I think I am an expert, but a punch landing under the chin is generally an uppercut. A hook would land on the side of the chin as the motion of the arm and fist are mostly horizontal.

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So I will slot this book in the 2021 Winter Reading Challenge in the Female Protagonist category, leaving open the Crime slot in case I pick up another crime novel before the end of next month. And I probably won’t seek out more McBride, but the odds that I have previously remembered the name at book sales over the last decade and stocked some of her other works on my to-read bookshelves are pretty good. And, now that I think of it, I might have an Elaine Viets novel somewhere that I might want to check out.

Strangely enough, I am pretty sure that I read a later version of this book not long after I visited in 2015. Although I have not done a direct comparison of the two, both are copyright by the House on the Rock, so this book is essentially what I would have picked up if I had visited the House on the Rock if I’d had an intact family that took vacations in high school.

So my memories of the House on the Rock track with the ones I had when I originally read the later version (and the trip was fresher in my mind): A lot of the rooms, especially the original ones, were dark, and I didn’t remember them except as a block of the dark rooms. I remember the giant carousel, some of the automaton music machines, and the room with the little drug store automatons.

Other rooms that I remember, such as the giant sculpture of a sea monster fight and the infinity room (the finger of glass that extends over the valley, where you can walk out and look around) are represented in the back of the book with artist renderings because they were only then under construction. Well, the effect was to make everything else feel like I had seen it after riding out to it in the back of a 1967 Chevy Impala.

A nice return to a memory. I am hoping to get back to Wisconsin this year or next, but not the House on the Rock. I have been, and I have the souvenir books.

This is another martial arts book I picked up at ABC Books, this one almost a year and a half ago. In the Before Times.

This book is a textbook for starting Karate or its derivative martial arts forms. Judging by the history it presents, most martial arts derive from a karate way in the past, with differences arising in different places (Tae Kwon Do, from Korea, features more kicking than Japanese forms of Karate because the Koreans tended to be taller than the Japanese, the book asserts–I have no idea if the science and anthropology bears this out, but it makes sense).

The book covers early elements of starting out, including pickin a gi (some of the ones in the book are quite spangled). It talks about basic strikes, but mostly with only the two-photo method and then goes into using those techniques in sparring and in kata (forms, where you do a choreographed set of moves). It also identifies some warm-up and other exercises you can do before class or as part of class to loosen up or increase your flexibility.

As it focuses on traditional strikes and not the boxing that my school focuses on, but I don’t wonder if I can see an evolution in the curriculum from sparring. When I started out six or seven years ago, some of the existing black belts threw back fists and jump punches that caught us n00bs by surprise. Except for the instructors, they’re all gone now. We really didn’t cover those strikes back in those days, and only covered the knife hand and ridge hand (karate chops) a little bit. Now we don’t cover them at all, and in free sparring, I can catch the newer students by surprise with the more traditional strikes since they’re trained and have practiced watching for boxing strikes. Also, I am the old man there now. I think one or two students might be older than I am, but none of the instructors are.

Jeez, every time I think of that, I feel the need to ice something.

So this book is kind of bifurcated in focus, perhaps on purpose: It is targeted to people who have yet to take a martial art–hence the talk about gear and gis, but also a source book to remember the different techniques. So it’s pretty good, better than some of the others I’ve browsed.

This is the size and shape of a poetry chapbook, but it’s printed on glossy paper with four color pictures throughout. So it was anything but chap, gentle reader. Apparently, the author has a ministry of his own (Oil and Wine Ministries) where you can actually download this book and his others as a PDF for free without having to pay ABC Books $3.50 for it.

At any rate, the poems are simple rhymed numbers based on the Battle of Gettysburg triggered by the author’s visit. They talk about Jesus’ forgiveness and how soldiers on both sides received grace as all were sinners redeemed by the savior. It’s a thought that might be a little nuanced for modern audiences. But probably not those reading Bible-inspired poetry published by a ministry organization.

So a very quick read indeed, as half the book is color pictures of the battlefield. It also has a collection of Bible verses tied to the poems, so there’s some learning in addition to just reading poetry. But the poetry itself doesn’t rise much above grandmother poetry, although to be honest, I still prefer it to more modern Good Poetry.

This book fills the Books about Books slot in the 2021 Winter Reading Challenge. The conceit is that it’s a topical list of reading that identifies a topic and then lists a bunch of books about the topic that you might want to read. The author is a long-time librarian and a contributor to a public radio station or two.

With that in mind, one might think the book lists would skew in a certain political direction. One needs only get to the American History Nonfiction section, page 20, where the first recommendation is A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Okay, so, yeah. But the politics don’t overwhelm the book–it was 2003, after all, and Bush was only slightly Hitler when the author was finishing the book. So the politics are not overt nor hateful, but some do inform the choices and the selections of topics.

The books comes off as a series of listicles, like you might find on a blog back in 2003 (or 2021). I found myself skimming more than reading, looking more for books that I have read that she recommends (some) more than recommendations (I already have thousands to read on my shelves, so I won’t be rushing out to buy new books until…. well, the next time I go to ABC Books, which is likely soon).

She has some author-specific “Don’t Miss This Author” recommendations which include Robert Heinlein and Ross Thomas, authors whom I have read and enjoyed.

I flagged a couple things:

In the topic Biographical Novels:

Reading The Death of Ché Guevara by Jay Cantor makes it easy to see how the charismatic Castro’s closest pal during the Cuban Revoluton was. The book is fast moving and sympathetic to both Ché Guevara and the cause. Cantor was clearly as captivated by the energy and humanity of the man as were Ché’s many followers.

So, yeah, politics inform the selections. But not hatefully. Strangely, too, she applies the accute accent to his name even though it’s not represented in the book title or other references to Che’s name.

The following, from the section Politics of Fiction, is even more timely now than in 2003:

Charles McCarry’s Shelley’s Heart tells the story of a presidential election that is stolen by computer fraud, and the winning and losing candidates whose lives are changed by the outcome. Eerily familiar, this is a perfect novel for today’s paranoia-filled world.

Me, to the author in 2003: Just you wait!

I also flagged a couple books I’d read or will read soon–she mentions Steven Saylor, whose Last Seen in Massilia I read in ancient times and one of whose books I stacked up for the Historical category in the 2021 Winter Reading Challenge–and also Jane Eyre–but I stopped flagging the books to whose book reports I could link. They were scattered enough that I was not tacking a slip to every page.

At any rate, I didn’t really flag any books to hunt down, as I mentioned (except maybe The Golden Gate, a novel made of sonnets), but perhaps I will kind-of, sort-of remember the recommendations in the book when confronted with some of the authors mentioned within at the book sales. But I likely won’t remember acutely why I decided to pick up an Iris Murdoch or why I decided to read The Last Picture Show, which I have in paperback on the outer rank of books in the hall, soon.

But it did fill a line in the 2021 Winter Reading Challenge form, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

I bought this book partly with gift cards after Christmas. As one of the 2021 Winter Reading Challenge categories is Memoir/Biography, you can guess which one I picked up first. And, probably, which one I said to myself One more chapter a couple nights before going to bed, wherein one more chapter sometimes meant more than one.

Okay, so for those of you who don’t know who Sid Meier is: Well, this book can explain that. He was one of the founders of MicroProse, who left MicroProse to found Firaxis, and even before he created the Civilization franchise which continues to dominate my free time, he was responsible for numerous games that shaped my beautiful wife and I’s lives. MicroProse also did F-15 Strike Eagle and whatnot; he/they made Pirates! which I just installed on my Windows 10 box, and it works, but not in a nice windowed mode; and he was responsible for the licensed Magic: The Gathering game that my beautiful wife has been able to hack and install on machines up until Windows 10. So, yeah, we have played a lot of them.

The book tells his story from his youth, his learning computers, his time in Switzerland, and onto the rudimentary games that he wrote in college and as a young man working for General Instrument, a cash register company. Then he and Bill Staley founded MicroProse, and the rest was history in the making. They developed flight simulators, including Gunship which I played for hours and hours in the trailer in Murphy, Missouri, when I had time for hours and hours of Gunship, D&D, and watching movies over and over again on Showtime–however did I have that many hours in the day?

The early chapters recount the history of MicroProse and then Firaxis on an almost year-by-year pace, tying each chapter to video games released that year. In the early chapters, they come fast and furious, and Meier (and Noonan) work in his back story and early life while they do. Later, as Meier becomes a recognized brand and becomes more of a team leader and executive, and the actual narratives of game development and running the company fade, and we get more general musings on games as education and whatnot.

So Meier’s philosophy has always been to build something fun, not just something that will sell (especially by slapping Sid Meier’s name on it). He sticks to turn-based games mostly, and although towards the end we do get some modernization and some attempts at MMORPG and console games, his work still seems old fashioned in a good way.

So I liked the book, and I liked Sid Meier, the person, as presented in the book. It made him real, it made him humble, and it made him seem like a fellow I would like to know.

I bought this on Mackinac Island on our trip north in 2018; I previously read Mackinac Island: Its History in Pictures.

This book is a little FAQ put tohether, presumably, by the public school on the island. It has about 500 full time residents, and they mostly live in the settled neighborhoods, and, yes, they have a grocery store and a hardware store that are open in the winter.

A quick read as it’s a booklet and a good reminder of the time we went there. And a couple bucks for the school which they’ve already spent.

Something about it, though, is hitting me in my hermit spot. I mean, we’re finishing the first, what, third? of brown season here in Missouri. We had a couple of days of snow dustings a week and a half ago that made it look wintery, but…. I read this book, and I have this craving to go live in a small, snug cabin up north with me, my books, coffee, soup, maybe some salted fish, and a wood fire where I would, I dunno, write and work seasonally and then hole up for the entire winter with permission to sit and read and nap.

Of course, it sounds nice, and it might be a good month or season, but I probably would tire of it after a bit. But I do get all hibernatey in the winter time, going out somewhat reluctantly. Which is weird because it doesn’t tend to get wintery like I associate with Winter down here.

As you might remember, I bought this book online from ABC Books during the Great Apausening last Spring. I started it after January 2, so this is the first book I completed in the 2021 Winter Reading Challenge.

Well, the author mentions early in the book that he’s widely quoted (in the same poem that he knocks Trump), and apparently he’s a going thing and a New York Times best seller. This book is, after all, published by a major publisher (Andrews McMeel), but it’s not my bag, baby.

I mean, you know I knocked Like the Pieces of Driftwood for its sentences with line breaks. You know by now, gentle reader, that I like longer lines with rhythm, cadence, good mouthfeel, and evocative imagery. This book is more modern, with short lines with rare concrete imagery.

For example, one of the poems starts like this (presented in a snippet, in an image, to make it harder for poetry poachers like Harvey to scrape them into collections of his own for sale for five bucks–what, fifteen years ago and I’m still bringing it up?):

So, it’s very modern in appearance, cadence, and execution. Some of the stuff that’s very short kinda hits the good haiku koan kind of thing, but the longer pieces don’t tend to work. Although I can certainly see them in spots where they’re the kind of thing that could easily appear on an image that’s passed around on Facebook or something.

As to the topic matter, basically, the poems have three threads:

• Girl, you’re duplicitous and aren’t worth my love.
• Girl, you’re strong and beautiful just the way you are. (If these were posted with images on Facebook, they would be misattributed to Ryan Gosling and would start with “Hey girl” [sic].).
• Girl, I love you and we’re going to be so happy.

I was thinking maybe that this guy was very unlucky in love–hey, my own collection Coffee House Memories is full of my own poems written to unrequited loves, loves that did me wrong, loves that I done wrong, and loves I did right. However, when I read the introduction (last, as is my wont, of course), I learned that all the poems were about a single break-up, courtship, and requiting with a new love–but the poems were all jumbled together. Which makes me feel a bit better for the poet-narrator throughout.

And I was a little surprised at one point when the poet-narrator mentioned his brown skin–and I learned that the poet is indeed black. Most of the time, black poets (such as Robery Hayden and Langston Hughes) tackle the topic of race, but this collection sticks a more universal themes. So I appreciated that.

Still, not my kind of poetry, but the man has got his following in this Internet age, so good for him.

I bought this book at ABC Books a couple weeks ago and started the book as a browser during football games that weekend. Which means I cannot count it as my Poetry book for the library winter reading challenge. Because although I didn’t see it in the rules anywhere, I’m playing the game that I need to read the whole book in the prevailing period, not just the last half of it (as I did with this book) or the introduction (which I read last in Wuthering Heights).

The author of this book apparently liked to travel along the Pacific coast, often in the winter, and write about his experiences and people, often women, he met. This is his fourth collection of poetry, essentially self-published, but as that was 1979, he is a man lost to time. I tried to look for things about him on the Internet. I briefly worried that I would discover that he wandered into the woods and dies like that McCandless kid–I mean, there’s a lot of rootlessness and wandering in this book–and on of my searches found the Jon Francis Foundation, named after a kid who died in a mountain climbing accident and it took his family a year of searching to find his remains in the wilderness. But it’s not the same guy. The only traces we have of this guy, or at least in the first couple pages of search results, are listing for his books on various Web sites.

At any rate, the poetry of the author is the conversational kind of things you get from casual poetry of that era, akin to Rod McKuen or James Kavanaugh. Not as formal as grandmother poetry with end rhymes (but not the modern short line paradigm, either). But mostly they’re sentences with line breaks expressing sentiments rather than evoking them. Here’s a sample of one’s beginning, presented in image form:

I mean, prose as poem because it has line breaks and line breaks between paragraphs, which means verses.

So, kind of relatable, but not very poetic.

However, he probably sold more books of poetry before he faded into obscurity, so he’s got that going for him.

I did want to take a moment to speculate on something. The photo on the back cover is a black and white image captioned “Jon and Trip on the Mendocino Coast.” And I for the life cannot figure out what Trip is. I’ve tucked it under the fold here in case you want to try with a large image to speculate.

Continue reading “Book Report: Like the Pieces of Driftwood by Jon Francis (1979)” →

Well, I finished this book. The Bolan Number for this book is only two (Black Hand and War Hammer, although I did start a Larry Dablemont book as well, so maybe the Bolan Number should have a decimal–albeit, it would be a low decimal, like maybe .05). Perhaps there should be a Bolan Quotient, which would be the number of other books I read divided by the total number of pages in the piece of classic fiction during which I read other books. I mean, I read two plus books in Wuthering Heights, and it’s 326 pages plus an introduction (which I read last, of course). I have since started Dickens’ Davif Copperfield, and it’s twice the length. It hardly seems fair to compare Bolan Number to Bolan Number between these books since one is twice the length of the other.

At any rate, if you have not read the book–and, c’mon, man, this is the 21st century, you haven’t–the main story is, well, it’s too complicated, let me sum up: A landowner brings in a foundling orphan to his house; the orphan and the daughter become close; when the father dies, the older brother inherits and treats the orphan badly; when they’re out together, the orphan and the daughter spy on neighbors, and when the dog bites the daughter, the neighbors take her in but drive off the orphan; the daughter and her new friends, the neighbors, laugh at the orphan once; the orphan runs off, only to return years later, when he’s wealthy, and finds the daughter married to the neighbor; the orphan encourages the affections of the neighbor daughter (younger), marries her, and then abandons her; when she begets his son and dies, the orphan brings the sickly son back home to win the affection of the original daughter’s daughter (believe me, two daughters in the paragraph here is less confusing than all the characters who shared names in the book); they wed, the sickly son of the orphan and the daughter’s daughter, and when the older neighbor who married the daughter dies, the orphan becomes owner of both properties as his son dies, leaving him in control. Well, that’s the first eighty percent of the novel. Maybe ninety.

Although the professor of The English Novel (Timothy Spurgin, if you’re keeping track) ascribes the birth of the frame story and the unreliablish narrator (why is the narrator telling the story?) to Joseph Conrad, this book has the same thing going on. A servant relates most of the story to a tenant who rents the neighbor house from the orphan after he has become master when said tenant meets the residents of Wuthering Heights in real time and then falls ill and asks her about them. So…. Who is Mrs. Dean, and why does she tell this story to a stranger? I mean, throughout even her story, she seems a bit conniving, gossipy, and although powerless to alter the precedings (as she tells it), she still keeps a job (among the other servants who do not). And after the ill tenant recovers and leaves with eight months on his lease, he returns on a lark to find the orphan has died, the daughter’s daughter has fallen for the rustic cousin–the son of the older brother who treated the orphan badly–whom she treated cruelly her part of the first ninety percent of the book, and there might be a happy ending after all!

Yeah, right.

I spent most of this book wanting to beat all of the characters with a stick. Only the original papa that brought in the orphan child eluded my predisposal to violence, but I thought maybe the big reveal would be that it was his own illegitimate son (I see from the Wikipedia entry that some critics have speculated this was the intent). But, no. All a bunch of vapid, cruel, mean, and evil characters; even the nice-seeming ones end up cruel and mean until the end is tacked on.

I read the introduction last, as is my wont, and I discovered just how awesome this book really is. It’s a dream-like musing on brutality of the moors or something. Also, I learned many salacious details of Emily Brontë’s life, like she was a closeted lesbian and/or had an incestous relationship with her brother. Or that Charlotte wrote this book–it appeared after Jane Eyre (which I read in 2019 and prefer). She, Charlotte, did edit a revised edition of the book in 1850 after her sister’s death, but she really insists her sister wrote it. I am not so into textual analysis and literary forensics to dispute it.

I do wonder if the Brontës punched above their weight in the canon, though, as Jane Eyre was okay, but this book was not very good, and you don’t really hear about the other novels except maybe Anne’s Agnes Grey and only then when reading about the sisters. Their books were originally published under pseudonyms, which gave them an air of mystery and allowed for speculation, and Charlotte was very active in curating and correcting their works for posterity. Also, they were women writing in a male dominated world, so they stand out for study for that. They also all died young–Charlotte lived the longest, to age 39. If not for all these factors, would only English professors think of them in the 21st century? Just kidding. This is the 21st century, you know–I am not even sure if English professors think of them these days.

At any rate, it does give me reason to run this again, which I first ran in January, 2017, before I re-read Jane Eyre:

I am pretty good on being able to name all three, and I shall probably be able to remember the name of the brother (Branwell) as well. Which will definitely help me in trivia nights if such things ever come to pass. As might knowing that "Wuthering Heights" was Kate Bush’s biggest single, which I just learned in researching this book report. So this book proved educational in 20th century trivia, too.

This book, read a couple days after Black Hand, brings Wuthering Heights‘s Bolan Number up to 2 the easy way.

This book is a better entry in the series–better than Black Hand anyway. In it, Bolan is on the trail of stolen nuclear triggers that are on their way from California to Iraq (which has just restarted its nuclear program after the first Gulf War). So set pieces include a couple shootouts in California, the Irish coast, and Iraq after getting smuggled in via Turkey.

At any rate, the author clearly has read some of the other Executioner novels at least–he blends some Bolan philosophizing sections into the story and uses similar phrases like “numbers running down” that undoubtedly are mentioned in the outlines of the books given to the house authors but some handle them more deftly than others. The tactics and firing Uzis from the hip to great effect are more informed by watching movies than, I don’t know, serving in the military or firing an actual gun–much less playing realistic military games from the 21st century. As I’ve not done two of those three, I am an armchair novel writer when I criticise that, I know, but still.

A quick read, and then back to the moors of Scotland briefly.

Strangely enough, I started this book before I read Boxer’s Start-Up (which means this does not count against Wuthering Heights‘s Bolan Number either). However, I put it down and on my chairside table to read towards the end and quite forgot about it for a bit. Enough to push it from the 2020 reading list to the 2021 reading list, which, combined with starting the Reading Year in the last week of the preceding year, explains how I have read four books already in 2021. Through government and corporate accounting rules.

At any rate, this book, as it indicates, includes a number of techniques and drills, kata even, for practicing sparring. It focuses a lot on tae kwon do style kicks, which means really pretty big kicks to the head or higher; my school teaches them, but the crescent kick is a sweeping front side kick where your leg comes up sideways and strikes with the instep, and although it’s a nice distraction–I use it to hide a second strike following it–it plays a large role in a lot of the drills and kata here.

As I have mentioned, these books are best for people who study the arts and want something to review when not in class. This book formerly belonged to a student at a martial arts school–he has written notes beside different techniques along when he should be proficient at them and minor variations (knife hand instead of a punch, for example).

So I didn’t get a lot out of it myself; I am familiar with many of the strikes, and as far as the sparring drills go, I’d have to have a partner to put them into effect–and my school has its own drills, so when I’m partnered up, I’m doing things my kyoshi has selected. I got bogged down in the last bit of it. The last section–60 of the books 140 pages, not quite half, is some thirty different kata that are attack/counterattack drills this are between six and ten sentences and six and nine photos of the two-person kata. So I set it down and might have forgotten about it except I finished an Executioner novel and did not want to pick up Wuthering Heights again right before bed–and I rediscovered this book instead.

So it was probably more worthwhile for the preceding owner. Who might well have been studying martial arts even before The Karate Kid, if you can imagine such a thing.

Technically, this book does not count against Wuthering Heights‘s Bolan Number as I started reading this book before Wuthering Heights. Also, it’s not a cheap paperback the likes of which will fill my time between chapters of Wuthering Heights. Which, I assure you, I am actually reading.

At any rate, I picked this book up in December at ABC Books. As you know, I work my way counter-clockwise through my two aisles, the first of which is the martial arts/football/artist monograph aisle (with the local authors at the front of the store at the end of the aisle). This book was in the Boxing section which is mostly biographies and auto-biographies of boxers. So I don’t tend to look too closely in it, but by this time I have basically bought all the martial art books that are not about Tai Chi Walking, whatever that is. Come to think of it, somebody else is buying martial arts books up there–some of the ones I have seen in the past but have not bought aren’t there any more, either–which means nobody likes the Tai Chi Walking books, I guess. Me or this other guy. Come on, we know it’s a guy.

I digress. As I mentioned I looked over the boxing section and picked this up because it’s a how-to book about boxing. #9 in a series, presumably about taking up a sport you’ve never done before. The author here talks about his experience fencing, so I presume that he has also done the article about fencing in the book.

As I might have mentioned (or mention all the time), my martial arts school emphasizes boxing over tae kwon do hand techniques, so I am a bit familiar with the strikes in the book–the jab, the cross, the hook, and the upper-cut. Boxing, apparently, does not emphasize as much hip rotation as our school does.

Of course, I’m all about the comparisons to the martial arts as I’ve been trained. The biggest difference is the fighting stance–this book emphasizes a more fencing-style stance, which presents more of your side to the opponent. It closes off target areas on your own body, but it also puts one side of your body out-of-range for attacks–which might be a bigger deal in martial arts, where feet are employed and where you’re supposed to be ambidextrous, being able to attack with the same combinations (but reversed) if you present your other side.

So the book was a bit of review for me in spots, but it did give me some ideas for drills, such as a head movement drill–I am not so good at head movement (and given how sparsely I’ve attended class the last year and a half, I am probably not so good at sparring at all), so I have started doing some of the rythmic movement that I read about in the book. I watched some boxing a while back, and those guys slip punches very fast indeed.

One definite improvement in this book versus other martial arts books I’ve read is instead of a pair of photos showing before and after the strike, the book includes at least three, with one in process, and the images often have callouts and lines to indicate focus or planes:

That is very helpful, indeed.

The book runs 150 pages plus a glossary; only about two-thirds of it is technique and whatnot. The last third are a history of boxing up until the turn of the century and a journal of the author’s individual lessons with a boxing coach. Interesting, I suppose, but not what I am looking for. Although also interesting is that the book has an AOL email address for the amateur boxing group and a fax number to contact them. Wow, twenty years, huh? I cannot imagine that I would have picked up a book like this for practical information twenty years ago. To research for a novel, perhaps, but to hone my technique? Who knows what the next 20 will bring? Sorry, that’s a little extra reflection you get in a book report around the turn of the year and the turn of a duodecade.

Well, gentle reader, I now have a new metric for Classical literature. Out: The Anna Karenina moment where I’m reading a long piece of literature and determine I could have read a whole other book by that point. The new metric is the Bolan number: The number of Mack Bolan or other paperbacks that I read while reading another piece of literature. This is the first Bolan book that I’ve read while going through Wuthering Heights, and Wuthering Heights will have a Bolan Number greater than 1.

But we’re not here to talk about Wuthering Heights; we’re here to talk about Black Hand, a novel that finds Bolan in Turkey after an attack on the American embassy that is laughably underguarded ten years after Beirut. He teams with a director of counter-terrorism and then an attractive sub-director of terrorism to free some hostages and smash the terrorist group, which is five people. Well, clearly, a diminishing number of people once Bolan gets involved, but they certainly seem to punch above their weight.

So it’s not one of the better entries in the series. One incident in the book that I read out loud to my poor long-suffering but beautiful wife was when a terrorist invaded a hospital to kill the anti-terrorism director. He bypasses a supply closet, shoots a surgeon in the head while the surgeon is in a break room, hides the body, and puts on the surgeon’s white coat as a disguise. Except why hide the body after making a mess in the break room? And just how white is the lab coat going to be after that gunshot luridly removes the surgeon’s head?

Yeah, not one of the best entries in the series, but it helped get me through another couple chapters of Wuthering Heights.

I picked up this collection of poetry at ABC Books on one of the classified gift card runs this December. I didn’t do Good Book Hunting posts on them because I bought only a couple of books each time and a handful of gift cards. I mainly hang out in the martial arts, poetry, philosophy, local, and now the classical literature sections over there. I tend to start with the local and rotate counter clockwise through these sections. I’m prone to picking up inexpensive poetry collections. I think I got this one because it’s from Coffee House Press in Minnesota, and the title is similar to my collection Coffee House Memories. So I spent $3.50 on it.

Which might have been too much.

Even though it’s from 1988, it’s still too modern for my tastes. The short line breaks and the choppy mouth feel don’t lend themselves to good, evocative images or pleasure in reading aloud (even if it’s just in your head). The poet is Native American, so there’s a lot of Mother Earth, Brother Crow tropes in it; given that there’s not much else, it really stands out in not a good way.

So someday I’ll have to pen my “What makes a good poem?” essay, and it’s the contrasts with material like this that help me really dial in on the good stuff. Most of which comes from the ninteenth century.

Alan Dean Foster might well be the greatest living science fiction writer. There, I said it. At the very least, I have enjoyed his work ever since I got a book in the Spellsinger series in middle school.

Since then, I’ve read and reported on:

• Midworld
• Codgerspace
• The Dig
• Cyber Way
• The Black Hole
• Clash of the Titans
• Outland

It looks like it’s been nine years since I read one of his paperbacks, which is odd since I have several of his books in the to-read shelves, but if you’ve seen the to-read shelves, you’d understand why I have a wealth of things from which to choose. Given that I posted about Some Paperbacks of Note, the in middle school link above, in 2016, that means it’s been four years since I last completely dusted and shuffled the to-read shelves lineup. I should probably do that again. Likely I would shake out other Foster paperbacks to read next year.

At any rate, I have reached the point in Wuthering Heights where I want to read something else after a couple of chapters of that Literature, so this was just the thing.

In it, a low-level thief kills a jewelry store owner who won’t pay protection to the local crime boss and then kills the crime boss’s killers who come for him because he’s… different. So he works his way up the levels, and that is numbered levels, of being an illegal, and when some of the political powerbrokers on Terra take an interest in him, he pulls a trick to become legal businessman, again starting at a low level number and working his way up. He makes an alliance, essentially becoming a spy for an alien race but seems to play both humanity and the aliens off of each other until a grander scheme comes to fruition–allying the humans and these aliens against a menace from the galactic core.

The first half of the book focuses on the main character himself and deals with how he goes about what he’s doing; the second shifts to a psychologist of the alien race who suspects the main character has some sort of plot going against his race and tries to thwart him–all the while playing into his hands. The book ends with a short resolution where these antagonists talk it over and discover that the main character does all his plotting, including his latest, a mocked-up alien armada that looks as though it is about to invade the combined spaces of the humans and their new allies–he does all this just because he does not want anything to have control over him. Also, the improved commercial environment makes the humans, their new friends, and the man himself richer.

So ultimately, it’s a little thin, but it’s a roaring read. I thought the ultimate twist would be that it was some sort of video game, what with the marking levels playing so much of a part early. That was not the case, though. But a fun read, interesting characters–the main character is an amoral, pragmatic man much like say Raymond Reddington in the television series The Blacklist or similar anti-heroes that abound here in the 21st century. It seems a bit ahead of its time, but I am sure one could find other examples of it in other works preceding this one.

Well, I have completed the first three books in the series, which I bought in 2017. He’s got at least one more out, and I’ll probably pick the others up the next time I see Chase at a convention. And by “the next time,” I mean “if ever again,” but I hope I do.

Let’s see, in this one, the Empire and the Confederacy are stalemating a bit. The Confederacy has some alien tech that gives them a bit of an advantage; some systems align with the Empire, and some with the Confederacy. And the military leader for the Empire starts laying the groundwork for a coup when the current emperor orders the slaughter of civilians in retaliation for a Confederate victory. Then the aliens whom humanity slaughtered hundreds of years ago–the ones that left behind the advanced technology return, and they’re pissed.

The book runs a little longer than the previous ones–180 pages versus under 140–and Chase is still good at plotting, and the book moves along at a quick pace, but he’s also really starting to develop as a writer with some more polished descriptions added and some characterization to the story. So he’s improved as a writer since his first book eight years ago to this book which is four years old.

Good for him.