Category: Book Report

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.

I said when I reviewed Georgia O’Keefe earlier this year:

I think I confused her with Grandma Moses when I was young, as she was still alive but was very, very old–both she and Grandma Moses lived to about the century mark (Grandma Moses a little older, Georgia O’Keeffe a little younger). And both of their names started with G, which means to a young man not steeped in the arts, they were practically the same person.

Well, I have now completed my education into the differences between Grandma Moses and Georgia O’Keeffe (with a little Frida Kahlo thrown in this year for a bit of spice). Grandma Moses was what they call a “primitive” artist, meaning in the art world that she was not trained in the arts. I tend to use the term incorrectly, meaning that she’s kind of folk art, with some good representation of nature in a distant landscape but with diminishing skill on buildings and then on people and animals. I mean, much of her work is about what you would expect from a paint-with-wine class, maybe. Not quite up to Bob Ross on the landscapes, even.

I think she became famous because she was a novelty: She started painting at about 80, and a New Yorker visiting upstate spotted her work and worked to make her famous (and that he was an early collector and made money on her is purely coincidental). Soon, she was having exhibitions around the world and appeared in a documentary film and an appearance on Murrow’s See It Now television program.

This book is not just a monograph, but rather a comprehensive treatment of Moses and her work. It includes a biography, information about her career, several letters in her own hand reproduced, and a complete catalog of her known works (at the time of publication–it’s possible they have found and/or authenticated more in the almost fifty years since this book’s publication). It’s a bonzer–356 pages, although it’s not small print and has extensive indexes and a complete listing of her work with small photos where available). Very complete.

One gets the sense that Grandma Moses herself did not take the whole thing too seriously and did not let her fame go to her head. Of course, as a child of the 1860s and a resident of Virginia in the reconstruction era (perhaps considered a carpetbagger by the Virginians) she would have more perspective than a young artist who was 20 something at the time of “discovery.”

So although I appreciate her work a little more than Kahlo or O’Keeffe, I would still not decorate my house with Grandma Moses prints.

This book is of unknown provenance; it has no title page or copyright page, and the Internet has never heard of it. I’m guessing that it was written in the early to middle 1970s because it refers to Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. It has the feel of small town paper’s humor column (or maybe something from the Springfield papers at the time, but it’s before the Internet), and a later entry does start out “This week” which lends credence to the belief.

And it’s quite an enjoyable little book. The “author” is purportedly a barber in a small town who tells stories about the local residents, mostly made up characters so I guess this is more an example of a collection of flash fiction than the actual reporting on what is going on in a real small town, but it’s amusing and sometimes humorous. I actually laughed out loud at a couple of the bits, including a man who corrected a nagging wife by slapping her bottom with a carp (it must be the Ozarks, as no self-respecting northerner who catches a carp brings it home to eat–because even when we’re poor, we’re not barbarians).

Given the size of the book, I probably bought it in a packet of chapbooks for a buck at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale at some point. I will keep my eyes open for other volumes by the author, but I’m not sanguine–this looks like a self-published low run number (although it’s signed and inscribed to Theodore), so it’s probably a one-off for a larf.

This is the second of Joshua Clark Chase’s military science fiction novels; I read the first, Triumphant Empire a week or so back, and I will likely read the third very soon. So that if I ever see him at a convention again, I can proudly by the next book or two in the series since I will have finally found and read the ones I bought three years ago.

So.

The copyright date is 2014, two years after Chase published Triumphant Empire, and I think I see some improvement in his writing. The book still jump cuts a bunch not only between chapters, but in chapters between the various characters and perspectives. We see the Primary of the Ordeon Empire (the triumphant one) as he meets with the emperor and deals with some light intrique with the leader of the Star Knights by commissioning an apprentice and assigning her to his task force. We get some of her perspective as well. On the other side, we focus mainly on the leader of the resistance and his brother the pirate, but also amongst some others as the resistance foments rebellion on a slave planet and meets with other leaders. The resistance discovers alien tech and captures an imperial dreadnaught to try to reverse engineer it. The empire helps the weaker side in a conflict to actually pull both into its orbit and then launches an audacious attack on three systems at once–only to be thwarted on one such attack by the resistance.

So there’s a lot going on, and the books might have fit together as a single novel. Or, perhaps, the plots could have been fleshed out to make each book bigger than the roughly 130 pages of action. The next book looks to be longer and even more recent, so I’m looking forward to it after a brief interlude. It’s best to read them all very close together, as the books might not stand alone very well as the plots are so completely linked.

I’m starting to realize that my year’s reading log is coming to an end. I will finish, what, three or four books that I have in process? I don’t know that I’ll read a whole other novel–aside from Total War, the third in this series, this year. But I guess it’s only the middle of December. I might.

I have a confession to make: Despite the fact that I have bought several years’ worth of Christmas novels at book sales past, when Christmas time closes in, I can’t find the Christmas books I already own (and this year, I am certain they are not by the Joshua Clark Chase books). So last Friday, I headed to the northern wastes of Springfield, where ABC Books is an oasis on the distant horizon to buy one such novel for this year. Ms. E. keeps her holdings in far better order than I do; although she did not have a special display of Christmas novels set up, I quickly found one in the extensive Christian Fiction section. I recognized the name Melody Carlson as I started to read it; her novel The Christmas Shoppe was the first Christmas novel I read in 2012, when it and I were young.

This book focuses on a college-aged adoptee whose natural mother died shortly after her birth and who was adopted by an older couple who befriended the natural mother who fled from her family for some reason. Although they look a little to try to find her family, it’s only now (sixteen years ago, so then already) that the young lady gets a lead on her birth grandmother in the very town where she is attending college. As she rings the doorbell, the embittered old woman thinks she is a housekeeper/caretaker she has hired because she has sprained her ankle. So the young lady does not correct the misinterpretation and hires on as a housekeeper/caretaker and grows close to the woman without revealing her secret. She tries to learn a little about her mother and why she left–apparently, she took preggers a couple weeks before her graduation and left after a row with her family about whether she should keep the baby or not.

About the midway point, she talks to her pastor and decides to tell her family–her grandmother, her step great aunt, her step-uncle and his family–which left me to wonder where the book was going to go after the big reveal. Welp, it had one family secret too far: You see, the adopted girl is the product of a union between the stepfather and the (of age) step-daughter. So the second half of the book is the family members coming to terms with this revelation. The book uses the word rape a lot, but neither of the participants are alive in the book to say whether it was really rape or just a drunken hookup. I read enough Agony Aunt things where that sort of thing happens to think it possible, but the book calls it rape, so let it be rape, I guess. As I said, that’s a family secret too far, and it makes for the most macabre Christmas romance I can think of (actually, there’s no romance in this book: no love interests for the grandmother or the granddaughter, wait, I mean stepdaughter, I mean, whatever she ended up being).

So, yeah, that might not have been the Christmas novel I was looking for.

As I’m listening to a lecture series on the English Novel, I can’t help compare this book to the themes found in traditional English novels. An orphan, a rich family, mistaken identity, a family secret, and at the very end, the revelation that the orphan is a blood relation inheritor. It reads a lot more modern than, say, Jane Austen, but one can easily see the influence of the typical, and generally much longer, classical English literature story arc.

Or at least I can, right now, because I’m listening to the lectures that I mentioned.

Of the two, I think I prefer the later work that I read earlier. I won’t dodge her Christmas books in the future. Likely because I won’t remember until I’m researching book reports on them that I’ve read her books before.

I hit my bookshelves looking for a Christmas novel to put me into the mood for the holidays, and I did not find one. Instead, I found this play by a playwright whose name I didn’t recognize. Of course, whilst I was reading it, I spoke of it with my beautiful wife, and we got to naming modernish–that is, twentieth century, playwrights. She could only name, sort of, Alan Ayckbourn, “The Norman Conquests” guy, and Neil Simon. I could name a couple more, being a reader of twentieth century drama, but not this fellow, so I thought he must have been pretty obscure. Although “pretty obscure” does not generally get a Random House hardback and Book Club Edition.

David Storey was something in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. The son of a coal miner, Storey was a professional rugby player for a bit before turning to painting, novels (his first won a prestigious award and was adapted for the screen in 1963). Then he turned to plays. At the bottom of his Wikipedia entry, you find references to several textbook type academic works covering his plays, mostly, so some university (or maybe several) must have mentioned him in class at some time or another. This particular play opened in London and then ran on Broadway for a while. It was even revived for a run several times in this century (and has its own Wikipedia article). So he was not obscure–I just hadn’t heard about him.

Sadly, that’s a more interesting story than this particular play. It starts off with two men taking a seat and talking, which makes it a bit more difficult in reading than watching, as they don’t have too much distinction on the page or in what they’re saying. They’re passing time, not working toward a goal or problem. So I thought it was a bit Waiting for Godotish, and sometime toward the middle of the first act, I realized they were in prison or something. Spoiler alert: They’re in an insane asylum. In the second act, another man character is introduced who comes in and picks up the table and chairs at various times, and a couple of women characters, one of whom is round-heeled, I guess, and they… talk. About nothing, really, and then the play ends with no real resolution.

So I didn’t like it that much, but to be honest, I am coming to sense that I don’t like too many plays that I read cold; I guess I am more charitable to them when I see them on stage, but even then it’s about fifty-fifty. The ones I like, I really like, and most of the rest are kind of meh.

One thing, though: Look at the book cover. Now, understand that the play describes one of the characters as a middle-aged man in his forties. Brothers and sisters, I am older than that (what? when?). Why do the people on the cover look older than that? Is it because they’re English, and Americans tend to look younger than Europeans? Is it because in the fifty years since, people have taken to looking younger? Both of these? Is it because the directors chose actors who were older than the play text stated? All of these? Or worse: I do kind of look like that? Sadly, and fortunately, that’s what I see of myself reflected in this book–and not someone in an asylum.

Well, gentle reader, I have found these books which I ‘lost’ on my to-read shelves after I bought them in 2017. I have had to avert my eyes when I have seen the author at subsequent LibraryCons (in 2018 and 2019) because I had not read his first three books yet. I had even mentioned that I could not find them. He had no idea. On this humble blog, this has been the story of the mythical Joshua Clark books, which I have sometimes mentioned when I reported on other books that I had purchased at cons since then (such as Elton Gahr’s Spaceship Vision: The Impossible Dream earlier this year or Miracle in the Ozarks last year).

But now it becomes clear: From that very first day, when I bought his books three and a half years ago, I got his name wrong. It’s Joshua Chase, not Clark. Not that it made the books any easier to find. Which they were–when I was looking for a monograph or collection of poetry to browse this weekend, I found the three books in this series on the outside rank, but on the lowest shelf on the leftmost book case in my office (seen here before they got really full and started to break down). I don’t think it was the mistake in the name that made my eyes pass over this set for the last three years; I think it might have been because I often have something (sometimes book-things) stacked in front of the book shelves, and the best time for me to find a book is when I’m looking for a different book.

At any rate, the book: You can tell when an author, especially a young one, has played a lot of role-playing games. The fantasy story describes characters in such a fashion that you can almost see their rolled-up scores. This book reads as though the author was big into miniatures and wargaming. The story itself is about 130 pages long with 30 pages of appendixes about the main characters, the factions, and the weapons on each side. It looks like the next book has the same set of appendixes, so it, too will be a quick read.

In the book, the last holdout base of the Vehlan Union falls to the forces of the Ordeon Empire; escaping remnants of the Vehlan forces link up with space pirates whose supreme leader happens to be the brother of the leader of the Vehlans. A small special forces team has been holding out on a conquered planet, and when they’re forced to hide out when one of the members’ estranged family, they learn the Union has fallen. And the Ordeon leader who led the final assault on the Vehlan Union gets promoted to a supreme military leader position and starts his assaults on the remaining non-Ordeon systems in the galaxy.

The writing focuses on the plot and the battles more than individual characters or setting the scenes. As you know, gentle reader, if given the choice between a book which favors a moving plot and a book that focuses on the writing, I’ll pick the book with the plot every time–I do read a lot of genre fiction for this very reason, after all. This book has probably enough plot for a more modern 400 page book, but it’s stripped down perhaps even more than your common men’s adventure paperback.

But it was a quick read, and the plot was engaging enough. So I will read the other two books soon, and I will probably pick up the other(s) in the series if I get the chance just to see how this young man’s writing evolves over time.

This book is a small collection of newspaper column-length text accompanied by one of the artists’ drawings of people and places near Alley Spring in northern Shannon County, Missouri. Self-published in 1980, this book includes interviews with local figures who were born around the turn of the century and remember traversing the county in wagons, in cooling their perishables in springs, and who used or restore old mills and steam equipment.

So, yeah, it was right in my wheelhouse.

I take a paper, the Current Local, which is just south of Shannon County and is also on the Current River, so some of the place names are familiar. And my favorite bits in that paper are the columnists, so the book fits into what I’m reading every week anyway.

So I enjoyed it. It’s a little saddle-stitched 59-page collection, so about 20 or 25 “columns.” The drawings are good, too, and the author is a painter by trade, I take it. She’s from before the Internet, so searches on her name bring up a variety of “We found Tania Gray for you, cyberstalker” sites but no examples of her paintings. I’ll have to watch out for them at local antique malls and garage sales, I suppose. As well as perhaps other similar collections, which would be a treat to find.

I have described “carry” books from time-to-time, gentle reader. These books I throw into my gym bag to read at the martial arts school whilst my boys are taking classes before my class or to carry to church to read during the Sunday School hour. Well, this year has eliminated the latter, and time itself has eliminated the former. When my boys were younger, they took early afternoon young children’s classes, and the adult class was at 7:00, so I would spend sometimes three hours at the dojo before my class. Then, they were in older kids’ classes, which meant I would still spend an hour or so with time to read. But with the new abnormal, once the dojo opened back up, the older kids and adults had classes together, so we have all had class at the same time. And if the school ends up with enough kids again to split the kids from the adults, my boys will both be old enough to take adult classes. So the days of the carry book, or at least the one that goes into the gym bag, are over. And this is one of the last that I will finish, although it spent some time (years) on the table by the recliner because I was tired of carrying it and wanted to finish it during the evening reading (which is how so many of those books end up on the side table for a long time).

At any rate, this is a coffee-tableish book that focuses on showing variations in samurai armor over time more than give a detailed history of the samurai, although it does give a high level overview of medieval Japan and the tensions between the Shogun and the Emperor.

The book reflects my first foray into Japanese history, and unfortunately, it’s not a good intro (which, again, is not so much the point–it’s more a picture book of Samurai armor and art with some overview than a true history). I found it a little challenging because I am not familiar with the topography of the Japanese islands–the book only provides a single map, early in the book, that I had to keep flipping back to–and I am not familiar with the names yet, so I found it a little difficult to follow. Not Russian novel-level bad, but still. The samurai sometimes changed names, which didn’t help.

So it’s a good book if you’re already kind of familiar with Japanese history and samurai armor, as it can reinforce what you’ve already seen or read, but you would better be served reading other works first.

What other works? I will be hanged if I know. A quick search of the local library system for Japanese history brings up titles on how Anime conquered the world and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, so I am not sure how much of a NNipponophile I can become from the library books. But I should read up on it a bit. Japanese history looks to be a little more internally directed than, say, China, where China can get invaded (and does) from every direction, but the Japanese islands mean that no outside force can walk there (a key in conquest, I explain). So Japanese history is full of internecine conflict, but not a lot of being conquered by the Mongols, the Manchu, and so on.

But I’ll find something, sometime, at a used bookstore or book sale. If not, I’ve still got primary sources of Frankish history to read, so I am not hurting.

This is a collection of poetry, or rather a group of cantos about America. Spoiler alert: About the only good thing about America is jazz music. Everything else is pretty much killing the Indians, slavery, and oppression. Well, not exactly that bad but mostly so.

So poetical bashing of America goes back a long time, but I guess Charles Sykes published ProfScam in 1988 and The Hollow Men in 1990 (I read them in my formative college years when they still had that new book smell).

The verse itself is not very evocative; rather, it’s expository, preferring to mostly tell what it wants to say (America bad, or at least suspect). The author in a note at the end says he’s trying to emulate Ezra Pound and the Chinese Odes in writing a vast epic built on individual cantos (there are 15) which include a narrator introductions to individual segments in each canto. The author intends for each canto or indeed segment to be an independent poem, so the rhyme scheme and rhythm varies. Some are better than others. But that praise is relative. Nothing in it is very compelling.

The book is signed, an unnumbered copy of a limited printing of 100 copies. It looks like it was laid out with a typewriter.

It probably was, as it precedes the desktop publishing revolution. My first chapbook, Unrequited, appeared during the desktop publishing revolution and still looks like it was laid out with a typewriter. But on a computer! We all got better.

My beautiful wife glanced over at some point and read some of it, pronouncing it not good, and wondering why I read things that are not good (poems and novels). The professor conducting the current lecture series to which I am listening said yesterday that writers can learn as much or more from reading bad things as good. Which is what I also maintain. Although the importantest lesson for writers is to write as I hope to learn someday.