Category: Book Report

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

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

So:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I just read a volume of poetry by early 20th century radio man Bud Rainey (Jes’ Dreamin’), I thought about this book in 2008 when it was relatively fresh. And lost it in the stacks. But, coincidentally, it was also in the same section of the shelf from which I grabbed a stack of unrelated books so that I would have a wide selection of books to read on vacation (as with Homicide Near Hillsboro). These two books represent the only books I read on vacation, actually, although I started a couple more.

So: Well, it is a collection of Jack Buck’s poems and not short stories but rather a couple of anecdotes from the early part of his broadcasting career, many of which are a little more boozy or slightly salacious than one would expect from someone who was by the time the book came out an elder statesman of broadcasting (who decries trash radio in an address included in this book). The book itself is a fundraiser for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation–apparently, Buck had a relationship with a fan suffering from the disease–and the book also includes an address given when he received an award from the foundation. In his addresses, he gives a little boilerplate politicking about being in favor of schools and also in favor of the government subsidies for Busch Stadium III (which was still in the negotiating stages at the time, as though the Cardinals would really move to Illinois). I see the state and the city of Kansas City are going through the same thing for the Royals now, but moving to Kansas City, Kansas, or Overland Park is not as big of a divider as moving to Illinois would be. So when it comes up again in a couple of years for the Cardinals again, call their bluff.

Eh. What about the poetry? Kinda like grandma poetry, but without God for the most part and with a more modern sensibility: shorter lines, less rhythm, and lesser vocabulary. I mean, I’m not knocking it; the guy was writing poetry, but it wasn’t as good as even the Rainey, but it was a way of expressing one’s self in a semi-disciplined fashion.

Full disclosure: In 2001, Jack Buck read one of his poems at the first Cardinals game (in Busch II) after the attacks on September 11. I was in the stands for it along with a couple of friends from Wisconsin who came to visit and helped me get a better sense of return to normalcy. That poem is not in the book which presumably came out earlier in the year. But St. Louis indulged Jack Buck his poetry because he was Jack Buck, not because the poetry was particularly compelling. But he was of maybe the last generation (or maybe it was early Boomers) who wrote poetry just because. And I don’t see the self-conscious efforts like the ones in the Springfield News-Leader‘s Poetry from Daily Life will change that much. But good on ’em for trying.

Ah, gentle reader, although this is a signed copy of James R. Wilder’s latest novel from last year, I did not get it personally inscribed at his book signing as I had something else going on at the time. Which is just as well, and probably for the better. When I attended the book signing for Death in Dittmer, I brought my beautiful wife along and then proceeded to spend an hour and a half standing there and talking with the author as the poor girl starved–I failed to see her behind the author table making time to go gestures, and she then sat in the car for a bit and was about to walk to a restaurant herself when I finally emerged from the book store. Well, I certainly avoided that this time. Although I do not see a Good Book Hunting report that mentions this book–my purchases at ABC Books have been very intermittent and small in scope of late–I am pretty sure I bought this about Christmas time last year. And it took me almost half a year to read it mostly because it was lost in the stacks until I gathered books by the handful from one particular shelf for vacation this year and it was there by chance.

Unlike the previous books, this book does not pick up the moment after the last ended, which is for the better for readers who get them out of order.

In it, the Chief of Police from Hillsboro, with whom Chet Harbison (of the “A Harbison Mystery” Harbisons) has butt heads in past books, is found dead under a covered bridge, mangled almost beyond recognition. His sergeant the bully expects to be made the chief of police instead. The Hillsboro sergeant friend of Chet, recently busted to corporal, are injured in a botched bank robbery, and the bully sergeant appears to beat Chet’s deputy friend Pete who has just taken down the inside man on the bank job. As Chet investigates, he finds that the police chief was not the war hero he portrayed himself as and is living a double life with a second wife. Meanwhile, the first wife and her cousin (some saphostry involved) are eager to get the insurance money and pressure the sheriff to find them innocent of suspicion. And as Chet (and crew) investigate, they find that someone in town was involved in planning the bank robbery, someone who knew the police chief often spent Wednesday nights away from Hillsboro with his second wife. Suspicion on the murder falls upon the brother of a local butcher, a ne’er-do-well who has disappeared with the brother’s truck. The ending resolves with a not unexpected twist and ultimate justice implied in an epilogue.

A pleasant read, but not without typos. I offered to proofread for him in 2023, but he thought I was offering expensive professional services. I should reach out to him and tell him I’ll do it for an advance copy of the book and maybe a retconned mention in the book.

Of course, I enjoy these books a little more because I lived in northwestern Jefferson County from seventh grade through high school and a little beyond, so I’m familiar with towns he mentions. In this book, for instance, he mentions that Chet meets Hillsboro town officials at the Russell House. Ah, gentle reader, I “just” ate at the Russell House myself (wherein “just” means in 2021 as part of our Desoto vacation). So little tidbits like that are especially meaningful and part of the reason I enjoy these books maybe more than comparable works.

So why did I read Walden earlier in the year? I’d gotten it in my head that it was for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge–I said as much in another book report in April, but I didn’t actually slot it into any of the categories. Huh. Perhaps I was just reading it to race my youngest to whom I recently gave a copy and who might have had to read it for school. Regardless, I did not do a book report on it when I finished it because it’s in this omnibus three-books-in-one edition. And the omnibus only counts as a single book in the annual count because my rules are so arbitrary that Calvin has said to me, “Hey, how about a little consistent structure to your framework, buddy?”

At any rate, I’m not going to go into too much detail. This is a blog and not a paper for a college grade, gentle reader. But I will say something about each.

The Maine Woods chronicles several trips that Thoreau made into Maine; once to visit the largest mountain in the state and a couple other trips up and down the rivers and lakes just to take in the scenery and to enumerate and describe all the birds and the flowers and the trees found along the way. Actually, I found it tedious because that’s what it is. He tells about traveling by water, a little about the swamps along the way, and not much narrative flow. We get small asides about his philosophy, how man is changing the landscape, but the land is pretty wild and pretty much untouched except for logging. I mean, even events that could be exciting, such as a companion getting separated from the party overnight, is told pretty laconically. It was only 185 pages, but it took me a long time to slog through it. The book qua book was published after Thoreau’s death; I expect he would have tightened it if he meant it for print as a book. The book is structured in long chapters for each trip and subsections for days on the trip. Which is fitting, as people put it together from his journals after he died.

Walden chronicles the time that Thoreau spent in a small shack on Walden Pond (not On Golden Pond, which is different, you damned kids). Thoreau spent over two years there, but he condensed the journal entries into topical chapters and kind of made it seem like only a single year as he kind of follows the seasons–but the text is pretty clear that he’s talking about multiple years, so I’m not sure why current exegesists (current being late 20th century insist he pretended it was only a year.

At any rate, this is one of the two “books” that Thoreau published in his lifetime (the other, A Week on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers, was much shorter, so one might think it’s only a long essay). So it represents what Thoreau wanted published and a degree of refinement you don’t get in the posthumous works.

Themeatically, he muses on living the simple life, paring one’s needs down to the bare minimum, and rhapsodizes about nature and decries man’s progress in building things and destroying habitats and whatnot in the name of progress. It is strangely approachable not only because this was a theme popular even in the latter half of the 20th century, but the words he uses–cars for rail transportation, for example, or “”Who would live there where a body can never hear the barking of Bose.” (which is a brand of speaker and headphones today)–make it seem like he’s almost writing it in the middle 20th century and not the middle 19th century.

And I am sure it hit the Greatest Generation and early Boomers differently than someone today. I mean, they had exurban woods, at least in the north and northeast and parts of the south, where they rambled as kids which were developed for suburbs. So they knew what the loss of the wild places they played felt like. But here in the 21st century, kids have far diminished room to ramble even if they can be torn from devices long enough to do so. My boys played a bit in the wood break behind our house in the brief gap when they were old enough to play unsupervised and the time the oldest got his first phone because he was going into high school and might need to be in communication with his folks. And although I was kind of limited to the (big) block of the housing project or the trailer park or whatnot, my father told stories of hopping on a train as a kid with a gun to go hunting. So I knew what this felt like if only by proxy, the loss of those “wild” spaces (ours were not really wild, the old edges of the Army Reserve base in Milwaukee or the wooded hills above the trailer park or, it turns out, the toxic creek below it). But they’re gone now, too, lost in the past.

So it’s clear why it was a college favorite back then. It’s not a bad read; a bit more poetical in tone than what we would prefer today (or at least what I prefer in my paperback fiction selections). And it provides some things to think about. But more archaic now than it would have been in 1990.

Cape Cod is another book drawn from his journals and published after his death. It covers a trip that Thoreau and another took walking Cape Cod to Provincetown, a several week journey of 60+ miles. He talks about the sea, seamen, lighthouses, and living on this rural sandbar where not much grows. It starts of with a bang, a chapter on a shipwreck and the aftermath, talks about “wreckers” who gather jetsam and floatsam. And most of the wood for home fires comes from driftwood. Back then, the Cape did not have roads or rails, so they walked. An interesting excursion, and a little better than The Maine Woods, but still gets into the weeds, literally. At the end, they take the ferry back to the mainland. I was reading Jes’ Dreamin’ about the same time as this book-within-the-book, and I noted that both depict eras in areas which have been heavily developed since the authors wrote about them as bucolic and/or backwater rural areas.

SO: I guess the whole thing is worth reading if you’re in an English department somewhere focusing on mid-19th century American literature (c’mon, man, they’re still got to be one somewhere, maybe Hillsdale or something) and you need to read it for work and for your dissertation or continued non-perishing publishing. But these are not for everyone. I’m not even sure they’re for me in retrospect. But I’ve read this bonzer of a book, and it’s good for me to read bonzers of a book from time to time since I have so many, and reading them clears more space than paperback originals.

Oh, and Thoreau did not think much of the Irish. He dings them several times. So some small inclusions in the diamond of his thought. He was imperfect, and unfortunately undoubtedly the complete works of Thoreau, including, what, fourteen or fifteen volumes of a journal (not available at Nogglestead, and not on order), will undoubtedly prove it more clearly.

I jes’ picked up this book earlier this month, and I brought it with a stack of other poetry books to the chairside table for some shorter reading after working my way through chapters of a longer book (The Maine Woods, Walden, and Cape Cod by Thoreau). And I guess I jumped on this one first.

So this is a self-published volume from 1938; apparently, Rainey was a radio personality in Connecticut. Presumably he read some of these poems on the air, and they definitely have the rhythm of a polished performer. Most of them are four to eight sestets or octets with mostly iambic buy with some anapaest thrown in for variety. Thematically, they’re Americana, not unlike what you might find in Ideals magazine, although Rainey writes an awful lot in the vernacular, not only dropping the final consonant of words but also using rural phonetic pronunciations like shadder for shadow. So some possible James Whitcomb Riley influence there (see the book reports for Little Orphant Annie and Other Poems and Old School Day Romances to see what I’m talking about).

I’m doing the math here, and somehow 1938 was seventy-seven years ago. That hardly seems correct, but I’m a manchild who still watches dumb movies, so I probably still think it’s 1980something when I do my default time calculations. Rainey would have been a contemporary of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Ogden Nash, but his poetry appears not to have been picked up by a major publisher. Perhaps he wanted to keep the rights for himself. Or maybe the collections of poetry were just a larf. As a result, the books look to be kind of rare.

What seems incongruous, or might, is that he was a broadcaster in Connecticut (WTIC, I believe, but I’ve closed the tabs and can’t be arsed to look it up again–oh, all right, I did verify it was WTIC–no point in me hallucinating like an LLM would please add aside in the self deprecating style of Brian J.). Which, in the 21st century, I think of as suburban or even urban because of its proximity to New York City (although I have never been to Connecticut, although my beautiful wife has). The Google map shows a lot of green which would indicate it’s not completely overdeveloped. So it was my mistake in thinking it was rural. The film Holiday Inn is set contemporaneously with when this book was written, roughly, and it depicts Connecticut as the height of yokels in the sticks. So I guess the incongruity was based on my misconception of Connecticut.

At any rate, if you like the kind of poetry that you find in old Ideals magazines with a touch of the Riley, you’ll probably enjoy these books. Nothing is going to really stick to your intellectual ribs–nothing in here compelled me to memorize it–but a better read than the current issue of Poetry magazine anyway.

Ah, gentle reader. Even with the gluttonous trips to library sale bag days and more recent trips to estate sales and garage sales on the weekends, I still scout the free book cart at church for things to pick up. And last Sunday, I was particularly greedy, snatching up this book as well as a book about the book of Genesis. From the Bible. Which is more what the free book cart tends to proffer except when some of us sneak more secular works onto it. Like this one.

The Baldknobbers are a long-running show down in Branson, and this is probably a self-published book to include amongst their souvenirs. The copyright date is 1999, but they could very well have stock of it down there even now. Branson shows aren’t really my thing, Yakov excepted, so I don’t know if I’ll ever see them or the Presleys (both of which claim to be the first show in Branson, I think).

So of course I read it in a night or two as something else to read after finishing a chapter of the Thoreau omnibus I’m hoping to finish soon. It’s purportedly a list of jokes that the emcees have used over the years, so they’re very twentieth century equivalents of what you would find in Reader’s Digest. Not especially edgy humor, which is fine: I’m not too into crass, although the only joke that I actually laughed at dealt with bodily functions: One fellow is complaining to a friend that his wife is on a fiber kick, so he’s eating bran in the morning, bran in the evening, and bran at night. The friend asks, “But are you regular?” And the fellow says, “Regular? I’m thirty days ahead!” Probably complete with the exclamation point.

So, eh, it passed a little time in church before the service and a couple of minutes before bed a couple nights. And it was free, which was nice.

I just bought this former library book from the Knoxville High School Library at the Friends of the Library book sale on May 3, and I jumped into it after the collection of Finnish proverbs.

This says it’s a book of Eskimo poems, but it’s really a book of photos of Eskimos and the great white north with poems as text. The photos are more interesting than the poetry, which mostly deal with the landscape and survival, and the photos show you why. The collection is 60-something now, and I wonder how different a 21st century edition of the book would look different. Many of the photos depict the outcome of a hunt, and one of the poems talks happily about having seal to eat. I mean, that’s life in the harsh environment, but people in New York who make books would likely blanche at the thought of it.

So a quick read. No poems I’m interested in memorizing and not even aphorisms or proverbs to quote to sound smart. But, wow, what interesting photographs.

I have dived right into the stack of “poetry”” that I purchased earlier this month partially because I have not been arsed to put them on my bookshelves yet, so they’re still on my (rather large) desk. Maybe I’m thinking with dedicated effort, I will read them all before I shelve them kind of like I’m hoping to watch all the movies atop the movie cabinet soon (but my night gig has restarted, so my reading and viewing time will be lessened for a couple of months).

The translator/editor is the child of Finnish immigrants, and this book was partially funded by a university where the translator works (or worked) in a Finnish fellowship or something, so the author has other presumably short works related to Finnish literature as well. But this book is but a collection of proverbs and sayings along with some line drawings of Finnish places and design elements. So it’s definitely a quick read–under an hour, for sure, and it has some little bits of wisdom, although some of the proverbs are not unique to Finns.

I marked a couple:

• Better once too much than always too little.
• You can fool others only once but yourself for a lifetime.
• What you do not repair you destroy.
• You do not reach Heaven in one jump.
• Not all clouds bring rain.

I cannot wait to use them and announce they’re proverbs from the Finnish. You know I will.

I’m actually vicariously Finnish to a degree. One of my uncles is of Finnish lineage. His daughter is blonde and fair, but the son got the darker complection from the Noggle side of the family, so he has a Finnish last name but looks like a Mexican bandito. He, my cousin, has been to Finland to meet his relations several times and actually speaks a bit of Finnish. So I’m only vicariously Finnish, which is odd since I have lineage from just about every other European country.

So, yeah, worth the fifty cents I paid for it.

I mentioned when reading Fatal Interview that I was reading another collection of sonnets simultaneously; this is it. I bought this book last spring at the Friends of the Library book sale; it’s clear I haunt the dollar (fifty cents on half price day) poetry table.

So: This is a contemporary collection, only six years old, but it’s anachronistic as the poet tries to emulate medieval sonnets. Not only does the poet affect some middle English stylings, but the sonnets are English style as well (abab cdcd efef gg, with three samples and the couplet instead of the Italian sonnet which is 8 lines and a turn for 6 lines–which is what Edna St. Vincent Millay and I wrote back in the day). And the text of all poems is italic, perhaps to look more like handwriting, but that’s always a poor design decision as it slows reading down just a bit.

The poems? Eh, okay, I guess. The rhythm is fairly suspect–the poet does not stick to iambic pentameter much.

But, you know what? They’re earnest, and I have to say I developed a little…. well, maybe not affection for them–I won’t memorize any of them for open mic nights–but I did feel a little sympathy or camaraderie with the fellow. When I was in college, my poetry professor knocked my poetry for being like reproductions of antique furniture. My later sonnets had a more modern sensibility. Even Edna St. Vincent Millay’s hundred-year-old sonnets read a little more contemporary than this book.

So perhaps this poet will also evolve. But you really have to be in the mood for this kind of thing to take much from this volume.

I am enjoying running through the stack of Edna St. Vincent Millay books I bought last autumn–I read Fatal Interview last month, and when I went to the book sale last week, I hoped to buy additional copies of Millay’s work so I could put them in my to-read stacks and read them again. But none were forthcoming, and I still have a few unread from last autumn. Or I could dig out my existing copies to re-read, but that’s not how I roll.

At any rate, this collection is not a collection of sonnets, but most of them have good rhythm and end rhymes anyway. The fourth part of the book does include some sonnets, though. And it’s not a series of connected works, unlike Fatal Interview, but you do get the usual Millay themes of love and longing and loss.

No penciled into the end papers, but it does have a book plate naming a previous owner (Reggie Johnson) and a label from the Personal Book Shop with two locations in Boston, Massachussetts. The book shop no longer seems open, and the style of the label indicates that it’s decades old, so. Someone, probably more than one person, enjoyed this book. Perhaps someday someone else will enjoy it when it passes from my hands.

Not much of a book report, but I can only gush about Millay as she is my favorite poet bar none.