Category: Book Report

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.

To break up the monotony of the paperback science fiction novels I’ve been reading (most recently Halo: The Fall of Reach), I picked up a paperback Western instead. Although this book is actually a paperback that’s been upgraded to the library binding (as it was in the library of Nixa High School in the early 1980s, with intermittent checkout stamps until 1988 which means while I was reading adult crime fiction from the volunteer library and Agatha Christie books from my school library, someone my age was already reading Westerns in high school). Someone else acquired this book and later donated it to the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale, where I bought it and other Westerns last June.

So: This is not one of L’Amour’s best.

In it, an Irish immigrant from the County Cork is heading west to work on the railroad; he has a disagreement with the conductor, he falls asleep on a layover and awakens to find the stationmaster missing (and later finds him wounded) as former Confederate soldiers hope to kidnap General Sherman from the train–but they end up with a colonel instead. The lovely daughter of the colonel wants to go looking for him, so the immigrant goes with her and has to learn the ways of the west as he goes.

So the book has many different foci: The kidnapping, the search, it turns into a boxing book in the middle as the immigrant gets a chance to box the conductor for money, then it’s back to a search and rescue and a big battle in the end and a brief one-on-one, and finis!

So a serviceable throwaway book, but not one heavy on the philosophy to quote in A Trail of Memories, although it had a few one-liners about proper manliness and self-reliance. So something to read if you’re looking for a Western, but not something to really pull you into appreciating the genre at its best if you’re not already a fan.

I bought this book on my only trip to the Friends of the Rogersville Library book sale in 2016, and something funny about it: Although I read the Spiderman novel Spiderman: The Octopus Agenda in 2017, the only two other books I bought at that book sale were this book and an omnibus edition of Thoreau’s works which I’ve been reading science fiction paperbacks because, yeeks–although I read Walden and counted it for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, I’m bogged down in The Maine Woods and hope I’ll finish it and Cape Cod to count that thick volume as one book. This particular paperback weighs in at almost 400 pages, and I read it faster than I’ve read the last couple of days of Thoreau’s final trip into Maine.

At any rate, I pregress. This book is the prequel to the video game Halo: Combat Evolved, the first game in the franchise, and it talks a bit about how John/Master Chief/Spartan-117 became the chief, some early encounters with the Covenant including a couple of space battles that culminate in the fall of the human’s major base at Reach and then the humans finding and decoding, with Cortana’s help, the location of the Halo–so they go there, and the book ends.

I mean, I’ve oversimplified the plot quite a bit. Early, we get a lot of training insight into what the Spartans did, a couple of missions including one to a planet with artifacts that identify the location of Halo, and whatnot. The Spartans take some losses, and John, the Master Chief, has to do little soul-searching about it.

As you might know, gentle reader, military science fiction is not my genre of choice generally (what is? whatcha got?). But this book moved along really well. I did not feel like I was left in the dark because I did not play the games or because I did not serve in the military (unlike some hard science fiction which I don’t like because I’m not an academic scientist–Greg Bear, I’m looking at you). Plus, as I mentioned in the previous review (didn’t I?), I was a technical writer circa 2000, and I cannot imagine how awesome it would have been to have my employer ask me, and pay me to write a science fiction novel. Well, mine kinda did, as I wrote about how technology might work someday. Oh, but no, and so I still toil at my trades today instead of cashing in on stock option wealth.

At any rate, I repeat myself, this book is alright (in the northern sense of alright, meaning good). It made me want to try to play the video game again (on brief attempt to play a later Halo game with my son ended in humiliation). The controller has a lot of triggers, buttons, and mini-joysticks, though, so most likely I will just continue with my twenty-something-year-old Civilization game. Or not: I am putting together my next computer, and I’m not sure I’ll put Steam on it. Sometimes, I’ve done that to some good effect. But there are always blogs and job boards to waste my time on, so it will remain to be seen how long that might last.

Oh, and two more things:

One: I mentioned to my son that this franchise, or at least the early bits of it, are heavily influenced by Ringworld by Larry Niven. He didn’t know or care who that was or why.

Two: The franchise features Spartans wearing MJOLNIR armor. So let the people who post this meme say no more:

As a reminder, this is one of those memes that hits close to home: Sparta is over in Christian County. I’ve been to archery competitions in one of the schools there, and I’ve been to and will likely again attend a book sale at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library this year.

Since I’m apparently reading a lot of paperback science fiction this year, I picked this book out of the paperback cluster of the paperbacks stacked on the yet unrepaired bookshelves which broke in 2014. Looking back in the annals of this blog, I bought it at Pumpkin Daze later that year, which was the same time I bought John D. MacDonald’s The Wine of the Dreamers which was one of the other paperback science fiction books by authors that are known for a different genre. Pendleton, of course, was best known for starting The Exectutioner series of books, although the Ashton Ford series (one of his lesser known lines) had elements of fantasy to them.

At any rate, a couple of years into the future, the human race has enhanced itself through directed evolution. One such fellow graduates from his military training and is about to take charge of Terra 10, an interplanetary battle device that the corporations in charge of Earth want to use to keep rebellious systems in line (this is pre-Star Wars, so it’s not based on the Death Star). The guy has been enhanced to interact with the computers quickly and think like a machine partly, and he’s large (actually, larger than most of the type). But things go sideways and he ends up on Earth, which is an agricultural powerhouse, with a group of “Reavers”–reverts who failed evolutionary enhancement and are passionate people who want to be free from the tech overlords. He falls for one of the women there, and so he becomes involved in a plot to seize Terra 10 for the Reavers to negotiate a peace with the techno overlords, but then an alien invasion force comes into the solar system, and he has to use the weapons platform to defend humanity en toto.

It definitely has mid-century paperback original vibe. It tries to grapple with some bigger issues, like how much can a man be enhanced and still be a man and whether computers serve man or does man serve computers (timely, as I sit here writing a book report knowing its main audience will be LLM scrapers of some sort and me in the future, which is more of a machine audience than man). But although it raises the questions, it does not answer them, not well. But at least it does not read like Mack Bolan In Space. No numbers falling, no statement of philosophy followed by the one-word sentence “Yeah.” So good on ‘im for trying something different.

Ah, gentle reader, I intended to make this a dual book report with a more modern collection of sonnets (circa 2019) which I had on my chairside table for some time but didn’t get into until I picked this book. And then, although I made some progress on that other book, I haven’t been compelled to complete it in the intervening hours days weeks since I read Fatal Interview. So allow me to talk a bit about this book.

Well, of course, I’ve read it–I read a pile of Millay in college and inspired my mother to go to the bad part of St. Louis (which part is bad? the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) to buy some for me when I was away in school. However, apparently, I have not bought it again in the intervening years, unlike so many, until I bought a stack of them last September. And I quickly re-read Renascence and A Few Figs From Thistles.

So: This book is about a decade later than those books, when she was established, a celebrity poet, and maybe on the downhill slide of her career (heaven forbid we apply pop music and celebrity ideas to poets). It’s a collection of LII sonnets, ostensibly about a romantic relationship mostly self-conscious from beginning to end, and, aw, hell, that pretty much explains how I approached things in my youth. Who’s my daddy? E. St. Vincent Millay.

Overall, the sonnets are a bit hit or miss. I probably have mentioned that I memorized “Love, though for this you riddle me with darts….” from A Few Figs from Thistles for open mic nights. I also memorized “Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink….” from this collection as well for performance, although it is not as exciting as the former. Or, at least, it was not as much of a hit in cafes thirty years ago.

Welp. Alrighty, then (he said, quoting a thirty-year-old movie to get down verbally with the young people today). I like Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she influenced me more in my young poetry and young affectations than even Billy Joel or Robert B. Parker. Of course, I recommend it. And deep down I hope I stumble across another old copy in the wild which I can buy and have an excuse to read again.

OH: And about this copy: Someone else treasured it. While reading it, I came across the detritus of what looked to be a ribbon in several places, and I thought it was an old bookmark. But who uses a decaying red ribbon for a bookmark. I bet someone used multiple pieces of red ribbon to mark favorites, and the decayed ribbons were later removed, perhaps by Friends of the Library. And the back endspiece has a sonnet penciled in:

I’d hoped, briefly, that it was the long-lost sonnet from a master poet which would make this into a real collectible, but it’s just a copied poem from Elizabeth Barret Browning. Not that I’m slagging on her work, but it’s not her handwriting.

This was the Lenten devotional from the church I attend for this year. 40 Days of Wisdom last year, the first time I’ve gone through a devotional almost in real time. Or at least at the same time as everyone else, as I did not not attend a small group or anything. Not that they were emphasized this year, perhaps as a result of the continued attendance decline with this particular church.

At any rate, although I picked it up early in Lent, I really didn’t get started really reading it for many days. The first daily devotion starts with the woman recounting the indecision that she felt when she was a girl at Disney World, and…. Well, gentle reader, I am a bad, bad man, for I still hold a little envy/resentment/outrage for people who grouse about things I never had or never can. Just imagine how I seethe inside when someone over forty complains about having difficulties with their parents–you have to imagine, because I don’t outwardly make a show of my personal ire of this sort, especially not performatively, look-at-poor-me variety. But these sorts of things get me up. I mean, aside from trips up north for the weekend or holidays down south in St. Louis with my mother’s family, the only family vacation we ever took was when my mother, who must have scrimped and saved all year, brought us down to the Ozarks for a week. Poor little me, but I did pick the book up and put it down many times when getting into the setup for the first devotional.

So, yeah, well, it’s a devotional written by members of the congregation, although I do not recognize some of the names, including a fellow with the title Reverend. They range from personal anecdotes as springboards to scriptural lessons to more earnèd pieces (such as the contributions by my beautiful wife). They’re pretty quick to read, and if you’re not giving them serious daily contemplation, they’re pretty easy to forget as well.

But I guess they’re more workbooks than things that are supposed to stick with you anyway.

And, unfortunately, because I am the Master Chief of sinners, I’ll mostly remember the hard time I had with the first devotion.

Wow, gentle reader. It has been sixteen years since I picked up a Tarzan book; I read Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan. Perhaps not long after I got the books, although back in those days I was not dilligent about posting my purchases for future me to review. Also, I was not posting the scans of the covers–probably expecting the Amazon link below to carry the weight of it–so I can’t easily review how awful this brutal 1960s covers were. Ugly.

At any rate, in this, the eleventh volume of the series (originally from 1927), Tarzan is not really the main character. In it, a group of Arabs have come down into the heart of Africa looking for a fabled treasure city, and there’s some intrigue amongst them. One fellow is in love with the sheikh’s daughter, but he’s framed for attempted murder and escapes before he is killed. Meanwhile, an expedition with a couple of Americans, a young naturalist out to photograph the wildlife and a wealthy man out to hunt exotic game, and they fall out due to the brutality of the wealthy man. The young man wanders into a hidden valley, a lost world where Crusaders have taken up a defensive position and think that they’re surrounded by Saracens. But the residents of the valley are broken into two factions in two cities, and they have an annual tournament instead of war. The young man falls for the princess of one of the cities, but she’s stolen away by the leader of the opposing city. And these threads come together as the Arabs find their way into the valley. Tarzan has his moments, but the greater part of the book is given over to the other characters.

So it blends several different genres of pulp: The jungle adventure, the lost world adventure. The prose is, of course, deep and learned in a way that gets thinner in time–learned but terse in the 1940s, a little learned but thinner in the 1960s, and then mostly unlearned but thick with unnecessary description and extraneous scenes in the modern era.

I have one or two more of these paperbacks in the stacks somewhere, and I’ll look forward to reading them maybe in the near term.

After reading Mid-Flinx, I picked up this other mid-80s Alan Dean Foster paperback for a quick read. Which was a bit of a mistake as it was not especially quick at all.

In it, a large Corporation conducts a quick, overnight cleanup of a longtime toxic waste dump in a California valley which was not adequately distanced from the parent company. So a corporate executive fixture oversees the project, and it goes flawlessly except for a bit of a cancer cluster amongst the residents of a shantytown on the hill beside the dump. The company finds/relocates a number of them, but one old man, who has lived there his whole life, doesn’t want to go. When the fixer visits him, the old man shows him a couple of tricks that indicate he might have special powers as a result of living by and playing in the dump as a youth. So the fixer hopes to bring him into a black site corporate lab for testing, but the old man, who has a heart condition, takes off–his grand niece, the crippled sole survivor of a school bus accident, has telepathy and counsels him as he flees from the corporation to meet her in Texas. But the corporation through its regional offices are hot on his trail, culminating in kidnapping and murder to get a hold of him.

So: I was not really sure where it was going, and the setting of the middle 1980s southwest was not as exotic as, say, a forest planet. The prose was serviceable, but the story not especially gripping. Kind of Firestarter, actually. With toxic waste instead of a government program behind it. And toxic waste was really a big concern in the 1980s, ainna? We sure got a lot of pop culture from it: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Toxic Avenger, C.H.U.D., and so forth.

At any rate, thinking about it and researching this post made it clear how Foster kind of recycles current tropes, themes, and setting from not only his own work but the culture at large. I mean, Midworld takes place on a forested planet (like Mid-Flinx). Codgerspace features older protagonists (although so does Cocoon which comes out later). Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

But I might want to hold off on picking up another Foster soon. And given how I’ve apparently paced them out so far, it might be a decade.

I bought a bunch of these Pip and Flinx (or Flinx and Pip) books in Fairfield Bay, Arkansas, in 2023. They might have been together on the bookshelves at one time, but now they’re scattered amongst the stacks. I figured that after a year and a half, I would jump on them, hoping I would get them in some sort of order.

At first, I thought it would not matter when I started the book. It seemed episodic at the outset: Flinx, an empath, is on a remote planet, hiding from as much sentient contact as he can to keep from getting empath headaches, when a local big shot comes into the restaurant/pub, confronts an attractive worker there, and then decides he wants to “buy” Pip, an exotic miniature dragon. Flinx rebuffs him and flees to his ship, which is a pretty spiffy ship for a twenty-year-old (results of a previous adventure), but the spoiled and single-minded wealthy merchant bushwhacks him in orbit. Flinx sets the autopilot for the first inhabited planet on the current heading and flees.

There he finds an uncharted planet covered in extremely tall trees, a planetary jungle on many levels where flora and fauna predators abound, and every flower is probably deadly. He finds some preprimitivizing humans who have grown and adapted to live amongst the third level of the forest canopy. A mother, two children, and their extremely sympathetic furcots agree to help him find a collection of metal and he offers to help them find their way to their home tree in exchange.

But the merchant has gathered a band of mercenaries and has followed Flinx. So they search for him, and they’re picked off one by one by the jungle. They still manage to capture Flinx and the other humans, but the furcots help them to escape. But! A military expedition of a lizardian race somehow also has found Flinx, and they want the secrets of his ship. So the jungle and the furcots start picking them off until they can escape. And then they discover the secret of the metal–an unauthorized colony that failed–and they lead them to the home tree and then back to his ship, where he finds a Thranx-ex-maquina has eliminated the threat of the lizard military. He, too, wants to learn more about Flinx, his ship, and a vision that Flinx might have had about a dark spot in space which might be evil.

So, at the outset, it was episodic: Flinx and Pip on the run on a remote planet and then on the forest planet, with a lot of time given over to the description of the jungle and the creatures there in–almost too lushly described, actually. But when we make the turn from the in-book bad guys to the previous book antagonists, it gets into series lore a bit which is less than optimal since it’s been a while since I read one of these books. If I ever have; I recognized the title The Tar-Aiym Krang, written in 1972–so it’s possible that I’ve read that book, the first written in the Humanx Commonwealth universe, in sixth grade, where the M. Gene Henderson Junior High library had a lot of older Del Rey paperbacks in library bindings, and I want to say this was one of them. I could be mistaken, and I might just remember the name, or I might have read it in high school. I don’t have it in my book library database, which means it’s not on my read shelves, which includes the paperbacks I owned in middle school, such as The Moment of the Magician, a Spellsinger novel by Foster.

Foster’s prose is pretty good. Easy to read, moves along, offers novelty in the plotting and worldbuilding. He’s been writing in the series and in the Humanx Commonwealth universe for over fifty years, so I guess they can’t be too reliant on series lore and drama–it would be hard to remember some of the things you read in 1985 when it was fresh–but I think they’re more like small series, even the Pip and Flinx books, within the larger series. So maybe I should be more careful when I pick out another Foster book in the near future. And it should not be too long now that I’ve cracked back into this series (after what might have been forty years).

I took this book off of the shelf for the Fantasy category in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, but I did not finish it at the time (instead opting for a aftermarket Conan book).

Because…. Well, gentle reader, to start with, the book is printed on low-luminosity paper with a bit of a green tint and art at the edges designed to make it look like an old book or perhaps a book from the video game Myst. I guess I didn’t mention it when I reviewed Ghost Mine last year, which had an image background (only really impeding the edges of the text, but under the text nevertheless) on the first page of each chapter, and although this is novel, it really makes reading the book harder. Especially coupled with the low luminosity paper. I must be getting old to keep slagging on design decisions and paper luminosity, but there you go. Maybe the latter book is designed to be read on ebook readers, but that wouldn’t have been the case with this thirty-year-old book based on a thirty-year-old video game.

So: The D’ni, who I guess are the civilization under the earth who produced the red herring books for the video game, are tunnelling upwards and are considering making contact with the surface and the primitives up there. A mysterious quake halts the effort. Thirty years later, a young woman explorer and her father find evidence of this abandoned effort in an unusual geological formation and a small cave. When the father dies, the daughter goes into the cave and encounters the D’ni. Some of them think she’s no more than an animal, but she learns the language with the help of some friendly D’ni aristocrats, including one Aitrus who falls in love with her. His close friend and mentor, though, continues to oppose her, and through some machinations of a D’ni Philosopher banished for forgery, the entire empire is destroyed, but the girl and her half-human, half D’ni son manage to escape to the surface.

That’s one paragraph that pretty much covers it. The book is 322 pages long, and it’s about one-third setup and world-building (although it expects the reader to be invested in the world already), and then it’s more than a third of the intra-D’ni intrigues, and then a fairly chop-chop fall of the D’ni.

In addition to the green-tinted paper, the book is split into seven parts which segment the action, but each part lacks actual chapters. Instead, you have sections which are one paragraph to several pages separated by a glyph. That kind of annoyed me, too.

The video game Myst was huge back in the day; it was the best selling game of all time until The Sims came out. I remember that I recommended it to my my girlfriend’s mother (now my mother-in-law), and she really got into it and even bought the sequels. Myst spawned a whole genre that was pretty big before the smartphone came out and casual gamers had even more casual games to become addicted to. And, I’d like to point out, according to Wikipedia, the game has been remade and sequelated for thirty-one years now, with VR versions and remakes all the way up to 2024 (so far). And Myst and its progeny have spawned a trilogy of books–this is the middle books–and has been considered for film, television series, and theme park treatment. Which is awful good for a relatively simple game.

I won’t be running out to buy the other books in the series, and I’m not really inclined to pick up the recently updated set of games. However, I am glad to have it off of my to-read shelves.

I mentioned Woz in a Bizbook post a couple weeks ago, so it seemed a good time to pick this book up. Where did I buy it? Ah, gentle reader, I know you wait with bated breath for me to reveal exactly from what book sale or book store I bought a particular book in some particular year recounted in a Good Book Hunting post, but I don’t have any such information for you on this book (which is several this year where I haven’t had a referent). I don’t think I got it new in 2006. It doesn’t have an ABC Books sticker on it nor a penciled price inside the front cover. Perhaps I got it as a gift. Who knows?

At any rate, here’s what I said on FacedIn:

What was the name of your first software company?

I put the name Foowoz (Friends of Old Woz) on the BASIC programs I wrote on the Apple IIs in the middle school and high school computer labs circa 1984.

Jeez, he would not have been that old in 1984. Maybe he seemed it to me. He wrote this book almost 20 years ago, when he was about my age. And he had something to write about. Me? Fifteen years at this same desk for a variety of contracts and employers who are all dead, Dave. But enough of my self-pity.

I consider the book to have two parts. The first deals with his youth in what would become Silicon Valley, where his father was an engineer. His father quietly encourage young Woz when he was building things or exploring electricity or rudimentary computers using large logic gates. Woz won all his science fairs, well, practically, and became possibly the youngest licensed HAM operator in the country in the sixth grade. He then went on to make a variety of electronic gadgets in his early college years, often for pranks, and his amusement or interest. This led to him making the Apple I kit and essentially open-sourcing it, a job at Hewlitt-Packard designing calculators, and eventually building the Apple II. Which was a huge success.

The first part is enthusiastic, exuberant, and made me want to go out to buy a basic electronics kit so I could play around with the electrical components. Which I don’t have to do, I remind myself–I have a bunch of electronics here I could learn by repairing and, yes, Rob, even soldering–since I’ve been reading this book and once searched Amazon for electronics kits, Facebook has started showing me suggested posts with best practices for soldering and electrical repair. And a lot of general Do-It-Yourself stuff–I guess YouTube is sharing my searches with Facebook as well? But I digress. I loved this first part of the book.

Then, of course, he becomes rich from his work at Apple. His relationship with Steve Jobs is colored rosedly–he mentioned Jobs deceiving him about how much Jobs was getting paid for the Atari game Breakout, which he promised to split with Woz but, according to Woz, did not. If you read his Wikipedia entry, Woz slags on Jobs more after this book came out. So it was not a smooth relationship. And Woz did not really fit in with the Apple corporate ethos as it evolved under Jobs and investors. I can understand that a bunch having worked with big corporations and big contracts myself.

After he leaves Apple, he founds a company to sell a universal remote control he built, but the company does not go far. And the book kind of changes then into a bit of dilettantism. He funds and partially runs a giant music festival which ran a couple of years in the 1980s; he gets a chance to teach for a while; and so on. He then caps the book with some life lessons, and finis! This last part of the book is a little scattered, maybe like his life after the Apple II, and it’s not as inspirational as the first part, although one of the lessons at the end is that if you’re a builder, inventor, or engineer, a large corporation is probably not the place for you to do your best work. Preach it!

At any rate, I really liked the book and found it inspirational and aspirational. Woz built hardware and wrote the software to run the hardware in a variety of low-level languages–he talks about writing programs to run on ROMs with only a limited number of bytes in it, which is amazing. I mean, I know that’s how it was done in the old days–even some of the Commodore programs I typed in were basically loaders for values to put into machine language in specific memory locations coupled with those values and locations–but today’s world is more about grafting on extensive, unknown, and probably untested megabytes’ worth of libraries to make your application do simple things (or ask AI to do it for you). So I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for Woz’s technical abilities.

The book only tangentally mentions his personal life–it’s not the focus of interest–but I see via Wikipedia that he’s on his fourth wife. I pray for him, his health, and his family, and I can take the lessons learned in this particularly homer auto-biography–he goes on about how he was the first or the best or the youngest in a variety of contexts, and I believe him for what it’s worth. It’s enthusiasm more than chest-thumping, and I suppose I could check if it were important to me that all the assertions were absolutely 100% factual. Whether or not they are, the enthusiasm makes for a fun, entertaining, and informative read.

Recommended. Even though it’s older than the iPhone which was about to drop and make Apple the resurgent juggernaut it is twenty years later.

You know, I suppose I could have read this book last year, when I was on a bit of a Hiaasen-clearing mood (when I read The Downhill Lie, Bad Monkey, and Razor Girl in October and November), but I did not. This book has been on my shelves since 2018, but I’ve not been inclined to pick it up until now. Probably because of the list of authors all working on one novel.

And it was a good judgment call on my part, actually. You know, when I was a sophomore in high school, one of the exercises, the class wrote a story in the round. We were divided into groups based on our columns of desks, and we each started a story and then passed it off to the next column to add to it. We made up a character and inserted him into every story (I know, I know: I just mentioned this story 21 years ago, but that’s back when the blog was on Blogspot, so I can understand if you don’t remember it–and I did mention it more recently in the book report for Samurai Cat Goes To The Movies in 2023).

This book is similar–and apparently it originally appeared as a serial in Miami Herald Tropic. So each of them, it looks like, picked up the thread or from the cliffhanger of the previous writer left off. And we whipsaw a bit between stylistic changes and even some plotish and characterization elements. One of the authors kills off a sympathetic character in the middle. Another makes the title manatee, nicknamed Booger, almost sentient in sentiment only to have Hiaasen de-retcon that when he wrapped it up.

So, the plot, as it starts: The manatee, naked, gets tangled in some cargo being smuggled in a special metal container after a boat collision sends it into the bay. An elderly defender of nature whom the manatee knows helps untangle him from the netting into which the contraband was caught discovers It’s Castro’s frozen head! (remember, The Day After Tomorrow was a best seller the year before). Except another cannister turns up with another Castro head in it. And Castro wants to come to the United States to visit an old paramour from the days of the revolution. Or he’s already here receiving advanced cancer treatment. Given that they’re just riffing off of previous chapters and putting their own spins on it, the authors kind of do what they want, and Hiaasen writes the final chapter to try to make sense of it all, but….

What I read was more of a concept than a novel, and it doesn’t hold together very well. I’m not even sure who most of the characters are–they have names, and relationships established in various chapters, but they differ just enough chapter-to-chapter that I didn’t really remember who was who or what they wanted to do. And I’m not really sure I could tell you the actual resolution except that the manatee, human-intelligent in one chapter but not at the end, never does get clothing and remains naked at the end.