Category: Book Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did flag a couple of things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From “Olympian 2”:

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

From “Olympian 5”:

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

From “Olympian 6”:

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

From “Pythian 1”:

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

From “Pythian 3”:

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

From “Nemean 3”:

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

From “Nemean 4”:

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

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

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

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

I read Yogi Berra’s It Ain’t Over last month, and when I came across this book, I picked it up.

Ted Williams is seven years older than Berra and played with the mostly unsuccessful Boston Red Sox for his career. This book delves into his life story, especially his early years, a little deeper than Berra’s book. His family life was a bit troubled when he was young, but Williams found an outlet in baseball and played pick-up games, and then some organized games at the neighborhood park, and then into high school and a minor league team before breaking into the majors very young–one of his nicknames was “The Kid.” He always had a good eye, and he worked at hitting, and he became very good at it (in case you needed me to say it, gentle reader). He talks about his troubles with the Boston press, and even in this, his own book, he comes across as a character who was a little prickly at best.

Like the Berra book, it’s almost an oral history more than an organized autobiography. It came out at a different time in his career as well: Williams played until 1960 and was mostly away from baseball for a decade until he got an opportunity to manage the Washington Senators. The book was written/told to at that moment: he’s about to embark on his role as manager. Berra’s book came out after he had over a decade of work as a coach and a manager and after he was a national celebrity for being Yogi Berra. So perhaps it’s not fair to compare them, but one cannot help it.

So, a good read with a ballplayer’s insight into the first half of the 20th century. Williams holds a bunch of records yet, and he lost several years of playing time as he was called up for both World War II and the Korean War. I probably have a bunch of other such books seeded amongst my stacks. I won’t dodge them now that baseball season is over.

I bought this book at ABC Books in 2022, and I paid $7.95 for it. Clearly, I was jonesing for some art books to browse during football games, as I was watching a lot of them back in those days. As it stands, though, this weekend’s two football game Sunday is probably an abberation in my current watching habits, but it did give me a chance to pad the annual reading statistics.

This is a large oversized coffee table book about an artist and illustrator who was most active during the early decades of the 20th century. Fred Maxfield Parrish was the son of an etcher/engraver/artist and was brought up in those circles. He had talent of his own and absolutely was in the right place and the right time. Whereas his father might have still been working on the Currier and Ives paradigm, but changes in printing technology allowed color, and the need for color illustrations for magazines exploded, and Parrish was right there to take advantage of it. He became a known name in the industry and by the public, and he got certain concessions in his contracts: The magazine could run the illustration one time, and he would then have reprint rights and he could sell the original. So he was making bank until radio and television came along and the long decline of magazines began, at which point he turned to watercolors for a couple of decades in retirement.

A good story, and as for the art–well, definitely what would come to be known as middlebrow stuff. Linear colored illustrations with some depth and thought behind them–he studied architecture and worked extensively to block his works to use the Golden Ratio. Better than the “high” art you get now, but they’re illustrations and prints, so more like watercolors than oil paintings.

Still, an enjoyable book and perhaps leading to some understanding about the business of mass art transitioning from the 19th into the 20th centuries. But it’s not like I’ll be able to use that in conversation as my cats have heard it all before.

This, too, is a fairly recent acquisition (May) which I flipped through during the Bears game on Sunday. Unlike the Okinawa book, the other languages used in the captions use the Roman alphabet, so I recognize them as Danish, French, Spanish, and German (and I can almost suss out the captions in some of them). And all the photos have the captions, and an end notes-type section includes further information about some of the photographs, although I admit I did not flip back to look at the photos as I read the extra material.

So: Denmark. Sounds interesting. It’s a relatively small country, a collection of islands and penninsulas between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. North of Germany, across the water from Sweden and Norway. It punched above its weight in history due to its location. It’s not a very tall country, as its highest point is only a couple hundred meters above sea level, and it has a variety of topography in spite of that. The photos focus on some of the more touristy old town areas and some of the rural areas. It looks interesting, but I do wonder how much it has changed since 1984 especially as Malmo, Sweden is just across the bridge.

I am starting to imagine that I will never have to choose whether to travel to Europe, but if I did, I might want to see Denmark.

Oh, and as a reminder, I must be on a Denmark kick as I did a little research on it in May when I found a Christmas card with a return address of Sundby, Mors, in a book.

Undoubtedly, Facebook will use this to surmise I like Danishes. And it would be right!

On Sunday, I did something I really haven’t done in a while: I watched a couple of football games. And since the one was the Chicago Bears game, which they won not because they deserved to win it but because the Raiders deserved to lose it, I had the opportunity to flip through some art and touristy books between plays (which is most of the three hours of the televised football game).

The first book was the book on Okinawa that I picked up on Saturday because it was still on my desk (as are the swords).

As I mentioned, it’s a set of glossy photo pages bound with an iron comb and with a thin plastic front cover. It’s designed for tourists and dates probably from the 1990s (as one of the photos has the date 1992 attached to it).

English captions are really an afterthought, as the book is written probably primarily in Japanese, but looks to have two other alphabets in the mix (Mandarin and Korean?) Not all of the photos have English captions, so although I could look at the photos, I didn’t know where most of them were taken or what I was looking at–a lot of stone monuments and shrines, but little to explain them.

So this was a quick browser for sure, and it shows the wide variety of topography that Okinawa has. Including white sand beaches which were quite stained when my grandfather visited. I often mention, either because I want to bask in reflected glory or because I respect what the other men of my family did, that three generations–my grandfather, my father, and my brother–were stationed on Okinawa during their time in the Marine Corps. I was thinking about giving this book to my brother for Christmas, but I will probably keep it and stack it atop the precarious pile of art books atop a couple of my bookshelves in the common area.

So that must be some kind of record; I bought it on Saturday, and I browsed it on Sunday. Maybe not–I probably did that plenty when I watched multiple football games the day after book sales in the past. But I will likely not watch multiple games again.

I picked up this book in June, and since I’ve been reading a lot of Westerns this year (The Man from Skibbereen, Westward the Tide, Homicide Near Hillsboro (sorta), and Once More with a .44, which is only four books this year, but it seems like more), I thought I would read a real history book about a character in the old west. Probably because I watched a lot of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. concurrently.

And, well. This book is more a history of the towns where Joe Lowe visited and some of the stories based on what people said about him than a true biography. He left no diary or journal, and this pre-Internet book relies on the authors, one of whom is in England, relied on historical societies to provide news clippings containing the title character–and they would have had to rely on whatever indexes they had at hand to find them.

So we get the story of Ellsworth, Kansas; Witchita, Kansas; Newton, Kansas; San Antonio, Texas; Leadville, Colorado; and Denver, Colorado. Joe Lowe lived in and often operated dance halls in this cities, which often brought him into conflict with other dance hall owners, cowboys, gamblers, and the police. As I mentioned, much of the coverage is quoting newspaper articles about his court cases or public recrimination for dance halls, prostitution, and whatnot with some connective tissue in it. Many of the articles mention him as having a great reputation for being a bad man, but I don’t know if it’s borne out by the text–I have no real insight into how other such personages were described in the papers of the day. But Joe Lowe did apparently know some of the other more recognized names from the era, including Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and others. So maybe the book really is talking about a legend about whom I’d never heard.

Still, a good read and interesting because I’ve somehow become interested in the old west in my dilettante fashion. Looking at the front matter, I see Roda wrote The Gunfighter: A Man or Myth?. Which I have seen and passed over many times on my to-read shelves since I bought it seventeen years ago. In a post my sainted mother commented on. At any rate, I might not pass over it the next time that I see it.

I don’t remember when I got this booklet. By “remember,” I mean I did not list it on the Web site in a Good Book Hunting post. But it is the size of something that would have come in a dollar bundle at a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale.

It contains four short stories:

• “A Chess Problem” by Agatha Christie, a Hercule Poirot story involving a murder during a chess game.
• “Back for Christmas” by John Collier about a man who murders his wife before leaving on a holiday only to be undone (probably) by plans she made while they were away.
• “The Border-Line Case” by Margery Allingham about a gangland hit made incomprehensible and unsolvable by the police actions.
• “Sredni Vashtar” by Saki about a boy and his secret pet ferret whom he worships and an overbearing maiden aunt who would have none of it. I probably “just” read this story in 2023 when I read The Best of Saki.

So, yeah, four short stories, 40 pages total, and I’m counting it as a book.

Man, I am glad I was born when I was, before the ubiquity of computers and mobile devices. I can read and appreciate stories from 100 years ago without being jarred by how different they are. Because they were not as different in my formative years when we did not have them. Fifty years ago. Half the distance to the original copyright date on “A Chess Problem”. I can even relate to things like not having air conditioning (not that it comes up in this particular story) but, you know. I even find historical fiction approachable because I’ve lived in cabins unhooked to the power grid or running water.

I “just” got this book in the spring of 2024 where it was in a dollar bundle with The Yellow Wallpaper which I just read last month. I might make it a twee goal to read all the books from that bundle, but unfortunately, they’re scattered amongst the stacks, and I probably won’t even see them before the end of the year.

Although the title indicates it’s a memoir and the author’s name starts with a P, it looks to be a fictionalized account, as the Ms. P in the book says her last name is Pepperdine and says she does not have a boyfriend–and the back cover indicates Ms. Petrus is married. I guess it’s possible that the author was née Pepperdine, and she didn’t have to change her monogram when she got married. Sure, and it’s possible Petrus is a pseudonym, and she put her real name in the book text. I’m overthinking it, but I’d like to think it’s a fictionalized account with some amalgamation of anecdotes and personalities.

So: It’s a series of short vignettes taking place throughout the school year. Ms. P. teaches third grade. It starts with the first day of school and cycles through different things like parent-teacher conferences, recess duty, the Halloween parade, Christmas, and then the last day of school. And by “short,” I mean that the chapters are two pages or so. The writing is wry, maybe a touch world- or school-weary (even though the Ms. P. of the book is only a couple of years into a teaching career), and I expect teachers, and elementary school teachers especially, can relate.

A quick read, and worth whatever portion of a quarter I paid for it. If you want a copy, though, gentle reader, it might be harder for you to find.

So much wrong with that Amazon listing. But they spelled the author’s name, if that is her real name, correctly.

I said I was going to read enjoyable books for a bit, and I thought I’d pick up some of the thin saddle-stitched books that I buy by the dollar bundle at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sales to pad my annual stats.

I knew this book was prose instead of poetry, but I didn’t look to closely at it until I sat down with it. Published by Hospice of Huntington and with a The Hospice of Southwest Missouri sticker in the front cover, I discovered I was not in for a comfortable read.

Basically, it’s a set of fictional letters (presumably, as they’re not particularly personal) from a woman who is caring for her father who is in hospice care to her brother who does not live in the area. They demonstrate a gamut of emotions and kind of how the feelings change over the course of hospice care to provide an example for those dealing with it in the now (which was then–a later edition might have emails or social media posts instead of letters).

The book uses the metaphor of redwoods, which it says have shallow root systems, so they have to grow together and entangle their roots to survive–like, I guess, caregivers and their non-profit helpers. Also, I’m not clear whether this is just one entry in a series or if the letters in the book are the series in the title. I guess I could do an Internet search, but, eh. CBA.

You know, I’ve never really had to be a caregiver like this–when my sainted mother was sick, she stayed in her house, alone (jeez, I did that whole thing badly). I remember when my aunt died from cancer twenty years ago visiting her a couple of times while she was waiting to die (my aunt who died six years ago from cancer moved in and took care of her, much like my youngest aunt did as she, my St. Charles aunt, was dying). So the book lightly ruffled my unmitigated guilt for not being a caregiver (but not so rawly as Love’s Legacy did).

Given how small my close family is, I don’t think I’ll ever need to deal with caring for someone at the end of life–I’ll probably be the one needing the caring, and if my matrilineal line is any indicator, not too long from now. But should that befall me, gentle reader, remind me that resources like these are available, or I’ll go crazier eating the emotions on my own.

I picked up this book last year Sparta (home of the Trojans) because I had some room in the bag-for-three-bucks and I’ve been working some Westerns into the rotation. I read this book in between chapters of Perelandra, the Venus book of C.S. Lewis’s Space trilogy, and I am likely to cull the stack of books on the chairside table because I’m finding that I’m reading more and more of these enjoyable little in-between-chapter books rather than the others, and I do want to make quota this year.

So: Apparently, this is the third(?) book in a series, and it rehashes a bit of the previous business in spots. A small town is growing due to the influence and spending of a rough rancher and his collection of hired hands, and they turn to a retired lawman who had previously taken care of another badman in town. He brings his tough but genteel wife along, and he hires a deputy barman who is black to help him clean up the town and to serve a warrant for the murder of a mentally disabled man in a put-up shootout.

The text of this 25(!)-year-old book moves along pretty well. It has some sex scenes in it which are not as explicit as a Gunsmith book, but definitely describes what goes where in a manner you would not find in Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. It spends some time with the setup, but ultimately devolves into a couple of set pieces and questionable decisions that lead to a dramatic staged climax. I mean, not a bad book, but it’s light popcorn reading and nothing more.

Also, I must comment that the main character plus black sidekick staying at the Boston made me wonder if it’s supposed to be a holla to Spenser and Hawk. Dunno.

So if I find any more of this writer on bag day at the Christian County book sales, I won’t avoid them. At the Springfield-Greene County book sale (running now), I won’t make it to the Westerns section, so I won’t be seeking them out. As it stands, I have enough backlogged Westerns for the pace at which I read them, even as I am reading them more frequently these days.

I just picked this book up a couple weeks ago at Hooked on Books, and I brought it up to my bedroom to be the book of poetry I read before bed. Actually, I already had one of those, Pindar’s odes, but I wanted something a little lighter in case I did not want to read six pages of poorly footnoted 2500-year-old name-checks. So now my upstairs dresser, the one by the chair under the lamp, not the book accumulation point dresser, often has two books of poetry on it: The book I’m reading, and the book that I’m reading because the book I’m reading is kinda long and I’ve run out of steam on it momentarily. (The chairside book accumulation point has this progression nested deeply, where I’m reading a western and a business self-help book because I lost momentum on The Space Trilogy because I lost steam on the second book of The Story of Civilization which was to be a little light reading while I await the urge to continue with Pamela–and I think there are a couple of other long-suffering books in there.)

At any rate, this is a gift book circa 1980. Something you’d give to a friend, or something that your great-grandmother would give to a friend. Idealsesque with illustrations, paragraphs of prose, and a mix of poetry from then-contemporary light poets and some of the heavy weights from the classics. I mean, it’s a nice book, a nice bit to read a couple of poems from before bed. And I cannot help but contrast it with the gift books that would come within the decade, where paperbacks took over and got smaller and cutesy.

These books are catnip to me, which is why I pick them up when they’re on the buck cart or sight unseen in bundles at the library book sale. And any Ideals magazines themselves that I can spot in the wild, which is not that many these days and in southwest Missouri.