Category: Book Report

This book collects some commentary on primary Buddhist texts by an early 20th century Nipponphile. R.H. Blyth was born in London and moved to Japan prior to World War II. He was locked up for the duration of it, but continued to live in Japan afterwords. He became quite the scholar in Buddhism and whatnot.

The book takes an excerpt from some Buddhist text, whether it’s a poem or a complete parable, and Blyth comments on it, making it more palatable or comprehensible to Western readers. He ties some of the tenets and lessons to Christian teachings to illustrate how some of the concepts align, but dealing with the primary sources really highlights some of the ways the ontology of Buddhism is a little hard to swallow at times.

You know, I might have said this before, but the Buddhism and Yoga purists rail against lightweight Mindfullness industry even though the authors and speakers who talk about embracing and focusing on the present instead of embracing the Eastern religion in toto might be distilling the best part of the religions kind of like non-denominational churches focusing on the gospel instead of the law. These provide practical blueprints for living, and we Americans are practical people in the aggregate. After all, we invented Pragmatism, did we not?

So this book lies a little more Buddhist than even some of the writings of Shunryu Suzuki or Hanh. Perhaps more akin to the Talmud where these other writings are akin to the epistles of Paul. That is, this book is commentary on the ontology, and those others are commentary on the message.

Or maybe I’m just making this all up. I don’t know if I’m really clever or really daft. Or if these are mutually exclusive.

You might remember, gentle reader, that my house is completely done in Impressionism, with maybe a dozen prints of Renoir on the walls along with a Monet print (and the other classic print is a Rembrandt). But what about the sculpture? The only classic sculpture we have is a small rendition of Rodin’s The Kiss because it was a souvenir from the Milwaukee Art Museum which has a plaster cast of it, and this small rendition of it has been in the family for probably almost fifty years–I remember it on the shelves in the apartment in the projects. So I was really hoping to like Rodin (which I am pretty sure I pronounce like Rodan because, although I like to pretend otherwise, I am an uncultured clown).

At any rate, this book: Oh, my.

You know how I like to comment on the balance of text to work in these sorts of books (monographs and photography collections)? This one is completely unbalanced in favor of the text. The text is not biographical; it’s more self-indulgent art criticism (redundant, I know) that explains how Rodin was to sculpture what the Impressionists were to painting. However, the text makes it sound like Rodin is the sculptural equivalent of the Jigsaw killer. Every incomplete figure is a gruesome dismemberment by the sadistic sculptor. I mean, the prose is pretty purple over and over in this regard. And then there’s a dash of Marxist class struggle, which Rodin’s work really, really advances. Death to the Bourgeoisie!

So, yeah, not worth reading. But I just bought the book for the pictures.

And I have a new favorite Rodin piece: The Eternal Spring/Eternal Springtime. But I probably won’t be getting a cast of it any time soon as Nogglestead does not have a lot of horizontal surfaces for sculpture.

And I learned that Rodin worked for a couple years in a factory designing vases and cups, so Rodin was decorating common household goods not unlike the people who worked on Painted Treasures. Rodin also illustrated an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, known in English as The Flowers of Evil. The last would come in handy on a trivia night if only the trivia window had not shifted to the 1990s.

At any rate, I find that it’s not so easy to flip through these books during football games any more. I’m not sure if my attention spans continue to shrink or if football games have been shortened. Perhaps both. Perhaps the books I’ve picked up of late are particularly wordy in the text. Regardless, I have a couple more queued up and might get a chance to get a couple more at the library book sales this autumn.

I bought this book earlier this year when I went to a book signing at ABC Books and made my way to the poetry section in addition to the martial arts and football books. I picked it up to browse during football games, but I ended up just reading it as I do so many books that I plan to browse.

So this book is a collection of poems by a woman of some success–her work has appeared in literary journals I’ve heard of. The poems are modern and a bit self-indulgent, which led me to wonder about modern poetry: Is it more about the poet telling his or her story and making you sympathize or empathize with him or her more than it is about using an incident to create a resonant moment within the reader? Because a lot of poems seem more about the poet’s expressing himself or herself more than anything else.

As in this book.

The poet recounts the end of a relationship with a modern sensibility, and her life experience does not resonate with mine, and her poems don’t evoke anything in me as a reader. As a matter of fact, certain elements create a conscious distance, and they express something, but it’s not necessarily good poetry.

Of course, she’s an award-winning poet with poems in journals whose names I recognize, whilst I am an almost double-digit selling poet whose works have pseudonymously appeared in zines like Monkey Spank. So perhaps being a successful poet is more about one point of view over the other, which is mine.

Well. This is a collection of paintings done by the named artist and exhibited in New York and perhaps on the road shortly after the turn of the 21st century. A bit of introduction explains who Gussow was and why he was important, which basically justifies the exhibition.

But ultimately, he’s a mid 20th century brush strokes and shapes on canvas sort of painter. It’s hard to find anything represented in his work but for the colors and shapes. The frontspiece is reminiscient of Guernica but without the actual, you know, distinguished shapes. So this work doesn’t rise to the level even of Picasso. Or even, heaven forfend, Matisse.

So why do I bother with monographs and collections of artists I don’t like? Perhaps I hope to crystallize things I like and to be able to explain better what I don’t. But I’m not sure that’s working. To turn Tolstoy’s quote from Anna Karenina on its head: All art that I don’t like are all alike; each piece of art I like is pleasing in its own way. And the reason I don’t like a lot of modern art is that it’s basically self conscious artist doing art that is supposed to be viewed and reviewed as art. That is, you know you’re looking at a painting. It has little content other than Hey, I’m a painting!.

Perhaps I need to review more modern art monographs to improve my explanation. Or put a little more thought or effort into it. But what am I, Driscoll or Lileks?

This book is by one of the artists behind Duel! and the author of a couple of other books I picked up at LibraryCon 2019.

This book deals with Rook City, a place where many people have special abilities, but one fellow does not. A college student who likes mysteries, he helps an elderly vigilante escape a nursing home and witnesses several students who consume Dracula’s reconstituted blood and each receives a single ability of the vampire’s power–and a professor that drinks a vial with a more powerful reconstitution. Oh, and the super hero defender of the city pays an actor to act as his nemesis and always look good.

It has a number of stories with interconnections, and it works. The art is simple and serves the story, which you know is what I like in comics. And it hints at a continuation, so I’ll look for that.

I liked it, so I’ll pick up more of the artist’s narrative work (that is, not the sketchbook kinds of collections that a lot of con comic book participants offer). And I hope that I like Gahr’s fiction as much as I liked these stories.

This book is not a real monograph, nor is it a comprehensive survey of art in America between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century. It’s a very, very brief glance.

For painting, we’ve got a couple paragraphs and an image or two for Whisler, Sargent, Cassatt, members of a group called The Ten, Eakins, Remington, a couple photographers, but each really only gets a mention and a plate. Then we’ve got a couple paragraphs on the Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Didn’t Cassatt do an impressive mural for it? Yes, yes, she did, I remembered.), some pages on architecture and engineering in the last half of the last century (The Roeblings who built the Brooklyn Bridge suffered for it; the father died and the son had lingering effects from working in the caissons, I remembered).

So it’s a quick skim–the text is really only essay length–with relatively few images for the text (but the text is not dense). It was most valuble for me to remind me of things I already knew, as I have read books on Sargent, Cassatt, and Remington and the story of the Roeblings in Who Built That?.

But not a bad way to pass an hour or so.

This is a fun little collection of, well, two stories essentially: Duel 1 and Duel 2.

The first has the conceit of two kids drawing super-powered characters who take turns stomping the other kid’s most recent character. So we get a bit of one-upmanship with simple comic drawings of different types of characters.

The second actually features two comic artists swapping drawings, so each new creation attacks and defeats the champion from the previous turn.

The book also includes a couple prequel adventures of the characters before they met their ends in the duels, which is a nice treat of more straight forward comic bookery. The end matter of the book includes additional treatments of the characters.

It’s a bit of fun. I might get a copy of it for my boys for Christmas.

I bought this book six years ago because I recognized Doctorow’s name from the Internet. In those six years, I have read a pile of Executioner novels acquired that same day before picking this book up. In the interim, I forgot it was a novel, and I initially placed it in my carry bag last week to read at the martial arts school while my kids were in class (and I was not, as I recovered from the memorial stair climb).

But it is a novel, and to sum up: Nothing of consequence happens in an interesting world.

The extrapolated world has people constantly jacked into the Internet, extreme body modifications, and sort-of immortality via consciousness backup and restore to a clone. People live not on cash, but a currency based on social media reputation called Whuffies–if you do a lot of things that people on the Internet value, you have a lot of doors open to you, but if you do not, well, you’re on hard times. Down and out, one might say.

The narrator begins by recounting how he met his best friend, and then the main narrative explains that he (the narrator) returns periodically to Disney World after various adventures. His friend returns, out of Whuffies, and talks again about permanently ending his life. The narrator convinces his friend to not go out on the bottom, but to rebuild his reputation and to go out at his peak. So the two work with the narrator’s girl friend to manage part of the park.

The park itself is run by various ad-hocracies, like-minded individuals who come together to do things guided by people on social media who reward them with likes–and Whuffies–for good ideas. Another attraction developer moves into Liberty Square and threatens the status quo with new technologies–and someone murders the narrator, which makes the narrator go a little off in his defense of the status quo.

Spoiler alert: At the end, status quo is maintained. As I mentioned, nothing of consequence happens in an interesting world.

I’m not sure if the intended message is that nobody can move forward or change in such a society, but that’s what I took from it.

At a little over 200 pages, it’s a pretty quick read, and narratively, it pulls you along. So pleasant, but meaningless.

I got this book at LibraryCon 2019. The author/artist had a couple of regular, staple-stitched comics that I bought as well as this collection which has a flat spine and hence gets counted as a graphic novel and eligible for my annual reading list and an official MfBJN book report.

This book is a collection of stories that take on stuff from the Brothers Grimm (or at least popular representations thereof) and nursery rhymes and given a darker (although not necessarily as dark as the Brothers Grimm) turn, often featuring lycanthropy as the pivot.

An interesting book. The art is black and white and not too busy. The art and story are well balanced–it’s not a story ins service of the art, but the art serves the story. So pretty good.

I liked it better, strangely enough, than his individual comics. One of the series I read, Musical Mishaps of Cat and Fiddle, stretches a story similar in feel (and featuring a form of lycanthrophy as well), into six issues which lends itself to creating more panels for the story which unbalances it a bit.

So perhaps I’m learning a little about the balance I prefer, and this book has it. For what it’s worth.

Still, I’ll watch for more from this guy at future conventions.

So, Brian J., you’re saying. It’s not enough that you count looking at artist monographs as reading a book for your annual total, but now you’re counting comic books? Well, in my defense, gentle reader, this is a collection of the first six comics in a re-imagining of the Scooby Doo universe published by DC comics from 2016-2019 (or so I learned on the Scoobypedia). So it’s not too far off from, say, Potbelly Mammoth or a graphic novel. He said in his defense.

One of my boys borrowed this from the library, and one of my boys (perhaps the same one that checked it out) this weekend said it creeped him out. So I picked it up.

The book reboots the story as post-apocalyptic fiction. Velma works for a secret corporate lab that has a plan to release nanobots that will reprogram humans to be nicer to each other. When she discovers that her superiors also will make humanity docile, she invites an obscure journalist (Daphne) and her cameraman (Fred) to the complex. They and a dog trainer (Shaggy) and an artificially augmented dog (Scooby) are the only ones who are unaffected when the triggered nanobots instead turn people into monsters. They grab a prototype armored vehicle and head out into the wastes in search of… Well, other survivors or other of the complexes.

Not much happens in the first six issues, really. We get some flashbacks about Shaggy and Scooby and Velma, but too many of the pages deal with the bickering between Daphne, who blames Velma for the apocalypse, and Velma, who really did. The actual action of the issues are kinda nil. Reading the above post about the cancellation of the series after 36 issues, I saw the same complaints with the whole run.

Oh, and spoiler alert: Taking a page from the movie, Scrappy Doo is a bad guy–but is arc is just beginning at the end of this volume.

Eh. I didn’t care for the reboot/reimagining. It didn’t creep me out, though.

I liked this collection better than Jon Corbino: An Heroic Vision. They both come from the early part of the 20th century, where painting has been freed from the line, but Peters’ subject matter is more appealing. It depicts landscapes, generally creeks/rivers or docks, but with human figures in those landscapes.

Well, “figures” might be a little giving. Basically, they’re a couple of brush strokes. But the effect is more akin to the original Impressionist influence. Well, maybe it’s more akin to what I take away from my favorite Impressionism–a sense of a remembered scene or setting.

Unfortunately, as the introductory text indicates, Peters liked to do the same scenes over and over again at different times and in different seasons. So although most of the work is pleasing to look at, if you run through a catalog for an extensive show like this one, it’s repetitive.

But, like I said, pleasing to look at. The human figures make them more pleasing than Monet’s sterile, flora-only landscapes anyway.

I wonder if I will remember Peters or Corbino in a year month or two. Unless I see some of their things at the Springfield Art Museum sometime soon, and I can say, “A-ha! I saw a monograph in that artist,” probably not.

Well, this is the first artist’s monograph that I’ve browsed during the 2019-2020 Packers season.

The book is a couple of full-color plates and a lot of black and white images. The art itself is unclean lines with Degas-like Impressionist touches. The subjects tend to be human figures, but the unclean lines combine with the phrasing, so to speak, make it look a little like Soviet peasant art. I didn’t like it much.

As you know, gentle reader, aside from Impressionism, I prefer cleaner lines, and most of the stuff produced after 1870 will not please me. But your mileage may vary.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I bought this book on my last excursion to ABC Books, where the author was signing books.

To recap a bit of it: He started writing books when he was 80, and he’s got nine books out and a couple more coming out. If you’re wondering how he can do it, I’m guessing he does it by dictating using a speech-to-text program and then does not edit the work very carefully. I mean, you have missing quotation marks, some wrong words which sound like other words that fit, and that sort of thing. It’s not as bad as Dark Star, but you do have to pay attention when you read.

The story revolves around a couple of high school students who become good friends in college and get an incredible opportunity to run a pharmaceutical? Bio-chemical? plant while at the university. The main character gets free rein and builds a multi-million dollar subsidiary of the small company that gave her a shot. Along the way, the young ladies learn about sex, start families, and whatnot. Then the book ends with them in middle age when one of the women’s husband is discovered to have been unfaithful and has a gambling problem. This ending doesn’t really add much.

At any rate, it’s best to think of your grandfather telling you a bedtime story when reading the book. It’s pretty simply done, with years passing between paragraphs and some passages where it’s not especially clear which character is doing what. But, still, not Dark Star.

I suspect the style will work better in his other books. Which I’ll get to by and by.

This book marks a momentous event: I have read all of the books that I bought at Calvin’s Books in May. I jokingly said I would probably not read those five books that day. And then I set as a personal goal to do just that. And now I have.

This book looks to be almost an employee or management handbook for Herschend Enterprises, which started with Silver Dollar City west of Branson and now includes a number of theme parks around the country (and the Harlem Globetrotters). The book talks about working and acting with a servant’s heart (although it does not use those terms). It has a couple of corporatey bits in the intro and the conclusion, but most of the book is short chapters of anecdotes where employees or co-workers at Herschend properties went the extra mile to help sick or down-on-their luck customers or co-workers.

I liked reading the book, and I’m thinking about recommending it to my beautiful wife. She likes reading good leadership books, but perhaps this one isn’t so much in that particular vein.

You know, one might be cynical and think this book is just lip service to an ideal and a way to get the company employees to behave this way for better customer service, but sometimes, I’m not cynical, and I think the book is sincere. Even if it’s not, at least the corporate masters recognize an ideal outside of the short-term materialism of the corporation. But I think it’s pretty sincere.

This is the second monograph or collection of photography I’ve reviewed this football season, and strangely enough, neither of them really during a football game. As it happens, one of our floor lamps died this year, and I moved the one I used when watching football to the more important location by the reading chairs. So I ended up with a couple monographs out on the sofa-side table, but not enough light to really look at them. So I reviewed this book whilst in my reading chair.

It’s a collection of photos of various places in Missouri taken over the course of a year or so by a professional landscape photographer from the west coast. He groups the photos in chapters based on a photography conceit such as Color, Form, Moment, Place, Microcosm, and Light.

The photos are landscapes, but some of them are very narrow in focus (with a whole chapter on Microcosm). I don’t like the photographs of a single leaf on a lichen-covered rock nor collections of lily pads on a pond as they’re just exercises of technique in service of showing us a technique or a texture, not in showing us a scene. Or maybe I’m just flogging my new dichotomy. Sometimes, though, the different textures work together in a single scene that is a scene, though, so the photographer has some definite talent.

Still, a pleasant enough browse. It contains images of Elephant Rocks and Johnson’s Shut Ins on the eastern side of the state. When I was growing up back there, I remember the other kids in school talking about going to those places on the weekend like it was nothing. Do you know where we went on the weekends when I was growing up? No where. Well, no where like that.

So I’ve gone through two of these books already, and I have yet to watch a complete football game. I shall have to visit the book sale on half price day to resupply my monographs and photography collections in early October for sure.

Well, it’s football season again, so I will finally get a chance to review some of the artists’ monographs that I got last May (and I can go nuts since the next Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale comes in October).

This book is a collection of line drawings and paintings as the title says. The artist’s subject matter are still lifes of a sort–she has three self portraits and another painting with human figures in them, but there are also, what, landscapes that look like a picture taken out of a house window or images of rooms, wallpapers, and window interiors without anyone in them.

The technical skill is great–some of them are nearly photographic in quality. Definitely interesting things to look at and a great combination of textures and techniques.

The afternoon that I began to browse this book I went to an open house at a gallery here in town that featured an artist who practices a more modern approach to art. Some of it was figurative, but it was all pretty flat. Some of it was just textures and strokes on the canvas. But in any case, it was clear that you were looking ata painting. In this book’s images, you’re looking at something in a picture or a drawing. Have I made this dichotomy between modern and classical art before? It seems like you can apply it to literature, too.

At any rate, a pleasant way to spend an hour or two, and I wouldn’t mind going to see some of her work. According to Wikipedia, you can find it in many collections, although none in particularly close locations. Perhaps I’ll get lucky and the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art will pick something up before I make my way down there.

I bought this book at ABC Books in July, so it was at the top of the stack. I’ve read a couple other martial arts books in the last year (The Martial Artist’s Way, The Zen Way to Martial Arts, Taekwondo Kyorugi, and so on).

The book starts with a bit of history of the ninja in Japan and then tells how the author went to Japan to study with Masaaki Hatsumi, the last ninja grand master (still alive at 87 today). The book then talks about some fighting techniques, describes some weapons of the ninja, and the has a couple of chapters on reconnaissance, espionage, and the spiritual elements of budo. It’s not a long book–150 pages or so–and it has a pseudo-libary binding but no library marks, which makes me think it might be a book aimed at younger audiences.

It’s not so much a how-to book on strikes and whatnot as a summary course. Which is unfortunate. I’m really looking for dirty tricks to pull on the other students at the martial arts school where I train and not so much high-level musing on how to manipulate people using the earth/water/fire/air/void breakdown of the universe.

Full disclosure: I studied at a bujinkan dojo briefly in the middle 1990s, so I would have been indirectly a student of Hatsumi Sensei myself. But not this book’s author.

I bought this book at LibraryCon this year and picked it up first from amongst the gleanings.

I remember noticing that this book, unlike the others at the convention, was hardback with a dust jacket. Most self-published authors go with paperback. When I cracked it open, I discovered that it was actually published by an imprint of Macmillan Publishing. The back flap talking about the author said she was into equality and inclusion in publishing and that she created a #Hashtag, and I thought uh oh. I feared it might be a modern science fiction or fantasy with a message. Fortunately, it is not.

It is a good story. Basically, yes, it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Wonderland. A young woman, grief stricken at the death of her father, is attacked by a fantastic creature and is saved by a man from Wonderland. Not the Executioner’s man from Wonderland; an exiled resident of a fantastic world who bears a dark blade. He teaches her to be a Dreamwalker, a person from our world who goes to Wonderland to kill Nightmares, which are manifestations of human fears that are more frequently plaguing Wonderland. Alice has allies in Wonderland–other Dreamwalkers who guard other places where the two worlds intersect–but they discover a growing danger from a mysterious Black Knight who wants to resurrect the Black Queen to rule Wonderland.

The only quibble I have with the book is that the climactic battle at the end comes up and is dispatched very quickly–which, as you know, gentle reader, is a common complaint I make. The book too clearly leads into the next in the series, which means the end doesn’t really resolve that much in the story arc.

But that’s a minor thing. The story moves along well, and the author not only relies on the Alice in Wonderland story for a jumping-off point, but she also alludes heavily to “The Jabberwocky” as well. And she titles her chapters in addition to giving them numbers–a practice of which I approve.

But I’ll pick up the next in the series when it comes out next month. And I will pick up a copy of both books for my godson for Christmas since he likes fantasy novels. Or so I hope–because every year, he still gets them from me.

If only the author would do a book signing at ABC Books so I could get the books signed.

In keeping with my recent spurt of Ozarkiana (Unto These Hills, The Willow Bees), I picked up this short novel.

In it, a grandfather still grieving from his wife’s death from cancer takes in his daughter and grandson as the boy suffers from leukemia and the marriage is on the fritz. The daughter takes a nursing job in town, leaving the ailing boy to spend the days with his grandfather in a cabin in the mountains. The boy starts talking about meeting the fairy people down, and his imaginative incidents almost make it sound believeable. But the boy gets lost in a thunderstorm, and the local crazy war veteran helps to find him, and the adventure results in reconciliation and healing all around.

It’s a short book–156 pages–and it’s one of the better of the local novels I’ve read. Although it’s not self-published, it’s apparently from a very small press, and the author is (or was) a grandfather himself who is pictured on the back with his wife and one of his large woodcarvings. So perhaps not a professional writer, but the story is well executed nevertheless.

Apparently, I bought this book four years ago at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale, so it’s a relatively recent entry in my book stack. Which explains why it was in the front. Perhaps I should dust and turn-out the library again, but that would hide so many of my new acquisitions in the back. But it might turn up those Joshua Clark books I’ve hidden.

This book is a bit of local color. It was written in the early 1990s by a woman who grew up on a farm outside of (but which is probably now in) Nixa, a little town south of Springfield. It recounts very short, three to eight paragraph slice-of-life memories about farm work, socializing, family relationships, and whatnot interspersed with numerous poems composed by the author, her family, or those in her social circle.

It was a pleasant read, and it made me consider writing something like this about my life. I mean, I’ve seen some things, and as a child of the last century, I have seen enough change that some of it would be novel to kids of today or tomorrow.

Assuming that any of them would want to read it.

At any rate, I enjoyed the book as you might expect. The author comes from a large family, and sometimes she name checks families who participated in an event or attended a (one room) school in Lone Hill (the actual town she lived in or near). When I read the list of names here (and in Unto These Hills), I wonder why the names of my relations from the Ozarks are not represented. But then I remember that they’re from Taney County further south and, in the early part of the last century, a whole world away.