Category: Book Report

Clive Barker was all that in the late 1980s. He had a couple of movies out, including Hellraiser and, um, what’s that other one?

Well, this book collects a novella and several short stories. The novella, “Cabal”, talks about the Nightbreed. Ah, there it is!

At any rate, this book has on the outside edge of my to-read shelves since I cleaned up my library (::cough, cough:: three years ago). I read Barker’s Books of Blood (I, but that was before they needed Roman numerals) in 1994, and I’ve picked up a couple of his books here and there because every once and again, I think I’ll read some horror and maybe write some (which tends to come out more like H.P. Lovecraft than Stephen King or one of the modern Urban Fantasy people).

At any rate, this book contains:

• “Cabal”, in which a mentally unhealthy individual is convinced he’s committed horrible murders, so he tries to go to a remote Canadian town where monsters are welcomed. Once there, he finds that he is not the monster he thought he was, but there are monsters in this world–human and otherwise.
• “The Life of Death”, wherein a lonely woman becomes enamored with the thought of the dead and becomes a killer inadvertently and meets Death, although not in the way she expected.
• “How Spoilers Bleed”, wherein some adventurers acquire land rights in the jungle and try to displace a native tribe only to fall under a curse.
• “Twilight at the Towers”, wherein an espionage agent discovers he’s not just human, and that he has more in common with others of his kind than his handlers.
• “The Last Illusion”, wherein an investigator with experience (not pleasant) with the occult is called to help protect the body of a magician from dark forces.

I mean, they’re okay stories, a bit gory as expected and with a touch of S&M (graphic at times) that spawned more than one Goth in the 1990s.

So perhaps I’ll read a couple more of these 1980s horror books that I’ve accummulated over the years. Back then, horror books (as with so many other books) were thinner, running 200 or 250 pages (this volume is 338, but broken over multiple stories, it seemed shorter), and horror books must have been fairly popular in book clubs, as you can see bunches of them available at book sales. For a little while, yet. I have to wonder if they’ll all disappear soon as the baby boomers finish downsizing and if another burst of availability will occur when the readers of Generation X start downsizing.

I don’t know where or when I bought this book; it cannot have been too long ago as it’s a book of recent vintage and it was not buried in my to-read shelves. I picked it up to read because I might be going to an event where Malkin is speaking this autumn, and I wanted to be able to say I read one of her books.

At any rate, this book is not a political polemic as one might expect from a political commentator. Although the book piggybacks off of an Obama quote (“You didn’t build that.”), the book focuses on a number of what Malkin calls “tinkerpreneurs”: inventors whose innovations changed our lives, sometimes in ways that seemed small but had big impact. She looks at Carrier and Lyle (air conditioning), the Roebling family (steel cables and suspension bridges), Libbey and Owen (glass), and others. The book looks at how many of them had humble origins (and by humble, I mean nineteenth century origins, which meant they went to work, often in manufacturing, and then improved upon the things they did every day through mehanical automation). No eight year degrees in inventing for them.

So it was an inspiring book. One of my stretch goals for my life is to get a patent for something. Unfortunately, I’ve ended up working in computers, where patents and innovation are squirrelly instead of actually working for a living. So it’s made me want to tinker (where other books make me want to write more).

I just need to clear some space in my garage to get going.

I rescued this book from a box of outgoing books that my beautiful wife was winnowing from her collection (from time to time, she gets rid of books, a concept that is very foreign to me). I grabbed it because it looks like something I would browse during a football game.

However, I browsed it after reading How To Read A Poem as sort of a palate cleanser.

This compact book was probably designed to be a humorous little gift for the cat lover you know (the one you always give cat-themed things because that’s her gift schtick). Undoubtedly, my wife got this for similar reasons.

But the book really isn’t that amusing. It’s one or two sentences or sentiment per page from your cat’s point of view, but nothing really insightful and not much that’s really clever. So I was disappointed with it, but I’m happy to not have browsed it during a football game as I’d like my forthcoming disappointment with the 2019-2020 Packers to be unalloyed.

Now I’ll put it on my read shelves, from whence my children will poach it, love it, and likely destroy it as they have Bad Cat.

Since I just read How To Read A Play, I thought I should further my education with this text. And don’t be fooled: This is a textbook geared to high school kids or perhaps early college students.

Perhaps the subtitle should be “And Come To Hate Poetry” because the focus is not on how to read poetry for pleasure, but how to read poetry so you can write a cogent paper on it. The book encourages readers to treat every poem like a worksheet, circling keywords and drawing arrows and diagramming this and that. I kid you not.

The book starts out talking about the importance of key words and concepts, and only after almost a hundred pages gets around to the the rhythm and the rhyme of poetry. You know, the stuff that makes reading poetry fun.

So I didn’t like the book that much, but so much of the technical information I already knew, and I disagree with the basic premise that you have to work hard to unpack a poem. Poets should work hard to build the poem so that it’s easy and fun to read. Poets should not “work” to craft a poem that takes heavy analysis to understand. As a poet, you can pack meaning into a poem, but you have to make it fun for someone to read even if they’re not hunting for meaning or having to write a six page paper on your poem. For Pete’s sake. I blame e.e. cummings. Jeez, I’m coming to hate that guy more than William Carlos Williams, if only because it’s a shorter name to type when preening my disdain on this blog.

At any rate, the best part of the book was the sample poems (except the e.e. cummings). The book includes a number of Robert Frost pieces, samples from Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins (of whom I have a collection around here that I’m going to look for to read mid-Keats), and others, some of whom I might remember but probably not if I cannot enumerate them here.

So I’m glad to have read the book if only because it continues to cement my belief that academic poetry split off into its own cul-de-sac sometime in the early 20th century and might have destroyed the popular appreciation of poetry. Or maybe not–perhaps popular music picked up some of the slack for a time. But that’s a thesis I might tease out little by little over the course of innumerable book reports in the future instead of sitting down and writing an essay on it.

Now that I’ve learned how to read plays, I’m off to the races! Well, no, I’ve always mixed some drama in with the novels and nonfiction I’ve read, so this is not different at all.

At any rate, the book contains about two acts of decent drama amid the talky Existentialist theorizing. I’ve been talking a lot about the paper rhythm and spoken rhythm when discussing poetry, but I could probably also make such a distinction in plays as well. Some plays are snappy, with fast moving dialogue and an entertaining story and has its themes beneath the surface, and some plays are theme-first with lots of paragaph-long speeches about the theme. These plays definitely fall into the latter.

Caligula has its name in the title, but it’s probably the weakest play in the lot. In it, the Roman emperor embraces his freedom and does whatever he wants at the expense of his countrymen until (spoiler alert) he is deposed.

The Misunderstanding is a three act play that contains the aforementioned two acts of stage drama as a mother and daughter run an inn and infrequently kill isolated travellers for their money. They decide to do one last job before leaving their central European town for the sea, and the man who comes in is the prodigal son who has made a fortune overseas and wants to better their lives, but he doesn’t want to reveal who he is until he gets to know them. The first two acts are pretty good tension, but they kill him at the end of the second act only to find his passport in the beginning of the third, and then the man’s fiancée comes in, and they bore her to death. Not really, but the third act is all talky philosophy.

State of Siege kind of looks like it’s going to be The Plague but set in Cadiz, Spain. But it takes a turn when a character representing the plague shows up and institutes some changes to the government to make life more orderly, but one doctor eventually defies the order by not being afraid, which causes the plague to lose his grip on power. The play offers a bunch to think about–is it anti-fascist or anti-Communist in its resistance to a properly ordered totalitarian government? It also has some dramatic tension in it, but it features a chorus and a lot of stage directions that seems like it would make it hard to stage.

The Just Assassins deals with a cell of Russian terrorists who want to assassinate a Grand Duke with bombs. One of their members, a poet, falters when he sees children in the duke’s carriage, so the cell talks and talks about it. The poet is also possibly falling for the bomb maker who might want to leave the revolutionary world behind and be normal. But when the poet gets a second chance, he does not falter, and he is arrested and interrogated by the authorities and forgiven by the newly widowed duchess. But the clemency she grants leads his fellows in the cell to think he turned on them. So it’s an intellectually interesting thing, but it, too, lacks real tension.

I sometimes wonder if British and American drama really is the pinnacle of the genre, but I guess some British and American drama fits into the mold (Equus, anyone?).

I’m also thinking that there’s a larger dichotomy to explore among literature: works where theme is prevalent over entertainment or good storytelling. These plays, then, fit more with works where theme trumps entertainment. I’ll probably start using that as a recurring measure in my other book reports.

Oh, and reading this book answered a question for me. I saw a Camus quote in a Birds and Blooms magazine in 2015 that I wondered if it was a real Camus quote. Sort of. It’s presented in pretty posters and across the Internet as “Autumn–a second spring where every leaf is a flower.”

It appears in The Misunderstanding thus:

MARTHA: What’s the autumn?
JAN: A second spring when every leaf’s a flower.

A little different, but it is from the Camus.

At any rate, worth a read if you fancy yourself a hoity-toity well-read individual, as I so. And I still prefer Camus to Sartre (whose collection No Exit and Three Other Plays I reviewed in 2014–note that both books are from the Cintage Book collection, which were not very vintage in the late 1950s but are surely such now).

I bought this book last weekend, and when I finished The Physics of Love, I wasn’t ready to jump back into the Keats, so I read this book instead.

The book is subtitled “Ecstatic Verse” and is called “devotional verse” on the back cover, but I thought most of it would be meditative in nature given the “paper rhythm” of a couple syllables per line which lends itself more to the contemplative pacing of haiku more than ecstasy, which I would associate with longer lines. Some of the poems are rather short, too, with a title and a couple of words for contemplation.

But the poems do get a little more ecstatic, with several sexual-themed pieces. Is the sexual experience leading to an experience of the divine, or is the poet-narrator’s experience of the divine akin to sexual experience? The poems leave room for interpretation and, dare I say it, meditation on the point.

At any rate, some good moments, but I am still not a fan of the paper rhythm and prefer the more lyrical spoken rhythm in poetry.

I’ve got a couple of other books by this author, as I mentioned, which are not poetry which I’ll probably delve into before too long, where “too long” might mean “within a decade” as my unread collection of books still numbers in the thousands.

I bought this book over the weekend, and as I just completed Keats’ “Hyperion”, I was looking for other poetry to clear my palate before jumping into Keats’ posthumously published poems (which, I think, includes a sequel to “Hyperion” but fortunately not other bonzers of dubious merit and readability).

I pretty much struck the jackpot with this book.

The poetry’s themes include things I can relate to: Children growing up, getting older, and whatnot. The lines are long and have a good mouthfeel, more of a spoken rhythm than a paper rhythm (as I explained when reporting on my my cousin-in-law’s book). I’ve even picked out a favorite piece in it, “Relativity”, which is about kids growing up, and I’ve thought I should try to capture similar sentiments in a poem of my own.

You know, I sometimes read something that makes me want to write more, and this collection definitely did. It’s fun to read, has some depth, and doesn’t take as long as a lot of Keats does.

Recommended. It’s on Amazon at less than the cover price. Unfortunately, it’s her only book so far.

I’ve been reading some drama this year (Dinner with Friends, The Time of Your Life), so when I spotted this book on my to-read shelves, I picked it up. Because, hey, maybe I should learn how to read a play.

I didn’t agree with a lot of the material in the book; it takes kind of a producer- or director-first kind of perspective. Most of the book deals with the things you should infer outside the text–the layout of the stage, the stage directions, the silences and pauses, the things left unsaid. It says you have to really spend a lot of time thinking on these things to get the real experience of seeing the play live.

I don’t know if I buy that for a couple of reasons. Mostly because it throws out a lot about I’ve learned about writing plays. Back in the olden days when I was writing plays at the university (cough, cough The Courtship of Barbara Holt), we focused on minimizing the stage directions and stage layout so that theatres on a budget can stage it as they see fit. I was also told that the words in the play should present everything that the reader and viewer will need to know.

One example: He talks about having to imagine the stabbing of Claudius by Hamlet at the end of the play:

HAMLET
The point!–envenom’d too!
Then, venom, to thy work.

[Stabs KING CLAUDIUS]

The author here talks about how you should imagine this as an elaborate action on the stage; however, in my Shakespeare class at the university, the professor says that this kind of takes place as an afterthought and that the main point of the play was not the revenge but Hamlet working himself up to it.

You know what? With the limited stage direction, either interpretation is possible. A good play allows for that flexibility. It’s like a musical score that different symphonies will play according to their arrangements, instruments, and conductor.

So when I read a play, I read the words which are of paramount importance in the play. I imagine some of it as needed, but I don’t build little models of the play to see it.

Going to see a play, on the other hand, is a different experience, and you enjoy it differently. But trying to reproduce the live theatre experience while reading it in a book seems like a fool’s errand.

I get the sense that the author also favors written plays with more words in italics, kind of like The Time Of Your Life.

So I didn’t get much from the book aside from disagreement, and I’m not even sure it sharpens the way I think about writing plays or reading them. Ah, well.

This is the 130th entry in the series, and I’ve apparently read 72 of them so far. So I have started to not so much compare them to literature but to each other. You probably have already seen that, gentle reader, but I guess I’ll need to re-remember and re-write it every time I read one of these (the last was Haitian Hit in April). Or maybe I only write this preface paragraph every once in a while, as I didn’t for the previous book.

At any rate, like Haitian Hit, I picked this book up after a piece of Serious Literature (then it was The Count of Monte Cristo; this time it was Jane Eyre).

The series has shifted from terrorism back to targeting organized crime, so Bolan is called upon to avenge the murder of an undercover narcotics agent who was looking into a smuggling ring using hijacked macguffins. The crime boss takes the wife and daughter of the murdered agent hostage to bargain with Bolan and the government. Officials want to negotiate, but Bolan does not, and so he finds him against elements in the government as well as the criminals.

So, yeah, it’s a lot like other Bolan novels, but it’s a creditable entry in the series. It was a quick enough read. It introduces a high-paid assassin, a tall black woman with shortly cropped hair which probably means that someone just watched A View To A Kill before plotting it. And she gets away at the end, so I’ll probably see her again after my next piece of Classical Literature.

Well, gentle reader, as you might know, my beautiful wife is is a poet of some reknown and publication credits. So I had resigned myself to being the second best poet in the family. However, as this collection of poetry comes from my cousin’s husband, I might only be the third-best. Until my children start expressing themselves in verse.

As you might expect, gentle reader, I cannot say anything bad about the book at risk of not getting invited to family reunions, although I actually haven’t been invited to a family reunion since 2007. Schmeltzer’s poetry is more modern than I prefer or write. I liked elements of it better than most things I read, but I read a lot of chapbooks of amateur origin (like this and this) when I’m not struggling through the long, long poems of British Romantic poets (I read this book as a break from Keats; currently, I only have “Hyperion” in his long poems left, but it’s harder to slog through it than “Endymion” for some reason). Schmeltzer’s modern sensibilities reminded me a bit of David St. John, but that’s because that’s the best of the modern stuff I’ve read recently.

At any rate, Schmeltzer covers some ground that’s topically in my wheelhouse: the death of parents, relationships, and whatnot. However, some of the poems are a bit obscure, a collection of images that sort of hint at something, that didn’t tie it up neatly. Which might have been part of the point, I suppose.

I might have put my finger on a dichotomy in two different types of poems and rhythms: the paper rhythm and the spoken rhythm. As you might know, gentle reader, my poetry is steeped in performance in open mics, so my lines tend to be longer. A lot of modern poetry, including some of Schmeltzer’s work, has shorter lines. I wonder if they’re written to be seen on paper instead of heard aloud. When I’ve heard Serious Poets reading these kinds of poems in the university, they pause ponderously after every image or phrase. I blame William Carlos Williams. It’s not how I like poetry–I like longer lines and better sustained rhythm, I guess. Which should mean I love Keats, right? Well, he and the other Romantics had an outsized influence on my early poetry, I rediscover when I go through it.

I’m not saying that Schmeltzer is particularly guilty of overly truncated lines and unneccesary enjambment; it’s just what I thought of as I was reading what he wrote and relating it to the other things I’ve read.

So I liked it better than most of what I read. And, if you need the ultimate endorsement, I read one of the poems to my beautiful wife, and she nodded with her chin low and her eyes rolling up as she said, “It’s good.” Which is a sign of true excellence in her estimation. So she’d probably give it five stars instead of four.

This book shall probably forever hold the Personal Record in my life for the longest time between re-reads at 33 years. I read this book as a freshman in high school and didn’t remember that much from it except the basic outline of a servant woman working and falling for a rich man with a crazy wife in the attic. Uh, spoiler alert.

So not long after I read The Count of Monte Cristo, I spotted this book on my shelf and decided to pick it up since it was a classic and shorter than the aforementioned The Count of Monte Cristo. Still, it took me two weeks to read the book, partially because my evenings have been pretty active in those two weeks with watching playoff hockey and the less occasional movie.

On re-read, I recognize and appreciate the three part structure of the book. The first part is Jane’s unhappy youth at her aunt’s place and the charity school she attends; the second her life as the governess at the said home with a said lunatic; and the third is her life after she’s fled from Mr. Rochester after discovering his secret at the altar when she was going to marry him.

You’ve got a bunch of hints that Jane has some wealth coming (she does), a little bit of resolution with her family line (her mother was from a moneyed family that disinherited her when she married a poor clergyman, and the moneyed family lost the money in a bad speculation), and whatnot. It’s one of those tangly Gothic romances, you know.

It does, however, offer a bunch of topics for school papers, though. You can explore Jane Eyre’s personality: Is she really strong? She yields a lot to circumstances and strong male figures. Is her endurance a strength? Is it weakness? One could talk about the proper ways women relate to men: Should they yield as Jane does? You could talk about the roles of class. You could write about how Jane can only really be with Rochester when he is humbled. I’m sure many could.

Me, I’m thinking that this book warped me at a young age as to how imperious and haughty one can be and still get the chicks. It didn’t work for me throughout school. But I eventually got a babe, so maybe not too much.

So it was interesting to read, shorter than The Count of Monte Cristo, and it makes me feel worthy of my English degree to have returned to it.

But I don’t think I’ll read it in another 33 years when I’m eighty. I’ll not be that far into the to-read shelves by then.

Wait a minute, Brian J., are you saying that you’ve re-read Me and My Little Brain as an adult? Well, gentle reader, I didn’t think you were paying attention. So this re-read of Jane Eyre is probably not my personal record, but I can pinpoint the time when I read it to give it an absolute number, so I went with it. Me and My Little Brain probably went almost forty years between readings. EVERYTHING YOU READ ON THIS SITE IS A LIE! Except the part about my beautiful wife being beautiful.

To what do I turn after completing The Count of Monte Cristo? Why, an Executioner book, of course.

This book is not a bad entry. Bolan is in Haiti to put the hurt on some mobsters, and he ends up getting entangled in a revolution looking to overthrow the military junta in charge after Baby Doc fled. Since the junta is allowing the mob to build a casino and resort, Bolan’s plan turns to its destruction.

Once again, these books from the 1980s illustrate how little has changed in the thirty years since they were new. Haiti is still a mess, and the story would not need much updating to be set in 2019 instead of 1989.

Donald Margulies is my favorite modern playwright. I really enjoyed Sight Unseen both on stage and in print. Which makes it weird that it took me over a year to get to this book (bought in in January 2018) while I read lesser plays.

This book has four characters: Karen and Gabe, two married food writers, and Beth and Tom, friends that they introduced a dozen years ago whose marriage is ending. Beth reveals that Tom has cheated on her, and he cannot join them for dinner because he’s gone out of town to visit his mistress. The news shocks Karen and Gabe. Scenes center on meals where Beth or Tom eat at Karen and Gabe’s.

The emotions are pretty raw, and the play really evokes wondering what is happening off-stage as much as on. Karen and Gabe disagree over how to treat Tom after the break-up, and Tom touches Karen’s hair at one point, which leads one to wonder if something happened there. How strong is Karen and Gabe’s marriage? Can Beth and Tom reconcile while eventually destroying their friends’ marriage?

Very good, but not as good as Sight Unseen. Margulies has numerous other works, and one of these days I might start ordering them new instead of hoping to spot them at book sales in Springfield or Ozark.

I bought this book just last month, and like so many of the Buddhist or martial arts books, I dived right into it. This book is a two-fer in that regard, as it blends Zen Buddhism with martial arts.

The book is a collection of talks given at a retreat in Switzerland in 1975 that blended zazen sitting with martial arts demonstrations. Of course, you can draw many parallels between the focus in practicing martial arts techniques and forms and the Buddhist focus not only on sitting/meditating, but also in the focus on being present in every moment and doing everything fully in the moment.

So there’s not really anything surprising in the book; I didn’t flag anything for comment.

I read these books because I find them a bit calming, but they really do go in one eye and out the other as far as remembering their contents goes.

Well, I finally finished this book.

I read the comic book adaptation of this book last year, and I knew that the comic book adaptation left a lot of things out–I suspect there are panels in the comic with scenes that are hundreds of pages apart in the book. My beautiful wife read the book not long after we saw the film in the theater, so I ordered myself a nice copy to read. And I picked it up in November not long after passing The Villages At Monte Crist. And it has taken me six months to read it.

The book is essentially three books in one, and I only liked two of them.

The first part of the book tells about how Edmond Dantès, a sailor, who returns to port happy to see his fiancée Mercédès, but a disgruntled shipmate, a ne’er-do-well, and a rival for Mercédès frame Dantès as a Bonapartist after the restoration. When the prosecutor reviews the case, he discovers his own father’s involvement, so Dantès is sentenced to the remote Chateau d’If. He passes fourteen years there, his lonely days broken when an abbe from an adjoining cell breaks through into Dantes’ cell. They spend years studying together and planning an escape, but it’s only the abbe’s death that gives Dantès the chance he needs. Once free, he finds the buried treasure left behind by the abbe, whom everyone thought was mad because he offered millions for his freedom–millions that nobody thought he had.

The second part of the book and, sadly, the biggest portion of the book deals with what has happened to everyone else during the years of Dantès’ imprisonment and his travels and studies before he returns to Paris. The people who framed Dantès have prospered. Their children have come of age. So a lot of things go on, and the independent characters who are not the title characters have their chapters, kind of like in a Stephen King novel, but they don’t get killed by flying soda machines shortly after you’ve read a couple thousand words on them. The second part also includes the return of Dantès, now styled as the Count of Monte Cristo, to Paris to exact revenge and some parts of him putting his plans in motion, but it’s a lot more intrigue than action.

The third part of the book details his plans coming to fruition, and how he has set each up to fail according to his strengths. So the third part, with its action, moves along a little faster. As his plot goes on, though, Dantès starts to wonder if the collateral damage in his revenge makes him evil.

It ends, not with a reunion of Dantès and Mercédès, but a happy ending never the less. Dantès really grows as a character, which is rare for an action book, but Dumas has a thousand pages to play around with here.

So I enjoyed the first and last parts of the trilogy, so to speak. And I’m glad to have read it even though at times I did not enjoy reading it. Overall, though, I prefer The Three Musketeers, and I have one or more sequels to it around here somewhere. Which I’ll get into in a couple of years, I reckon.

I think my beautiful wife gave me this book right after I read The Screwtape Letters (Three years ago? Are you kidding?), but I might be retconning it.

I’ve read it now between bonzer thousands-of-lines poems in the collected works of Keats that I’m ambling through, and the books are not dissimilar. As a matter of fact, if you put Keats, the Christian-themed chapbooks I tend to read, and modern quality into a blender, you might get C.S. Lewis’s poetry.

The poems are grouped thematically. We start with some with the most Keats flavor, a series of poems retelling folk tales and mythological stories and then move into more modern concerns, lamentations about politicians and progress, and some reflections on God as would befit the best known apologetic from the twentieth century. I flagged a couple of his poems so I could come back to them.

Such as “Lines During A General Election” which begins:

Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear
All that; it is their promises that bring despair.

I also flagged Re-Adjustment, the first of Five Sonnets, and Footnote to All Prayers (which is by far my favorite).

So the book was a pleasure to read, and it (like The Screwtape Letters) made me want to read more by C.S. Lewis.

But for now, it’s back to the Keats for me.

When we last left the Ingalls family (Little House on the Prairie in September), the Ingalls family had to leave their home in Kansas. Instead of returning to Wisconsin, they headed to Minnesota. The book opens with Charles, the father, trading his horses and wagon for a sod house beside a creek with a Norwegian farmer looking to move west.

The book covers a couple of years, unlike the first ones in the series. Hopeful of a good crop of wheat, the Ingalls family builds a house on credit only to run into trouble when plagues of grasshoppers destroy the crop right before harvest. Charles has to walk a hundred miles to the east to find work through the harvest season to support the family. And although the first winter is very mild, the second is definitely more snowy than they’re used to–even in Wisconsin.

The book hints at some perhaps poor decision making by the father who had previously been omnicompetent. He buys a bunch on credit, and then cannot pay it off with the wheat crop. When he’s harvesting back east, he sends four dollars back to his family–and buys himself a new pair of boots for three dollars. One wonders how these stories appear in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s adult book Pioneer Girl.

Of course, I might just be reading more into this children’s book than I should. But I’m looking for a double-effect narrator that the author does not intend.

So I’ve got the next book, On the Shores of Silver Lake, so I will probably read it before the summer. I’ll also keep my eyes open for the others in the series and for Pioneer Girl, her more adult memoir, at the coming spring library book sales. Given how close we are to her home down in Marshfield, I should find them pretty easily. I hope. Because I really am enjoying the series and, apparently, my second childhood.

It took me two tries to make it through this book, a single full evening play that says it’s in three acts on the cover but is actually five acts. That’s not why it took me two attempts, though.

It’s a thematic play set in a dive bar in San Francisco on the eve of World War II (written in 1939, this edition came out in 1941). The cast is quite a few people: A guy who has a lot of money with no visible means of support; a simple man who does errands for him; a man who keeps trying to call a woman he loves on the payphone; a guy playing the marble game (a forerunner of pinball); an Arab who basically spouts two ‘profound’ lines over and over; a black guy who can play the piano; a guy who wants to be a comedian but is not funny; a woman of the night; a vice detective; the bartender; and a couple of others who have a couple of lines and disappear.

So you can tell it’s a very busy play with all of these people interacting with themselves and a full stage.

The text of the play is very patter-like interaction between these characters along with a whole lot of stage direction that identifies more than stage directions. They include treatises on the characters’ back stories and whatnot that really don’t belong in a play. The play itself follows a long introduction by the playwright which is a pre-war essay on the importance of art in a time of militarism or something. To be honest, I might have read it the first time I tried to read the play, but I bailed on it this time after I couldn’t understand what the playwright was trying to get at.

It reminded me a little of Picasso at Lapin Agile, which I saw staged by the Clayton Community Theatre almost twenty years ago, but with less of a point.

I have a new thesis: Twentieth (and the beginning of twenty-first) century art and literature is a triumph of theme over plot or characters. The rise of the university put the academics at the forefront of “art,” and, as they give outsize weight to theme over the other elements of art. Plots and characters are hard. Themes are easy and allow one a very easy, and unfortunately obvious way, to expound on a moral or political message without having to really engage the viewer/reader. This play would serve as evidence.

Apparently, it’s the middle of a trilogy, but I’m in no hurry to read the other four (let me explain the joke: It says it’s a play in three acts, but it’s actually five, so…. get it?)

I bought this book by a local author at ABC Books, but not while the author was in evidence. ABC Books has quite a good selection of books by local authors (present company excepted), and, as you know, I try to support both ABC Books and local authors whenever possible. And sometimes I read the books.

Like Stories of Suspense, I picked this book from my to-read floor after the recent bookshelf collapse. I figured the more books I read from the floor, the fewer I would eventually have to pick up.

This book is set in Springfield after World War II. After a woman’s body is found in the river, two men hire Max Black to find their sister, and he suspects it might have been her corpse found murdered. But Black discovers his employers are not the brothers of the woman they’re seeking, and the plot gets very tangled with the New York mob sending hitters to keep their operations in Springfield secret, and the operations include drugs and prostitution. It all becomes very tangled.

The book could have used a copy edit, and some elements of it seem a bit off–I’m not sure Springfield police in the 1940s would have responded to a body in the river since I don’t think a major river ran through Springfield until it later expanded. But perhaps I’m mistaken in it.

The prose is a bit clunky, but it fits in the pulp mold that the author is imitating (he’s a fan of Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins). The plot, too, convolutes in a way the old pulp ones did, albeit perhaps a little more than necessary.

But I enjoyed it enough to perhaps pick up something else by the author sometime when I’m up at ABC Books.

I chose this book because it was on my floor. It’s a Scholastic book from 1963, when my mother would have been starting high school. Not that the books was hers, of course–I picked it up somewhere later. But it’s interesting to think that this book was targeted to kids, well, kids my mother’s age, in the middle 1960s.

The book contains:

• “The Birds” by Daphne du Maurier. The concept is the same as the Hitchcock film that came out in the same year–the birds are murderous–but the story, set in Britain instead of California, is completely different.
• “Of Missing Persons” by Jack Finney, wherein a man is given an opportunity to travel to a far different place.
• “Midnight Blue” by John Collier. A woman dreams that her husband has murdered his partner, and she recounts her dream in uncanny detail.
• “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keys, which was made into the 1968 film Charly which I tried to watch recently.
• “Taste” by Roald Dahl, wherein a host at an elaborate dinner party wagers a gourmand that he cannot guess the vintage of the claret, with the stakes being his daughter.
• “Two Bottles of Relish” by Lord Dunsay, wherein a man suspected of killing his wife is watched but they cannot figure out how he would have disposed of the body.
• “Charles” by Shirley Jackson, wherein a child’s tales about the naughtiest boy in the kindergarton makes his parents want to meet Charles’ parents at the school open house.
• “The Contents of the Dead Man’s Pockets” by Jack Finney, wherein a man risks his life to retrieve a business paper that has blown onto the apartment building’s ledge and regrets his decision.
• “The Perfectionist” by Margaret St. Clair, wherein a man’s aunt helps him out financially, but her methods for preserving art subjects make him uneasy.

Overall, I liked the book. The stories were short and clever and made me want to write short stories like this. Kind of like the inspiration I felt reading The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t yet inspired me yet to finish a short story like this. I am too busy reading these books to actually write anything.