Category: Book Report

I can’t actually tell you when I bought this book from ABC Books, as it does not show up in a Good Book Hunting post via a quick search, but it would have been shelved right above the martial arts section when they had one (the last time I was in, they did not have a martial arts section, which was empty most of the time anyway). They must have thought a lot about this book, as it is wrapped in a mylar cover, but one of the things I noticed about it very early was the poor paper quality. It’s yellowed and its luminosity has dimmed–I would have thought I was reading a 1960s paperback instead of a hardback that’s under 20 years old.

At any rate, it tells the story of a man who attended and played football for a remote Texas state university in the late 1960s who left college after his junior year. Well, left is a euphemism. He was thrown out because he was a brawler, raised by a brawler to fight from a young age. The book starts out describing how he got back together for a reunion with some of his team mates from the old team when they were all older, and he wondered if he could still play. He had a year of eligibility left, so he went out to Aspen, Texas, to find out if they were open to letting him try out for the team, and they were. So he comes down, enrolls in grad school, and….

The book shifts to a bit of an autobiography, talking about how he was raised by a hard father, how he got into a lot of fights in his youth, including the one with a team mate that got him thrown out of school, and then about how he got started as a weight and strength training coach for different universities culminating in a position at Texas A&M and how he fought and bested an NFL player who was ignoring him when he was trying to close the weight room down for the night. He talks about finding Jesus, he talks a little about getting involved with a friend’s pyramid scheme in collecting money to invest in selling American clothes overseas but eventually after they’re both indicted, his charges are dismissed. Then…. there’s a gap of about 20 years, and then we’re back in the present.

He tries out and makes the team as a special teams player, and he spends much of the season hurt with a groin pull (not fun; I had one almost a decade ago, and it took me eight or ten weeks to return to semi-normal activity and maybe a couple of years before it stopped hurting sometimes), herniated disks, and other things. He gets hurt in practice, and cannot actually play, although the media comes to town to do stories on him and the crowds chant for him to go in, and eventually, at the end, the he gets to play in the last game of the season and makes a couple of blocks.

And then, in the last chapter (“Afterword: Is There A Fountain of Youth?”), he talks about the missing 20 years: He apparently came up with a simple apparatus for exercising which he sold via infomercials and then to the government in wholesale lots and made big bank on it. The last chapter is almost a pitch for the device. And, to be honest, it brings the whole thing into question. Was the whole thing a publicity stunt to sell the devices (and a book and, eventually, a movie in 2023)? Did he really earn a roster spot or was he merely a wealthy alum humored by the university? The coach seems ambivalent to say the least, and the authors claim his distraction was because his family had moved to Wisconsin and he was stuck in Texas, but is that really it?

So I was looking for inspiration in being athletic even when one is getting up there–I mean, I’m still lumbering through triathlons and doing martial arts even as various aches and pains arise with no seeming reason nor triggering event, so I could use that sort of thing. But this was not it. Also, my experience of the book is probably colored by the fact that I attended a manufacturer’s conference a week ago where “Rudy” Ruettiger whose story was the basis of the movie Rudy about an undersized player who attends the university later than other students (only a couple years in Rudy’s story), walks on to the football team, and gets to play at the end (and was later indicted for financial shenanigans). But at least Rudy got a sack.

So not to slag on the guy, who is 77 now and can probably still kick my can, but not inspirational to me.

This is one of John D. MacDonald’s science fantasy books–The Ballroom of the Skies being the other, which I just read almost 20 years ago. I just picked this book up ten years ago, and I’ve been kind of pacing myself on new (to me) MacDonald books because one day I will run out. Although there are so many, and I’ve paced them out so, that I can probably re-read them.

So: On Earth, a brilliant scientist is working on a discredited project for interstellar travel that the military wants to kill. A technician, in a moment of “madness,” damages the project, but Bard, the project leader, wants him back. The team is monitored by a psychologist for signs of this madness, this loss of control. Meanwhile, a dissipated and dying race on another planet has forgotten its history and only lives to play and to “dream” in special machines that show them worlds that they think don’t exist where they can play violent and destructive games. An outcast of this race who has gone to forbidden levels of the world, a large building on a desolate planet, to learn, and he wonders if the worlds and the people are real–and he hopes to establish contact with the scientist and to help him to reach their planet–or to take one of the remaining rockets on his planet to visit Earth.

So it’s very close thematically to Ballroom of the Skies in that psi-aliens are responsible for the burgeoning violence on the planet. In both cases, Fawcett reprinted some of MacDonald’s earliest works given his later success, particularly with the Travis McGee series. It’s early in his career–and with a bit more imagination, perhaps he would have become a successful science fiction writer rather than crime fiction. But this book is a little uneven–it tackles bureaucracy well, but it flags in the middle and limps to a happy ending. Maybe that’s characteristic of MacDonald’s early work, the interesting setup, a tailed-off middle, and an abrupt end–I seem to remember thinking that about some of his other early paperback originals–the checklist in the book report for John D. MacDonald: A Checklist of Collectible Editions & Translations links to my book reports on some of his work from the 1950s, and it does seem to be the case that he’s still finding his footing and his formula that will be successful in the 1960s and beyond.

So definitely a book for a MacDonald fan. But for a general science fiction fan: you could probably do better. And worse, as the book reports on this blog indicate: paperback original science fiction from the mid-century period was a mixed bag.

So I got this book in a roundabout fashion: As part of the stocking stuffers for Christmas 2023, I bought the family Barnes and Noble gift cards, which I failed to stuff in their stockings in 2023 (they were full enough anyway), so I put them in the stockings for Christmas 2024 (where the stockings were less stuffed, so the deferred giving worked out better than it might have). My beautiful wife knew that this book was coming out this year (although the copyright date is 2024, it was not in book stores until February 2025). She read it right away–ah, gentle reader, I remember a time when I would buy a book by an author the day it came out and read it that night, but we are too far in the 21st century for me to do that much any more. After she read it, she put it into my office, and I put it in my unread stacks until after the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. And, amazingly, I found it again shortly thereafter, so I picked it up.

This is an Elvis Cole / Joe Pike novel–it seems that Crais has abandoned writing other non-series books–and it’s definitely a throwback to late 20th century suspense writing. The style balances paragraphs of decription with dialog, which means good pacing with actual description in it and not just a script in a hardback. It’s almost 400 pages, but it doesn’t feel like it.

So, the plot: A young woman famous and rich from her online baking videos and growing media and baking empire contacts Elvis Cole to look for her father who disappeared ten years ago. He was declared dead after five years missing and a search by an investigation firm that Cole knows and respects. So he starts his investigation and discovers that someone in Rancha, the last place the father was seen, doesn’t want him investigating. Which leads to a brutal beatdown of Cole by multiple attackers (when he doesn’t give up) which allows multiple characters to say, “It looks like you got your ass kicked,” which was probably funnier to the author when he was writing the book than to me reading it.

The plot is a little convoluted–well, no more so than a Raymond Chandler book–and I don’t know that it hangs together seamlessly or without wrinkles–I thought a particular twist was coming which did not, and it ended up a little disappointing, but the execution and writing was refreshing enough that I’ll probably get the next Crais book for my wife right when it comes out, should another be forthcoming (it’s taking him several years to crank them out these days, so one of these will be the last, but hopefully not soon).

Which leads me to think maybe I should read all the Cole and then Cole/Pike books again. I’ve read Robert B. Parker’s early works several times, including some binge reads where I tore through all the works to a certain point in rapid succession, but that’s been twenty or twenty-five years–and I’m not especially inclined to do it again with the Spenser novels as they got longer and more hardback scripts having gained length but losing depth somewhere around that time. But Crais? I suspect I’d find they are pretty much quality throughout. But I have so many other books to read that I’m not eager to run through them again unless they accidentally end up on my to-read shelves again.

So: Recommended.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention that I own two copies of what might be Crais’s first published work–which is not The Monkey’s Raincoat. Which was expensive in paperback when we tried to find it twenty years ago.

This book is undated and looks to be self-published, probably something for the gift shop in Smirnoff’s theater in Branson. I could date it pretty closely by its topic matter: Several Enron jokes, but no mention of the September 11 attacks. I went to the Amazon listing for the book, and it says 2000, which is what I would have guessed. Closer to when I met him in 2012 than that meeting is to today, gentle reader, and meaning it’s been fifteen and a half years since I read America on Six Rubles a Day, and only eight months since I bought this signed copy in Clever last year. I just sort of presumed I had a lot of Yakov Smirnoff books on my shelves, but I guess there are not that many titles available. I just see a lot of them because they’re pretty common in these parts.

At any rate, it’s a collection of short topical bits about, well, life and living in this country and whatnot. Fairly basic humor stuff. A little biography worked in here and there, some of his story of coming to America and coming to Branson. A little about the philosophy that would lead him to becoming Doctor Smirnoff later and his philosophy of happiness and love.

So I guess I could have picked this book up for the Feels Good category of the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, but I did not. But it was close to Hope Always Wins, so I picked it up shortly thereafter.

And I guess my shelves are not rife with Smirnoff, which is a shame. I’m old enough to remember his 80s schtick which gives him a head start in appreciation. I should really get down to one of his shows again before he does retire for good this time.

So for my first book after the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge (and finishing the volume of Dickens, I picked up another of the books about lofts which I bought last year in Sparta (home of the Trojans). This is the second of the three I bought that day that I’ve flipped through (Small Lofts being the first).

It’s basically the same thing. New York and European lofts mostly done in white and minimalist style (I guess it’s right there in the title). Each “loft” section has photos, a couple paragraphs, and a floorplan (which is tiny–I put my beautiful wife’s hot librarian reading glasses on to look at them sometimes). But they’re really all of a piece, and I was very excited when I got a splash of wood on the walls or on the floor just for the cover of it. Many of them looked like hotel rooms, and not the nice ones–more like the dorm ones like the recent “concept” hotels. The lofts in this book were larger than in Small Lofts (which has “small” right in the title, so what did I expect?). Although I got the sense some were but pied-à-terre (hence the hotel look), some were actual residences–1990s television critic Joel Siegel’s loft is in here, so I assume it was his home in New York, but he probably had a country home elsewhere, too. They’re not short-term rentals–the book precedes AirBnB and the lot–but they’re pretty sterile looking. On the other hand, although most of them are described as diaphanous, not many of them have spaces described as liminal.

I’ve mentioned that this is definitely not my style. Perhaps the third of the books, Loft Style will match my preferred aesthetic.

At any rate, I’m looking at the book, written around the turn of the century, and I’m wondering what the owners of these fine downtownish domiciles would think about how their cities have evolved over the intervening two decades. You know, if you’re living in a loft downtown, you’re probably okay with how things have turned out or have been turning out. Maybe I would have been, too.

This volume includes two books I counted toward the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge—A Tale of Two Cities for the Set Somewhere You’d Like To Visit (a two-fer in two places, London and Paris, and a two-fer in it’s also a Classic or a Retelling) and A Christmas Carol which fit into the Classic or a Retelling (and, I guess, a two-fer since it’s set in London). I didn’t get to finish the book until after completing “The Chimes” after I completed the Winter Reading Challenge. So it counted as two books for the Winter Reading Challenge, but only one book in my annual tally. The rules are the rules, no matter how arbitrary.

Because I might go on a bit at length here, I’m going to tuck this book report under the fold.

Continue reading “Book Report: A Tale of Two Cities / A Christmas Carol / The Chimes by Charles Dickens” →

The 2025 Winter Reading Challenge had a category Feels Good, and like the Blends Two Genres, I was a little uncertain what to pick for it. A feel-good fiction story? I’ve already finished my collection of Executioner men’s adventure paperbacks. Maybe a self-help book? Perhaps this book, which I recently rediscovered in the stacks, whose author overcame a divorce after a long marriage and a bout with cancer? Should fit the bill, ainna? Let’s hope so.

And I know, gentle reader, you’re asking, “So you’re buying books just based on PWoC (pretty woman on cover) now, Brian J.?” The answer is no. Although I do have similar accumulation strategies for books and records (buy them at book sales, cheap), I don’t tend to select books that way. I bought this book because the author was signing them at ABC Books back in the day when I could afford to try to make all of the book signings up there. As such, I can say the author is pretty and vivacious, although as she is a radio personality and former school teacher, so she’s probably pretty used to being put together and in a public persona.

At any rate, this book is not really an autobiography, although it has some autobiographical elements as illustrations, but they’re not linear. It is, however, a self-help book about training yourself to be more hopeful through scriptural and Christian practice (both prayer and attending church/serving others). It is broken into fifteen “days” as a mechanism of highlighting practices to put into place, but in actual practice, you’ll probably work on one particular area for a while and then go onto another.

The “days”–foci, if you will, include things like “30 Minutes”, time dedicated to prayer each day, akin to meditation in other faith practices; “Write Your Own Story”, which is consciously focusing on the positive not only today, but in your past, which is akin to some things I’ve read recently about how remembering things rewires your brain and alters your memories; “Elimination”, which is about de-cluttering so you have time to focus on important things (and prayer); and so on. So there are a lot of practical practices as well which form as steps toward a more hopeful and prayerful life.

So: More Christian and scriptural than your Norman Vincent Peale or your Lloyd Douglas. More dense in the scripture and more heartfelt than Joyce Meyer that I’ve recently read. And it covers more ground than any of them in both practical and spiritual life.

So it reinforced some of the efforts I’ve been trying to make in my life (not decluttering, clearly), so I enjoyed the book. I am thinking about getting a copy for my beautiful wife, but not my mother-in-law (she’s already getting two of the books from the Winter Reading Challenge, but let’s not go overboard).

Well, since Robert E. Howard’s Three-Bladed Doom had no sorcery in it–it was just a men’s adventure novel with guns and swords–I could not count it as the Fantasy category in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. But fortunately the Nogglestead stacks still teem with Conan titles, so I was able to pluck this volume. You know, I’m not sure where it came from: It’s not one of the titles from the 2021 trip to Berryville where I got several Conan titles, and I did a quick search on the blog for valorous and maddox to no avail. One of those single or small stack purchases that don’t get immortalized here or I have owned this book a long, long time (probably the former).

At any rate, in this book, Conan is hired by a sorceress to perform a small ritual in a cave sacred to the Cimmerians, the home of Crom. So Conan goes to his homeland and scuffles along the way. The book switches perspectives between a couple other magicians who are also hoping to perform the ceremony, including a couple of Vedyans who take a sea passage knowing the seamen plan to rob them and who hire enemies of the Cimmerians to guide them into the mystic mountains and another more ancient magician who hopes to ride along with the sorceress when she teleports into the Cave of Crom after Conan performs the ritual. Each hopes to become the greatest magic user who ever lived, or at least the greatest for the next 1000 years.

That oversimplifies things, but there’s a lot in the and scuffles along the way.

The book also has a lot of Cthulhu mythos-adjacent bits to it, so I presume the author was also informed by the works of Lovecraft and Derleth (and beyond), but probably not the collection The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard which was 35 years in the future from 1985.

The end is a bit quick but is probably not out of line with the ending of Conan the Destroyer (1984).

But, overall, a fairly good bit of sword-and-sorcery, aka low fantasy, and worthy of calling Fantasy for Winter Reading Challenge purposes.

A couple of things of note unrelated to the content of the book, though.

One, the book was read through at least once as someone turned down a number of the pages. And someone was also reading it using this as a bookmark:

It’s some card representation of an early Wolverine comic cover (early meaning low number, not a comic from the 1960s). I did a Google image search on it, and I didn’t see it as a card as part of a set. Who knows? It might be collectible, something thoughtlessly used as a bookmark thirty-five years ago.

Second, the pastor at our church mentioned in a sermon that he hadn’t known what a diadem was. He’d thought it was just another word for crown, but it’s not; it’s a jewel worn on the forehead either with a chain or some circlet holding it there or as the fastener of a turban. Many heads nodded in our pew, and my mother-in-law and wife learned the difference. I told them I knew what it was because I read a lot of fantasy, and people in fantasy novels often wear them.

So when I finished the Dickens I read for the Winter Reading Challenge, I texted my mother-in-law, a former English teacher, a photo of the book cover along with the comment “Finally, some LITERATURE!” And I had to send her the word diadem when I found it in the book:

So I had to send it as proof of my previous assertion.

The 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a category labeled simply Dystopian, which left me a bit at a loss. I mean, what really marks that genre? Young Adult novels are rife with The Hunger Games and whatnot, but what distinguishes them? So I struggled a bit, figuring that everything was going to have to be a parable like 1984 or something….

But this book has this atop the front flap:

The future is a strange and dangerous place.

Chaz Kato can testify to that. He is a citizen of Xanadu, a near-future perfect society hosting the wealthiest men and women on Earth. Along with his fellow citizens on this artificial island, Kato bears the burden of a dark secret that the outside world would be shocked to hear.

Well, alrighty, then. This probably qualifies.

The book starts by following the perspective of Lenore Myles, an engineering student visiting Xanadu who meets Chaz Kato, a computer/brain interface scientist, and they woo and fall in love, but Kato gives Myles high-level access to the computer systems, and she stumbles across…. something. She disappears from Xanadu, is almost killed, and goes on the run with a former boyfriend who is involved in a terrorist organization. Focus shifts to Kato, who is not actually the illegitimate grandson of the genius Chaz Kato but is in fact the Chaz Kato, rejuvinated by the medical technology from Xanadu. He tries to find out what Myles might have discovered that led to her being framed as a spy, and he encounters Saturn who seems to be manipulating even the council which rules the planet, a council composed of leaders or figureheads for the major corporate concerns on Earth which is often at odds with national governments, and he discovers a plan certain to lead to world-wide unrest when it is revealed–and Saturn plans to reveal it at soon.

So, okay, I guess we can squeeze it into dystopian.

The book starts out slowly describing the characters and Xanadu and then moves faster once the game is afoot, although perhaps a little too quickly and too far afield once the protagonists get away from Xanadu. As it was published in 2000, the height of the Internet bubble and the end of the twentieth century sensibilities, it projects fairly well a plausiblish future when read nearly three decades later. No problems with the Soviet Union continuing to rival the United States, for example, one of the things that immediately dates 1970s and early 1980s darker science fiction projected forward from that day’s problems.

A good enough book. One I confused with The Achilles Choice in my stacks because that one features runners on the cover.

The last Niven book I read, apparently, was Playgrounds of the Mind which I read in 2008 and whose review starts, “Wow, it’s been almost three years since I read N-Space, the collection to which this book is billed the sequel.” Wow, I guess almost 17 years have elapsed since then. Given I was a bit of a Niven fan back in the day, that seems a long time. But the stacks of Nogglestead are lovely, dark, and deep. Maybe I’ll have to read The Achilles Choice now if I should run across it again sometime soon so that almost two decades do not elapse again between my Nivenings. And now that the Winter Reading Challengs is almost over, so I can read whatever I want again.

I had already picked this book out as the Scares You category for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge when I heard about Todd. But it did add a little umami to the conflict. I’ve lost much of my family to cancer, and often very young. So although I don’t have a parent left to lose as Mlle. de Beauvoir, I still fear losing a loved one or going through it myself. It’s not a horror book like many people might have selected, but it certainly fits the category.

This book is the first of Simone de Beauvoir’s that I’ve read even though Robert B. Parker really flacked for The Second Sex back in the early Spenser books. Maybe he only mentioned it once but I read the book a bunch. But it deals with the, what, maybe month from the time her mother went in for a relatively routine procedure in the middle 1960s to her mother’s death from cancer. Apparently, the doctors figured it was pretty bad to begin with, but nobody told the mother so that she would be in good spirits.

So the book is partly a description of those days, although Mlle. de Beauvoir was not the attentive daughter tending to her mother constantly–that was her sister–but Mlle. de Beauvoir came back from trips behind the Iron Curtain once or twice when travelling and when it looked like her mother took a turn, and she did visit frequently in Paris. She also delves into her mother’s life a bit, telling us her interpretation of her mother’s bourgeous life and projecting unhappiness on her where the mother would not have claimed it was so–apparently, the father was a Frenchman, and he might or might not have had a number of lovers. Mlle. de Beauvoir therefore casts judgment upon her mother and, well, not vows to not lead a middle class life, but affirms her decision to live the mid-century French existentialist writer lifestyle. David Brooks coined the term Bohemian bourgeoisie in Bobos in Paradise, but his diagnosis was probably forty years after the French invented it. And adding Bohemian to it makes it sound hipper than it really is. I would call it simply New Bou since the values and ethics that replaced the old middle-class morality and “inauthenticity” of some degree of stoicism in the public face really did not depend upon being cool and artsy. Merely in following the herd that the French Existentialist and probably just any “artist” who could afford to go to Europe in the early part of the 20th century could afford to espouse.

Where was I going? I don’t know. All I know is the book triggered a little dread in me as I remembered my own mother’s death lo those 16 years ago from cancer and did a little self-flagellation in wondering if I could have / should have done more (yes). So “Scares You”? Yes.

It reminded me a whole lot of Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing which I read, what, almost thirty years ago when it was fresh and I got it from the Quality Paperback Club in one of those instances where I bought four books for a buck back in the 1990s when I thought I should read more literary fiction. I even saw the film at some point. It definitely has the same vibe, a combination of losing her mother and judging her mother at the same time. I more recently read Love’s Legacy by Stephanie Dalla Rosa which was also about losing her mother to cancer, but written a bit at a remove has her mother has already passed, and her mother’s diary helped the author eventually overcome her pain and return to her faith. So it’s a completely different focus, but another daughter loses her mother to cancer book.

You know, I can’t think of a book by a man talking about losing his father to cancer. I’m not sure that our relationships and emotions and regrets are any less complicated. I suppose we’re just less likely to work through them verbally in the form of a book.

At any rate, one more book down on my quest for 15 in the first two months. Which will actually not be fifteen on my annual list as two come from a single volume. Which is what I have to remind myself as I near completion of one form and it does not align with the tally on another.

I picked up this book for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge‘s Blends Two Genres category. To be honest, I felt a bit hard pressed to come up with even an idea of a book that could blend genres without being part of a new genre. Cookbook/mystery? It’s a subgenre. Science-fiction westerns? Subgenre. Fantasy and car repair manuals? Not yet a subgenre, but I like the thought of it and will probably try to write something along those lines presently. But this book probably stretches the category, or maybe it’s right in the center of what they meant when they came up with the list of categories.

At any rate, this book is a 416-page collection of prose short stories (not plays) based on or around the works of Shakespeare. 23 use the settings and characters from Shakespeare’s plays. 1 takes place in London when he’s alive and features some actors in his troupe and another theater company. The last imagines Shakespeare as someone who gives information regarding monarchical intrigues through his plays, and an agent is tasked with watching the plays and sussing out their meanings for the… well, not exactly the resistance, but those who think that Anne Bolleyn got framed (wow, has it been twenty years since I read another book about Shakespeare being a secret agent? It was Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove in December 2005).

Basically, the stories fall into a couple of types: What really happened, where we find that one of the supporting characters was really behind the events of the play (such as Hamlet or Macbeth), or the rest of the story, where the story is extended by focusing on events which happened after the play, such as The Merchant of Venice, where we see what happens when the resolution of the play has led to a later murder and how the characters have gotten on after Shakespeare’s work.

As you know, gentle reader, I have been “working on” the complete works of Shakespeare for over six years now (I started with The Tempest in January 2018 and last read Much Ado About Nothing last January, so “working on” might be overselling it). But I certainly got more out of the stories whose plays I was familiar with. So if you’re into Shakespeare, you’ll get more out of the book than someone who is not. The stories are a bit uneven–some are written in modern prose, but some dabble with Middle Englishness in a bit of a yeah, I get what you’re doing, but… way.

But it helped me to fill a slot on my way to a mug. Clearly, I will not have finished the Winter Reading Challenge in a month, but I am well-positioned to clear it before my birthday and certainly before the end of the month.

Ah, gentle reader. As the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a category simply labeled “Funny” and as I laid my hands upon this volume of Ogden Nash poetry which I bought in 2021, I thought it would do. After all, I have found Nash amusing over the years. As I recount in my last book report on a Nash collection (I’m a Stranger Here Myself in 2019), I read a bunch of Ogden Nash poetry 15 years ago when I would sit and read the poems aloud to my toddlers as they played with blocks or whatever, trying to foster a love of reading, poetry, and/or silliness in them which lasted right up until they got smart phones.

At any rate, this is collection came out after Nash’s death, and it’s a bit…. Well, not jarring, but many of his best-known works came out in the period between the 1930s and early 1960s, so they always seemed to talk about a different time, a bit anachronistic and dealing with the pre-, during, and immediately post-World War II northeast. I mean, they weren’t Clarence Day, but they were closer to that era than to today.

Meanwhile, this book tackles and makes light of late 1960s America. The world of Dirty Harry, the Vietnam War, and whatnot. So it bridges a divide of sorts between a world my grandparents would have known and the world into which I was born. Odd.

Although I have to say that I probably draw more on Ogden Nash when I coin a word in one of my poems rather than drawing on some classic poet of antiquity.

So, “funny”? Well, it amused in spots as Nash does, but that’s about the best I can hope for out of a book.

So worth a read if you’re a Nash fan and maybe a good place to start if you’re not as you might find the topics a little less anachronistic if you’re of a certain age (that is, the age of someone who reads books instead of watching whatever short attention span app will arise on smart phones in the coming days).

Oh, and I do want to kvetch a little bit that I got this book in paperback (unlike the other volumes of Nash I own), and its spine cracked and the binding started giving way even though the book is but fifty-some years old. So maybe I will have to look for it in hardback somewhere as I might be becoming a Nash collector. Which is cheaper than collecting the car (so far).

The 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “Recommended to You,” which is a bit of a problematic category for me as I don’t have a wide circle of friends, most of the people I know don’t read books, and even people I know do read books, they tend to be of a different variety than I read. For example, my mother-in-law reads a lot of contemporary, modern, and a little messagish literary fiction, and my beautiful wife reads practical for her professional aspiration books like books on sales, technologies, and self-affirmatory books the types of which I buy from time to time but don’t tend to read (which leads to some hijinks at Nogglestead–a couple years back, she gave me a book about networking called Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty, which I said I’d heard of–which I had, as she picked a book from my to-read shelves to give to me as a gag, and no one told me till later). So when Jack Baruth mentioned this book on his Substack, I ordered a copy. I also ordered a copy for my mother-in-law for her birthday as buying a copy for her and for me is a fig leaf for when I want to buy a book which she might also find interesting–I say I’m buying it so we can both read it. To my knowledge, this is the first of such books that I’ve actually read–and she has been a little more dilligent about it than I.

At any rate, this book starts not long after the Soviet revolution in Russia. A gentleman, Count Alexander Rostov, is found to be a problem to the Soviets. However, as he purportedly wrote a pro-revolutionary poem some years before, instead of execution, he is given a modified Minus Six punishment–Minus Six being internal banishment in the USSR where the banishee could not live in the six largest cities and had to eke out an existence somewhere else. Count Rostov, instead, is confined to a grand hotel in Moscow which he cannot leave under the punishment of death. And he’s no longer allowed to stay in the elaborate suite he’d occupied–he’s banished to a small room upstairs.

The book starts pretty linearly with the banishment and the immediate aftermath, but soon starts skipping to incidents and plotlines spanning decades. The Count befriends the young daughter of a party official staying at the hotel, but she grows and becomes a young party participant herself. Eventually, she leaves but returns with a daughter that she wants the Count to watch for a couple of weeks which turns into years so that the Count calls the girl his daughter.

Through the decades, the Count learns to change with the times a bit and to handle the changes in life as he ages and as the Soviet Union and the Party evolves around him (I admit having some preparation for some of it having read some Dostoyevksy and Tolstoi and watching The Death of Stalin last year). There are subplots and threads running through it, including the Count’s relationship with an aging movie actress; a Party-favored fellow rising in the hotel management; and so on, but some of them feel as though they would be resolved or would change in the gaps in the narrative, but here they are, five years later, not much changed.

The writing is a bit florid and sensous in spots, especially when talking about food, and when you get down to it, characters aside from the Count are a bit cipherish, but it’s not a bad read. At 462 pages, it has proven to be the longest of the books I’ve read for the Winter Reading Challenge thus far, but it was a pretty quick read and fairly easy to break away from to fit in another bit of a shorter book during the reading thereof.

Definite life lessons to be learned from it: Changing/adapting with the times so that you’re not merely buffeted by them is the biggest one and to make the most of your surroundings even when they’re limited. Something I surely need to learn over and over again.

As with Karate-dō: My Way of Life:

When I started reading this book, it felt familiar: A book by a man who was the son of a noble family on Okinawa who became a teacher and then brought karate to Japan proper. I thought Oh, crap, I just read this!

Actually, I kid; I “just read” Linda Greenlaw’s The Lobster Chronicles in 2009. The books both cover lobster fishing in Maine, but this book is more straightforward documentation where the Greenlaw book was a personal narrative/memoir of the same thing.

At any rate, it, too, like most of the books I’ve read for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, is fairly short, clocking in at 98 pages. It’s condensed from a larger book, The Great Lobster Chase: The Real Story of Maine Lobsters and the Men Who Catch Them. Apparently, the longer book had a lot more discussion about policy, regulation, and legislation which were trimmed for this shorter book which focuses on the lobster, the fishermen, the equipment, the relationship, and the communities in which the fishermen live. The chapters are limned with a bit of humor, a wry but respectful tone that illustrates and informs and makes one greatful to be ashore and indoors when it’s cold outside.

Again, like so many of the books I’ve read for the Winter Reading Challenge and so many of the books in the stacks, it comes from the latter part of the 20th century and not the 21st. But I suppose the sheer proportion of books that have been published come from before now, so I guess that doesn’t make me too much of a fuddy duddy.

So a pleasant, short read to fill the Food category of the book. Is that a stretch? I went looking for a book that I bought some years back, the Dummies Guide to … something food related because I bought it for another food category on another Winter Reading Challenge. And I couldn’t find it. I also couldn’t find anything about peanuts (from a trip to the George Washington Carver historical site some years back), berries or preserving food, or anything like that. A couple general gardening books, but that felt like a stretch. Probably no more than a book about professional hunters/gatherers, but still. And if you ask me in the next couple of days how a lobster trap works, I might be able to answer it. But hurry–I would have expect that Greenlaw covered it, too, but I didn’t really retain it and probably will not again since it’s not a daily practical consideration.

I pored through my stacks looking for any stray bit of manga or graphic novel that might have escaped my notice for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge‘s Graphic Novel or Comic category, but I could not find anything. So given that I had a little time between dinner and the beginning of a Springfield Lutheran School basketball game, I stopped in at Hooked on Books for the second time in a month (the first was for some fruitless Christmas shopping where I bought a book for myself anyway) and looked over their supply. I grabbed this volume because I remember Hawkeye from the West Coast Avengers series from the 1980s.

Ha! The joke is on me. This book is about the female Hawkeye. It’s from 2019. Who is the female Hawkeye? Bloody heck, I don’t know; I have barely read any fresh Marvel for thirty years. Apparently, she knows the Clint Barton Hawkeye, who is something of a mentor to her (and who appears on the last page as a cliffhanger), and a running joke is that she is the other Hawkeye, the girl Hawkeye. Apparently, she was a member of the Young Avengers before she got her own book, wherein she has moved to Los Angeles and has set up a shingle as a private investigator (she’s working on getting a license when she gets the capital).

The book collects the first twelve issues of the series which includes three story arcs which have some interrelation. Apparently, her mother is missing (or dead); her father is missing (or dead); and a group of white Nationalist types are doing bad things (at the behest of a supervillainess who is apparently cloning people for some reason which might be known to people who were fans of this Hawkeye before this series). The style of the art changes a bit between arcs, so I wonder if the artists got shuffled (and maybe why).

So if you’re looking for a comic like the old Ms. Tree comics but with a protagonist who is also an expert archer featuring a modernly diverse set of sidekicks and a bit of a girly focus (a lot of How do I look? kinds of panels and whatnot), I guess this is a book for you. I mean, it’s not bad, and it’s a little more story rich than some 21st century comics that I’ve read, where the art is the point and the words/plot are just there to support the drawings. But I’m not sure why it’s necessary to call the character Hawkeye.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, no, a female Wolverine does not appear in the books. Two do.

You might remember, gentle reader, I read a couple of golf books last October (The Downhill Lie by Carl Hiaasen and The Bogey Man by George Plimpton). So I came across this book and thought it’s too bad I didn’t read it then, but the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a Sports category, so it’s game on (although it does not actually clarify when I might get to the Bob Hope golf book I’ve also uncovered while combing the stacks for prospects for the Winter Reading Challenge).

So: The book comes out not quite in-between the other golf books (seventeen years after The Bogey Man, 21 years before The Downhill Lie), but the book reads a lot more like the former rather than the latter. Dobereiner was a golf writer for British papers and Golf Digest, so he covered a lot of tournaments before this, his third book, came out. He was also steeped in the history of the game, so he refers to a lot of the old timey players from the early part of the 20th century (although not necessarily that old timey in 1986). We get mentions of Sam Snead. Arnold Palmer is still very big in the game along with Jack Nicklaus. Names that still resonate, I suppose, but as old timey now.

The book has several chapters that collect small anecdotes about bad shots, errors, bad luck, and that sort of thing grouped by…. Well, the chapters are “Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory”, “On the wrong side of the law”, “Bundles and bunches”, “One of those days”, “All God’s creatures”, “The law according to Murphy”, and “Just whose side are you on?” Okay, I guess the chapter titles are not that descriptive, but they’re grouped by mistakes that cost tournaments, rules violations or rulings, animal encounters, and that sort of thing. Each anecdote is maybe a couple of paragraphs with some connective tissue philosophizing.

It clocks in at 180 pages, and it’s somewhere between the two books topically as well. The Downhill Lie is mostly about Hiaasen’s personal experiences; The Bogey Man is Plimpton’s experience on the Tour leavened with stories about golf history and the books about golf he’s reading; this book pretty much omits any personal experience, certainly golfing, and goes right to the stories about others. Of course, that was to be expected as the author is a golf writer, not a writer golfing.

A quick enough read, and something that got me ever closer to my goal of completing all 15 categories of the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. At this pace, I’ll be done sometime at the end of the month, which will leave my February reading open for maybe the Bob Hope golf book (and other Bob Hope books, of which I seem to have several).

When I started reading this book, it felt familiar: A book by a man who was the son of a noble family on Okinawa who became a teacher and then brought karate to Japan proper. I thought Oh, crap, I just read this!. But it was Karate-dō Nyūmon by Funakoshi which I read for the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge (the author of Different Race/Religion Than Your Own category). The books are in different editions, so they look different, and I actually bought them a week apart (this book July 23, 2022, and the other July 30, 2022, at ABC Books) during my periodic clearing of the martial arts section. So they were, in all likelihood, shelved in different locations in the stacks here. In the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, this book goes into the Asian Author category. Although I could have set it in the Set Somewhere You’d Like To Visit category. So perhaps it’s a two-fer.

At any rate, this book is an autobiography by the author (obviously), so perhaps it goes into greater detail about his life than the previously read volume (which had enough about his life to make it familiar). And, well, actually, looking over the summary of the book I read a year ago, it was:

So this book is part history of Karate (and Okinawa and the southern part of Japan by extension), autobiography, and the description of a particular kata that the author’s school emphasizes (and briefly compares it and the other kata it uses to other schools and the evolution of kata). It has a number of static images from the kata, including the steps that feature a partner, but it’s hard to get the flow from a kata from text description and pictures.

So I guess the difference lies in the fact that this book does not have the photos of the kata and talks a little more about how karate as a way of life fits in the Buddhism and Zen Buddhism in particular as well as perhaps shinto. It doesn’t go a lot into texts or sutras or theory in that regard–instead it just goes into peace, nonviolence, and a little Confucism in the heirarchy of authority. Perhaps it goes into greater detail into about his life story and experiences, but the familiarity I had with the basic outlines indicates maybe not much.

So also a quick read at 127 pages. Most interesting to the students of martial arts such as I fancy myself (wish me luck on testing for a third degree black belt later this month and as I consider perhaps joining another school to learn another form). And, most importantly, progress towards my next mug.

Ah, gentle reader. I thought this Robert E. Howard book, one of the paperbacks upon which I blew all my cash in Berryville, Arkansas, in 2021, would slot into the Fantasy category in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, oh, but no.

The book is a mere adventure story, a pulp version of Kim after a fashion dealing with The Great Game in Afghanistan (so it couldn’t fit in the Set Somewhere You’d Want To Visit category). An American adventurer who works for the British, sort of, a legendary swordsman and shot, investigates a series of attempts (some successful) on leaders in the region. It leads him and some retainers to a hidden city in the mountains where a descendent is trying to build a new caliphate based on the Assassins order, but apparently a Russian is funding it and pulling the strings from behind the scenes.

A couple of action scenes lead to fisticuffs, skulking around the city, intrigue, and whatnot, and all the while I’m hoping for some magic or a demon or something. There’s a dungeon and a door to a mysterious place where the tortured and sometimes babies are thrown, and I was all right! Here we go!. But the adventurer, El Borak, as he is known, (real name: Francis Xavier Gordon) discovers it’s just a labyrinth with a yeti in it. I mean, a touch of cryptozoology does not make it a fantasy book. Or Harry and the Hendersons would be a fantasy movie, ainna? Maybe it is, but I’m making the arbitrary Rules up as I go, so no to this.

Apparently, it started out as a short story and first came to the light of day (publishing) in the middle 1970s (according to Wikipedia) which says it came in various flavors and with various revisions in the 1970s. So I was going to say that this book is a direct ancestor of mid-1960s pulp such as Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels, where the hero is known by many names and who uses ruses to get into the hard sites he’s going to hit. But given that most of the text here is likely later than 1960s pulp, perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that things written forty years after Howard’s death influenced this book attributed to him.

Although I could not, due to the impartial judge’s (my) ruling on the yeti thing, count it as Fantasy, and I could not count it as Set Somewhere Where You’d Like To Visit, I did decide to slot this as Chosen Based on the Cover. I mean, it’s not like I was likely going to be able to choose a book from the stacks based on the front cover as they’re jammed tightly into the shelves. But I did choose this one which I judged to be a fantasy book based on Howard’s name and the cover which features a domed citadel, a man with a sword, and a damsel. So let this also be an illustration, again, about how you should not judge a book based on its cover.

It’s only the second entry in the reading challenge, and I am almost a week in. I’d better lock in, as the kids say these days.

So of course I picked a picture book for the first entry in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. As you know, gentle reader, I have accumulated a number of monographs as I used to flip through them whilst spending my Sundays watching football (that is, having football on so I could sit and browse art and poetry books). However, I haven’t had the expensive football package for a couple of years now, but I’ve still picked up inexpensive art books when I can. Like this book, which I bought in October at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library, whose sales are pretty much all bag day sales–so this book was under a dollar and probably closer to twenty-five cents given how I can pack a bag.

This is a hardback with a dust jacket, and it kind of falls between an exhibition catalog and a monograph. It contains an intro essay by oceanographer Sylvia Earle and an outro by art writer Joan Seeman Robinson, both a couple hundred words of overly vivid prose designed to sell the work, but if you’re familiar with Chihuly and a fan, you don’t need the selling. And if not, prose ain’t going to do it. The book was published in Seattle, home of Chihuly’s workshop, and you can imagine the gift shop of his museum/workshop is its natural habitat.

This book covers one series/set of his work from the 1980s. Blown glass bowls, essentially, with floppy sides and inspired by/designed to represent, sort of, aquatic life. Aside from the two essays, the book is essentially photographs of the work against dark backdrops. And unlike, say, images of paintings in monographs and art books, the photos do not do the work much justice. For one, you lose a sense of scale. Some of the work takes up a cubic yard in volume, but you don’t get that even if the photo spans two pages and the photos are the same size as 10″ works.

But, again, if it’s something designed for the gift shop, it’s more to remind you of what you’ve seen. And, you know, I can see it. Actually, I wonder if I did see it, or at least some of it. I think the Milwaukee Art Museum has or had a lot of his work or an exhibition in the early 1990s when I was at the university up the road and went to the museum a couple of times a year. So I have seen a bunch of his work in person. And now I’m wondering why I haven’t really been to the art museums since. I hit the St. Louis Art Museum a couple of times in the middle 1990s, and I’ve only been to the Springfield Art Museum three or four times since I moved to Springfield. I wonder why that is–I’m no longer trying to impress girls with a relatively cheap date, or my beautiful wife does not particularly favor art museums (she prefers botannical gardens), or because I’ve become a homebody as I’ve gotten older. Ah, well–the Springfield Art Museum is closed for a number of years for expansion and renovation, so I’m not going to revitalize my official art appreciation anytime soon.

And the easiest book is knocked off of the category list. Easier, even, than Graphic novel or comic.

This is the third of these little Salesian Missions booklets I’ve read this year; I read The Way in June and Priceless Gifts in August. Given that I bought another booklet when I got this book and The Way in April 2023, I have at least one more floating around the stacks here in an unread state. They tend to get jammed into narrow slices between larger books only to pop out at strange times, like when I’m not hoping to start a larger book before the Winter Reading Challenge begins on January 2.

So: a booklet small enough to fit into a #10 envelope with poems by Whittier and Whitcomb Riley which won’t help me to keep them straight (although remembering Riley is the Little Orphant Annie and Old School Day Romances guy helps me to remember that Whittier was the more serious of the two). Several poems by Helen Steiner Rice back when she was a going concern (I just read her Wikipedia entry, and an interesting but brief story which is told with greater detail on her Web site–she died in 1981, and she has a Web site, so let that be an indicator of what a big deal she was to some).

At any rate, you could do worse than to read these little booklets with their focus on inspirational messages and mixtures of greeting card scribblers and major poets and to read old Ideals magazines which are mixtures of the same with some grandmothers’ poetry included as well. I recently bought a stack of a major poetry magazine issues from the last year, and I’m telling you that they are, in fact, much worse. So don’t laugh at me for picking some of these up and wondering if I should start actively collecting them (given that they were published many per year for decades, probably not). And enjoying them for the little literary charcuteries that they are. Designed to be disposable but with indispensible literary merit within. What a culture we once were.