Category: Book Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and two more things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the name of your first software company?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.