Category: Book Report

I picked up this collection in September at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. It’s a fairly nice little hardback collecting poems and aphorisms grouped by topic (Beauty, Music, Love, Friendship, Brotherhood, Inspiration, Courage, Achievement, Truth, Happiness, Faith, Patriotism). The collection includes a number of poems from classics such as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Pope, and even a poem by Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton (the “It was a dark and stormy night” guy) so on, but also some quotes from other famous leaders and a couple of anecdotes that are a couple paragraphs at length. Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” makes an appearance, as do a couple of poems by the author and an anecdote of visiting the house of a Japanese school employee after a death. Running 87 pages with multiple pieces per page, it’s heavier than a Hallmark book and definitely several nights reading. I found myself reading the name to which each piece was attributed (below the piece) first as I guess I am a snob.

So a nice relatively quick bit of edification, but you know what’s even more interesting? The editor.

He has a Wikipedia page because he was a college football (and baseball and basketball) in the 1920s and 1930s. Just as he was finishing up his doctorate in education (according to his obituary) he was called to run a school for the children of American servicemen during the occupation of Japan. After which he returned, published this book when he was 80, got his doctorate finally at age 84, and passed away in 1987 at 94. The obit indicates he wrote about his experiences in Japan for the equivalent of the dissertation. You know what? I would like to read his biography and/or that work about occupied Japan as much as this book. Ebay has dozens of copies of this book in several editions listed, but nothing else by the author. More the pity.

At any rate, my reading for the year is winding down. Most years about now, I call it early for the year–my reading list generally runs the last week of the year to the last week of the year, and not January 1 to January 1. However, the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge starts on January 2, so I am reluctant to start anything that I won’t finish before then. This is my 95th book this year, but it might not be my last. I guess we will find out in the coming week.

I got this book this summer in an attempt to stuff my stacks with Christmas novels so that I would easily find one, surely, when it came time to read my annual Christmas novel. As it happens, I read three Christmas novels already this year from Karen Kingsbury’s Red Glove series (Gideon’s Gift, Sarah’s Song, and Hannah’s Hope), but they did not impress me nor help my heart grow three sizes, so I grabbed this one as well since it was nearby on the stacks (that being lying atop the ranks of books atop my bookshelves in the office where so many recent acquisitions go until I can fit them onto actual bookshelves). And, you know what? This might be the best modern Christmas novel I’ve read in the thirteen years I’ve made this a personal tradition.

So, the setup: A former war correspondent has been put on the no-fly list for an outburst at an airport. After his retirement of sorts from overseas journalism, he has written feature material for women’s magazines and other pieces like that. He gets a chance to do a story on traveling by train during the Christmas season, which also will allow him to join his casual, on-again/off-again opposite coastal lover for a trip to Lake Tahoe. But their phone conversations indicate something is off–is the wealth voice actress getting tired of him? Coincidentally, the One Who Got Away, a lover who left him some years ago when he would not commit or give up his exciting and dangerous lifestyle, happens to be on the train as the writer for a Hollywood director who is thinking about doing a movie about trains. So will they/won’t they? On the ride along the Capitol Limited and the Southwest Chief, they meet a couple who want to marry on the train as they elope; a retired priest; a former railroad employee who rides the trains because he misses it; and a variety of colorful employees and regular passengers–and, apparently, a thief who steals a single item from every sleeper compartment several times.

I won’t give away the bit of the twist at the end, but it’s a pleasant book, and it has depth and richer writing than I found in most of the other Christmas novels I’ve read. It might be the best of the lot, although Lloyd C. Douglas’s Home for Christmas from 1937 might hold onto the top spot simply because it hits upon the nostalgia notes that so many Christmas songs do from the early part of the 20th century and the transition from rural to urban lifestyles.

Also, the book is a bit of a love letter to Amtrak (along with some asides that the government should fund it more even though rail remains a fairly limited and highly inflexible travel option). I mean, I recognized the names of the longer lines listed (the Capital Limited, the Southwest Chief, and the Texas Eagle). No mention of the Anne Rutledge, which ran from Chicago to Kansas City, the Hiawatha Service (Chicago to Milwaukee) or Empire Builder (Chicago to the northwest), but I traveled back and forth between Missouri and Milwaukee many times during college, so I got to learn all the names. I even rode the Texas Eagle from St. Louis to Chicago early on Sunday mornings on my trips home (the Anne Rutledge was an afternoon train, and I wanted to get back to Milwaukee early in the afternoon since I was taking a city bus home). So the book made me want to take a cross-country trip on a train just to see what it’s like, but it’s unlikely to be as good as it’s presented in this 20-year-old book.

Still, a good read and a good way to wrap up my Christmas novels for the year. It looks like this might be Baldacci’s only departure from thrillers and detective stories into Christmas novels, so I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere for Christmas novels next year. Of course, by this time next year, I will have found and lost again several Christmas novels which I buy to seed the stacks here at Nogglestead so that I can find at least one Christmas novel in December, and I will have bought and lost several others that I buy throughout the year for the purpose. But with enough seeding, I should be able to find something. Although knocking off four of the Christmas books in the stacks doesn’t help the effort.

I picked up this book just this summer at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale. It’s a chapbook, for which I would have paid a buck at the Friends of the Springfield County Library Book Sale (or got in a bundle for a buck), but as this was the Christian County Library which sells books by the bag, I probably paid a nickel for it. But it’s definitely worth more than that. The book is inscribed to the Christian County Library by the author in 2015, which must be an interesting story as the poet is from the upper penninsula of Michigan and the inscription is dated seven years after the chapbook was published (by a chapbook publisher, perhaps not by the poet herself).

I enjoyed this book more than other collections I have read for two reasons: The poet is someone around my age, reminiscing and navigating relationships in middle age, so it’s not grandmother poetry nor is it instapoetry written by the very young who have not read much actual poetry and cannot dialog with tradition by extending it or defying it. Also, the poet often uses a simple declarative sentence as the first line of the poem, which I’ve been doing a lot with my recent poems. I half-remember an adage that a poem is a descent into hell, and the first line tells you how far you’ll go, but I cannot find it on the Internet. I attributed to Frost, but I cannot confirm that via Internet search.

Thematically, it’s a lot of reminiscing about past relationships but not in the college professor enumerating body count way that you get too often in professional male poets. Also, some reflections and musings on current relationships thrown in. Some depth to many of them, some good line length and rhythm, but a couple are the short line breaks that are self-consciously poems.

So, yeah, a cut above other poetry I’ve read. It flags a little in the middle poems–enough that I thought I might need to read the first poems again to make sure my previous judgment of not bad was still correct, but later poems returned to form. So some filler material, but some good poems within.

Strangely enough, the author only seems to have come out with this single chapbook of poetry (and a collection about Michigan cherries, as the author is from the upper penninsula). Of course, I cannot knock it, as my output aside from twee blog posts and extensive documentation for losing causes has been thin in recent years as well.

Still, this is what I hope for when I pick up a cheap chapbook (redundant, I know): Something that I really enjoy in spots rather than merely read.

Well, after reading the Horatio Alger book, I snatched up this book which was shelved by it on the top of the bookshelves in my office. I bought the books two different times, the Alger in 2021 and this book in 2022, and the books came out fifty to sixty years apart (the Alger mid- to late- 19th century, this book in the height of the Great Depression), but they’re both books for young men with applicable life lessons.

In this book, Jimmy Arch, the young son of a widow, struggles and acts out in school and needs to work to supplement his mother’s income. When his mother dies, the shopkeeper where he works takes him in, and Jimmy helps the store to thrive when he discovers he has pinpoint control pitching baseball from his pastime of throwing bricks at things in the alley outside his meager apartment. The headmaster of the school he attends recognizes Jimmy’s intelligence even though his boredom in school leads him to underachieve and lends him books for self-study. Jimmy watches the construction of a bridge to The City and becomes interested in engineering. As a result, Jimmy gets first a job in the city when an engineer at the big engineering firm that built the bridge tells the boss that the kid can pitch for the company team. Later, Jimmy gets into the big engineering college and almost works himself to death trying to support himself until he is rediscovered as a pitcher who might be able to help the team win against its biggest rival–and get a plum engineering job if he does.

So the book is similar to the Alger novels in Strive and Succeed, but: Jimmy Arch rises not only because he’s good and industrious, but he also has the talent of being a good pitcher. Although this is a talent he develops–and the book does mention how hard he practices–it might be the first step on the slide towards all young adult protagonists being special in a way that the Alger heroes were not.

Still, a quick read and not bad for what it was. The cover looks like it could be a retelling of The Fountainhead, but with engineering and baseball and help from other people (and adult male figures provide guidance for the young man growing up). At no point, though, does Jimmy Arch ever stand on a girder being lifted into place. Maybe someday.

It has been three years since I bought this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale, but it seemed to fit thematically with the audio course The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and re-reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, so I picked this two-book collection from the top right corner of the stacks in my office.

It contains:

• Julius, or the Street Boy Out West (1874), wherein an orphan who lived with a burglar is out on his own after going to the authorities when the burglar and an accomplice plan a burglary at the home of someone who has done Julius a turn. Julius resettles “out West” (in this case, Wisconsin, near “Milwaukie” [sic]) with the help of an aid society in New York (a real concern that Alger promoted in a number of his books), gets an education, earns the trust of the family that accepts him into their home, becomes successful, averts tragedy when the burglar accomplice who has broken out of Sing Sing comes looking for him.
  
   
• The Store Boy, or the Fortunes of Ben Barclay (1887), wherein the son of a widow works in the local grocery store, but the local money man is going to foreclose on her mortgage unless they can come up with the $700 in a couple of months. It seems impossible, but the boy made friends on a buying trip to New York and has a chance to work for a wealthy woman whose distant cousins try to sabotauge the relationship, fearing he will inherit. He gets the drop on them, and a menacing tramp turns into an ally who helps them not only pay the morgage but to put the local money man and his ne’er-do-well son in their place.

So they both tell rags-to-riches story, but in both cases, the urchins have help from people who appreciate that they’re honest and hardworking. So it’s definitely not akin to an Ayn Rand novel where the protagonists succeed despite how much the world is against them. In Alger’s world, bad people do oppose the young heroes, but other good people help them. Which might have represented a shift in the zeitgeist between the mid- to late-ninteenth century to the post-World War I world.

The books also feature a couple of interesting duplicated scenes; in both, the protagonist spots a pickpocket at work, and calling him out leads to a rewarding situation beyond a monetary reward. And in both, the young men are given nice watches. It’s a small sample size from Alger’s work, but one wonders if it’s a common element or if the books just happened to have the repeated scenes which were so similar.

At any rate, the language was approachable–the books were written for young people, after all–back in the time where boys read books and when the heroes of books were like better versions of the readers themselves or certainly encouraging peers. Unlike much of the YA you see talked about these days, where the protagonists are all special or superhuman or who have to deal with dystopias unlike what the readers will encounter (hopefully) or where the protagonists represent something in Proper Contemporary Thought and who have to navigate the patriarchy that wants to keep the faddishly different down.

I flagged something in one of the books, and it’s true of both of them: Alger has a city sense of scale. He talks about something a mile and a half away being distant. He talks about Ben Barclay picking up someone to give her a ride for a half mile. That might seem like a long way off if you’re used to living in the city, but here in the country, a mile off is…. visible. Not that far at all. You can always tell someone lived entirely in cities and maybe visited the country when they talk like that. Although, to be honest, when Thoreau in Walden talks distances, they’re not that great, either, so maybe it’s more of an East Coast/New England thing where the sense of scale is different.

So not as inspirational as the Franklin, but better than what you might get from the 20th century.

I got this book in Sparta in October as part of a minor bag-day binge along with a couple of other loft design books. I mean, I liked the HGTV show Small Space, Big Style (example) about how people decorated their small apartments in the big city (often New York). So I thought I would really like this book. But….

The book is Euro-centered with a couple of “lofts” in South America and in the United States. But the aesthetic is basically European: Lots of white walls (finished walls for the most part) with minimalist furniture in them. Many of them are not “lofts” in revitalized industrial or warehouse buildings but rather repurposed other businesses. Some of them exceed 1000 square feet, which is not especially “small”–not that I think lofts must be small, but the book title has the word in it (although perhaps not in the original language–this book is a translation, which might explain its non-American focus and preferred aesthetic).

So, I dunno. Not my bag. My style is more Ethan Allen than Euromoderne, and I fully expect my lofts to have unpainted red brick walls (or maybe painted cinder block) and I presume that they will not be on the first floor. I dunno why: probably because that’s what I have in my head as a loft based on its origins, not that it’s a condo by another name to appeal to people too cool to own a mere condo.

So it was almost a quick flip through, but I definitely have some quibbles with the book. First, it had some blatant copy errors: One, the verb fomd which I could not actually guess what they meant. A pair of chapters covering two halves of the same building were out of order, so that the second of the two referred to the other chapter following it. And so on. Secondly, some photo captions were in something like six point font–I mean, it was tiny. I don’t want to go all old man here, but I had to angle the light just right on the book and damn near squint to read them–I even tried my beautiful wife’s cheaters and they didn’t help much. Third, the book lapses into the argot of interior design–which I suppose is fitting since this is clearly an inspiration book for designers, but, c’mon, man, if every liminal space is diaphanous, what does that even mean to distinguish it from every other instance of transition and example of natural light?

So I was not impressed by the lofts depicted nor the book itself.

Which likely will not put me off on reading the other loft design books I got in October. A man has to make his annual reading goals even if it’s just browsing pretty pictures.

This collection is a collaborative effort by two people who worked for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune before Lileks was there. Ed Fischer was a cartoonist, and Jane Thomas Nuland was books editor. So this collection is about aging, one page a cartoon and the facing page a quip, a gag, a little story, or a little poem by Ms. Noland.

So: I dunno, about the same as you’d get from, say, a collection of Saturday Evening Post material (ye gods, have I reported on three? 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, yes indeedy–but in my defense, this blog is coming up on 22 years old now, so I am reading other things in between). Not as quotable nor retellable as what you would get out of a collection of jokes or Reader’s Digest every month, but amusing. Presumably, a lot of these were given as birthday gifts for someone turning 40, 50, or 60 back in the day where people photocopied cartoons to tack onto their cubicles or tape to the walls of their workspaces.

So an hour or so browsing, one more book on the annual list, and not a great expense–it was stuffed into a $3 bag amongst other gleanings in Sparta in October.

It’s funny to think, though, that this sort of thing (and Reader’s Digest) might have been the equivalent of TikTok for the pre-Internet generation. A series of short, unrelated things for amusement that passed right through the eyes and through the brain, presumably, but not retained. I guess the main difference is the lack of infinite scroll, so eventually you come to the end of the book or the end of the magazine and have to get up and do something in real life for a bit before picking up another one. Or maybe not; perhaps I am tweely pronouncing whatever little thought comes into my little mind at any time.

So after reading Gideon’s Gift and Sarah’s Song, of course I ploughed right into this book simply so I could spell plough the British way yet again. Also, what better time to finish the set than when rushing through them all at once (Heigh, Brian, how’s the ‘Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies’ series coming? you ask, and I salute you for your British spellings as well as I avoid the question).

This book is better than the previously mentioned books because they don’t have a wrapper prologue nor, really, a bifurcated story, although some of it is told in flashback, but not a whole lot. The titular Hannah is a freshman in an exclusive high school in Washington, D.C., who keeps very busy with extracurricular activities because her parents are away for most of the year–her father, a former Senator, is the ambassador to Sweden and her mother is quite the social butterfly. Hannah lives with her maternal grandmother in a big house and does not have much in terms of companionship outside of those activities. Her driver, though, prays for Hannah all the time, and when he asks her for what he should pray for, she asks for a Christmas miracle–and later, when her parents tell her they won’t be home for Christmas, she narrows her miracle into hoping her parents will be home for Christmas. To take her mind off of the daughter’s loneliness and to keep her from pestering them during the party season in Sweden, the mother reveals a secret: the ambassador is not her real dad–the mother had been with a surfer type out in California in her salad days before returning home with a 4-year-old daughter to marry into her position in society. So Hannah reaches out to Congressmen and the press to help find her father who enlisted in the Army a decade ago and might be in Iraq. He is, but he’s going on One Last Mission, a dangerous one, because the other helicopter pilots have wives and families. So there’s a bit of tension as to whether he will Make It Home Alive, much less in time for Christmas (and the mother jets back from Sweden to quell the noise her daughter has made).

So it was a more straightforward narrative without the double-effect, the half-the-story-in-flashback, method used by the other two books I read. It did have some head scratchers that made me go, “Really?” like the fact that the mother brought the box of mementoes from her California fling to Sweden with her instead of leaving it in the mansion which was their pied-à-terre in the United States–ah, well, it served to move the plot, such as it was, along.

The best of the three I read and more on par with a traditional Christmas novel. No real unreal ending where the mother and the biological father rediscover their passion for one another–that would be a different kind of book, ainna?–but still the best of the lot (unless the second in the series was the best).

So now I have most of the month of December left. Will I read a Christmas novel by a different author? Can I even find one in the stacks even though I stock up on them through the year? Stay tuned!

After I read Gideon’s Gift, I was a bit divided over whether to plow through the other two volumes that I own in the Red Gloves series (which only has four books in it, so I have 75% of the whole series). I mean, yeah, they’re short and quick reads, but Gideon’s Hope was just a touch off, even for a Christmas book. Still, I finished Walden in the interim (which I suppose I could write up even though I cannot count it as a complete book as the version I read is in a three book omnibus edition) and have plucked at a couple of other books, but I picked up this book for a single-night read.

And because I thought Gideon’s Gift was a bit….off, I went into it looking for things that were wrong. Which I found, even if they weren’t wrong.

The book has a similar double-story going on and a bit of a contrived frame. An elderly woman has held on for one more Christmas so that she can share her special story (and song) with someone who needs it. She is Sarah, obv., and a worker in her old folks home, Beth, is the one who needs it. Beth has decided to leave her husband because…. well, the modern “because,” which is because she wants to get her groove back, to eat, pray, love, and just because she’s not living her best life with her husband. In short, she’s bored. But she agrees to not leave until after Christmas so as to not ruin the holiday for their little girl. So Sarah tells her the story of her youth, her love, and her song: She loved a local boy in her hometown, but she wanted bigger things, to be a singer, so she went off to Nashville, works as a secretary/receptionist at a recording label while trying to make it, got picked up by a womanizing country star who takes her on tour with promises of making her a star, but he’s not faithful to her, so she returns home only to find the boy has moved on, so she writes a song which captures her feelings for him which her Nashville bosses discover and make a hit, and he hears it on the radio and comes back to their hometown, and they live happily for five plus decades. After she finishes the story and sings the song for Beth, she gives Beth the red gloves and dies like Yoda. And Beth reconciles with her husband. Happy ending! Except, I suppose, for Sarah, although I guess she goes to heaven to be with her husband after fulfilling her last mission on earth.

Ah, twee.

The first anachronism I found was in 1940, teens (Sarah and her friend) were listening to records in their bedroom. That seems a little early for that particular trope. Also, the girl goes to Nashville in 1940 for a “record deal” which seems a little early for that particular development as well. And as she is struggling in Nashville, she is calling her parents long-distance twice a week. C’mon, man. In 1940, inexpensive apartments did not have telephones in them, and even in the 1980s, we weren’t calling someone long distance twice a week. That was expensive. Some of us can remember it. One presumes that many of the people who read Karen Kingsbury novels would know it, too, if they stopped to think of it.

But probably this book is not designed for thinking. It’s designed for quickly reading and feeling, and I’ve quickly read it and felt that I was not really the target audience. Not for any Christmas novel, actually, but yet I read them around this time of year when I can find them in the stacks.

I don’t know where I came up with this book–I have three such titles in the Red Gloves series, which is not a series with the same characters but rather different Christmas-themed books which Kingsbury wrote to raise money for some charitable organization. After a Christmas-themed trivia night where we led all night only to lose in the final round to a team using “mulligans” for free points (which we do not as we are trivia night purists), I thought I would pick this book up for my Christmas novel this year since I knew where it was–atop the bookshelves in the office.

So: Earl was a family man who enjoyed Christmas with his wife and daughter and his parents and siblings, but he was not a believer. His wife and daughter are killed on their way to or from church, and Earl goes into a downward spiral until he’s homeless for five years when the book begins. He’s trying to be heartless, and the only things he cares about are the red gloves his wife made him (I get the sense red gloves are a motif that all the books will share). When they’re stolen, Earl starts thinking about ending it all.

Meanwhile, Gideon is an eight-year-old girl living with leukemia whose parents are living hand-to-mouth. The mother is working two jobs, and the father is only getting 12 hours a week at “the mill,” but that allows him to take his daughter to the doctor and whatnot. Gideon goes into remission long enough to move the plot forward, which is that she wants to help serve at “the mission” (her parents volunteer a lot even though they’re poor). Where she meets Earl and wants to make him believe again, so she gives him a present which he eventually opens–and it’s the red gloves! Which she bought at a second hand shop since the thief sold them or something?

At any rate, she gets sick again, and it’s dire, but Earl believes now, and it turns out he’s a rich homeless man who pays for her bone marrow transplant and reconciles with his family. And finis!

Oh, and the book has a wrapper story thirteen years later at Gideon’s wedding, so a lot of possible suspense is lost. But I guess you’re not reading this for suspense.

So it was a quick read–I ploughed through the 146 pages in an evening–but.

I mean, it’s not my first Christmas novel, so I know to expect a bit of unreality, some magic or divine intervention, but this book, this short story or novella, really, made me raise my eyebrow. I mean, the experience of the homeless guy–let’s be honest, I can too easily picture myself in that situation, as the whole year I have known my job situation was tenuous and my continued employability questionable and knowledge of the cash flow situation led me to conclude that if I lost my wife and kids and job, I would be in a perilous situation indeed–but this homeless guy has both his parents alive in a single household and one or more siblings, and he has a big payout from the accident that claimed his wife and kid, and he lived with his parents for a while after, but then he gave that all up to just live on the streets in a different city. I mean, that seems…. contrived. I don’t know. Perhaps I was just disappointed in the character whose path to homelessness did not involve having no money and no family.

Also, the father is only working 12 hours a week at “the mill”? What is he doing there, and what kind of shift or shifts is that? A single twelve hour shift? Two sixes? Is he a part time janitor or food service worker? It just clangs.

And the remission of the little girl lasting just long enough to make the events of the book happen…. Eh.

I get the sense that I am going to be harsher on these books than others–I’ve already started the next one I have of the series, and I’ve already encountered my first Oh, really? in the first chapter. But my beautiful wife, who has read many Karen Kingsbury books, asked me if this was the one with the homeless guy and said it was not one of her better books. So after ploughing through these three Christmas novellas, I won’t necessarily shun any other Kingsbury books I find on my to-read shelves. Unless the next two are also rather Oh, really?

I guess it has been seven years that this book has floated near the top of the paperbacks stacked horizontally on the broken bookshelves as I bought it and some others in Branson in 2017. What, I have not repaired or replaced those bookshelves which broke ten years ago? Ah, gentle reader, no. And probably not soon given our current lack of means of visible support.

So this book is a bit of pure rocket-jockey stuff like you would get out of vintage Heinlein. Pournelle extrapolated a world from the middle 1970s which is strangely not so hard to extrapolate from ours: The government has become paternalistically totalitarian, but it lets juveniles commit crimes without consequences. Universities are overbooked and overadministrated into Kafkaesque hellscapes. The best the students can hope for is a union job that will get them out of the squalid megacities. Meanwhile, a couple of entrepreneurs and corporations fancy themselves the saviors of humanity want to mine asteroids. In this world, Kevin, a university engineering student accidentally kills a juvie gang member as they plan to rob him and/or torture him to death. As the gang’s attacks escalate and police are powerless, Kevin discovers some of his credits won’t transfer, so he would have to attend two extra years of college if he survived.

But he’s put in touch with an outfit that can employ him on Ceres, the asteroid, so he heads out with an attractive young woman, and adventures ensue including intrigue as to who might be trying to keep them from reaching Ceres and why and what to do when they get there.

I flagged a couple of things: In one spot, a computer nerd pets a simple computer and says he’ll teach it to play Star Trek–which is fresh in mind because I read about it in 50 Years of Text Games (and I remember playing the Commodore 64 port back in the 1980s). I also flagged a spot where a man in his fifties was described as elderly; clearly, that’s from the perspective of a college student–Pournelle himself could not have held that view as he was 45 when the book came out.

I also noted that the last page was an ad for a play-by-mail game called StarWeb; 50 Years of Text Games also mentioned play-by-mail games, so I was familiar with it. Apparently, StarWeb lived on until 2021 at least (its Web site looks like it might now be defunct, but the page for StarWeb says it was updated in 2004 and probably didn’t need updating after that). Still, it intersects with what I’ve been reading, partly because I’m elderly and because I read old books and books about old things.

At any rate, a nice little read amidst all the other things I’m reading. You know, I did not really read much Pournelle when I was younger. I guess when I went through science fiction phases, I was getting Del Rey paperbacks-in-library-binding and then the big names. And Pournelle wasn’t really on the pantheon. Which is unfortunate, as I think I would have enjoyed them. I’ll pick them up as I come across them, though.

I am not sure where I picked this book up; it is not included in a Good Book Hunting post, so I might have gotten it before I started them, or I might have gotten it at a garage sale where the small number of books I bought did not warrant a photo and comment. At any rate, I will not try to calculate how long has passed since I first read this book, but it was probably longer than The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I went through my real Gregory McDonald phase in middle school and high school where I borrowed the books from the Community Library. Although I reckon I could have read it at college. Or even later; it’s entirely possible I will find the book already in the read books section of the library when I try again to organize it.

So this is the third of the Inspector Flynn books. Flynn is a Boston homicide detective, but he gets called away a lot on special cases (presumably, the preceding two books and maybe Confess, Fletch where he also appears). He is awakened in the middle of the night by a police commissioner who instructs him to drive to a remote location and tell no one. And to come alone. So of course Flynn brings his sidekick Cocky, a medically retired policeman, and they discover that the commissioner is the guest of a secretive Rod and Gun Club where wealthy and powerful men come together to re-enact boarding school traditions and to be weird. One of their members has been shot and killed, and they have moved the body to a local motel that poses as the front for their two-thousand-acre retreat. They’ve brought Flynn in to discreetly investigate, but stymie him when other members start dying.

The cover says that it’s a novel with murder, and I think the main theme of the book is poking at the power brokers of the world or caricatures thereof. Amongst the club members who are suspects (and sometimes victims), we have a judge who wears a dress and makeup when at the lodge; a Senator who drinks heavily all day and all night; a nudist who wears nothing; and cold players determining the fate of companies owned by other members. Given the setting (an isolated hunting lodge) and its language/style, it must have seemed like quite a throwback to Agatha Christie and other protocozies with an American Poirot minus the facial hair investigating.

So it winds up within its 198 pages with perhaps not so much as a true whodunit–or maybe I just did not see the clues which in retrospect pointed to the killer because I’m not really into that genre these days and am out of practice for not so much clues in the story but clues in the writing.

At any rate, it was okay. I wonder how much my tastes have changed and evolved from when I was in the 1980s and limited to what the Community Library had in abundance. I am pretty sure I read a number of Dell Shannon/Elizabeth Linnington books back then and, well, read more than one (I read one, Blood Count, earlier this year and was pretty disappointed). I have to wonder what I would think of Fletch books now (I read three in the omnibus Fletch Forever, in 2011). I haven’t read a pile of McDonald since these book reports began which probably testifies to the memories my cells have about what I think about McDonald these days. Coupled with the fact that you don’t see many of his books in the wild any more–at least not where I browse fiction, which is the smaller library book sales predominated by recent thrillers and Westerns. But the peak of McDonald’s sales were in the 1980s, and those who bought him originally have emptied their houses long ago.

It almost seem like fait accompli that I would read this book after listening to the audiocourse The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin during a long car ride in early October. But I spotted the Classics Club edition and not the Harvard Classics edition that I bought in in 2020 when I assigned it to my boys to read during their long, long vacation from in-person classes. I’m not sure either of them actually read it, but the oldest has been looking for Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations which I also got in cheap editions for the boys about that time as well. Wait, that’s digressing.

So: Whereas the audiocourse was a long, full biography on Benjamin Franklin, Franklin wrote his actual autobiography in chunks. Part of it he wrote when he was young and was trying to capture what it was to be on his way up; the second part was written decades later when he was an accomplished businessman and influencer in Pennsylvania; and the last part of it was assembled from some notes after Franklin’s death. So this book is not the Director’s Cut. Or maybe it is. But it’s more than an autobiography as it gave some others time to do a bit of hagiography was well.

Still, it’s an amazing story: Franklin, born into a very large family, eventually becomes apprenticed to his brother a printer, but he breaks his apprenticeship and goes on the run from Boston to Philadelphia where he becomes a printer, eventually a writer and owner of a printshop, and he moves and shakes with the important men in the colony (but not necessarily the decendents of Penn who really owned the place). He makes the most of the opportunities he gets and speaks up on the virtue of industriousness (but, as we know from the audiocourse, although he described the virtues he espoused, he never completed The Art of Virtue). The autobiography, as I have mentioned, focuses mostly on his early life and mostly the business life as that is the example he was hoping to set. When get to page 246 of 300, we’re at 1756. His role in the events leading up to the American Revolution, the Revolution, his ambassadorship after, and his brief retirement get almost a page for each year depicted. Of course, this last was the bit the least assembled and polished by Franklin, and it’s at a high level summary. But, still, what a life.

Given my current position, hammering on the theme of personal industry was inspirational. My favorite aunt once said I had hustle because I had a full time job, a sideline of selling estate sale finds on Ebay, and thoughts of running a vending machine route or video game route. I somehow lost a bit of that ambition, probably after having a blog that did not turn profitable, publishing books which have not earned enough to cover the cost of the first book’s professional cover, trying to write a couple of software applications but getting stumped at certain points and doubting anyone would use them anyway, putting together a collection of fine fashion which has not sold a single t-shirt except to myself, and other bits of “hustle” that did not actually pay out. I have some ideas for other sidelines, but I’m not sure that they would pay out more than they cost, and certainly would unlikely pay me much in net revenue. But Franklin’s example leads me to thing maybe I should.

I read this book once before, probably in my college years–I think it was required for a class, but I’m not sure which one it would have been. I really need my transcripts to jog my memory of what exactly I took in that collection of English classes which was almost too many credits in one discipline to allow me to graduate. No, really.

At any rate, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. The text is very approachable, although the sentences are longer than you would get in a Don Pendleton paperback or a Jeff Kinney book designed to get kids to read. But I’ve found that it’s easier to read than English prose from the same period. And a pleasure to read as well. I’ll have to read this again, probably when I find the copy which I bought in 2020 or one of the cheap copies I bought for my boys.

And I’m going to just stop trying to guess what the longest time between re-reads is when I re-read a book. I mean, this book is, what, thirty years give or take? A while, indeed.

Ah, gentle reader, this certainly might be the most I’ve paid for a reading book so far. I mean, maybe I spent a similar amount on Homage to Catalonia when I bought it last year or The Gallic and Civil Wars when I bought it in 2014. But since I didn’t write down the exact price I paid for the books (and I’m too lazy to dig out the receipts because of course I still have them), I will just say that this is the most expensive set of books I’ve ever bought for reading since I backed the publication on Kickstarter for $125 (back in the days when I had a job and spent money on things like this and CDs by bands I’d only seen in a single YouTube video). To date, this is the only Kickstarter project I’ve backed. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

So, you say, “What is it?” Well, it is a long (623 pages including index) semi-scholarly look at the history of text-based games. It has a bit of a roll-up chapter leading to 1971, and then it has a chapter that gives a summary of the history of each decade (1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s). It then selects a single game from each year in each decade and gives a well-researched and written essay on that game not unlike you’d find on a Substack like The Lake of Lerna or The Librarian of Calaeno when they delve into popular culture or something you might have found on DamnInteresting.com back in the day (it looks like that site is still around, albeit more into podcasting these days–as you might remember, gentle reader, I tried out for that site in 2006). The essays touch upon the history of companies working in the space (Infocom, natch, but a couple of others), the technologies behind them (not only in discussing at a high level the parsers and whatnot but also including some sample code or data file extracts), and some of the people behind the games.

So, heck, yeah, it was quite a nostalgia kick. For a while. Because I played a number of the games listed in the first two or three decades if you include things ported to the Commodore 64 (I had a Commodore 128, gentle reader, but I downloaded a lot of things from BBSes for the Commodore 64).

I mean, I played Eliza. I played Super Star Trek. I played many Infocom titles–I still have Zork, Zork II, Suspended, and Deadline not in the original packaging but later folder packages. I played TradeWars 2001 on several WWIV BBSes (and I actually have downloaded the source code for TradeWars 2002 and have it somewhere around here). The latest of the games listed by name (but not covered in depth) that I played would have been Gemstone Warrior 3 around 1997–I remember introducing it to a friend from the print shop at the time, and he got into it, but his dialup access was long distance, so it amongst other things led to his declaring bankruptcy sometime shortly thereafter. After that, I didn’t really play games but the Civilization series past that (and up to now, as you know).

But:

One, as text games faded from the forefront, it seems to have become more of a community, with its proponents, academics, and development of games to satisfy the community more than the public. Many of the selections in this book are explicated more because they’re interesting to someone steeped in the culture of text games. Kind of like how art criticism and art itself in many cases has turned inward, pleasing artists and critics more than the public at large. It doesn’t make the essays about the games less interesting per se but it does make one wonder. Often, I read two or three chapters/years of essays in this vein and then got a chapter about an interesting game that was interesting to read about in itself.

Second, well, the book does have its political moments. I mean, it does talk a lot and choose several queer games (his word as he is academically minded), and it does celebrate/elevate trans and nonbinary representation. It made me muse about the nature of outsider community–in my day (sonny), playing on computers and reading comic books and science fiction and fantasy were an outsider community, whereas today, that is mainstream pop culture–so do people who consider themselves outsiders gravitate toward the current self-reinforcing outsider communities that trans and nonbinary life (and, somehow, certain political viewpoints which are almost 50% of the electorate apparently)? That’s outside the scope of this book and this blog. But back to the actual political elements: It gets all the way to 1985’s chapter on Infocom’s A Mind Forever Voyaging before slagging on Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump (president when the book was written, and soon to be president again). And not just slagging, but vituperating. And we get more sucker punch vituperation in the chapter on AI Dungeon because Trump is a lying liar who lies!!!!! (my words, but the spirit is there). For the most part, the book is even-tempered in its disposition, but the little political slaps are there, unfortunately. Also, GamerGate gets a couple of relitigations from the defense of the gamewriter who slept with game reviewers (or something), although that’s not the crux of the matter as it’s presented: it’s mouthbreathers who buy games versus the community (of text game writers and perhaps only those who think correctly).

One does wonder, though, if the author was just too darn young to realize how much Hitler George W. Bush was, too. Is it just me, or does he get overlooked in the pantheon of the worst presidents EVAR!!!!? Millenials filling the Internet are too young to remember, I guess.

Overall, though, those two bits only slightly diminished my enjoyment of the book, although I have to admit that I really got more out of the earlier years where I had first hand experience of the games. Heck, I can even see in my mind’s eye the advertisements for some of them. I could probably re-read the ads and the reviews in my stash of mid-to-late 1980s Commodore magazines (Run and Power Play which would become Commodore Magazine and Ahoy! and maybe Compute’s Gazette). I flagged a sidebar note about Little Computer People–I still have a copy with Bradley, my Little Computer Person, on it. I flagged his mention of a book called Pilgrim in the Microworld by David Sudnow, a book about a guy who got obsessed with the Atari game Breakout!. Man, I picked that up used or remaindered around 1990 and read it. When the book was less than 10 years old (I was there, Gandalf). But it seemed twee to me at the time because technology had changed so much in that decade.

As I got in on a mid or upper tier of the Kickstarter, I got a shorter companion volume entitled 50 Years of Text Games: Further Explorations which has another couple of games called out and brief essays on some text-adjacent game genres. It’s only 57 pages including a timeline of text adventure games at the end, but it’s a nice contiuation of the book. And I counted it as a whole book in my annual total (82 so far, and I’m feeling good–I might make it all the way if I start ripping through some poetry collections).

At any rate, a nice nostalgia trip despite clear signs that the author would vigorously and probably unkindly disagree with my political views.

And it really makes me want to unbox one of my Commodore 64s and run through some of these games that I was not patient enough to appreciate when I was fourteen. Only to discover that I am probably still not patient enough for Suspended.

I bought this book in Davenport, Iowa, last month, and the author signed it for me. He was the only author at a cybersecurity convention, and his table took the whole end of the single cul-de-sac of the vendor area. He has a lot of books available, including three in this series, and several other multi-volume series to choose from and a couple of one-offs. That many quells my temptation to buy one of each, so I bought the first two in a couple of series and a one-off Western. I was tempted to buy a children’s book, briefly, but I remembered then with a start that my children are too old for children’s books. As they’re old enough to carry phones to high school and college now (what?), they’re too old for books as all their handheld entertainment comes from what tech companies feed them.

So: I picked this book up first because it has a mystery element to it. A mining company re-opens a mine three years after an accident claimed the lives of all the miners in a particular sector. Because it’s a profitable mine, they reopen it with some questions in place and with maybe a ghost in the old sector. The book starts with a new miner, Justin, coming to the planet with his friend Keontae. Justin vomits on re-entry, embarrassing himself in front of an attractive woman and the mine’s bully and his buddies.

Meanwhile, strange things are afoot at the Circle K. A hacker is lured into the mine and disappears. When Justin is out of his quarters at night, a mysterious green light leads him into the mines and the mysterious Sector 6 which is still closed. And the cold, half-cyborg (can one be half-cyborg? One is either a cyborg or not, I guess) a FULL cyborg scientist who was the only survivor three years ago brings Justin into a conspiracy. And Justin cannot keep from running afoul of security for the mining corporation and the bullies at the mine.

So the book has a lot of interesting plot getting set up, and then….

Well, I won’t be ordering the next two in the series.

The writing is a bit…. sterile, I guess. It’s not bad writing. It’s not full of grammar errors or misspellings or anything, but it lacks depth and soul.

I had been reading a book about text games for a while when I started this book, so I perhaps too easily compared the first part of the book to a text adventure, with the way it mapped out the mining complex and described entrances and exits and things that might be useful (the last is probably more in how I was reading the book after weeks of reading about text adventures). The main character, Justin, is a bit of a cipher–we don’t know from where he’s coming and going, and the plot carries him along as he mostly follows the mysterious light or follows the actions or guidance of others (NPCs) in the book. About half way through the book, though, it turns from slow text adventure mapping and buildup to watching someone else’s Twitch stream of a Doom knock-off. We have a party led by space marines but which includes the main character (now with a cybernetic arm), a few of the named miners with a couple sentences’ of characterization, the CEO of the corporation who was compelled to come in person to the mine, a couple members of corporate security, and the CEO’s body guard go marching through ranks of bloodthirsty mutated corporate minions and murderous androids. A couple, and that is more than one twists of family melodrama, too, amidst all the gore and finis via a deus ex machina whose twist I’d spotted early on. And beyond the finis a bit of a…. well, not cliffhanger, but a tip to the mystery and the twist that might come in the next book.

The author signed it “Read this with the lights on!” along with Joshua 1: 5-9 (in which God tells Joshua to be courageous). To be honest, it was not that suspenseful. Oh, and the last line is:

And Justin never saw her again.

Easy, son. You’re not Raymond Chandler. None of us is.

So: I mean, it’s okay. But too much influenced by video games and related cinema. The third person narration doesn’t give us a lot of depth to any of the characters.

The book is seven years old; I’m not sure where it came in this writer’s cannon-like canon (best I can tell from his bio is that he started around 2009 and by 2019 had about ten books, so it’s not that early). Still, he’s clearly comfortable in writing and his output, so who am I to criticize? Given that he looks to work the con circuit in the Midwest, I might run into him again sometime. And perhaps I’ll pick up the next book in the series.

Like Bad Monkey, I got this book down in Clever in June, and I read them back to back, which is just as well as they feature the same characters. Well, a couple of them.

In this one, the agent of a cable television star who stars in a knock off of Duck Dynasty is in the keys to perform at a comedy club. But he’s an accordian player from Milwaukee (well, Whitefish Bay) only playing a redneck on television, and when his agent is accidentally kidnapped when a woman rear-ends his car whilst shaving her bikini area (we discover where the title comes from very early), the television star causes a near riot with, erm, jokes about gays and disfavored colloquialisms for black people in a club featuring many black gay men. So he, the television star, goes into hiding, and the agent is eventually helped out by the Razor Girl, but a big fan of the television star who wants to be more bigoted than his redneck hero kills a swarthy fellow on the tourist tram and ends up kidnapping his hero to become his friend. Meanwhile, there are some subplots about mobsters and recycled sand scams. Andrew Yancy’s girlfriend the coroner-turned-ER doctor flies to Europe to leave him behind. Yancy investigates the situation while trying to keep an attorney who is addicted to the hazardous aphrodisiac deodorant that he’s running television ads for class action lawsuits from building on the lot next to his house.

Again, a crash of various threads, characters, and zany situations where the mystery is solved in the middle of the book and the rest of it is resolution amongst the whacky characters.

Amusing; not a waste of time, but not high literature, and it has not overtaken in my heart the things I’ve read of his long ago from long ago.

But I know what you’re wondering:

• Trump? Yes, of course, but only a mention that someone has Trumpish lips. This book might have been written before he ran for president or during. Not when he somehow won.
• The baddest word? I thought that Hiaasen had given it up because he uses the N-word early in the book, but the redneck antagonist does, in fact, invoke the whole badness.

He has a later book, but it does not appear to be a Yancy title.

Apparently, Bad Monkey was turned into a television series just this fall and stars Vince Vaughn as Yancy. So it might be worth a watch when it comes out on DVD. Which is likely never, as most streaming does not.

After reading The Downhill Lie, Hiaasen’s nonfiction golf book, I gave myself permission to read this book, a recent acquisition. I have read many, many fine Hiaasen books in the past (see also Skinny Dip, Strip Tease, Nature Girl, Lucky You, Stormy Weather, Basket Case, and even the YA novel Hoot). Still, this is a 21st century book, so I was looking for a sucker punch, but the book came during the holy interregnum of the Obama administration, so none was forthcoming (spoiler alert!).

At any rate, the story focuses on Andrew Yancy, a former police detective in the Florida Keys who has been busted from the force for publicly sodomizing with a cordless handheld vacuim the husband of a woman with whom Yancy was having an affair. His allies on the force help to get him a food inspector gig which he talks reluctantly. A tourist on a fishing charter catches the arm of a swindler about to be taken down for a Medicare scam, and Yancy is given the job of pawning it and the case off on the Miami police. He does not succeed and pursues a murder investigation on his own time. Was it the wife and her mystery man? Meanwhile, Yancy is trying to scare off a real estate speculator who has bought the lot next to his and wants to build a large home which will block Yancy’s view. Also, he is trying to woo the medical examiner in Miami while trying to determine what to do with the woman with whom he is having an affair, whom he learns is a fugitive teacher who seduced a student fifteen years ago. Oh, and someone is building a resort on a Bahaman island, the homestead of a simple fisherman who won the titular bad monkey and who commissions the local woodoo woman to curse the resort builder.

All these threads come together, of course. The book makes the Big Reveal about half way through the book, and then we get another half where the characters deal with the ramifications of the big reveal and a gradual denouement that probably goes on a little too long.

But you’re not reading the book for the plot, per se. Instead, you’re reading the book for the characters and the zany situations and…. Well, I was kinda meh. Yancy’s a bit of a slacker, and he smokes a lot of pot, and one wonders how it is he gets these attractive women to throw themselves at him. And it might have a couple too many situations and characters to be truly compelling. Or maybe I’ve outgrown Hiaasen and Dave Barry (maybe not–my review for The History of the Millennium (So Far) last year doesn’t indicate meh, but perhaps it was the nostalgia for a simpler time–2008–talking).

Two things:

• Does Trump make an appearance? You betcha! This is a pre-presidency book, though, so it’s not hateful. A character says:
  

  “Showin’ off is all. He said he come into serious money, but that could mean he won eighty-five bucks on the Lotto scratch-off. Now all of a sudden he is Donald fucking Trump.”

• The baddest word appears. This came out in the first year of the second Obamanency, which is far later than you find it in other writers. In the dark age of the 20th century, as in this book, it appears to show how backward the person using it is, but that petered out somewhere around 2005 in most books, or at least most books I’ve read after that (which is not that many, I admit). But it was noticeable mostly for the copyright date of the book.

Just things you can comment on and notice about books and how just the asides can date them. Or not.

So the book was all right. It didn’t drive me away from Hiaasen, but it looks as though I’ve read most of his ouevre already anyway.

Oh, and the titular monkey? I’m really not sure why he got the title slot, honestly. Perhaps Hiaasen had bigger plans for him.

I picked this book up in Davenport, Iowa, earlier this month, and when I sought a book of poetry to leaven my evening reading, I grabbed it. As I mentioned, this is a lavishly illustrated 1909 book that makes me want to buy some Mylar to wrap it. It’s in fine condition and was only $10. I guess Riley fans are few and far between these centuries.

As it stands, this is not a collection of poems, but a single poem lavishly illustrated. Pages with text have a series of borders with color illustrations of schoolday activities rotating at the top, and the book also features 10 slick full page illustrations woven throughout. The poem itself is a nostalgic look back at school days and a bit of the first romances you have at school, which leads to a bit of a question as for whom the book was made. Children still in school? They would like the pictures, I guess. Older people reminiscing? Perhaps it’s designed for parents and grandparents to read to children.

The poem itself is not something I’ll memorize, but the book is beautiful, and I’m glad to own it.

I’m also still a James Whitcomb Riley fan, although apparently Little Orphant Annie and Other Poems remains the only other book I’ve read. Maybe I’ll get that 10-volume set from ABC Books yet.

It seems like I just read Hondo, but I guess it has been a couple of weeks. Which is a very short “just” in terms of the passage of time in my head, but it’s still been a couple of weeks. This book first appeared only a couple of years after Hondo, which was apparently his L’Amour’s first, but it actually reads more like a men’s adventure paperback or later work than the straight forward Hondo.

In this book, wandering gun Matt Brennan comes to a small town in Utah and falls in love at first sight with a young woman. He learns that there’s a bit of trouble between two large cattle operations squeezing a single man building a ranch in the canyon between them, and violence is breaking out. Turns out that the girl whom he decides he will marry is the daughter of one of the big boys. He has trouble with a man who thinks he’s courting the girl (the guy beats the tar out of him), and he (Brennan) signs up with the man in the middle ranch. But that ranch owner is killed but before he does, he gifts the ranch to Brennan, who vows to defend it. The girl’s father dies of a gunshot wound on the ranch, and Brennan is briefly considered a suspect. His name is still Mudd, but he discovers a third party plot to stir up the violence between the ranches for what might be a silver strike initially found by another courter of the girl who left suddenly. Or was he murdered?

Compared to Hondo, it is a very busy novel with the intra-human intrigue coming to light slowly and with the characters, particularly Brennan, spending paragraphs or pages mulling over not even so much the possibilities but how much he cannot figure it out. So a bit more like the Pendleton Mack Bolan books in that regard.

Which is probably why this book is not considered in conversations about L’Amour’s best works. Not that I am privy to those conversations. I’m just a guy on the Internet, providing elementary school-level book reports and hoping not to get asked tough questions about them. Because I’ve read a couple of books since this one and only dimly remember it outside of the brief summary I’ve listed above. And the thought that gunslingers in the old West should not really punch men in the face a couple of times and expect to close their hands around a gun butt anytime soon.

I just read Carl Hiaasen’s golf book The Downhill Lie, so I figured that there would be no better time to read George Plimpton’s golf book as now. I’ve previously read his Paper Lion (in 2016) and Open Net (just last year). At some point when I was moving books on the shelves, I put this book right next to Open Net so I knew where it was exactly. Which meant I had no reason not to read it at this time, especially as I am not a golfer, so I’m not reading golf books all the time.

The conceit is similar to Paper Lion: George Plimpton joins the PGA Tour for a number of tournaments, although he plays in the Pro-Am events and not the actual professional tournaments. And, as is his fashion, he drops a hella lot of names even when they’re not golfers. He meets Bing Crosby at the Bing Crosby tournament; Andy Williams calls him over to give him some golf advice; and Samuel F.B. Morse, not that one, his relation who was wealthy on his relation’s inventions; and so on. He relates numerous heresay stories, including one about Bobby Riggs who was a notorious gambler even in 1969 and older golfers who retired decades before.

The chapters break on two things: First, topical stories which discuss things like the “yips” (nerves) which afflict golfers, the life of a caddy and stories they tell of golfers, superstitions of pro golfers, and so on, and second, the events and people he meets on the tour. He is not as good of a golfer as even Hiaasen, and he ruminates and marinates in that an awful lot (and says at the end of the book that he probably did too much of it instead of enjoying the experience).

The book climaxes with a locker room interview with Arnold Palmer where Plimpton is a bit awed by the professional and does not get the information out of him that he wanted and suspects he did not impress the legendary golfer (extra legendary because he was retired when I was a kid and is now known mostly for his soft drink). Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino are mentioned in passing, and they’re the only golfers whose names I recognize.

I enjoyed the book far more than the Hiaasen book. Plimpton provides real insight into the pro tour in the 1960s, such as how much a pro had to make in each tournament to cover the cost of travel (they generally drove from tournament to tournament in their own cars) and lodging, the lives of caddies (in the summer, professional caddies were essentially laid off so that country clubs could use local teens), the rise of the driving ranges just off of the highway (what, Top Golf and Big Shots Golf were not 21st century inventions?), and others. His writing style is definitely richer as he’s a long form writer writing a book, not just a columnist trying to stretch a couple of essays and a diary into a book. Also, Plimpton is a generation or two ahead of Hiaasen so he probably has a better-rounded education, and his upbringing in New York gives him a wealth of stories and names to drop (which bothered me less than in Paper Lion, apparently).

Plimpton has quite a bibliography. I should look for more of his books in the wild as I seem to be running low (as far as I can tell). But who knows what I might find in the wild if I actually look in the P section?