Category: Book Report

This is a fascinating book, especially on the meta level.

It is the autobiography of Horace Conner, born in 1919. Here’s how he puts it in the first lines of the book:

I was born on May 15, 1912 in Cotton County, Oklahoma, the southern part of Oklahoma on the Little Red River. I was the second child. The year I was born my father’s house was blown away in a cyclone.

And we’re off.

The book chronicles, in some order, his youth in a large, blended family; his businesses throughout the Depression with his father, particularly working on farms and orchards; his drafting into World War II and his service in the Navy and in post-surrender Japan; then his return to the United States, his failed marriage, his carousing and carrying on with women; and then his jobs after the war, including time in a produce market and a distribution center for Marshall Fields in Kansas City.

It’s a life of some dude who didn’t do particularly heroic things or live a particularly memorable life. But the voice is complex and engaging, or maybe I’m reading too much into it.

He’s humble, saying he wasn’t very good at writing at school, but here he’s written the book. He does a lot of humble bragging, where he does something and throws in that someone who saw him do it thinks he’s the best they’ve ever seen at it; I’m not sure if he is actually humblebragging because he’s good at it and wants affirmation of it or if he’s throwing it in to say it’s because he’s showing us he is too good at something. Some of the things he’s done that are less than heroic are just dropped in, like selling stuff from the Navy on the black market. But he also throws in stuff that he does that’s all right, like feeding Japanese war orphans from the back of his ship. He admits that he’s a bit of a carouser and not good relationship material, but that’s matter-of-fact and he doesn’t regret it or think it’s immoral or counterproductive. He goes out of town on a pleasure trip and ends up missing a day of work, and the excuse he gives his boss is that he was in jail in Sedalia. That’s his best excuse. And the manager buys it and keeps him on. What does that say outside the text of the book?

Most tellingly, he mentions that he wanted to have children and that he enjoyed time with his stepson while he was married, but he leaves no admitted progeny. He talks about retiring and picking up his small entrepreneurial ways, delivering some produce and selling it from his trucks. But he doesn’t much mention church–although he claims to read the Bible, particularly Proverbs. And he talks a little about his methodology of research at the library to make sure he gets his dates right in the book.

But he never explains why he wrote the book.

It’s not for his kids. Perhaps his nieces and nephews? I don’t know. For someone who claimed to not be a good writer, he didn’t do badly. But why did he do it? The writing of this book does not necessarily jibe with the simple man described within it.

As I said, on the meta level, it’s fascinating. And it wasn’t a bad read (better than An Ozark Boy’s Story for example) but there’s no real climactic payoff. After all, this is the life of a man. Also, gentle reader, it’s apparently $125 on the Internet, so you’ll probably not pick it up.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book was a part of my beautiful wife’s collection until she decided to winnow her collection down. I culled the discards for books I wanted, and so I got this one. Which I might have gotten for her as a gift in the swirling clouds of the past.

This book is a collection of poems as written by famous poets’ cats. You’ve got “The Cat’s Tale” by Chaucer’s cat, “Vet, Be Not Proud” by John Donne’s cat, “Kubla Kat” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s cat, and so on.

They’re very clever, and I felt very clever and/or well-read for recognizing most of the source material. It only cost me $40,000 plus interest in an English degree for that.

But, as with my riff about the loss of allusion in heavy metal music, I have to wonder if there are many Generation X-level people who would enjoy this book or if there are any members of later generations that would get them at all. Some, I suppose, but not many. Ah, life. There is no before-me, there is no after-me, there is only during-me.

At any rate, as I said, I enjoyed the brief little book, and the book made me want to re-read the poems they were based on. Did you know I used to be able to recite “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from memory? Indeed, I used to do it at poetry open-mic nights in St. Louis, and I impressed my beautiful wife (then my beautiful girlfriend)’s mother, an English teacher in high school, by reciting it to her the first time we met. But that’s been a long time. I should work on re-memorizing those things.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book was designed as a gift for graduating seniors. It’s got a little place for a to and from in the beginning and a message. Given that 1995 was about seventeen years from 1978 (and ninteen years from now, old man), I’m deducing here.

It’s a little book of tidbits, a couple lists about news stories and pop culture in the year 1978.

I was six in 1978, so I don’t remember any of the news from that time. I mean, I do know of the things now: the Camp David Accords, Jim Jones, Sid and Nancy, and so on, but I don’t remember knowing them at the time. The first news things I think I can recollect are gas lines, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.

The only pop-cultural things I knew then were the television programs: Laverne and Shirley number 1, Happy Days number 2. But I know of the music (“Night Fever” the number one record, higher than “Stayin’ Alive”. Really?) and the books (#1: If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing In The Pits?) because the cultural impact is more resonant over the years than the news items themselves.

Still, it’s a good reprise to bring you back a bit and maybe freshen things up if the Jeopardy! people summon me for an audition this year.

And, strangely enough, it’s probably a quicker read than this blog post was.

Books mentioned in this review:

Ah, now this book is a little more manly that decoupagistry.

This book is the first of a three-volume set that includes all of the Conan stories in the original order, which is to say not chronological order according to Conan’s point of view. Howard wrote just a bunch of stories from Conan’s life with a handy history guide he created after a couple of the stories.

For those of you who don’t know, the Conan stories are set in a prehistoric age called the Hyborean Age wedged between the fall of Atlantis and the rise of our recorded civilizations. They’re centered around a land mass similar to Europe, but different enough. Conan is a king fighting assassins, a pirate, a mercenary, and a bunch of different things as he swashbuckles through a series of adventures that are fresh enough in the beginning, but at the end of the volume start to become just a touch formulaic. As they would, being the inspiration for many knock-offs we’ve all seen in film since then and have read other stories (Brak the Destroyer, I’m looking at you–John Jakes endorses the Conan stories with a quote on the cover, and he’s identified as the author of North and South, but I remember him most as a writer of a couple of collected volumes of stories similar to this).

It’s definitely sword and sorcery, as the gods, demons, and summoning make up many parts of plot points. Some of the descriptions are even Lovecraftian–and it comes as no surprise, as Howard and Lovecraft corresponded and worked for the same editors and magazines. Conan stories are a bit like Lovecraft stories where humanity gets to hit back.

In addition to the stories, there are a couple of introductory and academic essays explaining the Importance of Howard and a bit of his writing chronology. They’re okay if you don’t take them too seriously and don’t mind skipping past it. I don’t know why I want my actual histories to be written by homers who appreciate and somewhat applaud or respect their subject, but I get a little irritated when editors and literature majors do that with fiction.

The book also includes the aforementioned history of the Hyborean age that Howard wrote to keep his notes and stories straight, some maps in his hand, and some fragments and drafts. It also includes his first draft of his first Conan story. When you compare them directly, you get a pretty good sense of how editting can improve writing. I’m a poor editor, as readers of my books can attest, but this example offers a stark example of the benefits.

So I enjoyed the book, but given its length and the fact that it is short stories means it took me longer than I would have liked to have read it. So although I own the other volumes, I don’t expect to dive right into them immediately. But I look forward to them.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is The Executioner in New York, blowing things up and shooting Mafia.

The title says New York, but it could be anywhere, of course. The sense of place is pretty much limited to the title. You get more sense of place and time from Nightmare in Manhattan, for crying out loud. And it’s a series of set pieces much like the rest of the books.

Sorry, I read it hard on the heels of Hard Magic, so it suffers by comparison. A lot.

So now I look at the shelves full of Bolan titles with a little trepidation.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got this book as a Christmas gift for my nephew this year along with the mass market paperback of its sequel Spellbound. Only after I received them did I check my Amazon history and discover that I gave my nephew Hard Magic last year, which means this was an inadvertent display of the One for you, one for me gift protocol.

I’ve read Larry Correia’s blog for some time, and although his books sounded interesting, it took an accident like this (or the eventual appearance of them at book fairs) for me to get a hold of one and to read it. And I liked it.

The book is a fantasy alt-history where Magic was discovered in the late 18th or early 19th century. Individuals tend to have an aspect of magic, such as gravity control, personal density control, telekinesis, and so on. Most have only one power, and some are stronger than others.

In this world, a secret society of magicians are working to keep a super weapon out of the hands of the Imperium, the Japanese expansionist government. The action takes place in the 1930s of this other history, and the main character is an ex-con war hero. As part of his release from prison, he’s supposed to help the FBI apprehend wanted magic-users, and his last assignment is to help apprehend a woman he’d known before going inside. That snatch turns bad, but it puts him in touch with the secret society, and he becomes embroiled in their intrigues.

The pacing and tone reflects that of higher pulp, but its length and the number of jump scenes and sub or hidden plots reflect a modern thriller sensibility. It moves along better than some of the ponderous longer works, though, so I finished it in shorter time than some shorter works.

And with greater pleasure.

I read a lot of low pulp, men’s adventure novels, and this book contrasts starkly to them. Where they’re set pieces with set explosions and gunplay amongst stock scenes and characters, there’s real imagination in this book and so much novelty that I’ll remember its plot and schtick better than individual Mack Bolan books, say, where Mack goes somewhere and infiltrates/blows up some Mafia hardmen and the city name in the title is the only differentiating factor.

So I won’t turn down gifts of other Correia books, and if I find them in a book fair, I’ll pounce on them. Or maybe next year, I’ll “accidentally” pick more duplicates for my nephew.

And whereas I used to want to write pulp fiction akin to Robert B. Parker, Mickey Spillane, the MacDonalds, and whatnot, I think I’ll aspire to better things and more memorable books.

Also, if you dreamed of being a writer when you were a kid, check out Correia’s blog or Marko Kloos’s blog to get a glimpse of the life of successful writing you imagined. There’s work involved, and success.

Books mentioned in this review:

Apparently, I am trending science fiction this year, as this book is the second by Pohl I have read this autumn interspersed with some Philip K. Dick and whatnot. I must feel like I need an escape from the real world and crime.

This book revolves around an ancient alien artifact, an outpost on an asteroid off of the solar system elliptical that has about a thousand alien ships with autopilot programmed into them. Man has not yet figured much about these ships; only that they seem programmed to return to the asteroid, called Gateway by man, and they have a lander. So volunteers risk their lives hoping to strike it rich with discoveries at the ships’ destinations, even though many of them do not return from the journeys.

The book focuses on one fellow who won a lottery on earth and bought a ticket to Gateway. Once there, though, he forestalled his eventual trip until he was running out of money.

The narrative is twin-pronged: one timeline is his experience on Gateway, and the second is the future of his trip to Gateway, when he is fabulously wealthy but is seeing an analyst. It turns out something traumatic happened, and he eventually comes to terms with it as it is revealed in the earlier timeline.

I didn’t see where it was going; I thought it would have a more epic resolution, but a lot of these early science fiction stories described big changes to individuals, but not epic wins at the end. So I was pleased that the book did not resolve as I thought, and I think it resolved better than Black Star Rising. The story is also spaced out, filled out, by advertisements, reports, news articles, and other sidebar material that adds to the whole conceit.

As I researched this book report, I learned that this is part of a series that Pohl continued. I’ll keep my eyes open for other titles in the series, as I’m interested in learning what happens to some of the characters after this book ends. So let THAT be my final rating on it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up this book at the library on Tuesday, the third snow day in a row for my children, when we needed to get out of the house. I wanted something to flip through for a bit while they played on the computers at the library. This book is a good little flip through book.

It is a collection of reminisciences from a Branson-area emcee and radio personality who’s lived in Branson for a couple of decades and has talked with a number of the artists who perform on the strip. So he captures their stories in a bit of history in the area in a book that promotes Branson just a touch as he talks about it.

As you know, I’m not against that sort of thing; I prefer some enthusiasm about the subjects I’m reading about. So when he’s talking about the Presleys and how they opened their theatre or about how some of the acts have moved around from venue to venue, I enjoy it even though I’m not paying that close of attention.

The book runs only 97 pages, so it’s a couple hours long. It’s an AuthorHouse self-published book, so it has a couple of typos, but not enough to distract you from the vignettes. Worth a read if you’re into local history or flavor of the Ozarks.

It’s a nice counterpoint or antidote to Jeanette Cooperman’s piece in the October 2013 issue of St. Louis magazine, “Branson Between the Centuries“, wherein a hip big city woman comes to Branson to diminish it for a slick.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is set in the Parker universe, but its main character is a sometime associate of Parker, Alan Grofield. Grofield participates in jobs to fund his summer stock theater in the boonies.

So when an associate tells him about a payroll job, he attends the initial meeting; however, the plan involves a lot of killing, which ain’t his bag, baby, so Grofield opts out, as do the other professionals in attendance. The guy organizing the job then robs one of Grofields friends after attacking Grofield, which leads to a bloody revenge and counter-revenge tail that includes an unrelated grocery store heist.

It’s a quick read, good enough that Hard Case Books republished it 35 years after its appearance. Grofield is a warmer character than Parker, so there’s a twist of sorts in the writing and reading of it, but it’s obviously in line with the Parker books.

I liked it, and I’ll continue to pick up Richard Stark books when I can. Yes, I know, it’s really Donald Westlake.

Books mentioned in this review:

There’s nothing like a Philip K. Dick book to pick you up when you’re feeling down. Personally, I picked this book up at a book sale sometime recently, as it’s an ex-library book with Christian County Library stamps on it. I’m always happy to grab a used book from this master, as you don’t see many of them out in the wild. Because they don’t want you to have them.

A popular television personality with a weekly audience of millions finds himself a victim of attempted murder by one of his lovers; the next morning, instead of dead, he finds himself in a seedy residential hotel with his roll of money but no papers, and nobody from his previous life knows who he is. He has to rely on his wits to survive, and it’s fortunate that he’s a Six–the product of a genetic experiment of some sort that makes him smarter and more charismatic than normal man. He hooks up with a document forger since he lacks papers in a totalitarian society, but the forger is an insane police informant. He then hooks up with the sister of a police detective who winds up dead while he’s drugged. Naturally, he falls under suspicion and might be used as a patsy by The Powers to spare political discomfort. And he might or might not have been given a weird drug that dilates time or warps the perceptions of space.

So, yeah, it’s got some plot holes in it. Like, many. But it’s a Philip K. Dick story, which is always fun to read because the rules don’t apply. They’re fantasy stories more than science fiction, you know. So you suspend enough disbelief that only at the end do you think, “That point doesn’t make sense.” And you don’t even mind.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is not only a collection of Peanuts cartoons, but it’s a subset of a larger collection entitled Dogs Don’t Eat Dessert (1987).

It’s the story of Charlie Brown and his dog and his friends. Things you’ve seen and read before, especially if you’re old enough to have had fresh Peanuts when you were young. Which, strangely enough, means you’re older than high school.

But Schulz was pretty good at timelessness, I think, which is why, according to Forbes, his estate ranks highly amongst earnings from people who have passed away and why there’s still a major motion picture forthcoming.

I have nothing more to say except that I’ll read more Peanuts in the future. I like them.

If you’re interested in serious discussion about the themes within, see this book report from 2005: What’s It All About, Charlie Brown? by Jeffrey H. Lorria (1968). Accompanied by comments posted two years later to my old Blogspot blog by detractors of Jeffrey H. Loria.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book reads like someone’s Twilight 2000 campaign. Back in 1992, when I was playing Twilight 2000, the idea of a conventional and nuclear war in Europe was at least not written out of possibility by actual events. Of course, they’re not now, but the timeline developed by Game Developers’ Workshop was proven to be inaccurate (fortunately), so thinking about the Warsaw Pact in 2013 requires a bigger suspension of belief now than then and perhaps a bit of historical perspective to remember what that was like.

Similarly, military thrillers from the early 1990s. In this book, the United States has seen the Soviet Union fall and has cut its military budget after the end of the Cold War (this actually happened, public school kids). BUT the Japan of the 1980s continued rising, and although it was not a military power on its own, it provided very advanced weapons to the Arab Alliance (this has not happened). I guess analysts missed the whole Japanese economic stagnation thing that prevented it from being a real global power (see also Debt of Honor)–however, although it has not come to pass yet, the future remains TBD.

After a worldwide pandemic, partial societal collapse in the United States, a bit of related reconquista, and some hemispheric excursions, a survivor of the first exposure to the Japanese super helicopters (who had to walk out of war-ravaged Africa, hence the early association in my mind with Twilight 2000) is the colonel in charge of a squadron of new super US weapons is staged in Russia (our erstwhile allies in this case) to stop an offensive by the Islamic Republics backed by the Japanese. They have a new weapon–The Scramblers–which disrupt human neural function, kind of a neutron bomb that leaves its victims alive and helpless. But the United States has an ace up its sleeve, too.

So it’s alt history now, and if you can read it that way, you might get something out of it. Peters is not as good as Clancy–there are too many characters just put out there in detail and then cast off–but it’s not a bad read.

It does offer a bit of optimism, though: Peters is a shrewd analyst, but he got these predictions wrong (and, in his defense, in an afterward he says he has played a lot of things up for narrative effect that were not realistic or probable). But the last 25 years have not gone this way. And whatever the shrewd and not-so-shrewd analysts in the papers and on the Internet say about our immediate future, that has yet to happen, too, and far better students of human nature have missed the mark. By that, I mean that Peters does grasp certain elemental truths about man and his relationship to other man–and power structures and tribalism that result. Unlike some who prognosticate and politic with misconceptions in mind. But the future will probably look different from all the things we see published as probable.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a strange mixture of English cottage mystery and American police procedural. Which sort of makes sense, given that it is a Canadian mystery novel.

The plot revolves around a man found dead in the cabin of a retired Toronto detective. Is it someone who wanted the former hired man, a simple man who thought he was heir to his brother’s successful farm? Or was it someone looking for the detective for revenge?

This particular plot is spread among a couple of subplots, including a convoluted story about the detective’s allegedly illegitimate son coming from England to meet his ‘father’–convoluting the story and warranting the quotation marks is the fact that the detective, as a young man in World War II, claimed to have impregnated the English girl to take the fall as the bad guy who returned to Canada and did not cause trouble for the actual father, a man of some repute in the town. So when the not-really grand daughter visited Canada and her grandfather for a couple weeks, he enjoyed having her around. Now, he’s got to wonder whether he should come clean with anyone, including his new wife.

As a newlywed in his sixties, the detective and his wife have to deal with the disposition of their duplicate properties: His cabin in the woods that he has leased or lent to the former former hired man and her house in town. In addition, he has to deal with whether to tell her his convoluted story about his granddaughter. And he keeps his investigations into the death under wraps, lying to her as to his purpose for repeated visits to see his old friends on the force in Toronto.

Do you think my descriptions of the subplots overshadow the plot? Then I’m giving you an accurate flavor of the book. The author has at least one other series under his belt, and this particular book, the second in its series, exaggerates the flaws of a series book–too much series business, not enough book business.

Another flaw with the book, I think, might be a bit of city bias: that is, the detective comes up from the city to the back country, so I can too easily see the author doing the same. The up country characters are a bit simple (except for the cops, of course: those guys are multi-layered with their own backstories that also detract from the plot). The detective’s cabin sits on five acres along with a mobile home–and this is a lot of land. That’s city scale. Here in the country, five acres is a yard and a hundred acres is about enough room.

So, hey, maybe this blend of chatty British tea mystery / character drama with police procedural (police are involved) is your bag. It’s not mine. I grabbed the book at the Friends of the Christian County book fair sale a while back to experiment with something new, so give me just a little credit for it. But I probably won’t go back for a second helping.

Books mentioned in this review:

If you like it when James Lileks takes screenshots of locations in old movies and looks up what they look like now, this book is for you. Especially if you browse picture books during sports on television, as I do.

It puts historical images from San Antonio’s past and puts the same location and/or building on the right page with a bit of history about them. Some of the sites you’ll recognize, and by some, I mean “The Alamo.” Some focus on Mexican sites (that is, locations from when San Antonio and Texas were part of Mexico), some on American sites from more recent times. They’ve got a picture of a building being moved back when the city widened one of its thoroughfares. The building, unlike its neighboring buildings, are intact.

So very cool. The images of San Antonio’s River Walk make me want to see it in person; unlike, say, Milwaukee’s River Walk, where they’ve thrown some concrete walkways beside the water and back doors on the restaurants, San Antonio’s River Walk looks to incorporate mature trees and other vegetation overhanging the water along with multi-level walkways and stairs. It looks cool.

So the book did what it is supposed to do: It made me want to visit San Antonio.

One thing about it, though: as a civic boosterism book, it features a number of then-and-nows of historic buildings turned into underpopulated (I assume) arts venues through the magic of tax credits and the like. Personally, I think this is a bad use of space, as it drains the public coffers for the good of a few people who like to go to the theatre once in a while and to be seen in the society pages of the newspaper at a fundraiser for the arts organization. But the book is not political, and it does show a number of commercial structures as well, so I’m only reading into it my own pecadilloes.

Books mentioned in this review:

According to my research, I haven’t read a Family Circus book in four years. According to my initial calculations, I thought 2009 was three years ago; however, damn, that is, in fact, four years. Where are they going? Slowly from the ever-expanding to-read shelves to the read shelves. And more, sometimes, but we’ll get to that.

This book was initially copyright in 1971, but this is a printing from 1984. In a third edition of sorts. Ponder that for a while: these books were popular enough to go through several editions. Do you see that in modern cartoons not named Dilbert? I dunno, I don’t even read the funny pages of the local paper.

This is early in the Family Circus life: you can tell because the father starts out without glasses, and there’s a gag when he gets his glasses. In all of my living memory–which is appropriate, since this book came out before I was alive–he’s had glasses. I didn’t notice until the glasses panel that the father was without, which is a comment to how closely I study the panels before reading the punchline, I suppose.

At any rate, amusing at best, but an exploration of domestic life with a family from the last bit of the middle of the last century. A worthwhile browse for me because it reminds me of my youth, when this stuff was fresh, and it filled time between plays in a series of sporting events, but I’m sure these things won’t get multiple reprintings in the future.

Although I see some of the syndicates are putting out presumably print-on-demand editions such as this and this to have one more crack at the fan base. Good on ’em.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is almost 100 years old; I have the original edition, not the one available on Amazon these days. Which is some testament to its content or its continued resonance in college courses somewhere.

The lecture upon which this book was based was presented at King’s College in defense of the war effort and against those who would accept a premature peace with Germany in World War I. Allen counters arguments put forward from pacifists, but agrees that most people want the absence of war. However, he recognizes that a cessation of conflict without complete defeat will lead to war in the future.

At 37 pages, it’s a quick enough thought-provoking bit of reading. If you’re steeped in Downton Abbey and are rediscovering the period, it’s an insight into the real thoughts of the era. If you’re somewhat lacking in World War I history, as I am, it’s a reminder of whole epochs with lessons still applicable and to the universal truths of human nature they can reveal and that modern thought cannot conceal for long.

Books mentioned in this review: