Category: Book Report

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

But this book has this atop the front flap:

The future is a strange and dangerous place.

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

Well, alrighty, then. This probably qualifies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As with Karate-dō: My Way of Life:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!