Category: Book Report

No doubt, I picked this book up because I thought it was a compendium of true cases (back in the old days, I hoped to write for DamnInteresting.com and expected I would need constant pointers to interesting cases). But, no, this book is a collection of short fiction collected from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and was edited by the Director of Marketing for those two brands. Trying to extend the brand, you see, into some hardcover publishing dollars since Ellery Queen aren’t churning out the books like they used to.

The anthology collects its stories from a number of decades, so some seem dated (not that I disprove), but others are remarkably contemporary. As you might have noticed, gentle reader, I’ve returned to a fondness for short fiction because it lends itself to easy truncation of a night’s reading when I need to go to bed. Forgive me that I don’t enumerate the stories here, but I’m lazy. Overall, the book was entertaining and short and worth the buck I paid for it. There you go.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book for a buck at some book fair this year. I don’t think I’ve read any Mike Royko since high school. Many people of Internet age won’t know who Royko is, as they’re steeped in Internet stars like James Lileks, Mark Steyn, Andrew Sullivan, and whatnot. The era of the mega columnist, with a string of syndication papers and inane commentary, left behind those like Royko, who seemed more of a Metro columnist than a humorist or a commentariat.

I mean, who does this any more? Here in St. Louis, there’s Bill McClellan and the black guy. I don’t know if either of them has written a book, but I tell you something, in 20 years, I won’t have ever gotten a copy and I won’t read it with pleasure.

Sure, Royko is what some would call a bleeding heart. But it’s a very communitarian liberalism. He came from humble origins and kept the blue collar edge in his writing. I can sympathize with blue collar origins in a rust belt city. So although he obviously doesn’t like Ronald Reagan, he doesn’t alienate readers who perhaps don’t.

This was Royko’s last collection published in his lifetime. Man, if I had known that would have read this with a sad, sepia overtone.

Recommend it? Yes. Read more Royko. He’s amusing, short, and often right even when he’s left.

Books mentioned in this review:

Heather gave me this book for Christmas along with a number of earlier Hiaasen novels because she knew that I enjoyed (see also Strip Tease, Skinny Dip, and Basket Case).

This book, however, suffers from the same slow start that stifled Strip Tease. Unfortunately, it has a slow middle and a slow end, too. Whereas the normal whacky Hiaasen characters come out of the Florida backwoods to amuse, ultimately, interact. We have a half Seminole on the run from his own demons and the ghost of an unfortunate tourist whose body he sunk in the swamp; a philandering ne’er-do-well telemarketing salesman and the mistress who’s above him; an activist and off-kilter single mother seeking revenge against the telemarketer for interrupting her dinner; a lecherous man lusting for the single mother; the ex-husband of the single mother; a private detective trailing the telemarketer; and so on.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t have a real central plot; instead, we’re following along a set of subplots that will intersect on a small Florida key. When we finally got the whole crew onto the key, I thought it would be a quick resolution, but I still had 100 pages left, and I was disappointed.

The book isn’t Hiaasen’s best, and it’s definitely the weakest of the four books I’ve read so far. Heather was disappointed at my disappointment, but I tried to reassure her that one book had to be the worst. I hope this one was.

Books mentioned in this review:

 
 
 

This oversized book offers 52 individual projects that it claims you can do over a weekend and groups them by season. The difficulty of the projects ranges just about from sweeping your basement to building a summer cottage, but they all run about 3-5 pages, some with illustrations. Most of the projects offer only a high level overview, really, of what you’d do, and most offer pointers to others in the series (also by Dan Ramsey) for further details.

Still, this book is supposed to be an inspirer; you’re supposed to get ideas about what’s possible and then either try something or get a more detailed set of instructions and then try something. Although I didn’t find any projects that fit for my house, the very brevity of the chapters reminds one that it’s not that hard to do most of these things. It takes a bit of planning and a bit of time, but it’s not surgery.

Recommend the book? If you can pick it up for a couple of silver pieces at a book sale, sure, or if you can borrow it from the library. I don’t know that it’s worth the shipping and handling for an Internet buy, though, but in case you feel differently, here’s a handy link to Amazon:

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book at Webster Groves Book Shop for full price, gentle reader; yea, verily, I spent $13.95 plus tax on this book whereas I could have bought it online for the low, low price noted below or some smaller price at a chain bookstore because I live in a smaller town now (surrounded by St. Louis suburbs) and need to support the local merchants. Why, my very wife suggested I write down the ISBN numbers of books I was interested in so we could order them online, but I resisted, because I don’t think that’s playing fair to the small content stores we were frequenting that day. I did, however, put down most of the $60 in books I’d picked up since I already own thousands of unread books already.

But I did buy this one, especially since its back cover promised:

A nature book unlike any other, Jordan Fisher Smith’s startling account of fourteen years as a park ranger thoroughly dispels our idealized visions of life in the great outdoors. Instead of scout troops and placid birdwatchers, Smith’s beat–a stretch of land that has been officially condemned to be flooded–brings him into contact with drug users tweaked out to the point of violence, obsessed miners, and other dangerous creatures. In unflinchingly honest prose, he reveals the unexpectedly dark underbelly of patrolling and protecting public lands.

That and the title promised me something the book was not.

For starters, allow me to say that the writing is good. It’s vivid, it describes something that I haven’t seen well enough that I want to see it. However, it’s themetically vapid.

It sounds as though the book is designed so that it will describe a lot of encounters with bad men and thrilling pursuits in the wilderness. The first chapter itself lends itself to that, with an encounter with a drug-addled badman who, after a party on the beach, tries to throw a baby through a car window after an argument with the baby’s mother (driving the car). After a brief search, the rangers find the man when he wanders back onto the beach and collapses of an overdose. This, the first chapter, provides most of the excitement of the book.

Afterwards, the chapters include incidents that serve as springboards into the author’s opinion on environmentalism as filtered through the California state bureaucracy. The actual noir incidents occur in the flashbacks of reports to which author had access, and the book presents them in reverse order of their excitement. The author talks to someone who is following up on a cold case featuring a sheriff’s deputy who might have killed his wife and buried her in the park. The author goes on into the history of his current station, scheduled to be underwater when they build a new dam, and then the chapter is over, with nothing resolved. He only talked to the guy opening the cold case and looking for the grave of the missing wife.

When the author has a woman claim rape from a miner in the park, and the miner is beaten within inches of his life by the woman’s boyfriend, the author goes into the history of mining and the impact of the gold rush on the natural area around the park. Oh, yeah, the woman’s boyfriend might be making meth in an abandoned mine. The author fills in the appropriate papers and turns it over to the sheriff’s deputies, but he doubts anything will be done.

And so on, and so forth. About 100 pages in, I realized that the book I’d expected, based on the title and the back cover, were not forthcoming. I turned to the acknowledgements and saw someone told the author he could make a good essay out of his experiences. Hell, yes, he could have, but it’s a heck of a stretch in a memoir termed noir and promising encounters with bad men. Instead, I was treated to a number of chapters describing the history of the particular park and a subtle indictment of civilization for impacting the beauty of nature.

Aw, screw it. Or so I think the author said about chapter 10 (“Weak as Water”). Following some reminisce of accompanying parents of a drowned boy to the site where he drowned (not actually the drowning itself, which the author was nearly present for, but the accompanying of the parents to the site later), the author writes chapter 11 about a trip to an abandoned camp of a miner who was ornery. Before the camp was abandoned. Never mind, the scenery is lush and the trip to the camp mildly exciting as we read about damming upstream and its impact on the whitewater river impacted by miners in the previous century. But the camp is abandoned. And then we get the unvarnished rant.

In chapter 11, the ranger gets Lyme disease and abandons his dentist and job, and not in that order. Or maybe in that order. Lyme disease mucks with the narrative, and I was skimming. I mostly skipped the Epilogue, whereing the Mighty Heroes of California Environmentalism blocked continuation of the dam (putting Sacramento at risk, but from the chapter where the author recounts his fruitless search for a missing woman and the history of a flood that threatened Sacramento, I know he’d rather Sacramento drown than The Wilderness be spoiled). Maybe it did. I don’t even think I skimmed the last bit of the epilogue.

Well, there you have it. The book disappointed me greatly. I expected some dynamic tension of the ranger as a hallmark of civilization in the wild, cognizant of the folly of modern man and sentimental for the disappearing wilderness, but this fellow seems to root against civilization. Period. Also, let it be said that the Mariners trade paperback edition is on cheap paper and oddly enough smells of a freshly sharpened pencil every time I open it. I’m savaging this book especially on the account of the publishers who sent me into a genre I wouldn’t like. I liked the sound of the book from its title and its back cover so much I almost bought the book next to it at Webster Groves Book Shop because it sounded similar, but with a different bent. But thanks to this book, I’m leary of dabbling in this genre again. I bought this book in late November and bought it a month later–that’s phenomenal by MfBJN standards. But this one tome might have killed my interest in the genre of modern ranger novels.

In a personal note for Jordan Fisher Smith when he Googles himself: Dude, you write well, and I hope your Lyme disease is better. I didn’t like your book.

Books mentioned in this review:

After reading Ancient, My Enemy, I was in the mood for some more science fiction short stories from the silver age of science fiction. This collection, apparently the 14th from the heydey of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine (now back in print, apparently).

Okay, the book collects 17 short stories into 251 pages of reading, not counting the introduction that explains why it’s all relevant. It’s good enough short stories, and as I look over the titles, I can remember them after a week. Only one, “The House by the Crab Apple Tree” by S.S. Johnson, will stick with me at all.

Each story also includes what I suspect is the original intro bio bit from the magazine. It’s interesting how many of the writers really were journeymen, dashing off short stories for a tolerable existence. A couple of them are remembered today, but most aren’t. Probably only one or two of them made a really comfortable life of it. Such is the life of a real writer who has to do it for a living and not some dilettante writing short stories for fun. Today, those journeymen are working as business writers, copy writers, and technical writers, so their fame and recognition will be far more fleeting than the sales circulars and software manuals they’re producing as their life’s work.

Don’t get me started on the life of backwater bloggers whose daily hit totals have dipped under 100 again.

Thanks for reading, and come back tomorrow for more Christmas cheer the MfBJN way!

Books mentioned in this review:

Through some strange quirk of fate or ill-done packing when we moved, this book ended up on my to read shelves even though it became clear when I started it that I’d read it before. That didn’t stop me from reading it again, though, so that counts as a testament to my enjoyment of Gordon R. Dickson’s short fiction.

This book collects some of Dickson’s work from the 1950s and the 1960s, including:

• “Ancient, My Enemy”: A prospector on a distant planet who finds that one of the primitive members of the regressed native civilization has found him to be an ancient enemy.
• “The Odd Ones”: A pair of intergalactic observers and philosophers who try to glean the meaning and morality of a pair of humans they encounter.
• “The Monkey Wrench”: A Venutian ne’er do well hides from his socialite wife in a remote meteorological outpost and enters a risky bet with a former classmate.
• “Tiger Green”: A ship and its crew become ensnared by a jungle and confounded by the natives who live in it. The four who resist a strange madness struggle to understand its source and save themselves.
• “The Friendly Man”: A time traveller from the past reaches a distant future and finds a friendly man awaiting him. Suspiciously friendly.
• “Love Me True”: A soldier faces trouble when he brings back a ferret-like pet from a distant planet. As he should.
• “Our First Death”: The first death in a colony threatens to destroy it.
• “To the Bone”: A human explorer finds an extraterrestrial vehicle on an outlying planet, only to have that vehicle destroy his ship and survival gear. The extraterrestrial intelligence underestimates the nature and ability of man at his most primitive.
• “The Bleak and Barren Land”: A Colonial Representative, banished from earth and sent to a backwater planet, must handle the conflict between an advanced and inscrutable native race and the first shipload of authorized colonists on the planet.

A quick and interesting read, these stories remind me of my youth when I ate up simple science fiction stories like this. Again, like the last Andy Rooney book I read, this reminds me of the kinds of things that inspired me to become a writer. Perhaps if I spend more time with them, they’ll inspire me to keep writing.

Books mentioned in this review:

I guess it’s been two years since I’ve read an Andy Rooney book (see also Years of Minutes ca 2004). I’ve had a couple on my to-read shelf for about a year now, maybe a year and a half. Perhaps there’s even an Rooneyesque essay in how long books remain on my to-read shelves. As a matter of fact, most have tenures far longer than the Andy Rooney books, even if it takes me another two years to read the (currently) remaining volume.

This book collects some of his paper columns instead of his 60 Minutes things, so it’s (slightly) longer pieces and a period piece to some extent. Rooney’s got his normal pecadilloes, and when he’s griping about a United States president, it’s Reagan. If you want to pigeonhole his politics, it’s a bit Libertarian in its distrust of some institutions, but liberal in its desire to do something for the downtrodden. But the politics are so very simply presented that you can overlook them. As a matter of fact, Rooney lets on that his life is different from ours. He’s a television/media personality with an office in Manhattan, a house in Connecticut, and a summer home. But his essays and musings focus so much on the minutiae of life that one focuses on them, too, and doesn’t worry about the differences. Instead, we focus on our similarities.

Or we would. I imagine Rooney’s falling out of fashion because he brings a WWII generation view on things that have left the WWII generation behind. Still, he’s not a bad guy, and he shares a certain amount of worldview with me. Enough that I read his essays and I want to write some of my own, much like them. To share in the conversation and to make some normal guy nod his head in comprehension and understanding.

That’s not how Joseph Epstein makes me feel.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

You know, I’ve put these links on my site for some time now, and I’ve only “made” 8 cents. I put quotation marks around made because Amazon doesn’t cut no checks for 8 coppers and no doubt bleeds the pennies away in fees of some sort or another. You all are some of the cheapest gentle readers in the world, or the most illiterate.

Buy a book and show me you care.

Bloody heck, show Andy Rooney you care.

Back in my eBay seller days, I bought a first edition hardback written by Manly Wade Wellman at a garage sale for next to nothing and sold it for quite a bit of scratch. So when I found another paperback by the author and tried to turn that one for some bucks. No dice. So I still have it, and here it is. So much on my to read shelves follows this pattern (see also the Chronicles of Counter Earth series and numerous Stephen King and John Saul titles). So it’s here, and now it’s read.

Manly Wade Wellman was an author in the science fiction pulps. This book includes a novel originally published in 1940 (the eponymous Twice in Time) and a bonus short story called “The Timeless Tomorrow”. It also has a brief introduction, which I thought I’d read, but I got to the point where it said “If you like surprise endings, don’t read any further.” I mean, come on, you’re going to give me the ultimate twist in the introduction because you take this author seriously as literature enough to strip that enjoyment from readers? Where does that mean you fall on the self-esteem scale, or where do you think the audience does?

So I stopped reading it, but I knew there was a surprise twist coming, so I figured out the surprise fairly early. I don’t know if I would have otherwise, but the names and the very cover gave the game away.

A modern (ca 1940) man builds a time reflector to go back to Renaissance Florence. He does and falls into the clutches of an ambitious courtier who wants to use his new “friend” in his lust for power. Together under duress, they take on the d’Medicis.

The additional short story also deals with time travel, as Nostradamus learns he cannot only see the future, but can participate in it.

The writing style is the simplistic of the pulps, but without the transcendence of Hemingway or Hammett. It reminds me of much of my early fiction and probably too much of my contemporary fiction, probably. It’s not bad, but the not bad is not a synonmym for good. And it’s really not worth an introduction that talks about the book as though it was a literary triumph with which everyone is familar, even if they haven’t read it.

That said, click the link below to buy it and send me a couple pennies for my effort.

Books mentioned in this review:

I found a pile of Ed McBain books at the Carondolet Y book fair this year, and I bought them. This book clocks in at 147 pages, so it’s more like a novella than a novel, but it was a quick read.

The book deals with Bert Kling’s marriage to the model, Augusta, and her kidnapping on their wedding night. The detectives of the 87th, along with Fat Ollie Weeks, beat the bushes, grasp the straws, work the informants, and ultimately find her just in time.

Even though I know the longer story arcs of these characters, I can still enjoy individual books pulled from the middle of the 87th Precinct series. It would be a neat endeavor to read them all in order. Someday, perhaps, when I get them all.

Sure, it’s a short review. It’s a short book. And you don’t read these anyway.

Books mentioned in this review:

Mark Steyn has been talking about the old James Bond books and a new book about James Bond books, so I was inspired to draw this old paperback from my shelf. It had been a while (at least two years, since there are no book reports) since I read the first three Signet paperbacks in my library (Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Diamonds Are Forever), but I liked them enough to buy a couple more when I found them at garage sales.

Thunderball is based on the screenplay of the same name, so it’s not a straight James Bond novel, I suspect. Still, the author has a lot of fun making cracks about the plot being like a B movie plot, so Fleming didn’t take it too seriously. Much like the movie Never Say Never Again didn’t take it too seriously when they remade it.

The story, for those of you who don’t know and probably don’t care, is that SPECTRE (not Spectra, that was Battle of the Planets, silly!) has stolen a plane with a couple of nukes on it and they’re going to blow them unless they get ransom. The West looks for SPECTRE and thinks about paying, but Britain sends James Bond to Bermuda just in case it’s there. It is.

A quick read (188 pages) and, apparently, a piece of British history. Shorter and more engaging than a Clancy, anyway.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

I bought this book for $3.00 from Hooked on Books. It’s gotten easier to tell, since Hooked on Books has begun marring the inside front covers with large labels attesting to the fact. It’s perhaps slightly less risable than stamping the page edges, but not much.

It’s one of MacDonald’s science fiction efforts (he calls it science fantasy, but it’s the same difference). In a world not too far in the future, after the First Atomic War, India has risen into prominence in the world, vying with Irania and Brazil for power. As tensions escalate, a United States diplomat tries to engage calm tensions, but they get to him. His assistant investigates and finds that a dark conspiracy of alien forces with psi powers are fomenting tensions on earth, and he has to discover why.

Which he does. MacDonald’s science fantasy books are somewhat less than his crime fiction, and let’s be frank, this is an old example anyway. But the book was engaging and moved along fairly well. After working on Emma for a couple weeks, it was nice to run through a book in a couple of nights.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up this book off of the discount rack at a regular book store. I probably paid a couple dollars for it and I am sure I wanted to impress Heather by looking smart and reading it. Some years later, I picked it up.

The edition, the Everyman Library paperback, is not the best edition aesthetically, which figures since it was on the cheap shelf. It’s a paperback with lightweight paper and, most appallingly, rife with typographical errors.

Unlike when I read Kafka, I did not read the supporting introductory essay before I delved into the book. I did glance at the timeline of Jane Austen’s life, though, to clarify the time period in which she was writing. I also admit that I read the back, which reveals the entirety of the plot as well as any Cliff Notes. It’s just as well, though, since I could focus on the characterization and catch hints that I knew would indicate the conclusion.

The book centers on Emma Woodhouse, a 20-year-old daughter of gentry who has recently lost her nanny/confidante to marriage and who decides to help elevate a young lady of unknown origins. Miss Woodhouse decides to make a match (as one would expect in an Austen novel) for Miss Smith. Emma tries to set her up with the vicar, then the local gentleman farmer, and finally the son of her nanny’s husband. Emma, the novel lets us know, is not as insightful into the human condition and heart as she thinks she is. She misinterprets signs, feelings, and motivations of almost everyone around her and eventually ends up attached to the local gentleman farmer. This summary is slightly more obscure than the back cover for your non-spoiler pleasure.

When reading historic novels, I often wander into thoughts of who the target audiences for these books would have been in the early 1800s when the book was out initially. Surely, it speaks of the upper class without disdain which is so fashionable in serious fiction now. It focuses on young (late teens or early 20s) people making matches and courting. I guess it was targeted to those markets, or merely whatever literates wandered England at the time. So it meant something different to them 200 years ago than it does now, but I read it just the same.

Well, that’s all I got for now. I never really did go back to read the introduction nor the end material, but I have the luxury of reading this because I wanted to (and it was on my To Read shelves). I don’t have to put together some sort of coherent paper (obviously) and defend arguments against the patriarchy vigorously enough to pass a class. Which is nice, in a way. In all ways, actually.

Books mentioned in this review:

In February, I read Geherin’s The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction, and I mentioned having read Sons of Sam Spade in college. Sometime this summer, I found an ex-library copy at a bok fair, so I picked it up for a re-read. In the intervening fifteen years since I first read this book, Robert B. Parker has put out a number of books, including non-series novels and two new non-Spenser series, that really don’t live up to the promise of his beginning four. I’ve also read several of the Roger L. Simon Moses Wine novels (The Lost Coast, California Roll, The Big Fix, and Peking Duck) and they probably live up to my preconception of them.

I haven’t read anything by the third author covered, Andrew Bergman, but his work sounds interesting enough to look for when book fair season begins next summer.

The content of Sons of Sam Spade, like The American Private Eye, offer a nice summary of some of the late entrants (at the time) into the genre and makes a good, short respite from actually reading the genre. It’s literary criticism, sort of, and I can enjoy it.

Books mentioned in this review:

 
 

 

 

 

Well. I bought this book cheaply at a book fair because I was already buying dozens of other books, so what could this one hurt? My pride, my friends, my pride.

For this book offers a hundred some pages of quizzes that cover the field of crime fiction mostly of the twentieth century, and as a trivia-lover, I fell very, very short.

I thought I was doing all right on the authors I know well. A couple of questions touched on the 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain. A couple on the Lew Archer books by Ross MacDonald. I even answered correctly a number of questions about Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series, some of which I read in high school. But there’s a great number of books, authors, and series in classical and frankly just 20th century fiction that I didn’t get around to reading yet, although there’s plenty of it to be read in the Noggle Library.

My final humbling came at the hands of a simple quiz that just wanted me to get the colors right in the titles of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. It’s been a year since I last touched one of these books, and some many more for most. I got a couple right–I can even see the cover for Free Fall in Crimson in my mind’s eye since I just organized some of the read shelves this year, but ultimately, I fell very short. For an author whose books I really enjoyed and have, in several instances, read more than once.

Forget it, the Northside Mind Flayers trivia night team is no more, for I cannot even respect myself for my performance with this book.

But it was a quick browse, like a phone book. Only occasionally did my eyes fall upon a familiar name. The rest of the time I was turning pages without comprehension.

Books mentioned in this review:

When you’ve got a self-help sex book with the dedication TO MY FATHER – Who taught me the meaning of tenderness with his soft cheeks and gentle hands, you know you’re getting into some downright creepy psychoanalysis territory. To help women of the baby boom generation cope with their sexual hang-ups, Dr. Irene Kassorla has devised the PLEASURE PROCESS, a set of steps not actually recognized by ANSI or ISO. This process involves the usual good advice about sex:

• Care about your partner.
• Communicate with your partner.
• Have sex with your partner.

However, it’s wrapped in psychoanalysis that obviously traces all sexual hangups to interaction with the parents as a baby. Ergo, Dr. Kassorla invites you to free-associate while going at it, particularly if you’re able to free-associate yourself to a repressed memory and its attendant guilt of a moment where your daddy was changing you and you were gloriously naked in the bassinet. If you’re able to talk about that with your partner while you’re both, um, busy, you’ll get over the guilt that’s held you back and will finally achieve orgasm.

I mean, ew. Please. No. That’s not a test of whether your partner loves you, ladies; that’s a test of whether your partner is listening to you. For his sake and for the sake of your relationship, I hope he’s not.

Frankly, Irene Kassorla is no Marabel Morgan, and I’m glad Ruth Westheimer had Dr. Kassorla “disappeared” in the great sex therapist turf battles of the end of the disco era. Because frankly, I’m more hung up than when I started the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

Now I remember where I got these books; I bought them at Patten Books for a couple dollars each after I discovered how well they sold on eBay. Unfortunately, I would also later discover that the books available in bookstores tended toward the later, less salable editions. In a final stroke of ill luck, I started reading the ones I couldn’t sell and found they were okay. So now I go into bookstores looking to buy them and might, someday, float ludicrous sums of money to buy back the very books I once bought for fifty cents and sold at great profit.

But I digress. This, the fifth book in the series, finds Tarl Cabot disguised as an assassin hunting someone who wanted to kill him in his rebuilding home city of Ko-Ro-Ba. He travels to Ar and enters the employ of a slaver to find out what he can about his adversaries. In the course of having his vengeance, he aids a plot to overthrow the leaders of that city.

Again, the main character is strong, assertive, and still a pawn of things he only half-understands. The book continues some of the serial story alluding to a bigger payoff and bigger plots to come in the series.

I remembered where I got these books because I returned to Patten Books to fill in the gaps in my set. I picked up 1, 2, 6, 7, and 10, which means I now only lack 9 of the first 10. Although Patten had a number of the later books, I held off on spending the sums to which I alluded (over $20 for at least one of the paperbacks) until I get a better sense of whether I’ll enjoy the books that late in the series. The earlier books remained in print for a long time, making them cheap and plentiful, whereas the later books are expensive because they had fewer printings. Whether this is due to quality drop-off or the backlash against the books that arose in the 1980s, I’m unsure, but I’m certainly not spending good liquor money on those books yet.

But all signs indicate that I’ll buy 11 sometime in the next year or so.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book this year at the Carondolet Y Book Fair, I think. It’s back when I thought I might write for Damn Interesting, so I purposefully sought out compendia like this that would give me inspiration for stories I could write. I never got the gig, but I do have a number of interesting books to read.

It’s only after I cracked this book open that the brevity coupled with the large print size indicated that this might be a juvenile book. That’s okay, though, as I am often juvenile.

The book contains a number of short chapters on famous spies through history, including Mata Hari, Nathaniel Hale, Gary Powers, and Rudolf Abel. Aside from these well-known figures, the book also covers Major William Martin (see, it is Damn Interesting sort of material); Velvalee Dickinson, spy for Japan in World War II; Peter Ortiz, Marine reserve and leader of the French resistance in WWII; and others. The brief chapters and simple language make it a very quick read and serves as trivia fodder or a source for further investigation.

So it was worth my time, even if I’m three times the age of its target audience. Plus, it’s the 76th book I read this year. So there.

Books mentioned in this review:

I know, what’s next, book reports on Dell mini mags? But I read this book and it’s 96 pages, so it’s thicker than some of the tracts I’ve covered here. It’s a tiny little octo or whatever you would call it with a number of crime-related puzzles. You’re supposed to figure them out and look up the answer in the back to see if you’re right. The book’s stories are split between logic puzzles, the kind you’re supposed to draw grids for and mark off the inferences from a finite number of statements of fact such as “One of the suspects is a liar,” and the more Encyclopedia Brownish spot-the-inconsistencies. I prefered the latter, mainly because I read this in bed often and didn’t have pen and paper to do the logic puzzles.

I paid a quarter for it at a book fair (Carondolet 2006? Oh, it’s so hard to tell). It’s worth it if you can get a cheap copy if you remember Encyclopedia Brown fondly.

Books mentioned in this review: