Category: Book Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Justin never saw her again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I know what you’re wondering:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not sure why I picked this book up so soon after buying it and thought it would be a quick read. Perhaps because the collection of the complete works of Shakespeare which I have been ignoring on my chairside table starts with his comedies which are rather quick reads. But this book is a history play and one about a monarch with whom I was not familiar. So it was a little slow going, made a little slower by the fact that the characters call each other by their first name sometimes instead of their titles, which are the names that precede their dialog. So it was a bit of a Russian novel in that regard: Oh, Edmund is Kent and vice versa. That sort of thing.

So the plot of the play is that the King, Edward II, wants his pal Gaveston who was apparently elevated from less-than-noble status, and the real nobles think he’s a frivolous wastrel spending all the king’s money (which he gets from them) and diverting the king’s attention from kingly things. So he, Gaveston, is exiled, recalled, exiled again, recalled again, and then civil war breaks out. The king suspects his queen is having an affair with a Mortimer, while she pleads her innocence–come on, who outside of fiction dallies with someone named “Mortimer”? Crikey, I am having BBS flashbacks because one of the people in St. Louis signed himself as Mortimer, but I doubt that he read this play or history. Although it was the 1980s. People were better schooled then. Perhaps he had. But that’s neither here nor there. The nobles do not like Gaveston, so eventually they send him away and recall him, kill him, and then depose the king, placing his son on the throne–to Mortimer’s ultimate ill luck.

The play covers a long actual timespan in history, condensing it into five acts and adding a number of speeches on how much the king likes Gaveston (turned into many, many fine papers about latent homosexuality), the relationship of the king to the titled nobility, and whatnot.

But it lacks a little something compared to Shakespeare. Nothing is really stirring nor memorable except for the easy win of the they’re gay! for English majors in the past. I guess the Wiki says that it’s been staged even in recent past, probably again not so much for the monarch versus aristocracy themes.

I have Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which I read in 2020, better.

You might be asking, “Brian J., why did you pick up a book on golf?” You know, I’m asking myself the same question; after all, I have played maybe seven or eight holes of golf in my life (when Iron Maiden Dave and I hit the local park’s nine-hole course, we abandoned the game far later than the other two guys who wanted to join us to make us a foursome abandoned us). I suspect my thinking was this: I saw Razor Girl by the author which I purchased this summer and thought I should read this book before I read the novel. A “how can you eat your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” sort of thing. So I picked this book up and worked my way through it with some other books in the interim (which should tell you what I thought of it).

The schtick of it is that Carl Hiaasen, who played a little golf in high school and college with his old man, decides to pick up the sticks (as I’ve picked up the lingo) again in his middle age. Which is about the same age as I am now (so I am pleased to think I am not old). So I guess the theme might be the struggle to recapture one’s youthful glory or or man versus himself in trying to improve on a skill game (at a certain age). But I think the book is poorly executed.

Most of it is a diary of the first 577 days of his return to golf; numbered days (not all 577, just ones where he did golf things) give a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs of his golf experience for the day which might be playing a round or buying some new golf product he purchased and maybe tried. These little italicized bits are leavened with longer internally coherent pieces about other rounds of golf he’s played or the golf academy he attended or lessons he might have had. These longer pieces seem internally coherent, as I said, and I cannot help but wonder if they were individual columns or essays placed elsewhere, and they’re unrelated to one another. Case in point: One such essay talks about Hiaasen attending Leadbetter Academy for a day-long seminar, and then a later chapter mentiones playing on a course beside the Leadbetter Academy in Florida without mentioning he’d attended it–explaining it as though this was the first time the reader heard about it. Then, I guess the book feels the need to build to a finish which is bifurcated: Hiaasen plays in a tournament, and Hiaasen completes the book. No fooling; a couple of times whether he would finish the book is questioned and whether he could gut it out after getting discouraged.

So a bit slapped together, and one guesses that the draw is that it’s a Hiaasen golf book. Of course, since it’s a 21st century Hiassen book, it certainly slaps around the boogeyman of the day, George W. Bush. If it was written in the present day, undoubtedly it would be even meaner in its asides about the devil Trump. As it stands, Trump is mentioned on page 129, but only in reference to his rumored 300-yard drives which the author, about the same age, cannot match. A new edition, not that anyone would bother, would not be so laudatory.

So I was not impressed, but I’m not exactly the target audience, which is a golfer who would read anything about the sport and maybe relate to some of the author’s experiences. The title page and dust jacket do not indicate whether one should consider this a humor book or a sports book, but you should consider it the latter.

As you might remember (because it’s only been a week or two, which is at the outer edge of my memory, gentle reader, but I expect more from you), I bought a stack of old Edna St. Vincent Millay hardbacks at the Friends of the Library book sale two weeks ago, and I have already (re)read Renascence.

This is a later edition of her second book (first edition is 1920) and includes four sonnets at the end and poems not found in the first edition. You know what? If I had to pick a volume of her poetry to call my favorite, it would be this one (although ask me again when I get further into the stack and you might get another answer). After all, I know two of the poems by heart (“First Fig” and the sonnet which begins “Love, though for this you riddle me with darts…”) Not only did I memorize the latter, but I used it to open up my set at poetry open mics when I played a new venue; I’d approach the mic like a normal shy poet who hadn’t read much before with a sheaf of papers, and I’d leap from the stage or in front of the mic, reciting this poem angry and throwing the papers and sometimes my hat as I did so. I also recall the other sonnets from the book (although I don’t think I ever performed them).

The other poems are pretty good to great; they have rhythm and they have rhyme, but not so much the inner- or inter-line wordplay that I use these days (although I’ve mostly abandoned the end rhyme).

Some thirty-some couple of years after I’ve read the book for the first time, I still enjoy re-reading it. I’ll probably re-read it again as I’ll be tempted to buy any other copy of it I see in the wild, and if I end up in a good place financially, I might look for a proper first edition/first printing for my real library in those days. Otherwise, I’ll have to look forward to grabbing whatever copies I find in the wild. Now that I’ve gotten ahold of the other Millay collector in Springfield’s copies, I guess it will have to be when I travel.

And note that I will probably finish another of these Millay collections before I finish another Louis L’Amour book as they’re shorter.

This is the first of the Louis L’Amour paperbacks that I picked up in Clever in June but the second overall that I’ve read this year (Last of the Breed being the first). And, you know what? It wouldn’t surprise me if I picked up another one or two before the end of the year.

This book centers on the title character, Hondo Lane, a frontiersman who spent five years living with the Apache and who has worked as a scout and a dispatch carrier for the United States Army. He has lived alone for a long time except for a mostly wild dog that accompanies him. A spot of trouble costs him his horse, and he happens upon a ranch in a valley populated by a woman and her son. Trouble is brewing with the Apaches as they’re raising all of their tribes/lodges for war after the white man breaks another treaty. He looks to buy a horse from her, and although she says her husband is away for the day, he sees that some things are falling into disrepair which indicates the husband has been gone for a long while. He fixes up the place a bit, and sparks fly between them. Hondo has to return to the fort/camp with his dispatches warning of war, though, and the woman and the boy wonder if he will return. When he gets to the fort, he encounters the husband, a gambler and all around not good guy, and gets on his bad side. The man accuses him of being a horse thief, since the horse has the man’s brand on it, but the authorities let Hondo go since he says he is returning to the ranch with the horse. Meanwhile, the Apaches approach the ranch, and they are ready to attack even though the woman reminds them they have lived in peace for so long. When the six-year-old boy fires a pistol and grazes a subchief, the big chief and the tribe are amused, so the big chief becomes a blood brother to the boy and offers his protection to the ranch. But, eventually, he says that if the woman’s husband does not return, she will have to take an Indian brave as a husband. As Hondo heads out, the husband follows him with a partner, as they hope to rob and kill him, but through the timely intervention of Apaches who also want to ambush him, Hondo kills the husband, complicating his relationship with the wife for whom he has developed feelings. One Apache escapes, and then they hunt and capture Hondo, and….

Well, all right, I don’t want to give the whole plot away–there is some more to it than that. But it’s a good book. Mid-century westerns are definitely a cut above men’s adventure fiction or modern westerns like the Gunsmith or Longarm which are basically men’s adventure novels with horses. Given that L’Amour and John D. MacDonald came up about the same time, one can see the benefits of an early 20th century education in the writing styles. Or maybe they did not have monthly deadlines. Regardless, the writing and characters have more depth; perhaps they’re built from imaginations fired by books and stories and not movies/television and comic books.

The book also presents the Indian characters, at least as personified by Vittorio, the head chief, as wise and almost heroic and has a nuanced view of the cowboys and Indians dynamic. Hondo speaks highly of the Indian way of life and that they do not have a word for “lie” in their language and so on. So it’s entirely possible that the Boomer’s parents, those squares, were more enlightened than the gave them credit for. Certainly moreso than modern “thinkers” give them credit for. And even though he has rough edges, Hondo is a hero, and not an immoral one. He does not preemptively kill people, and he does get softened with his contact with a woman.

So, yeah, you know what? I might pick up another such book before long. I do have several more, you know, right on top of the stack.

Also, note the years in the title. The book was first published in 1952 and was still in print and in racks in the drugstore in 1985. Can you imagine a writer of the last part of the 20th century or the first part of the 21st who would remain in print that long? Stephen King, I guess. Maybe some back list Koontz and whatnot. But it’s a very short list.

I picked this book from the shelves on September 10, along with Dogs and Cats Unleashed as a palate cleanser after almost making it through a single lopsided question in the presidential debate that evening. As you might recall, gentle reader, I bought a stack of this fellow’s books at Rublecon this year and have already read his short novel Hang Me If I Stay Shoot Me If I Run and collection of poetry Loot the Bodies.

The subtitle of the book is “Poems for The Golden Girls“, so that should give you an idea of what you’re in for. The author/poet used the episodes in the seven seasons of the show with Bea Arthur as springboards/writing prompts, and this is the result. You know, I never was a fan of the show–it was on when I was in high school, when I still watched some television, but I was not the target demographic. In this part of the 21st century, for some reason it has become a cultural touchstone for members of my generation–I’ve seen Facebook images of a slightly younger cousin, her husband, and another couple dressed up as the quartet of the Golden Girls for some event or another. I mean, cosplaying the Golden Girls? Not something that even comes close to interesting me. And even though I’m watching some old series (The Streets of San Francisco and Red Dwarf, for example), I am not tempted to buy DVDs of this particular series. So perhaps I’m not the target audience for this book, either.

At any rate, the book breaks the series into its seasons and then has a poem for each episode. Most of them deal with the events of the episode and rely heavily on that knowledge of the series and the particular episode. I flagged one poem as being good standing on its own–Season 1 Episode 23 “I want to be the person I used to be”. I flagged another, Season 3 Episode 2, “I need a favor” because it kind of alludes to O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”–or maybe the episode itself did the heavy lifting from American literature. Another one, Season 6 Episode 15, “Miles to go” riffs on a Frost poem (“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”, in case it wasn’t obvious). I get the sense that the poet kind of patterned other of his poems on different poetry styles and/or other particular poems as well. As I mentioned, it’s really a bit of poetical doodling more than a serious attempt at meaningful poetry (I hope).

HOWEVER, the poet does go out of his way several times to make clear that gun owners are bad, that people who are not fans of state-run schools are right wing nut-jobs, that Donald Trump is a bad, bad man (if not the devil), and that the series had too many jokes about communists back in the day when this was laughing defiantly in the face of what we were told was an existential threat and that we were on the verge of extinction by nuclear warfare (one wonders if the poet ever had to do an actual duck-and-cover drill in school like 80s kids did). Which is sad: Although he seemed like a pleasant guy at the con, he would dislike me if he knew I am all of those things he does not like in the abstract. Maybe he would not want me to buy his books. Maybe he won’t be the one deciding next time I see him at a con should I pass him by. And for what? Petty self-expression? Bah.

I know, I know, you’re saying, Brian J., haven’t you taken some arch and snarky little shots at political opponents over the years? Well, yes, but this is a blog which is the medium for that sort of thing. And you’ll noticed I’ve tempered those kinds of posts and whatnot over the years as the atmosphere has become rather toxic. But I’d never (I’d like to think) do it in my poetry or fiction or even personal essays, gentle reader, because I’d like to make something that appeals to many people and gives people something to reflect on in the universal human condition, not what’s on the television or Internet right now. That ages like milk in a sippy cup left in the car in August.

I got this book a week ago at the Friends of the Library book sale. Again, I am not excited about the stack of books piled on my chair side book accumulation point, so I picked a couple of short books to read as I glacially move through those books I am compelled to read (or eventually throw back into the stacks). This promised to be a quick read, and it was.

It really is nothing more than a set of Web site listicles in print; one could easily imagine this as a blog posted over the course of time with a lively comment section, but looking on the Internet does not show anything blog about it. Blogs are so 2006 (but this book is from 2009, so coming out of the blog era). It features sections on Arts & Literature, Sports & Leisure, History & Politics, Entertainment, and Science & Nature (which makes it one Geography chapter short of a lawsuit from the Trivial Pursuit people). Some of the individual face-offs include the 80s vs the 90s, summer games vs winter games, Gandhi vs Mother Theresa, Smurfs vs Care Bears, and so on. Each has a set of snarky bullet points for each side, sometimes obvious in its preference, and it has some pages where it just lists challenges for discussion. This would probably be a good book for reading aloud during road trips–and back in the day, that was the sort of thing my beautiful wife and I did. But now everyone has headphones on and a personal device leaving the driver to listen to lectures and audiobooks unless driving on the narrow roads in Arkansas.

Some of the challenges have aged poorly and might seem in poor taste, but then again in 2009 contenders like Amy Winehouse and Eddie Van Halen were alive then. And the author doesn’t inject politics too much, although the contenders for Worst President are Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush (boy, do we have some new entrants for you). Does Donald Trump make an appearance? Oh, boy, mister, you bet he does: but as it is before his political career as the devil, it’s in the category of Balding vs Extreme Anti-Balding Measures.

Still, a quick and amusing read and perhaps worthwhile for a road trip if you can get your family from under the hood.

This would be Millay’s first book of poetry; she won a contest for her poem “Renascence” which brought her to the big city (New York) and let her be the phenomenon that she would become, both as a poet and as a young woman having experiences that would lead her to be the Taylor Swift of the Twenties. Well, not that much, but it did put her on track to professional poetry.

The book starts out with a couple of long poems, “Renascence”, “Interim”, and “The Suicide” which are heavily influenced by the long lyrics of the Romantic poets except that they have meter and rhyme. They’re not her best work, of course; I am partial to the sonnets, of course. This book contains “Bluebeard”, a sonnet that influenced me such that I wrote a dramatic monologue when I was in college with a similar theme (a lover pries into her hidden spaces and learns that she has fled him; in my monologue, a lover wants to know what is held in her lover’s closed hand only to discover it contains nothing, but that little bit of closing the hand kept a part of the speaker independent).

So I’ve read the book before, and I already have a copy (although a later edition from 1924). But I really was due to read it again, and buying this copy for only $2.00 gave me just the excuse I needed. As I mentioned, the book sale earlier this month had a number of Millay’s works, so I likely will be revisiting a number of her works in the near term. And by consolidating the previous owner’s collection with mine, I might well have the best collection of Millay in Springfield, if not Missouri.

This particular version has a previous owner’s name inside the cover: Priscilla Metcalf Glendora, 1930. The title page indicates it might have been a gift–I think it says Priscilla from with an illegible name following. However, the book is also stamped (former) property of Nathaniel Hawthorne College in Antrim, New Hampshire, which has a brief but interesting history–which begins with the college’s founding in 1962. So the book must have been donated or bought as part of a collection and hung out in the library there until maybe 1988 when the college closed its doors. How would it have gotten to Springfield? Well, Ebay or something. After all, a collector has got to have the first book by the author, ainna? And this is a nice edition with cloth pages. A fourth edition to go along with my sixth edition. I’ve taken a moment to look at Ebay to see what first editions run for, and they’re not terrible, but I probably won’t be shopping for them soon.

All right, you know what did trigger anemoia (nostalgia for something you did not experience)? This Ethan Allen catalog/look book which I bought at the Senior Center in July. I was not clear when I bought it whether it was something for collectors or a catalog, but it’s definitely a catalog. It has some bits about how great Ethan Allen stores are and how great the quality of the furniture (solid oak and select veneers, so….). The stores not only handled furniture and accents/accessories but also window treatments and floor coverings/carpets so it was a one-stop shop for when you were decorating, as it had experts on hand to help you design and decorate a room or a home from scratch.

The catalog is grouped into the different collections, from olden opulent styles like the Georgian Court to a more modern look called Heirloom which looked to be a little less expensive (and Antiqued Pine which was probably the most, erm, economical). I rather enjoyed the more elaborate styles, of course, but would have been most likely to have seen the lower end things. If I ever saw any Ethan Allen furniture in the wild, it would most likely have been those latter things. Our homes would have been decorated in garage sale chic and later inherited antiques. Heck, even my rich aunt and uncle were only aspirants to upper middle class in my youth. Maybe they later would have gotten some Ethan Allen things. I see the chain is still in business, and there’s a location in the Mid Rivers Mall area near where they lived after St. Charles.

But: The thing that really stirred my interest and nostalgia was the patterns and the colors on the walls. Wallpapers, not paneling, and oversized window treatments. Floral print upholstery. Which is not what we’ve had much of in our three homes and certainly not in Old Trees or Nogglestead. We’ve had homes where the only window treatments were blinds–at Nogglestead, the living room, parlor, dining room, hall baths, and both offices still have the blinds we inherited from the previous owners fifteen years ago–and as the ones in the parlor, dining room, and living room are paper and have been subject recently to kittens chewing the cords, they’re falling into disrepair. And the walls in both the home in Old Trees and at Nogglestead have, for the most part, remained an off-white or beige color–the neutrals that are designed to help sell a home. I mean, we have painted a couple of rooms a different color or added an accent wall, but the only texture we’ve had on the walls (aside from the knock-down cover-the-wall-defects-without-sanding treatment which is then painted all one color) is the rag-rolled blues in my office at Casinoport. And aside from a couch which my then-beautiful-girlfriend bought as she was moving to St. Louis, most of our furniture has been of a single color or solid. Heck, even our throw pillows have been mostly a single color (accoutrements with Green Bay Packers logos excepted, of course). Boring!

At Nogglestead, we’ve accumulated keepsakes and personal relics to build a layered look on mantels and whatnot, and the books jammed into their bookshelves provide a texture of sorts, but I’m wondering if a wallpaper or paneling might not make the lower level of Nogglestead more to my taste. Probably! Although my wife does not like the look of wallpaper. And have you noticed the talk of decorating has lead me to overusing exclamation points? Well, it has! As I am getting older, I am starting to really dial into the look of a home I want–but we’re not in a position to make our vision come to life–partially financially, but also partially because the “we” and “our” differs and defers to the taste of the Mrs. And to the taste of the previous Nogglestead owners.

At any rate, I read the text introducing each section of the catalog, the descriptions of the various rooms and the very palely purple prose praising the collections (but I did not read the details of each particular item found in the rooms or in groups of furniture types such as end tables or occasional tables). Forty-five years ago (probably forty-six), someone made a living writing copy for catalogs (I’ve known a few people who did that while working on their literary works–::cough cough:: Leah Holbrook). I felt a little bad for someone like that whose work was generally transient. So I read this unnamed author’s works.

I also flagged a couple of things:

• In a section on kitchens, the catalog also includes serving lists and recipes, and one such for a Heirloom collection dining room with an Italian theme included mentions of a La Caprese. A Caprese salad. I’ve recently started buying fresh mozzarella, and my beautiful wife has made Caprese salads for me with store-boughten tomatoes but homegrown basil because I’ve ordered them when I can at Italian and upscale restaurants around town.
• A blue-themed Heirloom collection had Matisse prints on the wall above the headboard, including the one on the cover of the book I read in 2018 (that long ago?). It hasn’t been that long since I’ve seen this particular print though–it was in an episode< of The Streets of San Francisco which I just watched.

Also, I looked at the back, which had a stamp of the local Ethan Allen gallery:

I had to look up the actual location to see if I could place it, and I most assuredly can: It was located in the building that now houses the Ozark Treasures antique mall. I asked my wife if she knew where it was, and she did; apparently, the store remained open until after she moved to the Springfield area, although that was less than a decade after this catalog came out. It’s unclear from the Internet when it actually closed; in 1998, it moved from this location to a former movie theatre in the mall which by 2017 was a large thrift store which closed a couple years later. I don’t remember if it was in the mall when my toddlers and I wandered through it when our car was getting serviced in a service center in the out lot, but I am not sure. So it’s possible I might have passed by such a store and never stopped in. But, to be honest, I have enough furniture with select veneers that a couple years of children and kittens have begun to peel.

The next dilemma: Do I enter this catalog into the book database I have? I mean, I have counted it as a book I read this year (currently at 69, but I am not stopping for the puerile humor of the total). But I have not counted the Ideals magazines I have read nor have I entered them into the book database (but the hardback Ideals book Houses of Worship? You bet!). So what to do? What to do? Since I am likely to crack the 25-year-old database program open and wait through its overtaxed type-ahead feature for books I have yet to review, maybe so!

On September 10, I watched about thirty seconds of the presidential debate, when the moderators attacked Trump about his tariffs, and that was all I could take. You know, a long time ago, I would liveblog such things, and in 2008, I went to a rally when Palin debated Biden in St. Louis and shook my head in disbelief whenever Biden lied, and I could not believe that people did not know better. Nearly two decades later, it is I who have been educated, and they do believe it.

So instead of trying to jump into Walden, I picked up this book, a fairly recent addition to the stacks along with a book of poems inspired by the television series The Golden Girls (you’ll be hearing about it) to calm my mind.

Ah! Kittens! Puppies! Forty-some full color pictures beside a quatrain of cutesy doggerel or catterel. It’s definitely a gift book, complete with To and From lines before the title page. Nothing more, nothing less.

As you might know, gentle reader, I have started a cutesy pet picture business at NicoSez.com. I only have fifteen photos/designs up, but, you know what? When I get a litter further along, perhaps I will make a book of it and sell it at ABC Books. Maybe have a signing with Nico.

So I did count this as a book I read. After all, it had as many poems as photos. Well, less if you count the cover, front and end pieces, and title pages. But still. Poems, everybody! Poems!

I picked this book up from the free book cart at church. I might have mentioned before that I pick up a book sometimes on Sunday mornings, especially ones where my beautiful wife has to be there thirty or forty-five minutes before service begins. I’ve also been known to drop off books when I find a duplicate in the Nogglestead stacks, but only if the book is fairly wholesome–the Battlefield park little free library gets the saucy stuff. For a while, other people were also leaving books, non-church books–westerns and whatnot–but then on Sunday all that was cleared off as though someone decided that was not what the cart was for. The cart, I imagine someone saying, was for inspirational Christian books. And, brother, this book is not a Christian book.

Instead, it is a collection of quotes from Klemp, who apparently is the leader of Eckankar, which scans like Hinduism blended with just enough Christian iconography to perhaps attract wandering members. The book talks about God, and it talks about the Holy Spirit, but it also talks about the soul as being part of divinity, different worlds/planes of existence to which the soul can rise, and reincarnation. Stuff that your pastor probably would prefer you not like too much.

The book, again, is a set of quotes from other works (Klemp had over 60 books by 2006, and probably many more in the intervening decades). So it doesn’t go into too much the ontology of the recently developed school of religious thought, but one wonders how much deep ontology one would find in the more seminal works–whether they would tend to the academic and scholastic or just be happy guides to letting your soul glow.

C’mon, man, you can’t read that phrase and not sing it.

At any rate, one of the passages reads:

Each Soul is an individual and unique being. We have two parts to our lower nature: the positive and the negative. When we get to the Soul Plane, we find that threse two parts become one.

I can’t see “Soul Plane” and not think of the film. And I can’t help but say it my head like this:

Sorry, I didn’t take this book very seriously. It’s got just enough of the ontology, the talk of different planes of existence and whatnot, to not be completely useful as a simple mindfulness self-helper. And I’m not really a spiritual kind of guy looking for a new framework to help me understand my place in the universe. So, ultimately, I cannot actually assess the book nor its religion properly. But it’s definitely different from the lightweight Buddhism I sometimes read.

After reading Tough Guys and Gals of the Movies, I came across this book and figured that I might as well keep on the theme.

In this case, the book covers mostly monster movies as the “horror” films–slasher films would only be coming into prominence about the time this book was coming out (the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was 1974). We do get some Hitchcock-style thrillers, and I laughed out loud when a still from the opening of Zardoz was on page 18.

So the book is probably designed for people who are fans of the genre to page through as kind of a checklist or a reminder of things they’ve seen or items to add to their list of things to catch on the Creature Feature on Saturday mornings on a UHF station. I have seen a number of films in it, including a couple quite recently (Dracula and Barbarella if you, as I do, count 2022 as recently). I’ve also seen Night of the Living Dead, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Birds, King Kong, Metropolis, Soylent Green, The Pit and the Pendulum with Vincent Price (recently, but not recently enough to have blogged it), and maybe all or parts of some others. I have to say I’m less inclined to go hunt down the old horror films than the old noir films in Tough Guys and Gals of the Movies, but I’m not likely to find many of either in the wild.

It’s a product of its time also in that one in the 21st Century knows to call some films the original. Films the book discusses, such asInvasion of the Body Snatchers, Psycho, The Fly, and King Kong would be remade not long after this book came out. Some of the actors became more widely known for other things–Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, for example, starred in a number of monster films in the 1960s and early 1970s, but they’re most known for Star Wars and/or The Lord of the Rings.

I did spot one error in the book; it says The Omega Man was set in New York, but I knew it was in California (I’d thought San Francisco, but Wikipedia says Los Angeles).

As with the previous book, I found it to be a pretty quick read; it is chock full of photos, mostly black and white but some color, but the ratio of text-to-image was too high for browsing during football games. Now that that old life is behind me, I shall endeavor to go through more of these sorts of book. Heaven knows I have a couple more like it.

This was the only book I bought at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale last month, and after finishing Glory Road (and whilst still working, slowly, on Walden), I wanted something a little different.

Do not confuse this book with Tough Guys and Dangerous Dames, which I reported on in 2004. Not that you would; that one is a collection of pulp fiction, whereas this one is a litany focusing on actors (and some actresses) who played hardboiled or sub-versions of such characters in the movies, whether detectives, villains, or…. monsters? Yes, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price are mentioned. Of course Cagney, Bogart, and Robinson are mentioned. So are later arrivals like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster (I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen these actors together in a film called, oddly enough, Tough Guys which was on Showtime back in the day). At the very tail end of the period covered, we get actors like Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, and some others who were getting into 70s tough guy actors who were really not that tough at all.

It’s an interesting role call (ahut) that includes some older actors who are mostly forgotten today (Dan Duryea, Charles Pickford, and so on) as they did not reach the heights of some others.

This was a longtime high school library book in Ash Grove, but not necessarily a popular one. It was checked out 7 times in 1982, 4 times in 1983, 2 times in 1984, 3 times in 1985, 2 times in 1987, what looks to be once in 1992, and once in 1983. I have to wonder how relevant this book would have been to high school students in the early 1980s, as the majority of the films covered in the book were released in the 1930s through the 1950s. Probably more relevant than a similar time elapsed period today as old films were still in rotation on UHF stations and on Saturday afternoons and late night shows, and the cable viewing diaspora had not occurred yet. I guess some of the actors were still working in the 1980s–Vincent Price provided voice over for “Thriller”, Clint Eastwood was still playing Dirty Harry and had perhaps his best Western yet to come, Raymond Burr was still making Perry Mason movies, and, of course, the aforementioned Tough Guys.

I enjoyed the book and read it quickly, and it made me really want to find some of these classics on home video. Which might inspire me to spend even more at the upcoming Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale than I would. Although restraint has not really been one of my strong suits.

When I bought this book in 2021, I said, “…a browser that would be right up Lileks’ alley.” And so it was, although with less depth than you get out of Lileks’ The American Motel site which Lileks has built over years from postcards.

This book, though, is a quick, inexpensive collection of photos featuring mostly motel signs but also some actual motel photos, including a few interiors and a couple of the fronts of motels or the grounds. A few are black and white for real retromania, but others are relatively contemporary. Ha! I mean contemporary to people of a certain age. Judging by the cars outside the motels, the photos only go up to the 1980s.

You know, I was kind of expecting to have visited a motel depicted within the book. Not because I’ve visited a lot of non-chain motels in my day–I think I’ve stayed at maybe three or four in my lifetime, and Budgetels, Hampton Inns, and whatnot. But given that the cover of the book has Route 66 right on it, I fully expected to see St. Louis’s Coral Courts in it somewhere because they had a distinct art deco look to them–and as I mentioned, I “urban explored” them before they made way for a subdivision. But no.

I suppose it counts to my good that my scores on checklists of churches exceeds the score of quizzes based on one-night cheap motels I’ve visited.

I ordered this book from ABC Books during the Covid lockdowns in 2020; apparently, that day I was browsing the animal listings as I bought a number of cat books (and probably sent some to my friend Glenn who never acknowledged it).

It’s basically a listicle of things you can do to be friendly to a cat with one item per page aside a picture of a cat doing something cute (not that I would try to monetize something like that). Basically, it’s a little book designed to be a gift for someone you know who likes cats. Which makes it all the more not-needed-to-be said: That person you know who likes cats probably already does most of these things already because they’re pretty obvious. Also, the age of the target audience becomes obvious when you run into an Ethel Merman reference. C’mon, man, she was old when she was in Airplane!, and that was forty-five years ago. Very few people under the age of 60 will know who she was.

Still, it counts as a full book for the annual total. And, to be honest, I’m a little surprised that it took me this long to get to it. Perhaps I’ve been reading magazines and poetry for end-of-the-evening browsers, and I haven’t really been watching football enough to run through books like this. Still, good to have moved it along in the to-read stacks > read books > estate sale pipeline. Not really looking forward to that last step, admittedly.