Category: Books

As a reminder, gentle reader, I bought this book in Davenport, Iowa, in 2024, and the book shop owner asked me if I knew the author who used to call the bookshop when he was looking for source material. Last year when I went to the same bookshop, different people we behind the counter, so I don’t know if the book shop was still in the same family as it had been. I’ll have to be sure to look for the founder’s portrait behind the desk as an indicator. Not that it would indicate yea or nay, but if it’s not there, that might indicate nay.

The book is a history from the first white settlements in the Quad Cities area. The Sac/Sauk are already there, of course, so some of the earliest history deals with establishing trading posts, the Black Hawk War, and the advantage that a man named Davenport had because he was originally from England and had the accent, and the natives in the area had sided with the British in the wars against the Americans.

Settlements came, settlements expanded, and they formed into the communities that became the cities. Each had a certain amount of its own character determined by the people who settled in each–not only by nationalities, but also trades. Davenport became commercial because the traders founded it, and their impact carried on. Moline, from the French for mill, was (and is) heavily industrial, dominated today by John Deere. The actual Rock Island was taken pretty early by the federal government to be an armory, but the city of Rock Island is on the Illinois bank of the river. The book calls it variously the two cities and the Tri-Cities; the fourth of the Quad, Bettendorf, was founded in the 20th century, so one is forgiven for not remembering which is the fourth (Milan and East Moline were formed earlier, but I guess they’re disqualified because they’re not on the river).

You know, I’ve been to Davenport twice, but I did walk around the downtown area a couple of times, so some of the names are a little familiar to me, and I look forward to maybe sharing some of this knowledge with my beautiful wife should we attend a conference there again. And she will undoubtedly wonder how I know such things. Ah, gentle reader, we know: I do my homework on history for places I visit and places where I live for not only the trivia-sharing, but also because I like to know.

Gentle reader, I have done it: I have read all the Ben Wolf books I already own before I go to Davenport, Iowa, for the cybersecurity convention where he has had a booth for the last couple of years (2024 and 2025). I have previously read:

• The Ghost Mine
• The Ghost Pact
• The Ghost Plague
• Rickshaw Riot
• What the Frost?
• Unlucky

The above books except for Unlucky are parts of series; this book, apparently, is a one-off as well.

In it, the remnants of humanity huddle together on Antarctica after a war between humans and the Magic Born, another race discovered in Antarctica that used magic. The rich people live in Cypress, which is earth-like; outcasts and lower classes live in The Thaw or The Slab, which are on the outskirts of civilization and are not heated as well. Mankind still has access to magic, and some people can use it a little bit. A Peacekeeper, one of the military law enforcement in the area, is from a good family framed for wrongdoing, and he barely escapes to the thaw alive–but a triple amputee. Another is an amnesiac young woman, perhaps an escapee from a science facility, who can process magic and transfer it to others. A third is the CEO of a medical company whose products will be eclipsed by a competitor who promises magic-based cures. The final one is a loner from outside of civilization who has especial impervious armor and is older than he should be. They band together to go to the lake under Antarctica to use a device the CEO and genius scientist says will end magic once and for all. But that’s not her plan at all.

I think this book is the best of the Ben Wolf books I’ve read, and I think the others helped to leaven the dough. It has an interesting premise, some good world building, and some characterization that differentiates the characters and gives them some depth–but this could be improved a bit with a little more interiority and less bickering (sometimes they go on with their tropes a couple of beats too long or too often). Wolf has his normal things (asking “Crystal?” for a response, not often given, of “Clear.” and “What the frost?”). Although it’s not self-consciously video-game-esque like Rickshaw Riot, I cannot help but think that the writing is still video-game-informed, as though the source material comes from video games and movies rather than other novels as fodder. But that’s my thesis that I’ve banged on while reading Wolf’s books and can retcon into my understanding of a lot of other self-published science fiction.

At any rate, as I mentioned, this is the last of the Wolf books I’ve already boughten, so that means I only have a history of the Quad Cities are and a book about growing up on a farm in Iowa to read before I’m caught up on at least the local interest and local author books, but a collection of Kipling verse and a Hemingway book short of having read all of the books I’ve bought in Davenport–although, to be honest, Kipling and Hemingway sound like some fun (re-)reads, so perhaps I’ll get to them before October.

But! I have learned from my beautiful wife that our trip to Davenport might not be a set thing for this October. She’s got a lot of other speaking engagements coming up, and there’s always a slight chance that we’ll have, you know, jobs come the autumn. But time will tell, and I will keep you posted, especially if I do buy books up there this October. But if I don’t, well, all might be forgotten.

At any rate, not bad. Almost rises to, say, Alan Dean Foster.

This is actually only the second of the Diagnosis Murder paperbacks that I bought in Berryville, Arkansas, five years ago (The Silent Partner was the first in 2022). Which is kind of odd, really, and I like the books by Lee Goldberg which I have read in this and the series tied in to the television series Monk. So I spend some time gutting out long books that I think I should read or that I’ve started reading and have started putting off finishing, suddenly I read a couple of books that I rather enjoy in the evenings. Which is why the stack of books beside the chair tends toward the thicker books, and I’m just reading everything else while I’m still working on them…..

At any rate, this book has almost two stories in it. A murdered woman dressed as a mermaid washes up on the beach outside Dr. Sloan’s house, and it might be related to his first case in 1962. So the book flashes back to that case when Sloan was just a resident at the hospital, when his son the police office was a baby, and his wife was still alive. Sloan uncovers a series of murders of young nursing students who were moonlighting as babysitters–and maybe prostitutes. This flashback comprises much of the story, and when it is resolved, it doesn’t help Sloan with the contemporary (20 year ago now, though, old man) murder, which turns into murders, of course, until he finally gets the picture–and almost becomes the contemporary murderer’s next victim–and the resolution parallels the one in the past.

At any rate, the pacing moves the reader along, the writing has enough depth to be interesting, and the characterization has enough flourish to not overwhelm, but to give you a sense of who the players even if you haven’t seen the show (as I mentioned previously, I only caught bits of it when visiting my sainted mother). There are touches of humor–it was a Dick Van Dyke show, after all–and some in jokes that are there for real fans (at one point, Dr. Sloan thinks about what it would have been like to go into show business in 1962 and expected he would only merit a half hour sitcom–which Dick Van Dyke did have with The Dick Van Dyke Show).

So I enjoyed it, and maybe I will have enjoyed it enough to pick up others I have, which are stacked on the broken bookshelf (unfixed in 12 years, so don’t expect it to be replaced or fixed soon). So I know where they are. However: You can’t have yer pudding if you don’t eat yer meat. How can you have yer pudding if you don’t eat your meat? I think I would read books much faster if I didn’t feel the need to live up to my English and Philosophy degree and did not innundate myself with audio courses exciting me about the source materials.

I actually ordered this book because I’ve been noodling on writing something something about how the Agile manifesto destroyed software, and I was aware of this book, so I wanted to see if the author touched on it.

Oh, but no.

Here are the biggest reasons, according to Doctorow, about why everything has gone to pot:

• The breakdown of government regulation
• The weakness of labor unions
• Elon Musk
• Donald Trump

Doctorow’s focus is fairly narrow–he’s got a mad-on for the big tech platforms, formerly known as FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google). No, wait; Netflix doesn’t piss him off, so maybe it’s MAAAX if you use their current names and throw in X. When he talks about consolidation, he does mention poultry producers, and he mentions healthcare consolidation, but, man, does he focus on big tech mostly. He’s a former bigwig with the Electronics Frontier Foundation, so that’s his experience, I guess.

And his solutions are:

• More government regulation. Not the bad kind, like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, but the good kind, like the stuff the EU uses to extract money from American companies. And regulation to ensure safe spaces, nonharrassment, censorship, etc. And not by Congress, oh, no! Sometimes the Republicans control it. The rule should come from the executive agencies which will remain in place even when the political tide shifts.
• Tech workers should throw their wooden shoes into their companies’ processes when they, the employees, don’t like them. Or whatever the political cause they have, probably, since we’ve seen that happen in the past, but it’s not cited in the book (nor here, because I’m not a paid public intellectual, man).
• Unions. Which will bring prices down and quality up through wishful thinking.

Yeah, basically, that’s it. Break up the monopolies, I guess. He mentions Mastadon, which was briefly talked about as an alternative to Twitter after the devil Elon Musk took it over. The book was perhaps written to early to mention Bluesky instead. But it doesn’t seem that Musk ruined Twitter except renaming it “X.” I guess we should be thankful he did not create an unpronounceable glyph.

You can tell he’s real, man, because he swears in the text (and the book title!). And he wears his politics on his sleeve–calling people who voted for Trump cultists, etc., which really means the book is targetted to his side of the political aisle (his biggest fans!), so it’s not convincing. And because he’s describing a real problem, but has all the wrong answers to it (well, mostly the wrong answers), I wished that I had ordered the book in paperback so I could beat the hell out of it.

I mean, you get similar messaging from Substacks like Your Brain on Money, even down to the policy solutions, but without the political invective that prevents discussion and conversation.

I mean, one could argue, and were I public intellectual who made money from his glib fingertips instead of a backwater blogger who pays for the privilege of writing book reports nobody reads. However, since we’re both here (me and the cat), let’s look at some of the things that have also contributed to us old people saying things were better in the old days:

• Government regulation in every domain has made things worse. Whether it’s mandates for what health insurance has to cover or improved safety/efficiency in cars, lightbulbs, appliances, and seemingly everything you can buy.
• He does mention rent-seeking, and somehow he thinks more regulation will fix things–but large organizations that get the government to regulate industries by requiring credentials or licensing make it harder for people to become cosmeticians, sellers of real estate, and more.
• The aforementioned Agile Manifesto which had its heart in a right place but which lead to minimum viable products as final product and to rationalizing technical and business failures whose consequences are not only felt by the businesses but by the users who might have come to depend upon them.
• Importing large numbers of people and tech workers from non-Western countries whose mores and ideals do not necessarily match Western thoughts of quality or fair play, especially in the tech field, might lead to lesser outcomes.
• Changes in generational mindset, from the effects of having phones from toddlerhood to changes in the “education” system.
• The long-term impact of putting “diversity” on the same level, or higher than, competence in hiring.

Etc., etc.

Unions and government regulations aren’t going to fix it. If it is to be fixed, it will likely take a long time and a cultural shift which I’m not sure is possible any more.

(Oh, and I would be remiss not to self-referentially post other mentions on this blog: I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in 2019 and thought it was okay, and apparently, in 2010, a proto-clanker thought that I write like Doctorow.)

Oh, and another thing: I came up with the he is a Canadian who does not like hockey as a perjorative to apply to Doctorow, but apparently, he has become a British citizen (according to Wikipedia), and I’m pretty sure he mentions getting US citizenship in the book (and later says, “As a Canadian, I….”). So make of that what you will. Still, I’m going to use that to denigrate Canadians with whom I disagree in the future. “You have forgotten the face of your father” is the only thing I remember from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.

And! I’ve been kind of putting of going to the eye doctor because I think this time I really will need glasses for distances, and I’m afraid wearing glasses will make me look like a public intellectual of a certain type. Although, hopefully, a public intellectual who can do finger pushups like Bruce Lee. But not one-finger pushups because I do not have kung fu hands.

As I am deep in some thicker books which I am not really enthusiastic about reading, so I picked up this bit of pulp for enjoyment, kind of like having a bite of the sweet corn whilst eating the liver. I picked this book up in 2012 at Hooked on Books–a year later, I would really pad out my collection of the books in the Executionerverse, which includes the next title in the Able Team series, but who knows how long it will take me to get to it.

Able Team is three of the members of the Stony Farm team that helped Mack Bolan, the Executioner, out on occasion. Note that the Stony Farm series is a separate line in the Executionerverse, and who knows when I will get to them–since I finished the last of the Executioner books I accumulated in 2022, I’ve been slow to really delve into the men’s adventure paperbacks. Maybe I’ve gotten old and switched to Westerns. Anyway.

So Able Team is sent to El Salvador to hunt for a guy who has eluded their grasp in the United States, a big drug dealer or what have you, not part of the government but a powerful man with his own private army nevertheless. It’s a story ripped from today’s headlines, where today is almost forty years ago. The El Salvador civil war was going on. Is it still? Maybe. Central and South America, neh? Although they find help from various rebel groups with their own agenda, they find that the hard site is too hard for their small band, and the bad man has gone to a meet-up in Honduras with other similar fellows from across Central and South America who are looking to bring about a Fourth Reich. It’s a story ripped from today’s pulp fiction forty years ago.

You know, strangely enough, the plot is not necessarily that dated. Not that there’s a great swell of Naziism, but it never really went away in thrillers, did it?

At any rate, it’s an ensemble piece with characters who are almost ciphers, just bundles of characteristics, whose characterization, I guess, takes place over time. The book alludes to events in previous books, and the bad guy gets away again, which means I can guess what Able Team is doing in their next book. Which I’m not sure when I will get to. Unless, of course, I dawdle in the thick books stacked beside my chair for any length of time.

I got this book for my birthday this year, and after kinda sounding like I was slagging on the gifts, I decided I’d prioritize reading the books. So I picked up this book, the first of the two Grishams; my son thought I was a Grisham fan, and although I listened to one of the early books–A Time To Kill? It’s the one with the attorney in it. You know, aside from reading Perry Mason books from time to time and in bulk in my youth, I never really got into legal thrillers. I mean, I probably have read some Scott Turow, too, but I’d be hard pressed to remember, and it would have been a long time ago.

So: A woman on the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct is getting bored with the job which is getting starved of funds. The BJC investigates judges suspected of wrongdoing–and in a previous book, she’s nailed one such judge for corruption, but not without cost. An attention-averse woman approaches her with knowledge and some circumstantial evidence that a local judge is a serial killer with a list of victims going back several decades. As they begin to investigate, the judge kills again, but makes a mistake. Which leads them to more investigating, and going to proper investigators in the FBI, but….

Okay, so the first part of the book deals with the investigator’s doubt about the woman bringing her the information, but eventually she gets going on looking into it. The second part of the book introduces the judge as a character, so we get into his mind as he prepares his crimes–he’s hopped up on bennies, a hacking genius, a compulsive type who cleans enough to make the guy from Gattaca look like a slob, and kind of unbelievable. Then, after he makes his kill and has to kill a witness (which I guess is the turning point?), he figures out who the woman who intially discovered him is, and he gets the drop on her even though she’s supposed to be almost as paranoid as he is (his super hacking helps), and he sets a trap for the investigator. But deus ex machina thwarts the trap, deus ex machina saves the kidnapped girl, unsatisfying resolution to the pursuit of the judge, and a denouement which includes the winding down of the team (not an unexpected twist to the unsatisfying resoluton to the pursuit of the judge which would have been unsatisfying in itself, but it’s somehow worse without) and a lot of jibber jabber, talking to families of victims to offer them resolution, which is jibber jabber and not a shoot-out where the good guys triumph.

Ach, this is a chick book. Not sure if JG has a girl ghost writer or if he just knows the market that gets him forty-something consecutive bestsellers, but the book has a lot of talking, self-doubting, other-doubting, and then more talking as though the talking and overcoming self-doubting were heroic in themselves. But, uh, yeah. Not making me want to delve into the backlist (except where gifted).

But, ya know. He’s sold more books than I have books, apps, t-shirts, related CafePress sundries, blog traffic (including bots), and social media impressions that I’ve gotten in a comparable time. So take it for what it’s worth, but in my opinion, he’s no John D. McDonald.

This book was sitting on my chairside table, and I thought I might read it for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Inspiring” category if Be Water, My Friend bogged down too much (not quite). And when I finished the reading challenge, I ran through it pretty quickly.

I bought it sight unseen in a bundle of chapbooks only last spring, and although the name of the editor sounded familiar, I don’t have anything else by her or edited by her. However, I might well have a poem by her in a similar collection–and I well might have. The publishing house is SPS Studios, and one of the poems is by Susan Polis Schutz–a poet who has been editing and publishing poetry since the 1980s (her first company for self-publishing was Blue Mountain Press, which later turned into BlueMountain.com which did electronic greeting cards which sold for $780 million in 1999, and that, children is how you get Governor Jared Polis of Colorado) If anyone wants to buy my publishing company, it’s far less expensive and comes with 7 unused ISBN numbers at no additional charge! Plus a couple of apps, presuming that the clankers companies don’t come from them. Sorry, where was I?

Oh. Inspiring? Meh, not really. A bit of lightweight mindfulness musing. Poetry? Again, no, not really. Sentences with line breaks. Not quite as good as heartfelt grandma poetry, albeit more spiritual than Christian–definitely a California-and-crystals vibe with 0 mentions of God and the only faith is the faith in yourself.

Still, with the number of copies that turn up in Springfield book sales, SPS has definitely had more reach than either my publishing company or my publications which recently have only paid in electronic presence which is lasts as long as the university keeps paying hosting fees. So….good?

For the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Translated” category, gentle reader, you might have expected me to pick up a martial arts book of some sort as that is my wont. But, ah! My translated martial arts books are getting a little thin, and the adjacent material that I have is pretty deep and dense for the final charge through the winter reading challenge. So I decided to pick up a Japanese manufacturing quality textbook from the 1970s!

So that’s what this is: It’s a manufacturing quality book, which means that its focus is on testing lots or examples of repeated machine work or chemical work. And it was designed as a textbook: It’s for quality circles, which were little afterhours learning groups at Japanese factories at the time when they were about to surpass the United States in reputation for quality. It relies on a lot of data collection and statistical analysis to look for places to improve. Which is not like software quality assurance at all.

I’ll be honest, though: I only skimmed a lot of the formulae within the book, and I did not diligently, as the book recommends, work through them to fully grok how to do the different analyses. The first half of the book is the explanation of the different types of analysis and, mostly, how to present the information in graphs and charts to make useful decisions based on the bars, lines, and points and figures. The second half is practice problems which the book recommended you work out individually or in your study group. I guess, in the 21st century, the next step (not depicted here, of course) would be to get a certificate of completion or other certification (and spend a lot of money to take the test, if not to take the training as well). I rather only scanned the problems to refresh the concepts in them. So did I really read this book? It took me several nights despite not working out what the square root of the x with the bar over it divided by pN means.

You know, I sometimes “work” in the software quality assurance field, and there was some effort to make SQA more like physical quality control a long time ago. I was even a member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) around the turn of the century, and the bulk of the magazine was like this–and they had a cartoon called Mr. Pareto-head. Well, this book helped to cement what that diagram really is–a bar chart with the values in descending order with a line chart atop it which shows those values as they add up to total percentage as you move to the right. Also, I learned a bit about the different types of charts, about the Ishikawa fishbone cause-and-effect diagram (named after the book’s author sometime perhaps between the first edition and this, a translated multi-printing American edition). But, really, the most directly applicable (sideways) chapter is the one on samples and sampling techniques because that could be an interesting way to describe/conceive of sets and subsets of tests to run.

At any rate, it closed out the fifteen categories for the Winter Reading Challenge, so I am eligible for a mug when I can be arsed to get up to a library branch for it in the next week.

And now you’re wondering if this will be the year where Brian J. works on reading all the quality assurance textbooks which he has accumulated over the course of the 21st century. Or even merely another. Prediction markets are leaning toward no.

I got this book in 2011, three years after I bought its sequel, 1633, in 2011, when Tam K. visited and commented from time to time, and a VftPlanche was the next best thing next to an Instalanche (which was over the course of a couple hours, but VftPlanches, although, smaller, stretched over days, and I still sometimes get a click from deep in her archives). We were bloggers once, and young. These days, the only ‘lanches I get are when a new Asian LLM comes scraping content.

Ah, well. The 2026 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “Set in Two Time Periods,” and although The Sins of the Fathers has a reprinted log entry set 100+ years in the past, I could not count it in the arbitrary good conscience I use when making up the actual rules for the contest. This book, however, starts in then-modern West Virginia before the town of Grantville is transported to 1632 Germany. It’s only a chapter, and then we’re in the second time period for the rest of the book. One presumes that 1633 takes place exclusively in one time period, so I’ve glad I found this one first.

So: A group of union mine workers are at a wedding of one of their own to the daughter of some uptight YUPPIE types when “The Ring Of Fire” takes the high school where the wedding is taking place from the West Virginia mountains along with several miles, including the town, to 1632 in the region now known as Germany. As they’re all good old boys, they’re armed to the teeth, which gives them an advantage as they try to remake their portion of the plains into America.

The book kinda has several threads in it: The pairing off of transplanted Americans with the attractive members of the locals; politicking as they talk about how they would like to govern themselves and the new nation they hope to bring forth; and some battle scenes where the Americans have to defeat the local powers of the day and work with their growing allies, which includes Jews.

To be honest, I kind of thought some groundwork was getting laid for some intrigues where pairs might start working at odds with each other, vying for power, but that had not really happened by the end of the novel–although the book has several sequels, so who knows what might be to come.

I found the politicking parts the most dragging, because a lot of it was mere speechifying. It’s a pretty big cast of characters, too, who are sometimes referred to by their first names and sometimes their last names, which made me sometimes think, “Which one is this again?” But it was an all right read. And it did bring the Thirty Years’ War into a little more familiarity and perspective. I read a book about Swedish history in 2013, and I remember tweeting at the time about how the Swedish leader at the time, Gustav Vasa, was interesting only to have a Swedish woman say, “Ackshually….” However, he’s presented sympathetically here (as are guns and a lot of the concepts of the Founding Fathers’), so no sucker punch ever came.

So if you like your alt-historical fiction, a blend of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (which I read in college), Puck of Pook’s Hill, a Kipling novel I read in 2010), some more modern alt-history people like Turtledove and Stirling, you could probably do worse.

As the book was over 500 pages, it counts as a two-fer (a book that could have filled two categories in the Winter Reading Challenge).

I picked this book up last weekend at ABC Books because I hoped it would have a time travel element in it, as the back of the book indicates that it tells the story of a ship that went back in time to make some astronomical observations, and on the way back, the astronomer on the crew of three went mad and killed the captain of the vessel. And I thought I was it would fit into the set in two times category of the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, especially as the first bit of it is set on the ship in the past (which is still our future a bit). However, at the end of the prolog, it says it’s an excerpt from the surviving mate’s log. Uh oh.

So: The first part of the book is the mystery as to why the astronomer went mad. Well, apparently, in their trip to the past, they discovered from their position not only in the past but 100 light years over from Earth’s position that the galactic core had exploded a long time ago, and the shockwave of radiation would reach earth 20 years after their own time. That alone wasn’t quite enough to make the astronomer mad–he also had some “hallucinations” that they were being followed on their return to earth for months in the starless void of their hyperspeed (from which they dropped periodically to take additional measurements to make sure they were not mistaken).

When they return to Earth, the mate reveals the story to the head of the international science agency–and then they discover that the astronomer was right–they were followed by aliens who land at Kennedy Spaceport and offer their help, which would involve turning the planet into a ship, but that would not only put the inhabitants into hardship as they hardened domiciles and whatnot but would also use up most of earth’s mass as fuel, rendering it not like it is now when they eventually reach the M31 galaxy (some time in the future). So the middle part is a boggy bit of bureaucratic stuff while they try to make the decision politically appealing and the head of the UN tries to pawn off ultimate responsibility to the head of the science agency. And the big mystery is why are the aliens helping? And that do they want in return? The middle comprises months of interactions, public reactions, and ruminations. But I guess it’s hard to write an emergency that is seventeen years in coming.

The end is pretty quick, though, when the aliens force a decision and reveal the reason they’re helping–their forefathers accidentally triggered the explosion, and they’re traveling to safety at near-light speed so they can find and help along other civilizations that they might find. And they want the humans’ help because they’ve become dependent upon a “coordinator,” a hive mind intelligence (via computer) which has guided them for thousands of years and which is going to “die” because they won’t have energy to run it–so they need humans who are closer to nature to be able to help them survive on wild planets they find. And, finis.

I hope you don’t mind that the book report here as spoilers, but, c’mon, man; the odds of you finding this book and picking it up in the wild are pretty low, and I would not go ordering it off of the Internet. It has a bit of a 70s vibe to it, not the eternal Soviet vs. US thing you get out of many books from the era, but the other, more “optimistic” one where international bodies kind of rule (although it’s worth noting that the book does not shy away from describing the human nature of those who run the organizations). But the thought of the UN being a unifying force for humanity is so 1900s, man.

So the book is not a direct ancestor of the movie Event Horizon (the novelization of which I read in 2008), but I can see how it might have been an inspiration. Someone takes the base conceit–a ship went somewhere extra-dimensionally/extra-timely and its occupants went mad–that someone put their own spin on. You know, if I were more of a writer instead of just a twee little blogger, maybe I would mine the 1970s midlist fiction I read from time to time for ideas. Ah, but that’s effort, and I’m not giving up nap time or time to try to finish the Winter Reading Challenge for actual productivity of any sort. Perish the thought!

Ah, gentle reader. I combed my stacks for something “Inspiring” to read for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge. You might remember, gentle reader, that I also had trouble with the “Feels Good” category last year, settling for Hope Always Wins. Which might have made a good entry this year for this category, but, alas, I’d already read it. I had one of the small poetry collections I get bundled for fifty cents at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale with “Inspirational” in the subtitle, but I’ve already got two poetry collections on this list. So I found this book, which I bought…. I dunno. No book sale marks on it, no ABC Books sticker on it–I think I received this as a gift. Someone gave me a book. Probably my beautiful wife. Its subtitle is The Teachings of Bruce Lee, and the author is his daughter (who was four when he died).

So, inspiring? Well, it made me want to practice martial arts (which, of course, I haven’t, because that would not be wasting my time like writing twee little apps) and to watch the Bruce Lee movies I bought a year ago (soon, now that I’m about a book and a half away from completing the Winter Reading Challenge). This book is really three books in one:

1. A biography of Bruce Lee’s adult years, studying philosophy, working in Hollywood, starting his martial art (jeet kune do), and writing.
2. A memoir of the daughter as she works through some of her issues, seeking knowledge from a variety of thought sources and practices, and landing on her father’s writing as she takes the reins of Bruce Lee’s enterprises in adulthood.
3. A self-help book, nominally based on the works and writings of Bruce Lee (paraphrased), but run through a corporate-speak blender. At several points in the book, I lost the thread of thought because I was counting variations on to be as the verb in a sentence. In some places it was over fifty percent. Maybe sixty. It’s just not compelling writing, although it improved later in the book where it got punchier.

It was definitely a slow read for its subject matter, better in the spots where she’s exegesisating on something of her father’s, and I did get one or two things out of it, particularly the way the book differentiates react versus respond. Also, she documents one day of his workout regimen which includes hundreds of punches, which reminds me (as so much does) that I have a heavy bag which I rarely use–and I should, especially since a martial arts class yesterday showed me again how my left side kicking strength has withered. So the book inspired me to watch Bruce Lee movies and to work out more, especially in my martial arts skills.

The book could have benefited from an editing to trim the corporatese language and to punch it up with some action verbs. Did I use “punch up” and “punchier” in a book report on a book about Bruce Lee? You betcha. It’s my blog, and I do what I want.

For the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Genre New To You” category, and given how voraciously, profligately, widely, and not very wisely read, I definitely had to go narrow and niche. So I thought of an Amish romance because I read Lewis’s blog (Rural Revolution). Which is good, because the only other thing that might qualify as some of the more modern monster erotica, and, well, let’s just say I’d only go 14 of 15 on the Winter Reading Challenge if that were my only choice.

So I ordered this book new from Amazon as part of the $10 in padding I needed to get the spare oven heating element I ordered after replacing it yet again in our tiny oven. Ah, gentle reader. I had to return that heating element because it was mailed in a plastic bag and had, strangely enough, gotten bent in transit. A couple days later, I sat down to read a copy of this book, but I discovered that it, too, was no good–someone has spilled coffee or something on it in the bindery, on the pages, before it was bound. The cover was pristine, but the first forty pages were completely unreadable–I mean, the paper quality on this little throwaway are pretty thin, but spilling coffee on them made them translucent and washed much of the print off of them. And some employee let this go through rather than stop the line. I guess I cannot say anything–when I ran a printing press, I let some prescription blanks of questionable quality pass because I was already attracting attention for my waste. Fortunately, Amazon took the second return from three items ordered that day and sent a replacement post haste ergo post (he said, trying to make a pun in Latin because he’s been listening to lectures on Roman authors recently). And I got to read a legible copy. Although, I must note that the replacement copy had light damage, dinging and whatnot, to the edges of the book. Probably as much from the cheap materials as Amazon mishandling, but my Amazon tweehad continues.

So: Well, the characters are all Amish–no Englisch (that is, non-Amish Americans) have speaking roles. Olivia has just moved to a settlement in Montana from Ohio after her father’s death. She is settling into her rental cottage and life as a spinster–she’s almost 30, and, as she and other remind us, she is awfully plain in appearance. One morning, she hears something on her doorstep, and she discovers a baby and a note. Her estranged wild-child sister is off with yet another man and has left her months-old baby for her sister to take care of. Olivia doesn’t know much about children, and when a local handyman appears at the door, she turns to him for help. And he’s handsome, unattached, and also new to the settlement. They’re both kind of starting over after losses–she took care of her father until he died; the handyman is looking for a new start after a relationship ends. They decide to buy a farm together, and to get married to do so–but they encounter some opprobium and a little resistance from the community–and when the sister returns, Olivia is worried she will tempt the handyman–or take the baby away.

The book has rather few events in it, instead padded out a bit by the interior thoughts of the main characters, each wondering at length if the arrangement will end up in a love match, but, no, the other person couldn’t love me. And the book recounts the initial arrival of the baby several times as they recount the story to different people in the settlement.

And it had a couple of things that didn’t seem right to me. The Amish people talk a bit more modern than I would expect despite the interjection of German into the dialog. In the first two chapters, the setup–the baby on the doorstep–is called cliche twice. A couple of different speakers use “literally” when describing something–they use it correctly, but “literally” is a speech tic that not everyone shares. That sort of thing, a speech tic shared by multiple characters, has been something I’ve watched out for ever since college, where one of my colleagues wrote a play where all of the characters exclaimed the name of the person they were talking to when surprised–something she did, but not everyone else did. She, too, probably called a lot of things cliche as was the style at the time. But I guess I could be mistaken–maybe the Amish do say “Whatever” and stuff. My experience with the Amish is avoiding their buggies on regional highways and reading occasional books about Englisch encounters with them. Maybe I should go to some of the localish Amish shops to do my own research.

Eh, not really my genre. I’m sure Mrs. Lewis knows her market and what she’s doing. She’s sold more copies of this book than I have all of my books and my apps put together. Of course, as I read her blog, I can see some parallels to her life in it–like building a pantry into their farmhouse–her husband did that when they moved to their new place a couple years ago–so when I say “I can see,” I mean I sorta can–I remember the pictures she posted.

At any rate, probably a serviceable entry in the genre, but I feel like my boys when they were younger: It would have been better with guns in it (like the genre paperbacks available by subscription that I generally read). I mean, I liked the movie better.

For the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Science Fiction/Nonfiction” category, I just grabbed this relatively thin hardback. I picked it up with the great haul at the Fairfield Bay, Arkansas, Library in 2023 (almost three years ago? Already?). I thought it might be a Pip and Flinx book, like Mid-Flinx since I bought a lot of them at that time, but like Slipt, it is a stand-alone novel. Again, I am going to pause to admire the career of Alan Dean Foster: Multiple series, movie and television adaptations, and many standalone novels. He definitely got into the writing racket at the right time.

So: An insurance adjuster with a particular set of skills, his sexy, semi-alien counterpart, his “Minder” (a self-propelled mobile computing device), and a sort-of humanoid robot go to Juarez El Paso’s space port to find out who is stealing very expensive pharmaceuticals from the ultra-secure storage facility where they are stored before being lifted into orbit on their way to ports across the, I dunno, galaxy. Much of the book is their investigation, including some attempts on their lives by the unknown thieves–and they eventually discover who’s behind it, saving the reputation of the company and the sanity of the police in JeP.

It’s a bit of a loose narrative. It features monospaced commentary by the “Minder” who is constantly slagging on humanity along with some humor from the robot who the adjuster has “reprogrammed” to be a little more human-like. But the investigative episodes and other set pieces don’t lead anywhere, and when we get to the climax, in kind of drags on an extra scene or two–I mean, I kind of get why, but it still drags on for that little pat payoff at the ultimate end.

But for its slight flaws, it’s not a bad bid of midlist/semi-pulp science fiction. Its 216 pages move along fairly quickly, and fortunately the Minder’s intrusions, which start pretty early in the book, taper off to traditional narrative as it goes on. And at 32 years young, it’s not dated–as a mater of fact because they book talks about the Minder and various robots as powered by AI, so it seems timely (and although not on a Segway, the humanoid robot is on a ball or wheel which limits some of its mobility–no stairs, for example). Also, Foster uses different terms for things like computer workstations, so he’s not dating the material that way, but he does use physical media more than we do now–WiFi is computer telepathy, ainna? But, again, not bad.

So it’s my 11th book for the year. I am in progress on two other books, which means I just have to find an inspiring book and a book set in two time periods to hit the Whole 15. If this book had any time travel whatsoever (like, say, Time & Again), I would have used it in that category instead like I put The Pride of Chanur in the non-human character category. Could I have put this book in that category as well, making this a two-fer? I guess. But, fortunately, I’ve read enough science fiction this year to cover all these bases separately.

I bought this book not long after Neo announced it, but it didn’t arrive until the last week of the year. So it wouldn’t count for 2025. And if I started it before January 2, I wouldn’t be able to count it toward the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge which has a “Short Story / Poetry” category (ah, gentle reader, you knew this category would not be an issue for me). As a matter of fact, it’s not the first book of poetry I’ve completed this year–Native American Songs & Poems was–and it might not be the last–a little poetry collection with “Inspire” in the subtitle is my fallback for the “Inspiring” category unless I get, erm, excited about another book (that is, I find an inspirational book of some sort in the stacks).

This book was not a particularly quick zip-through; van Der Leun’s poetry features some longer lines that I favor and some longer, multi-page poems that I had to slow down for, and some probably would get better with a re-read or dwelling on. However, the poet often layers descriptions upon descriptions (with prepositional phrase-based rhythms, so I cannot fault that) into poems. And, thematically, some of the poems explore the impermanence of individual life and, indeed, all human life and civilization, and they seem almost Lovecraftian in their descriptions of primitive/pre-human and post-human life. Also, since I’m airing grievances, the poet says in many different poems that water “plash”es instead of splashes–which honestly might be a better word for strict onomatopoeia purposes, but it is atypical–so one instance of it would be novel, but repeated in numerous poems in the course of a short collection, it was distracting.

It’s probably a sampling of his work over many years, some that he selected and some that Neo selected. So he might have only used “plash” every decade, but they’re all in this book.

Ultimately, the poems overall are pretty good–certainly better than a lot of the grandma poetry I read and more engaging than, say, Pindar. He’s not Robert Frost or Edna St. Vincent Millay, and, to be honest, he probably suffers by comparison because I’m reading the complete works of one of America’s finest poets (of whom you’ve probably never heard, name to be revealed within the next decade when I finish the 600 pages).

And it’s one more book down in the reading challenge; I shall (probably) have 11 complete by the beginning of February, which will put me in pretty good shape. If only I could find something “Inspiring” and “In Two Time Periods”.

Oh, yeah, and, as a reminder, I read van Der Leun’s book of essays, The Name in the Stone, last month.

Well. I’m not sure when I got this book; the ABC Books signing event was on November 5, 2022, and the book is inscribed to me, so that was probably it, but I did not buy enough for a Good Book Hunting post, apparently. I think I remember talking to the author, but I’ve been to so many book signings over the last decade…. I had to go to ABC Books’ Facebook posts to find the date, anyway. Since the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge has an “About Family” category, now was the time to read it.

So: The named author is the wife of the person who’s, uh, telling the story. Basically, the man’s father was inducted/drafted into the Army during World War II right before the man was born, and he died in World War II when the boy was about two. So the father only saw his son two or three times whilst on liberty stateside, and then he got sent to Europe in March 1945 and died a month later, a month before Germany surrendered. After spending a year and a half stateside and going through basic training twice, mechanic’s school, and M.P. school once or twice.

The man’s mother remarried a year or so later to a man who was not kind to the boy, who spent as much time as possible with his other relations. Around the turn of the century, the mother sent the father’s effects, including his military records, medals, and these letters to him.

So the book is largely a collection of excerpts from the letters that the father sent to the mother during his service with a little bit of commentary or explanation. The book includes some family and service photos and records as well. Apparently, the father was interred in Germany, moved to Holland, and then repatriated to Nebraska, his home, at the behest of his parents, not his widow.

So, what to make of it? Well, I am not impressed by the wife much–many of the letters include reminders and eventually admonishment and threats that she should go to the dentist as she had one or more problems with her teeth who needed correcting; she’s always going out with her sister-in-law/roommate whose husband is also away at war, and sometimes it seems like it bothers him; and she often buys new shoes and stuff, including a fur coat whose price he asks about many times over the course of many months (apparently, it cost $96 in 1940s money–the author says it would be over a thousand dollars today, in 2022 dollars–which might not be today today’s money). Of course, the hero of the story is the father, so the excerpts of the letters might craft a certain point of view and clean up some of his rough edges. The daily letters, though, declare his undying love (with a little impatience) and fidelity and include details of camp life, the training he’s going through, and whatnot. The book footnotes some of the military jargon and anachronisms, but as a child of military parents and a reader of pulp, I didn’t need them. The book also takes a moment to explain that the father might prefer that a white man win in a boxing competition over a Negro, might mention when people are Jews or Japs (and Polish, and anything besides Nebraskan-American), if the father had lived, his thinking would likely have evolved to match modern sensibilities–maybe, or maybe this is just something the actual author, a former teacher, had to insert as a matter of course. Odds are that someone reading letters sent by a relatively unimportant soldier in a war eighty years ago might already have known he was a product of his time.

At any rate, an interesting book for its look at Army life in the time period from a private (later PFC) perspective.

I hope the man got some solace from this exposure to his father whom he never knew. He, the man whose wife wrote the book, went into the Marine Corps early in the Vietnam era, and he mentions going through El Toro MCAS (although it’s misspelled in the text) and visiting Okinawa. He might have been a couple years ahead of my folks, but maybe not. Also, I couldn’t help but note that the father was stationed one or more times with a fellow named Lum; I just read a book by a woman named Lum. Probably no relation, but who knows.

This is the ninth book from the Winter Reading Challenge; I have 6 more to go in February, and I’ve started a science fiction book and a translated quality textbook, and I will likely finish a collection of poetry tonight. So I am in good shape for the Whole 15, but the “In Two Time Periods” category might be tricky unless I stumble a time-traveling science fiction story. Which I probably will.

For the “Based on a Real Person / Event” category in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I selected this book. Actually, I first picked it for the “Money” category since the title was an amount of currency, but I wasn’t sure that even I could stretch that to fit, and I was a little concerned that Unbroken, Lauren Hillenbrand’s take on Louis Zamperini’s life story (his own was Devil at My Heels which is also around here somewhere), would be another near 500-page book. Since the cover of this book says it’s a biographical novel, I thought it would fit its category and almost count as a two-fer.

At any rate, this novel recounts elements from the life of Polly Bemis who was a Chinese-born woman who came to America as cargo and was sold to a saloon owner in Idaho (maybe–this is a novel and it takes liberties, and the Wikipedia entry highlights some of the confirmed details and places which are in dispute). She ends up owned/freed by a neighboring saloon owner, with whom she lives for almost two decades before she marries him, and they move to a valley seventeen miles away from the town where they’d lived and operated a saloon and boarding house. They live there for a number of decades until their deaths, Charles, her husband, first and then her some years later.

The book does not have a particular overarching narrative, no book-long antagonist. The first part, when she is owned by the first saloon keeper, gets presented with her unhappiness in dealing with that and her love for first, the Chinese packer who brought her to Idaho as part of his cargo after she was bought by the saloon owner, and second, the white saloon owner next door who protected her and then wins her in a poker game (which probably did not happen but was part of her legend). Then we have a bit of, I dunno, story arc as anti-Chinese sentiment rises and falls a couple of times offstage (for the most part) until they get married and move to the ranch. And then some incidents and vignettes about ranching, Charlie getting sick, the fire at their ranch which destroyed it, Polly’s trips to larger towns and cities (in the roaring 1920s) and finallt her settling back into her ranch when friends rebuilt her a small cottage. She then dies there ten years later. The last several decades of her life are just a hop-and-skip approach, but I guess the quiet part of her life was less of a legend and probably less remembered than the later parts. Kind of like my life, too–most of my stories are from 20+ years ago because I’ve been a house tabby since then.

At any rate, it was a quick read–at 308 pages, it only took me parts of two nights to read it. Partially its the slightly wider than normal margins, but the prose is plain and readable. The author says she based the story on previous writings about Polly’s life and on interviews with people who knew Polly or people who knew people who knew Polly–Dr. Elizabeth Vandiver mentions a technical-sounding term for that, having a source that is in the third generation up (someone who knew someone who knew or saw something) in a lecture on Herodotus, but I have forgotten it by now (like most things I read or hear these days). But it is not nonfiction; it is a novel.

It looks like this novel got made into a movie in 1991, ten years after its publication–I presume they truncate and tart up the first part of the book for the film. And, apparently, that spawned a couple other books about her life–the ones I see on eBay date from after this book, so you’d have to look more closely to find the source material books.

And, apparently, the ranch on the Salmon River where she and Charlie lived is not only a historical site, but a place where you can “own” part of it and stay in guest cabins on property. It’s called, appropriately enough, The Polly Bemis Ranch, and it might prove cheaper than a Viking River cruise up the Mississippi, but maybe not–it’s a long way from civilization and reachable only by jet boat even today.

So a pleasant and interesting read about someone of local or regional importance in a place far away from here. The copy I have is a remaindered library book from the Polk County Library which I picked up on one of our only and maybe only only trip to the Friends of the Polk County library book sale in 2011. We joined the Friends of the Polk County Library based on that excursion, but so many of the friends groups I’ve joined (Webster Groves Library, Webster Groves Historical Society, Polk County Library) did not send out reminders when my memberships ended. Perhaps the Lawrence County Historical Society will be the same way, but when I visited them in 2012, I sent them an exhorbitant amount of money, and instead of giving me an annual membership at Deity-Level, they gave me the $10 annual membership into forever. I hope it’s heritable, because when my children ask, “Daddy, why is our roof made of 2 mil plastic sheeting that you stapled up there?” I will be able to point to this membership, expired membership cards from across the state, and lapsed subscriptions to newspapers from here to St. Louis on I44 and to Cape Girardeau on US60.