Category: Books

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.

The 2006 Winter Reading Challenge includes a category “Native American Author” again (it did in 2021 which doesn’t seem like so long ago, but it’s been half a decade?). Instead of doing what Dave Ramsey would have approved, which is to say get a book from the library, I ordered this book on Amazon (also buying it on a credit card, Dave). But, in my defense, it was only $3, and I needed to pad my order to $35 to get free shipping on a heating element (since returned as it was damaged in transit, and I’ve since returned the other book that I bought at the same time because someone spilled something on the pages in the bindery, which meant the first 50 pages of the book were unreadable but the cover was pristine–hey, Amazon, one out of three is bad). At any rate, after finishing Different Seasons, I tore into other books to get back on track in my quest for the full 15 (reading a book in all categories in the Winter Reading Challenge), which is more fun than the Whole 30, that’s for sure.

At any rate, this book is half traditional Native American songs, with preference given to plains and southwest Indian tribes, and the other half is contemporary Native American poets, and although many of the names do not sound especially Native American, one presumes they have more tribal ancestry than many United States senators.

The songs are often presented in concrete form, with the words making shapes on the pages, which led me a couple of times to have to re-read the poems when I figured out that the words were going in a different direction that I thought. I mean, they make sense, the songs, in their simple ways, and I guess the concrete form made it so they filled pages where they would not otherwise.

The poetry is okay in spots. A little much about being Native American in places, and as you know, I prefer poetry which I can relate to, not something that’s affixed to explains something separate from me (and with the subtext, culturally if not textually, that I could never understand). Is Joy Harjo, whose collection I read for the Winter Reading Challenge in 2021, represented? You betcha! And as this book is copyright 1996, it’s even before she became Poet Laureate.

I’ve mused before on Dover Thrift Editions: For a long time, they were cheap paperbacks with classics that have fallen out of favor, and here I got one in 2026 “new.” Although I have to wonder if this was printed recently or is if it’s part of someone’s dwindling 30-year-old stock. The cover price is $4, and I did pay less for it. But they are still a thing, on Dover’s Web site and everything. Good on ’em.

I didn’t flag anything to mention in particular, so nothing will really stick with me. But that’s so much of poetry in general and, increasingly, in things I read. Ah, well, I have this collection of book reports to remind me.

For the 2006 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Money” category, I was a little conflicted. I mean, I don’t have many books on investing–not enough so that they’re seeded for quick discovery of the genre in the stacks of Nogglestead. So, instead, I bought this book at ABC Books last weekend, putting a Dave Ramsey book on a credit card, and I expect he felt that in the Financial Force.

This is a short book, 134 pages (perfect for the Winter Reading Challenge!). Even more perfect is that it’s designed to be a quick intro, a gift book (with “To / From” lines on the frontpiece). So its contents are basic: Cut up your credit cards. Pay in cash. Pay down your debt. Tithe. Negotiate. Buy secondhand. That sort of thing. Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses, especially if it puts you into debt.

And the “chapters,” such as they are, are really three or four paragraph summaries–maybe a page, maybe two–about the topic followed by a couple of pages of quotes/bible verses/proverbs sort of related to the topic. And we get one or two pages, which is three or four, short testimonials about the Ramsey program and how he helped people of various stripes get back onto track. And the book includes a number of worksheets you can use to begin your journey to freedom from debt and whatnot. So lightweight even for its light size, but designed as I said to be a giveaway and maybe gateway to the program.

A couple who got into this and, probably, the MLM component of it ran workshops at church for the program, but I didn’t participate, and they’ve since left the church. Which is probably why some of the people who did are out of debt now (having gone to Ramsey’s radio station to do the whole scream thing and everything) and now have multiple income streams and rental properties and drive Porsches a decade later whilst I’m wondering how I’m going to tackle major repairs at Nogglestead with thin income but too much for health care marketplace subsidies.

Oh, but don’t worry about me, gentle reader. Like the other Philosopher says, grant me financial austerity, but not yet. I am not yet eager to downsize my home (with its mortgage payment less than modern rents), sell my valuable possessions and collections, or, heaven forbid, work on a government contract (this last the more likely of the three). Also, this book is now 25 years old; one wonders what the modern equivalent numbers would look like (a $1000 emergency fund? That covers an appliance or single car repair these days).

But I do take some solace in some of the things I do right:

• Shopping secondhand, at least for gifts and sometimes clothes.
• Not buying a lot on the spur of the moment these days, heating elements and sundries aside.
• We’ve been a little light on the tithing after a decade of being heavy on the donations, but I’m trying to work some more into our spending.
• I’m resisting taking on another car payment, and our main drivers are 20 and 18 years old and hopefully will last a couple more years.

Dollars-a-day habits remain, though, and the Whole 30 diet is not a cheap one; we’re eating probably $10 a day in grapes, maybe $10 in other varied produce and nuts for snacks. Which is not bad, but they’re not the meals. And rice and canned beans are right out.

It does make me think I should pick up another source of income. Looks like blogging, writing books, hawking cute kitten t-shirts, and writing twee little apps (including some based on cute kittens) is not doing it for me.

Dave Ramsey. He tells a bit about his story in the book (one section is “Dave’s Story”), but man, this guy has been around a long time. When I was working at my first startup around the time this book came out, my office mate listened to him on the radio. And he’s still around. And even this week, you can find stories talking about his strategies (Couple eliminates $43,000 of debt in under a year — here’s how, which does not mention Ramsey by name). He’s certainly made a lasting mark, although maybe just for some people. Too bad. The whole of society could use some of his common sense.

The 2006 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “500+ Pages,” and, to be honest, I had a little trepidation about what I would find to fill that category. And here I had just been talking about my shelf of Stephen King which I might never get to. As it turns out, not only did I get to it, but we had a second copy of the book which had been in my son’s room for a time and then moved to the parlor when he cleaned his room a couple weeks or months ago. It was my mother-in-law’s copy, sans dust jacket, which she had loaned to my youngest when he was grounded from electronics, and he managed to make it through the first story and onto the second, but that’s when his grounding ended, and I’m not sure he has opened a book since.

So, the combinations of those factors, thinking recently about the Stephen King shelf, and talking about 11/23/63, which my mother-in-law enjoyed as a book and, as she has started watching the miniseries and is not enjoying it, and encountering a copy of this book led me to think of Stephen King for this category, and I checked some of the books. Early novels are not 500 pages; later novels are too much so. But, it turns out, this book weighs in at 527 including the self-indulgent afterward that some authors tack on.

As you might know, gentle reader, this book is a collection of three novellas and a short story which King had written in the gaps between his early successful novels Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Cujo, and The Shining (he’s about to write Christine according to the afterword, although the title is not given, but 44 years later, we know). Three of the four, all the novellas, were made into major motion pictures. This guy was a juggernaut in the late 1970s and 1980s, as hard as it might be to imagine now that he’s been around forever.

The book contains:

• “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” (made into The Shawshank Redemption, the biggest of the films or at least the one most fondly recollected) is about a banker, Andy Dufresne, who is convicted of murdering his wife even though he proclaims his innocence (he is, in fact, innocent). The story is told by Red, who is a long-time inmate at Shawshank Prison and is known for “getting things.” He gets Andy a rock hammer so he can continue his geology hobby, and the story covers decades of the lives of the inmates at Shawshank. One morning, they cannot find Andy and discover he has been tunneling from his cell to a wet wall for decades and has escaped to a new life with an alias he had set up before he went into the can. The coda finds Red paroled and on his way to meet Andy in Mexico. Haven’t you seen the film?
   
• “Apt Pupil” (made into Apt Pupil, appropriately enough) is set in the early 1970s. A middle school aged boy recognizes his neighbor as a superintendant of a concentration camp and wants to hear all about it. They end up mutually dependent and mutually blackmailing each other to keep the secret. I really didn’t like the story because the first half of it, 100 pages or so, is two evil people doing evil things. Finally, it starts to move in the second half, but King introduces sympathetic characters, but you know he’s going to slaughter them. Well, it turns out, not all of them, but for much of the book you really don’t have anyone to really sympathize with. Not the boy, not the war criminal, not even the boys’ self-involved and self-indulgent parents. The book ends with more implied bloodshed, not a real climax, really. Looks like the film changed it in significant ways–setting the story in the 1980s instead of the 1970s, but it should definitely have the macramé-decorated feel to it. The boy is changed to a high schooler in the film, and the end is apparently ambiguous and not as final. I haven’t seen the film; I haven’t had the urge to see it; and the written story has not made me want to.
   
• “The Body” (which became Stand By Me) tells about a group of boys who learn of a dead body and then hike and camp several days to see it. It’s sold as a coming of age story, but the double-effect narrator is a wealthy horror writer who is dissatisfied with his current state of writing by rote for money and who longs for those days again. I haven’t seen the movie in probably 30 years, but I wonder what they might have changed from it.
   
• “The Breathing Control Method” (not made into a movie) is a double story of sorts. A midling employee of a law firm is invited by a partner to a nondescript club with no obvious dues where the “members” tell stories. One Christmas Eve, a retired doctor tells of a case where a single mother carried her baby to term, but has an accident arriving at the hospital and she delivers the baby after her death.

So: I mean, the prose moves along, for sure. King wrote very frankly for the time about things that might have been shocking then, but then were not shocking, but now are prohibited. The stories are all set in the past, although I guess “Apt Pupil” was fairly recent past. He uses the word nigger and the word Republican both as perjoratives–I am pretty sure that all the stories have that, the baddest word, in them, although maybe “Apt Pupil” only uses the German equivalent. I don’t remember him using the word Democrat for anything, so I guess that was just normal to him even then. So the guy didn’t just start slagging on those who disagreed with him in the George W. Bush administration.

As I might have mentioned, I have a shelf full of King, and I’m not sure when I’ll be inclined to get to them. Maybe I’ll read one or two this year. Although if I get a hankering for thick tomes, maybe I should finish the second volume of The Story of Civilization (it’s been three years since I read the first, and at that pace it will take me almost as long to read it as it took the Durants to write it) or the Summa Theologiae which I received as a gift in 2021 and which I have not started, but it looks nice on my shelves. More likely, though, I might pick up Herodotus or Thucydides (he says, having just heard lectures on them, but the lecture series is long and I’ll likely want to read other books as well when I hear about them).

First, though, the Winter Reading Challenge. With this book, I have hit five, which is what you need to read to get the mug. But I must press onward in my quest for filling all fifteen categories.

So for the In a Different Country category of the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, when I was gathering prospective reads for the categories, I grabbed Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, a literary novel elevating the bleks and putting white South Africans in their place which I read in college (in a copy I might have borrowed from the campus library as was my wont in those years) and later picked up in hardback. Undoubtedly, this is what the librarians wanted: a proper literary book with a proper literary message. Oh, but no. You get a Tarzan novel.

Not sure where I picked this copy up, but I do know that somehow I ended up with two copies of this book, both in the 1960s Ballantine printings with the hideous 60s covers. And I’ve been reading the Tarzan books out of order, apparently; I read both Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan, the first two books in the series, in 2009 and Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, the 11th book in the series, last year. This is the third book, but I probably did not have it when I read the other two books–although without its (or their, considering I bought two copies probably at different times), perhaps I did but it was shuffled in the move. Certainly, in those days, the Nogglestead library was not quite as double-stuffed and unkempt as it is now.

So, after quickly reviewing the previous book reports, I guess this is a pretty stock Tarzan plot. Something connives to get Tarzan to Africa, where wild things happen. In this case, Russian nemesis, presumably from the last book, escapes prison, links up with a colleague and some unsavory fellows, and they kidnap Tarzan’s son and tell Tarzan they’re going to have him raised by a tribe of cannibals. They connive to get Tarzan, too, and they do. And! As a bonus, Jane follows Tarzan to an unsavory meeting and they get the drop on her, too. So they strand Tarzan on an island not far off the coast of Africa which allows Tarzan to gather a troupe of apes and one panther to cross to the mainland and begin the chase.

So a series of set encounters occur, and Tarzan twice decided to sleep in the village of hostile natives, allowing the bad guys to get the jump on him. The book shifts perspectives from Tarzan to that of Jane and/or the bad guys, sometimes shifting into the past to catch up with one group or another, but allowing to end a chapter and section on a cliffhanger to be resolved a couple of chapters later.

So it’s an okay piece of pulp, and, again, an enduring character–this edition came out fifty years after the original, and I’m reading it over a hundred years after it was published. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice. Also, for something coming out at the turn of the 20th century, one (educated in the very end of the last century or beginning of this one) would think it all racism and misogyny, but although Jane is sometimes helpless when overpowered by stronger males, she definitely is not a docile character. And some of the African natives are bad, but some are good. You know, a little like real life. So the pulp of 1914 is more realistic and treats people more akin to people rather than message-conveying ciphers that you get in some modern cartoonish depictions. But that’s why I read the old books.

This book is a two-fer in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge; it would fit into the Science Fiction/Fact category, but I’m putting it into the Nonhuman Character category. Looking at the list, many of the categories whisper to me books that would also fit into the Science Fiction/Fact category as well. So I will probably listen to that whisper to get my two-fers.

And I must confess, gentle reader: I read this book about forty years ago. And my first exposure to it was from a song. You see, at some point in middle school or high school, I ordered an inexpensive cassette called Quarks and Quests from the back of a science fiction magazine. It was a “filk” (science fiction and fantasy folk music) collection which included “The Pride of Chanur” by Leslie Fish:

I spotted it in a library at some point thereafter–I remember it was in the original DAW paperback but with the library binding (basically, a hardback with the paperback inside and the paperback cover pasted on the outside). I picked up this volume in a book club edition in 2007 (the same day I bought After Worlds Collide, the sequel to a book I read in sixth grade and the follow-up recently, in 2024), so it’s a hardback with the paperback front cover on the front dustjacket. Weird.

At any rate, the book starts out on a trading station where the crew of a cat-like race called the hani are loading cargo when a nearly naked and bleeding creature that is keeping to the shadows bolts onto the ship. Spoiler alert: It’s an unknown-to-them species, but it’s human, and the kif, a race of raiders and pirates, want it back so they can torture it to reveal its homeworld so they can raid trade with it (::wink::). The haniem> on the ship, the Pride of Chanur, decide not to give the human up, so it turns into a bit of an interstellar war. Kind of like the song says.

So the book has a bunch of world- galaxy-building, detailing the internal politics of the clans of the hani and the relationships between the races. It alludes to the technologies the different species use, but it doesn’t go into excruciating detail. It has but a few set pieces–fleeing, hiding at the edges of a system, and so on, and then it culminates in a trip to the hani home world to handle some intrigue and a rush back to orbit for an epic space battle handled with a bit of a “Wait, what?” deus ex machina climax followed by a long dénouement.

Apparently, the book spawned four additional books over the next decade and are part of the same universe as Cherryh’s Downbelow books, of which I read Merchanter’s Luck for the Winter Reading Challenge in 2023. So it looks like James Wilder is not the only author to make a repeat appearance on the forms. Some librarian or librarians will think I don’t read widely at all.

Also, forty years later, I still pronounce the name cherry-h although I am sure that I have read her Wikipedia entry before (likely in 2023), so maybe someday I will remember it’s pronounced just Cherry because that is her real last name–the h was added to make it look less like a romance author’s name.

For the Part of a Series category in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I decided to go with this book, part of the Harbison Mystery series which I picked up in November, signed, but not at the book signing. To keep you up-to-date, the Harbison mysteries include:

• Terror Near Town
• Tough Times in Grubville
• Sheriff without a Badge
• Murder at Morse Mill
• Homicide Near Hillsboro

And now this book.

So: In it, Sheriff Chet Harbison investigates a murder at a resort. The deceased is a doxy formerly involved with a deputy but dismissed from her job at the county clerk’s office for conoodling on the job. Meanwhile, the widow and mistress, now (whispers) lesbians, of the presumed murdered sheriff who faked his own death and got away at the end of the last book–these two are trying to maintain appearances in Jefferson County whilst using their inheritances to open a bar in St. Louis now that Prohibition has been repealed. The investigations and machinations conmingle with some series business (will the deputy’s journalist girlfriend go to Europe to work for the big national syndicate? Will the sheriff pass his kidney stone?), and eventually they find the bad guys and resolve the situation.

I might have mentioned that I have considered reaching out to Mr. Wilder to offer to proofread his books for him for a galley copy and/or a free copy of the book and maybe an insertion of my fictional kin into the Harbinsonverse. I should probably make that offer, as this book was full of missing quotation marks (full of the lack somehow), problems with formatting, and even anachronisms (referring to The Thin Man movie in January 1934 when it was not released until May of that year)…. I started noting them in my phone as I didn’t have the little flags in Branson with me. I don’t know if Wilder rushed to get it out or his normal pre-readers were unavailable, but this book definitely needed some pre-press work that it did not receive.

So a little underwhelming, but I’ll keep picking up the Wilder series because I still like the little tidbits of local history from a region where I used to live.

For the first book for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I picked up this book. I had thought that I bought it from the Quality Paperback Club around the turn of the century, but a blog post from 2007 indicates I bought it at a garage sale or a book sale in the waning months of that year. Presumably a used book store or a yard sale, as one of the pages has a stain on it and the bottom of the pages has a marker’s mark on it. Maybe I just thought about buying it from the Quality Paperback Club. Maybe not–I don’t remember how late into the century I might have dabbled in that particular mechanism for expanding one’s library rapidly.

So, the setup is this: Right before his wedding in 2000, the author’s fiancé calls it off. But he’s already paid for the honeymoon, a trip to Costa Rica, as well as the venue and reception. So he goes ahead with a party for the guests who were coming, apparently mostly his friends, and then he convinces his brother to come on the honeymoon with him–which gives him the idea, since he’s just been demoted or sideways assigned at work, to quit his job and spend a year traveling the world with his brother.

I mean, that’s the setup. He goes into flashback a bit about his relationship and his job and does a bit of self-reflection. He seems to come from money, and his job out of school was in the political realm, so about ten years into his career, he’s a highly paid and very connected Californian (Republican) lobbyist for the Irvine Corporation which is the major developer behind Irvine, California. He met his fiancé in Washington when he was working for a member of Congress and she was a graphic designer. From the flashbacks, it seems like he was always in the driver’s seat of the relationship, making plans for the both of them–moving them to Seattle and then California and then pushing. When she began having panic attacks, he proposed, and she separated from him for a while, but when they got back together, the wedding was on again until it was not. He reflects, eventually, that he really had a template for life and she was a part of it, but he doesn’t express remorse, really.

So: They go to Europe; his brother, a part-time but successful realtor with a number of rental properties, buys a Saab because they will let you pick it up at the factory and insure it for six months if you want to take it on a tour of Europe with it. So they do, staying with friends in Prague and Moscow and then driving through Turkey to Syria, gaining entry with a photo of the author with George W. Bush (he also has one with Gore just in case–the election had not yet taken place). Then! They take a tour of southeast Asia with stops in Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other places. Followed by a tour of the southwest United States, briefly (not really depicted). Then a tour of South America, including Brazil, Venezuela, Peru (and Machu Picchu), and Trinidad. Then, wow, they’re famous, apparently, for the dispatches that the author has been sending to his ninety-seven-eight-nine-year-old step-(great?)-grandmother, who has been sharing them with the other residents of her nursing home–and they’ve appeared in the local papers and whatnot. So he gets a chance to go on a junket without his brother all paid for, and then he and his brother go to Africa, where they can go on safari and slag on white South Africans before wrapping up the book. The book interleaves interactions with the step-grandmother, and at the end, she dies and leaves he and his brother a bundle. He goes on to become a travel writer, and the back cover of this book says his brother and he are traveling for a new book.

I intended to, and I’m going to, count this book in the Vacation category because it’s somewhere between that and memoir–it’s not a travel book, for although it does talk about the places he goes, the places are a little in the background to him being in those places, reflecting on his life and the world in those places, and trying to reconnect with his younger brother in those places. I cannot say that I can really identify with the fellow–he’s traveling the world from a place of fiscal security and, to be honest, confidence that I presume is borne of being positioned for and enjoying success at a high level. I mean, I would not try to talk my way across a border in the Middle East. Maybe I’ve ended up like a dog that’s been beat too much–not sure what percentage of my life just covering up, but it’s probably measurable. But I digress.

At any rate, an interesting book, at any rate. A bit rushed in the ending–the Africa trip is given pretty short shrift–but I’m not likely to seek out the sequels.

And, oh, how the world has changed in 25 years.

I’m counting this book, which I picked up in Davenport, Iowa, in 2024, as my first book read for 2026 even though I finished it on December 30, 2025. As I mentioned, I flip that particular calendar sometime the week after Christmas, and these days, finishing a book right before the turning of the year puts me in a bit of a spot because the library’s Winter Reading Challenge starts on January 2, so I can’t use books I started before January 2 for it. So what do I read for the next two days? I’m leery of picking something up that I cannot finish within the two days, so I guess I’ll nibble at some of the books on the chairside table which I won’t be finishing any time soon.

At any rate, this is a one-off Western from an author whose other works are fantasy, science fiction, or a blend of the two, so it is a departure. Dalton Phillips comes to Spider Rock, Arizona, in 1848, and he’s a bit of a Perry Sue in that he’s formally educated, a great piano player, the fastest gun in town, and a very good gambler. He has come to live with his uncle, the local preacher, but they conflict because of the aforementioned talents the man has. But he has a couple of fatal flaws or drawbacks, including consumption (one of the reasons he came to Arizona, the other being he’s a hellraiser), and he likes to drink and to carouse with the ladies of the saloons in which he likes to play piano, to drink, and to gamble. So he guns down a couple of people, develops a reputation, and then….

Well, he is unlucky in getting caught with the daughter of the Big Boss Man in town, and he is unlucky in trying to defend one of the ladies of the saloons to whom he feels a special connection. The latter leads him to being bested by a number of banditos and taken into the desert, shot, and left for dead, but brought in by a tribe of Apaches, including one he’d humiliated in town–and who remembers and resents. But Perry Sue, I mean, Dalton, is adopted by the chief, woos and weds the chief’s daughter, only to see them slaughtered by US Calvary led by a particularly odious colonel….

Well, afterwards, Dalton returns to town and sinks even lower, drinking with his last coins, and….

Well, I thought that part of the point of the book was to build a “protagonist” or merely main character whose fatal flaws led from promise to an ultimate wasted demise (a la Vienna Days and the kid from Running Scared, almost), but….

The self-destructive and “Unlucky” things that happen to the protagonist put him in a position to ultimately help (save) the people of town from an impending assault, and he redeems himself a bit, but the story finishes tragically (unluckily, and because the character grew and showed mercy).

The twist certainly makes the book a little more interesting, but the characterization is a little flat. I still look for the influences from popular culture which informed or inspired the writer–but whatever thoughts I had when reading the book are lost to me as I type this. So I continue to rate Ben Wolf above most self-published authors and some of the house pulp writers, but lacking a bit in the umami that makes someone like Don Pendleton pop.

So I have one more book of his to read before October (Winterspell) when I return to Davenport (perhaps) and buy one or more of his other books (probably, if perhaps comes true). So far, it’s the next in the Santa books that I’ll pick up and maybe what he’s written since unless Winterspell is really good.