Category: Books

As I mentioned, I streamed part of the Kansas City Chiefs football game yesterday because apparently we have streaming subscriptions to CBS and to NBC along with Spotify (at $35 a month now!) and, I guess, some other things that do not include football games (not that Spotify does, but it went from $12 a month to $35 a month awful damned fast for a family subscription). “Watching” the game gave me an opportunity to page through one of my recent poetry-and-monograph purchases.

This book is a 45-year-old collection of pencil sketches by an artist born in 1902 (see this bio if you are so inclined). Some of them were made from old photographs, but they generally track to the early part of the 20th century based on the cars and whatnot. Some are just scenes from a particular corner, but others are of St. Louis landmarks, and these contain a bit of text about the landmark. Just a couple paragraphs.

Interesting to look at, and because of the early 20th century topic matters, I thought about the James R. Wilder books set in the first part of that century; although the books are not set in St. Louis, in many of them the characters come to St. Louis for one reason or another.

Also, it became a bit of a quiz at least as far as the landmarks goes. Which ones have I been to? Well, the Arch features in a couple of them. I’ve been there a couple of times and even went up it once as an adult. I’ve been to the Admiral riverboat when it was a casino and the Goldenrod Showboat when Todd had a brief, non-speaking role in a revue. I might have been on the Becky Thatcher–the book brought to mind that my mother, brother, and I took a cruise on the Mississippi in one of the Mark Twain themed boats once, and my brother and I got to handle the wheel for a bit because we were kids and that’s what they let kids do. I’ve been to Union Station a number of times, although the number of times my beautiful wife and I went to Landry’s behind it might exceed the times I was in the building myself. I’ve been to the Public Library a couple times–once to do some geneology research with a family friend and once professionally when I was writing documentation for library software to see how the company’s first client did things. I’ve been over the Grand Avenue Viaduct. I have been to either the New Cathedral or the Basillica for a funeral for the father of one of my wife’s co-workers. I’ve been to the Art Museum many times, but not in 20 or 25 years. I’ve visited both Grant’s Cabin at Grant’s Farm and the Hawken House in Old Trees; I do not think I’ve been to the Sappington House, but I’ve driven past it. And I’ve been to Lambert field a couple of times. Not as often as the Springfield-Branson National Airport, though.

Well, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t treat it like a full quiz because it’s 158 pages divided by two for a total of 79 sketches, and I’ve not been to that many of the places after all.

Still, and interesting browse during a football game. And another book towards my annual (stretch) goal of 100 read.

Ah, gentle reader. I’ve mentioned that I have read a couple of books of recent acquisition (The Art of Emily McGee and Sheer Poetry, both of which I bought last weekend) whilst reading The Life of Greece–ah, given that it’s been on my chairside table in progress for several years, you can surmise all of my reading since Our Oriental Heritage in 2023 has been breaks from reading the second volume of the Durant. So this book, which I bought within that interim (in May 2025), is no big deal except that it’s the only book where I’ve read a couple poems and then thought, “Hey, how’s Greek history going?” and picked up the Durant again to end the night.

I mean, you know I love me some Ogden Nash, gentle reader; this blog has, what, seven (now eight) book reports on his poetry, the most recent being The Old Dog Barks Backwards in January 2025 and the oldest being Versus in September 2007, when I would read the collections to my young children whilst they played (although in 2007, I only had a young child). But somehow I rate-limited this book to a couple of poems a night until last night when I powered through the last of them.

The book might be a topical compilation from other works, as the original copyright dates range from 1931 to 1970 (with some renewed because, gentle reader, in the olden days, copyrights lapsed before Disney got tired of them). The topic: Illness and growing older. Since I’m generally a pretty healthy guy, not suffering a lot from colds or flu, and, because of the vaccine schedule in the 1970s, neither measles or mumps either, although I remember Cracked magazine making light of the swelling associated with mumps, so it was in living memory then–since I’m generally a pretty healthy guy, I did not get a whole lot from the illness/hypochondria poems, but I did feel a twinge from the growing older posts–although he puts that turn into old man in the middle 40s when I still felt pretty young, back when I would not pull a hammy doing a head-high round kick with pop to it (which I recently did, dang it).

A couple bits worth quoting, including “A Man Can Complain, Can’t He?” where he repeats, “Another day, another dolor.” I myself have said this, so either I read this in a collection almost 20 years ago and have been inadvertantly quoting it ever since or the two of us came up with the pun independently.

From “This Is Going To Hurt A Little Bit”:

Because some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.

Ah, gentle reader. I was afraid of dentistry for a while until I got my teeth cleaned up twenty-five years ago, and now I go thrice a year for cleanings. But once you’ve lived with a filling rubbing on a dental nerve for weeks thanks to a sedation dentist who went a little deeper than he thought and only after picking a new dentist got emergency surgery where the numbing shot brought the first real peace in a month, after that, there’s little pain a simple dental visit can bring. Although my latest trusted dentist just retired. Perhaps I’ll go back to fearing it or avoiding it if the new guy seems eager to bill.

From “Let’s Not Climb The Washington Monument Tonight”, we get this then-contemporary allusion:

It is when you wouldn’t visit Gina Lollobrigida or the Aga Khan if it meant sleeping on a sofa or a cot

Ah, gentle reader. I understand the allusion not because I have a degree in English and Philosophy and continue to read them as I age but because I read Kim du Toit (link maybe NSFW depending upon your work).

At any rate, I have to wonder if Ogden Nash set out to lightly parody the vernacular poets popular in his youth, such as James Whitcomb Riley and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and then he got stuck in the wordplay because he, too, discovered that’s what audiences wanted. I suppose a real Nash scholar who has read all his papers and letters would know, but I am not that guy.

I might have a collection or two of his still floating about, but I probably won’t jump right into it even if I discover it. After all, I re-seeded my stacks last weekend with small collections of poetry that I will likely get to first. But: Maybe not before I finish The Life of Greece–I have determined that the volume contains almost 100 pages of notes, bibliography, and index, so I am doner than I thought–so I might power through it in the near term.

I got this book at the Friends of the Library book sale last weekend, and it wasn’t the first book I picked up (The Artwork of Emily McGee was), it was the second I began on Sunday night whilst watching the football game. And, to be honest, it’s not the collection of poetry that I picked up recently as a break from The Life of Greece. But because it is poetry interleavened with photos, so it was a faster browse and….

You know, the poetry is pretty good in it.

I might want to build out a rubric for how I score poems. The poems in this volume have pretty good rhythm; have line lengths that vary between the shorter, couple of words lines and the longer, near-sentence complete thought lines I tend to favor; have a little of the small-i thing going on, but not so much “i did this” or “i went there” as opposed to just a way to start a poem–which is how I’d like to think I do it (but probably don’t); don’t have end rhymes or formal structure; and evoke rather than tell. This book would score pretty highly.

Or I guess what I’m saying is that I enjoyed it. Probably my second favorite collection of poetry so far this year after the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. But I guess “second favorite for the year” is not a high bar given that I really only read one or two collections of poetry that I actually enjoy in a given year.

The photography is okay, too; black and white landscapes, still lifes, and closeups.

I’ll have to try to remember the name Toler and look for their work in the future. Although, sadly, when looking for information about them just now, I learned that she passed away last week. Kind of a downer to end a book report on, but I can do worse; I also discovered a scam site that mimics the official funeral home Web site and collects money in the name of the deceased, and if you’re a family member, you can “make a request” that they give some of the money to you.

What a fooking world. I actually looked at filing a complaint with the state attorney general’s office, but this has not affected me personally, so they will not take it seriously. And when it does affect me personally, I’ll be too preoccupied to be incensed then.

I picked this book up over the weekend. You know, I used to load up at the autumn Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale on art monographs, brief humor/joke books, and poetry for browsing during football games. Since the NFL has optimized its revenue by requiring almost all possible streaming subscriptions to watch a bunch of football at the casual viewer’s, well, expense–which means the casual user such as me is not watching two or three football games on Sundays and maybe another one or two during the week–well, since the financial wizards made that optimization and since a cynical viewer might think that the games are now optimized for billions in sports betting (The Bears scored how many in week one? Wow, a lot of money to be made on the over. They scored how in week two? Wow, a lot of money to be made on the under. Is it me, or are more games going to overtime or won at the last second now? And if not, does reality make a difference?), my football watching has fallen off the cliff. Still, you would not know by what I bought on Saturday, and since the Sunday night game is streaming on Peacock, one of the handful of such subscriptions scattered amongst Nogglestead that cost what cable or DirecTV did before we cut the cord–well, since it was on, I put on a bit of the Chiefs game if only to hear Friar saying, “Shut up, Colinsworth!” in my head, and I picked up this book.

As I mentioned, this is not really a monograph; although it does include a number of Ms. McGee’s works, more importantly or interestingly, most of them show stages of their development, from tracing to working region to region. And she does not put in hard outlines and then work from them; instead, she does maybe part of the head and then works out from there.

She is a local artist who does (or did–the Web site in the book is not longer active, and a quick Internet searches led to a Facebook page that was active until 2022) commissions, and she’d work from photographs, which is where the light tracing comes in. I’ve seen artists like this with booths in Relics–some samples for sale and information about how to have your own photo turned into art. The book itself might be promotional material as well, as it does include information on how to commission work.

I hope that has not fallen off of a cliff as much as it probably has with the new AI-generating tools because being able to create works like these from scratch is amazing (said the oft-attempting poetaster).

At any rate, I only made it to the half, so it will be a day or so until I complete the other book I started on Sunday night. But even without football, I’ll probably work in a lot of the books I bought this weekend. If I can find them in the stacks. Because The Life of Greece is long, and the next volume in The Story of Civilization ain’t short, either.

I am not sure where I picked this book up–it does not show in any Good Book Hunting post, but it’s a Hallmark hardback, so I suppose it could have been in a book sale bundle. Hallmark issued this little gift book edition following the release of the film in 1965, when I guess Zhivagomania was at its peak? I bought a videocassette copy of the film last year, and I would not be surprised to discover a copy of the book from this era in the stacks since I know I picked up a copy of it in my Ebay peddling days. How soon I will get to them, I have no idea; I’ve seen mention of the film on a Substack somewhere in the recent past, but I’m not sure how eager I am to tackle a Russian novel these days.

The poems in this collection, 61 pages long, fall into three categories, broadly (with some overlap, of course). Poems about the seasons, mostly autumn and winter (being set in Russia, lots of winter amongst the poems). Love poems–given that the poems come from a novel which was a love story and that the poems were attributed in the novel to the title character, not the author, one wonders how much more meaningful they would be in the context of the story. And Christian poems dealing with the life birth and life of Jesus.

The poems are translated into quatrains with rhymes on lines two and four. No idea how much the translator had to alter the work to make it fit, but certainly some. Which is always the risk with translations, especially poetry, which I pretty much point out every time I read poetry in translation.

At any rate, better than the grandmother poetry I like to read. More approachable than the Pope I’ve saturated myself with over the last half of a year. Maybe on par with the Larsen I read before it. Which could be good news for Larsen: After all, Pasternak won the Nobel Prize, which I believe is a bigger deal than the Pushcart prize or even a Rattle prize. Neither of which I have won, to be clear.

I got this chapbook, the winner of the Rattle magazine Chapbook of the Year prize, because I entered a poetry contest with a reading fee that came with a subscription to Rattle. Not sure when I will get to reading my new subscription–I have a great number of literary magazines to which I subscribed over the years or older copies that I’ve picked up at book sales in the past, and I have a desk drawer in the parlor full of old history magazines, Renaissance festival magazines, and beer magazines that I subscribed to around the turn of the century and years of First Things I will get to when the topical articles are history. But I had just finished Treasures of Truth as my night-ending poetry (The Rape of the Lock being a reading chairside table book, not the collections and magazines containing shorter poems that I prefer to read right before bed), so I read this book over the course of a couple of nights before lights out.

And…. Well, I guess Lance Larsen is one of my favorite poets from the second quarter of the 21st century, maybe even of the 21st century, but that’s not a high bar to clear. The work is better than Rupi Kaur and most of the self-published work that I read and pretty much all of the grandmother poetry I read. Unfortunately, though, I read the work after encountering the phrase “small i poetry” somewhere, and although the research I’ve done (a Google search) indicates this definitely (as far as an LLM knows) refers to ee cummings and his lack of capitalization to indicate wonder, contextually (if I remember), it meant how poets insert themselves into their poems. And I saw this meme again:

I know, I know, it’s been this way at least since the romantic poets, and my favorite poet (Edna St. Vincent Millay) does this consistently, and I know, I know, I do this all the time (see also). The latest poem I sent to the very contest which brought this chapbook to my door is almost two pages of me me me. So perhaps I was too harsh in my reading of this fellow’s work. Perhaps I was jealous; he’s certainly made more of a go of it than I have; poems in this volume previously appeared even in the hometown(ish) Missouri Review.

That being said: The poet-narrator of these particular poems often makes note of physical places where he is, cities and states and whatnot, and they acted as an abstraction layer–I was reading a poem, I was not in the poem. I hope I’m not doing too much of that, but, probably I am. A couple of the poems feel like filler–a list of thoughts from a hammock, for example–perhaps a good blog post, but a poem? Nah.

So: Better than average, but not on the pantheon of the best ever. Which, I suppose, is the best I can hope for, too.

I mentioned after reading Bastion of Darkness last month that I had only one book left from my son’s birthday present of three paperbacks. This was the final one of the trio, not the trilogy. He got me two John Grisham legal thrillers (The Judge’s List being the other) and the third book of an R.A. Salvatore fantasy trilogy (Bastion of Darkness). It’s a twee little goal, to have read all three of the gift books, but my life is made of twee goals.

This book, pretty early in Grisham’s career (he’s still writing, but I’m not sure that his current books are quite as boffo as his earlier work, but I haven’t been paying attention to the best seller lists). In it, a lawsuit against a tobacco company goes to trial in Biloxi, Mississippi, and both the plantiff’s pool of bought-in lawyers but especially the defense funded tobacco companies and their undefeated fixer go to work on the jury to persuade or otherwise convince them, against judge’s orders, of course, to vote their way. They run into an unexpected fly in the ointment as one member of the jury, a former law school student, is apparently a drifter who has found is way into the jury pools of many such trials, but this is the first time he’s been seated, and he and a beautiful, also seemingly pastless, woman have their own agenda.

So it’s 550 paperback pages of the maneuvering with the agenda of the two coming into focus at the very end. I found it interesting for several reasons: I have been to Biloxi (and know how to pronounce it) in the time period when the book takes place; I have family nearby to this day, and a couple from church have just announced they’re relocating there; and recently, a trial has captured the headlines with a holdout juror.

A pretty good read, albeit a little long for my taste–it’s probably slightly less daunting in hardback.

But you know what it brings to mind? In the middle 1990s, we almost had a subgenre of legal fiction dedicated to lawsuits against tobacco companies, ainna? They’re still around, though, not bankrupted or banned as they hoped in the 1990s. Are there such legal thrillers about lawsuits against tech companies or social media companies? If not, why not? To be honest, as I mentioned, I don’t follow contemporary fiction much. Maybe the best seller lists are rife with them and I just don’t know it. Or is it something more sinister?

At any rate, I’ve got a copy of Skipping Christmas around here somewhere which I might read eventually, but I’m not jonesing for more legal thrillers of this type. Did Grisham and Turow really reshape the landscape in the last bit of the 20th century legal fiction world? I mean, Perry Mason was big, but that was pretty episodic and formulaic. Did these guys mark a sea change? It’s a rhetorical question of a sort. I’m not digging to find out.

I thought this was the third of the small century-old textbook editions of Alexander Pope’s that I read this year, the first being a 1901 Riverside Literature Series volume that included “The Rape of the Lock”, “An Essay on Man”, and “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”. I remembered another volume, but it turns out that the Maynard’s English-Classic Series volume including only “An Essay on Man” I found and moved directly to the read shelves and did not count it amongst my reading total because it only contained “An Essay on Man” and not a single other poem that I could have read and thus counted the book (and could have written a book report on that single poem). If only I had read the previous book report before going looking, I would have seen that I explained this all then. But June was a long time ago, man.

At any rate, this century-old textbook is from the MacMillan’s Pocket Classics series and includes:

• “The Rape of the Lock”
• “An Essay on Criticism”
• “An Essay on Man”
• “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”
• “Address to the Goddess of Dullness, From The Dunclad”
• “The Triumph of Dullness, From the Dunclad”
• “Ode for the Music on St. Cecilla’s Day”
• “On Sir William Trumball”
• “To Mr. Gay”
• “On Mr. Gay”
• “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady”
• “Eloisa to Abelard”
• “Messiah”
• “Ode on Solitude”
• “On the Grotto at Twickenham”
• “Universal Prayer”
• “Windsor Forest”

So I did get to read “An Essay on Criticism” which was mentioned prominently in the Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition audio course, and I thought I was home free–that the other poems would be shorter. For the most part, they were, although “Eloisa to Abelard” and “Windsor Forest” were both several hundred lines of small print long. I bogged down in “Eloisa to Abelard” for a couple of weeks and finished a couple of other books in the interim, but, here is where my larnin’ intersects: In the audio course I am currently listening to, a course on the history of the philosophy of science (or maybe those words transposed somehow), the lecturer talks about Abelard and makes an aside that another of his troubles was Eloisa, and I had this dot to connect it to. Also, the title of the 2004 film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film I really enjoyed after seeing in the cinema and at least once since, comes from “Eloisa to Abelard”. Don’t I feel smaht? Sometimes.

At any rate, reading the old, classic literature poets in depth like Keats and Pope here really make me appreciate some more recent poetry more. Much of the poetry they wrote relies on knowing contemporary personages and allusions to contemporary events in addition to the allusions to even more classical (that is, older) works and myths. Blooming heck, even Pindar is this way. And because they were patronized, the poets could and too often did go on at length, leading to the archaisms that I was accused of (and was probably guilty of) pursuing when I was younger (that is, in college). So, okay, I’ve read these guys. But Riley, Longfellow, Millay, and Dunbar? I re-read them.

At any rate, I think I am finally out of these little textbook editions of Pope (although the paperback complete works lurks somewhere in the stacks). But I do have a couple or three of these old green-bound textbooks of Longfellow (not including The Courtship of Miles Standish and Elizabeth which I read in 2024) and not including the really nice sixty-year-old reprint of an older edition of The Song of Hiawatha (which I read in 2018) facing out in the poetry section of ABC Books because Mrs. E. knows I’m a sucker for pretty editions of things I have already read (see also my most recent read of The Book of Five Rings). Hey, wait a minute: The Song of Hiawatha which I read in 2018 is a later reprint of the same book (featuring the illustrations of Frederic Remington). So there’s a slight chance that this edition only differs in the cover. And a slight chance that it’s enough of a difference that I’ll buy it next time I’m at ABC Books anyway.

I got this book in May 2025, and I picked it up sometime last year to read in the main reading chair. As you might know, gentle reader, I will often have a poetry book or chapbook beside the chair for times when I’ve reached a stopping point in a prose book (end of a chapter, end of a book), and I’ll read a short poem or two before heading up. Over the course of the last year, though, I’ve started reading poetry in the bedroom immediately before turning in, so chapbooks and the like have languished on that side table downstairs. It did not help that the material in this book is rather repetitive. But instead of returning it to the unread stacks when clearing the side table, I moved it upstairs and read it in between copies of Ideals magazine since the stack I have up there is mostly Mother’s Day issues and that, too, can be repetitive.

The poems are very Christian, with definite references to Christ, salvation, the crucifiction, and so on. It’s 156 pages’ worth of them, mostly three eight-line stanzas each, and only a couple of them do not deal directly with seeking or helping others find salvation. A couple of interesting metaphors in them, and a few of them might seem almost hymnal–I am going to share the book with my beautiful wife who would like to write some hymns in case she can get any ideas about them. The book is inscribed (but not to anyone), and a second cursive hand has a couple of notes at the end of a couple of poems describing how the poet got the idea for the poems. So perhaps she gave talks or readings as well.

The little wingdings marking the end of each poem kind of look like QR codes to 21st century eyes. The paper is a little shiny/inexpensive, and the typography looks more typewritten than National Guard memos leaked to CBS News (22 years ago, gentle reader! 22 years ago, when this blog was young) and includes some bold type which, as you remember, we made by backing up and typing over the same letters a second time (done almost 40 years ago, gentle reader, when I turned in freshman college papers typed on a Smith Corona because the Commodore 801 printer I brought to college was dot matrix without Near Letter Quality mode).

At any rate, pleasant enough when read kinda like a devotional, a couple or four poems at a time. Lyle has a pretty good sense of rhythm, but imperfect–a couple of times, I would have thrown in another syllable to make an iamb–and some end rhyming.

I do not think I will seek out her other work avidly. Well, I won’t order them; but I see that she self-published poetry starting in the 1930s, so antiquarian grandmother poetry is catnip to me, and I’ll pick it up if I can see it priced a buck. And who knows? She was born in Michigan and is buried in Oak Brook, Illinois, (and her grave marker says Poetess, Author of “Treasures of Truth) but at least one book made its way to southwestern Missouri. Even if I put Poet on my marker (or my kin do it for me), I will not have had that reach. Also, I see her work appears on a record (Devotions In Poetry With Stan Cook, Vol. 1, recordings from an old radio program). Jeez, Louise. With any chance (and perhaps but a single other purchase), I’ll be the biggest collector of Lyle (married name: Melone, but she seems to have been known by her maiden name professionally) in Missouri.

I thought completing this book meant that I was 3/4 of the way through my birthday present of almost random paperbacks, but I guess I was counting the Heathcliff comic book in it as well; as it stands, I am 2/3 of the way through the paperbacks having already read John Grisham’s The Judge’s List. I have John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury to go, and it’s entirely possible I will get through it before I finish The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate, perhaps the slender volume of Alexander Pope I’ve bogged down in, and certainly before The Life of Greece.

It’s been a while since I’ve read R.A. Salvatore. I read The Sword of Bedwyr in 2012 and The Servant of the Shard in 2006, and I know I’ve read the first two parts of the Icewind Dale trilogy (and reclaimed an omnibus edition of the trilogy in January so I can re-read the first two parts and finish the whole thing which I could not in my initial collegiate reading of it because my brother only gave me the first two books in the set). Have I read anything else by R.A. Salvatore? Not in the last twenty years, apparently (according to the blog here). He was absolutely huge in the fantasy space in the 1990s, but after college, I guess my mainline reading tastes moved from fantasy to detective stuff. I mean, I read both of them interchangeably. And maybe I’m mistaken. It was thirty years ago, you know. But Salvatore was huge back then, and I think I missed most of it.

Within this book, the forces of good have defeated the forces of darkness at some cost. The main baddie, who has summoned a powerful wraith to do his bidding, is not sure he can control it in his diminished state and withdraws to his distant stronghold. A ranger and the witch daughter of the main green/nature witch in the world are conducting mop-up operations on the orcs talons, but the witch daughter feels the presence of the wraith and goes looking for him. The ranger follows, and the wraith defeats them and brings the daughter to the stronghold. And vast armies of the good guys, including ranger bands, an elf army, and the main body of the human kingdom, march out to the bastion of darkness (the bad guy’s stronghold) just as he discovers he can raise an undead army which grows each battle.

So much of the book is the events leading up to that march and the battle at the stronghold. If you’re familiar with the preceding two books, which took place hundreds of years or decades or maybe just a little while before (or both), and if you just read them, you probably get a head start on keeping the characters straight, especially as the main ranger characters (three different guys in three different places with three different goals) all have similar names. But I did all right with it anyway.

I did read the thin Wikipedia entry on the series (The Chronicles of Ynis Aielle) to pick up what I could on the lore, especially as the main magic users had Earth names as well. I guess some people on a submarine (?) survived an apocalypse/were hurled into the future after the apocalypse and became the main magicians in this world? And some of the magicians were already there, which is why they’re hundreds of years old but the others were not. That was definitely an 80s trope, ainna, the normal people or, better yet, gaming group were hurled into a fantasy world? Maybe I’m making too much of the Guardians of the Flame series and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.

So: An all right bit of pastiche or homage to Lord of the Rings mixed with other bits. Salvatore’s writing is pretty good and moves along all right, but with trilogies and series, it pays to already be invested in the world.

Okay, so this is not the first of the books that I’ve read from the April 2018 Friends of the Christian County Library Book Sale–I’ve read Iroshi in 2018, the two Sally Forth books, A Woman’s Work Is Never Done and Sally Forth in 2018, and Naked Came The Manatee last year. But this year, I have read two books from that book sale: This book and The Secret Power Within: Zen Solutions to Real Problems by Chuck Norris. Wow, I’m almost done with that book sale, although I have been dodging the sequels/latter two thirds of the trilogy after Iroshi and Rex Stout’s Death of a Doxy, all of which are facing out on the book shelves in the library, for several years.

But, about this book: Wow, is it an artifact of its time. The author apparently made a franchise of this topic and based it on a series of seminars he ran, presumably for upper middle class businessmen and strivers (and their wives). So although the book came out in 1993, it definitely has a 1980s sensibility to it, which is why businessman is probably an accurate depiction–the 80s women from 9 to 5 and Helen Reddy and Ronnie McDowell songs (geez, did I have to listen to those an awful lot when I was growing up)–and, I guess Trisha Yearwood‘s poet-narrators were coming up in 1994, women were hitting management positions, but, again, this book was just coming out with its sensibilities from the previous decade. Wow, that’s a lot of exegesis on an off-hand assessment that the book was geared to businessmen and spouses, but I guess I did get to dump a number of music links from way back.

A lot of the individual items are pointers to catalogues or 1-800 numbers where you can get different types of gifts; in just a couple of years, that advice which would have worked for thirty years would be out-of-date as the Internet replaced everything. Some of the ideas are definitely for the successful businessman, as they involve international travel, cruises, and riding the Concorde (also, soon to be dated). Maybe they’re just targeted to businessmen who did not buy fractional ownerships in brief periods when they were feeling flush (successful businessmen would probably have parlayed that capital into further success). The book encourages men to look for inspiration in numerous women’s magazines of the day (mostly now folded). It encourages women to look for inspiration in both Playboy and Penthouse(!) magazines.

The author favors Earl Klugh and Yanni as mood music–and I have a lot of Earl Klugh records (no Yanni, though–you don’t tend to see him in the wild, or I would probably buy it–I have Kenny G, for cryin’ out loud).

And, dig this: Books. I was a little surprised by how many of the books I’d read (poetry by Susan Polis Schutz, Chocolate: The Consuming Passion by Sandra Boynton, The Prophet by Khalil Gibran). I was surprised by the number of books in it by Ayn Rand’s inner circle (well, an excommunicated member, Nathaniel Branden’s The Psychology of Romantic Love). And I had a little flashback when I came across the title I’m OK – You’re OK by Thomas A. Harris. This book was everywhere in the 1980s, but mostly in paperback. I think my sainted mother had a copy. Which means I might very well have a copy around here somewhere, although I do not remember seeing one.

So I did flag a couple things for individual snarkiny:

176
Have you made your plans for the New Year’s Eve celebration to end all New Year’s Eve Celebrations? I’m talking about the next millennium! It’s less than 10 years away! When the calendar changes to the year 2000, and then to 2001, the planet’s going to party like never before! Start planning!

As it would turn out, I was newly happily married, but I was working in tech, so I had to carry the beeper that week in case the Y2K bug required a documentation update. And, as it turned out, I was laid low with the flu the whole week.

227
For sensual, silly time:

• Blindfold her.
• Sit her on the floor next to the refrigerator.
• Feed her a variety of delicious foods: Strawberries, Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses, cherry tomatoes, cheese, ice cream, Cheerios, cookies, popcorn, yogurt, watermelon, leftover chicken, pickles, olives, maple syrup, etc.
• (There’s a great scene like this in the movie 9½ Weeks.)

You know, I’ve seen bits of 9½ Weeks late at night on Showtime with the volume off when we lived in the trailer park, but I’ve not seen the film in its entirety. I have, however, seen 9½ Ninjas many times which features a similar scene.

278
You could update his entire album collection! Convert his aging album collection of beloved Beatles albums, Moody Blues tunes, and Rolling Stones records to compact discs. Converting a lifetime collection of 500-some albums would cost about $6,500.

You can see about how some of the ideas are spendy. Plus, this has not aged well: The records would have been worth more in the long run. In 2026, you would probably want to go the opposite direction, but only for Gen-X or older–so many albums of this millennium were never released on vinyl.

Oh, and 500-some? My beautiful wife wishes I were sane enough to be that limited.

549
How about a custom-made brass bed to give your bedroom an extra-personal touch?

Holy stars and garter snakes. Brass beds. Now that was a piece from that time, ainna? I’m not sure I’ve even seen those in estate sales any more. I know my favorite aunt had one, but I have not see one of those since…. Well, the 1990s, when they were passing so far out of fashion that they never made a comeback.

Or maybe they did and I missed it.

At any rate, mostly interesting as an artifact of its point in time. I guess I did get a couple of ideas from it, but a lot of things that would have been romantic for a breadwinner to do for his stay-at-home wife at the end of the 20th century, I already do. Do a chore to relieve her of it? I do most of the housework (those who will tell you women think it’s sexy are probably women who like the thought of it more than the execution of it). Make her a sweet treat? I bake pies most weeks these days, and I’m told I should make less as she is dieting. Get her chocolate? As the primary shopper in the household, I made sure that she always had dark chocolate on hand (but she’s dieting now, so don’t do it!).

I’ve gotten a few ideas and have thought of reviving some of our past traditions, however: She knows I’ve read the book, and I might be accused of getting the ideas from the book. Which might diminish it somehow.

Well, I said in my report on The Builders of the World that, now that I have found this little collection of Instructor Literature Series pamphlets from the beginning of the century that I would probably tear through them in a hurry to pad my annual book total numbers since I’m in the middle of some longer works which will take a while to finish (okay, mostly The Life of Greece)–and I am also watching some training for people who are planning to take the Network+ certification exam in the evenings with my beautiful wife who is collecting certifications because unless your name wraps into three lines on LinkedIn, are you even a person? That’s not why she’s watching them with me–it’s a bit for self-improvement, the continual (professional) learning beloved of the corporate world. Will I take that exam and maybe re-A+ certify (my A+ certification is over 25 years old, so that doesn’t exist in the former COMP-TIA world)? Depends upon how exactly bored I get–I’m working on certifying a new rank in my martial arts.

At any rate, where was I? Oh, yes. This is a little pre-Soviet era bit of educational material. I say pre-Soviet for two reasons: One, it’s from 1911, so it was before the Russian Revolution. And it’s also before educational materials became more, erm, Sovietsticated. So the Christians are the good guys in this book, although the different personalities of the four main army leaders differ in their goals and motivations. Some seem to be acting out of Christian piety (or at least the papal promise that previous sins would be forgiven), some were looking for glory, and some were looking for loot. Which led to disagreements in strategy and even in whether to go onto Jerusalem (the stated goal) or get fat in Antioch.

A brief primer on the topic, ending with the capture of Jerusalem and the establishment of a couple of Christian kingdoms in the area. It was not to last, though, as we know. But perhaps that comes in a sequel to this volume which I probably don’t have.

When I said I was going to tear through them, though…. The pamphlets are in varying degrees of completeness. Some might lack covers. Some have covers that are separated from the volumes in the stack. So I really am going to have to buy some poly bags to protect them. I guess I’ll be stopping by Hobby Lobby one day soon rather than order them from a big online seller who’ll algorythmically overcharge me for them. This particular pamphlet was in lesser shape than The Builders of the World with some tearing, staining, and cover loosening. I might end up reading them not in stack order or interest order but in order of their condition, best to worst. Time will tell. But I am almost onto 60 books this year, so I should be in good shape to hit 70, the minimum, but pressed to hit 100, the stretch goal.

So I’m a little bogged in my disciplined reading these days–I try to do a section or chapter of The Life of Greece, a couple or twenty things in the giant listicle 1001 Ways to Be Romantic, and a chapter in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate (somehow, trying to clear books from my chairside table has in fact added these last two books to the pile). So I thought I would prowl my stacks for some of the pamphlet-sized single short stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper“, some short fiction that I could use to break up the current stream of nonfiction without committing myself to a full book and which I could count as a “book” for the annual total. But I came across a stack of “Instructor Literature Series” booklets from the early part of the 20th century. And this book was on the top, so I grabbed it.

It’s a 29 page (including a quiz at the end) treatment of geology at the macro scale. The book talks about the then-contemporary understanding of the formation of the earth and its processes. I say then-contemporary because it only mentions igneous and sedimentary rock types, and although it does talk about slate and whatnot, it does not break these rock types into metamorphic rock like we do today. And, the book has, if not overtly Christian, then certainly a Deist perspective as it mentions that God put this all into motion.

I looked a little into the history of this series, and it was a New York (state) guy who made, eventually, 350 of these titles available for school teachers. Inexpensive, compact, and a ready-made lesson (of various difficulty levels). Remember, in the days when these were published, one-room schoolhouses were still common and Horace Mann’s acolytes had not destroyed schooling. I imagine those hard-pressed teachers treasured these little books, and the search engine AI tells me they’re sought after by collectors, but Ebay indicates they’re not that rare.

So I’ll probably work my way through the stack so that I can refresh myself to 1910s-era knowledge as a break from The Story of Greece which is 1940s-era knowledge (although history has not advanced as science might have). As a break from my little early 20th century hardback textbooks like the Riverside Literature Series and MacMillan’s Pocket Classics which I’m also using as a break from other things, although in the case of Alexander Pope’s longer poems, I’m taking a break from them by reading thousand page eighty-year-old history books.

But I assure you that the stack of books on the side table is slowly diminishing. Glacially slowly.

Huh. I thought I’d mentioned it, but The Complete Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, which I read in June, mentioned this book on the back flap or back of the dust jacket. I had the urge to read it, expecting it to be more than the Wikipedia entry which I have had in my browser’s bookmark since time immemorial (which is a short period of time these days, sometimes). I spotted a copy on Ebay, “signed,” and I wanted it. So for a long time (only a couple of months, I guess), I demurred, but I guess I was in the mood for some shopping therapy recently, and I bought it. It’s actually an incribed copy with a little message to John and George Bohnert–the inscription seems to indicate that they’re young brothers at the time of the inscription and not old friends of the author. Ay, me–I spent $25 on this book. I need to get some mylar to wrap it before I shelve it, or take it to ABC Books for them to wrap it (although Pam is gone, and I think she was the pro), or…. Never mind, I’ve lost it in the read stacks, which are almost as disorganized as the unread shelves, now.

So: As a juvenile narrative biography from the middle of the 20th century, the book is designed to appeal to younger readers to give them a model to emulate. And, brother, Paul Laurence Dunbar is a good one. Born to a freed slave and the youngest of several children that a single mother kept together, Dunbar was a bookish and sickly young man with a facility for academics and wordcraft. He worked hard, attended high school (a rarity), but had to repeat his last year because he was not so good at mathematics. His young friends included Orville and Wilbur Wright, and they helped to publish his first book with their print shop before they went into bicycle repair and aviation. Dunbar met a lot of helpful people along the way, and he sold copies of his first self-published book and worked at a variety of jobs before landing steady work as an elevator boy which allowed him a lot of time to read, study, and craft poems. He had sort-of successful runs in London (before being abandoned there by his manager’s daughter who was supposed to be his shepherd on his English trip but apparently lived it up and left him in meager accomodations when she went on to the continent) and in New York, and then, bam, his sickliness is revealed to include tuberculosis, and he dies at 32, leaving several volumes of poetry and several hundred pages of mostly good poems.

The book does confirm a couple of things: First, his vernacular poems were wildly popular in his day, even amongst black people and freed slaves who might have been pleased to see not only poetry written like they spoke but also capturing some of the stories and traditions they knew. Although he did not meet James Whitcomb Riley, they did correspond (I mention this in this paragraph because Riley also wrote in vernacular, that is, in misspelled and accented English, albeit different vernaculars for the most part).

A bit of a ding on the book is that its school days take up the bulk of the book, and when we get to Dunbar as an adult, it gets a little more terse and a little more “six months later.” One does notice, however, that when being at about the poverty line, one can easily pick up and go to Chicago for months to attend the World’s Fair or move around a little more easily. You know, I’ve known this from some of the vagabonds I’ve known in my life. Couch surf for years at a time, rotating amongst friends, or just being able to pick up and move to chase a slightly better job with but a truck full of stuff (or less, probably, in Dunbar’s case). Being an early collector of books definitely has made this lifestyle impossible for me (I hope, but one never knows). But: To get back to the thesis sentence, the book is targeted at school kids, so perhaps that’s why the book is weighted to the school days.

At any rate, an interesting read. And, an unfortunate one: Because now I’m perusing Ebay for old and/or original editions of Paul Laurence Dunbar books which I cannot afford. At least, not until one of my damned apps goes viral or sells at least more than one copy.

As I mentioned when I bought this book two weeks ago that I had already read this book in 2021, but this pretty edition (only $8) was tempting. So I bought it, and I’ve read the book again. Note that this “pretty” edition is a Barnes & Noble edition from thirty years ago. You know, when they took books out of copyright and packaged them into discounted hardbacks not unlike Dover Publications did with paperbacks basically printed on newsprint. What a time to have been alive–this was seen as a profitable endeavor! I’ve been in Barnes & Noble recently, and I’m not sure any brick and mortar new book store has any profitablity path. Ai, what a time to be alive.

At any rate, as with the paperback edition, this book collects not only The Book of the Five Rings, a book of five “scrolls” dealing with the lessons of Musashi’s martial arts school training in sword combat but also A Hereditary Book on the Art of War by Yagyū Munenori which is a similar book but more steeped in Buddhist and Confucian thought (I said in my previous review that it was more Confucian, but it’s really more Buddhist).

So, what did I take away from this reading?

Well, Musashi favors fighting with two swords; I can visualize this better since I acquired the wakizashi and tachi pair in 2025 (and I can sort of see them behind all the other clutter on my desks).

In retrospect, the books are kind of like modern martial arts books in that they’re better understood if you have trained in the martial art described. You’re not going to learn swordsmanship from either of these books as you’re not going to learn karate from reading Complete Karate, tae kwon do from reading Tae Kwon Do Basics, or boxing from Boxer’s Start-Up. The Book of Five Rings and A Hereditary Book on the Art of War don’t even have photos or illustrations to capture a single point in motion, a strike, or a drill. They’re maybe most helpful with some pointers if you’ve already studied the art just a little bit. And these books (the ones I’m reporting on) don’t even go into strikes but more philosophy.

That said, in this reading, I got more out of the back-of-the-book filler book (A Hereditary Book on the Art of War) than The Book of the Five Rings. Its Buddhist mindsets and metaphors–probably the first half of the book deals in these metaphors for how the martial art should eventually flow through you without thought, and how thinking while martial arting will trip you up. Gee, mister, does it! I speak from experience. I think too much while I should be stick fighting.

At any rate, it might be worth re-reading every once and again since it’s a short book. I’m not sure why it was in the philosophy section as it is more martial arts than Buddhist or Zen (and I think those would be in a different section altogether at ABC Books anyway). But I will likely not re-read it any time soon, although in five years, who knows what kind of edition I might find.

Well, of course, I bought this book after finishing To Rise Again at a Decent Hour and jumped right into it. And, as I mentioned, I finished it a week ago but am just now getting around to reviewing it. Which, if you’re sussing things out, means I have not finished a book in the interim as I mentioned it was still on the scanner. Hopefully, soon, I will have something else on the scanner, or I am not going to make 100 books this year. I guess I have only done this seven times in the last fifteen years, so it’s not that common, and the “goal” listed on the inherited spreadsheet is to finish 70 books a year, which I am better at.

ANYWAY, this book is part of the Harbison series, but only in a cousinary way. The first seven books, ending with The Killing at Cottage Farm, which I finished in January, deals with Chet Harbison in northwestern Jefferson County where I grew up (albeit seventy and more years before the Noggle boys ever hit Murphy or House Springs). This book is set several decades later in Cape Girardeau and features Reese “Red” Harbison, who was mentioned in the previous book as a boy who moves with his family when their farm fell on hard times. Now grown up, he’s a World War II veteran coming home for his mother’s funeral and to take over the auto body paint and supply company where he used to work. After he finds a stolen car using the tag from an abandoned and neglected dog, he decides to also be a private investigator. But he’s accused of a murder which harms his business, and he discovers that one of the high school teachers has short eyes and has been drugging and taking advantage of high school students, and he resolves to take care of the latter while kind of investigating the former.

Wilder shifts from the third-person perspective to the first-person with this book, and between that and his greater experience with novels make for a bit better of a read. The book still focuses a lot on setting the stage, talking about the characters, and capturing the sense of southeast Missouri in 1961 which makes the resolution of the plots a little quick and pat. And, boy howdy, I might have mentioned previously that the books could have used another set of eyes on them, and this goes doubly true for this book. In addition to frequent problems with quotation marks, such as breaking in quotations at nouns of direct address, the last chapter misspells two of the main characters’ names. I offered in 2024 to act as a proofreader for him. I need to reach out to him again with the same offer, making clear I’m not looking to charge him corporate rates.

Our conversation at the book signing led me to a couple insights about publishing. He mentioned that his covers and typesetting cost him about $400 a book (I hope that was not a trade secret). Boy, howdy. The cover of John Donnelly’s Gold cost me $300, and I ordered 50 print copies to send to bloggers, papers, and magazines when I first published it. I will never make that out no matter how many authors I sell them to when I’m ostensibly at ABC Books to buy their books–and Wilder, I believe, bought a copy of John Donnelly’s Gold (or so he said he would–I guess I will see when I go to buy the copy of the Frankl book I couldn’t find at Barnes & Noble).

But, despite its typos and seeming occasional anachronisms, I like the Harbison series and will pick up the next. In December, maybe?

Wow, it’s been almost twenty years since I read Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came To The End, which describes a failing ad agency and the rounds of layoffs leading to its closure. I liked that book quite a lot–as you know, gentle reader, I had just finished a couple years’ service at a digital marketing agency about that time, so it really spoke to me. That was his first book; seven years after, this was his first book. I’m not sure where I got it; it’s not on a Good Book Hunting post. It’s even possible I got it at Barnes and Noble on the discounted shelves as the price tag indicates. We will never know. An event in history, lost, unimportant except for its loss.

At any rate: This book deals with a dentist with mental illness, whose father committed suicide before the narrator reached double digits in age. Forty years later, he’s a dentist with a small but successful practice in Manhattan who lives in Brooklyn, alone and deeply lonely even though he ends up pushing people away. In flashback, he talks about relationships he’s had in college and after–one with a Roman Catholic girl with a conservative Catholic family, another with an Jewish woman with a big family–a relationship he started with a temp he hired and who still works with him after the relationship ends. In both cases, he gives himself unhealthily, hoping to join a big, loving family that he never had. But, ultimately, he admits to being an atheist to both families, which drives a wedge between them. The MacGuffin is that someone starts to impersonate him on the Internet, creating a Web site for his practice, commenting on news posts, and starting a Twitter feed in his name and to post some “apocrypha” from a people mentioned briefly in the Bible, where the distant descendents have been persecuted worse than the Jews. A member of that tribe has started reaching out to these descendents and is teaching them about their heritage–and the dentist meets a couple of others in the line and a researcher who is trying to bring them together to visit their homeland in Israel.

But: This is really more of an atmospheric book than anything else. We’ve got parallel stories, where a billionaire financier meets with the narrator. Also a member of the descendents of the hidden-from-history people, he, too. The researcher also has a parallel story, as decades ago he wooed an Orthodox Jewess, going so far as to start the process of converting to Judaism and wanting to become a rabbi, but ultimately rebuffed by the girl’s rabbi father because he, the researcher, admits he does not want to believe in God, but wants to be part of a family and a persecuted tradition. And I guess the climax of the book is the billionaire and the dentist hearing the story of the researcher and maybe discovering it’s all probably invented, a way for him to find meaning and to impart it to others who are in his situation?

I dunno. I was waiting for some resolution, some twist to it. Is the whole thing in the narrator’s head? Is he just crazy? Definitely some indicators that it’s the case–in one episode, he has a meaningful conversation with someone in the know, and one of his employees asks him who he was talking to that might indicate such. But even though the–maybe this is the climax?–the numbered chapters end with him visiting a new patient at home to floss for him, something he does daily now (he reveals)–and we get a climactic play-in game for the Red Sox (the dentist so much a fan, it’s almost crazy)–we don’t get any resolution or change in the narrator. There’s an epilogue where he goes on a mission trip with his lead hygenist, a widow who is very Catholic but does not have a large family, but he does this annually or so with her. And the last paragraph is him agreeing to a pick-up game of cricket with local children. Is this supposed to represent a real change on his part, or is it all supposed to represent more of the same: hope for change, but not forthcoming.

So, as I said, a vibe book, too much effective writing for the story and theme it holds. There’s not a lot of bio of Ferris on the Internet that I could see, but something about his pace of output and the too much good writing made me think he’s a creative writing professor by day. My own creative writing professor and academic advisor whose total career to my college years was a collection of short stories, a novel, and editing a book (The Boundaries of Twilight, which I ordered and read whilst in college) and his career since then has been another collection of short fiction and another novel (which I have around here somewhere, along with his first collection of short fiction which I read in college but only borrowed from the library and whose acquisition I remember even though I don’t have a Good Book Hunting post on it).

I actually sat up from my reading recliner at one point most of the way through this book and thought, “Do I even like to read?” I’d spent months complaining to my beautiful wife on how much I was not enjoying That Hideous Strength and then a week or so saying the same thing about this book. Most of my book reports are not snarky, but they are kind of down on the books I read. But I read a lot of books that are not the core of what I like to read–junk genre fiction and the occasional headier work which I either enjoy and feel pleased to have read or I slag on them. So do I like to read, or do I just do it out of habit? I guess that is a very ringing disrecommendation of this book.

I am less likely to pick up a Ferris book I find in the wild, but he was not so much of a best seller that you see them strewn widely about. Which is good as I have thousands of books to read already, including a new James R. Wilder book to read, four from Dodge Merrin, as well as, I guess, two from C.J. Hribal. If I ever read again, which is “I will” since I’ve already started on the Wilder book and have continued to read old Ideals magazines throughout.

After finishing The Space Trilogy after a year of working on it, I wanted something quick and easy to read to pad my annual reading total before diving into the other long-term and lengthy tomes on my chairside table. And, boy, mister, was this book quick and easy.

It weighs in at 137 pages of large print, double-spacing, and pages with chapter titles and blank pages before each chapter. So it’s really more novella length and young adult in tone and depth; it has a good plot, sparse and moving prose, but not a lot of umami; the main character is good, the people who help him are good, and here are the events/set pieces for the plot. Better, but shorter, than the worst of men’s adventure paperbacks (including Westerns) and probably heavily influenced by television and movie tropes.

So: After recovering from a long bout of pneumonia, the main character, “Red” Weathers, goes hunting for the people who stole his herd of 35 cattle and his really good horse while he was will. He watched them do it, but when he tried to make an effort to stop them, he passed out from the effort before leaving his house. His first stop is a town up the way where he learns that the thieves sold the horse to the local hardman or bad rancher, so he goes to buy his stolen horse from said rancher–who immmediately goes to the gun, and some of the rancher’s gun hands get shot–and Red frees a squaw, the wife of an Indian he has met, from captivity. The rancher gets his friend the sheriff on the case, and Red, the Indian, and the town blacksmith, goes on the run, sets a trap, and kills some of the other gunhands but get captured. After a trial that turns from corrupt to fair–and where Red is freed and the bad rancher is booked, Red goes on to gather his horses from a crooked gambler and to settle scores with those who have wronged him before a happy epilogue where he’s back to ranching and living with a new wife.

So: Well-written, but not very deep. The author is/was a Pentecostal professor/speaker, and a list of his other books includes what looks to be a number of other westerns plus some nonfiction, Christian, motivational, and/or memoirs. I won’t seek the author out, but if I see some of his other books in the wild, I might pick them up.

I bought this book at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library in 2024. In years past, I’ve kinda gamified hitting all four of the Friends of the Christian County Library book sales in a year at the rotating libraries (Ozark, Clever, Nixa, and Sparta). This year, though, I’ve missed the Ozark sale and the Clever Sale (I could not parse the markings on the calendar for a while, and when I figured it out, somehow I managed to forget what Saturday it was even though it was, semi-scrutibly, upon the calendar). That leaves Nixa’s three day sale in August and Sparta’s one-day bag sale in the autumn. Will I go? I dunno. I seem to be making slight progress on my stacks, or at least my chairside table, so I don’t want to maybe overfill them. HOWEVER, on an autumn day, with a $3 bag (or two) in my hand, who knows to what levels of gluttony I might descend.