Category: Books

Ah, gentle reader: As I mentioned when I bought this book in 2020 with a gift card, I had read about Dunbar somewhere and had bookmarked his Wikipedia entry for later use when writing an essay or something. Back when I thought I was an essayist. I guess it’s only been 20 years since I had a piece in History magazine and a couple in Writer’s Journal. Could I have bookmarked it that long ago? Ah, gentle reader, I have exported my then-Firefox and now-Brave bookmarks every time I’ve upgraded computers, so…. Maybe.

As I might have mentioned, I have returned to reading in my bedroom immediately before bed–some time ago, I had a full-sized lamp beside the bed, and I read in bed for a while before sleeping, but we moved a small chair into the bedroom because my beautiful wife has always favored the idea of a “reading nook.” She doesn’t read there frequently, but I’ve taken to having a stack of literary magazines handy there to transition to bedtime. I’ve also read poetry books there, including the first part of The Complete Works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Odes of Pindar, and some Salesian Missions things. For the last couple of months, I’ve had this 479 page long collection.

I don’t remember where I first came across his name, but I’ll definitely say that (in my opinion), Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of America’s best poets, certainly of his time (the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th). Much of his poem has rhythm and rhyme and is eminently approachable and readable and has actual substance to it, sometimes unexpected but plausible takes and metaphors. But.

But, and this is something that can be used to ding and to dismiss James Whitcomb Riley (Dunbar’s contemporary). Dunbar wrote a lot in the vernacular, and in his case, as his speakers were former slaves and black, the vernacular probably triggers modern readers. But even within the poems in the vernacular have depth and poetic sensitivity. Another thing that separates him from modern poetry, well, a couple of things: One, his poems not in the vernacular are rather formal in structure, so they’re not authentic enough. And the other thing modern professionals might think is a sin is that some of the former slaves who miss their lives as slaves. You know, when they were freed, they lost a lot of social structure, comraderie, and suddenly had to live a completely different life. Which led to some complexity in human emotion, ainna? But that would be doubleplusungood thought expressed in the 21st century. I guess I should add here because it is the 21st century that I am not advocating slavery, but I can imagine some counterintuitive and conflicted emotions on the part of the freed slaves.

So, yeah, I liked this book. Over the months of working through it, I flagged a number of poems. I’m not going to recount them here for you, gentle reader–I’m thinking I might at a later time pull this book from the shelf and re-read what I have flagged. I also bought a later edition of his first work, Lyrics of Lowly Life in 2023. When I bought it, I pointed out to the volunteer counting my books that he was an important black poet and one of the first to achieve fame from it, and she thought it was great that I knew it. I think it a failure of our collective society that nobody else does.

Dunbar died at 33; how unfortunate, but like Keats, he burned brightly. And wrote more poetry by that age than I can have been arsed to write with a couple of extra decades. But I’m working on it.

Like Mother Tried To Tell Me… And I Wouldn’t Listen, I got this book last May at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale. It is a short collection of poems dated June 2015 through March 2019, and the Print on Demand date in the back indicates the book was printed in May 2021.

The subtitle is “a tribute to living life on the open road”, and the first poem is about a van she named Frida, and it sounds like she’s planning to live in it, an early representation of Van Life or perhaps homelessness, but the poems are not exclusively about travel. They’re about relationships, et cetera. And although they hint at some poetic sensibility, some underdeveloped moments, most of them are not very good–they’re just prosaic thoughts broken into lines, sometimes lines with only a word or two on them, and not especially descriptive or evocative.

Sadly, in reading a lot of lesser poets (and modern magazines), I’m still concluding that the changes in education over the last, what, century and a quarter? have really diminished the depth of poetry across all levels of skill and professionality. Some of the grandmother poetry, or, heck, the poetry my father wrote (which I’ve posted on the blog, somewhere, but I cannot find it now), has depth that the casual poetry writer today lacks. Because they’ve not been fed the classics as input, so all they have is tweets and insta-poetry to learn from. And it shows. Even the college-trained poets these days suffer from it.

Ai.

At any rate, this is book 37 for the year (and the third on the night when I also read browsed Up Close! and Mother Tried To Tell Me… And I Wouldn’t Listen). Annual book count: PADDED.

I got this book last May at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale, and it was shelved close to Up Close!, so when looking for something to read in between epistles in Pope’s “An Essay on Man”, I pulled it as well. As I have only read 35 books so far this year, I have to pump my numbers up.

This is a little gift book, not very long, which is bound at the top. Each page contains a truism or quip, advice that I suppose your mother might have given you. And by “each page,” I mean one per sheet of paper–the “top” page of the book/back of the “bottom” pages, are blank. The individual quips are things like “Tact is the ability to close your mouth before someone else wants to.” and “You can give without loving… but you can never love without giving.” In cursive, as though someone just wrote them down on a notepad.

So, yeah, it took me a couple of minutes to read it. But I am counting it as a book. Because I make the rules around here.

After thinking about Gary Coleman, I thought about this book. Which I had knocked akimbo on the to-read shelves whilst dusting on Monday, so its location was fresh in my mind.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I have picked up these elementary school book fair celebrity bio books before (see also TV Superstars ’81, TV Superstars ’82, TV Superstars ’83, TV Now: Stars and Shows, and any number of similar books about sports figures). The difference, though, it that the aforementioned book covers a period 40 years ago when I watched network television and new who the people in the books (like Gary Coleman) were.

This book, though, is from 13 years ago. So these child stars–and they’re all child stars–I guess some of them are in their 20s, but, c’mon, man, to someone who was down with the celebrities 40 years ago, anything under 35 looks like a child, ainna?–come from an era where I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to television. Especially Nickelodeon, where many of these stars matriculated. Some, of course, I’m familiar with because they’re still around. But some not.

The book includes brief bits with lots of exlamation points! about:

• Big Time Rush, a boy band from a Nickelodeon show
• Victoria Justice
• Rachel Chow
• Andrew Garfield
• Jennifer Lawrence
• Josh Hutchinson
• Chloë Moretz
• Lily Collins
• Cody Simpson
• Bella Thorne
• Zendaya Coleman
• Justin Bieber
• Selena Gomez
• Taylor Swift
• One Direction
• Willow and Jaden Smith

So, yeah. About half are still relevant? I’m not sure I’ve seen a film with any of them except the Spider-Man film which had Zendaya and Andrew Garfield in it. The one thing I’ll take from this book is Zendaya’s last name since she’s dropped it. And the book describes Taylor Swift as the Queen of Country, although in 2013 should would still have been princess-aged, and the last line, punctuated with an exclamation point! says she’ll be the Queen of Country forever. I am from the future, and I have some startling news for you.

At any rate, I’d say it’s good fodder for trivia nights, except:

1. At thirteen years old, this book is likely outside the range of the questions at trivia nights we’ve been to in recent years: Questions written by college kids who were too young to pay attention 14 years ago when this book was compiled or questions about very contemporary things. Also, when it comes to pop culture, Disney categories rule more than Nickelodeon television shows do.
2. I’m likely to forget everything except Zendaya’s last name after I schedule this blog post. It helps that she has the same last name as Gary Coleman, to be sure.

Still, the passage of time, neh? I am not sure where I got this particular volume, but I’m likely to dabble in others like it in the future.

Wow, it’s been eight years since I bought this book at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale back when they only had it twice a year in Ozark. One would think I would have jumped on this book sooner. But one would also have thought I’d also jump on Chuck Norris’s autobiography, too, but yet it languishes here, somewhere, amid the stacks.

I’ve got to say: I’ve read my Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind in 2017), and I have read my Joko Beck (Everyday Zen in 2020), and I have read other non-Zen Buddhists including Thich Naht Hanh (various), but this book is maybe the best book on mindfulness I’ve read. Not true Zen, but mindfulness.

The book is not a true biography, but it has enough biographical elements and anecdotes to be interesting. But its focus is on what we now call mindfulness which Norris was introduced to in his various dealings with the inscrutible Orientals in Korea where he learned tae kwon do and later in California where he had a chain of martial arts schools before he got into acting. He talks about emptying the mind, focus, breathing, et cetera, and, again, it’s leavened with the anecdotes and name drops. He mentions Bruce Lee, of course, and even includes a story/koan/sutra of the empty cup that was in Shannon Lee’s Be Water, My Friend. He mentions that Steve McQueen recommended he try acting when he was at a crossroads (being open to those pivotal points is a lesson taking a chapter).

So it’s a little like Joe Hyams’ Zen in the Martial Arts, but, to be honest, better. Because it’s Carlos Ray Norris, man. And I say this even though I’m only slightly afraid that if I posted a bad word about him that he would spin kick me from beyond.

And I’m kinda encouraged to find his autobiography. More inclined to do so than to watch The Jimmy Stewart Show based on reading the latter’s book of poetry.

Having run out of Readers Digest magazines on my recent Florida vacation, I delved into this book, which I bought in Daytona Beach during the trip. It took me less time to read it than a Readers Digest because it’s 31 pages long.

It features four (4) poems total plus an introduction telling about how he started writing poetry on a bit of a lark and an introductory couple of paragraphs about how he came to write each poem. We have a poem about a step in a hotel in Junín, Argentina, that trips guests; a poem about how cold it is in the Aberdares mountain range in Kenya; a poem from the point of view of a movie camera nipped by a hyena also in Kenya; and an eulogy for a not particularly well behaved dog.

It’s not high art; it’s a bit of doggerel, although it has decent rhythm and rhyme to it. But what’s most telling, and a bit sad, about it is that it reminds us that people, normal people and celebrity, tried their hands at poetry in the middle of the twentieth century before the practice was completely turned over to the priests of academia, and that people, normal people and celebrity, would read it. Would read at all might be the case, although a woman next to me on one of the flights had a book when the most of the rest of the people were left to their own devices. Also, it’s kind of bittersweet to find a hardback priced under ten dollars.

At any rate, it reminds me that I have a DVD version of The Jimmy Stewart Show around here somewhere. Maybe I’ll give it a watch sometime soon. But I often say that here on the blog, and then I do not.

I just got this book in January when spending a gift card at Hooked on Books. So I came across it while taking a break from “An Essay on Man” by Alexander Pope (itself a break from That Hideous Strength, which is a break in the complete works of Shakespeare…).

So: This comes from the middle part of Leary’s career, although I guess he’s continued to work since 2008. But it’s in the middle of Rescue Me which was his dramatic fireman series which ended in 2011, fifteen years ago. He’s been busy with other television shows, films, and voice-over work, but because I associate him mostly with the MTV ads in the 1980s, No Cure for Cancer which I listened to over and over in the middle 1990s driving to Milwaukee and back, and his roles in 1990s films like National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I, The Ref, and Demolition Man, I think of anything past the turn of the century as part of his later work even though most of his career has happened after that arbitrary point.

So, what do we have? Well, Denis Leary schtick. He rants about the importance of hard work, families, and gores some sacred cows about our softening society (eventually having to walk back some bit about autism). Being it is 2008, he takes some shots at George W. Bush and lauds Obama; I wonder whether he feels any differently eighteen years on–and whether he could or would admit it if he does.

So I flagged a couple of bits:

• On page 25, he mentions Donald Trump making a vodka when he doesn’t drink.
• On page 90, he mentions Paris Hilton who was a thing back then before the onslaught of the Kardashians. I just watched Paris Hilton in National Lampoon’s Pledge This!.
• Here’s a long and slightly vulgar bit:
  

  I could update that bit [a bit from Lock’n’Load about coffee-flavored coffee] this very second with my thesis on how Starbucks may be responsible for the pussification of America–I reresearch the subject once or twice a week when I stand in line there and listen as some limp-wristed, yellow-Lance-Armstrong-bracelet-wearing, metrosexual-har-goo-sporting, Hillary-Clinton’s-tired-old-ass-worshipping puke spends twelve minutes trying to decide between the Orange Cranberry Vagina muffin or the Pumpkin Cream Tampon Cake while fingering a Save the Rainforest Compilation CD featuring Sting, Sheryl Crow, Joni Mitchell, Sting’s Abs, That Hot 19-Year-Old Blonde White English Chick Who Sounds Like Janis Joplin, and Sting’s Penis–who apparently pops out of his master’s yoga pants to sing his new single “How I Have Tantric Sex With Trude Styler For Seven Straight Hours.”

  He means Joss Stone. I was there in 2008. It was so long ago, but not that long ago.

• Donald Trump again on page 191. I mean, for late boomers coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, he was quite a touchstone. Especially after his television show.
• Talking about memory in male/female relationships, he says “Unless we’re talking about sports or The Godfather Part One and Two or the Vanessa Williams issue of Playboy magazine.” ACKSHUALLY, the photos that toppled her reign as Miss America appeared in Penthouse. My brother had a copy back in the day.
• He says: “Here’s hoping that–two decades from now when perhaps another twenty-million Mexicans have settled in here and begun to legally prosper, vote, work, and play–racists will have at least five or six more slurs to shout at them during an altercation.” Well, here we are twenty years later (almost), and whole swaths of other populations have arrived on these shores, and Americans of all stripes have indeed updated their dictionary of derogatory ethnic terms. And, yet, somehow anti-semitism is the sentiment of the day.

So: It’s slightly a product of its time, with the political jabs at Bush and whatnot, but it’s also notable for how some of the things he identifies are still relatively timely–and that’s not just the parts about where he talks about the importance of family. The seeds for current sociopolitical concerns were already germinating in 2008. And were fertilized by the administration Leary welcomed.

I got this book in Sparta in 2024 with a couple of other loft interior design books. I read the others, Small Lofts and Minimalist Lofts, not long after I got them. This one, however, languished partially complete beside the reading chair for quite some time before I recently finished it as part of my drive to finish up (or reshelve) books that have been there for a long time.

It’s because it has a high copy-to-photo ratio. It has these chapters:

• the loft look
• space
• light
• materials
• color
• styling
• outside in

Yeah, not capitalized, because that’s stylish.

Each two-page spread has three photos, generally a larger one and two smaller ones, but a lot of gushy, purple, catalog-style prose. Each chapter has a “case study” which is slightly more specific, more of the same. Although the book did not depend upon the word liminal quite as much as the others.

So, to underline (as this book does), the loft style of the early 21st century (and maybe beyond) is to create open floor plan condos that look like Scandinavian museums with their light and neutral colors and simplistic furniture and art presentation (a limited number of things per room), objects chosen for how well they conform to the contempraneous concepts of style and nothing else. Architectural elements like floating steps which look like they might last a decade, but don’t most loft dwellers, especially those buying bespoke lofts like those depicted in books, make me wonder what they’ll be like in five or six years. To say nothing of twenty. But, again, I imagine lofts turn over a lot, and everyone who’s buying a pied-à-terre is going to pay designers and architects to redo it in their vision anyway.

You know, I prefer craftsman to almost lodge design, so for me, a loft has exposed brick and industrial elements but also thick wood accents and tend toward the dark colors. And as for décor, the chapter “styling” opens with:

The key to styling urban spaces is balance. Balance between personal treasures and cohesive, clear and contemporary home style. With our choice in furniture, fabrics, and a hundred other details, we stamp our personality upon a room, we make it ours.

I mean, if you cannot trust a philosophy described with a missing serial comma and a comma splice, what can you trust?

So much of interior design, it seems to me, is self-referential and artificial within the industry itself. Making spaces look like other spaces, with external indicators substituting appearance for meaning. Of course, when I look around Nogglestead, I see things and decorative items with meaning. Going along the mantel on the oversized brick fireplace in our family room, for example, we have a needlepoint girl which was a gift to my beautiful wife; a pair of replica dueling pistols which belonged to her uncle; her acryllic plaque for being on the park board; a shadowbox containing duck and goose calls belonging to her father; a time/thermometer/barometer bit which was a gift; the flag from my mother’s casket; the little crystal lamp I bought in 2018; the cartridges from the salute fired at my father-in-law’s funeral in a triangle flag shadow box; a scale that belonged to my sainted mother; a shadow box containing three garrison caps from my mother’s veterans organizations; a mirror which belonged to my favorite aunt; a marble chessboard that belonged to my grandfather and then my mother; a tin cat garden decoration I bought for my wife; two cat sculptures that belonged to my godmother aunt, including one I bought for her; a fireplace tool set which was decorative at my mother-in-law’s house but is functional (some times) at Nogglestead; and a porcelain cat sculpture I’ve named Darla which belonged to my favorite aunt. I look around the rooms, and I can tell you why the things are here. Some elements do not scream Brian J. did this–mostly gifts consumer art from my godmother aunt or chosen by my beautiful wife (although we have one set, down from two, of cheap consumer art I bought in my Ebaying days). So no balance between personal treasures. All personal treasures.

Should I someday have a loft, it will not look like this. It will look like Nogglestead but probably with a more open floor plan. And I will invent industrial lodge cluttercore.

Ah, gentle reader. I have picked this short book to be a mild distraction whilst I work through That Hideous Strength, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Pamela, and the second book in the Story of Civilization set by the Durants. Well, mostly, That Hideous Strength right now, which I thought might go better/go faster after reading the Gothickish mess of The Unloved, but, oh, no. Still slow going there–a couple of segments of a chapter or a chapter of it a night. So: This book, which I acquired at ABC Books in 2023 (along with two books on how to play guitar, strangely enough–clearly this is a sign that I need to learn to play guitar).

So: It is a rather recent book as the books I acquire goes. It is a basic instruction book on Kendo, Japanese swordfighting techniques for a hand-and-a-half sword, focusing on fighting armored opponents. It has a list of exercises and drills and a couple of illustrations, but mostly it directs the user to YouTube videos for actual demonstrations. Which is atypical for the books I read on martial arts–most of them are old enough that they precede YouTube. I haven’t watched the videos, though, as I’m still a fencer more than a kendo guy, and that will be all right until people start wearing armor again. Good enough for duels, anyway.

And, as I mentioned, or meant to, it’s a slash and chop martial art, designed to cut through samurai armor. Try this on full plate, and you’re probably in a world of hurt. So some stepping and chopping from overhead strikes. I wonder how well I could pick it up from some of the diamond footwork drills I’ve learned (and included in Boxing Drill Companion, available on the Apple App Store!). Simple research indicates there are three kendo dojos in Missouri, none in Springfield, and my dojo only trains sticks these days (in the past, we did some sword work, other weapons, and other styles, but that was a long, long time ago).

I’m thinking about going through some of the thinner martial arts books I’ve got to continue with the breaks from the homeworkish reading. It makes me feel like a martial artist in a period where I’ve gone through a little lull in my studies due to many circumstances, only one of which is that I’m lazy and feeling old at the same time.

I don’t know where I got this Book Club edition; as it does not show up on any Good Book Hunting reports, I’ll assume that I inherited from my aunt who passed away 20 years ago whose few bookshelves were packed with 70s and 80s horror and thrillers. You know, in my Ebay peddling days, she came along to estate sales a time or two and tried the Ebay thing for a while as well–at least, she listed, sold, and shipped a few things from what she picked up, mostly the collectible statuary of the era. She did better than Pixie, who more frequently accompanied me, who collected items but didn’t generally get around to listing them on Ebay.

At any rate, I read Creature in 2019, and I thought it was okay. But this book? Absurd. Absurd. I did not like it.

So: A prodigal son is called back to his childhood home, Sea Oaks, as his mother is dying. So he brings his nuclear family to the island and its antebellum mansion off the coast of the southern United States. His mother is a harridan who has been hard on his sister who wanted to be a dancer but fell down the stairs and broke a hip which put off her dreams, which to be honest were as much her mother’s dreams. The old woman dies, and then the daughter goes crazy (again) and begins to kill everyone one-by-one. The wife. Her dance students. Her housekeeper. Her brother. And so on. Somehow, the fact that these deaths are piling up on Sea Oaks in a relatively short time (like a couple weeks) doesn’t draw any attention, and somehow, this middle-aged woman with a pronounced limp can get the drop on a whole bunch of people and can handle corpses like a professional coroner, and….

Oh, for Pete’s sake. I have recently dinged authors for having their plots too informed by video games; this book’s plotting seems ripped from contemporary (then) direct-to-video slasher films. Eesh, one of the first video cassettes we owned in 1985 was Alice, Sweet Alice, and this book is right on par with it.

I mean, Saul is an adequate writer. He spends a little too much time, perhaps, setting up the tropish Southern Gothic setting (the first hundred pages of the 300 page book are setting the scene, it seems). But.

Yeah, you know, I’ve often, at least in person, commented on how some writers of the past who are wildly successful in their time are forgotten now. When I was hitting the estate sales around the turn of the century, as the, what, Silent Generation and maybe Greatest Generation were cleaning out, I saw a hella lotta Frank Yerby novels. A lot of Harold Robbins novels. Probably my share of John Saul novels. But you don’t hear much about them now, and reading this book written and published in my lifetime, I can kind of see how it happens. Wildly popular, a product of its time, but not timeless in any sense.

I don’t know how many other Saul novels I might have floating around here; however, I can say that it will probably be another seven years before I get to one. Unless I decide I must read all the John Saul books right now like I sometimes do. But I hope not.

I kind of thought that I’d bought this book with the collection of books on Korea that I bought in 2014 in Clever, where I speculated that the previous owner might have served in Korea (during the war or after) and returned as a tourist later. But I actually bought this book in in 2024, also in Clever, and notes indicate that a previous owner visited Thailand in 2004; a World War II vet would be getting up to almost eighty, so perhaps not someone who directly served. But most likely someone with an interest in the subject. Which is not to say there are not many; this book is a product for tourists put out by a company in Thailand.

It tells the story of the Western POWs who the Japanese empire made to construct an ill-advised railroad from Thailand to Burma to help the Japanese with their Asian land-based operations after their Pacific naval advance was stopped at the Battle of Midway six months after Pearl Harbor. I mean, I read The Battle Off Midway Island in 2014, but this book (under review) gave a timeline of the Japanese explosion in 1941 and early 1942, when they captured a bunch of southeast Asia and knocked on Australia’s doorstep but their Pacific campaign was basically nullified after the Battle of Midway, so they turned their eyes towards the land mass of Asia and maybe thought about invading India after this rail line was in place. But that was not to pass, happily.

The book details the conditions the prisoners (mostly British and Australian) and Asian slave labor faced–back-breaking work in the heat, working on a rail line that the British and Germans had surveyed decades before but said was too difficult, the deaths, and the constant need to repair problems and handle damage from Allied bombing (and prisoner sabotage) meant that it never performed like the ill-informed Japanese imperial powers thought it would.

So the actual building and destruction did not line up with the film (The Bridge over the River Kwai), but the film stirred interest, I guess.

The text of the book looks to be translated, as it features a number of, erm, ill-developed bits of English, and the typography and layout are a little faulty. It includes a lot of small, ill-reproduced photographs of the era, but dayum, man, they’re photos of the history. Some of the text repeats itself a bunch–the book is “Organized by J.P.”, so maybe it’s sourced from a bunch of pamphlets cut-and-pasted without altering and smoothing the text.

But it’s lightweight and informative for people who did not know about the Asian land front in World War II. Which does not probably align with people going to Thailand to see it. But as a man approaching middle age who is not sure whether he is on team World War II or team Civil War for old man history interests, it’s making its case for Team World War II.

Oh, and as I mentioned when talking about the record with marches that belonged to my grandfather (in 2012, gentle reader; I forgive you if you’ve forgotten), the record includes the whistled march tune from the film. Which I can depict now, although probably not whistle accurately as I am tune-deaf. So I knew kinda about the story, if not the real history (I have not seen the film, but will undoubtedly look for it now).

And I could place when the previous owner visited the site because the book and a paper pamphlet included at no cost to me both say Sept 24 2004 on them. The included paper is not part of the book, and it’s too big for a Found Bookmark post, but I read it as well. It’s entitled “History of the Thailand-Burma Railway”.

But only counted the whole as one book in the annual total. A quick read whilst dodging the quick read in between Shakespeare plays and while I dodge the remainder (most of) That Hideous Strength.

The artist of this book is the son of someone we knew from church in Old Trees, and when their Christmas letter indicated that he’d done a comic book, a book of comic art that is and not a saddle-stitched comic book, I ordered it on the pretense of giving it to my children, and I took possession when I culled my youngest’s bedroom of books and children’s books earlier this year.

This particular volume is mostly comic art; it lists heroes (men and women) of the Bible and has a comic art portrait of them. A few selected heroes have a portion of their stories in a single page of related panels, but mostly it’s portraits.

So, yeah, much like a modern comic book. But it’s a quick palate cleanser after Love’s Labour’s Lost, the most recent Shakespeare play I read (thoughts forthcoming), and A Deadly Shade of Gold.

Now, about the arbitrary rules: I will count it as a book I’ve read this year, and I will put them on the bookshelves instead of comic boxes (unlike the Bongo Simpsons comics, which have a flat spine and more actual content than this book). Why? Because I wanna.

I see Boggs has not only produced more similar (and probably with actual plotting) Biblical comics, a Western-looking comic book, and a book about being a business artist in the AI-world. Ah, gentle reader! If I ever get a job and have disposable income again, I shall consider buying more of his work if I can avoid Amazon.com (I’m back fighting my tweehad against it).

I guess this is a re-read; I did a book report on it not long after I picked it up in Clever in 2012. So I must have re-patriated it to my bookshelves when I culled the youngest’s book shelves earlier this year. Which means I should probably not add it again to my book database program from 2000 when I finish the re-book report.

The cover of the book indicates this collection is not drawn from the daily strip and instead is original material. Man, Dilbert was part of that fin de siècle zeitgeist (he said, mixing two foreign languages to show you how smart he is), ainna? (The south Milwaukee slang killed that vibe, ainna?)

So, basically, it’s Dogbert giving etiquette advice for people who lack it. Each page is four panels dealing with an individual boorish behavior, and the cartoons are grouped thematically. Amusing in (a lot of) spots, and the jokes are of a sort you could make in 1993 that would be problematic in the latter part of the first quarter of the 21st century. As with so many things, Scott Adams, who was on the naughty list for a while and was pop-culturally cancelled for…. Oh, some transgression; aren’t they all the same? And one wonders whether it was because he shifted or because the culture did.

The book is in pretty good shape, which means that my children didn’t sleep with it, so perhaps they, 21st centurians, didn’t get it. The oldest has an office job these days. Perhaps he’s better primed for Dilbert and Office Space than he was when he was six.

I bought this from Hooked on Books in January. I remember when I first shopped at Hooked on Books, nearly thirty years ago, that they had a good selection of John D. MacDonald books, but then they didn’t. Since I had a gift certificate from Christmas, I stopped in and discovered that they once again had a good selection of MacDonald’s books. Perhaps the people who bought them twenty-some years ago are now downsizing or dying, and the same books are coming back in. Maybe I’m thinking too much of estate sales this last, apparently, year.

So: This is a 1960s Travis McGee novel. It originally appeared in paperback and then, a decade later, in this hardback edition when MacDonald books transitioned to the big time. A former friend of McGee, a boat bum who disappeared after walking out on a happy relationship, reappears and want’s McGee’s help in reconnecting with the woman he left behind, and McGee meets him, looking haggard and gaunt from a cross-country drive, at a remote motel where he shows McGee a gold statue and alludes to using it to set himself up. But when McGee returns after contacting the woman who wants to see the love of her life right now, they finds the man dead and the statue gone. So McGee and the woman head to Mexico to the town where the man worked during his missing years and find a despised Cuban exile (remember, gentle reader, that when this book came out, the Castro revolution was only a few years on–hard to fathom, since it’s been in place my whole lifetime, but old books and movies remember). Bloodshed, bombs, and much McGee musing, and he eventually breaks up a Hollywood blackmail ring which also preys on expats from Latin America, and finis!

I mean, it’s a lot more than that–the book is 336 hardback pages, which would have been quite a chonker for the paperback era. It’s full of the McGee-musings that give the books their depth–asides where MacDonald goes off on the modern era, the politicians, the culture, and the loss of the preceding era. You know, when I was in my teens, that sort of zeitgeist–you find it in early Parker, too, the 1970s stuff maybe up until the Hollywood era–the loss of something as subdivisions and development (in Florida or inland Massachussetts) encroaches on the wild spaces, and the politicians make things worse. You know, that probably hit me a little more precisely in that adolescent era where my parents divorced and I was removed to Missouri. Reading it now, it’s okay–I can see that MacDonald was an old-school liberal in his inclinations, a little more against big business corporate politicians and up-with-people in an era where the politics weren’t overt sucker-punches calling one half of the country troglodytes (who probably didn’t read books anyway).

MacDonald also sits in between Chandler and Parker in that the plot is labyrinth and shifts and that the resolution ultimately ends with a truce and understanding between the person who killed the boat bum and McGee because he, McGee, has just gotten tired of all the killing in the book. He’s weary in a way that they didn’t really capture at the end of the 20th century in protagonists, not really. The depth of the asides really layers that on.

So MacDonald is still really, really good, but I’m not so sure how I relate to Travis McGee now that I’m older. I might have transitioned to too old for the real figurative consanguinity. But I’ll think again about raiding Hooked on Books to make sure I have a good and completer set of MacDonald’s work.

Ah, gentle reader, I just bought this book from the author at Rublecon, where “just” in this sentence means July 2024. So I have owned it longer than the Ben Wolf books, and I finished the Ben Wolf accumulated over two different trips to Davenport, Iowa, first. But that might be because of my experiences with other Walker books: Down the Road and Back Again (poems based on the television show The Golden Girls), Loot the Bodies (other poetry), and Hang Me If I Stay, Shoot Me If I Run, a short novel.

So: The plot, such as it is, is that a sick young man is taken from his bed to a place called Everland, run by a Boy-God, who is a dark analogue of Peter Pan. The Boy-God, not named, likes to watch the people in Everland, mostly pirates, fight and die with one another. He especially takes issue with a particular pirate whom he allows to succeed and then wrecks his ship. Inland, we have natives. And, periodically, the denizens of the sea rise and slaughter the people in the seaside town, but as Everland is always summer and the people, aside from the battles, don’t age or die, and they tend to forget the previous Reaping when the sea monsters rise. So the boy, who lands with the Everland equivalent of the Lost Boys but doesn’t completely buy in, the one-eyed pirate, and a native girl who kills a seamonster that killed her father team up to kill the Boy-God.

The actual text of the book runs 134 pages, and then the book is padded with 50 pages of behind-the-scenes things. The author did a Kickstarter before producing this book, and I guess it was originally going to be a comic book series–the book contains panel outlines for several issues, incidents which appear in the book–and which might have worked as one-off stories in a series of comics, but integrated into a “novel,” they are threads that go nowhere. One such story is a pirate who goes overboard and is about to drown, but he’s saved by a seamonster whom he thinks is a beautiful mermaid–and it tells about him meeting the monster’s father, and then…. Well, he is killed. Why bring him into the story? I mean, it’s Stephen Kingesque, but this 130-page book shouldn’t have room for such asides–it just pads out a short novella to a longer novella length. The book has some world building, but its depth is pretty shallow for all that. I mean, we get almost a Space Trilogy sort of cosmology, but it’s never really addressed, and some of the characters are built up and do…. not much.

I mean, the setup and material would have made for a longer book, but it’s really just repurposing some material from a proposed comic book to get it out the door. The author is a better writer than Ben Wolf whose books I’ve just read–but the plot is underdeveloped. The book that comes to mind, though, is A Blade So Black by L. L. McKinney just because hers was a modern fantasy twist on Alice in Wonderland and other works by Lewis Carroll. But, again, that book was fully developed as a novel where this was a little underdone.

Actually, I have the sequels or next book in the series from both these authors–The Lion, the Witch, and the Eye by Walker and A Dream So Dark by McKinney. I actually picked up A Dream So Dark from the bookshelves but decided against it for one of my next reads. Who knows where I’ll go with my twee reading themes–to finish the Walker books I own in case he’s back at Rublecon, or maybe to finish the books my son got me for my birthday. Given that I’ve only got a couple of each, perhaps I’ll complete them all before long. Certainly before the Shakespeare I’m working my way through.

This is the third year running in which I have read the church’s Lenten devotional–in 2024 it was 40 Days of Wisdom, in 2025 it was 40 Days of Discovery. This time, it was 40 Days of Courage.

I mean, it ties in with the sermon series we’ve had this season, but the variety is a little underwhelming. Whereas in years past, we’ve had a lot of contributions from different congregation members, this year the devotional features a higher percentage of pastors, including one who is retired but still preaches in our church on occasion (and whose wife is from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, and who laughs like my aunt up in Hubertus, so if I spend any time around her, I run the risk of backsliding or propersliding into a Wisconsin accent). We also have a contribution from the pastor’s daughter and one from a high school member of the youth group, and a couple from members of the board, etc., but definitely a smaller sampling of voices than my previous experience. Which, I guess, means that I am sorry that my beautiful wife did not contribute three devotions this year.

I mean, otherwise, I don’t have much to say about it. I’ve mentioned that I’m not the target audience for devotionals.

Unlike some comic books, though, I did count this in the annual reading total. These are my arbitrary rules. If you don’t like them, I have others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, but no.

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

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

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

And his solutions are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Etc., etc.

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

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

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

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