Category: Books

The 2024 Winter Reading Challenge has a category Outside Your Comfort Zone, and I figured it was finally time to tackle this novel. I bought it sixteen years ago at an estate sale south of Blackburn Park in Old Trees when my oldest was but a toddler. It has languished on the to-read shelves for an occasion just such as this as at no point would I carry this book outside the house to read it, gentle reader.

You might know the basics of the story, gentle reader, as it has passed into the culture even beyond its film adaptations. Humbert Humbert has what Ed McBain would call “Short Eyes” for the title character. The book details his biography, an encounter in his youth to which he attributes his predilection, and then how he comes to room with a woman and her daughter, the title character. The book, erm, waxes poetic on the attributes of the girl, and when the mother dies shortly after marrying the narrator and then finding his hidden journal detailing his obsession. Humbert takes the girl across country, dallying with her often, but although initially she was into their assignations, she grows bored and distant. They settle in a town, and she attends a girls’ school for a while, but they take off on another cross-country excursion, this one in desperation as the narrator fears she is into someone else. Then she disappears, presumably with that someone else, and he loses touch of her for a number of years before she reaches out, and he meets her, married and pregnant, and then he kills the man who stole her from him (not her husband).

The frame of the book is that it’s a manuscript written by a man in jail awaiting trial (for the murder, likely). The narrator is trying awfully hard to not sound like a bad guy with his actions taking place in between bouts of real madness and trips to a sanitarium. The sensuous descriptions of the girl, though, make one feel squicky. The unreliable narrator comes off as pretty pathetic, and the girl kind of bratty. The prose is overwritten, with the author just dropping lists into the text (not bulleted, mind you, but lists anyway, which gets tedious).

As I was reading it, I was wondering, “Why write this book?” I mean, there’s no hero in it and no lesson to learn from it unless it’s just to shock the bourgeoisie (which might have been part of the point) or to perhaps normalize this behavior (not the madness nor brattiness but the other thing, which is probably not the point but seems to be gaining steam in the 21st century). Nabakov included an afterword in the English depiction here which boils down to 1.) It’s Art and 2.) I am a great novelist in several languages. But I don’t wonder if he didn’t just want to write Crime and Punishment for mid-century America.

Welp, I read it. So I have another thing to strike off in innumerable “you should read this book” lists (such as this, this, or this). And I have one more category done in the Winter Reading Challenge.

In searches on this blog for the book’s title, conducted to see if I had it in a Good Book Hunting post, I rediscovered that this book played a part in The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. Ah, a shame! The Library/Bookstore Setting category will likely be the last I complete, and The Bookshop would not only have satisfied that category but also the Made Into A Movie/TV Show category. As you know, gentle reader, I like those twofers.

Ah, gentle reader. I was going to lead off by saying “I’ve already read this book,” but you might remember that. I read it in 2006, which is slightly more recently than I read Blood Relatives. But this 2024 Winter Reading Challenge is proving not only to be a year of Bowlderized (or merely edited) books, questionable category assignments, and re-reads. I will note that this copy, which I bought in 2022 for $1, which is better than the ex library book First Edition for which I paid $10 and read in 2006.

At any rate, this book was compiled by Millay’s sister after her death (as I mentioned). Some of the poems are polished, as she might have been gathering some for publication before her death. Some are not. Millay experiments with free verse, but without a lot of what makes free verse palatable to me–good rhythm, internal rhymes, and alliteration–but I write free verse for performance at open mics (not that I have done an open mic in 20 years). Instead, it’s words laid out on a page without rhyme and with some obscure meaning and discrete images that don’t hold together too well.

But it has some sonnets as well, and Millay is at her best in the tighter confines of traditional structures. Her structured poetry looks pretty effortless and almost conversational, and they’re short and often poignant. And these are not her best sonnets.

The poems overall deal with death and remembering the past than love (although she touched on these subjects in the past). Millay died in 1950, a year after her long-time husband (who died of lung cancer, which might have taken some time although not as long as it can with modern treatments). So one can understand where her mind might have been immediately before her death. Her Wikipedia entry indicates she might have been in chronic pain after a 1936 automobile accident as well, so, yeah. Not bright and cheery poetry, but the book contains a lot of birds, flowers, and trees landscape poetry.

So not my favorite of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s work, but I am probably growing into it more than shouting “Love! Though for this you riddle me with darts!” at a half-empty coffeehouse (I guess I am telling the same old stories over and over again as I read books over and over again, ainna? Is this my dotage already?).

Ah, gentle reader. I am certainly playing fast and loose with the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge. Although I did not use The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam or The Broken Spear as the Author of Different Race/Religion Than Your Own book because those books were collected/compiled/edited by presumable Christians and people of European descent, I did enter Tales from the Missouri Tigers in the School Setting category even though it’s more a sports book than a school book (but university sports). And now, gentle reader, I have fallen even lower.

The Winter Reading Challenge has a Neurodivergent character. Heaven help me, but I was not going to wade back into The Sound and the Fury again for a mug. And I’ve already read Of Mice and Men recently (what? twenty years ago recently?). I remembered that I had a copy of this novel in the Reader’s Digest Select Editions format. I “ordered” this and, apparently, four other such editions back around the turn of the century (the volume containing this book is from 2004). Reader’s Digest (not italicized as it’s the company, not the periodical) would send out a teaser for offering a free book for your review, and then you can cancel or get any one such book every month or two on subscription unless you canceled. I was pretty good at canceling, and I accepted the free offer a number of times (but did “buy” a book or two). These Select Editions are paperbacks, unlike Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, so I thought they were the complete text. But as I started The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, I noticed it was under 200 pages, and not even Mack Bolan books of the era fell under that. With some trepidation, I turned to the front of the book (this novel is fourth of four in the volume), and…. Selected and Edited. Oh. This is a Reader’s Digest Condensed book in a cheaper package for people who, at the turn of the century, might have thought that the Condensed Books were for old people (as an aside, I hardly ever see Condensed Books at garage sales, estate sales, or book sales any more–have they all been pulped by now?). But I am going to count it as a complete novel because I really, really don’t want to wade into the children’s section of the library, where one can easily find entries for every category on the Winter Reading Challenge list.

At any rate, I remembered that this book focused on a neurodivergent child, and so it does. The first person, fifteen-year-old Christopher, is autistic. The book starts when Christopher is out walking late at night, which he likes to do because it’s quiet, he finds the neighbor’s poodle dead on a lawn, stabbed with a garden fork. Police initially think that he did it, but he did not, so he starts to investigate and to write this book to describe his investigation.

Christopher tells us about his life a bit, slowly working in details about his special school and life with his father, an HVAC man who has been raising Christopher since his mother died of a heart attack. Christopher steps outside of his comfort zone to talk with the neighbors in his investigation, including an old woman who tries to befriend him. Christopher’s father orders him to stop investigating and bothering people and takes away Christopher’s manuscript of the book. While looking for the book, Christopher finds a stack of letters from his mother. She did not die, as his father said, but instead could no longer take the pressure and/or responsibility of raising Christopher and ran away with a married neighbor. Christopher’s father discovers him with the letters and explains that not only did his wife run off with another man, but he had hoped to become a couple with the left-behind wife, and when he had a falling out with her, he killed the ill-tempered dog. This sets Christopher off, and he must really leave his comfort zone and travel to London to be with his mother. Who is falling out of love with the man she ran off with. The book ends kind of media en res as well; Christopher returns to Swindon to take his Maths exams; his parents can be in the same room together; and Christopher’s father tries to make amends with Chistopher.

It’s a thin plot, and the whole purpose of the book is to imagine and experience the imagined voice of an autistic teenager. Which it does with some limited success, I suppose, but I imagine that it’s different enough that a lot is lost or transmogrified. A couple of times the narrator says that he does not imagine things, but he goes off on flights of fancy a time or two. The narrator also describes clinically how he perceives things instead of simply perceiving them that way. Although I suppose that it would be too jarring to try to completely reproduce it.

The book was originally sold both as an adult novel and a YA novel with different packaging and covers for each. It does kind of have more of an young adult book to it, but part of that might be in the Reader’s Digest trimming.

You know, I read this fairly quickly and probably got a good flavor for it. Perhaps I should give these Selected Editions and Condensed Books (where I can find them) a second look. I am not especially a fan of modern and mainstream novels, but reading these would give me a deeper overview of the works than the Wikipedia entries. And I could count them as a complete book in my annual tabulation (and the Reading Challenge categories). So maybe I should add them to the list of things I hope to read this year after the Reading Challenge. Along with the rest of the Sharpe’s books I own, one or more volumes of The Story of Civilization, and pretty much whatever catches my eye in the interim.

Well, gentle reader, when I bought this book in 2021, I said:

I am thinking of giving this to my mother-in-law for Christmas, but we might already have done so. Which might lead me to justifying keeping it for myself.

I know you have been waiting in suspense lo these almost three years, but I did not end up giving this to my mother-in-law. Well, not yet. I think I shall take it over to her apartment to let her read it. Because I might not be a giver, but I can be a lender.

Also, gentle reader, I must admit that I’m playing fast and loose with the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge categories. School Setting appears on the list of categories, but one gets the sense that the categories might be skewed to younger readers these days. I don’t read many books set at schools. This book deals with a university’s athletic program, so it will have to do. If not, I have a similar book from Michigan State (I think). Maybe even by the same author.

The author breaks the book into two parts plus some appendixes. The first trips through some reminisciences from basketball players from the Tigers in the 20th century (and a couple of years into the 21st) focusing on coaches (and Norm Stewart, who was a two sport man at Mizzou before becoming a storied coach much later) and some of the better players. The second part, which is most of the book, does the same with football players. Appendixes include memories from the sidelines–including a section that includes Dan Meers’ memories (I read his book Wolves Can’t Fly last summer).

I say the book “trips through” because it’s written in that blocky style that skips between memories and interview bits from players, staff, and whatnot (including a guy who had attended/reported on the Tigers since the 1930s, seventy years by the time this book came out). Surely You Can’t Be Serious and Louder than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Heavy Metal both used this technique, which makes it easy to read in snippets since the snippets are two to three paragraphs long. Why bother reading whole chapters? Why bother writing the connective tissue between topics? Just lay in a couple of centered asterisks and move on.

It’s 191 pages with appendixes, and it proved to be a pretty quick read. It gave me some sense of the history of the sports programs and their successes that I previously had lacked. I should have taken better notes, I suppose, because Mizzou sports facts are not uncommon at trivia parts around here. But I only have retained so far the things that especially resonated with me. That Norm Stewart played baseball and football for Missouri state; that Dan Devine coached Missouri football before the Green Bay Packers, and…. Well, that’s all that comes to mind right now. I can only hope that other information might rattle out if needed, but that’s probably too much to hope for. Beaver Cleaver’s first name did not rattle out on New Year’s Eve even though I’d just read Why We Watch: Killing the Gilligan Within.

Ah, gentle reader, of course I did not have to rely on All Quiet on the Western Front for the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge Historical Fiction Outside the U.S. category. After all, I have a bunch of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels (and a couple of one offs) and a stack of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series, and I know where they are–on the outermost ranks of the to-read shelves in the hall. So why not grab one of those? Certainly better than a Bridgerton tie-in that librarians might favor.

At any rate, I bought most of these paperbacks at a garage sale in South City right after we moved to Old Trees and before we had our first son. It was only a couple of months, late spring and early summer, but the world was awash with possibilities–I was an executive working downtown, getting ready to grow a family, and I had actually moved to Old Trees. I read Sharpe’s Tiger and Sharpe’s Triumph the next year, but not another Sharpe book since then (fifteen years ago!). I also read non-Sharpe novels Stonehenge and Wildtrack the same year, but after we moved to Nogglestead. And given how much I enjoyed this book, my underwhelmed response to the latter put me off on the Sharpe books, and that’s a shame.

The events of the book take place after Sharpe’s adventures in India (Sharpe’s Tiger, Sharpe’s Triumph, and Sharpe’s Fortress which I have not read). Sharpe is headed to England to join a regiment there. He has booked passage on an Indian cargo ship and has bought furniture and provisions for the trip, but the right before the trip, the warehouse storing his provisions “burns down.” The book begins with Sharpe, in disguise, trying to infiltrate the estate of the merchant’s cousin after receiving a tip that the merchant did not actually die in the fire–and that the “fire” was part of a scam to sell the same goods to other travelers. He recognizes the merchant among his cousin’s entourage, but before he can make a move, a British capitan and some marines appear seeking recompense for the scam perpetrated on them. Although the captain and the marines are handled by the cousin’s guards, Sharpe makes a successful roll to backstab gets the drop on the merchant and gets recompense for his scam, for the captain’s scam, and makes friends with the captain.

When he goes to sea, he finds an old adversary on board posing as a German duke and a pompous British politician with a beautiful wife with whom Sharpe falls in love. While at sea, the merchant ship is captured by a French privateer, but Sharpe manages to help recapture the ship with the help of the captain’s ship. And Sharpe finds himself on the captain’s fast ship hunting for the Revenant, which is not the large bear that almost eats Leonardo di Caprio but instead is a large French ship. Instead of Sharpe’s Trafalgar, Cornwell could have called it Sharpe’s O’Brian Book.

So most of the action takes place at sea and doesn’t involve much, mostly Sharpe wooing the woman and dealing with her husband’s secretary who tries to blackmail him. It has a lot of detail about ship’s operations along with some drilling because just as the ship is about to catch the Revenant it is summoned to participate in the Battle of Trafalgar. And, as luck would have it, they get to battle the Revenant up close and personal.

Sharpe remains a bit of an anti-hero, although he does seem to be trending a little more traditionally heroic in this book. In researching this book, I discovered that Cornwell did not write the books in chronological order. He published the eighth book in the chronological history in 1981 and only sixteen years later did he publish Sharpe’s Tiger. This book came out in 2000 (my edition is a later paperback edition), so it was twenty years since Cornwell’s first Sharpe novel. Interesting, and now I’ll have to look to see how they hang together when I get to the actual start of the series in publication order.

As I mentioned, I enjoyed the book and don’t know why I’ve waited so long to get back to it. I was tempted to blow off the rest of the Winter Reading Challenge–I have more than enough for a mug now–and jump back into it, but I probably will try to get as many of the fifteen categories as I can before hitting this series again. It looks like the series has 26 books in it so far, mostly dealing with the the war against Napoleon. I don’t have that many (yet), but the books are written to be individual novels and not relying on too much knowing what happened immediately preceding the book you have in hand. Which is good, as I’ve already skipped gaps (both in the series and in a decade and a half of real time) with no great loss of reading pleasure.

The O’Brian books will likely have to wait, though.

I picked up this book last year during the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge, but it did not slot into any of those categories. This year, though, it could slot into either of two categories: Author of a Different Race/Religion Than Your Own (which I already filled with Karate-dō Nyūmon) or Featuring Music. So I have slotted it into the latter, but I do like the additional thrill of reading books that can fit into more than one category.

The book looks like it might have been, at inception, an oral history or a family history that Bedell put together of his musical family, his grandparents, parents, and uncles as well as he and his siblings (a family of eleven siblings) for the next generation–his younger siblings and his grandchildren. As such, the books layout is lacking–it looks to be simply a dumped word processor document whose formatting was lost in the translation to whatever print-on-demand service the author used. Photos are laid out oddly, their captions are misplaced, section headings are widowed (they appear at the bottom of the page and the section starts on the next page). Additionally, the text repeats itself in several places, sometimes a phrase, sometimes a sentence, and sometimes a couple of paragraphs as though in editing, the author copied and pasted instead of cut and pasted. Listen to me on this point, gentle reader; recall, it has been said that my books suck but they look professional whilst sucking.

So it’s an unpolished work, and it does seem a bit voyeurish to look this closely at another person’s family, but the author has some interesting stories to… well, allude to. Born into a musical family, the author, some siblings, and neighborhood kids form a touring band (the Fabulous Elites) in high school in the 1960s (1950s? The book jumps around a lot and does not often root one into the exact time). After a couple of years of performing, the group winnows to a smaller group that tours regionally into the 1970s (The KC Express). When that band’s members starts to settle down, some of them buy and run a club on Commercial Street.

I say that the stories are alluded to because, for the most part, the author just dumps names and some events without building them into fully fleshed-out stories. It kind of reminded me of Danny Mile’s Twice a Week Heroes in that regard except with fast-pitch softball players swapped out for musicians.

Still, I’m glad I read it, and I’ll have to keep an eye out for the author and his current band, ABS Band. I’ll also watch for his bands’ records and recordings when I am out and about.

The last bit of the book has a roll call of the current generation of musicians and artists (again, the book has a bit of a family album feel), and you might have been wondering, is Gary Bedell, artist/author of Thawed a member of the family? Of course!

But what really made me go “Hmmm…” was this bit talking about the author’s grandfather:

I remember my mother’s father, Harry Piggee, was a jolly person full of spunk and who always had a smile on his face. His military background included both Navy and Army amd my grandfather “Piggee” loved the military.

* * * *

My mom was a housewife who took care of us kids. She was a woman who had a love for poetry and a gift for writing it.

Hmmm… Military. Poetry. Could Ronald E. Piggee, author of As Autumn Approaches, be a distant part of this family? It would explain how that small-run book would have found its way to Springfield.

At any rate, the book has promise, but I’d wait for the second edition if I were you.

The 2024 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “Author of Different Race/Religion Than Your Own” because of course it does. To a librarian, the common library user around these parts only read Karen Kingsbury, James Patterson, and other white authors (probably Assemblies of God church members at that), so compelling patrons to read something else will elevate those patrons to the level of identity box-checking librarians everywhere.

I started out looking from something of a different religion. I wanted to avoid having to read a fat tome by Mencius or Confucius or Aristotle or Plato. I pulled The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam in the Classics Club edition, figuring the fellow was probably Muslim, but I discovered that the book was translated and “refined” by an Englishman probably so much that it was not “by” Omar Khayyam much at all. Then I uncovered The Broken Spear, the Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico, but it, too, was so clearly that would fall under the rubric of a different religion, but it, too was compiled by a Mexican historian in the 20th century, so I could not be sure.

Ah, the heck with it, I would go with race then. In lieu of looking at the authors’ pictures on the dust jackets (where available), I figured I would just grab one of the martial arts books I have that are written by someone from Japan. And here we are.

I bought this book last year 2022 (although I write 2024 on my checks, I am still thinking of 2022 as “last year”) at ABC Books and note that I read another of the six books I bought that day, A Beginner’s Guide to Glass Engraving, as part of the Winter Reading Challenge last year (in which “last year” is actually 2023, but not by much). So if I keep up this pace, I will have read all six books I bought that day by 2028. A daunting deadline to be sure.

At any rate, this is the translation of a 1943 work by Karate master Funakoshi who learned the art form back when it was still a hidden practice on Okinawa and then demonstrated it and opened a school in Tokyo. If you’re doing the math correctly, you will notice that this book first appeared in Japan during the war, which made me feel a little like a traitor in reading it. This book appeared not long after the Durants’ Our Oriental Heritage, for crying out loud, although this translation/edition came out in 1994. Past the 1980s martial arts cultural explosion, but there’s continued to be a market for them as the Martial Arts section at ABC Books and its barrenness continues to attest.

So this book is part history of Karate (and Okinawa and the southern part of Japan by extension), autobiography, and the description of a particular kata that the author’s school emphasizes (and briefly compares it and the other kata it uses to other schools and the evolution of kata). It has a number of static images from the kata, including the steps that feature a partner, but it’s hard to get the flow from a kata from text description and pictures. Heck, in my experience, it’s hard to get the flow of a kata from repeated demonstrations and practices (and, apparently, it’s hard to teach them as well, which is probably why my school moved away from them when it tried to introduce them 6 or so years ago).

At any rate, a quick read, more informative on the history of Karate than anything else. And an entry for the Author of Different Race/Religion Than Your Own which could almost be part of the Published Before You Were Born category, as it appeared in Japanese presumably before my parents were born (and before the author’s countrymen shot my grandfather on the author’s home island of Okinawa) but this particular edition is from 1994, so as a pedant, I can’t use it in that category. Besides, I’ve already started a different book for that category (thankfully, not a volume of The Story Of Civilization–I am not that optimistic, and I still have to finish The Greek Life).

I said when I bought this book in 2021 that I thought this was a children’s book. It’s an ex-library (Springfield-Greene County Library’s Brentwood branch) book with pouches for cards and no computer markings, so it was likely removed from circulation when I was a boy. But event though the dustjacket, in its protective mylar, looks a little like a library binding, it’s not. This would have been a fairly inexpensive hardback western. Apparently, there were over a hundred of them, but not all by Bill Gulick.

The book deals with an attorney in Portland, Oregon, who works with a Chinese importer who has his hand in some shady businesses, but the attorney, Walt, tries to keep him as legal as possible. When the authorities get wind that the importer is bringing in several young women for sale, a friendly cop asks Walt to dissuade the importer. Walt does so at their regular poker game, but ends up winning one of the young ladies in the poker game. She has been taught to please a man, and she does end up pleasing him both as a housekeeper and as a lover, but anti-miscegenation laws don’t permit marriage, and anti-Chinese sentiment, particularly among the Irish, cause trouble for the couple.

Meanwhile, his brother, a prospector, has not only found gold (in Hell’s Canyon) but has legitimate English investors who want to develop it. He would like Walt’s help making it all legal, albeit retroactively.

After a near riot and shooting leave Walt almost dead, the girl nurses him to health, but he decides he must send her back to the importer who arranges a marriage with a laborer. Walt goes to Hell’s Canyon to help his brother, and the girl and her husband join a work team heading inland. Which just happens to end up in Hell’s Canyon as some bad men are planning to rob the mine–and the workers’ camp.

Probably not for modern audiences as although it features anti-Chinese sentiment and bad words, the book itself has a nuanced view of it, defending the Chinese and probably trying to portray the actual friction objectively (the author was a regional historian with other nonfiction tomes in his oeuvre). The imported young ladies are also young to the modern legal framework–the one Walt wins is fifteen–but young marriages were more of a thing in the past, and this is not a book about the perils of human trafficking–it portrays Walt’s relationship with the girl as mature and loving. Still, probably not something one would encounter in a modern book, but I guess I would have to read a modern book to find out.

A short bit, definitely a bit of a pulp feel although this was a Doubleday (Double D) hardback. Less meat to it than a L’Amour or Grey book, but the writing has a bit of knowledge and depth that you don’t get from real, paint-by-the-numbers, publish-a-book-a-month pulp or men’s adventure books.

The author did not have a series of books in the Double D Western line, and I’m not sure I’ve seen another in the wild. But the book sales I go to these days is large, and I don’t tend to hit the fiction sections much at all, much less the Westerns section. So maybe they table(s) is/are lousy with them. Maybe I’ll find them if I ever attend the Christian County or Polk County library fundraisers again, but I don’t get to small, one-room, browse-them-all book sales any more.

You are not mistaken, gentle reader; I have written a book report on this 87th Precinct novel before (in 2006). I picked this copy up at the Friends of the Library book sale in May 2022, and as I noted then, I will pick up mid-career McBains when they’re cheap just in case I don’t already have them. This one has a mylar cover on it to protect the book jacket, but it is only a Book Club edition, so not that collectible. But nice nevertheless.

At any rate, this book is very focused on a single crime, unlike some later books which blended a number of plots, sometimes bringing them together but not always. A girl shows up at the 87th precinct with defensive knife wounds, and her cousin has been stabbed. As they were on the way home from a party, they stopped to outwait a downpour in a tenement/construction site when a man with a knife appeared and wanted the older (17-year-old) girl to perform unspeakable acts. So Carella and Kling investigate, finding a man sleeping off an evening drunk which matches the description, but he is not picked out in a lineup, and the blood on his shirt is not the victims. They look at the dead girl’s boss at the bank where she worked, who matches the description. Then the living cousin fingers her older brother for the crime, and the eventual discovery of the dead girl’s diary indicates it was probably not him.

When I re-read it in 2006, I remembered mostly a memo that appeared as an aside in the book–a police superintendent says that orders using rubber stamps should not be obeyed, but the order is signed by a rubber stamp. Carella puzzles over this for a page or two, and that’s all I remembered from a previous reading. But I remembered the plot, or at least whodunit, this read around.

The book is a brief 151 pages and makes use of the pasted-in interview notes, memos, and documents style where these appear in a different font. They pad out what might only have been a novella to short book length. I can see why McBain would later include more than one plotline in later books: He was moving from a paperback sensibility to a $25 hardback value-in-length mindset.

Still, I like his old stuff as much as the new, and I’m always happy to find them in the wild. Even if I come home to discover I already have it.

This book will fit into the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge Suspense category. It’s only a one-fer, though, as it doesn’t look as though it fits in other categories.

I bought this book in May 2008, when I was young and life was good. Little did I know I would be reading it in the hellscape of 2024 almost sixteen years later. Did I say, “hellscape”? Damned autocorrect! I started typing “2024 Winter Reading Challenge.”

Originally, I’d planned to use this book in the Historical Fiction Outside the U.S. category as it was slightly historical fiction when it was published in 1928. Set in World War I France, it tells the story of a group of school boys who enlisted in the German army together and who end up on the front lines in France. The first-person main character, Paul, has a bit of a poetic soul, and one can imagine him keeping this as sort of a diary although the book doesn’t mention that–but I seem to remember that the 1979 television movie adaptation had John Boy writing in a little book (but I could be mistaken, as I saw that film in school while it, the adaptation, was fairly new).

The book details how the group goes through training with a sadistic leader, and then they go off to the front. The book details the conditions on the front, in the trenches, and how the soldiers lived. It zeroes in on a couple of incidents: A charge over the top; Paul’s month-long liberty, when he visits his home and family a changed man; Paul’s presence on a reconnaisance which traps him in a shell hole when an attack comes, leading to his stabbing a French soldier and watching him die; an interlude where the group guards a supply depot in an evacuated village and get to live well until the French advance; Paul’s trip with a comrade to a hospital after they’re wounded, and then finally the return to the front, where the group dies one-by-one until Paul dies right before the armistice.

So the book kind of blends themes from The Red Badge of Courage along with Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist. Anti-war with insights into German deprivations during the war.

Paul demonstrates enough admiration and affiliation with an older soldier to likely have kept students in homoeroticism theme papers for decades, but not enough to slot the book into the LGBTQ+ Character category, so I’ll put this into Made Into A Movie/TV Show, although ever the pedantic, I feel like I’m cheating because this has not been adapted into a movie, but it has been made thrice into films or a television movie. None of which I have seen in over thirty years.

This, of course, was the first book I read for the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge. Although I could try to slot it into the Western Setting category, it is a Western, albeit one set in the thirties and actually northeast of here. So, no, definitely Published in 2023, and perhaps the first book that I’ve read from 2023. Perhaps the last, although I will likely pick up other works by local authors published last year. So perhaps I should not be melodramatic.

Like previous books, this book picks up immediately after the events in Murder at Morse Mill. The same scene. The bad guy from an even more previous novel has interrupted Christmas dinner with revenge on his mind. As he holds a knife to Chet Harbinson’s daughter’s neck, her boyfriend, whom the bad doctor coshed outside, comes in and kills the intruder with an Indian war axe but loses consciousness from the coshing. Uh, spoiler alert for Murder at Morse Mill there. Chet and his family try to load the boy up into his truck to take him to St. Louis in a blizzard for medical care. They cannot, but the German man who owns the mill comes by with his stronger truck and takes him.

So Chet is wracked with self-doubt and worries that the doctor must have had an accomplice to help escape Leavenworth, where he was incarcerated. So he’s a wreck when a working man laboring for a mean cattle rancher dies one night–well, it’s murder, as the book shows us whodunit: the ne’er-do-well son of the rancher who wants the property promised to the working man and his family to give to a mob-connected man to settle gambling debts. The mob man wants it to build a slaughterhouse he can use to launder mob money. When someone kills the ne’er-do-well son, Harbison and his deputies try to find out who–and the laborer’s son admits to the crime to protect his mother, whom he suspects did it.

The book has other subplots and series business, and it’s a pretty good read. I’m not fond of the book picking up immediately like it’s the next chapter of the last book, as sometimes time passes between reading books in the series (although I read this book but a month after the previous installment). It still takes a bit for the reader to get back into where the last book left off exactly. And, unfortunately, this book ends on a cliffhanger note. Actually, it’s not a cliffhanger–if you didn’t know there was a DUN DUN DUH! coming, you would just expect the book denoued.

I picked this book up from the free book cart at church; it has the name of our former pastor’s father in it, which probably means that this book has made it through two trips through the seminary before coming to rest on my read shelves. I picked the book up and started reading it before a service where my beautiful wife was early to warm up either her horn or her pipes, and it (the book, not her horn) never landed on my to-read shelves. Although it did take me a while to go through it as it was lost in the car or a bag for a couple of weeks, and later I left it at a different campus of the church after arriving early so my wife could practice with the choir before a cantata, and I stuck it under my chair (the newer campus does not have pews) and forgot it after the cantata. So that’s a nice story. Have you noticed I’ve stopped stuttering?

This book, one of a series, collects a number of essays/papers on the history of the Old Testament. It talks about how some of the stories match or mirror stories in other Mesopotamian cultures (such as the flood story appearing, for example, in the the epic of Gilgamesh). It talks about different kinds of Jewish literature, including poetry forms and wisdom literature. It talks about other books that do not appear in the official canon, but how they inform it a bit. They talk about the Septuagint (the translation of the Jewish canon into Greek) and how it influenced the Jewish canon itself (and the canon that would be part of the Christian bible).

The book is part history, part literary criticism (it talks a bit about how different types of literary criticism and interpretation have informed the canon) as well as part theological practice as it talks about both Jewish and Christian worship uses the various parts of the Old Testament.

So I ate it up, of course. I find this sort of material fascinating (see also On The History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon and On Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication by Professor Bart D. Ehrman (2002)). Sometimes I almost wish I studied this rather than read it and forgot most of it soon after (although the same is probably true of things that I studied in college). Have I ever told you that I was almost a triple major in college, including theology with the English and Philosophy? No? I’d say it’s a long story, but it is not.

I picked up this book in Wisconsin last year in 2022. One would have thought I would have picked it up before now, but it was lying atop books double-stacked on a shelf and pushed back. I am pretty sure it resurfaced when I pulled out the books on Brett Favre and Danica Patrick which were in a similar position (if not actually stacked with this book).

The book is a product of its time: Nick at Nite was hitting its peak, perhaps as older people retreated from the encrassinating sitcoms of the 1990s. The author made appearances on the network starting in 1992 with “Why We Watch” segments and appears on the Bob and Tom Show. But he appears to be a real therapist and his Web site has material on other subjects. So make of it what you will. But one could not as easily find common cultural representations in television after that era as the explosion in cable (which made Nick at Nite possible) led to a diffusion and fragmenting (try not to imagine both metaphors at once, gentle reader, as it might cause you to need therapy) of characters and television shows so you might talk about Blossom and someone who watched Sister, Sister might not understand (although I pulled those examples of 1990s sitcoms out of the air and didn’t look it up, so it’s entirely possible that they aired consecutively on the same network, immediately demolishing the point I was trying to make, but you’ve probably learned by now that I write these book reports quickly, on-the-fly mostly, and sometimes a week or more after I read the book, but you’re not here for deep insight into the book, but my asides and parentheticals, ainna? Hello? Hello?). Friends aside, what might remain a touchstone for current and preceding generations? Come to think of it, are current generations watching television at all? So, yeah, not a book that would be written in 2013 much less 2023.

Amazon reviewers aren’t sure whether to take the book seriously or not, and I can see why. The book has a light tone to it, as it is a pop culture book, but it has just enough actual therapy-style talk to make you wonder if maybe it’s serious (the classification on the back cover is HUMOR/TELEVISION, so probably not too much). Its chapters include “Television and Self-Esteem: Herman Munster or Mary Richards”, “Television and Codependence: Lassie’s Disturbed Unconscious”, and “Television and Dysfunction: We Are All Jethro” (to name a few, that is, the first three past the introduction). Each describes some personal problems and then riffs a bit on them, framing them in the terms of shows that would appear on Nick at Nite (they probably extend whatever bits he might have done on the network). My boys are unlikely to know who Mary Richards and Jethro are. They might know Lassie. And although they probably do not know who Herman Munster is, they can sing Rob Zombie’s “Dragula.” But Rob Zombie, too, is an old man.

So I can see how the metaphors of the different characters might be useful in some sort of Jungian analysis, perhaps, as the myths and stories we tell ourselves or to which we gravitate reinforce the internal stories we live by. Which is how the book can look serious. But it constantly refers to tele-therapy institutes, papers, and research studies with outlandish addresses or locations to underscore that this is not to be taken seriously, and certainly people who cite these papers should not be made presidents of prestigious universities.

It’s not Make Room for TV (which I read 20 years ago–how long have I been doing this?)–but that’s good, as that serious scholarship was a slog. This book, though, carries the joke of teletherapy, the gag which probably worked in short doses on television and on the radio, too long. But it was built to capitalize on that one gag at that one moment in time, and it must have, since I am at least the third owner of this book as it appears to have two separate used bookstore prices inside the front cover–I presume someone bought it at full price and then turned it in for store credit–although the first sticker is for Half Price Books which today is a chain handling unsold leftovers from first-run book stores, so perhaps this copy was never sold at full price.

At any rate, I am enjoying idle speculation on the provenance of this book as well as nostalgia/speculation on the time when it was published than reading the book itself. So take that as you will.

I got this book at ABC Books at the first (I think) of the writers’ group group signings I went to in November 2022. I don’t mind telling you that those are the expensive book signings, as I buy one or more books from all of the authors present. Plus often other books. So I definitely prefer the single author signings.

This book has a healthy display at ABC Books, or has in the past–I’ve often seen it and thought about picking up a copy, and eventually I did. I thought it would be about the author’s dog or a novel about a dog, but it’s actually about a real dog who amazed parts of Missouri with his intellect. Not tricks; the owner would tell the dog to find the man with the red hair, and the dog would; the owner could spell out words in the request, and the dog seemingly understood; and if asked in French to go to the Ford automobile, the dog would. He was examined and tested by members of the University of Missouri staff, and they could not determine how he might be doing it. They never mention whether the dog could do it without the owner present, which would have certainly ruled out responding to cues from the owner, but perhaps they didn’t think of that, or perhaps that was the trick and not part of the legend.

Jim the Wonder Dog is still the pride of Marshall, Missouri, with a Web Site which includes a shop where you can buy this book, a museum, and a park with a statue of Jim.

It’s a short book–60 pages plus end matter including photos and references. To be honest, it kind of inspires me to write similar, short form popular history books on a single subject. Heaven knows when I wrote my piece for History magazine fifteen years ago (!), I thought I could mine the compendia that I read (or read) for tidbits, research them, write about them, and make a living at it. Of course, I was still thinking in print in those days–today, I would be thinking I would do short videos or podcasts on them and make a living at it, but somehow the video form seems cheap and easy and ultimately uninformative, but perhaps I’m just tangentally exposed to what my kids watch. Still, it might have inspired me to try my hand at it.

The book has copious sources listed for each chapter of the book, and it helped clear up something for me. I thought I had just read about Jim the Wonder Dog somewhere, and the probable source appeared: Rural Missouri magazine, which my electrical co-op sends to me every month, had two “recent” articles on him noted in this book: one in 2010 and one in 2014. So it’s possible I read one or both of those articles and thought I read them recently; it’s possible that I did read one of those articles recently because I pulled the old magazine out of the depths of the old magazine drawer (some of whose back issues arrived new around the turn of the century to my home in Casinoport or Old Trees before being moved to Nogglestead); it’s also possible that Rural Missouri, keeping with its schedule, published a more recent article on Jim the Wonder Dog which I read in a more timely fashion. Instead of speculating, I did a little research, and an article entitled Pawprints on Our Hearts indicates the magazine had a story on Jim the Wonder Dog in the May 2020 issue. So I could have read the articles when they first came out, in reprint, and recently.

So a nice little book. Suitable for young readers, but it’s not really a kids’ book. Or maybe it is and it’s just suitable for older readers, too, but that thinking leads to Harry Potter, which I am trying to avoid.

As you know, gentle reader, the year is winding down, and I tend to cut my annual reading list off the week after Christmas sometime. So I thought that this book, which I purchased in 2021, would make a fitting fin de siècle. However, I have previewed the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge, and it begins on January 2, so I might as well count the books that I finish before then as 2023. It will help pad my anemic total for the year if nothing else.

Long time readers will know I have been a big fan of Dave Barry since I seemingly stained a borrowed copy from Smurphy in high school. Although those keeping track would say, “If you’re such a big fan, Brian J., why haven’t you delved into his work since that audio book in 2020?” Maybe I’ll allude to that a bit by-and-by.

In my defense, I have also reviewed:

• Best. State. Ever. (in 2020).
• Insane City (in 2016).
• Dave Barry Does Japan (in 2011).
• Dave Barry Turns 40 (in 2011).
• Homes and Other Black Holes (in 2009).
• The Shepherd, The Angel, and Walter the Miracle Dog (in 2009).
• Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need (in 2009).
• Dave Barry’s Gift Guide to End All Gift Guides (in 2007).
• Big Trouble (in 2006).

Suffice to say, I’ve been a fan for a long time. Although I do not remember the last words my father spoke to me, I remember the last thing Barry’s father said to him (he, the father, wanted some oatmeal). So take it for a given that I’m a Dave Barry fan, okay?

Well, that’s a lot of pixel inches in self-defense. What of this book?

This book starts with a preface which abbreviates history in Dave Barry fashion (a longer treatment of American history appears in Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, Smurphy’s book that I might have soiled with snack food when it was brand new) and then reprints Barry’s year-in-review columns/articles from 2000 to 2007 (skipping 2001, as the events of September were too recent for him to be funny). Read fifteen years on, the book astonished me both with “That was twenty years ago already?” (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Kelly Clarkson wins American Idol in 2002, and so on) as well as “That was twenty years ago?” The latter stems from how many names from the headlines today appear in gags from the turn of the century. I counted 7 jokes about Donald Trump whose role on The Apprentice kept him in the cultural zeitgeist back then. But, like so often happens, I found 6 jokes about Joe Biden late, presumably based on his performance in the Senate when confirming Bush appointees in the latter’s second term. We have gags about Vladimir Putin and Robert Mueller, the iPhone, and other things as familiar today as they would have been when the jokes were fresh.

As I have mentioned (just recently–see above) that I am a Dave Barry fan from way back, I have to wonder how he “hits” with the younger generations. I mean, he spends the preface goofing on history, and I appreciated the jokes, but I wonder how much of an outlier I am because I was a bit of a nerd in school with a great degree of retention and speed of recall that led me to dominate the chapter-review Jeopardy!-style quizzes in the Western Civilization class that Smurphy and I shared. I know a lot of history that my boys do not and probably won’t ever. Plus I am not sure that the style of humor has wide appeal in 2023. Dave Barry actually retired as a regular columnist in 2004 (continuing to do his annual reviews and gift guides, though). That long ago.

I probably wonder about this every time I read a Dave Barry book, but he might well be the last American humorist with wide reach. I mean, I know that Roy Blount, Jr., is still churning out monthly columns and Doug Larsen is still working–or they were the last time I had subscriptions to magazines where they plied their trade–but Barry had reach, and eventually had a television show based on his life. Starring Harry Anderson, for crying out loud. I am not sure anyone could ever recreate that. Certainly not in print.

It looks as though Barry, like many other authors (Hiaasen, Pearson, and so on), turned to young adult books in the 21st century, which was a good business move as the YA market was just about the last refuge of big-selling books. It also means that I probably won’t find them at book sales since I don’t hit the children’s books sections (and the old, unsorted book sales for the Friends of the Christian County Library and Friends of the Clever Library seem to have gone by the wayside). But I still have plenty of other Barry titles to discover in the adult humor sections because he was pretty prolific in the 80s and 90s.

I picked this book up right after Brett Favre: The Tribute. Actually I pulled them from the Nogglestead to-read stacks at the same time, which is appropriate: I bought them together in an online order from ABC Books during the big No-No of March 2020.

Like the Favre book, this book comes out in what would turn out to be the middle part of Patrick’s racing career. She has moved up the ranks and placed fourth in the Indianapolis 500 as part of her open-wheel racing career, but she has not peaked (she later placed third in the Indianapolis 500) nor yet moved to NASCAR nor appeared on the GoDaddy home page or Super Bowl commercials.

The book clocks in at 128 pages with index, and it does not focus exclusively on Patrick. I mean, it does talk a bit about her youth, some success she had in kart racing that led her to go to England to a minor league racing team and then back to the states and to 2005. It talks about her media success and the attention given to her when she does the Indianapolis 500 for the first time. It mentions her fiance (didn’t last) and has numerous photos of her at the time when she was 23 or younger.

However, the book is also an introduction to open-wheel racing as a sport. It delves some into the history, the classifications of the races, and most of all the business of it–individual racers apparently have to get their own sponsors, and they have to know how to schmooze (and develop a media persona) to succeed in addition to the technical skill in racing. As a matter of fact, the book does not actually get far into describing the technical elements of racing–one gets more hanging around Jack Baruth’s Avoidable Contact for any length of time.

But the book is an interesting mix of Patrick’s life story until then (when she was, what, 23?) and that introduction to Indy-style racing (and we’re not talking outrunning rolling boulders in ancient temples).

Definitely something worth picking up for a buck or for ordering at used book store prices during the next Great Enshackling.

Sports Illustrated must have had this book ready to go, as it was published in that brief period in which Brett Favre had retired as a Green Bay Packer but before he did his little thing and got traded to the New York Jets, for whom he would actually play (unlike his predecessor). Favre announced his retirement on March 4, 2008; the book was published March 31; and Favre started making unretirement motions on July 2. I presume that book sales cratered in summer and autumn. I bought this book as my first ABC Books online order during the great national time-out in 2020 and picked it up last week when I could not watch the football game on television (reading this book was probably better for me anyway).

When I picked up the book, I mentioned to my beautiful wife that I’d read another book on Favre earlier in the year. I am correct if I did not specify the year; I read Life After Favre in May 2021 (which led me to ask was it that long ago?)

The book is composed of numerous stories about Favre’s career from the magazine–perhaps these were all his cover stories. At the outset, it looked like it was going to be a pretty comprehensive retrospective, as the first articles are on his background, his drafting by the Falcons, his trade to the Packers, and the Packers’ playoff return and two Super Bowl appearances in the mid-1990s. Then we get a story about his painkiller addiction around the same time, and then…. Well, a gap, until it starts talking about his pending retirement (the first noises the first year he thought about it) resulting in a moving tribute followed by another article the next year about how he did not retire. Then half the book is given over to Sports Illustrated photographs not only of Favre but also other Packers of his time.

I must admit I became an active Packers fan during the later Favre years. Although I went to a couple of Packer games at Milwaukee County Stadium in the early 1990s, it was before Favre’s time, and I did not follow football then. I really started following in the early part of the century after the Packers lost to the Rams in the playoffs, buying and wearing Packers apparel to shine on my co-workers. So I missed the mid-1990s Super Bowl years, but some mentions of the early 21st century Packers teams and players resonated with me (and led me to ask was it that long ago?)

The articles are feature stories, which have a depth and richness to them that you don’t get from reading modern sports Web sites. I guess the 90s represented the swan song of magazine writing much like the 2020s might represent the swan song of human writing at all. But the sports photography–I don’t get that. Although they have crazy depth of field, everything is flattened to the foreground. Blockers a couple of yards down field? The crowd at the back of the end zone? Right there with Favre on the 20 yard line. Not my bag.

Also, for posterity, I would like to note this: In my whole life, I shall probably only read two books that mention that Leslie Nielsen had a “fart machine” that he used to make sounds of flatulence at unexpected times. The first was Surely You Can’t Be Serious. The second was this book, where the Sports Illustrated writer mentions that Nielsen had it when he and Favre played in a golf tournament together (although the journalist here mistakenly calls it a “whoopee cushion”). Friends, I will in all my life only read about this in two books, and I read those books one after the other. That’s some sort of cosmic kismet, and probably the best kind of luck I can hope for (all these losing lottery tickets piling up on my desk affirm it). Which might not be true, as I think I have Leslie Nielsen’s “autobiography” around here somewhere which might mention it depending upon how surely serious it is.

Gentle reader, after reading the story about it in the New York Post, I ordered this book immediately from Amazon. And it got hung up somewhere in, what, East St. Louis? So I requested a refund and ordered it right away again, when it got hung up again in shipping in East St. Louis. Where did these books go? I requested another refund from Amazon, but Amazon’s process got a little pissy, telling me I would have to return the copy I ordered at my own expense if it arrived. Which it did not, but thank you, Amazon: You’re rapidly falling out of being my go-to site for ordering, with your Prime membership now meaning “Sometime, Maybe Shipping” benefit. Ah, but gentle reader, after a month passed (and I got my second refund), I ordered it again, and the roving gangs stopped looting Amazon trucks as they traveled through Illinois apparently (how do you know that didn’t happen? It would be in the news? Which news? The local television station manned by four interns and two people who thought they would be good enough for the networks someday or the local daily which is down to four pages, including the comics?). For I got this copy in a couple of days, and I jumped right into it after A Knight’s Bridge Christmas.

So this book tells, in interview-style snippets from Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker and various associates, including several stars from the film and studio people, the history of the making of the film from the beginning of their collaboration together with Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison and then in Los Angeles, where they wrote Airplane! and faced rejection before they put some of their multimedia clips from the comedy theater together and got a group of theaters in California to finance Kentucky Fried Movie. Even though that film was a modest success, they still had trouble getting movie professionals to grok what they were trying to do with Airplane! which was a comedy where everyone played it like they were in a drama, no matter how ridiculous the lines were.

At any rate, I enjoyed the book. I don’t really think I’m that much of a celebrity nor fame chaser, but sometimes I do like a behind-the-scenes look at the making of movies or television shows, particularly ones I enjoy (see also Star Trek Memories). Also, as you might know, Zuckers/Abrahams/Zucker are from Milwaukee (well, Shorewood, but that’s Milwaukee enough for me), and they return frequently to their old school (unlike Steely Dan, although I guess it was Steely Dan’s college). And although I just watched Airplane! (well, a year and a half ago, which is “just” at Nogglestead), I will probably pull it out to watch again soon.

And I bought this movie at full price. Only once, but it took me three tries (and a trip to Barnes and Noble to see if it was in stock, which it was not). So let that be my endorsement.