Category: Books

I picked this book from the shelves on September 10, along with Dogs and Cats Unleashed as a palate cleanser after almost making it through a single lopsided question in the presidential debate that evening. As you might recall, gentle reader, I bought a stack of this fellow’s books at Rublecon this year and have already read his short novel Hang Me If I Stay Shoot Me If I Run and collection of poetry Loot the Bodies.

The subtitle of the book is “Poems for The Golden Girls“, so that should give you an idea of what you’re in for. The author/poet used the episodes in the seven seasons of the show with Bea Arthur as springboards/writing prompts, and this is the result. You know, I never was a fan of the show–it was on when I was in high school, when I still watched some television, but I was not the target demographic. In this part of the 21st century, for some reason it has become a cultural touchstone for members of my generation–I’ve seen Facebook images of a slightly younger cousin, her husband, and another couple dressed up as the quartet of the Golden Girls for some event or another. I mean, cosplaying the Golden Girls? Not something that even comes close to interesting me. And even though I’m watching some old series (The Streets of San Francisco and Red Dwarf, for example), I am not tempted to buy DVDs of this particular series. So perhaps I’m not the target audience for this book, either.

At any rate, the book breaks the series into its seasons and then has a poem for each episode. Most of them deal with the events of the episode and rely heavily on that knowledge of the series and the particular episode. I flagged one poem as being good standing on its own–Season 1 Episode 23 “I want to be the person I used to be”. I flagged another, Season 3 Episode 2, “I need a favor” because it kind of alludes to O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”–or maybe the episode itself did the heavy lifting from American literature. Another one, Season 6 Episode 15, “Miles to go” riffs on a Frost poem (“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”, in case it wasn’t obvious). I get the sense that the poet kind of patterned other of his poems on different poetry styles and/or other particular poems as well. As I mentioned, it’s really a bit of poetical doodling more than a serious attempt at meaningful poetry (I hope).

HOWEVER, the poet does go out of his way several times to make clear that gun owners are bad, that people who are not fans of state-run schools are right wing nut-jobs, that Donald Trump is a bad, bad man (if not the devil), and that the series had too many jokes about communists back in the day when this was laughing defiantly in the face of what we were told was an existential threat and that we were on the verge of extinction by nuclear warfare (one wonders if the poet ever had to do an actual duck-and-cover drill in school like 80s kids did). Which is sad: Although he seemed like a pleasant guy at the con, he would dislike me if he knew I am all of those things he does not like in the abstract. Maybe he would not want me to buy his books. Maybe he won’t be the one deciding next time I see him at a con should I pass him by. And for what? Petty self-expression? Bah.

I know, I know, you’re saying, Brian J., haven’t you taken some arch and snarky little shots at political opponents over the years? Well, yes, but this is a blog which is the medium for that sort of thing. And you’ll noticed I’ve tempered those kinds of posts and whatnot over the years as the atmosphere has become rather toxic. But I’d never (I’d like to think) do it in my poetry or fiction or even personal essays, gentle reader, because I’d like to make something that appeals to many people and gives people something to reflect on in the universal human condition, not what’s on the television or Internet right now. That ages like milk in a sippy cup left in the car in August.

I got this book a week ago at the Friends of the Library book sale. Again, I am not excited about the stack of books piled on my chair side book accumulation point, so I picked a couple of short books to read as I glacially move through those books I am compelled to read (or eventually throw back into the stacks). This promised to be a quick read, and it was.

It really is nothing more than a set of Web site listicles in print; one could easily imagine this as a blog posted over the course of time with a lively comment section, but looking on the Internet does not show anything blog about it. Blogs are so 2006 (but this book is from 2009, so coming out of the blog era). It features sections on Arts & Literature, Sports & Leisure, History & Politics, Entertainment, and Science & Nature (which makes it one Geography chapter short of a lawsuit from the Trivial Pursuit people). Some of the individual face-offs include the 80s vs the 90s, summer games vs winter games, Gandhi vs Mother Theresa, Smurfs vs Care Bears, and so on. Each has a set of snarky bullet points for each side, sometimes obvious in its preference, and it has some pages where it just lists challenges for discussion. This would probably be a good book for reading aloud during road trips–and back in the day, that was the sort of thing my beautiful wife and I did. But now everyone has headphones on and a personal device leaving the driver to listen to lectures and audiobooks unless driving on the narrow roads in Arkansas.

Some of the challenges have aged poorly and might seem in poor taste, but then again in 2009 contenders like Amy Winehouse and Eddie Van Halen were alive then. And the author doesn’t inject politics too much, although the contenders for Worst President are Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush (boy, do we have some new entrants for you). Does Donald Trump make an appearance? Oh, boy, mister, you bet he does: but as it is before his political career as the devil, it’s in the category of Balding vs Extreme Anti-Balding Measures.

Still, a quick and amusing read and perhaps worthwhile for a road trip if you can get your family from under the hood.

This would be Millay’s first book of poetry; she won a contest for her poem “Renascence” which brought her to the big city (New York) and let her be the phenomenon that she would become, both as a poet and as a young woman having experiences that would lead her to be the Taylor Swift of the Twenties. Well, not that much, but it did put her on track to professional poetry.

The book starts out with a couple of long poems, “Renascence”, “Interim”, and “The Suicide” which are heavily influenced by the long lyrics of the Romantic poets except that they have meter and rhyme. They’re not her best work, of course; I am partial to the sonnets, of course. This book contains “Bluebeard”, a sonnet that influenced me such that I wrote a dramatic monologue when I was in college with a similar theme (a lover pries into her hidden spaces and learns that she has fled him; in my monologue, a lover wants to know what is held in her lover’s closed hand only to discover it contains nothing, but that little bit of closing the hand kept a part of the speaker independent).

So I’ve read the book before, and I already have a copy (although a later edition from 1924). But I really was due to read it again, and buying this copy for only $2.00 gave me just the excuse I needed. As I mentioned, the book sale earlier this month had a number of Millay’s works, so I likely will be revisiting a number of her works in the near term. And by consolidating the previous owner’s collection with mine, I might well have the best collection of Millay in Springfield, if not Missouri.

This particular version has a previous owner’s name inside the cover: Priscilla Metcalf Glendora, 1930. The title page indicates it might have been a gift–I think it says Priscilla from with an illegible name following. However, the book is also stamped (former) property of Nathaniel Hawthorne College in Antrim, New Hampshire, which has a brief but interesting history–which begins with the college’s founding in 1962. So the book must have been donated or bought as part of a collection and hung out in the library there until maybe 1988 when the college closed its doors. How would it have gotten to Springfield? Well, Ebay or something. After all, a collector has got to have the first book by the author, ainna? And this is a nice edition with cloth pages. A fourth edition to go along with my sixth edition. I’ve taken a moment to look at Ebay to see what first editions run for, and they’re not terrible, but I probably won’t be shopping for them soon.

All right, you know what did trigger anemoia (nostalgia for something you did not experience)? This Ethan Allen catalog/look book which I bought at the Senior Center in July. I was not clear when I bought it whether it was something for collectors or a catalog, but it’s definitely a catalog. It has some bits about how great Ethan Allen stores are and how great the quality of the furniture (solid oak and select veneers, so….). The stores not only handled furniture and accents/accessories but also window treatments and floor coverings/carpets so it was a one-stop shop for when you were decorating, as it had experts on hand to help you design and decorate a room or a home from scratch.

The catalog is grouped into the different collections, from olden opulent styles like the Georgian Court to a more modern look called Heirloom which looked to be a little less expensive (and Antiqued Pine which was probably the most, erm, economical). I rather enjoyed the more elaborate styles, of course, but would have been most likely to have seen the lower end things. If I ever saw any Ethan Allen furniture in the wild, it would most likely have been those latter things. Our homes would have been decorated in garage sale chic and later inherited antiques. Heck, even my rich aunt and uncle were only aspirants to upper middle class in my youth. Maybe they later would have gotten some Ethan Allen things. I see the chain is still in business, and there’s a location in the Mid Rivers Mall area near where they lived after St. Charles.

But: The thing that really stirred my interest and nostalgia was the patterns and the colors on the walls. Wallpapers, not paneling, and oversized window treatments. Floral print upholstery. Which is not what we’ve had much of in our three homes and certainly not in Old Trees or Nogglestead. We’ve had homes where the only window treatments were blinds–at Nogglestead, the living room, parlor, dining room, hall baths, and both offices still have the blinds we inherited from the previous owners fifteen years ago–and as the ones in the parlor, dining room, and living room are paper and have been subject recently to kittens chewing the cords, they’re falling into disrepair. And the walls in both the home in Old Trees and at Nogglestead have, for the most part, remained an off-white or beige color–the neutrals that are designed to help sell a home. I mean, we have painted a couple of rooms a different color or added an accent wall, but the only texture we’ve had on the walls (aside from the knock-down cover-the-wall-defects-without-sanding treatment which is then painted all one color) is the rag-rolled blues in my office at Casinoport. And aside from a couch which my then-beautiful-girlfriend bought as she was moving to St. Louis, most of our furniture has been of a single color or solid. Heck, even our throw pillows have been mostly a single color (accoutrements with Green Bay Packers logos excepted, of course). Boring!

At Nogglestead, we’ve accumulated keepsakes and personal relics to build a layered look on mantels and whatnot, and the books jammed into their bookshelves provide a texture of sorts, but I’m wondering if a wallpaper or paneling might not make the lower level of Nogglestead more to my taste. Probably! Although my wife does not like the look of wallpaper. And have you noticed the talk of decorating has lead me to overusing exclamation points? Well, it has! As I am getting older, I am starting to really dial into the look of a home I want–but we’re not in a position to make our vision come to life–partially financially, but also partially because the “we” and “our” differs and defers to the taste of the Mrs. And to the taste of the previous Nogglestead owners.

At any rate, I read the text introducing each section of the catalog, the descriptions of the various rooms and the very palely purple prose praising the collections (but I did not read the details of each particular item found in the rooms or in groups of furniture types such as end tables or occasional tables). Forty-five years ago (probably forty-six), someone made a living writing copy for catalogs (I’ve known a few people who did that while working on their literary works–::cough cough:: Leah Holbrook). I felt a little bad for someone like that whose work was generally transient. So I read this unnamed author’s works.

I also flagged a couple of things:

• In a section on kitchens, the catalog also includes serving lists and recipes, and one such for a Heirloom collection dining room with an Italian theme included mentions of a La Caprese. A Caprese salad. I’ve recently started buying fresh mozzarella, and my beautiful wife has made Caprese salads for me with store-boughten tomatoes but homegrown basil because I’ve ordered them when I can at Italian and upscale restaurants around town.
• A blue-themed Heirloom collection had Matisse prints on the wall above the headboard, including the one on the cover of the book I read in 2018 (that long ago?). It hasn’t been that long since I’ve seen this particular print though–it was in an episode< of The Streets of San Francisco which I just watched.

Also, I looked at the back, which had a stamp of the local Ethan Allen gallery:

I had to look up the actual location to see if I could place it, and I most assuredly can: It was located in the building that now houses the Ozark Treasures antique mall. I asked my wife if she knew where it was, and she did; apparently, the store remained open until after she moved to the Springfield area, although that was less than a decade after this catalog came out. It’s unclear from the Internet when it actually closed; in 1998, it moved from this location to a former movie theatre in the mall which by 2017 was a large thrift store which closed a couple years later. I don’t remember if it was in the mall when my toddlers and I wandered through it when our car was getting serviced in a service center in the out lot, but I am not sure. So it’s possible I might have passed by such a store and never stopped in. But, to be honest, I have enough furniture with select veneers that a couple years of children and kittens have begun to peel.

The next dilemma: Do I enter this catalog into the book database I have? I mean, I have counted it as a book I read this year (currently at 69, but I am not stopping for the puerile humor of the total). But I have not counted the Ideals magazines I have read nor have I entered them into the book database (but the hardback Ideals book Houses of Worship? You bet!). So what to do? What to do? Since I am likely to crack the 25-year-old database program open and wait through its overtaxed type-ahead feature for books I have yet to review, maybe so!

On September 10, I watched about thirty seconds of the presidential debate, when the moderators attacked Trump about his tariffs, and that was all I could take. You know, a long time ago, I would liveblog such things, and in 2008, I went to a rally when Palin debated Biden in St. Louis and shook my head in disbelief whenever Biden lied, and I could not believe that people did not know better. Nearly two decades later, it is I who have been educated, and they do believe it.

So instead of trying to jump into Walden, I picked up this book, a fairly recent addition to the stacks along with a book of poems inspired by the television series The Golden Girls (you’ll be hearing about it) to calm my mind.

Ah! Kittens! Puppies! Forty-some full color pictures beside a quatrain of cutesy doggerel or catterel. It’s definitely a gift book, complete with To and From lines before the title page. Nothing more, nothing less.

As you might know, gentle reader, I have started a cutesy pet picture business at NicoSez.com. I only have fifteen photos/designs up, but, you know what? When I get a litter further along, perhaps I will make a book of it and sell it at ABC Books. Maybe have a signing with Nico.

So I did count this as a book I read. After all, it had as many poems as photos. Well, less if you count the cover, front and end pieces, and title pages. But still. Poems, everybody! Poems!

I picked this book up from the free book cart at church. I might have mentioned before that I pick up a book sometimes on Sunday mornings, especially ones where my beautiful wife has to be there thirty or forty-five minutes before service begins. I’ve also been known to drop off books when I find a duplicate in the Nogglestead stacks, but only if the book is fairly wholesome–the Battlefield park little free library gets the saucy stuff. For a while, other people were also leaving books, non-church books–westerns and whatnot–but then on Sunday all that was cleared off as though someone decided that was not what the cart was for. The cart, I imagine someone saying, was for inspirational Christian books. And, brother, this book is not a Christian book.

Instead, it is a collection of quotes from Klemp, who apparently is the leader of Eckankar, which scans like Hinduism blended with just enough Christian iconography to perhaps attract wandering members. The book talks about God, and it talks about the Holy Spirit, but it also talks about the soul as being part of divinity, different worlds/planes of existence to which the soul can rise, and reincarnation. Stuff that your pastor probably would prefer you not like too much.

The book, again, is a set of quotes from other works (Klemp had over 60 books by 2006, and probably many more in the intervening decades). So it doesn’t go into too much the ontology of the recently developed school of religious thought, but one wonders how much deep ontology one would find in the more seminal works–whether they would tend to the academic and scholastic or just be happy guides to letting your soul glow.

C’mon, man, you can’t read that phrase and not sing it.

At any rate, one of the passages reads:

Each Soul is an individual and unique being. We have two parts to our lower nature: the positive and the negative. When we get to the Soul Plane, we find that threse two parts become one.

I can’t see “Soul Plane” and not think of the film. And I can’t help but say it my head like this:

Sorry, I didn’t take this book very seriously. It’s got just enough of the ontology, the talk of different planes of existence and whatnot, to not be completely useful as a simple mindfulness self-helper. And I’m not really a spiritual kind of guy looking for a new framework to help me understand my place in the universe. So, ultimately, I cannot actually assess the book nor its religion properly. But it’s definitely different from the lightweight Buddhism I sometimes read.

After reading Tough Guys and Gals of the Movies, I came across this book and figured that I might as well keep on the theme.

In this case, the book covers mostly monster movies as the “horror” films–slasher films would only be coming into prominence about the time this book was coming out (the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was 1974). We do get some Hitchcock-style thrillers, and I laughed out loud when a still from the opening of Zardoz was on page 18.

So the book is probably designed for people who are fans of the genre to page through as kind of a checklist or a reminder of things they’ve seen or items to add to their list of things to catch on the Creature Feature on Saturday mornings on a UHF station. I have seen a number of films in it, including a couple quite recently (Dracula and Barbarella if you, as I do, count 2022 as recently). I’ve also seen Night of the Living Dead, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Birds, King Kong, Metropolis, Soylent Green, The Pit and the Pendulum with Vincent Price (recently, but not recently enough to have blogged it), and maybe all or parts of some others. I have to say I’m less inclined to go hunt down the old horror films than the old noir films in Tough Guys and Gals of the Movies, but I’m not likely to find many of either in the wild.

It’s a product of its time also in that one in the 21st Century knows to call some films the original. Films the book discusses, such asInvasion of the Body Snatchers, Psycho, The Fly, and King Kong would be remade not long after this book came out. Some of the actors became more widely known for other things–Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, for example, starred in a number of monster films in the 1960s and early 1970s, but they’re most known for Star Wars and/or The Lord of the Rings.

I did spot one error in the book; it says The Omega Man was set in New York, but I knew it was in California (I’d thought San Francisco, but Wikipedia says Los Angeles).

As with the previous book, I found it to be a pretty quick read; it is chock full of photos, mostly black and white but some color, but the ratio of text-to-image was too high for browsing during football games. Now that that old life is behind me, I shall endeavor to go through more of these sorts of book. Heaven knows I have a couple more like it.

This was the only book I bought at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale last month, and after finishing Glory Road (and whilst still working, slowly, on Walden), I wanted something a little different.

Do not confuse this book with Tough Guys and Dangerous Dames, which I reported on in 2004. Not that you would; that one is a collection of pulp fiction, whereas this one is a litany focusing on actors (and some actresses) who played hardboiled or sub-versions of such characters in the movies, whether detectives, villains, or…. monsters? Yes, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price are mentioned. Of course Cagney, Bogart, and Robinson are mentioned. So are later arrivals like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster (I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen these actors together in a film called, oddly enough, Tough Guys which was on Showtime back in the day). At the very tail end of the period covered, we get actors like Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, and some others who were getting into 70s tough guy actors who were really not that tough at all.

It’s an interesting role call (ahut) that includes some older actors who are mostly forgotten today (Dan Duryea, Charles Pickford, and so on) as they did not reach the heights of some others.

This was a longtime high school library book in Ash Grove, but not necessarily a popular one. It was checked out 7 times in 1982, 4 times in 1983, 2 times in 1984, 3 times in 1985, 2 times in 1987, what looks to be once in 1992, and once in 1983. I have to wonder how relevant this book would have been to high school students in the early 1980s, as the majority of the films covered in the book were released in the 1930s through the 1950s. Probably more relevant than a similar time elapsed period today as old films were still in rotation on UHF stations and on Saturday afternoons and late night shows, and the cable viewing diaspora had not occurred yet. I guess some of the actors were still working in the 1980s–Vincent Price provided voice over for “Thriller”, Clint Eastwood was still playing Dirty Harry and had perhaps his best Western yet to come, Raymond Burr was still making Perry Mason movies, and, of course, the aforementioned Tough Guys.

I enjoyed the book and read it quickly, and it made me really want to find some of these classics on home video. Which might inspire me to spend even more at the upcoming Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale than I would. Although restraint has not really been one of my strong suits.

When I bought this book in 2021, I said, “…a browser that would be right up Lileks’ alley.” And so it was, although with less depth than you get out of Lileks’ The American Motel site which Lileks has built over years from postcards.

This book, though, is a quick, inexpensive collection of photos featuring mostly motel signs but also some actual motel photos, including a few interiors and a couple of the fronts of motels or the grounds. A few are black and white for real retromania, but others are relatively contemporary. Ha! I mean contemporary to people of a certain age. Judging by the cars outside the motels, the photos only go up to the 1980s.

You know, I was kind of expecting to have visited a motel depicted within the book. Not because I’ve visited a lot of non-chain motels in my day–I think I’ve stayed at maybe three or four in my lifetime, and Budgetels, Hampton Inns, and whatnot. But given that the cover of the book has Route 66 right on it, I fully expected to see St. Louis’s Coral Courts in it somewhere because they had a distinct art deco look to them–and as I mentioned, I “urban explored” them before they made way for a subdivision. But no.

I suppose it counts to my good that my scores on checklists of churches exceeds the score of quizzes based on one-night cheap motels I’ve visited.

I ordered this book from ABC Books during the Covid lockdowns in 2020; apparently, that day I was browsing the animal listings as I bought a number of cat books (and probably sent some to my friend Glenn who never acknowledged it).

It’s basically a listicle of things you can do to be friendly to a cat with one item per page aside a picture of a cat doing something cute (not that I would try to monetize something like that). Basically, it’s a little book designed to be a gift for someone you know who likes cats. Which makes it all the more not-needed-to-be said: That person you know who likes cats probably already does most of these things already because they’re pretty obvious. Also, the age of the target audience becomes obvious when you run into an Ethel Merman reference. C’mon, man, she was old when she was in Airplane!, and that was forty-five years ago. Very few people under the age of 60 will know who she was.

Still, it counts as a full book for the annual total. And, to be honest, I’m a little surprised that it took me this long to get to it. Perhaps I’ve been reading magazines and poetry for end-of-the-evening browsers, and I haven’t really been watching football enough to run through books like this. Still, good to have moved it along in the to-read stacks > read books > estate sale pipeline. Not really looking forward to that last step, admittedly.

I’ve had this book atop the bookshelves in the hall facing out for a while. Well, I guess we did just move/reorganize the shelves out there last autumn when we had some work done at Nogglestead, so it might not have been looking down on me every time I passed through the hall since I bought it ten years ago. But for some reason, I’ve passed over it time and time again. Except this is the year of Sword and Sorcery at Nogglestead (or a year of Sword and Sorcery as the stacks have enough of the genre to support many such years), and the book has a man with a sword talking to an ogre on the cover, so now was the time.

The edition I have is from 1982, so I was going to expound upon the rise of the “normal people from earth go to a fantasy world” subgenre which I would have posited was a mainstay of fantasy in the 1980s, drawing upon my familiarity of Rosenberg’s The Guardians of the Flame series and Chalker’s Dancing Gods series, but further reflection indicates that the subgenre goes way back to the Chronic (what?) cles of Narnia and the Gor books whose reviews pepper the last 20 years of this blog, so instead of a thesis easily disproven, you get this paragraph. Also, this book was originally published in 1964, but thematically it seems later as we will see.

It starts out in that fantasy genre: An early Vietnam vet musters out and bums around, eventually answering an ad in a European magazine. He finds himself transported to a magical universe with a beautiful woman and a short sidekick. Apparently, he’s the hero that the woman needs to complete a quest which takes them across vast distances and through strange environs so that he can help her recover an artifact she needs as queen of the multiverse.

However, after a couple of set action pieces befitting a fantasy novel, we veer into Heilein polyamory philosophy. And then the quest is completed two-thirds of the way through the book, and after that, it explores a bit of what it’s like to be the queen of the multiverse and to be her consort. So it gets a little blowsy in the last third as not much actually happens besides a little politics, musings on male/female relationships, and a visit home by the hero who has changed on his journey.

So: A quick read, well-written but not necessarily action-packed. Not remembered as one of Heinlein’s best, and probably a transitional work between the rocket jockey stuff and the adult stuff with the alternative lifestyles. But perhaps that transition preceded Stranger in a Strange Land more than I commonly think.

After finishing Houses of Worship, I wanted another book to serve its purpose: Something a little light to read or browse not during football games (probably not going to watch many again this year) but in the fifteen or so minutes between finishing a chapter in a longer work and actually going to bed. I didn’t find a similar coffeetable book immediately, but I did pick up this book which I bought in April 2022, and, as it happens, I read the whole thing in one sitting.

Not because it was compelling nor particularly good poetry.

Instead, it’s a litany of poems written about specific lovers and wives whom he cheated on with named and poetized lovers (and the wives, apparently, cheated on him as well). But it’s written as a bit of a retrospective, a lyin’ in the winter of his years, trying to recapture a bit of his youth and/or maybe brag.

Although published in 1984, this book is a bit of a throwback; the author’s first (of only a handful) collection appeared in 1957, and he went into teaching in the 1960s. So he was in academia in the free love era, when poets were sexy, and he took advantage of it. Yet I can’t but characterize him as Rod McKuen without the depth.

How did this signed copy come to Missouri from back east where the author taught? Apparently, he was a Springfield native (although he did not live here for most of his life). So it’s not like finding Bernard O’Donoghue’s copy of Five Themes of Today here.

I bought this book at the end of June, and I selected it as my end-of-night, I-don’t-want-to-start-another-chapter-of-a-longer-book book. What are those longer books I deferred whilst paging through this book? In order of time spent on my chairside table without my planning to throw them back into the stacks, they are The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Life of Greece (the Story of Civilization Volume 2), The Rape of the Lock by Pope (not a long book, but eighteenth century verse is harder and slower to read than nineteenth), and whatever bit of fiction I’ve got. I have other books on the side table, but I’m going to one day soon clear them from that table and throw them back. It’s been long enough that I’ll want to start from the beginning again. Well, maybe not The Innocents Abroad.

At any rate: This is a hardback publication by Ideals Publishing, the firm behind Ideals magazine (at least in those days). It has 36 different entries on old churches and cathedrals not just Christian or Catholic but also including a synagogue, a temple of the Bahai faith, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and Christian Scientists. I guess, depending how ecumenical your faith is, the latter two are Christian faiths of a sort as well. But anyway.

They’re broken into chapters grouping them as old churches of New England (and a little west), missions, modern churches, and whatnot. Each entry has one to three pictures about it as well as a couple paragraphs of the location’s importance or origin. Many of the locations were by then (1977) abandoned by worshippers and picked up, sometimes after some time, by foundations or historical societies for restoration as museums.

But as with my score visiting the best book shops in the world, I found that I have been to three of these locations as well:

• The Joan of Arc Chapel on the Marquette campus. Although I spent many hours reclining on the wall between the chapel and the Memorial Library, I only visited the chapel while showing the campus to someone else, either my mother at graduation or a girlfriend after. But I’ve been in it.
• The Church of Annunciation, also in Milwaukee, which was the location of an annual Greek festival. Maybe I’ve only been on the grounds, but I have a sense that I took a tour at some point.
• The new cathedral in St. Louis, where I attended the funeral of the father of one of my beautiful wife’s co-workers.

Which is a surprising number, actually, as I don’t tend to seek out old churches when travelling (active Missouri Synod Lutheran churches when staying over on a Sunday, but not old churches). And I have not been to the southwest (home of Spanish missions) or much to New England.

So an interesting little browse, especially for the purpose I use it: To pad out fifteen minutes before bed and to pad out my annual reading count.

I mentioned when I bought the book that it had an inscription. Here it is:

In it, Mrs. Gamble apologizes to the Barner family for “crashing their party” and hopes that they enjoy their retirement.

Internet stalking says the Gambles founded a gift shop in the 1960s that sold Waterford Crystal and that they later sold the store in 1984 to a local poet/children’s book author and his wife. The shop closed in 2018. Mr. Gamble died in 1990; Mrs. Gamble died in 2021 at 101. Mr. Barner was a local banker who died in 2021 at 100. Given that the inscription is dated 1986, he had a nice long retirement. Mrs. Barner died in 2009.

I really have become an Internet stalker of people whose books I later own, and this seems really weird because unlike Mary Ovenshine, these people could have been neighbors. Well, probably not, but some of them lived in Springfield when I did.

Well, after reading Flashing Swords #2, I picked up the other entry in the series of anthologies (there were five total) that I had (and that I bought at the same time ten years ago).

Again, this is a collection of sword-and-sorcery novellas by a small circle of writers from the time period with an introduction by Carter.

The stories include:

• “The Bagful of Dreams” by Jack Vance, a story of Cugel the Clever. Cugel is down on his luck, and he meets up with a wizard with a bagful of dreams on his way to impress a royal personage and win a prize. But Iolo and Cugel beset and try to best each other beforehand and before the Duke.
• “The Tupilak” by Poul Anderson is part of a series about human/merfolk hybrids seeking to find their vanished kind. They come to a cold land where colonists from abroad are suffering and are hounded by invaders from the north, and the merfolk intervene to try to save them.
• “Storm in a Bottle” by John Jakes, a Brak the Barbarian story which starts with Brak as a captive brought into a strange town under threat from a dark mage who might be leading barbarians in the hills against them. Brak breaks free and finds that the threat comes from closer to home.
• “Swords against the Marluk” by Katherine Kurtz which is part of the Deryni series. Apparently, it’s an event that the books mention but did not cover, and it’s how one new king defeated a magickal rival with magic of his own and a Deryni on his side. I didn’t get much out of it because I haven’t read the books.
• “The Lands Beyond The World” by Michael Moorcock wherein Elric finds himself in another world having traveled through a gate and having had some adventures there. He is on his way back when he encounters a woman in trouble, on the run from an ancient sorceror who wants to resurrect an old love in her, and Elric tries to protect her.

I liked the Cugel story; I might have read the Brak story in middle school or high school; and the Elric stories are growing on me. I don’t know that any of it will stick with me, but it was for the most part a pleasant passage of a couple of hours. The context-switching between the stories, with completely different rules and whatnot, was kind of difficult. Probably easier if one is more used to anthologies and definitely easier if you’re familiar with each story’s particular mythos from other works.

So will I pick up the other three books in the series? Well, if I see them at a book sale, perhaps, but I don’t think I’ll order them.

So will this conclude Brian J.’s year of sword-and-sorcery? Maybe not.

This book is classified as humor, and undoubtedly it was designed to be a quick, fairly inexpensive, gift for someone you know who has a cat, whether that person (or cat) is a Taoist or Buddhist or not. It’s structured like a set of sutras (or suttas, depending upon your particular flavor of Buddhism) where a story or teaching of the titular cat is presented and then you get some explanation/exegesis (including disputes amongst the experts who study the titular cat).

So I think it’s supposed to be satire, but it’s actually pretty close to the mark as far as how books of this stripe go (remember, I’ve read some of Thich Nhat Hanh’s commentaries on Buddha’s teachings and other work, so although I am not a scholar, I recognize the structure). And, I mean, some of the life lessons that the book presents are actually helpful life lessons even if you’re not a cat.

So I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be arch commentary riffing on Eastern philosophy or if it’s a gateway to Eastern philosophy, or at least the self-help elements of popular Eastern philosophy. Nothing in it is absurd or laugh aloud funny. I’m not sure anything even rises to the level of amusing, actually, as much of the book is fairly earnest.

It looks as though the author has a couple of cat-themed books, a book on runes, and wrote something for Wonder Woman comics. So I don’t know what to make of the book based on the other things that the author has written. So very, very odd.

This is the second of the two little Salesian fundraising giveaway collections that I bought in last year; I read another, The Way, in June. Which means that I have another floating around here somewhere. They’re awfully small, so who knows when I will find it. This volume comes from the middle 1990s, which means that they were still coming in the mail to potential donors as far as that. The Way was from 1983, so they certainly had a run that spanned decades. Which means I might be able to find a bunch of them out there, not that I need to collect another series intermittently. Or perhaps one does not find them so often because they are little cheap giveaways that most people did not save (or, probably, even read).

So: There’s not too much to say about this that I did not say for The Way, which was:

This volume is 32 pages of grandmother poetry focusing on religious themes, but generic Christian religious themes–you get Jesus and you get God, but no Mary. The small pages are akin to Ideals magazine, with the poems set on pages surrounded by illustrations of homey and old-timey scenes and landscapes. Basically, the target crowd overlapped a lot with people who would subscribe to Ideals. They’re poems, too, not prayers; some are addressed to God, but most of them talk about God instead. Quality varies from meh to okay, but really, this is everyday poetry, the kind that people who were not academic poets or kept by patrons wrote. Normal people. I mean, jeez Louise, my father wrote poetry not unlike this. So it’s not designed to be profound, meaningful, or obscure to differentiate the Poet from the Rubes without advanced degrees in literature. So it was nice, and a quick read, and I suppose it could fit into one’s daily devotions if one were so inclined.

It comes from a time when everyday people read middlebrow poetry, and it was not seized by academics and obscuratans who decided poetry is only for them. Of course, it kind of tracks also with the decline of education and the replacement of books by other media (television, the Internet) which means that regular people turn to other things seeking the meaning and the sense of life rather than poetry. Which is a shame.

Most of the poems in this volume are nice, which is probably a step below not bad, but they’re not aiming for Literature. Not that the Literature that has replaced this sort of poetry will be any more remembered through the centuries if nobody is reading, sticking on their mirror or fridge, or memorizing them either.

At any rate, I will probably pick more of these books up when I run into them.

Well, I recently read The Quest of Kadji, and in doing some research on him (reading the Wikipedia entry), I was reminded that he edited the Flashing Swords anthologies, two of which I bought in 2014 (along with the volumes of the Agents of T.E.R.R.A. series, The Golden Goddess Gambit and The Emerald Elephant Gambit, both of which I have also read this year, which means I’m clearly catching up on my reading from the last decade, slowly). Given that I’d read a Carter original, I thought perhaps no time would be better to read these anthologies which I’ve passed over many times in the past.

When I bought The Quest of Kadji in 2018, Friar said, “Carter worked in the same vein as ERB, in many cases to a degree of homage that rose to pastiche.” In the introduction to this book, Carter uses the word pastiche, which can just mean that it’s a conscious imitation like an homage. But the word has come to take on a more purple prose definition since then. I also said, “I did read some of John Jakes’ Brak stories, though.” in the comments, which is amusing given that this book has a Brak story in it.

Carter explains that he is part of a small group of sword-and-sorcery writers with some twee name, and he has started anthologizing some of their works. Strangely enough, I ended up with the even numbers of the series which filled the 1970s.

This book includes:

• “The Rug and the Bull” by L. Sprague de Camp which features a group of travellers similar to Gypsies who try to sell a flying carpet to a king.
• “The Jade Man’s Eyes” by Michael Moorcock wherein Elric is enlisted to travel West to his homeland in search of the ancient fabled city of his people, but disasted befalls the expedition as it often does when Elric is involved. You know, I might have heard the name Elric in my youth, probably on BBSes when the material was fresh, but I have not read any of the related novels. I’ve read The Black Corridor and An Alien Heat twenty years ago, and they put me off on the Moorcock. But the Elric stories might be interestinger.
• “Toads of Grimmerdale” by Andre Norton wherein a woman seeking revenge for her ravishing and impregnation at the hand of an invading army’s man asks help of unholy creatures only to learn that she might have marked the wrong man for revenge.
• “Ghoul’s Garden” wherein Brak the barbarian encounters a woman and a cleric travelling and finds that a man pursuing the woman has a rug which contains its own dark world in the embroidery.

At 200 pages, it’s not a long read, but it does require some context-switching between each story. It might help, I suppose, if I were versed in the sword-and-sorcery of the era, as they’re all part of pre-established worlds.

But I do agree that sword-and-sorcery comes best in short stories or novellas (as these anthologies contain). Too much world building would bog things down. Too bad that all genres (and modern representatives therein) did not learn the lesson. People want to read quick escapes, not plunge into hundreds of pages of world building. Or, probably, I’m speaking for myself, more a fan of Hemingway than Faulkner.