Category: Books

Well, my first book of the year–why not make it one of the less than a handful of Executioner novels I have left? Especially since they’re really now something to be finished rather than really enjoyed by the late 1990s, when they’ve bloated a bit and have kind of lost their roots and what made them most enjoyable at their best–the philosophical musings.

In this book, Bolan is in north Africa when an Egyptian band of Islamic terrorists begins targeting tourists, especially Americans. With funding to buy expensive explosives and the hired know-how of a Palestinian terror expert, the group–The Holy Voice–presents a real threat, although not on the scale of Chinese nationalists attacking nuclear plants or Caribbean dictators trying to buy nukes; but some of these smaller side missions could be satisfying, but in the execution (ahut), not so much.

I mean, you have set pieces, and you have bang-bang, but that’s about it. Perhaps I’m hoping for too much, or perhaps I’m idealizing the early books that I read fourteen years ago (whose publication date was a mere twenty-four years and 204 books prior to this volume). Still.

I flag a couple of things in these books as though I’m going to bother reviewing the little tabs while writing these little reviews. The first thing I flagged, though, again was the “A Brit wrote this” because it talks about height in terms of yards. We Americans tend to measure distance in yards, not height. But I have pointed that out in recent books which turned out to have been written by an American, so never mind.

At any rate, March 1997 is the publication date. I often like to track what I was doing at the time the book came out. That was a big year: A couple weeks before this book came out, a girl at the University of Missouri emailed me where to read poetry in St. Louis. And that worked out all right for me. You know, I printed out every email she sent me during those first few months, and when I admitted that I was emailing a girl to one of my friends, I used the two inch stack of paper to indicate she might be serious, I dunno. I have them all in binders here; I should re-read those instead of an Executioner novel sometime.

Never mind, the Winter 2022 Reading Challenge is on. It will have to wait until spring, as will the next Executioner novel.

When I bought this book last June, I said I thought I would confuse it with Coffee Is Better Than Therapy. And so I did; as I was reading, I was picturing the woman living in Webster Groves, but then she would mention something from Springfield, and it would throw me off.

The book comes from a bit of a vanity project: It’s a book collecting 100 of her online posts during the first 100 days of the pandemic, which she counts from the lockdown order in Springfield in Spring 2020–although that’s a localized start date. I was skipping triathlon classes for weeks before that to limit my exposure to a disease I feared might be akin to something out of The Stand or The Andromeda Strain (books, gentle reader, books–although I have seen a contagion movie before, but not Contagion, I can’t think of what it would have been). In my paranoid defense, I’d like to point out I thought about cancelling a trip to DisneyWorld during the Ebola outbreak in, what, 2014? That experience–my own fears not coming to pass–mitigated my fears about Wuhan flu as time went by and the dead were only lying in the streets in pictures on the Internet and not in Springfield, Missouri.

So we have 100 entries of a couple paragraphs, more or less, talking a little bit about what she did that day, the tea mug that she used (she collects hand-crafted tea mugs from around the world), the little aphorism or proverb on her tea bag, and maybe a little bit of something else. Most of them cross some of the Country Grandmother/Rural Reporter column from small-town newsletters. They give a little insight into the mindset in early 2020 about the state of the disease and the government responses to it. I think Ms. Kynion continued believing in its potency and virulence longer than I did–after all, I was out in person several times a week going to essential businesses to keep things topped up even though I’d laid some things up before the lockdowns, and I saw the same checkers week after week meaning that they were not dying of a plague.

At any rate, an interesting project and a bit of a time capsule, but not something to read straight through as many of the entries cover the same ground and very similarly. It took me months to read it, as I would read a bunch of them and put it aside for a while. Also, I think it got lost in the truck for a while after I took it out to read elsewhere at one point.

Perhaps pace one’s self to a couple a day to better mimic the daily updates that each entry represents.

I must have gotten this pamphlet tucked into a pack of chapbooks bought from the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County. It is a mid-(twentieth)-century pamphlet, apparently one of six in the set, from Britain collecting the wisdom of Father Andrew, real name Henry Ernest Hardy, one of the founders of the Society of Divine Compassion, an organization dealing with the poor in London.

This 32-page book has a bunch of paragraph or two snippets from Father Andrew’s other works, presumably. A number of them deal with focusing on one’s work as a vocation, not merely a job, but doing work for God no matter what the work is. So it reminded me a bit of C.S. Lewis’s work blended with Buddhism, perhaps. It’s definitely Christian work, though, as Father Andrew wants you to live like Christ. Father Andrew died in 1946, so this book and its brethren are posthumous.

More interesting, though, is the provenance of the book. Kathleen E. Burne was apparently a female poet of the World War I era (just like Joyce Kilmer!), but if you search for her now, you find some mention of her books of the life of Father Andrew (you can find Prayers from Father Andrew online here). The booklet I have is a second impression from 1950, and in the intervening fifty seventy years, it’s made its way across the ocean and into the interior of another continent (not as quickly as Five Themes of Today, but still).

Imagine a tract in the little plastic holder in the front of your church in the hands of someone in another country in 2095. Hard to imagine, ainna? And yet, my beautiful wife’s current Portals of Prayer might go far. If we did not recycle them at the end of every month. I think that might be a bit of a difference: Ephemera like that, and current Reader’s Digests that we read, we discard–unlike people in the last century, and certainly not like people in mid-century Britain would have.

As you might remember, gentle reader, when I bought this book last month, I said that the back of the book called this a “sprawling erotic thriller.” So of course I jumped right on this book–as you know, I am a sucker for the smut. But wait, Brian J., you bought Fanny Hill a year and a half ago? Well, gentle reader, I like to cover up my propensity to read diry books by spacing them out a great deal indeed.

So is it erotic? Well, on page 30, we learn that the love interest read de Sade in college, so one might expect the book to turn into Fifty Shades of Ninja, but it does not. It has a bunch of sex scenes with some brief explicity, but we’re talking only a couple of sentences or paragraphs per, and they’re spread through 500 pages. We do get a variety of sex scenes that would have been called deviant in 1980, including incest, pedophilia, lesbian sex with a firearm as sex toy, and male anal rape. The book might have been shocking in 1980, but it’s definitely less titilating than a Gunsmith novel.

But is it sprawling? Oh, boy, Mister, is it!

All right, so the plot: A guy from an ad agency has quit and is living in the suburbs when a neighbor dies from what looks to be an accident, but a World War II veteran medical examiner finds traces of metal in a puncture wound, reminding him of an experience in World War II when he met the ninja. Our hero, Nicholas Linnear, is really a ninja! Spoiler alert, but, c’mon, man, the “twists” are pretty obvious as we go along. He meets the modern love interest, the daughter of a tycoon, soon after the murder (who turns out to be a former co-worker of Linnear). He becomes involved with her, but we also get long, vivid flashbacks of his upbringing in post World War II Japan by an English (Jewish) father and a Chinese mother (who might not be his real mother).

So we’ve got the past and the present interwoven; in the present, we have the good ninja agreeing to guard the tycoon from assassination by the ninja and collaborating with the local medical examiner and talking with some of his Japanese friends in New York, and they’re all systematically killed by the bad ninja, leading the good ninja to realize that maybe the bad ninja is targeting him as much as the tycoon. Whoa! And in a twist you can see hundreds of pages in advance, the bad ninja is his cousin! Or is he really Nicholas’s brother?

And then we go into a flashback of Nicholas’s young life in Japan, with some Nipponophilia and Japanese history worked in along with his love for a Japanese girl, Yukio, who might be playing him for a fool and in the service of his cousin, a student at the same ryu as Nicholas until Nicholas beats him–at which time he goes to a black school to learn the dark arts of bujistu. To be honest, a lot of words in the book are italicised to emphasize their exotic flavor.

But the backstories–each character gets his or her pages or paragraphs, if only to flesh out a character to be killed later–really chonk this book up. I mean, it goes into greater detail about the characters than classical literature which often weighs in at 500 pages or more. But I prefer my genre fiction a little punchier, and this book could have lost probably half of its words to tighten it up.

Oh, and the book is broken into five sections–rings based on The Book of Five Rings, and the author is name checked a bunch. I felt smaht for knowing this as I read the book earlier this year.

At any rate, not my kind of “thriller.” Overly long and wordy. I will probably not bother with the rest of the series which spans six novels through 1995 and two e-book short stories in 2014 and 2016.

Definitely the second-best book entitled The Ninja that I’ve read recently (The Ninja and Their Secret Fighting Art, which I read in 2019, was the best–I was surprised to see I already had an image called theninja.jpg for book reports).

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This book, the less expensive of the books by this author that I spotted at Hooked on Books almost a month ago, is the work of a professional poet. The author is the assistant editor at The Ohio Review at the time, so he’s definitely a pro. But for all that, it’s not so bad.

Some of the poems to do fall to the two-to-four-syllable-lines problem. How can you develop a thought or image in lines that short? Short answer: unless your name is Issa and some of the beauty of the poetry is in the brushstrokes themselves, you can’t. But modern poets lurve it, and when I read poems like that, I can here them reciting a couple of short words and then pausing ponderously at the end of the line. Eesh.

At any rate, many of the poems contrast growing up on the farm with today, which although it was then was later than growing up on a farm. I liked it a little more than I thought I would, but I found enough in it to not dislike it.

But none of the poems really touched me. You know, I’ve read a lot of poetry this year–what, about 20 books, give or take how you account for some of them–and not many of the poems or poets stick with me. I liked some of the Mary Phelan and John Ciardi I read this year, the poem I remember most en toto and even quote bits of to myself comes from Robert Hayden whom I read in 2020. So I guess the best I get out of most poetry is that’s nice and move on.

Perhaps that’s the best I can hope for from people reading my poetry. Or people reading my poetry at all.

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This hardback comes from Carleton Press, a self-publishing firm, in 1973. Not only is it a hardback in a dust jacket, but the dust jacket is Mylar-wrapped, so someone thought highly of it. Perhaps Ellen Massey, the teacher extraordinaire, to whom the book is inscribed.

One might think of this as grandmother poetry, based on the photo on the back, but the author bio indicates that she still has a child in the house. I certainly made that mistake; she’s likely in her late thirties or early forties when this book came out, so not grandmother yet.

It doesn’t touch on the normal grandmother poetry themes of religion, patriotism, and so on. Instead we get short (well, terse is right in the title) bits about personal relationships and whatnot. The poems’ lines are not short, so she’s not a Professional, but many of the works are light on imagery and heavy on abstractions and explaining emotions.

So the poetry is not very memorable or compelling to a poetry glutton like me, but she must have been very proud of it, and she pursued her dreams, spending likely thousands of dollars in the process.

Instead of some grandmother poetry, how about some grandpa poetry instead? Ah, but for the depth of grandmother poetry. This volume has 51 pages of landscapes with little beyond describing the flora of East Central Illinois. Many of the poems within are cinquains, which are short five line verses. Longer than a haiku, but not by much.

Still, the book I have is autographed and is from the third printing, somewhere in the 601st through 800th copies made available. So the fellow sold or gave away more books of poetry than I have amid my two chapbooks and one self-published print-on-demand title, and like At the End of the Rainbow, it’s available on Amazon almost fifty years after publication.

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Now this is what you would expect of good grandmother poetry. The book, comb-bound when I was but two years old (but not by my grandmother) runs 94 pages on high-quality cardstock for the most part. It touches on themes of holidays, religion (lightly), family, and patriotism, but not unalloyed with a touch of pain (apparently, she lost a son in World War II). We get the gamut of history in the poems: She married in 1918, in the shadow of World War I, lost a son in World War II, and wonders about kids these days in the 1970s.

The poems are tidy little bits with end rhymes; the introduction says that the author had pieces published in the newspaper; I remember when newspapers published poetry. I will have to admit, of all the papers I take these days, only one drops in a poem from time to time, and of all the magazines I take (which, to be honest, is fewer than the newspapers), only one or two have a poem from time to time. But in the olden days of the last century, gentle reader, you might get your little ditty in the paper, read by people, enjoyed a bit and mostly forgotten. Unlike today, where you pump the poem into a database somewhere to be eventually discarded with a click of a No button instead of a nice form letter, and even if you get it published in a proper place, only other poets will read it.

You know, that’s why I read grandmother poetry and old Ideals magazines. Because I remember when poetry like this was a staple of the people and not The Poets and Power. 1974, maybe 1980, might have been the high mark of this; by the time I was dropping chapbooks in 1994 and 1995, nobody at the coffeeshops was buying.

Compare and contrast: Although you can get a print-on-not-much-demand copy of Coffee House Memories on Amazon, you can actually order a print copy of this book on Amazon. Unrequited and Deep Blue Shadows, my laid-out-and-printed-at-Kinko’s chapbooks, are not available.

Or maybe that’s because they’re more collectible.

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I saw someone–perhaps the Ace of Spades Midmorning Art Thread–mention Edward Hopper. Of course, I knew about “The Nighthawks”, which the particular post mentioned. So when I got a chance to pick up this book at Hooked on Books, I did.

The book mixes biographical text with large renderings of the paintings as well as some detailed close-ups. It definitely uses the page effectively; some books have fairly large margins and tiny reproductions of the art, but this book really illustrates how to do a monograph. Of course, it is from the 21st century. Clearly, printing has improved since the 1970s and 1980s, when a lot of the monographs I review were published.

The author of this book talks about how grim and isolated, how despondent the people in the paintings are, and he lays out a good argument for that, but I think the scenes are not quite as bleak as the author would have us believe. They’re scenes of working people, often urban or newly developed areas, and they depict not portraits but moments in time in the urban landscapes and in the peoples’ lives. The almost impressionistic blurring of the lines works well, and this author indicates that Hopper might have influenced Noir cinema instead of vice versa.

So I liked the book. Of course, I live in the country now, so city living is but a memory, which might be why I like the gauzy focus urban paintings–paintings from a time way past when I lived in the city, but how I imagined myself in that city even as I lived there and even now.

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You know, ABC Books has amongst its dwindling artists section a thick volume on Watteau, and I felt a bit like a traitor when I bought this book at Hooked on Books two weeks ago. Of course, that’s odd, since I was a Hooked on Books patron before I even moved here, twenty-some years ago when I came to Springfield with my beautiful-then-girlfriend. So perhaps I should feel like a traitor to Hooked on Books for buying so much at ABC Books, but Hooked on Books has changed hands once or twice since then, and ABC Books has not changed hands since I’ve known of it.

At any rate, watteau to say about this artist. A late seventeenth and early eighteenth century French artist–Voltaire might have thought him old school. You know, if I read and remember enough of these monographs I will see he’s more Gainsborough than Caravaggio. The brief text introduction in the book explains how he was misunderestimated in his age, but how he’s really a towering figure. Except fewer people remember his name than Caravaggio, probably.

Not bad to look at; group scenes where you can tell the subjects are people. I don’t know that I would hang any reprints of his work in my home if I were to come upon one somewhere. But I probably wouldn’t, as, c’mon, it’s Watteau.

The book, though, is nominally a Harry N. Abrams book, but it’s also credited to Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad. Most of the pieces depcited on the plates were in Soviet museums, and this was a nice, artificialish “We like art, too” reach across the Iron Curtain where the book was published in the Soviet Union, but the art images are all pasted in by work-from-home people circa 1979. I have mentioned before that I dated a girl in the 1990s who caught on with one of these publishers who would send her books and art plates to paste into them, and the girl would get dinged on quality control if the plates were a little crooked, so it wasn’t something you could do while watching television (as the ads in the magazines promised).

You know what? I have forgotten Watteau since I started typing this review. Which explains why it’s the only monograph left at ABC Books besides the $30 “comic” art one (which I will probably buy in 2022). So, consider that the ultimate meh.

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C’mon, man, it’s like Checkov’s gun. If the man buys a twee collection of tweerific baby pictures as an artist’s “monograph” on Saturday, you have to know he’s going to browse it during the football game the next day. And, the best part is that this book, which counts in my simple annual total as much as Wuthering Heights or David Copperfield. Well, no, that’s not the best part.

All right, all right, all right. Anne Geddes has made a life of making books like this, books with staged photos of infants and newborns. She got her start at the turn of the century with calendars and whatnot, and one of her books was featured on Oprah. Which was a television program of some influence, although it’s mostly forgotten now.

So if you dig pictures of babies dressed like butterflies and perched on something looking like a tree branch or babies made to look like flowers posed in a field, this is definitely the book for you. Or if you’re interested in spending $4 to get a quick entry onto the annual reading list.

The best part about this book, though, was my family’s reaction to it and to my reading it. My beautiful wife recognized the photographer’s name and said the photographer’s works creeped her out. And as I sat on the sofa, watching the Packers victory this weekend, my youngest sat next to me, playing on his Nintendo Switch, and every couple of pages, I would say, “Aw, look at that baby dressed up like an insect!” and show it to him, and he would look but shake his head. That alone was worth the price of the book and the hit my reputation took for reading it.

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I bought this book earlier this month, and I kept it where I could see it. As you might remember, gentle reader, I like to read a Christmas novel every year in the holiday season. But I sometimes have difficulty finding one in the Nogglestead stacks when the time is right. I mean, I buy them when I see them at book sales and whatnot, but the Nogglestead to-read shelves are a dense jungle, and if I have to find something, I generally cannot, but then when I am not looking for it, it is right there.

At any rate, this book has a bit of a dark premise: A couple has split up right before Christmas. Although good Christian kids who dated in high school, they split when they went to separate colleges. But she loses her mother, and when he loses his father, their shared grief and past leads them to one night of passion pregnancy and guilt. He drops out of college to take over his father’s auto parts store, and she drops out of school to be a mom. Although they start from humble beginnings, they build a good upper middle class life together as the parts store prospers under his guidance, and they have a total of three children. But the woman mourns the loss of her youth and her college degree, and when her school rival for her husband’s affections returns to town, she becomes suspicious and throws him out.

Through a series of flashbacks, many revolving around the central gimmick that he has given her a Christmas ornament every year of their marriage, we get this story and its lead-up. Although she really loves him, she hasn’t forgiven herself or him for that one night that led to their successful marriage, and she self-destructively breaks it up. But, c’mon, man, this is a Christmas novel, so, spoiler alert, they get back together at the end.

A nice bit of Hallmark Channel movie in a book form. It’s got a little depth to it, unlike some Christmas books, and I kind of felt bad for the protagonists until they reconciled.

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Well, this is a later (well, middle, since the series goes on for another 20 years) Mack Bolan book. He is again dealing with terrorists looking to build a nuclear weapon, and this book hopscotches across the world (Scotland, Turkey, the Caribbean) as Bolan chases leads and shoots people and blows up things. He has the assitance of a Russian agent for a while (spoiler alert), and discovers that a Caribbean dictator deposed by the US has commissioned the device so he can get his revenge by blowing it up in an American city.

Kind of a meh book, to be honest. A bit sweeping for a Bolan book, but I guess by 1997, even the pulp was packing it on.

This book leaves me with but four Executioner titles in my to-read shelves, which means I have to start thinking about what other series in the line I should start after. I’m thinking SuperBolan because I’m a glutton for punishment.

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As I mentioned, I own an original Hirschfeld. A Matt Hirschfeld, Al Hirschfeld’s considerably younger second cousin also from St. Louis. So when I saw this book at ABC Books, I had to have it. Well, I had to have it because I’d run out of monographs to browse during football, and I didn’t make it into the Better Books section of the Fall 2021 Friends of the Library book sale (where the Art section is). So I paid $15 for this book instead of two or three. Also, note that the art monograph section of ABC Books is getting pretty thin these days as the Martial Arts section is. Make of that what you will.

This is a 300+ page comprehensive review of Al Hirschfeld’s work including a biography and plenty of images. Hirschfeld had plenty of biography–he started drawing in the 1920s and lived into the 21st century, so he had a lot of ground to cover. He worked mostly with entertainment subjects, starting with plays but also moving into movies and then television, and he made a really good living at it. To make a short story long, that’s it. His style evolved a bit, as he sought to really condense shape and movement into the fewest lines possible, so while he was never really as busy as the old timey illustrations you find in classic literature or, say, the children’s works illustrations by Mercer Mayer, Arnold Lobel, or Maurice Sendak, by the end of his career, his works are very sparse indeed. To ill effect, I might add. And although I could recognize some of the notables he illustrated, the captions helped a lot–not only because the personages might have peaked decades before I was born–well, mostly because of that.

So an interesting perusal–a bit text heavy for pure gridiron browsing, I had to take this one to the chair to complete it. As I mentioned, it’s as much a biography as a monograph. But worth my time, and yours, too, if you’re into pop art from the 20th century.

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