Category: Books

I got this book in my first ABC Books online order during the past-but-sorta-current unpleasantness, and after I finished the Agatha Christie omnibus, I fully expected to jump immediately into the ordered books because last in, first out. After all, I was excited to receive them in the mail, so I should jump on them as soon as I could while I was still sort of excited about them. Also, these books will be atop and in front of other books, so they’ll be the ones closest at hand.

Si, a member of the Duck Dynasty clan and a popular part of the show, recounts his life through stories from his youth and his army days peppered with tall tales and old jokes recounted as though they actually happened to him. It’s a pleasant enough read; it’s 230 pages, but lightweight prose that moves quickly.

I do have one quibble, though. When he’s talking about a military posting in Massachusetts, he talks about the crazy accents they have, and he says:

The first time I walked into my barrack, I asked a sergeant where I could find some water to drink.
“The bubbler is down the hall,” he said.
“The what?” I asked him.
It took me a few minutes to realize he was talking about a water fountain.

That sergeant isn’t from Massachussetts. He’s from Wisconsin, Jack!

I have never seen the program, but Duck Dynasty had been a gift schtick for my recently passed aunt. She’d mentioned something about the show at some point, probably tut-tutting it, so for most of the last decade she got at least one Duck Dynasty branded product (but not the wine) as a Christmas gift. So reading the book kind of reminded me of her. Strangely enough, my other aunt (who once lived in Texas) spent a great deal of the decade living down the road from the Robertsons in Louisiana. Well, as down the road as Mickey Gilley’s anyway. That other aunt, my only remaining one from that side of the family, was and is a vagabond and is probably due to move soon.

Having read the book, I’m interested in seeing a bit of the program to see what prompted the interest in Si–it’s claimed that fans of their outdoor program and later Duck Dynasty wanted to see more of him telling stories like those in this book. I would, too. He is a couple of years older than my father was, and an outdoorsman, so he could serve as some middle-aged proxy of sorts. Well, not that psychologically deep, but still.

At the end of the book, there’s a page marketing the other books in the Duck Dynasty series, including a cookbook and a book by/about the head of the clan/company. Which leads me to believe that someone believed that fans of this show could read, which probably differs from what the friends Facebook shows you would believe. Maybe I’ll pick some of them up at the book sales to pair with my Duck Commander wine if they even make that any more.

I bought this book at LibraryCon last year (is it showing off my riches to link to posts that illustrate how profligate I am in buying independent artists’ and writers’ work at fantasy conventions?). After reading the long Agatha Christie omnibus, I wanted something shorter to pad out my annual to-read collection. So I essentially read this on Wednesday night after finishing the Agatha Christie.

I told my beautiful wife that Cullen Bunn was a horror writer, but that’s not exactly true. He’s a comic book writer, and this is an independent collection of some of his stories that he’s turned over to other comic book artists (aside from his normal co-workers at the big publishing houses) to draw up and whatnot.

We’ve got eleven stories set in the horror milieu with different drawing styles. Unfortunately, the depth of the stories is a little thin–at least from a textual perspective. As you know, gentle reader, this is a peccadillo of mine: That modern comics have thinner stories to make more room for the art work, which someone decided is the whole reason for comics in the first place and should be paramount.

The stories themselves are of the type you’d find in D.C.’s Secrets of the Haunted House (although how would I know? I was a Marvel kid), albeit a little thinner. Perhaps those old stories were padded to stretch two into a comic, or maybe they had ads in them to make them seem longer.

At any rate, a quick enough read (look). It didn’t inspire me to try my hand at more fiction like The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia did, but, on the other hand, this represents eleven story set-ups that Bunn came up with that turned into a finished product. Which is a far better track record than I have over the last decade, which is basically two completed poems and maybe a short story nope, that was completed in the first decade of the century, not the second. So maybe I should get to work and get into the game before I tut-tut someone else’s comic book stories too much.

Also, when I went looking for the book of Charles Sander Peirce last weekend, I turned up a lot of books I wished I could read right now but I had to finish the Agatha Christie omnibus. Now that I’m done, though, I’ve forgotten which books I was so hot about, so I’ll probably pick up another graphic novel I bought at LibraryCon or an Executioner novel instead.

This is the famous five-novel omnibus that my grandmother sent me earlier this year. It includes the following novels:

• The Mirror Crack’d, wherein a movie star buys a home and renovates a home in St. Mary Mead, home village of Jane Marple. The movie star throws an open house, and a woman dies immediately after meeting the movie star. Poisoned! Miss Marple investigates.
• Caribbean Mystery, wherein Miss Marple is on holiday at a Caribbean resort, when an elderly blowhard offers to show Miss Marple a picture of a murderer. When he glances at the photo whilst taking it out of the wallet, he reacts to it and puts it back without showing Miss Marple. He then dies, and when Miss Marple investigates, she discovers the photo is no longer in his wallet, and someone else to whom he told the story must be THE MURDERER. Other bodies hit the floor sand before Miss Marple strikes!
• Nemesis, wherein a rich fellow from Caribbean Mystery leaves a strange bequest/challenge for Miss Marple when he dies: Travel on a garden and sites bus tour and solve a mystery. What is the mystery? He doesn’t say, but ultimately it might be to clear his estranged, ne’er-do-well son of a murder. Other bodies hit the floor treacherous mountain trail before Miss Marple, along with some dead rich guy-funded guardian angels, nab the bad guy before Miss Marple becomes the next victim!
• What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, wherein a friend of Miss Marples is convinced she has seen a murder on a train on the next track, but the police find no evidence and no body. But Miss Marple believes her friend and finds herself in a remote town with a catspaw investigating a rich house full of suspects. When the catspaw discovers the body, everyone might be a suspect, but whose body is that in the sacrophagus? Also, poisoning occurs!
• The Body in Library, wherein friends of Miss Marple find a body in their library. For novelty’s sake, this body was strangled, but it’s not anyone known to the Bantrys, in whose library the body was found. So Miss Marple comes to investigate on behalf of her friend, and as the other bodies hit the floor canyon in a flaming wreck, she has to uncover the real murderer.

So, Brian J., did you figure out the murderers? You know, I knew by page 70, about halfway through The Mirror Crack’d, but I might have read that book before. I also remember Mrs. McGillicuddy seeing the murder from when I read that book in high school, but I didn’t remember whodunit. So I was one for five, ish, as I knew in what direction the murderer lie in What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!. But perhaps I kind of remembered it. Also, I knew kind of something in Nemesis, but not exactly.

My beautiful wife asked me which was my favorite, but to be honest, that’s like asking what your favorite Executioner book is. They’re formulaic, but of a different formula than men’s adventure paperbacks. Someone Miss Marple knows or somewhere Miss Marple goes has a murder on her/its hands, and she acts all dithery but listens to people and compares them to a list of people she’s known to ferret out the killer. The books often feature common tropes, such as:

• A child or young person interested in the murder who looks for clues or tries to help, and sometimes finds a relevant clue. Although in one such book, playing against type, the child is the murderer (not in any of these books, though).
• The murderer(s) kill a second person to confuse the issue by dressing the second person, a random townie, up like the person he/she/they meant to kill in order to confuse the time/circumstances of the original murder. This happens a couple of times in these books.
• Poison is the method of choice for many of these murderers, or strangulation. Neither of which leaves a messy crime scene–at least, not a crime scene that would have yielded many details in these days.
• Rich men who are almost dead or invalid. Such characters appear in two of these books and trigger a third.
• The murderer is generally present throughout the story, but is not under suspicion until the big reveal at the end.

Reading five relatively close together means I can spot these tropes. I imagine if I read a bunch of them, I would get better at figuring out whodunit. I think I was better at them when I was reading a bunch of them at the beginning of high school, but in the interim, I’ve gotten a little more used to hard boiled or modern thrillers which are less clue-driven whodunits.

Also, the body in the library thing. The last novel is entitled The Body in the Library, as a matter of fact. You know, in reading these old English mysteries, libraries aren’t good for much except killing people or stashing bodies. You know, I have often dreamed of having a home with a proper library, but English mysteries might be killing that urge in me.

So it was a nice way to pass some time. Although I’m not sure I am in the frame of mind, really, to get the most out of English or modern cozy mysteries, although I will read them from time to time when I find them on the to-read shelves. Or when my grandmother sends them to me.

This is a pretty nice edition, too, with Genuine Bonded Leather cover and gold paint atop. Probably archival paper, too. Chatham River Press must be akin to Easton Press in publishing nice editions of books, but it looks like they’re no longer in business. Still, although Nogglestead does not smell of mahogany, it’s nice to have as many leather-bound books as possible.

Like The First Four Years, this book was not published in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s lifetime and is based on a loose diary she had of her trip with Almanzo (Manly), Rose, and another family from South Dakota to the land they eventually bought near Mansfield, Missouri, which became Rocky Ridge Farm and their forever home. The diary entries are leavened with Rose Wilder Lane’s recollections and some photographs not only of the family but also of the places they passed through, although many are historical photos of the time when the Wilders passed through and are not of or by the Wilders themselves.

That said, the book does not have a great narrative structure and does not characterize the people in it much. The trip occurs after repeated crop failures and both Laura and Almanzo suffer from bad cases of diptheria. I read Willa Cather’s O, Pioneers! after I started reading the Little House books, and this one reminds me most of the Cather book. Whereas the other Little House books (except, perhaps, the aforementioned The First Four Years) emphasize the technical skills and mindset in being a pioneer, but the diary entries in this book catalog not only how pretty the land is that they visit but also the price of land per acre and the expected yield in bushels per acre.

The other stunning metric from the book is that she reports the daily high temperature on their trip until she loses the thermometer sometime along the way. Many or most of the days of their trip through South Dakota and Nebraska the temperature was 100 degrees in July and August. In 1894. Don’t the models predicting our imminent demise from the boiling seas take data from after that to make their predictions? All I know is that we’ve had two cool springs in a row here in southwest Missouri, this one with a late freeze that killed my peach blossoms (again), so I’m inclined to believe that temperature has varied and continues to vary. But I am no scientist, just someone who takes his lived experience and tries to make sense of it.

I have two other books of Little Houseiana here: A biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and a collection of her “discovered” writings in pompous hardback that I suspect will be more unpolished bits that she didn’t plan to publish but that the Trust put out on her behalf eventually. I was going to power through them, but I’ve decided to power through the last novel in the Agatha Christie omnibus instead. Because, despite all the cool books I’ve recently found and want to read right now, this is a situation that calls for powering through books I’m not excited about. But soon: fun!

As I predicted when I got this book, I jumped on it quickly as an interlude between books in the Agatha Christie omnibus I’m reading. Also, as predicted, it’s a school book order kind of book, geared to youths in the late 1970s and early 1980s in elementary school who wanted to read about monsters and science fiction. Nerds, we were called in those days. The text looks to have been original in 1980 with an update in 1986, so I would have been a couple years too old to have ordered it from Tab, Arrow, or Scholastic. Now, of course, I’m very old indeed.

At any rate, the book groups monsters, mostly from cinema, into different groups: Alien invaders, aliens in space, robots/androids, horror monsters, and invisible monsters. It then touches on some of them from movies, as I said, from the 1940s to Return of the Jedi (an update to the original 1980 text, natch). It’s kind of a high level enumeration rather than any in-depth exploration, but it’s a kid’s thing, for crying out loud.

And although it touches upon giant insect movies from the 1950s and a couple of giant octopus/dinosaur movies, it does not really go into the Godzillaverse at all, which is odd, since those films were in heavy rotation on Saturday afternoons in the 1970s. Maybe that was only Milwaukee. But no name-checks of Rodan, Gamera, Mothra, or Mechazilla. So a clear oversight.

And the best thing is the very last section:

What is the most frightening of all the monsters of science fiction? I suppose everybody has his or her own favorite. And I have mine. Like the other creatures discussed in this chapter, my favorite does not have a solid body. It appears only as a color.

The thing–it has no name-is in a story called The Colour Out Of Space. The story was written in 1927 by H.P. Lovecraft.

* * * *

The Colour Out Of Space is a truly frightening story. Someday you may wish to read it yourself. Let me give you one piece of advice. Don’t read it just before going to sleep.

A 2020 update of this book would probably mention that the film version of this story came out this year. And it might not mention the story at all or only in passing instead of the three page treatment it gets in the book–the longest non-movie or television treatment of text.

At any rate, I didn’t get much out of it except a reminder of some of the films I haven’t seen yet and probably won’t as they’re old and don’t appear on streaming services or in my local video store anymore. I did get an entry in my list of annual books read, though.

This book identifies and documents a number of lighthouses that are (or were) at risk of falling down and need preservation and restoration. The book looks at a variety of lighthouses in different regions, including the northeast, the south, and the Great Lakes (and on on Lake Tahoe, but it’s not really a lighthouse in the lighthouse sense of the word).

It gives, in dribs and drabs, some history of the Lighthouse Service, which handled lighthouses before the Coast Guard took them over, as well as information about some of the players responsible for designing multiple lighthouses and patenting lens systems. Also, some of the lighthouses were staffed and not automated until my life time.

Many were not considerered worth preservation immediately after they were decommissioned, and even now, some are nothing more than brick towers standing on some bit of private land. Although lighthouses in the popular imagination are picturesque, in many cases they were much more utilitarian structures, and one can understand why the government and locals might not have thought them worthy of preservation. Contrast them with something like water towers to get an adeqaute sense of the relationship.

Some of the relics are in parks or public locations where the locals have not allotted budget for restoration, and the book refers to a couple that are on private property (one is being restored for an AirBNB before that was a thing). Man, how cool would it be to have a lighthouse on your land? Of course, I think it would be cool because I would have the urge and perhaps someday the budget to restore it. Note that I had this exact same idea when I read A History of the Rural Schools in Greene County, Mo ten years ago.

I also got to thinking of a recent film set at a lighthouse with Williem Defoe, a Wisconsin native, and that guy from those vampire movies. I wracked my brain trying to remember the name of it, and that was especially hard because it was the obvious The Lighthouse. And now that I’ve read the plot summary, yep, that’s a movie I’m not going to watch just because I read a book about lighthouses.

At any rate, an interesting browse. Too wordy for a football game browse, but who knows when that will again be an issue.

This book is a little wordier than Einstein for Beginners, but one would expect that the sort of people who would write Marxist comic books are probably better equipped to go on at length about Sartre and Existentialism than physics.

But it’s a good primer on Sartre’s thought through his career. It’s broken out by topics, but also a bit of evolution which, spoiler alert! culminates in the highest point of Sartre’s thought which is of course the defense of the Soviet Union and Stalinism found in Critique of Dialectical Reason which was not published completely in his lifetime because he could not square the circle. Fortunately, this comic book does its best to do the same. But, yeah, that’s not what Sartre is best known for and for good reason.

In case you’re wondering, Marx doesn’t appear in this book until page 3. Fortunately, though, he is clothed.

I’m getting a strange sort of pleasure out of these books. I mean, I know they’re simplistic Marxist tracts, but it’s interesting to kind of contrast my understanding of the topic with the comic book and see if I can spot exactly where it goes spinning into nonsense.

This book is sixteen years into the series after Einstein for Beginners, and I see that they’ve got a bevy of books in then-current print. Einstein for Beginners isn’t listed in the covers, nor are Marx for Beginners, Lenin for Beginners, or The Anti-Nuclear Handbook, but we’ve got a mix of then-contemporary-ish titles like Mao for Beginners, Pan-Africanism for Beginners, Black Panthers for Beginners and Malcom X for Beginners along with “timeless” topics like Plato for Beginners, Hemingway for Beginners, and Nietzsche for Beginners. Then we go into the WTF with The History of Clowns for Beginners. And Sex for Beginners–I’m almost afraid how Marxism might ruin that for me. But, still, I have a strange fascination for these books now, and I know if I see any of these in the wild for a dollar or two, I will buy them and read them soon.

I got this book from ABC Books last week, so at a lull in the Agatha Christie omnibus, I picked it up because I thought a play would be a quick read before I returned to Miss Marple.

Well, no.

It turns out that this is an extra full evening play. It runs 196 pages of dense dialog. It’s not the centered character name with snappy dialog that you get in something like, say, The Courtship of Barbara Holt; it’s more like the character name at the upper left and a dense speech that you get out of a thick collection of Shakespeare (the likes of which I should probably pick up again two (!) years later).

It’s of the subgenre, which is apparently a subgenre given the propensity of plays with similar setting and characters, of “grifters and losers in a bar” type (see also The Time Of Your Life by William Saroyan) which differs from another subgenre of the “grifters and losers in their home” type (such as The Homecoming by Harold Pinter and another play I saw staged at St. Louis Community College-Meramac twenty-some years ago). Given that these were Big Plays that appeared on Broadway or in London, I have to wonder about the class implications of the hoity-toity people getting together to watch the pale imitations of the lower classes get together and be losers together. Undoubtedly, one could also say something about the lower classes coming together to watch well-to-do losers and grifters come together to grift on The Real Housewives of New York, New Jersey, Beverly Hills, or Khardasia. Meanwhile, I keep stumbling upon these books.

At any rate, a group of souses at a rundown bar in 1912 await the coming of Hickey, a salesman who comes for a bender every year on the owner’s birthday, and buys all the drinks. We get introduced to a couple of leftists, a couple of “tarts” (not prostitutes) run by the bartender (not pimp). We’ve got another “tart” who has been planning to marry the other “bartender.” We’ve got a number of people who’ve lost their jobs or positions, presumably for love of the bottle, who’ve thought to sober up and get their things together “tomorrow.” And when Hickey comes, he’s a changed man, sober, and ready to help them come to acceptance of their lots by showing them that they really don’t want to do those things at all.

So it’s long, it’s got a lot of characters, and it’s depressing. Which is why it keeps getting revived, sixty years later (the cover ties into the 1999 revival starring Kevin Spacey, Tony Danza, and Paul Giamatti; the 1966 version had Mr. Drummond Conraid Bain in a juicy role).

It might be the first Eugene O’Neill I’ve read; it won’t be the last, as I have A Moon for the Misbegotten which looks to be shorter.

Also, note that this is the second book in a row that I’ve completed which features the ultrabad word nigger (The House of Man being the first). Is this a sign of my latent racism, or just luck of the draw? The Internet would probably agree to the former. I bet the word is cut or will be cut from the newest revival of the play, though. Even when depicting a different time and place, whitey can’t say that, especially in anger (as it appears in this play).

This book has an introduction to it written by Wilder’s attorney who explains the provenance of this book since Laura Ingalls Wilder did not publish it, and it did not appear until after Rose Wilder died. So it was published by the estate, the intellectual property machine that later came up with other “generations” of Little House books likely not envisioned by Laura Ingalls Wilder herself. And I can guess why.

This book is short, only 134 pages, and it outlines the first four years of Laura and Almanzo’s marriage, their hardships holding onto both homesteads Almanzo had, and the birth of Rose. The book does not go into details, and it does not include actual scenes, really, between the characters.

What we do get is a lot of bad things happening. Almanzo buys a lot on credit, and his crops fail due to new and inventive ways (a hail storm right before harvest, four days of extreme heat before harvest). He retrenches a bit, but at the end, their last shanty burns down. And the book ends. The Wilder family moves to Missouri afterwards, but On The Way Home is not considered part of the series generally.

I can see why and how this book was not included in the books Wilder published. The books through These Happy Golden Years are romanticised, where the men are generally competent–although some hints of less do appear–and the families generally come out okay at the end of the book. The earlier books in the series describe “Laura”‘s childhood through her marriage, and the marriage and her moving into her first house as a bride kind of cap that story arc. This book, on the other hand, does not really provide much of a coda to the series or cap it like the end of These Happy Golden Years did.

So I can see why she was content in her lifetime to stand pat on the books as she published them. Because they were uplifting and set a good example, whereas this book lacks that.

This book, like Red Plush and Black Beard, is a pamphlet-sized publication that I probably bought in a bundle. It’s subtitled “A Lecture”. Research indicates that the presenter was a humorist/poet who performed on the chautauqua circuit (see this and this where he was on the bill with Carrie Nation). Hey, I know what a chautauqua is! So although one might, at the outset, think it’s a piece by a clergyman and this represents a sermon or theological lecture of some sort, it’s not.

What is it, then? Well, I suspect an entertaining and potentially uplifting/inspiring way to pass an hour or so in a tent in the summertime.

His conceit is something out of Maslow’s heirarchy of needs or chakras: basically, mankind consists of four “floors”: The base needs, the heart, the intellect, and the soul, and he ties them to levels in the body. He then goes onto a little politics trying to stretch the metaphor, but it doesn’t work.

The prose is chock full of poems of the author’s own creation to illustrate the point. The poems aren’t half bad; better than the typical grandmother poetry, but they would have to be–he wrote and probably refined these poems for performance.

In the middle of the book, he goes into a riff about black churchgoers and a sermon delivered to them in dialect, which includes the word niggers, which will probably give modern audiences the vapors if not make them faint right out. Of course, it’s not racist–it’s a black preacher telling a black congregation to quiet down–kind of like its appearance in modern rap songs (but in this case, it’s a white author using it, so: vapors).

Wait a minute, Brian J., did you just type out the whole n-word? I did. It’s just six letters, not a magic talisman.

I’ve had to type it and a lot of other squicky words in testing content filters in my day job. And I grew up in the projects, so I’ve heard it. I might even have said it, but I cannot remember doing so and probably wouldn’t have as I was a small white boy in the projects, and saying THE BAD WORD in anger would likely have led to a beating. But that was in the 1970s, when Blazing Saddles was made. Somehow the word got worser since then, if you can imagine. A word. But I digress. And I used a derogatory term for Caucasians in this paragraph, and you probably went right over it.

He also uses the term mick in a couple poems, but, again, they’re Irish people calling themselves that. So according to modern accounting, I guess he’s twice as anti-Irish as Racist. But in neither case is he saying that blacks or Irish people are bad. Which is what racism and anti-Irishism is, don’t forget. Not just using words neutrally.

To be honest, those parts of the book in dialect, including the Black church scene and the two Irish poems, really bog the reading down as you have to try to sound out the phonetically spelled words. But, again, this was written not so much as a “lecture” but as a performance piece that had to fill an hour or so in a tent on a hot summer evening.

So it’s an interesting piece as much for what it is as what it says.

I got both of these books this week from ABC Books, and I jumped right into them as I procrastinate starting the next of the Miss Marple novels in my omnibus. So let that speak to my character: I jumped right into the cartoons instead of naughty book.

You know, I haven’t seen Ziggy in the local papers lately. I’m not sure if that’s because his presence on the funny pages are just so much like the atmosphere that they don’t stand out or if the Ziggy’s syndication has contracted. But reading through a bunch of Ziggy cartoons at once led me to realize what a sad sack Ziggy was. Kind of an everyman, a bit lonely, a bit Existential. Still, I got a couple of chuckles out of the collection which is more than I can say for some of the multi-panel strips (such as Sally Forth) from back in the day. Some of the humor refers to then-current events, so maybe my boys won’t understand when they make off with this book, but, as I sad, I chuckled.

I was pleased to see that Catss by Gross was not of a type with 101 Uses for a Dead Cat; apparently, Gross is the name of the cartoonist and not the type of humor one finds within. Instead, it’s a number of one-panel cartoons featuring cats. Several of them appeared in The New Yorker, so it’s that sort of dry, sophisticated pictured wit. I got a chuckle or two out of the book; not as much as the volume of Ziggy, but enough to be pleased to have read it (quickly).

Now, enough procrastinating; back to the Agatha Christie. After I read the other comic book I bought at ABC Books this week.

This is a condensed, pamphlet-sized version of a longer book (which is $300 on Amazon if you search via Bing but $8 if you search on Amazon?) about Marguerite Higgins’s experience in the Soviet Union. It clocks in at 16 pages, and I probably got it in a bundle of chapbooks/pamphlets for a buck at a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale some time ago. But I’m counting as a book I read regardless of the length.

At any rate, you don’t have to be a Russiaphile to know what she finds: Brutal architecture, primitive living, but a resilient and resigned people.

But enough about this little publication of the Good Reading Rack Service. It leads to a little wondering about the Good Reading Rack Service itself. The book has no price markings; what was the Good Reading Rack Service? Internet searches yield no history of the company but a boatload of entries from their series. Was it teaser giveaways for bookstores trying to sell the books themselves?

Also, how about Marguerite Higgins herself? A woman war correspondent who covered World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam along with being the bureau head in Moscow when she wrote Red Plush and Black Beard. Wow, that’s more interesting than what she had to say about Moscow in the middle 1950s.