Category: Books

I must confess to you, gentle reader, that it took me three tries to make it through this book. The first, no doubt, was during or not long after our vacation to Florida which included a stop on Sanibel Island in 2016. I am not sure why I powered through this time. Perhaps because access to my library was limited for a bit. Perhaps my new reading habits allowed for it–although I did not take this upstairs to read whilst stretched out on the sofa. Perhaps my present “reading habits” also includes dodging my dilligence in reading a little bit of the Story of Civilization every night. But I made it past page 50 (of 232).

Okay, so, the plot: A Russian arms dealer blackmails an attorney into helping him take over land left by a Sanibel-island resident to create a nature conservatory (along with others in various places) so that he can store biological and chemical weapons that he’s selling. Local and part-time Sanibel residents including a couple of government and quasi-government officials, a potter, the former judge handling the estate, and the main character, a marketing guy who has just written a book and was instrumental in the incident of the Sanibel Arcanum (a previous book) work to thwart the Russian. I mean, the plot has some interesting twists to it–the blackmailed attorney plans to double-cross the Russian. Okay, that’s the twist.

Unfortunately, the execution poorly serves the plot.

Most of the narrative structure is very short peeks into various characters. By “short peeks,” I mean sometimes we get two or three paragraphs before jump cutting to the next group. This makes it difficult to really tell the characters apart. And even the longer pieces are the groups getting together to talk about what’s happening instead of actual action. The characters come together and have dinner; they talk about biochemical weapons, which is the subject of the report that the quasi-government characters are working on and, coincidentally, what the Russian hopes to store and/or traffic from Sanibel Island.

At about page 70, the marketing guy/novelist goes to the Grand Cayman where the Russian has another home. The books focuses on this single character, who happens to be on Grand Cayman because he has a freelance assignment to write about the island. Not because he’s investigating the Russian, although he does while he’s there.

Even when focusing on the single character, the tone of the book shifts to a bit of travel writing with exquisite descriptions of the island and the food the character eats. A little action happens, and then the reader thinks, “Ah, a story!” But then after a bit of action, the character returns to his main home in Indianapolis, several months elapse, and then his family returns to Sanibel Island and we get dinner parties again. Oh, wait, no, the potter goes on a mission trip to Russia to a Siberian town where the Russian’s father coincidentally lives, and he gets info that will ultimately become important.

We get another burst of action/action in the book’s climax, but a lot of the book hinges on coincidences and improbable-to-poor decision making. It repeats some of its descriptions early and refers to the previous book far too often.

I did flag a couple of things in the book:

• The book mentions several times the bin Laden organization as a possible buyer for biological and chemical weapons; this book was published years before 2001.
• “We have established a strong environmental stewardship here. Thanks to the wonderful efforts of Ding Darling when he worked for the federal government.” To be honest, I was a little afraid to search the Internet for that name, but I guess you probably already know he was an early 20th century cartoonist who founded the National Wildlife Federation. The book is all-in on trusting the government and believing it’s a force for good–and perhaps that simply raising awareness of the dangers of biological and chemical weapons will change the world.
• “Hey, Dad, you’re on Amazon.com!” one of the children says. True fact, children: We did call it Amazon.com once upon a time.

The book is also very dated for its relatively young age. It goes into too much detail about computer use and the Internet–people sure are printing out a lot of Web sites–and it is before the Department of Homeland Security and the whole two-by-two/hands-of-blue/pats-for-you regime. So the bad guys wheel an incapacitated character onto a plane in a wheelchair and just walk through security like that in a fashion we cannot fathom now, where we still have to take off our shoes after that one thing twenty years ago.

One biography of this still-living author says he has a third book in the works, but I have not seen evidence of it online. He does have a blog which he looks to update monthly or a little more frequently with photos and musings from his life in California (not Sanibel Island). I’d link to it, but although he says the media is broken, he also says that those who creatively indict the former president are patriots who are sucking the poison out of our country. So, nah.

I thought I might have just picked this up at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale in September, but apparently it was part of my haul in April.

I guess that makes sense, as I picked up a number of chapbooks to plant on my chairside book accumulation point when the football season started so I could browse them whilst holding an iPad to watch football games on those rare occasions where my NFL+ subscription would yield a football game I wanted to watch but could only do so on the iPad due to NFL+’s limited streaming rights. That was a week before the book sale this autumn. I discovered one cannot really browse a book whilst holding an iPad, so I have not been able to browse the chapbooks during the couple of football games that I have caught on a mobile device. I still have them on the table, though, as I have invented a new reading habit this summer which finds me reading on the sofa upstairs to finish the evening. I have some First Things and New Oxford Review magazines that I’ve read up there–mostly reading The Story of Civilization in the chair downstairs–but I’ve also read some of other books such as Samurai Cat Goes to the Movies and Vengeance Is Mine! up there. So I brought this book up to read there. You know, I might have written a navel-gazing post on my new book reading habits (mostly, I finish the evening stretched out on the couch upstairs reading a book or magazine because that tracks with how I spend evenings on vacations), but, c’mon, man–you’re not here for my navel-gazing. You’re here for pictures of movie starlets in films I watch. Odds are you’re not even reading this, and Jeremy Daryl is going to wonder what the hell I’m talking about in this book report. If he can even find it when searching the Internet on “Jeremy Daryl”.

So that’s a lot of verbiage in a book report that’s not about the book, but I suppose that’s okay since I really don’t have a lot to say about the book. To be honest, it looks like it might have been the results of a high school or college introduction to poetry class that the fellow decided to dump onto print-on-demand. The layout is rudimentary–a series of poems with titles and lines in double-spacing with no breaks at the pages, no headers or footers, and no pagination. As you might recall, gentle reader, I have been lauded, well, noted for my bok design ability more than my actual poetry.

The poems themselves are, well, rudimentary. You don’t get the whole mélange of different types of poems–an acrostic, a limerick, a haiku, a tanka, a sonnet, and a free verse–all the poems look to be free verse with little to no rhyming on a variety of topics. A couple nice moments amongst the pieces

However, if the fellow chooses to continue writing poetry and reads a bit more of the stuff, I’m a little more optimistic for his development than your average Instagram poet because the poems are longer and have a little more room for thematic expansion and explanation than brain droppings not done by George Carlin. So maybe there’s hope, but probably the publication of this book was more of a lark than a serious endeavor.

I bought this book in 2017 (at the same garage sale where I got Catnapped! which I also read this year) for just the moment where I was in the mood for it, and apparently this was it. I mean, I had passed over it a couple of times, but this time was the right time, apparently.

So: This book is the fifth in a series (!) about bipedal cats who are samurai and who are on a mission to avenge the uncle’s master’s slaying. Well, that’s the premise of the series, anyway. In this book, they are on the run from a cold assassin robot from the future (or another timeline) sent to kill one of them. Which leads them to Oz (Australia, you see) to see the wizard (which allows them to blend parody/satire of The Wizard of Oz with Mad Max), a flashback story patterned on The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven, and then onto a Predator/Star Trek mashup, and, well….

I am pretty sure I would have found this more funny in 1994. When in high school, I penned a number of satirical stories of this nature. It started when my creative writing group broke into groups, and each group added a bit to a story started by another group, and the assignment continued until each group had contributed to each story. We came up with an obnoxious character named Tyrone Jackson who was a rabbi from Thailand and inserted that character into each story. Once we were done with it, I wrote out, by hand on loose leaf paper The Further Adventures of Tyrone Jackson where I did the same sort of thing in this book, and Jackson “borrows” Doctor Who’s TARDIS and goes through space and time and dimensions, picking up a companion from a world of superheroes and confronting his multi-dimensional enemy Lyndon LaRouche. So, you see, I was primed for this kind of humor in my youth.

But now that I am, ahem, slightly older? I found some of it amusing, but it really ain’t my bag any more, baby.

I got this book the last time Sleuth Ink came to ABC Books for a signing in July. Wait, maybe it’s not the last time ABC Books had a book signing for the group–maybe it’s just the last time that I went. ABC Books has been racking up the book signings since, and I have been missing a lot of them. I’m also playing the little interior drama will I go to the Friends of the Library Book Sale? It starts today, and I am not sure about going. I am really, really running out of space for books and LPs. And yet the odds that I attend are still fairly high even though I won’t decide to do it until Saturday morning.

At any rate, this book presents itself as a Christian Suspense Novel, but it’s not, really. It’s more of a Christian romance or melodrama. A young man with a family moves to Springfield Lake City from a small town in the region with a promise of a contract by a known developer based on a relatively recently deceased mogul from Springfield. However, this business owner has the reputation for screwing over subcontractors who work for him, driving them into bankruptcy. The young man pretty much bets it all on this one contract and gets put behind the eight ball when a flood wipes away his work and makes it difficult for him to making the spring Lake–no, it’s spring in this case–and missing the deadline would trigger financial penalties.

The pressures of the job lead him to pulling away from his pregnant wife. Then a series of unfortunate events occurs: A car hits their house, the husband is t-boned by a car which puts him in the hospital, the wife has her baby, the husband befriends the homeless near the job site and eats with them at the mission, and the wife get hit over the head when visiting the job site which puts her in the hospital as well. The family pulls apart and comes together, the husband finds the faith that the wife always had, and then an unrelated investigation handles the bad businessman in the last couple of pages.

The writing is not bad, but the plotting is a rather melodramatic. The book is a bit talky–I know, I know, if you’ve read John Donnelly’s Gold, you could say the same about it. But the worst part is some of the detail work which just doesn’t ring true. Now, I’ve not been in a maternity ward in fifteen years, but the description of the events of the wife’s giving birth and that whole thing–she hasn’t seen the baby in a long time? From my recollection, the mother is supposed to suckle the child a whole lot. I’ve been in an ER and in hospitals, and some of those elements don’t ring true. And the owner of a landscaping business who spends months moping around a job site and a husband counting on that one thing for all of his family’s finances…. Well, these things did not feel right.

I always feel bad when I pan the work of local authors who have put in the effort to write and self-publish novels. I mean, it’s been almost 20 years since I finished my magnus opus. Reading these books inspires me, though, to see other people doing it. And I’m hopeful that the authors I review will go on to write more and better in the future, unlike me.

I forgot to include Fraktur in my list of disparate vocabulary words I will soon forget, but fraktur is one of them. Because suddenly I found myself reading this book, which I undoubtedly got in a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale bundle of chapbooks for $1.

The booklet contains the contents of a talk that the author gave when the Free Library of Pennsylvania got a large collection of fraktur documents. Fraktur refers not only to a font/typeface of German printing but also to the freehand documents produced by German immigrants in Pennsylvania in the late 18th through the late to middle 19th centuries.

Basically, if you wanted to have a birth certificate or a marriage certificate in those days, you’d hire a wandering illustrator to write one up for you are pre-printed forms from the county office were not available. The Pennsylvania “Dutch” (Deutsch) mostly spoke German, so they hired German-speakers to write them up, and the producers also decorated the documents with little illustrations. The Free Library of Pennsylvania in the middle of the last century (hey, old man!) got a private collection (and later another) of these historical documents.

And, you know what? It was an interesting little read.

The talk/booklet gives a bit of history, some description, and a couple of stories. She tells of finding an illustration of a crocodile on one such document and wondering how a German-American circa 1850 knew how to draw a crocodile, so she starts looking at educational spellers, in German, and finds the very illustration the artist reproduced. She also briefly outlines one such itinerant artist who spent years going community to community, sleeping in the rail depots, and earning just a bit writing and illustrating fraktur.

It’s 26 pages, so the length of a long essay or something that the New England slicks produced before they became mere propaganda mills.

And, gentle reader, you might wonder, Does Brian J. have any fraktur? Well, gentle reader, I might, although a photo reproduction. I have in a rolled tube somewhere a large photograph or slick reproduction of my great Aunt Laura’s birth certificate from the late 19th century (I assume), and from what I remember, it is in German, elaborate, and quite likely frakturic. It has been a while since I’ve gone into the archives–about a year and a quarter ago I had to come up with my marriage license, and although I did not find mine (I am married–I remember that pretty clearly even though I might have gotten a little wavery and woozy when she came down the aisle), I found many others in the family–and I would likely have put this document to the side un-unrolled as I knew what it was and I was not interested.

I am interested now. So I got more out of this book, and more interest on things outside this book, than I get from most books I read.

The author has a couple of other books available on Amazon and eBay from the first half of the last century, but this one does not look to be widely available. As it is collectible, perhaps I should put it in a special place on my read shelves. Undoubtedly, wherever I put it, it will be the place where I cannot find it again.

Well, gentle reader, when I reported on The Best of Saki, when I was younger and had probably only read a short-story or two from O. Henry, I confused the two because they were both wry/humorous short story writers who used pseudonyms and were basically contemporaries albeit on different sides of the Atlantic ocean. I also read a book whose author called O. Henry blended with The Twilight Zone, so I thought I would familiarize myself with the O. Henry to see if the comparison was apt. And, well, sometimes.

So the first two stories, “The Gift of the Magi” and “A Retrieved Reformation”, are the ones you see most anthologized in textbooks. In the first, a husband and wife living on a strict budget sell their most precious possessions (hair and a wristwatch) to buy a Christmas present for the other–which augments the precious possession pawned. In the second, a safecracker is in town for a job, but goes straight when he falls in love and opens a shoe store. But when children are accidentally locked into the new bank vault, he uses his old skills to open the vault under the eyes of the lawman who just caught up with him–but who lets the safecracker go (which reminds me a lot of The Outlaw Josey Wales which might have drawn inspiration from the story).

The book has 27 other stories in it, and I’m too lazy to enumerate them all here. They kind of fall into two camps: love affairs that are missed or are matched and stories about men and/or criminals who don’t get what they’re looking for. Maybe I should break it into three silos, with men getting or not getting what they want and criminals somehow getting a comeuppance, caught, or turning over another leaf.

If you read a bunch of them in a row, they’re a bit repetitive. I mean, we have two stories in 29 where old friends meet after a time where one is now a cop and the other a lawbreaker and the cop cannot bring himself to bust his friend but sort of does due to the twist. The stories do not all end with DUN DUN DUN! They have a little more denouement for that, mostly. And they don’t end up happily–sometimes Richard Cory goes home and puts a bullet in his head (the twist at the end of two or three–or more–of the stories is suicide). But for the most part, they are amusing, or just (justice–I did not forget a word there).

But I was ready after 29 stories to be done. My mother-in-law apparently has the complete works of O. Henry which she inherited from her father, and I cannot imagine trying to go through a multi-volume set at once. Although reading them one or two a month, maybe, or more if you took all the magazines in 1910, that would have been pleasant.

I guess O. Henry doesn’t get much truck with academia these days, which is too bad. He has a lot of good moments and life lessons. And a lot of vocabulary to teach.

I saw this book mentioned on a blog, and I cannot remember which one. It almost makes me want to create a blog or browser plugin called “Where’d I read that?” which searches the sites on your blog roll and in your browser history to find out where I should attribute credit. Or I could just guess Bayou Renaissance Man, conduct a quick site search over there, and discover yeah, that’s it.

So Bayou Renaissance Man’s preview had the first bit of the book in it, and it looked to maybe be a combination of musing on Emerson’s essay blended with modern prepping tips, and I guess it was that after a fashion. But it read more like a series of blog posts hastily stitched together, and I didn’t get a whole lot out of it. I found it very hard to read, in fact, and then I realized why:

60% or more of the sentences in the book (an estimate, not a count) use the verb is.

Let’s look at the first part of the Bayou Renaissance Man’s excerpt for an example as I am too lazy to type any out on my own:

What is self-reliance?

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance still rings true today: “Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another.”

For Emerson, self-reliance means thinking independently, trusting your own intuition and refusing to take the well-worn path of conforming to others’ expectations.

This celebration of individualism is the norm today, but it was radical in Emerson’s more traditionalist day. What’s striking about Emerson’s description of self-reliance is its internal quality: it’s about one’s intellectual and emotional self-reliance, not the hands-on skills of producing life’s essentials.

Emerson doesn’t describe self-reliance in terms of taking care of oneself in practical terms, such as being able to build a cabin on Walden Pond and live off foraging and a garden like his friend Thoreau. (The land on Walden Pond was owned by Emerson.)

Emerson did not address practical self-reliance because these skills were commonplace in the largely agrarian, rural 1840s. Even city dwellers mostly made their living from practical skills, and the majority of their food came from nearby farms. (Imported sugar, coffee, tea and spices were luxuries.)

The economy of the 1840s was what we would now call localized: most of the goods and services were locally produced, and households provided many of their own basic needs. Global trade in commodities such as tea and porcelain thrived, but these luxuries made up a small part of the economy (one exception being whale oil used for lighting).

Even in the 1840s, few individuals were as self-sufficient as Thoreau. Households met many of their needs themselves, but they relied on trusted personal networks of makers and suppliers for whatever goods and services they could not provide themselves.

Okay, perhaps it’s not 60% in that excerpt, and maybe it’s not 60% in the whole book, but it is a whole lot, and I certainly noticed it and then got bogged down analyzing the writing more than the content. Of course, if you’ve made it this far, you’re looking at that preceeding sentence and are preparing your tu quoque attack because I used is for 60% of the verbs in that particularly convoluted sentence. But this is a blog post, not a book. Not even a book based on blog posts.

Aside from the issue, the content was a bit repetitive, identifying global macro forces that have led us into a tight spot–the book italicises key concepts like landfill economy–that items are produced to have a short useful life after which the owner will scrap them and buy a new one–and then italicizes and defines them again. Useful tips are repeated in different lists of useful tips. And, yes, I did spell italicize both the American and English way because I’m not sure what that one guy in Seoul who keeps searching for mature pantyhose only to get a book report on The Life Expectancy of Pantyhose and the Poems of Middle Age prefers.

At any rate, a couple of good reminders–grow what grows easily, which is good advice if only I could find what aside from grass grows easily in this rocky clay soil and if I could only find something I can do easily and well that would produce a side income. But overall, a lot like reading a blog on paper–and not even a Substack long-form kind of blog, but rather the quick hits and bulleted lists kind. I had a similar response to The Gorilla Mindset by Mike Cernovich last year. I should probably steer clear of bloggers’ nonfiction in the future unless it’s from someone I already read and it promises more substance or more detail than their existing posts.

I am not sure when I got this book. It has a Redeemed Books sticker on the back that seems to indicate it was added to their inventory in 2010. So somewhere between then and now. It is a collection of poetry written by a retired economist from a consultancy or think tank and it’s illustrated by his brother, a retired artist. The volume I have is numbered 386 of 1500 and is inscribed to Linda. I found myself musing as much on the history of this book and the men who produced it as the actual contents.

The book contains poems that are built using haikus as the syllable counts for each stanza. The number of haikus per poem, that is, the number of stanzas per poem, varies. The book mostly deals with introspection and landscapes and follows the seasons from spring to winter.

So: okay, the author says they’re haikus, and some of them could stand alone as haikus, but most of them cannot, and they’re just syllable counts for lines in English. I think a much more interesting challenge would have been to make haikus that build upon each other to a common theme or poem, but the poet does not indicate this is the case. Although I am pretty sure the result would have been similar: some good haikus that build to a complete poem, but some haikus that clanged on their own and didn’t rise to independence just serving as filler material in longer poems.

At any rate, an interesting read, fairly quick, sometimes enjoyable, but sometimes questionable. I remember one poem talking about a fox eating turkeys, and given the relative size and feistiness of each, I had a hard time believing it to be true. I would need a Dablemont ruling on that.

So if you can find one of the other 1,499 copies available, it might be worth a glance if only to think What if I tried that?

Also, as an aside, something I learned in Our Oriental Heritage: Apparently, the Japanese were so crazy for hokku when they first came out that they had competitions on who could write the best and they bet on it until the Japanese government put it down (Our Oriental Heritage, 881). I am not sure I would have bet on Gustafson unless I knew something about the other guy.

I picked up this book back in 2007, and likely then as now I confused it for “Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist” which was a physics lecture given when I was an adult instead of this novel which was written when I was a boy and must have gotten some use as a textbook, as the volume I have contains some note-taking.

It is a bit of a non-linear story about a classical physicist at the end of his career in the year 1917. He reflects on his career, the physicists he has known, and how Einstein and quantum theory is really not all that–he still believes that aether is the substance tying everything together, and he bemoans that physics has moved from a mechanical understanding of the universe to a mathematical one. The story is set during World War I, when it was becoming clear that the war was not going well for the Germans, so the war and its impact are a counterpoint to the main character’s story–or an augmentation thereof, as he served during the 1870 war with France. The timeline of the story outside the flashbacks and dreams of being judged for being an inadequate physicist takes place over a couple of days starting with a trip to the theatre and through a talk that the professor gives and beyond. He reflects a bit on the suicide of a peer, which leads to a (spoiler alert) final Did he? Probably!

It’s but 157 pages, so a quick read if you’re in it for the fiction. It also comes with 60 pages of end notes and bibliography, essentially, if you want to see how much research the author went through to get details right. But I’m just here for the story, pal. I’ll deal with the math when I come to a copy of “Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist” which I probably have around here somewhere. Actually, I both do and do not until I discover I do, and that copy is right now on my to-read bookshelves vibrating in unison with a copy in Berkeley, California, right now.

An interesting read, more literary than a lot of stuff I stuff into my intellectual gullet, and it kind of reminded me of The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy in its end-of-life reflections. Hopefully, the theme is not resonating with me because I am nearing the end of my life, but one never knows. One never knows.

I have to say that this is the best novel based on country-and-western album liner notes that I have ever read.

Apparently, Brooks & Dunn’s albums had some stories featuring Slim & Howdy in the liner notes. Gentle reader, I gathered my Brooks & Dunn albums in those dark days of audiocassettes, which contained liner notes in very small type indeed. So I had not seen any of this material before.

Slim and Howdy are a couple of hard luck singers who meet at a used car lot and decide to pool their resources for a bit. They have some adventures recovering Slim’s guitar; wooing a couple of women from a honkytonk who then lead them unwittingly into a burglary; and ultimately into rescuing a friend and employer, the woman who owns the Lost and Found bar in Del Rio, Texas. A border town, get it? Lost and found in a border town? Yeah, the book alludes to a number of Brooks & Dunn songs like this. It probably does more than I know since my collection stops at Hard Working Man, and to be honest (as you can guess, gentle reader) my country and western listening is limited to the rare occasions (rare now as my son is mowing the lawn, and rare as it will be for a year or so until he is too busy or two gone to do so).

The bulk of the book is ultimately (I guess I already said that) to the latter quest–finding the bar owner who has been kidnapped for unknown reasons, but for whom a ransom note eventually arrives. Is it the recently fired employee, a hard case with body piercings making a fake mohawk? Is it the person from whom Slim and Howdy recovered Slim’s guitar, the person who has vowed revenge? Is it someone who has done busines with the woman’s father, who has gotten wealthy not entirely honestly? Or something else?

Well, it’s something else, a bit twee and perhaps expected. It ends up with gunplay that only scratches the heroes but mortally wounds the bad guys. And finis.

Not a bad read. Certainly targeted to Brooks & Dunn fans. The book included a CD single with the song “Gotta Get Me One Of Those”, and very stern warnings indicated you could not return the book if the envelope containing the CD had been breached. I assumed that the CD was missing, as it is on so many of my tech books, but I discovered it is intact and unbroken. Oh, the dilemma: Get the single which I will not listen to often or preserve the collectibility of this book for future generations who will not find it collectible anyway?

Well, gentle reader, they might have saved it from Napster kept it off of the iTunes store and forgotten to make it available on Amazon, but it’s on YouTube:

No word on if it’s available for free on Napster.

I did not break the seal on the CD, anyway, as it is my wont to not adulterate the books I read in any way except for some Dorito dust now and then.

At any rate, an okay, if simply told bit of modern Western. Not the amount of depth you get in, say, Louis L’Amour or James R. Wilder, but a bit of fun for Brooks & Dunn fans. Speaking of whom, holy smokes, those guys are like 70 years old now, and they’ve been retired as a musical act for over a decade. Somehow, in my head, they’re always forty-something like they were when I got the albums in the middle 1990s. And I’m still twenty-something.

I got this book last month at ABC Books, and when I saw the date, I thought Was it that long ago? Because somehow July 2023 already seems like a long time ago. I guess it has been a long week for me.

At any rate, this collection of science fiction, horror, and other stories is part of the author’s Take Ten Tales series which has a couple of other books that I passed over because the book signing had multiple offers, so I only bought one book from each.

So I just read Into the Night, another collection by a local author with similar thematics/genresificity. So I cannot help but compare them, and I kind of liked this one better.

It is shorter, which helps, even when I’m starting out. I mean, when I pick up a really thick book, even if I really enjoy it, I tend to get a little antsy with having to stick to the book for a long time, even if it’s only a week or so. Or more, sometimes (details forthcoming). So a quick collection of 10 stories beats out a couple hundred pages of other material.

Although the stories are not as well written–which is not to say they’re poorly written, but they lack a bit of the umami in setup and character development that you get in the beginnings of the stories in Into the Night–but the story structure varies. The stories do not end with a DUN DUN DUH! and a predictable loss on the part of the human characters in the story.

So I consider it a notch above the other book, and when the author returns to ABC Books, I shall pick up some of her other work.

The book also has some room for your handwritten notes and discussion questions in the back of the book, which I thought was interesting. I cannot imagine any of my work being included in a book club discussion, but I guess this author can/could.

The book was published in 2003, which means she has slowly been putting out work over the last twenty years. Me? I’ve got a novel, a collection of poetry, and a full evening play in print, and I’ve not written much outside this blog and some professional articles in that time. Clearly, I need to do better.

I mentioned when I read Viets’ collections of columns from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Urban Affairs and Viets Guide to Sex, Travel, and Anything Else That Will Sell This Book in 2009 and 2010 respectively) that I would delve into her fiction. Well, I read both books after we moved from Old Trees to Nogglestead, and I had not seen any of Viets’ fiction until the Lutherans for Life garage sale in 2017. I don’t tend to hang about in the mystery sections of book stores or book sales much these days, so it would have to be a garage sale for me to find them.

Also, I clearly did not jump right into the book six years ago. But it seemed a thing to read between chapters/sections of Our Oriental Heritage.

This book is the 13th entry (of 15) in Viets’ Dead-End Job Mysteries. Which means that the series has a lot of business in it already, and that takes up a good portion of the book.

The main mystery revolves around the purebred kitten of a socialite who shares custody of said cat with her husband. The kitten is kidnapped, or Catnapped! as the title would have it. The main character, Helen Hawthorne, and her husband are private investigators engaged to find the kitten. They find the ex-husband murdered, and the socialite is arrested. Meanwhile, the ex-husband of the owner of their apartment building shows up after thirty years of shacking up with another woman–he wants to reconcile, but she most assuredly does not. When he winds up dead, she, too, is arrested for the murder.

So we have two or three crimes that the duo investigates. It took me a while to get into it–as you know, gentle reader, despite this being the second cozy I’ve read this year (Murder, She Wrote: The Maine Mutiny being the first for the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge), they’re not my bag.

The particular schtick of this series is that Helen Hawthorne had been on the run from an ex-husband in St. Louis, so she takes low skill jobs for cash. According to legend (and by legend, I mean Wikipedia), Viets actually did these jobs before writing about them. By the 13th book in the series, the reason for the schtick–the ex-husband–was a problem solved in an earlier book, so Hawthorne has to go undercover as an assistant cat groomer to get close to a subject and to show us how grooming and cat show exhibiting goes on.

The other bit of series business that takes up a lot of real estate in the book is the group of people who live at the apartment building. They get together every night to watch the sun go down, and they interact a bunch. It does lead up to the third mystery, who poisoned the ex-husband, but it also fills a lot of pages with socializing and chitchat.

Most people don’t start series toward the end (or just the latest, perhaps), but it does detract a bit from the stand-aloneness of each novel. I know I’ve mentioned it before, and it’s a line that authors have to walk between serving their long-time readers who want these elements of the book and those just looking for a mystery. This book goes a bit far in the series business.

At any rate, I liked it well enough that I’ll pick up more Viets books when I run across them, and maybe I’ll even read them six years later.

I got this book at ABC Books in June at the author’s book signing.

When I bought the book, the author described the short stories as O. Henry mixed with The Twilight Zone. As you might recollect, gentle reader, I read The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia in 2018 and have since accumulated a number of DVDs with episodes on them (and I’ve watched a few). I’ve always found its speculative fiction inspirational in giving me ideas for my own writing, so I looked forward to this book. I bought the author’s first two books of short fiction, and she said she had enough ideas mapped out for another eight or nine books in a similar vein.

The book collects 42 stories in roughly 420 pages, so about ten pages per, more or less. Genres include fantasy, horror, and science fiction along with some that are more speculative than genre-specific. They’re pretty well-written and well-executed for the most part, with interesting characters built with good prose. But….

The O. Henry part rears its head in that most of the stories are structured with that well-crafted beginning of the story that ends on the twist ending in the last sentence, paragraph, or couple of paragraphs. Characters and their situations are built up and then DUN DUN DUN! The demons are loosed upon the world. Or DUN DUN DUN! They were the aliens visiting Earth. Or DUN DUN DUN! The aliens sucked their brains out through their noses!

So it’s a book best taken in sips and not one to read all the way through all at once, as that will highlight how the stories have very similar structures and DUN DUN DUNs. As I said, well-written but formulaic in its own way, and many of the stories could use a little more denouement and maybe not have all of the sympathetic heroes and heroines getting killed by shapeshifting alien serial killers. Once in a while, it would be nice if the plucky small town girl would maybe at least survive.

I got this book two years ago at ABC Books, and it stayed on the side table for browsing during football games in 2021 and 2022, but I didn’t make it through them, mostly because I kind of gave up on browsing through books during the football games. I’m in a bit of a spot, gentle reader, as I have read fewer than 40 books so far this year, and I’ve always counted on the football browsing to make up some ground in my annual quest for 100 books read at the end of the year kind of like how churches expect to make up an outsized portion of their budgets during Christmas week. Since I gave up the habit of browsing during football games, and we’ve given up any television provider that carries football games, I won’t be doing much browsing at all in the autumn and winter.

At any rate, onto Earth Games. Well, now, this might be Grandmother Poetry: The Next Generation. Blurbs on the back come from grandchildren, and one of them indicates Grandma Ruth is 80. My Internet research (a quick search) found an obituary that aligns with that, so Ruth Loring might well have been a grandmother when these poems came out.

However, unlike the Grandmother poetry that I read from earlier eras, these poems do not often deal with home, family, and Jesus nor do they end with rhymes. Instead, they read more like the instapoetry of Rupi Kaur and Pierre Alex Jeanty in having short lines, stream of consciousness, and abstractions rather than images.

Here’s a taste:

Zapped

Round and round and round I go
my life an endless zero
forever o-ing money.
Oh oh oh!
Then owe owe owe.
Oh…
     woe.
Credit card junkie
and all for naught.

More wordplay than poetry, and like I criticize (most) instapoetry, it has a few good moments scattered throughout but it’s mostly for the amusement of the poet herself.