Category: Books

I bought this book six years ago because I recognized Doctorow’s name from the Internet. In those six years, I have read a pile of Executioner novels acquired that same day before picking this book up. In the interim, I forgot it was a novel, and I initially placed it in my carry bag last week to read at the martial arts school while my kids were in class (and I was not, as I recovered from the memorial stair climb).

But it is a novel, and to sum up: Nothing of consequence happens in an interesting world.

The extrapolated world has people constantly jacked into the Internet, extreme body modifications, and sort-of immortality via consciousness backup and restore to a clone. People live not on cash, but a currency based on social media reputation called Whuffies–if you do a lot of things that people on the Internet value, you have a lot of doors open to you, but if you do not, well, you’re on hard times. Down and out, one might say.

The narrator begins by recounting how he met his best friend, and then the main narrative explains that he (the narrator) returns periodically to Disney World after various adventures. His friend returns, out of Whuffies, and talks again about permanently ending his life. The narrator convinces his friend to not go out on the bottom, but to rebuild his reputation and to go out at his peak. So the two work with the narrator’s girl friend to manage part of the park.

The park itself is run by various ad-hocracies, like-minded individuals who come together to do things guided by people on social media who reward them with likes–and Whuffies–for good ideas. Another attraction developer moves into Liberty Square and threatens the status quo with new technologies–and someone murders the narrator, which makes the narrator go a little off in his defense of the status quo.

Spoiler alert: At the end, status quo is maintained. As I mentioned, nothing of consequence happens in an interesting world.

I’m not sure if the intended message is that nobody can move forward or change in such a society, but that’s what I took from it.

At a little over 200 pages, it’s a pretty quick read, and narratively, it pulls you along. So pleasant, but meaningless.

I got this book at LibraryCon 2019. The author/artist had a couple of regular, staple-stitched comics that I bought as well as this collection which has a flat spine and hence gets counted as a graphic novel and eligible for my annual reading list and an official MfBJN book report.

This book is a collection of stories that take on stuff from the Brothers Grimm (or at least popular representations thereof) and nursery rhymes and given a darker (although not necessarily as dark as the Brothers Grimm) turn, often featuring lycanthropy as the pivot.

An interesting book. The art is black and white and not too busy. The art and story are well balanced–it’s not a story ins service of the art, but the art serves the story. So pretty good.

I liked it better, strangely enough, than his individual comics. One of the series I read, Musical Mishaps of Cat and Fiddle, stretches a story similar in feel (and featuring a form of lycanthrophy as well), into six issues which lends itself to creating more panels for the story which unbalances it a bit.

So perhaps I’m learning a little about the balance I prefer, and this book has it. For what it’s worth.

Still, I’ll watch for more from this guy at future conventions.

So, Brian J., you’re saying. It’s not enough that you count looking at artist monographs as reading a book for your annual total, but now you’re counting comic books? Well, in my defense, gentle reader, this is a collection of the first six comics in a re-imagining of the Scooby Doo universe published by DC comics from 2016-2019 (or so I learned on the Scoobypedia). So it’s not too far off from, say, Potbelly Mammoth or a graphic novel. He said in his defense.

One of my boys borrowed this from the library, and one of my boys (perhaps the same one that checked it out) this weekend said it creeped him out. So I picked it up.

The book reboots the story as post-apocalyptic fiction. Velma works for a secret corporate lab that has a plan to release nanobots that will reprogram humans to be nicer to each other. When she discovers that her superiors also will make humanity docile, she invites an obscure journalist (Daphne) and her cameraman (Fred) to the complex. They and a dog trainer (Shaggy) and an artificially augmented dog (Scooby) are the only ones who are unaffected when the triggered nanobots instead turn people into monsters. They grab a prototype armored vehicle and head out into the wastes in search of… Well, other survivors or other of the complexes.

Not much happens in the first six issues, really. We get some flashbacks about Shaggy and Scooby and Velma, but too many of the pages deal with the bickering between Daphne, who blames Velma for the apocalypse, and Velma, who really did. The actual action of the issues are kinda nil. Reading the above post about the cancellation of the series after 36 issues, I saw the same complaints with the whole run.

Oh, and spoiler alert: Taking a page from the movie, Scrappy Doo is a bad guy–but is arc is just beginning at the end of this volume.

Eh. I didn’t care for the reboot/reimagining. It didn’t creep me out, though.

I liked this collection better than Jon Corbino: An Heroic Vision. They both come from the early part of the 20th century, where painting has been freed from the line, but Peters’ subject matter is more appealing. It depicts landscapes, generally creeks/rivers or docks, but with human figures in those landscapes.

Well, “figures” might be a little giving. Basically, they’re a couple of brush strokes. But the effect is more akin to the original Impressionist influence. Well, maybe it’s more akin to what I take away from my favorite Impressionism–a sense of a remembered scene or setting.

Unfortunately, as the introductory text indicates, Peters liked to do the same scenes over and over again at different times and in different seasons. So although most of the work is pleasing to look at, if you run through a catalog for an extensive show like this one, it’s repetitive.

But, like I said, pleasing to look at. The human figures make them more pleasing than Monet’s sterile, flora-only landscapes anyway.

I wonder if I will remember Peters or Corbino in a year month or two. Unless I see some of their things at the Springfield Art Museum sometime soon, and I can say, “A-ha! I saw a monograph in that artist,” probably not.

Well, this is the first artist’s monograph that I’ve browsed during the 2019-2020 Packers season.

The book is a couple of full-color plates and a lot of black and white images. The art itself is unclean lines with Degas-like Impressionist touches. The subjects tend to be human figures, but the unclean lines combine with the phrasing, so to speak, make it look a little like Soviet peasant art. I didn’t like it much.

As you know, gentle reader, aside from Impressionism, I prefer cleaner lines, and most of the stuff produced after 1870 will not please me. But your mileage may vary.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I bought this book on my last excursion to ABC Books, where the author was signing books.

To recap a bit of it: He started writing books when he was 80, and he’s got nine books out and a couple more coming out. If you’re wondering how he can do it, I’m guessing he does it by dictating using a speech-to-text program and then does not edit the work very carefully. I mean, you have missing quotation marks, some wrong words which sound like other words that fit, and that sort of thing. It’s not as bad as Dark Star, but you do have to pay attention when you read.

The story revolves around a couple of high school students who become good friends in college and get an incredible opportunity to run a pharmaceutical? Bio-chemical? plant while at the university. The main character gets free rein and builds a multi-million dollar subsidiary of the small company that gave her a shot. Along the way, the young ladies learn about sex, start families, and whatnot. Then the book ends with them in middle age when one of the women’s husband is discovered to have been unfaithful and has a gambling problem. This ending doesn’t really add much.

At any rate, it’s best to think of your grandfather telling you a bedtime story when reading the book. It’s pretty simply done, with years passing between paragraphs and some passages where it’s not especially clear which character is doing what. But, still, not Dark Star.

I suspect the style will work better in his other books. Which I’ll get to by and by.

This book marks a momentous event: I have read all of the books that I bought at Calvin’s Books in May. I jokingly said I would probably not read those five books that day. And then I set as a personal goal to do just that. And now I have.

This book looks to be almost an employee or management handbook for Herschend Enterprises, which started with Silver Dollar City west of Branson and now includes a number of theme parks around the country (and the Harlem Globetrotters). The book talks about working and acting with a servant’s heart (although it does not use those terms). It has a couple of corporatey bits in the intro and the conclusion, but most of the book is short chapters of anecdotes where employees or co-workers at Herschend properties went the extra mile to help sick or down-on-their luck customers or co-workers.

I liked reading the book, and I’m thinking about recommending it to my beautiful wife. She likes reading good leadership books, but perhaps this one isn’t so much in that particular vein.

You know, one might be cynical and think this book is just lip service to an ideal and a way to get the company employees to behave this way for better customer service, but sometimes, I’m not cynical, and I think the book is sincere. Even if it’s not, at least the corporate masters recognize an ideal outside of the short-term materialism of the corporation. But I think it’s pretty sincere.

This is the second monograph or collection of photography I’ve reviewed this football season, and strangely enough, neither of them really during a football game. As it happens, one of our floor lamps died this year, and I moved the one I used when watching football to the more important location by the reading chairs. So I ended up with a couple monographs out on the sofa-side table, but not enough light to really look at them. So I reviewed this book whilst in my reading chair.

It’s a collection of photos of various places in Missouri taken over the course of a year or so by a professional landscape photographer from the west coast. He groups the photos in chapters based on a photography conceit such as Color, Form, Moment, Place, Microcosm, and Light.

The photos are landscapes, but some of them are very narrow in focus (with a whole chapter on Microcosm). I don’t like the photographs of a single leaf on a lichen-covered rock nor collections of lily pads on a pond as they’re just exercises of technique in service of showing us a technique or a texture, not in showing us a scene. Or maybe I’m just flogging my new dichotomy. Sometimes, though, the different textures work together in a single scene that is a scene, though, so the photographer has some definite talent.

Still, a pleasant enough browse. It contains images of Elephant Rocks and Johnson’s Shut Ins on the eastern side of the state. When I was growing up back there, I remember the other kids in school talking about going to those places on the weekend like it was nothing. Do you know where we went on the weekends when I was growing up? No where. Well, no where like that.

So I’ve gone through two of these books already, and I have yet to watch a complete football game. I shall have to visit the book sale on half price day to resupply my monographs and photography collections in early October for sure.

Well, it’s football season again, so I will finally get a chance to review some of the artists’ monographs that I got last May (and I can go nuts since the next Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale comes in October).

This book is a collection of line drawings and paintings as the title says. The artist’s subject matter are still lifes of a sort–she has three self portraits and another painting with human figures in them, but there are also, what, landscapes that look like a picture taken out of a house window or images of rooms, wallpapers, and window interiors without anyone in them.

The technical skill is great–some of them are nearly photographic in quality. Definitely interesting things to look at and a great combination of textures and techniques.

The afternoon that I began to browse this book I went to an open house at a gallery here in town that featured an artist who practices a more modern approach to art. Some of it was figurative, but it was all pretty flat. Some of it was just textures and strokes on the canvas. But in any case, it was clear that you were looking ata painting. In this book’s images, you’re looking at something in a picture or a drawing. Have I made this dichotomy between modern and classical art before? It seems like you can apply it to literature, too.

At any rate, a pleasant way to spend an hour or two, and I wouldn’t mind going to see some of her work. According to Wikipedia, you can find it in many collections, although none in particularly close locations. Perhaps I’ll get lucky and the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art will pick something up before I make my way down there.

I bought this book at ABC Books in July, so it was at the top of the stack. I’ve read a couple other martial arts books in the last year (The Martial Artist’s Way, The Zen Way to Martial Arts, Taekwondo Kyorugi, and so on).

The book starts with a bit of history of the ninja in Japan and then tells how the author went to Japan to study with Masaaki Hatsumi, the last ninja grand master (still alive at 87 today). The book then talks about some fighting techniques, describes some weapons of the ninja, and the has a couple of chapters on reconnaissance, espionage, and the spiritual elements of budo. It’s not a long book–150 pages or so–and it has a pseudo-libary binding but no library marks, which makes me think it might be a book aimed at younger audiences.

It’s not so much a how-to book on strikes and whatnot as a summary course. Which is unfortunate. I’m really looking for dirty tricks to pull on the other students at the martial arts school where I train and not so much high-level musing on how to manipulate people using the earth/water/fire/air/void breakdown of the universe.

Full disclosure: I studied at a bujinkan dojo briefly in the middle 1990s, so I would have been indirectly a student of Hatsumi Sensei myself. But not this book’s author.

I bought this book at LibraryCon this year and picked it up first from amongst the gleanings.

I remember noticing that this book, unlike the others at the convention, was hardback with a dust jacket. Most self-published authors go with paperback. When I cracked it open, I discovered that it was actually published by an imprint of Macmillan Publishing. The back flap talking about the author said she was into equality and inclusion in publishing and that she created a #Hashtag, and I thought uh oh. I feared it might be a modern science fiction or fantasy with a message. Fortunately, it is not.

It is a good story. Basically, yes, it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Wonderland. A young woman, grief stricken at the death of her father, is attacked by a fantastic creature and is saved by a man from Wonderland. Not the Executioner’s man from Wonderland; an exiled resident of a fantastic world who bears a dark blade. He teaches her to be a Dreamwalker, a person from our world who goes to Wonderland to kill Nightmares, which are manifestations of human fears that are more frequently plaguing Wonderland. Alice has allies in Wonderland–other Dreamwalkers who guard other places where the two worlds intersect–but they discover a growing danger from a mysterious Black Knight who wants to resurrect the Black Queen to rule Wonderland.

The only quibble I have with the book is that the climactic battle at the end comes up and is dispatched very quickly–which, as you know, gentle reader, is a common complaint I make. The book too clearly leads into the next in the series, which means the end doesn’t really resolve that much in the story arc.

But that’s a minor thing. The story moves along well, and the author not only relies on the Alice in Wonderland story for a jumping-off point, but she also alludes heavily to “The Jabberwocky” as well. And she titles her chapters in addition to giving them numbers–a practice of which I approve.

But I’ll pick up the next in the series when it comes out next month. And I will pick up a copy of both books for my godson for Christmas since he likes fantasy novels. Or so I hope–because every year, he still gets them from me.

If only the author would do a book signing at ABC Books so I could get the books signed.

In keeping with my recent spurt of Ozarkiana (Unto These Hills, The Willow Bees), I picked up this short novel.

In it, a grandfather still grieving from his wife’s death from cancer takes in his daughter and grandson as the boy suffers from leukemia and the marriage is on the fritz. The daughter takes a nursing job in town, leaving the ailing boy to spend the days with his grandfather in a cabin in the mountains. The boy starts talking about meeting the fairy people down, and his imaginative incidents almost make it sound believeable. But the boy gets lost in a thunderstorm, and the local crazy war veteran helps to find him, and the adventure results in reconciliation and healing all around.

It’s a short book–156 pages–and it’s one of the better of the local novels I’ve read. Although it’s not self-published, it’s apparently from a very small press, and the author is (or was) a grandfather himself who is pictured on the back with his wife and one of his large woodcarvings. So perhaps not a professional writer, but the story is well executed nevertheless.

Apparently, I bought this book four years ago at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale, so it’s a relatively recent entry in my book stack. Which explains why it was in the front. Perhaps I should dust and turn-out the library again, but that would hide so many of my new acquisitions in the back. But it might turn up those Joshua Clark books I’ve hidden.

This book is a bit of local color. It was written in the early 1990s by a woman who grew up on a farm outside of (but which is probably now in) Nixa, a little town south of Springfield. It recounts very short, three to eight paragraph slice-of-life memories about farm work, socializing, family relationships, and whatnot interspersed with numerous poems composed by the author, her family, or those in her social circle.

It was a pleasant read, and it made me consider writing something like this about my life. I mean, I’ve seen some things, and as a child of the last century, I have seen enough change that some of it would be novel to kids of today or tomorrow.

Assuming that any of them would want to read it.

At any rate, I enjoyed the book as you might expect. The author comes from a large family, and sometimes she name checks families who participated in an event or attended a (one room) school in Lone Hill (the actual town she lived in or near). When I read the list of names here (and in Unto These Hills), I wonder why the names of my relations from the Ozarks are not represented. But then I remember that they’re from Taney County further south and, in the early part of the last century, a whole world away.

This book is the novelization of Oliver Stone’s Academy Award-winning screenplay. I’ve never actually seen the film, and I really haven’t watched a lot of Vietnam movies As I mentioned, I have seen the television program Tour of Duty and Forrest Gump, which is not really a Vietnam movie. I’ve also seen The Siege of Firebase Gloria (“That’s it, Nardo. The story’s over.”) and Apocalypse Now. But Platoon seemed to kick off a number of Vietnam films in the 1980s like Full Metal Jacket and Hamburger Hill (and including The Siege of Firebase Gloria). But I just never got into it. Kids in the 1980s didn’t get into playing Vietnam soldier like previous generations played World War II soldier.

So as a novelization of the screenplay, the book takes advantage of it and suffers from the disadvantages of the printed word. Let’s go with the disadvantages first: One, it’s an ensemble piece with a lot of different characters who are identified by name and a single distinguishing feature, and it is easy to confuse them (and the author refers to the protagonist both by his first name and his last name in different places, so you have to remember that these names are both one guy). On screen, that’s easy to see.

Another thing is that what must have been the spectacle of the film is lost a little.

But we do get more interior lives of the characters which the film would not convey; on the other hand, that turns a couple of seconds of screen time into a page or more.

So what’s the plot? The usual. A green recruit, a literate and educated young man, joins a platoon in the field where he gets mundane duties, gets into firefights, learns, sees death, and ultimately takes part in a pitched battle with massive casualties on both sides.

Not poorly executed, but mostly noteworthy as a study of turning a screenplay into a novel.

You know, I have a set of Tour of Duty DVDs–did I buy them for my father and then inherit them? Not likely–I think I bought them later. But I don’t know that I’m inspired to dive into Vietnam media based on this book alone. Unless the Marcinko books count.

It’s very rare for me to read a book written in the last couple of years, so it says something when I read a book in its week of release. Robert Crais is the only author that can claim that honor, slight that it be. Well, if you search for Robert Crais on this blog, you’ll see that’s not always true. It might actually only be true for this book.

The plot: Joe Pike runs into a crime in progress (like The Sentry) and helps a young lady that Joe Pike might develop feelings for (like The Sentry). She has a crush on him before the crime in progress and is pleased when he comes to her rescue. However, bad guys have been searching for a relation of the young lady (like in The Sentry). And Joe Pike and Elvis Cole have to figure out who has it out for her (is this, too, like The Sentry? I don’t mention it in the book report, but presumably so).

So maybe it was really like that other book, but I haven’t read it in six years, so it was fresh enough for me. But binge readers might find it a repeat.

The book has quick, modern pacing with lots of dialog and short paragraphs which contrasts with Platoon, the book I am currently reading as well as other literature and novels over forty years old. The book also shifts viewpoints, which is pretty standard for thrillers nowadays as well. But these devices really keep the action flowing along.

So I enjoyed it, and I expect I will get the next book right when it comes out. Well, my beautiful wife will, and I will read it when she finishes it. Which is not long, as I finished the book four days after it came out.