Category: Books

I just bought Greenlaw’s Seaworthy earlier this month, so I decided to pick up this, her first book, to get on with reading the complete canon.

I read her second book, The Lobster Chronicles, in 2009. I thought that book was a little disjointed, but that must have been something of a sophomore slump. The Hungry Ocean hangs pretty tightly together.

The book describes the events of a single swordfishing expedition, an approximately one month voyage from Gloucester, Massachussetts, to the fishing grounds east of Canada where the fishermen ply their trade. The book starts out with the captain, Greenlaw, taking on supplies and making lists, fretting about the return of her crew from their two days of shore leave, and then starting out, steaming, to the fishing area. There’s no great disaster to overcome (a la The Perfect Storm, the book and later film which have Greenlaw in them on the periphery). It’s just a normal fishing trip, but it goes into elaborate detail about the technology and techniques of commercial swordfishing as well as the captain’s considerations throughout the voyage.

It’s akin to Moby Dick in its technical descriptions, but is overall more readable. It’s got more detail than an Educators Classics edition of Captains Courageous. And it falls almost into the journals of George Plimpton, Dave Anderson, or Jerry Kramer in distilling the essence of a long, repeating sport or profession into a single block of that profession. Although Greenlaw is not a sport fisherman; she makes a living at it.

I’ve sometimes thought whether I could have done the work, ever since I was a young man regaled with the stories of that one friend of a friend who worked as a fisherman for a couple months a year and made enough for a whole year in a couple of trips (I actually did have a friend of my beautiful wife who did that for a couple of years before returning home for good). I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but the days were long, the conditions often poor, the work repetitive, and the reward uncertain and often underwhelming.

On the other hand, it makes for better stories than being a ronin software documentation and testing professional.

So I’m looking forward to the other two nonfiction books from Greenlaw and might someday delve into her recent mystery series as well, although I get the sense that I’ll have to order those books new. Or perhaps look over the fiction selection at the library book sales more closely.

I bought this book at ABC Books earlier this month; the author was in the store with a book signing, so I stopped by and picked up a copy of his book. ABC Books has signings on a lot of Saturday afternoons, but I haven’t had much luck slipping up there when an author was actually in house until then.

In this case, the book is more of a chapbook (for $6.50) that contains a single short story. It’s a a spooky sort of story, kind of a speculative bit of fiction dealing with life after death. Something handled better by The Twilight Zone.

Back when I was a publishing mogul, I would have run a story like this–as a matter of fact, I did, but I was desparate for prose. This story kind of falls into that category. It’s okay, but proably not worth $6.50 unless you particularly want to support local book stores and local authors. Which I do.

I must have bought Baldilocks‘ book when it was fresh and new, as it’s autographed and everything, but it’s been floating around my to-read shelves for a while. But, in my defense, such as it is, I have not actually had to move the book unread.

It’s a literary novel set in the early 1990s at a university in New Mexico. A black young woman who has gained some notoriety for past behavior has decided not to leave school and to stick it out meets the white quarterback of the football team, and they like each other and start dating.

That’s the plot in a nutshell; the execution of the book is a slightly talky exploration of how this affects the protagonists, their families, their friendships, and their standing within their communities. It’s a pretty frank set of musings and interactions, and they do have a conservative/classical Liberal bent, so I agreed with the sentiments for the most part, so I didn’t mind them much but I would expect readers with a different, more modern perspective would not be convinced.

It was a quick, pleasant read and worth my time regardless.

I bought this book for a buck earlier this month, and I had the opportunity over the last couple of weeks to browse it over a couple of football games that I watched parts of because I’ve been disappointed in the Packers’ play this year.

As I alluded to in the Good Book Hunting post, this book is part project book and part catalogue.

As it’s published by the parent company of Writers’ Digest, which also has a number of other art and crafts magazines in its stable, this book has a number of art project discussions of how to make the painted objects, including the colors on the palette and brush stroke techniques to mirror the project originally painted by the artist. I learned how you build up from the background with basic colors and shapes and then add lines, shading, and highlighting to give the actual depth. This is a lot different from the flat way I did painting when I was in school and trying to get extra credit in my art classes, but I wasn’t doing it like Bob Ross told me to even then.

Then we get into some items in the Decorative Arts Collection, which is a 25-year-old (then) club/consortium of decorative painters that got together to promote and to collect historical art of the stripe. Well, not stripe: It’s painting flowers and walking men on various practical articles to tart them up a bit. A lot of painting on tin, a little less kitchy than pure folk/country art, but along those lines.

Prettier to look at than, say, Matisse but with a little less depth than real Art. But still, pleasant to look at, and certainly not something I could do.

I’ve been haunting the antique malls the last couple of weeks, looking for gifts for different people, and I’d seen something I thought I would pick up last Sunday at Ozark Treasures, a cat-themed game, and I thought it would be good for a friend, but we’ve already taken care of that particular friend this year, so I let it go. But I thought of another friend it would be perfect for, so I returned Friday to look for it. But I didn’t find it. Instead, I picked up this book, which is also cat-themed and would be a good gift for either of the aforementioned friends. But in a stunning turn of events, I decided to keep it because I also like cats.

The book is a picture book of classic through the middle 1980s stars with cats, and there’s a caption telling you who it is. Most cats appear only once, although Morris the Cat and Orangey, who appeared in several movies, appear more than once. We’ve got the cover woman Carole Lombard, we’ve got Marlon Brando, we’ve got Sigourney Weaver with the cat from Alien.

It’s an interesting book to browse mostly if you’re in the intersection of old movies and cats like I am, and, in retrospect, only one of the friends to whom I thought to give this book. So perhaps it’s for the best that I kept it after all.

Although I could, I know, give it away now that I have read it. But that would be most unlike me of all.

I might have read this in another form before (I have read plenty of Millay before, which probably lead to my fondness for clunky language and line).

The preface gives the book’s history:

This powerful and deeply moving dramatic poem is as contemporary today [1972] as it was in 1942 when Edna St. Vincent Millay was commissioned by the Writers’ War Board to write a poem immortalizing the village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia. This verse-narrative, arranged as Reader’s Theatre Script, very eloquently voices the protest and horror of all peoples of the world at the wanton destruction of the small village during World War II by the Nazis who claimed that the citizens of Lidice were harboring the assassin of Reinhard Heydrich, a Nazi henchman. Opening on the peacefulness of the village and daily activities of a peasant family, the action soon draws us into its suspense and mounting tension as Nazi soldiers enter Lidice, destroy every structure, kill every man, drive the women into “concentration camps,” and her the children into “educational institutions.” Written in a white heat of outrage and fury after news of the cold-blooded mass murder, Miss Millay’s poem has become one of the great literary classics opposing all war atrocities.

You can read more about the actual event on Wikipedia. Note that this is what actual Nazis did, and that the literal Nazis did not stop their reprisal with this one village. Contrast with political figures compared to Hitler in the modern world.

At any rate, this version of the poem is broken into different narrators so that different sections are told in different voices and sometimes the individuals mentioned in the poem can have a distinctive voice to present the sections of the narrative. I kind of ignored that because in reading, there’s little difference between Woman 1 and Woman 2 or Woman 1 and Man 2. The poem itself delves into the lives of a family in the village, two parents whose oldest daughter is getting to marrying age and is getting courted by two local lads when the Nazis arrive. It’s 32 pages of verse, so a pretty quick read, and it’s pretty well executed.

But it’s more interesting as a snapshot of a time in history where a group of writers came together to promote national unity in a war effort. A sepia-toned and faded snapshot when compared to the behavior of “poets” in the 21st century.

The copy I have is in a library binding from a local high school whose theatre program I support through my business. The book itself stems from 1972, and the checkout form in the back cover shows 11 checkouts in the 1990s. People who went to school with my wife checked this book out. Whoa.

This book isn’t a complete waste of time, which was the wish I expressed in the report for Twisted Path. Mack Bolan doesn’t smoke a cigarette, for example.

The plot: Someone is killing off the Saudi royal family, and it looks like the Iranians and the Russians are working together to install a puppet monarch on the Saudi throne. Bolan goes to Saudi Arabia to uncover the plot, and it leads him and Grimaldi into an assault on a compound at Mecca.

It’s an odd duck of a book; I was first pretty satisfied with it, but then the set pieces in the plot were kind of clumsy. I don’t know how much to ascribe to the writer or to the people who prepared the plots. But the set pieces don’t really seem like they’d be a good idea to advance to the next, and then Bolan charges in with guns blazing. So the writing was okay, but the set pieces were faulty.

Although the book contained a couple of mistakes:

The men were Arabs, probably with the ayatollahs–Iranians in Western dress carrying compact Russian automatic weapons.

Iranians are not Arabic. As I was reading, I wondered if I could tell Arabs from Persians and Semites based on appearance. Maybe, maybe not. But in plain text and history, I can.

Also, at the very end, they crash land a plane that has run out of fuel, and it explodes. Which is one of the nice things about an airplane running out of fuel: The explosions are much lesser.

Still, not a bad entry, but it might be until next year until I get to another, especially as I realize I have not read a Christmas novel yet, and I will have to do so on an emergency basis.

Wow, how time flies. It’s been September since I read Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. I don’t know where that time has gone, but I guess I have read or finished 27(!) books since then. Which is weird because I don’t vividly remember a bunch of them. I mean, I see the titles and remember what the books were about, but I don’t remember them as having read them this year in particular. Some years, I remember a couple of books easily that I read, and I have to look again at the tally to remember the books. The Little House series are going to be the ones I remember easily from 2018. And probably 2019.

At any rate, this book deals with Almanzo Wilder as a nine-year-old boy and his experiences on his father’s farm in New York State. The Wilders are not vagabonds like the Ingalls family; they have a well-established farm with lots of livestock and acres under plow, and Mr. Wilder is a known and important man in his community. The book follows the pattern of the other books, starting in winter and following the seasons through planting, growing, and harvest. The book details how the farmers worked in those days and offers important life lessons in money management and growth. And it’s from a boy’s perspective; although the point-of-view in the books focused on Laura and her sisters doesn’t dwell too much on their being girls and this one does not completely toxically masculine, but there is a difference–and Almanzo has brothers and sisters, so the family dynamic is different.

So a fun book, a quick read, and it might very well be the first book that my boys and I have all read (not counting books that I read to them). They each read it in fifth grade leading up to a visit to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home which is nearby (and, I have learned, I know people with firsthand knowledge of Mrs. Wilder and her life there). Hopefully, the boys and I will eventually read other books in common. Of course, now that I think of it, we might have all read a collection of cartoons or a joke book, since they raid my shelves for that sort of material from time to time. But that’s neither here nor there.

Now I need to find the rest of my collection so I can once again determine the gaps and fill them in so I can complete the series.

I bought this book at Library Con this year. As I mentioned, it’s the author’s account of being a single father for his eight-year-old daughter, chock full of incidents and considerations from dating to juggling work and childcare needs. I related to a lot of incidents in the book, and I related to the humble origin story.

The book kind of falters towards the end, where it moves from parenting topics to more general thoughts, but all in all, not a bad effort.

I’ve got the first in his fantasy series around here somewhere. I’ll have to see how he does at fiction.

I don’t know where I got this book; it has the markings of a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale, but I don’t see it in the photos from this year. It also has a Barnes and Noble Autographed Copy sticker on the front, so it’s possible I paid full price for it at Barnes and Noble and didn’t take a photo of it. Weird. What is this blog for if not to remind me where I get all these books?

The plot: A showboat similar to the Branson Belle runs aground on Table Rock Lake, and as the local authorities are ferrying the survivors to shore, they discover a murder victim on board. The newly appointed sheriff has to deal with Branson business interests and a blizzard in his investigation.

It’s a standard midlist sort of book, something akin to the Jesse Stone novels from Robert B. Parker.

Except.

Boy, howdy, the author, who resides in California, gets a lot of details wrong. It starts when a deputy says that they’re getting some assistance for the boat rescue from the next county. It doesn’t identify which county, which made me wonder about how many details were going to be wrong. Well, not only does it mention that Table Rock Lake is close to freezing–heaven forbid, the lakes down here do not freeze, especially one of the big dam-created lakes like Table Rock. Then, it’s revealed that the sheriff is from Branson County. But Branson is in Taney County. The kids go to Branson Valley high school, which does not exist–in Branson, the kids go to Branson High School. The book refers to 76 as Seventy-six (this is a copy error, not a factual error). There’s a Latino woman saying there’s no Latino community and that people look at her strangely, but, come on, this is not true. When watching the airports for a fleeing suspect, the sheriff talks about the small airport south of town, the Branson airport, and then talks about friends watching the Kansas City and St. Louis airports, but nobody accounts for the Springfield National Airport here in Springfield. The sheriff waits at a convenience store on the corner of Glenstone and Battlefield across from the mall here in Springfield–and there’s no such convenience store. The Springfield Channel 12 reporter–there’s no such station. Oh, and the cold and snow–it’s not typical down here, so people are not that well-equipped for it and it doesn’t tend to last long.

The book has enough errata of this nature to draw one familiar with the area out of the book and perhaps even doubt if the person whodunit really done it.

Which is not to say that she gets all the details wrong–she mentions the twisty drive to Forsyth, and that’s true, especially if you roll through Rockaway Beach, and she talks captures the drive north out of town on 248 pretty well.

Which makes me wonder about how she got some things right, but so many things so wrong.

Apparently, this is the first of a series, so I’m a bit interested if later books correct some of the errors or whether they just let them slide. If I come across others inexpensively, I’ll pick one up to see. I thought about offering to read the manuscripts to flag things that don’t ring true, but I’m not sure I have the time for it.

I bought this book in February along with three other books at ABC Books, and I predicted I would read it first since I read The Tao of Pooh in 2016 and The Tao of Elvis in November of 2017. However, of the four books I bought that day in February, I have already read two others (The Virtue of Happiness and The Beauty of Gesture); the other, a history of the Celts, joins another history of the Celts that I bought in 1993 floating around in my backlog.

Well, that’s a lot of bookkeeping. What about this book?

I hoped, as I mentioned, that it would be an insightful comparison of the parables of Christ and the teachings of Lao Tzu, identifying similar thematic elements in each as well as a contrast where appropriate. With a focus on how the Bible is better, of course, along with some little hope that people interested in the Tao might find their way to Christianity through this book (as opposed to Buddhism through Christian Eyes which warns Christians about the sweet seductive lure of heathen philosophy).

Oh, but no.

It’s more of a daily meditation structure. Each of the 48 lessons presents a teaching of the Tao, a parable or Gospel teaching, and then Keim’s own meditation, some of which seem to have nothing to do with the preceding. Many of them rely on an, erm, contemporary translation of the Tao Te Ching, such as:

When a country is in harmony with the Tao,
the factories make trucks and tractors.
When a country goes counter to the Tao,
warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

There is no greater illusion than fear,
no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,
no greater misfortune than having an enemy.

Whoever can see through all fear
will always be safe.

Strangely enough, the original does not mention factories, tractors, or warheads. So I started comparing the translations of the Tao in this book with another translation that I have, and it has quite a bit of variation in it. I didn’t compare the translations of the parables, though, but the stories themselves were familiar and not updated to modern contrivances.

But Keim is not traditional in the Christian sense as he often refers to God as She; I thought perhaps it was only a translation thing as he refered to the Tao Te Ching Master as either he or she, but, no, he was probably equitably translating the same there as well.

So I was going to say that the best thing about this book was that it got me to reading the Tao Te Ching again and the parables, but now I’m even not sure I read them in honest translations.

So I’m going to have to say the best thing about reading this book is that I’m done.

I bought this book a couple of weeks ago and delved right into it. I hoped it would be a football browser, albeit something I could browse during night games to hopefully not expose the nude model photographed on the back to my children. But it turns out this book has a lot of text that includes not only biographical information about Matisse and a broad discussion of his artwork as it relates to trends in the art world and whatnot but also lush descriptions of the images that explain why the images are awesome.

Text like this:

In 1944 the Argentinian diplomat Enchorrena, who was resident in Paris, commissioned a door to connect his bedroom and bathroom. Initially Matisse opted to present an idyllic theme: a nymph sleeping, observed by a faun. But both subject and composition left the artist dissatisfied, and his work was a trial to him and stagnated. The diplomat persisted, and Matisse tried again. He chose a new subject, and this time succeeded. The mythological ‘Leda and the Swan’ (p. 82) has been stripped of all narrative content. Jupiter, who according to the myth came to Leda in the form of a swan, can be seen in the upper part of the picture, his arabesquely curved neck and head bending across a black space to Leda, who turns away. The monumental female nude has been fashioned sparingly and vastly. The empathetic, streamlined figure has something heroic, and restores the dignity to the myth. To right and left, red panels with a leaf design provied the triptych’s frame and give Matisse’s interpretation a revelatory flavor.

Which describes this:

The text contains a lot of art criticky words about the colors (the subtitle of this book is “Master of Colour”), flattening of the foreground, the additional complexity of the patterns when a table is turned in perspective in an otherwise flattened picture, and the wonderfulness of simple geographic patterns (sometimes repeated!).

But, come on. This stuff is insipid and stupid.

I have mentioned that that I don’t grok primitive art, and I really, really don’t care for the early 20th century’s descent into simplistic, unrefined brushstrokes as art. I mean, looking at a lot of this, I conclude that individual choices in the strokes, lines, and coloring doesn’t really matter. If that crescent had been an inch to the right, what difference would it make? My beautiful wife said she could probably not do better, but I don’t think she could do worse, and she and I are not fine artists with devotees and collectors and some influence (for some reason).

I’m starting to wonder if my beloved Impressionists, even the good ones (Renoir, Manet, Cassatt, and I suppose Monet) irretrievably broke art when they diminished the reliance on clean lines. The bad ones (Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and so one) might have led to Cubism and whatever ism Matisse is. In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of World War I, a lot of commentators told us that the war broke Western civilization. Looking at Matisse, I expect the cracks were already there.

So don’t expect to see Matisse prints at Nogglestead nor any other monographs of his work reported on in these pages. A Good Book Hunting post from 2015 indicates that I have another Matisse title around here somewhere, it might be akin to What Makes A Picasso A Picasso?–that is, a children’s book. So that might be the exception–I’ll certainly not buy another Matisse monograph.

Oh, and since this the Internet, I know you’re all jonesing for the back cover. I’ve put it below the fold.

Continue reading “Book Report: Matisse by Volkmar Essers (1989, 2002)” →

This book is a collection of 14 poems about living on a farm and then losing the farm. It comes out of the 1980s Farm Aid era of family farms lost to corporate interests, a genre that somehow was a big thing in the middle 1980s (a response to President Reagan, perhaps?) but has dwindled (although, apparently, Farm Aid is still going, so perhaps it’s just my awareness of it that has dwindled).

Apparently, the purchase of this book in 1984 included a raffle ticket to win the Hirst farm. The author and her husband, faced with debt and foreclosure, tried to sell 50,000 copies of the book to pay off their debts, but ultimately they cancelled the raffle. 50,000 is a pretty lofty target for a chapbook. Take it from a poet who thinks 100 copies is a stretch goal.

At any rate, the poems are lyrics, generally over 12 or 16 lines long and end rhymed. Opposite pages have photos of the family farm and the livestock, so it’s a quick enough book to read. Nothing that sticks out, really. A little more meat than Under the Sunday Tree but that’s mostly because the lyrics are lyrics and longer.

More interesting for the story behind it, though.

When I found this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale this spring, it must have been misclassified as Literature (that’s what the first page says) or maybe Art, but it’s actually a children’s book of art and poetry. I think it’s based on the art of the Bahaman artist Mr. Amos Ferguson with some verse by Eloise Greenfield added.

The verse is light and simple, which is not a bad thing in itself, but its depth is aimed at children, so it lacks real poetry meat to it. As does most of the poems I read in cheap chapbooks anyway.

The art, though, is primitive/folk art, and I really don’t know how to appreciate it. I mean, the paintings kind of look like the stuff I painted on the recovered white-coated cardboard tops of doughnut boxes that I used as my canvases when I lived in the trailer park and watched my first episodes of The Joy of Painting. I mean, I can look at Renaissance paintings and judge, knowing that it’s my opinion alone, good and bad, what moves me and what does not. I can do that with Impressionism. I can do that with a lot of European figurative painting. But with primitive and folk art styles, I really lack an aesthetic vocabulary to say whether one thing is good or better than another. So all I can say here is that it ain’t my bag, baby.

Which is weird, because most of the “art” I do in woodburning or etching is pretty primitive and folk-artish. Which explains why I have no idea whether I am any good at it or not. Which probably means “No.”