Category: Books

I jes’ picked up this book earlier this month, and I brought it with a stack of other poetry books to the chairside table for some shorter reading after working my way through chapters of a longer book (The Maine Woods, Walden, and Cape Cod by Thoreau). And I guess I jumped on this one first.

So this is a self-published volume from 1938; apparently, Rainey was a radio personality in Connecticut. Presumably he read some of these poems on the air, and they definitely have the rhythm of a polished performer. Most of them are four to eight sestets or octets with mostly iambic buy with some anapaest thrown in for variety. Thematically, they’re Americana, not unlike what you might find in Ideals magazine, although Rainey writes an awful lot in the vernacular, not only dropping the final consonant of words but also using rural phonetic pronunciations like shadder for shadow. So some possible James Whitcomb Riley influence there (see the book reports for Little Orphant Annie and Other Poems and Old School Day Romances to see what I’m talking about).

I’m doing the math here, and somehow 1938 was seventy-seven years ago. That hardly seems correct, but I’m a manchild who still watches dumb movies, so I probably still think it’s 1980something when I do my default time calculations. Rainey would have been a contemporary of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Ogden Nash, but his poetry appears not to have been picked up by a major publisher. Perhaps he wanted to keep the rights for himself. Or maybe the collections of poetry were just a larf. As a result, the books look to be kind of rare.

What seems incongruous, or might, is that he was a broadcaster in Connecticut (WTIC, I believe, but I’ve closed the tabs and can’t be arsed to look it up again–oh, all right, I did verify it was WTIC–no point in me hallucinating like an LLM would please add aside in the self deprecating style of Brian J.). Which, in the 21st century, I think of as suburban or even urban because of its proximity to New York City (although I have never been to Connecticut, although my beautiful wife has). The Google map shows a lot of green which would indicate it’s not completely overdeveloped. So it was my mistake in thinking it was rural. The film Holiday Inn is set contemporaneously with when this book was written, roughly, and it depicts Connecticut as the height of yokels in the sticks. So I guess the incongruity was based on my misconception of Connecticut.

At any rate, if you like the kind of poetry that you find in old Ideals magazines with a touch of the Riley, you’ll probably enjoy these books. Nothing is going to really stick to your intellectual ribs–nothing in here compelled me to memorize it–but a better read than the current issue of Poetry magazine anyway.

Ah, gentle reader. Even with the gluttonous trips to library sale bag days and more recent trips to estate sales and garage sales on the weekends, I still scout the free book cart at church for things to pick up. And last Sunday, I was particularly greedy, snatching up this book as well as a book about the book of Genesis. From the Bible. Which is more what the free book cart tends to proffer except when some of us sneak more secular works onto it. Like this one.

The Baldknobbers are a long-running show down in Branson, and this is probably a self-published book to include amongst their souvenirs. The copyright date is 1999, but they could very well have stock of it down there even now. Branson shows aren’t really my thing, Yakov excepted, so I don’t know if I’ll ever see them or the Presleys (both of which claim to be the first show in Branson, I think).

So of course I read it in a night or two as something else to read after finishing a chapter of the Thoreau omnibus I’m hoping to finish soon. It’s purportedly a list of jokes that the emcees have used over the years, so they’re very twentieth century equivalents of what you would find in Reader’s Digest. Not especially edgy humor, which is fine: I’m not too into crass, although the only joke that I actually laughed at dealt with bodily functions: One fellow is complaining to a friend that his wife is on a fiber kick, so he’s eating bran in the morning, bran in the evening, and bran at night. The friend asks, “But are you regular?” And the fellow says, “Regular? I’m thirty days ahead!” Probably complete with the exclamation point.

So, eh, it passed a little time in church before the service and a couple of minutes before bed a couple nights. And it was free, which was nice.

I just bought this former library book from the Knoxville High School Library at the Friends of the Library book sale on May 3, and I jumped into it after the collection of Finnish proverbs.

This says it’s a book of Eskimo poems, but it’s really a book of photos of Eskimos and the great white north with poems as text. The photos are more interesting than the poetry, which mostly deal with the landscape and survival, and the photos show you why. The collection is 60-something now, and I wonder how different a 21st century edition of the book would look different. Many of the photos depict the outcome of a hunt, and one of the poems talks happily about having seal to eat. I mean, that’s life in the harsh environment, but people in New York who make books would likely blanche at the thought of it.

So a quick read. No poems I’m interested in memorizing and not even aphorisms or proverbs to quote to sound smart. But, wow, what interesting photographs.

I have dived right into the stack of “poetry”” that I purchased earlier this month partially because I have not been arsed to put them on my bookshelves yet, so they’re still on my (rather large) desk. Maybe I’m thinking with dedicated effort, I will read them all before I shelve them kind of like I’m hoping to watch all the movies atop the movie cabinet soon (but my night gig has restarted, so my reading and viewing time will be lessened for a couple of months).

The translator/editor is the child of Finnish immigrants, and this book was partially funded by a university where the translator works (or worked) in a Finnish fellowship or something, so the author has other presumably short works related to Finnish literature as well. But this book is but a collection of proverbs and sayings along with some line drawings of Finnish places and design elements. So it’s definitely a quick read–under an hour, for sure, and it has some little bits of wisdom, although some of the proverbs are not unique to Finns.

I marked a couple:

• Better once too much than always too little.
• You can fool others only once but yourself for a lifetime.
• What you do not repair you destroy.
• You do not reach Heaven in one jump.
• Not all clouds bring rain.

I cannot wait to use them and announce they’re proverbs from the Finnish. You know I will.

I’m actually vicariously Finnish to a degree. One of my uncles is of Finnish lineage. His daughter is blonde and fair, but the son got the darker complection from the Noggle side of the family, so he has a Finnish last name but looks like a Mexican bandito. He, my cousin, has been to Finland to meet his relations several times and actually speaks a bit of Finnish. So I’m only vicariously Finnish, which is odd since I have lineage from just about every other European country.

So, yeah, worth the fifty cents I paid for it.

I mentioned when reading Fatal Interview that I was reading another collection of sonnets simultaneously; this is it. I bought this book last spring at the Friends of the Library book sale; it’s clear I haunt the dollar (fifty cents on half price day) poetry table.

So: This is a contemporary collection, only six years old, but it’s anachronistic as the poet tries to emulate medieval sonnets. Not only does the poet affect some middle English stylings, but the sonnets are English style as well (abab cdcd efef gg, with three samples and the couplet instead of the Italian sonnet which is 8 lines and a turn for 6 lines–which is what Edna St. Vincent Millay and I wrote back in the day). And the text of all poems is italic, perhaps to look more like handwriting, but that’s always a poor design decision as it slows reading down just a bit.

The poems? Eh, okay, I guess. The rhythm is fairly suspect–the poet does not stick to iambic pentameter much.

But, you know what? They’re earnest, and I have to say I developed a little…. well, maybe not affection for them–I won’t memorize any of them for open mic nights–but I did feel a little sympathy or camaraderie with the fellow. When I was in college, my poetry professor knocked my poetry for being like reproductions of antique furniture. My later sonnets had a more modern sensibility. Even Edna St. Vincent Millay’s hundred-year-old sonnets read a little more contemporary than this book.

So perhaps this poet will also evolve. But you really have to be in the mood for this kind of thing to take much from this volume.

I am enjoying running through the stack of Edna St. Vincent Millay books I bought last autumn–I read Fatal Interview last month, and when I went to the book sale last week, I hoped to buy additional copies of Millay’s work so I could put them in my to-read stacks and read them again. But none were forthcoming, and I still have a few unread from last autumn. Or I could dig out my existing copies to re-read, but that’s not how I roll.

At any rate, this collection is not a collection of sonnets, but most of them have good rhythm and end rhymes anyway. The fourth part of the book does include some sonnets, though. And it’s not a series of connected works, unlike Fatal Interview, but you do get the usual Millay themes of love and longing and loss.

No penciled into the end papers, but it does have a book plate naming a previous owner (Reggie Johnson) and a label from the Personal Book Shop with two locations in Boston, Massachussetts. The book shop no longer seems open, and the style of the label indicates that it’s decades old, so. Someone, probably more than one person, enjoyed this book. Perhaps someday someone else will enjoy it when it passes from my hands.

Not much of a book report, but I can only gush about Millay as she is my favorite poet bar none.

To break up the monotony of the paperback science fiction novels I’ve been reading (most recently Halo: The Fall of Reach), I picked up a paperback Western instead. Although this book is actually a paperback that’s been upgraded to the library binding (as it was in the library of Nixa High School in the early 1980s, with intermittent checkout stamps until 1988 which means while I was reading adult crime fiction from the volunteer library and Agatha Christie books from my school library, someone my age was already reading Westerns in high school). Someone else acquired this book and later donated it to the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale, where I bought it and other Westerns last June.

So: This is not one of L’Amour’s best.

In it, an Irish immigrant from the County Cork is heading west to work on the railroad; he has a disagreement with the conductor, he falls asleep on a layover and awakens to find the stationmaster missing (and later finds him wounded) as former Confederate soldiers hope to kidnap General Sherman from the train–but they end up with a colonel instead. The lovely daughter of the colonel wants to go looking for him, so the immigrant goes with her and has to learn the ways of the west as he goes.

So the book has many different foci: The kidnapping, the search, it turns into a boxing book in the middle as the immigrant gets a chance to box the conductor for money, then it’s back to a search and rescue and a big battle in the end and a brief one-on-one, and finis!

So a serviceable throwaway book, but not one heavy on the philosophy to quote in A Trail of Memories, although it had a few one-liners about proper manliness and self-reliance. So something to read if you’re looking for a Western, but not something to really pull you into appreciating the genre at its best if you’re not already a fan.

I bought this book on my only trip to the Friends of the Rogersville Library book sale in 2016, and something funny about it: Although I read the Spiderman novel Spiderman: The Octopus Agenda in 2017, the only two other books I bought at that book sale were this book and an omnibus edition of Thoreau’s works which I’ve been reading science fiction paperbacks because, yeeks–although I read Walden and counted it for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, I’m bogged down in The Maine Woods and hope I’ll finish it and Cape Cod to count that thick volume as one book. This particular paperback weighs in at almost 400 pages, and I read it faster than I’ve read the last couple of days of Thoreau’s final trip into Maine.

At any rate, I pregress. This book is the prequel to the video game Halo: Combat Evolved, the first game in the franchise, and it talks a bit about how John/Master Chief/Spartan-117 became the chief, some early encounters with the Covenant including a couple of space battles that culminate in the fall of the human’s major base at Reach and then the humans finding and decoding, with Cortana’s help, the location of the Halo–so they go there, and the book ends.

I mean, I’ve oversimplified the plot quite a bit. Early, we get a lot of training insight into what the Spartans did, a couple of missions including one to a planet with artifacts that identify the location of Halo, and whatnot. The Spartans take some losses, and John, the Master Chief, has to do little soul-searching about it.

As you might know, gentle reader, military science fiction is not my genre of choice generally (what is? whatcha got?). But this book moved along really well. I did not feel like I was left in the dark because I did not play the games or because I did not serve in the military (unlike some hard science fiction which I don’t like because I’m not an academic scientist–Greg Bear, I’m looking at you). Plus, as I mentioned in the previous review (didn’t I?), I was a technical writer circa 2000, and I cannot imagine how awesome it would have been to have my employer ask me, and pay me to write a science fiction novel. Well, mine kinda did, as I wrote about how technology might work someday. Oh, but no, and so I still toil at my trades today instead of cashing in on stock option wealth.

At any rate, I repeat myself, this book is alright (in the northern sense of alright, meaning good). It made me want to try to play the video game again (on brief attempt to play a later Halo game with my son ended in humiliation). The controller has a lot of triggers, buttons, and mini-joysticks, though, so most likely I will just continue with my twenty-something-year-old Civilization game. Or not: I am putting together my next computer, and I’m not sure I’ll put Steam on it. Sometimes, I’ve done that to some good effect. But there are always blogs and job boards to waste my time on, so it will remain to be seen how long that might last.

Oh, and two more things:

One: I mentioned to my son that this franchise, or at least the early bits of it, are heavily influenced by Ringworld by Larry Niven. He didn’t know or care who that was or why.

Two: The franchise features Spartans wearing MJOLNIR armor. So let the people who post this meme say no more:

As a reminder, this is one of those memes that hits close to home: Sparta is over in Christian County. I’ve been to archery competitions in one of the schools there, and I’ve been to and will likely again attend a book sale at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library this year.

Since I’m apparently reading a lot of paperback science fiction this year, I picked this book out of the paperback cluster of the paperbacks stacked on the yet unrepaired bookshelves which broke in 2014. Looking back in the annals of this blog, I bought it at Pumpkin Daze later that year, which was the same time I bought John D. MacDonald’s The Wine of the Dreamers which was one of the other paperback science fiction books by authors that are known for a different genre. Pendleton, of course, was best known for starting The Exectutioner series of books, although the Ashton Ford series (one of his lesser known lines) had elements of fantasy to them.

At any rate, a couple of years into the future, the human race has enhanced itself through directed evolution. One such fellow graduates from his military training and is about to take charge of Terra 10, an interplanetary battle device that the corporations in charge of Earth want to use to keep rebellious systems in line (this is pre-Star Wars, so it’s not based on the Death Star). The guy has been enhanced to interact with the computers quickly and think like a machine partly, and he’s large (actually, larger than most of the type). But things go sideways and he ends up on Earth, which is an agricultural powerhouse, with a group of “Reavers”–reverts who failed evolutionary enhancement and are passionate people who want to be free from the tech overlords. He falls for one of the women there, and so he becomes involved in a plot to seize Terra 10 for the Reavers to negotiate a peace with the techno overlords, but then an alien invasion force comes into the solar system, and he has to use the weapons platform to defend humanity en toto.

It definitely has mid-century paperback original vibe. It tries to grapple with some bigger issues, like how much can a man be enhanced and still be a man and whether computers serve man or does man serve computers (timely, as I sit here writing a book report knowing its main audience will be LLM scrapers of some sort and me in the future, which is more of a machine audience than man). But although it raises the questions, it does not answer them, not well. But at least it does not read like Mack Bolan In Space. No numbers falling, no statement of philosophy followed by the one-word sentence “Yeah.” So good on ‘im for trying something different.

Ah, gentle reader, I intended to make this a dual book report with a more modern collection of sonnets (circa 2019) which I had on my chairside table for some time but didn’t get into until I picked this book. And then, although I made some progress on that other book, I haven’t been compelled to complete it in the intervening hours days weeks since I read Fatal Interview. So allow me to talk a bit about this book.

Well, of course, I’ve read it–I read a pile of Millay in college and inspired my mother to go to the bad part of St. Louis (which part is bad? the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) to buy some for me when I was away in school. However, apparently, I have not bought it again in the intervening years, unlike so many, until I bought a stack of them last September. And I quickly re-read Renascence and A Few Figs From Thistles.

So: This book is about a decade later than those books, when she was established, a celebrity poet, and maybe on the downhill slide of her career (heaven forbid we apply pop music and celebrity ideas to poets). It’s a collection of LII sonnets, ostensibly about a romantic relationship mostly self-conscious from beginning to end, and, aw, hell, that pretty much explains how I approached things in my youth. Who’s my daddy? E. St. Vincent Millay.

Overall, the sonnets are a bit hit or miss. I probably have mentioned that I memorized “Love, though for this you riddle me with darts….” from A Few Figs from Thistles for open mic nights. I also memorized “Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink….” from this collection as well for performance, although it is not as exciting as the former. Or, at least, it was not as much of a hit in cafes thirty years ago.

Welp. Alrighty, then (he said, quoting a thirty-year-old movie to get down verbally with the young people today). I like Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she influenced me more in my young poetry and young affectations than even Billy Joel or Robert B. Parker. Of course, I recommend it. And deep down I hope I stumble across another old copy in the wild which I can buy and have an excuse to read again.

OH: And about this copy: Someone else treasured it. While reading it, I came across the detritus of what looked to be a ribbon in several places, and I thought it was an old bookmark. But who uses a decaying red ribbon for a bookmark. I bet someone used multiple pieces of red ribbon to mark favorites, and the decayed ribbons were later removed, perhaps by Friends of the Library. And the back endspiece has a sonnet penciled in:

I’d hoped, briefly, that it was the long-lost sonnet from a master poet which would make this into a real collectible, but it’s just a copied poem from Elizabeth Barret Browning. Not that I’m slagging on her work, but it’s not her handwriting.

This was the Lenten devotional from the church I attend for this year. 40 Days of Wisdom last year, the first time I’ve gone through a devotional almost in real time. Or at least at the same time as everyone else, as I did not not attend a small group or anything. Not that they were emphasized this year, perhaps as a result of the continued attendance decline with this particular church.

At any rate, although I picked it up early in Lent, I really didn’t get started really reading it for many days. The first daily devotion starts with the woman recounting the indecision that she felt when she was a girl at Disney World, and…. Well, gentle reader, I am a bad, bad man, for I still hold a little envy/resentment/outrage for people who grouse about things I never had or never can. Just imagine how I seethe inside when someone over forty complains about having difficulties with their parents–you have to imagine, because I don’t outwardly make a show of my personal ire of this sort, especially not performatively, look-at-poor-me variety. But these sorts of things get me up. I mean, aside from trips up north for the weekend or holidays down south in St. Louis with my mother’s family, the only family vacation we ever took was when my mother, who must have scrimped and saved all year, brought us down to the Ozarks for a week. Poor little me, but I did pick the book up and put it down many times when getting into the setup for the first devotional.

So, yeah, well, it’s a devotional written by members of the congregation, although I do not recognize some of the names, including a fellow with the title Reverend. They range from personal anecdotes as springboards to scriptural lessons to more earnèd pieces (such as the contributions by my beautiful wife). They’re pretty quick to read, and if you’re not giving them serious daily contemplation, they’re pretty easy to forget as well.

But I guess they’re more workbooks than things that are supposed to stick with you anyway.

And, unfortunately, because I am the Master Chief of sinners, I’ll mostly remember the hard time I had with the first devotion.

Wow, gentle reader. It has been sixteen years since I picked up a Tarzan book; I read Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan. Perhaps not long after I got the books, although back in those days I was not dilligent about posting my purchases for future me to review. Also, I was not posting the scans of the covers–probably expecting the Amazon link below to carry the weight of it–so I can’t easily review how awful this brutal 1960s covers were. Ugly.

At any rate, in this, the eleventh volume of the series (originally from 1927), Tarzan is not really the main character. In it, a group of Arabs have come down into the heart of Africa looking for a fabled treasure city, and there’s some intrigue amongst them. One fellow is in love with the sheikh’s daughter, but he’s framed for attempted murder and escapes before he is killed. Meanwhile, an expedition with a couple of Americans, a young naturalist out to photograph the wildlife and a wealthy man out to hunt exotic game, and they fall out due to the brutality of the wealthy man. The young man wanders into a hidden valley, a lost world where Crusaders have taken up a defensive position and think that they’re surrounded by Saracens. But the residents of the valley are broken into two factions in two cities, and they have an annual tournament instead of war. The young man falls for the princess of one of the cities, but she’s stolen away by the leader of the opposing city. And these threads come together as the Arabs find their way into the valley. Tarzan has his moments, but the greater part of the book is given over to the other characters.

So it blends several different genres of pulp: The jungle adventure, the lost world adventure. The prose is, of course, deep and learned in a way that gets thinner in time–learned but terse in the 1940s, a little learned but thinner in the 1960s, and then mostly unlearned but thick with unnecessary description and extraneous scenes in the modern era.

I have one or two more of these paperbacks in the stacks somewhere, and I’ll look forward to reading them maybe in the near term.

After reading Mid-Flinx, I picked up this other mid-80s Alan Dean Foster paperback for a quick read. Which was a bit of a mistake as it was not especially quick at all.

In it, a large Corporation conducts a quick, overnight cleanup of a longtime toxic waste dump in a California valley which was not adequately distanced from the parent company. So a corporate executive fixture oversees the project, and it goes flawlessly except for a bit of a cancer cluster amongst the residents of a shantytown on the hill beside the dump. The company finds/relocates a number of them, but one old man, who has lived there his whole life, doesn’t want to go. When the fixer visits him, the old man shows him a couple of tricks that indicate he might have special powers as a result of living by and playing in the dump as a youth. So the fixer hopes to bring him into a black site corporate lab for testing, but the old man, who has a heart condition, takes off–his grand niece, the crippled sole survivor of a school bus accident, has telepathy and counsels him as he flees from the corporation to meet her in Texas. But the corporation through its regional offices are hot on his trail, culminating in kidnapping and murder to get a hold of him.

So: I was not really sure where it was going, and the setting of the middle 1980s southwest was not as exotic as, say, a forest planet. The prose was serviceable, but the story not especially gripping. Kind of Firestarter, actually. With toxic waste instead of a government program behind it. And toxic waste was really a big concern in the 1980s, ainna? We sure got a lot of pop culture from it: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Toxic Avenger, C.H.U.D., and so forth.

At any rate, thinking about it and researching this post made it clear how Foster kind of recycles current tropes, themes, and setting from not only his own work but the culture at large. I mean, Midworld takes place on a forested planet (like Mid-Flinx). Codgerspace features older protagonists (although so does Cocoon which comes out later). Maybe I’m reading too much into it.

But I might want to hold off on picking up another Foster soon. And given how I’ve apparently paced them out so far, it might be a decade.