Category: Books

I got this book in October, and when I was looking for something sort of escapist to work into my rotation, it was right there atop the stack.

This is the ninth book in the Dresden Files series, which is indeed about a powerful gun-toting hard-boiled wizard. In this volume, the wizard is looking for someone who is killing witches. While dressed up in his usual clothing. Some clues indicate his brother might be involved. His brother is a vampire, you see, but not a blood-sucking vampire. Instead, he feasts upon the emotions of his victims.

So the book starts out with the current crime and details and starts working us into the case, but just as suddenly it veers into Series Business. Characters from previous books and plotlines impact what’s going on. Of course, the houses of the vampires are politicking and manuvering against each other. Then there’s a mysterious figure whose identity is not revealed at the end, which means that’s something for a later book.

So it’s an interesting conceit–not unlike Hard Magic. But the Series Business distracts me and emphasizes that I’m an outsider to this series, not someone who’s been with it from the beginning. And I think it detracts from the current book’s plot some. It’s not only this book, gentle reader; as you know, I often complained about Robert B. Parker’s later books for the same reason. In the middle 1990s, I started the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton, but I dropped out after book five or six (of apparently 21 by now) because so much of the business in each book deals with characters and plots from other books. You don’t get much of that at all in classic pulp, but I guess the modern publishing world relies on the brandification of series and this sort of thing solidifies the connection with recurrent readers. But I don’t like it.

At any rate, reading Butcher’s bio indicates his path to becoming a published writer (and apparently a better-selling author than Larry Correia. He wrote and wrote and submitted and finally started doing conferences where he met…. Laurell K. Hamilton. And his career was on track. It’s pleasing to read of hard work leading to success.

But in a final reflection on the book: I’ll take others in the series if I find them easily, but I’m not going to go buy them new for myself or specifically looking for them at used book stores or book sales. I did, however, buy the first two in the series for my nephew (the same one I got the Correia books for a couple years back). So I did put a couple pennies in Butcher’s kitty which is more than I do for most authors I read these days.

Oh, and this book is the second one I’ve read this month that was originally sold at a Border’s (Blog being the other). I hadn’t thought of that book store in a while. I remember a time when there were a bunch of big book stores like that in St. Louis and here in Springfield. We’re still lucky enough to have a free-standing Barnes and Noble that’s only half-given over to Nooks and toys, and I only get in there three or four times a year. Sadly, I have enough to read without hitting a new book store frequently.

This book is a self-published memoir of a man who served as a chaplain during the Korean War. It’s built from his daily journal, so each day or so we get a paragraph or two that details where he was going, what he was doing, and the services that he held. It’s a remarkable time capsule and throws light on the daily activities of a chaplain in a war zone that you don’t get from M*A*S*H‘s Father Mulcahy. I mean, he has a box he throws in his jeep, and that acts as his altar and whatnot when he stops amongst a squad or brigade to perform an impromptu service. He highlights a piece of scripture, does a short sermon, and then encourages the men. It’s remarkable; Griepp actually won a Bronze Star for performing a service calmly while getting shelled.

At any rate, I highlighted (well, flagged; I’m not the type to put my own ink in books) a couple passages for comment:

In response to a letter from his mother, I looked up Pvt Roy Hartford of the King Company, age 16, and arranged a minority discharge for him.

Can you imagine a modern 16-year-old lying to get into the military? It happened a bunch back then.

Met some of the Marines, as they are fighting right next to our troops. Good soldiers, too, neither superior nor inferior to troopers of the 7th Cavalry.

My whole line wilts a little at this thought. On the other hand, this is a chaplain, so he has to say nice things about his sheep.

May 12 is “M-Day” for Operation Mascot. All of these children had experienced abandonment, rejection, or loss of both parents. Now it was time for another separation.

Apparently, various companies adopted orphans and lost children, and it got to be such a problem that the Army had to make a concentrated effort to keep its soldiers from taking care of the weak and the unfortunate in a war zone. Contrast this with the behaviour of most armies throughout history. And make a point of it in a history class if you dare.

Our personnel officer and Lt Edward Jirikowik, the center company commander, are having a problem. The Lt is expected to locate men to fill vacancies for jobs other than riflemen. Rotation is sending the riflemen home, but leaving typists, drivers, radio operators, and wire men. Such men cannot go until they are replaced by men of like skills.

My father, fresh out of boot camp, was lined up with the others and the first ten men were sent to Okinawa for a clerical position if they knew their alphabet, and the rest went to Vietnam. Which is why my father spent his overseas time in Okinawa. I always thought he felt bad about that because it meant he was unable to fight with his mates, but he might not have liked it because it represented a lengthened committment. I’ll never know, of course.

At any rate, it’s a fast and fascinating read if you’re interested in the history of the Korean War or whatnot. As I mentioned, the book is not just a book, it’s an artifact of a man who wanted to publish it. Check out the rudimentary layout:

Dan Rather emailed me to say that was laid out using Adobe Pagemaker on an Apple II.

The book also bears an inscription to a presumed comrade (forty years after the conflict). The handwritten message is for the recipient to see page 28; page 28 is starred. I presume this is where the Chaplain and the inscribee met. I hope it’s not the first clue to a treasure hidden in the Korean wilderness since I mentioned it on the Internet and would have put myself in the crosshairs of unscrupulous fortune-seekers if I did.

This book is a little Hallmark gift pick-up from the 1960s, the kind of simple gift that says I’m thinking about you but don’t know what to get you that’s more substantial. In the late 20th century, gift certificates served the same function. This particular volume was given as a Mother’s Day gift in 1966.

Unlike some books of this type, it collects poems from real poets, like Longfellow, Emerson, Wordsworth, and so on. Real poets whose works were (and still are) in the public domain, but the poems themselves had a greated depth than more recent ones. Of course, the Classics Club was popular enough to be in business in this post GI Bill world of the middle 20th century, so readers and compilers of gift volumes aspired higher than a collection of images with quips cribbed off the Internet.

And this book was not only read, but the recipient read the poems within at socials, and she noted which she’d read so she wouldn’t repeat herself, I guess.

So someone enjoyed this book more than I did, for sure.

It’s a nice, brief collection, and it most pleased me to know someone else, someone’s mother, read and appreciated the poems, perhaps even without a college degree in English.

As you can guess, I flipped through this book during football games.

As a Eyewitness book, it’s a graphically designed, visually oriented work with a number of images surrounding brief text, history, and explanations. Like a lot of these survey course coffee table books, the book covers a lot of ground in the Impressionist movement, a brief history, and a bit of individual information about the artists. It has sections (two page spreads) covering some themes and practices shared by the Impressionists and reasons why they’re considered Impressionists. As survey books, it’s not bad; I also see there are titles in the series that deal with the individual authors as well.

Serious students might think these books are a waste of time, but unserious students like me can pick up some tidbits. Two I did from this book: Renoir was one of the first to prime his canvases (that is, put down a base coat of white or gesso so that colors overlaid on the base coat would pop out more) and that Renoir worked wet-on-wet (I know what that is because Bob Ross did that). So I learned something certain in addition to adding to my familiarity with the works and images.

The book also gives a bunch more depth to the non-painting work, such as the sculptures and the cast bronze of the artists. Some other books shy away from this a bit because the paintings are easier to represent two-dimensionally perhaps.

At any rate, a good book to look at for a bit. I’ll keep my eyes out for others in the Eyewitness Books series on art. I think I have one or two on other topics that I’ll have to move up in my reading queue.

Books mentioned in this review:

On Thanksgiving, my mother-in-law brought trinkets and gifts for the kids, and I guess I qualify since she brought this book for me. She found it at a church bazaar or something, and it has Brett Favre’s picture right on it (as did this book which is about the same thing).

This book is a Scholastic paperback aimed at grade school children. I’m not sure what sort of statement my mother-in-law was making in giving this book to me. Or was she? Did I just steal a book from my children only because it has Brett Favre on the cover? WHAT KIND OF MAN AM I? Well, it’s only fair. They steal my cartoon books.

At any rate, the book gives brief laudatory bios of good NFL quarterbacks of 2004, including Tom Brady, Brett Favre, Peyton Manning, Michael Vick, Donovan McNabb, and Chad Pennington. The first three are creme-de-la-creme; Michael Vick played for a long time; Donovan McNabb had his day; and Chad Pennington was a quarterback in New York, which New Yorkers think is automatically worth two elsewhere before the season starts and they stink.

It was a quick read, and I was able to finish it on Thanksgiving before the Packers game which the Packers lost. I’d have been better off re-reading this book six times rather than watching that tragedy.

So it’s a bit dated, but not as dated as it will be in four or five years when all of the aforementioned quarterbacks are out of the league and some are in the Hall of Fame, including Chad Pennington if he goes to visit.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a short collection of photos and prose about the state of Missouri, but it’s published by the University of Kansas Press. So all of its information is suspect.

The prose is a bit boilerplate and rah-rah, but the photographs are interesting. They’re grouped by city or town, and almost forty years later, they’re more poingant because they’re not only a collection of images of places you might not have been (or maybe you have), but they’re historical throwbacks to the Carter years. So although I didn’t live in Missouri at the time, the types of cars and haircuts depicted in the pictures remind me a little of when I was young. Very young, I guess; I was pre-school aged when the images were taken.

A neat book to flip through during a football game. Or whatever you might watch that doesn’t require that much attention. Hey, some people knit. I flip through books to pad out my annual total.

Books mentioned in this review:

I read this book as part of my recent Sinophilia kick.

This book is a bit of history and a bit of cultural psychoanalysis. Instead of a straightforward history, the book focuses on the story of wall-building in China, from the earliest walls in the Qin Dynasty through the creation of the Ming wall near Beijing called The Great Wall and beyond to the Great Firewall in the 21st century. As such, a lot of non-wall building dynasties and history is left out along with major trends in Chinese thought (Confucism vs Daoism and the import of Buddhism). The book chops around a bit, too, jumping from the early history to stories of explorers and Indiana Jones types finding remnants of the wall in the desert.

Still, it highlights some patterns and cycles in Chinese history, from where barbarian tribes overthrow a Chinese dynasty, remain vital for a while, and then become Chinese only to lose their military moxie and build walls in their decline. Whereupon another vital tribe takes over, remains vital for a while, and so on. The narrative sweep of the book isn’t compelling enough to pull you along unlike other books more biographical or focused on ascents of civilizations, and the author could have tightened in places a bit.

The author takes a couple of light shots at George W. Bush (president of the United States when the book was written) and at Israel (for building a fence of its own, the fools! The Mongols always get in!), but overall it’s not a political book nor a particularly noticeably leftist history book. It isn’t pro- or anti-China. It gets a few shots in at Jesuits, though.

So I’m glad to have read it.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is part of a greater collection, originally published in hardback no less, that collects all of Jack Kirby’s early work before he became THE Jack Kirby responsible for (with Stan Lee) Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and a variety of later things that would be important to Jack Kirby fans because they were Jack Kirby things.

This book focuses on summer 1947 and the numerous stories he wrote. He wasn’t THE Jack Kirby then; he was a contract guy for a bottom rung publisher of anthology series, so there are a lot of crime stories in here along with a romance story.

Well.

I’ve already sacrificed a lot of geek comic credibility when reporting on books that deal with Comic Art (see also Comic Art Now). Although some of the work can be elaborate, none of it really rises to the level of great paintings by, say, the Impressionists (although since it depicts things from a single point of view and is therefore comprehensible, comic art rises above Cubism, surely). The work in this book is all black and white, so it’s limited in what it can do to begin with.

So it’s worth a browse if you can find a cheap copy like I did or if you like comics. I mean, amid the history and biography of Kirby, it does have short comic stories in it. It’s definitely worth your time if you’re a real Kirby fan.

And the one thing I learned from the book: Dell and Delacorte originated as comic publishers and only then moved into paperbacks and then hardbacks.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’ve been reading DC comic books that I bought at the most recent Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. I was saddened to find that I spent more than a dollar each on the issues on half price day (because they were priced at over $2 each inside the front cover). So I read a disconnected set of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World (by John Byrne no less). Which was kind of a good primer for this graphic novel which collects six issues of recent Worlds’ Finest comics with Huntress and Power Girl.

Well. For those of us NOT keeping up: In the middle 1980s, DC consolidated its comic book universes in a limited series called Crisis on Infinite Earths. One of the net results of this was that some of the heroes from other versions of Earth were on our Earth. Or other Earths. Just not an infinite number now. Or something.

In this case, we have alternate Earth versions of The Huntress and Super Girl (Power Girl) who are looking for a way to return home. Within this set of comics, they investigate and fight the minions of a rival technology company who is supposed to be dead.

To be honest, it’s been a couple weeks since I finished this book, too, so that’s about all I remember. Except that the science minion of Darkseid makes an appearance from Apokolips. Who I recognized because I’ve been reading Fourth World.

So it’s not selling me on DC over my preferred Marvel. Of course, I didn’t really get into the X-men titles or Fantastic Four when they got to fiddling with the timeline and alternate versions of comic book heroes. I prefer simpler stories, which is why I read paperback men’s adventure novels. So there you have it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up this trade paperback because I’m running out of good, smart-looking mass market paperbacks to be my carry book. As such, I could not stick it into my pocket for easy travel, but I guess I don’t need that as much as I thought, since most of my outside-the-home reading places have places for me to stow books when not in use.

I enjoyed this book, as you might guess by my posts quoting it (here and here). It’s styled as a psychology book, but Jung really gets more into philosophy than psychology. He discusses the role and experience of the individual relative to mass movements, both the State and the Church and discusses how the individual gets wrapped up in them and how they in turn enwrapture the individual to the individual’s detriment.

Of course, I agreed with the assessments of the individual versus the State. For people of a certain stripe, like me, trends have indicated the Federal government is creeping and sometimes bolting towards an omnipresent I didn’t agree with the assessment of the Church, though. Perhaps it’s because I attend a less centralized church than the Catholic church or because I’m up close and personal with the people who make up the church that I can see the atoms in the conceptual object, but I don’t see it as monolithic as the State. I guess one could say the State is likewise composed of well-meaning individuals who sometimes go astray in pursuit of well-meaning ends, but the State and the Church are different in that the Church has to operate through spiritual and moral suasion and the State has the military and law enforcement to compel its well-meaning urges. So they are very different indeed.

It’s been a while since I actually read this book (I finished it way back in July), but I’ve put off posting about it because I took a lot of notes on it and considered writing a really long, thoughtful post on it. In addition to the wisdom of posts linked above, I took some notes like this:

• P46 Jung contra Objectivism; he says the world would not exist without consciousness. Jung says:
  

  Without consciousness, there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously experienced by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

  Anyone who knows his or her Objectivism (and a bit of Existentialism) knows these hold the existence of an external reality precedes the consciousness that perceives/experiences it.

• P58 wisdom. I have no idea what I meant.
• P81 individual slipping into purely conceptual world. Does it contradict p46 above? Jung writes:
  

  Nothing estranges man more from the ground-plan of his instincts than his learning capacity which turns out to be a genuine drive for progressive transformation of human modes of behaviour. It, more than anything else, is responsible for the altered conditions of his existence and the need for new adaptations which civilization brings. It is also the ultimate source of those numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties which are occasioned by man’s progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious. The result is that modern man knows himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself – a capacity largely dependent on environmental conditions, knowledge and control of which necessitated or suggested certain modifications of his original instinctive tendencies. His consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him, and it is to the latter’s peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resources. This task is so exacting, and its fulfilment so profitable, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively take the place of reality.

  It highlights the dangers, but it does not contradict the assertion of consciousness preceding reality.

• P84 reiterates the primacy of the psyche. Jung writes:
  

  All the same, nobody can deny that without the psyche there would be no world at all, and still less a human world.

  So he’s all in on the consciousness first.

• P92 church attendance is an expression of faith, not the source. I think I was arguing against what he wrote on p91:
  

  In view of the general ignorance of and bias against psychology it must be accounted a misfortune that the one experience which makes sense of individual existence should seem to have its origin in a medium that is certain to catch everybody’s prejudices. Once more the doubt is heard: “What good can come out of Nazareth?” The unconscious, if not regarded. outright as a sort of refuse bin underneath the conscious mind, is at any rate supposed to be of “merely animal nature.” In reality, however, and by definition it is of uncertain extent and constitution, so that overvaluation or undervaluation of it is pointless and can be dismissed as mere prejudice. At all events, such judgments sound very queer in the mouths of Christians, whose Lord was himself born on the straw of a stable, among the domestic animals. It would have been more to the taste of the multitude if he had got himself born in a temple. In the same way, the worldly-minded mass man looks for the numinous experience in the mass meeting, which provides an infinitely more imposing background than the individual soul. Even Church Christians share this pernicious delusion.

  This doesn’t resonate with the experience I have in church attendance, where it’s more an expression of faith, a reinforcement of it, and a time for fellowship with others who believe similarly rather than a place for direct divine interjection. But I don’t go to a snake-handling or speaking-in-tongues church.

• p93 The Psychological Advantage of Communism. I think I refer to this passage:
  

  Communism has not overlooked the enormous importance of the ideological element and the universality of basic principles. The nations of the Far East share our ideological weakness and in this respect are just as vulnerable as we are.

  Aside: I confess I’m swiping text from this translation which differs from my text; in my text, nations of the Far East appears. In the online version, it’s coloured races. A quick reminder that this is, in fact, translated text subject to all the attendant risks.

• p107 defense of modern art. I have no idea what this means.

So where was I? Oh, yes, digressing and rambling. The notes are as far as I got into a thoughtful post.

At any rate, Jung comes at the questions as a psychologist, which means his entry point into the questions is the discrete experiences of individuals, and he conceptualizes and generalizes from their to his conclusions. So where I disagree with him on the greater meanings and movements of Modern Man, it’s from these faulty macro-level concepts and less on the experiences and recommendations made for individuals in the milieu. Well, I also reject a priori the idea that the whole of reality depends upon the psyche. No, the individual’s experience and the shared and transmitted experience relies on psyche, consciousness, and communication, but not the world itself.

So I feel smarter for having read the book even though I didn’t agree with some of it. What a difference between modern books; is it possible to read something written in the last twenty years that won’t insult people who disagree?

Books mentioned in this review:

Okay, John, I read this book outside of a football game, and I didn’t get much more out of it than if I’d read it during a football game. Mostly, it’s about looking at the pictures. Even when given the opportunity, I didn’t linger on the pictures or particularly study them. I assessed whether I liked them or not and whether I thought they were good or not, and then I moved onto the next or the text describing the artist’s life and relationship with his peers.

The goal is to get a better familiarity with the artist, and I did. So I can speak intelligently about Manet and his relationship with the Impressionists and whatnot. And I can say I like Manet not quite as much as Renoir, but better than Monet and Degas.

At any rate, Manet is the old man of the Impressionists; he preceded the movement and dabbled with it, but his relationship with the formal French art structure of the end of the 19th century (I almost said “Last century” and then I realized how old I am) differed from the young ones. He wanted acceptance and commercial success (and got some degree of it), but he also alienated the academy with some of his work, subjects, and treatments. He also provided support for the young Impressionists who would eventually surpass him.

So it’s worth a browse whether during a football game or not. If nothing else, browsing the book helped me comprehensively identify my favorite Manet painting (The Bar at the Folies-Bergère).

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, hang my britches and slap my hound, but this book is listed on Amazon for between $30 and $55. Whether it sells for that is a rather different matter. Still, I got it as part of a pack of similar books (Boogar Hollow’s Scraps of Wisdom, How To Talk Pure Ozark, and How To Speak Southern) for a buck from the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Book Sale this autumn for a buck. So I might be way out ahead here in the fictional money of Internet e-commerce.

At any rate, where the other books play it for laughs, this book plays it pretty straight. Its goal is not humor, but rather an actual account of the ways people speak. I guess it spoke to some people, as the copy I have is in the sixth printing from twelve years after the original.

So it’s a bit informative; I suppose it might be so if one has spent one’s life living in a semi-southern state. As I’ve discovered with the other books, some of these sayings are just part of my vernacular.

The book also includes some food-related words that identify some elements of Southern cooking, some portent-based sayings, and some general colorful sayings and idioms.

Not a bad thing to flip through; it’s a couple dozen pages of listicle in a chapbook form from an era when this is the way these cultural memes were transmitted. Well, as cultural memes. The actual content was conveyed orally amongst families, neighbors, and peers.

Books mentioned in this review:

I see a lot of this while reading art books on Sunday afternoons:

This article redeems him:

When Andrew Luck looks like the best quarterback in the NFL—as he often has in previous seasons—the Indianapolis Colts are a playoff team. When Luck throws interceptions and takes sacks—as he often has this season—the Colts are mediocre.

It’s possible no group of players in the league is more dependent on one individual than the other 52 members of the Indianapolis roster.

They’ve even come to depend on Luck when choosing what books to read.

“He’s always saying ‘I read this great book,’ ” said backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck. “He’s recommended books on concrete architecture, Rob Lowe’s autobiography or ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains,’” a 2003 account of a doctor working to fight tuberculosis.
More on the NFL

In the same way that Oprah Winfrey has become known for vaulting books she likes to popularity across the country, Luck can make his favorite reads become the talk of the Colts locker room. Some of the books he recommends are for inspiration, players say, if a teammate is going through a tough time. Others are passed on simply because Luck enjoyed leafing through them. “He’s a voracious reader and he likes talking about it,” said center Khaled Holmes, a beneficiary of Luck’s penchant for recommending his favorite titles.

Now, he has to overcome the DirecTV commercial.

This book is a cross between the southern language dictionaries I’ve been reading of late How To Talk Pure Ozark and How To Speak Southern) and Poor Richard’s Almanack: Benjamin Franklin’s Best Sayings which I read earlier this year. As such, it’s a pithy collection of observations about life and advice.

A couple of the items made me chuckle, a couple made me want to quote them (minus the vernacular spelling), and one led indirectly to a tweet. So it was worth browsing for sure. It’s make a better gift than the aforementioned Southern dictionaries, although a Southern dictionary with a Southern variant of aforementioned might be interesting. For one definition.

The book itself is in chapbook form, which is what I think when I think cardstock cover over photocopied and saddle-stapled booklets. Instead of typewriting them or using Microsoft Word on them (which Dan Rather insists is truthy for the time period), someone hand-lettered the pages and hand-drew the graphics and images therein. That’s a lot more work than we have to go through in 2015 to do professional quality work, my friends.

Apparently, this was one of a series of Boogar Hollow books; the front material lists several titles in the series. I hope the couple that put these together about the time of my birth broke even at least on them. At the very least, I’ll bet they had fun.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is very similar to How To Speak Southern. It was written by a newspaperman (in this instance, a Springfield newspaper editor) based on some columns or essays, and this one dates back to 1961. It did not get nationwide distribution, though: this is a chapbook and was probably only locally distributed and not for very long.

It also collects phonetically spelled Ozark accent words in a dictionary form; however, this one had thinner, less humorous definitions, so it was a bit less enjoyable to go through. It has a lot of overlap with the later collection (not directly–nobody’s plagiarizing here), but enough so that it was not fresh. Sometimes I had to read the words a couple of times because in some instances, instead of giving a definition, the word would include a sample of it in an Ozarks sentence. Which was full of other Ozarks words, so I had to read it a couple of times to figure out what word it was supposed to be. You know, having to work for the punch line doesn’t make humor more rewarding.

As in the previous book, this one includes something I didn’t think was a particular Southernism: The word mull meaning “to think over.” Of course, in this instance, it only identifies the definition of the word and not its etimology, so I have no idea why this is particularly Southern.

So I didn’t really learn anything from the book, and I’m not sure how true-to-life it is 50+ years after it was written. Much of the Pure Ozark sounds a lot like South City Hoosier. Of course, the line of my family that lived in Lemay a long time and pronounced the French invisible R in toilet and wash originated in the Ozarks anyway. So there I go.

Books mentioned in this review: