So I published a book, and suddenly my name is linked to Jerry Pournelle and suddenly Don Pendleton’s widow stops by to leave a comment.
Well, aren’t I all la-di-da.
Now, if I could only sell a couple books.
To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
So I published a book, and suddenly my name is linked to Jerry Pournelle and suddenly Don Pendleton’s widow stops by to leave a comment.
Well, aren’t I all la-di-da.
Now, if I could only sell a couple books.
This book marks Pendleton’s return to the series after the one-off Sicilian Slaughter by Jim Peterson. By comparison, it’s a better book. Also, it’s clear that the book was planned to be number 16 in the series, as it mentions 15 different campaigns and begins the same way as 16, with Bolan wounded and needing attention. Instead of going to a bad doctor in Manhattan, though, he’s taken in by a brother and sister on a New Jersey farm. Actually, since Bolan was unwounded at the end of Peterson’s book, they had to graft a wounding into the first chapter. But it’s pretty clear what happened in the real world. Also, the back has a bio and photo of Pendleton to show he does exist and does not (yet) represent a stable of writers.
Bolan has to recuperate in hiding while the mob searches the countryside for him. He does, but his benefacting farmers are captured by the mob, so Bolan has to conduct a rescue instead of just hitting and gitting.
Contrasting a bad Bolan book with a Pendleton Bolan book really puts the latter into stark relief. The books often begin with epitaphs from famous poets and philosophers followed with a Bolan quote to spin it; the books also feature cast-off allusions to classical literature that one finds in a lot of WWII veteran-aged pulp writers that you don’t really see in modern popular fiction. Telling.
This book follows Panic in Philly, which I read way back in 2007. That book report contains the immortal lines:
Of all the series I’ve sampled this year, this is the least likely for a return visit; that’s not to say that it’s bad pulp, but it’s the worst of the pulp I’ve read this year.
Something changed by the time 2010 rolled around and I read Missouri Deathwatch and Arizona Ambush. Maybe I got better acquainted with pulp. But I changed my mind about the Executioner series.
But about this book: This book was not written by Don Pendleton; I read somewhere it was about a licensing dispute or something. So this take on Mack Bolan is more straightforward brutal than Pendleton’s philosphical (at times) hero. A couple of the set pieces involve Bolan killing people that I don’t think Pendleton’s Bolan would have, and in theatrical fashion with bad “numbers” (Bolan’s calculation of the odds, a recurring trope).
At any rate, wounded Bolan goes to NYC to get healed up after the Philadelphia adventure (and has to kill the doctor who helps him). He then decides to go to Italy to take out a training ground for mafia soldiers. He blows stuff up and whatnot. The end.
An relatively unsatisfying outing, but I guess Pendleton was refreshed after his brief hiatus, as the next novel (which I’m currently working on) is better.
C.G. Hill of Dustbury.com reviews John Donnelly’s Gold.
This really should not have worked as a novel: technical descriptions tend toward the mundane, and most of the techies I know are decidedly short on drama. What makes this worth your time is Noggle’s attention to detail: J. Random Noob will appreciate the extra exposition, and your local expert will nod, “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I’d do that. If I were going to do that, which of course I’m not.” There might be a hair too much geographical exposition — by the time you’re finished you should be able to hire on as a cab driver in St. Louis County — but no matter about that. The plot is more than sufficiently twisty; I’m pleased to report that I did not even come close to predicting the way it ended. And if the dialogue meanders a bit, hey, that’s the way these people talk. I’ve heard them, and so have you.
This book updates an earlier edition of the book, wherein the editors of the Book of the Month Club got together to decide what a well-stocked bookcase should include and then included a couple paragraphs of why they think so. The subtitle limits the conceit to 72 Enduring novels by Americans published between 1926 and 1998. The analysis of each book is much shorter than in Vintage Reading, as they more likely reflect the blurbs in the BOMC newsletter than actual news reviews.
So what do they think should be on your bookshelves? (I have italicized those I know I own and have bolded those I have already read.)
Title | Author | Year |
Accidental Tourist | Anne Tyler | 1985 |
Alias Grace | Margaret Atwood | 1996 |
All the King’s Men | Robert Warren | 1946 |
Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner | 1971 |
Appointment in Samarra | John O’Hara | 1934 |
The Assistant | Bernard Malamud | 1957 |
Bastard Out Of Carolina | Dorothy Allison | 1992 |
Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart | Joyce Carol Oates | 1990 |
The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath | 1963 |
Beloved | Toni Morrison | 1987 |
The Bonfire of the Vanities | Tom Wolfe | 1987 |
Burr | Gore Vidal | 1973 |
Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | 1961 |
The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger | 1951 |
Cold Mountain | Charles Frazier | 1997 |
The Counterlife | Philip Roth | 1987 |
The Day of the Locust | Nathaniel West | 1939 |
Death Comes For The Archbishop | Willa Cather | 1927 |
Delta Wedding | Eudora Welty | 1946 |
Edwin Mulhouse | Steven Milhauser | 1972 |
A Fan’s Notes | Frederick Exley | 1968 |
A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | 1929 |
A Flag for Sunrise | Robert Stone | 1981 |
From Here to Eternity | James Jones | 1951 |
Geek Love | Katherine Dunn | 1988 |
Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | 1936 |
The Grapes of Wrath | James Steinbeck | 1939 |
Guard of Honor | James Gould Cozzens | 1948 |
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers | 1940 |
Heaven’s My Destination | Thornton Wilder | 1935 |
Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 1952 |
The Joy Luck Club | Amy Tan | 1989 |
The Last Hurrah | Edwin O’Connor | 1956 |
The Late George Apley | John P. Marquand | 1937 |
Libra | Don DeLillo | 1988 |
Lie Down in Darkness | William Styron | 1952 |
Light in August | William Faulkner | 1932 |
Little Big Man | Thomas Berger | 1964 |
Lolita | Vladimir Nabakov | 1958 |
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne | Brian Moore | 1956 |
Look Homeward, Angel | Thomas Wolfe | 1929 |
The Magic Christian | Terry Southern | 1960 |
The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett | 1930 |
The Man with the Golden Arm | Nelson Algren | 1949 |
The Mountain Lion | Jean Stafford | 1947 |
The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | 1961 |
The Naked and the Dead | Norman Mailer | 1948 |
Nickel Mountain | John Gardner | 1973 |
Other Voices, Other Rooms | Truman Capote | 1948 |
The Postman Always Rings Twice | James M. Cain | 1934 |
Rabbit, Run | John Updike | 1960 |
Ragtime | E.L. Doctorow | 1975 |
The Recognitions | William Gaddis | 1955 |
Seize the Day | Saul Bellow | 1956 |
The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles | 1949 |
Slaughterhouse Five | Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. | 1969 |
Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | 1977 |
The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1929 |
Studs Lonigan | James T. Farrell | 1932, 1934, 1935 |
The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | 1926 |
Tales of the City | Armistead Maupin | 1978-1989 |
Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1934 |
Them | Joyce Carol Oates | 1969 |
To Kill A Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 1960 |
The Transit of Venus | Shirley Hazzard | 1980 |
The Trees/The Fields/The Town | Conrad Richter | 1940, 1946, 1950 |
U.S.A. | John Dos Passos | 1930, 1933, 1936 |
The Wall | John Hersey | 1950 |
The Wapshot Chronicle | John Cheever | 1957 |
What Makes Sammy Run? | Budd Schulberg | 1941 |
That Which Springeth Green | J.F. Powers | 1988 |
The World According to Garp | John Irving | 1978 |
Apparently, my bookshelves are not well-stocked. I must find another book fair, stat! Although it would not surprise me if I did not own more of these titles hidden among my to read shelves and forgotten.
The only one on the list I read but do not own is Catch-22, which I read the summer before my freshman year of college when the big Swedish mechanic next door taunted me for not having read much literary literature and planning to be an English major. He recommended it. Thanks, Mark!
The thing about this sort of popularity contest is that the list tends to be stacked toward more recent books. Or, in this case, books recent to a decade ago. You end up with a lot more “Who?” responses the later you get; I think the “classics” portion of this list really stops about 1960, and anything after it is very suspect. I mean, two books by Joyce Carol Oates? Really?
At any rate, it’s a quick read and hopefully has brushed me up a little about contemporary serious literature, but I’m not sure I’m going to remember anything new except that Carson McCullers is the author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
The review copies of John Donnelly’s Gold have arrived:
To adjust the quote from Thoreau, I have now a library of nearly six thousand volumes, over seventy of which I wrote myself.
I’m sending these out in bunches to people who I think might be influencers and to book reviewers across the country, hoping to get some traction or notice.
Wish me luck.
This is the first book of trivia-stuff or fact-review things I picked up for my upcoming June adventure, and I chose wisely. If I was looking for a quick read, this juvenile book is it. I should start checking publishers so I don’t get snookered by Scholastic.
It’s a quick bit of paragraphs with history vignettes / trivium in it, but it’s not without some trepidation. Any time you run into something in a book that you know is not true, particularly in a trivia book, you have to wonder if any of it is true. In this particular book, the author explains that the origin of the term “jeep” is that soldiers named it after the Popeye cartoon character. Well, that’s one theory of many.
Regardless, if anything in here stuck in my head, hopefully it’s the right questions.
This is the 14th book in the series. Mack Bolan is summoned to San Diego by some former associates who worry about Bolan’s mentor from Vietnam, who seems to have become embroiled in some sort of mob scheme. Although Bolan does not consider San Diego a major target, he decides to investigate. When he tries to visit the general, Bolan finds the man dead of an apparent suicide and his papers in the fireplace. Bolan decides to investigate and clear his former boss’s name as much as possible. During the course of his investigations, he uncovers a ring involving stolen military-grade equipment.
It’s not one of the strongest in the series, and it contains a little more speechifying than the norm, but a quick and enjoyable read nevertheless.
This is the 13th book in the series, and it follows closely the events from Boston Blitz. Bolan goes to Washington D.C. to break the Mafia’s growing control over the levers of power. He meets a woman used to bait powerful men into compromising positions who might be an ally or who might be an enemy and discovers that the powerful man behind the Mafia’s efforts–the elusive Lupo–knows the woman better than she knows.
Also, explosions and guns. Bang! Bang!
Here’s another bulleted list of trivia items, ungrouped. This one, though, is targeted for adults. And in case you’re wondering, this book’s known untruth is the assertion that the Great Wall of China might be the only man-made thing visible from space. As you and I know, 35 years after this book was published and some decade and a half after the rise of the Internet and Snopes.com, uh, no.
So I don’t know if any of this will help me at all, if I retained any of it, but I did find something of interest in this book. As it was written in 1975, it includes trivia about cigarettes, and they are not demonized. Additionally, there’s a lot of trivia about tea in this book, so the knowledge of the author speaks to the things the author likes, perhaps. I can almost picture what he looked like in 1975, swilling tea and smoking on a cigarette. Hippie.
Hey, you. That dude in Texas who likes Mack Bolan books and has been crawling my book reports for a couple of days.
I don’t want to be a tease, but I’ve got a couple of Mack Bolan Book Reports forthcoming.
Also, don’t be afraid to send me a note or comment with some mention of what you think of the Executioner series.
UPDATE You know what sucks? Having blogged over eight years running and being able to reverse-stalk someone from my Sitemeter stats.
You see that new link in the sidebar?
Yeah, I finally got around to self-publishing my novel John Donnelly’s Gold.
Buy now, and it comes with a free survivalist fuel source (paperback only).
The results of the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale:
Friends volunteers sold $102,068.20 in used books, CDs, DVDs, audiobooks and more during the sale — the fifth consecutive Friends book sale that passed the $100,000 mark.
Given the damage I did to it (or it did to me), that means I represent .1% of the proceeds. If I had not gone on half price day, I might have been .2%.
No book sales this week, but I must have known I was going to be challenged, because I bought some books anyway. We hit two church garage sales, looking more for wooden things I could pyrographitate on, but I found some old books marked a quarter each, so how could I pass them up?
Titles include:
Most of the books are from the early part of the last century. They’re in fair shape, but come on, they were $1.75 all told.
I also got a collection of flight simulator software that probably won’t work on any of my operational PCs. Right after I donated to Goodwill the joystick I bought some years ago for flight simulators before realizing there weren’t any flight simulators any more. That’s all right, this will have a place on my shelf beside the other games I’ve bought but never opened.
My beautiful wife bought a couple cookbooks and some cheap music.
Seven books. Wow, that’s almost seven times what I’ve read this week. And it was a slow week for book buying.. Maybe I should step away from this chupaclocka and read.
In the comments on her blog, Roberta X. accuses me of having insufficient books.
I accept her challenge. I will buy more.
(And, come to think of it, we might be nearing time for a Noggle Library update. The last one is almost a year old. Sadly, there are not more bookshelves to look at. Just more books crowding those same bookshelves.)
You’re saying, “What, Noggle, you’re reading cartoon books now and counting them in your annual total?” If you’ve paid attention, I’ve done this for a number of years. I’ve read these two books in the last two days as a brief respite from the 500+ page books I’m still working on, so deal with it. Or skip the report if you weren’t already.
At any rate, as I worked through these books, my wife mentioned that Dilbert was funnier than Garfield. Well, I guess it depends on what your life is. If you work at a white collar job, you probably get the jokes in Dilbert. If you have a cat, you can relate to Garfield. If you don’t live the lifestyle, then you’re not going to relate to the humor. I think both of them are amusing, and I don’t think myself any less sophisticated for it.
The Adams book is from the middle 1990s, but its humor remains topical enough to not be dated. It’s the same with the Garfield book, although its timing is my senior year of high school, so I get the extra little bit of nostalgia and have read this morning the Garfield cartoon that ran on my 18th birthday. I don’t know if I’ll get nostalgia kicks out of anything after 1995, so Scott Adams will never do that.
Well, there you have it: about as in-depth of a review of fourteen and twenty-one year old cartoon books as you might expect.
I wasn’t going to go to the book sale at Remington’s.
Wait, let me back up: I volunteered at the Friends of the Library book sale on Friday night, collecting the money as other people bought books and offering a running commentary to the customers about books they had. I was pretty adamant to the volunteer at the table with me that I was not going to go to the sale to buy anything because I already own enough books and I don’t have any room.
Of course, as with any of these things, I always find someone has bought something that I want specifically. In this case, a young man came through the line with Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, which I have not seen in the wild, but in retrospect that’s because I tend to skip over the religious section.
I told the guy about it, and he said these fateful words: “There’s another one, but it’s an older edition.”
So despite all of my assurances to my partner volunteer, since my beautiful wife and I had a ‘date night’ on half price day, I fell off the wagon. Loudly.
I got:
And so on.
My wife bought a couple books, mostly cookbooks that she picked up while waiting me to finish, along with a record, some sheet music, and a CD. The Smooth Jazz CD is mine, but please note it’s not smooth jazz in format; it’s a collection of standards by Sinatra, Count Basie, and whatnot.
The total, after half-off, was $98.50. I got 42 books in total along with the CDs. I have already read the Dilbert book depicted within, which means I need to read 41 by October’s sale to keep pace.
The funny thing is how I almost blackout regarding what I buy. When my wife and I had dinner, I could barely recount what I bought. Some books I thought I’d picked up, I must have put back. I am such a glutton.
I began to read this book a long time ago. I remember reading this book to my son when he got a rare excursion into the basement in our home in Old Trees. That’s before he was our eldest son, and our non-eldest son is turning three next month. So it’s been a long time since I first put a bookmark in this book.
As you might recollect, my main methodology of reading poetry these last few years has been to read it aloud while my son(s) played. Sometimes he (they) actually ask(s) for more poems. But I read this aloud to my boy before he got to that point. And then I hit the poem letters, which sometimes run for several pages. That’s too much to try to jam into a session where one is reading aloud to a child and interjecting to keep the child from flossing with the poorly insulated electrical cord.
So I thought I’d read the epistles to myself. Then I hit the poem “Of the Progress of the Soul”. Which is 16 pages. Which is a long slog. Especially if you’re trying to pay attention and read the poem out loud, which is what I do: I cannot read poetry without reading it aloud to see how it sounds and how the rhythm of the words, line breaks, and punctuations make it sound. You know what 500+ lines of a single poem take? An hour or so scattered in places where I waited to pick children up from school over the course of several days. What will they think of the Noggle boys’ Daddy, who has to move his lips when he reads? I don’t know, but suffice to say the number of birthday party invitations has declined.
Oh, wait, a comment on the poetry? It’s “Meh.” I mean, Donne’s poems are about love, sometimes, and spirtual all of the time. If you’re going to read him, read him in an anthology. There are few poets I can take in large doses–I mean, it took me four years to read this volume and coming on twenty to read the complete works of Emily Dickinson (as of 20 years ago; I think they’ve been revised upwards since). He has a couple of quotable lines here and there, but if the poems are going to stretch into more than a dozen pages–there’d better be bloodshed in them, not just the flattery of a perfect soul who died two years prior.
So get it if your class requires it, I suppose–I think that’s the purpose of this cheap volume. Or if you have patience. But be prepared.
This book is an Ozarks History of the Yoachum family that was responsible for the Yocum Dollars, which were briefly used in currency in the Ozarks in the early part of the ninteenth century. Of course, as it’s an Ozarks history, only the first part of the history talks about the three brothers who purportedly traded some horses, soaps, and blankets to some departing Delaware for the location of an old silver mine and then mined the silver, minted coins, and exchanged them among their neighbors. Given the bank failures and the dearth of other currency, the money caught on amongst Ozarkers and went on until a homesteader tried to pay the government for his land with these unofficial dollars. Government officials called the proferred dollars and sent it to Washington for analysis, where they determined the silver was purer than that in actual US coins. One of the Yocum brothers died in a cabin fire, perhaps sealing the mine forever, and the bulk of the Yoachum family moved out of the area.
It might be a myth, or it might have happened. Records are sparse, and I don’t think any of these dollars actually has come to the present day.
As an Ozarks History, though, this book then goes into general stories of days gone by in the Ozarks. Read how the author’s mother’s experience as a mail carrier. Learn about the Wilderness Road hangin’ tree. And so on. So the book is more a collection of stories than a true investigation of the Yocum Dollar. The Yocum/Yoachum/Yoakum family and the searches for the silver mine do crop back up, though.
Unfortunately, some of the stories are untold. The author mentions his father found a cache of these in the 1920s and searched for the mine all his life, but that story is underrepresented. Then, in a chronology in the back, a simple line reads 1975 – Two hundred thirty-six Yocum Dollars found buried in a metal box South of Branson, Mo. No account of this discovery is given.
Still, an interesting read if you’re into regional history.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, but down here in Southwest Missouri, we only get to four or five book fairs a year, which is a good thing, as my bookshelves are collapsing under the weight of the books I own and will never actually read.
Instead of the twice-a-year Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book fair or the Friends of the Christian County book fair, this weekend we traveled 41.7 miles to the Friends of the Polk County Library book fair in Bolivar (pronounced as a rhyme to Tolliver, not like the Liberator).
Here’s what I got:
It includes:
And so on.
That’s 30 books for me, a couple cookbooks and religious themed books for my beautiful wife (one of which is a duplicate, but I did not mention this because her books are her books and my books are mine), and a couple of books for the children. I gave the Friends of the Polk County Library a double sawbuck to help them out, overpaying according to their pricing guides, but I could help out some, so I did.
Additionally, I have an application to join, so I’ll send some money along with that to add to my collection of Friends of the Library memberships.
I look forward, sort of, to the Christian County and Springfield-Greene County book fairs in the next couple of weeks, but I am really running out of space for books, again. I need to cut this out.
Hey, wait a minute, I still own that house up in Old Trees, Missouri, that has a lot of rooms for bookshelves….