Category: Books

I’ve had this book atop the bookshelves in the hall facing out for a while. Well, I guess we did just move/reorganize the shelves out there last autumn when we had some work done at Nogglestead, so it might not have been looking down on me every time I passed through the hall since I bought it ten years ago. But for some reason, I’ve passed over it time and time again. Except this is the year of Sword and Sorcery at Nogglestead (or a year of Sword and Sorcery as the stacks have enough of the genre to support many such years), and the book has a man with a sword talking to an ogre on the cover, so now was the time.

The edition I have is from 1982, so I was going to expound upon the rise of the “normal people from earth go to a fantasy world” subgenre which I would have posited was a mainstay of fantasy in the 1980s, drawing upon my familiarity of Rosenberg’s The Guardians of the Flame series and Chalker’s Dancing Gods series, but further reflection indicates that the subgenre goes way back to the Chronic (what?) cles of Narnia and the Gor books whose reviews pepper the last 20 years of this blog, so instead of a thesis easily disproven, you get this paragraph. Also, this book was originally published in 1964, but thematically it seems later as we will see.

It starts out in that fantasy genre: An early Vietnam vet musters out and bums around, eventually answering an ad in a European magazine. He finds himself transported to a magical universe with a beautiful woman and a short sidekick. Apparently, he’s the hero that the woman needs to complete a quest which takes them across vast distances and through strange environs so that he can help her recover an artifact she needs as queen of the multiverse.

However, after a couple of set action pieces befitting a fantasy novel, we veer into Heilein polyamory philosophy. And then the quest is completed two-thirds of the way through the book, and after that, it explores a bit of what it’s like to be the queen of the multiverse and to be her consort. So it gets a little blowsy in the last third as not much actually happens besides a little politics, musings on male/female relationships, and a visit home by the hero who has changed on his journey.

So: A quick read, well-written but not necessarily action-packed. Not remembered as one of Heinlein’s best, and probably a transitional work between the rocket jockey stuff and the adult stuff with the alternative lifestyles. But perhaps that transition preceded Stranger in a Strange Land more than I commonly think.

After finishing Houses of Worship, I wanted another book to serve its purpose: Something a little light to read or browse not during football games (probably not going to watch many again this year) but in the fifteen or so minutes between finishing a chapter in a longer work and actually going to bed. I didn’t find a similar coffeetable book immediately, but I did pick up this book which I bought in April 2022, and, as it happens, I read the whole thing in one sitting.

Not because it was compelling nor particularly good poetry.

Instead, it’s a litany of poems written about specific lovers and wives whom he cheated on with named and poetized lovers (and the wives, apparently, cheated on him as well). But it’s written as a bit of a retrospective, a lyin’ in the winter of his years, trying to recapture a bit of his youth and/or maybe brag.

Although published in 1984, this book is a bit of a throwback; the author’s first (of only a handful) collection appeared in 1957, and he went into teaching in the 1960s. So he was in academia in the free love era, when poets were sexy, and he took advantage of it. Yet I can’t but characterize him as Rod McKuen without the depth.

How did this signed copy come to Missouri from back east where the author taught? Apparently, he was a Springfield native (although he did not live here for most of his life). So it’s not like finding Bernard O’Donoghue’s copy of Five Themes of Today here.

I bought this book at the end of June, and I selected it as my end-of-night, I-don’t-want-to-start-another-chapter-of-a-longer-book book. What are those longer books I deferred whilst paging through this book? In order of time spent on my chairside table without my planning to throw them back into the stacks, they are The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Life of Greece (the Story of Civilization Volume 2), The Rape of the Lock by Pope (not a long book, but eighteenth century verse is harder and slower to read than nineteenth), and whatever bit of fiction I’ve got. I have other books on the side table, but I’m going to one day soon clear them from that table and throw them back. It’s been long enough that I’ll want to start from the beginning again. Well, maybe not The Innocents Abroad.

At any rate: This is a hardback publication by Ideals Publishing, the firm behind Ideals magazine (at least in those days). It has 36 different entries on old churches and cathedrals not just Christian or Catholic but also including a synagogue, a temple of the Bahai faith, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and Christian Scientists. I guess, depending how ecumenical your faith is, the latter two are Christian faiths of a sort as well. But anyway.

They’re broken into chapters grouping them as old churches of New England (and a little west), missions, modern churches, and whatnot. Each entry has one to three pictures about it as well as a couple paragraphs of the location’s importance or origin. Many of the locations were by then (1977) abandoned by worshippers and picked up, sometimes after some time, by foundations or historical societies for restoration as museums.

But as with my score visiting the best book shops in the world, I found that I have been to three of these locations as well:

• The Joan of Arc Chapel on the Marquette campus. Although I spent many hours reclining on the wall between the chapel and the Memorial Library, I only visited the chapel while showing the campus to someone else, either my mother at graduation or a girlfriend after. But I’ve been in it.
• The Church of Annunciation, also in Milwaukee, which was the location of an annual Greek festival. Maybe I’ve only been on the grounds, but I have a sense that I took a tour at some point.
• The new cathedral in St. Louis, where I attended the funeral of the father of one of my beautiful wife’s co-workers.

Which is a surprising number, actually, as I don’t tend to seek out old churches when travelling (active Missouri Synod Lutheran churches when staying over on a Sunday, but not old churches). And I have not been to the southwest (home of Spanish missions) or much to New England.

So an interesting little browse, especially for the purpose I use it: To pad out fifteen minutes before bed and to pad out my annual reading count.

I mentioned when I bought the book that it had an inscription. Here it is:

In it, Mrs. Gamble apologizes to the Barner family for “crashing their party” and hopes that they enjoy their retirement.

Internet stalking says the Gambles founded a gift shop in the 1960s that sold Waterford Crystal and that they later sold the store in 1984 to a local poet/children’s book author and his wife. The shop closed in 2018. Mr. Gamble died in 1990; Mrs. Gamble died in 2021 at 101. Mr. Barner was a local banker who died in 2021 at 100. Given that the inscription is dated 1986, he had a nice long retirement. Mrs. Barner died in 2009.

I really have become an Internet stalker of people whose books I later own, and this seems really weird because unlike Mary Ovenshine, these people could have been neighbors. Well, probably not, but some of them lived in Springfield when I did.

Well, after reading Flashing Swords #2, I picked up the other entry in the series of anthologies (there were five total) that I had (and that I bought at the same time ten years ago).

Again, this is a collection of sword-and-sorcery novellas by a small circle of writers from the time period with an introduction by Carter.

The stories include:

• “The Bagful of Dreams” by Jack Vance, a story of Cugel the Clever. Cugel is down on his luck, and he meets up with a wizard with a bagful of dreams on his way to impress a royal personage and win a prize. But Iolo and Cugel beset and try to best each other beforehand and before the Duke.
• “The Tupilak” by Poul Anderson is part of a series about human/merfolk hybrids seeking to find their vanished kind. They come to a cold land where colonists from abroad are suffering and are hounded by invaders from the north, and the merfolk intervene to try to save them.
• “Storm in a Bottle” by John Jakes, a Brak the Barbarian story which starts with Brak as a captive brought into a strange town under threat from a dark mage who might be leading barbarians in the hills against them. Brak breaks free and finds that the threat comes from closer to home.
• “Swords against the Marluk” by Katherine Kurtz which is part of the Deryni series. Apparently, it’s an event that the books mention but did not cover, and it’s how one new king defeated a magickal rival with magic of his own and a Deryni on his side. I didn’t get much out of it because I haven’t read the books.
• “The Lands Beyond The World” by Michael Moorcock wherein Elric finds himself in another world having traveled through a gate and having had some adventures there. He is on his way back when he encounters a woman in trouble, on the run from an ancient sorceror who wants to resurrect an old love in her, and Elric tries to protect her.

I liked the Cugel story; I might have read the Brak story in middle school or high school; and the Elric stories are growing on me. I don’t know that any of it will stick with me, but it was for the most part a pleasant passage of a couple of hours. The context-switching between the stories, with completely different rules and whatnot, was kind of difficult. Probably easier if one is more used to anthologies and definitely easier if you’re familiar with each story’s particular mythos from other works.

So will I pick up the other three books in the series? Well, if I see them at a book sale, perhaps, but I don’t think I’ll order them.

So will this conclude Brian J.’s year of sword-and-sorcery? Maybe not.

This book is classified as humor, and undoubtedly it was designed to be a quick, fairly inexpensive, gift for someone you know who has a cat, whether that person (or cat) is a Taoist or Buddhist or not. It’s structured like a set of sutras (or suttas, depending upon your particular flavor of Buddhism) where a story or teaching of the titular cat is presented and then you get some explanation/exegesis (including disputes amongst the experts who study the titular cat).

So I think it’s supposed to be satire, but it’s actually pretty close to the mark as far as how books of this stripe go (remember, I’ve read some of Thich Nhat Hanh’s commentaries on Buddha’s teachings and other work, so although I am not a scholar, I recognize the structure). And, I mean, some of the life lessons that the book presents are actually helpful life lessons even if you’re not a cat.

So I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be arch commentary riffing on Eastern philosophy or if it’s a gateway to Eastern philosophy, or at least the self-help elements of popular Eastern philosophy. Nothing in it is absurd or laugh aloud funny. I’m not sure anything even rises to the level of amusing, actually, as much of the book is fairly earnest.

It looks as though the author has a couple of cat-themed books, a book on runes, and wrote something for Wonder Woman comics. So I don’t know what to make of the book based on the other things that the author has written. So very, very odd.

This is the second of the two little Salesian fundraising giveaway collections that I bought in last year; I read another, The Way, in June. Which means that I have another floating around here somewhere. They’re awfully small, so who knows when I will find it. This volume comes from the middle 1990s, which means that they were still coming in the mail to potential donors as far as that. The Way was from 1983, so they certainly had a run that spanned decades. Which means I might be able to find a bunch of them out there, not that I need to collect another series intermittently. Or perhaps one does not find them so often because they are little cheap giveaways that most people did not save (or, probably, even read).

So: There’s not too much to say about this that I did not say for The Way, which was:

This volume is 32 pages of grandmother poetry focusing on religious themes, but generic Christian religious themes–you get Jesus and you get God, but no Mary. The small pages are akin to Ideals magazine, with the poems set on pages surrounded by illustrations of homey and old-timey scenes and landscapes. Basically, the target crowd overlapped a lot with people who would subscribe to Ideals. They’re poems, too, not prayers; some are addressed to God, but most of them talk about God instead. Quality varies from meh to okay, but really, this is everyday poetry, the kind that people who were not academic poets or kept by patrons wrote. Normal people. I mean, jeez Louise, my father wrote poetry not unlike this. So it’s not designed to be profound, meaningful, or obscure to differentiate the Poet from the Rubes without advanced degrees in literature. So it was nice, and a quick read, and I suppose it could fit into one’s daily devotions if one were so inclined.

It comes from a time when everyday people read middlebrow poetry, and it was not seized by academics and obscuratans who decided poetry is only for them. Of course, it kind of tracks also with the decline of education and the replacement of books by other media (television, the Internet) which means that regular people turn to other things seeking the meaning and the sense of life rather than poetry. Which is a shame.

Most of the poems in this volume are nice, which is probably a step below not bad, but they’re not aiming for Literature. Not that the Literature that has replaced this sort of poetry will be any more remembered through the centuries if nobody is reading, sticking on their mirror or fridge, or memorizing them either.

At any rate, I will probably pick more of these books up when I run into them.

Well, I recently read The Quest of Kadji, and in doing some research on him (reading the Wikipedia entry), I was reminded that he edited the Flashing Swords anthologies, two of which I bought in 2014 (along with the volumes of the Agents of T.E.R.R.A. series, The Golden Goddess Gambit and The Emerald Elephant Gambit, both of which I have also read this year, which means I’m clearly catching up on my reading from the last decade, slowly). Given that I’d read a Carter original, I thought perhaps no time would be better to read these anthologies which I’ve passed over many times in the past.

When I bought The Quest of Kadji in 2018, Friar said, “Carter worked in the same vein as ERB, in many cases to a degree of homage that rose to pastiche.” In the introduction to this book, Carter uses the word pastiche, which can just mean that it’s a conscious imitation like an homage. But the word has come to take on a more purple prose definition since then. I also said, “I did read some of John Jakes’ Brak stories, though.” in the comments, which is amusing given that this book has a Brak story in it.

Carter explains that he is part of a small group of sword-and-sorcery writers with some twee name, and he has started anthologizing some of their works. Strangely enough, I ended up with the even numbers of the series which filled the 1970s.

This book includes:

• “The Rug and the Bull” by L. Sprague de Camp which features a group of travellers similar to Gypsies who try to sell a flying carpet to a king.
• “The Jade Man’s Eyes” by Michael Moorcock wherein Elric is enlisted to travel West to his homeland in search of the ancient fabled city of his people, but disasted befalls the expedition as it often does when Elric is involved. You know, I might have heard the name Elric in my youth, probably on BBSes when the material was fresh, but I have not read any of the related novels. I’ve read The Black Corridor and An Alien Heat twenty years ago, and they put me off on the Moorcock. But the Elric stories might be interestinger.
• “Toads of Grimmerdale” by Andre Norton wherein a woman seeking revenge for her ravishing and impregnation at the hand of an invading army’s man asks help of unholy creatures only to learn that she might have marked the wrong man for revenge.
• “Ghoul’s Garden” wherein Brak the barbarian encounters a woman and a cleric travelling and finds that a man pursuing the woman has a rug which contains its own dark world in the embroidery.

At 200 pages, it’s not a long read, but it does require some context-switching between each story. It might help, I suppose, if I were versed in the sword-and-sorcery of the era, as they’re all part of pre-established worlds.

But I do agree that sword-and-sorcery comes best in short stories or novellas (as these anthologies contain). Too much world building would bog things down. Too bad that all genres (and modern representatives therein) did not learn the lesson. People want to read quick escapes, not plunge into hundreds of pages of world building. Or, probably, I’m speaking for myself, more a fan of Hemingway than Faulkner.

I bought this book way back in 2018 at ABC Books on a trip that only patriated 7 books. This is the fourth of them I have read. Perhaps I should not buy any books until I read at least the other three from six years ago, but I’m not sure I could find them quickly. Also, there’s another Friends of the Christian County Library book sale in about three weeks, and I cannot miss that. So, anyway….

This is a little pulp paperback sword-and-sorcery book a la Conan the Barbarian–apparently, I am just surrendering 2024 to low fantasy fiction. It opens with a defeated band of nomads retreating to their secret valley. They’ve been bested by a new claimant to an ancient throne, and the chieftain tasks his son, Kadji, also called the Red Hawk, with getting their revenge. So he, Kadji, is given the sacred axe of the tribe to slay the king–who might not actually be the rightful heir to the throne. So he goes on the vengeance quest, and he ends up in the capital city, getting closer to the king, when a rebellion sends the king to flight. He, the king, flies to an eastern land where he presents himself as an ancient prophet to a pampered emperor who wants to restore his empire’s glory. Until Kadji catches up, ruins that plan, and follows the false king and prophet to the end of the world. Literally.

It’s set on a different planet with a named sun and seven moons, so it’s not like Howard’s stuff from ancient (undocumented) history. Its writing is a bit thinner than the Howard, but that kind of tracks with my new, soon-to-be-abandoned thesis that pulp and genre fiction became thinner between the 1930s/1940s and the 1960s/1970s (only to become bloated in the 1980s and beyond). It also features a red-haired fighting lass whom Kadji has to rescue a time or two and whom he cannot completely trust…. But they fall in love, but cannot be together because of their independent vows….

You know, it’s not bad. Friar has thrown out the word pastiche (when I bought the book), but Carter himself uses the word (which we’ll get to at a later date). Originally, it meant a respectful copying of, but I’m sure it has later taken on a more deriding sense. But it’s not a bad read, but probably targeted to younger men than I. I really need to study the Howard and the Carter (and the like) to figure out how I can write more like the former (should I pick up my pixels seriously again).

But: I will note that this is the second book this year featuring “The Red Hawk” and a flame-haired fighting woman. The other was Conan the Invincible by Robert Jordan. Which was richer than this, but not terribly bloated even though it came out nine years later (before the Clancification/Kingification of genre fiction).

Like Post Scripts Humor, I picked this book up in Clever last month and used it as a break from reading Walden (which itself is a break, a long break, from The Life of Greece and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, both of which I will finish this decade, maybe). I’ve read fewer Calvin and Hobbes books during the lifetime of this blog (The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes in 2004 and Calvin and Hobbes: The Sunday Pages in 2015) than Dilbert for some reason, which is odd, as Calvin and Hobbes would be more universal and timeless. Well, except that sometime in this century, Calvin’s adventures would have been nothing but staring at an electronic device of some sort.

So this is a contiguous arc of stories dealing with Calvin duplicating himself and Calvin locking the babysitter out as well as shorter, one-offs or couple of days’ worth of Spaceman Spiff and whatnot. Given that the book itself came out in 1991, presumably these appeared in newspapers while I was in high school. A couple of years later, they’re still relatively fresh and amusing.

I mentioned in one of the other book reports (for The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes) that you could still find unlicensed decals of Calvin peeing on auto logos and whatnot–ten years after the strip ended. Well, I guess it’s twenty more years later, and you don’t see them around much any more. So the hold on the public imagination is fading. The more the pity. But I have used the word transmogrify in conversation recently, and it’s not because I ran across it in a 17th century tome. Although with me, I suppose that’s not out of the question.

Ah, gentle reader. I have tasked my youngest with reading Walden this summer (unlikely), so I have started a re-read of it myself. What that means, though, is that you’re likely to see numerous short humor book reports before a report on the Thoreau.

I just picked this book up at the end of June, so it was on top of the stacks. Unlike The Best Cartoons from the Saturday Evening Post from 1998 and “One Moment, Sir!” Cartoons from the Saturday Evening Post from 1957, this book has not only cartoons but little gags from the one page of jokes that the Saturday Evening Post ran. Do they still? I am pretty sure I let my subscription lapse a decade ago by now, so I cannot speak to what the magazine offers now. But back then, it was increasingly left pablum, medical advances and ads for old people (older than I was then, and even still older than I am today), and the Post Scripts page.

Again, some of this material was inner chuckle-worthy, but it’s all dated by now and based on what would have been situations to poke fun at in the middle of the last century. So it’s probably best read by someone who would, you know, have read The Saturday Evening Post.

Aside from that, one noteworthy bit about this book is that a previous owner, perhaps Mr. Brengel who signed his name inside the front cover in 1979, marked the margin of some of the jokes and wrote some one-liners based on the gags in the margins. One must presume that he was mining this particular book for gags that he could include in his own talks, whether professional talks or his turn at the Toastmasters or something. I mean, he could just have highlighted the ones he particularly liked, but something about it suggests a more practical application. I’m not sure that it’s common practice any more to look to books for humor bits for talks, but back in the 20th century, a whole genre of books existed for it–I almost remember the name of one such series whose material often appeared also in Readers Digest. But that was a long time ago.

At any rate, something to fill a little time after reading a segment of Walden and going to bed.

I bought these books last weekened at Rublecon where Cody Walker was the only author or comic book artist (actually, he’s both) present. And as I was done with The Emerald Elephant Gambit shortly thereafter, I delved into these books in fairly short order.

I dived into Hang Me If I Stay Shoot Me If I Run first. It’s a short (122 pages) book which includes the title novella along with a handful of short stories set in the fictional town of Pinhook, Missouri, which just happens to be up the road (Highway 13) a piece like Bolivar, Missouri. Where the author is from. In the novella, a kid from the area returns with a dead dog in his trunk and holes up in a local motel. He has just burglarized a home in the Rivercut neighborhood (just east of Nogglestead). He meets up with the housekeeper/night manager of the motel, a woman of her own ill repute, and they decide to rob a local church run by a preacher with a predilection for philandering and then the local fair run by a man whose money and influence comes from dodgy sources, including the manufacture of meth. When the final reckoning comes, though, the young man is willing to sacrifice himself for revenge. Other stories in the book deal with a gay couple trying to live their lives in secret in Pinhook; an older woman finds that strangers unburden themselves to her; a young woman deals with the attentions of young men and a skeevy uncle as she hopes for college acceptance which will take her away; an older man has had a health episode and is supposed to be resting, but he wants to go to the coffee shop to trade knives; and a young couple seeking to get married finds some resistance from the church.

I mean, I can see a little bit of Winesburg, Ohio in it, albeit with a bit more modern sensibility and them to it. It’s not poorly written, but it does lack a little depth to it that I’ve kind of alluded to before. Kind of like college level classwork or stuff you might find in a writing group. Of course, back in the day–the early part of the 20th century–they filled whole magazines with these kinds of stories.

Loot the Bodies is a collection of poetry. Interestingly, most of the poems are pretty short–maybe the longest clock in at under 30 lines–but the book is printed on very large paper and not in 4×6 size, which means there’s a lot of white space in the 88 pages of poems. The book also includes a couple of short stories at the end; again, slice-of-life material. The poems are okay. Better than Rupi Kaur instapoetry and better than the grandmother poetry I often read. Again, the sort of thing that you might have spotted in mid-century general interest magazines in the 20th century.

Which is odd because the author looked too young to have spent too much time in the last century.

At any rate, I have, what, six more of the author’s books from Rublecon? I’m not feeling compelled to read them all at once, but they’ll be pleasant enough when I get around to them.

Since I just read the second volume in the Agent of T.E.R.R.A. series (The Golden Goddess Gambit), I figured it would be the best time for me to polish off the other volume in the series that I have. As the series total is four books, so I have now read half of the series, and I don’t own the others. Given that the series only lasted four books that came out in rapid succession (both books I read came out in 1967; the first came out in 1966 and the last in 1969 according to Fantastic Fiction), I probably won’t run across the remaining volumes in the wild, and I’m not inclined to order them.

So, in this book, a researcher embedded in Mohenjo-dara before the barbarian invasions is tasked with collecting information about the civilization for the home office. A couple of days before she is to leave because the barbarians are going to conquer and raze the village, a UFO appears in the sky, claiming to be Indra and offering to protect the village if the villagers will give up their gold and valuables as a sacrifice. The researcher calls for help, and Hannibal and Webley come to the past and uncover a plot from their enemies in the Empire to accumulate gold from the era. Hannibal has to put things back in order, including convincing Divodasa, the ruler of the barbarians, to settle down in the area as he did in the prime timeline.

So it’s an entertaining little yarn. It’s as though the author went through the first volumes of The Story of Civilization and poked his stories into the gaps in history. Well, not the Durants’ work; the book contains a for further reading section which does not include Our Oriental Heritage. But it could. Much of the book is adhering to the special rules of time travel, one of which is that a person cannot be present in the same time twice, which leads to some planning for jumping backwards and forwards for an hour or so.

Somewhere between rocket jockey juvies and men’s adventure fiction, but a quick fun read just the same.

I guess it has been nine years since I read a John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novel (three, actually, in A Tan and Sandy Silence and Two Other Great Mysteries which also includes The Long Lavender Look and Bright Orange for the Shroud) and five years since I’ve read McDonald at all (On the Run in in 2019). As I might have mentioned then, I’m pacing them out.

In this book, a wealthy businessman asks McGee and Meyer to go to Mexico to find out the circumstances in which his daughter was living before she died in an auto accident, perhaps while drunk or high. She had fallen into a bad crowd and had travelled to Mexico with them, and McGee and Meyer find layers of intrigue as they try to find her associates. The father of the other girl in the group has also come to Mexico to find his daughter and is also trying to find himself and get tuned into the youth culture. A wealthy woman emerged from seclusion, although the two girls were staying with her, to identify the body and has gone back into seclusion somewhere around the world. And the group itself descended into drug-fueled madness and free sex, culminating in a plan to use the dead girl’s savings to smuggle heroin into the United States. McGee and Meyer unpeel the layered plots over time with a lot of speculation taking pages along with the normal existential musings you get in MacDonald.

The plot and goings on might have been edgy and shocking in 1969, but you could set a similar story in a high school and play it out on a network television show (not even a cable or streaming show, although presumably if you did you’d get more skin and depicted violence). It has a few anachronisms, like presenting Mexico as a fairly safe destination for travelers and easy border crossings without a passport, but it’s still relatively timely to someone who lived in an era before cell phones and personal tracking devices became a thing. Access to these devices and their pings would have made a much simpler story indeed.

As you know, gentle reader, if you’ve been around long enough and remember previous MacDonald reviews, I like the man’s writing. He writes pulp with a depth of theme and depth of writing that was beginning to fall out of practice in the 1960s. I mean, Robert E. Howard’s work had depth to the writing (but not as much overt philosophizing thematics). Don Pendleton had a little philosophy, but his writing was not as thick and rich. Now, of course, you get length that has replaced depth. I wonder why the writing changed. The nature of the business? The difference between education in the eras? Something, for sure.

So I will continue to dabble in reading the MacDonald, although I have to think I have read most of the popular work, and it would take some doing on my part to figure out definitively what books I have read since I have started tracking my reading and books that I own (I have no way to be sure what I would have borrowed from the library when I was younger) and to seek out the ones I have not. And I have a bunch of projects ahead of me in the queue. So that’s a thing for another day. Meanwhile, I will probably continue to pick the books up when I see them and re-read them as I come across them in the stacks here at Nogglestead.

I picked up this little 1960s-era paperback almost 10 years ago at Pumpkin Daze. It’s the second of a brief series of four books featuring Hannibal Fortune and his alien symbiote protoplasmic partner as they try to protect the natural timeline from changes made by their enemies in a war where time itself is the battlefield.

In this volume, Fortune and Webley, his partner, go back to a continent that will be lost in the sea in the future to find out who Kronos is and why he was worshipped as a god there. They discover that Kronos has planted the seeds of a goddess-worshipping cult but whose queen/goddess figure might not want to share power when Kronos returns. Fortune and Webley foment a rebellion and look to restore the queen’s sister, the rightful heir to the throne.

It’s a short book–158 pages–and moves along pretty well. But I was amused to find myself, again, in prehistoric times on a continent/island that could be Atlantis. It fits in with the history books I’ve read recently (Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi) as well as fiction (the Bucky and the Lukefahr ladies books Walking the Labyrinth and Songs of Three not to mention Robert E. Howard’s work such as The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard). I’m not even seeking out books that feature ancient Cypriot/Minoan/Celtic/Pictish books at this point, but I keep finding them anyway. Funny how that works.

As it happens, I picked up the third book in the series at the same time, and I’ll probably delve into it soon as well. Heaven knows with all the thick hardbacks in the Nogglestead to-read stacks that I will constantly pick up the small mass market paperbacks instead.

Facebook must be reading my blog as it seems to know that I’ve read a pile of Howard this year (Tigers of the Sea, Conan the Invincible, and The Hour of the Dragon). So it’s been showing me a hella lotta Dungeons and Dragons suggested/sponsored posts. And, in June, an ad for this book, which I proceeded to order from Amazon.

The stories certainly do not have the flavor of Lovecraft’s stories of the mythos (or other writers who followed him). Instead, they only share some thematic elements, specifically that alien races preceded man on the Earth, including Atlantis which sank beneath the waves.

The book includes:

• “The Shadow Kingdom”, a Kull the Conqueror novella wherein Picts help Kull to learn that an ancient shape-shifting snake people have infiltrated his palace.
• “The Skull Face”, a novella wherein an ancient magician has laid plans in the shadows to unite non-white races to overthrow the white men around the world and establish his own global empire. The magician ensnares an opium-eater in London as his thrall, but the man recovers himself to ally with the authorities to try to stop the plot.
• “The Children of the Night”, wherein a modern Englishman is hit in the head and regresses to a previous life where he was a barbarian hunting the Children of the Night, an ancient race of non-humans, and when he returns to the present day, discovers one of his cohort is a desendent of them. This story has elements of the mythos and refers to the Call of Chulhu and other texts shared across the mythos.
• “The Gods of Bal-Sogoth”, a novella similar to the Wulfhere/Cormac Mac Art stories from Tigers of the Sea blended with Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”. Two enemies are cast ashore on a remote island where the savage population has been ruled by a white woman who was their goddess until unseated by the practitioners of the old religion. She hopes to use the two to regain her throne.
• “The Black Stone”, a story wherein a traveler in the back roads of Europe decides to visit a mysterious monolith and has a vision of an ancient race celebrating a black and eldritch ceremony in the distant past.
• “People of the Dark”, wherein a modern man goes to a cave in a plot to kill his rival in a love triangle, but a blow to the head regresses him to a past life wherein he was Conan and entered the caves to capture a woman but has to unite with a rival to fight off a subterranean race. Then the modern man un-, de-, or re-regresses to the present day, he saves his rival and love from the remnant of the ancient race.
• “Worms of the Earth”, a novella wherein Bran Mak Morn summons an ancient race to attack Romans who have crucified on of his citizens.
• “The Thing on the Roof”, wherein an adventurer who has stolen a temple gem asks for help from an antiquarian to discover the meaning of its power in an old book.
• “The Haunter of the Ring”, a story wherein a man’s newlywed bride seems to be trying to kill him, and it’s tied to a cursed ring given to her by a jilted lover.
• “The Challenge from Beyond”, a story written in the round by many authors. C.L. Moore starts off with a conceit about a man finding a strange cube in the wilderness and gazing in it; A. Merritt extends the story; H.P. Lovecraft sets his stamp on it by setting up how it’s a mind transfer probe from a distant and ancient worm-like race to seek habitable planets to plunder and populate; and then Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long turn it into one of their stories by explaining how the human mind transferred to the worm body conquers the worm planet due to the violence only human consciousness brings but rules as a benevolent despot. It’s funny how Lovecraft turns the story one way and Howard and Long turn it into one of their style stories at the end.
• “The Fire of Asshurbanipal”, wherein two adventurers in the Middle East are pursued in the desert but seek refuge in an ancient city feared by the locals, and, in it, they discover a gem in an ancient idol. Before they can steal it, though, their pursuers find them, bind them, steal the gem for themselves, and deal with the deadly consequences.
• “Dig Me No Grave”, wherein a man asks another man to help with a ritual that an old, old man who recently died tasks the man to perform on his death. It turns out to be an eldritch ritual releasing the man’s soul to the evil it had been promised.

So some of the stories have a modern-day setting to them that more closely aligns with stories in the Cthulhu mythos, but others are more straight-forward Howard stories.

I thought the book was a cheapo collection of public domain stuff, but it’s actually more than that: It’s part of the MFA program at Western Colorado University where students put together and publish a book. So it’s not riddled with typos and stuff (I saw one), and I have a couple of design notes I’d add. The page headers have the author’s name on left pages, but on right pages, they have the name of the novella if it’s a novella or the book title if the heading is on a short story. I’d have made it consistent, probably with the book title and story/novella title (the book title has the author name right in it). Also, the last chapter of the novella “Skull-Face” appears in the table of contents as its own short story (and the heading of the right pages does not have the novella title but the book title). Still, I have an eye for that.

I guess the program/publishing house has published a couple of other books, but I’m not going to run out and get them–I got this one just because I have been so much on a Conan/Howard kick this year. But binge reading them (if three or four books over six months is “bingeing”–) really highlights the tropes and repeated motifs that make the material seem less fresh. So I’ll likely put them down for a bit now.

I passed over this book which was on the outer rank of books in the hall for a number of years. Even when I’m in the mood for a McBain, which happens from time to time (such as when I am working on the Winter Reading Challenge), I pick up an 87th precinct book. This is a Matthew Hope book, the other series McBain did, about the attorney in Florida. I am sure I read a number of these when I was younger (the series ran from 1977 to this book in 1998), but I’ve only read one since I’ve been reporting on books for this humble blog (Rumpelstiltskin in 2004).

Matthew Hope is an attorney who has a team of investigators working for him; in this book, a woman hires him to find her husband who walked out on her and went up north. Presumably, she wants to divorce him or have him declared dead. So Hope and his team swing into action, and a corpse turns up with the husband’s wallet but is not, apparently, the husband, the start to unravel a complicated plot for a heist that involves a couple of different bisexual love triangles and plans to steal the heisted cup of Socrates from the original heisters.

The story occurs partly in real time and partly in flashbacks amongst the good guys and the bad guys and features a team-up with the detectives of the 87th Precinct as they look into what the husband did when he was up north in The City.

But, ultimately, although the good guys catch on at the end, it relies a little on coincidence to put Hope at the museum as the heist occurs, and a quick climax with bloodshed and finis!

Yeah, ultimately, I don’t like the Matthew Hope books that very much. I am pretty sure I have one or more amongst the to-read shelves here (including, likely, one or more that I have already read), but I will space them out. Maybe every twenty years or so.

As I mentioned when I bought this book on June 20, I fully expected to read it fairly quickly as its premise matches that of the Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies books I’ve read recently (Walking the Labyrinth and Songs of Three)–that is, that a Hittite travelled with Minoans to the Americas a couple millennia B.C.

Also, I actually read an academic book about the copper mining ancient peoples in Michigan back around 2008. I got the book through Inter-Library Loan at the Old Trees library from something I’d read in a History or Renaissance magazine; the volume I got was a numbered book out of a thousand published, and I forget from how far away it came. I pored through my book report archives here and did a quick search of the old Blogspot blog, but I cannot find a book report for it. Which is odd; I thought I did them all, but perhaps I did not do this one because it is not or was not available on Amazon, and there was a time when I thought I could monetize this blog (spoiler alert: no, and it hasn’t served as much of a spring board to book sales, either).

At any rate, that previous book was an academic work by a university professor, but this book is an amateur work, a labor of love, by a guy who’s had numerous jobs including working for the United States Forestry Service in the upper midwest which sparked his interest in this topic. He wonders where all the copper that the natives mined went and why they seemingly stopped mining it and regressed to hunters and gatherers about 1200 BC.

He lays out reasons why he believes the Minoans were able to sail beyond the Mediterranean, up the coast of Europe, to Britain and then Greenland and Iceland and beyond where they established trading posts and helped the natives to mine the copper which they then brought back to the Mediterranean. He refers to something called the Newberry Tablet, a stone tablet found under an uprooted tree (which also happens in Walking the Labyrinth) with cuniform writing as well as similarities between Algonquin written language and Cypro-Minoan script.

The book is not very well written; it repeats itself and is a bit stilted in spots, not like academic speak though. It’s a bit informed by cable television history, but you know what? This guy has done some research, and he has traveled to Europe and the Mediterranean to view artifacts in various museums. He says that the establishment does not take his theory seriously, and I believe that’s true whether his theory is true or not: The academy selects for people who will not rock the boat and will parrot the established narratives to ensure continued funding and employment.

So the book presents an interesting theory, one worth considering, even if it’s just to use the concept for a series of fantasy books that I’ll get back to by and by.