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I’m Such A Tease
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Category: Books
Book Report: Fantastic Four The Universal Guide by Marvel (2007?)
Apparently, this book came along with one of the films when it was released on DVD. As such, it’s marked NOT FOR RESALE. Note that I am personally not in violation of the law here, I hope, since I merely bought this little book at some book fair or garage sale. Hopefully, I can avoid the affection of the TSA, the BATFE, and the other secretly abbreviated agencies with that disclaimer.
What is the book? It’s a little Marvel Universe lite that focuses on the Fantastic Four. It talks about the members, their enemies, the different eras in the comic books, and the different plot arcs the comics have followed. Unfortunately, since it was bundled with a DVD, it did so in a very small book with freaking tiny print and a lot of italics on a lot of colored backgrounds. That made it very hard to read in places. By “in places,” I mean “on pages.”
That said, when I squinted enough, I got a good flavor of the remembered history eras of the 1960s and early 1970s, the remembered present era of the 1970s and 1980s, and that weird future era of the 1990s and the 2000s. Of course, all references therein are to my contemporaneous reading of comic books. The wild story arcs were much more tolerable and comprehensible when you were reading them issue-by-issue. Of course, in the time I was reading comic books, a lot of the stories stretched two issues. Then they started the longer story arcs over a number of different titles, so you had to buy three or four magazines a month to keep up, and if you missed one, you were lost. And the stories got daft. For example, the Spider-Man Mark of Kane series really turned me off to the Spider-Man titles. I haven’t really read comics since.
But this book makes me think about dipping back in. I have a half long box of comic books I bought in 2007 and a small stack of comics my brother gave me at some time or another. As well as several boxes that my mom didn’t throw out.
Given that I haven’t read any of the other books I bought on September 22, 2007, maybe I will stick to real books for a while yet.
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Book Report: Missouri Trivia by Ernie Couch (1992)
This book is a collection of questions and answers loosely grouped into categories where the questions are about people, places, and things in the state of Missouri. I browsed it during a couple of football games and in advance of our recent trivia night triumph. The book didn’t help in that regard, however, as there were no Missouri-centric questions at the trivia night.
Unfortunately, the format of the book as questions and answers grouped loosely at the chapter level means this book is better for, say, quizzing someone during a long drive rather than reading it straight through to pick up knowledge about the state of Missouri. I might retain a couple of nuggets, but the loose grouping and the format make for poor retention. For retention, organization by title, region, or something might have helped.
Although for the sheer quizzing of a companion, some of the answers are going to be marvelously trivial. What was the corn production in 1870? I don’t remember if that actual question is in there, but there are some looking for particularly specific numbers that you’d get from an old almanac and nowhere else.
Oh, and the final little asterisk? The answer given in this book to the question Who won the 1981 World Series? is The St. Louis Cardinals. So any answer you don’t know for sure is suspect anyway. Maybe it’s better if you not retain them.
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Book Report: Copp on Fire by Don Pendleton (1988)
This is the third book in the previously mentioned Copp series, and it focuses on the seamy side of Hollywood. Copp is hired by a studio head to take some quick pictures of people entering and leaving a business. Immediately after he turns over the film, Copp sees the aftermath of a car bomb in a limosuine–the one the studio head drove. Suddenly, Copp is wanted in connection with the explosion and with a string of deaths of the people depicted in the photographs. Before long, he’s embroiled in a twisting journey through the sleazy underbelly of Hollywood including faked deaths, hidden deaths, marriages of convenience, sexy starlets, and enforcers from the syndicate back east who are bankrolling studios.
The book is a little longer than the first in the series, and it has a lot of characters to keep track of. Unfortunately, Copp works in the dark a lot here and things just seem to happen to him, but it’s a good enough book nevertheless. I’m still keeping my eye out for others in the series.
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Book Report: Copp for Hire by Don Pendleton (1987)
In my forthcoming novel, I use the word fuck in a couple of different forms on the first page (and seventeen times throughout the novel according to my aunt and godmother–or maybe that was my first one). This book uses the word tits on the first page. That’s definitely more directly evocative. I think I’ve learned an important writing lesson in it.
As you might now (especially if you at least scan the headlines for the book reports if you don’t outright read them), Don Pendleton started the Executioner series and wrote 38 books in it throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. This book is a departure from it, the beginning of a new series focusing on an ex-cop private eye named Joe Copp. Since he’s free from the constraints, such as they were, of the Harlequin publishing empire and is into the big time, he can talk in more gritty terms. So the book has a different flavor, more akin to the more modern styles of novels. It’s quite a jump, really, like going directly from old John D. MacDonald to Robert Crais, for example. I’d imagine Ed McBain made a similar transition, but it wouldn’t have been as jarring and would have been more graduated.
The book uses the first person narrator as opposed to the third person of the Executioner series, and it works better for the occasional philosophical asides that appear here as well as in the Executioner books. The book is thicker, too, but for the most part the first person narration carries it along.
The plot? Oh, I don’t know, something to do with a dead stripper and a politician who likes strippers and a party palace in Hawaii and connections with the Hawaiian underworld. Pretty standard stuff, but done better than the standard pulp crime fiction novelist.
I was pleased to note that this is part of a series, and I was even more pleased to discover I had bought more than one of these books (at the St. Charles Book Fair? That might be it). I think the series came out in hardcover first. I like it and have grown to like Don Pendleton so much that I’ll snap up his work when I find them, and I will seek out these titles in hardcover just because I want them for my collection. How’s that for an endorsement?
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Book Report: Paul Harvey’s For What It’s Worth edited by Paul Harvey, Jr. (1991)
I read Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story, lord, has it been five years ago already? No wonder I’m feeling old. I was going to go on a bit about how you can hear Paul Harvey’s voice as you read these things if you’re of a certain age and tie it to how people about 40 years old also have a certain affinity for CBS News’ Christopher Glenn’s voice, too, since he used to do the news breaks on Saturday mornings and CBS hourly news on the radio, but jeez, I think I need an old man’s nap before I do.
Although I didn’t like the pacing of the Rest of the Story segments translated to the page, these shorter pieces fit okay. For those of you who don’t know, the For What It’s Worth bits were just shorter segments of Harvey’s News and Comment instead of stand-alone pieces in their own right. The length varies, but the choppier radio broadcast style works better.
The vignettes are amusing. Now that we have Snopes, we know many of them are urban legends recounted, some knowing jokes with the artificial spontenaity of an America’s Funniest Home Videos nut shot (am I old enough that I have to explain that to kids, too?), and some things that might have happened. Just enjoy the stories and don’t build a worldview about them.
Paul Harvey was audio blogs, really. Some linking, little thinking, some wry notes, and some urban legendry. Enjoy them as such, for what it’s worth.
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Book Report: A History of the Rural Schools in Greene County, MO by David L. Burton (2000, 2010)
I bought this book from David Burton at the UM Extension office because I wanted to learn more about the one room schoolhouse just down the road (Farm Road 190 and Highway FF). It’s Green Ridge, and apparently it’s in use as a garage, or it was when the book was written. I’d known there was a school over there, but I think I’ve been pointing visitors to the wrong building.
I’ve also learned there was a one-room school probably in sight of my back deck (Capernaum). How fascinating.
At any rate, the book is a brief history of school districts in Missouri from the pre-state days up until the reorganization in the 1940s. A bit dry on the text, but it’s focused on policy and events, not a driving historical personage. A catalog of the schools in Greene County follows as well as some photos and driving tours.
A nice resource. Nice enough that I bought the book on CD, too, so I can search it with a computer. However, for this review, I flipped through the book to check the names of the schools above. Maybe I’m not that far into the 20th century yet, which explains why I sought this book out.
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Book Report: The Libyan Contract by Don Collins (1974)
Just when I get to breezing along these paperback pulp novels, thinking they’re all the same, I run into one that’s not.
Maybe I’ve been running in a particular series (The Executioner), so I get complacent and think that they all read like that, fast and engaging, and then I run into something like this.
Oh, not to sell it short: this book is ripped from contemporary headlines. A Texas oilman wants to kill an Arab leader for his own personal gain! If that doesn’t strike you as the summation of the left’s view of the 21st century, I don’t know what would, aside from that the post-2009 21st century includes RACISM! as the motivating factor for Texas oilmen and their sympathists opposing…. Well, anything.
Except this book takes place ca. 1974, when a CIA agent seeks out a South African son of an SS officer who’s out to kill Muammar al-Gaddafi. Wait a minute, a CIA agent protecting Gaddafi? This just in: I made a dartboard with Gaddafi’s face on it as an art project in middle school. I am now middle-aged. I would say, “WTF?” but that’s how the kids talk these days. Did I say “kids”? I meant “people who think they’re young, but are marketing to kids.”
Sorry, as a middle-aged man, I’m prone to the wandering thoughts that come with age. Where was I?
Oh, yes, this book I read in 2010.
Well, it’s a book that takes its inspiration from the international suspense pulps of the era. Ian Fleming inspired many, which is why the main character has relations with Israeli intelligence and Maltese natives in that way.
However, the book’s pacing really pulls it out of the ranks of pulp or paperback fiction; solid paragraphs and extraneousity slow the book down a great deal. The story is a bit meh. The set pieces are not so much predictable as slow to develop, and the main character’s main job seems to be running to authorities in various locations and asking for their help, which is not what one usually wants in a two-fisted pulp novel.
Apparently, this is part of a series and is the first in the series without the Secret Mission: prefix. So I’ll avoid those with it and try to avoid others in the series without it.
And I’m back to Don Pendleton by now, thank you very much.
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Book Report: Second Opinions of Hippocrates’ Oaf by James T. Brown, MD (1982)
This is my second book of self-published Ozarks humor this year (the first was Branson Humor as you well recall). I liked this book better.
That’s not to say that this book is a laff riot. It collects some musings of a doctor as he goes through the business of being a doctor (ca. 1982). There are some amusing bits, but nothing that made me laugh out loud or anything. As a matter of fact, it continues my absolute descent in recent reading from Cosby to Bombeck to this.
The book has some things in common with the latter as they come from the same time period. But because it’s a small press book published in the area where I live, although there are no particular pieces dedicated to the Ozarks, I look upon it with affection. It strikes me as a collection of stories a relative might tell you, expecting laughter but mostly getting smiles as much for the relative as for the stories themselves.
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Book Report: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford (2004)
Well, I read about the rise of one Khan, so it lends itself to a certain symmetry if I were to follow pretty closely with the rise of another. And so I have.
This book is an overview of the rise of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire and the empire after Genghis Khan’s death. The author is a homer, but I prefer that: someone who writes positively of the subject of the book. That’s not to say that the Mongols were not brutal when they were; it just doesn’t stand athwart history, shouting, “Naughty!” and condescending to historical figures with the sensitivites of a modern academic.
The book is a pretty good primer on Asian history from the 13th century and serves as a reminder to a Western reader who has been steeped in Western Civilization that there’s a whole wide world out there with history of its own, and that history went on even during the dark ages. The Mongol Empire was the largest empire in the world, ever. In the 13th century. Also, the Mongols had a pretty large number of Christians among them. The Christians among them were helpful when the Mongols sacked Baghdad, the capital of the Islamic world at that time. The Moslems have not forgotten it.
The Mongols spared Western Europe from most of their predations for two reasons: The heavy forests were not ideal terrain for their horsemen, and Europe didn’t have anything worth sacking relative to China and the Islamic nations of the time.
So it’s chock full of new perspective and whatnot, but unfortunately the last chapter kinda weakens the book. It follows the youth of Ghengis Khan, the rise of Khan, the aftermath of Khan’s death, and Kublai Khan’s rise in China. After the actual history part of the book, the author tacks on a conclusion that talks about how Genghis Khan came to be a symbol of Asiatic man and its inferiority to the West with all the proper sentiments expressed. Then the author LARPs an event out of Khan’s life by riding swiftly on a horse on the Mongolian plains while wearing a deen, the traditional garb. I could really have done without that. Also, as the book progressed, it occurred to me that the legal and civilizationary triumphs of the Mongols that the author celebrates align liberal policies (public education and women’s rights come to mind).
That being said, I feel the need to compare the Mongols under Khan to other personages I’ve read in the last couple of years. The Mongols would have eaten John Hawkwood (100 years later) for lunch. The Aztecs (200 years later)? Not even a snack. They were pretty good at their version of warfare and their administration of the conquered lands. But the book posits the ultimate downfall of the Mongol empire came from the Bubonic Plague, which it carried from its origin in China to the whole populated world at the time.
I enjoyed the book, the last chapter aside, and recommend it. As a side note, I paid full price for this book at a real book store. I’d read an article in the September 2010 History Magazine about Genghis Khan’s law and wanted to learn more, so when I had some time to kill in a mall, I browsed the book store and this book was in it. Kismet. A sign. A worthwhile purchase.
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Book Report: Double Crossfire: The Executioner #40 by “Don Pendleton” (1982)
After the consortium began producing these books, it moved from a mob-centric plot to an international terrorist plot template. After all, the 1970s were over and the 1980s were beginning. Out with the Dirty Harry, in with the Rambo.
In this book, Mack Bolan is out to protect America from heroin coming from Turkey. The KGB and its mercenaries are using a guerrilla front group to grow and process opium. The KGB also has designs to encourage an Armenian-American to fund and front an Armenian rebel group so it can thwart the Armenian-American and publicly embarrass America and to drive Turkey into the Russian sphere of influence. To save the day, Bolan has to protect the Armenian-American from a mob-like hit in Beverly Hills and then to air drop into Turkey to rescue Americans and an attractive Kurdish woman and to blow up the operation.
As the book turns from the mob focus to the world focus, it does broaden the possibilities. It also leads to more complex plots and lenghtening books. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll be pleased that it’s more modern thrillerish. The end of the book features a number of cables coming in that tip you to the next several books available in the sundry series in the Mack Bolan world. I dunno. I’m probably romanticizing it in thinking there’s as much lost as gained in the transition.
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Book Report: Satan’s Sabbath: The Executioner #38 by Don Pendleton (1980)
This book is the last one written by Don Pendleton before he turned the series over to The Executioner, Inc., and they turned out hundreds of books in the series and others. As such, it does have an ending sort of feel to it as Pendelton finishes up with the War on the Mafia that covered the first books in the series.
As in Friday’s Feast, this book picks up on the final one week swing through the country that Mack Bolan takes after accepting a job working for Washington. It’s probably best if you not reflect on how Bolan can drive across country in a week while stopping and infiltrating and exterminating various mob bastions while doing so.
This time, he returns to New York to finish off the remainder of the families there who are reorganizing after his previous visit. It’s a pretty standard piece of Bolan fare with a couple of ambushes and set pieces where Bolan turns a bordello and Central Park into a hellground and then he infiltrates the mafia HQ using the same Omega/Frankie/Ace of Spades schtick. I don’t mean to diminish it too much, since I’m learning how relatively good the Bolan books are in the monthly pulp paperback line, but if you read them too quickly, you see they are very similar. That’s part of the comfort and the lure of them, I guess. They are put out by the Harlequin people, for crying out loud.
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Book Report: Motherhood, The Second Oldest Profession by Erma Bombeck (1983)
After reading Fatherhood by Bill Cosby, I looked for another book of short pieces to keep on the bedstand. I inherited a number of Erma Bombeck titles from my mother, so I chose one of them. I wondered why Erma Bombeck doesn’t get much acclaim or even mention only a decade after her death and why I lump Bill Cosby in with Mark Twain as a great American humorist, but Erma Bombeck doesn’t percolate up to collective memory. Well, this book explained it.
It’s an amusing collection, but Erma Bombeck was a suburban housewife whose great success came writing newspaper columns in the 1970s and 1980s. Her columns in this book really tie themselves to that era and concern, so I cannot relate to them with the depth that I can to Bill Cosby or even to Andy Rooney. Sadly.
This is not my first trip through some of Bombeck’s works. I read some of them, perhaps even the same volumes, when I was in middle school and maybe early high school since my mother had them around and I didn’t have a library of several thousand volumes to read through at that time. Did I say middle school? I might have read some of them as early as elementary school, since it might have been before I moved to Missouri for the first time.
I remember one of the columns from this book, a column about a mother who died at 48 and left each of three boys a letter that said, “Don’t tell your brothers, but I loved you the best.” When I first read it, I had a mother. Now I have my mother’s book. There’s something poignant, self-consciously so, in that. One of the late of-the-cuff remarks in this book, about mothers who throw out their right arms when they step hard on the brakes, struck me. I’d teased my mother about that when she did that to me into my 30s, as though her thin arm was going to save me. But it’s an impulse many mothers who grew up in the era before mandatory seat belts and rear car seats must have had. It will be meaningless to kids these days, but I remembered it well, the karate chop to the chest in a tense automotive situation.
Will you like this book? Probably more if you’re over the age of 35 and can see your mother in it or see yourself in it if you’re over 60. Kids today and adults in the future will look at the sitatutions therein as though they were reading “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” So maybe someday she’ll be something of Mark Twain. But probably not, as humor columnists fall out of favor and are forgotten.
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One Less Temptation On Bag Day
Curse that volunteer’s sharp eyes:
The value of a box of old books donated to the Friends of the Library book sale can’t be measured just in dollars.
The box contained an eight-volume collection of Shakespeare’s works by Lewis Theobald printed in 1773 and a volume of the Bard’s poetry published by John Bell one year later. The books were part of an effort to rehabilitate William Shakespeare’s image.
Heck, I would have paid $2 each for them.
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Book Report: Rustic Reminders of the Past by Leo Hamblet (?)
I bought this book at a book fair down here, and I hoped it would do dual duty:
- I wanted something easy to flip through during a football game.
- I hoped to find some linear drawings to turn into wood burnings.
Well, I got one of the two, that being the first.
It’s a small, self-published collection of drawings produced by Mr. Hamblet during his drives and meanderings in Oklahoma and Western Arkansas. The images focus on rural buildings, barns and whatnot, with landscape around them. No people or horses. Mr. Hamblet demonstrates some talent with the pen.
Unfortunately, as far as the wood burning goes, the images are a little too busy for me, with a lot of pen strokes and detailed lines. I’m still at the clip art difficulty level when it comes to wood burning.
Since it’s not available on Amazon.com nor other bookselling Web sites, I’ve included the cover here so you don’t think I’m completely making it up:
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Book Report: Borrowed Ideas and Famous Firsts: St. Louis Architecture by Marilynne Bradley and Ahme Quist (1984)
This is a very short booklet about some architectural landmarks in the St. Louis area. Short paragraphs about each landmark accompany a photograph or a drawing of the landmark in question. Ms. Bradley does the photos and drawings.
As some of you might remember, I bought Ms. Bradley’s book of watercolors in 2008. Given that the books are 24 years apart, she’s maintained her interest in the architecture of the St. Louis area for a long time.
It’s an interesting little book to browse (you can easily do it between football plays on television) if you have interest in the St. Louis area and its history or architecture at all.
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Book Report: Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall by Henry Bursill (1859, ?)
You’re thinking that I’ll pretty much count anything as a book I’ve read, especially when I look like I’m going to fall short of the 100 annual goal. After all, I could flipping through craft books. How much lower can I sink? How about a book that’s nothing but hand puppets and titles? You betcha.
That’s what this book is: a collection of hand puppets, including a two-dimensional representation of how you’re supposed to make them and the representation of what it looks like when you’ve done it successfully. It’s only one side of the page, too, as this volume recreates a book published in the middle of the nineteenth century. Back when they didn’t have electricity and wanted to entertain themselves at by candlelight or whale oil lantern, this is what they did.
I thought the book was starting out from a bad spot when it showed this:
Look at that finger on the top hand. Is that the ring finger? Is it even attached to the hand? The book didn’t say anything about needing a knife to make any of the shapes.
Fortunately, the rest look easy to accomplish. With practice. Just what I need, another hobby. I’ll get right on it, once I figure out how to successfully operate a sewing machine and learn the harmonica.
A quick perusal, something you can do while watching the football game or, if you’re like me, trying to avoid watching the Packers play a good quarter and blow it in the second half. Which they did not do this week, I heard; I don’t know, I was breaking my own fingers trying to make hand shadows.
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Book Report: Trash to Treasure 6 by Leisure Arts, Inc. (2001)
I’ve read a couple in this series (Trash to Treasure 2 and Trash to Treasure 8), and I’ve dinged them for being kinda goofy and for making things out of junk that leads to crafts that look like they’re made from recycled things.
This book, though, elevates the game. Its opening section makes good looking furniture out of remnants of other furniture, and those good ideas build up some good will. Later, we get into fabric crafts that look like projects made simply because you’ve got a lot of scrap to waste (a man’s suit collage, a shirt pocket organizer, and sachets out the wazoo). But only a couple things made out of coffee cans or old aluminum cans, so the overall quality of the end result is way up.
Definitely the best in the series I’ve read so far, and it makes me look forward to others in the series. Sadly, 2 of 3 of them will probably be disappointing if the sample holds true.
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Good Book Hunting: October 24, 2010 (Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Sale)
I waited until late on bag day to go to the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale, so I only got 31 books. Two bags, two bucks, but I threw in a little extra because I’m a greedy, heartless Republican who compulsively buys books.
The haul:
Among the highlights:
- James Lileks’ Fresh Lies, a 1994 collection of his columns. Lileks before the Internet? No way.
- A bunch of Clifford Simak science fiction novels.
- A bunch of Walter Mosley, although maybe only one of them is an Easy Rawlins novel.
- Bookstore, which is apparently the story of a small bookstore. No doubt a small bookstore in NYC.
- A Mike Shayne novel, This Is It, Michael Shayne, that looks to be part of the Mike Shayne book club. Like I need more book club editions to collect.
Et cetera.
I volunteered at this fair on Friday night and saw some interesting things come through. Someone bought a couple Classics Club editions, but they did not pay at my table, so I could not see what they bought. I’m so deep into those now that the titles have to be far into the series for me to lack them. A woman also got a copy of Philip K. Dick’s Through a Scanner Darkly, and I commented on how hard it is to find Philip K. Dick books at book fairs.
I notice as I post this that this represents the 68th photo of book fair purchases I’ve put up. You can see the others by searching for "Good Book Hunting".
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James Lileks: Heretic, Again
In his Bleat yesterday, he said:
Me, I’d like to get rid of every single book I have, except for twenty or so. I would like them all scanned and digitized and accessible via iPad, thank you. Yes, yes, the argument about the love of books; I love them too. The love of being surrounded by your library? Yes yes. But. I would be more likely to dip into something if it was incorporeal. On the shelf, they all seem to reproach me: you don’t remember me, do you? All that time we spent together. But I remember the good times; isn’t that enough? Really: if I could, I’d reduce everything to a big desk in a white room with a shelf holding just a few books. The obligations of possessions, the accretion of things: it’s enough to make a Buddhist of me.
He said something similar in September of last year, so he’s obviously not that serious about it. But if he is, well, the more for me.
Of course, what kind of compulsive book acquirer am I these days? I spent several hours last night volunteering at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book fair and did not buy a single book. Because I’m waiting for bag day.
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