Category: Books

After reading Songs of Three, the second Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies book, I considered jumping into the next, but instead, I picked up this Louis L’Amour title that I bought in 2022 after reading A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour.

This book is not a Western; instead, it is an 80s-style thriller, sort of. It still has some Western tropes and overtones as befits the particular story.

Major Joe Makatozi is an Air Force pilot testing an experimental aircraft in Alaska when he his forced down in the Soviet Union and is taken prisoner to a camp in Siberia where he will be interrogated about American aircraft. However, Joe Mack is a full-blooded Sioux who grew up in the wilds of Idaho, so when he makes a plan to escape the camp, he has a better-than-usual chance. So he does make a break for it and lives off of the land with a plan to walk across Siberia to the Bering Strait and to cross it somehow as his ancestors did. He uses all the skills he learned in the wild to hunt, trap, and skin animals using mostly bow and arrow. He spends some time near a village of outcasts, falling for the de facto leader, a lovely woman whose father is a disfavored professor, but another of the outcasts betrays them, so he must flee without her to continue his journey alone.

The book cuts from his perspective (all third person perspective) to several others, including the colonel in charge of the camp and the program to kidnap and interrogate Westerners of note; the Yakut (native Siberian) tracker on Joe Mack’s trail; the colonel’s mistress, a woman on her way up in the party; a furrier who bought furs from the village that came to the attention of the colonel’s mistress because Joe Mack’s furs were better than the others; the woman from the village who flees with her father ahead of the Soviet raid; even the betrayer gets a couple of pages for his perspective. I mean, what’s a lengthy thriller without the jump cuts?

At any rate, it does run on a little long, with some of the characters’ introspection repeated (not word for word, but the same sentiments are reiterated several times). And the ending comes pretty abruptly; about page 300 or 310 of 364, I wondered how it would all get wrapped up, and to be honest, a bit quickly and ambiguously. Perhaps L’Amour thought about continuing it in another book but wrapped it up here instead. But although an enjoyable read, a little unsatisfying in the end.

Still, after reading it, I did pick up 11 other L’Amour books. So make of that what you will. An endorsement in action if not in a twee blog post.

This is the second book in the Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies series; I read the first, Walking the Labyrinth, immediately before it.

So this book only clocks in at 584 pages before appendices, which is shorter than Walking the Labyrinth, so it’s got that going for it, which is nice. It’s also a little more soap opera than the preceding book.

In it, the people of Turn Back are having dreams of a cave. Secrets emerge as Bucky learns that her father, erm, fathered a child after a drunken encounter while on a book tour, and that the mother sent pictures of the baby until communications stopped when the baby was about a year old. In an amazing coincidence, that is the boy next door–the boy whose parents died when he was only one year old and is being raised by his great-grandmother, and it turns out that since he is Simon, the father’s son, the boy is not actually the great-grandmother’s blood relation. Meanwhile, Bucky, the 10-year-old girl, has dreams about her mother returning and trying to kill her. This comes to a head when the mother actually does show up, eight months pregnant and seemingly unaged since her disappearance. We learn about the two types of others who come from elsewhere and can cross over at mystical springs like the one at the old resort where they live, and they think Simon is a great Hittite who did them a good turn several thousand years ago. After a blow to the head, Simon starts having visions that he is such and that he and his wife and even Bucky have been intertwined through many incarnations. Things with the local fundamentalist preacher who has been harrassing Bucky and Simon come to a head in a sudden climax that should take him out of the picture in future books. And they find a cave with Minoan writing along with some Latin from later Spanish visitors. Oh, and I forgot to mention Ian, the boy next door, gets hurt near the cave and part of the book is his recovery.

I am not sure what to make of the reincarnation themes intertwined with the church-going. I wonder where that will lead.

But the book is thick with details and incidents of everyday life in Turn Back, and the plot events are few and scattered over the book’s length. I mean, the writing is easy to read and the pages fly by, but about page 300 of this book, I realized I was 1000 pages into the ongoing saga and not half done. So I will take a break from this series and read something else (besides poetry) for a while.

I think reading these big series is easier when they come out at a book a year; however, a shelf full of them and thousands of pages daunts me. Not just this series, but I have Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series (complete, I think). I read the first two right after college, but they got thicker as time went on, and I collected the rest, and there they sit behind me, thousands of pages. I’ve probably mentioned this when binge watching episodic comedies recently (Red Dwarf and Sledge Hammer!). They, too, were easier to watch back in the day in weekly installments rather than dedicating weeks of nightly watching to plow through them all. It’s a harsh realization as I have a lot of DVD sets and book series to somehow plow through. Perhaps here and there, a bit at a time, as they were intended.

That said, the books are pleasant and easy to read. I get the sense they’re more cozy fantasies for older ladies, who might be more interested in the geneology that plays heavily in it, the church events, and the cooking. I will get through the rest of the books I have from this author before long, and I’ll buy others in the series when I catch her at ABC Books. So let that be my endorsement.

I got this book at the same time as I got The Way at the Friends of the Library book sale, and it make sense given my shopping habits there the last couple of years: Pore over the dollar records, pore over the dollar videos, pore over the dollar audio books, and then glance at the dollar poetry books and maybe literature section, and only sometimes do I make my way to the Better Books to look at old books, local interest, art monographs, and audio courses. This particular book was sold alone and not part of a tied set of chapbooks and pamphlets, which means I paid a whole fifty cents for the single volume. Was it worth it?

Well… It’s a two sets of poems totalling 57 pages. The first set deals with watching high school track meets, and the second set deals with school. The poet was a teacher, and her husband was a coach, so that’s where she got her ideas from. The poems are short, and the lines are very short–three to five words each most of the time, very action-oriented with a dash of imagery here or there. I mean, not bad, but not the best.

And you would think I would be the audience for this. Or sympathetic at least, as I have satten in bleachers this last spring cheering on my son who decided to do track in high school after a year off. The cover image is a track meet from field level with mountains in the background. Our photos are not as exciting. They’re from the cheap seats, and our perspective on our long-distance runner and a bit of the inner football field, maybe, is less descriptive than the photos of old. We can look back on them and say what school or gym they were in in middle school, but in the tightly focused shots this spring, they all look the same. Perhaps I shall try a wider focus next year. Oh, wait, this is a book report. Back to it….

The author has an acknowledgements page where she tells you that four of the poems had previously appeared in four different magazines/journals/zines/Web sites, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Coffee House Memories has an acknowledgements section that is only slightly longer, and I was trying to be a poet at that time–and I really have no pub credits for poetry after like 1997, so perhaps I just don’t know what the market will bear.

Someone, though, thought enough of this book to buy it in 2012 from Amazon for $4.99 plus $3.99 shipping plus sales tax according the a paper folded inside the back cover. I cannot count this as a Found Bookmark; even though it’s a sales receipt, it’s not of a particular place or shop. It’s not even like pamphlets/flyers that came with some of the volumes of various mail-order collections which detail the book and so on. I think I’ll feed this into the shredder presently. Let that be a marker of what I think of Amazon packing lists in books I buy secondhand.

I got three of these little Salesian Missions poetry collections a year ago at the Friends of the Library Book Sale, and this is the first of them that I’ve found to read. Actually, I had it on the lamp table beside the sofa upstairs which became a minor book accumulation point after last summer’s vacation, where I carried the habit of lying on the sofa reading a book home. But a couple of collections of poetry (including this one) lingered there since autumn or winter as I’ve started a new tradition of reading a magazine in the chair in the bedroom as the final step-down to bedtime.

This book was a free giveaway to potential supporters in mail campaigns in the 1980s. I remember that one or more of them passed through our household, although I am not sure whether my sainted mother would have given money to them. After all, Salesian Missions is a Catholic charity; perhaps they had my father’s name on the envelope, as he was nominally Catholic.

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.

At any rate, it was a quick read, which I needed as I’ve been reading large tomes lately. And I kind of look forward to the little respites (and the incrementing of the annual blog total).

You know, I wish some of the charities wishing to entice me today would send out little books of poems. I get a lot of come-ons from Catholic charities (but not Salesian Missions) as a subscriber to First Things, Touchstones, and maybe The New Oxford Review. I get a lot of address labels, a couple of notepads, a coin from time to time, and a pin once, but no poetry. I guess the middle class of potential donors has moved on from reading for the most part, more’s the pity.

I got this book and four others in its series and a related stand alone novel in July 2022 in a trip that was noteworthy as I had instructed my oldest on how to parallel park, and he drove us to ABC Books. Reading the book comes at a parallel time as my youngest is completing his instruction and needs to learn how to parallel park. Will we make it to ABC Books as well? Maybe not.

At any rate, this book is the first in the series about a 10-year-old girl who moves to a small town, Turn Back, in southeast Missouri. Her father, a famous and successful mystery author, has bought an old spring resort to keep her in seclusion because every time she cries, mysterious scars on her back open, and she bleeds. She might be his daughter, though, as the author’s daughter disappeared one night in her crib and someone else apparently took her place–a larger baby whom the author raised by himself as the wife disappeared shortly thereafter.

So they come to Turn Back and try to keep to themselves, but a neighbor boy about Bucky’s age is drawn to them, and they meet his great-great grandmother who is raising him, and they start to attend the local Methodist church which leads to Bucky beginning a “prayer walk” in the city park which leads to the participants sharing dreams, first of mastadons (which stop when flooding reveals a number of mastadon fossils) and about ships (which stop when they find an ancient stone with Hittite markings on it). Along the way, hints of a greater mystery are doled out: Did ancient seafarers reach the center of the United States? Why does the father keep calling Bucky Imala by accident? The major conflict, such as it is, is with a local firebrand preacher who torments the prayer walks as sinful and calls the father “the Devil.”

I am not sure that the cozy fantasy exists as a genre, but that would describe the book. It is just short of 700 pages, and for that bulk, not a lot of plot happens. To be honest, some of the characters outside the father and daughter are still kind of ciphers. But we get a lot of what it’s like living in a small town, going to church in a small town, and so on. We get chapters, chapters where the characters have dinner or hold a talent show, which doesn’t exactly drive the plot forward. But the writing is very good, and it carried me along so that I would read over a hundred pages or even two hundred pages in a sitting and only then think critically, “but what has happened?”

The book ends with a solution to one of the mysteries, but others remain for solution in future volumes.

So, gentle reader, what do you think: Will Brian J. jump right into the next volume or read something else in the interim? Stay tuned!

I was going to say that I just read this, but it turns out that “just” in this case means ten years ago as this title, the only Conan novel that Howard wrote, was included in The Bloody Crown of Conan.

In it, Conan has become king of Aquilonia, but the Zemedians hope to conquer Aquilonia and place a puppet on the throne, so a shadowy group resurrects a sorceror who has been dead several thousand years. When Conan arrays his forces against the invaders, a magic spell paralyzes him in his tent, so he sends out a friend in his armor to lead the battle. But the friend is killed by magic along with much of the cream of the Aquilonian forces, and Conan is captured. He escapes from his dungeon and has to go looking for a jewel that can thwart the sorceror so he can reclaim his kingdom. Along the way, he rejoins some of his colleagues from his corsairing days and has to outwit a vampire in an ancient temple while being stalked by assassins from the east.

So it’s a good yarn, but the whole get-the-sorceror’s-gem plot is very close to Conan the Invincible. So I’ll probably lay off the Conan and sword-and-sorcery titles for the nonce.

The book also contains “The Hyborean Age”, which is Howard’s accounting of the history of Conan’s world and ties it in as unknown history of our world in a forgotten age. But I bogged down in it. It was a lot like reading from The Story of Civilization but without the benefit of making progress in that set. And I just read it. Ten years ago.

Still, it’s nice to revisit these stories and re-read them.

I’ve also determined how much this particular pulp style has influenced my own writing style. I’ve found myself chaining prepositional phrases a bunch, and Howard does that, too. It adds a bit of rhythm to the in-your-head reading that the staccato of choppier sentences lacks. I’ve sometimes tried to iron that tendency out of my writing, but perhaps now I will embrace it a bit more. When I get around to writing any fiction or anything aside from this blog and the occasional LinkedIn post, that is.

This book is another of the paperbacks I bought in Berryville in 2021. Clearly, I’m all-in on the Conan/Robert E. Howard books this month (see also Tigers of the Sea and….well, the book I’m reading now, which we will get to by-and-by). This one was written by Robert Jordan who would later become known for his Wheel of Time series which I haven’t picked up, as large fantasy series daunt me these days when they’re mostly done and you can see the thousands of pages ahead of you sitting on a bookshelf. A bunch of Conan stories and novels, though….

At any rate, in this book, Conan is in town and is hired by a “merchant” to steal some jewels from the king. The merchant is actually a member of a circle of sorcerors looking to get his/its hands on a gem to use against a more powerful sorceror. Conan’s attempt is thwarted when he discovers five dancing girls in the palace wear the pendants. He plans to come back the next night and vows to rescue the girl whom he met, but as he prepares to depart, another group steals the gems and the girls, and Conan strikes out after them. Along the way, he rescues the red-haired leader of a band of raiders, keeps one step ahead of the soldiers looking for the raiders (whom they presume has stolen the gems), and confronts the very wizard who should not get his hands on the gem.

It’s a rip-roaring book, pulpy but more modern than Howard’s work, and something that would not be written today. I liked it and will consider picking up the other Jordan Conan books if I see them in the wild.

I picked up this book, another Berryville score, simply because it was not a Robert E. Howard or Conan book. I’ve passed over Haggard’s She on a couple of occasions–it’s on the book shelves in the hall, which I have looked through when looking for something to read from time to time, but never seemed the right moment for it. This title, on the other hand, shares the title with one of the two Richard Chamberlain Allan Quatermain movies from the 1980s–which was on Showtime, so I saw it a bunch. So I picked it up first amongst the Haggard books. The two I have. As it turns out, this is the first Quatermain book and the book Haggard published before She, so I accidentally got the order right.

So: A British nobleman and a retired Navy captain engage Allan Quatermain, an old elephant hunter, to take them into uncharted Africa in search of the nobleman’s brother who sought to find the legendary mines of King Solomon. Quatermain comes up with a map from an explorer from several hundred years ago purportedly showing the way, and they take off, doing a little hunting along the way. They encounter difficulties crossing a desert and then the mountains, but they find Wakanda Kukuanaland, a hidden tribe in a fertile valley surrounded by mountains. It is ruled by a brutal warlord who deposed his own brother and who follows the advice of an ancient witch who encourages him to conduct annual purges of tribesmen to keep himself in power. Quatermain and party convince the natives that they’re from the stars, but when the warlord starts to doubt, the group helps the most noble of their porters, Umbopa, the son of the deposed king, to lead a rebellion. After which they are shown the mines by the witch, who dies trying to trap the men in the mines. They escape with but a couple pockets’ full of stones but with their lives, and they find the nobleman’s brother at an oasis on the way back to civilization.

So the film, which I saw over and over, differs greatly from the book as it was recast/recut into an Indiana Jones-style adventure (so common in the 1980s) with a female love interest and whatnot. Still, it made me want to watch the films again.

I was going to call this book a cross between Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, but that’s a bit dismissive. The book is credited with being the first of the “lost world” (not “hollow world”) genre, which means it spawned the whole type of adventure story that would influence Robert E. Howard and generations of pulp writers. And Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling were life-long friends.

The book might get knocked for its colonialism and portrayal of African natives by facile interpreters hungry for an A or tenure, but it, like so many works, provides a fairly balanced view of Africans as human with a variety of virtues and vices, but that they did not have the Gatling gun and organization that set the West apart at the time. It’s a shame that the work gets dismissed for academic clout and huzzahs. This is a Penguin edition, though, which meant that at least as late as the 1950s it was studied in school.

It reads like a piece of the time; the writing is vivid and has a great deal of depth, but it’s a little slower than pure pulp. Still, it’s not especially archaic, and it should be accessible to any literate person of our time.

So maybe I will get to She sooner rather than later, but I do have a lot of more pulpy works from Berryville which I will likely get to first especially as they have remained together instead of being scattered amongst the Nogglestead stacks.

Ah, gentle reader. You are forgiven if you think that I’ve not been reading much these days, but it’s sort of true. I’ve divided my evenings between watching DVD sets that I bought twenty years ago (like Red Dwarf) with reading, and in that reading, I have taken up the second volume of The Story of Civilization, The Life of Greece. I’ve been interspersing it with the old hardback Houghton Mifflin poetry primers like The Deserted Village and Other Poems and Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish and Elizabeth), but instead of 19th century writing, I picked up a volume of Alexander Pope from the 18th century which is harder to read and is not as compelling of a narrative. So I picked up this little paperback, part of my 2021 haul in Berryville, Arkansas, to intersperse with all of the above. And it was just what I needed.

This book collects a set of stories featuring Cormac Mac Art, a Gael, and Wulfhere, a Viking leader, in their various adventures in Britain not long after the Romans retreated. We’ve got four stories of how the odd couple and the ship which follow a fairly basic pattern of Cormac infiltrating and then the Vikings bringing the hammer, whether they’re tasked to rescue a princess or dealing with Picts or what have you. They’re fun reads, but they’re not going to stick with you. To be honest, I finished the book two weeks ago, and I could not easily nor quickly distinguish between the four stories by their titles (“Tigers of the Sea”, “Swords of the Northern Sea”, “Night of the Wolf”, and “The Temple of Abomination”) nor by a quick skim of the contents of the first. So a fun read, but nothing to stick to your ribs.

Still, this might be my reading pattern going into the summer: A little of the Durant, a little of the old-timey poetry, and then one of the Howard and Howard-related paperbacks from Berryville. There are worse things, and they’ll ensure that I keep slogging at the Durant.

After reading a century-old copy of The Courtship of Miles Standish and Elizabeth, I quickly picked up another one of these old, old elementary school (!) textbooks. This one bears the copyright date of 1894 but is likely newer. Although it has an owner’s name penciled in, it’s less legible and would likely yield a less interesting account of the previous owner.

So: Oliver Goldsmith is most known for The Vicar of of Wakefield, but these poems are what really put him on the literary map right about the time of the British Transcontinental Civil War Revolutionary War (we won, we call it what we want).

“The Deserted Village” is a response to the industrial revolution and how the rural areas were depopulating as people moved to the cities for work. Wow, this was a thing before the 20th century? Of course it was; but by not reading these things in school any more, we don’t need that perspective about how some things, themes, and sentiments or concerns precede the solutions that salesmen and politicians would offer us today for our completely novel troubles. “The Traveller” is a, well, travelogue of someone visiting the continent and comparing the different places and their foreigners to England (which is clearly the best). A couple of shorter poems appear to fill out the thin (96 page) volume.

These poems and The Vicar of Wakefield represent the bulk of Goldsmith’s work (although he had a couple plays put on and a couple other novels). But he was lauded in his time. We have forgotten so many of the people who were big literary stars in their time.

The poems are easy to read. Long lines and end rhymes, attention to rhythm. Meant to be read aloud, perhaps to friends, but that’s not how the party people do it these days.

So, again, suddenly I am enjoying these century-old poem collections, so don’t be surprised to see me pick up another in the future. So many of the ones I have, though, are Longfellow, so I will try to pace them out.

I bought this book in 2007 (that’s right, seventeen years ago, when I was attending more than one book sale per weekend whilst living in Old Trees), and I picked it up now because I just read The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and I was prone to confusing the two. After all, both were Middle-Eastern-flavored collections of poetry and parables which were huge in their day and which were still found around middle class households in the late 70s and early 1980s. I am pretty sure that my “rich” aunt and uncle had a copy of this book if not both.

So: The frame is that a “prophet”–a wise man or hermit of some sort–has lived on the edges of an island’s society for some number of years, and a ship has come to take him to his native land. So as he makes his way to the docks, the people want him to make a speech, and he does: 90 pages of individual poems on the philosophy of various topics such as friendship, death, prayer, joy and sorrow, and so on.

To be honest, it kind of read like a garlic-infused Rod McKuen for the most part, but some segments hit me. Like this one:

You may give them [children] your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

Day-um. As I mentioned, my oldest graduates high school next week. So, yeah, this rang true.

Also:

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.

So to call it Lebanese Rod McKuen diminishes it too much. It’s lightweight poetry, easy to read, with aphorisms that will speak to a variety of readers spread throughout. It’s poetry that you could read aloud with the lyric and narrative rhythms to match. And with a taste of the exotic even though Gibran was Lebanese-American and not tenth century Persian (like Omar Khayyám). Still, the sum of these parts explain why the book was very popular; the hardback I have was the 67th printing, forty years after the book first appeared. I wonder if it’s still in print and still read–given that the author was a hyphenated-American, he would not have been eliminated from the curricula based on race.

As I mentioned, I picked up the musical version of it this weekend, and I will have to give it a listen soon. I bet it translates pretty well to music.

To be honest, I don’t know where I got this book. It doesn’t show up in almost twenty years’ worth of Good Book Hunting posts, and it has no distinguishing price marks. So did I pick it up before the turn of the century? Inherit it from my aunt? Who knows? All I know is that it is bound in the light brown Walter J. Black-esque cover used by book clubs that sent you books on subscription in the middle of the 20th century. This is, in face, a Doubleday Crime club selection. Only one book in the cover, though, unlike the three-in-one book club editions of which I have many.

At any rate. This is a police procedural, but it is more in the vein of what you would find in an Ed McBain novel than the one I read earlier this year (Blood Count, which is almost thirty years younger than this book but reads much older). The book has multiple plot lines: A police detective is hunting for a murderer in a case going cold, and he suspects a local private investigator/fixer is behind it. The PI’s current mistress suspects he is about to throw her over, so she has turned informant, but the PI suspects it. So one of his hard men is watching her, and the hard man hatches a plan for her to escape which involves killing and disfiguring another woman in her place. Meanwhile, the police detective is scheduled to testify before a state legislature hearing about corruption in the police department, and a local newspaperman dogs him in service of that syndicate to get him to change his testimony–even digging up the fact that the detective’s wife tried to be a prostitute before he arrested her and later married her after she’d gotten a real job.

I cannot help compare it to the disappointing Dell Shannon/Elizabeth Linington book. This one has a moving plot, maybe a little too complex in places, and the characters are for the most part well-developed. The book contains some series business–presumably the courtship/marriage/etc with the detective and his wife was mentioned in earlier books, and they have two adoptive children who probably played a part in earlier books. But it’s handled well and doesn’t overwhelm the main plot–actually, some of it actually influences or affects the main plot.

The end doesn’t quite resolve everything, but the main points/crimes are covered. Perhaps a little too patly, but one could say the same about one or more McBain novels. The location is never really identified clearly–it seems Californiaish but the places are not sharply identified, which is good as things would have changed in the last seventy years enough to make it dated.

I noted a couple of things in the book to comment on:

• About the only hard facts in the case were that she had been shot twice in the left lung with a .32 between the hours of 10 P.M. and 4 A.M., and that she had been found by the ten-year-old around eleven the next morning.

  People were always getting shot with smaller caliber guns in old books; .25s and .32s. Nowadays, it’s .38, .45, or 9mm. You could also have told, in the old days, that I read a lot of old books because I thought my first handgun would be a .32.

• He heard the record player spinning. Sarah Vaughn and Dave Brubeck.

  Perhaps these books seem less dated to me because this could be any night at Nogglestead in the current year.

• He fired for the target his ears picked up, and again there was bursting and splintering of glass, explosive in the cavernous stillness. He heard two more blasts and lay suddenly quiet, mystified they had found no mark near him.

  He was still a long time, his hearing reaching out with such intensity he felt the ache in his head.

  After letting off a couple of rounds, even .38, I would suspect his hearing was not that acute.

• Chico, only ten, was an I-NS case, a Mexican illegally in the country and scheduled to be shipped back any day now.

  All right, this dates the book. The boy is one of the adoptive children, a Jewish refugee who ended up in Mexico before coming to the US. It probably made more sense in the book in which it happened.

• “Most of us have little pet tunes–and they often give our age away.”

  “Hearts” by Marty Balin and “The Pocket of a Clown” by Dwight Yochum aside, during the time I was reading this book, I might have sung or hummed any number of tunes that would give my age away. Although they don’t come to mind right now. Never mind.

• He laughed, and then remembering what an iguana was, said, “Great Caesar’s ghost!”

  Which is funny, because last week, while I was reading this book (but before I got to the last page, where this quote appears), I said “Great Caesar’s ghost!” in a LinkedIn comment. I, of course, remember it from the old George Reeves Superman television show (which I did not see in first run, thank you very much) where Perry White, editor of the Daily Planet, exclaimed it once per episode (except the one where he sees Caesar’s ghost, of course).

At any rate, I took great comfort and courage in enjoying some mid-century crime fiction. I read a bunch of it when I was a kid, when it was but thirty years old, and I liked it. But some of the things I’ve read recently (recently might here mean “in the last quarter century”) have had me a bit down on it and reluctant to read more. Which is a problem, since I still have 42 of the 3-in-1 book club books that I bought in 2009 to go through. Slowly. But perhaps not as slowly as if this book had sucked, which it did not.

I got this book as part of a book order back when ABC Books and everything else was in a timeout in 2020. I’ve picked up a number of similar editions and have grouped them together, so maybe I’ll be reading elementary school textbook poetry a bunch this year.

So: This book collects a number of Longfellow’s poems, including “The Courtship of Miles Standish”, “Elizabeth”, and some shorter ones. In “The Courtship of Miles Standish”, the military captain of the struggling Plymouth colony loses his wife in the first winter and asks his friend John Alden to ask Priscilla for her hand in marriage–but John and Priscilla already have eyes for each other.

In “Elizabeth”, a settler is taken with a travelling preacher, and he returns her affection. The poem includes a bit of a parallel between the maidservant and the hired man.

“Enceladus”, which I read like James Hetfield singing it. I mean, can’t you see Lovecraft taking some inspiration from this?

Under Mount Etna he lies,
It is slumber, it is not death;
For he struggles at times to arise,
And above him the lurid skies
Are hot with his fiery breath.

And:

They talk together and say,
“To-morrow, perhaps to-day,
Euceladus will arise!
And the old gods, the austere
Oppressors in their strength,
Stand aghast and white with fear
At the ominous sounds they hear,
And tremble, and mutter, “At length!”

The other short poems include the standard landscapes and a paean to John Greenlead Whittier delivered during a dinner in the latter’s honor. I remark on this because I was just telling my wife about how I confuse him with James Whitcomb Riley. I was talking about Whittier because “Elizabeth” comes from a collection of poetical stories told by travellers thrown together at an inn (Tales of a Wayside Inn) much like The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer or Tent on the Beach by Whittier (or is it Riley?) which I started in one of these early 20th century editions but put aside.

So, yeah, one can draw a pretty direct line from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Longfellow. He draws from real sources for his stories and writes of events from hundreds of years prior for his narratives. His poetry style is breezy, hexameter with some end rhymes (I know, “Enceladus” above does, but “The Courtship of Miles Standish” and “Elizabeth”, also known as “The Theologian’s Tale”, do not). The other work bears the influences of the English Romantic movement and probably Whittier (although I have not actually read enough of his work yet to know too much about it).

“The Courtship of Miles Standish” and some of the other poems have footnotes–“The Courtship of Miles Standish” has a bunch of them, taking up half of some pages, where the editor of this textbook, not the poet, defines some terms, highlights allusions to other work, or identifies historical records which corroborate the narrative. I read many of them and said, “I already know that,” but it is an elementary school textbook (!). One that I read in the middle of “The Courtship of Miles Standish” indicated, for example, that Bradford’s history of Plymouth mentioned Priscilla was a real person who married John Alden and had eleven children with him. Which is to say, the footnote contained a spoiler alert just when the poem was getting good.

The book also has some other educational material, including a short introduction and study helps like ideas for lessons based on the book which I just skimmed.

I enjoyed the book, and I enjoyed The Song of Hiawatha when I read it six years ago (!). As I said, I’ll probably read another couple of the like this year.

And I mentioned it was an elementary textbook almost 100 years ago. Here’s the little girl’s name:

I found the obituary for that little girl, who died at 90 in 2007. You know, a lot of times books have inscriptions or names in them, but finding this particular obituary made reading the book poignant indeed. After all, I am but a temporary owner of it as well, and I’m not even leaving my mark in the book itself.

When I bought this book seventeen years ago, I mentioned that I’d read When Worlds Collide, the book that precedes it, in middle school or high school. Now, I think I read the earlier book in sixth grade: I think it was on the metal spinning racks of paperbacks that my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Pickering, had in her room so that students could borrow them and read them (I also think I read Profiles in Courage from that rack as well, and I’ve got my own copy somewhere here in the stacks). It’s weird to think you remember something more clearly after almost 20 years have passed (between the Good Book Hunting post and this, gentle reader, not sixth grade and now, which is about twenty and a half years, give or take). I doubt my own memory on many things, and wonder if I’m retconning my initial reading of When Worlds Collide. Regardless, it has been a long time since I read the first book.

Fortunately, though, the first chapter is a brief recap: Astronomers discover a pair of runaway extrasolar planets that are hurtling into our solar system. The larger of the two will likely smash into the Earth; the smaller of the two looks like it might be habitable, and it looks as though Sol will capture this planet into an elliptical orbit ranging from just outside Venus’s orbit to just inside Mars’s orbit. So a group of scientists decide to build a couple of space ships to try to reach the second planet and save some bit of humanity. But they encountered challenges, including those not selected to escape storming their compound in Michigan, before they were able to lift off successfully in two ships. The recap kind of fleshed out what I’d remembered. Which was planets colliding and some scientists getting their rockets off.

So this book handles what happens next. The smaller of the two ships lands successfully and scouts for a place to build their homes that will weather the long and harsh winter (and the long and harsh summer). They discover the roads of a civilization on the planet from the time before it went extra solar; that the tailies have also crashed onto the island (sorry, that’s Lost which came later) the other ship from their group crashed elsewhere, and that the Nazis landed on the moon first (sorry, that’s Rocket Ship Galileo which came out later) a Russian/Asian communist rocket reached the planet first, and they’re months ahead in learning how to use the perfectly preserved machines in the domed cities of the missing aliens, and they’re using the technology to conquer the new world.

So most of the book kind of sets this up in an kinda talky way. It has a lot of action, but it has long sets where people tell other people what they’ve done and a lot of musing on the enormity of what happened–and not in a particularly individual or character-building way. And as we came closer to the end, I wondered if it was setting things up for a third book, where the protagonists would tackle the commies over a longer timeline and maybe unravel further mysteries of the human-like aliens who populated the planet so long ago, but, no. The commies cut the power to the city that the protagonists hold, so a small group hides their plan to infiltrate a third city to use its service conduits to infiltrate the enemy city. But they don’t report in. And, finally, and awfully quickly in the narrative, a pretty woman steals a car from the protagonists’ city, runs to the antagonists’ city, ingratiates herself to the bad guy leader, kills him in his bath, disables his minions, and allows the English survivors of another rocket’s crash to rise up and liberate the city/planet. And finis! But that resolution comes out of nowhere in the course of a couple of pages–I have to wonder if the authors were running out of runway in the magazine space they had left–this book was originally serialized, apparently–so they just wrapped it up in a hurry. And rather unsatisfyingly. No wonder it takes me several decades years between them. It is not a series, though–just the two books. So I don’t have another one to look forward to in 2064.

A couple things, though: One, notice the copyright dates above. This book first came out as a book in 1934, and it was still in print forty years later. That’s not a bad run, ainna? I cannot imagine much written now that will be in print in 2064.

Second, the book proved that I’m reading my library in the proper order. Page 107:

Eve disappeared into the darkness which was all but complete. In the north, toward Bronson Beta’s pole, hung a faint aurora, and above it shone some stars; but most of the sky was obscured. There was no moon, of course. Strange, still, to expect the moon–a moon now gone with “yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.”

That’s from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám which I just read, and I was pleased to recognize it. Of course, the book’s characters casually alluded to and quoted Shakespeare and Kipling. A testament probably to the benefits of a turn-of-the-20th-century British education, and it’s rare to find that sort of thing and references to God in anything past the middle of the 20th century.

Oh, and a note about the 1973 paperback. The print is tiny, and the pages’ luminosity has faded. It was reading tiny black marks on a beige or darker background. I contemplated cheaters, gentle reader, but they didn’t help a whole lot. Perhaps this will get me out of my habit of reading paperbacks and into hardbacks. Maybe large print books at that.