Category: Books

You know, once might have been enough.

Fresh from reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales, I jumped right into this book by another American author to see if my thesis that I could read American vernacular with more pleasure than the British was true. Apparently, it’s not unflinchingly true, as Hawthorne’s stories are more allegorical, high-faluting, and educational rather than enjoyable.

I read it slowly. At the beginning, I thought the style was overwhelming. Then, I amused myself in snickering at double entendres that would have made Hawthorne blush if he’d known how they’d sound to 21st century ears, such as the first paragraph of “The Maypole of Merry Mount“:

BRIGHT WERE the days at Merry Mount, when the Maypole was the banner staff of that gay colony! They who reared it, should their banner be triumphant, were to pour sunshine over New England’s rugged hills, and scatter flower seeds throughout the soil. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire. Midsummer eve had come, bringing deep verdure to the forest, and roses in her lap, of a more vivid hue than the tender buds of Spring. But May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all the year round at Merry Mount, sporting with the Summer months, and revelling with Autumn, and basking in the glow of Winter’s fireside. Through a world of toil and care she flitted with a dreamlike smile, and came hither to find a home among the lightsome hearts of Merry Mount.

However, I eventually got acclimated to the book and got more into the tales, but they’re not really the sorts of things one reads for pleasure unless one gets pleasure out of saying, “I read Twice-Told Tales by Hawthorne for fun.”

So I guess I got some secondary pleasure out of it.

Less fun than the aforementioned Irving though, and only a bit more enjoyable than the Stallone but at greater investment.

This is a Fawcett reprint of the original book, so you’ll have to forgive the back cover’s references to patterns of violence and evil lurking beneath the surface. Instead of a crime novel, this book depicts a decadent family in a milltown in New York that has a week wherein their lives break out of the rut into which they’d fallen. It’s a character study of each and the events that change them.

The patriarch, 50 something Ben, runs the mill he and the others inherited, but his progenitors allowed it to run down, so he’s barely holding it together. A major financier comes along to buy the mill, and Ben has to determine what’s best for the family.

Ben’s son Brock has been expelled from school after falling in with a bad woman and stealing from another student to support her. He has to deal with his father’s sanction, but he meets another girl who draws his attention.

Ben’s daughter Ellen is dating an older boy and hangs with some older kids, college students now, but she thinks that they’ve changed or she has.

Ben’s half-brother Quinn, a vice president at the mill, is intimidated by his robust and energetic wife. He doesn’t work for his salary and keeps a woman on the side.

Ben’s half-sister Alice married a construction man and deals with frigidity.

The construction man used to build good homes, but now speculates with his construction, cutting corners and using cheap materials.

The youngest brother of the family marries a strong woman in Mexico City, where both work for the State Department, and they return.

Over the course of the week, Alice has a sexual awakening of sorts, which causes the construction man to reevaluate his life and goals and stop doing shoddy work. Ellen’s boyfriend stumbles through a rape attempt, and she grows up. Ben tells off Quinn, who must be the evil guy as he engages in the pattern of violence–beating his girlfriend to death (he thinks) and then killing himself. Brock regains his father’s trust as he helps the patriarch with the crises. And Ben decides not to sell, even though it might drive him to an early coronary, because he likes keeping the mill–and the family–together ultimately.

A decent character piece, a bit awash in characters though, more like MacDonald’s business books than his crime fiction. But a good read nevertheless.

After almost winning an Academy Award for writing (Rocky, which ties Stallone with the number of almost Oscars as Roger L. Simon and puts him only one ahead of me), Stallone unleashed this book in bookstores before turning it into a film starring Stallone. Unlike Rocky, which dealt with boxing, this book deals with wrestling. And it’s set in the 40s, not the present day (then), so it’s completely different.

It’s wooden, it’s written pretty specifically in scenes for a movie, and it uses concrete poetry style arrangements of words to make points. But ultimately it didn’t suck as bad as some novels movies are based on or some novelizations of movies.

Plus, I get to say I read Stallone’s novel. It’s mixed in with Austen, Dickens, and Hardy this year, but jeez, any kid in college reads those. I alone read Stallone.

I passed up a couple of copies of this at the St. Charles Book Fair because I knew I had a copy of it at home. The copy I have is an ex-library copy, so because I wasn’t that attentive, I passed up a chance to upgrade. One of these days, I should really add my to-read shelves to my database and run a comprehensive report before I go so I know what to look for and what to buy. But that’s more organized than I pretend to be.

This book is a 1974 87th precinct book, which means you’ll not find it as easily in the wild (St. Charles Book Fair notwithstanding) as you’ll find the 80s-00s books, so I’m glad I got it regardless of the edition. One finds that McBain’s quality remained pretty steady throughout his career.

This book deals with an arson fire that destroys a shipment of toys, putting a company’s owner in a bind. Investigating leads the 87th Squad to find some dubious investment schemes and a series of related murders that indicate something more than toy selling was going on.

It’s a good book, and it’s dated a bit. I mean, pushers want bread, dig? But still a worthy read.

You know, Garfield gets all the attention these days, but back in the old days, Heathcliff was the cat. Of course, his cartoon was a single panel, not a strip, so his humor had to get to the point, and it did. Instead of lazy, Heathcliff was a helion. Instead of liking lasagna, he eats the remnants from trash cans. In other words, he’s a scrapper where Garfield is a dilettante. No wonder I liked Heathcliff more when I was younger. Also, the daily we got had Heathcliff, but not Garfield, which could explain it. Heathcliff even had a cartoon before Garfield did.

This book collects a number of strips, mostly around the motif of Heathcliff’s love for Sonja. Given that, though, the book really identifies how Geo Gately used a limited number of ideas for a lot of cartoons. Another cat looks at Sonja, and Heathcliff does something to him; Heathcliff steals the fish; Sonja’s woman owner asks the man why he doesn’t do for her what Heathcliff does for Sonja; and so on. I hope that over the run of the series, the cartoonist spread these repeated bits out a little more than you can within a book limited by this theme.

Ultimately, I guess this might explain why Garfield would ultimately eclipse Heathcliff.

And although there’s no Heathcliff without Heathcliff blog (unlike Garfield, there is the Heathcliff Explained blog which echoes sentiments expressed above with some profanity and daily cartoons.

Can’t anyone else in the 21st century just enjoy the cartoons, or just look at them?

I picked this book up a couple years ago at Hooked on Books in Springfield for 33 cents. It’s taken me until this month to get to it simply because the title was so, well, bland.

The book centers on Ned Allen, a regional sales director for a computer magazine who finds out he’s in a jam. Seems a major client has decided to pull a promised insert at the time the magazine is being acquired by a German publishing company. The Germans are going to replace the magazine’s publisher with the regional sales director, effectively putting him in the position of climbing over his mentor to the big time. However, things go awry very quickly when Ned twists an arm to save his job, but effectively loses it and finds he’s made enemies that will keep him from working in his field and maybe even New York again.

The book sort of struck me as a fun mash-up between And Then We Came To The End and Lloyd, What Happened? for their high-flying corporate business ways and Vienna Days for its compelling central character who, through weakness, tends to make poor decisions and is perplexed a bit by the consequences.

However, about 2/3 of the way into the book, one screw too many turned, I thought, and then suddenly the book departed into a crime-suspense novel with a murder, blackmail, and a resolution out of a Spenser novel, where Ned Allen talks down the big bad level boss and makes a free-wheeling deal to extricate himself and others from danger while giving a bad man his comeuppance. The character’s name could even have been Tony Marcus, for crying out loud, or that guy in LA.

The book, then, really seems like two different books stitched together a bit unsuccessfully. A pity, really. I still rather enjoyed it, but my praise is not unqualified.

I’ll probably keep my eyes out for another Douglas Kennedy book, though. What the heck, I’ve given David Morrell (of First Blood infamy) another shot.

This is a collection of fantastic stories for children, which explains why not many brown people were oppressed in the book, although the book does include the word nigger in it. I’m sure one could go in depth to find language structure and plot points to identify how Kipling wanted to use this book to indoctrinate the young in old England to believe in their cultural superiority and need to overrun the heathens. I think many have.

However, it’s probably best just to enjoy these stories for what they are and for the language within them.

Please note that this children’s book represents the 49th book I’ve read this year. I don’t count the board books, but things over 100 pages, especially Rudyard Kipling, count in my annual reckoning.

As you know, I’m a fan of Lupica’s fiction (Wild Pitch, Bump and Run, Too Far, and Full Court Press), and I’ve even read some of his nonfiction Mad As Hell). So of course I was very, very happy to find this book earlier this year.

It’s a sequel to Bump and Run. Unfortunately, it’s also mostly a repeat of that book. Jack Malloy, having secured ownership of the New York Hawks NFL team, dissipates a bit and sells half of his share. He has seller’s remorse and tries to get it back, particularly after the paper billionaire who bought it begins edging him out of the life he loved. Before dissipation.

The characters are fun, the plot moves quickly, and it’s not a bad read at all; however, it does seem to be a simple recasting of the original novel. I’d hoped for a little more.

As you might now, if you’re Gimlet, Gimlet’s mom, or Deb (that is, someone who reads my book reports), I’m trying to intersperse some classical literature within my normal reading diet of cartoon books, space operas, and crime fiction these days. Here’s the first American author I’ve read in some time, dabbling in the French (Hugo and Dumas), Russian (Tolstoy), and British (Austen and Dickens) literatures lately. And you know what? Oddly enough, writers who use the American idiom, even the American Idiom of 200 years ago, are more accessible to the modern American reader (or at least me) than the imports.

This book collects a number of short stories from Washington Irving, the first American-born novelist to get note (or so the insert tells me). He wrote a number of tales in a series of volumes, many of which focused on the regular American theme of the old rural ways versus the new urban ways (rural=better). The theme goes back 200 years, back to a concept urban that we would find rural and quaint today. I can surmise where Irving would stand on the direct election of Presidents/elimination of the electoral college issue.

The volume includes The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, the two tales most alluded to or made into cartoons. Additionally, it contains a number of other stories from the same volume, so they have the similar tall tale sort of flavor to them (the volume is based on the premise that it’s a collection of papers and true stories from Diedrich Knickerbocker). This book also contains a selection from the Tales of a Nervous Gentleman series, including a series of ghostly stories told by a group of hunters in a remote lodge where each tale follows the other in telling as the speakers riff off of each others’ stories.

Very enjoyable, and it makes me want to get the originals from which the stories appeared. Also telling: the number of Yahoo! IM statuses I got from turns of phrase in the book. I think it was 3. Three lines I quoted from the book. Far more than I get from most of the volumes of poetry I get, and far beyond what I get from space operas or crime fiction (that is, more than nothing). I guess that’s what makes this literature classic.

Here’s a crazy sort of sidelight into my mind: I’m sort of a fan of looking over house plans. Back in the days when I was working at a startup, spending half my day working like crazy to build an award-winning set of manuals for a software product nobody eventually bought, I spent the other half of my days spending my stock option millions. I looked at a number of Web sites offering the plans for sale and dreamt.

I mean, I bought a number of magazines and whatnot containing them and had a good run of selling them on eBay around the turn of the century, so I ended up with a bunch of them in my unsold inventory. I even bought a cheap piece of home designing software to play with in my spare hours in the old days where I didn’t think I had any time for spare hobbies, way back before I knew what that meant. So I sort of sometimes dabble in this as an interest. Dreaming still of that stock market wealth, I suppose. I’ll have some when National Lampoon stock goes to $400 after a couple of splits.

This volume I bought at a garage sale sometime in the past. And I perused it while watching a number of baseball games. If you’re not familiar with the genre, it’s a bit of marketing text along with a bare home layout schematic coupled with some measurements (sometimes) and the way to order the actual plans from the stock architectural firm if you’re interested in actually building the home. Each page also includes an artist representation of the home and sometimes a photo of a built unit.

That said, slight hobbying aside, it took me a while to get through it because each page is almost the same, and many of the homes have very similar layouts when the architectural firm starts with a template and rearranges the interior a bit. So I got bored every couple dozen homes or so, particularly when I was reading all the marketing fluff bullet points. I started skimming a little faster, though, and I got through it.

In case you’re wondering, the elements I like most in the plans and that I’d like to see in my future dream home include:

• An atrium/courtyard.
• An octagonal shaped house.
• A tuck under two car garage with basement workspace.
• A loft.

I mean, sure, I could just buy this house when I buy the lottery, but the original on the site was far larger and I have seen a map of its lands at the time of its construction, including orchards, toboggan run, tennis courts, and whatnot, so its pale comparison to its former splendor would break my heart daily. Maybe.