Good Book Hunting: April 26, 2008

Today, we hit a couple of garage sales nearby. We did not come home empty-handed.

More garage sale books
Click for full size

I got:

  • 9 volumes (of 11, apparently) of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series of historical novels. I don’t think I’ve heard of them. However, they were fifty cents each, and if I like them, I have a lot of them. If I don’t, well, I hope my heirs like them or get similar value for them.
  • A thin reference volume on using perennials in landscaping.
  • A collection of Pogo cartoons that I can read while watching a baseball game.

Additionally, I bought a CD of hits of the 70s and SimCopter.

And a really nice Renoir print; I spotted it even though the signature was covered by the matting of the print. It was marked $4, but the garage sale proprietor and owner of a Lustron house offered to give it to me for $3, even after I had $4 out. I like when negotiations go like that. My beautiful wife didn’t like the frame, but we found another of the same size that she liked at another sale. Providence, I tell you.

So that’s 11 books for me, total, which is more than I’ve read this week, so I better get onto a couple more quick browsing books.

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Book Report: Solved! Famous Mystery Writers on Classic True-Crime Cases selected by Richard Glyn Jones (1987)

Now, this is an idea book (unlike this). This volume collects 11 essays about real criminal cases, written by famous (or semi-famous, or at least published) authors of suspense or crime fiction. Most of the cases were sensational in the day, but time and probably O.J. have erased them from our minds. As such, they’re worth a bit of exploration from decades later and retelling. The book also includes a science fantasy story by Harlan Ellison about Jack the Ripper, which is out of place.

A pretty enjoyable read, although as one Amazon reviewer notes, some things go on too long, including a recap of the Snyder-Gray trial in 1927 and Erle Stanley Gardner’s explication of Argosy magazine’s “The Court of Last Resort” series. But still worth the time, I’d say, especially if you can score a copy cheap, such as one cent plus fifteen dollars shipping and handling through the convenient link below.

Books mentioned in this review:


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Book Report: Michelangelo: His Life and Works by Donatello de Ninno (?)

I grabbed this book because I owned it and because I’ve gotten into the new good habit of looking at these browseable books while I’m watching a baseball game instead of leafing through a magazine or trying to get into something of my denser, deeper reading between pitches.

This book, apparently dating from the 1960s (it’s not dated inside, but Amazon or its users says 1969), so who am I to argue? It looks to be a companion to a museum exhibit or two. It contains a brief (30-40 pages of text?) biographical sketch of Michelangelo and images of his work. It explores his movement in Renaissance Italy and the trends in his work. Interesting stuff, particularly since I was not that familiar with his time period or whatnot.

Coupled with my other recent read of Renaissance Italy (John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy), I’m getting more familiar with this pivotal period in history and whatnot. Interesting bonus factoid/intersection: Less than 100 years after Hawkwood was chief of Florentine defenses, Michelangelo took at turn at the walls, literally, as he was the Governor General of fortifications and lent himself to constructing the walls and whatnot.

Interesting, and something one can browse during a televised baseball game. Culture and Cardinals baseball are going to be the hallmarks of my summer.

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Book Report: The Top 10 of Everything 2008 by Russell Ash (2007)

I received this book as a Christmas gift. It provided a couple hours of browsing while watching baseball, as it’s that sort of book: a number of Top 10 lists about various and sundry subject grouped into categories like music and sports and leisure. Definitely a coffeetable/browsing sort of book, as there’s not much text besides the lists, the sources, and the occasional tidbit.

The first chapters on science and nature didn’t really hook me, as I really have little interest in the top animals by size or the most common or uncommon elements. Once we moved into to the entertainment sections, though, I could get through more of them in a sitting.

Probably not worth the amount it’s going for on Amazon, but it was a gift. If you’re looking for lists, you’re probably better off with The Book of Lists series, which offers more interesting lists with better commentary/detail on the list items.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: Strange But True: Mysterious and Bizarre People by Thomas Slemen (1998)

I hoped the book would be a good idea book for historical essays. However, the “But True” part was overstated. Maybe it would be a good book for fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy, ideas instead.

I guess I should have guessed by page 43, in a piece about Springheeled Jack, where the sentence “But one theory that does fit the facts is the alien hypothesis.” appears. Prior to that, we’ve got some interesting historical anecdotes which might provide fodder for historical research and some “Hmmmmm” essays, but this piece on the English folklore tips the author’s hand: he’s ready to accept the Fortean and the Fate magazinean as “true”.

Well, that’s not what I was looking for in this book. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve read many of the anthologies of the mysteries of the unexplained (Reader’s Digest, of course), but I was hoping for something more, um, proveable from this book. Not (from p311-312, in the chapter “The Green Children” which doesn’t provide much more data than the Reader’s Digest book and lacks the black and white reimaginative photo) “The only credible explanations seem to point to extraterrestrial life or a parallel world.” Not (from p370, the chapter “Doppelgangers”, which comes after the chapter “Vampires” and the chapter about the intelligent life on the moon) “Until scientists can open their minds to the reality of the doppelganger, societies will continue to live in fear of this phenomenon.”

Some of the things prove interesting food for thought and speculation (Was Edgar Allan Poe a murderer? Who was Prester John? What about that song by Reszo Seress?), but ultimately I was a tad disappointed that the material skewed speculative fiction instead of speculative historical fact.

I don’t know how much more I can explain that. I did, however, read the book. Whether fiction comes of it or not remains to be seen.

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Good Book Hunting: April 19, 2008

After yesterday’s book fairs, today we stuck to yard sales around Old Trees. It was a grey, rainy day, so many of the yard sales in the paper were rolled up before we arrived. Others had wet stock, which sucks for books. However, one in the area had an indoor room with books going at 2 bags for $1. It was an enclosed porch, not laid out for good book browsing, and one fat guy spent twenty minutes in the middle of the spread blocking everyone else’s access while he filled two dry cleaner sized bags so he could get just the books he wanted for only $1. One other fellow had his bag break while he waited, so he stomped out in disgust.

We waited patiently, though, even dissuading the toddler from taking a piece of trim with exposed nails to the prominent, semi-bared backside of the fat man. We managed patience, though, for a handful of books we stuffed into a bag. They charged us a whole dollar for it, too, but we just wanted to get out of the sale without inflicting casualties.

Sometimes, an experience like that sets a poor tone for the day, and this seemed to prove true today. Not a lot of fun to be had, but some books to acquire. These:

Rainy yard sale day results
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  • Three Nights in August, a recent book about the St. Louis Cardinals. Did I mention I’m watching baseball this year?
  • Inventing for Fun and Profit. Hey, I have a couple ideas I might want to patent one of these days. Why not get inspired?
  • The Mousetrap and Other Plays by Agatha Christie.
  • The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. Sure, I already have it, but I’m programmed to buy Chandlers that I find in the wild. Plus, I haven’t read it for maybe almost a decade now. I should read it again.
  • A collection of mysteries. I bought it because it was a Walter J. Black edition. I’m pathetic.
  • Modern Electronics. Given the typeface, perhaps I can use it to learn about TRS 80s and calculators powered by nine volt batteries.
  • Making Decisions Ethically. I’ve tried everything else. Maybe this methodology will lead to wealth and fame.
  • Mysteries of Mankind; since it’s a National Geographic book, maybe it will be a more serious idea book than a Reader’s Digest book with a similar name.
  • Cabinetmaking, an honest-to-goodness textbook about making cabinets. Because I was thinking of making one for my bathroom. I’ll probably only put in shelves, but in case I get really serious, I have this.

Additionally, I bought a Dwight Yoakum CD and an Andrews Sisters audiocassette. The boy and the wife got a couple things, too, but I retain my title of champion accumulator.

Total books acquired: 9. Total spent: Under $10.

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Good Book Hunting: April 18, 2008

Uh oh, it’s the annual Kirkwood Friends of the Library Book Fair. I hit the Automated Teller Machine Machine, entered my Personal Identification Number Number, and got out a pile of money, and oddly enough, it was just enough:

Kirkwood Book Fair 2008 results
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That’s $85 in books and $8 in audiocassettes; I bought most of the books, and my beautiful wife bought most of the cassettes, although our son apparently picked up two cassettes of his own while mommy was browsing and we bought them instead of wasting the time to put them back.

I got:

  • A handout from a program in 1984 where local citizens put on a walking tour of their homes on a street that the county wanted to widen. 24 years later, the road is still only two lanes, but the county is chomping at the bit still to improve it. Recently, stop lights appeared on a cross street and last year, paint markings appeared showing where the current right of way extends so they can chop turn lanes out of people’s yards. Remember, when you fight city hall, you’re only fighting a holding action. Bureaugnarok is still coming.
  • Democracy in America by de Tocqueville. Because I want to read about what that was.
  • A couple of literary magazines from the late 1970s with Lyn Lifshin poetry in them. Because my wife collects them, so must I.
  • An autobiography of Bob Gibson, because I’m watching a lot of baseball this year. And because they lowered the mound because of him.
  • A book by the recently deceased Clarissa Start, a resident of this municipality for a while and the author of its official history and a former columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This will be the third book of hers I’ve read and the second I own.
  • St. Louis 365, a trivia bit about St. Louis.
  • Inter Ice Age 4, a science fiction bit. A collection, I think.
  • Myst: The Book of Ti’ana, because I’m suddenly into books from video games, I think (see below). The pages are special paper with a background design in them. I think that will annoy me when I start reading it.
  • Cell, the latest novel from Stephen King.
  • 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. Completes my collection. For some reason, I left behind the hardback copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. What kind of collector am I?
  • Lipstick Jungle by the woman who wrote Sex and the City. To get in touch with my feminine and kinda slutty side.
  • Lovelock, an Orson Scott Card title. Because the other bloggers say he’s good, I’ve accumulated a couple. However, I haven’t delved into one yet because some bloggers encourage you to read Greg Bear, too.
  • Alfred Hitchcock Presents a Month of Mystery because sometimes these collections hit the spot.
  • The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy. Earlier this year, I picked up a book club edition of this title; this is a fourth printing (not book club). I’m getting closer to the first printing, werd.
  • Children of the End by Orson Scott Card. See above.
  • Why Orwell Matters. I would have bought it on the title alone, but it’s Christopher Hitchens. Back in the last decade, I read No One Left To Lie To and I think it was okay, but this decade and the Internet have been good to him and my appreciation of him.
  • Burnt Sienna by David Morrell. Bloody heck, aren’t two books (First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II) enough from this author this year? Maybe not.
  • The Dark Tower V-VII by Stephen King. I read the first three when they came out. I guess I’ll have to pick up IV somewhere and probably re-read the first three if I’m to make a real run of it. However, I don’t think I really liked how III went, but it’s been a long time.
  • Titan AE; I thought the book Forge of God reminded me of the trailer for the movie. I’ll have to see how the book compares to the trailer, since I’ve not seen the movie. I’ll probably like it better than Forge of God regardless.
  • Cyrus the Great, a mass market paperback history of Cyrus of Persia. It might make me a better Civ IV player.
  • The Age of Reason, a novel by Sartre. The book fair also had a copy of Nausea; the former is hard enough to find, and I’d never seen the former. But I own it now! It should brighten a day for me.
  • Why Things Are by Joel A. I used to read his bits on WashingtonPost.com.
  • A Catskill Eagle by Robert B. Parker. A first printing; I’ll have to see what my existing printing is.
  • The Mahdi by A.J. Quinnell. I own Man on Fire (because it’s the novel upon which a movie is based, natch). In case I like it, I now own another book by the author. As you can see, at the Kirkwood Book Fair, it doesn’t take much of a rationalization for me to buy a book.
  • The Case for Mars, a book arguing for space exploration and colonization. What’s not to like about that?
  • One More Time, another collection by Mike Royko.
  • Love, Poverty, and War, another Hitchens title that promises to cover three of my favorite things. Hopefully, there’s a sequel about guns, famine, and software quality assurance.
  • Pearl by Tabitha King. I don’t remember seeing a book by Mrs. King before.
  • Nobody Safe by Richard Steinberg. The title looked cool, the inside of the flap looked cool. How rarely I buy books based simply on that.
  • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens in the Reader’s Digest edition (unabridged). Whereas if you order it from Reader’s Digest, it’s $30 by the time it’s all said and done. Here at the Kirkwood Book Fair, random pricing for these editions was in effect. This book was $4.50 (probably because it’s so thick) and the other titles in the series were $2-3.
  • The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving in Reader’s Digest edition.
  • The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens in the Reader’s Digest edition.
  • Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Reader’s Digest edition.

Whew, that’s quite a bit. Fortunately, our circumstances allowed us to go on a Friday. We spent a bit more than an hour before our toddler alarm went off, but that’s about as many books as I could carry anyhow.

Fortunately, though, there was a smaller book fair that evening at church, so I got a chance to spend the last of the hundred bucks I’d gotten at the ATM machine after entering my PIN number and whatnot. A smaller haul, to be sure:

Friday night results
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I got:

  • Rebel Moon, another science fiction novel based on a video game.
  • Barbarians at the Gate about the takeover of RJR Nabisco in 1988.
  • Family Rooms, Dens, & Studios, a Sunset book. I think I might already have this one, actually, but its list price was fifty cents, so I had to get it just in case.

The boys made out like bandits, though.

Fortunately, the ATM machine was still there on Saturday morning for our weekend (proper) book hunting.

Total books acquired: 37 (and 2 literary magazines). Total spent (for family): $103.

Even more fortunately, these dangerous book fairs only come once a year, and only 3 or 4 are that tempting.

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Book Report: Case of the Horrified Heirs by Erle Stanley Gardner (1964)

This is a short Perry Mason book (171 pages, but the short chapters make it seem like less). When a woman is framed for carrying narcotics, Perry Mason proves her innocence, but it turns out that the charge was part of a greater plot to discredit her as a witness for a will of a wealthy woman. When the wealthy woman’s recent bouts of stomach illness prove to be arsenic exposure, Mason semi-investigates but has to find out the real story when his client is charged with her murder.

It’s a Perry Mason novel. Quick, pulpy, and not dated much. I cannot get enough of them, and someday I hope to own the complete set in Walter Black editions.

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Book Report: The Running Man by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachmann) (1982)

I have the movie tie-in edition for this book, so it has Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover and movie photos inside. The novel, however, is not the movie. As I do a number of these books upon which movies were based, I’m discovering vast differences in the books, and at least between this one and First Blood, I’m ultimately disappointed in the book.

In this book, Richards is married and has a kid and he goes to the network to participate in the Running Man game show to get some money to support them. Instead of a confined area with comic book villains, the contestant tries to hide out in the open United States with law enforcement trying to find him and citizens looking for him for bonus money. I don’t think that would have been good movie material, so I can see why the movie changed it a bit.

Still, I enjoyed it a bit until we came to a sudden absurdity and the final climax which was ultimately dissatisfying. We end up with the offer from the movie, where Richards can be one of the network people, but ultimately he exacts suicidal revenge upon the network.

It’s definitely not a Stephen King book, so you should expect a different writing style. It’s not bad for a pulp paperback, but a little unsatisfying, as I mentioned. I liked the movie better. Of course, I was kind of hot for Maria Conchita Alonso, so that last goes without saying.

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Book Report: Man O’ War by William Shatner (1996)

Well, this book certainly wasn’t steeped in the hard science fiction that is hard to read, nor the bureacratic science caper that would thrill readers of Bob Woodward’s books about the presidencies, although it does feint in this direction by making the main character an ambassador and a diplomatic negotiator who’s made governor of Mars in a tough spot. After establishing the colonies off world, Earth has become dependent upon them for food and for resources. A strike and violence threaten that, so as punishment for siding against a career politician in adjucating a corpor/national plot to annex part of Australia, the negotiator finds himself sent to Mars not only to solve the problem, but to find out who wants him dead enough to invade his home and kill some of his employees and his dog.

It could have been boring, I suppose, but it’s space opera. The bureaucrat picks up a gun and investigates, gets into scrapes on the fourth planet, and ultimately comes to a successful resolution. The ending is very abrupt, though, and it’s clear that either Shat or his ghostwriter had watched Total Recall, but it’s a fun enough book with semi-Libertarian demirants against The Man.

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Book Report: The Dead Zone by Stephen King (1979)

Well, that’s interesting. Given how this book ends, they must have done a Morrell on the story to get a whole television series out of it.

If you’re not aware of the plot, it involves a psychic from Maine and a politician from New Hampshire who might become President with disastrous results. Actually, it’s more of a character study of the psychic from Maine who awakens from a coma with the ability to recognize the future and the present and the past from a touch of a person or an object. He solves a serial killer case and then encounters the politician, but given that the main story bit comes late into the book, the ending ultimately seems a little rushed and the story goes from the first person limited omniscient narrator to a series of letters and then back to action. That cheapens it a bit.

The book runs only 350 or so pages, which is very short compared to King’s later work. Later works which sometimes seem to drag, but are not often rushed.

The book also contains a number of noteworth allusions: One to Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct stories, where Cotton Hawes has his white streak of hair from a knifing; one to the novel Carrie, written by King himself; and unfortunately, one to the Dirty Harry movies, but Harry’s gun is misidentified as a .357 Magnum. Very contemporaneous to the time in which the book appeared.

A pretty good book in King’s line.

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Book Report: Mad As Hell by Mike Lupica (1996)

I love Mike Lupica’s fiction, and this is the first of his nonfiction I’ve tried. Its subtitle is “How Sports Got Away From The Fans And How We Get It Back”. I read it over the course of two nights, and each was different.

I read the most of the book on the first night, and I almost felt like I’d been plagiarizing Lupica’s points about sports since he wrote it in the middle 1990s, and I hadn’t cared enough to make points until after 1999 or so. Still, he lays into the owners who don’t understand the sport, city “leaders” that give rich owners what ever they want just to attract/retain a sports team for the prestige it gives the city and themselves, the players who are out for themselves at the expense of the sport and the fans, and the fawning media that offers little but rah-rah coverage and machismo posturing from its jock-wannabes sports reporters. So I was really into the book.

On the second night, I got further into it and into some solutions. First, though, we have the problem of all the white people in attendance at the sporting events when most of the athletes are black and Hispanic. All righty then, I thought we’d covered that with the expensive nature of sporting events, but Lupica needed another chapter, so he introduces with a Bryant Gumbel bit about showboating as cultural and then goes into some sort of racial overtones of his own. And then he offers as a megasolution a consumers’ watchdog group for sports fans headed by Ralph Nader (this, remember, is when he was a semi-obscure consumer advocate before he became a semi-obscure presidential election spoiler).

Ultimately, the book is a bit repetitive at the end and really seems to want some sort of macro-level top-down solutions to the crisis in sporting, but ultimately I think that the problems inherent in the sports world are reflections of the diminishing class in the country at large. So having a special commission or board of fan poobahs along for rules changes or whatnot would really only give a set of corruptive influence to another set out people who would ultimately lack class and would act in their interest as board members instead of fans.

So my enjoyment of the book is not unqualified, but since I agree with many of the viewpoints, I appreciated seeing them represented in print by someone I enjoy reading.

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Book Report: Journey to Cubeville by Scott Adams (1998)

In the midst of reading a Jane Austen novel triggering an Anna Karenina moment, I read this collection of Dilbert cartoons from a decade ago. Dilbert’s comedy level is pretty good and pretty consistent, and fortunately the corporate world has continued to live down to the comic strip’s estimation.

What more insight into it do you want? It’s Dilbert, for crying out loud.

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Good Book Hunting: April 5, 2008

So this weekend marked the first really dangerous book fair of the season: The St. John’s United Church of Christ book fair. We went to this one last year, so I knew what to expect: I picked up a box right when I went through the door instead of pretending I was only going to buy one or two things and then picking up a box after I accumulated a dozen books.

In the end, I needed two boxes for my books, not including the books for the other residents here. The stacks:


St. John's 2008 offerings to the Noggle Library
Click for full size

To sum up my acquisitions:

  • 19 volumes of the Time-Life Books series The Great Ages of Man. Okay, it’s apparently 18 volumes (1 duplicate) from the (I know see) 21 volume set. Still, a nice primer on some history stuff. Good idea books, I hope. As I get older, I’m acquiring more and more of these sets so that I or my children will have them to kind of page through in a way you really can’t with Wikipedia.
  • A couple Dell Shannon mysteries. He wrote mysteries in the 1960s where the crimes are all fairly minor. They’re police procedurals, and sort of pastoral police procedurals now.
  • A couple of Mike Shayne paperbacks. Good, short pulp bits that I cut my teeth on when I was a lad.
  • The April Robin Murders, a paperback co-written by Ed McBain?
  • Take the Money and Die, a paperback mystery I bought simply because it was that close to the others I picked up. Seriously. Collateral collectage.
  • No Witnesses by Ridley Pearson, a writer from the next suburb whose work I have yet to read. I own one of his books in Swedish, so it’s nice to have something by him that I can read.
  • A stack of gardening books because I’ve planted some things. Most of them are small, brochurish things from the 1940s and 1950s.
  • Coping in the 80s because I want to see how I managed.
  • Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries.
  • A biography of Robert Burns because I don’t already have one.
  • Dickens’s Hard Times and Steinbeck’s Cannery Row to pile onto my classical material.
  • A couple of Rod McKuen books, Lonesome Cities and And to Each Season, so I can screw up the next childright from birth, too.
  • On Flirtation, a psych book about flirting.
  • A book by Bob Hope from the 1960s. You know, I’ve not read any book by him. He can’t be worse than Sinbad or Judy Tenuta.
  • The Giant Book of Insults because I have a long list of people to insult.
  • Literary St. Louis: A Guide. Ironic, isn’t it, that I’m actively catching up to William Gass (I hope) with one of his books?
  • Godless by Ann Coulter. It’s worth a buck, and she’s not getting any portion of it.
  • Gravity by Tess Gerritsen. At the checkout, my wife said she already owned a copy. However, she is not me. Now I own a copy and will read it, eventually.
  • The World of George Orwell, a picture and sort of bio of Eric Blair. Because (say it with me), I didn’t own one already.

I also got two videocassettes, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion and Pink Floyd at Pompeii. They were $2.00 each; had I known that, I would not have gotten the first. Had I seen it before I bought it, I wouldn’t have spent another dollar on it.

Total spent: $61.75. Total books for me: 48. Total for household: 61.

Looks like I’m going to have to forgo some heavy reading for a bit to clear some of the backlog.

And the Old Trees and Kirkwood library friends, not to mention the Carondolet Y book fair, are still to come this year.

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Book Report: Rambo: First Blood Part II by David Morrell (1985)

As you might remember, I just read First Blood recently and liked the first part of it, but didn’t like the ending. I’d bought this book, but later bought that book and read it first so I could follow the story. Not that “the kid” from First Blood, who died at the end, and a character played by Sylvester Stallone would have much in common. This book follows the movie from First Blood.

Well, what can I say? It expands a bit on the movie, giving some interior world to the stock characters from the movie, but it also sexualizes the violence a bit, and Morrell must have worked from an incomplete script, because it doesn’t follow the movie exactly. Still, it was 250 pages, and I read it in 3 hours, so it’s not as though I spent weeks on it. It was a good break between outings in pre-Victorian English novels.

The author’s forward provided a bit of a bright spot. In it, the author said, “Yeah, he died in the first book. But here’s where you can buy the cool knife, bow, and arrows from the movie!” Also, another amusing bit occurred when I read about Rambo gearing up for his insertion into Vietnam. I misread a passage, and snorted. “He’s putting .45 rounds into an AK-47,” I told my beautiful wife. “Everyone knows AK-47s take 7.62mm rounds.” “How do you know,” she asked, almost like she challenged me when I mocked Spare Change. I mean, I’m a man, aren’t I?

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Book Hunting: March 29, 2008

I wouldn’t call it good book hunting. It was nominally the first garage sale weekend, so we hit a couple advertised in the Old Trees local papers. Unfortunately, a couple weeks ago when the people decided to throw their sales, it was 70 degrees on the weekend. Yesterday morning, it was 38 with a wind. So not many people were out, and nobody was happy about it.

Here’s our take:


March 29 book
Click for full size

I got:

  • Space Wars Worlds and Weapons, a book of space weapons art from 1979. No doubt designed to tap into Star Wars‘s new popularity.
  • THX 1138, George Lucas dystopian first film on videocassette.
  • Two Garth Brooks CDs, Garth Brooks and The Chase.
  • The soundtrack for Dazed and Confused. Soundtracks for period nostalgia movies are better for collecting a number of period hits at cheap prices at garage sales. They’re often better than hit compilations, since so many hit compilations get “hits” you’ve never heard of because they’re cheaper than real hits. The movie guys, though, they spent the money and got the A-list stuff.
  • Adore by Blind Melon because I have only heard one Blind Melon song, and $1 for the whole album is cheap.

The son(s) got a stack of Dr. Seuss big boy books. My beautiful wife came away empty, figuratively of course because she’s literally quite full these days.

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Book Report: Mischief by Ed McBain (1993)

Even after reading McBain for 20 years, I’m always amazed that I come across books that I don’t seem to have read. Granted, he wrote them over the course of 50 years, sometimes more than one a year. If I tried to read all of them and all of the Evan Hunter books and Smoke books and whatnot, it would take a whole year. Of course, given how many there are, I might have forgotten this one and only think this is the first time I read it.

This is a Deaf Man book, so the cops of the 87th Precinct dial up the dumb. They find the Deaf Man’s clues inscrutable until such time as it’s too late for them to stop the plan. I knew from the first clue what he was talking about, and I don’t live in Isola. But the cops who normally act rationally get a whiff of the Deaf Man, and they live down to his characterization.

Also, this book has a lot of unrelated subplots. The best of his books have a main crime and a subplot with some character soap opera within them. This book includes the Deaf Man’s plot, a murder mystery, an abandoned elderly case, Eileen Burke’s dealing with her transition to the hostage negotiating team, and Kling dealing with the breakup with Burke and meeting Sharyn Cooke. That’s a pile of stuff packed into one limited space, padding the book out to 350 pages and sort of scattering attention.

Don’t get me wrong; the writing is still excellent, but the potency is diminished.

I will probably read this book again; either I’ll pick it up at a book fair for a buck and forget about reading it now, or I will actually collect all of them and read them all in chronological order for fun.

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Book Report: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1996)

Wow, this book has something for everyone. Girls making connections in period costume for the women, and the 36-year-old man ends up with a firebrand 19-year-old hottie (played in the movie, apparently, by Kate Winslet) for the 36-year-old men.

This book is Jane Austen circa 1811, the language is more elaborate than one gets into with modern books, so it takes a bit of patience to read compared to pulp fiction. However, it’s not a hard, inscrutable language; just something that requires attention.

The book outlines a period in the late teens (marrying and matchmaking age, natch) for two lower upper class sisters: Elinor, the older, who is very sense-oriented, that is, she is proper and full of etiquette and the stoicism required of a lady, and Marianne, who is sensible–that is, captive of the senses. Or maybe I’ve got that backwards. However, they move in their circles and fall into and out of what passes for love in that class-conscious society.

The ending sort of bothered me; a bit contrived, and even the villains live happily ever after. I’d prefer a bit of comeuppance to them, maybe not a truly Dickensian bad ending, but at least some psychic misery. Austen is too polite even for that.

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Book Report: First Blood by David Morrell (1972)

I bought this book recently because I already had Rambo: First Blood Part II, the novelization of the movie, and thought I should read them in order. Also, it was cheap. I knew the book differed from the film (mostly in that Rambo lives for a sequel in the movie). So I picked it up as an intermission from a longer piece of classical literature that I’m only half way through.

At the onset, I loved the book. Morrell creates the situation and makes both Rambo and Teasle, the police chief who runs him out of town a couple times without true rancor and with only a dash of Respect My Authoritah! Ergo, the confrontation takes on the dimensions of a natural disaster, albeit one at which one simultaneously wants Rambo to get away (even though he snapped and killed a cop) and wants Teasle to capture him.

Unfortunately, about halfway through, the book stalls. Suddenly, Rambo turns back to slaughter more of the cops. Then the injuries start to accumulate, and both Teasle and Rambo get 18/00 constitutions and great feats of holding their poor bodies to keep in the novel. Yes, I know you cannot get 18/00 constitutions (or you couldn’t in Second Edition rules, which is when I quit shelling out money for D&D), but Morrell invents it for the book. The climax carries on for 50 pages or so, dabbles in mysticism and the hunter and the hunted, whichever the order is, and then ends poorly.

I’ll have to take another look at the film to see which I prefer; however, although I leaned toward the book at the beginning, I’ll probably end up preferring the movie.

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