Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I kind of thought that I’d bought this book with the collection of books on Korea that I bought in 2014 in Clever, where I speculated that the previous owner might have served in Korea (during the war or after) and returned as a tourist later. But I actually bought this book in in 2024, also in Clever, and notes indicate that a previous owner visited Thailand in 2004; a World War II vet would be getting up to almost eighty, so perhaps not someone who directly served. But most likely someone with an interest in the subject. Which is not to say there are not many; this book is a product for tourists put out by a company in Thailand.

It tells the story of the Western POWs who the Japanese empire made to construct an ill-advised railroad from Thailand to Burma to help the Japanese with their Asian land-based operations after their Pacific naval advance was stopped at the Battle of Midway six months after Pearl Harbor. I mean, I read The Battle Off Midway Island in 2014, but this book (under review) gave a timeline of the Japanese explosion in 1941 and early 1942, when they captured a bunch of southeast Asia and knocked on Australia’s doorstep but their Pacific campaign was basically nullified after the Battle of Midway, so they turned their eyes towards the land mass of Asia and maybe thought about invading India after this rail line was in place. But that was not to pass, happily.

The book details the conditions the prisoners (mostly British and Australian) and Asian slave labor faced–back-breaking work in the heat, working on a rail line that the British and Germans had surveyed decades before but said was too difficult, the deaths, and the constant need to repair problems and handle damage from Allied bombing (and prisoner sabotage) meant that it never performed like the ill-informed Japanese imperial powers thought it would.

So the actual building and destruction did not line up with the film (The Bridge over the River Kwai), but the film stirred interest, I guess.

The text of the book looks to be translated, as it features a number of, erm, ill-developed bits of English, and the typography and layout are a little faulty. It includes a lot of small, ill-reproduced photographs of the era, but dayum, man, they’re photos of the history. Some of the text repeats itself a bunch–the book is “Organized by J.P.”, so maybe it’s sourced from a bunch of pamphlets cut-and-pasted without altering and smoothing the text.

But it’s lightweight and informative for people who did not know about the Asian land front in World War II. Which does not probably align with people going to Thailand to see it. But as a man approaching middle age who is not sure whether he is on team World War II or team Civil War for old man history interests, it’s making its case for Team World War II.

Oh, and as I mentioned when talking about the record with marches that belonged to my grandfather (in 2012, gentle reader; I forgive you if you’ve forgotten), the record includes the whistled march tune from the film. Which I can depict now, although probably not whistle accurately as I am tune-deaf. So I knew kinda about the story, if not the real history (I have not seen the film, but will undoubtedly look for it now).

And I could place when the previous owner visited the site because the book and a paper pamphlet included at no cost to me both say Sept 24 2004 on them. The included paper is not part of the book, and it’s too big for a Found Bookmark post, but I read it as well. It’s entitled “History of the Thailand-Burma Railway”.

But only counted the whole as one book in the annual total. A quick read whilst dodging the quick read in between Shakespeare plays and while I dodge the remainder (most of) That Hideous Strength.

The artist of this book is the son of someone we knew from church in Old Trees, and when their Christmas letter indicated that he’d done a comic book, a book of comic art that is and not a saddle-stitched comic book, I ordered it on the pretense of giving it to my children, and I took possession when I culled my youngest’s bedroom of books and children’s books earlier this year.

This particular volume is mostly comic art; it lists heroes (men and women) of the Bible and has a comic art portrait of them. A few selected heroes have a portion of their stories in a single page of related panels, but mostly it’s portraits.

So, yeah, much like a modern comic book. But it’s a quick palate cleanser after Love’s Labour’s Lost, the most recent Shakespeare play I read (thoughts forthcoming), and A Deadly Shade of Gold.

Now, about the arbitrary rules: I will count it as a book I’ve read this year, and I will put them on the bookshelves instead of comic boxes (unlike the Bongo Simpsons comics, which have a flat spine and more actual content than this book). Why? Because I wanna.

I see Boggs has not only produced more similar (and probably with actual plotting) Biblical comics, a Western-looking comic book, and a book about being a business artist in the AI-world. Ah, gentle reader! If I ever get a job and have disposable income again, I shall consider buying more of his work if I can avoid Amazon.com (I’m back fighting my tweehad against it).

I guess this is a re-read; I did a book report on it not long after I picked it up in Clever in 2012. So I must have re-patriated it to my bookshelves when I culled the youngest’s book shelves earlier this year. Which means I should probably not add it again to my book database program from 2000 when I finish the re-book report.

The cover of the book indicates this collection is not drawn from the daily strip and instead is original material. Man, Dilbert was part of that fin de siècle zeitgeist (he said, mixing two foreign languages to show you how smart he is), ainna? (The south Milwaukee slang killed that vibe, ainna?)

So, basically, it’s Dogbert giving etiquette advice for people who lack it. Each page is four panels dealing with an individual boorish behavior, and the cartoons are grouped thematically. Amusing in (a lot of) spots, and the jokes are of a sort you could make in 1993 that would be problematic in the latter part of the first quarter of the 21st century. As with so many things, Scott Adams, who was on the naughty list for a while and was pop-culturally cancelled for…. Oh, some transgression; aren’t they all the same? And one wonders whether it was because he shifted or because the culture did.

The book is in pretty good shape, which means that my children didn’t sleep with it, so perhaps they, 21st centurians, didn’t get it. The oldest has an office job these days. Perhaps he’s better primed for Dilbert and Office Space than he was when he was six.

I bought this from Hooked on Books in January. I remember when I first shopped at Hooked on Books, nearly thirty years ago, that they had a good selection of John D. MacDonald books, but then they didn’t. Since I had a gift certificate from Christmas, I stopped in and discovered that they once again had a good selection of MacDonald’s books. Perhaps the people who bought them twenty-some years ago are now downsizing or dying, and the same books are coming back in. Maybe I’m thinking too much of estate sales this last, apparently, year.

So: This is a 1960s Travis McGee novel. It originally appeared in paperback and then, a decade later, in this hardback edition when MacDonald books transitioned to the big time. A former friend of McGee, a boat bum who disappeared after walking out on a happy relationship, reappears and want’s McGee’s help in reconnecting with the woman he left behind, and McGee meets him, looking haggard and gaunt from a cross-country drive, at a remote motel where he shows McGee a gold statue and alludes to using it to set himself up. But when McGee returns after contacting the woman who wants to see the love of her life right now, they finds the man dead and the statue gone. So McGee and the woman head to Mexico to the town where the man worked during his missing years and find a despised Cuban exile (remember, gentle reader, that when this book came out, the Castro revolution was only a few years on–hard to fathom, since it’s been in place my whole lifetime, but old books and movies remember). Bloodshed, bombs, and much McGee musing, and he eventually breaks up a Hollywood blackmail ring which also preys on expats from Latin America, and finis!

I mean, it’s a lot more than that–the book is 336 hardback pages, which would have been quite a chonker for the paperback era. It’s full of the McGee-musings that give the books their depth–asides where MacDonald goes off on the modern era, the politicians, the culture, and the loss of the preceding era. You know, when I was in my teens, that sort of zeitgeist–you find it in early Parker, too, the 1970s stuff maybe up until the Hollywood era–the loss of something as subdivisions and development (in Florida or inland Massachussetts) encroaches on the wild spaces, and the politicians make things worse. You know, that probably hit me a little more precisely in that adolescent era where my parents divorced and I was removed to Missouri. Reading it now, it’s okay–I can see that MacDonald was an old-school liberal in his inclinations, a little more against big business corporate politicians and up-with-people in an era where the politics weren’t overt sucker-punches calling one half of the country troglodytes (who probably didn’t read books anyway).

MacDonald also sits in between Chandler and Parker in that the plot is labyrinth and shifts and that the resolution ultimately ends with a truce and understanding between the person who killed the boat bum and McGee because he, McGee, has just gotten tired of all the killing in the book. He’s weary in a way that they didn’t really capture at the end of the 20th century in protagonists, not really. The depth of the asides really layers that on.

So MacDonald is still really, really good, but I’m not so sure how I relate to Travis McGee now that I’m older. I might have transitioned to too old for the real figurative consanguinity. But I’ll think again about raiding Hooked on Books to make sure I have a good and completer set of MacDonald’s work.

Ah, gentle reader, I just bought this book from the author at Rublecon, where “just” in this sentence means July 2024. So I have owned it longer than the Ben Wolf books, and I finished the Ben Wolf accumulated over two different trips to Davenport, Iowa, first. But that might be because of my experiences with other Walker books: Down the Road and Back Again (poems based on the television show The Golden Girls), Loot the Bodies (other poetry), and Hang Me If I Stay, Shoot Me If I Run, a short novel.

So: The plot, such as it is, is that a sick young man is taken from his bed to a place called Everland, run by a Boy-God, who is a dark analogue of Peter Pan. The Boy-God, not named, likes to watch the people in Everland, mostly pirates, fight and die with one another. He especially takes issue with a particular pirate whom he allows to succeed and then wrecks his ship. Inland, we have natives. And, periodically, the denizens of the sea rise and slaughter the people in the seaside town, but as Everland is always summer and the people, aside from the battles, don’t age or die, and they tend to forget the previous Reaping when the sea monsters rise. So the boy, who lands with the Everland equivalent of the Lost Boys but doesn’t completely buy in, the one-eyed pirate, and a native girl who kills a seamonster that killed her father team up to kill the Boy-God.

The actual text of the book runs 134 pages, and then the book is padded with 50 pages of behind-the-scenes things. The author did a Kickstarter before producing this book, and I guess it was originally going to be a comic book series–the book contains panel outlines for several issues, incidents which appear in the book–and which might have worked as one-off stories in a series of comics, but integrated into a “novel,” they are threads that go nowhere. One such story is a pirate who goes overboard and is about to drown, but he’s saved by a seamonster whom he thinks is a beautiful mermaid–and it tells about him meeting the monster’s father, and then…. Well, he is killed. Why bring him into the story? I mean, it’s Stephen Kingesque, but this 130-page book shouldn’t have room for such asides–it just pads out a short novella to a longer novella length. The book has some world building, but its depth is pretty shallow for all that. I mean, we get almost a Space Trilogy sort of cosmology, but it’s never really addressed, and some of the characters are built up and do…. not much.

I mean, the setup and material would have made for a longer book, but it’s really just repurposing some material from a proposed comic book to get it out the door. The author is a better writer than Ben Wolf whose books I’ve just read–but the plot is underdeveloped. The book that comes to mind, though, is A Blade So Black by L. L. McKinney just because hers was a modern fantasy twist on Alice in Wonderland and other works by Lewis Carroll. But, again, that book was fully developed as a novel where this was a little underdone.

Actually, I have the sequels or next book in the series from both these authors–The Lion, the Witch, and the Eye by Walker and A Dream So Dark by McKinney. I actually picked up A Dream So Dark from the bookshelves but decided against it for one of my next reads. Who knows where I’ll go with my twee reading themes–to finish the Walker books I own in case he’s back at Rublecon, or maybe to finish the books my son got me for my birthday. Given that I’ve only got a couple of each, perhaps I’ll complete them all before long. Certainly before the Shakespeare I’m working my way through.

This is the third year running in which I have read the church’s Lenten devotional–in 2024 it was 40 Days of Wisdom, in 2025 it was 40 Days of Discovery. This time, it was 40 Days of Courage.

I mean, it ties in with the sermon series we’ve had this season, but the variety is a little underwhelming. Whereas in years past, we’ve had a lot of contributions from different congregation members, this year the devotional features a higher percentage of pastors, including one who is retired but still preaches in our church on occasion (and whose wife is from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, and who laughs like my aunt up in Hubertus, so if I spend any time around her, I run the risk of backsliding or propersliding into a Wisconsin accent). We also have a contribution from the pastor’s daughter and one from a high school member of the youth group, and a couple from members of the board, etc., but definitely a smaller sampling of voices than my previous experience. Which, I guess, means that I am sorry that my beautiful wife did not contribute three devotions this year.

I mean, otherwise, I don’t have much to say about it. I’ve mentioned that I’m not the target audience for devotionals.

Unlike some comic books, though, I did count this in the annual reading total. These are my arbitrary rules. If you don’t like them, I have others.

As a reminder, gentle reader, I bought this book in Davenport, Iowa, in 2024, and the book shop owner asked me if I knew the author who used to call the bookshop when he was looking for source material. Last year when I went to the same bookshop, different people we behind the counter, so I don’t know if the book shop was still in the same family as it had been. I’ll have to be sure to look for the founder’s portrait behind the desk as an indicator. Not that it would indicate yea or nay, but if it’s not there, that might indicate nay.

The book is a history from the first white settlements in the Quad Cities area. The Sac/Sauk are already there, of course, so some of the earliest history deals with establishing trading posts, the Black Hawk War, and the advantage that a man named Davenport had because he was originally from England and had the accent, and the natives in the area had sided with the British in the wars against the Americans.

Settlements came, settlements expanded, and they formed into the communities that became the cities. Each had a certain amount of its own character determined by the people who settled in each–not only by nationalities, but also trades. Davenport became commercial because the traders founded it, and their impact carried on. Moline, from the French for mill, was (and is) heavily industrial, dominated today by John Deere. The actual Rock Island was taken pretty early by the federal government to be an armory, but the city of Rock Island is on the Illinois bank of the river. The book calls it variously the two cities and the Tri-Cities; the fourth of the Quad, Bettendorf, was founded in the 20th century, so one is forgiven for not remembering which is the fourth (Milan and East Moline were formed earlier, but I guess they’re disqualified because they’re not on the river).

You know, I’ve been to Davenport twice, but I did walk around the downtown area a couple of times, so some of the names are a little familiar to me, and I look forward to maybe sharing some of this knowledge with my beautiful wife should we attend a conference there again. And she will undoubtedly wonder how I know such things. Ah, gentle reader, we know: I do my homework on history for places I visit and places where I live for not only the trivia-sharing, but also because I like to know.