Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book marks a momentous event: I have read all of the books that I bought at Calvin’s Books in May. I jokingly said I would probably not read those five books that day. And then I set as a personal goal to do just that. And now I have.

This book looks to be almost an employee or management handbook for Herschend Enterprises, which started with Silver Dollar City west of Branson and now includes a number of theme parks around the country (and the Harlem Globetrotters). The book talks about working and acting with a servant’s heart (although it does not use those terms). It has a couple of corporatey bits in the intro and the conclusion, but most of the book is short chapters of anecdotes where employees or co-workers at Herschend properties went the extra mile to help sick or down-on-their luck customers or co-workers.

I liked reading the book, and I’m thinking about recommending it to my beautiful wife. She likes reading good leadership books, but perhaps this one isn’t so much in that particular vein.

You know, one might be cynical and think this book is just lip service to an ideal and a way to get the company employees to behave this way for better customer service, but sometimes, I’m not cynical, and I think the book is sincere. Even if it’s not, at least the corporate masters recognize an ideal outside of the short-term materialism of the corporation. But I think it’s pretty sincere.

This is the second monograph or collection of photography I’ve reviewed this football season, and strangely enough, neither of them really during a football game. As it happens, one of our floor lamps died this year, and I moved the one I used when watching football to the more important location by the reading chairs. So I ended up with a couple monographs out on the sofa-side table, but not enough light to really look at them. So I reviewed this book whilst in my reading chair.

It’s a collection of photos of various places in Missouri taken over the course of a year or so by a professional landscape photographer from the west coast. He groups the photos in chapters based on a photography conceit such as Color, Form, Moment, Place, Microcosm, and Light.

The photos are landscapes, but some of them are very narrow in focus (with a whole chapter on Microcosm). I don’t like the photographs of a single leaf on a lichen-covered rock nor collections of lily pads on a pond as they’re just exercises of technique in service of showing us a technique or a texture, not in showing us a scene. Or maybe I’m just flogging my new dichotomy. Sometimes, though, the different textures work together in a single scene that is a scene, though, so the photographer has some definite talent.

Still, a pleasant enough browse. It contains images of Elephant Rocks and Johnson’s Shut Ins on the eastern side of the state. When I was growing up back there, I remember the other kids in school talking about going to those places on the weekend like it was nothing. Do you know where we went on the weekends when I was growing up? No where. Well, no where like that.

So I’ve gone through two of these books already, and I have yet to watch a complete football game. I shall have to visit the book sale on half price day to resupply my monographs and photography collections in early October for sure.

Well, it’s football season again, so I will finally get a chance to review some of the artists’ monographs that I got last May (and I can go nuts since the next Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale comes in October).

This book is a collection of line drawings and paintings as the title says. The artist’s subject matter are still lifes of a sort–she has three self portraits and another painting with human figures in them, but there are also, what, landscapes that look like a picture taken out of a house window or images of rooms, wallpapers, and window interiors without anyone in them.

The technical skill is great–some of them are nearly photographic in quality. Definitely interesting things to look at and a great combination of textures and techniques.

The afternoon that I began to browse this book I went to an open house at a gallery here in town that featured an artist who practices a more modern approach to art. Some of it was figurative, but it was all pretty flat. Some of it was just textures and strokes on the canvas. But in any case, it was clear that you were looking ata painting. In this book’s images, you’re looking at something in a picture or a drawing. Have I made this dichotomy between modern and classical art before? It seems like you can apply it to literature, too.

At any rate, a pleasant way to spend an hour or two, and I wouldn’t mind going to see some of her work. According to Wikipedia, you can find it in many collections, although none in particularly close locations. Perhaps I’ll get lucky and the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art will pick something up before I make my way down there.

I bought this book at ABC Books in July, so it was at the top of the stack. I’ve read a couple other martial arts books in the last year (The Martial Artist’s Way, The Zen Way to Martial Arts, Taekwondo Kyorugi, and so on).

The book starts with a bit of history of the ninja in Japan and then tells how the author went to Japan to study with Masaaki Hatsumi, the last ninja grand master (still alive at 87 today). The book then talks about some fighting techniques, describes some weapons of the ninja, and the has a couple of chapters on reconnaissance, espionage, and the spiritual elements of budo. It’s not a long book–150 pages or so–and it has a pseudo-libary binding but no library marks, which makes me think it might be a book aimed at younger audiences.

It’s not so much a how-to book on strikes and whatnot as a summary course. Which is unfortunate. I’m really looking for dirty tricks to pull on the other students at the martial arts school where I train and not so much high-level musing on how to manipulate people using the earth/water/fire/air/void breakdown of the universe.

Full disclosure: I studied at a bujinkan dojo briefly in the middle 1990s, so I would have been indirectly a student of Hatsumi Sensei myself. But not this book’s author.

I bought this book at LibraryCon this year and picked it up first from amongst the gleanings.

I remember noticing that this book, unlike the others at the convention, was hardback with a dust jacket. Most self-published authors go with paperback. When I cracked it open, I discovered that it was actually published by an imprint of Macmillan Publishing. The back flap talking about the author said she was into equality and inclusion in publishing and that she created a #Hashtag, and I thought uh oh. I feared it might be a modern science fiction or fantasy with a message. Fortunately, it is not.

It is a good story. Basically, yes, it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Wonderland. A young woman, grief stricken at the death of her father, is attacked by a fantastic creature and is saved by a man from Wonderland. Not the Executioner’s man from Wonderland; an exiled resident of a fantastic world who bears a dark blade. He teaches her to be a Dreamwalker, a person from our world who goes to Wonderland to kill Nightmares, which are manifestations of human fears that are more frequently plaguing Wonderland. Alice has allies in Wonderland–other Dreamwalkers who guard other places where the two worlds intersect–but they discover a growing danger from a mysterious Black Knight who wants to resurrect the Black Queen to rule Wonderland.

The only quibble I have with the book is that the climactic battle at the end comes up and is dispatched very quickly–which, as you know, gentle reader, is a common complaint I make. The book too clearly leads into the next in the series, which means the end doesn’t really resolve that much in the story arc.

But that’s a minor thing. The story moves along well, and the author not only relies on the Alice in Wonderland story for a jumping-off point, but she also alludes heavily to “The Jabberwocky” as well. And she titles her chapters in addition to giving them numbers–a practice of which I approve.

But I’ll pick up the next in the series when it comes out next month. And I will pick up a copy of both books for my godson for Christmas since he likes fantasy novels. Or so I hope–because every year, he still gets them from me.

If only the author would do a book signing at ABC Books so I could get the books signed.