Musings from Brian J. Noggle

When I bought this book in Baraboo, Wisconsin, I thought it was a local history book. That’s not exactly what it is. It first tries to determine where the name Baraboo comes from, from the word for catfish, beautiful sandbar, or a vine.

The book eventually settles upon the theory that the river took its name from a French Canadian trader, François Barbeau, who set up a trading post on a bluff on the river. He traces Barbeau back to his youth and then to his military service at Fort Michilimackinac, from whence he received a commission to conduct the trading expedition to southwest Wisconsin (which, of course, was not yet Wisconsin).

The book weaves a lot of history from the colonial period into a narrative of traveling by canoe from the junction of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan across lakes and rivers to a trading post where they collected furs all winter and then returned when the ice broke up in spring. You get sidebars about equipment, lots of discussion of the native tribes in the area, and whatnot.

It’s a pretty good, relatively short (180 pages) narrative from a long stretch of time that gets pretty short shrift in history books and classes. I enjoyed it a bunch.

If I had read it immediately, I could have visited Fort Michilimackinac when I was in Michigan last year. Ah, well. Maybe next time.

It’s the strangest thing: I could have sworn that I just read the first collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, recently. But a quick search of this blog and the spreadsheet I use to track my accumulated reading since 2009 indicates I have not apparently read that collection in the last sixteen years. I even looked at my recently read bookshelves to see if I had missed it in my electronic tracking, and I had not. My book database software indicates that I have two (!) editions of the first collection, including one by Reader’s Digest that I remember so clearly.

So I don’t know why I thought I’d read it recently. Perhaps because I just read The Man Who Knew Too Much last year. Maybe I’ve even got another copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes floating around that I’ve seen recently on my to-read shelves.

Regardless.

This book tells the story of the reanimation of Sherlock Holmes by the Romulans (sorry, wrong book) a collection of stories about Sherlock Holmes set in the 1890s after he makes known to Watson that he did not actually die in “The Final Problem” but faked his death so he could hunt for those who wanted him dead. The book includes 13 stories that vary in tone and resolution; they’re pleasant enough to read, but too many of them in a row became a little tedious for me.

From a historical perspective, although we think of Sherlock Holmes as gaslight era, the last of the Holmes yarns appeared in print after the first Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot books appeared. The latter seem so modern and the former so old-timey. Partly that is because the last of the Holmes stories were a bit of an anachronism when they appeared, and Christie wrote of the modern world with cars, telephones, radios, and in her later works more modern technology yet. It highlights, though, the vast changes that occurred in England and in the world between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1920s. Of course, if you’ve watched Downton Abbey, you’d be aware of this as well.

In “The Six Napoleons”, part of the investigation deals with Italian immigrants, and one of them is suspected of being Mafia. So Sherlock Holmes is a forerunner of Mack Bolan. Face it, we’re one encounter with a young man named Broz from Sherlock Holmes touching all the greatest 20th century detective/heroes.

I marked a couple of other things:

• In “The Three Students”, Holmes come to Watson while he’s making his toilet. I once wondered where I learned the term. I’m still thinking it was Ellery Queen.
• The first paragraph of the Afterward says:
  

  Sherlock Holmes lives in our imagination in the pantheon of immortal literary heroes, right alongside King Arthur, Robin Hood, and the Count of Monte Cristo.

  A book I picked up as I avoid finishing The Count of Monte Cristo calls me out.

At any rate, an enjoyable read, but probably best read a story or two at a time.

My beautiful wife eats self-help, goal-setting, accomplishment-preceding books like this up. Me, I tend to prefer my self-help books to be written by philosophers and Buddhists rather than itinerant life coaches. I mean, when you go to the local weekly entrepreneur’s event, it’s chock full of these peppy people who want to build business empires on the weight of their optimistic messages. And yet, as I have bookshelves chock full of unread books about everything except chemistry, apparently, I have many titles like this lingering about, so I might as well read one from time to time.

So, this book is not about starting projects/dreams/goals, it’s about finishing them, and it identifies very early perfectionism as the villain that keeps one from finishing one’s goals. It does lay out some pretty good points about how trying to be perfect often causes one to stumble or quit something the first time one encounters something, an obstacle or lapse, that destroys a dream of perfect resolution to one’s goals or projects.

But it carries on the conceit a little to far and applies the term perfectionism to other obstacles where it doesn’t really seem to be the operative problem, such as bad personal habits. It turns what was a valid insight into a schtick to tie the book together in ways it didn’t need.

Still, I got a little out of the book and flagged a couple of bits.

One is a section entitled How to Read One Hundred Books A Year. Oh, I know how to do that: lots of picture books. Although this author says comic books are allowed; once I hit that passage, I put the book down and picked up a comic book.

Second, he refers to Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame. Personally, I think of him as of The Andromeda Strain fame because I read that book in middle school, before Jurassic Park came out. The author is talking about how the television show ER came out, so he’s might be more informed on Crichton from his works made into films and television shows (although The Andromeda Strain was adopted for the big screen and, much later, television).

Also, he mentions several times that you should start a blog (party like it’s 2005). Strangely enough, that’s the same advice I got from a business coach from the local entrepreneur event: start a blog and go viral. Welp, I’ve started, what, eight blogs in he last 20 years (this one, QA Hates You, Pop-Up Mocker, Draft Matt Blunt 2008, The Beading Will Continue, Found Bookmarks, The Weakened Gardener, and probably others I’ve forgotten, and I contributed to 24th State for a while). To be honest, they didn’t do much for me. Even with a sixteen year presence here, I don’t get that much traffic, and it hasn’t helped me push enough books to cover the cost of publication (a professionally designed cover on John Donnelly’s Gold and a fifty-freebie-book publicity push put me in the hole quite in the hole on that one). So, yeah, I suppose it could help in some regards, but going viral is not in the cards for a lot of people, so social media engagement might just be busy work on your way to a goal.

At any rate, this is why I don’t read too many go-get-’em books: They don’t fit my personality type, and they really don’t compel me to change my personality type.

Your mileage may vary.

(For related musings from me, see For Me, The Hardest Part Is Not Starting from 2012.)

This book, the cover informs you, is by the author of Fletch. And it shares the title with the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines film from the middle 1980s. However, this book is not the source for the film. It’s from 1964 and is Mcdonald’s first book; it would be about ten years until Mcdonald started the series that would make him known and about twenty years until the movie Fletch, based on that series, led someone to print his first novel with a tout that this is the guy who wrote Fletch (the book).

At any rate: It’s a simple enough story, sort of. A cold, detached college student watches his roommate and longtime friend commit suicide in their apartment and, only after it’s done, calls campus police. When asked about it, the college student, Tom Betancourt, says his roommate Casey was free. He quits school before they can expel him and goes home to his high class family, such as it is–a father who is never there, traveling on business most of the time, and a needy mother with a longtime affair. Betancourt doesn’t know anything about Casey’s family, as his roommate never talked much about them in their years rooming together at boarding school and college, but Betancourt knows Casey has a sister, and Betancourt hopes to meet her.

So he goes to their summer home community and takes a job at the yacht club under an assumed name. He meets and falls for the girl and meets her parents who are also quite rich but are dysfunctional in their own way, especially after the death of the son. As they fall deeper in love, Betancourt knows he must tell her the truth, and he does, with tragic consequences clumsily foreshadowed earlier in the book.

The narrative punches quite a bit above the plot’s weight, as we’re carried along, trying to figure out something about this main character. He somewhere on the spectrum between Howard Roark of The Fountainhead and Meursault of The Stranger. He’s handsome so that all the girls throw themselves at him, not that he cares, and he’s hyper-competent, but more detached and less driven than the Rand hero. The book hints at things, such as how his childhood might have made him hold everything at arm’s length. The book also hints that the roommate might have killed himself because of an unrequited homosexual attraction to the main character as the main character sort of considers the possibility. But these questions remain unresolved at the end, which is rather abrupt (but not unforeseen, as the foreshadowing was not subtle).

It reminded me a little of Robert B. Parker’s Love and Glory as both feature young men falling in love at college in the olden days, and something of the narrative style, but they’re really not that much alike.

So I was hoping for better as the narrative pulled me along, and the more I think about it, the less I actually liked the book. That’s what pretty good writing in service of a plot lacking will do.

But I liked the Fletch and Flynn books I read in high school (and reread much later).

Well, this book reverts to the mean of Bolan book quality after War Born.

In it, Bolan is told to go to Sudan to rescue some journalists being held by a Libyan puppet government only recently installed via coup. Bolan accompanies a retired general who is going to be an unofficial liason with pro-American rebels seeking to depose the current government. When presented with evidence of a Libyan-sponsored chemical weapons program, Bolan decides to destroy the program and coordinates the rebels’ attack on the existing government in the process.

I mean, it’s got some twisty plot stuff, but it’s handled less than adeptly. The retired general character is just an appendage, a savior in a couple of situations and a wounded person Bolan has to take care of in others. Bolan and the general are inserted by air drop, but the amount of equipment that Bolan comes out with (two different crossbows? Really?) makes one wonder if he has a Bag of Holding. I can’t help wonder if the book was influenced by Ikari Warriors as Bolan hops into a number of piece of Soviet equipment, including an armored human resources carrier and a tank, and operates them immediately.

The book did not encourage me to immediately read another in the series, but it wasn’t bad enough to make me swear them off forever (which is a good thing, as I still have 32 ever-thickening titles in the Executioner series alone remaining on my bookshelves).