Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This is the third of these little Salesian Missions booklets I’ve read this year; I read The Way in June and Priceless Gifts in August. Given that I bought another booklet when I got this book and The Way in April 2023, I have at least one more floating around the stacks here in an unread state. They tend to get jammed into narrow slices between larger books only to pop out at strange times, like when I’m not hoping to start a larger book before the Winter Reading Challenge begins on January 2.

So: a booklet small enough to fit into a #10 envelope with poems by Whittier and Whitcomb Riley which won’t help me to keep them straight (although remembering Riley is the Little Orphant Annie and Old School Day Romances guy helps me to remember that Whittier was the more serious of the two). Several poems by Helen Steiner Rice back when she was a going concern (I just read her Wikipedia entry, and an interesting but brief story which is told with greater detail on her Web site–she died in 1981, and she has a Web site, so let that be an indicator of what a big deal she was to some).

At any rate, you could do worse than to read these little booklets with their focus on inspirational messages and mixtures of greeting card scribblers and major poets and to read old Ideals magazines which are mixtures of the same with some grandmothers’ poetry included as well. I recently bought a stack of a major poetry magazine issues from the last year, and I’m telling you that they are, in fact, much worse. So don’t laugh at me for picking some of these up and wondering if I should start actively collecting them (given that they were published many per year for decades, probably not). And enjoying them for the little literary charcuteries that they are. Designed to be disposable but with indispensible literary merit within. What a culture we once were.

I picked up this collection in September at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. It’s a fairly nice little hardback collecting poems and aphorisms grouped by topic (Beauty, Music, Love, Friendship, Brotherhood, Inspiration, Courage, Achievement, Truth, Happiness, Faith, Patriotism). The collection includes a number of poems from classics such as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Pope, and even a poem by Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton (the “It was a dark and stormy night” guy) so on, but also some quotes from other famous leaders and a couple of anecdotes that are a couple paragraphs at length. Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” makes an appearance, as do a couple of poems by the author and an anecdote of visiting the house of a Japanese school employee after a death. Running 87 pages with multiple pieces per page, it’s heavier than a Hallmark book and definitely several nights reading. I found myself reading the name to which each piece was attributed (below the piece) first as I guess I am a snob.

So a nice relatively quick bit of edification, but you know what’s even more interesting? The editor.

He has a Wikipedia page because he was a college football (and baseball and basketball) in the 1920s and 1930s. Just as he was finishing up his doctorate in education (according to his obituary) he was called to run a school for the children of American servicemen during the occupation of Japan. After which he returned, published this book when he was 80, got his doctorate finally at age 84, and passed away in 1987 at 94. The obit indicates he wrote about his experiences in Japan for the equivalent of the dissertation. You know what? I would like to read his biography and/or that work about occupied Japan as much as this book. Ebay has dozens of copies of this book in several editions listed, but nothing else by the author. More the pity.

At any rate, my reading for the year is winding down. Most years about now, I call it early for the year–my reading list generally runs the last week of the year to the last week of the year, and not January 1 to January 1. However, the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge starts on January 2, so I am reluctant to start anything that I won’t finish before then. This is my 95th book this year, but it might not be my last. I guess we will find out in the coming week.

I got this book this summer in an attempt to stuff my stacks with Christmas novels so that I would easily find one, surely, when it came time to read my annual Christmas novel. As it happens, I read three Christmas novels already this year from Karen Kingsbury’s Red Glove series (Gideon’s Gift, Sarah’s Song, and Hannah’s Hope), but they did not impress me nor help my heart grow three sizes, so I grabbed this one as well since it was nearby on the stacks (that being lying atop the ranks of books atop my bookshelves in the office where so many recent acquisitions go until I can fit them onto actual bookshelves). And, you know what? This might be the best modern Christmas novel I’ve read in the thirteen years I’ve made this a personal tradition.

So, the setup: A former war correspondent has been put on the no-fly list for an outburst at an airport. After his retirement of sorts from overseas journalism, he has written feature material for women’s magazines and other pieces like that. He gets a chance to do a story on traveling by train during the Christmas season, which also will allow him to join his casual, on-again/off-again opposite coastal lover for a trip to Lake Tahoe. But their phone conversations indicate something is off–is the wealth voice actress getting tired of him? Coincidentally, the One Who Got Away, a lover who left him some years ago when he would not commit or give up his exciting and dangerous lifestyle, happens to be on the train as the writer for a Hollywood director who is thinking about doing a movie about trains. So will they/won’t they? On the ride along the Capitol Limited and the Southwest Chief, they meet a couple who want to marry on the train as they elope; a retired priest; a former railroad employee who rides the trains because he misses it; and a variety of colorful employees and regular passengers–and, apparently, a thief who steals a single item from every sleeper compartment several times.

I won’t give away the bit of the twist at the end, but it’s a pleasant book, and it has depth and richer writing than I found in most of the other Christmas novels I’ve read. It might be the best of the lot, although Lloyd C. Douglas’s Home for Christmas from 1937 might hold onto the top spot simply because it hits upon the nostalgia notes that so many Christmas songs do from the early part of the 20th century and the transition from rural to urban lifestyles.

Also, the book is a bit of a love letter to Amtrak (along with some asides that the government should fund it more even though rail remains a fairly limited and highly inflexible travel option). I mean, I recognized the names of the longer lines listed (the Capital Limited, the Southwest Chief, and the Texas Eagle). No mention of the Anne Rutledge, which ran from Chicago to Kansas City, the Hiawatha Service (Chicago to Milwaukee) or Empire Builder (Chicago to the northwest), but I traveled back and forth between Missouri and Milwaukee many times during college, so I got to learn all the names. I even rode the Texas Eagle from St. Louis to Chicago early on Sunday mornings on my trips home (the Anne Rutledge was an afternoon train, and I wanted to get back to Milwaukee early in the afternoon since I was taking a city bus home). So the book made me want to take a cross-country trip on a train just to see what it’s like, but it’s unlikely to be as good as it’s presented in this 20-year-old book.

Still, a good read and a good way to wrap up my Christmas novels for the year. It looks like this might be Baldacci’s only departure from thrillers and detective stories into Christmas novels, so I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere for Christmas novels next year. Of course, by this time next year, I will have found and lost again several Christmas novels which I buy to seed the stacks here at Nogglestead so that I can find at least one Christmas novel in December, and I will have bought and lost several others that I buy throughout the year for the purpose. But with enough seeding, I should be able to find something. Although knocking off four of the Christmas books in the stacks doesn’t help the effort.

I picked up this book just this summer at the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale. It’s a chapbook, for which I would have paid a buck at the Friends of the Springfield County Library Book Sale (or got in a bundle for a buck), but as this was the Christian County Library which sells books by the bag, I probably paid a nickel for it. But it’s definitely worth more than that. The book is inscribed to the Christian County Library by the author in 2015, which must be an interesting story as the poet is from the upper penninsula of Michigan and the inscription is dated seven years after the chapbook was published (by a chapbook publisher, perhaps not by the poet herself).

I enjoyed this book more than other collections I have read for two reasons: The poet is someone around my age, reminiscing and navigating relationships in middle age, so it’s not grandmother poetry nor is it instapoetry written by the very young who have not read much actual poetry and cannot dialog with tradition by extending it or defying it. Also, the poet often uses a simple declarative sentence as the first line of the poem, which I’ve been doing a lot with my recent poems. I half-remember an adage that a poem is a descent into hell, and the first line tells you how far you’ll go, but I cannot find it on the Internet. I attributed to Frost, but I cannot confirm that via Internet search.

Thematically, it’s a lot of reminiscing about past relationships but not in the college professor enumerating body count way that you get too often in professional male poets. Also, some reflections and musings on current relationships thrown in. Some depth to many of them, some good line length and rhythm, but a couple are the short line breaks that are self-consciously poems.

So, yeah, a cut above other poetry I’ve read. It flags a little in the middle poems–enough that I thought I might need to read the first poems again to make sure my previous judgment of not bad was still correct, but later poems returned to form. So some filler material, but some good poems within.

Strangely enough, the author only seems to have come out with this single chapbook of poetry (and a collection about Michigan cherries, as the author is from the upper penninsula). Of course, I cannot knock it, as my output aside from twee blog posts and extensive documentation for losing causes has been thin in recent years as well.

Still, this is what I hope for when I pick up a cheap chapbook (redundant, I know): Something that I really enjoy in spots rather than merely read.

Well, after reading the Horatio Alger book, I snatched up this book which was shelved by it on the top of the bookshelves in my office. I bought the books two different times, the Alger in 2021 and this book in 2022, and the books came out fifty to sixty years apart (the Alger mid- to late- 19th century, this book in the height of the Great Depression), but they’re both books for young men with applicable life lessons.

In this book, Jimmy Arch, the young son of a widow, struggles and acts out in school and needs to work to supplement his mother’s income. When his mother dies, the shopkeeper where he works takes him in, and Jimmy helps the store to thrive when he discovers he has pinpoint control pitching baseball from his pastime of throwing bricks at things in the alley outside his meager apartment. The headmaster of the school he attends recognizes Jimmy’s intelligence even though his boredom in school leads him to underachieve and lends him books for self-study. Jimmy watches the construction of a bridge to The City and becomes interested in engineering. As a result, Jimmy gets first a job in the city when an engineer at the big engineering firm that built the bridge tells the boss that the kid can pitch for the company team. Later, Jimmy gets into the big engineering college and almost works himself to death trying to support himself until he is rediscovered as a pitcher who might be able to help the team win against its biggest rival–and get a plum engineering job if he does.

So the book is similar to the Alger novels in Strive and Succeed, but: Jimmy Arch rises not only because he’s good and industrious, but he also has the talent of being a good pitcher. Although this is a talent he develops–and the book does mention how hard he practices–it might be the first step on the slide towards all young adult protagonists being special in a way that the Alger heroes were not.

Still, a quick read and not bad for what it was. The cover looks like it could be a retelling of The Fountainhead, but with engineering and baseball and help from other people (and adult male figures provide guidance for the young man growing up). At no point, though, does Jimmy Arch ever stand on a girder being lifted into place. Maybe someday.

It has been three years since I bought this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale, but it seemed to fit thematically with the audio course The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and re-reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, so I picked this two-book collection from the top right corner of the stacks in my office.

It contains:

• Julius, or the Street Boy Out West (1874), wherein an orphan who lived with a burglar is out on his own after going to the authorities when the burglar and an accomplice plan a burglary at the home of someone who has done Julius a turn. Julius resettles “out West” (in this case, Wisconsin, near “Milwaukie” [sic]) with the help of an aid society in New York (a real concern that Alger promoted in a number of his books), gets an education, earns the trust of the family that accepts him into their home, becomes successful, averts tragedy when the burglar accomplice who has broken out of Sing Sing comes looking for him.
  
   
• The Store Boy, or the Fortunes of Ben Barclay (1887), wherein the son of a widow works in the local grocery store, but the local money man is going to foreclose on her mortgage unless they can come up with the $700 in a couple of months. It seems impossible, but the boy made friends on a buying trip to New York and has a chance to work for a wealthy woman whose distant cousins try to sabotauge the relationship, fearing he will inherit. He gets the drop on them, and a menacing tramp turns into an ally who helps them not only pay the morgage but to put the local money man and his ne’er-do-well son in their place.

So they both tell rags-to-riches story, but in both cases, the urchins have help from people who appreciate that they’re honest and hardworking. So it’s definitely not akin to an Ayn Rand novel where the protagonists succeed despite how much the world is against them. In Alger’s world, bad people do oppose the young heroes, but other good people help them. Which might have represented a shift in the zeitgeist between the mid- to late-ninteenth century to the post-World War I world.

The books also feature a couple of interesting duplicated scenes; in both, the protagonist spots a pickpocket at work, and calling him out leads to a rewarding situation beyond a monetary reward. And in both, the young men are given nice watches. It’s a small sample size from Alger’s work, but one wonders if it’s a common element or if the books just happened to have the repeated scenes which were so similar.

At any rate, the language was approachable–the books were written for young people, after all–back in the time where boys read books and when the heroes of books were like better versions of the readers themselves or certainly encouraging peers. Unlike much of the YA you see talked about these days, where the protagonists are all special or superhuman or who have to deal with dystopias unlike what the readers will encounter (hopefully) or where the protagonists represent something in Proper Contemporary Thought and who have to navigate the patriarchy that wants to keep the faddishly different down.

I flagged something in one of the books, and it’s true of both of them: Alger has a city sense of scale. He talks about something a mile and a half away being distant. He talks about Ben Barclay picking up someone to give her a ride for a half mile. That might seem like a long way off if you’re used to living in the city, but here in the country, a mile off is…. visible. Not that far at all. You can always tell someone lived entirely in cities and maybe visited the country when they talk like that. Although, to be honest, when Thoreau in Walden talks distances, they’re not that great, either, so maybe it’s more of an East Coast/New England thing where the sense of scale is different.

So not as inspirational as the Franklin, but better than what you might get from the 20th century.