Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book is a ninety year old children’s book, written when children’s books were not 300+ page fantasies part of a series for adults to read. As such, it’s a couple pages over one hundred and is, the title page informs us, designed to make children interested in history. As opposed to fantasy, magic, dystopia, and intrigue, which is what we’re teaching them now, I guess.

At any rate, this follows two young Norseboys, Leif Ericson and Thorkel. Leif has come to live with Thorkel and his family, including father Lodin and wife Astrid. The chapters of the book recapture some of the slices of life in Norway around 1000 AD: Lodin comes home from raiding England; they drive the cattle down from the mountains for the winter; they prepare for and endure winter; they prepare the cattle to go to the mountains in the spring; they attend a Thing, which is a court proceeding adjudicating a dispute among neighbors and then a duel when one party does not concede. Then, the boys go their separate ways: Leif to Greenland where his father lives and then onto the Americas briefly and Thorken as part of a war between his half-brother, who becomes king of Norway, and an alliance of other nations against him.

The book has no larger plot other than these guys growing up and becoming men. It illustrates the way the Vikings lived from the perspective of young men whom the target audience could relate to. And it leaves the reader a little smarter than when he started, even if it’s only to remind an adult of things he’d learned about the Vikings in school but didn’t have at the tip of his brain.

This 1924 book was published by the World Book Company. Later, that company would be better known for its encyclopedias.

It’s a handsome looking hardback, too. Which is a shame, though, because I’ll probably start collecting other volumes in the series in my nonchalant collecting fashion, and it’s hard for me to keep track of all things I’m nonchalantly collecting.

Books mentioned in this review:

Since I’m apparently on an Existentialism kick (see my recent report on Camus’s The Fall. I picked up this book. I’ve read No Exit before, whether in my collegiate Existentialist reading period or my collegiate Existentialism class. I had not read the three others, though.

For those of you who don’t know, The Fall is about three people in Hell. Each of them is condemned for sins related to love, and their torment is to spend eternity with people who irritate them. It’s the source for the quote “Hell is–other people.” that American collegiate Existentialists banter amongst themselves.

The Flies is a retelling of the story of Orestes and Electra’s revenge upon their mother Clytemnestra for the killing of their father Agamemnon. In this retelling, the Orestes returns to Argos just before they ‘celebrate’ a holiday when the dead come back to remind the living of their crimes and slights against the departed. Orestes meets a disguised Zeus and then his sister, who has long hoped for her brother’s bloody return. When they meet, she does not think he’ll be the one to wreak vengeance, but he does and she has second thoughts. He kills his mother and stepfather, and the siblings hide out from the vengeance-seeking populace and Furies in Apollo’s temple, where Zeus appears to deal with them and to get them to return to his fold and to rule the people by casting off their freedom and doing his plan.

In Dirty Hands, a comrade imprisoned for killing the leader of a rival faction returns to his revolutionary compatriots to their chagrin, as he has proven to be unreliable. An old flame or crush of his secures his temporary safety while she tries to understand what went on with the assassination attempt and whether the fellow killed the charismatic and pragmatic leader for proper party reasons or in jealousy.

The Respectful Prostitute tells a short tale about a prostitute fresh in town who was the witness of the killing of a black man on a train by an respected citizen of the town and the member of a powerful family. The official story is supposed to involve the attempted rape of the young lady by two black men and her defense by the racist fellow, but she does not initially want to hew to that line and tries to resist various forms of persuasion to keep her story true.

They’re all pretty quick reads; the translations aren’t dated. Sartre’s work really draws out some of the Existentialist thoughts on freedom and what it means to be a person, and Sartre really subtlely leaves some questions for us to wonder about–particularly whether the wife of the main character in Dirty Hands got herself into a compromising position with the political figure to trigger her husband’s jealousy and compel him to complete his mission. Pretty good stuff, and reading it makes me feel deep.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book looks enough like something that Henry Beard would write that I thought maybe they were the same guy (until I looked at a Henry Beard book and saw his name was Henry and not Alan). I thought maybe they were related. It appears not. They’re only in the same vein of humor.

This book presents a series of Twitter messages–tweets– that historical figures might have sent. It’s akin to a number of lists you’ve already read on the Internet.

So it’s quick and it’s clever in places, but there’s nothing especially revelatory about history, nor does the humor last with you after you turn the page.

But it counts as a book I read this year, so there.

Worth a buck at a book fair, but please don’t give me the 2015 desk calendar for Christmas.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up this book, and I was all like, “Shazam, how different are these titles in the same series?” For lo, although the book started out with a bit of gratuitous hey, sailor contact for grandfathers everywhere, the paragraphs were longer, deeper, and richer than I could have expected. But then I realized I’d confused this, a volume in the Longarm series, with the entry in the Gunsmith series that I’d read earlier. And they’re night and day.

In this book, Longarm is a Federal marshal sent from his normal Colorado range to Laredo, Texas, to investigate a fellow Federal marshal who might have gone bad and might be helping crooked local authorities in smuggling operations. So Longarm picks up an unlucky gambler traveling partner and heads down to pose as a merchant who can happen to come across a large number of Federal weapons to sell.

As I mentioned, the book is deeper and richer in prose and its set pieces take a little work. It’s got some, er, amorous scenes, but it’s also got its limits in that area; there are apparently some women the main character won’t touch. Additionally, the book reads like a Western with its painting of frontier towns and–who would think it?– concerns about horses and transporting horses.

So I liked it as a lighter read, and its linear story telling allowed me to put it down and not have to go back to see if I’d forgotten a three page jump cut scene with important information that I’d read and forgotten the night before.

So as I get older, I’m finding myself looking forward to good genre fiction and classic literature for pleasure reading than modern thrillers and detective novels. Fortunately for me, there is plenty of both on my to-read shelves. Also, should I want to get into this series, it’s apparently still in production 20 years after the release of this book, the 174th in the series. It’s up to 436 novels done or in planning, 30 Giant novels, and 4 Double novels (according to Fantastic Fiction). So I’ll keep my eyes open for these titles at the book sales in Ozark and in Clever. And someday I’ll gut out others I own in the Gunsmith series. When I need penance for something.

Books mentioned in this review:

I picked up this book because it was sure to be more weighty than the other things I’ve been reading recently, and so it was.

The book is a short novel told in flashback by a reliable narrator. The first person narrator is a former Parisian lawyer who now haunts a bar called Mexico City in the red light district of Amsterdam. The narrator talks to a new visitor to the bar and, over the course of a number of nights and trips around Amsterdam, tells his story: He was a successful, had many mistresses, was respected, and demonstrated philanthropy until a single event called him to question himself, at which time he no longer felt the success he wanted to be and tried to show he was. He eventually ends up in this bar, telling his stories to try to knock other successful people off of their game as well.

Of course, the story told in flashback by an unreliable narrator makes it easy to dismiss his stories, but the book does illustrate a certain tension between a Dale Carnegie outlook and that of the Existentialist. That is, a Dale Carnegie self builds itself into greatness and might find happiness by striving to be better and experiencing setbacks, whereas the Existentialist might be going along all right until something triggers the Existentialism, the sense that the creation of the self is hypocrisy. I’m being a bit twee here, but I’m identifying two types of self-conscious personality types, people who think about who they want to be and either try to be it or do not. Of course, another personality type that is not so self-conscious exists and just does what it does, whether it’s Randian Triumph or Moochery or just people who go through their lives doing their things. Maybe I’m philosophizing a little glibly here and broadly talking about types of people who do not exist.

At any rate, it does show the defeatist Existential response to resistance in self-definition. Given the nature of the narrator, it’s not a ringing endorsement of this point of view, but it’s not an indictment of it, either. More of a description.

One can’t help compare this book to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea; in that book, a historian eventually has his Existentialist trigger moment, but it’s just thought-based, whereas in The Fall, it is the narrator’s reaction to an event (or events) that triggers his pessimism. Ergo, it’s a much more approachable and true-to-life book. Of course, it’s been twenty years since I read Nausea, so I might be describing my experienced flavor of it instead of the book itself, so your mileage may vary.

At any rate, it’s a short little novel, as the Existentialists were wont, and it does give one some things to think about regarding consciousness, our self-images, and their relationships to the world. Which is never a bad thing, unless one goes the full Existentialist and starts feeling the need to compliment Sartre.

Books mentioned in this review:

With this book, I decide I don’t like Ace Atkins’ books very much.

This is one in his Nick Travers line of books. Travers is a former New Orleans Saints linebacker who becomes a college professor, one who teaches only a class or two and spends most of his time researching blues music and interviewing old blues musicians. And doing favors for friends, favors of an investigative nature. Also, he becomes a bar owner during the course of the book and begins rehabbing/resuscitating his favorite blues bar. Also, he’s seeing a woman in Mississippi, but he spends a lot of time in New Orleans away from her, especially while on this case.

A fellow former football player, now a rap record mogul, turns to Nick when the new fifteen-year-old sensation is ripped off and when the rap mogul needs to come up with a large amount of cash to satisfy a loan from another rap mogul. So Travers looks into it amidst the other series business.

This book include the flaws I didn’t care for in The Lost Ones and Cheap Shot. Chief amongst them is how much of the book is spent on the series business and not on the efforts of Travers to solve the problem at hand. He gets a dog. He meets with his girlfriend, but she does not serve as a philosophical foil a la Spenser’s Susan Silverman. He kind of tries to mentor the fifteen-year-old by taking him to a friend’s farm, where he’s expected to do manual work to find himself (compare to Robert B. Parker’s Early Autumn). He gets ownership of a bar and works on it with friends; its opening serves as the triumphant end book. Most of these things do not apply to the actual plot of the book.

A good book, and a good series book, works the plot first and then a little bit of series growth and movement as the plot unfolds. In this book and others in Atkins ones I have read recently, the overarching movement of the series occurs at the same time and independently of the actual individual book’s plot. I’m not sure you even saw that in the late Parker as starkly as you see it here. Perhaps it’s the 21st century way–I don’t read that many modern series, as you know.

Also, this book offers three points of view: The first person of Nick Travers; a third person limited omniscient focus on one of the bad guys in scenes to show us how bad he is; and the first person of the fifteen-year-old. The perspective of the fifteen-year-old and all the scenes there only give us the flavor of his perspective and don’t advance the plot. The third person of the bad guy only serves to show us how bad he is. Well, okay, they show a little of relationships that prove important to the plot, but the scenes aren’t really necessary to show the relationships. They don’t even really humanize the bad guy or add depth to him; they just illustrate he’s a bad guy. And he’s just a level boss, not the big bad guy..

I’m not sure whether these extra scenes and extra points-of-view merely padd the book up to hardback size or if they’re intended as what my fiction professor told our workshop were nice little moments. But they slow the book down quite a bit.

Additionally, the book is built out of short chapters jumping around amongst the points of view and into and out of the plot. This doesn’t suit my current reading style, which is just a brief twenty or thirty minute session at night before bed. I found myself having to re-read preceding chapters to ensure that I hadn’t forgotten something out of left field that I’d read the night before. With a more linear book, I can recap by simply finding my place in the book.

At any rate, I only picked this book up because I dropped by the library when I was going to have an hour available for reading and nothing to read on hand. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a short history summary book and ended up with this book. Next time, I will try harder. Or make sure I’ve got a paperback in reach at all times.

Books mentioned in this review: