Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I picked up these books in Clever this spring for something to flip through during football games. And so I did.

The first, Bomun Temple in Seoul Korea, is an inexpensive tourist trinket for visitors of a Buddhist temple in Seoul, South Korea. It’s a set of photos with captions bound with string, and it includes errata such as the same page appearing twice. It focuses on the artifacts and architecture of a single temple, so it’s pretty in-depth.

The second, Wonderful Korea, is broader. It’s broken into sections by province or geographic region and has a couple photos of different temples, pagodas, parks, and museums. As such, it focuses on things you can see all over Korea. It’s broken down into districts within Korea and highlights some of the things to visit in those areas. The area around Seoul is heavily represented, and the locations are given a couple of images and sometimes a couple of artifact images, but it is by design not very detailed about any one location. The book also includes a number of maps to help you get around Korea and the districts in each chapter, and amid all of the eastern architecture and art, there are dots on the map for the local YWCA. Which would now be historic, but were then contemporary.

Takeaways from flipping through:

• Historical books from continents other than North and South America really drive home how recent our historical sites are. Whereas your local historical societies run back about a hundred or a hundred and fifty years before getting very swirling-fog-of-prehistory, these books feature temples built while the Roman Empire was a thing that were burned when Charlemagne was important and then rebuilt when Christopher Columbus was considered crazy instead of evil.
   
• Eastern art and architecture aren’t my thing. I’m more into the highly realized works of the European Renaissances and beyond, and Asian art looks a little primitive and playful to me. That’s a taste judgment, ungentle reader, not a moral one. Your kilometerage may vary.

Still, I’m glad to have looked through them. I have a couple more from that score this spring and I’ll keep you apprised as I go through them, but I imagine my reaction will be similar.

Books mentioned in this review:

So close after reading Designation Gold, I picked up this book to really juxtapose and contrast the Marcinko books with more common men’s adventure fiction.

This book finds Barrabas set up and kidnapped in Athens by a former associate who blames Barrabas and the SOBs for a botched operation that left him disfigured. Once he has Barrabas locked in a basement on a Greek island, the man now going by Joshua leaves a trail for the SOBs to follow to lead them to his island–and an ambush.

The book starts out with the operation that went bad and then seemingly tries to play up the mystery of who this “Joshua” is. Perhaps the scene at the beginning was added later. It’s a quick read, of course, and interesting and consumable in that men’s adventure novel way.

Where I dinked the Marcinko and Weisman book about the non-first person narrator characters for seeming like NPCs, this book uses third person, so many of the characters come across that way, too. The good guys and the named bad guys are interchangeable but for a characteristic. O’Toole is the Irish one, Billy Two is the Indian one, Lee is the woman one, and so on. The plot is thinner and more straight forward than the more modern thriller (although there are only eight years that separate these two books, one is patterned on the thriller and one on the adventure novel).

At any rate, they’re different books and they suit different audiences or moods. But I experienced the flavor of each and, as I said, got the contrast acutely.

I’ve got a couple more SOBs books (and keep accumulating men’s adventure novels), and I’ll get to them as the mood strikes. The SOB books aren’t as good as the old Pendleton Executioner books, but they’re not dumpster diving like some of the paperback series are.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book, strangely enough, is the first one I tried to read after I read the purportedly nonfictional Rogue Warrior, and I was immediately bogged down in the very opening of it. So I set it aside and later realized it was not the first of the fiction (Rogue Warrior II: Red Cell was, and I’ve since read that).

However, on my second go-round, I was more into it.

Within the story, Marcinko goes to Russia (ca 1997) to investigate the killing of one of his “shipmates” and his family, including Marcinko’s godson. He finds Russian gangsters, a multinational fixer, and ultimately a plot for the Syrians to build a nuclear weapon for it–or be framed for the effort in order to draw an Israeli strike. Marcinko investigates, does some action stuff, leads some set piece raids, gets thwarted by the brass, overcomes obstacles, meets some kindred spirits, and triumphs.

It’s a decent thriller, thicker than a men’s adventure novel and written with a little more depth. Many of the non-Marcinko characters do come off a bit like non-player characters where they’re only distinguished by their nickname. But the voice of the narrator is distinct and brash and, if you’re in the mood for it, a bit of fun. The definite, conscious asides about exposition, equipment, tactics, or whatever the narrator is going on about now contrasts with Clancy-esque attempts to just fit it into the narrative where it can be tedious and jarring. The voice also contrasts a bit with the first person narrator of the Odd Thomas novels, wherein Odd goes into deep musings of philosophical questions in between action bits. In these books, the narrator is briefing you, often at the presumed annoyance of his editor. It works pretty well.

Secondly, these books are coming on twenty years old, and the world has moved from a place of turmoil in the shadows to a place of overt turmoil. The plot described in the book isn’t imaginative or speculative since the Israelis have hit a Syrian site thought to be preparing nuclear materials. Twenty years ago, this stuff might have been just outside the realm of what we thought was really possible. Imaginative. Now, it seems a little more true-to-life. Sadly, it’s aging too well.

So I’m looking forward to reading the others I have (but that doesn’t mean I’ll rush right into them), and I’ll probably fill in the gaps such as I can. I have to wonder, though, if they suffer from the same eventual fate of these kinds of thrillers when they transition authorship that they will lose that which makes them special. Probably, but I have a ways to go until I get there with the series.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book proves me a hypocrite. I’ve dodged cultural sensations like Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games because, I’ve ::sniffed::, they’re children’s books. But put a discarded library children’s book about an artist in front of me, and I’m all over it.

Because, let’s face it, my knowledge of Picasso is precursory. I know his era, his acquaintence with Gertrude Stein and the Lost Generation, and he did La Guernica which I did a paper on in college, although I’m not entirely sure what I had to say about it. Probably that it fought the norms of the day in which I wrote the paper, which strangely enough were sort of still norms instead of the anachronisms they are now. Everything else I got from Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which is why I’m prone to answer at trivia nights that Picasso knew Elvis.

This book is a simple little book from the Museum of Modern Art and takes a brief, high-level overview of Picasso and his work and its phases. So I learned a bit about his Blue Period and what he was trying to do with Cubism. Basically, it’s a painted collage of different views of the same image. Okay, I get it, but I don’t think it’s any less stupid.

So I got something out of this book, and it didn’t take too long to read. Best of all, there are others in the series with other artists, so I’ll definitely keep my eyes open for others in the line. Because I like to know a little bit about a lot of things, even though I have to go to children’s books to learn them. And it didn’t take a million words to get to the end and think it was stupid that Picasso and Hermione weren’t together.

Books mentioned in this review:

I was not particularly impressed with this book. Perhaps I read it too soon after The Lost Ones and found too many of that book’s flaws in this one.

In this book, a New England Patriots linebacker hires Spenser to look into some people who were following him. Spenser is not sure if it’s someone associated with his second wife who has a sketchy past or if it’s related to a nightclub shooting where someone died and the linebacker might have been responsible. So Spenser does some sleuthing and follows some false leads to make it interesting. Nobody in the Patriots organization wants him hanging around, nor does the linebacker’s agent. Then the linebacker’s son is kidnapped and held for ransom, but the linebacker instead offers the ransom as a bounty on the kidnappers. Hey, haven’t I seen that in a movie? Spenser then follows some other leads and saves the kid after some danger. The end, except one of the bad guys is untouched, which does not bring closure to the story and leads into next week’s episode.

So Atkins’ writing sometimes seems as informed by television and movies–where he makes allusions to celluloid instead of print, and by “allusions to” I mean “he borrows from.” His writing style when affecting Parker’s is better still than the mid-to-late Parker, but I’m hopeful that he gets more original with further books.

Also, SUCKER PUNCH ALERT. Okay, Atkins is wise to steer away from political commentary within the books–which means he’s probably a conservative, but Spenser repeatedly mocks people for wearing suits from Men’s Wearhouse. Hey, I own suits from Men’s Wearhouse. And they’re a far step above the slacks and button down shirts I get at Walmart that are my daily apparel. Also, one of the cheap foils for Spenser and Hawk’s masculinity claims to be a second-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, but he crumples with a single blow from Hawk. Hey, I am studying Tae Kwon Do (mixed in with a couple of other disciplines). I know some second degree black belts, and I’d like to think they’d put up a bit more of a fight (although, in full disclosure, in my started-but-incomplete follow up to my first, unpublished novel, the protagonist squares off on a fellow who goes into a fighting stance. “Tae kwon do?” my protagonist asks. The bad guy nods. Then my protagonist drew a semiautomatic and said, “Meets some urban ninjistu.” So although I’m dissing it a bit, I’m not going to the extreme Atkins does). Where was I? Oh, yeah, Why is Ace Atkins attacking all of my life choices? What next, mocking an English degree? A taste for omelets? All because I’ve given him a lukewarm review on an obscure blog?

What, it’s not all about me? Gentle reader, this is the Internet. It *is* all about me. Cosmically. If only you connect the dots and dust motes.

So I’m not weaned off of Atkins’ Spenser novels or other novels because I’m hopeful others will have better things to offer. But these last two things I’ve read have not been highlights of his oeuvre.

Books mentioned in this review: