Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Well, since Robert E. Howard’s Three-Bladed Doom had no sorcery in it–it was just a men’s adventure novel with guns and swords–I could not count it as the Fantasy category in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. But fortunately the Nogglestead stacks still teem with Conan titles, so I was able to pluck this volume. You know, I’m not sure where it came from: It’s not one of the titles from the 2021 trip to Berryville where I got several Conan titles, and I did a quick search on the blog for valorous and maddox to no avail. One of those single or small stack purchases that don’t get immortalized here or I have owned this book a long, long time (probably the former).

At any rate, in this book, Conan is hired by a sorceress to perform a small ritual in a cave sacred to the Cimmerians, the home of Crom. So Conan goes to his homeland and scuffles along the way. The book switches perspectives between a couple other magicians who are also hoping to perform the ceremony, including a couple of Vedyans who take a sea passage knowing the seamen plan to rob them and who hire enemies of the Cimmerians to guide them into the mystic mountains and another more ancient magician who hopes to ride along with the sorceress when she teleports into the Cave of Crom after Conan performs the ritual. Each hopes to become the greatest magic user who ever lived, or at least the greatest for the next 1000 years.

That oversimplifies things, but there’s a lot in the and scuffles along the way.

The book also has a lot of Cthulhu mythos-adjacent bits to it, so I presume the author was also informed by the works of Lovecraft and Derleth (and beyond), but probably not the collection The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard which was 35 years in the future from 1985.

The end is a bit quick but is probably not out of line with the ending of Conan the Destroyer (1984).

But, overall, a fairly good bit of sword-and-sorcery, aka low fantasy, and worthy of calling Fantasy for Winter Reading Challenge purposes.

A couple of things of note unrelated to the content of the book, though.

One, the book was read through at least once as someone turned down a number of the pages. And someone was also reading it using this as a bookmark:

It’s some card representation of an early Wolverine comic cover (early meaning low number, not a comic from the 1960s). I did a Google image search on it, and I didn’t see it as a card as part of a set. Who knows? It might be collectible, something thoughtlessly used as a bookmark thirty-five years ago.

Second, the pastor at our church mentioned in a sermon that he hadn’t known what a diadem was. He’d thought it was just another word for crown, but it’s not; it’s a jewel worn on the forehead either with a chain or some circlet holding it there or as the fastener of a turban. Many heads nodded in our pew, and my mother-in-law and wife learned the difference. I told them I knew what it was because I read a lot of fantasy, and people in fantasy novels often wear them.

So when I finished the Dickens I read for the Winter Reading Challenge, I texted my mother-in-law, a former English teacher, a photo of the book cover along with the comment “Finally, some LITERATURE!” And I had to send her the word diadem when I found it in the book:

So I had to send it as proof of my previous assertion.

The 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a category labeled simply Dystopian, which left me a bit at a loss. I mean, what really marks that genre? Young Adult novels are rife with The Hunger Games and whatnot, but what distinguishes them? So I struggled a bit, figuring that everything was going to have to be a parable like 1984 or something….

But this book has this atop the front flap:

The future is a strange and dangerous place.

Chaz Kato can testify to that. He is a citizen of Xanadu, a near-future perfect society hosting the wealthiest men and women on Earth. Along with his fellow citizens on this artificial island, Kato bears the burden of a dark secret that the outside world would be shocked to hear.

Well, alrighty, then. This probably qualifies.

The book starts by following the perspective of Lenore Myles, an engineering student visiting Xanadu who meets Chaz Kato, a computer/brain interface scientist, and they woo and fall in love, but Kato gives Myles high-level access to the computer systems, and she stumbles across…. something. She disappears from Xanadu, is almost killed, and goes on the run with a former boyfriend who is involved in a terrorist organization. Focus shifts to Kato, who is not actually the illegitimate grandson of the genius Chaz Kato but is in fact the Chaz Kato, rejuvinated by the medical technology from Xanadu. He tries to find out what Myles might have discovered that led to her being framed as a spy, and he encounters Saturn who seems to be manipulating even the council which rules the planet, a council composed of leaders or figureheads for the major corporate concerns on Earth which is often at odds with national governments, and he discovers a plan certain to lead to world-wide unrest when it is revealed–and Saturn plans to reveal it at soon.

So, okay, I guess we can squeeze it into dystopian.

The book starts out slowly describing the characters and Xanadu and then moves faster once the game is afoot, although perhaps a little too quickly and too far afield once the protagonists get away from Xanadu. As it was published in 2000, the height of the Internet bubble and the end of the twentieth century sensibilities, it projects fairly well a plausiblish future when read nearly three decades later. No problems with the Soviet Union continuing to rival the United States, for example, one of the things that immediately dates 1970s and early 1980s darker science fiction projected forward from that day’s problems.

A good enough book. One I confused with The Achilles Choice in my stacks because that one features runners on the cover.

The last Niven book I read, apparently, was Playgrounds of the Mind which I read in 2008 and whose review starts, “Wow, it’s been almost three years since I read N-Space, the collection to which this book is billed the sequel.” Wow, I guess almost 17 years have elapsed since then. Given I was a bit of a Niven fan back in the day, that seems a long time. But the stacks of Nogglestead are lovely, dark, and deep. Maybe I’ll have to read The Achilles Choice now if I should run across it again sometime soon so that almost two decades do not elapse again between my Nivenings. And now that the Winter Reading Challengs is almost over, so I can read whatever I want again.

I had already picked this book out as the Scares You category for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge when I heard about Todd. But it did add a little umami to the conflict. I’ve lost much of my family to cancer, and often very young. So although I don’t have a parent left to lose as Mlle. de Beauvoir, I still fear losing a loved one or going through it myself. It’s not a horror book like many people might have selected, but it certainly fits the category.

This book is the first of Simone de Beauvoir’s that I’ve read even though Robert B. Parker really flacked for The Second Sex back in the early Spenser books. Maybe he only mentioned it once but I read the book a bunch. But it deals with the, what, maybe month from the time her mother went in for a relatively routine procedure in the middle 1960s to her mother’s death from cancer. Apparently, the doctors figured it was pretty bad to begin with, but nobody told the mother so that she would be in good spirits.

So the book is partly a description of those days, although Mlle. de Beauvoir was not the attentive daughter tending to her mother constantly–that was her sister–but Mlle. de Beauvoir came back from trips behind the Iron Curtain once or twice when travelling and when it looked like her mother took a turn, and she did visit frequently in Paris. She also delves into her mother’s life a bit, telling us her interpretation of her mother’s bourgeous life and projecting unhappiness on her where the mother would not have claimed it was so–apparently, the father was a Frenchman, and he might or might not have had a number of lovers. Mlle. de Beauvoir therefore casts judgment upon her mother and, well, not vows to not lead a middle class life, but affirms her decision to live the mid-century French existentialist writer lifestyle. David Brooks coined the term Bohemian bourgeoisie in Bobos in Paradise, but his diagnosis was probably forty years after the French invented it. And adding Bohemian to it makes it sound hipper than it really is. I would call it simply New Bou since the values and ethics that replaced the old middle-class morality and “inauthenticity” of some degree of stoicism in the public face really did not depend upon being cool and artsy. Merely in following the herd that the French Existentialist and probably just any “artist” who could afford to go to Europe in the early part of the 20th century could afford to espouse.

Where was I going? I don’t know. All I know is the book triggered a little dread in me as I remembered my own mother’s death lo those 16 years ago from cancer and did a little self-flagellation in wondering if I could have / should have done more (yes). So “Scares You”? Yes.

It reminded me a whole lot of Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing which I read, what, almost thirty years ago when it was fresh and I got it from the Quality Paperback Club in one of those instances where I bought four books for a buck back in the 1990s when I thought I should read more literary fiction. I even saw the film at some point. It definitely has the same vibe, a combination of losing her mother and judging her mother at the same time. I more recently read Love’s Legacy by Stephanie Dalla Rosa which was also about losing her mother to cancer, but written a bit at a remove has her mother has already passed, and her mother’s diary helped the author eventually overcome her pain and return to her faith. So it’s a completely different focus, but another daughter loses her mother to cancer book.

You know, I can’t think of a book by a man talking about losing his father to cancer. I’m not sure that our relationships and emotions and regrets are any less complicated. I suppose we’re just less likely to work through them verbally in the form of a book.

At any rate, one more book down on my quest for 15 in the first two months. Which will actually not be fifteen on my annual list as two come from a single volume. Which is what I have to remind myself as I near completion of one form and it does not align with the tally on another.

I picked up this book for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge‘s Blends Two Genres category. To be honest, I felt a bit hard pressed to come up with even an idea of a book that could blend genres without being part of a new genre. Cookbook/mystery? It’s a subgenre. Science-fiction westerns? Subgenre. Fantasy and car repair manuals? Not yet a subgenre, but I like the thought of it and will probably try to write something along those lines presently. But this book probably stretches the category, or maybe it’s right in the center of what they meant when they came up with the list of categories.

At any rate, this book is a 416-page collection of prose short stories (not plays) based on or around the works of Shakespeare. 23 use the settings and characters from Shakespeare’s plays. 1 takes place in London when he’s alive and features some actors in his troupe and another theater company. The last imagines Shakespeare as someone who gives information regarding monarchical intrigues through his plays, and an agent is tasked with watching the plays and sussing out their meanings for the… well, not exactly the resistance, but those who think that Anne Bolleyn got framed (wow, has it been twenty years since I read another book about Shakespeare being a secret agent? It was Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove in December 2005).

Basically, the stories fall into a couple of types: What really happened, where we find that one of the supporting characters was really behind the events of the play (such as Hamlet or Macbeth), or the rest of the story, where the story is extended by focusing on events which happened after the play, such as The Merchant of Venice, where we see what happens when the resolution of the play has led to a later murder and how the characters have gotten on after Shakespeare’s work.

As you know, gentle reader, I have been “working on” the complete works of Shakespeare for over six years now (I started with The Tempest in January 2018 and last read Much Ado About Nothing last January, so “working on” might be overselling it). But I certainly got more out of the stories whose plays I was familiar with. So if you’re into Shakespeare, you’ll get more out of the book than someone who is not. The stories are a bit uneven–some are written in modern prose, but some dabble with Middle Englishness in a bit of a yeah, I get what you’re doing, but… way.

But it helped me to fill a slot on my way to a mug. Clearly, I will not have finished the Winter Reading Challenge in a month, but I am well-positioned to clear it before my birthday and certainly before the end of the month.