Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book is a little tourist guide to the All Saints Church in Wing, Buckinghamshire, England. I certainly didn’t visit it, and I’m not sure what I would have paid for it, but I doubt it was fifty cents. The booklet is only 20 pages of text and photos, after all.

But this book like so many of the tourist-centric, very localized books I’ve read about locations in Europe (see Orvieto and Bruges from last football season, for example). Each is focused on a single city or location with the attendant pile of photographs and maps. More importantly, and more startlingly to someone who has lived in a city-within-a-city where its lustrous history extends back about a hundred years or now a region whose densely worded histories extend back a couple of hundred years, the history of Europe extends back millenia. In more narrative-driven history books, you tend to lose a little bit of a sense of wonder in the sweeping epochs and the rises and falls of civilizations and monarchies.

But All Saints Wing church extends back to when manor owners tended to take care of the churches on their manors. The church was probably built in the tenth century, as its first mention appears in the will of the manor owner in 966, and its architecture reaches back to the Anglo-Saxon period before the Norman Conquest. The guidebook points out what features survive and how the church was modified in the centuries, including during Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic church and the English Revolution. The various defilements of the historical character of the church are now part of the historical character of the church.

And in the present day, or at least in 2003, All Saints Church was not a historical venue maintained by a foundation or the British equivalent (with the additional U that is so characteristic of the Queen’s English is fouundation).

It is a church. With people attending services there and children’s programs. Just like your church, which is probably about a millennium younger than it.

You want to know what Noggle does when he’s desperate to make his annual reading quota, and he’s nowhere near finishing the three different 1400+ page books he’s spending a lot of time on this year? He reads a children’s book.

This is a children’s book circa 2000 that introduces children to the very high-level concepts of computers. What a computer is, how computers were in the 1940s, what a component is, what a peripheral is, what kinds of computers there are, what software is, and so on. Kind of like if you just read the titles of that old Time-Life Books series.

Twelve years later, I guess it’s hard to justify keeping this in a library, since most kids these days are born with an iPhone in their hands, and libraries themselves have whole rooms dedicated to functioning computers rather than books, so children can get hands on experience without the need for a book about them. Still, this book is a book targeted to libraries; I cannot imagine many people picking this up and giving it as a gift, even to children who don’t already have a computer (which brings to mind how I used to pore through the Radio Shack ads in 1980, looking at the pictures of the Tandys for sale, and now I have piles of computers with lots of blinking lights and whirring fans beneath a monitor bigger than my television playing Whiz Kids, and all I want to do is get away from them these days).

It’s a book for libraries, and the local library has discarded it.

Is it worth a read? If you pick it up at the local library book sale with an eye to mockery (although I’m not as wry about it as I would have hoped on that particular bag day), if you need to pad out your reading list, if you’ve got the book, and if you’ve got a football game to watch in between large print definition of mouse and keyboard (it’s the part that looks like a typewriter, which isn’t something someone born in 1994 is going to be familiar with).

On the other hand, this book just might be a good starter book not for children, but for seniors getting in touch with their first computer. It’s short, it’s basic, and it’s larger than normal print. Hmmm. I think Roberta could have used this book.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a collection of 90 pages of 2-3 quips per page filling out the set-up You can tell you’re a Midwesterner when….. They’re almost akin to Jeff Foxworthy’s redneck series, but a little less absolutely funny. They skew a little northern Midwest than Missouri, and they’re about small town living more than big city quips. A couple of them ring true, with a deeper understanding and statement of small town America than others.

An amusing, short read that I browsed while watching the preseason football game. I’d better stock up on these sorts of things and coloring books, since this in only the 55th book I’ve read this year and will have to make tracks if I want to get close to 100.

Books mentioned in this review: