Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book is a short series of essays, some originally appearing in Gibson’s local newspaper, about life on a small farm in northwestern Arkansas. Gibson deals with calving, moving rocks, the benefits and pitfalls of owning goats, and other rural concerns. The essays are short and enjoyable, often with a wry sense of humor to them. Not a bad little collection.

I’m really getting into these rural accounts these days. The pattern began with Growing Up In The Bend and continues with other things I’ve since added to my bookshelf. Perhaps the inclination ties together my love for history and my new location in the rural Midwest.

Books mentioned in this review:

I know you’re asking yourself, “Gentle reader, what is the longest a book has sat on Brian’s to-read shelves before he got around to reading it?” Gentle reader, I just want you to know I don’t find it odd in the least that you refer to yourself as “gentle reader” in your own mind. And that longest book, so far, has been about 30 years.

I received this volume as a gift from my aunt and uncle in the late 1970s or early 1980s. We were living in the Berryland housing project in Milwaukee when we received this, a student desk, and a small two-shelf bookshelf from them (and maybe a couple more books). I remember this book distinctly because it was outsized. And to be honest, in 1981, I was not interested in sea stories. I was probably reading The Great Brain series, Encyclopedia Brown, and whatnot.

Fast forward to 2010 (and from 2010, it does seem like a fast forward), and I read historical novels, sea novels, and especially in the recent past, I read Rudyard Kipling. So I took this book from the to-read shelves. It hadn’t been on the to-read shelves for very long, though, since I’m pretty sure I didn’t carry it to Wisconsin nor count it on my to-read shelves for much of my youth. Sometime, though, I plucked it from my mother’s bookshelves or my mother’s estate’s bookshelves and reclaimed it. So I’m being maudlin a bit to say I’ve owned it for 30 years without reading it, and the chain of custody was broken.

But, Brian, what about the story?

This book is a coming-of-age story. A spoiled rich youth falls off of a Europe-bound steamer and is rescued by fishermen from a Gloucester schooner fishing the banks off of Newfoundland. When they don’t believe that he’s really a rich lad, they put him to work on the boat and he learns the value of hard work. Well, there’s the plot. It moves along very well–these are really the equivalent of Young Adult novels, back when YA novels taught children to work hard, grow up, and contribute to society. I think most of them now teach kids to serve Gaia and to love one another, even when the other does not love them back.

The book, as part of the Educators Classic Series, also includes a little afterward that tells about Kipling’s life and that describes sailing throughout history and especially in the era of the novel. You know, these old timey educators’ books with their endnotes and footnotes are pretty interesting if you’re not already an expert in the subject matter (as I am not–I read a Patrick O’Brian book and immediately wanted to take a Master’s level course on ships). In modern times, though, I expect all that extra material is, again, all about serving Gaia and how those damn white men didn’t love one another.

It’s an interesting book, a quick read, and a glimpse into another era from that other era. Kipling’s faster to read and more accessible than Dickens or Hardy and could serve as a good gateway to classical literature. I’ve already promised to read Kipling to my children. No other books are official promises for when they get older. Kipling, and Captains Courageous, are.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book 1) because it was at a book fair for a buck and 2) because it was written by Humphrey Bogart’s son. I wasn’t 100% sure when I saw the book at the book fair, but come on, the book’s named after a famous misquote from Casablanca and the guy made sure his middle name was in it. He ain’t Joe Hill here, hiding out and trying to make it on his own.

So this book follows the story of a private eye in NYC named R.J. Brooks, the son of an actor and an actress (write what you know! Hey, Margaret Truman made a good living at this sort of thing) who rarely sees his mother and avoids her mostly when she is in New York because she didn’t pay him much attention when she was a child. When his mother is murdered, Brooks can choose between self-pity and finding her killer–and something about her in the process.

The book is an interesting, weird blend. It hearkens back to old school pulp detective stories with spots of brutality for its own sake, but in our own date and time this really isn’t appropriate (says a fellow whose first novel–unpublished–is full of the same). There’s the attempt at emotional stuff as the private eye works through his feelings for his mother (I can relate–as you remember, gentle reader whose name is ‘Charles’ and represents my only long-term reader–my own mother passed away just over a year ago.

But the story doesn’t really move forward much on the detective’s initiative. The resolution of the main plot line is driven by the italicized-text bad guy, whose thoughts pop in from time to time to remind us of what’s at stake. Finally, when the time and wordcount is right, the bad guy kidnaps the love interest and streetwise sidekick, ties them up in the dead actress’s bedroom, and awaits Brooks. Then, in a laughable climax, the bad guy picadors Brooks and holds him at bay with a fencing foil with a sharpened point. To make it dramatic, the bad guy gives Brooks a toy sword to defend himself. In a room full of furniture, Brooks tries to defend himself from a death of a hundred little pricks. Come on. If I think I would do better than the hero in a climax, it really takes one out of the moment.

I mean, it’s not that bad of a book. Most of your pulp boils down that way. Because it’s a sort-of semi-biographical imagining that mixes the old and a new in a not entirely convincing fashion, it’s…. not a particularly good book, either.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is one of Carl Hiaasen’s, so you know what to expect. Off-beat characters, a smart hero who is at odds with mainstream Florida society and development, and some zany situations. Unfortunately, this is not one of Hiaasen’s strongest works, but it’s one of his earliest.

When a witness to a four-year-old disappearance tries to sell her story to a television investigative reporter suspiciously close to Geraldo Rivera, she tells them that the now-retired investigator is important to the case. So the television crew accosts him. Then the witness tells her former boss, a poorly skilled but wildly successful plastic surgeon who killed the disappeared woman during a simple rhinoplasty, that the investigator is cooperating with the television program to take the heat off herself, which inspires the plastic surgeon to put a hit on the former investigator, who has to figure out why New Jersey hitmen and then local talent want him dead this time.

Unfortunately, this particular book features an anti-MacGuffin. One of the hit men loses a hand to a barracuda and instead of getting a regular prosthetic, he has a Weed Whacker® attached to his stump. Every time that the book mentions this, it pulled me out of the amusement into dismissing the whole thing as absurd. Maybe this seemed funnier in 1989. To Floridian newspapermen.

It’s an okay way to pass the time. I read this in paperback, and the book has more of a paperback vibe. I would hate to have bought it in hardback.

Books mentioned in this review: