Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book is a slender Hallmark version of the book listed below. Child photographer Josef Schneider has taken photos of children with odd expressions on their faces, and they threw in word and thought balloons to ascribe wry thoughts to the children. Mildly amusing.

It’s not a coloring book that I’m counting towards my yearly reading total, but I am counting it.

Well, this was a book in a plain brown wrapper.

The cheap binding mirrors a Walter J. Black sort of binding. A novel title like Devil’s Holiday and an author named Fred Malloy, I was sure someone was going to get icepicked. But you learn something new every day. Like that there was a lurid genre of what they called sleaze or soft-core pornography featuring tawdry, descriptive scenes of seduction as it were. In 2009, you wouldn’t call this pornography. But fifty years ago, apparently, hoo-whee!

The book centers on the afternoon, evening, and night of Christmas Eve. Young couple (almost 30, so Old Married Couple in 1950s books) is kinda on the rocks. When husband came back from the war, he was different and the wife had almost taken a lover in his absence, but did not. The afternoon of Christmas Eve, the husband gets together with a young woman from the office and, after heavy drinking, they spend the afternoon in a hotel. He leaves his wife’s Christmas gift in a cab with her, and he starts fruitlessly seeking her to find it. She returns it to the wife, and the husband’s infidelity is thrown in her face. So she goes out on the town to get even and to give him grounds for a divorce because she loves him and doesn’t want him to be the villain in the divorce. So he goes out to a dive bar, hooks up with a ruffian from Missouri, and they drink, get into a fight, and try to meet women.

The characters at the root have a basic love for each other but cannot communicate it, and they’re swept into a series of poor decisions that are fueled by the constraints of the norms of the time and more alcohol than it would take to kill me and preserve me.

I don’t know what it says about its times that the relatively tepid sensual descriptions in the book were considered sleazy or pornographic. I also don’t know what it says about our times that 1950s sleaze has more conflicted characterizations and internal dilemmas in a simple plot than in much contemporary fiction of a more lofty-goaled but still genre fiction.

I might try this author again if I stumble over another one of his works, but I gather they’re pretty rare.

This is a book aimed at the middle-school or early high-school market, and it describes, briefly and zealously, some of the role-playing games available for the original NES. These include The Legend of Zelda, Shadowgate, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, and whatnot. Each has a couple of pages that includes some information about the storyline, a bit of comment on the game play, and tips that range from knowledgeable and insightful to vague, general, or obvious, possibly depending upon whether the author played the game before writing it up.

I’d call it a walk down memory lane, but that’s cliche and I was not an NES guy. But it did give me the urge to install a new role-playing game. Or maybe install one that I bought in the past when I’ve had this passing urge. Or maybe hook up an NES and run through one of these games. Instead, I’ve started a game of Civilization IV which I’ll probably abandon in a couple of days. Face it, gaming’s not high on my priority list these days.

But I liked the book. A simple read.

I find Cavuto to be the most engaging of the Fox News hosts. He’s pleasant, polite, and assertive, and he always looks as though he believes that his guests are full of crap. In many cases they are.

This book collects, in written form, some short pieces of comment he used on his television programs in the late nineties and the early part of this century. He offers a couple paragraphs on dot-coms, on the Fed, various recessions we’ve passed through in the last decade, the Iraq War, Congress, and so on and so forth. In the Brave New World, they remind us of the time Before, the time of prosperity and opportunity. I can’t imagine a collection from 2008 through 2018 would look like. If it would be allowed to be printed.

That said, it’s only an okay book. The topics are handled with empathy and whatnot, but given that they’re based on thirty second comments at the end of a newscast, you don’t get really deeply into a topic. Since they say a lot of the same things, the book is also a bit repetitive since a collection from a decade or so is going to cover the same thing the same way sometimes. If you’re going to read the book, break it up by reading a chapter a night or such. Maybe that’s how normal readers do things instead of reading for hours at a sitting.

I’m a bit saddened that I don’t get to see his program more often, but I’m busy afternoons and the guy isn’t taking an afternoon bottle these days.

Rex Stout falls, in the Brian J. Noggle Pantheon of Crime Fiction, into the second tier of demigods. The Nero Wolfe books more closely resemble the Watson/Holmes school than hardboiled PIs, but they feature pretty punchy writing and the first person narrative style popularized by the pulps. I’ve read a number, and I like them well enough, but they’re not Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler books.

In this book, a woman comes to Archie Goodwin, Wolfe’s assistant, and wants the duo to find out who her father is. She was raised by a frugal and detached mother, and when the mother dies, she leaves her daughter a quarter of a million dollars “from her father.”

Wolfe and Goodwin find the trail leads through a wealthy, unliked family and might well solve the hit-and-run death of the mother.

It’s okay reading, but not MacDonald.