Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I bought this book because I thought it might be a saucy sort of male equivalent of Sex in the City or something. Without a dustjacket, I flipped it open and landed on the first person narrator’s self-description, and that was enough since I had a wallet full of money and a box half full of books at the book fair. I missed the part where it identified him as a high school kid.

So it’s a young adult novel, set in high school. The main character isn’t so good with the girls, so his friends post an online ad for him seeking a prom date, and it gets a lot of response. So he agrees to evaluate 24 girls for in the week before the prom and then to select one for his date. It takes on a little of a reality show feel, and he deals with the unreality and with the reality of his life.

Oh, and he grows and learns something about himself at the end.

Well, then. I frankly missed the YA thing. I went from Hardy Boys in elementary school to hard boiled detective fiction in middle school. I suspect I didn’t miss much, and I used my reading to prepare myself for the grim real world, not the goofy high school world. I’d go on a spurious tangent about how YA books have trained kids to be adolescents in their adulthoods, but frankly, I don’t think enough kids read to have that impact.

Books mentioned in this review:

When I bought this book, I expected a book in the line of Tom Braden’s Eight is Enough: a collection of anecdotes and incidents about raising a large family, set in a familiar location and with a historical relevance.

Instead, this book is really just a brain dump of parental advice on topics from buying insurance to handling kids’ drug problems. Not what I was looking for at all, really, but it made the book–dare I say it?–very skimmable.

One bit of historical trivia: The book has a whole chapter on 16 in Webster Groves, a documentary about growing up in suburban America that CBS shot in Webster Groves. In true reality television style, the network apparently cut the film to portray its story that suburban American children were being brainwashed into the bourgeoisie. Webster residents at the time were upset with it. So much so that the authors include it and spend a chapter railing against it 23 years later.

I’d tell you where the book is for sale, but you don’t find it anywhere on the Internet. Its existence is proven electronically only that it appears in a photo in this Flickrstream. Given that this book was printed as a limited edition, the photographer is either a Dahlin, a Pepple, or a nearby resident of Webster Groves.

This book collects a number of questions covered in Slate’s “The Explainer” column and groups them by some sort of similarity. It’s better than The Best of Slate as far as collections go, but it’s not “The Straight Dope”.

Worth a buck, I suppose. If you will have any to spare in the upcoming Obama/Pelosi/Reid Bush depression (overtime).

Books mentioned in this review:

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Back in 1984, the powers that be wanted to widen Elm Avenue, a north-south road that cuts through the middle of Webster Groves, to make it an artery of sorts to handle traffic from Clayton areas to South County. The residents of Elm Avenue banded together to fight it and had a street party to show off their homes which would be lost or have yards cut drastically as part of the plan. This slender volume is a catalog of the homes on Elm Avenue along with the history of each. Not quite Webster Park, but its aim was much lower.

Last year, as part of preparations for the Highway 40 closing, powers that be floated the idea of widening Elm again, 23 years after this book was published. They got a stop light where only stop signs had existed before and a no-left-turn thing instead, fortunately for the big old houses along Elm.

Sorry, no Amazon link for this book; I cannot find any reference of it on the Internet, either, which means I must be making it up.

In case you’re wondering, I finished this book on November 3, a day before the election. I haven’t posted on it because I’ve had other things on my mind, such as the way the world will be to me going forward. Pardon me for the delay.

I was going to entitle this post, or at least sum it up, as encapsulating this book as 50 Horror Stories We, British Editors, Could Anthologize On The Cheap. Because for the first couple of nights wherein I read the book, that’s the sense I got. Fiction, poorly written in a British horror sense. We get a couple of ghost stories, and then a treatise on lycanthropy. Were the stories supposed to be spooky, or what?

After a couple glasses of cheap liquor, though, I got into it. Well, a couple of glasses of cheap liquor and a couple of nights of reading, perhaps interspersed with more compelling fiction. But these stories combine actual events with actual recountings of ghost stories, so if you’re an Angliophile, you can get into it for the flavor of the past told from the recountings. If the spirit, so to speak, moves you, you can wonder, “Did the authors present this as a piece of fiction, or are they recounting an actual event but providing spooky music?”

Thus, I ultimately enjoyed the book more than I thought I would. One has to leave behnd one’s expectation of horror stories, though, particularly if you’re an American reader used to a bit more spookiness in the proceedings.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you know, I read the sequel, of sorts, to this book earlier this year. So when I found the actual novel upon which the movie True Grit was based, I snapped it up. A two-fer of sorts; I like paperback movie tie-ins/source novels for some reason.

This book is exceptional. The book relies on a double-effect narrator, an elderly spinster recounting her trip into Choctaw country to find the man who shot down her father. At the time, she’s 14 and rather precocious, although let’s not forget that there was a time when 14 was an adult for all intents and purposes. She hires Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn (the John Wayne role) to lead her into the hostile territory to find the man. A Texas Ranger joins them, and together (reluctantly, it must be said–the men don’t want a little girl along) they encounter the bad men.

The voice of the book, through the double-effect narration (telling the story through first person, but with the passage of time), really makes it work. Throughout, the character displays primmishness and vulnerability; she’s not as tough as she’s putting on, but she’s tough enough. Additionally, there are a lot of educational asides and a couple suggestions for Bible reading, but it doesn’t get in the way of the action and the girl’s response to it. Well-played.

I need to read more Westerns, but this does represent the second I’ve read this autumn. As our world and country changes, I’d like to hearken back to a time where it wasn’t how it is now or will be in a couple years.

Books mentioned in this review: