Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This book sat on my sofa-side table, an old Sauder printer stand actually–past the half century mark, and I still have two Sauder printer stands from the middle 1990s as household furniture–for over a year. Although in past years, I have browsed poetry or art monographs during football games, I did not do so this year. I’m not sure whether it’s that my attention span has withered or that I cannot switch between football plays and text as easily as I could when I was a younger man or if my current selection of monographs and poetry chapbooks does not compel me to read them. Maybe both.

So as the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge has a Pictorial category, so I grabbed this book. The artist comes of age, so to speak, at the same time as the Impressionists–and he exhibited at times with them in their anti-Salon shows, but he’s not really an Impressionist. His art has two veins, really (well, three): He was a successful painter of still lifes and flowers who did brisk trade in them amongst the aristocracy or at least the monied class in England, but that was not his passion. He liked to do more fantastic works based on things like Wagner’s Ring Cycle and dabbled in etching.

So the book presents about 16 pages of text and biography, which is a pretty good balance between the that and the actual art. Unfortunately, most of the images of the art are in black and white which really doesn’t do justice to the art itself, and one cannot really get a sense of the realism in the still lifes when they’re mostly gray. Although I note that one of the works is courtesy of the St. Louis Art Museum, so it’s entirely possible I have seen one of the works in this book in the flesh as I did go up there a couple of times over my decades in the St. Louis area.

At any rate, a nice collection of art. Even the dreamier fantasies are better than most modern art.

Fun fact: Henri Fantin-Latour signed his art Fantin to differentiate himself from his father who was also an artist.

Probably not that LaTour, though.

The 2023 Winter Reading Challenge has a Speculative Fiction category in addition to the Set in Space category, so I selected this book. The tagline above the author’s name is It’s 1946. The white man is about to discover America. So it looked alt-historyish, but it has a bit more of a science fiction vibe to it.

In 1946, a disabled (well, walks with a limp) World War II veteran is messing with a radio set in his San Francisco apartment when he accidentally opens a rift to another place, an undeveloped Bay area. We learn eventually that Alexander the Great did not die at 30, which ended up stunting Western civilization. America is still sparsely populated by natives who have not changed in centuries. He brings some of his army buddies and their families over to colonize the new found land, and over the course of the decades, they build a small, slightly feudalistic society, but they do keep the gate open so that they can travel between the places, albeit secretly.

In the modern day, a couple of department of conservation detectives come across animals that should not exist–long extinct, or greatly endangered, including a California condor with no traces of lead in his blood, and it leads them to investigate a privately held company centered on an industrial part of Oakland–the home of the gate, of course–and they are abducted to the far side where they help uncover a plot by one of the old families and some new emigres to take over the far side.

So it has a bit of flashback to unveil the backstory (although not all of it) as well as excursions the two sides of the gate and interludes where the semi-omniscient narrator follows different characters, mostly the main antagonist and the woman from the far side who has lied to him and then kidnapped him–and whom he might love.

As the main character is a conservation agent, we get a lot of enumeration of species of both flora and fauna along with great details about the topography and how it is unchanged by man; it reminded me a lot of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in that regard. We also get a little commentary about how the society is structured on the far side of the gate with more conservative values, including a bit of aristocracy, but sold as overall good–I mean, I was not entirely swayed, but it did lack some of the deleterious features of our world.

The book runs over 400 pages and includes a couple of appendices, but it could have been trimmed by about a quarter or a third to improve the pacing. And with the thick descriptions running up over the 300 page mark with the main problem only then coming into focus–the raising and training of a bunch of native mercenaries to seize the gate–I thought perhaps it was going to lead to a cliffhanger and another book, but no. Suddenly, we have a fast, Executioner-style raid on the training camp followed by a clash at the gate which disrupts it, and the book ends with them working with two physicists on the far side trying to recreate it. So a very abrupt ending with room for a follow-up that has not yet come.

So not bad, and it ticked off a box on the Winter Reading Challenge. And it gives me the opportunity to post this song by Canadian trumpeter Maynard Ferguson which I heard at least once and perhaps more whilst reading the book and procrastinating writing the book report.

Once for sure on WSIE; also, perhaps, on my copy of the record of the same name.

The 2023 Winter Reading Challenge has a category Under 200 Pages, and 40 pages is definitely under that limit. As I mentioned when I bought the book last month, it was between this and the collection of the Sara Teasdale poetry as to which I would use to fill the slot on the paper. Well, you probably could have guessed that the man who read Lecherous Limericks by Isaac Asimov would go for this book. So I have.

Well, I will say this for the book: Originally published in 1985, it was reprinted several times–this book comes about ten years later, about the time I turned 20-something. The limericks are often off-color–which means they’re proper limericks–but clearly it’s the product of an earlier era, where a little naughty was amusing. Thirty (almost) years later, and who’s telling limericks now? Old men. Ay, in the Lecherous Limericks review, I told the story of how I knew a lot of dirty jokes in middle school and how that made me popular amongst some kids in middle school. In 2023, this stuff is tame to the point of being twee. But we’re not here to talk about it as a cultural artifact except that we are.

Not as good as the earlier Asimov–probably, but I don’t remember that well the actual content of that book which I read four and a half years ago. I mean, it’s not like poetry I’ve memorized or poems whose catchphrases (poems have catch phrases?–damn right they do!) I repeat to myself at times. Most of the initial lines do end in a place name, and to be honest, as I don’t know my Irish geography or, more importantly, Gaelic pronunciation, that well, I’m a bit at a loss for grading the rhymes. At least once, a limerick is repeated with a different place name in it, and assume they both rhyme if you’re Irish.

Amusing, and brief enough to have been amused rather than annoyed. But it did take me three nights to read it amongst longer works, so not something to tackle all at once, or you’ll be bored. But briefly.

It’s been a year since Thich Nhat Hanh died; in researching how to say his name, I found a documentary made on the anniversary of his death where everyone was calling him by either his nickname or his birth name, so I’ve had to rely on the Wikipedia entry for pronunciation. Not that I’ll ever actually say his name aloud; mostly I just type it here in book reports (see also Thundering Silence and Peace of Mind: Becoming Fully Present).

This book slots into the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Religious or Spiritual” category. Originally, I picked up the Joel Osteen book I bought five years ago(?!), but it was more of a self-help book akin to Eat the Cookie, Buy the Shoes or The Power of Positive Thinking–although they include Bible versus, they’re not religious in theme–they don’t talk about the nature of the divine or the doctrines of a church.

This book, like Thundering Silence, is commentary and history of a particular Buddhist sutra. This one is a lesson on breathing by Buddha, sixteen practices or things that you can think while breathing in and out to calm your body, calm your feelings, calm your mind, and lead you to enlightment or closer thereto. It’s basically thirty-two lines of teaching wrapped in the story of where and when Buddha taught it (the sutra itself) followed again by historical analysis of how the Sutra (or sutta) was passed down, history of the sutra’s setting, and then commentary and expansion on the practices.

Basically, again, it’s breathing, but with each exhalation and inhalation, repeating to yourself to calm your mind, calm your feelings, understand the object of your mind, and then progressing at the last quartet into understanding the non-dual nature of everything and whatnot. So one can take it through the first three quarters of it and get a good course on mindfulness, but the last quarter goes into the unified nature of self and non-self that underlies Buddhism.

That, and the mention of the cycle of rebirth, are really the only Buddhist cosmology in the book, and none of the later evolved cosmic Buddhas (like Amida Buddha and whatnot). So very core, very original to the tradition. But the text itself was passed down for generations, popping up in Vietnam based on an earlier Chinese translation (or perhaps I got this backwards). So an interesting read and an educational read, but it has not convinced me to be a Buddhist.

To breathe a little deeper and talk to myself as I do so, sure.

The 2023 Winter Reading Challenge has a category entitled “Set in Space”, and this was the first space paperback that I set my hands on. It was a pretty fine DAW first edition when I started it, but it’s a read copy now, which is just as well.

I have not read a Cherryh book since middle school or high school, when I came across a copy of The Pride of Chanur at the library and recognized the title from the song “The Pride of Chanur” by Leslie Fish from a collection of filk music, Quarks and Quests, that I’d ordered basically for the cost of shipping from the back of an Analog or Asimov science fiction magazine.

Uh, spoiler alert: That is a good summary of the plot of The Pride of Chanur, which I also bought in….2007? Which is odd; I am pretty sure that I just came across a paperback copy of the book in the stacks, too, so maybe I have two.

At any rate, it has taken me this long (35 years) to read my second Cherryh book (probably–although I might have read another when I was younger that I do not remember).

Which is a lot of column inches to another book I’ve read by the author. What about this book?

The title on the spine is Merchanter’s Luck, but the cover also says Rendezvous at Downbelow Station which made me wonder if this book was the start of a series. Well, a moment’s research on the Internet indicates that this book followed Downbelow Station but was not so much a sequel as a book in the same part of space with some minor characters who were the major characters in the previous book.

In this book, a single owner/operator of a small merchant vessel, the sole remaining member of the family who’d owned it after they were slaughtered or taken prisoner by pirates and two other brothers died after, is down on his luck. He’s down to his last credits, he’s operating under an assumed identity and with a renamed ship, “borrowing” money from the margin account of a distant trade syndicate, and without a crew since his last hired man jumped ship, and with few prospects. In a dive bar, looking for a crewman, he encounters a beautiful woman, member of a powerful family running a ship with 1000 crew but with no prospects for young helmswomen to advance, and they spend the night together. He then vows to see her again at her ship’s next stop, several hops away. No problem for a ship crewed around the clock, but for a single man flying solo, a risky endeavor–as the hops are disorienting and the total time takes several weeks of flight time. He manages to get there and becomes a minor celebrity, but entangles himself embarrassingly with the woman’s family–which leads to the family bankrolling his operation so long as he takes five family members with him on an expedition to nigh-uncharted space where trading opportunities might be had. Or they might be bait for a trap.

The book runs 208 pages, and for the first quarter I was really enjoying the world-building and how it was worked in with the plot, and the captain of the small vessel and the woman were falling for each other. But it got a little too intriguey, with the limited omniscient narrator looking in on one then the other and the other family members and a lot of back and forth about how they could not trust each other and steps they took in their mutual distrust. I would have preferred a more straightforward narrative, but that would not have made book length without the long passages and sections where one character distrusts the other, they talk about it, and one or the other thinks about how he or she cannot trust the other. As you might know, gentle reader, I don’t really get off on intrigues, which is why I am not so fond of modern television.

At any rate, it was ultimately okay. I won’t dodge Cherryh books in the future, but I don’t know when I’ll find another on the shelves. I do have numerous other DAW books on the shelves here, including a boxed set of Andre Norton books, another author I read once or twice as a kid that led me to buy more later. I don’t know when I will get to them, but certainly not before the end of the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge.