Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I got this book in June of last year at the author’s book signing at ABC Books. It was the same weekend that I got Tea in the Time of COVID, so apparently I am making a tear through the books I bought that weekend. AND apropos of nothing, this is the second book I’ve read this month with the word terror in the title (Terror Intent being the other).

So when I bought this book, I mentioned one in the series has the town name of Grubville in the title, and I grew up in northwestern Jefferson County, so I know where Grubville is–along with a lot of the other towns (Cedar Hill, Dittmer, House Springs, Murphy Flats–when I lived in the trailer, it was in Murphy, and my sainted mother was the only one who affected to call it Murphy Flats) and other geographical markers (Big River, Meramac River). So I got a bit of a kick out of reading a Western novel set where I partly grew up.

The book centers on a young man freshly back from Cuba as part of the Rough Riders. He rescues a horse and brings it home to his family’s ranch, where they raise horses and mules. A neighboring farmhouse burned down, killing all inside but for a pretty young lady, so the Harbisons–the ranch family–take her in and help her manage her family’s cattle. Meanwhile, the young men on the ranch have encounters with the local ruffians, who it turns out helped start the fire that killed the girl’s family because her father was in a financial scam that took an out-of-town man who wants his revenge.

So it’s got a number of Western set pieces, and it’s got a lot of vignette/slice of life stuff to give you a feel for life in the era, but it’s a little light on the plot–I wasn’t sure of the main conflict until the big gun fight two thirds of the way through the book.

Still, it’s a pleasant read, although not really a mystery–perhaps the other books in the series will have more mystery to them. And I am looking forward to reading the others in the line, but only after the end of February and the Winter 2022 Reading Challenge. Where this book slots into the Set in Missouri category.

As with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, I read a nice cold winter story in winter, which means I put a couple extra logs on the fire while reading. The 2022 Winter Reading Challenge has a Young Adult category, so I picked this up–I have four or five other young adult books from the Children’s Classics series that I will probably knock out later in the year just to move them en masse from my to-read shelves.

You know, I think a copy of this books was amongst the children’s books that my aunt gave us when her stepchildren outgrew them. Not this copy, though–if it exists, it’s on the shelves of unread children’s books in our family room. My boys have probably outgrown that collection, composed of books from my beautiful wife’s childhood and my childhood that the boys really didn’t cotton onto. They did not get into Hardy Boys or similar boys’ adventure books. But I digress.

Hans Brinker is a peasant boy in Holland. His father used to work on the dikes; the union’s been on strike, they’re down on their luck, it’s tough. Wait, no, that’s someone else. Father Brinker did work on the dikes, but he took a fall and has been insensible ten years by the time the story opens. Hans does some odd jobs; his sister tends geese. The well-to-do kids look down on them, except for a couple of good-hearted kids. Before the father went to work on the fateful day, he did something with the family savings and came home with a mysterious pocket watch that he would explain later–but he couldn’t. A local well-to-do family decides to hold a skate race with a pair of silver skates as the prize–but the Brinker children only have handmade skates with wood runners instead of blades.

I mean, that’s the story as it’s laid out. The first sixty or seventy pages set this up, and then we get 150 pages of the boys not named Hans Brinker deciding to take a trip skating to visit Amsterdam and The Hague, so they do. They go off, skating the canals, and they visit a hella lot of art and history museums and talk with a visiting English boy about Holland. Which is what teen boys do. When written by an older woman.

After the long interlude, we return to the title character. A noted surgeon performs brain surgery on the father right there in the hovel, where the father recovers in a matter of days. The family finds their savings. The mystery of the watch is solved–it’s from the son of the surgeon, who fled after fearing he’d accidentally killed someone working as his father’s assistant–and he ran off to be a successful manufacturer in England. He returns, Hans becomes the surgeon’s assistant, Father becomes the foreman in the surgeon’s son’s new Dutch facility, and everyone gets enough to eat.

Oh, and the race: Gretel wins among the girls, and Hans withdraws, giving a piece of his equipment to help one of the other boys. We get a little bit about how the characters grow up and grow old, and finis.

So it’s as much a book designed to educate young’uns on Holland as to tell a story. The narrator sometimes shifts into first person plural, especially trying to create excitement during the actual race, so it’s a bit strange, too. Children’s literature was such a strange thing back in the olden days, ainna?

At any rate, another category down in the Winter Reading Challenge. You know, I rather like the gamification of my reading in the first months of the year–it’s more interesting and exciting to me than the things with which I finished the year last year, anyway.

The Winter 2022 Reading Challenge has a category Time Travel, so I found this book first amongst the many I have on my shelves that deal with time travel of one sort or another (all of them, at least the fiction books, deal with time travel at the speed of now, anyway). It helped that this book had “Time” right in the title.

At any rate, it’s an Arthur C. Clarke book. You know, he’s considered one of the big three with Asimov and Heinlein, but in the years since someone made that judgment, he’s really tailed off, ainna? He had, what, Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood’s End, and 2001: A Space Odyssey followed by a bunch of sequels for each. Except, of course, with the one with end right in the title. Perhaps his short stories were something else, but barring that, I would not put him in Asimov or Heinlein’s class. Maybe the people who put him in the big three were his publicists.

This book, the first in a series called A Time Odyssey, has the premise that a couple of groups of mid-21st century people find themselves removed from their time and placed somewhere/somewhen else. A UN Peacekeeping reconnaissance helicopter is shot down and manages to crash in Afghanistan near a 1890s-era British fort. Just over the horizon, scouts find an army–Macedonians led by Alexander. Three astronauts returning to earth from the International Space Station arrive in the same time period in Mongolia–where Ghengis Khan’s army has found itself also. A member of the missing link species is captured with her daughter near the fort; and amid all the disruption, one of the helicopter officers’ phone calculates based on the position of the stars that they’re in the 13th century. The descending astronauts did not detect many signs of human life or activity aside from themselves. Oh, and alien orbs, impossibly perfect spheres, float above the landscape in various places.

So we’ve essentially got a book that throws a game of Civilization into a blender with tropes from Clarke’s other works (an ape, elevated; a computer that asks if it will dream when it’s shut down; an advanced civilization’s artifacts) and maybe some other works (Under the Dome, although that book came out five years after this one) to make a readable book that leaves one saying, “What’s it all about?” The groups and armies come together in a great battle at Babylon, where the biggest of the alien artifacts resides. And after that climactic battle, we get sixty pages of denouement that leads to…. What? The next book? One of the protagonists is returned to her own time, only to find one of the alien artifacts there.

You know, I read the Wikipedia entries for this series to see where it goes, and it goes like an Arthur C. Clarke series does. A conceit, readability, and then it’s an alien reveal that doesn’t lead to a triumph or resolution for man, but rather a big conceit. Meh. I prefer space opera, thanks.

So I checked off a book, and I have revisited Clarke and find my opinion of him has not changed since I read 2001: A Space Odyssey in 2007. I still haven’t gotten to that series’ sequels yet, and they’re on the outside edge of the to-read shelves in my office. Maybe next year since I’m finding myself in a mood to clear some of these old books out (which will last one or more of these old books or until my next trip to ABC Books).

But the first entry in the 2022 Winter Reading Challenge is complete.

Well, my first book of the year–why not make it one of the less than a handful of Executioner novels I have left? Especially since they’re really now something to be finished rather than really enjoyed by the late 1990s, when they’ve bloated a bit and have kind of lost their roots and what made them most enjoyable at their best–the philosophical musings.

In this book, Bolan is in north Africa when an Egyptian band of Islamic terrorists begins targeting tourists, especially Americans. With funding to buy expensive explosives and the hired know-how of a Palestinian terror expert, the group–The Holy Voice–presents a real threat, although not on the scale of Chinese nationalists attacking nuclear plants or Caribbean dictators trying to buy nukes; but some of these smaller side missions could be satisfying, but in the execution (ahut), not so much.

I mean, you have set pieces, and you have bang-bang, but that’s about it. Perhaps I’m hoping for too much, or perhaps I’m idealizing the early books that I read fourteen years ago (whose publication date was a mere twenty-four years and 204 books prior to this volume). Still.

I flag a couple of things in these books as though I’m going to bother reviewing the little tabs while writing these little reviews. The first thing I flagged, though, again was the “A Brit wrote this” because it talks about height in terms of yards. We Americans tend to measure distance in yards, not height. But I have pointed that out in recent books which turned out to have been written by an American, so never mind.

At any rate, March 1997 is the publication date. I often like to track what I was doing at the time the book came out. That was a big year: A couple weeks before this book came out, a girl at the University of Missouri emailed me where to read poetry in St. Louis. And that worked out all right for me. You know, I printed out every email she sent me during those first few months, and when I admitted that I was emailing a girl to one of my friends, I used the two inch stack of paper to indicate she might be serious, I dunno. I have them all in binders here; I should re-read those instead of an Executioner novel sometime.

Never mind, the Winter 2022 Reading Challenge is on. It will have to wait until spring, as will the next Executioner novel.