![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/theolddogbarksbackwards.jpg\")
Ah, gentle reader. As the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge<\/a> has a category simply labeled “Funny” and as I laid my hands upon this volume of Ogden Nash poetry which I bought in 2021<\/a>, I thought it would do. After all, I have found Nash amusing over the years. As I recount in my last book report on a Nash collection (I’m a Stranger Here Myself<\/a><\/em> in 2019), I read a bunch of Ogden Nash poetry 15 years ago when I would sit and read the poems aloud to my toddlers as they played with blocks or whatever, trying to foster a love of reading, poetry, and\/or silliness in them which lasted right up until they got smart phones.<\/p>\nAt any rate, this is collection came out after Nash’s death, and it’s a bit…. Well, not jarring<\/em>, but many of his best-known works came out in the period between the 1930s and early 1960s, so they always seemed to talk about a different time, a bit anachronistic and dealing with the pre-, during, and immediately post-World War II northeast. I mean, they weren’t Clarence Day<\/a>, but they were closer to that era than to today.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, this book tackles and makes light of late 1960s America. The world of Dirty Harry, the Vietnam War, and whatnot. So it bridges a divide of sorts between a world my grandparents would have known and the world into which I was born. Odd.<\/p>\n Although I have to say that I probably draw more on Ogden Nash when I coin a word in one of my poems rather than drawing on some classic poet of antiquity.<\/p>\n So, “funny”? Well, it amused in spots as Nash does, but that’s about the best I can hope for out of a book.<\/p>\n So worth a read if you’re a Nash fan and maybe a good place to start if you’re not as you might find the topics a little less anachronistic if you’re of a certain age (that is, the age of someone who reads books instead of watching whatever short attention span app will arise on smart phones in the coming days).<\/p>\n Oh, and I do want to kvetch a little bit that I got this book in paperback (unlike the other volumes of Nash I own), and its spine cracked and the binding started giving way even though the book is but fifty-some years old. So maybe I will have to look for it in hardback somewhere as I might be becoming a Nash collector. Which is cheaper than collecting the car (so far).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ah, gentle reader. As the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a category simply labeled “Funny” and as I laid my hands upon this volume of Ogden Nash poetry which I bought in 2021, I thought it would do. After all, I have found Nash amusing over the years. As I recount in my last book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33444"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33448,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33444\/revisions\/33448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}