FOOD: There’s an all-you-can-eat pizza joint where you get all the salad you want, a drink and a selection of all kinds of pizza slices as many times as you go back for them and as many kinds as you want for $5.00. You wouldn’t believe how much salad and pizza a person can eat in an hour-or-so.
Only trouble is I always feel sort of bloated and sometimes have stomach cramps after I eat there. Maybe it’s something in the food.
Thrift Store 25 cent books acquired:
A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller: Good SF I read every 10 years or so.
Rebel – Bernard Cornwell – I like Cornwell fairly well but I haven’t read this one. Civil War historical fiction
Quick Silver – Clark Howard – Never heard of the author. Taking potluck on this one.
Double Jeopardy – Colin Forbes – Another potluck. Never heard of the author.
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene – I might have read this one sometime. But the only Graham Greene I’ve ever not liked was Brighton Rock, required reading in some English course.
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco – Time I read this one again.
High Sorcery – Andre Norton – I might have read it 40 years ago. Usually liked Andre Norton.
Fuzz – Ed McBain – Potluck. Never heard of him. Looks like an extortion, cops and robbers yarn.
The Third Man – Graham Greene – Once more before I die.
Hobbit and others – JRR Tolkien – Hell, for .25 why not one more time?
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco – I dunno if I can do this one again. I ain’t as young as I used to be.
The Blue Hammer – Ross Macdonald – I read all these 30 years ago, loved them but ran spang out. Nice finding this one.
The Forge of God – Greg Bear – Never heard of him. Appears to be SF.
Flashman at the Charge – George Mcdonald Frazer – Sheeze. I love finding these. I must have read the entire Flashman series a dozen times over the decades. They never grow old.
I should have known this was coming yesterday when I took a nap and kept noticing a few things crawling on me occasionally. But I was preoccupied with musing about other goings on.
Then last night I went in there to rest a few minutes and conked out, only to be awakened around midnight-thirty with a lot of things crawling on me. Pretty much all at once, doing a little stinging here and there.
That half of the bed is taken up by upwards of a hundred books, some read already, some partway through the experience of being read, some waiting to be read, some held for re-reading. They’re usually not enough of a problem to outweigh the advantage of having a book near at hand when I need something to read. But when I turned the light on, here’s what I saw last night:
It’s not the first time that’s happened and I could have prevented further invasion if I’d been paying closer attention. I keep a container of boric acid powder nearby and usually try to do a pre-emptive strike on them on a fairly regular basis. But it requires taking the layers upon layers of books off and squirting the boric acid powder all over the underlying bed surface.
This, I’m reluctant to do, because everything gets disorganized and I lose track of which things have already been read, which are waiting to be read, which are occupied holding something else up, and generally where things are.
So they sneaked up on me. I had to do it in the middle of the night with no pre-planning, no organization at all.
Sheeze. Now it’s chaos in there.
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9:30 AM edit:
Heck, I might as well add this since I’ve got them there together now. Here are a couple of authors I’ve come across lately I’ve enjoyed a lot.
They’re thrift store books, so I’m not certain you could find them easily, but both authors have an interesting approach, plotting is tight, characterization’s good, and they hold the attention well.
Upfield writes about an aboriginal who’s an Australian police homicide detective and his mystery solvings, along with his ethnic difficulties trying to do his job in that setting, along with his internal struggles demanding he go back to being a bushman. Good reads.
Alexander’s a completely different bag of tricks. He’s created a blind brother to Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones, who’s a magistrate-cum-detective in London. His characters include Dr. Johnson, whores, a pirate, poets, actors, and all manner of peasantry. The narrator is actually a ‘Boswell’ sort relating the activities and events, a young teenager taken off the streets.
I don’t have enough distance from the Alexander books yet to decide whether it’s his unique and innovative setting, plotting and characterization intrigues me so much about him, or whether he’s also a damned good author.
Old Jules
11:20 AM edit:
Heck, I might as well add these since everything’s screwed up in there anyway:
Mari Sandoz – Crazy Horse, and Old Jules. Mari’s my daughter in a previous lifetime. Her biography of Crazy Horse is better than a lot of others about him. Her biography of me during that lifetime is as good as you’d expect from a daughter.
Doug Stanton, In Harm’s Way is the hair-raising account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during the last days of WWII, and the ordeals of the survivors in shark infested waters off the coast of Japan.
Dan van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign is nothing to write home about. Of the thousand-or-so books following the steps, events, tactics and strategies of the Pacific War this one ranks in the bottom third,in my estimation.
Lauro Martines, Fire in the City, is a narrative of the strange and
surprising emergence of Friar Girolamo Savonarola in Rennaisance Florence. So little attention has been paid this fascinating man and time it’s worth the read even if you aren’t crazy about Martines’s particular style of writing and his method of organizing his material.
[They didn’t come back even when it was over, over there]
Sometimes we get lucky and a fiction work sets us off on a journey of discovery. For me, this was such a work. Fifteen Flags was a launchpad.
One of the defining events of the 20th Century was the Russian Revolution. The International response, both in diplomacy and military intervention set the tone for the next seven decades of Soviet interactions with Europe and the US, and to a lesser degree, Japan.
I’d done a lot of reading years ago about the US troop involvement at the time of the Russo-Japanese War and had a vague background of reading about the International forces guarding the railroads while the White Russians fought the Trotsky forces. I even knew US forces were involved.
But what Ric Hardman managed to do with this tome was to broaden the scope of what happened there in my own perception enough to cause me to want to know more. Hardman’s characters, whether they’re US troops, Japanese cooperating in the International venture to guard the railways, Chinese, Czech, or German POWs trying to survive being prisoners awaiting release in a time of military chaos and famine: “Life is cheap.”
If I had to make a one sentence summary of this book, this set of events, this episode in world history I suppose no better words exist.
Book Reviews:
Do you enjoy reading reviews of books as a part of planning what you’d like to read? Jeanne, the lady who administers this blog, is a library employee in KS, and tells me about books, sometimes calls me when she’s picking through boxes of books in an auction parking lot waiting to be hauled to the dump after an auction, to find out if I’d like to own them.
But Jeanne also put me on to this newsletter library people evidently read:
A couple of days ago I came across a tattered copy of Henri Charrierè’s, Papillon on the bookshelf. I’d read it many times over the decades, but there’s always one more read left in it, it seems. This might be the last.
Charrierè’s autobiography always has something new to tell me, depending on where my life is when I re-read it.
Papillon (Charrierè) was transported to the French prison islands of Guinea in the Caribbean in 1931, where thousands of prisoners were kept out of sight and mind of the French citizenry. Devil’s Island was the most well known, but it was only one of the camps where 80 percent of the prisoners died before serving out their sentences.
The book is a story of courage, determination, brutality, as Papillon goes through a series of escape attempts, dungeons, unthinkable tortures, solitary confinements at a time in history when the ‘civilized world’ was no more civilized than it was before, or since. Eventually, he escaped and became a worthy citizen of Venezuela from 1945 until he wrote the book in 1967.
In some ways the writing and the stories both remind me of the fiction works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Strange how some nationalities get all the credit, while others manage to escape notice. The Spaniards and Portuguese take their battering from the waning memories of the Inquisition. The Russians from the Gulag camps. The Chinese from the Great Cultural Revolution. The Belgians from the terrors they poured onto the Congo. The Cambodians, the Ethiopians and the Germans have all been held up to the light and examined with appropriate repudiation.
Somehow the Brits and the French just managed to escape notice when the recognition for some of the vilest institutionally sanctioned acts of human brutality in modern human history.
Papillon. A book worth reading and thinking about by all you ‘jail’em-til-they-rot’ enthusiasts.
We haven’t caught up to the French, Brits, Spaniards, Cambodians, Chinese, Russians, Belgians, Germans, and other civilized nations yet. But we have the ingredients.
Plenty of prisoners and prisons. A freedom-loving population of the same kind of jurors, courts, prosecutors who sent Papillon and thousands of others off to a life and deaths they’d never tolerate for any cute animal that appeared in a Walt Disney film named Bambi.
Leavenworth Papers #17 – The Petsamo-Kirkenes Operation: Soviet Breakthrough and Pursuit in the Arctic, October 1944, Major James F Gebhardt,Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, 1948
Detailed examination of the Soviet success in the offensive attempting to identify what the US military should learn from it. Concluded light infantry to be the weapon of choice in arctic warfare. Examines the lessons learned by the Germans fighting under those conditions.
Good read for those interested in such matters.
Hidden Horrors – Japanese War Crimes in World War II, Yuki Tanaka, Transitions: Asians and Asian Americans Series, 1996
The Contents describes it better than I can:
1. The Sandakan POW Camp and the Geneva Convention
2. The Sandakan Death Marches and the Elimination of POWs
3. Rape and War: The Japanese Experience
4. Judge Webb and Japanese Cannibalism
5. Japanese Biological Warfare Plans and Experiments on POWs
6. Massacre of Civilians at Kavieng
Conclusion: Understanding Japanese Brutality in the Asia-Pacific War
Tanaka elaborates on the collaboration between the US and Japan to cover-up and downplay many of these events because of the post-WWII need for Japan as a strong Pacific partner against Communist aggression. Many were not investigated, prosecuted, even mentioned again in public media.
Fifty years after the Japanese surrender Tanaka writes: “Consequently, we Japanese have failed to recognize ourselves as aggressors, still less as perpetrators of war crimes. Moreover, because of the widespread perception of ourselves as victims of war, the notion of “victim” gradually expanded even to the point that the Japanese state was also seen as a victim of war.”
Reveals various deals made between the US Command under Dugout Doug and the Japanese commanders who conducted human lab experiments on POWs. Immunity from prosecution in return for everything learned in the experiments.
The King’s Own – Captain Frederick Marryat
Marryat’s a worthy read. He was a British Navy Captain when he retired in the 1820s and began publishing fiction works based on his experiences. His writings almost certainly were foundations for Horatio Hornblower and a lot of other sea yarn characters in fiction series during the 20th Century.
Marryat’s the daddy and granddaddy of them all.
Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, George MacDonald Frazer
The Flashman series is possibly the most laughing [and among the most educational] historical fiction series ever written.
I thoroughly resent Frazer dying before he wrote several more of them, though I re-read the ones he did write at least one time every decade. He’s welcome to resent me dying off without reading them again if it works out that way.
The Flashman Papers in Chronological order
Flashman [Britain, India and Afghanistan, 1839-42]
Royal Flash [England, 1842-43, Germany 1847-48]
Flashman’s Lady [England, Borneo, Madagascar 1842-45]
Flashman and the Mountain of Light [Indian Punjab 1845-46]
Flash for Freedom [England, West Africa, USA, 1848-49]
Flash and the Redskins [USA 1849-50 and 1875-76]
Flashman at the Charge [England, Crimea and Central Asia 1854-55]
Flashman in the Great Game [Scotland, England1856-58]
Flashman and the Angel of the Lord [India, South Africa, USA, 1858-59]
Flashman and the Dragon [China, 1860]
The Engines of God, Jack McDevitt
Respectable and readable sci-fi.
The Conscience of the Rich, CP Snow
Strange and unsettling book. Published during the 1950s the title’s an anachronism to such an extent the reader feels a bit lost at the beginning, figuring on some class warfare thing that would have found that name a decade later.
In fact, it’s probably the book Maugham would have written in Of Human Bondage if he’d been writing about a family of Jewish aristocrats in Britain during the 1920s and 1830s. The intractable controls imposed by the Jewish family on personal choices of family members in almost every facet of their lives.
Unsettling, but a worthy read.
Telegraph Days – Larry McMurtry
That original McMurtry book where he decided to become Louis L’Amour wasn’t bad, certainly a lot better than some that came later. I’d put Telegraph Days somewhere up near the top of his work since he became the great American novelist trying to push L’Amour out of the way.
The Time it Never Rained – Elmer Kelton
Good read about that pivotal time in the relationship between independent ranchers in the west and the US government, coincident with the drought of the 1950s.
Rumpole’s Last Case – John Mortimer
Another good Rumpole. What more needs saying?
The Black Throne – Roger Zelazny and Fred Saberhagen
Saberhagen books were always considered safe to buy at a quarter in the thrift stores until this one. I imagine it wasn’t him dropped the ball, but maybe it was just a pot-boiler for both of them. The writing craft is what’s at fault. Everything’s there, crisp dialogue, plot, characters with some depth. Good command of the language.
But something’s missing. I wouldn’t spend a quarter on it next time if I can remember when I see it again in a thrift store.
Retired university librarian. Oblique political humor of a liberal slant, frequently a smiler, sometimes a chuckler or horselaugher.
If you know more about politics than I do you might enjoy it even more. To me they’re just faces sometimes attached to names, but fun and interesting.
“Airplanes, cats, guns, war, the more than occasional rant about the party of the Confederacy, the spinelessness of the Democrats and crap about anything else that flits through the somewhat offbeat mind of an armed lesbian pinko as she slides down the Razor Blade of Life.”
I’m not crazy about a lot of the content, but the airplane pics she posts are worth the price of admission and reading the posts offers a different slant on things worth chewing on.
If you’re one of those folks who believe you ‘don’t like’ the works or Renaissance writers you might be the victim of having been forced to read the wrong ones by academians. Fact is the period includes some of the most entertaining writing mankind has ever been guilty of producing. Rabelais is one such example.
Academian praisers of Rabelais and this particular work have already expressed a lot of the truths to be found here, the exquisite style, the masterly satire. All they say is true and would be reason enough to read Gargantua and Pantagruel. I won’t repeat those laurels to affirm them. Instead, I’ll say it’s gutter crude, frequently barnyard humor with more levels than Grand Central Station.
Hilarious work.
But I’ll suggest another reason a segment of readers might find Rabelais interesting. Followers of the Thelemic ‘tradition’ created by Alister Crowley during the early 1900s might be surprised to discover Crowley’s claims to having channeled the doctrine from Horus in Cairo in 1910, were preceded by Rabelais several centuries earlier. Rabelais creates an imaginary monastery and sect of monks he names, “Thelema”, where a sign above the entry reads, “DO AS YOU WILL”. Sound familiar?
Give this book a chance. If you do you won’t regret it unless you offended by violations of polite discourse.
But if you read it as an admirer of Crowley’s channeling be prepared to have some of your balloons deflated, lean back and enjoy butchering of a sacred cow for the barbecue.
The nearest town, 15 miles away, has started a library, so I paused in my various re-readings off my own bookshelves to check out library books. I was familiar with some of the authors I began with, but it had been a long time since reading them.
Elmore Leonard– I ran through a plethora of his books in a short time.. everything the library had. I’ve never read a book by the man I didn’t like, whether it’s the westerns he began with, or the detective stories that later became his tour de force. I recommend him to anyone in danger of doing some light reading. However, I came across one that’s unlike any Elmore Leonard I’ve ever read. The Touch. Those of you into metaphysics and healing would probably find it of interest. It’s the best handling of the stigmata phenomenon, guru-ism, and commercial evangelism that I’ve ever read.
Rudolpho Anaya– This guy came highly recommended by the librarian. Sorry, folks. I came away thinking some editor somewhere dropped the ball on the three books I checked out. Loose sloppy writing, wordy, rambling. I suspect editors are a lot more forgiving of ethnic writers and mooshy metaphysical gawdawful rambling flashbacks these days than when I dealt with them as a writer. 150 pages of Rudolpho Anaya would have benefited by a lot of cutting and brutal rewriting, and still ended up with maybe 75 pages worth the time. Maybe.
Nevada Barr– Never heard of her, but I thought I’d give it a try. Checked out three books, made it twenty-five pages into one and declared, “No more!”
Elizabeth M. Cosin– I check a couple of these out because the first one was named Zen and the City of Angels. I’m willing to try what I don’t know, and the name of the yarn brought back pleasant memories ofZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Checked out two. Score, zero-two. They’ll go back in hopes someone else can struggle through them.
Poul Anderson– checked out The Stars are Also Fire because I recall liking Anderson’s work several decades ago. The Boat of a Million Years comes to mind. It was a fine work. However, this Stars are Fire piece seems to me to be the work of a person who needed to smoke some weed to get his mind back, or a manuscript written early in his career, a dead turkey no publisher would touch by an unknown writer, dragged up out of the files and published as a pot-boiler hack to raise grocery and whiskey money, riding the name of the later, more competent Poul Anderson. I’m 67 pages into it, debating with myself whether to drop the effort and read some William Soroyan off my own shelf until I get back to the library tomorrow.
I’d like to point out to you that the sentence-before-the-last in the previous paragraph is five lines long. Count’em. Five.
No good writer would put a sentence that long on a page where some poor human might read it.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
