Musings from Brian J. Noggle

The 2006 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “500+ Pages,” and, to be honest, I had a little trepidation about what I would find to fill that category. And here I had just been talking about my shelf of Stephen King which I might never get to. As it turns out, not only did I get to it, but we had a second copy of the book which had been in my son’s room for a time and then moved to the parlor when he cleaned his room a couple weeks or months ago. It was my mother-in-law’s copy, sans dust jacket, which she had loaned to my youngest when he was grounded from electronics, and he managed to make it through the first story and onto the second, but that’s when his grounding ended, and I’m not sure he has opened a book since.

So, the combinations of those factors, thinking recently about the Stephen King shelf, and talking about 11/23/63, which my mother-in-law enjoyed as a book and, as she has started watching the miniseries and is not enjoying it, and encountering a copy of this book led me to think of Stephen King for this category, and I checked some of the books. Early novels are not 500 pages; later novels are too much so. But, it turns out, this book weighs in at 527 including the self-indulgent afterward that some authors tack on.

As you might know, gentle reader, this book is a collection of three novellas and a short story which King had written in the gaps between his early successful novels Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Cujo, and The Shining (he’s about to write Christine according to the afterword, although the title is not given, but 44 years later, we know). Three of the four, all the novellas, were made into major motion pictures. This guy was a juggernaut in the late 1970s and 1980s, as hard as it might be to imagine now that he’s been around forever.

The book contains:

• “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” (made into The Shawshank Redemption, the biggest of the films or at least the one most fondly recollected) is about a banker, Andy Dufresne, who is convicted of murdering his wife even though he proclaims his innocence (he is, in fact, innocent). The story is told by Red, who is a long-time inmate at Shawshank Prison and is known for “getting things.” He gets Andy a rock hammer so he can continue his geology hobby, and the story covers decades of the lives of the inmates at Shawshank. One morning, they cannot find Andy and discover he has been tunneling from his cell to a wet wall for decades and has escaped to a new life with an alias he had set up before he went into the can. The coda finds Red paroled and on his way to meet Andy in Mexico. Haven’t you seen the film?
   
• “Apt Pupil” (made into Apt Pupil, appropriately enough) is set in the early 1970s. A middle school aged boy recognizes his neighbor as a superintendant of a concentration camp and wants to hear all about it. They end up mutually dependent and mutually blackmailing each other to keep the secret. I really didn’t like the story because the first half of it, 100 pages or so, is two evil people doing evil things. Finally, it starts to move in the second half, but King introduces sympathetic characters, but you know he’s going to slaughter them. Well, it turns out, not all of them, but for much of the book you really don’t have anyone to really sympathize with. Not the boy, not the war criminal, not even the boys’ self-involved and self-indulgent parents. The book ends with more implied bloodshed, not a real climax, really. Looks like the film changed it in significant ways–setting the story in the 1980s instead of the 1970s, but it should definitely have the macramé-decorated feel to it. The boy is changed to a high schooler in the film, and the end is apparently ambiguous and not as final. I haven’t seen the film; I haven’t had the urge to see it; and the written story has not made me want to.
   
• “The Body” (which became Stand By Me) tells about a group of boys who learn of a dead body and then hike and camp several days to see it. It’s sold as a coming of age story, but the double-effect narrator is a wealthy horror writer who is dissatisfied with his current state of writing by rote for money and who longs for those days again. I haven’t seen the movie in probably 30 years, but I wonder what they might have changed from it.
   
• “The Breathing Control Method” (not made into a movie) is a double story of sorts. A midling employee of a law firm is invited by a partner to a nondescript club with no obvious dues where the “members” tell stories. One Christmas Eve, a retired doctor tells of a case where a single mother carried her baby to term, but has an accident arriving at the hospital and she delivers the baby after her death.

So: I mean, the prose moves along, for sure. King wrote very frankly for the time about things that might have been shocking then, but then were not shocking, but now are prohibited. The stories are all set in the past, although I guess “Apt Pupil” was fairly recent past. He uses the word nigger and the word Republican both as perjoratives–I am pretty sure that all the stories have that, the baddest word, in them, although maybe “Apt Pupil” only uses the German equivalent. I don’t remember him using the word Democrat for anything, so I guess that was just normal to him even then. So the guy didn’t just start slagging on those who disagreed with him in the George W. Bush administration.

As I might have mentioned, I have a shelf full of King, and I’m not sure when I’ll be inclined to get to them. Maybe I’ll read one or two this year. Although if I get a hankering for thick tomes, maybe I should finish the second volume of The Story of Civilization (it’s been three years since I read the first, and at that pace it will take me almost as long to read it as it took the Durants to write it) or the Summa Theologiae which I received as a gift in 2021 and which I have not started, but it looks nice on my shelves. More likely, though, I might pick up Herodotus or Thucydides (he says, having just heard lectures on them, but the lecture series is long and I’ll likely want to read other books as well when I hear about them).

First, though, the Winter Reading Challenge. With this book, I have hit five, which is what you need to read to get the mug. But I must press onward in my quest for filling all fifteen categories.

So for the In a Different Country category of the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, when I was gathering prospective reads for the categories, I grabbed Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, a literary novel elevating the bleks and putting white South Africans in their place which I read in college (in a copy I might have borrowed from the campus library as was my wont in those years) and later picked up in hardback. Undoubtedly, this is what the librarians wanted: a proper literary book with a proper literary message. Oh, but no. You get a Tarzan novel.

Not sure where I picked this copy up, but I do know that somehow I ended up with two copies of this book, both in the 1960s Ballantine printings with the hideous 60s covers. And I’ve been reading the Tarzan books out of order, apparently; I read both Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan, the first two books in the series, in 2009 and Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, the 11th book in the series, last year. This is the third book, but I probably did not have it when I read the other two books–although without its (or their, considering I bought two copies probably at different times), perhaps I did but it was shuffled in the move. Certainly, in those days, the Nogglestead library was not quite as double-stuffed and unkempt as it is now.

So, after quickly reviewing the previous book reports, I guess this is a pretty stock Tarzan plot. Something connives to get Tarzan to Africa, where wild things happen. In this case, Russian nemesis, presumably from the last book, escapes prison, links up with a colleague and some unsavory fellows, and they kidnap Tarzan’s son and tell Tarzan they’re going to have him raised by a tribe of cannibals. They connive to get Tarzan, too, and they do. And! As a bonus, Jane follows Tarzan to an unsavory meeting and they get the drop on her, too. So they strand Tarzan on an island not far off the coast of Africa which allows Tarzan to gather a troupe of apes and one panther to cross to the mainland and begin the chase.

So a series of set encounters occur, and Tarzan twice decided to sleep in the village of hostile natives, allowing the bad guys to get the jump on him. The book shifts perspectives from Tarzan to that of Jane and/or the bad guys, sometimes shifting into the past to catch up with one group or another, but allowing to end a chapter and section on a cliffhanger to be resolved a couple of chapters later.

So it’s an okay piece of pulp, and, again, an enduring character–this edition came out fifty years after the original, and I’m reading it over a hundred years after it was published. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice. Also, for something coming out at the turn of the 20th century, one (educated in the very end of the last century or beginning of this one) would think it all racism and misogyny, but although Jane is sometimes helpless when overpowered by stronger males, she definitely is not a docile character. And some of the African natives are bad, but some are good. You know, a little like real life. So the pulp of 1914 is more realistic and treats people more akin to people rather than message-conveying ciphers that you get in some modern cartoonish depictions. But that’s why I read the old books.

This book is a two-fer in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge; it would fit into the Science Fiction/Fact category, but I’m putting it into the Nonhuman Character category. Looking at the list, many of the categories whisper to me books that would also fit into the Science Fiction/Fact category as well. So I will probably listen to that whisper to get my two-fers.

And I must confess, gentle reader: I read this book about forty years ago. And my first exposure to it was from a song. You see, at some point in middle school or high school, I ordered an inexpensive cassette called Quarks and Quests from the back of a science fiction magazine. It was a “filk” (science fiction and fantasy folk music) collection which included “The Pride of Chanur” by Leslie Fish:

I spotted it in a library at some point thereafter–I remember it was in the original DAW paperback but with the library binding (basically, a hardback with the paperback inside and the paperback cover pasted on the outside). I picked up this volume in a book club edition in 2007 (the same day I bought After Worlds Collide, the sequel to a book I read in sixth grade and the follow-up recently, in 2024), so it’s a hardback with the paperback front cover on the front dustjacket. Weird.

At any rate, the book starts out on a trading station where the crew of a cat-like race called the hani are loading cargo when a nearly naked and bleeding creature that is keeping to the shadows bolts onto the ship. Spoiler alert: It’s an unknown-to-them species, but it’s human, and the kif, a race of raiders and pirates, want it back so they can torture it to reveal its homeworld so they can raid trade with it (::wink::). The haniem> on the ship, the Pride of Chanur, decide not to give the human up, so it turns into a bit of an interstellar war. Kind of like the song says.

So the book has a bunch of world- galaxy-building, detailing the internal politics of the clans of the hani and the relationships between the races. It alludes to the technologies the different species use, but it doesn’t go into excruciating detail. It has but a few set pieces–fleeing, hiding at the edges of a system, and so on, and then it culminates in a trip to the hani home world to handle some intrigue and a rush back to orbit for an epic space battle handled with a bit of a “Wait, what?” deus ex machina climax followed by a long dénouement.

Apparently, the book spawned four additional books over the next decade and are part of the same universe as Cherryh’s Downbelow books, of which I read Merchanter’s Luck for the Winter Reading Challenge in 2023. So it looks like James Wilder is not the only author to make a repeat appearance on the forms. Some librarian or librarians will think I don’t read widely at all.

Also, forty years later, I still pronounce the name cherry-h although I am sure that I have read her Wikipedia entry before (likely in 2023), so maybe someday I will remember it’s pronounced just Cherry because that is her real last name–the h was added to make it look less like a romance author’s name.

For the Part of a Series category in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I decided to go with this book, part of the Harbison Mystery series which I picked up in November, signed, but not at the book signing. To keep you up-to-date, the Harbison mysteries include:

• Terror Near Town
• Tough Times in Grubville
• Sheriff without a Badge
• Murder at Morse Mill
• Homicide Near Hillsboro

And now this book.

So: In it, Sheriff Chet Harbison investigates a murder at a resort. The deceased is a doxy formerly involved with a deputy but dismissed from her job at the county clerk’s office for conoodling on the job. Meanwhile, the widow and mistress, now (whispers) lesbians, of the presumed murdered sheriff who faked his own death and got away at the end of the last book–these two are trying to maintain appearances in Jefferson County whilst using their inheritances to open a bar in St. Louis now that Prohibition has been repealed. The investigations and machinations conmingle with some series business (will the deputy’s journalist girlfriend go to Europe to work for the big national syndicate? Will the sheriff pass his kidney stone?), and eventually they find the bad guys and resolve the situation.

I might have mentioned that I have considered reaching out to Mr. Wilder to offer to proofread his books for him for a galley copy and/or a free copy of the book and maybe an insertion of my fictional kin into the Harbinsonverse. I should probably make that offer, as this book was full of missing quotation marks (full of the lack somehow), problems with formatting, and even anachronisms (referring to The Thin Man movie in January 1934 when it was not released until May of that year)…. I started noting them in my phone as I didn’t have the little flags in Branson with me. I don’t know if Wilder rushed to get it out or his normal pre-readers were unavailable, but this book definitely needed some pre-press work that it did not receive.

So a little underwhelming, but I’ll keep picking up the Wilder series because I still like the little tidbits of local history from a region where I used to live.

For the first book for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I picked up this book. I had thought that I bought it from the Quality Paperback Club around the turn of the century, but a blog post from 2007 indicates I bought it at a garage sale or a book sale in the waning months of that year. Presumably a used book store or a yard sale, as one of the pages has a stain on it and the bottom of the pages has a marker’s mark on it. Maybe I just thought about buying it from the Quality Paperback Club. Maybe not–I don’t remember how late into the century I might have dabbled in that particular mechanism for expanding one’s library rapidly.

So, the setup is this: Right before his wedding in 2000, the author’s fiancé calls it off. But he’s already paid for the honeymoon, a trip to Costa Rica, as well as the venue and reception. So he goes ahead with a party for the guests who were coming, apparently mostly his friends, and then he convinces his brother to come on the honeymoon with him–which gives him the idea, since he’s just been demoted or sideways assigned at work, to quit his job and spend a year traveling the world with his brother.

I mean, that’s the setup. He goes into flashback a bit about his relationship and his job and does a bit of self-reflection. He seems to come from money, and his job out of school was in the political realm, so about ten years into his career, he’s a highly paid and very connected Californian (Republican) lobbyist for the Irvine Corporation which is the major developer behind Irvine, California. He met his fiancé in Washington when he was working for a member of Congress and she was a graphic designer. From the flashbacks, it seems like he was always in the driver’s seat of the relationship, making plans for the both of them–moving them to Seattle and then California and then pushing. When she began having panic attacks, he proposed, and she separated from him for a while, but when they got back together, the wedding was on again until it was not. He reflects, eventually, that he really had a template for life and she was a part of it, but he doesn’t express remorse, really.

So: They go to Europe; his brother, a part-time but successful realtor with a number of rental properties, buys a Saab because they will let you pick it up at the factory and insure it for six months if you want to take it on a tour of Europe with it. So they do, staying with friends in Prague and Moscow and then driving through Turkey to Syria, gaining entry with a photo of the author with George W. Bush (he also has one with Gore just in case–the election had not yet taken place). Then! They take a tour of southeast Asia with stops in Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other places. Followed by a tour of the southwest United States, briefly (not really depicted). Then a tour of South America, including Brazil, Venezuela, Peru (and Machu Picchu), and Trinidad. Then, wow, they’re famous, apparently, for the dispatches that the author has been sending to his ninety-seven-eight-nine-year-old step-(great?)-grandmother, who has been sharing them with the other residents of her nursing home–and they’ve appeared in the local papers and whatnot. So he gets a chance to go on a junket without his brother all paid for, and then he and his brother go to Africa, where they can go on safari and slag on white South Africans before wrapping up the book. The book interleaves interactions with the step-grandmother, and at the end, she dies and leaves he and his brother a bundle. He goes on to become a travel writer, and the back cover of this book says his brother and he are traveling for a new book.

I intended to, and I’m going to, count this book in the Vacation category because it’s somewhere between that and memoir–it’s not a travel book, for although it does talk about the places he goes, the places are a little in the background to him being in those places, reflecting on his life and the world in those places, and trying to reconnect with his younger brother in those places. I cannot say that I can really identify with the fellow–he’s traveling the world from a place of fiscal security and, to be honest, confidence that I presume is borne of being positioned for and enjoying success at a high level. I mean, I would not try to talk my way across a border in the Middle East. Maybe I’ve ended up like a dog that’s been beat too much–not sure what percentage of my life just covering up, but it’s probably measurable. But I digress.

At any rate, an interesting book, at any rate. A bit rushed in the ending–the Africa trip is given pretty short shrift–but I’m not likely to seek out the sequels.

And, oh, how the world has changed in 25 years.

Ah, gentle reader, you are correct. It was quiet around here for a couple of days. You might have panicked, if you even visited Monday through Wednesday at all, thinking that I, like Wirecutter or Animal, had hung it up or drastically reduced the output. Oh, but no such luck for those relying on the Chinese Large Language Models training themselves up on the inanity that this site has provided over the last twenty-three (almost) years–if your legal brief prefixes with the clause “As the Philosopher says” while quoting a Richard Marx song, it’s as good as a watermark–I have not quit. But I did take a little trip down to Branson.

But, Brian J.! you exclaim. Didn’t you just take a trip to Florida? I did! That, as I mentioned, was a “marketing package” from a timeshare company which we’d booked early in 2024 and had to use by January 2026, so we had to use it.

This trip, though, was one of my beautiful wife’s “annual retreats” where she books a couple days in a resort in Branson in the off-season and uses the quiet (which means no boys to distract her) to work on self-improvement or focus on her Web sites, conference talks, or whatnot. As my contracts are currently in abeyance for the holidays (hopefully are in abeyance and not have ended), she invited me along. So I went.

We were booked in a one bedroom unit in (The) Falls Village just south of Branson’s main area. I put (The) in parentheses because the resort name appears both with and without the article throughout the property. It’s an older property, decently kept up (subject to change since another bigger, snazzier timeshare company has bought it and seems to be focusing its attention on the snazzier properties owned by the previous company). It has an indoor pool and hot tub, a small fitness center, and is walkable to some places (a cat cafe, a diner that serves live country music with its breakfasts).

However, we spent most of the time in the unit (as planned). For starters, one of her current engagements required a lot of her attention (four hours a day), so it was almost just working remotely from remoter in her case. Secondly, Branson is in the off-season: After the Christmas shows close right after the first of the year, the shows go into remission until sometime in March or April, when travelers (not the Roma sort) start making their journeys again and there’s tourist revenue to earn. Some of the indoor attractions are still open, maybe catering to the occasional field trips and safe from the weather, but we’ve been to the most interesting of them. And, finally, we were not eating out at the restaurants that did not also close because we are doing the Whole 30 diet yet (now on day 87, it seems, but just day nine).

So she worked, and I spent most of three days on the unit’s sofa, reading books (unlike the trip to Florida, where I read magazines to discard). So I got a good head start on the Winter Reading Challenge (although a Facebook memory from last year indicates I was through with six books by this time last year, whereas I am only through three and several fractions).

We did take two walks along Table Rock Lake in the state park on a couple of days, and I did hit the fitness center (what to do with only dumbells up to 50 pounds? Reverse pyramids, my boy, reverse pyramids.) in between, but mostly reading.

I did kind of feel bad because all I was doing was relaxing, and she had to work. She, on the other hand, worried I was not having fun because she was working. We reached an uneasy truce of sorts where we assured each other it was all right, but hoped it was so.

So, a couple notes about Branson in the off season:

• The Walmart and the grocery were on lean mixtures. Without the tourists visiting, they had thinner stock than we expected, especially in meat. Normally, we go to the grocery for groceries and the Walmart for sundries, but the thin meat selection sent us to the Walmart (next door) for meat, and we discovered the Walmart is an old-style Walmart with a very thin grocery section. But we got provisions.
   
• Without tourists, the locals were about the only people about. And the locals are about what you would expect from small towns in Missouri but leavened with some foreigners, perhaps guest workers idling until the season resumes or fortunate guest workers who have year-round employment at the hotels and resorts which are still open.
   
• The resort was really quiet. The building we were in has at least 18 units (some are connectible units which are often booked together, but 18 individual rooms are available) on each floor and three floors. To my Ennglish major math, that’s 54 units total. The first night we were there, only three cars were parked by it (by the night before we left, it was up to six or seven cars, but still not very many people). Additionally, the room was very quiet. Nogglestead generally has some background noise–we’re running laundry all day, the dishwasher is going, the downstairs fridge and freezer run their compressors, and the upstairs refrigerator, which has long had a rattling compressor fan, has recently developed more of a rattle and runs very frequently, so the coils are likely dirty and/or frozen (ask me about it in a couple of days, when I will have fixed it or incapacitated our main refrigerator).

  Although we did some laundry, the laundry was in the vestibule between our unit and the “studio” unit which could connect to ours to make a two bedroom unit. We ran the dishwasher after every meal (prepared in-room), and the utility closet provided an intermittent rattle, but for the most part, the room was silent. We did not bring a bluetooth speaker, and the television did not offer its speakers via bluetooth and offered no music channels, so we could not play music. Just…. A lot of silence.
   

The weather was unseasonably warm–highs in the upper 60s and low 70s–so it did not feel like winter at all. It was very odd.

At any rate, it was a nice trip; definitely less stressful than flying (and having to get up at 3am to drive an hour to fly). A working washer and dryer (and no complaining offspring) made for a better trip than this summer (and I didn’t try to work on a hotspot, although it was probably better in Branson proper–my wife did it).

I was eager to come back home, though, and as I mentioned, this year’s theme is Get away from the damned desk. So far, so good.