When people find out that I’m a retired English teacher, they sometimes assume that I read a lot and ask me what kind of books I like. I tell them that I like good books. I’m not trying to be a smart-ass. I’m serious: I don’t have one set genre. I just like the good books from different genres.
Some readers like specific genres and will read (almost) anything in their favorite genres, but not me. After a few books of any genre or author, I get bored and move on for a while. In the 1970s, I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but I got bored with most fantasy. I read I,Robot and a couple Foundation books by Isaac Asimov, but I didn’t care for much science fiction. I read a couple Louis L’amour westerns but not many (and there were many to choose from).
I noticed my tendency in the 1980s when I stopped reading Needful Things by Stephen King. I had read several Stephen King books before, but I quit several in a row after Needful Things. I finished It (the book) though. I almost didn’t read It, but word-of-mouth was so high on the book that I thought I was missing something. It (the book) wasn’t bad (except for THAT scene… if you know what I mean). As I was reading, I wondered why so many people thought this book stood out so much.
Then I remembered that I’m different. I forget that sometimes.
In the 1990s I read a couple John Grisham legal thrillers (The Firm and Something Else). I read a couple John Sandford Prey novels, but I don’t remember their titles: I don’t think there was a Lettuce Prey. I even got through a couple long-winded Tom Clancy military thrillers (they were okay if you skimmed through the tech jargon and laughed at the dialogue).
Sometimes I think that I should have more high brow tastes since I was an English teacher. Then I remember that I was a public school teacher. Oh yeah, public school. Low brow taste is fine.
Anyway, “good” is a good answer to a lot of questions dealing with matters of taste.
“What kind of movies do you like?”
“Good movies.”
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Good music.”
“What kind of food do you like?”
“Good food.”
When I answer “Good” to these types of questions, I need to be prepared to clarify my answer. If I’m not willing to clarify, then I’ll sound like I’m just being a prick (which is a plausible interpretation of my behavior). Since I’m primarily a book blogger, I’m just focusing on books here.
Even though I usually don’t read more than three books by any given author, there are exceptions. I’ll read almost anything Bernard Cornwell publishes. Yeah, he uses the same formula for most of his books, but it’s a good formula. I like his formula. He just takes the same formula, uses it multiple times for one character and time period in a bunch of books. Then he takes the same formula and uses it for another character and time period multiple times.
I’ve accidentally read a couple of Bernard Cornwell’s books more than once because it took me over a hundred pages to realize that I’d read it before. I like his formula so much that I don’t care if I’ve read the same book over and over again.
If you ask me who my favorite author is, though, I probably wouldn’t say “Bernard Cornwell.” I just say I don’t have one so that I don’t get pinned down to one author. I don’t even recommend Bernard Cornwall to everybody. He just has discovered the formula that I like the most in novels. Maybe that should make him my favorite author. Maybe he is my favorite author, and I’m just too stubborn to admit it.
My unpredictable taste helps me to be aware of a variety of books because I’m never sure if I’m going to like a book before I start to read. I start many books, but I finish very few. Except for ‘good’ books. I sometimes finish reading those.
Here is a ‘good’ book that I finished writing. Then I finished reading it. It’s called The Sunset Rises, A 1990s Romantic Comedy, and you can find it here on Amazon!!
Or you can buy it below from the ‘trunk of my car.’
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. Free delivery in the United States!
$10.00
Last week, I published one possible introduction to my older brother’s 1980s comic strip Dummo Mouse. Today’s comic strip also seems like an introduction but with a slower approach.
Unlike my brother’s 1979 comic strip Calloway the Castaway, Dummo Mouse has never been published anywhere, not even in a local weekly newspaper. My brother drew these over 40 years ago, and you’re one of the first people to read this, other than a few family members and friends and a few agents for syndicated comic strip artists back in the early 1980s.
Haha! I just noticed that my brother left out an apostrophe in the first panel.
To be continued! Come back next week for Dummo Mouse and the Daily Strip!
First of all, no dogs are going to die in this story. I might mention a dog or two that died or got killed over the years this story takes place, but it won’t be something that I witnessed, so I won’t write a scene about it. Keep in mind, though, that this story takes place 50 years ago. I was ten-years-old at the time, so all the dogs mentioned in this story have probably died. If that bothers you, then don’t read any further.
If it’s any consolation, a lot of the people that I will mention in this story have died too, so, I mean, it’s not just the dogs.
Anyway, in August (I think) of 1975, my family moved to Sewanee, Tennessee, a small college town that’s home of The University of the South on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau. A lot of people have never heard of Sewanee but are more familiar with nearby Monteagle, which is about halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga. My dad had just retired after twenty years in the United States Air Force and had decided to become an Episcopal priest, so he was attending seminary school in Sewanee. It was a weird transition, seeing my dad go from a military guy to a priest guy, but that’s not what this story is about. People aren’t interested in that. People are usually more interested in the dogs.
And Sewanee had a lot of dogs. Many of those dogs were strays, and the two dogs that my family eventually adopted hung out in a place called Abbo’s Alley.
Abbo’s Alley was a wooded area next to some of the dorms (I think). A creek separated the two sections, and a stone bridge was the best way to cross it unless you wanted to take a risk jumping from one side of the creek to the other on a dry day. For a while, a large tree trunk hung over the creek, and kids (along with an occasional adult) would walk or crawl across it, just to do it. I’m sure somebody fell off that trunk at some point, but I never saw it happen. It probably wasn’t that far of a drop anyway.
I’m not sure how long Abbo’s Alley was. For a fifth grader, it felt like maybe a mile or two. It was probably just 100 yards with a few minor turns. As far as width goes, it only took a few minutes to go from the dorms to the bridge to the first set of regular houses on the opposite side. That’s why it was called an alley. I don’t know who Abbo was. The internet didn’t exist back then (well, maybe the military had it, but I didn’t). I could probably look it up now.
The story was that students in the dorms would adopt or feed a lot of the strays during the school semesters, so the dogs would hang around Abbo’s Alley. Since most of the strays were being fed by humans, these dogs were generally friendly to anybody who passed by. The problem was that in the summer, the students would leave, and the dogs would go hungry and then forage into the town’s trash bins or wander the mountainside or get killed on the highway leading into town. The highway was almost always littered with dog bodies.
‘Littered’ might be a strong word, but dead dogs were a common sight on the highway. You’d see the smart dogs looking both ways before crossing the highway and some of the busy streets (well… busy for Sewanee). The non-smart dogs probably didn’t last long during the summer. Mentioning the highway doesn’t count as a scene where a dog dies in this story.
Since my family arrived in August before the college students returned, the neighborhood where we lived was a common hangout for these emaciated strays. We lived maybe a quarter mile from one end of Abbo’s Alley (the end that was near the football field), and it was natural for the dogs to wander down a paved street into our neighborhood. I said ‘paved’ street for a reason, and I’ll get to that later.
My new neighborhood had a bunch of kids my age, and one of the first rules I learned was that you didn’t feed the strays. If you fed the strays, they said, the strays would get attached to you and never leave you alone. You didn’t feed the stray(s) unless you intended to adopt the dog(s).
Well… of course, I fed some strays. But I’ll get to that in the next episode.
For more of my childhood stories that took place in Sewanee (though the setting will be more ambiguous), see the following:
The Tale of the Almost-Expired Milk
Childhood Ghost Story- The Prologue (This one mentions one of the dogs that will be introduced later.)
4th of July Story: The Box of M-80s
*****
No dogs were harmed in the writing of my one novel The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. And no dogs are harmed in the novel either. Of course, you can find The Sunset Rises, A 1990s Romantic Comedy here on Amazon!!
Or you can buy it below from the ‘trunk of my car.’
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. Free delivery in the United States!
$10.00
After a short time on the East Coast, my older brother moved to Texas where he got married and messed around with several comic strip ideas as he worked and took care of his kids (short version). This was back in the early 1980s when four-panel comic strips were a big deal, and cartoonists had to get syndicated in order to get published regionally/nationally in newspapers (please don’t make me explain what newspapers were).
My brother’s dream was to be a syndicated cartoonist, and throughout the 1980s he worked on several comic strip ideas while he also juggled work and family. My favorite of these strips was Dummo Mouse. This isn’t the first Dummo Mouse comic strip that my brother drew, but it’s a good introduction.
By the way, my older brother is still alive and well. I just used the past tense when it comes to cartooning because he doesn’t draw that much anymore. Maybe he’ll pick things up again. We’ll see.
*****
Come back next Sunday for more Dummo Mouse and Friends!
And to read my older brother’s long-lost 1979 comic strip, start here at The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 1!
I self-published my one-and-only novel The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy about a year ago, and the most favorable comments I get are about the cover. That makes sense. Even people who don’t read the book will see the cover. Even people who didn’t care for the book too much said positive stuff about the cover.
Don’t get me wrong. A lot of people have made positive comments about the content of my book as well, but I know The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy isn’t for everyone. In fact, it can actually be a little polarizing.
After I was finished writing and revising and revising, I had no idea what I wanted in the cover because all I was interested in was trying to write a decent novel when I’m not a novelist. As far as the cover was concerned, I just wanted something that might stand out a little bit. I figured I’d look at iconic covers and see if there was something I could rip-off from one of them. For a few weeks, I scoured book sites and stared at hundreds of famous book covers, but the cover of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a novel that I had sitting on my book shelf, stood out to me the most.
The dancing outline, I thought. I could rip-off the dancing outline.
In fact, I could have two outlines, a hot chick outline dancing crazy and dude outline watching her. I’m not sure my hand drawn outline comes across as an attractive woman, though. I’m not an artist. Even some professional artists can’t draw attractive women very well, so I don’t feel bad about my artwork. I still consider my older brother the artist in the family.
Actually, my uncle is “the” artist in my family, but that’s for another blog post.
I also threw in some editing marks in the title since the main character is an English teacher. I was pretty sure the editing marks would be distracting and confusing, but this was a rough draft cover, and I always include some bad ideas in my rough drafts.
I went to the website 99Designs and sent in my artwork (or whatever that is) to a designer named Setz who always responded within 24 hours (that’s a big deal to me. I don’t expect an immediate response; 24 hours is good). This was the first cover design.
This was the right track, I thought. The editing marks definitely didn’t work, so I asked to see just a normal title.
Much better. But I wondered if the dancing female looked more 1950s or 1960s than 1990s, so I asked for an “updated” version.
Yes! Then I asked for a lower case ‘s’ in ‘1990s’ so that the ‘s’ didn’t look like a 5. And I asked for the color to be filled in a little more. I might have been getting nitpicky at that point, but Setz still came through within 24 hours.
This was it! I was happy.
Oh yeah! I can’t forget the back and front cover spread.
Of course, you can find The Sunset Rises, A 1990s Romantic Comedy here on Amazon!!
Or you can buy it below from the ‘trunk of my car.’
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. Free delivery in the United States!
$10.00
And for more about The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy…
The Main Character Of My Novel Is Not A Simp!
At Least I Know That My Book Doesn’t Suck!
Why Did I Write A Romantic Comedy When I Don’t Read or Watch Romantic Comedies?
Yeah, even I have to admit that this ending is a bit anti-climactic.
That’s it! No full-cast goodbye cartoon. No explanation of what happened to Captain Calloway. The last we see of Captain Calloway in this episode, we don’t even see him. In fact, we haven’t actually seen Captain Calloway since Episode 21. What a rip-off! Even Charlie Brown was treated better than this. Poor Captain Calloway.
Anyway, my older brother left our hometown and moved to the East Coast in the middle of 1979 for a new job that didn’t work out for very long, and he never continued Calloway the Castaway. He didn’t stop cartooning, though. And I’ll get to his next phase of cartooning next week.
Long live Calloway the Castaway!
For more Calloway the Castaway, back when he was treated with respect, start at The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 1!
Not sure what’s going on? Read the current storyline with Captain Calloway’s final physical appearance from the beginning below.
The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 20 .
And come back next week for the first episode of… Dummo Mouse!?!?
I have a disagreement with Artificial Intelligence. It started when I typed the question “Is ‘crap’ a bad word?” into a search engine, and the following response came up at the top of the page:
My first thought was, “I disagree. You suck, A.I.”
My second thought was, “How can ‘crap’ be a bad word when “it essentially means ‘nonsense’ or ‘rubbish'”?
Most bad words have to do with bodily functions, sexual references/body parts, or outright curses/slurs. ‘Crap’ refers to garbage. Its only connection to other bad words is that ‘crap’ has four letters in it, so people think of it as one of the four-letter words.
Even ‘crap’s etymology shows that centuries ago ‘crappe’ meant garbage. It’s not the same thing as the word ‘sh*t.’ (I don’t know why I still self-censor stuff on my own blog when everybody knows what I mean). Even worse, the A.I. answer was incomplete because it leaves out an explanation of the necessary components of a bad word. This is Incomplete Artificial Intelligence, otherwise known as I.A.I.
Another problem with the A.I.’s answer is that it makes people’s opinions part of the equation. ‘Crap’ is a bad word because people say it’s a bad word. That’s the type of gibberish that leads to fluff philosophical beliefs like “perception is reality” when, in reality, reality is reality, and individual perceptions by themselves are wrong most of the time.
To be fair to A.I. (I don’t know if I have to be fair to a computer program), it did state that ‘crap’ is “considered a mild swear word or vulgar slang.” It did NOT outright say that ‘crap’ was a bad word. So now we have A.I. hedging its beliefs. This is just getting worse. I didn’t ask if ‘crap’ was considered a bad word. I asked if it actually is. Artificial Intelligence. Pffft.
I grew up believing that ‘crap’ was a bad word and that it meant ‘waste or feces,’ but when I looked up the etymology of ‘crap’ in a dictionary years ago, I realized that I had been wrong all that time. And I was glad that I was wrong. I like saying ‘crap.’ And since more people will trust A.I than will trust me, I want A.I. to agree with me.
Unfortunately, A.I. sucks. But at least A.I. knows that it sucks.
Here’s the blog post that inspired my question to A.I.:
*****
A.I. did not write my ONE novel! I wrote it all by myself, and you can find it here on Amazon!!
Or you can buy it below from the ‘trunk of my car.’
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. Free delivery in the United States!
$10.00
More related blog posts:
Don’t Change the Meaning of Literally
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton might be the BEST YA NOVEL EVER!!! When The Outsiders was published in 1967, Young Adult fiction didn’t really exist. Bookstores didn’t have YA sections. All the books that weren’t meant for adults were in a kids’ section. If you were a teenager looking for a ‘good’ book, you wouldn’t find it in the kids’ section. If you wanted the good stuff, you had to read what the adults read.
I’m not saying that The Outsiders changed that, but The Outsiders helped. It’s a good book (that’s my book review). I recommend it (that’s a bonus to my book review). Almost everybody likes The Outsiders.
I even liked teaching The Outsiders with my 8th grade students before I retired. The students generally enjoyed The Outsiders (though they weren’t always wild about the essay assignments that came with it), and the book has enough literary weight to justify it being in the curriculum. I appreciated the literary references, and I had fun explaining why Pony Boy read Great Expectations while Johnny liked Gone With The Wind and Darry read The Carpetbaggers. Haha. The Carpetbaggers. Haha. You ought to see what I think about The Carpetbaggers .
S.E. Hinton wrote a bunch of books as an adult, and none of them that I’ve read come anywhere close to the depth and details that The Outsiders had. I’m not going to go into those details too much because it would be wasted effort. Hardly anybody would read all of it, and anybody who has read S.E. Hinton books probably knows what I’m talking about. Plus, I don’t care enough to make that kind of effort. I’m just wondering.
I’m treating this like I treated the argument about who was more important to the creation of Marvel Comics in the 1960s, Stan Lee or Jack Kirby. I just looked at what Jack Kirby created by himself and what Stan Lee created by himself, and I had my answer. With S.E., we can look at The Outsiders, which she allegedly (I’m kidding) wrote when she was around 16, and then look at all the novels she wrote as an adult, and we can see the difference.
I’m not saying that S.E. Hinton DIDN’T write The Outsiders. I just wonder if maybe somebody possibly helped her out and wasn’t credited. Maybe it was Truman Capote (that’s a To Kill A Mockingbird joke). Maybe it was someone else in the book publishing business. I don’t know who it was. And if she had help, that person should get some credit. Then again, that might damage the ‘story’ that a 16 year-old girl wrote this, and the publishing world can’t have that. It’s a good ‘story.’
Even if S.E. Hinton didn’t write The Outsiders by herself, I wouldn’t think of SE Hinton as ‘fake’ like some people think Helen Keller was ‘fake’ or the the moon landing was ‘fake.’ Even if Helen Keller didn’t really accomplish everything she was said to have accomplished (it WAS in a movie, and movies never embellish the truth), it still makes a cool story. Even if the U.S. never put men on the moon, it was a cool story, and it gave the U.S. a win when it needed one. In some situations, you don’t mess with a good ‘story.’
I’m not trying to bash S.E. Hinton or outright make accusations. I know what happens to people who go against the ‘story.’ They’re called ‘crazy.’ They ‘commit suicide.’ Even worse, the algorithm shuts them down. And 50 years later, people(sometimes, not always) look back and think ‘maybe that loon had a point.’
And remember, asking a question is not the same thing as making an accusation. I’m not accusing S.E. Hinton of secretly having help writing The Outsiders. I’m just curious about the disparity in quality between the The Outsiders and the novels she wrote as an adult. I’m just asking the question. I’m just wondering.
I SAID I’M NOT ACCUSING HER OF ANYTHING!!!
Here’s my ONE novel! I wrote it all by myself (you know what I mean), and you can find it here on Amazon!!
Or you can buy it below from the ‘trunk of my car.’
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. Free delivery in the United States!
$10.00
I get the feeling that my older brother doesn’t really like these comic strips that he drew for our local weekly newspaper back in 1979. For years, he thought he had lost these until he accidentally found them stuffed in some old boxes stored in his garage, but he didn’t seem very excited to have been reunited with them.
The newspaper clippings that he’d taped together were yellowed from age and exposure to extreme temperatures. The originals had been folded in a disorganized pile and tossed into a box. Several originals (like today’s episode) were lost altogether. He definitely had not handled them with care.
Then again, these might have been packed by his ex-wife.
For more “Calloway the Castaway,” start at The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 1!
Not sure what’s going on? Read the current storyline from the beginning below!
The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 20
The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 21
The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 22
The Lost Adventures of “Calloway The Castaway” Episode 23
The Lost Adventures of “Calloway The Castaway” Episode 24
The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 25
The Lost Adventures of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 26
And come back next week for The Last Adventure of “Calloway the Castaway” Episode 28.
This probably isn’t the best pair of books to read at the same time.
Both Shogun by James Clavell and The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough are historical epic novels from decades ago. Shogun was published in 1975 at 1210 paperback pages. The First Man In Rome was published in 1990 at 935 paperback pages. The First Man in Rome also has 140 pages of glossary that I didn’t include in my page count. Shogun has no glossary. Shogun paralleled 1970s fascination with East Asian culture. The First Man in Rome paralleled Western culture’s general fascination with the Roman Empire.
Shogun is easy for me to read. It’s more like an adventure novel than a historical drama. I read Shogun almost 50 years ago when I was in eighth grade, just before the NBC mini-series began. The First Man in Rome is a slog (for me). I’ve attempted it three times and have never finished it. I started it a few months ago, and I’m stuck on page 627. I’m much more interested in the Roman Empire than I am in Japanese culture before the influence of the West, so I should be enjoying The First Man In Rome more. I probably should have already finished it by now. I’m only a few hundred pages off.
Shogun is primarily a Westerner’s perspective of feudal Japan’s culture, with doses of the Japanese characters’ thoughts and motivations. The First Man in Rome is almost like an insider’s look at ancient Roman life. Even though most of the characters are historical figures, the details of specific locations and everyday items is… kind of boring to a guy like me. Fans of The First Man in Rome are fascinated by the McCullough’s thoroughness, so I can’t complain about it. I know I should appreciate the details, but I get impatient for the author to get to the story.
When you’re done reading Shogun, that’s it. There’s not a sequel. You can watch two TV versions, one from last year on Amazon and one made for network television in 1980. Clavell has some other great novels like Taipan, King Rat, and Noble House, but none of these are directly related to Shogun (as far as I know).
When you’re done reading The First Man in Rome, you have several more books in the series, including The Grass Crown, Fortune’s Favorites, Caesar’s Women, and maybe a couple others that I probably won’t get to. And if that’s not enough, the series Rome on HBO reminds some readers of McCullough’s Rome novels, but I haven’t read enough of her books to know if that comparison is really a comparison. The Rome series is good, though the second season was kind of rushed.
To me, the characters in Shogun are much more interesting. Each character is motivated by fear to some extent, knowing that decapitation or torture is one wrong move or wrong word away. The characters in The First Man in Rome are bland, motivated by their desires for greatness or belief in their destinies. There’s little tension in most scenes. Some of the details are interesting, but (to me) the scenes aren’t riveting. Even characters who suffer brutal deaths show little if any fear of what’s about to happen. Maybe the Romans were made of sterner stuff. Sterner than pre-Western Japanese culture? I doubt that.
I’m a little biased against The First Man in Rome because I want to see the Romans lose, but that’s not The First Man in Rome’s fault. Most readers don’t share my feelings.
I might not have enough time in my life to read a lot of books the size of Shogun or The First Man in Rome series, so I have to be picky. I’ll probably end up finishing both, but my preference so far is Shogun by James Clavell. The First Man in Rome is definitely high quality and worth reading, but the perspectives and pacing in Shogun make it more interesting to me.
What do you think? Which do you prefer? A high quality book that’s thoroughly detailed and historically accurate? Or a high quality book that moves quickly with lots of tension and action and drama?
And to read a book that is NOT a historical epic, get a copy of my ONE novel here on Amazon!!
Or you can get a signed copy from ‘the trunk of my car’ below.
The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy
Get a signed copy of my one and only novel, The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. Free delivery in the United States!
$10.00
And for more LIterary Combat…
Dr. Seuss vs. Stephen King! The Battle of the Self-Banned Books
Harry The Dirty Dog vs. Dirty, The Hairy Dog
Dysfunctional Literacy 