52. The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain by Eric Andrew-Gee

I am a regular patient at the Montreal Neurological hospital.  I didn't even really consciously know about its existence before I was diagnosed by them (very fortunately too) with a rare neurological disorder that falls under the category of Multifocal Neural Neuropathy (MNN).  I'm one in a hundred-thousand!  In my case, I am very, very fortunate.  First that it was caught quite early (I started noticing weakness in my right hand, a reduced shooting range with my jump shot and at its worst the inability to turn the ignition key in a car).  Second, that I am in Canada and where we have universal (sort of thanks to the neo-liberal fucks and incompetents in government constantly trying to destroy it) health care. And third that I live so close to the Neuro, because as it turns out, this is an amazing medical institution with an incredible history and an ongoing commitment to both research and care of their patients.  

I now go in once a month or so for IVig treatments where I get pumped full of expensive blood byproducts to get my antibodies to behave correctly and stop erroneously attacking my mylene (the sheathing that insulates your nerves).  Some of the damage is permanent (which manifests itself as a weakness in my pinky and ring finger on my dominant hand; many cases are much worse affecting both hands and feet and impacting walking and handling) but it appears that the disease has been stopped altogether.  It's super chill, I get a comfy chair and good wi-fi and just work and sometimes take a nap.  The nurses are elite and the other staff super efficient.  Everybody is really nice.  Not to mention Dr. Massive who identified the problem (after several misdiagnoses from other doctors).

So I have experienced firsthand the excellent of the Neuro from the great care and expertise that I have received and am receiving first hand.  But it is this book that taught me the history behind it.  I was looking forward to reading this book, but a bit skeptical as these kinds of less-than-academic histories tend to lack depth and bend the history towards narrative. I think there is a teeny bit of the latter here, but the historical context was very efficiently done.  What makes the book really effective, though, is that it is truly moving.  For this reader, it had the effect it intended, which was to elevate the unsung partner of one of Canada's most famous doctors.

The hook is the famous Heritage Minute which most Canadians of a certain age featuring Dr. Penfield, the rock-star neurosurgeon who advanced the field massively in the 20th century.  Penfield is the known name but he began his career and worked closely with another doctor, William Cone.  Cone was the one who excelled at surgery and had the best bedside manner.  He obsessed over hygiene and technique as well as ensuring patients were emotionally taken care of.  Penfield was no slouch in these areas, but his real passion was in the research and writing, which Cone did not like.  Penfield was the charismatic one and Cone hitched himself to his star, seemingly driven by his love for is friend more than anything else.   

These kinds of journalistic histories are not usually my jam, so I was surprised by how well put together The Mind Mappers was.  It's a very readable, informative and ultimately quite touching telling of an important history of Canada, Montreal and science.  

51. The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

[written Nov 19, 2025 because I put off writing this for weeks as explained below.] 

Wow, I really hit a block with the 50 books blog for the first time in years!  The obvious cause is a recent head-first plunge into the world of tabletop role-playing games, but I wonder if there is a deeper fatigue at play that has allowed/enabled me to avoid writing book reviews for almost two months.

Very briefly, I played RPGs back in the 80s when D&D first exploded and then stopped with adolescence and other social pursuits.  I got pulled back in in the late '90s and then got deep into it (online fights and everything) in the early aughts and then dropped out again with the birth of my own child.  

During the pandemic, my friend groups and I were having regular zoom calls and decided to start a 5e game online.  We have been playing sporadically but consistently since then.  Something happened a few months ago where I got sucked way back in and am now demonstrating all the classic behaviours of the true addict (online talking about it way too much, buying all kinds of beautiful books, playing in a second group locally and in one shots online; it's bad!).

So to slowly drag this back to actual reading, I've been spending most of my reading time, reading game books, which you don't usually read linearly (they have rules, settings, etc. it would be kind of like reading an encyclopedia straight through).  I did actually read one from beginning to end and I will count that in this blog, but overall my reading has fallen way off.

Before the sickness truly set in, I did read this second Tarzan.  Somebody somewhere recommended this one and The Jungle Tales of Tarzan as particularly good and I found both of them in Vancouver.  I did enjoy The Return of Tarzan overall, but had mixed feelings.  First of all, with Burroughs, one has to account for the racism and eugenics.  It's less present here just because the first half of the book takes place in Europe so less opportunity for him to describe the various disadvantages of the non-whites.  But it goes hard in the second half.  It's bad and I condemn it but I'm still going to read the books.

To me as a reader, the literary problem with Burroughs is that he has a lot of potential with the Tarzan concept and he just kind of barfs it all over the page.  His miraculous education and rise to the role of gentlemen (due to his racial superiority of course which is intrinsically tied to class in Burrough's world) makes Tarzan a great vehicle for the contrast between the stiff laws of civilization and the powerful release of the savage.  You need to build this up gradually, though, and use it sparingly at the right moments.  Instead, Tarzan is just kicking the shit out of groups of people multiple times right away, while, super annoyingly, never actually killing the one serious bad guy.  It's just so bald that Burroughs is keeping the Russian spy alive to maintain a central narrative, but he does it by violating the the rules of Tarzan's own character.  It's bad.

On top of that, there are all these convoluted plot lines which ensure that Tarzan and Jane won't get together.  They literally pass each other on separate ships in the night.  I've avoided the plot this whole time.  Basically, the first half is in Europe and involves said Russian spy doing bad shit to a rich guy.  Then they all go to Africa and get shipwrecked and Tarzan comes to rescue them.

Before he can rescue them, though, we get the main plot of the second half which is Tarzan going back to the tribal village in his old stomping grounds and defending them against Arab slave raiders.  Here the book gets really fun.  It's almost Conan the Barbarian territory; real pulp stuff.  He discovers an ancient city filled with gold and these weird pygmy descendants from space who were once purebred but got all corrupted with time or some shit.  The hilarious part is their queen is still super hot and genetically pure and she saves Tarzan from being sacrificed because she is hot for him.  It's quite wacky and super entertaining and with a bit of tweaking could be a cool origin story for the Kingdom of Wakanda.

 

 

50. A Chill Rain in January by L.R. Wright

50 books achieved. I guess it's a good sign that I don't make a big deal out of my 50th book anymore.  Like a succesful athlete, not too high, not too low.  Just keep grinding.  Still, satisfying.

I picked this one up at the family home which may not be so much longer as we were there to move our mother to assisted living. I "discovered" L.R. Wright on my own only a few years ago, but now realize that my parents must have been reading her books at the time they came out as we have a few of her paperbacks floating around in the study.

A Chill Rain in January is the fourth or fifth book in the series, and I think it may have been a bit more fulfilling had I been reading them in order.  There are two major plotlines in the mystery that collide.  The first and the main character is Zoe Strachan, a beautiful sociopath who lives on her own outside of Sechelt with a perfectly controlled life until her spendthrift older brother comes to blackmail her for money.  He has her "scribblers", notebooks where she reveals her true inhuman self and evidently admits to some actual crimes.  At the same time, Ramona Orlitzki, an old woman loved by the community escapes from the hospital where she has recently been committed because of her oncoming dementia.

It's a nice premise and the characters are well-conceived.  Unfortunately, I found the actual storyline frustrating.  The suspense is extended multiple times due to incompetence among multiple characters, incompetence that is never called out and so it is left unresolved.  The officer hunting for Ramona doesn't look in her closet when he goes to her old home.  This is never really mentioned as an error.  The coroner finds strange injuries on the murder victim and Sergeant Elberg, who is the main character of the entire series, totally brushes them off. Worse, when he finally cottons on that there is something suspicious going on, the coroner then seems to try to contradict that.  It's inconsistent and frustrating. And it keeps going right up to the climactic conclusion where the mailman is given the crucial evidence and just dumps it off at the police station instead of taking it right to the top.  Finally, when they do figure it out, they wait until the next day which allows for a major out for everybody (being vague here for spoiler alerts).  All this incompetence leads to two unnecessary deaths and should lead to a major scandal and one would hope an investigation into the RCMP in Sechelt (of course, all the Mounties would be exonerated since we all know how that goes in Canada but there should have at least been some official murmurings).

The physical locations, the weather and the trees and water were all well-written and did remind me of my own childhood and that is why I read these.  What was missing, though, from this one, is the human culture of coastal B.C.  This could have taken place almost anywhere.  I'm hoping this was an exception from the rule for this series. 

 

49. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

My sister forced me to read this.  She is a bit like a male nerd in that way but only sporadically and she does have good taste (she got me to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas years back) so I acquiesced.  I had read A House for Mr. Biswas in the pre-50 Books days and loved it, so felt it wasn't going to be a challenge to read this one, despite it being a bit high-falutin compared to my usual reading choices.  It's actually a fairly "intellectual" book.  Though very well-written, it's much slower to get through than Mr. Biswas.  There is a lot of inner reflection, both personal and political and ideas that take some parsing and re-reading.  So it took me a while.  On top of it, I am fully back into the Tabletop RPG community (Discord seems to have become the replacement for the old forums) and had a major life task (moving our mother into assisted living) both of which contributed to inconsistent reading.  I finally banged out the last third in a night of jetlag insomnia.

It's the story of Salim, an Indian African (African Indian?) who was born and raised in the coast of Africa but is given a small goods store up the river.  Here he half-heartedly tries to start a new life away from his family compound and culture amidst the political and social turmoil of post-independence central Africa.  Everybody knows the book takes place in the Congo and the Big Man is Mobuto but they are never specifically mentioned by name in the book.

I won't go into any depth because there is a lot to write and discuss that has been done already by smarter and more diligent people.  I would like to focus on one element relevant to today's collapse into authoritarianism, which is the protagonist's strange passivity and listlessness in the face of the changes around him and his community.  We know that really bad shit is coming down and he sort of does as well.  So it's a bit dissonant as a reader to see Salim basically just putting one foot in front of the other.  What finally knocks him out of his malaise is a woman, who gives him an image of another world (basically cool Europe) but even this doesn't really create much initiative in him.  What Naipaul succeeds in here is demonstrating how difficult it is for people who come up in such an old and solid reality to conceive of alternatives to that reality (positive or negative) let alone acting on such alternatives, even when it may be a question of survival.

Salim's family has been in Africa for generations and though not of Africa, they are as thoroughly fundamental to the social fabric as the indigenous Africans (and less-indigenous Arabs).  When the institutions around them begin to collapse with the end of colonialism, they can only shrink into themselves.  There is also an element of privilege, where their role as "foreigners" with greater wealth and status as well as some contacts outside of Africa delays the impact of the real horrors to them compared to the Africans (who also have also suffered the horrors of colonialism and are thus in a sense already living after the apocalypse).  

But the horrors are coming, just like they are coming to us right now.  And I see the same sort of stunned stolidness in my American friends.  But what are they to do?  You still have your job that you have to go to, taxes you have to pay and the real bad shit is happening to people you don't know just down the road.  So they cling to the fading promise of already broken institutions like "mid-term elections" and "courts" when they should probably be trying to emigrate to Europe and start a new life before the shit really hits the fan.  That is the major part of the success of the criminals taking over America right now: while they destroy all the elements that made America such a great political experiment, they maintain the ones that allow for day-to-day living and comfort, supported by the shitbags in business and tech.  A Bend in the River really gets into the head of that mentality.

I also have to add that there is a scene of misogyny and gender relations in the book that is so bad and craven and deeply dishonest that it almost risks in undermining the entire enterprise. He beats the woman with which he is having an affair quite brutally and then does some other really sick things.  This portrayed in a book is not in and of itself a sin, as these things happen.  But it feels dishonest here, a forced and artificial narrative device to demonstrate some turning point in the protagonist's thinking which completely renders the woman character a device only and also tries to justify Naipaul's own behaviour (he beat up his girlfriend in real life).  We get this nasty shit in many of the mid-century men's books I read and I abhor it there, but it is usually more "I slapped her and she finally got horny" nonsense.  When literary people do it, they often take it to the next level of grossness.  It's a bad look and undermined much of Naipaul's reputation later and deservedly so.

48. Survival Margin by Charles Eric Maine

I believe this was given to me by a friend who knows I like PA. I thought it was American at first, but quickly realized this is a British author. It's actually not PA, but rather A or whatever the term is called for the sub-genre where the world is actually falling apart.  In this case it is a virus, particularly well-constructed with a bunch of science that sounded more or less legitimate for 1968.  Basically, the virus called AB causes a person to get a fever and then die with in a day or two after which their skin melts off.  This concept seemed disgusting and interesting at the beginning, but then gets totally abandoned and has no impact on any of the issues of dealing with the bodies or people dying at home, etc. I point this out now, because Survival Margin while overall being a a fun look at a world ripped in half by disease, also omits or is sloppy and inconsistent about a lot of fun details. 

The virus has a counterpart called BA that mirrors it but only gives you a slight fever for a day and then you become immune.  But a BA person is also a carrier of AB.  About half the people get AB and die and the other half live, so the premise is that basically half the world is going to die.  The powers that be in England decided to create a bunch of armed and sealed underground bunkers (another sloppy lack of detail because they never really explain how this airborne and waterborne virus wouldn't also get into the bunkers if not already there) to protect their top leaders.  This causes civil unrest that eventually becomes a full-on class divided civil war.  The big picture is fun.

The anchoring narrative is between two main characters: the charming and successful soulless journalist/TV producer Clive Brant and his principled disease scientist wife Pauline.  Right at the beginning, as they reunite after a long absence (she was in Japan fighting the early stages of the disease), he announces that he wants a divorce because he is now seeing the much younger daughter of an American media mogul who is giving him a plum job to run his new new studio.  I saw coming that their narrative was going to be some kind of morale on marriage and relationships throughout the book and it kind of bummed me out.  Felt like the author was working out his own boring relationship issues and getting in the way of the disease apocalypse we came for.  

The disease itself was interestingly close in many ways to Covid.  It's totally ramped up in speed and impact (basically going to kill half the humans on the planet in a few years), so the scale is different. It starts in Asia (though the scientists surmise because of a mutation of cells from nuclear testing, not jumping from animals). Many of the quarantine measures are similar and the working classes suffering and having to keep working while the privileged get to shelter were also thematically reminiscent.  Things here, though, go much further, with most of Souther England taken over by a semi-organized revolution of working class men led by a charismatic MP.  The second half has lots of violence and military combat and was quite action-packed and Clive and Pauline are of course re-united this time with him as an interrogator for the rebels and she as a captured establishment POW scientist.  He has opportunity to redeem his previously selfish character and does so in a way that was sort of tiresome and predictable.  This made for a lot of start and stop reading as I would get into the action and then get annoyed.

Another flaw is that there is a lot of telling rather than showing.  In the early stages of the spread of the disease, Maine just narrates how it is spreading in Asia with rumours of mass graves.  It made me remember the opening scenes of The Stand with the truck barrelling into the gas station and dude coming out vomiting blood.  Just so much more alive and visceral while giving you basically the same info.  Still, the telling is pretty cool and I have to credit Maine with some interesting speculation about what would happen with a disease that kills half the population.

I'm critical and would not encourage everyone to seek this book out, but it's overall not a bad read and I think worthy of inclusion in any disaster/disease subgenre reader to seek out.

 

47. The Big Bite by Charles Williams

Helpful hint for the hopelessly distracted. If you ever take a train trip, don't bring a laptop.  You will get a lot more reading done.

When I first started this, I became concerned that I had already read it.  The protagonist is a professional football player who got into a car accident that smashed his leg.  When he healed, he was mostly fine, but had lost the explosiveness that made him the player that he was.  A previous Charles Williams I had read, A Touch of Death, also starred an ex-football player who gets caught up in criminal shenanigans with a femme fatale.  However, after some checking, I confirmed that this was indeed a different novel.

He quits football and is a bit lost and down on his luck.  The accident was not his fault; a drunk driver sideswiped him and knocked him off the road. That driver had died in the accident and the insurance paid Halan 10k, but it wouldn’t cover his potential future salary loss as a pro player.  Things change when he gets a call from an insurance investigator named Purvis.  Something was fishy about the accident and he wants to pick Halan’s brains.  Purvis is a neat side character, an old skinny weak looking guy with sharp eyes who it turns out knows some kind of martial art (as Halan learns when he tries to brace him).  He also no longer works for the insurance company and is working a blackmail deal on the wife of the dead driver and wants to bring Halan in on it.  I’ll stop here with the narrative in case you read it.  You can well imagine that shit gets complicated.

Halan is smart and ruthless, almost without any feeling at all.  It’s weird to read a book and sympathize with the character and slowly realize that he is the asshole jock who is only looking out for himself.  You figure this out gradually, through the words of the widow, Julia Cannon, who is one of the better femme fatales I have encountered in a while.  She too is quite ruthless, but also philosophical, almost tragic in her outlook.

A lot goes on in this book, but there is also a lot more dialogue and life philosophy than you usually get with Williams.  It’s very dark and very fun.

 

46. To the Far Blue Mountains by Louis L'Amour

This is book 2 of the much-lauded Sacketts saga (here is the first one, Sackett's Land).  It was Paperback Warrior who first turned me on to it and so far my reading has been lukewarm with some highlights.  This book, the second chronologically in the family's story, but actually published fairly late.  This continues the story of the original patriarch, Barnabas Sackett, as he flees his life in England for Raleigh's Land in the New World.  It takes place at the end of the 16th century.

A big part of Barnabas's background and character is that he grew up in the Fens, a marshy region in eastern England which at least according to this book, was home to independent-minded people who did things like cut peat and smuggled.  It's a cool region, where the locals know the labrynthine waterways intimately and anyone else enters at their peril.

In Sackett's Land, Barnabas goes to the New World.  Here he returns and has to deal with a bunch of local drama culminating in the Queen believing he has found the long lost royal jewels of King James (he actually only found some roman coins that is what gave him the boost he needed to start his life of adventuring).  So there is a price on his head and the first third of the book is him sneaking around England, trying to get back to his ship with his bride-to-be Abigail and his compatriots in order to return to the New World, settle himself and make his way to the mountains.

He escapes and we get some fun ship trading and combat on the way to the Virginia coast.  The second half of the book, he and a new gang of adventurers, including a tough Welsh woman named Lila who is his lady's maiden and equally good with domestic skills as with sword and fists, make their way up river trying to find a place to settle.

The portrayal of the new world is odd.  L'Amour's rhetoric (through Barnabas' voice) is respectful of the Indigineous people and he recognizes that his arrival foretells a lot of change, much of which will be negative.  The individual Native characters are shown to be intelligent and human.  However, he also portrays them as in constant warfare and even a culture of weird militaristic excess.  This is all contextualized by Barnabas' idea that all men seek to expand and take over other regions, so the behaviour of the white colonists is basically the same as one group of Indigenous people taking over another one. So throughout the second half of the book, even though they are peacefully situated in the territory of the friendly Catawba, they are constantly coming under attack by other tribes.  Eventually this becomes like a rite of passage for these other tribes, to try and kill Barnabas.  He is seen as almost superhuman and a way to test their young warriors.  It feels like L'Amour was quite well-researched on the various tribes (in a similar way that he knew about the Fens and the many other historical details with which he stuffs the book), but wanted to also maintain the colonialist mythology of the west that the land had to be wrested from the warlike natives.

That being said, the portrayal of colonialism here is not as bad as I expected and I think deep down (at least from this book) that L'Amour was an appreciator of the diversity of the people of the world.  He has a passage almost a page long describing Barnabas' children's education, emphasizing how they learn from the natives, the Persian doctor, the Welsh woman, their mother, etc. so they have a rich mix of religions and folklore.  

The real problem of this book is the pacing and structure.  It jumps from years of narrative to a sudden fight scene. There is no real throughline, nor antagonist, nor conflict to hold it all together.  It's just Barnabas wanting to go to the mountains and a lot of stuff happening to him.  In the last quarter, he is suddenly old and has like 4 sons and one daughter and his wife takes two of the kids back to England forever (she's not mad, just thinks the girl needs to be educated back home and the son is smart).  We get an almost throwaway defeat of an earlier sort-of nemesis and then a final attack by the Natives which kills him followed by a coda of how they respected him.  

I wasn't going to continue with the series, so I was happy to read this guy's ranking who puts this one way down at the bottom.  I speculate that maybe L'Amour was much more interested in the history than in putting together a good story.  I'll keep my eye out for the third and pick it up if I find it cheaply.