17. Blue Moon by Lee Child

I am not supposed to be picking up any new books and have a general block on Reacher books.  I quite like Reacher but there are so many and so ubiquitous, I want to save them for emergency situations.  I wouldn't quite say I was in a reading emergency; I was just needing something that made me want to read it.  I am also almost done season 3 of the Alan Richter Reacher series and I wanted to remind myself of what the books were like.  Furthermore, Blue Moon is from 2019, so relatively recently and I wanted to see how the quality is of the newer books.  What pushed me over the edge, though, was the blurb on the back about Reacher seeing some old guy on a bus he knew was going to get mugged.  That was enough for me.

I am pleased to say that as of 2019 the quality of Reacher is strong as ever.  Blue Moon did not disappoint.  The entry into the situation was classic Reacher, totally compelling.  He follows the old guy off the bus, foils the mugger, but then quite quickly figures out the man is being extorted.  In trying to help him and his wife out, he gets involved in (well actually creates) a gang war between the Albanians and the Ukrainians, each of whom control one half of a medium-size midwestern city.

What the TV series only hints at is what makes the books so great.  In Reacher's America, the collapse has already come.  America is no longer civilized, the social and economic structures have collapsed.  Civilians are fodder for criminals (organized and unorganized) and the forces of law are weakened or absent.  He's always walking around the fringe areas, the post-industrial wasteland of mini-malls and car dealerships.  There are good people here and there who aren't victims but they aren't strong enough to resist the evil around them.  Until Reacher shows up.

In Blue Moon, other than the two gangs, the major baddies are a techbro and the US health industry (which is portrayed as more efficient and ruthless extorter than even the Ukrainians and Albanians).  I mean talk about relevant.  Reacher and his new allies must get through these gangs first and it is a hoot.  This book had some funny moments, because Child juxtaposes Reacher investigating with the two gangs trying to figure out what is going on and constantly getting it wrong.  It has two shootouts that are almost like a slapstick comedy.  The ending gets quite preposterous and perhaps a bit too easy and long, but it's all so much fun getting there that I accepted it all.  And there are just several great fight scenes.  Lee Child is really good at his job.

16.The Jupiter Legacy by Harry Harrison

Looks like a question mark

I took this book mainly on the strength of its cover design.  I was a big fan of Harry Harrison in my teenage years, but won't go out of my way to read his books now a days.  I just really dug the cover and it is about a plague, which is Post-Apocolyptic adjacent.  The original title was "Plague from Space".  I bet there are some much more illustrative and action-oriented earlier covers with that title and then when we got into the late '60s (this version was published in 1970), they wanted a more conceptual and heady look and title.

The protagonist, Sam Bertolli, is an intern, late in life to become a doctor, working on the emergency shift.  He and his driver get a call to JFK airport where a ship that had gone to Venus, has landed basically frying a bunch of the airport and now just sitting there amongst the ruins.  It's gigantic and when they get there,  the main door opens and a sick man comes out.  He dies before he can say anything, other than "sick in ship".  They quarantine him but soon learn that somehow, when the main door was open a disease beam shot out of the ship in a straight line, infecting anything that it hit, which was birds.

The birds soon become the vector for this strange space disease that kills in hours.  The odd thing about the disease is that (at first) it only jumps from birds to humans, but not humans to humans.  While trying to figure out the disease, they also have to decide on the logistical response, which means killing all the birds and setting up a perimeter.  Though Bertolli is only an intern, he has some connected past which I forgot, so he gets access to everything.  He must figure out the source of the disease and deal with bureaucracy and ignorant colleagues.

The first half of the book was quite grim, lacking the light touch that is Harrison's usual style.  It's a pretty dark look at what would happen if you tried to kill all the birds around the tri-state area and prevent people from leaving.  There are a couple of bad plot points that extend the narrative, the big one being that the doctors decide to seal off the rocket and not let anybody go inside and investigate.  Bertolli, at first agrees with this decision.  The plan is to nuke it! This is so stupid.  Of course, they would go in and investigate, even with the risk of losing other diseases.  Set up a perimeter around the entire rocket, send people in with hazmat suits.  Furthermore, Bertolli suddenly changes his mind about halfway through, I guess out of desperation, though the book does not offer any explanation.  So now he has to escape the bureaucratically repressive doctors  to meet up with his old General and break into the rocket.

Despite the flawed premise, the book really kicks into gear in the second half.  It moves away from dour social collapse to fun individual adventure with a pretty fun sci-fi explanation as to what is going on.  The action moves forward as does the reader's desire to find out.  This is a neat multi-genre story that is a bit flawed in its construction but mostly fun in execution and concept.

15. The Fighting American by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby

I wrestle with the ethics of adding a comic book to the 50 Books count, not because I consider reading comics in any way a lesser literary or artistic endeavour than reading just words but because they can be so quick to read and feels a bit like stat-padding. Ideally, I would have a separate count/blog just for comics, but I don't read enough to justify that.  My general rule is that if it took me a few days and if it is an entire series, then I can count it.  If the material is particularly interesting and worth discussing, I may even bend those previous two rules a bit to get one in.

Fighting American checks all 3 boxes, so I'm counting it.  There were only 8 issues and the are all collected in this beautiful hardback.  It's quite an interesting evolution as it starts out being a Captain America facsimile but with the bad guys being the reds rather than the Nazis. The first issue is sort of straight forward, having a similar concept of Reds as we see in the I Was a Communist for the FBI OTR series, with commies being these impossibly organized cells all over the country, led and connected with other types of criminals.  By the third issue, though, things start to get really weird.  It's a great combo of Kirby clearly starting to feel his insane creativity busting out and both of them recognizing the insanity and absurdity of the red scare.  The bad guys get wackier and the tone gets goofier until by the end we are in Plastic Man territory.  It's great fun!

From this (where they wipe out an invading force hiding on the summit of Mt. Shasta!):

To this:

 

What's also interesting is how Fighting American actually lives with his sidekick in the same apartment and they even share a single bedroom!  Different times.

The art is early Kirby so not quite as angular and explosive as he would get but definitely uniquely his style.  Bodies in the fight scenes are always so contorted and lined, nothing wrinkles like a bad guy's suit when he gets flattened by a Kirby hero.  And I love his teeth!  My only complaint is that the inking and colour separations are a bit sloppy.  I suspect this is not a fault of the reprint but that these comics were cranked out quite rapidly at the time.  

As always with Kirby just incredible covers, works of art each one

 

14. The Luck of Ginger Coffey

I picked this one up from a free box because I had some notion that it is a Canadian/anglo Montreal classic.  Other than that, I really didn't know much about it.

Ginger Coffey is an Irish immigrant to Canada with his wife and daughter in the early 50s. As the book starts, he is approaching a life crisis. He was supposed to be a freelance field sales agent for Irish whiskeys and clothes, but had run out of clients and now almost money.  Veronica, his wife is utterly finished with his promises and bluster and when she learns that he spent the $600 she had put aside for a return trip to Ireland, she decides to leave him altogether. There is also a third party in the mix, generous and gregarious Canadian Gerry Grosvener, who at first seems to support the family but then reveals himself to be in love with Veronica.  The story follows Ginger as his life falls apart and he tries to hold it together.

At this stage, it is hard to ignore that this is another book about a flawed, self-involved white male whose challenges are almost entirely internal.  The economy was pretty good at this point and there are plenty of jobs available for him, yet he is all up in his head because they don't fit into who he thinks he should be.  He is 39 and that spectre of life failure is real, but at the same time, does it really take an entire book for the dude to realize that he is responsible for his own destiny and should stop fucking around with childish hopes and dreams and just start making a steady income and set up a dependable situation for his wife and daughter?

It is well-written and quite funny.  The cast of side characters and the locales are great as well.  Also very revealing how sidelined Quebecois culture is.  There are a few french characters, most of them being brutal cops and jailers and basically sidelined as the slightest hint of decoration on what is otherwise all very anglo-saxon, even down to the food in the restaurants.  I think this is the world that today's dying out angryphones remember and miss.  Despite the "erasure" of the french, it does paint a picture of a pretty diverse and rough-edged Montreal which seemed fun as hell (relatively speaking for the early '50s).

So an enjoyable read with an archaic mission. One could argue that the reification of the flawed white male is not only still with us, but actually having a dark and ugly resurgence with the victim narrative of  today's authoritarian rise. Even without the forced political interpretation, I was generally a bit frustrated with Ginger as a protagonist.  Despite that, I had a good time reading the book.

 

 

13. In the Grip of Winter by Colin Dann

Love these covers!

I finally have read another Colin Dann!  My good buddy brought me home two of his books in these great Beaver Books versions and I convinced my daughter for us to read it together.  It takes place immediately after The Animals of Farthing Wood.  The gang of wandering animals have found a new home in a reserve for white deer that they call White Deer Park.  Everything is looking good until winter comes, a particularly hard one this year.

My daughter pointed out, somewhat disappointingly I thought, that this book was more episodic in nature.  It is overall about the animals and their struggle with winter, but it is really made up of separate mini-adventures, including Badger getting injured and then taken in and healed by the warden, his turning on his friends, the attempts to get food to survive through the winter, the warden's sickness and poachers coming on the reserve and finally Toad instinctively trying to return to Farthing Wood (which is now a housing development).  The cover makes it seem like it is all about Badger, which I think also contributed to my daughter's expectation of a single narrative.

We enjoyed it, but it didn't grab me the way my first reading of King of the Vagabonds did.  It's still a lot of fun. It's an interesting juxtaposition and a bit of a delicate one where the hero animals are sentient and can talk as well as resist their instincts to eat each other, while the "NPC" characters are still animals (though they can also talk).  I'm curious to see how it evolves as I also have the next book, which we are reading now.  It turns out there is a bit of a Farthing Wood series.

 

12. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

I read this in the context of Black History Month at work.  One of the organizers recommended it and another non-fiction book.  I fortunately got this one out of the inter-library loan service in a few days.  I am always happy to diversify my reading, and especially trying to cut down the proportion of white male authors I read (which is probably like in the high 80%s at least lol).  So I was pleased to have this book recommended.  They are going to have discussions but that is not my thing at all.

At first, I was a bit put off, as the story starts with a birth in a 19th century West African village in the Asante and Fante region, involving fire and a mean step-mother and it all felt very magical realism/literary fiction.  It did have some of that, but fortunately, as I read on I saw that it was in the service of a much more interesting project.  Homegoing is basically a narrative genealogy beginning with a pair of sisters, separated at birth in the aforementioned village.  One stays in Africa and the other is captured as a slave and sent to America.  Each chapter is then the story of the next generation down.  We get the entire connection from the beginning in Africa to two modern-day people with all the major historical stops along the way. 

It's all very narrative and story-driven as everything has to be these days, so each chapter is sort of like a finely crafted short story, though connected both to the story before and after.  The literary trappings are much more toned down for the rest of the book except the beginning and the end to tie it all thematically together.  I found myself just enjoying (though there are a lot of unpleasant moments) the story and wanting to know how each person would end up.  The inherited trauma of slavery and its fallout both in society and the individuals is woven throughout the stories.  It makes the book doubly effective as a history, in that it really shows what actually happened while also helping you to understand how it impacted and impacts the people.

The beginning was particularly enlightening for me, as it portrays the mechanics and politics of the slave trade on the Africa side.  There are only the briefest scenes of the horror of the slaves being kept in Cape Coast Castle and then put on the ships, but they are almost harder to take than the tortures of slavery in the South which I had just finished reading.  I never doubt the capacity of cruelty by our species, but it is still shocking to even read about how the slaves were treated.

11. Kick Start by Douglas Rutherford

cover design by Phillip Castle

I'm quite pleased with this discovery.  I took it from a free box solely on the Fontana reputation and period.  Turns out the Rutherford was a fairly prolific men's adventure writer, but I guess we could say lesser-known.  His particular angle was that most of his works featured cars and motorcycles.  This isn't really my thing, but the bulk of this book was quite good so that I will definitely keep my eye out for his books in the future.

It started off in a slightly low-brow way that set off my alarm bells.  The main character, Valentine Kroll (cool name) starts off bluntly stating how we wanted to pull off a specific crime.  There was a lack of subtlety as well as the dropping of several brand names (he refers to his watch as his "Breitling wrist chronometer" on page 1) that made me glad it was quite a thin book as I thought I would be in for a surdose of that particular brand of stupid British 70s masculinity and faux prestige (cough Ian Fleming cough).  Fortunately, once the action starts, much of that drops away and we get a pretty entertaining adventure that though truncated, approaches a Desmond Bagley level of situation with a post-earthquake dam about to explode.

Kroll's particular skill is his motorcycle riding and maintenance and ostensibly for money but more likely for the thrills, he devises a plan to check in for a flight to Rome from Heathrow, than race back to London to rob a fading movie star of her famous diamond and then back to the flight.  It's a cool idea and though I am not a motorcycle guy, I got quite into all the details of the driving and the mechanics.  It won't be too much of a spoiler to say he gets away with it as far as Rome where the real plot begins.  He gets nabbed by Interpol who need his specific skill to sneak into a valley in Tunis where there has just been a terrible earthquake and find an Israeli spy and steal the deadly bacteria he was trying to sell there.  The extra cool twist is that there is a giant dam that has been damaged by the earthquake and risks collapsing at any moment.  You can anticipate, I am sure, where the motorcycle comes into play.  It doesn't disappoint.

This still is a 1970s man's action book, so there are a few unpleasantly sexist tropes (like the movie star disappointed that he was only there to steal the jewel and not rape her).  The location and the treatment of the Tunisians was relatively informed and respectful.  Rutherford fought in North Africa (and was in Monte Casino!) in World War II and his descriptions are vivid and convincing.  The plot gets a teeny bit goofy near the end (let's join the British tour bus party to avoid our pursuers!) but in a fun way.  I dug it!

 

10. The Narratives of Fugitivs Slaves in Canada recorded and compiled by Benjamin Drew

I found this in one of the free boxes here and had it put to one side.  I realized at the beginning of Black History Month that I did not have a single book by a Black author on my on-deck shelf, except this one.  I was a bit worried it was going to be too dry but it makes obvious sense to read now so I started it.  

It did start out to be very hard to get through as the introductory essay by Drew is written in that verbose, indirect manner of the 19th century.  I do enjoy long and complex sentences, but they have to be well-written and actually clearly deliver their meaning.  Unfortunately here, the language is cumbersome and indirect.  It's not entirely Drew's fault as he is writing in response to the insane pro-slavery arguments that were the dominant rhetoric in America at the time.  At the time, pro-slavery propaganda was pushing the lies that slaves were happy and needed the structure and guidance of their masters.  This book was written to counter those arguments.  Even though it was hard to read, the opening essay also drives home how the forces of oppression have used propaganda and sophistic logic to defend their clearly immoral positions.  These techniques have flared up to an extreme today, amplified by social media, leading to a bunch of con artists and racists taking over the US government.  I suspect a smarter and more informed historian could trace a direct line between the slave-holding south of the 19th century to today's MAGA.

From a purely reading perspective,  once we get past the introductory essay, this book gets extremely readable, though very very painful at times.  It is divided up into sections by region or town, each one starting with a brief overview with some statistics on the number of people per race, the state of land clearing and schools.  Then we get a series of narratives by various individuals.  Given that many of them could not read or write, I am assuming they were told verbally to Drew who then transcribed them.  They tend to have a consistency of language and structure that also suggests he asked specific questions in a specific order in order to put forth a consistent argument.  So they usually talk about their own story that led them to Canada, followed by their current situation, like how much land they own and how much of they have cleared, what animals they have, etc. and concluding with their opinion on slavery.  They also often mention that the money gathered to help slave refugees never seems to get to them and that even if they did, they wouldn't want it and don't need it, as there is ready work for them in Canada and they are able to gather their own community support for new arrivals.  

Anyhow, I am myself being quite dry here in describing the structure.  The narratives themselves are incredibly powerful and enraging.  Each one could make a novel of their own. It seems obvious to us today that slavery is a profound evil, but reading about the actual details of the brutality and tortures that were done to the actual people is still shocking.  The list of atrocities that go on in these stories is long and varied from the most basic concept of one human owning another (and all the ancillary crimes that stem from that such as hiring out a skilled slave and the owner taking all the salary), splitting off children from their parents, wives from husbands to just straight up torture, rape and murder.  One thing I didn't realize is that one of the most common triggers to finally drive a slave to run away is that they often would be raised to a "good" master who treated them well and promised to give them freedom but as soon as that person died or hit economic issues, they would be sold off to a potentially much worse owner.  

 The escapes themselves are harrowing. Though written in very dry language ("I lived in the forest for 3 months"), the toughness and will of these people is astounding. They had to survive both intense physical challenges, like not having shoes or food for weeks long treks as well as never being able to trust anybody else on their road.  The Fugitive Slave Law basically made it legal for people to just grab any Black person, escaped slave or not, and kidnap them back to the South for a reward or just to be sold into slavery.  And even other Black people could not always be trusted, as they were under their own pressures.  On the other hand, there are great tales of bravery and selflessness both by Blacks and abolitionist whites, like when all the waiters surrounded one of the escapees when he was working at a restaurant and got accosted by slave hunters.

On the Canadian side, this is a tantalizing insight into the very early days of Black Canadians.  I was totally ignorant of the many Black communities in what is today the far western side of the Windsor corridor near the border.  Sadly, their populations were reduced by usurious land practices and the end of slavery. Today, though, there are still several famous Black Canadians who came out of that region and some interesting museums and historical locations (I plan to visit the Josiah Henson Museum of African-Canadian History one day).  I am curious if there are still Black people living in that area.  I am very ignorant of the Windsor-Toronto corridor even though it is a crucial economic region for Canada!

9. Death of a Doll by Hilda Lawrence

I do remember where I found this book!  I bought it in Amsterdam, back at the one remaining true english-language used bookstore which while a great little bookstore, has yet to reveal to me any real treasures in the three times I've gone there.  Despite its depressingly banal and unremarkable cover (how fall Pan had falled in cover design by the early 2000s!), it really was it being a "classic" and part of some Pan series that had other good authors that pushed me over the edge in buying it.  I had never heard of Hilda Lawrence before.

Death of a Doll was written in 1947 and is of the American class aspirational cozy mystery sub-genre, where the protagonists and detectives are of "the quality" and a part of the pleasure of the book is sharing both their leisurely, tasteful lifestyle and their benevolent superiority over the victims and supporting cast.  There may be a more official name for this sub-genre.  I've mainly discovered it via Old Time Radio (in particular through the really thorough and well-curated Great Detectives of Old Time Radio podcast, which I highly recommend) with shows like Mr. Chameleon and Mr. and Mrs. North, though to today's readers, Nick and Nora Charles would be the most well-known example.

The detectives are quite quirky here and they don't really appear until about a third of the way in.  Mark East is the private detective, but he is joined by two old, meddling, bickering and comedic spinsters, Bessie and Beulah.  The narrative begins with a young woman, Ruth Miller, who works at a department store and has just found an advantageous lodging at a single women's hostel called Hope House.  Everything seems great until upon walking in, she sees something or someone and becomes deathly afraid. The narrative is from her perspective but the other doesn't tell us any details, beyond her trying to avoid being seen which is almost impossible with the shared bedrooms and common dining area.  We also get perspectives from various characters in Hope House, including the director and her assistant who are in an interesting implicitly lesbian relationship.  Aside from Ruth's fear, they do a lot of controlling of the girls in the house and when she indeed turns up dead, ostensibly having committed suicide by jumping from her window, they ramp up the control.

The detective team is brought in because a good friend of Mark East's (presumably from some ivy league and shared class background), shopped regularly at Blackman's the department store where Ruth worked and had taken quite a liking to her, thinking of maybe hiring her as a nanny.  She doesn't buy the suicide story and the rest of the book follows Mark and the B's investigation and the internal tensions and dramas of the girls in the house as the murder's aftermath impacts their world.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on, not so much with the actual victim and murder, but who the detectives were. I read afterwards in Minette Walters' introduction that this is the third book with these characters and that Lawrence really doesn't give any backstory. You learn about their relationships by their dialogue and actions but no background is ever explicitly given.  Walters also argue that Lawrence was attempting to mix cozy and hard-boiled genres, but I'm not so convinced about that.  Nonetheless, the detective team is certainly a unique one with very different styles, each contributing effectively to the investigation.  The murder takes place during a party in the house, where all the girls dress up in the same burlap dresses and masks (to look like dolls, thus the title), which is effectively unsettling with imagery that keeps coming back.  It would make a great movie.  By the second half, I was definitely flipping pages and stayed up at my bedtime to get to the end.  I wouldn't call it a masterpiece but it is a fascinating and creepy mystery in its exploration of the world of urban single women after the war and an enjoyable dark look into the souls of broken people.  I will keep my out for her three other books.

8. An Ace up my Sleeve by James Hadley Chase

This is the last of the super 70s Corgi James Hadley Chase's that I bought in a bunch almost entirely for the incredible front covers (love that typeface!).  I have to say, the more of his books I read, the higher he rises in my estimation.  I think he may get doubly denigrated, first because his books were considered exploitative and puerile by the snooty intellectuals of the time and are considered (I suspect) somewhat second-rate by pulp and hard-boiled aficionados of today.  I'm here to tell you that the text itself is more than solid. I'm even starting to believe that he has some real themes and ideas going on under the solid craftsmanship, though that will require more reading on my part.

The first quarter of An Ace up my Sleeve is absolutely excellent.  Straightforward, adult and gripping with a great twist.  The second half of the book meanders a bit, with some clever cat and mouse, back and forth between antagonists, though it is never dull and you definitely want to find out what happens.  Helga Rolfe is a beautiful middle-aged woman, married to a super old businessman. She is lonely and horny as hell (this is portrayed as her one big flaw) and picks up a studly American while traveling alone to Switzerland to meet her husband at their sick cliffside mansion.  He is a big strong naif, AWOL from the army and got rolled by a woman who picked him up at the bar.  He's weirdly competent, though, and seems to constantly avoid getting into a situation where they could hook up.  Then things get interesting.

I'm going to stop here but just say the ending is really interesting on a sociological level, though surprisingly soft given JHC's brutality in past books.  I learned afterwards that there are two other novels continuing Helga Rolfe's adventures.  I will be looking for them and let's hope she gets laid!

7. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

I'd been looking for this used for a while.  It's pretty new and probably being reprinted since it was fairly successful.  I did find a used copy in this bloated trade paperback format (although to be fair, slightly easier to read for me as the pages go by so much quicker).  I was intrigued by the dystopic sci-fi concept with animal companions.  Unfortunately, when I was about a quarter of the way through, Meezly noticed it and was surprised that I was reading it as she had read two of her books and found them consistently badly written!  This was dismaying as I was already feeling somewhat distanced from the story, but I tried to put aside any bias and plow through.

Zoo City does at first have a cool concept.  It takes place in a ghetto for "the animaled" in Johannesburg.  For reasons that aren't at first clear (and actually were never clear for me until I read some other reviews), certain people suddenly find themselves attached to a single animal of a variety of species.  They are corporeal and real animals but seem to initially appear magically and if you are separated from them it is like agony.  If your animal dies, you get swallowed up by some weird darkness.  You also gain a magical skill.  The heroine has a sloth and she can find lost things.

The story begins with her finding a lost ring in the sewer for a client only to find the old lady brutally murdered when she returns with the ring .  She is on the scene with her fingerprints (she touched things to get a bead on the lost ring) and so gets accused of the murder.  This triggers her being engaged to also find a lost pop star twin, even though she swears she will never look for lost people (we are never really told why this is and it doesn't seem to matter as she takes the job).

I didn't find the writing as bad as Meezly did.  There are a lot of short sentences and really wild metaphors (which I didn't mind as they were kind of fun in a dystopic sci-fi Chandleresque manner).  The problem is that she is trying to do subtle inference instead of just telling you what is going on and many times, especially in the action scenes, I couldn't figure out what actually was going on.  The real problem with this book, though, is the overall plot and for lack of a better word, its intention.  It felt like Beukes went out and did an inventory of as many tropes she could find under the dual headings of "dystopic near-future" and "contemporary issues" with a particular appeal to young, woke readers.  So we have refugees, exploitation, discrimination, ghettoization, trauma and on and on.  These things are fine but none of it feels heartfelt here.  The plot goes all over the place so that by the time it all does come together, I really didn't care.  Another reviewer pointed out something I hadn't explicitly noticed, that the protagonist has zero influence in the big final climax.  She rescues the man she was sleeping but is basically an observer to the quite violent and nasty revelation of the plot secrets.

There is a nice little side piece that is an academic study of the notion of wandering spirits and how they will possess pigs and if you don't sacrifice the pig properly they will take over a human.  I guess this is some real tribal folklore from that region and it ties in really nicely to the animal companions in the book.  But that's about as far as it goes.  I can see how many readers got their fix of dark near-future detective world but Zoo City did not work for me.

6. Roughing it in the Bush by Susana Moodie

I picked this one up at Chainon with reservations.  Canadian history is notoriously boring and this looked very much to have that potential. The trade dress (I'll get into this more later) is from the absolute nadir of Canadian boringness, the late 60s and 70s and I sort of expected a way less charming but perhaps more realistic portrayal of 19th century settlers coming to Canada.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.  This book isn't boring at all.  It's actually quite funny at times.  Even better, it really blows away the myth of hard-working Europeans cooperating to tame the savage land.  Holy shit, the people are just awful!  I mean I know we all know that settler colonialism was awful to the people already living here and the environment.  In Roughing it in the Bush, they are also totally shitty to each other!  Moodie was of the fallen gentry, educated but poor.  She's quite a snob and naive about what she and her husband are getting into.  So you are prepared for some class conflict when she comes to a "republic".  Even taking that into account, these people are just scumbags.  Her neighbours constantly steal from her and presumably each other.  They just walk into her house and take stuff and she accepts unwanted guests for months and months.  Community barn-raising parties seem to end in drunken brawls and deadly accidents before any barns get built.  There is a bizarre tradition of gathering outside newlywed homes and making tons of noise all night long that can go on for weeks and weeks.

This all takes place around Peterborough, which is wild to think of as an untamed wilderness.  My sister calls the Onscarions and after reading this book, you can see how the descendants of these yahoos voted for Doug Ford.  

The story itself is not really a narrative of championing the elements and getting their lives established in the new world.  They do make some progress, but in the end, the husband gets a job as a sheriff in town and they move away into civilization.  Moodie became a succesful writer at the time.  It's more a collection of anecdotes.  They are quite good and entertaining.  I recommend this book for anybody who wants an eye-opener on the origins of our great nation.

On to the trade dress, I am sure Frank Loconte was a talented artist, but god this is just the most boring, meaningless and safe book design.  It's just so Canadian.  Hey we wouldn't want to create any kind of excitement (nor sell any books), as that is what uppity Americans do.  This is reflected even more annoyingly in the jumbled and anodyne introductory essay by Western's Carl F. Klinck, which also shows the worst of Canadian academia: smug, safe and undeservedly superior.  What's particularly vexing is that he starts out by saying the book is too long and that Moodie stuffed it for a British audience.  So this genius makes his own decisions and cuts a bunch of stuff out, including all the chapters discussing her relationships with the First Nations!  He's desperate to make the argument that she fancified her experiences but gives neither evidence nor analysis beyond that she wrote it several decades after the experience.  And this guy got an Order of Canada!  I apologize for my lack of nationalism at this time when all Canadians need to be pulling together to combat fucktard Elon Musk and his little butt boy Trump, but honestly we should not forget our own sins even in these times!

5. King of the Vagabonds by Colin Dann (re-read)

Got a proper photo this time

Colin Dann has been on the top of my hunting list and my favourite animal adventure author based almost entirely on this single book.  I found it years ago and have been looking for his books with no success since then.  My buddy found two of them recently on a trip to England and that got my daughter and I to choose it as our reading book for bedtimes.  At this point, she is reading more to me than vice versa and I got to sit back and listen to the second half of this book for a second time.  It didn't feel quite as amazing this time, but still very enjoyable and the episode with the bird bone in the throat was as harrowing as ever.  I found the stereotypicallness of the gender roles to be limiting to my now more-woke eyes.  The female characters are limited to mothers, sisters and lovers.  The Pinky character is a manupilatrice. Both my daughter and I were quite disappointed that Sammy ended up with her.

We have since started on In the Grip of Winter, about which I am quite excited.  It is actually a continuing story about the Farthing Wood gang in their new domicile.  Stay tuned!

 

 

4. Boomerang by Andrew Garve

I discovered Andrew Garve due to this post on Twitter* from April 2024, put his name on my list and have been keeping any eye out for him since.  I found 3 of his books in Berkeley (2 at Moe's, I think and one at Walden Pond Books) over Xmas.  My on-deck shelf has reached its limit and I am not supposed to be buying too many new books, but these were all thin and more importantly, attractive Pan editions.  I have to say, now that I have completed Boomerang, I ask myself the same question as Paperback Papa:  why have I only heard about Andrew Garve now?

Boomerang starts with Peter Talbot, a young and successful but risk-taking financier in London.  He has his own loan corporation that has done well but is now over-extended. After a fight with his starlet girlfriend, he crashes his car into a store front and ends up losing his license and doing some time.  In prison, he meets an Australian miner who is in for punching out a cop and a radio operator who got caught smuggling.  The three hit it off and their characters and experience inspire Talbot to come up with a scheme involving an Australian mine to make them all rich.

The bulk of the book is the preparation for the scheme.  All three travel separately to Australia to carry out their part of the operation, with the bulk of the narrative focusing on Talbot who is being himself, pretending to scout the region for a potential motel chain investment.  We as the reader do not what the plan is until very late in the book.  Hints are dropped here and there that it will involve explosives and the monsoon season.  Garve must have travelled to Australia because much of the book is entrancing descriptions of the varied and powerful landscapes of the outback.  It really made me want to go there.  

What was neat about the book was how pleasant and conflict-free the bulk of the story is.  You know it's got to go wrong somewhere but most of the time, the three conspirators are quite happy with each other and enjoy the work they have to do.  When it does go wrong, it is much more about the elements and the forces of law than any internal conflicts.  The likable characters aren't unnecessarily stressing with each other, which I appreciate.  There is a great slog through the monsoon-flooded desert that really had me gritting my teeth.  The ending was the teeniest bit pat, though with a nice dash of humour.

Great find!  I can only speculate at this point that perhaps Garve was somewhere between crime and men's action that he is not more well-known among 20th century paperback book nerds.  I am grateful to Paperback Papa for the discovery and psyched that I already have two more awaiting me.

*I am off Twitter for the most part now and primarily on Bluesky, though I still have kept my account active as there are a few people there that I follow that I check on from time to time.  Why?  Because fuck Elon Musk.  I hope I or someone else can look back at this post from a place in the future where the internet is actually clawed back from the trolls and shitbirds.

3. A Civil Affair by Lois McMaster Bujold (#11 in the Vorkosigan Saga)

I picked this one to coincide with the end of my vacation and flight back, because I have learned that I struggle with focus on a flight and need fun and easy to digest page-turners rather than something that requires concentration.  The Vorkosigan saga has proven to be always enjoyable and fun to read, even when it does delve into some deeper issues.  I suspect we are nearing some kind of end of Miles' narrative, as here the big struggle is if he can successfully woo the woman of his dreams, with the implication that he will settle down and stay on Barrayar.  Though I guess he can have other adventures in his role as Imperial Auditor, it feels like his arc has reached a certain maturity.

After the events on Komarr, where Miles uncovered a conspiracy to destroy the solar satellite crucial to terraforming and accidently discovered the love of his life, he is now back on Barrayar, preparing for the imperial wedding.  Ekaterin Vorsoisson, the other important character from Kommar, is now a widow living with her aunt and uncle in the capital.  Miles desperately wants to marry her, but recognizes that she is still recovering from decades of psychological abuse in a stifling marriage.  More practically, he has to avoid anything that would encourage speculation that he had murdered her husband (the truth is buried in ImpSec censorship).  This is the main storyline, a very romantic adventure as Miles tries in his typical way to manipulate the situation to get his outcome, which of course blows up in his face.

Meanwhile, his clone-brother Mark returns from Beta where he was working out his own psychological issues and starting to nurture his gifts at business success.  He comes back with two major complications:  first, he is going out with Kareen Koudolka the daughter of a very conservative Vor family and second he has brought "butterbugs" and the brilliant but utterly impractical Escoban scientists who developed them.  The butterbugs are disgusting to look at it, but produce a very rich food from vegetable scraps.  Both these complications lead to lots of funny hijinks.

I think this is the book that got the comparison to Georgette Heyer. It is truly a romantic comedy and quite enjoyable.  There were just so many fun threads (the Lady Donna/Lord Dono battle for succession is so great) and it is fulfilling to get more depth in Bujold's rich world building of Barrayar society and history.  All the stuff with cousin Ivan and his mother and aunts is quite hilarious.  I can see why nerds would love this, because the male characters that get the best partners are not the jocks at all, but the deformed strategic genius and the overweight business genius.  Really fun and now I am torn whether I should take a break or jump right into the next one!

2. Calibre by Irving Shulman

Continuing my exploration into the Amboy Dukes literary universe, I found this non-canon Irving Shulman somewhere that I can't remember (note to self: note where I find books when I get them!). At it's core, it is basically a post Civil War western, but layered with rich melodrama and tortured Shulman characters. Had it been longer, I might have grown impatient, but the first half where we learn about the various characters ends just before it wears out its welcome. And the second half is full of great action and a satisfying conclusion. So overall a fun read. 

 Dave Shannel is a confederate soldier returning to the home of his colleague Ben, who died in battle. Ben spoke all about his family and Dave, rootless and shell-shocked with nowhere else to go, visits them at their failed desert inn. When he gets there, he discovers that three roughnecks and an alcoholic woman have taken over more or less. Their leader, Barlow, is a wealthy war racketeer on the run and they are waiting for some other men to make an escape to the north. Ben's family is his mother, his wife and his uncle (who believes there is treasure on the land and is always out prospecting). You know there has to be a showdown and Dave the hero, but we get there via lots of tension and conflict between and among the bad guys and the family. The historical context adds depth to the standard set-up. Dave is really suffering and lies to the family about Ben's bravery. The bad guys all represent different types of players in the Civil War and its aftermath, especially Barlow the war profiteer. 

Dave struggles with his role.  He's not a coward per se, but just so broken that he simply wants to keep moving.  The men aren't all even that bad, except Barlow and we learn that even he has a somewhat legitimate reason for stopping at the inn.  Turns out Uncle Darcy was a hunter of confederate deserters and murdered Barlow's brother.  The final battle is quite good and intense.  

1. The Banker by Leslie Waller (and 2024 year-end round-up)

Happy new year!  I hope you are all doing well.  2024 wrap-up will follow below.

I found The Banker in Montreal, I think, but can't remember.  It looked very middling but I had to pick it up. I'm glad I did.  It was middling but never boring and surpassed itself by the end, with a fun and satisfying but not simplistic conclusion.  Woods Palmer is a reluctant midwestern banker, dragged into the role of president of his father's bank.  The beginning of the book is him sailing with the president of America's biggest commercial bank who recruits him as the second-in-command.  Right from the beginning, the internal monologue shows Palmer as a disinterested strategist of his own life.

He moves his family from Chicago to New York and starts the job, which is already odd because his main responsibility seems to be the interface with the freelance strategist/PR flak the bank hired to fight a state bill that would give the savings banks more power.  He doesn't really do much else until he starts to get it on with his own PR person, the widow Virginia Clary.  I don't know how much of the conflict between commercial banks and savings banks was or is a thing, but I was able to follow along so I hope it has some basis in reality.  The narrative advances very slowly, taking a while to settle on the main financial and business intrigue, involving the savings banks bill and a big aerospace company that wants a super-generous loan. 

By the time it all comes to a head, his affair also playing a significant role, the heroic narrative reveals itself and Palmer has to finally step up and kick ass on all the New York slick city types who tried to pull one over on the country newcomer.  There is a good theme of white protestants old boys oppressing all the other groups and the conclusion was both satisfying and somewhat nuanced.  Even the love dialogue about the affair between Palmer and Virginia was mostly not cringey.  This was a fun and satisfying read.  It also helped me reinforce some feelings about improving how to behave with others I've been thinking about for 2025.

2024 Year-End Wrap-up

But we aren't quite ready for 2025!  Let's look back at my reading for 2024.  It was a solid year, until the end, when I dived naively and ambitiously into The Life and Death of Ancient Cities which was just too hard for my simple narrative-dependent brain.  I got about halfway through and had been reading sporadically and without enthusiasm for the last several weeks and finally decided to put it it down and pick up something fun to read.  I lost over a month on that book and half of it is still waiting for me, sword of Damocles style.

I read 20 books by female authors out of 61.  I only read one person of colour (The Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah)!  Yikes, that's bad.  I could say 3, but of the other two one was Chinese and the other Japanese from Japan.  Need to diversify in 2025.

I guess my favourite reading this year was with my daughter.  We read The Blue Sword, Watership Down (her favourite now) and The Hobbit (my favourite).  I do most of the reading, but she'll do it for quite a few nights as well now, so it's a lot of fun.

Other than that, there were no real highlights for me this year.  I really enjoyed the book about the Ottoman Empire which was readable and informative, giving me a deeper understanding of the forces behind the current conflicts in the Middle East.  I was also pleased at how I was able to get through it pretty steadily (though this led to my over-confidence with the ancient cities).  2024 was also the year that I discovered Riad Sattouf, thanks to my neighbour putting out beautiful hardbacks of several of his books.  Every Man a Menace stood out for me in its operational complexity and coldness.  Duncan Kyle once again comes in strong with Green River High.  That guy does not disappoint.

Sadly, the David Morrell Victorian period mystery did disappoint.  It lacked subtlety and killed my motivation to follow up on what I had thought might be a rich vein of reading.  The Tribe that Lost its Head was also quite a bummer, as I had high hopes for an adventurous Trevelyan epic.   

Overall, 2024 was a mixed bag, but I was broadly enjoying it most of the time, until hitting the non-fiction ceiling.  My on-deck shelf has also gotten near to full so I am going to try (probably futilely) to read and not buy/pick up any more books.  Happy reading in 2025 y'all!