50. The City by Jane Gaskell

Hoo boy okay now things are starting to get weird!  Thematically, The City is very much a continuation of the first two books, with Cija passively suffering from one situation to another, especially at the hands of the two men in her life (her half-brother Smahil and of course Zerd the dragon emperor).  Now we have a new evil man hovering in the shadows, her father, the priest lord of her country.

This one is called The City because it begins with her arriving back to the mainland after fleeing Atlan, finding herself sold (of course) by the captain that was supposed to be bringing her safely away.  She escapes from her first purchaser only to be brought to a brothel by the docks.  She escapes from here as well and sort of welcomed to a suburban home.  There are several adventures with the sisters here that end up making her father aware of her existence so that she is under constant threat.  The first half is all kind of meandering, though with great descriptions of the city (where she lived most of her life but never actually knew, being stuck in a single tower) and the wider politics.

It's the second half where this book gets really, really wild.  I'm going to have to spoiler here because it's too good not to share and most of you sadly will not read this book.  The son of the home where she is staying (and the guy who rescued her from the brothel in the first place) goes missing and they figure that it's the priest's men who took him, so Cija and the sisters try and rescue him.  They get captured and here we get this insane floating pyramid where people are lowered in a net down the middle.  The priest is on a throne here and has an alligator woman as a bride! This is some dark, sick cultish shit.  I hate the priest-lord and love hating him (Gaskell is good at inciting these feelings in the reader without being too blatant about it).

She escapes from that in a crazy battle (so much quick and casual violence in these books) and makes her way back to her tower where this time she is captured by a band of ape-people.  I am guessing sort of neanderthals but they are described as pretty ape-like.  The settings veers strongly into the lost world mode here, which I guess I knew from the beginning but now there are dinosaurs.  One of the ape-men protects her from the others (she was supposed to be for eating) and they are both ostracized from the tribe.  They flee deeper into the jungle and encounter two tyrannosaurus rex who at first get it on (yeah baby dinosaur sex) and then the female eats the male!  You know it's coming when you are reading it as Gaskell seems to be priming the pump with the dino-romp but it's sort of hard to believe.  That's right, she and the ape man get it on! Not only that, but he is gentle and turns out to be the only "man" who treats her right!  I felt very topical in reading this old book now because horny romances of women getting properly satisfied by non-men is a trending topic right now with the upcoming movie Wicker (which looks great, I have to admit).

I'll stop spoiling here beyond saying that the book does not close off any of the major narrative storylines.  I learned that it was not until 10 years later that she finished the fourth and final book, which is next for me.

I've done an even lazier and sloppier job of writing about these books, partly because I am quite busy with work and life (and Draconis) these days, but also because this series is quite complex and worthy of real literary analysis by an actual academic/intellectual.  

 

49. Atlan by Jane Gaskell (Book 2 of the Atlan saga)

After reading Atlan, the second book in the Atlan Saga, I am somewhat reluctant to recommend it.  I still need to complete the series to decide, but this one wallowed too long in elements less interesting to me.  It had its moments for sure and the ongoing world building of Atlan continues to be imaginative and intriguing as hell.  It's just that Cija spends pretty much the entire book being passive.  Her agency is almost entirely her own psychological processing as when she is not held against her will (which is most of the book), she is fleeing, hiding or lost.  Adding to the sense of futility is that she really doesn't seem to get beyond processing and come to any conclusions.  So a lot of the book is her in the (admittedly excellent) continent of Atlan and thinking about what is happening to her and how she is responding to it.  

Narratively, things move quite quickly in the beginning, as Zerd almost immediately becomes emperor of Atlan (the boy-emperor being so enamoured with him and decadent, he just cedes his power to Zerd).  Unfortunately, this brings the mainlanders over to Atlan and they immediately spoil it, taking the naive women, hunting the unicorns and introducing industrial farming (Gaskell makes an explicit point about chemicals in the foods in this and the first book).  The depiction of the colonization of Atlan is disturbing and realistic in the context of the world she has created.  As painful as it was to read, I wish we could have had more of that.  It felt like Gaskell rushes through the larger plot to get as quickly as possible to the internal stuff.  

She spends the first half of the book trapped in a remote inn, abused by the proprietress.  She is then rescued and spends most of the rest of the book trapped in an abandoned Atlan castle now given over to Zerd.  This is a bit gothic as the place is mostly unexplored and hostile to her.  There is a really great creepy ass wizard/necromancer here.  She ends up after being cast adrift and then wandering deeper into the continent in the camp of Sedili, Zerd's first wife sometimes enemy, sometimes ally.  Oh yeah, she also has two kids, son Nal and baby daughter Seka.  Most of the time, Zerd's forces, the north and the southern armies and the bandits are in various states of winning and losing against each other. 

The excellent Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff podcast had a great overview of melodrama that gave me a helpful framework to analyze and appreciate books where the emphasis is on passive and the internal (coded feminine) versus the active and external (coded masculine).  The melodrama was originally a play with music in it (melody drama), which in the 19th century became associated pejoratively with working class and female audiences.  In melodramas, the protagonist tends to have the world act on them.  The drama is in how they persist and then overcome (or not).  

This lens helped me to move away from my "why isn't she kicking ass" stance and accept that shit was going to be bad for her and let's see how she evolves in reaction to all this. The problem is that much of her internal stuff was being in various states of coercion with different at first creepy, then ambivalent, then rapey, back to ambivalent men.  I get a sense that Gaskell, who was a minor cultural celebrity was working through some of her own experiences with 1960s British men.

I'm hoping for the best in the next book, but I suspect this may be her groove.  I'm fine with some passive melodramatic internalizing, but would appreciate more of a balance with the cool world and larger plot (which is complex enough). 

 

Bonus, here are stamps from some now defunct used bookstores in B.C.  I guess it made its rounds!

48. The Serpent by Jane Gaskell (book 1 of the Atlan saga)

Once again, I can not remember where I learned about Jane Gaskell. She is an early British woman fantasy author who seems to have slipped into obscurity.  I wonder why, male-dominated nerd publishing industry.  It took me quite a while to find all the books in this series and then I had them sitting on my pre-on-deck shelf (where I hold books in series until they can be moved into the on-deck shelf) for quite a while before I got the desire/courage to take them on (there are 4 books in total).

This was a fascinating, mostly enjoyable and at times thrilling fantasy epic.  It is the diary of a young princess, Ciya (pronounced Kee-ya) who begins the story locked up in a tower until she is married off to a conquering general that she must assassinate.  This premise launches Cija into a rocambolesque bildungsroman across the pre-Atlantis lands of the western hemisphere.  It really goes all over the place, very adventurous.  It is also quite dark and political in a rich kaleidoscope feeling very much of its mid-60s time.  Near the end, I felt that it kind of went on too long.  I was still enjoying it but there is a lot of brutality told in a very matter of fact way that kind of wears you down.  It's also not super tightly plotted, the narrative is inconsistent in pacing and there is too much coincidence at times (that may or may not be some kind of destiny).  Despite all that, it really took me into another world, while making me think and have some feels.  I was always very much invested in the fates of Cija and the world around her.  I really want to read the second one, but currently debating if I should take a little break with something lighter between courses.

The sexual and gender politics are also really interesting.  On the one hand, it feels very progressive on gender.  There is much gender confusion and switching in Cija's journey.  One of her friends is a straight-up transsexual woman and she is loved for this in the book.  On the other hand, sexual coercion is portrayed ambivalently and even dismissed or accepted.  You would almost think it was written by a man if the heroine's inner personality wasn't so richly and complexly expressed.

There is some really cool fantasy stuff in here, like the warrior birds the Northmen (and Cija quite soon) ride, the insane decadent feast in the city climaxing in a roasted dinosaur on a platter, the route across the ocean to Atlantis (no spoilers), all the underground locations.  This book should be a second-tier staple of the genre.

Addendum:  found this promisingly long essay on Gaskell that I will read after I finish the Atlan series. 

 

47. The Scotch by John Kenneth Galbraith

Before I read this book, John Kenneth Galbraith was really just a name that I knew was associated with politics in the 50s and 60s.  After having finished this book, I read his wikipedia page and have since learned that he was a towering figure in post-WWII American economics and politics (and during WWII as he is credited with managing price controls and maintaining reasonable inflation during the massive war production boom).  He seemed like a very smart guy who also held on to his values and ideals right to the end of his life.  And most importantly, Canadian!

The Scotch is probably best considered as a minor appendix to his life's work.  It is, though, a very well-written and even fun appendix and especially interesting to me.  I guess I am slowly continuing my studies into the region east of Windsor which is more and more becoming an area I'd love to visit.  I don't think it is all that exciting, but there are lots of long agricultural roads which hide quiet but important chunks of Canadian history.  Oddly, the only other book I have read is The Narrative of Fugitive Slaves, many of which take place not far from the area where Galbraith grew up and yet the only mention of diversity in his book is the English! 

The Scotch is basically Galbraith's ode to his childhood and in particular to the Scottish immigrants who moved to the north shore of Lake Erie near the end of the 19th century and took up farming.  The book is structured in very light and brief chapters, almost like an anthrophological monologue.  He doesn't take himself very seriously and there is no real research.  Most of the knowledge is drawn from his own upbringing.  The descriptions of the land, which he admits is somewhat dull, are still evocative, especially the seasons.  He is an excellent writer, with short, readable sentences that are still often somewhat complex and rich in construction.

He goes through the farming, the social relations, their culture, religion and approaches to education.  The penultimate chapter is particularly funny as he basically rips apart the principal of the high school he went to.  It sounds like the guy thoroughly deserved it as he was ignorant and mean and even worse particularly biased against the country students versus the ones who live in town.

This was a very enjoyable read and gives one an insight into some of the roots of today's Canadian culture, both political and social, with some tiny snippets of actual history, such as the brief period when the United Farmers of Ontario were in power in Ontario.   

 

46. Death is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury

This was a total stinker.  I hate to come out swinging like this, but I just went on the internet to see a bunch of people calling this noir and in the style of Hammet, Chandler, etc.  Holy fuck are people really that stupid and uncritical?!  Now to be fair, this book may stand on its own merits (though sure as hell not for me), but it is not in the style of those masters at all.  It's all endless sentences, excessive sentences and that weird 80s style poetry writing.  I guess the story is sort of noir-ish, but it's really hard to tell under the cloying layers of verbiage.   I feel bad being so critical because I have a lot of respect for Bradbury and was a big fan of his work back in high school. Maybe I should go back and read some of his earlier stuff to see if his style was always like this and I just didn't recognize it back then.  I sure hope not.

I guess this is supposed to be sort of autobiographical, about Bradbury's early days before he got The Martian Chronicles published.  The protagonist is a young man living in Venice, struggling to write and missing his love who is traveling in Mexico.  This Los Angeles, though, is one of melancholy, decay and despair (jebus, it's contagious).  He hangs around the sad old people of Hollywood past, watches as the amusement park slides off the pier into the ocean.  Slowly, various characters he meets are being killed off, though it takes forever for us to figure this out as it is page after page of him going to some place or visiting some person with tons of extra metaphors and allusions stretching them out.  I had to put the book down halfway through and almost gave up.  I picked it up a year later and just forced myself to finish it.

He's Ray Bradbury and a great writer so some of the metaphors hit but that's like saying Mr. Creosote had a delicious flavour of desert at a few points during his meal. How can you even tell?  This entire book if written by Hammet would have been maybe 80 pages. I'm glad it's over.

What's weird is everywhere it says this book was published in 1985 but mine says 1999.   

45. All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

First of all, if you are into contemporary crime fiction, S.A. Cosby is one of the best right now.  This is the third of his 4 books that I have read and they have all been excellent.  I had some personal issues with the second half of the story that I'll get into later, so it brought it down somewhat from the heights I was holding it in the first half.  But wow there are straight up moments of reading joy here where I was reminded why I love reading and why I love this very masculine genre of tough guys fighting against evil.  The hype is real with Cosby.  It's a bummer that he is one of the few Black writers in the crime genre, but he's there and he is kicking fucking ass.

The story here takes place in semi-fictional (actually purely fictional but I'm guessing much of it is pretty accurate) Charon County, Virginia.  The protagonist is Titus Crown, the first Black sheriff in the county.  Ex-football star who made it out to University and then a solid gig with the FBI who returned to his hometown ostensibly to look after his aging father but really to lick the psychic wounds of a white nationalist terrorist showdown that went bad.  Already the set up is rife for drama, with a history and structure of racism and a suggestion of evil in the soil that is almost supernatural (reminiscent of Stephen King's It here), Crown's job is already tough.  He is holding it down and good at it until a disturbed young man shoots a favourite teacher during school hours and then gets himself killed by Crown's deputies on the way out.

The kid was Black (and son to one of Crown's close friends and old high school football buddy) and the teacher loved by generations of townsfolk.  At first the shooting of the kid is lauded by many of the white townsfolk while the Black and white progressive contingency, led by a young, hip preacher, consider it another unjustified murder of a Black man.  Crown is of course in the crosshairs.  Of course as I'm sure you suspected, the teacher was perhaps not as good as we thought and we are off and running into an intricate investigation both into the teacher himself and his behaviours and the dark heart of Charon county.  This part was an absolute joy to read.  Cosby is skilled at both the police stuff but also the human stuff and the complex racial element (though not ethically complex at all; which is the stance we all should be taking) makes for a rich mix of reading pleasure.  There are a couple moments where we get a bit too blatant moralizing and some telling and not showing right at the beginning, but they are quickly swept away by the much deeper and more human telling in the rest of the book.  Crown is awesome, he has issues but he doesn't fuck around and he is a total badass when challenged.  Just a great hero for our time.

[SPOILERS BELOW; though not a huge one nor in detail.] 

 

 

As I mentioned above, while the rest of the book was great (I basically read it in 36 hours), the ending lost a bit of steam for me.  Ultimately, there is a serial killer and that as a concept for crime books is just not interesting to me.  It's been played out, the idea of the elite killer who is totally nuts but also a bit of a mastermind and it is only his arrogance that allows the cop to find him.  There are only so many ways we can show their inventive deaths.  Cosby does manage to add a racial element, which does give depth and make it fit with the overall theme of a country and county still fighting the evils of the Confederacy, but it wasn't enough to keep me as riveted in the first half.

As I was reading this, I was thinking this has to be a TV series or movie and it already is in production with some good names behind it.  I will definitely watch this and I'm hoping Cosby will be getting the big bucks he deserves.

44. The Warden by Anthony Trollope

Trollope was deep on the bench until a convo on a gaming discord convinced me to read The Warden.  It's one of his shortest books (possibly his shortest) and is the first book of the Chronicles of Barsetshire (of which I've regrettably already read the second and best known, Barchester Towers).  I say regrettably because now I wish I had started with The Warden and read it in order.  Turns out the major characters in the second one are introduced and feature heavily in this first one.

The Warden is about Mr. Harding, a gentle old man who is the preceptor and warden, meaning he is responsible for church services and for administering a small "hospital" which had been set up generations before by a medieval wool merchant for retired bachelor wool pickers to have a place to live and die in relative comfort.  They are known as bedesmen and their duty is to pray but basically they are poor working-class older guys with nobody to take care of them.  Mr. Harding receives a lovely cottage and garden and £800 a year for his work.  He is a super nice old guy and does both his duties at the church and the hospital diligently and with heart.  

However, this is the time of reform against the excess control and power of the Church of England and specifically corruption around these kinds of appointments.  They are big news items in the 1840s and 50s when Trollope was writing.  Mr. Harding's daughter is in love with a Mr. Bold, a nice, well-to-do young doctor with too much time on his hands and an idealistic bent.  He learns that in the original will for the hospital, it was ambiguous how much the warden should keep of the money and how much should be given to the poor bedesmen.  He quite likes Mr. Harding as well (and definitely doesn't want to harm his future father-in-law), but in his youth and fervour starts a lawsuit to expose the supposed exploitation of the legacy.  Meanwhile, Mr. Harding's other older daughter is married to the archdeacon, Dr. Grantly, a traditionalist and strong defender of the church. This sets these two men in conflict, with Mr. Harding in the middle.  It becomes a minor cause celebre, amplified across London by powerful and manipulative editorials in The Jupiter (proxy for the London Times).

At first, I found Trollope's writing a bit less refined and the plot setup to be somewhat simplistic (relatively speaking) and I wasn't super caught up in the story.  It's more polemical than his other books, so he spends a chunk of time parodying Carlyle (a popular essayist at the time), dissing Dickens and really going after the people behind The Times.  These were quite interesting and not unentertaining but were a bit strong and took away from the story for me.  However, as the book continues, Mr. Harding's character both deepens for the reader and solidifies for himself in his outstanding resistance to all the pressures around him. He becomes incredibly lovable and sympathetic.  The hallmark with Trollope is he never forces drama on to the reader and it is on full display here, but you really don't know what the outcome will be and find it difficult to see how it won't be either a brutal tragedy or a sentimental victory.  So you are turning the pages quicker and quicker by the second half.  It's very moving and complex by the end.

This was the Penguin edition I guess for undergrads and had annoying end notes.  Some of them were helpful but many were just distracting and depressing in how badly educated in general young people are (like I don't need a footnote to tell me who William Pitt was or what triste means).  However, the essay at the beginning by Robin Gilmour (which I read at the end) is excellent and provided excellent context on the controversies around church reform and the role of the newspaper, particularly the Times, in this period.  It's really instructive, because much of what Trollope is lamenting is still very much with us today in an even more aggressive and accelerated form with social media and the internet.  The voices of people with strong theoretical opinions on issues are amplified with powerful effects that then impact real lives where the situation is much more complex than these ideologues can understand.  As always, plus ca change...

 

43. The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

For some reason, I thought this book was a big deal in the Paperbacks from Hell world, but it turns out to get only a passing mention (and a photo of the cover).  I guess it's infamy in the film world is more likely where I heard about it.  The movie adaptation by Ridley Scott Michael Mann was a famous production disaster and bomb, though of course, now somewhat more appreciated for its efforts.  I've seen it and it really is a mess and it's too bad too because the book if done well would make a great movie.

This book has a minor history for me as well.  It was quite hard to find a copy and I finally came across one at The Monkey's Paw in Toronto.  I was pleased because The Monkey's Paw is a unique little used book store that sells more "antiquarian" books and the genre books are extremely curated.  Unfortunately, I was with my sister, a chaos agent and after I had gotten about a quarter of the way through, I somehow lost the book on a trip to an estate sale with her.  I never lose books! It was quite vexing and took me a while to get through it psychologically and several years before I found another copy.  I made sure I was not travelling and kept this one only at home and am quite satisfied that I finished it.

The setup is excellent. A troop of wermacht have been sent to occupy a stone fortress in the remote mountains of Romania.  It is built into such a steep environment, across a gorge from a small village, that it only gets a few hours of sunlight a day.  Even more odd, it is in pristine condition and utterly abandoned.  Captain Klaus Woermann, an old soldier whose loyalty is to the army and Germany and not to the Nazis, is growing sick of the war and questioning their leadership. When he arrives, the caretakers warn him that nobody is allowed in the keep.  Things go bad fast as each night, one of his men is brutally murdered by something that seems to walk through walls.  After much agonizing, he sends a request to Germany to be allowed to leave, but instead they send an SS Major Kaempffer, an old colleague (and adversary because Woermann saw that he was a coward) from the previous war.  Kaempffer is on his way to Romania to set up a big new location for a concentration camp, a significant step up in his career but he first has to deal with this issue in the keep to demonstrate to his superiors that he is competent.

So we have an old German soldier with some honour squaring off against a cowardly and sadistic SS officer in an ancient redoubt with some supernatural power that is killing them all.  It is very satisfying to watch the Nazis go from sneering, sadistic arrogance to shit in your pants fear (and getting their throats ripped out).  As an aside, this book was written in 1981 when I was an adolescent and while there was much anti-Semitism back then, it was an era where WWII and the evil of the Nazis was still very present in Canadian culture.  I think part of this is why so many older people were (and are) still sympathetic to Israel and buying into their propaganda that their behaviour towards the Palestinians is somehow justified.

The Nazis learn of a scholar in Bucharest who may be able to decipher the writing scrawled in Nazi blood on the wall and the history of the keep in general.  He is super sick with some degenerative nerve disease and so his beautiful and resourceful daughter also has to come along. They start to figure out what is going on and try and use this against the Nazis.  The father also wants his daughter to flee out of Romania because he knows what is coming, but she refuses out of love and loyalty to him. Finally, we get brief snippets of a guy who was working as a fisherman in Greece when he suddenly has to leave, digs up a long package and a money belt full of various gold pieces and starts making his way across war-torn Europe to Romania.  All these exciting elements come together in an epic clash that will decide the future of mankind!

I quite enjoyed The Keep, especially the first 3/4.  It's always tough to end these sorts of supernatural books, because we now have so many narratives in all media of some great evil that has to be put down.  The Nazis and the context of being in Romania in 1941 make it quite interesting.  There are enough details and history to make it all fit well.  The ending was well done but didn't totally rejoice me as it possibly could have.  Overall, it's a well-constructed 1980s page-turning horror adventure.

 

42. Tyler's Row by 'Miss Read'

There must already be an existing genre for this kind of book, quite well-known among a certain generation.  It's a cozy cozy.  Or just a cozy.  I mean look at the cover!  I read after that it is the middle of a 20+ series of books about an English village called Fairacre and all the people and goings-on that happen in and around it in the second half of the 20th century.  I suspect that other than that they are in post-war England, the actual decades do not matter that much, as the interactions that go on among the townsfolks and visitors are mostly timeless.

Tyler's Row is specifically about a small property with four little cottages on it. The owner is getting old and decides to sell it.  After some back and forth, it is purchased by a middle-aged couple whose grown children have left home.  The story is basically about them inspecting the property, their decision behind buying it, fixing it up and dealing with their two difficult tenants.  Interspersed with their story, in the third person, is the first person narrative of Miss Read herself, the local primary school principal, who also hears the village scuttlebutt about goings-on a Tyler's Row.

It's like a plate of digestive cookies at tea, very easy to eat and satisfying.  The worst tension is a possible cat poisoning, but the cat survives and you are quite sure it will (and animal death was not such a big deal in rural England in those times as it is today).  Otherwise, the pleasures in this book are the pleasant exchanges of the various people and the revelations of their character.  There are some barbs in the dialogue and not everyone is so pleasant themselves, but underlying it all is an appreciation of the British character.  You can see why she was much loved and earned the Order of Britain.

It's funny because my sister just told me after reading a lot of British books that maybe deep down, the reality is that the British are just awful people.  This was further reinforced by listening to this great radio show where Henry Rollins and Ian Mackaye recount their first tour of England with Black Flag and what an utter shitshow it was. They were not paid, not fed, only sheltered by the kindness of punk strangers and spit upon by the crowd.  I get the resentment of Americans at that time, but just the general cheapness and squalor did bring home to me that despite all these idyllic fictons, England has a very brutal, nasty side that we should not forget. 

You will forget it reading any of Miss Read's books and if that interests you, I recommend that you do. Very enjoyable. 

 

41. The Ship of Ishtar by A. Merritt

One of my reading side quests is finding and reading some of the more obscure of the famous (in gaming circles) Appendix N of the original Dungeon Master's Guide.  Gary Gygax listed all the authors that inspired D&D and it has since been shared as a reference, critiqued and added to by the tabletop RPG community.  Goodman Games in particular has made a big deal about it and helped to revive awareness of it.  The did their own expanded Appendix N and often highlight specific authors in their blog, including this one specifically about Merritt by influential gaming blogger James Maliszewski So in the last year, I found two A. Merritt books in paperback.  I knew nothing about him and was pleased to see that he was writing in the 20s and 30s so really back in the origin of pulp fiction.

I was receptive to the Ship of Ishtar right from the beginning.  First of all, this cover is awesome.  Second, it starts not in medias res per SE (can you say that?), but pretty much right into the situation.  Kenton, presumably a well-to-do New Yorker is in his study standing before an excquisite miniature ship that just appeared from behind the dissolving mists of a slab of masonry another scientist explorer friend had sent him.  As he stares at the ship, noticing tiny figures on the deck, he finds himself sucked into the ship and the world it is in.  He becomes entangled in the war between Ishar, Goddess of Light and Nergal, God of Darkness who are battling it out on this ship through the complex machinations of the Gods as a result of two of their highest priest and priestess falling in love.  The spiritual construction and plot leading up to the ship situation is complicated, but basically the ship is black on one side and white on the other, with representatives of each God on each side and they cannot cross (it's like a curse against the two lovers).  Kenton arrives and can cross back and forth and thus upsets the balance and becomes the vehicle (and hero) to break the curse.

The spiritual stuff was way to detailed for me.  Merritt is like a gamemaster who desperately wants to create a complex pantheon and religious history where his players just want to cast fireballs.  I think audiences of the 20s and 30s went in for this exotic mysticism.  Fortunately, the characters and action in between the religious stuff are pretty frickin' awesome.  I get why this is in Appendix N.  Kenton meets basically an adventuring party:  Zubar the urban Persian warrior who will accept anything but boredom, Gigi the with the powerful upper body, Dwarven legs and a backstory of regret due to baldness and Siggurd the Viking always ready for Valhalla.  The bad guy is Klaneth, the evil priest and the love interest is Sharane, priestess of Ishtar.  The ship sails across this fantasy world, visiting cool little islands, cities of evil priests and in the finale a vast labrynth of coloured stones thrusting out of the sea.  The action is excellent and super gory!  There are two lovingly detailed decapitations, much smashing and bashing with blunt weapons and a really nasty eye-gouging.  I was quite surprised by the level of gore.

Now this is some 1920s stuff, so while it is not straight up racism and nowhere near bad as Burroughs, it definitely has the language of that period of racial distinctions.  It's actually not that bad given the time period, leaning more towards patronization and exoticism.  The treatment of the women is worse, though again, not negative and aggressive.  Sharane and her priestesses do get armoured up and fight at the end, but one gets tired of her constantly telling Kenton that he is her lord.  Ultimately, it's a white male fantasy so one's enjoyment of the book probably depends on how much of that sort of thing one can tolerate.  I will say that it is a really lively and creative one, with all kinds of cool situations and imagery, marred a bit by too-long passages of religion that kind of lost me.  I'm looking forward to the second book of his I have on deck.

This actually happens

Zubran, the Persian

40. The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Caudwell

This is the third in the Hilary Tamar series of lightly comic mysteries, where the manners of the young lawyers at Lincoln's Inn are as much a part of the fun as the mystery itself.  I've read the first one, own the 3rd and 4th but held off on continuing until I find the second.  A stalwart reader informed me that I don't have to read them in order, thus lifting the shackles of continuity and allowing me to take this one on my August vacation for some fun light reading.

These books stand out for two reasons (at least the two that I have read).  First is that they feature esoteric British legal knowledge.  You actually learn about English tax law (I think, as much of it I couldn't fully understand) and it's a bit off-putting for non-lawyer at first, but soon becomes integrated into the narrative in a way that is kind of fun.  She also has excerpts from I believe fictional travel guide for Lincoln's Inn lawyers (or barristers or whatever) specifically where she lays out the highlights of each of the various Channel Islands that are visited (and heavily featured in the plot).

The second is that much of the action is told in an indirect or epistolary manner (as was the case in the first book).  The main action is by a young lawyer who accidentally gets caught up in a pursuit/protection of a client and narrates his adventures via telexes sent back to London.  Tamar also has conversations with people where they narrate what happens to them.  Little of the actual action happens at the point where you are reading.  It's odd but doesn't distract or distance from the narrative somehow.

The story here involves a group of trustees who have moved a bunch of money in a trust out of England for tax reasons and are now trying to figure out how to free up the money for the intent of the original trust.  The wrinkle is that, from what I could understand, because of some missing paperwork, the money would go to the natural heirs rather than the intended benficients of the trust or something.  It sounds boring and taxey which it is but the trustees themselves are a colourful group of people and they keep getting murdered.  Much of the book takes place on one Channel Island after another, which is interesting, as we learn more about the trustees' pasts and try and link it together.  As usual, I was a bit lost on the mystery but enjoyed the ride.

39. Hidden Histories of the Jazz Age New York: From the Suppressed to the Strange by Jonathan Ezra Goldman

I must express my bias outright, as Jonathan Goldman, Joyce Expert, scholar, musician and all around cool guy, is a friend of mine.  This is his third book but the first two, though, compelling were way too academic for me to read.  I was worried about this one, but since I was going to visit him in NYC, I was motivated to get reading.  I did not need to worry about this one being too academic as, while still built on a good academic foundation (a basic thesis, thorough research), it is eminently readable.  

I don't know if this kind of book has a name already.  It was unique in structure to me.  Basically, he goes through all the various non-dominant (re: white, male, Protestant) peoples who have been neglected in history and finds all their little histories.  There is a lot of small bits of info and it can kind of wash over this reader in its totality, but at the same time it weaves a rich tapestry of all the diverse communities and cultures in New York and all the things they were doing culturally and politically.  You really get a great feeling of what a rich, vibrant city New York was and how so much of those strains of fighting for the community over the big corporation are built into its history.  

There are also many crazy little anecdotes and tidbits that pop up that add to the interest.  I can't imagine (but will ask) on the amount and type of research that went into this book.  There is a lot of straight up popular culture that would have been gleaned from the newspapers at the time, but there is also much deeper knowledge of specific movements.  He spends a lot of time on Marcus Garvey, for instance, which would have required a deeper range of primary and secondary material.

I know one specific audience who would benefit from reading this book:  Call of Cthulu RPG fans.  The classic version of the game takes place a little later, in the 30s, but this book is close enough in time and so full of great detail that it would be an ideal aid to the GM.  You could just use it to broaden your knowledge of New York culture history.  Beyond, there are so many individuals, factions, neighbourhoods that can be used for encounters and plot hooks just as is and even more so with a little occult shenanigans added to their behaviours.

38. Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe

Some of you may already recognize the title.  It is the 1979 book upon which Die Hard is based.  I've read several good recommendations for it and have been looking for it for a while. I found this uninspiring trade paperback in San Jose, CA while waiting for a tour of The Winchester Mystery House (very touristy but worth it) and since a better version seems very hard to find, I picked it up.

It's very hard to read and discuss this book without thinking about the movie.  The film deserves its reputation as an all-time great.  I've seen it many times and hope to take my child to see it when she is old enough to appreciate it (it's playing at the Cinématheque Québecoise on August 15, but we will be away).  Furthermore, it's hard to write about the book without giving away spoilers as part of the fun for reading it is to see how it differs from the movie.  I'll do a separate spoiler section at the end.  Read at your peril.

The premise here is a great one.  Joe Leland is on his way from New York to visit his now successful upcoming executive daughter in LA for xmas.  He is an ex-cop, ex-private detective and now a very high-level security consultant on terrorism.  He sees her only briefly at her office xmas party where they are celebrating the closing of a big business deal before the place is taken over by terrorists.  Leland who was in the bathroom is able to sneak off and spends the rest of the book wrecking the terrorists' plans while trying to save his daughter and grandchildren.  This is all seen through Leland's eyes and brain and as the action is going on, he is reminiscing through all the ups and downs (mostly downs) of his own life: his descent into alcoholism, his divorce and how it messed up his daughter, his fears about the brutality of a military response and on the positive side, the stewardess that he really vibed with on the plane (and whose number he has).

The biggest difference between Nothing Last Forever and Die Hard is that the book is much more firmly set in the 1970s worldview.  It's really about the conservative reaction to the extremist counterculture that came out of the 60s.  The big twist in the movie is that the terrorists are pretending to be supporting some vague leftist cause but are really just there to steal the money, which is an extremely 80s motif (and came to be the main idea in most of the Die Hard sequels and basically the motivation for almost all big bad guy movies since).  Leland is killing educated, upper middle-class euro-revolutionaries and kind of ambivalent about it.  The actions in the book lean right, but his thoughts are pretty balanced.  He just wants to survive and in the end, the corporation comes off as guilty if not worse than the terrorists. It's an interesting read from that perspective (though again hard to parse with the movie so dominant in mind).  I really need to read The Detective, the prequel to this one (which was also made into a movie with Frank Sinatra).

Themes and politics aside, it's a really fun read. The action is tight and you feel the pain and filth of Leland as he gets more and more messed up.  Some of the more elaborate physical situations, like him tying the firehose around himself and jumping off the roof get a bit unclear in my mind but this is probably due to my own laziness.  You can see why it got made into a movie.  It is kinetic as hell and almost all of it takes place in its own limited space.  The side characters are good too, though the movie does a great job of making them even more fun.  It also has a grim humour in it, though overall the tone is much darker than the movie.  I would have really liked this book even if Die Hard had never been made (though thank The Gods that it was).

 

 

 

SPOILER STUFF

 

 

 

 

The biggest difference between the movie and the book is that it is his daughter that he is going to visit (his divorced wife died in a car accident).  At first this seems like a smaller detail and we won't get the reconciliation from the movie, but as we get to the end, it becomes thematically a much bigger deal.  The daughter always had a wild side and in the book she is dating her boss, Ellis, the arrogant cokehead.  We learn that the big business deal was super shady, ostensibly to build a bridge in Chile, but it turns out also to sell arms to the repressive Pinochet regime (this is the reason the terrorists are going after the money, to give back to the Chilean people or something).  And Leland is critical of his daughter's involvement in this as he realizes what is going on.  She in effect becomes the sinner as much as the terrorists and suffers the same fate.  Yes, it's quite a brutal ending, though in its own dark way ending with a weird kind of family resolution with a suggestion that Leland will get with the nice stewardess and they will adopt the grandchildren.  His family state is restored.

37. Richer than all his Tribe by Nicholas Monsarrat

This is the sequel to The Tribe that lost its Head and was the original purchase that started it all.  The photo cover here is not very well executed, as the sexy white lady on the drum looks more like an abstract shape peanut or the top of an ice cream sundae and the whole thing looks like a jack-o-lantern.  Still, the two books together make an attractive diptych.

Richer than all his Tribe jumps ahead from the brutal transition to independence that concluded the first book.  Now the fictional island country of Pharamaul is independent, though still part of the Commonwealth with the Queen at its head.  David Bracken is the head of the civil service and has two elementary school age children.  He is on good terms with the ex-chief now Prime Minister, Dinamaula and working with his new Pharamaulian counterpart.  Things have settled down from the upheaval, though getting ready to upheave very soon), though there is still discontent from the Whites who have businesses, servants, etc.  

This book is done in a series of vignettes (though each one is much longer and more narrative than just a vignette) with some time skips between each one, so a lot happens.  On the political side, the Africans want to move faster to independence than Bracken wishes.  They jump to become a Republic (and the Prime Minister becoming President) and then to a really scary tyranny, culminating in genocide.  Though there is a lot of thinking I don't agree with in the book, this progression felt terrifyingly realistic.  On the characters side, we continue to follow David Bracken and his family and that becomes the most solid link to the first book, but most of the side characters leave quite quickly when things turn against them.  We get a new white, English character, Paul Jordan who is the aide to the president, both treated with contempt but also kept around because Dinamaula depends on him.  He is young and single and we get the romantic angle with him meeting a young Chinese-American woman on his trip to the United Nations (there is some cringeworthy orientalism in the description of their sexy time together, but mostly she is well created and a real person).

The bias of the benevolent colonialism is still the prevalent theme here, with a massive lack of self-awareness endemic to that mindset, yet I found it much less offensive.  Monsarrat spends a lot of time exposing and critiquing the excesses, corruption and ultimately brutality of the Africans being in charge and draws it up like it's because "they aren't ready for civilization" rather than understanding where the culture of authority and violent repression may have come from in the first place.  Despite that, he equivocates in the end, when Bracken is met with a shrug of the shoulders from his own government and finally a fairly thoughtful soliloquy by his retired boss, who lays out how the African will never forget the atrocities laid on them by colonialism.  I wouldn't say it is redemption but this book delivers a more nuanced portrayal of the challenges of moving from colonial rule to independence than the first book does in depicting the initial transition.  And it is pretty scathingly critical of almost every character, except the British mid-level civil servants, Jordan and Bracken, who are the innocent, right-minded functionaries trying their best as the structures around them collapse and their leaders betray them.

 

From a functional perspective, the book really does an almost excellent job of portraying the challenges of moving from colonialism to independence.  The solution according to Bracken is to go slowly, but Monsarrat does a good job of showing how that would almost never happen in this context.  He portrays the interference of the Russians as a strong factor (with a ridiculous coda at the end, suggesting the Pharamaul will become a launching point for nuclear bombs and that Lord Protector Dinamaul could take over all of Africa and then possibly the world), as well as the "Afro-Asian" block of newly liberated ex-colonialist countries, who unite at the UN.  Here is where his blinders are at their worst, portraying a situation that is disturbingly similar to the right-wing racists today who argue that white people are somehow victims of racism and crushed under the woke ideology.  He makes it seem like this Afro-Asian block has basically dominated the UN while white liberals desperately kowtow to them.  He almost completely ignores the massive power of the large corporations who were doing everything they could, with the assistance of western governments to destabilize the new independent governments and continue to steal their resources.   I keep getting back to critiquing Monsarrat's colonialist viewpoint, but my main takeaway was that the actual portrayal of what happened and (mostly) why it happened is quite convincing and richly portrayed.  Colonel Mboku, the police officer initially recruited by the English who rises to become the terrifying fist of Dinamaula seems very realistic.

 

Finally, while the conclusion is far more horrific and destructive than the violence that led to independence at the end of the first book, Monsarrat avoids the sexual violence to the female characters in this one (though the threat is hovering around).  It all just felt much more real and less manipulative here and made for a very impactful book.   

36. Seven Men of Gascony by R.F. Delderfield

Delderfield is just so darned readable.  I've had Seven Men of Gascony on my shelf for quite a while.  The cover does little for me.  I'm just not a fan of the Napoleonic era, though not sure why.  The aesthetics?  The horribly confusing mess that is European politics at the time?  So I was putting it off, but it made at the near bottom of my vacation grind pile and I'm glad it did.

It's Delderfield retelling the Napoleonic campaigns from the perspective of the front row soldiers, specifically the Voltigeurs who were marksman responsible for holding the frontmost point in the place of battle.  The book is framed by an old veteran living alone in a small town in 1840 when Napoleon dies.  When he hears the news, he reaches for an old pile of sketches, which launch us back to 1809 when a young artistically-talented Gabriel, after his adoptive mother dies, volunteers for the French army.  He meets his fellow soldiers (the six other men), and more abruptly their dog, Fouché, when he tries to steal some of their food.  The sergeant is Jean, a grizzled vet and totally loyal to Bonaparte.  The 5 others are Nicholas the cynical ex-teacher, Louis the horse whisperer, Dominique the simple fiddler, Claude the young and handsome and Manny the Jewish ex-circus performer.  Following along is the camp cantinière, Carla and her daughter Nicholette, the latter whom figures significantly in the overarching storyline.

Seven Men of Gascony reminded me somewhat of the Black Company books.  The language is richer and more complete but otherwise in form it is basically a series of vignettes within each significant campaign.  As I say above, it is very readable.  I only got a bit confused when Delderfield gets into the historical and military specifics, but since the bulk is from the soldiers' perspective, that was very rare.  Other than entertainment, one of the important functions of historical fiction is to impart the history via those who were living it and I definitely learned some broad strokes of this period in Europe.  

It loses its steam somewhat as it approaches the end. This is not so much because of the writing but because it takes place in the retreat from Moscow and this just rough and depressing, no matter how much Delderfield's schoolboy enthusiasm for historical war makes it seem somehow bearable.  It's just rough though Nicholette's narrative (also very rough) keeps you turning the pages.  The climax is the battle of Waterloo and I think this would have been more effective if you had already studied it as the military significance (other than the final blow of Napoleon's empire), kind of went over my head.

Ultimately, the book is about friendship and camarderie in the world of war and it is a very effective and  enjoyable one.

35. the antagonists by William Haggard

Now this is Haggard in fine form.  Charles Russell of the Executive Branch spends the entirety of this book doing his job.  There are no dalliances with younger women and no dates in acceptably unpretentious Italian restaurants.  It's a classic Haggard situation.  An elite radar scientist, Alexander Gorjan, from an eastern European, Communist country (but still a sovereign nation) collapses while on a talk in England (in quite a funny, British scene where he lashes out at a British anti-nuclear aristocratic lefty).  The ambassador of said country comes to Russell and reveals that his country is under significant pressure from the Russians.  There is a risk of a major political upheaval, which the Russians would exploit, between the old guard, who are communist but also nationalists, and the new younger politicians who are much more religious in their communism and beholden to the big commie master.  The old guard want Gorjan held in England indefinitely to protect him during this turmoil.

This leads to a complicated game where the Russians are trying to kill Gorjan and now the Americans want his knowledge. The Americans in this case are coming from the diplomatic side, not the intel side, and Russell loathes this as diplomats, like civil servants will always screw things up and are just generally ideologically loathsome to Russell. 

At first, I was a bit nonplussed to the setup, but things get quite complicated.  The wild card is the traitor to the unnamed small country, working for the Russians as he is forced to flee when his initial plan to assassinate Gorjan in the hospital fails.  There are quite a few really good, short action scenes and some excellent London locations, including a cool raid on a block of flats with a bunch of small manufacturing shops on the inside.  I don't know if this is a trope with Haggard yet, but there is a West Indian nurse again and her race is constantly referenced.  Gorjan is a good scientist and communist but also likes his wine and women and somehow he and this nurse start a regular thing which is kind of cringey but also kind of fun.  He also really goes hard after a fellow traveller journalist who is a woman and promiscuous.  I'd say at the very bottom of Haggard/Russell's list of contempt are educated leftists.  He loves to skewer them and he does it to men and women, it just feels nastier here and a bit of a "straw woman", though in the end her punishment is not cruel at all and quite funny as well.  [spoiler alert:  she is forced to marry the American whom she helped to get at Gorjan.]

34. Nails by R. Lance Hill

This was a pretty neat find, a previously unknown to me 1970s Canadian crime paperback.  They really hype it up on the cover and I have since learned that R. Lance Hill was a fairly successful writer in Hollywood, hitting his peak with the original Road House.  Nails is an interesting contrast to the Long Masquerade that I had just read.  The former is a man's action adventure book disguised as a chick romance.  Nails is kind of a romance/relationship tale disguised as man's crime.  The excellent opening of a drug ripoff involving snowmobiles next to a frozen lake in Creston, B.C. and the ending chapters frame the middle which is mostly about the protagonist running a club, deciding who he is and what to do with his life and most significantly being in a relationship with two different women.  

After the drug rip-off, where protagonist Joe Black, also cold-bloodedly shot and killed the other courier, the main narrative starts off back in time.  There is a major factual error I noted right away here, first, that he says normally it takes 4-5 hours to get from Creston to Vancouver, which is completely untrue, more like 10 hours and would have been even slower back then before they built the new highway.  I can only guess that Hill was writing this from memory in Hollywood.  But I'll let it pass.  The feel is Canadian and he clearly knows Vancouver of that time.  We only get snippets of Joe's past, including that he had travelled around when growing up and had been drifting post-college as well before returning to Vancouver.  Of his character, though, we learn that he has an extreme sense of pride as well as a cold rationality and zero hesitation to fight.  He gets a job with a wealthy high school friend to manage a new club he has just opened.  The bulk of the rest of the book is him managing the club, the challenges of difficult patrons, his friends trying to get him to commit to staying while the entire time he is itching to just get on the road and drift.

He meets a beautiful stewardess and she immediately falls in love with him.  He later meets a beautiful wealthy Shaugnessy debutant and she also seems quite smitten with him.  As the book goes on, his drive to make quick money and get out fights constantly with the pressure around him to settle into this good life.  There is another thread where he comes more and more into confrontation with the psycho son of a local crime family.  Though Italian, they are not true organized crime, but run a bunch of extortion and drug dealing locally.  These threads all come crashing together.

There was a lot of relationship narrative in the middle, interspersed with some cringey (though not too bad) race relations.  One of his friends is a Black cop.  There are also several really nasty mysgonistic scenes thrown in.  I was sort of losing patience with the book but then when the crime stuff picks up, the book gets really good again.  Hill has an excellent writing style for that world, as well as realistic seeming characters and details.  He needed a sitdown with Richard Stark to excise some of the 70s self-involved character development and human relations and we would have had a 70s pulp masterpiece.  Still, not bad.  It's funny, his Wikipedia is all about his screenwriting career.  He doesn't even have a bibliography but he's written a few books.  I'll keep my eye out.

Way more details here than
in Hill's Wikipedia bio

33. The Long Masquerade by Madeline Brent

A few years ago, Rennaissance, a chain of thrift stores that I think supports some charity, opened up a books-only store on St-Denis.  It has a very small english section and like so many thrift stores, they prioritize trade paperbacks and big names, but every now and then you can find an actual decent book there, so I do very much appreciate its existence.  I was shopping for the latest Hunger Games book for my daughter and popped in and found The Long Masquerade.  The cover is clearly targetting a female audience, but I had my suspicions (the Fontana imprint was a big clue) and the little I read of the back blurb suggested there may be as much adventure as romance in this one.

It turns out that Madeline Brent is the pseudonym for Peter O'Donnel, best known for the Modesty Blaise comic strip (and later books) series.  I discovered this after having finished the book but suspected I was reading a male author.  This really isn't a gothic romance though it starts out very much in that vein, as 18 year-old Catherine Delaney is set to marry the much older and wealthier Oliver Foy. She isn't ready for this major life change, but already has a courageous and stoic character.  Her biggest worry is that she won't be able to continue swimming with her dead nannie's husband, Daniel Choong, but Foy seems really nice at first and says he has always admired her from afar and won't try and change her too much.

The plot thickens before her marriage when she stumbles upon the mysterious adventurer Chad Lockhart, who it turns out is the sworn enemy of Daniel Choong from some mysterious past sin. The plot continues to thicken in this book to the point where I don't know where to leave off and avoid spoilers.  I think you can all guess that of course her husband turns out to be a total monster, as she brutally learns on her honeymoon.  Can she save her self from her abusive husband?  Will she learn why her beloved Daniel has a man pursuing him?  A lot goes on in his book and it is all somewhat unbelievable, but still very fun.  I enjoyed that Brent does keep suspense going, but never artifically draws it out, so when something needs to be told to avoid misintepreration, the characters just tell it.  The ending is full-on action and violence, with a nice dashing of romance, all of which I enjoyed.  

I won't seek any of his other romantic adventures out, as they are a bit too cozy (you kind of know it will all work out and every one is just so nice an accepting), but I won't complain if I am stuck with one in the future.

32. A Hero for Leanda by Andrew Garve

This was a short, somewhat slight, yet still entertaining, classic British mid-century sailing adventure.  It starts right into the situation,  where our hero, Mike Conway, discovers that his sailboat, and all his worldly possesions, has come unmoored and crashed, a complete write-off.  He's now almost penniless and stranded in Accra, Ghana.  We learn quickly that he has spent his last years sailing around the world, a vagabon with no ties.  His desperate situation does not last long, however, as he meets a sophisticated Greek gentleman who makes him an incredible offer.  He is representing a wealthy businessman, Metaxas, who is originally from the island country of (fictional, I'm guessing analog for Cyprus?) Spyros, currently under the thumb of the British and resisting.  The rebel leader of Spyros has been arrested by the British and is being held on a remote colonial island far off the eastern coast of Africa.  Conway is the perfect man to sail quietly in and free him.

The wrinkle of the title is that the boat that Metaxes finds for Conway needs a second hand to make such a long crossing.  This person turns out to be Leanda, a beautiful competent young woman, who herself is a native of Spyros.  You can see the setup!  This is all done quite efficiently in the first section and then we are off on a sea voyage.  I would say this is almost a cozy sailing adventure, with much of the book mostly pleasant sailing. Things get complex when they pick up the prisoner.  I think the thing with Garve is that he kind of pulls his punches with his priority being a nice, romantic resolution.  This was a fun read with a somewhat soft, but enjoyable ending.

31. The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson

I wish I could remember who recommended this book to me, because I owe them a debt of significant gratitude.  It has easily taken the top spot of books I've read this year and has a place on the all-time favourites as well.  I do remember that I bought this new at Dark Carnival.  The NYRB reprint is quite well done, with excellent maps (though spoilery as they show the paths of the journeys as well, so beware) and a brief, inoffensive, non-spoilery intro by Michael Chabon.  

I'm surprised that this book is not better know and loved among the nerd community.  It's an incredible adventure epic with many D&D tropes, such as exploration, treasure, strange lands and even a bit of light, folk magic here and there.  For the first book, you could basically call the protagonists a band of murder hoboes.  I try in my later years to not be that recommending guy ("you gotta read this!"), but I am making an exception in the case of this book and will be foisting it on others as much as possible, especially gamers.

The book is about Orm the Red, a Danish viking in the late tenth century AD.  It was originally two books, each made up of two books.  The first is his initial voyage as a young man to plunder the lands to the west and then further fall into several wild adventures in western Europe.  The second is about his involvement in wars and politics within the viking lands.  The third is much more domestic and tells various tales of Orm's homestead and the region he is in.  The final book is the shortest and is his last adventure to find some hidden gold in Eastern Europe.  The first book is far and away my favourite,  with so much adventure and ass-kicking, told in such an entertaining way, that I could barely put it down.  It becomes quite domestic in the third book and this goes on for many pages. It's not boring at all and I always enjoy stories of people developing their homestead ("domain play" as we say in the TTRPG community), it's just that it's hard to beat the thrills of the first book.  Nevertheless, there is still combat a-plenty in the years back in the Danish hinterlands as Orm builds up his community, has to fight off bandits, assassins and berserkers and deal with the other groups around him.

A big through line in the book is Christianity and its adoption in the viking lands.  Another reason I enjoyed the first book the most is that it is decidedly anti-christian in a very funny way.  The vikings are not nice to christians, let's just say.  Slowly and insidiously, they are converted for one reason or another.  I do have to agree that trying to get vikings to move from constantly killing each other and their neighbours to a more peaceful "turn the other cheek" policy is a good thing.  And the Christianity here never fares well when it tries to impose its sexual mores on the vikings so it doesn't become too much of a bummer.  Feels distinctly Scandinavian. The main priest character is a fun part of the proceedings as well, usually in a foul temper because of the godless north people.  

Others have written more thoroughly and better on the virtues of The Long Ships, but my recommendation is that you just get it and read it.