Olman's Fifty

2. The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle

2012-01-25T16:04:00.001-05:00

Note to self: continue to read non-Sherlock Conan Doyle books. The Lost World was really awesome. I found it at a bookstore with the Lantzvillager, who recommended that I get it. It was a good recommendation as I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The adventure to the lost world plateau in the heart of South America was great, but I loved the public spectacle of scientific controversy in Edwardian London that bookened it even more. Good stuff.

1. The Diamond Smugglers by Ian Fleming

2012-01-12T16:01:00.000-05:00

I don't know what's up with me this year, but I just can not get motivated to write my blog posts. Perhaps I pushed myself too hard last year, perhaps it's bigger issues. It's bizarre and I can't figure out what is going on (which is also bizarre). I do not want to lose track, though, so I will continue to log the books I've read and put up their covers.

I found the Diamond Smugglers in the Maritimes. It was in terrible condition, but had such a cool cover that I picked it up. It assembles a series of articles Ian Fleming wrote for a Sunday paper where he interviews a top agent working against international diamond smuggling. There were some neat anecdotes and a fascinating picture of the diamond industry and black market in the world after WWII. There were some very disturbing and damning assumptions made about who had the native rights to the diamonds that reflect an ongoing colonial mindset. Neat book.

61. Without Drums or Trumpets by Alec Le Vernoy

2011-12-31T11:30:00.000-05:00

Another succesful random book find closes out my 2011 year of reading. Without Drums or Trumpets was one of the books I found in a dusty box in a top shelf of a work closet. I had actually not taken it the first time through because the cover and title combination was so uninspiring (I thought it was a treatise on peace). I had a second opportunity to go through the box and gave this one a closer look, thus realizing that it was actually a cool-sounding WWII narrative about a french guy who got into all kinds of adventures.

At the start of the war, Le Vernoy was a young outdoorsman, who loved the mountains. There is a brief prologue of him with some friends on a trek and then we launch into the invasion of France and Le Vernoy's crazy story. He fights briefly with the French army before the capitulation. Instead of surrendering, he continues fighting and fleeing, making his way to North Africa. There he tries desperately to join the British with a couple of insane kayaking and sailing episodes to Gibraltar. He finally succeeds but instead of getting sent to fight, he is placed by British intelligence back in North Africa where he does a bunch of spying and then sabotage missions with the local french community in occupied North Africa. I throw that off in a sentence, but this section alone is full of incredible episodes of tension and violence.

He eventually gets captured and spends time in a Tunisian prison. When Nazi rule in North Africa starts to collapse, he is shipped to Germany with a bunch of other important prisoners where he ends up in a concentration camp. The narrative here turns from the adventurous to the truly dark. No matter how many different perspectives and narratives I encounter about those concentration camps, I am still surprised once again by the incredible horror of what went down there. I guess the mind just sort of blocks it out. In Le Vernoy's case, he was one of the POWs in the camp so it gave a different perspective than from the Jews who were for the most part sent specifically to be murdered. All the other prisoners were basically being worked to death, so it wasn't much better, but it is just interesting to read about the experience from someone who actually saw families still carrying their suitcases being driven to the gas chambers, not realizing what was going to happen until the last minute. He also writes an extremely effective passage where he describes the horrific philosophy of production behind the way the camp was being run.

Aside from being incredibly resourceful, he can also speak German and was a medical student, skills which get him into slightly less deprived positions in various prisons and which also allow him to find means of escape, which he does. Most of his war, in fact, is him on the run, which leads to a lot of frustration for him, as his main goal is simply to get out and fight. He also has a lot of criticism for the majority of his own people, the french who collaborated or just remained passive. The times when he goes from door to door, desperate for a bit of help, and is categorically refused by his own people are maddening and an important reminder for us all.

As a book, the translation from the french is a bit rough (but makes it feel that much more authentic) and as a personal narrative it lacks a consistent structure. Those are minor concerns, though, as the guy's story is just so crazy and entertaining (and informative) that you can't stop turning the pages.

I was reading the end of this book while flying home. The in-seat entertainment device was playing 24 channels of broadcast television and I kept getting distracted and flipping through the channels. It was new year's eve and so we had all these countdowns and summaries of 2011. Except for the brief actual news events, it was all so much irrelevant horseshit. It just saddened me that a guy like Alec Le Vernoy, who had all of his fingernails peeled back slowly one by one because he wouldn't inform on his fellow prisoners, is mostly forgotten while our most powerful media voices spend vast resources celebrating nobodies who have done nothing. Is this what guys like m. Le Vernoy sacrificed for?

60. The White Rajah by Nicholas Monsarrat

2011-12-27T11:24:00.000-05:00

First of all, a minor pat on the back for myself as this 60th book brings up my "lifetime" (well since 2005) 50 books average up to 50 books per year. This was my goal and though I flagged in the second half of this year, I have achieved it. So that is quite satisfying. Now I shall try to maintain this average in the years to come.

I picked up the White Rajah early on in my trip to the Maritimes this summer almost entirely on the strength of the author's name. I had only read The Cruel Sea and really enjoyed it. The White Rajah sounded like a very different kind of book with an adventurous, possibly swashbuckling premise. It also had a cool map of some south seas island. As you can see, those elements were strong as they outweighed the super cheesy cover.

It's the epic story of Richard Marriot, younger brother of an artisocratic family in the 18th century who is left nothing but a globe and a pair of pistols by his wealthy father. The book opens at the day of the funeral when Richard's stuffy older brother basically throws him out of his newly inherited estate. After this dramatic chapter, we jump forward 10 years when Marriott is a pirate captain, sailing the exotic oceans. He stumbles upon the island nation of Makassang and finds himself in an advantageous position, where he can upset the balance of power in a struggle between the ruling Rajah and the resentful buddhist priests. Marriot is soon inculcated into the royal family and the bulk of the book follows the political struggles and his efforts (and lack thereof) to take control and help move the island from its savage state to a more politically enlightened place, with the help of the Rajah's beautiful daughter.

It was a really enjoyable read that suffered in the end by moving away from the adventure and intrigue towards political moralizing. It wasn't heavy-handed, but instead of a tense narrative, Marriot's struggles are sort of undermined by a semi-deus ex machina ending (that also all too easily waves away all the narrative potential of the conflict between Richard and his brother, who is instrumental in the deux ex machina ending). Another problem was the protagonist himself. He is portrayed as a lusty, headstrong young man whose natural energy and charisma (which are wild and out of control when he is a young lord in England) are honed in his years as a south seas freebooter. When he gets to Makassang, he becomes seduced by the easy living and grows soft and oblivious to the dangers around him. It's a great theme, but I felt that it went on for way too long, with the dangers being so obvious and Marriot himself being so lame that I grew frustrated with him. So instead of personal growth and a kick-ass return to form, we get lots of lots of him being passive while worse and worse shit goes on around him until finally the situation is intolerable, at which point a British gun ship comes out and saves the day. He is never really given the agency that would pay off all the built-up potential and so the reader is left a bit unsatisfied.

Still, the first half of the book is gripping, the situation and location are exotic and richly developed and portrayed. It was an enjoyable read and I would keep an eye out for any other Monsarrat books. He is very skilled at telling a story, enough so that I am not ready to say that some of the choices he made in this book reflect an actual flaw in his skill as an author.

59. The Folly by David Anne

2011-12-15T08:58:00.002-05:00

My copy does not have the yellow graphic on it.

I stumbled upon this book in a big ripped open garbage bag of books in my own back alley. At first, I thought I had stumbled upon the mythical motherlode. They were all paperbacks, all in read but decent condition and looked to be from the time period that I am interested in. But as I started to root around, I saw sadly that whoever had owned these books had the worst taste. It was all that late 70s, early 80s garbage like Lawrence Sanders. Ugh. I did manage to salvage an Ed McBain and this british horror novel which looked promising.

According to the inside cover, it is David Anne's second novel and his first was a best-seller. The cover I got off the net here also suggests that The Folly was also a best-seller. I find it a bit hard to believe. This book is not terrible, but it's pretty bad, awkardly and obviously structured without any real suspense. It does have a few moments and ideas of horror that are okay, but otherwise it feels like the book equivalent of the TV movie of the week.

It takes place in the countryside and the events surrounding Sir Mark Hatrell's lands and the ancient tower called the Folly. People in the surrounding countryside are getting savagely attacked and eaten by some creatures. [spoiler here] It turns out that sir Mark, with a crazed scientist he hired, have turned the Folly into a secret lab and are experimenting with rabbits and myxomatosis. I guess that was a real virus that killed tons of rabbits in the english countryside. Their goal is to get rid of rabbits, which eat the crops, once and for all. To do this, they need to create a rabbit that is immune to the disease (yes, this makes no sense and doesn't in the book). They end up creating giant carnivorous rabbits. We get lots of semi-gruesome eatings of various people, an intrepid journalist who is having an affair with sir Mark's wife (and an even more convoluted backstory involving sir Mark's first wife, whom he stole from the journalist then turned into a junkie—I guess to give the journalist some more motivation but it really has little role in the book) and a small cast of other characters, including a police sergeant and a gamekeeper.

When the gamekeeper was first introduced early in the book (he is resistant to Sir Mark's aggressive plans to modernize his farms), I had high hopes that he might be the protagonist. Unfortunately, he ends up being a secondary character. Even worse, he makes a stupid blunder that is clearly put in place to create some action. He and the journalist hide out in a blind with a recently killed lamb to attract the rabbits. Their plan succeeds and they finally observe the rabbits in action, but when they go out to inspect the shredded carcass, the gamekeeper trips and shoots the journalist in the leg! This is an obvious device to get the rabbits to come back (they are attracted by the smell of blood) so we get an action scene. So retarded. What kind of gamekeeper would ever trip in a hole in a site they had carefully prepared and even worse would have their gun unbroken or the safety off so they would shoot a compatriot in the leg. This scene offended my sensibilities to the point that I almost stopped reading the book. If you can't write a thriller with everybody being efficient, just don't bother, okay.

58. Deadly Welcome by John D. Macdonald

2011-12-09T00:20:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Vintage Paperbacks

This was one of the paperbacks I found on a weekend trip to the Laurentians this summer. I've read a lot of John D. Macdonald's, both from his Travis McGee series as well as his stand-alone thrillers. I love his books, but a writer as prolific as he, with such a strong style, can tend to become a bit repetitive if you read too many too close together. Also, his books are very easy to find, used and cheap. For these reasons, I tend to not buy his books any more, preferring to hold them back in case of emergency. In this case, it was the original paperback and thus probably has some value (except the guy stuck a $3 price tag with masking tape on the cover-Argh!) and it has been quite a while since I last read a John D. Macdonald (according to this blog, not since May 2007!).

The story here is about an agent who is pulled from his Venezuela post to go back to his own small Florida town to try and convince an old scientist to get out of his funk and get back in the game working on the weapons research that he abandoned for a beautiful young woman who was recently murdered. The agent has a rich and troubled past with this small town and the murdered woman as well, so his espionage assignment also includes his own personal challenges.

Macdonald is excellent at creating corrupt small Florida towns and that was one of the things in the blurb that attracted me to this book. I wasn't disappointed. The psychotic sheriff was particularly well (and disturbingly) portrayed. He rules the town with expert and scientifically sexual beatings with his billy club, breaking the spirit of anyone who might be a troublemaker. He gives the agent a solid working over his first day in town and that becomes motivation for the reader and the agent to get their own back.

Unfortunately, it never really builds up into a rich climax. Instead of the whole town being corrupted, the sheriff is really the sole bad guy. There is also not a lot of mystery around the murder of the woman, though it is drawn out for quite a while. The atmosphere and the characters are quite good, but I suspect it's the mix of the espionage side with the personal history side that didn't quite gel. It might have been better had it been one story or the other (which Macdonald later did do). So all in all not terrible, but not one of his best.

57. Cinema Sewer Volume III by Robin Bougie

2011-11-30T11:14:00.000-05:00

Just a little example of where Bougie's sick head is at

I already blogged about this book earlier in the month when I first received it. I did so because I wanted to share some of the Robin Bougie goodness with the world and I didn't think I would "finish" it any time soon. Cinema Sewer is a magazine and these collections are just that, a collection of past issues. So it has tons of short articles and I tend to read them jumping around (often when on the can) never really sure if I've read the entire thing or not.

However, for whatever reason, I started out doing that and then just ended up reading it straight through, skipping the few articles I had already read (and reading some twice in a few cases). So I get to count it as a completed book for the year.

As always, if you enjoy the combination of degenerate smut, lost popular culture and general weirdness, then Robin Bougie is your man. This guy is an expert in the history of pornography, women in prison movies, 80s action flicks, weird Japanese perversion movies and so on. His writing is enjoyable for two major reasons: 1) he drops tons of knowledge which for the nerd and student of history is like a big bowl of ice cream and 2) he has so much enthusiasm for the subject. His love of what the info he is sharing with you is just so contagious that almost every article makes you think "holy shit I need to go hunt [obscure bizarre crazily enjoyable sounding movie or series of movies X] down right away and dedicate the rest of my weekend to watching it!"

Actually, I should add that his writing style, technically and creatively is impressively skillful in and of itself. He's raunchy but direct and punchy, so you want to keep reading. And he has some hilarious turns of phrase, particularly when he is describing the sex act and element thereof and when aggressively pushing you to go watch the movie he is talking about. Most nerd preachers can be very annoying (and you know that Robin can go down that road with the hilarious cartoons from the great Colin Upton—who is also Bougie's long-suffering neighbour—about being forced to watch some profoundly disturbing movie by Bougie). But somehow, at least in print, Bougie is so positive and enthusiastic that he doesn't have to be pushy. He has already convinced you that you want to watch the movie.

I have one minor problem with the text in these books and it is a typographical one. Bougie hand writes all the text in all caps. It's a strong, steady and actually quite readable lettering, except for the punctuation. The first letter is the same size as the rest of the letters in the sentence and the period is easily overlooked so that I often found myself getting confused about a sentence only to realize that I was mixing two sentences together. Just a minor quibble and probably nothing that can be done about it now, especially given the tremendous amount of physical labour that goes into these books (and the overall look is quite beautiful), but just thought I should share.

I also found this third volume a bit too consistent in content as compared to the first two. It was almost entirely movie reviews and biographies of porn stars. All were good and interesting, but it felt like the first two volumes had a greater variety: more guest writers and artists, articles about a wider range of topics and some rich and challenging opinion pieces as well. On the other hand, the opening essay of this volume "HOLY SHIT! PORNOGRAPHY!" was powerful, compelling food for thought, a strong argument that our current moral perception of art is something quite new in the history of civilization. I would have liked to see a bit more of that kind of thing in the overall volume.

Generally, though, another excellent addition to the Cinema Sewer oeuvre. Robin Bougie is doing western civilization a huge service by his hours of research, drawing and writing. I would subscribe to the magazine, but I just can't keep things in that physical format around, so I will wait patiently for volume IV and maybe this time I'll get a raunchier dedication drawing!

You should get this and the first two. Also great xmas present for the movie nerd in your life who may be ready to take the next step towards the dark side. You can do all that here.

56. Airs Above the Ground by Mary Stewart

2011-11-15T10:39:00.001-05:00

I first discovered Mary Stewart thanks to my friend (sadly not blogging about his books and probably not reading much anymore due to a good case of the triplets) who is a huge fan of her Arthurian trilogy. I read the first one and really enjoyed it (and have the second one from the same publisher on deck). I did not realize, though, that Stewart was a succesful and well-established author of the genre people credit her with creating and mastering, the thriller-romance, long before she did the Arthurian trilogy. I learned this by discovering Airs Above the Ground in a very full used bookstore in Moncton and then doing a bit of follow-up research on the web.

The book started off in a very promising way. A young woman is bummed out because she and her husband had a big fight just before he left on a business trip. They were supposed to meet up for a holiday after, but now it is all up in the air. During a lunch with an older family aquaintance, she gets roped into chaperoning the older woman's son to Vienna where he is hoping to stay with his father. At first, the heroine is really not interested, but what clinches the deal is when she sees a newsreel talking about a deadly fire that took place in a circus travelling through Austria. She glimpses a man who looks just like her husband standing next to an attractive woman in the crowd outside the ruins of the fire. It's an intriguing premise and definitely makes you turn the pages.

Even more fun, the boy, who is 17 and at first full of resentment at being chaperoned, turns out to be up to his own little game (he hasn't actually told his father he is coming) and quite capable (he speaks german, knows all about horses). So both characters have their own little secrets (she doesn't tell him her suspicions about her husband) and as they travel, they start to reveal them and team up. Of course, they do end up chasing after the circus and that's when the intrigue starts.

Unfortunately, the premise was much better than the payoff. I found the first half to be really enjoyable and gripping, but when the reveals start happening, they are all pretty banal. Her husband turns out to be a super spy and the boy just tags along for the ride. All the potential tension is taken out of the relations between the characters and instead we get a super-safe, British old boys (but with a keen girl) crime-stopping caper. There is some interesting sub-text about men and women and the role of the male protagonist in the genre, but Stewart plays it very safe. It's not bad, but once I knew there were going to be no twists and that the good guys were truly good and decent, I wasn't so motivated to keep reading and it took me a while to finish it. I had been hoping for something a bit more acerbic along the lines of Highsmith or Millar. Maybe in her later books, she pushes things a bit, because she was certainly talented and intelligent. And the Crystal Cave definitely had a darker side.

Cinema Sewer volume III - my own personalized copy has arrived!

2011-10-30T14:11:00.001-04:00

Got my personally dedicated copy of Cinema Sewer Volume III in the mail this week!

I used to be sort of scared of Cinema Sewer. Robin Bougie does not hesitate to go into some of the nastiest corners of the grade B movie world. On the contrary, he jumps in with both feet. Some of the movies he talks about are way too harsh or gross for even my depraved tastes. But I finally broke down when I found Volumes I and II at some great discount while waiting in line at Fantasia. Once I started reading them, I realized what I had been missing: tons of awesome information on all kinds of crazy movies delivered with a rocking attitude and beautifully laid out and designed. Since I devoured the first two volumes, I've been following Robin's awesome (and definitely NSFW) blog and waiting impatiently for volume III.

Robin also has a tradition of doing a dedicated drawing to each person who buys the book directly from him. His pictures are bonkers, possible quite offensive even. You can see them over at his blog. I was quite excited to get my own dedication drawing. The drawing itself showed up on his blog this summer, but it wasn't until last week that I got the actual book. Wow is it ever gorgeous. And just so stuffed with info. Bougie hand-letters each page himself and there is a ton of text. When I first looked at it, I was sort of intimidated by the amount of text, but once I got into it I am having a hell of a time putting it down. This is the kind of book you want to just sort of jump around from article to article, but it's so engrossing that I am almost tempted to just start at the beginning and read it straight through (it does have a great opening essay on the origins of obscenity).

I have mixed feelings about the dedication drawing I got. On the one hand, I really appreciate the effort that was put into it and in real life, the quality of the art is really impressive. It's just that I think I may have gotten the tamest image of them all! It's an elegant little piece, but it feels almost absent when you see the insane robots and aliens and amputees in dripping, stretching sexual acts that everybody else got! It is entirely possible, though, that I may have asked for him to not go too gross on mine when I ordered my book. Nevertheless, I treasure my dedicated drawing and am just loving the book itself. I already read a great piece on "southern discomfort" movies by contributor Don Guarisco (who has his own SchlockMania blog here) that led me to Race with the Devil which we watched last night as part of a Halloween double feature.

Thanks Bougieman!

55. Eighty Million Eyes by Ed McBain

2011-10-27T11:02:00.000-04:00

I literally found this book in a pile of garbage in an alley here when walking the neighbour's dog. It wasn't total "garbage" but a bunch of stuff left over from someone who had moved out. This happens often here in Montreal, people move out and then just dump all the shit they didn't want to take with them into the alley or the street in front of their apartment. It can be a disgusting mess but you can also find some cool stuff (I've found several beautiful old tools in the past). In this case, there were several garbage bags filled with old paperbacks! I really thought I'd hit the motherlode. When I started to go through it (and I was not the first, so maybe somebody got to the good stuff), I realized that whoever owned these books had the worst taste. It was almost entirely terrible 80s schlock. Thick wannabee bestsellers with embossed and fold-out covers. Crap like Lawrence Sanders and a bunch of those epic romances. I did find this one McBain book and even though the cover is super 80s, I felt I needed to find something. McBain, in my experience, pretty much always delivers. He's not awesome, but he is solid and you get a great look at police procedure in the city.

Eighty Million Eyes is two simultaneous and unconnected investigations. One is about a really scary psycho guy who is stalking a woman. The other is about a successful comedian and talk-show host who dies mid-show of poison. Both were compelling and the one about the stalker was actually quite brutal and scary. It had one part that I would almost say fell into the exploitative, but just by a smidgen. It definitely freaked me out as I was in the middle of biting into a mayonaissey burger at the time of reading and it was all about a woman who after being brutally beaten discovers an even more horrible thing on her stomach. Yuck!

This book also had cool artifacts, like an actual sketch drawing of the suspect, a classified ad (faked by the cops to draw the suspect out) and a complain report. I guess that gave it more of a realistic, procedural feel. I wonder if McBain did that stuff himself or if he had people lay it out for him.

54. The Freebooters by Robert Wernick

2011-10-24T11:03:00.000-04:00

I picked this one up warily, early on in my Maritimes trip. I hadn't yet really made any great finds, so was a bit less choosy. I loved the cover and it was in beautiful condition, but it looked more like one of those literary-type war books rather than one with lots of ass-kicking. Well it turned out that my hunch was correct, but it was nevertheless kind of an enjoyable read.

It takes place near the end of the war, immediately after the allies have liberated Paris. The narrator is one of those too intelligent, too cynical soldiers who spends most of his time drinking wine and reflecting on humanity and doing it in that weird pseudo-beat, pseudo-hemingway writing style which seems affected and mildly annoying in the gleaming of the noonday light against the metal ashtray while a prostitute screams from above. Fortunately, this style was applied relatively lightly so it never became cloying. The book details his adventures with a special unit. Unfortunately, these adventures never involve actual combat, but because he and his two partners are fairly crazy, they keep getting into all kinds of romantic or criminal trouble. The book flows from one weird post-war situation to the next. Seeing the locations and the characters was quite enjoyable and somehow it all flowed together, even ultimately I couldn't really get the point of the book or care about anybody.

So a nice-looking cover and an okay read, but not one I would strongly recommend except for readers particularly interested in philosophical post-WWII books.

53. The Break in the Line by Berkely Mather

2011-10-20T23:04:00.000-04:00

My reading consumption has slowed down to a trickle, thanks to a major renovation project I am overseeing at work. This will kill what was going to be a record-breaking year, but I still have a book going at all times. This is an important lesson. Even if you get swamped and barely have any time to read, don't stop reading altogether. You'll be surprised how many books you get through without even really realizing it during very busy periods. The trick is to pick books that you can pick up and put down without forgetting too much of what is going on or which character is which.

The Break in the Line attracted me because it is one of the Fontanas with the same look to the Desmond Bagley's I first saw as a kid. I particularly like the use of the green in the cover title. Berkely Mather had a whole series and I guess was a well-enough respected military espionage writer that his name got to be much bigger than the title.

The story takes place in cold war southeast Asia. The protagonist, cynical and self-effacing, screws up what was supposed to be a pick-up mission upriver into Burma. He sort of hopes he'll get fired and can get out of the game altogether. Instead, his superiors corner him into taking a more risky job (both personally and professionally) of following a double agent from Calcutta far to the north, across the Himalayas (dangerous) and into China (super dangerous) in the hope of finding "the break", the point where the Chinese were meeting with their agents.

It was a gripping story, especially when they get into the mountains. Both the espionage stuff and the outdoor adventures stuff was good. The former had lots of tense stops at small mountain villages where they had to try and not stand out too much (or be hidden entirely by allies). There is a cool part in Tibet where the monks are basically fascist thugs, no friends to the Chinese (though possibly with informers among them), but very scary to anyone else. My only complaint was that the protagonist had that tendency to be a dick to everybody as well as constantly down on himself. You see this in these British books of the 60s and 70s and I've never quite understood the appeal. It makes them not likable at all, which I guess was part of the point. Ultimately, the portrayal of the political reality of his situation makes it quite believable that he would be a stressed-out dick, so at least it wasn't forced.

Another funny thing happened when I was reading this. There is a map at the beginning (which I always appreciate), but it's weirdly oriented and badly labelled. It's a section of southeast Asia, centered around the northeast corner of the Bay of Bengal. What was driving me nuts was that it showed Pakistan to be south of Bhutan and east of India! I couldn't believe that they could have made a mistake so I finally started looking into it and it turned out that there used to be two Pakistan. Rather, Pakistan was divided into two after Indian independence, I guess because there were Muslim communities on either side of India. Eastern Pakistan felt neglected by their more powerful western counterpart and eventually there was a war of independence and eastern Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971. The Break in the Line was published in 1970. Kind of cool that it caught that little geo-political window in history where Bangladesh was part of Pakistan.

52. Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins

2011-09-29T01:09:00.000-04:00

Not good. Probably the biggest disappointment since I've started doing this blog. It's not like I had super high expectations, but I like football and I like the early '70s and the combination of the two is a great little slice of American culture that I've always enjoyed (Hunter S. Thompson talking with Nixon about football on the campaign trail is a great example of this). I guess Dan Jenkins is a well-respected sports writer and Semi-Tough was quite successful, critically and commercially. But it sucked. I don't even really get what the point of it is. About three-quarters of the book is the narrator, the star running back for the New York Giants, saying all this stuff that is supposed to be shocking: casual racism, sexism and drug use. Whoopee-doo. Maybe for people in the '70s this was some titillating, shocking revelation. Even if it was, do we need a hundred pages of it, and always in this self-congratulatory tone? The whole thing is narrated before a Super Bowl, though the game itself is an afterthought. The climactic scene seems to be a big party the night before the big game where two women strip naked in front of the party. Whoop-dee doo. Even lamer, the whole thing ends with a weak romance. There was just nothing here and it was boring.

I had kind of wanted to see the movie, but it sounds even stupider.

If you want to read a half-decent book about football in the '70s, go read Jack Tatum's biography "They Call me Assassin."

51. Hell to Pay by William R. Cox

2011-09-07T07:21:00.001-04:00

We went up to the Laurentians for an overnight stay at a lakeside hotel with some friends during the Labour Day weekend and during a lunch stop at tourist town St-Agathe, wouldn't you know it, there was an outdoor book sale! Most of the tables were french or local authors or recent best seller paperbacks in english, except one where the guy had an amazing collection of paperback pulps from the 50s for reasonable prices! Unfortunately, I felt some social pressure and we hadn't eaten lunch, so I ended up only getting three and regretting not scooping up the others when I had the chance. Turned out the seller had once own a bookstore and this was left over from his remaining inventory. He had inherited most of the inventory and didn't know much about old crime paperbacks. The previous owner had, but also had some ridiculously marked-up prices (this one for instance, had $26 pencilled in the inside front cover). I was actually reading another book, but Hell to Pay starts off so well that I couldn't put it down.

It's the story of a succesful Manhattan gambler, Tom Kincaid, who is connected to the Syndicate and underworld but manages to maintain his autonomy (to everyone's displeasure). He keeps the balance until a brief altercation at a dice game with a young punk suddenly puts him in the middle of what appears to be a generational gang war between the Syndicate and these crazy, hopped-up greasers who seem to like violence for its own sake. The plot is much more complicated than that, with lots of twists and turns. Right up until the end, there is a mystery as well, which is why the protagonist is so much in the middle of everything. The reveal was pretty cool and definitely surprising, but that part of the story was not super convincing and it came out a bit soft in the end.

What was convincing and really well done, was the milieu. This is Richard Stark's syndicate, with big, older men with last names only from out of town meeting in fancy residential hotel rooms. All the locales—the restaurants on Broadway, the garages, the underground dice games and high-roller card games—were richly portrayed and interesting as hell. The violence, also was compelling and intense ("Like in the Islands during the war, I kept moving, firing"). The cover over-hypes the young punks theme, but it is the central theme and they are truly hateful. Hell to Pay echoes the conservatism of the genre, but from a strange perspective, because basically everybody is a criminal. It's just that the older criminals have a code and are doing it for the money and the control, while the young ones are just irrational, cruel and destructive.

For some reason, the language of the action scenes reminded me of The Big Blowdown, when they corner the extortionists in the garage. Wonder if Pelecanos has read this one? Anyhow, despite a bit of an easy ending that didn't really fit in with the grit, tension and brutal violence that went on before, this was a solid, satisfying crime novel.

50. Operation Stranglehold by Dan J. Marlowe

2011-08-26T06:52:00.000-04:00

My reading and posting has slown down somewhat and probably will continue to be slow until early October as I am overseeing a fairly large renovation project at work (large for my normal job, anyhow) and it is taking up a lot of my time. I'm going for the short, punchy books that don't demand a lot of my memory or commitment but deliver the cathartic savagery a working man needs in this world of law where you aren't allowed to break someone's fingers for sticking gum on to to front railing.

Operation Stranglehold is apparently the first Dan J. Marlowe book I've read, at least since I started the 50 books project. While I was reading it, I had him mixed up in my head with Donald Hamilton. That is cleared up now and it sounds like Marlowe had an interesting life history. Operation Stranglehold is part of the ongoing series of Drake books ("The man with nobody's face"). If this one is representative of the series, it is pretty standard mass paperback espionage fare of the period. I suspect he has better books in him. In this one, he has to rescue the son of a powerful politician from a spanish jail before the arrest can be used to make the politician look bad. Also, Drake's mentor or sometime partner had been sent out to do the job and got caught himself. So Drake and his super-hot girlfriend (who is also rich) go out to Spain and get involved in a decent little adventure.

It's not a great book and a bit of an inauspicious choice for my 50th, but it was competent enough and had some good little details about trying to get through the authorities in rural spain, some nice stuff on a train. It just had no real bite or thrill. There is one really weird thing and that is the conceit of the book, that Drake has had extensive plastic surgery and thus looks really weird and anonymous. He has no hair on his head at all, wears wigs and has to wear make-up in the sun! How the hell does he get a super-hot babe girlfriend? Doesn't everybody think he looks like a disturbing weirdo?

Note, this cover is not my own. I've got the same one, but there are no scribbles on it. I picked it up in my Nova Scotia trip. I'll scan mine when I can find it again (told you I was busy!)

49. Virginia's Thing by Henry Woodfin

2011-08-23T21:34:00.000-04:00

Picked this up for a buck during our vacation in Nova Scotia, though I can't remember exactly which book store. Maybe the one in Lunenburg? You can see by the cover why I picked it up. I'm always interested in portrayals of the '60s in crime fiction. I love the crazy naîveté of the period, especially juxtaposed against the hard reality of the investigator.

The book is much calmer and less over the top than the blurb on the back suggests. It's a basic detective story, starting with a job. The sensible and independent daughter of a union boss has been missing for two weeks. He wants her found as quietly as possible as he is participating in a tight election. The job sends the detective to the campus of the state university, where he encounters the diverse society that is the intellectual left, focusing especially on a professor couple. Slowly, we learn more about the girl and more about the people around her.

It's interesting and engaging, but we don't learn anything that helps us with what actually happened to her until quite near the end. So the mystery itself seems a bit rushed when it gets wrapped up.The emotional impact doesn't though, and the message of this book is pretty establishment all the way, though in a sensible, quiet sort of way. The academics with their extreme, absolutist views, are made to look obsessed, weak, soulless and basically evil. At the same time, there is a certain sympathy for the more sensible liberal elements (interracial marriage is strongly approved of). Though it's a savage portrayal, the author suggests that living with their own conscience is punishment enough for their sins. All in all, it's that kindler, gentler conservatism from folks who fought in the war. I wish we had more of that around today.

Other than the pacing of the mystery itself, this was quite a good read. I was caught up in the characters and felt a certain bit of satisfaction with the way it all concluded. I can't find a single other book by this author. It was from Pyramid books, who bothered to credit the cover artist (D. Greene - I wonder what Louis XIV knows?)

48. The Big Guy by Wade Miller

2011-08-20T21:09:00.000-04:00

Was this ever a cool book. The opening lines were enough to sell me: "Joe Drumm glanced dispassionately at the blood on his knuckles. It was not his own blood." Well the rest didn't disappoint. I read this book pretty much non-stop, including staying up way past my bedtime to finish it. So I am happy to say that it lived up to my expectations, even exceeded them.

It's the story of a heartless and aggressive thug who rises to power and then succumbs to it. Joe Drum is a brutal man, animal-like in the way he approaches the world. Early on in the novel, he and a partner stumble upon a bunch of cash while doing a strong arm job for the big boss in town. They use it to leverage a higher position in the organization. From there, Drum sees all the weaknesses and attacks until he is the kingpin. Then things start getting interesting.

The first half of the book, chronicling Joe's strategies and conflicts on his way to the top, is enjoyable but not uncommonly good. We've read this kind of stuff before. The second half, where we learn through Drum that power does indeed corrupt, is uncommonly good. It is structurally satisfying as well.

I really want to talk about the sexual relations in the book, but doing so will mean revealing some pretty major spoilers. Put short and as vaguely as possible, The Big Guy subverts that tradition in crime novels of this era where the dudes either stalk or sexually assault the women who then fall in love with them. Great read. One of the best of this genre I've read so far. Great language, rich crime milieu, lots of creative action, decadence and sex, what's not to like? A nasty and smart little book.

Here's a link to a good review with some interesting info about the author (authors actually as it was "a couple of high school buddies who teamed up to write mysteries all their adult lives"). He doesn't like their other books, but many people do in the comments below. I'll keep my eyes open.

Okay, now here is the motherload: MysteryFile has pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about Wade Miller.

And here is a little Westlake reference : "More recently, Mr. Wade was given the 1998 City of San Diego Local Author Achievement Award. Still an active octogenarian, he writes a monthly mystery wrap-up column called “Spadework” for the San Diego Union Tribune. From this vantage point, he can survey past and present crime writing. He has praised such crime authors diverse as Martha Lawrence, Robert Crais, Rochelle Krich, Sue Grafton, Donald Westlake, Marianne Wesson, and Janet Evanovich."

47. Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

2011-08-17T05:09:00.001-04:00

When I was younger, though some of my friends were reading the books of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, I always thought they were going to be too hard and dry, so I never read them. Perhaps Lucifer's Hammer is not totally representative, but if it is, it's a shame, as I would have loved it as an adolescent and the simplistic politics would have mostly gone right over my head. The authors do have the reputation of being hard sci-fi authors, but I think that must have been a title that was easier to learn back in the 70s as the science in Lucifer's Hammer seems to be about as good as all these reports debunking climate change. And it reads like a giant soap opera with lots of crazy action.

It's the story of an asteroid that hits earth and it centers around a large cast of characters in southern California. It takes place in the mid-70s and it shows. The first quarter of the book feels like a written version of Knot's Landing or some boring "adult" novel from that period. It isn't until society starts getting a bit freaked out about the comet that things get interesting. Then the comet hits and the fun starts. The middle section is very satisfying as we get to see all the various forms of destruction it causes and the various characters trying to save themselves. The last part of the book is those characters trying to rebuild a society and struggling against the challenges of resources and the destructive factions, notably an army of cannibals. The super blatant theme of the book is that science and technological progress is good and any form of resistance to that is bad and naive. This is sprinkled lightly throughout the book at the beginning and then made obvious at the end and finally basically shoved down the reader's throat in a final secondary climax that kind of ruins the satisfaction of the ending.

I've run into many nerds in my travels who espouse this kind of faux-tough, pseudo-science based anti-environmentalism. This position disguises itself as a rational, political stance when it is primarily an emotional one. The basic tenets are that 1) environmentalists are naive and their ideas would never survive a second in a non-civilized world and that 2) science and technology will always find a solution to man's needs. There is a lot to both of those tenets, but there is also a lot to question there. Of course, the nerd anti-environmentalist position leans heavily on the logical fallacy of the excluded middle. And ultimately what it really is is a justification for one being allowed to do whatever one wants without any kind of interference or having to make an effort to think about how your behaviour may impact the rest of society, the planet and the future. It's a kind of technological libertarianism and very appealing to the male adolescent who can't get laid.

Here, for example, is a throwaway line when the reporter decides to get some stuff ready for hammerfall (the name given to the time when the asteroid hits, even though it is not predicted to hit):

Solar heat: the simples and most efficient solar system known to man. Hang your clothes out to dry, rather than use an electric or gas dryer. Of course, not many "conservationists" did it: they were too busy preaching conservation.

Have you never read the Whole Earth Catalog, Jerry and Larry? This kind of nonsense is peppered throughout the book but really gets retarded when, in the final pages, after the organized good people have beaten off the cannibals and are celebrating. The team that was sent to protect a surviving nuclear power plant comes back with the bad news that the remnants of the cannibal army are in a position to destroy it. This sets up an impromptu debate with all the main characters deciding whether they should hunker down, enjoy their win and survive the winter or go and save the nuclear power plant to ensure a long-term future. What is so stupid about this, in the context of the book, is that this argument was already had and won by the long-term faction, which is why the team was sent out to protect the nuclear plant in the first place. So not only are you thinking, "okay, yeah, yeah, we get it, having power is awesome and the future of mankind" but you are also trying to figure out why the pivotal character who comes in and forces the trip out to the nuclear power plant is suddenly nowhere to be seen in this final debate. Oh yes, we also learn that not only is chemical warfare necessary, but it (and the bodies of its victims) are excellent fertilizer. And for a supposed hard science book, there is some shocking ignorance about nuclear power (such as blowing up a nuclear power plant is not the same as a nuclear bomb so therefore there won't be any radiation or fallout).

I'm harping on the political stuff, but the bulk of the book is actually just people surviving the craziness and that stuff is quite enjoyable, once you get past the stupid '70s soap opera crap. (Just for one example, the main character goes out to the country in one early episode to interview a senator at his ranch and ends up hiking with his hot daughter. when they get home, she offers to make him dinner and I kid you not suggests microwaving the steaks and this is treated like some awesome advancement; this probably offended me more than any of the nerd politics. How utterly retarded were the 70s.) Lucifer's Hammer felt like a mix of a bunch of post-apocalyptic classics. You've got your Alas, Babylon, your Earth Abides, The Postman, even The Stand comes to mind at points (which came out a year later). It's good fun for the most part with a couple of really cool characters (Harry the country mailman who never gives up doing his rounds and ends up as a messenger in the post-hammerfall world and Dr. Forrester who lovingly wraps up all his books and buries them in the front yard). I guess I would consider it a best-seller type of PA book, kind of a mess, but quite entertaining for the most part. If you are a fan of the genre, you need to read it at some point.

Looking for others on Google Plus

2011-08-10T08:38:00.003-04:00

Hey, I'm over at Google+ and I'm finding it difficult to connect with other people there who are interested in the same kind of books as I am. I'm sure they are out there and it would be fun to have the kind of short-term discussions and sharing of neat stuff that goes on on G+ with them. So if you are on google+, find me at Olman Feelyus and add me to your book circles or whatever. If you want to be on, let me know in the comments and I'll try and send you an invite.

It's weird, because I already have lots of people I already know as well as tons of people from the tabletop RPG community in my circles. But I can't figure out a way to search people by interest and thus find discussions about other subjects (mainly books and movies) that I am interested in.

(I'm going to post the same thing over at Briques du neige, but over there I'll be looking for movie geeks and Montreal and Canadian issues nerds.)

46. Bloody Sunday by Frank Scarpetta

2011-08-05T16:49:00.000-04:00

Okay, now we're talking! No more of these sensitive chick books! What a breath of fresh air to finally wallow around in the mud of good old fashioned killing of mafia and hippies and balling young hippie chicks. Bloody Sunday was weirdly really good in parts, appropriately pornographic in others and basically workmanlike in its ensemble.

We start in medias res, with no real back story or history for the protagonist, Magellan. He has been shot in the shoulder after wiping out a nest of mafia scum in one city and ends up in another. An old woman finds him in the alley and takes him home. She is originally from the country and one of the few good people in the bad part of the city. Turns out she had 12 sons, only 2 of whom are still alive and the last one got killed trying to find out what happened to his daughter. What did happen was that she had been sent to an apartment as a replacement stenographer for a meeting with some big time businessmen. The meeting turned into a party and they wanted her to join along. She didn't want to party and they threw her out the window.

So though we are almost already halfway through the book (he also dispatches the local enforcer and his superiors who are extorting the old lady), Magellan now has his new mission. The second half of the book is him hunting down each of the four businessmen, figuring out how to get to them, getting to them, killing all their men and then torturing them to death after letting them know why. This is really the porn here. There is some sex (and I have to say it wasn't bad, especially the lead-up stuff; I guess I'm becoming the perverted middle class, middle-aged white male demographic Scarpetta is targetting) but it's the descriptions of the exit wounds and the bodies spinning and the long-drawn out final torture (which really is gruesome) that push this book into pornography. But hey, I'm not really complaining! Those scumbags had it coming to them.

Parts of this book, though, were actually quite well-written. There are way, way too many adjectives and lots of run-on sentences, but otherwise it's sparse and direct and at times even quite effective. The final torture scene takes place on a field of cows and the whole thing is punctuated by the cows themselves, who at first nervously hover around and then, when the torture really gets going, totally freak out. It worked very well to ramp up the tension and horror of the scene.

There was a small, squat structure a few yards from the feeder. Several of the cattle snorted with fright and raced away again as he walked toward it, their tales whipping as their hooves thudded against the ground. They lumbered around and crashed through the brush to circle and come back in their agony of terrified fascination with him and the break in the monotony of the long night of their lives.

During my vacations I took a walk that passed several fields of cows and I have to say that "their agony of terrified fascination" perfectly describes their reaction to me. It was rather unsettling.

I have learned through this post on the Glorious Trash blog, that Bloody Sunday is actually The Marksman #20, part of one of the many series in this sub-genre. I'd love to find out the history behind the series, who were the real writers, who was behind the publishing. Probably some good stories behind that history.

45. Memoirs of a Lighthouse Keeper's Son by Billy Budge

2011-08-03T12:46:00.002-04:00

This book was published locally in the Maritimes. I learned about it thanks to the recommendation of the good innkeepers of the excellent Four Mile Beach Inn at the north end of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. It's a region of Canada that has a lot of history and they are quite proud of it. I was happy to find this book in one of the little road side stops and to learn that there is a small but going press that produces a lot of interesting books from and about the Maritimes.

This is the story of Billy Budge, whose father got a job being the lighthouse keeper in lonely St. Paul's island, a rock off the northern tip of Nova Scotia that was known (and still is today) as the Graveyard of the Gulf. It's a short, directly told and quite engaging tale. The family (Billy was 5 at the start, his little sister, their mom and their Newfoundland, King) stayed there for 5 years and had many interesting and challenging interactions with the tough environment as well as the isolation. It's a great read, very positive but also realistic. It's one of those books that reminds you that life can be really rich and fulfilling without a lot of stuff and society as long as you have a purpose and interesting things to do.

What I found a bit surprising is that the challenge for the author was not going out to the island and being separated for everybody. His real difficulty came when he had to return 5 years later and go to school. Either it was because of his age during his time on the island or his personal make-up, but he really preferred the loneliness and difficulty of his life on St. Paul to the crowded world of the mainland and it took him some time to re-adjust.

Check out St. Paul's Island:

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Regional Report: used book hunting in the Canadian Maritimes

2011-07-31T14:51:00.001-04:00

I just came back yesterday from an excellent two-week+ vacation in the Maritimes that my wife pushed for and almost entirely organized. We took the ViaRail train overnight in a sleeper car from Montreal to Moncton (the line is called The Ocean and it is the oldest continuous-running passenger line in North America). We spent 4 days in Prince Edward Island and then the rest of the trip in Nova Scotia, first in Cape Breton, then Halifax and points south and finally along the Bay of Fundy.

I was somewhat ambivalent about going used book shopping. My on-deck shelf is near its limit as it is (it's the top of a dresser in my closet, running along the back edge and I don't like it to get much closer than two-thirds or so of that length; currently it is almost nine-tenths, so I have some reading to do). I also didn't want to distract too much from the sun and sand and sights of the Maritimes. I also didn't have time to plan much ahead of time, so felt not properly prepared for attacking ill-organized used bookstores.

But of course, once on site, my excitement got the better of me and I ended up with so many books that I had to get a separate box to put them in as my suitcase got to heavy to lug up to motel rooms. Here is the painful result:

My poor on-deck shelf is going to feel like Mr. Creosote soon!

Also due to my lack of preparation, I did very little photographing of the various bookstores we visited. It's a shame, because there were a couple of pretty interesting little spots. My wife noticed one just off the main road in Alberton, PEI. The place, a beat up old residence that had seen better days, was closed, but the guy had left his phone number in the window. I called but nobody answered. Happily, the next day he was there, parked in his truck outside the store, reading something. This place was paperback heaven. Unfortunately, he was clearly near retirement and the books were suffering from too long not being dusted. The place was for sale.

Another amazing find (also spotted by my wife, though this one was in the little Maritimes Used Book flyer that various stores had available in various years) was Amy's in Amherst, Nova Scotia. This was a bright white, vinyl-sided, windowless rectangle on the main business route (that goes by all the gas stations and Tim Horton's). Inside it was literally stacked floor to ceiling with books. They were quite clean and organized, though by author with many large piles that had yet to be organized. Here I found some serious gems, including The Green Eagle Score in paperback for $3. The owner was quite friendly and helpful, though edging very close to bitterness in the tough time he was having.

I would have thought that one of the prerequisites for running a used book store would be a kind of mania for organization and categorizing. This does not seem to be the case. Rather, it seems to be the contrary. Perhaps the job starts to overwhelm one's ability to organize. We encountered several establishments with pleasant, engaged proprietors who seemed completely and happily oblivious to the insane mess their store was in. My wife and I were both tempted just to quite our lives and sign on as intern to help put these guys' stores in order.

Overall, my haul was not mindblowing. I found a lot of interesting little books and some with just cool covers. The two big scores were the Parker mentioned above and one you will see below. Here are some of the more interesting finds:

Here are the Westlake books. I've never heard of Gangway! and quite curious to check it out. I've read Help I Am Being Held Prisoner, but loved the cover here (looks a bit like Donald himself, no?) and it was only a couple bucks. The Green Eagle Score, as mentioned above, was $3. Terrible condition, but I'm very psyched to have this version in Paperback. I couldn't help myself and paid $15 for Killtown at a savvy store in Halifax. They also had The Split in the paperback version with Jim Brown on the cover (it's the fifth image down on the Violent World of Parker site here), which I really wanted, but it was $30 and that was way too much.

For some reason, I also picked up a bunch of mafia crime books, the first two just because the covers looked so cool, but the third one I found (actually the first one in the photo) was the real major score.

I got all excited and nervous that the book seller would realize that he had a gem on his hands and charge me more than the $3 asking for Peter Rabe's War of the Dons. The cover is stained, but it is otherwise in pretty good condition and I believe a first edition (same edition, I believe, as Louis XIV's, but I suspect he didn't pay $3 for his! ;)). I note how the cover design, especially for the two Fawcett books, is very similar to Vendetta, which I quite enjoyed. I guess that was following up on the success of the Godfather?

Here are three other crime paperbacks I found, also dealing with the mafia, though these I picked up mainly because of their great covers:

I did actually buy a few hardcovers as well, though really nothing too exciting.

Both the Margaret Millar and the Gilbert are lowly book club editions, but they are nice looking and I thought would complement the other books on my not-so-full hardback shelf. The Deliverance does appear to be a first edition, a bit battered, but quite cool-looking.

The other bonus with the Margaret Millar book is that it has a picture of her on the back. Does she ever look Canadian!

I really don't know how I am going to handle my on-deck shelf, now that it will almost double in length and go far off the edge of my dresser. I am definitely going to have to get some reading done in the next couple of months, that's for sure!

44. The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

2011-07-30T22:17:00.001-04:00

I read 4 books in the first 5 days of my vacation and then spent the next 10 reading The Eustace Diamonds, finally finishing it after we had got home this morning. It is the epic story of Lizzie Eustace née Greystock who is quite beautiful and charming, but soulless, ambitious and dangerous. She marries a Lord whom she knows is going to die due to his high-living, inherits $4,000 pounds a year and a Scottish castle from him. He also gave her a diamond necklace, a family heirloom worth $10,000 pounds to wear. After his death, she claims it was a gift to her while his family tries to get her to give them back. Much hijinks occur, told by Trollope in exquisite, living detail. I sometimes stop and realize that I am reading a 600+ page book which is almost entirely about human social interaction. No guns, no crime (although there actually are two really good interconnected robberies in this one), no physical violence (though an exciting fox hunt and some pretty strong emotional and social violence), really not the kind of book I expect myself to like. But Trollope is just such a great writer and does such a great job of exposing character, that, though daunted by the length at the beginning, I often have trouble putting down.

The Eustace Diamonds is pretty dark, as well. Though Lizzie is probably the most loathsome character in the book (and even then you often feel for her), she is surrounded by such flawed colleagues that you have trouble ever really liking any of them. The good ones are often stupidly loyal or weak or misguided. But it doesn't make the book any less enjoyable, because each character is so rich. It's also a fascinating exposure on marriage practices among the upper classes in 19th century Britain. Trollope's big theme, especially prevalent in this book, is the difficulty of being in the between classes: not rich enough to comfortably afford all the things you need to be in society but not poor enough to not have to care about them. All the principal characters suffer from this affliction and the remedy is marriage. The problem is that when everyone around you also wants to move up via marriage, it becomes a complex game of negotiations and investigations. Love is window-dressing at best in this world.

It was really interesting to read this book after having read The Gamekeeper. That book was about the warden in charge of maintaining the hunting grounds of a lord. In The Eustace Diamonds, we see a glimpse of that world but from the upper side. I don't think I would have fully appreciated the costs and difficulties in maintaining their land that was a part of the responsibilities of the landed gentry had I not read that book.

43. The Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

2011-07-22T15:40:00.000-04:00

This was an okay mystery with a great premise that got undermined somewhat by the narrative. The premise that is so great is the heroine, Amelia Peabody, a feisty and headstrong Victorian woman, who embodies all the values of the British Empire, but is somewhat restricted by doing so in a female form. She is really a great character and you want to read a bunch of stories with her poking her parasol at men who don't behave like gentlemen or berating poor egyptian shopkeepers who try to get one over on her. Even better, about a quarter of the way through the book, she befriends a younger, extremely beautiful "fallen" woman and for a while I thought we were going to have a sort of Aubrey-Maturin type series, but with women.

Unfortunately, the mystery they get involved in isn't all that interesting. It's about sabotage that goes on at a dig for Egyptian relics. It was okay, but not mindblowing, though the interplay of the various personalities was entertaining. Even worse, the book ends with Lady Peabody and her new friends situations both being resolved with marriage. The series does go on, but I guess it is now Peabody and her husband, which seems okay, but, to my mind, kind of undermined the vibrancy of the original premise. It is a well-loved series and I would be curious to hear if my concerns are wrong. I wouldn't say no to reading another one in the series.

Why do all of the books I read have to be in series? It's endless!

42. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2011-07-20T15:28:00.000-04:00

I happened upon the jacketless hardback copy of The Hunger Games at one of the bed & breakfasts we stayed at in PEI. It was on a small shelf of books that other guests had left, which you could take or add to. Such a great tradition. I had been meaning to read a few of this new generation of post-apocalyptic youth fiction since reading a survey article in the New Yorker about it. I guess the Hunger Games is one of the most popular series from this new wave and they are going to make a movie based on it, which is already getting some buzz.

This was a page turner and a really entertaining read that both me and my wife had a hell of a time putting down. The only false note was the inner thoughts of the protagonist concerning the various boys in her life. They seemed muddled and unrealistic and at times were slightly annoying intrusions on what was otherwise a tight and exciting ride.

I'm not going to bother with a synopsis, as I suspect we will all be hearing about it when the movie comes out and many of you may have already read the book. What struck me about it is how much it reminded me of John Christopher's young adult science fiction, in particular the Tripods series. Both books are about adolescents in an authoritarian society who are forced at a certain age to participate in a competition run by the society's masters. In Collins case, it is the Capitol. In Christopher's, the tripods themselves. In both cases, an exemplary adolescent, who is the protagonist, will end up being the key that will undo the tyranny that rules their world. I wonder how much Collins is aware of Christopher's work and if we will get any comparisons in the popular media.

These books are short, with big type, so I'll most likely read the rest of the series. It's possible, though, that with the amount of other reading I have head of me, I may just let someone tell me what happens. In any case, I approve of these kinds of books being popular and being made into movies. It suggests a renewed skepticism by the current generation, something the western world badly needs after the betrayal of my own generation X and the lameness that has since followed.

41. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

2011-07-19T14:52:00.032-04:00

Since we were in PEI and our next stop was Cavendish (the area upon which the Avonlea of the books is more or less based and now a major tourist center), I rushed through 20,000 Leauges and made sure I'd be reading Anne of Green Gables when I was there. It turned out to be no problem to finish this book before we even left Cavendish, as it was a very enjoyable read that kept me turning the pages.

I can see why this book is so loved. It really does grab you at the heart right from the beginning, when simple bachelor Matthew Cuthbert goes to the train station to pick up a male orphan to help with his farm chores and instead finds loquacious, imaginative Anne. The rest of the book are short episodes of her slowly integrating into the community and the home of the Cuthberts, into their hears and of course into generations of readers. What I really enjoyed about this book is how the uptight people are portrayed. They aren't really all that uptight. Usually, in western literature, whenever we have an overly artistic person in an uptight environment, the uptight people are super freaky and end up winning and we all have to feel tragic about it. Here, the uptight people are actually okay in the end, but just a bit focused on practical matters due to their rough existence. Ultimately, they are warm, accepting people and come to love Anne, sometimes despite and sometimes because of her foibles and differences when compared with the rest of the community. I'm tempted to say that this element is what makes this book so Canadian. It reminded me why I chose to lean on my Canadian side in life and politics, though I fear with the neo-con cultivation of selfish suburban values, that temperance and fair-mindedness is slowly being drained out of Canada. We are being sickened by the same disease that is currently ripping America apart. I recommend a re-read of Anne of Green Gables by every Ontarion that voted Conservative in the last election.

I can also totally understand the Japanese love for this world. Anne's imagination is so animistic and colourful, where every living thing is actually some conscious creature, that it reminded me of a movie like Paprika or Spirited Away.

I will probably continue to read the series if the next one falls into my lap. I'm tempted to watch the television series as well.

40. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

2011-07-17T12:02:00.034-04:00

I have read that the popular english translations of Jules Verne's work were quite badly done, with large chunks taken out of them that were not deemed of interest to the english-speaking audience, or possibly even prejudicial. Nonetheless, I couldn't resist picking up this beautiful old paperback version two summers ago at an antique shop (where I found also The Black Arrow amidst an entire set of these Airmont classics that I felt a bit guilty for splitting up). It has sat on my shelf for a year and I finally thought our long vacation in the Maritimes would be a good time to read it.

The trip turned out to be perfect as 20,000 Leagues is extremely nautical, as are the Maritimes. So while I was reading about a fantastical voyage through the world's oceans, I was also visiting seafaring museums, passing famous historical maritime locations and dragging my feet through beautiful tide pools of the southern Prince Edward Island shore. You can see why Verne's books were so popular among the boys of his time and later. They are true speculative, escapist adventures, but based on what fact they had at the time and more or less reasonable theories of the way things might be. 20,000 Leagues is basically the answer to "what would it be like if we could explore the oceans of the world in an awesome submarine." There are all kinds of cool explorations and neat little adventures. They get stuck under the South Pole, get into a battle with giant squids. They get to look at fantastic ranges of sealife and plants (these sections, done in that 19th century style of science that was mainly concerned with categorizing stuffs, are kind of tedious) as well as cool locations under the water.

There is a more psychological and political theme lurking under the surface of this colonialist adventure and that is Captain Nemo's fierce hatred for the rest of the world. It frames the book, but is really only touched upon. I wonder if some of that text is what was lost in these translations? Ecology is also a bit of a muddle here, where sometimes Verne seems to delight in the wholesale slaughter of creatures and believes the earth's abundance is limitless and other times he laments man's excessive consumption of certain types of species.

I'm glad I've finally read some Verne. I would like, at some point in the future, to read a proper translation of whatever is considered either his most interesting or most representative work.

39. The Fourth Durango by Ross Thomas

2011-07-14T10:41:00.003-04:00

This is my third Ross Thomas book now, after the masterpiece that is The Porkchoppers and the enjoyable but (for me, at least) slightly flawed The Fools in Town are on Our Side. I'm very happy to report that while it is still not quite at the level of the Porkchoppers, The Fourth Durango is still a great read and renews my faith that future Ross Thomas books will deliver.

It's funny because for once, both the cover blurbs do a really good job of describing what you are going to get with this novel (and from what I've read Thomas's work in general). The front cover says "a master of the arabesques of storytelling" (Washington Post) and, if I understand the word arabesque correctly, that is exactly what you get in this book. The difficulty in describing the plot of a Ross Thomas novel is that it usually isn't delivered to the reader in its entirety until you are about halfway through the book. He tends to go backward and forward in time, revealing more and more layers of the onion (and given the corruption and criminal histories of almost all of its characters, it definitely is a smelly, tear-inducing onion). In the Fourth Durango, a once succesfuly state supreme court judge is released from prison after a bribing scandal that ruined him. His lawyer and son-in-law meets him and they head to the small, forgotten coastal town of Durango, California. There, through a complex set of shadowy connections (I believe this is an arabesque), they meet the mayor and the chief of police. The town's economy is basically dead and the two town officials have a thing going where they hide people out for large chunks of cash, which is then pumped into town services. The mayor has won three elections in a row. Oh yeah, the ex-judge and his lawyer are clearly threatened due to loose ends left over from the bribery scandal that put the judge in jail in the first place.

The other blurb on the back says "Thomas' heroes are heroic without being good" (USA Today). This holds very true in the Fourth Durango. Nobody in Thomas' world is unaware of the corruption and realpolitik that is the reality of politics. They all have rich backstories, which are quite often a combination of weird life twists and turns mixed with a certain toughness of character that allows them to take advantage of those twists and turns. For instance, the mayor and the chief of police were actually part of a busload of young hippies who ran out of gas in Durango and decided to stay. I'll let Ross Thomas fill you in on the rich and sordid details of how they got from that origin to their current positions of power.

An element that I really enjoyed in The Fourth Durango is how 80s it was. Somehow, I considered Thomas to be more of a 60s and 70s guy and expected some of his perspective to be dated. I probably should adjust that expectation, because this book, written in 1989, was quietly and convincingly of its time without being stuck in it. A solid, enjoyable read for grown-ups who like their steak rare.

38. Meet Me at the Morgue by Ross MacDonald

2011-07-11T17:44:00.002-04:00

So last week, I read a Margaret Millar book. She is my new favourite discovery, but I feel I should give some time to her husband as well, Ross Macdonald. I'm not quite sure how it all works today, but there was a while where Ross Macdonald was one of the biggest writers of detective fiction, often spoken of in the same breath as Raymond Chandler. I have only read one of his books, that I can remember, and I can't remember that as well.

Meet Me at the Morgue takes place in a town a little ways north of San Diego. The protagonist is Probation Officer Howard Cross. He gets involved in a complex kidnapping because one of his clients, the driver for the family whose boy is taken, appears to be the kidnapper. However, the driver was very close with the boy and the whole thing smells so Cross starts to dig deeper. The plot is very complicated, but quite well constructed. What I really enjoyed about the book was that Cross does some real detecting. He just keeps poking away at people and things until a new path reveals itself and then he goes down that. Slowly, a bigger picture starts to reveal itself, as well as Cross's competency and character. He's quite a tough guy, presaging, I guess, Macdonald's famous Lew Archer character. This is some hardboiled stuff and everybody is kind of flawed and rotten and California is hot and edgy and deadening.

The Neptune Hotel stood in the limbo of side streets between the neons of the business section and the dark waterfront. Its own sign, ROOM WITH BATH, $1.50, flickered and went out and came to life again like a palsied lust.

I was actually really enjoying the straightforward language for the first third or so and feeling a bit that at times Chandler got excessive with his language, and then passages like the one above started popping up with greater frequency. At times, it went just a teeny bit too far for my personal tastes. Another big flaw for me was the forced love interest that develops between Cross and one of the suspects. I felt like some editor pushed this on Macdonald (or he pushed it on his story in anticipation of the public or some editor). It didn't ring true and was distracting. Howard Cross, hard-boiled probation officer is just fine on his own melancholy driven self. This diversion only took a few pages though and really doesn't damage what is a sordid, engaging tale. This stuff is the real-deal, though, hard-edged, noir. I'm definitely going to be reading more Ross Macdonald.

37. Banshee by Margaret Millar

2011-07-09T10:01:00.003-04:00

I'm so happy to have discovered Margaret Millar. She is a great writer with a dark side who enjoys going deep into the ugliness and weakness in people's personalities. She isn't quite as relentlessly pessimistic as Patricia Highsmith and her explorations feel more colourful. When she is looking at darkness, though, she really doesn't flinch, so though her style and content is more colourful, I really get the feeling they shared a very similar perspective on humanity. It's too bad that I had to "discover" her, because in her time, she was a very popular and respected writer. I wouldn't be surprised if she sold more books than Highsmith. It's funny that Millar isn't getting the same kind of respect today. She deserves a line of beautifully-designed reprints with fawning introductions. I wonder if she had moved to Europe would she perhaps be getting the Highsmith treatment today. Instead, she spent the last of her almost 80 years living happily with her husband Ross MacDonald (for whose success she was in a large part responsible) in Santa Barbara. Oh yes, she is also Canadian. So basically pretty awesome.

Banshee is the story of a young girl in a small, wealthy California community whose body is found in the forest near her house after having disappeared for several months. The book begins with one short chapter that gives us a brief picture of the girl's life before she died, a happy one with two dogs, parents, grandfather and a maid who love her; an architecturally-designed playhouse and a big forest to explore with her older cousin. The real story of the book begins with her funeral, where the minister, whose wavering faith was finally broken by the little girl's murder, decides to team up with her dad to finish the job the police could not. There are two narratives here, the investigation and how all the characters around the girl are coping with her death. There are a lot of damaged, flamboyant and weird characters in this world and some ugly relationships between them. We get to go in deep. Part of Millar's skill was that she could really lay out a character in a subtle but satisfying way without a lot of text. A hushed discussion between the well-groomed Mr. Cunningham and his alcoholic mother during the funeral takes two pages and uses a variety of techniques (dialogue, inner thoughts, other character's perspective on them) and the reader gets a lifetime of codependency, guilt and failed expectations. Quite impressive!

Millar can be manipulative, but she never does it dishonestly or with trickery. But she does parse out information in such a way that if you are trying to solve the mystery, you can start asking yourself meta-questions, like why she puts a certain piece of info about a certain character in a certain spot. It makes the reading of the book quite enjoyable, because while you are engrossed in this rich cast of characters and wanting to learn more about their dark secrets, you are also trying to pick apart Millar's structural choices. I guess this is what makes a book like this much more of a mystery than a crime book. Beast in View is still my favourite book of hers (and I would argue a masterpiece of psychosis), but Banshee is still really quite good and probably my next favourite so far. Happily, I have several more of her books on my on-deck shelf!

36. A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane

2011-07-06T01:08:00.002-04:00

[Wow, is June ever going to look bad on my year-end graph! I was really on a tear there and then I slammed right into a brick wall known as the Grand Roludothon, a local tabletop gaming convention that was quite fun and got me all fired up for RPGs again. All the time I should have been working on my record-breaking 50 books year these last three weeks, I've been reading rich and interesting roleplaying game texts (especially in the sci-fi realm) and talking about them on the internet. It's good stuff, but I never read them from cover to cover so I can't really justify counting them in my 50 books challenge. I also was stuck on a C.S. Forester book of short stories that I thought was a novel at first. Plus, summer has come and one spends a lot more time outside, socializing and walking the neighbour's dog. So those are my excuses. Now back to your regular scheduled programming.]

I really enjoyed Shutter Island and since then have spent a lot of time keeping an eye open for Dennis Lehane's other books. I was wary, however, of his Kenzie-Genarro series. When I flipped through them, they seemed less focused somehow and more generic. I finally broke down when I found this one for a buck at the always fruitful Chainon thrift shop. Somehow in this current reading drought, its paperback best-seller design suggested to me that I wouldn't be struggling to read it and so I chose it from my now nearly full on-deck shelf to get me back on the virtuous path.

My instincts were correct in both sense. This was an enjoyable book, but not anywhere as special as Shutter Island. It reminded me very much of a lot of detective fiction that I read in the late 80s and early 90s (the Spenser books being probably the best example of that period). It was also very easy to digest and a page-turner.

The main detective is Patrick Kenzie. His partner, Angie Genarro, is hot and tough, but improbably married to an abusive husband. They both come from rough backgrounds and work in Boston. They are hired by a powerful state senator to track down an employee in another senator's office who left with some damaging material. Their investigation leads them quite quickly into the poor, black neighbourhoods of Boston and the criminal element thereof. There is a lot of pretty hardcore violence in this book, several shootouts with automatic weaponry, car chases, beatings. The story is good, with a nice range of places and characters. It lays the social issues on pretty thick. Most of the time, these critiques are woven into the narrative and descriptions, but in a few instances they become blatant and really take the story off its rails (such as when the white Kenzie and his black newspaper editor friend have a racially-charged argument; zzzzz). It was Lehane's first book, so I will forgive him. I assume things get subtler in future books.

The other slight flaw was the character of Bubba, who is sort of like the Hawk character from Spenser, except not intelligent and less central. What he is is a total simpleton badass who hates everybody except the two detectives and thus is able to protect them from any real threat for most of the book. It's a nice fantasy, but a bit too overblown in what is supposed to be a fairly realistic milieu.

But I'm nitpicking. It's an enjoyable read, fast-paced with enough intrigue and character that you definitely want to find out what happens. I'm not rushing to read the next in the series, but if they fall in my lap, I will not say no.

35. Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin

2011-06-07T17:53:00.002-04:00

Well I tore through this book! A very clever and enjoyable black murder comedy that puts Dibdin back up to the top of my charts again (after the less enjoyable Thanksgiving). The book is written in the form of a confession by a British expat living in some unnamed banana republic pleading for his innocence to avoid extradition back to Britain for murder. His argument, convincingly told, is that while he is guilty of many crimes and ethical lapses, murder is not one of them.

His story is an enjoyable one, told by him with a joie-de-vivre and certain objectivity (that becomes more damning as the book goes one). He is a member of the educated, upper classes who spent too long not making practical decisions and ended up still living in a shared, rented flat ("digs") and teaching english as a second language part time. He ends up meeting a bourgeois couple with terrible taste and social ambitions and almost accidentally begins to have an affair with the wife. Things get more complicated, leading to the protagonist being the center of at least two murder scandals and having to find various convoluted ways to get out of the hot seat. In doing so, his true moral core slowly reveals itself to the reader. He starts out as a slacker, quickly shows himself to be a cad, then a bounder, eventually a sociopath and finally to really just be straight out evil at the very end. It is all quite subtly done and the reader is carried along, sympathizing with the protagonist quite far into his bad behaviour so that you catch yourself realizing, holy shit this guy is truly awful!

The major theme of the book and the justification for his behaviour is the massive cultural shift in England during the Thatcher regime. The protagonist spent a lot of his younger life in the 80s living and working abroad and when he came back, he found the traditions of English class hierarchy cast aside for a new, aggressive, capitalist society. Worse, he was now in last place in this society. The narrative arc is as much about the protagonist adapting to the new society and finding a shortcut to finding his proper place, first financially and the socially: "I wanted the lifestyle which other people of my age and education enjoyed but which I had forfeited because of the wayward direction given my life by the humanistic propaganda I was exposed to in my youth." That gives a pretty good sense of the tone.

This was a highly enjoyable read. Dibdin really was a skilled writer as well as having a great perspective on the world. Faced with the bleakness that is post-Thatcher England, he responded with humour. Great stuff.

34. Gridlinked by Neal Asher

2011-06-06T14:10:00.002-04:00

I borrowed this from my brother-in-law, for whom reading science fiction is one of the few little pleasures my sister allows him. He tends towards the higher end of the spectrum, but every now and then will delve into the more populist fare, such as Gridlinked. I was looking for an easy and entertaining read and so I grabbed it. I was highly skeptical of the "Asher has lit up the sky of science fiction like a new sun" blurb on the front cover, but felt that I would get a fairly good cyberpunk bang for my buck here.

I'm being lazy, plus quite busy, so I'll quote the wikipedia page for the plot summary:

The novel follows the exploits of Earth Central Security agent Ian Cormac, as he attempts to discover who or what is behind the destruction of the Runcible on a remote colony. Cormac drops an investigation into Polity separatists on Cheyne III, and takes the starship Hubris to the ruined world of Samarkand to directly oversee the investigation there. Having been directly "gridlinked" to the Polity A.I. network for too long, Cormac has been slowly losing his humanity, and takes the opportunity of this particular mission to disconnect and solve the mystery the old-fashioned way.

My reading has finally slowed down, so it took me a week or two to get through this. I do blame the book a bit for this, as the plot tends to drag on a bit in the second half. The overall plot is not all that innovative either, being basically a military adventure. However, the trappings of the future galaxy and all its tech are really quite cool. I'm not even sure I would really call this cyberpunk, though it definitely has such elements. I particularly liked the portrayal of the AIs (that are basically the human government at this point) as well as the existence of miniminds in things like weapons.

It was an enjoyable read, but I felt could have used some tightening up. If you are hungry for this kind of super hi-tech sci-fi, Neal Asher is not a bad way to go at all. I suspect the series will get better and more interesting as it moves forward as well, so I would probably pick up the next book if I find it for cheap.

Old Time Radio interlude: The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen

2011-05-31T11:28:00.003-04:00

I'm a big fan of Old Time Radio (OTR as it is known online), going way back to my childhood. When I was a kid growing up on Vancouver Island, I had an insatiable appetite for any kind of fantastic narrative. We did not have a television (which was probably a good move by my parents, looking back) so I read a lot and listened to the radio a lot. One of my favourite things was on Wednesday night on CFMI, an otherwise mediocre AOR light rock station, they had one hour of comedy followed by one hour of classic radio shows, usually two of a half-hour each. I don't know what was the impetus behind this programming, but I am grateful for it, as it gave me so much entertainment. I used to record the shows on cassette and still have a case of recorded cassettes in my parents basement. The Shadow, The Whistler, Suspense, Gunsmoke, Boston Blackie, X-1 were on regular rotation. Each episode (really even just the intro) pulled me into another world. I don't know if it is a function of the medium itself or nostalgia, but even today those shows have a power on me that goes far beyond even the most awesome 3-D movie spectacle, an ability to really make me feel like I am in another world.

I also mention the great CBC, which used to also play them on weekend afternoons from time to time. Sometimes we would listen to them together as a family while making lunch or just hanging out. I think it may have been part of The Mystery Project, but I'm not sure.

For the longest time, getting one's hands on OTR episodes was quite hard. You could buy cassettes of them, but they were really expensive. Later, when CDs were the standard, they still seemed hard to come by. I understand there was a whole network of people who used to trade them. Sometimes you could find used cassettes for more reasonable prices at used bookstores.

Enter the internet. In the last 10 years, everything has changed. You can find pretty well every existing old-time radio show online in .mp3 format. There are also several podcasts that will deliver them to you on a regular basis, sometimes with some great background info such as The Radio Detective Story Hour (though I wish the host, Jim Widner, would chill on the spoilers in his otherwise excellent and thorough introductions).

So I've really been in pig heaven when it comes to old-time radio shows. A friend gave me a DVD that had literally hundreds, including entire series and I went hogwild for a while. But I also listen to many different podcasts on the regular and they soon crowded out my OTR listening, except for the aforementioned Radio Detective Story Hour (and of course the top-notch Decoder Ring Theatre podcast, which is a show produced today, but done in the spirit of the old-time shows; highly, highly recommended).

Which brings me finally to the title of this blog: The Voyage of the Scarlet Queen. For some reason, I never came into contact with this great series until a few years ago, when I saw it mentioned on a game designer's blog. Checking around, I found it had an excellent reputation and the set-up certainly seemed right up my alley: it's the tale of a freighter ketch, the Scarlet Queen, and the adventures her crew gets in during their voyage around the South Seas and mysterious Orient. It was considered a big budget show at the time and was a big succcess, though considered a bit broad by the critics of the time. The show's producer and also the actor who played the lead character, captain Philip Carney was Elliott Lewis, a pretty succesful player in the radio game back in the day.

Each show begins with the captain's log, which is actually written after the events in the show, just as the boat was leaving that port, thus giving a hint to the adventure to come. Though each episode stood alone, it had an overarching plot. The Scarlet Queen was on hire to one entrepeneur Kang, who was in a race to find these ancient Chinese treasures worth $10 million. There was his evil counterpart, who was constantly working to undermine the Scarlet Queen's mission.

What inspired me to write about it, is that I have been listening to the 33-episode series slowly over the last year or so. I have to admit that around the 15th episode, they started to blur together a bit. But yesterday, while on a long walk with the dog, my interest was piqued again, as I listened to several episodes in a row and realized that they were actually wrapping up the overall narrative about the Chinese treasures. There was a three-episode arc (episodes 19-21) where they actually did that! It was very cool. I've never encountered a radio series that did that and I found it very satisfying. In the following episode, captain Carney goes on to his first mate how great it feels that they can now just go wherever, do whatever without any long-term guiding rules. I suspect this is exactly how the writers felt as well! I'm curious to see how it plays out in the next dozen episodes or so, if they will all simply be one-offs, if they will start on a new longer-term adventure or if the old one will come back again.

It's a great show, with excellent production values and rip-roaring adventure in farflung ports of the Pacific, rife with mystery and intrigue. If you like that sort of thing, I definitely recommend it. You can find them all here:

http://www.archive.org/details/VoyageOfTheScarletQueen

Also, here is a great website that contributed to my knowledge of the series and its production history:

http://www.digitaldeliftp.com/DigitalDeliToo/dd2jb-Voyage-Scarlet-Queen.html

33. Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock

2011-05-26T16:03:00.002-04:00

Several years ago at my grandfather's funeral, I was admonished by a friend of the family's for not knowing who Stephen Leacock was. "He's Canada's greatest humourist!" And these were French-Canadians telling me this! So I've had his name in the back of my mind for a while now and was happy to put down a dollar for this slim volume, to at least get an introduction to his work and style.

I didn't realize quite how far in the past he is from and was suprised to see that this book was written in 1914. It is a fictional portrait of a small northeastern American city (though I later read that many think it was modelled after Montreal). It isn't a single narrative, but rather a series of loosely connected vignettes, each one poking satirical fun at the hypocrisy of the ruling classes. This isn't laugh out loud funny, but it is quite clever. There is lots of great dialogue with the wealthy and powerful speaking with complete earnestness about how they support the workers revolution, all the while lambasting the waiter for daring to bring the wine slightly off-temperature. The central theme of the book is that capital is all powerful, but must be guised in the rhetoric of social and spiritual welfare. In that, it certainly seems relevant today and reminds me that the struggle between private and public wealth is an old one indeed.

I was a bit disappointed that this book was not explicitly Canadian, but learned that he deliberately made that choice to expand his audience and that much of his other work, including the classic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, does take place in Canada. I shall keep my eyes open for that one for sure.

Spring bonus: my wife reviews Richard Stark's The Hunter

2011-05-25T16:15:00.004-04:00

Though I am constantly ranting and raving about Richard Stark and Parker at home, I can honestly say that I never actually tried to encourage my wife to read any of the series. We also have a neat little tradition where she buys me 3 or 4 of the new University of Chicago Richard Stark reprints for my birthday in January, which I've been re-reading and blogging about here. So I was quite excited when she asked me one day if I thought she would be interested in reading one of them. She explains why she turned her head towards the best series of books ever in her own blog as well as giving a thoughtful review of the first book. You can read it here.

Now let's see if I can get her to read the entire series! ;)

32. Spectrum 3: a third anthology of science fiction selected and edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest

2011-05-24T20:30:00.002-04:00

I tend to avoid short stories and anthologies in general, but I picked this one up because it has some classics in it and is edited by Kingsley Amis, whom I had learned not long before stumbling on this book was a big defender of science fiction in a time and place when it was truly treated with disdain by the literary set. The introduction to this book is pretty aggressive. Amis goes after a few named critics specifically for their ignorant and snobby derision of the science fiction genre. So as a small artifact of the early literary history of science fiction, this was a nice find. The stories themselves were also quite good, though suffering (at least for me) from some of the lack of depth that comes with the form. The stories range from 1945 to 1960 by the following authors: Theodore Sturgeon (it was his Killdozer! that really drew me to buy the book; it's about a bulldozer that gets taken over by malevolent energy and starts killing everybody), J.G. Ballard (meh), Poul Anderson, Mark Rose, Peter Phillips, Murray Leinster, Alfred Bester (his Exploration Team was my favourite, about an illegal settler with a team of three uplifted kodiak bears and an eagle eking out survival on a deadly planet) and Arthur C. Clarke.

If you are interested in some of the best names of classical sci-fi and want to get a good sampling, I would definitely recommend you pick this up (or any of the other Spectra, I suspect, that Amis and Conquest edited). Good stuff.

31. The Moon of Skulls by Robert E. Howard

2011-05-10T21:43:00.004-04:00

I picked this up at a flea market in Oakland. I'm a big fan of Robert E. Howard, but most of his work is like maple syrup: you don't want a big bowl full. Most of his work are short stories, so I only tend to read a story at a time. The Moon of Skulls is a perfect set-up, with one long novella and two much shorter stories, featuring the 16th century Puritan warrior, Solomon Kane. Kane is english, but spends most of his life in dark, adventurous places like central africa, uncovering the occult remains of ancient civilizations while battling off evil and savagery.

What I notice about Kane is that he does a lot of walking. He's constantly moving forward, ignoring warnings about travelling through the swamps at night, climbing straight up mountains, charging through lines of slavers. He's very puritan about his forward momentum. The plots of the stories are quite minimal, the last one almost seeming like a vignette. It's the rich atmosphere and robust energy that makes Howards' writing so great. Kane seethes with fury at injustice and when captured, his hatred for his slaver captor is so potent that the sheikh physically recoils. Here is how tough he is:

Even when they had him stretched out and piled man-weight on him until he could no longer strike with fists or foot, his long lean fingers sank fiercely through a matted beard to lock about a corded throat in a grip that took the power of three strong men to break and left the victim gasping and green-faced.

When reading this, I really wonder how Howard's writing would have evolved had he not killed himself. He was a prodigious writer and had an imagination large even for the pulps. I suspect he would have kept on experimenting and done some really interesting work.

30. Curtains for the Copper by Thomas Polsky

2011-05-09T16:14:00.005-04:00

I feel like The Lantzvillager gave me this book, but I can't rightly remember as it has been sitting on my on-deck shelf for the longest time. A combination of concern over the physical state of the book and a lack of anything particularly compelling in the mystery kept me putting it off until now.

It's a light, slightly implausible, story-heavy but kind of entertaining urban mystery set in a nameless town somewhere on the east coast. The protagonist is a sort of hero reporter who seems to have extremely high status such that he can order chiefs of police around (this is the unrealistic part) named Grid. A young, promising police officer on the beat is shot in a doorway in Night Town, the bad part of town. The murder is made to look like a suicide, but Grid knows different and starts to nose around, unravelling a complex situation involving graft, kidnapping, drug pushing and a pretty large cast of characters.

I'll say this, that while I felt the book went on a bit too long and took too many twists and turns, the mystery itself was rather well thought out and made logical sense within the world of the book, such that you the reader were challenged but actually had a decent shot at figuring most of it out. So I did respect the work that went into the book at the end. On the other hand, I also learned that despite my love of narrative, even for me there can be too much story. Things keep happening in this book but after a certain point, I just wanted it to be over. I didn't care all that much about the characters and though the setting was kind of neat, more things happening meant me waiting longer to find out what really happened.

It's a neat looking book with a beautiful illustrated cover. The icons in the background are continued on the inside first page, which makes for a nice touch. It also is one of those books that came with a map, which while not really necessary for solving the murder really helped me to understand the geography of Night Town, where most of the book takes place. More maps in books please! I've scanned those pages in if you are interested.

29. The Gamekeeper by Barry Hines

2011-05-05T07:40:00.003-04:00

What a great book! The Gamekeeper vaults to the top spot of the books I've read so far in 2011. I know its early days still, but it is going to take some competition to unseat this book. I would almost argue that, within its limited category (documentary fiction?), it is a masterpiece.

I can't even remember where I found it, but the price on the upper right corner says I only paid a dollar for it. It's been sitting on my shelf for a couple years now, tempting me. I was both strongly attracted to its subject matter but also quite nervous about its dangers. It's the story of a gamekeeper on a Duke's lands in Northern England in the '70s. I was quite excited about reading about the nature of the work, the setting and the social relations. My fears were that it would either be masochistically self-pitying throughout like some British works from that period or that it would have some terrible turn of events, such as a brutal and forced change of lifestyle for the worse for the protagonist or some terrible cruelty to animals. I'm sensitive about these things and generally won't read books where I know that the plot hinges on those elements. To me, it is a form of pornography for certain readers who get off on feeling others' pain. I have nothing against pornography, it's just my kind of literary pornography involves capable men dealing efficiently with difficult situations.

I actually had this trepidation throughout at least the first half of the book. It wasn't until I was very close to being done that I realized, with a great deal of satisfaction, that Hines was not going to pull any kind of narrative trick to force an emotional response. On the contrary, by simply telling the story of a year in the life of a gamekeeper, he elicits a powerful sympathy to the plight of the working man and lays bare the utter insanity of the hierarchical social system in England. Even that social argument is delivered subtly and really only comes out at the end. Most of the book is a beautifully written and detailed account of the life and work of a man whose responsibility is to raise pheasants and grouse in a privately-held forest in Northern England so that the owner of the land, the Duke, can come and shoot them once a year.

I would not recommend this book for everybody and I recognize that a part of my appreciation for it is that its subject matter touches on so many of my own personal interests (the pastoral countryside, self-sufficiency, British class relations). Nevertheless, I can definitely argue that this is an excellently-written book. The descriptions of the land, the sounds, the colours and the activities will take you away from whereever you are and put you right in that countryside. He also describes geography, interior layouts and technical procedures (how certain traps work, the different processes for hatching pheasant eggs, the cleaning and loading of a weapon) with a facility that makes it easy to picture and understand for the layman (as well as making it interesting and engaging even for someone who may not care about such details). The book has no chapters, with sections separated by double spaces, and it just flows from one activity to the next. The focus of each section is what the gamekeeper is doing, but it includes all the small side details and especially the human element.

George Purse, the gamekeeper in question, is stoic, hardworking and conscientious about his job almost to a fault. You learn that he took the lower-paying job to get out of the steel mills. He has an equally hard-working wife and two boys. They live in a small cottage on the property that isolates them socially from the families that live together in the council housing estates. His job is to raise as many pheasants as possible and to do this he captures them every year, mates them and oversees the hatching of their eggs. He also encourages wild propogation as well. He has to constantly battle against predators such as foxes, rats and crows and he goes after them with a cold efficiency and a nation's memory of tricks. He also has to fight against poachers, who hunt the birds to supplement their own meagre income or for their dinner table.

There is a lot of subtext about who has the right to the land. I don't know if the situation is still the same in England today (this was written in 1975), but it seems insane that there are huge tracts of country that are solely dedicated to the hunt. This argument, I suspect, is a big one in Britain and I will do some research into it later. On the other hand, these gamekeepers take very good care of the land (though in a very controlling way that emphasizes pheasant growth over all the other creatures), probably better than if nobody or private interests owned it. The contradiction of spending a year taking great care of these birds only to have them massacred is not lost on George either.

And the hunt itself really is weird. I've heard of beaters before, but I never realized how totally lame this entire method is. Basically, a bunch of aristocrats show up (these are called Guns). Each has a loader who has prepared their two guns. They go into a butt (a little hut) and wait. The beaters walk in a line, beating the ground and trees, driving all the birds forward so that they come out in a clearing and the Guns just start blasting away. Once they shoot, the loader hands them their second gun and re-loads the first. This goes on intensely for 45 minutes or so until the beaters come up to the butt. Then they take a break, pick up the hundreds of dead birds and start from the other side. There is some skill in aiming and firing steadily, but otherwise, for the Guns, this is not even something I could honestly call a hunt. It's really just a shooting gallery.

I note that there is an economic element. The Guns all get some birds to take home and the host cooks up a bunch for their meal, but the majority are sent to markets and restaurants all over Britain. I think there is a traditional day as well, the Twelfth, when people dine particularly on pheasant. The whole operation from beginning to end is so work-intensive and involves such a complex hierarchy of labour and money that it can only exist in a society that is firmly entrenched in its rigid social structures. You can see hints of these structures finally starting to break down in the book: the land that was once all owned by aristocrats is going over to industrialists, the beaters organize a minor strike for a raise, schoolboys tear down some butts (which is seen as an act of pure vandalism, but is actually misguided political will). And every now and then Hines will juxtapose the incredible wealth of the upper classes with that of the men that serve them. A single hunting shotgun is worth far more than several years of George's salary for instance. The shotgun was given to a landowner by his tenants as a gift for his 21st birthday during the height of the depression and massive strikes in Britain.

I did some reading on Hines and he is considered to be a part of the Angry Young Men movement of Britain in the 60s and 70s. It's not super obvious from The Gamekeeper, but you get hints of it. I suspect in his other novels the politics are much more apparent. His first is about a working class athlete who conflicts with the system (sounds a lot like The Sporting Life) and his best known about a working class boy who can only relate to a bird of prey he tames. Based on the total success of the Gamekeeper, I'm very curious to read more of Hines' work, but I'm a bit freaked out about the others being not as subtle as this one. If anybody else is familiar with his work and has some recommendations, I'd love to hear them. In any case, a great book.

28. Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley

2011-05-03T14:01:00.003-04:00

This was the third and final book in the stash I found hidden away at my job. I have never read anything by Sheckley, but have since learned that he was a very successful, popular and critically-acclaimed science fiction author who eventually became the managing editor for Omni magazine. Dimension of Miracles was written in 1968 and while I respect this kind of science fiction, it really isn't my cup of tea. These guys wrote in a period when ideas were more important than story and they really do have a lot of cool ideas, but without a strong narrative, I find myself getting distracted often.

This book, for example, is ostensibly about a human from 1968 New York who is mistakenly given a galactic prize. The mistake is that only species who are able to travel about in space, time and dimensions are eligible to receive this prize. Tom Carmody, is thus left adrift in space time whatever where he received the prize having no idea of how to get back to his right place time and version. Furthermore, because of the universal law of predation, by being taken out of his own place in the hierarchy of eaten and eater, Carmody has now a predator on his tail whose sole raison d'être is to eat him.

It kind of sounds like fun and the back and front cover copy make you think of some kind of world-spanning chase. [As an aside, this is one thing I don't get about sci-fi publishers from this period. They always had the most abstract, trippy cover art that never had anything at all to do with the content of the book juxtaposed against the most blatant, lowest-common-denominator copy. Why were they willing to be all speculative and creative with the cover art, but completely pandering with the copy?] Instead, as I had expected, we get an excuse to put the protagonist in many different situations where ideas of philosophy and crazy science can be discussed. He meets a god who is the sole inhabitant of a planet and stuck in an existential crisis. There is a builder of worlds (who reminded me a lot of Slartibartfast), who built earth on God's request and wanted to apologize to him for cutting corners. We go to super-consumerized Manhattan where everybody talks in advertising jargons. We meet an intelligent city whose nagging personality has driven away all the citizens. And so on. Some of it was clever. This book reminded me a lot of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in its tone.

But ultimately, it all kind of fizzles out because there is no real storyline and I'm not super concerned about the fate of the protagonist as it seems kind of random to me anyhow. It's not a bad read and it fired off some synapses in the lazier parts of my mind, if you enjoy this period of science fiction. It has helped me to get a better sense of what elements of that period I do and don't enjoy.

27. The Rare Coin Score by Richard Stark

2011-05-02T10:51:00.005-04:00

Well what a delicious tonic that was! After the bummer that the last book I read was, I needed something to cleanse the palate and though I felt it may have been a bit too indulgent, I also knew the Stark would deliver, so I went right to the next Parker book on my list: The Rare Coin Score.

I have definitely read this one before, but I have never owned a copy, so it is possible I had only read it once before, because I barely remember any of it, which is a great thing! The Rare Coin Score is an important book in the series because it marks a significant transition in Parker's romantic life. He meets Claire. I have mixed feelings about Claire and the role she plays in Parker's life. Though early on in the story, I became worried about how Parker was behaving, this is nevertheless a great heist story, from beginning to end, arguably in the top 5 of the series (though I'll need to quantify such a claim at some point).

The book begins with Parker at loose ends, not financially, but psychologically. He has money and really should be laying low after all the heat generated by the heist of the gambling island of Cockaigne in The Score. But he's restless and nervy and wants to work. Bedding a series of different women in party towns does nothing to calm the restlessness either. So when he gets a call from an old colleague about a job to hit a rare coin collector's convention, he goes for it, even though the finger man is a complete amateur his contact is fresh out of the joint and too desperate. Even more out of character, Parker hooks up with the woman who is behind the finger man and keeps hooking up with her during the planning of the heist!

Stark justifies this change in Parker's traditional patterns through both Parker's own psychology and Claire's intrinsic qualities. It makes sense for me how Parker, as cold as he is, still has a need for an intimate partner in his life. But I remaink somewhat skeptical about Claire's character. First of all, she is kind of a cipher. All of Parker's interactions with women are filtered through the cultural mores of the mid to late 60s as well as Parker's own particular way of dealing with them (basically telling them what's up as bluntly as possible, waiting for them to come on to him and then accepting or rejecting as the case may be). So Claire doesn't get a whole lot to say and what she does say is made up of those weird curt little phrases that seemed to pass for relations between the sexes in the '60s. She does demonstrate a strong will when dealing with men she doesn't want and she knows her role and plays it cooly in the planning phase.

She was a good woman, good to look at and good to be with. Sensible and independent. Not full of foolishness. [page 72]

You don't get a whole lot more than that, but it's enough for me and for Parker. Where I get skeptical is when shit gets violent, Claire totally freaks out. She actually goes into a state of severe shock, first catatonic and then talking childish nonsense. The end result is that while she is ethically completely okay with Parker's method of supporting himself, she herself can't stand to be anywhere around it. I'm not quite sure exactly what it is, but I don't totally buy it. She understands from the beginning the implications of what she was getting into and is totally cool about it, but somehow the violence when it actually happens totally freaks her out. Wouldn't there be at least some trepidation about that beforehand? The extremes just strike me as being too far apart in the same person and that, coupled with their stilted conversations, result in me never really feeling like I have a grasp on who Claire is. I will investigate this further in the forthcoming books.

I would like to point out another staple of these books: Parker reading some new acquaintance and implicitly judging him (usually correctly). As the reader, you can almost always tell who is going to be competent and who incompetent by Parker's initial impression of their physical appearance. Here is new heister Jack French when the string is first introduced:

He thought French looked all right; lean and rawboned and self-contained, maybe thirty-five, with level eyes and an expressionless face. French said, "Good to know you," and sat down again.[page 15]

Among other things, it's the levelness that is important to Parker, both physical and mental. Not only is his body self-contained, but so is his speech. No need for a joke here or any other verbiage. Just a greeting and let's get down to business.

Same with Wemm, the black sign-painter working at the shady auto-body shop who has been given the job of doing the fake lettering on the side of the getaway truck:

He had the self-contained movements of a man about to be asked to show how good he is, a man who knows he is more than good enough. His hair was gray but he had the face of a young man. [page 62]

(note to self: spend week practicing being self-contained). I think the gray hair and young face is also an indicator of Stark's world view: the positive combination of physical youth and mental wisdom. First impressions do count and Park can judge a book by its cover.

Finally, I am going to share two more great Westlakian metaphors with you:

Billy was at his most nervous, looking around like a possum coming out of a hole. [page 72]

When he saw Claire, a surprised smile creased his face, looking strange there, as though it had been delivered to the wrong address. [page 73]

That's Ninja-level writing right there.

I have distracted you all with some side analysis because I don't really have a lot to say about the meat of the book, which is the heist, its planning and execution. I don't have a lot to say, not because there isn't a lot to say about it but because it really is just much better for you to go ahead and read it. I can talk about those beautiful ribs on the bbq, how the sauce was made, how long I smoked it for, and so on, but wouldn't you rather just dig in? This is a good one, that's all you need to know.

26. The Menorah Men by Lionel Davidson

2011-04-29T15:46:00.002-04:00

Though the copy I found at Chainon had a very contemporary cover, the book was originally published in 1966 and was touted as being a classic action thriller in the mode of Deighton, LeCarré and Innes. Also, it was about a lost artifact and took place in the middle east. Right up my alley, so I took the risk. After having read it, I found that Lionel Davidson was quite succesful and though he only wrote around a half-dozen books, they were all big sellers and got excellent critical reviews.

So I don't know if the Menorah Men is a particularly bad example of his work or if his success was more a reflection of the time than any particular quality he may have had as a writer. Because this book was really not very good. From the very beginning, I struggled to get through the language, which was convoluted and overly clever. I couldn't even really figure out what the hell was going on there was so much innuendo and half-references. Just tell us that he is at a party and where and who the people are that he meets. I guess if you are a super pro, you can take your writing to that level, but Davidson was not there when he wrote this, that's for sure. I don't know if I got used to his "style" or if it toned down, but after the first 50 pages, I was able to actually get into it.

And the thing is, Davidson is actually a pretty good writer, when he stopped trying to be all 60s cool. His descriptions of the desert are quite evocative and there is a scene near the end, where two lawyers go at it, that was quite thrilling. But even if the whole book had been clearly written, it wouldn't have mattered, because the protagonist is such a prick. I mean I get the idea of the slighly boorish action hero or the normal guy in the wrong place surviving by his wits. But the hero here spends the whole book basically date-raping the hot Israeli soldier that is assigned to him (and of course she gives in and loves him by the end), being basically constantly drunk and even more so when an important military action has to go down and being completely disrespectful to the locals and religious people (barging into a synagogue on the sabbath and demanding some guy to open a store because he needs a map now which he could have waited for).

The story is about the search for a lost fabled Menorah that represented the spiritual wealth of the Jews after they were massacred by the the Romans. There is some neat history and the present day stuff is a cool set-up, with conflicts between archeologists and developers, Israelis and Jordanians at the border and artifact smugglers. The location is great. But the story meanders (the thrilling legal debate being the high point of the entire book is testimony to that) and when you don't hate the protagonist, you really don't give a shit.

Sorry, Lionel Davidson, maybe your other books kick ass, but I'm going to need someone whom I respect really argue that for me before I pick one up.

25. Monsieur Monde Vanishes

2011-04-24T12:21:00.003-04:00

The Simenon roman durs are everywhere! Monsieur Monde Vanishes, along with one other, was lent to me by my basketball-watching buddy. He's an intelligent fellow with quite specific tastes and we have a bit of a cultural exchange going on. Some things have worked and some haven't, but we definitely share an appreciation for Simenon's cold, distant gaze at humanity.

Monsieur Monde Vanishes, is, as the title explicitly states, about a man who decides to just leave his life. He is a successful industrialist with a distant wife and a distant son. One day, he just doesn't go home after work, instead taking out some cash from the bank, selling his tailor-made suit for an off the rack (gasp!) and wandering around Paris until he finds a dreary hotel. He seems to equate the working and lower-middle classes with some kind of freedom or at least with having something that he longs for. It's never explicitly stated what drives him, because even when he does succeed in truly leaving his old life behind, he still seems disconnected, at least from other people. Yet he gains some satisfaction from his adventure and there is some internal change in him. Whether it is for the better or the worst is hard to say. It ends on a very dark, inhuman note.

It's a quick and interesting read, with a rich immersion into some great Paris milieux, such as a casino and a poorer class of hotel where he lives. It makes you reflect on success and what it means to be alive and with other people, but perhaps not in the most optimistic way. I think that this novel could probably be correctly called existential. It lacks the intensity and focus of some of my more preferred romans durs and so didn't blow my mind, but it was still a good book.

The book is part of that very nice line of New York Review of Books Classics trade paperbacks. Normally, I don't like the trade paperback format, but these have a somber tone and nice spacing so that I quite enjoy their look despite the annoying size. However, in the case of this book, I find the cover image to be inappropriate. Monsieur Monde is described as stout, with an almost boyish body. The tall thin guy on the cover looks to much like what a North American would expect a french businessman to look like.

Spring Bookshelf re-org

2011-04-23T17:31:00.003-04:00

I don't know what got into me, but I was overtaken by a powerful compulsion to create a fifth shelf for my paperback collection. My quartet of Archives Canada solid maple bookshelves all had 4 levels on them and that does seem to be the amount they were designed for. I've known for a while that I could theoretically fit a fifth shelf and I have the boards already finished, but I was never quite sure that it would actually work. The issue being that the gradation between the little pegs that support the shelves is about an inch and I wasn't sure that if in actual practice 5 shelves would actually have enough space to fit books of a paperback size.

Unfortunately, I got so into the job that I completely forgot about taking any pictures until after I was done. As you can see, my theory was correct, unfortunately, I had to segregate out trade paperbacks. Only on the bottom shelf (where I just can't bear to separate my old Parker paperbacks from the new University of Chicago reprints), is there enough space for anything taller than a standard, classic paperback.

I also had to sacrifice my rolepaying games shelf, which was quite a tall one on the bottom. I was quite proud of that, but most of the books on that shelf are for games I'll most likely never play, so I am going to sell a bunch and then consolidated the rest with my (also tall) comic book shelf.

Here are the major advantages that have resulted in my work: 1) I have much more space to grow into, as you can see and 2) all my paperbacks are on the same shelf unit, as opposed to divided across two. So while I am very happy with the change, it isn't without some small regret. Sometimes you need to get tough in order to move forward!

24. You'd Better Believe It by Bill James

2011-04-21T17:02:00.005-04:00

I picked this up purely on a whim during a nasty, rainy evening that drove me into the warm interior of S.W. Welch's. The depressing weather spurred my consumer appetite and I bought this book and one other (a nice penguin Hornblower) despite my spreading on-deck shelf. I was drawn in by the thinness of the books, the setting of criminal urban england and the hard prose. My instincts were not off as Bill James is an excellent discovery. It turns out he is quite well known and respected in the U.K. for his various series of "Welsh Noir", this one being the first in the best known, Harpur & Iles, of which there are 22 books!

In You'd Better Believe It, detective Harpur is the main protagonist, a frazzled, but driven cop whose personal morality is revealed to be questionable at best in the first pages as he is portrayed making a play for one of his subordinate's wife. The plot centers around a tip-off about a big bank robbery that is supposed to go down. The job is delayed and during the wait, big time players come into Harpur's smaller seaside city and start ruthlessly killing informants ("grasses" as they are known in this milieu) and a police officer (the previously mentioned subordinate). Caught between a bureaucratic and politically-nervous administration and a poverty-stricken society, Harpur has to act often on his own.

The story is decent, seemingly quite realistic, but without a lot of suspense. The milieu is top-notch, as is the language. This is the hard, ruthless Britain where human culture is limited to dark humour, alchohol and a few good boots in. It's funny, because the plot and procedural elements were not dissimilar to the world of de Gier and Grijpstra, but the cultural level was just so different. Let's just say that I would much prefer to be a police detective in van der Wetering's Amsterdam than James' fictional Wales.

A great find. From what I've read, this series gets richer and I'm looking forward to seeing that happen. Though my on-deck shelf doesn't!

23. Hard Rain by Janwillem van der Wetering

2011-04-19T16:24:00.002-04:00

Hard Rain is the fourth and last of the pile of Grijstra and de Gier procedurals a friend of mine with a child dumped on me. I found all four to be really enjoyable and it is a series that I would always be happy to return to, but at the same time, I am quite happy to have these four off of my on-deck shelf.

Hard Rain was published in 1989, but other than the use of a computer modem, things don't seem to have changed much in the world outside of the Amsterdam murder squad. Amsterdam is still a fairly rough-and-tumble city, with a lot of drug abuse and petty crime. However, inside the squad, serious corruption is taking hold. At the beginning of the book, the Commisarius, who is Grijpstra and de Gier's boss, is coming back from a "relaxing" vacation, when he learns that the director of a bank has killed himself. The principal shareholder of the bank is an old enemy of his. He also learns that this investigation, as well as several others, have been bungled or shut down by the commissioner in charge during his absence.

This time, the Commisarius, who is in really the main protagonist of this story (and for that matter, referring to these books as the "Grijpstra and de Gier Series" is inaccurate as the Commisarius and Constable Cardozo feature just as much as those two; it should really be called "the four cool and incorruptible guys in the Amsterdam murder squad series"), goes "off the reservation" with his team. Together, using unorthodox methods, they strive to take down the evil banker and the internal corruption. Along the way, there are the usual philosophical and slightly absurd conversations about life, work and art. There aren't quite as many interesting Amsterdam locales and locals in this one, but there is more focus on the Commisarius himself, which is pretty good as well.

Also, it's interesting that the Commisarius's first name is Jan and his main rival the banker's first name is Willem while the author's first name is Janwillem. Maybe this means nothing if you know a little something about Dutch nomenclature, but I noticed it, in any case.

One more good entry in a solid and enjoyable series.

22. Black Camelot by Duncan Kyle

2011-04-18T10:52:00.002-04:00

In honour of Louis XIV's ascension to role of official Archivist for the British Library, I decided to go back into my own collection and re-read one of the few books that I have a first edition copy of (at least I think I do; I'm never quite sure of these things): Duncan Kyle's WWII espionage thriller Black Camelot.

[To stop being facetious for a moment, it really is a cool thing that the British Library found Existential Ennui and recognized it for the value it is providing. Nick Jones has been steadily posting about some great but relatively unrecognized genre authors of the 60s, 70s and 80s. He hunts down rare editions of the books, researches their publishing history with a special emphasis on their design and covers. These are books that never received the archival respect they deserve because of their commercial or genre-based nature but in hindsight, today we see a lot of art, culture and history in them. All of us genre fans always appreciated these works and recognize their contribution to culture. It is great to see that institutions like the British Library recognize that as well and it is thanks Nick's hard work that this information will be preserved and made accessible to more people.]

I have always enjoyed Duncan Kyle's work, but in my mind I always consider him a poor man's Desmond Bagley. Such a ranking is probably not just and I think that it's based more on Bagley being more consistent and prolific as well as having excellent marketing support during the height of his popularity. (Although reading this great post about him with layouts of all his Fontana covers suggests I may be wrong about the marketing part; perhaps it was only in Canada that he didn't receive the distribution of Bagley.) I had suspected for a while that I need to go back and re-read both Bagley and Kyle to re-assess how I think about them and this read of Black Camelot has helped reinforce that notion.

The cover of my book is awesome, showing as you see here, a nazi officer hanging from a rope surrounded by fire. This does happen in the book, but it takes such a long and circuitous route to get there that I was doubtful it would even happen at points. That route is quite enjoyable and shows Kyle's skill at weaving a rich narrative and his knowledge of espionage and crime. It also reveals a pretty hard cynicism that gives this book a dark edge.

Conway is an Irish reporter based in Stockholm in 1944. In neutral Denmark, he is able to get stories on the situation in Germany. One of his tricks is to wait for the flight from Berlin and get his hands on the German newspapers before his rivals do. He happens upon SS officer Franz Rasch, who has been sent by his superiors to deliver some papers that they hope will sow division between the British and the Russians. What Rasch doesn't know is that he is set up to be condemned as a traitor and deserter to make the story seem more authentic to the Brits and Russians. By fluke, Conway helps Rasch out, figuring out what is going on, they devise a blackmail scheme.

I don't want to give away anything more, so I'll skip out the details of the circuitous path, but the novel climaxes in an assault on the famous (and real) SS castle Wewelsburg, which Himmler created to be a spiritual center for Nazi mythology. According to the novel, it also contained a room full of Nazi intelligence files, both damning for the Allie as well as many leading Nazis (Heydrich, who assembled the documents, gained his political strength by having dirt on everybody). It's these documents that are the target of the raid.

This is a great book. It's got a little bit of everything you could want in a WWII thriller: espionage, nasty domestic crime, internal politics at the top level of both the Allies and the Nazis, awesome Nazi fanaticism and it is all topped off by an action-packed finale. The really strong points that made me raise Duncan Kyle in my ranking are a couple of asides where he describes the histories of two successful British businessmen and how they could have supported the Nazi movement. They were very realistic and rich, a few pages that encapsulated how easy it is for men to be sucked into evil. Their stories could easily take place today in slightly different contexts.

21. The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

2011-04-13T09:35:00.004-04:00

It's so strange that I had never heard of this book until my friend Castaway, man of good taste and fruitful loins, blogged about it in his now defunct 50 books blog several years ago (having triplets is a good excuse to stop with the blog, I'd say). I say it's strange, because it was an extremely popular novel and one that would have appealed to my adolescent self for sure. And we were exposed much more to British reading trends in Canada. In any case, I'm glad I found it, because it really was an engrossing and entertaining read and informative as well. (Appropriately, it was part of the minor treasure haul of old books I found high up in a storage room at my job.)

I will explain the informative part immediately, just to make it clear that I recognize this is a work of fiction, based on the Arthurian myths. However, I am so ignorant of this period of history that even the broad lines (about the back and forth between the various British tribes and European tribes, notably the Saxons for control of the the island of Britain) were new to me and really interesting. It's a period I would like to learn more about.

But on to the fun! The Crystal Cave is about the life and rise to power of Merlin. He starts out in a royal house, the son of a queen, but neglected and threatened because he is a bastard, his father unknown, his mother refusing to reveal. In some ways, this is the classic story of the young underdog rising to become a hero. What makes this book so enjoyable is the twist in that classic setup. Merlin's growth to power is through the path of knowledge rather than physical prowess. Furthermore, his role is always to one side of the visible power, in support of the kings who will unite Britain and drive out the Saxons. As he faces challenges and encounters new situations, he learns. He learns medicine, engineering, history and many other practical subjects. Through practice and his own shrewd wit, he also learns politics and the manipulative strategies necessary to survive in these courts of intrigue. All this stuff in the book is immensely enjoyable (especially for the underdog nerds of the world, I can well imagine).

Another interesting aspect is the way magic is handled. It exists, but it is quite subtle and except for a few brief mentions of minor cantrips, is limited to "the sight" and entirely out of Merlin's hands. Partly through accident and later by manipulation, he uses the visions in combination with his own wiles to create the perception that he is a wizard of great power. What is interesting is that all the while, he himself is quite humble and almost passive. It makes for a strange hero. You definitely like him, but you also feel that he is almost a victim of fate at times. It makes for a strange hero.

The last third, until I made it to the very end, began to feel a bit episodic as well. The ending ties it altogether, but I felt it lost a bit of its overall narrative arc and became more about a series of historical advances made by the British against the Saxons and Merlin's role in them. They were nevertheless still quite entertaining and engaging episodes, but it wasn't until the end that it all made more sense in the greater narrative arc. Perhaps if one was already aware of the legend of King Arthur's origins (which this book leads up to and is neatly summarized in an afterword), it would have been clear to what end these episodes were directed.

Overall, a really enjoyable and absorbing read which brings to life this early period of British history, where a culture and civilization was rebuilding itself on top of the Roman ruins and in the face of the barbaric onslaughts from mainland Europe, onslaughts she would face time and time again, always displaying her mettle with that indomitable spirit the great island nation was built on (see what this book does to me!:)).

20. The Dying Earth by Jack Vance

2011-04-08T09:10:00.003-04:00

I've been aware of Jack Vance for a long time, but never read anything by him or knew much beyond his influence on Dungeons & Dragons. The magic in earlier versions of D&D is often called "Vancian" in the sense that there are specific spells that have to discovered and learned and kept in spell books as opposed to other forms such as ritualistic or more free-flowing. There are adherents and opponents of this approach, but whatever your flavour, Vance's imagination had a lot of influence on the origins of fantasy roleplaying games.

We feed a stray tomcat on the back balcony and he tries to sneak into the house and leave his mark. He has hit us successfully a few times, the last being a quick blast on the bottom shelf of meezly's books. Bad scene, but she did a pretty good job of getting her books mostly rid of the cat pheremones, except for a paperback of The Dying Earth. I didn't even know she had it and considering her pretended abhorrence of roleplaying games (part of the secret unwritten chick code) it was quite ironic that she owned one of the classics of the genre and I hadn't even read it! I felt it was time to delve back into a bit of fantasy, so I picked it up.

As usual, these older paperback editions never represent the contents properly. This is one area where the world has improved. When you get a genre book these days, it is usually very clear from the publisher's info where the book fits in within the rest of the author's work and exactly what it is you are getting. Back in the 60s and 70s, it seemed like they always had to obfuscate and mislead, so you could never figure out what the order of anything was, which characters would be in it and so on. The Dying Earth appears to be a novel, but it is actually a collection of short stories, all but one loosely connected through characters but having no other greater narrative beyond that they all take place in some far future earth where the sun is a dying red giant.

There is both the remmants of great magic and great technology in this world. Everybody seems aware that the planet is dying and this allows for a certain melancholy and a certain decadence, which is a great mix for adventure. Many of the stories are quests, where a hero or magician learns of some lost knowledge and seeks it out. These frameworks than allow Vance to draw out wondrous locations and fantastic creatures. It almost feels a little bit like the original Star Trek series, in which each story brings us to a new cool milieu, sometimes even with a political parable. As one gets older, one becomes less interested in the fantastic and more concerned with the human, the character, the conflict. Vance's fantastic is pretty awesome though and I found myself enjoying it for its own sake. Little people that fly around on dragonflies, trading gossip and rumours for tiny bags of salt they hang from their mounts, a demon whose face is only able to penetrate into our world and attacks with his tongue and ghosts spouting from his nostrils, a wizard who shrinks his enemy and puts him in a maze with a tiny dragon as a form of endless torture. It's really cool stuff. Furthermore, the stories themselves are quite elegantly constructed, almost little fables, neatly constructed and just as satisfyingly concluded.

There are only three other books in the Dying Earth series, but most of the rest of his work is science fiction and mystery (which surprises me somewhat, considering his impact on D&D). I hope that at least one of them is an actual full-length novel, because I would love to see his talents in the form of a longer, more deeply engaging story. As it is, I wouldn't be averse to reading more of his short stories as well.

19. Murder over Dorval by David Montrose

2011-04-05T15:08:00.002-04:00

Murder over Dorval is part of a new series of reprints called Ricochet Books put out by Véhicule Press, a Montreal publisher. Véhicule Press puts out a wide range of books associated with Montreal, including The Man who Killed Houdini, by my mother's cousin and Montreal chronicler, Donald Bell (which I'm ashamed to admit I stopped reading about halfway through; but I'll get to it!). The Ricochet Books are reprinting a line of Montreal pulp detective fiction from the '50s, which is just an awesome thing to do. These books are very hard, if not impossible, to find and they represent a tiny sub-genre of literature that should not be forgotten. They are also (at least judging by this one) pretty fun reads.

Murder over Dorval was an interesting book. On the surface, it's a pretty classic hard-boiled detective mystery, a bit derivative, a bit convoluted, but pretty fun with some hardcore badguys and a great set of locales. The language ranges from enjoyably rich to just too much ("her face was longer than a rainy weekend in the country"). To the fan of the genre, what will make Murder over Dorval distinct is the Montreal setting and the excessive drinking. The detective is basically wasted the entire book. What happened to Canada and alchohol? We still have great beer here, but good luck trying to get the proper drinks detective Russel Teed was putting back here. He's having a few beers for breakfast and just keeps going from there. Drinking and driving, drinking and detecting, drinking and getting his ass kicked. All in a day's work!

As a dual citizen, there was something else in this book that stood out for me, a kind of self-consciousness. It reminded me a lot of The Stringer in the way the protagonist is always telling us where he is going and who is there, trying almost too hard to assure us that things are happening here. At the same time, there is such a blind anglocentric perspective here that it makes for a weird mix. I always thought the anglo self-conscious that I encountered here was the result of being a minority, but I wonder if the Revolution Tranquille only influenced an existing solipsism. Again, it's all very subtle and such a reading could entirely be due to viewer bias, but it's a feeling I got.

I'm looking forward to the others in the series. The Body on Mont-Royal is out on shelves now and I'll be picking it up after I get through a few other books on my on-deck shelf. Brian Busby says it's the best of the bunch (how psyched would I be to find the original Harlequin version).

Oh yeah, physically, they did a really nice job with this book. A lovely full bleed cover with the original image and the ricochet logo nicely subtle. And though it goes against my environmental principles, I have to admit liking the quality feel of the paper and cover. It has heft for a paperbook. I'm also grateful that it is proper paperback size, not one of these lame "trade" paperbacks.

If you want it, you can buy it here.

18. A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

2011-03-31T11:06:00.002-04:00

Another Chainon find. I had no idea about this book, being interested in it purely from its cover. But I did discern that this copy was originally published in Pakistan or India and that it was very popular in that region. I thought it was going to be a military thriller, which it partially is. It's not aimed at the genre audience, though, but rather at an educated reader who reads modern trade paperback literature. Nevertheless, a pretty interesting and mostly enjoyable read.

The book has two parallel storylines the ultimately run into one another. The first is about an air force cadet in the Pakistani military whose roommate disappears. He is blamed for it and sent into a process of investigations, imprisonment and even some torture. You know from the beginning that he was involved in some way in the explosion of the transport plane that killed the president of Pakistan Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (an event that really happened and upon which this book is based). The last days of the president and his assassination make up the second storyline. Here you get a completely out of touch (both with his people and his administration) president succumbing to the paranoia of the world he has created, culminating inevitably in his death.

Though at times I found the book a bit slow and I was not so interested in the young cadet's storyline, overall I quite enjoyed the read. The president is surrounded by a great cast of characters (his jealous wife, his zealous paratrooper head of security, his scheming head of intel, etc.) and the mix of naive egotism and caprice that Hanif imagines going on in Zia's mind is quite humours, despite the dark reality behind it (that the author does a subtle job of maintaining). It also was educational and incited me to do a bit of history on this period. Pakistan played a crucial role in the support of the Mujahadin of Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet Union and the U.S. had a big hand in supporting Zia's dictatorship. Some very interesting lessons for today's dynamic situation in North Africa, where the U.S. has to make some tough decisions about dictators they have been supporting.

A nice little find that I wouldn't foist it on anybody, but if you were interested in the period or found it at a beach house, you wouldn't be too bummed out.

17. The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst

2011-03-23T11:19:00.003-04:00

There is a great little cordonnerie (cobbler) near my neighbourhood that also has a small wooden display on the counter of used books for sale. It tends towards "literature" trade paperbacks, though every now and then they have some genre stuff. The place also has a cleaning service, so I've been going there more regularily and realized that the stock changes. I asked the owner about it and he told me he has a deal with a guy who comes by every Thursday and changes all the books. He also keeps track of sales by checking the remaining inventory, so the owner of the store doesn't have to bother with any records. He just gets a cut of the sales. Last week, I found this Alan Furst novel. I swear I had read in one of the book blogs I follow a lukewarm review of a different novel of his, but now I can't find it. In any case, he has a reputation of being one of the better contemporary spy authors, with perhaps a bit of hyperbole attached as well.

Spies of Warsaw is about exactly what the title says it's about (which I appreciate). It takes place in Warsaw in 1937 as the Nazi threat is becoming a real possibility for war. It's an awesome period for espionage and an awesome location. Poland, being third in line in Hitler's plans for expansion, after Austria and czechoslovakia, is an important information depot for all the other european powers. The protagonist is Jean-Francois Mercier, an ex-soldier and now agent working for the French embassy in Warsaw. He is of the aristocracy, comes from a long line of soldiers, and has a sweet pad in Warsaw, a family apartment in Paris and an old farm in the French country. He is pretty into his job.

There is no single plot line here, but rather a semi-tangled web of operations that Mercier has to undertake: making regular pick-ups from a german engineer he has set up with a mistress, helping two Russian spies defect, getting together with a hot polish League of Nations lawyer, making contact with a hunted anti-Hitler Nazi and so on. All of it is compelling, rich with period detail and atmosphere. I've read that Furst is often compared to Patrick O'Brian, in that it is historical fiction. I'd say that is accurate, minus the rich language and profound human warmth. Furst sometimes errs in trying to be a bit too historically accurate and in context. References to Buster Keaton or an article by a leading Nazi seem slightly forced. At times, the language also seems contemporary (though how would I know)? But these are minor complaints. I studied this period in college and I still find it fascinating today and Furst does an excellent job of bringing it to life. Another thing that I enjoyed is that the narrative doesn't try to hard to force excitement on the reader. There were lots of points where I thought we were heading into a traditional action climax, but instead situations resolved themselves in a much more organic and realistic way, thus creating a more satisfying depth.

I did some reading around and a lot of people feel his work suffers in the later years. This was one of the more recent (2008) and it was pretty darned good. I'll definitely keep an eye out for the earlier books. There is one that takes place on a tramp steamer that looks right up my alley.

16. The Wars by Timothy Findley

2011-03-18T16:23:00.003-04:00

I was told a few times that I should read this book, but now I think the actual book by Findley that was recommended to me was Not Wanted on the Voyage. The Wars is the story of a young upper-class Canadian from the Prairies who is sent off to World War I has terrible, growing stuff happen to him and then causes a scandal that ends up in his dishonor. The scandal itself is a mystery to the reader right up until the end and thank god for that because otherwise I am not sure I would have been able to finish this book.

Now let me preface my rant by saying that this is not a bad book, possibly even a great one and it has the reputation of being a Canadian classic. But it represents everything that I hate about Canada (and had pretty much forgotten), the cheapness, the self-pity, the protestant emphasis on suffering, the need to justify one's existence by constantly feeling that everything is a bummer. As much as I rail against the spoiled consumption of America and how that is poisoning our culture as well, I do greatly value the optimism of the United States and am glad we have gotten that here.

Here is the protagonist, Robert Ross: a very handsome, athletic young man from a wealthy family. But oh guess what he is too freaked out to talk to women. And his big sister whom he loves more than anything is hydrocephalic and spends her life in a wheelchair feeding her rabbits. But one day Robert neglects her and she falls over and dies. Guess what he was doing when he neglected her? That's right, wacking off for the first time! Oh the guilt and the shame! And oh guess what else his psycho alchoholic mom demands that all his sister's rabbits be killed and that he be the one to kill them. and on and on and on.

Look dude, I believe it sucked growing up in some upper-class family in the Prairies during the beginning of the century, but I don't want to read about it and I certainly don't want to revel in it. Why do I suspect that poor French-Canadian farmers, who had a much rougher situation back then, had a much richer, happier life. Sure there was tragedy and poverty and death and all that, but in between, why don't we have a drink and a laugh? Oh no, we can't because we are fucking uptight western Canadians who have to frown on fun and pleasure (and even then we can't go over the top about it like some good repressive catholics or fire and brimstone evangelicals).

And then on top of it, of course we have to have the constant sexuality, generally tending towards the homosexual and always causing guilt and freaking out. Every male is gay or not gay but in love with some other male. Zzzzzzz. And whenever people do have sex, it's always seen to be disturbing and violent.

It strikes me that this book is much more about the place and period when it was written (Toronto, 1997) than it is about its subject matter. That's not intrinsically a bad thing. It's just that it doesn't age well, especially not to my personal bias.

There are some neat moments, including an especially memorable one when the guy runs with a coyote on the prairie. That was awesome. But the rest of it brought me back to a Canada that I used to be trapped in and could not wait to get out of. Now that I am free of it and now that Canada herself seems be moving past that state, I really don't want to be reminded of it again.

Next!

15. Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies by C.S. Forester

2011-03-16T07:50:00.004-04:00

Helping to feed the Age of Sail reading frenzy that is going on chez nous this Spring in anticipation of our extremely gradual but progressing forward Beat to Quarters game, meezly found a really neat old hardback copy of one of the last Hornblower books. These are the true classic adventure stories of the British Imperial Navy, pre-dating and most certainly influencing Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey and Maturin series by several decades. I have read one other Hornblower, Commodore Hornblower, which is also late in his career. Clinging desperately to the fact that the books were not originally written in chronological order, I have pretended to myself that I am abandoning any care about following Hornblower's career in order and avoiding spoilers and thus jumped right into this novel, which chronicles the end of Hornblower's career as he patrols the West Indies. To be honest, I wanted to read H.M.S. Surprise, the next in the Aubrey-Maturin series and I knew that meezly had a copy, but she kept it hidden from me and then started reading it herself. This was a fine consolation prize, however.

It's interesting from a historical perspective. It takes place in 1818-21, when the big sea wars were all over and Britain's naval dominance, especially in the new world, had receded dramatically. Though still a powerful diplomatic force in the West Indies, Hornblower's fleet is relatively small, with a frigate carrying 12-pounders as his biggest vessel. No more ships of the line here. Because of this, he is often outclassed either in firepower or speed and has to use his skill and wits to resolve situations. He is really more like a policeman here, hunting down pirates, smugglers and political criminals. The book is actually a series of short stories, two of which are connected. The whole thing does trace a complete narrative about this period of his career, his 3-year separation from his wife, but there is no single over-arching storyline. All the stories are excellent, with the final one being a real cracker, once again keeping me up past my bedtime and getting me over-stimulated.

It's cool, because when I was in high school and college, I didn't find this period all that interesting. I think I just couldn't relate to the goofs in their buckled shoes and restrictive manners. It's also so complicated. But now I am learning to realize how much there is to appreciate about this period, the revolutions against monarchy around the world, the burgeoning technologies of transport that were changing the face of the world, the crazy political intrigues. So much going on and so much opportunity for adventure!

(Note, the cover pictured here is the same cover that meezly found, but not an actual scan. Ours is a book club edition and had one rip in the upper middle and another smaller one where I stupidly picked at the glue after successfully getting the price sticker off.)

14. Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

2011-03-10T21:41:00.003-05:00

The discovery of this book brightened my day. I was fighting the endless fight against other people's hoarding and trying to make some space in the storage area in our office. Going through boxes of files that haven't been touched in a decade, equipment bought, used once or never and then lost (but "keep that, we may need it"), over-ordered print jobs with obsolete content when I found two boxes that looked even too old for our office. They were full of books! Most were old textbooks, but I also found a couple of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, including this one. The rest will go to the local thrift store, to be released back out into the wild and maybe read once again. This one, as well as two others, went to my on deck shelf.

The only other Heinlein I've read is Stranger in a Strange Land and I found it quite dated. He was prolific and I suspected that his earlier work might have been a bit more prosaic (read, better) and less philosophical. Tunnel in the Sky was written in 1955 and the storyline sounded much more like an enjoyable sci-fi adventure rather than an opportunity to wank about gender relations. It takes place in a future, resource-strapped earth where space-jumping gates offer an opportunity for struggling earthlings to migrate to remote planets.

The hero, Rod Walker, is a student in a school that trains students to survive in new planets. For the final exam, they are sent to an unknown land and must survive for 48 hours. This time, though, something goes wrong and the gate doesn't open again. The bulk of the story is about Rod surviving, meeting up with other surviving students, eventually building a community and then facing the internal challenges that a burgeoning community must face. This last part dipped a tad into some basic (and a bit trying to me) social theory and reminded me a lot of Earth Abides. Thankfully, the narrative moves forward briskly, moving the story forward and coming to a satisfying conclusion.

A pretty enjoyable adventure with some cool ideas.

13. Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian

2011-03-08T11:10:00.003-05:00

In advance of an online Beat to Quarters game (and because it's been too long since I read the first one in the series), I decided to pick up the second book in the famous and much-loved Aubrey-Maturin series. Meezly was one step ahead of me and kept her copy of the book, so that made it even easier.

Once again, there is real pleasure in diving into these two remarkable men's relationship and the life of adventure they lead. Added to the enjoyment is the rich language of O'Brian and his great depictions of the world around them. One often thinks of this period in history as downtrodden and meagre, but O'Brian makes it a compelling fantasy world, with diverse charactes and intrigue and adventure at every turn. Just little things, like the poor alchoholic Gibbon monkey in the rigging of the Lively (and the struggle between two sailors for the heads of other monkeys that had died on board) make one want to ship off oneself, despite the privations and the fear of the cat and rope-ends!

I didn't consider this book to be a slog, as Meezly did. But I do agree that it goes on for too long. It seems that the story should end when Jack and Stephen's love conflict is resolved and Jack gets promoted to Post. Instead, there is a whole other storyline where he and his temporary command of the Lively joins a mission to steal some spanish gold. This feels like it should be in a different book.

In general, at least so far, these books are structured in a strangely dreamlike episodical way. He slips from scene to scene without any explicit transition. One moment, Jack is talking to Stephen about his worries for his meeting with the admiralty and the very next paragraph is him actually speaking to the Admiral. Other sections suddenly fast forward seasons in a single paragraph. It takes some getting used to. It made me think, in the beginning, that the division by books was an artificial one. By the end, however, I realized that it is the love triangle and Jack's need to get a Post position that unite this book. I'll have to see how this structure manifests itself in the next books.

The battle, though, before that, where the awkward Polychrest (a ship that had initially been designed to suppport a failed secret rocket weapon and then foisted on Jack by a spiteful Admiral) sneaks into a French bay and wreaks havocs on their parked ships is just awesome. This is the thing about this series, it is all wrapped up in rich language and social conflicts but when ships go broadside and cannons blast and men leap into other ships with pikes and swords, the shit really hits the fan. There is serious action in these books. Great, ripping stuff and I am so psyched that there are tons more books to go!

12. The Handle by Richard Stark

2011-03-01T15:26:00.002-05:00

I have finally started on the next set of 3 University of Chicago Parker reprints that I got for my birthday this year. I think that it is possible that I had only read The Handle once before. It is one of the series that I have never owned, so I must have borrowed it from a friend. In any case, I remembered almost nothing about it beyond the basic premise: Parker is hired by the outfit to rip off and burn down a private casino island off the coast of Texas, but actually in Cuban territory.

The heist here is one of the better ones. The isolated island, filled with rich party-goers and yachters, is a great target. Westlake, as always, makes it come alive with detail (love the little cockfighting pit in the rear, put in place to further heighten the air of exoticism for the guests) and colour. He also clearly describes the layout so the reader is encouraged to start thinking of the best way to hit it as Parker is.

However, I'm going to have to say that this is possibly one of the more flawed episodes in the series. The complications are just a bit too large and preposterous. Parker is already working with the outfit, hired by Karns, the guy who got to the top because Parker took out his predecessor, which seems a little off. Their motivation is because the island is competition they can't touch and they want Parker to take it out. I just don't like to see Parker cooperating with the mob, even if he is ultimately going to screw them. But then the feds show up and they know everything about Parker and his crew. They also want the dude who runs the island and want to use Parker to that end as well.

Finally, we have Grofield. Now, I like Grofield, but he always seems out of place in a Parker book. He's just too fruity and goofy. I get the feeling that Westlake was struggling with some other literary desires whenever he put Grofield in a Parker book. You see these tears in the Stark fabric that shine the light of Dortmunder into Parker's world. I don't want the light! The ending is this slightly unreal helicopter pursuit in the Mexican desert that just didn't feel plausible or like Parker at all. He even ends up on a navy vessel! I am having a hard time understanding how he doesn't just get arrested after this given the info the feds have on him now (they know his current alias and all his past aliases and link him up with 8 other robberies). Maybe it gets explained in later books.

Also, the heist itself goes down awfully quickly. The owner of the island, an ex-nazi with a really rich and colourful past, is set up nicely and then ends up not really doing a whole lot. He also has a disturbing right-hand man who is offed all too easily. I think I would have been happier to have not had the feds in it at all and stick with the other complications.

Still and all, a great read. I had wanted to savour it and I am trying to go to bed on time, but once the heist started, I couldn't put it down and ended up with the head lamp on staying up a good 45 minutes after my bedtime. A slightly-flawed (in the eyes of a hardcore Parker nerd) Parker is still a work of fucking art. I mean there are sentences in here that I just had to read over again a few times, as well as a few moments of badassedness I noted down for future dealings with annoying people (like when Parker tells the slightly officious outfit manager "I don't even want to be reminded of you.").

11. My Search for Patty Hearst by Steven Weed

2011-02-26T11:14:00.004-05:00

I've always held an interest in the various phenomenon that marked the end of the '60s, where the cultural movement got really dark. That whole period, sort of kicked off by Watergate, is just so fascinating, culturally and politically. The establishment was probably at its most retarded in the history of America, while the young radicals were also amazingly stupid. And right in the middle was Parker, kicking everyone's ass—oh no wait, I'm in the wrong review.

I picked up this book for a dollar because I thought it might be an interesting read. Steven Weed is the ultimate cuckold, the rational, sensible young white professor whose pure heiress fiancée got kidnapped, brainwashed and eventually turned out by the ultimate revolutionary black cock. I admit to having a slightly prurient, almost mocking, interest in hearing his perspective. Surprisingly, the book far exceeded my expectations and turned out to be both a very thoughtful introspection on his psychology as well as a detailed and accurate history. I don't know if credit is to Steven Weed himself or his ghost writer Scott Swanson, but a real effort was made here to detail all the craziness that went down during the period between Patty's abduction and the shootout of most of the SLA 3 months later. It makes for a fascinating read.

I am not too aware of all the context surrounding the publication of this book, but it's clear that Weed was trying to defend his reputation. So it should be approached with some skepticism. The Hearts ended up distancing themselves from him. He botched several media interviews. He published the book while Patty was still on the run and then added this bonuse chapter after her trial, so it does look like an opportunity to cash in. That being said, he does an excellent job of portraying himself as a victim, but ultimately one who comes to terms with what happened, while not hiding over any of his flaws. You do feel sympathetic for him, but he doesn't milk it or seem to feel sorry for himself. You get the sense that he was more just blown away by what was gong on. Imagine, your fiancée is brutally kidnapped from your house and you get the shit beaten out of you. You first think it's a simple hostage case after a break-in. Then you think it's for money because she is the heiress of a famous wealthy family. Then you get this communiqué from these freaky crimino-revolutionaries making these insane political demands. And then the final straw when she joins them and starts parroting their garbled revolutionary bullshit and claims you are a sexist, ageist pig. He was only 26 years old! I think it is a testimony to his basic stability that he didn't go completely bonkers. I'd be curious to hear another perspective, but I think another point in his favour also is that he seems to have completely disappeared from the limelight. The only thing I can find is that he is a real estate agent in the Bay Area.

But back to the book. One example of the detailed history that I hadn't expected was the recounting of the chaos that was the People In Need food drive. One of the SLA's demands was that the Hearst family donate $400 million worth of food to the poor. Instead, they donated $4 million and tried to create a system for buying, sorting and distributing to the food, hiring experienced administrators from Washington state and affiliating them with a wide range of local churches, political organizations, community groups, criminals and just everybody. Because the distant voice of DeFreeze in his political communiqués (sent via tape to the local media through a black church) was weirdly driving the whole thing, all these groups had a lot of power. Plus, it was the 60s in the Bay Area, which was just a total free-for-all when it came to these kinds of things. I mean you think PC thought can cripple getting things done today, you need to read this account. The first food drop turned into a total riot. By the end of the program, they did manage to get a lot of food out, but the waste, chaos and theft that went on in between is just a perfect demonstration of the vast gap between vague political ideals and actually getting something done. Steven Weed volunteered for four days during the last drive and you get a first-person eye view on it.

I know what I've written so far portrays the radical left as being profoundly naive and incompetent (or just criminal) and they were. But the undercurrent throughout the whole book is also the utter incompetence and disconnectedness of the establishment at the time. The FBI completely blew this case. They had absolutely nothing but bullshit and bluster. (Their rhetoric during this case sounds eerily similar to the garbage we get from Homeland Security about "terrorism" today, which should tell us something about how much they actually know.) Particularly hilarious is the part where they bring in an expert to interrogate Weed right after the kidnapping. He is an expert on "marijuana addiction" and asks if any of the attackers had a yellowish tinge, as that is a dead giveaway of said addiction. Straight out of a Freak Brothers comic. Patty's parents, especially her mother, were completely out to lunch. The cops, for the most part, seemed more concerned with harassing people and being dicks than actually investigating. The "establishment" just had absolutely no idea what they were dealing with on all levels.

I was a little kid in Oakland when all this was going down, completely oblivious. But my parents must have been following along, so I'm quite curious to hear their perspectives on the matter.

10. Eon by Greg Bear

2011-02-23T11:03:00.002-05:00

I have a strange relationship with science fiction. Basically, it's awesome and I love it. But I am not quite enough of a true nerd to actually be able to fully jump into it and be the guy who in the theatre is furiously reading a 4-inch think paperback while waiting for Aliens to start (I saw this). I often approach science fiction novels with trepidation, with fear that they will be too long, have too much detail and visualisation that I won't be able to follow, that they will be part of some massive series that I'll have to follow to get the fully satisfying reading experience. One of my 50-books goals a few years back was to catch up on a bunch of sci-fi classics and I read quite a few, but since then, it's been few and far between, reading one when the mood really strikes me.

I've been interested in Greg Bear for a while. He has a reputation of being a "hard" science fiction writer. This vague distinction always adds a level of hesitation for me. But I saw a well-read paperback on the shelf at Chainon for a buck and just felt the urge. Not giving myself a chance to be intimidated (and to wash a bit of the PC-stench of The Suspect off my mind), I jumped right in.

Happily, it turned out to be a real page-turner and definitely worthy of its reputation as a sci-fi classic. I read the 500+ pages in a couple of days, staying up too late on school nights (be concerned, Mom!). It's the near-future, 2012, and a large asteroid has appeared, about the shape of a potato and 120 km long. Upon closer inspection, it has symmetrical bands along its length and other markings that appear to indicate the work of intelligence.

I also note that interestingly this is the third sci-fi classic that involves a vessel showing up in our solar system that turns out to be hollow and reveals great secrets, the other two being Rendezvous with Rama and Titan.

Eon was written in 1985 and Bear has pushed forward the cold war context to our present day. He also added in a limited nuclear exchange, called The Little Death.

The west has the advantage in space and NATO quickly claims control of the stone, as it is called (cleverly, the Russians call it the potato). The book's perspective comes mainly from a young theoretical physicist, Patricia Vasquez, as she is called up for reasons she doesn't know to participate in the exploration of the stone. The discoveries in the stone have been kept under tight wraps and all she knows are the rumours that it is hollow and that evidence of an intelligent civilization has been discovered. The first part of the book is her going there and slowly being introduced to what they have actually found. What they have found is pretty awesome and it's a big part of what keeps the pages turning. You want to find out more!

I won't reveal any more, suffice it to say that there are external conflicts from the jealous Soviets and internal conflicts from what they learn about the civilization that did the work. I guess it's called hard science because one of the things they find at the far end of the stone is a seemingly endless tunnel made of walls of anti-matter or something. The tunnel (called The Way) is a huge part of the book and some crazy spacey-physics stuff happens. I guess the whole thing is based on real physics or something, but it all seemed like pretty standard science fiction to me. It was really cool, but I'm not sure what is so "hard" about it. A scientist would probably understand the distinction, but my point is that for a simple-minded thrill-seeker like myself, the science was not a deterrant at all.

Also, though it sounds like an afterthought, the humans and their narratives are ultimately what keep the book moving through to the end and they are quite well done. How do people react when faced with such mind-blowing situations. There is also the theme of nuclear annhiliation, something that was much more in the cultural forefront when the book was written. It is still very meaningful and intense here.

Great book.

9. The Suspect by Michael Robotham

2011-02-20T12:33:00.002-05:00

Well here is the first stinker of 2011. Well, that's a bit harsh. It's not a terrible book. The basic mystery is pretty cool and the guy is a competent writer. The problem is that this is basically the slightly upmarket version of a Jeffrey Deaver, a book that is demographically targetted rather than actually written. And the target? The guilty pussified middle-aged white male of the 21st century. Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I go off on a rant, I'll give you the basic premise.

Joseph O'Loughlin is a clinical psychologist in London who gets involved in a case involving a young girl found murdered and tortured in a very specific way. Because he works with prostitutes as a side philanthropic effort, the investigating detective comes to him, thinking the victim was a prostitute. It turns out that not only is she not a prostitute, but an ex-patient of the protagonist's. As he digs deeper, more and more is revealed until he himself starts to become the principal suspect. Okay, pretty standard non-detective gets in too deep and has to become detective-like, using his real world skills, to prove himself innocent. It's not bad as these kinds of stories go, with some good twists and turns, rich characters and good locales in and outside of London.

The problem is that to get to that story, you have to dig through pages and pages of whiny, self-indulgent, narcissistic chaff. First of all, the psychologist has early Parkinson's. Bummer. Dick Francis often had characters with a single handicap like this (the wife in the iron lung, the paralysed hand, etc.) and they gnawed at the main character. But they didn't become a major part of the narrative with the guy being a total douche, constantly obsessing over it, not telling his wife and child, nor the detective who is investigating the case, nor none of his colleagues so they all think he is being even more suspicious when his face gets all blank, serial-killer like, and his hands are trembling and he drops things at crucial moments. Even lamer than this though is that the guy also has a way hotter wife than he deserves (but of course she loves him unquestioningly), so he has to fret all the time about the other more alpha males wanting and possibly getting her sexually (his best friend, the plumber, the visiting cops). Oh yeah and his father is a super successful medical doctor and contemptuous of his son for choosing psychology and he has to fret about that every single time he sees his parents even though they are basically quite pleasant.

Look, I agree that we should try to be psychologically aware of ourselves. But there is a point where that just becomes preening self-indulgence and the character in this book goes way over the line. Dude, man the fuck up! You have a hot wife. Good for you. Own it. You are a grown man. Time to move past your parents' disappointment. I think this book was semi-deliberately written this way in an attempt to appeal to female readers. And I think the author is one of those misguided guys who thinks this kind of sensitive shit gets you laid. Lesson to my younger male readers: it doesn't.

But here is the real capper. Along with all this pussified hand-wringing, we also get a super-nasty, titillating gang rape, ripped almost directly from Leaving Las Vegas (in between rounds, they cheered for Man U). This comes in part of the narrative behind the protagonist's ex-prostitute ally, with whom he gets to have an affair (but it's okay because it was just once after he had learned he has Parkinson's and can't talk to his wife about it for fear of showing weakness or some such bullshit), and of course the sex they have is super angelic the first time but then he "takes her" the second round. And of course even though she has been a prostitute since she was 13 at the lowest levels of the game, she is still so hot that when they go out at restaurants everyone stares at her. It's the worst kind of adolescent masculine fantasy dressed up as some kind of profound psychological analysis.

Also, the psychology in the book is actually really simplistic. One of his patients is scared of crossing bridges and comes to his office with a life buoy. And guess what his treatment is? To talk with her about all the stable bridges in the world and going over the safety statistics with her until she is a bit calmer.

I have to admit to being a bit taken in by the packaging. It looked like it would be kind of tough and cold, with a very sparse cover and glowing reviews from (what I mistakenly assume to be more critical) British newspapers like The Sunday Times or the Telegraph. But really, looking closer, which I should have done, I see the majority of those quotes are from Australian papers and even The Australian Women's Weekly, which should have rung some alarms.

The protagonist in this book is the kind of character Patricia Highsmith would have made fun of. Thank god I didn't buy the other book by this guy that was right next to it and also tempting for a dollar.

If you are one of the hordes of pussified males that don't take responsibility for anything and can't fix a flat tire or drive in the snow and you feel terribly guilty about being a white male but still think it makes sense that a super-hot ex-hooker would ultimately sympathize with your sensitivity because you lecture to prostitutes about their safety and you want to revel in your feelings of inadequacy and doubt and impotent frustration towards your parents, then you'll probably love this book.

8. How Like an Angel by Margaret Millar

2011-02-15T11:48:00.003-05:00

Will 2011 be the year of Margaret Millar? How Like an Angel did not rock my world like Beast in View, but I am still blown away by how talented a writer Millar is. This is much more of a straightforward mystery, albeit an engaging and interesting one. Joe Quinn is a gambler and laid-off casino P.I. who gets dropped off in the middle of the desert after a binge at the tables. He wanders onto the property of a strange religious commune and from there gets mixed up in a mystery that involves bank embezzlement, small town real estate and, of course, murder.

Quinn meets an old woman in the commune who helps him out. In return, she asks him to find out the fate of one Patrick O'Gorman, who lived in the small nearby town of Chilcote. She doesn't say why and when he finds out that not only is O'Gorman missing and presumed dead, but that his mysterious disappearance 5 years ago caused a scandal that the town still hasn't gotten over. Intrigued, he starts to dig deeper.

What's great about this book are the excellent locations, especially the little fringe California town of Chilcote that was once primarily agricultural and since dominated by oil money. You can understand why so many writers lived or wrote about Southern California in the 20th century. It was a dynamic place, but also so atmospheric. She really captures the feel of a too-hot desert town. The cult is also quite neat, a precursor to the communes of the 60s.

What didn't quite work for me was the romantic angle, where the protagonist seems to all of a sudden fall in love with O'Gorman's widow. I mean yes she seemed like an admirable woman, but the falling in love came out of nowhere. Maybe that's how it worked back when you couldn't have pre-marital sex, but it seemed forced to me.

Margaret Millar was an amazing person. She was Canadian but moved to the States after marrying her husband, Ross MacDonald. She did a ton of conservation work and wrote kick-ass novels. I wonder if anyone has written a good biography of her? It's funny because she was quite succesful, both commercially and critically, and yet her name has sort of faded while everyone still knows who Ross MacDonald is. Is that simply the male bias of publishing and the crime genre or simply a testament to the longevity of having a single recurring detective?

7. Les Sept Jours du talion by Patrick Senécal

2011-02-10T14:55:00.004-05:00

[title translates to The Seven Days of Retaliation.]

Patrick Senécal is a very popular writer here in Quebec. Two of his earlier books (5150 rue des Ormes and Sur le Seuil) were made into movies (as was this one). I read Sur le Seuil, which was one of the first novels I read in french. It's the story of a psychologist investigating people who start suddenly going on killing sprees. It was quite gripping and I was particularly impressed with how extreme Senécal was willing to go with his plot (jusqu'ua bout!).

I was not interested in Les Sept Jours because I saw the trailer of the movie before even knowing about the book. And like so many trailers today, it gives away way too much. There really needs to be a law about that. And it looked like a harrowing, unpleasant subject matter and I closed my mind to it. Not that I'm against that stuff being in books and movies, but I just find it so difficult to watch or read about that I just avoid it. However, a friend of mine strongly recommended that I read the book, to the point of lending me his copy. It sat on my shelf haunting me, both because the subject matter looked rough and reading it in french makes it twice as hard for me.

The story is a simple one. A young girl is raped and murdered and the doctor father kidnaps the sex maniac responsible to get his revenge. He holes up in a cabin and tortures him for 7 days. You can see why I might have been reluctant to read this book. I'm definitely not a fan of torture porn. However, what that simple premise leaves out is the psychological depth of the book and the suspense. It's a real page-turner! Right from the first page, you are caught up in medias res with the doctor preparing to carry out his kidnapping. There is a lot of cool procedural stuff in flashback while he's waiting in the car outside the courthouse and you really want to find out what happens next.

Then when we do get to the cabin, the book is just as engrossing as you follow the police trying to find him, society's divided reaction to the doctor's actions, the affect on his wife and ultimately how the doctor himself starts to unravel. This is some dark, rich shit. It poses the question, what would you do in this situation and is it the right thing? It answers that question in a deep psychological way with a frisson of the supernatural. Very gripping and enjoyable read. What I like about Senécal, among other things, is that even his side characters are interesting. The team of cops, though playing a smaller role (except the main detective on the case) seem very real and kind of cool.

I also have to add that the things they guy does to his victim are pretty fucking harsh. I've seen some harshness in fiction (especially in the movies) and there are things that go on here that really had me quite freaked out. It's not only the excess or the twisted creativity, but also the way it is delivered to the reader and put into the psychological context.

It's also interesting to read this alongside Sur le Seuil. Sur le Seuil does it much more explicitly, but both suggest that there is a true evil in the world, but that it is something that is linked to our own psychology. We can access it and it can take us over, but we can also choose to fight against it. It is, however, a real thing out there (especially, it seems, in rural Quebec!) waiting for us to give it access.

Here is my question after reading this book. Why the fuck has it not been translated into english and properly marketed? Is this the fault of lame Toronto-centric publishing houses, trapped between their ignorance of the francophone market and their fear of anything "genre"? Is this the fault of navel-gazing Quebecers who can't imagine their written work would have any value in the rest of North America? Because this book seems highly marketable to me. It's a real page-turner and delivers the horror goods. There is a huge market in the States and anglo Canada for this kind of horror. Will somebody please sell it? Or if not, please explain why.

6. This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith

2011-02-03T10:51:00.002-05:00

This Sweet Sickness doesn't rank amongst my favourite of her works and at some point I even found it a bit trying. But it does pick up by the second half and ultimately she delivers a succesful tale of a man driven mad by his obsession with a woman. She is such a master at writing about what is going on inside the head of a crazy person. It's not just the internal dialogue, but subtle little clues, like sudden surges of energy or erroneous perceptions (that the reader is aware of).

I did have one exciting moment that sadly turned out to be not so exciting. The basic story is that a scientist, David Kelsey, pines after the woman he left behind in his town (to make money to be able to marry her). She ends up going out with another guy and then marrying him and the "protagonist" can't let go, to the point that he has bought another house and spends every weekend there, preparing for her eventual arrival in that home. He sends letters to her and eventually harrases her enough that her husband comes out to confront him. They get in a scuffle and the husband falls and hits his head on the concrete porch stairs and dies.

Kelsey drives to the police station and pretends he doesn't know the guy. And here is where I flipped out. "He [David Kelsey] said that the man had arrived at his house in a belligerent mood, addressed him as Parker or something like that, and eventually pulled a gun."

It sure seemed like a potential Highsmith/Westlake connection. I was actually jumping up and down and shouting at my wife "I think Patricia Highsmith may have read Parker!" I was under the impression that This Sweet Sickness was written in 1970 and I went on a flurry of google searching, which then made me realize that the paperback I was reading was released in 1970, but the book was originally written in 1960, years before The Hunter came out. :(

It sure does sound like a reference to Parker, though doesn't it? I mean isn't he always attracting beligerrent dudes with guns coming looking for him?

My wife did offer one appeasement to my disappointment. Perhaps Westlake had read This Sweet Sickness and the name had stuck in his head? The name Parker comes up twice more in that section as he continues to lie to the cops. Highsmith and Westlake were contemporaries. Can anybody find evidence that one may have read the other on the web?

5. Crusade in Europe by Dwight D. Eisenhower

2011-01-28T16:30:00.000-05:00

I'm having a hard time getting this post out. I'm a bit rusty! I've been busy with the new year, but it was also this 487 page tome that has been occupying my reading these last couple of weeks.

I don't know what spurred me on to my sudden Eisenhower kick a few months ago, but it led me to Crusade in Europe, which is his account of the allied forces involvement and victory in World War Two. He wrote it three years after the end of the war, so the events were still fresh in his mind (it also heavily cited and documented as well) and many of the politics that took centre stage during his presidency were only then beginning to gestate.

First of all, World War Two is mindblowing. For those of us who grew up with the last cultural remnants of that period (Time Life books, Hogan's Heroes, Sergeant Rock comics, old war movies on Saturday morning), it is sort of a basic part of our upbringing and you almost take it for granted. I did also benefit from a pretty thorough education about the Holocaust as a child, whose impact never really became trivialized in my own consciousness. I truly hope that the next generations are learning this history as well. All of us should try not to forget the incredible scale of the war. Pretty much the entire globe (certainly all the white people) were fighting. What this book brings home, though, is the sheer scale of the logistics and even more amazing is how it was succesfully managed by a relatively small command group (led by Eisenhower) reporting back to their governments, dealing with all the competing political and military interests. Eisenhower's main point is that it was crucial that one person be put in charge. An interesting thesis and one I do not have the space (nor the knowledge) to get into here.

Another element that I found gratifying and yet frustrating, was the social consciousness and general common sense Eisenhower displays in this book. It's gratifying because it is nice to be reminded that the general zeitgeist in America was once one of generosity and awareness of the rest of the world instead of the selfish consumerism and fear-based anger that dominates her thinking today (not that that stuff wasn't around back then, as it has always been a feature of U.S. history, but it was way less severe). For instance, Eisenhower was totally against censorship in the military. Only in a few instances did he hide information from the press. On the contrary, he let them in early on information on many major attacks with the understanding that they wouldn't publish the info until it couldn't harm the allies' effort (and which except in one single instance, that of the Germans surrendering, the press followed loyally). He also dedicated precious military resources to make sure that any reporters got driven and escorted to wherever they wanted to go on the battle lines.

I believed that the proper attitude of the commander toward represnentatives of the press was to regard them as quasi staff officers; to recognize their mission in the war and to assist them in carrying it out. Normally the only justifiable excuse for censorship is the necessity to withhold valuable infommation that the enemy could not otherwise obtain. during the war I personally violated this general rule by imposing temporary political censorship in North Africa and by withholding advance notice of the eventual command arrangements in Normandy. Though my reasons, on both occasions, seemed valid to me, I never failed to regret what later proved to be a mistake.

In Word War II the great body of the American and British press representatives comprised an intelligent, patriotic, and energetic group of individuals. They could, with complete safety and mutual advantage, be taken into the confidence of the commander. When this was done the press body itself became the best possible instrument for the disciplining of an individual who violated any confidence or code under which the group was operating. Throughout the campaigns in the Mediterranean and Europe, I found that correspondents habitually responded to candor, frankness, and understanding.

In the handling of the press, the American practice was to provide every facility that would permit an individual to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. While this imposed upon us some additional administrative burdens, it paid off in big dividends because of the conviction in the minds of all that there was no attempt to conceal error and stupidity. These, when discovered, could be promptly aired and therefore did not grow in the the festering sores that would have resulted from any attempt at concealment. (page 300)

How mindblowing is that? I wonder what Cheney and the rest of Bush's administration thought of when they read that (assuming they actually knew any American history)? Even the basic idea of admitting fault, of admitting that there was error and stupidity at times seems lost to government and corporations and even individuals in America today.

Here's another amazing passage that really struck me:

Once the recruit of 1941 was inducted into the service the military leader had to shoulder almost exclusive responsibility for imparting such an understanding, but there was implied a glaring deficiency in our country's educational process. It seemed to me that constant stressing of the individual's rights and privileges of American citizenship had overshadowed the equally important truth that such individualism can be sustained only as long as the citizen accepts his full responsibility for the welfare of the nation that protects him in the exercise of these rights.

Every stupid teabagger and every entitled Liberal (and pretty much every Canadian as well for that matter) should read those words and think about them.

I could go and on about this book. I'll just say that it was a great read on many levels. It's a bit plain in style and at times gets a bit slow with a page or two on troops moving into position, but that never lasts more than a page or two. The story itself is astounding and followng it from the top is fascinating, enjoyable and educational. I would also recommend this book for anyone interested in leadership. Some great advice here on handling multiple allies, on maintaining morale in the people under you, in being direct, straight and respectful of your colleagues and subordinates. Overall, I found it inspiring and just kind of mind-blowing. You should read it.

4. Iceman 6 - Canadian Kill by Joseph Nazel

2011-01-10T14:37:00.003-05:00

There was almost the whole Iceman series on display at S.W. Welch for the longest time. They are beautiful artifacts, but I always held off on buying them. Of them all, judging by the cover here, you can guess that Canadian Kill would be the one I really would want. We did a big sale of old books at the end of the year and I went a bit feverish with the $24 credit we had earned and I ended up picking this up.

The Iceman series was published by Holloway House, who are best known for being the first publishers of some classic ghetto literature, including Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. If Canadian Kill is representative of the series (and from other blog reviews I've read, I suspect it is), then Iceman is definitely a lower order of quality, both literary and political. I honestly suspect that this book had only one draft. There are many typos, but also some weird continuity errors and the occasional wrong name used. The set-up is spectacular and fantastic, but this particular story was quite pedestrian. Basically, Iceman is a street tough made good who now owns an insanely fancy resort in Vegas and has a coterie of beautiful, ass-kicking women and a jive-talking sidekick named Christmas Tree. They live in a world of trouble and decide to take a vacation at a remote cabin in Northern Quebec.

Unfortunately, they arrive by plane at their cabin just as young Yvette is escaping on skies from the snowmobiling guards of the New Body of Man whose top secret hideout just happens to be around the corner from Iceman's new ski chalet. A trigger-happy guard shoots the plane and thus Iceman and his team of beautiful deadly-handed babes and Christmas Tree have to pit themselves against this organization, led by the megalomaniac The Manager, that was just poised to take over the world.

It's basically Shaft meets James Bond, with everything turned up to 11. I do have to appreciate how quickly the action got started. Guns come out quickly and there is a lot of it. There was a weird trope where practically every time somebody got shot, the wound and blood was described in detail for at least one and sometimes two sentences. And yet there is absolutely no sex in the book! It's all offstage, a weird coyness that I would not have expected from a Holloway House book.

Joseph Nazel himself was quite an interesting guy. He cranked out tons of books and was a major player in the African-American journalism scene in the 70's, 80's and 90's, being an editor at a bunch of magazines. I suspect he was a better writer than the Iceman series indicates, but was probably just cranking these out to make his mail. I'd like to read a real in-depth biography of the guy.

It's weird, there is very little info that I can find about the Holloway House. They don't even have an entry in Wikipedia. Very odd. These guys are a crucial part of American cultural and literary history.

3. Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis

2011-01-07T10:52:00.003-05:00

I received this book as a pleasant surprise xmas gift from my wife. I had never heard of it before, but it's certainly a book that I should know about. Lucky Jim is high on the list of my all-time favourite books, though I have never read another book by Amis.

Everyday Drinking is a collection of three previously published books on drinking by Amis, two of which, Every Drinking (1973) and On Drink (1983) were collections of his regular columns for a newspaper (the Times?) and the third, How's your Glass (1984) which is a long and challenging alcohol trivia quiz.

This is enjoyable, informative and even inspiring stuff. The first book is an excellent practical primer for the beginner and expert alike on how to drink. It gives sane, realistic and specific advice on how one should stock a home bar, how to one up wine snobs and get the better of cheap hosts (and also how to be a cheap host), the best strategies for dealing with a hangover and what kind of diet a lifetime drinker should have. I have come to enjoy alcohol and drinking a great deal in my middle years, but anybody who appreciates expertise should realize what a perfect expert Kingsley Amis was to write such a treatise. He was a lifelong practiced drinker with an expert eye on the foibles of human interactions (which is a big part of the fun of drinking, as Amis himself makes quite clear) and a brilliant and productive writer. This is a satisfying read simply because you really feel like you are in the hands of a master. Also, compared to a lot of similar foodie books of today, he always keeps his advice on the ground. I can't tell you how many recipes I just have to skip because the ingredients are not for sale anywhere outside of their point of origin or New York or LA. Other than the specifically British items (especially the beers), pretty much everything Amis suggests for you to start a lifetime of drinking can be found in any liquor store.

It's also quite funny. His acerbic and misanthropic wit is as sharp as ever here. He has a chapter on how to host a party, all based around avoiding sharing any of your good or expensive booze with the guests, but doing it in such a way to make the wives think you are super generous and gallant and the "old stagers" (the husbands who really want to get drunk) think you are cheap with the ultimate goal of ensuring that they have a good fight on the way home from your party. One nasty technique is in response to the old stager who demands a gin and tonic at a party where only wine is being visibly served. You fill up the glass with a lot of ice and tonic and then pour a small amount of gin gently over the back of a spoon so it lays on top of the ice. The first sip will taste quite strong, thus fooling the guest long enough. Yes, the privations of the Blitz sit deep with the Brits!

The quiz at the end is really tough and quite fun too. If I had any space left in my memory banks, I'd probably try and commit a lot of it too memory. It just seems cool to know.

Interestingly enough, after I had finished the book last night, I was thinking that it would be neat to find the original copies of these books. I thought to myself, this is the kind of book Louis XIV would probably be able to lay his hands upon. And lo and behold this very morning, he has a post up about the original hardback of On Drink in all its 70s British glory. Such a coincidence calls for a drink!

2. The Blond Baboon by Janwillem van de Wetering

2011-01-05T21:53:00.002-05:00

This is the third of the Grijpsta/de Gier/commisarius/Cardozo series that I have read and the most traditionally-plotted. It's a straightforward murder mystery, taking placed almost entirely in Amsterdam. Note how I include two more characters in the identification of the series. That's because the commisarius and junior detective Cardozo are featured as much as the two main detectives. Really, the detectives act as a team, with everyone participating, and really the series should be identified as "the Amsterdam municipal police murder squad series" instead of "the Grijpsta-de Gier series".

This time, a woman falls down her back stairs during a destructive gale. It looks like an accident and she was drinking, but there are too many weird minor other things going on for the team to simply let it go. Soon they are digging into a complex tale of the internal politics of a furniture business. As usual, the real pleasure of these books is the interplay between the detectives and their humanist approach to their work and the world. It's like putting on an old comfy sweater. I wonder if they made a TV show out of this? They should if they haven't.

1. The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet by Michael Pearce

2011-01-04T13:05:00.002-05:00

Some blog somewhere recommended the books of Michael Pearce. I simply wrote down the two titles recommended and his name on the list I keep in my pocket. I have completely forgotten where the recommendation came from. I'd like to rectify that if I could, so if it happens to be any of the vast audience who reads this, throw me a comment.

The Mamur Zapt is the head of the British Secret Service in Egypt when it was under Britain's control in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Return of the Carpet is the first in a series of 16 books about the Welsh army captain, Gareth Cadwallader Owens, who fills this role of intrigue, politics and investigation in Cairo. I really don't know much else about the pedigree of these books, besides the brief bio in the back about the author, who grew up in Egypt and went back there to teach.

The Return of the Carpet refers to an annual ceremony where a holy piece of thread comes to Cairo from Mecca. The book starts out with a wealthy and powerful politician surviving an amateurish assassination attempt. We slowly learn about the complex politics (the fundamental basis of which is that Britain is ostensibly on there as an advisor to the government, but actually has the army and is basically in charge, but this is only the beginning; it really is complex) of the situation. Furthermore, the Mamur Zapt is supposed to be only responsible for intelligence and has no mandate to investigate. There are several other agencies with which me must negotiate, manipulate and politic to get things happening. If you like byzantine state politics and inter-departmental intrigue, this book does those things very well. It's great to see Owen make plays against obstinate army sub-commanders or Syrian consul generals as well as to watch him realize he has been manipulated.

What it also does well is describe the rich physical and social milieu that is 1920's Cairo. It was a crazy melting pot and Pearce really brings it home for the reader. This is a period and region I am not too familiar with but have always been drawn to (probably due to those early Tintins), so I will definitely continue along with this series as I find new volumes. The plot itself was a bit dry and not super-interesting to me at certain points along the way, but there is enough promise there that I have the feeling other stories will be more engaging.

2010 year-end wrap-up

2010-12-31T21:00:00.003-05:00

Wow! What a great year! I liken my year to that of the San Antonio Spurs regular season in the National Basketball Association this year. They started the season publicly recognizing that their star power forward was slowing down and that they were going to take the season with a more relaxed approach. And yet about a third of the way through the season, they have the best record in the league. Similarly, after my second-half letdown last year, I decided [url=http://olmansfifty.blogspot.com/2010/01/2009-end-of-year-wrap-up.html]to take it easy with myself this year[/url] (as it says above "reading for pleasure in 2010") and make no reading commitments. And yet somehow I managed to catch fire and record my best reading year since I started counting.

One of the lessons I learned and applied is to avoid the spring time meltdown. In my poor-performing years, I often stopped reading in March and April, probably caught up in the excitement of springtime. So now I make an extra effort in those months to stay diligent, which in turn increases momentum for the summer months. This year, I had a two-week honeymoon to the Galapagos in February, with lots of time on a boat and in airports, which gave me a huge boost.

Another factor is that I cut way down on participating in the gaming world. I still play once every two weeks with my regular group here, but I just lost interest in staying up to date on the hobby and marketplace, arguing with people about history and theory of tabletop roleplaying games. That took up a lot of time much of which I spend reading now.

Once I saw that I had a good pace going, I started to get obsessed with the idea of making up for years where I didn't make the goal by trying to get to an average of 50. This obsession got me tracking and calculating, which in turn, increased my motivation. Finally, in the late summer, our "free" cable got cut off, which definitely got the pages turning.

As far as content, it was quite a varied year, though with an emphasis on crime fiction as usual. Aside from my continued re-reading of the Parker series (each of the three books of which I read this year were as fulfilling and probably more rewarding this time around—I can't wait to get my hands on "Memory" which everyone is talking about), I had four standout reads this year:

The Porkchoppers by Ross Thomas

The Red Right Hand by Joel Townsley Rogers

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

The Engagement by Simenon

The Porkchoppers makes me particularly happy because not only was it a great book, but it's opened up an entire ouevre by a skilled author who talks my language. It is so nice to know that there is still more to discover out there!

The Red Right Hand is just totally fucked out. I'm usually not a fan of books where the author is messing with the reader, but this one is just so well done and so creepy that I couldn't shake it from my mind. Also, that it was written in 1945, and yet there is nothing today that exceeds it in terms of pure dark craziness I find strangely comforting (or the opposite, depending on your view of humanity).

Barchester Towers met my hopes (and exceeded them in that it was much easier for me to read than I had thought) and has opened the door for me to read much more Trollope going forward.

The Engagement sealed the deal for me with Simenon's romans durs: if I find one used, I will pick it up. This is a masterpiece of noir, guilt, crime fiction but also of depicting a sense of place.

Another enjoyable element of 2010 was hooking up with some of the other book bloggers out there that are outside of my initial group of 50 booker friends (who are still plugging away, with a nice resurgence at the end of the year, despite the imposition of family values and multiple responsibilities getting in the way of reading). Louis XIV of Existential Ennui, Trent at The Violent World of Parker and The Book Glutton have created a little corner of nerdy obscurity and intelligent discourse that has brought me a lot of enjoyment this year. Thanks for that!

A special note to the book blog of my lovely wife, who has also had a record-breaking year and whose choice of books keeps me aware of segments of the market I like to know about and whose much more diligent and disciplined approach to her posts keeps me from being totally lazy with my own writing.

It's always hard to say what 2011 will bring. I am going to take it easy on myself, but I definitely want to hit 50 this year. The on-deck shelf has swelled over xmas break and there is a nice list of intriguing books and authors awaiting me. Reading is good! Happy New Year everyone! I wish you all a rocking and well-read 2011!

73. Beast in View by Margaret Millar

2010-12-31T13:28:00.003-05:00

Still swinging! Got one last book in before the year ends.

As a general rule, I have very little interest in bookstores that only sell new books. I like them and lament there fate in the internet and big box age, but there is nothing to be discovered there for me, generally speaking. However, Dark Carnival in Berkeley, California, is an exception to this rule. It's a science fiction and fantasy bookstore that is overstocked to the point of books lining the floors under shelves. They do have a used section but it is limited to two shelves way in the back. However, they have such a wide stock of new books that there are many things to be discovered there. I don't know if it's because they keep stuff that is long out of print, or do orders with small publishing houses or perhaps distributors that still have old stock, but you can find new copies of books that are long out of print. For example, they have at least 5 different books by Margaret Millar, all new but quite old. The copy of Beast in View that I bought is a Caroll & Graf paperback released in 2000. I normally do not buy new books but Margaret Millar, despite her past popularity, has proven extremely hard to find in the used book stores that I have frequented, so I picked this one up as well as The Fiend (with the creepiest cover of a dude in a raincoat watching a girl on a swing).

Beast in View begins with an old maid, who isn't that old, living by herself in a hotel suite. She receives a very disturbing prank call from a female stranger who claims to know her and seems to know too much about her. This call disturbs the woman deeply and she calls the man who handled her late father's estate, the only person she really has any connection with at this point. The financial advisor is near retiring and at loose ends with the death of his own wife and so takes up the woman's case, though it is not really his line of work. The set-up is fairly straightforward but the execution that follows is not. Millar takes us into the lives of many different characters, connected only tangentially (at least at first) to the old maid and the prank caller. Many chapters starts out from the perspective of a new character, which almost becomes disorienting, except that a much larger and richer story of a completely dysfunctional family, twisted from their own emotional failings and the restrictive social pressures of late '50s white upper middle class America, comes slowly and intriguingly to the surface.

And what a dark story it is. The characters are so desperate, lost and damaged and Millar's portrayal so penetrating that it is almost painful to read at times, except that her language is so deliciously nasty and the intrigue so gripping that you keep turning the pages. This book reminded me a lot of Patricia Highsmith, that same kind of realistic and unflinching regard at other people's broken minds. I think that perhaps Millar has some sympathy for her characters, where Highsmith had none, but I think such a statement requires reading more of Millar's works, which I definitely will do. Beast in View is a great little novel with a tight, rewarding ending that caps off a dark, ugly journey into the despairing, twisted minds of the lost souls of Southern California's bourgeoisie. Strongly recommended.

72. The Fools in Town Are on our Side by Ross Thomas

2010-12-30T13:19:00.002-05:00

Well I'm afraid I faltered on the home stretch. I really had the opportunity to hit 75 by the end of the year, having two days before xmas vacation where work should have been quiet and then a day of flying, but those two days turned out to be really busy wrapping up year-end stuff and the flight was a total clusterfuck (how is a toilet not working a "safety issue" Air 'fuck you customers' Canada?!) and I just couldn't concentrate. Then when I got to the family seat for xmas there was just too much fun family stuff. A bit disappointing to not meet Book Glutton's generous and fun challenge.

I do wish a merry xmas and happy holidays to you all!

And now on to my second Ross Thomas book. The Fools in Town Are on our Side is ultimately, the story of a recently fired spy who is hired to shake up a corrupt town in order that it can be cleaned up. But that storyline is actually one of three and only really gets going in the last quarter of the book. The other two threads are a picaresque origin tale of the protagonist and the story of how he lost his job. Each of the three storylines are engaging and enjoyable, but as a whole the book lacked a consistent rhythm. By the time I got to the corrupt town storyline, I felt the energy had flagged some.

The longer storyline of his origins is a lot of fun, remined me of Isabelle Allende. Though American, he moves to Shanghai as a young boy, where he is orphaned by errant Chinese bombers in the early stages of WWII. He luckily ends up in a brothel run by a French madam and learns many languages and street-smart skills as her assistant. After several adventures in a Japanese jail and on a prison transfer ship (where he and the guy who becomes his adopted father fleece the other prisoners with their gambling skills) he ends up stateside and in the military. There he is recruited by this top-secret spy agency. Other shit happens, including a brutal, life-changing incident that was the most shocking, intense moment of the book.

As a spy in China, he gets double-crossed and arrested in Macao. In order to save face and to get him out of prison, the government makes him the scapegoat. He gets a nice retirement package, but has nothing he can legimately put on his CV. So he quickly accepts a mysterious job offer from a quirky trio of an ex-sheriff, a beautiful ex-prostitute and a brilliant, flighty mastermind. They make up, in effect, a consulting firm who clean up dirty towns. In this case, it is a small Florida city of a few hundred thousand and the plan is to make the town so corrupt and out of control that the whole thing will have to be shut down. The people paying for this work are not so pure, but have been pushed out of power and want and older, quieter form of corruption than the existing one.

Ross Thomas definitely has a cynical eye and it is fantastic to see it turned on a small southern city. There is a passage that opens a chapter where he describes the physical and socio-economic geography of the town that is a masterpiece of worldbuilding. When the "consultants" start to put their plan into action, the reading is delicious. You get to meet a dripping-with-grease cast of corrupt politicians, cops, merchants, journalists, gamblers and actual criminals. It gets even better when the chaos of the town causes the big-time out-of-town gangsters to roll in, either to defend their fiefdom or to try and snatch it for themselves.

This is all great stuff, but it comes late and never addresses the major points of conflict in the other two storylines: the horrible incident that drove the hero to become a spy and his betrayal that got him fired. A very enjoyable read, but not the near-masterpiece that The Porkchoppers is. This knowledge justifies my hesitation in going hog-wild on the many other Ross Thomas books on sale at Welch's. I need to know him better as an author before I can necessarily buy all of his books.

71. A Fine Ending by Louis Rastelli

2010-12-19T15:36:00.000-05:00

[Today's book review is a Special cross-posting today with my other blog, Briques du Neige, about life in Montreal, so go check it out if you want to hear me rant and rave about today's hipsters.]

I have a nice windfall of Ross Thomas books awaiting me on my on-deck shelf, but I didn't quite have the desire yet. I think I had read a few too many books of that genre and needed to take a little break. Happily, my wife had put out A Fine Ending on the outgoing pile which reminded me that since she had read and reviewed it and since I had accidently met the author himself, I also wanted to read it.

A Fine Ending is semi-fictional and semi-autobiographical. Rastelli was in the anglo-hipster Montreal scene of the 90s, back when it was a little more real and a little less self-conscious (and a lot poorer). His book is basically a chronicle of his life during that period: the places he lived, the people he knew and the things he did. There is a lot of musical shows and practices, finding of cool old stuff, moving and in and out of apartments, partying and caring (or failing to) of cats. This last subject is probably the only one where the book has any emotional resonance. The rest of it is strangely matter-of-fact and surface level. Louis seems to be strangely disconnected from it all in some ways. It's not just the writing style but his constant "friend-zone" relationship with women. He clearly is really connected and close with those people and a sensitive, aware guy. But somehow, you never really get to hear his own thoughts. He is so Canadian and passive that he seems to even have subsumed his entire personality for fear of being too aggressive. I wonder if part of it is that he knows a lot of the people still and can't really be totally open.

Today, Louis is a bit of an elder statesmen on the scene, maintaining cultural traditions and events for the new generation of wealthy, self-conscious hipsters. I can't say that A Fine Ending is a well-written book. There is some good stuff in it, some touching moments, but it's more like a tightly-edited and revised diary. It makes for some parts where you wonder why his is telling us exactly what he put in his backpack before going to watch fireworks on the mountain. However, it's not unpleasant to read at all and it has a good heart. If you live in Montreal and are curious about those storied days that influence the way we think about Montreal, you may well enjoy the book. Finally, it really is a pretty solid historical document, capturing a phenomenon that happens in cities all over North America and possibly the rest of the world, that fantastic period when a city truly becomes culturally alive on its own, without the influence of the governments or big corporations or self-aware hipsters for whom style trumps actual politics.

I'd also known that the book is beautifully designed. The full-bleed colour cover and the black & while illustrations inside perfectly capture the feel of the world Rastelli is describing.

70. The Japanese Corpse by Janwillem van de Wetering

2010-12-16T14:08:00.002-05:00

Continuing on with the adventures of Dutch detectives de Gier and Grijstra and their commisaris. This time, they get involved in the culture and criminal world of Japan. The story starts with a half-Japanese, half-American hostess of a Japanese restaurant who is convinced that her disappeared Japanese boyfriend has been murderd by the Yakusa (sic-this is how it is spelled in the book). This leads our heroes into interactions with the small Japanese community in Amsterdam and then to Japan itself for a major operation involving the Dutch diplomatic corps, the CIA and the Japanese secret service to bust up an antique and drug-smuggling Yakusa ring.

I had mixed feelings about this book as well, although overall I quite enjoyed it and I think it tipped me over into keeping and eventually reading the other two books in the series I was given. This isn't a series I will go out of my way to read in its entirety, but it will always be on my list in case I stumble across one I haven't read for cheap and I am in want of good reading material.

On the positive side, the main characters really continued to grow on me. They are so civilized and thoughtful, but still kind of badass and tough. Their personal lives are well drawn. We fantasize about the freedom and sexual success of the younger, good-looking de Gier and we sympathize with the older one, trapped by a nagging wife and obnoxious children. Their commisarius is the perfect boss, guiding but flexible, with a vast hidden experience. There are some great action moments in this book as well, though the style in which they are delivered is as straightforward and deliberate as the rest of the book. Sometimes I almost think it was written in Dutch and translated rather artlessly, but I think that is van de Wetering's style. It's generally quite good, but for the action scenes, a little more energy might be fitting. Sometimes you don't even realize action has started!

Though this leads me to another cool thing. As a writer, de Wetering likes to surprise the reader from time to time. It's quite well done. At one point, Grijstra is reminiscing on an interrogation he just came from and you are led to believe that he learned nothing new until all of a sudden he drops it on you that the subject broke down and revealed some game-changing info. This happens again with a major event happening to one of the protagonists. It just comes out of the blue and is most distressing and ends up informing his behaviour for the rest of the book (and probably books to come). These "surprises" are very well staged and force you to pay attention in a good way.

The plot also is much more complex and engaging. Going to Japan is cool and for a book written in the 70s (back when Japan was mysterious and exotic instead of bug-nuts wacky as we know now today), the culture is treated with depth and respect. The flaw for me in the book is that the ending drew on a bit long. The protagonists and their relation to Japan had been spelled out and resolved, but there was still a lot of plot to get through, that felt to me lacking in energy somehow. All in all, though, a very enjoyable read and taking me one book closer to the Book Glutton challenge!

69. Muscle for the Wing by Daniel Woodrell

2010-12-14T11:07:00.002-05:00

Well this was a pleasant little discovery, found once again at Chainon, my local thrift store. I was up trolling through their english paperback shelves like a cokehead pawing through a shag carpet and stumbled upon this book. It looked intriguing, though I had never heard of the author. Turned out to be a pretty good piece of "bayou noir" fiction (phrase stolen from this review over at The Edge).

The story takes place in St. Bruno somewhere in Cajun country, I guess around the time it was written (1995), though this part of the world is so backward and timeless it could have been anytime after WWII practically. The protagonist is a cop who came up in Frogtown, the rough section where most of the action takes place. But the story is about a small gang of ex-cons who have come into town to hit up the local corrupt power structure. Part of their motivation is that the place has been so under the control of the local crime boss, that everyone's vigilance is down. But they are also following the directives of Ronnie, a local who took a fall for that crime boss, whose swamp-sexy young wife is still in Frogtown. Ronnie and the ex-cons are all part of some minor white supremacist prison gang called The Wing.

The action is tough and efficient, but it's the characters and dialogue that really make this book a pleasure. Though poor and uneducated for the most part, these are people with a history and a rich culture and it shines through in the way they speak with each other and interact. The style reminded of a mix between Charles Willeford and Harry Crews. Though now that I went and did a bit of internet research, it appears that his books all take place in the Ozarks. I didn't know there were Cajuns in the Ozarks (or for that matter where the Ozarks even are beyond Deliverance). In any case, there is a lot of old french influence, both in the names of people, the language used and their criminal culture. There is a neat little aside that talks about a french soldier who was the knee-breaker for the governor in the 18th century who made his own little criminal colony downriver and whose antecedents are still more or less doing the same thing today.

I see also that Woodrell is far from forgotten, as the film of his book Winter's Bone appears to be the new hotness on the "indie" cinema scene. Good for him, because if Muscle for the Wing is representative of the rest of his books, Woodrell is a good writer who doesn't pull his punches. Good stuff.

S.W. Welch, he's good. He's real good.

2010-12-12T15:09:00.006-05:00

S.W. Welch Books is the quality local used bookstore in my Mile End neighbourhood (and I believe the only english language used bookstore east of St. Laurent in Montreal). I've come to appreciate it more and more, once I accepted that the days of cheap discoveries in used bookstores are basically over. On Friday, I quite enjoyed reading this nice blog article on the store and the man behind it. It reminded me that I hadn't been up there in a while and I wondered if he might have some Ross Thomas (since that was a name I had never looked for up there before).

My wife has started the domestic practice of stacking up our completed, non-keeper books on a little table under the window and when it gets to a certain height, taking them to Welch's to sell (and giving the rest away at Chainon). Well the pile was pretty high and she'd been wanting to go for a while, so I got us motivated on a grey, snow-covered saturday up to hipster St. Viateur street and Welch's.

Welch's pricing is pretty savvy. You won't find a book on the sci-fi or crime shelf for less than $4. But they do have a $1 rack that is usually outside the front door. And guess what I saw sitting on the top shelf of that rack:

Like what is this book even about, a dude with thick hair and some dogs who has a nice house on a beach and has sex with a 70s babe while his chinese manservant looks on? It's so bland! In many ways, the '70s were really, really lame.

Wow! Was I ever excited! Not only is it a Ross Thomas, but it's the one Ross Thomas I have specifically been looking for. It's the first in one of his series and is considered one of his classics. Louis XIV loved it (and take a look at the awesome cover of his copy) and he is not alone. Yes, the cover is absolutely heinous, just the worse kind of 70s generic bestseller design (though I actually kind of like the illustration on its own, if it wasn't so bland), which is probably why it was in the dollar shelf.

Because, as I should have guessed, the very recent Ross Thomas re-discovery movement did not slip by S.W. Welch's radar. He has a pretty sweet collection of Ross Thomas paperbacks on the Crime shelf. Of those, I only picked up this (for $4, but we had credit):

My apologies for the quality of this image, as this is actually kind of a cool design. I'll scan it when I actually read it and have a better image here.

Possibly one of the best crime novel titles ever. According to the woman who was working behind the counter, he had just put them out about a month and a half ago, saying "This guy is good and there will be a few people who will be looking for him." S.W. Welch know the game! We're I a Book Glutton, I might have just snagged them all right there, but a man's got to know his limitations.

Nevertheless, with all this excitement (and because we'd just got a $40 credit with our old books), , I went a little crazy and picked up two other neat finds. This great cover of a Patricia Highsmith I don't remember ever hearing about:

and this sweet Holloway House blaxploitation title which takes place in Canada title for $6 (I told you I was a bit over-stimulated):

Most Canadians are capable of riding a skidoo no-handed, standing up, shooting and holding a babe, but we also do it with a brew in one hand as well.

All in all, a very satisfying day at the bookstore. Now to read!

Edit: Here are the Ross Thomas's that were on the shelf. Many of them look to be from the same publisher and period, so I wonder if they didn't come from a single collection:

68. The Grid by Philip Kerr

2010-12-11T12:00:00.002-05:00

Another nice little one dollar find at Chainon, the thrift store near my house. I never would have bought this book had I not gone to Amsterdam and seen two of the three of Philip Kerr's Berlin trilogy and had them strongly recommended to me by the knowledgeable bookseller. Sadly, it was books two and three and I didn't want to have them without the first. Now I really think I should have picked them up. They were the Fontana ones with really cool covers and now I'm not sure they are going to be easy to find at all. In any case, it put Philip Kerr's name on my list and pointed my eye to this otherwise bland bestseller cover.

Happily, the story is about a super-modern building in downtown L.A., whose central computer system malfunctions and starts killing everybody inside. It's basically Demon Seed II: The Office Tower. A great premise and made doubly entertaining because Kerr creates a super-hateful antagonist in the form of the egomaniacal architect (and his undeservingly promoted to designer vapid wife). They are everything that is wrong with fashion, success, business, the media, your boss and Ayn Rand all wrapped up in one package that you can't wait for the computer to just house.

Overall, this is a solid, entertaining and forward-moving book. It's no great work of art. In the beginning, the long cast of characters makes you feel like you are watching one of those classic '70s disaster movies and the depiction of the computer's motivations and perspectives is a bit simplistic and off. It's language is too inconsistent and rings false, bringing you out of the fiction (geek aside: Kerr has no real understanding of how computers work at their base, but that's not really a problem for the book). On the flip side, near the end, he takes the concept of the awakened system and pushes it to a pretty cool extreme, that I quite appreciated.

This would make a great movie, basically building as serial killer. So all in all, a fun read and shows that Kerr is competent. I look forward to reading his less lofty Berlin trilogy, which is about a detective in Nazi germany.

67. The Corpse on the Dike by Janwillem van de Wetering

2010-12-08T10:07:00.002-05:00

A good friend of mine gave me this book along with three other van de Wetering mysteries. It was appreciated because I've been curious about this other and went to Amsterdam for the first time earlier this year (where these stories take place). However, he didn't realize the burden he was placing on me by adding 4 new books by the same author onto my on-deck shelf that I have been very aggressive about whittling down this year. I figured out their chronological order (of which the Corpse on the Dike was the earliest) and hoped either they would be super awesome or totally mediocre. In the former case, I would have three more books of this super awesome series waiting for me. In the latter case, I could just give the other three away.

Unfortunately, it was only pretty good. The main characters, two undercover police detectives—Gripjstra the hulking family man and De Gier, the athletic and weirdly single guy—and their commisariss, a shrewd police veteran suffering from severe rheumatism in the legs are compelling and entertaining. They have that civilized, respectful and educated belief that society should try to be generally benevolent that separates Europe from North America, but it doesn't weaken their fundamental cop nature. It makes for a nice balance. They also have some pretty funny riffing off of each other. It's just an odd, effective crew working for the man and they seem to be aware of it.

The locations and the other characters are pretty cool as well. I really loved Amsterdam and I enjoyed seeing it from an insider's perspective (although I believe van de Wetering was writing these books from outside of Amsterdam and they are originally written in english, for whatever that information is worth). It was a bit more rundown when this book takes place in the mid-70s. Among the many neat locations, a high-class brothel in a mansion, run by an accommodating pimp was particularly vivid.

However, the mystery itself was not all that interesting. It was more of a straight police procedural that was wrapped up a bit too easily and perfunctorily, without any real twists or complications. I sort of appreciated it the straightforwardness of it, but it just didn't really excite me. I'm definitely into the main characters, so I'll definitely read the second and then decide on what to do with the next two.

66. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

2010-12-06T11:25:00.002-05:00

Thought I was taking the foot off the gas did you? No chance! I just thought that given my surplus this year, I should try and take on something a bit more hefty. I've been meaning to read Trollope for years now as he is one of my father's favourite authors. Interestingly, I've been held back by the same reason I avoid a lot of fantasy epics: I didn't know where to start and didn't want to jump into the middle of a series. For you see, Anthony Trollope is kind of a nerd author. Most of his books are part of a multi-volume series all taking place in an imagined world (though cleaving very close to the realities of mid-nineteenth century England). Barchester Towers, for instance, while being the best-known and most popular of his books, is actually the second in the six novels of the Barsetshire series. They follow the paths of several players in the political and social dramas surrounding the clergy of Barsetshire County. There is even a map.

At this time, England is evolving from a society where the Church of England is basically the government to one that is becoming more and more secular. It is still extremely early in this process and the church still acts as the local government and community center in rural areas. The changes take the form of reforms and conflicts between the more modernistic, evangelical Low Church and the more traditional, formalized High Church. I knew very little of any of this history before reading this book and I still only understand it superficially. Ultimately, understanding the politics and history is not crucial to enjoying the story. John Kenneth Galbraith (of all people) even argues in a preface that the substance of the politics are not even important to Trollope. I would say that they are not of prime importance, but he quietly puts forth an argument for traditional stability and a relaxed, practical approach to religious observance (in contrast to the more fervant fidelity of the Low Church supporters, who I suspect are related to the pilgrims who came to America). You can see in Trollope that stoic, slightly bemused attitude that propelled her to colonial superiority over their swarthier or flightier european adversaries (and even to this day separates Britain from the rest of the english-speaking world, despite Tony Blair's attempts to drag it down to the angry trenches of North American self-importance and righteousness).

The story itself is about the newly appointed Bishop (who is the religious leader of the entire county), Dr. Proudlie. Because of his relatively evangelical and Low Church views his appointment is seen as a dangerous, destabilizing blow by the existing clergymen of Barsetshire, led by the Archdeacon, Dr. Grantly. The bishop comes with his controlling, meddling wife and his controlling, meddling chaplain, Mr. Slope, who are initially united in their evangelical fervour for reform, but soon become at odds. Politics, drama and romance ensue. The first half focuses on the political conflicts and the second half moves more into the romance, which resembles some pretty classic British Victorian romance novels, where you really want the good lovers to get together. I enjoyed the political maneuvering more, but was caught up in the story sufficiently that I was very eager to follow the romantic threads to the end.

What makes the book great is the engrossing and thorough way that Trollope describes all the characters and their role in this world. He has a benevolent but wry perspective and even renders himself as author visible from time to time which would seem to take you out of the fiction, but actually succeeds for the most part in making you more connected to it. You gain confidence in his voice as he explains where he may be at fault or lacking as an author before it can actually happen in the text. There is a great part early in the book, when you as the reader are quite concerned that a good widow is going to make a poor choice of husband between two unappealing suitors. Trollope jumps in and assures you that she will choose neither of them and then goes on to say that there is no need for him to hide that information from you for the facile purpose of keeping you in suspense until the end. That is a lesson many writers today would do well to heed!

Now that I've read Barchester Towers, I look forward to hearing why my father likes them so much. For myself, I can definitely see me continuing to move forward in the Barsetshire series, to envelope myself again in that pleasant, sensible, pastoral world where despite the swirl of conflict around them, people speak to each other in polite, measured ways.

65. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

2010-11-30T08:37:00.004-05:00

I got The Stepford Wives from meezly's finished book pile. It is a classic and as meezly pointed out a quick and entertaining read.

Her review does a better job than I can, so I'll let you read it. I would just add that I was a bit disappointed in the ending. It's not that it wasn't well crafted. It's just that with the book having such a strong impact in our popular culture, I basically already knew the entire premise. The intrigue in the book is the slow and subtle revealing of what is actually going on. But it never specifically reveals in any detail how the wives are being changed. This works well in that it leaves it up to our imagination and makes for a disturbing read. There are many interesting hints, but I was hoping for some greater reveal and never got it. Still, it's a tight and effective thriller with some good social commentary. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go look at real estate prices in Stepford...

64. Tales of the Red Panda - The Crime Cabal by Gregg Taylor

2010-11-29T10:44:00.002-05:00

The Red Panda is a wonderful podcast series from Decoder Ring Theatre, a toronto-based group of performers, led by Gregg Taylor, who love all things pulp and noir. They have two main series, The Red Panda about a pulp superhero and his sidekick The Flying Squirrel; and Blackjack Justice, a hardboiled detective and his even more hardboiled sidekick. Both are quite good, but The Red Panda is really their signature show. If you like old-time radio, great characters and pulp action, you should definitely check out the Red Panda series. It's really well done. A bonus is that it all takes place in a pulp Toronto during and after the Depression.

There are also three Red Panda novels out and I bought this first one when it first came out, but haven't gotten around to reading it, mainly because the shows keep coming out and are so fulfilling. I think I was a bit hesitant, thinking the book would be just like the shows, but more work for me because I'm reading it instead of passively listening. What I didn't realize is that the book is a real addition to the series, because in the written form, Gregg Taylor can expand in many ways that can't be done on radio. The Red Panda and his super hot and ass-kicking sidekick (and chauffeur) have a real romantic tension. It's great in the show, but it is even more fun when you get to read about each of their thoughts. There is also a lot more depth about The Red Panda's awesome equipment and set-up (including an underground system of human-size pneumatic tubes to help him get quickly from place to place).

Taken on its own, it is a thoroughly entertaining, slam-bang pulp novel, with great dialogue and some nice character development. The main plot isn't the most creative. The rackets, now quite weakened by the Red Panda's constant attacks, are united by two super-villains. But it is sufficient to bring lots of great action, bravado dialogue and a bit of humour. There is also a hard edge to the Red Panda (I know that sentence must sound a bit odd if you haven't heard the show before), especially when he is talking about the poor and the downtrodden and how crime is a parasite sucking away at the limited funds those people have worked so hard for. Another neat touch is how Taylor brings a modern perspective without undermining the pulp tropes. One of the badguy's allies is a Chinese laundromat owner, who allows the mob to use his building as a meeting place (with the laundry being a good front). The prejudice the Chinese faced at that time is made very explicit in the book, but fits in with the character's motivations. I found it enriched the book.

I do have a complaint about the layout. I know these books are self-published and Gregg Taylor and the good people at Decoder Ring Theatre give a lot more than they get, so it's totally excusable. Also, this is the first book and maybe the next two have improved. Chapter headings, page numbers, space between paragraphs, they all look like a word document basically. The whole thing needs a proper designer to give it a quick run-through and fix-up.

Other than that, though, I'm definitely going to pick up and read the next two in the series. Their catchline doesn't exaggerate: Decoder Ring Theatre really is Your Ticket to Adventure!

63. O.G.P.U. Prison by Sven Hassel

2010-11-26T12:37:00.005-05:00

I had the good fortune as a young man to spend three weeks on a cattle ranch in Brazil, basically working with the cowboys (though more likely getting in their way). The manager of the farm was a crusty old Brit and he learned me three things: 1) how to shovel, 2) that two non-gay men cannot live together in close quarters for extended periods of time and 3) Sven Hassel wrote great books about war.

I found one of his books, Monte Casino, immediately after that. But for some reason it sat on my shelf for years and I never found the desire to open it up. My understanding was that Sven Hasssel's book were incessantly grim and violent. I have always been a bit squeamish, but I think the other thing that made me hesitate was the sheer width of the book and a language that didn't grab me. Eventually I got rid of Monte Casino, but when I was in Amsterdam, I found this one for a really cheap price and thought it was high time to introduce myself to Sven Hassel.

Unfortunately, I have since learned that O.G.P.U. Prison is one of his later books and veers more into the black comedy and less into the grimness and is perhaps not the best representation of the series. I say unfortunately, because I really do want to get a better understanding of the series, but this book was kind of a slog. A fascinating, crazy slog, but still quite long and repetitive.

I apologize for dancing around the actual description of the book, but it's hard! It's like the Threepenny Opera mixed with Sergeant Rock (as directed by Sam Peckinpah or one of those Japanese gore-masters) and starring the Marx Brothers. What makes Sven Hassel stand out is that his books are written from the German perspective. The heroes are utterly cynical, war-mad and basically criminals forced into being soldiers. But they are excellent soldiers, basically immortal and constantly killing (during the war scenes). But it's super goofy! The book opens in Berlin, where the heroes are ordered to transport some prisoners. They go into bar after bar and chaos ensues at each place. Then they are sent off to the front to try and take this Russian prison that sits strategically at the top of a hill. It's a total gorefest, but weirdly disjointed and lacking flow. Part of it could have been the translation, but as a reader you jump from violent war scene to violent war scene. At times it happens so abruptly that you don't even realize the heroes have moved to a new situation. A lot of the language is passive or just colourful descriptions of gore (soldiers missing heads, missing legs, legs only, guts hanging out). It goes on and on. It's basically gorewarporn, but all with this ultra-violent humour and ironic awareness of the insanity of war. It felt at times very similar to playing a video game.

It has a certain hypnotic flow and there is some truly crazy stuff in here. But there is so much of it and it is often quite goofy, that I just felt removed from the story most of the time. It also bothered me that the heroes seemed utterly impervious to damage. People are getting slaughtered all around them and the worse they get are scrapes or bullet holes that go straight through but do no real damage. They also always have time to make clever comments and jibes to each other back and forth. It's all very surreal.

If it was less goofy and flowed a bit better, I think it could have been really awesome, truly dark and destructive. I read in a few places that the earlier novels are a bit less crazy, but I wonder how much. I say it was a slog, but it also gave me a certain hankering. Maybe one day I will pick up one of the earlier novels and see how it goes.

Just to give you an idea of the goofiness I am talking about here, is a moment from a scene in a German planning session near the Russian front.

...One of the lamps hisses and crackles loudly.
The General looks at it wickedly.
'Make that lamp shut up,' he shouts, red in the face with rage.
A Signals Unteroffizier tries nervously to adjust the burner, but the lamp continues to splutter. It is as if it has decided to tease the general.
The Unteroffizier burns his fingers, but is wise enough not to show it.
'Take that lamp away! Out with it!' roars the General, in a hoarse voice.
The Unteroffizier grabs the lamp, and rushes out of the black-out tunnel.
At the same time comes the roar of exploding bombs. The Signal Unteroffizier and the lamp come flying back through the tunnel in a rain of glass shards, strips of flesh and brickwork.
'Damned mess,' snarls the General, angrily. 'Clean it up and let's get on with it!'
Planning for the grand attack is resumed immediately. The bombing and the dead Unteroffizier apparently of no interest whatsoever. A couple of soldiers rapidly clear up the remains.

Does that not seem like a very violent Marx Bros. movie? Now imagine that like three or four times per page.

Sven Hassel himself is also an interesting guy. He claims to have been an SS soldier and he was definitely around during the war, but there is another Danish journalist who has dedicated his life to proving that Hassel is a fraud. The war rages on the internet.

I think these book are interesting and that you should read at least one if you are a student of paperback books and manly fiction. I'd love to hear some other people's opinions, especially those who have read more of the books.

62. Murder Twice Told by Donald Hamilton

2010-11-24T21:04:00.001-05:00

Snagged this little gem at Chainon, our local thrift store (which helps to support the larger organization, a women's shelter). Their used books section has really improved over the years.

This book is actually two novellas of Donald Hamilton, Deadfall and Black Cross. Both were initially published in magazines (Deadfall serialized in Collier's in 3 issues in September '49 and The Black Cross in The American Magazine in September '47; thanks to this website for that info). The paperback I read has a minimal colophon, saying only copyright Donald Hamilton 1948, 1949, 1950. I guess it must be some later printing of the paperback. On the inside of the back cover, the original owner wrote "acq. 22 sep. 1967 fin. 1 sep. 1967". That was cool to see. A gesture motivated by the same thing that motivates me to do this blog, I suspect. I also think it was a francophone based on the order of the dates and the use of acq (acquiré) and fin (fini), though both could have been abbreviations of english words, they don't seem that obvious choice.

I'm a bit wary of Donald Hamilton. Donald Westlake spoke of him as a big early influence and I found a couple of those novels and really enjoyed them. I then went and bought a bunch of his later novels, including some of the Matt Helm series. When I finally got around to reading them, I found them almost unreadable. They were clunky and obvious, not as truly terrible as some of that numbered paperback adventure fiction, but pretty uninteresting to me. This one looked promising, though, with minimal commitment (the two stories make up less than 200 pages). Plus, they were early on in his career.

And interestingly enough, the two stories perfectly encapsulated all that is good and all this bad about Donald Hamilton. Deadfall is the story of a chemist who is under suspicion by the FBI for having associated with a woman. It has some cool moments, but overall I found it kind of forced. Way too much time is spent on his feelings about this woman or that and whether or not he can trust them. It was obvious too me early on who was the real bad guy. There was some nice bitterness in the main character, but I just really didn't care about the story all that much. It's not bad, just not great.

The Black Cross, on the other hand, was superb. It was really dark and mature, with an excellent, unravelling plot that brings all its elements together at the end in a very satisfying way. It's the story of a young professor who is driving home with his tight wife after she made another scene at a party. They get in a terrible accident and she dies. Except he remembers seeing her still alive and the trucker beating her down with a black cross. Things get very interesting from there. I'll leave it at that because you should really try and track this little gem down. This is classic noir with a hard edge.

I need someone with similar taste to mine to sort all of Donald Hamilton's work into good and bad. The bad is really not terrible, just on the mediocre side and not to my liking. But the good is pretty hardcore and I want to read more of it!

61. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

2010-11-24T10:26:00.003-05:00

I am on such a tear of reading these days that I finally found the energy to actually read a non-fiction book. These things are often in hardback and wide and thus take up important inches on my on-deck shelf. If I can knock a few non-fiction books out before the end of the year, I can do some major clearing. I am extremely lazy-minded and have a hard time concentrating on reading when there is not an exciting storyline to keep me connected and wanting to know what happens next. However, I felt that with my current momentum, reading a non-fiction book was within my capabilities and possibly even enjoyable.

I got this book for xmas last year or even two years ago from my wife (I believe I requested it or at least was very interested in it) when there was a big wave of books and tv specials about what would happen if all the humans disappeared. It is a fascinating subject and a bit of a fantasy for people like me who lament humanity's impact on the planet. I'm also a big fan of the post-apocalyptic genre of which this book must be considered partially a member. Finally, I am going to be running a post-apocalyptic roleplaying game (Barbarians of the Aftermath is the actual game system I'll be using) starting next week with my gaming group and thought The World Without Us would provide lots of good imagination stimulation and concrete ideas.

It's a solid, interesting read, but it suffers a bit for me from two things: it's journalistic style and a greater proportion of information about the world today than the world without us. For reasons I won't get into here, I'm not a big fan of the fourth estate. I particularly dislike magazines. The articles so often follow the same structure and use the same techniques (clever hook, brief description of some dude who then gives some quotes, blah blah). The World Without Us evolved from a magazine and each chapter was basically structured in the same way. Not a deal breaker, but one of the reasons I have trouble concentrating on non-fiction. Nevertheless, it is thoroughly researched and mostly well-written (a teeny bit too florid for my tastes). I learned a lot in reading it about the state of the world today and long-term trends, both natural and man-made, that will affect what would happen to the planet were humans to disappear.

And there was a lot of that kind of information. I'd say more than two-thirds of the book was about current environmental situations on the planet. There was a ton of interesting (and depressing) stuff: agricultural research on elements in the soil going back centuries, shrinking pristine forests in Poland, the history of plastic and its proliferation (totally fucking scary) and so on. The problem for me is that I know a lot of this stuff already, especially the environmental issues and since that is a big part of my day job, indirectly (I'm the IT dude for an environmental NGO) and I find it hard to take as it is, I really don't want to be reading about how we are destroying the planet when I'm reading at home. My own personal difficulty with reading this stuff is not a criticism of the book and I would argue that if you are interested in the subject of a humanless planet but also want to get a good primer on a wide range of ecological impact going on, this is a great book for that. His information is built all around the science and conversations with scientists. It remains objective and never gets emotional. That being said, the parts where he does go into how things would degrade were much more enjoyable and interesting for me (he talks about New York City, works of art, farmlands, nuclear power plants, the Panama Canal) and I would have liked a greater proportion of that part than the current state of affairs. Though i do recognize you need some info on the current and past situation to explain what will happen when we leave (which I hope happens sometime soon).

So good stuff and I pat myself on the back for having read a non-fiction book this year. Hell, I kind of even enjoyed it and may do it again!

Guest post on The Violent World of Parker

2010-11-23T10:39:00.002-05:00

I'm very pleased to announce that my review from last week of Richard Stark's The Seventh attracted the attention of Trent over at The Violent World of Parker and he offered to put it up as a guest post on his site.

You can re-read it here.

If you don't know, The Violent World of Parker is the site for Donald Westlake's masterpiece, the Parker series. The site has an excellent (and I think complete or very nearly so) cover gallery, a summary of each of the novels, a section on comics and Parker movie adaptations and a great blog that collects valuable info on all kinds of Parker-abilia (and some forays into the greater paperback crime world). Definitely a must on your blog reader if you are a fan of crime fiction.

The other thing that I respect about the site is that it has been around for a long time. Long before Parker became hip again (with the University of Chicago re-release and the Darwyn Cooke graphic novels), The Violent World of Parker was an old-school, html-based website which I used as a reference quite often or just visited when I need a Parker fix. This was back in the day when you could still find a Parker paperback for a couple bucks at some used bookstore (today, if you can find any, they will be plastic wrapped under the glass at the front and start at $20). Almost nobody was talking about Parker online except The Violent World of Parker.

So congrats to you Trent and thanks for your dedication. Keep up the good work. I hope my next review will earn another guest spot on your great site!

60. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2010-11-21T12:25:00.003-05:00

Well I finally got the guts to read this book. My good friend, the Lantzvillager (whose production of reading has dropped with a recent production of a new human) lent this to me a long time ago and I have just been afraid that it would be too dark and depressing. Happily, my current reading frenzy overcame my trepidation. Even more happily, this is a quick read and a decent one, despite my misgivings about McCarthy (more directed at the media around him than the author himself).

I have mixed feelings about this book. At first, I was extremely annoyed. I can not stand McCarthy's stylistic pretension of not using quotation marks for dialogue. His reliance on incomplete sentences would be almost as annoying, but he is such a good writer that there is often an effective poetry or description there. However, in the beginning of the The Road there is some extremely pretentious blather that any 10th grade english teacher would have excised. Get on with it, Cormac!

Fortunately, the wasteland setting is truly effective. The situation of the boy and his father starts to seep into you and the pretentious useless sentences diminish in frequency. I do appreciate that he went for the full apocalypse. There is almost nothing left and the few remaining humans are either on the edge of death or scary murdering, raping cannibals. I loved the wagon train with the collared catamytes at the end. That was a pretty nice over the top touch that tells me that McCarthy still has a part in him that wants to entertain.

But fundamentally, The Road's bleak setting is a fake-out. Because it is ultimately a (relatively) happy story. It has a happy ending with a slight gleam of hope and may in the final analysis be a condemnation of the choices the father made. It is also so sappy and sentimental. The book spends a lot of time posturing and acting all tough and bleak while actually constantly tugging on your heartstrings with memories of the wife and the boy's pity for other humans. This latter struck me as being questionable. Would a child whose only knowledge was the world after the fall be so caring? Check out The Wire for a more accurate portrayal of how children adapt to their environment.

I will spare you a rant on the literary community and their snobbery against genre fiction (and how McCarthy has hoodwinked us all). I'll simply say that The Road is an enjoyable book, but ultimately its core is a bit too soft.

59. The Seventh by Richard Stark

2010-11-19T10:01:00.007-05:00

Holy crap, that heist went really sour!

We're developing a little tradition here where my wife buys me some of the new University of Chicago Parker books each year on my birthday in January and I read them slowly throughout the year. I've already read the entire series at least twice before the U of C books were released, but this is a dedicated, focused reading in the wake of Westlake's death and with the full consciousness that the Parker series is a literary classic. It's been great. I don't know if I've changed but the re-reading of each novel this time around has come as a real surprise to me. Things I'd forgotten are exciting to re-discover and things I had never noticed before are popping up now. I'm getting both the pleasure of re-reading a great book and the pleasure of discovering something new.

[NOTE: SPOILERS START HERE. I AM GOING TO WRITE A PRETTY THOROUGH ANALYSIS OF THE SEVENTH WITH THE ASSUMPTION THAT YOU HAVE READ IT ALREADY. IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT, GO GET ON IT AND COME BACK. THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION.]

Once again, with the Seventh, I had the feeling going in ahead of time that I knew what I was in for. I vaguely remembered this had something to do with a football game and that it was one of the books that was a standard heist, without any longer-term narrative complications for Parker. What I had completely forgotten is how brilliantly structured this book is. So far, it is the best heist followed by the worst fuck-up followed by the perfect denouement. The Seventh is also notable because it is the first time that Parker goes into the backstory of some of the other heisters in a bit of detail. You get hints of it in The Score, but here you really start to care. They are a much richer bunch then in The Score as well. The angry, flamboyantly-dressed dwarf is particularly cool.

The Seventh feels structured to me like an ever-narrowing tunnel. It starts off in a closed apartment, where Parker discovers the woman he had been shacking up with dead, pierced to the bed with an ornamental sword taken from the wall. Worse, all the money he had been holding from the recent and successful heist is gone. Parker goes hunting for the money and the book opens up. We learn of the heist, this college town, all the heisters as well as the local police. Much of the novel is Parker trying to find out who killed the woman and took the money while avoiding the enclosing investigation. Then in the last third, everything starts to constrict. The cops close in, his partners go down one way or another. Parkers pursuit becomes more and more focused. All he wants is "the amateur" who screwed everything up.

The final chapter is Parker stolidly climbing stairs in an empty high-rise under construction, in pursuit this panicking loser. The money, his colleagues, the investigation, the midget are all eliminated as storyline and it is just you the reader with a burning focus to get this amateur who caused so much trouble. It's a very intense ending. And satisfying. Westlake introduces so much tension and worry into the first two-thirds. It's so frustrating to have such a beautifully-executed heist go sour after it's over. You just know things are going to get worse and worse. And yet somehow, once everything is as bad as it can get, you as the reader only really care about Parker getting the amateur. The coda that makes the book so perfect (which I won't reveal here) is really only a cherry on top of a delicious ice-cream sunday. Not necessary, but oh so tasty. I laughed out loud.

Is this a love story?
Okay, get ready for some pretentious essay-writing, people. What struck me in the beginning of this book was the character of Ellie. She is the woman with whom Parker shacks up before and after the heist and whom he finds murdered when he returns after a quick errand for beer and cigarettes. What is remarkable about her character (and what I noticed for the first time during this reading) is that she is the perfect woman for Parker! As is well known, Parker is celibate leading up to the jobs and then satyr-like after. He is introduced to Ellie by Kifka, who is organizing the job, when he asks for a place to stay in town. I don't know if this is a period thing or just one of the perks of being a heister, but when you need a place to stay, you always have the option of getting a woman as well.

"It's been a long day. I need a place to stay while I'm here."
"With a woman or without?"
Parker hesitated and then said, "With." Not that he expected to want her, not just yet. Before a job he never had any interest in women, or in anything else but the job itself. But he would want her afterward, when he would make up for lost time.

The women that Parker stays with tend to be portrayed with some spirit and a bit of personality, but they are rarely anything more than their role as his woman. This is the case with Ellie. The difference is that she turns out to be the perfect Parker partner. Before the heist, she asks nothing of him, is mildly surprised that he doesn't want to get it on and leaves him alone.

Her style was very much like Parker's own, silent and self-contained. They spent hours in the same room without either saying a word. Parker was pleased by her. She didn't jabber away at him, and he never had to tell her anything twice. Kifka had done better than could have been expected.

Parker pleased!? I mean, wow, that never happens. And then after, when he is done. Whoo boy!

Seeing how lackadaisical Ellie was about everything else in life, Parker hadn't expected her to be more in bed than a receptacle, but she surprised him. He had found the one thing that made her pay attention. For three days and nights, they hardly left the bed at all, and the whole time she was nothing but stifled mumblings, and hard-muscled legs and hot breath and demanding arms and a sweat-slick pulsing belly. All the passion that had been dammed up inside Parker while his one-track mind had been concentrating on the robbery now burst forth in one long sustained silent explosion, and Ellie absorbed it all the way a soundproof room absorbs a shout.

[Feel free to go to your bunk now, I'll wait.] When Parker returns to find her impaled to the bedstand, he has no emotional reaction. Then the cops show up and he learns that the money is gone. Nowhere in the text does Parker ever display any sadness at Ellie's death. He needs to get the murderer because he needs to get the money back. And as things go to shit, he stays focused on the murderer because he is so angry about how this amateur was able to make such an ordered thing become so chaotic.

There was no profit in killing him, but Parker was going to kill him anyway. He was going to kill him because he couldn't possibly just walk away and leave the bastard alive.

But the fact remains that Parker does relentlessly pursue the guy even when it may not be the wisest choice. He also takes several dangerous risks and, one could argue (and the midget heister does), even makes a mistake. Should he have left the apartment in the first place without taking any precautions? Should he have braced the detective in his own home to get his list of suspects? In each of the situations, the choice seems reasonable, but when you look back at it, there is a certain aggressiveness in Parker's behaviour that is slightly out of character. One wouldn't say sloppy, but it's close. Parker always hates idiots who get in the way, but there is a certain extra vehemence directed against the amateur (who is the one character whose personality is only hinted at, thus making him more of a concept than a person), which I would argue may come from Parker's anger at losing a woman with such potential. I know I'm stretching a bit here, but there is a little something there. We'll see how Parker's future retalations compare (and there is at least one I can remember that is coming up).

Westlake's critique of progress

In some ways, Stark has a classically conservative inclination. Though he is the ultimate outsider, Parker also represents old-fashioned values of skilled manual labour, stability and fidelity. The other heisters that he meets are a more positive and fuller representation of this. Actually, representation isn't even the right word. Most of his partners are hard-working craftsmen. In The Seventh, it goes even farther, in that they are working people who were pushed into a life of crime by structural changes in the economy. One character ran a local movie theatre with love and care, but with the advent of television he fell into serious debt trying to keep it alive. Another is a highly-skilled carpenter whose work is too high quality and too expensive so that he slowly loses business, until two guys hire him to build a false compartment in the back of a truck and then he begins his life of crime (where he is properly remunerated for quality labour).

Except for the midget (and Parker himself), they are all portrayed as genial men. The planning sessions could be a bunch of factory workers planning a hunting trip in their buddy's basement. Violence is only a means to get the money and they use it sparingly. The machine guns purchased for the heist have a purely psychological function, to eliminate any opposition. Nobody actually wants to shoot them (though mainly because of the noise and mess they cause). These guys are motivated by doing a good job and earning some money in a society where doing a solid day's work no longer necessarily means you will earn some money.

This critique of the "progress" of the second-half of the twentieth century creeps into the descriptions as well. In the final chase, Stark lovingly details the rich nuances of the forest, going from the airy, needle-floored coniferous to the cluttered, multi-coloured decidous section. Suddenly, the forest ends and the chase spills out into a dirt wasteland, a construction site: "Later, when the building was done, landscape architects would come in with fresh earth and seed and hothouse plants and turn this moonscape back into something vaguely like the forest it had been, but with less clutter and liveliness." I posit that it is not just for visual effect that Stark describes the building as something fundamentally aberrant, broken:

It was over twenty stories high already, and from the confusion of cranes and pulleys atop the building—looking like unruly hair on the head of a Mongoloid idiot—it was apparently going to be even taller before they were done.

I found this final passage to be descriptively powerful. Westlake is such a good writer. I've been to that forest, I've walked along a bulldozed land site and I've clambered around inside a building under construction. Reading The Seventh put me back in those places. I'm probably imposing my own environmental melancholies to some degree, but I do think Westlake is channeling a lament for an America that he saw disappearing into today's world of mindless entertainment (the target of the heist is a football game) and cheaply-produced goods, where the complex, tactile natural world is bulldozed to make way for soulless apartment blocks. Parker is Stark's robot of vengeance, sent in to strike deeply into this new order and wreak as much havoc as possible using order and professionalism. He cannot succeed, but you cheer and rage for him along the way.

Now that all this pretentious twaddle is out of the way (and thank you for bearing with me this far, if any of you did), I'd like to just throw out two more side points:

1) There is a great passage where Stark describes the detective working on the case of the murdered girl. Parker has found out his home address and cased it out. His neighbourhood, his house, his car, all suggest that the guy is struggling economically. There is even a slight hint of contempt in the tone, though that is coming from Parker probably, as the passage is described as being seen through Parker's eyes. If you've read any Westlake, you just know something is up when he lays it on this heavily. And when we actually meet the guy, you get a classic moment of why the world of Parker is so awesome.

He waited a couple of minutes, and then Detective Dougherty himself came to the door. He was no more than thirty, but had all the style of fifty; dressed in his undershirt and trousers and a pair of brown slippers, carrying a rolled napkin in his left hand, walking with the male approximation of a woman in late pregnancy. He wasn't stout at all, but he gave an impression of soft overweight. His round face was gray with lack of sleep and the need of a shave, and his dry brown hair had already receded from his forehead.

But it was all crap. His eyes were slate gray, and all they did was watch. The way he held his right hand, his revolver was still on his hip somewhere.

Despite all the previous snide criticism of the guy's lifestyle, upon seeing him in person, Parker recognizes him instantly to be a serious opponent. Ultimately, it's about the man underneath. Game recognize game. That is great stuff!

2) The introduction to The Seventh is written by Luc Sante and is excellent. He must be of french origin as he read Parker originally in translation. He references several very interesting-sounding french crime authors whose works haven't been translated and he gives some solid, interesting analysis about the Parker series. There are some spoilers there about upcoming books, which I guess I'll excuse. I don't know who this guy is, but I will look into it, because this is finally an intro this series deserves.

3) Donald fucking Westlake.

58. The Painswick Line by Henry Cecil

2010-11-18T14:11:00.003-05:00

I can't even remember where I found this book, I think at the Spui bookmarket in Amsterdam. I remember thinking that it had a certain anglophile feel to it that appealled to me but that also I was getting into something unknown. With books that give me this kind of feeling, they need to be devoured quickly or they may get stuck on my on-deck shelf indefinitely. My pace is so good right now, I thought I should just knock it down. I was glad I did so. The Painswick Line is not a masterpiece and it's probably not even an author I will follow up with, but it was an enjoyable read and gave me a bit more insight into popular British reading in the second half of the 20th century. For you see, I have learned that Henry Cecil is the Richard Gordon of the Legal profession (Richard Gordon, if you didn't know, is the James Herriot of the medical field (James Herriot is, of course, the James Herriot of the veterinary field)).

I like to go into new novels fairly blind, with as little external information as possible. Though sorely tempted, I don't read the author blurbs or any of the quotations (I am definitely never tempted to read the book blurbs as they are almost always spoilers and should just be fucking banned). However, about halfway through the book, I started to get the idea that the main gist of this novel was to share funny anecdotes about the craziness of the world of law in Britain.

The base story is a vicar who reveals in court that he is able to accurately determine which horse will win the race. He has been doing it for years, but always purely as an intellectual exercise. He stayed true to his humble calling and never made a penny with his skill. But of course his skills do not go unnoticed and soon his small parish is hounded by punters and press and even the judge who presided over the trial where he revealed his ability. The judge's son is a scoundrel (though treated with the utmost respect by both his father and the author; very little moral judgement in this book either) and the father needs a large sum of money to keep him out of debt and thus jail. Though this plot seems sufficient for a humourous novel, it is actually resolved quite quickly and the book follows the son through several legal scams, some of which work and other that don't. The end of the book has the son of the judge (who has now since passed on) turning 84 and finally deciding to give up a life of crime so he can end his days at home with his always-loving wife (the daughter of the vicar).

So as you can see, this is not a tightly woven narrative. I didn't really mind the meandering structure, especially when it became apparent that the point of this book are all the little legal wrangles and boondoggles the son (and other people) get into. I think that this kind of book was really an enjoyable read for educated professionals in 50s and 60s Britain, especially lawyers. Some of the details went over my head and I did glaze over a bit when the language got a bit too industry-specific. However, it is a pleasant, non-judgemental read and didn't make me want to smash up the house as 30 seconds of network news or a single television commercial can. The back of the book had several other recommendations, including the Richard Gordon Doctor books, which look like they might be a lot of fun.

[Note: I have now broken my one-year record of total books read this year, at least as long as I have been keeping record. I'm happy, but with my new obsession of trying to get an average of 50 books a year, I am not satisfied. I've got less than 6 weeks to hit that average hard!]

57. A Classical Education by Richard Cobb

2010-11-16T11:12:00.003-05:00

I discovered Richard Cobb while studying history in college. Among the hundreds and hundreds of pages of text that I struggled to consume on a weekly basis (my ability to read non-fiction is relatively poor compared to my consumption rates for fiction), Richard Cobb's rich and meandering pieces on french history stood out. He wrote about places and very specific moments in history, taking a little slice and then weaving these amazing descriptions around them until he had built up a very complete sense of the place in the reader's mind, which he then associated with the greater history. He would spend pages, for instance, talking about a single sidewalk and the cobblestones in it, where they came from originally, who walked on them and how and at what times, what the storeowners whose establishments faced that sidewalk saw and so on. Eventually, he would come around to revealing the info that this street was where a certain Jacobean minister had walked just before making a certain specific political move that had ramifications for the history of the french revolution. I'm making that last example up, because I can't actually remember any of the details, but I think that provides a decent idea. He had some of the longest sentences of any historians, but they were ones you could follow and enjoy.

He was also known to be a bit of a wild man, an old boy who worked hard in the archives but was no stranger to drink or shenanigans. Our french history professor told us that before his lectures, he would be found in a nearby bar having a glass of Apple Jack brandy. His great writing and his exemplary character and old boy credentials combined to make him a favourite for me. I later discovered that he had also written some autobiographies about his public school childhood. I thought that I had already read A Classic Education, but now I am not so sure. It's the story of one of his classmates and their relationship over the years. They bonded at Shrewsbury public school in their shared antagonism towards the administration and fear of the bullies, though they also had very different approaches. The pin that the whole narrative hangs on is that his classmate murdered his mother in Dublin in what was at the time a fairly sensational news story. The jacket blurbs try to sell the book as some kind of mystery or thriller, but it really isn't. It's a study of the man and boy as Cobb knew him, their own relationship and Cobb's connection to the murder. It's a wonderful read, absorbing, enriching and funny. Cobb is refreshingly removed and un-moralistic. That kind of dry distance, in today's histrionic and morally righteous world, would be considered offensive by modern readers. Even I was a bit surprised at how unsympathetic he was to the murdered mother (though she was a pretty horrible person) and how lightly he treated the whole affair. My surprise, I suspect, is more of a function of being surrounded by a world of self-righteousness and mushy-minded sentimentalism. The treacle sticks. Cobb's approach is a reminder that I need to distance myself from indulgent emoting and cheap sympathy.

A Classical Education is a short, engaging read. I started it on the morning of a day of travel and finished it before I put out the lights that night. I laughed out loud several times. He is such an educated person that there are many references that I didn't recognize, but they are not an impediment to becoming absorbed in the eccentric, complex characters and the crazy, real stories that are their lives. Strongly recommended.

56. Inspector West Leaves Town by John Creasey

2010-11-15T10:39:00.002-05:00

John Creasey was an amazingly prolific British mystery writer. He had several series (including the Toff, one of which I read and reviewed here). I discovered him through the very enjoyable BBC radio plays of his Inspector West books. I was really excited to make the discovery, as I love the whole allure of Scotland Yard. I didn't love the Toff book and was expecting a bit more from this Inspector West book (great cover!), hoping that it might emphasize more the procedural side of things.

Unfortunately, it's a bit of a mess. I did a bit of reading and see that Creasey cranked his books out, going straight from his mind to typewriter and never revising. You can tell! It lacks cohesion and rhythm, so you don't really know why you are reading certain sections. A lot of time is spent on West's domestic life, which would be fine, but it doesn't seem to be in service of anything. There are moments and bits of dialogue that almost seem like you are reading a documentary of post-war British middle class life.

The real problem for me, though, was that the badguy is presented as incredibly powerful, almost invincible. Nothing wrong with that and he would have fit well into an American pulp novel. But it just seemed weird that a villain who is able to kidnap dozens of top British officials and prefaces all of his perfectly-timed exits with a specific concerto playing from nowhere is in the same book where one of the heroes has a badly injured hand for almost the entire story.

I get that he was cranking these things out and I am somewhat in favour of pushing the action forward rather than revising a zillion times to make the perfect novel, but in this case I just felt too unconvinced and mildly bored at times. I would not be surprised if there are superior books in this series. I also think they work better as radio plays, as the interplay between the characters is fairly enjoyable when delivered by BBC actors. If someone can recommend a particularly good Inspector West book, I'll definitely check it out. Otherwise, I probably won't be adding any more John Creasey books to my on-deck shelf in the near future.

55. The Enemy by Lee Child

2010-11-10T08:34:00.003-05:00

I was at the local thrift store dropping off some old pants and household items and decided that I could risk taking a look at their book section, which has actually been quite fruitful in the last year or so. Some unknown volunteer has taken to organizing the books and they are doing a great job. Hats off to that person. So rare to find someone who actually makes an effort to organize things these days. Everybody seems to think that they can just leave everything in a big pile and have google sort it out for them or something. Anyways, I found an old Donald Hamilton. I also picked up this Lee Child book. I quite enjoyed Gone Tomorrow and was looking for something easy to digest that I could get sucked into. Well mission accomplished. I tore through this thick book.

This time we go a bit farther back into Reacher's career, where he is an MP, actually the head MP in a large army base in North Carolina in 1990. He had been in Panama dealing with the Noriega situation, but suddenly got moved. He's army all his life and used to simply following orders (though seems to have no problem breaking them as well). Furthermore, he has a philosophy of just living life as it is presented to him. It's part of what makes him such a compelling character. He is the fantasy rogue male with the skills to handle any situation, so he has no need to plan, put aside savings, worry about loneliness, etc.

The story starts out with a General found dead of a heart attack in a seedy hotel near the base. The investigation gets more and more complicated and ultimately reveals a massive conspiracy. Most of the book is on the ground investigation, detailed and enjoyable. But the overall plot is some big-picture, end of the cold war, internal military politics stuff. It's just on the right side of being implausible, but totally acceptable because of all the stuff that Reacher is dealing with is well thought out and engaging. This is detailed, manly stuff with sprinklings of gun and vehicle porn (and a two-page discussion on a custom-made crowbar that I took particular pleasure in). In Gone Tomorrow, Reacher is a civilian and most of the action takes place in NYC, where he has all kinds of urban skills, including all the tricks for staying for free in fancy hotels. Here, money is an issue and when he goes AWOL he has to count his pennies. I guess he continues to add to his skillset.

Most of the books in this market—the thick, manly books sold at airports, with abstract, embossed, mainly black covers—are crap these days. They tend to be overly written and basically unintelligent. They often feature excessive serial-killerism. Lee Child's Reacher novels (at least the two I have read so far) are an exception, good escapist stuff but not insulting to the reader's intelligence. They are sparsely written and the good stuff (the ass-kicking, the technical details, the wise-cracking superiority over lesser bosses) is dealt out in just the right proportions to keep this manly reader quite satisfied.

54. The King of Swords by Michael Moorcock

2010-11-08T10:50:00.002-05:00

This is the third and final book in the Books of Corum series by Michael Moorcock. You can read my brief reviews of the first two here. In this third one, everything seems to be at peace, though we the readers know it cannot last as the final God of Chaos, the King of Swords is still mightily pissed at Corum for having destroyed his sister, the Queen of Swords and his brother the Knight of Swords.

The basic idea in Moorcock's world is that the gods mess with mortals indirectly, in this case through the Mabden or humans, a new lesser race who have been wrecking the world with their warlike ways. The main evil Mabden, who tortured Corum in the first book, poking out his eye and chopping off his hand, is in major retreat. But he still has strong connections with the Chaos gods and one broken Vanagh (the higher race of which Corum is one of the few remaining), whom he forces to create a powerful spell that causes everybody to hate each other. Soon Corum's pleasant world starts to fall apart in mutual aggression and violence.

So he has to go out and adventure again, gets sucked into all these different planes and even universes of existence. This is big, big picture stuff with some very trippy imagery. I'm kind of a geek, but not entirely and I think I draw the line at this kind of fantasy. I love it in principle and think that metal bands that base their entire aesthetic around it are really cool. But I don't really care. It's just all so removed. There was one exception and that was at the very end, when Corum learns that all that went on was part of a rare period of major change in the universe. After this, the gods power will diminish in the mortal realms. This theme is very common in fantasy (the classic is all the Elves leaving Middle Earth at the end of the Lord of the Rings) and it symbolizes the end of the imagination, adulthood, banality etc. I did find it touching and appreciated Moorcock's skill and desire to keep alive worlds where reason and "reality" are not actually prioritized.

One geeky element in this book that I also found mildly distracting (but probably would have sucked up when I was 15) is that this third book brings in a bunch of characters and concepts from other Moorcock books, particularly Elric, his most famous character. It made me feel like I needed to read a bunch of other books to fully appreciate what the hell was going on. I used to love this kind of cosmos building, but now it tires me slightly and honestly it did feel like it kind of deflated the impact of everything else that had led up to this point. You read a trilogy about a hero in a world and then in the last pages of the last book, it turns out that he needs to connect with another even bigger hero who has a special sword and an entire backstory himself that is only hinted at. To get really geeky and compare it to tabletop roleplaying, it's like when your character needs the assistance of the GMs special more powerful character to actually complete the quest. It takes the adventure out of your hands and that is kind of what I felt like as a reader.

Still, if you have a 15-year old who needs his mind blown, this may well be the way to go.