4. Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie

Like so many, I read much Agatha Christie in my younger years, I think as early as high school.  It has been a really long time.  I hadn't even thought of her that much, except for the recent remake of Murder on the Orient Express and somewhere learning that quite a lot of young french readers also get into her.  I found this one in the free box on St-Viateur and though xmas is over, I thought it would be nice to check hour out again.  As it turned out, this is another nice entry to get my reading habits back up again. She is certainly most digestible.

The story takes place on a British estate in the holiday season.  Three sons (two of whom were long estranged) of the old, nasty lord as well as his newly-discovered half-Spanish grandaughter and the unexpected son of his old business partner all assemble at what later turns out to be his request.  We quickly learn that he was a big success in diamonds in South Africa, quite a wild young man and today a manipulative bastard who has nothing but contempt for all his sons.  He of course gets murdered inside his own locked study with all the guests downstairs and accounted for (at first).

Poirot, who is a friend of the Commisioner, just happens to be on the scene and he ends up supporting detective Sugden in the investigation.  Everything moves forward at a brisk pace. We meet the characters, learn quickly of their characters with several mysteries about their pasts sprinkled in.  Once the murder starts, we learn more about each of them as they are interviewed.  And then Hercule starts poking and detecting, with a pretty good reveal at the end.  These are classic mysteries with curious clues that scream "CLUE!" at the reader.  I was close to elements of it but definitely did not guess.

I guess compared to all the British mysteries I have since read, she feels somewhat blunt in her portrayals of the British Aristocracy and all its damaged progeny. The Spanish granddaughter was pretty bad in the cliches (she was beautiful and would cut the throat of her enemies).  The cozy element I quite enjoy and she does truly have a savage side, which makes it all work quite well.    

3. You Find Him -I'll Fix Him by James Hadley Chase

James Hadley Chase is a good author to help one get back into reading form.  This one started out solid got quite good, ended up a bit banal with a fun coda that made the mystery worthwhile.  Despite the pat ending, I have to give Chase his credit.  He is able to keep a story moving.  Ed Dawson is a newspaper man heading up the Rome office of an American paper.  He gets a call from the paper's owner asking him to watch over his daughter who is coming to Rome to take architecture classes.  Dawson meets her, finds her plain and basically drops the assignment.  A few weeks later, he runs into her again at a fancy party and this time she is a total babe.  Like any fool in one of these books, he starts to go around with her and then accepts her proposition that they spend a passionate weekend at a remote villa in Sorrento together.  Against his better judgement (basically because he has the total hots for her), he goes.  Of course it goes very badly when he gets there and discovers her body at the foot of a cliff.

This was all kind of straightforward and made even less interesting because the protagonist is not very smart.  He panics and puts himself in a worse situation.  Now I know we wouldn't have a book if he didn't get himself in a jam.  Fortunately, the jam itself gets more interesting for most of the middle of the book, as we learn more about the backstory of the daughter.  It's complex enough to keep you wanting to find out what goes on, though a few of the twists are quite obvious.  The ending, as I mentioned, is almost sappy, quite the opposite of No Orchids for Miss Blandish.  However, there is a further reveal that reinforces the complexity of the backstory.  I apologize for speaking so vague, but I am pretty strict about spoilers.

The work of James Hadley Chase doesn't seem to merit a lot of analysis and maybe he was a bit of a journeyman.  I'll have to read more to know, but so far I have to appreciate his work.

2. Peel's England by J H B Peel

I can not even remember where I found this old hardback. I certainly didn't pay much money for it. I do remember my motivation for taking it. I felt that maybe a bit of non-fiction exploration of pastoral england in the 70s would help reinforce my appreciation of the context of a lot of the fictional books I read.  That goal was only somewhat achieved, not through any particular flaw in this book, but in my own inability to remain focus on facts and descriptions in text. 

I guess Peel was a well-known writer and commentator. He seems to be, at least in this book, one of those mild-mannered conservatives whose common-sense tone belies what we know today in post-Brexit england to be a pretty nasty jingoism.  Or maybe it was mild-mannered and has since evolved into the basic racism we see today.  In any case, the roots are there.  His real enemy, though, is progress and particularily the motor car and I am with him on that.  The entire book is him traipsing through all the regions of England, describing the scenery and a few specific locales like old churches or villages, adding tidbits of history, poetry and a few hints of the above mentioned politics.

Actually, as I think of it, it did give me a good broad sense of the various regions of England.  For instance, I finally get now that the legend of Arthur took place somewhere in the southwest, possibly even Wales.  I also think I know a bit about Cornwall, which is cool.  I knew a Cornish guy once and he had the black hair and an intensity of gaze, as Peel describes them.

Anyhow, that was perhaps not the best book to get my reading habits back up.  Now on to some fun fiction!

1. The Adventures of Ben Gunn by R.F. Delderfield

Past performance does not indicate future results.  Wow, after the last two years of consistent reading, I totally fell off in the end of 2020 and early 2021.  I gave myself a break after achieving my goal last year, played videogames, watched a lot of sports and too much twitter.  Somehow it turned into a pit of pleasant lassitude that is now catching up to me.  I did at least complete an entire videogame (Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden and the expansions).  And the post-Trump insurrection social media world was entertaining enough to bring my addiction flaring back (at least when social media is stressful and depressing you are really motivated to get out of it).  I guess my struggle with laziness will last my entire life and I cannot ever let up my efforts.  Enough wanking, on to the review!

I am now a full fan of R.E. Delderfield and will pick up his books when I find them. This was a real score, a lovely Coronet paperback of his unofficial sequel to Treasure Island.  When I found it, I realized I needed to reread the original, which turned out to be a great pleasure.  The conceit of The Treasures of Ben Gunn is that James Hawkins, now a comfortable middle-aged landowner, became the employer of Ben Gunn, the castaway on Treasure Island.  Once the latter passed on, Hawkins felt he could tell his tale as Ben had told him.  This tale also tells the story of Long John Silver and the origin of the treasure. It's a great idea and most well executed, though one wonders if it is right to actually write down a tale that may have been better left for each reader's own speculation.  This applies not only to the backstory but also the fate of the characters.  I felt sort of sad at the end of this knowing that the rest of James Hawkins life, though a good one, did not lead to much more adventure.

Ben Gunn's story starts out on land, on an estate in England with a new Lord who is a tyrant about following the laws. His rigidity and his asshole, drunken loser son, make the lives of their tenants miserable.  Nick Allardyce, whose skeleton you may or may not recall, pointed to the treasure, was a young squire who runs afoul of the masters of the estate.  He and Ben Gunn, after an altercation where the son is killed, are forced to flee England.  Their paths in the oceans eventually lead them to Captain Flint, Long John Silver and a life of piracy.

The opening section feels very Delderfieldesque and brings the reader some righteousness at the injustice.  The middle part of the book, where we follow the adventures of the pirates, somehow lacked excitement for me. It was very historically accurate, rich in location and situation, but somehow there wasn't enough of a real foil or narrative through line to get me fired up the way Treasure Island did.  Once Ben Gunn gets marooned, we get a mini-Robinson Crusoe, which I always enjoy, as well as his redemption.  This development as it aligned with the Treasure Island narrative (when the pirates return) was quite fun to read.  So it does fill in the backstory nicely but somehow didn't grip me the way a good pirate story should.  I will have to read more Delderfield, but my sense is that his strength is in the long, slow narrative, punctuated with moments of satisfying character and Englishness rather than the flash bang of a true adventure novelist.  Still, very enjoyable and I am happy to have this on my too-full bookshelves.

66. The Two-Headed Serpent by Paul Fricker, Scott Dorward and Matthew Sanderson

There has been a bit of a slowdown in traditional book reading here at Olman's Fifty.  Normally, I tend to crank it up in the xmas holidays, at I am at my parents which is very conducive to reading (not near my own computer, often times everybody is reading).  This year, having been an exceptionally busy one at work and having xmas at our own immediate family this year and me buying two new videogames, I am just generally taking a break from concentrating too hard.  The Two-Headed Serpent is a campaign for the Call of Cthulu tabletop role-playing game.  So definitely reading, but much easier to consume in small bites, as it is divided up into several different sub-adventures.

Once, when I was starting to really get into gaming (I had just discovered the incredibly rich world of RPGs outside of the big brand name game Dungeons & Dragons), I was at the Compleat Strategist in NYC, which was the big and really only tabletop RPG store in the city at the time.  I ran into a guy who was maybe 10 years older than I was who was asking about a few games.  He told me he used to play, but doesn't anymore but still buys RPG books for "non-linear fiction, you know."  I remember thinking that made a lot of sense, but was also a bit sad as you would just not get the same satisfaction of immersion and interaction from just reading these books as opposed to playing or running them.  And yet here I am, twenty odd years later, picking up game books with the almost sole intention of just reading them.  I do have a tiny hope to run something again.  It's just that there is so much material and so little opportunity and in the end I'll probably just make my own thing up as usual.

I'm not a big Call of Cthulu guy.  I am a huge fan of pulp gaming, though.  Together, they make a very nice mix. The pulp element elevates the Call of Cthulu setting out of its depressing (to me) death/insanity spiral base play and allows the players to go in half-cocked and blasting.  And the mythos world gives an endless possibility of conspiracies and bad things all over the world for pulp adventurers to go investigate and fight.  The Two-Headed Serpent sets the players are being hired by Caduceus, a global philanthropic organization that sends doctors and scientists to help crisis situations around the world.  I won't give any more away in case anybody is going to play it, but of course shit is not what it seems.  Lizard people are involved.

 

[warning some tabletop RPG nerdery/inside baseball talk in the paragraph below.]

Overall, it is extremely well put together.  It is a beautfully-produced book.  The adventures are in diverse and fun situations (chases through the crammed streets of Calcutta, disease outbreak in the Belgian Congo, mafia wars in NYC, expedition to Iceland and that's about half of them!).  The back story is well thought out and the badguys and other NPCs are a great mix.  My only hesitation to move this from really good to great is that it is all a bit old school.  Absolutely nothing wrong with the old school and while I vacillate, I am probably actually pretty old school myself at this point.  It's just that the overall timeline is basically a railroad.  I know that is hard to avoid with a long campaign in this vein. I just feel like there are innovative ways to present this material so that it is much more freeform and dynamic, which would allow the players more agency in the way things unfold, while still moving the campaign into all the great material provided here.  The few options are presented here as basically if then statements and they really ultimately only shift the order of things somewhat.  Likewise, there is no real connection set up between the material and the players.  So basically, their motivation is "you were hired by this organization to do some stuff".  If I were to run this, I think I would do some kind of hook-building process where I got the players to come up with two connections their character would have to something in the campaign setting.  I just find when they have those things, they tend to be much more motivated (or you just make the main bad guy kick their ass right at the beginning :) ).

Anyhow, really fun to read and would be great fun to play or run one day.    

 

65. Le chat du rabbin by Joann Sfar

I am always ready to read anything by Sfar but le Chat du Rabin was always low on the list for me.  My wife bought a copy of the first one in english and it was kicking around the house, so that got me started.  I got the next 7 volumes in french from the library here.  It's hard to pinpoint exactly what this bande-desinnée is about, as it can meander in many different directions. It's more of a cast and characters and a milieu thematically centered on Judaism and the philosophy of religion, with each album taking on a different story or concept and even then not always distinctly.

It takes place mostly in Algiers in the beginning of the 20th century (30s I think?).  The main character is the titular rabbi's cat, though he is more of a commentator, shit-stirrer and court jester.  The rabbi and his friends and family are the characters who tend to have stories and conflicts, while the cat observes or pokes and prods.  He's a real shit-stirrer, this cat, and it is even suggested at times that he may be the devil.  I think these characters may actually be Joann Sfar's ancestors, but I have not confirmed this.  It`s enjoyable reading, though arguments about religious theory are really not my jam and I did skim or glaze over those parts somewhat.  The characters, the milieu and the situations are absorbing and a compelling mix of semi-realistic history and geography and Sfar's slightly fantastical embellishments (such as a cat who can talk).

I have to mention Sfar`s art.  I prefer a hard, solid line, the empiricist that I am.  Sfar`s style is not usually to my liking, but boy does he capture real things in his loose way.  In the third or fourth volume, there is an actual photograph of Bahomet, the real life Sfar family cat that he based the character on and it`s uncanny how he captured the cat.  Likewise, the rabbi's daughter Zbaya just seems super hot to me.  It's almost weird.

 

 

64. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I took this book out of the library (which we have been hitting hard now that my daughter is reading; man do I love libraries) because I found an R.L. Delderfield that is a prequel story of the life of Ben Gunn, one of the characters from Treasure Island.  I thought it was just some pirate book by him until I brought it home and read the back.  I had read Treasure Island as a lad and enjoyed it (though Kidnapped stayed with me longer for some reason).  I didn't want to read the Delderfield without really having a memory of Treasure Island.  

I had positive but not elevated expectations of reading Treasure Island as an adult. I thought it would be a fine tale as they say.  It surpassed my expectations.  It's a great book, a tight, exciting adventure that still lives up to its reputation as a classic, beyond its massive cultural influence.  Though it owes much to the popularity of castaway and pirate tales that preceded it, it really is Treasure Island that defined what we think of pirates today. Reading it again, one understands why. It combines innocence and real darkness in a perfect balance that makes it light and enjoyable to read but not trivial. The pacing is masterful, so that you really have a hard time putting it down, yet also let's you take a pause in nice places.  Finally, it is the characters and dialogue that really make it a masterpiece.  Long John Silver and the disturbing father/monster/victim relationship he has with young Jim Hawkins is at the heart of it. Several side characters add richness without getting in the way.  

This is definitely colonial history and its sins are woven into the story and setting.  The obvious racism only shows up at the end since there is really no other characters other than Englishmen.  The jolly class relationships are a tasty illusion that makes the whole thing palatable.  Just pointing these things out, as they should be critiqued, but for the astute reader none of it gets in the way in what is probably one of the best adventure books I have read this year and definitely in the top ten.  I read this to prep for the Delderfield, but I may have to take Kidnapped out of the library now.

63. Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney

I can't remember how we discovered these.  We got one and my daughter was hooked, so I have been taking the rest out from the library over the last few months.  It only take about half-an-hour to read one of them.  I've read them all plus the two Rowley Jefferson side books, so I figure I can count it as a single book (similar principle to a bande-dessinée series).  They are aimed at boys in elementary school.  I am not quite sure what it is about them that so appeals to my 8-year old daughter.  I suspect the format itself is a big part of it. They are books with illustrations with just enough balance of text and images to make them very easy to digest. The pictures themselves are nice, clean solid line drawings that have a lot of humour in them as well.  

Kinney has made a kajillion dollars from these books, so I will leave it to other experts to figure out why they are so popular in any more detail.  I found them to be quite fun and very enjoyable to consume aesthetically speaking (I even stole some of the character images for a presentation for work).  I get a chuckle and sometimes a belly laugh at least once a book and there are a few truly hilarious moments.  Perhaps the standout for me is in book 14 with the epic neighbourhood snowball fight when the weird forest inbred children come and join.  

 The portrayal of the mother is somewhat problematic. She is always both the overly strict punisher in the family and the lone enthusiast who is always forcing them to do "family activities" nobody wants to do. Now, to be fair, I suspect Jeff Kinney grew up around the same time I did and whatever patriarchal structures were in place then and probably responsible, the truth at the time was that a lot of moms really were like this.  However, that has changed significantly and I feel like this series is perpetuating and reinforcing a stereotype that we can all move on from.  The dad is feckless and selfish, but his passivity is never portrayed as being such a negative element in Greg's life. You could also argue that everybody is kind of awful in these stories (except sweet, innocent Rowley), but it still feels like the brunt of the parody is thrust upon the mother character.

62. It by Stephen King

Whew!  Epic!  I have been looking for It for quite a while now, but would only read a used paperback copy.  These are actually quite hard to find, especially after the latest movie came out.  I did finally discover this really beat-up copy (not the ideal cover, but I am not complaining) in the big book dump in my alley last summer.  While I was still looking for it, I made the mistake of watching the first installment of the new movie.  When it came out, I hadn't been that interested in it, but the trailer for the second installment was so good (the one where she is visiting the old lady) that it made me want to give the two films a chance.  That was a huge mistake.  The first movie fucking sucked.  They had all this money and now we live in an era where it is okay (and even desirable) to actually tell the story and instead they ruined it like so many of Stephen King's properties. This one just devolved into tired repetitions of the way clowns could be freaky with only the smallest hints of the true storyline of the kids friendship and the evil that is the town of Derry.

The purity of my reading the book was thus somewhat spoiled by having seen the movie, as it imprinted some imagery, especially that of Pennywise and Beverly.  Fortunately, the rest of it was mostly forgettable.  I had also started reading It right at the end of my big Stephen King phase and then abandoned the book.  I just wasn't interested at the time.  My memory told me that I had only read a few pages before giving up, but I was 100 pages in and still remembering stuff, but couldn't tell if that was from the movie.  Finally at some point, I realized I had definitely not read it and could just enjoy the book.

I consider It to be the last of the early and for me best phase of Stephen King's writing. This could be erroneous, but it felt like after It he started going into more literary territory and doing things like The Dark Tower series.  I was always into his more adventure/sci-fi than his horror books.  Firestarter and The Dead Zone (and of course The Stand) were my favourites.  It is definitely mostly in the horror category but it gets pretty cosmic near the end.  There is a lot going on and it is a long book.  I am too lazy to fully and fairly analyze it.  I will say that I mostly enjoyed it and loved some parts of it enough to remind me why I was so into his books as a teenager. It's a bit long at times, especially in the early part.  There is so much horror in it, that it starts to get a bit not scary.  I am not into horror that much anyways, but I think the gruesome child murders could have been brought out a bit more slowly.  As it is, you are barely a third of the way in and you know there is a killer clown ripping lots of kids apart. The sexual and racial politics are questionable and interesting.  I think we can mostly give King a pass here as he was really trying.  The one black character, Mike the librarian, has some Magical Negro elements, but is also a fully-fledged character (though still getting somewhat second billing in the final action given his importance to the plot).  Beverly is really great as a kid, but somewhat weird as an adult, the abuse victim pattern doesn't feel entirely realistic (though the abusive husband does and is one of the scariest characters in the book).  There is also a super weird part in the end when they are kids that I am just not smart enough to unpack but seems somehow very wrong to me.  

Overall, though, the portrayal of this nasty town takes this book to the next level.  Stephen King knows America and though the evil here is from elsewhere, the manifestation it takes in Derry, Maine is all American and all too relevant today.  The real evil here are the racists, the bullies, the abusers and worse of all, the people who look away when it is all going on.  King describes the history, the geography, so many people, the establishments, the weather, everything to such a degree that I feel like the town should be findable on Google Maps and Wikipedia.  And he just savages it.  One wonders about his own childhood. He seems to know the darkness in small town America all too well.  And this is Yankee Maine!

As I mentioned when complaining about the shit movie, It is fundamentally about childhood friendship and before it gets really weird, this is the second-strongest part in the book. Each character and their confused perspective on their world is well written and when they start to find some salvation in each other, it is really quite moving. The part where fat Ben escapes from the bullies and meets Bill and Richie and then helps them build a dam and is blown away when they ask him to come and hang out with them is especially touching.  

Accomplishment achieved and thoroughly enjoyed! 

Now that is a well worn paperback!

61. Famous Trials 5 edited by James H. Hodge

This is the last of the Famous Trials Penguin paperbacks that I found at the Concordia book fair and bought almost out of pity and because they were just so beautiful.  Now, having finished this one, I find I am surprisingly pleased by their contents as well.  I would pick up any others that I may find in the future.  I can see why they were so popular.  Each one contains an essay, retelling of 4 or 5 famous trials.  They have a fairly consistent structure, beginning with a narrative of what actually happened, the ensuing investigation and then the trial.  They conclude with the author's thoughts on some social, legal or philosophical aspect of the trial.  Basically, they are true crime for the discerning reader (said in a slightly self-mocking snobby voice) and interesting and enjoyable at their base just for the retelling of these various disturbing and sordid human tragedies.  It is the various authors' voices that elevates these essays to sometimes quite enjoyable reading places.

Famous Trials 5 has 5 essays and I will give a brief summary of each, mainly for my own future reference. Overall, this was pretty enjoyable, highlighted by the last essay that had particularly rich writing and some nice critique of British moralism.  A bonus was that there were several Canadian connections in these trials.  Quite a lot of poison and drug use as well.

Thomas Neill Cream
Cream was a ne'er do well doctor who studied at McGill at the end of the 19th century and then went to England. His thing was hooking up with women, trying to get them to take pills that he claimed were to abort any potential pregnancy but would usually kill them. He would then send anonymous blackmail letters to some other well-known person claiming that he had evidence that they had poisoned the person.  It was all incompetent and kind of crazed, driven I guess by money needs, due to his addiction to "morphia" and his own misogyny.  

Neville George Clevely Heath
This charming fellow was recently demobbed and met two different women and horribly sexually tortured them then murdered them.  What was weird about his story is there was nothing in his past to indicate that he might become a sexual sadist. He was, however, a total cad and career criminal, getting kicked out of several armies and involved in many petty crimes.  This was one of the least interesting essays because it went on for pages and pages about how to define if someone is criminally insane (as his defense tried to do) and when to use it to excuse the death penalty.  As an empiricist, I don't really care about these kinds of arguments, though I recognize their value in making life or death decisions.

John Watson Laurie
Two young men meet on holiday in Scotland and go on a hike where one bashes the other with a rock to the head and then takes his stuff.  This was another truly incompetent murder where the killer returned home wearing the victim's clothing, among other sloppy actions.  This was more interesting for the history and geography of the Isle of Arran, which sounds incredibly beautiful.

Dr. George Lamson
A drug-addicted (and thus money desperate) doctor poisons his poor crippled 18-year old brother-in-law to get his inheritance.  This one was really quite sad because the boy, who was confined to a wheelchair because of a spinal defect, was quite loved by his housemates at a boarding school. He already had a tough row to hoe but seemed to keep up good spirits.  His death was agonizing and took hours.  The uncle once in prison and off the dope later realizes it was the addiction that drove him to do it and though not truly remorseful, you do get a feeling that it was just a shitty business all around.  

Rattenbury and Stoner by F. Tennyson Jesse
This essay was the gem of the book, so I add the author's name in case I should run across it again. It was written in a particularly enjoyable style. The author really had fun with it, including a hilarious letter from Benjamin Franklin (see image below) on the advantages of having an affair with an older woman.  The story here is that Mrs. Rattenbury, a woman in her thirties and married to Mr. Rattenbury, a wealthier man in his sixties, starts to have an affair with their 18-year old chauffeur, Stoner.  The latter becomes infatuated and kills old Mr. Rattenbury by hitting him in the head three times with a mallett.  It was portrayed in the media at the time as a classic affair murder and initially Mrs. Rattenbury tried to take the fall for young Stoner. She was aquitted and he did life but she killed herself not long after the trial by stabbing herself in the heart six times (!).  The essay is very sympathetic to her and portrays her as a bit unbalanced, but actually very loving. According to the author, the arrangement itself while the affair was going on was not even that bad of a situation.  Mrs. Rattenbury was very kindly and loving the Mr. Rattenbury, who was more concerned with his business and his nightly bottle of whiskey. He didn't seem to mind the affair. It was just the melodramatic nature of an 18-year old working class boy suddenly thrust into a grown-up love affair that turned it deadly.  Everybody suffered.  Quite sad, but very enjoyably written.

I draw your attention to the Fifth point

60. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (Robin Buss translation)

Found this hefty tome in one of those neighbourhood free shelves.  I had been wanting to read it since I saw the Jim Cazaviel movie (actually before that, but the movie cemented it from a fancy to a determination) and was happy to find this nice Penguin edition.  It turns out to be the most recent (and possibly most complete) translation in English.  I could probably have read it in french, but only if I were myself imprisoned in the Chateau d'If for 14 years.  As it was, the english edition of 1,243 pages took me almost 3 weeks!  

As the translator states in the introduction, Count of Monte Cristo is one of those books that was so popular that almost everybody knows something about it, without actually knowing it all.  The basic story is so compelling, that its impact is felt without needing the entire text (and reinforced by past incomplete translations and the many TV, movie and theatre adaptations).  I myself had a few misconceptions.  I was trying to figure out why it was so long, when he gets out of the prison within the first 200 pages.  The parts that I was most interested in, the endless training and self-improvement montage, are actually quite curtailed and even absent from the book.  He does educate himself mentally and gets a bit of aristocratic bearing while in prison, but the origins of all the combat skills, poisons, finance and the myriad other abilities that make him almost god-like are never explained beyond that he spent ten years in "the orient".  Much of the book is the more complicated narratives of the social and political lives of the families of the men upon whom he is seeking revenge and the slow, delicious unraveling of the count's revenge plot.

I got a bit confused in the early part of that, with several daughter's and wives who at first are not well distinguished as characters.  As the plot moves forward, though, and things get stickier, I figured it all out.  It's a real page-turner.  You can imagine when it was serialized how people would have awaited anxiously for the next chapter.  A lot of shit goes down and it gets quite dark and nasty.  There is even a cool lesbian cross-dressing escape from the constraints of Parisian aristocratic society.  I have to say, as well, the French really were fucking bonkers.  Their class system and its obsession with shame and duelling and all that really do make the 19th century British seem kind of staid and boring.  I guess the revolution and all the turmoil that followed it contributed to that.  This book definitely made me want to better understand that period of history.  It's just so complicated, Jesus, with so many revolutions and restorations and everything open to interpretation of the time.  No wonder historians still argue about it today.

59. Plunder Squad by Richard Stark

This is a very auspicious moment in the life of my 50 book blog.  With the completion of Plunder Squad, the 59th book of 2020, I have now finally recuperated my losses from the early child-rearing years and restored my overall average to 50 books a year.  I almost lost the trail entirely in 2016 with a record low of only 18 books read (and looking back a 4 year-old averaging 3-5 major meltdowns a week was probably the biggest factor, though there were several others) and may have even blogfaded altogether.  I don't know what pulled me back but I am glad I stuck with it as reading has never been more enjoyable.

I wrestled for about 24 hours with which book should I read for #59 and I realized that I had also been re-reading the Parker series and Plunder Squad was next.  It's actually quite perfect since these are my favourite books and probably anchor most of my online interactions in the reading world.

What an absolute joy!  It has been long enough, and I think I only read Plunder Squad once, that I had forgotten almost everything about it.  The structure is multi-faceted and it lacks a central narrative, so aesthetically, I do not rank it high amongst the best Parkers.  Yet it is so full of Westlake as Starkian goodness and so hard at its core that I can still understand how others may consider it among his best.

Plunder Squad starts, as always, in medias res, with Parker getting shot at from behind while planning a heist in an anonymous house. The shooter is George Uhl, whom Parker left alive at the end of The Sour Lemon Score. The first half of the book is more like a series of short vignettes of Parker trying to put together jobs while also dealing with Uhl.  The second half is a truncated, traditional Parker heist where we get the planning, the perspective of some of the side characters and finally the execution.  The ending is whatever the opposite of in medias res is, with Parker barely escaping a doublecross, fleeing a burning warehouse in Soho.

There are several great moments.  The scene when he is waiting out George Uhl in the California hills after having second-guessed the other guy who led him to Uhl who now knows Parker is probably going to kill him.  Just sad and brutal and yet so efficient.  The final heist here is really cool as well in all its details.  They hijack a truck full of valuable paintings while it is being escorted from one gallery to the other in the midwest.  I love Tommy the hippy heister.  Also this one has Stan Devers, mainly anonymous but still likable.  I'm rambling.  Plunder Squad is fantastic.  And finally, this:

Lou Sternberg met Parker at O'Hare International. He had a disgusted look on his face, but he gave the standard greeting:  "Have a good flight?"

"Yes." Parker meant nothing by the word; it was simply a sound that ended the topic.

Next up, Butcher's Moon, the masterpiece.

58. The Foundling by Georgette Heyer

I found the worst edition

I do follow some good people on Twitter in the book world, so good that it is one of the big reasons I haven't been able to delete my account and walk away.  Fans of the gothic and romance genre were talking up Georgette Heyer and how big a role they played in their own early reading.  Her stuff sounded right up my alley and I was pleased to find a copy for $2 at Chainon with a truly uninspired design, such that I would have no worries of my poor treatment of the book.

I am pleased to say that their recommendations were spot on.  I thoroughly enjoyed The Foundling.  It was delightful.  I found myself delighted from the first few pages and continuously delighted throughout the book.  I would have read it in two days if it wasn't for current events and my struggle with distraction. As it was I basically read it in two sittings but with days of wasting my life on Twitter and reading only a few pages at a time in between.

The story is about a young Duke who grew up quite sickly and though petite of frame is healthy and smart at the age of 24, about to come of age and claim his inheritance.  However, his controlling uncle and the retinue of staff conspire to mollycoddle him.  His own gentle and unaggressive nature only reinforces their maintaining a layer of protection between him and the world.  He yearns to live a bit in the world and his frustration with his uncle and servants reaches a peak when he is basically browbeaten to ask his old friend Harriet's hand in marriage.  They grew up together and he likes and respects her, but never really had a chance to develop any feelings.  When one of his cousins gets in a bit of a scrape with a blackmailer and asks the Duke for money, he decides to escape from his handlers and deal with the problem on his own.

There are so many things that I enjoyed in this story: the mannered interactions of the aristocracy, the talented and trained but never tested character off on his own, descriptions of Regency england at once so civilized and yet always simmering with potential villainy.  Ultimately, though, what really made this book for me was how it pleasant and un-tense it all was.  The bad guys really aren't all that bad, the scandals never really threaten to ruin anybody and the plot twists and miscommunications are fun and move the story forward without driving us mad.  Just a real tonic.  I am so happy to know that she has written some 60 books and everyone has their various favourites.  I think I will just keep an eye out for her and pick them up slowly, as I am sure used copies are easy to find.  They can be read between more stressful works. 

57. The Duplicate by William Sleator

Meezly lent this to me, a beautiful hardback version that she found at Dark Carnival.  She had bought it as a gift for my nephew but decided she wanted to read it first.  I had never read it, but I really feel like I must have read some of his books before.  They really look like the kinds of books I would have taken out of the library when I was in my early adolescence.  The story here is about a teenage boy who stumbles upon a strange device on the beach near his house.  He is in a bit of a dilemma because he has finally gotten a date with the cute girl in his class that he has a crush on (to help her with her math homework) but he forgot that he is supposed to go to his grandmother's birthday at the same time that evening.

He sees a seagull poke at the device and suddenly a second seagull appears.  Not sure what he saw, he takes the device home and starts testing it out and ends up with a copy of himself.  At first it seems like the solution to his double-booking but very quickly the logistical problems make having a second version of himself more trouble than benefit.  What clothes will they wear?  Who is going to eat dinner?  Who goes to school and where does the other one go.  Even more difficult, who gets to go on the date and who has to go to grandma's birthday party.

It's a quick read and aimed at adolescents, but it really does explore the issue to its peak and things get pretty dark.  I am sure there are equivalent books for young adult readers today, but I feel like a lot of them are quite safe.  Hunger Games, Harry Potter, they are all in a fantasy world.  Books like The Duplicate force you to ask yourself what you would do if you suspected your duplicate was actually plotting to kill you.  It's good.  I also like that the girl in the end is quite level-headed and cool.  A nice little interim read.  Now we will send it on to the nephew.  

Yes, reading his obituary, I do think I had read some of his earlier books. They sound really intriguing.

56. The Jook by Gary Phillips

I picked this up on a whim at S.W. Welch.  It looked pulpy, the protagonist was African-American and an a pro football player.  I am still buying too many books and my on-deck shelf literally floweth over (or stacketh upwards).

The protagonist is Zalmont Raines, an once star wide reciever in the NFL who had caught a superbowl-winning touchdown pass and had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated.  At the start of the book, he is arriving at LAX, coming back from Europe where had just been cut from the Barcelon Dragons because of his gimpy hip.  We learn soon that he partied way too hard and much of his big salaries was gone.  He was also being chased by a baby momma (I don't think this term was around when this book was written in 1999) and a potential lawsuit for statuatory rape after getting a blowjob from a 16-year old girl in a wheelchair.  His goal is to get a spot on the LA Barons, the new expansion team in his hometown.

Zalmont is a selfish, cold person.  The book walks a thin line, you do sympathize with him but you also are constantly reminded what an asshole he is.  It's never an excuse, but the cuthroat nature of professional football and his own upbringing, are definitely present as factors in his behaviour.  The language is rich and there are lots of nerdy references.  Furthermore, the story keeps moving forward.  Nevertheless deep down, it is a pretty bleak book.  Call it black noir.  This is grown-up stuff.  Lots of sex and violence.  The final climax, a heist of a garbage truck would make a great action movie.

Some of the writing was a bit clunky, with abrupt transitions and the wrong balance of exposition.  Also, some of the dialogue sounded too similar among different characters.  There would be a tendency to speak in the vernacular and then in more nerdy, explanatory english.  However, as I said before, the story really keeps moving forward, there was a lot of action and you kind of dig the arrogant, son-of-a-bitch elite wide receiver. 

55. A New Kind of War by Anthony Price

Anthony Price has been on my radar for a long, long time, dating back to when Louis XIV did an excellent series of interviews with him.  I have held off for all these years because I suspected his books might be not right for me.  I didn't know how but I have enough to read that it did hold me back until I saw one of his book last month at S.W. Welch.  The opening paragraph really worked for me and I was in need of something to kickstart my reading again.

Wow, was this a slow burn.  I mean perhaps the slowest burn of any espionage book I have ever read.  I couldn't even figure out what the plot was until page 300 of 362!   The basic set up is that Fred Fattorini, Captain in the British Army encounters a strange unit in Greece at the end of the Second World War.  He is then sent to join that unit in Germany where they are ostensibly there to study Roman ruins uncovered by recent bombing.  Even figuring out what I just typed there takes pages and pages of dialogue all done in this halting, interrupting style where Fattorini is constantly guessing as to what is actually going on and nobody will tell him anything but the slightest fragments of information.  It is actually quite frustrating and made it hard for me to get through this book, especially at a time when I needed some easy comfort reading to get my stamina back up.

The thing is, it's not bad.  It's actually really quite good.  It feels realistic, with complex and nuanced portraits of how the old boy network and class structure informed the makeup of the British army.  The descriptions of the surroundings are subtle and really give you flashes of a scene in your head (thus the seduction of the first paragraph).  Likewise the portrayal of the allies splitting up and fighting amongst themselves for the intel spoils of war as well as the various ethical and moral compromises that go with that are really well done. This is grown-up espionage, possibly too grown up for me.  You need to know your history and you need to be paying attention. 

By the end, it does all tie together in a pretty cool way.  It's one of those books where the ending is really cool because it sets the groundwork for more adventure in the future, but it doesn't feel like it has to actually tell those stories. Just the potential of it based on what came before makes it cool to read.  

Spoiler here (for my own memory when I go back to read this):  This is in some ways not a real spoiler because you could figure out a lot of it on your own and it is not a mystery per se, it's just that Price puts you in Fattorini's mind and part of the pleasure of the book is learning what the hell is going on through him.  The unit he is joined up with is tasked with finding and convincing German scientists to come to Britain to work with them.  They are rivals with the US and enemies with the Soviets in this task, and it comes out (and this is a real spoiler) that there is a traitor amongst them  The reason they are all so close-lipped and weird is because of this suspicion. Fattorini is brought in from the outside to suss the traitor out but they can't even tell him that directly until they know he is solid.  Ultimately, this book sets the stage for the cold war espionage that will dominate the decades after the war, thus the title.  Oh I see, it really is an origin story as characters from this book (which was written near the end of his career) are the younger versions of themselves in many of his earlier books.  Cool.

54. me and white supremacy by Layla F. Saad

A bit of a step outside my usual reading habits, this book is a work assignment!  We are decolonizing (can't decide if  I should put that in quotes or not) at the organization I work for and one of the tasks we've been asked to do is to read this book and have discussions about it.  I am very much in favour of rooting out racism and discrimination and I as a reader was kind of excited to actually have a book club at work.  We are pretty much full on "radical lefty" anyways, so it's not a big stretch for anybody, though I did hear some grumblings about being assigned homework.  Some may see it as preaching to the converted but there is a real and deep structural problem in the non-profit world where it is pretty much educated, economically comfortable white people in a majority of the roles, especially in management.  On the positive side, there are a majority of women in those roles and I have seen that change over time.

The argument is, and I hope everybody is now aware of this is nothing new, but that we have to look at racism as a structural problem that goes far beyond just individuals being racist.  Even if we can make people not be racist, the way we educate and hire, the way the markets work, all these institutions join together in a social structure that makes it almost impossible to create a racially just society.  The racism gets reinforced sometimes blatantly and sometimes subtly at every step in someone's life journey.  The black kid who is bored in school gets labelled a troublemaker and her parents who work in a low-income job don't have the time or resources to fight back and when they do they are labelled also as difficult. And thus the black kid doesn't get the same education (and are already disadvantaged because they live in neighbourhoods where their schools are less funded).

The target of me and white supremacy is more specifically at how we have internalized racist thinking (white supremacy as she labels it) because of all these structures and cultures around us.  The book is more like a self-help guide where you read a chapter, learn a new thing about white supremacy and then you are supposed to "journal" (that I will definitely put in quotes) and more importantly think and discuss deeply how you are racist and then work to root that out.  Chapters are on subjects like white fragility (how white people freak out when they get called on their racism and make it more about their pain), white silence (being against racism but not standing up when you see it in front of you), the way children are raised, the idea of being "colourblind" and so on.

As you can tell I am very much in favour of the goal of this book and so I don't want to think that the overall mission is not valid.  I also agree that the issues she brings up are real white people need to deal with them.  However, I do have several serious critiques of it. Primarily, it is very simplistic.  Both in the portrayal of the concepts and in the audience.  It really is a self-help book and so I understand why you are will only spend a few pages on what are incredibly rich and complex topics (again, when I say "complex" I don't mean some both sides argument bullshit, but that the history behind them and the mechanics of how they work are multi-faceted and vary depending on context; here is a one-size fits all that starts to undermine the validity of the overall argument).  She also has a very monolithic understanding of the white people she is talking to.  It feels like the only white people she knows are Nancy's she argues with on the internet.  Many of the questions you are asked are of the "have you stopped beating your wife" construction (for instance, "what have you learned about the dehumanizing ways you think about and treat BIPOC and why?").

After a while, it starts to feel like one of those terrible situations in college where you are surrounded by white upper middle-class east coast kids who are denouncing themselves and their bourgeois values, each competing to be more extreme and radical in unpacking their own class and race biases. And then in ten years they will all go on to be currency traders and homemakers in Greenwich, CT (this actually happened).  It all feels very culty.

There is a problem in general with this approach to white supremacy.  It assumes that all of us are already indoctrinated in it and we can't not be.  According to this book, we have all this hard work to do.  But at what point are we doing enough work to be free of white supremacy and who decides?  There is no option here for someone to say that they are doing the work and do not have white supremacist thinking.  So you either wait eternally for an external arbiter and meanwhile you live in constant guilt or you reject the premise altogether.  The first way leads to cult leaders and totalitarian thinking and the the other option makes you at best opt out or at worst be a total racist.  And even saying that would have people on the internet saying "see you are a racist!"

Maybe white supremacy is so deep that this is the only solution, but I can't help feeling there is a better way.  Again, all the concepts here are real and need to be fought against, but I think there needs to be a more nuanced approach and a recognition that there are many white people who are committed to anti-racism and really not approach the world with even the subtlest white supremacy thinking.

I think part of the problem with this book is that it has this unspoken foundation of 60s self-development ideas.  Those are great for some people, but not so great for others. It really wants us all to be in constant self-critiquing and development and to have all these emotional upheavals that help give us new clarity.  My mother is a therapist and her advice and perspective has been very good for me. I believe in personal development, but this method leaves me wanting, to say the least. There are a few sections of actual concrete work you can do to be anti-racist (supporting movements with money and time in the background, creating roles and opportunities in your job or organization, giving voices to BIPOC in situations where you have that power, etc.) and I would have found a book that emphasized those things to be much more helpful for me personally.  Maybe it is smart the way she did this book because she does seem to be going after white liberal women especially in the wellness field (which she mentions specifically several times) and they love that shit.

If you are someone who thinks racism is bad and that you are not a racist but maybe have some tiny doubts or have been confronted with accusations on the internet that angered you but you didn't really have a defense, I would recommend this book for you. Just be ready to not get defensive.  She really lays it out clearly what the issues are in a digestible way and it may open your eyes.

If you are fully on board with Black Lives Matter and all in in understanding structuralist racism and looking to deepen your knowledge and tactics, I would suggest you look elsewhere.

53. Hitler by Shigeru Mizuki

I am fairly well versed in the Second World War and in particular the rise of the Nazi party in Germany in the wars leading up to it.  I studied it in college and then much of my fictional reading and some non-fiction has been in this area.  Not to say I am some expert, but that the reality of Hitler and the Nazis versus the mythology does not come as something new to me.  That is a bit how this book is marketed and I hope that for some readers it would be elucidating in that fashion.

It really is a straight-up history, mostly a biography of Hitler himself.  It's very well done, going into a surprising amount of detail in such a rushed history.  Because it is a manga and there is very little exposition, a lot goes on in a few pages.  I suspect that for people totally new to the history, a lot of it might go past them and many of the character fade in and out. There are two nice little indices, one a roster of characters with illustration and the other a list of endnotes that go into more detail. Somehow, the combination of dark, sketchy, impressionistic but realistic backgrounds with the manga-ish cartoony expressions of the characters (toned down but nonetheless manga style) imparts a strong reality to the story.  The characters seem human.  This is what makes this book so effective.  It "humanizes" what happened, not in the sense that we realize these are complex people with feelings that we should feel sympathy for (there is little of that).  Rather that the rise of Nazi power and fascism in Germany was not some well thought out master plan but a series of complex interactions between the historical context and the individuals involved.  Grounding the narrative makes you realize that it really could happen anywhere, that there is no tradition or political structure so solid that it cannot be undermined or rot from within.

Of course in these times where an authoritarian takeover is happening in the United States right now leads to a comparison of the two situations.  There are so many differences that one feels it may be erroneously simplistic to compare them.  The situation in Germany (coming off of WWI, the crushed economy, the social and class structure not to mention technology) was wildly different than that of the US today.  It's probably more helpful to do broader comparisons of the rise of authoritarian regimes in general. The one big similarity, though, that stands out for me and is highlighted nicely in this book, is the complicity of the elites and business.  Hitler, as extreme and uncompromising as he portrayed himself, often backed down in the early days when faced with the threat of losing support from the big industrialists.  This kept them appeased (at best) and usually brought them onside when they saw how they could increase their monopolies.  Likewise, the upper classes, who detested Hitler's upbringing, consistently acquiesced to his power as they did not see him as a threat to them.  This is exactly what is happening with Trump now.  The editorial positions of the New York Times, normalizing his destruction of structures of American democracy with neutral headlines and constant "both sides" arguments will be seen in the future as one of the tools of propaganda that allowed him and his cronies to go as far as he did.

One thing that I did learn and am somewhat shamed of my ignorance is Shigeru Mizuki himself. He is, at least according to the biography, one of the most important figures in Japanese Manga.  He also did several history books on Japan's rise to the war and one about his own life as a soldier in WWII, where he lost an arm.  I would love to read those as well. 

52. Red Ketchup Integrale vol 3 (books 7-9)

7 Echec au King
This time Red Ketchup gets a new boss as his old is demoted after not being able to contain Red Ketchup.  The new boss is supposed to be one of the best, but it becomes clear quite quickly that he is too ambitious as he uses Red to get dirt on his superiors to gain more power.  He also is desperately in love with a fat trailer park woman and will do anything for her.  This is a theme we have seen a few times in Red Ketchup, the powerful man with the weakness for a woman far down on the social status.  Her thing is reading Amazing Facts, basically a News of the World tabloid and she uses her FBI boss lover to investigate the things she reads about (bigfoot, giant moles and eventually Elvis coming back from the dead).  He in turn sends Red to investigate who does so much damage that these fake stories start seeming real.  It all traces back to an alcoholic writer in the Florida Keys who is behind all the stories.  In some ways, this book is more his story and Red Ketchup is really just the catalyst, although there is also the grad student who comes down to interview the writer and the gallant next-door neighbour of the fat trailer park lady who seems vaguely familiar...

A lot goes on here.  This book reminded me a bit of one of the Parker stories where Parker is a vehicle for other character's narratives.  Come to think of it, you probably could do an interesting Parker/Red Ketchup comparison.  Echec au King doesn't capture the manic chaos of Red Ketchup at his best but it is still an entertaining story and another fun poke at American excess.

8 Red Ketchup en Enfer

(read May 12, 2020 during pandemic) This one was awesome, getting back to Red Ketchup stirring all kinds of shit up, this time literally in hell.  Red Ketchup dies saving some kids from a crazed cult leader in the bayou.  He takes an atomic bomb and runs with it on his back where it explodes.  He wakes up in hell, welcomed by the devil and all his demons.  Satan is so pleased to have Red Ketchup with him, he makes him the head of security for hell, where his extreme mania for order drives demons back to earth.  Meanwhile, Red's sister is sure he is calling to her and her search leads her to Dr. Beaudelaire Hyacinth, a Haitian professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal.   Dr. Hyacinth, it turns out, used to be a power voudou shaman but renounced his use of magic to study science.  Together the two of them head back to Haiti to try and find Red Ketchup and send the demons back to hell.  Even though we get classic Red Ketchup extremism, this is also just a really good story, well-structured and fun.  Dr. Hyacinth is an excellent side character, great NPC for anybody's modern occult campaign.

 

9 Élixir X

(read August 31, 2020, end of the pandemic summer) This final chapter (at least for now) in the Red Ketchup saga is an enjoyable story with some nice character development. However, it feels restrained and never achieves the chaos it sets up.  The main story centers on the insane Nazi doctor Otto Kunst who develops an elixir of life, which gets released into the public by his young model wife (who looks exactly like his true love the inflatable sex toy).  It makes people young, but also violently aggressive and addicted.  We really had the potential for some Red Ketchup mayhem but the storyline emphasizes Red Ketchup's attempt to find the assassins trying to kill his sister.  There are lots of nice touches and a pretty interesting development with the possibility of his sister becoming a second red ketchup.  A good read, but a bit mellow for Red Ketchup.

51. Mad Ship (The Liveship Traders Book II) by Robin Hobb

Wow!  This has been the least productive reading month for me for a long time.  Still two days left, but pretty clear that I will fail to achieve my 5 books a month goal.  The last time I went below 5 books was May 2019.  I have many excuses.  The biggest factor is the NBA playoff bubble which was running 4 games a day for almost three weeks in August.  I also allowed myself to fall back into a lot of wasted time on Twitter.  Things will tighten up in September.

My lack of reading forces me to question my phat fantasy strategy.  Mad Ship keeps up all the good stuff from the Ship of Destiny, and because I am so deep into it now, I can read it in snippets.  She packs so much story in each chapter that sometimes I have to take a break.  So it would seem an ideal companion to the NBA playoffs. The problem is that about halfway through the month, I start to feel the pressure of not meeting my monthly goal (and slipping away from the ultimate goal of restoring my monthly average to 50).  It makes it hard for me to truly sit back and enjoy this deep fantasy universe and the enjoyable unraveling of its mysteries.

In Book 2, we get a lot more of the pirate Kennit.  He becomes almost mythical, though it is hard to tell if it is his own insane ego or that he may actually be an important, fated piece in all the machinations going on around him.  He takes Wintrow, the ex-monk to Sa, under his wing and with his consort Etta and their pirate crew, they set in motion several important triggers that will rock the world of Jamailla, Bingtown and the Rain Wilds.  Their piracy of slaveships accelerates the confrontation between Bingtown and the Satrap (with the Chalced States behind him).  On the big magical picture, Kennit pushes Wintrow into a situation where he releases a sea serpent that is key to the story of the tangle in the prologues to each chapter.  There seems to be a lot of destiny going on.  We also follow the storyline of the rest of the Vestrit family as they put the mad liveship Paragon to sea to rescue the Vivacia and her captain.  

The political conflicts in this second book were great, complex enough to make them interesting but not get lost.  Most of the magical backstory is revealed here and it is really cool.  At first, the mythology seemed so different than that of the first trilogy, that I thought they were going to be basically two separate storylines.  Here, at the end, the reveal connects them in a really interesting way that gives you a totally different understanding of the dragons in the Assassin trilogy.  It's very cool.

I overally really enjoyed it, but there is still some balance with Robin Hobb that sometimes makes me have to put the book down in frustration.  Her characters are often relentlessly pessimistic and whiny.  Sometimes it makes sense, but it always seems to get pushed too far.  And you know something bad is going to happen to them before any good stuff, so it can be demotivating.  She also relies on people's stubbornness and stupidity as a plot device and sometimes it really doesn't work. It's a small part, but when Reyn is drinking himself to sleep to avoid the dragon dreams and his brother and mom come to him and he tells them to find Malta, they just ignore him and treat him like a baby.  Yet, they all were raised understanding the danger and power of the old city.  They also know the situation is super dangerous.  They would at least have checked on Malta. I found that really unbelievable and frustrating and it threw me out of the book.