41. The Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

The Economist had a podcast series called The Prince that went deep into the background of China's Xi Jinping.  It was excellent and led me to their follow-up series on China called Drum Tower, which is also quite good though a bit meandering and judgemental at times.  I was tempted to subscribe but am already overwhelmed with podcast and print content.  They recommended this book as a really good and interesting snapshot into modern China.  I found it at half-price books.

This kind of fiction is just not for me.  Let me start off by saying that it is well-crafted and a couple of the stories were quite good.  It comes from what I call The New Yorker school of short fiction, which is stories where not much happens and end on an ambivalent note that is supposed to give you some kind of feeling which makes upper middle class people feel that they are clever.  I have not read enough of these kinds of stories to know if they all have to be mildly depressing but I think that is also generally expected, as happiness and things working out isn't considered deep by anxious grad students.  The stories in the Land of Big Numbers were all mildly depressing.  What was really damning, though, is that I didn't feel that I really got that much of a better understanding of modern China.  This felt very much like the western judgement of all the flaws of modern China: quaint villages with traditions destroyed for crass wealth and modernity, the controlling but bumbling state apparatus and so on.

China has issues for sure, but I am sure there is a lot of good stuff about life there and I would have much preferred at least one or two stories of what is the good life in China today.  This all felt like a western visitor who was steeped in daily life but didn't actually grow up in China and is approaching it (and the writing) with an a priori critique.  There are many moments of local life that are interesting and did give an excellent sense of the day-to-day.  Two stories, one about a new fruit that has almost magical properties and the other about people stuck in a subway platform, were really good.  But the rest kind of bummed me out.  The worst one was about a young Chinese-American nurse travelling around the Grand Canyon with her douchebag outdoorsy American long-term boyfriend.  Oh boo hoo your boyfriend may be cheating on you and doesn't listen but you'll probably marry him anyways. 

I should have known but I have a vague memory that it was suggested this book was vaguely science fiction or some stories set in the near future and that sucked me in.  Also, the slick trade dress seduced me.  It was a quick read, the prose being tight and flowing and I finished it while stuck in traffic trying to get on the Lions Gate Bridge, so I appreciate it for that, but otherwise just not my jam at all.

40. The Young in One Another's Arms by Jane Rule

I found this in the free box on Esplanade and just had to take it.  So many factors contributed to this decision:  classic 70s painted cover, Canadian lit and finally it takes place in Vancouver where we were heading for "vacation".  I was wary, believe me, I mean just look at the title.  I was hoping that the location and period trappings would maintain my interest if the narrative got too cloying.  Fortunately, it is not an overly sentimental read, though spent too much time in the main character's head constantly fretting.  Unfortunately, I suspect the author was American and though living in Canada, didn't really seem to either want to or was not able to give it any real Canadian or B.C. or Vancouver flavour.  I wonder if this was a deliberate choice to try and make the setting approachable to potential American readers, like so many films shot in Canada but pretending to be the U.S.

The story is about Ruth Wheeler a middle-aged woman who owns a large house that she manages as a boarding house.  Her daughter died in a car crash a few years earlier at the age of 22 and her husband is away most of the time working on road projects up north.  She is effectively a den mother for a disparate group of what I guess is supposed to be a representative range of the youth of the late 70s, including a draft dodger and a young military runaway.  The neighbourhood they live in has been slated for development, all the houses to be demolished.  Hers was purchased and the dilemma is what to do next.  She plans to move into a condo with her older mother-in-law (also a tenant) and Warren, the shoe salesman with some kind of mental disability that she knows she can't leave him on his own.  Much of the book is the dramas of the various members.  There is a love triangle, then a quadrangle.  The deserter gets arrested.  The husband comes back from time to time and is a chauvinist jerk, though mainly in rhetoric as he doesn't actually block Ruth from doing what she wants.  It's all semi-interesting, though I never felt a strong emotional connection to any of it, beyond admiration for Ruth and her mellow approach to her charges.  Later, a Black character arrives, an educated gay guy whose shtick is to parrot stepinfetchit language and parody the racism around him.  This portrayal is very 70s, though he ends up being a cool and interesting character, about as well fleshed out as the rest of them.  What I did enjoy about the book is that none of the drama was exaggerated or hyped up to create fake tension in the reader.  It just happens and that made most of it feels quite realistic and natural.  There was one false where she recounts a childhood memory where a neighbour smashes all her watermelons because she wanted to taste them before they were ready which just seemed utterly false.

As I read this book, it reinforced the simplistic yet somewhat truthful idea that one could argue that every book is a genre book, with specific conventions that appeal to specific demographics of readers.  The Young in One Another's Arms is ostensibly just a novel, but ultimately it feels targeted to a certain type of semi-progressive but ultimately bourgeois female.  Just as I take pleasure in reading about men preparing equipment and calculating the odds of climbing a snowy mountain pass, I suspect women want to read about other women's constant inner monologue on their changing emotional state in reaction to their past and current events.

I read about Jane Rule and she was indeed an expat and a significant voice of lesbian rights and fiction back in the day.  She spent most of her life with her partner on Galiano and sounds like she was quite a nice person.  I have expanded my CanLit knowledge!

39. Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold (#10 in the Vorkosigan Saga)

I read this in the omnibus
"Miles in Love"

I love reading and since the dip from my daughter's birth, I have been steadily turning it into a constant habit.  It's kind of like eating for me now, which is cool.  I have to say, though, that sometimes it can be a bit of an effort, especially when a book is annoying or boring.  Reading these Vorkosigan books is the exact opposite.  They are like delicious ice cream sundaes that aren't too filling and not unhealthy.  I had set a goal to find a long science fiction series and many voices suggested that Bujold's saga be the one.  They were right.  However, now that I am over halfway through and really am getting (and really enjoying) the style and rhythm, I have the dilemma of wanting to plow right through them but also wanting to savour them and not wanting them to be over.

This dilemma is only amplified by Komarr being my favourite so far and it leading to a potential romantic situation whose outcome I am desperate to learn!  Komarr takes place on, you guessed it, Komarr. It's the planet situated right next to the only wormhole that goes to Barrayar and is thus strategically crucial for Vorkosigan's planet (and growing empire).  The Cetagandans did a deal with Komarr to allow them through the wormhole to invade Barrayar.  When Barrayar repulsed that invasion, they then came after Komarr, invading it and securing the planet and the wormhole.  Miles' dad was a principal military leader in that invasion and it ended with a bunch of Komarrian politicians and rebels getting massacred after having given up their arms thus earning him the nickname "The Butcher of Barrayar".

Several decades later, the power relationship has softened somewhat as Barrayar has tried to integrate and assimilate rather than dominate.  The Barrayan emperor Gregor has fallen in love with a Komarran scientist and they are to be wed, when suspiciously destructive accident sends a freighter into the massive solar reflector that is crucial to Komarr's terraforming project.  Miles, newly appointed and youngest of the Imperial Auditors is sent out with an older colleague and engineering expert Lord Vorthrys to investigate.

This premise alone is intriguing and satisfying, but this book becomes doubly delicious when they are sent to stay with Vorthrys' niece, Ekaterina Vorsoisson.  She is a stifled wife and mother married to a career bureaucrat who is just on the border of being truly abusive.  However, you define his behaviour he is one of the most dislikeable characters I have read in a book in a long while.  He has a rare genetic disorder that makes him a "mutie" in the Vor prejudice and deals with it in the most loserish way possible, by hiding it and avoiding getting the treatment because he wants to do it in some faraway place where nobody will know which is way beyond their means.  Even worse, his son also has it and he keeps delaying the treatment for him as well.  He is also just a generally insecure and mean dick and the wife has long suppressed herself to be able to survive with him.

What makes the book so fun is that Miles is immediately smitten with her.  She is his physical type and then keeps revealing more and more layers of a great personality with suppressed potential.  These books are very much romantic adventure fantasies in the Georgette Heyer mode (others have made this comparison) and here the comparison is particularly apt.  There are so many great scenes of Miles using his class, charm and experience to try and get her to like him.  The fantasy is on both sides as we want her to fall in love with Miles and we also want him to user his wealth and power to grant her the life she deserves.  It's good stuff!

There is also some cool space stuff (though at the planetary level) and a fun conclusion with some action.  I stayed up way too late.  Now I want to jump into the second one to see how the relationship progresses but also want to wait.  Dillema!

38. Killer Mine by Mickey Spillane

I'm not a huge Mickey Spillane fan and he is generally considered a lesser rated writer by hardboiled aficionados.  I think he is also slightly tainted for being somewhat extreme in his language that is a precursor to the right-wing Dirty Harry/vigilante mentality that really came to fruition in the Death Wish cinema of the 80s.  A friend of mine gave this to me and I thought I should give him a revisit, since to be fair, I had no memory of actually why I wasn't a fan of his as I hadn't read him since college.

This is actually two novellas put into one book.  The first, Killer Mine, is about a police lieutenant who is sent back to investigate some murders in his old tenement neighbourhood.  He is a good cop and had worked to put that world behind him, but his inside knowledge is seen as an assett by the department.  The plan is that he goes in "undercover" in the sense that everybody knows he is a cop but he is back in the neighbourhood because he has taken up with an old fling (who also was from the neighbourhood and kind of an old fling) who is still living there.   She is a police officer as well.  Big names have been getting killed and it seems to link up to something bigger in the mob.

The story was okay and I guessed the mystery quite early on.  Spillane also has a lot of weird very dated romantic interactions that I guess were supposed to seem modern and edgy at the time.  They aren't quite as psychologically convoluted as John D. MacDonald but have a similar tone and language.  The depiction of the neighbourhood, it's grime and various locations as well as the characters that live there and even some history was quite rich and well done.  A decent enough read.

The second story, Man Alone, also stars a cop, who just got acquitted from killing a mid-level gangster and taking bribes.  We start out with him sneaking out of the courthouse and getting in a cab.  He was framed and now he is pissed.  The plot here was quite convoluted and I got a bit confused, though I also guessed the main mystery (both involved somebody who was supposed to be dead but wasn't actually).  However, I quite enjoyed the protagonist's journey.  There is some good investigating (which I always appreciate) and some nice tough language.  This one was a good read.

So I'll re-assess Spillane somewhat.  He definitely churned them out with a certain cynical style towards selling books and there is a simplistic escapist fantasy element in there that is a bit too blunt for me to take him seriously.  Nevertheless, he sets a good scene and moves things forward.  There is entertainment here.

37. La Vie Secrète des Jeunes (volumes I, II & III) by Riad Sattouf

There are 3 volumes in total

I'm going to be somewhat ignorantly expository in this post, as I suspect most of the masses of readers will not be aware or able to read these.  I get the sense that among a certain set of Parisian, they were quite impactful at the time.  It was a daily one-page strip in Charlie Hebdo (the satirical magazine that became known outside of France after the horrible attack by some psycho extremists because they dared publish a picture of the prophet) depicting various scenes and incidents that Sattouf (though I wonder if it was just him or if he got anecdotes from other people as well) witnessed and overheard mostly on the streets and metro in Paris.

For the most part, they do not portray the people of Paris kindly.  He got a lot of feedback from readers not believing that the exchanges were real and he swears they all are.  I have to admit that some of the behaviour was quite shocking.  I had heard from some French expats here that it is very hard to be a woman on the street in France and this book bears that out.  There is a lot of really horrific street harassment which--while shit happens here in North America for sure--would just not be acceptable.  Also several straight-up violent attacks.  More common is frank sex talk and cliched Parisian rudeness, like a woman letting her dog shit right in front of somebody.

There is also an interesting theme of the various French people of North African descent. It was quite fascinating to see how Sattouf portrays these people who are often but not alway an underclass in the comics he did much earlier in his career than L'Arabe du Futur.  It helped me to learn a lot of French slang, some of which is common among young Parisians (the verlan, where they flip sylabbles on words so "noir" becomes "reno" which is supposedly a non-perjorative term for Black people) and other specific to those of Arabic descent ("le bled" literally means the village but is used as "back home" or "back in the old country").  Nobody comes off well in this book, but the portrayal of the French Arabs (what is the right way to label them) is particularly rough.  Without any sociopolitical context, it also can be seen at times as stereotyping.  I suspect this editorial stance was not limited to just this cartoon in Charlie Hebdo and that may have also been a factor in the attack.

There are also many frank sexual discussions that are also fascinating (and somewhat shocking as well) to read.  While sex is all over the place everywhere in the west now with the internet, it still seems that at least in the early 2000s, French women were way more sophisticated and sexually liberated than their North American counterparts.  And the men seemed to benefit.

I wouldn't say these are brilliant as they are just single-page strips and the art is kind of deliberately ugly, sort of a more cartoony and smeary Jules Pfeiffer (though the lines getting firmer as his style evolves).  But it is an eye-opening bit of anthropology and quite funny at times.

36. Pascal Brutal by Riad Sattouf

June is Riad Sattouf month here at Olman's Fifty.  Since stumbling upon L'Arabe du Futur, I have pillaged the library for his previous work.  Pascal Brutal come out in the early 2000's in the earlier phase of his work, though he had already established himself, where he was less polished and way more edgy.  It was published regularily in Fluide Glacial, which I need to learn more about, and then released in 3 albums (and later a fourth), which are what I read (thanks again to the awesome bande-desinnée collection at the Montreal library system).

These are fucking hilarious.  I don't think they could be translated into english, unfortunately, and it took me a lot of looking things up on the internet to understand some of the jargon.  Much of the cultural in-jokes about the French, the Bretons, the underclass and Arab/north african French I could only surmise or missed entirely.  Though reading Pascal Brutal itself is an education in these subjects and I felt that I better understood that part of the material as I advanced in the volumes.

The parts that do come through to any reader, and especially of my generation, are the anarchic energy and amplifying of extreme virility.  Pascal Brutal pokes at that hilarious intersection where the straightest, machoest toughest guy is so manly that he may as well be gay.  There are several scenarios where this indeed happens. His animal dominance of all other males and sexual irresistability to all females is also a big theme and super funny.  

The setting is also quite a funny take on the neoliberal direction France and the world was heading in the early 2000s.  France is now a depressed near third world country of concrete apartment blocks and discount supermarkets (the Toutattiprix "all at a cheap price" chain is a running joke).  We get glimpses of the rest of the world as well.  Belgium is a fascist gynocracy, Russia a savage post-nuclear wilderness and the Arab states a super progressive and united utopia.  It's very fun but also a painful reminder that sometimes the only way to not lose it altogether in the shit hole we have allowed our planet and society to become is via humour.

Pascal Brutal is in a similar tradition to Red Ketchup and the less well-known Terror Assaulter (O.M.W.O.T).  It's a counter-culture parody and examination of manliness and violence from the perspective of nerdy comics creators who love the genre but aren't of it.  I wish there were more!

The first three volumes are rougher in drawing and the stories more straightforward.  The fourth volume, which came quite a few years after the first three, has a more polished style, richer colours and takes the concept of Pascal Brutal to a more meta-level, with hilarious movie concepts and him leading the French soccer team in the world cup.  

"I'm going to make love to all of you!"

This one where he is training his dog and
gets set up on by some old enemies is my favourite

35. Watership Down by Richard Adams

My daughter is way into rabbits.  Obviously, Watership Down is the classic of the rabbit adventure genre and I had been wanting to read it to her for years but was wary due to my own memories of how harsh and potentially traumatizing either it or the movie had been.  These memories were hazy.  We finally bit the bullet and read it over most of the first half of the year. It's a fairly long book.

At first, it was a bit slow and took her a while to get into it.  There are lots of asides about rabbit behaviour and mythological rabbit stories, but as the gang of runaway rabbits make their journey, you start to get to know their characters.  Once they are settled into Watership Down and start to face the real threat, the neighbouring Efrafa warren and their control-freak leader Woundwort, we were fully invested.  The climactic ending was epic and moving.

I think it's fair to put Watership Down in the same classic fantasy genre epic as Lord of the Rings. It creates a rich alternate fantasy world that parallels our own and yet adds a level of excitement and heroism.  It builds up a conflict between good and evil, though interestingly the evil is less about industrialized world-destroying tyrants than an obsession with order and control of society.  The world destroyers are us humans and so powerful that it is basically the catalyst for the initial destruction of the home warren and then barely felt throughout the rest of the book.  As a particular fan of animal adventure narratives and the notion that our world to a creature of smaller scale can be as fantastic and escapist as any fantasy world, I actually would now lean towards Watership Down as a preferable read (though I haven't read LotR since I was a kid myself).

The one big bummer with Watership Down is how painfully and ignorantly sexist it is.  The adventuring party are all males, which while creating a good narrative need, took my daughter out of it at first and I've since read is also scientifically erroneous.  Warrens are actually more matriarchal in structure.  It's crazy how powerful and assumed our social stances are when compared to reality and especially discouraging when you see how entrenched they are in the fantasy and science fiction genre, which is supposed to be about moving beyond those stances.  You could simply swap the genders entirely in Watership Down and it would have been exactly the same and as good, except that nobody would have read it and those that did at the time would have probably scoffed at its unbelievability and lack of realism.  It would only get discovered decades later.

Anyhow, we got over it and ended up really enjoying it.  I strongly recommend it.  Needs to be rediscovered by today's nerds.

[VERY MINOR AND BROAD SPOILER ALERT CONCERNING HOW SCARY AND DARK WATERSHIP DOWN MAY OR MAY NOT BE]

I think now that I may have never actually read it myself and only saw the movie, which indeed has some pretty intense imagery and gore.  Because I had pumped up the harshness of the book so much, both me and my daughter were constantly in dread of some of our favourite characters getting offed throughout the whole reading.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that while it definitely has some real world death that comes to rabbits, the narrative as a whole is quite classic and heroic and in the end good mostly prevails.

We did watch the movie after, which is quite faithful and it has two sections that are definitely quite freaky.  The retelling of the gassing of the first warren has some imagery that while somewhat abstract is still effectively horrifying as the rabbits all bunch up in the tunnels. The final act is also just straight up really gory with some very red blood.  Not recommended for little ones but fine for 10 and up.  Her real issue with the movie that I thought was quite accurate was that it bunches the narrative up and everything happens too fast. It definitely should have been a trilogy.  We are going to check out the series next.

34. L'Arabe du futur by Riad Sattouf

I had already returned #1 to the library

I had vaguely heard about this bande-dessinée when I found books 5 and 6 (in almost new condition) in a free giveaway box just doors from our place.  I took them, started reading number 5 and then realized I really needed to read it in chronological order and so got the first 4 from the library (and they came via inter-library loan within a few days; gotta love the library).  I dived right in and basically didn't/couldn't stop reading until it was done.  This is the kind of book that makes it easy to not go to the internet (and makes it hard to turn off the light at bedtime).

It is the story of the author's childhood and youth, with a tail at the end summarizing his early success as a comics creator.  But it's really the tragic story of his father, a Syrian who did quite well in school that he was able to come to the Sorbonne, where he met Sattouf's mother.  He (and the family by extension) is torn between his main goal to build a palacial home on his hereditary land in Syria and the pressures of living there on him and mainly on his family.  Not only is Syria impoverished and a dictatorship, but where he moves his family too is way out in the country, which is even poorer and very traditional (trying not to be judgemental here, but from the mother's perspective also backward to the point of being scarily primitive).  It's fascinating to see how to our western perspective, the father seems strict and almost abusive in his attempts at raising his family in the Islamic tradition in which he was raised.  Yet from his family's perspective, he is going to hell because of his lack of practice and faith.

It's really hard for me to do justice to this book (or these books, as it is in 6 volumes).  It really is an epic tragedy but also chock full of humour, warmth and interesting observations on culture and politics and humans.  I was completely absorbed while reading it and moved with many emotions and thoughts.  There is an english translation so I would strongly recommend that you seek that out, via bookstore or library.

On a graphic note, Sattouf uses a slightly cartoony style and it deceives the reader into a lightness of reading that hides the depth underneath.  It is episodic and many of the narrative capsules are enjoyable moments in and of themselves.  The characters are made sympathetic with their round noses even if they often actually aren't and over time it makes the horror of what is actually going on really sink in (or sometimes slammed into you at certain particularly shocking moments).  It's incredibly effective storytelling.  

On a personal tangent, reading this book reminded me of a thing that went on right after I got out of college.  My girlfriend had met this dude from Morocco when she was travelling in Spain with her lesbian girlfriend a few year before we got together and he had become a kind of remote stalker.  He would phone her up from time to time and try to convince her that she was siding with the devil.  Her mother gave him her new phone number when we were living together (wtf) and I picked up when he phoned once.  I was aware of this situation and launched into a macho (hey I was in my early 20s) attack about how I was going to find him and kill him and then he did the same and we had a brief spazzy back and forth before we both calmed down and ended up having an interesting conversation for about a half-hour.  The guy was living in some small town in Morocco and believed that he was trying to save her.  It was actually kind of sad.  The poor guy was still obsessing over her and had some toxic mix of sexual/romantic attraction (she was quite lively and engaging with people to the point that there were boundary issues) mixed with fascination/revulsion of her being a lesbian.  I tried to argue with him on a philosophical level but he was more mollified that she was now with a man, though disappointed.  I can't remember how it ended but it wasn't negative and we never heard from him since, but who knows as we broke up a few years after that.

These fucking old school religions and their obsessions with controlling female sexuality end up fucking up the guys just as much (though of course it's the women who suffer).  The cultural differences go beyond just sex in L'Arabe du futur and it powerfully captures how this conflict can tear a family apart and by subtle extension also demonstrates how it continues to cause conflict in France.  Strong recommendation.  I am now on the hunt for Sattouf's other work.