Wednesday, January 30, 2019

10. Maneater by Ted Willis

What a find!  Man, 2019 has started out with a bang for my bookhunting.  I found the pulp haul at The Bookmark in Oakland right after New Year's.  I stumbled on this book at the free shelf on St-Viateur.  Man-Eater checks off so many of my reading preferences: 70s British manly adventure, beautiful Pan paperback, animals fighting for freedom against civilization and I've never heard of it or the author before!

The story starts off immediately, with an unnamed man driving a truck off the road into the moors, where he releases two lifelong circus tigers from their cages.  You don't know why except hints that he was as caged by their existence as they were by man's.  Then the fun starts.  An older man and a younger woman are parked near the forest for some illicit nooky.  When he goes out to take a piss, he doesn't come back and she freaks out and drives away.

The story then opens up into a wider investigation and exploration into the small villages in the county and how they are impacted by the escaped tigers.  We also go back to the tigers every few chapters, to see their perspective and how they are getting on in their new found freedom.  There are sort of two main protagonists. The first is the competent young Chief-Inspector Charles Gosford, who leads the investigation.  The second is David Birk, hunter and assassin on mental leave from his day job at the agency.  He's just chilling in his little hamlet off the beaten path next to the moors, tending his garden, taking tea when he hears the unmistakable call of the tigers.  He was raised in India with a famous hunting father and, though it is almost unbelievable, he knows exactly what he hears.

This is what I particularly love about these books.  The British are so good at understated competence.  There is always a great game recognizes game moment in the best British adventure books.  Here is one of the lieutenants describing Birk to his chief after Birk comes to the station to warn them that somehow there are tigers on the moors:
"Doesn't look like a crank either, sir.  On the short side, actually, but rugged, nose a bit squashed as if it had been broken some time.  Very sharp, bright blue eyes—first thing you notice about him almost.  Knocked around a bit, I'd say.  Odd manner, too.  Sort of detached, as though he was telling all this as a favour, wanted nothing to do with it himself."
And then later when Gosford first meets him:
He could see what Miller meant about this man's detachment; there was a curious air of completeness about him, as of a man able to stand alone, without the need of social crutches on which other men prop up their lives.  There was a calmness there too—no, thought Gosford, correcting himself—it was a sort of stillness, a poised, brooding stillness, like the moor, as if he were waiting, listening...
I love the use of "knocked about a bit" to mean super bad ass man-eating tiger hunter and world-weary elite sniper for dying empire still trying to punch above its weight in the world.  And of course, the stillness.  This is the impression I try (with minimal success, I suspect) to impart when going on job interviews or meetings with vendors.

The first half of the book is fantastic, capturing the district and a diverse range of characters and moments as the fear (and attacks) of two tigers on the region creates chaos.  Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to its potential as many of the storylines are abandoned or resolved too presumptorily and everything wraps up way too quickly given the scope of the chaos.  One is left slightly unsatisfied. It kind of feels like it should have been another hundred pages longer.  I can only speculate.  Still, a really enjoyable read and definitely a prized keeper for the shelf.  I will be looking for Ted Willis' other books.


9. Queenpin by Megan Abbot

This was an interesting (and good read.  It's noir, pulp, hard-boiled, etc. but a modern simulacrum.  It's like somebody perfectly rebuilt an old car but there were some modern parts hiding under the hood.  It's tight, tough and entertaining.  If it had come in fake dressing with dates from the late 60s I might have thought it was real, though little hints would have nagged at me.  It's the story of  a young, smart, working-class girl who does the books for a cheap bar.  She gets noticed by an older, glamourous woman who works for the mob, Gloria Denton.  Denton takes her under her wing and mentors her to be her sidekick.  This is the kind of book that was sort of predictable, or at least you weren't worried so much about where the narrative led as you knew right from the beginning it was ultimately going to be a power struggle between the girl and her mentor.  So it is safe to say that the girl sort of fucks up or sort of deliberately does what she wants by hooking up with a low-life, charming hopeless gambler.  Shit goes wrong in a deliciously brutal way.

Smarter people than me will be able to do a better analysis of this book.  On the one hand, you can at the very least, credit Abbot for wrtiing a near diamond perfect pulp book.  However, I suspect there is also a lot deeper shit going on here with the role reversals and how she plays with the power dynamics between the two women and the men in the world.   Or perhaps it can be criticized for being too much of something the male gaze would want?  I don't know, will go read up and will also keep her earlier pulp works in mind.  She has also gone on to a successful career writing "literary" fiction, some of which look promising and interesting as well.

Monday, January 28, 2019

8. The Innocent Mrs. Duff by Elizabeth Sanxsay Holding

I found this at the Grande Bibliothèque here.  It's actually a different double reprint of two of Holding's books (back-to-back so you flip the book over to read the second book).  The Innocent Mrs. Duff is from 1947, which would be a bit later in her career (though she wrote 4 books after it before dying in 1955).  I have to say that either I didn't get this book or that it is not one of her better efforts.  It did help me to identify some recurring themes in her work.

The story is about Jacob Duff, a wealthy New Yorker out in the suburbs.  His wife had died and he recently remarried a younger model.  They have been married for a year when the book starts and he is already clearly exasperated by her.  His distaste is all centered around class, somehow she can't do anything right, though she seems honestly to be making an effort.  He also is struggling with alchoholism, though in total denial about it.  As the book goes on, you realize he is an absolute drunk and that his life is spiralling out of control.

However, right from the beginning, I couldn't get a handle on his character.  His alcoholism accelerates so quickly.  I couldn't tell if it was him being an unreliable narrator or just that was the way Holding thought alcoholism works (which doesn't seem likely as the rest of portrayal is quite accurate).  It threw me.  Furthermore, the guy is just completely stupid, almost addled to the point where you wonder if he is being drugged by someone else.  Basically, he just gets more and more confused and paranoid and ruins his life.  There is some hinting at a mystery but there really isn't one in the end.  The narrative does careen forward and is entertaining and almost funny.  At one point he goes to the office to try and type up a fake ransom letter.  The secretary wants to do it for him but he can't let her see what he is typing.  He sits at the typewriter and keeps screwing it up and then stuffing the erroneous pages in his pocket, all the while the secretary is standing there waiting for her typewriter.

An odd story, kind of fun, but ultimately left me a bit puzzled as to what story she was trying to tell.  The late, great Ed Gorman writes a much more positive (and better) review that does make me realize this book is very well regarded by those whose opinions on these things count (Raymond Chandler said it was the best book about alcoholism).  He paticularily appreciated the portrayal from the drunk's perspective and the constant sense of dread that forces you to turn the pages.  I can attest that these things are very good in the book.  I just felt unsure of the foundation I was on from the beginning.

Friday, January 25, 2019

7. Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

She calls it a novella, but really it is a short story so I feel a bit cheap considering this as a single book.  I did purchase it new and separately, so economically it is quite definitely a book and I'll take that.  Anyways, I have been wanting to read a book by Okorafor for a while now. I thought Binti was the one you are supposed to read but I think I probably should have started with a real novel such as Who Fears Death.  She writes in a lot of different forms with novellas and sort-of series and some books for young adults, so it is difficult to find a clear entry point.

The story is about a gifted young girl who comes from a tradtional desert people and is running away off-planet to go to university, the first of her people to do so and against her family and community's wishes.  En route, the ship is attacked by Meduse and she by the luck (or perhaps her special technological skills) of a piece of ancient tech that she found and keeps as a good luck charm, she is spared.

I am reluctant to be overly critical as this is really a short book.  The protagonist is really cool, as is the setting.  It's written directly and enjoyably.  I gobbled it up.  It just felt a bit thin for me (again, the size so not a real criticism).  I feel that this could easily be a young adult novel (and perhaps that is a large part of its audience).  The resolution is very quick and things work out way too well (given humans), but again this is probably a function of the form of the story.

More disappointing, is that the progressive, racial themes were basically analogous to our own social issues, almost simplistically so.  It is like a 101 of post-colonial tropes.  The girl comes from a minority, dark-skinned tribe that wash, dress and decorate themselves very differently than the light-skinned majority on her planet.  The conflict that triggers the attack is because of a body part stolen for research and kept in a university museum.  I suspect this book informed some of the writing in Black Panther. 

I like these themes and recognize that their absence in sci-fi and fantasy are not an absence but rather due to the dominance of the white male viewpoint.  It's just that I wished they had been incorporated here in a way that didn't keep reminding me of the real world.  That being said, the final part of the book, where the heroine is transformed physically and makes a connection with the meduse suggests the setting will get more complex and take me to a new place without sacrificing the impact of those real-world issues on the narrative.  I do have the next one, so that should be interesting.

Despite my nitpicking, a good start.  I just want to go deeper.

Thursday, January 24, 2019

6. The Wild Party by John McPartland

Interesting, I just realized I read two books in a row with "Wild" in the title.  I have mixed feelings about The Wild Party and those feelings went up and down as I read the book.  It's jazz or trying to be jazz. Sometimes it succeeds and you feel the rhythm of the writing and the situation.  At other times, it becomes pretentious, annoying and trapped in its time.  I, feel, on balance that the ending unfortunately swung it just a bit into the latter, with a failed attempt at making some big theme about one of the characters instead of justing ending the narrative.

The set-up is great.  You start in a dingy jazz bar in LA and immediately get to know 4 pretty low characters.  Big Tom the brutal ex-football player and the leader of the gang.  Gage, the psychopathic knife-wielder, Kicks the loser pianist and Honey the wasted college drop-out.  They are broke, futureless and looking for money and trouble on a Saturday night.  Each has their own motivations and Tom is the uncontested alpha male of the group.  Right away, the dialogue and the inner thoughts are all hep jazz lingo.  I have always found this particular period of American culture to be profoundly annoying and it is on full blast here: weird pseudo-poetic incomplete sentences, lots of pre-60s labelling of various social roles and so on.  Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be McPartland's actual narrative voice most of the time and much of the objective voice it is straightforward and clear. 

They hatch a plan to send Gage, who is also good at looking and acting above his class, to a fancy motel to see if he can pick up a mark.  He falls upon this perfect couple, the navy pilot on leave and his debutante fiancĂ© who is into jazz (or "progressive" as they call it which I guess is the more freeform jazz of the time) and a slight yearning for excitement.  They get led out to this dingy bar where shit gets scary quickly. 

The trap and tension is very well put together.  It is hard to blame the victims here, beyond their mistake of going out with Gage to the bar in the first place.  Every step they take gets them closer to a terrible situation but the gang is shifty and savvy enough that there are no obvious outs for them.  There is a ton of psychosexual interaction.  Tom is portrayed as a kind of ur-man that is so sexually potent and masculine that he just takes women whenever he wants and women fear him and yet realize that he may offer them some transcendant manliness that speaks to them on some primal level.  This is probably all nonsense, but is deeply rooted even today in our gender relationships and so is impactful in the book. 

I generally avoid narratives where rape or the threat of rape is a central theme and I was hesitant to pick this book up.  It was just too beautiful of a paperback to resist.  It is pretty nasty in the threats and the thinking and writing behind them.  That theme is a big part of the story but it is more about these lost lives and the desperation of all the people who are caught up in the extreme, unfettered aggression of Big Tom's insane masculinity.  In some ways, he reminds me a lot of the character of McQuade from The Spiked Heel (written around the same time).  This conflict between civilized and animal masculinity may reflect some of the tensions in post-WWII society with GIs trying to live the straight life.  Where the book over-reached was in the psychological justification for the various characters' behavours.  It is based on simplistic and overblown ideas relevant at the time.  This was especially true with Honey, who was like 20 and supposedly had been a popular cheerleader type girl until she encountered jazz and men and pot and then somehow becomes a complete wastoid with zero confidence or future.

At other times, though, this book is tense and hard as fuck, quite scary and short.  So a good read, just undermined slightly by the need to try and be deep and jazz.

I am reminded of this classic comedy moment:

 




Tuesday, January 22, 2019

5. The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson

I noticed this sitting on one of the many piles hiding the front counter at Dark Carnival while having my big post-xmas book haul being rung up.  On a whim, I threw it on the pile.  I had initially thought my nephew might enjoy it, but he found enough books of his own and I ended up keeping it for myself.  It's a nice 80s paperback that I banged up too much.  I really don't like these designs, but age and rarity have made it much more appealing to me and I regret somewhat my rough handling, but it had to be read.

This is Kim Stanley Robinson's first published novel.  I don't know if this was the first place it was published, but it is part of a revival of the Ace Science Fiction Specials with an introduction by Terry Carr.  He talks more about the science fiction genre in the early '80s than the book itself, complaining about the popularity of generic sci-fi using rehashed plots.  It doesn't go into any depth, but is nonetheless an interesting glimpse into the ongoing tension between art and commerce in the genre at that time.

The Wild Shore is definitely a post-apocalyptic novel, and has many of the themes and situations that I enjoy in the genre. It takes place in southern California 60 or so years after a major nuclear attack reduced America to rubble and the remaining Americans to a hardscrabble frontier existence.  The community of Onofre works hard at fishing, farming and surviving after having built up a small foundation of civilization.  They also trade with neighbouring communities, including the gypsy-like scavengers, who choose to survive by living off the ruins.  There is a twist, though, we learn about a third of the way in.  America was actually the loser in the war and the rest of the world may be going on in its modern way, embargoing and quarantining the United States.  The Japanese control Catalina and patrol the coast, sending misilles from satellites anytime Americans build up too much infrastructure.  Japanese adventure tourists may be smuggled on shore and hosted by the scavengers.  This the young man Henry learns when he meets two travellers from the much larger San Diego to the south, travellers who also tell of the resistance.

It's a cool concept and it gets explored in the book, though not thoroughly.  The Wild Shore is more about a young man faced with difficult choices and making some bad ones and about the community around him and how it works together and deals with these changes.  Normally, I would prefer to stick with the setting and adventure stuff, but everything seems very realistic here and I got caught up in it.  Likewise, Robinson's style can be too straightforward and at first there seemed to be a lot of telling but as the novel progresses, you realize there are layers to the narrative.  It is also about writing itself, especially at the end.  I found some very inspiring passages that really captured the pain and magic of trying to write.

There are two other books that follow this one, though I felt that this one was wrapped up very nicely.  I will keep an eye out for them, but don't feel the need to read them to find out anything more that happened.  It might even spoil some of the magic of this book.

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

4. The Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse by Hugh Trevor-Roper

My friend lent me this book with a strong recommendation.  We both got our bachelor's in history but he kept with it more than I and said this one was really good.  He was not wrong.  It was also nice to be reminded of how funny and rich history is, both the content itself, but also all the crazy back and forth between historians.  I am glad I never went into it professionally as it can be painfully petty and vicious, but from afar it is quite entertaining.

The Hermit of Peking is a really interesting book because the story itself is interesting, but perhaps even more so it is the way that Trevor-Roper structures it that really captivates the reader.  There is a prologue where he explains how he knew of Backhouse but hadn't really thought much beyond his generally understood reputation as an eccentric and scholar living through the most disruptive times in China.  A Swiss diplomat contacted him saying he had an interesting manuscript by Backhouse but one that was quite offensive and he wasn't sure what to do with it.  They meet at an airpot where the manuscript is handed over.  It turns out to be Backhouse's biography but basically x-rated (at least for the 1970s).  This spurs Trevor-Roper to really dig into Backhouse's life. As we go through his research and archival detective work, we learn more and more about Backhouse's life and work.  Each chapter peels away another layer of the onion and things that seemed true and straightforward in early parts get exposed in an entirely different way as you learn more and more.

I won't go into the actual story, as Trevor-Roper does the job extremely well and the fun is in the reading.  To give you some tantalizing hints, Backhouse was seen as a historian and connected diplomat to the Chinese court.  He donated extremely valuable documents to a library in Oxford.  He also lied and forged and pulled several long cons all of which ultimately failed.  Yet he is not outwardly evil, but rather sad and lost (though ultimately a survivor).  Trevor-Roper does an amazing job.  I have two criticisms of his analysis.  Both are probably ones that I am only able to make because of the time period I am in.  First, there is a subtle but nevertheless omnipresent revulsion against sexuality and particularly homosexuality.  It's not hardcore, but rather the slight contempt of the supposedly objective protestant.  Trevor-Roper talks a lot about what a great and creative storyteller Backhouse is, but dismisses his autobiography as basically pornography, with terms like "revolting" to describe the explicit text.  Second, there is zero critique in this book of colonialism.  I mean ultimately, Backhouse could have only pulled off the stuff he did because of colonialism.  It is unstated, but this book really reminds you that the British presence (and the other foreign nations) in China was basically all criminal (and that is putting it mildly).  They destabilized a polity in order to rob it blind and that went on at the governmental level and at the individual level.  For decades, other Europeans bought into Backhouse's lies, partly because he was so good at it, but also because of racism.  They were all too quick to assign any failure or contradictions on Backhouse's part to wily Chinese machinations.  I guess I benefit from decades of post-colonial theory to be able to see those failings so acutely (this book was written in the 1970s).  He isn't excusing of the behaviour of the colonial powers, but also kind of glosses over it all. 

Great book, though.

Thursday, January 10, 2019

3. Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes

Dorothy B. Hughes, I am learning, was one of several popular and succesful female mystery writers from the middle of the 20th century.  It is extremely difficult to find her books today, though there are a few reprints and my library had a volume of three of her books.  Even though my on-deck shelf is full, I took it out out of fear they would get rid of it soon if it showed little activity (the english fiction shelves have limited space).  Now that I finished Ride the Pink Horse, I will return it and take it out again for each subsequent novel in the volume.  I wish I could do it on somebody else's library card.

Ride the Pink Horse takes place, I believe in Santa Fe.  It's some American city close to the border of Mexico on the weekend of a big festival called the Fiesta.  Sailor has arrived on the bus from Chicago in a hunt for The Sen, the corrupt politician/syndicate boss that plucked him out of the south side and trained him to be a smooth gangster.  As Sailor struggles to find a room (he had no idea about Fiesta), we slowly learn of the background of his beef with the Sen.  There is also a high-ranking homicide detective in town (he got a room), friendly with Sailor because he knew him also from the old neighbourhood.  The three of them circle a narrative around the murder of the Sen's wife, but really the story is about Sailor, who he is and what choices he has made and will make.

This is very much existentialist noir.  It is almost surreal, with the Mexicans and Indians representing other worlds, other histories and the Fiesta making all the scenes crowded and frenetic.  Sailor befriends the fat old man who cranks the merry-go-round the kids love to ride, who himself has had a violent path but now seems perfectly content to make the fun ride for the kids and sleep in the park.  These characters and others force Sailor to confront who he is and the journey and what holds you to the book is to see what he learns.

I tend to not go for the symbolic and prefer a concrete mystery (and there is one here).  In this case, the writing and the very real-seeming background of Sailor were strong and compelling and I thoroughly enjoyed the book.  This is literature folks and there is absolutely no reason on that merit alone that this book should not be seeing endless reprints as we see today for Chandler, Hammett, etc.  It's a shame.

Tuesday, January 08, 2019

2. The Shadow of Suspicion by Emilie Loring

The cutoff top is the book, not my photo
Part of the really great pulp haul from the Bookmark in Oakland, this was really not a very good read.  The premise is cool and it had some potential, but was ultimately undone by obvious plotting, inconsistency and a pretty insipid and uninspiring female protagonist.  It's about a young woman who goes to Maine to support her widowed aunt who must stay in her lumber camp to ensure they cut down enough wood to pay off the debts her husband incurred.  There is trouble at the camp, unrest among the men and other more mysterious whisperings.  The previous manager who was well-liked was killed in a hunting accident (this is the first of the bad plotting: he was shot in the head and it was dismissed as an accident even though they never discovered who did it).

So that all sounds good, but because this is 1955 there has to be some steely-eyed, firm-jawed dude who is actually going to do all the investigation and commanding and stuff.  His character also had potential, a Korean vet who had been imprisoned and now was on the hunt for a commie traitor he had discovered while being released.  He accidently discovers that the traitor may well be at the lumber camp. He is supposed to be this totally awesome dude "whose manners are invariably charming" except when he spazzes out and accuses the heroine of having fallen in love with the dude who drove her up to the camp.  That's like 20 pages in!  I am familiar with the sexual conventions of books of this period, but there is a subtlety even within those restrictions. This book was just weird, with her immediately falling in love with this guy and he obviously in love with her and yet not consummating for no reason other than stilted conversations.  His eyes are always flashing and her cheeks blushing. It's just badly constructed and leaves the reader with zero emotional romantic feelings about them.

I read up on Emilie Loring and she was really prolific.  She also died in 1951 and her family kept publishing under her name using a ghost writer and scraps of her remaining writing.  They did not do a very thorough job here.

Most interestingly, check out this list of other books at the back. This is like an excellent survey of the very specific nurse/female doctor romance/thriller sub-genre from the mid-50s.  You can just feel the tension between the conflicting cultures of traditional female domesticity competing with the dawn of the professional woman ("Has a dedicated nurse the same right to happiness as other women?" "Her ideal of nursing conflicted with her fiancĂ©'s ideas of the duties of a wife", "Dr. Gail Benton's rise in the medical profession is threatened by the imperious demands of her woman's heart")





Monday, January 07, 2019

1. Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson

I have been looking for a book by Lionel Davidson for quite a while now.  I did not note it down, but I believe that I heard his name the first time via Kenneth Hite (gaming luminary and a genre fiction reader of impeccable taste) in the fantastic Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff podcast.  I finally stumbled upon Kolymsky Heights at Moe's. I see now that this was his last book and the first one he had published in over 16 years, so I clearly still have some searching to do.

I sort of wished I was reading this in the summer, as it takes place mostly in Siberia during winter and you really do feel the insane cold there.  I read it in Berkeley and Montreal in the winter and I still think it helped, as it made me not feel so bad about it being -7 and somewhat windy here.  I am not actually sure it is truly possible to do a lot of the things that happened in the book when it is in the -30s and -40s (like could you really even tighten bolts in that temperature?  Spend the night, even in a super awesome sleeping bag?  Wouldn't you just die?).

The premise of the story is a bit preposterous, even slightly science-fiction.  In a hyper top secret chemical laboratory in Siberia, an old scientist discovers a perfectly frozen cavewoman.  Because of the security levels, he has committed to spend the rest of his life there (as have all the staff, except the native Chukchis who help with some external work because the authorities know they will only return to their reindeer herds).  He manages to sneak out a message to an old colleague that he has important scientific info to share and that he has a way of getting that info out.  He just needs someone to come to him. This someone is Dr. John Porter, academic, eccentric and (as we learn) total badass First Nations dude from northern Manitoba.  Because he is indigenous to Northern Canada as well as being a languages expert, he is the only person who can possibly sneak into the region and somehow access the top secret base.  It also turns out that this guy is super skilled at all kinds of things.  He can fight, he can act, he knows a wide range of industrial manual labour skills (can load merchant ships, drive winter trucks, fix vehicles).  It's all very understated and the details of his actual background are never revealed (he says once he is used to living rough).

What makes the book work are the subtle and complex details of all the spy stuff. How he gets his various identities, how he gets into (and around once there) the region, are interesting, well thought out and really fun to read about.  The location itself is really cool.  I really knew next to nothing about Siberia and here you get a nice look at the industrial and economic engines that drive it, some of the history (how much of it was settled by ex-prisoners of Stalin's camps) and the insane geography and cold.  In the summer, you have to fly everywhere because it's all mushy permafrost.  It is only until winter that the trucks start rolling, across frozen river beds often!  Finally, there are several groups of indigenous people who are integrated into the world there and Davidson portrays the relationship between the Russian state and them in an interesting way.  I don't know how much of it is true or accurate but as a broad portrayal, it certainly made me interested.

I suspect he has better books in him, but this was entertaining and innovative.  Lionel Davidson stays on the hunt list.

Saturday, January 05, 2019

2018 Year-end Wrap-up and Berkeley book haul

Here is what is awaiting me for 2019

Here is what I wrote for my 2018 objectives in my 2017 wrap-up post:  "My fundamental goal is to read 50 books in 2018.  My secondary goal is to try and get past that to whittle away at my deficit.  We shall see!"

I am very glad to be able to write that I did indeed achieve both goals.  I read 57 books in 2018 and have reduced my deficit  down to 63 (that is how many books I am behind to achieve an annual average of 50 books a year).  Though I am crowing now, things did not look so rosy halfway through 2018.  My reading was way down.  I only read a single book in February (probably due to Assassin's Creed: Origins). Surprisingly, I also only read a single book in each June and July.  Once again, it was my August vacation to Vancouver that kicked off the reading.  And then I just started surging.  My new job is going great (I used to be in charge of everything now I am responsible for three things and sharing that responsibility).  My daughter is in school and logistically that is going really well.  Google+ is shutting down and I pulled myself away from that and Twitter big time in the second half of the year.  I basically fell in love with reading again this fall.  I just really got into going through the books on my on-deck shelf and seeing that size reduce to the point that I had to actually find some books to add to it near the end.  Extremely satisfying!  I used to have to hem and haw over whether I should get a book.  Now I go to a bookstore and need to find something. This allowed me to go hogwild in my book buying over the holidays and now my on-deck shelf is full of interesting books I really am excited to read.

Again, my reading went across a wide swath of genres and periods, though mainly anchored by my interest in crime fiction from the 20th century.  I read 15 books by female authors, up from 2018, but still showing a preponderance of white males. I learned a few things: Anthony Trollope is great but not as perfect as I first found him, my tepid opinion of Alistair Maclean did not change after reading two of his books, and my random old paperback purchases were often though not always more enjoyable than I think they will be in the actual reading.  15 of the books I read in 2018 were old paperbacks by authors completely unknown to me, that I found intriguing.  More than half of them were really quite good and only one mediocre (Takeover Bid, which had the coolest cover).

There were no major highlights for me this year, but I have to recognize Daniel Suarez for the contemporary techno-action fun he delivered for me in three books.  I also got deeply sucked in to God Is an Englishman, so much so that I almost wished I had ended the year on it. I would love to find another book by Rosemary Kutalik or even find out more about her.  I hate even to mention it here, but a major lowlight was the piece of shit State of Fear by Michael Crichton.  Fuck that guy.

I was going to say that it was a rocking year of music but that isn't totally accurate, as it was really more like a rocking half-year.  I hope in 2019 to be a bit more steady, consistently reading every month so that I don't have to rush at the end of the year if I really do pick up momentum.  My objectives in 2019 will continue to be to read at least 50 books, to cut into my overall deficit and a new addition, to read at least 3 books a month.

Fortunately, I have a refilled on-deck shelf, with only a couple books that weren't added this december in the very rich book haul I added over the holidays.  Check them out:

Top 3 are from Moe's, bottom 3 from Half-Price Books:

Bookmark Bookstore (run by Friends of the Oakland Public Library):  A Peter Rabe, a Mary Stewart and two Parker paperbacks!  I am joining up as a FOPL.


 And finally the inestimable Dark Carnival: