53. The Suspect by L.R. Wright

I discovered this author and series because after decades, her work has finally successfully made it to the TV screen in the form of the new Canadian series Murder in a Small Town.  I backtracked to realize the books were written in the 80s and take place in and around Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast in B.C., which we visited last summer.  I found this, the first one, at The Book Exchange used English language bookstore in Amsterdam.  There were several others, but I wanted to see if I like it first.  Also, I suspect these should not be hard to find when I am next in B.C.

It starts out with a bit of a twist in that you the reader knows who committed the murder right from the beginning.  One old man, visiting another old man, bashes him suddenly over the head with an old shell casing.  The murderer recognizes his guilt and is about to turn himself in when realizes  why bother, as he will get caught eventually, he might as well live free for as long as he can. It's subtler and more nuanced than that, but you get the picture.  It's more of a "whydunnit" (I stole that from a Goodreads review), as well as an interesting cat and mouse game between he and the detective.

The detective is Karl Alberg, promoted from Kamloops where he had to leave his family behind as his wife had a successful business and his daughters doing well in school there (RCMP policy is to move their mounties around so they can never get embedded in the community which makes them assholes but also maybe less prone to corruption).  He answers an ad and meets the single librarian, Cassandra who moved from Vancouver to Sechelt to be near her older mother.  Cassandra has also become friends over time with George, the murderer.

It's a very absorbing and page-turning read, the kind of comfort mystery that readers can't put down and whose characters you grow attached to.  This is a great book to take on the plane and I actually forced myself not to read it at the airport because I knew I would get done too quickly.  I appreciated the locale and descriptions of the geography, though I found that aside from the old hippy fish seller, the characters were not all that quirky and you don't get the sense of some of the benevolent oddness that defined small B.C. coastal towns back in the day.  Maybe they get richer as the series goes on.

I won't seek these out but will grab them when I find them.  I do have one rant about the TV series.  How is it that in the year of our Lord 2024 fucking Canadian television productions still follow this dogma:

"A lot of U.S. media thought it was actually set in Canada, not in the U.S. They didn't actually grasp that this wasn't Canada," Roberts said. "We wanted to make it just a little more generic ... so that it would have the best opportunity internationally to succeed."

Are you kidding me!?  Have you learned absolutely nothing from the success of all those nordic and british crime series?  Or how about Trailer Park Boys or Schitt's Creek?  American viewers do not want watered down generic versions of mysteries they already see every night.  They want to see the unique cultures and perspectives of different places.  The very strength of the L.R. Wright series is that they take place in a uniquely beautiful and culturally interesting place in the world!  Thousands of American tourists now visit the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island every year.  It's just everything I hate about the media decision-makers in this country, the insecure, grovelling to the States, lowest-common-denominator thinking.  This is why the French-Canadians say we anglos have no culture.  We kill it ourselves out of fear and safety.  Just outrageous. Fire everybody.

52. Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie

I saw the Ealing movie adaptation of Whiskey Galore at an Ealing film festival in my younger days and quite enjoyed it.  I stumbled upon this trade paperback version of the book and thought I might enjoy it as well.  It served me as comfort and distraction during a trans-atlantic flight and then several subsequent nights of brutal jetlag from which I am still suffering as I write this.

It's a story of two small Scottish islands during the final years of WWII (1943 to be precise).  They are under rationing of many things, but it is the slowly dwindling and then finally exhausted resource of the island's whisky that is wreaking havoc among the psyche and relations of the people of the islands.  There are many subplots in this book and many characters.  The main one is the middle-aged English Sergeant who is engaged to marry the young Scottish lass, but whose father, famous already for prevaricating about everything, won't give his blessing nor agree on the wedding date.  The bad guy in the book, if there is one, is the local rep for English war security, who is the classic managerial popinjay spoilsport that nobody takes seriously.  He is always writing letters to his superiors, complaining about the laxity of the Islanders. We also have a nice school director who is also betrothed but completely beaten down by his puritan, domineering mother and too scared to tell her he is going to get married.

All these problems and the general mood and well-being of the region could be solved by whiskey and the solution arrives when a freight ship gets hung up on some rocks and turns out to be carrying 40,000 bottles of the best quality whiskey, to be sent to the US as part of I guess some lend-lease agreement.  The names, the descriptions of the bottles and the labels of all the different types of regional whiskeys was one of my favourite parts of the book.  I don't know if they were made up, but they were fun to read about and imagine.

It's a pleasant read, more of an exposure to the pleasant culture and people of these small islands, with an entertaining dig at English bureaucracy and superiority.  I was a bit confused at first, as I couldn't distinguish with any memory the various Scottish names (especially as several of them share last names), but once I got into it, it flowed nicely.

I left this book in a free book shelf in Amsterdam. I  hope it finds an appreciative next reader.

51. Ruler of the Night by David Morrell

I've wanted to read Morrell's more recent historical thrillers for a while now, but can never find them in a used bookstore.  I'm not sure what that means about his publishing success.  His books are published as big populist hard backs, though probably not in the numbers of huge name authors.  You would think some of them would show up used and in thrift shops, but so far they have eluded me.  I was in a different neighourhood and happened upon their library.  Never great pickings for English books in Montreal, so I will some times borrow books a bit recklessly, just because I want to leave with something.  I was psyched to stumble on a David Morrell book, and hastily took it out, without doing a bit of research.  Turns out Rule of the Night is actually the third book in his Thomas de Quincy and daughter Emily as historical fiction detectives.  It's not actually a trilogy, so each book stands on their own, but I nevertheless felt I was catching up and didn't have the connection with the characters that a proper narrative would have developed rather than expository reminders.

I think this added to some of the ungainliness I felt in the book, but much of it was inherent in the writing.  I was disappointed, I have to say.  The set up is really cool, with the early days of the railway and how the public, already hesitant but also fully caught up in the changes trains are bringing, are hesitant, especially after a brutal murder in a first-class carriage.  The ending as well, where we finally learn the truth of the complex mystery, is quite rich and clever.  de Quincy and his daughter are great detectives, with their mutual support and his opium addiction and her burgeoning medical skills.  It's a cool team.

It's the execution of the plot that I felt weakened its actual cleverness.  It goes all over the place, with several intriguing investigative threads and then suddenly about halfway through introduces a major character from de Quincy's childhood as a street urchin (and based on his real-life narrative).  On top of that, we suddenly get a really hateful major antagonist who does his horrible deed and is punished for it very soon thereafter.  It felt like that was supposed to be the climax.  I guess it was done to set up for the twist, but it ends up leaving the reader somewhat deflated and turning pages just to find out the mystery.

Even worse, for me, was the language.  Morrell is a very skilled writer, but it is the rare American writer who can grasp the subtleties of British dialogue.  Here, it's even worse because it feels like he simplifies it even more for the mass audience.  The dialogue between the police detectives, Ryan and Becker (allies of de Quincy and his daughter) and the evil peer is particularly unrealistic, both in the way it sounds and in the class relations that dialogue is supposed to be supporting.  Just felt super simplistic, like the Netflix version.

In the end, the backstory was quite intricate and clever, integrating a historical railway murder and de Quincy's life in a complex and cool mystery that made it overall a decent book to read and I may say for those of you who aren't sensitive to the nuances of British culture and dialogue in detective fiction might enjoy the series.  This may have been my one test of Morrell's Victorian fiction unless I hear that his others are far superior.  One good thing, for sure, is that it did convince me to read Thomas de Quincy!

50. Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams

Watership Down turned out to be such a hit that, despite my hesitation, my daughter demanded we get this out of the library and read it.  It took us a while as there were a lot of missed reading nights during the vacation and summer nights.  I was hesitant because I worried it wouldn't capture the magic of Watership Down and leave us feeling disappointed (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator being the biggest culprit of this).  I'm happy to say that Tales is a satisfying and engaging sequel that doesn't try to replicate the epic, original story, but builds on it and lets the reader be in the world of the rabbits a little longer.

The first part of the book are more tales of El-ahrairah.  I wasn't so into this mythology in Watership Down, but here El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle's adventures are more down to earth.  There is magic but it's not so powerful and abstract as the tales from the first book were.  Here they go on cool, scary quests and encounter (and often have to outwit) all kinds of fascinating creatures.

The third section is several short stories that continue the Watership Down story, as the warren evolves, changing its political structure to have co-chiefs one of whom is a doe, welcome new rabbits and expand to new outposts.  Leadership comes up a lot thematically, as Hazel, Bigwig and Fiver are now getting older and there are more and more rabbits who didn't live through the migration and the fight with Efrafa.  It ends with life in progress for the rabbits, there are issues and man is always threatening.  We are left as readers feeling very much that Watership Down is alive.

49. Negroland by Margot Jefferson

I found this in the new free book box in my neighbourhood (actually had an interesting collection of 80s and 90s paperbacks not to my taste but will keep an eye out).  I've long been curious about the Black upper class communities and their history.  I have to also admit that the slick cover design also went some way to me deciding to grab this.

At it's core, this is indeed Jefferson's biography.  We start with several interesting examples of the early histories of wealthy and educated Black families, following their ancestors who came out of slavery.  History, philosophy and social theory mix with her personal narrative to tell us about her and racism.  The racism stuff is really interesting; she demonstrates its complex and damaging impact in so many contexts.  You really get a sense of how all-encompassing race was for an African-American girl growing up in upper middle class Chicago to educated, well-to-do parents.  

The parts about herself were less compelling for me.  I get that its a biography and I do think she was successful in using herself as a vehicle to portray racism.  There is also a lot of adolescent anxiety and adult self-absorption that just doesn't interest me.  I mean we even get a whole section where she talks about which character in Little Women she would want to be and why.  So it dragged a bit for me and kind of fizzled out at the end, though not enough to negate the interesting parts of the first two-thirds.  I think readers who enjoy more poetic and intellectual style of writing might enjoy this book much more than me.  Not my jam, though was worth the time.

48. Beware of the Trains by Edmund Crispin

This post is really an admission of guilt to a crime against books.  I found this Edmund Crispin paperback before I had read any of his books and decided that he wasn't for me.  I kept it in my errands backpack as an emergency read if I ever get stuck somewhere and don't have my main book with me.  Short story collections are good for that. I have become quite consistent in my chore habits and tend to not have much waiting time and when I know I have a wait (like anything health-related), I will make sure to bring whatever book I'm reading.  So Beware of the Trains ended up in my backpack inside pocket for several years, getting more and more beat up as it shared the pocket with plastic bags for shopping and cutlery for lunches.  Taking off a chunk of the cover one day, I finally decided to clean it up and realized I had basically destroyed the book.  I've now taken to scrubbing my hands incessantly to get the little bits of pulp fibre that have dug their way into my skin.

Crispin is a great writer.  I enjoy the way he can paint an English scene and he often has interesting characters.  It's just that his books are primarily built around an intricate mystery that is supposedly solvable by the reader.  Not this reader!  These short stories are the same, which is kind of incredible, that he can come up with so many little mysteries.  These are like Encyclopedia Brown for grown-ups.  So if that is your jam, I would strongly recommend Crispin.

Now what to do with the body? 

47. The Lady in the Morgue by Jonathan Latimer

Latimer is in the "buy everything by him" category in my hunting list. It started with just looking for Solomon's Graveyard and not finding it to now just having his name (and still looking for the elusive Solomon's Graveyard).  His books are really fun!  It took me a bit to understand some of his stylistics as well as the cultural context and now that I do, I enjoy them so much more.

At their base, they are solid mysteries with a level of pre-WWII manly action.  They are also very much escapist entertainment where you get to follow detective William Crane (often with several quirky, competent allies along) as he gets to both party (with the fun lower classes and the fancy upper classes), do cool detecting and kick a little ass along the way.  Latimer lifts these pleasures to a higher level with his writing style, his complex plotting and most of all many interesting characters and locations/situations.  On top of this, like a maraschino cherry, is the drinking.  It's weird and fetishistic!  This was written in 1939 just a few years after prohibition ended and I guess alcohol was a big cultural deal for certain readers.  It's not just that they are almost constantly drinking incredible amounts of alcohol, but he also is very specific about which drinks and how much.  And the characters are always talking and joking about it.  It still feels a bit added; you could remove all the booze mentions and it would not impact the plot at all. 

The story here starts out in the morgue where two journalists and William Crane are waiting around to see if anybody will identify the dead body of a beautiful young woman.  This is all messed up when somebody sneaks into the cadaver room, kills the attendant and steals the body.  Crane was hired initially by a wealthy New York family who believe the body might have been that of their missing daughter.  Two rival gangsters believe it is the body of the moll they fought over.  Things get even more complicated and we get a raid at a taxi-dance hall, reefer addicted jazz musicians trying to get to the next level, multiple graveyard and morgue raids and fights and several parties.  There is a lot going on in this book!  Near the last third, it actually dragged out just a teeny bit too long for me, but it's still a lot of fun and the final climax in morgue is fantastic, involving hiding under the sheets on those rolling metal beds and then a fight in the dark.  

These books should be reprinted today, though they are full of that deep, assumed racism of the early 20th century which might be a deal breaker.  Characters use the n-word in every day conversation the way we might say Black or African-American today.  Even if you edited that out, these are probably a bit too niche to earn a proper reprint.  At least I hope somebody does a retrospective on Latimer's work.

As an aside, the marijuana scene is really wild.  It's a religious ritual where the musicians sit in a circle and chant certain sayings to certain gods, trying to get to the next level.  It requires multiple joints apparently as I guess the weed was much lighter back then.  It can't be a coincidence that in the scene where they are getting ready to go to the back room of the bar where the reefer party is going on, the bartender rings them up and the change is exactly 4.20 can it?!

 

This book is quite lovely. Printed in 1944, the paper quality is quite good and it has beautiful bright red cardstock pages inside the front and back covers.  Below is the promotion for their books for soldiers program which was responsible for both lots of reading from vets coming back from WWII as well as popularity for the various crime and action genres.  In the following pages are lists of various books you can order with quotes from real soldiers appreciating the program. It's very cool.

46. One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens

I stumbled upon a Monica Dickens book a couple of years ago and brought it out to the family seat to read during the xmas holidays.  My mother and sister immediately glommed on to it, one of them took it to read, then passed it on to the other and it never made its way back to me.  Typical.  They loved it so much that they started looking for her other books and this was one they got that I stole back.

It's a biographical telling of the year and a half that Dickens, born into a genteel family and bored with life, decided to get a job as a domestic in the role of the cook.  She recounts in a light and entertaining way each of the houses where she worked (from bourgeois apartments in London to country family estates).  She is admittedly not great at her job but does really try hard and improves.  It's not laugh out loud funny, but it is, as they say, thoroughly delightful and I would add, quite readable.  She has an excellent way of describing the worst kind of people in a way that is damning and yet excusing at the same time.  A large part of her enjoyment in the experience, which she shares with us, is the eavesdropping of the people for which she works.  Some of them are just awful, whereas others, particularly the last family, are quite loveable.

There isn't really anything deep here beyond perhaps a very nice anthropological exploration of the evolving relations between the classes in the context of domestic service in England at the beginning of the 20th century (it was written in 1939).  Underneath, though, you really do see how hard this work is.  You have to have a significant skill set (cooking is huge but also cleaning those old houses required all kinds of knowledge and techniques) but more importantly be really efficient and organized.  It's one thing to make a meal for your own family (a decent enough amount of work), but with these jobs, everything has to be presented correctly and with the exact right stuff.  It's kind of like running a private restaurant, not to mention that you have to be up before everyone else to get the stove running to make the hot water to prep breakfast.

I really enjoyed this book and will now have another name to look for in the gasp literary section of used book stores!

45. Green River High by Duncan Kyle

I went through my past reviews of Duncan Kyle and at least twice, probably 3 times, I referred to him as a poor man's Desmond Bagley.  I need some new material!  Well I always meant that in terms of perception and now after having finished Green River High, I am discarding it altogether.  Duncan Kyle is good.  He's real good.  I was almost weeping with joy at the setup in the first few pages.  George Hawke Tunnacliffe is at a turning point in his life, where he is about to be promoted to head clerk at the bank where he works and is extremely reluctant to take that step, fearing being stuck in the mediocre stability of such a life.  On his way to work on the day that he will have to decide whether to accept the promotion or not. he is delayed by an old man on the bus getting sick and because of that interrupts a bank robbery at his own bank.

Of course, Tunnacliffe has a background in the army and by foiling the robbery, he becomes a minor celebrity.  This scene in the hospital, where he is talking to his female doctor is the stuff that I absolutely love about good British men's fiction. 

Of course being a hero doesn't help this guy!   And I just love the "you're rather dangerous" with the subtle implication that the doctor is attracted to him, yet still professional herself.  This is what America so often struggles with, the understated nature of the true badass (Asia gets this as well).  Of course, the military background with the rugged but loved superior officer.  It's just all so awesome.

Because of his public exposure, two old contacts of his WWII pilot father reach out to him, each with intriguing, inter-connected opportunities stemming from his father's disappearance in SE Asia at the end of the war.  From then, the story is pretty classic well-researched exploration and struggles in the jungles of Borneo (with a side tour of action in the Essex hills).  There is one great wrinkle in the character of Mrs. Franklin, prim and proper churchgoer who was also a nurse in those same jungles and is a total badass in her own way.  She's a great character that really elevates the story.  Straight-up banger.

On a consumerist note, I really love these Fontana wrap-around covers.  I'd love to have a complete set in good order.  Here is a great site with each of them laid out flat.  Props!

44. The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji

This is another classic in the Japanese honkaku school, I believe actually shin honkaku, or new orthodox/traditional where the authors recreate the "fair play" mysteries of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, etc. that the reader has all the clues to figure out the mysteries themselves.  This one is hardcore into the classics as the main characters are a group of university students who are also members of the mystery book club and give each other pseudonyms of different classic authors (Carr, Ellery, Van Dine, Orczy, Agatha, etc.).  There are several tropes here that are quite common in much of the Japanese media we get translated in North America: the group of young people isolated on an island, the sad loneliness of the loser kid but the overall style and atmosphere is more straightforward and realistic.

The plot is that 7 members of the mystery club are going to spend a week on a small island that is infamous because the owner who was an eccentric architect built a mansion which then was the site of at least four people being murdered and the building burned down.  One of the students uncle, a real estate agent, ended up buying the island and let the kids stay in the remaining ten-sided building.  For them it is kind of an adventure, but little do they know somebody is planning an elaborate revenge against them.

There are two narrative lines in the book, one with the students on the island first just exploring and being themselves but then dealing with each of them being murdered one by one.  The other narrative is another student who had quit the club who received a threatening letter.  He starts investigating and we learn about the history of the architect and start to piece together what happened before on the island.

At first, it felt a bit wooden.  The characters used their nicknames and it took me a while to get a sense of who they actually were.  Characterization is not strong throughout the book as the emphasis is on the puzzle, but it does get more human as the trauma of the murders starts to impact them (and eliminate them so there are fewer to try and remember).  The mystery is layered and elaborate and I really got into it by the second half.  It's a page turner for sure.  I'm hopeless at figuring these things out, I finally started to cotton just when the author wanted me to.  It's a lot of fun and I can't understand why all of his books are not translated into English.

43. Path to Savagery by Robert Edmond Alter

Paperback Warrior turned me on to this book and after much hunting I found it (I believe at Pulp Fiction books in Vancouver but can't remember for sure beyond the happy feeling of seeing the book on the shelf).  I'm surprised it isn't better known among post-apocalypse readers because it really hits all the fun notes of the genre.  I would have loved this as a Road Warrior inspired adolescent.

The timeline is a little inconsistent, as different character's memories of the destroyed civilization seem a bit too fresh compared to the level of destruction and deterioration of society.  Falk is a Loner, picking his way through ruined America on his own, simply trying to survive.  He will glom onto Flockers to get some water and trade, as they are the small semi-civilized groups in contrast to the Neanderthals, who have regressed to nomadic raiding and destruction.  Falk's big advantage, other than his own experience and skill, is that he has a tommy gun.  We get several neat little episodes involving both groups until Falk discovers a ruined coastal city where the downtown is half under water.  Figuring he can maybe discover a treasure trove by making it out to the big department store, he discovers a small community that has already taken it over.  

The Paperback Warrior review goes deeper into the plot if you want to learn more.  Ultimately, it's just a fun action-packed read, with some hints at a greater storyline (rumours of some place called Genesis in the north where they are trying to create a new civilization).  However, the thematic through line is actually Falk trying to find the right woman, one he sees and feels in his dreams and then actually encounters.  The outcome is quite interesting.  I sort of dug it and felt that it pushed the sexual politics of the book slightly beyond the late 60s mores that were in the rest of the book.

42. The History of England by Lord Macaulay (abridged and annotated edition by Hugh Trevor-Roper)

I found this book in a free box in the community center where I sometimes play basketball.  It seemed a bit daunting, but interesting.  Now I wish I actually had the full edition and I may one day track it down and read it.  The full edition is roughly four times the size as this one.  Trevor-Roper does his usual solid job of putting the history into context and then picking out all the sections dealing with the Glorious Revolution that kicked James III off the throne, put William III on and established the foundation of England's strong parliament that would lead to its dominance in the world.  I had probably learned much of this in high school, but completely forgotten all of it but a few fleeting references.  This book was really informative.  Furthermore, it was also quite enjoyable.  Macaulay really could write and he has that great British characteristic of not holding back at all in his critiques and doing so in a readable way.  Trevor-Roper reveals all his biases and even where he is straight up erroneous and these make him ripping apart various Tory historical figures all the more fun.

Some great quotes:

It must be remembered that, though concord is in itself better than discord, discord may indicate a better state of things than is indicated by concord. Calamity and peril often force men to combine. Prosperity and security often encourage them to separate.

In revolutions, men live fast: the experience of years is crowded into hours: old habits of thought and action are violently broken; novelties, which at first sight inspire dread and disgust, become in a few days familiar, endurable, attractive.

Indeed, during the century which followed the Revolution, the inclination of an English Protestant to trample on the Irishry was generally proportioned to the zeal which he professed for political liberty in the abstract.  If he uttered any expression of compassion for the majority oppressed by the minority, he might be safely set down as a bigoted Tory and High Churcham

Also, a note on the length of time it took me to read this (astute readers will notice that it has been a month since my last post).  Part of it is that the book is long and there is a real slog in the middle where he goes into the mire of religious arguments of the non-jurors and their counterparts (another example of the absolute stupidity of religion where Catholic leaders in England had to twist themselves in knots to figure out how accepting or not accepting William as sovereign could fit into their interpretation of the bible).  But really, I could have finished it much faster but this July has been warm weather, Fantasia film festival and just hanging out in Montreal.

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.

33. The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

A friend recommended this book to me, sort of out of the blue and it looked up my alley (British dude walking) and I was lucky enough to find it right away at my local library.  Now that I have read it, I have mixed feelings about it.  First off, I have to acknowledge it is a very well-written book, very accessible and clear.  And the journey itself is insanely impressive and crazy, all the while its craziness is very much downplayed by the author in classic British understatement.  However, that understatement is also tamping down a lot of privilege going on behind the scenes here.  Stewart is basically a Scottish aristocrat with a possible military intelligence background and definitely a strong diplomatic background (which he has continued quite successfully into a significant political and academic career).  It's not that he doesn't acknowledge that his sufferings are his own choice and that he is consciously aware of the differences in his life context compared the people he meets on the road.  There is just a subtle attitude of slight superiority or something in this book that only once gets made explicit in a footnote where he tries to argue that the original British colonial exploiters in the Middle East were more engaged and connected to the locals than any of the "experts" coming in after 9/11.  Again here he is broadly right, but it's the attitude behind that made me go whoah.  Also the New York Times calling it a "a flat-out masterpiece" really doesn't help.

Stewart basically walks from Herat to Kabul, across extremely dangerous environments.  Until he gets close to Kabul, the danger is mostly environmental, but it is no joke. You do not get any real sense of the true discomfort he was experiencing.  He mentions quite a few times that his boots were soaked through but only once that actual temperate, which was -20!!!  He also is suffering from dysentery most of the time and eats the most minimal diet, with basically stale bread and water at points for several days at a time.  It's pretty fucking hardcore if you have ever done any actual hiking and read between the lines.

Also hardcore is his social/tourist courage.  He is basically walking through a country that has been engaged in 2 civil wars (to put it simply) first against the occupying Russians and then against the Taliban and now only slightly "pacified" by the coalition led by the Americans.  It's a really dangerous place.  Yet he just goes and knocks on people's doors and asks if he can spend the night.  As an individual on foot, most people are not threatened by him but more confused.  The Islamic tradition of hosting is also a factor, though much diminished with the extreme poverty (and destruction from war) that many of the villages he visits are experiencing.

It's a really interesting book, just to get a sense of how remote and removed these places are, not only from the foreign empires that are invading them, but even from their own cities and regions a few hundred miles away.  At the same time, Stewart peppers his narrative with lots of neat history (particularily the journey of Babur, Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor) so you get a sense of how connected it once was.  It is also a bit repetitive and not a lot goes on but him walking. I didn't mind this at all, but just noting it for those who want to argue that it is a masterpiece.  Anyhow, I'm glad I read it.

32. The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart

I'm going to laud the physical aspects of this book more than its contents.  Unfortunately, once again I can't remember where I found this, but I do remember that I picked it up because of the way it looked.  I also had an inkling that I had wanted to read some Mary Roberts Rinehart and that she may have been another forgotten female suspense author.  Unfortunately, The Bat was rather light, slightly goofy and too long, overstuffed with dialogue and fakeouts to artificially prolong what little suspense there was.  It felt a lot like a long version of the much-maligned Mr. Chameleon old-time radio show*, written more to appeal to people who want to read about the upper classes than actually feel suspense or solve a mystery.

The story seemed promising, as did the main protagonist.  The book begins with a prologue where various people of authority cry out how this new nefarious criminal genius "The Bat" must be stopped.  The specifics of his crimes are left unsaid but they involve at least two murders and he always leaves some kind of bat symbol behind, even a dead bat once.  We then get into the main, local narrative.  Miss Cornelia Van Gorder is an elderly aristocrat who has rented out a new summer cottage and longs for some adventure in her life.  Her main companion is her histrionically (I think this was meant to be funny) frightened maid Lizzie and her niece Emma is staying with her for the summer.  The previous owner of the house, a bank owner whose bank was recently embezzled by a teller of hundreds of thousands of dollars and foreclosed had died and his nephew, in need of cash, had rented it out.  Now Miss Van Gorder has received two threats to not move in and the previous owners' cook and housemaid had quit in fear, leaving only Billy, the Japanese butler (though overall treated fairly as a character, was pretty much the stereotype of the inscrutable oriental and was referred to as "the Jap" throughout).

Things started out okay, but soon there were just too many characters (the detective, the doctor, the new gardener) and inconsistent plotting so that some little things are revealed explicitly to the reader while others aren't so that it was just kind of a mess.  The woman, except Miss Van Gorder, are always frightened, screaming and fainting and the men are mostly obdurate and stupid.  I pretty much guessed the broad lines of the mystery before halfway, which given how bad I am at ever figuring out mysteries, is a bad sign.  The book is not terrible, and some of the elements I didn't enjoy are more cultural tropes of the period, but it really could have used a major rewrite driven by a more plot-focused editor.

Speaking of period, as I said it's a beautiful little book in great condition (somewhat dinged now that I read it sadly).  My wife took particular notice of the cover and asked about it (unfortunately she thought it was going to be some dark horror suspense).  I was quite surprised when I finally parsed the roman numerals in the copyright page (MCMXXVI) and they came out to 1926!  This book is almost 100 years old.  That is very cool and may make it a keeper despite it not being a great book.