24. The Green Wound by Philip Atlee

Philip Atlee's Joe Gall series is quite well respected by fans of manly spy and crime fiction from the '60s and '70s. I read The Canadian Bomber Contract, which I took a little less seriously as the anachronisms and cultural assumptions hit a bit closer to home for me (it took place in Montreal). It was also later in the series and I think was getting a bit more over the top. Also, The Green Wound was recommended as one of the better in the series. For whatever reason, I approached this one a bit more seriously.

Atlee is a good writer with some great turns of phrase. He uses some colloquial language of the time but it rarely becomes so pervasive that it is annoying. Rather it fits in with the rest of his style and gives the book a slightly poetic prose that can be quite entertaining to read. He also has some great locations and situations. Here, the bulk of the book takes place in a small southern town that is basically under the control of one man and fairly stable. No problems really, but another plot thread leads the CIA to send Gall here to check some suspicious stuff out and he undercovers a plot to overthrow the power structure by secretly enfranchising the black population and voting in black leaders. A pretty neat idea and the way it goes down is quite cool. Of course, the actual power behind this move is not some civil rights organization, but an evil external force that wants to bring down the U.S. and this is just the beginning of a larger campaign of destabilization.

The problem with this book, though, is that the main plot, which I just described only makes up about 60% of the book. There is all this complex and unnecessary cruft of Joe Gall's past and the machinations of the intelligence organizations in the government and Washington and it's all very roundabout so you have no idea of where the book is going until about two-thirds of the way in. And then when you do have a better picture of what the main story is, the situation in the town is suddenly broadened into a much bigger conspiracy involving white slavery and the caribbean islands and the reader is jumping from place to place chasing after the big baddie. It all felt a bit disjointed and unsatisfying. I think maybe that readers of the time, especially ones who followed Gall in a series enjoyed that kind of stuff, but it was just distracting to me. I would have much preferred it focus on the story in the town and the local politics. The description of the black side of town and the way the power structures were laid out and the riot that followed the election were all really top-notch. Atlee has it in him, he just didn't seem to be motivated to focus his skills into a single superior story. But that may have been a factor of what the audience wanted at the time.

Not a terrible book by any means and if I were stuck in an airport or some remote hotel I could do a lot worse than have a Philip Atlee book at hand.

23. The Red Right Hand by Joel Townsley Rogers

I think that Mount Benson Report blogger HannibalChew gave me this book, mainly because of the cool cover, but it could have been for the book itself, which after having done some research, I see is fairly well known and respected by crime novel enthusiasts. The respect is well-deserved as this is an absorbing, unsettling and genuinely creepy book that manages to keep the reader guessing both in the fiction and at the meta-level, trying to determine if the author is messing with you or not.

Reading this book made me realize how much at times our expectations can inform our interpretation of a book. As a rule, I try to read as little as possible about a book once I've decided to read it, including (and often especially) the blurb on the back page or any business in the first couple pages. So I really had no idea what this book was going to be like. I did, though, have some assumptions based on the time it was written (1945) and the look of the cover. I thought it might lack sophistication, addressed to a simpler audience by a hack author. However, right from the beginning of the book, there is a strong suggestion of an unreliable narrator. There are a lot of hints that the narrator himself may be the murderer and while I was really enjoying the rich prose and the slow layering of plot (it keeps backtracking from the present, revealing more and more), I kept thinking to myself, 'either this book is really obvious and the narrator is the murderer and I'm going to be annoyed or there is something a lot more complex and interesting going on here.' It was my own built-in chronology = progress assumption that made me doubt the quality of the author. Fortunately, the characters, the situation and the narrative of the mystery, as well as the writing style, that my own hesitation only detracted from the pleasure of reading it at a couple moments.

The story is told from the point of view of a young surgeon, Dr. Riddle, whose car crapped out somewhere in Northern Connecticut. He stumbles upon a hysterical young woman who had driven up from New York City with her paramour to get married. Along the way, they had picked up a hobo who had then attacked the boyfriend, and failing to find the girl had stolen the car, with the boyfriend in it and gone on a bit of a crime spree, running over a local dog and a local resident. At the time you start reading the book, the county is alerted and there is clearly a lot more story and information yet to come. The doctor is at a country house with the passed-out girl. The authorities are out hunting down the hobo, but the doctor keeps dropping hints that there were other murder victims and other characters that the reader hopes to learn more about.

So the narrative structure follows this pattern of the doctor presenting a new contradiction or problem in the story and then going back in time to expand on that piece of the narrative. Sometimes, it seems to come from an omniscient perspective, the detail of someone else's story is so great, but he always reminds the reader that this is the doctor piecing everything together. But the doctor is weirdly connected to everything. He looks kind of like the hobo (whose almost clown-like appearance is lovingly and repeatedly described), the hobo's hat turns out to be an old one of his and his car was parked in a part of the road the hobo must have gone by with the stolen car and victim only the doctor never saw him. And he keeps referring to this headache. I'll leave explaining the story at that, because it is the unraveling of all the little pieces that is part of the fun for the reader. I'll risk a general spoiler in saying that the ending is satisfying and interesting. There is no obvious cop-out.

I was also quite surprised at the level of gore and violence. There are some harsh moments and descriptions here, including facial mutilation that would seem fitting in an episode of CSI:NY. Aside from being a really enjoyable read, The Red Right Hand is also a strong reminder for me not to make assumptions about the nature of a book based on when it was written. Shit was just as hardcore back in 1945 as it can be today.

22. The Destroyer #106: White Water by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

You really never know what new world you are going to fall into in the used paperback game. I went up to the great S.W. Welch bookstore with my wife to sell some of our recently read books to clear some shelf space. We had the neighbour's dog in tow and I am on a strict no new books embargo, so I waited outside. They had the $1.00 book table out and I couldn't help but notice the cover you see here. I'm not a fan of most of these series of men's military action books that were produced in series, though I like to keep an eye on them and there are definitely some gems in there. I looked closer and seeing the lady with the 4 arms on the cover was just too much to resist. So I started skimming the book and lo and behold it is strongly centered around an environmental theme, the over-fishing of the ocean. I went to the back and saw that #107 is about plagues of insects attacking the world. Going against my embargo (and convincing myself that the book would be a quick read, especially with a train ride to Toronto for Easter weekend), I picked it up.

Well it turned out to be even wackier than the cover implied. The hero of the book Remo Williams (does that ring a bell to anyone in their '40s?) practices this super high level Korean martial art that allows him to run on water, smash people's teeth in with a flick of the finger and other pretty over-the-top stuff. I was quite pleased to see that they take this concept to the limit, with Remo trapped in the Atlantic and running out of the energy needed to maintain his body temperature, so he punches out a shark's teeth and rides it back to shore, but near the end of the trip, he rips open the shark's back and eats its meat raw in order to gain enough energy to make the trip! Colour me impressed. This was almost a send-up of these kinds of books.

So I did a little research and it turns out that this series has a strong following and was purposefully intended to be a bit of a humourous satire of the genre, but at the same time there was enough there that people kept buying them for over 100 books! This one sort of petered out at the end, and there is no way I'll read the whole series, but I'd dabble into some of the earlier ones. According to what I read online, books 1 and 2 are very straightforward and it isn't until the third that things really go in the new "neo-pulp" direction.

21. The War with the Newts by Karel Čapek

Wow, what a cool book! Sometimes truly classic sci-fi can be a bit austere and difficult to get through (say, for instance, We or Flatland), but this was thoroughly enjoyable. It was written in 1937. At the time, Capek was a succesful playwrite and satirist. The War with the Newts is basically the story of what would happen if intelligent, industrious creatures were discovered that would do in the sea what we do on land, e.g. build and populate.

There is no real protagonist, nor a single storyline. The book is more like a fake collection of historical artifacts, with some fiction thrown in highlighting various episodes in the history. It starts off with the captain of a merchant ship who first discovers these 'devils' (as the natives call them) in an avoided lagoon on a south pacific island where the pearls are mostly harvested. Realizing that not only is their lagoon filled with oysters, but that the newts are capable of harvesting them extremely efficiently for the cheap price of some knives to fight off sharks, their natural predators, he sets about making friends with them.

The newt's 'intelligence' is a major issue in the book. They can learn and grow increasingly more sophisticated. But they never seem to develop any real culture or individual personality. A lot of the book is about the various human reactions to the existence of the newts, socially, intellectually and ultimately economically. When it is discovered that they are capable of great underwater engineering projects, they soon become turned into labour commodity, with giant newt farms and newt trading markets. A lot of this section really made me think of District 9, except this book actually takes the concept much further and it really does make you think, why weren't the prawns in District 9 exploited for labour?

The War with the Newts is funny, prescient and really enjoyable. This is true science fiction at its best, in that the author came up with a novel concept and then took it to its limit. In doing so, he also reflects a very critical mirror back on humanity and our own social and political limitations. Top notch and definitely deserving of its classic status.

20. The Stringer by F. F. Langan

I picked this one up at Chainon, our local thrift store (affiliated with a women's shelter) despite my personal embargo on buying new books until I get my on-deck shelf whittled down to a reasonable size. I bought it because it was set in 1960's Montreal and had an energetic writing style in the first few pages I read. Though it is not a great book, my instinct to pick it up was correct as it had the kind of information I was looking for. It's not a terrible book either and I had no trouble making it through to the end.

It's the story of Jack Devlin, an ambitious and self-centered young anglo journalist in Montreal working for CBC television (though the network is not named) and freelancing for Time Canada. Thanks to a bit of luck and a pretty aggressive journalistic instinct, he manages to get ahead of the curve on a series of interlocking stories involving separatist bombings and corruption and organized crime among the longshoreman's union. He is also constantly drinking and fucking, going to a series of different bars and restaurants throughout the day and juggling up to 4 different women. The bit of luck is that he wakes up to a bomb going off in the mailbox of the house of a wealthy friend of his where he has ended up after a night of partying. He happens to be the first on the scene and sees the dead body of an innocent french-canadian servant who was going to mail a letter in the booby-trapped mailbox. One clue leads to another and soon Devlin has leads on the head of the longshoreman's union (who may be funding the revolutionaries) and connections into MPs offices where the plan to use the War Measures Act in Quebec is brewing. He also is unknowingly being made a patsy of by the organized crime unit of the Montreal Police, who use his articles as bait to get criminals to come out of the woodwork.

The stringer is very baldly structured. Everything is told very deliberately and the point of view keeps changing, sometimes so quickly you aren't sure whose it is for a sentence or two. I'm not a big proponent of the "show, don't tell" dogma of storytelling, but here the telling is so blatant that the book lacks any elegance or flow. However, it keeps moving forward and doesn't try to get too tricky (well, actually it does, with a couple of unnecessary foreshadowings and false suspense, but they are so brief and badly done that you blow right by them), so that none of this is really annoying. And on the positive side, the stuff he does tell is really interesting. Clearly, Langan lived the world of crazy '60s Montreal journalism and he shares it all with the reader. I truly appreciated that, as it not only does a great job of capturing that time and place, it also (and I suspect this was not deliberate) catches a very specific perspective: that of the ignorant anglo right at the end of his time in power in Montreal.

It's tricky to explain this, because this book is quite cynical and really doesn't paint anybody in a good light. He doesn't try to defend or pull any punches about Jack's ignorance about French-Canadian culture. However, the book itself really does a terrible job with the depiction of the french-canadians. The revolutionary is particularily two-dimensional and annoying. If you didn't know anything about the situation (or were an anglo who already had certain biases about it), this book would make you think that the people behind the Quiet Revolution were just a bunch of stupid, dreamy upper-middle class intellectual university students. It ignores entirely the rich heritage of Quebec, of the truly shitty labour conditions for francophones of all class levels and the importance of language. For Langan, it seems that the revoluion is the aforementioned bourgeoisie and a bunch of corrupt longshoreman who are already getting paid triple-time.

And this reflects the attitude of a lot of anglo montrealers from that period. It's sort of understandable, as they were the losers in the whole affair. But it's not so good to see it deeply embedded in a book that was written in 2000. It is very interesting to read about it from the perspective of one who was there. What is also good is the portrayal of the way the news media worked back then (with television copying news stories from the newspapers!) and the general social life. Great side characters, including a gay British antique dealer who suddenly turns out to be a badass in the final scene, taking out a couple of longshoreman with a collectible brass-knuckle knife and a shovel (turns out he was in the army in Malaya; love that kidn of shit, really left me with a good feeling about the book at the end).

Montreal did seem pretty wild back then. And there is tons of sex in this book. Very explicit, too. I'm not really sure what Langan was going for when he decided to get all explicit. It's weird. He throws in a sex scene wherever he can, even side characters getting up in the morning, suddenly turn their wife over on her stomach, tuck a pillow under her and enter her from behind, all while mentioning that she still got him as hot as ever after 20 years of marriage. Hey, I don't mind, but what is the goal? It doesn't seem to fit in to the demographic that this book was aiming for.

So a weird little find, well worth the read, with some criticizable flaws that did nothing to lessen my enjoyment of it.

19. The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin

My wife has held a particular fondness and interest in Darwin, his works and his legacy and this, among other obvious reasons, spurred us to choose the Galapagos as our honeymoon voyage. I decided to inform myself better on the story behind Darwin's influential voyage there and was told by two different scientists that The Voyage of the Beagle was worth the read. It was very popular in England at the time, though it is more of a travel and science exploration journal than a theoretical work and only holds hints of the radical (for the time) theory of evolution that Darwin was later to espouse in his Origin of the Species (which came out 15 years after the Voyage of the Beagle).

It really was an enjoyable read, though there were some slow parts where he goes into length various observations about land formation and geology. His clear prose, the interesting places he goes and his love of discovery really give you the sense of a young, curious man seeing amazing new places. Here is a nice quote about his experiences in the Pampas of Argentina:

There is high enjoyment in the independence of the Gaucho life -- to be able at any moment to pull up your horse, and say, "Here we will pass the night." The death-like stillness of the plain, the dogs keeping watch, the gipsy-group of Gauchos making their beds round the fire, have left in my mind a strongly-marked picture of this first night, which will never be forgotten.

There is nothing personal in here and you miss his terrible seasickness (except for a couple of paragraphs at the end where he weighs the pros and cons of such a voyage), his ideological conflicts with Captain Fitz Roy (whom he still considered a friend, nevertheless). So it is a bit dry. But the writing and his joy overcome it and I ended up really happy to have read it. There is a book of his correspondance on the journey and that looks to fill in a lot of the personal blanks. They have it at the library and I'll probably read it in the future.

It is also informative and interesting to see the new world in the early days of colonialism, when native populations were still very present as forces to be dealt with rather than extinct (as in southern South America) or relegated to isolated reservation as in the rest of the world. Comparing the state of communities of European origin in South America, Tahiti, Australia and elsewhere in the 1830's gives a lot of insight into the current political situations of those places today. Darwin makes some fairly accurate predictions and judgements. (Although not always, there is a hilarious part where says "General Rosas intimated a wish to see me; a circumstance which I was afterwards very glad of. He is a man of an extraordinary character, and has a most predominant influence in the country, which it seems he will use to its prosperity and advancement." and then follows that up with this footnote: "This prophecy has turned out entirely and miserably wrong. 1845. " I'm going to have to do a bit of research on this General Rosas character.)

Here's a sweet map of his journey:

18. High Adventure by Donald Westlake

I found a beautiful first edition hard copy of this book at Confederate Books in Quito and despite trying to keep my luggage weight down, I had to buy it. It turned out to be a good move, because I did so much reading on the trip that I went through all my packed (and lighter paperback) books before we even got to the flight home. I actually finished High Adventure on the first leg and was almost faced with being forced to read The Lovely Bones (the critics quotes on the back cover and the dedication alone fueled several long rants my poor wife had to endure), the only book we had left between us that I hadn't read. Fortunately, there was a movie on the flight I wanted to see, so I dodged that bullet.

High Adventure is the story of a bunch of shenanigans around a faked Mayan temple and smuggled Mayan antiquities all taking place in Belize. The main characters are a bush pilot who bought a useless piece of land, the scheming minister and developer who sold it to him, an idealistic archeology grad student, a gay couple of antique collectors, a nerdy midwestern museum curator and a mellow tribe of Mayan indians. Westlake wrote a few of these ensemble cast novels, ones that tend to have a bigger scale and don't fall into either any of his series or a specific genre (Humans and Kahawa are two other examples). I get the feeling that he vacationed in Belize and found it so fascinating that he decided to write a book about it. A big part of this book is about life in Belize and even a bit of history. He clearly has a lot of admiration for it and pits the way Belize accepted indigenous refugees from the other Central American countries (particularly Guatemala) against the miserable treatment they received from their own countries.

The story itself is a lot of fun. It has a good mix of characters and lots of very funny moments. The whole thing has a light, party vibe ("high" adventure), even though the climax involves a village getting attacked by a Guatemalan death squad. I quite enjoyed it and would recommend it if you are looking for some nice light escapist reading and want to learn a little bit about Belize. I have trouble believing things are quite as hunky-dory today as they were back then, considering the massive growth in the hardcore drug trade in the ensuing period. But it still sounds like it would be a cool place to visit.

17. The Engagement by Simenon

Buzby has been pushing the Romans Durs of Simenon on me for a long time (he actually lent me this book as well as Tropic Moon) and I am finally starting to see the light. The Engagement started out a bit slow for me and I was worried that it was going to have a lack of narrative and be more about a mood or a feeling than a real story. Instead, it subtly enveloped me into its world until by the end it absorbed me completely. Simenon paints a rich, dark and exposing portrait of lower middle-class outer Paris in the 30s so thoroughly that you feel that it is still existing in your mind's eye even after you close the book. At the same time, he delivers the life story of a single individual, a pathetic man, who is caught up in things beyond his ability to handle them.

A woman is brutally murdered and her body found in a vacant lot. The mean, frightened concierge tells the police that she suspects it is one of the tenants in her building, monsieur Hire, a fat loner who has always creeped her out. Once this is established, the reader enters into his world and though there is some doubt, you are basically quite sure he is totally innocent. The majority of the story is him going about his humble, slightly seedy existence (he sells paint by numbers kits through mail order based on "work from home" ads) trying to deal with the fact that everyone in his neighbourhood thinks he's a killer. The cops follow him and keep a man posted outside of his door. He's not a very likable person, but he is innocent and sympathetic, almost a naif and there is one moment which reveals his tough past as the son of a poor, Jewish tailor and the only fat kid, which is heart breaking.

And that's what is so amazing about this book. Almost the entire thing is physical, external observation. Simenon writes about what everyone does. Only in one moment does he go into m. Hire's thoughts and that is just a brief reflection of his past (in reflexive reaction to the way a police interrogator portrays his father as a petty criminal money-lender). Otherwise, the reader is more like a fly on the wall, watching everything go down. And somehow, through that, he creates a deeply human connection to the protagonist.

Behind this is this little street corner in some outer quartier in Paris. You go back and forth with M. Hire and some of the other characters, taking the tram, buying groceries and wood for the stove, dealing with the excessive rain, the cold. I don't have a big fascination and in fact feel a bit cold towards Paris, but this book really gave me a sense of the romantic version of that city that appealed to so many pseudo-intellectual North Americans.

And Simenon was 30 when he wrote this. He must have seen some shit or just had the natural soul of an old man, because The Engagement is unsparing, unsentimental. Makes Raymond Chandler look like Jude Deveraux. Maybe the best book I've read so far this year.

16. The Lincoln Hunters by Wilson Tucker

I'm always hunting for Wilson Tucker's elusive "Wild Talent" which is considered one of the early if not first esp-empowered man novels. The Lincoln Hunters was a light and enjoyable read, but didn't blow my socks off. It takes place in a bland future where prolonged unemployment means a mandatory banishment to a work colony and early death. A monopoly controls time travel and goes back in the distant (and largely forgotten) past to pick up memorabilia or record events, mainly for business or entertainment reasons. The agents who go back in time are special people who don't quite fit in with the rest of society. It's a fun premise, but I never felt connected to the protagonist and so ultimately didn't care too much about his troubles. He goes back in time to attempt to record a famous lost speech by Lincoln and through some screw-up by the engineers and a wayward colleague, ends up racing to avoid a time paradox.

Part of my separation from the characters was again because of an excessive use of that late 50's early 60s slang. In this case, the agents were always quoting from Shakespeare it all just seemed forced and kind of annoying. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as Venus Plus X, but it was in a similar vein. I'm sure every period has its argot, but it should be used in the appropriate place, where there is a reason for it. Layering your very era-specific colloquial mode of speaking on a future society just seems like an obviously bad choice. I may have to take a break from science fiction for a while, until I can find some authors who know how to write dialogue a bit more naturally.

15. Wild Jack by John Christopher

Wild Jack is one of John Christopher's young adult novels, a rare stand-alone (most of his works in this genre are trilogies, including the tripods and the Sword of the Spirits series). It's the story of a post-apocalyptic world that has been rebuilt into walled city-states, generic and hierarchical, where young aristocrats live protected lives and fear the bogeymen of the wilderness on the other side of the walls (Wild Jack being the best known one outside London).

The young hero is highly ranked (his father is one of the leading city councilmen) and doesn't question the status quo. He is actually quite happy with things, as he got a new boat and is smitten with his hot cousin who has come to stay with him. He does overhear some rabble-rousing words by an older boy at a party, who defends the dignity of an older servant. At first this seems to be just a teaching moment for the protagonist, but it suddenly takes on a much more ominous light when he is pulled from his classroom and interrogated about it by some frightening investigators a type of which he'd never encountered before.

As the interrogation continues, and the hero starts to lose his insouciant superiority, they accuse him of being the speaker of the treasonous words. Before he can get in touch with his connected father, he is whisked off to an airship and sent to a prison island, a brutal place, led by cruel guards and populated with other boys who had committed actual crimes against the society. He begins to doubt all that is good in his world and adventure ensues.

It's a good, quick read, a rollicking adventure that I'm quite sure most boys of the appropriate age will enjoy. My only complaint was that the foundation of the story is complicated enough that this could have easily merited a trilogy as well. It feels all wrapped up a bit too quickly. Look at me, complaining about a book not being a trilogy!

It's interesting to posit John Christopher's young adult novels to his earlier adult ones. He seems to have dropped entirely the self-doubt and sexual ambiguity of the latter. Here, the boy is confident and young romance seems to blossom without too many internal or psychological problems. There is a lot of conflict between the boys, though, that I seem to remember from the Tripods as well. I think it wouldn't be too inaccurate or dismissive to say that Christopher had found a rough formula that worked at a large popular level where his earlier adult novels never did. Perhaps the male conflict, basically a rivalry but one that has serious consequences for the protagonist, is less fraught for the reader than intra-gender conflict, which always seemed so fraught with self-doubt for Christopher. Boys don't want to know about that stuff. I was sort of holding off on looking for Christopher's young adult fantasy double trilogy, The Sword of the Spirit series, but now I'm much more interested in checking it out.

14. Thanksgiving by Michael Dibdin

It's been a while since I read Michael Dibdin. His Aurelio Zen books are required reading for any contemporary mystery fans as he is one of the better writers in this genre in the last 20 years. Sadly, he passed away quite suddenly and too early at the age of 60 in 2007.

Thanksgiving isn't really a crime novel, but more like actual literature (gasp!). It's about a guy whose wife dies. He goes back to pick up some of the missing pieces of her past, ostensibly to deal with her estate, but as the book moves forward you see that he is more just driven by his grief and kind of moving around randomly. There is a death in the book, with which the protagonist is tangentially involved and suspected, but it's secondary (almost a distraction, I'd say) and is wiped off the slate in the last part of the book. It's here that I realized that once again I'd found another book that doesn't really have a story. It's much more a study of one man's grief and all the ways it affects him. It's actually quite touching and interesting and seemed very realistic, but I thirsted for story! He is such a good writer, that his portrayal of the various characters and especially the interesting locations (a desert trailer, a Marin county bar, a french country chalet in winter) are excellent and kept me engaged. A very good book if you like this sort of thing.

13. Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon

Venus Plus X reminded me of my mixed feelings for science fiction. As a geek in most cultural areas, I should like it more, but I never really could dive into it the way I can with mysteries and action novels. I think the problem for me is that a lot of sci fi is too close to non-fiction. The story is often secondary to the author's big ideas and ideas just aren't as interesting to me as narrative. This book is an excellent example of that and it kind of blindsided me, because the other Sturgeon book that I read was a great story. Here, he wants to share his idea of a future, evolved species that takes over earth after humans wipe themselves out. What is special about them is that they only have a single gender.

The book is told from the perspective of a human from the '50s, Charlie Johns, who was pulled from his time to the future to give the Ledoms an objective look on their society (they are all about constantly questioning themselves). Instead of actually looking at their smug uni-gender society objectively, Sturgeon really seems to want to tell us what is wrong with our bi-gendered society. He does so by interspersing the Ledom explaining to Charlie Johns how their society works, with brief snippets from the lives of some "normal" middle-class Americans from the late '50s. Each snippet demonstrates some powerful gender coding or how the people of that time dealt with the growing independence of the American woman. I've read many books from this period and there is an annoying tendency to talk in this weird, extra-clever slang. You see it a lot with John D. Macdonald. But in Venus Plus X it is way over the top, so much that it was intensely annoying. The characters all worked in advertising and PR, so I guess the inability to speak plainly is especially pronounced.

In the end, there is an interesting twist that possibly undermines all the arguments set up in the rest of the book and if I gave a shit about gender studies, his arguments are probably worth taking into consideration, but I really don't, so it was kind of a slog for me. It did make me think about nerds and how they are able to conceive of all these idealized social states, and think beyond the rigid sexual mores of our society, but at the same time they really struggled to even get laid. Perhaps you should at least master the basic concepts of the given situation before trying to create theories critical of it and positing superior situations.

Also, I swear I remember in some underground comic an explicit discussion of Theodore Sturgeon. I feel like it may even have been Gilbert Shelton. Anybody remember where I may have seen this?

12. The Small World of Murder by Elizabeth Ferrars

Turns out there is a neat little english used bookstore in Quito, Ecuador, called Confederate Books. I was quite excited to go there as you can often find a gold mine of old British mysteries and thrillers in some of these post-colonial countries. Unfortunately, Confederate books was very much like a North American used bookstore. A very nice store, actually, but not the gold mine I had been hoping for. Ecuador was never under British control, and it is in the Americas, so you probably don't get the same stream of publishing houses coming through there via travelers and expats. The owner was very friendly and we discussed John Wyndham (he recommended the original movie version of The Day of the Triffids, arguing for the effectiveness of its lack of special effects, an argument that convinced me to seek it out). He goes to the States on buying trips, purchases used books from travelers and occasionally finds treasures from peoples basements in town. He also gave us some helpful streetwise advice for the mean streets of Quito. So if you should ever be travelling in Ecuador, do stop at Confederate Books and pick yourself up some good used reading material. I got the book I shall review today and a nice hardback of Donald Westlake's High Adventure.

I had never heard of Elizabath Ferrars, but the concept and the cover looked appealing. It's the story of a young woman who is invited to go on a luxury trip around the world with a couple friend of hers whose baby was recently kidnapped and never recovered. They are at the point where they really need to decide to get on with their lives, but the mother (who is the closer friend of the protagonist, though she originally dated the father, who is now a successful author and can thus afford the trip) is still barely coping psychologically. At first, there is a lot of awkwardness and general tension, as the marriage is under considerable strain. The wife believes that the husband blames her for the kidnapping (she had left her child in the pram outside a supermarket). The husband thinks the wife won't allow him to forgive her. It's an unpleasant mess and the burden of her role as mediator starts to wear on the heroine. But things get really weird, when the wife starts to tell her that she thinks the husband is trying to kill her. There are a couple of incidents while traveling that could be interpreted either way. It's bizarre, because he appears to have no real motive and nor does she appear to have any real motive to lie.

It's juicy stuff and starts to get more complicated as they conclude their trip at a friend's winery in Australia where the husband had visited years ago. More and more backstory starts to bubble to the surface. I was able to guess most of the mystery about two-thirds of the way in and the denouement lacked a bit of punch (there turns out to be some fairly unlikable characters and while they get their comeuppance, as the reader you wanted it to be with a bit more satisfying vengeful vigour). All in all, a very enjoyable read, a tricky little story of selfish people and the complicated trouble they can get themselves and the innocent people around them in. I left it on the boat where I was travelling and hope someone else can find it and enjoy it.

Addendum: after doing a bit of research, I discovered that Elizabeth Ferrars was quite a succesful and prolific author for her time and one of the founding members of the British Crime Writers Association. You can read about her more in this obituary in the Independent. I'll keep an eye out for her stuff.

11. The Mourner by Richard Stark

The Mourner is the fourth in Richard Stark's Parker series and where the books really start to take their classical structure. There is one small link that connects The Mourner with previous books: a thrill-seeking woman that Parker bedded managed to steal a gun he used in a job and he needs to get it back. He becomes involved in a scheme to steal a rare statue ("the Mourner") from an eastern european diplomat but things get very complicated when it turns out that said diplomat has been double-dipping from his employers when making espionage payments. They've sent a spy out to punish him for this error of judgment (with the ultimate punishment) who has then naively engaged the mob to help him also recover the stolen money. So clearly, things are quite complicated and as usual Stark drops us right into the middle of this mess, with Parker waking up in his DC hotel room to two guys loudly climbing up the fire escape to his window.

First line of the book (from memory): "When the guy with asthma came in through the window, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away."

So good. How can you not want to continue reading.

I remember The Mourner as being one of my favorites and it definitely lived up to my memory on this my third or fourth reading. However, I did go through an interesting development of my opinion as I was reading it. The Mourner is a slight departure from the books so far (and many of the other series), in that it features a non-American character. August Menlo is the fat and wily interior intelligence officer, who, due to his history of loyalty to the regime, is sent to America for the first time. He's a great character and his story arguably the central narrative to the book. His story is also the structural element that is an integral part of the Parker series. A side character makes an appearance in the first part, as the heist is being established, then when things go wrong in the second part, we stop and backtrack into the story of this secondary character. These stories are usually much more colourful than those of Parker and his crew and add significant depth to the book. The ending of their story often coincides with the resolution of the heist's disaster.

And here is where my slight dissatisfaction arose and then was dispelled. Every now and then in the series Richard Stark's firm grasp on the pen falter and Donald Westlake takes over. I am a huge Westlake fan as well (go check out his Dortmunder books for instance), but I do not welcome these brief intrusions. I call them "fruity" and they tend to be something slightly comic or goofy or just too colourful. The one that really stands out for me is the naive Africans in the Black Ice Score who are constantly grinning. They bring me out of the world of work and men and tools that is so integral to the series (and it strikes me, considering that they take place in the height of the '60s that the books are aesthetically quite conservative). The Menlo character at first just struck me as being just a bit too fruity. His character, combined with the rich history of the Mourner itself, set off some alarm bells and I was worried that The Mourner may lack the true heart of granite that is necessary for a good Parker novel.

Fortunately, once I delved deeper into Menlo's story and as it plays itself out, things get pretty rough pretty quickly and I realized that the fruitiness was just a small part of what is a really rich and layered narrative, with several great storylines going on (the heist, Menlo's plans and Parker trying to wrap up loose ends) and it all comes together in an extremely satsifying conclusion. Actually, this book is so good that I'd even recommend it for people who aren't necessarily interested in the genre.

Westlake is a master of metaphors and the Mourner contains two absolute gems that I feel I must share with you:

"and Handy, sprawled over there like a dummy dumped off a cliff, was an even worse mess."

Enough said. It works even better in the context of the paragraph, but it's too much of a spoiler to include it all.

"The somebody came up the fire escape about as quiet as the Second World War but trying to be quieter and stopped at Parker's floor."

I really wonder if Westlake just banged that sentence out, or spent time crafting it. The base metaphor is hilariously brilliant in its exaggeration and wry criticism. But the qualifying clause "but trying to be quieter" subtly encapsulates the utter incompetence of the act and the person doing it. You can just see Parker sitting up in his bed hearing this noisy amateur trying to sneak up on him. [Reading sentences like this turn me into a total gushing fan boy.] Fuck, you're a genius, Westlake! A master craftsman! Wherever you are in heaven, please take some small satisfaction with your life for that sentence alone. I thank you for bringing it into the world. [Okay, I'm closing the fanboy tap now. My apologies. I get excited at times.]

Finally, there is a paragraph that I believe really captures the overall theme of the Parker series. Menlo is following Parker and Handy while they prepare to steal the statue, trying to learn from them:

Menlo smiled with a touch of sadness. "I must say you remove the romance most utterly from all this. I had been seeing myself in quite dramatic terms. The defecting policeman, meting out poetic justice to the embezzler by depriving him of his ill-gotten gains, then disappearing again, quite forever, an enigma to all who seek him. But now I find I am merely a participant in a dreary and pedestrian series of quite normal activities--opening doors, driving automobiles, sitting in motel rooms." He shrugged and spread his hands.

He's exactly right and that's what make the Parker series so great. Go get this book and read it right now.

10. The Law at Randado by Elmore Leonard

(Note: I just came back from a 10-day vacation with lots of reading time during which I completed 9 novels, so expect a rush of reviews over the next couple of days. I'm going to be backdating them to the day that I read them, so they may not show up at the top of your blog reader.)

Another gripping, intense and satisfying western from Elmore Leonard's earlier days. I really got into this one. It's the classic young deputy going up against the more powerful, but morally weaker, men of the town. Leonard takes the theme and draws it out, playing around with it for a bit. It makes for a rich read, where you are really wanting the satisfying ass-kicking, but get drawn into a cool back story on the young deputy and where he gets his skills and mettle from (partly from hanging out with other young Indians, a recurring theme with Leonard).

The story here is that instead of waiting for the visiting judge from the larger city to the north, the wealthier citizens of Randado decide to form their own justice committee and hang two Mexican cattle thievers while the deputy sherrif is out of town. They are pressured by a young and out-of-control cattle baron (inherited from his better, but dying, father, of course). When the deputy comes back, he decides to arrest the members of the committee and the confrontation builds. It's not just a contest of strength, but also one of politics, as he must win the confidence of the townspeople as well.

A great read. Pick it up if you find and it and need to be reminded what it means to be a man.

(Unfortunately, the image above is not the one from the actual version of the book I read. I purposely left my copy in the common bookshelf in a hotel in Quito and was quite pleased to see that someone had taken it a couple days later. Except I had forgotten to take a picture of it! It was one of those classic photographed late '70s covers with a picture of a gun and a badge. Not as cool as the vintage illustration pictured here.)

9. Freaked Out Strangler by Patrick Morgan (Operation Hang Ten #10)

This is the third in the demographically precise and highly collectible Operation Hang Ten series that I've read. They star surfing freelance agent Bill Cartwright, with his sweet ride and trailer set-up (he has a "computer" in the trailer that mixes the perfect drink for him). It's number ten in the series and I was getting a bit weary of his schtick through the first through chapters. I guess it went over well for its audience in the day, but the main protagonist is really full of himself and spends a lot of time telling the reader how good he is at everything and how great his life is, thanks to being so good at everything. But he does it in that weird '60s way, using arbitrarily big vocab words and talking around things in a kind of faux beat poetry style. I called it "watered down John D. MacDonald" in a previous review. This time, it seemed almost condensed, thickened, as if it had been left on the stove too long.

This time, Cartwright is following up on a lead from a woman who wants to meet him at a pier because she has info on someone trading secrets from a sattelite manufacturing plant. When he gets to the Santa Monica pier, she is being strangled by a guy in a scuba outfit (the titular Freaked Out Strangler). Another convoluted plot ensues, but my enjoyment of it increased significantly as Morgan brings in some really depraved individuals and a few serious instances of brutality. You've got a low-rent Hugh Hefner type who lives in a penthouse, grows tulips and sleeps with a different paid high class prostitute each day of the week. There is a bitter loser with a terrible birthmark on his face, obsessed by the sexual teasings of his older sister (awesome talc on back rubbing scene) and the fruity manipulator who provides the loser with drugs and women (and his own sexual favours once he gets him high). Some good seedy stuff that makes for a quick and enjoyable read, marred a bit by the excessive masculine fairytale built up around the protagonist and a poor plot structure. Still, he's a surfing detective, for crissake's, what do you want?

Another interesting element that I am starting to glean in these later novels is that he is actually a pretty conservative character. I am getting the sense that Bill Cartwright is not meant to be a counter-culture figure for young male readers of the period at all, but rather an establishment proxy for older figures who don't really like the values of the 60s, but have grudgingly accepted them. He allows them to participate in this new topsy-turvy world, get all the fruits that men deserve in any age: the sweet car and mobile bachelor home, the adventure and above all the willing, subservient chicks who always end up making him breakfast or bringing him food (in return they get the best sex ever; Cartwright makes the hero of the Wolf's Hour seem positively flaccid in comparison). He mocks the idealistic ecological notions of an ex-flame he meets at the trailer park (with a smug, passing reference to the superior emissions standards of his custom-made german engine). He really doesn't take any political stance and almost all the bad guys are pulled from some deviant milieu (homosexuals, hippies). They are rarely the typical enemies of the left, big businessmen, politicans and so on. I'll keep an eye on how this trend continues as I get future episodes in this series.

Note to self: use the term "jive" more.

8. Tropic Moon by Georges Simenon

I've had this, one of Simenon's first Romans durs, sitting on my shelf for over a year. Buzby (whose book reviewing has been subsumed by two new little ones), who is a huge fan, lent it to me and I finally cracked it open. Buzby's review gives an excellent and much more detailed synopsis, so hop over there if you really want to know what happens. It's about a young upper middle-class french man who goes to colonial Gabon in the interwar period in the hopes of running a logging concession. Though he doesn't tell anybody this, the real reason he goes is because he has no real financial prospects back in France and like so many of the Europeans who went out to the colonies, he had the chance to maintain the aristocratic fantasy that was no longer possible at home. However, in this case, things go really bad for him.

This is an excellent book. An amazing portrayal of the utter degradation that was colonial Africa (focused particularly on the colonialists themselves, but with enough side glances at the natives and their treatment to evoke horror in the reader) as well as a spot-on portrayal of the ignorance, inexperience and emotional maturity of the male in his twenties. The character is so out of his league, so inexperienced and so utterly unable to control his emotions, that you almost feel pity for him. Usually, with a character like this, I'm tearing my hair out with frustration. But while I was certainly not very sympathetic with him, Simenon does such a good job of making it seem very real and understandable, that it's a fascinating and compelling read and you want to see how far it is going to go. Young males in their early twenties, for the most part, are perhaps at the least competent, most inept period of their lives. It makes sense that we try to keep them sequestered in university or send them off as soldiers. Simenon wrote this when he was 30, which is an astounding testimony to his writing. I'd say it is arguable that Tropic Moon addresses the themes of colonialism as well as Conrad in Heart of Darkness, but does it in a way more efficient and perhaps devastating way. Great book.

7. The Book Stops Here by Ian Ransom

I got this from my parents the xmas before last and finally cracked it open. [Why am I reading so much in January, you may well be asking. It's a combo of my usual January surge combined with our friggin' wireless router being on the fritz. You want to read 50 books in a year? Lose your internet connection and it's a cinch.] It's the story of a young man from London who has ended up in Northern Ireland working in a mobile library who gets involved in adventures. A neat premise (and this is the third in a series) but at least judging by this book, it seems to be more about the his own inner turmoil and the wacky people around him than any real misadventures.

In The Book Stops Here, he and his gruff, Irish partner Ted head back down to England to go to a mobile librarian's convention to look at getting a new van. Ted who has cared for the funky old van does not want to give it up and has never left Northern Ireland. Israel, the protagonist has an opportunity to visit his family and his girlfriend, whom it's quite clear to the reader is no longer really his girlfriend.

This sort of un-formed, loser male in his mid to late 20's seems to be the rage in England these days. The protagonist of this book seemed like the Simon Pegg character in Spaced (a series you should check out) or Shaun of the Dead, except way worse. At least the Simon Pegg characters are more or less happy with their lot except they can't get the girl. Israel just complains and seems bummed out and incapable of really doing anything. After a while, it gets a bit tiring. The only real development he made was to finally realize that his girlfriend had broken up with him. It was kind of depressing.

There is also a lot of quick back and forth dialogue with various colourful characters that most of the time (the new age hippy caravaners being one exception) didn't come off as funny to me. Maybe if you understand the regional distinctions better, but even then it was all very broad (like the seedy bar owner cousin who turns out to be gay) and not in aid of anything so you are kind of reading these long back and forths with lots of interruptions wondering what the point of it all is.

Not a terrible read and I did learn a little bit about the Northern Ireland character(at least that they consider themselves very distinct from Ireland proper) and the world of mobile libraries in Britain. I admit to being vaguely curious about the first two in the series, but I'll need to be convinced that the protagonist is at least somewhat effective before I'll pick them up. Too much competition out there.

6. Les mardis de Béatrice de Francine Tougas

This year I am making an effort to improve my french. I get by, but have been stuck on a plateau. One of the challenges with reading here in Quebec is that a lot of the classes you take will recommend books by french authors, which can be great, but are often written in a much more complex form and use a wide range of vocabulary. The dialogue is also nothing like the way people speak in the world around you here in Quebec. So I have been looking around for books by Quebec authors which reflect the actual language of Quebec. One friend, recommended Les mardis de Béatrice, written by her mother! Francine Tougas is an actress and writer in the Quebec television and movie scene.

Les mardis de Béatrice is the story of a professional woman who is seeing a therapist. Each chapter is a session, basically dialogue between the two. She is feisty, resistant but suffering enough from inner anguish that she is driven to keep coming back. I'm of two minds on the subject of psychology. My mother is a professional psychologist and she has spent most of her career working with sexually abused children and disadvantaged adults. She believes strongly that there is an unhappy state and that people can through therapy find ways to get to a happy state. My father on the other hand is completely against most forms of self-improvement and thinks the world is what it is and you just handle it as it comes to you. I go back and forth, having seen the good of both approaches.

The first half of this book definitely made me fall to my father's side of the equation. All of this woman's problems seemed to be the result of living in a free and wealthy society where people suddenly have enough leisure time to start worrying about their problems. It was actually kind of maddening and I didn't know if I could make it through the book. Fortunately, in terms of the language, it was very much what I was looking for, with lots of dialogue written the way people speak here. So it was easier for me to get through, enjoyable to read (it sounded very much like what I hear around me so that is a compliment to the writer) and educational as I finally got to see in written form many of the phrases and modes of speaking that they never teach you in a french class.

(For instance, the word pantoute which means not at all and I believe is a mutation of pas-de-tout is used all the time here. Good luck finding it in a dictionary.)

So I kept plodding through and the book does become more interesting as Béatrice reveals some darker facts about her background that give substance to her lonely, defensive condition. The narrative never really takes off nor arrives at a revelatory climax. Rather the story arc is more concerned with whether or not she'll continue her therapy and her relationship with the therapist. There was some slightly weird father-daughter dialogue and a tiny bit of behaviour by the therapist at the end that seemed to cross the line that creeped me out just a tad.

I suspect that Les mardis de Béatrice is a fairly accurate reenactment of a real series of sessions between a modern woman and her therapist and if that is interesting to you, you'll probably enjoy the book and find lots to think about. But don't look for a stronger story beyond that.

5. The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

The Body Snatchers is the original novel, written in 1955, that the better-known movies "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" were based on. I was mildly surprised to see that it was written by the same author of Time and Again. I guess he has had a fairly long and varied writing career (and as I see in Wikipedia was considered a genre author).

The Body Snatchers is written from the perspective of the town doctor. He's a younger man, getting over a divorce, with deep roots in the small Norther California town. The first sign that something untoward is happening is when an old high school girlfriend comes to his office to tell him how worried she is about her best friend. The best friend is convinced that her uncle is not himself, even though he looks and acts exactly the same. After briefly investigating this, the doctor starts to get patients making similar claims about other friends or family members. They can't put their finger on it, but there is just something off about them.

This is an enjoyable and quickly paced book and the adventure takes off when a farmer living out of town tells him about a strange body he found in his basement. It's like a not-quite formed human. Skepticism is replaced with real fear as the doctor (now teamed up with his old flame and another couple) realizes that there is a real conspiracy going on.

I know the common interpretation of the movies is that the body-snatchers were a metaphor for the Red Scare of the period. I really didn't get that same sense from the book. The aliens are portrayed as so passionless, empty of any real ideology or values other than sheer survival. Finney puts a lot of emphasis on the small town and how it is decaying and I wonder if general modernity is more of the bugbear in the book than anything political. He really does a great job of describing the small town, all the good things about it coming out in relief in their absence as the protagonist sees the town of his upbringing being completely dangerous and fearful to him. There is a really freaky scene where he watches the entire town gather in the main square for some nefarious purpose, at first behaving normally (going shopping, doing their business) until the last bus drives out of town and then slowly starting to switch over to their real purpose.

Finney is a calm, almost mesmerizing writer. He likes to take his time to describe things, letting the reader's own eye wander over the landscape. Because of that tone, the book is not super stressful as one might expect. You do get a sense of the hopelessness the protagonists must feel as their town is taken over, but not the oppressive fear that such a situation would create (at least in me). He's also very peaceful and there is none of the revengeful violence that we see in today's species propaganda (or anti-propaganda as we see in Avatar).

I also appreciated that the strategy and operation of the aliens was well thought-out. Sure some of the science is pretty questionable, but it all fits together in its own internal logic and the reader isn't left with a lot of annoying questions about how things worked.

However, I did find the ending highly questionable. I appreciated the theme of it, but didn't find it believable at all. (scroll down for some spoilers where I explain myself better).

Still, a great read and deserves an important place in the history of alien invasion literature. I think I need to check out the film adaptations, as I've only seen the Donald Sutherland one and that was a long time ago.


[added after seeing the 1955 Don Siegel movie] Check this out from the wikipedia page on the original film adaptation of the movie:

Despite the general agreement among film critics regarding these political connotations of the film, lead actor Kevin McCarthy said in an interview included on the 1998 DVD release that he felt no political allegory was intended. The interviewer stated that he had spoken with the author of the original novel, Jack Finney, who also professed to have intended no specific political allegory in the work.[13]
In his autobiography, "I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History," Walter Mirisch writes: "People began to read meanings into pictures that were never intended. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an example of that. I remember reading a magazine article arguing that the picture was intended as an allegory about the communist infiltration of America. From personal knowledge, neither Walter Wanger nor Don Siegel, who directed it, nor Dan Mainwaring, who wrote the script nor the original author Jack Finney, nor myself saw it as anything other than a thriller, pure and simple."[14]

And here are my thoughts on the movie itself, for posterity:

Inspired by having just read the book (which was originally published as a serial in Collier's), I downloaded the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel (they had a VSH copy at my local video store, but it was colorized!). Except for some minor changes and the ending, this is surprisingly faithful to the book and quite entertaining. It was shot on location in some real California small town in 1955 so it was quite pleasant to see all that brought to life. I still didn't see the strong Red Scare metaphor that gets attributed to this movie, except for two subtle cinematic touches (where the hero refers to the pod invasion as a "malignant disease spreading across America" text not found in the book and where he is running out in traffic trying to get someone to stop and he stares at the camera and screams "They're here already! You're next!"). It was a cool little movie and I'm looking forward to watching the '70s version next (with Donald Sutherland and a small role by Leonard Nimoy).

Here's a trailer for you, you can check out the screaming in traffic scene at the very end.

SPOILERS








Just when all seems lost, the aliens give up and send themselves out into space again. Their reasoning is that they realize that humans will fight them to the death and will not accept them taking over even though they (the humans) won't actually go away, they'll just have a parisitic host as part of their being. I kind of like the idea that we are the ultimate fighters who will never give up (and this isn't portrayed as entirely a good thing in the book), but I don't see why we wouldn't attribute that same quality to all life. And these aliens had behaved in such a way it seemed as if they expected resistance. They carried out their plan so well that they took over almost the entire town and were ready to spread throughout the rest of the world and then because there are a few resisters who don't allow themselves to be taken over, they give up the fight and head back into space? No, seems way too easy and I think the dark ending of the '70s version is probably a better interpretation.

4. Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

Hard Rain Falling is Don Carpenter's first novel, which has been brought out of relative obscurity in a New York Review of Books reprint with a forward by George Pellecanos. I got it for xmas. I'd never heard of the author before, but after completing his first novel, I think an argument could be made that he is an important American writer. He wrote steadily in his life until shooting himself at the age of 65 in the '90s. He had several debilitating illnesses, though I have yet to see confirmed that that was the reason for the suicide. His books were published but not super successful and he made most of his living writing for Hollywood.

Hard Rain Falling is the story of a man's life, starting with a brief recounting of how he was born and orphaned in the '30s. The rest of the book follows his wildlife from the streets of Portland, Oregon to his time in reform schools and prisons and to a sort of rehabilitation and attempt at comprehending a normal life in San Francisco. At several points, you think it is going to be a certain type of narrative (a crime story, a prison story and so on), but after a while you realize that it really is just about this one guy's life.

I'd like to provide a thematic summary here, but it is kind of difficult as there isn't really one. It's what made me enjoy the book. A lot goes on and the main character is intriguing, intelligent and very challenged by his own background. There are many different themes that come up along the way: maturity, isolation, love, the changing times (the book ends in the early '60s). None of them dominate. Each section of the book is a look at this man as he is in that stage of his life. I guess you could say there is a consistent theme of Jack Levitt trying to figure out who he is and how he should respond to life.

And it is quite a life. Jack's philosophical musings and his struggles are compelling, but the real pleasure for me were Carpenter's descriptions of the petty criminals of Portland's pool halls, of the prisons and their tenants, of San Francisco's night life in the '50s. I can see why George Pellecanos loves this book so much (though did he have to give away over half the narrative in the intro, which I wisely did not read until the end?). I've read a lot of crime fiction, but you don't often get to see it at the quotidian level with such richness and subtlety. He really gets into the world of gambling in pool halls in particular and it's pretty cool stuff.

Great book. I'm glad I read it. It moved me at the end.

3. The Wolf's Hour by Robert McCammon

Doc favourably reviewed this book and kindly lent it to me when I expressed interest in it. It was disturbingly fat considering my poor reading progress last year, but I decided to jump in, recognizing that if done well, it should be a page-turner. I was a bit dismayed at the very beginning, because the prose was written in that American 80s best-seller style, which is just a bit too florid and obvious (it's the kind of book where every sexual encounter ends in a perfect simultaneous orgasm). Because it is trying to be British in style and the beginning takes place in Britain (towards whose genre writers I have a strong bias), this weakness was really pronounced. I was particularly dismayed to see someone driving a Ford around in northern Wales at the height of WWII.

Fortunately, there is a very strong story here and lots of good action and once it gets going, it really gets going. It has two storylines going on simultaneously, the hero's mission to find out a secret Nazi plot that will undermine D-Day and his own upbringing as a werewolf in a Russian forest. Both storylines are equally engaging and you can't wait to find out next. The WWII espionage story has the best Nazi badguys I've read in a while. It reminded me a lot of Inglorious Basterds, though perhaps even less subtle and with the werewolf element (a huge advantage if you ever have to go over enemy lines, believe me). The werewolf story is really cool as well, as the author put in a lot of thought about how such a tribe would survive and what they would be like. He portrays the werewolf behaviour using much more biology than we usually get, with them hunting, when in wolf form, small prey for food and pissing to mark their territory. He also uses his excellent scent in human form to help with his espionage, which is quite cool as well.

Very entertaining. I do agree with Doc that it went on a bit long near the end, but really it was such a fun read, with some cool ideas and kickass action, that I've utterly forgiven the florid prose and lack of subtlety. Had I read this when I was 15, I would have gone out and hunted down the rest of this guy's books for sure. As it is, I'll probably keep on the lookout.

2. Uzumaki by Junji Ito

Uzumaki is a Japanese comic book ("manga" if you don't know by now) about a remoted, isolated town that suffers from a spiral curse. It manifests itself in many different ways, beginning with individuals obsessing with spirals and eventually getting into full blown craziness and destruction (I don't want to reveal any of the details because the fun is in finding them out). The english version is produced by Viz Comics and is in three elegantly small volumes, each of which contains 6 stories. At first the stories are isolated incidents, each built around some manifestation of the spiral curse but not really advancing the overall storyline beyond relating how weird this town is. These chapters reminded me a lot of the old EC comics, but viewed through the Japanese lens. Just weird (and sometimes quite disturbing) little episodes of horror that end with a clever twist. By the middle of the second volume, a greater narrative starts to pick up pace. In the last volume, the shit really hits the fan.

I wasn't expecting much with this, but I ended up really enjoying it. The horror here goes the distance and is quite creative as well. Though the ambience is really creepy, this is not the kind of J-horror which builds up tons of tension and then nothing ever happens. Shit really happens and it is gross and crazy. You can see a lot of the typical adolescenet sub-text and anxieties (obsessive boys, wanting to be popular, generational conflicts) but these themes are always secondary to the insanity so they don't become annoying. This is a quick fun read and there is some freaky crap in here. If you like horror and comics, I would strongly recommend Uzumaki. I know they made a movie which didn't manage to impress my wife too much, but now that I've read the comic, I may give it a second chance, just to see how they handle some of the crazy visuals.



I also note that when I remember Viz comics being the first company to start publishing english translations of Manga back during the black and white comics explosion of the '80s. It's great to see that they survived the ensuing crash and even appear to be thriving with the current manga boom. It sure seemed very marginal back then. What's also cool is that Uzumaki, and I guess a lot of the manga they publish, are organized to be read in the original Japanese order, from right to left, which takes some getting used to but is kind of cool.

1. The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons

I am a huge fan of Bill Simmons and a more reserved one of the NBA, so I obviously asked for the most highly-anticipated basketball books (actually, the only one) in my memory for xmas. And I got it! I am usually struggle with non-fiction, but I could barely put The Book of Basketball down during my vacation and finished all 700+ pages in under two weeks. Before I do a proper review of the book, I would like to talk about Bill Simmons himself a bit.

Bill Simmons is one of my heroes. In and of itself, this isn't all that special as I admire and respect many people in this world. What makes him stand out is that he is the only one who actually hails from my generation. After my brief stint working for Deja.com during the .com boom, I became profoundly disappointed with my people. We have pretty much failed in doing anything good for the world except making parts of it richer. We borrowed the worst parts of our baby boomer predecessors (their ambition and self-involvement) and left all the difficult, good stuff on the ground (their radicalism, their critique of authority). We're the worst kind of sheep, responsible for 8 years of Bush and the SUV stroller. We've somehow managed to combine the extremes of right-wing righteousness with left-wing political-correctness to create a world of excessive consumption and excessive caution. There really isn't much we've done that I'm very proud of.

I know with that set-up it sounds like Simmons is some kind of wild radical. He's not. Fundamentally, he's a sports writer. But there are three elements that make him stand out politically for me: he made his career on his own terms, he embraced technological change and he is highly critical. All of this is mostly limited to the world of sports, but it is significant nonetheless. Sports is a huge business, second probably only to Hollywood in terms of America's cultural and economic influence on the world. (Sports is also the last domain in North America where people argue critically and honestly with any intelligence, but that's another discussion.) Because of his success (due to his skill and hard, consistent work) he has influenced his peers and a generation of readers. With the former, we are already seeing a sea change in the discourse of sports journalism (there are clearly many other factors and invidivuals involved in this change, but Simmons is one of the most significant), where writers are finally starting to find some balls (do you think we'll see another elephant in the room like steroids in baseball during the '90s?). I'll break the elements mentioned above out using Simmons-style structure:

He made his career on his own terms: He started out briefly working at the very bottom of a Boston newspaper, then quit and partied for a bit and then started his own website (bostonsportsguy.com). He was way ahead of his time here (and ahead of me as well, as I didn't jump on the bandwagon until he got to espn) and the success of his website led to him being hired as a regular columnist at espn.com. His success at "The Worldwide Leader in Sports" coincided (and helped) the growth of the website and the web in general for sports information and allowed him a lot of creative freedom. He also gets his face on the front page now. My point here, though, is not that to vaunt his success, but to underline that he became successful following his ideals. He was frustrated at the limitations, both in terms of advancement and content in the traditional newspaper medium and so he went to the web and wrote what he wanted (those early days on his old site must have been a real blast to follow, except that I'm not much of a Boston sports fan*). On espn.com, he refused to pull punches and has come out extremely critical against some very powerful people and institutions. I'm sure there were some interesting conversations in the offices there during certain occassions (though we must give credit to espn for being so flexible and taking some risks, especially considering its size and power today).

He embraced technological change: I already mentioned how he jumped onto the web early, but the other arena that he has fully taken advantage of (and given me hours and hours of entertainment) is podcasting. His podcasts are generally relaxed, casual conversations with a few regular friends (Joe House with his gentle voice being my favorite), colleagues and sports pundits. They are the kinds of discussions you would either be having with your own friends or the ones you wished you could have with some of the great thinkers of sports. He isn't limited to just sports as he gets into reality shows and popular culture (including great back and forths with Chuck Klosterman). He has also gotten quite deep, including an awesome conversation about Obama with JA Adande (you have to scroll down to the 1/21 episode; it really is worth listening to, especially if you want to renew your enthusiasm and optimism now that we are on the verge of invading Yemen) and another one about The Wire (best TV show ever and constantly vaunted by Simmons) with Jason Whitlock that even my wife deigned to listen to.

Simmons recognized the potential of the podcast early on and he pushed hard for it. It took espn a while to appreciate the power of this new distribution form, but they are finally starting to get into it. A couple of podcasts ago, Bill Simmons said that once we get the internet regularily into cars and people can choose podcasts the way they choose radio stations, the medium will exploded and I suspect he is right). (Another podcast visionary, whom I also learned about from Bill Simmons, is Adam Carolla - definitely check his show out.)

He is highly critical: This trait is the one that seals the deal for me. I love following professional sports, especially the NBA but it is a love/hate relationship. I started following the league just as it really started to take off with cable television and Michael Jordan. Unfortunately, there is a constant struggle between the NBA that is the game and the NBA that is the marketing machine and for a while the latter was really winning out (to the point where refs, announcers and the league itself through scheduling and promotion would all work to ensure that a more marketable team or the team with the most marketable player would be more succesful). Simmons was one of the earlier and louder voices on the national stage who really started screaming bullshit at a lot of the stuff that went down. And as he has a legitimacy among the fans, the league and the machine surrounding it (including all the various media outlets) had to listen. I don't know if they've done much about it, but at least they listened and at least someone is screaming. In these times of capitalist supremacy where it's almost considered morally wrong to criticize a corporation or administration, I am grateful for the few voices who still are willing to take a stand. That Simmons has managed to do this and be wildly successful at the same time gives me some small hope for the world. At the very least, I'll get to read some honest and critical writing on a regular basis.

Re-reading the above arguments, I realize that I am ignoring the significance of the context Simmons is working in (the rise of the internet) and many other individuals who have contributed in their own way to these developments (AM sports radio in general, for instance, which has always been much more critical-minded than television or the print media and which had a big influence on Simmons). I am not a hardcore sports nerd, so I tend to read only the most popular writers. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who would possibly argue that I am exaggerating Simmons influence and they may well be right. I'm absolutely sure that I have excluded a ton of influential figures, but I am not reviewing a book by any of them.

All these big-issue arguments aside, the main reason I am a big fan of Simmons is that his writing is entertaining, often laugh-out-loud funny but built on a foundation of solid research, well-constructed arguments and interesting ideas. He's writing about sports in an intelligent way but doesn't take himself too seriously.

So onto the book itself. It's huge and is basically a giant look at the entire league from the beginning to last year. He starts out with an intro explaining how he got into basketball and why he wanted to write the book. Then he writes a great broad history of the league (extremely informative). The bulk of the book is him ranking the top 64 players of all time. Simmons loves theoretical arguments (such as "what if player x from the '60s and player y from the '90s played on the same team?") and this section is one giant exploration of how all these players who played in such different eras stack up. The next section is ranking the best teams of all time and then he concludes with his Wine Cellar team, the players he would put together if martians came down and challenged us to a basketball game for the fate of planet earth (seriously; he has a tiny nerd streak that adds to my appreciation). There is a final chapter where goes and meets with Bill Walton which is very moving. I got teary-eyed.

I learned a lot from this book. He has a strong thesis and that is "The Secret", the idea that playing as a team trumps individual athletic prowess and leads to victory. This seems like a truism, but it is a constant struggle in professional sports and many great players have not been able to learn The Secret. I was also shocked (again) by the racism players in the '50s and '60s encountered and how some rose above it and others were taken down by it. Overall, though, The Book of Basketball is kind of like a giant, massive collection of Simmons' online columns, really well-organized and structured with a singular focus. It's not a transcendent work, but terrifically entertaining and highly informative. It's a book about the NBA. If you're not interested in the league or basketball, then I don't suggest you read this. If you are, I strongly recommend it.

(and here's a better review of the book from Slate's Josh Levin, though I disagree that the jokes got repetitive.)

2009 end of year wrap-up

Well as far as reading quantity goes, 2009 was a bit of a shank. If I learned one thing is that I am not able to predict my own behaviour. I started off the year with a bang and was cruising through books, with no sign of stopping (read 11 books by February 24). And then it all came crashing down. My usual spring drop-off turned into a complete embargo. I have some explanations, but ultimately it boils down to a lack of will and focus. I got way too into gaming this year and as there was a lot of really interesting products this year, I spent a lot more time reading RPG books (which I tend not to read straight through or completely, so don't consider them as a book for counting purposes) and planning games than reading books. Life was busier as well. I got married in September (hooray!) and the planning took up a lot of time. My job became quite busy as well as we were leading up to the Copenhagen talks on climate change and had a lot to do (thanks for shitting the bed on that one, world leaders and especially you Harper and co. you shitheel scumbags).

Quantity aside, I enjoyed almost everything I read this year and was particularly happy to re-start the Parker books. I hope to get the next three in the series for my birthday this year and continue my longer analyses of Westlake's masterpiece.

We also did a couple of "book clubs" where most of the people on the list to the right chose a single book and all read it together. Those were quite fun and I wouldn't mind doing it again. I think the comments lacked a bit of energy because we all tend to have a similar opinion and those don't generate a lot of conflict. Maybe a more contentious pick this year if we decide to do it again?

I have a lot of goals and projects in my life this year, so I'll make no reading commitments for the '10 except one: to get a blog post written as soon as I finish the book. No more falling behind this year!

27. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller jr.

A classic of the post-apocalyptic genre, A Canticle for Leibowitz has been on my stagnant on deck shelf for months. I figured it would be good to read during the pre-xmas vacations.

It's too strong to say that A Canticle for Leibowitz doesn't actually fit into the PA genre. But it does feel much more like classic sci-fi. It takes place far in the future, after a civilization and knowledge-destroying nuclear war that sets humanity back to the dark ages. I use the term Dark Ages precisely because the author deliberately sets it up so that the church is the last and only outpost for knowledge, where little bits of information are stored as relics and artifacts from a past age, both to be worshipped and copied. The book takes place in the three parts, covering three periods, each separated in time by several generations, as humanity slowly reclaims the knowledge it lost and starts to make the same mistakes again.

The book is well-written and despite the over-arching themes, each segment contains rich characters and their own compelling storyline so that you get quite caught up in the book. It has some nice touches of black humour as well. It ends up achieving a nice balance of lightness and heaviness while making you think about our relationship with knowledge and humanity's progress such that it deserves its reputation as an all-time science fiction classic.