53. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

My wife is a big Shirley Jackson fan and has several of her books. I've been meaning to give her a try for a while now and finally got motivated since it was chosen as the July read for an online book discussion group I am in. Great choice!

The Haunting of Hill House is not the first haunted house story, but it's an early one and was quite well-respected when it came out (she also wrote the short story "The Lottery" that a lot of us read in junior high). At least two movies have been made from it. It's the story of a doctor of the paranormal who gets the opportunity to study an abandoned manor in the Britsh countryside. He invites four people, whose existence have come to his attention for their own histories of being involved in some kind of paranormal activity. One of them, Eleanor, is the character through whose viewpoint the reader follows the proceedings. She lives with her sister's family and up until recently, devoted her life to taking care of her cruel, sickly mother. For her, this "experiment" is an exciting opportunity to make a break from her old life. Things do not go well.

It's a subtle, cleverly-written book. Right away, Jackson is totally direct about how foreboding and ominous the house is. She doesn't actually describe it much. Rather, she describes how it makes Eleanor feel and allows the dialogue of the others to describe what it does to them. It is freaky, and in some creative ways too, that I won't give away. It's a slow burn after that, though. We spend a lot of time learning about the doctor and the guests, the history of the house and its geography. It takes a while for things to get weird, but they do.

There is very little objective third-person description in this book, to the point that at times I didn't realize that certain people were present in a scene until they spoke. It was odd at first, until I got that we really are seeing things through Eleanor's eyes and that, as she falls under the influence of the house (if that is indeed what happens), she becomes one of those unreliable narrators.

It's a dark, nasty book. She does a great job of writing catty, underhanded, passive-aggressive dialogue. I didn't realize she was American at first, because the book takes place in England. Her prose is strong, with longer sentences, but they are very linear and lack some of the more intricately structured phrasing that I like in my British authors. And scary, I don't know how it will affect others, but I wasn't scared at all for almost the first two-thirds but then one thing happened and I was reading it in my room alone, with only one light on and I really got quite scared, to the point that I had to will myself to go down the stairs to the front door and make sure it was locked! So, your mileage may vary, but I got a serious chill from this book. I'll definitely add Shirley Jackson to my list.

52. On Both Sides of the Law by Hugh H. Corkum

I bought this book at the Maritime museum in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia.  It's one of those books that you can only get in the place it was written.  The author was a rum-runner in the 30s and then became the chief of police of Lunenburg, which is the symbolic heart and soul of Canada's fishing and maritime history.  This book was plainly told, but full of great anecdotes, life lessons and viewings into what life was like in this region in the middle of the twentieth century.

Good stuff.

51. Vanish in an Instant by Margaret Millar

This is an earlier Margaret Millar, a pretty classic hardboiled whodunnit filled with all the pathetic, unsavoury, desperate characters a reader could want.  In this one, the "detective" is a lawyer hired by the financially comfortable mother of the accused.  The book, though has a semi-omniscient viewpoint and though the lawyer, Meecham, leads the investigation, we spend a lot of time in many of the other characters' heads.  The daughter, married to a sensible doctor husband, is not sensible herself and was found passed out drunk, covered in blood in the cabin of a married man who was known in town to be a playboy.  The married man is in the cabin also.  Somebody stuck him in the neck several times with a kitchen knife.

Things get very complicated and very interesting, as each knew character, as sad and broken as they often are, are worth reading about.  What I found really interesting about this book is how much it reminded me of Ross Macdonald.  This is early in her crime career, but after she had written a few gothic thrillers and I don't know if she was finding her voice or if her husband was the one finding his voice.  She edited (and I believe typed up) his books so there was definitely an interplay between them.  I wonder how that worked out.  They must have had a solid foundation of a marriage to not get into terrible competition over their writing.

This was a really enjoyable read, but not an exemplary Millar book.  It didn't stand out for me like some of her others (Beast in View, in particular).  The one really weird thing in this book is when the protagonist and a woman fall in love.  It's so sudden and they don't even kiss or anything.  They've only met a few times and then suddenly they both admit that they are in love with each other and get all goofy and swoony.  I guess that's how it worked in the weird '50s.

50. The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ding ding ding ding!  50 books!  Before July!  I really don't know what got into me, but that shit is impressive.  I think I may change my goal to 100 books [asteroid promptly crashes through my roof].  There are many factors at work here and some advantages that gave me a big boost.  But again, I think the biggest thing is just sticking with reading.  The more you read, the more you can read.   I really have not sacrificed much other stuff in my entertainment life this year.  Still socializing as much as I have since I moved to Montreal, still working hard, still maintaining a decent marriage.  I have cut out gaming (tabletop roleplaying, not videogaming which I don't really do anyways) and especially all the online BS of that world where I was wasting a lot of time.  Also, my wife is like 8 total seasons ahead of me in the various TV shows we watch.  And finally, I got this 3-month secondment in California, which has a good hour of readable commute time a day and way fewer distractions of home life.  Also, I suspect that come mid-October I will not have much time to read, so I wanted to make sure I met my goal ahead of time.  But enough crowing.  If I could write like I can read, I might actually have something to be proud of.

On to the third book in the Earthsea trilogy.  I enjoyed it, but I have to say it was kind of a disappointment.  It's definitely my least favourite of the three and I hope that the other, later Earthsea writings can satisfy me more now.  At first I thought it was just the unrelenting gloominess of this book, but looking back on it, I see that it also has some structural flaws that made it feel less rich than the first two.

The Farthest Shore takes place a decade or two after the Tombs of Atuan.  At this point, Ged has become the Archmage of Roke.  He is the most powerful wizard in the Earthsea and has a rich history of exploits (beyond the ones in the actual two books).  Now, there is a darkness emanating from the outer reaches of the land.  Wizards are reporting that they are losing their magic.  A young prince from an important kingdom comes as a messenger and Ged takes this as an omen.  He calls a council and decides to sail with the prince to find the source of the problem.

The first and second books both end with these dark, gloomy and trudging finales where Ged is challenged in a slow, draining way.  In the first one, he and a wizard buddy sail way out to the edge of the world to find Ged's shadow.  In the second one, Ged is trapped in the labyrinth, clinging to life while using all his magic to hold back the shadows there.  These were dark and trying, but they were only at the end of the book.  Almost the entirety of the Farthest Shore is this kind of quest.  For me, it dragged.  There was no joy in this book.  The spectre of the end of magic is always a scary one for the fantasy reader.  It almost felt like the magic was drained out of this book from the beginning.  And though the ending, the darkness is vanquished and the magic restored, the reader doesn't get to experience any of the resurrection that should have followed.  We don't get to go back into the rich, magical world of Earthsea that drew us in in the first place.

Worse than that, though, was a real lack of characterization with the prince.  In the first two books, Ged and the princess are richly portrayed.  The reader grows up with the character.  Here, the prince comes ready made and you don't get much from him besides being a witness to Ged's struggle.  And this guy turns out to be the one king who will return the single throne to Earthsea.  Similarly, the antagonist is a minor character who is only initially referred to in a passing history of Ged in an incident that takes place after the first two books.  It just doesn't have a lot of weight.  At least for me it didn't.

The worlds they visit are evocative and cool and the underworld quest they go on was compelling such that again I was hard-pressed to not keep reading.  But it just didn't give me a lot of pleasure.  I felt denied!  I know there is at least one other book and several short stories that take place in Earthsea, so I'll reserve my hope for more of the magic of Earthsea in those books.

49. The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin

One of the luxuries of being so far ahead with my 50 books reading is that now I can take a bit of time and actually read some series.  Now the Earthsea trilogy in its entirety probably has fewer pages than a single Game of Thrones or Harry Potter book, but hey it is three distinct books.

The second one, The Tombs of Atuan, is a direct continuation of the first, but you don't realize it at first.  It's the story of a young priestess, chosen by the elders at the age of four and taken away from her family.  The entire first half of the book is following this young girl as she slowly learns about what her roles and responsibilities will be.  She also learns about the politics of power that surround her and the ancient and secretive architecture of the temple and its ruins, most interestingly of this is the labyrinth, where no light is allowed to be lit.

This is another amazing book.  I think I would argue that this book is superior to the first one.  Personally, though I enjoyed the first one more.  But structurally, The Tombs of Atuan is like a diamond with a universe inside it.  We get to slowly explore the tombs with the priestess and our own alliance grows with her awareness of her potential power.  The focus on this limited world allows Le Guin to very subtly talk about power and politics, religion and society and how one reacts to a fundamental change in perspective and belief.  But in her craftsmanship, none of this gets in the way of the story, which keeps you turning the pages.  This is part of Le Guin's genius, her absolute commitment to a great story, while somehow delivering big ideas and making you think.

The second part of this book is where it connects to the first book.  SPOILERS (though this is spoiled on the fucking back cover, for god's sake).  Ged, or Sparrowhawk, whose origin is detailed in A Wizard of Earthsea shows up in the labyrinth, searching for a lost artifact of great power.  Here he and the priestess clash and develop a most interesting relationship.  Like in the first book, the trial for Ged is a slow, deteriorating one of his stamina against the constant pressure of the thing he is fighting against.  It gets gloomy, but the priestess and her own internal conflict (between her beliefs and the outer world this thief-wizard represents) keeps the book very lively, right up to the end.

My only dissatisfaction was that the denouement was all too brief.  I wish we could have spent some time with the characters after the adventure is over.  Perhaps that shows up in some of the later books or short stories that take place in the Earthsea.  Basically, another masterpiece.

48. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

I've been curious about the Earthsea books for a while now, having had the setting dance around at the periphery of my nerd vision for some years now.  It took me a while to pay attention to it.  Often, if I don't get the structure of a series of books and their basic deal, I won't really pay attention to them.  After reading The Left Hand of Darkness, I started checking out the Le Guin section of the used book stores shelves and I found the second and third books in the trilogy (with the handy numbers on the top of each book) in a neat, slim paperback edition.  They were super cheap, so I picked them both up with the new knowledge that it was indeed a trilogy and that the first book was named A Wizard of Earthsea.  I have since learned that there are a few short stories and a fourth novel published much later.  What I particularly appreciate about these books is that they are slim.  Why do all fantasy novels have to be three inches thick today?  Le Guin proves that you can pack an epic into less than 200 pages.

And what an awesome epic it is.  It's still fresh in my mind, but I might say that A Wizard of Earthsea may be my favourite fantasy novel ever.  I think it surpasses for me The Lord of the Rings.  One of the elements of the fantasy novel is the training and levelling up and this book is all about that, in the coolest way.  Plus, the setting is amazing, a land of many, many islands, with a cool map and Le Guin's subtle, moving, evocative voice to reveal bits and pieces to the reader.

The story is about Sparrowhawk, a young boy from the humble, goatherding island of Gont who has the magical potential to become a wizard.  His potential is recognized and he is sent to the Wizardry school on Roke.  There, his youthful pride clashes with his enormous innate power and he unleashes a darkness that sends him on a quest across the Earthsea.  Ultimately, his story is about growing up and the terrible price of being powerful.  In that sense, it is kind of a sad book, though there is so much coolness along the way that it doesn't get you down.

I suspect that most of my nerdy brethren have read this book long ago.  But if you haven't, I would say you need to get this book and read it right away.  This shit far presages Harry Potter (and does it better), so if your kids are into that, sneak this one into the pile at some point.

47. Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon

this cover sucks.

This is part of Simenon's romans durs, but I think in this case, it might be called a roman doux.  It actually has somewhat of a happy ending!  It's the story of an aristocrat, Loursat, in a small french town who has basically given up on life.  Though a skilled lawyer, he rarely practices, spending his days eating meals in the kitchen and reading literature in his study, steadily drinking red wine.  Then one night, there is the sound of a gunshot in his sprawling house and he discovers a dead body in one of the unused (or so he thought) rooms.  It turns out that his daughter has been hanging out with a group of wild friends and they have been getting up to antics in the top level.  In becoming involved in the case, m. Loursat starts to come alive again.  We learn why he shut himself off and we follow him as he slowly awakens to his sorry state.  The main narrative thread is the investigation into the murder and the subsequent trial.  Quite entertaining and satisfying.

46. Wyst: Alastor 1716

Wyst: Alastor 1716 is the third of the Alastor trilogy. I bought the entire trilogy in a single edition in order to read the first one, Trullion: Alastor 2262 and after that was told that Wyst is better.  Since I've already got the book and I felt guilty leaving a huge chunk of it unread, I thought I should read this one next.

It was very similar to Trullion in the style and story structure, though Wyst was a bit more adventurous and had some neat exploration stuff in it.  In this story, a young man from a sea-oriented planet isn't clear on his future and gets attracted to the idea of Wyst.  He's artistically inclined and learns that the light and colours there are the most beautiful.  It's also a planet that has a very peculiar lifestyle, called "egalism" where everyone is equal and there is no real striving.  So we have two storylines or themes going on.  One is the journey of the young man to find himself and the challenges and adventures he faces in Wyst.  And the other is the society of Wyst itself and whether or not it is truly sustainable. 

I found the lad's adventures quite compelling. He mixes it up with people in the city, then gets caught up in a conspiracy and has to flee.  Out in the hinterlands, he tries to raise money (similar in many ways to the protagonist of Trullion trying to raise money to get out of his situation) by painting and harvesting clam-like food creatures.

The study of Wyst was less succesful for me. I don't know if I was just having trouble conceiving of it or if it is badly conceived.  It just didn't seem feasible and though everybody seems quite idealistic about the values of egalism, they all seemed unhappy and complaining.  Even falser, there is a grand plot of a major conspiracy the proponents of which just did not seem capable of even coming up with such an idea, let alone actually executing it.  It felt a bit like a straw man argument by Vance.  In any case, I wasn't super convinced and the ending seemed pretty far-fetched. None of that really took away from the adventure of the protagonist, which was kind of fun and cool.

I just think that Vance's style is too removed and stilted for my personal tastes.  The stories he tells are rich and meandering in a fun way and the locations do seem quite creative and interesting. But I always feel a bit at arm's length and can't really get into them.

45. Hiero's Journey by Sterling E. Lanier

Hiero's Journey, where were you when I was 14?!  I stumbled upon this book on the dollar rack at half-price books saw this awesome cover, scanned the back where it was confirmed that this warrior-priest Hiero does indeed explore the wastelands of post-apocalyptic North America with his moose mount and telepathic black bear ally.  I mean what's not to love?  I found as well the sequel also for a dollar and picked them both up.  Quite happy with this score!  Somewhere in my internet-roaming past, I'm sure I've heard mention and possibly recommendation of this book, but it didn't stick.  This is not a masterpiece, but it is a pretty good read and should definitely be on the must-read list of any fan of the PA genre.

This post-apocalyptic world takes place 5,000 years after The Death, some kind of nuclear and biological disaster that almost wiped out humanity and created great mutations among the plants and animals that survived.  Hiero is a priest of the Metz Republic, the region that is today the Canadian prairies.  Metz is a distortion of Metis and his ancestors survived because of their remoteness.  In the current time, he is being sent out on a mission to the dangerous south to try and find a "computer" in the ruins of the cities.  He has been trained in fighting and the mental arts.  He has a limited telepathy, which he uses to communicate with his moose mount (called a "morse" and named Klootz).  As the book goes on, he encounters foes with much more powerful forms of mental power and he himself develops his own. There are tons of awesome psionic battles in this book. 

It's really the milieu that puts this book on the must-read PA list.  This is my kind of future PA world.  There are all kinds of mutated animals, either giant, or now sentient or some terrible hybrid.  There are also crazy plants and fungi as well.  These elements, plus the psionic battles makes Hiero's Journey about as close to the original Gamma World RPG as any PA fiction. Hiero's Journey was published in 73 and Gamma World in 78.  There must be a direct link.  I'll confirm this with the nerd community on Google+.

Anyhow, awesome read and I've got the sequel on deck!

44. Trullion: Alastair 2262

I read this book in the context of the Roludo Book Club.  I have read one of Jack Vance's fantasy books and am aware of his influence on the genre (and specifically on Dungeons & Dragons) but still don't quite "get" him.  Some of the people over at Roludo are quite knowledgeable and I am hoping that I'll understand Vance better through their aid. 

It was odd tracking this book down, because knowing that Vance is quite popular and that a lot of his books are available in used book stores, I thought I might stumble upon a nice used copy.  Oddly, the first bookstore I went to had no Vance books at all.  The guy there told me that someone had come in earlier that day and bought all the Vance books on the shelf!  How fucking weird is that.  Even weirder, at the next store, there were no Vance books and a big gap in the V section.  I went to two other used bookstores and only found one Vance book.  Very odd.  I eventually went to Dark Carnival where there was (as usual) an excellent collection of new Vance books, incuding the Alastair omnibus which has all 3 novels and was, for some reason, marked down to $7.50.  So though it is a rather uninspiring cover and in massive trade paperback form with no introduction or anything, it still was a good deal and I picked it up.

The series all takes place in a vast cluster of worlds call Alastair.  Each planet gets a number and a name and while there are overarching cultural and political connections between the planets, I suspect that each story is very different and has no real connection besides that they take place in the same world of Alastair.  In Trullion, a young man sets out from his tropical, idyllic world to join the military and then comes back ten years later to find his home world quite changed. Half his family plot has been sold out from under him, his older brother disappeared, his younger brother joined a cult and his mom doesn't seem to really care about any of it.  The rest of the story is about his efforts to fix these things.

He is an odd writer.  There is something distant about his style and approach.  Harsh things happen, close relations get into serious conflict. Yet the whole thing is written in a matter-of-fact style that takes the impact out of any of it. I found the family relations to be particularly distant and weird.  It was serious, but nobody really seemed to freak out about anything in the way they spoke about it.  Maybe this was reflective of Vance's portrayal of a super laid back society or maybe it's just his writing style, but it felt a bit unreal to me.  Still, it was a cool story and I got caught up in it. 

43. Ennal's Point by Alun Richards

I can't even remember where I found this book, but I must once again pat myself on the back for taking a chance on a totally unknown book and it turning out to be quite good.  It may be true that you can't judge a book by its cover, but I, at least some times, have demonstrated that one can judge a book by its cover, its back cover blurb, its pedigree, its first sentence and if necessary a few scraps of text in the middle.  Enough crowing, let's get down to the review

Ennal's point is the story of a small, poor seafaring town on the British coast and more specifically on the life and work of the volunteer lifeboat crew, which plays an important social and status role in the society there.  The book begins with a hearing on an accident.  The narrator is the local headmaster and the Lifeboat Association Secretary, responsible for administration and the history but not actually going out into the lifeboat.  He paints himself as a wimpy, nervous man, uncomfortable in everything but in love with the lore of the sea and deeply proud of the tradition of his town.  Without revealing the actual accident in question, he goes back in time to set the background, reveal to us the characters involved and slowly weave a complex story of family relations, human weakness and great courage in the face of an angry sea. 

At first, I found it a bit meandering and wanted him to get on with the story.  But I slowly got caught up in the rich history of the region and the complex (and quite nasty at times) relations between the towns people.  The idea that Richards tries (and succeeds majestically) to bring across is that these are poor, humble and sometimes mean folk but they have dedicated their lives and given their all to the duty of going out in a lifeboat to try and rescue people from crashed ships. It's heady, British, moving stuff and always gets me, especially when it is skillfully done.  My god would I ever not want to spend a night in one of these rescue boats, no matter how sturdily built, doing a painstaking search in 15-foot waves and gale force winds.  Barfing your guts out is only the beginning of the misery.  He describes so well the slow demoralization that evolves into hatred and anger and blaming towards everyone involved when men begin to lose hope.  And yet they also (at least most of them) continue to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward on the job that is their duty to perform.

The backstory, involving the big lifeboat family of the town, an older hotel proprietor marrying a far too young and loose girl and all the problems that creates, leads to the ultimate accident.  At times, it felt a bit soap opera ish, though you want to find out what happens.  It's worth it, though, when the book gets to the lifeboat action, which I really couldn't stop reading.  I would think this book would make for great summer reading at the beach.

42. The 22nd Century by John Christopher

Huge find here!  I've been scouring bookstores in the Bay Area for the last couple of weeks and finally made it to The Other Change of Hobbit.  They have a nice used section and I discovered this pretty tattered paperback there.  I didn't even know it existed, but it is a real find, a collection of short sci-fi stories Christopher wrote for the magazines in the 50s and 60s.  It lists the names of all the publications that the stories originally appeared in, but none of the specific dates or issues, which is very frustrating. 

I am guessing that a lot of the stories in here are some of Christopher's earliest work. I know he was very prolific, writing in several genres under several names to make enough income for his young family. It makes sense that short stories to paying magazines would also be another opportunity for him.  These stories are all very much in the style and content of that period of science fiction (is it the Golden Age) and reminds a lot of the kinds of stories you hear in X Minus One old time radio series.  There are stories about space travel, humans interacting with alien species, future societies.  Some of the stories are short and clever, with the classic little twist at the end.  There are hints here and there of Christopher's dark, apocalyptic side but for the most part, the book feels very different than his science fiction novels. 

Interestingly, it is organized into 3 sections.  The first section, entitled "The Twenty-Second Century" is made up of 5 stories, all with the same protagonist, Max Larkin, a sort of super-manager in a future where the world economy is divided up into several major, competing corporations each responsible for one thing like Atomics or Communication..  These stories appeared in different magazines, but evidently to John Christopher, they were of a piece.  There is even a footnote referring to another story with this character that doesn't appear in this compilation.  The other two sections don't really seem to have too much uniting them together.

One of the stories that stood out for me (and spoiler coming here) takes place in the future, where scientists have finally figured out a way to see into the future, but you have to ask a very specific question and the response comes back in the form of a question.  They are working furiously to outpace the Russians and come up with the better weapon.  They figure if they can go into the future and find out the most powerful weapon, they will be able to take the lead once and for all. They perform their experiment, asking the question "In one hundred years time, what is the most powerful weapon?".  They get back a picture of a crossbow.  A little presaging of his own work, I would say!

41. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

There is something about being in the Bay Area that really brings out the nerd in me.  Ever since I've gotten here, I've wanted to read more and more sci-fi and possibly even fantasy.  Given a choice, I will generally lean towards crime or action over sci-fi.  But in the last week or two, I've been scouring the local used bookstores, as well as the two excellent sci-fi and fantasy bookstores (Dark Carnival and The Other Change of Hobbit) and feeling the desire more and more to delve into other worlds and concepts.  This desire has gotten me to thinking about the Bay Area and the west coast in general.  I think this is a very sci-fi part of the world.  First of all, California really feels like "planet earth", in the sense that you can often see the moon in the middle of the day (reminding you that you live on a planet floating in space) the plants are weirdly alien and that many (probably most) sci-fi movies and television shows were shot in California (Star Trek, Planet of the Apes).  Second, California and the Bay Area in particular is the rich center of nerd history.  And it makes sense if you think about it.  It's the west, where first settlers came, people who were brave and curious and wanted (or needed) somewhere new to live.  It's also the point where many of the GIs shipped off to the Second World War and, coming back, decided they liked it here.  Think of what a lot of those guys reading material was back then, manly adventure and sci-fi stuff.  Plus, a lot of them were engineers, who are interested in gadgets and building cool stuff.  I don't know, could be all a bunch of hoo-haa but I'm going to take advantage of it while the spirit is in me and get some good classic sci-fi reading done.

I believe that Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness is a pretty classic piece of sci-fi literature.  Having stayed up late to finish the last 100 pages last night, I would have to agree and add that it is also a cracking good adventure story (at least the second half which is basically a gripping 800-mile trek through an ice planet's freezing northern pole).  I guess, other than a few short stories, this is the only book that takes place in the Ekumen universe.  It's a shame, because it is such a rich concept for a series (so says the guy always complaining about excessive trilogies and series).  The Ekumen represent a loose federation of planets.  Their mission is to find other planets with sentient life and to ask them to join them.  Their mandate is non-aggressive, mainly managing communications, fostering trade and organizing data (services which are much needed where ideas can be shared much easier than actual stuff due to the time involved in travel).  They first send investigators who study the planet in secret.  When they decide it has potential, they send a single Envoy, whose job it is to find the best way to approach the polity (or polities) of the planet and make the Ekumen's offer.  Obviously, this is quite complicated and potentially dangerous in practice. 

In this case, the planet is Gethen or Winter and it is basically a frozen planet with a ring of civilization around its equator.  The people are hardy, stolid and have a very different method of reproduction than us.  They are basically asexual except for a period of a week where they go into kemmer, become sexually active and then either take a male or female form (not quite sure how they decide this) and get it on.  What's interesting sociologically, from the Envoy's perspective, is that because of this set-up, sex is not really present in Gethenian culture.  They get right into it when it is the kemmer, but the rest of the time, because there are no genders, no sexual hierarchy and no sexual frustration or dominance, it makes for a very different society.  The other factor is the cold.  Everybody is fighting to survive and if you transgress, punishment is to be exiled and turned away, which almost always means death in the cold.

So you can see how in 1969 when this book was released, it caused a bit of a stir.  I imagine it was probably an exciting read for a lot of young nerds not sure about their own gender preferences.  What I really enjoyed about it in today's post-feminist environment was how reasonably and thoughtfully LeGuin addresses the subject.  This to me is where science fiction is the best.  She isn't telling us what should be or what is good, simply what is (and she goes into this in an annoyingly cutesy 1976 introduction).  By maintaining an outsider's perspective (that of the Envoy) as well as creating a richly-imagined, logically-consistent world, she gets us to question our own perspectives and beliefs most effectively.  It's very elegantly done.

Though the gender theme is what made this book famous, I think it is actually much more of a story of a friendship and about two people from very different cultures trying to bridge the differences between them.  The overarching storyline is about the Envoy trying to make his way among the machinations of the governments of Gethen, almost the entire second half of the book follows the Envoy and a disgraced politician as they make an epic journey across the planet's icefields.  It's a thrilling outdoor adventure, especially cool because they do have some great tech with them, but it is still a harrowing, survivalist affair.  It is also about the two people (one is a man and the other a Gethenian) coming to understand each other and becoming friends.  It's quite touching.

So in short, super cool book and deserved sci-fi classic.  I note also the LeGuin was born in Berkeley!

40. Look Back in Anger by John Osbourne

This is the play that really started the whole Angry Young Men movement that took place in Britain in the 50s and brought us such classic movies as This Sporting Life, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (also known as Kitchen Sink cinema).  This is the story of a couple and their friend who all live on a small working class flat.  The husband, Jimmy, is lively, intelligent and bitter with resentment to the point that he is almost constantly abusive to his upper-class wife (who married him against her parents's wishes).  They live with a third friend, Cliff, who is a simpler, calmer soul and puts up with Jimmy's tirades against the upper classes, society in general, Alison, her family, her friends.

As a stand-alone story or theatre piece, I wasn't really sure what to make of it.  In context, with my limited knowledge of the period and the books and films that came out of it, I get what is being conveyed here.  This play launched a new voice and a new representation of what England was going through at the time and it caused a lot of controversy.  But by itself, it did seem just kind of depressing.  The guy is such a jerk!  I mean, I get his frustration and the shittiness of the system and the culture in Great Britain back then.  But he has an attractive wife who irons and makes tea and all he can do is shit on her because her parents are socially uptight.  I guess that's just my modern perspective speaking.  There is also a strange element where Jimmy is constantly railing against the rich and is a total jerk, but of course gets the hot upper class babe and then gets her friend as well.  And once he gets them, all they do is iron and make tea and try and understand and tolerate why he is treating them like shit all the time.  The 50's - they were bugging.

39. The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard

Once again, my expectations are surpassed.  I picked this book up for a quarter against my better judgement.  I was a bit burned out on Ballard at that point and I am always reluctant to read an entire book of short stories.  I planned to read stories from this one in between other books I read, which I mostly did.  But the first story was so cool that I kept going and ended up reading these in chunks of stories between other books.  There were a couple of false starts here, but most of the stories were really cool, either dark and quite disturbing or mind-blowing in the concepts Ballard presents (and often both together). 

What was also cool about this was that it demonstrated that Ballard really does have quite a range.  He has such a powerful voice and often has repeated themes across his works that I got sort of too used to him and the last few books of his that I read all kind of felt the same.  Reading these stories reminded me that he can do introspective psychological fiction as well as big-picture high-concept sci-fi.  I'll describe just a few so you can see the diversity.

The first story, Storm-bird, Storm-dreamer, is very classic Ballardian post-apocalyptic, about a guy in some wasteland england where the birds started to grow to be huge and a menace.  All he does is fight them off and stare at this weird lady who is out collecting something from their bones.  As you can see, a lot of similar ideas from his PA quartet, but the descriptions of the giant birds and their dead bodies are pretty astounding.

The second story, The Concentration City, takes place in some human civilization that seems very much like earth until you realize that non-space is infinite, meaning that space exists only as it is carved out of the rock that surrounds everything.  The "planet" is a huge, possibly endless city, divided up into districts in the millions.

The third, The Subliminal Man, is an absolutely terrifying vision of a hyper-consumist future where everyone is kept ragged buying the latest consumer item, replacing their TVs, radios, cookers etc. every few months.  It reminded me a lot of Frederik Pohl's The Midas Touch from Spectrum I .

As you can see, quite a mix of interesting speculative ideas, executed with typical and effective Ballardian unease.  In some ways, these stories might be a better introduction to his work as in large doses he can be a bit depressing.  I'm quite glad I read these.

38. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

My brother-in-law discovered this interesting little crossover of post-apocalyptic and high literature and gave it to me for xmas.  It was a really interesting, though at times challenging read.  The book is written by Riddley Walker, who is a 12-year old boy in a post-nuclear Britain.  Though he is 12, he is basically a man and the book starts with his father getting crushed to death by some machine they were digging out of the mud.  Society has regressed to a world of fenced in villages with a mix of limited agriculture and mining for iron, which means digging old dead machines out of the ground.

The whole book is written by Riddley, in his voice and language, which is a devolved, phonetic english.  At first, it's tough to figure out even what the hell he is talking about, but after a while, you start to slowly pick up meaning (by context and hearing the sounds in your head and sometimes by Riddley explaining things).  On top of that, this primitive world has developed its own complex worldview, religion and history that the reader has to pick apart like an anthropologist.  This special language, plus the truly grim and hardscrabble lives these people lead reminded me of Cormac McCarthy at least in the feeling I got when reading it.  What Hoban is going for here, though is much more ambitious and complex than The Road.  It is also the part that made it a bit challenging.

There are various higher-up roles in the society here, including two men who go around from town to town and do a puppet show.  They are more like religious figures and the puppet show is an opaque parable that requires interpretation, which everybody seems to be doing.  Given the state of affairs, these are an amazingly introspective and philosophical people.  Maybe you have to be when your ancestors almost destroyed the world and left you in the mud.  There is a "connexion man" in each village whose job it is after the puppet show to share with the rest of the village a thought or idea. Riddley Walker's dad was the connexion man but when he dies, Riddley takes over and that's when things start getting weird for him.  He soon finds himself on a path that will change their society for ever as well as force him into new levels of introspection and understanding.

That was where the book bogged down for me.  There were pages and pages of Riddley thinking things through, trying to figure out how his mythology jibes with what is going on around him and the new mythology he learns.  It's all quite cleverly done and if you enjoy that sort of philosophical/anthropological mind puzzle, you will probably really get into this book.  It is probably the most succesful PA book that I've read that really seemed to capture realistically what might happen to human culture and language in such a situation.  The philosophizing parts just went on a bit too long for my simple, narrative-addicted mind.  I would say that if you are a student of the PA genre, you have to add this to your list for sure.

37. The Man who Killed Houdini by Don Bell

Don Bell was a chronicler of Montreal and a bookseller.  He had a regular column, I believe, for a while in a weekly and he wrote "Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory" which is a collection of short stories capturing places and people in Montreal back in the 60s.  He is also my mother's cousin, part of the big Belitzky clan that came over at the turn of the century (the one before the last one) with the rest of the Jewish diaspora from eastern Europe.  Their stories and myths that I heard as a child were a lot of the reason I was so drawn to Montreal and ended up moving here.

The Man who Killed Houdini was his last book and published posthumously by the valuable Vehicule Press.  I have had it since its launch, started it but got kind of bogged down in the middle.  The premise is excellent.  Houdini was killed in Montreal, after a performance at McGill, punched in the stomach by a student.  Most people know this story, but as Bell discovered, the actual information on the incident and the participants is very scarce.  He set out to find out who was the man who delivered the punch and what happened to him.

As others have said, it does tend to meander in the middle. Bell takes us on the exhaustive journey he took trying to track down anyone who had any connection with the incident and the people.  At times, it gets so far afield from the original quest that the reader feels a bit lost and not so interested.  But I'm glad I stuck with it, because he pulls it back again and though there is no definitive solution, you learn a lot about what actually happened and the man who did actually kill Harry Houdini.  It's a fascinating and real story of the complexities of human existence and reality.  J. Gordon Whitehead was his name and he ended up dying of malnutrition living on his own in a downtown apartment where he had allowed nobody else to enter for decades.  Yet he had started off as an athletic, intelligent and interested person.  What had happened to him?  How did his life end up this way?  Was it connected to Houdini's death?

The journey of research and exploration also tells another story, that of the strands of immigration and human history connected to the english speaking community in Montreal.  It's a rich tapestry and justifies the meandering in the middle chapters.  This is the kind of book that may make you think twice about the weird old neighbour that freaked you out as a child.  Who was he as a young man and what was his story?

36. River of Gods by Ian McDonald

I'm really surprised that this book and Ian McDonald himself only came upon my radar recently (that was thank's to Pechorin's Journal).  I'm not a huge sci-fi fan, but I keep my ears open and I really should have heard about this book. It's probably the best new science fiction novel I've read since the Cryptonomicon.  An engrossing, at times thrilling, thoroughly satisfying near future epic that mixes the good and bad of technological development with social and political issues that resonate very much with the present.  River of Gods takes place in India in the year 2047, the 100th year of its independence.  Except India is now divided up into several smaller nations after a civil war that is never fully detailed.  Bharati is one of those new nations and it has become a haven for certain higher-level artificial intelligences after they were outlawed by the U.S. government.  There is a wide cast of characters and the book is structured through them, with each chapter until the end being devoted to each character.  As their stories converge, the greater narrative starts to reveal itself, which I won't reveal but just say that this work is definitely a descendant of Neuromancer.

It's very well written, the kind of science fiction book where you feel a bit worried at the beginning that you are not going to be able to figure out what is going on.  It's not just the passing references to new technology that is taken for granted by the characters, but also the use of a lot of Indian cultural references and language.  However, you become quickly immersed in the world as the characters and whatever the hell they are up to become interesting.  And what a great cast of characters.  Standouts were Nandha the detective whose job it is to hunt down and "excommunicate" rogue AI's with his gun that uses avatars of various Hindu gods and goddesses to do its work and Taj the "nute" a person who has augmented their body so that they no longer have a gender.  The world, too, is just awesome. What I enjoyed about it was that it had a nice mix of optimistic and pessimistic about the future. Climate change is real (one of the serious problems for the nation is the lateness of the monsoon), but there are also many believable options of renewable energy.  So you get lots of neat little instances of day-to-day technology that are the kind of little candies nerds like me love to read about.  But it's all mixed up in a very rich, busy, diverse economy and society where there are still tons of poor people who follow their age-old traditions.  It makes for a very neat mix. 

Ultimately, I can't say that this is a work of art.  It is so well-crafted and slick that it almost felt like it lacked a teeny bit of soul.  I think that is a mean thing to say and probably inaccurate, because I don't think it was created in any way from a cynical motivation.  It just all went down so smoothly for me, like a top-notch summer blockbuster with actual intelligence behind it. I kind of knew how it was all going to go down and nothing in the end blew my mind or touched my own soul (the way Neuromancer did, for instance, though I was 15 when I first read it).  However, I still frickin' loved every page of it and could barely stop reading it at night.  Check it out.

35. The Green Eagle Score by Richard Stark

I just realized about a month ago that I have delayed for quite a while my ongoing re-read of the Parker books.  The reason is that I have been systematically going through my on-deck shelf from left to right and they are ordered by size, smallest on the left and biggest on the right.  I have a preponderance of traditional paperbacks and the new Parkers are in that larger "trade" paperback format.  I normally try to read a new Parker once every 3 or 4 months, as my wife has created a tradition of getting me 3 or 4 new ones from the U of C reprint library for my birthday every year.  So basically, I have a bit of catching up to do and it starts with the masterpiece that is the Green Eagle Score.

How many masterpieces are there in the Parker series?!  Christ, I'd forgotten how great The Green Eagle Score is.  It has vaulted into my top 5, possibly top 3 of the series.  I'm going to need to sit down and think about how it ranks, but there is no doubt that this is one of the good ones.  The heist is just great, the characters rich, the antagonist deliciously hateful, the Alma also hateful and maddening and the little insights into Parker's character are crucial as well.

The setup here is that Parker gets an invitation to participate in an audacious job in upstate New York to hit an air force base and rip off their payroll.  The touch comes from Marty Fusco, an old colleague who got sent up.  When he gets out, he finds his ex-wife shacking up with a young dude called Stan Devers.  It is Devers who points out the job to Fusco.  Parker is skeptical at first (as usual), but with some scouting starts to warm to the job.


SPOILERS AHEAD.  IF YOU ARE AT ALL INTERESTED (AND HAVE ANY BRAINS OR TASTE AT ALL) YOU SHOULD JUST STOP READING HERE AND GO OUT AND READ THE BOOK.  RIGHT AWAY.  ACTUALLY, YOU SHOULD GO OUT AND START READING ALL THE PARKER BOOKS FROM THE BEGINNING UNTIL YOU GET TO THIS ONE AND THEN READ IT AS ALL RIGHT-THINKING PEOPLE SHOULD (AND WILL WHEN I BECOME EMPEROR).



Almost every book in the Parker books has two elements, that I refer to as the Mal and the Alma.  The Mal is the antagonist, the person or group that you as the reader just really hate and can't wait for Parker to fuck up.  Often, it is the Outfit.  It can be a wide range of other characters as well (such as the sheriff in The Jugger).  They are an interesting character to look at, because they give insight into who Parker is and some of the themes that Westlake addresses in the series.  The Alma is the lame character whose emotional weakness spells disaster for the heist.  You always hate them for being so lame, but you also understand that they are weak losers who can't help themselves, unlike the Mals who deliberately choose to cause trouble.

In the Green Eagle Score, the Mal comes from a suprising source.  It's the psychiatrist who is treating Fusco's ex (and Devers' current), Ellen (who is herself quite clearly the Alma here).  She is a messed up individual, with all kinds of fears and insecurities and to help herself, she is in analysis.  It is there that she begins to talk about the planning of the heist, as much of it takes place in her home (and is a source for a lot of her anxieties, reasonably so as her last husband went up because of such an undertaking).  What makes this book so delicious is the slow way that Westlake reveals to the reader that the psychiatrist may be interested in the heist itself.  I really wish I was reading this for the first time or had my mind wiped, so it would come as a surprise to me at what point I would realize that the psychiatrist was fishing around.

His role is a fascinating one.  Often, I feel that in the Parker books, Westlake is taking a shot at certain segments of society.  He hates middle-men, people who control and make decisions without doing any real work.  In many ways, Parker is a true working class hero.  Here, the psychiatrist plays a similar role in that he isn't doing any real work.  He waits and listens and plans to take advantage of other people's labour.  Is that the ultimate sin in Parker's world?  And I wonder how much of a shot is Westlake taking at the practice of psychiatry in general?

There are also a couple of other really cool moments.  I love the introduction of Kengle, one of the heisters who is going to be brought on to help with the job. Westlake spends the better part of a chapter describing the struggles this guy is going through since he got out of jail, trying to sell encyclopedias door-to-door, living in a fleabag hotel.  Then he gets a phone call.

The voice said, "Jake?"
Kengle recognized it, and a heavy weight seemed to lift off his back.

So great!  In some ways, this moment encapsulates why we read these books in the first place.  Westlake takes us into Parker's world and takes the heavy weight of mundanity and the straight world off our back for a moment where rulebreakers are the ones in the right.

Finally, Ellen speaking to the psychiatrist becomes a vehicle through which Westlake can explore the Parker character.  When probed about her fear of him by the psychiatrist, she says:

He's cold and ruthless and he doesn't care about anybody, but that's because he cares about things. Not even the money, I don't think. It's the plan that really matters to him. I think the thing that counts is doing it and having it come out right.

 Again, I think this plays into the notion of Parker as a working class hero.  What is important to him is the job, how well it is done and that it is completed correctly.  He is always fighting against individuals and groups who are either incompetent for a variety of reasons or want to take advantage of his hard work.  The target here, the Air Force, is portrayed as being basically pretty useless, just a lot of bureaucrats with nothing to do but keep each other busy uselessly now that there is no actual war on.  It's ironic that Parker is a criminal, all of whose hard work is done outside the law, but he seems to be someone with a profoundly protestant working principle. 

The way the book ends is just perfect.  Perhaps this little quote captures perfectly Parker and his world (and is a good lesson for us all):

Devers said, "Thanks. This isn't the way I had it planned, but what the hell."

"That's right," Parker said.

34. The Crime on Cote des Neiges by David Montrose

  This is the second in the Ricochet line of books put out by Vehicule Press reprinting some classic old crime paperbacks from Montreal from the 1950s.  This edition has a forward by Brian Busby, Canadian publishing history expert (and sometime commenter here).  I can't say again how much I appreciate the work of Vehicule press in putting together this collection.  These books are cool in and of themselves, but they also represent a thin slice of Canadian culture that would have otherwise disappeared.

This second book is just as convoluted a mystery as the first (I say "second", but I'm not actually sure of the order; it's the second one I've read), however it starts out in a much more straitforward manner.  This time, instead of an omniscient opening, everything is seen through the eyes of private detective Russel Teed.  It's pretty classic private eye stuff.  He is invited up to the house of a wealthy woman and given the case of finding out if her daughter's now disappeared husband had a secret first wife.  This leads him to one then two than many more murders and a complex case involving the heroin racket, past sins and gang subterfuge.  I felt very similar about this book as I did Murder over Dorval.  It was enjoyable, but a bit too convoluted.  After about the third twist, I did appreciate the cleverness that Montrose must have summoned to make it all work but I didn't really care all that much.  Sometimes the writing was really great and other times forced. It is a time capsule of Montreal when it was a great, roaring city, but it really only feels like a time capsule of Westmount. It's amazing how much of this city was able to be ignored by the english-speaking minority at the time.  Even the rare uses of actual french are highly questionable (though he does write a great french-canadian accent).  It made me think of a book from a few years later, The Stringer, which is in many ways quite similar (the underbelly of Montreal, everyone is drinking all the time), but took into account all of Montreal, even if it was seen from the eyes of an anglo.  I guess this is just another example of the two solitudes.

One minor nitpick about this reprint is that the colours on the cover are off.  As you can see compared to the original, the black is so dark that the chair has almost disappeared (this isn't just an artifact of the web, it looks like that in real life) and the softness of the blue and yellow in the original become a harsh yellow in the reprint and it looks a bit cartoonish.  But a minor nitpick for what is a very commendable effort that you should all invest in.

33. The Happy Return by C.S. Forester

I found this beautiful paperback at S. Welch's and finally got through to it on my long (but shortening) on-deck shelf.  It turns out this is the first of the Horatio Hornblower books (and the fourth chronologically).  It's neat, because it isn't obvious that this is the first book in the series.  A lot of references are made to Hornblower's younger days and one might think (as I indeed did while reading it) that those references were to actual events in previous books (which they may well be).  So far, I've read Commodore Hornblower and Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies.  This one is possibly my favourite.  I found the story straightforward as well as the historical context around it, so I could just enjoy it for what it was without trying to figure out what the hell was going on.  It delivers on all the great characterization, locations, intrigue and sea battles that makes this series so well-loved.

In it, Hornblower is sent with a frigate on a secret mission to Central America where he is to aid a local baron and landowner in his efforts to foment revolution against the Spanish government.  When he gets there, he finds that this baron has turned into an insane and cruel cult leader, who calls himself "El Supremo".  Hornblower, trapped between the reality of the situation at hand and the political exigencies of his masters far away, is faced with moral and strategic quandaries that would best even the most capable of leaders.  On top of all this, he has to take on a passenger, the lovely and well-connected Lady Barbara Wellesley.  Forester serves up a delicious stew of everything the fan of adventure on the high seas could ask for plus a big dollop of romance.  This is great stuff and further cementing my appreciation of this series.

32. Serenade by James M. Cain

This book has been sitting on my shelf for almost two decades.  A guy lent it to me at the first job I had out of college.  He stressed repeatedly how he wanted it back and then proceeded to question me daily on if I had read it yet or not.  Of course, I ended up not reading it and not returning it to him. I feel kind of bad about it, which is why it has stayed with me all these years.  I finally got to it on my on-deck shelf and wasn't entirely sure that it truly was the copy I had borrowed back in the day.  But sure enough I found my old business card in it (possibly the first of my career).  So if you are out there, Paul (I think that was the name), I've still got your copy of Serenade and will gladly mail it to you.

And now on to the book.  Cain was very successful as a writer in Hollywood (he did The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity) and this was one of his later books.  It's the first of his I have ever read.  It's the story of a down and out singer, John Howard Shore, in Mexico who meets a beautiful native prostitute in a bar and steals her away on a whim from the toreador she was with.  They decide to open up a brothel together, but on their way to Acapulco they get stuck in a church together during a long rainstorm and end up getting it on.   Somehow, this repairs his voice (we learn as the narrative goes on that he was at the top of the game until his voice stopped working due to some unspoken traumatic event in Paris and he fell and kept falling until he ended up broke in Mexico) and he changes his plans and decides to return to America, with the girl and get his career going.

In order to discuss this book, I have to give away some of the stuff that happens.  In fact, I already have as the narration is continuous and steady so that you don't really know what the main premise of the book is going to be until you are well into it.  So be warned, spoilers here.

He is truly talented and his renewed voice, after some struggling, indeed takes him back to the top.  He gets a regular radio show with a good sponsor, a couple of movie deals and then finally onto Carnegie Hall.  Back in New York, he meets that guy who was his bandleader and inspiration before he cracked up.  It seems like it should be a good reunion, but Shore is super edgy about the whole thing.  The guy, Winston, is super wealthy and obsessed with music and quickly insinuates himself back into Shore's life and career.  For reasons that don't get revealed right away, Shore hides Winston's existence from his Mexican wife.  When they do meet, she totally freaks out and then it all comes out in the wash.  Perhaps it was more obvious for audiences of 1937 when this was written, but I never would have guessed that the whole thing was because Shore had gay feelings for Winston.  Somehow, the gayness made his voice stop working.  He had to get it on with the hot indian mexican earth mama to get it back.  This revelation is well into the book, but there is still a climax  to be played out (which spoiler alert is portrayed on the super '80s photographic colour-tinted re-enactment cover of the edition I have). 

Serenade is quite odd.  I can't tell if Serenade is an advanced cultural critique of homophobia or simply a reflection of the simplistic cultural homophobia of the time. I believe that it was banned in many places when it did come out.  I can't say I loved the book.  There is a lot of talk about music in it that I found pretty boring, because I don't like writing about music in general and I am pretty ignorant about both classical music and what was popular music at that time.  At times, it went a bit too far (like when Juana produces her breast for him to suck on as if it was restoring his heterosexuality) but overall it's an interesting read with some pretty ripe, rich stuff going on.  My guess is that I will prefer his more straight-up noir thrillers.

31. Bang for a Buck by Catherine Roman

Here is an odd little find, picked up for a buck itself (possibly less) at S.W. Welch's annual sidewalk sale.  It was the canlit, in particular the seamy underbelly of 80s and 90s Canada that intrigued me and Bang for a Buck didn't disappoint. It's the autobiography of a pretty wild woman who led a pretty wild life.  Her story is amazing, as are the situations and people she encounters along the way.  It's bizarrely written, though.  The entire book is so full of one-time idioms, unique turns of phrases and random references that it almost becomes like a stream of consciousness poem.  At times, it's even hard to understand specifically what she is talking about.  That's the thing, most of the book is narrative and the story just keeps charging ahead, so despite the excessive language, I had no trouble turning the pages.  By the end, I found myself somewhat caught up in her style, sympathetic to her and quite possibly understanding a bit of her inner psyche, which is I guess one of the end goals of poetry.  However, at times it was just too much, like she didn't have the confidence to simply tell the story.

And what a story.  This woman lived through a lot.  She started out in rural Ontario, starting out with a semi-functional nuclear family but eventually getting bumped from relative to relative, many of whom were already a part of the criminal element.  She just starts to get in to worse and worse situations, at least from society's perspective, finally ending up as a prostitute in a rural, mobile brothel up north.  While she gets beaten, sexually assaulted, kidnapped and constantly harassed, much of her life seems more like an adventure to her (and her real life) than some descent into badness.  There are some truly horrific situations, including getting kidnapped by this psycho french-canadian in the employ of the RCMP, where she is locked in his north Montreal house and forced to play shut-in wife and victim to his weird sex games.  Very scary.

It's hard to know what drives her.  I think a psychologist would recognize symptoms of mental dysfunction in her, both from abuse as a child possibly just innate.  The book ends without any real resolution, except perhaps that she has moved into a new stage of her life (though that is only hinted at).  She's only in her early-20s by the end and one must imagine that she got her life together enough to be able to write a book and get it published.  I'd be curious if today she is living a more stable life.

30. The Doomsters by Ross MacDonald

True to my promise to read more Ross MacDonald, I picked up this early Lew Archer novel (the cover is painfully, stupidly '70s but the book was actually originally published in 1958.  In this one, Archer is woken up by a strapping, well-spoken young man who has snuck into his garage way too early in the morning.  He turns out to be an escapee from the loony bin, with a story to tell about an evil doctor who had him put away.  Archer feels some pity for him but tries to convince him to go back to the institution.  On the driver there, Archer learns that he is from a fairly wealthy family from the agricultural town of Purissima, that his father was a senator and that his brother and wife are conniving to take his share.  It's hard to know how much of it is true, as the kid is pretty wound up and does indeed seem a bit crazy.  At the last moment, just before the gates of the institution, he jumps Archer, knocking him out and stealing his car.

Archer gets involved, driven by sympathy for the young man and some belief that he wasn't entirely wrong in is suspicions.  The reader is introduced to another broken, twisted, hateful California family and the corrupt town that grew up around them.  It's a dark, sordid journey that also goes deep into Lew Archer's own psyche (the reason the young man came to him was because he had escaped with a heroin addict who used to be a protege of Archer's).  MacDonald sometimes tries a bit too hard with the psychologizing and the moralizing, but it's all in aid of a good story and a nasty expose of nasty people.  The bodies really pile up in this one, too!  Good stuff.

29. Special Deliverance by Alexander Fullerton

Normally, I do not pick up action books that seem to be to military in their nature.  I do enjoy reading about war and the exploits of men and women in war.  But there is a point where a book can become to war-nerdy, with an emphasis on equipment and procedure and very little intrigue or human interaction.  So I was a bit reluctant to purchase this book. But the cool cover and its taking place during the Falklands Islands War—a little piece of history that I could do to learn more about—turned the table.

I'm glad I did, because while this book did have a lot of war stuff, especially sections on the boat where there was just way too much jargon, it was, as they say, a cracking read.  The main character is Andy McEwan, a civilian who gets dragged along on a commando mission in the Falklands to secretly disable a stockpile of missiles that are proving to be quite deadly to the British ships.  McEwan is brought along because the missile base is not far from his family land, where he himself grew up.  He's the perfect insider to help the elite SBS (Special Boat Service, bad ass commandos who deal specially with water and water craft), even though he is estranged from his older brother who runs the farm and who, as we learn later, is a high-ranking officer with the Argentine army.  Even worse, he is married to the woman Andy still has a hankering for.  

So there is lots of human interest stuff along side the military action.  Though the periods on the ship were a bit dull for me, the commando sections were really cool.  These guys are all about getting in and getting out without anybody knowing, even though they could kick everyone's ass if they had to.  They are experts in building hides, camouflaged hidey-holes where they spy on their target.  This book has one of the more exciting scenes of guys sneaking into a compound that I have read in a while. It's the kind of incomplete sentence action writing that doesn't always work for me, but worked splendidly here.  Just super cool with them scaling a barb wire fence in a specific order, one guy covering the barbs so the others can climb over him faster. 

The other thing I enjoyed about this book was that it gave me a new perspective on the Falklands War.  That went down when I was in grade 7 and our teacher had us all bring in clippings about it as a way to teach us how to pay attention to current affairs.  I remember the attitudes at the time being generally strongly anti-British.  They were portrayed as sabre-rattling aggressors in a useless war, not unlike the U.S.'s later invastion of Grenada.  Now Fullerton's book is not jingoistic, but it is certainly pro-British.  However, I did not know at the time that the Argentine government was a military junta, with a history of atrocities, who was using the war as a way to distract their rebelling society from an ongoing economic crisis.  In fact, their loss of the war led to the junta collapsing and Argentina setting up a democratic structure that is in existence today.  Thatcher and her cronies were certainly no good guys and their ushering in of the neo-con shitfest we are struggling through today (the long-term effort to move money from the public to the private realm) was majorly bad.  But despite that, it can perhaps be historically seen that the Falklands War was a good strategic move for the world.  

It looks like Fullerton has written quite a lot.  I will look a bit more into his oeuvre for sure.

28. Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harry Wheeler

Fail-Safe was a big bestseller during the cold war and one of those books, I believe that everyone was talking about at the time.  The theme is one film buffs will know well from classics like war Games and Dr. Strangelove: out automated weapon systems accidently trigger an attack that will lead us into nuclear oblivion.  Fail-Safe is deadly serious, though, and thoroughly researched.  It all takes place at the very top, with the president, all the top military brass and a few other stragglers as the large cast of characters.

Fail-Safe is the concept where if no action is taken, a thing will return to its safe state.  In this case, there is a fail-safe point where nuclear bombers will automatically turn around unless they get a specific command to go ahead and continue the attack.  In this case, due to a combination of factors (including an equipment malfunction, but not just that) one bomber group scrambling to what was a false alarm, does receive the go-ahead order and continues on its path to Moscow, with enough nuclear power to destroy the city entirely.

The rest of the book is everybody trying to stop it and the president (who is Kennedy, though his name is never mentioned, seen through the eyes of his expert translator) trying to convince Kruschev that the attack is erroneous.  If you think it through, and the book does, you can see the issues at stake.  How do you convince your enemy not to retaliate when you are just about to destroy their most important city?  The problem with the retaliation is that it will touch off a nuclear exchange that would basically destroy the world.

It's a gripping book, with great characters and a pretty intense outcome.  The portrayal of Kennedy was neat, making him seem like the coolest guy, a super badass with a profound humanitarian viewpoint on the world.  This probably represented a political bias of the authors, but whether it is accurate or not, it doesn't get in the way of the delivery of the problems of nuclear stalemate that depends on systems more complex than man.  It's funny, though, based on the foreward, it seems that these authors were convinced an accident will happen.  It never did and I wonder why that is.  How did we hold out long enough so that the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own ideology? Was it just luck?  Did our systems get better?  It would be interesting to know more.

Bonus, check out this topical promotion at the end of the book (click to make big enough to read):

A fine example of the propaganda front during the Cold War

27. Spectrum I edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest

This was the first in the Spectrum series that Kingsley Amis edited.  Though it was published in 1961, most of the stories come from the late 40s and early 50s.  It was a mixed bag.  I really love Amis' spirited defense of (and attack for) science fiction.  There were even more ignorant "literary critics" back then in relation to genre fiction than there are today and Amis must be credited as one of the first people to really go directly at them, especially in the UK.  I don't know who Robert Conquest is, but I should probably give him credit as well, as he co-wrote the intro with Amis and was the co-editor (and it is implied that they had some differences of opinion).  [edit to add that I did a bit of internet research and learned that Conquest was a well-respected Russian historian and poet and wrote two sci-fi novels as well, but—big surprise—the sci fi novels are barely mentioned and though his friendship with Amis is, there is nowhere I can find in any of his biographies the info that he edited several of these Spectrums, even in the Wikipedia!  Astounding.]

The problem is that it could be argued that a lot of these stories fell into some of the very criticisms levied against science fiction (Amis admits this as much).  They are often about the exploration of a concept rather than a good story.  There are a couple of really good reads though.  The best story (in terms of actual narrative) is John Berryman's Special Flightabout a freight ship making a standard, but in this case a rushed and unplanned emergency trip to the moon.  It's really quite a tense story, but focuses so much on the technical aspects.  It was written in '39, which is kind of amazing, and was probably really exciting to engineers who understood air flight and loved to speculate about how that would operate in space.  There is also a hilarious Robert Sheckley story about an offworlder who comes to earth to find love.  Another great concept was from Frederik Pohl's the Midas Touch about a future society where consumption and poverty were reversed and the lower down on the social and economic scale you were, the more you had to consume, with ration books and everything.  Very prescient, given the obese state of our lower classes today.

So all in all a mixed bag with some gems here and there.  But overall, this book gives you a feeling of the positive and imaginative spirit of those early sci-fi writers.  These people are enjoying themselves and so are their readers.