18. The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie (book 1 of the First Law trilogy)

Well I had promised myself that I would try to avoid any books that were the start of a trilogy, simply because at my current slow reading rate, I can't afford to commit to more than one book at a time.  The Blade Itself was seductive enough (laying around at my parent's right next to the comfy armchair, strongly recommend by my brother-in-law who had left it there) that I decided to ignore the rule and I'm glad that I did.

First of all, it begins with a bang.  The first pages are a brief, but intense action moment, almost like starting after a cliffhanger that also revealed a really cool character.  From there, the book delivered a ton of the kind of political machinations that I like, more appealing and interesting characters and lots of great moments of ass-kicking and revelation of superior skills.  Though I doubted it was possible, the fantasy world is pretty interesting.  I love the dying empire element, especially to constrast (or render palatable) our own current dying empire scenario the U.S. seems to be accelerating towards.

I won't go into the storyline, because it is kind of complicated and the whole point of the first book is to slowly reveal all the layers of the story that is going to take up the rest of the trilogy (which I am now eager to keep reading).  But it's cool and fun as hell, believe me. If you like this sort of thing.  Which I do.

17. Nothing to Lose by Lee Child

I watched the latest Jack Reacher movie on the plane.  I did not have high hopes, but it actually was even slightly more mediocre than I had expected.  The bad guys were generic, the locations were generic (another drippy alley, another drippy warehouse, ah big chase during Mardi Gras!, etc.), the action was overly-edited and without any real excitement (though it had a certain brutality at brief moments).  Worse, the story got all caught up in a family metaphor which was really awkward with Tom Cruise trying weirdly to be human and normal (always a bad idea).  The only redeeming factor was the female lead, who was convincingly fit and (other than the aforementioned stupid "family" scenes where she and Reacher "argued") was a badass in her own right.

The biggest problem with the movie, though, was that it skimmed over the main thing that is cool about the Jack Reacher character: he's surrealisticly free.  The movie paints him as a kind of freelance MP detective, meting out justice and uncovering conspiracies.  But in the books, he is really a true drifter, who stumbles into situations that force him to use all his MP detective skills to mete out justice and uncover conspiracies.  I know it doesn't sound much difference, but believe me the real pleasure in the books is how Reacher is just walking places with nowhere to go and nothing to do.  He travels across the country with nothing, not even a wallet!  He is the modern-day equivalent of Saki's "unledgered wanderer" and every middle-age, middle-management white male family man wants a little, teeny bit to be that guy.

The beginning of Nothing to Lose exemplifies this perfectly.  Jack Reacher is in the middle of desert Colorado, halfway between the towns of Hope and Despair.  There is literally a dividing line on the highway, solid, new tarmac on the Hope side and crumbling, greyed-out road on the other.  The town of Despair is pretty despairing and weird as hell too as Reacher gets purposefully ignored by the few townsfolk and then aggressively rousted by the local constabulary.  Of course, he breaks some noses and then decides to go back and see what the hell is going on.  Lots of intriguing investigation, punctuated with ass-kicking and then finally busting into full-on chaos the way only Jack Reacher can do.  Ultimately, the journey was better than the payoff, but it was well worth it.  There are so many Jack Reacher novels, and the situations are all just exaggerated enough that you wouldn't want to read too many of them close together, but it is great to know they are out there when you need an easy and entertaining read.

16. The Goblin Emperor by Katharine Addison

I picked this up from a stack of my nephew's books.  His dad said they hadn't read it because it was too old for him.  I don't know what prompted me to pick it up, but I am glad I did, because it is the best fantasy book I've read in a while and probably one of the most enjoyable books I've read of any genre in the last decade or so.

It's the story of an exiled orphan, who is yanked from his role as bullied supplicant to the capital city where he learns that he had become the emperor.  The story is about him going from fearful, inexperience naif to someone who could actually manage the role of leader of an empire. There are dangers and challenges everywhere and the book is a super satisfying study of someone slowly finding confidence and opening his innate abilities to succeed and even do some good in the world.  I'm not doing a good job of selling this to you, but if you like courtly intrigue, diplomacy and battles of wit in a cool fantasy setting, you should check this book out.

15. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Read this during our late summer vacation at PEI, but am only unfortunately reviewing it on New Year's Day 2017.   So an extremely truncated review that does not accurately reflect how much I thought about this book.  I was overall disappointed.  I found the storyline much less naturalistic and more overtly emotional than Middlemarch.  That being said, I found the ending really painfully sad and it stayed with me for quite a while.  The portrayal of the middle agricultural class and the family of sisters who had achieved various levels within that class was rich and entertaining.  These aunts and their intense pressure to conform to certain behaviours gave me a better understanding of some of the parents of my friends on Vancouver island (many of whom had emigrated from Britain).  However, major parts of the storyline felt melodramatic and forced on to this deep backdrop, giving the book overall an inconsistent and unsatisfying feel, at least for me.

14. Pentallion by Vanessa Blake

I have to admit that I am feeling quite pleased with myself having read this book.  Now, I am sure there is a large group of gothic romance readers out there who would read these words and think of me as a total newbie.  I am pleased, because I suspected that the genre of gothic romance would deliver some of the same kind of thrill that I have gotten from the more masculine genres of crime and action that I have spent most of my life reading.  I picked up Pentallion in the dollar box outside the way too cluttered Westcott Books on the Main (so cluttered that I actually don't go inside anymore because the entrance is blocked by several precarious stacks of books as high as my shoulder and leaving about probably just a little over 2 feet of space to get through) and it did not disappoint!

At first, it felt heavy-handed, with a ton of exposition being dumped on the reader in the first few pages: a young woman, Rosanna, whose father was a British spy in the Peninsular wars and mother a Portuguese lady is left orphaned in her small house in the countryside outside Lisbon.  There is immediate danger from neighbour and supposed benefactor "Dom Luiz" who had wormed his way into her father's society and now has designs on Rosanna Pentallion herself.  However, she is quickly saved by the arrival of her aunt and cousin, who take her back to her family estate in England.  The narrative relaxed at this point and eased into the real story.  I won't go into details, but it has all the classic elements of the gothic romance: the jealous relatives who are up to unrevealed shenanigans, the sworn enemy of her father who also happens to be ruggedly handsome and of good character, hidden wills, dangerous cliffs, miscommunications, faithful servants and so on.

Most of it was kind of predictable, but I still actually got a bit teary when the lovers finally understand each other and I was psyched when the conniving family members got theirs (though Blake pulls the punches with them so that the only real antagonist is Dom Luiz whose "hooked nose, hooded eyes, and excessively swarthy skin hinted of a Moorish strain.").

I am looking forward to finding more of these as I am sure there are some writers in this field who could take the form to an even higher place.  As it is, Vanessa Blake did a more than adequate job in keeping me entertained and I hope to see some of the variations that others will bring.  Good stuff!

13. One More Sunday by John D. MacDonald

I don't know if it is because summer is here (though I wasn't actually on vacation) or just the power of John D. MacDonald's page-turning prose, but I burned through this book.  One More Sunday is one of his later, thick "dramatic" novels (which I guess means not in the specific crime or mystery genre).  It's the story of a mega-church in the south.  Though there is a mystery that is in the center of it (a journalist disappears who was sent to cover the church), the book is really about the inner workings of the church, the flaws of all the humans that run it and it's slow descent into collapse as their human weakenesses pull it apart. 

I loved the first half, as MacDonald really delves into the setting, giving great details on the church's history, its geography and how it is run.  You get to see the database behind its fundraising, the operation that answers (and takes money from) the thousands of letters received each day, the security, the finances, its reslationships with big politicians and so on.  Things tend to get a bit saccharine and slightly unreal in parts in the second half, especially as characters have some dialogue that sounds very forced and unnatural.  There are a few too many uneducated hicks who somehow have a deep wisdom and a way too rich language to share that wisdom.  It also feels a bit rushed and in need of a tighter edit.  There are actually several typos, which suggest that it was actually rushed a bit.

Despite those minor flaws, I was hooked enough that I had to stay up late finishing it.  Something that happens very rarely to me these days, so I was grateful.  I love the way MacDonald doesn't pull his punches on sin.  Still in America, the media hems and haws on corruption and immorality of big names and we live in a culture where people still want to defend straight up scumbags because they are powerful or have celebrity.  There is none of that doubt in a John D. MacDonald book.  He shows you the big name preacher at his worst and it's very satisfying.

12. A German Requiem by Phillip Kerr

The third of the Berlin Noir trilogy (though not the last of the Bernie Gunther series, I believe), A German Requiem takes place in Berlin and Vienna after the fall of the Reich.  It's another really cool setting and a great, if slightly forced, context for a private detective.  This time, Gunther is hired to get an old comrade in the Berlin police (and later the SS) off of a murder charge.  The plot gets complicated quickly, as anything does in post-war Germany, with the US, the other Allies and the Russians all fighting for power and slicing up the remains of the German pie, not to mention the old Nazis who may or may not still be running around.  It almost got too complicated, but was enjoyable all the way through.  Kerr does a great job of painting on evocative picture and Gunther is a great hard-boiled private eye with a conscience in the classic mold.  He can punch, shoot and fuck with the best of them.  The only real flaw is that this book also features a semi-innocent woman who has horrible things done to her.  It's probably not unrealistic for the setting, but it happened in two out of three books in the trilogy and it feels like it falls a bit on the exploitative side.  If you can handle those things, then I would say the Berlin Noir lives up to its billing. 

Holy crap, I just did a bit of research and see that Kerr has continued writing Bernie Gunther novels and that there are 11 now!

11. The Garden of Evil (aka The Lair of the White Worm) by Bram Stoker

Picked up a paperback copy of this from the local thrift store and jumped right in.  I was quite psyched at first, as it had the classic Edwardian language and setup of the young scion coming back from Australia to meet his great-uncle.  Of course, the young man is of outstanding character and mettle and gets along famously with his elderly uncle, who is delighted to have discovered an heir of such quality.  Things get even richer, when we learn the history of the area where the uncle's estate is, one that exemplifies the ancient struggle between the evil of Roman heathenry and the good of Anglo-Saxon godliness.  Both forces are still very active in this valley, especially evil. 

So a great setup and there are some rich characters introduced early on that have a lot of promise, the super sinister Lord Caswall whose family is far too Roman in their genealogy and Lady Arabella, who wears a tight white frock to emphasize her impressively slim figure.  They are both up to shenanigans it is clear from the start. Unfortunately, the story does not live up to the promise of its beginnings.  The pacing is really inconsistent, with big events happening in a sentence while multiple chapters are spent on the nephew and Lord Nathaniel (his ally in fighting the supernatural) theorizing in the most inane way.  The plot also just seems to have some major holes where things don't make sense and major events have no impact on any of the characters.  It feels badly written.  I understand it was Stoker's last book and was published posthumously, but it's a real mess.  And I am pretty sure I am reading the unabridged version (there was a popular abridged version that had 28 instead of 40 chapters).

Despite the rough structure, there is a ton of pretty good supernatural action in this book.  The protagonists race the great worm in land and sea.  Mongooses are ripped in half.  And there is a full-on psionic battle that presages Scanners by over 60 years.  It's chock full of fun stuff, too bad that so much of it is quite bad.  A brief internet search showed me that it has landed on many worst of lists and I think that may have been fair.

10. The Flower People by Henry Gross

Picked this up at a stall at the Marché de Nuit here, after flipping through it several times.  It's a series of interviews with people from the the "hippie" movement.  It was written in 1968 and while some may find the cover and the idea something to laugh at today, it's actually a pretty cool historical document.  The author is a bit heavy at first with some of his framing, but the vast majority of the interviews are just the various people speaking and it's really fascinating.  There interview subjects range from a young woman who is doing way too many drugs, a head shop owner who is sympathetic to the scene, but also taking care of himself, a bunch of people from a pretty chill commune in Connecticut and a bitter loner who couldn't fit in. 

What was the most eye-opening to me was how self-aware about the scene itself most people seemed.  I thought that things were still in pretty full bloom in 68, but the people here are all well aware of how many of the "hippies" are just upper middle class kids coming in from the suburbs for the weekend, about how commercial things had become and about how dependent (or derived from) drugs the culture was.  It's sort of depressing to see how little we have learned as a society since then.  One guy, a chemistry professor, talks about how he can't wait for us to properly embrace marijuana and study it so it can be understood and applied properly.  That only took us 50 more years and a devastating "war" on drugs and we are only now starting to figure that out.

A good read, but its seriousness made me want to jump back into my Freak Brothers omnibus!

9. The Pale Criminal by Philip Kerr

I've been hunting down the original British versions of Philip Kerr's now classic Berlin Noir trilogy (or close enough that the first three have been reprinted in their own "Berlin Noir" entitled omnibus), since I discovered them at a great open air book market in Amsterdamn.  They only had the second and third and I thought it was a trilogy and so held off on buying them.  I've been looking for the first one ever since, to no avail.  I stumbled on a decent copy of the second one (Penguin, 1991) in pretty beat up condition with a fade spine, so I thought I could actually read it.  But again, I wanted to start with the first one, March Violets.  I was at my friend, paperback aficionado Hannibal Chew's recently and he had the above-mentioned omnibus and lent it to me, but of course I forgot to take it.  So I just decided to relax my stringent policies for this one case and started The Pale Criminal.

I was glad I did, because I jumped right into it.  I was a bit surprised by the tone at first.  It really is a straight-up detective mystery.  I was expecting something else, not sure what, but from the first page, The Pale Criminal follows all the tenets of the form.  The protagonist, Bernie Gunther, is the ex-cop loner with some sadness in his past and a dogged determination to do the right thing, no matter what it costs him.  He gets hired by an obese, wealthy woman to track down some blackmail letters showing her son to be a homosexual. 

After this traditional setup, things do veer into a deeper place, as Gunther gets picked up by the Gestapo for an interview with Heydrich himself, who reveals that there has been a string of serial killer like murders, the victims being blond, female teenagers, exemplars of Aryan youth.  I won't say anything more about the plot, but the storyline does open up and takes full advantage of the Nazi Germany setting.  The mystery is solid, but the portrayal of the Nazis in full power just before the invasion of the Sudetenland as seen by the eyes of a working stiff with some policy authority is what really makes this book resonate.  Nazi Germany and Hitler get thrown around a lot as internet memes and references to fascism, but whenever one is reminded of the actual reality of it, it is profoundly disturbing.  I am fortunate to have had a good high school education with a lot of emphasis on how the Nazis came to power as well as spending some time in college on it.  It really is something we should never forget, because humans unfortunately have an all to easy tendency to head down that road.

8, Fletch's Fortune by Gregory McDonald

I'm really going back to my original reason for buying paperbacks, which was to be able to carry them with me anywhere and not worry about them getting damaged.  That means I am buying books these days that I don't want to worry about and this Fletch fell into that category (also a dollar).  I remembered enjoying a few of these as a teenager.  This one was just okay.  Fletch is a post-60s anti-establishment James Bond of a journalist who also solves murders.  He can be funny but I think the establishment he is mocking has changed so much that he comes off today as just being kind of trying too hard.  This story takes place at a journalist's convention where the president of the association gets murdered just as it begins.  It got moving near the end, but ultimately lacked weight and I've already moved on.

7. The Black Company by Glen Cook

Not Tor's finest effort, cover-wise.

It took me forever to read this book.  It comes highly recommended in the well-read nerd community, but the prose style was just not doing it for me.  I think I sort of got it after a while.  It's supposed to read like those gritty war novels, except in a fantasy setting.  I like that conceit, but even with that understanding, I felt distanced.  The setup is cool.  The narrator is the medic and chronicler of a historic band of mercenaries in some fantasy land embroiled in war.  There is lots of cool fantasy battle scenes and fantasy grunts doing what they do in their downtime.  It gets epic, but ultimately didn't do it for me.  Another problem for me, and this may have been the edition, but it is very geographical (lots of strategic discussion about the war and which side has control of which region), but no friggin' map!  Come on. 

6. The Body on Mont-Royal by David Montrose

This is the third and last David Montrose book published by Vehicule Press.  I enjoyed it more than the other two.  Things actually happened, characters interacted and a rough mystery and crime narrative unfolded more or less amidst all the drinking.  It's also really violent, exaggerated to the point of being unrealistic at times (especially the beating the protagonist takes).  Still, it wasn't particularly enjoyable, beyond seeing 50s anglo Montreal in the noir detective context.  Even the portrayal of Montreal is lacking in how insanely un-French it is.  It's like Montrose lived in Toronto, had never met a francophone Quebecois and was writing about some fantasy Montreal.  The only french character is the police detective, who is shown as sympathetic, but not super bright (a Lestrade character basically) but with the goofiest accent. I mean it's fine to do a francophone speaking accented english, but if that is the way they spoke english in the 50s, shit has changed a lot.  This sounded to me more like Pepe le Pew.  I guess that probably does reflect the anglo reality before the Quiet Revolution, but you'd think at least detective fiction would try to portray the underclasses and oppressed a bit more realistically.

Also, I find the cover deeply uninspiring.  They couldn't have paid an illustrator to do a real pulpy cover or just copy the original Harlequin, which is actually quite nice?  I mean compare and contrast:

5. Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

My wife picked this up and enjoyed it with some reservations.  It was thin and seemed like an important book in a sub-genre of fantasy.  Also Fritz Leiber (I need to reread his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories).  It is the story of a successful professor in a small, stuffy northeastern university in the late 40s who discovers that his wife has been using magic to protect him and boost his career. He is a rationalist and believes she is deluded and the book is about the mistakes he makes because of this and his slow realization of the truth. It actually gets pretty intense and all the spell details and magic explanation are well constructed and fun.  The setting too, with the various flawed faculty and their malevolent wives juxtaposed against the free spirit that is his wife and his own independence, is instantly sympathetic.  The ending was a bit pat and deflated some of the import and horror that the narrative had built up.  It's a short and enjoyable read, and lives up to the reputation touted by the publisher.  Recommended.  (heh heh, my wife recommended Conjure Wife.)

4. Reamde by Neal Stephenson

I was sort of done with Neal Stephenson.  I loved Snow Crash and The Cryptonomicon (the guy who recommended this to me accurately described it as "the kind of book you feel sad about when it is over") but just could not make it through the first book of the Baroque cycle.  So much nerdy diversion that was not in service of the story!  My brother-in-law helped bring me back into the fold first by convincing me I might like Reamde and then by giving it me for xmas.  I picked it up at the end of January and while it was a beast (1000+ pages) I had a hard time putting it down and was able to crank through a huge section during two train rides to Toronto.

It's still really nerdy, but the nerdiness is a light peppering rather than a deep sauce.  Actually, the very foundation of the book is pure nerd ideology.  That ideology says that if only people would base their existence on rationality and skills and not get caught up in social convention, they will then succeed and kick ass in all kinds of situations.  There is some truth to this and it is very appealing to an old ex-nerd like myself.  The dark side of this is the libertarian techbro dolt that we see all too often today and I'm sure a lot of them loved Reamde.  Stephenson doesn't take us down this far because he maintains a human, sympathetic side, but also because the priority here really is the story.

And it's a great, crazy story.  It somehow manages to be both empirical and theoretical at the same time.  It's empirical because he brings in a wild mix of characters and situations, whose behaviour and premises driver what happens next.  Yet at the same time the whole thing is structured into some neat unities (it all takes place in 3 weeks) and maintains several consistent, interesting themes (the virtual world vs. the real world; terrorism as a thing, far right rural wingnuts as real people, family).

Ultimately, it is a teeny bit too American jingoistic and the ending wasn't quite as satisfying as I had hoped (by the time you get to it, you can kind of guess how things will play out).  But the ride itself was thoroughly enjoyable and I will keep my eyes out for his next book.

3. Dressed for Murder by Donna Leon

My mom left this when she came to visit last year, said it was quite readable but not top-notch.  I have to agree. The detective is intelligent, rational and moral in a world of corruption and politics. The setting, modern-day Venice, is cool, as the detective's lifestyle around it (buying fresh tomatoes and figs to prepare dinner).  They mystery was compelling and intricate.  A man's body is found in a field behind a slaughterhouse, a place where local prostitutes sometimes ply their trade.  The face is badly smashed and he is in woman's clothes.  The investigation leads to the transvestite prostitution scene in Venice and follows (of course) to well-placed and powerful political figures.  It all felt a bit light and the ending was a bit too easy.  Nevertheless, an enjoyable read and would work fine on a beach or winter cabin vacation.

Reading this, watching Foyle's War (about a similarly rational and moral detective but in England during WWII) and watching Making a Murderer, really makes me think about the idea of the fictional character of the detective.  Why do we love them so much?  Why are they so good?  Especially in the light of reality (at least in America and Canada) that most of them seem to be unethical bureaucrats at best and downright sociopathic murderers at worst.  I want to read more books about detectives where they are bumbling around, forcing cases into pre-conceived ideas, badgering witnesses, planting evidence and even straight-up murdering people.  What is going on in those detectives' heads?

2. The Shadow of the Lynx by Victoria Holt

I picked this up at the new (to me anyways) Pulpfiction Books East on Commercial in Vancouver.  It was in the dollar bin in front of the cash register.  I also found an intriguing Colin Wilson there.  The store was small and nicely curated, with a relaxing vibe to it.  I'll go back next time I'm in Vancouver.

Anyway, my interest in gothic romance had waned a bit since the last Mary Stewart, so I was wary.  Something about the cover and the masculinity of the title made me feel that it might hold my interest.  It did.  It promised some of what I had hoped the form would deliver in fast pace and dynamic storyline, similar in structure though not in content to the genre of men's action.  The Shadow of the Lynx starts with a young orphan on a ship to Australia, chaperoned by the son of her dead father's business partner.  There is drama right away, as the learns of her chaperone's father, a wronged British prisoner who, through the power of will, had become a wealthy entrepeneur and has a almost godlike charisma. The story twists and turns and comes full circle.  The resolution was a bit deflating, but the ride there was so enjoyable. 

It's cool the way a female protagonist (the orphan on the boat) has power and implements her will in the strictures of the patriarchy of that time (of both times actually, the narrative, which takes place in the Edwardian period, and the early 70s when it was written).  She is hemmed in by the constraints of masculine rule.  But within those constrains, it is the forthrightness of her character and the use of her wit to analyze situations that allows her to succeed.  She is also passive to events around her and decisions made by those more powerful than her (mostly men, probably entirely).  Yet somehow those parts of the book didn't feel frustrating to me.  I think because her inner monologue never gives up her spirit, so you respect her.

So yes an enjoyable read. Victoria Holt is a pro and I see was quite prolific. I don't think I am up for a steady diet of her books, but she will be something I will continue to look for and read when the time is right.  Nice to have discovered her. 

1. The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

Yes, I did read the movie cover one

I found this in the apartment we were staying in and felt it would be an easily digestible start to the new year of reading.  It was a quick and enjoyable read, though it felt a bit more simplistic than the Harry Bosch books I had read by Connelly.  I liked the set up of the protagonist, he is kind of like the pre-Better Call Saul, not quite as full on sleazy but playing the same game.  He has no office, but just rides around in his Lincolns, talking on the cell phone and keeping his files in a storage locker.  The actual plot, once it moved out of the mystery mode and into the thriller mode, was less engaging.  You kind of knew where it would go and the bad guy wasn't given enough depth to make him interesting.  Still, I definitely kept turning the pages to find out what was going to happen next. 

31. Crysis Legion by Peter Watts

This is possibly the worst book I have read since I started this blog.  That's not necessarily so bad as there have been few books that I truly hated in that time and the quality mean is quite high.  It's more frustrating because I paid $5.50 for it at a used bookstore on West Broadway in Vancouver, that should have known better (or perhaps they did, I bought it after all).  I had high hopes as well.  I like Peter Watts' work a lot, but always found it a bit conceptual and science heavy.  When I heard that he was writing a fiction based on a videogame, I thought it might allow him to focus on his badass action writing.  It did, but the result was not what I had imagined. 

Currently, for the things I enjoy in fiction, videogames are just not a medium that allows for creativity.  Crysis Legion does have tons of cool action, but it's mostly repetitive.  Even worse, the main character has barely any character and even less agency.  It's a first-person shooter, so the story is basically on rail road tracks.  Watts writes it like he is an observer, which I suspect he was, probably basing the storyline on watching walkthroughs of the actual game.  Worse, he relies on a few gimmicks over and over again, in paticular italicizing words constantly (really, like when describing big destruction he will do it several times in a paragraph).  It gets really grating.

It has bits and pieces of Wattsian crazy science reality gussied up into science fiction and the way he describes the final exposition is pretty compelling.  Also, at times you can feel Watts himself exasperated with the constraints and even poking fun at them (or at least pointing them out).  It's a valiant effort, but ultimately, nobody is connected to anything going on (neither Watts nor us) and it became a real slog to get through.  I have been reading this book for over two years!  (and man, what a relief to get it done.)

I love the idea of real authors doing the story behind videogames (Richard Morgan was the writer for the videogame and Watts worked under him for the novel) and I hoped it made the game better.  But going the other way, taking a game to make a novel out of, seems like basically cheap heroin for the Crysis addict who has already finished the game and wants more.  I also hope that it made Watts a good chunk of cash so he could go on writing the books he wants to write.

30. My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart

I really picked up steam on my reading over the xmas holidays this year and am now trying to get through books I stopped and started in the past.  I've been labouring over My Brother Michael for most of the year.  I expect Mary Stewart to be slower and more thoughtful than what I prefer, but this one really took a long time to get going.  The ending paid off, but I almost abandoned it at several points.

It's the story of a young divorcee traveling by herself in Greece when through some mix-up ends up delivering a car to an unknown man in a small village near the Oracle at Delphi (which had been on her tourist wish-list).  The man turns out to be a dashing British archaeologist who was also looking for the dying place of his brother, who had been killed at the end of World War 2.  It takes a ton of meandering, having to do with visiting a bunch of ruins and the picturesque greek town and a bunch of random people about two-thirds of the book before we figure out that there is a solid story here.  Maybe Mary Stewart wanted to do justice to a place she had visited or maybe that kind of travelogue is a big part of the sell of this genre, but it wasn't working for me.  Also, there is always that weird layer of British female romance of this period where they are all weird and coy about whether they are into the guy or not, trying to always be all practical while there are constant looks and finger brushings on cheeks or backs of arms ("like a moth"). 

It all did tie together and the ending is actually quite intense and brutal, restoring my faith in Mary Stewart.  But this one needed a tougher editor, in my opinion.

29. Play Dead by Peter Dickinson

Peter Dickinson was one of my parents favourite authors, but I never got into him (other than his young adult series starting with the Weathermonger) the way I did with other British mystery writers of that period.  It may be that he is just a bit too adult and sophisticated compared with Gilbert, Ambler, etc.  He died this year and received the appropriate respect and I thought I should, being practically an adult myself, read more of his books. 

Play Dead is told from the perspective of Poppy Tasker, a 50-year old recent divorcée in late 80s London who has reluctantly taken on the job of nannying her grandson.  She struggles with the role, feeling pegged into the role of a gran when she still has career and romantic aspirations.  Despite her reluctance, she does begin to enjoy the social complexities of the other caregivers at the play group where she takes her grandson.  Things get more than interesting when a man is seen creepily peeping at the children, then ends up dead–stripped naked, his genitals decorated with flowers– a few days later, in the park where the children play.  There are also several other plotlines going on, involving a squat of radicals, the local election and her own romantic involvement with several men in the community.

The mystery was really quite good and complex and I enjoyed reading from the perspective of this different character, who was not happy with her situation, but never became maudlin or annoying.  You slowly realized what a remarkable person she was despite her own inability to see it.  Still, it was all just a tad too reflective (though some of the reflections were quite interesting) for me to be drawn in and I'll definitely continue to read Dickinson, I believe my initial hesitations were not misplaced.  He is a great author, but perhaps just a tad too intelligent for a simpleton like me.

28. Capital by John Lanchester

This was recommended by every member of my immediate family and happened to be in the bookshelf over the xmas holidays.  A bit of a brick for the year-end reading rush, but I tore through it.  It's a real page-turner.  I guess it falls under the category of literary fiction.  The story follows the lives of several characters, all of whom interact with a specific street in London in 2007 and 2008.  The opening chapter lays out the history of the street and how it went from primarily a middle class neighbourhood to suddenly becoming super valuable with the money and real estate boom in London at the beginning of the 21st century.  The anchoring element is that somebody has been putting postcards in people's mailboxes with photos of their front door and the words "We want what you have".  The characters are a wealthy financier and his materialistic wife, a Pakistani shopkeeper and his family, a Polish builder who does lots of renovations in the neighbourhood, the non-citizen but can't be deported East African meter maid, a young Senegalese soccer star and a dying woman who lived her whole life on the street.

It's a thoroughly enjoyable read, that I am guessing really captures many of the major issues of living in London today, it's massive increase in wealth, the political and social challenges of the muslim populations living there (and other immigrants) and an overheated real estate market.  Lanchester treats the characters with a lot of respect and bad things happen, but never extremely so and you hope the best for all of them. 

27. Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C.S. Forester

Found this on the shelf of free books lining the window of the grocery store near my parents house and hesitated to take it at first, but then was drawn in upon realizing it is the first of the Hornblower books (at least within Hornblower's own fictional chronology).  As usual, it is a series of vignettes and I found this to be my favourite so far.  Each vignette describes a stage in Hornblower's early career and I found the contrast between his own lack of confidence and the boldness of his actions quite endearing (as did his senior officers, evidently).  There is also tons of great action, straight up mercenary action like attacking a galley with a jolly boat or jumping on to a burning fire ship to steer it away from its target.  Though I could not agree with it, my biased anglo-saxon side took perverse pleasure in the portrayal of the french and spanish militaries (cruel and inefficient).  Great stuff.

26. White Leopard by Laurent Guillaume

I picked this up on a whim in new trade paperback format at a nice bookstore in Berkeley I had been browsing at for way too long and felt like I should support with real dollars.  It was a good choice, though I wish the format had been a traditional paperback and I wish I had the discipline to have hunted it down and read it in the original french (and maybe I will with some of his other books as this one was pretty short).

It starts out intense and brutal and grabbed me right away.  After that, it was the setting of Mali that kept me hooked.  It's the story of a French cop of Malian origin who is forced to flee France after a revenge killing.  He is now a private detective in Mali, who earned the moniker the White Leopard in the local papers, due to his detecting exploits and light skin.  The story is fast-paced and relies too many times on last minute rescues (he is well-connected), but ultimately pulls together well.  Really enjoyable.

Guillaume has written several thrillers in french.  This one was translated by lefrenchbooks, a line that sources out good french genre books and translates them into english.  If White Leopard is any indication, this looks like a line worth keeping an eye on.

25. Hell House by Richard Matheson

Not my copy, but the version I found

(written Dec 26, 2015 catching up)

Another great find!  A woman at the tam-tam this summer had a blanket with a bunch of books spread out on it and a big sign "free books".  She said she was just doing it to encourage reading.  It seemed a bit odd, but I found this book and a few french Winnie the Pooh books for my daughter.  I am not a big fan of horror, but the period and the author and then the blurb made me pick this one up and I am glad that I did. 

Four practitioners of the occult make a deal to try and exorcise a haunted house as the last request of its dying owner.  All of the characters are seriously flawed or damaged and the history of the house that led to its reputation is just awesome.  In its past, it was owned by an insane megalomaniac tycoon with incredible charisma who turned it into first a playhouse in the forest that got darker and sicker until he and his various guests closed off the outside world and then all eventually died.

The four characters are a beautiful medium who used to be an actress, a psychic whose last use of power was in the house where 4 others died and he was left naked and broken outside, a way-too confident paranormal scientist and his sexually repressed wife.  In different ways and at different speeds, each of them is slowly attacked by the house (and all of them together).  It is really delicious to see the weakness of their character lead to their destruction and to have the history and power behind the house slowly revealed. 

A movie of Hell House was also made and got decent reviews.  I have it on standby.

24. Black Man by Richard Morgan

(written Dec 26, 2015 catching up)

I loved Richard Morgan's Market Forces and found this in hardback for cheap at a used bookstore in PEI.  I was a bit disappointed.  It had a lot of cool near future transhuman cyberpunk technology and politics and some good action.  But everybody was constantly grim and mad at each other and full of tension about their past that after a while it just became a bit tiring.  The protagonist is a variant 13 (or "thirteen" perjoratively), a genetically modified human species that was bred for war then abandoned as being too dangerous and exiled to Mars or secure desert colonies.  Our herois semi-legit because he has chosen to hunt down other thirteens who are hiding out in the rest of society.  The conceit is that the thirteens are modified back so their DNA is structured as society's hunters, before we became agriculture.  It was kind of cool, but his social ostracization got a bit heavy after a while and I had trouble seeing anything of value in its metaphor for today's racism.  It was okay but felt a bit patched together and uneven.

23. Tomorrow's Ghost by Anthony Price

(written Dec 26, 2015 catching up)

I found this book on a small shelf at the back of the Co-Op in North Rustico, PEI.  I have to admit that I am quite chuffed to have found this book there.  It demonstrates that the ever-thinning vein of British crime and espionage thrillers in Canadian culture has not dried out entirely.  Ever-fruitful blogger Existential Ennui made me aware of Anthony Price with his great interview with the author.

Reading this book made me respect Anthony Price's style and thoughtfulness, but I don't know if this was the best introduction.  It is late in a series and structured in a somewhat special way, as if Price was toying with the form.  The exercise was a success but it left me feeling a bit cold.

I will not seek his books out, but will definitely pick out the next one I stumble across in the aisle of a rural supermarket.

22. Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks

(written Dec 26, 2015 catching up)

We lost a huge writer when Iain M. Banks died.  I had been rationing his Culture books even before he moved on, because each one is just so delicious.  I found Surface Detail for really cheap in a used bookstore in PEI and it seemed the perfect book to cap off my vacation with.  Excession is still my favourite, but this comes into second place probably.  I won't go into the story details, but it delivered.

21. Under Stone, Over Sea by Susan Cooper

(written Dec 26, 2015 catching up)

I have been meaning to read these books for a while and found the first one in the library.  I never read these as an adolescent, but wish that I had.  It's a story of a family spending the summer with their great uncle by the seaside and stumbling upon adventure connected to him and his mysterious past.  What I love about this genre of British adolescent adventure is both the sense of the slow discovery of something exciting going on around them (because they are left on their own) and the real threat that the bad guys can deliver.  This one delivers both.

(My nephew had read the first two and got the last 3 for xmas, which made me realize that there are 5 books in the series. What is frustrating is that I have not been able to find all 5 in the same format and it is often unclear in any given volume which number it is in the series.)

20. The Skull beneath the Skin by P.D. James

(written Dec 24, 2015 catching up)

All I knew of P.D. James was my mom saying that she could be "quite nasty", that and her ubiquity made me not interested in checking her books out.  However, this edition, found somewhere free, did pique my interest.  It gave me the sense that she was one of those British authors from the second half of the twentieth century that I enjoy.  The story takes place on an island with an ancient castle, recently purchased by a wealthy fan of the theatre, who wants to restage a play in the theatre on the island.  The protagonist is a female private detective, who had an older ex-cop partner who has since died (this could be in past books, I never researched it yet).  The star actress whose star has faded but has been invited to lead the play on the island had been receiving death threats.  It's a classic closed-door murder mystery (the murder itself is quite nasty) all taking place on the island.  There are many characters, all richly drawn and I totally got into it. The ending was a bit contrived feeling, but the ride was worth it.  I will keep an eye open for future P.D. James.

19. Silver Robot Lover by Tanith Lee

(written dec 24, 2015 catching up)

Some Google+ pals of mine do a monthly book club.  I keep trying to participate, but ultimately just do not have the time.  They chose Tanith Lee recently and that inspired me as I am always looking for more women writers of the kind of books I like and she has an excellent but now neglected reputation.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find the specific book they chose so I went with this one and took it on my vacation.  It takes place in a post-scarcity future and is the story of a young woman who rebels by falling in love with the latest model of a companion robot.  His particular skill is music and the two of them become street buskers.  She rejects her snooty upper-class friends, but ultimately gets tracked down by them and the robot company and troubles begin.  It's more about love than about robot consciousness and is a well-paced, interesting story.  The ending was structured a bit like Lolita, oddly enough.  I will read more of Tanith Lee's work.

18. The Pnume by Jack Vance

(review written Dec 24, 2015, catching up)

I picked up the entire Planet of Adventure quadrology in a single volume to read over our summer vacation in PEI.  I will write a single, broad review of the whole series, because I can no longer remember the details of each volume.  This is book four. 

I struggle with Jack Vance.  I find his writing sort of primitive and un-nuanced and yet at the same time there is an underlying sophistication and cynicism in the stories he tells.  His style is like nobody else from his period or from the genre in general.  I get into the unfolding of the narrative, but never feel truly connected to any of the characters.  I am always slightly disconnected when reading him yet never disengaged so that I want to put it down. 

The theme across all 4 books of Planet of Adventure is the competent, scientific and strategic human gradually mastering a strange environment and in doing so, the read slowly learns of this interesting world.  The protagonist is a human space explorer who crash lands on the planet and has to navigate the various species and societies, which are really crazy and cool.  He has his struggles, but he generally kind of dominates, which starts to feel slightly biased over time with shades of colonialist superiority.  However, the portrayal of the societies and species and their power structures is rich and complex and Vance does seem to be really trying to imagine a realistic world utterly different from our own (except that women are also in subservient roles). 

17. The Dirder by Jack Vance

(review written Dec 24, 2015, catching up)

I picked up the entire Planet of Adventure quadrology in a single volume to read over our summer vacation in PEI.  I will write a single, broad review of the whole series, because I can no longer remember the details of each volume.  This is book three. 

I struggle with Jack Vance.  I find his writing sort of primitive and un-nuanced and yet at the same time there is an underlying sophistication and cynicism in the stories he tells.  His style is like nobody else from his period or from the genre in general.  I get into the unfolding of the narrative, but never feel truly connected to any of the characters.  I am always slightly disconnected when reading him yet never disengaged so that I want to put it down. 

The theme across all 4 books of Planet of Adventure is the competent, scientific and strategic human gradually mastering a strange environment and in doing so, the read slowly learns of this interesting world.  The protagonist is a human space explorer who crash lands on the planet and has to navigate the various species and societies, which are really crazy and cool.  He has his struggles, but he generally kind of dominates, which starts to feel slightly biased over time with shades of colonialist superiority.  However, the portrayal of the societies and species and their power structures is rich and complex and Vance does seem to be really trying to imagine a realistic world utterly different from our own (except that women are also in subservient roles). 

16. City of the Wankh by Jack Vance

(review written Dec 24, 2015, catching up)

I picked up the entire Planet of Adventure quadrology in a single volume to read over our summer vacation in PEI.  I will write a single, broad review of the whole series, because I can no longer remember the details of each volume.  This is book two and I had a hard time not constantly snickering at the title. 

I struggle with Jack Vance.  I find his writing sort of primitive and un-nuanced and yet at the same time there is an underlying sophistication and cynicism in the stories he tells.  His style is like nobody else from his period or from the genre in general.  I get into the unfolding of the narrative, but never feel truly connected to any of the characters.  I am always slightly disconnected when reading him yet never disengaged so that I want to put it down. 

The theme across all 4 books of Planet of Adventure is the competent, scientific and strategic human gradually mastering a strange environment and in doing so, the read slowly learns of this interesting world.  The protagonist is a human space explorer who crash lands on the planet and has to navigate the various species and societies, which are really crazy and cool.  He has his struggles, but he generally kind of dominates, which starts to feel slightly biased over time with shades of colonialist superiority.  However, the portrayal of the societies and species and their power structures is rich and complex and Vance does seem to be really trying to imagine a realistic world utterly different from our own (except that women are also in subservient roles). 

15. City of the Chasch by Jack Vance

(review written Dec 24, 2015, catching up)

I picked up the entire Planet of Adventure quadrology in a single volume to read over our summer vacation in PEI.  I will write a single, broad review of the whole series, because I can no longer remember the details of each volume.  This is book one. 

I struggle with Jack Vance.  I find his writing sort of primitive and un-nuanced and yet at the same time there is an underlying sophistication and cynicism in the stories he tells.  His style is like nobody else from his period or from the genre in general.  I get into the unfolding of the narrative, but never feel truly connected to any of the characters.  I am always slightly disconnected when reading him yet never disengaged so that I want to put it down. 

The theme across all 4 books of Planet of Adventure is the competent, scientific and strategic human gradually mastering a strange environment and in doing so, the read slowly learns of this interesting world.  The protagonist is a human space explorer who crash lands on the planet and has to navigate the various species and societies, which are really crazy and cool.  He has his struggles, but he generally kind of dominates, which starts to feel slightly biased over time with shades of colonialist superiority.  However, the portrayal of the societies and species and their power structures is rich and complex and Vance does seem to be really trying to imagine a realistic world utterly different from our own (except that women are also in subservient roles). 

14. Abaddon's Gate by S.A. Corey

(written Dec 6, 2015 catching up)

The third of the Expanse series and things keep on going.  I found this one a bit darker and heavier than the first two and I think just simply three big books of the same style and setting starts to slow down for me no matter how good.  So I lost a bit of steam here but ended up finishing it because I had to return the book to the library before we went on vacation.  I did enjoy the revelation of the backstory, what was the source of the mysterious disease and craziness that spread from it.  It was cosmic and mind-blowing in a way that fit in with the overall story.  I think there is a fourth book and it will be a TV series, so I may continue on in this world a bit in one form or another.

13. Caliban's War by S.A. Corey

(written Dec 6, 2015 catching up)

This is the second of the Expanse series and is very similar in theme and structure as the first one. Also, equally entertaining.  Here, though, we now have the set up established.  A group of ragtag space mercenaries now have a kickass ship and run around getting involved in adventures directly or indirectly related to the solar system-changing events of the first book. 

12. Leviathan Wakes by S.A. Corey

(written Dec 6, 2015 catching up)
Every now and then I get in the mood for some good epic space opera and I was in one of them when this came across my G+ feed.  Turns out the authors are part of George R. Martin's writing group.  It was exactly what I was looking for at the time, a real page-turner with a pretty cool scope.  It's the future, we have colonized most of the inner planets and human society is divided into three major political factions, Earth, Mars and the Belters.  We meet a bunch of disparate characters in cool situations that you know are all going to be connected.  The connection here is some weird package/disease that turns people into a grey stew that may or may not still be alive.  Lots of interplanetary politics and action with a really compelling setup make this book feel like a well put together summer blockbuster.

11. Blood and Judgement by Michael Gilbert

(written Dec 5, 2015 catching up)

This is really the Gilberts I love.  Urban (Londong) procedural investigations with really smart police (often Petrella).  This is early in Petrella's career and though clearly a gifted character, Gilbert never makes it easy for him. His career is often at risk.  The violence is limited, but what there is quick and brutal.  Good stuff.

10. A Kind of Anger by Eric Ambler

(written Dec 5, catching up)
I have a beautiful Atheneum book club edition of this later Ambler (1964), in great condition.  The story is a nice combination of sleazy journalism and current (at the time)events.  A reporter gets caught up in the middle of a murder of an expat Kurdish general and flees with his mistress.  A little more fanastical in the end than is usual for Ambler, and a lot of fun.

9. The Killing of Katie Steelstock by Michael Gilbert

(written Dec 5, 2015 catching up)
I always remember the setup of this one, a popular TV actress is murdered back in her home town and we get to see all the nasty local politics and infighting.  I didn't remember the solution, fortunately, and it hit me with a bang.  Enjoyable as always with Gilbert.

8. The Schirmer Inheritance by Eric Ambler

(written Dec 3, 2015 catching up)

This is the first post-war Ambler that I read in my re-read and it was really enjoyable.  Ambler's style is smoother now, but his treatment of the setting (Greece near the end and after WWII) is complex and subtle as his earlier books, with a great sense of intrigue.

7. The Empty House by Michael Gilbert

(written Dec 3, 2015 catching up)

As you cans see, I was deep (and happily) into my Ambler Gilbert revisiting.  Gilbert does a good job of portraying competent young men who are slightly out of step with the expectations set for them.  Here, Peter Manciple as an insurance adjustor is not really supposed to be making any waves, investigating the death of a scientist who drove off a cliff.  He of course makes a lot.  Nice transition from murder mystery to modern espionage. 

6. The Mask of Dmitrios by Eric Ambler

(written Dec 3, 2015 catching up)
This is probably my least favourite of Ambler's early pre-war books.  It's still really good, but the set up never quite grabbed me, with the writer following the trail of Dimitrios across Europe. He isn't really in danger until the last third, so there isn't a lot of tension. The story and backstory of Dimitrios himself is really cool.  It also has one of the best descriptions of heroin addiction I've ever read.

5. Anything for a Quiet Life by Michael Gilbert

(written Dec 3, 2015 catching up)
I had completely forgotten about this book, thinking it was a novel. It's actually a series of short stories about a super sharp London lawyer who sets up shop in the country to take a break from things.  Really enjoyable mix of fun crime law and investigation with a dash of action.  Great local rural character as usual from Gilbert.

4. Cause for Alarm by Eric Ambler

(written Dec 3, 2015 catching up)

Another one from the Intrigue quartert, A Cause for Alarm, stars a young engineer who desperate for work ends up running an arms factory in Italy.  It's a great telling of the naive guy slowly realizing the forces conspiring around him.  The adventure part of the story is a flight across frontiers, which was really cool.  Great book.

3. The Main by Trevanian

I bought this at a book sale on Avenue de Parc, which is the next big boulevard to the west of the real Main.  I have wanted to read it since I got here and even saw it once at Welch's.  But I got it here for a buck and the time was right.  Me and my adolescent reading buddies back in Lantzville went through a Trevanian phase, but we liked the over the top action stuff (Especially Shibumi) and I at least didn't find The Main appealing at the time.  It is kind of a dour, melacholy book, more concerned with painting a picture (possibly exaggerated and definitely florid) of what Trevanian clearly considers a very special culture corner of North America.  The pages turn quickly.

2. The Country-House Burglar by Michael Gilbert

(written Dec 6, 2015 catching up, actually had not recorded when I actually read this, so the date could be off, but it was definitely part of my Gilbert/Ambler binge early 2015)

I enjoyed this one as all Gilberts, but it is not my favourite.  Focuses on the older people, who are cool, but I didn't find them particularly compelling.  The culprit didn't seem super connected with the rest of the story either, so the ending was not totally satisfying.  Still, I'm picking nits because all of Gilberts books are worth reading.

2. The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

(Written Dec 3, 2015 catching up)

It seems like a lot of the classic sci-fi books from the 70s and 80s (is that the Silver Age?) are about first contact, with most of the story following the actual learning process.  Lots going on in this book.  I really enjoyed it, but found it ultimately not sure if it wanted to be a political treatise on xenophobia or an actual story.  The comparison of the alien advanced tech compared to the human was innovative and believable.

1. What's So Funny by Donald E. Westlake

[written Dec 1, 2015 catching up.]

Westlake was still very much in form when he wrote this second to last Dortmunder caper.  Great characters and situations that hilariously and consistently screw Dortmunder yet somehow you love it while still rooting for him.  Love the upstate New York cabin. Though it's comedic, Westlake demonstrates once again his mastery for procedure and description of place.

2014 Year-end Review

[writing this on Dec 1, 2015 catching up.]

I can't actually remember my thoughts at the end of 2014, but looking back, I am pleased at my output and the diversity thereof.  Not bad considering my ongoing internet addiction, which filled much of my little free time between parenting and work.  So basically same excuses as at the end of 2013.  We strive on.  Reading is great.  Let's all keep doing it.

28. Brink's, The Money Movers by R.A. Seng and J.V. Gilmour

(written dec 6, 2015, can't remember when I actually read it!)

I found this in a free box a long time ago.  It's a corporate published history of Brink's, well-researched, parochial and totally biased.  As a fan of the heist genre, I thought this would have some good information and be entertaining as well.  I wasn't disappointed.  The first half in particular, talking about the early days of Brink's moving money in the early West via horse carriage (real cowboy stuff) and it's growth into the twentieth century was good. The second half was a bit duller, but I still enjoy some of the corporate history. 

27. The Etruscan Net by Michael Gilbert

[Written Dec 1, 2015 catching up.]

Also found at my parent's, had to offset the Gilbert murder mystery with a Gilbert thriller.  The reveal of the antagonist in this one was much weirder and colourful than I had remembered.  Made it a bit uneven, but a really cool portrayal of rural Italy and the art/archaeology world. 

26. The Black Seraphim by Michael Gilbert

[written Dec 1, 2015]
This is the spark that fuels my Ambler/Gilbert fire that was the first half of 2015.  I am always in the mood for a good British murder mystery when I am staying at my parent's for the holidays and found this classic in the shelf.  Reading it at this age, I get all the cultural subtleties and manners, so the book seemed less subtle than when I was a younger man.  Still, thoroughly enjoyable.

25. Uncommon Danger by Eric Ambler

[written Dec 1, 2015 catching up.]
Uncommon Danger is in the 4-volume Eric Ambler omnibus, but the copy I read I found in my parent's guest bedroom bookshelf, a really old paperback with a breaking spine and flaking corners.  I read it anyways.  It was great, though I preferred the setup (with the down and out journalist on his last dime crossing a frontier with unknown contraband) then the conclusion.  Still, great stuff.

24. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

[written Dec 1, 2015 catching up ]

I can not remember the context of when I was reading this, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.  My aunt pointed out that it was really a satire, subtly ridiculing most of the characters.  Good.

23. The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth

Okay, now back to full manliness!  I've never read this classic and only seen snippets of the movie (which I shall also rectify now that I have read the book).  As a young man, I read a book of short stories, No Comebacks, by Forsyth that I absolutely loved, then tried to read The Day of the Jackal and wasn't able to finish it.  I think that sort of put me off Forsyth for a while.  I found The Dogs of War at the local thrifts shop for two bucks in a thick, generick 90s paperback that I didn't have to worry about treating roughly and jumped right in.

Really, this should be called The Dogs of Preparing for War.  The premise is a massive British mineral company discovers a mountain of platinum in a fictional West African backwater country and their CEO hires a mercenary team to take the entire government out while also performing some financial shenanigans to ensure a massive killing on the market.  The mercenary he hires, Shannon, is the protagonist and he is tasked with first scouting the mission, coming up with a plan, hiring the team and supplying it.  This process is really the majority of the book, a 260-page chapter called The Hundred Days where Shannon and his men travel all over Europe buying weapons and equipment, arranging transport, negotiating with customs brokers, gathering sketchy documentation, dealing with rival mercs and all the rest of the work that goes on in preparation of a military coup.  The only action is the aforementioned rival merc and that is a brief shot in the arm in what is otherwise all procedural.  For me, it wasn't boring at all.  I couldn't put it down.  I love this stuff anyhow, but it being pre-internet made it even more fascinating to read about the way arms get bought and sold and how to avoid surveillance (lot of letters to people staying at hotels under false names) and other extra-legal activities in 1970s Europe.

The portrayal of Africa and the Africans is at best patronizingly colonial and at worst straight-up racist. This book was written right after the wave of African independence from Colonialism and the attitude is one of the post-colonial country's superiority, with a contemptuous portrayal of the African governments as being hopelessly corrupt and inefficient.  This portrayal is not untrue, but when the root causes are unexamined (i.e. colonialism itself), it comes off as pretty ignorant at times.  The context is overall very cynical and morally speaking the whites in power, especially the businessmen are portrayed as being utterly unethical.  It's in the competence where the racism is the worst. It really gets bad when Forsyth talks about the Africans as soldiers, suggesting that they have an innate tendency to shoot with their eyes closed. I'm sure Forsyth is reflecting the attitudes of old Africa hands of the time, but still. It's not just racist, it's also historically inaccurate and weakens the rich, realistic detail he builds up so well otherwise.

It's ironic, because at the end of the book, it's clear that despite his militarism and accepted colonial attitude, Forsyth seems relatively liberal at the end of the book.  I won't give anything away, but "good" Africans come out of the woodwork plot-wise at the end and it's clear that Forsyth is in favour of them ruling their own lands.

Despite my misgivings on the portrayal of the Africans, this is a great read and deserves its reputation as a classic.

22. Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

Which book blogger has read and posted about women authors in four of his last six reads? This guy!  Okay, that was bad, but I do give myself a small pat on the back for trying to expand my horizon out of my cozy nerdy boys' club of masculine genre fiction and succeeding somewhat (by reading cozy nerdy feminine genre fiction).  Tales of Earthsea is 5 longish stories that fill out either the history or some parts of the world set out in the original trilogy.  I didn't make an effort to place these stories into the overall context of that trilogy, since I had forgotten all those details, but as I read them, bits and pieces came back to me.  The stories here are nice because most of them are very local, going into characters and locations with the richness that LeGuin is good at and avoiding the more fable-like remote telling that made the third book in the trilogy, The Farthest Shore, unsatisfying for me.  There is also a history at the end, which I think the attuned reader would find invaluable.

An enjoyable read, but it was the forward that I found the most stimulating.  As is my practice, I went back and read it after I had finished the book and it is there that I was reminded of LeGuin's genius, not just as a fictional writer, but also as a very active and critical social thinker.  This little essay just rips apart the commodification of science fiction and fantasy.  She goes after the world of completists, collectors and the producers who churn stuff out because it satisfies a certain consumer need.  Her attacks are broad and structural, but I almost suspect that George Martin might have been one of the producers she had in mind here.

So people turn to fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity; an industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks; it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable and interchangeable.

21. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

This was recommended to me by ex-50 booker (though still fairly prolific reader) Buzby and since I am always on the lookout for Canadian "genre" authors, I went for it.  Also, it gave me an excuse to support a local sci-fi/fantasy bookstore in Toronto and it fits into my new trade paperback reading strategy.  Finally, it's a book that makes me feel contemporary and hip when I read it in public locations (in the train station, I carried under my arm in such a way that you could see the author's photo).  So many compelling reasons to read Station Eleven!

The book itself is definitely a page-turner.  It's an interesting hybrid of "genre" and "literary".  Mandel is walking the same path as Cormac Macarthy wrapping what are basically good stories of action and adventure in a package that will make it appealing to the medium-brow mainstream.  Station Eleven is a post-plague world without us novel that references pulpy graphic novels as a serious art form but is also an exploration of character and modern-day relationships.  One of the main storylines is of a band of travelling musicians in the rebuilding wasteland in conflict with a religious cult that has ninja forest skills, but it is told in non-linear fashion, interwoven with pre-plague narratives that slowly give us the backstory of various characters and weave the entire thing into an exploration of one particular character who dies before the plague even starts.

This hybrid form forced me to ask myself what I really like.  I feel like this is an honest effort and the author's understanding of comics, sci-fi and the dystopian sub-genre appear to be deep and personal, not just slumming it as we have seen with some mainstream literary authors (only to get skewered on the pen of Ursula K. Le Guin).  But in the end, I wasn't clear on what the point of this novel was.  It seems to be ultimately one of those meditations on character, where the narrative takes a back seat to the attempt at sharing some kind of "truth" with the reader.  That's a bit ungenerous on my part, as I think here it is more of a feeling about the worth of a life and how we impact each other in our interconnected world than a truth.  It was a pleasant book overall and left me with a nice feeling, but it also didn't live up to the promise of its premise.  When it was over, I felt that it was just over.

20. Wildfire at Midnight by Mary Stewart

I see now that several of her romantic
thrillers are published in this style. 
Collection addiction stimulated!

I'm very angry at myself, because I found this really nice copy in the dollar book bin in front of the same used bookstore where I bought The Deal.  This time, the owner was sitting on a stool just inside the doorway, writing prices on the inside cover of books from a new shipment.  The story is overcrowded at the best of times, but on this day there were so many stacks of books that I could not walk through without taking my backpack off.  Classic used bookstore owner.  But I digress.  I am angry at myself because after keeping the book safely on my shelf I stupidly put it into my jacket pocket when going out to a friend's house in case I got stuck with time to kill and no reading material.  And of course, the spine got bent.  I still have so much to learn about myself.

Anyhow, Wildfire at Midnight is a well-written thriller with a plucky and beautiful British heroine, which is undermined by a painfully sexist romantic demoument.  It was Stewart's second novel, written in 1956, so I can excuse the gender politics somewhat, but it was just so disappointing.  The heroine is a divorced model who decides to take a vacation in Skye, rugged Northern country that draws anglers and climbers.  When she gets to the isolated and charming country inn, after meeting an attractive local outdoors enthusiast on the boat ride over, she immediately discovers that her ex-husband is staying there.  She also learns that there has been a gruesome, ritualistic murder of a local girl on a nearby mountain.  What follows is a thriller as more murders happen and nobody staying in the inn is above suspicion.

[SPOILER]

The sexual politics that were so frustrating is that her ex-husband acts like a total dick the whole time, even to the point of being so aggressively creepy that she thinks he is the killer (and Stewart leads the reader into suspecting him as well).  Of course, it turns out that he isn't and he even sort of saves her and then there is this really terrible scene where he declares his love for her and she realizes she still loves him and its all suddenly hunky-dory.  The whole idea of being divorced is presented as an untenable choice throughout the book and that it is superior to marry the jerky manipulator than to just stay single even if you are a beautiful, smart, brave and hardworking woman.

The other disappointment was that the mystery of the murders wasn't complex at all.  There was no link between the murdered and the potentially interesting conflicts among the guests at the inn.  He was basically just a psycho.  So there was nothing for the reader to dig into and try and guess who or why was responsible.  Finally, I guessed it about halfway through because Stewart's double blinds were too obvious.  Again, only her second book and the descriptions of the locale (which I would love to visit) evocative and the characters rich.  And the psycho is into some old-school Wicker Man style paganism, which is cool.

19. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

I follow some people on my Google+ feed who are big fans of gothic literature and it is from them that I learned of the Castle of Otranto, which is considered the first gothic fiction.  It turns out meezly had a nice paperback copy of it in her bookshelf (which is a growing source of potential good reads for me). 

This is a weird book.  It is far from gothic in tone.  It's actually quite absurd and funny.  Just to give you an idea, at the very beginning of the book, the sickly son of the Prince of Otranto, who is going to be strategically married to a neighbouring Duke's daughter, is killed by a giant plumed helmet that falls out of the sky.  What follows is a story of political and courtly intrigue as seen from the perspective of several characters. The Prince is the principal figure (to call him a protagonist does not capture what a maniacal asshole he is) and once his son is dead, he becomes obsessed with marrying Princess Isabelle (who was supposed to have become his daughter-in-law).  We also follow his wife and daughter, the priest (who shelters Isabelle) and a handsome, idealistic young foreigner.

The layout of the writing makes it difficult to read.  I don't know if it was this edition or that was the way it was orginally written, but there are paragraphs that last several pages, with back and forth dialogue and a lot of narrative all crammed in there.  Some of these passages, I suspect, are supposed to be quite humorous.  The dialogue involves one person repeatedly not getting to the point of what they said they were going to say while the other one keeps exhorting them to get to the point.  I found it tiring.  The action picks up in the second half and it ends up being somewhat enjoyable.

The gothicness of it is more in the themes and locations:  unknown birthrights, mysterious strangers, evil momarchs, the haunted castle, the catacombs underneath, a gloomy forest, etc.  I'm sure I am not doing justice to this book, as it is from the 18th century and has been studied extensively by scholars.  I'm glad I read it, though.