23. Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh

I almost bailed on this book.  It was part of the haul that I found down the street from me (mainly the Pelecanos and Lehanes but a few sci-fis as well) and the one that I almost didn't take.  It's pretty big (678 pages) and jumps right in to a ton of politics and names and I got lost quickly.  I found myself annoyed at the nerdiness (it felt like it was written for the kind of audience that thrives on details that immerse in a setting rather than a human narrative).  Fortunately, I had read everything else I brought with me (this was partially planned) and had to come back to it.  I am glad I did.  It does settle down into a very human, really fair to say deeply human story that while not totally satisfying at the end, takes the reader on a rich journey and makes you think a lot about family and the future of humanity.

The story takes place in the distant future where earth has colonized the stars.  There is now earth and and Alliance (which I think are the planets still allied with earth) and then the Union, which is a group that has gone farther out into space and separated in a war from the Alliance.  The political capital of the Union is the planet Cyteen.  On Cyteen is also a super important institute, Reseune, who developed the cloning technology that has been crucial to humanity's colonization of the stars.  The Union is divided into several different political representations (Military, Commerce, Citizens, Industry, etc.) of which Reseune basically controls Science.  The politics are roughly competition between the Expansionists who want humanity to keep colonizing space and expanding and the Abolitionists who are against cloning and expansion and the Centrists.

Reseune is led by Ariane Emory, a powerful, superior matriarch.  Her advanced intelligence (technical, social and political) is demonstrated early on as well as her many enemies, including another brilliant scientist, Jordan Warrick and his son/clone Justin.  Early on in the book, she is murdered.  Her family and the political bloc that she represented decides to clone her and grow her replicate up in an environment as close as possible to the original one and her growth and relationship with Justin is the main part of the story for most of the book.

See, it's a lot to explain and I am really glossing over it.  The issues that come up are really interesting.  Do you hate the child clone of the person who totally fucked you over as an adult?  How does a clone react slowly learning about their genetic mirror image and predecessor?  And what are the risks of a human society that can clone itself to make beings of various skill levels and psychological stabilities?  Cherryh really thinks these things through in Cyteen and it's pretty fascinating stuff.  It's also really gripping.  You get caught up in it and the readers emotional responses to characters get thoroughly twisted around as you learn different aspects of well-detailed characters.  It won the Hugo and I think it deserved it.

Honestly, that I almost gave up on the book in the first twenty pages, I blame on the publisher.  This edition had one really crappy map of the planet of Cyteen, which you don't even need.  There are only two cities they visit anyways.  What it needed was a political map and glossary, so you can quickly figure out who all the players are.

22. Brooding Mansion by Paulette Warren

This is the sub-genre where I hope to distinguish myself, modern gothic romance, but I suspect that is just the privileged white male in me being arrogantly ignorant of the wealth of thought by many women fans of the genre that have already been written.  And really I'm just a beginner in this area and grabbing books as they appear before my eyes, such as this one.

The cover really is pretty classic gothic romance, but the book itself falls a bit short to be totally in that genre.  It takes place in Manhattan, for one, albeit in a giant gloomy gothic house/manor.  The gloomy atmosphere and mystery get swept up very early in the book when the entire situation is basically explained (though everything in the book is accelerated as it is very short page-wise and a lot has to go down).  A young and competent Registered Nurse gets a job to serve an old wealthy man in his mansion but when she gets there, she finds that it is actually his out-of-control son that she is taking care of.  It was a bait and switch by the family's doctor, at first for truly medical reasons (he does have a badly broken leg from a car accident) but then as the plot thickens, we learn there was a more nefarious, criminal reason.

I won't go into the details of the plot too much as it is all kind of arbitrary and patched together (old man is actually a neo-nazi holding meetings in his ballroom, the doctor is trying to steal all the family money and the brother and sister are decadent but with good souls who need guidance).  What is interesting is how the book started with the heroine showing real promise. She is competent and smart and in control of herself, but unlike male protagonists, everything she does has to be justified and legitimized by a male.  So there is a really interesting crossplay between her being a cool character and the reactive need to constantly undermine that or block it.  All the men in the book are losers. It's when the romance plot takes over that everything sort of breaks down.  It's one of those pre-pre-marital sex worlds where people fall in love in a day and have those weird conversations about each other that have no meaning and make no sense but they are in love.  The main conflict in the second half of the book is whether the lame son will finally stand up to his dad and be a man.  It is entirely up to the protagonist to help him do this and she is basically constantly disappointed until the very end when he finally does something slightly independent and now she knows she made the right choice.  It's pretty depressing and annoying but at that point the plot has come so fast that you don't really care anyhow.

There is something here, though, and I suspect better writers (or ones who had more time) can take this female competence in a sexist world to a much more interesting place.  So I continue to seek out other examples of the gothic romance genre.

21. Stop this Man! by Peter Rabe

Always pick up a used Rabe if you find it, is a good general rule.  Original paperbacks of his are getting pretty hard to find, but Westlake's posthumous literary respect has resurrected Rabe's career tangentially and we are seeing more of his stuff getting reprinted.  This version was from Hard Case Crime, whom I know little about except that they seem to be doing exceptional work in putting out great new and old crime fiction. 

I struggle somewhat with trying to understand Westlake's love of Rabe.  It's not that I don't like it, on the contrary.  It's just that Rabe's books always seem somewhat meandering.  They lack the diamond structure of a Stark novel.  I think reading Stop this Man! helped me to better appreciate Rabe and understand why Westlake loved him so much.  That and the wisdom of age.  To appreciate influence, one has to also appreciate the cultural context of the time.  My father loves Godard while I have always been a bit mystified and sometimes annoyed by what looks to me today like french intellectual masturbation.  I realize, though, that my father was growing up in a cultural wasteland when it came to movies and so much of the irreverance and absurdity that is commonplace in cinema today is because of Godard. For a young person seeking something original in the late 50s, Godard must have come as such a welcome change.  I suspect this was similar for Westlake and Rabe.  The characters in Rabe's books just do.  Often, they are not good people. It's nihilistic at times.  Even the darkest noirs of the 50s and 60s had a lot of moralizing and hand-wringing in them.  With Rabe, and especially in Stop this Man! there is none of that.

The "hero" is an older jugger (safecracker) who has just got out of his third run in jail and gets signed up to a too-perfect job, steal a bar of gold from a laboratory.  The story starts after the heist, which went perfectly, except we learn that the gold bar is irradiated and basically poisonous to anybody who is near it for any length of time. This sets off a chase as the jugger tries to convert the gold into cash and the FBI try to find him by the trail of radiated bodies he leaves behind.  The jugger is a real carpe diem type of guy. He claims that he wants this to be his last job (he's 50 and one of the sub-themes is how he is behind the times crime-wise) but he is a pretty carpe diem kind of guy for somebody in his 50s, basically taking the ladies he wants and going aggressive against anybody who is getting in his way, including the syndicate smoothies (this theme of the modern, organized syndicate replacing and slowly eliminating space for freelance criminals is a theme we have seen somewhere before, no?).

It's dark and nasty and relentless right up until the end.  Reminded me a lot of The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Lawrnece Tierney could definitely have played the jugger.

20. Wolf and Iron by Gordon R. Dickson

I have been looking for this book for years.  I can't even remember how it came to be added to my list, but I know that Dickson is prolific and you can always find his books at used bookstores. There is usually a good length of shelf with just his books and they always gave me hope.  Time and after time, I would have a flash of hope seeing his name (most of the books on my list you can't even find the author) and then another confirmation that no Wolf and Iron was not there.  I finally did find it in Victoria earlier this summer.  I still don't get why it is so hard to find, it's one of those late 80s early 90s paperbacks that they usually printed a ton of. 

Once I read the blurb to remind myself of why I was interested in it, I knew that the reasons were still valid for it to be on my list. It's the story of a lone man, a social scientist who predicted the global chaos that came (but badly underestimated the speed and severity of it), fled from his university town and now travelling across America to get to his brother's Ranch in the Rockies.  The apocalypse in this case is purely social.  Some minor bank collapses trigger a global run which then causes all of modern society to fall apart and humans to devolve into a survivalist mode.  America is a bit like the wild west, except degenerating and more violent and xenophobic.  Other humans are the greatest danger, in a landscape with many other basic dangers.

Early on, Jeebee encounters a wolf and they flee together from a trading encounter gone bad.  He and the wolf slowly develop a relationship as he makes his way across the country and slowly transforms himself from thinking, civilized man to instinctive, survivalist man.  This book is a nerd's dream.  It's all about how using your brains, developing skills and organizing and gaining equipment.  It's funny because the book is ostensibly about him trying to figure out how to be a partner with this wolf, but the real challenge is other humans.  The details and execution of his transformation are really quite enjoyable, almost delicious to PA nerds like myself.  The last quarter devolves into a survivalist domestic nerd fantasy which though a bit pat, does nothing to weaken the pleasure of the first three quarters.  This one is staying on my shelves and it should be included in any list of significant post-apocalyptic fiction.

19. The Cut by George Pelecanos

The design on this trade paperback is really cool.

The Cut was really great.  It's got all of Pelecanos usual good stuff, the detailed locales of Washington DC and area, the rich characters of young, flawed men, many of them tough and competent, some kind of semi-complex but mostly realistic crime effort.  I suspect the Pelecanos was trying to do a bit of an hommage to Richard Stark here, because it feels sparser and tighter than his other novels.  There are also several references to Parker, some subtle (more like easter eggs for us Parker nerds) and some explicit.

The protagonist, Spero Lucas, is a Desert Storm vet who now works as an investigator for a criminal defense lawyer.  The lawyer for whom he works refers him to one of his clients whose in jail for dealing marijuana at the wholesale level.  The guy, who claims to deal only pot and not use violence, has two young henchmen still working on the street.  Their role is to pick up the weed that gets mailed to various people's houses who are not at home on the day and the distribute those packages out to the lower level dealers.  Somebody seems to have discovered their drops and has been stealing their weed and the big boss sends.  Spero gets sent to work with them and figure out what is going on.  Shit gets messy and the two henchmen get executed.  Spero goes on his own to figure out what went down and to sort of avenge their murders.

It's not pure Stark by any means, as Lucas' brother is a public school teacher and there are young African-American men with potential and complex family issues.  When it digs into the main storyline, which is basically the last third and where the book really gets going, it's just a gang of colurful scumbags as American as apple pie.  The whole criminal enterprise is mundane and realistic and fundamentally integrated into the DC/Baltimore urban landscape.  Really entertaining.

At this point, it's pretty clear for my tastes that Pelecanos is superior to Lehane.

18. Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane

Hey, it rhymes (Lehane... Rain, anyhow).

Quick review here as I am running out the door to start a week's vacation (and hopefully some major reading).

I had one more Dennis Lehane book from the drunken stumble haul and decided for completion's sake to give him another chance after my displeasure with my last read of his (Darkness, Take my Hand).  At the halfway point of Prayers for Rain, I was glad I did.  Here we have much more of what I was looking for, a complex investigation with interesting characters and the protagonist investigating.  There is a slight dusting of dark observation on the state of the world and his own mindset, but not pages and pages of mooning. Unfortunately, at about the halfway point, most of the mystery is revealed and once again the antagonist is a highly-skilled total psycho.  He wasn't quite as ridiculous as the one in Darkness, but after a while can we just not have flawed, broken characters who do a crime than over the top conspirators whose sole goal in life is to inflict creative torture and cruelty on good people?  So this one was okay, sort of satisfying, definitely not 100% redemption, but not closing the door altogether either.  I wonder if as the Kenzie-Gennaro novels advance, he matures more and more, gets away from the simplistic stuff and allows the good writer that he is to tell a story that doesn't have to impress you with its excess.

17. Frameshift by Robert J. Sawyer

I've been lamenting my drunken stumbling into a pile of free books because it added an unwanted burden to my already overflowing on-deck shelf.  And yet, since that incident, I have been on a tear, completing 4 of the 7 books in just over two weeks. Is it because they are all sort of new and I don't care about wrecking them so I can carry them with me?  Is it the summer?  Just a coincidence?  I don't know but I am going to ride this wave for as long as I can and try and recapture a teeny bit of the 50 books ground I lost since becoming a father.

Frameshift starts out slowly and a bit blandly.  I find Sawyer's style here generic and it took a while for the story to reveal its depths.  I did like that the main character was a Quebecois and mostly accurate (except when he said "morceau de merde").  It also takes place in the Bay Area with lots of locations I know well.  So that kept me going.  About halfway through the book, though, things get quite interesting and there is a lot going on and from there, it becomes quite a page-turner.

Pierre Tardivel is an associate professor who has Huntington's disease.  He is working at Lawrence Lab in Berkeley and he meets another professor, Molly Bond, and they fall in love.  At the beginning of the book, he is attacked by a neo-nazi mugger, though he and Molly for reasons I won't reveal know that it was actually a planned attack.  This starts him on his own investigation and we get into a story of unethical behaviour of private health insurance companies, hidden nazis, genetic manipulation and murder.  Really, the fun is in figuring out what is going on, so I will be even more spoil-sensitive and leave it at that.  It's an enjoyable summer read.

It does rip into the evil that is private health care, and rightly so.  It focuses specifically on the practice of not ensuring people with pre-existing conditions and what that will mean when we have sophisticated genetic identification technology.  Given the insanity of the times in America today and the incredible indoctrination and self-delusion of many of its citizens towards universal health care, this book, written in 1997, was surprisingly relevant.

16. Hell Is Empty by Craig Johnson

This was the lone outlier (non-Pelecanos, non-Lehane, non-sci-fi) of the drunken stumble giveaway pile of books I found this August in my neighbourhood.  The cover looked cool and I saw it was an A&E series.  It seemed potentially inoffensive to my overly-sensitive genre fiction aesthetic. 

The protagonist is Walt Longmire, a big tough sheriff in Wyoming, in a region dominated by native communities.  This is the 7th in the series and you don't get a strong sense of his connection to the society because the entire book is a chase up a mountain.  I suspect in other books, those relationships are developed much more deeply.  In Hell is Empty, it's pretty much action and a lot of soul-searching/spiritual quest stuff.  The action part was great.  Longmire is part of a team overseeing a prisoner transfer.  There are 5 of them and they are all nasty, but one is one of these superhero serial killers.  His skills were limited to violence, outdoor survival and psychological manipulation, so at least we had some limitations to keep it somewhat realistic.  But still, "he's a genius." says one of the characters who was manipulated into helping him escape.

The prisoners do escape and head up Bighorn mountain just as a major blizzard is moving in.  Longmire is in a position to either wait the storm out, because there really was no exit off the mountain, or go in after them, which he does because they have hostages.  Or at least that's his excuse to himself.

The pursuit up the mountain is tight, creative and entertaining.  It's not just him following them on a trail, a bunch of cool stuff goes down that I won't go into.  As the pursuit narrows and it becomes (of course) Longmire vs the psycho, we get into a more internal narrative, as Longmire struggles to figure out what is motivating the psycho as well as struggle with his own demons.  This was actually kind of cool too, but sort of dragged on a bit at the end, for my tastes.

Still, pretty enjoyable stuff.  I want to read one that deals more specifically with the native communities to see if it is handled realistically and with depth, because that could be quite good as well.  What I'd really love to find is a badass crime writer who writes about the First Nations milieu but who actually is a First Nations person him or herself.  Any recommendations?

15. A Firing Offense by George Pelecanos

I used to mix up Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane.  I discovered both of them because of The Wire and they are both known as contemporary detective fiction authors with a strong sense of place (Lehane being Boston and Pelecanos DC).  I've read the DC quartet and quite enjoyed it and always kept Pelecanos on my list as a potentially good read, but easy to find so no rush.  Dennis Lehane was also on this list until I read Darkness, Take my Hand and now he has one more chance. 

I approached A Firing Offense with some trepidation, fearing that it might suffer some of the same flaws of Lehane.  The protagonist and the set-up of Pelecanos' NIck Sefanos and Lehane's Patrick Kenzie.  Both are from white working class neighbourhoods in their respective cities with one foot in their rough past and another in the more gentrified present.  Quite quickly, though, Pelecanos stayed out of the kind of trouble that Lehane gets into.  Pelecanos dishes out melancholy and jaded self-reflection sparingly and in small doses.  The scope of the action remains local and much more realistic.  Half of A Firing Offense is more about Stefanos and his buddies just being a bunch of young fuck-ups at their job, with the actual mystery only getting going until later.  It's really an origin story.  While it strays somewhat too far into the white bourgeois fantasy of being a ghetto badass at the end, it mostly remains grounded in the reality Pelecanos constructs.  It's gritty and enjoyable and I am looking forward to stumbling upon another Nick Stefanos novel on the street.

14. Darkness, Take my Hand by Dennis Lehane

[I stumbled upon this book while walking home late one night. It was among a pile of contemporary mysteries and some sci-fi somebody was giving away.  I got a Pelecanos, 3 Lehanes, a Longmire mystery and a CJ Cherryh book.  I really didn't need more books on my on-deck shelf at this point, but I was drunk and my guard was down.  Do not drink and walk through neighbourhoods where readers with good taste and small library space live!]

Hmmm, I may be out on Dennis Lehane.  I was never a huge fan, but really enjoyed Shutter Island and respected him in general.  Unfortunately, Darkness, Take my Hand undermined a lot of that feeling. First of all, I do not accept serial killers as plot devices for any kind of detective fiction.  They are played out and were never that interesting in the first place.  You get a new one every week now on Criminal Minds and that is about the level of audience they are written for.  Even worse is the phenomenon of the, what I am coining, "superhero serial killer". These are the serial killers that aren't just ruthless psychos but also hyper-intelligent, elite fighters (in hand-to-hand and gun combat) and highly skilled ninjas with elite security and surveillance knowledge.  I guess The Silence of the Lambs started it and it was sort of okay in that over-rated movie.  Now, can we just put to bed this super-villain that if you even go visit him in jail you risk your entire family being raped and tortured before your eyes because you accidently left one of your eyelashes on his leather wrist manacle.  It's fucking stupid.

 My understanding was that Lehane was a slightly higher grade of writer than that, because of his deep understanding of the Boston milieu and the human cost of crime.  That's how he got his gig on The Wire, right?  Things started okay in this book, although even before you learn the plot is centered around a serial killer there are elements that really start to weigh in on this simple reader.  I get that we are painting a dark picture of the world, but is it necessary to have the detective waxing melancholy every single time he runs into another character or goes into a new neighbourhood?  I am not a huge proponent of "show don't tell" but there is a lot of telling here where a little bit of showing would be just as effective and less intrusive.

I have one more of these Kenzie-Genarro novels on deck.  I am debating whether to just give it away or to see if he can do a better novel that deals with a more realistic level of crime.

SPOILERS!

The serial killer here is actually almost worse in the context of Lehane's style. His plots are so far deeply connected to the protagonist's background and the milieu of poor, south Boston.  This is a rich milieu filled with crime potential.  Sticking a superhero serial killer here is incongruous and made worse when it is all actually profoundly connected to the detective's own childhood.

13. The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. Van Vogt

There is a group of gamers and cool nerds on Google+ who have a roleplayers book club that I keep trying to join but can never find the book or the time.  This time, I found both as this classic was easily found in the library.  We had a lively but short-lived discussion and I am very glad I read the book.

I have since learned that A.E. Van Vogt is an important though sometimes disrespected author in the golden age of sci-fi.  You can go to wikipedia to learn about the critic who dissed him early on in his career and left him with a maligned reputation.  I, for one, enjoyed the book. I particularily appreciated how he wed the space theorizing common to this period with a more aggressive pace than usual, so that just when the wankery was getting a bit too long-winded for my lazy mind, some shit went down (not unlike Raymond Chandler's send in the guns rule) and the narrative moved forward.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle is an episodic tale (technically a "fix-up" being several previously published short stories stitched together to make a novel) about a pioneering ship exploring distant galaxies.  It is high science fiction in the technology, but kind of low in the challenges, which is about a ship full of male scientists battling their own internal conflicts to overcome external ones.  Yes, all men.  And they behave stupidly quite often, which I don't think was intentional, but read today does seem like instead of some meta-philosophy to bring them together, they just could have had a bunch of women (and non white people too).

The meta-philosophy is "Nexialism" and the protagonist is the sole Nexialist on the ship.  His challenge is to use Nexialism to unite all the various disciplines so they can overcome the problems they face, because each discipline alone is too narrowly-focused to see the bigger picture needed to deal with the problem.  Nexialism itself is not entirely thought out, but it's fun and satisfying to see its superiority overcome the petty squabbles of its narrow-minded opponents.  The obstacles themselves are pretty cool as well, space beasts, telepathic societies and the like.  Good stuff.

12. A Dangerous Energy by John Whitbourn

I picked this up in another dollar bin outside a used bookstore, but I can't remember exactly where, somewhere in Vancouver of Victoria.  It just looked interesting and honestly I don't know if it is my honed instinct or that the Goddess of Reading is just blessing me these days but it was another total winner.  Probably more learned and erudite fans of fantasy and science fiction are well aware of Whitbourn's work.  I hope so.  If not, I hope my review will encourage you to seek him out.

Ostensibly, this is a bildungsroman in an alternate reality where the Reformation never happened.  The setting is the primary interest at first, a world where the Roman Catholic church dominates, there is subtle magic in the world (originally of wilder origins but now harnessed and controlled by the church for the most part), colonization is severely limited compared to our world and technology and commerce advancing at a much slower pace.

The story starts in the late 60s and ends in 2026.  Young Tobias Oakley encounters an elf in the forest outside his village who teaches him the rudiments of magic.  This leads him to be shunned by his village, discovered by a priest whose job it is to discover those with the magical gift and then sent to a magical Catholic college in London.  The rest of the book details his conflicts and rise to power, both in the world and in his use of magic.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, I would suggest you stop reading here and just seek this book out.  Anything more I say here, though not explicitly a spoiler, would ruin the wonderment and pleasure of where Winterbourn is going with this book.  I will add that it is pretty fucked up and super dark. 

Because A Dangerous Energy is really about a descent into evil.  Oakley is understandably driven by ambition, but with a singular focus that makes him worthy of a book but also pushes him farther and farther away from morality and ultimately even humanity.  It is done very subtly and there are many moments in the book where there is an opportunity for him to get back on the right path.  Each time, he chooses (or is not able) to stay on the wrong path.  And slowly it starts to rot out his soul.  The language is rich but not flowery, told in an omniscient almost matter-of-fact way that blindsides the reader into the atrocities Oakley undertakes.  It all makes so much sense in the narrative that you have to step back and remind yourself how horrible he has become. 

There is also a nice touch where each chapter is titled with descriptive phrases along the lines of very early novels:  "In which our hero goes to London and is obliged to remain there", "In which our hero receives help from the friend that he helped, and a problem is solved satisfactorily".  These are absolutely accurate descriptions of what goes on in that chapter, except the details are generally super dark and nasty, which adds to the cold irony of the book's presentation.

A lot of his ambition, as he becomes a more powerful magician, is around the development of his understanding of summoning magic.  The imagery around his attempts to contact demons is evocative and the procedures and details of how it all works really cool.  Things like the demons' names, the locations they appear in, how they come into our world are all novel takes that are super entertaining (and gameable).

Likewise, the alternate history itself is fully thought out, but only revealed as is needed to inform the narrative (with a few bits and pieces of material interspersed to add depth like questions from a history exam, excerpts from books, etc.).  I am not well informed on the religious history of Christianity nor a huge fan of alternate realities and this was delivered in such a way to keep my interest (that's putting it mildy) and allow me to keep it all clear in my head more or less.

A great read, strongly recommended.  It is part of a series, too (not with this character, I assume, but taking place in the same world).  Added to my list!

11. The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper

My wife had found this book and suggested I give it a read as her guinea pig.  I did so and polished it off in a few days (ah, vacation).  At first, I almost didn't make it through.  I was actually livid at times with the beginning of this book, which was overly-written and about just about the least interesting subject in Canada, the Toronto middle-aged, educated, urban white male.  It was educational, in that it confirmed a lot of my suspicions of this species from what I have read in the Globe and Mail and interacted with directly and indirectly over the years.  Nice fellows, great conversationalists and generally doing well in life, but just so unmanly and filled with anxiety about their unmanliness.  What is it with Toronto and being so scared about shit all the time?  They are almost as bad as Americans, who at least have guns and a fear-mongering media landscape that makes Canada look positively objective.  And the protagonist in The Killing Circle is the worst.  Guys wife dies and four years later still can't get over it at all.  And of course his only son is his most precious thing and he lives in constant fear that something is going to happen to him.  And there are lines like these:

It is a time in the city's history when everyone is pointing out the ways that Toronto is changing.  More construction, more new arrivals, more ways to make it and spend it. And more to fear.  The stories of random violence, home invasions, drive-bys, motiveless attacks.  But it's not just that.  It's not the threat that has always come from the them of our imagination, but from potentially anyone, even ourselves.

This is not only laughably preposterous, but possibly even offensive.  Toronto was never a dangerous city and the 21st century wealth spurt of globalization has only made it safer.  (A white journalist with a house on Euclid street has no right to claim fear and in doing so basically trivializes the real fear that the poor and people of colour suffer from police brutality and social inequality, legitimized precisely by this vague, bourgeois fear).

This book also does the thing where quotidien activities and mundane locations are elevated to literary heights.  Ooh, exotic, Chinatown ("...whole roast pigs hanging in butcher's windows, their mouths gaping in surprise"), wow Kensington Market ("one of the last places in the city where one can feel a resistance to the onslaught of generic upgrading, of globalized sameness, of money.").  It's relentless and makes one wonder where the editor was.

After having read the entire book, I think I know the answer to that question.  Because once we get past all this faux-literary navel-gazing, the rest of the book is actually a pretty decent horror mystery/thriller with an effective premise, interesting characters and a compelling storyline.  Wimpy protagonist joins a writing circle led by a self-exiled author who fled the Toronto literary scene in the 60s after a controversial first novel.  Shit gets weird, people start getting murdered and it is all connected to the stories in the group.  As is my policy here, I won't give away anything that could ruin the mystery, which is tough in this case because it doesn't allow me to write more about the positive aspects of the book, which really is the last 3/4.  It's not my genre, but if you like macabre tales of modern horror, this could be your jam.  I was honestly quite scared at moments and definitely kept turning the page.

My suspicion is that Pyper wanted to write a straight-up horror thriller, but because in Canada and especially if you are a Toronto writer who gets reviews in the Globe & Mail, you just can't do that.  You would never be invited to another dinner party again, let alone get published.  It was either unconscious or his editor pushed him to fancy up the beginning (or some combination thereof) to get critics and book buyers sucked in, my suspicion is that the beginning was all put there to make the book literary fiction rather than horror (the horror!) and thus acceptable for the Canadian market.

So, ultimately an enjoyable summer read and edifying both as an additional piece of evidence in the ongoing undermining of masculinity by Toronto-dominated media culture and of the ongoing snobbery in the Canadian literary community (and the two things are clearly connected).

10. Summer Lightning by P.G. Wodehouse

It's P.G. Wodehouse and diverting and entertaining as always.  I laughed out loud a few times.  He is such a treasure, because you can go back any time and find a new P.G. Wodehouse and it will most likely be entertaining.  Not unlike John D. McDonald in that way, but responding to very different literary needs.   Reading one this time did help clarify for me something about myself, that I probably would have faired best as a landed aristocrat whose greatest concern was nurturing a prize pig on my estate.  This is a vocation and setting that I think my interests and limited skills would have probably been best served.

9. Blizzard by George Stone

Another pick-up from J.W. Welch dollar cart and while I can't say that this book is a winner, I did enjoy reading it for the most part.  It's rare that I say this, but I found it actually too short for the subject matter! It has the very intriguing premise of a snowstorm over the northeast U.S. that just doesn't stop.  It's one of these multi-character political thrillers that interweaves the effects of the storm with  the various storylines.  The storm effects and the response to it are quite well done.  The storylines were rote  and simplistic (disgraced scientist, plucky female reporter, idealistic politician, evil military dude) but the actual explanation was pretty wacky and entertaining.  As the storm worsens, it becomes more and more apparent that it is not natural.  Is it the Soviets unleashing a secret attack or, worse, coming from our own side?!

It all gets wrapped up too quickly (although ultimately redeemed by the dark ending) for the scope and scale of the premise.  Nevertheless it was a decent page-turner and a nice little time capsule of a book, intersecting disaster fiction and cold war politics.  Also, it has a cool fold out cover where the publisher really tried hard.

8. To Serve them All my Days by R.F. Delderfield

I've just been nailing the random finds this year.  I scored a beat up hardback of this book at the free box on St-Viateur.  British public school, check.  Stiff upper lip, check.  Inter-war period, check.  I was a little wary because it was written in the early '70s and reeked of the precursor to today's "literary fiction" but once I started reading, I was sucked in.

It's the story of a young Welshman who is sent up north to teach at a mid-level public school after 3 years at the front during WWI.  The climate up there is supposed to be a tonic for his shellshocked nerves. This decision turns out to be a fateful one as he and the school become intertwined for his entire life.  The story traces his ups and downs, culminating in him becoming headmaster and leading a new generation of boys as they go off to the Second World War.  It also follows the development of his family and relationships with three women during his life.  Much of it is small vignettes of life at the school and the various boys.

I just ate it all up.  I went to a watered-down facsimile of such a boarding school and while there was a lot of not good stuff there, much of the core values of British stoicism, skepticism and free thought that were reinforced there have served me well and informed my own personal philosophy.  This book is a near-constant celebration of those ideals and got me welling up a few times with anecdotes of boys selflessness and humble courage in the face of adversity.

It's a bit 70s in its outlook, especially with the sexual relationships (although that might be a bit mean on my part as overall the relations were kept at a pretty human level and avoided that weird British 70s patronizing of plucky women).  The women in the novel are important and strong but definitely fail the Bechtel test.

I tore through it and may well be ready for his other novel "God is an Englishman".  (I kid you not.)

7. Crawlspace by Herbert Lieberman

I picked this up from the rolling dollar shelf outside S.W. Welch's.  Like many others, I thought it was going to be a fun, cheezy 80s horror thriller.  Instead, it turned out to be more of a deep and interesting social and psychological thriller that was quite moving and not that scary.  It's a story of a retired couple living outside a northeastern U.S. country town who end up weirdly sort of adopting this semi-feral young man.  At first he lives in their basement, but they eventually invite him upstairs.  He is strong and super competent, but also barely civilized and clings to them like an animal that eventually becomes suffocating and scary. At the same time, they defend him from the small-minded townsfolk and things start to get tense inside and outside their household. If you want a more detailed synopsis (and a good review), you can find it here.

In the first third, it tended to drag a bit for me, but I think much of that was my confused expectations (thanks to that cover).  Once I kind of got where it was going, I was pretty hooked.  It ended up being quite intense and sad.  Part of me was like "just have an open and honest conversation!" and trying to blame the 70s but then I looked around me and realized the truths in Crawlspace about fear and ignorance and not saying stuff are depressingly realistic.

6. The Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie (book 3 of the First Law trilogy)

I remember not so long ago my vow to never start a book that was part of a trilogy or a series.  Well it appears that if the books are enjoyable enough, I can relax my rules a little bit. This is definitely the case for the First Law trilogy.  Hell, I enjoyed it so much I am seriously considering checking out Abercrombie's other books. 

Often with any ensemble story, it is the beginning that is the most enjoyable, as you meet the characters and their various challenges are revealed.  Once you kind of know the path they are on, it can become a bit of a slog.  I felt that feeling briefly in about the first third of this book, but then just got caught up in the story and was carried along for the ride, as I was in the first book. It's not so much that the outcome of the tale is wildly unexpected. It is, ultimately, the classic story of ancient powers reviving their endless fight of good vs. evil, light vs. dark and dragging a bunch of mortals along with them. However, in the First Law series, the emphasis is all on those mortals and how their stories interact with that greater battle.  You really want to find out what happens to them and it is very satisfying when you get to the end (though not altogether happy).

Great trilogy, strongly recommended if that is your sort of thing.

5. Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria

(I did actually read this book but either forgot to review it or kept putting it off until way too late.  My thoughts about it are pretty well captured in my review of the second Thongor book.)

4. Clowns of Death by Keith T. Breese

I was a huge Oingo Boingo fan in high school (still am, just don't listen to music as much as I used to).  I have had this book sitting on my shelf for decades and was prompted to read it when a friend of mine mentioned how it was actually Danny Elfman's older brother who started the group The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo when they were doing crazy theatre shows in LA.  I am really really not a fan of writing about music and books about bands (the deep disappointment of actually listening to REM after reading Rolling Stone going on and on about how intelligent and groundbreaking their sound was has never really left me), so I sort of surprised myself when I cruised through this book.

The first part is a biography of the band, with information collected from other articles and interviews and the author's own personal knowledge. The rest is basically a very detailed discography with brief reviews of each of the songs.  They style is breezy and definitely from a fan's perspective, but Breese doesn't take himself too seriously.  He just seems to have wanted to get this information written down and shared with the world and it is a very useful reference guide for a fan of the band.

Here's a great Oingo Boingo song for your listening and viewing pleasure:

Makes you think, don't it folks!

3. To the Resurrection Station by Eleanor Arneson

I read in passing that Eleanor Arneson had a really good space opera series but wow is it hard to find her used books anywhere.  I've checked all my haunts on the elite coastal cities I have the great fortune to visit and so far nothing.  I got this one from a guy who was selling all his old paperbacks. 

It's a fun read, but one of those disjointed sci-fi novels that seems to be testing out several concepts rather than really wanting to tell a story.  It's about a young woman who lives on a colony planet, long since disconnected from earth.  She is yanked from her college dorm to go to a remote colonial mansion where she is supposed to marry a high-bred native of the planet.  Then it turns out the robot guardian is actually the original colonist and there is rocket ship in the mansion.  Shit happens and they return to earth which is now a changed world, with uplifted (but kind of simple) rat communities in Manhattan and weirdly unmotivated humans in Brooklyn.  And oh yeah the young woman has some kind of probability distortion effect so that extra weird things happen to her.  The first half of the book, I kept wondering if some editor had just chosen that cover purely arbitrarily to sell the book but that scene does end up actually happening.

As you can see, it goes all over the place.  Some of the places it goes are pretty interesting and cool, but you sort of wonder what it is all in aid of.  I later read that this was her first novel, so I'm okay with that and will keep looking.

2. Before they Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie (book 2 of the First Law trilogy)

As is so often the case, the second book of a fantasy trilogy is the one with lots of travelling.  They are often my favourite and I was not disappointed here.  We get to see much more of the world, learn more about the rich cast of characters and slowly learn more about what the hell is actually going on (though still leaving the reader with many questions leading into the last book).

1. The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper

This is book 2 of the much loved YA British fantasy series (also called "The Dark is Rising").  I started on it this summer and struggled with it for several months, taking it on trips and never opening it.  But I finally buckled down after the xmas break.  It's a good read in the end, but it just dumps so much of its own mythology on you that I couldn't keep interested.  Basically, young Will, who is part of a big, happy British family in the country is now also a sort of chosen one (an Old One) in the eternal fight between the Light and the Dark.  The first book took place during their summer vacation.  This one happens at their family home in a small village at the height of the Christmas season.  Will learns more and has to fulfill a bunch of small but dangerous quests.

What really works in the book is the setting and what happens there.  As Will learns more about the struggle he is invovled in, he moves back and forth in time, all the while the Dark mounts a vicious attack against the Light (and against his village and by extension all of Britain).  The attack begins with an endless heavy snowstorm.  So you get the battles and quests on the fantastic front all the while the regular people are struggling with all the effects of the weather.  For me, I wish the book had been more weighted towards the latter, but I imagine younger readers probably tend to prefer the magical stuff.  (It took me decades before I learned to appreciate the deep culture richness and joy of snow removal).

I'm not loving it, but it is not really the fault of the book but where my tastes lie today.  I shall continue to push forward though.

2016 Wrap-up

Whew boy, book reading has taken a massive hit and we are at an all-blog low in 2016 of only 18 books read this year!  I thought the slide had started much later, but looking back it all starts with the birth of my daughter in 2012.  That year was my second-best year with 67, but in my wrap-up of that year, I had already noticed a huge drop-off in the last quarter and was not super optimistic for the future.  The thing is, while having a child certainly has an impact on one's leisure time, I am not sure that her existence is the real issue here.  I do have time to read, but I don't do it.  Most of my leisure time this year was taken up in food preparation of one kind of another, watching sports and worse zoning out slackjawed on twitter for hours at a time.  I don't even really participate in the online gaming community anymore, but somehow when my brain is exhausted, social media responds to some kind of short-term appetite in a way that reading books just can't compete with.  If I could even cut my twitter-fritting in half with reading, I would be a long way back on track.

Anyhow, enough self-indulgent whinging.  I did get a nice jolt over the xmas holidays with some fun Jack Reacher and the first of the First Law series and I have a new energy and will to read more this year.  Once I do get stuck on a book, I can pretty much plow through it.  It's the getting stuck part that I need to work on.

Another thing is that I did read quite a lot of comics this year.  I have a hard time considering them as a book and so don't count them anymore, but it was reading (and most in french, so that's worth something).  I discovered that my local library (where I have been taking my daughter a  lot) has a pretty decent bande-dessinée selection.  I am working my way through the works of Jodorowsky (L'Incal a classic that I never understood when it was in Heavy Metal and Les Technopères which was awesomely trippy), discovered Margeurite Abouet (first with Bienvenue but then Aya which is just great) and am also working on the managa Soil.  I'm not a big manga fan (I know, I know, it's not a genre, but Japanese comics are consistently littered with certain trademarks that really take me out of the immersion) but this one is a pretty engrossing and fucked up story about a designed town that goes bad.  Maybe if I finish an entire series or ouevre of one artist/author I will consider that a book and add those as write-ups this year.

My apologies for my absence to those of you with whom I used to interact in the online book reading world in the past.  My relationship with the internet is getting weird, as I suspect it is for all of humanity these days.  We shall see.

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.