81. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

This is the second in her Wayfarer series.  I saw a link to a panel she was one that was entitled Cozy Sci-Fi and I think that is a pretty accurate description, though I might add Woke to it (in a tongue-in-cheek non-perjorative way) for Woke & Cozy Sci-fi as a sub-genre.  This second one continues to be absorbing and readable as the first, though because it only focused on two characters, at a certain time in the middle it got a bit too into their personal anxieties for my taste.  Fortunately, the tight structure which deftly brings the narratives together makes the second half a real page-turner and quite enjoyable.

The story leaves off from The Long Way to a Small and Lonely Planet with the newly wiped AI (called Lovelace at first until she changes her name to Sidra) from the ship and Pepper, the tech who had a smaller role both heading to the moon of Coriol, Pepper's home.  The big deal is that Sidra is now illegally in an artificial human-looking body and struggling to get used to it.  The first half of the book is our introduction to the progressively nerdy lifestyle of Pepper's neighbourhood (and her partner, stammering artist Blue).  This was all a bit of wish fulfillment fantasy for lefty geeks, full of diversity and freedom and community but no real downsides or authority.   

What kept me engaged here is that this narrative is then interspersed with the story of Jane 23, a 10-year old human girl living in some kind of factory with many other Janes of different numbers, all engaged in cleaning and repairing scrapped tech under the watchful and sometimes brutal eyes (or rather blank chrome faces) of robotic Mothers.  Her story is really cool, a gripping bildungsroman and a dark analogy of our own selfish consumerism taken to an extreme (where we sadly seem to be heading).  As Jane's story advances, we start to see how it connects to the present of Pepper, Blue and Sidra and it all comes together very satisfyingly in the end.

Overall, I think I enjoyed the first one more just because it was more varied and they travelled all over the place in their ship so you got more world-building.  However, this second book demonstrates that Chambers skill as a writer already improved.  There are two more books in this series as well as a fifth rumored to be coming out in 2024.  So I'll keep picking these up new when I need something good to read and a bookstore to support.

80. Cairo Intrigue by William Manchester

When we went to Vancouver last summer, my book-hunting was not yielding any real finds and I was a bit desperate.  I had hit up all the stores on the west side and though there are a few good used book stores there, the woods were almost empty of game.  Pulp Fiction closing their broadway store hurt as well.  So when we made it to the east side, I was a bit desperate and I saw this book in a nice flat box of old paperbacks.  I didn't have high hopes but it looks beautiful and I picked it up.  Immediately after, in that same store, I made some major scores.  And then the next store along Commercial Drive, I found a bunch more treasures from my list.  Not only that, but I also found a second copy of Cairo Intrigue!  I probably wouldn't have even bought it had I found it somewhat later that day.  Oddly, good condition copies of this book seem to be going for $20-30 online, so I guess it has some value.

It's not a masterpiece, but actually a quite entertaining everyman gets caught up in international intrigue narrative, along the lines of Eric Ambler but with more exciting set pieces and less subtle characterization.  The entire first half takes place on a transatlantic passenger cruise, which I really enjoyed.  Ben Sparks is a commercial agent for an American pharmaceutical firm who gets sent to try and complete some business deals in Jerusalem.  Just before he gets on the boat, he meets an Egyptian businessman who wants him to make a special connection with the government over there and gives him a letter of introduction.  Immediately after that, Sparks is attacked by a dangerous Arab on the Manhattan streets, then shot at from the dock just after he has boarded.  And we are off to the races.

The background plot is centered around these introduction papers, which are of course not what they seem, and are connected with a complex conspiracy between Cypriot and Egyptian extremists.  Manchester was better known for his non-fiction work and I am not sure if people at the time would have such a detailed understanding of the Middle East at that time or if it was just him being a politics nerd, but it seemed way too complex for the average thriller reader.  I'm actually dabbling in that history myself and I had to take a break and look a bunch of things up!  In any case, the actual politics don't impact the thrill ride for Sparks all that much (the letter, I guess, is what people who think they are smart call a "maguffin").

And there are thrills.  There is a ton of cool action and an especially cool scene where he gets locked in a Turkish steam bath.  Both the stress and intensity of the situation, they are basically getting steamed alive while trying to figure out how to get out, and the way they escape are really well done.  The finale involves sneaking out of Egypt through Gaza and into Israel.  This is a very different Gaza from today, with lots of open spaces sporadically populated (including some refugee camps) and a porous border guarded by U.N. patrols.

Also interesting is the style and tone.  Manchester is American and the protagonist as well, but the book felt quite British in the way he is a humble hero and how the real cool badasses are both British and from the public school low-key WWII hero.  Maybe that was just the default school for these kinds of books at the time.  Oh yes, the original title was "Beard the Lion" which is much better.  Anyhow, not a masterpiece but thoroughly entertaining.

79. The Mystery of the Ruby Queens (a Connie Blair mystery) by Betsy Allen

I found this in a well-curated antiques store on West Broadway in Vancouver.  It turns out to be a fairly vanilla and competent mystery written for I guess young women or maybe even high school girls in the 60s.  Betsy Allen is the pseudonym for Betty Cavanna, a successful and long-lived author of mystery books for girls.  I don't have much to say about this book.  Immediately, it seemed more of a lifestyle/aspirational read as the focus is on Connie's cool job in Philadelphia, living with her single aunt ("Living with Aunt Bet was fun.  Although she was Connie's mother's sister, Aunt Bet didn't seem middle-aged; certainly not thirty-seven."!) and her outfit.

Connie is working at the restoration of a colonial house, copying patterns and colours of the wallpapers that are revealed.  There is actually some nice travelogue and bits of history here.  The mystery involves the deceased owner of the house, who gave and then ungave various antiques and in particular a set of valuable figurines (the ruby queens of the title).  They have disappeared and Connie senses they weren't just misplaced.  There are many potential suspects among the various people working at the house and connected to the family but the mystery itself is never well-developed enough to interest the reader or give a chance to even figure it out.  It's all kind of gentle and pleasant with a lot of white people not really stressing all that much.  There is also the rescue and care for a mother cat and her litter (though how she got into the chimney is never explained).  

I'm curious who was the audience for these books.  I'm even more curious why a semi-orgasmic Debby Harry type was the choice for the cover here.

Did Betty Cavana come up with the colour title
concept before John D. MacDonald?

78. The Knot by Tim Wynne-Jones

I'm happy to have stumbled upon this Toronto-based canlit mystery/thriller, although once again, I can't remember where.  Tim Wynne-Jones is a successful author in the YA and children's picture book field, with a few adult novels earlier in his career.  The Knot is from 1982 and is centered around Toronto's even-then gentrifying Cabbagetown neighbourhood.  I imagine today that it is entirely gentrified and any of the neat characters in this book couldn't sniff a room in a boarding house there.  

The Knot in the story is a gang of errant youths who have been organized under a Fagin-like character called Gob, a seemingly crazy panhandler in a decked out wheelchair who has connections above him to more professional crime figures.  He rules the children with a powerful combination of charisma and fear, using them for petty crimes some that are just creative pranks but more importantly as observers and gatherers of data that will lead to much bigger scores.

There are quite a few characters in The Knot.  Crawford, the cop on disability leave because he got shot in the leg (and suffering psychologically from it) could be considered the protagonist.  He gets only slightly more billing than Crunkscully, the escapee from a psych hospital who is suffering from degenerative alzheimer's and is trying to remember that he is looking for his long-lost son.  Crunkscully lives in a boarding house with a great cast of the urban marginalized that used to make up so much of the character of Toronto. We also follow Stink, a 13 year-old juvenile delinquent who is the best sneaker in the Knot.  These characters lives intertwine around Gob and his plots and plans.

It's quite an enjoyable read.  You want to find out Crunkscully's backstory, who Gob is and what he is up to and you care about the characters, especially the rooming house gang who become a kind of broken and demented street irregulars for the reluctant Crawford.  There is clearly a love for working class Toronto in all its squalor and the transition to yuppiedom is well-captured.  The ending is somewhat preposterous but fun.  This is a nice little slice of Canadian genre fiction that I would recommend.

The last paragraph of the blurb is a bit much

77. Mist over Pendle by Robert Neill

Another random pickup whose origin I've completely forgotten.  Reminder to self, I need to get into the habit of making a little note in the book as sometimes they'll stay on my on-deck shelf for over a year. I thought from the cover that this was going to be more of a pastoral horror story along the lines of Harvest Home.  I was quite wrong and happy to be so, at least for the first half, as Mist over Pendle is really a historical fiction and somewhat of a bildungsroman.  It is a fictional telling of the (I have since learned) famous Pendle Witch Trials of 17th century northern England.

The story starts out with the history of a puritan family which leads to their problem of the youngest daughter, who has no prospects and the family little money (or will) to provide a dowry for her to wed her off.  The real problem is that she is charming and headstrong and they all suck, just the worst kind of uptight moralists who are constantly scandalized and punishing themselves and each other.  Fucking Puritans.  Her fate seems pretty shitty until her brother remembers a distant uncle of some means who may be interested in providing for her.  He sends for her in a gruff, commanding tone that offends her family and then really pisses them off when he sends her 20 silver coins to do with what she will (and what she will is buy proper, fashionable clothes for the trip out, the horror!).  This first section is deliciously enjoyable and somewhat nerve-wracking as she has no idea what this older male relative will be like.  

He turns out to be awesome, like her when he was younger but now a Justice of the County and well respected in Pendle County.  He immediately recognized what a bunch of assholes her family was but it also surprised at what she is like, as he had expected more of a docile maiden.  The two end up making an awesome investigative team, as she has with and manners, deep learning of the scripture (which helps endear her to the Puritans in the region) and writing skills (to be his clerk).  It's such a great set up that one could see an entire television series based on these two.

Unfortunately, the adventure we get here, which is the bulk of the narrative, is only okay.  There are dark clouds over Pendle.  People and children have died in odd experiences, often after conflict with beggar women who live in the forest.  Actually, the back story is quite interesting.  It's the way it is presented that leaves it lacking, with little real suspense.  The reader pretty much knows what is going on about halfway through the book and much of the plot concerns them trying to get evidence to be able to convict the witches.  This is more than was done in the actual history and thus further critiques this book.  It was written in 1951 and Neill comes from an establishment family in the Lancashire region, so he seems to reinforce the old narrative about witches, when we pretty much understand today that these trials were a way for Protestant england to force its authority on the marginalized (and further oppress women and destroy traditions that connected people to the land).  It's ironic because by centering the narrative on a young woman and making her super awesome, he was upending some of the gender politics of the time.

The descriptions of the region, the people, their social structures and culture are rich and very well done. Despite my misgivings about the storyline in the second half, this still was a rewarding read as it helped me to better understand this period in England, and particularly the conflict between Protestants and Roman Catholics in this time when the two religions traded power back and forth in England.

76. The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo

I only learned recently that Japan has a rich and plentiful tradition of the murder mystery genre.  This is probably a simplification but my understanding is that there are three broad periods/styles in the Japanese detective fiction genre.  Honkaku is the orthodox style, which I guess is the more classical mystery and follows certain conventions.  Later came the Shakai ha or the social school which is more grounded in realism and takes into account the social and political context.  More recently there has been a turn back to a neo-orthodox style called Shin Honkaku ha but more self-conscious with a real emphasis on complex mysteries that the reader could theoretically solve.  There is a ton of great books in there!

I am not sure where the Honjin Murders is located.  It's definitely orthodox in the sense that it is a classic locked-room mystery and supposedly the reader has all the elements to solve it themselves. However, it also does an excellent job of setting the place and social context:  1937 rural Japan and in particular the compound of a noble Honjin family.  Honjin were the family who managed the roadside inns for the nobility and thus were themselves conferred a high social status.  In this case with the restoration of the Emporer the Ichiyanagi family no longer ran a honjin, but they were still an upper class family in the region.

The writing is very self-conscious and involves the reader.  The narrator speaks to us, giving us context and setting the stage, acting sort of like a puzzle master who is teasing us to figure out the murder.  It feels slightly too straightforward, but this may be a product of translation where the cultural elements do not quite come across to my western mind.  In any case, it is not a flaw, just a question of style.  The way that the locations and the details of all the elements involved in the murder are presented are extremely clear.  I could visualize almost all of it, especially the layout of the compound. There also is a map of the place where the murder took place.  I am really bad at staying focused on all those details, so I have to say that this book excels at description.

It also does a really good job of explaining the social relations of the region as well some Japanese traditions and how the are changing.  There is quite a dark coda at the end where we see how the war impacts everybody beyond the murder itself.  

The Honjin Murders is a real detective mystery nerd book.  He drops the names of several authors and specific books that influenced the murder and actual detective books feature into the plot itself.  I already have a few of the John Dickson Carr books on my hunting list.  I may now have to add an A.A. Milne book!  I myself am not too motivated to try and solve these mysteries myself but I really enjoy following along with the detecting process.  My one beef is that it is only at the end that significant details of certain characters' personalities are revealed and these would have had a major influence on how I thought about the crime.  So though he lays out all the physical clues that smarter people than I may have figured out the how of the murder, he actually hides the social clues so you really could not have guessed the why.

There is a detective here, the youthful and sloppy Kosuke Kindaichi, who I guess would become quite famous in Japan.  Yokomizo wrote 77 books! Here is a great piece that better explains the mystery scene in Japan and Yokomizo's role in it.  This was a lot of fun.  I recommend.

75. The Spring Madness of Mr. Sermon by R. F. Delderfield

If you see a Delderfield, you gotta pick it up.  That's my new motto.  Can't remember where I found this, but my on-deck shelf was groaning and yet I knew I had to have it.  I took it with me on a trip to America which would involve much hanging with friends.  I thought it would offer easy reading in small bursts and this turned out to be true.

It starts out with a pretty funny bang.  Milquetoast professor at a middling prep school suddenly loses his shit and beats the snot out of a bad kid who set off a stink bomb.  He then goes home and realizes that his marriage and home life are also no longer tolerable so he takes off with a rucksack and 8 pounds in his pocket.  The first third of the book is deeply enjoyable, with a Delderfieldian collection of rough and honest and lovable English people and a series of situations that are never tense, all contributing to the awakening of confidence in Mr. Sermon.  His first encounter is really the best, where he hitches a ride with an antique seller, helps him out in his business by pretending to be a gentleman buyer and then gets totally drunk while entertaining the locals on the piano.  It's just a great party scene.

Eventually, the narrative settles down to Mr. Sermon living in this beachside town, getting a job as the waterfront supervisor and developing a friendship with a younger woman whose dad is the headmaster of the good kind of school that Mr. Sermon wishes he had taught at.  For the reader, you really want to know how it will resolve and unfortunately, the central conflict reverts back to his relationship with his wife. The book loses its spontaneous fun and starts to fall into weird early '60s gender clichés and unrealistic emotional developments.  It's all done gently and thoughtfully but is ultimately quite silly and deeply sexist, to the point where it is almost cancellable in today's environment (his wife just needed a good spanking).  I give Delderfield the benefit of the doubt and it was more the simplicity of the way they turned their marriage around that turned me off more than the stereotypes (and honestly these were much more bearable than when John D. MacDonald does them).

So the second half fell flat for me but I still really enjoyed the book.  The opening chapters are worth it alone.  It's ultimately a middle-age male fantasy, wrapped up in rich locations and characters with a love of all this good and simple in non-snobby England.

74. All Systems Red (book 1 of the Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells

This is really a novella but I didn't want to buy the entire 4-book set until I knew I would like it and if you held it in your hands you would say it's a book (albeit stretched out with lots of white space and extra pages like a high school essay).  A colleague at work who has good nerdy taste recommended it to me and it was a good recommendation!  It's a great concept and you jump right into it.  The protagonist is Murderbot or more officially a SecUnit, a cyborg of cloned human material who is a mandatory (for insurance reasons) part of the equipment package the "company" sends out when people contract it for planet-surveying services.

The company's priority is profit and does not have the tightest quality standards, which Murderbot has figured out.  It has hacked its own governance module and is therefore effectively a free-thinker. It's real goal seems to be to want to just chill out and watch endless hours of downloaded entertainments.  The concept is immediately compelling to anyone who has been trapped in an undemanding and thankless job with incompetent, uncaring management and not enough to actually engage the brain.  Despite his attempts to remain distant from the humans, however, this crew turns out to be quite cool and Murderbot does get engaged when at first they are put in danger by the fauna of the planet and more so when they figure out they are being sabotaged.

It's a tight, sparse read with only hints at the setting of the greater galaxy and the complexities of the company.  As the reader, you are caught up in Murderbot's sardonic, yet ultimately sensitive, voice and the action of the situation.  It really does a great job of combing likeable personalities and the emotions associated with Murderbot being forced to open up to them with cool tactical combat and strategy against this unknown enemy.  I can't wait to read the next one.

73. Quai d'Orsay 1945-51 by Jacques Dumaine

Another undocumented freebox find, I realize now that it is a minor classic in diplomatic history.  Jacques Dumaine was the chef du protocol of the French department of Foreign Affairs immediately after the end of WWII.  His diary was published posthumously (he sadly died a few years into a plum job as the Ambassador to Portugal) and was a big hit because of both its behind the scenes look at the political scene in France and Europe as well as a thoughtful and often humorous introspection into humanity.  Each chapter is a year which is then broken up into various days. This is an abridged edition of the original published in French.  I feel like I cheated but seeing as this one took me two weeks to read, it is probably for the best.

His opinions on Churchill and the complex relationships between the US and the other European states, especially around the potential re-armament of Germany were interesting and revealing.  Much of the internal politics around the French president, prime minister and various political parties I couldn't really follow as I know almost nothing about it.  Much of it was out of context and that contributed to the slowness of my reading.  

My uncle used to work for Foreign Affairs Canada and he once introduced me to the person who had been the head of protocol for Israel.  He said that that must have been a tough job.  I was a teenager and didn't really understand but today after having done some event planning and other semi-delicate administrative organization, I really get it.  Dumaine's job must have been an incredible pain in the ass!  Not only do you have to know all the minutest details of the rules of protocol involving super important people, you also have constant political pressure from various interested parties trying to get you to break those rules.  He kvetches about it, but always in a philosophical, positive spirit and seems to have done the job well. 

Another real pleasure in the book are his various quotations.  I'll share my favourites here:

"My personal definition of the word "relaxation" is any interval of time which separates me from a fresh irritation."

"As Cocteau says, let us give the impression of having organised that which we cannot prevent."

Analogous but more nuanced take than Churchill's on young versus old politicians:

On Truman defeating Dewey and all too relevant today concerning the media and political class's obsession over polls:

This is part of his story of Ristic, who was the Yugoslavian Ambassador to France and at first sent to Paris as basically a powerless figurehead, under the control of the communist political officers there, who then took over.  I like the idea of the quiet, seemingly meek man who is actually a badass and I especially like the middle sentence comparing him to a rod of steel:

72. The Blue Wall: Street Cops in Canada by Carsten Stroud

I found this at a wonderful little corner of an otherwise quite depressing place: the used bookshop/fundraiser at mountain-side entrance of the Montreal General Hospital.  I discovered it a few years ago after suffering from a basketball-caused case of Mallet Finger.  It was a miracle that I got in at all to see a specialist (though once I did, he was excellent and I got a full recovery) and a double miracle that there is this little corner crammed with english paperbacks and hardbacks mostly from the 70s, 80s and 90s.  The only problem is that it is open at limited hours, probably because it is staffed by volunteers.  I don't know if they get regular donations of books or if they have some single source because the shelves are stuffed and the few times I have come back, they seem to get restuffed.  Wherever the books come from, it is a pretty strong representation of late-twentieth century mainstream book-buying taste.  There is a heavy emphasis on big best-seller fiction, the Canadian literary establishment with a smattering of genre and British popular stuff.  I made no major finds, but a few unknown gems were lurking in there and The Blue Wall is one of them.

Though it started off a bit too wordy and descriptive for me with a geographical overview of Vancouver, once it gets into it's bread and butter the actual daily (nightly, actually) police work in various cities across Canada, it becomes eminently readable, thought-provoking and informative.  There is some implicit bias here, given that Stroud seems to have worked as a cop but he is mostly up front with his perspective and makes a real effort to think the issues through in a fair way.  In particular, there is zero mention of race other than First Nations (which both he and the cops mention treat with s surprising amount of sympathy and awareness of history; one of the cops goes on a rant about how Canada is basically enacting a slow-moving genocide), nor of corruption.  There are a couple of simplistic straw men, particularly a Haligonian college girl from money and hyper-naive socialist ideals.  There is a long and well-researched (he goes deep into the history of the gun) narrative on an officer who got killed in a bank robbery that turned into a hostage situation. He is of course a good cop with a family and it is really sad, but also plays into the classic narrative of the police officer sacrificing his life for the public.  How many innocent Canadians were also killed by police in this time and what about their long narrative?

Overall, though, this a rich portrayal of the lives of street cops in Canada in 1980 with lots of interesting context, like the history of gun laws in Canada.  He sat with the cops working the beat on Davie Street (which is a nice complement to Vancouver Vice), the badass armed robbery squad in Montreal (with a wild breakdown of how they stop bank robbers), cops in First Nations country in northern Ontario (really sad), Toronto squad cars, Winnipeg beat cops, back to Vancouver for the drug squad taking down low-level heroin dealers and addicts with little tidbits in between.  There is a small but powerful section where he interviews early women in the police force that both reminds the reader of how insanely sexist things were (though maybe still are given some of the recent shit in the Canadian military) and how strong these women were.  The ending is an excellent essay on the demise of the street cop and the growing separation between the police and the public.  This essay begins with an explanation on the difference between the values of a Canadian police officer compared to an American one, another distinction which I suspect has narrowed today with our massive increase in police budgets and culture of militarization.  According to him, Canadian cops were way less likely to go to force or violence and considered it a failure if they ever had to use their guns.  

This book really stands the test of time.  It is an excellent read just for enjoyment if you are into the culture and work of street cops.  It could also be a solid reference for anyone writing about crime in that period. It is also an informed and intelligent look at police work in the 1980s and thus a valuable sociological text for those who study policing and how it has changed.  Seek it out.

 

71. A Multitude of Sins by M.K. Wren

I've been looking for the book A Gift Upon the Shore by M.K. Wren for quite some time.  I can't remember who recommended it to me.  It's a post-apocalyptic fantasy/sci-fi book.  When I was in Vancouver, I stumbled upon her name in the crime section with a couple of books featuring Oregonian detective Conan Flagg.  Normally, I wouldn't purchase a different book by the same author until I found the one I was looking for, but the combo of the Oregon coast location and the elite first name of the character allowed me to break protocol.

I read this much faster than the P.D. James I read previously.  These American detective fiction books are much easier to read, with fewer characters and a more straightforward through line as well as less complex prose.  So I burned through it, despite being really busy with work and personal bureaucracy.  I got caught up in it early, enjoying the intriguing setup and the cool and cultured detective.  He runs a book shop, of which we didn't get enough, and receives an anonymous note asking him to meet privately at the trail behind his beach house.  He is reluctant (and there is a suggestion that he was involved in things in his past that might still put him at risk) but concedes and meets the daughter of a recently deceased senator.  She is convinced that she is being followed and Flagg soon confirms that she is not actually paranoid, though there is a lingering question of her mental health.  

She plays the piano beautifully and that is enough to convince Flagg that she is worth protecting.  We are soon learn of her messed up family, or what is left of it: her charming frat boy party-hardy step-brother, her artist and now weird shut-in stepsister and her blind stepmom whom she hates.  It was an enjoyable read, but there was not much of a mystery and even the semi-twist at the end was pretty obvious to me.  I'm a dolt when it comes to figuring out mysteries, so I can only assume that Wren did not really care about hiding it and the pleasure was supposed to come from the action, which was okay.

So no masterpiece, but a nice digestible read.  Coincidentally, the day I finished the book, I went to Dark Carnival with the intention of only poking around, but the place has really been cleaned up and a lot of books that were buried under piles have become visible and lo and behold I found A Gift upon the Shore!  The book-finding Gods smile upon me.  

70. The Black Tower by P.D. James

Hmm, so this is only the second P.D. James that I have read and the first with Adam Dalgliesh, who was her main character recurring detective.  As I started writing this, I thought this was one of the last in the series, as he is convalescing from some kind of illness and planning on retiring.  I see with a quick check that this is only the fifth of fourteen, so little harm done to a chronology nerd like myself.

In the Black Tower, he decides to go to the Dorset countryside to respond to the summons of an old family friend and colleague to his father (who had some religious role), the curate Father Badderley.  Upon arriving at Toynton Grange, a home for the disabled, he discovers that Father Badderley had died of a heart attack a week earlier.  It seems unsurprising as he was 80 but the fact of the letter (he had not heard from him since he was a child and referred to needing Dalgliesh's help as a police commander) and some odd inconsistencies (he was wearing his habit, which he should have take off and his last diary was missing) push Dalgliesh to ambivalently poke around.

Much of the book is an exploration of this strange place, led by a semi-messianic pseudo-monk who claims to have experienced a healing miracle from debilitating disease paralysis himself.  Even before any actual crime, there is much skulduggery amongst the patients and the staff.  Many of the people that work there have scandalous pasts (the doctor who had an affair with an underage girl, the ex-con orderly, the nurse who hit a patient) and are there working for cheap and lodgings because they couldn't get work anywhere else.  The patients themselves all have various tragic pasts and difficult personalities above and beyond their disabilities.  And of course, actual skulduggery is afoot, which goes beyond Father Badderley's suspicious death.  Previously, another patient whom everyone hated for his cruel went tumbling over a cliff edge into the sea, either due to suicide or because the brakes on his wheelchair failed.  

I actually had to resort to a piece of scrap paper with all the characters listed and it really helped a lot to get me engaged.  I struggled through at first, but once I hit page 100 and more or less had the characters in my head (these white people with the white people names, who can keep them apart?), I got quite intrigued.  It ended up being a bit too long and one grows tired of the weary resentment of post-colonial England (everybody is just so unhappy and narrow) but I definitely wanted to find out the solution.  The reveal is actually quite cool and satisfying and I imagine if you were already a fan of Dalgliesh you would have been quite psyched to know that it spurred him to get back into the game and abandon his retirement. 

I won't seek out her books, but it is good to know they are out there if my on deck shelf ever runs dry (ha!) and I need a good mystery.  She also had quite a tough life and basically wrote her way to incredible success in life.  Pretty impressive.

69. Codes Bananas by David Walliams

For some reason, my daughter insisted that I read this book.  She plows through graphic novels and is a decent reader but so far hasn't seemed super enthusiastic about any books yet.  Her close friends, the twins, loved this book and gave it to her for her birthday.  It may be that she just doesn't express enthusiasm about things (she tends to be pretty stonefaced during movies), I just don't know.  I would have read this book in a day were it in english, but the twist is that she read it in french.  I can read french fairly well but it is is not unconscious for me as reading in english is and thus requires concentration.  So even a kids book like this is a real chore.  Furthermore the style of these books is to have all kinds of cartoony typefaces in different sizes that I just found kind of annoying (old man yelling at cloud here).  So this took me weeks to read!  

A corollary of having to read french consciously is that I also don't internalize the story.  It's all very removed.  So to be honest, I can't give this book a fair review.  It's a really fun adventure about a young boy in London during the blitz (orphaned by a Nazi bomb) who lives with his grandmother and has so far avoided being sent out to the country.  His uncle works as a guard at the zoo and his great joy is going there to be with the animals.  One night when he sneaks out to the zoo (after he is caught there by the asshole security guard and forbidden to come back by the pretentious and rigid zoo manager), his grandmother and her house are destroyed by another Nazi bomb, he is caught up in a wild adventure trying to save Gertrude the Gorilla.  It's quite wild and over the top, utterly unrealistic and I suspect a lot of fun.

68. A Terrible Tide by Suzanne Mead

Books are being read slowly this fall here at Olman's Fifty.  I'm stuck on a French children's book my daughter aggressively pushed me to read and it's blocking all other reading progress.  I found A Terrible Tide at the Salvation Army in Langley (don't ask) and thought she might enjoy it (i.e learn from it, I've become the worst pushy Didactic Dad).  I am always trying to expose her to the concept of "Canada" as it gets more and more elusive in this global age.

A Terrible Tide is a fictional retelling of the real 1929 earthquake and tidal wave that hit Newfoundland and nearly destroyed many of the communities on the Burin peninsula.  I did not know about this event, nor did I even know about the Burin peninsula, so I was also educated!  At that time, the peninsula was not connected by land to the rest of the island.  People got around with boats, most of which were destroyed.  Furthermore, the one telegram/phone line had been downed in an earlier storm, so they also had no way to communicate.

The protagonist is Celia, the middle child of the X family.  It's her birthday and the dinner party gets rudely and brutally cut off as first the earthquake sends the family out of the house and then the tidal wave grabs her.  It's all quite adventurous with the bonus of an awesome dog (a Newfoundland of course) named Boomer.    The book is written at the young adult level, so fairly simple in its telling, yet with a lot going on.  I was caught up in it for the most part and I think my daughter was too (the clue is in the level of resistance beyond wanting to stay up when I say it's time to stop reading).  You really get a sense of how it must feel and what you have to deal with when your house is entirely destroyed and you have to decide whether to rebuild or to move and start again.  It also gives a nice perspective on a time and place where material goods were quite limited and pleasure comes from smaller, more important things like family and place.  This was a cool book.

67. Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts (Might Marvel Masterworks vol. 9) by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko

A friend lent this to me.  He's a big fan of the silver age of comics.  I grew up on a lot of these comics, but always very sporadically.  You never had an entire series back then, just whatever copies you found at garage sales or got as gifts or your friends had (or their older brothers).  So it's cool to get an entire series in order, even if with Dr. Strange's first appearances there wasn't much of an overarching narrative.  He was introduced in 1963 and you can see how the comics are reflecting the earlier manifestations of the interest in psychedelia and the occult that were a big part of the 60s.  

The narratives are fairly simplistic.  Each issue has a new baddie (or a repeating one the indefatigable Baron Mordo) usually from another dimension who decides he has to dominate planet earth (and presumably the rest of our dimension, though they seem generally fixated on earth).  Strange discovers it and following his rigid duty to always protect earth and help those who need his help, he boldly jumps into some other dimension for a magic battle.  Usually, after being almost defeated, he whips out his magic amulet gifted to him by his mentor The Master.

The language and the depictions of the other dimensions are what make these stories entertaining.  I've never been clear on how much actual writing Stan Lee did.  The language here is that great, fantasy pseudo-classical language where the traditional sentence structure is inverted ("It is over! Never have I faced defeat so close!").  Also, the combatants narrate each of their attacks ("Now feel the fury of the electro plasma ray of Tiboro!")

I don't love Ditko's art, it's slightly too sketchy for me (I'm a solid line kind of guy), but his surrealist depictions of other dimensions and the battles therein are quite neat.  Lots of weird random doodles floating in emptiness.  I wonder how much Ditko and Kirby influenced each other?

66. Thank you, Mr. Moto by John P. Marquand

I picked this up and another Mr. Mot Bantam paperback from a nicely-curated antique store in Vancouver that had an interesting collection of paperbacks (chosen almost entirely for aesthetic reasons as the otherwise friendly owner had not actually read any of them and had never heard of Ross MacDonald!).  I was a bit desperate for good paperback finds at that point so justified to myself that I needed to read a Mr. Moto book or two.  I did find a nice paperback of Margaret Millar's An Air that Kills and a Mary Stewart (The Moon Spinners) that I hadn't read before.

Thank you, Mr. Moto was a strange read.  Marquand was a successful novelist; he even won a Pulitzer, so I want to give him his due as a writer. It's hard, though, to find any merit in this book beyond its existence as a very specific manifestation of I guess what is called Orientalism.  It's not that the bizarre mix of trying to be progressive (in the 1930s) by arguing that all Chinese people do not actually look alike while constantly marvelling at China's (and particularily Peking) fundamental unscrutability is so bad that I am morally condemming the book.  Rather, the characters and the plot are basically dull and mostly passive.  It's just a boring story in an environment, pre-WWII Peking with all the various colonial powers machinating, which should be anything but.

The protagonist is professional expat Tom Nelson who hasn't gone native but is too satisfied with his life of doing nothing in China.  He gets involved with another young single woman with a slight questionable reputation (comes from good stock, but is staying on too long in China without getting married or something) who had been at another expat's house the night he was murdered.  There is some mystery around his death but no real suspense.  It feels like the plot is an excuse for Marquand to go on and on about the mysterious Chinese character, on which despite the many words, he really doesn't say anything.  Did he even ever go to China?

You may be wondering, what the hell does this have to do with Mr. Moto?  He shows up early but is only tangentially involved in the plot that turns out to be an alliance of an extreme Japanese nationalist and a warlord who are plotting to take over Peking.  He indeed speaks in that stereotypical way where he is contstantly thanking and apologizing but somehow we are told he is also extremely effective.  The end of the book is a standoff with the warlord where the plucky woman grabs his gun and thus foils the plot.  Moto is there and talks a lot, but seems to do very little and what he does do is off screen.

I can live with some old school "benevolent" racism in my 20th century fiction.  I can critique it but still find value in the rest of the text.The problem with Thank you, Mr. Moto, is that there really isn't much going on with the rest of the text so the racism is the only thing that stands out. And even this is not very interesting.  I would welcome an ethnocentric discussion of Chinese culture from an expat living in Peking in the 30s if it brought something interesting to the table.  Marquand's portrayal here is simplistic and limited; it honestly feels like he just made it up based on whatever popular cuture on China he was exposed to.  I'll be hard-pressed to read the second one I bought.

65. Badlands by Robert Kroetsch

With this posting, I tread warily onto the badlands of CanLit.  I can't remember where I picked this book up, but it must have been in a free library back when my on-deck shelf was down to a third of its max size.  After my massive book haul in Vancouver, my on-deck shelf is now full of books I want to read and so books I should read are much less tempting.  I debated putting this book down as it took me a few days to get into it.  After the awesomeness that was The Heights of Zervos, I was reluctant to start a new book.  I persevered and pushed through, the Macomber of boring books.

That's not actually fair to Badlands, which isn't boring.  It's actually kind of fun and weird, with an absorbing, vibrant portrayal of the Alberta Badlands and the river that runs through it.  Unfortunately, because this is "literature", we have to get an elaborate structure, forced themes and stylized language.  The main story is about Dawes, an obsessive explorer who has left his wife at home to hunt for dinosaur bones in the Alberta Badlands.  He is in competition with two other well-known bone collectors.  With him, on an enormous raft with their supplies and a made tent (when things are stable), are Web the steersman, Grizzly the cook and McBride (who bales and is later replaced by Tune, the boy rescued from playing piano in a "hoo-er" house).  All of them are strange individuals, communication is limited and seems mainly to release the various tensions among the men.  They get into various scrapes and interactions, many of which are entertaining (like when the raft goes through the rapids) or interesting (the various ferries and the photographer).  None of these interactions ever go truly crazy (I think this is what marks it as Canadian), though all are marked with eccentric behaviours and the language weighted with excess language and symbolism.

That narrative is further framed by I guess journal entries by Anna Dawes, the explorer's daughter, 56 years later.  She gives interprets what he wrote in his journal and laments his absence from their lives.  She ends up meeting Anna Yellowbird, the I guess Blackfoot woman, who follows and eventually joins Dawes' expedition (and of course has sex with Dawes and maybe with Web*) after her husband never returned home from WWI.  The two Annas attempt to drunkenly trace the raft's route backwards and I guess discover things about themselves.

Once I got into it, Badlands was a mostly fun read.  I enjoyed the portrayal of the zany raft crew and the detailed exposition of their work and interactions.  Likewise, the description of the environment made me seriously consider taking a trip there.  There is a dinosaur museum and I imagine great hiking.  

Unfortunately, the goodness of those things were somewhat buried under the forced "literature" elements like a well-made cake under too much cheap icing.  There are enough themes embedded here to fill 2-3 undergrad lit seminar sessions and yet none of them end up saying all that much.  Something about masculinity, yes a lot about masculinity of course, maybe something about Canada as a nation, buried dinosaur bones as metaphor of something or other, etc. The language is stilted and weirdly stylized. He uses a device where he says the subjects name in two sentences in a row, which I guess is supposed to be deep but just made it confusing as to whose point of view it was when he didn't use the name.  

You can see I wasn't exaggerating!

I'm glad I read it and Kroetsch had an esteemed career and seemed like a decent guy, so happy to have read it but now I am very much ready to get back into some straight-ahead story and ass-kicking.

*This edition was published by PaperJacks which seems kind of cool, though you can see where creative Canada was in 1975 by the books listed there, with references to Tonto, use of the word "Eskimo" and at least one book whose main point seems to be sex between a First Nations woman and a white man.

64. The Heights of Zervos by Colin Forbes

I honestly bought this book because it was a Pan with a pretty cool layout.  I don't even like the image on the cover that much. Sometimes I'll pick up a book that I'm not super sure about either because I feel it needs rescuing, or because I don't want to spend all this time browsing and then not even purchase anything and finally because I need my book-buying fix.

Well in this case, the hesitant purchase turned out to be a big winner because this book was awesome.  It's probably one of the best adventure books I've read in a while, rivaling Desmond Bagley.  Though a huge student of WWII, I tend to not love adventure books that take place then as I am not a big fan of military fiction.  I also was worried it was going to be all winter.  What made this book so great, was that it has so much going on.  We get great espionage and sabotage, as well as a whole section on a Greek ferry that could be right out of Eric Ambler, before we even get to the main adventure, which is a race by a three Brits and a Greek to beat a battalion of elite German Alpenkorps to a monastery on a mountain peak that will give them a huge tactical advantage in their invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia.

The whole second half is alternately tense and hair-raising.  It culminates in a wild, explosive finale.  I'm being vague here because I don't want to give anything away.  The protagonist, Macomber, is kind of a British soldier superman, though of course with zero self-promotion.  Just a competent public school boy who kicked around Europe as a kid so perfectly fluent in Greek, French and German (the latter allowing him to march around the boat in the guise of an Abwher agent, flustering his supposed Nazi colleagues with constant criticisms and unsettling questions).  I love lines like this, when Macomber explains how when in Bulgaria the British government tapped him to do sabotage jobs on Nazi stockpiles in the Balkans:

"It was lying around in warehouses and railway sidings, so the Ministry brainboxes said would I have a go at it?  Very obliging they were too — sent out an explosives man to teach me a trick or two about things that go bang in the night..."

One simply does one's duty, what?  A great read and a keeper.  Colin Forbes is going to the top of the list.

 

63. Iran: a Modern History by Abbas Amanat

My best friend is Iranian and his father recommended this book as a "pretty good history" of modern Iran.  He does not praise lightly!  Starting in 1500 and going right up to the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the Green Revolution of 2009, it answered all the big picture questions I had about Iran as well as filling in some significant gaps in the surrounding region.  It does so in a readable, yet still scholarly style, so I found it to be quite a page-turner actually.

My biggest question was how Iran/Persia remained a coherent nation (or maybe became one) with distinct language and religion from the rest of the middle east.  In answering this question, Amanat also really helped me understand the distinction between Shi'i and Sunni Islam (though I still don't know the origin of the split as that happened before 1500 I guess).  I also wanted to know better England's role in Iran's history.  I hadn't realized that Iran was never actually colonized, though it got pretty damn close.  

It's hard to write about a 900+ page book covering 600 years of history.  My big takeaways are that Iran is an amazing country with a rich and complex culture.  A lot of bad shit went down there (I thought the second Shah Pahlavi was bad then Khomeini is like hold my beer) and much of today's Iran is found in the diaspora after the Islamic Revolution.  It makes you wish that it can find a way to one day move to a more pluralistic society not dependent on autocracy and repression to grow.  It seems so often that despite changes in ideology, countries' basic structure of government seems to often adhere to their pre-modern roots.  Russia had czars and now they have a "President".  China had emperors and now Chairmen.  Iran had Shahs and now an Ayatollah.  Very hard to say what could shake that.  Another point is that Iran was never not fucked with by external forces.  At its borders, the Russians were up to constant fuckery, the Ottaman empire and then Iraq (to be fair this was more of a back and forth) and of course the British basically taking over all of Iran's oil.  Amanat is quite fair, though, in laying responsibility for Iran's mistakes equally at Iran itself as well as the outside forces.  He also gives credit for various government managing to maintain the slimmest Iranian polity when it seemed like the country was going to be split in half or uttery dominated.

Coincidentally, as I was in Vancouver finishing the book, there was a Parviz Tanavoli exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  Amanat spends a page or two on him and his contribution to Iranian modern art.  The exhibit was fantastic, adding depth to my reading.  Tanavoli captures a lot of history in his work, many of his pieces look like modernity enclosing traditional Persian forms and motifs while those forms and motifs resist back making a dynamic that felt like I was looking at the tension of Iran in a single statue.  Cool stuff.

Finally, I have to make a point about eurocentrism.  Earlier this year, I finished J.M. Roberts' Penguin History of the World, which I quite liked.  Roberts makes the argument that because Europe dominated most of the world through colonization and its political forms that the lens of world history should focus on Europe.  I don't entirely disagree with that article, but now that I have read this history of Iran, I see how much basic history of this region was missing from Robert's book.  Even if a region didn't have impact on the world (which is questionable, especially today), you still have to get its history into a history of the world.  I learned more about the history of India, the Arab world, Afghanistan and even Russia from Amanat's work in his tangential backgrounds to those regions connections with Iran.

Here are some photos I took of Tanavoli's work.

62. Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City's West End by Aaron Chapman

My wife picked this one up while we were in Vancouver.  She went to film school with the author who seems to have become a succesful "alternative" journalist, with several books on Vancouver history.  I was about halfway through the 900 page tome on Iranian history and picked this one up at first just to check it out, but it was so readable and interesting that I ended up reading the entire book overnight.

Vancouver Vice is the history of the West End of Vancouver in the late '70s and early '80s, specifically the development of the gay community there and the sex trade that flourished during that time.  We moved to Vancouver Island in 1980 and I didn't really become conscious of Vancouver until a few years later, so I missed the peak of this period, though certainly saw the seediness and crime on Davies and Granville in my teenage years.  My grandfather lived in the West End  and he and his brother who lived with him must have seen all of this.

The book is well-written, very easy and entertaining to read.  It is also thoroughly researched.  Much of the history is now lost, or at least not easily accessible or even part of the common knowledge of the region. Vancouver has a long history of its culture of stiff gentility trying to stifle its pockets of extreme vice.  Today, the really bad neighbourhoods are down on the east side and characterized by homelessness, mental health issues and addiction.  This book captures a time that would probably seem even more shocking to today's younger Vancouverites, where open prostitution of both sexes lined the streets of the West End.  The barriers and blocked streets that make it such a pain in the ass to drive were pu there not to help bikes and make calmer streets for the residences but to make it hard for Johns to drive and solicit sex workers.

Vancouver Vice is framed by a body being found in the trunk of a car left abandoned in Stanley Park.  We then get background on the establishment of the West End as a safe space for gay men, a look into the hot clubs and establishments and interviews with cops and locals as well as some sex workers who were there at the time.  The treatment of the police is quite interesting, they are portrayed in a favourable light and seem like decent guys who had a kind of rock and roll job.  I'm not sure the people they busted for hooking up in the English Bay bathrooms or for buying or selling weed (both activities now legal) felt about them.  Their motivation, they say, was really to go after the abusers and people who preyed on underage kids.

Ultimately, the laws of the time reflected the will of the general public but were also limited by the power elite of the province.  The only name we get is the successful founder of the U-Frame it business, but there is a lot of evidence suggesting many other wealthy and powerful people were participating in sex and drug parties with underage sex workers, who had been exploited by the lower level criminals, particularly the scary Wayne Harris. 

You can buy the book here.