18. Hell's Witness by Daniel Sanger

I met the author of this book at a book-signing for another book. It turned out that he worked with my sister at Saturday Night and also wrote the article that really motivated me to watch FUBAR. He's a big FUBAR fan and we had a good conversation about that. He's also an investigative journalist who wrote an award-winning article about the biker wars in Quebec. That article, specifically about Dany Kane, the informant who mysteriously killed himself when his information led to a massive sweep of biker arrests, turned into this book.

Hell's Witness is structured around Danny Kane, his struggle to rise in the Hell's Angels and his relationships with the RCMP. It's written in a very straightforward style and structured basically in a straight line. Despite the details of biker excess, it's written with such a sober, journalistically legit style that I found a lot of it a bit dry. There isn't a lot of life breathed into these characters. On the other hand, that approach lends it a lot of credibility and there is no exaggeration or hyperbole, something I'm sure a lot of true crime books suffer from.

He spends a lot of time looking at the behaviour of the various police forces and they do not come off well. They seem to get so caught up in their missions that they lose sight of their real role. The money they spent on Kane compared to the results they got is questionable at best and Sanger does a great job of laying out these weird and complex situations where the RCMP is actively working against the courts to get a murderer acquitted or his case dismissed because he's the main key to their larger case.

Also, if you, as a western canadian, ever had the sense that french-canadians are wimpy, this book will break down that stereotype. Most of the Angels are french-canadians and they are more than just badasses. They really seem just nuts. They are constantly calling hits on each other and are quite creative with their methods. Bombing, hammering, chopping off body parts, all part of a day's work to these guys!

17. Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

This was the perfect book to help keep the pace going. I read Morgan's first book, called Altered Carbon, that was basically a detective noir set in a pretty far cyberpunk future. It was well done science fiction. Market Forces is much more compelling and thematically rich, though still a classic male sci-fi book on the surface. It takes place near the end of this century. Globalization has continued to thrive and the world is controlled by powerful corporations. Division between the rich and the poor has become so extreme that London is separated into two distinct zones, divided by checkpoint barriers. The protagonist is a hot-shot financier working in Conflict Investment, the hottest growth area in the market. Basically, large corporations finance and manage small wars all over the world and reap huge profits off the weapons sales and subsequent cheap labour markets.

It's such a cut-throat world that to actually get ahead, you have a road duel with whoever's position or accounts you want to take. All the top execs drive around in armored, souped-up luxury vehicles and the best are like sports celebrities. I know it sounds kind of too over-the-top, but in the context of the book, it really works. How this state of affairs came to pass is slowly revealed and it fits in very well in what is ultimately a damning condemnation of global capitalism. The protagonist does some brutal things, but he's always wrestling with his conscience and begins to side with the revolutionary underdogs that he's financing.

It's macho writing and fun for people like me to read. The boardroom politics are well-constructed and gripping and there's tons of action: gunfights, street brawls and road battles. But the whole thing is very political. This is narrative entertainment with a political purpose balanced so well that neither side of the deal suffers. Good stuff. Strongly recommended.

16. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Holy Karst! This is the first book I've read in way too long. I blame the internet. Over a month. I've lost my pace now and am going to have to really pound them out to get 50 this year.

I picked up The Forever War at a thrift store for a quarter. It had a nice '70s sci-fi pocket book cover and lots of accolades. It definitely comes out of the tradition of the '60s and the Vietnam war. The story concerns the life of a soldier recruited as a young man into a war against some unseen aliens and follows his career throughout the war as it progresses. What makes it interesting is that the engagements continue to be farther and farther away. The soldiers are put into stasis when they travel to the outer reaches. Most are killed, but those few who do survive come back to a future earth that is hundreds of years ahead of them. The protagonist's life spans 1800 earth years and by the time it's over things have changed radically. He goes through an entire period where heterosexuality is considered taboo and he's the only straight soldier in his platoon.

It's an interesting concept and ultimately is set up to show the ridiculousness of war. The story is fairly linear, though and lacks much actual conflict. It's more like an exploration of the theme rather than a real story, though the main character is sympathetic and well-written. It's okay.

15. Breed to Come by Andre Norton

Andre Norton is my kind of author. She's written a bazillion books, I'm sure all of which are entertaining. She loves cats and she spent a good deal of her life with a congenital physical illness that kept her in a lot of pain. I have a lot of respect for her in that her response was to just produce. She's a female sci-fi author who seems quite interested in the civilizations that would arise after we destroyed ourselves.

This book is about a future where humans are gone from a planet because of a self-created plague. It is told from the point of view of a society of cats who've evolved into sentient beings. They consider the humans demons from the mythological past. However, one of the cats has started to delve into the human's old dwelling places, teaching himself how to use their tools and he begins to suspect that some of the humans left the planet and may be returning.

It's a cool idea and her conception of how housecats evolve into a society is well thought out and entertaining. The book moves along briskly and is compelling to the end. I could have gone for something a little more drawn out and in depth, but this is a pocket sci-fi and novels in this genre have been designed to end quickly.

It's a good fun read and I recommend it.

14. The King of the Vagabonds by Colin Dann

I have been really in a reading rut these last couple of weeks. I'm stuck on two french books. I picked this one up because I found it at Value Village, it looked thin and easy to read and I'm interested in fiction about animals right now. It's about a cat in the countryside in England who is driven to leave his comfortable farm home to hang out with the tough wild cats who live in the fields and the old bomb sites. It was written for adolescents, as it's part of some british line of books which include Enid Blighton. The story is tautly constructed and moves right along. The basic plot could almost be about a human adolescent growing up, except for some of the social mores (it's not weird that his mother disappears to get laid by a wandering tom every now and then). There are plenty of cat details and it does a good job of presenting the challenges of a wild cat's existence in an exciting and adventurous way, without making it seem too fun. It definitely has that harsh british element to it. My only biological complaint is that a lot of the protagonist's character development is based on the notion that a well-fed cat doesn't hunt, which is untrue. Anyways, a fun read, which nobody else may ever come across again in my world, that I hope will spur me on to getting my pace back.

Well that's cool. I just did a bit of research and it turns out that Colin Dann is a very succesful author of children's books about animals. He wrote a series of books that started with The Animals of Farthing Wood about a bunch of animals driven from their forest home by developers, who band together against their own instincts to find a fabled nature reserve. It got made into an animated series and clearly has tons of fans. Sounds pretty cool.

13. Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding

Women are fucked.

12. The Bug by Ellen Ulman

My brother-in-law gave this to my dad for xmas, who read it and gave it back to him, who then read it and gave it to me. It is the story of a tech firm in the mid-80's, a programmer who becomes obsessed with a bug and the QA tester who first finds it. I have to admit that I was pretty sucked into the narrative. I read the book in a couple of days. It has two threads going on, a technical mystery about the source of the bug and two personal stories about the respective relationships (and their unravelling) of the two main characters. The programmer is often not very sympathetic and his descent into depression is frustrating because you feel that he's a bit too isolated. However, the rest of it rings very true. It portrays the corporate culture of that time (which really was the genesis of the dotcom boom) convincingly. And the other human relationships are quite compelling as well. Ultimately, though, it's the story of the bug itself that drew me in. You want to find out what caused it and the conclusion is satisfying, and goes a bit deeper, presenting an interesting theme on the relationship between humans and machines.

This is an interesting book, because it definitely has a chick side, spending a lot of time on people's feelings and relationships. But it also has lots of semi-hard technical passages which the guys will love. I'd recommend it.

11. Hang Dead Hawaiian Style by Patrick Morgan

This is the first in a series of surf spy pulp novels called Operation Hang Ten. They came out in the sixties and feature Bill Cartwright, surfing detective and ladies man. The first one I read had him hunting down a busload of hippies who were selling drugs to schoolkids (I kid you not). It got me hooked on the series. Hang Dead Hawaiian Style is a bit of a mess, but a fun read. He works for the man (he's hired by the CIA as a freelancer), but the whole time he's spouting anti-establishment rants like a watered down John D. McDonald. The rants are actually not badly written and the action is pretty aggressive, entertaining stuff, but the plot is terribly constructed. The second-to-main badguy is a doctor selling opium to the beach bums. He goes on and on about how removed he is from it because he's hired this dude to do all the transactions (a tough surfer with whom Cartwright has a surfing battle with) for him. But he also takes the girls home that he's got hooked and molests them for payment. And it took Cartwright chapters to figure out what was going on. I'm going to keep collecting the series, though.

10. Fugue for a Darkening Planet by Christopher Priest

This is another obscure post-holocaust dug up by master bouqiniste Lantzvillager and man this one is dark! The basic premise is that a nuclear war in Africa sends millions of immigrants flooding to the rest of the world. They hit England the hardest, where they come up against a newly elected and badly organized racist administration. It was written in the '70's so the initial response by the government seems unrealistic. Basically, the refugees boats aren't stopped and they end up swarming the land, taking over peoples houses and turning the nation into chaos.

The story is told from one man's point of view. Though it is written in the first person, it's extremely objective, almost cold as if he's watching over himself like a scientist. The structure of the book is interesting too, with no chapters, just brief sections divided by an asterisk, jumping around between 4 different narrative threads of time: the guy's life growing up, his deteriorating marriage, his flight from his suburban home with his wife and daugher and his lone travels after they are abducted from him. These are quite well woven around, so that it doesn't get confusing and you are driven forward to find out what happens.

This book presents a very pessimistic view of mankind. The island becomes divided roughly into four groups, the organized Afrim army, who seem to be supplied with weapons by the soviets, the official british army, who is trying to regain control, a renegade british army who is sympathetic to the african refugees, nationalist troops who are racist and all the refugees, now english and african. It's quite a mess as you can see and the atrocities are realistic and disturbing. Ultimately, the main character, who begins as a liberal-minded professor must slowly confront the feelings of anger and fear that are changing his behaviour.

The british are good at this sort of stuff. Like War of the Worlds, Fugue describes small details that give the reader a real sense of the breakdown of society. It makes you feel scared to have loved ones. A quick and absorbing read, I strongly recommend it.

9. The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

My dad loves this book and I had read it a long time ago and thought it was okay. This time, I understand much better why he is so appreciative of it. It's a scathing attack on consumerism and I might have to say the most accurate prediction, in terms of social structures, of a dystopic future that I've read. The planet is overpopulated, run by giant mega-corporations. Most people are workers either blue or white collar, and basically trapped in a cycle of consumption and labor. They work to get the money to buy the useless things to which they are either addicted or so deeply brainwashed by constant advertising that they cannot do without. There are a few elites, who struggle hard to stay on top and keep the system in place.

It doesn't sound so original today, but the way it is described really spot on. A lot of the actual advertising techniques seem unsophisticated and you can tell that the book was written in the '50s. But the motivation behind it and the basic assumption that a world of endless cyclical consumption constructed on a fantasy of capitalistic renewal is incredibly powerful. The only political conflict comes from the Consies, ecological conservatives who are portrayed as a fringe group of total maniacs. The storyline and the way the actual conflicts of the narrative move forward are less engaging than the actual description of the society. But I strongly encourage everyone to read this book, at the very least to get a gander at Chicken Little.

We're fucked!

8. Smoke Detector by Eric Wright

Eric Wright is a Canadian mystery writer, whose main character, Inspector Charlie Salter, works for the Toronto Metropolitan Police. This is the first one I've read, but he's published tons and has a great reputation. The mystery was light, about an antique dealer who died of smoke inhalation in a suspicious fire in his shop. It was well put together and had some interesting characters. What kept me into it more was the Inspector and the life around him. This is a pretty common set up in mysteries, where the detective solves a different mystery each book, but his or her own life follows a greater story arc that keeps the reader hooked. In this case, Salter is on the outs with the force because he doesn't follow the politics well. He also has two boys, including a teenager with whom he can barely relate. He's old school and kind of funny about it. I wouldn't recommend that you run out and buy this book, but I'm going to be keeping my eyes open for any others in the series if I have nothing to read. It's also cool that they take place in Toronto, because I knew a lot of the locations.

7. The War of the Worlds

I've read a lot of H.G. Wells (I went through a big phase in college while avoiding my thesis), but I was never sure if I'd actually read the War of the Worlds. I knew a lot about it and have listened to Orson Welles' famous radio broadcast many times. What spurred me to read it this time, was a great sci-fi book by a Quebec author that I read last year. It was called La Cage de Londres (The London Cage) and took place on earth after a succesful second invasion by the martians. Now, humans lived naked, enclosed in giant concrete domes where all their food and shelter needs are taken care of. They are "milked" regularily for their blood by the martians. The book takes all the initial concepts in the War of the Worlds to their logical conclusion and it was really great. The author wrote an afterword explaining how he'd used the source material and urging sci-fi fans to re-read the original.

The narrator and his story about being separated from his wife is basically a very thin vessel to hold Wells' speculation on what an invasion from Mars would look like and how it would effect Victorian England. The first half of the book is very similar in structure to many apocalyptic classics, where civilized people first remain ignorant of the danger, then don't take it seriously, then get worried, then totally freak out and revert to a more and more savage state. Wells describes this process by showing small vignettes that he or his brother witness during their escape: crowded train platforms, looting, horses and weapons being confiscated by self-empowered local militias, etc.

Wells is ultimately a scientific moralist and this book fundamentally rests on the notion that man is in no way ethically superior to any other creature. We just happen to have an intelligence that privileges us with perspective. Referring to the martians, he discounts any rancor towards them:

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

Constantly, he compares himself and other humans when they encounter martians to how animals must feel when encountering humans.

It's a short book and an engaging read. Wells is a great writer. His sentences are strong. He writes with some of the complexity of the english of his period, but you always sense a direct honesty behind it. War of the Worlds was written in 1898, when they didn't have phones or planes, which makes the details and consistency of his vision even more astounding. His science fiction barely dates.

6. Ces Enfants de ma Vie par Gabrielle Roy

Gabrielle Roy is one of Canada's better now authors. She was a Manitoba born french canadian who went to Quebec after teaching in Manitoba for 8 years. There she started her writing career. This book is one of her last, written in the '70s and describes her year as a teacher in small northern prairie town during the depression. The first half book is divided into small sections, each one telling the story of a single, remarkable student. I found the first half to be amazing, truly moving and rich. It made me think of how much we have materially and how the children of our society seem to have so much less spiritually. These kids are really poor, the children of immigrants who work non-stop just to survive on their farms. There is a really moving story about a little boy who can't afford to give her a xmas present. When she describes the little bags of nuts and fruit that the kids get from the teachers and how excited and grateful the children are, it's really moving. She wwas definitely a teacher and other teachers would recognize the struggles she has and her relationship with the kids.

The second part is almost a novella and more complex. Here she goes into her relationship with the oldest boy in the class, Mérédic, a wild rebel who rides a horse to school when he does come and causes nothing but trouble. As she learns about the source of his problems, she begins to sympathize with him and they end up getting very close. He's 14 and she's only 18 and there is a lot of erotic and romantic tension. He is half-native and shows her the natural world while she tries to get him connected to studying. There are some incredibly beautiful descriptions of the prairie landscape.

Ces Enfantt de ma Vie has been translated into english as The Children of my Heart and I'd recommend it to anyone, but especially teachers.

5. The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer

This book was a surprise xmas present from my good friend Robson and his lovely wife Heidi. They left it at my house after staying with me in early December. It's about an alchoholic philosophy don at Oxford who takes off to France and starts robbing banks. It's told in the very post-modern style of today, with super-short chapters and all kinds of segues and diversions. Thematically, though, the book centers around philosophy and the question of existence in our modern age. It's quite well-written and quite entertaining. Especially hilarious is the reaction to the robberies by the blasé french. The robbers become famous and each of their heists is done with a different philosopher as the style of the robbery. The tellers want to get their autographs and are proud to be robbed by them. There is a lot of excessive drinking and waking up naked in strange flats with the police banging on the door. These kinds of books, I find, are ultimately undermined by their lack of a driving narrative. This one is no exception, except that the ride along the way is quite enjoyable and thoughtful and there are some very funny moments.

4. Sur le Seuil par Patrick Senécal

This is the first french book I've read this year (and the fourth in my life). It's from the Alire publishing house, a Quebec company that specializes in Quebecois genre writers. Senécal is a fairly popular horror author. I've been searching out Alire books at the used bookstore and this one caught my eye because it was made into a movie that came out last summer. It's about a psychiatrist who is totally burned out on his career and his life. He works in a psychiatric hospital and his complacency and rigid rationality are thrown into turmoil when he takes a famous horror author as a patient. The author in question was found hanging out his apartment window in a catatonic state, having cut off all his own fingers with a paper cutter. As the doctor digs deeper into his case, he uncovers bizarre and supernatural connections between the author's books and real-life tragedies. Of course, these connections can only be explained by the existence of supernatural evil and the doctor's refusal to recognize it leads to more horror and tragedy. I'm not a big fan of horror books and the psychiatrist's stubborness, though quite realistically portrayed, tended to annoy me. In the end, there really is some disturbing stuff. It's not just suggested horror; there's tons of blood, guts, mutilation, necrophilia and devil worship. I'm not sure about this, but his french was stylistically simpler, perhaps even closer to english, than what I've previously read. I found it relatively easy-going. Overall, with caveats for my slow french, I found this book kept me turning the pages and entertained, but it wasn't the richest and deepest of novels I've read.

3. Bangkok 8 by John Burdett

This book was going around my family last year with much recommendation and my parents ended up giving it to me for xmas. It's a detective story set in Bangkok dealing with the sex industry, heroin and jade. It's a classic policier in structure (and that aspect of it is also fairly well done) but what really sets it apart is the protagonist and his perspective. He's a low-ranking Thai detective, the only honest one in Bangkok, it seems and his approach to the case and the world around him is an appealling mix of buddhist remove and sophisticated modernity. The author is english, I believe, but he's spent a lot of his life in the east. I don't know if it's accurate or not, but he's created a mind set that really makes western notions of capitalism, hard work and morality seem ridiculous. At the same time, he is subtly arguing for an Asian future for the world and the way he portrays this is convincing and interesting. There are even some precursors to cyberpunk ideas in the plot here. He also gives such a rich portrayal of the Bangkok sex industry that I feel I don't really need to go see it for myself anymore. It's a lot of fun, with rich characters and great language. I recommend it.

2. Put a Lid on It by Donald E. Westlake

I'm a longtime Westlake fan, especially of his Parker books. I picked this one up just because it was cheap and I was going to be travelling. My dad finished it in a day. It took me three, but it's that kind of book. Short chapters, always moving forward and humourously entertaining. Westlake has lost the hard edge that he had in the 70's, but he still has a real knack at knocking the establishment. He also can still pull out the great metaphors. This novel pits a professional criminal against the president's re-election team and the latter comes out looking pretty pathetic. It ends a bit easily, but the ride is well worth it.

1. The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard

This is Ballard's fourth book and the last of what I guess is considered his end-of-the-world series. I found each of the first three to be at least interesting (and in the case of The Wind from Nowhere, awesome). The Crystal World is about a doctor at a leper colony in Africa going to some small Heart of Darkness like mining outpost that is slowly becoming crystallized. It's weird though because things don't just harden into crystal. They sort of stay alive and it comes and goes in waves. People become fascinated with the crystal world (as does the narrator). There are only brief hints that this crystallization is worldwide (the narrator reads in a newspaper that Miami has been evacuated) and the story is more focussed on the narrator's personal relationship with the crystals and the women around him. The descriptions are beautiful, but I found the characters' motivations distancing. Still, a pretty cool read. Ballard is really weird.

Credit due to the Lantzvillager for turning me on to these.