10. The Sixth Man: a Memoir by Andre Iguodala with Carvell Wallace

As I write this review, Andre Iguodala is currently officially on the Memphis Grizzlies, sent there in the sign and trade that got D'Angelo Russel to the Warriors in exchange for the always seeking new horizons Kevin Durant.  By mutual agreemement, Iguodala is not playing, which I felt he was justified in doing and I hope softens the "it's a business" blow that shipped him off the Warriors.  He is now seen as a potential contributor to a playoff-bound team, but I wonder if now that the Grizzlies are showing so much young potential that he would not have minded being the old mentor on that team.

At the very least, I do feel I have a much better insight into who he is as a player and a person after reading his book. My parents got it to me as an xmas present. They jumped on the Warriors bandwagon along with the rest of the country (to be fair, they had been paying attention to them before they really got good, probably in some response to my own enthusiasm and loyalty to the team).  I am not sure if Iguodala was their favourite player but they found him the most interesting.  My respect for him was solidified when he received the Finals MVP in 2015.  There were some people who expressed the opinion that it was not deserved.  Anybody who says that does not understand basketball and has probably never actually played.  The Warriors had a better team than the Cavs that year, but they didn't know it and they were not mentally ready for it.  Every time they got shakey and it looked like things were slipping away to LeBron's dominance, Iguodala either pulled them back in with a play or re-anchored their spirits with his consistency and focus.  It was a tremendous demonstration of basketball will and mental toughness.  You could see it happening during the series, the person who was the winner and going to make it happen no matter what. I knew Iguodala had this strength of will when he hit two free throws to tie the regular season game against OKC that season (the game being famous because Steph took the ball out and just hit the most ridiculous three with seconds left on the clock; a shot that woke the league up to how sick he was, but he never would have had the opportunity had not Andre iced those free throws, not his best skill).

My respect for him further grew when I started to read a bit more about his political convictions.  He is not loud about those convictions, but he is clear and firm and uncompromising, speaking openly about race in the NBA and America.  This is rare in pro sports because it takes so much courage and is so risky given the terrible efficacy of the racist system around them to punish any black athlete who doesn't walk the line (see Colin Kaepernick).

I devour these sports books.  First of all, they tend to be written in fairly large type, with wide margins, short chapters and a fairly straight forward style of writing.  The Sixth Man starts with his childhood in the midwest and goes into some details about his basketball path in high school and college. He passes pretty quickly over his years in Philly (though does a good job of characterizing the nastiness of the fans and media there) and then focuses on his time with the Warriors.  He is really clear and direct on the racial structures in his childhood (though he grew up in a good household with a strong mother and grandmother and he stayed on the straight and narrow, he and everybody in his community just knew that cops were dangerous to them because they were black).  He also does an excellent job of breaking down the notion that athletes are spoiled and should be grateful.  He recognizes the privilege but he is also very honest about the physical and psychological costs of dedicating your life and body to a business "owned" by white people who often treat the players as a commodity.  It is very enlightening and I hope some people who have that opinion get a chance to read this.

But for me personally, it was the stuff about specific basketball games and his own evolution in the game that was the most interesting to me.  I watch a lot of basketball, read a lot of sophisticated analysis and still play regularily.  Iguodala is known for his understanding of the dynamics in a game and having him explain the challenges of getting a team to work in a system was fascinating and eye opening.  The best beauty of the game for me (and there are many) is the team interaction, the complex dynamic between the players' roles and the system they are trying to execute in order to beat their opponent.  Iguodala really speaks to that in this book in a way that added to my own thoughts about the game and deepened my understanding of specific games I had watched in the past.

9. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

I've been vaguely aware of the existence of this book for a long time.  I was first introduced to it actually from the Roots album of the same name.  I got quite into that album and did a bit of research into the name.  I found this paperback in a box of books on the street and was pleased with how thin it looked (and also the nice paperback, despite the very dated cover illustration which reflects more a liberal cliche of African colonialism than the tone or content of the book itself).

I am actually a bit surprised and dismayed that I haven't already read this book. I did two long Humanities courses at Reed College, which were supposed to give you a broad overview of said subject.  We did a lot on colonialism.  After having read this, and knowing it is basically considered the grandfather of African literature (and seeing how short it is), it seems like it should be one of the ur-texts of colonialism in any course.

It's so fundamental that I sort of knew what was to come as I read it.  So many colonial narratives must have borrowed from this book, that they have basically permeated our popular culture at this point.  It's the native village minding their own business when the white man comes and fucks all their shit up.  What I did not know was the subtle combination of simple and straightforward language (almost anthropological) describing very rich and complex social behaviours that make up most of the book.  Two-thirds is just the life of Okonkwe, a well-respected man of his village, and also kind of an ass-kicker.  Only near the end do we get the very subtle arrival of the missionaries.  That is the other thing that I did not expect from the narrative.  The white man comes in very sneakily.  After an initial massacre at the market of another tribe (and one that was perceivded to be weaker), they behave relatively decently, building a little church in the evil forest the villagers direct them to.  The disaster is already happening and you know it, but it is done in such a way, like the proverbial pot of boiling water, that most of the villagers don't even see it.  When the "government" arrives to support the church's law, it is already too late.

Because of this quietness, the devastation of colonialism hits even harder.  I finished this on a train to Toronto and as I put the book down I looked upon a pleasant little town built around a river market by 3 church steeples.  I have never been a fan of the Christian religion but those steeples at that moment emanated evil in my eyes.

From a nerdy perspective, I also wonder how much influence Things Fall Apart has on the recent renaissance of African sci-fi, of which I have only read Nnedi Okorafor?

8. Devil on Horseback by Victoria Holt

I've been aware of Victoria Holt for a while now, having a sense that she is/was a big name in gothic romance. I picked this one up at the Concordia Book Fair, despite the horrific cover.  When I started it, I had a sudden frightening yet delicious feeling that I had finally found my crack cocaine of genre literature.  The set up was great, combining the complex clash of class and aspiration in 18th century Britain with the potential for political intrigue and adventure.  Because the protagonist is a woman, young yet educated, capable and smart (and as we learn headstrong), you have the built in underdog fighting against they system theme.  I was quite excited and imagined myself with a future of Victoria Holt reading ahead of me.  Unfortunately, the actual story did not quite achieve this potential  Whether or not this was because the author failed or her aims (and those of most of her readers) did not meet mine, I am not yet sure.

Minella Maddox is the daughter of a teacher who have a nice position on a Lord's estate.  He sends his two daughters to their schoolhouse, which then attracts the other gentry and ensure they make a decent living.  One summer, a french count's daughter comes to the school to learn english.  She is two years younger than Minella and her positive spirit makes her and Minella become friends.  The count is a very powerful figure in French politics and known to be a frightening tyrant to his people.  He is also intense and handsome. Minella first sees him on horseback as he checks out her school from afar.  She christens him The Devil on Horseback and learns that that is also his appellation back at home (though never to his face).  There is also the son of the British lord, a super nice guy, who takes a liking to Minella.  They go horseback riding every day.  He is super nice.  And though he is quite clearly into her, Minella being a realist feels there is no chance, as his parents would never approve.

So that's the basic setup but then fate hits as her mother dies and Minella struggles to keep the school afloat.  The count's daughter runs away with a handsome groom and gets knocked up.  The lord's son is sent away by his parents on the European tour (which I guess is a thing the sons of gentry did back then), ostensibly to separate him from Minella.  Oh yeah, and also during a game of hide and seek in the manor, Minella goes downstairs, where she is caught by the Count sneaking into their bedroom.  He kisses her and she pushes him away, outraged, but against all her judgement, powerfully stimulated!

So the Count finds out what his daughter has done and convinces Minella to accompany her to a small village where she will have the child in secret, pretending they are cousins (Minella's french is excellent, but they will say she is a long-lost cousin from England).  This is where I started to get excited.  France is near the breaking point here, so that aristocrats often do not leave their manors without guards.  The town is very small and people start asking questions about the two ladies.  There was lots of potential for a Fingersmith level of adventure here, with two aristocrat women on the run in revolutionary france, trying to get away with an illegitimate child.

Instead, we keep going back and forth between the Count's place in Paris and his castle in his ancestral domain and the main narrative starts to reveal itself.  Really it is about whether or not she should love this dashing handsome count who has done all kinds of evil shit in his life, has a wife confined to a sick bed and a mistress in a cottage nearby.  There is conversation after conversation where he declares his love for her and she remains prim and British, but oh what about her feelings!  It builds and builds as does the revolution, but we only get any real action in the last thirty pages or so where the mob rises up, the count is freed from the guillotine, we learn about a believed dead twin brother and she can finally love the count and they get married and live happily in England with his past behind them.

I'm a romantic guy and do enjoy that element (and can actually enjoy it as the primary narrative when it is done well).  Here, it just wasn't done very convincingly and I kind of guessed what was going to happen.  It all felt like a overly-complicated way to get a prim young British girl with a dashing French badboy on a horse together in some way that would still give her some clout.  It sacrificed so much potential, both for dashing adventure and for some complex gender-role challenging on the way.  I did not expect much of the second category but I do think I could have a bit more from the first at least.  I don't know, maybe Holt pushes herself farther in some of her other books, but I fear this stuff may just remain in the mainstream mode.

This pastely channel 9 Masterpiece Theatre vagueness
 is the kind of shit that I hated about the 70s when I was a kid.

7. City by Clifford D. Simak

I see now that this is a real sci-fi classic, though interestingly it was a colleague at work who first brought it to my attention.  It took me quite a while to find and this paperback cost $7, putting it into high-class status indeed!

I had a progression of feelings about this book as I read it, from "meh" to quite moved.  It is my own personal taste and not a critique or universal judgement, but I find a lot of the silver age sci-fi (if that is what this is) kind of naive today and often overly obsessed with a single concept.  City has a really cool conceit, it is a mythical set of stories that dogs (now the sentient dominant being) puzzle over.  They cannot understand or even believe in many of the concepts presented in these stories, but we the readers understand it as the explanation of what really happened to the human race.  The first story takes place in the 80s and the big problem is that the cities are basically empty.  The municipal government remains and they are trying to figure out how to deal with the abandoned rows of houses.  Because of the personal plane and advanced building technology, everybody has moved out to the country, building their own personal estate.

It is very facile for me to criticize a writer from over fifty years ago for how wrong their speculation was, but this just felt so locked into the post WWII suburban fantasy.  How could Simak have not taken population growth into consideration?  That was an issue in the fifties for sure, though perhaps not as big as it would become later.  And people like to get be together, even if they also may want their space.  This just felt really badly thought out as the trigger to the end of humanity and it left me feeling very critical.

As it turns out, this move to the countryside was only the first step (and kind of felt a bit unecessary).  Each subsequent story moves forward in the narrative of how humanity would lose hold on earth. The ideas start to get wilder and wilder.  And as they do, City becomes interesting.  It really did make me think about existence, what it means to be alive and human and got me kind of melancholy at times.  It is really a big picture concept book. We get martians in one story whose impact comes and then goes.  We get body-shifting, existence on Jupiter, wild robots, mutant advanced humans, global empathy, sentient dogs then all sentient animals and even quantum realities.  It goes to some wild places and while I am not sure I can say the narrative had a unity to it, it definitely made me think and feel.

6. Touch not the Cat by Mary Stewart

My nephew and I rode to downtown Oakland over the holidays, our destination the Salvation Army, in the hopes of finding there some cheap boots for a trip to Yosemite (I hadn't packed any).  I will share with you here that the men's shoe selection at the Salvation Army in downtown Oakland is quite poor and the boot selection non-existent.  I did, however, find two Mary Stewart hardbacks so it wasn't a total loss.  And we had an excellent vegetarian Thai lunch in the neighbourhood.

I am not quite sure what to make of this book.  Much of it puzzles me, as do her other gothic romance-mysteries.  People loved this book.  It is cited as one of her most popular and the reviews in Goodreads are gushing.  It's not that this isn't a good book.  It's really quite well thought out, gripping with an excellent location and situation.  It's the protagonist that I don't get.  She just seems way too nice and trusting to the point that starts to push at my willing suspension of disbelief.  I need somebody smarter and more versed in the literature of the period to help pick her mentality apart for me.

She is the only child of a widowed father, in her early 20s and part of a long, aristocratic clan that owns an estate somewhere in England.  They have long since lost any wealth associated with it, the father having sold the silver to pay for its upkeep and retired off to Germany because of health issues.  When he dies in a hit and run, she comes back, to help settle the estate, most of which is due to her cousins, because of a clause going back generations that the inheritor must be a male.  She is super fine with everything, even when we start to get hints that the cousins are not the most honest.  She stays fine when we learn that they have been stealing valuable items from the estate to make up money they have lost in their business.  She stays fine when it becomes pretty evident that they may have been responsible for the hit and run. 

I was feeling like the book was set up for us to want to preserver the estate, as Stewart gives us such loving descriptions of it and a detailed history.  Much of the heroine's character is built on her childhood there.  Her ultimate love interest is woven into its history.  And yet she is so weirdly passive and forgiving of her clearly completely fucked and evil cousins.  There is a mystery, the final fragmented words of her father involving old books in the library, that the reader can guess early on has to do with the true ownership of the estate.  The climax of this bizarrely involves her two nasty cousins arguing with her how she can screw them out of it while she sincerely is trying to argue with them that even if she could legally block them from their shitty plan of selling the place to developers so they can pay off the debts for money they basically stole, she wouldn't.  It's just a weird set-up where the reader and all the other characters can see the clear good vs. evil in the narrative, except the main character who though brave and strong basically spends the whole time not putting up any resistance beyond asking for time before she makes her decision.  Really the main point of tension is not that she doesn't want to let her cousins have the place, but that she just wants a week or two to chill out before she signs it away.  There is some unspecified reason the cousins can't wait, which is what drives them to be really stupid and blow their cover, when if they had just let her wait, she probably would have signed it all away and they wouldn't have had to do villainy.

I have had a similar, though less clear to me, critique of Stewart's other books.  Somehow, the passivity of her heroine's must be an accepted trope, akin to some similar consistent behaviour in male protagonists in the action genre.  Anybody know a book or article that might explain it a bit better to me?

5. Tiger by The Tail by James Hadley Chase

I picked up three of Chase's books at the Concordia Book Fair.  I started with this one as it was the latest published of the three and I wanted to see how his style had evolved.  I went into it with some trepidation.  Despite quite enjoying No Flowers for Miss Blandish, I now have this slight feeling that he is "fake".  This is totally unfair as a writer is a writer and if they are good in other elements, the authenticity of the setting does not have to be that big of a factor.

I was aware of some bias going in, particularly as the set up was revealed to me in the early pages.  Ken Holland is a head bank teller whose young wife is away for a few days with her sick mother.  He is starting to feel antsy, staring at attractive girls on the street.  But he's a good guy and a good husband and just wants her to get home.  However, his workmate Pete, is a party guy and keeps egging Ken on, wanting to live vicariously through him in his temporary bachelor state.  He gives Ken the phone number of a girl who will show him a good time.  Ken doesn't want it, rips it in half, but then on a super hot night after a few drinks while avoiding mowing the lawn, he gives in and calls. The way the temptation is set up and the way it sucks him in is all quite well done.  The girl is easygoing, friendly in a way that surprises him and he ends up spending the evening with her.  They get it on at her place (this is done offstage and felt strangely not American in its frankness), then go out to a club, where he learns she used to be a dancer there.  His gut tells him to end it there, but he can't say no to an invitation back to her place.  Here is where things go wrong.  She goes to her bedroom to get changed and then doesn't come out for a long time.  When he calls to her, the power goes out, somebody runs out of her bedroom and then her apartment.  When he goes to her bedroom he finds her stabbed to death with an ice pick.

This is the first two chapters, so I am not giving too much away as the book really starts here.  I felt slightly let down, as it felt like a less interesting Highsmith, where innocent Ken has to figure out how to play it.  However, my initial pessimism was unfounded as the book quickly expands to bring in a much larger cast of players.  The town itself is run by a shadowy crime boss, with high-ranking corrupt police officers and politicians doing his bidding.  His reign is on a shaky foundation and the murder of this girl and the possible exposure that she was living in an apartment full of call girls risks to bring it all down.  It ends up being a convoluted and exciting adventure.  Parts of it are a bit awkwardly plotted and there is even a glaring continuity error (when O'Brien the big boss calls a fixer to move out all the girls from the cat house and move in innocent people, he calls the same guy back ten minutes later, though several cross-scenes, and congratulates him on the job well done when there was no time and no way he could have known it was done at all) that suggests he and his editors cranked this one out.  Also, it does have an ersatz feel.  This is an anonymous American city (though at one point it gets a name in California) that though being small enough that the murder is the first one in a long time, has several night clubs, a wharf district with a seedy boardwalk, several cat houses, an opium den and guys who kill cops on the regular.  It's like Gangster City off of the RKO lot in print.  But that's okay because it is a lot of fun, with some good action and fun characters and doesn't take itself too seriously (though he can be hell of rough on some of those characters).  The ending made me chuckle.  Good stuff.

4. The Age of Scandal by T. H. White

I got this at the Concordia book fare.  It was the nice penguin edition that attracted me and the potential of the contacts that sealed the deal.  It brought me back to my college days where I studied history.  This period really didn't interest me at the time but I knew from some readings that there was often quite juicy tidbits of "civilized" European craziness in the 18th and 19th century and it sounded like this book had a lot of that.  Also, as themes of elite behaviours and gossipy obsession with social media dominate today, I thought reading about how it happened in the past might help inform my understanding of our current predicament.

White's main thesis (after a weird little intro where he seems to argue for a British aristocracy) is that between the Age of Romance and the Age of Reason, which traditionally has been seen as a bit stiff, there actually was a lively, dramatic period in Britain that he labels the Age of Scandal.  He then writes chapters on a wide range of subjects (ranging from views on religion, to discipline to ears) and on several specific scandals (the short-lived queen of Denmark, The Gunnington twins) and on individuals (Horace Walpole, Hervey, de Sade), most of which I had been ignorant. 

I don't think it is unfair to say that this isn't a rigorous work of scholarship.  It is peppered with quotations, many without reference (which I appreciated; I always feel compelled to read foot and endnotes and it kills my flow).  His argument is not unconvincing but also I don't think he is trying too aggressively so I don't imagine he got a lot of counter-argument (probably a naive assumption on my part as this is history; somebody was outraged somewhere).  It's just a lot of fun and the chapters are short.  There were some extraordinary little adventures.  I also enjoyed the specifics on the toiletry of the time (interesting that the french aristocracy were considered dirtier and smellier than the english) as well as the brutality of the culture of discipline.  The notion that though still very much an aristocratic country, the closeness in general of the upper classes and the plebians made for an oddly dynamic polity.  The mechanism for this, according to White, was the mob.  The lords and ladies would get more and more out of control and then there would be a riot.  This made me think of God is an Englishman, where a mob destroying a cotton mill played a central role.

3. Crown: Macao Mayhem by Terry Harknett

I had high hopes for this book.  Unfortunately, the ratio of cover coolness to content was excessively high.  I mean check out that cover!  Plus Hong Kong, you can see how I would snatch this up.  I found it at the Rennaissance thrift store on the more eastern side of ave Mont-Royal which I should probably check out more.

I was expecting there to be a good deal of colonial ignorance and possibly even racism and took that into consideration.  Macao Mayhem takes place in Hong Kong and Macao in pre-handover 70s HK when the British were still in charge.  The two characters on the cover are a pair of Royal Hong Kong Cops:  rigourously honest but of course refuses to play by the rules Senior Superintendent John Crown and his long-suffering more humble but still wisecracking partner Inspector Po Chang (who is Chinese but was raised in Australia and tends to speak english more than Chinese).  The plot is a bit of a muddle and begins with a high-level call girl leaving an assignation at a wealthy Portuguese businessman's house and then of course getting killed and brutally disemboweled (in that order).  It eventually ends up in a plot to kidnap an important American politician but this takes at least 80% of the book to get there.  The reader does not really know where we are going besides getting a lot of aggressive banter, car chases (which are decent) and some pretty good action scenes.  The fights are probably the one highlight of the book, as the moves are quite specifically detailed and the actions somewhat satisfying.

However, because we don't really have much direction, I found myself pretty disconnected.  Worse, it never actually gets as extreme as it threatens.  It's really crude, both in the narration and in dialogue, but never actually gets extreme. We always hear about the male character's sexual appetites but their fulfilling of them is always done offscreen.  There is some gore, but never due to human cruelty (which I appreciated).  The writing is sort of bald and none of the characters too likable.

The worse disappointment for me though was Hong Kong itself.  All the roads and locations are geographically detailed, but it feels like he just got it out of a map.  None of the descriptions are very evocative and we get very little of the local colour.  Harknett's bio says nothing about him living in Hong Kong, so it could be that he indeed read it all from a map.

Now my dilemma is do I put this beautiful but unfun read on the shelf?

Addendum:  I just did a bit of research and learned that Harknett was a prolific pulp author, who cranked out over 200 books.  Makes a bit more sense!  Even crazier, there is a copy of it for sale for $600 on Abe Books!!! Bro, I'll sell this copy for $100 and a random pulp fiction book of your choice. :)

2. Death in a White Tie by Ngaio Marsh

My mother recommended this to me after I had complained about the bizarre marriage rituals in Edmund Crispin's The Case of the Gilded Fly.  It takes places a decade earlier before the war and is focused more consistently on the aristocracy.  It is a nice contrast as both are very British and pretty classically constructed murder mysteries.

Ngaio's detective is Roderick Alleyn, himself of the upper crust.  This case begins with his elderly mother deciding she is going to return to society and participate as a chaperone in the many debutante balls that would be going on in London.  This leads us to a blackmail case that touches many of Alleyn's acquaintances.  He engages an old family friend to be his man on the inside and at the end of an important ball, this man is murdered.  So the investigation involves both the blackmail and his murder.  Were they connected?  Who among the last people at the party could have followed him into his cab and suffocated him?

It's a solid and well-plotted mystery with some genuinely captivating moments of detective mastery.  Marsh does a great job of setting up diverse unpleasant characters who get their comeuppance in the face of Alleyn's superb interviewing skills.  These moments were quite fun, especially with the two super-pompous lords (though their characterizations blended a bit and were over broad to be truly ideal; still fun).  In the end, the mystery was complex but not too much that you got lost or disconnected.  I get why she is one of the Grand Masters of mystery and was popular for so long (and probably still is).  Nice to know there is a significant back catalog of her books that I haven't read, so when the time comes that I want a sure bet, I can go to it.

Note, this was a Jove edition from the early 80s and it has a very nice cover design and illustration that was part of a series of her books that I find quite aesthetically fetching.  You can see the other books on the back cover.

1. Bearskin by James McLaughlin

I read this brief review by blogger John Oak Dalton whose taste I admire over a year ago and had been naively looking for Bearskins as a used book.  I finally asked for it for xmas and got it from my parents.  I think it was fairly succesful (at least critically), so not sure why it never turned up used but after reading it I am happy to help add a few more coins McLaughlin's profits.  This was a fantastic read, a great way to kick of the new year and decade.  I stayed up late reading it and then got up early on New Year's Day to finish it.

Bearskins is the kind of book that you want to give to certain of your manly friends who are literate but may not have read anything in a while.  If you know my tastes and personal politics, you will understand why I found the premise so compelling.  Rice Moore is on the run from the cartel and takes a job as a caretaker on a natural reserve in the Appalachians.  It is owned by a rich family and part of his job is to ensure that the locals don't do any poaching.  We learn early that though a thoughtful, educated person with a background in science, Moore has somehow a history of violence and may in fact be quite a badass.  When he discovers a bear carcass on the reserve, with its paws cut off and it's insides cut open but otherwise left to rot, he decides to investigate and stop whoever is doing this.  At the same time, we slowly learn about his backstory that led him to this solitary life.

This is a great male fantasy, I suspect especially for the more left-leaning environmentally aware reader who also loves his pulp fiction.  McLaughlin does an excellent job of constructing a new "woke" male hero.  Sexual violence is partially a plot driver and character-motivator here, which generally is a no-no for me. Somehow Mclaughlin elides around it that it avoids being the simplistic cliche of dude getting revenge and free to kick ass now that his woman is taken from him.  Rather we have a guy who is also a victim of trauma, who understands the trauma of other victims and is just trying to get on with his life.  The hunt for the bear poachers becomes a more general raison d'être as does his connection with the old growth forest he is trying to protect.

There are so many great elements here and it all comes together in some super-satisfying elite ass-kicking.  You get the tense relationship with the good and bad rednecks, multiple levels of badassery, respectable (local) and shitty (the feds, of course) law enforcement, some batshit back to nature stuff all add up to an all-around great time.

One thing about these new literary fiction pulp books is that they are so well-crafted.  I guess in today's market, you can no longer just crank out a story with an excellent plot.  It has to be workshopped with your local writing group, go through multiple revisions and every sentence nuanced so that it is almost poetry.  The writing here is straightforward and solid but it all feels so perfectly finished.  I suspect it took McLaughlin a long time.  This is not really a criticism, just an observation as there is a certain preciousness with the trade dress and the style of the writing that doesn't totally jibe with the subject matter. Hey, if more people buy it and he can write more books along this line, I am not complaining.

2019 Year end wrap-up

Phew!  A record-breaking year for book-reading here at Olman Central.  I am quite pleased to have continued to maintain and even increase the new-found energy I found for reading at the second half of last year.  Even better, I was really quite consistent about it.  I made a huge dent in my deficit and where I had planned to take 3 to 4 years to get my average back to 50 books a year, it is now conceivable that I could achieve that by the end of 2020. 

More than the numbers, though, are the benefits of so much reading.  First and foremost, I get to read so many great books!  Really if you are reading this, I don't need to say much more than that.  Some may argue that reading in such quantity diminishes the experience, as if I am rushing through books.  It is the opposite, as I am not reading any faster than usual but just reading instead of doing other things.  As I have said in the past, those other things were usually wasting time anyways, like futzing around on the now totally-polluted World Wide Web (so advertising did destroy the internet, just like everybody said it would back in the day, who would have thought?).  I am also barely watching any television or movies these days, except some sports while cooking.  This is not so bad except that it was one area that my wife and I liked to do regularly together.  I still would like to do that but all these prestige shows coming out seem so similar to me that there is nothing that grabs my attention more than the book I am reading. 

The other big advantage of reading so much is that I can vary the kinds of books I read.  I have been branching out more into non-fiction and even picking up hard to read books every now and then.  I am toying with the idea of reading some big classic next year when I am ahead of my goals, as I will have the extra time.

Finally, I find that steady reading becomes an anchor in my life for other good disciplines.  I believe there is a subtle calming, even meditative, mechanism in reading that counter-acts the psychological frenzy of adult life in the so-called civilized world, especially in today's phone-zombie nightmare we are all living.  It isn't all due to reading, but my sleep schedule is the most consistent it has been for a long time perhaps ever.  Though to be fair, there are certain books that will keep you up either because you can't put them down or because they get you so excited it's hard to go to sleep after.  For my own personal discipline and productivity, 2019 has been a banner year, a real step in a return to my old ass-kicking form.  It would be an exaggeration to say that this is because of all the reading, but that certainly has been an important factor in the mix that sets the foundation for all the rest. 

My reading goals for next year are the same as last.  Read 50 books and if possible whittle away at the average.  If I can keep up any of the consistency of 2019, 59 is a very realistic possibility.  I also hope to read a long series or trilogy one after the other, to stay in the same imaginary space for a longer time rather than jumping all over the place.  I am targeting the Vorkosigan saga and some of these great new what I call "woke" sci-fi or fantasy series, possibly Robin Hobb's Assassin books or the N.K. Jemison trilogy.  I hope to throw in a major classic in there as well.  We shall see!

Now on to the actual books!  It is hard to summarize 2019 with any general theme as I read so many books.  There were several highlights.  As I mentioned above, I read several non-fiction books which I usually resist mightily.  The two books on the history of basketball and the ABA were great, super fun, informative and I tore through them.  I didn't tear through The Hermit of Peking but it was also enjoyable and it refreshed my knowledge of the British colonization of China, which I had studied in college and which indirectly informs so much of the British spy and adventure fiction I read (basically reminding me that despite its outwardly benevolent guise, British Colonialism was at its base motivated by greed and was fundamentally a giant and destructive theft at best).  A bizarre read for me, which ended up being quite rewarding was The Organized Mind, though it did reinforce my belief in the hype around all these organizational self-help books.

Another highlight was that I found and read a lot of authors that have been on my hunting list for years:  Edmund Crispin, Lionel Davidson, Michael Tod, Edgar Pangborn, Dorothy B. Hughes and a few others.  I also finished a few series that I have been working on over the years, including Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series (disappointing) and Mary Stewart's King Arthur trilogy (solid) and C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series (which was great but really should have been a single massive book or I at least should have read it that way). 

Speaking of female science fiction writers, I also jumped on the wave of all these great new series and books coming out in the new "woke" sci-fi space.  I only read two authors but that was simply because I am pacing myself as so far everything has met the hype and even exceeded my expectations.  Nnedi Okorafor's Binti series was really cool and innovative.  Anne Leckie's Ancillary series was really mind-blowing and awesome, up there on my most favourite books.  I really have had to force myself not to read the third one.

Finally, I discovered or found several Animal adventure books (I really need a term for the sub-genre where the animal is the protagonist).  The Silver Tide about squirrels in england had been on my list for ever.  Maneater was an awesome random find, as was Black Fox Running.  I still haven't found a single Colin Dann book used but did discover a beautiful reprint of The Animals of Farthing Wood and loved it.

Specific books that stood out for me were the quiet and gentle and almost simple The Long Way Home by Margot Benary-Isbert.  The super nasty and intense No Orchids for Miss Blanding which since I have read it keeps popping up everywhere (a character is reading it on the train in Crispin's The Gilded Fly mystery).  Wake in Fright, as well as being satisfying as a great find (Penguin paperback for $3 off a sidewalk garage sale) stayed with me like the heat of the Australian outback it portrays.

I really could go on and on. I probably missed something.  However, now it is time to move on to the next decade of reading.  Happy new year and happy reading in the Double Twenties everyone!

104. Catch-As-Catch-Can by Charlotte Armstrong

I have been looking for Charlotte Armstrong for quite a while and found one here in Berkeley at Moe's and then found four more at Walden Pond books in Oakland!  It was almost too much and in the end I decided to take them all.  It turns out my mother was a big fan of Charlotte Armstrong from back in the day and was happy to have them back in her life.  She picked one at random (her memory is that she often had good stories with children and she remembers specifically one with a child in an airport).  I started with this one as it is was roughly in the middle of the publishing dates (1952) in the logic that she would be in her prime.

The story begins a little falteringly for my tastes.  I didn't find all the characters and their motivations totally convincing. Dee Alison's favourite and adventurous uncle returns home with a strange long-lost 18-year old daughter who is bizarrely naive.  He dies shortly thereafter, leaving her a fortune.  She speaks french and english fluently but could barely write, knows how to order at a fancy restaurant but doesn't know what phones or hospitals are.  I couldn't really understand where she was supposed to be from.  In any case, she is the driving force in the plot as she becomes enamoured with Dee's fiancé who starts to reciprocate, despite himself.  The uncle dies and becomes the ward of Dee.  Things are really thrown into chaos when the girl runs away and we learn belatedly that she ate some canned beans with botulism and needs to get treatment in 24 hours or will die.

The second half of the book actually got quite thrilling and exciting as various people, all with different motivations try to find or deliberately not find the girl.  There is another stupid, scheming cousin in particular who wants her to die so he can inherit her wealth; a well-meaning but unrealistic old mystic friend of the uncle who wants to protect the girl from evil and various other selfish people.  It becomes an exciting chase around LA with all kinds of crazy complications that cumulated up into a truly thrilling ending despite some of the original characters not being so well-founded.

103. The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin

It's actually the Moving Toyshop that I have had on my list for quite some time, however after months of fruitless searching, I will take any Edmund Crispin and that is what I did.  I found that at Half-Price Books in Berkeley.  It took me a long time to read and I was much distracted, only partly because of the book itself.  It is the holiday season and I was at the family seat, surrounded by rambunctious children, interrupting relatives and tempting sweets.  The book itself, though, was not a natural page-turner.  It starts out great, with a passage about how annoying the ending of the train trip from London to Oxford is.  In doing so, it also lays out all the players who will be participating in the murder and in the play that they have all come up to Oxford to perform.

It actually takes a while for the murder to happen.  We spend a lot of time with the characters and learn more about their relationships and tensions, mostly centered around a sexy but not so beautiful secondary actress named Ysuet whom everybody hates.  We also meet Gervase Fen, professor of classics at Oxford and amateur detective.  He is a funny character, oblivious and unthinkingly ill-mannered, but also brilliant and caring.  Once Ysuet is murdered, I started to lose steam.  It is a true whodunnit where I guess we are supposed to be able to deduce it as a reader (this is what Gervase Fen keeps telling all the other characters, as he has figured it out right from the beginning but for various reasons won't tell), but I found it all kind of tiring.  The investigation seems to go on and on and I just wanted to find out who did it.  There were two other weird things that kind of bothered me as well: 1) the story takes place in 1940 and none of the males are in the war.  Was this a function of class?  2) the way people get married at the drop of a hat here.  They start going out and then one of them says they want to get married and the other agrees and it is all done in a weirdly casual way.  I know part of it is being droll and British but when it is 4 sets of characters, it all seemed a but unreal.

I will still keep the Moving Toyshop on my list but not sure about looking too hard for any Edmund Crispin in the future.

102. Condominium by John D. MacDonald

I was a bit wary going into this one.  I was worried about having read too many JDMs this year, having scored a nice set of his non-Travis McGee books in Vancouver over the summer.  John D. Macdonald can get a bit indulgent with his philosophizing about the world and his weird mid-twentieth century sexual mores, so it is best to take a break from time to time.  Still, this tome seemed a perfect book for the holidays.  I love this paperback version with the big gold embossed title over the great cracked sunglasses with the condo in the reflection image.

I was not disappointed as right away I saw Condominium was going to spend most of its time on characters, story and situation with a nice sprinkling of life philosophy.  I was particularly happy when we got early on a great JDM type of strong man character, in this case a retired engineer whose body still retains the hardness of a lifetime on international construction projects (take a moment to read the first two pages of the chapter below where he is introduced).  I was even happier when I figured out the setup.  The good guys are a mixed bag of retirees living in their brand new luxury condo that we soon realize is a con job, from the disrespectful manager, to the hidden fees, to the disappearing management company and as we learn the shoddy construction.  The bad guys are the developers (boo, hiss!) and the structure of greed, corruption and general moral weakness that surrounds and props them up.

There are a lot of characters and a lot of seemingly accurate details about the financial shenanigans used by developers to finance these condo projects and get them built.  Some of the money stuff, I glossed over though it seemed all too realistic (and sadly probably not that different than techniques being used today).  I got lost with a few of the characters, but as you move forward you realize that not only is this book an underdog story but also a disaster story, as a hurricane with the potential to expose the shoddy construction, starts developing in the Pacific about halfway through the book (around the time the engineer has brought in an old colleague to do an assessment whose conclusion is that these condos could not stand a major hurricane).

When the shit hits the fan, it is pretty damned enjoyable.  I ended up staying up two and a half hours past my bedtime finishing this book.  What the hell, I'm on vacation.  If you like epic 70s disaster stories in sleazy Florida with some John D. MacDonald musings on where we went wrong plus lots of torrid affairs, this book is for you.

This is where John D. MacDonald is the master

101. Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association by Terry Pluto

As big of a basketball fan I am, I actually am not very well-versed in its history.  This book made me realize that and helped fulfill a big gap.  I knew a bit about the ABA from Basketball: A Love Story, enough to want to read this one (lent to me by the same friend who gave me Basketball: A Love Story).  Loose Balls is also an oral history, but goes into much greater depth with anecdotes and details from all the major players (both on the court and in the offices) who created and made this league run for its nine seasons spanning 1967 to 1976.  Actually now looking at those years, I realize that it basically ran for the peak years of what we consider today "The 60s".  It's funny, because when you read about the counter-culture of that time, the politics, the societal upheaval in America, basketball isn't mentioned at all, not even as a backdrop.  Likewise, in this book, while there are references to racial issues, the narrative is almost entirely apolitical.  Was that because sports was considered the establishment during that time?  I did wonder while reading Loose Balls why there was so little discussion of race.

The theme here is that the ABA is the plucky, creative, talented little guy playing in the shadow of the more boring and powerful NBA.  The ABA played a faster, looser game, had cool red, white and blue balls, invented the all-star game and the slam dunk contest, had Dr. J and all kinds of other great players.  All these things were brought to the NBA in the merger/"expansion" when the ABA finally died and many of them are the reasons it is such a successful beast today.  This is very well described in Loose Balls and quite fun to read.  There are many crazy stories of excess and really tough basketball (like literally fistfights were a fairly common affair), but also incredibly gratifying stories of players reaching and achieving their potential and teams bonding together.  It's a super-satisfying read for a basketball junkie like me.  So many names that I know of as broadcasters, NBA execs or old ex-coaches were huge stars in the ABA and now I have a much deeper appreciation of their history.

I still can't help feeling that some of the history is missing here.  This book was written in 1990 where racial issues in America were kind of subtly being suppressed in the Clinton-era or maybe improving, but in any case were not talked about the way we are today in the post-Obama backlash.  Was race really not an issue in the ABA? 

100. The Animals of Farthing Wood by Colin Dann

Colin Dann is my white whale of used book hunting.  I found a later book of his King of the Vagabonds and grabbed it as it fell under my reading area of interest: animal adventure subgenre.  I have looked high and low (well at least in dozens of used bookstores in many major cities in the US and Canada and even a few in Europe) for the last 15 years and have not found a single copy of his books. My guess is that they were not published in large quantities in North America, or that they are in some in-between age category that has since been swept up in the resurgence of YA fiction post-Hunger Games.  This copy that I read was not some great find.  Rather, it has been reprinted as a classic and I found a new edition at Kidsbooks on Broadway in Vancouver.  I believe it was imported from the UK.  So I continue to seek his other works.  Maybe one day a trip to Great Britain will reveal the mother lode.

And thus it is fitting that this should be my 100th book of the year.  I am in a mild state of disbelief about this and I don't want to go on too much about except to record how I got here.   My goal for the last three years, since the crash of 2016 (when I read only 18 books) has been to get my average back up to 50 books a year.  I recognized that with such a significant deficit, this was going to take several years of more than 50 books.  I pushed myself then to read at least 5 books a month, with at least once a week.  Somehow, I caught fire this year and the reading just kept flowing.  There were only a few times when I flagged a bit, but the momentum I had built carried me forward.  There were several changes in my life that allowed this to happen.  I had very little videogame playing, with no game that is really grabbing me.  My daughter started going to elementary school and became a bit more independent (though still wants to play constantly when we are together).  My job has a lot of flexibility and a lot of satisfaction, which I think helped me to cut waaaaay back on useless social media scrolling.  I still go to Twitter almost daily but for minutes now instead of the hours that it had been in the past.  I guess there is a good side to advertising ruining the internet.  Since it sucks, I'd rather be reading!  Anyhow, I am happy with this achievement, but even happier with all the great books I have read.  I'll get into that at my end of year post.

The Animals of Farthing Wood was very straightforward, a little bit too simple for me to really get into.  Despite that, by the end, I was quite moved and felt a real sense of triumph at the completion of the adventure.  The stakes don't feel that high, though in the narrative animals do die and the threat of human destruction and cruelty is very real and depressing.  This was Dann's first book and judging by my memory of King of the Vagabonds, I suspect his work increases in subtlety. 

The story here is about the animals of Farthing Wood, a badger, a fox, an adder, an owl, a kestrel, a toad, a mole and families of hares, rabbits, hedgehogs, mice and voles.  The books starts in a drought and quite soon after the animals discover that their precious pond has been filled in by developers.  (Fucking developers, I hate them already but just typing this and thinking about the emotions this early part of the book brought up gets me stirred up.)  They realize they need to do something and they band together to try and find a solution.  At that point, Toad who had disappeared shows up.  Turns out he had been snatched by some kid and put in a jar and then released quite far to the north.  He made his way home which took four mating seasons.  Learning what happened to his pond (where had been born and raised), he tells the animals that he had discovered a nature reserve and could probably find his way back there.  The animals decided, after some debate, that escape to this place may be there only choice.  Their decision is confirmed the next day when the bulldozers show up.

It is a true adventure journey.  They battle weather, forest fire, nasty farmers, big agriculture, the hunt, predators and traffic.  Every episode is cool and tense, though as I said before, you always feel there is a certain benevolence to the narrative.  This does get undermined once or twice, which made me think I would wait a few more years before reading this to my daughter.  The travail with the fox hunters was particularly thrilling and satisfying.  A great book and a deserved classic.  I hope more kids in North America read it.

99. Courtroom U.S.A. 2 by Rupert Frumeaux

I was planning on following up the Canadian dog book double rock block with another animal-themed book, but Fifteen Dogs saddened me enough that I need a little break.  What better than to jump into these odd, informative and sometimes entertaining trial books put out by Penguin.  I can imagine in my mind the editors and writers at Penguin coming up with this idea, figuring out they would make a few quid and saying something like "let's give Rupert a swing at this."  Each essay is in some ways like a Wikipedia page on the subject, but more artfully written and structured chronologically.

I found this one to be more engaging than Famous Trials 4.  It focused more on the actual story of the crime and wasted little time on the esoteric contortions of legal theory.  Unfortunately, I still have Famous Trials 5 to read instead of another Courtroom USA.  I actually found this one good enough that I will seek out the first one and any following editions.

There are 4 trials documented here, as you can see on the cover.  All of them were quite famous at the time (the theme of the role of the media in these trials is a constant sub-text).  Only Leopold and Loeb and Alger Hiss I had known roughly about.  The Leopold and Loeb story is really dark.  Several movies and plays were based on it and it is seen as the harbinger of a new kind of crime, a manifestation of the sins of the 20th century:  the crime for crime's sake by an immoral youth.

The Alger Hiss story is also fascinating to read in light of today's new cold war with Russia using cultural disruption tactics on the internet.  Even today, the truth behind the Alger Hiss accusations is unfound and being argued.  He was accused of having been a communist by a pretty sketchy character with super sketchy evidence, yet because it was the height of the cold war, the accusations had to be addressed.  The accuser, Whitaker Chambers, who seemed if not a traitor and liar than at least insane.  And yet after the trial, he ended up becoming a luminary of the American right wing, with Reagan considering him an important mentor.  To my mind, the whole thing felt like the kind of dirty tricks that Nixon did and the fake news strategy of the Republican party today.  Say something until it sticks, even if you are actually destabilizing the country and building up Russia's strategic power.

The Hoffman trial was interesting, though slight compared to the other three.  A projectionist is accused of murdering a woman as he fits the description seen of the man who gave her a ride.  Because he was Jewish, he panicked and tried to make up an alibi and get rid of his gun, which made him seem even guiltier.  He took the risk of appealing his sentence and pleading not guilty and ended up being exonerated by the excellent work of his lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz.  I felt the anti-semitism was underplayed in the telling here, as well as the side fact that the most obvious culprit was the brother of a local Republican official.  I would love to know the rest of the story.

It was the story of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray that really got to me.  As I was reading it, I suspected that it had been the basis of Double Indemnity and it turned out to be correct (also possibly The Postman Always Rings Twice).  Ruth Snyder married an older, succesful man and they moved to a house in the nice part of Queens.  He became quite domestic and she became quite bored.  She ended up meeting Judd Gray, a lingerie salesman, who was actually quite milquetoast.  They had a torrid affair and she convinced him to kill her husband.  It was an argument in the trial, whether he had been the instigator or she, but it really does seem like she pushed him to it.  It's a crazy, nasty murder, messy and amateurish and altogether pathetic.  They collapsed and gave each other up as soon as the slight pressure was put on them.  Both ended up getting the chair.  Her execution was famous because of the hype of the trial, because she was the first woman executed in a long time and finally because a report for the NY Post snuck an ankle camera into the execution chamber and took a picture of her at the moment of death that they blasted on the cover (and probably made a killing, pun somewhat intended).

Nice work, Rupert

98. Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

It's a Canadian dog story double rock block!  Fifteen Dogs is written 63 years after The Wild Dog of Edmonton, which was my previous read.  I think that a detailed analysis and comparison of the two would probably yield fruitful knowledge about the state of literature and dogs in Canada.  However, I do not have the time nor the inclination to do more than scratch the surface of this rich topic.

Fifteen Dogs is a winner of a bunch of Canadian awards and was a contestant (and maybe even the winner?) of Canada Reads.  These awards tend to bias me against a book, as I can only guess at the maze of politics and cronyism the author must make his or her way through to get here as well as the even more precarious balance of interesting yet safe content the book itself must contain.  For instance, the blurb on the back calls it "meditative and devastating".  Devastating alone would have been too risky.  And even worse, "Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks."  You can almost hear the anxiety of the editor, "make it super clear that this isn't a genre book!"

So yeah, many strikes against it before I even cracked the cover.  On the positive side, it was recommended by a friend whose opinion I respect and it was printed on acid-free paper from second growth forests here in Quebec.  I do like Canadian things and will support the Canadian book industry.  I just wish it would stop being so insecure and pretentious!

The story here is really clever.  It's basically a greek myth.  Apollo and Hermes are drinking in a brewpub in Toronto (this scene is quite funny: the Gods and Canadian beer) and make a bet that if they give dogs intelligence will they die happy or sad?  They choose fifteen dogs who happen to be staying overnight at a vet near the brewpub and bless them with intelligence.  The dogs quickly escape and most of the rest of the book is about what happens to them.

It's interesting, though I found it much more meditative then devastating.  There is not as much narrative as there is exploration of what intelligence would mean to a dog and what they do with it.  Some embrace it, others reject it and this causes a schism that turns quite nasty.  Alexis does a creative job of imagining how the nature of a dog would mesh with human-level intelligence.  They certainly don't become human.  In the end, as more and more of the dogs die and the bet remains inconclusive, the gods start to meddle.  All the stuff with the gods was really clever and well crafted.  It fit in perfectly with the stories of the Greek gods I loved in D'Aulaire as a child.  It's also kind of a downer.  The book was quite dark and sad for most of it.

Interestingly for such a divergent approach to a dog's life, both Fifteen Dogs and The Wild Dog of Edmonton portray the perspective of the dog on the run in a very similar fashion.  The dogs running around Canadian neighbourhoods, looking for food, shelter and figuring out which humans may provide that while always remaining wary was very consistent across both books. That's as deep as my analysis goes. 

So while I generally avoid "literary fiction", I will give Fifteen Dogs a moderate two thumbs up.  I am not sure if I got anything deep about the human condition from it, but I cared about the dogs and enjoyed the story. 

There is one small yet glaring error.  At the very end, there is a scene in Ralston, Alberta.  It says "It was a late afternoon in Summer. The sun had just begun to cede its ground to darkness."  I don't think Alexis has actually been in Alberta in the summer, because the sun I am pretty sure would be high in the sky in the late afternoon.  Is this not the case across Canada?

97. The Wild Dog of Edmonton by David Grew

I found this at the Value Village southeast of downtown (can't remember the neighbourhood name, rapidly gentrifying) which was packed with people buy Halloween costumes.  It was $7.99 which struck me as a bit pricey.  I also noted that if you are looking for contemporary thrillers, fantasy and sci-fi it had a pretty impressive collection of mainstream stuff.  I should add these to my hunting maps.

The Wild Dog of Edmonton was a great little book. It was written in 1948 for a young adult audience.  There are two protagonists, Dwight the orphan who lives with the hard-working and hard-feeling Brunnels.  They haven't officially adopted him and he is basically there as a farmhand.  Mr. Brunnel is the kind of resentful asshole they are still breeding in rural and suburban Canada, angry in this case because the government is forcing him to send Dwight to School.  Dwight, while tending the barn witnesses the birth of a litter of pups and falls in the love with the first one. He names him Whitepaw and he becomes our second protagonist.  Old Farmer Fuckface Brunnel realizing that the boy loves the dog, does everything he can to force him to get rid of it.  The boy's nice teacher (who also realizes his potential) lets the dog stay with her at least until the end of the school year.  Whitepaws becomes a favourite among the students.

However, when the school year ends, Brunnel, despite the pleas of the nice teacher, reiterates his threat that he will shoot the dog, so Dwight and Whitepaws run away, heading to Edmonton where he hopes to find work.

Thus begins a two-part adventure, first with the two making their way in the winter on a perilous journey and second once in Edmonton, when they get separated and then Whitepaw learns to fend for himself.  Both parts are cool but the book really shone for me when Whitepaws was on his own.  He was a loving, trusting dog, being brought up with nice Dwight, the kindly teacher and all the kids.  Here on the mean streets of Edmonton he learns to sneak, steal and fight.  It's pretty cool stuff.  It moves along at a nice tight pace with nice descriptions of wintery Canada and this strange world from a dog's perspective.

It struck me as reading this that the post-apocalyptic genre and the animal perspective adventure genre share a lot in common.  They both have potential heroes exploring strange lands with whom they have little or no connection or history.  Meaning can only be guessed at, puzzled together by the bits of information they glean from the ruins or Man's world.  Survival is a share theme as well.  Something to ruminate on.

This was a great find.  The fundamental conflict is between the selfish individualism of the farmer, who uses his struggle for resources and labour as an excuse for an ideology of negativity and control versus the liberal spirit of the teacher who recognizes that with education and community everybody can be uplifted.  This conflict is still with us today in Canada.

96. Slow Burner by William Haggard

I went to Toronto in October to see my aunt's art exhibit (which was really wonderful and moving).  I did some research ahead of time and mapped out all the used book stores I could find.  I ended up hitting quite a few of them.  The results were somewhat disappointing.  Toronto has lost some good used bookstores recently and the ones that remain are all quite nicely appointed, well-managed and often quite pleasant.  They also have this odd BMV chain which I can't tell if it is nefarious or good.  Unfortunately, they do not have a lot of the kinds of books I look for.  Nevertheless, I found a few things, including two William Haggard's at Rereading in the Darlington, which had the best stock of used genre paperbacks in general and made me want to go to what I believe is their sister store Reading.

Slow Burner turns out to be Haggard's first book.  It takes place domestically in England (actually mostly in various government offices in London) and is kind of an "office thriller", in the sense that much of the action is various educated and upper class government officials strategizing and speculating on how to deal with a crisis.  It may sound boring but I love this stuff.  The crisis in this case is that a scientific agency that has developed a form of efficient, transferable nuclear energy called Slow Burner that is being used in several factories to give the UK a competitive economic advantage discovers the same signal that Slow Burner gives off coming from a suburban house in Dipley.  Slow Burner gives off very specific epsilon rays and the security part of the agency constantly monitors the factories to ensure safety.

What does it mean?  How did it get there?  Who lives in the house?  The head of the nuclear agency, a super smart physicist turned administrator has to deal with his overly cautious Assistant Minister, who also hates him.  He works with the head of Security, Russel (a recurring character in Haggard's books) to try and solve the problem while maneuvering around the assistant minister.

There are two things that I find odd in this book.  The first is class.  Every main character is educated and many seem to have separate incomes and have been raised in public schools.  Yet, there is a still more complex layer of class hierarchy behind all their conversations.  The subtlety of political interaction is already incredibly high here.  Every interaction is a possible powerplay, down to the way somebody is greeted.  Somebody says or does something that seems pretty standard and then the other character is suddenly primed for an attack or shaken to the core.  I have dipped my toe in office politics and am thankfully in a role that is almost entirely free of them today.  I can see how when you are actually in politics, in a stratified society with an ancient aristocratic culture like Britain, it would be pretty intense, but this is at another level, much of whose background is lost to me.  I need to read this book with somebody from that world and have them explain it to me.

The second thing is the civil liberties and the deep respect they are given.  I always assumed the British internal intelligence agencies could just invoke the Official Secrets Act and do whatever they want.  Here, they are stymied by this house because they have no legal right to enter it nor to detain its owner.  They do have dossiers on everybody and find out a lot of info quickly but if this was today and some house was emitting epsilon rays, would there not be some commando team surrounding it within minutes?  It makes the book much more interesting and our world much more pleasant when the security forces actually respect the rule of law, but it was a bit of a surprise to me.

The ending was a bit too neat and the physicist character and his romantic arc resembled a bit too closely the career diplomat in The Powder Barrel, but these are minor quibbles and it was his first book.  I have two more Haggard's on deck and those are going to stay there for a while, aging like a fine wine, until the right time to take each one out.