38. Titus Groane by Mervyn Peake

The Gormenghast series has been on my radar for a long time, but I have always hesitated because it looks so daunting.  It is one of meezly's favourites and I took advantage of her having a reading copy when my books that I ordered a month ago still haven't arrived and nothing interests me on my on-deck shelf.

My trepidation was accurate.  This book was a bit of work for me.  As the vast multitude of my readers knows, I am lazy-minded and driven forward by the narrative of a book.  Titus Groane is almost 400 dense paragraphed, narrow-margined pages and what actually happens in the book could probably be condensed down to maybe 100 pages and that would be pushing it.  As Anthony Burgess says in his introduction, Titus Groane is "architectural".  Gormenghast castle and the surrounding bleak landscape take up the bulk rest of the pages. It is incredibly rich and evocative world-building, a fantastic evocation of an epically decadent aristocracy, manifested in the few remaining members of the House of Groane and their servants, but mostly in the place itself.  It is good and I would say it deserves the title of a modern classic.  It's just for me, this kind of reading can be a bit of a grind.  I just get distracted too easily.

The story too is compelling, though perhaps ultimately lacks some weight as the characters are so crazed and almost entirely unlikable.  It begins with the unexpected birth of Titus Groane, next in line to become the Early of Gormenghast.  We meet the cast of characters around him: his check-out, book-obsessed father, his lonely older sister, his mother who lives for her cats and birds only, the self-obsessed and victimized nanny, the class-jumping doctor and the sort-of protagonist, Steerpike the young kitchen aid with a machiavellian drive for power that risks to bring change to Gormenghast.  There are others and though each is quite unique, they are all almost entirely self-centered and utterly disconnected from any reality other than their role in the castle.  There is also Keda, a woman from the mud towns that live at the foot of the castle walls, who seems to have a larger role in the later books. She is actually decent, so far.

The geography of the castle is amazing. It would be literally possible to get lost on the rooves and die of starvation.  The twin sisters of the Early, total freaks, live in a room with the roots of a giant dead tree whose network is so complex that you can get stuck and not be able to leave the room without them guiding you out.  It looks like I will have to read the entire trilogy, but not right away.  Need something with some pace to it next.

37. In the Teeth of the Evidence by Dorothy L. Sayers

This book makes me feel slightly sad. It is the last book I found in the free shelf outside of Latina supermarket on St-Viateur which is currently chained closed, I guess by some stupid overreaction in the time of the Coronavirus. I think the way we freaked out here about surface cleanliness instead of wearing masks will prove to be a big mistake, driven by cultural assumptions in the face of incomplete information. We defaulted to our North American obsession with sterility and physical purity and the result is unecessarily locked free shelves. The other thing I liked about this book is that it was already in such bad condition, I did not have to worry about damaging it further and could throw it in my bag or jacket pocked without any care.  Because it was a book of short stories, it has mostly been read while waiting in line, which has been pretty rare, so it took me almost two months to complete.

It begins with a few Lord Peter Wimsey short stories (the first one involving a dentist, thus the title), then several Montague Egg and finally by random little mystery vignettes.  It is kind of amazing to me how not only could she come up with multiple mystery scenarios for novels, she had so many extra they could also be used in short stories.  Many of these are enjoyable but not super satisfying.  I did like the Monatague Egg ones, not so much for the mystery but for the cultural context. He is a travelling salesman of fine alcohols and each story starts with him in a different location, usually at a pub, meeting up with other salesman and reminiscing about past sales.  His life philosophy and detection techniques are based on Salesman's Handbook and it is quite clever and funny how he applies some quotation from it to each mystery.  I could definitely read a few more Montague Egg stories and perhaps even a novel. 

I told you it was beat up.

36. The Long November by James Benson Nablo

Despite myself, I ended up quite enjoying this book.  I say that because it is written rather poetically and has a lot of philosophizing (though always in small bites), elements that tend to get in the way of the story for me.  Fortunately, there is a story here and I agreed with much of the philosophy and found the stream of consciousness not too distracting.  Reading the forward (which started out as a blog post that attracted the attention of Nablo's daughter and eventually led to the book being reprinted) by the crucial Brian Busby made me appreciate it much more. He argues strongly that this was a much-read book that has since been passively or actively rejected by the Canadian literati and public, most likely because he left to work in Hollywood.

The story is framed by the narrator Joe Mack who is lying on the floor in a ruined house in Italy, just shot in the shoulder by a Nazi sniper.  As he lies there, different smells come to him and each smell recalls a memory from his past. It is basically a picaresque journey of a young working class boy in Ontario in the depression and his path to life and love that led him to become a soldier in WWII.  The through line is his love for upper class Steffie Gibson.  He starts out in high school, going to the dance with her and getting in a fight with the farmboy who was picking on her gay cousin.  We then follow him through interesting episodes as a rum-runner, hobo in Chicago, miner and eventually succesful businessman before he goes off to war. This quick summary does not do justice to how well each of these vignettes captures a period in history.  Even better, the whole thing is infused with a truly Canadian idealistic political perspective: a belief in giving a hand up to the little man, a suspicion of excess wealth, an appreciation of a state that doesn't let that wealth get too excessive.  Ultimately, the theme here is that despite the rough edges, in the end one has to try and do the right thing, no matter the cost.  It's a neat, touching book and I am glad Ricochet press brought it back. 

35. Pied Piper by Nevil Shute

I really am in the mood for epic escapist fantasy but must continue to wait because the books I ordered from Thrift Books have been sitting somewhere in the Canada Post void since April 20th, most likely with those extortionist scumbags at Canada Customs.  Fortunately, I found this book in a box by the side of the road and though I have read too much British WWII fiction in recent months, the subject appealled to me and the first few paragraphs totally sucked me in.  Pied Piper is a quiet, touching at times tense story about a 70-year old British man, Mr. Howard, who naively takes a fishing trip in Switzerland just before the Nazis invade France.  He is less naive than sort of stunned, finding himself unable to contribute in England due to his age and also just learning that his son, a bomber pilot, was shot down over Heligoland Bight.

The book is framed in a neat way.  It starts out with the narrator collecting his mail at the club and noticing the old man stumble over a rise in the carpet.  He and the porter discuss how the carpet needs to be fixed and the narrator ends up in the quiet reading room with the old man.  They get to talking and continue to talk even when the air raid signal is sounded and the placed blackened.  They both agree that they are as safe on the top floor as in the basement. The old man then reluctantly and diffidently starts to tell his tale.  The introductory stumble and the way the old man tells the tale, suggesting that he really did nothing and just sort of made his way back from a vacation suggest the real theme of this book: British humble stoicism and heroism.  With Howard in the mountain resort in Switzerland is the wife and two children of a British attorney at the League of Nations. The parents feel that they must stay on in Geneva and do their jobs at the League but ask Howard if he could take the children back to England with him to stay at their aunt's.  What at first appears to be a simple train ride across France and a ferry trip across the channel soon falls apart as the Nazis advance right into Paris.  Howard finds himself on foot in a parade of refugees with two children in tow.  As they make their way via various means trying to get to the coast, he slowly accumulates more and more children, victims of war. 

The journey is more tense and worrisome than outright thrilling.  The man must constantly make ethical decisions weighed against his and the childrens' survival.  His age, though physically a disadvantage, gives him the patience and wisdom to always benefit the children.  It's really sweet.  Furthermore, we the readers get an informative and rich perspective on France in the first days of the invasion and takeover.  Fascinating and scary as hell.  This was a great read.  Strongly recommended.

34. A Time To Be Born by Dawn Powell

My on-deck shelf is not inspiring me these days, so I asked meezly if she had anything interesting on hers.  She passed me this one, which I first was quite interested in, then slightly turned off by the prose on the first page.  However, I decided to commit and was happy to find that the style in the beginning was deliberately flourid, representing the state of mind of an introductory but secondary character.  The rest of the prose is certainly not sparse, but much more digestible.  Actually, it's extremely well-written, with funny, scathing metaphors and vivid physical descriptions capturing New York City in the 40s and briefly the environs upstate.  The main stuff though is about the people, their personalities and their relationships.  And wow, what people!  The sympathetic characters are weak and insecure and the rest are absolutely loathsome.  Yet it is all portrayed in such a rich and enjoyable way that you love to loathe them.  Powell portrays upper-class New York (and striving upper middle class) as utterly devoid of any principles in their constant quest for status.  They are almost inhuman.  I mean just really awful people.  I mean I have a strong contempt for the American class elite, especially in  New York City but even I found this portrayal pretty extreme.  She is just scathing.  Perhaps she is not wrong in portraying powerful people as being completely without any empathy, given what we are seeing from the nouveau dotcom billionaire class of today.

The story revolves around two main female characters, the unterfrau of Amanda Keeler, now a celebrity author and married to a media tycoon and her old "friend" Victoria Haven, who comes to NYC to get away from heartbreak in their shared hometown in the midwest.  Keeler is ruthless and only accepts Vicky into her world because it gives her a justification to set up a love nest where she can have an affair. The narrative is really about poor, wounded and so insecure Vicky as she navigates the sophisticates around her and Amanda's power over her.  There are several other threads as well and it is all quite enjoyable, though one has to suspend some disbelief at the extremity of the characterizations.  In Powell's depiction, there is only class striving.  It is not until the end that we get a glimpse of an actual counterpoint, of a character being a little bit normal and real and not making every decision based on how it will be perceived by those of higher status.  It's like adult Heathers.  I did find the ending slightly jarring and simple, as once you pierce the ridiculousness of status (especially with America joining WWII), it pops like a balloon, putting all the previous behaviour in question. 

Since she lent me the book, I will share a link to a review by meezly of another Dawn Powell book, with a nice summary of Powell's career.

33. A Sour Apple Tree by John Blackburn

My opinion of this book was thrown by misleading expectations.  This amazing cover suggested dry political espionage or perhaps an office murder.  The language and setting was very much in the British mold, with the protagonist being a high-ranking security officer and his top agent and they do dryly discuss past affairs of state.  Then things got a bit too colourful for my taste with a bizarre murder attempt and the agent going full Bond on the first woman he meets.  As I read through, I realized that this is more of a horror, semi sci-fi potboiler that should have had a much more garish cover.  The cover, to be fair, does symbolically represent what goes on in the book.  It begins with the resurgence of an old adversary, a British traitor named John Glyne who went over the Nazis in WWII and did english-speaking radio propaganda against the British.  His method was much nastier and less open to ridicule than the infamous Lord Haw-Haw and there were rumours that he later went into POW camps and somehow brainwashed British prisoners and turned them into traitors as well.

From the beginning, Glyne is described as having this tremendous charisma, so powerful that people feel compelled to follow him after being around him for a few minutes.  The way it is described in the book, it sounds not unlike Steve Jobs famous reality distortion field.  However, as the book progresses, the reader starts to suspect that we are moving into the supernatural territory.  More and more murders are being committed by subjects in insane asylums, ones that had shown no previous signs of wanting to do violence.  What starts as a hunt for an ex-Nazi traitor turns into a potential national murder crisis as the killing starts to infect the sane.  Much of the action is still an investigation and there are some really good regional inquiries and a discovery of a downed german sub.  A very fun, super-pompous old school Navy minister called Admiral Vane adds some fun to it all as well.  By the end, we are in full on Saturday morning matinee telepath battle and I had let go of my previous disappointment.  There were some minor annoying flaws, like one of the characters not phoning in what they were doing in order to make for a more suspenseful ending, but overall it ended up being quite enjoyable.

 

Nazi eyes make you dead!

32. The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

This was recommended to me by a colleague at work who said it was quite weird but interesting.  It took me quite a while to find, so long that I accepted paying $12 for this bagged and near pristine copy, which I believe is a reprint.  The book was written in 1972 and the cover copyright from 1986.  I am happy to say that I managed to read the entire book without adding any significant damage other than it not lying quite as flat as when I pulled it out of the bag. 

It is a weird book!  The concept is that almost the entire book is actually the book "Lord of the Swastika" written by Adolf Hitler.  The about the author just before the title page, reveals that you are in an alternate history where Adolf Hitler emigrated to the US in 1919, became a succesful illustrator of science fiction and fantasy literature as well as a sometime writer and move and shaker in the fandom scene, before writing this immensely popular novel that was published after his death in 1955.  You get this one, fascinating paragraph to tantalize you with this alternate history.  Then the bulk is this insane fascist fantasy novel that is horrifying and yet somehow really fun to read. Then at the very end, there is an afterword that is a critical analysis of the Lord of the Swastika and serves to fill in the broader strokes of the alternate reality where such a book would have been published. 

The novel is really bonkers and deeply disturbing, both because it is somehow so propelling that you find yourself caught up in its momentum while at the same being totally aware of how wrong it all is.  It is basically a simplified, Nazi wish-fulfilled narrative taking place in a science fantasy, post-nuclear world.  Feric Jaggar is a superior true human, raised in the mutant-filled capital of Borgravia because his parents were exiled from their homeland of Heldon.  At the opening of the book, he is finally coming home, filled with disgust at the genetic impurity of the mutants all around him and patriotic fervour at his return.  Things move very quickly and he soon becomes the new leader of Heldon, leading it to greater military glory and genetic purity.  It is basically an allegory of Hitler's own rise to power but with Jaggar as a 6 and a half foot aryan super hero wielding a gigantic phallic hereditary truncheon that only he can lift.  The book is obsessed with uniforms and massive spectacle, as well as constant language contrasting the rigid and fanatical purity of the Heldons versus the putrid, sickening (sometimes pitiable) corruption of the mutants and worse the psychic Zind who control the oil and much of the rest of the world.  Reading this book is kind of like reading Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will in a fantasy world.  It's really a trip.  Because so little is revealed about the world in which Lord of the Swastika is written, you really have no idea of how it will end.  This also keeps you turning the pages.

I won't reveal any of the afterward, beyond saying that it's import in the meaning of the overall book (The Iron Dream, I mean, not the book within the book) far outweighs its few pages.  Spinrad seems to be critiquing a lot here, he attacks the Lord of the Swastika for the simplistic fantasy it is, mocking its sexual pathologies, its obsession with uniforms and massive human spectacle.  Yet, the reader knowing that in the real world (or at least our world), these things led to a horrific conclusion and were actually extremely effective.  He seems to be both revealing the ludicrousness of it all while at the same time underlying how deadly serious it can become, a message all too relevant in today's world.  On a lesser and tangentially related note, he also goes after the fantasy and sci-fi genre, noting that many of the elements taken to the extreme in The Lord of the Swastika have their roots in the classic sci-fi and fantasy tales of lone heroes with phallic weapons imposing their will on the world.  This is another element that is all too relevant today, as the nerd logic and masculine adolescent asperger's culture  which 20 years ago was confined to message boards and convention newsletters has now erupted into one of the most powerful propaganda techniques bringing down western civilization in the age of social media. 

Really interesting book. I shall now go read what others have to say about it.

31. The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

I was very excited about this book.  It may be the first book I have ever pre-ordered, which I did from the lovely Argo Bookshop in downtown Montreal who hand-delivered it to my home because pandemic.  I first experienced Grady Hendrix when he was one of the organizers of the New York Asian Film Festival way back in the day when it was first starting.  I'm sure he did a ton of work behind the scenes (and I know he took my tickets once or twice), but he was best known for his over the top intros before the movies.  Now I took my Hong Kong movies nerd-serious back then and so his emphasis on the wackiness of the movies didn't totally sit right with me, but I had to admire his knowledge and recognize that his enthusiasm was genuine not mocking.  I lost track of him until Paperbacks from Hell came  out, where I started to follow his newsletter, which is fucking hilarious (you can sign up for it here).  I hope he keeps doing them because they bring me great joy, especially during this pandemic, where he is really shining.  So a long preamble to say I was happy to help support his pre-sales and looking forward to reading the book. 

Horror is not really my jam, but groups of non-standard heroes fighting evil is so this book held a lot of promise for me. I was not disappointed.  It's a solid book, quite horrifying at times and honestly moving at the end.  At one point, I got so upset with one of the characters that I had to put the book down and chill out.  This is not necessarily a book you want to read just before going to bed.  The world-building and the innovative and subtle yet complex history of the monster adds a rich depth that also makes the book satisfying.  I found some of the side characters to lack development (I wished that we had a bit more insight into Tilly, who seemed to change from wacky fun person to weirdly conservative), but this is a minor quibble.  The ending lacked a truly satisfying get back at the assholes feeling but that is a question of style than a critique.  I feel like Hendrix kept with a more realistic and thus less easy ending, but I would have enjoyed a bit more simplistic comeuppance for the dick husbands.

The hero of the story is Patricia Campbell, good wife and mother but a bit lost about who she is and what she wants.  Early on, she joins an alternate book club with the less serious wives in town and instead of reading pseudo-intellectual literature they go right into the true crime genre. One of them who is a devout Christian lies to her husband that it is bible study.  The book club is a through line, but much more of the story is about Patricia's tenuous hold on her marriage and her family, which really starts to fall apart as strange but handsome James Harris moves in to his great-aunt's house next door.  Shit gets weird and then gruesome real fast when Patricia stumbles across the great-aunt eating a racoon in her backyard.  This is where I knew we were going to be in good territory.  Hendrix does not pull any punches and it is really fucking gross.  And gets grosser at parts.  This is horror.  Another element that also develops early on is the mythology of the south and the supernatural.  At first, it comes through Patricia's mother-in-law, who lives with them and suffers from dementia.  It's all really engrossing.

I won't go into any more plot details because if you enjoy any of these elements, than you should just read the book.  I will say that there is further depth that elevates this book beyond just a good horror story.  The subtext here is privilege and how the evil impacts you worse the less privileged you are.  Hendrix portrays the husbands, at the privilege pinnacle, scathingly.  You just fucking hate them, especially Patricia's husband.  I almost want an epilogue where terrible shit happens to him as he is exposed to his own ignorance.  The white women's blindness to the situation of Mrs. Greene, who "does" for them is equally exposed.  

One other thing is that as a physical artifact, the hardcover of this book is really beautiful.  When you take off the slipcover, the cover is a sherbert green and the inside a lovely orange, which reflect the peach and leaves on the cover. It also has an embossed faux library seal.  Very well done, publisher and designers!

30. Killing them Softly by George V. Higgins (original title Cogan's Trade)

I am really not happy with the trade paperback I found at a local thrift store. It has Brad Pitt looking way to contemporary on a boring cover and now that I have finished the book, a totally sucky alternate title.  Was this done just for the movie, because it reeks of Hollywood idiocy.  The contents, fortunately, are pretty fucking tight.  Higgins writes mostly in dialogue.  Things happen, but you usually learn about them from one guy telling another guy in roundabout, Southie, semi-organized criminal argot.  The basic plot here is that three ex-cons rip off an illegal card game in some suburban hotel and Cogan is sent in to punish them.  When I was about a third of the way through, I told my wife that it didn't have much of a plot, that the real meat of the book is in the milieu and the characters and the dialogue.  Those things are incredibly strong, but the plot itself actually becomes subtly kind of intricate.  You realize that in this little world, everybody is sort of connected one way or another and a guy who was listening to another guy talk about two guys planning a hit on a fourth guy was actually one of the guys in on the original job that incited the need for the hit.  

Cogan himself is only in about half the novel.  Everyone is treated equally by the narrator and we get slices of all their various lives.  Their common theme is their struggle to make money and keep their wives happy and stay out of jail and not get killed, which for most of them seems to be too much of a struggle.  There were some passages that felt a bit long and I had to take a break as a guy goes on for two pages about his wife not liking it when he goes to prison.  On the flip side, there were amazing little crime vignettes.  One that stood out was two dog thieves, taking a carload of doped up dogs to sell in Florida who get caught in a southern deluge just as the dogs start waking up, shitting and farting in the car whose windows they can't open.  And by the end, the storyline really picks up pace and it becomes hard to put it down.  The ending is brutal and hard, quite sad but very satisfying.  Great stuff.

here is the lame one I found
Compare that to these below:

29. The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

My nephew and I made an epic trip last xmas to the Salvation Army in downtown Oakland to find boots and books, only to be dissapointed in both.  I did, however, find two 80s first edition hardcover Mary Stewarts, which I took as consolation prizes.  The first one was okay but I now consider this one to be a real find.  First, Mary Stewart is an excellent writer and I had forgotten how good she is at creating a sense of place as well as moments of satisfying character and badassery in her Arthurian saga.  Second, as I have embarked on the Farseer series by Robin Hobb, I am reminded of some of the tenets of epic fantasy, several of which Stewart does very well in this series.

That being said, I did not totally love this book.  It builds up wonderfully but ends on a frustrating note of uncharacteristic misunderstanding between the two main protragonists. The main character is Mordred, Arthur's bastard son with his half-sister and witch Morgause (Morgane Lefay as she is more commonly known).  Mordred is raised as the only son of a hard-scrabble fishercouple in the Orkney islands.  It's a long and twisted story that takes place in the previous book that lands him here. When Morgause's later husband, King Lot (like a few months later) learns that his wife was impregnated by Arthur and the baby abandoned, he has all the baby's in that village put to death, but Mordred escapes.  He is a good boy and his adopted mother loves him and fears the day when the queen may come and take him away.  Blood will tell and one day he accidently stumbles across young prince Gawain, his half-brother and rescues him, which brings his attention to Morgause the queen.  Thus begins his introduction to his destiny.

In some ways, up until the ending, this may have been my favourite book of the series.  Merlin, who narrates the first three, is really cool but can be somewhat of a bummer.  Here, we mainly have the perspective of Mordred and it is a very enjoyable coming of age plus political intrigue story.  There are some really cool interludes where he demonstrates his character and toughness. His mother as the antagonist is creepy and nasty, with one near-incest scene definitely taking her evil over the top.  I was thoroughly into it and turned the pages quickly.  It's all leading up to Mordred's destiny, which Merlin has foreseen, that he would be the downfall of King Arthur.  You don't want that to happen because they two develop such a good relationship and Mordred had the makings of a fine successor.  I could accept the bad ending except that the mechanics of it felt forced and really went against all that had been built up.  There is excessive miscommunication that creates distrust between the two men, which just didn't feel solid enough to destroy what was such a strong relationship.  So the ending left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.  Still, it wasn't enough to wipe away the enjoyable taste of all that led up to it, especially a really nice section where he makes his away alone through old England, camping out and feeding himself and just enjoying the autumn wilderness.  Very cool stuff.  I am also happy to know that though there is a fifth book in the saga, it is a standalone adventure taking place near the end of the third book.  So I don't feel any pressure to have to seek it out and read it soon, though it shall be on my list.

28. The Brass Cupcake by John D. MacDonald

I'm in a bit of a minor quandary with myself this month.  I have an on-deck shelf that is mostly filled with authors whom I like and whose books I was quite excited to find (John D. MacDonald's non Travis McGee's, Charlotte Armstrong, James Hadley Chase, William Haggard).  However, since I have read books by each of them already this year, I want to save and savour these waiting books over time. This desire conflicts directly with my obsessive need to clear out my on-deck shelf.  I had made a temporary solution by deciding this year to read a single series or author of a big fantasy or science fiction book in order and live with the on-deck shelf not going down much.  That author was to be Robin Hobb and my plan was nicely confirmed by how much I enjoyed the first book in the Farseer trilogy, Assassin's Apprentice.  Unfortunately, it all came undone with my order of the second and third books in the trilogy which won't arrive here until May, assuming all goes well!  So now I am stuck back facing my on deck shelf. I have decided to take this opportunity to narrow down what I have in the next few weeks. There are a few books by authors other than the ones mentioned above, but I thought I would go with this John D. MacDonald as it is his first book and I suspected would be quite different from the books where he had really found his voice.

It is a great setup.  Cliff is an agent of an insurance company, an ex-cop whose rigorous honesty got him kicked off the force in Florence City, a nice little resort town in Florida.  A wealthy old New England socialite gets bumped off in her winter hotel suite, her jewels stolen.  Because Cliff has some underworld connections and has done dropoffs before, he gets the job to try and reach out to the thieves and do a payoff from the insurance company to get the jewels back.  This has often worked with past thefts. The company still takes a loss, but nowhere near what they would have to pay to replace the jewels to the insured.  In this case, however, because of the murder and the damage it does to the reputation as a safe town where the rich can spend their winter months, the cops are all over it and they already hate Cliff.  They won't let him do the payoff because they want to catch the murderers too badly.  To make things worse, Cliff starts to fall for the socialite's niece, who may be involved.

It's a great ride, nicely paced with lots of action.  It's much more wild than you usually get with JDM (at one point, he chases down thugs in a car). The social theorizing is peppered in only sparsely, which makes it more enjoyable.  It's a light touch as opposed to the sometimes heavy moralizing that can wear you down a bit with JDM.  The sexual politics are as weird as ever, abhorrent at one point near the end where a woman gets slapped to have some sense put in her about marrying the dude who slapped her.  Again, though, they are mostly in the action and the subtext rather than JDM telling us directly his bizarre theories on women and gender, so they don't bog the book down.  There are two actual sex scenes as well, one which is quite effective in a steaming hot Florida apartment in a sudden thunderstorm and one which is so bad and weirdly written that I had to take a picture of it.  You can see the text below, whose climax is "twin convexities of alive plum-tautness" to describe the woman's buttocks.

Despite my weariness with JDM, which I think is overly emphasized in my review here, the guy really can create a rich and gripping situation and setting.  The town is so well portrayed, the various locations, the shitty corrupt cops (whose brutality is as nasty as ever), the syndicate run high-end club, not just physically but in how it all works.  He also weaves a realistic and interesting portrayal of how jewel thieves and the payoffs work. I don't know where he got all this stuff from, but it is convincing and absorbing. The title is a nice touch.  A cupcake, according the Cliff, is the term for little special things you get in jail in some prisons in the south, like cigarettes or a pint bottle of something, things that can also be taken away.  The brass cupcake is how he comes to see his badge, which he had thought sparkled with gold when it was first pinned on him.

Schwing!

27. The Secret People by John Wyndham (written originally under the pseudonym John Beynon)

This is a lovely physical object.  The cover immediately caught my affection, especially the typeface of the title. I love these Coronets.  Unfortunately, it has absolutely nothing to do with the book. It's a stretch to even say The Secret People is science fiction. The story is about a man, Mark,  who has made his fortune by building up his family's shoe company.  He takes a little break to fly around the world in his personal jet (this is the sci-fi part).  He meets lovely Margaret at a resort hotel in Egypt and offers to fly her over the New Sea, a massive project to artificially flood part of the Sahara desert and make it viable for agriculture again.  On their way back, the plane engine blows out and they crash into the lake.  They manage to get to a small island, but when trying to escape are sucked down into the water by a giant whirlpool.

It turns out that underneath the desert is a vast network of underground caves, people by white-skinned pygmies who survive on giant mushroom colonies.  There are also hundreds of other human castaways who have gotten themselves trapped her over the years (and centuries as some people have been born there). The pygmies keep them prisoners in a lowered section where they farm their own mushrooms.  Though the pygmies are small, they far outnumber the castaways.  Because Mark and Margaret had found a scraggly old cat on the island and had brought it with them, when they are confronted by the pygmies, Margaret is not thrown in the prison section, but kept up with the pygmies as the handmaiden to the cat, whom they consider a god.

It goes quite quickly, though with a few overly theoretical dialogues speculating on the pygmies and man and all that.  There is a small team that has been trying to escape and when they are betrayed, it becomes a race to fight off the pygmies while defending the escape tunnel.  This part is really pretty excellent, as the only real material in the caves are stone and giant mushrooms.  The escapers build ramparts and creative weapons out of them while the pygmies become more creative in trying to break through their barrier.  There is a series of attacks and defenses in a giant cave that is a lot of fun.  The ending is quite exciting and made for an enjoyable adventure romp in a strange situation.  It is all tinted with "benign" and thoughtful colonial thinking.  Wyndham is trying to be conscious but the subtext and the way certain characters act and are treated because of their race is a bummer.  The whole idea of flooding the Sahara and the destruction it would do to the people who actually live there is addressed, though in an offhand manner that also reflects the offhand manner in which the pygmies civilization comes to an end. 

Nothing close to this exists in the book,
but nice image!

26. Assassins's Apprentice by Robin Hobb (part 1 of the Farseer Trilogy)

I've been holding off on this popular fantasy trilogy for a few months now.  For the longest time, I avoided trilogies and series as a rule.  Then when I really got my reading pace back up a few years ago, I relaxed that rule.  I spaced out books in trilogies and ultimately found myself losing track of what happened and not feeling so satisfied.  My plan now is to read them all together or at least much closer together.  I read an article which extolled the greatness of her world-building and so picked this first one up.  She has many trilogies and I believe most of them take place in the same world, though perhaps at different times.  Various commenters suggested the Farseer trilogy, (Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin and Assassin's Quest) was the place to start.  I was not disappointed, though I have some hesitations.

I am not sure if a label exists for this subgenre, though I have encountered it a few times in sci-fi and fantasy.  A young person enters a high-ranking political situation as an outsider and has to navigate unknown enemies while growing into his or her own character and skills.  The best example of this and one of my favourites, is the Goblin Emperor by Katharine Addison.  The first half of Assassin's Apprentice reminded me a lot of that book, though it definitely goes off on its own path as the story goes on.  A young boy is dropped off at a military castle by his grandfather.  He turns out to be the bastard son of the land's prince and the family could not afford to keep him.  He is rejected by his father and left to be taken care of by the stable master.  Here he learns animal husbandry, seemingly ignored by his family until one day the king taps him to be trained as a royal assassin.  He recognizes that a bastard is a potential asset that could be exploited by their enemies or used by the royal family.  It's a really cool set up and was a pleasure for me to follow the development of this naive boy in his training.

The world-building is as cool as advertised.  It is standard fantasy stuff (though mostly humanoid) but varied and original in its details.  The kingdom of the Six Duchies is on a peninsula and there is tension between the agriculture regions inland and the duchies on the coast.  The external threat, red pirate ships that have some power or method of turning the people they kidnap into soulless maniacs, is severely weakening the kingdom.  Most of the story is on the internal politics, though so much is left unclear until the end that it is more detective story than courtly intrigue.  I really enjoyed this book, but I found the good characters to be oddly unaware of the threat around them and the bad characters to be so obviously bad that I felt kind of frustrated.  I am hoping that part of it is that the hero is only 14 years old so really naive.  Like there was clearly a conspiracy going on and the various participants are all super antagonistic to him, several for no reason. He himself is befuddled at why the stable boy gives him such a hateful glare.  That could have been handled more subtly as it was clear way too early for me what was going on and yet the good guys walked right into it.  Despite that, the climax was quite satisfying and I am definitely ready to jump into the next book, which is supposed to be arriving here in a few days.

25. Ramona by Helen Jackson (H.H.)

I believe this may be the oldest book I have ever read, meaning physically oldest.  This book appears to have been printed in 1884.  It is in quite good shape and I hope I kept it in almost as good shape as when I got it.  Because of the Coronavirus pandemic, I am not going out so wasn't worried about carrying it with me.  I still tore ever so slightly one page.  The quality of the paper and binding on these olders books was quite good.  It was given to us as a gift from old family friends and I had no idea what it was about.  It turns out to be a forgotten classic, a huge hit back in the day that it came out and one that reinforced the idea of California in the eyes of a westward expanding nation. It also created a lot of consciousness about Mexicans and to some degree the suffering of the indigenous peoples of California.  Jackson had written a non-fiction report three years earlier titled "A Century of Dishonor" about how the Americans had totally fucked the natives.  She wrote Ramona to fictionalize much of what she had put in the report to try and spread the word.  On her deathbed, she wrote a letter to the president, pleading with him to redress the ongoing repression of the indigenous population.  Some argue that her book was influential in pushing the Dawes act.  

The story takes place in a Mexican ranch in central coastal California.  It is run by a strong, inflexible woman, La Senora Morena.  Though her son, Felipe, is the ostensible boss, she has the great skill of subtle manipulation, controlling everything without saying anything directly and somehow making her son think he is making all the decisions.  She has also taken in her dead sister's daughter, Ramona, whom everybody on the farm loves, except La Senora herself.  Ramona falls in love with the head of the Indian sheep shearers and La Senora forbids it for all kinds of crazy reasons, but basically racism and a weird, misplaced jealousy of Ramona.  I am not doing justice how well and thoroughly written the characters are, turning this simple into a rich and believable dynamic.  The character of Senora Morena is really an all-timer, nearly tragic at the Lady Macbeth level.  It's the kind of story where you would be screaming why can't you just not be fucking lame everything would be fine, except that their characters are so well-built that the lameness (the rigidity of the mother, the weakness of the son, the jealousy of the friend) makes perfect sense.

It also really pulls no punches when it comes to portraying what happens to the natives.  I portrays the Mexican and Catholic relation wit the natives a bit too positively, despite some narrative saying they weren't all as nice as the main ones in the narrative.  The Americans are shown to be the monsters they are, using manufacturing laws to drive the natives from their homes, steal their cattle and horses and basically destroy their lives.  It is interesting to read this narrative after There, There.  It is no surprise that there is so much trauma among the American Indians.  What is a surprise is that they even survived at all.  It's fucking horrific.  Some of this is hard reading.

What is not so hard to read are the beautiful descriptions of California at this time.  It really is an incredible part of the world and back in the 19th century as Americans were only starting to destroy it, you get a sense of how bounteous and beautiful it was.  While you start to get the sense that things are not going to go well early in the book, the fleeing couple stay in a few really cool locations, ultimately ending up in a hidden valley high in the mountains. This location had me feeling quite a sense of longing seeing as I will probably be here in my nice little urban neighbourhood for many months.

Great book.  I am really glad it was given to me.  

(Note, why the fuck can I not wrap text around the image in Blogger anymore?)

24. The Chocolate Cobweb by Charlotte Armstrong

Still tough going with the reading as my twitter addiction flares unabated and we go into our second week of Coronavirus lockdown, everybody's attention on the ticking time bomb that is the U.S. right now and wondering how bad the explosion will be.  I did power through the last third of this book, so it caught my distracted attention that much.  It's a nice little thriller with a great antagonist, though somewhat lessened for me as it had two very similar themes as the first Charlotte Armstrong book I read.

Amanda is a young, attractive art student who learns that as a newborn, she was temporarily given to the wrong parents.  Morover, the wrong father is a well-known artist, Tobias Garrison who lives not far from her in L.A. and is exhibiting.  She boldly introduces herself, gets invited to their house where she meets his handsome, distant son, Thone (with whom she was mistaken in the first hours of her life) and his mousy wife, Ione. Ione, it turns out, is not Thone's mother, but a first and third wife.  Ione's mother, Belle, was Tobias second wife and the subject of his most famous painting.  She died in a horrible accident one night, accidently trapped in the garage with the car running where she was poisoned by the carbon monoxide.

We learn quite early by Armstrong switching to Ione's viewpoint that Ione is a complete psychopath, who is obsessed with removing all traces of Belle from her and Tobias' life, including Belle's son Thone.  She is actively plotting to poison hin with some hot chocolate when Amanda shows up, spoiling it and seeing Ione knock over the thermos of poisoned chocolate deliberately.  It is somewhat contrived, as she helps to mop it up and then swaps the handkerchief so she can take the stained one to her boyfriend the chemist.

Anyways, I gave a lot of the plot away, because it all sets up in the opening chapters (which I appreciated).  The rest of the story is Amanda trying to convince Thone that he is being poisoned, while avoiding Ione's plotting, as she herself may now become a target (Ione suspecting that she may actually be Belle's daughter).  It has a nice gothic situation, in a very modern southern California hillside home.  I enjoyed particularly Ione's the super sweet, controlling utterly mad wife.  Unfortunately, some elements reminded me strongly of Catch As Catch Can, particularly the heroine being trapped in an enclosed space with almost too tight of a time limit before death only to be saved at the very last minute.  The love tension between her and Thone was also similar where there was an almost too aggressive conflict between them where they are so opposed you know they have to fall in love.  Armstrong is good, but I need to give her a break for a while and be in a quieter place to properly appreciate her work.

Oh cool, I just discovered that Claude Chabrol directed Merci pour le Chocolat in 2000, based on this book with Isabelle Hupert as the Ione character.  Definitely not the right body type, but she could play this role extremely well.  Might be worth checking out.

23. The arena by William Haggard

I have been having a hard time reading consistently in these first days of the Covid-19 pandemic.  My twitter addiction, which I had really gotten under control to the point of seriously considering deleting my account on principle due to their ongoing "free speech" tolerance of racists, trolls and fake accounts, has flared up like the virus itself.  It is my main news feed and probably also fulfilling a social need that is not getting its fix on the basketball court or the office or even day-to-day interactions with neighbours and merchants.  I am really struggling to get to that place where I can't stop turning the pages and won't put the book down.

I picked The arena because Haggard writes so well and his characters are all about pragmatic efficiency that I thought it would keep me engaged while helping to model emotional distance in this time of crisis.  It was mostly succesful, given the situation.  It still took me almost a week to read a book I would have read in three days in 2019.

The story centers around the merchant bankers in London in the early 60s as they were evolving from family-owned, aristocratic entities to more and more mercenary affairs driven primarily by profit.  I am not sure about the title, nor why it is in lowercase on the cover (could that just be part of the design?).  The protagonist is William Hillyard, a director and shareholder in the Bonavias bank, a fourth generation company that is threatened with a takeover bid.  That this is happening is because the firm cannot keep up, but behind it there is also espionage.  One of their holdings is a small radar development firm who, unbeknownst to them, is working on some technology that could be very beneficial to the British government.  This is where Haggard's "detective" Charles Russel, head of the Executive branch and his competent assistant Mortimer step in.

There is a lot packed into this thin book, much of it involves Hillyard and his struggle to resist the takeover (he is the only one who is against it), which puts his own life at risk.  Class plays a huge role.  The antagonist, Scott Sabin (whose character comes in strong only late and thus, at least to me, lacked enough depth to feel satisfied with the denouement) is not of the class that I guess family bankers are or were in England and he is driven by a deep resentment.  We are supposed to loathe him, either because he is not of the correct class or because in his insane desire to move up a class, he has lost all sense of ethics and character.  You get the feeling that this book was written for the landed class, but were there enough of them in 1961 to make up a readership? 

As I alluded, the ending was a bit unsatisfying.  The rest is really good, very subtle, very strategic and political. Haggard has a way of making two men in a room speculating about other men's actions seems really cool.  There is also an attempted murder on a train in a tunnel in Italy, thwarted by one of Mortimer's "top men" that is an excellent example of subtle action and skill not requiring much firepower or physical excess.  Haggard is really good, though you have to keep an eye on the class perspective.

22. The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams

Compare this to some of the covers below

I was led to understand that this was a real classic WWII POW escape book.  It's weird to me that it took me so long to find it and when I did (at Dark Carnival, of course) it was in a new large format reprint of not great quality.  The printing looked smudged and the cover was not of great quality.  Still, I appreciate Skyhorse Publishing for having reprinted it.  Seems a shame that a book like this would not still be on the shelves in most bookstores.

[Ah, just realized I had already read another book by Eric Williams, Dragoman and it led me to look for The Wooden Horse.]

It is written as fiction in third person, but is basically true.  The author and two others did actually escape from a POW camp by building a tunnel underneath a camp-made vaulting horse.  In the introduction, which I read after I completed the book, he explains how when he first published it right after the war, much of the info fell under the official secrets act, so he had to embellish it and change lots of details.  He since rewrote it several times until this 1978 edition which he says is mostly fact.

It is a really tense book.  The first half is all about them digging the tunnel.  I am kind of claustrophobic.  I don't know if I were in their situation, maybe I would be desperate enough to squeeze into a 100-metre tunnel of sand that was barely wider than my own body, with oxygen constantly running out, the walls and ceiling crumbling, sand everywhere.  I actually had to keep putting it down because it was stressing me out too much to read.

Later, when their tunnel succeeds and they are on the run in Germany, it is also extremely tense, but in a different way.  Posing as French foreign workers, neither of them speak German.  They have forged papers, limited maps and outdated railroad schedules.  They don't know how to act.  And they can trust nobody.  It's nerve-wracking.  Also, really interesting to see war-time Germany from the inside through the eyes of outsiders.

It's a great book and I am glad I read it on the day that schools were announced to be closed for two weeks and people are making runs on toilet paper in the supermarket to combat Covid-19.  The privations of the POW camp (which you read in his intro were actually much worse for their guards thanks to the Red Cross packages the prisoners received) put into perspective the anxiety about not being able to wipe your ass with 2-ply quilted Charmin.

21. Hunting the Fairies by Compton Mackenzie

Deciding to take this book home falls under the "it's an old Penguin so it is just too physically beautiful to leave on the shelf, no matter the subject" category.  I quickly scanned the first few lines of the back author blurb and it left me no more the wiser about the subject of this book.  The cover illustration was equally unelucidating, though I know now that it depicts an actual scene in the book and a good one.  It turns out that either it's pure confirmation bias (I chose it, ergo I must like it) or Penguin just generally did a good job with these paperbacks.  Either way, I quite enjoyed this book.

It's a comedy of manners of a sort about a Scottlish Laird, Hugh Cameron of Killwhillie, I guess sometime right after the war.  He is of the old landowning class, though Scottish, not English so a weird subset of British aristocracy that I had never encountered before.  He has an old house on a large piece of land somewhere in Scotland.  All the place names and geography were completely lost on me, but it does sound quite beautiful and rugged.  His dilemma is that an old friend who lives now in the States, having married an American, will not be coming this summer but did take the liberty of asking if Cameron could host an acquaintance of hers, her daughter and her maid.  The woman, Florence Urquhart-Unwin, Yu-Yu to her friends, is the president of the Ossian Society and is coming to Scotland to research and absorb the culture to bring back for the society.  Cameron is quite put out and anxious about this guest, but invites her to come.  Much of the book is then her touring around Scotland, being way more into Scottish stuff than Cameron and many of the Scots.  She also has a rival who comes from the U.S. as well, with her eye on taking away the presidency of the Ossian Society from Yu-Yu.  Much of the humour is them trying to best the other with having more authentic Scottish experiences.

I found it quite funny, even laugh out loud at times.  It is the gentle humour of an older time and an upper class, with lots of dialogue ending in "what?"  The plot thickens as Cameron falls in love with Yu-Yu's 19-year old daughter (he's 50).  It all wraps up nicely and even touchingly, taking on a somewhat more realistic and human tone than the light satire of the middle of the book.  Turns out, Mackenzie has published over 70 books and was very well known on the BBC back in the day.  I would keep an eye out for his other books.  This was fun.

20. There There by Tommy Orange

I picked up this book last year on a recommendation from my sister and my mother and decided to read it now since we are having a lot of increased awareness about the reality for First Nations people in Canada with the blockades on the railroad tracks.  The wet'suwet'en people of British Columbia are blocking a pipeline that was rammed through their land in the usual completely fucked-up way the government and multi-national resource companies work.  Many other First Nations communities then blockaded railroad tracks in solidarity and it has put the federal government in a real dilemma.  If you can't tell, I am 100% in support of the First Nations.  Even if you want to be totally selfish, they are doing us a favour by putting the brakes on all this insance fossil fuels extraction that is destroying our planet.  This issue also brings to the forefront the incredible selfishness and racism in Canadian culture and it really pisses us off to be forced to see it for what it is.  Suddenly we can't be all smug and complacent because it turns out we are just as bad as our friends to the south.

Anyhow, I'll save that rant for when I resurrect Brique du Neige.  I hate to say it but I was somewhat disappointed in There There.  Once again, it is quite a good book but the hype is just insane.  I was getting ready to read a masterpiece based on the pullquotes from every major newspaper review and many famous writers.  I should know better, but nonetheless when people write "pure soaring beauty" and "a miraculous achievement" you can't help but get your hopes up.  I am very glad that the book is a huge success.  Tommy Orange seems like a really cool guy and I hope it opens the doors for more indigenous authors to get their stuff out there.  I'll take a thousand There Theres over one American Dirt and most of the mainstream "literary fiction" out there.  I just wish we could be objective and realistic about the actual text.

The story is about a lot of different American people of indigenous descent (he calls them "Indians" and they call themselves that, but I don't know how that works in the U.S. but us settlers don't use that term in Canada anymore and I suspect shouldn't down there either).  Most of them are in Oakland, but a few are making their way there.  The focus of the plot is that they are all coming to a big powwow that is going to be held in the Oakland Coliseum.  There are quite a few characters, so many that it has a cast of characters at the beginning.  I didn't actually need it until the very end when I got some of the heisting characters mixed up because each character is very distinct, very real.  The introductions and backstories of all these characters do get close to the hype.  They are all so brutal and sad, yet rich and interesting that it makes for that rare combination of compelling reading while being "educational" (for lack of a better word on my part).  Just one cool element is that some of the characters participated in the American Indian Movement takeover of Alcatraz Island, an incident mostly forgotten today but a big milestone in their struggle.  It was cool to read a fictional account (probably based on some reality) of what it was like to be a kid there.  These are all just really great stories about what it is like to be an indigenous person in America today and it is fucked up.  It was also cool that there is a lot of Oakland in this book, both its rougher past and the even more painful gentrification it is going through today.  Tommy Orange is clearly pissed at that.

Where the book did not totally succeed for me is around the powwow.  Everything is leading up to the powwow, including some young toughs who are going to heist it.  It became quite predictable that we were going to end in a violent tragedy with many of the main characters dying.  There lives were so difficult and challenging already, that I don't know if such an ending had much impact on me.  And it felt simplistic and it all ended too quickly. I would rather have read another hundred pages on the robbery going bad, but maybe on person getting killed and the rest of them continuing with the fallout and how it impacted their lives. 

It's funny me saying that, as I am the first to admit I am a slave to the narrative and want a good satisfying conclusion.  Here, I felt that Tommy Orange did such a good job building a rich reality, I would have rather it kept going, even if it never really ended with any kind of narrative conclusion.  Weirdly, it felt a lot like the ending of Game of Thrones to me.

Again, a good book and while I hate to use this term, I think it fairly applies here, an important book.  I hope it removes some ignorance in the world.

19. Complicity by Iain Banks

I'm not sure what to make of this book.  I bought it at Chainon for $3 as I was looking for something readable after having slogged through a few duds in February.  Although I haven't loved all of his Iain Banks novels (Whit being the one standout), he is an excellent writer and the brief few lines of the inside cover blurb I read made me think the premise was compelling (and I am glad I only read the first few lines, because I went back and read the whole thing after I had finished the book and it basically gives away almost 80% of the story for fuck's sake).

It takes place in the early 90s.  The main character is a Scottish journalist in Edinburgh, political lefty, does a lot of drugs, plays a lot of videogames and is having an ongoing affair with a married woman while being friends with both her and her husband.  He is a good journalist, though, and works hard.  His main storyline is basically living his life, though getting these anonymous calls that seem to be providing hints to a big conspiracy.  While this story is going on, we get these nasty vignettes in the second person voice, where horrible "justice" is meted out to mostly white collar criminals: a judge who gives a rapist a lenient sentence is tied up and sodomized with a giant vibrator, an industrialist who allowed a factory accident to kill thousands is blown up in his home, etc. "You" do them all tactically, using cat burglary techniques, voice disguise and costumes.  They are pretty rough.  That's the thing about Banks, his sex and violence can be quite graphic. 

I won't go into any more about the storyline, though you can see the various ways these two storylines might start to converge.  It is well-written and the structure is excellently crafted.  Thematically, I couldn't quite get my head around it.  It is a thriller, with a mystery and action, but much of the emphasis is on the main character's backstory and his relationship with his childhood friends.  There is also a really strong theme of the justice of vigilante action against these kind of elites for their crimes.  So I enjoyed the story, but I just am not sure that any of those questions were really answered or explored in that much of an interesting way.  I guess also for the time the character was sort of novel in that he is doing speed and living a pretty dissolute life but this is presented as normal and okay.  I think it may have had more of an impact if you read it when the book came out (1993).  I felt that Banks was trying to make a point.