61. Moominvalley in November by Tove Jansson

My daughter is a big fan of the Moomins. She has read all the comics in these beautiful hardcover editions her mother got for her.  I didn't grow up with them and had never heard about them. They are cool and weird.  I've only read part of the comics.  She chose this book as the next one to read aloud at bedtime.  I had no idea what to expect but I was pleased from the outset to find a neat little map inside the book.

We just finished it tonight and I'm still not sure what to make of it.  The story follows several eccentric characters who have all decided to go to Moominvalley to visit the Moomin family, with whom each has or thinks they have some kind of relationship.  But when they get there, the Moomins are gone, seemingly on their own vacation.  So all these characters end up stuck together in this neat little valley as summer ends and winter comes on.  There is Fillyjonk, a female aardvark thing who obsesses about cleaning or not cleaning and turns out to be a really good cook.  There is Toft this strange little boy who lives in a boat on land.  Snufkin who opens and closes the book and seems to be the closest to the Moomins is somebody with a hat and an imagination and there is The Hemulen who seems to be a sort of stuffy older fellow, who felt kind of British.  

They have their interactions, sometimes verging on conflicts but more like a lot of strange eccentrics doing their own thing and not really tripping too much off of each other, all of them waiting for the Moomins.  It's very soothing and pleasant.  Sometimes I would drift off while reading aloud and have to force myself to concentrate.  My daughter listened, absorbed most of the time.  She knew most of the characters from the comic, so I think that helped.  She was a bit surprised by the ending, asking "isn't there an epilogue or something?"

Strange, Nordic stuff but I'm not against it.

60. The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross MacDonald

I've now come all the way around with Ross MacDonald.  He may have moved to the top of my detective fiction rankings after reading the Zebra-Striped Hearse.  This is the fourth or fifth book of his that I have read in the 50 Books era and they just keep getting better and better.  It's really the detecting that gets me and this one has a lot of it, but then the intricate and tightly-structured plot that keeps revealing more and more and finally the real darkness at the end that brings to near-masterpiece level for me.

Archer is almost a cypher in this one, though with several great quips and observations along the way.  He starts here with a request from an angry old man to investigate the beau of his rebellious daughter (well a request preceded by the angry old man's wife, which anticipates the complexity of the case to come).  The daughter, who is 24 and will inherit her aunt's millions when she turns 25, has run off to Mexico and met an old, attractive artist/bum and threatens to marry him.  It begins with a pretty straightforward effort to find out the true identity of the artist.  An envelope found in the beach house where the couple was hiding away suggests that the man came across the border using an alias.  Archer hops it to Mexico and things start to get complex.  I'm going to stop there with the plot, because the unraveling is a big part of the pleasure.  I did find it a bit confusing about two-thirds of the way in, but it's all so carefully built that it comes back together again (and boy does it!) by the end.

What I love about MacDonald is that there is a ton of real investigating.  This book is quite procedural.  I just love scenes of the detective talking to various characters, getting past their defenses and getting the info he needs to go to the next character.  Nobody does it better in my reading experience so far than MacDonald in these Archer books.  Each encounter is also an opportunity to expose a little bit of mid-20th century America, especially California.  The locations (expat artist town in Mexico, seedy Reno hotel apartment, Malibu beach houses) and the weirdos that live there (struggling bar owner, cute girl who goes on dates for slot machine money, drunken mom with wayward son) are each finely crafted and in the aggregate open up to the reader a fading, changing America.

I'm not going to say this book is super deep, but the title reveals a richer sub-text.  The hearse in question is the vehicle of a gang of surfer kids whose role is only incidental to the plot but thematically quite central.  It's about wayward children, the separation from their parents and the anger towards them, anger that comes out of trauma and just change.  The Zebra-Striped Hearse was written in 1962 and California feels decaying.  The 60s are coming and MacDonald makes you feel it in the wind.  I know too that Macdonald and Millar had their own wayward daughter with her own tragic end (and their own responsibility) so may surmise that is what he is writing about here.

It does get very dark in the end.  Characters that we thought were bad are much, much worse.  What I particularly appreciated is that the complex plot once you know the whole story is not that complex at all. It's just that everybody lying and hiding and Archer coming into it backwards makes the unravelling complex, which is the pleasure of the mystery.  Great book.  I haven't gone back and checked thoroughly but this is up there for one of the top books in 2023.

Oh yes, I almost forgot, there is a great little interchange near the end where Archer interacts with an early sci-fi nerd "a fat man with a frowzy unwed aura".  LOL!  He clearly did not approve:

59. Murder in the Wind by John D. MacDonald

Wow, an absolute banger!  I had been putting this one off for a long time.  It is the last of the Ed Gorman recommended JdM's so I was saving it.  Also, as I've expressed in my previous reviews, I had been growing somewhat weary of MacDonald's style, especially his sometimes convoluted sexual mores.  I gave in because I just needed a pallette cleanser and something hard and direct after some of the longer books I've been struggling through.  Well I am very pleased to report that this was absolutely great, one of my favourite JdM's (after Condominium, which I can consider a classic now that my sister loved it; interestingly also centered around a hurrican).

Because of the title and the way it began, I thought we were going to get more of a crime story.  The first chapter is a description of the growing storm.  These are the kinds of near-thrilling paragraphs  that MacDonald excels at, grabbing you with the captain of a freighter in the Caribean looking at the water and recognizing the signs, then zooming out to the geography and science of a growing hurricane.  We move to the human scale next, in classic JdM manner, with a neat structure of various cars passing each other on the highway heading North on the Gulf side of Florida.  As each car passes another, we get a chapter about that person's background: the family with the defeated father who are moving back north after failing to make it in Florida; the aggressive businessman with his belittled business partner, the widow with the ashes of her manic-depress husband who had recently killed himself, the failed tennis pro and his heiress bride, the two escaped cons and their cow-like girl in tow and finally the hard as nails fed who has finally found the last spy of the cell that blew up his wife.  

There are a lot of characters!  I thought we were going to have a book mainly focused around the tensions and conflict of these characters trapped somewhere in the storm, but as they only finally get stuck together well past the halfway mark, I realized it was more of a troupe story with the storm and its destruction as the main conflict.  Fine by me.  MacDonald keeps them clear for the reader and I only once or twice had to refer back to remind myself which was which.  It's a short, efficient book and he satisfies all their narrative arcs with an extremely moving romantic storyline as well.  This really is a tight, fun read.  He gives you everything you want with both the characters and the physical action of the storm.  That shit seems really terrifying!  It's not in depth but for instance, he spends a gleeful two pages describing the wealthy people's waterfront properties and how the storm first destroys their sea walls and then the houses themselves.  Thoroughly enjoyable, though honestly at one point, given how we are accelerating these disasters with our addiction to empty fossil-fuel driven consumption and you don't have to be in Florida or on the coast to have your life destroyed, I did have moments of real father anxiety while reading.

Dark fucking times, but on a Fifty Books note my project of reading all the Ed Gorman recommended non-Travis McGee books ended perfectly.

The part about the fish got my hyped.  JdM so good.

 

58. Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins

I discovered this at Drawn & Quarterly.  I'm ideologically opposed to trade paperbacks but this design by Seth definitely caught my eye and I'll make an exception for books that would be impossible to find in a traditional paperback format.  It is a truly interesting historical document, though the reading of the first two-thirds is quite slow going.  It picks up in the end in a sudden frenzy of narrative and plot craziness but I can't recommend it if you are looking for thrills.  

It's the story of a young doctor, Reuel Briggs, extremely good-looking, smart and conscientious but brooding, his soul weighted down by something.  It really takes us a long time to get anywhere, but we learn that he is well-liked and respected by his peers, but poor because he dabbles in only obscure sciences, including paranormal studies. He is entranced by Dianthe the lead singer of an African-American (the word "Negro" is used in the text) show as he had seen her in previous visions.  Soon after she dies in a train accident, but he realizes that as her body is not damaged she isn't truly dead and can be revived using some of the skills he has been studying.  He succeeds in bringing her back, but much of her memory is gone, including the knowledge that she herself is black.  This was the age of "passing" and we also soon learn that the protagonist himself is also black.  

We are already halfway through the book at this point and nobody has even mentioned going to search for a lost civilization in Africa, as we were promised on the back cover.  The story was originally serialized in in 1903 in The Colored American Magazine of which Hopkins was the editor. You can see how reading it as the issues came out would have made fora more satisfying read, as the writing has a lyrical quality and there are interesting ideas, especially about race (hints and suggestions at first but much more explicit near the end).  However, in book form, it feels very meandering and the reader does not always feel on sure footing.  I think much of that is also due to the style of the times in which it was written, with references to Milton and abrupt jumps in location and changes of pace.

Eventually we get to a love triangle, as Briggs' close friend and sponsor Aubrey Livingston, scion of a wealthy, white previously slave-owning family falls for Dianthe and tricks Briggs into going off on an expedition to Africa.  Once Briggs is out of the way, Livingston arranges a canoe accident where his fiance drowns and at first we think he and Dianthe also drown but instead he makes it shore and squirrels her away.  From here things get quite gothic and crazy.  Dianthe dies at least 3 times.  There is a real muddying of contemporary ethics (she feels super guilty about being married twice) and racial issues. I get the feeling that Hopkins had to rush the conclusion.

I'm glad I read it for several reasons. It's a seminal piece of science fiction that I had not known about. The racial issues are fascinating, both to see how they are treated in the behaviour in the book (seems like 1903 was weirdly less racist then today in some social ways, yet clearly super duper racist) as well as some of the foundations of ideas that are prevalent in later black crime fiction in the second half of the twentieth century.

This is part of MIT Press's Radium Age book series, celebrating early science fiction that bridges the classics of the 19th century and the big boom that we call the Golden Age in the second half of the 20th.  It has an aggressive and informative forward by Minister Faust which helped put a lot of the African mythology in the book in context.

Pauline Hopkins was a badass and
yet sadly neglected by history.

57. Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell is one of the grande dames of British crime fiction and I have had her on the non-urgent hunting list for a while.  I've been trying to make regular visits to scour S.W. Welch's in its final days and noticed quite a few Rendells in the thinning mystery shelf.  I quickly googled "best Ruth Rendell" and got this one so I bought it.  Time period, cover design and page count all looked right up my alley so this got bumped my priority list for a long weekend vacation trip the Eastern Townships.

Unfortunately, it begins with two potential strikes against it for me.  First the crime and the culprit are revealed in the opening paragraph.  She implies that there is still a mystery about what led up to the crime and how it was solved afterwards, but this made me worried that what I was going to read was more of a horror story then a detective story, which turned out to be true.  An upper middle-class family of four is shot to death in their home by their live-in maid.  

The second strike which is also laid out in the opening pages is that the maid, Eunice Parcherson, is illiterate and this was the motive behind the murders.  I can imagine that illiteracy is an incredibly powerful social stigma (and even those words feel like I am putting it lightly).  I am pretty ignorant about how illiteracy would impact somebody socially and I am hoping that Rendell did her research before making it the defining characteristic and drive for a brutal murder.  I don't feel like I really learned any more about it from this book.  The idea is that this working class woman not only isolated herself socially because she couldn't read, but that her illiteracy actually deadened her feelings and sensitivity to the human world.  While she does have heightened memory and quick practical learning skills, she has never learned empathy or the basics of emotional human interaction. Ultimately, it is even suggested that Eunice is not even human but an atavistic, pre-human creature.  This just strikes me as utterly false.  I would imagine that illiteracy might even heighten the emotional senses as you have to rely on so many non-written clues to get around in the world.  

The construction of the Eunice character also feels deeply classist and biased, as the implication here is that lack of education (of which not being able to read is the most extreme form) is what creates the monster.  To be fair, Rendell is quite ruthless with almost all her characters and she is equally nasty about the well-educated, pretentious and un-self-aware family.  One gets a sense, nevertheless, that Rendell would not trust anybody who doesn't love a library.

So as I sense from the beginning, Judgement in Stone is really a horror story about a family unknowingly trapped in their home by a sociopathic illiterate whose flaw will drive her to homicidal mania.  Reminiscent of In Cold Blood, the trigger that will transform Eunice from a cold, removed repellent presence who is kept on because of the excellence of her house work into a homicidal maniac is her friendship with town gossip and religious maniac Joan Smith.  This latter character who starts out quite rich also ends up being somewhat simplistic, basically just going insane in the end.

I'm spending a lot of time critiquing the premise.  The actual execution is quite well done.  The portrayal of the family and the town is extremely well done so that the reader is quite able to sense the environment both physical and social and really know and quite sympathize with the family (especially the two children).  Rendell expertly expels any illusions one might have about moving to the English countryside. The town is dominated by the worst kind of British social constraints and a rapid and condemning gossip network.  I grew up with a watered-down version of this on Vancouver Island in the 80s where there were a lot of middle-class British expats and it's just the worst.

I'm just not a fan of horror. I have enough low-level anxiety and dread in my own imagination that I don't enjoy reading about it all.  But if that is your thing as it is for many, I can see how enjoyable this book would be. The idea of having the live-in help who does a really excellent job (it is a big house and Eunice's labour turns it from a deteriorating, stress-creating environment for the wife to the ideal aristocratic household) but makes you at first vaguely uncomfortable and then more and more creeped out until finally the masters are psychologically beholden to the servant is a really great one touching on so many social issues.  It's deeply uncomfortable and the tension and dread increase until the almost mild but psychologically explosive pre-climax (before the actual violence) when Eunice's greatest fear of having her illiteracy exposed happens.

I can understand the critical praise the book gets, just know you are not getting a mystery but a social horror/crime novel.  I do feel the portrayal of the antagonists is still simplistic enough that it deserves some critique even for fans of those genres.

Postscript:  I just learned that Rendell has an entirely separate series of straight-up detective books starring Inspector Reginald Wexford.  Those are what I should probably be looking for.

 

56. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

Another pick-up from S.W. Welch's last days, I thought that I had already read this, but once I was about a third of the way through I realized it was new to me.  I kind of messed myself up by stopping reading Gibson and then picking up books at random much later.  I would have rather read them in order, simply to keep track of which ones I've read.  All his post sci-fi books that I have read have been really good, but their narratives are not clearly delineated nor easily remembered with time (they tend to be cool girl and other neat characters are trying to find something that they don't know what it is). His books are grouped into trilogies but not because of a narrative through line but just shared time and place and some characters.  Now that I have "rediscovered" Gibson and enjoy his later books, I have them on my hunting list and am going to try and read them in order.

Pattern Recognition is Gibson's 9/11 novel. The story goes that he was almost finished with it when the planes hit and was going to abandon it when his editor convinced him to re-write it to incorporate the new world.  I resist the idea that "9/11 changed everything" because it is so annoyingly American and self-centered, but two decades later, I can see that there is a lot of validity to it.  Pattern Recognition puts 9/11 in the back story, the protagonist's father who worked for the CIA but had retired, disappeared on that day after checking out from a hotel in lower Manhattan.  The main plot is about her working as a consultant for an elite advertising/marketing agency called Blue Ant and its powerful, charismatic, manipulative and morally ambiguous Belgian boss named Bigend.  She has a unique skill/flaw in that she is allergic to branding and logos and can sniff out a logo that will work or not.  On the side, her main interest is investigating these mysterious snippets of video that are being released to the internet. She is a big part of the internet community (online forums at this stage) that is obsessed with these videos.  The story takes off when Bigend hires her to continue her personal investigation into these video snippets in a professional capacity.

There is a lot going on here.  Gibson explores early internet culture, as well as fashion and street style (one of the characters is a "cool hunter" another a guerrilla marketer hired to be cool and hot and drop references to certain products to men she meets in bars).  The roads slowly lead back to Russia and we get a lot of exploration into post-Soviet collapse and the growth of oligarchs.  It's a testimony to Gibson's vision and style that none of this feels dated.  The content is, but he frames it from an objective stance that both gives you a slice of what was going on then as well as demonstrating how these things laid the foundation for the excessive versions with which we are living in the 2020's.

There is also a real aspirational, wish-fulfillment element in these books that I really enjoy.  They are corporate fantasies, where the protagonist gets the coolest freelance gig ever.  She never has to deal with any administrative or grunt work.  Has access to first-class flights, boutique hotel rooms, limo pickups and elite restaurants where the tab is paid all with a quick phone call to a person whose job is to immediately get you anything you need, including visas, passports, etc.  Her challenges are internal (should she expose her personal and artistic interest in these video snippets to her corporate boss who wants to exploit it for marketing clout?) and political (why does the icy Italian VP seem to want to fuck with her and what should she do about it?).

The goals are ambitious and somehow Gibson wraps it up in a rich, satisfying way.  This is the first book of the so-called Blue Ant trilogy and I've already read the second, so the next on my list is.

55. Intrigue by Desmond Cory

Sadly, S.W. Welch is closing up shop.  It's one of the last English language used book stores in Montreal who narrowly dodged a shitrat developer rent increase thanks to public protest.  Now, the owner (Mr. Welch himself) says that there will be another increase, not as drastic but still too high, when his lease ends so he is taking this as a good time to retire and I guess they couldn't find another owner.  The stock had remained pretty stale in the last few years but I loved browsing there and still found good books from time to time.   It's a sad loss, but at least feels to me more like one due to time rather than the greed and corruption that dominates this province.

Everything is half-off and because it pains me to see books not go to a good home I've been poking in here and picking up books I may not otherwise have bought.  Thus this nice Johnny Fedora hardcover, about which I have always been curious.  Based on this one, it will probably be my first and last Desmond Cory. It's not terrible, but sort of generic, seeming to rest on its Britishness more than any actual exciting storytelling or adventure.  The fight scenes were quite rigorous and fun but overall the whole thing felt slight and rote.  It does not have much "Intrigue" that's for sure.  The region also was kind of interesting, as it takes place in Trieste during the early years of the Cold War, which I guess was not part of Italy back then.  I'm not really sure.

The story involves the British holding some master spy who won't tell them anything but they know he has planned some big plot.  It's up to the protagonist to figure it out by going to Trieste and investigating.  He hires/pressures Johnny Fedora and the two of them get involved in sneaking into places, finding and befriending/interrogating a beautiful woman.  It feels like watered down, less rich and well-written Eric Ambler (though with more fight scenes).

It's not terrible by any means and if you were desperate for some decent 20th Century British espionage and sleuthing, this would assuage your thirst.  He clearly has his fans and the official Desmond Cory website is an excellent reference source.

 

54. Fool's Fate by Robin Hobb (book 3 of the Tawny Man, trilogy 3 of the Elderlings Saga)

actually bought this new!

Phew!  Now this was a nerdy fantasy tome!  I'm quite proud of myself now over halfway through the 16 book Realm of the Elderling series and especially for getting through this 900+ page beast.  Overall, I will say that I really enjoyed reading this trilogy.  I didn't quite do it straight through, but read the 2nd and 3rd back to back which I realize now as a bit too intense.  I think for me there is a nice middle ground where I read series or trilogy books in order and without waiting too long that I forget the plot details but can also read a very different book or two in between.  The richness and depth of both the narrative and the world (and especially its history) make it well worth getting deep into the series.  It was not effortless, though, as getting through certain parts made me feel like Fitz when he was dragging Thick behind him in the snow.

 I will limit my critiques here as both the things I didn't like and the things I liked in the first two books were more or less the same here. I did, though, have one major issue which really slowed down my reading of this.  The entire first two-thirds of this book is predicated on a clearly stupid and erroneous quest to slay the dragon.  Obviously, the Narcheska and her uncle were under external pressure and pretty obviously this was the white witch.  Chade and Dutiful and Fitz all seemed uncharacteristically stupid in continuing stubbornly to try and kill the dragon when all they had to do was have a bit more communication with the Outislanders and just go after the White Witch.  This drove me crazy and made me only able to read a few pages at a time.  Not as big a deal, but likewise Fitz stupidly jumping through the portal stones after everybody warned him multiple times about how dangerous they were was totally uncharacteristic for the same person who is super conservative about any skill use or training. It just didn't ring true and only seemed like a justification to create a delay in his return.

I will say, though, that as usual Robin Hobb has the last word as she has an in-book magical reason that explains why FitzChivalry was such a whiny bitch for the bulk of the trilogy:  when he had dumped his traumatic memories of torture and abandonment into the stone dragon at the end of the first trilogy, he had also lost something of his spirit and the strength to push himself.  This leads me to discuss some of the themes that she explores in this series.

The main background theme here (main in the sense that it is driving the ultimate conflict going on between the White Witch and the Fool) is interestingly environmental.  Ultimately, the White Witch wants to push events so that dragons are destroyed and humanity dominates the land, though why she wants to do this is never clearly explained beyond her broad hatred of anything beautiful (as demonstrated in her vandalizing the Elderlings under-ice city).  So basically humans dominating = evil.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next seven books.

The other main theme is trauma and trauma recovery. Fitz is deeply damaged and is a child (and young man) of abuse.  Though I feel that it goes too far in pushing his terrible decision-making, it ultimately does make thematic sense and does make you feel deeply happy for him when things finally work out. Hobb was somewhat ahead of the times with addressing trauma so deeply in a fantasy epic a good decade before it became all the rage in every genre. Like all great fantasy and sci-fi authors, she uses cool fantasy stuff like Skilling magic as a metaphor for very real issues of our time.

Finally, though it is not addressed too deeply, I was struck by a great comment when Dutiful accuses Fitz of using his wolf side when he wants to get aggressive and go all loner and ass-kicked and Fitz corrects him and says that the real Wolf side of him would have shown his strength by defending the pack, teaching and caring for the young ones.  The loner violence is the human side.  This was a nice little stick in the eye to all these loser fake-ass alpha male douchenozzles who are making money scamming sad boys on the internet today.

There are several other themes (addiction) in this series.  I suspect that part of the reason I enjoy them so much is not just the great writing, characters and setting but also that I am probably roughly politically aligned with Hobb.  Also just shout-out to her for being a badass writer, cranking out books while raising 4 kids on a husband's commercial fisherman's salary.  I presume she has bank and comfort now and it was well earned.  I'll take a longish break before getting into the next quartet, but am quite looking forward to it as it is back to the River Wilds and the dragons and hopefully a lot less whining and self-doubt.

53. Golden Fool by Robin Hobb (book 2 of the Tawny Man, trilogy 3 of the Elderlings Saga)

So now we conclude book 2 in the ongoing adventures of Mr. Jump to Conclusions always in the worst possible way man.  Oh my god, I seriously considered whether I would be able to finish this one in the middle.  The setting in incredible, rich and evocative.  The plotlines are multi-layered and intriguing.  The magic system is well thought out and keeps revealing more.  I want to find out what happens.  But argh the protagonist sucks!  I still can't tell if Hobb is doing this on purpose or if she doesn't get that we don't need his constant misinterpretation and extreme pessimism to drive the book forward.  Almost every thing that happens, he takes it in the worst possible way.  He is also often quite stupid (like no shit the Outislanders young queen's servant woman is obviously an avatar for the evil White Prophet).  

But not only is he always misunderstanding everything to an extreme, he is also kind of an asshole.  He is super prude about sex in a way that nobody else around him seems to be.  Two different women want to have regular sex with him with no strings attached but niceness and not only does he have to reject them, he has to do it in the most assholish way guaranteed to piss them off (and unfairly).  And then to make matters worse, he is also a homophobe!  His best friend, who may not even be a human and can switch identities and genders and peels his skin like a snake every year, is in love with him.  When he pushes the friend to admit this, he then shuns him and is all angry.  Like WTF?!  Yes, this can be awkward, but anger?  Just maddening.  He spends the entire book shunning his biological daughter because he is so convinced that if he shows himself to be alive, her adopted dad will be destroyed?  The same person who is devastated and blames himself for his death?  Make it make sense.  

And the final thing that is really bugging me is that he acts like he has to make this tough choice whether or not to support Prince Dutiful in his quest to kill the dragon.  He frames it like this terrible choice between supporting the Fool and saving the dragon so they can mate and dragons can come back which duh everybody wants and would be good for the world or killing the dragon because his prince took up a challenge from his bride which she was obviously forced by the evil white prophet to make.  Obviously, you save the dragon and try to free the Outislanders from the white prophet's coercion.

The thing is despite these frustrations, Hobb always manages to pull it back by the end.  There is some redemption and positive developments in FitzChivalry's whiney life and more importantly, the storylines are gripping and conclude in exciting and satisfying ways.  The brutal fight scene where the Piebald leader and his supporters get their just desert is intense, brutal and extremely satisfying (though still we have to have Fitz get all resentful because he got left in jail afterwards and feeling abandoned when it obviously was the right thing to do and he was better protected because of it).  The negotiations with the mixed representatives of the Old Blood is equally satisfying and almost promising, with the bonus that the young prince shows some character as well.

I am surging on to the last book in the trilogy and then can move back to the Rain Wilds where there are also some annoying characters, but a nice mix and done I hope in third person so I don't have to hear their thoughts.

52. Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith

I found this on my parents' bookshelf.  My mom didn't seem to know about it so I don't actually know where it came from, but I'm glad it was there.  Turns out Diary of a Nobody is a major influence on english literature in two streams: the fictional diary format and the sympathetic mockery of the growing lower-middle class in Edwardian (and later) England.

The diary is written by Mr. Pooter, a married clerk living in the suburbs outside of London who strives to be proper and uphold Victorian class ideals and esthetics.  He is hilariously prim and un-self-aware.  He is also always constantly injuring himself in minor slapstick accidents, like banging his head on the window when pulling it in quickly because he thinks a gentleman is arriving at his house and wants to ensure the maid answers the door. He narrates in detail his petty conflicts with tradespeople as well as his sycophantic love for his boss, the gentleman Mr. Perkupp.  Though he is the object of much scorn by many of his fellows and the book is poking fun at him, none of it is mean-spirited.  The writers clearly have a real sympathy for him and it makes the book funny and endearing.  He and his wife Carrie have a very good and loving marriage and that is never attacked or mocked.

As it was initially a series of entries in Punch and expanded when published as a single book, it's not a full narrative, although there are a few narrative threads that run through it.  The biggest is Lupin, their wayward son and whether or not he'll get a job.  He falls in with the bad influence of a theatre troupe. It is a light and quick read, highly enjoyable for those who have an understanding of British culture, possibly mostly impenetrable for those who don't.

51. Fools Errand by Robin Hobb (book 1 of the Tawny Man, trilogy 3 of the Elderlings Saga)

Jumping back into the Realm of the Elderlings saga, I started the third trilogy (and the second Farseer) with Fools Errand.  I did a bit of wikipedia reading on the first Farseer trilogy to catch back up and Hobb spends a good chunk of this first book with Fitz recalling the past events, so it wasn't too difficult to get reintegrated.  Fitz is now a hermit woodsman, living with hit Witted wolf Nighteyes and his adopted son Hap in a small cabin and existing off the land.  He is of course full of constant regrets and doubts and just generally pathetic mopiness. Hobb walked a thin line in the first trilogy between making Fitz a deliberately flawed character and just making him annoying and socially obtuse to the point of ridiculousness (and plot manipulation).  We get a lot of the latter in the first third of the book, but it's tolerable as there is also a lot of good stuff, including fleshing out the world (we learn more about the complexities of the prejudices against the Witted), some nice new characters (innocent, promising Hap and magic-item providing and possible love interest Jinna the witch) and finally some actual hints of badassness from Fitz himself!

There is a lot of preamble and setting up, but ultimately Chade convinces Fitz that he needs to come back to Bucktown and continue his career and destiny.  The bigger plot of The Fool is expanded upon and we learn that he is some kind of destiny manipulator and that he has an antagonist who was maybe involved with the Redship Raiders.  The catalyst that brings Fitz back is the disappearance of the prince.  The Fool, Fitz and a hunstwoman head out to a neighbouring county whose queen had given the prince a hunting cat to which it seems the boy became witted.  This adventure is pretty straightforward for a Robin Hobb novel, basically a long chase and eventual ambush.  I enjoyed it, except for a part that again felt forced and false where they capture one of the bad guys, who was left as a rear guard and is clearly a teenager way out of his depth.  Fitz all of a sudden decides he has to torture him.  The character motivation here was his loyalty to the Farseer line but there were just so many other ways for him to find out what he needed (and he didn't really even need to find out that much).  It just seemed like fake conflict and just out of character.

Fortunately, this was short-lived and the climax is quite exciting (including a teleporting interlude to the beach of mementoes from the Liveship Traders trilogy hinting at greater connects between these two narratives).  Surprisingly, this book actually has a solid denouement where Fitz gets some reward and love for his efforts.  Despite some nitpicks, this was a great start to the next trilogy and I look forward to seeing Fitz's next challenges as the new Chade.

50. Anarchy and Old Dogs by Colin Cotterill

My mother had several of the books from this series in my family's bookshelf and I was curious to read them but had too many other books to read at the time.  I found this one in a box on the street where some neighbour (whom I heard has since moved) had put some good 80s sci-fi and other miscellaneous paperbacks. I debated choosing something more auspicious for my 50th book of the year (a new speed record for me), but ended up just going with something consumable.

This is part of a series featuring national coroner and amateur detective, Dr. Siri Panboum.  It takes place in post-revolutionary Laos.  I feel like there needs to be a name for this sub-genre, the cozy regional/other culture detective series.  There is probably one for almost every part of the world, Alexander McCall Smith's No 1 Ladies Detective Agency being the big name.  I guess the difference here is that is also a period piece.  

The investigation is triggered here by a blind man who is killed by a runaway truck, revealing an invisible ink letter on his person.  Siri uncovers a possible royalist sponsored military coup and heads south with an old revolutionary colleague to investigate.  We get lots of interesting locations, culture and history.  The history was informative and I appreciated learning more about what happened to Laos in the revolutionary period after WWII.  There are also two side murder mysteries, a deputy governor who is electrocuted in his bathtub and a village boy who is drowned.  The last one was quite sad. 

I enjoyed the book but didn't get deeply caught up in it.  It might have been that I jumped in late in the series and did not have a strong connection to Dr. Siri.  He's a fun character, with a spiritual side.  There is a lot of drinking as well.  

A note on reading 50 books in under 5 months.  It's rather intense.  My mind feels a bit jumbled but wants to keep pressing on, like at the end of a long-distance race.  A big factor here is just consistently reading, with a few late nights.  Mainly, though, I think it's because I have cut movies and most TV out of my life these days (though still watching a lot of basketball).  I've also cut way down on Twitter, though it still sucks me into its maw from time to time.

49. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

This was the latest book I was reading to my daughter at bedtime.  Obviously, a classic, I wanted to get it into her consciousness before she was too old. I think at first she wasn't totally into it. The narrative jumps around a bit and the first few chapters are more about Mole and Rat and their pleasant semi-rural existence.  I loved these parts, myself.  Once Toad became the centre of the narrative, she got more connected.  It was interesting because at some point she pointed out that she thought the book was going to be about Mole but then seemed really to be about Toad.  He really is a funny and infuriating yet compelling character that keeps the book driving forward with his egomaniacal narcissism.  Sort of a Bertie Wooster on steroids, the kind of lovable aristocrat that would no longer fit in today's world (and probably shouldn't have been as lauded in yesterday's), but so much fun to read about.  

The two sections of the book really are an interesting mix of descriptive, almost lyrical examinations of friendship, hospitality and the British countryside, among other themes with just straight-up action and slapstick comedy.  It got my eyes watering when Mole returns to his old, abandoned home and experiences all those feelings of nostalgia when one has closed one chapter and moved on to another.  And then at the end it's basically Badger leading Toad, Rat and Mole armed with cudgels to go full brawl on the invading stoats and weasels.  

Anyhow, a wonderful book.  Read it to your children.  My only regret is that in my haste to get a copy to read to my daughter, of all the various illustrated editions, I bought this elegant but too minimal copy that is kind of a bummer.  I'll look for an illustrated version so she can check out some images and we'll watch one of the movie versions as well.

48. A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

I consider this paperback to be a pretty nice little find.  I had read this a long time ago, it was all the rage amongst a group of friends I was hanging with in the 90s.  They were all about alternative culture, zines and all that and I remember this one being a big deal.  I see on the wikipedia page that Crews was trendy among the 90s hipsters like Sonic Youth and Madonna.  I can definitely say this book is very readable, though it's not my jam.  There is too much cruelty to animals and just gross stuff.  I am trying to supress a slight contempt, as my understanding is that Crews was the real deal. It just feels like there is a deliberate attempt to be over the top, to write something that would get urban 90s hipsters in their early thirties all excited.  As an old hardboiled head, I feel a slightly smug superiority from some of the equally hardcore, but less over the top and perhaps therefore more impactful, books of the decades before.

That being said, the setup in A Feast of Snakes is pretty wild and creative.  The snake theme is everywhere and well thought out.  The description of the town and its big snake festival is richly painted.  The characters are all interesting and the writing is compelling.  I just don't really get what it is all in aid of.  The passage where they bully Poncy, the fat old ex-salesman with a Spanish name and background, feels gratuitous and somewhat forced.  Let's make a weaker person party super hard and make him shit his pants!  Even when I get beyond how much of this is an accurate portrayal of the extremes of redneck life in small-town Georgia, I still don't really understand why we care.  If it is just a creative portrayal of a pretty wild location, then as that it succeeds and is entertaining.  I'm not sure what the narrative and internal dialogue of the protagonist, Joe Lon Mackey, tortured ex-football star, is supposed to tell us about life or anything.  The ending especially feels like a simplistic resolution to the typical depression/anxiety of the redneck living in a double-wide who beats his wife and realizes nothing will ever change.

So I have lots of criticisms, but if you can stand a little excess and grossness and cruelty and may even be down for some of that, this is a really quick and fun read.

47. The Paperback Conspiracy by various National Lampoon writers

Well from the best book of the year to the worst (also possibly on the all-time worst list as well).  This was a gift from a friend who can't help buying stuff at this cool comic store.  I didn't get what it was until I started reading it.  It's basically a collection of National Lampoon articles from I guess the magazine.  It's a bummer because my aunt's long-time boyfriend when I was an adolescent and in college who was a very cool funny guy was a writer for the National Lampoon I guess around the time this book was published (1974) though maybe quite a lot later.  He doesn't have anything in this one in any case, but if what is written here is indicative of the Lampoon that he was writing or then I have to notch down my respect.

There are a few very mildly funny pieces (or parts of pieces) but mostly this is deeply unfunny.  I recognize that humour is hard, probably the hardest kind of writing to craft.  So I like to give some leeway.  The problem here is not only is not funny, but much of it is mean-spirited with sprinkles of misogyny and centrist-establishment mocking of radical politics.  It just all feels easy and lazy and smug, the humour of the privileged.  There is one writer who had some cleverness in his turn of phrase and ideas, Henry Beard, but the rest was an absolute chore to get through and I almost gave up several times.  I have been reading it for a few months and only finished the last few stories today.  Hey, it gets me closer to 50 books.

46. The Runaways by Victor Canning

This is so far the book of the year for me, possibly going into my all-time pantheon.  I found it in a free book box inside the Little Burgundy rec centre.  I actually hesitated at first, as I am not a huge fan of Victor Canning's espionage and crime novels.  My good judgement held firm as I could not turn away a beautiful (if faded) Pan that is a combo of young adult and free animal themes.  I am sure glad I took it.  This find went from a B to an A+ that is still delivering.  What a great book!

If I were much less lazy, I would try to write a proper essay on this book and its implications.  Reading this book really crystallized why I read the types of books I do.  There is a common theme of many of the books I read, of freedom.  The private eye working on the edges of the law making his own decisions, the ex-soldier trying to find lost gold in the jungle, Parker walking the thin line between the cops and the outfit, all these narratives provide a fantasy of escape from the confines of quotidian domestic life (the "four walls of today" as the intro to the great OTR Escape puts it so well).  I also like violence and ass-kicking, but reading The Runaways made me realize that I can have a deeply satisfying and even emotional response to a basically action-free adventure.  Other than the cheetah hunting (which was pretty cool but written in a matter of fact style), there is almost no conflict in this book, let alone action.  

Smiler, as he is known, though his real name is Samuel M., is a nice but somewhat errant 15-year old boy who gets falsely arrested for stealing an old lady's pocket book and is sent to an "approved school".  He runs away and gets picked up by the police.  While they are driving him back they get caught in a powerful thunderstorm.  Stopping to help a stranded motorist, the cops leaving Smiler alone and he takes advantage to hop it into the woods.  At the same time, in a nearby open air wild animal zoo in an arisocrat's estate, a female cheetah, Yarra, escapes when a lightning strike destroys the fence that closes her in.  After their various wanderings, Smiler and Yarra end up unknowingly (at first) sharing the same barn as a hiding place.

Smiler is a resourceful and smart kid, almost wise above his years in some ways. His father is a cook on merchant marine ships and his mother died when he was young, which accounts for his independence as well as his somewhat wild ways.  Another element that I loved about this book that though he is on the run from the law and has to be very careful, so there is some tension, everybody that he encounters is that great sort of reasonable, tolerant English person who doesn't ask unnecessary questions once they ascertain that you are a good sort on the out side.  The worst person is his older sister (from whom he ran away) and her great sin is just to maintain a way too clean and uptight household.

I found this book a joy to read from beginning to end.  As well as the freedom angle, particularly enjoyable when following Yarra on her explorations and hunts, we also get some great bildungsroman as Smiler gets a job working at kennels and local colour and geography and even a small bit of detecting.  The final cherry on the top is that there is a sequel, which perhaps I should be wary of as the open ending is quite perfect.  Still, I will definitely add this to my hunting list.

45. The Notch on the Knife by William Haggard

This is a propitious find as I had been under the impression until recently that Haggard was really a writer of the post-war period, but it turns out he wrote books about Colonel Russel right up until the early 80s.  I think mainly the reason I had that impression was because the only books of his I could ever find were those lovely old green Penguins. So I was pleased to find two of his books from the 70s in the recent Plattsburgh haul, under the Walker British Mystery imprint (which I believe is American).

Haggard's post-WWII conservative pragmatism comes out even more starkly when you know it takes place in the 70s.  Colonel Russel is retired now, has a flat and is on the board of a big mining company.  Milo, an old friend from his war days in the Balkan mountains who also happens to be the president of the country where the fought comes to visit.  It is purely social but he does let on that there has been a significant discovery of iron in those hills and that he has come to England to negotiate with Russel's company about getting the rights to mine that iron.  Upon leaving, Russel saves Milo from his own booby-trapped hallway where somebody planted a mine.  

Haggard does a lot of telling rather than showing.  This is often done by the internal thoughts of various characters.  On top of that, he never names any specific countries, except England.  Milo's country is a kind of lesser Yugoslavia, divided up into three barely held together (by Milo's charisma mostly) regions.  It is, like Ukraine today, caught between the west and the east.  The iron is a big factor in the tensions of such a nation, as Milo selling the rights to a British mining company is seen as selling out to capitalism.  This is only intensified when the big secret comes out that there is also significant gold.

I had trouble understanding the economics here, but this was before we got off the gold standard and currencies were struggling for some reason.  A single country getting a lot of gold could then use that somehow to destabilize other countries' currencies, which triggers the Americans to get involved.  Russel goes to the country, meets a hot young badass security agent when she knocks out a burglar in his hotel room and throws him off the balcony before acrobatically jumping down after him), gets involved in several adventures and assists the situation which climaxes in actually quite a crazy ending from which the title of the book comes.

There is a lot of action here, but it doesn't feel very exciting as much of it is sandwiched between long strategic soliloquies from the minds of the various players.  Haggard seems to have it in particularly for economists, diplomats and young hippies.  It's a decent book and the action saved it, but the plot felt simplistic and abstract and the politics is starting to show its age.

44. The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold (and the preceding Novella, Mountains of Mourning) (#4 in the Vorkosigan saga)

The Becky Chambers book got me into a sci-fi mood.  Because they are so hard to find and to remember the order, I had bought in advance several of the Vorkosigan saga books at Dark Carnival just so I would have them at hand and this was the perfect moment to dive back in.  The novella, Mountains of Mourning and the book The Vor Game were both in the same physical paperback where I read The Warrior's Apprentice.  I thought I was just going to read the novella and count it as a book, but calling it a novella is really stretching it.  It's closer to a short story.  So I felt it fair and wanted to stay with Miles so I simply continued on with The Vor Game.

Mountains of Mourning has Miles get sent deep into the heart of his home country Barrayar to investigate the murder of a "mutie" baby.  Born with a hare lip, the child is found dead by her mother in the crib.  The town wants to move on as this practice, though technically now illegal, is deeply woven into the military Barrayan culture. For Miles it is a challenge of leadership and ethics.  This is a tight, enjoyable story where we get to see him use his intelligence and charm to somewhat win the locals over and figure out the case.  Very enjoyable.

The Vor Game starts out similarily, this time with Miles graduating from the academy hoping for a posting on a ship but ending up getting sent to a frozen training island to be the local weatherman.  Here he encounters his drunk predecessor, hazing colleagues and the aggressively old school possibly psychotic colonel Metzov who runs the place.  This looks to be a murder mystery and then a similar ethical challenge when the colonel goes too far, when Miles is suddenly whisked away (because of the outcome of the ethical challenge where he stood up to the colonel with the other men whom he was forcing to clean a dangerously toxic accident) and joins Imperial Security to become a spy.  We are thrust back into space politics and Miles' old Dendaarii fleet.  This was a really tone shift (and Bujold acknowledges it, saying she wished they could have been two separate novels).

The second part was fun but it reminded me where these novels can require a lot of generosity from the nerdy reader.  There are a lot of wild coincidences that drive the plot forward.  Once I accept them, then I can get into the spirit of the story (and she also said she deliberately wanted to make it somewhat of a comic space opera), but one feels a bit of "come on!" when he not only runs into his old fleet who are involved in a imbroglio that may threaten Barrayar, but also the emperor himself when he is arrested!

The characters are quite fun and Miles is so likable that I can excuse some of the forced plot machinations.  Ultimately we are here for Miles to brilliantly and narrowly drag himself out of the fires, take advantage of his galactic old boy status and screw over some great badguys (Colonel Metzov returns, another coincidence and we also get a new villain platinum blonde manipulatrice Cavilo).  The Vor Game reminded me of Georgette Hayer's books, but in space.

43. the long way to a small angry planet by Becky Chambers

This book has been on my list for a long time and I ended up buying it new as I like to throw some money to independent bookstores when my on-deck shelf can afford it (and currently it is at less then 50% width full which is the lowest it has been in several years).  It is part of what I half-jokingly and endearingly refer to as the new wave of "Woke" Science Fiction.  Other than a recommendation from a work colleague who is way ahead of me on these new authors, I had no knowledge of what to expect.  The cover is misleading as is the pull-quote ["a quietly profound, humane tour de force" - The Guardian].  It's definitely humane; quietly profound is stretching it and tour de force is simply unearned.  It is however, a thoroughly enjoyable science fiction read, inventive and compelling and at times movingly satisfying.  

The actual one area where it really is quite groundbreaking is in its structure.  There is no overarching storyline at all, no big conflict with a final climax.  It is episodic, almost like an older TV series, except that the transitions between episodes are not as delineated.  The story starts out with Rosemary, privileged young human woman from Mars who ships out on a beat-up but lovingly crewed tunneling ship.  Their job is to dig the tunnels between layers of space that allow for travel between systems.  Perspective jumps from crew member to crew member, each of which is a quirky individual and whose pasts give us knowledge about the universe we are in.  We basically follow the ship and its crew as it moves from job to job, getting to know them and the universe better.  They are ultimately setting out to do one big job that involves connecting a tunnel to a volatile species and the final chapters are about that job, but it is the people and the setting that is the throughline here, not any narrative.  

This is overall a relatively reasonable and benign world.  It's kind of the Scandinavia of science fiction world-building.  There are conflicts and problems and politics but it seems that most people are trying to make things okay.  Humans are a lesser species, saved from extinction only by the luck of one of their pilgrimage ships escaping dying earth running into a superior race of aliens.  The fun here are the exotic locations and the cool side characters.  This book is almost like an introduction to a tabletop RPG campaign setting put into a narrative form.  There is not a lot of tension and I appreciated that.  It was an easy page-turner that had me moved on several moments, a much needed tonic from some of the bad books I had to go through recently.

42. The Bamboo Blonde by Dorothy B. Hughes

Wow was this ever a disappointment.  I was pretty excited to find an original Pocket book of one of Hughe's early works, both as a collector and to read it.  After finally getting through this one, I have but faint hope that it is a nice collector's edition that I got a deal on.  I consider Hughes to be one of the best and most influential noir/hardboiled authors (of course semi-erased today because woman writer), so would really like to understand her motivations and goals in writing this book.  It's really a disaster.

There several problems with The Bamboo Blonde and they are apparent right from the beginning.  First and foremost, the protagonist, Griselda, is so disempowered and weak that it almost seems a parody.  She is on honeymoon in Long Beach with Con. It's their second marriage and already he is walking out on her with other women in bars, not listening to her, constantly drinking excessively against her wishes.  He is a well-known radio reporter and announcer but also has a history of espionage work and Griselda is deathly afraid he is actually there on a mission.  He just seems like a total dick and the more dickish he is, the more she wants to sacrifice herself for him. He puts her in truly dangerous positions constantly all the while telling her nothing because he doesn't want her to get involved and put herself at risk.  I was hoping right up until the end that she would start to show some pluck and turn the tables on him.  This book is like the negative Bechtel test.  Con is barely in it and yet her entire internal monologue (which is a lot of the text) is all about Con.  The only actual active behaviour that Griselda manifests is calling her colleagues in Hollywood to get info. She is a costume designer and there are tiny hints that she is well-respected in her business milieu, but that is the extent of it.

It's also just super boring.  The bulk of the action is all the various characters meeting over dinners and lunches and speculating about who did what.  Nobody has any information, least of all Griselda, so you are basically in the dark about everything.  There are things happening, but I would be being generous to call it a plot.  A woman is murdered.  There is an evil British colonel who is evil because Griselda can feel it right away (of course Con exposes her to him at every opportunity).  There is a maguffin about a missing radio engineer who is working on a Pan-American network or something that is causing all these people to gather at Long Beach but nobody knows who is doing or knowing which stuff.  It just goes on and on and then at the end we get endless pages where they all explain to each other what they did and why they did it but at that point you really don't care at all.

There are a few genuinely creepy passages when Griselda is all alone at their beach house and some of the characters, like the one-legged sheriff and his candy-eating son, are fun.  I learned that this was a sequel or follow-up to The So Blue Marble which I also disliked, though not as ferociously.  Good to know that writers can improve!