7. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

I'd been looking for this used for a while.  It's pretty new and probably being reprinted since it was fairly successful.  I did find a used copy in this bloated trade paperback format (although to be fair, slightly easier to read for me as the pages go by so much quicker).  I was intrigued by the dystopic sci-fi concept with animal companions.  Unfortunately, when I was about a quarter of the way through, Meezly noticed it and was surprised that I was reading it as she had read two of her books and found them consistently badly written!  This was dismaying as I was already feeling somewhat distanced from the story, but I tried to put aside any bias and plow through.

Zoo City does at first have a cool concept.  It takes place in a ghetto for "the animaled" in Johannesburg.  For reasons that aren't at first clear (and actually were never clear for me until I read some other reviews), certain people suddenly find themselves attached to a single animal of a variety of species.  They are corporeal and real animals but seem to initially appear magically and if you are separated from them it is like agony.  If your animal dies, you get swallowed up by some weird darkness.  You also gain a magical skill.  The heroine has a sloth and she can find lost things.

The story begins with her finding a lost ring in the sewer for a client only to find the old lady brutally murdered when she returns with the ring .  She is on the scene with her fingerprints (she touched things to get a bead on the lost ring) and so gets accused of the murder.  This triggers her being engaged to also find a lost pop star twin, even though she swears she will never look for lost people (we are never really told why this is and it doesn't seem to matter as she takes the job).

I didn't find the writing as bad as Meezly did.  There are a lot of short sentences and really wild metaphors (which I didn't mind as they were kind of fun in a dystopic sci-fi Chandleresque manner).  The problem is that she is trying to do subtle inference instead of just telling you what is going on and many times, especially in the action scenes, I couldn't figure out what actually was going on.  The real problem with this book, though, is the overall plot and for lack of a better word, its intention.  It felt like Beukes went out and did an inventory of as many tropes she could find under the dual headings of "dystopic near-future" and "contemporary issues" with a particular appeal to young, woke readers.  So we have refugees, exploitation, discrimination, ghettoization, trauma and on and on.  These things are fine but none of it feels heartfelt here.  The plot goes all over the place so that by the time it all does come together, I really didn't care.  Another reviewer pointed out something I hadn't explicitly noticed, that the protagonist has zero influence in the big final climax.  She rescues the man she was sleeping but is basically an observer to the quite violent and nasty revelation of the plot secrets.

There is a nice little side piece that is an academic study of the notion of wandering spirits and how they will possess pigs and if you don't sacrifice the pig properly they will take over a human.  I guess this is some real tribal folklore from that region and it ties in really nicely to the animal companions in the book.  But that's about as far as it goes.  I can see how many readers got their fix of dark near-future detective world but Zoo City did not work for me.

6. Roughing it in the Bush by Susana Moodie

I picked this one up at Chainon with reservations.  Canadian history is notoriously boring and this looked very much to have that potential. The trade dress (I'll get into this more later) is from the absolute nadir of Canadian boringness, the late 60s and 70s and I sort of expected a way less charming but perhaps more realistic portrayal of 19th century settlers coming to Canada.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.  This book isn't boring at all.  It's actually quite funny at times.  Even better, it really blows away the myth of hard-working Europeans cooperating to tame the savage land.  Holy shit, the people are just awful!  I mean I know we all know that settler colonialism was awful to the people already living here and the environment.  In Roughing it in the Bush, they are also totally shitty to each other!  Moodie was of the fallen gentry, educated but poor.  She's quite a snob and naive about what she and her husband are getting into.  So you are prepared for some class conflict when she comes to a "republic".  Even taking that into account, these people are just scumbags.  Her neighbours constantly steal from her and presumably each other.  They just walk into her house and take stuff and she accepts unwanted guests for months and months.  Community barn-raising parties seem to end in drunken brawls and deadly accidents before any barns get built.  There is a bizarre tradition of gathering outside newlywed homes and making tons of noise all night long that can go on for weeks and weeks.

This all takes place around Peterborough, which is wild to think of as an untamed wilderness.  My sister calls the Onscarions and after reading this book, you can see how the descendants of these yahoos voted for Doug Ford.  

The story itself is not really a narrative of championing the elements and getting their lives established in the new world.  They do make some progress, but in the end, the husband gets a job as a sheriff in town and they move away into civilization.  Moodie became a succesful writer at the time.  It's more a collection of anecdotes.  They are quite good and entertaining.  I recommend this book for anybody who wants an eye-opener on the origins of our great nation.

On to the trade dress, I am sure Frank Loconte was a talented artist, but god this is just the most boring, meaningless and safe book design.  It's just so Canadian.  Hey we wouldn't want to create any kind of excitement (nor sell any books), as that is what uppity Americans do.  This is reflected even more annoyingly in the jumbled and anodyne introductory essay by Western's Carl F. Klinck, which also shows the worst of Canadian academia: smug, safe and undeservedly superior.  What's particularly vexing is that he starts out by saying the book is too long and that Moodie stuffed it for a British audience.  So this genius makes his own decisions and cuts a bunch of stuff out, including all the chapters discussing her relationships with the First Nations!  He's desperate to make the argument that she fancified her experiences but gives neither evidence nor analysis beyond that she wrote it several decades after the experience.  And this guy got an Order of Canada!  I apologize for my lack of nationalism at this time when all Canadians need to be pulling together to combat fucktard Elon Musk and his little butt boy Trump, but honestly we should not forget our own sins even in these times!

5. King of the Vagabonds by Colin Dann (re-read)

Got a proper photo this time

Colin Dann has been on the top of my hunting list and my favourite animal adventure author based almost entirely on this single book.  I found it years ago and have been looking for his books with no success since then.  My buddy found two of them recently on a trip to England and that got my daughter and I to choose it as our reading book for bedtimes.  At this point, she is reading more to me than vice versa and I got to sit back and listen to the second half of this book for a second time.  It didn't feel quite as amazing this time, but still very enjoyable and the episode with the bird bone in the throat was as harrowing as ever.  I found the stereotypicallness of the gender roles to be limiting to my now more-woke eyes.  The female characters are limited to mothers, sisters and lovers.  The Pinky character is a manupilatrice. Both my daughter and I were quite disappointed that Sammy ended up with her.

We have since started on In the Grip of Winter, about which I am quite excited.  It is actually a continuing story about the Farthing Wood gang in their new domicile.  Stay tuned!

 

 

4. Boomerang by Andrew Garve

I discovered Andrew Garve due to this post on Twitter* from April 2024, put his name on my list and have been keeping any eye out for him since.  I found 3 of his books in Berkeley (2 at Moe's, I think and one at Walden Pond Books) over Xmas.  My on-deck shelf has reached its limit and I am not supposed to be buying too many new books, but these were all thin and more importantly, attractive Pan editions.  I have to say, now that I have completed Boomerang, I ask myself the same question as Paperback Papa:  why have I only heard about Andrew Garve now?

Boomerang starts with Peter Talbot, a young and successful but risk-taking financier in London.  He has his own loan corporation that has done well but is now over-extended. After a fight with his starlet girlfriend, he crashes his car into a store front and ends up losing his license and doing some time.  In prison, he meets an Australian miner who is in for punching out a cop and a radio operator who got caught smuggling.  The three hit it off and their characters and experience inspire Talbot to come up with a scheme involving an Australian mine to make them all rich.

The bulk of the book is the preparation for the scheme.  All three travel separately to Australia to carry out their part of the operation, with the bulk of the narrative focusing on Talbot who is being himself, pretending to scout the region for a potential motel chain investment.  We as the reader do not what the plan is until very late in the book.  Hints are dropped here and there that it will involve explosives and the monsoon season.  Garve must have travelled to Australia because much of the book is entrancing descriptions of the varied and powerful landscapes of the outback.  It really made me want to go there.  

What was neat about the book was how pleasant and conflict-free the bulk of the story is.  You know it's got to go wrong somewhere but most of the time, the three conspirators are quite happy with each other and enjoy the work they have to do.  When it does go wrong, it is much more about the elements and the forces of law than any internal conflicts.  The likable characters aren't unnecessarily stressing with each other, which I appreciate.  There is a great slog through the monsoon-flooded desert that really had me gritting my teeth.  The ending was the teeniest bit pat, though with a nice dash of humour.

Great find!  I can only speculate at this point that perhaps Garve was somewhere between crime and men's action that he is not more well-known among 20th century paperback book nerds.  I am grateful to Paperback Papa for the discovery and psyched that I already have two more awaiting me.

*I am off Twitter for the most part now and primarily on Bluesky, though I still have kept my account active as there are a few people there that I follow that I check on from time to time.  Why?  Because fuck Elon Musk.  I hope I or someone else can look back at this post from a place in the future where the internet is actually clawed back from the trolls and shitbirds.

3. A Civil Affair by Lois McMaster Bujold (#11 in the Vorkosigan Saga)

I picked this one to coincide with the end of my vacation and flight back, because I have learned that I struggle with focus on a flight and need fun and easy to digest page-turners rather than something that requires concentration.  The Vorkosigan saga has proven to be always enjoyable and fun to read, even when it does delve into some deeper issues.  I suspect we are nearing some kind of end of Miles' narrative, as here the big struggle is if he can successfully woo the woman of his dreams, with the implication that he will settle down and stay on Barrayar.  Though I guess he can have other adventures in his role as Imperial Auditor, it feels like his arc has reached a certain maturity.

After the events on Komarr, where Miles uncovered a conspiracy to destroy the solar satellite crucial to terraforming and accidently discovered the love of his life, he is now back on Barrayar, preparing for the imperial wedding.  Ekaterin Vorsoisson, the other important character from Kommar, is now a widow living with her aunt and uncle in the capital.  Miles desperately wants to marry her, but recognizes that she is still recovering from decades of psychological abuse in a stifling marriage.  More practically, he has to avoid anything that would encourage speculation that he had murdered her husband (the truth is buried in ImpSec censorship).  This is the main storyline, a very romantic adventure as Miles tries in his typical way to manipulate the situation to get his outcome, which of course blows up in his face.

Meanwhile, his clone-brother Mark returns from Beta where he was working out his own psychological issues and starting to nurture his gifts at business success.  He comes back with two major complications:  first, he is going out with Kareen Koudolka the daughter of a very conservative Vor family and second he has brought "butterbugs" and the brilliant but utterly impractical Escoban scientists who developed them.  The butterbugs are disgusting to look at it, but produce a very rich food from vegetable scraps.  Both these complications lead to lots of funny hijinks.

I think this is the book that got the comparison to Georgette Heyer. It is truly a romantic comedy and quite enjoyable.  There were just so many fun threads (the Lady Donna/Lord Dono battle for succession is so great) and it is fulfilling to get more depth in Bujold's rich world building of Barrayar society and history.  All the stuff with cousin Ivan and his mother and aunts is quite hilarious.  I can see why nerds would love this, because the male characters that get the best partners are not the jocks at all, but the deformed strategic genius and the overweight business genius.  Really fun and now I am torn whether I should take a break or jump right into the next one!

2. Calibre by Irving Shulman

Continuing my exploration into the Amboy Dukes literary universe, I found this non-canon Irving Shulman somewhere that I can't remember (note to self: note where I find books when I get them!). At it's core, it is basically a post Civil War western, but layered with rich melodrama and tortured Shulman characters. Had it been longer, I might have grown impatient, but the first half where we learn about the various characters ends just before it wears out its welcome. And the second half is full of great action and a satisfying conclusion. So overall a fun read. 

 Dave Shannel is a confederate soldier returning to the home of his colleague Ben, who died in battle. Ben spoke all about his family and Dave, rootless and shell-shocked with nowhere else to go, visits them at their failed desert inn. When he gets there, he discovers that three roughnecks and an alcoholic woman have taken over more or less. Their leader, Barlow, is a wealthy war racketeer on the run and they are waiting for some other men to make an escape to the north. Ben's family is his mother, his wife and his uncle (who believes there is treasure on the land and is always out prospecting). You know there has to be a showdown and Dave the hero, but we get there via lots of tension and conflict between and among the bad guys and the family. The historical context adds depth to the standard set-up. Dave is really suffering and lies to the family about Ben's bravery. The bad guys all represent different types of players in the Civil War and its aftermath, especially Barlow the war profiteer. 

Dave struggles with his role.  He's not a coward per se, but just so broken that he simply wants to keep moving.  The men aren't all even that bad, except Barlow and we learn that even he has a somewhat legitimate reason for stopping at the inn.  Turns out Uncle Darcy was a hunter of confederate deserters and murdered Barlow's brother.  The final battle is quite good and intense.  

1. The Banker by Leslie Waller (and 2024 year-end round-up)

Happy new year!  I hope you are all doing well.  2024 wrap-up will follow below.

I found The Banker in Montreal, I think, but can't remember.  It looked very middling but I had to pick it up. I'm glad I did.  It was middling but never boring and surpassed itself by the end, with a fun and satisfying but not simplistic conclusion.  Woods Palmer is a reluctant midwestern banker, dragged into the role of president of his father's bank.  The beginning of the book is him sailing with the president of America's biggest commercial bank who recruits him as the second-in-command.  Right from the beginning, the internal monologue shows Palmer as a disinterested strategist of his own life.

He moves his family from Chicago to New York and starts the job, which is already odd because his main responsibility seems to be the interface with the freelance strategist/PR flak the bank hired to fight a state bill that would give the savings banks more power.  He doesn't really do much else until he starts to get it on with his own PR person, the widow Virginia Clary.  I don't know how much of the conflict between commercial banks and savings banks was or is a thing, but I was able to follow along so I hope it has some basis in reality.  The narrative advances very slowly, taking a while to settle on the main financial and business intrigue, involving the savings banks bill and a big aerospace company that wants a super-generous loan. 

By the time it all comes to a head, his affair also playing a significant role, the heroic narrative reveals itself and Palmer has to finally step up and kick ass on all the New York slick city types who tried to pull one over on the country newcomer.  There is a good theme of white protestants old boys oppressing all the other groups and the conclusion was both satisfying and somewhat nuanced.  Even the love dialogue about the affair between Palmer and Virginia was mostly not cringey.  This was a fun and satisfying read.  It also helped me reinforce some feelings about improving how to behave with others I've been thinking about for 2025.

2024 Year-End Wrap-up

But we aren't quite ready for 2025!  Let's look back at my reading for 2024.  It was a solid year, until the end, when I dived naively and ambitiously into The Life and Death of Ancient Cities which was just too hard for my simple narrative-dependent brain.  I got about halfway through and had been reading sporadically and without enthusiasm for the last several weeks and finally decided to put it it down and pick up something fun to read.  I lost over a month on that book and half of it is still waiting for me, sword of Damocles style.

I read 20 books by female authors out of 61.  I only read one person of colour (The Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah)!  Yikes, that's bad.  I could say 3, but of the other two one was Chinese and the other Japanese from Japan.  Need to diversify in 2025.

I guess my favourite reading this year was with my daughter.  We read The Blue Sword, Watership Down (her favourite now) and The Hobbit (my favourite).  I do most of the reading, but she'll do it for quite a few nights as well now, so it's a lot of fun.

Other than that, there were no real highlights for me this year.  I really enjoyed the book about the Ottoman Empire which was readable and informative, giving me a deeper understanding of the forces behind the current conflicts in the Middle East.  I was also pleased at how I was able to get through it pretty steadily (though this led to my over-confidence with the ancient cities).  2024 was also the year that I discovered Riad Sattouf, thanks to my neighbour putting out beautiful hardbacks of several of his books.  Every Man a Menace stood out for me in its operational complexity and coldness.  Duncan Kyle once again comes in strong with Green River High.  That guy does not disappoint.

Sadly, the David Morrell Victorian period mystery did disappoint.  It lacked subtlety and killed my motivation to follow up on what I had thought might be a rich vein of reading.  The Tribe that Lost its Head was also quite a bummer, as I had high hopes for an adventurous Trevelyan epic.   

Overall, 2024 was a mixed bag, but I was broadly enjoying it most of the time, until hitting the non-fiction ceiling.  My on-deck shelf has also gotten near to full so I am going to try (probably futilely) to read and not buy/pick up any more books.  Happy reading in 2025 y'all!

61. They Found Him Dead by Georgette Heyer

I found this in a Montreal free box (there are more and more popping up these days, which is nice).  I thought that Georgette Heyer only wrote entertaining Regency romance adventures, but it appears she also had a career and name as a mystery writer as well, at least according to the marketing phrase on the back cover of this book:  "By the Queen of Mystery and Suspense" and that she has quite a few other mysteries written.  

I was looking for a readable, English book and this definitely fit the bill. It starts off at a dinner with a confusing number of inter-related characters, so confusing that I had to write them down.  The broad picture is a successful business firm making "nets" with two older partners and their various family members.  The patriarch, Silas Kane, who inherited the business is conservative and cheap.  His business partner wants to take on a risky new venture in Australia which Kane is decidedly against.  That night, in his evening walk, Silas Kane falls off a cliff and dies.  This is seen as a terrible accident and upends the family business, putting his weak-willed nephew Clement at the helm.  Clement is desperate to please his beautiful, comically self-absorbed and expensive wife until he is shot in the back of the head.

The investigation is fun, but more fun is the family, each of them a character.  The most sensible ones are young, sporty Jim Kane who though competent, wasn't ready to have the business thrust upon him and his fiancee, his great-aunt's secretary.  We get lots of very funny dialogue as the self-absorbed compete with the acerbic.  The mystery was marred somewhat by a couple of the characters being really obtuse and it being so obvious that Heyer had to deliberately hide it from the reader.  Still a very enjoyable read and good to know that she also has a competent line in contemporary mysteries!

60. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

beautiful paperback from
my wife's adolescence

I convinced my daughter that this could be our night-time reading book and I'm so glad I did.  I was a giant Tolkien nerd back in the day.  I read Lord of the Rings three times by the time I was 13. The back cover of one of the paperback books of the trilogy with the picture of Tolkien tore off and I taped it inside my school binder with the words "My Hero" under it.  I realized, though, that The Hobbit had been kind of neglected in my memory.  Partly because I watched the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings which kind of underwhelmed me (and the constant swelling music annoyed the shit out of me) and thus skipped the Hobbit remake.  I also worry about what I am terming "Youth Narrative Overload" which is the phenomenon of children today being spoonfed endless fantasy narratives.  We had Lord of the Rings, the Sword of Shannara and a few others here and there.  The nerds growing up and taking over media has been good in a lot of ways, but also churned out a kajillion movies and series, driven mainly by the Harry Potter craze.  When my daughter was younger, we let her watch one episode on Netflix every morning and by the time she was like 8, she had seen so many series with a scrappy adventuring party going on a quest to fight some existential evil that I worried any sense of wonder and imagination had been burned out of her brain.  So I was very pleased that we could go back to the ur-text that started it all.

My own memory was that The Hobbit was good but a bit slight.  Wow, was I wrong.  First of all, it is not just good, it is still outstanding, arguably a masterpiece that holds up today in the crowded field of fantasy adventure.  And it is actually quite epic.  I had completely forgotten the ending.  For me, though, what makes fantasy work is not the epic, not the giant battles and crazy powers, but the subtle moments that evoke in the reader a feeling of being in another world, that adventure is just around the corner in your own even.  This is what Tolkien does so well in The Hobbit.  He creates a very likable, sedate character in Bilbo Baggins with just the slightest hints that a few generations back on one side of his family, there may have been some more feisty characters. And then we get these dwarves who disrupt his life and it isn't until about a quarter of the way through the book that you realize how serious the adventure actually is.  And though there is the main storyline of the dwarves trying to get their treasure back from Smaug and the even broader backstory of good people being pushed out by evil, the real story is Bilbo himself and how he ends up as Gandalf predicted being the major player and honestly somewhat of a badass.

I did find the ending where all of a sudden the narrative widens to include human politics and a massive regional power struggle to feel a bit arbitrary (especially with how Smaug is dispatched) and thus render the overall narrative less pure somehow.  As a world-building nerd, I loved it at the time and get now how it fits into the later Lord of the Rings narrative, just pointing out that it mars somewhat the unities that are so well constructed in the first three-quarters of the book.

This is a classic and I implore any of you with kids reading Harry Potter to try and get them to go back and read this one.  It moves surprisingly fast given that it was written in 1937.  But this is where it all began, I am sure there are many antecedents but it is The Hobbit where we get so many core fantasy tropes today: adventuring party, humanoid races, levelling up, magic items, dragons as the main boss, etc.  and they are all so well done here.  Unfortunately, there is one other major flaw that is sadly also a core fantasy trope (though finally being somewhat rectified these days).  There are absolutely no female characters at all.  This is probably the biggest knock on The Hobbit and on the world of fantasy fiction in general that it was so white male. It's something to talk about, but still not a reason to not read this absolute banger.

59. The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman

Whoo boy, faithful readers will notice the significant gap between this blog post and the last one, over a month! It's not that I gave up reading, but I got over-ambitious with a non-fiction book.  It's called The Life and Death of Ancient Cities and came highly recommended but hoo boy is it slow going! I finally had to put it on pause about halfway and get into some fun reading.  On top of that, I moved over to Bluesky with all the others after the election and it's quite fun and pleasant.  I hope it survives and its model can be a future path for social media.  Unfortunately, the goodness of it is not good for my internet addiction.  Twitter was such a shit hole that I barely went there, which was great for my reading. Now I am once again getting excellent feeds on the situations in Syria, South Korea and Georgia as well as reconnecting with great book and movie nerds (and even some sports people) so it is hard to pull away.

Nevertheless, I was able to finish the final book in Pullman's misnamed Sally Lockhart series.  It might be more accurate to call it his Victorian Penny Dreadful series or something.  This last book is a spinoff which focuses on two other characters in Sally's orbit (she at this point is more of an elder statesman of adventurous, boundary-breaking characters):  Jim Taylor who started as a courier in the law firm where Sally first went and is now a globe-trotting adventurer and writer (who never actually writes) and young Adelaid who was the cockney slave to the evil nemesis of the first book.

The Tin Princess feels very much like Pullman trying to do Sabatini or other books of English people having adventures abroad and getting mixed up in European politics.  Here, Adelaide ends up marrying a prince of the tiny central European country Razkavia who discovers her in a brothel (funny how I read this after watching Anora, which has a similar plot basis though very different storyline).  He barely survives a terrorist attack in London and then learns that his brother is killed and he is next in line for the throne, so Adelaide must accompany him back to Razkavia.  She meets a young well-educated Razkavian girl (who fled because her father had been imprisoned and killed) who becomes her ally and Jim goes along as well. Razkavia produces tin which is much needed by both Austria and Germany and it is thus caught between the machinations of these two superpowers.

It's all quite preposterous but also quite fun.   Jim shows his mettle several times.  The country of Razkavia is well thought out and portrayed.  It's fun to see poor, downtrodden Adelaide reveal that she actually has the native intelligence and mettle of a sovereign.  It all could be more tightly constructed and there is a bit too much going on for it to be concluded satisfactorily.  As usual with Pullman, he does a great job constructing super loathsome antagonists but never really gives the reader the satisfaction of them getting their just deserts in a deservingly brutal way.  In this case, it is nasty and manipulative chamberlain of the royal house, Godel.

So I've finished the 4 books and enjoyed them, but they weren't quite the thrills I had hoped for.  I think the whole thing would have been better had it remained centered around Sally Lockhart and the photography studio/detective agency.  We could still have had all the same adventures but with more unity and ongoing character development.  I understand that at the time, Pullman probably wrote where the muse sent him and that is fine, just left this reader with some dangling threads.  I think the excellent trade dress by Scholastic did a good job of selling them to me and may have set my expectations a bit high.

58. The Tiger in the Well (Sally Lockhart #3) by Philip Pullman

Now this is more like it!  I was quite frustrated by the structure and plot elements of the second book, The Shadow in the North, and that led me to some trepidation while reading this one.  The story starts a few years later.  Sally is established in her business and home and she has given birth to a daughter, Harriet, who is now a toddler.  All the men in her life are gone.  Jim and Garland Webster have left on an adventure of their own in South America.  The conflict starts immediately, although subtly, as Sally receives a legal summons.  At first, she treats it lightly as it is so absurd.  She is being sued by a man for abandonment who claims to be her husband.  He also wants Harriet.

As she looks into it, and deals with super weak and sexist legal representatives, the case becomes deadly serious and she truly risks losing her child, as well as all her assets and her business.  We quickly meet a truly nasty antagonist, the bland and professional seeming Mr. Parrish.  Meanwhile, we also follow the story of Jews fleeing the pogroms in Europe and arriving in London, where they are often exploited by criminals and attacked by racists or a combo of both.

These two storylines combine in a rich historical adventure that all center around Sally.  I was able to guess quite quickly who was behind it all and it was a bit frustrating that it took Sally so long.  That felt a bit manipulative on Pullman's part, though he explains himself away by basing it on her psychology (she knew all along but didn't want to face it; why?).  My distrust held back some of my enjoyment as Sally really goes through the wringer.  He pulls it out in the end, but the promise of a competent, extraordinary woman that the first book is set up is not fulfilled here in a lot of ways.  She spends much of the book being victimized and never gets to use her skills (no cool financial gamesmanship, she never shoots anybody).  This what we call deprotagonization in the tabletop RPG business.  For instance, in one scene when she is down to her last shillings and she pawns the watch that her father gave her and gets a super low price for it.  I get that Pullman wants her to be as desperate as possible, but this woman is super skilled at money and her dad taught her to be tough and street smart.  This could have been a good opportunity for her to show some mettle and skill and instead she meekly accepts the price.

The other characters and the situation is wild enough that once we start to see some hope, the book gets really fun.  Sally doesn't use her skills, but she is brave and resourceful and quite tough.  We get to see a lot of the lives and locations of the poor Jewish community and this is quite interesting and entertaining.  The finale is quite wild, a real page-turner, so much that I partially blame it for my insomnia and me writing this at almost 2 in the morning.  Too stimulating!

So some minor hiccups but overall this was an excellent adventure and I am glad I am working my way through this series.

57. The Shadow in the North (Sally Lockhart #2) by Philip Pullman

I've committed to reading all 4 of the Sally Lockhart series in order (and also kind of wanted to, though the energy is wearing off a bit; I am almost finished the third as I write this review) and thus jumped right into this the second one.  I was immediately a bit disappointed, as this book jumps ahead 6 years from the ending of the first book.  Sally is now on her own, running a financial management business with mainly women clients.  She still is connected to and manages the photography business, but no longer lives with them and only visits once a month to do their books. It's an odd choice, as so many of the elements that made the first book so fun are just tossed out the window.  They were starting a detective firm, they were an eclectic gang of great characters all living under one bohemian roof.  Sally was finally starting to come into her own. It would have been great to see her continue to develop her strengths and for the gang to do some adventures together.  

Once the adventure gets going, I got caught back up in it.  It's quite fun, involving a cowardly magician who is on the run and a nefarious Dutch industrialist who is doing sneaky things with companies (whose ruin impacted one of Sally's clients which is how she started to sniff around).  Unfortunately, I found the ending very frustrating on two points.  One, which is spoiler free, is that it feels brief and truncated compared to all the investigating and plotlines that came before.  You kind of figure it out quickly and the bad guy gets dispatched all too quickly.  Pullman was trying, I believe, to make a modern retelling of the Victorian penny dreadful.  He does a great job of setting up the environment and the story and then elevating it with modern sensibility.  However, he spends most of his energy on bad stuff happening to the characters (which is fine), but doesn't give the reader the satisfying payoff of the ending.

I remember when I was teaching and the His Dark Materials was all the rage among the middle school kids.  The last book actually came out in 2000 and the kids had been waiting for it.  I personally read it and quite enjoyed it, though I do remember feeling it ended with a bit of a whimper rather than a bang.  But the kids hated it!  They were so mad about the ending that it ruined the series for many of them.  I kind of get where they are coming from now.  I was reading it more as a critique of Christianity and I enjoyed that, but they were focused on the relationship between the two main characters and he did totally pull the rug out in that one.  I kind of think he is trying to be too clever and he showed signs of it here.

SPOILER ALERT

 

 

 

What's worse in this book is that he sets up this awesome gigantic dog that is Sally's companion.  He is clearly super dangerous and super loyal, but we never get him doing anything but sniffing and growling at potential enemies until one final scene, where it isn't even Sally being attacked, and he gets killed!  Totally fucked.  This is the animal equivalent of the Bechtel Scale and it is just lame.  I was really pissed about the dog, but he does the same thing with Frederick, who was one of the great characters in the first book, a significant player in this one, the other half of their potential detective agency, an ally in fighting to young Jim and finally a potential love interest for Sally.  He just kills him off and it felt cheap and manipulated.  I don't really know what was the point in making this choice.  It makes me lose confidence in Pullman as a storyteller.  He feels that his own clever "breaking of the rules" is more important than the reader's pleasure.  No bueno.

56. The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman

If you are going to do a trade
paperback, do it like this!

I read this book already and at the time enjoyed it enough that I wanted to read all of them.  I happened to find all but the first one at Rennaisance thrift shop here in these nicely designed trade paperbacks (see I am not totally close-minded) and then totally lucked out and found the first one that same day at another thrift store that was more clothes but had a few books. I felt that if I was going to do the series, I probably should just re-read the first one, which is what I did.  I also had my daughter in mind who is finally adding actual books to her voracious and rapid graphic-novel consumption pace, but the covers didn't grab her and now that I am reading them I suspect they may be a bit old for her still.  I do remember when I was a teacher, Pullman's Golden Compass series went through the sixth and seventh graders like wildfire but maybe those being more fantastic also makes them more appealing.  I will spring those on to her soon for sure.

The Sally Lockhart series was written before the Golden Compass and though his prose is as strong as ever, some of the structure lacks the craft and polish to make this a masterpiece. Nevertheless, this is a real page-turner and the plot and setting of Victorian England are super fun.  It feels like Pullman just wanted to make a Sherlock Holmes/penny dreadful type adventure but do so with a female protagonist to make it really interesting.  Sally Lockhart is a great character.  Raised unconventionally by her sailor and soldier father who disappeared in a ship wreck in the far east, she is not well-versed in the important skills of manners and social etiquette, but is an expert markswoman and accountant.  The Ruby in the Smoke is basically her origin story as she races against unknown malevolent forces that are conspring against her for reasons she doesn't know.

It gets even more enjoyable when by chance she falls in with an eccentric photographer and his actress sister.  They take her into their sprawling house out of pity but soon realize that her organizational and business skills can rescue their floundering photography business.  They also become allies with her and enlist young and scrappy Jim Taylor, another great character!

There is lots of great action and a truly moving denouement as she learns the truth about what happened to her father.  Very enjoyable and I am now going to read the next one.

 

 

55. Sunset and Jericho by Sam Wiebe

I'd heard of this author before and was interested as I am always curious about B.C. detective fiction.  I found this one at a neat little used book store, The Paper Hound, near Gastown when I was out in Vancouver this summer.  Classic little Vancouver downtown eastside anecdote:  when I was walking towards the store, I noticed they had a small bookshelf outside with cheaper books on it as many used bookstores do. I always check those out, but this time there was a woman leaning and peering into them with a particularly folded and intense posture.  I thought, damn she is more into used books than even me!  But no, when I got closer I saw that actually she was a junky nodding off and just happened to use that shelf to lean on.  Ah, Vancouver!  The poor bookstore owner must have a hell of a time.  

A word about The Paper Hound. This is one of those used bookstores where everything is carefully curated and it is more about a wide range of eclectic finds than exhaustive sections of every genre that you usually find.  It's not entirely my jam as they tend to only feature quirky or out there old paperback fiction.  Nevertheless, you can often find gems at these kinds of stores and I always celebrate the people who keep old books alive.  I also found a book of short stories by Barry Gifford.  So continued success to the Paper Hound.  Go visit if you are in Vancouver.

Sunset and Jericho, I learned after I started reading it, is the fourth installment in the Wakeland detective series, about Vancouver private investigator Dave Wakeland.  This was a solid and enjoyable detective story about a gang of anti-capitalist radicals who kidnap and murder the mayor's son.  The plot is deeply integrated into current Vancouver political issues, especially the problematic dynamic of real estate values and the growing gap between the rich and the poor that has destroyed what little homegrown culture Vancouver used to have.  I say "what little" in a slightly demeaning way but I don't belittle it because back in the day there was a really cool punk rock, artists, weirdo scene in Vancouver that was the one thing holding it back from the dominant culture of bourgeois gentility (which had some pleasant aspects though ultimately suffocating and depressing).  Sunset and Jericho gets a little fantastic with some crazy violence and action which I felt extended the ending unnecessarily.  It also portrayed the radicals in a way that you hated them but never really gave the full satisfaction of them getting their asses kicked.  Finally, there was a brutal and what I felt was forced surprise twist at the very ending that kind of undermined the rest of the story for me.  Maybe if I had read the first 3 it would have fit in better, but it just didn't work.

All the criticisms out of the way, the rest of the book up until the ending was a real page-turner with great characters and locations (many of which are familiar to me) and a nice, convoluted backstory to the mystery that was quite satisfying to unfold as you read.  I particularly like the abandoned therapy retreat in the British Properties.  I'm going to keep my eyes open for the first 3 books.

54. The Long and Loud Silence by Wilson Tucker

I've been looking for the Wilson Tucker book Wild Talent for decades now.  It inspired a tabletop RPG (Wild Talents) whose design I quite appreciated and is also considered I believe to be the first or one of the earliest ESP battle type stories.  I have read a few other of his books and never loved them (not terrible just from that period of sci-fi which tends to be too speculative and not enough story for my taste). However, this one I decided to take because it is post-apocalyptic (a sub-genre which used to be my favourite but now I am just more of a completist) and because it's a beautiful Coronet with that sick cover.

I'm glad I did get it because this was an interesting read.  It is marred by the nerdy white male sexual politics of the early 1950s.  Once you filter that out, it is a dark and low-key "realistic" PA tale that is quite cool.  The narrator is almost Parker-like in his absence of emotions.  Corporal Russel Gary, career military man, wakes up after a major drunk on his birthday to find that some enemy had somehow sent bombs that killed most of the people, either through a nuclear blast (the kind that leaves buildings standings) or with disease.  His first encounter is with a teenage girl who is desperately robbing jewelry stores.  This is already where the books sexism really sucks.  I get it that she is a young, teenage girl but it shows she has street smarts.  Why would she only be stealing jewelry?  It's stupid.  We get away from her fairly soon (of course though totally naive and unable to make the most basic survival decisions, she is sexually experienced and "surprises" him at night).  We get a lot of cool exploring where he learns that America is divided between east and west along the Mississippi. The east is contaminated and considered full of spies and traitors.  The Mississippi is guarded all along its banks and all the bridges except a few blown up.

The portrayal of the behaviour of the survivors on the eastern side is weird and not well thought out.  Feels like in Tucker's world there are barely any people and he doesn't explicitly say most of them were killed.  It also seems like they quickly and too easily degenerate into looting mobs and starvation instead of pulling together.  Despite these issues, the interactions with the world is quite cool.  He spends a winter on a Florida beach with another man and woman but leaves when they fall in love.  He becomes a sort of bodyguard for a naive farmer family.  It's cool and readable. As the narrative progresses, he slowly descends further and further into animal survival, in the end living in a cave.  It doesn't really end, except a sort of "romantic" wrap-up to the storyline with the naive teenager.  So while flawed, it was an engaging and unsettling story of a ruined and divided mid-20th century America.

53. The Suspect by L.R. Wright

I discovered this author and series because after decades, her work has finally successfully made it to the TV screen in the form of the new Canadian series Murder in a Small Town.  I backtracked to realize the books were written in the 80s and take place in and around Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast in B.C., which we visited last summer.  I found this, the first one, at The Book Exchange used English language bookstore in Amsterdam.  There were several others, but I wanted to see if I like it first.  Also, I suspect these should not be hard to find when I am next in B.C.

It starts out with a bit of a twist in that you the reader knows who committed the murder right from the beginning.  One old man, visiting another old man, bashes him suddenly over the head with an old shell casing.  The murderer recognizes his guilt and is about to turn himself in when realizes  why bother, as he will get caught eventually, he might as well live free for as long as he can. It's subtler and more nuanced than that, but you get the picture.  It's more of a "whydunnit" (I stole that from a Goodreads review), as well as an interesting cat and mouse game between he and the detective.

The detective is Karl Alberg, promoted from Kamloops where he had to leave his family behind as his wife had a successful business and his daughters doing well in school there (RCMP policy is to move their mounties around so they can never get embedded in the community which makes them assholes but also maybe less prone to corruption).  He answers an ad and meets the single librarian, Cassandra who moved from Vancouver to Sechelt to be near her older mother.  Cassandra has also become friends over time with George, the murderer.

It's a very absorbing and page-turning read, the kind of comfort mystery that readers can't put down and whose characters you grow attached to.  This is a great book to take on the plane and I actually forced myself not to read it at the airport because I knew I would get done too quickly.  I appreciated the locale and descriptions of the geography, though I found that aside from the old hippy fish seller, the characters were not all that quirky and you don't get the sense of some of the benevolent oddness that defined small B.C. coastal towns back in the day.  Maybe they get richer as the series goes on.

I won't seek these out but will grab them when I find them.  I do have one rant about the TV series.  How is it that in the year of our Lord 2024 fucking Canadian television productions still follow this dogma:

"A lot of U.S. media thought it was actually set in Canada, not in the U.S. They didn't actually grasp that this wasn't Canada," Roberts said. "We wanted to make it just a little more generic ... so that it would have the best opportunity internationally to succeed."

Are you kidding me!?  Have you learned absolutely nothing from the success of all those nordic and british crime series?  Or how about Trailer Park Boys or Schitt's Creek?  American viewers do not want watered down generic versions of mysteries they already see every night.  They want to see the unique cultures and perspectives of different places.  The very strength of the L.R. Wright series is that they take place in a uniquely beautiful and culturally interesting place in the world!  Thousands of American tourists now visit the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island every year.  It's just everything I hate about the media decision-makers in this country, the insecure, grovelling to the States, lowest-common-denominator thinking.  This is why the French-Canadians say we anglos have no culture.  We kill it ourselves out of fear and safety.  Just outrageous. Fire everybody.

52. Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie

I saw the Ealing movie adaptation of Whiskey Galore at an Ealing film festival in my younger days and quite enjoyed it.  I stumbled upon this trade paperback version of the book and thought I might enjoy it as well.  It served me as comfort and distraction during a trans-atlantic flight and then several subsequent nights of brutal jetlag from which I am still suffering as I write this.

It's a story of two small Scottish islands during the final years of WWII (1943 to be precise).  They are under rationing of many things, but it is the slowly dwindling and then finally exhausted resource of the island's whisky that is wreaking havoc among the psyche and relations of the people of the islands.  There are many subplots in this book and many characters.  The main one is the middle-aged English Sergeant who is engaged to marry the young Scottish lass, but whose father, famous already for prevaricating about everything, won't give his blessing nor agree on the wedding date.  The bad guy in the book, if there is one, is the local rep for English war security, who is the classic managerial popinjay spoilsport that nobody takes seriously.  He is always writing letters to his superiors, complaining about the laxity of the Islanders. We also have a nice school director who is also betrothed but completely beaten down by his puritan, domineering mother and too scared to tell her he is going to get married.

All these problems and the general mood and well-being of the region could be solved by whiskey and the solution arrives when a freight ship gets hung up on some rocks and turns out to be carrying 40,000 bottles of the best quality whiskey, to be sent to the US as part of I guess some lend-lease agreement.  The names, the descriptions of the bottles and the labels of all the different types of regional whiskeys was one of my favourite parts of the book.  I don't know if they were made up, but they were fun to read about and imagine.

It's a pleasant read, more of an exposure to the pleasant culture and people of these small islands, with an entertaining dig at English bureaucracy and superiority.  I was a bit confused at first, as I couldn't distinguish with any memory the various Scottish names (especially as several of them share last names), but once I got into it, it flowed nicely.

I left this book in a free book shelf in Amsterdam. I  hope it finds an appreciative next reader.

51. Ruler of the Night by David Morrell

I've wanted to read Morrell's more recent historical thrillers for a while now, but can never find them in a used bookstore.  I'm not sure what that means about his publishing success.  His books are published as big populist hard backs, though probably not in the numbers of huge name authors.  You would think some of them would show up used and in thrift shops, but so far they have eluded me.  I was in a different neighourhood and happened upon their library.  Never great pickings for English books in Montreal, so I will some times borrow books a bit recklessly, just because I want to leave with something.  I was psyched to stumble on a David Morrell book, and hastily took it out, without doing a bit of research.  Turns out Rule of the Night is actually the third book in his Thomas de Quincy and daughter Emily as historical fiction detectives.  It's not actually a trilogy, so each book stands on their own, but I nevertheless felt I was catching up and didn't have the connection with the characters that a proper narrative would have developed rather than expository reminders.

I think this added to some of the ungainliness I felt in the book, but much of it was inherent in the writing.  I was disappointed, I have to say.  The set up is really cool, with the early days of the railway and how the public, already hesitant but also fully caught up in the changes trains are bringing, are hesitant, especially after a brutal murder in a first-class carriage.  The ending as well, where we finally learn the truth of the complex mystery, is quite rich and clever.  de Quincy and his daughter are great detectives, with their mutual support and his opium addiction and her burgeoning medical skills.  It's a cool team.

It's the execution of the plot that I felt weakened its actual cleverness.  It goes all over the place, with several intriguing investigative threads and then suddenly about halfway through introduces a major character from de Quincy's childhood as a street urchin (and based on his real-life narrative).  On top of that, we suddenly get a really hateful major antagonist who does his horrible deed and is punished for it very soon thereafter.  It felt like that was supposed to be the climax.  I guess it was done to set up for the twist, but it ends up leaving the reader somewhat deflated and turning pages just to find out the mystery.

Even worse, for me, was the language.  Morrell is a very skilled writer, but it is the rare American writer who can grasp the subtleties of British dialogue.  Here, it's even worse because it feels like he simplifies it even more for the mass audience.  The dialogue between the police detectives, Ryan and Becker (allies of de Quincy and his daughter) and the evil peer is particularly unrealistic, both in the way it sounds and in the class relations that dialogue is supposed to be supporting.  Just felt super simplistic, like the Netflix version.

In the end, the backstory was quite intricate and clever, integrating a historical railway murder and de Quincy's life in a complex and cool mystery that made it overall a decent book to read and I may say for those of you who aren't sensitive to the nuances of British culture and dialogue in detective fiction might enjoy the series.  This may have been my one test of Morrell's Victorian fiction unless I hear that his others are far superior.  One good thing, for sure, is that it did convince me to read Thomas de Quincy!

50. Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams

Watership Down turned out to be such a hit that, despite my hesitation, my daughter demanded we get this out of the library and read it.  It took us a while as there were a lot of missed reading nights during the vacation and summer nights.  I was hesitant because I worried it wouldn't capture the magic of Watership Down and leave us feeling disappointed (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator being the biggest culprit of this).  I'm happy to say that Tales is a satisfying and engaging sequel that doesn't try to replicate the epic, original story, but builds on it and lets the reader be in the world of the rabbits a little longer.

The first part of the book are more tales of El-ahrairah.  I wasn't so into this mythology in Watership Down, but here El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle's adventures are more down to earth.  There is magic but it's not so powerful and abstract as the tales from the first book were.  Here they go on cool, scary quests and encounter (and often have to outwit) all kinds of fascinating creatures.

The third section is several short stories that continue the Watership Down story, as the warren evolves, changing its political structure to have co-chiefs one of whom is a doe, welcome new rabbits and expand to new outposts.  Leadership comes up a lot thematically, as Hazel, Bigwig and Fiver are now getting older and there are more and more rabbits who didn't live through the migration and the fight with Efrafa.  It ends with life in progress for the rabbits, there are issues and man is always threatening.  We are left as readers feeling very much that Watership Down is alive.

49. Negroland by Margot Jefferson

I found this in the new free book box in my neighbourhood (actually had an interesting collection of 80s and 90s paperbacks not to my taste but will keep an eye out).  I've long been curious about the Black upper class communities and their history.  I have to also admit that the slick cover design also went some way to me deciding to grab this.

At it's core, this is indeed Jefferson's biography.  We start with several interesting examples of the early histories of wealthy and educated Black families, following their ancestors who came out of slavery.  History, philosophy and social theory mix with her personal narrative to tell us about her and racism.  The racism stuff is really interesting; she demonstrates its complex and damaging impact in so many contexts.  You really get a sense of how all-encompassing race was for an African-American girl growing up in upper middle class Chicago to educated, well-to-do parents.  

The parts about herself were less compelling for me.  I get that its a biography and I do think she was successful in using herself as a vehicle to portray racism.  There is also a lot of adolescent anxiety and adult self-absorption that just doesn't interest me.  I mean we even get a whole section where she talks about which character in Little Women she would want to be and why.  So it dragged a bit for me and kind of fizzled out at the end, though not enough to negate the interesting parts of the first two-thirds.  I think readers who enjoy more poetic and intellectual style of writing might enjoy this book much more than me.  Not my jam, though was worth the time.