Serial Innovators by Claudio Feser

Started: Nov. 5, 2012
Finished: Dec. 16, 2012
Pages: 186

Some organizations are very open to change.   Others, not so much.   I've been curious about that, and whether it's possible to move an organization from one state to the other.  But when you go trolling for books on "change management", much of what you find is patronizing and trivial.  Both Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson and Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions by John Kotter are gag-inducing parables that I couldn't force myself to read.  I attended a seminar based on The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg, but either the seminar or the source material trivialized reasons why people might resist change.  It makes sense that habit can play a role, but the example in the seminar had everything to do with the fact that the change being resisted actually removed control over parts of people's work, so calling their resistance "habit" was either dumb or disingenuous.

But I liked Serial Innovators.  It's popular non-fiction:  it's a brief book that summarizes and synthesizes a lot of research about  and how and why most organizations "age" and often vanish (viz Eastman Kodak), while others adapt and thrive over longer periods of time (viz Apple).  It does include a "story" (NOT a parable), but explains why it does so in terms of human psychology, and then uses the story to directly illustrate the principles that it discusses.

Maybe it helps that it's not a "change management" book per se.  Instead it talks about the factors that cause most businesses to fail over quite short timeframes: the average post-listing lifetime of a publiclly traded company in the US is apparently 15 years.

So what does it have to say?  Basically that corporations naturally tend to rigidity.  Your initial success is always due to following a certain set of strategies.  But nothing stays the same.  Your own success changes the marketplace you participate in, and your competitors may emulate you, counter you, or outpace you.   Internally, as your organization grows you're likely to impose more structure on its operations.  But it's human nature to continue and even reinforce what brought you success in the first place.  So you're very likely to continue with counter-productive marketing strategies, and to fail to recognize that the amount of hierarchy and process you've introduced has strangled your ability to act, let alone adapt.

How do organizations avoid failure?  By encouraging a learning culture and a diversity of viewpoints.  By giving teams the autonomy to organize their own work.  By making sure that the organization as a whole has a clear sense of purpose, that is reflected at every level of the organization.

Those are just a few of the points that have stuck with me, probably because they especially reminded me of the glory days at CREO.  And are a few of the things I've seen be spectacularly absent elsewhere.

Bleeders by Bill Pronzini

Started: Dec. 6, 2012
Finished: Dec. 12, 2012
Pages: 213

Yet another mystery, and yet another mystery from a series I'm familiar with.  I have to admit that I've read fewer of the "Nameless Detective" books than most of the other series that I've covered, mostly because Pronzini's books are harder to find.  I've never seen a paperback, and only sought out the first of his books because I'm familiar with his wife's.

What are the "Nameless" books like?  Standard private eye fare, set in San Francisco.  I've come to the series late, so "Nameless" is no longer a loner running a one man agency.  But you get the idea.  Missing people, small time hoods, stakeouts, and bars that have never seen better days.  But although Nameless is introspective he's not hard-boiled.  The title of this one reflects his emotional state as he works his latest case:  one he survives only because a gun held to his head mis-fires.

Why is the detective nameless?  I don't know if the schtick was deliberate, or if Pronzini ran with it once he noticed that a story told in the first person does not necessarily need to spell out who the protaganist is.  Either way, it's not obtrusive.  If the cover didn't say "a 'Nameless Detective' novel', you might not notice.

And be a villain by Rex Stout

Started: Nov. 28, 2012

Finished: Dec. 3rd, 2012

Pages: 247

Rex Stout, like Ellery Queen, began his career during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction during the 1930s.  And be a villian was the 13th in the series that nominally starred the eccentric genius Nero Wolfe as its detective.  I say "nominally" because in fact Wolfe is only the costar: he provides the brains, but his confidential assistant Archie Goodwin provides the charm, brawn, and ingenuity necessary to corral clues for Wolfe.

The plot:  clever, as is usual in Golden Age fiction, and especially as is usual for a Nero Wolfe tale.  After all, why write a novel about a reclusive genius detective unless you're going to come up with a puzzler?   In this case Wolfe is prodded by Archie and the state of his finances to approach a radio star who has just had a dramatic on-air murder occur on her show.  Contrary to logic and fairness, the guest was NOT killed by the execrable beverage that they were drinking as a promotion...but by someone who managed to introduce poison into a single glass poured from a just-opened bottle in front of the host, several guests, and a studio audience.  Who did it?  How did they do it?  And did they mean to kill the seemingly innocuous guest at all or perhaps the host?

Read And be a villian to find out.  And see if you spot the same plot hole that troubled me.  :-)

Revolution Business/Trade of Queens by Charles Stross

Started: 23 November, 2012
Finished: 30 November, 2012
Combined pages: 324/303 = 627

Technically these are the last two books in a series of six:  but like Blackout/All Clear, all of the books in  the Merchant Princes series are part of a single narrative.  There isn't even a trace of a recap at the beginning of each book.

Which was a bit of a problem:  I read the first three books in about 2009, and ummm....wasn't entirely clear on every detail anymore when I started in on The Revolution Business.  But I soon remembered why I'd stalled before finishing the series.  Despite the non-stop action, the books are kind of tedious.

Yes, there are a few interesting ideas.  There is suspense.  There are surprises.  There is action and adventure.  The main character is an innocent abroad who acts as our proxy as we learn about the parallel world that exists beside our own, separated from us only by several hundred years of economic and social development,  and the rare inherited ability to step between worlds.

But....there are also plots and counter plots, alliances and betrayals, double-crosses and triple-crosses, and schemes within schemes.  Which is all well and good until...you begin to feel an irrestistible urge to ...yaaawwn.   Of course subplot x is actually an attempt by character X to double-cross character y.  We haven't had a plot shift in almost 3 pages. Yaaaaawwwn.  What was I saying again?

Oh yeah.  Stross calls this economic science fiction.  And it could have been, if he's spent more time exploring why one world is our world and one world is medieval, and played more with the Family Trade instead of writing a series of cheap thrillers.

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

Started: Nov. 8th, 2012
Finished: Nov. 24, 2012
Pages: 344

Any review of this book calls out for a compare and contrast with The Life of Pi.  After all, how many books can there be that feature a boy, a tiger, and a shipwreck?  Unfortunately, I can't do the honours: I may be the only person in the history of the world who started The Life of Pi and didn't finish it.  (Don't ask:  I am also the only person alive who got through the 1980s without seeing E.T.)

So, I'm on my own here, and am feeling a little at sea.   Jamrach's Menagerie is engaging....it follows the adventures of a Victorian boy born into the mud of the East London slums who encounters a tiger.  Knowing no better, he pets the tiger on the nose and it reciprocates by taking him in its jaws and carrying him into a much different life.  

So far so good.

But....when I read a literary novel I feel as if I ought to be able to figure out what it's trying to say.  Instead, as far as I can tell the author was struck by a couple of historical incidents and decided to spin a tale.  The end.

Nothing wrong with that.  But it feels like empty reading calories.

Sprig Muslin by Georgette Heyer

Started: Nov. 19th, 2012

Finished: Nov. 23rd, 2012

Pages: 276

By 1956, Georgette Heyer was supporting her family by her writing, was contemptuous of her fans, and was evidently a little bored.  So she'd started twisting her twisty little romantic romps to amuse herself.  In this one, the hero *doesn't* fall for the high-spirited runaway girl, even though he literally pursues her (to save herself from herself, of course) for the first two-thirds of the book.   Instead he woos a frumpy, respectable and superficially shatter-brained lady who refuses to marry him.

Don't worry, just as in a Bollywood musical, all comes right in the end.  Speaking of which, I wonder how many Bollywood films follow Heyer plots?  And if any of them do so on purpose?

Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor by Stephanie Barron

Started: Nov. 3
Finished: Nov. 9
Pages: 318

This novel features my least-favorite "historical novel" trap:  it makes its characters and their attitudes modern.  I know, I know.  These books are written to entertain.  They're written to appeal to a contemporary audience.  And *of course* they're written to sell.   So what do I expect from a novel that features Jane Austen as the detective?

Sigh.  I know, I know.  If I pick up a piece of trash at the library, I get what I deserve.  But I refuse to forfeit my right to complain about getting exactly what I ought to have expected.....  :-)

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Started: June 16th, 2012
Finished: October 31st, 2012
Pages: 481

Wow.  I think this is a record.  I'm not sure I've ever taken this long to read a book.   At least, not one that I never gave up on or restarted during the time period in question.

Oddly, this is actually a recommendation for Thinking, Fast and Slow.   It was so interesting that I really wanted to finish it.  And its short chapters are conducive to intermittent reading, so I could pick it up and read a self-contained chunk even after a couple of weeks away.

What's it about?  How we think.  How we make decisions.  And how the structure of our brain can work against us.

Daniel Kahneman is an experimental psychologist who shared a Nobel Prize in economics for his work  on decision-making, and more specifically on "prospect theory", an explanation of how human beings make decisions involving economic risks and rewards in uncertain conditions.  His shocking conclusion: people do not typically make rational decisions.  Instead they make "irrational" ones in predictable ways that overweight the risk of losses, and underweight the benefits of probable but uncertain gains.

Kahneman and his chief collaborator, Amos Tversky, were led to this conclusion by years of work on decision making.  But the book is fundamentally not just about prospect theory, as interesting as that is.  Instead it's a coherent summary of the current understanding of how our brains function, and how that affects our thoughts and the decisions that we each make every day.

In some ways this is a very depressing book. In the same way your visual intuition can be quite easily fooled by any of the standard 'optical illusions' (like the ones that ask you to judge which line is longer or shorter), your judgement can quite predictably affected by a number of perceptual factors like "narrow framing", "anchors", and a failure to understand the phenomena of regression to the mean.  Kahneman demonstrates this with specific examples.   In each case he provides a scenario, asks you to make a judgement, describes the typical responses and how those responses are logically wrong, and then explains the research in that specific area.

Why is this all depressing?  Everyone likes to believe that *they* aren't easily fooled.  But if you're honest about it, at least some of the time you'll find yourself making exactly the responses that Kahneman analyzes. And even if you avoided every erroneous intuition in the entire book....it would be by concentrating on the specific questions that he asks.  In Kahneman's terms, it would be by employing "System 2" in your brain: the thoughtful rational agent.  But none of use "System 2" all of the time.   It's slow.  It requires effort.  And the quick-thinking, reactive "System 1" is what gets us through most days.  "System 1" recognizes habitual situations, and warns us and allows us to react quickly when we encounter something surprising....like the car that's about to sideswipe us in traffic.  We can't live without System 1.  In real life we use System 1 all of the time.  And it's primarily the behaviour of System 1 that Kahneman describes.

Kahneman had a noble goal in writing Thinking, Fast and Slow.  He wants to make people more aware of System 1 and how it works, and wants to give us tools to help ourselves to recognize situations where we need to trigger System 2.  But he also says that after a lifetime of studying the brain and decision-making, he hasn't noticed himself getting notably better at decisions.

The next time you get excited, or upset, or motivated by political rhetoric, or advertising of any kind, you should stop and think about exactly *how* that statement was put together.  It's likely that it was crafted by someone who has studied Mr. Kahneman's work.  Which is the real reason that this is such a depressing book.

Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian

Started: 16 Oct. 2012
Finished: 26 Oct. 2012
Pages:496

You do know Patrick O'Brian don't you?  The pull quote on the cover reads "The best historical novels ever written".   I suppose Hillary Mantel might quibble, but the quote dates from long before Wolf Hall or even Sandra Gulland's The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B, so we can allow The New York Times to be a little more definitive than later writers might choose to be.

This is book 2 of a 20 book series set during the Napoleonic Wars.  They're widely praised as the best naval adventures ever written, not the least because although our hero Jack Aubrey and his physician friend Stephen Maturin are entirely fictional, every battle is based on a real encounter as recorded in British naval records. And the battles are thrilling, even if your average reader can't understand the fine points of sailing and all the many details of ship's rigging that you encounter in a blow by blow account of battle.

But that's not what makes the books great.  You watch Jack being forced to dodge tipstaffs to prevent being thrown into debtor's prison.  You ride beside Stephen and Jack as they choose to overnight at an inn rather than travel roads plagued by out of work soldiers who've turned to highway robbery.   You read the letters rapidly dictated by a naval official resisting entreaties for ship assignments or promotions made by various nobles for their relatives and proteges.

O'Brian published the Aubrey and Maturin novels in the 1970s and 80s, but he makes you feel that he lived at the turn of the 19th century.  And that he's bringing you along for the ride.

Monster by A. Lee Martinez

Started: Oct. 12, 2012
Finished: Oct. 15
Pages: 325

Monster is the kind of book that Tooth and Claw is not: it's funny, satirical, and exists both to make you laugh, and to make you laugh *at*.  What you're laughing *at* is mostly just everyday life.  It's the kind of book where the annoyance that disrupts your overnight shift stocking shelves at the supermarket isn't aggravating coworkers or a broken freezer....but yetis gorging on ice cream.  And the solution is calling the authorities, but the person who shows up to deal with the problem has received thaumaturgy training at the Community college.  Which would surprise you a lot more if your memory of magical events didn't get confusingly vague just moments after the yetis are removed or your apartment is destroyed by trolls.

Amusing, with no threat of profundity.

Tea from an Empty Cup by Pat Cadigan

Started: Oct. 4, 2012

Finished: Oct. 10, 2012

Pages: 254

Remember Omni Magazine?  It doesn't surprise me that Tea from an Empty Cup originated from an Omni short story:  the novel was published in 1998, but it has that early 90s cyber-punk feel.  It also doesn't feel as dated as some books written in that era, maybe because the "alternative reality" cyber-technology is neither as ubiquitous nor as "taken for granted" as it is in some books from the era.  The cyber-world is basically just an incredibly immersive MMORPG, rather than a replacement for every-day reality, and the viewpoint characters are themselves only marginally familiar with it, entering only to investigate a crime / friend's disappearance.  That makes the book still compatible with today's future:  you can imagine that we'll still invent such a thing even if we no longer talk about "virtual reality" or see booths with dorky eyeshade headsets at the fair.

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

Started: 24 Sept 2012
Finished: 3 Oct 2012
Pages: 292

Tooth and Claw is "Jane Austen with dragons".  No, not a pastiche of classic fiction, like "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" or "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"   Tooth and Claw is a mannered romantic tale where all of the parts are played by dragons.

Books like this are generally a part of a separate sub-genre of fantasy/speculative fiction.  Depending on its tone,  you'd expect Tooth and Claw's readers to be either people who will read anything and everything about vampires or dragons or zombies or <insert favourite trope here>,  or, if the tone is arch rather than twee, to be people who enjoy satire.

But Tooth and Claw is simply a well-written regency-style romance that explores an interesting idea or two about what kind of society might be established by dragons, and what kind of role might be played by women (dragons) within that society.  It won the World Fantasy Award in 2004, which gives you an idea that the writing and plotting are well above average.

I'd previously read two of Walton's later books:  Farthing and Half-penny.  Be warned.  In the same way that a reader of To Say Nothing of the Dog might be surprised by the Domesday Book, a reader of Tooth and Claw might be a little taken aback by some of her later work.  Farthing and Half-penny take place in an alternative history where British fascists gain the ascendancy and Britain abstains from the Second World War.   The first book (Farthing) perfectly captured the zeitgeist of George Bush's America....a world in which certainties about logic, justice, and decency are heartbreakingly false.  Recommended, but not exactly something to curl up with with a cup of tea and a cat -- unlike Tooth and Claw.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

Started: Sept. 8th
Finished: Sept. 24, 2012
Pages:544

This is what the future looks like.

Sea levels have risen.  Bangkok is protected from the ocean by huge dikes and pumps.   Whole forests of sacred trees stand as haunted lumber, and the appearance of a dragonfruit in the market is as puzzling and awe-inspiring a mystery as the appearance of a unicorn in downtown Vancouver.

Our great-great grandchildren live in a "calorie" economy.   Large machinery is driven by megadonts (genetically engineered elephants), and smaller devices by "kinksprings" that are wound by people or animals because global warming has made the everyday use of carbon-based fuels unthinkable.   But calories are not so easy to come by either:  the food chain has been catastrophically disrupted by genetically engineered accidents or attacks.  And the threat of a newly mutated plague is never far away.

This is another book that took me a long time to read.  It seemed far too vividly probable.  And the cast of characters too desperate, too corrupt, too sinned against, and too sinning to let you identify with any one of them.

I could never have finished it if the book weren't so brilliant.   Or if this were the depths of a dark November.

To Kill or Cure by Susanna Gregory

Started:  28 August 2012
Finished: 7 September 2012
Pages: 436

Medieval mystery.

Meh.

Still Life by Louise Penney

Started: 20 August 2012
Finished: 24 August 2012
Pages: 384

Yet another in the long line of mysteries I'm reading this summer.

Louise Penney is new to me, and Still Life was her first novel.  It was nominated for a number of prizes, including a British prize for best unpublished first mystery novel.  One can certainly see why.  Although the first chapter is overwritten, she gets over herself pretty quickly and puts together a nicely written murder in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.  

Recommended, if you like this sort of thing.
 

YVR by W.H. New

Started: July 14, 2012
Finished: August 24, 2012
Pages: 126

What is it with the poetry? Really, it's been a long time since I've read as many as 3 books of poetry in a year.  Unfortunately, I liked where I started (Memory's Daughter)  more than where I've ended up. 

Which isn't to say that YVR was without merit.   But I suspect that it would be difficult to read and enjoy without both a knowledge  of Vancouver and a knowledge of Vancouver's history.  Too much of the imagry and too many of the references would slip by you otherwise. But if it's our cup of tea, the book is a single poem to Vancouver, past, present, and future.

"This is a praise poem:

for the public school,
    where cultures mix to become now,
    the lion dance as everyday as
    Robbie Burns and Halloween

for the idea of the Vancouver neighbourhood,
    which no longer paints living space,
    by colour, languge, filiation --

for crossing meaningless lines, for talking over
    fences, for walker's right-of-way, for
    public space to meet in, share --

We do not stop hearing the pipes and sitar,
cymbals, fiddles, dulcimer, drums --
But the past does not fix our children
sing their own songs, wear their own clothes --

If we choose, we will learn who we are
from the breath of our grandchildren:

Praise them -- "

(from "Main Street", pg. 96)

Blackout / All Clear by Connie Willis

Started: 12 August 2012
Finished: 17 August 2012
Pages: 491 / 641

Connie Willis conceived of this as a single book but her publishers insisted on publishing it in two installments. I wouldn't have minded so much if it hadn't meant that when I first read it I ended up waiting almost a month between the time I finished the first half (Blackout) and the time I tracked down and read the second (All Clear).

Those of my readers who read SF have almost certainly already read this. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 2011: the Hugo because it's gripping and has great characterizations, humour, and heroism, and the Nebula because the quality of the writing.

Reading the book for a second time gave me the opportunity to observe the skill used to foreshadow, build suspense, reveal character, develop the plot, and develop the conceptual framework of time travel, all through the mechanism of multiple parallel storylines. It would have been trivial to have made a muddle of it, and just slightly less trivial to have come up with something banal. Instead Willis wrote something both entertaining and inspiring. If living through the London Blitz as a non-combatant wasn't like this, it should have been.

Points of Departure by Pat Murphy

Started: July 16th, 2012
Finished: August 4th, 2012
Pages: 316

Pat Murphy writes "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction", and her stories generally include both an element of the fantastic and an element of ambiguity.  How did that battered woman escape her abuser?  Did the trekker find a yeti when he retraced the footsteps of his long-lost father?  And is the derelict old woman who lives in a residential hotel crazy, or did she actually find part of an alien spacecraft.  Who knows?  As she says "The government does not want people to know about the alien spaceships. They deny all reports of UFOs and flying saucers.  The government is good at hiding the things people would rather not see: the old men and women in the lobby, the hookers on the corner, the aliens who visit our world."

Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie

Started: 5 August 2012
Finished: 8 August 2012
Pages: 220

Why can't modern authors take a leaf from Ms. Christie's books?  She fits a whole who-dunnit, complete with about 8 suspects, classical quotations,  and several red herrings into a little over 200 pages.

There's a reason why Agatha Christie books still appear in airport bookshops while Ngaio Marsh and Ellery Queen are a more of a special interest.  Her books have not dated.  The murderer may always be the least likely suspect, and a moment's reflection makes some of her key plot points seem *rather* improbable, but her writing is fluid and her characters entertaining. All of which combines to make her books entertaining rather than period pieces.

Coming Back by Marcia Muller

Started: 2 August 2012
Finished: 3 August 2012
Pages: 292

Marcia Muller completes the big three of contemporary women mystery authors.   Muller started writing in the late 70s though, so Sharon McCone has been detecting for a few years longer than either Kinsey Milhone or V.I. Warshawski.  Muller has also evolved McCone's life far more than the others:  once a loner working as the house investigator for a legal cooperative, McCone now married and runs a high end investigative agency staffed by ex-FBI and ex-cops.

From a practical point of view, Muller herself is running a business.  She writes books that she feels appeal to the zeitgeist -- late 70s San Francisco, the heroine has ties to Berkeley and social justice.  The social justice element faded through the 80s and into the 90s.  Late 90s, some of her clients became high tech businesses.  By the 2000s she'd struck out to found her own agency.  By the 2010s,  she's wealthy and married to a guy who owns a rather frightening security business with ties to the CIA.

I think that's why I have never loved McCone.  The mysteries are always solid, the plots fast-paced, the San Francisco background interesting, and the cast of secondary characters always evolving.   But I always feel a little bit like I'm being sold something.

That being said, there's nothing particularly wrong with this one.  It was kind of interesting to have the story told as a series of vignettes by the various members of her team.  The story moved along, and wasn't too implausible most of the time (although seriously, you aren't going to report the abduction to the police?  Or those corpses you find along the way? And how is it you were able to convince the social workers to give you custody of that abandoned 13 year old you found along the way?)  And it let me unwind when I needed to unwind.  So, mission accomplished.

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Started: July 22, 2012
Finished: July 29, 2012
Pages: 326

The pull quote on the front cover says "Should have won the 2009 Booker Prize". While Kim Stanley Robinson is perhaps not the best judge of that, this is definitely a smart, well-written book.

The narrator,Konstantin Svorecky,is a veteran of the Great Patriotic War who's eking out a living as an English-Russian translator in the dying days of the USSR. There are only two remarkable things about Svorecky: he no longer drinks vodka.  And he used to write science fiction.

His incentive to stop drinking vodka is a terrifying accident involving vodka, his beard, and a drunken miscalculation with a lighter.  His incentive to stop writing science fiction is no less terrifying:  a personal encounter with Joseph Stalin. In the wake of the Second World War he and 5 other science fiction writers are summoned by Stalin and ordered to invent an alien invasion that could be used to unify the Soviet peoples.  ("I give the Americans five years" scoffs Stalin).  

Against all expectations, all six writers escape with their lives when the top secret project is abruptly cancelled.  Svorecky abandons writing, abandons his dreams of the future, and spends the next 40 years religiously following his orders to forget the very existence of the project.  Until 1986.....when the Challenger disaster, a chance encounter with the lone other surviving writer from the project, a meeting   with two American Scientologists, and an unexpected visit to the Pushkin chess club lead him to the fantastic supposition that the story that they invented 40 years before might just be starting to come true.

Not that Svorecky believes this for a second.  He is an ironist, as his KGB interrogator so furiously expostulates, and his ironic outlook on life infuses this first person account with a very Russian world-weariness.  "I drank more than most Russians.  That, I am perfectly well aware, is quite a boast." "Writers you see, daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any others in this respect.  A realist writer may break his protagonist's leg, or kill his finance; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying."

I found this book in the science fiction section, but it could be enjoyed by any reader of historical fiction who has the patience to follow the meanderings of an elderly and skeptical former writer of science fiction.

Death comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

Started: July 9th, 2012
Finished: July 17th
Pages: 291

Well, I should have known better.  And I did know better. But again....I've been working long hours, and need something to relax with when I get home after, say, 11 hours of work and a 40 minute commute.  Which is okay the first time you do it, but does get old after a few weeks.

Anyway, I knew what I was getting in to, so there are lots of criticisms I have absolutely no right to make.  When you read a book that picks up the story of Mr. and Mrs. Darcy several years after the wedding that concludes Pride and Prejudice, you have to expect that it will spell out altogether too much about their subsequent lives.  And it isn't surprising that it might unnecessarily revisit key scenes from the original book, while drawing in every single major character and some of the minor ones too, irrespective of the demands of the plot.  But I do wish that James hadn't gotten quite so involved with the legal aspects of the mystery. It dragged, particularly towards the end.

The Diviners by Margaret Laurence

Begun: 27 June 2012
Finished: 14 July 2012
Pages: 462

I first read The Diviners as a teenager. At that time, there were two Margarets in Canadian literature, and Laurence seemed somehow the wiser and more eternal. It still feels that way.  Maybe because Laurence gets me in the gut every time.

The Diviners says something new to me every time I read it. As a teenager it was about the need to get away. In my twenties, the story of Morag and Jules spoke to me of the importance of enduring connection. Today I see the cost of all of the choices, the story of Canada told through the person of Pique (Scots and Metis), the power of story to shape our lives, and how where you are from makes you who you are.

And somehow that feels like just the start.

I wonder what I'll think when I reread it 10 years from now?

Killdeer by Phil Hall

Started: June 16, 2012
Finished: July 5, 2012
Pages: 118

The last book of poetry to appear on this blog went slowly because reading it was so intense.  Every poem had a lot to offer,  and each one demanded some space and time to absorb.

This one....well, for most of the time I was reading it, I was actually reading 3 other books (The Diviners, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, and The Nonesuch).  That hinders progress. But the real reason this one went slowly is that I didn't enjoy it all that much.

I was initially puzzled as to why this book is a GG award winner.  It hardly seems like poetry:  more like short boring essays written to scan like modern poetry.  You know:
"I read the first poem--
and couldn't understand
why
anyone
would
ever
read another"

My initial working theory was that the book won a Governor General's award because it is self-consciously "Canadian Literature".  For example, one early piece in the collection is about the "writer" meeting Margaret Laurence, and there are multiple other callouts to Irving Layton, George Grant, etc. etc.  I think chances are even that this book won a GG because the judges of the GGs are Canadian authors.  It reminds me of an experience I had as a young woman.   Just for fun, I "competed" in a blitz poetry competition at my local public library that was sponsored by the CBC.  Every competitor drew a page of a dictionary, and had 10 minutes to compose a poem that used one of the dictionary words they'd drawn.  The 3rd prize winner confided to me that the sure fire cheap-ass way to get on the winner's list was to use the names of the judges and CBC personalities who were present in your poem.  It worked for him!  And while the prize jury did not include the named authors (I think they're all dead),  if you're competing for the Griffin Prize, it probably doesn't hurt to appeal to the Canadian judges.

I did warm slightly to the book as it drew to a close.  I enjoyed some of the later poems, like the scathing "The Bad Sequence", and the seemingly autobiographical "A thin plea".  But.....I still suspect that the book is a prize winner because it appeals to prize judges.  The subject matter is often writing, writers, and the writer's life.  Many of the references are to the work of other authors.  I think I'd have gotten more out of it if I were a professor of English literature.  In other words....even the best poems are not really for general reader.

If you're looking for poetry, read Memory's Daughter, whose imagery and some of its subject matter is drawn from the world of science.

The Nonesuch by Georgette Heyer

Started: June 20, 2012
Finished: June 28, 2012
Pages:299

What can I say?  I've been working a lot of long hours leading up to the long weekend, and found myself unable to concentrate when I got home.  Brain, tired.  Need to relax.  Thank you Ms. Heyer, for providing something that keeps my brain from going in circles long enough to relax into sleep.

The Nonesuch is on my top 10 list of Heyers.  It features a well-born governess who uses guile to control her beautiful, spoiled, and wilful charge, winning the heart of an incomparable beau and making her way back into the class into which she was born.  The end.

V is for Vengance by Sue Grafton

Started: June 11th
Finished:June 17th
Pages: 437

After this one, there are only 4 books left before Kinsey Millhone retires.  Presumably at least.  Who knows what happens after "Z"?  But in the meantime, Sue Grafton made some wiser choices than Sara Paretsky for her long-running "alphabet" series.  Most notably, Grafton has frozen Kinsey in time.  While the rest of us meander through the decades, only 6 years have passed in Santa Theresa.  "V" takes place in 1988, as Kinsey is about to turn 38 years old.

But for all that Kinsey detects the old-fashioned way, sans internet background searches or gps tracking devices, Kinsey has changed over the course of 22 books.  She's still a misfit who owns a single disreputable dress, and she still cuts her own hair with nail scissors.  But she's hardly a loner anymore.   She's collected a family.  Two of them in fact:  the aged but spritely family of her landlord, complete with his hypochondriac brother and his curmudgeonly Hungarian wife Rosie, and her own estranged family who show up intermittently when convenient for plot purposes.

But the biggest change is that Kinsey is now notably funnier.  It's been quite a while since I read "A", but I don't remember quite the string of sardonic humour from start to finish back at then.

All that being said, there is nothing really notable about "V". It's not a high point of the series (Q and S were both quite interesting).  Just a good read, competently executed.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Started: June 4, 2012
Finished: June 9, 2012
Pages: 374

Ready Player One is the real deal.  I could just say "read it!  read it!" and have done, but I enjoyed the book too much to leave it at that.

Of course, I suppose it's not for everyone.  Ever play Galaga?  If I say appreciatively "you're evil", might you respond "chaotic neutral, actually"? Do you have any idea why it would be super cool to drive a DeLorean that was also equipped with a Oscillation Overthruster?  If so... you're such a geek!   Ahem, I mean, you're squarely in the target readership of this book.  It's well-written, engaging science fiction that's full of 80s geek nostalgia.

Ready Player One is Ernest Cline's first SF novel.  Let's hope it's not his last.

The French Powder Mystery by Ellery Queen

Started May 31
Finished June 3
Pages 316

Not all popular fiction ages well.   Ellery Queen isn't awful, but you can't help being aware that you're reading a book written in 1930. And, alas, not in a good way. Want your medical examiner to remove a bullet from the victim's heart at the actual crime scene, while simultaneously determining the bullet's angle of entry? Want a know-it-all detective hero who doesn't for a moment wonder about the guilt of one of the possible suspects because, after all, the fellow is the right sort and went to the same school as him?

If you're interested in classic American detective fiction, you're probably best off with Noir: Dashiell Hammet or Philip Chandler. If you're not in the mood for darkness, you can't beat Nero Wolfe.

Sister of the Road, as told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman

Started: May 25, 2012
Finished: May 30, 2012
Pages:314
Copyright: 1937

Now this is an interesting book.  I picked it up last year on a whim at a second-hand bookstore out in Chilliwack.  It's an autobiography of a female hobo, "Box Car" Bertha Thompson, written during the dirty 30s.

Why did I read it?  I've also read:

• an autobiography of a suffragette.  Laugh a Defiance by Mary Richardson is a matter-of-fact description of, well, frankly, her terrorist actions while following Emmeline Pankhurst in the struggle to win the vote for British women.  
• the memoir of Caroline Herschel, an 18th century astronomer who discovered 7 comets at a time when there were only about 20 in total known, and who also helped her brother William do the first systematic astronomical survey of the skies.  
• Sister Marie Celeste's letters in Letters to Father: Suor Maria Celeste to Galileo.  (translated and published by Dana Sobel after she wrote Galileo's Daughter)
• the autobiography of Diane Di Prima, a 50s Beatnik poet who was a contemporary of Jack Kerouac.

These women have nothing in common except that they tell their own stories in their own words. History in the raw. The books are an adventure for someone who isn't used to reading primary sources that drop you--- slam!--into the past.  They are also a very immediate way of connecting to the lost history of women's lives.

That's the context I brought to Sister of the Road.  And in some ways this book didn't disappoint. I wondered how shocked contemporary readers would have been at Bertha's unconventional lifestyle. I was interested in the range of women and men that Bertha met on the road, and was surprised at how commonplace radical political movements appeared to be in the  hobo camps.  More lost history:  when we talk about "the homeless problem" today we aren't generally talking about the problem of  I.W.W. or anarchist agitators.  Except sometimes in the Occupy camps, which ended up hosting all three types of travellers that Bertha knew: hobos (jobless wanderers), tramps (those looking for adventure), and bums (drunks or addicts).

The book follows Bertha from age 15 or so until just past her 30th birthday.  But at about age 22 I started to have doubts.  Granted Bertha was a tramp who was interested in people and any and all experiences of life.  But .....her experiences started to seem a tich too comprehensive for plausibility.  Why did she take up working for a pimp in a brothel again?  Really?  Just as she leaves that life, pregnant and afflicted with venereal disease,  her grifter ex-boyfriend dramatically finds her again from death row.  Ah ..okay.  Which made me start thinking: Bertha is literate, well-educated, and articulate.  Why is this book is "as told to"  rather than written by Bertha herself?   Hm....and here's an appendix of statistics about homeless men and women.  New hypothesis: Bertha is a fabrication by a sociologist who chose to illustrate ALL of those statistics in a single woman's life?. 

I have an original 1937 edition of the book, but I thought "what the hell" and googled it anyway.  Thanks to the gods of the internet I did come up with something.  But it was a weirder something than I expected.  Sister of the Road was reprinted in the 2000s with an appendix that explained that it was a fabrication based on the stories of 3 or more hobo women interviewed by Ben Reitman.

It also explained that Ben Reitman was an anarchist, abortionist, birth control activist, and Emma Goldman's lover.  Which of course changed my perceptions of the book all over again. Of course he chose to make Bertha a political activist moving in a network of political activists.  Even if that hadn't been his life, it would have been his propaganda.  But why did he make Bertha so promiscuous and so unconventional?  Originally I'd thought the book was sensationalistic simply to draw in readers. Was he instead trying to advocate for free love by treating Bertha's sexual adventures matter-of-factly?  Why did he write the book in the first place?  He romanticizes Bertha's life and makes her likeable, but she and the others she meets on the road are often far from admirable.  Did he feel it was important to circulate and humanize those statistics ?  I don't see another clear political purpose to the book and I think there must be one.  Finding out the book was fictional raised more questions than it answered.

In the end the best part of reading this Sister of the Road was having my perceptions altered first by Bertha's story, and then by my understanding that Bertha's story was fiction.  Which makes it a very modern book after all, a la "A Million Little Pieces" and "Three Cups of Tea".

Light by M. John Harrison

Started: May 13, 2012
Finished: May 24, 2012
Pages: 418

Light is a hard, spiky book.  It uses the trope of three parallel stories told in a cycle of three chapters, with the added complication that the third storyline begins as the tank-dreams of a hallucination junkie. But it's almost a relief to encounter those: story one follows a serial killer physicist trying to invent quantum computing in 1999.  Story two takes place in the far future where a petulant ship's intelligence carelessly murders other expeditions that are also cruising the pyschedelic fringes of the galactic core. Story three is just hard to make any sense of.

As you may have gathered by now, I found it difficult to engage with Light. The book bursts with a disturbing weirdness.  The serial killer is driven by an obsession with chance and a fear of the Shranker....who may not even exist. The intelligent ship is a deeply unsympathetic character who inhabits a universe where space-faring species do no more than scavenge the grandiose and inexplicable remains of vanished cultures. And when the tank-dream junkie returns to the "real" world, it's one where he remembers nothing of his life except that everyone is trying to kill him.

Light is not a comfortable read.  I'm not at all sure what it was "about".  But the writing was excellent and the characters and images were striking. So, while not exactly recommended, not exactly dis-recommended either.

Christmas Mourning by Magaret Maron

Started: May 16
Finished: May 18
Pages: 289

Margaret Maron writes very comfortable books. When you visit Deborah Knott, her husband, stepson, and her large extended family, it feels very natural to spend a few days with her preparing for Christmas and watching her husband figure our the causes of the latest tragedy to hit Colleton County. I suppose that makes her books fall into the "cozy" category, even though the deaths are seem real and sad, and unpleasantness lurks beneath the surface of the life of the perfect cheerleader and her grieving family. But every neatly-wrapped up murder mystery needs to have a murder at its heart (Alexander McCall Smith excepted), and Maron writes better than many mystery authors. So Christmas Mourning wasn't a bad way to waste a few head-achy summer hours.

1493 by Charles C. Mann

Started: Feb. 23
Stalled: Feb 25
Restarted: April 28, 2012
Finished: May 13, 2012
Pages: 459

Charles Mann's previous book, 1491, uses recent archeological and historical research to draw a picture of the Americas before Columbus's arrival.  1493 describes the impact of on the entire world of sustained European involvement in the Americas post-"discovery".

Both books are full of surprising facts.  Perhaps the single most unbelievable item from 1493 is that earthworms are not native to North America.  I looked at the footnote on that one, and am tempted to actually look up those references myself!  (The assertion in the book is that farmers in the Chesapeake Bay area brought earthworms with them both in ship ballast and in the root balls of plants that they transported to their new home.  Okay, it's a plausible scenario for introduction....but weren't there any American earthworms in that ecological niche before contact?  And how do you know? For that matter, how do you know that the "European" earthworms weren't already here when the British settlers arrived?),  I could list a lot more random facts, but I'd hate to spoil too many of these nuggets for anyone who might like to go on to read 1493.  Rest assured there are lots more.

Mann uses these surprising facts along with a lot of historical detail to build the central theses of  his book: the Spanish conquest of the Americas fundamentally changed the world.  It was the start of an inexorable process that led to the world becoming effectively a single economy, and increasingly a single ecosystem.   Furthermore, this change was a direct, real, and traceable result of various decisions made by first the Spanish conquistadoras and later by (mostly) the subsequent Spanish colonial administrations. As with 1491, Mann's arguments are convincing both because of the amount of detail he includes, and because of the way he links his stories together to draw the bigger picture.

So, overall, I'd recommend reading it.  Although... if I had to choose between reading 1491 and 1493, I'd read 1491.  I enjoyed it more.  It could be because I read 1491 while I was in Mexico and actually visiting some of the same specific places that he discusses in the book.  It could also be that reading both books so close together was a bit much.  He does have some annoying tendencies (like oversimplification of philosophical or political issues), which are easier to overlook in a one off.  But it might also be that 1491 is the better book.

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party by Alexander McCall Smith

Started: 20 April 2012
Finished: 8 May 2012
Pages: 213

Mysteries range from semi-horror through thrillers and police procedurals to the (usually) British cozy.  In a cozy, the corpse barely appears.  There are no graphic descriptions or upsetting details,  you probably didn't get to know the person well or at all before they were "struck down", and you get the distinct impression that a murder occurred only to  give the detective an excuse to poke about, ask questions, and solve a puzzle.

Take a British cozy, subtract the corpse, add an extra dose of quaint charm....and you have the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.   In fact, I sometimes suspect Alexander McCall Smith of attempting to entirely subvert the mystery genre itself in aid of some obscure post-modern project.  For example, his later books go to the point of almost subtracting the very mystery itself, let alone "tired" conventions like a resolution.   And wouldn't a twee book be the best way of slipping something like that by an unsuspecting book-buying (well, borrowing) public?

Breakdown by Sara Paretsky (spoilers)

Started: Tuesday April 24
Finished: Saturday April 28
Pages: 431

Disappointing.  I'm fond of V.I. Warshawski, but the ending on this one was lame.  It reminded me of classic 1920s English detective fiction, where the detective calls everyone into the library to review the investigation, complete with a few revelations, in hopes of startling the prime suspect into a public confession.  The "solution" was almost as convoluted and implausible too, even if Paretsky didn't quite resort to making the murderer the least likely suspect.

The problems don't end there.  It would have been much more satisfying and topical to have her bad guys brought low by a Chicago version of the British phone hacking scandal of 2011.  And appropriate too, given that V.I. is facing down members of a right wing media empire who seem suspiciously well-informed of her movements and seem likely to be hacking into her cell phone.

But overall I think the main issue is that the series is getting tired.  V.I.'s sidekicks are a little old to be performing their normal supporting roles in her investigations.  Would a Holocaust survivor like Lotty still really be doing surgery into her....at a rough guess, late 70s or 80s?  Is it likely that anyone on the police force would still remember V.I.'s father given that V.I. is herself in her 50s?  And let's not start in on her dogs, Peppy and Mitch, who at a conservative estimate are 22.   I"m all for willing suspension of disbelief, but...author, baby, you've got to work with me.

Sara Paretsky:  you've still got it.  The story was gripping, the characters and situations interesting.  But please, as much as we've all loved her, you have to stop writing about V.I. before all of the good memories are gone.

Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger

Started: April 5th
Finished: April 22nd 2012
Pages: 260

Everything is Miscellaneous features the kind of writing about the internet that's been driving me away from reading writings about the internet since....oh, about 1993.    You know the kind of thing.   The INTERNET CHANGES EVERYTHING!!!!!   Everything internet is cooler and more revolutionary than anything invented anywhere anytime before, and everything non internet is....just hooey.  (insert additional exclamation marks here if you like.  I'm all out.)  Ho hum.  Sandy and I were forced to write a letter to As It Happens back during the 1997 election campaign to point out that political parties creating websites that were online versions of their party brochures ..... wasn't actually that significant.  And the only reason the letter was written in the first place was that I was sick and tired of the "INTERNET CHANGES EVERYTHING" then already.

So, why am I reading an "INTERNET CHANGES EVERYTHING" book in 2012?    Well, it didn't happen exactly on purpose.

One of my "resolutions" upon returning from Mexico was that I was going to give in and spend a bit more of my own time outside of work thinking about and reading about stuff that relates to my work.  I've resisted in the past because it seemed like yet another intrusion of work into my personal time.  But...I am interested in my work, and subjects relating to my work.  So I decided to change my attitude and resist less.

So when  Everything is Miscellaneous appeared as a must-read in an article from a professional organization and it was available from the library, I decided to give it a go.

The book does have a few core points that are interesting.  People invent taxonomies to bring order to knowledge.  Taxonomies help make sense of information by exposing important relationships between items.  However, items can usefully exist in multiple taxonomies because there are many many possible inter-relationships between any two items.  With digital copies, it's possible to add essentially unlimited amounts of metadata to any item, or even to treat the entire contents of a digital item as metadata in that you can categorize or search for an item by any element of its contents.  These two properties potentially give end-users the power to create their own taxonomies, or for taxonomies to emerge from the collective action of large groups of users who individually tag the digital items.  These "folksonomy" taxonomies can permit hitherto unsuspected relationships, or even purely personal relationships between items to become visible.  This can be powerful and useful, and could permit users of information to derive new levels of meaning from data.

Okay, fine.  But why did you have to spend most of the 260 pages at your disposal exclaiming that expertise was an obsolete concept, amongst other hyperbole?  For example, as the creator of technical data with an interested but limited audience (currently at a career level high in the thousands or even tens of thousands), this is interesting, but not decisive.  Jakob Neilson has found that perhaps 1% of users will be regular contributors to a site, and perhaps 9% more will contribute occasionally.  The remaining 90% simply consume the content. Who do you think would do a better job of tagging this technical content so that it can be easily found and used by others:  someone who has a pretty good idea of the overall scope of a particular subject area and the relative importance of its various parts, or a random collection of 10 people who happen to look at some subset of that information?  I'd argue that for collections of information with audiences smaller than that of Wikipedia, and where the consequences of failure are larger than a failed Wiki search, expertise can definitely add value. But that would make me boring and obsolete, apparently. Because with the internet, expertise is obsolete.  Unless it's contributed by someone on the internet, of course.  :-)

Okay, enough already.  An annoying book with a few kernels of interest.  Now if only someone would explain to me why books about the internet feel compelled to present their ideas in simplistic and bombastic ways.  I might enjoy reading a book about that.

Great Houses of England and Wales by Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and Christopher Simon Sykes

Started: Feb. 25th
Finished: April 20th, 2012
Pages: 235

 I bought this book back in 2002 on a trip to Britain and I found it on my shelf while I was looking for some bedtime reading.  It's published by the National Trust and features photos and a brief history of  25 of the most splendid historic houses in their collection.

Between classic British mysteries and classic British fiction, I've spent a lot of literary time in English Country houses. This book helps put a face to those bland mentions of East Wings, libraries, withdrawing rooms, and drafty Great Halls.  So this is what"classic" wealth looks like.

The Complaints by Ian Rankin

Started: April 11th
Finished: April 14th
Pages: 381

I needed a break from the intensity of Half-Blood Blues, so I took a detour into a mystery novel.  Mystery novels are relaxing because they have a strong plot and the bad guy always gets caught.  And Ian Rankin avoids the two great sins of mystery:  he's a good writer, and he doesn't sacrifice plausibility for the sake of proving how clever he is.  The special bonus feature of this book (for those of use seeking a novelistic respite from Nazism) is that the guy who gets murdered isn't very likeable.   So The Complaints turns out to have been a perfect choice.

Thank you Ian Rankin, and thank you for not making Rebus's retirement an excuse for quitting yourself.

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Started: April 2nd
Finished: April 15th
Pages: 311

When I was in Saskatoon I decided that I was in the mood to read some current "literary" fiction, so I bought two  Booker-nominated novels, both Canadian: Half-Blood Blues and the Sisters Brothers.

I've just finished Half-Blood Blues.  The books that made last year's Booker shortlist were selected for "readabilty". But readable fiction isn't necessarily easy to read.  Half-Blood Blues is wrenching.  Nazis may make the best villains (a la Raiders of the Lost Arc), but there was nothing cartoonish about Berlin in the 40s or the fall of Paris near the beginning of the war.

But overall I enjoyed the book.  The tone is convincing:  you believe that you are hanging out with black jazz musicians, and feel the joys, demands, and disappointments of trying to make great music. And the period and the characters are fascinating.  Who knew that for a black man Hitler's Germany of the 1930s was an easier place to live than the Southern US?

The fact that the author is Canadian shows up only as an Easter egg:  Our Narrator shuts up an inquisitive cab driver by telling him that he's travelling to London Ontario.  No one's curiosity extends to trips to Canada.

My new blog

Okay, I don't actually know why anyone would be interested, particularly, but I've started a new blog.

Like my last blog, I decided to write a few articles to see if I'd continue before launching it to "interested" parties.  This one is simply a record of everything that I read from February 2012 until February 2013.  Why?   Well, here's my "intro" post where I explain my rationale and blog title.

What have I read so far? Here's the list as of April 3:
Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam
Elements of Style by Strunk and White
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stig Larssen
Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott
After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn
Memory's Daughter by Alice Major
Great Houses of England and Wales by Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and Christopher Simon Sykes
Black Moth by Georgette Heyer
Footsteps in the Dark by Georgette Heyer
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Allan Bradley

I've labeled the various articles by type of book (SF, nonfiction, work) in case that helps you understand which books you might be interested in. If there is no end date listed I haven't finished it yet.  And yes, I'll admit it if I don't get through something.

Feel free to add your own comments about books you've read, or suggestions for things that I ought to read.

Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam

Started: March 26th
Finished: April 2nd
Pages: 235

Penguin's Extraordinary Canadians series is a series of brief biographies, generally written by someone who is also well-known, who can perhaps bring an interesting personal perspective to the biography.  In this case the author is Vincent Lam, an award-winning author who happens to be an emergency room physician.

Unfortunately, the book feels formulaic.  For example, it's strictly linear.  But the backstory of Douglas's life before his political career lacks interest  told out of context.  If Lam had started with, say, the story of the 1944 Saskatchewan election and then gone back to explain how Douglas got to the point where he was being greeted everywhere by cheering crowds while in the background a national committee of corporate presidents coordinated opposition to his campaign and every mainstream paper in Saskatchewan printed stories headlined things like "Socialism Leads to Dictatorship" and "All Opposition Banned if CCF Wins Power"-- well, I'd have gobbled it up instead of thinking "la la la....immigrant Scottish boy, small town preacher, la la la" as I did for the first 100 pages.

Don't get me wrong: I picked up the book because I wanted to learn more about Tommy Douglas.  And I ate up the story of his political career:  17 consecutive surplus budgets implementing a progressive social agenda, culminating in the introduction of Medicare, all in one of the poorest provinces in Confederation....bam!  Take *that* you sad sorry excuse for a federal conservative government. Stop bleating about "fiscal responsibility" while cutting programs and running up big deficits.  

Ah hem. I digress.  I guess my point was that Douglas's story could have been better told.  I'll give Lam the benefit of the doubt and believe that he was constrained by the format of the series.  

The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White

Started: March 9th
Finished: March 31st
Pages: 85

My excuse for taking so long over this one is that it's a little book. It vanished for over a week at one point because it was skinny enough to hide under a single piece of paper.

Summation:  it's prescriptive, it's funny, and it's out of date.  Or at least the edition that I read is.  Time has passed by many of the specific usage rules.  Imagine describing Web 1.5 without using the word "personalization".

On the other hand, the advice about clarity and brevity is timeless.  "Vigorous writing is concise.  A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines or a machine no unnecessary parts."  "...although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one."

There, saved you from having to read the whole 85 pages.  :-)

But seriously, despite the criticism I've been newly conscious of my writing ever since I finished it.  I think that's actually a good thing.  It's never a mistake to check that you're saying what you mean, clearly.

The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stig Larsson

Started: March 17, 2012
Finished: March 23, 2012
Pages: 602

I was looking for some fiction, so I stopped by the library and found this.  I've read Dragon Tattoo and Played with Fire, but waited a long time to read this final novel because the publisher refused to put out the paperback version.  Well, fooled them.  I can't remember how I read the first one, I bought the second,  and would have bought the 3rd in paperback....but instead waited until it was easily available at the library.  That's how I read most mysteries:  they're consumables, and as such as not worth purchasing.  Sara Paretsky is almost the only author I regularly buy, and that's mostly because I like her books and political attitude and want to support her.

At any rate, on to the book itself. I won't call it predictable, but it is very similar to the first two.  Blomqvist brilliantly pursues a story while Lisbeth proves herself super-heroic.  Corruption is uncovered, evil-doers are punished.  Gripping writing makes it hard to put down.  The end.

It's too bad Larsson didn't get a chance to write more....but only because I'm curious as to what Lisbeth would have chosen to do with her $2.3 billion after she finished slaying dragons.

Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott

Started: March 3
Stopped: March 17.  Due back at the library.
Pages: 253

Fierce Conversations is a business/self-help book that was recommended to me by a coworker.  I can see why she liked it.  The book is about how to have necessary, potentially difficult, and even transformative conversations at home, or in your work life.

I'm struggling a bit to finish it though.  How to have those kinds of conversations isn't a top-of-the-mind issue for me right now so I don't feel committed to doing the work needed to get the most out of the book.   I'm still deciding whether to continue skimming to get an overview of the message, or to abort and pick it up again when the issue feels more urgent to me.

Update:  I finished about 1/3 of the book before the library wanted it back.

After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn

Started: March 9
Finished: March 14
Pages: 342

So your parents are superheroes.....without having superpowers yourself, all that seems to get you is a permanent front row seat for the kidnapping plans of the less-brilliant members of the local criminal class. At least that's the premise of After the golden age, which follows the adventures of the accountant daughter of renowned crime fighters.

Unfortunately, the summary is better than the book.  Okay, just to be clear, my summary may not be better than the book, but After the golden age doesn't live up to it's potential.  It's not a bad read, it just could have been better.

If you want a truly funny satire, read Heroics for Beginners by John Moore.  Even modern adventure fiction will never be the same again afterwards.

Memory's Daughter by Alice Major

Started: Feb. 24
Finished: March 26
Pages: 134

I don't read much poetry.  When I do, I usually pick modern Canadian poets, and I buy their books.  Somebody should: poets need the encouragement.

There's also a practical rationale.  I read poetry very very slowly.  Memory's Daughter has only 134 pages, and perhaps 100 poems but I started it weeks ago and I'm only on page 64.  There's just so much compressed onto every sparsely printed page.  The first poem, "Baucis and Philemon" runs for 6 brief stanzas over 2 pages, but comprises a novel's worth of beauty and tragedy.

I finally finished over a month after starting.  There are in fact several novel's worth's of emotion and observation compressed into these poems.    Recommended.

Black Moth by Georgette Heyer

I've read all of Georgette Heyer's romances several times....or so I thought.  But when I started rereading The Black Moth on Sunday I realized that I've only read this one once before.  So reading it again now is almost as good as discovering a new one.

Started: 4 March 2012
Finished: 6 March 2012
Pages: 326

Footsteps in the Dark by Georgette Heyer

I was going to say, "Georgette Heyer's romances are second to none", but I don't actually know that.  I've never read any others, unless you count the Harlequin romances my sister used to leave lying around the house.  And I only read the last 3 pages of those to get the peculiar experience of reading the exact same ending with different character names, over and over again.

So Georgette Heyer is my expectation of a romance:  witty,  well-written, and with plots of extreme implausiblity but high entertainment value.  Jane Austen light, with a bit of madcap adventure thrown in for leavening.

Her mysteries don't live up to that standard.....but I've read all of the romances, and almost all of the historical novels!  And they're solid, readable British country-house mysteries of a certain era.  Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours of relaxation.

Started Feb. 27
Finished Feb. 28th
Pages: 347

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Started: Feb. 13
Completed: Feb. 22nd
ebook
Pages: ~160

I've read Huckleberry Finn before, of course, but it would have been more than 30 years ago.  A couple of things brought the book back to mind and back on the mental "list":  the recent publication of Twain's unexpurgated autobiography, and the recent controversy about publishing a version of Huck Finn that doesn't contain the word "n*****".

Huckleberry Finn didn't make a big impression on me when I read it as a kid.  For one thing, I've never been fond of books written in dialect. For another, it's a very "boyish" book on the surface, full of picaresque adventures that I found difficult to identify with.

But on rereading, the satire that was invisible to my childhood self is the most notable part of the book.  And the slave narratives I've read since then (most recently the Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill) gives a poignancy and urgency to Jim's plight that I couldn't understand in the same way back then.

Okay, now I get it.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (spoilers)

A lacuna is "a blank space or a missing part", a "deficiency".  or "a small cavity, pit, or discontinuity in an anatomical part".  Kingsolver also uses it to describe the small missing piece, that once found, makes a different whole.

Which is a purpose of Barbara Kingsolver's novel: to describe a missing bit of North American history that once added back makes Fox News, and "birthers", and the Tea Party ..... if not make sense, at least fit into a larger pattern of pathological American behaviour.

I was attracted to this book by my recent trip to Mexico.  The book begins there, with the early life of (the fictional) Harrison Shepard, a half American/half Mexican boy who becomes a cook and secretary first for Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera, and later for their friend and colleague Lev Trotsky.  The book ends with Harrison's "death" by persecution by a McCarthyist witchhunt.

The description of McCarthyism is superb.  Kingsolver describes how "anti-communist" hysteria at first appears risible, then dangerous, and then inexorable in its immunity to proportion, logic, or even facts.  The hysteria rolls over American culture, and although it now calls itself something different and has different bogeymen, rolls over it still.

I also very much enjoyed the first, Mexican half of the book.  Today Frida is far more famous in popular American culture than either her husband or even Trotsky.  The book gives much more context.  Frida was an acclaimed artist in her own lifetime, but her husband was a Mexican superstar.  Rivera helped create what is now a founding myth of Mexican culture:  the triumphant vision of the Mexican people as the heroic merger of Spanish and Indigenous cultures.  A friend commented on facebook that she found the ubiquity of that message in Mexico creepy and kind of totalitarian (think Aryan "master race" talk). But consider the Canadian alternative: indigenous invisibility.  And Trotsky emerges as a surprisingly sympathetic character, while Stalin appears malevolent beyond description.


Started:  Feb. 9, 2012
Finished: Feb. 20, 2012
Pages: 507

Sweetness at the bottom of the pie by Allan Bradley

I had a cold.  I couldn't concentrate.  I decided that nothing would do but to find a mystery to relax with while my head cleared.  So I popped by the library and picked up a few books suitable for reading on the couch with a cat on my lap.

Allan Bradley got a lot of press when this book was published:  he's a Canadian writer and I believe first time published author in his 70s who got a contract for several books on the basis of this one.  It also won a first mystery novel award.

Summary: it's engaging, relatively well-written, and certainly has an original detective in its precocious 11 year old heroine.  Unlike many mysteries by less-experienced authors, the plot was plausible within its context, and barely creaked (although I continue to wonder how the stamps survived some of their adventures).  However, after having just spent 3 days with several very bright kids in the 8-12 year old range....I have to say that I find Flavia a bit too precocious for plausibility.  Sure, she has an appropriately hostile relationship with her elder sisters, and an entertaining passion for poisons....but her knowledge of chemistry is a titch too comprehensive for me.

Started: Feb. 25th
Finished: Feb. 26th
Pages:292

Four books at a time

I enjoyed blogging about my recent trip to Mexico (see my Tea or Chocolate blog).  Now that I'm back in Canada and am preparing to go back to work, I'd like to continue.  When thinking about a theme, books naturally occurred to me.  I read a lot (or at least I used to).  Blogging about what I read would give me an excuse to keep blogging, would likely help me get more out of the books that I pick up,  and who knows?  Someone might be interested in reading my reviews. I think I'll give it a try, anyway.

As an added twist, I'm going to try to review every single book that I read over the course of the year.  I'm curious how much I read these days, and am also curious what the current distribution of books is.  I don't usually keep track.

As for the blog title......I like reading more than one book at a time. I'm not always in the mood for the same thing.  For example, I may alternate between something serious and something light.  When I have more time I might read three things:  maybe something non-fiction, a serious novel, and a mystery.  But when I have even more time and more energy (like I did on our recent Mexico sabbatical), I sometimes go farther..... up to four books at a time.

Frankly, reading four books is something I've tried to do many times but may never have actually achieved. Three books is doable, where "success" is defined as making progress on all of the books and eventually finishing them all.  But every time I start that fourth book....one of them seems to fall off the mental radar.

So, I'm not sure if reading four books at a time is an aspiration (one day I will have enough time and focus to successfully keep four books going at once!), or a fool's errand (who on earth can keep that many mental threads going at once? And who would even want to?).  But given that this book blog is an experiment of similar "dubiosity", I'm taking "four books at a time" as my title.