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".