Old Enough to Say What I Want

Dave Broadfoot has got to be one of my favourite comedians. This is his life story, and is as funny as any of his monologues. I had no idea he was so old, though, and some of the stuff he's done and is able to relate humorously is amazing. By all means, if you like comedians, read this. As a bonus, he includes some of his material - Sgt. Renfrew, Big Bobby Clobber and the whole gang.

Portfoolio 20 - The Years Best Canadian Editorial Cartoons

This is a collection of editorial cartoons for 2004. The cartoons are typically brilliant; the editorial blurbs introducing sections are somewhat wan as they try to mix written humour with a 20 second backgrounder on the issues being addressed by the cartoons.

Dead Heat

This mystery by Caroline Carver was more engaging to me than most mystery novels, perhaps because it's set in tropical Australia, where I lived for a few months. There's not much to the book - dangerous animals, hippy-ish healers, Chinese organized crime, and James Bond-ish Australian policemen - but it is a fairly rapid page turner and a bit of fun to read.

King of the Scepter'd Isle

Michael Greatrex Coney's book is an interesting concept, but somewhat dry in the reading. It's the fourth in a series, but fortunately the previous three books don't seem to be essential to getting the story. It's a take on the Arthurian legend, where Merlin and... I've forgotten the character's name - roam about England telling stories about Arthur and the Round Table and so on; stories so real that the audience feels like they are right in the story. There are also 'happentracks', basically parallel universes that converge and diverge through time. There are also a sort of supreme being, who manipulate or guide events along particular happentracks. There's gnomes, too, and gnome-human relations, and robots and interstellar grasshoppers.

These are all the ingredients of a fabulous story, but I found it sort of limp to read.

The Conqueror's Child

Ah, the thirty year long creative process wraps up. Again, I don't really agree with the fulsome praise heaped on this book by the reviewers cited on the covers.

Summary: Yay, everything kinda works out in the end.

The most interesting part of this series is that it is a feminist sci fi opus spanning 30 years - at a meta-analysis level, the shading of the good versus evil does show some evolution over time. I won't pretend to be sufficiently expert in the realm of feminist theory and/or dogma to say whether the books follow the evolutionary trends, though. Alldera the Conqueror would smite me down.

If someone was considering reading this series, I'd really suggest starting with the last book; and then starting from the beginning, because the first book is a little offputting in its simplicity of scenario and lack of nuance - frankly, tedious. However, the series is worth reading for the arc of development.

The Furies

This is book three of Suzy McKee Charnas' Holdfast Chronicles. Well, I was right - this is a feminist oeuvre through and through - and about as subtle as a sledghammer against a window. I'll avoid for now the arguments around feminism's different schools of thought and so forth.

The book, in my opinion, suffers for being so blatant - there's no mystery or challenge in trying to figure out who is a bad guy and who is a good woman. I'm writing this blurb after I finished the fourth book, and I think this, the third one, is the weakest in terms of holding interest.

I may as well carry on to deal with the fourth book...

Lucifer's Hammer

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's book about the end of the world at the hands of an enormous comet is strangely fascinating. They clearly hail from the Hobbesian perspective of Man (I know, but it's Hobbes' term, not mine) in a state of nature. Of course, getting one's world destroyed in a very scary way probably constitutes a confounding variable, but suffice to say, there's a lot of nasty people in this book.

The second thing that strikes me about this book is the American (specifically, Californian)-centric nature. I'm not calling that an inherently bad thing, because it is a very effective means to constrain the scope of the book which otherwise would be thousands of pages long if written in the same degree of personal detail and addressing the whole world. What I am now curious about is sci-fi takes on the end of the contemporary world from other areas of the world. This book, for example, written in 1977 has as a minor theme the US-USSR Cold War rivalry. I wonder, for example, how would survivors in Africa, or the Andes, or ... wherever would be perceived as carrying on after a catacylismic event.

I just thought about it a bit more, and the device to limit the scope of the book is elegant in its simplicity - tsunami take care of the world's population, because people just seem to love that beachfront view (I know, port cities, trade, it's all economic and logical!); a nuclear war takes care of another large swath of the earth when one country gets jumpy on the trigger finger, and most of the rest of the world (which isn't much) doesn't seem to be all that important except for a few offhand mentions.

I find it hard to read about fictional people reduced to barbarity, and the nasty things they do to one another, especially when the real world has far too many examples of it already. I think the writers used the barbarity to try and make their point (a little crudely) about the strength of the American dream and the power of technology; I can understand the device, but I didn't really enjoy it.

The praise heaped on this book by reviewers (at least the ones plastered over the back and face page of the book) is overly effusive. It's not really that good, in my opinion - I was curious to see how it ended, but at no time did I have trouble putting it down - it's not a "just another couple pages" book. To the book's credit, I now have a literary interest in the cultural study of end-of-the-world stories.

A Nation Forged in Fire : Canadians and the Second World War, 1939-1945

J.L. Granatstein and Desmond Morton wrote a fairly thin history volume, which is deceptive - it's quite well written, and includes a good stock of photographs.

It's hard to comment on the plot and character development of a war history book. This one's pretty good.

1066: The Year of the Conquest

David Howarth has done some rather serious detective work surrounding the Norman invasion of England, decoding disparate sources such as the victor's tales, the loser's accounts, and even the Bayeux Tapestry, to deduce a fairly rigourous and tenable story.

It is a very academic undertaking - I would expect this for a graduate thesis in history; but Howarth does make it readable by bringing characters to life. It's not really a book to read for fun, but I rather enjoyed it - it's a great train book.

A World in Flames, 1944-1945

This is the second volume of Richard Malone's tales of his involvement in World War Two, and I think the novelty of the story is wearing off, because this volume wasn't as captivating as the first one. The book's value is in the perspective it provides of the war effort, and overall is well written. I think I'm getting war history burn-out, though.

Worth reading.