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.

The Regiment

Farley Mowat chronicles the history, mobilization and actions of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment during World War Two. It's a different kind of war history from that of Malone's books in that Mowat has a much more lyrical style, and is much more personal with the members of the Regiment, while writing from the third person - it is not an autobiography by any means.

I read this one exceedingly quickly, as it was due back at the library, and I could not renew it because someone else wanted to read it.

So, it was much more readable than Malone's two books, but of a completely different style so I wouldn' t be too keen on comparing the two. In any event, the only critique I might level at the book is that the misery of war is rather minimized - it reads as a bit of a light story, with only a few instances of combat tragedy - and even those don't jolt or stand out from the narrative in an attention-getting device.

I shouldn't criticize too sharply - Mowat was there, I wasn't; and if he captured the experience of the Hasty Pees, only the Hasty Pees could tell. It is definitely worth reading, though.

A Portrait of War 1939-1943

Just prior to Remembrance Day I picked up some war history books from the library, and the first one I finished was Richard S. Malone's "A Portrait of War". The book details his involvement in Canada's participation in WWII, from an interestingly personal point of view, as opposed to the normal stories told based on troop movements, military actions, and political overtones. Malone was a newspaperman, and early in the war was tapped to work on the Defense Minister's staff, and eventually was involved in nearly every major Canadian activity. The book can read a bit like an exercise in name dropping - referring to General Montgomery as "Monty", in the context of a series of interactions the author had with the General; however, Malone's presentation serves to capture a sense of the personal, and this serves to provide an enriching background to the various events.

Malone's involvement included participating in the initial efforts to move Canada from a peacetime to a war footing, planning portions of invasions, facilitating meetings and the exchange of information between Canadian, British and eventually American war offices, and arranging press operations in Sicily and Italy (which included the inauguration of the Canadian military newspaper, the Maple Leaf.

It is not a fast read, and at times can get a little laborious, but it is a well written book overall that richly recounts a perilous time in history.

George Trosley-CARtoonist

George Trosley-CARtoonist looks pretty cool. Haven't had much time to look through it, but I will do so later.

The Slave and the Free (Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines)

This is one of the wierder sci-fi-fantasy books I've read. Before I get into that, this volume contains the first two books of a four-book series written by Suzy McKee Charnas over something like thirty years. Not a prolific pace for an author, and interesting since sci-fi (I know I'm probably mixing up genres a bit here, but never mind that, okay?) authors seem to be able to churn out books one after the other a bit like a sausage factory.

So that piqued my interest - perhaps this will be an extremely writerly book, which I think would be interesting in the genre. Okay, full disclosure - I just grabbed the book off the shelf in the library because it looked interesting, and it wasn't til later that I found out the rest of the stuff.

I'm still not sure if I like reading this series. Set formulaically after an apocalypse known as The Wasting, leftover and survivor humans are eking out a grimmish existance, with a rather bizarre set of customs and mores. In the first book, consider a patriarchal society embodying everything inequality of the sexes in the extreme. In the second, consider a matriarchal society - with no men. Read the book to find out how they procreate - as the process was hinted at I hoped against fleeting hope that it would not be so... It was.

So the social order of Charnas' vision isn't really to my taste. I suppose that would have something to do with her aims in writing the book - thirty years, the first book first published in 1974 - which strikes me as coinciding far too neatly with the cycles in radical feminism. (At the end of the second book, it's starting to sound like things aren't going to go too well for any male character that might appear in the third book. I hope the library has it.) Back on track: It's almost a Swiftian trope, but I will reserve judgement until I finish the series.

I would have to say that I am appreciating the vision and development of the books. The first one was a quick, interesting read; the second I found a little harder to get through. It could have been the subject matter, it may have been the writing. In any event, my interest is aroused enough to say "Bring on the next book," which I'll do next time I'm at the library.

Still... very wierd book.

Latitudes of Melt

Joan Clark's novel really is amazing, in my opinion. A loose synopsis: in 1912 a baby is found on an ice pan off the coast of Newfoundland and is brought into a small community of fishermen and their families. She's a little different, but she gets along, finds love, marries, and so on. Late in the book, and thus later in her life, she has had children, and they range through their lives, until her granddaughter happens to extricate her past from the wisps of history, discovering who the baby was, and where she comes from.

That short summary does incredible violence to Clark's story. The descriptions of characters, environments and situations were arresting - I didn't really want the book to end. This was a really good book, one I'm glad to have read.

The Seeds of Time

Kay Kenyon's first novel is pretty darn impressive. Humans have come up with "Time Diving" technology, which allows them to travel through time and space, with certain constraints, of course. Naturally, the ability to use this technology must have a need associated, and that need is the search for biological speciments from other time/spaces to rejuvenate the Earth's biosphere, with has been utterly degraded by human depredation. Along with the dwindling life potential on the planet, social organization has evolved (or devolved, as it's pretty clear that the structures are not all that pleasant) such that "Sick" people are routinely rounded up and put in camps to live out their miserable days, accompanied by homosexuals and mentally challenged people - basically a eugenic echo of social engineering. A pretty miserable place.

The central character, Clio Finn has escaped the mess on Earth and is a "Dive pilot" - she is one of the few who are uniquely capable of maintaining consciousness (and the contents of their stomachs) as they dive through time/space.

Adventures abound, they find a planet in time that has an almost ideal source of plant life, loyalties are strained and realigned, tough decisions are made, the Laws of Time are toyed with... it's really quite a well done story, particularly in terms of a nuanced take on the old science-fiction standby of time travel.

A quick read, but an enjoyable one.

Heartbreaks Along the Road

Roch Carrier's book is a big book, with a lot going on inside. I suppose it could be best called a satire of life in Quebec, probably just before the Quiet Revolution. The principal foci are social, political, and religious life, which, when I think about it, constitutes life in general in that era. The omnipresent corruption of "the Right Party", led by "Le Chef" touches pretty much every one of the myriad characters in the fictional village of Saint-Toussaint-des-Saints. Come election time, everyone who votes for the Right Party gets a "strippa road" or some other petty favour; anyone who votes for or otherwise supports the "communist Opposition" can expect to be a pariah from the electoral largesse. Tragedy abounds, comedy lurks in the oddest of places (a deep-fried saint, among others), and all through the tale reverberates with the spirit of the era.

The story is not as bleak as Last Days of Montreal, but ranges further and is more subtle in its critique. This book took me longer to read than normal, and I'm glad for it. A very good book.

Richter 10

Arthur C Clarke collaborated with Mike McQuay to write this science fiction novel about human hubris and insignificance in the face of the awesome forces of nature.

Lewis Crane, the main character, is a child during the devasting 1994 LA earthquake in which his parents are killed when their house collapses and a leaking gas main is ignited. Fastforwarding, he is revealed to have become a rather brilliant, though naturally eccentric scientist, who has dedicated his career to the precise prediction of earthquakes. I won't do a spoiler by revealing his ultimate, hidden agenda.

Since the book is set in the relatively near future, the authors are free to hypothesize on the outcomes of various evolutions in technology, commercial and political spheres. The technology hypothesis is admirably understated, though perhaps an extreme extrapolation of consumerist/entertainment trends of 1995. As an example, imagine the ultimate reality TV, where the traffic accident you have just passed (or caused...) is broadcast live on the sides of buildings and on clouds. Imagine, also, brand names projected upon the Moon. Commercially, the book extrapolates the trend of mega-mergers of multinational corporations, and predicts (in 1995) the ascendency of the Chinese as an economic power. This I found interesting, as the Globe and Mail devoted a large portion of this Saturday's paper to analysis and description of the Chinese growth into a global economic powerhouse. Politically, the book's prognostication is an extension of the commercial/economic influence on the political sphere. The cynic in me finds the political economy of the book unsettling as it is again but an extrapolation of existing trends.

The conflict between groups of people, religions and races also has verisimilitude due to the drawing out of historical trends - although the rise of Africa as a world power, at this point, can be readily debated. I suppose it helped that most of the Middle East was turned into a sea of glass after the detonation of 30 multi-megaton nuclear bombs...

I can't neglect to mention the impacts of environmental degradation that are presented as merely a fact of life for the characters of the future - moonbathing is the last activity left for people to do outside unless they are protected by full clothing, hats, and powerful sunscreen.

This is a delightfully complex and wideranging book. Well worth reading.

A Hack a Day

The Hack a Day Web site/blog collects up all sorts of different hacks. Take a look, it's kind of interesting.

Canadian Stories of the Sea

This is a collection of stories and excerpts edited by Victor Suthren, whose credentials are impressive both as a historian and as a sailor. The book has eight logical sections, each with five or six stories. The first section, The First Peoples, presents First Nations' accounts and myths dealing with naval adventure. The Newcomers, the second section, covers the initial encounters of what would become Canada by the Norse and the Europeans. Blood on the Waters covers the early naval warfare in the region. Making a Living on the Sea holds stories of the fishing industry. Special Ships, the fifth chapter or section, has tales of the Bluenose, of an esoteric experiment by a Nova Scotian, and of the sinking of the Princess Sophia. Going It Alone comprises a few tales of solo maritime adventure in the spirit of Joshua Slocum. Dark Shadows: Modern War at Sea holds tales of Canadian naval trial by fire - the Atlantic Convoys and the like. Finally, chapter eight addresses "The Modern Sea: Harsh Workplace, Beckoning Playground," with stories from the boom, bust and evolution of fishing industries to the notion of going to sea for amusement.

These stories don't necessarily require an affinity for the sea to be appealing - they form an empathetic picture of a significant aspect of Canadian history.

Well worth reading for anyone with an interest in history, Canada, the sea or any combination of those.