My Nerdy Friend

Last year my goal was to read a book a week, and made it to 49 or 51 (depending on how you count). You can read about it here. This year I decided to read at my leisure and see where I landed. The answer is 37 books, or about 3 per month. Admittedly, this is better than I expected – I would have guessed closer to 24 books for the year.

A quick summary: 10 Book Club books, 8 mysteries, 4 nonfiction, 4 pure science, 8 scifi (2 of which were dystopian) and 1 spy novel. Some surprises:

• I thought I would read more science books, but I am happy that I fit more in than last year.
• My scifi count is WAY higher than I expected, since I consider myself more of a fantasy reader than scifi. Which leads me to ….
• ZERO fantasy! Damn.
• It appears that my guilty pleasure is mystery novels.

I’m doing it again this year, but I plan to set a few goals this time. I will read fewer book club books (which are, in a sense, books you read for other people), I will increase my science books to at least 6 (one every other month), and I WILL find a fantasy series that I love!

1. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene (blog entry pending)
2. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
3. Monkey Beach, by Eden Robinson
4. All The Missing Girls, by Megan Miranda
5. The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells
6. The Girls, Emma Cline
7. The Travelers, Chris Pavone
8. Persons Unknown, Susie Steiner
9. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown
10. Missing, Presumed, Susie Steiner
11. The Gene, An Intimate History; Siddhartha Mukherjee
12. Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery: Even More of the World’s Most Outrageous Scams, by Andreas Schroeder
13. The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton
14. The Perfect Stranger, Megan Miranda
15. Sojourner: An Insider’s View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission, Andrew Mishkin
16. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
17. My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem
18. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
19. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
20. When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi
21. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
22. What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim, Jane Christmas
23. The Likeness, Tana French
24. Passion on the Vine, by Sergio Esposito
25. Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld
26. The Daily Show (the book), by Chris Smith
27. The Particle at the End of the Universe, Sean Carroll
28. The Murder Wall, by Mari Hannah
29. Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
30. I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh
31. Foreigner, Robert J. Sawyer
32. The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood
33. Fossil Hunter, Robert J. Sawyer
34. Far-Seer, Robert J. Sawyer
35. The Widow, Fiona Barton
36. No Time for Goodbye, Linwood Barclay
37. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two, Jack Thorne

Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

This is my second time reading Good Omens and it’s just as good as the first. I decided to re-read it because some actual genius decided to make a TV mini-series and cast David Tennant (Dr Who) and Michael Sheen (Passengers) as Crowley and Aziraphale, respectively. I mean, just take a look at this picture I stole from the web! Was there ever a more perfect casting? No. The answer is definitely no.

It’s almost too perfect

If you haven’t read this book, it’s about the Apocalypse. The biblical one, foretold (“foretold”) in the Book of Revelations, everyone’s favourite pick-me-up chapter of the Bible. A baby has been born, known affectionately in the book as “the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness”, and it is up to a Satanic order of nuns to switch this baby out with another newborn at the local hospital in order to place him with a family who will raise him to be properly evil and ultimately bring out the End Times on or around his 11th birthday. In a baby-switching mix-up, however, the Adversary winds up with the wrong family, who name him Adam and raise him to be a normal little boy.

Meanwhile, the demon Crowely and the angel Aziraphale have been left to roam the earth with their own orders, from below and above, to facilitate the coming Apocalypse but have second thoughts at the idea of losing their second home. Over the course of the 11 year countdown to destruction, we encounter the four horsemen bikers of the Apocalypse, witches, prophets and a cast of semi-ordinary characters in a narrative that’s chock-full of British wit and humour.

I loved this book. It’s what introduced me to Neil Gaiman, of whom I’m now a big fan (if you want to read some great, funny book, pick this guy up!). I unfortunately didn’t end up reading any Terry Pratchett, but his books seem to be very lengthy fantasy series of books (one, the Discworld series, is comprised of FORTY ONE books!! This is WELL over my limit of five.) However, I believe Pratchett is renowned for writing brilliant and funny fantasy, so maybe I’ve been too dismissive, and perhaps my friend Erin can recommend a starting point?

Rating: Buy it and take it with you to the next Neil Gaiman book tour. (Sadly, to our great loss, Terry Pratchett has since passed away.)

Monkey Beach, by Eden Robinson

Monkey Beach tells the story of a girl growing up in the small First Nations community of Kitimaat on the west coast of British Columbia. The story is told in a series of flashbacks while the protagonist, Lisa, waits for news of her brother, whose fishing boat has disappeared.

During the flashbacks, you get a sense of what life was like growing up in a First Nations community as a backdrop to Lisa’s everyday life which isn’t that different from stories we’re all familiar with. She struggles to give school appropriate attention, she wants to be noticed by boys, she loves the outdoors and she bickers with her parents. However, some things stand out that differentiate her experiences:

• she is date-raped by a boy within her circle of friends and seems to accept it as a matter of course (unless I missed something here)
• her uncle (who’s “not quite right”) and one of her aunts were sent to residential school and suffer some kind of PTSD symptoms as a result
• another uncle won’t accept government assistance when times are particularly tough because it would require him to give up his status, and presumably any benefits that they are getting for that.
• Lisa is threatened with physical violence by a car load of “white boys” who obviously believe their behaviour will go unpunished because she is native
• there are several references to the spiritual beliefs of her family, particularly her grandmother

Again, this is not the heart of the story, it’s merely a framework. Because of this, it adds a sense of relate-ability to what life for this community is like, since it gives us familiar paths to navigate while exposing us to unfamiliar.

My only complaint is that the last 1-2 chapters seems to very suddenly dive very deeply in the spiritual world in a way that I found difficult to follow. It was also inconsistent with the amount to which this played a part in the rest of the book, without any clear reason as to why.

Rating: Borrow it. It’s an easy and enjoyable read, and will open doors to other First Nations writers, who I believe are highly under-represented in Canadian Literature.

All The Missing Girls, by Megan Miranda

All the missing girls is yet another book in the genre of “girls gone crazy” which has been sweeping the bookstores lately (think Gone Girl, Girl on a Train, Perfect Stranger – by the same author – and even Big Little Lies to some degree…). Admittedly the genre is getting a little tiresome, but this particular book has a unique approach – the author channels the movie Memento and tells the story in reverse. After setting the stage for the mystery of the titular Missing Girls, the author jumps two weeks into the future and writes each subsequent chapter one day earlier. My impression is that she very cleverly manages to uncover the mystery in this way, even though you realize at the end  that the characters in the book already knew the answer from day 1. (To truly judge her skill, I would actually have to read the book again, but I’m not giving out any grade here so I’ll just stick with impressions.)

I am very impressed with Megan Miranda as a mystery writer. She has (so far) managed to avoid my dislike of LARGE PLOT TWISTS in favour of subtle inferences and slow reveals that keep you guessing about at least some plot points right to the end. The thing is, what I like about mysteries is not knowing what’s going to happen, and to be honest, I don’t try very hard to figure things out because I’m actually in it for the surprise. I treat magic shows the same way. I’ll do whatever I can to avoid seeing anything that might give away the trick because, to quote Fox Mulder, “I want to believe”!

This reminds me of a story. Once upon a time, when part of my job was to (wo)man the corporate booth at trade shows, a popular “draw” was to have a magician perform in order to attract an audience to your booth. I loved this, and would cruise the trade show floor looking for the magic shows. I once stumbled across a man performing one of my favourite tricks (large metal rings that would appear to spontaneously interlink and separate upon intoning a magic phrase). Unfortunately for the child in me, this man was a poor magician and it was ridiculously easy to figure out how the trick was done. I have felt cheated and disappointed ever since. This was 25 years ago.

Mystery books are the same for me. First, if there is a LARGE PLOT TWIST, this invariably becomes a selling feature (“you’ll never see the plot twist coming!”) and this in and of itself is a huge spoiler! When I know there is a plot twist, I spend entire potentially enjoyable reading moments keeping an eye out for it. Plus, if you happen to figure out the twist, the book is basically ruined. Same for movies, BTW. But when the book uses slow reveals, there is no big plot twist distraction and even if you figure one thing out, there’s another reveal coming that still has the chance of surprise. I find this approach so much more satisfying. I hope Megan keeps this style up!

Rating: I am borderline between borrow and buy. I would have gone with borrow it, but I am considering starting a Megan Miranda collection.

PS My all-time favourite Seinfeld episode is the one where the characters all travel to India to attend a friend’s wedding and guess what? The whole episode is told in reverse! I think I have a “type”.

The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells

This is a weird and creepy book that most people have probably heard of, but probably not read. The story is straightforward enough (spoilers….): A man gets shipwrecked and ends up on an Island run by guy-with-a-god-complex and titled character Dr. Moreau, who conducts grotesque experiments on animals in order to turn them into humans, more or less. Less, not more, actually. Dr. M controls his custom-designed menagerie by installing himself as a kind of overlord, drawing on Christian religious metaphors to secure his position. As one might expect from such a solidly laid plan, things eventually go awry. The animal-human hybrids start to revert to their natural animal states of hunting and eating each other and, as a matter or course, catastrophe unfolds. Our shipwrecked narrator manages to escape on a raft and, after being rescued and returned to his homeland, lives the rest of his life haunted and forever changed by the events to which he was witness.

The most disturbing part of this story for me was the way in which the narrator seems less troubled by the cries of a tortured puma since a puma is a “dumb” animal than he is when he realized the creature is partly human.

Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe – I have thought since – I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

Of course, the book was written in 1896 and so this is a sign of the times, but such a startling lack of empathy towards the suffering of animals is still galling to me. Annnnd now you know why I’m not a hunter, and why, on my walk this morning, I rescued a Woolly Bear caterpillar by moving him off the walking path and onto the grass.

The second disturbing aspect of the book was the easy-go-lucky way the actual humans were about killing, and in fact luring creatures into behaviours that would then justify execution.

And that their sins may grow, I said, let them live in their folly until their time is ripe. Let them not know that I am the Master.

WTF??? I really want to like this book, because it’s H.G. Wells, after all. It is absolutely far ahead of its time in terms of providing commentary on eugenics, religion, and animal experimentation. I expect it will provide for some interesting discussion at book club. And an excellent pick for this year’s creepy Halloween theme.

Rating: Buy it, and keep it with your H.G.Wells collection. But be warned there are definitely some difficult bits.

PS I can’t believe there is a movie …

The Girls, Emma Cline

There was a hearty debate about this book in my BBCE book club. Oddly enough, one of the topics at issue was when it becomes disingenuous to claim that a book is based entirely on fictional characters where inspiration has obviously come from actual events. In this case, there is little doubt that Cline’s book is a fictionalized “re-imagining” of the events of the Charles Manson cult and murders of the late 1960’s, but it could reasonably also be considered a direct parallel of those events, right down to the Brian-Wilson-rockstar character who feeds the cult leader’s psychopathic need for self-aggrandizement.

But perhaps the fiction (and therefore the fictional claim) is due to the fact that Cline’s book centers around a character, Evie, who doesn’t exist at all in the Manson world but instead is the reader’s window into the allure of the cult (to Evie it’s just “the ranch”.) Evie is “everygirl”, a disenchanted teenager who feels invisible to her parents and disconnected from her friends. At her most vulnerable, she meets Suzanne, who introduces her to the Ranch and from there she meets the cult leaders who prey on her desperate need for connection and acceptance.

What I loved most about this book was how the author captured the essence of Evie’s disconnectedness, and how much it brought back memories of my youth. I am absolutely one of those people who felt that I was not quite tuned in to the things that were going on around me. Friends would disengage from me without my noticing any early signs, or would suddenly go from talking about cartoons to talking about boys or bra sizes, even though it probably wasn’t “sudden”. The best analogy I can give is that I felt like I was living in a slightly different phase (for all you Trek fans), or that I had gone to sleep and woken up in a slightly future time (Rip Van Winkle fans). Essentially I was always just a little bit outside of whatever was happening in my life. I think this is why I don’t remember very many events from those days – because I never truly connected with them. The Girls brought all this back to me with alarming clarity.

However, I am still trying to understand that final ingredient that sends Evie into the clutches of the cult with such devotion that she is seemingly willing to participate in the cold-blooded murder of innocent people, including a child. Evie had this ingredient, and I don’t believe I did, but our stories seem quite similar so what is the difference? I suspect self-esteem is one factor. But is that enough to make us susceptible to the machinations of a sociopathic cult leader, or is there more? I hope there’s more to it, and that it doesn’t all just come down to being lucky enough not to encounter our own Suzanne.

Rating: Borrow it. Or just cut to the chase and read Helter Skelter.

The Travelers, Chris Pavone

An entertaining “summer read” pseudo-spy-novel. A veteran news reporting becomes entangled in the world of espionage, being directed on missions by his ‘handler’ until eventually you have no idea who to trust. There are some weak and eye-rolling plot devices that the writer uses to advance the story, but it’s still a fun read overall.

Rating: Borrow it. Probably best to avoid judging it on a Robert Ludlum scale.

Persons Unknown, Susie Steiner

Manon, our difficult-to-like, sexually ambivalent detective is back, but this time she is pregnant and has an adopted son. She has also reconnected with her estranged sister and will manage to drift her way into an semi-healthy relationship with a man.

Meanwhile, however, she ends up embroiled in a murder that is a little too chock-full of coincidences that involve her sister, her sister’s ex-husband, and her adopted son. Her involvement in this hard-to-believe situation gets her kicked off the case, and paves the way for an all-too-real situation where her misogynist sergeant begins to mentor and groom a less-qualified younger male cop to step into her shoes (and one presumes to eventually pass her in the line of succession).

I am enjoying the growth of the characters in this series, and I look foward to Part III…

Rating: Borrow it.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown

Here’s the thing. I am very VERY far behind in the book blog. Therefore, in the spirit of essentialism, I’m just going to write a few very VERY short ones.

Essentialism is basically a lesson in deciding what is important enough to you that you want to do that thing really well, and saying no to everything else. The key, I believe, is saying no honestly and transparently. No lying, no word games, no passive aggressive crap. Just plain “I’m sorry, I just can’t take that on right now”. I love that, because I hate wordsmithing.

I did not expect the book to have as powerful an impact on me, however I have noticed myself clearly saying no to things that I once might have done anyway (for fear of the repercussions of saying no), or said I would try to do while knowing I’d never be able to. Now I am developing a comfortable repertoire of “no” expressions.

• I think I will pass this time, but rain check?
• I actually have another commitment at that time, can we reschedule?
• I wish I could do that but I just can’t fit it in right now. Perhaps another time?

You get the idea. So powerful!!

Rating: Buy it. You’ll never re-read it (that is anti-essentialist), but you will want to lend it to friends.

Missing, Presumed; Susie Steiner

For every damsel-in-distress-falls-for-handsome-detective-white-knight-hero mystery (that I admittedly love) there is a better, grander, unpredictable and more complex mystery novel that needs to be read. Susie Steiner’s novel Missing, Presumed is one of those (and her second novel – covered in a separate review – is another).

The lead character, Manon, is smart, abrasive,  flawed and extremely difficult to like. And yet I like her! She doesn’t conform to obvious female stereotypes, and yet is bound by them. She unapologetically sleeps with people she dates, not as a means to exert power, but as a way to get rid of them more easily.  She competes with a younger, male coworker for the attentions of her misogynist veteran boss. She has an estranged sister as a result of some unresolved grudge from long past. I suspect many people would have difficulty liking her, but I would challenge those people to honestly ask themselves if their feelings would be different if she were a man. Or, more specifically, if she were a ruggedly handsome man. It’s my experience (and therefore not at all applicable to anyone else) that ruggedly handsome flawed men are seen as characters that can be “saved” by the right women, but nondescript flawed women are simply seen as tiresome at best, and bitches at worst. Just my experience. Feel free to disagree, and let’s discuss.

What I liked most about the story itself is that, while there were many little surprises and unexpected turns, there wasn’t one big twist that could easily be spoiled simply by knowing that there was a twist. The ending did have a bit of  a “let’s wrap this up” feel, but for a first novel to introduce a diverse set of interesting characters, I really enjoyed it.

Rating: Borrow it. Save your money, because this is going to turn into a multi-book series.