My Nerdy Friend

My goodness, I am really confronting my global disaster fears this month! February is a dreary month in Ontario, and it’s challenging even for a milestone birthday to cheer it up. It seems, with few exceptions, that my February book selections reflect this.

The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Now, THIS is how you write a dystopian climate change novel. No aliens, no weird paranormal abilities bestowed on random people that can be used to control other humans. The most unbelievable part of this book is that people (eventually) realize the only way to survive the climate catastrophe is to stop doing the things that are ruining the earth, like oil drilling and raging consumerism, and start spending money on things to slow and eventually reverse the effects of climate change, like pumping water out from under the Arctic and Antarctic glaciers and creating re-naturalized “half earth” zones for animals to run free. Haha as if.

But seriously, if you are looking for a reasonably possible and thorough exploration of how humanity might actually win the fight against climate change, look no further! Robinson has covered all the angles about how to slow and eventually reverse the impacts of climate change, calling on some very detailed knowledge of economics, political systems, currency and lending practices, covert global agencies, and the science of climate change itself. It’s dense with detail but pays off in the long run with a much-needed hopeful outlook.

Rating 9/10.

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler

Then again, perhaps you like your dystopian climate change novels to be more, well, dystopian. Like a nice little mash-up of The Walking Dead, Children of Men, The Road, and I am Legend. Parable of the Sower paints a depressing picture of what people might become when all hope is lost, although it takes a fictional drug that makes its addicts want to set things on fire to really amp up the random destruction and fast-track the story to a group of wandering survivors looking for a new home. Along the way, the heroine invents a new religion called Earthseed that is founded on the principle: All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God is Change. Then there was this prescient verse, written, not yesterday, but *32* years ago:

“Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.”

Rating 8/10. I could have used a bit less invoking of God (even though she argues that God is just Change)

The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A tiny little book that is packed with goodness. The Serviceberry (google it, it goes by many names) serves as a metaphor for abundance in a world that believes in scarcity and hoarding. Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, draws heavily on the philosophies of the First Nations people, which embody the principles of reciprocity and distribution of wealth. When her orchard of Serviceberry bushes bear more fruit than she can use, she gives the excess away, with the understanding that when fortunes are reversed, she will likewise be given gifts of her neighbours excess. This is a world I want to live in, truly. The hoarders of wealth can, frankly, suck it.

Rating: 9/10

A Tiding of Magpies, by Steve Burrows

Oh my goodness, the poor recurring characters that live and work in Steve Burrow’s Saltmarsh community. Relationships are crumbling, recently freed murderers are on the hunt for vengeance, families are creating career-ending problems, past cases are being questioned. I know I said previously that I wanted things to shake up a bit or the characters were going to become a bit tiresome, but jeepers! Maybe just a nice sit-down at a local pub with some honest conversation and mutual soul searching, or a little holiday in the Cotswolds!

Rating: 7/10.

Frog Music, by Emma Donoghue

In 1876 in San Francisco, a young woman was shot dead and her murder never solved. True Story. Here, Emma Donahue has compiled an exhaustive collection of historical information from that time and written a fictional account of a possible, or one might say even probable, solution to the mystery. The historical detail includes researched origin stories for songs referenced in the book. A very enjoyable book, made more phenomenal when you realize the research that went into it.

Rating: 8/10. A bonus point for sheer research effort.

The Premonition, by Michael Lewis

I fell in love with Lewis’s writing with Moneyball, a stats-heavy book on how to win at baseball, and god love him for not shying away from the math AND making it interesting. I moved straight into The Big Short which is quite a bit more of a mindf*** but somehow still (mostly) engaging. In The Premonition, Lewis tackles the science of how pandemics work, how they spread, how models are built to predict them, how they can be stopped in their tracks with the right social distance protocols (close the schools, people! CLOSE THE SCHOOLS!) and how, ultimately, the Trump administration laughed in the face of it all and let half a million people die of COVID, while much of the rest of the world followed his “lead”, because America. But the best part of this book isn’t the fascinating science of disease vectors and propagation, it’s how Lewis celebrates the small number of unrecognized should-have-been heroes and how they actually had all the right answers, if only someone had bothered to listen.

Rating: 9/10. Hot tip, world leaders: there’s an actual manual on how to stop a pandemic. Might I suggest some light bedtime reading?

Hard to believe, but I read seven (!!) books this month. Only two are murder mysteries, so maybe I’m getting better at branching out? Certainly book clubs help. Two of the books were selections by my Amnesty book club group and two were books that were recommended in my Big Island neighbourhood book club. As mentioned in my 2024 wrap-up, I’m not formally adopting any reading challenges this year, but I do like the 2025 challenges selected by the Reading Glasses podcast, and will keep these in mind over the course of the year. Mostly because I’ve already completed a few of them haha!

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

There’s really nothing like starting the new year off with a refreshingly optimistic outlook on the future, is there? Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know, since I started the year off with this unnerving tale of a dystopian future that seems entirely and ominously plausible. We’ve already seen the freedoms that people are willing to sacrifice in the name of fear and “security”. Well, tack that onto a world where birth rates are way down – and we all know how much capitalism depends on high birth rates – and you find men and women(!!) creating a society where women of childbearing years are assigned by law as handmaids to bear children for couples who are unable to conceive. And really, it only gets worse from here.

As horrifying as the scenarios in the book are, Atwood says in her introduction that everything she writes about has already happened somewhere. As just once example, in 1966 in Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu passed a law requiring women to bear 4 children, and were mandated to take pregnancy tests every month. Why? Because birth and fertility rates were low. I consider this book a cautionary tale, and strongly recommend all women read it.

Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies, by Catherine Mack

This is almost a very fun and entertaining book, except for her heavy-handed overuse of footnotes that were meant to be funny but were actually just distracting. At one point, she does invite you to ignore them, it’s not in my nature so I kept getting pulled abruptly out of the story, often to read a footnote that was not enlightening or funny, but just stupid. If you’re gong to read this book consider keeping a piece of paper handy to cover the footnotes so you won’t be tempted like me to read them. Just another casual aside, something that stood out for is is that the main character engages in the same kind of negative self-talk that I do, particularly around missing things she thinks she should have seen coming.

This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams

If you want to read a book with the most poetic and lyrical writing style, a book that makes you savour each and every sentence, paragraph, and chapter, a book that subtly makes you rethink your life priorities, and ultimately a book that just makes you happy, then this is a book for you! Set in a tiny Irish village in 1958, a young man named Noe is sent from Dublin to live with his grandparents. At the same time, the grandparents have taken in a border named Christy, who has come to town to prepare the villagers for the long-awaited arrival of “the electric”. Together, Noe and Christy learn what it means to live a life full of happiness. [many heart emojis]

We Have Always Been Here, by Samra Habib

I’m not sure I’m in love with Samra Habib’s writing style. The book is a memoir, made up of chapters that are essay-ish, a bit like A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, except that Habib’s chapters do seem to connect together a little bit better. Still, it seemed to me like she was just scarping the surface of some deeper and more intimate stories. Like her relationship with her father which, in one moment is completely estranged after she “shames” him by getting divorced, and in the next, has him telling her how he’s proud of the difficult decisions she’s made in her life. I’m not entirely clear how we got from point A to point B. On the other hand, it’s won a boat-load of awards, and hey, I am not a writer! And honestly, memoirs are not my favourite genre, so maybe just ignore me on this one.

A Shimmer of Hummingbirds, by Steve Burrows

Burrows’ best book of the series, so far! I had originally expressed concern that the idiosyncrasies of his characters had the potential to become tiresome without some significant growth over time, and boy does he deliver! Big events happen in this book, many of which actually started in Book 3, and his characters are, I expect, going to be permanently affected.

The Life Impossible, by Matt Haig

On about page 50, this book started to give off some serious Celestine Prophecy vibes. I thought it might recover from that, but it doesn’t. An alien presence bestows magical powers of telepathy, telekinesis, and prognostication on a very few chosen individuals who’s purpose must then become to save the planet. Actually, to save a small island off the coast of Ibiza Spain, but po-tay-to po-tah-to.

I didn’t like this book. I find Matt Haig to be a frustrating over-explainer in a way that feels like he’s delivering a lecture. I said this before, about The Midnight Library. Haig comes across to me like he either doesn’t do nuance or he doesn’t trust his readers to understand nuance. And so he has to explain, ad nauseum, how math works, or how positive thinking works, or how ecosystems work, or how brains work … I could go on (ad nauseum) but I trust that you get the idea. I know lots of people loved this book and found it rewarding, and that’s ok! It’s just not a book for me, and in fact, I think it’s more that Matt Haig is not my thing. This will be the last book of his that I read.

A Room With a View, by E. M. Forster

A Room With A View is in my Top 10 list of favourite movies and, fun fact, it is Helena Bonham Carter’s movie debut! I wanted to rewatch it after the many references that kept popping up in Still Life but it’s not streaming anywhere so I decided to read the book to satisfy a craving. I am very pleased to report that the movie and the book are extremely closing aligned, so reading the story was like playing the movie in my brain. Very satisfying indeed! The book was written in 1908, so if you’re thinking of reading it, fair warning that the language is a bit old-timey on top of English proper. Which is, of course, what makes the movie so charming! BTW, if you happen to own a copy of this movie I would love to borrow it!

With minimal preamble, here’s my complete list of books for 2024. The categories are pretty self-explanatory. BTW, I read 52 books this year (!!!), a new record since my record keeping began! I’d say at a glance I still favour murder mysteries, but am not fussy about the setting or style (past, future, Holmes, cozy, scifi) but I also branched out a bit more this year, partly thanks to the Amnesty book club that I joined back in January.

I’m not doing a Reading Challenge wrap up, it turns out it was too much. As in too many things and I’m irritated at the prospect of a long, drawn-out assessment of my performance. For 2025, I’ll keep it simple – read 52 books! And if one more person recommends The Year of Magical Thinking, I’ll consider reading it.

LOVED it

Loved it

• The Sleeping Car Porter, by Suzette Mayr
• Starter Villain, John Scalzi
• Lock In, by John Scalzi
• Greenwood, by Michael Christie
• Close to Hugh, by Marina Endicott
• A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman
• The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Bad Cree: A Novel, by Jessica Johns
• Artemis, by Andy Weir
• In The Woods, by Tana French
• Broken Harbour, by Tana French
• Scarborough, by Catherine Hernandez

Imperfect, but with redeeming qualities

• The Age of Magical Overthinking, by Amanda Montell
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon
• The Women, by Kristin Hannah
• A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, by Alicia Elliott
• Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan
• The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig
• Medicine Walk, by Richard Wagamese
• The Magician’s Assistant, by Ann Patchett
• Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

I liked it, but you might not

• My Dark Vanessa, by Kate Elizabeth Russell
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
• Apeirogon, by Colum McCann
• The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss
• European Travel for the Monstrous Gentleman, by Theodora Goss
• A Siege of Bitterns, by Steve Burrows
• A Pitying of Doves, by Steve Burrows
• A Cast of Falcons, by Steve Burrows
• Unnatural Creatures, stories selected by Neil Gaiman
• How to Sell a Haunted House, by Grady Hendrix
• The Final Girl Support Group, by Grady Hendrix
• Woman, Watching, by Merilyn Simonds
• Long Division, by Kiese Laymon

Good, not great

• Elementary, She Read, by Vicki Delany
• Body on Baker Street, by Vicki Delany
• The Cat of the Baskervilles, by Vicki Delany
• A Scandal in Scarlet, by Vicki Delany
• Tiny Beautiful Things, by Cheryl Strayed
• What Strange Paradise, by Omar El Akkad
• The Immortal King Rao: A Novel, by Vara Vauhini
• The Absolution (Book 3 of Children’s House), by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

Hated it

• The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides
• Anna O, by Blake Matthew
• The Story of Us, by Catherine Hernandez

HATED it

• Fifteen Dogs, by Andre Alexis
• Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

One – I forgot to publish an entry for Nov, so lucky you, you get a total of ten books in this post. I’ll try to keep them brief!

Two – I surprised myself (shocked, even!) by finishing the year at 52 books!!! Retirement is fun! Stay tuned for a summary list coming soon, maybe even in a few minutes.

Three – I definitely still favour the murder mysteries, but have rounded things out a bit, I think. You tell me!

Still Life, by Sarah Winman

Still Live was recommended by my friend Andi, and after taking FOREVER to read it, I was pleased to discover that it is a delightful book! To describe it in a nutshell (virtually impossible to do), a young soldier, Ulysses Temper, meets a middle aged art connoisseur, Evelyn Skinner, while both are in Italy near the end of WW2. Their lives take different paths, but Italy calls to them and they eventually both end up in Florence, my favourite city on Earth ever since I watched the movie A Room With A View a million years ago. Even better … Winman weaves E. M. Forster throughout the story, and now I think I need to read that book, and I certainly need to watch the movie again!

The Age of Magical Overthinking, by Amanda Montell

Well, I really thought this was going to ridicule The Age of Magical Thinking, a book I enjoy judging despite having never read it. Alas, Amanda is a huge fan, as are many, many other people, I’m quickly discovering. I wonder if a reading challenge for 2025 should be to read books I’ve pre-judged to suck? At least if I pick The Age of Magical Thinking I can reasonably avoid Eat, Pray, Love…

Anyhoo …. In the book, Montell tackles many of the cognitive biases I am fond of, and gives modern day examples of them in full swagger. What I enjoyed was both her writing of her own failings in recognizing and avoiding these biases as well as her ability to make me see where I have them as well, despite trying desperately not to. Which is, ultimately, why everyone should read this book, or at least a similar one. In the age of social media engagement managed by sociopaths like Musk, it’s important that, at the very least, we recognize the tactics that we are continually falling prey to.

Fascism: A Warning, by the great Madeleine Albright

Is Donald T***p a fascist? No. At least not yet. Is he headed down that road? It certainly looks like it. The brilliant Madeleine Albright describes a number of different fascist regimes, beginning with Mussolini and including the usual suspects (Hitler, Franco) and perhaps less well known (Erdogan, Chavez, Orban). Most alarming is how a number of these people came into power under democratic means and then chipped away at or blew up the infrastructures that controlled that power.

What I appreciated most about her book was the balance with which she assesses world politics – she’s not overly freaked out (like me, and many people like me) and she’s not downplaying the threat (like many, many people not like me). She’s pragmatic, and factual, and you are invited to take what you like from that. She does include a list of questions to ask yourself about politicians, to help detect the warning signs of fascism on the rise, such as “Do they cater to our prejudices by suggesting that we treat people outside our ethnicity, race, creed, or party as unworthy of dignity and respect?” (answer: “let’s round up all the immigrants, and place them in holding camps to be deported” counts as a “yes”).

Scarborough, by Catherine Hernandez

I liked this book as much as I disliked her book, The Story Of Us. Scarborough is told from the points of view of several different people, all of whom are connected by their presence at a local community center family reading program as well as their low-income socio-economic status. The stories are thoughtful and compassionate, and despite the struggles and tragedies encountered by the community, it carries a message of hopefulness. I may actually pick up her latest, Behind You, which looks like it might pull from memories of the Scarborough Rapist (you know who she means), a man who was overlooked as a suspect in the early stages of his string of horrific crimes because of his – you guessed it – charm and good looks. White good looks, but I probably don’t need to add that.

Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

Another Kate Atkinson scooped up at my local book club from a fellow Atkinson fan. This is perhaps not my favourite, but still gets high marks for the Atkinson style and humour. The story centers around a young woman during WW2 who is hired as a typist by MI5 to transcribe the recordings of a double agent as he chats up fellow spies. The fun begins when, ten years later, the typist starts to run into the characters from this tight window of the past, including the double agent himself and a smattering of the spies. The books moves backward and forward in time (a favourite technique of mine, it would seem) as various mysteries start to reveal themselves in unexpected ways.

The Final Girl Support Group, by Grady Hendrix

In Grady Hendrix’s world, real life murderous rampages were the inspiration for the popular slasher movies of the 80s and 90s and their (seemingly endless) sequels. The survivors of the real life rampages form a support group to deal with their trauma as well as with the infamy that follows them after the copycat movies are made. And if you think their real-life terror is over with the killing or disappearance of their nemeses, well, you’d be wrong! Suddenly, the final girls start dying or narrowly escaping being murdered (again!!) and we’ve got ourselves a nice little horror story on our hands. This is book worth reading, if horror is your jam.

Broken Harbour, by Tana French

Although this book is considered part of French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, the characters are only loosely connected between the books, if at all. The connection seems to be simply the Dublin Murder Squad itself, with each book being narrated by a different DMS detective. Which really just means that they are somewhat able to be read independently and in any order. In Broken Harbour, French introduces star murder squad detective “Scorcher” Kennedy and his rookie partner Richie Curran. Both men are flawed (of course, this is Tana French after all) and struggling to deal with their inner demons while working to solve a horrific murder case involving a young family. I have to say, the beginning of this book, where the murder scene is investigated and the murder itself is recounted, is so well written that I had trouble sleeping for a few nights, imagining all kind of horrific outcomes in my isolated country home. If you are like me, it’s worth sticking it out, however.

A Cast of Falcons, by Steve Burrows

In book 3 of the Birder Murder series, Steve Burrows’ cast of characters (hahaha) is starting to grow on me. Jejeune’s standoffishness, which I mentioned before would quickly become tiresome, is now a little more understandable. The police officers are also becoming more interesting and complex. There is still a level of disbelief-suspension necessary with one character in particular who is mind-bogglingly blind to the affections of his coworker, but perhaps that will also start to clear up as the series continues. Suffice to say, I’m interested enough now in the individual characters to keep reading. 3 down, 5 to go!

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, by Alicia Elliott

A series of stand-alone essays by Haudenosaunee writer Alicia Elliott about how awful white people are (she’s not wrong), and/or how awful yet loving her childhood was. All while being clear that it’s not our (white people’s) place to judge. It’s a difficult book to read, Elliott doesn’t pull any punches while making the reader face some harsh truths not just about the past behaviour of Canadian settlers, but about our present day actions and prejudices. Difficult, but worth reading. I desperately also want to say, as feedback, that I would have enjoyed the book more if Elliott had marginally revised the essays in order to connect them in some way but as already stated, she is very adamant that she doesn’t need or want white people’s perspective. She has plenty of that already, thank you very much.

Lock In, by John Scalzi

John Scalzi is a recent discovery for me and I have to say, I’m a fan! I’ll see if I can set the stage for this one. To be transparent, the setting for this story is actually two pages of exposition at the start of the book, written in the form of a news article. Saves Scalzi a lot of world-building time, I imagine. The world in question is recovering from a global pandemic which killed a large percentage of the infected (important aside: the book was written pre-COVID). Of those who survived infection, a subset came down with secondary meningitis-like symptoms, and of those, there seemed to be 3 possible outcomes. 1) recovery, 2) an affliction known as Haden’s syndrome that caused the central nervous system to disconnect from the body, leaving people brain-alive, but fully paralyzed, or 3) a sort of brain damage that makes people receptive to connected neural net implants. The Haden’s suffers are able to exist in the world through their own neural implants that allow them to inhabit cyborg bodies. As well, they are able to inhabit the brains of those people in the 3rd group, on occasions when they really, really need access to a physical body. And this is just the set up! The story revolves around a murder, or possibly suicide, of an Integrator (what the group 3 people are called), and the investigating agents are a rookie who is a Haden (what the group 2 people are called) and a senior partner who used to be an Integrator. So, a murder mystery set in a science fiction future. Perfect!

Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles

Want to read a book with notes of The Great Gatsby, but without the annoying characters and male-centric plot? Then Rules of Civility may be the book for you! Set in the late 30s instead of the heady roaring 20s, the story focusses on one year in the life of the main character, Katey Kontent (Kontent, as in satisfied versus something contained), as she navigates her way around and through the New York social scene. The novel is as much a love letter to New York as it is an engaging story about a beautiful young woman gifted with fierce wit and determination (AND is a voracious reader, thank you very much!). I loved Towles’ writing, and will be picking up more of his books! 10/10

The Women, by Kristin Hannah

On the other hand … I can’t for the life of me understand why people loved this book. Yes, Kristin Hannah chose to write about women who served in Vietnam, when an entire country pretended that women Vietnam Vets did not exist, and kudos to her for that. And in a minor defense, the parts of the book that were specifically about serving in Vietnam were compelling, page-turning chapters. But OH. MY. GOD. then you had to put up with cheesy and implausible romance story lines!!

[warning: spoilers coming!! You could skip the next paragraph, or on the other hand, if you, too, were planning to waste a few hours of your life reading this book, let this be my way of giving you back the gift of time.]

While serving in Vietnam, the main character, Frankie, falls in love with a doctor at her med unit. Sure, sure, I get that. I’d probably fall in love too, in the middle of an insane war when I might die at any minute. But he turns out to be married and she’s too moral to sleep with him but she continues to be agonizingly in love with him until he dies while returning from R&R. Then she meets and falls in love with another soldier, the best friend of her brother (who has already died in combat). He also is married (well, rats) but it’s okay because he dies too, so moral dilemma avoided. Except … we soon learn that many, many solders in Vietnam were captured as POWs and their families were told they were dead when in fact they were imprisoned and being tortured for years. For real. Several years after the end of the war, many of these POWs were released, to the shock and joy of the families who had already buried them. In the book, guess who turns out to not be dead? BOTH OF THESE MEN!!! That’s right. By sheer good/bad luck, both of her married heartthrobs return home alive to be reunited with … their wives. This is supposed to be very emotional, but I may have missed the impact of that while I was in the bathroom barfing. 2/10

Bad Cree: A Novel, by Jessica Johns

So far, this is one of my favourite books from my Amnesty Book Club (the other is the Sleeping Car Porter). It’s a good ol’ supernatural horror story set in first nations culture, with a set of characters you actually care about and a theme of sisterhood, family, and enduring friendship. As a bonus for Canadians, it’s set partly in urban Vancouver and partly in rural Alberta. Jessica Johns originally wrote this as a short story for her creative writing class, but felt compelled to delve more deeply into some of the details she had to leave out of the short version. Despite centering around themes of supernatural and family tragedy, the book is an easy read with a wonderfully feel-good ending. 8/10, since this is a debut novel and I have to save room for her to grow into a 10/10.

Unnatural Creatures, stories selected by Neil Gaiman

All the necessary details of this collection of unusual stories is covered in the Nerdy Friends Book Club posts.

The Immortal King Rao: A Novel, by Vara Vauhini

I have a confession. This is the very first audio book I’ve ever listened to. I didn’t understand it (the plot of the book, not the narrator, who was actually quite soothing to listen to) and I attributed the lack of understanding to my lack of attention span – when I listen to podcasts, I’ll often realize my attention has drifted away and I end up back-tracking 30 or 60 seconds to the last point when I was tuned in. I assumed that the book suffered from this same mind-drift and that perhaps it was actually really good. Then I went to my Amnesty Book Club and discovered that the other two attendees also didn’t get it. One stopped reading after Chapter 5 out of boredom and confusion and the other finished it but didn’t get the point. So maybe it wasn’t a listening issue at all, but a writing one instead. It’s a strange book, that suffers from trying to tell too many stories without really connecting the reader with any of them, to the point where I couldn’t figure out what happened to the main character at the end and I didn’t really care. 2/10 for effort. Apologies if you loved it.

Aside: this is the second book this month that includes the qualifier “A Novel” in the title. Weird!

I have more, but I’m going to leave it here for now and just publish another blog next week.

Welcome, book club readers! I’m sorry for being so late this month! We have two short stories left, and these are actually quite short at 14 pages and 24 pages respectively.

The first is titled “Or All The Seas With Oysters”, by Avram Davidson 14p. Avram Davidson is another multi-award-winning SF & Fantasy author. He wrote prolifically, publishing a few series, several stand-alone novels, and over a dozen collections of short stories, none of which I’ve read or even heard of. I look forward to this interestingly titled story as an introduction to an untried fantasy novelist!

The second, and final in our reading series, is “Come Lady Death”, an ominous sounding tale by Peter S. Beagle. Beagle also has numerous writing credits to his name, only one of which I’m familiar with, which is his screenplay for an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“Sarek”).

Happy reading!! Perhaps as part of this month’s comments, you could include your most and least favourite stories from the entire collection? Just for fun, don’t overthink it

I am on several waiting lists at the local Picton library, for both physical books and e-books when physical copies didn’t exist. And, as luck would have it, this month my number came up and up and up.! Day after day I was getting notified that a book I’d had on hold for weeks and weeks was ready for me to pick up or download. I’d even re-upped the hold on a few of them because I was too busy the last time they came in. This month, I decided to push through and read as many of them as I could just to get them off my list. Plus I suspect there is a limit to how many times you can re-hold a book… So here you go, the September library reads!

The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

An intriguing story about a young boy, Daniel, who discovers a book in a secret library known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books (if only this really existed!). Daniel embarks on a quest to find the book’s missing author, Julian Carax, while being pursued by a mysterious stranger who is determined to destroy every copy of Carax’s books in existence. This book was written by someone who loves (LOVES) books and if you love books as well then I highly recommend it. It was suggested to me by my friend Chrystal, partly because it takes place in Barcelona right after the civil war, and we are heading there in a month for a vacation. To Barcelona that is, not to civil war. Although, we’ll be there during the US presidential election so who knows! BONUS: The locations in the book are real, and there is a walking map provided, just in case you happen to find yourself in Barcelona in early November looking for something to do.

How to Sell a Haunted House, by Grady Hendrix

You know that moment when you make the hard decision to finally sell your vacant family home only to discover that it is packed to the rafters with creepy, life-like dolls and puppets? And when you try to clear all the creepy stuff out, you find out that the house is haunted, not just by the tortured memories of your past but also by a very unhappy poltergeist who has no interest in leaving? That! Well, this book is here to help you! It checks a lot of boxes in my “no thank you” list (generational trauma, estranged siblings, haunted taxidermy squirrels) but I really enjoyed it. Hendrix has the ability to drop in just the right amount of dark humour to balance out the scary parts, and overall it makes for an entertaining read. I started reading a library book version, but I was so overloaded with books coming due that I caved and bought myself a copy instead. Grady Hendrix also wrote a book with the very intriguing title “The Final Girl Support Group” and I justified buying this book so that I can trade with my niece for the Support Group one.

The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig

A book about a library in a month of reading an excessive number of library books feels about right! In this particular library, visitors who linger in the space between life and death are given the opportunity to change the outcome of decisions that they perhaps regret making (“why didn’t I take that new job instead of staying in the job I hated” is one of mine). Then they get to live out that life in some kind of parallel universe to see how differently their life might have turned out. A similar concept is presented in the movie Sliding Doors, but in the movie we see only one other life, while in this book the number of lives that can be lived is infinite. I loved this idea, and any time the lead character is living a different life, I loved the book. However, what repeatedly took me out of the story was an excessive amount of exposition, drawing on physics and philosophy and whatnot to explain how the library worked, but honestly I didn’t really care. I just wanted the library to be magic, no explanation necessary. There was significant disagreement on this book at my neighbourhood book club, however. One woman loved it, and one found it kind of annoying. I find myself right in the middle.

Fifteen Dogs, by Andre Alexis

What would happen if a bored and frankly amoral god, Hermes, were to wonder aloud “what would it be like if animals had human intelligence?” and an equally bored and amoral god, Apollo, wagered a year of servitude that animals would be even more unhappy than humans if given human intelligence? Well, what might happen is that these same reckless gods could decide to grant 15 random dogs with human intelligence and frame the wager around whether any of the 15 dogs will die happier with said intelligence than without. Why this happiness quotient is measured at the time of death is, really, just the kind of thing you’d expect a foolish and alarmingly idle god to do. Of course, the only way to complete this wager is for ALL THE DOGS TO DIE. (……. oops …. spoiler …….) And because they are also asshole gods, sometimes they interfere in the process, in order to try and win their thoughtless bet, and in doing so create immense and unnecessary suffering for the dogs. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that this is a terrible book written by a man who knows literally nothing about dogs. Give it a wide berth and go hug a dog instead.

Artemis, by Andy Weir

Andy Weir can write a captivatingly fun and suspense-filled story! What I appreciated in this book was that the protagonist, Jazz Bashira, was female and Saudi Arabian. Was she a little too much of a mouthy brat and too smart for her own good? Yes, yes she was. But the story was entertaining, and high-energy, and mostly funny (although some of the jokes were a little boy-ish for my taste). The plot is a “caper” and many aspects of the caper adventure defy logic and believability, but just like in the Martian, I suspect the science is sound, even if many of the coincidences that create the need for the science are a stretch. So yeah. Lots to criticize, but lots to enjoy.

Only two books this month due to the usual September demands, but both were excellent books! Of course, if family drama and/or trauma isn’t in your wheelhouse, you may want to give these careful consideration.

Close to Hugh, by Marina Endicott

I found this to be one of the more peculiar books by Marina (not in a bad way!) It’s hard to describe this book and do justice to it at the same time, but here goes nothing. A group of aging artist friends with much drama and a group of young-adult artist friends with much drama interact in ways that are very …. familiar. Teachers, students, mentors, proteges, parents, children, all trying to move forward in a complicated and anxiety-filled world. It’s a book that I had to work to stay with because it draws you into other people’s, well, drama, and I find that emotionally tiring at the best of times. It pays off, though, if you can hang on and live with these people for the week that the book spans in their lives. Also, I guarantee some of these people are part of your real life and there’s some fun in trying to figure out who they are.

Medicine Walk, by Richard Wagamese

Franklin, a first nations man, is asked by his estranged, alcoholic, and dying father, Eldon, to accompany him on a journey, both physical and spiritual, to a sacred place in the mountains where the father can be buried in a traditional Ojibway manner. Along the way, Eldon tries to make amends by sharing the tragic stories of his own past, while Franklin works to better understand his own backstory. If you’ve ever wondered how someone can repeatedly ruin their chances at a better life through alcohol abuse, this book provides some poignant possibilities. It’s a solid book, but our little local Amnesty book club agreed that we’d have appreciated a bit more depth on a few key characters that were left fairly undeveloped. For example, the father and son stop off at the cottage of an elder woman who saves them from starvation and she gets minimal page time. Of course, she is also not the key focus of the story, so perhaps that was an active choice by the author.

Let’s get moving on the September stories, mostly because the first one is another long one, at 77 pages. It’s (hopefully) about a werewolf though, so I’m good with it! Oh, and don’t forget to add your comments to the Month 6 post!

The Compleat Werewolf, by Anthony Boucher. I had to google this (I know, sad…) but “compleat” is a valid, albeit archaic, spelling of the word “complete”. Perhaps this gives us a clue as to the setting of this story? An interesting tidbit about Anthony Boucher is that he was a friend and mentor to Philip K. Dick, of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” fame (which became the movie Blade Runner). He wrote mystery, SciFi, and horror (horror! my pick for this story!), and he co-created The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The Compleat Werewolf was written in 1942.

The Smile on the Face, by Nalo Hopkinson. Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica in 1960 and so frankly is not that much older than me. Her stories often draw on Caribbean history, and I really hope this one does!!! She has received numerous nominations and awards for her speculative fiction, including being nominated for a Hugo in 2001, which is impressive considering it’s a significantly male-dominated award. Disappointingly, she lost to the now extremely problematic J. K. Rowling for Goblet of Fire.