On a Reading Roll for Nov/Dec

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!