I could not get enough of Best Laid Plans when I read it at the tail end of 2020. Combining engineering, Canadian politics, and comedy, it was a total hit (wait, wait hear me out!). Terry Fallis won a number of awards for the book, including a comedy award and Canada Reads, when it was published in the late 2000s, and this sequel does not disappoint.

*very minor spoilers*

Instead of focussing on the humour of a verbose engineering professor signing up to run in an election simply to avoid teaching “English for Engineers 101”, and winning against all odds, it tells the story of Angus, the engineering professor, intentionally throwing his name into the hat, only to be running against the man who literally wrote a book on low-road, mud-slinging campaigns. When, shortly after the election, a bridge collapses, the politicians turn to the only engineer they know to discern what the cause was, and how to stop it from happening.

*spoiler over*

If you had told me I’d be reading a book that managed to make Asset Management funny, I wouldn’t have believed you. This book perfectly captures the essence of  Canadian Politics in a vice of satire, but also speaks very honestly (if dramatically) about the issue of underfunding of Canadian infrastructure and the problems it can cause. Discussions of what to fix, how much money we have to fix, how do we optimize that spending, and how much help we can get from the government to help is a daily discussion in my workplace in a municipality. The issues of downloading maintenance to smaller, less well-funded and -resourced jurisdictions came into sharp relief with the flooding of BC this fall. And Angus and Daniel made me laugh, groan, and appreciate it all.

I love these books, but you certainly don’t need to know engineering or politics to appreciate and laugh over them. I can’t wait to read “Operation Angus”, the third in the trilogy, published this year. I think we could use a good dose of the principled Angus now more than ever.