It has been ages since I read a Poirot novel. Poirot is my favourite fictional detective. So I thought I should start again from the beginning, with his debut in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It is at once classic Christie with so many of the nascent attributes that would become hallmarks of Poirot’s career. Nevertheless, it is also much rougher and undeniably an early work, with much looser plotting and characterization than some of the books that come afterwards.

Much of one’s opinion of the book rests upon one’s opinion of the narrator. Captain Hastings is the most famous narrator of Poirot’s cases, even though (much to my surprise) he actually narrates few of the novels. He’s probably iconic because he is the Dr Watson to Poirot’s Sherlock Holmes; Hastings is a bit of dolt, and when present, he serves as a perfect foil to Poirot’s methodical, analytical nature. Christie showcases this perfectly in this, their debut: Hastings, fancying himself every bit the detective, jumps to conclusions and allows Poirot to lead him down blind alleys of thought. His attitude towards women prevents him from reliably evaluating whether they could be the murderer. Poirot repeatedly insults Hastings using backhanded compliments, and this flies right over Hastings’ head.

Still, as way of introduction to Hercule Poirot, Hastings is effective. In addition to offering such a stark contrast in wits and temperament, Hastings is full of admiration for Poirot, even if he occasionally declares that Poirot is obviously getting old and past his prime as a detective. (I feel sorry for Hastings, because Christie clearly understands dramatic irony and is determined to wring as much from this man as she possibly can.) It’s Hastings who essentially gets Poirot involved in this case, singing his praises both to the reader and to John Cavendish. I suspect that Christie wanted Hastings to be the English everyman through whom readers could enjoy, from a distance, the quaint foreign idiosyncrasies of the Belgian Poirot.

When it comes to the actual mystery of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, this is far from the most substantial or interesting of Christe’s novels. The mystery is fairly straightforward, with only a few red herrings. I’m generally not a fan of mysteries that employ tricky legal concepts either, but I suppose it would have thrilled some readers.

The highlight of the novel has to be how Poirot handles the climax and resolution of the case. He doesn’t just find and reveal the guilty party; he does so in a way that helps to heal the wounds of the people at Styles and bring them closer together. This is intentional on his part—in the denouement he explains to Hastings how he could have helped acquit one of the characters falsely accused of the murder, but that he let the trial continue for a little longer because it helped the accused reconcile with his loved one. The reason why I love this is that it shows us another side to Poirot. Despite being portrayed as analytical and devoted to logic and order, Poirot clearly has a softer, more human side that is sympathetic to the needs of the heart. This is Christie’s most deft characterization, far above the generally stereotypical nature of the other characters, and it sets the tone for the rest of Poirot’s career.

Christie pretty much singlehandedly created the country house murder mystery genre that feels so quaint and comfortable to modern readers who are so far removed from that milieu. The Mysterious Affair at Styles is in many ways the prototype, then, and it shows. This is not where I would recommend a casual reader pick up Poirot; reading his cases in order are not really all that essential. For the Poirot fan, of course, this is required reading, especially because he returns to Styles in his final case.

I’ve had this book on my to-read list for several years now, and I feel like the me who added this book would have liked it more than the me who ended up reading it. One of the nice things about having Goodreads to help me track my reading, what I’ve read and what I want to read, is that sometimes I can remember why I’ve put something on my list. In this case I can’t, specifically, except maybe that I heard about Peter Watts or Blindsight somewhere, maybe io9, and it seemed like something I could read. Plus, you know, he’s Canadian and a science-fiction author, so that’s something to celebrate.

Three or four years ago was my personal zenith for posthuman SF. As I noted in my review of Postsingular, I’ve become rather fatigued with posthuman SF that is fantasy masquerading as SF so hard that the technology verges upon magic. Greg Egan’s Incandescence and Diaspora contributed to this somewhat as well.

Blindsight, to be fair, is harder SF than the aforementioned novels. Watts restricts himself to the near-future (2088 or so?) and to the confines of our solar system. Some of the technology, such as the telematter-driven Theseus or the cyborgs Szpindel and Cunningham or the vampire (I’ll spend some time on him later) seem more out there and fantastical. Nevertheless, Watts seems intent on honestly interrogating how humans might investigate an alien object lurking at the edges of the solar system.

In many ways this book reminds me of an SF horror movie in the same vein as Alien or perhaps Cube. Watts introduces the scramblers, denizens of the alien object Rorschach that might be parts of a whole or individual entities—it’s hard to tell. I like, however, how he tries to take a fairly original approach to alien biology: no DNA, distributed neural networks, etc. The crew’s initial encounters with the scramblers inside Rorschach feel like a horror movie. Everything is so disjointed; it becomes difficult to follow what’s going on. It feels like a scene from one of those movies where the protagonists are walking down a dark corridor, and you just know something is going to jump out at them. Now picture the dark corridor as the vacuum-interior of a large alien object, and the something involves direct manipulation of the human visual cortex. Yeah.

Bottom line, without spoilers: the theme behind everything (seriously, everything) in Blindsight is one that any transhumanist would acknowledge (and probably celebrate) while the rest of us often deny or conveniently forget—the human brain is easily hacked. We aren’t all that good at hacking it to do specific things at the moment—at least not with any degree of finesse; technically, programming our brains to read and write is a monumental feat of hacking, albeit one that is done much more slowly. But it seems like we are developing technology, and a better understanding of the brain, that would let us manipulate the brain more easily. With this ability would come more questions and issues surrounding what makes us conscious, and whether our consciousness makes us who we are.

Everything in this book is another facet of how Watts explores these issues. Each of the four protagonists manifests consciousness and brain-hacking differently. Siri, the narrator, underwent a hemispherectomy as a child to cure his epilepsy; he now considers himself a Chinese Room more than a functional individual, and we get treated to flashbacks of an awkward relationship as evidence. Contrastedly, Jukka Sarasti is a vampire. It turns out that vampires were a subspecies of humanity from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Never very populous because of their nature as predators, vampires probably would have become the dominant species, except for a weird brain glitch that causes seizures when they see intersecting right angles (“crosses”). But for some reason, a vampire is necessary as the leader of this first contact mission, so scientists used some DNA to recreate one. Cool, huh? I kind of feel like that whole idea could be a plot of a novel by itself.

It would be easy to dismiss Blindsight as a collection of interlinked concepts that don’t quite work together—a precarious house of cards on an unstable foundation. Yet for all the work reading this turned out to be, it’s clear Watts is pursuing a single and comprehensible idea. He has no qualms about forcing the reader to consider how truly alien life outside our solar system could be. He makes us confront the terrifying idea that we could be the anomalies—not in the sense that we are alone, but that other advanced forms of life might not be sentient or might be so different from us, sentient or not, that we could never hope to communicate with them.

Watts is far from the only one who advances such propositions, of course! The antagonist of Peter F. Hamilton’s Pandor’s Star is similarly so alien that it isn’t evil, just different. Yet Watts succeeds in confronting these ideas, in interrogating them, in a compact way that remains fast-paced and, at times, fiendishly difficult to follow. He throws so many curveballs and twists at the reader that keeping up requires careful attention and a willingness to have a little faith. Siri is a somewhat unreliable narrator, as he should be, and even by the end it remains difficult (at least for me) to understand clearly what happened aboard Theseus. Siri is one step up from found-footage when it comes to being informative on such things. I’m not going to pretend I fully grok what happened, and I’m not all that interested in going back and re-reading to clarify things. Fortunately, one of the perks of being human is that we can form snap judgements based on the bigger picture.

The big picture, when it comes to this book at least, is that it is incredibly ambitious, quite clever, but also somewhat boring and unpalatable. I’m probably going to lose my literary snob street cred for saying this, but I’m a big fan of the straightforward narrative, especially in hard SF where the technobabble can make it difficult enough to follow the plot. Blindsight asks a lot of its readers. This is not per se bad. But the return on investment wasn’t there for me. I’m intrigued by the ideas that Watts puts forward, and for that reason I still liked the book despite finding it difficult to get through. Alas, if you don’t already share my fascination with philosophy of mind, then you may find it difficult to perceive the positives of Blindsight.

The first viral marketing campaign, and the most successful to come to mind, that I remember is the Old Spice video response campaign from 2010. I first heard about it on Twitter, and in no time at all I was enthralled by the hilarious, personalized videos the Old Spice team was producing in response to commenters. True, the marketing firm behind the campaign admits they purchased a promoted trend on Twitter to get the ball rolling. But the campaign soon became truly viral, with the Internet taking it upon its collective shoulders to create new memes. (Perhaps the most memorable is the extant Old Spice Voicemail Generator crowdsourced through Reddit.)

For two short days in the summer of 2010, there was this massive phenomenon surrounding Old Spice. It didn’t make me want to buy Old Spice. To this day I don’t think I’ve bothered sampling any of their products; I’m not particularly on board with their “smell like a man!” marketing ideology. But that didn’t stop the viral campaign from being fun, memorable, eminently shareable. It was something I wanted to talk about with my friends, so of course I showed it to them.

And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture was published a year before the Old Spice campaign. So despite this campaign being my personal touchstone as I navigated Bill Wasik’s explication of viral in the Internet age, it’s necessarily absent from these pages. Instead, Wasik discusses his own participation in the subculture of viral content creation, starting with flash mobs and progressing to the 2008 Democratic primary and presidential election.

There is something paradoxical about a dead-tree book exploring a primarily online phenomenon—but it’s not the obvious paradox. It’s not that paper books become out of date so quickly—no, And Then There’s This actually holds up pretty well after five years (ignoring the focus on MySpace, of course—remember MySpace?). The paradox, rather, is that the very short attention span that contributes to the brief surge of popularity of viral memes makes the Internet a less-than-ideal place to write about culture in posterity. Yes, there are blog posts and similar essay-style sites that occasionally attempt a more fruitful discourse. Largely, though, books remain the best way to analyse a subject at length—even if they are static and prone to obsolescence.

For those who find themselves more accustomed to a shorter attention span, though, good news: this book is short and a quick read. Wasik’s writing is brief, informative, to the point. He doesn’t often digress into speculation or pop psychology explanations. (The closest he gets is when he explains the origins of the word meme as coined by Richard Dawkins as a cultural equivalent to genes.) Wasik is more interested in looking at specific examples of viral trends and recounting his own attempts to grapple with making something truly viral.

I discovered this book by listening to Wasik’s appearances on CBC Radio’s Spark. I didn’t remember that he is the originator of the flash mob phenomenon, but he reminds us of his viral street cred in the introduction and first chapter. In each subsequent chapter he discusses another experiment he conducted to look into different facets of virality: he attempts to drum up support for a “stop Peter Bjorn and John” protest; he creates a “right-wing New York Times” for the Huffington Post’s Contagious Festival; his alter ego Bill Shiller enthusiastically participates in all of the various online communities half-heartedly created by corporations; and during the 2008 presidential election he creates OppoDepot.com, a repository of user-submitted smears about candidates. As he explains his impetus for each project and what he learned from each of them, Wasik constructs a more useful model for comprehending the way viral trends spread, flare, and die out.

One could be forgiven for regarding this book as a “look what I’ve done” greatest hits of Wasik’s side-job as a viral creator. The constant focus on his own personal involvement in viral subculture, and his namedropping of people like Jonah Peretti, can get grating at times. It would have been nice to see more discussion of other examples of viral projects (he makes some stabs in this direction, interviewing other participants in the Contagious Festival, for example). Similarly, aside from a few half-hearted questions directed towards a marketing firm that made a viral Ford commercial involving a car hitting a pigeon, Wasik tends to dodge the ethical issues around viral marketing. For someone who claims not just to be a journalist but actually participates in this subculture, this is ignoring a huge aspect of it.

The best takeaway from And Then There’s This might not be about virality at all but about story and narrative. Wasik reminds us that the media are not relayers of objective reality but instead create the stories we read. He discusses how veterans of The Washington Post go on to create The Politico, a politics-focused blog, and asks them about how they decide whether to cover a story. Much earlier in the book he explains how when The New York Times finally covers his flash mobs, they talk about a backlash before the backlash had actually begun, because that was the only place new they could take the story. If media outlets want the page hits or ad buys, they need good stories—so they consciously shape the narrative and discussion. And though viral culture offers an opportunity for individuals to influence, at least briefly, the cultural discussion in a way never before realized, it is also prone to hijacking by clever corporate interests.

In the end, then, viral culture is a combination of conscious effort on the part of someone (the creator, who could be independent or a corporate partner of some kind) and buy-in from a larger community who can’t resist sharing whatever is on offer. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about viral culture. And Then There’s This does an adequate job looking at specific examples of viral memes and how they rose and fell. It isn’t all that inspiring and doesn’t really propose anything groundbreaking in its analysis of viral culture.

Every once in a while when I open a box from Subterranean Press, I discover a surprise tucked inside. Such was the case with Zodiac; I received a free surplus ARC of their special edition of this novel. I seldom refuse free books, and of course, it’s Neal Stephenson. So off we go.

Even when attached to a name such as Stephenson’s, a novel that bills itself as an “eco-thriller” does not earn eager anticipation from me. My opinion of thrillers is low in general, and when combined with ecological motifs, the result isn’t always pretty. True, I also have a marked preference for physics over biology, preferring those thrillers set in deep space, orbiting wormholes or derelict spacecraft and deploying nanotechnology. As much as topics like genetic engineering and environmental responsibility are important to our society, it takes a really skilled writer to pull off a story that I will enjoy.

So in Zodiac, our protagonist, Sangamon Taylor, cruises around in an inflatable motor boat. He is a modern-day crusader against corporate abuse of the environment, stepping in where the EPA cannot or will not go. Eventually, he stumbles on a secret that would make an upcoming presidential candidate look bad, and for that he must be eliminated. The bad guys frame Sangamon (or ST, as he calls himself) as a terrorist. That’s when the thriller part of this eco-thriller kicks into high gear; prior to Sangamon’s fugitive status, the book is a somewhat enjoyable but frustrating mystery. Once ST is on the run from … well, everyone, the plot suddenly picks up the pace.

Pacing was probably my biggest issue with Zodiac. Stephenson’s exposition runs to a tendency to rhapsodize as it explains science. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m reading in 2011 a book written for a 1980s audience, but some of it is old hat, and much of it seems superfluous. This is another issue I take with many thrillers: they don’t realize that, with exposition, less is more. The more detailed a scientific explanation in a thriller, the less realistic it sounds. There is a fine line between plausible explanations and unrealistic technobabble, and that’s the line most thriller authors walk. To Stephenson’s credit, he doesn’t so much cross the line as make furtive forays over it in the dead of night, only to steal back across the border before I can train my search lights on him.

Oh, he’s crafty. But when I start talking about interacting with the author in this way, often it’s because I spent more time thinking about how the book was written than about the book itself. Zodiac has a satisfactory story, plenty of action, and a nice science-fiction premise involving some scary PCB-eating bacteria. But with the intermittent motor boat chase sequences and ST’s smarmy observations about various other characters, I could never shake the feeling I was in some kind of pulp thriller. Don’t get me wrong: I understand that, for some people, this works, that this feeling is desirable. If you are one of those people, check out Zodiac.

Zodiac also bears its age well. You don’t see that too often with science fiction set in a contemporary period. It would be very easy to take the events in Zodiac and transpose them to 2011 without changing many of the details. The lack of constant cell phone communication was the most conspicuous incongruity—so pervasive are mobile phones these days that we take them for granted, even in our thrillers and action movies. Indeed, the absence of cell phones was constantly on my mind. I began to analyze what would have to change if the characters had access to cheap mobile phones, and that in turn reveals a lot about how our society has changed now that we use mobile devices constantly. Zodiac is that rare novel that remains relevant in the present even as it presents a useful study in history.

As a Stephenson novel, Zodiac shows its colours both in style and in its place in his oeuvre. It’s obviously an early novel. But it’s Stephenson through and through. The characters aren’t the greatest, but he somehow manages to use them and some fascinating science-fiction ideas to create a genuine thriller. I’m just not that big a fan of thrillers.

I couldn’t remember why I had added Something Missing to my to-read list, so I was somewhat sceptical going into it. Matthew Dicks’ writing style didn’t improve my opinion at first. Something about Marin, a burglar who only robs select “clients” and only takes items that won’t be missed, changed my mind. Somewhere along the way, Dicks made me care, not just about Martin but about the proposition that he could help the people he is otherwise stealing from.

I can even point to when my opinion began to shift. Dicks telegraphs the change at the beginning of Chapter 3: “Some people can point to a specific day in their lives when everything changed. For Martin, that day was a Wednesday in October.” Yeah, not exactly subtle or inspirational. Dicks’ writing is flat, unassuming, with all the painstaking attention to describing details one might expect of a schoolchild who has received more than one gentle rebuke from a teacher on a scene assignment. The lack of dialogue, at least for the first part of the novel, compounds this issue: we spend most of our time inhabiting Martin’s head, from a third-person perspective. So while Martin’s almost obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, the reason why he is so successful at burgling houses unnoticed, justifies Dicks’ style, it doesn’t make the style any easier to read. And I admit that well into the book, even after I had begun to heartily enjoy it, I still struggled to derive a lot of pleasure from the writing itself.

So Something Missing is not a modern love letter to the English language and modern prose. But it is a quirky story about a sympathetic burglar. I love stories that take advantage of the moral ambiguity of the sympathetic criminal, and this book succeeded for me where The Hitman Diairies did not. Now, Martin is quite different from the main character of that book: he is about as sympathetic as one can make a career thief. He abhors violence. He goes to painstaking lengths to ensure that he only takes that which his clients won’t miss, whether it’s a roll of toilet paper or a diamond earring. Martin is about as close to an “honest criminal” as one can get, and it’s exactly by riding this paradox that Dicks succeeds in creating a boring character captivating enough to carry a novel on his shoulders.

See, the entire setup of Martin robbing select couples, whom he calls his clients rather affectionately, is hilarious and ripe for situation comedy. Indeed, it seems like that’s the direction in which Dicks is set to go in that fateful third chapter, when he finally stops introducing Martin’s career and relates an incident in which Martin is trapped in a client’s house when they come home. Oh no, Martin has to hide behind a sofa until he can escape undetected! But the husband is watching TV instead of taking a shower like his wife nagged him to! (Canned laughter here.) But Dicks understands that such a setup is limited to only a few good jokes before it become stale. He isn’t afraid to have Martin change and grow as the story progresses, something essential for any novel.

Martin begins Something Missing as someone who, well, is missing a lot in terms of personality. He has even less of a social life than I do. He hasn’t talked to his father in years. His career and fencing the proceeds of his career takes up most of his time. But he comes across as somewhat empty. So it’s nice to see that Martin cares enough about other people to take a risk to help the Claytons—and then to take an even bigger risk, a few chapters later, to help the Ashleys. He doesn’t have to do either of these things; he risks discovery by anonymously encouraging Alan Clayton to be a little more romantic or alerting Justine Ashley that her friend Laura has almost ruined her husband’s surprise birthday party. And when this has more profound consequences for him on a personal level, I kept worrying he would screw things up.

Then for the last act, Dicks raises the stakes again. Martin has the opportunity to jump from guardian angel to straight-up guardian when he discovers that one of his clients is in danger of being attacked and raped in her own home. He is faced with the dilemma of how to avert this without revealing his own illegal activities, either to her or to the police. Once again we’re confronting with the human contradiction: that which is legal is not necessarily that which is right. Martin is indubitably a criminal in the eyes of the law, yet does he really harm these couples by taking things they don’t notice are missing? And if he had never taken on this client, he would never have discovered the impending attack and been able to do something about it.

I admire the way that Dicks continually raises the stakes and the risks he takes in mixing such serious elements into what is otherwise a comedic novel. Something Missing does not stand out as a brilliant work of art. Nevertheless, it’s an entertaining character sketch that avoids a lot of mistakes and pitfalls so easy for novels of its kind to fall into. I was getting good thrill out of this, and in the last few chapters where Martin truly has to step up, it became almost a thriller instead of an easy comedic read.

I love libraries! I hadn’t planned to get the illustrated version of this, or probably read it at all. But then there it was, on my library’s New Books shelf, staring at me … and I stared back … and I borrowed it. Because that’s what libraries let you do. They let you take books, as long as you promise to bring them back. It’s amazing.

The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains is a short story reimagined as a picture book for adults. Actually, I think we need more picture books for adults. No, not graphic novels—those are fine in their own way—actual picture books, with stylized illustrations accompanying prose, like this one.

The illustrations by Eddie Campbell definitely enhance the story. They emphasize certain elements of the characters—the narrator’s diminutive stature, Calum’s wolfish red beard—and portray some of the lovely landscape through which the characters travel. I don’t visualize things when I read. So had I read this without the illustrations, with only Neil Gaiman’s sumptuous, scrumptious prose to go on, I would still have enjoyed the story … but I don’t think I would have marvelled at the setting quite so much.

The story takes place in Scotland, perhaps not our Scotland, in an area inspired by the Isle of Skye. Our narrator is a little person who recently lost his daughter after she ran away from home. He looks up Calum MacInnes, a border reaver who knows how to find the Cave in the Black Mountains of the Misty Isle. Together they go to this cave, where the narrator hopes to find the gold reputed to be hidden there. But there is more going on than meets the eye, and The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains shifts seamlessly from fable to fairytale to revenge story. It can’t quite seem to decide what it should be—but why should it be confined to any particular thing?

The disadvantage of a story so short and so fairytale-like is that it becomes easy to fall into the pattern of old, outmoded tropes. The sparseness of characters makes the absence of women characters all the more pronounced. The narrator mentions his wife, Morag, by name several times, but always in relation to himself … she has no existence independent of the role of absent wife. His daughter’s death is, of course, the motivation behind his entire journey. And along the way we encounter two other women: the first, Calum MacInnes’ wife, we don’t actually see—and it’s at this point I almost feel like Gaiman is intentionally lampshading—and the second dares to grant hospitality to Calum and our narrator, and for that her husband beats and rapes her while the protagonists lie awake, listening to it.

It’s easy to make excuses for these decisions. One can argue that it’s supposed to be “dark”, that these are all common and therefore somehow acceptable motifs in a fairytale-like story. But that’s disingenuous; it misses that point that maybe they shouldn’t be, that a writer of Gaiman’s calibre could certainly create a story where they aren’t necessary….

The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains is about revenge and regret and greed and what, exactly, it takes for someone to become evil. There is a lot of emphasis on choice, the fact that it’s not just one’s actions but one’s decisions to act that contribute to one’s moral alignment. Gaiman seems to suggest that people are inherently good, but that the world and our decisions tend to erode this goodness. This is true regardless of whether we have access to a tempting cave filled with Norse gold…. This is a moving, if imperfect, short story accompanied by nice, stylized illustrations. I’m glad it’s in the library.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a kind of bildungsroman for an anti-hero. We first meet Duddy through his Scottish history teacher, the tired and broken Mr. MacPherson, who earns Duddy’s enmity when he insults Duddy’s father and quickly finds out that he has crossed the wrong boy. From the first, Mordecai Richler establishes that Duddy is a bully and prone to holding a grudge. Indeed, Duddy’s long memory figures prominently in a novel that is, as its title implies, his personal journey into adulthood.

One of the best tricks that Richler pulls off is managing to make a short span of time feel like over a decade has passed. The story takes place before Duddy reaches twenty-one (then the age of majority in Quebec), with the bulk of it happening when he is around eighteen or nineteen years old. Owing to the speed with which Duddy wheels and deals, however, it feels like more years pass. The moment Duddy graduates from school and is unleashed upon the unsuspecting Montreal landscape he never rests. Always, his grandfather’s assertion that “a man without land is nothing” nips at him, spurring Duddy onwards in the pursuit of picturesque farmland around Lac Saint-Pierre.

The novel succeeds or fails based on one’s feelings about Duddy. It’s easy to love him: he is relentless, almost a force of nature. When he is good, when he is helpful and kind to those around him, he is like nothing else. He is clever to the point of cunning, and when he’s with his father or even his grandfather, there is a tenderness to him—a fierce desire to make his family proud. Uncle Benjy recognizes this when he later confers upon Duddy the title of “head of the family”. Unlike the other Kravitz men, Duddy is an operator. For all his father’s tall tales about friendship with the enigmatic Boy Wonder, it’s Duddy who gets things done.

It’s easy to hate him: he is relentless to the point of self-destruction. When desperate—and oh, how often he gets desperate—he will lash out and make deals no matter what the cost, breaking them later if he comes to regret or feel chained by them. At times it almost feels like Duddy cares about nobody other than himself—this is untrue, manifestly, because he cares about his family … but he is not someone who gets close to others. The way his mistreats Yvette, his sometime-lover whom he calls his “girl Friday”, is the most egregious example of Duddy’s ability to hurt those close to him.

Yvette enters the story as something less than a girlfriend of Duddy’s. They grow close during his summer at a hotel in St. Agathe, where Yvette hails from. She eventually acts as a secretary and middleman for Duddy’s dealing with a notary through whom he begins to buy up the land around Lac Saint-Pierre. Yvette is older and able to hold title to land, so the land is actually in her name for most of the book. However, Duddy and Yvette’s relationship is anything but straightforward. Duddy routinely pursues other women, and other men seem to enter Yvette’s orbit (but it’s not always clear what her relationship with them is). Virgil later acts as a third body in this problem, his cohabitation with the two of them introducing a new dynamic that eventually results in Yvette’s retreat back to St. Agathe.

The novel follows a rise-then-fall pattern standard for these kinds of coming-of-age stories. Nevertheless, the ending is quite interesting. Duddy is poised between two, seeming mutually exclusive paths. He can choose kindness, goodness, a life with Yvette and a conscience free of guilt … but at the cost of that land. Or he can allow his ruthless pursuit of the land to trump all other concerns … but it means saying goodbye to Yvette forever, and likely making more enemies along the way. Richler pleads with Duddy to take the former course through the voice of Duddy’s departed Uncle Benjy in a letter that laments how the harshness of the world often makes us harsh in turn. And for a short time, it feels like Duddy will actually manage to shake off this obsession with land … for a time.

In the end, Duddy brings his family to see the lake and all the land he now owns. He has burnt a lot of bridges in the process, and the victory is bittersweet. His grandfather, the man whose advice started this all and to whom Duddy promised some land for a farm, is upset by the price of all this. Duddy suddenly finds his triumph now tastes of ashes. But he is not to be beaten so easily, and the end of the novel implies that Duddy is committed to being a “smooth operator” and a big player in the community of Montreal Jewish businessmen. Whether this makes him happy or not is not question Richler answers.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a compact and careful story with a lot to recommend about it. The description on the back of my edition rightly pegs Duddy as “one of the most magnetic anti-heroes in Canadian fiction”. This is the first novel I’ve read from Mordecai Richler, and already I understand why he has received such acclaim. Although the story is deeply connected with the topical concerns of that era—the integration of Jews into a larger, predominantly francophone Montreal; the threat of Communism and the McCarthyism of the United States; the nascent movie production business—it still feels timeless, and it helped me understand how people who grew up in an area like Duddy’s might have felt and struggled back then. You can’t ask for much more than that.

There's more to epic fantasy than sword fighting and magical duels. Patrick Rothfuss seems to know this, and that's really the best way I can think to praise The Name of the Wind.

Since this is a story about a single man, it seems appropriate to start my review by talking about him as a character. A man of many names, Kvothe first appears as an innocuous innkeeper in a small town. He's hiding, not only from enemies, but from the stories, rumours, and legends that have attached themselves to his many names. Still, dark things lurk on the horizon, and although the majority of the story takes place during a flashback, the frame story isn't entirely just a frame. Somethings of substance occur, signalling a new beginning to Kvothe's quest, not an end. But first we learn how Kvothe became an innkeeper and receive an inkling of what lurks in the dark.

It's easy to like Kvothe. I won't say it's inevitable, since I can also see some people disliking him. But he already scores points because he's not insufferably badass. There are only so many Magnificent Bastard masculine heroes I can take before I need a good dose of farmboy naivety. Kvothe falls somewhere in the middle, a happy medium between crazy-capable and powerless. He's clever--something he mentions several times--but far from infallible. He makes plenty of mistakes. He has an insatiable love for learning--something with which I can personally identify--and is totally clueless about women--again, something to which I can relate.

The majority of the flashback takes place during Kvothe's time at the University. I could talk about his childhood and his time as a street urchin, but those parts didn't interest me as much as the third act. Firstly, as an autodidact, I empathized with Kvothe's impatient anticipation of gaining access to the University's endless Archives so he could learn more about his shadowy enemy, a group of killers known as the Chandrian. Secondly, the University boasts a much more interesting cast of characters, both friend and foe.

Right away, of course, Kvothe's plans run afoul of several snags, the largest one being that he gets banned from the Archives--I don't count this as a spoiler because Kvothe reveals upfront (on the dust jacket of this edition, in fact) that he gets expelled from the University, so obviously some misconduct will have to happen sooner or later. Or, you know, sooner and later. In fact, it seems like Kvothe is one of those people who are always doomed to try really, really hard to do the right thing and still end up getting in trouble.

Rothfuss tends to focus on minutiae a lot, such as how Kvothe manages to scrape together enough funds for tuition, clothing, etc. At times this got tedious, but a lot of it was relevant to the plot in some way, so I tolerated it. We already had the "and this is how the currency of the world works" speech earlier in the book (although I didn't really get it and sort of ignored everything about money for the rest of the book, since it was pretty obvious when something was expensive). Really this is just a sign that the narrative is uncompressed.

--This is where I talk about pacing in The Name of the Wind, something that comes up in almost every review, whether the reader enjoyed the "slow" pacing or not. I'm not going to call it slow, because I actually got through the book pretty fast. For the most part, Rothfuss keeps the story moving. It's long, yes, because it's not been compressed--or as they say in the TV business, "formatted for time". Once you've stripped out any scenes required either because they're dramatically or thematically important, you're left with some bits and ends. Some of them are fun, others I could have done without. So I can see why there are mixed reviews about pacing, but I don't think that's The Name of the Wind's problem. Rather, I take issue with its overall structure and its ending.

Common knowledge (the subtitle alone gives it away), but this is the first book in a series. And it ends at a rather unnatural termination, with both the frame story and the flashback on "pause" rather than "chapter end." In this respect, Rothfuss has taken "story arc" to the extreme (rather like the television series Heroes, only without the flimsy characters and horrible acting). To be sure, he does it well, and I enjoyed the book. However, for something seven hundred pages long, I was left with a sliver of disappointment when I approached the end of the book and realized this couldn't wrap up in time, that we were going to be left with more of a commercial break than a conventional cliffhanger. The Name of the Wind is more of an investment than an adventure.

Flaws aside, The Name of the Wind is a genuinely enjoyable work of fantasy fiction. And I'm pretty optimistic about the state of the fantasy genre these days; we've got plenty of great authors turning out both epic and urban fantasy. Still, Rothfuss stands out from the crowd.

But why take my word for it? At the time of writing this review, The Name of the Wind has an average rating of 4.45/5 with slightly over 3000 ratings. That's pretty statistically significant: 1729 people gave it 5 stars, while only 74 people gave it either 1 or 2 stars. So as long as you have some interest in fantasy, you aren't taking much of a risk by reading this book. And if you happen to be among that 1% who don't like it ... well then, you can say you beat the odds!

My reviews of the Kingkiller Chronicle:
The Wise Man’s Fear →

My exposure to politics as a child was, like so many things, gradual and haphazard. There were the overt attempts to indoctrinate me into democracy—vague spectres of mock elections in grade six dance in the deep recesses of memory. There more subtle episodes, such as the late-night satirical sketches of Royal Canadian Air Farce, where most of the humour would go over my head for years after I started watching. There were the disruptive moments, like that day in grade seven when I came home for lunch and learned that someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Centre. I have a particularly vivid impression of listening to the CBC’s broadcast of the BBC World Service late one night the next year, reporters in British accents describing the carpet bombing of Iraq. Slowly, but not gently, my understanding of the world as a political thing was starting to come together. It would be inaccurate to say that my political awakening coincides with September 11, 2001, but it is a useful enough milestone.

I’m kind of Canadian. And I’m proud, for all the complications that come with it, to be Canadian. Yet unlike so many other countries, Canada seems to struggle with its concept of nationhood. It is so common for people to define Canadianness as “not American”. And this is true, to the extent that any identity through negation can be true. But it’s so woefuly inadequate—why don’t we have a better identity?

I’ve moved past the unsophisticated engagement with politics that I had as a child. I am an adult now, and I watch and judge what our leaders do with the harsh, critical eye of adulthood. Stephen Harper stands up and rattles a sabre and makes loud noises about reclaiming Canada’s place on the international stage … and then proceeds to do absolutely nothing of consequence. It’s fair to say that since my political awakening—essentially this entire decade and a half of the twenty-first century—Canada’s position and influence in the international community has done little but decline. Far from bolstering us as a nation to be respected and listened to, Stephen Harper and the Prime Ministers before him squandered the reputation and respect that the leaders of the previous decades spent so long establishing.

In A Fair Country, John Ralston Saul sets out to look at what distinguishes Canada from other former British colonies. He wants to see if our history offers any clues as to what type of nation we could be, what philosophies could embody our national identity. Indeed, he goes as far as to argue that Canada is a métis nation, in that the values built into our democracy and culture from the start of our nation have been heavily influenced by Aboriginal ways of thinking. From here Saul goes on to describe how lingering colonial tendencies have masked this Aboriginal identity, to the great detriment of Canadian society. Finally, he offers suggestions for how we can acknowledge and reclaim our Aboriginal values.

Saul is helpful enough to offer up the book in four parts, which makes it easy to structure my review. He is not quite so helpful to provide an index, which makes it a lot harder to look back and refer to specific passages.

The first part, “A Métis Civilization” addresses Saul’s contention that we are a métis nation. That last phrase needs a little unpacking. The key is in the capitalization: métis rather than Métis. Saul is not invoking directly the cultures and traditions of the Métis people (although they certainly have a bearing on the discussion). Rather, he is using the word métis to describe the blending of anglophone/francophone culture with Aboriginal culture. Some critics pan this part of Saul’s argument because they look around and scoff at the idea of Aboriginal influence on our culture, given the Canadian government’s poor treatment of Aboriginal peoples. I understand their scepticism. But this is also part of Saul’s point, which is that Canada has historically developed as a nation of mixed heritages in a way unique from other former colonies—but that this heritage is now under attack from a reactionary revival of colonialism.

Ironically Saul invokes the idea that Canada is not America to support his argument. He points to the differences in how the two countries treated the indigenous population. Prior to the arrival of European settlers, there was no “Canada” or “United States of America”—there was just one vast continent. Yet the French and British governors who first set up shop in what would later become Canada established more fruitful dialogues with indigenous peoples than did the governors of what would be the American colonies. The treatment of Aboriginal peoples by the Canadian government was (and continues, sadly, to be) just as shameful and unforgivable as that of its American counterpart. Yet, and maybe I’m wrong on this, it seems to me that Aboriginal people and Aboriginal culture are far more visible and in evidence in Canadian society than in American. There has to be a reason for that.

Even if Saul is incorrect, and facets of Aboriginal culture aren’t the essential distiguishing characteristic of Canadianness … shouldn’t they be? They certainly shouldn’t be absent from our national identity. So even if Canada isn’t a métis nation, we should be.

The other major difference between Canada and our southern neighbour (I like to think of the United States as “Canada’s ironic hipster T-shirt”) is that the United States fought for independence while Canada merely asked. All stereotypes aside about Canadians and politeness, and this marks a fundamental divergence in the development of Canada as a nation.

Saul goes on to investigate that development with the second part of A Fair Country, “Peace, Fairness and Good Government” (but not, apparently, Oxford commas—the most colonial of all commas!). He makes a lot out of the fact that, back in the day, the fathers of Confederation talked a lot about “peace, welfare and good government” but that the wording morphed into “peace, order and good government” during the negotiations for independence with Britain. But I admit to being somewhat confused about whether this change is important.

On one hand, Saul suggests that the current generation of politicians has gone overboard on its focus on order, to the detriment of public welfare. (One example of the contrary is the 1849 riots and LaFontaine and Baldwin’s decision not to use military force to stop the rioting: “they chose public welfare over public order”. And I couldn’t help but think about Ferguson, Missouri while I read this chapter, and how the opposite is so sadly true these days.) He sees our government as the victim of excessive bureaucratic feature creep, with a layer of civil servants acting as custodians and handlers of increasingly illiterate (and thus ineffectual and impotent) politicians; these civil servants act predominantly and reflexively to preserve their own positions rather than for the greater welfare of society. This is something to which Saul returns with more vigour in the next part of the book.

On the other hand, Saul’s attempt to trace the replacement of “welfare” with “order” seems to suggest that this was little more than a sop to British interests and colonialistas of the time. (I’m coining colonialista in the same vein as fashionista, as in someone who fancies themselves a supporter of colonialism.) This would then be part of the long line of Canadian tendencies to ignore the written rules and instead obey a series of unwritten rules. By this reasoning, the disappearance of welfare from the slogan is not a big deal.

Part III, “The Castrati”, is an increasingly-terse rant against the “failed elite” who have embraced a neo-colonial mindset in which Canada is constantly sucking up to either Britain or the United States in lieu of acting independently abroad or at home. The title of the part says it all—Saul condemns our leaders mostly for lacking fire, passion, and the guts to do something (even if it is the wrong thing). He criticizes their reluctance to spend money and their lack of transparency. I agree with a great deal of his criticism; I’m no fan of the current or recent governments. Yet this part of the book is a dramatic shift in tone from the rational, even-handed approach of the first two parts.

Part IV seems like an attempt to reconcile these two conflicting tones. “An Intentional Civilization” offers three brief, concluding chapters to A Fair Country that offset the depressing cavalcade of perceived failures from Part III with a new plea for action and hope. Saul focuses heavily on the North and the prospect of restoring Canada’s international clout, to some degree, by trying to play catch-up with other polar nations that have universities in the North and well-established policies. I can’t speak to any degree about how realistic these ideas might be, but I can agree in principle that the North is neglected and that anything we might do with the North has to be done from a Northern perspective, rather than imposed by we Southern types….

It’s fair to say that A Fair Country is what I expected. It’s a meditation on nationhood and identity, part political treatise and part cultural essay. None of it is really all that controversial … and I think that’s part of the problem. I can see how hard-line conservatives might raise their hackles over Saul’s characterization of the “Family Compact” style of governance that he links to conservative views. But that’s an exception in what is otherwise a very centrist and thus moderate book. It’s good, I suppose, that Saul is making an argument that could be embraced regardless of one’s political leanings. Nevertheless, it lacks the fire and sensationalism that could make it anything more than an academic curiosity attractive to intellectuals like me.

There’s also the issue, of course, that this is a book by a privileged white man largely about Aboriginal relations and culture in Canada. Saul is careful to acknowledge his privilege and to include Aboriginal people in his sources. But I think it behoves readers of A Fair Country to consider consulting primary sources of Aboriginal information, even if they might not always receive as high a profile as a book by John Ralston Saul. I’ll freely admit I’ve been lacking in pursuing books by Aboriginal authors (feel free to suggest some for me in the comments!). But I can recommend Feminism FOR REAL, which includes several Aboriginal authors and viewpoints in its essays.

If, like me, you are interested in Canadian politics and culture and want to question the conventional (and frankly insubstantial) presentation of our history we learn in school, then A Fair Country is a good resource. Saul asks interesting, deep questions and raises points that make for good discussion, whether or not you agree. At times he seems to switch gears very quickly, going from academic to polemical in tone without much warning. And even then, he is never quite scathing enough to feel as transgressive as I might like. Canada is a good country sometimes. It could maybe be a great country—it has potential. But a fair country? Not yet. But it’s something to strive for, and it’s somewhat more important than greatness.

Blood and Iron, not to be confused with the urban fantasy novel of the same name by Elizabeth Bear, is the first entry in a trilogy by Jon Sprunk about fantasy nations at war. Our hero is Horace, a shipwright and carpenter stranded on the shores of a hostile empire, at their mercy, who suddenly finds out he can do magic. What ensues in the slow self-destruction of the capital city of this kingdom within the empire while Horace stands around making amazed noises at it all.

Horace is essentially an Idiot Protagonist (TVTropes), so your mileage is going to vary quite a bit here. He goes from being a prisoner to a magic-wielding-but-still-clueless leader of the Queen’s guard in about a hundred and fifty pages. If this rise to power isn’t unbelievable enough, all this happens without Horace taking any initiative. Instead, he just reacts to everyone else manipulating him like the pawn that he is. From Mulcibar to Byleth to Alyra, all the supporting characters push and prod Horace into the few actions he actually takes on his own.

Although there is nothing inherently wrong with having an idiot protagonist, when deployed the way it is here, it gets boring. Fast. I just had nothing invested in Horace. Instead of taking stock of his impossible situation and coming up with a plan, he just waits for things to happen and then hopes for the best. That’s not how a clever, commendable hero should act! Even if their plans don’t work out (and it’s often more entertaining that way) heroes need to make them! Horace learns the language (with surprising speed) but consistently fails to learn much about court politics, assuming instead that he can continue to blunder about and act on his own recognizance without much threat to his life.

Horace not making plans comes to a head along with the climax of the book itself: rather than, you know, making a plan to save the queen and all that, Horace decides to run full tilt at the bad guys and rely on his precarious grasp of his magical ability. The result is a series of interlinked scenes in which Horace continually pummels people with magic. There is no brinksmanship, no intrigue involved, just a straight-up no-holds-barred magical firefight. And while this might be appealing to some people, it once again left me feeling cold and unsatisfied.

Then there’s the fact that Horace seems to have no distinguishing characteristics other than being a brooding foreign carpenter who suddenly can do magic—yet the only two women in the book of note are immediately, hopelessly fascinated by him. Horace is not fascinating. Horace is a dolt who once built ships and now does magic with the finesse of someone trying to embroider a throw pillow using a fencing sword. Now, in the disgustingly chauvinistic types of fantasy books of yore that Blood and Iron unfortunately seems to be trying to emulate, the women all swoon over the hero because he actually is, you know, heroic. Not because he is the designated hero of the story.

Let me tick off a few more clichés while we’re at it. Evil priesthood? Check. Slave revolution? Check. (Actually, I was extremely confused by Jirom’s entire subplot, and I had no clue what was going on for most of it.) Embattled queen forced into marriage with a charmless ape? Check.

By no means do I want to suggest that Blood and Iron simply retreads the same, old grooves in fantasy without much to show for it. There are certainly some commendable aspects. Sprunk includes a pair of gay characters in an offhanded manner and in a way that makes it seem like no one else considers it a big deal (and I think that they might be the first to get a romantic kiss as well). The magic system is interesting. Sprunk clearly has it worked out, but he doesn’t dump too much exposition on us, and I admit he has piqued my curiosity. (I just wish that it weren’t used as a sledgehammer in the climax.) Although the two supporting women were indeed pressed in service as Horace’s admirers, they are also fairly three-dimensional characters in their own right, with problems and desires of their own. Byleth reminds me a lot of Elizabeth I; Alyra is an interesting albeit not very competent spy with a believable backstory.

One last quibble, and one which has absolutely nothing to do with Sprunk’s writing: my edition has absurdly huge headers consisting of the title on the verso and Sprunk’s name on the recto. I’m used to headers and footers being in a much smaller font size than the body text. These were larger and darker type, in all-capitals, and very distracting. It’s a shame, because the large-format trade paperback is otherwise extremely nice to read.

Blood and Iron is not a stunning new work of fantasy. I’m not really interested in reading the next book in this series. But it’s also not a bad book. It leans a little too much on the conventions of the genre and seems to think it is more clever than it actually is. But I can see how other readers might find it more to their liking. So while I won’t recommend it, it is nice to know there are other options out there.