This is yet another early Matthew Scudder novel; it’s interesting mostly
in that this is the book where Scudder first begins to admit to himself
that he has a drinking problem. He has a couple of blackouts, and does
some seriously dangerous and stupid things, and almost–but not quite–
persuades himself to go to an AA meeting. The mystery itself serves
mostly as background for Scudder’s own story in this one.

This is a dry, dusty, obscure, scholarly book, and while I wouldn’t call
it a compelling read, I did manage to read the whole thing over the
period of about a month, and I’m not sorry about it. What that says
about me, I’m not sure, because This Is Not A Book For The Mass Market.

This is a book about the wave of emigration along the California and
Oregon trails in the middle part of the 19th century, and in particular
the understanding of law by the emigrants themselves, and in particular
of law as it relates to private property (as, after all, most civil and
criminal law does).

One gathers from a variety of snide (if exceedingly polite) comments that
Reid makes in the text that there has been the tendency among historians
to make one of two errors regarding the Overland Trail and the California
mining camps. The first is to see them as “lawless”, places where the
usual societal norms didn’t apply, and therefore places where every human
impulse, no matter how base, is given free rein. This is (I paraphrase)
utter hogwash. During the course of this long book, Reid builds a
compelling case that the emigrants brought the law they had known in the
east with them as they travelled west–despite knowing full well that
they were travelling far beyond the bounds of any kind of coercive authority.

The Overland Trail was a place of great hardship. What with short water, short
food, burning heat, bad water, disease, freezing cold, there was
something bad for everyone. In such a desparate situation, we’d
expect to see the have-nots stealing from the haves, and murdering if
necessary to get the food and water and other supplies they needed.
But Reid has surveyed the many diaries of the trip–and there
were hundreds, at least, written by men and women from all classes and
levels of education–and the picture is clear. Property rights were
respected on the Overland Trail. There was remarkably little thievery.
People bought what they needed, often at exorbitant prices, from other
emigrants, or from the trading posts that sprang up. Basic honesty is
taken to a surprising degree; emigrants finding a stray horse or ox or
mule and taking it into their train would freely return it should the
owner come and recognize it.

The Trail was a dangerous place, certainly, but the dangers did not
include, for the most part, one’s fellow man. And the emigrants
recognized this: when the evitable need to lighten the load became
extreme (everyone overpacked), one of the first things to go as being
of no use were the guns.

Well, you might ask, what about murders for other reasons? Certainly
there were some, though it seems to be have uncommon. Reid has written
another book on that topic, Policing the Elephant, which I’ve
not yet gotten to.

The other error historians have been prone to make is to see the Overland
Trail as a place where the dictum, “From each according to his ability, to
each according to his need,” would naturally hold sway. But there is no
Marxist paradise, and in fact even those in the deepest degree of need
expected to pay (in money or in kind or in labor) for what they needed.

The conclusion seems to me to be inescapable. The emigrants were decent,
God-fearing folk (and they were, too) when they left the east; they
remained decent God-fearing folk as they travelled west. They brought
their moral compasses with them.

I don’t know what it says of historians that they seem to think that,
once away from the coercive power of state and society, the emigrants
would turn into slavering beasts with all the morals of, well, modern
academics. But they didn’t.

This is the third Matthew Scudder novel; it’s better than the first one,
The Sins of the Fathers, and Scudder’s always interesting to
read about, but otherwise it’s nothing special.

This short novel by Peter Lovesey is a variant on the “Strangers on a
Train” theme. It’s set in England in the late 1940’s, a few years after
the end of World War II. Two woman, friends in the WAAF during the early
part of the war, meet on the street after a parting of some six years.
One had married a heroic RAF wing commander only to discover that heroism
takes you only so far in civilian life; the other had married a wealthy
engineer only to find that money wasn’t everything. Both think maybe
they’d be better off without their husbands.

But this isn’t an account of how the police crack what could have been
the perfect murder. It’s the story of the two women, Rose and Antonia,
and the steps they take to gain their ends.

As usual for Lovesey, the characters are clearly drawn,
three-dimensional, and compelling; the plot is convoluted and surprises
are many. Plus, his depiction of the post-war years has such detail and
immediacy that Jane (who also read it) was quite shocked to find that it
was published in 1989.

Though compelling, I wouldn’t call this a delightful book; while not
gruesome, it was nevertheless like watching Humpty Dumpty fall off of the
wall in slow motion. You know he’s scrambled for good, and yet you can’t
help watching.

Brian
Daley now has an official web
page, put together posthumously by those who knew him. Check it out!

This is a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” book that Dave got at a book fair
at his school. It’s all about people and animals that escaped certain
death in a variety of unlikely ways. There’s the woman who bit a pit
bull terrier in the neck to make it let go of her dog; the woman whose
life was saved by her potbelly pig; various people picked up and carried
improbable distances by tornadoes only to land safely; people rescued
from volcanoes; et cetera, et al.

I got to read all of this aloud to Dave over the last five nights. It
was less tedious than some things we’ve read, but it isn’t going to win
any literary awards either. I think this one will recede into blessed
obscurity on David’s shelf until the day when he can read it to himself.

I like Dickens’ books. Some call him long winded and tedious but I have
never found him to be so. James Joyce’s Ulysses is long winded and
tedious. Dickens is just… extremely Victorian. His plots are complex,
his descriptions are voluminous and his characters are cartoons rather
than rounded people. Nevertheless, I almost always find something
relevant in his books. He creates a world that I find immediately
familiar, understandable and amusing.

The skeleton plot of Bleak House revolves around the story
of two young
litigants, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone, in a long and hugely involved
Chancery suit called Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. The case is hopelessly bogged
down in legal mumbo jumbo, the lawyers are eating all the money up in
court costs and the whole process of waiting for resolution has driven
the people involved to madness or suicide. On the opposite side is John
Jarndyce who, in an effort to repair the damage done by the suit, takes
the pair under his wing as wards and provides them with financial support
and a beautiful home called Bleak House. He also takes in a young woman,
orphaned and raised by an aunt, to act as a companion to Ada. Esther
Summerson, the young orphan, becomes his housekeeper.

Now, all of that is very nice, if a little dry. What makes the book so
much fun to read is all the side characters Dickens throws in as well.
Usually, it’s his long winded descriptions that are so amusing.
My personal favorite is Mrs. Jellyby, who uses all her time in
philanthropy for the people of Boorioboola-Gha and completely ignores her
household affairs. Her children are filthy and wild, her servants drink,
the house is a pig sty and her husband comes home to say nothing and lean
his head against the wall. However, she has a Mission and it’s to raise
money for the poor Africans, not tend to the minor facts of her home
life. She is something right out a Monty Python sketch. She does
illustrate well the thematic elements involving charity and
philanthropy that runs thru the entire book. Mr. Tulkinghorn, the
personification of the evil lawyer, is another well drawn character. He
hears everything, sees everything, feels nothing, loves no one.
Fortunately, Dickens kills, oops, sorry. Anyway, he lives up to every
lawyer joke I have ever heard. And, of course, there is the poor little
street sweeper, Jo, who has the audacity to be orphaned, ignorant,
homeless, hungry and always being told to “move on” though he has nowhere
to go, like the dust he sweeps from the sidewalks for the rich.

If you haven’t read a Dickens novel, start with a shorter one like Great
Expectations. But if you are not new to the world he creates and you are
willing to read slowly and digest, this book is certainly one of his more
rewarding and amusing books.

This is the second book in the “Bunnicula” series, although Bunnicula the
vampire bunny doesn’t actually appear in it. The Monroe family is going
off on a vacation, and leaving Chester the cat and Harold the dog at a
kennel called Chateau Bow-Wow. As usual, Chester is determined to play
Sherlock Holmes, and as usual Harold (the narrator) is just about capable
of holding down Dr. Watson’s spot on the roster.

Chester soon determines that the pair of wire-haired dachsunds (Heather
and Howard) are in fact werewolves; and when a French poodle named Louise
disappears, Chester is certain that she’s been murdered by her boyfriend
Max and his new friend Georgette. Or maybe by Lyle, the psycho-kitty.
Or by Max’s hanger-on, Taxi. And as more animals disappear, even Harold
begins to think that Chester might be right.

I’ll pay this book the compliment of saying that David enjoyed it very
much, and is looking forward to more; I’ll also say that I found it
rather boring, and not much fun to read aloud. I’d probably have liked
it more if I’d been able to read it silently (and therefore more
quickly), but alas–I fear that this belongs to the set of kid’s books
that really are only for kids.

There are two or three more books in the series, and I’ve no doubt we’ll
get to them all in time.

Every so often I take a shot at a hazard and find something unexpectedly
wonderful, and that’s definitely the case here. What’s even more
wonderful is that this is the first book in a series–and I’ve come to it
late enough that I think that the entire thing has been written. I just
need to go about and buy the subsequent books.

Lord of the Isles is the beginning of an epic fantasy with a
number of interesting and original twists. The world in which it is set
is divided into two oceans, the Outer Sea and the Inner Sea, by a roughly
circular ring of islands. At one time the islands were united under a
single king, but that last king, Carus of Haft, was brought down by a
would-be usurper; the ensuing struggles ushered in a thousand years of
chaos.

There are many wizards in the world of the Isles, and one interesting
twist is that few of them know what they are doing. They’ve got kibbles
and bits of learning, but few of them can perceive the forces they
manipulate by rote. The results they get can be wildly at variance with
their intentions. I like this because it turns one of my pet peeves on
its head–the hero who has exceptionally strong magic powers, but has no
idea how to harness them. Andre Norton wrote a good many of
these, but she’s not alone; Robert Jordan has turned the idea
into a saga that stands at ten books and counting. And the thing that
annoys me about it is the whole deus ex machina thing. Just when
the hero has gotten into a fix and is facing certain death, he reaches
down to the depths of his soul and in a triumph of nebulous, overwrought
prose does the dirty to his enemies in a blaze of wild magic. Which he
still won’t know how to control when it’s all over. I think Drake’s take
on it is much more amusing.

The problem is enhanced because there are magical tides of a sort.
Wizards can draw on two sources of power, the “Sun”, which is a good
principle, or Malkar, which is an evil principle. Most drawn on a
mixture of the two. But the sources are stronger at some times than at
others, and just as happened a thousand years earlier when Carus was
overthrown, Malkar is becoming ever more strong in the world. So these
various wizards not only don’t know what they are doing, not only can’t
they see where their power is coming from, but they are far stronger than
they would have been a hundred years earlier. They are like children
playing with molotov cocktails instead of matches.

On top of this interesting setting, Drake has created a set of intriguing
characters.

There’s Tenoctris, a wizard from an earlier age, cast
forward in time by the magic cataclysm that killed King Carus. Unlike
most of the wizards we run into, Tenoctris’ powers are extremely weak.
But unlike them she’s a scholar; and on top of that she can see the
forces they manipulate blindly.

There’s Garric, a descendant of King
Carus, with whom he has some kind of arcane link; he’s clearly destined
to be the next King of the Isles, though it’s nothing he desires.

There’s Cashel, shepherd, adept of the quarterstaff, and (though he
doesn’t think about it) a strong wizard in his own right. He doesn’t
draw circles and cast spells like the others; instead, he uses it
instinctively. He’s a man of character and integrity, and his magic is
part of that (as Tenoctris says, he has good instincts). He’s also, I
gather, half sprite, which may explain things.

There’s Sharina, Garric’s sister. There are two factions trying to
regain rule of all of the islands, and when she is discovered to be the
long and well-lost daughter of the Duke of Haft, and thus heir to Carus,
she becomes a pawn in their hands. But she’s well able to take care of
herself.

And there are as many others that I don’t have time to write about. I
like many of them. And they don’t bicker incessantly like
Robert Jordan’s characters, which is just about worth the
price of admission.

The bottom-line is, if you have any taste for epic fantasy, buy it.
You’ll like it.