Books Read in 2021 - Part II

Books, part the second!

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World Travel: An Irreverent Guide (Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever)

I miss Anthony Bourdain. The world is a poorer place for his absence. Shortly before he died, he and his assistant, Laurie Woolever, were making plans to write a travel guide of sorts – one that would cover the world (or at least those parts that Bourdain had visited in a long and peripatetic career) and some of the best places to eat therein. After his death, as Woolever writes in the preface, there was a period of debate over whether to proceed and if so how, and the end result was this book. It’s an odd combination of general tourist guide on the one hand – each chapter is a country, arranged alphabetically, with information on how to get there and what transportation from the airport to the main cities will cost – and a Bourdain-style eating tour on the other, with a couple of chosen restaurants listed for each place, including costs, menus, and such. Throughout are quotes – often quite long – about each place taken from published works, television show transcripts, or just random writings by Bourdain, all set off in blue ink so you can see at a glance what is his and what was added by others. There are also a handful of essays from friends, colleagues, and in one instance Bourdain’s brother, all on the general theme of what it was like to travel and eat with Anthony Bourdain. It’s a lot of fun for those of us who are dedicated fans, and if I ever find myself in any of these places perhaps I’ll look some of these restaurants up and give them a try, but this book is perhaps something best left to the hardcore fans.

A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisine (Anthony Bourdain)

This is one of Bourdain’s earlier books, published in 2001, and it reflects both the times and Bourdain’s early, more testosterone-driven writing. As he matured over the years Bourdain got more even-keeled, but even so this is an entertaining and enjoyable book. It’s basically a series of essays around the general theme of “Send Anthony Bourdain somewhere out of the usual path of American tourists and have him eat exotic things and report back about them,” and there are chapters here on Vietnam, Cambodia, Scotland, Russia, Morocco, and – of all places – San Francisco, as well as others. At one point he ends up in the little Mexican village where most of his kitchen staff in New York City are from, eating with their families. Even in familiar places he goes to unfamiliar restaurants and generally eats things that the average American won’t touch – he was a far more adventurous eater than I will ever be, for example. Some of the appeal of this is the food but most of it is just Bourdain reacting to both food and circumstances (his trip through Cambodia is awful though he just loves Vietnam, and his “I’m going to try to be nice except I just can’t” rant against vegans in San Francisco is definitely a more jagged Bourdain than he became in later years – he would have managed to be more polite, though I doubt his opinions underneath ever changed). It’s a fun book and one that is almost impossible to read without hearing it in his voice.

Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far) (Dave Barry)

Nothing ages so fast as humor, and no form of humor ages as quickly as political humor. But if you can put your mind back into simpler days at the beginning of the current century, this is a fun little book. I’ve enjoyed Dave Barry’s writing since I stumbled into his stuff back in the 1980s and he is nothing if not consistent – light, mildly absurdist satire of daily life and its foibles, often with a political undertone that says “they’re all nuts.” He’s funny, and I appreciate the fact that he got his start in the Philadelphia area because hey, local pride. Every year he does a “year in review” column where he goes through the events of the past twelve months – some of which actually happened (those are usually set off by the phrase “I am not making this up,” because they can be hard to tell apart from the ones he did make up). The column for 2020 was a much needed break after a hard year, really. These are the columns from 2000 through 2006, plus a long chapter skimming through the millennium prior to that in much the same style. There are a lot of names I’d forgotten about (Elian Gonzalez? William Hung?), but the overriding impression I got from it is that it was a lower-stakes time. In an age where the US has barely survived four years of increasingly overt Fascism capped by an actual insurrection against the legitimate government of the country by hardcore right-wingers – an insurrection which the Republican Party steadfastly refuses to acknowledge, let alone investigate – the kind of gentle “both sides are idiots” humor that Barry offers here is a bit jarring. I suppose that’s more a commentary on the present than on Barry, but there you go.

Dead Lies Dreaming (Charles Stross)

The tenth installment in the Laundry Files is a bit of a divergence, given that never once does any character from the Laundry actually appear in the book. It clearly takes place in the same world as the Laundry Files and there are occasional references to things that exist in that world, but the characters are different and you get the feeling that this is a temporary diversion designed to set up a much larger collision down the road. Jeremy Starkey – “Imp” to his diverse collection of friends – is a transhuman, someone with minor magical powers (a dangerous thing to be in the world of the Black Pharoah’s England, both for political and sorcerous reasons), and all he wants to do is get enough money to make his films. His friends – generally referred to as Del, Game Boy, and Doc – are similarly transhuman (and similarly non-hetero in various ways), and at the opening of the book they’re robbing a toy store. Wendy is a former cop turned private security guard, also transhuman and deeper than she appears. Eve Starkey, Imp’s sister, works as the personal assistant to Rupert de Montforte Bigge, a high priest of the Mute Poet and a ruthless and bizarrely rich corporate titan. All of this – plus a team of Transnistrian mafiya hitmen and Rupert’s personal muscle (known throughout as “The Bond”) – will converge on an ancient book of great evil, a cursed object that must be retrieved by one of the blood. Stross weaves the Starkey family history throughout the book, and in the end much has changed though how much remains to be done is unclear. Stross is a marvelous writer for both plot and the simple art of putting sentences together, and this book pulls you right along and leaves you waiting for the next installment in the Laundry Files.

Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir)

On a spaceship in the interstellar void a man wakes up with two dead companions and no idea who he is or why he is there. Over time he works out the answers to those questions – he is Dr. Ryland Grace, a former academic biologist who left the field to teach middle school science, and his mission is to save the earth from the astrophage, microscopic alien life forms who live on light and are rapidly dimming the sun to the point where life on earth will become unsustainable. From there the story branches out into both past and future. Weir gives us flashbacks of how the astrophage were discovered and how humanity reacted with the Hail Mary, the spaceship Grace finds himself traveling on. Perhaps the most compelling character in this part of the story is Eva Stratt, the person in charge of Project Hail Mary – a ruthless but sympathetic administrator who drafts Grace into her domain. Weir also continues the story forward into orbit around the star Tau Ceta, where the solution to the astrophage problem may lie. Here the most compelling character is Rocky – a sentient alien life form whose planet had a similar project that ended up at Tau Ceta as well. Grace and Rocky learn how to communicate and how to overcome the vast challenges that this project entails, and the end result isn’t quite what either of them expected but it seems to work. Weir is an entertaining writer with a dry sense of humor that leavens the hard science that fills these pages, and the book flies by quickly. It’s a First Contact space adventure with three fully-fleshed-out characters, which is not an easy thing to do.

Death’s Apprentice (KW Jeter and Gareth Jefferson Jones)

In a grim, rainswept city ruled by the Devil himself, there are three hard men. Blake was a soldier taken in by the Devil and is now cursed to wear his coat, a garment that has become part of his body and taken half of his soul. Nathaniel was sold to Death by his drunken father and is learning the trade. Hank is a hit man, a giant, and is psychologically incapable of fear (a condition the authors repeatedly describe as “pantophobia,” which is in fact precisely the opposite condition – I’m not sure how that got past the editors). They will join forces in the search for an infant, and a literal pandemonium will break loose. This was a library remainder and probably for good reason – it reads smoothly but there is about half again as much in this book as there needed to be and it can be difficult to keep track of who is doing what or why the reader really should be concerned about it. Overstuffed, determinedly weird, mostly combat and explanations, and the first of a planned trilogy that probably would have followed the infant rather than the three men had it been published, this is a book that had a lot of interesting things in it but didn’t quite come together into a successful story.

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Imaginarium (Paul Kidby)

Paul Kidby illustrated many of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, and his visual style is nearly synonymous with the series for many people. An untrained artist, he approached Pratchett with some samples of his work and spent a career following up on that. This is a large format collection of some of these illustrations – one per page, usually – divided into sections, each section introduced with a brief comment from the artist. If you’re a hardcore Discworld fan this will be a fascinating collection, and if you’re not you should probably skip over it. I am, and I enjoyed this Father’s Day present from my family.

The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde)

It was a long year and a half and looked to get even longer, so it seemed a good time to revisit an old favorite series. When the boundary between fiction and reality is porous, someone has to police the border and that someone is Thursday Next, a detective for SpecOps 27, the division tasked with investigating literary crimes in a 1985 Britain where such things are considered serious offenses. She's a veteran of the Crimean War (still going on in 1985), her father works in the Chrono-Guard (SpecOps 12) though he went rogue and is now careening through the timelines with occasional visits to see his daughter, she has a pet dodo named Pickwick (made from reconstructed DNA), and her great but largely self-thwarted love interest is Landen Park-Laine, which makes more sense once you understand that a) Park Lane is the British equivalent of Park Place in Monopoly, and b) Fforde adores puns and allusions of all sorts. This is even more clear with Jack Schitt – a soulless corporate enforcer from the Goliath Corporation, which rebuilt England after a rather different WWII than we know in our timeline (there are occasional references to a German occupation) – and the main villain, Acheron Hades. After an attempt to capture Hades goes badly awry, Next transfers from London to the Swindon office of SO27. Eventually Hades uses the Prose Portal (invented by Thursday's uncle Mycroft) to enter Jane Eyre and kidnap the heroine, after which all sorts of literary shenanigans ensue. Fforde is a delight to read if you enjoy following odd little references (some of Thursday's colleagues include her boss, Braxton Hicks, and her fellow detective Bowden Cable) and long-form humor, and this opening volume of the first four-book arc of Thursday's story has one of my favorite bits of dialogue ever:

“We’d like your opinion on this. It was taken yesterday.”

I looked at the photo. I knew the face well enough. “Jack Schitt.”

“And what do you know about him?”

“Not much.”

Lost in a Good Book (Jasper Fforde)

Thursday Next is now famous after her adventures in Jane Eyre and she hates it. It interferes with her SpecOps job and her marriage to Landen, and she’d much rather just get on with both. But when a train ride with a Neanderthal goes badly awry and a copy of a long-lost play by Shakespeare turns up mysteriously in an aristocrat’s family library – and becomes an opportunity for a neofascist politician to curry favor with voters – Thursday gets thrown back into the thick of LiteraTec action. To complicate matters Landen gets eradicated by a rogue ChronoGuard agent so that he died at age two, the Goliath Corporation is still angry at her for what happened to Jack Schitt, and she is pursued by another enemy with a personal grudge who is trying to kill her through aggravated coincidences. To solve these problems she figures out how to enter and leave books on her own, which – after a series of other equally outlandish events – ends with her apprenticed to Miss Havisham of Great Expectations as an agent of Jurisfiction, the in-book equivalent of SO27. From there it gets odd. Fforde is up to his usual wordplay (a section on grammasites remains one of my favorites) and puns (there’s a long-running joke regarding the unfortunate fate of SO5 agents assigned to tail Thursday – agents with names like Dedmen & Walken, or Lamme & Slorter) and a side plot involving the extinction of all life on earth that somehow seems less important than any of that. If you follow Fforde at all you will recognize some characters who will play a much larger role in their own spinoff being introduced here, but for the most part you just try to keep up with his imagination and enjoy the ride.

The Well of Lost Plots (Jasper Fforde)

After the events of Lost in a Good Book our hero retreats to the Bookworld for some rest and recuperation, switching places with DS Mary Mary in a disused police procedural that will eventually turn into Fforde’s first Nursery Crimes book if you know what to look for. Thursday spends her days training as a Jurisfiction agent under Miss Havisham and trying not to forget her eradicated husband Landen. Fforde keeps a lot of balls in the air as far as the plot goes – Thursday’s battle with mnemonomorph Aornis Hades, her trying to fit into Caversham Heights and train the two Generics into becoming actual characters (and the problems that happen when they do), and the underlying issues with the rollout of UltraWord all dart in and out of the plot – but the main joy of reading these novels is Fforde’s dizzying parade of allusions, puns, and creative ideas. In the end things turn out well for certain values of well, and Thursday Next is off to the concluding volume of her initial four-book series.

Something Rotten (Jasper Fforde)

In this final installment of Thursday Next’s initial arc, she is once again back in Swindon and trying to tie up all the loose ends from the previous books. An increasingly Fascist Yorick Kaine is now the Chancellor of England, stirring up xenophobic hatred against the Danes and opposed mainly by President for Life George Formby. Landen is intermittently uneradicated – more and more as the book goes on – while the 13th-century St. Zvlkz has reappeared with his Seventh Revealment, which is about the fate of the planet hinging on the outcome of the 1988 SuperHoop Croquet championship between the Reading Whackers and the Swindon Mallets, croquet being a much more violent sport in this world than in ours. There’s a side plot about the Neanderthals and another about Danish literature, while a third revolves around the efforts of England’s most feared assassin – The Windowmaker – to kill Thursday before the SuperHoop. But mostly you read this for the worldbuilding and the deep dive into Jasper Fforde’s imagination. There are several one-off books that continue Thursday Next’s story, but for now I will take a break and read elsewhere for a bit.

Born a Doofus (Adam Huber)

Bug Martini is my favorite web comic. The art is clean and interesting, Huber’s sense of humor is right up my alley, and most strips have multiple punchlines so you’re almost always going to find something funny in them. I started following the strip when it was still called Bug (he changed it because “Bug Martini” is easier to search for, I think) and I have done my best to share these strips with the world. I very nearly got Huber to come to Home Campus to give a presentation, in fact, and we had actually gotten everything arranged before the world caught fire in March 2020 and burned that down too. I still have hopes. When he announced that he was going to do a Kickstarter to get his first collection published – a project he did largely himself, it turns out – I was on board from the get go. It took a while longer than either of us expected but given the state of the world during that time it’s quite an achievement that the book is here at all. And it’s just as wonderful as I thought it would be.