My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Only Ben Cooper appears in this nicely short story. I like the interplay befween Cooper and Uddal; the mystery itself is Intriguing; and the ending satisfies. But this is a mystery with a message. And that message is hammered home in Cooper’s thoughts, a policeman’s dialogue, a character’s spouting. It was a bit Law & Order like in its preachiness. Booth made an effort to make the dialogue and thoughts natural, but it was the sheer overwhelming amount of it that ruined that effort. I would’ve preferred more of the usual Cooper mystery tone and less of the message being so obvious.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I find it a pleasure to read mysteries set in a country other than UK or US (yes, I didn’t include Canada because it’s not a big setting either), and I like this series because not only is the setting — Africa — new to me, but also the culture is so different, so personable and gentle. The tone is calm and thoughtful but not in an oh-get-on-with-it way but in a slow-suck-you-in-and-keep-you-glued way. There are levels of stories and mysteries, some minor, two the main event, that are woven in together expertly, all interesting. Tears of the Giraffe is a pleasurable antidote to Scottish grimness and North American alienation.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another good read by Nevada Barr. What made me admire her more as a writer is that she had a scene where a lesser author, going for the easy titillation, would’ve thrown sex in. Instead Barr adds credibility and excitement and interest by not doing so. As a result, in more than one way, the last scene makes you want to get the next book — now.

This is the first book I’ve finished reading in 2012. A new year of reading begins!

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My rating: 1 of 5 stars

OK, it’s rare for me not to finish a book. I’m endemically inclined to finish any book I pick up, even if it takes me years. But this writer has a really annoying habit of jumping around in time. At first, I thought the publisher had screwed up the ebook formatting and left out pages. I’d be in the middle of a scene, “turn” the page, and I’m suddenly somewhere ahead in time. When I kept reading, I’d eventually enter one of the character’s thoughts of what happened from the point the writer left off. I felt like I was getting mental whiplash every few pages.

That was bad enough. But the editor did a piss poor job with quotation marks. I’d be reading dialogue, enter another bunch of thoughts (or even a simple “he said”) as indicated by a close quotation mark, then suddenly realise I was reading dialogue — except the editor forgot to put in the open quotation mark to indicate the character had started speaking again, necessitating me to go back and reread it.

The mystery itself is interesting. But when the physical act of reading is this difficult, it’s not worth pursuing. Thank goodness I borrowed this from the Toronto Public Library and didn’t buy it.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book won’t leave my head. I keep feeling the coldness of a Lake Superior summer, the lushness of a temperate climate, the aliveness of the protagonist Anna Pigeon.

I’m sure I’ve read Nevada Barr before — I have memories of reading a mystery set in a desert — but this one was immersive to me, perhaps because, as a Canadian, the wild green landscape is more familiar to me.

I took this ebook out of the Toronto Public Library, and I was reluctant to turn off my eReader when something else called my attention. Even though I found it difficult to keep track of her cast of characters — the old-school method of listing characters and having maps at the front of books would’ve been handy — I found the plot, the descriptions, the mystery, and Anna Pigeon herself so compelling that being lost in who was whom didn’t stop me from reading. And eventually I would figure it out. I cannot wait to borrow the next one in the series.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had heard great reviews of this book, but I found it a difficult read — not style-wise but content-wise. And so at first I read it on and off.

“People just don’t talk about it,” [the Iranian woman] said.

That’s true for any suffering. People get a terrible health diagnosis, friends disappear. People spiral down into mental illness, family shuns. A young teen girl is arrested as a political prisoner, is tortured, held captive, forced to marry, and parents and fiancé don’t ask. Lives are destroyed in public and must be rebuilt in private. In Iran, the author Marina did it surrounded by the silence of not being asked what had happened and not feeling safe to tell. Here in Canada, sufferers get lectures on “get on with your life,” “move on,” “think positively,” “fill in a gratitude journal,” “focus on the good not the negative.” More sophisticated yet nastier ways of ensuring silence from the sufferer about their experiences.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” [my husband] asked when he finally read [my manuscript].
We had been married for seventeen years.
“I tried, but I couldn’t … will you forgive me?” I said.

Always it is the sufferer who apologises first — for not being strong enough, keeping silent, looking weaker than those who seem unscathed from similar experiences — not the ones who abandon, neglect, don’t ask. Yet, Marina’s husband did something different:

“There’s nothing to forgive. Will you forgive me?”
“For what?”
“For not asking.”

What a burden that must’ve fallen off of Marina’s shoulders in that moment.

At one point, I stopped reading the ebook on and off and started reading in large gulps, pausing only to process. I got over my antipathy to hearing about an unpleasant reality.

Marina seemed to have put behind her the horrific two years in Evin, Iran’s notorious political prison. She and her family emigrated to Canada, they built their lives up from nothing, and reached the Canadian dream. That’s when things began to fall apart. In the perfection of suburban life, memories came crashing back and robbed her of sleep. The only antidote was to write about it and then share it with her husband and then talk about it and then publish it so that her story became a witness to the truth of Iranian life.

It takes courage to bear your personal story to an ignorant world when it’s filled with pain and mind-breaking loss, even more when it exposes a criminal regime that hides behind the mask of religion. It’s told in a back-and-forth way. It begins in the present and ends in the past when she and her family were on their way out of Iran and then to Canada. In the middle she weaves memories of her childhood and the friendships that like a set of falling dominoes led to her incarceration in between the memories of her time in Evin and her forced marriage to one of the interrogator/torturers. What was most interesting for me was that she is not Muslim but a Christian and she went to a Zoroastrian school for a time. When I think of Iran, I think all Muslim with a diminishing minority of the original Persians, the Zoroastrians. I learnt that there were (are?) Christians allowed to practice their faith; that Christian women are allowed a different dress code from Muslim women; but that like Zoroastrians if they marry a Muslim they must convert, no choice.

It was difficult to know exactly what Marina was thinking during the telling of certain events, only later in her narrative did she reveal the fullness of her thoughts. I’m not sure if that was deliberate or the way her memory worked so as to allow her to re-experience the horror times without being sucked in completely.

“Why did we turn our backs on reality when it became too much to bear?”

After she was forced to accept her interrogator’s proposal, her thoughts turned to that question. Guilt rose up and her body rebelled. She was not allowed to express her feelings and thoughts about her interrogator’s proposal publicly, not allowed to be free in her choice, but her body expressed her disgust and pain for her. This story is not just a witness to Iranian atrocities but also to resiliency and the maturing of a conscience, of how a human being copes with and changes under suffering (and how some break).

I think this is a book that would be more appreciated in the second reading. It’s written in an accessible style, but there is so much to absorb and ponder that I’m sure much is missed in the first reading. I had only one day left before my library ebook expired when I went back to reread it; I had time only to reread the beginning. It made more sense now that I knew her whole story.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The thing about Rex Stout’s writing is that it’s tight, matter-of-fact yet visually, auditorally, and smell-o-vision live. The characters are so strong it’s like they’re standing in front of you. By the time you finish your first Nero Wolfe mystery, you know Archie, Nero, Inspector Cramer, Fritz, and the principal clients as well as you know your own friends.

Homicide Trinity provides three short Wolfe mysteries. I like compilations of shorts by my favourite mystery authors; unfortunately, they’re harder to find than they used to be. They provide a quick immersion into a well-loved mystery series, reading them one at a time when you have only a few minutes to read — or so that’s the theory. However, these three stories were so compelling, I went right from the first into the second, barely pausing for a bite or breath. Whether you like mysteries or want to study how tight writing can succeed, check this one out from your library or buy it from your favourite bookstore. It’s worth the price.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m enjoying this series set in Sweden. The Torso is rather gruesome but not relentlessly so. Humour, personal conflict, doggies, and vivid descriptions of Goteberg and Swedish life add welcome counterpoints and keep one engaged. I also like the peek this series gives into a different society and culture. There is far more misogyny and objectification of women in Sweden than I would’ve expected of a socialist country. And I learnt that Scandinavian countries are not all one vast blonde sameness either.

I don’t know what it is about Tursten’s writing, but she kept me reading. I haven’t read late into the night in quite some time — until I loaded this ebook onto my Sony Reader — and I replaced the light battery in my Reader’s cover just so I could. I’ll be putting the next book in this series on hold at the Toronto Public Library virtual branch!

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My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a needlessly big book and it’s filled with visual imagery that so realistically conveys the grimness of life and its grossest aspects that you just want to go kill yourself or hide under a rock.

The day I got to the point in the novel where the graphic intensity reached levels that both bored me and turned me off, I received a pep talk from Jonathan Lethem in my NaNoWriMo mailbox (National Novel Writing Month), to wit:

“The comings and goings, loosening and tightening of faucets, shittings and pissings and nose-blowings of everyday circumstances. Keep them at the periphery, in the subliminal range, unless you really want to try to make something of them, and then you’d better make it good. I’m trying to tell you to ignore transitions. Skip to the good stuff.”

Although MacBride is a good writer who has a great command of the language, he could’ve used this advice. By the time I read the pep talk, when I was about halfway through the novel, I was skipping entire pages, including repetitious reflections filled with guilt and dumb-ass thinking.

But the thing that really got to me, that changed my mind from “liked it” to “it was OK” was when Logan suddenly became stupendously stupid, just so as to fill more pages and keep the plot going a little longer. I thought: really? A detective can’t put two and two together when it’s given to him one right after the other? Really??? I’m supposed to think he’s a good detective when he’s that oblivious? Uh, no. Aside from that, the unrelenting grimness is not something I want to read. I set aside the book for a few days, just to recover. But though I finished it, I didn’t care about whodunnit. I almost always care! But this book wore me out that much.

In the end, I learnt a lesson as a writer. As Lethem put it so well: “Write like you’d read—and notice how much you customarily skip as you read.”

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My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Geeze, I thought I’d marked this book as read and had written a review already. I guess I got distracted! Or was that when the computer was in the shop… Anyway, I always enjoy Paretsky and was thrilled to see a new (to me) book out by her.

It’s been such a long time since I last read one of her books, I’d forgotten that she can get a little preachy in some areas, a little Law and Order like. But as I was about to get turned off, Paretsky refocussed on the plot and the action and the relationships between the characters. She draws vivid characters, imbues their relationships with a rainbow of emotions, and makes the story leap off the page. The mystery is never easy to solve either. A good read.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don’t usually read spy novels, but the plot for this one sounded intriguing. And I was captured by the idea of a lead female character. I wasn’t disappointed.

I read the ebook version of Bloodmoney. Fiction is probably the easiest kind of ebook to read because there’s no expectation of clickable notes, links that work, or even a table of contents, although this novel had one. It was a speedy read in some ways in that the action or feeling of action never stopped. Even in the slower scenes, the sense of anticipation, the suspense kept the tension up. However, it took me a week to read — it was longer than I’d realised. Ebooks give you no visual sense of how big a book is!

I would read this author again, although it would depend on the plot. But if I liked the sound of the plot, then I would know it would be a good book to get lost in.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve read only one foreign-language-translated-into-English mystery author before, and when I stumbled onto this book while browsing the shelves of the Toronto Public Library’s virtual branch, I decided to give her a try. Good decision!

It’s interesting reading a story set in a country I’m not that familiar with. All the little cultural, geographical, and wintry details bring Goteborg, Sweden to life for a foreigner like me. I’m not a reader who needs to have North American touchstones in order to enjoy a book. I find that slang or jargon or even measurement systems that are native to the area in which the story is located makes it much more real and authentic and enjoyed immersing myself in the unfamiliar. I discovered some real differences between Canadians and Swedes, some of which I knew from my Swedish contacts who helped me with my research for Lifeliner, but some more shocking trends and events I didn’t know. Mysteries aren’t just for entertainment!

But Detective Inspector Huss is an entertaining read. There’s no solving the mystery way before the ending, no obvious red herrings, no cheating tactics to fool the reader, just a well-crafted mystery and plot with strong characters and vibrant details. Well worth a read. I’ve put the second in this series on hold at TPL and cannot wait to read it.

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I was looking for a Canadian mystery writer, and Robert Rotenberg was recommended to me, forget by whom. Even better for me as a Torontonian, he sets Old City Hall in Toronto. Unfortunately, that meant as a Torontonian, I got tossed out of the flow of the book when he used strange-to-monikers for common place, like “bay” for the “inner harbour” (or at least I think that’s the body of water he was referring to). The strange terms may be because of his publisher as the book didn’t seem to know whether it was Canadian or American. Personally, I think the ACC should be spelled correctly as in Air Canada Centre (not Center) and cheque instead of check. Language is part of culture and reading such a decidedly Canadian book in part-American English is weird. Also the editor not ensuring consistency was jarring too.

There are many characters in this book, an ensemble. I found the characters interesting, and the only real objection I had to Rotenberg’s plethora was that sometimes a character would pop and then disappear for so long you wondered why the heck they’d been introduced in such detail when only around for a few pages. Then long after you’d given up on them, they’d pop up again. A bit disconcerting. He spends a lot of time detailing the events and thoughts leading up to a crucial meeting, let’s say, only to move on to the next scene as the characters begin the meeting. I consider this cheating in a mystery. There are better ways to hide the clues in plain sight! But the descriptions and dialogue are engaging — another reason for being peeved for being moved along and out of the scene you’re so engrossed in. That’s a good negative though!

Overall, I enjoyed this book and would like to read his next. But I’m not a hard cover reader and refuse to pay so much for a DRM-locked ebook or even a reader-friendly non-DRM ebook. I’ll wait till either it comes out in paperback or appears in Toronto Public Library’s virtual branch. I anticipate it’ll be worth the wait.



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I liked the inside look this mystery book by a Canadian publisher gives the reader into the publishing industry. I liked the basic plot and the characters. But I solved the mystery long before the end, and so I found myself impatient for the final reveal. Porter also has a boring, and sometimes confusing, habit of using narrative instead of dialogue to tell us what characters are saying. Right near the end, she finally, finally writes an extensive piece of proper dialogue, with quotation marks and everything, and it was good. Engrossing. Full of emotion and tension. Too bad, she didn’t do that all through the book but only here and there. Printing errors were a bit distracting too. So much for traditionally printed books being superior to POD.



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My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a writer, I’ve discovered it’s difficult for me to review books of authors I’ve met or have had some communication with. Because of the ebook SNAFU with Blood and Groom, Jill Edmondson kindly sent me paperback copies of this book and her next one. And I wanted very much to give this book a rave review. Much to my regret, I can’t, but I can say it’s the kind of book you pick up when you want to switch your brain off and just escape into a quick read.

The voices are strong in Blood and Groom, no mistaking one character for another, and as I’ve learnt this past year, not always a given and a really good thing. The mystery itself is intriguing, and a secondary plot serves as a juicy red herring. The protagonist or heroine of the book, Sasha Jackson is energetic, for sure. But I found the litany of adjectives a bit overwhelming. As the book progressed, the adjectives decreased. There were times when I wondered where the editor was; traditional publishers say their strength is in their editing, that self-published authors can’t have such high standards as they have. But this is like the umpteenth traditionally published book I’ve read in recent years where I wonder if the editor fell asleep or did the most cursory of forays into the manuscript. Bad editing reflects on the author unfortunately. Publishers owe it to their authors to do a better job. All in all it has the makings of a good mystery series, and best of all it’s set in Toronto.

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My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m pacmanning my way through theoretical physics books these days as background reading for my next novel. I think if you want to learn complicated concepts, talking to different people or reading different books on the same subject means you get a three-dimensional explanation rather than a one, which means you’re more likely to “get it.” After reeading Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time and The Grand Design, this book seemed rather long. Relatively speaking, for it wasn’t wordy, and it went into more depth than Hawking did in those two books. On the other hand, Hawking says much more in fewer words.

Overall, I much preferred Goldberg’s examples to Hawking’s: they were more relevant, visual, and understandable. The one thing that really started to grate on my nerves was that pretty much all the physics characters were boys: Rusty, Patches, Dr. Hyde, Billy. When I finally came across a female character, she was, well, relegated to the kitchen. I definitlely got the impression that theoretical physics is a boys-only club. Girls are there to feed not feel physics.

Being as I was most interested in time travel, I really liked how in two places in the book they commented on the methods of time travel used in some TV shows and movies. But they left out Doctor Who! How could they leave out the one show all about time travel?!! Argh!

Illustrations are a must in these kinds of books, and I liked the cartoons that littered the pages of A User’s Guide to the Universe. In the ebook, some of the lettering was hard to make out, and it wasn’t possible to magnify the cartoon, only the printed text. I did a lot of staring at one of the Big Bang cartoons till I finally made out “Birth of Elements”…at least I think that’s what it said.

It’s rather funny that a science book would not be designed well as an ebook. The hard-to-read lettering on some of the cartoons was pretty minor compared to the real problem: the publisher made it a pain to read and frustrated learning.

First off, we have the [epithets deleted] DRM, which makes you waste time trying to figure out which app on the iPad will read the darn thing (not iBooks, only Bluefire Reader), to get it onto the iPad if you buy it from the “wrong” ebook store, and then prevents you from taking advantage of the format and makes it less useful than a print book. Imagine that – a science book publisher who designs an ebook to be primitive compared to a print book. Oh sure, they managed to get the endnotes to be clickable, most of them anyway, which is better than many ebooks I’ve read. But then they don’t use that simple tool to link references to previous chapters and previously discussed ideas to those chapters and ideas. So if you want to refresh your memory, you have to do a Search (which in apps and my Sony Reader is forward first before going back to the beginning and going forward from there). Searching an ebook is in some ways slower and more cumbersome than a print book if you have a visual memory. But that wasn’t the only way the publisher frustrated ebook readers. There are many terms used in this book that one would not use in real life, like leptons or mu neutrinos or Casimir something-or-other. The great thing about an ebook is they could make these terms clickable (not necessarily a different colour or underlined as that would make the text harder to read) so that a reader could click the word and get the author’s definition. Oh sure, eReaders include dictionaries but believe it or not, they don’t always define physics’ terminology beyond sub-atomic particle, real helpful. Worst of all, because of the DRM, I could not print out the Rogue’s Gallery appendix at the end of chapter four to keep in front of me while I continued to read the ebook because God forbid I “pirate” the ebook for my own use. Publishers are so petrified and anal about ebook technology that they forget the fact that anyone can photocopy those same pages from a print book — thereby making it more useful than the ebook — and that people have been lending/passing on print books ad nauseum for years so that total sales probably don’t reemotely reflect total readers. I probably have about 10 readers for each purchase of my book Lifeliner. I guesstimate that because everyone who proudly tells me they passed it on talk about lots of people, not one or two (I could buy groceries for a week in those lost sales from just one original buyer). Somehow publishers have managed to stay in business this past century or so with all this “pirating” going on and readers could also, gasp, read their print books wherever they wanted and in whatever light levels they wanted. But if I want to read this book at night on the iPad, versus sunlight on my Sony Reader, I had to jump through hoops to get it to work. And I couldn’t be bothered wasting an hour to break the DRM just so’s I could make it easier to read and to print out the appendix to make the ebook easier to follow. Yes, publishers, your DRM is breakable, which means the only readers you’re pissing off are the legit ones.

The one thing the authors are responsible for in this frustration factor is in not including a glossary. Hawking did. A glossary is essential, with or without clickable terms. And since this ebook didn’t have clickable terms and clickable internal references and it had the DRM, a glossary was mandatory.

On the frustration factor alone I would give ten demerit stars. But that’s not fair to the authors and the work they’ve done. So I will delete one star for publisher idiocy. And remind me never again to buy an ebook from a mainstream publisher.

Aside from all that, this book makes a nice complement to Hawking’s, especially in the few areas they seem to diverge. Forget the overpriced ebook. Buy the print book. You’ll be helping to keep the publisher in the 20th century, where they belong and are comfortable, and it won’t want to make you want to tear your hair out.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a signed copy direct from the author. The problem with brain injury is you meet these fascinating people, and you can’t remember how or why. This was several years ago, and I do remember talking with him about the trouble of selling books, I think before…or maybe it was after…I’d written Lifeliner. There are so many good books that are missed by readers, and this is one of them.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I came across this slim volume (again) while I was reorganizing my books and sat down to look through it, as is the wont of any good reader. Underneath the title “Reach Out for Your Dreams” my English grandmother had written, “& may they all come true Shireen & all your life may you find as much pleasure and happiness as I have from reading & quoting good poetry that will always bring you soul satisfaction that will go with you wherever you go.”

I think that’s the longest dedication she ever wrote in a birthday gift to me. The year was 1981, and it was a tough one. I’d forgotten what a sharp, observant tack she was. Thirty years later, it’s like she’s speaking to me again. That’s the value of this book to me, more than any of the poems and quotations in it.

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In The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking along with his co-writer Leonard Mlodinow go beyond A Briefer History of Time, which I reviewed recently, and enter the territory of philosophers. They claim that philosophy is the domain of physicists because philosophers have abdicated their role in society by not keeping up with scientific developments and knowledge. In this book, he and Leonard attempt to answer the question of if there is a God, if there is a Grand Design, and what it is.

I got this book out of the library, but it had such a long hold period that when it became available to me, I was in the throes of wrapping up some work and didn’t have the time I would have liked to read it. By the time I started it properly I had three days and a bit to finish. But it repeats some of the same ground as A Briefer History of Time, and it wasn’t too long, making it easier to read. I finished it before Overdrive went boing, time’s up.

Only the pressure of time got me to read it and to finish it.

It isn’t that bad a book. It’s just not as good as A Briefer History of Time. What Hawking forgets is that though philosophy may’ve abdicated the sciences — and I think a few philosophers would disagree vehemently on that point — science alone cannot answer these questions of being and grand design.

I had not noticed particularly in A Briefer History of Time that Hawking seems to believe that human beings do not have free will until I read it again in The Grand Design.

He writes: “Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.”

He goes on to talk of the well-known situation wherein a neurosurgeon electrically stimulates the brain of an awake patient and lo and behold they move a hand or their mouth. Thus, according to Hawking, speaking and moving hands are not by free will but by electrical impulses from the brain to the mouth or hand. Yes, well, we know about the impulses. But last time I checked there aren’t neurosurgeons with electrical probes hanging over the heads of each of us, poking this neuron and that to get us to speak…or maybe there are, and we just don’t know it…yet.

The point is that outside of the operating room what stimulates those nerves to fire to get us to speak? Is it only external stimuli? Are internal stimuli only external ones in disguise? To go further, what gets one depressed person to hide and not seek help and another equally depressed person to hightail it to the doctor’s office? Is it just a lack of external stimuli in the former situation? Is it the upbringing that makes seeking help a bad thing for the former patient and a good thing for the latter? But if so how do the laws of nature that govern matter and energy and our biological processes account for culture and attitudes? Do we say it’s simply a matter of entraining the neurons to fire in a certain way, yet things like birth order, peer groups, health, talent, skills, and luck will create people with different attitudes and even different cultural expression in the same family. So then do we say, well, their external stimuli were different and thus entrained their neurons differently. But we are still left with the idea that the act of seeking help comes from within and not from the neurosurgeon poking his probe into the brain.

Hawking believes that there is no God. Yet many of his arguments line up neatly with religious thinking. Free will is a prime example. I’m apparently told (probably for the umpteenth time, as I’m obstinate in my disbelief) that in my Christian tradition, our lives are preordained, that is, we have free will, but we don’t. While Hawking says it’s just our biological processes governed by laws of physics, religion says it’s our humanity governed by laws of God. It is like two people arguing heatedly when they agree on the result and only disagree on the method.

One of the ideas he is at pains to disprove, in order to prove that there is no God, is that people are at the centre of the universe, people are not special. I realise the Church had a problem with the idea that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, but it is very clear in the Creation story that human beings were not created to be the centre of the universe but to serve God’s Creation. Since people were rather thick on this concept, Jesus hammered it home in his teachings. To serve is a rather different idea than to be the centre.

Furthermore, I don’t understand how multiverses make us less unique in the universe. I get that what he’s saying is that we simply exist because of statistical probabilities. Still, the laws of physics or nature that gave rise to us are extremely fine tuned, so fine tuned that an error one way or the other and poof we boil away or freeze into oblivion. We are rare. Period.

And the discoveries of time confirm what many who have followed one God have known for millennia — God is outside of time, thus time cannot be strictly a linear construct. It is difficult for many of us to comprehend that in an experienced way, tis true. But the story of Abraham and Sarah clarifies how differently God views time than we do. The story Zarathustra told is partly about time and how human beings see time as linear and the present time as important, but God doesn’t. Experiments on prayer have shown how past time has been changed in the present (my head is starting to hurt). Again physics is lining up with ancient teachings.

Since he began the book with incomplete arguments I can poke holes in, I’m afraid I was not so impressed with his other arguments either.

He makes sense when he talks about looking at the cosmos from the top down, but he forgets that just as our current state influences the way we understand the Big Bang, so too do our observations and interpretations colour our views on life, past, present, and future. Two people can look at the same event and see completely different things because of their backgrounds, personalities, talents, age, experiences, etc., etc. Their observations show different histories — Feynman’s sum over histories effect, if you will. Thus he has not seemed to take into account the effect of his own life, upbringing, and having ALS have had on his interpretations in the top-down view of the cosmos, multiverses, and so on.

And at the end of the day, he has not explained the Big Bang satisfactorily to me, specifically, what came before. He writes that it was a spontaneous combustion in which time was space (thus why time did not exist before) and because of its spontaneity, there was nothing before. Yet he also states that empty space is not actually empty. So why would it be emptier or be a complete void (to use a Creation term) prior to the Big Bang? And as far as I know, spontaneous combustions don’t happen in the complete absence of matter and energy. So what elements existed that created the explosion? What were the conditions in the seconds before the Big Bang? A spontaneous combustion out of nothing makes no logical sense to me.

The brevity of the book is its downfall. These are deep arguments that have many entries to them — science, arts, literal, metaphor, evidence, myth. They require more space-time in a book to delve into them properly.

In the end, to me, Hawking is essentially saying that the laws of physics and nature correspond to the stories of Creation. That is not a very effective refutation of the existence of God in my humble opinion. At the end of the day, like so many writers, it comes down to this is my belief. And yours is wrong.

(I am posting this review but won’t be online to see and answer any comments for about a week or two, time in my present being a bit elastic.)



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I think it was an Amazon Kindle group thread on good public domain books to read that I heard of this one. I downloaded it to my iPod Touch and read it using the Stanza app.

Apparently Bentley was a newspaperman, who wrote Trent’s Last Case in 1913. There’s no doubt writers wrote differently back then, and I found the story-telling method of that era a bit slow at first, and it was many weeks before I picked it up again. I’m glad I did. After the intro, this book is a deceptively mild meandering mystery. It seems that the mystery is solved when you’re only halfway through the book, yet is it? The fact you’re only halfway through the book creates doubt although all the clues seem to be sewn up. But the mystery, the story, is like a Russian doll — when you think you’re at the end, when you think this is another genteel early-20th-century scene between two or three characters, surprise! The title is revealed on the very last page, or I should say the reason for it.

There are all sorts of neat details about life a century ago. Although we may still be familiar with the word “receiver” in relation to phones, I’ve never heard the word “transmitter” used in relation to consumer phones. Cars were real slow. And there were no forensics! Forensics are imaginative-crime killers. Finger markings could tell the police only so much 100 years ago, which gave the writer lots of room, whereas today microscopic hair, blood, fingerprints, DNA tell the police lots, enough for them to figure out the gist — in mystery books anyway. A century ago, the little grey cells ruled.

I enjoyed this ebook very much and would recommend it for a summer or holiday read. And next time I download a public domain book, I need to put it on my Sony Reader too. Stanza makes it easy to read an ebook on the iPod Touch, but I prefer a bigger screen.



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**I’m not really sure you can have spoilers in a non-fiction book and one that was extensively discussed in the press, but if so, there is a tiny bit of a spoiler four paragraphs down and on.**

In preparation for my next-next novel, I decided to read the briefer (and, I assume, easier) of Stephen Hawking’s books on time and space for the lay person. It’s something I would’ve been loathe to do even six months ago because of the state of my reading ability. But Goodreads has done for me what I’d hoped it would: gotten me to practice, practice, practice reading. And as you know, practice makes better and gives a person the confidence to try harder material. Also my rehab team had told me when choosing books that material I was already familiar with would be easier to read than new material. Fortunately, I am familiar with all of the physics discussed in this book up until about the 1980s and Feynman’s work. I just didn’t recall it all that well.

Hawking and his co-author Leonard Mlodinow (of Star Trek: The Next Generation) do a nice job of building the physics story from centuries ago up to the present day. You get a good sense of how laws and theories progressed and of the obstacles the various physicists faced, whether from within their own theories, from their rivals, or from the politics of the day. By the time you get to the meat of the book — Einstein — you’ve received a good background.

But that’s when I ran into problems. The language was as simple as could be. They used effective illustrations, for the most part, to help you visualize what they’re talking about. I liked how they inserted Hawking into some of the images. They also came up with examples people could relate to to help explain these mind-bending concepts. Unfortunately, when they got to the good stuff on time, their language broke down. Maybe the editor had a brain cramp or something because a key example was rather imprecise.

“Suppose that one twin goes to live on the top of a mountain while the other stays at sea level. The first twin would age faster than the second. Thus, if they met again, one would be older than the other.” (pg 43)

OK, so twin #1 is at the top and is older than twin #2 at the earth’s surface, right? I assume that based on logic sequence — the first twin mentioned is the one on the mountain, and so must be “first twin.” However, I did have to assume, and that’s the trouble, for then came this passage:

“…if one of the twins went for a long trip in a spaceship in which he accelerated to nearly the speed of light. When he returned, he would be much younger than the one who stayed on earth.”

Um, isn’t the one in the spaceship like the one on the mountain? This confusion could’ve been avoided with some judicious editing. It happens again elsewhere, but only this one made me really go spare. Luckily, I have an engineer friend I could confer with, and I decided to forget the mountain man example and focus on rocket man.

In a way, this is a small quibble except for the fact that this book is aimed at a lay audience, whose physics knowledge is low and thus will need the authors to connect the dots for them with clear, precise language.

The chapter on going back in time was interesting. I learnt something new physics-wise although Hawking’s philosophizing against backward time travel was not new as his stance has been discussed many times in the popular press or on television. Physics is, in a sense, about philosophy because to get to a new theory you have to think about the possibilities and the whys and wherefores of both sides of the equation. Still, Hawking focuses on the reasons against backward time travel to such an extent that his ending statement that “the possibility of time travel remains open” comes as a bit of a surprise.

I like their little bios at the end, especially of Newton. I had no idea he was a man such as that! All in all, a good read, and it has given me a few ideas too for my novel.



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This novella by Linwood Barclay was OK. The point of the mystery is only partly to do with whodunnit, which is a good thing as there are little clues all over the place from the get-go. No, the bigger point is what will be the outcome of the interaction between the characters. Unfortunately, I couldn’t care less about any of them, and in a mystery like that, you need to care somewhat in order to enjoy the suspense and have it do for you what suspense is supposed to. It was like watching a swim meet final where no Canadian is entered: it’s something to pass the time, but you’re not vested in it.

Having said that, the message at the end is pointed and makes you think, “if only…”



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My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I studied psychology in university and used to be quite interested in the psychopath, what made them tick, how to deal with them (warily). Back then, there was no scientific or physiological explanation for the psychopath. And the view was they were incurable. They never changed. It was my misfortune to run into a couple or three. It always amazed me how well they sucked in almost — well, not almost, every person I knew. To me, they had little red flags over their heads saying, danger, charm offensive. If I could, I stayed far away. It’s why to this day, if I see or meet someone who’s obviously charming, my hackles go up. Yet these psychopaths I’d met would take in people, convince people of the truth of their stories, whatever those stories were, manipulate people into doing their dirty work, and people would only figure out their sheep’s clothing-like nature when they did something stupid or were caught out in a lie. Unfortunately, by that point, damage had been done. They are really really good liars. The best. Now, I should mention these people were not known to the police, had not seen the inside of the criminal system to my knowledge. That’s why I was interested in this book. For so long, talk of psychopaths has mostly focused on those in prisons, yet I’m convinced they destroy people and companies in ever-widening ripples from families to friends to neighbours to employees and strangers. Others have too as that film so famously explored. But I wondered how this anxiety-ridden journalist would handle meeting one and finding out more about them.

Jon Ronson writes in a breezy, easy-to-read way, and sprinkles his book with humour that makes you bark out loud at the suddenness of it. Psychopathy may seem like a serious subject, but the humour shifts the subject, his own attitudes, and his perceptions of the people he meets so that you see what you’ve just read a little bit differently. At first, it was all connected, but then he seemed to go off tangent. He described a man who sounded like he had mania, not psychopathy, which confused the heck out of me. And then he went off on another tangent talking about reality shows (which sound way more prevalent across the pond than here and way more bizarre than what I’ve seen in Canada). I scratched my head. Is this book about psychopathy or something else? Still, his writing — and my own interest in things psychological that I’d thought had disappeared, but apparently not — kept me devouring the book.

When I read the last line, I felt unsatisfied, like I’d been given a tease of three different morsels, but not enough to fill me up on each one. The premise of the book is psychopathy, yet he never finishes that theme. He does circle it, starting and ending with a prisoner he met in Broadmoor. But what was the point? Other than an incomplete story, which is as life is. Then he switched to talking about psychiatry and the DSM and how it shaped how we look at psychiatric diagnoses, as well as how the pharmaceutical industry has used it to increase (new) psychiatric diagnoses. But he didn’t finish that theme either. Frustrating! He wrote just enough for the reader to realise that a good book on the madness industry was warranted. And then his talk about reality shows and their deadly consequences raised the eyebrows, but he veered away just as you wanted to know more, to think about it more through the contemplations of the author and interviews with acknowledged experts in the field and perhaps discussions of the latest research. This third theme could’ve been a whole book on the reality show industry and how it encourages madness.

Perhaps he could’ve written this book better so that his introduction to the diagnosed psychopath at Broadmoor led in an obvious way into an exploration of the madness industry and thence to the reality show industry. But he never connected the mania guy to Tony the psychopath guy to the dead sister of the reality show contestant. The only connection was his travelling. Not enough. In short, the writing was entertaining; the structure sucked.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was looking for the Canadian author Robert Wilson in the virtual branch of the Toronto Public Library. He wasn’t listed, but this Wilson was. The blurb sounded interesting, and even more relevant, it was available to borrow right away. Most books in TPL are on hold!

Instruments of Darkness describes a world I’m not familiar with at all: the grit of Africa, where violence roams next to pockets of people trying to earn a living, where booze and cigarettes are as ubiquitous as the heat, where money greases the shipping, and pale-skinned folk stand out. I wasn’t sure at first if this was my kind of detective story, but I kept turning the pages. I took that as a sign that I was engaged enough to make reading it worthwhile.

In places, I really noticed the short sentence structure, and the patois got a bit tedious at one point. As a young reader, I used to be a fan of writers using dialect in their dialogue. But now I often find it distracts when overused and adds a layer of artificiality or a feeling of trying too hard on the part of the author. As the book went on, the dialect lessened, and the story took ascendance.

It’s a simple story on the surface, of a man trying to puzzle out why two people died in the way they did and the truth of how they are tied together. But underneath seethes a plot that requires you to use your little grey cells. Even the personal back story of the protagonist requires one to do more than eyeball the words but to think about how men and women interact and what the woman in the protagonist’s life really wants.

The heat is unrelenting and is a metaphor for the heat of injustice weighing on the Englishman, the narrator and protagonist of Instruments of Darkness. But it’s not done in an obvious way. Rather, though at first unpleasant to read seemingly endless descriptions of sweat and sticking, it became a compelling part of the milieu and gave me a peek into what it’s like to live in another part of our shared planet where air conditioning is infrequent.

The book ended when I was not ready. The story was complete; I just wanted more.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sacred and Profane is one of those infrequent books with a perfect title. The title tells you exactly what the book is about; even better, it is lifted out of a dialogue in which this concept is emphasized.

Titles are tricky. I’ve always liked the process of coming up with titles. Sometimes, it’s like pulling hen’s teeth and makes one want to scream. Even so, I was astonished and horrified to learn that publishers — not authors — choose or have the final say on book titles. Giving feedback I understand; making the decision, no way. So I wonder who came up with this title? Was it one of those instances where the author’s choice stood? Or did the publisher’s marketing department have a moment of genius? Either way, it makes the book.

The book itself continues the story of the relationship between Peter Decker, a cop with bad habits and an angry heart, and Rina Lazarus, an orthodox Jewish woman. I had read this book before, a long time ago, but though I couldn’t remember how the mystery part of it unfolded, it really didn’t matter, for the main plot is the conflict between Decker and Lazarus and within Decker himself. Sacred and Profane also explores some of the tenets of orthodox Judaism within the parameters of the two conflicts so that it is part of the story, not extraneous or preachy. The mystery itself is standard hard-boiled police stuff. And in the end, I kind of lost track of who did what and who was responsible for what. Faye Kellerman didn’t do a wrap-up like some other mystery authors do…for the mystery anyway. She did for the relationship.

Sacred and Profane is part of a series that must be read in order as the relationship between Decker and Lazarus grows and regresses so much within each book that you’d be lost if you read one out of order. It is worth it though to start from the beginning and not let the fact you have to read the books in order put you off.

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My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like the other books in the series, this one was light and breezy. The characters are familiar, the story not deep, a good read when you want to switch your brain off. My only quibble with it was that the dialogue seemed to become stereotypical towards the end, as if it became difficult for the author to keep the voices of each character — except for the narrator Charlotte — clear in her head. Or maybe she had a Law & Order moment, you know, that point in the show when the characters start preaching instead of talking like real people and you roll your eyes and yell at the TV to get on with the story. That kind of thing. Luckily, it happened close to the end of the book.

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I read recently that this series featuring Diane Fry and Ben Cooper, two police detectives in Derbyshire, England, is popular in Canada. It’s nice to know I’m amongst much company. But I’m not surprised. This is British to the core but not in a stereotypical way. Instead the characters are nuanced, they grow from book to book, they create conflict through their personality quirks and because of their past history. There is never a dull moment in any of these books so far, including The Dead Place. However, at one point in this book, I was getting a tad annoyed (and distracted from the story) with Fry’s constant anger. She seems to be in a snarky, irritable mood all the time in this series, always looking for the wrong way to look at things. It’s wearing, and her detective skills are at odds with that kind of emotionalism. But just as I was about to be turned off by her attitude enough to close the book, Stephen Booth switched it up, and I once more became engrossed in the plot and the characters.

It is a long read, which in this case is a good thing. There are some characters that you just want to stay with for a long time, and Cooper and Fry and their ever-eating colleague Gavin Murfin, fit the bill.

When Booth revealed whodunnit, I have to admit I was confused. This is why many authors have wrap-up scenes — to unconfuse those of us who get lost. Booth’s wrap-up is more than just an explanation though; it’s a continuation of the relationship between the police detectives and an exploration of the characters affected by the crime. Sometimes one gets lost because the author is trying to be too clever and leaves out crucial details as a way to prevent the reader from solving the mystery. But here it’s more that the story has so many threads that come together in a tighter and tighter weave that you need to be able to hold it all in your memory. I wasn’t able to. Still, I enjoyed the challenge, and I enjoyed the story. It’s well worth spending a few hours with.



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Somebody wrote that this is British to the core. It is very British, that’s for sure. I sometimes wondered if almost stereotypically so. It was an OK read. Lots of domestic details that were I think put in not so much to move the plot forward, but to try and bury the clues in detail. However, I solved the mystery well before the end. Not good. Since my brain injury, I have not figured out whodunnit before the end, not even — until very recently and then only sporadically — in books I’ve already read. So for me to solve it meant this was an easy puzzle. This would bore the usual kind of mystery reader with no reading problems, though it may be just the right cup of tea for a person who likes an easy read.



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I wouldn’t call this hair-raising or a cliff-hanger, but it is a darn good read. It’s interesting how Lippman focuses on different regular characters in each book. In this one, she gets rid of Crow in a convenient way, and Kitty plays a bigger role than in previous books…although none of the regulars show up much in this book. By varying how much the regulars show up and which ones, Lippman makes each book in the series slightly different in tone and action, for each character puts their own stamp on how the action goes and how Tess will react to events.



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Middles. I’ve been thinking a lot about middles recently because I’ve been going through the final edits of my first novel She. The beginning needed little work (probably because I spent the most time on it in the writing phase), and the ending went fast. But the middle…oy! Why is it middles are the hardest part to write? I wondered that again as I was reading In A Strange City. It seemed to sag there for a bit, and I kind of got lost. But the latter could’ve been because my brain was fried from all the editing and writing I was doing and didn’t have much left over for reading. And then the final action sequences began, and the book picked up. Even the final chapter, the one that came after all was solved and resolved, was intriguing and kept my attention.

The entirety of this book also felt like a middle. It is number six in the Tess Monaghan series, and it feels like it’s between the first part of Tess’s adult life and the rest yet to come. Her personal story is moved along, but instead of there being action and drama in it as well as in the mystery part, all the action is in the mystery. Her personal life does need a quiet time. One’s life cannot be all drama. It’s exhausting. Still, it’s an unexpected change from the previous books in the series.

I wasn’t sure about the title, but I’m guessing it’s an allusion to the fact Tess knows nothing about Edgar Allan Poe and this case is her entrée to Poe and his effect on her native city, something she’d never thought about before. Overall, a decent read.



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