Paul Love et al. Beginning Unix (2005)

     Paul Love et al. Beginning Unix (2005) A nicely laid out and easy to follow introduction to the OS that will perhaps eventually displace Windows. Surprising fun, too. I can’t judge the accuracy etc, but it seems authoritative to me. Three years is a long time in computing, so some of the information is already out of date: Linux is maturing rapidly, with several easy-to-install and easy-to-use distributions, so that the kind of hands-on familiarity with Unix taught in this text is no longer necessary. Recommended. *** (2008)
     Update 2013: Unix has not displaced Windows, in fact, in many places Windows Server has replaced *nix servers. Linux has slowly gained in overall  numbers, but has hardly moved in market share. Android a derivative of Linux, operates over half the cellphones in the world.
     Update 2016: Not much change. Ubuntu and Mint  have both been made to look'n'feel like the de facto standard Windows/Mac GUI, and have gained some ground. But the OS wars are pretty well over. Most people have no idea what an OS is, and have a hard time caring enough to find out. Computers have become "devices", people have come to expect them to just work. Many people now own two or more devices, and wireless connections (with or without a network) is taken for granted. Security and privacy-protection skills are now more important than understanding an OS. The pace of technical innovation and change has accelerated: this book is now a museum piece.

Alison Gordon Striking Out (1995)

     Alison Gordon Striking Out (1995) It’s 1994, and the baseball strike has just started. Kate Henry, sportswriter, is at loose ends, but she has enough stuff to do that she doesn’t miss her work. Then her partner Andy, a homicide detective, is shot and nearly killed while attending a home to interview a witness. It gets complicated when a homeless woman who’s taken up residence in the back alley disappears. Then a handless body is found stuffed in a garbage bag. Other casual acquaintances are drawn into the circle of suspicion, a nicely complicated knot unravels plausibly and loose ends are tied up.
     Gordon writes well. The dialogue is in the wisecrack romantic comedy mode of old movies, and works very well. Plot moves forward, characters reveal themselves, additional information and red herrings drop into conversations, relationships strain but don’t buckle, and anyone who knows Toronto will recognise the settings. The narrative’s structured like a TV show, which does it no harm at all. A well-done entertainment, not the kind of crime story that prompts musing about justice and human frailty. The relationships have the ring of truth: Gordon is a sharp observer. **½

John A. MacDonald. The Deep Blue Good-by (1964)

    John A. MacDonald. The Deep Blue Good-by (1964) The first Travis McGee novel, and it sounds like a mature series. Well done in every way. One can see how people get hooked on Travis McGee. In many ways, John MacDonald’s McGee is like Ross MacDonald’s Archer: both see the world with an acutely moral imagination, and both know how much we compromise with our values for the sake of survival and self-respect. **½ (2008)

Ursula Le Guin. City of Illusions (1978)

     Ursula Le Guin. City of Illusions (1978) A quest story, set in the distant future, when earth barely remembers the days of galactic Empire. A half starved, mindless man appears near the House of Zove. He is not quite human. The people name him Falk, and nurse him to health. He learns quickly. About four years later, he sets out to the city of Es Toch, where he hopes to find the secret of his real identity. After many typical questy adventures, he arrives there, and does discover who he is: Ramarren, one of two survivors of an expedition from one of the lost worlds, the only one known on which humans and natives could and did produce viable offspring. He engages in mental warfare with the Shing, who present themselves as a wise and kind human elite trying to maintain a peace on a ravaged earth, but are aliens, and conquerors. The book ends with Falk on his way home, to warn his people, and presumably mount an attack on the Shing. Nicely done, but the telling seems hurried and perfunctory towards the end. Le Guin either had gotten all she wanted from writing this book, or didn’t know where to go with it. Well done, mostly. **½ (2008)

Anne Morice Murder, Post-dated (1983)

     Anne Morice Murder, Post-dated (1983) The narrator Tessa Crichton, TV-series actress, has a reputation for nosing around and discovering crucial clues in murder cases, Her husband is a Chief Inspector in the CID, which I suppose is intended to add a soupçon of police procedural realism to what is essentially romantic fantasy. This time, a missing wife has sent a letter indicating she’s run off with a lover. It may be a forgery, so Tessa jumps in with both feet. It turns out there was indeed a murder, but of a different woman. Several other love tangles are sorted out as well, so all ends happily.
     “Tessa” writes a very literate style, the kind young people are encouraged to develop in senior high school. I should say, were encouraged to develop. Nowadays, the encouragement is to find your own expressiveness. Anyhow, the effect is an odd distancing, especially from the characters, who all speak in the same style. The puzzle is nicely conceived, and the pacing of the discovery works well enough that I read on despite the off-putting high-flown language. The sly wit and touches of social comedy improve the book a lot. Tessa has a pleasant relationship with her husband, and is far too modest to be believable as a major actress. All the same, this is a nice bit of pleasant fluff, good enough that I’ll pick up any other books by Morice I find; but I won’t search for them. **

The Way (2010)

     The Way (2010) [D: Emilio Estevez. Martin Sheen] Tom, an ophthalmologist learns that his son Daniel, with whom he’s had a rocky relationship, fell to his death on the first day out on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Tom travels to France to identify the body, looks through Daniel’s diary, and decides to do the walk himself. He carries Daniel’s ashes, and sprinkling a handful at way-stations. He links up, unwillingly, with three other pilgrims, with whom he eventually forms a bond. Occasionally, he sees Daniel’s ghost. At the end of the movie, he spreads Daniel’s remaining ashes in the Atlantic Ocean. The final clip shows him wandering somewhere in North Africa: his journey in Daniel’s planned footsteps continues.
     This is beautifully photographed and very well acted quest movie. It takes religion seriously but not solemnly. All four main characters are looking for something, and they all find it, though not in the way they imagined. Jack the writer finds his creative energy, Sarah the divorcee finds contentment, Yost the Dutchman accepts himself as he is. Tom himself is a closed character, more of an observer than a participant, driven by a desire to somehow make amends with his son, with whose life-style decisions he disagreed. He accepts his life, and stops trying to make the right choices.
     The episodes seem random and chancy, which some viewers may see as forced quirkiness, but it’s not. Real life is random and chancy. It’s fiction that has order, plot, causation, and meaning. People live by values they may not realise matter to them until they must make a choice that makes a difference. Tom’s prime value was love of family; even his attempts to guide Daniel into a respectable life were motivated by his fear that Daniel would lose something precious. Holding the box with Daniel's ashes, he decides to finish what his son  began. The pilgrimage leads Tom into life; he realises that what matters is the acceptance of all life's abundance, not a careful selection of the right things.
     The movie is two hours long, but despite its laid back, casual narrative rhythm it felt shorter. ***

Louis L’Amour. The Outlaws of Mesquite (1990)

     

Louis L’Amour. The Outlaws of Mesquite (1990) When I was in middle school, I read a lot of Westerns. They were in German, and sold in thin 32-page booklets slightly larger than a regular paperback, with glossy newsprint covers in lurid colour. They were called Schundliteratur, or trash-literature, and our teachers disapproved. That didn’t stop us, of course. The publishers commissioned all the pulp-fiction genres, but I preferred Westerns. The Western was obviously a variation on the chivalric romance, not that I was sophisticated enough to know this. All I knew was that in the American West men were men, women were women, and villains got a very satisfying comeuppance, after which the heroes got the girl. I’ve been a sucker for romance all my life.
     I’ve gone off Westerns since then, and don’t read nearly as many as I used to. Part of the reason is that the movies do a much better job than print. The genre is a quest romance: the hero must negotiate a wilderness populated by monsters and villains. His skills, while above average, are barely a match for the villains. He relies on help from people weaker than himself. He’s not always smart enough to outwit his enemies, luck plays a large role, but in the end he gets the hand of the princess. As often as not, his horse is a loyal friend.
     The genre is extremely flexible: a good story teller can use it for any purpose. But above all, the landscape must feel authentic. That, more than anything else, makes a Western a Western. Louis L’Amour’s main talent is to put the reader into that landscape. In a few sentences, he helps you see and hear and feel and smell the place. That alone makes his stories a pleasure to read. He’s also a page-turning narrator: we always want to know what happens next, even when L’Amour uses well-worn plots. His style is compact and spare: he rarely has a word out of place or words he doesn’t need. He’s good at sketching the details of ranching and farming so that we feel convinced of the reality of what is after all a romantic fantasy.
     Here we have eight love stories. I guess L’Amour’s a sucker for romance, too. The women are all pert and pretty, and very, very smart. They also know what they want: it’s not always clear who is pursuing whom. “Thoroughbred” is the term the objective admirers use for them. The hero is usually a wanderer who hasn’t had much if any time for women, until he sees the One that will focus his life. He’s seen more trouble than he’s wanted to, but he’s never shied from defending his honour, which as often as not entailed protecting the weak and helpless. A true knight in trail-dusted armour.
     I read the whole book at one sitting. Actually, I was in bed, and just didn’t turn out the light until I was done. ***