Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

Re-read this one as a break between some other books, after I watched the first half of the movie on TV late one night. Still a personal favourite, even with its flaws and shortcomings. If you want to understand what happened to the '60's - how peace and love became the '70's - then use this book as guide.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda .... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning ....

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simplyprevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark —that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Embassytown - China Mieville

It takes a while to get going, but once it does it becomes a smart story about the meaning of language. In the distant future, on a remote planet, humans live side-by-side with The Hosts, a very alien race that has two mouths and no difference between language and thought.  Interaction is mediated by Ambassadors, highly trained, genetically created twins. A new kind of Ambassador is sent by the government, which turns The Hosts into drug addicts with his voice.

The ending comes rather quick, glossing over some action sequences to wrap it up in a reasonable amount of time. More of a philosophical dissertation than a novel, but worth the read for the imaginative level of detail.

Flight Paths of The Emperor - Steven Heighton

The best story in this collection is the first one, about a Canadian, who speaks some Japanese, working at a coffee shop in Osaka to make ends meet. The coffee shop, built after the war, is slated to be demolished to make way for some new developments, and there is some trepidation that a certain lifestyle was about to come to a end.  Shot through with bits of humour (even if some of it seems a bit forced - the idiom mangling English student, for example) you can tell it's a serious work of fiction because the coffee shop isn't saved.

This "serious work" tag infects most of these stories - objects take on significance, narrative shifts through time, connections are drawn between relationships and larger events. At times the stories collapse under this seriousness, but at other times it works - a story in which a man (Caucasian) takes his daughter (born to a Japanese mother) back to Japan ends in uncomfortable territory.

Of course there's the war and the bomb and a sense of old Japan dying to make room for a new Japan (though it should be pointed out that the old Japan, such as it was, created the conditions for the war) and proverbs that start stories and a very unbelievable episode involving Yakuza kidnapping an English teacher.

These stories are trapped in a certain time period - both a certain time in Japan and a certain time in Canadian fiction - and the energy created in the first story failing to sustain itself throughout the collection.

The Big Short - Michael Lewis

On the surface, it`s hard to find the good guys, the heroes, in this story. Three years we are living in the aftermath   - S&P, who just downgraded the U.S.`s credit rating and sparked a massive dip in the stock market, plays a role in this book as one of the agencies that continued to give triple A ratings to mortgage backed securities, even though they were junk.  It reminded me of the moral universe in a James Ellroy novel - everyone is selfish and corrupt, so the hero is the person who is the least corrupt, or at least corrupt for a reason.

The story follows a few individuals saw the impending economic doom of the sub-prime mortgage, and shorted the market (and made a fortune in doing so)  They are colorful characters - a medical doctor with Aspger`s, a socially stunted trader, three California dudes who have little idea what they are actually doing - and the author spends considerable time with them, providing some solid reporting and character background.  The usual suspects are here - Goldman Sachs, Bear Sterns, AIG - and what struck me is how they managed to not only screw people and businesses over and make millions, but it was all technically legal - it was so far out in front that no one had any idea if it should be against the law or not.

2030 - Albert Brooks

A challenge in reading a book by an author who is famous for other things is that you are predisposed to view the book through a lens clouded by the author's fame. In non-fiction and autobiography, this isn't much of an issue - the reason why are you reading the book is usually based on who the person is. With non-fiction, this gets a bit trickier.

Since he is famous of acting and directing, I was expecting more of a Vonnegut, black humour style tale of the future. There are elements of that in this, but it's mostly a straight up story about what happens to the US in 2030, after a massive earthquake destroys Los Angeles. It takes time to get where it's going - the characters are set up with lots of background, the plot is put in motion - but it comes together at the end. An ending that seems entirely probably under the circumstances, and one that seems devoid any political influence.  One thing that did stand out - the lack of the role technology plays in this future, particularly the Internet. There is an Internet, but no one in 2030 seems to have an iphone or spend their time online - it's a future Internet that could have been written in the late '90's. (Which stands in contrast to Super Sad Love Story)