THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU, an adventure story about books and the people who love them

THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU
JOSHUA HAMMER
Simon & Schuster
$13.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven.

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers.

In 2012, thousands of Al Qaeda militants from northwest Africa seized control of most of Mali, including Timbuktu. They imposed Sharia law, chopped off the hands of accused thieves, stoned to death unmarried couples, and threatened to destroy the great manuscripts. As the militants tightened their control over Timbuktu, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali.

Over the past twenty years, journalist Joshua Hammer visited Timbuktu numerous times and is uniquely qualified to tell the story of Haidara’s heroic and ultimately successful effort to outwit Al Qaeda and preserve Mali’s—and the world’s—literary patrimony. Hammer explores the city’s manuscript heritage and offers never-before-reported details about the militants’ march into northwest Africa. But above all, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is an inspiring account of the victory of art and literature over extremism.

***I WON THIS BOOK IN A LITERARY HUB GIVEAWAY. THANK YOU TO S&S AND LIT HUB!***

My Review: A journalistic telling of a summer-blockbuster level tale...not that that's a bad thing!

What's most exciting in the book is the interaction of Al Qaeda and the resistance. What's least exciting about the whole story is the fact that we need to be told about the awful and hideous actions of the hate-filled anti-intellectuals who are, even as we speak, eviscerating an entire world's millennium of progress so their imaginary friend won't be mad at them.

And then there are the angry anti-intellectual greedy motherfuckers running the US government as an ATM for the world's wealthiest people.

And that, my dears, is 2017 in a nutshell. Books threaten these scumbags. They have to eliminate them somehow, and here in the US they've chosen the modern path of making them irrelevant, while in the old-school climes of Africa they physically destroy them. Same result. The forces of rage are out to stupidify the globe and it looks depressingly like they're succeeding.

But there are people like the brilliant, beautiful-souled Mr. Haidara. There are nooks in cyberspace where learning and passion for words still matter. There will always be a way to prevent the final night from falling.

It's more urgent than ever to remember that #READINGisResistance!

Happy Yule, my friends!

The Solstice is upon us, the longest night of the Solar year. I'll be off, as in not posting, until a few reviews come out late next week. Today at 11:30am Eastern Standard Time, the day will begin its journey to night. This is the moment during the year that cultures more closely attuned to the seasons than Western cultures are have used to celebrate the brightness that begins its inexorable return to the Northern Hemisphere. Traditionally a toast offered at Yuletide is, "All the Yule blessings rain on {your friend's name here}!" This year, the Solstice coincides with a rare astrological alignment of the Sun and Jupiter in Capricorn.

For the astrologically illiterate, that means "whoa Nelly, this gonna be one really bad motherin' day." That toast would just rain hellfire on your friend this year, so don't use it!

I hesitate even to type this...how much worse could it be than the other 350-plus days of 45's totally illegitimate presidency?

What a year this was. What a difficult and complicated year! An illegitimate government based on fraud, lies, and misrepresentation. The worst sort of people, an actual kakistocracy, blatantly colluded with a foreign power for the first time in US history. They wrenched control of our country away from We The People on the 8th of November 2016. One full cycle of the Sun later, the horrors are unraveling but not fast enough, not soon enough, for the most vulnerable among us.

The "laws" passed by the Gross Old Pedophile Party's "lawmakers" are, as they themselves have proved by attacking Obama's very modestly progressive legislative legacy, susceptible to repeal and replacement. It's what they used voter suppression and Russian hackers to achieve, after all, a spurious and invalid "majority" to invalidate, erase the best true Republican president of modern times.

The one solid, reliable joy in this dark night of our national soul has been reading good books. It's a tough world out there. #ReadingIsResistance, my year-long scream of outrage at 45 and his cronies, has kept me from curling up and giving up and resigning from life. They can't colonize my mind if I stuff it full of ideas I want to support, believe in, guide myself by. This is their worst nightmare: The quiet small-time resister with a big mouth and an agenda.

I want everyone to resist the continuing drumbeat of stupidity battering each of us as media outlets report the inane and idiotic blather of the kakistocracy to us. Listen to what these idiots are saying, and in public no less, thinking that the US populace is less a body politic than a hoi polloi, a rabble to be roused then doused with the piss they've trickled down on us.

Here's my one and only positive idea for this Yule, this season of renewal and revival: Raise a glass and toast, "All the Yule blessings rain on you, {insert 45's horrible name here}!" Then so mote it be.

PINEAPPLE, a comic novel about the end of civilization told in verse...wait! Come back! It's good!

PINEAPPLE
JOE TAYLOR
Sagging Meniscus Press
$22 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Welcome to Los Alamos, where the big-brained boys and girls are at it again. But atoms have turned passé: now it's the Higgs boson, which they are using to develop a clean, efficient weapon of mini-destruction, mysteriously dropping bodies into junior black holes within a fifty mile radius. Moreover, they're accomplishing this perfidy in comic rhyming quatrains. Can an intrepid group of six amateur do-gooders resolve the mystery and prevent the unleashing of this new WMD?

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. ALSO, I'VE KNOWN THE AUTHOR FOR A QUARTER CENTURY.

My Review: But anyone who's ever had a chance to hear my mouth on the subject of poetry knows that the best a friend who commits versification can hope for is silence from my general direction. It's better than what I'm likely to say, I assure you.

The sharp-eyed among y'all will note that this is a review, and carries a star rating, and isn't a bad rating at all. What gives? Well gather round, kiddies, and let Uncle Daddy tell you a little tale.

Waaaaaay back in the Mists of Time, I was a literary agent. A manuscript sailed over the transom one day, a humorous and bitter comedic romp about the North American Executive council of witches and their attempts to come to grips with a very, very bad madre of a witch in Florida (where else?) who was upsetting the cosmic balance in a big, nasty way. I was hooked. This was a decade before the paranormal book boom and I was sure the sheer verve and delight of the novel could ignite a movement.

Publishers disagreed.

It was Joe Taylor's manuscript that I couldn't, to my eternal chagrin, sell. But never mind, Joe was publishing good books via Livingston Press! Maybe I could, you know, movies or...but no. Sad to say, nothing ever eventuated except my snarky correspondence with Joe and a number of laugh-out-loud funny phone calls over the years.

So one fine day not so long ago, I got a missive from Joe telling me about this wizard idea he had for a comic novel about quantum mechanics (he's prone to saying things like that, I wasn't especially worried) where the End of the World was going to be brought about. Uh-huh, sounds cool, I said. Then Joe said IT: "I'm going to write it in rhyming quatrains."

"Are you out of your MIND? Joe, do you not WANT people to read your stuff?!" I shouted at my computer screen as I typed those very words.

Having heard the identical sentiments from me before about his dialect novel Oldcat and Ms. Puss, Joe tinkled a merry laugh and went about committing versification concerning quantum physics and the End of the World.

It's a darn good thing he doesn't listen to me. This is a comic novel of sharp, biting wit. This is poetry *about* something, not just its own pit-sniffin' self. This is what Daniel Defoe would be doing were his rotting zombie corpse to get access to a PC and a blogging platform.

It's impossible to quote poetry in a review. Well, damn near. And narrative poetry? Fuggeddaboudit.

It was a dark and bleary night. Which means,
I s'pose, Ol' Sol done gave it a rest.
Dave's dad, bandanna in teeth, was last Sol'd seen.
Now Ms. Moon watches two Hansons, a harsher test.

Do you think, by the way, sun and moon
communicate? Morse code? Telepathy?
Ah, but I promised no spiritual loony tune.
Still, it'd be nice to think they share empathy.

Nice layers of humor in there, doncha think? Suns and sons and moons and loonys...Joe knows how to make a word nerd grin, always has, and bless his cotton socks for it.

Will this book light everyone's fire? Nope. Will it light yours? If you're reading my blog, chances are it will. *I* liked a book of poetry! Even Joe was gobsmacked about that. Go on, be a devil, try out a small indie press's big indie author's seriously weird novel-in-verse. Hey, even if you hate it, you're gonna score big on the cooler-than-thou meter (see what I did there? haw) just having it on the coffee table.

WHITE SILENCE, a suspenseful thriller to give your Disaster Magnet friend

WHITE SILENCE
JODI TAYLOR (Elizabeth Cage #1)
Headline Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: "I don't know who I am. I don't know what I am."

Elizabeth Cage is a child when she discovers that there are things in this world that only she can see. But she doesn’t want to see them and she definitely doesn’t want them to see her.

What is a curse to Elizabeth is a gift to others – a very valuable gift they want to control.

When her husband dies, Elizabeth’s world descends into a nightmare. But as she tries to piece her life back together, she discovers that not everything is as it seems.

Alone in a strange and frightening world, she’s a vulnerable target to forces beyond her control.

And she knows that she can’t trust anyone…

White Silence is a twisty supernatural thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat.

My Review: I cannot believe I did it voluntarily. I mean, I'm completely current in Author Taylor's The Chronicles of St Mary's series...eight novels, eleven novellas and stories released...so I can't plead ignorance of her vicious, violent, eviscerating cruelty. I have been reduced to a quivering heap of snot and tears by Author Taylor on more than one occasion. It's not like I didn't buy the book aware of what would happen to me.

In fact I was unable to read a part of the book around 16-17% because it triggered my personal issues around claustrophobia. I solved this by skipping ahead to the next chapter and inferring what happened from what was then going on. It was too much for my frail little fleur of a heart to live through Mrs Cage's horrid experience, and then in the chapter I skipped to there was an equally awful moment of encavmaphobia (google it) when I thought "oh right then, I'm going to close this file and quietly remove the book from my Kindle" but, at the end of the day, left it on there and just didn't read anymore.

Two months passed. I finished a romantic novel, last in a series I've been following despite the absurd and disgusting and overused winking trope that author insists on fouling her books with, when I thought to myself, "Self," I thought, "never in all the history of personkind would Author Taylor have a character *shudder* wink at another character. You are safe, Self, so finish up White Silence at last."

I did. I am so glad. (There was no winking.)

While Elizabeth Cage doesn't have a smooth ride in this book, she does have a fascinating psionic power and the range to use it. She is clearly unmoored by her beloved husband's death. She forms an attachment to a damaged spy that came rather out of nowhere. Her life is turned upside down by several of Author Taylor's trademark dreadful, sadistic maulings of her readers' emotions. I mean characters' arcs, silly me.

There is so much that happens in this book that giving a book report is almost desirable, but I shall refrain because spoilers make people very angry. Suffice to say that each event in the book will have repercussions within seismic shifts atop temporal tsunamis. Absolutely nothing is as it seems, which we know from about the 90% mark on, though the full and devious range of Author Taylor's sadism hasn't come anywhere near to being tested or revealed.

*happy sigh*

So I tell you true, reader, the Disaster Magnet (aka Jodi Taylor follower via the Chronicles of St Mary's) that you love will adore this book. You will get so many bonus points with your Disaster Magnet that you could come out as a 45 supporter or Brexiteer and earn no more than a hurt look and some tutting. And it will guarantee several hours of dead silence as your beloved slurps it down in which you can watch sports or planetary explosion movies or even go out with your buds and get no more than a vague wave and distracted "take your mother with you."

POTIKI, almost forty-year-old Kiwi tale of lives changed by modernity

POTIKI
PATRICIA GRACE
University of Hawaii Press
$20.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Roimata and her family have rejected cities and unemployment to return to the land. Here they live a rural life, fishing and farming just enough for their own plates. But when they are approached by property developers, they suddenly find their land, livelihood and community under threat.

It is the younger generation who prove that it is possible to fight back: Manu, child with nightmares, who was schooled at home and fostered a new heart in the community; James, the wood carver, who will retell their genealogies with his hands; Toko, the Prophet Child who knows he won't live long, and who warns as a young boy that the stories will change; and Tangimoana, lawyer, daughter and wilful loner, who sees 'the strength of a branch to be not in its resilience, but in its ability to spring back and strike.'

With its layers of stories and shifting perspectives, Patricia Grace has crafted a spirited and moving novel showing that 'good can come from sorrow, new life from old.'

My Review: Simply stunning. Almost perfect. A pearl in the oyster (I love me some oysters!) of reading life.

It will not appeal to everyone, as it has many words and concepts untranslated (or untranslatable, I can't be sure which) from Maori. It unfolds, as I feel the best stories do, at its own pace. It's 30 years old and that means the events of the past referred to by Roimata and Hemi are in the 1940s and 1950s. 21st-century readers are cautioned not to think that New Zealand is the same; also that it's changed utterly. Like the US with its fraught "racial" divide in politics and culture, New Zealand has its own fault lines and seismic cultural rifts.

The dreamlike poetry of the first half of the short novel makes one think that the story will fit comfortably into a magical realist groove. The second half takes up the story's 1980s crisis in a less otherworldly tone, but with the same sense of rootedness and cultural sanctity as the first part.

MALAGASH, Canada's New Weird which is really old weird and superbly crafted

MALAGASH
JOEY COMEAU
ECW Press
$11.99 ebook platforms, $15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Sunday’s father is dying of cancer. They’ve come home to Malagash, on the north shore of Nova Scotia, so he can die where he grew up. Her mother and her brother are both devastated. But devastated isn’t good enough. Devastated doesn’t fix anything. Sunday has a plan.

She’s started recording everything her father says. His boring stories. His stupid jokes. Everything. She’s recording every single “I love you” right alongside every “Could we turn the heat up in here?” It’s all important.

Because Sunday is writing a computer virus. A computer virus that will live secretly on the hard drives of millions of people all over the world. A computer virus that will think her father’s thoughts and say her father’s words. She has thousands of lines of code to write. Cryptography to understand. Exploits to test. She doesn’t have time to be sad. Her father is going to live forever.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU.

My Review:

I thought Malagash would be a small town, but it is not even that. One long road, a twisting paved red loop around the north shore of Nova Scotia. There's a tractor sitting in a field. A dirt bike leaning up against a shed. We pass a pen of llamas, who look bored as hell. The Atlantic Ocean itself comes right up to drive along beside us. Then it slips away.

The way he sounds, talking to my little brother, is different from how he sounds when talking just to me. I feel certain that it means something different too, even though the words are the exact same. This particular softness in my father’s voice is meant only for Simon.

There are parts of my father that he shows only to Simon. Parts he shows only to my mother. What if I had never heard this? What if I had never realized this?

It is a fact parents feel compelled to deny: Your relationship with each of your children is different. Each one has a different way of being themself, therefore a different side to show you and you to them. Sunday realizes this, and in realizing it pops a pustulent buboe on the buttocks of every parent/child problem: "You liked {sibling's name here} better than me!" And no parent ever says the simple truth, "Differently, darling child, never better." Routine denials, love all equally and other such impossibilities...Sunday does this wonderful bit of thinking for us all, and arrives at the correct answer. Comeau should win an award or two just for this.

I tell him that it will be our father's ghost. His memory. His echo. I tell him that a virus need not do harm. That not all self-propagating code is malicious. Our father's virus would never delete files. Would never steal passwords or spy on the intimate moments of strangers. Would not spread like cancer, but like a story. Would slip through fibre optic cables to cross oceans, would pass like radio waves through the walls of houses that nobody even knows are haunted. A ghost story that computers tell one another in the dark.

And with that, I died a little. I was utterly forlorn at the idea of a love so strong and sure emanating from a child to a parent. I never experienced that from either side. It made my own grieving heart stop with the loss I felt...not the loss of either parent, not the loss of my child, but the loss of love and family. I feel no love for my siblings, felt none for my parents, all of whom were adults when I was able to know them and self-absorbed, unkind, unpleasantly stridently needy adults who had no desire to listen to the likes of me.

Profound sadness? Not really. Regret? Grief. Poor younger me.

And the family I could have formed? Not to be. Death, despair, misery, but no family.

So reading this book was a giant act of catharsis and a huge relief to me.

THE DOOMED CITY, Soviet-era scary predictive fiction

THE DOOMED CITY
ARKADY AND BORIS STRUGATSKY (tr. Andrew Bromfield)
Chicago Review Press
$13.00 ereader platforms, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work, Roadside Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel that was their own favorite, and that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English. The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their best friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication.

It was translated into a host of major European languages, and now appears in English in a major new translation by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield. The Doomed City is set in an experimental city bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from Earth's history and left to govern themselves under conditions established by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a diehard believer in the Experiment, even though he's now a garbage collector. And as increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll say this about the Strugatsky Brothers: They had *fearless* imaginations, tempered by fearful souls that quailed before publishing this nihilistic, absurdist, deeply subversive book in Soviet Russia. Completed in 1972, shelved until 1989, and published in a professional English translation only in 2016, this stateless satirical look at the amoral roots of True Belief in a System reads as well in 45's Amurruhkuh as it did in Brezhnev's USSR.

Voronin, our astronomer-turned-state-official, is an ideal. He is every system's beloved child, the True Believer who makes excuses and finds reasons instead of asking, "...the fuck...? Are they kidding with this?" As experience teaches him to question, he sidesteps. He changes his beliefs without batting an eyelash, a clue to his essential hollowness. For all that he is an eager participant in all the City's shifts of philosophical direction, the reason he can do so remains unexamined: He's complicit in the acts of the State, not driven by a desire to enact a Vision. His lack of an inner compass is rather amusing given that almost the entire novel is an internal monologue. I myownself found this a delightful twist, enjoying the musings of a centerless man as irony. Others might find that conceit wearing.

The things I found wearing were the astoundingly sexist and anti-Semitic attitudes of the characters (and, I suspect, the authors as well). There are horrible words used in connection with the two women I can recall at all...they might indeed have been the only two women mentioned, for I can summon no other woman to mind...and Katzman's presence in stereotypical fashion was not obviously played for ironic effect.

Given my track record for objecting to these facets of other older books, why am I giving this one the Full Five? Because, my friends, the story of a city between an unscalable wall and an endless abyss recommends itself to me as a parable for all of human life, and the awful attitudes of the PoV character are part and parcel of the falling, failing world that the Strugatskys were lampooning, dissecting, parodying, itemizing. These facets seem to me, even though I suspect and believe they were presented unironically, to be so much of a piece with the Experiment being ridiculed that I could easily make them objects of fun. Nonetheless they are there and merit mention lest an unsuspecting reader trip over them and feel blindsided.

Boris Strugatsky, in his Afterword, says it all and best:

How to live in conditions of ideological vacuum? How and what for? In my opinion this question remains highly relevant even today—which is why City, despite being so vehemently politicized and so categorically of its own time, potentially remains of interest to the present-day reader—provided that this reader has any interest at all in problems of this kind.