Reading during break

On the way up, I finished "Excellent Intentions" (Richard Hull). I think this is currently only widely available in the British Library Crime Classics paperback, but you might find an older edition in a sleepy library where there's not much weeding, or at a used book store (it was called "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" in its original US run). It was published first in 1938 - one of those Golden Era mystery novels.

(And yes, modern readers be forewarned: some of these have attitudes or words in them that modern readers will find unpleasant or offensive. I admit I kind of blip over these things with the feeling of "people used to believe a lot of quite dumb things" and frankly people say and do dumb and offensive things NOW, so I don't "cancel" an entire story or author because of that. And oftentimes I have found the person expressing the bad attitude is not a particularly nice person otherwise....)

I really enjoyed this one. It took me a bit to get into it but once I did it was interesting. It uses a very unusual trope - it starts out in a courtroom, with The Accused (who is neither named nor their gender mentioned - which would be somewhat of a giveaway) in the dock, and the oddly-named Anstruther Blayton is the KC here. The story is largely told as a series of flashbacks to events in and immediately following the murder, particularly the investigation by Inspector Fenby.

As is often the case in these stories, the victim is a detestable person - he dies fairly early on, apparently by poisoned snuff. (I had no idea people still took snuff in the 1930s. I think of it as an artifact of the early 1800s or so. And I admit I knew very little about it, but: yipes. Apparently it was even known in its early days to put people at risk for nasal cancer...)

However, the victim also had a "bad heart" (which would suggest the "swift hit of nicotine" from snuff would *not* be even remotely advisable) and of course that's one of the sticking points: was he poisoned, or did the snuff itself kill him?

It's a fairly complex story and there are four potential suspects. (Never mind that I guessed who it was about 2/3 of the way through, based on what was fundamentally a Chekhov's gun in the narrative; it's still a good story and you wonder to the end if maybe the accused will get off on some kind of technicality, or if it could *possibly* turn out to be some kind of "Murder on the Orient Express" situation, given how many low-level enemies the victim had).

I'm also reading away on "The Three Musketeers," but this one will take a while yet as it's about 700 pages long and the translation does keep the somewhat "archaic" way of writing intact. And I'm working on "Coroner's Pidgin," a Margery Allingham mystery (with Albert Campion as the lead, though he does seem to be less a "detective" than "someone who gets mixed up in situations of intrigue")

The only non-fiction I brought along I kind of gave up on (at least temporarily): "Annals of a Lost World: travels in Ice Age America." I thought it would be an interesting (if speculative) account of some of the first people to come to America (for some reason, the Native pre-history of North America fascinates me. Well, so does the pre-history of other places, but there seems to be a lot written about North America and Europe, and much, much less about Africa and Asia). There *was* some of that - including some of the newer hypotheses (the book was published in 2018), but there's also an *awful* lot of "look at how cool my life is" detail about his various camping and exploring trips (and also some family drama - apparently he and his then-wife divorced not long after one trip they went on, and that just feels...unnecessary....in a book I was expecting to be more about "this is where the first evidence of human-made fishhooks was found, and this is how old we think they were").

Also, at one point he speculates on the importance of children to the "tribe" (there's a lot of talk of "tribes," even modern ones). He has two sons....the younger one he discusses at some length and concludes based on the six-year-old's "singing" to barnacles, that the kid would wind up as a shaman if they were a prehistoric tribe....no mention of the older son. (As an oldest child, i tend to notice those things. And I wonder how the older son felt. Or maybe he expressly said "Dad, don't write me into your book, okay?") He also talks about how in those small tribes, how vital children were, and notes that a lot of the early burials found (or at least the ones found in North America) are of children, that their burials were elaborate, and apparently adults' were not, and he speculates that adults' remains were just left for the scavengers whereas children and babies were buried with some degree of ceremony....and I don't know. I suppose that suggests there's an evolutionary reason behind why it's so much more horrifyingly reported in the news when a child is injured in a car wreck than an adult (sometimes even when the adult is in graver peril). Though I would argue that now our numbers are the reverse of being perilously close to extinction-from-demographic-instability....

He does also mention something to the effect that people need either family around, or stories, because both are something that combats a feeling of falling off the edge of the earth, and yes, I feel that, very much. Part of the reason I think I try hard to access the memories of my younger years (especially the happy ones) is that they are my "stories," and do give me the sense of not being quite so rootless and...yes, as if I might fall off the edge of the earth. When I'm down at home by myself sometimes it's hard, because I do often feel kind of unattached from other people, and I know - all too well - that someday in the not-too-unthinkably-distant future my parents will be gone, and my brother has his own family and they are twice as far away as my parents are now...And I think that is one of the hard things about having to move far from family for your career.

He also reminded me again - and this is a big reason why I put the book aside for now - of how being able to live alone, and not really being part of an official "tribe," is very much a thing of the modern world. In a pre-industrial society, I would not have been able to live on my own, other than some VERY isolated situations (e.g., a religious anchorite, where people were willing to bring food and whatever few other things I needed). Other than that, I'd have had to marry (or whatever prehistoric equivalent there was) or remain with a sibling's family as a caretaker of their kids or something....or else, perish. And I admit, I don't much like that idea. Yes, I am grateful I live in a milieu where I don't have to scrabble for every bit of food I eat, and where I might only be valued for as long as I can do the manual labor necessary to help keep the tribe going....but I also worry that society and the like is fragile enough these days, that it's not unthinkable we could find ourselves (after some major natural disaster or societal upheaval or even a new civil war) back in a situation more like that, where someone like me - who doesn't have an obvious "tribe" (in the sense of spouse, in-laws, children...I don't even have more than one sibling) wind up not really making it. Oh, I suppose there would be people who would "let me in" but I feel like I can't count on that, and that enough of the people I know who MIGHT be tribe-members have so many grown kids and grandkids of their own that another mouth to help feed is probably not possible....and I wonder if I'd be stuck having to decide to do the equivalent of "I am just going outside and might be some time" if worse came to worse. (Then again, I do know a few unattached people who don't have huge families, and we might be able to forge some kind of small tribe. But it's not something I feel comfortable bringing up to people because it feels crank-like to say "Hey, if society totally fell apart, would you have my back?")

But yeah. I suppose my main complaint that isn't related to my own weird vague fears about my own "disposability" if our world became one where the "knowledge economy" no longer existed is that it feels like the book was presented as one thing (prehistory of the First Nations) and it turned out to have a lot of something else ("cool travelogue, bro") in it instead...