Kim Miller

This one has raised a storm of fake rage in the US states where book banning is the new normal. So I decided to check it out.

It's a graphic novel of a woman's memoir about growing up non-binary. She is three years old at the beginning when her family moves to a backwoodsy house with no electricity, water, etc. Her parents are kind of hippie but well educated. At the end of the book she is approaching thirty and considering top surgery.

Her life is one of continuing identity crises as she struggles to fit in but feels she is pushed into silence about herself. While I can see that the religious bigotry of the US would hate the book, it seems to me to fill a real need with young people trying to navigate their way through the minefield of opinions versus the emerging genetics and neuroscience of how bodies and brains are gendered in utero.

A madcap race through 1990s Boston as two private detectives get sucked into a political scandal that breeds a gang war, and all the while trying to stay alive. Lehane's debut novel and a racy easy to read action story.

Two politicians hire Patrick Kenzie to find a cleaning woman who has taken documents from their office and disappeared. They want the woman found and they want the documents back. By the end of the novel there must be fifty dead bodies (we lose count) in the city morgue and gallons of blood draining into the street.

The dialogue is the black humour of noir detective stories of the era, the sort where the detective looks out through the venetian blinds in high contrast black and white TV shows. There's a Porsche, a psycho guy who, luckily, is on their side, and a cast of coppers doing copper type things. All in all a fun read for a long wet afternoon.

Vonnegut here is like a shaman who throws a bunch of knuckle bones in the air, sees how they land, and tells the client what they mean. The novel is a crazy ramble through whatever Vonnegut had tucked away in the absurdist corner of his mind. It's dark and dangerous, reaching past satire to the edges of savagery.

SciFi author Kilgore Trout appears again alongside other Vonnegut regulars. He's been invited to an arts festival where one of his books about a lone human on a planet of robots sparks a psychotic episode in a paticipant. The narrator has made many references to 'bad chemicals' effecting human behaviour, but the assumption has been drug references. As the story progresses we see that he means the chemicals our brain makes for itself. Humanity is little more than a bunch of robots being controlled by our own chemistry.

To add to his theme, the narrator becomes a character in the book towards the end, demonstrating how he can make any character in the story do whatever he wants them to do. It's a weird flex that adds to the feeling of insanity that threads its way through the whole story.

Book 2 of The Bromeliad. The Nomes have driven the truck until they crash it and are forced to run into the wilderness again. They come across an abandoned quarry and take refuge in the manager's hut. Once again, disaster as the quarry is about to reopen.

Some of them take off to explore and find a permanent place for the community to live.

The men arrive to get the quarry into action again and the Nome need a quick escape plan. Having once driven a truck they decide to take a digger from the quarry and to an old barn up the hill behind the quarry. Everyone gets loaded into the front scoop and the 'drivers' get coordinated again and they drive the digger out of the yard with the workers running after them in the muddy field.