When We Walk By

When We Walk By by Kevin F. Adler, Donald W. Burnes et al.

Social Issues (2023 - 235 pp.)

When We Walk By is a brand-new part-monograph, part-activism book by San Francisco-based social entrepreneur Kevin Adler, academic Donald Burnes, and two assistants,* exploring the causes and effects of homelessness in the United States, as well as possible solutions. Being from Toronto, a city in the midst of a housing crisis, I compared the situations in my hometown, San Francisco and Los Angeles as I read the book, as well as the (so-far) attempted solutions. 

At the heart of the book’s message is Kevin’s company Miracle Messages, which has reunited 800 unhoused people since 2014. Among their innovative methods include attaching body cameras to unhoused volunteers, which allows their stories to be told in real time, and the extensive use of social media to locate family members across the United States. On a personal note, the book is dedicated to Kevin’s uncle Mark, who lived on the streets of Santa Cruz for three decades, and is sadly no longer with us.

The book flows easily, with each chapter exploring a different facet of homelessness. From Kevin’s personal story in the introduction, the book shifts into a more neutral tone, covering topics like relational poverty, paternalism, and transcarceration. Relational poverty is straightforward, in which people can experience homelessness not so much due to financial or logistical concerns, but due to the lack of a social network, which isolates them from their peers. The authors divide paternalism into progressive paternalism, which is making someone else’s decisions out of a misguided belief that they are being helped, and punitive paternalism, which is making someone else’s decision as though the decider is handing out a criminal sentence. (64) The authors point out a particularly bizarre instance of paternalism, in which a person experiencing homelessness received a “Blue Apron-style” package of food; the package contained tuna and peanut butter, and the recipient was allergic to both. (72) Depending on the aid offered and what the unhoused person needs, a supposedly humanitarian gesture may actually be harmful.

Transcarceration is a relatively new word within the sociological lexicon, so I’ll post the Legal Information Institute definition in full:

Transcarceration is the transfer of prisoners or persons institutionalized for mental illness from one facility to another of the same type. Through transcarceration, prisoners are moved to another prison, and the institutionalized mentally ill are moved to another psychiatric hospital.

Entering the public eye during the dismantling of the often-horrifying state mental asylum system, transcarceration saw the mentally ill shuttled to prisons or the streets. As the authors note, this process causes them to frequently lose social connections (for example, if they are transported to a different part of a large state) or lose access to necessary medical treatment. (119, 151-152)

The invisibility of homelessness is striking. Contrary to the stigmatized stereotypes of disheveled, reeking addicts rabble-rousing on street corners, over half the unhoused live in shelters, and a significant portion are families. (2) These shelters often separate families due to stringent gender requirements, and in some cases are even less safe than life on the streets. (97)

My favourite of the authors’ recommended solutions is the tiny home village movement. Having lived in a Toronto-sized apartment, and being familiar with the similar Canadian concept of “bunkies”,** I thought immediately of how relatively simple tiny homes are to construct.*** Ranging from 100-200 square feet or thereabouts, tiny houses can provide people a place to sleep and store their belongings while taking up very little space. They’re not just for the homeless either – I have a friend in Alaska who is currently planning a tiny home village for people on fishing vacations. What surprised me, as the authors point out, is that tiny homes were one of the solutions San Francisco employed following the 1906 earthquake, which displaced 250,000 of the city’s the 400,000-person population. The San Franciscans of that age were more than likely to go from  squatting in rubble to living in tiny houses, through, as the authors emphasize, no fault of their own. (212-213) As an erstwhile student of American history, that tale of tiny houses, right in Kevin’s back yard, brought a smile to my face.

Less convincing are the discussions of wages. Unexplained is why a single earner making the minimum wage should be able to support a family of four (108); as a Torontonian, it would puzzle me to see this idealistic scenario play out in my city when many middle-class people here can barely support themselves. The growth of CEO salaries relative to average worker salaries is also mentioned (109), but the wealthiest CEOs make relatively little in base pay compared to their benefits, stock, stock options and restricted stock units. People living paycheck to paycheck frequently need money right now, as opposed to stock options that may take years to vest.

A further research direction that could be useful in the broader housing crisis discussion is the work on learned helplessness, broadly defined as “the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control.” If someone’s repeated attempts to secure housing are met with draconian restrictions, or they are subjected to constant paternalism by well-meaning (or not-so-well-meaning) authorities who never listen to them, why should they keep trying? Why shouldn’t they give up and resign themselves to life on the streets? True help may come in the form of giving someone hope.

My own volunteer experience is adjacent to Miracle Messages and other unhoused-supporting charities; I have put in over 120 hours in 2023 at my local food bank.**** There, I work in the community kitchen, cooking meals that are frozen and then distributed to over 180 locations across Toronto. I am certain I have met some people experiencing homelessness during my time there, and others living in precarious arrangements that could lead to homelessness. However, at staff and volunteer lunches I eat the same meals I cook for anyone who stops by, no questions asked. Vegetarian options are always available, and only foods containing known ingredients are used in order to avoid accidentally giving someone an allergic reaction. This food bank also accepts medication donations, which are often more necessary to sustain those experiencing homelessness than a can of tuna or a free burger from McDonald’s. In Toronto, a wealthy city by any stretch of the imagination, I meet people all the time who have at least some of the same needs as the people whose stories come onto the page throughout When We Walk By.

Those stories make the book different from a pure academic monograph. They humanize homelessness, not through attempts to cherry-pick the direst situations possible, but to show who the authors actually met on their journeys. Talk to a person experiencing homelessness, and you might meet Adam, Ray, Gabe, Lainie, Jeffrey, Linda, David, Timothy, Rand, Tom, Elizabeth, Joseph, Angelo, or any of the others. (Ronnie, sadly, passed away while awaiting senior housing.) Some of them no doubt just want to re-meet their families, shed the stigma of homelessness, and get out of the cold.

Ease of Reading: 7

Educational Content: 7

*Amanda Banh and Andrijana Bilbija, two recent graduates. 

**It’s tougher than you’d think to find bunkie websites unaffiliated with any particular seller. I myself have no stake in the bunkie industry.

***Given the high cost of “frequent-flyer” hospitalizing, policing and prosecuting the unhoused, it may actually be cheaper to just build them all tiny houses. (122-124) I’m a lawyer, and I would appreciate a tiny house, if only to have a place downtown I can stay at instead of paying for taxi fare home. For someone with no home, the need is far more acute.

****The Daily Bread Food Bank at Islington and Lake Shore, for those interested in seeing how a large-scale food bank works. A nice young man recognized me from there at a restaurant in Guelph in early December. Two middle-class people, in a city an hour outside of Toronto, and the food bank was our common ground.

King's Steel

King’s Steel by John Morris

Fantasy (2022 – 645 pp.)

John R. Morris’s King’s Steel is a brand new release in the epic high fantasy genre. Morris’s protagonist, Major Kallan Garrik, investigates a rash of soulstealers who threaten his home kingdom, while the mysterious but beautiful Vala and a cadre of loyal soldiers* join him in uncovering a long-held, deep-seated, magical grudge. While King’s Steel doesn’t break new ground, it zips along at a pace rivaling even the pulpiest airport novel, making its considerable length (approximately 154,000 words) more manageable than most books of that length.

A historical division within the fantasy genre is often between sword and sorcery (exactly what it sounds like), typified by series like The Chronicles of Prydain and Conan the Barbarian, and fantasies more contemplative of the social and cultural conditions in which the characters live. In King’s Steel, Morris balances both ends of the spectrum. The book opens with Kallan immediately in swashbuckling mode, which establishes him as a formidable fighter, but also demonstrates the teamwork that will be necessary to overcome the soulstealers (or “hexen”, depending on which character is speaking). Starting at Chapter 28, a semi-major character is a dressmaker. Morris describes the ladies’ dresses** in sufficient detail that if King’s Steel were ever optioned as a movie, limited series or stage production, the costume designer would have plenty to work with. Fans of the more Renaissance Faire style of fantasy will surely enjoy those descriptions, all the way from Chapter 9 onward. Then, of course, there are plenty more battles to be had.

Magic comes with rules. One of the dictates of the fantasy genre is that no matter how much disbelief is suspended, once the rules of the world are in place, the author must obey them. Morris does this almost perfectly. Innate powers (tau) and crystals can heal, but they drain the subject of energy. Kallan suffers grievous injuries that lay him up in hotel rooms (well, it’s fantasy, so a room above an inn) for days at a time. Although Kallan and Vala have a certain amount of plot armor, as one expects in this genre, they never appear invincible, even when they are enchanted. The one exception is the abrupt appearance of the portals, which are crucial to transporting Vala and her compatriots across South Reach*** and Urdan. The first instance of the word “portal” occurs in Chapter 19, and completely threw me for a (hyper)loop.

Morris simultaneously employs and subverts the quest theme. While Kallan’s story arc starts as a seemingly straightforward quest to find out what the hexen are plotting against South Reach, it quickly goes astray based on the shared goals of South Reach and Urdan. Characters like Vala, Relenki and Bartholomew generally support Kallan but insist on having a say in the overall goals of the quest. Magistrate Allistrando of Urdan, by contrast, is extremely wary of exposing Urdan to other kingdoms, acting in Chapter 39 as an isolationist who is initially opposed to outward engagement. He eventually realizes he will need to form an alliance to succeed over the hexen, completing his arc. Characters’ goals in King’s Steel are rarely opposed or orthogonal, instead usually consisting of North versus North-North-East. The primary exception is Andor, who is exposed as an ostracized pariah who manipulates subjects from a distance.

The only scenes I found wholly unrealistic**** were the ring scene leading up to Chapter 45 and the courtroom scene in Chapter 66. In the former, one of the characters requires an engagement ring, so his first idea is to detach the gemstone from his sword’s pommel. This is despite him belonging to a royal family, which presumably owns a number of family heirloom rings that would be perfectly suited to the young man’s upcoming engagement. Morris gives no reason as to why this character does not first inquire about the family’s collection. The courtroom scene is typical fantasy fare, complete with self-represented parties, sloppy court procedure, and general proclamations of characters’ intentions. My qualm here is not with Morris specifically, but rather with a time-honored tradition that needs to perish. No more fantasy trials.

Otherwise, though, Morris makes the world realer than many another fantasy author might have. Magistrate Allistrando’s brother Luggio, for example, reveals in Chapter 40 that he is the owner and proprietor of a restaurant. This is the ultimate illustration of how an at least somewhat democratic country would differ from a top-down autocratic kingdom; in democracies, merchants are prized for their successes, whereas in autocracies they are typically not. One of my favorite characters, meanwhile, is Yantz, who is a magical doctor. As mentioned above, characters’ injuries in King’s Steel are bloody, debilitating, and result in extended infirmary stays. Without Yantz, the whole troupe***** would probably be dead in the first third of the novel.

After unofficially retiring this blog, it is fitting that my lone review of 2022 so far is a Fall 2022 release full of adventure, romance and theme. King’s Steel is quick-reading fantasy fun that should please both the martial and social fans.

Ease of Reading: 10

Educational Content: 1

*There’s a Captain Greenway. The chief editor of the book, who also wrote a foreword, is named William Greenway. I imagine this is 100% pure coincidence with absolutely nothing more to it. 

**At one point, there’s a form-fitting lavender wedding dress. Clearly the era of Disney Princesses is behind us, and we’re ready for our fantastical brides to wear more modern designs.

***I kept reading “South Beach” here, but alas, there was no Bam Adebayo sighting.

****Again, by the standards of the world. Healing crystals and soulstealers, I can accept as being pillars of a fantasy world.

*****There are some misspellings of this word as “troop”. Similarly, there are some instances of switching “hanged” and “hung”. While these editorial issues niggle slightly, they are a cup of water in Lake Superior compared to the red pen I would take to the average thriller novel.

Ten Years In

Although this blog hasn't been maintained since August for a variety of reasons (i.e. my life has been way too busy since then), I thought I'd mark what would have been a momentous occasion had I still been reviewing books.

I've reviewed over 100 books on here. Some are long, some are short. Some are fiction, some are non-fiction. Some are old, some are new. Some are highbrow, some... not so much. Over the 2013-2019 span alone, I reviewed 91 books and read many others.

In 2021-2022, my reading hasn't let up. I picked up The First World War by Hew Strachan, a remarkable summation of one of history's most violent conflicts. Then I took on The Habsburgs by Martyn Rady, a fantastic whirlwind tour through a thousand years of Europe's first family. Then I read The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams, a book so voluminous at 275,000 words it could have supplied three months' worth of reviews. Then I read Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, the first book I'd ever been recommended at work. Now it's on toward other fiction and non-fiction, in the roughly alternating order I tend to take. While I make no guarantee as to what I'll read next, especially in this post-review state, I'd like to point out that I do own a Library of America science fiction collection.

I don't see myself ever returning to "full-time", i.e. at least once per month, reviews on this blog, but I'll keep it active as a repository of book recommendations. 

As always, onward and upward!

Pictured: Art Gallery of Ontario, yesterday. Not all art is written down!

Happy Ten Years, my 2012 self. I'd like to think I've made you proud.

August's Book: The Luminaries

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Western (2013 - 832 pp.)

Eleanor Catton is a Canadian writer, two years older than me, who won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries while I was still in law school. Bravo. More to the point, she was raised in Christchurch, New Zealand, and was evidently inspired enough by local history to set The Luminaries in 1866 during the New Zealand gold rush. Historically accurate gold miners, outlaws, and sketchy rural pharmacists abound, as a patchwork jury of 13 local men attempt to figure out who killed Crosbie Wells, why the opium-addicted prostitute Anna Wetherell was drugged, and who made off with all the money.

Our protagonist, young lawyer Walter Moody, comes upon the scene to find twenty-four-year-old mining mogul Emery Staines vanished and presumed dead. Moody is convinced he hears Staines's ghost inside a nailed-shut wooden crate on board a ship, while charlatan madam Lydia Wells organizes a seance to communicate with the presumably deceased Staines. The other characters, such as my favourite back-alley chemist Joseph Pritchard and semi-sleazy banker Charlie Frost, have to watch all this unfold. Catton's strength is in creating lovable characters, whose stunned responses to the madhouse scenarios thrown their way echoes how readers would react to those same scenarios. The town's hospital is so useless, people with all manners of maladies are sent directly to Pritchard, sometimes in a wagon. Harald Nilssen, a commission merchant, seems ready to commission just about anything. (Non-spoiler: yes, this gets him in hot water.) In a tiny town far away from the rest of civilization, the most qualified person appears to perform any number of tasks. I shudder to think of myself providing tax law advice, but then, it's not like much was being taxed in New Zealand in 1866 anyhow.

The prevalence of the shipping industry in that era's New Zealand gives Catton the license to have characters appear, exit, or be totally transient. Stowing away on a cargo ship proves a cheap and easy way to see the world. Alternatively, Ah Sook's transportation from Kowloon to New Zealand ends up being the bane of his existence, as he tearfully confesses. Generalized ne'er-do-well Francis Carver, son of a wealthy merchant, becomes a fraudster who serves as the book's main antagonist. I use the term "antagonist" loosely, as none of the characters in The Luminaries appear to be nice people, exciting as their stories are.

The timeline jumps back from 1866 to 1865, so the reader has to be careful to watch for the date accompanying each chapter. At one point, the book travels exactly a year into the past, (656) which was initially confusing but quickly became clear. Catton's interrupted timeline allows the reader to see past events through the lens of their inevitable fallouts, which gives the last quarter or so of the book a very "aha!" feel.

Shockingly, in an 832-page book featuring a prostitute and taking place in multiple hotels, there is no sex scene. I am not entirely sure what to make of this, which means that in an already too-long book,* it is probably for the best that there is no additional material. Judicial clerk Gascoigne is certainly tempted by Anna, Staines is her lover for a brief time, and she frequently passes out high on opium in Ah Sook's den, but that's as far as it went. In reference to Anna's initial recruitment to prostitution, I smiled upon seeing the term "euchred", (694) although the card game was not yet cemented in its modern form.

The courtroom scenes fell flat for me. As someone who finds inevitably inaccurate courtroom drama interminable, I found the entire section on the trial wearing. Catton confuses some criminal and civil terms as well (why would a criminal case have a plaintiff?), although it's entirely possible New Zealand trials in 1866 were sloppy, haphazard affairs. Nonetheless, legal inaccuracy in media is an ongoing nuisance to me. By contrast, Wells's letters (469-479) were gripping. Reading faux-19th-century correspondence written with the knowledge it might never be returned is at once tragic and investigatory, as though I were an archivist pawing through old letters trying to solve the case. The closest comparison is to Adam Ewing's journal in Cloud Atlas, which is my favourite part of that book.

I don't usually read westerns, but when I do, they seem to be written by Canadians. What a fun genre. I think we could all use a few more gunslingers on our reading lists.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 3**

*The Luminaries clocks in at a hideous 263,000 words. By comparison, notable doorstopper Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (220,000 words) is approximately half a novel shorter than The Luminaries. I'd say someone should have hired Catton an additional editor, but she has a Man Booker Prize and I don't, so the point is taken.

**For a book that does not purport to contain any educational content whatsoever, The Luminaries 

provides a good overview of the New Zealand of the time period from 30,000 feet. While the book is about as realistic as Jack London's White Fang and Call of the Wild, it captures the spirit of the times well.

July's Book: Tuesdays with Morrie

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

Journalism (1997 - 192 pp.)

Having discussed Mitch Albom's Time Keeper on here over eight years ago, and being a long-time fan of Albom's basketball writing, I figured it was high time to return to him. This time, it's a more philosophical bent, although the past year and a half of pandemic life has made us all a bit more philosophical. Albom's old professor, Morrie Schwartz, was dying of ALS at the time of writing, but was kind enough to share some profound life wisdom with Albom. The book is organized into a series of vignettes, featuring fourteen consecutive Tuesday conversations between Schwartz and Albom, as well as flashbacks to earlier time in Schwartz's life. Accepting one's imminent mortality, as Schwartz learned to do, leads to much-needed pondering about what is really important in life.

Schwartz spends much of the book railing against an America that is too obsessed with moneymaking at the expense of relationships. Although Schwartz waxes poetic, he is also unfailingly direct, making statements like "We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don't satisfy us." (84) Schwartz's core values of kindness, forgiveness and family transcend his own life,* influencing Albom heavily as the book progresses. Albom expresses regret for chasing too many dollars and not enjoying life enough, but when he shares these regrets with Schwartz, the teacher shares one of his last lessons, that we have to forgive ourselves "For all the things we didn't do. All the things we should have done." (166) As someone who has taken many of life's opportunities and passed up a few others, and is self-critical by nature, what could I have done differently? Living in the present has helped, especially when it comes to exercising** and writing, but the question always remains of what more should I be doing? Ironically, Albom mentions that "America had become a Persian bazaar of self-help", (65) combining the images of materialism and salesmanship, but does Tuesdays with Morrie simply add to the heap?

As much as Schwartz's body failed him in those last months, he and Albom were always able to share a good laugh together. Albom's sense of humour emerges within the book's first few pages, when he gives a short physical description of Schwartz: "In his graduation robe, he looks like a cross between a Biblical prophet and a Christmas elf." (3) Having graduated from an American school that is known for its pageantry, there is a Henry VIII-level theatricality. One of the book's funniest moments comes when Schwartz is discussing his early career as a psychologist, when a woman told him how thankful she was to be in Chestnut Lodge mental hospital. When Schwartz is appropriately befuddled as to why someone would be thankful for being institutionalized, she quips back about the quality of the lodgings, "Can you imagine if I had to be in one of those cheap mental hospitals?" (110) Schwartz's jokes about needing to eventually have his behind wiped for him provides much-needed bathroom humour.

I would be remiss to read Tuesdays with Morrie as a cold, clinical document, as though it were some Elizabethan screenplay. Part of getting Albom's and Schwartz's full emotional spectrum is self-reflection during and after reading. I thought of my own experience with loss - at one point, I was losing a family member each calendar year. I also thought about all I've accomplished, and how excited I am to move forward with the rest of 2021. Schwartz draws considerable attention to the lack of meaning in peoples' lives when they live in the past, and how the mark of a meaningful life is the desire to always move forward toward the future. (118) As someone who always seeks new challenges, I like Schwartz's attitude. I'm trying to make each day even better than the last, complete with measurable happiness gains. For Schwartz to have spent those last few months of his life always looking toward the future, even when he had a distinguished past and the future held a lifetime of ALS, is courageous. 

In the spirit of my "giving credit where credit is due" tradition, I am pleased to credit Albom with teaching me a new word. Apparently, a "lavaliere" is "an ornamental pendant, usually jeweled, worn on a chain around the neck." It is also a type of microphone.

I read this entire book today, on a Tuesday.

Ease of Reading: 10

Educational Content: 3

*Other life guide-type books espouse similar values, sometimes with even less subtlety.

**I will hit 1,000 miles on the treadmill later this week. I have lost 25 pounds in 2021, one 5-pound month at a time. I should have run yesterday, but I didn't, so I'm going to take Morrie Schwartz's advice and forgive myself.

A Day of Authentic Happiness

For those who know me, I'm an extremely happy person, I love being the subject of focus groups or research studies, and I love arbitrarily defined Iron Man challenges. I'm also an Ivy League graduate. 

Naturally, when I saw the opportunity to sign up for the University of Pennsylvania's Authentic Happiness tests, for free, I figured: Why not complete all 26 tests in one day?

I completed 24 out of 26, as one is for children, and one requires a workplace profile that is impossible to approximate in these COVID times. Some tests are north of 100 questions, while others are under 10. There are no wrong answers, except when an answer is telegraphed to make you look worse. The lot of them took me almost 4 hours, with frequent meal/phone/bathroom/social media breaks.

Test Center link, for anyone interested in taking these tests themselves

Here are my results:

Key observations:

• I am apparently a happy person whose top strengths are Vitality and Love of Learning. I can get behind this.
• I found the Optimism Test the toughest to take. Often, there would be two options for a statement I would associate with an event, when I would associate neither with that event. On the plus side, I have a distinct lack of Permanence-Bad perspectives on life.
• I scored 41 out of 42 on Gratitude. I am a supremely grateful person, a reality for which I, to be circular, am quite grateful. (Admittedly, the low end is 6, not 0.)
• On the Grit Survey, measuring "perseverance and passion for long-term goals", I scored relatively high (3.92 out of 5), but right around the median for people of my education level. I wonder whether people with advanced degrees see those degrees as the long-term goals requiring perseverance and passion in the first place, making their answers relative to each other a batch of white noise.
• A few of the tests were so micro as to make me wonder about the extent of their usefulness. This was especially true with what I'll call parrot tests. A hypothetical parrot test question would be, "How happy are you on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being happiest?" Then, upon clicking the 5 button, the results page shows your happiness rating as a 5, based on that question alone.
• I've always found joy contagious and sadness repelling. In the absence of clarity, I was left to wonder: Do I have empathy? It turns out there is beneficial empathy and depleting empathy. I appear to have the former but not the latter, which syncs with my own self-observations.*
• The Approaches of Happiness test is interesting in that it divides meaning from pleasure. I tend to think more in terms of meaning, but I don't tend to turn down pleasure either. I had never made such a sharp distinction before. Then again, I tend to go light on creature comforts.
• My favourite tests were Jeremy Clifton's Primals tests, which assess individuals' core beliefs. Their general, interpretable, apolitical nature makes them more interactive than the typical political compass-type tests on these sorts of topics. The grueling process that went into designing the Primals tests is explained here.
• Speaking of Primals, I bristled a little at the idea that the world is either something that can constantly be improved, or else it is "inanimate [and] mechanical... without awareness or intent". What if a lot of things in this world are perfect just the way they are? I don't feel the need to improve a sunrise.

These were fun! I wish there were more...

Ease of Reading: 6

Educational Content: 8

*According to the results page for the Stress and Empathy Questionnaire,

If your score on this empathy assessment is positive, that means you have more beneficial than depleting empathy. Experiencing beneficial empathy maximizes a person’s health and well-being and predicts more charitable donations.

 

If your score on this empathy assessment is negative, that means you have more depleting than beneficial empathy. Experiencing depleting empathy has a negative effect on a person’s health and well-being and predicts less charitable donations

Happy Canada Day 2021!

As we gradually emerge from the almost year and a half that is the COVID-19 lockdowns, it's time to celebrate the 154th anniversary of Canada's independence!

Here's the view of the CN Tower from Tollkeeper's Park at the northwest corner of Bathurst and Davenport, taken by yours truly today, one of the most underrated views in Toronto:

Accompanied, of course, by the Unicorn flavour from Toronto's iconic Dutch Dreams ice cream parlour:

Here's today's Google search screen in full rodential commemoration:

Canada Day is an ongoing feature on this blog. Here's 2019 from beautiful Silent Lake Provincial Park, 2016's maple leaf picture day and Google theme, and some less admittedly inspired posts from 2013 and 2012. Then there's my Quora post from Christmas break 2017, which shows six pictures that sum up Canada.

With so much to be happy about and so many sources of pride, let's all celebrate one of the greatest nations in the world!

Happy Canada Day!

Incidental Haunted House Month! Hell House

Hell House by Richard Matheson

Horror (1971 - 301 pp.)

The year 2021 marks Hell House's 50-year anniversary. What a perfect time for more Richard Matheson on this blog, after 2013's entry on I Am Legend and 2019's entry on Somewhere in Time. It also marks the second haunted house-related entry in June 2021, after Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.*

In Hell House, physicist Lionel Barrett, his wife Edith, spiritual medium Florence Tanner and physical medium Benjamin Franklin Fischer are offered $100,000 by aging plutocrat William Reinhardt Deutsch to investigate the Belasco House, the apparently most haunted house in the world, in Maine in 1970. Previous attempts in 1930 and 1940 had been catastrophic, with most of the investigators dying; a young Ben was part of the 1940 team. Lionel comes armed with the Reversor, a machine that is supposed to negate the electromagnetic energy he believes to be causing the haunting, whereas Florence is more concerned with connecting with the house's energy on a spiritual level. Ben, drawing on his terrifying past experience, wants to use his physical energy to draw out the haunting more gradually. Edith is given no qualification other than being Lionel's wife.

The family patriarch Emeric Belasco had apparently been an early 20th century man of some importance, had many guests, murdered or disfigured many of them, and murdered his son Daniel. As in any Clue-style mansion, the action occurs not only in such mundane rooms as bedrooms, but also in the steam room, swimming pool and chapel. In what I sincerely hope is not a spoiler, the house is indeed haunted.

Matheson's language is middling in description, sticking to the main characters while offering few details about the house's architecture. By the middle of the book, I could imagine Florence standing right in front of me, but I could not imagine what any of the bathrooms look like. Matheson makes the action work by using short, choppy sentences during horror scenes, such as Florence's descent to the cellar in search of Daniel Belasco's body:

She cried out as unseen hands clutched her by the throat. She reached up and began to grapple with the hands. They were cold and moist. She yanked them away and staggered to the side. Regaining direction, she lunged for the wall. (116)

Matheson uses similarly staccato wording when spirits chase Edith later in the book, keeping up the tension, which produces horror that is actually scary:

Darkness fled; she was acutely conscious, knowing even as she flung herself into the empty doorway that she hadn't been allowed to faint. She lunged into the corridor and headed for the stairs. The air was thick with mist. (270)

Other linguistic intrigues include the use of pseudoscientific language to add to the eeriness, such as Lionel referring to "teleplasmic" (93) energy used by his Reversor machine, as well as intense descriptions of gore best left to the reader (184, 267).

Although Hell House has an ensemble cast, Florence is arguably the protagonist. She is the primary victim of the book's grisly body horror, nearly torn to shreds by the book's end. Early on, Edith demurs at how beautiful Florence** is, while Florence's naked body is described in a moderate amount of detail. (95) Florence's body, beautiful as Edith finds it, ends up being a "living puppet", which leads to a scene even I was surprised to read. (242)

When Florence ends up with teeth marks around her nipples, purportedly made by the spirit of Daniel Belasco, the other investigators struggle to believe her (120-121); after a similar attack to her head, they openly wonder whether she is injuring herself during psychotic breaks. This raises a question that I was shocked was never answered. Find a solid chocolate bar, such as a Dairy Milk or Jersey Milk, and take a bite out of it. You'll see that the marks made in the remaining chocolate are shaped differently based on your top and bottom teeth, which are shaped differently. If Florence had bitten her own breasts, the bite marks would appear upside down, as she would have to bring her breast up to her face, so that her top teeth marks would be below her nipple. If the bite marks were right-side up, with the top teeth marks above the nipple, someone else must have done the biting. Matheson's narrator never tells the reader the direction of the bite marks, nor do the characters seem to bother inquiring.

Although Hell House was filmed as The Legend of Hell House in 1973, with Matheson writing the script, Hell House would likely be unfilmable*** today. Hell House's first 50 pages are relatively uneventful, making any properly proportioned movie a slow burn like Psycho more than a modern thriller. The characters' social norms are firmly rooted in Matheson's era, resembling Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land more than anything a modern feminist might appreciate. The Florence body horror scenes would especially shock 2021 audiences' consciences, or else they would have to be so toned down they would lose what makes them scary. (Not because of the gore, to which we are all properly desensitized in this post-Saw world, but in the way the scenes sensationalize the abuse of women.) Hell House's gruesome combination of sex and gore could have worked in the '80s and '90s slasher heyday, but would be seen as retrograde now. For a truly retro comparison, think of how the naturalistic, gory Grand Guignol theatres of 1920s France would not have been seen as appropriate fare during the straight-laced 1950s.

Not only does Hell House feel set in the past because it is too edgy for the present, even the characters' names reflect this. Edith and Florence are names people would have had in 1971 - if they had been 80 years old. (Lionel is slightly more modern, peaking in the 1920s before making a surprising resurgence in the 21st century.) Each of the characters is in his or her 40s, though. Ben is the most pointed example, having been named directly after Benjamin Franklin, (146) who far predates any of the book's events. The Franklin comparison is apt for Ben's calm, patient style of physical medium practice, which can be compared to Franklin's kite experiment, finding ambient electrical charge by relatively simple means.

Although Matheson often straddles genres, at times writing what appears to be science fiction without using any science (Matheson was a journalist by training, for reference), the science fiction nerd in me has to ask: how on Earth does the Reversor work? Although there are vivid descriptions of Florence's medium work during times when the Reversor is operating, a blood and guts description of the Reversor's mechanisms would have been fun. Then again, if the Reversor were so readily describable, we'd all have to live with a different horror: that of some smart young engineer making a homemade Reversor.

Although Hell House isn't as strong a work as Somewhere in Time, and especially not as strong as Matheson's classic I Am Legend, it reads even faster. Once you get past page 100, you won't put it down. As much as I'd recommend Hell House for Halloween, the events take place from December 20-24, 1970. Step aside, Nightmare Before Christmas. It's tough to imagine scarier Christmas entertainment than Hell House.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 1

*In a strange coincidence, this is the second consecutive June featuring an incidental theme. June 2020 was Incidental Japan Month, when I read Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 and James Clavell's Shogun. Each of these books addresses a very different Japan, whereas each of June 2021's haunted house books are set in 20th-century New England.

**Florence is described as being 43 years old at the time of the investigation. This may be a feather in the cap of the "older models are pretty too" movement. However, it also makes the casting choice of 23-year-old Pamela Franklin in the 1973 movie The Legend of Hell House a curious one. I haven't yet seen the movie, but it looks like it'd pair well with my popcorn machine.

***New word? It might just be! I need to post a lexicon of all the words I improvise. What they all have in common is that they're close enough to existing words that their meanings are easy to derive from context.

Bonus Book! We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Horror (1962 - 186 pp.)

Of Shirley Jackson's work, I was previously only familiar with "The Lottery", which I read - and loved - years ago, as well as the fantastic Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. According to Jackson's biographer Judy Oppenheimer, when Jackson's physical and mental health deteriorated, her protagonists' own health went with it, in an extreme version of Real Life Writes the Plot. As We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Jackson's last, and purportedly best, work, it stands to reason that protagonist Mary Katherine ("Merricat") Blackwood is completely psychotic. Jackson does not disappoint.

The narrator, 18-year-old Merricat, lives with her 28-year-old sister Constance, their elderly uncle Julian, and, for a brief period during the book's second half, their 32-year-old cousin Charles. They inhabit the family home, located on a sprawling estate somewhere in New England, where Constance and Julian never leave. It falls to Merricat, and later Charles, to go shopping in the nearby village for books and groceries. Merricat is shunned by the villagers. The reader quickly finds out why; six years prior to the book, most of the Blackwood family died by arsenic poisoning, leaving only Merricat (who was not at dinner), Constance (who did not eat any poison) and Julian (who ate a small portion of poison, leaving him permanently disabled). Constance was charged with the murders but acquitted, although that helps her little in the local court of public opinion. The home dynamic resembles the classic 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, making 1962 a year marked by uncomfortable home drama creepiness.*

I saw the reveal (143) coming from essentially the start of the book, yet I was still impressed with Jackson's foreshadowing. Without spoiling any plot point, Merricat's frequent info dumping of her likes and dislikes, her predilections, and her deep-seated but unexplained hatreds come through numerous times. 

Where my perception of the book differs more from the traditional critical take is that I consider Charles to be a genuine good guy. He is preoccupied with the family fortune, but given how much longer Merricat and Constance have to live, the sisters should be thinking about money more. By contrast, in one scene, Merricat buries a substantial sum under the lawn, which Constance laughs off as an expression of Merricat's love of burying things. (115-116) Charles is frequently furious at the other characters, and rightly so; Merricat attempts to ward him off using magic, Julian calls Charles "John" after the deceased family patriarch, and Constance considers all of this and more to be perfectly tolerable. Meanwhile, Charles is so perplexed by Merricat's hostility toward him that he asks Jonas, "How can I make Cousin Mary like me?" (90) When Charles finally gives up on restoring the family relationship and finances, there is nothing left for Jackson to write. The Charles/Constance break is more of a game over for the Blackwood family than the original deaths or the housefire.

A subject that gripped me throughout the book is just how small the house's inhabitants' worlds are. For a book released contemporaneously with the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is no mention of the Cold War, no hint that any of the older characters could have been World War II veterans, and no mention of any place outside the small, unnamed New England village where Merricat shops. At the very start of the book, when Merricat passes the general store, she notes that "[i]n this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home." (13) It borders on preposterous that any character within Merricat's reclusive perception would ever think outside the boundaries of the village, which may as well be on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific.** This geographic isolation presents the Blackwoods' situation as retrograde, so We Have Always Lived in the Castle would be believable as a period piece set as early as the American Civil War. More currently, it calls to mind pandemic-related isolation, as well as life in a hotel. Would Zoom have helped the Blackwoods, or would it have simply been another medium for shunning them?

I was stunned to learn that We Have Always Lived in the Castle was never released as a feature movie until 2018. With its film-friendly horror genre and deranged narrator, clocking in at a svelte 48,140 words, it seems like a logical choice for the big screen. On top of that, We Have Always Lived in the Castle would have virtually zero special effects. Of course, the movie is not available in Canada on any of the streaming services I have, so the question is moot anyway. Merricat's narration*** is scary enough.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 2

*1962 is also the release year of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. By pure coincidence, 1962 was apparently a good year to release a novel ending in the word "Castle".

**Ironically, it is easier to imagine various science fiction characters who roam the galaxy jumping from solar system to solar system than to imagine Merricat, Constance or Julian walking two villages over.

***For a 1962-written comparison (what a year!), Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest intersects unreliable first-person narration with palpable mental illness. Books are arguably the best media at entering a narrator's head, especially with narrators like Merricat, who never even tell the reader what they look like, and tend to smash mirrors anyhow.

Up Close with Ontario's 2021 Gypsy Moth Explosion

2021 has seen one of the largest incidences of gypsy moths in Ontario in recent memory, eclipsing last year's gypsy moth bonanza. They're eating foliage.* They're "everywhere", causing "the worst infestation since the eighties". In a particularly scathing assessment, the Ottawa Citizen called gypsy moths, their caterpillars and their eggs "a cataclysmic insult".

Gypsy moth caterpillars "literally rain down out of the sky". 

They sure rained on me in the North Kawarthas earlier this month:

They crawled on my skin only briefly, so I didn't suffer any gypsy moth rash. They were actually kind of cute, as they periodically rear their front legs like tiny horses. Besides, who can resist something so small and fuzzy?**

Nonetheless, a pest is a pest, and a generally anti-pesticide person except when it's absolutely necessary, I thought: do any birds eat these critters?

The answer is that yes, they do, including some of Ontario's most iconic bird species. According to this Michigan State University bulletin from all the way back in April 1999:

Many birds do not like to feed on large, hairy gypsy moth caterpillars, but other species seem to relish them! Yellow-billed and black-billed cuckoos, blue jays, orioles and rufous-sided towhees are among the species that feed on gypsy moth caterpillars. Some birds, such as the black-capped chickadee, will also feed on egg masses and can sometimes cause substantial egg mortality.

Here's a closeup I snapped of a chickadee last October:

Either this one, or a similar chickadee, was so friendly it landed on my shoe - while it was on my foot. It was unfortunately too quick for me to get a picture, but these adorable chickadees apparently consider Eastern Ontario so familiar they're willing to land on its human inhabitants.

I've seen more blue jays farther south (in Toronto - how fitting), so it'd be nice to see them up in cottage country. I can't recall the last time I saw a cuckoo, a towhee or an oriole, but they'd be welcome.

One final issue: Terry McGlynn, the ecologist and conservationist who named the completely unrelated gypsy ants, regrets using the racist term "gypsy". In the interest of naming things, let's rename gypsy moths! Here are a few fun ideas:

• Destroyer moth, based on its Latin name Lymantria dispar
• Day moth or Sun moth, based on the fact that it is unusually diurnal
• Striped tree moth, based on its jagged stripe markings

I'm open to more ideas and fewer moths. Let's cross our fingers for an increase in the presence of local avians.

*I don't usually toot my own horn, but here, I must: my pictures are better than these Canadian Press pictures. Matthew Gordon, Ontario's new nature photographer?

**Remember Weepuls? Gypsy moth caterpillars are like living, elongated Weepuls.

June's Book: The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

War (1895 - 79 pp.)

In The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane tells a quintessential story about 18-year-old Henry Fielding,  a fresh recruit in the Union army in the Civil War. Crane was born in 1871, too late to serve in the Civil War, although he conducted an impressive dive into archival war research. He later served as a war correspondent in Greece during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, a conflict perhaps best known in the United States for being covered by Crane. His other experiences include being stranded in a dinghy for 30 hours.* After all this, Crane died at age 28 in a sanatorium in the Black Forest. I rarely discuss authors' lives in such detail on here, typically preferring intrinsic analysis, but Crane's life is asking for a biopic. How I had somehow managed to read so much literature without encountering his work is a mystery to me, especially considering I have completed a course on American literature up to 1900.

The Red Badge of Courage is reminiscent of other turn-of-the-century** American adventure stories like White Fang and "A Resumed Identity", in terms of pulpy style and boundless optimism. Crane lived and wrote in arguably the most wide-eyed, forward-thinking era in American history, which shows in his use of the Civil War as a backdrop for camaraderie, wit, and the ability for a young man to learn how to take charge. Later Civil War stories showcase the war's brutality, such as in Bring the Jubilee, but Crane is content to have his teenage soldiers learn militaristic values. Fielding and his friend Wilson are shuttled around to different battlefields, at times carrying rifles or bearing standards. In a Looney Tunes-esque series of incidents, Fielding is whacked with a rifle, shot in the head just enough for it to hurt, and taken aback at how new some of the Confederate uniforms are.^ 

Crane's writing is fast-paced and magazine-like, with plenty of imagery. An early example of a battle scene could have been used as a US Army recruitment ad:^^

Bullets began to whistle among the branches of the trees. Showers of pine needles and pieces of wood came falling down. It was as if a thousand axes were being used.

The lieutenant of the youth’s regiment was shot in the hand. He began to curse so magnificently that a nervous laugh went through the regiment. It relieved the tightened senses of the men. (60)

The Red Badge of Courage is such an easy read, especially by the standards of often dense 19th-century fiction, I am stunned it is not in more educational curricula. That said, I have only ever attended high school in Ontario, where those inhabitants who do ever think about the US Civil War look on in horrified apoplexy. The phrase "Civil War" is just as likely to refer to the English Civil War here, or to the Guns 'N' Roses song.

Crane may be a difficult author to explain, values-wise. Before World War I, heroism in battle was so vaunted that soldiers would invite their own wounds: "At times he wished he were wounded. He believed persons with torn bodies were unusually happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound—a red badge of courage." (77) Although honour and duty are likely not completely expired virtues, it is difficult to identify with someone who sees the world the way Fielding sees it. Now, of course, veneration of 1890s-era values is confined to memorabilia collections. Perhaps an Art Nouveau revival is in order.

Thanks to the magic of the public domain, the book is available in its entirety here.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 3

*Back in 2018, I was trapped in an elevator for an hour. This is the closest I have come to such a predicament. I also had a phone on me, which, suffice to say, someone in the 1890s decidedly did not.

**It never ceases to amaze me that, even after another century has turned, we still use the phrase "turn of the century" to describe the period surrounding the year 1900.

^It is unclear whether Crane's depiction of jaunty new Confederate uniforms (114) belies a lack of understanding of just how ragged Confederate uniforms tended to be, or whether Fielding lucks out by seeing what few new uniforms there were.

^^The Spanish-American War was fought three years after The Red Badge of Courage's release, and was portrayed using some of the same types of images. Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill could have been devised by Crane as a plot point.

Happy Victoria Day! With Happy Days All Around

Happy Victoria Day!

A view of the sky, Victoria Day 2020.

For those of us in Canada, where Victoria Day is a statutory holiday, that much was obvious. However, it turns out that there have been many other commemorative days this past week. My social media feeds are teaching me something, it seems.

On this holiday Monday of gorgeous weather and relaxing outside, on a day commemorating the monarch when Canada gained independence, let's also reflect on:

International Museum Day: Celebrated on May 18th every year, International Museum Day gives tourists and locals alike as good a reason as any to delve into the world's rich physical and cultural history. Sadly, I wasn't at a museum on May 18th in either 2020 or 2021 due to COVID-19-related restrictions, but the spirit lives on.

World Bee Day: Celebrated on May 20th every year, World Bee Day is a time to give thanks for all bees do for us, from pollenating flowers to creating delicious honey. I admired my houseplant while eating my homemade honey mustard dressing; I don't know a more festive way to celebrate from home. Remember, colony collapse is a science fiction-level disaster. Buzz on!

World Turtle Day: Shellebrated* on May 23rd every year, World Turtle Day lets us all watch Franklin, dream of post-pandemic Galapagos adventures, and withdraw into our shells at the end of a long, exhausting day. I wasn't sure how to mark the occasion, so 

On some other year, Victoria Day may fall on any of these days. Victoria Day is, by definition, the Monday on or before May 24, meaning it will always fall on May 18-24. I like it best this way, celebrating four days instead of three. If you've heard of these other fine days, now you get to see them all in one place.

Bzzzt!

*The World Turtle Day website encourages the use of this groan-worthy pun. Don't shoot the messenger.

May's Book: The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Post-Apocalypse (2006 - 287 pp.)

Cormac McCarthy's The Road became a feature film within three years of its release (2009). I saw it when it came out, at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto. Usually, I read a book before watching the movie. In the case of The Road, watching the movie first helped me read the book.

The Road follows the lonely story of a man and his son travelling by foot across an unnamed portion of a post-apocalyptic United States of America. No character is ever named, even in memories, but there's never an everyman feel to The Road because of how non-relatable the experience is. The Road is perhaps best told as a movie, aside from Viggo Mortensen's terrific acting job, because of how blurred together the various buildings and stretches of road become in McCarthy's novel. McCarthy's dialogue and imagery are intense, drawing the reader into the story, but in a disembodied way that makes it feel like the reader is never really in those haunted houses or huddled under a beaten-up scrap of tarp.

McCarthy's refusal to reveal the cause of the apocalypse is crucial to The Road's appeal, yet he weaves the story so vividly I never bother to wonder what happened. Different eras worry about different apocalypses, from foreign takeover to mutually assured destruction to who knows what. The unstated apocalypse of The Road focuses instead on the contrast between the before times, which the father remembers constantly but exist only as a haze to the son, and the after times, which are so rife with danger that survival is the only goal. When the father recalls the before times early on, when the mother is still alive, "She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame." (19) McCarthy presents it as though it is a still from an old movie, the film wearing away with time as the owner frets over losing a memory. The after times are so bereft of options that the reader never stops to wonder what the father used to do for a living or where the son would have gone to school. The Road must have been simultaneously easy and difficult to write: easy in that a lot of character background can be omitted, difficult in that each scene has to shuffle the deck in terms of ways to portray life on the eponymous road.

The tensest moments are when the father and the son encounter other people. The floor hatch scene, (in)famous for how scary it is in the movie, makes the reader's heart beat faster just as the characters' hearts do. For all the monotony that most of the road entails, the main challenge being the stripped-down version of nature the characters endure, human threats present some of the greatest difficulties: "Run, he whispered. We have to run." (111) Conversely, the father and the son stay for short stretches in various abandoned houses, where the presumably deceased former inhabitants leave behind canned foods for our heroes' taste treats. Coca-Cola, canned pears, and canned tuna are among the best finds. As canned food evolves, a more futuristic take on The Road could feature anything from canned tom yum to canned butter chicken soup - but that would be cold (heated-up?) comfort to future characters.

For all the harshness of nature, whether it's the burnt-out ex-farmland or the oncoming winter, wildlife never seem to be a concern. Bears and wolves, if they still exist, don't appear tempted by the stacks of supplies people leave out while they go for walks on the beach. Humans, not animals, are the scavengers. The lack of corporeal wildlife makes the mere mention of animals as a conversation topic into spiritual subject matter. When the father and the son discuss the phrase "as the crow flies", the conversation quickly turns toward crows' lack of need to follow the road, charting their paths all over (but not as far as Mars), prompting the boy to ask: "If you were a crow could you fly up high enough to see the sun?" (158) It's refreshing to see some of the world's smartest avians presented as stand-ins for dreams of freedom rather than as stand-ins for death. Euphemistically left out of the corvid banter is that if people, who can open cans for food, are so starving, crows' situations must be at least as bad, if not worse.

The relationship between The Road's characters and freedom is a strained one. With society destroyed, there's no one left to tax, compel, or otherwise corral the characters. There's also nothing left to fight for. There's no freedom to do anything, as anything worth doing is irreparably lost, like a Toronto Raptors game during the COVID-19 pandemic but for all time. It also means that anytime a possession is lost, whether it's an article of clothing or a frying pan, replacing that item is a morbid scavenger hunt. Some of the people the father and son pass on the road stink and are wearing rags.

Amorality reigns in The Road, but the father grounds the son by repeatedly insisting that they're "the good guys". The bad guys are highway robbers, so by refusing to rob from others, or do anything worse, while repelling any robbers they meet, the father and the son become good guys by default. The son, who has few memories of the before times, ingrains the good guys/bad guys duality as his morality, in the absence of anything else. Near the end of the book, he asks a kindly stranger on the beach:

How do I know youre** one of the good guys?

The stranger answers:

You dont. You'll have to take a shot. (283) 

The guessing game the father and son play - deciding which houses to enter, which people to approach or avoid, which places to sleep - is totally encapsulated in those two lines.

Neither good nor bad, The Road is verbose. McCarthy uses words I didn't know frequently enough that I didn't bother looking up many of them, as I can generally tell what he means through context. Sometimes, the terminology creates a darkly medical atmosphere, as in "rachitic"; at other times, entire sentences are composed mainly of 7+ letter words. The density of the language adds to the book's dreamlike quality, as a first-person narrator would never describe the world with such arcaneness.

My emotional connection to the book revolves around the growing awareness of just how much I have, as does everyone I know. Something as mundane as a dish towel - there are four of them hanging in front of my oven - borders on unthinkable in The Road's world. I'm surrounded by outlets, which power all manners of electrical devices that occupy my time during the stay at home order; in The Road, electrical power is non-existent. When I lock my door, I feel content that I'm safe from whomever may lurk beyond my premises... but, as in post-apocalyptic fiction more generally,* the father and the son don't even feel safe when they're barricaded in a basement.

They have nothing, yet the pass the time they have, just like we all do. I'm just thankful for all the lighting, shelter and fresh food.

Ease of Reading: 8

Educational Content: 1

*Now there's a good novel study project: comparing the highway robbers in The Road to the vampires in I Am Legend.

**At various points, McCarthy omits apostrophes in contractions. It makes the book feel more scrawled down, although the presence of apostrophes in other places confuses the matter.