Years ago, I dubbed Kathy Shaidle the Only Good Canadian.
My general hatred of Canada is so well-known I’m surprised the SPLC hasn’t taken notice, but that’s the thing about hating Canadians — it’s so commonplace that even liberals don’t object to it. Anyway, some of my readers who divide their digital downtime between obscure political message boards and offshore casinos objected that Kathy was not the only good Canadian, and I’m willing to stipulate that there may be a few others like her, but none of them could possibly be as good as she is. Her blog Five Feet of Fury was a regular read back in the day, and she’s been a columnist at various outlets — including a stint at PJMedia, another at Taki’s, and most recently doing film reviews at Mark Steyn’s place. Her most famous aphorism is, “You’re not smart enough to tell me how to live.”
Well, Kathy developed ovarian cancer, which is now in a very advanced stage, and her husband who blogs at Blazing Cat Fur has got an online fundraiser to which everyone should contribute.
. Ms. Shaidle, proprietress of the 
and Mencken’s 
, the main problem with this book is that the covers are too close together.
, which would have been a righteous doorstop of a book if I’d bought the dead tree edition, but since I borrowed it from the Amazon Prime Lending Library it was merely a nice long read. Harrington has done a good job of writing a distinctly different sort of fantasy, set in a world where magic works very differently, magicians fall out of the sky periodically, and a farmer’s boy comes back from a mushroom gathering walk in the woods to find all the adults in his village slaughtered, all the children enslaved, and the world’s best bowman searching through the wreckage to see what, if anything, can be salvaged. From that grim beginning stems a coming-of-age novel that’s also an epic tale of revenge involving dragons, an utterly corrupt (but still brutally, effectively, oppressive) Hegemony, a less corrupt matriarchy, and a number of other folks who help our hero on his way. Also, magical oranges that wind up changing the world for the better. All things considered, this is a fun book and well worth the money I’m going to drop on it when I have to give it back at the end of the month. 
, the classic novel of the prewar Army in Hawaii. This is the restored edition with more of the original obscenities and a couple of sections that were deleted from the original print edition by squeamish editors and lawyers, along with an afterword that discusses those edits, and the whole thing is definitely worth the $3.03 (see what they did there?) Amazon wants for the Kindle edition. I originally talked a lot about this book in the long-ago 21 Books post and really don’t have anything new to add; the restored parts don’t significantly change the plot in any way. I do not, on the other hand, recommend the other two-thirds of Jones’ trilogy (
and 
); Jones was apparently obsessed with using the same characters in all three books despite killing off Prewitt at the end of the first novel, and as a result they wind up being textbook examples of the maxim that most authors have one good book in them, their first, and spend the rest of their careers trying to rediscover the spark that made that first book so special. This is not to say that the latter two books don’t have their moments, because they do, but if I had to do it over again I would have borrowed them from the library instead of buying them.