March 10th, 2012
#19 – The Canterbury Trail by Angie Abdou
I follow @Angie_Abdou on Twitter, and she follows me. It’s a fun internet friendship. We have similar tastes in books and a penchant for crying at inopportune moments. And when I confessed that I have a strange obsession with climbing-related nonfiction, she asked if I’d enjoy climbing-related fiction and promptly mailed me a copy of her intense, addictive, and refreshing novel, The Canterbury Trail.
Of course, I’m going to digress — I lived in a town not unlike the fictional Coalton, BC. I fooled around with a boy or two insanely like F-Bomb, SOR and Loco, and while I never stayed in Banff long enough to get to ski season, I certainly did my share of dumb, dangerous things the two summers I spent there during university. And I got it. The reason why people live in places like Coalton. For me, and it’s not this way for everyone, it was one-part my youth and another part my need to run away, it wasn’t real life. I completely got Alison, the slightly-older journalist who decamped to the town and invited herself up the mountain with the boys just for the ride. When I lived in Banff, we had no television, no phone, no internet, no radio, no newspapers, nothing to tether us back down to society except beer, mountains, and elk. It was awesome. (more…)
December 19th, 2011
#80 – #83 – Review Catch-Up
Getting caught up with book reviews might be an impossibility at this point. There are a few that I think deserve full, thoughtful reviews. But for some of the books that I’ve finished over the last little while I just want to note that I’ve read them, you know?
So, here’s my lesson: do not buy multiple books by the same author if you a) have never read the author and b) don’t know if you’d like the author’s voice in the first place. Way in the way back, I bought a copy of The Polished Hoe because it won the Giller. Then, because I thought to myself, Clarke was a Giller-winner and therefore must be a great writer, I bought a copy of another novel of his, More, before actually reading The Polished Hoe. And I found More an exceptionally hard book to get through. I’m glad I read it — it’s an interesting look at a woman living in downtown Toronto who abandoned her life’s dreams upon arriving here after taking up with a rogue of a man and having a son who becomes difficult to raise as he grows older. Yet the story, told in extreme stream of consciousness over the course of a few days when Idora discovers her son is missing (and she refuses/is scared to go to the police), remains incredibly hard to follow. And the voice, complex, issue-driven, and difficult, yet heartbreaking at the same time — it’s a highly personalized narrative, but it’s also confusing in terms of locating a coherent time/place in terms of the story. And that about did me in, I often found myself wondering where is she, what happened? how long has passed? throughout each of the diversions from the actual time frame of the novel. And then, I discovered that The Polished Hoe is written in much the same vernacular. Oh boy. Avoiding reading The Polished Hoe had me reorganizing ALL of my books in alphabetical order (instead of alphabetical by country/reading challenge) JUST to put it off for a few more days/weeks.
#81 – Make the Bread, Buy the Butter
I read this book over a few weeks on my iPad and enjoyed it immensely. Former EW writer Jennifer Reese. Over the course of many, many months Reese undertook an enormous task: is it actually cheaper to make anythings and everything at home? From butter to cheese to vermouth to chickens to turkeys to you name it, Reese tried to make it. And you know, the results were fascinating. It was an interesting experiment — and wholly interesting in terms of the comparisons. I don’t think I’d ever make a cheesie from scratch but I might actually go back to using our breadmaker in the new year (if I can find it). The only downfall was that the formatting of the ebook was terrible — drop boxes ending up in places that didn’t make sense, strange typos, and odd recipe layouts.
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how this book ended up on my shelves. I avoided it for months, giving up my British shelf to focus on the Canadian, because I had zero interest in reading this novel. And yet, the novel was a complete delight — the story of a young girl, coming of age, coming out, who has to cope not only with being an awkward, outcast of a teenager, but with her mother’s manic depression. Jesse wants nothing more than to fit in and, after her mother returns from hospitalization, her father moves the family to a new town where she falls in with the popular (cruel) kids. The difficulties of leading a double life, not only hiding her mother’s troubling state of mind from her friends, but also her own sexuality, come to fruition with a somewhat cliched but still utterly engrossing conclusion. This novel completely surprised me, in a good way. Beale’s a strong, empathetic writer, and by the end I was rooting so hard for Jesse that I had to remind myself she wasn’t real.
SJ Watson’s thriller seems to have done the impossible — thrilled literary and non-literary readers alike with an insanely addictive novel that is literally impossible to put down once you’ve started. In many ways, we, as a society are spoiled by the massive amount of entertainment that’s available to us. To someone who consumes a lot of pop culture, surprises are hard to come by. I mean, I can count on one hand how many times in the last ten years I’ve actually been fooled by “twists” in movies. I’m not going to step out and say that Watson’s novel is perfect — there are little inconsistencies that made me a little mental — but here’s the trick, I roared through this novel in less than a day and that’s while working full-time and taking care of a toddler. And that’s saying something about the power of his writing. When Christine wakes up, she has no idea who or where she is, amnesia has taken her life, and not for weeks, for years. Kept carefully and safely by her husband (or IS she?), Christine slowly manages to both overcome her medical condition and discover what really happened all those years ago. The novel keeps you hooked (although, like I said, anyone who knows their pop culture/thrillers/Julia Roberts movies will guess the ending) and it’s a terrific novel for a rainy Sunday afternoon when there are no good films on your PVR .
December 5th, 2011
#79 – The Virgin Cure
Way back in the way back, when I started working in publishing as a lowly little Digital Marketing Manager at Random House of Canada, I had the pleasure of working with Ami McKay, whose first novel, The Birth House, charmed even the most cynical among us lowly bibliophiles (read: me). For years afterwards, I sent many authors towards Ami’s website, Twitter feed, etc., as a picture perfect example of how to build a really terrific digital footprint. McKay is open, honest, forthright and utterly authentic — it’s impossible not to like her. You know?
So I kept all of this in mind when I was reading The Virgin Cure. It becomes harder and harder to read books, and then review them critically and/or comprehensively read them without allowing for personal feelings to creep into my thoughts about the book. Reading Ami McKay’s blog, you know immediately how much research she had done for the novel; you understand the personal connection to the topic; and you feel her very intense dedication to her work. It’s lovely that it’s utterly apparent that all of this is totally apparent in the end result as well.
Moth, part gypsy, part lost girl, lives with her fortune telling mother in a tenement building in New York’s Lower East Side. When her mother sells her off into the service of a wealthy woman, Moth takes her future in her own hands. The opportunities for young girls, orphaned, abandoned, are not great and, yet, Moth does what she has to in order to survive. McKay’s novel is heavy on action — it rips along like some of the best historical thrillers I’ve read, reminding me of books like Slammerkin and Fingersmith. While there’s no overt “twist” like there is in either of those novels, there is a somewhat shocking reveal that I won’t go into too much detail here so as not to spoil it. (more…)
October 30th, 2011
#78 – Saints of Big Harbour by Lynn Coady
Anyone who might dismiss Lynn Coady’s masterful Saints of Big Harbour as a regional novel would be selling themselves short, I think. Yes, it’s set in Nova Scotia in a small town adjunct to an even smaller hamlet where life resists any change that doesn’t first come in the form of a rumour; and yet, it’s as a pure novel that explores the ideas of love, life, and family as I’ve ever read anywhere. The whole book just swooped in and stole my heart.
Guy wants nothing more than to date a girl “not from around here.” “Here” being the place where he’s grown up, outside of town, with a single mother, a sister who has already escaped, and a half-crazed uncle hell bent on ruining his life all the while claiming to save it. And when the girl of his dreams turns out to be slightly unhinged (or a teenager), his life takes a complex turn. As if being a teenager isn’t hard enough, Guy has to contend with Isadore, his unhinged, alcoholic uncle, whose violent, angry, controlling tendencies keep his family under continual threat of emotional explosion. And when Corinne Fortune makes up a story about him, avoiding violence (from her brother, from his uncle) becomes a way of life for poor Guy.
It’s a multi-perspective novel, and more and more Coady’s writing reminds me of other great Canadian storytellers like Paul Quarrington. There’s an element of humour. An instance of absurdity. And yet, it feels so utterly honest and real, and depicts a life that if I took one step to the right, I could completely see myself living. That’s how real her characters feel to me. The story barrels along and it hums with efficiency — there’s so much truth in the telling, from her portrayals of alcoholism to the unhappiness of a teenage girl, that I was consistently amazed at the evenness of Coady’s storytelling — it never falters, never waivers.
October 27th, 2011
#77 – Mean Boy by Lynn Coady
After reading Lucky Jim for book club, there was chatter about other “set in post-secondary education” novels and whether or not they were successful. One of the books that was mentioned was Lynn Coady’s Mean Boy. As I’ve talked about earlier, I’ve been on a quest this year to clear off my shelves and get through all the books gathering dust in my life. It’s an impossible task — I’ve been reading my “old” books in a haphazard, semi-alphabetical/dewey-like system since a few months into the RRBB’s life. I was, at first, reading “A” titles from Canada, England, etc., and then gave up and just wanted to power through one country before moving on to another. So, I’ve started with my Canada shelf, and I’m at C now (FINALLY) and have three Lynn Coady novels to get through (four if I add the *new* The Antagonist to the list even though I’ve promised myself that I’ll only read one new book for every one from the TBR pile), which means it’s weeks before I get through just this one particular author, sheesh. All of this rambling is to say that I’m knee-deep in Coady these days. I raced through Mean Boy, am half-way through The Saints of Big Harbour, and had actually started The Antagonist weeks ago before I felt too guilty for not reading all of her backlist. In a lesser writer I’d be frustrated by having to read so many of their books in such a short period of time. Lucky for me then to discover that I LOVE Lynn Coady. (more…)
#76 – Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
Short stories are epic and amazing things to read on the subway. They give you the false impression that they are “lighter” reading than novels because of their length, but I’ve been finding that so many of the collections I’ve read as of late pack an emotional punch that knocks me out after ten rounds a-la the Ali rope-a-dope, and none walloped me harder than Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner.
Like many obnoxious city dwellers, I pride myself on my political correctness. I urge my life forward in terms of pop culture knowledge and feel some pride that I can still scramble in some quality viewing in terms of films, television. I’m achingly earnest about my interest in environmental issues, even if we struggle on a daily basis with our consumption and teaching our families about our feelings about how much stuff there is in the world. But Zsuzsi Gartner takes a machete to pop culture, and slices through it with her razor-sharp prose, like I said on Twitter, and inevitably makes you think about it in a way that consistently questions my own steadfast resolve in my own “goodness” (if that makes any sense).
In many of her stories, there’s an element of the fantastic — a man reverts back to the stone age, becoming more neanderthal by the day, barbecues become open pits, women turn feral, and a young girl rides out of the ravine on a tortoise. The group of neighbours, all healthy, wealthy and utterly politically correct, can’t understand what’s so appealing about ripping open a 2-4 and roasting giant, hulking hunks of meat over an open flame. Houses disappear due to mud slides (I imagine) but never claim a human life. Young, adopted Chinese girls fly up into the air and are no longer human. The stories are awe-inspiring. Both in the sense that Gartner’s awe-inspiring imagination is unparalleled in Canadian writing (I think) but also in how she manages to create a world that’s so utterly familiar and terrifically strange at the same time. I’s kind of like Fringe, in a way, with two realities — the one in which I live every day and the other where it’s not strange to see a blimp floating on by. (more…)
October 20th, 2011
#75 – What We All Long For by Dionne Brand
There’s a definite advantage to being back at work and that’s reading time during my morning and evening commutes. One would think that would have me reading at a furious pace except that now my days are so full that I feel as though we are in a sailboat during one hell of a windstorm with the waves threatening to capsize our vessel at any moment. So, I’m reading but I’m not finishing a lot of books. And I’m still desperately trying to get through my shelves because I’ve started, gasp, collecting all kinds of books again now that they are there and ripe for the picking. I just can’t seem to resist a shortlist these days.
So, I finished Dionne Brand’s novel, What We All Long For, a couple weeks ago, and haven’t had the chance to string any thoughts together until now. The novel opens up with a heartbreaking tragedy: a Vietnamese family attempting to flee their native country loses their son in the mayhem of the escape. Quy’s father thinks his mother has him; his mother thinks the opposite. And it turns out neither does, the boy, just a toddler really, mistakes a pair of shoes, pants, for his father and ends up on a boat that takes him entirely away from his loved ones and into a world of crime, abuse and relentless self-survival. When his family lands in Toronto, they are broken and never truly recover, even the siblings born after the boy is lost feel an emptiness where a there should be a brother.
Quy’s youngest sister Tuyen, whom he never met, bridges the difficult gap between the two worlds. Her parents want her to stay home, to be more family-oriented, and she wants to spread her wings, explore her art and her sexuality, move beyond the sadness that has defined their lives to this point. Tuyen and her friends Carla, Oku and Jackie, are all young, just trying to find a way to live life on their own terms, to battle their own demons. They are the children of immigrants straddling expectations and opportunities with an increasingly split perspective, and writing this kind of dichotomy is something that Brand does exceptionally well. (more…)
October 11th, 2011
#74 – The Communist’s Daughter
I remember reading all about the advance and/or the sale of Dennis Bock’s first novel, The Ash Garden. And when I read the novel, I was completely taken by not only the story but his writing as well. But then, The Communist’s Daughter, despite how much I enjoyed the first novel, sat on my shelves for years and years and years. So I’m glad that I’m reading in alphabetical order because this novel probably would have sat on my shelves for another many years without it.
Years ago, I felt very Canadian as I watched on the CBC or some such, Donald Sutherland’s starring role as Norman Bethune. Who knows why, but in my romantic youth I was obsessed with Bethune. Perhaps I had always dreamed of communist doctors fighting for the good cause in faraway places. Perhaps I had idealized the idea of the Spanish Civil War in terms of all the great minds that participated in the cause. All of this is to say that I’m much older now. No longer a wide-eyed innocent, I enjoyed Bock’s portrayal of Bethune in this novel, even if, as anyone know who reads this blog, the format (it’s epistolary) drove me bananas.
The novel opens with a series of letters, each in a different ‘envelope,’ written on old typewriter with a mocked up old ribbon to Bethune’s daughter, whom he has never met. Born in Spain to his Swedish lover, the girl’s mother passed away in tragic circumstances, leaving Bethune bereft but not dissuaded from his cause. When he begins his tale, truly a record of his life, loves and losses, for his daughter, Bethune’s in China attempting to shore up battlefield surgeries, improve their frontline medical conditions and teach the masses about not only blood transfusions but also the fundamentals of Western hospital care. Struck with tuberculosis while a younger man, his lungs are troubled now and his health is failing. Before he finishes, he needs to tell his daughter everything about his life, from beginning to end, and the narrative skips back and forth from Canada to China, from Spain and the oceans in between. (more…)
September 2nd, 2011
Good Gravy, Reviews, Wha?
I am so behind in, not just my reading, but my writing about my reading it isn’t even funny. So, for posterity, I have finished the following books:
#66 – A Gate At The Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Truth be told, I loved this book like a high school crush, I couldn’t get enough of it. The tragedy of it felt a bit forced but the writing remained so fresh and inspiring all the way through that I forgave Moore for the melodrama. Her writing reminds me a little of Miriam Toews (I’m reading Irma Voth right now) and perhaps that’s why I ear-marked about 100 pages of phrases and thoughts that melted my heart as Tassie Keltjin, a 20-year-old university student who becomes a nanny only for the entire situation to go so magnificently awry in the most horrible of ways (no death, nothing gruesome, just sad), suffers through one of the most pivotal years of her life. The book is so, so sad, but that’s what makes it so, so good in my estimation.
#67 – Pulse by Julian Barnes
Personally, and I’ll take anyone to task, I think Barnes is one of the best short story writers working today. It’s an amazing little collection. I liked every story. I love Barnes. I don’t know what else to say. Well, except that the package — the cover art etc., is terrible. Truly.
#68 – Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay
My, when I started this book I raved and raved to my aunt that Elizabeth Hay was one of the best Canadian writers working today. The story of the young girl’s murder, the narrator’s amazingly intriguing aunt Connie, the setting (Ottawa and Saskatchewan), it all came together and gave me a reason to rip through the pages, and then half-way through the book, the whole thing sort of fell flat, like a ginger ale, really awesome when you first open it, then by the time you get to the bottom of the can, your teeth hurt and your whole mouth feels kind of fuzzy. It’s not her best novel, and that’s all I’m going to say at the moment because I am about to go and play some cards on my last night here at the cottage.
July 26th, 2011
#54 – Suddenly
First, I am going to preface this review with a statement: I adored Bonnie Burnard’s The Good House. It’s a novel I picked up on a whim from Book City when it was first published and sang its praises to everyone who would listen for years. It’s a classic, right up there with The Stone Diaries, Clara Callan, and Away (book I read all around the same time), and so I was excited to read Bonnie Burnard’s latest novel Suddenly, if only because it’s the first one she’s published in 10 years. That’s a long time to wait.
Sadly, I probably never should have read this book. It’s neither the right time of my life (it’s a novel about truly middle-aged women) nor am I in the right frame of mind (having spent the last nine months battling my own life-threatening disease, I couldn’t quite cope with the breast cancer victim at the centre of the novel) to appreciate the gift of Suddenly. There’s no doubt in my mind that Bonnie Burnard’s a wonderful writer. She has an ability to bring the everyday to the page that’s unparalleled by many of her contemporaries. It’s a unique gift, and her voice reminds me deeply of Carol Shields, which is why I was so very disappointed in this book.
Sandra, our heroine, finds an evil lump in her breast at the end of the summer — her grandchildren have just gone back to the city with her husband, and she sits alone after a swim contemplating the hard reality of her future. Of course, her friend Jude has battled breast cancer and survived, and Sandra hopes she will too. Alas, it is not to be, and the majority of the novel takes place on her deathbed, that awesome Canadian-woman-writer-trope, where the family rallies around and all of the action takes place in reverse as the dying go through their lives, their relationships, their happiness and their regrets with a fine-toothed comb.
But one remains easily lost within this book because the point of view isn’t that simple, it switches from Sandra, to her best friend Colleen (who is beautiful, but childless, natch, and married to Sandra’s brother, the surgeon Richard), to her other best friend Jude (the ex-hippie, jilted by a Texan lover who left her on a farm to go fight the Vietnam war after casually fathering her son), to her husband Jack, and back again. It’s all over the place and the pronoun “she” doesn’t help matters when all three main characters are women…
It’s a tedious book, with tedious, unbelievable characters: Sandra’s a saint; so’s Colleen only she’s beautiful too, Jude’s “wild” but reformed, and they all feel so old they’re covered in a layer of dust. These are the women of my mother’s generation, one of them could have been my mother, and yet they have no sense of humour, no sense of adventure and really no life in them at all — even when it’s “flashing” before them as their best friend fades away in a cloud of morphine and horrible pain from an awful disease that takes far too many women. The title confused me for nothing happens quickly in this book — Burnard takes pages and pages to describe the most mundane aspects of everyday life, episodes that would have been best excised, and the whole novel would have been better for me if it read chronologically, if I got to see these women through their lives and not just as flashbacks in Sandra’s journals, which, of course, she kept religiously her entire life.
But I feel bad being so critical, which is why I think that my original statement, that it’s neither the right time of my life nor am I in the right mindset to contemplate a novel about someone so willingly giving in to a disease — not fearing death is one thing but Sandra’s utterly unrealistic in terms of her approach to illness; no one is as saintly as she’s portrayed on the page, no one. There’s no anger, and even when there is, it’s slightly ridiculous — two women having slight “words” during a winter storm and then poof, it’s back to celebrating Sandra and her ability to hold the other two women together. Yawn.
I much prefer Lionel Shriver’s approach to illness: frank, honest, angry, and also accepting — there’s something raw and real to how she writes about sickness, and I appreciated it. There’s tedium to being sick, to having tests, to being stuck in a bed, and anger, relentless, unceasing anger about the fact that your body just isn’t doing what it’s supposed to. And I’d hope that Sandra would have a glimpse of this throughout the book, that someone, anyone, might rage against the dying of the light just a little before rubbing more lotion on her cold feet or recalling some other wonderful thing she did during her abnormally normal life and marriage.
So don’t blame Burnard — it’s a great book club book for women of my mother’s age, it’s a terrific book to give your mother-in-law for Christmas, and it would have done wonders if Oprah’s Book Club still existed and ever considered that Canada has a literature from which to choose reading material. But Suddenly, with its long, drawn-out conclusion (Sandra dies! People mourn!) just didn’t cut it for me, a girl of a certain age who has battled a mean-ass frustrating disease for months.