Ten-year-old Gemma, an orphan now twice-over, finds herself shunted away to Claypoole, where she’s a “working girl,” scrubbing floors and dusting shelves for just to sustain her Annie-like existence and meagre education. But she’s strong willed and good of heart, and lands an au pair position in the Orkneys, where her fate is forever linked with that of her employer’s, Mr. Sinclair. As with the original book, morality and secrets are the enemy of love, and Gemma finds herself chased away, yet again, from yet another home. She lands not fifty miles from her awful aunt’s house, and must come to face the truth of her own existence, her own life’s story, before she can even consider whether or not she’d like to be married. Set after the Second World War, when Scotland itself must have been changing, where the men and the women who had been through the battles faced a different world when they returned, Gemma’s life opens up for her in ways that her predecessor, Jane, would have most likely reveled in.

While I found some of the strings tying this novel to the other a bit flimsy, in the end, it didn’t matter because Gemma’s such a wonderful character in her own right. When she sets off to “find herself,” pushed to the brink by the choices forced upon her by both society and “good” morals, you root for her entirely, and that’s enough for me. Knowing the “other” Jane’s story so well becomes irrelevant by the end of the book, as if Livesay wrote herself out of it on purpose, if only to prove how far we’ve all come, to examine the roots of feminism, of free will, of delight in the power of learning, all of which, I’m sure, Brontë would have reveled in herself. Like Emma described it to me, this is a book for people who love books, and she’s not at all wrong.

By far my favourite stories are the ones taking place in a natural setting. And by far by far, the one I enjoyed the best was the very first one, “Geology in Motion.” Because, how could you not love a story that starts like this: “Lorrie and Kate tended to say too much.” You see, they talk themselves right into an Alaskan vacation, two over-sized ladies in an under-sized kayak — woman against nature. And immediately the story brought to mind the infamous line from one of my favourite Flannery O’Connor stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” where Julian accompanies his mother to the Y for her reducing classes.

And then my mind really started to wander as Lorrie and Katie’s epic journey takes them in completely opposite directions: one, when faced with the absolute beauty and endless possibility of the glaciers, reduces; the other, rages, and by the end of the story, all the pent up anger about society, about their size, about the mistakes you make when you abandon hope while on vacation, made for some interesting reading revelations. It got me thinking a lot about what I’d consider Southern Gothic — the slightly off-kilter peas-under-the-mattress, about-to-crack humanity that files the pages of O’Connor et al — and how for Canadian writers, the easiest way for us to write into that zone always involves facing down nature in some way or another. Just like the south can’t escape the heat that melts their words, their world, we can’t escape the need to endlessly put our characters in front of glaciers and expect a happy ending that never materializes. It’s endlessly fascinating. And Booker has a gift for this quote/unquote Canadian Gothic-like tangent that’s prevalent in much of our short story writing.

The other story that touches upon this theme, “Spears,” is about an almost stepmother who takes her boyfriend’s pre-teen son camping only to set him loose in the woods. It’s a terrifying story, and yet, Booker manages to hold it all in, letting the fear build as the light fades, and leaves us staring off into the distance into the headlamp that “settles on strong” when they set off to see what has become of him. Again, the trees are larger than life, illuminated as they are by that kind of light, and the same goes for the situation, heightened and yet awkward at the same time — an exact echo of what happens when best intentions sometimes go awry, pinpointing that “Gothic-like” feeling I recognize, again, in O’Connor.

I don’t want to speed away and pigeon whole the entire book based on two of the stories within the flaps. The entire collection is especially the bits where Booker encounters teenage girls with a veracity that would make Judy Blume blush,  from poor Margaret stuck in love with a terrifically damaged character named Prinkie, and everyone in between — there’s just too much here to discuss in one post. Suffice to say: highly recommended for late-night, can’t-sleep-because of the meds, my-own-life-has-gothic, reducing class-elements, moments.

In a way, it’s one of those rare times where the movie wholly spoiled the reading experience for me. I couldn’t get Christian Bale’s Jim out of my head, and every time I saw him doing something in my mind’s eye, the movie flashed before me and I was back to thinking I’d just rather watch it again than read the source material. Not a good sign. There’s an emotional depth that’s somewhat missing in the novel, a chord that doesn’t quite strike right, and maybe that’s my own prejudice in terms of storytelling coming forward, but I wanted so much more from the book. The horrific things that Jim endures, like the constant flies at the sores in his mouth, are epic, and overwhelming, and yet, the childlike innocence that fosters the richness of the character from the beginning of the novel wains by the end. And the things that are never explained, the bits of the story in between the lines, that’s what I really wanted.

So, I’m glad I read it. I’m glad it’s off my shelf. I’m glad I crossed another title off the 1001 Books list, but the “Bs” are proving difficult to get through. I have a mammoth undertaking in Cloudsplitter, which I’ve started six times, and my go-to escapism author, Chris Bohjalian, has written a novel that’s impossibly dull as well — in short, I might be stuck in the “Bs” for a while.

Then, I’m at work and it’s crazy busy and really stimulating these days, and actually kind of exciting. I have a number of giant projects, which means the days fly by, no lunch, no gym, no fresh air, and then on Mondays and Tuesdays, it’s racing to get the RRBB from daycare, racing home, and then dropping on the couch after he’s been fed, bathed, storied and deposited in bed. And, it’s overwhelming.

So, more so than usual, I think because everyone has been endlessly sick, and not the disease-kind of sick that I endure on a daily basis but a runny nose, achy, coughing, stuffed up, miserable, feverish, snotty, daycare-plague that haunts us from one weekend to the next. I don’t think we’ve ever had a Saturday or Sunday since I went back to work that all three of us have felt at our best. I’m sick. The RRBB’s sick. The RRHB’s sick. No one is happy. There’s a lot of whining. There’s not enough fresh air or fresh food because who can cook when their head feels like it’s going to explode. And, it’s overwhelming.

Things that I used to excel at — keeping our budget organized, our money sorted, our bills paid — were falling by the wayside. I paid our gas bill twice and forgot entirely to pay the cable bill (which, TWO DAYS after the bill arrived in my mailbox Rogers started calling me like they were a collection agency and I have never been so mad at a poor telemarketer. This is the ONLY time I have ever forgotten to pay that bill. Shut the flapjack up Rogers, seriously). We’re more broke than we’ve ever been in our lives — but still, we have a beautiful house, food on the table, clothes on our backs, a happy, well-adjusted little baby in private daycare — so I would better classify us as monetarily challenged at the moment, going from one salary to two, and from two people to three. You know, it’s overwhelming.

And my other work, my book, some short stories, things that have been percolating for decades, keep getting pushed aside, and a tiny little part of me, the me who I think I really am inside, gets lost in the shuffle. And that is, well, overwhelming.

So, I’ve started breaking my life down into manageable pieces. I pay the bills on any computer the moment they come into the house. I take the car in on daycare days even though it’s $13.00 to park because the baby is happier when we get home earlier. I run errands on my lunch hour when I’m not working through it. I’ve been doing okay with my New Year’s Revolutions — making soups with the slow cooker on the weekends that are good for lunches and at least one dinner. Making meal plans, fitting in grocery shopping wherever possible to make sure we can make meals at home. Now, we’re only ordering once a week — usually on Mondays because my RRHB has been working, and we’re all out of the house — instead of two to three times a week. That’s a win. We dusted off the bread-maker and my RRHB has been making delicious bread at home, which I think is terrific because we’re saving all that packaging and the RRBB loves his bread. And I’ve taken something to heart — a good friend of mine with two kids used to describe his life as “choosing tired.” In order to squeeze in the parts of himself that got lost in the daily back and forth and up and down that is parenting small children, he stayed up too late, and “choose” to be tired.  So, I’ve skipped the last few naps with the RRBB on the weekends and sat down at the computer and wrote, and it was amazing. I started a new project. Found some new life in an old one, and was glad to have done it. It’s only once, but it’s a start.

That’s the key — to use the skills that I’ve learned in this new life to try and feel less overwhelmed minute-by-minute. And I think it’s working. However, I was up with a seriously cranky RRBB at 4:45AM this morning, trying so very hard not to get angry when he whined and moaned, knowing he was so very tired and just needed to go back to sleep, yet refusing the rest at every turn. We read books. I steamed him up to help with his cough. I cuddled him when he allowed it. I lay down on the floor in his room when he bawled at the thought of being in his crib. And I did all of this because at the end of the day I love him so much it hurts. I barrel through my life during the day so that I can get home and spend a lovely evening with my RRHB, whom I adore, even when I’m fighting with him tooth and nail. Because at the end of the day, I might be overwhelmed, but I am loved at every turn and, in that, I am lucky, so very, very lucky.

It’s the book equivalent of flipping through 100 channels and still finding nothing to watch — seeing 400-odd books on your shelves and not desiring to read a single one. And yet, I’ve collected them all for a reason, whether I enjoy the writer, or heard something good about the book, and until I give each title its due, I can’t get rid of them. But they weigh, weigh, weigh me down. I feel immense pressure to “get through” them — it almost takes the joy out of reading. All the lists, all the challenges, all the tries in terms of keeping my life organized — it comes out in microcosm with reading. I think on some level that if I manage to keep my books organized my brain won’t feel so scattered.

So this year I’ve just made two resolutions — I’m going to take the pressure off. I’m going to read alphabetically and then I’m going to read everything else organically. What does that mean? I’m going to read books that have been recommended to me by friends, colleagues, other bloggers and I’m going to carry on ignoring everything else around me. Those subway posters are usually terrible anyway.

The first chapter sets out a premise. Geoffrey Braithewaite, an amateur Flaubert scholar, stumbles upon a mystery involving two stuffed parrots and it starts him off on a journey deep into the writer’s life. Interspersed within his discoveries are tales of the writer’s affairs, opinions by an ex-lover, some strange actions by a disgraced scholar, and a wonderful, masterful chapter where Geoffrey explains the true essence of his obsession — he’s a retired doctor; his wife took lovers.

I could not put this book down and even though there’s very little “novel” to the novel, the writing, as is with all of Barnes’s work, is impeccable. Sharp, detailed, witty, engaging and compelling. To try and fit in too many adjectives might defeat the purpose and put me in the ranks of the other critics the narrative so disparages; so, I’ll leave it there.

Annywaay, Skippy. Oh, the poor soul, so troubled, so riddled with angst, so deliciously in love with an unworthy girl. And then, it happens, he dies and the whole world that he leaves behind can’t seem to cope with the loss. Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies would have made for excellent book club discussion had I been able to participate. And, from the sounds of things, it did. One would imagine that many threads of a 600+ page novel would get lost, but Murray manages to keep a handle on the sprawling story for the most part. Sure, there were parts that I would have excised, but, on the whole, the book’s utterly readable and incredibly well-paced from beginning to end.

Murray smartly sets up the book with the scene where Skippy dies, close at hand is his best friend and roommate, Ruprecht, and they’re in the midst of a donut eating contest when it happens. The novel then spends the rest of time filling in the gaps, why Skippy dies, what his life was like before it happened, and how his life and death impacted those around him. Skippy is the sun, the centre of the universe in this imagined world, and everything eventually comes back to him.

Murray has an uncanny ability to write young adolescent male characters. He has an ear for their dialogue so it just hums through the novel. Unfortunately, as I’m sure my book club pointed out, the same can’t be said for his female characters. They’re terrifically one-dimensional, amazingly Mean Girl-esque without the Tina Fey undercurrent of honesty, and they seem to be unable to define themselves outside of the boys and/or men they are pushing and then pulling away. A cliched romance between a terrifically “bad” boy and the girl Skippy loves, Lori, also seemed a bit forced, but what do I know — I was just once a teenage girl.

Regardless, so much of this novel is sad, sad, sad, that it’s almost cathartic to read. I caught myself welling up so often, as Howard’s life collapses around him, as Skippy endures his terrifically difficult home situation, as Carl, the aforementioned bad-boy/bully, puts up with extremely adolescent parents, as Lori makes yet another utterly terrible decision. And then, when Skippy does die, the aftermath just about tears your heart out, the characters feel the loss so completely that for many many moments in this book the mother in me wanted to reach into the words and hold these boys tight, tight, tight to my chest and tell them everything will be okay.

Last night, we were watching something on television, I don’t know what, and my RRHB remarked that having a baby has forever made him a big old softie. For me, it’s awakened emotions that run so close to the edge that it barely takes a commercial to set them off. It was hard reading this book while my own RRBB was so ill, it was hard to imagine him being a young boy, having to contend with obnoxious girls, bullies, the breadth of modern life, the horrors of a boarding school, and the pressures of keeping secrets. So much happens to Skippy that if I didn’t have an equally difficult and tumultuous adolescence, I’d have found it hard to believe because that’s really the heart of this book — that life has no balance, it has no score card, that sometimes horrible, horrible, horrible things happen to the best of people, and figuring out how to cope with them isn’t always as easy as acing a test or winning a swimming meet.

Oh, Mo Hayder

First, let’s examine the set up: two sisters, recently reconciled, sit on a bench outside of a funeral. The reader (ahem, me) makes an assumption, it’s one you’re led right into like a fly to a sticky trap, about the funeral’s protagonist, if you will, and Hayder expertly unravels bits and pieces throughout the novel until you get to the shocker of an ending — and are stunned by its  final pages.

Sally’s recently divorced working as a cleaner and trying to raise her daughter while she stubbornly refuses to accept their new living conditions. Sally’s sister Zoe, with whom she’s been estranged for the better part of her life, works as a detective in Bath. Their paths rarely cross until a series of crimes find them embroiled in a situation that proves without a doubt that blood is thicker than water. They both make bad choices. They both need to face the consequences but the harrowing ways they end up still alive and closer than ever on that park bench make for great reading. Honestly, they do! And the ending, well, don’t even get me started — I didn’t see it coming, had to read it through a couple of times just to make sure I understood, and then I cursed Hayder for ending it the way she did because, like I said, it’s more than a little shocking. Awesome.

Promptly enrolled in boarding school, Mor tries to make sense of the world, and, as if it’s hard enough being a teenager, she’s got to contend with a terrible witch for a mother, aunts insistent upon casting their own spells, and a crush on an adorably inappropriate boy in her science fiction book club. An outcast if there ever was one, Mor’s also incredibly strong-willed, fiercely intelligent, and remarkably brave in terms of the troubles she endures.  When my friend Dan sent the book over to me, he implored me to ignore the cover, which is, honestly, quite terrible — and I’m ever so glad that I did. I devoured this novel. I simply couldn’t put it down,  then I gave it to a friend at work just so she could read it and I’d have someone to talk to about it. I didn’t want it to end — I was so proud of Mor and how she dealt with her tragedies, and I haven’t rooted for a female character like this since Katniss volunteered in The Hunger Games.

Sure, as Charidy and I discussed, there are a lot of “WTF” moments within this book — I really wanted a prequel (that would give me more than the forward and so I could know more of the story of what happened between Mor, her sister Morganna and how they saved the world from the ruin of their mother) and a sequel (so that I could see how the love story plays out) because everything in between the covers of this novel made me ache for more. It’s a love letter to science fiction and fantasy, and being one who has never really read either, you’d think that would put you right off, but it doesn’t, you dive in and desperately cheer for Mor when she finds  (or casts about for) a group of people to commune with. Your heart crushes just a little when you discover why the fairies are calling her back to Wales, and by the time the novel hits its climax, you’re desperately wanting your own bit of magic to add another three hundred or so pages because you don’t want it to end. It’s a brilliant little book.

Armstrong, a failed nun, a failed post-doc, a failed teacher and a failed television presenter (yes, I’m being harsh but bear with me), finally finds her calling when she, after a long struggle with real life, comes to writing about comparative religion. It’s funny, I finished The Night Circus, a whimsical novel about real magic only to come to a very real memoir about a woman who loses her faith so colossally that she fears she’ll  never find her place in the real world, the magic in her ideas about God and religion, so to speak, lost for the foreseeable future. In so many ways, Armstrong’s struggles to find her right place in the world are so powerful that it’s impossible not to cheer for her every single time life churns her out in a direction she never imagined for herself.

This is a beautifully written, wonderfully rendered memoir. It teaches you, among many, many other lessons, that there’s honesty in failure. That hard work, in any direction, will always be rewarded, even if you don’t end up in the place you imagined for yourself. That life, however fragile, can’t be defined by structures that refuse to evolve with society; and that Armstrong’s voice, pure, authentic, engaging, refuses to blame her circumstances for any of her so-called defeats. She simply picks herself back up, delves deep into her own philosophy, and moves on to the next thing. And if the result is books like this one — well, I don’t quite know what to say, except I hope she fails evermore so that I can enjoy however she phrases the journey upwards.