Category: american authors

#29 – Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, could possibly be the best book I’ve read so far this year. Achingly beautiful prose echoes through each of the stories, and they all have such a resounding and impressive narrative voice that it’s impossible to put the book down once you’ve begun. The stories are as rich and inherently detailed as the best novels aspire to be, which just goes to show that Lahiri’s skills as a storyteller are paramount. She’s one of the best writers working in English today. I know that’s a bold statement, but I’d put forth that she rivals Alice Munro when it comes to ensuring that the form of the short story isn’t relegated to beginner’s classes and college literary journals. The work is powerful, passionate, cutting and emotionally driven. And while each of her stories work with similar themes, first and second generation East Indian families in America, they’re also each distinct both in terms of their internal rhythms and the morals that drive the narratives forward.

In the first half of the book, Lahiri doesn’t really play with form. The stories are straightforward in the sense that they don’t play with time or traditional methods of storytelling, but they are rich in character development, and they do ache with the everyday heartbreak of life. In the second half of Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri has written three linked stories. The first two use the second person, which I was resistant to at first, but once I read the last few pages of the book, I understood her choice. You will too. It’s these three linked tales, stories of Hema and Kaushik, characters linked by a common childhood, that will crush your reading soul in the same way any good book should. I don’t want to give anything away so I won’t say anything more about them, just to reiterate that to appreciate them is to appreciate writing at its finest.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT:If I have one criticism, it’s that I’m really not fond of the book’s jacket. Hence no photo, although I guess I could have taken a picture to make it seem less, well, boring.

READING CHALLENGES: I don’t think I’ve read an American author yet for my Around the World in 52 Books. This would be a great one to read for the States. It’s a rich canvas, writing from the perspective of immigrants to the great and fascinatingly flawed country. And while I had Dennis Johnson’s book in mind. I’m going to count this instead. Even if the setting is somewhat secondary to the character development, in a sense, it’s defining of it too, place defines these characters as much as it marginalizes them; it changes their lives from the moment the plane touches down and new homes are built. But it’s also a fascinating study of the idea of what it means to be a part of a second generation in the U.S. How different their lives are from their parents, how charged with being both American and Indian can be, how important it is for history to change perspective.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I was reading Huckleberry Finn on the ride home (I finished Unaccustomed Earth on a hard cement bench outside of The Bay after having a quick bagel with Sam before heading back up to the craziness that is work these days). But I’m not sure if I’ll continue. Maybe, like I said the other day, I’ll finish The Sealed Letter tonight.

#25 – Bringing Home the Birkin

My, my, my, my, my, the lives some people live! They are absolutely fascinating, and Michael Tonello’s is certainly no exception. His witty, charming, and butter-smooth memoir, Bringing Home the Birkin sucked me in and wouldn’t let me go until I had finished the very last page. No word of a lie, I started the book on the subway ride home last night and read the rest throughout the day (I had to send the author questions for an interview we’re doing).

After Michael makes a drastic change in his life, giving up his lucrative and stable life in the United States for Barcelona, Spain, he finds himself making an eBay auction living buying and selling rare Hermès products. From scarves to pottery, if he can find it and it’s rare, he’ll sell it. But it’s not until he realizes the desperate need for the rich and richer to own a Birkin that his business flourishes. Waiting list? What waiting list? Tonello discovers a fool-proof method for buying Birkins, and works it around the world. Literally. The man travels to major cities all around the globe that contain Hermès stores, makes connections with other bag-buyers, and becomes an industry in and of himself.

There’s little not to love about Tonello’s warm, chatty writing style, his adventurous spirit, and his entrepreneurship. Bringing Home the Birkin is that rare piece of nonfiction that zips along like the best commercial novel, and it would make perfect summer reading, whether you’re urban-bound or lazing about at the cottage, it’s so easy to get caught up in his world you’ll be transported either way.

#23 – The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton’s classic might have just moved onto my “best books I’ve ever read in my life” list. I’ve been quoting from the novel for days. The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer in 1921, and it’s easy to see how and why the book is included in the 1001 Books list.

Newland Archer, our hero, devotee of upper class New York society in the age following the Civil War, finds himself torn between the life he imagined, the proper life, the expected life, and his passion, which comes in the form of his fiance May’s cousin, the mysterious Countess Olenska. Already standing outside society, the Countess has left her brute of a European husband and returned to the bosom of her family. Archer, a lawyer and all-round saviour of a man, becomes enlisted in the cause to resurrect her standing, and falls in love with her along the way.

Wharton’s tone is pitch perfect, and her narrative shows no signs of age, but it’s still as if the book is frozen in time, the descriptions are vivid, the characters redolent of the period, and the story heartbreaking. It’s great storytelling told by a master of the form.

Two more quotes, and then I’ll spoil no more of the book for you:

“…[F]or a moment they continued to hold each other’s eyes, and he that saw her face, which had grown very pale, was flooded with a deep inner radiance. His heart beat with awe: he felt that he had never before beheld love visible.”

“Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in the lottery.”

Ah, if only the goal of self-satisfaction was so still utterly admired as unachievable in our post-post modern thoughts.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The book on top of its 1001 Books entry on my desk.

READING CHALLENGES: The first of the two 1001 Books Challenge titles I’m supposed to read in April, which brings my score to 154. Yee-haw!

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Consolation by Michael Redhill and The Ravine by Paul Quarrington. And maybe I’ll get back to War and Peace. But really? Who am I kidding? Anyone have recommendations for Summer reading?

#22 – The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee

I’ve been banging on about Rebecca Miller for days now, ever since I started reading her new novel, which is coming out in August, for work. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee tells the story of a woman, the protagonist of the book’s title, who marries a much older man, Herb, and starts a new life with him. Of all of my favourite things about this novel (and that list is endless), the fact that the narrative is so utterly surprising and goes in places you absolutely would not suspect endlessly impressed me as I read.

Here are 2 things that happened to me on my journey with Pippa Lee: I read in the elevator. Yes, I realize it’s silly as I’m only on the 20th floor, but that’s at least 2-3 minutes, which can be pages. I not only missed my floor but didn’t notice the elevator was heading down instead of up before I realized I forgot to get off. “Oh well,” I thought, and kept on reading. The VERY SAME day, I almost missed my subway stop and barely made it out of the doors before they crushed me in an iron grip, brushed myself off, and continued to read as I walked up the stairs and out on to Lansdowne. The book is that engrossing and entertaining.

It’s just my kind of novel: swift, smart, acerbic, completely unpredictable and kind of kooky. I love Pippa. She’s adventurous and damaged, a mythical combination, and I didn’t want it to end.

Here’s an interview with the author, Rebecca Miller. She rocks. She’s talking about the filmed adaptation of the book coming out in 2009 starring Robin Wright Penn:

My Interview With Beth Lisick

Is up on MSN today here. And if you don’t feel like clicking through, my favourite question and answer:

DM: What are you working on now? And are you still taking banana jobs?

BL: Still taking banana jobs. I always feel the need to state that I really love my banana suit. I definitely don’t do it because it’s the only job out there. And my friend Tara and I are working on a stage show called “Getting In On The Ground Floor and Staying There.” The title is in reference to the fact that we have been collaborating on comedy shows and films for the past 10 years, but have never “taken it to the next level.” Or any level, really. There were a few meetings with some Hollywood people where we were promised things. We’ll address those meetings in full detail in the show, as well as talk about things that make us laugh. Like the image of a bunch of helium balloons in a gazebo or those posters where a wet muscular man is holding a tiny newborn baby.

Creativity, in general, never ceases to amaze me.

#14 – The Talented Mr. Ripley

If I could choose only one word to describe Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, it would be: thrilling. If you haven’t seen the movie, I’d highly recommend reading the book first; it’s so much richer and far less stereotypical than the film. And now I’d even go so far as to say the movie spoiled the book for me in many ways.

When first introduced to Tom Ripley, he’s pulling a half-hearted tax scam and not even bothering to cash the cheques. When fate brings him into contact with Mr. Greenleaf Sr., and presents him with the opportunity of a lifetime, there’s an instant when the story could have gone either way. Highsmith could have set out to write a beat-inspired (which is certainly what the movie picked up on) buddy tale, an On the Road Does Europe, but for one fact: ambition. Tom sees the life he wants and sets about getting it, doing anything he possibly can to abandon his pathetic life back home and reinvent himself as a man worthy of his surroundings.

When the wealthy Greenleaf sends Tom over to Mongibello with all of his expenses paid to “rescue” his son Dickie from a life of total and utter leisure, Sr. believes them to be friends, which is his first, utterly tragic mistake. From the very moment that Tom abandons his pitiful existence in New York for Europe, one can embrace the following statement from a 1001 Books:

Tom Ripley is the one of the great creations of twentieth-century pulp writing, a schizophrenic figure at once charming, ambitious, unknowable, utterly devoid of morality, and prone to outbursts of extreme violence.

See, thrilling.

Tom just doesn’t want to live with Dickie, he wants to be Dickie. And Tom’s decision to become him is so cold and calculated that it sends a chill down well below your spine. While the crimes add up (what’s another murder, really?) and the lies become truth in Tom’s head, the book races along to its utterly satisfying, yet somewhat open-ended, finish.

In a “is this book worth 1000 words” aside, here are the reasons why I book is just so much better than the Hollywood version:

1. There are far less characters. In fact, ones that play a huge role in terms of amping up the dramatic action, namely “Meredith Logue” (as played by Cate Blanchett) and Peter Smith-Kingsley (Jack Davenport), aren’t even in the book (the former) or play an incredibly insignificant role (the latter).

2. So much of the action takes place in Ripley’s head. You really get to explore the motivation behind his actions. They hint at that in the film, but the action has to be driven by impulses that can be read by even the most dense in the audience. Hammer. Meet head. Head. Meet hammer. The book is just so subtle, and that’s what’s so seductive about it.

3. Marge is pudgy. I think there’s a point when Ripley refers to her as a gourd. Unkind, to be sure, but certainly not the svelt, sexy Paltrow as portrayed in the film.

4. I do admit that the film did justice to the setting of the novel. Yet, there’s so much more in the little details: how Tom’s only going to heat his bedroom in his palazzo in Venice; how Dickie’s house has no refrigerator at first in Mongibello; how Greece looks when Tom first lands toward the end of the book. The descriptions are crisp and clean, like scissor cuts, and absolutely contribute to the atmosphere of the book. They don’t need to make the book believable; they just are.

5. The film turned Dickie into a jazz musician. Yes, it’s utterly sexy, but it’s way more real when you discover he’s a totally (from Tom’s point of view, of course) mediocre painter.

6. The end of the film always, always sat wrong with me. I felt that it was overkill (ahem, pun not intended) and unnecessary. I could understand Ripley’s motivation in terms of his other crimes, but not at all in terms of this one. It felt fake and constructed. Imagine my surprise to find that the ending to the novel is nothing like the one from the movie. Imagine my delight to see the pitch perfect note that Highsmith ends upon. And then imagine how redeemed I feel in terms of having the criticism in the first place. See, I knew it just wasn’t right…

And while I realize I can’t go back in time and unwatch the movie to preserve my reading experience, it has taught me an incredibly valuable lesson: always, always read the book first.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The Vintage Crime / Black Lizard trade paperback on the shelf with many other 1001 / Around the World in 52 Books titles. This one’s a keeper.

READING CHALLENGES: Another title from the 24 that I’m trying to read this year from the 1001 Books challenge. Although, I have to say, that the classics are really inspiring me these days. They’re all I seem to want to read. And I’ve now hit the nice number of 150 books read from the list. Whee!

#13 – Helping Me Help Myself

I had brought the ARC of Beth Lisick’s Helping Me Help Myself to Mexico with me, and had planned to read it on the plane home, but then I got swept away in What is the What. Most of my thoughts about the book are already noted over at The Savvy Reader so I won’t go into much more detail except to say that I’m really excited to send the author some questions next week for an email interview.

After a particularly grueling New Year’s Eve party, Lisick decides to spend the next 12 months working through the works of 10 self-help guru’s in an attempt to honestly change her life from the inside out, as she says, “What if I could just look at everything in my life that was bugging me, everything I wanted to make better, and systematically fix it all?” And despite being utterly skeptical of the whole self-help racket, she actually manages to find kernels of good advice in just about every aspect of her ‘year spent on the bring of [her] comfort zone.’

This is not a self-help book, but a book about helping yourself, about discovering what holds you back, about finding humour and dedicating yourself to a cause even if it means spending a whack of money to attend a Richard Simmons fitness cruise. It’s about approaching change honestly and openly, and taking what you need and leaving behind the rest, the bits that seem false, that seem like a racket, and improving your character because of it.

Also, it’s got a banana suit. And who doesn’t love a 30-something woman dressed up in a banana suit to pay the bills. Seriously?

As with many of my ARCs, I have no need to keep them and am very happy to use Canada Post, so, who wants my copy?

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: My own Achilles heel when it comes to home organization, the absolute exhaustion at the end of a work day that leads to every single piece of clothing being piled up on a chair instead of in my closet.

#12 – What Is The What


For the first time in my Around the World in 52 Books two-year reading odyssey, I am going to break the rules. You heard me. I’m going to bust them wide open and actually let the setting of the novel define my country choice, and not the author’s birth. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that the voice in Dave Egger’s What is the What seems so completely that of Valentino Achak Deng that to name this my book from the US might do it a disservice.

When I saw Eggers back in November, I was very taken by the social commentary found within his slide show presentation. The idea that China’s need for oil propels the terrible situation in Sudan still makes me think twice every time I see a Made In China stamp on just about everything we buy and/or own. But now that I’ve read the book, I’m thinking more about the accomplishments of its writer and main character, and not just about the social-political underpinnings of the book and its incredibly important message. It’s as if it all has a human face now.

Subtitled “The Autobiography of Valentine Achak Deng,” What is the What is such a skilled, intense and utterly compelling book that it held my interest through every one of its 535 pages. The structure of the novel develops around an epistolary format reminiscent to an early scene in the book where Achak, still living then with his parents quite happily in Marial Bal, sits with a group of men and listens to them debate ‘What is the What.’ Achak speaks to a number of different people directly within the novel as he tells his story, the nurse/clerk at the hospital, the boy set to watch him as he gets robbed in his own home, members of the health club where he works, and as a narrative tool, it’s ridiculously effective. It’s almost as if, as a larger theme, the entire story sets out with the need to find and define ‘the What,’ an elusive, angry at times, but always tragic quest for Valentino to discover not only his own purpose, but a larger sense of the universe.

It’s an unbearably sat, yet utterly uplifting story, as the rebels fight against the Arab government, war breaks out and a country falls apart, and then Achak begins a long, arduous walk to Ethiopia surrounded by hundreds of other Lost Boys. Finally settling at a refugee camp in Kenya called Kakuma, Achak lives with a foster family, receives an education, and finds a decent job before being relocated to Atlanta to start a new life in the United States. The novel opens with a harrowing scene of Valentino being beaten and robbed in his own home, and still, the utter strength of his character remains steadfast. When any number of truly horrible events conspire against him, Achak carries on.

In places, Valentino describes a feeling that tears through him, not that he is cursed per se, but that bad luck has a way of following him around, shadow-like, in every facet of his life. I am not going to lie, and I know it might seem almost shameful for me to have felt akin to him in this way, but for many, many years I fought with the idea that I too must have been cursed in another life to have endured what I have. Nothing, nothing at all compared to Achak’s own struggles, I know, I have always had a roof over my head and have never had to walk further then a few blocks to a bus stop, but the feeling that life seems to consistently be a current working against you, well that’s something I can absolutely empathize with in more ways than one.

READING CHALLENGE UPDATE: Am declaring What is the What as my book from Sudan and not the United States as I had originally intended, which is good because I think I’d like to read Tom Perrotta’s Little Children instead. And because I did not buy my copy of the book, and with all the author proceeds going to Valentino’s charity, I went online and made a donation in lieu of the cost of the novel.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I want to thank Baby Got Books for linking to the place to buy the t-shirt that had just arrived the day I finished the novel, where it ended up on my desk amongst a whole bunch of mail clutter from when we were away. I also want to give Tim an extra shout-out for saying that I “had” to read Eggers’s novel, because he was so very, very right, I did.

CURRENTLY READING: The Talented Mr. Ripley and last Saturday’s Globe and Mail crossword puzzle.

#11 – Belong To Me

First of all, please forgive me because this post is going to be so weepy and girlie that anyone not feeling particularly feminine may feel alienated. As I had been doing so much non-work related reading on vacation, I felt that I had to pay some attention to some of our upcoming titles and took this book with me after Charidy sent around a note that was so compelling it was impossible NOT to want to read Belong to Me. She had read and loved Marisa de los Santos’s first novel, Love Walked In, years ago, had high expectations for this book, and was not disappointed.

Fast forward to Wednesday afternoon, when I’m waiting and waiting and waiting for the doctor to see me. There was a wonderful old woman sitting next to me whose name was Diana, and her middle-aged daughter was so tender, caring, and well, good spirited, that I spent much of my time smiling at them and making idle chatter. Even so, I managed to read enough of Belong to Me to get so hooked that I actually turned off the television on Wednesday night waiting for my RRHB and our house guest to return from dinner. And then, I read the rest in bed until about 2 AM because the cough was keeping me up anyway and I might as well do something productive if I wasn’t sleeping.

Annnywaaay. Told from three inter-connecting points of view, Belong to Me could be described as a modern suburban drama. Taking place in a sleepy, yet totally high brow suburb of Philadelphia where looks matter and status is everything, at first it’s hard to tell where de los Santos is going. Each of the characters are so very different, it’s almost impossible to see what connects them — until the glistening, glorious and delicious end when it all becomes clear, that is.

Cornelia, married to the gorgeous Dr. Teo (he’s an oncologist), finds herself adrift almost from the moment she lands in town, a place not unlike the wistful suburb where she and her husband grew up (they’ve known each other since they were four but their romantic relationship developed much later in their lives), and makes a quasi fool of herself at a dinner party. The novel opens: “My fall from suburban grace, or, more accurately, my failure to achieve the merest molehill of suburban grace from which to fall, began with a dinner party and a perfectly innocent, modestly clever, and only faintly quirky remark about Armand Assante.”

From there, Cornelia tries to fit in to her new surroundings, failing to look, act or submit to the usual social niceties that would ensure she would make some new friends and become a good neighbour. Only it doesn’t work that way, as Queen Bee Piper swoops in and shows Cornelia who’s boss before we even hit page six. Shocking then, when Piper turns up as the protagonist whose point of view we take over in the next chapter. As we get inside Piper’s head toward the beginning of the novel, she sort of comes across like a Bree from in the first season of Desperate Housewives clone, until a tragedy turns her life, her values and her whole world inside out.

The third narrator, a thirteen-year-old boy named Dev, might just be the heart and soul of the book, and de los Santos’s talents at bringing to life his particular brand of teenage angst (hard luck at school, somewhat wacky but good intentioned mother, super-smart kid with a brain that’s always going) soar in ways that made me a little nostalgic, especially in the scenes where he falls in love for the first time with an equally special young girl. As an aside, I couldn’t help but think of the one boy that I felt that way about when I was their age, and how that relationship, idyllic, somewhat silly, and always special, remains one of the reasons (among many) that I can say I had a blissfully happy childhood. But there are emotional connections like that all through this book, which is why I think, overall, it’s incredibly successful.

Heart spills out all over Belong to Me: messy, angry, wonderful, aching, honest, and open heart. It’s a novel about women and their relationships with each other; it’s about how tragedy can rip open your world and put it back together again in ways one might not recognize; it’s about the meaning and making of family; and, in more ways than one, it’s about love that comes in all shapes and sizes. Moments in this novel ring so true that it was impossible not to bawl like a baby (and I did cry openly at least four times). And while the emotional centre of the book switches as each character takes a turn telling their own story, it never looses any sense of the pure heart the narrative voice contains on the whole.

A bit Tom Perrotta (Charidy’s comp), a bit Ann Patchett (it’s a snow globe world for sure), with a little Carol Shields thrown in for good measure (it made me think of Unless), I highly recommend this book for bookclubs, for that lonely night when your significant other might be out of town and you’re dying for that little something the latest Cameron Diaz movie has failed, yet again, to provide, for mothers or women looking to become mothers — it’s a book that deserves to be passed around from friend to friend like a secretly coded game of telephone that says, “look, this is how much I love you.”

Now, who wants my copy? Anyone? Anyone?

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The book sat atop What is the What, which I have now returned to reading, on my bedside table. Other things necessary for bedtime: ceramic holder for my rings, ear plugs, super-duper hand cream clutter the shot.

#s6 – 10 – Vacation Reading

So, this is the stack of books I brought with me on vacation. Maybe a bit too ambitious, but I did read 5.5 of them. Not bad, eh? At one point, I was so totally engrossed in The Good Soldier that my husband and friends marveled at how I totally ignored them until I had finished the last page. Ocean? Waves? Wha?

#6 – Another Thing to Fall

I know, I know, before anyone actually says it, I should never read the ARC of the LAST book in a mystery series before reading the first, well, many books. But after loving Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know this summer and being utterly giddy at the sight of her cameo in the first episode of The Wire this season (why are you not watching that show? Go. Right now, stop reading and start watching, honestly. It’s the best show television has ever produced in my lifetime.), I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed a copy off the publicity shelves and snuck it out before anyone could notice (yes, yes, I replaced it when I got back to work and my own copies arrived). Annnywwaaay. It’s a Tess Monaghan novel. Once a fearless reporter for a Baltimore newspaper, Tess is now a private investigator, and in this book she’s charged with the protection of an uppity actress who seems to be causing all kinds of problems on the set of the HBO series in which she stars. It’s a taut, action-packed, first-rate detective novel that hooked me from start to finish. And I have to admit, the tongue-in-cheek references to a certain production currently filming in the so-called Charm City, were all kinds of wicked fun. Plus, isn’t the cover bloody gorgeous?

#7 – The Abstinence Teacher

I came home convinced that my life needs more Tom Perrotta. My friend Randy gave me the ARC for The Abstinence Teacher back in the summer and it’s taken me a few months to get here, but I am so glad that I took this book along with me and had the chance to give it the attention it deserved. Perrotta has such a gift for capturing the nuances of American life, the contradictions, the confusions, the Christian right in battle with the more liberal left, while ensuring that his characters aren’t sacrificed in anyway for the overall themes conveyed in the story, that it’s impossible to put the book down after you begin.

The book’s two main characters: Ruth Ramsey, a sexual education teacher convinced that proper information and open honesty are the best tools she could possibly equip herself with in terms of her job; and Tim Mason, an addict turned born-again Christian who coaches the local soccer team Ruth’s younger daughter plays on, find themselves in very adult and very difficult situations when it comes to their own families, their lives, and their careers. The themes in this novel, of how religion is polarizing much of the States, and the evaporation of the middle class, never overpower the story of Ruth and Tim’s friendship. But they certainly make you think twice about the state of our society as a whole, which might be a bit heavy for the usual beach fare (goodness I counted a lot of Da Vinci Codes, honestly), but not for me. Highly recommended.

#8 – Astrid and Veronika

The Swedish entry in my Around the World in 52 Books, Sam lent me this novel before I left and it was a last-minute addition to the vacation pile. Veronika, a young writer who has just suffered a terrible tragedy, arrives at her rented cottage adjacent to a small Swedish village to find her only neighbour, Astrid, is nothing like the “witch” she was told lived in the house next door. The two women, separated by an entire lifetime, form a fast and furious friendship that allows each to free themselves of the ghosts plaguing both of their pasts.

Linda Olsson’s novel is sweet and tender as the two women reveal themselves to one another through their stories. I have to admit that I found Olsson’s storytelling a bit cloying: “Oh, let me tell you that story”, but the further I drifted with Astrid, the more I enjoyed her character, and realized that the book means for you to find it awkward at first, just as all friendships are, until it’s as if you’ve known the person beside you all your life. And the setting, especially Astrid’s house and its descriptions, well, they absolutely made me think of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, and good grief did I love that novel. The landscape is rich and overall I did enjoy this book. One I never would have read if not for my challenge. And isn’t that always the point?

#9 – My Name is Bosnia

My friend Kat recommended this book to me when we were discussing Russian novels for my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. I’m pleased I picked it up last year on a whim, because it fit nicely with my quest to finish The Canadian Book Challenge. As the book’s author, Madeleine Gagnon, is from Quebec and part of the novel takes place outside of Quebec City and in Montreal, it’s my book for that province. Gut-wrenching and unbearably sad, but hopeful by the time you get to the end, it was another book, like Astrid and Veronika that took me aback in terms of the writing style (but that could be down to the translation). The story of a young girl, Sabaheta, who comes out of the forests surrounding Sarajevo after the death of her father and changes her name to Bosnia, her journey, both emotional and physical, is epic as she tries to escape the war. Heartbreaking, that’s a good word for this book, just heartbreaking.

#10 – The Good Soldier

Saving the best for last, of course. After many, many false starts, I was determined to bring Ford Madox Ford’s classic novel with me so I would absolutely have no choice but to finish. I’ve mentioned, at least two or three times on the blog before, how much I love the first sentence of this book: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” And considering the man telling the story, John Dowell, is also central to its plot, setting it up this way immediately clues one to the fact that he’s an utterly unreliable narrator, and isn’t that just delicious. When we first meet John, he’s still in love with his wife, a woman with a bad heart who needs constant caretaking and long, restful periods spent at Nauheim. An American couple of a certain stature, the Dowells count themselves lucky to find company with the Ashburnhams, an upper calls British couple who also vacation for their health. “The Good Soldier” of the novel’s title refers to Ashburnham, and the further we go into the utter depths of why it’s such a sad story, the more we uncover, or discover, rather, that nothing is as it seems, either with the Dowells or the Ashburnhams.

Indeed, it’s the saddest story I’d read in a while, but the writing is just so exact and so true, and the narrative so utterly engaging that I am ashamed to have put the novel down so many times before actually finishing it. I earmarked passage after passage of prose, and even pressed the book to my chest and uttered a few, “oh no’s” while reading in a totally melodramatic fashion as I grew cold on the beach when the sun started to go down, and literally refused to speak until I had finished. Part of my own 1001 Books challenge, I utterly agree with the inclusion of this novel on the list, and if I were still studying, I think I would devote pages and pages to the effectiveness of Ford’s unreliable, utterly immovable and somewhat (if I’m being honest) idiotic narrator.

Whew! It certainly was a lot of very good reading. Good, I love vacation. I started What is the What on the last day we were there, and I’m this-close to finishing. So it was 5 Beach Books, Ragdoll styles on vacation last week.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The stack of novels on my hotel room bed.

READING CHALLENGES: Oh, almost too many to list: 1001 Books, The Canadian Book Challenge, Around the World in 52 Books, it was a great catch-up week.