Category: ragdoll reads

The Better You Read — The Better You Get Challenge

I know I preach a lot about “green” and all that jazz. Collecting books that I never read certainly isn’t the “greenest” way I could be living, especially if many of those books have socio- and/or environmental causes behind them. So here are the 10 titles I’ll try to read this year:

1. What Should I Do With My Life by Po Bronson
2. Living Like Ed by Ed Begley Jr.
3. Gorgeously Green by Sophie Uliano
4. Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel
5. Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe
6. The 100-Mile Diet by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
7. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
8. Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs
9. The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner
10. When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate

11. The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
12. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
13. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
14. The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

#66 – Brideshead Revisited

Sometimes, just sometimes, I fall so hard for a book that I would even consider myself a bit strange. It happened with Theft. It happened with Hunger. And now it’s happened again with Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. I love this book so much that I want to sleep with it under my pillow for weeks. I love this book so much that I wish it was alive so that I could kiss it.

Subtitled, “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder,” the novel opens up in the midst of the Second World War, as the book’s protagonist (he of the subtitle) pauses before his company departs the position they’ve held for the last three months. As he says, “Here love had died between me and the army,” setting up the aesthetic nature of his character, Charles Ryder is presented as a thinking man’s soldier, from the upper classes, a man who fights more so because of the excitement than perhaps the duty. The new position his company takes up is at Brideshead, a castle that belongs to the Flyte family, a group of people who made an impossible impact on Charles’s life.

As the novel moves backwards to tell the story of how he first came to Brideshead, Charles recounts his own glory days at Oxford with one of the sons, Sebastian. Charles falls hard for Sebastian, for his strange ways (and odd teddy bear) and falls equally hard for his family, his sister Julia in particular. As the novel progresses and the friendship is tested again and again because of Sebastian’s drinking, their lives grow in different directions. Then, ten years pass, Charles is married, Julia is married, and yet they seem to pick up naturally where they left off, and it’s this love affair that defines the rest of their lives.

I don’t even really have the words to describe how lovely the prose remains throughout. How well-crafted the story is, how ingenious Waugh is when it comes to creating voice and character. The novel doesn’t drag (it was better than TV this week, hands down) and it makes you want to dive into the imaginary pages and wear the clothes, live the unhappy lives and experience the world as these people for just a moment. Kate sent me a note this morning about how I shouldn’t watch the movie version that recently came out — instead, she said, I HAVE to watch the miniseries (which I just ordered as a treat to myself from Amazon). For so many, the most important theme in the novel is faith, and I won’t argue that it is, the Flyte’s are Catholic and the struggle to balance the idea of religion in a world that finds it increasingly irrelevant remains consistent throughout the novel. But, of course, being the incurable romantic, it was the love story, both the idea of the glorious friendships of youth and the affairs that forever change your life, that really held my attention. Just glorious.

READING CHALLENGES: Of course this book’s on the 1001 Books list so I’m counting it as one of the books for that challenge.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I started reading Choke this morning on the subway. We’ll see how that goes.

#65 – Oryx and Crake

When I first started reading Oryx and Crake about five years ago, I was still working for the evil empire and being bullied by the Boss From Hell. It seems that misery in real life isn’t a good bed fellow for post-apocalyptic fiction, so I never made it past the first chapter. Enter the 2008 Canadian Book Challenge and the need to clear out my reading shelves. I cleared off my shelves by creating the For the Ladies series for this year. And after reading Blindness and Hunger, why not throw in a little speculative Canadian fiction?

Atwood’s story takes place in the not-so distant future when all of human society is split up and defined by different sets of walls. The chosen few, the scientists, the gene-splitters, the evolutionary experts, work in compounds for huge companies cloning and creating new animals, new foods, new drugs that are then sent out into the pleeblands where society is less evolved. Fast forward to the years after some sort of disaster (that’s explained throughout the narrative) has almost wiped out the entire human race save for quasi humans called Crakers, and Snowman, the one charged with taking care of them.

Jimmy aka “Snowman” lives in a tree, scavenges the detrius for food, gets loaded as often as possible, and posits all kinds of pseudo-philosophy into the heads of the children of Crake. Crake, a brilliant if not utterly misguided scientist, was Jimmy’s best friend growing up. Oryx, also of the book’s title, was a young girl they first discovered on the internet after she held their budding sexual attention. She was someone neither Jimmy nor Crake could never forget. One of those people who wraps themselves around your mind and refuses to leave — no matter what the cost.

As Snowman’s supplies dwindle, he knows he needs to venture out and away from his safe zone, his tree in the park where the people of Crake live, back to the compound to pillage for more supplies. As he sets out on this journey, the story unfolds: how he got there, what happened to the world, what his life is like now with no other true human contact. The narrative as inventive as it is compelling, feels not unlike Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman (in ways). Jimmy’s a bit of a misfit, he likes words, he works in advertising, all things that sort of make him comparable to Elaine. Although in her world, she rebels against (am I remembering this correctly?) all of the pressure put upon her by turning it inside and then by literally eating herself (oh, that cake!). Here, Jimmy’s problems, his difficult relationship with his parents, his own mediocrity, and his love for Oryx, all manifest themselves in a true-to-life horror show. How come he still can’t let it go when the entire world has collapsed in front of him? Why does he continually play the loop of his life in his mind? What makes his story important?

The answers to all of the questions are woven through the narrative and the telling of them isn’t remotely disappointing. I have to say that I enjoyed this novel by Margaret Atwood more so than any of her work I’ve read in ages (Alias Grace and Surfacing are my other favs). It makes me wonder what took me so long to get back to it. And what I really enjoyed about the book was its imaginary elements. The pigoons and the rakunks. The social experiments. The ways in which Atwood extrapolates the world is heading. Frightening, yes. But also really addictive in terms of interspersing it with the more traditional parts of the narrative. Maybe we’ll all end up eating 100% soyo products with pet rakunks in the next 10 years. Maybe we’ll suffer through daily storms and live in the pleeblands. Who knows. But it sure makes for good reading.

READING CHALLENGES: My sixth book in this year’s Canadian Book Challenge!

#64 – Blindness

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading interesting but somewhat bleak fiction. I’m halfway through Oryx and Crake, devoured Hunger and just finished Jose Saramago’s Blindness this morning. All three novels deal very strongly with how absence has an effect upon human society. Represented in the protagonist in Hunger, represented in the landscape in Oryx and Crake, and represented in the society’s blindness in Saramago’s brilliant novel. Why do novels about absence work so well? It’s an easy question to answer: because they force the writer to observe, and observation is always at its sharpest when there’s some sort of tragedy or trauma forcing it forward.

Like in Hunger, the characters in Saramago’s book are not overtly named but referred to by description: “the first blind man,” “his wife,” “the doctor,” “the doctor’s wife,” “the girl with the dark glasses” (even if she’s not wearing them), etc. In a way it makes the plight, an epidemic that causes blindness throughout an entire city (or country), more poignant; it hits everyone and anyone. That is, with the exception of the doctor’s wife, who retains her sight even when the rest of the world has gone blind. The opening scenes of the novel are pitch perfect: a man alone in his car in traffic suddenly goes blind — a form of white blindness (instead of seeing darkness those affected see nothing but white) that spreads like wild fire throughout the population.

Those first individuals who “catch” the virus are quarantined and suffer through a hellish situation as more and more people arrive who suffer from the same plight. The novel doesn’t shy away from its central theme: when humans are pushed away from civilization they will act abominably. That’s not to say that the core group the novel remains centred around — the first residents quarantined after becoming infected — don’t act decently. They do and continue to do so regardless of their increasingly difficult circumstances. But they come across nefarious and despicable people as they try to survive the decimation of their society.

I’m not sure if it’s the translation, but Saramago’s writing style reminds me of Marquez. He writes long, luxurious sentences that examine every aspect of the situation. The allegory (if I’m using that word correctly) of the story almost keenly ascribes the defeat of human society when faced with this kind of categorical tragedy. Old philosophical debates of the essence of the human soul, whether it’s good or evil, are apt in terms of thinking about this book, and that’s probably why I enjoyed it so very much.

But before I sign off, here’s an example of how Saramago’s keen observations bleed into every inch of the novel:

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them come irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armour, we might say.

READING CHALLENGES: Jose Saramago was born in Portugal so this novel counts toward the Around the World in 52 Books challenge that has been woefully under represented in my reading this year. There’s no way I’ll catch up now so I’m guessing I’ll give up sooner rather than later.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Finishing Oryx and Crake and Brideshead Revisited (more 1001 Books!).

#63 – Hunger

In my last post about the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, I was full of resentment over having slogged my way through American Pastoral. With Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, I’ve now forgiven the list. As the unnamed protagonist wanders around Christiania (Oslo) starving and half-mad, he narrates the decline of both his physical and mental states. Hunger is a striking, captivating novel that feels utterly modern in its conception with echoes of the stream of conscious-type narratives that I am ever-so fond of reading.

Originally published in 1890, the struggles of the writer to simply live, to find a warm, dry place to sleep, to keep his body protected, to find food to satiate the most basic of the body’s expectations, seem beyond him for many reasons. He has no money because he hasn’t sold an article (he has sold many articles to the pawnbroker, though). He’s been evicted because he can’t pay the rent. His appearance deteriorates as the novel continues leaving bits and pieces of his hair all over the city (it’s always falling out!). While respite comes throughout the book in various different places, the overall suffering and consistent starvation of the narrator, his awful living conditions, and the fact that at one point he resorts to sucking on wood chips ensures that he never really comes through the other side.

In a life where a few pennies (øres?) would make a world of difference, the writer clings to a sense of his own morality. He refuses to steal any food for survival. He pays back his debts (even if it means he’ll starve once again). He believes entirely in the value of his written words if only he could get his mind to work. He simply never asks for help. Then, driven to the brink of madness, the writer finally sacrifices his freedom for survival, and it’s a bittersweet moment.

Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920, and from what I can discern from the biography in the back of the book, his own struggles to make a living from his work inspired aspects of Hunger. The author’s strength of character comes through (sitting atop a train after being diagnosed with tuberculosis and breathing in as much air as humanly possible) both in terms of the power within this novel but also in his personal story. Balancing out the basic needs of life with the kind of hard work the narrator resigns himself to just in order to survive, the entire book feels like a testament to the kind of men who value ideals of strength in character above all else. All in all, it’s a magnificent book. One that I would have never discovered had I not embarked upon the whole 1001 Books Challenge in the first place.

READING CHALLENGES: Killing two challenges with one book: Norway for Around the World in 52 Books and another 1001 Books title.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: My second-hand copy underneath my 1001 text, which has a far superior jacket image.

Psychic Reading

I am forever amazed at the seemingly psychic ways that reading makes its way into your life. How sometimes, books just choose you. Yesterday after picking my brother up from the hospital, I was driving back to work (and I never drive to work) and noticed how windy it was in the city. The multicoloured leaves were strewn (and continually blowing) all around the streets and it was an amazing site to be seen. You know, it’s one thing to know that the seasons are changing, to see the treetops from the 20th floor and to remark about the prettiness of it all. But it’s quite another thing to experience the seasons: to stand on Bloor Street as the wind whips you into next week, to put out the recycling and kick a pile of leaves around at the bottom of your stairs, to smell the cold, autumn air. It’s so easy to forget the importance of noticing these things as the days get busy with life, stress and (in my case) seemingly never-ending drama (and, well, trauma).

I’ve been reading Oryx and Crake, slowly and it’s reminding me of The Road. Anyway, the edition I have is hardcover and I didn’t want to lug it all the way to work so I picked up Knut Hamsun’s Hunger this morning instead. I bought a second-hand paperback when we were in NYC this summer because it’s been on numerous ‘to be read’ lists that I’ve made over the years. Imagine my delight at finding this sentence: “The fall had come, that cool delicious time of year when everything changed colour and died.”

Just perfect.

#62 – Goldengrove (& The IFOA)

I didn’t set out to read Francine Prose’s Goldengrove this week. And the IFOA’s kind of snuck up on me. A number of our authors are here to do readings and we’ve tried to organize On the Fly videos for them. Emma, Francine Prose’s publicist, gave me a copy of the book so I could come up with a couple of questions for her author video and, as well, because I’m going to see if the author has time to do a quick email interview for Savvy Reader. To make a longish (and somewhat boring) story shorter, I read the first few pages of Goldengrove and couldn’t stop.

Before you read any further, if you have any inclination towards reading Goldengrove, be warned there may be spoilers in my review.

Nico and her older sister, Margaret, live in upstate New York on the idyllic Mirror Lake. Their mother writes liner music for classical CDs and their father owns and runs a bookstore called Goldengrove after “Spring and Fall,” the Hopkins poem. On a lazy, gorgeous day before summer truly begins, one of those days where you enjoy all the promise of the season after the slush of spring has finally cleared up entirely, the two sisters float on a rowboat on the lake. Wearing their bathing suits to get a jump on their tans (Margaret) they have one of those shorthand sibling conversations that the skilled Prose uses to set up the entire family dynamic.

“This is heaven,” Margaret says. She’s dreamy: gorgeous, full of promise, a superstar singer in the process with an equally gorgeous painter of a boyfriend named Aaron. Nico, the book’s protagonist replies, “Don’t you ever worry about the polar ice caps melting?” She’s a precocious thirteen-year-old who loves science and gets straight As. The two float around the lake until Margaret has had enough, maybe of her little sister nagging her about her smoking, maybe to be dramatic (she loves old movies; the melodrama of black and white), and jumps into the lake. Nico closes her eyes and falls asleep. When she wakes, her sister is nowhere to be found, her mother’s piano music drifts over the lake as Nico pulls herself back to shore. Only they don’t find Margaret until much later — her heart condition more serious than anyone thought becomes the cause of her sudden death.

The sudden shock of the magnitude of the tragedy propels the entire family into a summer they’ll never forget and their grief manifests itself in each in different ways. An endemic loss of appetite. An inability to continue with everyday activities. The closed door of Margaret’s room. The hot, insufferable summer, their creaking train car of a house, and the slow ruination of Mirror Lake as a result of algae all become metaphors for how Nico and her parents cope with their loss. But it’s not until Nico begins a strange friendship with Aaron, her sister’s boyfriend, that the implications of how grief can truly change a person becomes evident. Nico and Aaron start off being a comfort to one another. They take drives. They talk about Margaret. They do things the two used to do together. Only Nico’s not her sister, she’s four years younger and Aaron pulls her further and further away from herself, into someone she doesn’t recognize. Nico’s desire at once to be more like Margaret feels right in a way, maybe it’s a necessary stage she needs to go through to deal with her death, or maybe it’s just the only way she knows how to cope, but it’s not something that can sustain her, and as she realizes more and more of what’s happening, her body, her mind, finds its way back to itself.

Last night at the IFOA, Francine Prose prefaced her reading by telling the audience that many of the reviews she’s read about Goldengrove take note with the fact that “it’s not a Francine Prose novel.” Some postulate that she’s written it “just to sell books” (whatever that means). As I’ve only ever read Goldengrove, I can’t really compare it to any of her other books. I can only say that I was utterly captivated by Nico’s voice, by her pain, by her experiences, by her loss. Prose read from the book’s first section, as I sort of guessed that she would, to go any further in the story might be to spoil it in ways that would stop the reader from taking that journey from Nico. The months after the loss of someone so important to someone so young change your life forever. Prose captures her voice so very well that Nico’s grief becomes almost exquisite in a way (but never precious, that’s something different entirely). It’s sharp and painful and has depths that need to be explored before one can come out the other end.

This morning while lying in bed coughing up a lung and cursing my headache, I kept thinking about why I enjoyed the novel so much. One reason, of course, is because I can completely identify with Nico, in how she coped with the tragedy, in her strange behavior, her odd relationship with Aaron. Beyond the more personal reasons for liking the book, I admired Prose’s ability to capture the voice of the character in such profound ways. You’re never pulled out of the story. You never feel as though the author is using the situation to prove a point (read: American Pastoral). You’re never frustrated with the mistakes Nico makes beyond you’re heart aching just a little for what she’s going through.

Prose was a definite highlight of last night’s readings. The other readers were enjoyable too, especially Emma Donoghue, whom I also enjoy, and Joan Barfoot, whom I’ve never read but thought she did a great job. The only reader that didn’t really catch me was Anita Shreve. Her latest novel feels too overwrought and movie-of-the-week for me. Regardless, it was a whirlwind two days with Goldengrove, and I’d highly recommend the novel.

#61 – American Pastoral

Sometimes I really resent the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list. Like when you slog through umpteen pages of books like Philip Roth’s bloated and self-indulgent masterpiece American Pastoral. I’m honestly shocked that a book that so clearly needed an editor won the Pulitzer Prize. I liken Roth’s writing in ways to Canadian David Adams Richards, who remains highly regarded by many people in the literary world (and is ever-acclaimed and never-endingly nominated). It’s just not the book for me. Honestly, I’m barely surprised that I finished.

In theory, and at the beginning of my reading experience, I couldn’t put the book down. I was fascinated by Seymour “The Swede” Levov, the golden-blond, all-American, football-playing, Riggins-reminding main character. The novel does an excellent job of exploring how his Jewish roots somewhat sit in opposition to his golden boy lifestyle thus setting up this ideal of the American pastoral. In a world where a man, who has worked incredibly hard (he took over his father’s glove business) and married a woman he adores (and is a beautiful Irish-American beauty queen), can’t even succeed, what hope is there for the rest of us? The Swede’s more than a character: he’s an archetype, one that Roth’s narrator, the bachelor-slash-writer Nathan “Skip” Zuckerman explores in tireless detail.

After a chance meeting at a baseball game when they’re both well advanced into middle age, The Swede approaches Skip and asks if he’d like to write a book about his father, Lou Levov. This becomes the premise behind telling the Swede’s story. And then retelling it. And then retelling it a little more. And then a little more. Like a record that skips, the book plods along in ceaseless and sometimes utterly unnecessary detail about every aspect of the Swede’s life, his relationship with his first wife, Dawn, and their troublesome daughter, Merry.

When Merry’s (as described on the jacket) “savage act of political terrorism” destroys the family, much of the novel is dedicated to trying to understand the reasons behind why she did it. The breakdown of the family is never explored in detail, only hinted at, as we discover at the beginning of the book that the Swede has remarried and has three teenage sons. For the majority of the novel, he tries to keep his life on course despite it’s consistent derailing. As the nature of tragedy in and of itself is cyclical, I can see why Roth spent so much time writing around and around the events; but it took a sheer force of will for me to finish this book.

I am not, however, giving up. Anyone who can write sentences like Roth deserves a second chance:

Marcia was all talk — always had been: senseless, ostentatious talk, words with the sole purpose of scandalously exhibiting themselves, uncompromising, quarrelsome words expressing little more than Marcia’s intellectual vanity and her odd belief that all her posturing added up to an independent mind.

I started The Plot Against America this morning and am already enjoying it. Also, let’s make note that I read the majority of this book during my own tedious and utterly frustrating moments: waiting for the doctor; waiting for the ferry; riding on the ferry; sitting in the car and waiting for the ferry…and so on. Maybe that had something to do with my frustration?

READING CHALLENGES: Yes! A title in my woefully underrepresented 1001 Books Challenge and if I were actually still doing the Around the World in 52 Books I might have counted this title for the United States.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The book. My lap. The ferry. Boredom.

#59 – One Fifth Avenue

“Pleasantly surprised.”

I know. Two words I never thought I’d use when it came to a book by Candace Bushnell. But, um, One Fifth Avenue is good. It’s entertaining, well written and quite a departure from her earlier books. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that in a way it’s kind of a modern comedy of manners. There are hints of bawdy Restoration literature and even a dash of Edith Wharton thrown in for good measure sprinkled in between the Vanity Fair-like plot that revolves around the very wealthy (and quite silly) people that live at One Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

When actress Schiffer Diamond returns to One Fifth after a substantial absence, quite a few things have changed. Most importantly, the ridiculously wealthy woman (and I can’t remember her name and left my book in Tofino) who occupied the top two floors of the building has died and her apartment is up for grabs. The infighting begins between the remaining residents: Enid Merle, an aging gossip columnist, Philip Oakland, her screenwriter nephew, and Mindy and James Gooch, an online director and an author, respectively. The rivalry continues even as the new tenants, the newly rich Annalisa and Paul Rice, move into the building and cause problems of their own. Completing the cast of characters is Billy Litchfield and Lola Fabrikant, outsiders who both want in for different reasons.

In the kind of New York world where address means everything, the people who live in One Fifth exemplify the idiocy of a certain kind of lifestyle. Bushnell’s ability to be cutting comes out freely in this book — the characters are all double-sided. Of course, they do have amazing lives, but they aren’t without their own flaws, making them at least human in this novel (unlike, say, the women of Lipstick Jungle). Strange, and maybe it was the wicked cold I’ve now caught after just finishing (barely) with the stupid bronchitis, that I enjoyed this book for reasons well beyond the usual insipid happiness I feel after reading chicklit. Kudos to Candace.

#58 – Ritual

Oh, Mo Hayder, I should not read your books when I am at home alone with only two cats for protection. But once I picked up Ritual, I could not put it down and if that’s not the sign of a great, plot-driven book, I don’t know what is.

When a hand washes up unannounced and with no body attached, Sgt. Flea Marley, a member of the police dive unit in Bath, and her CID (I think?) Caffrey unravel a complex and shocking case founded in the immigrant experience in England. Their investigation uncovers an underground market for muti that soon becomes focus of their policework. Muti, African rituals brought from the continent to England that broker in human body parts and fear (among the believers), forms the basis for Hayder to bring race, class and colonialism into her work, and the book is all the better for it.

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with Ms. Hayder for an interview that’ll appear on The Savvy Reader later this week. A self-described autodidact, Hayder researches carefully but not without really great instincts, and in Ritual she’s written a daring and addictive thriller that has echoes of Henning Mankell. When I walked into the room, I said, “Your book scared the pants off of me!” She laughed and replied, “Good!” And it’s true, there’s an element of fear that pervades the entire novel: people (even the police) are being watched, stalked even, and no one seems untouched by tragedy. Both main characters are broken in some way from major life events that alter their perspectives; Flea’s parents are dead and Caffery lost a brother at a very young age. Yet, as ‘outsiders’ in a way (they’re also lonely and have little true human contact with other people), the tragedies are exactly what make Flea and Caffery good at their jobs.

Subtitled “A Walking Man novel,” Ritual introduces a character who will appear in upcoming books. He’s a man who lives outside, cooks his own food, follows his own path, and is kind of a sooth-sayer for Caffery. Yet, the Walking Man also has a past. He committed one of the most heinous crimes the district has ever seen and now that he’s paid his debt to society, he’s determined to stay at its edges. Captivating, creepy, smart and ridiculously readable, I loved Ritual. Although I have to say that the fellow standing next to me on the subway yesterday must have thought I was reading something utterly disturbing. Every time I’d look up from my book he’d give me a sweet little smile trying to make me feel a bit better because I was honestly scared out of my wits and it must have shown on my face.