ragdoll reads – Page 28 – my tragic right hip

#35 – On Chesil Beach

For now, I’m going to post pictures of the books I read in context. I spent the weekend up north, so this photo is fitting then, with the galley (thanks Trisha!) of Ian McEwan’s latest, On Chesil Beach perched on the railing of our sun deck. The last book of McEwan’s I read was Amsterdam and considering I barely remember anything about it, I’m happy to say that my reading experience of this sweet, sad little book was extremely different.

The story of newlyweds Edward and Florence, On Chesil Beach explores how one very small mistake, a misspoken word, a poor reaction, can alter the course of your life forever. I don’t want to say much more than that considering the novel is only 166 pages long and to give too much away would perhaps ruin it entirely. Suffice to say that it takes all that was so great about Saturday, the attention to detail, the exploration of family life, and the intimate details of everyday events, and shrink wraps it to a moment versus an entire day.

Set in 1962, On Chesil Beach, as much as it is about the change the characters themselves experience, it’s also about the evolution (and later sexual revolution) of England in the 1960s. The setting feels so perfect too, even though the novel travels back and forth through Edward and Florence’s lives, the one night that they spend on Chesil Beach truly impacts their past, present and future, and I find that fascinating. I love novels that challenge the idea of traditional storytelling and, in a way, even though McEwan’s style is very classic, and this novel quite straightforward, it’s how the author gets into the details that makes this book so great.

I can’t tell you how perfect this was to read sitting in the quiet at the cottage, watching a loon or two float by, hearing the birds, feeling the pebbles underfoot, imagining the cold beef the characters had for their dinner…just lovely.

Shhhh, Sleeping Rock Stars

My RRHB was in Windsor and London the last two nights, and now he’s asleep, along with their drummer Nathan Lawr (who is also a wonderful musician in his own right) who is crashed out on my couch.

Normally, if you had a regular house that wasn’t being renovated, there would be other places for you to hang out, like downstairs. But because we’re all crammed upstairs, I’m sort of trapped here on the computer waiting for them to wake up. And considering we’re supposed to leave for the cottage in an hour, I’m getting desperate to jiggle the bed a little and step away from the celebrity gossip. There’s only so much trash I can fill my mind up with before feeling slightly dirty myself.

I’m also pleased to say that two nights of really good sleep have brought me back to rights in terms of the past week. Last night I watched The Good Shepherd and barely made it through before crawling into bed at 10 PM. I also finished reading Claire Cameron’s debut novel, The Line Painter, which is #34 for the year.

What A Week

I can barely believe that it’s Saturday again. The week flew by at light speed and I haven’t even been home long enough (other than sleeping) to update anything. So, because today should be spent writing so I have something to send my mentor by the end of the weekend, I’m updated via a quickie list. Had I had time this week, all of these would have been separate entries, so I apologize for the brevity.

1. This was the week of author events through work. I attended four of them in three days. The first, a forum to launch Michael Chettleburgh’s Young Thugs, was very interesting. I even learned that there were Irish gangs in Toronto in 1850. Another thing for my list to investigate because I think it would make a cool story. Then I went to two different events for Daniel Handler: a Lemony Snicket cocktail party, and an event at the Andy Pool Hall to celebrate his novel Adverbs. But my favourite was the underground club party for Richard Flanagan, author of The Unknown Terrorist, where Russell Smith mildly insulted me before carrying on his way and doing a superb on stage interview with the author, who, by the way, read Chekhov as preparation for writing about the women in his novel. That made me want to take him out for dinner and listen to him wax philosophical for hours.

2. Gilmore Girls is over. I managed to watch the last episode but only after begging my RRHB to remember to tape it before he went off to his second job on Tuesday. I was chatting over email with Kate who pointed out that it’s actually kind of ironic to see every single episode of a show and then forget to tape the very last one. She’s right, but I was just so busy this week that a number of things slipped my mind. I felt very ho-hum about the finale. Even though the show has absolutely gotten off track as of late, I’m still not 100% convinced it should have been over. And how they dealt with both of the relationships, Luke and Logan, was ridiculous. Regardless, it’s one less hour of television I’ll have to keep up with in the fall.

3. I finished reading Chantal Simmons’s Stuck in Downward Dog. I got a little teary at the end, and it was refreshing to read a chicklit novel where ‘getting the boy’ wasn’t the central focus of the story. I liked how the book was more about a journey for the character into herself versus a more stereotypical journey into the right relationship. Anyway, that’s book #33 for the year. I’m also halfway through about a half-dozen other books that I’m hoping to finish this weekend up north while my brother and RRHB are watching Pan’s Labyrinth.

4. Yesterday afternoon, our summer hours started. I had some work to finish up so I didn’t leave right at 1:30 PM, but I did manage to make it to an afternoon show of Away From Her, Sarah Polley’s directorial debut. Based on Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Down the Mountain,” I felt like it was a solid adaptation, if Polley did take some liberties with the story’s point of view and tended to sentimentalize where the author had been tack-sharp. I found some aspects of the film a bit overly dramatic but Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie were just so good that I was willing to overlook the bits of the movie that just felt too forced. Grant reading “The Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife” really? Regardless of how much I love that poem, the can lit overtures in the film were a little, well, eye roll inducing. But I don’t want that to deflect from the fact that Away From Her is a film I would highly recommend as counter programming to the glut of American multiplex blockbusters hitting the streets every week or two.

5. I saw yet another specialist this week about some lady problems I’ve been having. Needless to say, a lot of what I’m experiencing is probably a side effect of the methotrexate, which doesn’t make it any easier to take. I’m also getting frustrated because I can’t seem to loose a single pound. Eating better, riding my bike, dance class, pilates, and still over the course of the last few months, I am the same chubby -bloated sick-looking girl I was when I started. I’m very frustrated about all of that but I have to say that if it’s the medicine at least I know that I’ll be off of it in the next six-to-eight months and maybe then the weight will start coming off. I can’t stand looking at pictures of myself though, which is annoying because everyone and their uncle seems to update Facebook with a million different albums. Anyway. I really liked this doctor very much and feel like she’ll be extremely helpful when it comes to this particular problem that won’t seem to go away. I have to say that even now that the disease is in remission technically, I’m dead sick of all the treatments. It’s been three years of different medications, difficult side effects, and I’m just plain tired of it all. And the mood swings with everything else combined has just about caught me by the fray of my last rope.

TBR Stacks

I totally cribbed this from Baby Got Books, but here’s a picture of one portion of my TBR books. The bottom shelf should be books for the 1001 Books / Around the World in 52 Books challenges but they’ve all gotten mixed up with some other novels, ARCs from work, and other job-related titles that I need to read.

The top shelf is a mishmash of books I want to get to some day. These are books I haven’t read so they haven’t been packed away yet. They’re also books that I couldn’t bear to give away when we did the big clean out a few months ago. Some of them I will never read. But the interest is there, regardless.

#32 Depths – Henning Mankell

I was halfway through this book before I declared the death of my reading challenges, so maybe all is not lost.

While Depths isn’t a Wallander mystery, it still retains many of the qualities that Mankell displays in his popular detective series, especially in tone and narrative style. Mankell has never been an author to shy away from the bleaker aspects of human nature, and Depths is no exception.

The novel, set during the First World War in Sweden, opens years in advance of the main story, as one its main characters, Kristina Tracker, the wife of naval Commander Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, escapes from the mental hospital that has been her home for many years and stands alone in the forest contemplating one memory: that she once had a husband.

From there, the narrative switches point of view, and the story becomes entirely Lars’s. He’s an exacting kind of man, with a mind that has a unique talent with measurements; a man who is drawn inexorably to the sea, who uses his unique skills to become a hydrographic survey engineer for the Swedish navy.

While on a mission, Lars discovers a young woman named Sara Fredrika living on a Halsskär, a skerry close to where they are measuring the depths of the sea. Soon he becomes obsessed with the woman, and the friction between the life he has in Stockholm with Kristina Tracker, and the one he desires on Halsskär turn Lars into a man even he would not recognize. His longing to escape from both of his two disparate worlds drives him to desperate acts, those of which bring the novel to its tragic conclusions.

Mankell shows with the novel that the ache of humanity that drives the overwhelmingly brooding yet wonderful Wallander series can carry into a more literary, artistic novel. His voice in this book is clear yet abrupt. Depths has short, succinct chapters, barely longer than two or three pages each, yet the story feels rich, flushed out and complete. Mankell’s sea, and how it relates to Tobiasson-Svartman’s consciousness, becomes almost a secondary character in the novel; it’s described beautifully and at length, and it’s easy to understand Lars’s connection to it, both psychologically and physically.

The Swedish entry in my Around the World in 52 Countries challenge, for once I felt a sincere and complex connection to the setting in the novel. Depths is a novel all about landscape, bleak, cold winters, rolling storms, the power of the sea, and the deep impact that war has on the men in its service. It makes me think that I’d love to read anything Mankell writes outside of the Wallander series, not that they aren’t great books, because they are, but Depths satisfies in an entirely different way.

The Death Of My Reading Challenges

I am desperately trying to hang on to my reading challenges these days. But I’ve got so many books to read for work that I might have to call it quits on both: Around the World in 52 Books and 1001 Books until I’ve got more time.

I’ve also finished #31 for the year, Magyk by Angie Sage. It’s a book for kids that I read for our What Would Harry Read? promotion. I love the idea of imagining the reading lives of imaginary characters. It’s a super-cute theme that should get people talking, if only to imagine what other characters would read.

Like what would Elizabeth Bennett read if she were alive today and reading in this century? What would Dean Moriarty have in the back pocket of his jeans? If Trip Fontaine were real, would he read? If you had a favourite fictional character: what do you think would be on their bookshelves?

Anyway, I’m going to try to keep on top of my ‘for me’ reading but I have a feeling it’ll get buried well beneath all of the books that now teeter on the top of my TBR pile from work. It’s an embarrassment of riches, that’s for sure.

#30 – The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

Alexander McCall Smith’s latest novel in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Series, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, is the Zimbabwe entry on my Around the World in 52 Countries challenge. These days, I kind of feel like Phil Keoghan from The Amazing Race, “this is the latest stop in a race around the world!” Heh.

Annnywaay. With familiar characters, the lead detective Mma Ramotswe, her husband Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, the associate detective/assistant Mma Makutsi, and many others, the story follows the same basic structure as the seven books before it, where the ‘mysteries’ more like moral lessons. Each character comes to his or her solution in a way that highlights the good characteristics of their personalities, all the while life goes on as normal in the small Botswana agency. As always, the books are more about life in Botswana perhaps, than about the problems the people bring to Mma Ramotswe and her co-workers.

In this particular story, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni discovers that he might like to try being a detective and has a case to himself, and while it doesn’t get solved in the traditional sense, a happy ending is found regardless. Reading McCall Smith is like drinking a large glass of lemonade on a hot day, it’s sweet, satisfying and never too tart for my liking. Although just like anything sweet in life, it’s easy to OD, so I’d take it one book at a time (over the course of a few months, at least) when reading this series, should the magic wear off, because who would want that?

#29 – The Road

Lavish praise aside, Cormac McCarthy’s novel felt like a fitting book to read on the cold mornings and early evenings on the way to and from work last week. A bone-chilling story of a man and his son walking the road south in post-apocalyptic America, The Road contains McCarthy’s trademark sparse yet rich prose, as well as fitting setting for the this-close-to-the-edge world we inhabit today.

This book scared me. Honestly terrified me. Akin to that feeling I had when in grade school we watched The Day After (seriously, my brother and I both had nightmares after that miniseries, I think we even might have slept in the same bed a couple nights because were were both terrified), my mind could not help but picture the bleak landscape, the frightening feeling of being alone in a world that no longer exists in any way, shape or form like the one I walk out in every day. As I read the novel, it was impossible not to think of what I would do in a similar situation. Would I prepare? How would I prepare? Or would I just feel like my time had come, and let it? Who knows. And I don’t think my heart could handle an answer.

Regardless of my own terror, I hopelessly enjoyed the novel. I run hot and cold with McCarthy: I count All the Pretty Horses among one of my all-time favourite American books, right up there with On the Road and Beloved. But so much of his work I just can’t read (Blood Meridian); it’s too violent, too bloody, despite its obvious literary merit. But this book I couldn’t put down, the simple, aching sentences, devoid of complex punctuation and lack of contractual apostrophes pulls you along, page upon page, like the journey the two main characters take themselves, slowly, urgently, foot after foot.

So much of the core skill of McCarthy’s talent lies in separating his heroes from society in general. The father and the boy in The Road, while some of the few remaining human beings on Earth, don’t fall into the same category as the rogue cannibals they encounter along the way. They ‘carry the fire,’ refuse to eat their fellow man, woman or child, and are moving south to be closer to the warmth, convinced that there will still be some form of society there to welcome them once they arrive.

A novel as much about survival as it is about the familial relationship between the man and his boy, there are so many elements of The Road that feel so close to the truth, so near to what life would be like should the world as we know it disappear, that it’s not unlike Children of Men. What I mean is that it’s just so close to being real and it’s in that almost-reality that the terror sets in. Even when the novel reveals obvious parallels to Beckett that I can recognize, my overwhelming panic never disappears, even as I approached the last sentence of the last paragraph on the last page.

I hesitate to use words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘brilliant’ for fear of hyperbole, but it’s hard not to think in those terms when you finish this book. You ache for their survival toward the end, want to do everything in your power to protect the feeling of love that prospers between the father and his son, and cherish the fact that these very good, very human traits manage to abound in a world covered with ash, dead trees and never-ending fire.

They went through the last of the cars and then walked up the track to the locomotive and climbed up to the catwalk. Rust and scaling paint. They pushed into the cab and he blew away the ash from the engineer’s seat and put the boy at the controls. The controls were very simple. Little to do but push the throttle lever forward. He made train noises and diesel horn noises but he wasnt sure what these might mean to the boy. After a while they just looked out through the silted glass to where the track curved away in the waste of weeds. If they saw different worlds what they knew was the same. That the train would sit there slowly decomposing for all eternity and that no train would ever run again.

#28 – The Raw Shark Texts

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the launch party for Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts. Delightful and charming, Hall speaks with a lovely British accent that sounds Manchester-ish, which always reminds me of Coronation Street. However, I could be getting that totally wrong and making all kinds of assumptions. It’s just that he sounds a lot like my old neighbour, Andrew, whose family was from Manchester. Soooo. His speaking voice reminded me of Andrew, which was lovely considering I haven’t seen and/or thought of him in a while. It’s nice to miss people in that way, without even realizing it, like an echo that sort of bounces off your memory but only when you’re within hearing distance.

Annnywaaay.

Before Hall read a very short excerpt (just the first page) he mentioned that he had set out to write a book that had elements for all readers: a love story if that’s what you like, a thriller for those readers, maybe a dash of mystery for that crew. All in all, it’s quite a mash-up of styles all sewn together with his lovely, literary voice. He also laughed because he said that in every country, except Canada, the book starts off on the first page. Ah, but here, we got to start with the Aquarium fragment (which you can read here if you can figure out the puzzle), which was bound into lovely looking booklets for the party.

I read a review in the Torontoist yesterday that mentioned that maybe the in some ways marketing of the book ‘overshadows the text itself.’ And it’s true that rarely have I seen so much buzz about a book, from packages being stolen off of porches to conceptual shark boats being built in amazing art spaces, alongside the wiki, the puzzle, and high profile bloggers, there’s an incredible force of nature surrounding The Raw Shark Texts, and that it’s a first novel makes it even more exciting.

But, I’d have to disagree that it takes away from the book at all, I think, because so much of it comes from the spirit of The Raw Shark Texts itself. Every single thing that I’ve seen and/or read about the novel feels very much akin to the text, which is a hard thing to achieve in this cold, cruel market-infested world.

When Eric Sanderson wakes up one morning with no idea who or where he is, he finds a note from the “First Eric Sanderson,” telling him to contact Dr. Randle, who will help him with his condition. From that very first moment, a story of massive proportions, both imaginary and real, is set into motion.

As Second Eric Sanderson (SEC) bumbles through life suffering from a dissociate fugue and attempts to piece his life back together, he discovers he’s being chased by a Ludovician, a conceptual shark that feeds on human knowledge. While he races for his life outside of the jaws of the shark, SEC finds fragments of his former self, when he was in love with a beautiful girl who died tragically while they were on vacation in the Greek islands.

See, something for everyone.

Yet, Hall’s ability to not only manage the wild and even outrageously imaginative parts of the book remains perfectly clear throughout the novel. Not only is it believable, but it’s real, even if the story is perfectly unreal: there’s great emotions, high chases, wickedly fun references and post-post references, and lots of fascinating characters, not the least of which is a very adventurous cat named Ian. In addition to the great writing, there are visual aspects of the book (flip shark pages included) that don’t seem incongruous and/or like devices. On the whole, The Raw Shark Texts manages to be literary, adventurous, sweet and fascinating all at the same time.

And it’s so not the kind of book I would normally read, but I’m very glad I did, even if now before I go to bed, I try not to imagine a conceptual shark under there swimming around in my dreams, eating up my memories, and spitting them back out again.

#26 – Out Of Africa

The romantic notions I had regarding this book stem, obviously, from seeing the film, where I assumed Out of Africa would echo the autobiographical elements of Sydney Pollack’s adaptation. For years, I’d wander past it on the shelf and think to myself, ‘man, I really do need to read that book,’ ashamed, that in six years of studying English, with a focus on post-colonial literature, I had never had the courage to actually conquer Isak Dinesen’s work. It was quite a shock, then, to discover how different the book actually is from how I built it up in my imagination.

After almost two months of reading it on and off, I’ve finally finished the real Out of Africa. Sometimes majestic, sometimes upsetting, sometimes painfully dated, and sometimes downright brilliant, the book is described in the 1001 Books as “perhaps the greatest pastoral elegy of modernism.” Telling the story of Dinesen’s time running a coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills, it’s almost anthropological in much of its intent, and the parts of the book that are so distasteful now, racist even, are contained in her attempts to categorize life in Africa. But the parts of the book that soar are when she’s exploring her very real connection to the land, to her farm, to her life as she built it around her. For example, when the book captures her very human emotions, it’s some of the most wonderful writing; yet when she attempts to “explain” away Africa to her European counterparts, perhaps her imagined audience, it’s almost painful to read it’s so offensive.

Yet something makes you hang in there, and there are subjects you almost wish that she released herself, and/or her voice, enough to write freely about: her true feelings toward Denys Finch-Hatton; her absolute heartbreak with the failure of the farm; her obvious anger toward her husband (who gave her syphilis, as we all know from the film). All of these aspects of Dinesen’s life are explored in passing, as if she could only express herself when truly looking at the landscape, as if the descriptions of Africa and the farm could somehow intuit how she felt on an emotional level about the rest of her life.

There are so many wonderful passages in the book that it would be impossible to list them all here, and as the Denmark entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, I find myself once again confronted with the fact that the author I’ve chosen has once again transplanted themselves elsewhere to tell the story of an adopted land rather than his/her homeland. Perhaps in the end, it doesn’t matter at all where you’re from, all that matters is that you find your heart in the place you choose to write about. There’s no denying Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) left her heart behind in Africa when she was forced to return to Europe.

My own books I packed up in cases and sat on them, or dined on them. Books in a colony play a different part in your existence from what they do in Europe; there is a whole side of your life which there they are alone take charge of; and on this account, according to their quality, you feel more grateful to them, or more indignant with them, than you will ever do in civilized countries.

…I had consented to give away my possessions one by one, as a kind of ransom for my own life, but by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all, for fate to get rid of.