Category: ragdoll reads

#62 – One Good Turn

A few months ago, Publisher’s Lunch noted that of all the fall books coming out this year, Kate Atkinson’s new novel One Good Turn was among the most highly anticipated. And for once, the hype has substance behind it (ahem, The Historian I’m looking at you, I couldn’t even finish that abysmally written thing). In fact, Atkinson, like Ishiguro (although not as literary), is such a deft novelist that by the end of the book you’re marveling at her skill with a story as much as you are her ability to write in the stream of consciousness form in such a controlled and subtle way.

One Good Turn weaves and bobs through the life of Jackson Brodie, the hardhitting cop from Case Histories. Now in Edinburgh for his lover Julia’s play during the Festival (she’s also from Case Histories), he finds himself embroiled in a case and now stands on the other side of the law, more a criminal than a cop. With the same keen eye for detail and remarkable skill at creating realistic yet completely distinct characters, Atkinson’s novel is much more than your typical bash-’em-on-the-head and solve the crime kind of mystery.

Don’t be disappointed, there are dead bodies, lots of intrigue, plenty of coincendences and a pile of action to keep you interested. In fact, I’m not going to say any more except treat yourself and read this novel: you won’t regret it.

#57 – Lullabies For Little Criminals

A friend gave me this book while we were in Winnipeg because I left my copy of The Thirteenth Tale on the plane (yet another in a long line of problems plaguing our otherwise totally awesome trip). Now, I never leave home without more than one book, like, never. I hate being stuck reading something that I might not like and not having any options. Generally, this means I have books stashed all over the place: in suitcases, carry-ons, purses, RRHB’s backpack, you name it, I’ll put a book in there. Of course, this time, the only time I leave the house with one book, is the moment I choose to leave my book on the airplane from hell. Whatever. I was stranded with nothing to read. It’s like being left out from your favourite party, not having a book, and I really hate that.

Annnwwaaay. Instead of going to a bookstore, said friend loaned me Heather O’Neill’s first novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals. Set in Montreal, I’m thinking in either the late 1970s or early 1980s, the novel tells the story of Baby, a girl who turns 13 over the course of the story. But this is no average bildungsroman, as Baby’s journey takes her as far away from the normal kid on a bike, Hollywood troubled teen, as you can possibly imagine. Her father, Jules, who was only 15 when she was born, is a heroin addict; totally incapable of parenting, even after he gets out of rehab, Baby is forced to grow up on her own, painfully noting time and time again, about what not having a mother means to a girl that age. Her own mother, who we hear very little about in a concrete way until the end of the book, died when she was a baby.

The novel falls into the cracks and crevices of the seedy Montreal streets as Baby and Jules move from one rundown apartment to the next. Constantly in and out of social service situations (group home, neighbour’s house, juvie), Baby has no one to guide her, and making her own way truly isn’t making anything better, as she falls into a terribly destructive relationship with a pimp named Alphonse. And every time Baby makes a bad decision, your heart breaks just a little; she’s smart, she’s beautiful, but she has no chance or opportunity to take a different path.

O’Neill’s writing tumbles down into simile upon simile, which sometimes had my head spinning, but it’s so lovely and absolutely engaging that it didn’t matter to me that it might be a little bit too much. The story rushes along, sometimes breaking back into Baby’s memories, and almost crashes into the redemptive ending, like the end to a really good rock song. Of the 50-odd books I’ve read this year, this one got caught in my throat (all motherless daughter stories do, dammit!) and I related to it on many levels, not because I had anything in common with the protagonist, but because O’Neill does such a good job of creating her world that you immediately empathize with Baby, all you want is for her to succeed. I’m not going to spoil the ending, in fact, I’m not going to say much more at all, except for a first-time novel, it’s pretty damn outstanding.

#53 – The Ruins

Okay, I was so afraid while reading Scott Smith’s The Ruins that I went ahead while only halfway through and read the bloody ending. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was that scared. While I’m technically not quite finished (I have about 10 pages in between where I am and the ending I already read), I feel quite confident I can blog about it because I’m going to finish it this afternoon while waiting at the hospital for bloodletting.

So, the novel takes place in Mexico and the main characters are all, of course, on a lovely sunny vacation. Four Americans, Jeff and Amy, Eric and Stacy, are on one last hurrah after finishing university (or, I guess, college as they say in the States). When Mathius, a young German man, asks them to accompany him to find his missing brother who disappeared while chasing a girl in the title’s ruins, they set off on what they hope will be a day-long adventure.

Armed with no other information except a crudely drawn map, the five of them, along with a Greek friend (who doesn’t speak their language) they call Pablo, leave the resort early one morning after a heavy night of drinking. Nothing goes right, of course: they’re dropped off in the wrong place; the taxi charges them too much money; they run into a decidedly unfriendly Mayan village, and soon they’ve moved past what I’d like to call the point of no return.

I don’t want to give even a hint of what happens away because it would deter you from actually reading the book and being as bone-chilled scared as I was—I read the majority of the novel up at the cottage last weekend and was literally shaking in bed. Never a fan of horror movies or even scary books (mysteries, yes, but Stephen King-type novels, not so much), The Ruins is so well written and so literary that it’s more of a character study in a truly horrific situation than a run of the mill blood, guts and gore book.

Oh, and there are no chapters, so you are sucked right in and carted along without even being able to take a breath. And the sun is hot, very, very, very hot.

#43 – Terrorist

I’ll say one thing for Terrorist, John Updike’s new novel, it’s certainly the perfect book for the current climate. Considering the media fury over the death of al-Zarqawi and the young men they arrested here in Canada, not to mention the ongoing efforts of George W. and company in Iraq, a novel about an 18-year-old boy who becomes embroiled in a terrorist act seems rather timely. What’s odd then, is that’s all the book truly has going for it: a good hook.

I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never read any other Updike. I started Rabbit Run years ago and it remains sitting unfinished on the shelf. And perhaps it’s just my own personal taste, but he’s not really a writer for me. I found this book to be trying too hard, to have angry, awkward and not entirely believable characters. The story is fascinating, but Ahmad’s (the teenager in question) faith doesn’t come across as authentic, nor does his dissent into the crucial act that defines the book feel real. Not to mention the fact that he’s stiff and speaks in such muted, oddly writerly tones that Ahmad’s almost a caricature.

But what bothered me the most were the lack of truly redeeming female characters, Ahmad’s mother was an artist who was not particularly prone to childrearing, Ahmad’s quasi-crush ends up being a hooker, and the two other women, one a spinster, the other an obese librarian, were so one-dimensional that I had a hard time finishing the book.

I had a teacher write on an essay once, “You are certainly a good writer, but this is not well written.” That’s very close to how I feel about Terrorist. It’s, of course, the job of the novelist to be consistently challenging our ideas of stereotypes, our ideas of the world around us, but in the way the Updike presents the Muslim faith, he does nothing to dispel the very misconceptions that exist in the world. And I know that’s not the point, that he’s writing about fundamentalism from the point of view of said fundamentalist, but Ahmad’s speeches, his thoughts, his actions all feel so put-upon that I have a hard time imagining him in the real world.

There is no doubt that Updike remains one of the great modern literary giants of American books, and so much of his latest speech at BEA points to this fact (where he, ironically, rails against the internet, the very tool used to disseminate his speech, um, whatever), but just because he can write doesn’t mean that everything he does write will automatically be great fiction. Despite how much it wants and/or tries to be.

It’s an interesting book to read after finishing Sweetness in the Belly considering how much deft and talent Gibb shows when discussing the same faith (albeit in two very different ways). Because I think the point of a book like this should be understanding, at least that’s my humble opinion, and it’s a shame that Updike presents me with the same dogged images/characters I hear about in the news every day. There’s no underlying enlightenment, like in Gibb’s novel, to make me feel like this book has changed my world. All in all, I’m just glad I managed to get through it.

#39 – Devil In The White City

Erik Larson’s magnificent Devil in the White City represents nonfiction at its best. Larson’s story of how Chicago’s infamous World Fair came to life is told alongside the chilling tale of serial killer H.H. Holmes (aka Herman Webster Mudgett). At first glance, the two stories have little in common but for geography (Holmes’s sick imagination profited from the arrival of many young woman to the fair) and opportunity. Yet, Larson’s deft hand weaves the two together like a sort of magical tapestry, intertwining all kinds of other relevant material into a book that’s inevitably impossible to put down.

The Gilded Age, so eloquently captured here, remains the backdrop for the story. As the Fair’s leader, Daniel Burnham, struggles against all odds (financial, egotistical, architectural, geographical, seasonal, meteorological and personal) to complete the project, the world sits back and expects failure. Of course, as history records, the Fair succeeds and its lasting impression upon American culture, architecture and general culture felt for decades. And then, as equally magnificent, celebratory of the great heights to which human nature can sore, the feats of the murderer Holmes are recorded to show how dizzyingly, terrifyingly evil human nature can crawl. A perfect read for a rainy night with a cold, all snuggled up in my duvet with the cat at my feet. Just perfect.

And just think, only six months to wait until Larson’s Thunderstruck hits the book shelves. And dammit, can he think of great titles or what?

#23 – Amsterdam

I came late to Ian McEwan, reading Atonement first, and then the only other book of his that I’ve read is Saturday. I’ve never truly delved into the backlist, until now. Amsterdam won the Booker Prize in 1998, and it’s a swift, surefooted tale that reads more like a morality play (as reviews suggest) than a straightforward novel.

The book opens with the funeral of Molly Lane. Two of her former lovers, newspaperman Vernon Halliday and composer Clive Linley, stand by and attend the bare bones service. In the pages that follow, as the friendship between the two men fails, so to do their respective careers. Everything thus orchestrated in some way by George Lane, Molly’s widower, a powerful man they both despise.

Amsterdam, keen on detail with McEwan’s sharp eye for the intrinsic and complex minutiae of everyday, reads almost like a precursor to Saturday. A lot of detail is spent on the day-to-day activities of each of the men, trapped in a way by their own success, and the fallout from midlife failures. One of the cut-out blurbs calls the novel “chilling”, and I’d agree, both in terms of what happens (I don’t want to give it away) but also in terms of how the story is told. There’s also a level of obvious detachment from the narrator, which makes the eventual underlying moral ambiguities all the more interesting.

It’s a short novel too, thankfully, because I’ve been finding the Book A Day challenge a bit rough the past few days. Now, I’ve got to get reading for tomorrow’s installment, as I’m shooting a movie all day, I doubt I’ll get a book finished. In fact, I’m going to take tomorrow off, if that’s okay with all of you.

#3 – Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go might just be the most well crafted piece of writing I have ever read. Not a sentence, not a word, not a single piece of punctuation is misplaced or out of step. In short, it’s a bloody brilliant book.

The book tells the story of three clones: Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. Each has a particular role in their lives; their destinies so to speak. Ruth and Tommy become ‘donors’ (of what is exquisitely left to your imagination), while Kathy is a carer, someone who spends her days taking care of the donors after they’ve, well, donated.

All three grow up in an extremely cloistered way at Halisham, a private boarding school for other clone children, designed for them to express their creativity and have a well-rounded upbringing. Once they’re finished at Halisham, the three end up at a place called the Cottages, where they spend a few years becoming adults before their real jobs begin.

There is a deep sense of suspense written into the novel. It’s a page turner in the purest sense, but the plot and the chapters are so intricately developed that you don’t feel like you’re being manipulated. The book moves along so quickly that it creates a world in your head even before you realize that your imagination has taken the story over and made it into something of your own. If that makes any sense.

I know I’ve only read 3 books so far this year (well, I have read 4 but I can’t talk about the other one until it’s been published, which isn’t until March), but it’s the best book I’ve read in a long, long while. Truly deserving of its Booker nomination, and later on this year when I read The Sea, I’ll be able to compare the two—but something in my mind tells me Ishiguro will come out on top.

#59 The Time In Between

I’ve been reading David Bergen’s The Time in Between for months now. I started the book way back in the summer, read about a quarter of it, then went on vacation. By the time I got back, I had moved on to so many other books that it took me some time to get back to it. It took a conversation with a co-worker to get me to pick the book up again, when she mentioned that it hit her so hard she still hasn’t completely recovered.

And at first, I didn’t see it, I found the book kind of slow going; it didn’t grab me like so many of the others I’ve read this year. But now that I’ve finished it, I can totally see what she means—the slow burning, sparse prose creeps up on you and takes a hold almost like a good ghost story.

Set mainly in Vietnam years after the war, the book tells the life story of a mainly absent Charles Boatman, first through his eyes, then through the eyes of his daughter, Ada. Having fought in the war, Charles returns to hopefully deal with his demons, and then goes missing. Ada and her brother Jon arrive in Vietnam to try to find their father, or at the very least, find out what happened to him. There’s a pivotal scene in the middle of the book, exactly placed, that I won’t spoil, but it’s a moment that grabbed me so hard that I had to put the story down and take some deep breaths before I could continue.

The setting is such an unrelenting part of this book. Forced to deal with their tragedy in a foreign country, Ada and Jon, while looking for their father, inevitably fall upon their own paths of self-discovery. Rich with metaphor and filled with mystery, the backdrop of being an outsider in a country already riddled with the aftermath of the war becomes an intrinsic part of how Bergen chooses to tell the story. It’s almost as if Vietnam becomes a character in its own right, a living, breathing part of The Time in Between.

Dealing with themes of loss, family, understanding and the cultural differences between life in northern British Columbia (where Charles eventually settles with his three kids after their mother dies) and life in Vietnam (where the majority of the story is set), the book feels so universally human, if that makes any sense.

Having it win the Giller seems fitting, and it does a little to take away the sting of Three Day Road being shut out of the awards this year. All in all, I’m glad I actually took the time last night to finish it, to read the last 10 pages that had been bookmarked for months. The time in between The Time in Between finally coming to a close.

#57 The Year of Magical Thinking

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down and dinner and life as you know it ends.

It was aptly fitting that the book I took with me to the doctor’s today was Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. A highly personal and extremely effective memoir about the sudden death of her husband John Dunne and the illness of her daughter Quintana, Didion’s book just won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

It’s a superb read, and it actually calmed me down to the point of thinking it’s the perfect book to have with you when you’re sitting in a hospital waiting room. Didion’s writing style is sometimes hard to follow, she writes long, complex sentences without a lot of punctuation, but that’s because they echo long, complex feelings and issues like grief, death and illness.

Her magical thinking is such a brilliant way of looking at how to cope with the death of a spouse, someone she had been married to for almost 40 years, that it becomes a bit of a trope within the book itself. She can’t give away her husband’s shoes because what would he wear. She doesn’t want to move the last stack of books beside his bed because what will he read when he gets back. When she finds out Julia Child has died, she thinks she and her husband can have dinner, wherever they are.

Yet, there’s another element to the story: her daughter’s illness. It’s another example of magical thinking. Didion’s own mourning and grief over the death of her husband is totally interrupted by her daughter’s terrible illness, and the book moves back and forth over the experiences around these two devastating tragedies that define her life in this period.

It’s not a book of advice, nor is it a self-help book, rather it’s a brilliant examination of the process of grief and mourning. Throughout everything, Didion notes that her own experiences as a writer, as a reader, tell her in times of trouble, of dis-understanding, to go back to the literature, back to the written word, to find the answers. In an extreme bit of self-reflexivity, Didion’s given so many people dealing with tragedy something magical of her own—this book for us to go back to.

“This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

#55 When in Rome

After having a pretty interesting discussion over at Chicklit about the genre chicklit, I decided to knock back an easy read today: When in Rome by Gemma Townley. I heart Gemma Townley. She’s totally underrated in terms of the phenoms of chicklit (Sophie Kinsella, Melissa Banks, Lauren Weisberger, Ms. Weiner, Ms. Keyes, etc), but I think she rises to the top, for more reasons than one.

1. The plots might be predictable, but they’re never contrite and don’t have obvious holes, like so many books I’ve read in the genre lately.

2. The heroines often have the same problems (two boys, one love; bad job, like shopping) as many chicklit books have, but they seem to rise above and use their wits to get them out of situations vs. their acumen when it comes to men.

3. She’s a fun, flirty writer, and that’s hard to achieve.

4. There are a lot of cute pop culture references that I love, and that seem to fit, which means they don’t feel forced in any way. They just work. Like in this book, the heroine, Georgie, is obsessed with Roman Holiday. It just feels right for the character, even when she ends up in Rome and cuts her hair off, all stereotypical products of a good Audrey Hepburn movie, but it works both for the character and for the book.

5. I love books that I can read in two subway rides: one to work, one home from work. It’s a minor pleasure in a busy life.