Category: ragdoll reads

#48 – The Ice Princess

I probably should have blogged about this earlier in the week as I actually read this book a while ago. Having read all of the Larsson’s, I needed a little bit of that Swedish mystery one week while I had umpteen doctors appointments. Mystery/popular fiction is very good crowded waiting room reading, isn’t it? So, I downloaded the first book of Camilla Läckberg‘s incredibly popular series of set in Fjällbacka.

A beautiful young woman ends up dead, the so-named “Ice Princess” of the book’s title, and Erica Falck, a writer trying to come to terms with the death of her parents, finds herself embroiled in the investigation. Everywhere she turns, she’s connected to the murder — the deceased was her best childhood friend, the family leans on her for support, her love interest is the lead investigator, and multiple other coincidences stick her to the case like glue. Unlike my favourite writer-slash-Swedish-crime-thriller-hero, Blomkvist, Erica writes mainly biographies. She’s a woman’s writer — chronicling their lives for mid-list biographies. There’s not a political edge to these mysteries; they’re more straightforward, and interspersed are more personal details about Erica’s life: her abused sister, her blundering love life, her male best friend. There’s an element of romance novel in this book, and it kind of softened the hard-edges that I’m used to by reading Larsson and/or Henning Mankell.

That doesn’t mean that this novel is ultimately successful — certainly not to the level of the Millennium trilogy, but Läckberg has a talent with description and setting. The atmosphere absolutely infuses the level of intensity surrounding the case of the murdered woman. But the translation feels clunky and a lot of the set-ups feel unrealistic, and I honestly didn’t care who had actually committed the murder by the end. I know, that’s harsh, but the book definitely falls down in a number of ways. But my lust for Swedish mysteries these days seems unhinged. I just can’t get enough of them.

Oh, and this novel should REALLY be nominated for some bad sex writing. Wowsers.

#47 – In a Strange Room

Damon Galgut has come to occupy a piece of my reading heart only formally held by Coetzee. Like Coetzee, Galgut writes with such skill and serenity that I find myself a better person for having finished one of his books. Until I discovered Galgut, I’d never read another writer who can write so simply (in terms of structure and punctuation) and yet who can still create such a compelling, moving Coetzee-like narrative. I don’t want to just compare the two or lump them together but it’s impossible not to notice the influence as you read In a Strange Room.

As of late, though, I haven’t been as enchanted with Coetzee’s novels, and, in fact, one of my pet peeves in books is when authors create and/or write themselves as characters (it’s the main reason why I can’t get through Beatrice and Virgil and why I’ve never read THE Paul Auster that everyone else has read). Coetzee’s been doing a lot of this lately and as such I haven’t been as enthralled to read his novels as I once was. Yet, when I got halfway through the first of the three stories contained in Galgut’s latest, Booker-shortlisted, collection, and discovered that the narrator is in fact a travelling writer named “Damon,” I kind of inwardly groaned, but I was so taken already with the story, with the setting, that I didn’t put the book down. And I am very glad that I got over my bias because Galgut’s three stories are incredible.

There’s something about landscape in this short collection that defies description — the idea of travelling, of how it leads you to become someone so much more than you are at home — and pervades the narrative throughout this book. In each tale, more lost at home than he ever is on the road, the narrator often boxes up his life for months on end and takes to the road. The settings are exotic to a Canadian girl like me — Goa, Zimbabwe, Lethoso, even Switzerland, places where the only chance I’ll probably ever get to see them is through watching The Amazing Race. But it’s the deeply personal aspect to travelling that I found so affecting throughout. It’s not a travelogue. The stories aren’t about the setting; they are simply informed by it, the dingy hotels, the hostels, the camping trips, the odd characters, the difficulties of travelling with a friend, the difficulties of travelling to unstable places, it never feels forced or fake. It never feels Hollywood. It never feels like he’s using setting to “prove” something. The places he visits are often accidental (in the middle story, “The Lover,” the narrator leaves for a two week “jaunt” to Zimbabwe and ends up in Tanzania weeks upon weeks later) and it’s this idea of happenstance, the essential inability to know what’s going to happen once you’ve put yourself decidedly out of your routine, that creates the bulk of the plot contained within the three linked stories.

Galgut switches up what I’d call perspective; in some sentences he’s using “he” to describe the main character, in other places it’s “I” — both refer to the traveller “Damon,” and as a reader, I sort of inferred that the character of “traveller” is very different from the “I” that recollects what happened upon return; two different sides of the same experience, in a way. The dual nature of the narrator, who he is at home (wondering, wandering, a little lost) and who is he on the road, willing to take risks, confident (in a way), was perpetually fascinating for me throughout all three stories. If I had to name a favourite, it would have to be “the Guardian,” for it’s sheer narrative force. I don’t want to ruin any part of the story for someone who might want to read it so I’ll just say that it’s far less about travelling than it is about friendship — the narrator takes a troubled friend to Goa and horrible things happen, and the sadness that Galgut projects even through his simple storytelling left me a little breathless by the end. Time and distance have such an affect upon tragedy — it’s an interesting perspective.

Anyway, I’m rambling. I truly hope that Emma Donoghue wins the Booker for Room. But there’s definite worth in reading the other shortlisted books too, so far, for me, I’ve enjoyed the two I’ve read immensely. Oh, and Galgut is South African, which means I can add a book to my incredibly lame, utterly failing Around the World in 52 Books list for this year. I might be at 5 or maybe 6 countries if I’m lucky. Fail!

#42 – Fauna

Please, please forgive the pun but I’m going to fawn over Alissa York’s magnificent Fauna over the next few paragraphs. Good lord I fell hard for this novel, for the author’s imagination, likening my experience of reading this book to the high school crush I had on a boy named Chris P. Rice — his blond hair and blue eyes ruining me for months when our brief love affair ended. I fell and fell hard, just like I did for Fauna.

The novel counts squirrels, bats, raccoons, coyotes, and skunks among its characters. All kinds of critters combine to create a world that exists, wild and sometimes frantic, in and around the edges of the urban city of Toronto. In a way, even the human characters are misfits, outcasts, human versions of the animals they co-habitat with in between the pages. Edal, a troubled young woman who used to work for the Forestry service, currently on leave, befriends and then feels abandoned by a mouse in her house. She’s suffered a loss that she can’t quantify and spends much of the book trying to find her way back from tragedy.

And while you don’t find out what that tragedy is until the end of the book, how she comes to met Guy, a kindhearted animal lover who runs a scrap heap/yard/towing service feels magical and reminiscent of fairy tales. Edal enters his giant yard by a locked gate (The Secret Garden!), finds their magical world (SPOILER: an animal graveyard covered with hubcaps), and returns often to listen to him read The Jungle Book out loud (ever good relationship starts with a story). Rounding out Guy’s (he’s named after Lafleur, people pronounce it incorrectly ALL the time) motley crew are Stephen, a wounded war vet and Lily, a teenage runaway who makes her home in the Don Valley.

The novel takes you through each of these characters, and one other, Darius aka “Coyote Cop,” as they interact with various different kinds of wildlife in the city. Oh, and there’s another character, Kate, who is also broken — she works at an animal rehabilitation clinic in the city and meets Lily as she’s jogging through the Valley. The one theme that holds them all together is their love of animals. Whether as a career or a hobby or, in Darius’s case, as a strange obsession, animals become a focal point to how they understand the world around them. Every single one of York’s characters feels empathy in a way that accelerates how connected we are with the animal world around us, even when we live in a concrete jungle like Toronto.

Yet, even when the animal characters show up in the vignettes, York’s not anthropomorphizing in any way. These aren’t Disney squirrels. They aren’t Alvin and his brothers. I mean, it would be impossible not to describe them in human terms, but you get a real sense of what life is like for a skunk in the city, you feel the raccoons fingers trying to figure out a bungee cord, and you see the car lights flashing by as the animals attempt to cross the road. It makes the world of this novel feel more organic than setting traditionally is in a novel — the leaves and trees, the bugs, the mice, the living, breathing world that surrounds these characters becomes so much more rich and alive with York’s magical thinking (I KNOW, I hate using that term but it feels magical, it does).

There’s little about this novel I didn’t like. There’s deep emotional resonance, fascinating characters, and even if the essence of the novel’s plot runs a bit thin, the wildness and imagination that courses through every page, every sentence, of the book more than makes up for it. I didn’t need a lot to happen on the surface of this novel — because the ideas that drive the story were so rich and experiential that I was pulled along regardless. It’s one of my favourites I’ve read this year, absolutely. Highly, highly recommended.

#41 – No Way Down

Perhaps I should follow up my furious Franzen rant with another post about the state of publishing or some other issue floating around (and, believe me, if I was still remotely anonymous, I would). But, instead, I’m going to go back to basics: a book review. This week I took a break from guilty pleasure reading and read, well, more guilty pleasure stuff. Most people imagine armchair travel to be lovely, pretty memoirs like Eat, Pray, Yawn or the like. Instead, what I love is a truly good horror story incurred by a natural disaster happening at the top of a mountain. Yes, I love climbing disasters — I don’t know what it is about it, maybe the time I spent in Banff during my formative years scrambling up mountains, maybe it’s the sheer Titanic-ness of it all — the knowledge that the weather’s about to turn, something’s about to crack, someone’s about to fall, and no one will ever be the same again.

In 2008, eleven climbers died on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. NY Times reporter Graham Bowley first saw the story flash across his screen as an assignment (I think) for the paper. He wrote so convincingly about it that it appeared on the front page and then he went on to realize that the story was so much larger than the paper could accommodate. The resulting effort, his book No Way Down, couples a little bit of the climbing history of K2 (it’s deathly grip!) alongside a detailed, poignant and utterly captivating look at what went wrong.

The weather was seemingly perfect on the assent. A record number of climbers advanced to the summit despite some epic problems getting up through a bottleneck of people who were having trouble at one particular point on the mountain. But as the aptly titled book suggests, the descent was problematic for many. Between glaciers breaking, avalanches, snapped ropes and leaving the summit simply too late, many of the climbers were trapped at high altitudes, which had disastrous consequences — deaths, frostbitten limbs, climbers getting lost coming down, bad weather, accidents — all contributed to the high toll the mountain took on that day.

It’s hard to explain what I find so fascinating about these kinds of stories. I’m hugely attracted to the idea of climbing to the top of a mountain even if health- and lifestyle-wise I’d never be able to do it. I’m also consistently amazed at the propensity for things to go wrong and that, still, hundreds of athletes still push themselves to the limits and then put their lives at risk in a very classic human versus nature scenario. Bowley’s careful to explain, both in his preface and his epilogue, how much research went into constructing the narrative. In his words, he tells the story as well as he could, but there’s always room for conjecture. It’s a sad, captivating story and even though it’s a terrible tragedy, it makes for one hell of a good read.

No Way Down coverage on NPR
Bowley’s original NY Times piece

#36 – #39 – Summer Chicklit & #40 Gone

There’s something I’ve discovered about my iPad — it’s incredibly easy for me to buy books with one click. Books I had long ago stopped buying because they were (and I don’t want to use this word) disposable — not that they’re throwaways but that they satisfy the need I sometimes have for the reading equivalent of a girlie movie. When I was pinching my Gail Vaz-Oxlade-inspired pennies, I couldn’t justify buying a book that would only take me an hour to read. I needed to buy books that were an investment, that would keep me occupied for longer than the time it would take to watch a film.

Well, my iPad has changed all that — I can spend less than $15.00 (which is less than the cost of a movie now) and in some cases, less than $10.00 (and let’s not get into a moral discussion of what’s wrong with ebook pricing because I work in publishing, I KNOW), for books that I can read like my mother used to read Harlequin romances, quickly, painlessly and with some tears (because I get so emotionally involved). I don’t always have to be reading literature but it does have a very special place in my book snob heart so forgive me if I’m a bit harsh on these books. Take this all with a grain of salt.

#36 – Fly Away Home
I still remember reading Good in Bed one afternoon when I was home sick from work. I bawled from start to finish. Weiner has a way with writing female characters that just gets to the heart of the hurt that we all seem to carry around. I haven’t read a novel of hers for a while and so I downloaded one thinking it’d be good to read up north last week at the cottage. The situation that starts off the novel feels “ripped from the headlines” Law & Order-esque. The wife of a prominent politician discovers via CNN or something equally horrible (her best friend calls to comfort her re: the news that had just broken) that her husband of x-number of years cheated on her with a not-quite intern. Sylvie Serfer Woodruff has two grown daughters: Diana, an overachieving doctor, and Lizzie, a recovering addict. When each woman hears the news of their father’s affair, they react differently but in each case it becomes a catalyst for change. It’s a very chicklit scenario — the overtly dramatic “event” that spurns women into some sort of evolution as if regular life just isn’t enough to make anyone become introspective, but whatever, the emotional journey each takes throughout the novel is rewarding and I can’t front — I bawled like a baby towards the end. BAWLED. IN FRONT OF COMPANY. AT THE COTTAGE. So it’s a breezy, solid, emotionally rewarding read even if it feels overwhelmingly cliched in many, MANY places.

#37 – An Ideal Wife
I didn’t read this on my iPad, a friend sent me a copy, and Gemma Townley used to be one of my favourite chicklit writers — I always felt she was one step above so many of her counterparts. Her characters felt fresh, their lives just that little bit more interesting, but I’m no longer in my 20s or even early 30s and I’m less charmed by her books as I once was. An Ideal Wife follows Jessica Wild, a protagonist from two earlier books, and she’s never been my favourite. The hijinks that happen in the book feel contrived and I could tell what was going to happen almost from the beginning pages. In a sense, I think it’s the curse of a successful mid-list chicklit writer, the sales are good so the publisher puts you on a book-a-year treadmill and so you start churning out titles to suit the schedule and not the work. I’ll still recommend Townley over writers like Giffin and the like, simply because I’ve met her in person and she was AWESOME, but the last three books, in fact, the whole Jessica Wild series, has kind of disappointed me.

#38, #39 – The Sookie Stackhouse series (Dead Until Dark & Living Dead in Dallas)
Oh sweet Sundays I’m obsessed with a capital “O” with True Blood these days. It’s smart, sexy, fun, silly, fascinating, and now almost complete with fairies (as per Sookie’s reveal). Contrary to Salon, I don’t think fairies are lame and neither would about a half-dozen YA writers I know. But I digress. I’m dying for spoilers — even those trapped in cliched, irritating, truly terrible writing. Wait, did I just start to review the books? I know you have to give over to the nature of them, to the silly, candy-like essence of these books but I can’t help but feel my intelligence slipping away each time Sookie curls her hair or has someone comment on her perfect breasts. I’ve imbued the literary characters with a little of the spirited nature of the television show and that makes the writing a tad more palatable but I can’t help but wonder if Charlaine Harris doesn’t spend hours laughing her way to the bank over her royalty statements. What a fast one she’s pulled on all of us — there’s so little in the way of actual writing here vs. pure narration for the sake of narration that I’m not surprised it only takes me a little over three subway rides to get through one book (my commute is anywhere from 20 minutes to 45 minutes depending on the TTC). And it’s not that I’m NOT addictively flipping pages — it’s that I AM. I’m not reading. I’m scanning. I’m dying to know what happens just so I can know what happens and not at all because I’m enjoying the writing. I roll my eyes more times than I can count but I respect Harris for her success and I’ll probably read all eight of the books that I downloaded last week.

#40 – Gone
Anyway, I felt a little sick to my stomach after reading so much chicklit in a row that this weekend I took Mo Hayder’s EXCELLENT new novel, Gone (published in Canada this January), away with me to the cottage and then proceeded to stay up very, very late to finish it. It’s a Jack Caffrey novel and it picks up relatively soon after Skin ended. There’s a new case in town — a man’s carjacking comes with a twist: he’s only taking cars with children in them, and the deeper Jack Caffrey gets into the case, the more goes wrong. Mo Hayder’s novels are suspenseful, terrifying, impeccably written and researched and this series just gets better with each novel. I know January is a long time to wait but if you’re at all interested in top-notch thrillers, why not give Ritual or Skin a try before then?

Summer Reading: A Catch Up Edition

I have a huge list of books to get caught up on in terms of keeping track of my reading here in the blog. As I doubt I’ll find the time to create individual posts for every book I’ve read since the beginning of July, I’m going to do one big post here, and then try very hard for the rest of the summer to update here more than once a month.

#24 – Shadow Tag
This was the very first book I read for my new book club. I’d read Louise Erdrich back in university and remembered enjoying Love Medicine very much. Shadow Tag, with its semi-autobiographic overtones and extremely dark subject matter, was an unsettling novel. It’s not even that you can’t trust the protagonist, or that she’s an unreliable narrator; it’s more that both Irene and her husband Gil are truly, completely unlikeable. They lie to one another, feed off each other’s insecurities, have a terrible, damaging relationship, and ultimately aren’t the best parents to their three children. The writing is terrific but I consistently go back and forth on the age-old debate in my head — can I really enjoy a book when I hate the characters? We had an amazing discussion about the novel, about their motivation to stay together, about the destructive nature of art in the book, and about both of their selfish, selfish behavior. It’s an intense novel, be prepared for that should you decide to delve in.

#25 – Freedom
I’m not sure how much to say about Franzen’s latest novel because I read a work galley (well, I begged to borrow a work galley and it’s my ONLY copy) and the book isn’t being published for another few weeks. However, I will say this — it’s a terrifically engaging chunk of a book that follows the lives of the Berglund family. Like The Corrections, Franzen writes so convincingly about American life that it’s impossible not to get emotionally involved in the lives of these characters. It’s an excellent novel.

#26 – I’d Know You Anywhere
The same goes for the new Laura Lippman. She’s one of my favourite commercial fiction writers — her stories are always page-turners and her characters always have issues to overcome that develop into rich, realistic plot lines — you never feel like she sacrifices anything for the story, it’s relentless. Her latest novel is no exception. Eliza Benedict has worked hard to create a very particular kind of life for herself — until the man who abducted her when she was a teenager tracks her down and asks something of her she isn’t necessarily prepared to give. The novel reminded me in a way of Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless in the way it gives a bird’s eye view of not only the victim, but the criminal as well. It’s a captivating novel — perfect for summer reading.

#27 – We Have Always Lived In The Castle
Oh my goodness I adored Shirley Jackson’s macabre, Gothic novel. This was another book club book and what an awesome choice it was. Merricat (Mary Katherine) Blackwood and her sister Constance live in a run-down old manor house with their Uncle Julian. Years ago her entire family was killed by a fatal dose of arsenic-laced strawberries during dinner. Constance, the elder sister, was accused of the crime, and then tried, but found innocent. However, the townspeople have never quite forgiven her, and so Merricat (an 18 year-old who acts far more like a 12 year-old) and Constance have somewhat shut themselves up against the world. That is, until their cousin Charles arrives and throws their world in chaos. It’s a delicious, deceptively simple novel, and we all raved about it at book club. I comped it to the best of Flannery O’Connor with even more edge, if that’s possible.

#28 – Mr. Shakespeare’s Bastard
Richard B. Wright remains one of those Canadian authors, like Jane Urquhart or Michael Ondaatje, that I’ll read anything they write. If they wrote a grocery list, I’d probably read and enjoy it. His latest novel, Mr. Shakespeare’s Bastard, feels like a departure, and that’s not a bad thing. While I loved October, I felt like it had a definite place in the Canadian canon — it was almost as if he was actively trying to write back to Hugh MacLennan. With this new novel, I feel like he’s moved into decidedly new territory. It’s a hybrid kind of novel — one part historical fiction (the book’s protagonist is the bastard daughter of Wm Shakespeare), one part typical literary fiction, and one part juicy page turner. Aerlene Ward has lived her entire life with a secret: William Shakespeare was her father. As she gets on in age, she feels the need to tell her story and enlists the help of Charlotte, the youngest daughter in the manor house where she’s been the housekeeper for all of her adult life. It’s a rich tale — both as its told and as it was lived — and Wright has a keen ear for Elizabethan London. The biggest issue that I have with so much historical fiction is the romance-novel-ness of them all. This book isn’t that, while I can see how it would appeal to the biggest fans of Philippa Gregory, it’s so much richer in how the historical details are integrated into the fabric of the story. These are strong, interesting women, and there’s an apt feminist critique to be explored upon a more educational reading of the novel. Anyway, I’ve got high hopes for this book for the fall — I really want many, many people to love it as much as I did. We’re doing a Savvy Reader read-along post for it that should be live in the next couple weeks.

#29 – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Like the rest of the universe, I finally went back and read the first of Steig Larsson’s ridiculously addictive series. I’m glad I did, if only to fully understand how all three books fit together, and to see how Lisbeth and Blomkvist actually meet for the first time. We watched the film the other night, and I found it almost better than the book — while definitely not as detailed, it was far more streamlined, which I appreciated. As much as I find these great books, great social experiments in how a book can “tip,” sometimes the writing is clunky, the dialogue terrible, and there’s just too much detail. And I enjoyed seeing the Swedish landscape if only to give myself a visual picture to accompany the reading experience in my head. I read this book on my iPad with the Kobo application and found that there were some layout issues with the text that made transitions a little awkward but overall I think it’s the perfect way of reading commercial fiction. It’s not a book that I’m dying to keep — it’s an impulse, something I want to read right now and steam through, and knowing I don’t have to pawn off a physical copy on a friend was a relief.

#30 – The Help
Now, this novel truly surprised me. From the cover, it screams “Oprah” and “Nicholas Sparks,” but because it’s my job to know what kinds of books sell like stink, I figured it would be another good one to try on my iPad. This time, I used the Kindle application, and I found it just that teeny bit superior to the Kobo (mainly in the fact that it gives an accurate idea of where you are in a book), but there’s really little difference between the two as a reading application for the basic stuff that I need (good bookmarks, easy navigation, etc). Annywaaay, The Help. I bawled like a baby by the end of it, found myself reading until 4 AM one night at the cottage when I couldn’t sleep and realizing it’s just a really good novel. Set in Jackson, Mississippi smack-dab in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, The Help entwines the stories of the young white women who form the “society” of the area with the black women who they consider their “help.” From debate over why separate bathrooms IN ONE HOUSE for the women who feed, clothe, bathe, and raise their children to Miss Skeeter’s desperate ‘Peggy in Mad Men-esque’ quest to get out of her Southern life entirely, the novel keeps you emotionally invested from beginning to end. Stockett writes convincingly from both perspectives and the payoff at the end was impeccable.

#31 – Locavore
When the iBookstore launched at the beginning of July, I bought a few of our books so I could make sure they worked. Sarah Elton’s look at the local food movement from a Canadian perspective had been on my TBR pile forever. I did a lot of work with her when the book first came out and she’s just such a lovely author (but that’s an aside). She has a very easy-going writing style and her way into the topic (from a pink sugar cookie made in China in her daughter’s loot bag) was both personal and intriguing. There were so many things that I didn’t know and so many interesting, new perspectives about the local food issues that Elton puts forth that I learned a lot. How wrong was my assumption that once I’d read Pollan and Kingsolver that there was nothing left to know about the locavore movement. This is a book for anyone remotely interested in the issues surrounding the food we eat — and even if you aren’t, it’s a great primer to get you started. But my favourite part of Elton’s perspective isn’t a holier than thou approach, it’s more “do the best you can; it all helps in the end.” And I feel like this suits my life — we buy local where possible, support farmer’s markets, grow our own veggies, and balance out the more exotic aspects of your eating with better choices. I LOVED this book.

#32 – The Lovers
I have so much respect and admiration for Vendela Vida. Not just because she leads an obviously envious life and is bloody gorgeous, but because she’s an exquisite writer whose craft I covet every time I read a sentence of hers. Yet, this novel disappointed me. It lacked the emotional resonance that reverberated so nicely through Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, and the tragic event posited by the jacket copy to “rock” the protagonist, Yvonne, to her core, felt contrived and even stereotypical when looked at in context. It felt very Hollywood, this novel, and maybe I was just expecting too much from Vida because I pushed her earlier book on every single person I know. So, in short, Yvonne, a middle-aged widow, visits Turkey, the site of her honeymoon, to try and figure out how to move on with her life. She’s had a good life, but one with issues, and she starts to unravel the more time she spends trying to ‘find’ herself in relation to who she once was: mother, teacher, wife. The setting, at once meant to invoke her past and perhaps spurn Yvonne into a sense of self-discovery, becomes exotic and strange to her. And then, things start to go very awry when she befriends a young Turkish boy visiting his grandmother. There could have been such a rich palette to explore so much in the book but Vida doesn’t drift beyond the superficial in a way. You never truly feel like you know Yvonne, and maybe that’s on purpose, but the whole novel felt incomplete to me, especially the ending.

#33 – Secrets of Eden
And, again, here’s another of my favourite novelists with new books that fell short of my expectations. I adore Chris Bohjalian’s books — even his critical misfires work for me, unlike many, many reviewers, I really liked the trippy nature of The Double Bind and didn’t even mind his last book, Skeletons at the Feast despite its truly awful cover. But Secrets of Eden, well, it failed to impress either with the moral premise underneath the story or by its storytelling. Like in Vida’s novel, the “twist” at the end felt very much like an M. Night Shyamalan film — far, far too apparent from too early on and really quite stereotypical for my tastes. The whole book felt like a Law and Order episode but without any convincing or interesting characters. I find the complex nature of religious characters in novels interesting — but I’ll turn to Marilynne Robinson when I want to explore it in more depth — Bohjalian used it to very obviously pit “good” against apparent “evil” and in this case it didn’t work. Oh, the plot, right: a reverend loses a member of his flock, a woman who had been abused by her husband, and becomes accused of the murder when she and said partner are found dead the morning after her baptism. Enter a very famous writer who has made plenty of money writing about angels. They become involved, which, of course, casts even more suspicion on the poor Reverend Stephen Drew. Yawn. Yes, I know, I’m being sarcastic, but the book was truly tedious in places. Anyway, nothing will stop me from reading Bohjalian, because I adore his fiction, but this just wasn’t the book for me.

#34 – The Big Short
Wow, was this a dynamo of a nonfiction book. Michael Lewis examines the financial crisis in such a detailed and fascinating way that it’s impossible NOT to think of the yahoos on Wall Street as crooks by the end of it. While the book has a LOT of technical jargon as it relates to the financial markets, it’s not remotely dry. In fact, it’s just the opposite — it’s utterly riveting and totally fascinating. He breaks down the few characters who managed to short the crisis even before it began, including a hedge fund owner whose driving characteristic is his Asperger’s, along with a few “outsider” funds who actually took the time to investigate the market and pull it apart at the seams — primarily to find the ways of making huge amounts of money from what they could see coming: a total collapse of the system. It’s incredible that the US government propped up the big investment houses, essentially rewarded them for their stupidity, and then they turned around and rewarded themselves with huge bonuses, and, well, got to all keep their jobs. Billions upon billions of dollars with hidden paper trails and bad trades are lost, unknown or hidden from the general public, just so we can keep the illusion that the big investment banks actually had any idea of what was happening. I’d highly recommend this to anyone remotely interested in why the US is such a mess these days — it’s just utterly captivating and you will shake your head in amazement that not a single person stopped the madness before it all collapsed. Anyway, it’s a great, great read.

Whew. That’s about it — I’m sure there are a couple of books that I’ve probably forgotten but that’s about the extent of my summer reading so far. I’m so behind in my reading in general this year that it’s nice to just have a big stack of books out of the way before the insanity of the fall creeps up on us.

#22 – The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest

I was sitting with an author yesterday speaking with them about the web, how to use it, what’s important, how and why to blog, etc., when she asked what my blog addy was, I replied, “But I’m a terrible example of a good blogger these days.” It’s a “do as I say and not as I do” kind of situation. There’s just too much going on these days and I can’t seem to get it together to sit down, ass on chair, and get writing.

Maybe I’ve lost my words.

Or maybe I’m just far too comfortable on the couch.

Regardless, things should quiet down by July and then I’ll feel more in control.

Annnywaaaay.

At long last I finished the galley I had of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest about three weeks ago. A friend had sent it over to me when she saw my exuberant post about Larsson’s previous book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and I started and stopped a few times before actually getting through to the end.

If we’re being completely honest, as much as I am sucked in by Larsson’s rambling narrative style, I find the excess of information, the journalistic tone of his writing, sometimes a bit frustrating. Does the book really need those chapter openers about the Amazons, the female warriors, etc. Do we really need to know every single detail of the founding of the secret government society (the so-called Hornet’s Nest that Lisbeth kicks?). Probably not. But once you wade through all of that stuff, it’s almost impossible to put the book down — once the mechanics of the conspiracy are unraveled, which would be difficult to explain if he didn’t go into painful detail about how it all got started, the book roars to its conclusion.

As the book picks up right where Fire left off (SPOILER), with Lisbeth in the hospital and her abhorrent father just down the hallway, it doesn’t contain as much pure action as I would have liked. But, again, this novel isn’t about action, it’s about conspiracy, cover-ups, the responsibility of governments and the underhanded way Lisbeth has been dealt with over the course of her entire life. The machinations of the cover up and the reasons behind it remain so utterly despicable that it’s easy to see Blomkvist as hero as he unravels and brings it all to light. Yet, he, like Lisbeth, is not without flaws — and, as a reader, you appreciate this. These two characters, Lisbeth and Blomkvist, stop this novel from becoming a poor Bourne knock-off (often, in my head, I saw Treadstone in the place of the Swedish “secret” government agency). They’re refreshingly different from the norm (although “downtrodden” seems to be the characteristic du jour for so many thriller-type protagonists).

What’s more, I appreciate how Larsson’s own writing never flushes into the Hollywood/movie-style of prose that so often plagues novels within the genre (like what Black Water Rising ultimately suffers from). He never relies on tropes or tricks when describing action and maybe that’s his journalistic background, or maybe it’s just his own particular gift. Regardless, the story hums because of Larsson’s inherent capability to drive the action forward, despite how irrelevant some of it actually is when it comes to the end of the book.

The Girl that Kicked the Hornet’s Nest isn’t a perfect book but it absolutely won’t disappoint fans (like myself) and truly feels like a fitting conclusion to the trilogy.

#19 – Solar

There’s little doubt in my mind that Ian McEwan is one of the English language’s greatest working novelists. If I’m not mistaken, almost every single one of his novels is on the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list (perhaps not all deservedly), and Atonement still stands in my memory as a near-perfect book. Maybe that’s why I’m willing to forgive the missteps in Solar. No, rather, maybe that’s why I expected so much more out of Solar, his latest novel. I enjoyed the last two McEwan novels, especially On Chesil Beach, which I liked maybe even more than Saturday, but I found Solar hard slogging. It’s a relatively short novel at just under 300 pages, yet it felt dense, convoluted in places, and even somewhat implausible.

The protagonist, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard, bumbles his way through complete and utter moral corruption without any true sense of himself. As a man, he’s short, corpulent, and slovenly, but his apparent brilliance means he’s led a charmed life. Well, hard work and a sharp mind began a charmed life, and since winning the prize, Beard has essentially coasted off its fumes. From one marriage to the next, from one high-paying job to the next, from one meal to the next, Beard shows no remorse or even any kind of sustained thought over his actions. He’s a womanizer who has five failed marriages behind him; yet, at five-foot-three somehow remains ridiculously attractive to smart, accomplished women. Thus begins a number of somewhat implausible characteristics — that women would fall, nay, fight over such a man remains a little, well, unbelievable. A great mind only takes you so far, success only takes you so far — mushrooms growing out of your rotting apartment? That’s a sign you’re not fit for life amidst other humans.

Anyway, when the novel opens, Michael’s latest wife, Patrice, has just discovered he’s cheated, again. And yet, when she dares to step out on him, Beard can’t bear it. He wants his wife back. He loves her, he even goes so far as to confront her boorish lover (their contractor) who smacks him right across the face. It’s not as if Beard doesn’t have a cause to dislike the man (beyond the whole sleeping with his wife sitch), he did give her a black eye. And to get back at him for ruining his marriage, Beard does something so morally bankrupt it’s hard to believe the character could possibly ever redeem himself.

Yet, the novel isn’t about redemption. In fact, I’d argue that Michael never considers redemption. Even more so, he never really even considers he’s wrong. His mind functions on a level where he can convince himself in any manner that his actions were good and true to himself. He justifies anything if it sits in his mind long enough: lies become truth, outcomes absolve actions, and another woman inevitably lands in his bed. Even if, by the end of the novel, Beard seems to have finally gotten his just desserts, the fact remains that his moral core is unchanged. The man takes absolutely no responsibility for any of his actions and still he’s rewarded. The complete and utter collapse of his life, the no less than three times that happens throughout the book, has almost no lasting impact on him. In short, Michael Beard does not change, evolve or become even slightly more informed about himself by the end of this book. He’s simply not that kind of person. And maybe that’s the point.

Even so, McEwan keeps the narrative tight to his point of view. We learn little about him, snippets of his home life, of his failed relationships, of his childhood, but mainly what we follow is his career, of sorts. As the book opens, Beard is part of a collection of scientists working on climate change, specifically funding wind turbines that will become alternative sources of energy. The solar from the book’s title comes from the secondary science-related plot, the ideas of a young post-doc, Tom Aldous, who works with Beard who firmly believes they can harness the sun’s power to use as energy. Beard’s skeptical at first, and abjectly refuses to listen to the younger man’s theories, but as the novel progresses, he comes around to Aldous’s science. But what he does with it is despicable and ultimately leads to his downfall, if you can call it that.

The force of the novel felt weak to me, there’s not enough plot to drive the narrative along, which is why I felt the book was kind of sluggish to get through. The science is fascinating, relevant and so interesting. And Beard does interesting things, he’s invited to amazing parts of the earth, but nothing seems to have any impact on how he lives or what he feels about life. That was the most disappointing aspect of the novel. It’s hard to get behind a character that turns your stomach. I know that’s the point — an exploration of someone who gives to society for no reason other than personal gain (it’s the Heidegger was a Nazi argument: does someone’s personal philosophy, personal beliefs matter given the ultimate overarching contribution they’ve made to public thought). McEwan takes it further — is a man’s mind enough to redeem him for being utterly repugnant as a human being, and does one great act give you license to coast on said act for the rest of your life? It makes for an interesting moral debate and discussion but not a terrific plot for a novel.

All in all, I kind of feel as though even McEwan’s brilliant writing couldn’t save Solar from itself. I wanted so much more out of the novel, a different perspective, a reason for any of these women to actually fall in love with him, a realization that using your big old brain for manipulative purposes isn’t always the best use of your talents, something, anything that signified change in Beard. But, alas, nothing happens in the end. I suppose, the fact that Beard made any positive change in the world, contributed a measure of science (slipped by as an appendix) that fundamentally altered the way our world is perceived, remains his single best quality. Most people don’t even do that. Still, you hope that the people with the power to change the world, the ones who are working hard to protect our dying planet, are doing so from a position of good. What McEwan tirelessly points out with Michael Beard that’s just not a realistic view of the world.

However, some of the reviews that I’ve been reading have been noticing how, for the very first time, parts of this book have the reader in stitches. And there’s one scene in particular that involved a bag of crisps that did have me laughing, but the few laughs and light touches, the mocking nature the author has with his main character in the way he describes him, writes about him, suggests a bit of an ironic perspective. In some ways, just feeling that way while I was reading made it even worse.

Also, there’s my reader’s bias — I’m tired of reading books by middle-aged men who create middle-aged characters who are nothing more than a mid-life crisis on the page. McEwan hasn’t gotten to the stage of say a Rushdie or an Irving, other novelists in his class who have fallen into the same narrative pitfalls, because there’s still an acerbic nature to this book that’s missing from say Rushdie’s last few novels, but I guess I was really looking for a female character to appear as something other than a foil in this book. I was looking for an actual storyline that wasn’t tethered to a despicable man who fails every single person around him, except himself. I was tired of hearing about his Nobel Prize and seeing his bumbling ways. I was offended by his politics, his obsession with terrible food, his tepid alcohol abuse — in short, I just didn’t care for him, despite the bloody excellent writing that surrounded him.

#17 – So Much For That

Amanda (my intern) and I will be co-reviewing the book over at Savvy Reader, just like we did for Cool Water, but I still wanted to write my own thoughts down about this exceptional novel. No, that’s not hyperbole — I truly think Lionel Shriver’s So Much For That is exceptional from start to finish. And when I did finish the book on my way home yesterday, I ended up bawling like a baby on the subway with all kinds of commuters looking at me oddly. Yes, it’s a good thing I had the physical book and not a gadget, or else they would have really thought me strange.

Shep Knacker has always been a self-starter. Despite his lack of a university education (his pastor father still holds the fact that he never went to college against him), he managed to build up a million-dollar handyman business before selling it to a bohunk (one that keeps him employed, more to humiliate Shep than anything else). On the eve of Shep finally taking the plunge into his ultimate dream of The Afterlife, escaping to foreign soils where he and his family would live off of the proceeds of his company’s sale, tragic news stops him in his tracks. Shep’s wife, Glynis, has never been all that supportive of The Afterlife. She resents the idea that he wants to get away from everything (modern life, her) and spend his dying days on Pemba, an island off the coast of Tanzania. So when Glynis announces that she has a very rare and very virulent form of cancer (mesothelioma) that requires immediate and expensive treatment, it’s almost a passive aggressive attack on her husband and his dreams. Upon hearing he’s about to up and leave for Pemba, has even bought the tickets, she announces almost blithely, “I do wish you wouldn’t… I’m afraid I will need your health insurance.”

The other set of main characters in the novel are Jackson, Shep’s coworker and best friend, and his family. His eldest daughter, Flicka, is a teenager who suffers from Familial Dysautonomia (FD), yet another rare and difficult disease. Carol, Jackson’s wife, is Flicka’s primary health care provider, and the family’s other daughter, Heather, often feels excluded because her sister demands so much attention. They are a typical New York family — they own a house in Brooklyn with a hefty mortgage and the couple works night and day to afford the care for their daughter, much of which isn’t covered by their combined insurance policies.

Regardless of how you might feel about the debates raging south of the border — the ridiculous “Tea Party,” the sensational news coverage by the right, the objections by the right, all of it — the idea that health care and the fundamental lack of affordable ways of getting it, form a central thesis in the novel. It’s topical and timely, but not preachy. Oh, it passes judgement but more in the sense that it allows the reader to draw her own conclusions by presenting facts and an honest, if fictional, situation.

Annnnwaaay.

In the face of their diseases, both Glynis and Flicka find comfort in one another — that’s not to say that they are “happy” by any means to be sick. The opposite, in fact, is often true, and Shriver’s uncanny ability to write characters who are at once complex and yet so unbearably human comes into sharp focus in this novel, just as it did with We Need to Talk About Kevin. The impact of the two unhealthy individuals shatters each family in different ways. The patients are angry, upset, and unflinchingly honest when they need to be about their diseases. But the road to acceptance, to leading a life where disease is always present and can never be escaped (and here’s something I know better than most), is never easy. Glynis fights to live. Sometimes, Flicka fights to die.

The moral issues Shriver explores, the sheer expense of health care in the States, the value of a human life (the millions of dollars spent on treatment), becomes so much more than a moral question — it’s the entry point for examining American society in general. From Jackson’s anti-establishment rants to Glynis’s fervent need to blame someone for her cancer (in this case, it’s the company who produced artistic supplies for her metalwork training when she was a student — they contained asbestos, the cause of her cancer). And because Shep has always paid for everything, that’s just his role in his family, he pays and pays and pays — for Glynis’s treatment, for his father’s old age home, for his sister’s heating bills (and is she ever a piece of work). No matter how hard he works, no matter how much he cares about his family, his life seems to crumble down upon him as penny by penny disappears from his Afterlife account.

At any point in this novel, there are moments when you simply don’t like the characters. You can’t believe they’re acting so selfishly, are so obtuse. And then, something happens and you see them in a different light. I’d argue that few living novelists do this as well as Shriver. She has a talent for pulling out extraordinary details in ordinary lives and writing them in a way that’s original and provocative.

As a girl who has dealt with a serious illness for all of her adult life, I couldn’t help but associate with the two characters dealing with disease. And while my Wegener’s is nowhere near as aggressive as Glynis’s cancer (because it’s moderated with medicine, unchecked it’ll kill me in terrible ways) or as impactful as Flicka’s FD (primarily because you can’t tell I’m sick by looking at me; at least I hope you can’t), the psychological warfare that disease plagues one with remains ridiculously effective throughout this entire novel. Shriver’s research reads impeccably — she writes the side effects, the symptoms, the treatments, the physical implications of each disease in such rich detail — and it’s the main reason the reader becomes so emotionally involved with this story. And the ending, well, I’m not going to spoil it — I’m only going to say it’s absolutely perfect and calls to mind the absolutely perfect ending of another exceptional novel, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.

Highly, highly recommended. This is not a novel that will disappoint even the most cynical of readers.

WHAT’S NEXT: Ian McEwan’s Solar. I’m 30 pages in and loving the Salman Rushdie “man in midlife crisis” of it all.

#16 – Sylvanus Now

Rachel loaned me Donna Morrisey’s Sylvanus Now when we went to see (shhh! keep your thoughts to yourself) this in the theatre back when there was still snow on the ground. She gushed. I tucked the book away and meant to get to it sooner. But once I started reading it, not even the exhaustion of sales conference could stop me from finishing. It’s addictive, sad, aching in parts and absolutely worth forcing yourself to muddle through the somewhat gross mass market edition (why this format; a TP could be so lovely!).

The novel takes place in Newfoundland in the mid-to-late 1950s when the government all but ruined the fishing industry and forced inhabitants from their outports into communities. The novel very much relates a society in flux: from fishing by hand in a little boat to giant trawlers with destructive nets; from an industry built up around drying salt cod to fish factories; from community built around family, neighbour and self-made lives to roads, towns, and government subsidies. Parts of the novel are achingly tragic, and Morrisey’s descriptions of the havoc “new” “industrial” fishing has on the lives of her characters broke my heart into pieces.

The story centres around Sylvanus Now, the youngest son of Eva, a widow who had already raised many, many children by the time he came along. He’s a fisherman, of the old-school variety, who prefers to go out with line in hand and fish the coastal waters near his outpost. The apple of his eye, Adelaide (Addie) sets herself apart from the rest of her kin almost immediately. She loves to be alone (almost impossible in a house full of so many kids) and wants to stay in school. When they marry, their relationship is all heat and tragedy, happiness and sorrow, but it’s also about the essence of marriage — the coming together in so many different aspects of life, how your lives become so entwined and in ways you never expect, and what it means to love someone over years and years instead of months and months.

The driving force of Sylvanus’s life seems to be resisting a certain kind of change. I’m sure, we can all relate. The way of life, salted cod and all, has sustained his family for generations, and his obstinance to evolution seems level-headed in a way, knowing what we know now about the depleted state of our oceans and how we’re fishing ourselves into extinction. Those were the most poignant moments in the novel — how Morrisey describes the differences between how Sylvanus fishes and how it’s done industrially. Like anything, progress comes at a cost: smaller fish in coastal waters; mothers harvested before they’ve had a chance to spawn; the decimation from trawling nets, all parts of what we sacrifice to have fresh fish on our plates.

It’s an unbearably human novel, somewhat like Kevin Patterson’s excellent, excellent Consumption. Morrisey does for Newfoundland what Patterson does for the Arctic, describe in indelible detail the destruction of a way of life, and while we’re richer for her work, I’m not sure if our country’s richer for the loss of Syllie’s sustainable fishing industry. Maybe I’m making terrible generalizations, but this felt like a very fitting book to read one month away from celebrating the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, where we need, more than ever, to think about where we’ve come from and how we want to leave this earth for the next generations. Like Addie, I’d never leave the outpost either — its beauty seemed breathtaking, regenerative and part of her, just like my cottage is part of me.

All in all, I’m so pleased I found time to read this book in between conferences, pet peeves, rain, sun, antiques, plane rides, train rides and uncomfortable hotel rooms.

READING CHALLENGES: Yet another for the Canadian Book Challenge. I wish I had a better idea of how many Canadian books I’ve actually read since last July.