Category: Uncategorized

In the end, it my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum is the story of the life of Ruby Lennox, from conception to old age, told in a fury of first-person that captivates you the minute your eyes hit the page.

I’m too tired now to give a full review, or even a half a review, but suffice it to say that I really loved this book, and it’s no wonder, judging by how much I enjoyed Case Histories. The Book A Day challenge lives for another day. But I must admit I’m getting a bit burnt out.

Great article by Mark Daniell about my RRHB’s band. Enjoy!

There were two passages from The Night Watch that I wanted to share, but last night I was so tired and just wanted to put the Book A Day to bed, that I didn’t include them in my post.

In the first, Kay, an ambulance driver at the height of the war in London, comes home at the end of a particularly gruesome shift. Her lover, Helen, is already asleep:

At last she grew calm enough to finish her cigarette and sit more comfortably. When she was perfectly steady, and sure the express train wouldn’t come back again, she’d go to bed. She mightn’t sleep, for an hour or more. Instead, she’d lie and listen to Helen’s steady breathing in the darkness. She might put her fingers to Helen’s wrist, and feel for the miraculous tick-tick-ticking of her pulse.

I marked that paragraph because I do the same thing, not the whiskey drinking and smoking, but I do often sit with my two fingers on my RRHB’s wrist listening to his pulse. I don’t even know when or how I started it; it’s something I do just to reassure myself that he’s there, alive, ticking, literally. It’s something that makes me feel safe, which is why this resonated with me so much. Kay, the strongest woman in the book, suffers silently for the most part, so true to herself in a world that wasn’t necessarily ready to accept her, but still so valiant and brave to save every piece of it that she can.

The second passage that I marked has to do with Viv, a pregnant girl whose lover is a married soldier:

The window opened on to a courtyard. She could hear typing, the ring of telephones, from rooms on the floors above. If she listened carefully, too, she could just make out, beyond those sounds, the ordinary sounds of ignore Street and portmanteau Square: cars and taxis, and men and women going shopping, going out, going home from work. They were the sort of sounds, viva thought, that you heard a thousand times, and never noticed—just as when you were well, you never thought about being well, you could only really feel what it was like to be healthy for about a minute, when you stopped being sick. But when you were sick, it made you into a stranger, a foreigner in your own land. Everything that was simple and ordinary to everyone else became like an enemy to you. Your own body became like an enemy to you, plotting and scheming against you and setting traps…

How perfect is that quote for what my life is like these days?

I’m back on track this morning, as I knocked off Liza Palmer’s Conversations with the Fat Girl in about two and a half hours. There’s really nothing to the book, which is why it was so easy to read. Maggie, the ‘fat girl’ in question learns to love herself over the course of the novel as she pursues the boy of her dreams, finds herself a fabulous new job and finally ends a toxic friendship with her formally obese best friend Olivia.

There’s nothing new here and the writing isn’t remotely remarkable enough for me to read another of her books. Even though the easy reads are necessary for the Book A Day challenge, I’m beginning to think of them like television, good for a bit of time wasting but not really worth the investment.

In good chicklit, there’s an overarching sense of a stereotypical story looked upon in a very unusual way, some spark that keeps you interested in the characters and their outcomes. In this book, there was none of that; it fell flat, regardless of how hard the author tried. I wouldn’t even recommend this book for a plane ride. As my mother used to say, “It’s a toilet novel.”

I forgive you Sarah Waters. Not that you probably care, but after hating Tipping the Velvet so very much, I was happy to enjoy The Night Watch with the delicious passion I felt towards Fingersmith.

I forgive you too for writing a book 470 pages long and, I suppose, for my own audacity in thinking that I could finish it in one day for my Book A Day challenge. But the prose is so easy-going, the story, about Londoners during the war, so addictive, that I left television behind for the evening and kept on reading.

I even forgive you for telling me the story backwards, for starting in 1947 with the end and then doling out the background in the subsequent sections from 1944 and 1941.

But most of all, I thank you for showing me a London that my grandmother lived through, bombs, air raids, night watch wardens, soldiers on leave, love stories told in the dark, torches, and terror.

It’s a truly great piece of fiction.

Ahem, and it’s been an industrious sort of morning (now afternoon) for sure. I finished up the final edits of my two latest Classic Starts. And have also finished yet another task from the list:

12. Clean the kitchen cupboards (see #10).

Done and done!

I watched this abysmal film on Sunday afternoon. Holy crap it’s poo. Awful script, painfully bad acting by usually good actors and chalked full of trite, predictable situations. What’s more embarrassing? I actually watched it to the end. Shame on me. And shame on Alicia Silverstone and Queen Latifah, they’re so much better than this dreck.

Oh, and I didn’t watch any movies on Monday, so that means I’ve got two, count ’em, two extra ones stored up! Maybe I’ll indulge today…

What a busy day I had yesterday! As I’m living and dying by the list these days, here’s item 16:

See the eye doctor (appointment made), family doctor (appointment made), naturopath (appointment made) and osteopath (appointment not made yet…). This is all in the goal of spending the next 2.5 weeks getting as well as I humanly can get in the time I’ve got to myself.

Yesterday I saw the family doctor to talk about the strange prednisone-crazy anxiety attacks. She was very kind to me about it all and just wanted to make sure that the super-fancy disease doctor knew that I was starting to feel a bit weepy from the stupid meds. Then she was kind enough to give me some little pills that calm me right down. The last thing I need is to start freaking out all the time, rev my immune system up even more and then have the disease get even worse. Oh, and I’ve now made not one but two appointments with the osteopath, so cross that off too!

Then I walked all the way from the hospital up to Bloor Street just so I could knock this one off the list:

6. Buy a good pair of walking sneakers for the better weather soon to arrive.

Done and done!

By then it was time to take the subway to see the naturopath, who I haven’t seen in two years. That’s how much my life had sort of gotten away with me…anyway, it was great to see her and she’s going to help me work on my diet and other homeopathic stuff. I see her again once more before I go to back to work. It’s a great start, I think.

My one true goal is to be much better prepared for the toll that working takes on me in terms of living with the disease. If I can get super-organized by the time I go back, then I won’t feel like I’m wasting my life away when I get home and am too tired to do anything except watch television.

Oh, and there was this great quote that I forgot in my post yesterday about The Good Life. It’s kind of pretentious, as Corinne is reading Plato to her lover, Luke, while they’re off cheating on their respective spouses, but I liked the sentiment:

“…any single book is the instantiation of a kind of Platonic form—the ideal, the creation of an author, which exists independent of the physical object. And here they sit on the shelf: The ideal’s latent until we pick it up and connect ourselves with the mind of a man or a woman who may long be dead. And, in the case of a novel, with a world that never actually existed.”

Just something to think about today as I go about slicing and dicing the list!

Jay McInerney’s latest book The Good Life sets a love story against the backdrop of 9/11 New York. The novel’s central relationship between two middle aged people having affairs outside their own unhappy marriages portends the very real and very modern changes that affected New York after the wake of the terrorist attacks. It’s not a story of young love, but rather true love, which is an interesting point of view.

Yet, as much as a reader wants this novel to be about 9/11, it’s really not, and I think that’s kind of a shame. The cataclysmic event remains a setting, and an adept one at that, but there’s a sense of emotional depth missing, which sort of ruined the book for me. There’s none of that lingering Rescue Me psychological meltdowns among the rich and famous New Yorkers depicted in The Good Life. There’s none of the celebration of New York found in Sex and the City and the book reads more like Bonfire of the Vanities (a novel I hated) then I would have liked.

McInerney’s a good, lyrical writer, with long, luscious sentences, but he relies on repetitive phrases and stereotypical characters too much. The idea of “the good life” at once challenged and then ultimately revered throughout the novel comes across as a bit vain and even self-indulgent. I found it hard to care about the hearts of the two main characters because, quite simply, I didn’t care about them. There’s a bit of sloppiness to the novel too, with characters introduced at critical times and never brought up again, and situations explored but never truly resolved.

But mainly, I didn’t like the female lead, Corinne. I thought she was actually kind of ridiculous and a lot of her dialogue was utterly unbelievable. The male lead, Luke, was more interesting and the novel might have been more successful if it hinged entirely upon him, although that would mean putting up with his absolutely annoying wife, Sasha. Just tying a love story to the events of 9/11 isn’t enough. I kept thinking: what is this book about? The vapid nature of the rich and famous or how hard it is to change when you’re at a stage of life where there are dire consequences (broken marriages, children, career changes). But really, because there’s no emotional depth to the characters, the truly emotionally charged situation they find themselves in is kind of redundant.

Give me Denis Leary any day.

(And thank goodness I finished the Book A Day challenge today, it was tough!)

So, I didn’t end up watching a movie yesterday, which might be a good thing. I was too captivated by Intuition. And I had to go to a family function thing last night that left me out of the house during prime movie watching times. So I’m giving myself permission to watch two movies one day this week…and I’m not sure what day that might be, but I’m guessing Tuesday, when all the new films show up at Rogers. Ah, my life is so predictable and somewhat pathetic, but I’m resting dammit, I’m resting!