#5 – Hanging Hill

Oh, Mo Hayder. I’ve told anyone who’ll listen that Mo Hayder is my favourite thriller writer. While, yes, sometimes there are gruesome aspects to her novels, but they are just so damn well written that even when the words make me cringe, I’m impressed by them. Hanging Hill is a standalone novel, written outside of her current series, The Walking Man books, and while there are familiar aspects to the story (a tough-as-nails cop; family conflict; great villains), this is one hell of a mystery.

First, let’s examine the set up: two sisters, recently reconciled, sit on a bench outside of a funeral. The reader (ahem, me) makes an assumption, it’s one you’re led right into like a fly to a sticky trap, about the funeral’s protagonist, if you will, and Hayder expertly unravels bits and pieces throughout the novel until you get to the shocker of an ending — and are stunned by its  final pages. Continue reading “#5 – Hanging Hill”

#4 – Among Others

From one kind of magic to another seems to be the theme around here lately. Jo Walton’s ridiculously good novel, Among Others, while dealing with a similar kind of world, where magic exists as reality and not illusion, couldn’t be more different than The Night Circus. The novel follows the diary of 17-year-old Morwenna Phelps, who after living through the horrific death of her twin sister, which leaves her disabled and walking with a cane, is shipped off to live with her estranged father in England, where it’s exceptionally hard to see the fairies.

Promptly enrolled in boarding school, Mor tries to make sense of the world, and, as if it’s hard enough being a teenager, she’s got to contend with a terrible witch for a mother, aunts insistent upon casting their own spells, and a crush on an adorably inappropriate boy in her science fiction book club. An outcast if there ever was one, Mor’s also incredibly strong-willed, fiercely intelligent, and remarkably brave in terms of the troubles she endures.  When my friend Dan sent the book over to me, he implored me to ignore the cover, which is, honestly, quite terrible — and I’m ever so glad that I did. I devoured this novel. I simply couldn’t put it down,  then I gave it to a friend at work just so she could read it and I’d have someone to talk to about it. I didn’t want it to end — I was so proud of Mor and how she dealt with her tragedies, and I haven’t rooted for a female character like this since Katniss volunteered in The Hunger Games. Continue reading “#4 – Among Others”

#3 – The Spiral Staircase

After rearranging all of my books in alphabetical order, I was disheartened to have to start at the “As” again — but it meant that I am finally getting to some of the nonfiction that has been collecting dust bunnies for more years than I’d care to count, and hence: The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong. A friend of mine, Deborah Birkett, who used to run a terrific website called Chicklit, had mentioned Armstrong either in passing or in something she had written or in some conversation she may have moderated. I am pretty sure that’s how this book ended up on my shelves — through her recommendation.

Armstrong, a failed nun, a failed post-doc, a failed teacher and a failed television presenter (yes, I’m being harsh but bear with me), finally finds her calling when she, after a long struggle with real life, comes to writing about comparative religion. It’s funny, I finished The Night Circus, a whimsical novel about real magic only to come to a very real memoir about a woman who loses her faith so colossally that she fears she’ll  never find her place in the real world, the magic in her ideas about God and religion, so to speak, lost for the foreseeable future. In so many ways, Armstrong’s struggles to find her right place in the world are so powerful that it’s impossible not to cheer for her every single time life churns her out in a direction she never imagined for herself. Continue reading “#3 – The Spiral Staircase”

#2 – The Night Circus

Yes, I have hijacked #1, which was Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. With the amount that’s been said everywhere about Austen’s work, there’s nothing more I can add to the conversation except to say that the more of her novels that I read, the more I discover how indebted fiction in general is to her work. Fanny might be my least favourite of her heroines, but I did admire her utter dedication to morality and her ability to always do the right thing, especially considering how things turn out for poor Maria. It took me ages to read, and I was getting antsy, so I was glad to finish and turn my attention to The Night Circus.

At its heart, this is a love story, and like Rob Wiersma (review linked), it stops you in your tracks. It’s very classic in a way, star-crossed lovers, circumstances built into their lives to keep them apart, and the lengths that people will go to when their love is grand in nature. Celia, the daughter of Prospero the Enchanter, a magician whose magic is more a gift than slight of hand, thrusts his utterly talented girl into a fight-to-the-death game with his rival, Alexander’s protégé, Marco. Working through Chandresh Lefevre and using his own magic, Marco controls The Night Circus, an epic travelling show that enthralls audiences with its interesting blend of traditional circus fare and the tricks/spells/enchantments the two main characters engage in.

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New Year’s Revolutions: 2012 Edition

Every year, it’s the same. I call them “revolutions” to really affect change in my own life. I do well by some and completely fail for others. There’s always a list because I think lists are spectacular and they keep me sane (and I’m not even joking). So let me recap what I think my accomplishments were for 2011:

1. I managed to stay alive. I’m not even being flippant. The meds weren’t working for the disease, I kept getting sicker, and all kinds of complications happened after giving birth. I also kept this baby alive. That is no small accomplishment.

2. I discovered that parenthood is deeply complex, deeply rewarding and nothing at all like what I imagined when I first discovered there was a “fig”-sized baby in my womb.

3. I know what it means to appreciate where you work and the people you work for.

4. Reading has saved my sanity for all of the years I have been on his earth and can remember reading. This year was no exception. Writing has taken a backseat but I am okay with that, for now. I read 89 books (finishing off the year was Ian Rankin’s EXCELLENT thriller, The Impossible Dead. It does what so many crime novels fail to do — absolutely stump me until the very end) this year and dozens upon dozens of children’s books. I am not sure what the total would be if I included the RRBB’s books so let’s just leave it at almost 90. That’s a good solid year of reading for me, for anyone.

5. Prednisone + pregnancy equals a LOT of extra pounds that I would very much like to say goodbye to sooner rather than later. Continue reading “New Year’s Revolutions: 2012 Edition”

#88 – The Hunger Games

I might be the last person on the planet to read The Hunger Games. The story of Katniss, who volunteers in place of her younger sister, to fight to the death as a tribute from her area in The Hunger Games of the book’s title. A fight to the death where teenagers from every district in Panem engage in the bloody, terrifying televised war, only one person survives to win — and, in this case, Katniss will do anything not only to survive but to do her family, and her district, proud. They choose two people from each district, and Katniss’s partner is Peeta, the son of a baker who simply doesn’t have the survival skills that she has been honing her entire life.

Ever since the death of her father, Katniss has been honing her hunting skills. Creeping out from the fence that surrounds her district, she heads into the woods, her second home, with Gale, her friend, confidant and hunting partner. They shoot, kill, and trade what they scavenge from the woods for the things they need to survive in this post-apocalyptic world. It’s a hard living but Katniss does what she does to keep her family afloat, her sister, Primrose, and her mother whose depression since the death of their father has left her almost unable to cope.

The games are violent, intense and utterly captivating. Televised for the entire country to watch, the tributes are helped along by mysterious packages dropped into the games by sponsors who see and support their performance. An under current of a love story drives through the book as both Gale and Katniss learn that to survive means to play up their alleged (is it really?) romance. I loved the Katniss character — she’s a survivor who’s strong, smart and quick thinking. Such a better role model for young girls than the soppy, sodden Bella from that other series. The description “page-turner” was meant for this book — once I started I really couldn’t put it down, and I was consistently engaged by Collins’s descriptions of not only the world she created but of the violence that drove the games. The best science / speculative fiction, in my opinion, is the kind that’s just so-close to the world that we are familiar with to make it feel utterly real. Collins does an exceptional job — her world reminds me of the one that Atwood created in her latest novels, it’s stark, and the people who have survived have done so simply because they both play inside and outside of the rules. In The Hunger Games, it’s a fight to the death, and while we know from the outcome that Katniss is the hero of this story, how she survives is almost as interesting (SPOILER) as the fact that she does. I can’t wait to see the movie. I think it’ll be spectacular on the big screen.

Busted on the Bloor Line: Holidays

We are utterly unprepared to have a child during the holidays. Thankfully, he’s too little to really notice the extreme lack of “festive” decorations or, really, a tree. I’ve bought him a stocking and even a few things to stuff it with, and a couple of presents, but we’re finding it hard to strike a balance between what we believe (we’d rather spend the money on a trip than extravagant gifts; the world is filled with crap that has taken precious time, energy and resources to make, do we really need it?) and the need to give our son happy, healthy family memories. There’s a point where you need to make your own traditions — to decide what’s right for your family. In a way, I know these sorts of things will evolve over time. Before we lost my mom, we had a number of things we did around the holidays: we each made a decoration both for the tree and for our homemade stockings, we read a battered, aged copy of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas on Christmas Eve after we were allowed to open one present, and we spent days covered in family from head to toe culminating in a delicious meal or two, or three. Continue reading “Busted on the Bloor Line: Holidays”

#86 – The Sense of an Ending

My reading life this year has been defined by my “discovery” of Julian Barnes. I think I’ve read four of his books over the last fourteen or so months, and honestly think he’s one of the finest novelists working in English today. The Sense of an Ending, his Booker-prize winning novella (because it’s really short, come on!), reminded me a little of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, both because it’s short, but mainly because they both have protagonists whose lives are defined by a fractured relationship that seems to drive an earthquake-sized fissure through their lives.

Tony’s an average man. Balding. Divorced. Retired. He has a good relationship with his ex-wife and his daughter. He travelled a bit in his youth. He held down a good job. He has a nice little condo. All in all, he has had a happy life. Perhaps not necessarily fulfilling in the way that you imagine, you romanticize, adulthood when you’re in the throes of the high points of your youth. While in school, Tony’s and his friends envelop Adrian into their fold — he’s charming, ridiculously intelligent, and soon becomes a favourite of both the teachers and students alike. He’s a young philosopher who dissects a fellow student’s suicide with a calm, exacting kind of matter reminiscent of some of the great existential minds, and when he goes off to study at Oxford or Cambridge (one of those high profile British universities anyway), it’s not surprising. He has that kind of energy that pulls people towards him, including, Tony’s first serious girlfriend.

Everyone knows memory isn’t anything close to the truth (the heroine of Before I Go To Sleep knows that better than anyone, I think). It’s selective and seductive — keeps the good (and the terrible; hell, don’t we all have those “stop your heart” moments where you look back and feel the utter ruin of a moment?) and reverberates the bad. And as Tony goes backwards, forwards, and in between, to piece together why said ex-girlfriend’s mother has left him not only money in her will but Adrian’s diary (and how did she get it in the first place?), the story slowly unravels into truth. And like the best of novels, like the best of writers, the story, the ending, is not at all what one would expect.

The sense, I think, that the title refers to the many ways that situations can end — death, obviously, break-ups, naturally, but also philosophically, that is, knowing how and when to say good-bye, to bring things to an end. There’s a moment, always, when one can go too far with something, hurt people, get hurt oneself, and Barnes explores this theme brilliantly. The narrator of the book, utterly fallible to human emotions, human mistakes, finally understands the complex nature of the situation, and the revel is everything you expect from a superior novelist. There are no cracks or fissures in this book. No stray words, no false pretences, no extraneous, well, anything. It’s not a lengthy or even as rich a novel as say Arthur and George, but the way it looks at moral questions, the way it builds character and suspense, remains engaging from start to finish. I know, in a way, that perhaps the Booker committee gave him the award as a kind of lifetime achievement situation, but, in the end, when a book is this good, does it really matter?

#85 – Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Over the last few years, instead of sending sympathy cards for friends who have lost loved ones, parents, I’ve sent copies of The Year of Magical Thinking. It’s the one book that helped me on every level deal with the accident/death of my own mother. Didion’s exceptionally precise writing and her own deep, deep loss was both oddly exacting and yet comforting at the same time. It’s the most consistently accurate book about how to think about what the absence of the kind of love that we take for granted every single day does to the human heart, mind, soul that I have ever read. And then, we come to Blue Nights.

After the death of her husband, Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, died a complicated death caused by inexplicable but utterly explainable cascading medical situations that seem to define the word tragedy. Blue Nights remains the author’s meditation, for it’s hard to refer to it as a memoir, on the loss of a child. But any discussion of children cannot be separate from that of motherhood, of its failures, of its successes, of its utter inability to define your life outside of it once it’s happened to you. And Didion, balancing the life of a writer with that of mother was never a cause for regret, per se, but of reflection — and the results are brilliant.

Having led a life already defined by the inexplicable kind of tragedy that Didion herself has experienced (and I am not for once “putting myself into her shoes,” I’m just saying that my life has not be easy), it’s impossible for me not to relate on every level to this work. I am happy that this book is free of the platitudes that usually plague books of this kind — that the honesty required of Didion to even write about what happened to her excises any of the typically movie-of-the-week emotions that would feather a lesser book into melodrama. Yet, when Didion describes her own frailty, her wonder at who her emergency contact might be now that both her daughter and husband have died, and the complex relationship she had with her beautiful daughter while alive, there’s an undercurrent of honesty that a lesser writer would simply be unable to achieve. Her writing is direct and simple yet it aches with emotion. The book can write in one sentence what would take me paragraphs. My heart will never be the same after Blue Nights. There are lessons in its pages, and maybe that’s more the point, for me as a reader, that my own words will never come close to being able to explain how profoundly this book affected my consciousness. I have put it back on the shelf — it’s one to keep, to reread, to remember.

#84 – Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

I’ve been sitting here for a few minutes trying to think of how to write about Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. Firstly, it’s an amazing alternative history or, rather, underwritten history of the Second World War. A group of jazz musicians in Paris, a young half-German boy among them, a gifted musician, perhaps the most gifted among them, is taken by the Nazi’s while simply on a quest for milk. His companion, Sid, his friend, another musician, perhaps not as gifted, watches as the Gestapo carts Hiero away. This is the moment that haunts Sid for the rest of his life, through multiple wives and multiple lives, it’s not something that he’ll ever forget.

Yet, Edugyan’s story isn’t so straightforward. Yes, it’s a novel about musicians during the war. It’s about displaced people and a how a burgeoning art form creates families among the young men who eat, drink and live jazz. It’s about betrayal and loyalty as much as it is about cowardice and making hard choices in impossible situations. Sid is an amazingly conflicted character — he acts, well, human in situations where one would think that morality needs to have a higher purpose. Life, in times of war, is not to be taken for granted and, yet, he seems unable at times to move beyond his own jealousy about the music, about his own inability to come to terms that the gods have not necessarily bestowed him with the same kind of gifts as his fellow musicians.

Continue reading “#84 – Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan”