#22 – Quiver

With Quiver, Holly Luhning has written a passable first novel that I, for the most part, enjoyed. There were issues, again, with the fact that I’m not sure if the novel itself knew what it wanted to be — which is something I’ve encountered a lot these days in the books I’ve been reading, especially with first novels — it’s part thriller, part historical fiction, part conspiracy and suspense, with some chicklit cliches thrown in there (I’ve never met a heroine who fixes her makeup so much in any other book before).

Annnywaaay. Danica aka “Dani” has landed a plum fellowship at Stowmoor Psychiatric Hospital in London. A relic from the Victorian era, the hospital holds some of the country’s most violent offenders, including Martin Foster, a man who brutally murdered a young girl in the name of Elizabeth Báthory, the 16th century countess infamous for bathing in the blood of her victims so it would preserver her youth. The cult of Báthory unwinds throughout the novel in a distinct Da Vinci-like way — with found “diaries” and a secret group of people dedicated to keeping her memory and, for lack of a better word, “ways” alive. Dani has always had a fascination for Báthory, and this leads her into some dangerous territory. She meets a mysterious and beautiful “archivist,” Maria, while at a conference. She’s glamourous and a bit dangerous, and thus Dani’s slippery slope begins — soon she finds herself making professional errors and her personal life (she moved to England with artist boyfriend Henry) begins to fall apart.

Because something just isn’t right.

Oh there’s intrigue and italics, lots of secret meetings, and plenty of gruesome details, but the whole book lacks a certain focus to make it truly creepy. It just didn’t quite get there for me, maybe because I found it a little too melodramatic in places, especially in the sections of the recreated diaries, and Luhning has a penchant for tangents when she’s trying to make a point in places where fast-paced plotting would have been more beneficial.

There’s a lot of Silence of the Lambs meets Interview with a Vampire within these pages — a lot of rich description and I do find the whole Báthory backstory utterly fascinating. I just wish it was better entwined with the general plot and action of the book. A lot of the times, I found myself wondering how Dani got to be a psychologist at all — she’s quite terrible at reading people, and falls into obvious traps that would have more advanced crime fiction enthusiasts rolling their eyes a little bit.

That said, it’s a really easy book to fall into, and that always takes talent — to grab the reader and haul them along for a nice 1.5 day diversion. And I was truly creeped out by some of Báthory’s behaviour — and would have liked to have seen a lot more of it throughout the novel.

#21 – The Lemon Table

My bookish love affair with Julian Barnes continues, and I thoroughly enjoyed his short story collection, The Lemon Table. It’s funny, a lot of the criticisms that I leveled against Sarah Selecky’s work — mainly its use of the second person, a story in epistolary format, and general the “twee-ness” of much of the stories — can be set against this collection as well. Barnes uses the second person, which normally makes me crazy; he has a story that’s all letters from a kooky old lady to himself, wherein the self-referential nature of it all would usually enrage me; and the last piece could be described as microfiction with no “real” plot per se but a selection of descriptions that come together to tell the tale of an egotistical composer. All of the above normally have me throwing the book against the wall and giving up in exasperation. But gracious, these stories are excellent.

The last story, “The Silence” tells me that lemons are a symbol of death in Chinese culture — I’m not sure how reliable the narrator is in this last piece, so I am not going to take that verbatim. But it does give the reader and understanding of the general theme that pervades the entire collection. Musings on the ends of lives, on divorce, on death, on widows and the children left behind, on relationships that could have been but never were — and I imagined ‘table’ more of tableau — of that terrible acting exercise where your teacher yells “hold” and everyone freezes in whatever position they landed upon.

It’s a terrific collection, cohesive even though none of the stories are linked; rich in language and metaphor; paced brilliantly and truly honest in its interpretation of the human condition. In a way, these stories reminded me of Alice Munro, only there’s a little bit more sex and bad language, especially in “Appetite,” which like her story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” deals with the tragic and debilitating affects of Alzheimer’s. Both Barnes and Munro have a distinct talent when it comes to creating characters and situations that highlight the slightly awkward and sometimes terrible aspects of human nature. In this, the stories feel real, they feel relevant, and they feel complete, but not overwritten.

On the whole, I can’t get over the immense breadth of Barnes’s talent for creating characters that cross decades, even centuries, are so wholly different in voice, and are so utterly believable (even when he writes from a woman’s perspective). In the epistolary story, entitled, “Knowing French,” a spunky pensioner sends the author Julian Barnes a number of letters, each progressively more familiar, with little gems of humour and slices of life: “What I was trying to say about Daphne [a fellow “inmate” at her home] is that she was always someone who looked forward, almost never back. This probably seems not much of a feat to you, but I promise it gets harder.”

Indeed!

And then, in an amazing story about misguided and unrequited love, “The Story of Mats Israelson,” he writes, “Barbro Lindwall was not convinced of her feelings for Anders Boden until she recognized that she would now spend the rest of her life with her husband.”

Exactly!

And then my last favourite line from the book, it’s from the last story, the microfiction-like one about the egocentric, aging, and silent-for-years composer: “Geese would be beautiful if cranes didn’t exist.”

You see!

I can’t stop. I earmarked a half-dozen, maybe more, pages, and kept putting the book down on my chest just to savour particular passages. In “The Things You Know,” two elderly widows sit down for a terribly polite breakfast once a month and what comes out of their mouths is completely different from the thoughts in their heads: the resentment towards one another only palpable as a fork stabs an egg or a waiter brings hot water instead of a purely fresh pot of tea — it was actually one of my favourites among an already rich collection.

Overall, now I think I want to read every single book Julian Barnes has ever written. It’ll be a challenge to find books this good on my shelves as I continue through them. Thankfully, I’ve got a few books from publishers to get through before I get back to my challenge. I need a bit of a break from the pressure of the 300-odd titles staring at me day after day from my desk chair.

Notes From A House Frau XIX

Thoughts When The Last Time You Slept Well Was Two Tuesdays Ago

The RRBB cracks me up these days. Here’s a picture of him on his activity mat, where he plays everyday for about a half-hour or more before getting cranky and not enjoying the company of his baby-friend the octopus any longer. We’ve started dressing him in real clothes when he leaves the house as well — although that’s hard to do when sleepers are the best things ever, especially if they have a zipper. And a picture of an elephant. Or feet that are fashioned into “shoes.” The whole idea of cuteness just goes into overload on a daily basis in our house. Multiple strangers stop me when I’m out and about and comment upon the beauty of the baby — and some, without permission, natch, reach in the stroller and touch him. I try not to get annoyed. But it’s hard when everything is annoying me these days because I’m so freaking tired.

The being tired isn’t the RRBB’s fault entirely. Sure he’s still waking up once or twice in the night, but it’s mainly the fault of the prednisone that when I am up, I can’t seem to get back to sleep. Or, I can’t get to sleep at all and then there’s no point in lying there being miserable — I might as well get up and read and make more to-do lists than listen to both of the men in my life snore away happily. Oddly, it doesn’t make me angry at all to not be sleeping these days, a little grumpy, a little out of sorts, but nothing like the rage that I usually feel after months and months of being on drugs that keep you awake and turn your brain inside out.

Last week I felt a little of the prednisone crazies for the first time. I was a bit down in the dumps thinking that it’s been almost six months of really intense treatment for the disease this time around, and I’m over a quarter of the way through my maternity leave. Winter seems never-ending. The snow is still beautiful and we are still getting out and about but my son (my son!) hates hats. He screams when I put them on, screams until he’s resigned that I’m not going to take it off, and then screams when his head gets too hot. So I will be very glad when it comes time to abandon his head to the elements and walk around unencumbered by animal-inspired toques.

As I sat up doing a restorative yoga posture called “legs up the wall” in the RRBB’s bedroom (because he’s still sleeping in ours) reading the other night, yet again after trying to go to bed early, after finally getting the baby down, after my RRHB put down his book and we turned off the light, and I discovered that sleep was like the mystical South for early explorers — something on the horizon to be expected but never experienced — I just felt sad. Overwhelmingly sad. And for no reason. Sometimes, I think the trauma and the stress of the disease comes out of my body in sadness — the ache of my poor beleagured organs can’t express themselves and so I just get sad, sad, sad.

It’s hard not to feel the pressure of the physical changes of the disease. Hard not to feel frustrated when you see people who gave birth the day after you looking like a million bucks on Oprah (don’t make me say who; it’s embarrassing enough to be watching Oprah), and you’ve still got a paunch and your hair is terrible despite a cute new hair cut and you’ve got a pooch and your stretch marks are still purple and tiger-like and you haven’t had a shower in two days because your RRHB is working and you’ve got the baby and haven’t talked to anyone in days and are kind of lonely and it’s 2AM and there is no sleep in sight. See, sad.

And I tried, for about 24 hours, to “Change [My] Life in 30 Days” as per a challenge in Chatelaine magazine. They dared me; I tried — I ate well (followed their 80% rule and then gave up and went right back to eating three muffins and some organic jujubes for lunch), I “scheduled fun,” which sounded stupid even when I was reading it, and could just not bring myself to go on a “laughter date.” I’m impressed with the writer’s ability to come up with 30 ways to change your life, small things to make your everyday just that little bit better, but they were not the long lasting, calming changes that I was craving. They were a bit too Gretchen Rubin (not bad; just not for me) for my taste. So, I’ve been thinking of my own 30-day challenge, because, of course, what I need is more to-do lists and ways to improve myself during an already stressful time, something to try next month and to keep track of here. Where I’d start — create a healthy budget and stick to it. The trouble with these “dares” is that they aren’t long-lasting. You do it one day and then drop it the next. My life isn’t going to be made better or different or less sad by only having the “pick six” things on my to-do list. Seriously, shut up Chatelaine. When did you get so vapid?

Self-improvement seems like such an easy goal when you’ve got an entire year of not working. When you’re committed to examining every aspect of your life — not only because you’re thinking every day of how your life impacts a wee one in your care, but because you never want to take that life for granted. I’m tired of almost dying every couple of years. I’m exhausted from fighting the Wegener’s. I’m feeling like I’ve had my fill of epic tragedy. I don’t want to talk about my life in terms of the things that have been denied to me — because it’s so much better to actually think about it in terms of what my life experience has opened up for me. There’s a richness in the strength and understanding that comes from struggle. But sometimes, just for a couple of hours, I wish it wasn’t all so blood hard all the time.

A year ago, even well before I was pregnant, I never would have imagined I could walk so far and for so long. But, like anything else in life, the more you do it, the better you get, and it seems that the more I walk, the more I can walk. I’d make all kinds of excuses: my hip, too tired from work, too far, let’s just take the car — and now I get angry if I can’t get out and get going. A “block” means at least an hour, maybe two, and while I’m doing things along the way, grocery shopping, to-do list attacking, I’m also pounding out the sadness, leaving it a bit behind as I go — it’s the days upon days that I get stuck in a rut, where I am too down to leave the house, those are the moments when the prednisone wins. When the disease wins. When I am struggling to know myself outside of the diagnosis and the bloodwork and the peeing in jugs and the blood pressure issues and the preeclampsia and the rest of it all. If only it wasn’t there in my face every time I look in the mirror — the “moon” cheeks and the thin hair. If only I could leave those reminders behind as well.

Annywaay, I am rambling. The baby’s sleeping still and I’m taking advantage and rolling out words like thunder, and not really thinking through what I’m writing about. Perhaps this is the moment to stop.

#20 – Turtle Valley

I really must confess that the last couple books have really been not up to snuff in terms of the quality of reading that I’ve been finding on my shelves — I mean, I’ve discovered some truly excellent authors I had never read before (Julian Barnes) and inhaled the backlist of others that I had come to love (Elizabeth Strout). I really wanted Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz to turn things around for me. Alas, it did not.

Sigh.

Turtle Valley has to be one of the most frustratingly erratic novels I have read in a long time. The narrative suffers from a distinct lack of focus and can’t really decide what it is — a ghost story, the tale of a woman’s marriage falling apart, a story of seemingly never-ending family tragedy? Instead, all of these plots and themes are muddled up together in a rushed, convoluted, awkward book that had so much promise.

But let me digress. I really loved The Cure for Death by Lightning. And, if I can remember, I enjoyed A Recipe for Bees too. Anderson-Dargatz is a talented writer, no one is denying that fact, but this is not a cohesive novel that shows off her storytelling ability. Kat, short for Katrine, arrives home to Turtle Valley with her preschool-aged (I’m imagining; his age is never given) son Jeremy and disabled husband Ezra in tow (he suffered a stroke; tragedy #1) to help her aging parents pack up their house as a forest fire rages in the area. The natural disaster provides an excellent backdrop to the story, and allows a sense of natural urgency and drama to inhabit the narrative — this is the good stuff. But where the novel falls completely apart is how Kat unravels the mysteries of her family’s past, hidden letters, hidden stories, unforgiven truths, and a ghost that haunts them all.

There’s no straight shooting in this novel. Anderson-Dargatz wants to tell things slowly but then there are places where the book just doesn’t make sense, where it would have benefited from a serious sense of grounding just so the reader can believe what’s going on. In one scene, Kat’s lifting dinner out of the oven (wha?) and then discovering her grandmother’s letters and racing off to the neighbour she once had an affair with (tragedy #2, lost love) and then suddenly the fire’s on top of them and her father’s dying (tragedy #3). Then she’s telling her older sister about a moment of tenderness between she and her husband (marital discord and eventual divorce; tragedy #4), which is a scene we READ, that had nothing to do with the retelling or any of the moments she described, and this goes on throughout the entire novel.

Far too many scenic moments and heavy-handed imagery plague the narrative (how many times can we be told about the ladybugs, how many!!!) and, in places, the dialogue is terrifically awful, and I found myself doing the patented eyerolling, yelling in my head, “people don’t talk that way!” as I was reading. The whole book would have benefited from a far more dedicated sense of time and place, and there needed to be far more attention to detail. Maybe if there wasn’t so much going on — ex-lovers and dying fathers and dead grandfathers haunting the place and half-bonkers mothers and angry husbands and ever-looming fires getting closer — the book wouldn’t feel so all over the place. In a sense, I felt overwhelmed by the trouble in the novel, by Kat’s inability to actually cope with one aspect of her life at any one time — she’s racing around like a firebug, jumping from thing to thing, and we barrel along with her, much to the novel’s disadvantage.

The real fire in the Shuswap happened in 1998 and, like I said, Anderson-Dargatz uses the event well, but I often wonder if so much tragedy feels or reads realistically — it all felt so forced: her husband’s stroke (how old was he, how did they explain the stroke, what was his prognosis, how long has he been sick, none of this is explained); their marital problems (which, of course, led to her wanting to rekindle a relationship with the hot potter next door whose own wife suffers, OF COURSE, from MS); the drama surrounding her grandfather’s death (that’s the big family mystery); her father’s cancer and her mother’s increasing dementia, that there are just too many awful things happening in this novel.

I know life is like that sometimes, terrible tragedy upon terrible tragedy, but I just didn’t get Kat. She pleads with her husband to let her in, to let her love him, and then she cheats on him; her family keeps secrets upon secrets from her, and then they spring the truth on her at the very moment the fire’s about to take all the proof away. And when they finally discover the love letters between her grandmother and her great-uncle (her mother’s mother; her father’s uncle), she races off with them even though, as I said above, she just took a pot roast out of the oven. And no one says ANYTHING. All in all, the erratic, convoluted nature of this book disappointed me throughout. I wanted to love it. I wanted to be swept away in the scenery and the shock of the fire — I wanted to believe in the ghost story, the haunting, and I wanted Kat to redeem herself by the end, but there’s too much in this novel for it to be wrapped up quickly, and yet, that’s what Anderson-Dargatz attempts to do. The end of Kat’s marriage is glossed over in one sentence, and then wrapped up awkwardly, as if it was simply a tool to insert even more drama into an already conflict-heavy, relationship-based family story.

All in all, I’m not sure how I feel about the book. I sped through it, so it definitely grabbed my attention, but I definitely expected more from this book, and this author.

READING CHALLENGES: Off the Shelf, and if I was doing a Canadian challenge, it’d be one for the books there too. I skipped the 1001 Books section of the shelves this time around, I really want to save those chunky books for the summer at the cottage, so I am trying to power through the Canadian, American, International and British sections over the winter/spring. Also, I only have one Austen left, Mansfield Park, and I don’t want to read it just yet. So I might skip the “As” and come back around to it when I’m not so disappointed in my reading. Thank goodness for Julian Barnes. I’m reading his short story collection, The Lemon Table, now and it is excellent.

#19 – In The Time Of The Butterflies

When tackling this whole “off the shelf” challenge I have consigned myself to this year, I’ve been judging books by their page length, which, in my reading world, translates to how long it’ll take me to get through it. In the Time of the Butterflies, from start to finish, clocks in at 324 pages. That’s about three hours for me — so maybe a day and a half in baby time. But GOOD GRIEF this book took me forever to read because I just couldn’t get into it.

While I have no doubt it’s an important novel — the weight of the language, the heavy-handed metaphors and sentences dripping with meaning, tells me as much — and the history that forms its central plot, the murder of the Mirabel sisters in the Dominican by the ruthless dictator Trujillo, is actually really fascinating. But the book does not, in my mind, “[make] a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression.”

In a way, this is women’s history. The novel centres around the 4 sisters and their daily lives — their marriages, the birth of their children, and it’s a domestic novel for the most part. And all the while, the four sisters are charging forward with a revolution. I just wish there was more revolution in the book and less meandering. I wanted to know more about the revolution and less about ribbons. I know that’s probably quite sexist of me, that the fact that these were women revolutionaries challenging the male-established dictatorship means the novel should necessarily include discussions of the domestic, but it slowed down the action to a crawl. And by telling the story from all four of the sisters’ points of view, Alvarez manages to disjoint the narrative so completely that you only get a fraction of each of their lives. Personally, I would have preferred the novel centre around Mirabel, the most dynamic and active of the four sisters. But, I didn’t write this book.

First published in 1994, I think this book suffers a little from the trappings of the time — long-winded and overly descriptive, I’m reminded of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine goes to see The English Patient (let me just state, for the record, that I loved both the book and the film), rolling her eyes the entire time in boredom. At least I think that’s what happened — I think that might be the only episode of Seinfeld that I’ve actually seen from start to finish. Annnywaay, she just doesn’t get what the big deal is, and I feel that way about this novel. It’s a national bestseller, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and blah de blah, accolades and great blurbs. Yet the book failed to keep my interest and over and over again I found myself not wanting to finish. It was written at a time when long, flowery sentences and the cult of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was going strong. And the importance of the novel, the politics, the very real struggle, the incredibly tragic murder of these four women, gets lost within the precious nature of the prose, the inevitable storytelling that never seems to actually tell a story but circle around it, planting pretty flowery sentences along the way.

Overall, I was disappointed, and found myself just wanted to get to the end, to see how they die — and then, of course, it all happens off stage, which made me furious. They died violently, brutally, unnecessarily, and Alvarez should have had the bravery to write it. Instead, the book simply stops and then switches perspective again, heads back into its dreary narrative and tries to cover it up by describing their dead bodies as the remaining sister, Dede, identifies them. There’s no power to this narrative; the power is in the truth of the events themselves, and Alvarez coasts along because of it. I know it’s harsh but, again, books should stand the test of time, prose shouldn’t feel dated, and a story of such importance should actually read that way, and not hold itself up on some bronzed pedestal.

READING CHALLENGES: Off the Shelf, and Around the World in 52 Books. Alvarez was born in the Dominican, and I usually really love Caribbean literature, but not so much in this case.

Notes From A House Frau XIIX

Between Love And A Hard Place

First of all, I can’t believe that our RRBB was ever that small. I’m being brave putting this picture online. It was taken during the heart of all the tragedy and trouble that surrounded his fairly easy birth. And now, 4 months later, he’s giant — 14 pounds and almost 2 feet long; he survived and flourished as my body recuperated from all the drama surrounding the disease, my pregnancy, and then our delivery.

I am so torn these days. As much as I want the time to pass — so he’s a little bit older, so he sleeps a bit better, so I get more sleep, just realizing that he’s already doubled in size in 4 months makes me realize that people telling you time flies isn’t just a platitude.

I have a rolling to-do list that never seems to get the most important items crossed off, and I can never seem to find the time in a day just to get caught up with blogging. And we’re not even doing anything. It’s the non-productivity that I find most daunting about being at home. The busy work. The mindless hours spent reading while baby sleeps on me because we still can’t train him to sleep anywhere else during the day. I feel like Sisyphus and the rock — only I’m way more tired than I ever imagined a god might be. There’s a lot of existential thinking that goes on in the wee hours of the night. A lot of first sentences are being composed. A lot of sleeping happens by the men I am surrounded by, not so much by me. I know it’s the meds and, in the past, these sleepless nights used to be filled with despair. An aching, longing kind of sadness that was punctuated by extreme self-hatred. I know, now, that was the meds too, a lovely thing called prednisone-induced psychosis, but rationalizing that it’s the drugs never stopped my self-loathing, never stopped the 4AM struggles with whether or not I even wanted to be alive.

There’s none of that this time around when battling the disease. The sleepless nights are passed in relative calm. Like I said, I make a lot of to-do lists. I eat breakfast at 3AM and take my meds so they get through my system before the baby wakes up again. We sleep in together some mornings, him nestled in the crook of my arm, as he has done since the moment he was born. These moments are fleeting, just as the sadness was momentary as compared to how much time I’ve spent actually healthy vs. in the throws of the disease; but, when you’re there, the time stretches out, long, sinewy, and I have to force myself to just enjoy it. Instead, like this morning, when I couldn’t sleep but RRBB was snoring happily, I had all the blog posts rolling through my head, enough to risk trying to put him down — pop open go his eyes, wide smile on his face, and then we’re downstairs, and then he’s playing on his activity mat, and I’m playing with him, and then he’s tired again and, here we go, he’s sleeping on me for another hour and I’m starving and have to pee and would really like to make a sandwich or a smoothie.

And then, the day is just gone. My RRHB is back from errands or work or recording and gives me a chance to have a shower (oh, the humanity!). We make dinner and then it’s the endless session of trying to get the baby down for the night. And this, this is how the time flies, all of a sudden another week has gone by and I’ve done stuff: gone to the mall, bought soap, made dinner (once!), got groceries, half-cleaned something, written more to-do lists, and am utterly exhausted having accomplished nothing. I am not a girl used to accomplishing nothing. My time is fractured all over the place — sure, I’ve got lots of it, but it’s filled up with the care of something so precious that my heart aches with the importance of it all — and sometimes I wish, hating myself for it, that I could have just a little bit of it back. Yet, there’s no resentment, no anger, just wishful thinking. I’m torn between the two lives that I’ve created: the old me, the non-mom and the new me, mother to the RRBB.

There was a writing contest I wanted to enter but probably won’t because I never win writing contests. The theme, “How Motherhood has Changed You,” seemed trite in a way, no, that’s not the right word; too obvious, that’s a better phrase, because the change is so shocking, so complete and so utterly different that for a slow learner like myself, it’s hard to come to terms with — 4 months in and I’m still searching for the right words to describe it.

I’m starting to impose some structure on our days. While not a routine per se, we do have story time in the morning. Lately we are reading Where is the Green Sheep, a new Mister Men book each day (because I ADORE them), some Dr. Seuss, and Oliver Jeffers. I’m not sure baby is paying any attention at all, mainly he gets excited by the kiss bombs in the middle of story time vs. story time itself, but I love reading aloud. Then he sleeps, maybe I sleep too, then we go out for a walk, run errands, and by the time we get back it’s afternoon nap time — which means I’m stuck for sometimes three hours in one place, if he’s particularly fussy, playing iPad Scrabble and reading. I’m being relentless about dropping him in his bed when he nods off, but the wailing, good gravy, that ensues isn’t worth it — why would I WANT to make my child unhappy?

But it can’t continue, oh, this accidental parenting (damn you Baby Whisperer, damn you). But I need some time. Just a little bit, just a teeny, tiny bit, to myself, and it can’t be at 2 AM because I’m neither awake nor asleep enough in those moments to get anything accomplished. But I sure think about everything I’d like to accomplish. How has motherhood changed me? I don’t think that it has — my perspective, my day-to-day routines, and my life is certainly different, but I am still the same person, deep down, I still want all the same things. I still believe in all the same causes. I still want to do all the same things — I just don’t have any time to do them.

Winter was wonderful. But its time has come and gone. We managed brilliantly through snow storms and disease clouds. We still got out. We didn’t go stir crazy. We almost destroyed our poor stroller for all the bumps and boulders on the sidewalks. Yet, I’m craving better weather, sunshine that actually carries warmth, ridding the car seat of bunting, and days where I can cart a pen and a notebook to a park with the RRBB and just sit outside. Just a few more weeks and I’ll welcome the smell of melting dog shit and all the cigarette butts and other debris that litters the streets around my neighbourhood. There will be parks and swings and swimming and gardening and time will pass too quickly and I will try and savour every moment.

#18 – Pretty Little Dirty

If I remember correctly, I wasn’t terrifically enthralled with Amanda Boyden’s second novel, and so I let Pretty Little Dirty languish on the shelves for, well, years. And while there were a few problems with the novel, I found myself reading it well into places in my life where I should have been sleeping, and that’s got to be a sign that it moved me in some inexplicable way.

Lisa Smith (oh what a placid, everyday name) has been best friends with Celeste Rose Diamond (yes, you read that right; the names are terrible, I know) since they were both in grade six and moved to Kansas City from other, larger cities (Chicago and New York respectively) before the start of the school year. Their friendship is epic: they are destined to love one another in ways that only schoolgirls can — utterly and completely, beyond a familial relationship and creating a bond that best friends know is there, even if they can’t explain it — they love one another above and beyond anyone else.

Celeste, of course, is utterly beautiful, and both she and Lisa are gifted academically — so they excel at school, when it’s in their interests. They are suburban girls looking for adventure, and they find it the summer before they graduate from high school in the form of an teacher and his students from the local art college. Experimenting with sex and drugs, Boyden’s narrative matches the feverish way young girls have of barreling into adult life — it rolls around and around, often repeating similar thoughts over and over again — much like a conversation between girlfriends. She has a strange tick to her writing — keeps telling us, the reader, that Celeste’s story is far more interesting than her own, but then we never get the full story when it comes right down to it, because the book is told from Lisa’s perspective. Celeste remains at arm’s length from us, and maybe that’s the way Lisa likes it — she’s as much in love with being Celeste’s best friend as she is with the idea of friendship itself. The ultimate unreliable narrator, in a way, putting her subject on a pedestal and then never really letting the reader see how the sculpture came into existence.

I also like how, while there’s very typical things in this novel that even reminded me a little of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (minus the very important Trip Fontaine character, naturally) — mother’s with psychological problems, broken families, fathers that hold on too tight to their daughters, sex with older men — Boyden intersperses this with the punk scene in the 80s, something that’s kind of close to my heart. Not because I was remotely a punk, but there was a time when I used to sneak downtown to hang out with skin heads at a bar called Michael’s on Queen Street across from the Big Bop, and grew up just at a time when the wrong Doc Marten’s could get your head kicked in — so much of this book, while set earlier than my own teenage years, reminded me of my youth. I didn’t do nearly the same amount of drugs, and never dropped out of university, but the struggle to find myself, to define myself outside of the tragedy that defined my own family, as Lisa attempts to do by attaching herself to the Diamonds, well, that rang incredibly true.

It’s hard to write teenage angst without it coming across as melodramatic, and Boyden does it so very well in this book — there were problems with the book in places, mainly the sex scenes (they were a bit too much and a little “ride me like a stallion Morag” for my liking) — but overall, once I started this book, I couldn’t put it down. I actually avoided sleep training the RRBB so I could read more, which meant we spent a lovely few hours with him sleeping on me as I powered through the pages. Lastly, I really, really wish people would stop using the second person. I don’t know why it bugs me so much, but it does. However, I would have given my left shoe to be at some of the shows Boyden describes throughout the narrative. Black Flag in 1982? Probably way too violent for me but what an experience.

The Summary: Another Off the Shelf book down, and while the alphabetical reading is now weighing me down a little (I’m really not liking my current book, In the Time of the Butterflies), I am getting through the books much quicker than I thought. I might start reading 2 or 3 in a row from any particular shelf just so that I’m not bouncing around so much and can get through a letter before moving on to the next. In fact, maybe that’s what I’ll start now and pause my current book because it’s seriously boring.

#17 – Arthur & George

Oh, Julian Barnes, how I adored Arthur & George. From its opening pages right up until the end, it’s a complex mix of the fictional and the historical, a comment on colonialism/literature, and a rollicking good adventure. The novel even encouraged me to download The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to my iPad (it’s on the 1001 Books list anyway). I’m not quite sure how to alphabetize my ebooks into my reading yet so it might remain unread for some time, but I digress.

Told from either man’s changing perspectives, with a few odd other characters thrown in, the novel brings to life to exceptionally interesting characters: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, among others and George Edalji, a half-Scottish, half Parsee solicitor wrongly accused of a number of heinous crimes.

Doyle’s a larger than life character — both in the book and in his own mind, to a degree. He’s the prototype for the colonial British man: athletic, sharp, intelligent, opinionated, moral, and just (to his own sense of duty and accomplishment, if that makes any sense — we might question his upstanding “Britishness” under a post-colonial analysis and discover his beliefs lacking a broader, more realized context) and his confidence spills over every page. He marries a lovely woman because he should; and then promptly falls in love with someone else (but never acts upon his feelings in anyway that could be considered ungentlemanly). He strives to clear George Edalji’s name because it’s the right thing to do but doesn’t believe in the suffrage of women. And it’s these contradictions that make him such a fascinating character caught within Barnes’s rollicking story.

George Edalji, a firm believer in truth with a capital “T” finds himself in quite a pickle when the local constabulary arrests him for mutilating animals and sending horrible, harmful prank letters to his own family. George, a solicitor by trade, firmly believes in the good, just righteousness of the legal system. It will save him. What he doesn’t count on is the racism that feeds the decision to imprison him. Even when further animals end up mutilated, there’s a “viable” explanation as per why George is still guilty of the crimes.When Sir Arthur reads about his case in an obscure newspaper, he sets his mind upon clearing George’s name and helping him seek restitution for both his wrongful conviction and his imprisonment.

Even though their lives and personalities couldn’t be more different, when they finally meet, their actions — Doyle’s “investigation” and subsequent attacks in the press and George Edalji’s further insistence of his innocence — challenged and then changed the existing legal system. But it is the personal lives of both men that keep the narrative from feeling dry and/or crisp. Barnes remains rich in his description of their lives, their wants, their needs, their loves (or lack thereof in the case of Edalji). He’s also careful to keep a narrative distance. While we feel and know the racism behind George’s conviction — the staunch way that George himself refuses to believe it had any part in his troubles, how George firmly believes (and was brought up to be) himself to be an Englishman first, remains a fascinating part of his character. Goodness, I enjoyed this novel — its pacing, the characters, the setting, the “investigation,” — all of it. It was a bright and welcome change — to race through a book that you felt was somewhat flawless in terms of its prose and presentation.

I’ve never read any other Julian Barnes. I’m glad there is at least one other on my shelf that will be tackled the next time I reach the British section. It shouldn’t take me too long. I can’t believe that after finishing In the Time of Butterflies, I’ll be back reading Austen again — the last on my shelves.

The Shelves: Their Glory


Here they are in all their glory: my beautiful, alphabetized books. My challenge: read every single one before I go back to work in October. Will I get there, doubtful, but I’m going to give it my all, or my eyeballs, so to speak. I probably will not read that Kleenex box, though. I didn’t count the books but I estimate there’s over 300 titles here, which is daunting, to say the least considering I’ve never even made it to 100 in a calendar year. Oh boy. What have I done?

#16 – Showbiz

I’m not going to lie — I cursed my “I am totally determined to read everything on my shelves” challenge a little bit with Jason Anderson’s Showbiz. Part-fan fiction, part faux-history, and part “journalist that gets caught in a thriller,” the book, well, simply felt implausible to me. I’m not saying that Anderson isn’t a good writer, and that he doesn’t have one wickedly fun imagination — both of these things are true, but this book wasn’t for me.

Nathan Grant’s a Canadian ex-pat journalist attempting to make it in NYC. He’s broke, needs to find a job, a girl, a life. And when he stumbles across an old comedy record by a fellow named Jimmy Wynn — he finally thinks he’s getting somewhere. See, Wynn used to do an impersonation, a really good act, based around his contemporary president — Cannon (who bears a thinly veiled resemblance to Kennedy). After Cannon’s assassination, Wynn’s act is ruined and he’s on the run, disappeared into pop culture oblivion, because of a “secret” the president apparently imparted to him.

What Nathan knows he’s got is a story he can sell to the magazine where his friend Colin works: The Betsey. It’s dedicated entirely to the life and times of President Cannon. Bingo, he’s pitched it, it’s accepted and all of a sudden he’s in Vegas trying to track down an aging comedian among bucket loads of aging stars all kicking out their last legs on the strip.

But where there’s Cannon, there’s conspiracy, and where the book turned into a strange film-like mess for me. I just didn’t believe it, and that’s my fault. I couldn’t get passed the whole “faux” world in which it was written — and Anderson heads off on a lot of tangents. The reader doesn’t necessarily need to know the plots of every single B film that Wynn, in one of his many disguises after being disgraced, and nor do we need to read every single article or have each clue spelled out so exactly. The pop culture stuff within the novel was interesting but I’ve never been one for conspiracy theories and prefer to read my history straight — not that I don’t believe that fan fiction, which I kind of somewhat consider this to be, isn’t a worthy enterprise, it completely is, but you have to accept and believe the action for it to work, and I just didn’t with this book.

In the end, I finished it, but I did a lot of complaining while reading. I knew when my RRHB said, “What a great cover,” that the book probably wasn’t going to be for me — and even though I enjoyed Nathan’s almost hapless way of finding himself in the middle of the action and, like I said, am in awe of Anderson’s amazing pop culture inventive imagination, on the whole I wanted just a tad bit more resolution and reality within this book. He could have gone even further with the satire and I would have enjoyed it more. I guess, that’s what I’m trying to get at — this book just didn’t know exactly what it wanted to be (from my perspective). So, I have mixed emotions about this book. I want to support the writer, I think he’s got an interesting talent, but the novel, overall, didn’t really work for me.

But I think I’m a better person for reading it. It’s important to read out of your comfort zone (literary fiction) and see what other kinds of novels are being published. See what other writers are coming up with in the wee hours of the night when their imaginary characters are being chased down by men with not-so innocent motives. If I were to give a good comp for this book, it might be the film St John of Las Vegas, which I actually enjoyed a great deal. It’s got the same quirky, “mis-happenstance” feel to it that the novel strives for.

WHAT’S NEXT: I’ve started the utterly delightful Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, and am already enjoying it immensely. Then, we’re into the Americans: Amanda Boyden’s first novel, Pretty Little Dirty I think it’s called.