Starting To See The Light

There’s only so many ways of saying that life is so ridiculously busy that it’s impossible even to keep up with the things that I like to do, this blog for example. This week I’ve got two more freelance assignments to get to after one that I handed in earlier in the week (holler to Scarbie for the work!), my RRHB’s web redesign (which is going really well), a full-time job, Christmas shopping (thankfully almost done), knitting (come on, it’s relaxing!) and babysitting. And surprisingly, this is a quiet week.

Annywaay, what I have been doing is trying like crazy to finish up some classics for the 1001 Books challenge by the end of the year. One book in particular, Middlemarch, so I can cross at least one massive classic off the list. In my ballistic state, I bought a copy of the Penguin classic only to discover a second-hand version on my shelf, and then I decided that it’d be easier to read the 900-odd page book on my Sony Reader because then I wouldn’t have to cart the giant book around everywhere. Let me just say that it comes up at 1800+ pages when dumped in ebook format from Project Gutenberg so even though it’s a quicker read, it’s still a bit daunting.

But I’m loving it. I’ve totally decided that not all Victorians deserve to be abolished to the dusty bins at used bookstores and university course lists. The book is engaging, has great dialogue and effortlessly shows Eliot’s irony (writing of women who have no opinions whilst being a woman who obviously had many opinions) in surprisingly refreshing ways. I’m already thinking of what my life would have been like had I married the first person I fell for when I was Dorothea’s age. Of course, now that I’ve started watching the impeccable Brideshead Revisited with Jeremy Irons, I’m wondering if there’s some sort of miniseries I can buy for Middlemarch too.

Sigh.

Obsessions are just so expensive.

Other classics I dumped on the Sony Reader: Dracula, Dead Souls, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Mansfield Park. Combined, it’s well over 5,000 pages so I’m not sure I’ll get through even one of them by the end of the year, but still, I love my Sony Reader.

Boo.

Back on meds. I think it’s the most depressing news I’ve had this month. After valiantly battling back to health, I saw the Super Fancy Disease Doctor today and even though my tests are looking okay, my symptoms are of concern. He doesn’t know if the disease is flaring yet but to be careful, he’s put me back on the dreaded prednisone. I hate prednisone.

I go back to see him in a month and then he’ll decide if I need to go back on the methotrexate again. I really don’t want to do any of it. I really don’t want to cry either but that doesn’t seem to matter either.

#70 – Through Black Spruce

My head has been pounding all day and my stomach just won’t settle. I’ve been peeing in a jug — the test that I hate the most when it comes to disease maintenance — and this morning the blood tech took forever to draw out what she needed. All of these petty insufferables, the annoyance of the snow blowing around, the pain in my sinuses that just won’t seem to go away, the same pain that woke me at 3 AM and held on tight until 6 when I managed to fall back asleep for an hour, were simply swept away when I finished Joseph Boyden‘s amazing Through Black Spruce.

Easily one of the best novels I’ve read this year, entirely deserving of its Giller crown, and utterly unstoppable in its narrative, the novel echoed around my heart like sweet poetry and made me fall hard for the words between its covers. Carrying forth with the descendants of Xavier and Elijah from his first beloved book, Three Day Road, the novel’s protagonists, Will Bird, son of the former and his niece Annie, take turns spilling out their stories in interchanging chapters. The novels reads as though they’re telling one another all of their secrets. Bits and pieces that need to be put together for either to move on with their lives. Annie, back from the south, back from searching for her lost sister, Suzanne, tends to her uncle who lies in a coma in a hospital in Moose Factory.

Back and forth from past to present, the pair unravel the reasons why and how they’ve ended up where they are — Annie’s found trouble of her own in Toronto, in NYC, in Montreal; Will’s been out in the bush for reasons that I won’t spoil. Their lives, far more intertwined and complex than simply saying they share the same blood, spill over into one another’s over and over again as the story pushes forth, as reliable as the weather, as the seasons.

The ending, oh, the ending, moments ago, me, crying like a baby wrapped up in my bedcovers, wishing for my headache to go away but silently thanking it for giving me a whole day to experience this book. I’m gushing, I know, but phooey to those who say that Through Black Spruce isn’t as good as Three Day Road. I remember reading the latter when I first started working in publishing, a tattered ARC broken almost entirely apart in the 24 hours it was in my possession, a ridiculously long transit ride sped by in what felt like minutes as the narrative simply swept me away. The same happened here. And while the first book, if I had to boil it down to just one theme (and how dare I, really), I’d say it was about change — both on an epic as well as a more personal level. This novel, while continuing that general idea, is also about loss, both on a grand scale, in dealing with an entire culture, and on a personal one, in dealing with the acute pain that comes with the absence of loved ones.

One of the best books I’ve read this year, hands down. I just adored it, all of it, flaws and all.

READING CHALLENGES: I could count this novel towards my Canadian Reading Challenge but as Joseph Boyden’s not a lady…I’m afraid it’ll just have to be another in the list of books I’ve read this year.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Here’s my stack: “A Christmas Carol, The Other Queen, The Given Day, The Plot Against America, Lush Life, Through Black Spruce, The Origin of Species, The Boys in the Trees, The Double, The Almost Moon and Middlemarch.” I’m not sure where I’ll go next, but it’ll be something from the above list.

#69 – A Christmas Carol

Let me first put it out there that I am not necessarily what you would call a fan of Dickens. In fact, all of the Victorians have been giving me trouble ever since second year university. And then I made the colossal mistake of trying them again in grad school. I still haven’t recovered. They are impossible to avoid, these Victorians. Their influence is everywhere. There are a pile of them on the 1001 Books list. They are classics. What can you do except keep trying? Right?

So, “A Christmas Carol.” I know it’s not technically a full book but it’s on the 1001 Books list and I’m trying to at least part-way finish that challenge before the end of the year. The story is so well known, so ingrained in our society, that it’s impossible not to have seen at least one version of it in your lifetime (at least that’s what I think). Of my favourites, I remember watching a very old movie (made in the 50s, I think?) when I was a teenager and adoring it. It’s hard to read the original when it’s been interpreted so many different ways over the years. No matter that you haven’t actually read the story before, you know it so well that when each of the Ghosts show up, I wasn’t really surprised. Except, it’s also interesting to note the differences between the original, classic story and how it’s been interpreted over the years.

The parts that I enjoyed the most were obviously the bits and pieces attributed to the time — the colloquial sayings, the references that firmly represent the day and age that Dickens was writing from. In particular, I thought it interesting how Scrooge kept referring to the prevalent fears of overpopulation. All in all, it’s a delightful, entertaining, lovely story. And not bad at all to be at 158 classics read from the 1001 Books list. Now only 12 more to go until I reach my goals for this year. Ha! As if I’m even going to get there.

TRH Movie – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

We had screening passes for this book through work and bundled ourselves up on a cold Sunday morning last weekend to make the 10 AM showing. Based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story of the same name (we’re publishing a gorgeous, illustrated edition), the film stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. The movie opens on the eve of Hurricane Katrina where a daughter (Julia Ormond) sits beside her dying mother (Cate Blanchett) as the storm rages outside the hospital. This I would like to call the Titanic portion of the film — the cliched way of telling a story by which an old, dying person brings out a long lost diary and begins to tell a fantastic tale. (Note this isn’t always bad, let’s use Big Fish as an example; I loved that movie). The film then moves back and forth from the life of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt) to the hospital as Daisy (Blanchett) dies. Thus begins what we were calling the Forrest Gump portion of the film, complete with many a token sayings that I will not repeat.

Being born with a strange and rare disease that causes him to age backwards, Benjamin Button’s mother, who dies in childbirth, makes his father promise to always look after him. Of course, it’s a film, so he promptly takes off with his oddly misshapen barely born baby and dumps him on the steps of a home for the elderly in New Orleans. Picked up by the woman who runs the home, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) and raised as her own, Benjamin survives despite all of the odds. Here let’s insert The Lord of the Rings-style special effects, as from a young child it’s glaringly apparent that Benjamin is played by Brad Pitt, who portrays the character at many stages over the course of his life.

When Benjamin meets the young Daisy, his life changes and the two of them form an awkward, if not lovingly, friendship. He grows younger. She grows older. He leaves home to sail the seas. She leaves home to become a dancer. Things happen. They come back together. Other things happen. They meet again. More happens. Well, you get the picture. It’s not that the movie isn’t beautifully shot or wonderfully acted (it is; the performances are particularly good). It’s not that the movie isn’t about a half-hour too long (it is). It’s not that the special effects aren’t amazing (they are). It’s just that the whole film felt like something I’d seen before, something that has been done before. A giant studio picture meant to get people to enjoy the spectacle (and sweet humour) of the amazing story. Like we both said when we left the theatre, it’s not that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a bad film — it’s just not very original and I think that’s what we were both hoping for, a touch of originality.

#67 – Choke

What a crazy week. I actually finished reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke on Monday and haven’t had a single spare moment to post about it book until now. The novel opens with a very young Victor Mancini on the run in a stolen school bus with his mother who suffers from mental instability. Every now and again she “saves” Victor from his foster homes, from his temporary shelters, and takes him on the run with her until the cops catch up to them.

Along the way “The Mommy” might be conducting a mail scam (not to benefit herself, of course) to encourage havoc (people receiving coupons for a free dinner in the mail — hundreds of them to besiege one poor restaurant where she may have worked). Interspersed with the stories of his childhood, parts of Victor’s story take place in the few weeks leading up to his mother’s death. Now in a long-term care facility, Ida Mancini is wasting away, refusing to eat, and has no idea who Victor is when he comes to visit. So Victor pretends to be people from their past, and branches out to pretending to be many other people for the many other patients in the hospital.

In order to afford the stay, Victor works at a theme park (of sorts) that depicts early Colonial America. His best friend, Denny, works with him, and the two are both fighting their own sexual addictions. He also fakes choking at various restaurants around town, picking up cheques along the way from the various people who have “saved” his life. The closer his mother gets to death, and the more he’s propositioned by the very strange and somewhat awkward Dr. Paige Marshall, the more Victor examines his own life, the more he falls into patterns of bad, almost destructive behaviour.

On more than one occasion, this book, which is included in the 1001 Books list, felt so much like Fight Club (thematically) that I wondered how close they were published to one another. The voices, the characters, even the predilection towards mining support groups, felt tired, but maybe because we’ve spent years with Palahniuk’s characters being enmeshed in the the pop culture ether that I didn’t find this novel particularly original. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy it overall, more that I just felt that in a way he was continuing with many of the same themes and same type of character that he wrote in his 1996 book.

The cover for my trade paperback is quite amazing though, the human anatomy stripped away from the skin, maybe metaphorical, even a little bit literal as Victor attended medical school before his life started to fall apart. And I didn’t dislike the book, it’s easy to read, flows well, has great characterization and the observations of Victor are quite poignant at times: “You don’t see fish agonized by mood swings. Sponges never have a bad day.” But I did feel it suffered maybe a little from the cult of Palahniuk, but that’s just me — I do have to admit that I’m not necessarily his target audience.

READING CHALLENGES: It’s on the 1001 Books list, so it’s one of my challenge books for the year. As you can probably tell, I’m reading like a maniac to try and at least finish the ones that I’ve picked for this year (or others I’ll substitute).

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I finished a book for work (#68 Wings) that I can’t blog about because it’s months away from publication, and have a book stack for the rest of the year that contains: A Christmas Carol, The Other Queen, The Given Day, The Plot Against America, Lush Life, Through Black Spruce, The Origin of Species, The Boys in the Trees, The Double, The Almost Moon and Middlemarch. Fingers crossed, eh? And if I add all of the Harlequins to my reading tally for the year, I’d probably be up around 80 (but I’m going to keep those separate).

The Better You Read — The Better You Get Challenge

I know I preach a lot about “green” and all that jazz. Collecting books that I never read certainly isn’t the “greenest” way I could be living, especially if many of those books have socio- and/or environmental causes behind them. So here are the 10 titles I’ll try to read this year:

1. What Should I Do With My Life by Po Bronson
2. Living Like Ed by Ed Begley Jr.
3. Gorgeously Green by Sophie Uliano
4. Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel
5. Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe
6. The 100-Mile Diet by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
7. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
8. Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs
9. The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner
10. When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate

11. The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
12. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
13. The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
14. The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

The Off The Shelf Challenge – 2009

The third challenge for 2009 will be styled after Eminem, and I’m “cleaning out my closets.” I’m getting these books read and off my shelves. The list could be endless, but I’m starting here:

1. Serena by Ron Rash: Serena is a “must read” by Salon and it was a huge in-house fav at work too.
2. A Mercy by Toni Morrison
3. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski: The latest Oprah pick.
4. Cockroach by Rawi Hage: Giller short-listed, IMPAC-award winning author.
5. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai: The Booker winner for 2006.
6. Beowulf by Seamus Heaney
7. Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley
8. Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier
9. Naked by David Sedaris
10. Affinity by Sarah Waters
11. Blue Angel by Francine Prose: Recommended by a friend. I adored Goldengrove.
12. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
13. Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden: Another recommendation
14. The Wig My Father Wore by Anne Enright: Found a great secondhand copy at The Strand in NYC; loved The Gathering
15. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
16. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
17. The Retreat by David Bergen
18. Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwartz
19. Lush Life by Richard Pride
20. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
21. Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt

1001 Books Challenge – 2009 – Whenever

After hours of cleaning off the shelves and organizing the books from various different places in the house, here are the 1001 Books titles that we have ready to be read. I highly doubt that I’ll get through 60+ of them in one calendar year, but we can always hope. They’re in book order:

1. Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
2. Candide by Voltaire
3. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Lawrence Sterne
4. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (Sony Reader)
5. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (Sony Reader)
6. Emma by Jane Austen
7. Ormond by Maria Edgeworth (Sony Reader)
8. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (Sony Reader)
9. The Nose by Nikolay Gogol
10. The Fall of the House of Usher (Sony Reader)
11. Dead Souls by Nikolay Gogol (Sony Reader)
12. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
13. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
14. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
16. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
17. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
18. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
19. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
20. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (Sony Reader)
21. Dracula by Bram Stoker
22. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
23. Howard’s End by E.M. Forster
24. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. The Trial by Franz Kafka
27. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
28. Independent People by Halldor Laxness
29. The Hamlet by William Faulkner
30. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
31. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
32. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
33. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
34. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
35. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
36. Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
37. The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
38. Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
39. In a Free State by V.S. Naipaul
40. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
41. A Question of Power by Bessie Head
42. Grimus by Salman Rushdie
43. Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
44. In the Heart of the Country by J.M. Coetzee
45. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
46. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
47. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
48. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
49. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
50. The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
51. Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud
52. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
53. Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
54. The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
55. Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
56. Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
57. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
58. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
59. Ignorance by Milan Kundera
60. Schooling by Heather McGowan
61. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
62. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
63. Islands by Dan Sleigh
64. Drop City by T.C. Boyle
65. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
66. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
67. Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho
68. Under the Skin by Michel Faber

69. Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
70. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson

Around the World in 52 Books – 2009

So, here are some of the titles to work towards another year of reading around the world. As I barely made it through 13 titles in an ENTIRE year last year, I’m starting off with these 20 and will add as I go along the way:

1. The Successor, Ismail Kadare, Albania
2. The Swallows of Kabul, Yasmina Khadra, Algeria
3. The Witch of Portobello, Paulo Coelho, Brazil
4. Soul Mountain, Gao Xingjian, China
5. Tales from the Town of Widows, James Canon, Columbia
6. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, Dominican Republic
7. Sugar Street, Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt
8. The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai, India
9. Let It Be Morning, Sayed Kashua, Isreal
10. From Harvey River, Lorna Goodison, Jamaica
11. In the Country of Men, Hisham Matar, Libya
12. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, Pakistan
13. Links, Naruddin Farah, Somolia
14. The Quarry, Damon Galgut, South Africa
15. The Speed of Light, Javier Cercas, Spain
16. In a Free State, V.S. Naipul, Trinidad
17. Snow or My Name is Red, Orham Pamuk, Turkey
18. Babylon Rolling, Amanda Boyden, United States

Additions to the list because I don’t feel like alphabetizing before dinner:

19. A Hard Witching, Jacqueline Baker, Canada.
20. Got You Back, Jane Fallon, England. Or Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Atill, England. Or Little Black Book of Stories, A.S. Byatt, England.
21. Ignorance, Milan Kundera, Czech Republic.
22. The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende, Chile.*
*Technically, Allende was born in Peru, and so if I was sticking to my own self-imposed regulations around the challenge, I’d be crossing off that country instead. But the blurb in the back of the book specifically calls her a “Chilean” novelist and I’m not about to argue.
23. Under the Skin, Michel Faber, The Netherlands
24. Bonjour Tristesse, Francoise Sagan, France

25. Brooklyn, Colm Toibin, Ireland