Oprah Schmoprah

I have to admit that I was quite sad when my online book club decided to evolve. I had really enjoyed the discussions I had with the group about the few books I was able to read (I joined late), and found them to be smart, wordy in all the right ways, and a fabulous bunch of readers. Having been stung by the whole book club concept in a previous life, I was quite happy to find a group of people who actually talked about the books, and we even had some author participation for a number of titles, which is always a thrill.

Annnnnywaaay. The group has evolved now into something pretty special: Oprah Schmoprah, the blog. And I just wrote my first post. Hopefully, many more are to come.

Rhymenoceros & Hippy-crites

So, last night we (the RRHB and I) went over to have dinner with Scarbie and her lovely hubbie, as she calls him, the Dog. Dinner was delish, of course, but we were talking about The Flight of the Conchords, which has been cracking me up and is now one of my favourite summer shows (the others, in no particular order, are So You Think You Can Dance, Big Love, and Entourage).

The episode we watched the other night included Bret and Jerome chillin’ and illin’ with their hip-hop monikers, “Rhymenocerous” and “Hiphopopotamus.” I can’t even say how much this cracked me up, but as a girl whose favourite joke is “What’s brown and sticky. A stick,” it obviously doesn’t take much.

And then later on in the evening, the Dog referred to himself as a ‘hippy-crite’ — one who knows what they’re doing to the environment and feels bad about it almost instantly, but still goes ahead and does it anyway. And again, we cracked up. So if that’s not a contender for the Urban Dictionary, I don’t know what is. They we got into a heated discussion about carbon credits, because I’ll often make the argument that yes, I did get my hair dyed, but then I donated x number of dollars to David Suzuki to make up for it. It’s all about balance. In my mind anyway. But that’s besides the point: I’m guessing I’m a self-defined hippy-crite too, doing my very best but still driving my car to the cottage and buying things on the internet.

What’s the point of this post? Oh, the humour, of course! I totally think that the Rhymenocerous should rap about being a hippy-crite. How awesome would that be? And if you haven’t seen it already, check it here:

The Bat And #48 – Bec

So I’m all about finding themes in my life. I don’t know why, but my mind just sort of wanders all over these places and looks for connections. Now, I mentioned that I’ve been reading Darren Shan, a children’s horror author who has written a deliciously scary series of books under the moniker of the “The Demonata.” (It gives me shivers just to type that). I read another one night while waiting for my aunt to get back to the cottage (and hanging out with the dogs) that was totally addictive. Like a sugar rush, it makes you totally high and buggy, and then you come crashing down once you’ve turned the last page.

The story of a young priestess in the time where Celts and Picts and all kinds of other tribes ruled the land, Bec, the self-titled character of the novel, sets off on a challenge to a) battle the demons who have taken over, well, everything and b) find herself by finding her true tribe (family). She comes into contact with a much earlier version of Lord Loss, the same demon who tormented Grubbs in the first book in the series. Scar-ee.

Two days earlier we were tormented by a slightly smaller but no less scarier version of our own Lord Loss. Granted, more Silverwing than Shan, I swear to the gods that I had never been so scared in my entire life.

Let’s set the scene: I’m sort of a little drunk after having maybe a half-pint too many Strongbow. I happily wind the way down the dark road back up to my grandmother’s cottage. I’m thinking about writing and family and fun stuff and playing cards and all kinds of other delightful things. I’m relaxed. I’m happy.

Snuggled all up in bed after reading for a bit, I’ve got my earplugs in and I’ve drifted off dreaming of who knows what but it probably includes Ethan Hawke.

I hear, “Deanna! Deanna!” as my cousin Cam comes back to the cottage with his lovely lady Krista. “I don’t mean to scare you but there’s a bat in the cottage.”

Keep in mind we’re all tired at this point and kind of delirious.

I scramble out of bed and head into the main room, which was a good thing because the bat was IN MY BEDROOM.

Neither Krista nor myself are feeling particularly brave at this point, so Cam whips up this awesome contraption using a couple of coat hangers, a garbage bag, a broom stick and some tuck tape. Now that sh*t is strong.

And he proceeds to chase the bat from one room to the next as it swoops and swerves its way into every single crevice it can trying to elude Cam’s capture. Until it lands ON THE WINDOW IN MY BEDROOM where we finally trap it between the screen and the glass.

Okay, when a bat swoops at your head it’s scary. Because it gets so close that you can actually HEAR IT FLAP.

After we captured it, we all felt horrible, a) for screaming like maniacs and b) for scaring the wits off the little guy. We ended up cutting the screen so he could escape in the night, which he did, thankfully. But that creates yet another job for my RRHB to do up north because he’ll be the one to replace the screen, which is not fun, I know, but there was a BAT in the cottage.

And for your lovely edification, here’s a picture. See…SCAR-EEEEEE.

#48 – The Double Bind

Wow, this book threw me for a loop. There are so many reasons why I appreciate Chris Bojhalian’s writing, in a way, he’s like an old-school moralist, not that he preaches, but that each of his novels have a way of showing you, like a good philosophy teacher, the limitations of your own thought. The Double Bind is no different, and with every novel, Bojhalian’s skill as a novelist seems to improve, and this book is on par with my very favourite of his, The Buffalo Soldier.

The novel’s protagonist, Laurel Estabrook, is attacked while riding her bike down an abandoned logging road in Vermont. As she copes with the tragedy, we’re pulled further and further into her world. We see her become obsessed with the photographs of Bobbie Crocker, a homeless man she helped at the shelter where she works, as she uncovers a world of secrets around the story of Jay Gastby.

I don’t want to say much more than that because to give anything away with this novel would be to ruin it, for like the Lippman, the ending really makes the entire reading experience. Let me just suffice it to say that not everything is as it seems, and that’s the true quality in the writing of this novel, Bojhalian’s skill in exploring or, rather, plunging the depths of the young woman’s despair over her attack.

See how it was hard to get any work done this week? The reading was just so good.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: It’s quite fitting, again, that I read a lot of this book on the old-school psychiatrist’s chair we have in the cottage. The book is sitting upon it on an old plaid blanket that I adore—even though it’s the itchy kind. And can I say that the cover of my ARC is way, way better than the cover of the finished book? It’s so blah, that other cover, compared to the vibrant images on the advance reader.

#47 – What The Dead Know

Before picking this book as one of our Facebook The Reading Group titles this month, I had seen Kate’s capsule review of Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know and immediately put it on my TBR pile.

Let me say it this way: I could not put this book down.

Here are all the things that I did not do because I was engrossed in the story of two sisters who disappear one sunny pre-Easter afternoon from a mall in Baltimore (yes, where The Wire is set, fab):

1. Entertain my nephew. I rocked him so he’d go to sleep and then let him sleep on me for almost a half hour after he sort of semi-woke up so that I could keep reading. I didn’t put the book down until he made it absolutely clear he was having no more of it.

2. Swim in the lake. It was one of the few beautiful days and I put off going swimming although it was a million degrees out because I was obsessed with finding out if the woman who has an accident and leaves the scene of the crime actually was one of the missing Bethany sisters.

3. Eat. Seriously, I skipped lunch and was absolutely starving until I had finished.

4. Talk. Really, I cloistered myself in my grandmother’s cottage while my cousins and all the rest of my wonderful family were doing all kinds of fun outdoorsy-type stuff.

5. Finish the seventeen other books I had started. All of my other reading, including two or three books that were half-done took a back seat until I had read the very last word.

And I’m telling you, it’s a hell of a good last few words. Do you need any more then that? I don’t think so.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The very chair where I sat for four hours on Tuesday reading this deliciously addictive little novel.

#46 – Love In The Time Of Cholera

I find it perfectly fitting to be writing about Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, Love in the Time of Cholera, while I have a fever. As there’s nothing new that I can possibly add to the world’s discussion of this text other then to say that I came to it for many reasons: the first of which would have to be its inclusion on the 1001 Books list; the second, because I’d read One Hundred Years of Solitude after finishing my undergrad at Queen’s and fell hard for it; and I read Ben McNally’s Valentine’s Day column over at Booklounge.ca where he said it was the ultimate book to read for that holiday. See, lots of good reasons to pick up this book.

Regardless, could there be a more expressive book about love ever written? Probably, but this book took my breath away more times then I could possibly count. Full of every single type of love story, from an unrequited affair that lasts the length of the book itself to the hills and valleys of a long, successful marriage, from the physical to the spiritual, from the epistolary to the serenade, it’s impossible not to appreciate love in all its forms after finishing this novel. The sentences are exquisite, complex and meandering, almost to the point of getting lost down the cobblestones of the author’s mind, until he brings you back to the apex, which lands in exactly the right place.

The Columbian port in of call for my Around the World in 52 Books, I can’t think of another novel I could savour like this, as if it’s a sweet cheese or a fine glass of wine. I was all rosy for love after finishing this book up north, and ended up watching Before Sunset for the fourth or fifth time. My own story ended up with a lot of long sentences as I thought about the main love affair that forms the center section. Of course, I ended up editing half of them down over the last few days I was there because they didn’t make much sense, as I was all drunk on Columbia, the Caribbean, the food, the smell of almonds, and the like. Ahem.

In the end, the craziest analogy I can come up with that describes the reading experience of Love in the Time of Cholera is this: a few years back when I was still working at the evil empire, I was having a discussion with my coworker Lynne, where we were imagining what life would be like if we were cats. Go with me here. It’s okay as it’s not as kooky as it sounds. Beyond the pale ass licking jokes we got from the cheap seats, we were thinking of how cats don’t really know time as we do, how their days are measured by their senses, by things that they smell, by places they visit. In a way, Márquez’s novel is set out by the senses as well, but it’s also defined by one emotion, in a way, it’s all measured out by love. Love sets the pace and brings the action. Love defines the characters and their motivation. Just like a cat smelling its way through the day, this novel imagines an entire book not set about by the plain, banal chronology of the weeks, days, months, years in a life, but by love itself, as real as the grass, the trees, and yes, the ass, that my cat uses to define her day. In a way, it’s the essence of everything. And aren’t we just dumb enough never to realize it.

And there. I’ve jumped the shark now by mentioning my cat in my blog. Sigh.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Of course I finished this novel while in bed. If you look closely enough you can see the tip of my grandfather’s paint-by-numbers on the wall.

#45 – Nowhere Man

Aleksandar Hemon‘s Nowhere Man took me many weeks to finish, but like so many of the extra-ordinarily literary books on my Around the World in 52 Countries challenge that sit on the 1001 Books list, I’ve come to expect that I will work my way through these books like one would an art gallery in a foreign city: slowly, methodically, and with great patience.

The story of Josef Pronek as told from the point of view of many different narrators, Nowhere Man is a captivating novel that highlights the uncanny ability of the author to challenge conventional storytelling techniques while creating a character who ultimately glues the book together. Hemon, originally from Sarajevo, perhaps perfectly distills the idea of a splintered society, what war does to a person, to a people, in this novel. At times he merges the stereotypical (The Beatles as revolutionary charge and right of passage) with the nonsensical (Pronek’s time as a canvasser for Greenpeace), but always manages to show how each narrator maintains that little bit of love and affection for Josef without losing the reader.

All in all, it’s a powerful, moving book that I would recommend if only for it’s wonderful use of form. In a way, it’s a bit like learning a new language each time we switch narrators and see yet another sliver of Pronek’s life. The syntax might be different in each section, but the end goals, communication, compassion, understanding, englightenment, remain exactly the same.

It’s interesting too, how my reading life and my movie life have been tracing common themes of one another really without any conscious effort on my part. Recently, the RRHB and I watched The Secret Life of Words. Sarah Polley plays a young nurse also stunted by the war in Bosnia. The two characters intersect so nicely: Josef finally releases so much of the tension built up through the entire novel by falling in love with an American girl and, in a way, the very same thing happens to Hanna, Polley’s character (she falls in love with an injured oil rig worker). It was a good experience reading and watching the two works somewhat in tandem, to get a male and female perspective, in art form, of the conflict.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I finished the book one very foggy, very cool morning on the sun deck while my cousins slept in the cottage and I wasn’t quite ready to start writing.

Back On The Concrete

As it stands, I have returned from the cottage fully rested only to now have developed a cold. Bah. The weather was crap as viewed from the picture of the rain on the window from the sliding glass door in the cottage, but it didn’t matter because my family was there, and I had a grand old time, as always.

I’m in the process of organizing my pictures and putting to mind blog posts for the five books I read, plus I wanted to chat a bit about all the work I got done on my super-duper long story now (it’s up to almost 56k words), and treat you all to an entertaining story about a bat.

Yes, you heard me: a real, live bat.

(Shiver).

Holiday!

Tomorrow we’re off to the cottage for an entire week. One week of relaxing, of writing, of listening to music, of watching the lake, of swimming in the lake, of reading books, of playing cards, of drinking a beer or two, of seeing my family, of celebrating my family, all of the things that deserve high kicks and sh*t eating grins.

And corn. Lots of corn. What’s the cottage without corn on the cob and cards? Seriously?

Not to worry. When I get back there will be plenty of updates. I’ll have finally finished two of my challenge books Nowhere Man and Love in the Time of Cholera, plus hopefully quite a few more.

Have a great week all!