tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22044617338589570932024-03-05T00:53:35.643-08:00Bibliofilly Musings of a Distracted BibliophileAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.comBlogger89125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-9949163185813310302016-02-03T14:12:00.000-08:002016-02-03T14:12:19.038-08:00Kent Haruf - Our Souls at Night<br />
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<span style="font-family: "book antiqua"; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">This little book is absolutely
charming. It didn’t take long to sink into the austerity of the prose, which is
entirely unsentimental even as it deals with themes of love and passion. Haruf’s
writing is so spare as to get out of the way entirely of the story, which
unfolds rapidly, largely through dialogue, and ends all too soon.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "book antiqua"; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">One day, in a small Colorado
town, 70 year-old Addie Moore visits widower Louis Waters and asks whether he
will come over sometimes and sleep next to her in the night, when she is the
most lonely. Her husband, too, has died, and her adult son has moved away.
Louis, though surprised by the offer, is in equal parts intrigued. A day later
he packs his toothbrush and pyjamas in a paper bag and walks along the lane
behind their houses to her home, where they have a drink of wine and then go up
to bed to lie together and talk.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "book antiqua"; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">A romance blossoms, though
without sex it is not what the curious townspeople believe it to be. Addie and
Louis gradually tell each other the stories of their lives, and we learn about
them through their late-night conversations. Addie’s daughter died when she was
still young. Louis never properly loved his wife the way she would have liked. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "book antiqua"; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Midway through the book Addie’s
young grandson comes to stay after his parents separate. The closeness he forms
with both Addie and Louis is as moving as the relationship between the two
seniors, and the outings they have together, to go camping, or to an
agricultural fair, are memorable and beautifully told. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "book antiqua"; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Of course all good things must
come to an end. Whilst I was at times surprised by some of Haruf’s narrative
choices, such as his tendency to detail every ingredient in a dish Addie
prepares or every item in a picnic basket, such mundanity, combined with the
simple writing style, brings an element of unpretentious realness to the story.
I was touched by many moments in the book and it is one I may well go back and
re-read. I will also note that parts of the narrative made me very angry – but to
go into that in more detail would be to open up this review to spoilers.</span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "book antiqua"; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">What I loved:</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "book antiqua"; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Moments of great joy peppered
throughout, described without mawkishness, that lept off the page like images:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "book antiqua"; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">“The boy was asleep. The dog
lifted her head from the pillow, looked up at Louis and lay back again. In
Addie’s bedroom Louis put his hand out the window and caught the rain dripping
off the eaves and came to bed and touched his wet hand on Addie’s soft cheek.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "book antiqua"; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">“After dark one night they
walked over to the grade school playground and Louis pushed Addie on the big
chain swing and she rode up and back in the cool fresh night air of late summer
with the hem of her skirt fluttering over her knees.”</span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-37836991040127975642016-01-26T06:39:00.002-08:002016-01-26T06:39:52.078-08:00Elena Ferrante - My Brilliant Friend
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">I finished reading Elena
Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend late last night and had to restrain myself from
immediately starting the second book in her Neapolitan series. There is a vivid
immediacy to Ferrante’s writing that made me feel I was IN Naples with the
characters. I would look up occasionally, disoriented, from reading, surprised
to find that I was still in my Canadian mid-winter living room and not in the
hot, dingy streets of Italy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">The book centers around Elena
and Lila, two small girls living in the same poor neighbourhood of Naples, who become
friends after Lila throws Elena’s beloved doll into the dark basement of her
apartment building. When Elena retaliates by throwing Lila’s doll, too, between
the iron bars of the basement window, their mutual shock at the fate that has
befallen their most precious belongings forms the beginning of a silent pact
between them. Elena’s words as they stare at each other in realization –
“Whatever you do, I do” – characterize the bond they will have for years to
come. Together, they attempt an (unsuccessful) rescue mission into the basement
to recover the dolls, and this marks the start of an unspoken competition, in which they push each other every day to confront a fear more awful
than the last. The determined, fiery nature of this childhood friendship
persists as they grow into teenagers, influencing them first to read more
books, get better marks at school, learn more, then to stand up to the boys and
men of their neighbourhood, and finally to manipulate their way out of the
futures expected of them. In short: the friendship between them protects them
both from the very real dangers of the world in which they exist, and becomes
the most important factor in both of their lives throughout their formative years.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">The depiction of the girls
growing up, their adventures and interactions with their neighbours, provides
the reader with an intimate portrait of Naples during the 1950s. The families
we come to know are those of the fruit and vegetable seller, the carpenter, the
grocer, the shoemaker. These are the real people who make up a community, and
through them we come to understand the rules and realities that govern them. The
neighbourhood is rough and violent, but the people who live there share an
identity that manifests itself in a fierce protection of one another – by
parent of child, by brother of sister, by friend against outsider. This becomes
particularly clear on the occasions when the girls venture outside of the
neighbourhood, accompanied by the group of boys they know well from home, who
react fiercely – and en masse - to anyone who looks at the girls too directly,
who appears too forward, or whose appearance offends the nature of the
neighbourhood clans. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">It is apparent from the
beginning of the novel that Lila is quite brilliant. Through Elena’s narration
we see a whippet-like girl whose stubborn will refuses to bend, who is able to
best her classmates, both male and female, in competitive tests, whose desire
to learn causes her to borrow library books in the names of everyone in her
family, who can see beyond the circumstances of her neighbourhood to understand
there is more to life, and who is able to pull almost out of thin air the circumstances
she navigates and manipulates to ensure she and her family are safe and
ultimately drawn into a better sphere of living. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">But we see all of this through
the eyes of Elena, a narrator whose reliability we have some cause to question.
Lila, towards the end of the book, calls Elena her brilliant friend, and we
understand that of course she IS brilliant, perhaps the more so of the two,
that the unbalanced picture we have of Lila the Great comes to us through the
insecure, adolescent lens of a teenaged girl. We also understand that, though
Elena does not yet see this, her own form of brilliance is likely to lead to a
future far brighter than the one Lila has secured for herself by the end of the
book. And that Lila herself, her best friend, has given her, through years of
pushing her, the tools to reach for that future.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">I became thoroughly attached
to these characters whilst reading and I can’t wait to continue the saga. I am,
however, imposing a break on myself, I have other books on my TBR list, and I
don’t want to swallow these up too quickly. Though I am certain I will come
back and re-read these books one day, I want to treasure each volume in the
series, like toffee to be sucked instead of bitten, in order to ensure the
pleasure endures a little longer.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What I loved:</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"></span><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">- Ferrante writes so brilliantly, so vividly – and kudos too, to the work
of the translator, Ann Goldstein, because it reads wonderfully well in English
– and there are all kinds of meta passages in the book during which Elena
describes Lila’s writing, and then her own work to imitate that writing, to
improve her writing, that I felt could easily have been passages on Ferrante’s
own writing. I loved that this is a book about writing and books as well as
about Italian traditions and culture:</span></span></div>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">“<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-weight: bold; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Lila was able to speak through writing</span></b>; unlike me when I
wrote, unlike Sarrator in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I
had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well
constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school,
but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice
of the written word."</span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">And later:</span><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Professor Gerace
and Professor Galiani, who were part of the committee, praised my Italian paper
to the skies. Gerace in particular said that my exposition was further
improved. He wanted to read a passage to the rest of the committee. And only as
I listened did I realize what I had tried to do in those months whenever I had
to write: to free myself from my artificial tones, from sentences that were too
rigid; to try for a fluid and engaging style like Lila’s in the Ischia letter.
When I heard my words in the teacher’s voice, with Professor Galiani listening
and silently nodding agreement, I realized that I had succeeded. Naturally it
wasn’t Lila’s way of writing, it was mine. And it seemed to my teachers
something truly out of the ordinary.”</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">- </span><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">The tortuous road through female adolescence is described so perfectly
that it took me right back there. The first plump growth of breasts, the acne
blooming across the face, the first fleeting feelings of attractiveness and
then the crippling insecurity of weight fluctuations and pimples, the pain of
watching boys find another girl attractive and not you, the heart-palpitating
excitement of a first crush. </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">- </span><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Ferrante brilliantly conveys the sense of the neighbourhood, of how
things are done, how they have been done for eons, and then the creaking,
gradual changes that are taking place largely at the hands of Lila, and which
are so unfamiliar that even Elena, though she recognizes the change, and sees
it happening, finds it hard to grasp.</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">“They were behaving
in a way that wasn’t familiar even in the poems that I studied in school, in
the novels I read. I was puzzled. They weren’t reacting to the insults, even to
that truly intolerable insult that the Solaras were making. They displayed
kindness and politeness toward everyone, as if they were John and Jacqueline
Kennedy visiting a neighbourhood of indigents. When they were out walking
together, and he put an arm around her shoulders, it seemed that none of the
old rules were valid for them: they laughed, they joked, they embraced, they kissed
each other on the lips… <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-weight: bold; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Did she want to drag us
out of ourselves, tear off the old skin and put on a new one, suitable for what
she was inventing</span></b>?”</span><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> </span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">- </span><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">The character of Lila is just astonishing. I want to read more about
her. I want to know what happens to her. The beginning of the book is a teaser
for what must happen later in the series: Lila, adult Lila, has gone missing.
And Elena writes that she knows Lila well enough to know that what she wanted
most of all was to erase all trace of herself off the earth. The rest of this
book is a flashback to their early friendship. And I am left wanting to know
what happens to get her back to where we started, what happens between the
girls later in life. In other words, this series is at once detailed in its descriptions
of the minutiae of quotidian life in 1950s Naples, and sweeping in its
generational and compulsive story-telling. Quite magnificent.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-19777796836533154002016-01-20T07:53:00.000-08:002016-01-20T07:53:08.623-08:00Purity - Jonathan Franzen<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span id="freeTextreview1298888176">I was primed to love this book, had been eagerly awaiting it since news of its September 2015 release date hit me in late 2014. I am a Franzen Fan. And as another reviewer has said, somewhere in here is a Great Novel. Franzen's voice is often laudable, parts of the story quite fabulous. But in a book about secret-keeping and whistleblowers and the digital revolution, I was left wondering exactly what he intended to say about those things. Other than that, sometimes, the whole truth should not be told. But I can't tell: is he in favour of projects like Wikileaks? Is he saying marriage profits more from truth telling or from secret-keeping? And even more frustrating, several major plot threads were opened up and then fizzled out with no real conclusion, leaving me unsatisfied and a little confused.</span><br />
<span><br />I saw Franzen interviewed when he was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago. I was about halfway through the novel and still loving it. In response to a question about the genesis of this book he confessed that he really wanted to tell the story of a marriage. Then he thought, maybe there should also be a child. And then he added some other elements that had been percolating in his imagination for a number of years. <br />
<br />This genesis story is so funny to me, because it is precisely the story of the marriage - of Tom and Anabel - that doesn't quite work. Or the depth of analysis about the marriage seems out of place in a book that initially appears to be quite edgy and so much about Snowden / Assange type leaks - sunlight as the best disinfectant and all that. Once the history of Tom and Anabel came into play, the book started to feel like a bit of a hot mess. The character of Anabel is absurdly intense. She is a film-maker with such an extreme perfectionist streak that she has spent her whole life on one unfinished project, won't allow her husband to pursue any creative endeavours that might compete with hers, turns every conversation into an hours-long intellectual argument, and - critically - only permits sexual intercourse during the full moon, because that is the only time she is able to climax. Tom, on the other hand, proves himself to be so besotted by her that he is unable to stand up to her in any circumstance, even years after they have divorced and there are very good reasons for him to despise her. The story of their courtship and marriage reads as interesting, because Franzen is writing it and he is, really, a great writer. But to have this at the core of the novel felt like a betrayal of those readers whose interests he had piqued in the first 300 pages or so, with stories that promised to go somewhere - stories about Berlin during the Soviet era, the Stasi, the fall of the wall, the evolution of transparency groups like Wikileaks. To me, that was the core of this novel, or it should have been. Anabel and Tom are such extremes that no useful truths can be divined from their relationship. It is a case study, no more. Whereas Pip, the millennial, and Andreas, the accidental hero, and Leila, the determined do-gooder journo - these all felt like people who could carry a novel.<br />
<br />I was also far more interested in the Denver Independent and the Sunlight Project than I was in the history of Tom and Anabel, and then I was sorely disappointed when the story lines for each of those aspects of the book went nowhere, in particular. I am not a naive reader. I do not expect every thread to be tied up neatly in a bow. But the beginning of the book led me to believe that the end would come back, in a satisfying way, to Pip's quest for something more, to Andreas's lack of fulfillment, to the uneasy and entirely impure centre of the Sunlight Project, to Tom and Leila. If there was a marriage or relationship anchoring this book I wanted it to be that relationship, the Tom and Leila one. Leila! Smart, complex, likeable Leila. Not the ueber-narcissistic Anabel. Ugh.<br />
<br />Don't get me wrong: I didn't hate this. There is originality here. There is an enjoyable subversiveness to Franzen's description of Andreas as a paranoid criminal fleeing from his past, whose great fame and advertised passion for transparency arises only as a corollary to his secrecy and need to hide. To the notion of an organization called The Sunlight Project growing out of lies and deception. And I was fascinated by Franzen's portrayal of Stasi-era Berlin, which reveal Franzen's own interest in and understanding of Germany. There is violent crime here, and adultery, and underage sex, and a cult-like camp in the jungle. All of this infused with Franzen's easy writing style. Like I said, it could have been a great novel. I just feel like he got lost somewhere along the way, and unfortunately, so did I. </span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-84372500451231561302016-01-18T13:09:00.001-08:002016-01-18T13:09:04.616-08:002015: My Reading Year in Review
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">I read 20 books in 2015, a
paltry number, half of what I read the year before, and fewer than the number
of books I read in each of the years that my babies were born. If I can chalk
this up to anything, it would likely be my job. In February of last year I started
the first full-time job since Iggy arrived that is as mentally challenging and
time-consuming as the work I used to do prior to the baby years. We also moved
house in March. It was a busy year, but in the past that hasn’t stopped me
reading. 2015 was different. I went into a bookstore in late summer last year and for the first
time ever felt sad rather than inspired. I looked longingly at all the books I
wanted to read and bought none of them. Picking one up and holding it in my hands,
I wondered when I would ever have the time to read it. </span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">As the year ticked over, something
changed. I have started 2016 feeling like I have a grasp on my job and a workable
routine going with the kids. My resolutions this year are not set down anywhere
in writing, but they constitute a vague intention to nourish myself better in
the months ahead: intellectually, with books, nutritionally, with food. To take
advantage of this feeling of being a little more on top of things by pushing
myself again to be the best I can be – to work out, to eat well, to stop
drinking mid-week, to write regularly, to keep a neat house, to correspond
better with friends.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Already, I have read one book
this year and am reading two others. More on this later. For now, let me turn a
last time to those books I did manage to read in 2015.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Of the 20 books I read, about
four were chick lit read on holiday purely as a means to relax. One was a non-fiction
business book, a requirement for my bookclub, and a few others were diverting
but not worth dwelling on.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">So, the books <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of note</span></i> I read last year numbered twelve, and they were: </span></span></div>
<ol style="direction: ltr; list-style-type: decimal;">
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper
Lee</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> – a re-read.
One of my favourite books in the world, a sentiment now confirmed as an adult
reader.</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Go Set a Watchman: Harper
Lee</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> – a fascinating
insight into Lee’s writing process and the genesis of one the great American
classic novels.</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Hateship, Friendship,
Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Alice Munro</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> – a wonderful selection of short stories by one
of the very best story-writers, and Canada’s second Nobel Prize winner for
literature.</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">This Book Will Save Your
Life: A. M. Homes</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> –
a cult novel set in L.A., by one of my new favourite authors, in which a
day-trader, Richard Novak, remembers through a series of bizarre events what it
is to be human and connected to others.</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Jeffrey Eugenides:
Middlesex</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> – the sweeping
multi-generational tale of a family’s emigration from Greece to the United
States and the story of the gene that turns narrator Calliope into Cal.</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">A Tale for the Time Being:
Ruth Ozeki</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> – a really
beautiful story about sixteen-year-old Nao in Tokyo, her Buddhist nun aunt, and
Ruth, a Japanese-American novelist living on a remote island in BC. This story
wraps together a message in a bottle, quantum physics, Zen Buddhism, environmental
consciousness, depression, the dot com crash, Proust, prostitution, theories of
time and connectedness, and a little magic realism in a way that is moving
rather than overwhelming or absurd.</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Girl on the Train:
Paula Hawkins</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> – a Hitchockian
thriller by a female writer about a bitter young woman suffering from
alcoholism in the wake of a seriously abusive relationship, and who is trying
to solve a murder no one else realizes has taken place in circumstances where
no one will believe anything she says. </span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Station Eleven: Emily St.
John Mandel</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> – other
than To Kill a Mockingbird, perhaps the best book I read in 2015. This is a
literary post-apocalyptic tale in which the story-telling jumps between
present-day and a time twenty years after 99.9% of humanity has been wiped out
by a pandemic flu. It is the first book in this genre I have read that has left
me feeling uplifted, and it is as much about art and relationships as it is
about a cataclysmic plague and its aftermath.</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">All the Light We Cannot
See: Anthony Doerr</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> –
the other contender for best book of 2015, Doerr won the Pulitzer for this
novel and deservedly so. A beautiful, moving story about a young blind French girl
and a boy in the Hitler Youth during World War II.</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The History of Love: Nicole
Krauss</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> – I have
wanted to read this book for several years, and last year I finally got around to
it but I made a grievous error: I listened to it as an audio book. The History
of Love is an astonishing story about a precocious fourteen-year-old girl
trying to find a new husband for her mother, and an old man who wrote a book
many years earlier inspired by a girl he loved, and the events that connect
these characters. It is made up of many different threads of narrative, and to do
justice to it I will need to read it again, in hard copy.</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Purity: Jonathan Franzen</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> – Franzen’s first book after
Freedom, I was desperate to read this but it fell a little flat. At its best,
this is a novel about freedom of speech and journalistic integrity and a
cult-ish Wikileaks-type project started by an East-German man whose passion for
transparency lies in stark contrast with the secrets that lie at his core.</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-weight: bold; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The Heart Goes Last:
Margaret Atwood</span></b><span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;"> –
Atwood’s latest is a return to form to her earlier writing. Though the book has
Dystopian elements to it, it is unlike the MadAddam series in that the world is
still recognizable as ours and the focus of the book is a relationship between
husband and wife rather than survival of the human race. Peppered with the
sardonic humour and feminist wit that caused me to fall for Atwood’s writing back
when I first started reading her in the early ‘90s, this was an enjoyable romp
of a book.</span></div>
</li>
</ol>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Here's to a 2016 with a broader, more diverse reading list and more mental energy to devote to the act of reading. </span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-46918799887474668352015-05-13T10:51:00.000-07:002015-05-13T10:53:43.166-07:00A. M. Homes - This Book Will Save Your Life<div style="border-image: none;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoHqmhMBS_hyphenhyphenmkm3QhWLITMAkYb2e36t-218568p21FGUVi1oWM8CEtkCHFwd8-nu7Qf9YOPe_nbpMKJQ9_yuu_qAPg757ApWqeUCvYKsO-2BLB_LjVwbFBBnb03lUhbvmeYNLihSlehA/s640/blogger-image-1993382713.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoHqmhMBS_hyphenhyphenmkm3QhWLITMAkYb2e36t-218568p21FGUVi1oWM8CEtkCHFwd8-nu7Qf9YOPe_nbpMKJQ9_yuu_qAPg757ApWqeUCvYKsO-2BLB_LjVwbFBBnb03lUhbvmeYNLihSlehA/s320/blogger-image-1993382713.jpg" width="208"></a>I adored A. M. Homes's book May We Be Forgiven, and so I picked up this one - which has come to be known as a cult classic - with great anticipation. Unfortunately, This Book Will Save Your Life reads a little like the dress rehearsal for May We Be Forgiven, which was published 6 years later. Had I read it first, I might have liked it better. And don't get me wrong - I did enjoy this book, but it doesn't have the finesse of Homes's later work.<br></div>
<br>
<div style="border-image: none;">
Richard Novak is a wealthy trader in Los Angeles, living a life almost entirely independent of other people, until a health scare - unbearable, unlocalized pain - lands him in hospital and wakes him back up to the world. Over the course of the next months, he wrangles his way back into the lives of other people, performing acts of kindness for strangers, reconnecting with family members, and embracing the strangeness of life. Indeed, highly peculiar things happen to him in rather quick succession: a sinkhole forms outside his house and a horse falls into it, the Hollywood actor living above him rescues the horse by helicopter and cooks Richard dinner, he gets hit by a car, is treated by a fake doctor with remarkable insight, goes on silent retreat, saves one woman from a hapless marriage and another from almost certain death, becomes nationally known as "The Good Samaritan", rents a house in Malibu belonging to the mayor, and befriends the White Whale of the writing world, a decrepit fellow who wrote the last Great American Novel and might just be writing the next. In the midst of all this, Richard's abandoned son comes to stay. <br></div><div style="border-image: none;"><br></div>
<div style="border-image: none;">
Interspersed in the bizarre turnings of the plot are moments of great joy, through which Richard remembers again what it is to be human. This is a book of hope and optimism, in spite of the sardonic tone Homes adopts towards the LA landscape and its jaded inhabitants.<br></div><div style="border-image: none;"><br></div>
<div style="border-image: none;">
Honestly, if May We Be Forgiven had not mirrored the plot of this book so exactly - its protagonist is a man who is jolted out of his lackluster life by tragedy, which has the effect of rejuvenating him as he is forced to interact with strangers, cope with bizarre encounters and form a new relationship with his brother's children - I probably would have found it breathtakingly original. It's just that Homes did it better the second time around (as one would hope), and that's the book I happened to read first. <br></div>
<br>
<div style="border-image: none;">
<strong>Overall assessment</strong>: 3.8 out of 5 stars. My bookclub has introduced me to the use of the full spectrum of decimal points in ratings, and I like the subtlety it allows me in rating a book. </div><div style="border-image: none;"><br></div>
<div style="border-image: none;">
<strong>Memorable moments</strong>: Anhil, the owner of the doughnut shop Richard ends up in on the night he "wakes up", is perfectly positioned as the outsider in America, a Hindu immigrant whose vision of the USA comes largely from movies and misunderstandings. Much of the insight and humour in the novel stems from Anhil's left-of-centre comments.<br></div>
<div style="border-image: none;">
<br></div>
<div style="border-image: none;">
"<em>Americans try on the spiritual life of others like they don't have any of their own</em>."<br></div><div style="border-image: none;"><br></div>
<div style="border-image: none;">
"<em>Explain, why does everyone in American pretend to be blind? They practice not seeing. They get into the car and they call someone on the cell phone. They are afraid to be alone but they don't see the people around them</em>."</div>
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<br>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-80890429731730502142015-01-02T08:47:00.000-08:002015-01-02T08:48:48.669-08:00What I read in 2014<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYM5huzTlOcA-y_OdZULyDQJr-b3lJF4SiZ736JOPKBHs5lJcuwpo5YDjw9842dhVNbkDHj4k_ETN_s9lP4EU1Vu-ByB3LDz7hB6-ZafAkF90L-J6CF8fsaSNXobr8a3PrZHrRMrDJc9M/s1600/Owl.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYM5huzTlOcA-y_OdZULyDQJr-b3lJF4SiZ736JOPKBHs5lJcuwpo5YDjw9842dhVNbkDHj4k_ETN_s9lP4EU1Vu-ByB3LDz7hB6-ZafAkF90L-J6CF8fsaSNXobr8a3PrZHrRMrDJc9M/s1600/Owl.gif" height="184" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The year 2014 was an amazing literary year for me, though unfortunately much of it went unrecorded on this blog. What with working full-time again, and the kids, and getting used to a new country, AND the hard drive on my home computer conking out for the fourth time since I bought it, I haven't had much time or energy left over to devote to writing and reviews. Which is really too bad, because there has been a lot to write about. This year I met my biggest (living) literary heros. Really - that is no exaggeration. I met Paul Auster and SALMAN RUSHDIE and Ian McEwan. I heard them read and discuss a variety of bookish topics, but I also shook their hands talked to them in person. It still blows my mind that this actually happened. I also funneled all the free time I DID have into reading, so that, shockingly, I managed to read 50 books this year. With a three year old and an 18 month old running wild in the house and Bibliohubby to look after (just kidding, he looks after me, really truly), with meals to cook and life to live, I feel rather proud of myself for fitting enough reading into the cracks that I accomplished this goal. <br />
<br />
Turning back to this blog now I suddenly feel inspired again. There will be more posts soon, I promise, reviewing various books and events retrospectively and looking forward to what we can expect from 2015, from a literary perspective. But for now, here is a list, in no particular order, of the books I read in 2014.<br />
<br />
1. Eve in Hollywood - Amor Towles<br />
2. Life After Life - Kate Atkinson<br />
3. The Invention of Wings - Sue Monk Kidd<br />
4. 11/22/63 - Stephen King<br />
5. Beautiful Ruins - Jess Walter<br />
6. The Reason I Jump - Naoki Higashida & David Mitchell<br />
7. The Alchemist (re-read) - Paulo Coelho<br />
8. Freakonomics - Stephen D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner<br />
9. Orphan Train - Christina Baker Klein<br />
10. Tempting Fate - Jane Green<br />
11. Timbuktu - Paul Auster<br />
12. The Circle - Dave Eggers<br />
13. Barracuda - Christos Tsolkias<br />
14. The Blazing World - Siri Hustvedt<br />
15. The Children Act - Ian McEwan<br />
16. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt<br />
17. The Woman Upstairs - Claire Messud<br />
18. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler<br />
19. I am America and So Can You! - Stephen Colbert<br />
20. The Storied Life of A. J. Ficry - Gabrielle Zevin<br />
21. The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan<br />
22. The Family Man - Elinor Lipman<br />
23. The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith<br />
24. Me Before You - JoJo Moyes<br />
25. The Massey Murder (DNF) - Charlotte Gray<br />
26. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce <br />
27. The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells<br />
28. We'll Always Have Paris - Jennifer Coburn<br />
29. The One & Only - Emily Giffin<br />
30. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour - Joshua Ferris<br />
31. I am Having so Much Fun Here Without You - Courtney Maum<br />
32. Summer House with Swimming Pool - Herman Koch<br />
33. We Were Liars - E. Lockhart<br />
34. Damage - Josephine Hart<br />
35. This is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper<br />
36. Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief & Agile Introduction - Chris Sims<br />
37. The Awakening - Kate Chopin<br />
38. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery<br />
39. Not That Kind of Girl - Lena Dunham<br />
40. The Rosie Effect - Graeme Simsion<br />
41. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde<br />
42. Instructions for a Heatwave - Maggie O'Farrell<br />
43. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene<br />
44. Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie<br />
45. Yes Please - Amy Poehler<br />
46. Eleonor & Park - Rainbow Rowell<br />
47. The Strange Library - Haruki Murakami<br />
48. Landline - Rainbow Rowell<br />
49. Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell<br />
50. The Book of Joe - Jonathan Tropper<br />
<br />
It's an interesting list. Eight of these titles are non-fiction, though three of those are memoirs (of sorts) by comedians. I feel like this is almost its own genre these days. More than half of the books on this list were written by women - 28, to be precise. I am pleased about this, but it's only half the battle, of course. Harking back to a post I wrote in <a href="http://bibliophilicdistractions.blogspot.ca/2013/03/sunday-salon-do-female-writers-get.html">March 2013,</a> reviewing those books publicly is the other half, a challenge I would like to take up in 2015. Five of the above-listed books are what I would consider to be classics - though clearly that is a complicated term, one which I may well discuss in greater depth in another post. Here I use it to mean a book that continues to be relevant and highly regarded many years (more than 50?) after its publication. Three of the books I read this year, for example, we published prior to the year 1900. <br />
<br />
And finally, referring back to a post discussing <a href="http://bibliophilicdistractions.blogspot.ca/2014_09_01_archive.html">global literature,</a> I read books this year from nine different countries - the USA, the UK, Australia, Japan, Ireland, Nigeria, France and The Netherlands. That's not bad!<br />
<br />
More to follow soon, I promise.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Bibliofilly x</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-79696853622957287042014-10-06T10:49:00.000-07:002014-10-06T10:49:23.154-07:00Ian McEwan - The Children Act<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtZADV6VEYrqYDhIg9cTNUeSzTMuxGKcSfompthU4Ai7OF6fWrPkP5WLTton7RZuc0etrNoETNYQvxkDQ-ymGyvBgfbeGXZBRGDvDw_6Mo4Mu97eDXra8VPnfrqwS6j-aSUmHRFZ8LDqc/s1600/childrenact.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtZADV6VEYrqYDhIg9cTNUeSzTMuxGKcSfompthU4Ai7OF6fWrPkP5WLTton7RZuc0etrNoETNYQvxkDQ-ymGyvBgfbeGXZBRGDvDw_6Mo4Mu97eDXra8VPnfrqwS6j-aSUmHRFZ8LDqc/s1600/childrenact.jpg" height="320" width="216" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">If I had to compare Ian McEwan’s new book
to his other work (and we all do this, don’t we, once we’ve read a few books by
the same writer, whether or not it’s fair), I would say it’s a little On Chesil
Beach and a little Enduring Love. I have always particularly enjoyed those
books of McEwan’s in which story hangs together with a philosophical tension of
some sort. This is certainly the case in The Children Act, in which McEwan
explores the tension between religion and modern medical science, whilst
simultaneously composing a story about family, the law, and marital love. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Fiona Maye is a High Court judge in London, in the Family Law
Division. Perhaps as a consequence of her job, she is aloof and can come across
– even to her husband – as cold and removed. The novel opens on Fiona at home,
left in shock after her husband Jack informs her that he wishes to have an affair.
He is entitled to this, Jack says, after seven weeks and one day with no sex, and
after a long and committed monogamous relationship with Fiona. He even has someone lined up - a 28 year-old Fiona has met. He does not wish
to change their marital status, he simply wants a holiday from it. Fiona
watches from the window as he leaves their house with a suitcase. She is in her
50s, childless partly by choice, partly because her focus on career took
priority until it was too late for children. The state of her childlessness, in
the mire of marital upset that threatens to leave her forever alone, is a central concern
of Fiona’s during the weeks that follow.</span></div>
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The drama at home is, of course, mirrored by drama at work. A
new, urgent case comes before Fiona, of a 17 year old boy suffering from leukemia, one month shy of
reaching the age of majority, whose parents are refusing a life-saving blood
transfusion to him that would save his life. Their refusal is on religious
grounds, and Fiona must decide whether the rationale of modern medicine trumps
their staunch faith in circumstances where that faith would almost certainly
lead to the death of their son. Complicating her decision is the son himself,
an intelligent, charming soul who shares his parents’ faith but can’t help
reveal to Fiona the potential living inside of him for a fulfilled future life.
He is poetic and unusually innocent and Fiona finds herself drawn to him in a
way she might not be were her personal circumstances not currently in chaos. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">McEwan brilliantly weaves a story about the inconsistency of emotion
and law in a division of the court where these two must by necessity coexist.
He illustrates the difficulty for judges of making decisions that are right
according to the law and, as far as possible, morally right for the people
concerned. It left me wondering how on earth anyone in that position could
possibly live a normal emotional life outside of court – because in order to do
what they must at work, these judges have to shut off standard emotional
responses to heart-breaking problems, and live with the very real, sometimes dramatic, consequences of their decisions.</span></div>
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Simultaneously moving and fascinating, this is a book I found
hard to put down – not least because, as a lawyer myself, I appreciated the
details of the legal cases that Fiona deals with throughout the book (reference
to many cases is made, although just one stands at the core of the story). And
as with many McEwan novels, music too plays an important role, so that one
feels that the text and the marital relationship within it ebb and flow to the
strains of classical music. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">McEwan is back in top form here. I very much recommend this one
to his fans, as well as to those of you who are new to his work.</span></div>
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<strong>Overall assessment: 4 out of 5 stars</strong>. I'm not sure why I hesitate to award it a higher rating.</span> I enjoyed this immensely, but it somehow hasn't resonated for me as deeply as Amsterdam, for example. For me, a 5 star rating is really reserved for those books that stay with me long after I put them down, books that I would consider "favourites", to be read again and again. Getting caught up in McEwan's sparse language and razor-sharp observations, however, was, as always, a real joy.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-46915439806008383162014-09-16T13:17:00.000-07:002014-09-16T13:17:19.381-07:00Reading the World
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYZnT1op6uH0FDOXNBpnzk-r2I2EZkYWpwNjfmsKPL-WEFzTVUgh6bFSQhgMm6rDfoY98oIaus4qHeXL8lQdBGxqNBSggs4SJRy95khtRiYboocqS42LK3YnFtAJbHgxAH5zTZCt6dFSI/s1600/World+books.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYZnT1op6uH0FDOXNBpnzk-r2I2EZkYWpwNjfmsKPL-WEFzTVUgh6bFSQhgMm6rDfoY98oIaus4qHeXL8lQdBGxqNBSggs4SJRy95khtRiYboocqS42LK3YnFtAJbHgxAH5zTZCt6dFSI/s1600/World+books.png" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial;">I came across a fascinating article recently, about a woman who
decided to spend a year reading one book from each country in the world. It’s
such a wonderful idea. I love to travel, and informed my husband early on in our marriage that,
even with our two young children in tow, I would like us to commit to visiting
one new country each year. Why on earth I hadn’t thought of doing something
similar with literature is beyond me!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Ann Morgan’s challenge was to read a book from every one of the
195 UN-recognised states (as well as former UN member Taiwan) in one year. By
her calculations this meant reading one book every 1.85 days – a tall order
indeed, especially as much of her non-reading time was spent trying to track
down books (in English) from some of the smaller states. She succeeded though,
in attaining her goal, and has since written a book about it, due out in
February 2015.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Morgan’s list of books can be found <a href="http://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/thelist/">here</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">.
The list includes not just the books she actually read, but some of those recommended
by international readers of her blog. Out of curiosity, I printed the list and combed
through it to determine how many countries I had covered in my own reading
experience. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Before I divulge my own results, I need to confess that I have
two significant counts in my favour. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">First, I went to an international school where the upper level IB
English class in our final year was called “World Literature”. We read well and
widely, and I didn’t realise just how unusual this was until I went on to study
English at a Canadian university and found myself subject to a curriculum made
up almost entirely of books from the British end of the Western Canon (and,
later, American and Canadian literary giants). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Second, I subsequently undertook postgraduate study in the field
of English, and my specialty was postcolonial literature – the closest I could
get to world literature without leaving the English department. As a result, my
bookshelves became filled with Indian, African and Carribbean texts. I enthusiastically
collected the excellent Heinemann African and Carribbean Writers series. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Even so, on examining Morgan’s list and adding to it writers with
whom I am personally familiar, my current count is 43. I have read books from
43 countries. Interestingly, using this list of countries as the definitive standard,
I have traveled to 42 of them – but the two lists do not line up. My reading travels
include far more African and Carribbean nations than I have actually visited,
whereas Asia is better represented in my physical travels. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I find the notion of “bookpacking” around the world intriguing,
and Morgan has inspired me. Looking at the books I have read this year, only
six countries are represented. It’s likely this will grow to seven by the end
of the year, if I get to the first book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic My
Struggle as planned. But now, as well as traveling to a new country each year,
I am determined that I will also read from at least one new country each year.
A new way of expanding my horizons – thanks, Ann Morgan!</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-41439666984408425052014-08-13T14:05:00.000-07:002014-10-06T14:05:53.474-07:00Claire Messud - The Woman Upstairs<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ4V9bzkJg-H2HDpFPAhcBTxRo7B03swU-3aZZHT1cvAwTDBSDFtEKHO-w6Fg1cnMxKMjVq8Cmt1G-TYRNGeHqEuQeqdfnDiVXEfzijqbwWAU0Llm1vNA6w79uTLvEON6Yl0NUx48WG0o/s1600/Upstairs.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ4V9bzkJg-H2HDpFPAhcBTxRo7B03swU-3aZZHT1cvAwTDBSDFtEKHO-w6Fg1cnMxKMjVq8Cmt1G-TYRNGeHqEuQeqdfnDiVXEfzijqbwWAU0Llm1vNA6w79uTLvEON6Yl0NUx48WG0o/s1600/Upstairs.png" /></a>I have wanted to read this book ever since Claire Messud attended the Sydney Writers' Festival last year and impressed attendees with her obvious intelligence. I must admit, though, that I had very little idea what it was about until I actually picked it up to read. I did not know, for example, that the "woman upstairs" of the title refers to middle-aged women who have failed to partner up and surround themselves with children, in the way that society expects them to, and who therefore feel relegated to the "attic" of the world (they are not madwomen, Messud's protagonist is at pains to point out, with clear reference to Bertha Mason; but expectations hang heavy upon them for how they are meant to live, quietly, without causing trouble for anyone else). <br />
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Please note that this notion of modern late-30s female singledom as a "failure" is Messud's (or rather, her protagonist's), and not mine. So we get immediately to the crux of my issue with this book: the attitude of its protagonist towards age and ageing.<br />
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First, though, I must stress how much I really enjoyed most of the novel. Messud is an absorbing writer, and Nora Eldridge is superbly drawn in her self-absorbed, intense rage against the world. Her fury courses through the book, instilling each page with shimmering vibrancy. I understand this fire is missing from Messud's other books, and the extreme emotion here certainly makes for compelling reading.<br />
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Nora is a third grade teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is highly regarded and well-liked. She has few close friends, but those she does have are good friends indeed. She looks after her widowed father and her spinsterly aunt, the woman she fears she is becoming. <br />
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However well she hides it, though, Nora is angry, seethingly so. She is 42 at the time of writing and 37 when the events she describes unfolded, and during this, her "<em>middle-age</em>", she feels her life is over. She is furious with the way she believes she is regarded by society, and by what she sees as being her lot in life. She wanted so much more. "<em>It was supposed to say 'Great Artist' on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say 'such a good teacher/daughter/friend instead.</em>".<br />
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Nora was born to a mother whose great dilemma had been "<em>to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price</em>." By the time her mother saw that a career and independence were possible, she was tied down to a domestic life with children. And this, she cautioned, is what Nora must avoid at all costs. Which she has, so much so that Nora now has the opposite problem. She has never married, and has no children. She lives in a world that is increasingly about appearances, where she and other women her age are considered to be "invisible". She still makes her art, tiny replicas of other women's rooms, a series she intends to call "<em>A Room of One's Own?</em>", the question mark being key. But her art, too, is small and private and, in not being seen, this side of her, the artist's side, is also invisible. <br />
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When Nora meets the Shahids, a family from France whose worldliness and beauty and interest seem to rub off on her, she feels that something is finally happening. The world turns, once again. All of a sudden, where before there had been no possibilities, now anything is possible. Nora falls in love, with Sirena, the glamorous Parisian artist, with Skandar, her handsome Lebanese-Palestinian professor husband, and with Reza, their sweet, long-lashed dark-haired son. It is an obsessive love, a love that is troubling to read. We can see, even as Nora feels she is awakening in their midst, that she means so much less to them than they to her. But where this will take Nora is unknown until the powerful ending of this book.<br />
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I was absorbed in Nora's interior rant, in her obsessions. But I was torn because, whilst I understand that one's late 30s / early 40s can be a difficult time for a woman - that transition from desirable youth to something less obviously glamourous and yet unknown - I also feel (like many other reviewers), that Nora's self-perception is largely self-pitying rubbish. Another way, for example, of expressing the notion of "middle-aged" is "in one's prime". The middle of one's life is also likely to be the most productive time of one's life. No longer so caught up in finding oneself, one can hopefully start to enjoy life more deeply. <br />
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I think it is true that society is geared, in many ways, towards admiration of youth in women, rather than age. And I know that it is difficult to be childless, not by choice, but by circumstance, at a time when most women one's own age are subsumed in the time consuming endeavours of raising a family. I myself met my husband late and started having children in my mid-30s. But because I was single in my early 30s I also know for a fact that Nora, especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts (she is not living in rural Idaho, for heaven's sakes), could be living a seriously exciting life at 37. She could be saving up her teacher's salary to travel during her long vacations. She could be studying. She could surround herself with other single 30-somethings, she could be dating and eating out at fabulous restaurants and going to art galleries and meeting new people and filling her life with the stuff that us "smug marrieds" only have time to dream about. <br />
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Anyway. The frustration is misplaced because we are dealing, here, with a character who has persuaded herself that she will live in a shoebox for the rest of her life. Until this family come along, who interrupt that certainty. And then, when they leave, which we, as readers, know all along they are going to do (this is really not a spoiler) they destroy her. Because it becomes abundantly clear that she only ever meant very little to them. She was a placeholder in Sirena's life, but for Nora, Sirena had become the centre of her life. <br />
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Messud tells a dark psychological tale and I was left horrified, hoping that Nora's rage would indeed fuel her into some sort of extreme life-affirming action. <br />
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<strong>Overall assessment: 4 out of 5.</strong><br />
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<strong>Pros</strong>: Terrific language, Messud fully engages the reader with this dark and disturbing tale which is, at times, un-put-downable. As well as a story about the energy and power of anger and obsession, this is a novel of ideas - there are fascinating discussions about what it means to be an artist, what defines art, about history and who writes it and about ethics and morality. <br />
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<strong>Cons</strong>: It is unsettling to get inside the head of someone whose views are so frustratingly self-destructive. And Nora's continous description of women of a certain age as "<em>spinsterly</em>" is unnerving for those of us reading who are in her age group! I mean - "<em>death is knocking</em>"? For heaven's sakes!! I hope I have another 40 years left in me! Life ain't over yet, sweetheart!<br />
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<strong>Select quotes</strong>:<br />
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"<em>Sirena was turning, before my eyes, into my ideal of an artist - as if I'd imagined her and, by imagining her, had conjured her into being. And here's the weird thing: her existence as an ideal woman artist didn't feel as though it thwarted or controlled me, I didn't look at her and think, 'Why are you almost famous and I'm only your helper?' I don't recall having the thought even once. Instead, I looked at her and saw myself, saw what suddenly seemed possible for me, too, because it was possible for her.</em>"<br />
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"<em>But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive</em>."Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-70951864996644242902014-08-08T11:37:00.001-07:002014-08-08T11:37:32.284-07:00Herman Koch - Summer House with Swimming Pool<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I was keen to read Koch's new book because I really enjoyed The Dinner, which is a highly original, thought-provoking and ultimatey disturbing read. It shouldn't surprise me that Summer House with Swimming Pool is also disturbing. Or that, as with The Dinner, we don't find out what the crime is that lies at the heart of the novel until three quarters of the way through. But what did surprise me was just how hateful most of the characters are.<br />
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Koch is a good writer, but after reading this, his latest, book, I feel that he may not be a very nice person. His protagonist here, the good doctor Marc Schlosser, is really rather detestable. He has a distaste for the human body and the wellbeing of his patients is more or less irrelevant to him. He has built up a stable of patients well-known in the creative arts by turning a blind eye to their foibles (too much alcohol? Pfft, he says, many people drink too much and live long ), and by liberally doling out prescription drugs. <br />
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It is through his work that Marc meets Ralph Meier, an ego-driven actor who looks at women in a way that disgusts even Marc. Through a series of social occasions, Ralph's family and Marc's become friendly and end up, eventually, holidaying together. Here, at a summer house with a swimming pool, events unfold that cause Marc to behave in a manner contradictory to the hippocratic oath he has taken, and which land him in the quandary he is in when we meet him at the beginning of the novel: on the verge of possibly losing his medical licence, not through some mistake, but through a conscious and deathly serious infraction, the consequences of which he was well aware.<br />
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The story unfolds persuasively, but the book is too long, and the characters too distasteful. The nuances that made The Dinner a hit are largely absent here, though the final twist (it is no spoiler to say there is one) packs a punch. <br />
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The only redeeming feature of Koch's protagonist is his love for his daughters, and the way he speaks of drawing closer to his wife in a crisis. But even these characteristics are insufficient to keep one's skin from crawling after placing the book down. <br />
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Koch is clever, there's no doubt about that, but this book has persuaded me that there is no need for me to read the rest of his oeuvre.<br />
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<strong>Overall assessment: 3 out of 5.</strong> A good read if you can stomache it. And note that it took me a good quarter of the novel before I was drawn in to the story.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-49289631483569724352014-07-10T14:11:00.002-07:002014-07-14T04:28:26.373-07:00Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: black;">How strange: this is the second book I've read this year purporting to warn against the evils of social media (the first, of course, being <a href="http://bibliophilicdistractions.blogspot.ca/2014/05/dave-eggers-circle.html">The Circle</a>). I chose this title for our bookclub at the beginning of the year after having read a blurb promising it was about a dentist who discovers that someone is impersonating him online, and who soon realizes the impersonator may be living his own life better than he is. </span></div>
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An intriguing premise, but unfortunately the blurb was written well before publication of the book and it is not an accurate description of the content.</div>
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Yes, Paul C O'Rourke, dentist, depressive, serial lover of women and their religious families, does discover soon into the novel that he is being impersonated online by someone who is au fait with social media in a way that O'Rourke himself is not and does not wish to be. But the story from there does not revolve around this identity theft in the comical way the publisher promised. Instead, the impersonator creates an identity for O'Rourke that is alternative from his actual identity in one important respect: whilst O'Rourke's defining drive throughout his life has been striving to find a place, belief system or a family in which he will find a sense of true belonging, the faux-O'Rourke has already discovered where he belongs and is not afraid to proclaim it loudly. </div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Don't get me wrong: Ferris does deal with the problem of identity theft in the new world. There is a period in the novel during which O'Rourke is so troubled by what is happening that he calls a lawyer, the police, internet experts and so on, seeking redress against the impersonator. What is fascinating is the cold hard truth that there's not much he can do - and not much anyone could do in similar circumstances. The impersonator does not defame him. On the contrary, he builds up his reputation as a dentist, he creates a webpage for O'Rourke's practice where before there was none. The impersonator does not rob him (except of his online identity) or damage him. So what recourse does O'Rourke have against this act? It is a question worth pondering. </div>
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But Ferris quickly moves on from this modern dilemma. Whilst O'Rourke is initially shocked by the falsity of what is being broadcast in his name, he soon becomes intrigued by it. The impersonator claims (as O'Rourke) to be a descendant of a long lost tribe of oppressed people, called the Ulms. This is a group, claims the faux O'Rourke, that has been more oppressed than even the Jews. It is the group that suffered the first genocide, recorded in the Bible. Fragments of documents are gradually parceled out, enticing<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"> O'Rourke into believing that he does in fact have a meaningful history, a past, a place in society. Having always felt lost, it is captivating to O'Rourke, this fairytale of oppression and meaning. He quickly becomes obsessed with the notion that there is a way for him to go 'home' without needing to adopt the religion of a girlfriend or her family.</span></div>
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This obsession results in comical lapses of concentration at work, and Ferris is a brilliantly funny writer. Surprising hilarity ensues from horrific moments like O'Rourke coming out of a daze to find himself about to drill into a patient's mouth with no idea why. Or O'Rourke sitting in his own waiting room observing his receptionist at work and spying on his own patients whilst his staff look around for him wondering where he's got to. Or the moment when he absent-mindedly asks a patient for a stool sample instead of asking him to spit. </div>
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The comedy is balanced by pathos, and Ferris portrays O'Rourke beautifully as a poor lost soul. The core of O'Rourke's character is perhaps best described by the fact that, when he was a little boy abandoned by his father, he couldn't bear the thought of being awake when everyone else was sleeping. He was eventually able to sleep only once apprised of the knowledge, imparted to him by his exhausted mother, that the Chinese are still awake on the other side of the world even when everyone in New York is asleep. </div>
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Most of the women in my bookclub found O'Rourke to be an unlikable character. I did not. It is true that he sometimes says the most despicable things. But so often when this happens he is actually trying very, very hard to say the right thing. When he comes across as anti-semitic to his ex-girlfriend's uncle, for example, he is actually trying to ingratiate himself into the family and decry the appalling things that have happened to the Jews throughout history. Other times he is brutally honest in a way that does not work in polite society. He is a complex character and I found O'Rourke to be strangely endearing. </div>
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Moreoever, O'Rourke is quite clearly an unreliable narrator. His own deep insecurity colours his telling of the story and the portrait he draws of himself. But it is clear from the way other characters relate to him - his long-suffering assistant Mrs Conway, for example, or Connie, his receptionist and ex-girlfriend - that they care deeply for him, in spite of the exasperation he causes them on a daily basis. And O'Rourke's relationship with Mrs Conway, an older, Catholic woman, is one of the highlights of the book. Ferris is so clever with dialogue. As readers, we are only ever exposed to one side of the conversations O'Rourke has with Mrs Conway, and so we are left to guess at what he might have said. It is an odd, highly original way of describing a conversation, and it works brilliantly well, giving rise to many of the funnier moments in the book.</div>
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O'Rourke's interest in his new religion is matched only by his lifelong attachment to the Boston Red Sox, and by the end of the book I had grown tired of both lengthy passages about baseball and heavy, pseudo-Biblical passages from the Ulm's religious text, the Cantaveticles (although I will concede that these read convincingly as the Uhr-text of a long-lost belief system). Neverthless, the depth of meaning Ferris conveys through a story that is funny and sad and wise all at the same time is comendable.</div>
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<strong>Overall assessment</strong>: 4 out of 5. This is a dense but enjoyable novel, but it is not for everyone. It is darkly satirical, in the vein of Shteyngart and O'Toole, and it therefore perhaps an acquired taste.</div>
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<strong>Pros</strong>: This book made me start flossing again. And it made me feel awfully relieved I am not a dentist!<br>
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<strong>Cons</strong>: Lengthy excerpts of faux-religious drivel.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-4929736183793436862014-07-02T14:13:00.000-07:002014-07-02T14:13:01.698-07:00Stephen Colbert - I am America and So Can You!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This was one of my early Audible books, and at first I thought it was the ideal book to listen to rather than read. Like watching his show, it was fun having Colbert's voice (because yes, he narrates) wash over me as I walked to work, or stood crowded next to others in the subway. It meant lots of laughs out-loud at inopportune moments.<br />
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Unfortunately as the latter half of the book approached I found that the absence of a plot meant that it was also quite easy to tune out, so that sometimes I would suddenly realize I had missed a large chunk of a chapter. At least I am now more adept at 'rewinding' on Audible.<br />
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This is a difficult book to review because one's enjoyment of it is so subjective - somehow with humour I find this to be more obviously the case than with other books. Bibliohubby and I are huge fans of Colbert's, recording his show every night to watch the next evening. I find his brand of parody hilarious and self-affirming, as the real Colbert shares my political views and pokes fun at the people I like to see taken down a peg (such as gun-toting Tea-Party Republicans). It goes without saying, then, that I would enjoy his book, which is really an extension of what he gives us in his show. People who are not fans of Colbert's to begin with will not enjoy the book, and what really gives me pause is that - more than with his show, where his over-the-top antics should clearly indicate to most sensible people that Colbert is <em>acting, </em>that he is playing a character, and that what he says is satirical - I worry that this is not necessarily the case with the book. I'm sure there are people who could feasibly pick this book up in isolation and take Colbert at his word - a rather shocking prospect when his pronouncements include the following tongue-in-cheek sentiments: "<em>The biggest threat facing America today - next to socialized medicine, the Dyson vacuum cleaner, and the recumbent bicycle - is gay marriage</em>." Or - "<em>Ever have a nagging suspicion you're poor? I know my staff does</em>." <br />
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Each chapter of the book deals with a 'big subject' of life, providing Colbert's take on it, and his advice in relation to it. So, for example, he deals with family, religion, race, sex and dating. Because I 'read' this on Audible and don't have a hard copy to refer back to, I can't cite any of the more amusing moments here. But take my word for it: much of the book is very funny.<br />
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My guess is that this book falls a little flat on the page, without Colbert's energetic, deliberately over-enthusiastic delivery, so I was pleased that I opted to listen to it - although Colbert's natural delivery is so quick that it is quite easy to miss things. <br />
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There's not much more to say than this: I am a fan, I enjoyed much of the book, and I didn't worry about losing bits here and there when I got caught up in the mechanics of my commute. It was nice to have Colbert as my regular companion for a while there, and I didn't really need this book to be anything more than that.<br />
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<strong>Overall assessment</strong>: 3 out of 5.<br />
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<strong>Pros</strong>: Laugh out-loud moments.<br />
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<strong>Cons</strong>: Lacking in substance, and this book alone does not really do justice to Colbert's persona - you have to watch him. This is really more of a companion text to the show. My advice? If you don't watch The Colbert Show, don't pick up the book.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-55656543157748644982014-06-30T12:27:00.004-07:002014-06-30T12:27:39.752-07:00Author Reading: Tom Rachman and Emma HealeyOne evening last week I battled gailforce winds and apocalyptic rain to get down to the Harbourfront Centre and hear three authors read from their new books. The event fell under the rubric of the International Festival of Authors which, though it ocurrs in the fall, hosts literary soirees of various kinds throughout the year in Toronto. I love author readings and would have wanted to attend in any case, but the real draw for me here was Tom Rachman, author of <a href="http://bibliophilicdistractions.blogspot.ca/2013/03/tom-rachman-imperfectionists.html">The Imperfectionists</a>, which I read and loved and reviewed here last year. I knew he was reading in Toronto in late June, but my determination to attend was increased when I entered into a brief correspondence with him recently. I discovered that he had released a short story two years ago as an Amazon Single. Entitled The Bathtub Spy, it has received excellent reviews and I was keen to read it - but it is no longer available on Amazon. After a fruitless Google search, I emailed him directly, not particularly expecting a response. To my surprise, he wrote a very friendly email in reply, apologizing for the difficulty in locating a copy of his story, and suggesting that I should attend this IFOA event in June where he would be reading.<br />
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Well. As if I wasn't going to attend after that personal invitation!<br />
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It was a bit of a revelation to walk into the venue and discover that it had been set up like an intimate comedy club, with individual tables lit with votive candles, and a pop-up bar serving wine. So very civilized. <br />
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Our host for the evening was the charming Becky Toyne, a publishing industry personage who regularly appears on CBC Radio One to speak about books and writes a column about Toronto's literary scene for Openbooktoronto.com. </div>
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Reading before Tom Rachman were Linda Holeman, a writer of historical fiction, and Emma Healey, whose debut novel, Elizabeth is Missing, has just shot her into literary super-stardom. The manuscript for Elizabeth is Missing was fought over at the London Book Fair last year by NINE different publishers, and so a real furor surrounds the book. It is so rare and therefore so exciting to hear stories about publishers fighting over a new author's work, and it was delicious to hear Healey speak about the lengths some of them went to in order to impress her. The book is about an elderly women who suffers from dementia, and who is fond of tinned peaches, so several of the publishers gifted Healey with boxes of tinned peaches (unfortunately, Healey said, her boyfriend is not fond of peaches, so these remain piled up at home), and one filled a boardroom with Forget-me-Nots. </div>
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As I sat there, by myself, listening to people speak about books and surrounded by others soaking up the atmosphere with the same intent pleasure as me, I felt filled with something akin to love. When Rachman got up to read, he noted how unusual it was for people in this day and age to gather for something that has nothing whatsoever to do with technology. As for me, being there reminded me how rarely these days I get to immerse myself in the literary scene. Books are what I am most passionate about in my life (other than family, of course), so it seems rather a pity that I am not able more often to engage with people who share my interest. But then, reading is by its very nature a solitary pursuit, as is writing. Any chance to turn these pursuits into something more social should, in my view, be seized upon with glee. </div>
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Rachman was as personable and energetic as I had hoped, and I can't wait to read his new book, which is receiving rave reviews. But the surprise of the evening was Emma Healey. She looks and sounds like Sophie Dahl (Roald Dahl's model daughter), with a sweet upper-crust English accent. She read from her book, a novel that shows great maturity and a deep understanding of the human condition, yet she looked just like a schoolgirl. She wore a long skirt and a modest full-sleeved blouse, and she made a habit as she stood at the lecturn of lifting her left heel so that only her toe remained fixed to the ground beside her right foot, an endearing trait that made her look about 12. I believe the hype around this book will prove to be justified, and I believe she may well go on to become one of the great writers of our time. I purchased her book at the event and asked her to sign it (I had pre-purchased Rachman's, of course, and very much enjoyed meeting him on the night).</div>
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Two more signed books to add to my collection, and a fond memory or two as well. </div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-19127588942045362172014-06-23T13:53:00.001-07:002014-06-23T13:53:42.066-07:00Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction - Winner Announced!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It was a tough shortlist of brilliant writers, but Eimear McBride has taken them all out, winning the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction with her debut book, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. I haven't read it, though it's on my TBR list, but from what I understand this was the most experimental book on the shortlist, and perhaps a surprising winner.<br />
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The website for the award cites Helen Fraser, chair of judges, saying of McBride’s startling debut: <br />
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“An amazing and ambitious first novel that impressed the judges with its inventiveness and energy. This is an extraordinary new voice – this novel will move and astonish the reader.”<br />
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I can't wait to read it, but I am still all aglow from the experience of reading Donna Tart's The Goldfinch and I can't help wishing she had won. <br />
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I spoke some <a href="http://bibliophilicdistractions.blogspot.ca/2014/04/baileys-womens-prize-for-fiction.html">time ago</a> of trying to read every one of the shortlisted books this year. Embarassingly, The Goldfinch is the only one I have thus far managed to get to reading! I haven't given up though.<br />
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-20443782311529856692014-06-20T14:02:00.002-07:002014-06-23T13:53:53.671-07:00Did not Finish: Charlotte Grey's The Massey Murder<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I started reading The Massey Murder: a Murder, a Maid and the Trial that Shocked a Country by Charlotte Grey at the beginning of May, thinking piously that I would finish it well before my bookclub meeting, which falls on the last Thursday of each month. But in the week before our meeting, not only had I not finished the book, I had made a conscious decision not to. <br />
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I've spoken before about books one does not finish, for whatever reason, but it has been so long since this happened to me I thought it was worth remarking on again. Grey's book should have been a perfectly good non-fiction history lesson. It is set in Toronto in 1915, and purports (as suggested by the title) to follow and elucidate upon the events of a murder, whereby Carrie Davies, a maid, shot and killed her master, Charles Massey, a member of one of Toronto's most esteemed families. <br />
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I like history. I even studied it at University. I really enjoy learning. But if I am reading a book, fiction or non-fiction, I require it to have a story or a thesis or something that ties together the bits of information I am being fed. This book is notable for the absence of any such thing. <br />
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Ms Grey seems to have done an awful lot of research into the social history of Toronto in the early 20th century, but she appears to be so wed to all of this research that she was loathe to leave a single fact out of the book - whether or not it was relevant. I'm not sure why her editor did not encourage her to exercise greater stringency, but it seems Ms Grey was free to throw in whatever trivia she damn well pleased. And I. Was. SO. BORED.<br />
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Example: "<em>Bert's twenty-seven-year-old first cousin Vincent Massey, then a member of the University of Toronto's History Department, attended the service. (He noted in his diary, "Went to Bert Massey's funeral from Arthur Massey's house</em>.)"<br />
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Why was it necessary here to mention Bert at all, let alone state in the text where the note of his attendance of the funeral was recorded? If Grey was going to write a history text, she should have left that kind of thing to footnotes.<br />
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It should have been interesting to read about the history of the city I'm currently living in. And it should have been interesting to learn about the practice of law, my given profession, two hundred years ago. Admittedly I never got to the trial, and various reviews have said things improve in the second half of the book, but I was so put off by this book that I really couldn't imagine things improving enough that I would actually enjoy finishing it. After slogging through a third of it, literally forcing myself to choose this book over others I had going at the same time, I finally admitted to myself that there was no point in continuing, and I stopped reading. I decided that my precious reading time, restrained as it is by work and kids and everything else life throws at one, was not worth squandering on a book I really detested.<br />
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Let me try to explain why I disliked this so very much. The book opens on the murder. Of course the interesting aspects of this immediately spring to mind - motive, personality - who is the maid who shot Charles Massey and why did she do it? Did he deserve to be killed? What fate will befall his poor son who was in the house when this happened and who was both close to his father and attached to Carrie, the murderer? <br />
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Unfortunately very few of these questions are explored except in the driest possible language and in the briefest possible manner. It is almost as though Grey wished to convey the history of Toronto in a given age and seized upon this event as a vehicle to do so, knowing she would need a selling point (and re-read the title, above - go on. See? It's shamelessly sensational, in direct opposition to the actual contents of the book. Even the publisher knew they would need to really push to make this sound exciting). In fact, the first quarter of the book is largely taken up by facts about the buildings and people of Toronto in 1915. But instead of choosing to talk about one building or one person at a time, and divulge all of the interesting facts about that topic and make that description and historical detail relevant to the tale at hand, Grey goes on a meandering marathon of fact dropping, as though she is a senile great-aunt trying unsuccessfully to tell a story at a family gathering. She never gets to the point. It was like listening to Bibliohubby's stoner friend who we dined with recently, and who dominated the conversation with a story that never ended and had no discernible point. Only that was quite funny. Ms Grey is not funny at all.<br />
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Here, this is what it feels like to read this book:<br />
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"Charles Massey is shot and killed. Oh, who else was in the Massey family? Let me tell you. There is this Massey, he was a farmer, this is what he farmed. This is where his farm was. This is what happened to the farm. There were a lot of tractors, let me tell you a bit about the tractor industry in early twentieth century Toronto. Oh, there were immigrants! Let me tell you a bit about them - but not too much. Because also, what about this Massey? He lived here. Oh, you know Massey Hall? This is the history of that building in one uninteresting sentence. You would like to know more about the architecture or how it came to be built or what it was originally designed to be? Too bad - there is this other Massey here I want to talk about now, he was really rich and this is what he did and this is where his wife came from. Oh, now we're at the court house. There is a magistrate who runs almost all the cases - let me tell you all about him and his entire life history and - oh! There are lots of ladies who come to the courthouse for all of these reasons, let me tell you about them, but also they are engaged in a lot of reformative early feminist activities, let me very briefly tell you about those without going into detail or explaining how this was relevant to the development of feminism in Toronto or Canada broadly - oh. Wait? Why are we at the court house? That's right! Cassie Davies has been accused of murder! I almost forgot! Never mind, nothing really happened that day, she was refused bail."<br />
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And so on. Reading it was like listening to nails on a blackboard. <br />
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As I said, I do understand that it improves towards the latter half. However, even if the trial was riveting, my understanding is that Grey had very little to go on by way of court transcript. So, ironically, what forms the very centre of the book is actually fictional - or biased, taken from the newspapers of the day. If only she had then treated this as a fictionalized account of a true story, like Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace or a book I am just starting to read, Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. She might have succeeded in creating a story at the same time as she presented an interesting, realistic, historic portrait of life in Toronto at the time. Which, frankly, is what I was hoping for when our bookclub voted for this at the beginning of the year.<br />
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<strong>Overall assessment:</strong> Look, she did her work, there is no doubt about that. And I will say that it was interesting to learn about the women-only courthouse and to get a glimpse of life for women at that time in Canada. But generally speaking, as if you couldn't tell, I really did not like this. Giving it a 2 seems a stretch. I am going to give it <strong>1.5 out of 5</strong>.<br />
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<strong>Addendum</strong>: I held off on posting this mean review for some time, because I felt badly after attending book club, where most people had better experiences with the book than I did. I should have kept reading, they told me. The trial at the end is more interesting. So I borrowed a hard copy from someone else and thought I might squeeze in a few more chapters, maybe reassess. <br />
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Sadly: no. I just can't bring myself to do it. Sorry all! Life is too short, there are too many other books in the world, and I just recently finished Donna Tart's The Goldfinch, which was so very brilliant, on so many levels, that even <em>good</em> books I have picked up since then pale in comparison... I really just can't bear to open this one up again. So I won't.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-87038708283165838452014-05-08T14:09:00.000-07:002014-05-08T16:31:33.934-07:00Dave Eggers - The Circle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: black;">Wow, this was a hard review to write. So many things are contained in this book. There were times when I became so frustrated with the protagonist that I felt like hurling the book across the room, but in the end it is a novel of significance. There is more to say about it than I can properly summarise here, and if you are interested in a deeper analysis I will refer you to Margaret Atwood's fantastic review in <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/21/eggers-circle-when-privacy-is-theft/">The New York Review of Books.</a></span><br />
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This is Eggers' Orwellian tale, foretelling apocalypsis through technological subsumation. Eggers has received censure from some of the IT crowd, who dispute the accuracy of his portrayal of their world. But for me, and indeed for those members of our bookclub who work in IT, this had the ring of truth about it. Frighteningly, Eggers' warning feels timely and realistic.<br />
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Mae Holland is in her early 20s and in a dead-end career until she leans on her best friend Annie to get her a job at The Circle, which is basically what you would get if Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft joined forces: a monster tech company, a total monopoly, the offices of which constitute a massive 'campus', not dissimilar to the grounds of various tech companies that already exist (though much bigger). The Circle is run by the 'three wise men', each of whom resembles a tech figure we know in real life (Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, perhaps?), and the 'gang of forty', a group of the 40 highest ranking officers in the company.<br />
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Mae and Annie are very close, sharing a believable friendship and dialogue that frequently sparkles with comedic wit. For the first weeks after Mae joins The Circle she continues to leave campus for visits home to her family, to sleep at her own apartment, and to commune with nature through her solitary hobby of kayaking. Mae's father suffers from MS and needs increasing care, and Eggers writes a couple of scenes early on of father-daughter bonding which reveal that Mae is close to her parents. Her ex-boyfriend Mercer is also still friendly with Mae's parents and is often present when she visits home, an annoyance she has learned to live with. Mercer voices concern about Mae's new job from the beginning, raising the moral counterbalance to Mae's unquestioning enthusiasm for The Circle - a necessary warning because it's not long before Mae becomes totally absorbed in her work to the detriment of everything else in her life.<br />
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Indeed, she becomes so engulfed in the philosophy of her workplace that leaving the campus for any reason becomes actually uncomfortable - life outside is comparably so <em>messy </em>(both literally and figuratively). And the corollary to her voluntary submission to The Circle is her rise within it. In no time at all, it seems, Mae has moved into the upper echelons of The Circle, away from the customer service team in which she started into something that is far creepier. <br />
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In some ways it seems unrealistic that Mae, a person who initially derives genuine pleasure from solitary pursuits, from being surrounded by nature, from close relationships with family and friends, so quickly becomes absorbed into a world in which none of these things are considered to have value. One scene in particular, a seminal scene for Mae, shows her kayaking by herself in darkness to an island she knows she should not visit, and her excitement and enjoyment stem from the thrill of doing something illicit and unknown. Ironically it is this experience that lies at the centre of her eventual mutation into a Circle hero, the centrepiece of The Circle's increasingly pronounced ethos - "Secrets are Lies; Privacy is Theft". <br />
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As Mae eschews contact with Mercer, her parents and eventually Annie in favour of the all-knowing, all-seeing Circle, the tale becomes eerily familiar and worryingly prophetic.<br />
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Eggers writes with a fluid, clear style that immediately captured my attention and drew me in. He sets the scene perfectly. As a reader you can understand why Mae would be excited to work at The Circle. But as soon as I read that it was 'like Paradise' I knew it would be the very opposite. What is frustrating is that Mae never has this realization. Alarm bells started to ring for me during her first few days at work, when she was asked to transfer all of her personal information from her phone and her own laptop onto Circle devices. As Mae was informed that all of that information now existed in The Circle's cloud, accessible to anyone, I began to feel deeply uncomfortable - but she didn't blink. When Mae was told about the exciting work Francis was doing to ensure child safety, by installing chips into their BONES (!), neither she nor anyone else at The Circle paused to consider the consequences, or enunciate any concern - but as readers we are supremely aware that those children will grow to be adults whose every move can be monitored.<br />
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What is incredibly clever about Eggers' writing is that although we are able through our outsiders' lense to comprehend the problematic nature of The Circle's practices, each new privacy-killing scheme is introduced in the book by socratic conversation in which convincing, rational, utilitarian arguments are put forward in favour of The Circle's methods. It's unnerving, because we understand how multitudes of people might be persuaded by the same arguments. <br />
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For example: <em>Don't you want your neighbourhood to be safe? Wouldn't you rather sacrifice some of your own privacy for the privilege of knowing without a doubt that your family and your home were always safe? </em><br />
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Or:<em> Oh, you're concerned about your information being made public? Why? What have you got to hide?</em><br />
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It is the same ploy that has been used over the past ten years to persuade us to give up all kinds of civil liberties. <em>Isn't the sacrifice of a stranger viewing your nude body worthwhile if it means safety in the skies? Isn't the safety of our civilians worth the annoyance of the government listening in on our phone calls?</em> <br />
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If we have already given up these freedoms, what's to say we might not be amenable to giving up more, as Eggers predicts? <br />
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About three quarters of the way through the book I became frustrated. Various metaphors are drawn that are awkward and condescending. A few major events felt unrealistic to me - or rather, Mae's unquestioning response to them felt unrealistic. I also found Mae as a character to be thoroughly unlikeable. The speed with which she turns her back on her family and her friends, her narcissism and selfishness were not endearing. And I found the ending of the book less satisfying than I had hoped (but this may be because I wanted to feel some optimism, and really - an apocalyptic book such as this should not end on an optimistic note or what's the point?).<br />
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But in the grand scheme of things, all of these are minor faults. <br />
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The truth is that since putting the book down I have been more aware of the way technology is infiltrating every part of our lives. It is difficult to keep the book from crossing my mind when I 'check in' on Facebook or see advertisements heralding new social media developments. I keep wanting to talk to people about it. Eggers' style is disarmingly breezy, so that it is not until one sets the book down that one suddenly realises how profound he has been. Some critics have suggested that Eggers is undeserving of praise because none of this is new - we all realise that we are fighting a losing battle against new technology. To those critics I say: Sure. But that doesn't mean it's something we should not be urged to consider, it doesn't mean it's unnecessary to shake the greater population out of its complacency or ask ourselves what we intend to do about it. As the great Ferris Bueller famously said, life moves pretty fast. If we don't do something about this now, it may soon be too late. <br />
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<strong>Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5</strong>. This is a book that is worth more than the story within it. I am certain it will become a classic of our age. A real conversation-starter, you will be desperate for people around you to read it so you can discuss it - perfect for bookclubs. <br />
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<strong>Notes and noteable passages:</strong><br />
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- Eggers is occasionally very funny. I had to clamp my lips shut to stop myself from waking everyone in the household with laughter when I first read the passage between Mae and Francis upon their first meeting: <br />
<em>'"This is my first day," Mae noted. </em><br />
<em>"No way."</em><br />
<em>And then Mae, who intended to say, "I shit you not," instead decided to innovate, but something got garbled during her verbal innovation, and she uttered the words "I fuck you not," knowing almost instantly that she would remember these words, and hate herself for them, for decades to come.'</em><br />
- I like Annie, who expresses herself in surprisingly original ways - to Mae, for example: '<em>"You're like part human, part rainbow."'</em><br />
- This is a very accessible book, which I think is a good thing for a text which Eggers obviously wants as many people as possible to read. Nevertheless, his skill as a writer is clear. Some of his descriptions are delightfully original.<br />
- I coudn't decide whether it was because Eggers was a man that he believed Mae would accept such unsatisfactory sex on a regular basis or whether it was just another indicator of the level to which she had descended - that it was preferable to her to be with a man she actually finds detestable and have company, than to be free of him but alone. Sadly I think many women make this kind of sacrifice even without the daily pressure of complete transparency.<br />
- Mercer's outcries occasionally felt forced, but what he says is so crucial and so relevant even for today's society:<br />
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"<em>Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication... No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food</em>."<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-86587017770475031202014-04-30T14:26:00.000-07:002014-04-30T14:26:58.717-07:00Ian McEwan - The Cement Garden<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmL1X6mJMWn2TX3dUnH1UkMgd3Gl7UWD8nsmsPkh6UWOgFTt1AWVZCti7yiywIvgVYgzTYXs5lOI8hqsTk6RaSgD6CaibxKMOSKS7Tg_lT0ikEqzFtVbumdlXeA6_lXmj_20so9RUH1IU/s1600/CementGarden.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmL1X6mJMWn2TX3dUnH1UkMgd3Gl7UWD8nsmsPkh6UWOgFTt1AWVZCti7yiywIvgVYgzTYXs5lOI8hqsTk6RaSgD6CaibxKMOSKS7Tg_lT0ikEqzFtVbumdlXeA6_lXmj_20so9RUH1IU/s1600/CementGarden.jpg" /></a>I have mentioned before that I'm a huge McEwan fan. At the start of this year I had three of his novels left to read, of which The Cement Garden was one. It's a funny thing, reading through a favourite author's entire works. On the one hand, the goal is obviously to finish - to read them all. On the other hand, there is a reluctance to finish because then there will be no more of something one loves. Luckily, McEwan has a new book out later this year, so reading one of his earlier novels and ticking it off my TBR (to be read) list seemed appropriate.<br />
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The Cement Garden was McEwan's first novel. The publication of this and his second novel, The Comfort of Strangers, caused him to be nicknamed 'Ian Macabre', and rightly so. Like many of his works, this is a seriously disturbing book. It is narrated by Jack, one of four children whose parents both die early in the novel. Various critics have suggested there is a strong Oedipal subtext running through the story, which is referenced in the first line ("I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way") and realised in the final scene, which I will not describe for fear of revealing spoilers. It is indeed plausible that McEwan drew on Freud to create the dark undercurrent that runs throughout, because the book is deeply unsettling in a way that is difficult to precisely define. <br />
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Jack is the second eldest of four siblings who decide after their mother has died that they don't want to publicise what has happened and risk being put in care, which would almost certainly result in their separation from one another. The pact they make to ensure things stay as they are, and the way this pact is physically manifested, haunts the rest of the book and taints it with a clammy sense of unease. <br />
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McEwan is at his best here; no word is out of place. His writing is visceral, nuanced, the heat of the summer palpable, the sloth of the children in their humid, festering surrounds somehow gripping. <br />
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As a mother, I found many of the passages worrying. Is this how all children feel or are these very unusual children? Tom, the youngest of the four, reacts to his mother's death with obvious grief, but this is soon overwhelmed by his concerns about being bullied at school. He goes through a phase of wanting to be a girl, and another of wanting to be a baby, which Julie, the eldest child, gladly entertains. The other children do not appear to react to the death of their parents with any grief or sorrow - instead, for example, Jack describes feelings of elation and hysterical joy at his newfound freedom. But we glimpse through Jack's narrative lense various activities that might hint at deeper feelings underneath: Sue, the younger girl, keeps a diary in which she records imaginary conversations with her mum. Julie occasionally lets Tom into their dead mother's room, which she has preserved behind a locked door, where he lies in her bed and tries on her clothes. <br />
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Jack himself allows his personal hygiene to fall entirely by the wayside, and we are treated to lengthy passages about his multiplying spots, sweaty clothes, dirty bedlinen and his greasy hair. This is in direct contrast to his sister Julie, whose beauty grows throughout the book, alongside Jack's illicit but pronounced attraction to her. From early on the children are shown playing 'doctor', a game which as adults we tend to regard as learning stripped of sexuality. McEwan, of course, does not let us off so easily. Sexuality is rife in the childhood he describes, and this too is discomfiting.<br />
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Although this is not a scary book, I found it difficult to read after lights out. McEwan's genius lies in unnerving us at some profound, subconsious level so that we are left on edge without quite knowing why: there are no monsters here. Instead it is the monsters within all of us that he depicts so well. His use of language is perfection, the characters vibrantly alive and the plot winds inexorably towards the inevitable finale.<br />
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<strong>Overall assessment: 4 out of 5.</strong> I know I should probably give it 5, as this really is McEwan at the top of his game. But I find it difficult to award 5 stars to a book that leaves me feeling so disturbed, and where I find the characters so nasty. I also tend to prefer the work McEwan does when he is exploring philosophical questions of art versus science, belief versus rationality (see Saturday, Amsterdam, Enduring Love). But if you are looking for a short read that will have you biting your nails and squirming in your seat, there's no doubt this is it.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-80996047693613153532014-04-24T04:49:00.003-07:002014-04-24T10:01:02.563-07:00Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction - ShortlistEarlier this month the shortlist for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction was announced. A. M. Homes was the winner of this prize in 2013. As you will know if you've been reading the blog for a while, she was one of my favourite discoveries last year. In fact she is attending the Sydney Writers' Festival next month and I am gutted I won't be there to see her. But I digress.<br />
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The point is, if A. M. Homes was awarded the Baileys Women's Prize for May We Be Forgiven, it makes me curious about the books that have been nominated this year - maybe among them lies another gem (or two)?<br />
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With no further ado, the nominees are:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Americanah</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Hannah Kent – Burial Rites</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Jhumpa Lahiri – The Lowland</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Audrey Magee – The Undertaking</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Eimear McBride – A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: #303030;">Donna Tartt – The Goldfinch</span></div>
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Such a great line-up. And I'm also impressed with the choice of judges this year, especially the fact that Caitlin Moran is among them (I love her!). When I read this quote, from Denise Mina, it made me think I would like to sit down and have a drink with these women:<br />
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“<i>This list of six shortlisted books is a source of such pride to us judges, you might think we had done something more noble that just curling up, reading and loving them. This shortlist seemed to make itself known because we chose those books that we really, really loved. Not the ones we admired technically, or the cleverest ones, but those books that made us yelp with joy or sob on planes, the ones we’ve bought for friends and couldn’t wait to tell people about.<br /><br />“WE CHOSE BOOKS THAT WE REALLY, REALLY LOVED”<br /><br />I think I can speak for all of the judges when I say that we’re so proud of the shortlist of six books, we’ve begun to talk as if we had some hand in producing them. That’s wrong. We didn’t. We feel that sense of ownership because great books are beguiling and make readers feel proprietorial. It’s not just that the books are individually fantastic, but the span of the shortlist, in subject matter, style and tone, is so textured and the standard so high, choosing just one as the winner will be like choosing between your children. If you decide to do the Full Marathon and read all six before we announce the winner on the 4th June, I’ll bet you feel the way we do. If you don’t have time for six, and pick three for the Half Marathon, let us know how you get on, keep us updated and tell us who you think should win, if you can!</i>”<br />
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- Denise Mina, WriterBaileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014 Judge </div>
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Isn't that brilliant? "We chose books that we really, really loved" - shouldn't that be exactly how book prizes are judged?</div>
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So the winner is to be announced on the 4th of June. Given that The Goldfinch alone is 771 pages of book (I just went and checked in the lovely hardcover I was given for Christmas), it will certainly be a challenge to read all of these books by that date. But Burial Rites, The Lowland and The Goldfinch were already on my list for 2014. I'm going to add the rest and try to read all of the shortlisted nominees this year, if not by June 4. </div>
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Who will join me for this delightful challenge? Who's in?<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-89161286850666576172014-04-22T18:56:00.000-07:002014-04-23T06:11:38.637-07:00Jess Walter - Beautiful Ruins<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSmyF5QaFhT-63A22D96Rty0-DT4Pu0R5qjPrpms7yap6zs-sMxiIJB3NaXD_IK_0JoTwWuVPug5Ln7pkkvJluHU9F7oh8rabZss9qJrI1ojB3F_p0VGW0bjv60TblljF9veO1nC_3Co4/s1600/Beautiful+Ruins.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSmyF5QaFhT-63A22D96Rty0-DT4Pu0R5qjPrpms7yap6zs-sMxiIJB3NaXD_IK_0JoTwWuVPug5Ln7pkkvJluHU9F7oh8rabZss9qJrI1ojB3F_p0VGW0bjv60TblljF9veO1nC_3Co4/s1600/Beautiful+Ruins.png" /></a></div>
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This is the first book I 'read' on Audible. It had been sitting on my bedside table in hard copy for an awfully long time, unread. In fact, worse than that, it traveled with me from Australia, throughout Malaysia and Europe, to arrive with us in Toronto, without me having read more than the first chapter. What a waste! It is truly such a fun book I'm surprised I didn't get into it during our travels. I think the reason I didn't, though, is that it's one of those books in which the narrator changes from chapter to chapter. As a result, the story jumps around considerably. In this case the shifting nature of the narration works, but initially I resisted it. I like settling into a story. If the narrator, the setting, and the time period change too frequently, the flow of reading is seriously interrupted. Each chapter is like starting again.<br />
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When I downloaded Audible, this was my first purchase. And it was a perfect book to listen to. The narrative flow didn't matter as much out loud - it became more like a movie. Interestingly, we are accustomed to switching quickly between disjointed scenes in performative art forms. It doesn't feel as uncomfortable as it sometimes does on the page.<br />
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As I mentioned in my previous post on <a href="http://bibliophilicdistractions.blogspot.ca/2014/03/audible.html" target="_blank">audio books</a>, listening to a book rather than reading it adds a new dimension. The interpretation of the book by the person who records it is vital to one's enjoyment as a 'reader'. In this case, the narration was done by Eduardo Ballerini, who was unknown to me. He had a serious challenge on his hands. The story of Beautiful Ruins moves fluidly across continents and time periods. The many nationalities and corollary accents include Italian, American, Irish, English, and Russian. And Ballerini handled all of this very well. So well, in fact, that I giggled to myself frequently while listening - the narrative often succeeded in absorbing me to the extent that I forgot I was in public. <br />
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In spite of the rather garish looking cover, Beautiful Ruins is not a chick lit offering. It is a sweeping tale, covering a period from the 1960s until present-day, in places as diverse as Hollywood and remote coastal Italy, and featuring a wide range of protagonists including the charismatic Richard Burton.</div>
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The story starts in 1962, when beautiful American movie starlet Dee Moray arrives by boat in the remote (and fictional) coastal village of Porto Vergogna. Local hotelier Pasquale watches as the glamorous blonde steps onto shore. Nothing so exciting has ever happened before in his life. </div>
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Many years later, a now elderly Pasquale arrives at a studio in Los Angeles, looking for the woman he fell in love with so many years before. He encounters a man he has met before, the gruff movie producer Michael Deane, who Walter paints as a deliberate caricature of Hollywood absurdity. His face has had so much cosmetic work done he looks "<i>like a 9-year-old Filipino girl"</i>. This kind of descriptive vigour is one of the strengths of the book - it's <i>funny</i>. Like really funny, laugh out-loud funny. Funnier than you think it will be, and at the most unexpected times - although it's difficult for me to say whether I would have found it quite so entertaining had I not had the benefit of Ballerini's take on Walter's script. And I use the word 'script' deliberately - in some ways, this does read like a script. I can see this as a movie and I guess I'm not alone, because I believe it has already been made into one, to be released later in 2014. </div>
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So much happens in this book that it is quite impossible to compress into a succint review. Walter takes us through the travails of filming the epic Cleopatra in Rome, to the tempestuous relationship between Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, to a washed-up former drug addict's attempts to reinvigorate his music career through comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. We meet a writer pitching his script, an assistant producer on the day she might quit her dream job, a novelist whose single story idea takes him back again and again to the last days of 'his' World War II. At its heart, yes, this is a love story. But it is so much more than that. </div>
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Walter is a good enough writer to pull all of this off with aplomb. It is not high literature, as such, but each character is skilfully portrayed and the many threads of the story are tied together in a satisfying finale. Beautiful Ruins left me thinking I would eagerly read whatever Walter wrote next. Having said that, I am not so keen that I will run out to find his previous five novels and devour them.</div>
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<strong>Overall assessment: </strong>A great read, well written, imaginative. <strong>4 out of 5</strong>. <br />
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<b>Notes on reading with Audible:</b> As I said above, this book was really funny. Unfortunately, because I listened to it in audio form, I don't have highlighted passages to take me back through this dense novel and pick out favourite (or problematic) bits. Sometimes days would go by where I couldn't find time to listen to my book, and I would read something else instead. Sometimes I would pick up the hard copy version of this novel in order to re-read a passage, or to remind myself of something that happened. It was an unusual reading experience for me, and it took me much longer to get through this book than had I just persisted with the paper version. Having said that, I'm glad I listened to it - the voices will stay with me, and I do believe that Ballerini's performance added something to my enjoyment of the book. But having the hard copy handy as a companion to the audio book was key.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-62963062994902247882014-04-20T06:54:00.000-07:002014-04-20T06:54:07.291-07:00Vale Gabriel Garcia Marquez<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXUs34uI3SKDG-Jtuah-ab7kPXwPV-4F_V1_-C3WFMmwh3Vm9OjxTC6bUvAKPl3vHt8CXZgvv5G4EpwIWrR79hyphenhyphencaxwpff0nZbnlY60fOgyTkoxlGwbo5gapE_HZkVOmHdQwMaFdJuZRo/s1600/Marquez.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXUs34uI3SKDG-Jtuah-ab7kPXwPV-4F_V1_-C3WFMmwh3Vm9OjxTC6bUvAKPl3vHt8CXZgvv5G4EpwIWrR79hyphenhyphencaxwpff0nZbnlY60fOgyTkoxlGwbo5gapE_HZkVOmHdQwMaFdJuZRo/s1600/Marquez.jpg" height="320" width="256" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25px;"><em>Gabriel García Márquez in Mexico City on March 29, 2004. © The Richard Avedon Foundation. From The New Yorker.</em></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25px;">How sad I was to learn this week that Gabriel Garcia Marquez had died. He was truly one of my favourite writers. I started reading his work in high school, when our curriculum included the book of stories, Leaf Storm. I loved it so much I graduated to One Hundred Years of Solitude and then Love in the Time of Cholera, which remains one of my favourite books of all time. Since then I have tried to read as much of his work as possible. Most recently (several years ago) I read his novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 25px;">I loved Marquez's writing, but he also introduced me more generally to the world of Latin American fiction, and to magic realism. Marquez was my jumping off point into Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, Laura Esquival, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda. And my mother, a great reader and a great influence on me, also loved Marquez. It was her copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude that I read, complete with her pencilled-in, ease-of-reference family tree covering the title pages of the book. That book contains one of the great opening lines in all of literature: </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”</span></i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 25px;">It's right up there with the opening lines of Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Perfection. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 25px;">Hearing of Marquez's death was a shock, for some reason, even though he was 87 years old. In honour of his writing and his life, I am going to turn back to his work in the next few months. I would love to re-read Love in the Time of Cholera, but I would also like to read some of his work I never got around to - like The Autumn of the Patriarch. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 25px;">Who is with me? Let's have a Marquez love-fest. I will post details when I have decided which book of his to read first.</span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-82757723239551739732014-04-16T04:41:00.001-07:002014-04-16T04:41:30.646-07:00Christina Baker Kline - Orphan Train<div align="left" class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFY98io0-3eb_2K7MCAuqYbrodR0w_ZPkcSFAap93us8eAUjXa_BMLJ49NBP4z-m_dmJs3UGw1m23VyJHdkM52QrmlMTvSkWat0HyaKUsNdu_QWoDfIYxHa0-GcsBqihnkVdA6wZvNFeA/s1600/Orphan+train.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFY98io0-3eb_2K7MCAuqYbrodR0w_ZPkcSFAap93us8eAUjXa_BMLJ49NBP4z-m_dmJs3UGw1m23VyJHdkM52QrmlMTvSkWat0HyaKUsNdu_QWoDfIYxHa0-GcsBqihnkVdA6wZvNFeA/s1600/Orphan+train.jpg" /></a>Between 1853 and 1929, 250,000 orphaned, abandoned or homeless children were transported on trains from urban centres in the U.S. to foster homes in rural areas of the midwest as part of a questionable welfare initiative. The founders of the orphan train program aimed to eradicate the existing system of institutional care which they believed stunted, rather than supported, children, and instead place them with families. It was what led to today's system of organised foster care. Unfortunately, the orphan train movement was insufficiently regulated and deeply flawed, and the families who sought to adopt children from the trains were often seeking free child labour, or worse, rather than a child to love and call their own.<br />
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This is the extraordinary history Christina Baker Kline draws on for her novel. Sadly it is a mediocre book, one that might have been better suited for a young adult audience, and Baker Kline fails to depict the fascinating phenomenon of the trains in sufficient depth to educate or enlighten a reader.<br />
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This was the first book chosen for the 2014 reading year of my Canadian bookclub. We sat down over dinner one night in February and mapped out our books for the year, a feat involving creative organisation, entertaining debate and numerous voting rounds. Most of the women enjoyed the novel well enough, and I admit that I was its harshest critic. But my pet reading peeve is poor writing, and Baker Kline's writing is weak. By 'poor' or 'weak' writing I mean that the obvious is frequently stated, metaphors are drawn that don't really work, and events that should rightfully be shown are told, even glossed over. <br />
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Orphan Train tells the story of Molly, a 17 year old foster-child in modern-day Maine, who is sentenced to community service for stealing a library book, and Vivian, the woman to whose service Molly commits. It soon turns out that Molly and Vivian have much in common, Vivian having been orphaned at a young age. Vivian, of course, was one of the children shipped away from New York on an orphan train, and her tale of being tossed from foster home to foster home in rural Minnesota is appropriately bleak. The narration moves from Vivian's story to Molly's and back again, gradually revealing the secrets of Vivian's past as Molly's future becomes clear. Unfortunately Molly's story is less nuanced and far less interesting than Vivian's and it is hard to know why Baker Kline felt the need to tell the more interesting story of Vivian's life through this contemporary lense. Again, it feels as though she is using Molly to appeal to a younger generation of readers. If the book had been marketed as YA, I might have approached it differently, but for an adult novel it comes across as sappy and sentimental and a little condesending. <br />
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Nevertheless, I'm glad I read this and I'm glad to have learnt a little about the orphan trains, even if most of what I actually learnt came in researching around the novel rather than from the novel itself. For those of you looking for a light diversion, this may well be it - it has the feel of chick lit at times, especially in the latter half of Vivian's story, which is happier than her orphan train beginnings, and Baker Kline does succeed in getting her readers to keep turning the pages. All of the women in my book club were agreed that the novel became rather addictive in the second half, in the same way that a romance does when one is wondering who the heroine will end up marrying.<br />
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<strong>Overall assessment: 2.5 out of 5</strong>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-75488549772656868602014-04-15T13:16:00.002-07:002014-04-15T13:16:48.691-07:00The Gift of Rare Books<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjThf00S2io8zh0GDCaQRPSoDT_XKbf_bpl18lQoc6OuEkmIBe71lnptof1Jsf28eTD4ULQ9sCgcxPHxybouJqobSHYwoO5u5nmKrTGmjM8Caj_PAaddImpDU_W4WCBkgBVa1DhtqaVqPM/s1600/IMG_2868.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjThf00S2io8zh0GDCaQRPSoDT_XKbf_bpl18lQoc6OuEkmIBe71lnptof1Jsf28eTD4ULQ9sCgcxPHxybouJqobSHYwoO5u5nmKrTGmjM8Caj_PAaddImpDU_W4WCBkgBVa1DhtqaVqPM/s1600/IMG_2868.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a>I started writing this post months ago. It pertains to something that happened on my birthday, back in November 2013. So, you know, take that into account. I decided to publish this rather than scrap it because what I am really saying is this: I have become the kind of book-loving nerd who attends antiquarian book fairs and collects signed first editions. There is a passage in The Storied Life of A. J. Ficry where A.J. says that in the end, acquisitions don't matter - even the first edition E. A. Poe manuscript he treasured didn't matter. Only the people you love matter. And I really do agree with this. But I also believe that there is some joy to be derived, during life, from collecting things that give you pleasure. </div>
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So, for my birthday, months ago now, Bibliohubby went to significant trouble to track down bookstores in Toronto that carry rare books. He did the initial research without telling me, and then stumbled across an event that was happening on my birthday weekend, which he knew I would enjoy. And so it was that the four of us set out one Saturday in November to attend the Toronto International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Bibliohubby took Iggy downstairs to the learning centre whilst Lulu and I browsed (with Lulu on my chest in the Babybjorn, that most wonderful of inventions, leaving my hands free).<br />
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I have never before been to such an event but after this experience, I know I will be going again. Bookstores from all over the world were represented by small stalls, in which the rarest of books were displayed. Books from Hemingway's private library, inscribed to other writers. Original illustrations by E. H. Shepard from Winnie-the-Pooh books. First editions of classic novels. All manner of precious manuscripts. Textual history writ large. Amongst the stalls I honed in on two in particular, which held books by some of my favourite writers. That day we purchased a signed first edition of Alice Munro's Still Life and another signed first edition by Paul Auster - Yippee! I went home and placed the books carefully upon my new bookshelves.<br />
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A few weeks later, Bibliohubby arranged another surprise, taking me to one of the bookshops I had been introduced to at the fair. When we walked through the door, this is what we saw hung upon the wall in the vestibule:<br />
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"<em>To care about words, to have a stake in what's written, to believe in the power of books, this overwhelms the rest and beside it, one's life becomes very small</em>."</div>
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- Paul Auster</div>
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Those of you who know me well will know that Auster is my favourite writer. One of the quality assessment tests I give to new bookstores is whether they stock Auster's books and, if so, how many. To walk into this particular shop and find his words on the wall made it clear immediately that it was a place I would love.<br />
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Contact Editions is one of those bookstores you might want to live in. It is cosy and eclectic, hung with literary posters and prints and decorated with all manner of interesting bits and bobs, with a Chesterfield to sit and read in, green banker's lamps and, of course, walls lined with books. It is run by the most delightful couple, with the poetic names of Wesley and Lucia. I feel like a cat should live in the store too, a fat orange cat curled up on the sofa, with a bushy tail that slowly wags its disapproval when the door is left open to drafts.<br />
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Again we walked out with books, a signed Salman Rushdie, another signed Auster and Wesley threw in an additional first edition Auster at no extra cost. <br />
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I know that acquisitions are not what makes the world turn. I know that the words within a book are what matter, rather than the frame that holds those words and ideas. But the lovely books we bought in November adorn my shelves now, and I can't help it - they make me happy. <br />
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I am a book nerd, yes I am, and I make no apology for it. <br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-58394611628209429802014-04-14T13:56:00.000-07:002014-04-15T07:00:48.053-07:00Sue Monk Kidd - The Invention of Wings<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7t5K-Mzzff2dLwLX86oYQayON5uChPWoNHOdzbEwnSjVjX0InIgpo3i-9zuGfR162i7k096eYg0onisufVwFr6uQpg1wcvls7QCQZSke0pWxT6MqAybuoTqNxf6tgdqXjZWgancU68lE/s1600/Invention+of+Wings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7t5K-Mzzff2dLwLX86oYQayON5uChPWoNHOdzbEwnSjVjX0InIgpo3i-9zuGfR162i7k096eYg0onisufVwFr6uQpg1wcvls7QCQZSke0pWxT6MqAybuoTqNxf6tgdqXjZWgancU68lE/s1600/Invention+of+Wings.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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I was so excited when I heard that Sue Monk Kidd had a new book out. I absolutely loved The Secret Life of Bees, and from the early reviews I read of this one I knew it would be good. I'm never quite sure whether the fact that Oprah likes a book means I will love it or hate it, but this time when I read about her enthusiasm for The Invention of Wings, the things she said about it made me hopeful it would be a case of the former.<br />
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As with The Secret Life of Bees, Kidd tackles a big subject here, writing about slaves in South Carolina. Loosely based on the true story of one of a pair of sisters from Charleston, who campaigned for emancipation, racial equality and women's rights, Kidd creates a world grounded in the household of the Grimkes, a large slave-owning family. Sarah Grimke is the privileged young daughter to this family, whose speech impediment and liberal conscience are born out of witnessing the gruesome flogging of one of the family's slaves. For her 11th birthday, Sarah is gifted with a slave girl her own age. Already immensely uncomfortable with the notion of slavery, she rebels against the gift, but Hetty - 'Handful' - remains enslaved. <br />
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Against all odds, the girls become fast friends, and the friendship that blossoms between them ultimately changes both of them forever. Sarah overcomes her stutter and her traditional Southern family's values to become a woman whose voice is heard across the nation. Handful, whose lively intelligence and fierce resolve stem from her mother Charlotte, the talented (and rebellious) seamstress to the family Grimke, becomes a key figure in a planned slave rebellion.<br />
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Sarah and Handful share the narration of the story as it winds from their childhood towards adulthood, when each becomes an influential force in America's history. And through these two strong figures, Kidd creates a compelling portrait of pre-emancipation life. During my reading, Charleston became a vivid place, from the docks to the industrial centre to the plantations and white-washed properties. The fences - literal and figurative - that surround both Sarah and Handful became almost tangible to me, so that I found myself filled with genuine anger and frustration at the walls that American society put up around women generally, and around slaves specifically. <br />
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In the first chapter of this book I was certain I would end up rating it five stars. The writing is extraordinarily powerful and evocative - just stunning, really. The central characters are immediately sympathetic, the story gripping. I read various passages out loud to my husband, convinced I had found one of my books of the year.<br />
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Unfortunately, the intensity of the first few chapters is not sustained as the story evolves. Kidd slips into a more sentimental style of story-telling and the book loses something as a result. However, the characters live on in my mind and the story is wonderfully rich. The realistic depiction of some of the horrors of slavery is appropriately horrifying - I had to put the book down, from time to time, to recover from some of the more gruesome episodes. I was moved to tears several times and desperately wanted Sarah, Handful and Charlotte to succeed in their endeavours. This is a big book which will resonate with you long after you turn the final page.<br />
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<b>Overall assessment:</b> This was on its way to being my first 5 star book of the year, but by the end I had re-assessed somewhat. Still a fabulous <b>4.5 out of 5</b>.<br />
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<strong>Favourite passages:</strong> There really are too many too mention, but here are a few.<br />
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"<em>It's mother, however, who descends the back steps into the yard. Binah and the other house slaves are clumped behind her, moving with cautious, synchronized steps as if they're a single creature, a centipede crossing an unprotected space</em>."<br />
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"<em>I would rove down the hallway to the front alcove where I could see the water in the harbor float to the ocean and the ocean roll on till it sloshed against the sky. Nothing could hold a glorybound picture to it. First time I saw it, my feet hopped in place and I lifted my hand over my head and danced. That's when I got true religion. I didn't know to call it religion back then, didn't know Amen from what-when, I just knew something came into me that made me feel the water belonger to me. I would say, that's my water out there</em>."<br />
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"<em>She laid the book down and came where I was standing by the chimney place and put her arms round me. It was hard to know where things stood. People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn't know for sure whether Miss Sarah's feelings came from love or guilt. I didn't know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing. That day, our hearts were pure as they would ever get</em>."<br />
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"<em>I saw then what I hadn't seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I'd lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I'd grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There's a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it</em>."<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-30356876596268640132014-04-13T08:20:00.000-07:002014-04-14T16:38:30.370-07:00Gabrielle Zevin - The Storied Life of A. J. Ficry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjIkNOmPD3gnFDZu_YNJOfgYLWj3cPqUFWXQ3GnMn5EsAxWS9JI8lGJp4bALqKU8yAtxza1yYwvWrG-NS-zk3DrBDSPqA1yZbfZyTAkVFcgSGyqvD4aNKDdjcRrj7VaBZfXC9PsZMUydw/s1600/Storied+life.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjIkNOmPD3gnFDZu_YNJOfgYLWj3cPqUFWXQ3GnMn5EsAxWS9JI8lGJp4bALqKU8yAtxza1yYwvWrG-NS-zk3DrBDSPqA1yZbfZyTAkVFcgSGyqvD4aNKDdjcRrj7VaBZfXC9PsZMUydw/s1600/Storied+life.jpg" height="320" width="216" /></a></div>
I had never heard of this book, or of Gabrielle Zevin, until I read the glowing review on one of my favourite book blogs, <a href="http://www.lovelaughterinsanity.com/" target="_blank">Love, Laughter and a Touch of Insanity</a>. I was looking for something light and short to read in between more substantial books and this looked like it would do the trick.<br />
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I have just now finished reading it and wanted to sit down and write a review before the magic wore off. Because this truly is a little treasure of a book. One that I will read again, and which I will keep on my book shelf and take down from time to time like an old friend.<br />
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Zevin succeeds in creating a wonderful world of people who come to matter greatly to the reader, whose fates we care about and whose legacies we will remember.<br />
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A. J. Ficry owns a bookstore on Alice Island. As the book opens, he is a widow slowly drinking himself to death and sinking his business to the ground. Through a bizarre turn of events, a baby is left in his bookstore, and his decaying heart blooms as he grapples with the basics of childcare ("<i>She's a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times.</i>"). A. J. adopts Maya, and the love he feels for his daughter restores him. After reading a book left for him by a quirky publisher's agent named Amelia, he finds his thoughts returning to her messy blonde hair and gauche galoshes, and realises that life may yet hold more in stock for him than he had anticipated.<br />
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The quiet world of Island Books is quaint and intellectual and peaceful. Although the characters here do not lead big lives, they are lives filled with love and joy, the point being that this is the essence of a good life. Ownership, materiality, employment - none of this matters, as long as one is blessed with love.<br />
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Zevin gets the pacing of the story just right, and peppers the narrative with literary references that will please any bibliophile. Each chapter begins with a note from A. J. to his daughter, a reading recommendation, and through this brief correspondence the reader is able to guess at what twists and turns lie ahead for A. J. Although this epistolary device could have come across as contrived, Zevin's deft hand prevents it from interrupting the story in a problematic way. The writing is soft and unobtrusive, and, at times, surprisingly humorous - for example, when A. J. tells his friend, Chief of Police Lambiase, that "<i>Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no chance but to say you liked it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life</i>." Or when, upon going for a run, A. J. notes that "<i>There are many challenges to long-distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put one's house keys</i>." Or when A.J.'s mother gives Maya an e-reader and he says: "<i>I would rather you have bought my daughter something less destructive like a crack pipe</i>."<br />
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<b>Overall assessment: 4 out of 5</b>. I really enjoyed this book, and it will stay with me. A crowd-pleaser. If you love books and bookstores, this is a must-read.<br />
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<b>Favourite passages:</b> "<i>A. J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it's love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother.</i>"<br />
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"<i>We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone</i>."<br />
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"<i>We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on</i>."<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2204461733858957093.post-74063164724124149962014-03-22T17:54:00.003-07:002014-04-03T13:57:33.736-07:00AUDIBLE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzoWu33vwEQT1KzlAXST8LBciDkABpqR4Wgd0rFIukbNRIbvIO0qaR-uPwHkK3DMFWL2zIpmSBfKlvqNIA7T0er1VnbzvDp04HVsOA1pZP_Rex7tbRl5kNEaBMLZjlLQJwW4QPsWQL5-o/s1600/Audiobooks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzoWu33vwEQT1KzlAXST8LBciDkABpqR4Wgd0rFIukbNRIbvIO0qaR-uPwHkK3DMFWL2zIpmSBfKlvqNIA7T0er1VnbzvDp04HVsOA1pZP_Rex7tbRl5kNEaBMLZjlLQJwW4QPsWQL5-o/s1600/Audiobooks.jpg" height="238" width="320" /></a></div>
As you all know, I am an avid reader of books both on paper and in electronic form. Until recently I had not thought to add audio books to my rotation. I'm not sure why. They make all the sense in the world. For someone who used to walk to school whilst reading a book (suffering occasional bumps to the head from encounters with lamp posts and the like), and who, as a child, habitually brushed her teeth with a book propped up behind the faucet, you would think this form of reading would be a no-brainer. I guess I thought it was all terribly complicated - figuring out where to buy audio-books, how to listen to them and so on. God, I sound old.<br />
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When Audible starting advertising through Amazon and I learned that it was not only easy to download audio-books, but that I could do so using my existing Amazon account and that, moreover, as an Amazon user I would receive one book credit free each month - well, it seemed silly not to try it.<br />
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I started last month and have almost finished 'reading' my second Audible book. The first was fiction and I deliberately chose non-fiction for my second, so as to better evaluate the overall experience.<br />
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And my initial assessment? Basically: HOW HAVE I NOT DONE THIS BEFORE????!!!<br />
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Finally, I can read while I'm driving and while I'm walking to the gym. Audio books conveniently fill the gaps in my time-poor life, making me more efficient.<br />
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Recently, even though I've been home with the kids, I have been finding it difficult to fit in a lot of reading. I am honestly in awe of women whose job it is to look after children all day long (their own or other people's) - it is more relentless than any paid job I have ever had. With just one baby to look after I had pockets of time to myself. But with two very little children at home, the opportunity to read while they nap or 'sleep while they sleep' (to quote the common advice given to new mothers) falls away completely. Generally, one of them will wake just as the other goes down. Or else neither naps properly because one seems intent on creating a large amount of noise just as the other starts to droop sleepily on the couch.<br />
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Since downloading Audible, my behaviour has changed in subtle but noticeable ways. I find that I will now look for reasons to load up the kids into the car and drive somewhere, anywhere, so that I can fit in some 'reading' time (the kids like it too, by the way; the narration combined with the motion of the car lulls them into soft sleep). I have taken up walking with my daughter in her stroller again, in spite of the bitter cold of this first Canadian winter, and these walks have become far longer than they once were - another time around the block means I get to find out what happens in the next chapter!<br />
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This newfound efficiency, a whole new level of multi-tasking, is the most wondrous aspect of listening to audiobooks.<br />
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Listening to a book rather than reading it also adds a new dimension: performance. The narrator is vital to the success of a particular audio-book. Luckily I have had good luck with the two I've experienced thus far. I will speak more to this in upcoming reviews, but I can imagine a bad narrator would seriously detract from one's enjoyment of a book.<br />
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There are downsides to this form of 'reading'. Continuity is a problem, for one. Even with my increased car journeys and walks, there have been periods of several days when I have not had the opportunity to crack open, as it were, the audio-book I was currently reading. This is not the case with hard copy or electronic books, which I make time for at night even if I can only read one, exhausted page at a time. Because of this continuity issue, and because listening is less conducive to intent concentration than the act of reading, I'm not convinced that I take in as much of the story or the language when I am listening to a book as I would were I reading it in other forms. With the novel that was my first Audible purchase, I ended up buying a hard copy version of the book too so that I could delve into it at home - but then I found that it was difficult to fast forward the audio version to precisely the point where I had left off reading the hard copy. I also really miss being able to flick back through actual pages to remind myself of a particular scene, or re-read a section. This is a problem for me with electronic books too, however.<br />
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In spite of these challenges, I will certainly keep using Audible. One thing I have discovered is that it helps me to read books that I might put down for one reason or another if I was reading the hard copy version. I might try to listen to some of the longer books I've been wanting to read but have put on the back-burner because of their size - Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, for example. Big books are hard to lug about, and these days, if I have one going on my Kindle, I'm likely to want a change halfway through and might read another book in between starting the lengthy tome and finishing it. Not great really, my reduced attention span, though probably an inevitable result of today's Twitter- and YouTube-fueled society.<br />
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But for precious books that I know I will truly love, I will be reading them on paper (or on screen) - or at least supplementing the audio experience with a hard copy version.<br />
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How about you, fellow readers? Have you tried audio books? How do you feel about them?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00346696568207377465noreply@blogger.com3