What I read in 2014

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.

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.

1. Eve in Hollywood - Amor Towles
2. Life After Life - Kate Atkinson
3. The Invention of Wings - Sue Monk Kidd
4. 11/22/63 - Stephen King
5. Beautiful Ruins - Jess Walter
6. The Reason I Jump - Naoki Higashida & David Mitchell
7. The Alchemist (re-read) - Paulo Coelho
8. Freakonomics - Stephen D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner
9. Orphan Train - Christina Baker Klein
10. Tempting Fate - Jane Green
11. Timbuktu - Paul Auster
12. The Circle - Dave Eggers
13. Barracuda - Christos Tsolkias
14. The Blazing World - Siri Hustvedt
15. The Children Act - Ian McEwan
16. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
17. The Woman Upstairs - Claire Messud
18. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler
19. I am America and So Can You! - Stephen Colbert
20. The Storied Life of A. J. Ficry - Gabrielle Zevin
21. The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
22. The Family Man - Elinor Lipman
23. The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith
24. Me Before You - JoJo Moyes
25. The Massey Murder (DNF) - Charlotte Gray
26. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce
27. The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells
28. We'll Always Have Paris - Jennifer Coburn
29. The One & Only - Emily Giffin
30. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour - Joshua Ferris
31. I am Having so Much Fun Here Without You - Courtney Maum
32. Summer House with Swimming Pool - Herman Koch
33. We Were Liars - E. Lockhart
34. Damage - Josephine Hart
35. This is Where I Leave You - Jonathan Tropper
36. Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief & Agile Introduction - Chris Sims
37. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
38. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
39. Not That Kind of Girl - Lena Dunham
40. The Rosie Effect - Graeme Simsion
41. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
42. Instructions for a Heatwave - Maggie O'Farrell
43. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
44. Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
45. Yes Please - Amy Poehler
46. Eleonor & Park - Rainbow Rowell
47. The Strange Library - Haruki Murakami
48. Landline - Rainbow Rowell
49. Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell
50. The Book of Joe - Jonathan Tropper

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 March 2013, 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.

And finally, referring back to a post discussing global literature, 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!

More to follow soon, I promise.

Bibliofilly x

Ian McEwan - The Children Act

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5 stars. I'm not sure why I hesitate to award it a higher rating. 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.

Claire Messud - The Woman Upstairs

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 "middle-age", 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. "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.".

Nora was born to a mother whose great dilemma had been "to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price." 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 "A Room of One's Own?", 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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 "spinsterly" is unnerving for those of us reading who are in her age group! I mean - "death is knocking"? For heaven's sakes!! I hope I have another 40 years left in me! Life ain't over yet, sweetheart!

Select quotes:

"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."

"But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive."

Herman Koch - Summer House with Swimming Pool

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Overall assessment: 3 out of 5. 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.

Stephen Colbert - I am America and So Can You!

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.

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.

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 acting, 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: "The biggest threat facing America today - next to socialized medicine, the Dyson vacuum cleaner, and the recumbent bicycle - is gay marriage." Or - "Ever have a nagging suspicion you're poor? I know my staff does."

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.

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.

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.

Overall assessment: 3 out of 5.

Pros: Laugh out-loud moments.

Cons: 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.

Did not Finish: Charlotte Grey's The Massey Murder

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.

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.

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.

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.

Example: "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.)"

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.

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.

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?

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.

Here, this is what it feels like to read this book:

"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."

And so on. Reading it was like listening to nails on a blackboard.

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.

Overall assessment: 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 1.5 out of 5.

Addendum: 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.

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 good 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.

Dave Eggers - The Circle

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 The New York Review of Books.

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.

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.

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.

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 messy (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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

For example: 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? 

Or: Oh, you're concerned about your information being made public? Why? What have you got to hide?

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. 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?

If we have already given up these freedoms, what's to say we might not be amenable to giving up more, as Eggers predicts?

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?).

But in the grand scheme of things, all of these are minor faults.

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.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. 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.

Notes and noteable passages:

- 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:
'"This is my first day," Mae noted.
"No way."
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.'
- I like Annie, who expresses herself in surprisingly original ways - to Mae, for example: '"You're like part human, part rainbow."'
- 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.
- 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.
- Mercer's outcries occasionally felt forced, but what he says is so crucial and so relevant even for today's society:

"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."

Ian McEwan - The Cement Garden

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5. 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.

Jess Walter - Beautiful Ruins

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.

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.

As I mentioned in my previous post on audio books, 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.

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.

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.

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 "like a 9-year-old Filipino girl". This kind of descriptive vigour is one of the strengths of the book - it's funny. 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. 

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. 

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.

Overall assessment: A great read, well written, imaginative. 4 out of 5. 

Notes on reading with Audible: 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.

Christina Baker Kline - Orphan Train



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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Overall assessment: 2.5 out of 5.

Sue Monk Kidd - The Invention of Wings

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Overall assessment: 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 4.5 out of 5.

Favourite passages: There really are too many too mention, but here are a few.

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

Gabrielle Zevin - The Storied Life of A. J. Ficry

I had never heard of this book, or of Gabrielle Zevin, until I read the glowing review on one of my favourite book blogs, Love, Laughter and a Touch of Insanity. I was looking for something light and short to read in between more substantial books and this looked like it would do the trick.

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.

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.

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 ("She's a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times."). 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.

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.

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 "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." Or when, upon going for a run, A. J. notes that "There are many challenges to long-distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put one's house keys." Or when A.J.'s mother gives Maya an e-reader and he says: "I would rather you have bought my daughter something less destructive like a crack pipe."

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5. 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.

Favourite passages: "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."

"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."

"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."

Dominic Knight - Man vs Child

I didn't review the first book I read by Dominic Knight (his first, Disco Boy) because I know the author. Not well, mind you, but still. It's always a bit tricky, reviewing a book on its merits and trying to separate it from one's personal knowledge of a writer. But I decided to put worry to one side after reading Man vs Child. The book engaged me and I wanted to write a review and decided it was silly not to simply because of personal affiliations. 

One thing I love about Knight's books is that they are unashamedly set in Sydney, Australia. Familiar bars and cafes and suburbs populate the narrative so that when I read this book as a newly settled Torontonian I could imagine myself back home. That's nice. Obviously it won't have the same resonance for people who don't or haven't lived in Sydney, but Knight's novels are a fun way to get a real glimpse of life in that city if you're interested. 

This is a book about a guy trying to make it in the world of stand-up comedy (day job: radio producer) and his relationship with a woman who has a baby, which changes his view on life and commitment and the notion of having kids. It's a funny book, genuinely funny, and made me laugh out loud a few times. The protagonist, 34-year-old Dan, is entirely believable and Knight's writing is confident and strong. I found the narrative addictive, particularly as Dan's radio production job starts to develop into something more exciting.

Like many 30-somethings, Dan finds that his social circle is shrinking as fellow singles hook up, get married, have babies and cease going out or (apparently) having any fun at all. Notwithstanding the pressure from his parents to tick all the right boxes and bring home some grandchildren, Dan is entirely uninterested in the prospect of procreating and can't understand his friends' fascination with their children's most banal activities. But when his old high school crush, Penny, walks back into his life, newly single and toting a toddler accessory, it doesn't take long for Dan to change his tune. Little Lloyd has a soft spot for Dan who suddenly gets how intoxicating it can be when a tiny human being regards you with love and adoration. As Dan's radio career develops and his stand-up takes off, he finds himself dreaming of a family life he had previously eschewed.

It's an absorbing story, a satisfying coming-of-age tale. I always enjoy finding male writers who come to grips with emotions and romance on the page in a light-hearted manner. It's rare, I think. Knight is like an Australian Nick Hornby, and that's high praise indeed, coming from me - I've read all of Hornby's books.

My only gripe with this novel is that Dan's ruminations on his friends' behaviour once they have children are irritating if you are someone who has children. His ignorance of what it's like to have children is understandable, but his total absence of any empathy with parents make it appear as though he is ignorant of more than just the state of parenthood. He comes across as slightly autistic or incredibly self-absorbed, unable to imagine what a change it would be to suddenly have a small being entirely dependent upon you all of the time. Instead of recognizing that his friends might be suffering some shock of their own in undergoing such dramatic life changes, Dan seems to believe that his friends are lording it over him as soon as they have children, that their absence in his life is more to do with their judgement of his life choices than their loss of actual physical freedom. 

It's fine for a character to embody such traits, and I guess it's partly the point of the story. But I experienced a high degree of frustration in moments where he exhibited such an unbelievably extreme lack of understanding for part of the human condition. 

Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5

Pros: Funny, engaging, enjoyable read.

Cons: See above.

Mohsin Hamid - How to Get FILTHY RICH in Rising Asia

Finally, finally, here it is - the review I promised you so many months ago.

I stumbled across this book by accident. I loved Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist but had no idea Hamid had published other books since. I was looking for a new book to read and trawled through my go-to book-related sites (which include various book blogs, Amazon, the Guardian books section, the New York Times and Goodreads). And I started hearing good things about this book with a funny title. In a Booker discussion group on Goodreads, for example, this book joined members in unanimity - they all thought it was a shoe-in for the longlist (in fact it was NOT longlisted, though Hamid has previously been on the shortlist for TRF).  When I saw that it was by Mohsin Hamid, my mind was made up and I lifted my finger for that all-important 'click' which is the simple action of purchasing a Kindle book on Amazon.

It was soon obvious this was a good choice. After reading only a few pages I was in. The story moves at a galloping pace and the portrait depicted of Pakistan is neon vivid. Bearing some initial resemblance to Aravind Adiga's book White Tiger (though that was set in India), How to Get Filthy Rich is the story of a poor boy rising to the heights of corporate success in Asia.

Hamid chooses to tell the story in the second-person, which is quite rare, and he uses an unusual conceit: the book is written as though it were a self-help book. Each chapter doles out a different piece of advice about how to transform oneself from a peasant living in an impoverished rural environment to a wealthy entrepreneur in a big city. There are chapters entitled 'Learn from a Master', 'Work for Yourself' and 'Befriend a Bureaucrat'. Hamid is heavy on the irony and much of the book is darkly comical.

Initially I was resistant to both the second-person narration and the self-help lingo, but I soon fell into the story. The thing about second-person narration is that it forces the reader to become subjectively involved in the story. It personalizes everything. You become the hero. So that when something happens to 'you', we feel like it might be happening to us. It works.

The facade of the self-help book, however, is potentially a different story. Yes, it provides Hamid with the ability to comment, at the start of each chapter, on the plight of those living in modern-day Asia, on the notion of self-help books as a genre (a genre which is parodied here with brutal accuracy), and on the notion of selfhood itself - 'the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one'. It allows him, in short, to ruminate on bigger political and philosophical issues, outside of the story he is telling at the book's core. The obvious problem with this is that it takes him (and us) outside of the story. But the conceit also allows Hamid to tell a story that is bigger than the characters. The characters are devices, in some way; their story is a synecdoche for the greater story, that of Pakistan itself.

Hamid is such an effective story teller that I was never weighed down by lofty political commentary. I was quickly caught up in the vivid coming-of-age story at the centre of the narrative, about a man (whose name we never learn), his quest for success, and the woman he has always loved. It is a tale about what it takes to succeed in a land still weighed down by a deeply entrenched class system and systemic corruption. The frequent interruptions for philosophical musings didn't disrupt my enjoyment of the book. In fact, in retrospect, they probably enhanced it. What might seem clunky and contrived at the start becomes contextual enrichment by the end. Reviewing the book now I realize that it is about so many things - Hamid does so much, so well. This is a love story and a political story. It is a farcical self-help book. It is a book about the notion of 'self', about how fast life moves and how critical it is to seize what is important to you when you have the time to do so. It is also a book about writing and creating fiction. All of this works to keep us readers distanced, to some degree, from the characters central to the Bildungsroman around which all of this is constructed. And yet by the end I was surprised at the extent of my engagement with that story. I was so engaged, in fact, that I was moved to tears by the final scenes.

This is such an original book and, mostly, it works. Hamid is a wonderful writer. I thought of the book several times during our travels, so it has stayed with me. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Adiga's White Tiger, to anyone who likes a good story told in a new voice, to anyone who enjoys a bit of politics spicing up their fiction.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5 stars.

Favourite Passages: 'We are all refugees from our childhood. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.'

'But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood, or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm. Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you'll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of reading.'

Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

This is a rare occasion. I am forced to admit that I read this book because I first saw the TV show, rather than the other way around. I KNOW. I surprised myself, too.

The show is really great, filled with strong female characters and peppered with laugh-out-loud humour. The book is an interesting read, but obviously - because it's REAL - it lacks Hollywood finesse. Piper is not as innocent or as beautiful as her television self, her ex-girlfriend isn't a hot, glowering sexual nemesis, and the other characters lack the charm delivered by the small screen. It's a memoir. If you want more of what the TV show provides, reading this book will not fulfill that need.

For those of you who haven't yet accessed this show on Netflix (and if you haven't, go and do it right now!), this is the true story of a white, middle class, educated woman in her 30s who is sentenced to a year in jail for a drug offence she committed during a post-college experimental phase ten years earlier. Piper is sent to a low security facility, leaving behind her fiancé, her friends and her family. Her memoir is fascinating because she doesn't fit the mould of what we imagine a typical prison-inmate to be. This won't be a surprise to anyone, but most of the female prison population - as described by Kerman, anyway - is made up of low-income, uneducated women of colour. Not because white educated women do not commit crimes, but because for various reasons they tend not to be incarcerated for those crimes as often as their less privileged sisters. As an educated, middle-class reader myself (clearly the type of reader Kerman expected / hoped to attract), it is easy to identify with Piper, and therefore to share her discomfort as she ekes out an existence in such foreign surroundings. It is easy, shall we say, to imagine that we might one day fall subject to the same fate, and that is a scary thought. It makes the read exciting, in some voyeuristic kind of way.

Kerman's anger at the inherent injustices of the current prison system and the lack of equality in the way women from different backgrounds are treated shines through much of her writing. She clearly intends for this to be a polemic of sorts, to make people in broader America aware of the absurdity of a system where low-income women consistently do serious time for petty crime at a heavy cost to the tax-payer, frequently becoming institutionalized and therefore ceasing being able to function as citizens upon release. In order to shore up her argument in this regard, Kerman drops frequent statistics into the narrative. I admire her social conscience but it changes the tone of the book and the statistics are presented without adequate citations or sociological context. Because she tries to write both a diverting narrative and a social diatribe, she ends up doing neither well. As a result of the frequent statistics, the story gets bogged down and there were times when I was bored. Yet the book alone is not sufficiently researched to stand alone as a treatise on the prison system in the United States.

The TV version of Kerman's book makes a social statement without statistics, by providing back story for the characters who are Kerman's fellow inmates, and revealing the hardships that have landed them in their current position. The viewers sympathize with and grow attached to these characters who are merely peripheral in the book. The effectiveness of the show lies in its ability to make viewers laugh at Piper's naiveté and the juxtaposition of her home life against her prison life whilst simultaneously moving us with poignant moments of sadness and futility.

Kerman talks about her fellow inmates in the book, too, but it is generally done from the standpoint of her relationship with them. She doesn't focus enough on describing each of the characters she introduces so that they are distinguishable from one another by name. I often felt quite lost when she referred back to one or other of them.

I did enjoy the way that Kerman's vocabulary and mode of speech changes throughout the book so that by the end it's clear she has evolved as a person during her time behind bars. And I think the story itself is compelling and quite horrifying. It's certainly worth a read, but if you were choosing between the book and the TV show, I would say the TV show is the more enjoyable form of the story (although obviously the book is the more authentic, and it depends what you are after).

Overall assessment: 2.5 out of 5.