The Dog of the South

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis (1999) is a quest novel. Ray Midge's wife Norma has run off with her ex-husband Dupree. They've taken Ray's credit cards and his Grand Torino and they've headed south from Arkansas to Mexico and finally to Belize. Ray is in his mid-twenties and he's struggling to figure out what to do with his life. He's very interested in military history and he knows quite a bit about cars, but he's lost in the world.

Ray decides to go after his car, credit cards and yes, also his wife Norma. He packs a gun (from his collection) in a pie box and off he goes. We learn along the way that Ray isn't likely to shoot anybody, and in fact he forgets about the gun. The book is about Ray's adventures following the trail of Norma and Dupree. The heart of the novel is in all the characters and adventures Ray encounters along the way. Ray sallies forth on his adventure with a "don't look back" attitude. When bad things happen, Ray gets mildly annoyed but simply carries on, moving closer to the objects of his quest.

The characters include a bail-bondsman (Dupree has jumped bail after threatening the President), a former doctor turned grifter, two older women running a missionary church in Belize, and a boy named Webster who sleeps in a box. There is no worry about what's going to happen two weeks from now. Ray lives his roadtrip in the moment as he deals with the various obstacles separating him from his Torino.

I don't know how it is that I've failed to read a Charles Portis novel until now. I'm going to read some of his other books in the coming months. I enjoyed the story and the characters and the humour as well in The Dog of the South.

Dinner with a Cannibal

I read this as part of my research into witch hunts and Satanic Panic, as diabolic feasts involving babies and whatnot are such a huge part of myths of the sabbat and devil-worship. I wanted to know more about actual religious cannibalism, and this book seemed like a decent place to start, since Carole Travis-Henikoff is a paleoanthropologist with a deep interest in the subject (according to the intro, she spent 7 years researching it). But Dinner with a Cannibal was not helpful. It's focused heavily on endocannibalism (funerary cannibalism), but worse yet it's full of digressions and lengthy anecdotes and events that didn't actually happen. For instance, Travis-Henikoff tells us that in 1933, the Russian ship Dzhurma was trapped in ice while ferrying 12,000 prisoners to a slave labor colony in Siberia. The guards survived by cannibalizing the prisoners.
This didn't happen. In his 2003 book Stalin's Slave Ships, Martin J. Bollinger explains that Dzhurma wasn't even in commission until 1935, and that no other passenger ship experienced such a disaster. Note that Dinner with a Cannibal came out in 2008.
Travis-Henikoff also uncritically accepts the fantasies of Marco Polo, the highly questionable revelations in Zheng Yu's Scarlet Memorial, and dodgy British accounts of leopard societies. All in all, though it contains a few interesting tidbits, this book is a waste of paper and time.

Essex County - Jeff Lemire

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that, if you don't count Mad Magazine, Essex County is the first graphic novel I have ever read. I knew full well that there was a world of difference between graphic novels and comic books, and that there are many acclaimed graphic novels gracing the shelves of serious bookworms, but I somehow still carried the BIFF, BAM, POW prejudice within my psyche.

And that may be why I was so taken with Essex County. It's a stunningly beautiful book, comprised of three interwoven stories that explore alienation, family, love, loss, and betrayal in a southern Ontario farming community over the decades. An orphaned boy who wears the shield of a superhero, two hockey hero brothers torn asunder by secrets, a public health nurse whose entire life is the community are the rich characters who are depicted so strikingly within the novel.

I took my time reading this book. I wanted to savour the experience, to give this haunting book the full attention it deserves. I found myself pouring over the black and white artwork, marveling at the emotions that Jeff Lemire brings to the faces of the characters with just a few lines. Their eyes in particular speak volumes, while the people themselves are largely silent.

Lemire manipulates perspective and space so masterfully in his drawings that you can't help but get lost in them. From the intimacy of facial closeups to the staggeringly open spaces of his large panels, Lemire tells an incredible story with a few strokes of the pen and a handful of words. The large panels, of field and sky and forest and staircases, are especially striking. They often function as scene changers, but they are so much more than just place markers; at times I was overwhelmed by the sheer power of these enormously silent panels.

Essex County is one of the novels battling for this year's Canada Reads championship, the first graphic novel ever to be included in the competition. It will be championed by Sara Quinn and (fun fact!) came to be on the Canada Reads list via a nomination by our very own book meister.

My copy of Essex County fell into my hands via the thoughtfulness of my very dear friend, who sends me wonderful things. I owe him enormously for this.

Essex County is a poignant novel, which leaves you deeply wistful after the last page is turned. But within the poignancy there is profound beauty. I know I will be opening those pages again and again to return to Essex County.

Portobello - Ruth Rendell

I've always considered Ruth Rendell to be the undisputed queen of the disturbing psychological thriller, so I was chuffed when I found this relatively recent Rendell novel at the library. Rendell's impressive series of Inspector Wexford novels are also highly readable, but it is in the non-Wexfordian books that her unsettling prose truly shines.

But not, sadly, in this book. In fact the most unsettling thing aboutPortobello is that it all seems rather pointless, petty almost.

This may be somewhat intentional on Rendell's part, to reflect the silliness of the addiction to a particular brand of sugar-free candy that the primary character, Eugene, finds himself spiraling into. I found it difficult to believe that anyone, even a man as secretive and set in his ways as Eugene, would allow a candy to destroy the most important relationship in his life.

There are a series of coincidences that lead to the unfolding of events in Portobello: Eugene's decision to tape a note to a post about a sum of money he found, rather than keep the money or take it to the authorities, and then to ask Lance to come to his home to make his claim instead of just asking him over the phone how much money he had lost. This allows Lance, a petty criminal, to case Eugene's neighbourhood. That Eugene's girl friend, Ella, happens to be a physician who returns the money to its rightful owner, Joel, who happens to be in hospital and who then happens to become her private patient, is the next in the series of happenstance. And it continues on and on.

Portobello is actually an enjoyable read, and despite the unclear motivation behind many of the characters' actions, the characters are memorable in their own way. The deeply disturbed Joel is the most Rendellesque character and the one who offers the best promise for delicious creepiness, particularly after he becomes haunted by the specter of Mithras, the angel whom he inadvertently brought back with him from the brink of death.

But ultimately, the finale feels soft and unworthy of a Rendell novel. Portobello is certainly not Ruth Rendell's most successful effort, but it does pass the time quickly on a snowy weekend.

Youth in Revolt - C.D. Payne

I have not seen the film which this book spawned, but I can already tell you that Michael Cera is horribly miscast in it. Nick Twisp, the protagonist of Youth in Revolt, has little of Cera's stock in trade awkwardness and none of his sweetness. Truth be told, I did not like Nick Twisp. Nor did I like The Object of His Affection, Sheeni Saunders. I kept thinking to myself, you two deserve each other.

Both characters are capable of great cruelty. Sheeni manipulates every male she encounters. She is a Siren masquerading as a pseudo-intellectual fourteen year old. Prior to meeting Sheeni, Nick was a decent enough thirteen year old, ruled by his masturbatory tendencies, but loyal to his friends and somewhat sweet in his Frank Sinatra-loving geekiness. After meeting Sheeni, Nick's efforts to get together with The Woman He Loves lead to an escalating series of misadventures, which he approaches with an increasingly Machiavellian single-mindedness. He becomes not only reckless, but turns nasty - betraying friends, ruining lives and property without regard.

That said, I did enjoy Youth in Revolt. The sardonically funny daily journals of Nick Twisp held my attention far more than I would have expected of a 500 page book. The lack of chapter breaks can be daunting to someone who hates to put down a book mid-chapter, but the daily journal entries, further broken into timed subsections (this kid is an obsessive journal keeper), provide the natural breaks that keep you from going insane.

As a work of absurdist fiction, the nihilist tendencies within Youth in Revolt are to be somewhat expected. I can accept the reassembled Chevy in the living room, the conflagration of an entire city block, and the Mussolini Revivalist alter ego, and I admire the subtlety of Nick's creative editorial pranks. But the utter abandon with which he back-stabs friends made it difficult for me to like him.

And, perhaps I am just being thick or a grammar Nazi, but I still have not figured out the purpose of the quotation marks in the book's tagline: Every "Revolution" Needs a Leader.

Youth in Revolt is engaging and memorable, but I am not sure I will be in any hurry to read the sequels. Not until Nick and Sheeni get smacked up the side of the head a couple of times, anyway.

curious compendium

The Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities:

an unconventional compendium of health facts and oddities, from asthmatic mice to plants that can kill

- Nicholas Bakalar

The title pretty much sums it up.

With segment lengths ranging from a couple of sentences tcuo a couple of pages, this is the perfect book for people like me to read in bed, people who can generally only stay awake for a few paragraphs. Filled with fascinating little snippets from the world of medicine, The Medicine Cabinet of Curiositiesis written in a fashion where you can easily skip around from section to section, finding those distinctly gruesome or disturbing bits that always ensure a good night's sleep.

A singularly nice touch is the relegation of footnotes to a dedicated appendix. I personally have an issue with MLA style footnotes. I find them disruptive and untidy and, unless they happen to be especially witty, quite unnecessary for me to read right away.

I particularly enjoyed the gruesome diseases segments, as well as those times when I was able to condescendingly sniff that of course I already knew that.

Nicholas Bakalar has a delightful sense of humour and I found myself chortling frequently, which is not generally what you expect to do when reading about maggot therapy, for example. He does have a curious habit of referring to himself with the royal we, but somehow this little quirk only serves to make his writing more inclusive. Like there is this cozy group of white coated professionals sequestered in a room somewhere, ready to assure you that no, you don't actually have Ebola.

The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower

Spoiler alert: At the end of this post, you'll find a blank space. If you mouse over it, you'll be able to read the spoiler.

Thanks to an early Christmas present from Richard's wonderful sister, Kathy, I finally read Robert Graysmith's latest book, The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower. As I'm both an unsolved-mystery freak and a Hitchcock geek, this one would be nearly impossible to pass up. It tells the story of the young dancer-model who served as Janet Leigh's nude body double for the shower scene in Psycho, as well as the story of a warped mama's boy named Sonny Busch, dubbed "The Pyscho Killer" because he stabbed two women and abducted a third immediately after seeing the movie.

Marli Renfro was the Girl in the Shower. When the knife wielded by Norman Bates (also a female body double) seems to pierce Marian Crane's belly, Hitch himself was holding the knife and the belly was Marli's. She spent hours in that bathtub, pruning and shivering in the buff as the most infamous scene in American cinema was shot from nearly every angle imaginable. Her role in the film was uncredited, and for years Janet Leigh claimed she did the entire scene herself. Graysmith spends the first several chapters on the film set, shivering and pruning along with Marli through every re-take (delightful for Hitchcock fans, but perhaps tedious for everyone else).
In the late '50s and early '60s Marli Renfro appeared on countless men's magazine covers, starred in Francis Ford Coppola's grad-school "nudie cutie" film The Peeper, waitressed at the first Playboy Club, appeared on Hef's TV show, danced in Vegas, and made a supremely corny, nudie cutie Western that eventually became Coppola's first credited feature film (Tonight for Sure). But when she wasn't nekkid in front of a camera, Marli Renfro had a full and healthy life. She was a dedicated nature-lover and nudist, a painter, a filmmaker, a devoted daughter, and ultimately a wife and mother who sold real estate and traveled the country in an RV. After 1963, she began raising up a family with her first husband, and gave up the modeling and acting.

Meanwhile, the Norman Batesian serial killer Henry "Sonny" Busch was dating his mother's elderly friends and quietly working at an eyeglass-manufacturing shop. One night in the summer of '57, he took his mum's septuagenarian neighbor to a screening of Psycho, accompanied her back to her apartment, and murdered her. He left her body in the apartment while he killed another woman - his own aunt - and kidnapped a co-worker. Graysmith deftly intersperses the two stories, Marli's days of carefree nudity and Sonny's tortured nights of deviance, with colourful tales of the early days of what you could call porn (though it bears little resemblance to today's variety), the painfully repressed sexuality of the American 1950s, and the first faint stirrings of the sexual revolution that would soon wash all the way from the California coast to splash nearly every town and city across the nation, from Midwestern burgs to bluenosed East Coast villages.
We see the rise of mammophile director Russ Meyer and the creation of the very first nudie cutie (The Immoral Mr. Teas), but Graysmith also shows us the darker side of California's awkward love affair with female beauty - obsession, violence, and murder.

After her heyday in the early '60s, no more was heard of Marli Renfro until 2001, when media outlets throughout the country announced that Janet Leigh's shower body double had ironically been stabbed to death in her own L.A. home by Kenneth Dean Hunt back in 1988. The murder had only recently been solved. Marli had been known as Myra Davis when she died at Hunt's hands at the age of 71.

Graysmith, who had been intrigued by Marli since she appeared on the cover of Playboy, was grieved - but also baffled. The reporting on Ms. Davis' murder didn't jive with what he knew of Marli Renfro. First of all, she was not 43 years old when Psycho was filmed, as Myra Davis would have been. Secondly, the woman's granddaughter told reporters that the knife in the shower scene had been held by a female body double, rather than Hitch.

He began to wonder: Were Marli Renfro and Myra Davis really the same person?

Spoiler below:

As it turned out, they weren't. Ms. Davis had indeed been on the Psycho set, but she was used only to work out some of the shower shots. She wasn't actually in the film. Marli was still living happily in the California desert that she had first fallen in love with during her modeling and acting days. She had heard of Ms. Davis' death, but had no strong desire to set the record straight until Graysmith came along with his "double body double" theory. A twist worthy of Hitchcock, no?

Miracle at Indian River - Alden Nowlan

I found this book of short stories at a lovely little used book store in Kitsilano, solid wooden shelves immaculately stacked, rain pelting the window, dog lying beside the counter. It seemed to me the perfect place to stumble upon the writings of a quintessential Canadian author, albeit one who hailed from the opposite shore.

I had actually been looking for a book of Nowlan’s poetry, as he is more widely known as a poet and I suffer from a serious poetry dearth. Generally, my eyes will glaze over after the first few stanzas, but Nowlan’s poems seem different, with their tales of struggle amongst hard-bitten Canadian pragmatists. Those, I could read.

The stories within Miracle at Indian River are pretty much archetypal early Can Lit. They are peopled with labourers, those who toil in lumber camps and saw mills, those who scrabble a living from desolate farms, those who sweat in factories and long for escape. The struggle to survive looms large in these stories, but within this struggle for mere existence lies also the struggle for dreams to survive. Most of Nowlan’s people have only known abject poverty, most of their days are consumed with the menial struggle to feed and house themselves. And yet, there is a spark of hopefulness within. Despite the crushing weight of daily existence, these people maintain a dignity that transcends the wretched reality of their days.

Sometimes the dreams are so meager that it is almost heartbreaking. There is the teenage boy who risks the distain of the taciturn men in the lumber camp to listen to the Polish immigrant’s memories of glass roses. There is the girl from the potato chip factory who wears her best dress to dinner at the boarding house, practices her diction to put the stain of her impoverished family behind her and dreams of becoming a shop girl. There is the boiler man who finds solace in the flames.

It was odd reading these stories so long after this man-against-the-elements phase of Can Lit has passed, and at times I was in danger of thinking of them as caricature. But in reality, this was the world that Nowlan knew. He was born in Nova Scotia in 1933, into an impoverished family, and left school after grade 4. His stories in Miracle at Indian River are old school Can Lit, because that is the school from whence Nowlan came.

I’m glad I found and read this book. But I am still looking for those poems.

Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay

I haven't been reading much fiction lately, but I was in a bookstore a couple weeks ago and on impulse bought a copy of Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay. It's a Giller Prize winner, and I thought it had a lot going for it.

Much of the book is set in Yellowknife around the lives of people working at a radio station. It seemed to me this was an excellent backdrop to create a novel. In addition, it was set during the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, also known simply as the Berger Inquiry, in the mid-70s.

For me though, the novel never really came to life. I didn't quite believe the characters, any more than I believed that four inexperienced canoeists would embark on a dangerous 6 week canoe trip into the Barrons. There were chapters and passages I enjoyed, and in particular the descriptions of Berger and his approach to the Inquiry was fascinating.

Tuffy P didn't like this one either. Apparently we're in the minority though, but what else is new.

The Freddy Stories: with the Great Marlys and Sister Maybonne.

Clearly I've been saving all of my postings until I had time to write them! But I did read The Freddie Stories in two parts, and finished it just recently.


What can I say? Lynda Barry rocks! I may have said that before on this blog, and I will probably say it again. I fell in love with her characters Maybonne and Marlys and their childhood stories that are at times traumatic, and at times very light and fun just as childhood can be. Barry's stories read like a memoir, drawing you into the inner world of her characters that no one else gets to see. The stories are funny, sad, and very moving, and The Freddie Stories are no different.

Freddy is witness to some pretty horrifying events, and Barry recounts the events through Freddy's point of view. His sister Marlys' sums up the book very well on the back cover.

Um this is the story of the weirdest year of my brother Freddie's life.

She goes on to describe some of the "weird" events, and then sums up:

So, um, if a very realistic story about an unusual boy could make you nervous, you should probably not read this. But if you don't mind unusual children, I think you will like my brother, who to me, is the best brother of all time!

I guess I don't mind unusual children. These kids don't really seem so unusual, they are just witness to unusual events for kids to be exposed to. Barry's characters are so well drawn (so to speak), it is evident that there is a universal experience of childhood that makes her stories accessible to all.



Visually, in traditional Barry fashion, the page is full of doodles and extra information to round out the entire Freddy experience. 

If you've never read her, I highly recommend any of Marlys, Maybonne, or Freddy books.



You can see a sample of her work here from the Drawn & Quarterly website, a fantastic bookstore in Montreal. If you're ever there try and visit (just a little plug for them). In a world of Chapters and Borders, it's what I wish more bookstores were like.

Unless

Unless is my first Carol Shields book, and based on what I've read so far I expect there will be more. I picked it up at the library on one of those days when I was just wandering the libary looking to see what they had that was small enough for me to carry on transit. I was open to anything paperback. 

Most simply put, Unlessis a story about a mother and writer, Reta and her family's struggle to reconnect with an absent daughter.

Living in a small community outside of Toronto, Reta is in the process of writing her second novel after having had some success with her first novel. She struggles with where she wants to take her characters versus where she needs to take them (some self-reflexivity at work here. I guess it's inevitable if a writer is writing about a writer's process).  What happens to the characters in her novel is indirectly shaped by what happens to Reta in her life. Will there be a happy ending?


As a mother, Reta is trying to understand how the family tragedy has occurred. Her daughter Norah has disconnected herself from life, from her home and university education, and has stopped talking. She sits mute on a Toronto street corner with a sign that reads "Goodness." Reta can do nothing for her, and Norah refuses to acknowledge her family despite their attempts. Throughout the book Reta tries to piece together where it all went wrong. What happened to "their" Norah? As Reta works through these questions we are invited into her private world. Despite being a closely connected family, and despite the closeness of Reta's friends that she meets with once a week, we the reader are invited to know Reta most intimately in these moments in her life. We are permitted to see what others might miss caught up in their own day-to-day.


Reta's life as she works through these problems are revealed almost chronologically, but at times in flashback or even through letters. We learn more about the other characters in small doses, but we learn the most about Norah from Reta, the one character who does not speak. As Reta tries to work out what happened to Norah and why, we learn more and more about this one daughter and her seemingly normal relationship to her family. How could such a strange act occur under such normalcy? What is the meaning of "goodness?" What could Norah mean by this sign? These are the questions Reta asks. The chapter titles, such as So, Then, Once, Unless, are an indication of Reta's attempt to understand, and are what I would call the words in between the concrete. These are the connecting words that are perhaps a reminder that Reta is trying to piece together what she does know as being true. 


Based on this description it might sound like this is a downer of a novel, but it's not as there is quite a bit of humour throughout the book, which seems remarkable considering the circumstances with the absent daughter. But that's more true to life is it not? Reta has a wry wit, and observes what others might miss. The book's humour keeps it from becoming too dark, which reflects Reta's character.  


The novel flowed with beautifully crafted language, and compelling characters until I soon found myself at the end.


What a great introduction to Carol Shields. I look forward to more.

 

Anna Karenina

Okay I've been delaying this one for far too long. I keep reading other books, but I have to return to Anna Karenina, and write about it. What can I say about this Tolstoy classic?

The size of the book was daunting. I had been picking it up and putting it down for so long, that I finally decided that I had to read it from cover to cover, and not give up after 50 pages. Once committed, I delved into a 19th Century Russia that I never expected to experience, and was pleasantly surprised by the various stories, and fully realized characters that fill this book from start to finish.

While the book may be titled Anna Karenina, Levin's story does dominate almost as much, and parallels Anna's arc in many ways. I must admit though that it was Anna's tormented love story that I found most compelling compared to Levin's inner turmoil over his refused proposal and musings on peasant life and Russian agriculture (this latter subject I did appreciate in the context of knowing that a Bolshevik revolution was in Russia's future, but I admit that I may have scanned over some long-winded passages between 2 characters debating Russian agriculture and the "problem" of the peasant).

The story 

Anna is an upper class woman who marries someone of equal status. She enjoys her society life until she meets Count Vronsky, and realizes that marrying for status does not necessarily bring happiness. While this seems to be common knowledge amongst her class, no one really ever seems to speak of it, including Anna. In fact, this book is about what is not said or done as much as it is about what is said and done.

Anna leaves her husband and son for Vronsky, which is not only scandalous, but ultimately destructive to Anna's state of mind since her husband forbids her to see her son again. She is shunned by society (in a way more than her lover is), and becomes isolated in their new home limited to whom she can see and where she can go. No one comes out and says to Anna that she is a shamed woman, but the visits from "friends" stop, and she is no longer invited anywhere. The sight of someone's carriage even nearing where she lives could cause a great scandal in itself. Tolstoy draws attention to the hypocrisy of this class by surrounding Anna with others who are in a similar situation, but have maintained their marriages by not speaking about their adulterous affairs.

Tolstoy's love story between Kitty and Levin may also be his way of drawing our attention to the upper class hypocrisy as well. Kitty's mother is very concerned that her daughter be married to the "right" man; however, it is because of her  concern with social status that Kitty is led astray by Vronsky, and becomes despondent. Kitty is ashamed of her behaviour and realizes that the actual proposal she did receive from Levin was based on love and not on status. It's Kitty's lesson to learn. Her mother? Well, we are led to believe that her mother may accept the Kitty and Levin pairing, but is still somehow disappointed that it was not a man of greater status.

While Levin may be a landowner and circulate amongst the same people that Anna does, or once did, he is often shown to be uncomfortable and awkward amongst his class. Tolstoy sets up an idealized depiction of peasant life through Levin's point of view. Levin admires the simple, hard-working peasant life that he views, and seems envious of the love that they show towards one another as if knowing that it cannot be so amongst his class. Even though he does love and marry within his class when he gets a second chance with Kitty, it is not viewed as a status marriage.

The Levin and Kitty pairing stands in contrast to Anna's and Vronsky's. When the two vain characters of Anna and Vronsky fall in love, they self destruct because their status has changed. They no longer have the rest of their class admiring them, but instead are whispered about. The two become stuck in their positions, and begin to turn on one another. Anna cannot go out in society, and Vronsky cannot move up the social ladder. In contrast, Levin and Kitty's pairing is based on a mutual love and respect for each other. They only admire one another and not themselves. Their social status is not about moving up the ladder or being seen in society, but rather about building a life together. While they aren't the toast of the town to anyone, and seem isolated in their rural life, their happiness seems genuine.

This is just the tip of the iceberg because there are many comparisons I could make between these 2 couples, but I leave it to you to discover if you decide to read this book. In fact, they aren't the only couple you could look at and compare, and there really is a lot more going on that I haven't even mentioned here. 

Unfortunately (as you probably already know) Anna's fate is a tragic one. Isolated from the life she once had, she becomes a prisoner. Behind her exquisite beauty is a dark and tortured woman, and Tolstoy does much to create sympathy for her. We are invited into Anna's inner conflict, and hear here biggest fears, and longings. I appreciate Tolstoy's careful attention to all of his characters.They are beautifully depicted.

It was well worth the read and I'm glad I finally got around to it, so I do recommend this book.

Tell-All - Chuck Palahniuk

I had really been looking forward to reading Chuck Palahniuk's new book ever since I got my signed edition at the highly entertaining book reading I attended a few months ago.

The premise, as he described it to us that evening, sounded intriguing - a novel written in the form of set directions and told from the vantage point of a sherpa for a glamorous Hollywood star. As Palahniuk described it, he was fascinated by these stodgy women he would often see at celebrity-studded events, who would carry coats, and bags and brushes and makeup, effectively allowing the star to be her glorious unencumbered self. These sherpas would always be standing in the wings, a few paces behind the star, and always out of range of the cameras and microphones.

Tell-All is narrated by Hazie Coogan, long-time sherpa to Katherine Kenton, who tends to the star's needs throughout her multiple marriages, endless cosmetic surgeries, and a series of comebacks in Hollywood's fickle star game. She is fiercely determined to protect the reputation of her "Miss Kathie", to ensure that her charge's name is never slandered by opportunists and revisionists intent on capitalizing on their involvement with Katherine Kenton upon her demise.

During his reading in Calgary, Palahniuk mentioned his fascination with the name-dropping rampant among the Hollywood elite and hangers-on. In Tell-All, he uses a device he refers to as name-dropping Tourette's syndrome, a rapid-fire string of bolded names, mostly of big stars from the golden age of Hollywood, who are now largely forgotten.

I understand his point, but it gets pretty tedious, particularly when he uses the name-dropping as part of his characters' conversations, in which the names that are being dropped are imbedded amongst animal noises. Again, I understand what Palahniuk is attempting to do, to illustrate how all this name-dropping becomes nonsensical after a while, becomes part of the background noise. But I found it to be annoying.

After a few too many chapters in which dinner parties are attended, domestic rituals are attended to, and many many names are dropped, the plot picks up when Katherine Kenton meets and beds a much younger man. In his suitcase Hazie discovers a tell-all autobiography of his life with the star, complete with the grizzly details of her impending death. It then becomes a deadly battle between the suitor and the sherpa for the life of and the rights to Katherine Kenton.

Despite my initial disappointment with Tell-All, I ultimately I did enjoy this book. It's no Fight Club, and I had to continually forgive those annoying devices, which I found to be seriously overdone, but the final third of the book, especially as my realization of the plot twist started to dawn, did make Tell-All worth reading.

But I felt that I had to work for it a little harder than I wanted to.

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Bicycle Diaries - David Byrne

As the participants of yesterday's World Naked Bike Ride Day spend today administering first aid to their chafed bits, I felt it was only fitting that I share my thoughts on a book about cycling that I finished reading recently. I received this book a few months ago from a dear friend who has a gift (or perhaps just the inclination backed by hard work) for precisely matching his gifts to the recipient. No generic gift cards from him. He has an unerring ability to find that perfect book, one that precisely suits the interests and the personality of the person who receives it, certainly, but also one that simultaneously reflects aspects of his own personality.

He's batting a thousand with Bicycle Diaries.

Bicycle Diaries is part travelogue, part essay, part philosophical musings on the nature of globalization, transportation, sustainability, city planning, architecture, music, art, and humanity. The sorts of musings, in other words, that one should not be surprised to encounter coming from the immensely talented former Talking Head, artist, and all-round awesome celebrity with brains and heart, David Byrne.

David Byrne has been riding his bike around New York city for almost thirty years. He found it to be such a convenient and sensible mode of transportation at home, that he then began taking a collapsible bicycle with him on tour around the world. In Bicycle Diaries he shares his insights into the cities that he has experienced from a bike seat.

Bicycle Diaries has a very wide focus. In each city about which he writes, Byrne critiques the transportation infrastructure for its attitude toward cycling. It should come as no particular surprise that most American cities fall far behind European and Asian counterparts in terms of accommodating the bicycle. American cities are by and large designed for the automobile. But it was somewhat surprising to learn that a large metropolis like New York is actually making great strides to embrace cycling culture and is far safer in that regard than many mid-sized American cities. Istanbul, Manila, and Buenos Aires, on the other hand, are very challenging for cyclists.

While the central theme of Bicycle Diaries is that of getting around the world's cities on two wheels, that idea is really just a jumping off point for Byrne's observations on culture and for his stories on encounters in the art and music communities that he has had in his travels. I certainly expected this book to be intelligently written, given the reputation of the author, but I admit I was surprised by the esoteric nature of the topics that Byrne touches upon. I enjoyed the book almost as much for its insight into the mind of David Byrne as I did for the highly credible job that he does in imparting fascinating aspects of the history, geography and politics of some of the world's most intriguing cities.

This book is written with a great deal of insight and ingenuity, sprinkled with large portions of humanity and humour. Because the book is comprised of relatively short chapters, further broken down into sub-sections, it is the sort of book that is perfect for reading in short snippets. Chances are you will want to put it down frequently to muse over some of the concepts and questions that are raised in the chapter you just finished anyway.

It really is no surprise that David Byrne has become an elder statesman of sorts amongst the arts, music and civic communities. His insightful and thought-provoking writing in Bicycle Diaries proves that he is more than just another incredible musician with awesome hair who is aging exceedingly gracefully. David Byrne is actually one of our generation's thinkers.

He is definitely on my fantasy dinner party list.

Heart's Blood

What is the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, even though you know it'll be the same?

Yeah, well, I should have known better after reading Juliet Marillier's last novel, the ugh-inducing Heir to Sevenwaters. It was formulaic in a way only Marillier can be, and Heart's Blood was, in the end, no different.

I had high hopes at the beginning. This wasn't a typical Sevenwaters heroine: Caitrin is on the run from some abusive relatives who took over her father's home after his death, and she finds herself in an isolated holding surrounded and inhabited by a host of ghosts tied to the chieftain by a cenury-old curse. A trained scribe, Caitrin is hired by the chieftain, Anluan, to translate a whack of old documents in an attempt to find a counterspell to release the spectral host and Anluan from the curse. Along the way, the sexual tension between Caitrin and Anluan rises - even though he is gruff and rude to her - and Caitrin finds an inner strength she didn't know she had. Blahx3.

So, the setting might be a bit different, as is the premise and the problem that requires solving, but in the end, the story, the heroine, the love interest, and the resolution were typical, formulaic Marillier: Young pretty gal with skills (which makes her unusual in her time, of course - she is no baby-making doormat) and some backbone embarks upon seemingly impossible task with series of setbacks. She falls in love with absurdly handsome man who is outwardly rude, distant, and emotionally unavailable but inwardly a soul who just needs a little loving in order to get him to come to rights. Despite his issues and her resistance ("oh, it's so wrong..."), they are obviously very attracted to each other and were destined to be together, even after knowing each other only a short while. She brings out his inner goodness, he can't handle it and distances himself further, or gets distanced further by pesky old fate (in this case, he sends her away "for her safety"), she can't live without him so she comes back unexpectedly, they make beautiful perfect love even though they are both virgins, the story's big problem is solved, and the couple get married & live happily ever after.

It's almost laughable!

I liked some of the characters in this book and I liked the different setting and premise, but in the end, it was the same shit between different covers.

I have to give this author a break, I think, until I am confident she has come up with a new schtick. Alas, once more, I find myself in the minority with my negative opinion. The reviews on Library Thing are all glowing! Is it me? Am I to cynical, too jaded, or too picky? I just don't get it!

This is definitely going in my "donate" pile.

Happily Ever After Marriage

The flap reads: "Sarah, a bride in her twenties, embraced what traditional marriage has to offer. But after 18 years of marriage, she and her husband called it quits, leaving her to raise three boys while working to re-establish her career. Here Sarah tells the story of her own life (from childish dreams to the fear of being alone and how to move beyond it) as well as those of others (including a visit to Leonard Cohen!) to bring this hidden subject to light. Her sharing of these stories, the finding of common concerns and voicing them, can help the process of beginning to move past the d-word."

Written by Globe & Mail columnist Sarah Hampson, Happily Ever After Marriage, piqued my interest because I am a divorced woman myself and it's always interesting to me to read about another woman's experience with marriage and the ending of a marriage.

Although more geared to women in middle age and with children, Sarah's book was, for me, quite a comforting read. Candidly recounting the parental role model of marriage she got growing up, she explores with poignant honesty her own marriage, the break down of it, and the consequences of her divorce on herself and her family. But with passionate determination, Sarah also tells the story of how she moved beyond the pain and disappointment of her divorce to forge a new "self" and a new relationship with the world and her family.

As a journalist with an award-winning column, "Generation Ex", Sarah includes in this volume details of her interviews with various big names who have also been divorced, sometimes more than once or twice, and with people who have journeyed through loneliness and love to arrive at places of comfort and confidence - single or married or in a partnership. As mentioned above, she had a lovely conversation with Leonard Cohen I found quite touching and insightful.

Even though I am not middle aged and have no children (apparently I had what is termed a "starter marriage" - a marriage that lasts less than 5 years and produced no kids) I found a lot in this book that completely resonated for me, and I found great comfort within its pages. There is nothing like reading something where you feel the author "gets it", and I felt this with Hampson's experiences, and when I read this book, I felt somewhat less alone with many of my own experiences.

This book is also a great treatise on the complexity and rewards of love - not just romantic love, the but love of family, children, and friends. Sarah's ability to articulate these complexities is nothing short of beautiful.

This is a definite must-read if you are divorced or going through a divorce, or even considering a divorce. There is a lot of wisdom in this book, and a lot of solace as well.

Dragon Haven

Dragon Haven is the sequel to Dragon Keeper, which was the debut novel in Robin Hobb's new Rain Wilds Chronicles series. Dragon Keeper was excellent, and Dragon Haven was even more excellent and compelling, so much so that I couldn't put this book down at all while I was reading it, though I had to, lamentably, when I worked the other day.

Picking up where the previous book left off, we find the fifteen dragons, their keepers, and the crew of the Liveship barge, Tarman, still slowly slogging their way up the Rain Wilds River in search of a fabled city called Kelsingra, which the dragons only recall sketchily from their incomplete ancestral memories. The journey upriver turns out to be far more long and arduous than anyone expected, fraught with perils no one could have imagined. But it's the perils within the company of keepers and the passengers on the barge that turn out to be the most dangerous. This book focuses less on the dragons and more on the conflicts between the keepers, who themselves are outcasts from the society of Rain Wilders, and who are hoping to create a new life and society for themselves in Kelsingra. A man named Greft has named himself the leader of the Keepers, and he strongarms many of the young men & women into following his set of new rules, which includes trying to mate off certain pairs to keep the men from fighting over the women. Caught in the middle of this is Thymara, Keeper of one of the more temperamental and powerful dragons, Sintara. Greft pressures Thymara to choose a mate so the other young men in the company don't start fighting over her, but Thymara refuses, saying that Greft's new rules are really just as prohibitive as the rules they lived under in the Rain Wilds, and she asserts her right not to choose anything, including following any of Greft's directives.

On the barge, the stories mainly focused on are those of the two Bingtown residents, Alise, and her friend Sedric, who was sent along by Alise's nasty husband, Hest, to keep an eye on Alise. But Sedric has other plans, which include harvesting dragon parts to make himself rich so he can run off with Hest & live happily ever after. Alise, for her part, is falling in love with Tarman's captain, Leftrin. Both Sedric and Alise encounter situations that will change them beyond anything they could possibly have imagined, and their personal growth and gaining of insights were a huge part of this story, and very well written ones, too.

But the main thrust, of course, is getting to Kelsingra, if such a place really exists. The ending had me on the edge of my seat, and I was actually glad I didn't have TV for a little while so I could solely concentrate on finishing this book - and I was sad when it ended because I WANT MORE!

According to a post on Robin Hobb's web site, Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven were meant to be one manuscript divided into two volumes for publication. She does say that a third book is in the works, but it's not been written yet. The fact that these first two books were actually one manuscript accounts for the quickness in which book 2 was published - only a few months after book one. It will be a hard, long wait for book three, I can tell you! But I know it will be worth it!

This Body of Death

I am always so excited when Elizabeth George publishes something new in her Inspector Lynley series, and This Body of Death is the latest installment. And I am happy to report that this is probably her best book yet, too!

George's main hero, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, is still on compassionate leave from New Scotland Yard after the murder of his wife Helen. A very unlikable woman, Isabelle Ardery, comes in to fill the shoes of Lynley's superior for a while, and she proceeds to ruffle every feather with Lynley's old team that she possibly can. But when a woman is found murdered in a graveyard, Ardery does succeed in bringing Lynley back to work for a while, which greatly improves the team's morale.

Ardery proceeds to botch the murder investigation royally, and manages to marginalize the team she's assigned to. Meanwhile, she assigns Lynley's two main right hands, Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata, to follow up on some leads in a place in Hampshire called the New Forest, where they uncover some extremely germane details, only to have Ardery call them back to London prematurely before they're able to put it all together.

While I do love the character of Thomas Lynley, I primarily read these books because I love love love Barbara Havers. She is by far one of the best-rendered characters in mystery fiction, in my opinion, and I cannot get enough of her. In this book, Ardery takes on Barbara's infamous lack of fashion sense, which leads to a series of comical scenes that had me laughing out loud. But Barbara always maintains her telltale bullheadedness, and once again, as I have come to expect from her, her brains and instincts get the job done, and once more, she saves the day. She is the real hero in this series, as far as I'm concerned.

What really stood out to me in This Body of Death, was George's writing. She has come a long, long way since the debut of this series and her style and use of language has just gotten better and better over the years, with this book being probably the best so far. She is a mistress of not only the mystery novel, but of the English language.

Another thing: the secondary characters in this novel are brilliant. I enjoyed them as much as I did the primary ones, in particular a hilarious psychic who provided some of the greatest comedy George has ever insinuated into her stories.

Definitely a must read if you are an Elizabeth George fan, and I can't recommend this author enough if you haven't read any of her stuff before.

Mistress of Rome

I snagged a copy of this via the Library Thing Early Readers program, and after some cursory research on the internet to see what other people thought of this book, I seem to be in the minority in my dislike for it.

Written by new novelist Kate Quinn and set in 1st century Rome, the novel focuses on Thea, a fifteen-year old Jewish slave girl, owned by Lepida, who is same age and the daughter of the Colesseum's games organizer. Lepida is ridiculously beautiful and even at a young age will not stop at anything to use her physical charms to claw her way up Rome's competitive social ladder. Early on in the story, Lepida sets here eyes on Arius the Barbarian, a gladiator from Britannia, yet it is Thea who catches his heart and the two fall in love. When Lepida finds out, she abruptly sells Thea to a pimp in Brundisium to be rid of her. Lepida winds up marrying a Roman senator, much older than she is and way too boring for her (not to mention he's crippled) but the social advantages are just too good to give up.

Thea's time at the brothel is short-lived. Pregnant, she is eventually sold to a kind master who recognizes her signing talent, and Thea is reborn as Lady Athena, still a slave, but doing what she loves and in a good, safe environment.

It is in Brundisium (modern day Brindisi) that Lepida and Thea eventually meet up again, and it doesn't go well. When the emperor, Domitian, takes Thea as his mistress, Lepida goes pretty much nuts and Thea finds herself enslaved to a crueler master than she ever could have imagined.

While this story is epic by any standards, I can sum up my feelings about it in a short series of one-syllable expressions: ugh, crap, and ugh.

Like I said, I'm in the minority with this negative opinion. But let's take into account my education (which some may say is meaningless, but I beg to differ): I have creative writing degree and a minor in Greek & Roman Studies, AKA Classics, in which I focused on Roman history and society, and the Latin language.

Also let's take into account the fact that I have an uncorrected advanced reading copy of this novel, so I have no idea what the final draft looks like. But I have to say, it had better have been cleaned up before publication because this book was a mess.

My main criticism is that there were lots of point of view problems. Lepida and Thea's stories were told in their first person voices. In the case of Thea, that was fine, but when it came to Lepida, I really thought it was ridiculous that she was describing her own death as it happened. And we are not talking about something like The Lovely Bones, here; Lepida could not have told her story in first person if she hadn't lived to tell it. It was ridiculous and amateurish of the writer to have Lepida narrating her own death. Unless you are writing something like The Lovely Bones, this doesn't work. One of the pros of using first person narrative in this way is that you know the narrator survived, and if they didn't, you usually find out that somehow they have left a written first person account, like a journal, behind (ex. Sandra Gulland's Josephine B. series). Other points of view, like Arius the Barbarian's, Marcus's (Lepida's husband), and Paulinus's (Lepida's stepson with whom she has a raging affair) were all told in 3rd person, but there were several spots where this fell apart, too, with no transition between one of these characters and the next - in the same section. Having so many points of view, two 1st person and numerous 3rd, and so poorly executed, made for a really chaotic narrative structure, and the whole thing was just a mess. Any editor worth his/her weight should have been on these pretty basic issues.

My other big criticism was the characterizations. Lepida was too beautiful, too shallow, too ambitious, and too evil. You are meant to hate her, but I also expected some kind of character development with her, yet she gets none. She is the same throughout the novel. If she was such a prominent character with her own 1st person narrative, it seemed strange that she didn't merit any character development.

Similarly, Thea was too good, too smart, and too strong. You know she is Lepida's foil and you know she is a slave who is bound to be treated shitty, but of course she gets the man, the money, the great escape, and the happy ending. It was predictable.

Plot-wise, this book was barely not a trashy romance. There are also a few holes in it I won't get into here because they involve spoilers.

As for the historical detail, I found it to be mediocre, and again, I seem to be in the minority with this. In fact, the detail was so lacking, I was imagining the set to the movie Gladiator and my own travels in Italy (including Rome) the whole time because I didn't find the book's setting very well rendered at all. Author Kate Quinn's descriptions of Lepida's gowns & jewelry were nice, but overall the feel of the Roman era was missing completely. I personally did not feel like I was "there" at all, and I found that disappointing. The majesty of the Colosseum and the city of Rome were just not there. And although my Latin is extremely rusty, I could tell that Quinn was incorrect with some of her pluralizations of Latin words and gender agreements.

Will say that the end of this book was more exciting than the rest and it kept me gripped with its political intrigue and little coincidences, but other than that, this is a really disappointing book I felt I wasted a lot of time on.