Bookworm Collective

The Dog of the South

2011-03-16T04:44:00.000-07:00

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

2011-02-11T14:10:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-20T07:32:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-10T18:35:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-19T11:00:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-20T18:29:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-10T12:15:00.000-08:00

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

2010-09-01T11:01:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-19T14:59:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-07-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-22T18:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-12T16:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-04T18:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Twitpic - Share photos on Twitter

2010-06-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

Twitpic - Share photos on Twitter

Bicycle Diaries - David Byrne

2010-06-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-24T08:45:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-12T17:55:00.000-07:00

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.

Doing Dangerously Well

2010-05-11T01:45:00.000-07:00

This was another one of the three novels sent to me by Random House as part of this year's batch of "New Face of Fiction" titles.

The back of my advanced reading copy says: "When a humanitarian catastrophe strikes Nigeria, an unforgettable cast of Machiavellian opportunists and quixotic do-gooders swoop in to make the most of the tragedy."

The short story from where I stand: this is one of the best books I've read this year so far. I was completely blown away.

Who doesn't love a really good, juicy black comedy? Doing Dangerously Well, Carole Enahoro's debut novel, is just that. Brilliantly melding a vicious sibling rivalry with disaster capitalism, Machiavellian political and office politics, this book is chock-a-block satire that cleverly fictionalizes the points Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.

The inciting incident is the bursting of Nigeria's Kainji Dam, a fictional incident, but a real dam. This disaster kills about a million people and puts the country in political turmoil. On the other side of the ocean, a fictional water megacorporation called TransAqua gets set to purchase the Niger River and help Nigeria with "reconstruction." Leading TransAqua's rather spider-like manoueverings is Mary, a cut-throat but otherwise personality-less high level executive who will stop at nothing to thwart her randy office rival's attempt at securing the river for the company himself. Mary has a sister, Barbara, who is very steeped - or so she thinks - in the New Age movement but is really a washed up hippy who can't find a decent job. As soon as Barbara finds out what Mary is trying to do, she jumps on the water activism bandwagon and does her best to thwart Mary and TransAqua.

Mixed into this we have the Machiavellian machinations of the Nigerian government, led by the paranoid opportunist and former Natural Resources Minister, now President, Ogbe Kolo. Not caring about the suffering of his fellow countrymen after the Kainji Bursts, Kolo wastes no time massaging deals out of TransAqua, pitting Mary against her rival, Sinclair.

And then we have Femi , a Nigerian environmental activist and folk hero whose family is killed by the massive flood causes by the dam's rupture. Fighting his own demons, Barbara spurs him into action - action that basically turns out to be terrorism.

If this sounds bleak, well, yes, the subject matter is indeed bleak. But this is one seriously hilarious book! Enahoro's writing is tight, her characterizations punchy, and her dialogue is snappy. Barbara, Mary, Kolo, and Barbara's love interest, Astro, are some of the most well-drawn characters I've encountered in fiction recently. While dealing with a serious topic like disaster capitalism, the author has mined a bad situation for all the satiric possibilities it can dare to offer. I particularly loved how the more paranoid Kolo got, the more outrageous his behaviour got, eventually leading him to hide out in the special bulletproof trunk of a car, complete with oxygen tank and luxurious linens. The escalation of everyone's behaviour in the story gets more and more outrageous as the stakes become higher and higher, and I found myself laughing at loud and unable to wait for the next page to see what happened next.

Definitely a worthwhile, timely, and entertaining book, and I totally recommend it!

Thirteen Hours

2010-05-04T12:15:00.000-07:00

The flap reads: "Some would call Detective Benny Griessel a legend. Others would call him a drunk.
Either way, he has trodden on too many toes over the years ever to reach the top of the promotion ladder, and now he concentrates on staying sober and mentoring the new generation of crime fighters — from the many ethnic backgrounds that make up the new South Africa. But when an American backpacker disappears in Cape Town, panicked politicians know who to call: Benny has just thirteen hours to save the girl, save his career, and crack open a conspiracy, which threatens the whole country."

I was really excited when I heard Deon Meyer was putting out a new novel because I really enjoyed his previous book, Blood Safari, a lot. In Thirteen Hours, Meyer takes the reader on another breathtaking journey into the seedy side of South Africa with a thriller set in and around Cape Town, with a hero poised in the precarious position of not only being a recovering alcoholic on the job, but a man trusted with putting out racial fires amongst his colleagues and trying to solve two murders and find a missing tourist, all at the same time.

Thirteen Hours follows Inspector Benny Griessel from early morning one day, when he gets called out to a murder scene after having a difficult night before. While starting off the preliminaries with that murder, another body is discovered in another part of time, apparently unrelated to the first murder, and Benny, who is now mentoring new detectives, needs to see to the second scene too. On top of that, there is the case of a missing American girl who is being hunted down by a group of young thugs for reasons we never discover until the very end. As Benny oversees both investigations, the reader gets insight into the many challenges faced by law enforcement in the new South Africa: corruption, tense race relations between colleagues, racial quotas, apathy, and a drastic shortage of manpower.

The pace of the novel, as one might expect since it covers a 13 hour day involving a series of crimes & mysteries, is breakneck and never rests for a minute. Meyer deftly weaves in the thriller aspects of the story with a gritty portrait of the issues faced by South African law enforcement. Once again, I learned a lot about the culture of this country and it's people, and I really appreciated that about it. Originally written in Afrikaans and translated to English by someone named K.L. Seegers, there were a few clunky bits of dialogue and prose, but overall, these elements were snappy and tight. I could not put this book down!

A definite recommend if you like mystery, suspense, and intrigue mixed with some politics and insights into a different culture.

Curiosity

2010-04-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

The flap reads: More than forty years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a cabinet-maker's daughter named Mary Anning found the fossilized skeleton of a dolphin-like creature in the cliffs of Dorset. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this exceptional woman. Indeed, Mary Anning may have been the most significant paleontologist of her day, even though her finds where taken over, named, and exhibited by the male scientific establishment - including a young man named Henry De La Beche."

Not too long ago, I read and reviewed Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. Excellent book, also about Mary Anning and her discoveries, and how as a woman she was excluded from the scientific establishment that was dominated by men. Additionally, this book went into detail about the questions these fossil discoveries brought up around the biblical stories of Adam and Eve and Noah and his ark, and the challenges to the long-held religious beliefs of the time.

Curiosity, by Joan Thomas, covers the same subject matter, only with a different spin. This book tells the story of impoverished Mary Anning and her fossil discoveries along the cliffs of Lyme Regis, and delves into the religious tensions it caused and the gender and class biases of the time. But this book is equally about another historical character related the this historic time, Henry De La Beche, a wealthy young man with a passion for painting and drawing old bones and fossils, and who makes impulsive decisions that change his life in a matter of seconds. Most notably, as a teenager, he sees a pretty girl next door and sets out to pursue her; they share one kiss in the garden and, according to the societal expectations at the time, this means marriage. Henry finds himself engaged to this girl, something which he struggles with for years and deems unfair because, after all, it was only one bloody kiss.

Henry finds himself in Lyme Regis eventually, living with his mother as he waits for his marriage. It is here he meets Mary Anning and where he gets caught up not only in her paleontological work, but also in the male-dominated scientific community buzzing around Mary and her discoveries. And it is here that a subtle love story develops between the two.

Curiosity is a book with many layers, like the strata of the cliffs around the setting of Lyme Regis. This is one book where the lack of actual plot works in its favour because the characters and their various predicaments, as well as their internal dialogues carry the narrative very strongly. Mary, living in poverty, struggles internally with her religious upbringing vis a vis the questions her fossil discoveries bring up. She struggles with her family and the death of her father. She struggles with her feelings for Henry. And most importantly, she struggles with her own knowledge that she is intelligent, experienced, and providing the world with important discoveries while she is being completely left out of all the writings, debates, and lack of proper credit due to her for what she does for all these men and for science in general. Her poverty, class, and gender keep her stuck, and she is painfully aware that she is powerless to change that.

As a member of the wealthy elite, and someone whose income comes from a sugar plantation worked by slaves in Jamaica, Henry's struggles are similar. His position in society dictates to him that he needs to marry an unsuitable girl after one impulsive moment when he was young and impetuous; he is as much a victim of his class as Mary is, because he is just as stuck. The portrayal of the stifling upper class lifestyle by the author is excellently drawn.

As with Remarkable Creatures, which is an perfect companion book to Curiosity, this story of Mary Anning is gentle and elegant and deft. Henry, Mary, and the rest of the cast, which includes the big historical names surrounding Mary and her fossil findings, are powerfully characterized. The prose is eloquent and poignant. I knew enough about these characters previously to know that there would be no romantic, happy ending at the conclusion of the book, but I was still sad for both Mary and Henry because the author really made me root for these two finding happiness.

Definitely a recommended book if you like historical fiction, stories of gender & class struggles, and a good old fashioned, bittersweet love story.

Exit Music - Ian Rankin

2010-04-13T16:07:00.001-07:00

I started at this all backassward, reading the 18th and final book in Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series, with only one other Rebus book under my belt. But despite the flimsiness of my familiarity with Detective Inspector John Rebus of the Edinburgh police department, I was immediately drawn into the troubled world of this often rebellious detective.

Merely days away from a decidedly unwelcome retirement, Rebus is thrown back into active police work by the discovery of the badly beaten body of a famed Russian poet, a dissident poet highly critical of the Russian establishment. Simultaneously, a delegation of Russian businessmen are being wooed by the top echelon of Scottish parliament and the Scottish national bank, keen to trade local interests for bags full of rubles. The pressure is on to close this case quickly and quietly.

And then a business associate of the poet is also brutally murdered.

John Rebus is a compelling character. Definitely not a team player, and evidently quite flawed, he has a troubled relationship with his job and with the lines of authority within the police department. Retirement is not going to sit well with DI Rebus, who has sacrificed his marriage and his personal relationships for the job to the point where, aside from his whiskey bottle and his stereo at the end of the day, it is the only thing that defines him.

I found myself quite interested also in the character of Rebus' presumed successor, Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke, and concerned for the similar path which she seems set to follow. Equally galvanized by police work, she seems to exhibit much of the same professional drive as Rebus, and I would be interested to see how she fares years down the road, in what state she allows her personal life to be usurped by the demands of the profession.

This is a mystery that is satisfactorily peppered with leads which may or may not be red herrings, and that draws on situations gleaned from the news headlines of the day, which bring a sense of historical placement to the fictional events. The real-life incident of the polonium poisoning of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko acts as a running plot point in Exit Music. It's an incident that provides a backdrop to the underlying concerns of Russian-British diplomacy in the novel, and adds a degree of historical significance and realism to the novel's story line.

The highly controversial Scottish parliament building, renowned for the criticism it has elicited for its unusual architecture, also plays a role in the novel. It would be next to impossible to set a novel in Edinburgh, particularly a novel in which members of Scottish parliament are placed under scrutiny, without making mention of the building meant to be representative of a nation but which has actually turned out to be a highly divisive element. It makes rather a good statement for the hidden interests and the power struggles at play within Exit Music.

I enjoyed this book enough to make me want to go back and read some of the earlier DI Rebus novels, to get a better feel for this flawed and troubled, yet ultimately likable protagonist.

The Spice Necklace

2010-04-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

The flap reads: Spices and herbs are the heart and soul of Caribbean cooking, adding more to the pleasures of the table here than perhaps more than anywhere else. In The Spice Necklace, award-winning food and travel writer Ann Vanderhoof embarks on a voyage of culinary discovery, as she follows her nose (and her taste buds) into tiny kitchens and fragrant markets, through rainforest gardens and to family cook-ups on the beach, linking each food to its traditions, folklore, and history.

Oh man, did I ever enjoy this book! Now, when I think of Caribbean cooking, the word "jerk" immediately comes to mind, and I am not a fan of spicy foods at all. But The Spice Necklace really opened my eyes up to the enormous variety and versatility in Caribbean cuisine. Actually, the word "jerk" doesn't even appear in this volume, which surprised me; but then again, Receta (Spanish for recipe), Ann and her husband Steve's boat, didn't travel to Jamaica in this book, sticking instead to the Windward and Leeward Islands, which include Trinidad & Tobago, Grenada, Martinique, St. Kitts & Nevis, and Dominica, amongst others. Having taken a two-year break from their bustling lives in Toronto, Ann & Steve embark upon a sailing adventure around the Caribbean, eating, cooking, and discovering a cuisine as they go.

Ann & Steve don't just stay on their boat, either, enjoying the more immediate luxuries of freshly caught fish and local markets. They often rent a lemony vehicle and drive well off the beaten tourist path to seek out the most unique culinary experiences a particular island has to offer. They endure a horrendous drive in the Dominican Republic to taste dishes made with local goats who feed on wild oregano; they hunt fresh water crayfish in the rain forest of Dominica; they seek out decadent tarts called "The Torments of Love," a specialty of Guadaloupe; and they eat a vegetarian and locally-foraged Rastafarian feast back in Dominica. They visit rum distilleries, cocoa and vanilla plantations, and while all this is happening, Ann provides a fascinating glimpse into the production, history, folklore, and personal stories of the people who make, grow, harvest, and cook a seemingly endless array of exotic ingredients - many of which we take for granted here in North America.

Each chapter is a delight and I found myself so looking forward to whatever Ann & Steve encountered next in their travels because I knew it would be something cool and unexpected. I was never disappointed. And bonus - this book comes with over 70 recipes, too! I plan on having a Spice Necklace-inspired family dinner using recipes from the book!

The one recipe I have made already is the Grenadian Banana Bread with Chocolate, Nutmeg, and Rum, found on page 21. I even went to the liquor store to buy rum (though I didn't want to invest in a relatively expensive bottle of dark rum when I could get a mini of amber rum for $7). This banana bread is unlike any I've ever had before; the spices hit the back of your mouth just as the rum starts tingling on the tip of your tongue. This is no mere banana bread; it's a sensual experience to savour. Kind of like the book!

The only thing I didn't like about this book was that (apart from not having any pictures in it), it didn't have an index, and I found myself quite frustrated at time trying to keep information straight in my mind because I couldn't easily reference it via an index.

Nevertheless, this book is a keeper, and despite its lack of photos, Ann has a web site here where she has a photo gallery.

And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks

2010-04-07T18:46:00.000-07:00

This book was written in 1944, making it one of the first works by either legendary Beat writer, but it wasn't published until 2008 - a pleasant surprise for fans who had pretty much given up hope of ever seeing it in print.

Being virtually a first work, Hippos bears little resemblance to the later writing styles of either Kerouac or Burroughs. There's none of Kerouac's breathless "bop prosady", none of the nightmarish surreality of Burroughs' solo novels. What you get instead is a straightforward dual account of an event that forged lifelong bonds among the Beat writers: Lucien Carr's murder of their friend David Kammerer. In the novel, which is told in alternating chapters by "Will Dennison" (a character not far removed from Burroughs) and "Mike Ryko" (a sailor not far removed from Kerouac), the strange and still-baffling relationship between the magnetic young Carr ("Phillip") and his obsessed former Scout leader Kammerer ("Ramsey Allen") plays out like a manic tango. The gang's aimless wanderings, wild parties, lofty ambitions, and philosophical musings have an edge of desperation from the very beginning, but the inexplicable conclusion still comes as a harsh blow.

As a cathartic effort and as a first novel, Hippos is superior to most semi-autobiographical works, but I couldn't help wondering if we would have gotten a much different story from an older Kerouac and a wiser Burroughs. The sexual conflict experienced by most, if not all, of the Beats peeks through the veneer of machismo more persistently than in Kerouac's later works, while Burroughs' bisexuality remains firmly masked, leaving the reader to wonder if either man then possessed the insight necessary to grasp such a complex relationship at that point in their lives.

The Lost City of Z (David Grann)

2010-04-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

The Lost City of Z is the true tale of Percy H. Fawcett, an English explorer and adventurer who was obsessed with finding an undiscovered civilization in the heart of the Amazon. In 1925, Col. Fawcett entered the jungle with his son and a friend, intent on finding the mysterious, undiscovered city of Z, and disappeared forever.

Author David Grann alternates Fawcett's tale along with his own research and preparations to follow in the explorer's footsteps. The result is an exciting literary romp through the rainforests of South America. However, unlike most adventure novels and films, Grann drags the reader into the muck along with Fawcett and his party - coated in bugs which bite, suck, and burrow under the skin, starvation, hostile native tribes and a jungle so thick you can barely see beyond the next tree.

Z was an eye opener for me - I had never heard of Fawcett or of the recent discoveries made by archaeologists like Michael Heckenberger. But then again, South American archaeology was never my area of interest. It's intriguing to think that Fawcett may actually have been right (at least partially) and even walked across the spot where the city he referred to as "Z" may have existed. While Grann's intention may have been to finally put an end to the mystery surrounding Col. Fawcett's disappearance (the oral tradition provided by the K Indians is probably the closest anyone will ever get), I found his book far too exciting and have a feeling others will continue to try to solve the mystery.

According to Wikipedia and to IMDb.com, Brad Pitt's company has obtained the rights to the book and will be making a film version of the book. No surprise, Pitt will be playing the English adventurer. I'm curious to see how it turns out.

A definate recommended read.

Terminal Freeze (Lincoln Child)

2010-03-31T13:04:00.000-07:00

On an abandoned army base deep within the Arctic circle, a small group of scientists are conducting research on the effects of climate change. Working in the shadow of a rapidly retreating glacier, the team makes a unexpected discovery in a nearby cave - a prehistoric animal buried in the ice. When their financial backers, a documentary film channel, gets word of the find, they immediately send a film crew to the location. Rather than document the scientists' work, the shoot quickly turns into a docu-drama where the filmmakers are more interested in wowing the audience than scientific advancement. On this film set though, not everyone listens to the director.

Plans to defrost the creature during a live broadcast go amiss when the ice melts prematurely and the body disappears. The filmmakers believe it to be a simple case of sabotage... until one of their own is discovered dead and they discover that the creature is alive. A seemingly perfect killing machine, the creature is unlike anything anyone has ever seen before. Everyone except a local shaman who once worked at the base during the cold war. The film crew and the scientists ignored his earlier warnings. Now that they're being picked off, one by one, it might just be too late.

When I first picked up Terminal Freeze, I was sure it was going to be a major literary cheese-fest. I was pleasently surprised - the book was fast paced and full of action. And although it uses climate change as part of the plot, its not preachy.

The Witching Hour By Anne Rice

2010-03-31T13:03:00.000-07:00

Hi there. I just finished the Witching Hour by Anne Rice. Wow what a book.. There is a lot going on.. I dont know where to begin.. All I can say is read the dang book because I dont know how to describe this one.. If you like Vampires/Witches.. its a good book.There are four books in the Series.. Suppose to be five but Anne Rice found God before she finiished the series... So we get left hanging in the fourth book.. but anyway I am now currently reading the second book Lasher... I have no idea how to describe the Witchign hour.. It bounces alot from past to present but it all connects by the end of the book.. Esp the end of hte book.. Just pick it up and read it.. Its good. there is one dry spot but you need that spot to understand the rest of the book..

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

2010-03-29T15:10:00.000-07:00

Flavia is back! And I can't tell you how happy this makes me! And, even better, I won a copy of TheWeed that Strings the Hangman's Bag from Library Thing!

In this sequel to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, eleven-year-old Flavia puts her vast powers of observation and her knowledge of chemistry to work to solve the murder of a puppet master whose vehicle breaks down in the village, leading to a pair of puppet shows in the church hall as said vehicle is fixed. The puppet show features, shockingly enough, a puppet that looks exactly like a small boy who, five years previously, was found hanging in the woods outside the village. Eventually, we discover that there is a link between these two deaths and the victims - a like no one would have picked up except the overly precocious, stubborn, but unceasingly charming and witty Flavia de Luce.

This sequel sees the return of many of the characters from the previous book, too, including Flavia's two nasty older sisters; their stamp-collecting and distant father; their housekeeper and local gossip, Mrs. Mullet, and their jack of all trades and PTSD-stricken war vet, Dogger. And of course, Gladys, Flavia's trusty bike. The cast of this second book is rounded out by the odd-ball characters one might typically find in a small English village, and we also see the return of Flavia's sometimes nemesis, sometimes hero, Inspector Hewitt.

Again, Flavia's penchant for getting to the bottom of things is aided by her love and talent for chemistry, which she practices in a laboratory in her family's crumbling mansion. It totally made my day when Flavia used a sample of a character's snot to perform a pregnancy test - and got a result! Flavia also loves the library, and once more she uses the seemingly quaint skill of combing newspaper archives in order to get information she needs to fit the puzzle pieces together. This time, she breaks into the archives, and cleverly covers up her tracks using clay, revealing once more her enormous resourcefulness.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag is an excellent follow up to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and I am so stoked that the author, Alan Bradley, has been signed to write a series of these books. Flavia is one of the best characters in recent fiction, in my opinion, and I am excited about reading future books!

Things The Grandchildren Should Know - Mark Oliver Everett

2010-02-26T19:03:00.001-08:00

This is not your standard rock autobiography. But then again, Eels and its enigmatic frontman, Mark Oliver Everett, is not your standard rock band.

Like his music, Everett's book is written in simple yet eloquent language, which, as a literary work, is both its weakness and its greatest strength.

Everett's life story is a study in pathos; his upbringing was unstable, peppered with madness and mired in tragedy. Still a young man, he lost his entire family - a withdrawn physics genius father, a confused child-like mother, a sister who was his biggest fan but who was unable to deal with her personal demons of addiction. That Everett managed to battle the mental illnesses that also constituted his psyche is a testament to both his obsession and to the healing power of creativity.

This book seems to fall naturally into two camps, one in which Everett tells of the often heartbreaking circumstances of his upbringing, the other in which he focuses on the creativity that ultimately gave him an outlet and the strength to fight his genetic demons.

Particularly in the early chapters of the book, I sometimes found Everett's simple and straightforward recounting of events to be somewhat abrupt. He tells of one event and then simply heads in to the next, without explanations, without summation. At first I found it a little offsetting; I kept looking for the punchline or the take-home message in each episode, but then I gradually realised that this was simply Mark Everett telling me the unembellished truth of his life. It was up to me to decide what the message was.

About halfway through the Things the Grandchildren Should Know, something changed for me. As Everett began writing more about his struggles to live by his belief in the way he wanted to make his music, I began to find his life story to be more and more inspirational. Everett's life still had more than its share of tragedy, and he still divulged the details in his straightforward and unapologetic fashion, but I began to understand the power that music had to quite literally save this man's life. And I began to appreciate the simple beauty of the language that Everett uses to tell his autobiography.

Mark Oliver Everett does not need flowery and overly-descriptive words to give us the powerful and starkly honest music that Eels makes, and nor does he need purple prose to tell us the often heartbreaking but always inspiring story of his life so far.

Things the Grandchildren Should Know is a rock autobiography for thinking people. I think you should read it.

What I talk about when I talk about running: a memoir

2010-02-22T18:33:00.001-08:00

Haruki Murakami one day decides to write a novel, and thus becomes a writer. One day he decides to run and thus becomes a runner. This book is a reflection on both with an emphasis his runner's life.

Murakami's book has a (pardon the analogy, but perhaps it is no accident) long distance runner pace to it. He measures his steps and we are invited into his reflections on life. His running stories are told at a runner's pace with a stream of consciousness style that kept me engaged from start to finish. He does set up the New York marathon as a goal, but it's not a great build up because he's not an elite runner, and there are other stories to be told before he even gets to New York. These other stories are not told in a chronological order, so he moves to and from the goal of the New York marathon dipping into other events in his life, which is why the marathon's importance seems less so in the greater picture, just as it would in life. Besides it's not the kind of book that is about the outcome; it's about the process. Afterall, this is a memoir and is more reflective in nature.

So why should you read it? I'm not sure you should. If you've read his novels, which I haven't, then you'd probably appreciate reading this memoir. If you're a runner you'll appreciate it a little more since it is like talking to another runner about their last run, or best run, or most unique run. I lapped up every mile, every ache and pain, and every running experience that was familiar or not to me. I also found his experience offered me some insight into my own running. His book even motivated me at times. If you're not a runner, you might also enjoy it as a writer since part of the memoir does reflect on his becoming a writer as if overnight. Mostly though it's the ease in his storytelling that is enjoyable. He's in no hurry to get to the end, there is a lighthearted view with a pace that is just right.

Kylie Kwong's My China

2010-02-21T09:51:00.000-08:00

I treated myself to this weighty tome for Christmas, being a fan of Kylie Kwong's Simple Chinese Cooking, which launched my series on ReTorte called Cooking with Kylie.

My China's subtitle is "A Feast for the Senes" and that it definitely is.

Kylie is a fourth generation Chinese Australian, born in Sydney. This book is her homage to her Chinese heritage, and recounts her travels through much of China and Tibet, cooking and eating as she goes. She starts off in the village of her ancestors, where she is greeted like a long lost relative and where she cooks up the first of many feasts featuring local ingredients in rustic cooking conditions. My China takes the reader everywhere: up the Yangtze, along the Silk Road, the Great Wall, to the great cities of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing, to Lhasa in Tibet, and to a place that really fascinates me Xi'an, where the Terracotta Army resides. Interspersed with food history and stories, are cultural vignettes featuring Chinese history written with Kylie's sense of wonder, respect, and enthusiasm.

Kylie's descriptions of her experiences are a feast for all the senses. She is a great writer, I discovered, incorporating sound, taste, touch, and smell into her narrative so well I could imagine myself there with her. And there are plenty of large, colourful photos to feast the eyes on.

There are over 80 new recipes in this book, and I have yet to try them. But I will!

This is a great companion book to Beyond the Great Wall, which I reviewed here. There were many similarities between the two books, both being a great mixture of travelogue, photographs, recipes, and personal stories.

If you are fan of Kylie Kwong and Chinese food, history, and culture, you cannot go wrong with My China!

Robin Hobb is BACK!

2010-02-20T14:07:00.000-08:00

She's BACK! After the lackluster Soldier Son trilogy, which I gave up on not even half way through book two, Robin Hobb returns to the world she does best: the land of Rain Wilds and Liveship Traders. Thank God!

Dragon Keeper picks up where the last of the Liveship books leaves off, with the sea serpents finally making their way up the Rain Wilds River to cocoon and hatch as dragons. If you read the Liveship Traders series, which I highly recommend you do, you'll remember that the sea serpents were old and decrepit by the time they reached their traditional cocooning grounds because their memories had failed to lead them where they needed to go. The awakening of what was thought to be the last living dragon, a queen named Tintaglia, helped them out and struck a deal with the Bingtown Traders (who have the Liveships) and the Rain Wilders, who supplied the special wood that the Liveships were constructed of, the legendary wizardwood. The deal was that the Rain Wilders & the Bingtown crowd would protect and take care of the serpents as the cocooned and hatched and Tintaglia would protect the Rain Wilds & Bingtowners from an invading army in a neighbouring country.

But because of timing and the age of the serpents, the dragons that hatch turn out to be weak, stunted, and very dependent. They cannot hunt for themselves, and resources and patience start running thin. Tintaglia disappears after finding a mate (which we see at the end of the Tawny Man series).

After years of being trapped, starved, poorly cared for, and resented by the locals, the remaining dragons decide they want to depart for a land they all recall from their ancestral memories, the fabled Kelsingra. The Rain Wilders agree to send a group of their people along to help them on their way, a selection of outcasts who are to care for the dragons, hunt for them, and generally look out for them as they embark on a journey with an uncertain destination and an even more uncertain end.

Hobb is definitely in her element with this setting, these cultures she created years ago, and the new characters she has drawn. Every character in this book is compelling, particularly the dragons, who are very sentient, have very strong personalities, and despite their physical weaknesses, all have an incredible drive to survive. The descriptions of the dragons, their way of conversing, and the details of their disabilities and hardships makes for excellent, entertaining reading.

I am totally stoked about this new series from an author I have loved for years but who had disappointed me with that dreadful Soldier Son series. And it looks like I won't have to wait too long for the sequel; Amazon says the next book, Dragon Haven, will be released in May! Take note, George RR Martin!

The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy)

2010-02-15T09:20:00.001-08:00

A young man, his wife, and their baby daughter stop in at a country fair after travelling through the English countryside searching for work. In a fit of alcoholic rage, the man sells auctions off his wife and daughter to a sailor passing through for a few coins. When he sobers up the next day and realizes what he's done, he searches the nearby towns trying to find them and undo his actions. He fails to find them and vows to give up alcohol. Years later, he's become a succesful businessman and mayor of Casterbridge. When his wife and grown daughter suddenly reappear, his life takes an unexpected turn. Success turns to failure, lives intertwine not always for the better, and everything he's worked so hard for look as though it will crumble before his eyes.

Hardy masterfully weaves a fantastic tale filled with the consequences of secrets and lies, the excesses of alcohol, and the power of love and redemption. I had tried to read this a few years ago but wasn't in the right frame of mind. This time around, however, I was hooked from the opening scene. I found The Mayor of Casterbridge to be a powerful story that had me eagerly looking forward to each spare moment I could spend reading a few pages or even a paragraph of two. I highly recommend picking up a copy and reading it yourself. As for me, I'll be checking out some of Thomas Hardy's other great works: Tess of the D'Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure.

Deloume Road

2010-02-09T07:27:00.000-08:00

Random House was nice enough to send me some of their New Face of Fiction books to review, and a couple of weeks ago, they arrived in a brown paper package tied up with string. Deloume Road by Matthew Hooton was one of the three novels I received and I chose to read it first because it took place on Vancouver Island, near a place called Mill Bay. A place familiar to me, actually, and the setting piqued my interest. Also, I was very curious because the author graduated from the same writing program at UVic that I did, and I always love to see someone from my alma mater get published!

Taking place during the first Gulf War, Deloume Road is set, well, on Deloume Road - a small rural community scattered along an old country road. The inhabitants of this community vary in background and experience: Irene is very close to giving birth and just lost her husband in the Gulf; Al is a native artist awaiting news about his son, whose plane had gone missing near the Alaskan border; The Butcher, a Ukranian immigrant, slaughters pigs and runs a small deli on the street as he tries to come to terms with leaving his wife and son behind in the old country; and Bob Ford, a nasty, abusive piece of work who buys and sells junk for a living and beats his son. But the guts of the book revolve around some of Deloume Road's children, namely Andy, Matthew, Josh, and Miles Ford. One day, Matthew finds an old object related to Deloume Road's past, and this one simple object will change their lives forever.

Hooten writes with an amazing eye for detail. His descriptions of Deloume Road and it's tiniest intricacies are incredibly well-rendered and give the setting an unmistakable authenticity. If there was one thing drummed into our brains at UVic, it was know your setting - and Hooten obviously knows his. On the other side of the coin, though, some of his descriptions of less pleasant things going on in the book were downright macabre and almost made me sick to my stomach.

Although I would love to have loved this book, in the end I just couldn't. For one thing, there were way too many characters and way too many story lines, some of which had, for me anyways, unsatisfactory resolutions, or resolutions that seemed to come too easily. The story lines that didn't involve the children and the main event of the novel almost seemed extraneous when all was said and done, and seemed to distract from the guts of the story. And as for the guts of the story, I had a very difficult time relating it in anyway to anything else going on in the novel. There was a patchwork feel to the book that didn't work for me, a lack of cohesion and focus that relegates this to my "just OK" category. Unfortunately. I will say this: for CanLit, it was kind of refreshing not to have to deal with any weird sexual stuff or the typical coming of age trappings I am so cynical about. Though, perhaps because this is CanLit, there is a healthy dose of the depressing in Deloume Road that has been hard to shake.

Report Weirdness, Please

2010-02-04T20:22:00.000-08:00

OK, two contributors, Captain Karen and Barbara the Bad Tempered Zombie, have reported that this here blog is looking odd to them:

side bar content underneath the posts on the main page, not on the side
posts missing (i.e. big gaps between say, November and January)
mismatched titles and posts (e.g. sp's vegan cookie book title and picture appears with the body of an older review of Barbara's in the post)

Strangely enough, the blog looks absolutely normal to me - nothing amiss whatsoever.

So, if you are reading and see weirdness, do please leave a comment to let us know. Thanks!

Edit: OK, maybe let us know what browser you are using, too. Thanks!

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - Mary Roach

2010-02-04T19:41:00.001-08:00

I am sure I have already yammered on endlessly to most anybody who will listen about what a fascinating and enjoyable book this is. But if you are one of the unfortunate few who has so far escaped my enthusiastic blatherings about Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, allow me to back you into the corner for a few minutes and give you my elevator pitch while you search desperately for a means of escape.

Stiff is not only one of the most enthralling books I have read in a long time, but also one of the funniest. Which is not exactly what you would expect from a book about cadavers. But with this book, Roach joins the ranks of those science writers who have become personal heroes of mine with their ability to explain complex concepts in such a way that even a dolt like me can understand them.

I have always been fascinated by the workings of the body (you can't stumble through a Master's in Physiology without some level of enthusiasm), and have never been particularly squeamish about the processes of decomposition. But even if you are bothered by the engrossing details of decay or by the thought of injury analysis of the human wreckage that is sometimes required to piece together the details of an air crash, I guarantee that you will be fascinated by the lengthy history of body snatching for the purposes of human dissection, by bizarre tales of medical cannibalism, and by a litany of attempts at human head transplantation.

Roach looks at the use of cadavers in medical school anatomy classes and as practice tools for plastic surgeons, as volunteers in body farms to pinpoint decomposition times and factors for crime analysis, at the use of body parts in crash injury studies and in ballistics and bomb analyses, and she ponders the concept of the human soul and the issues that arise in brain death.

Who knew that dead people led such busy and intriguing lives?

Did I mention that Stiff is hilarious? Somehow Roach manages to bring real laugh out loud humour to the subject, while still treating the deceased with dignity and compassion.

Personally I cannot wait to read Mary Roach's other books - Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner by Elizabeth George

2010-01-28T08:31:00.000-08:00

I have to admit I bought this book along time ago and I just recently just refound it. I had read it when I first bought it. I just reread it and I couldnt remember who did what or why.. I really enjoyed it the second time around as I did the first..

In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner it starts out with telling how this great big Manor house is being restored by Julian Buxton. He is dating this girl named Nicola Maiden. She is a student in London and she comes home for Holidays and summer time between classes. Well Julian proposes marriage to her and she turns him down. He is just upset about it..

Well in the mean time Nicola goes camping and meets up with a friend of hers. They both end up dead.. Well Nicola's father was with the SO10 when he was a police officer and he requests for a certain cop.. Langly I believe is the cop.. There is alot going on in this book so excuse me if I get mixed up..

Langly goes down to Derbyshire and meets up with the Inspector there.. They talk to Nicola Maidens parents.. Lanly feels slightly uncomfortable talking to his old SO10 co worker.. But he does what he has to.. They get what they need done and such at this meeting and to tell you there are many more meeting that get more uncomfortable with this group.

They talk to Julian and Sam and Julians Father Jeremy. Julian is so distraught over the murders.. Somewhere in here Nicola had told Julian why she didnt want to marry him and she wouldnt be back in Derbyshire for along time...

Nicola had met up with this girl Vy Nevin and they worked for an Escort Service but they wanted to veer off on there own and open there own Escort Business.. They were in the process when the man that put out there Call Cards in Phone Boxes intercepted a phone call for some one else. Well he got his hands on this music and thought they could make some real cash with these.

He took them to several different places and couldnt sell them.. Well he ended up taking them to who was actually looking for them.. He took them to Matthew King Ryder. Well Matthew took one look at the music and kicked Terry Cole out of his office.. He didnt claim the music was his but he didnt want to Terry to know that he was looking for it either..

Well in the mean time Nicola had went back to Derbyshire to work for the summer and let her parents be happy she was there for the summer.. In the mean time before this happened she had phoned her father and had him go to London. He thought she wanted him to bring some of her things back to the house with him when he went but instead Nicola told her father what she was doing in London. She told him that she wouldnt be returning to school or Derbyshire for a long time after this..

So they heard someone say I will see you Dead before I let you do this. So in the process of the book they looked at Nicola's father..

In the mean time Barbara Havers was on the case also looking into other possibilities and they had found several there.. Barb had gotten into trouble when the book started but she worked her way into the case anyway and she helped bring down the killer at the end..

I am not good at book reviews but I enjoyed this book.. I will give this book 9.5 Tweets out of 10.. If you read this book I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I am even more than willing to ship my copy to you to borrow if you want to read it..All I have to do is pay shipping to you..

Surfacing

2010-01-25T18:20:00.000-08:00

I've always been a fan of Margaret Atwood's books. Even the ones that I liked less (which are few), I can always appreciate the craft in her words and her ability to tell a story.

Surfacing is a dark tale about a young woman returning to her family's cabin after her father has gone missing and is presumed dead. Being in a place that is so familiar to the main character (who remains nameless throughout the book), she recalls childhood memories and it soon becomes evident that the protagonist's true mission in the book is a journey of self discovery. Since this book was written and published in the early 70's, Surfacing also reflects its time and place, as it is also a novel about a woman's identity in a man's world (a feminist reading), and Canadian identity in an America's world.

After I read the opening of the book describing the remoteness of the cabin with the set up of the two couples cut off from the world in a place with no running water or electricity, it suggested to me a cliche horror situation, and I think there might be something to this. There is often an atmosphere that feels threatening or as if doom is around the corner. This could be because we are seeing everything through the protagonist's eyes and it is simply a reflection of her state of mind. At one point she believes that her father might return to the cabin to frighten them in what could only be a deranged state. While this does not occur, it does foreshadow where the protagonist is headed. At another juncture in the book, they come across the body of a dead heron strung up on display. The protagonist is deeply angered by this, blaming the American's who use the area for recreation, and the tone has been set while we follow the couples as they set up camp for the night. Such moments continue throughout the book. In many ways, we are invited to look at this wilderness space as being dark and dangerous. If it reflects the protagonist's own feelings as she goes deeper into her past, it is not surprising that her relationships with her partner, Joe, and her married friends, David and Anna, slowly but inevitably unravel. If much of the book can be read as a reflection of the main character's state of mind, then what is unravelling is the main character.

Where the book ends up I won't give away, but I can say that where the protagonist starts out, believing herself as someone who has been powerless, as if a victim, she ends up (or surfaces) feeling empowered and stronger; a woman more certain of who she is in the world.

Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar

2010-01-25T14:18:00.000-08:00

I hope no one minds if I'm posting cookbook reviews here. Please let me know if you feel it is inappropriate for the Bookworm Collective. In my defence though, I have to say that with Isa & Terry's cookbooks I tend to sit down with them and read them through to the first recipe. I find their insights interesting and entertaining. With a cookbook, as opposed to a recipe from the web, I enjoy it like any other book, appreciating the physicality of the book as well as the content.

So yes, this is another great cookbook from Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jaris a pint-sized book containing 100 vegan cookie recipes broken downinto catergories such as, “Drop cookies”,“Fancy Cookies,” and “Slicedand Rolled Cookies.”

Justlike other books written by these two,the writing style isconversational, and the recipes are clearly written and easy to follow.Before you bake you should read Part One on "Cookie Science," whichcontains a section on the tools recommended and required, a section oningredients (there's a gluten-free flour blend that can besubstituted), and a troubleshooting section to help with common cookieproblems should your cookies not turn out as you had hoped.

Throughoutthe book there are “morsels”, which are bite-sized suggestions toenhance your recipe. Of course there are lots of glossy mouthwateringphotos to inspire as well. I even appreciate the size of this book(about half the height of an average paperback cookbook), making iteasy to fit in a small working space with all of your ingredients.

There are a wide range of spices and flavours used. Imagine Sweet Wine biscuits with Sesame, or Chocolate Chip Chai Spiced Shortbread. Or how about a Whole Wheat Fig Bar or Caramel Pecan Bar? If you can't make up your mind you could just start with the Banana Everything Cookie, which the authors describe as “a clean out your cupboard kind of cookie.”

I tried the recipes for Citrus Glitters, Mexican Chocolate Snickerdoodles (with cayenne & cocoa), Linzertorte Thumbprints, Old-Fashioned Pie Plate Shortbreads, and the Lemon Bars.I had success with all of the recipes, and felt like a pro when Ipulled each tray from the oven to reveal the bite-sized wonders.

This book will definitely make you the cookie queen or king in your household.

Beat the Reaper

2010-01-24T16:37:00.001-08:00

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell 2009 Back Bay Books

A few things bothered me about this book from the get-go. First of all, you see on the front cover that it is a national bestseller. Open the book and the first page is glossy with drawings and one-line positive reviews like "Completely outrageous...Genuinely entertaining - New York Times Book Review". Then the publisher offers us a section called Applause for Beat the Reaper - 5 pages worth. By this point I figured there was a movie deal so I googled: it is rumoured that Leonardo diCaprio will star in the film. Back to the book. I noted the novel has 304 pages but there are lots more pages in the book. What's that all about? Well, first there's a warning page. Next there are two pages of acknowledgments followed by a page for About the Author. Then we have a reading group guide. This starts with a conversation with Josh Bazell (4 pages), and is followed by Questions and Topics for Discussion. (3 pages). Then we have Josh Bazell's suggestions for Further Reading. This has sections: 22 great crime novels;22 great true crime books; 6 great novels about science or medicine; 6 great nonfiction books about science of medicine; and 9 great comedic novels. The publisher puts Mr. Bazell's name directly into the company of all kinds of great authors.

As you might imagine, I was ready to release this one into the wild unread. I can handle being marketed to, but you don't have to hammer me over the head, thank you very much. The only problem was that I decided to read the first few pages. The book is a page turner. It's about a former mafia hit-man in the witness protection program who becomes a doctor. It's all plot but I have to admit, it's terrific plot. The story bounces back and forth between what is happening today, right now, and events of the past that inform today's events. There's lots of interesting medical stuff thrown in to spice it up.

Beat the Reaper is really solid crime fiction. It's a fast junk read and I lapped it up. I would say that if you like a really tasty crime novel, you'll really enjoy it. It's comedic in parts, gritty in others, and is laced with plenty of tough-guy cynicism. Delicious.

The Great Depression (Pierre Berton)

2010-01-18T13:55:00.000-08:00

Pierre Berton’s The Great Depression takes the reader on a journey back to the dirty thirties, a decade where millions suffered through drought, unemployment, and times so tough it’s difficult for many of us to imagine today. What makes Berton’s book unique from most is that he looks at it from an entirely Canadian perspective.

As most of us have learned, the Great Depression is generally considered to have begun on October 29, 1929 with the stock market crash. While this did have an impact on many Canadians, equal blame can be placed on the severe drought that struck the southern prairies for the first half of the decade, as well as an indifferent Canadian government who refused to help or, for many years, even acknowledge that there was a problem. Berton examines in great detail the actions of the government (or lack thereof) of the time and their attitude that everything could be solved with a balanced budget. To R. B. Bennett (the Prime Minister during the first half of the ‘30s), those asking for help were lazy and unwilling to work. Unlike his counterpart in the United States who created various building/construction projects in order to help his citizens and spent millions of dollars to get his country back on track, Bennett threw responsibility back on the provinces and municipalities and tried, unsuccessfully, to wash his hands. Throw in a protectionist mentality of the federal government who believed high tariffs and increased production would solve many of the country’s problems, and you can smell disaster in the air.

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit just how little I knew about this time in Canadian history but I honestly do not remember learning about it while in school. The decade was filled with police violence, many Canadians were anti-communist and anti-Semitic. Many of the rights and freedoms that we take for granted today didn’t exist or were completely ignored during the Depression: a free, unbiased press; the ability to gather in public and freedom of speech; the right to follow the belief system of your choice; birth control; universal health care; etc. However, it is because these freedoms were ignored or trampled upon during this turbulent decade that we also see the establishment of the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), unemployment insurance, and the beginnings of unions in Canada. Does anyone else of my generation know about “On to Ottawa” trek or the Regina riot?

Berton expertly weaves historical events with personal stories to show the impact the depression and actions (or at times lack of action) by the government had on the average Canadian. It frightening at times to read about events more than 75 years ago and realize the similarities with some of things we’re experiencing today: recession, war, unemployment, and the inability of our government to adequately respond to these issues.

I was drawn into this book as easily as I was with my introduction to Pierre Berton, his book on Vimy. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Definitely a keeper and I will be ordering more of his books very shortly. A must-read for all Canadians.

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

2010-01-17T04:21:00.000-08:00

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry is a new novel, a sort-of detective story come imaginative romp. It's set in a nameless rainy city, a city that has detectives - in fact, a city that has an Agency. The Agency has detectives, watchers, clerks, underclerks, assistants and an overseer. It's all very specialized. The protagonist, Unwin, is a clerk who one day strangely finds himself promoted to detective. The only problem is that he has no detective skills.

The story traces Unwin's increasingly strange adventures, eventually into dreams, as he tries to rescue a detective named Sivart. Unwin was Sivart's clerk; he wrote up Sivart's reports, editing them and sending them to the Agency's archives. Sivart has disappeared. Strange things happen in the city. People are sleepwalking. Somebody is stealing all the alarm clocks in the city. It seems it is up to Unwin to straighten things out, but a watcher is murdered and Unwin is the prime suspect, and even his own beloved Agency is after him.

The Manual of Detection is an enjoyable enough book, but I thought it had some problems too. As strange as the narrative was, it was still a straight-ahead plot-driven narrative. It reminded me of paintings by one of those surrealist painters like Magritte, whose paintings carefully decribed images juxtaposed in unusual way. Ultimately, everything was explained, everything made sense in a fairly obvious way. The writing did not transport me to Unwin's world. I watched from outside. I also found I had difficulty grabbing onto any emotional attachment with the characters. They seemed to be there to tell their part in the story, but I didn't care what happened to any of them.

Next up: Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell.

Heir to Sevenwaters

2010-01-16T10:07:00.000-08:00

I was a big fan of Juliet Marillier's Sevenwaters trilogy, so when I saw that she had added a fourth book, Heir to Sevenwaters, I was very curious. The write-up sounded good, I had a gift certificate from Amazon waiting to be used, so I got the book.

I've read most of Marillier's books, and for the most part have really enjoyed them (the exception being The Dark Mirror, book one of the Bridei Chronicles, which I couldn't finish because it was so boring), so I had certain expectations. The main one was that this book would no doubt contain Marillier's typical heroine & romantic plot: pretty girl of approximately 15 years of age with plenty of practical talent and skill, good daughter in every way imaginable, involved in some monumental quest/adventure in which she meets a troubled/marginalized/tortured hottie, whom she falls in love with after a short period of time and knows this is the only man for her despite her age and his monumental issues; they have super sex, get married, remain blissfully happy for ever, and have beautiful, perfect children, who then usually go on to repeat their mother's pattern.

So, in that sense, I was not disappointed with Heir to Sevenwaters, because that's exactly what happened. The narrator and heroine, Clodagh, daughter of Sean of Sevenwaters, an excellent, capable daughter in every respect, runs the household as her mother, Aisling, endures a difficult pregnancy past the time when women back then could safely give birth (she's probably just under 40). When Aisling gives birth to a son - Clodagh is one of 6 girls so far - there is much to celebrate, until the baby gets abducted on Clodagh's watch and an otherworldly creature is left in its place. Clodagh then embarks on a mission to the Otherworld accompanied by a tortured warrior on the run named Cathal.

While the Clodagh-Cathal romance runs well within Marillier's typical romantic parameters (oh, these two wait till they get married to have their super sex, though, so...they show some restraint), the meat of the story is pretty good and there is plenty of action to keep this book interesting and engaging. Marillier's strengths always lie in her ability to produce a kick-ass plot, and in this regard, she doesn't disappoint. She also leaves enough of an opening at the end for further sequels.

Some of the reviews on Library Thing were not all that positive, and the negative reviews complained of this book being predictable. I can understand that because this book was totally predictable. Marillier is the queen of the romantic happy ending. I expected nothing less.

That being said...Despite the plot, action, cool characters in the Otherworld, yeah, I did find myself wishing Marillier would step outside her usual formula for once. I would have made this book far more intriguing.

Also, the title was a little mystifying...This book isn't about the heir to Sevenwaters at all; in fact, the succession issues touched upon in the story are very minor in the end, even though the abduction of Clodagh's new baby brother is the big inciting incident. I think this book could have been more appropriately titled.

So, not a bad addition to the Sevenwaters series, but this does not come anywhere near the excellence of the first book, Daughter of the Forest.

The Sea Captain's Wife

2010-01-09T13:13:00.001-08:00

This is another book I won from Library Thing's Early Readers program! It comes out this Tuesday, so the copy I got was an uncorrected proof, but that was OK with me because this was one seriously unputdownable book, people!

Written by Canada's Beth Powning, whom I had never heard of before this book, The Sea Captain's wife tells the story of Azuba Bradstock, wife of Captain Nathaniel Bradstock of the merchant ship, Traveller. Set in the early 1860s, we see Azuba struggle with being stuck at home alone with her young daughter, Carrie, while her husband sails the seas for extended periods of time moving cargo all across the planet. Sometimes he is gone for well over a year, and when he gets home his child doesn't know him and the specter of his next voyage looms over Azuba and Nathaniel's relationship. Azuba wants nothing more to accompany her husband on his journeys, but sailing back then was a man's world and it was uncommon - but not unheard of - for women and families to accompany their men aboard the ships. After suffering a miscarriage while Nathaniel is away, Azuba strikes up an innocent and platonic relationship with the local minister, but this causes a bit of a scandal, and when Nathaniel returns, his relationship with Azuba is damaged. It is only then that he decides to take Azuba and their daughter with them aboard Traveller to wherever it might go, despite the dangers and hardships.

From there, we get a great story of both great adventure on the high seas and the story of a marriage a woman's coming to terms with her place in her husband's life and her own role in her family and in society. There is an excellent balance in this book between teeth-gritting action and the self-examination of a woman desperately trying to find herself and attain some equality in her marriage, at a time when such a thing wasn't the norm.

Not only is this book set in the Victorian era, where women were still second-class citizens, but it is also a time when sailing was on the verge of great change itself. Powning's attention to historical detail as well as the details of the seafaring life bring this book alive. Azuba is an unforgettable character as she makes both heartbreaking decisions and suffers the consequences of those decisions.

I totally recommend this book. I spent a whole day completely absorbed in it, and when it was over, I was kind of sad it had come to an end. I will definitely be on the lookout for some of Powning's previous books.

The Monster in the Box

2010-01-06T21:00:00.001-08:00

Oh, Ruthie, why did you do this to me?

Normally, I enjoy a good Wexford novel, and normally I enjoy Ruth Rendell, but Madame Rendell's latest effort, The Monster in the Box, has left me unsatisfied and annoyed.

Set in Wexford's usual stomping grounds of Kinsgmarkham, the novel starts out with Wexford having a very chance sighting of a figure who has been haunting him since Wexford's career started. Wexford first met Eric Targo when he first started out on the force, and questioned the man in relation to Wexford's very first murder investigation. Immediately, Wexford instinctively knew something very sinister about Targo, but lacking evidence and proof, his hands were tied when it came to acting on his instinct. But in the present, decades later, Wexford finally gets the lead he needs, yet Targo still manages to elude him. Add in a lion on the loose, some tense race relations, and Rendell's typically well-drawn, quirky characters and you think you might have a great Wexford mystery on your hands right?

Um, no.

The first half of this novel involves Wexford telling in great, painful detail his story about Eric Targo and their long history, to his second-in-command, Mike Burden. Intermingled with these lengthy periods of exposition are Wexford's own memories of his personal life. It's a double-edged walk down memory lane and all of it is told in either flashbacks or in long story-telling sessions in pubs over drinks with Burden.

And then, intermingled with all this expository stuff, is a seemingly unrelated subplot involving a local Muslim family and one of Wexford's detectives meddling where she doesn't belong on a matter that isn't even one of police interest.

This novel doesn't even get remotely interesting until over halfway through it. The only reason I kept reading is because I had faith that Rendell wouldn't let me down in the end, mistress of the genre that she is.

But even the missing lion and the melodramatic secondary characters couldn't save this story from becoming a massive fail I felt it was. With an unsatisfying ending and a slightly far-fetched resolution to one of the story-lines, I couldn't help but put this down feeling disappointed.

Oh well. This is the first time Ruth has let me down. I just hope it is onwards and upwards from here!

The Bounty (Caroline Alexander)

2010-01-01T16:13:00.001-08:00

As you know by know, I'm a big fan of nonfiction, especially books on sailing, exploration, and all things nautical. It should come as no surprise then that I finished off 2009 with a book about probably the most famous mutiny in history. What is surprising though is that other than watching the movie version with ~~Hannibal Lector~~ Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson years and years ago, I knew almost nothing about the Bounty and the mutiny which occurred. Let me summarize briefly: promising British naval lieutenant William Bligh is commissioned to undertake a trip to the South Pacific in order to collect breadfruit plants which can be transplanted to the British slave colonies in the West Indies. After a stay in Tahiti to collect the plants, the Bounty begins the return home. However, just days after sailing from Tahiti, the crew mutinies and sets Bligh adrift along with other members of the crew. Caroline Alexander's The Bounty takes a fresh look at the events surrounding the voyage and the subsequent mutiny in an attempt to fix blame and discover the truth.

From the research she provides (and it is, indeed, quite extensive), it's clear that Christian Fletcher was the ringleader but that others are equally culpable either for their support of Fletcher or their lack of action and unwillingness to support Bligh. Unfortunately, thanks to just about everyone (except Bligh) changing their story at each telling over the years, contradictory journal entries and the loss of important sources, the real reasons leading up to the mutiny will never be known but Alexander does an admirable job of sorting through the convoluted mess that has been left behind.

While I enjoyed Alexander's book immensely, I found that she was hardly impartial in her assessment of blame. She concludes her book with a brief summation of what she feels were the reasons for this tragedy: "The seductions of Tahiti, Bligh's harsh tongue - perhaps. But more compellingly, a night of drinking and a proud man's pride, a low moment on one gray dawn, a momentary and fatal slip in a gentleman's code of discipline..." (p. 407). Throughout her book, Alexander is consistent in her defense of William Bligh and, while she admits his methods were a bit unusual (something he picked up from his voyages with Captain Cook) and he had a passionate temper, the mutiny simply could not be laid at his feet. She points to reasons Bligh himself felt he could not have been at fault. When commissioned for this voyage, Bligh was not (as he and others expected) promoted to Captain; he retained his current rank of Lieutenant. While as an officer in His Majesty's navy, he would still have expected to be respected and his orders followed without question, the title of Captain would have instilled in the men under his command a greater sense of power, control and leadership ability. Unlike most voyages of a similar nature, Bligh was not granted the use of Marines aboard ship. If he had them at his disposal on board the Bounty, he would have felt more secure in his position and, he believed, the men would not have dared to mutiny.

My big complaint about The Bounty is the relative lack of space dedicated to the overloaded open air boat voyage Bligh and his shipmates undertook after the mutiny. It is truly remarkable that they survived the 3600 mile voyage and eventually made it back to England. And yet, she devotes only one chapter in the entire book to this portion of the whole story. A significantly larger part of the book is spent on the individual reports from the mutineers and men who accompanied Bligh. I would gladly have read an additional 100 pages if she had included more information.

The Bounty is a complete story. While other authors may have simply told the story and followed up with the outcome of the courtmartial, Alexander goes into great detail about the background and families of each of the men involved in an attempt to explain some of their actions as well as the intricate family connections amongst many of the sailors and with Bligh and even some of the judges - connections which would alter not only the outcome of the trial but the way that history has remembered the mutiny. Additionally, Alexander follows up with each of the crew members to see what became of them and how the events of 1789 affected each of their lives. Heavily laden with direct quotes from personal journals, letters, newspaper articles and official trial transcripts, The Bounty can, at times, make difficult reading given the flowery language used at the time and various spellings.

Curious? Check it out! Definately Captain recommended.

The Age of Persuasion - Terry O'Reilly & Mike Tennant

2009-12-31T18:50:00.000-08:00

If you are a fan of the Pirate Toronto/CBC Radio program “The Age of Persuasion”, I can pretty much guarantee that you will enjoy this book immensely. Whenever I listen to the half hour radio program, I am always left wanting to hear more of these tales from the trenches of the advertising world. In the book of the same name, O’Reilly and Tennant at last have the freedom to expound upon some of the fascinating concepts that they barely have time to touch upon on radio.

I bought this book following a reading that O’Reilly headlined in Calgary last month. During the reading, we were all captivated by his premise that advertising has permeated daily life and insinuated itself into our psyches. In fact, advertising is so widespread that its effectiveness is being drowned out by the very clutter that it is creating. Ads are so ubiquitous, appearing everywhere from the insides of golf holes to the roofs of cabs, that they are in danger of becoming invisible. And in an industry which must remain fresh and surprising to be effective, this has led to increasingly inventive ways to get our attention, such as guerrilla marketing. Advertising is the only industry, O’Reilly surmises, that simultaneously creates the problem as it tries to solve it.

The Age of Persuasion is a fascinating study of both the sociology and the psychology behind the science of advertising. The book explores the history of advertising through the ages, the contract that advertisers have with their target audience, and some of the compelling stories of how branding has changed not only loyalties, but language itself.

This is a very compelling book, a highly enjoyable read, and one that will have you shaking your head and exclaiming “really!”

Remarkable Creatures

2009-12-28T15:26:00.000-08:00

If you're not familiar with Library Thing, it is a book social networking site and if you have an account, you can sign up for their Early Readers program, where there is basically a lottery for review copies of upcoming books. I managed to score and advanced reading copy of Tracy Chevalier's new novel, Remarkable Creatures.

If you're not familiar with Tracy Chevalier, you might be familiar with a little work called Girl With a Pearl Earring, which was made into a movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. I haven't read the book but did enjoy the movie, and so Remarkable Creatures was my first adventure with Chevalier's writing.

I could not put this book down.

Set in the early 1800s, Elizabeth Philpot and two of her sisters are exiled from London to the seaside town of Lyme Regis when their brother decides to marry. Each of them settling into spinsterhood in her own way, Elizabeth takes up the hunting of fossils in the cliffs and beaches surrounding the time. While she does this, she meets a girl named Mary Anning, who comes from an impoverished working class family barely scraping by, but who depend on the discovery of fossils for their livelihood, as they sell them to tourists and collectors. A relationship builds between the two, and eventually Mary and her brother discover something in the cliffs that will change the world: the skeleton of a prehistoric creature eventually to become known as ichthyosaurus.

In this pre-Darwinian time, such a discovery is met with both suspicion and derision by the God-fearing citizens of Lyme Regis, but it sets the scientific community on fire. Both Mary and Elizabeth, though they are the local experts in the hunting, extraction, and mounting of these fossils, not to mention have speculative minds that are asking the pertinent questions of the time and who are the most well-read and knowledgeable on the subject of the fossils in general, are excluded from any scientific discussion because they are mere women. Mary also has the disadvantage of being not only female, but of extremely low birth, whereas Elizabeth comes from money and has had far more opportunity and learning. But each woman, in her own way, forges a unique path through her gender and class limitations.

There is a lot of stuff going on in this novel. Not only are there class and gender issues, but this story also examines that fascinating time when science was just, just starting to make people question long-held belief systems. Mary and Elizabeth were challenging those beliefs in their own small ways, but what Mary Anning discovered on the beach that day - and kept discovering for many years afterward - influenced science and religion and philosophy like nothing else previously. It might have brought out the best in some people, but it also brought the worst out in many more.

Also central to this story is the friendship between Mary and Elizabeth - indeed, it is the central part of the story. This was very beautifully and poignantly conveyed by the author, and for both women, this friendship was as life-changing as Mary's incredible fossil discoveries. And just as these two women endeavoured to stretch beyond the boundaries set by their culture and society, they also discovered that their relationship was key to not only their personal growth, but also to their struggle against the odds set against them.

The title is very apt; not only did Mary and Elizabeth hunt remarkable creatures on the beaches and cliffs around Lyme Regis, but they were also remarkable women in their own right. Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot were real people, as were most of the characters in the novel, and though this is a fictional account of their experiences, it was very cool for me to superimpose this story on actual historical events. Mary Anning did change the world and was a trailblazer, and I'd like to think that Elizabeth Philpot was indeed right along side her, spunky and outspoken and supportive, the two of them blazing a trail together.

Great book; a definite recommend.

Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith

2009-12-26T18:34:00.000-08:00

Child 44 is the story of Leo Demidov, a former war hero, is a high ranking officer in the MGB, the state security force. A near perfect Soviet citizen in Stalinist Russia, Leo "investigates" those individuals who are accused of various anti-Soviet activities. In a world where crime doesn't officially exist, neighbours turn in their neighbours, spouses denounce each other and children rat on their parents, all in the vain hope that it will save themselves.

When the child of one of his men is found dead on a set of railroad tracks, Leo is sent to talk to the parents. Claiming their son was murdered, Leo convinces them that it was merely an accident - the official story - despite evidence to the contrary. After humiliating another of his men during a separate investigation, Demidov finds himself being arrested on false charges and he and his wife are sent into exile, demoted to the lowest rank in the militia.

Knowing that he will eventually be re-arrested and either sent to a Gulag or killed, Leo and his wife await the inevitable. That is, until another child is murdered in an almost identical manner. Realizing his former life was a sham and everything he once thought he believed in, including his marriage, was a lie, he begins to investigate. Ordered to drop his investigation, Leo can't let go and uncovers scores of other murdered children stretching across southern Russia and the Ukraine. With the MGB hot on his trail, and an agent bent on personal revenge out for blood, Leo and his wife vow to discover this serial killer who preys on children and kill him before they are eventually captured themselves. However, the investigation will force Leo to confront his own past and realize a connection to a horrific murderer that he never could have imagined.

Inspired by real-life serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, the Butcher of Rostov, the premise of the book intrigued from the moment I first came across it, shortly after it's release in 2008 and I've been wanting to read it ever since. As I read Child 44, I was hoping that someone would eventually make a movie out of this book. There's good news and bad news. According to Tom Rob Smith's official website, a movie is planned and the screenplay written. The bad news? It's going to be directed by Ridley Scott. Not a big fan but considering how engrossed I was in this novel, I'm willing to sit through one of Scott's films.

However, I can highly recommend Child 44, Smith's first book, and I'm definately going to be checking out his latest release, The Secret Speech, very soon.

book markers..

2009-12-22T20:49:00.000-08:00

Karen,WC if you want me to delete this post I can. But I was hoping to show you book readers you can have reusable book markers... Handmade on top of that... Enjoy your holidays my friends... If you want beads in the book markers they will be .50 cents more a piece. The ones with beads around it are 2.00 each also..It just takes more beads to put them in the marker... And more thread to be honest.. they will be about 2 inches wide by 11 inches long..

Ok those of us readers.... I have a question for you??? I usually dont post anything else here but book reviews but I have gotten myself into making book markers with size ten thread... I am looking at selling them on Etsy but if any of you want to purchase one or two let me know... E-mail me and let me know.. I am looking a 2.00 for each marker and 2.00 dollars for shipping... I had three but sold them.. I can give you an example by posting the three I had... Why dont I do that...

Sandstorm - James Rollins

2009-12-14T18:19:00.000-08:00

Yet another Rollins novel. Sandstorm is filled with the usual: action, adventure, archaeology, improbable story lines, cheesy characters and supernatural occurrences. And, of course, sandstorms. However bad it sounds, I find myself reading novel after trashy novel. This one focuses on a long-lost city (don't they all?), this time buried in the sands of Oman, a line of women descended from the Queen of Sheba, lots of guns, secret military organizations and a source of energy so powerful it could wipe the entire Arabian peninsula off the map.

Truth be told, this was one of Rollins' better novels, at least in the ones I've read. As usual, easy reading although for some reason it took me over a month to get back in the habit of reading regularly (was it really July the last time I finished a book?). The characters are very cookie cutter, and the story line? Standard movie-style archaeologist fare. Think Indiana Jones (or in this case, Omaha Dunn...yes, I'm serious) but with undercover secret agents instead of the Nazis. And a lot more guns. If you're looking for something that doesn't require a lot of deep thought, give it a go.

Meat is Murder - Joe Pernice

2009-12-14T16:07:00.001-08:00

This is the perfect book to read on a plane. It’s tiny (4 ½ x 6 ½ inches), so it will fit into your purse or your computer bag. It’s brief (102 pages), so you can start reading it while waiting to board and finish it just before landing, on a short-haul flight. And it’s about music, specifically about the albums that defined us and formed our consciousness, so it appeals to music nerds like me.

This book was a gift from a friend who shares my musical tastes and is even more of a music nerd than I am, and who was shocked to discover that I had not read any of the 33 1/3 series of books to which this belongs. I am not quite sure how I avoided doing that my entire life, as there were 69 books published in the series at last count, with a pile more to come. But, based on my experience with Meat is Murder, I am afraid the flood gates have been opened now.

While all the books in the series are about specific record albums, Meat is Murder diverges somewhat from the formula in that it is a work of fiction. In this tiny novella, author and musician Joe Pernice tells the story of a disgruntled teenager (is there any other kind?) growing up in middle class America in 1985, who finds community and a form of solace through the discovery of the Smiths’ album Meat is Murder.

I admit to being a sucker for these coming of age in America stories, and to read one based around a teen’s experience with the seminal Smiths album brought me back to the world of high school experiences, and made me glad I survived those years. I admit I did not have to deal with asthma, suicide or Catholic school, but the sweeping subtext of humiliation and alienation are universal no matter where you grew up.

Meat is Murder is sort of a mini Catcher in the Rye, only with better music. I rather wish it had been longer; I would have stayed on the plane to read more.

I know I will be looking for more books in this series. Highly recommended for music nerds, particularly those in need of a portable book.

The Taken

2009-12-01T17:03:00.000-08:00

I do love a great mystery novel! My favourite writers in this genre are Elizabeth George of the most excellent Lynley series, and P.D. James who has been writing detective tales featuring Adam Dalgliesh since my early years. And now we have someone named Inger Ash Wolf, who the flap of The Taken describes as "the nom de plume of a North American writer." Well, that tells me exactly nothing. And, after doing some very rudimentary research online, it seems that this pseudonym is actually a carefully guarded secret that has caused quite a bit of speculation since Wolfe's first book, The Calling, was published last year. Presumably, Wolfe is Canadian, and this most recent novel, the sequel to The Calling, takes place in the fictional Ontario cottage country town of Port Dundas. And it features a kick-ass female detective named Hazel Micallef.

I haven't read The Calling, and I really am not terribly concerned about the real identity of Inger Ash Wolfe (though I would love for it to be one of my favourite authors ever, Jane Urquhart, one of the names that has been bandied about). I just know that this was one gripping story with writing, characterization, and suspense to rival the big names in the genre.

Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef is commanding officer in charge of the Port Dundas detachment of the Ontario provincial police service. Divorced and living in her ex-husband's basement after back surgery, the mother of two girls, and as crusty as they come, Hazel and her crew of loyal officers got caught in the centre of a bizarre missing persons case when a headless mannequin is discovered in a local lake. The mannequin leads them to a web site containing a live feed featuring some grisly goings-on, which in turn leads them to a cold case in Toronto.

In the midst of this well-plotted tale, we get a deeper examination of what people will do for love and selection of some of the various complexities love creates in humanity. Hazel herself still smarts from her divorce, her strong feelings for her ex, and her ex's hasty remarriage. Her second-in-command, James Wingate, turns out to be a gay man who's partner was beaten to death by gay bashers, an event which still has him traumatized by grief every day. The wife of the missing person, chronically drunk, remains married to her husband even though he is a philanderer. And the mother of a murder victim takes extraordinary measures to avenge her daughter's death.

There is a lot going on in these pages, yet the story is fast-paced and snappy and never gets bogged down in lengthy expository sessions carrying on about the deeper themes involved. Wolfe creates layers of story subtly, kind of like a really experienced writer does! Hmmmmmmm...

Definitely a recommend if you are a mystery fan!

James Redfield The Secret of Shambhala

2009-11-23T15:09:00.000-08:00

Oh boy where to start with this short read.. I picked it up off my book shelf in the bedroom and have had a hard time putting it back down. Only 238 pages of intense reading..

Ok we all have our religious beleifs ok. I know how many people feel about God and what makes us tick. I have my own beliefs and they wouldnt be anywhere near what you would think ok..

But this book starts with this man in his house and getting a phone call that the neighbor girl wants to talk to him before she goes to Soccer practice. Ok no big deal so he goes there. She tells him that he needs to go to Tibet. Then she gets up and walks away.. He is confused and stunned that this 14 year old girls is telling him where he needs to go.

Well a few pages later his friend Wil tells him that he needs to go to Tibet also. Well he isnt sure if he should go or not. Well he decides to go and decides that if things get to harry he will just fly home. He doesnt want any trouble this time around. So he boards a plane and gets there. He finds that Wil is not there but Yin is.

Yin notices they are being followed and needs to get out of the way. So they take some chances and go.. Well they find several places they are suppose to go and then head up into the mountains. They end up losing the vechhile for a while and have to hike. Well in the process they find this spot to rest and sleep. When he wakes up Yin is gone and if only he would have waited Yin would have returned.. But instead he left and started walking..

He had seen some people that were trying to help him but he hadnt used his prayer-field I for got to mention here.. I am lousy at book reviews.. but this is a good book.

In the process He finds how to use his Prayer-field better and finds this monastary that Yin is at.. Well Yin yells at him for leaving where they were.. But in the end it turned out ok.. Anyway He gets to talk to the head Monk as we call them. He gets some vital information.. Esp about the prayer-field..

Only if we could keep people from fighting and arguing with good thoughts my friends.. What an amazing world this would be. I mean we all have been teased or degraded by some one in our lives right and wished we could make them happy or give them something to chew on??

Well that is what happens here really. On with the book they end up splitting up and going there own ways and finding out how to use there other three extensions to the prayer-field. Then He gets back in contact with Wil and they stay together until the end of the book.

I have to say I give this book a 10 tweets out of 10.. I am not into the religious aspect of any book because of how I was brought up and my beliefs now but this was good just in the thought of how we could handle people more effectively if we could just make them see there is no enemy in our lives.. Make them just be happy..

If you read this or have read it I hope you enjoyed or enjoy it as much as I have.

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

2009-11-19T08:27:00.000-08:00

I almost gave up on this book. I desperately wanted to enjoy it, as it had been given to me by a dear friend who cited it as one of her favourites. But lord it was hard. At first.

Perhaps it was the translation, perhaps it was the comparison made on the jacket cover to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose – a book which I found highly disappointing and ultimately pointless, perhaps it was the cover itself – with the little cutout window and the baroque font, which made me feel that something was off in this book. The language, although nicely descriptive of 1940’s Barcelona, felt suspiciously of the purple persuasion. The dialogue felt stilted.

Had The Shadow of the Wind not been recommended by someone whose taste and whose intelligence I respect, I would have given up 100 pages into the novel. And at nearly 500 pages, I knew it was going to be a considerable time commitment.

But I must love my friend dearly, because I persevered, and finished the book last night. And I am glad that I did, not only because I can now look my friend in the face if she asks how I enjoyed one of her favourite books, but also because somewhere around page 150-175, I began to enjoy it.

I began to develop a fondness for the characters of Daniel, his father, and their friend Fermin, as they found themselves drawn deeper into the mysteries surrounding an old book. Set against the political and historical backdrop of war-torn Spain, The Shadow of the Wind ultimately won me over, allowed me to suspend my disbelief and get swept up in the intrigue and the dangers surrounding their quest.

I did have some additional quibbles with the novel, even after my initial resistance had been overcome, primarily with the lengthy side stories voiced by other characters. Some of these were so long that I had forgotten what was going on in the main story by the time we had returned to it. Many of these side stories were printed in italics as well, and 20 pages of that shit is hard to read in bed at night.

Ultimately though, The Shadow of the Wind, is an ambitious novel, not without faults, but certainly not without its charms either. If you enjoy somewhat gothic historical fiction, you will most likely enjoy this book. And if you don’t, you may just end up surprising yourself.

Confections of a Closet Master Baker

2009-11-15T17:36:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies, a good blogging friend of mine and regular ReTorte reader, had a giveaway for Confections of a Closet Master Baker by Gesine Bullock-Prado, and guess who won? Go me!

This book was well-reviewed by not only Natashya but one other food blogger whose name I cannot recall right now, but I was really excited about getting to read it, and finally, I did.

Gesine started out as a Hollywood movie executive, and it took me a while to figure out exactly whom she was related to; turns out she is Sandra Bullock's younger sister (um, yeah, the last name should have been a dead give-away but I am slow, I admit!) and for a while she ran Sandra's movie production company. But she was miserable and hated it, and her mind was always on baking and dreamy confections. So, one day after having enough of the Hollywood lifestyle, Gesine and her husband relocated to Vermont and opened a little bakery.

Interwoven with Gesine's tale of starting up the bakery and all that involved and stories of how life has been for her since the opening, are lovely vignettes of Gesine's childhood spent partially in her mother's homeland of Germany, and poignant stories about the women in Gesine's life who helped shape her passion for pastry. Including a collection of her favourite recipes, this book is a wonderful homage to the experiences, people, and flavours of Gesine's life that inspire her baking and keep her wanting to keep ungodly hours at her bakery so that she can do what she loves and is passionate about: feeding people sugary, buttery treats.

This was a light book to read, and it was a joy to read. I haven't made any of the recipes yet, but I have my eye on a couple. This book actually made me think of a lot of the common foods - both baking and savoury - that marked my childhood, too, and it made me appreciate all the more the love of cooking and baking my mother instilled in me, and the nurturing it can do for one's soul.

Thanks, Natashya! This was a great find!

The Hunger Games

2009-11-14T12:24:00.001-08:00

I'm way behind on my book reviews! Before I started the month of writing, I did complete The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. Charlie was kind enough to send me a copy since he was convinced I would love this book. You can read his review of it here. Charlie described it as "unputdownable" and I have to concur.

Set in a not-too-distant future USA, now known as Panem and divided into twelve districts and a capitol, we get a grim look at how one family amongst many ekes out a living and enough food to survive in the coal mining and near-starving Twelfth District. Katniss hunts beyond the fence that separates the district from the surrounding forest to feed her family and to trade her catches on the local black market. The food and fuel in each district is controlled by the Capitol, who exert technological, economic, and psychological power over all the districts. And each year, in order to keep everyone afraid enough of them to keep them in line, the Capitol puts on an event called the Hunger games. Each district chooses by lottery two teenagers to participate in the ultimate game of survival in an outdoor arena, with the entire event being televised for the required viewing of all of Panem's citizens. In the Hunger Games, it's kill or be killed. The goal is to be the last one standing so that you can bring back extra rations and fame for your district. For the people of the Capitol, the Hunger Games are pure entertainment, and a lot of money is spent to put them on. For the districts, it's a callous reminder of just how much they are at the mercy of the Capitol.

Katniss's sister is actually chosen from the lottery, but since Prim is so young (only 12) Katniss volunteers to take her place. Once in the arena, fighting for her life amongst trained killers, genetically modified wasps, and the Capitol's ability to change the rules and the conditions of the area any time to make things more interesting, Katniss's brains, strength, and survival skills are put to the ultimate test.

This book was rich with theme, setting, character, and brutal conflict, but it was still a tightly-written novel that provided a compelling story without getting overly involved in lengthy exposition exploring all the themes the author was working with. Theme is left up to the reader to figure out on her own!

This is the first book in a trilogy, so there is more to come. The second book is called Catching Fire, and I can't wait to read it. Though classed as "young adult," The Hunger Games is relevant to adults and teens alike, and makes for good reading no matter what age you are.

Two books by Khaled Hosseini

2009-11-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

I started to write about the Kite Runner, my most recent book completed, but found myself talking about A Thousand Splendid Suns as well. I found that I didn't want to talk about one without talking about the other. As I wrote about them, the similarities kept popping up. There's a further study here for sure.

Yes, the Kite Runner. We've all heard about it. Okay, well I heard about it because it seemed like it was big news when it was made into a film. Was that your experience? I haven't seen the film and I'm not sure I need or want to because I just read the book, and enjoyed it.

Actually, this summer I read Hosseini's other book A Thousand Splendid Suns, which I think I may have enjoyed more because the two protagonists are women, and I don't know, somehow I relate to women's stories more.

Both books are tragedies with uplifting endings. Both books have left me with lingering impressions of Afghanistan, and an understanding of the country's history I'm not sure I would have otherwise. While both books are works of fiction, they are based on the real issues in Afghanistan.

They are gripping books, although A Thousand Splendid Sunsdid make me wonder why I was reading something so, so dark, and if I should continue with the book. However, I was so engaged by all of the characters (in both books) that I found them to be very believable, and to be characters that I truly cared about. That said, I did have trouble with Hosseini's antagonists who are very evil indeed. He makes them so very evil that they almost become too stereotypical or are caricatures. Both antagonists physically stand out from all of the other characters in the book. They look different and perform such immoral and abhorrent acts to the main characters that I found it difficult to believe in. I guess I like my antagonists in fiction with a little more dimension. They do make the narrative very dramatic and kept the stories moving forward, making the protagonists' journeys that much more difficult.

As for plot, The Kite Runner has 2 main characters, two boys, who grow up together and are inextricably linked. They are born into different classes in society, but it doesn't become an issue until one allows it to be. A Thousand Splendid Suns has two female characters also of different backgrounds who become inextricably linked because they end up in a forced marriage to the same man, and live as women in a Taliban ruled Afghanistan. The women become bonded through their oppression and torture by their husband. It is their bond that gets them through their darkest days. Similarly, it is the bond between the two boys that, although they are apart as adults, shapes their adult experiences, and gets them through their most difficult obstacles. Hassan returns to Amir's home in memory of his friend. And it is Amir who returns to Afghanistan also for his friend. (I'm trying not to give away too much in case you haven't read either of these books).

Loyalty and friendship are at the heart of these books, suggesting that as long as we remain true to our friends, we remain true to ourselves and can overcome any obstacle. That's what I glean from these books. Two boys who ran kites together, read together, played & laughed together, are made better because of their strong relationship. Two girls bonded when they are women, find a deep friendship in the other when they hadn't expected it. Even in a dark time, they find a way to laugh, smile, and seek a way out of their oppressive life.

If you've read one and liked it, then I assure you, you will like the other. If you haven't read either then I recommend you chose whichever book you come across first. Either one of them I recommend.

Waiting for Columbus

2009-10-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

The write-up for this novel, written by Canadian Thomas Trofimuk, was really intriguing. Here is an excerpt from the flap: In this captivating novel, a man who believes that he is Christopher Columbus looks into a two-way mirror in a contemporary Spanish mental institution and says: "It's time, Nurse Consuela, that you knew the story of how I got my boats."

What we have in Waiting for Columbus is a craftily woven tale of three converging lives: the mysterious, unidentifiable man in the mental institution who believes he's Christopher Columbus; a lonely nurse who befriends him and who listens to his tales in an attempt to try to unravel the mystery behind this man, and who develops feelings she shouldn't have for a patient; and a wounded, tormented Interopol agent on the trail of a man gone missing after a terrorist attack.

The character of Columbus, both 15th century and modern day, is complex and charming. The 15th century Columbus is a bit of a dolt, but he's stubborn, falls in love easily, and has a huge internal struggle associated with getting his three ships to sail to the new world. This internal struggle mirrors the external struggle he faces with the scientists of the time, the Spanish Inquisition, and Queen Isabella & King Ferdinand - not to mention his friends and family. Contemporary Columbus is a weaver of amazing tales, a bit of an escape artist, and a colourful character on a psychiatric ward full of colourful characters. He is incredibly compelling and heavily veiled in mystique.

Nurse Consuela is essentially spying on Columbus, taking meticulous notes of whatever he tells her so that she can help the treating psychiatrist unravel the mystery of this man. Having her own demons to deal with, she is vulnerable and eventually winds up falling in love with the man.

As for the Interpol agent, Emile, we see less of him than we do the other two main characters, but he is also very compelling in his own way, especially as he is on a journey of healing himself.

It took me about 150 pages to get into this book, which, until then, I found mildly confusing and not overly gripping, but once the author got rid of the dipstick psychiatrist who wasn't getting anywhere with Columbus and replaced him with a new guy who was also a great character, things began to pick up. The individual threads began to tighten and make sense, and at the end I was barely able to put this book down because the climax and denouement were beautiful, painful, and utterly gripping. I nearly cried.

This is an amazing story replete with humour, pathos, exquisite detail, and emotion. Read it!

Once An Eagle by Anton Myer

2009-10-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

Here is one lengthy book. Its over 1200 pages. Oh by the way i just wanted to apologize to those of you who read my little Milwaukee Adventure instead of a book review earlier. I deleted it and put it on my main blog. For some reason I thought I had my main blog and I had it here. Anyway enjoy the book if you decide to shovel through.

I have to say we all know or knew some one in the first world war right?? We have read about it and what not in history and have had relatives telling stories about how they survived this and that and how the women worked in the factories when the men were out getting shot or killed. OOPs same thing.. I havent finished it but I can still give you my view on the book. I dont want to spoil it anyway.

Here is a young Sam Damon with a friend of his outside on a beautiful day and he tells her he has something to tell her. Well she guesses anyway and he finds it upsetting his sister opened her mouth. Well anyway this friend wants him to stay and work at the bank her father runs instead of going off into the Army. She begs and pleads with him but no such luck.

Sam works as a night clerk in bar/whore house you might say.. I cant think of the right word. If you do please correct me. He reads up on history while working the late night shift. Then he decides he is going to go talk to the commissioner in the next county. He is a boy of 18 and lost his father and his mother doesnt have the money to send him to West Point to get what he needs to be in the Army. Well he makes it there and suprises this commissioner.

The commsioner is so astonished by this boy that he puts in a few words for Sam to take the test and Sam passes it with flying colors but the catch is Sam has to wait a year to get into West Point. Sam doesnt want to wait that long. So he goes and joins the Army with out West Point behind him.

Well in the process the war starts up and Sam is shipped over to somewhere. They are fighting the Germans. He ends up getting like six of his guys back in one sitting that had been taken captive and then a few hundred yards off they take this one place and hold it until reinforcements come. Pretty cool. His side Kick Devlin is with him all the way.

After this Sam and Devlin are relaxing and meet these two young ladies and Devlin falls head over heals for the one. Things turn sour and then he tries to be one of the runners. Well Sam talks him into going back in but not too soon afterwards Devlin gets shot and dies from his wounds.

Well WWI ends and everyone goes home. Sam meets his bride to be before going home. They get married. They move around from base to base. They end up with there oldest child a son. They name him Donny. Tommy has Sam promise never to get him mixed up in the Army life. She grew up as an Army Brat as you call them. Sam promises but you just never know.

Then Sam ends up going over to China to help with something over there because he is a good solider. Well he helps win what they wand and comes home.

Guess what happens next and where I am at now. About 900 pages into the book we are in WWII. Yes they have just over taken Moapora. Sam walked himself right through malaria. It says most people would have died before walking through this episode of Malaria. Sam is with another friend named Ben. This Ben has been there since the beginning but didnt make a major roll until now with Sam. They are in Australia trying to rest up before being shipped back out again to either go home War Heroes or Dead in Body bags.

Well Ben is married with three kids of his own he is feeling around the edges since his wife isnt with him. Sam is tempted but realizes his marriage means more to him than Ben's does I guess. Anyway that is where I am at and going to leave you. Its a long book and some pretty dry parts but interesting none the less. Some history I have forgotten about and with this war with Iraqu I have been more inclined to read it.

Its not the same but we still have soliders coming home in body bags or terribly wounded from this new War. Life is not the same as we knew it 8 years ago.

I give it 7.5 tweets out of ten.

Await Your Reply

2009-10-18T16:44:00.000-07:00

The flap of Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply reads: "Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed."

The flap also says this book is "gripping" but I have been gripped tighter by a baby Dungeoness crab's 2cm long pincer on a college biology club trip to the coast when I was 18. It hurt and I bled. And that experience was far more exciting than this book was.

The story revolves around three seemingly unconnected characters who have some uncanny things in common - namely close associates or relatives of theirs are not who we think they are, and they all are involved in faked deaths in some way. Miles Cheshire seeks his schizophrenic, shape-shifting twin brother and drives all the way from Cleveland to Inuvik, NWT to find him. Lucy Lattimore runs off with her high school history teacher in his Mazerati hoping to leave behind personal tragedy and a pedestrian life. Ryan Schuyler suddenly decides to leave his life at university to fall in with his con-man of a father, hoping to find himself through becoming other people.

Though these stories seem to be unconnected, you know that they must be connected somehow, and the only really engaging mystery of this novel for mewas to figure out what that connection was. It led to a let down, some frustration, and more questions. In a way the climax and denouement were clever, but not clever enough to make me thin, WOW! It was more of a "this author just thinks he's so clever doesn't he?" kind of clever. When I was finished the book I was irritated more than anything.

I could see this book making a great Hollywood movie, actually. And I would probably have enjoyed that more.

Mathilda Savitch

2009-10-03T15:21:00.000-07:00

This book, by first-time novelist Victor Lodato, is one of Random House's hot new releases and I just finished it last night! The flap on the cover of Mathilda Savitch reads:

"Fear doesn't come naturally to Mathilda Savitch. She prefers to look right at the things nobody else can bring themselves to mention: for example, the fact that her beloved older sister is dead, pushed in front of a train by a man still on the loose. Her grief-stricken parents have basically been sleepwalking ever since, and it is Mathilda's sworn mission to shock them back to life. Her strategy? Being bad."

At first this book reminded me of a Lovely Bones and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie hybrid. You had the mysterious death & killer on the loose, and the getting over grief aspects from Lovely Bones, and the precocious, spunky, and smart heroine aspect from the latter book. Yet, this book was more complex than either of them.

The Savitch family is falling apart nearly one year after Mathilda's sister, Helene, dies after being pushed in front of a moving train. Through Mathilda's eyes, we see how her parents' grief has stagnated their lives and their marriage. Their inability to move on is sharply contrasted with Mathilda's strong desire to solve the mystery of Helene's death and her pro-activeness to achieve this goal. It takes her on a journey that enables her to move on from her grief and to come of age, even though what she learns about her sister's secret life isn't pretty. This story exemplifies how, in order to move forward with life after a tragic loss, we on some level must almost shed a skin, much like a growing snake.

I have to be honest, though: this book didn't grip me the way I was expecting it to. It was intense and I could only read it for small periods at a time. Mathilda was a little much for me at times, and her shennanigans were sometimes bizarre and annoying.

I also found the ending anti-climactic and a tad bit disappointing. I was expecting a bit more concrete a resolution and was only left with more questions. Mathilda, for all her cunning and smarts, lost her resolve at the end and didn't give me what I was anticipating. Not that I need a nicely tied up ending in every book I read, but in this case...It just didn't work for me.

But who knows? Maybe one of you will have a different experience!

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures - Vincent Lam

2009-09-29T15:40:00.000-07:00

Vincent Lam is not your typical Can Lit darling. And although this literary debut garnered the Giller Prize in 2006, Lam does not spend his days in a coffee shop penning precious words. Rather he is an emergency room physician, who taps into his professional experiences and his memories of medical school to create this highly compelling collection of short stories.

I love short stories, but am sometimes left feeling that the story was simply too brief or that I have been cheated out of a deeper understanding of the characters by the brevity of the tale. Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures is a book of interconnected short stories, and thus it is highly satisfying to see recurring characters surface in later stories. The stories, although not strictly chronological, do follow a timeline of sorts, as the characters age and advance in their professions. In How to Get into Medical School Part 1, the first story in the collection, we see Fitzgerald and Ming striving to pass their entrance exams. Their troubled relationship, as it evolves and crumbles through the years, forms the basis of these tales of the driven, intelligent and often very flawed people who inhabit these stories.

I found myself quite drawn to Fitzgerald and, despite some really horrible character flaws he eventually reveals, continued to root for his character throughout the book. It’s a sign of a well-written character, I think, who can continue to garner sympathy and affection from the reader, despite being revealed to be deeply flawed.

I highly recommend Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. Not only are the characters wonderfully rounded, but the underlying medical tales are fascinating and will appeal to anyone with an interest in the medical sciences. There is even a substantial glossary of medical terms at the end of the book.

Do read it!

Dazzle by Judith Krantz

2009-09-01T19:44:00.000-07:00

Ok here are a few questions that I want to ask before I start this book review.

One: Has anyone ever dreamed of being richer than they know how to spend the money Or have the dreamed that they were so rich they spent the money before they even thought about it??

Two: Do any of you like me have brothers and sisters or half siblings that want nothing to do with you?? I mean I have two half brothers and a half sister that I know and a few more that have an idea I exist but dont know me.

Ok the book starts off with Mike Kilkullen and his beautiful girlfriend at the beginning and he is a rancher. Sure strong stereo type man and powerful with the ropes of the world at his finger tips basically. Well they get to messing around and decide they want more than just touching so they elope and come back married. They act happy for many years to come and then when their daughters are like 11 and 13 they get divorced.

Well Mike finds another woman in the process. She is a gorgeous actress. She is in and out of his life but he decides it worth it. When they met she told him that if it worked for them she would be in and out a lot doing films. Well Mikes divorce was stopping them from getting married right away but when it was settled Mike and Slyvie got married right away. They ended up with a daughter Jazz.

Slyvie stayed home for the first ten months being mother but after that she got antsy to just sit and be mother and wife. Well in the process she ended up doing many films and was in and of Mike and Jazz's life but when Jazz was eight Slyvie went to do a movie and finished it and went to be with her lover one more night before returning to the Ranch. They were speeding down the highway and Slyvie and the car and her lover went over the edge of the cliff.

Well earlier that year Jazz had gotten a camera for her B-day. Well she had taken a photo of her mother and it hurt so bad when her mother passed on. She was only eight. Some of you know what I mean when you lose some one at an early age.

Anyway as Jazz grew up she realized she wanted to be a photographer and she became a good one. She fell in love at age 18 and was almost married at age 21. Her love of her life walked out on her the night before and she lived in Paris because he was a photojounalist.

What caught my eye was how she put her life back together after all this.

She just put her mind to being what she wanted and knew what she could be and didnt stop for anyone. She ended up with a Rep for her being a photographer and made a mean dent in life with what she accomplished. Then she went to a Feista her father held every year and met this guy and then realized after a long story with him in the book that he was the one.

I am skipping around here and I am very sorry for it. I have a heck of a time keeping my mind in one area of the book when its a good book. All I can say is that her older half sisters disliked her until the end of the book when they realized they could make millions by splitting the Killkullen Ranch up and putting a small Village in one corner of it.

I am going to sign off here with the thoughts of it. I would give it a 9.5 tweets of 10...

Nothing is Strange With You

2009-08-29T11:37:00.001-07:00

This is the true story of serial killer Gordon Stewart Northcott, the man portrayed in The Changeling. And a strange man he was. If you think you have a dysfunctional family, you've got nothing on the Northcotts: A batty mother who may or may not have aided in at least one of the murders, and insisted that she was secretly married to an English aristocrat; a meek father so frightened of his own wife and son that he stuck up for them even when they (falsely) declared he had sired Stewart by his own daughter; a son so pampered that he believed he had a right to own anything he wanted, including people. Unfortunately, these folks were Canadian - though they lived illegally in the U.S. during the events recounted here.
A disturbing, but fascinating, read. Author James Jeffrey Paul spent twenty years researching Northcott and his murky background; you'll learn anything you wanted to know about the "Wineville Chicken Coop Murders" and more. I've updated my post on the real stories behind The Changeling with info from this book.

The Wife's Tale

2009-08-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

Lori Lansens' The Wife's Tale tells the story of Mary Gooch, morbidly obese and abandoned by her husband on the eve of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

When we first encounter Mary Gooch, she is waiting for her husband, Jimmy, to return from work, and when he doesn't show she starts to worry. We then get a portrait of a woman who is constantly feeding her sorrow and emptiness with binge eating. On the very first page, a great image is described: Mary looks as if she "were enrobed in by a subcutaneous duvet." Spending most of her life as an compulsive overeater, the only time Mary was slender was as a teen after she contracted a case of GI worms after berry-picking. During this short window of acceptable body weight, she attracts the attention of Jimmy Gooch, high school basketball star and jock with a damaged past of his own. Upon discovering Mary's pregnancy just after high school graduation, the couple marry, only to have their marriage slowly unravel due to a string of reproductive and personal tragedies that create emotional distance, loneliness, and erosion of intimacy.

The descriptions of Mary's binges, obesity, and all the problems, both major and minor, both physical and mental, that result from her size were compelling, as was the character of Mary herself. Not only encased in her fat, she is oblivious to the world outside the small cocoon of the county in which she lives. She's never been anywhere and has so little experience of life outside her eating and regular daily routine that she's as naive about the world as a pre-schooler. When she strikes out on her own after her husband leaves, every discovery about the world and the people in it she makes is as delightful to read as it is to witness the joy on a child's face when you introduce him or her to a new experience.

Despite Mary's flaws, she is a sympathetic, lovable character whom I had a lot of compassion for. The Wife's Tale is about breaking free from the past and the present, and creating a different future from the broken down pieces of something that had died long ago. I found myself rooting for this fictional woman, because although her corpulence was self-created, the issues and motivations Mary has, as well as her fight to create something new for herself, are universal experiences most of us can identify with.

Definitely a recommend!

The Shortest Distance Between Two Women

2009-08-18T09:05:00.000-07:00

The back cover says "Bestselling author Kris Radish takes the emotional measure of mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends in her wise and wonderful new novel of a woman unsure if she's on the verge of a breakdown...or a breakthrough..."

The Shortest Distance Between Two Women centres around 43 year old Emma, and the stresses revolving around her role as the organizer of a very large annual family reunion. However, life seems to be getting in the way, distracting her from her duties. An old love reappears. Her oldest sister is discovered to be an alcoholic and in a bit of a marital crisis. Her relationships with her other two sisters suddenly becomes rocky. Her mother is acting very strangely. And her favourite niece is navigating the rocky road to womanhood. Emma's life appears to be imploding.

This book had the unfortunate position of being the first book I read after The Thirteenth Tale, and I have to say it was quite mediocre in comparison. There were long stretches of the novel where I felt that Emma was indulging in a lot of self-pitying whining, and playing the victim ad nauseam. It was only near the end of the book, when the much-anticipated family reuninon actually took place that things began to tie together and become more relevant to the overall themes. There are a lot of wise and insightful statements about family relationships said in the last few pages that were poignant and emotional, but otherwise the Emma character was mostly annoying to me, and I couldn't help but become bored with her very quickly. The rest of the cast, like Marty the mom and the niece, Stephie, were far more interesting, but we didn't get as much of their internal dialogue as we did Emma's.

In the end, a ho-hum read.

Dirt Music

2009-08-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

Australia's Tim Winton's dirt music is a story Georgie Jutland and Lu Fox whose one encounter disrupts their lives forever. Doesn't sound too earth shattering does it? But the stories are unique and unfold in an unexpected manner. Winton is a fine writer and has crafted a very fine novel.

The novel follows each character separately as they go on their own bruised journeys to try and muddle through life as best as they can. Once they find each other it disrupts their way of life and they can no longer live the way they've been living. However, that is easier said than done. Each character's journey after their encounter becomes a jouney of self-healing.

As the plot unfolds, Georgie's and Fox’s life stories are doled out in bite size pieces throughout the book so we spend time imagining what might of happened until the facts of what really happened are revealed. This worked well to draw me into the characters' lives. While I learned about Georgie through her actions, Fox is a more internal character and we experience him through his memories and nostalgia. We are drawn to each character for different reasons and experience pain and suffering in different ways. Georgie soothes herself with drinking, but also with water. She's often swimming in the ocean or a pool. It's her retreat from the pain of being in her skin. For Fox he lives in the darkness. He poaches before the day breaks and seems to live without being seen by anyone. He keeps himself hidden from the world as best he can.

Georgie has found herself in a bland, but easy relationship with Jim, the revered fisherman in White Point, the one that all the others look to and often model their behaviour after. His family is renowned in the community. Georgie has filled the gap after the death of Jim’s wife, and at a time when she leaves her profession as a nurse behind because she is burnt out. Life with Jim is easy. Money is not a worry, and while her relationship with Jim’s two sons is often tense, Georgie makes a half-hearted attempt to make this “family” work. Georgie is restless though, and her encounter with Fox makes her more restless. She seems to bide her time until she can escape from that life. The question for Georgie is will she do it?

Fox is trapped in a home that no longer exists. Once a musician with his brother and sister-in-law who played "dirt music" (blues/folk), he gives up music when he loses them in a tragic accident; Fox is the sole survivor. Without them he’s lost his way. He works as a poacher, illegally fishing in White Point. Fox is muddling through his life stuck in memory and nostalgia. His encounter with Georgie opens old wounds. The Fox family is superstitiously thought to be bad luck and the town would prefer they didn't exist. It also makes Fox feel emotions he's certain he doesn't want to feel again and he tries to escape.

Even though Fox and Georgie's emotional and sexual encounter is unlike anything they've felt in a long time, they do what they do best: retreat. They realize that they can't be together since Jim and the town would probably lynch Fox and burn his house to the ground. They think it is best to stay away from each other. However, what's done is done. Deep down they both know that they can't be apart. No matter how hard they try, they can't escape how they feel about each other and how their brief encounter made them feel alive again.

Georgie retreats to playing the dutiful housewife with a drink always nearby. Fox retreats to the wild remote coast of northern Australia. Each of them begins to heal in their own way.

It's a powerful novel. Although I had trouble with some of the Australian jargon and not knowing some of the wildlife, I also found that the story could not be from anywhere else. It felt like what I imagine wild western Australia to be like. For me it was a glimpse into a world I wasn't too familiar with, but the characters' stories are universal and very engaging.

I know Wandering Coyote wasn't particularly fond of this novel, but I want to thank her for sending it on to me. I'm glad I finally got around to reading it. I kept thinking about what a wonderful film it would make. Of course it looks like that's already in the works.

The Thirteenth Tale

2009-08-10T09:58:00.001-07:00

I picked this novel by Diane Setterfield up at a second hand bookstore where I trade in my books and finally got around to reading it this weekend.

I did nothing else all weekend but read this book - well, except berry picking and cleaning the bathroom. Sunday in particular was spent curled up on my uncomfortable couch with this book in hand and Apocalyptica playing on my iTunes. You have no idea how appropriate that music was for this novel...

I don't know how to express exactly how I feel about this book, other than to say I was gripped to the point of obsession and simply had to tear myself away from it quite painfully to leave the house for the huckleberry patch & to clean the bathroom. In fact, I had a hard time tearing myself away from it even to go to the bathroom. It was that good.

I can safely say this is one of the best books I've read in a while. It was stunning. It was dark, creepy, mysterious, well-crafted, well-told, unique, suspenseful, Gothic, full of surprises, layered with symbolism, imagery and literary allusions...I could go on and on...

The Thirteenth Tale is a story within a story within the story. We start out with our main character, Margaret Lea, who, at about 30, has lived her life in her father's antiquarian bookshop and read just about everything out there there is to read. She has a family secret she's kept that has obsessed her since childhood and has been detrimental to her relationship with her mother. She's also an amateur biographer, and a biography she published about a pair of siblings caught the eye of a famous British writer named Vida Winter. Vida is dying and hires Margaret to write her biography, where she promises Margaret she'll tell her "the truth." Vida has written prolifically a series of fiction novels, but is a recluse and no one knows a thing about her. Her most famous book is a collection called Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation but the volume is missing the thirteenth tale, and her fans and followers are all waiting with baited breath for this thirteenth tale to appear...

The story we are told, however, is utterly Gothic in nature and so full of mystery, surprises, and suspense that it made for incredible reading. Nothing I can say about this book will do it justice, in fact. The language simply doesn't exist.

I'm still not sure when I can move on to the next book in my stack of TBRs gathering dust on my shelf...I can't get this story out of my mind.

A DEFINITE recommend.

What They Wanted - Donna Morrissey

2009-08-08T09:08:00.001-07:00

I should offer a disclaimer about this book. I received it as a wonderfully unexpected gift from that kind and clever wordsmith, Gifted Typist. And what I received was not only a solid hardcover edition that felt so substantial in my hands, but a copy that was autographed to me by the author, a personal friend of the dear typist. With that kind of introduction and those personal connections, of course I wanted to love this novel.

In What They Wanted, Donna Morrissey explores the dynamics within a family who are clinging to a way of life in an isolated Newfoundland outport, as filtered through the eyes of the eldest, the only daughter, returned home following her father’s heart attack. Sylvie has long been trying to entice Chris, the middle son, the talented artist, away from this limiting life and into an academic life where his gift and his dreams can blossom. However, when Chris insists instead upon following Sylvie back to Alberta’s oilpatch to make some quick money to bolster the family’s failing resources, the tensions within the family come to a head.

Sylvie has always had a volatile relationship with her mother, whom she sees as having essentially abandoned her in favour of lavishing excessive devotion upon the preferred child, Chris. In turn, her mother feels betrayed by Sylvie’s abandonment of the family, made far worse by the fact that now two of her children have gone into the world far beyond the insulated world of Newfoundland’s hostile yet embracing coast.

And when the brother and sister find a world of machismo and a perplexing hierarchy in the oil rigs, they struggle to deal with the family’s past and with existing relationships that haunt them. When tragedy strikes, it comes not as a shock, but rather as a culmination of an encroaching sense of dread that these are people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I admit that I had a couple of difficulties with What They Wanted. Initially I had some problems with the colloquialisms used in this book. Morrissey’s characters speak in a broad Newfoundland dialect, and it felt a trifle odd to me, uncertain as I was of the authenticity of this particular vernacular. I think this is largely a result of the flap that E. Annie Proulx caused when she wrote The Shipping News in a Newfoundland dialect that most people concur was simply fabricated. However, since Morrissey is herself from Newfoundland, I will take it on faith that the way in which her characters speak is authentic.

I also found it hard to understand the degree of animosity between Sylvie and her mother. I found myself wanting to smack their heads together at times, to tell them to suck it up and put their issues of estrangement behind them. To me, the intensity of their relationship felt a little overwrought and not entirely believable, but perhaps that’s simply because that sort of relationship has never really entered into my sensibilities.

However, the raw pain with which Morrissey imparts the tragedy in the novel is entirely and painfully believable. It was rather hard to read, the aftermath of the accident, so intensely naked was the grief. But through the overwhelming loss and guilt and isolation that Morrissey explores in the grieving, comes an understanding and ultimately a catharsis.

What They Wanted is a gripping and at times wrenching novel. Despite the small quibbles I had with it, I was left with a lasting memory of this particular family, of the strength of blood ties and the bonds of loss.

The Da Vinci Code

2009-08-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

Wow was this an interesting book for those of you who havent heard or read it. I am not very religious and dont follow what most people do in there lives ok.. I do know that this was suppose to be border line religous.

This 7 year old Albino kills his father because his father beat his mother to death. Yikes that tells you something there doesnt it?? I mean sure those that have heard about abuse in house holds want to do stuff to those that hurt but come one do or would we really do it??

Well this Albino forgot what his parents named him so when he met this priest he was called Silas. Well Silas grows up and helps builds a few churches and a very faithful person to the priest. Well in the end he ends up trying to help get the Holy Grail.

This is where the story goes funny at least for me. I mean you think of the Holy Grail as a cup from like the Monty Python and the Holy Grail but according to the book its a woman. There is probably stuff I missed here but as always I get my point across I hope.

Well in the mean time a man named Langdon is in Paris making a speech on the Grail and his beliefs. A curator of the museum of Paris was suppose to meet with Langdon and ends up dead and Langdon gets the first suspect thing going. Well Langdon meets up with this Sophie Nevue. She warns him that he is in danger and they go on the run. They find hidden codes in messages left by the curator for them to follow.

This Albino follows them. The priest who raised Silas was in on the murder with another man. Well anyway the story takes a twist here and you would never believe who the man was and why.. I will not spoil anymore of the book.

If you have not read this I think you should. If you have seen the movie dont spoil that for me because we havent seen it yet. I am going to add that to my netflix que..

Rhapsody

2009-08-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

I love immersing myself in fantasy fiction - it truly is escapism. I came across this novel, Rhapsody, by Elizabeth Haydon, at a second hand book store, and both the cover and the write-up on the back intrigued me.

I read on Rhapsody's sequel's Amazon page this quote: "In a book world awash in sword-slinging fantasy novels, each trying to out-Jordan the other, the arrival of yet another big new series on the scene is...no big deal." I love the term "out-Jordan" because it's so true - or at least it would have been in 1999, when Rhapsody was published. Now anyone can out-Jordan Jordan himself because Robert Jordan is dead.

Rhapsody is a young woman of Lirin birth and a kind of magical singer. One day, on the run from a man who wants to possess her, she comes across two fishy characters who get her out of a bind. She ends up joining these two characters, Achmed and Grunthor, on an epic journey literally through the centre of the earth - and through centuries of time. When they get to the other side, the find they are in a completely different world altogether, and they have to start not only finding navigating their way through new language and culture, but also they must also destroy an ancient evil before it destroys this new world.

So much happens in this novel, it almost felt like a trilogy in itself. Haydon does a smart thing to keep it simple: she keeps her cast of main characters to three and spends a lot of time developing their personality and dynamics. This isn't a story diluted with a cast you can't keep track of and who each has a subplot revolving around him/her. Plot-wise, this is very tight, though it did seem to drag a bit in the last quarter.

The writing is excellent. Craft-wise, Haydon can create suspense, theme, drama, and poignancy without bogging her prose down; she keeps her structure tight, and her transitions between point of view characters were smooth. The magical elements are more mystical in quality than high fantasy stuff, which is always nice to see.

So, I'm very much looking forward to getting my hands on the rest of the series, which contains two more books, Prophesy and Destiny.

The Fruit Hunters

2009-07-28T16:46:00.000-07:00

I've had this book sitting around for a long time, and I procrastinated for months before finally finishing it today. One of the reasons was the introduction didn't grip me. An introduction should be gripping, shouldn't it? Somewhat? The second reason was that we were having cat peeing/marking issues at the time, and this book was a victim. I sat it on the stairs, where it collected dust and cat hair, so that it could dry out and de-odourize a bit. Eventually, I got sick of it there and did my duty as a book reviewer.

The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession by Adam Leith Gollner is a wild ride to say the least. Taking the reader to the margins of society - much like Krakauer did in Under the Banner of Heaven - this book explores the world of, well, fruit. But not just our grocery store fruit - we're talking the exotic, the rare, and the downright weird fruits that 99% of us will never see in our lives. Gollner travelled the planet during his research, going to the Seychelles in search of the endangered coco-de-mer; the junlges of Borneo to sample the stinky durian in it's natural habitat; Cameroon in search of the miracle fruit; as well as a bunch of other far off places like Hawaii, Thailand, and South America. Along the way, Gollner exposes a cornecopeia of not only exotic fruits, but strange, strange people.

As with most books I read, it's the characters that grab me, and this book was no different. The author meets some of the most obsessed whackos non-fiction has to offer. You couldn't make up some of these people if you wanted to.

There are fruitarian Doomsday cultists in Arizona. There are vicious fruitleggers. There are mega-rich men who spend their time collecting exotic fruit trees. There is the weirdo who invented the Grapple. There are men who make it their life's work to go clomping around the world's jungles cataloging every fruit they come across. There is the guy in Florida commonly known as "Graftin' Clafton", who is addicted to grafting to the point where security guards now make him leave his grafting implements at the door when he enters a certain botanical garden (he'd been caught grafting different species there too many times).

The Fruit Hunters also is a depressing overview of our modern fruit and agriculture industries. The chapter on marketing fruits here in North America was extremely disheartening. I will never go into a grocery store's produce aisle and look at the fruit displayed there the same way ever again.

A few things I'd like to point out:

never buy Grapples. Trust me. It's not worth it and I wouldn't give that idiot any of my money
90% of the foods we eat derive from about 30 plant species
fruit hunting isn't cheap, which is why it seems to be dominated by rich white men - most of them American
some guy named Bob Harvey invented a nuclear powered artificial heart in the 1960s - WTF?

A fascinating read, one that I totally recommend.

Award & Convergence

2009-07-26T17:18:00.001-07:00

Charlie very kindly bestowed upon me this lovely award for straight-shooting book reviewers:

Direct.
Honest.
When you like a book, you say why.
When you don’t like a book, you don’t mince words or sugarcoat it.
That’s why you get the Straight Shooter award.

Thank you, my friend!

And now for a straight-shooting book review, this time the first installment of a fantasy series by Sharon Green called The Blending. Convergence, the first of five books, apparently, tells the story of five men & women who come together to do the magical testing required by the laws of their land. Each represents an element: Air, Water, Fire, Earth, and Spirit, and each come from a very different background with very different motivations for travelling to their empire's capital city for the testing apart from legal reasons. Each is trying to escape something and each is on a very particular journey that will not only test their magical talents, but their personal limits, beliefs, and backgrounds.

Convergence is about these five characters converging not only on the capital of Gan Garee for the magical testing, but into each other's lives. They are forced to live together, which leads to tension but also to the cliche liasons one would expect to find in a book about a group of twenty-somethings living together in a nice house with a huge bath-house and nice gardens. Of course, they all have issues but that doesn't keep them from having mind-blowing sex. ZzzzzzZzzzzz...

Still, despite the boinking, this was a pretty good introduction to a series. Each character is loveable in his or her own way and it was an engaging read. Unfortunately, the books appear to be out of print. I got this one from a second hand bookstore where I trade my books at, so I'll have to go back there and see if they have any of the rest of the series.

The Flying Troutmans

2009-07-12T19:07:00.001-07:00

After a dry spell with my reading, I have completed two books in 24 hours. Last night I finally, after many frustrating, yawn-inducing hours, and an incredible utilization of my willpower, I finished The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. My brother claimed that this sequel to Hyperion would move much quicker - and it did, the way a turtle might move more quickly than a slug. It ended well, but the journey to the last 50 pages nearly killed me. I was so happy to move on to Miriam Toews's The Flying Troutmans. It took me less than a day to read.

Toews's previous novel, A Complicated Kindness, took me a while to get into, but in the end was a rewarding read. I cannot say the same for this newer novel - and I realized I'm going to get skewered for saying this.

Tightly written and reading more like a short story/ screenplay hybrid, The Flying Troutmans tells the story of Hattie Troutman, who comes back to Canada on spec to take care of her sick sister's children: Thebes, a precocious 11 year old girl, and Logan, a sullen, secretive, uncommunicative 15 year old. Hattie's sister, Min, has a mental illness of some description that involves psychosis and suicidality, and as soon as Hattie hits the ground, she is taking Min off to the psych ward and the children off on a huge road trip in an unreliable mini-van to find the kids' long-lost father. Many things happen along the way, as you might expect.

As my brother Jem would say, it wasn't bad, it just wasn't good. I had a few issues with it.

For one thing, the scenes involving the psychiatric ward seemed incredibly unrealistic to me - and let's bear in mind here that I've been on three different psych wards in three different hospitals in two provinces, OK? Never in all of my 10 psychiatric hospitalizations have I ever seen the family of a patient treated by the staff the way the Troutmans were treated by hospital staff. There were a lot of details about Min's psychiatric visit that were either inaccurate or highly unlikely. Call me picky, but stuff like this needs to be far better researched than it was in this book because every so often a reader with lots of psychiatric experience like me is going to come along and see the mistakes or lax research. And if the author is experienced with psych wards and family members with mental illness, then I feel badly for mental health consumers in Manitoba.

My other issue was the dialogue. Normally, I love snappy dialogue more than anything else in a novel. But, man, if I wanted to read a movie script, I would read a movie script. This book was more dialogue than narrative. Additionally, the dialogue was at times really annoying. Thebes, the 11 year old, was a unique, bizarre character, but after a few pages I wanted to wring her neck. She would not shut up. In a way, this is brilliant on the part of Toews; to be able to characterize someone so strongly that it brings up such emotion in the reader is a gift. But I don't want to be put off by it, and I was. Also, the narrator, Hattie, had some of the most irritating dialogue in the book because she seemed at times to be completely unable to speak in a complete sentence. She was a struggling, confused character, yes; but her continual trailing off and the author's heavy use of ellipses to convey this got aggravating. Characterizing through dialogue is a valid technique, but again, I don't want to be put off by it.

The last thing I'll nitpick about is this: have you ever seen Little Miss Sunshine? Yeah, a movie about a dysfunctional family on a road trip in a falling apart van, with a sullen teenaged boy and annoyingly precocious prepubescent girl and all that jazz. Happy ending & family is restored, blahx3.

Watch the movie; read the book if you need a beach quickie. I think I'll be trading this one in at the second-hand bookstore.

Lovely Bones By Alice Sebold

2009-07-07T21:37:00.000-07:00

Hi there. Here is an interesting book. We all know we will lose someone some day right?? Well here is a book on how people act after they have lost some one and why they reacted the way they did.

Susie Salmon was a young girl about 12 years old and she was walking home from school one day and a neigbhor asked her into this place that he built. She didnt want to go with him. She kept telling him she had to get home before her parents started to worry. Well in the mean time he poured her something to drink and asked her to read to him out loud.

She did all this and then said she had to go. He then got mean and said no way and he raped her and then sliced her neck. Well in the mean time he took her body and other possessions out of the whole he made and then buried the whole back in.

Susies father thought that this man did it and knew with every bone in his body that this neighbor did it. But couldnt prove that he had done it. Creepy to be honest with you. Anyway people act like they do when we lose some one because we dont understand the ways of losing someone we love.

Life takes us in many directions. Some of us grieve for our loved ones wanting them back all the time, some of us grieve with thanking that they are out of there misery. Well this book talks about all of that. Its fiction but when you think about how you have felt when losing some one you can relate with how your friends and family and such have seen you in life.

I know when I lost my grandmother and great grandmother I used to talk to them all the time but you know what I got answers sometimes. I never understood where the answers were coming from but then it hit me one day.

These friends were always talking to Susie and her family was too. They ended up witha few possessions they had found but never the body. The family split a part for a while but in the end it was whole again. They needed the time to understand what it was they wanted and how to deal with the death of there daughter, sister, and friend.

I reccommend this book highly. I give it 8.5 tweets out of ten.. Hope all is well with everyone.

Ladies and Gentlemen: the Bible - Jonathan Goldstein

2009-06-30T18:46:00.000-07:00

If, like me, you are a fan of Jonathan Goldstein’s droll and whimsical take on life and human dynamics that is presented weekly in his CBC Radio program, Wiretap, then you’ll love Ladies and Gentlemen: the Bible. And if you listen with any regularity, you are no doubt familiar with the segments in which Goldstein reinvents stories from the Old Testament, stories that are well-known, but which have the typical Goldstein twist of modern angst and self-doubt.

David is a frustrated comic, never quite satisfied with the way his life turned out after slaying Goliath failed to generate laughs from the crowd. Samson is a love-struck knuckleheaded bully. Jacob is smothered by an overbearing mother. The snake in the garden of Eden fancies himself to be quite the ladies’ man.

These are all characters who people the pages of Ladies and Gentlemen: the Bible. Their names have been ingrained in human culture and history for eons, but what were they really like? Jonathan Goldstein thinks he knows. And despite being big shots who had the ear of God, they had just as many neuroses and were just as fucked up as we are.

But Jesus they are funny.

This is one of those books in which you can hear the unmistakable radio voice of the narrator in your head as you read these stories. And that alone makes me laugh.

Ladies and Gentlemen: the Bible is well worth reading, particularly if you are a fan of Wiretap. But even if you are not, chances are you will find it amusing and entertaining. Perhaps even enlightening.

Well-Preserved

2009-06-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

The flap reads: "Most of us remember our mothers or grandmothers painstakingly canning tomatoes or pickles outside on a sweltering summer day so they'd be able to grab them from the basement pantry come winter. But how can a busy person with limited time and space put up the seasons' delicious bounty to savor later in the year?"

The essence of Eugenia Bone's Well-Preserved is summed up in the subtitle, "Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods." Bone herself lives in a small New York apartment, and if her book is any testament, she can pump out an incredible amount of stuff in a small, limited space.

Covering water bath canning, pressure canning, pickling, smoking & curing, freezing, and oil preserving, Well-Preserved covers a lot of ground in a slim volume. Bone's highly readable tone makes quite a scientific subject engaging and inspiring. Methods for these different types of preservation are well-laid out and the language is accessible. Her recipes look delicious and inventive. When canning time comes around this neck of the woods, I will for sure be making some of the recipes I've bookmarked, like the Strawberry Balsamic Jam and the Stewed Onions with Marjoram.

Bone structures the book around one master recipe, like the Strawberry Balsamic Jam, and then provides a series of recipes that use that one master recipe as a staple ingredient. There are a lot of cool ideas for everything from desserts and main dishes to salads and soups. As one might expect, there is a ton of variety.

So, I am very much looking forward to canning season (which is usually around the end of August in my family), though this book has some great ideas for non-canning preservation methods that I can totally see myself using. I am very grateful for my freezer, I can tell you that!

Clapton's Guitar

2009-06-20T20:29:00.000-07:00

Clapton's Guitar - watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument, by Allen St. John, has little to do with Eric Clapton, and a lot to do with master guitar maker (and picker) Wayne Henderson.

There is a wait time for a Wayne Henderson guitar, and it could be a decade or more. Guitar "god" Eric Clapton didn't get his guitar any faster than anyone else. The fact is that during the decade since he asked Henderson to make him a guitar, it seems there wasn't even any contact between Henderson and Clapton, and the climax of the book seemed to me to be a non-event as Clapton didn't even accept delivery of the guitar in person.

Really, this book is a loving portrait of a great craftsman. Allen St. John does a great job helping us get to know Wayne Henderson, what he's like as a person and as a luthier. Of course, without the Clapton angle, many fewer readers would have even found this book.

Here's Wayne Henderson performing with friends...

Here, Henderson talks and plays...

Doc Watson plays a Wayne Henderson guitar

Reading Clapton's guitar, I thought this Henderson fellow has worked out a pretty excellent lifestyle, playing music and making really highly crafted instruments. The descriptions are vivid, and I sometimes felt I was in Henderson's shop with the author and the other general loafers. This is a good book to read if you have a love of good craftsmanship or old time music, or both. I love all kinds of traditional music and so really enjoyed the read. I think I would have preferred it as a biography of Wayne Henderson without the Clapton angle at all.

2009-06-19T17:04:00.001-07:00

I read a lot of garden books, but mostly as reference. With a recent invitation to borrow from the company library, I searched the stacks for interesting titles. A Brief History of Gardening by Neil Fairbairn caught my eye because I hadn’t really considered a linear history of gardening before.

The book is structured in short segments and chapters that follow the significant moments in recorded history. This is an appropriate structure since how and why people gardened can be understood by what was going on in the world at the time. For example, I found it interesting to consider the decline of the Roman Empire being related to the decline in its food production as well. The Empire couldn’t produce enough food to feed its people. I see parallels to our modern agriculture and our own contemporary concerns with being able to produce enough food to feed everyone on this planet. But I digress.

The book is a little Western focused, but that doesn’t take away from what the book has to offer. Other cultural influences are discussed to offer glimpses into how gardens differed in various parts of the world and how they influenced European gardens. The timeline that introduces each chapter does remain predominately Western.

The balance between textual information and illustrations makes it a visually interesting book as well. Some of the illustrations are quite beautiful and I found myself flipping through the pages landing on pages that caught my eye and from there I would read the accompanying text. You could read it from front to back or open to any page and start reading.

If you’re passionate about gardening you’ll probably enjoy this book. It's full of interesting little facts (the Shakers invented the first seed packets for sale) and is not without humor (the English fear of the tomato) and overall is entertaining to read. It gave me an introduction to a subject that suggests to me that I'll have to start looking for more in depth books on gardening.

Anyone Watnt A Free Book?

2009-06-17T12:10:00.000-07:00

Check out this link to Green as a Thistle and follow the author's instructions. You might just get yourself a copy of her book, Sleeping Naked is Green!

About a Boy - Nick Hornby

2009-06-07T07:52:00.001-07:00

About a Boy is an entirely pleasant book, upon which an entirely pleasant movie was based. Coming on the heels of a similar success with High Fidelity, it firmly established the genre of male confessional lit as Nick Hornby's stock in trade.

I am not knocking that. There is loads of chick lit which falls into that category, so why shouldn't we get a look into the male psyche? At least from the perspective of one British male former teacher, anyway.

About a Boy tells the story of Will, an independently wealthy and rather shallow man, with too much time on his hands. Through a series of circumstances and initial misunderstandings, he comes to the realization that pretending he is a single father will open opportunities for him to meet loads of (hopefully desperate, beautiful, and horny) single mothers.

And then he meets Marcus, an odd twelve-year-old, who is charmingly unaware of how uncool he is, but is such an obvious target for bullies. He and his hippie mother complicate Will's comfortable existence, and their sensibilities, which are so blatantly different from his own, frustrate him beyond measure.

And then, of course, he finds himself drawn, most unwillingly, into their lives.

About a Boy is a perfect book for your summer reading list. It's charming and witty, chock full of the pop culture references that I love, and it is ultimately hopeful without once resorting to sappiness or cliche.

I would, though, be very interested to hear what men think of this book. Has Hornby succeeded in capturing the male psyche?

Thunderstruck (Erik Larson)

2009-06-06T05:20:00.000-07:00

If the first book on my self-imposed summer reading list is anything to go by, I'm in for a great summer! Thunderstruck is the real-life story of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, a mild-mannered, quiet homeopathic doctor who murdered his wife and ran off with his secretary. The age old story... Erik Larson, however, is a masterful storyteller and weaves Crippen's story with that of Gugliemo Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraphy, the invention which would allow investigators to find and capture the Doctor and his lover as they sailed across the Atlantic.

The two stories seem unrelated for most of the book but after Crippen's wife disappears and his lover begins wearing her clothes and jewellry in public, alerting friends and eventually the police, the pieces begin falling neatly into place. The ability for investigators and ships to be able to communicate across the Atlantic and between ships at sea not only helped capture Crippen but gave Marconi and his company the world-wide recognition that his system did work and just how useful it could be (along with it's "successful" use on board both the Lusitania and the Titanic).

Crippen's tale of love and murder is not a new one; we've heard similar stories throughout history but Larson presents it to the reader in such a compelling way that you can't help but find yourself reading page after page, unable to put it down. Thankfully, the chapters are relatively short, alternating between Marconi and Crippen, so finding a spot to eventually stop and insert your bookmark isn't difficult. Last summer, I had read Larson's The Devil in the White City and loved it. At the time, I was a bit put-off by his somewhat fictional style of story telling but this time, I didn't have any issues. I highly recommend Thunderstruck and found myself as caught up in the tale as newspaper readers around the world who followed the hunt for Crippen daily (thanks to the use of Marconi's wireless to relay messages and updates from the middle of the ocean to reporters on both sides of the Atlantic).

Inside the front cover of the hard cover version of the book is a reproduction of Bacon's New Map of London 1902 and a few points of interest relevant to this story have been pointed out including the location of the murder scene and the prison where Crippen and his lover, Ethel Le Neve, were incarcerated and another where the doctor eventually met his fate (she was acquitted). I was struck by the inclusion of one of these, Holloway Prison, as I was sure I had walked by the entrance to the prison grounds when I got lost on my first day in London. Sure enough, upon closer inspection, I found that this was correct. Curious now, I took a closer look at the map and was suprised to discover that the murder scene was mere blocks (less than 1 mile!)from the B&B I stayed in while in London a few months ago. Egads! It woudln't really have mattered though as the Crippen's house on Hilldrop Crescent was destroyed by a bomb during the war.

Go out and read today! A great mystery!

Tar Sands

2009-06-03T18:26:00.000-07:00

I love reading really depressing books while in a depression. There's nothing like it!

Thanks to my good friend Charlie, who was generous enough to mail me his copy of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, I was able to spent several marvelous hours reading one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. This is right up there with Timothy Findley's Headhunter, which made me want to have a shower after reading it. I felt similarly dirty and violated after reading Tar Sands, let me tell you.

This book disturbed me so much, I barely know how to review it.

Written by Andrew Nikiforuk, a Calgary journalist, Tar Sands presents the whole nasty business of extracting bitumen from the sands of northern Alberta in all its filthy glory. It explains the process of mining and refining the bitumen into oil exported directly to the US via a series of pipelines. We get the mind-boggling stories of the effects of mining bitumen on the environment, the health and welfare of the inhabitants living near the tar sands, the economy, the social ills surrounding this messy business, and the political ramifications of our oil-addicted society for Americans, Canadians, and Albertans.

To say the tale of dirty oil and tar sands development is a sordid tale would be a gross understatement. The environmental atrocities will curl your teeth. The greed of multinational oil companies will enrage you. The shafting of native communities and the citizens of Albera will infuriate you. The undermining of our democratic political system should shock you into action.

This is a really important book for Americans and Canadians, particularly Albertans, alike. Read it.

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

2009-05-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

I got this one from my MIL. I have to say there is no jacket to tell what its about and its a very old book. Copy right date is 1970.

It starts out with this boy that is a bastard in the days of kings and queens. The mother of the boy wouldnt tell any one who the father was. She was beaten bloody because she refused to tell who he was.

Then one day the king was killed by accident. The grandfather to the bastard child. The uncle took the Kings place and had plans to kill the boy. Well the boy escaped and found his way to another country. Well he ended up finding his father instead. He learned his lessons with a teacher. I am having a hard time explaining this book for some odd reason.

I have to say this about it. It didnt hold my attention that great or I could have given you a better play by play.. If you can find it and want to give it a try go for it but I didnt care for it as well as I thought I was going to. Its a Fantasy..

The Little Stranger

2009-05-22T09:01:00.000-07:00

A while back, I reviewed Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, a book that riveted me to the point of obsession. Well, Waters has a new novel out called The Little Stranger, and I just finished it last night.

The flap reads: "In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to see a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the once grand house is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its garden choked with weeds. All around, the world is changing, and the family is struggling to adjust to a society with new values and rules."

What's more is that this is a story about a house wherein the house is actually a character. If you've ever read Cloudstreet, which I recommend you do, you'll know what I mean. Hundred Halls, beyond dilapidated and probably beyond saving, has taken on a life of its own despite the hard work of its inhabitants to keep it going. The Hall harbours a presence...But the way Waters presents this to us keeps the lines between haunting, psychological imbalance, and imagination blurred.

The narrator, Dr. Faraday, comes to know the Ayres family intimately after a housecall one summer day. He becomes a family friend, and as his relationship with the Hall's inhabitants (Mrs. Ayers, an aging matron who has known her share of tragedy; her daugher Caroline, a plain spinster working hard to keep the Hall and it's adjacent farm going; and her son, Roddy, phycially and mentally damaged after WWII and completely stressed out about managing the Hall and its finances) develops, he becomes a confidant and as such gains intimate knowledge of the goings on in the lives of the Ayres and Hundreds. Grounded in science, Dr. Faraday listens to the stories Caroline, her brother, Roddie, and Mrs. Ayres tell him of the strange occurrences in the house and responds with characteristic rationality, but as a reader, you begin to wonder what's really going on here.

Waters does an excellent job of creating suspense and structuring the story so that it slowly unfolds, much unlike the unfurling of a flower. Though not quite as riveting as Fingersmith, I found this book still very difficult to put down. It's creepy, too, and I had a hard time reading it before bed. I also liked the fact that I have spent time in the area the story is set in; I could picture the setting so much better, which was nice.

Definitely an excellent read I highly recommend.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

2009-05-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

This slim volume was recommended to me by Charlie, who raved about it in a post several months ago. I'd actually been interested in this book since my Crapters days, but just never got around to reading it until last weekend.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a charming story about two young men who are sent to boonie-land China to be re-educated as part of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Both are city boys with decent educations, and are children of well-educated parents who have been black-listed by Mao. During their time of exile on a mountain in the middle of nowhere they perform back-breaking peasant tasks and live among uneducated yokels. Two things happen: they meet a beautiful young woman called only the Little Chinese Seamstress, and they come across a huge suitcase of forbidden Western literature translated into Chinese.

This is a charming story of young love and the allure of forbidden treasure - not to mention the power of reading and the places fiction can take us. It also is a mild commentary on the quirky aspects of China's back country and the silliness of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

A quick, entertaining read I highly recommend.

The End of Overeating

2009-05-09T18:05:00.000-07:00

The flap reads: "Most of us know what it feels like to fall under the spell of food - when one slice of pizza turns into half a pie, or a handful of chips leads to an empty bag. But it's harder to understand why we can't seem to stop eating - even when we know better. When we want so badly to say "no," why do we continue to reach for food."

Written by Dr. David Kessler, The End of Overeating is part food manufacturing expose, part biology lesson, and part impulse-control rehab.

I guarantee that after you read this book you'll only want to eat lettuce - for a while. Which might not be a bad thing, right?

So, why do so many of us overeat, and not just once in a while, but regularly? Well, according to Kessler, this isn't a will-power issue: the food industry is purposely setting out to make foods so yummy - or "hyperpalatable" - that our bodies are being biologically programmed by the industry's layering of fat on sugar on salt to eat more and more. The industry, whose number one priority is to make as much money as possible, is purposely manipulating our food so that resistance is futile.

Kessler's research is meticulous, and he even gets an anonymous food industry insider to give up the ghost on some of the secrets of food manufacturing. Kessler also talks to numerous researchers, obesity experts, and scientists who give him the low-down on the biology behind overeating and weight gain. It's fascinating stuff, actually.

The author also offers a rehabilitation plan for those amongst us who are "conditioned hypereaters." Interestingly enough, this is a cognitive behavioural approach that included many components of both CBT and the DBT I did a couple of years ago. Some of the impulse control and distress tolerance techniques are virtually the same as what Kessler describes in his Food Rehab(TM) program. This really piqued my interest, not only because it was already familiar to me in a different context, but because it's quite novel. This isn't a dietary solution and this isn't a will-power solution: this is a reprogramming of the brain solution. And, like recovering from BPD, it's hard, hard work.

Though this is packed with quite a bit of scientific and psychological information, Kessler does an excellent job of keeping this book readable. He avoids insider jargon and lingo, keeps his prose simple and to the point, and makes the sections in the book short and consise.

This book is definitely worth a read.

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

2009-05-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

My brother Jem and I have similar taste in books, so when he recommends something as highly as he recommended Hyperion, I figured he'd hit upon something great and decided to read it myself. After all, he loved Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and I did, too. Hyperion, Jem said, was one of the best books he'd ever read. OK. How could I go wrong?

Oh, it went wrong. Really wrong.

After about 150 pages of being not very gripped, I phoned Jem.

Me: This book is fucking boring!

Jem: What? It's one of the best books ever! It won all kinds of awards!

Me: I don't care what it won! It's brutal!

Jem: Well, what can I say, WC?

Indeed, what can I say?

Basically, what we have here, is a sci-fi novel that takes place as humanity is about to go to war with a humanity off-shoot called the Ousters. Seven people have been chosen to take a final pilgrimage to a sacred location on the world of Hyperion, a sacred location where these mythological creatures called the Shrike lurk in something called the Time Tombs. In the vein of The Cantebury Tales, each pilgrim tells a story as they edge towards their destination. The stories all have a commonality, and that commonality is the Shrike and Hyperion. The tales are long and only two of the six told in the book interested me enough to keep reading. Yes - only six tales; one of the seven pilgrims disappears en route - and for that I was grateful because I'm not sure I could have handled another story - the book was already too long.

But the most frustrating thing about Hyperion wasn't the tales, it was the lack of resolution at the end. It just...ends. All the anticipation built up through reading these tales results in absolutely nothing. All of the pilgrims have specific reasons for being on the pilgrimage to begin with, and at the end, they just wander off and the book ends without anything happening at all. I felt so frustrated and so gypped I nearly tore the book apart!

Apparently, according to Jem, I have to read the sequel to see what happens.

Good God!

Of course I'm going to read the sequel. One of the tales really intrigued me and I would like to see how that storyline resolves itself.

According to Jem, The Fall of Hyperion moves much more quickly.

All I can say is, it better.