tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73044955955789181682024-03-16T03:34:51.154-04:00Books Under SkinA blog about the books that become a part of your life.Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.comBlogger287125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-21229638607093462522013-04-18T10:46:00.000-04:002013-04-18T10:46:05.228-04:00Life After Life<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">I don't know why, but I haven't been reading well lately. That isn't to say I'm having a hard time with the words or anything – it's something about my choices. I've been reading and enjoying a lot of non fiction, but the novels have been feeling a little meh. There hasn't been anything wrong with them, but they haven't grabbed me the way books usually do, and I'm not sure if that's because I've been distracted lately (work is crazy) of if it's the writing or some combination of the two, but it's frustrating. The one bright spot in all of this has been <i>Life After Life</i>, the new novel by Kate Atkinson. I actually read it a month ago while on holiday and, even though I love it, I hesitated to write about it in case my recent literary doldrums interfered. But I've kept thinking about it, and Atkinson is everywhere at the moment, so I to put it out there and see if it breaks whatever fiction-meh I've caught.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The idea behind <i>Life After Life</i> is fairly simple: Ursula, born in England in 1910 (a year that makes keeping track of her age very simple) lives over and over again. That is, each time she dies, she is brought back at some pivotal moment before her death, and given a chance to do it again. For example, as a child at the beach, she and her older sister go wading in the water and are caught by a wave; they drown, but then a few paragraphs later they're saved by a man who was painting farther up the beach; at yet another return, Ursula has a bad feeling about the water and convinces her sister to build sandcastles instead. These deja vu feelings are basically all Ursula retains from life to life – although she gets a seemingly endless number of do-overs, she doesn't have the luxury of knowing what mistakes led to her death (or even that she died), just a feeling that she shouldn't be somewhere or do something. Furthermore, she does actually have die in order to get a do over, which is to say, sometimes excruciatingly bad things happen to her and the storyline continues and, because she doesn't know that death won't be permanent, she has no choice but just to continue.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Of course, not every do-over is successful. It takes Ursula several attempts to survive the Spanish influenza epidemic after the First World War, for example. This leads to a lot of repetitive story telling, which in short bursts can be a little much, but later on can prove immensely satisfying as you watch for the small changes that will affect the outcome 10 or 20 years down the road. It's an unusual way to get to know a character, since you get to see how she will react to various situations and also realize that, whether X happens or not, she sometimes ends up in the same place. For anyone who has wondered <i>what if I hadn't/had done that? Where would I be now?</i> Atkinson has done some of that thinking for you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I'm not sure it should be called time travel, since that suggests an agency that Ursula doesn't have (how are the pivotal life moments decided, and by whom, are never explained), but I think this continuous cycle of life and death and sometimes literal rebirth would be tedious if it weren't for the time Atkinson chose to set her novel in. Nearly half the book is set during the Second World War and much of it during the Battle of Britain. Ursula's roles vary, but Atkinson's look at wartime London (and elsewhere) is gripping. Ursula's multiple experiences of the war, furthermore, allow Atkinson to explore various aspects of wartime life, which bring a richness to the experience of reading it. I feel like I've read a lot books (both fiction and non-fiction) about the war recently, but Ursula's was a unique perspective.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Life After Life</i> is a perfect escapist novel. It's the kind of book you both want to keep to yourself and talk about with everyone. I will admit that sometimes I just hoped Ursula would die so she could get out of some situation or another, but Atkinson is tough on both her readers and her character, and no one gets off the hook that easily. It's a proper literary page-turner, and I'm not sure I've ever read anything quite like it.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">Life After Life</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Kate Atkinson</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Published 2013 (Bond Street Books edition) </span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-80110798237727862502013-03-28T11:38:00.000-04:002013-04-18T10:46:31.531-04:00Some Great Idea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">I work in news, so it's possible I just feel like certain stories are always running, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Toronto's mayor, Rob Ford, is in the news way more than he ought to be. For ridiculous things. I've only lived in Toronto for four and half years. It is, if I'm honest, a city I never wanted to live in. Toronto always seemed so big and impenetrable and busy, but it turns out that once you get out of the car and start walking around (and get yourself a home base) it's a great place to live. I've lived in three distinct neighbourhoods since moving here and my job means commuting from downtown to the north part of the city – part of the city formerly known as North York. The more time I spend here, getting to know different neighbourhoods and learning to better navigate the transit system, the more I love this city. Edward Keenan, author of <i>Some Great Idea</i> also loves this city, and he turned his relationship with Toronto in a book that should be on every nightstand in the city.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Some Great Idea</i> is an analysis of post-amalgamation Toronto – just the past 15 years, plus a few important influencers from the city's history. To describe it broadly, Keenan's book gives a rundown of what happened when the City of Toronto was amalgamated with its neighbouring municipalities (Etobicoke, York, North York, East York, and Scarborough) and then looks at the work and legacies of the three post-amalgamation mayors: Mel Lastman, David Miller, and Rob Ford, who is still in office. Each one brought his own brand of urbanism to bear and, says Keenan, each one mobilized a core of people, exciting his followers and infuriating his opponents and thus drawing an increasing number of voices into city politics. Of course, you can't talk about the city now without talking about its past, and Keenan folds the stories of historically important Torontonians into his narrative, as well as looking at how the various pieces of the new city had been planned and developed. It is, for someone who didn't grow up in Toronto, and incredibly edifying view of the city.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">Keenan has been a journalist in Toronto for over a decade (and grew up here to boot), and while I wouldn't say he's unbiased, I would say that he's fair. His personal stories, whether from reporting or his personal life, are illustrative of both how the city works and how it doesn't, and that dichotomy is often jarring. Take, for example, Keenan's story of moving from one ward to its neighbour across the tracks. His family moved only a couple of blocks – easy walking distance from their old apartment – and found themselves in an entirely different version of the city. I see these changes every day on my way to and from work. I get on the subway in a dense, walkable city neighbourhood and get off in a neighbourhood of busy four-lane roads and a whole lot of cars. In my case, both of these neighbourhoods are middle class, but they demonstrate very different planning philosophies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">But these differences – this diversity – are Toronto's strength, Keenan says. Diversity of income, race, urban landscape, age, gender, background, etc. is what makes Toronto such a liveable city. In recent years, however, that diversity has become increasingly divided. The city as whole remains diverse, but its neighbourhoods less so, as development downtown pushes up prices and low income residents are pushed farther out, where there are lower levels of the services they would most benefit from. It's a problem Keenan says, but not one without solutions (and, to his credit, he offers numerous workable ideas as starting points).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">In the last few years, it has been easy to get caught up in the antics of Rob Ford and forget how great Toronto is. Keenan's book ends with Rob Ford being found guilty of conflict of interest and ordered removed from office, which leaves Keenan to speculate and what will happen in city hall and where the city will go from there. Of course, Ford won his appeal and remains the mayor, but just to read a book about the city that goes almost right up to the present day is amazing. So often these kinds of recent-history books end somewhere safe, a year or two before the time of writing, say, after which point the writer knows what happens and can structure his/her book accordingly. That Keenan goes right out on a still-growing limb and stops without knowing whether that limb will keep growing is, in a way, the perfect attitude for a book about Toronto. This is a city that is still evolving and changing, that doesn't have <i>a way we've always done things</i> and that by itself is a great idea, because it means we can nudge it in the direction we want to see it go.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">Some Great Idea: Good neighbourhoods, crazy politics and the invention of Toronto</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Edward Keenan</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Published in 2013 (Coach House Books)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-40028890490498785212013-02-28T11:19:00.000-05:002013-03-28T11:38:32.310-04:00My Life in France<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">It is still winter. I know it's February and that February means winter and so I should expect that it would be winter, but man, it is still winter. The thing is, that by now, the last day of February, it feels like we should be almost finished with winter, but I suspect that isn't the case. We had a pretty un-wintry December and January, and the late descent of winter is depressing with its cold and snow. It's the kind of weather that makes me want to hunker down indoors and read and knit and cook hearty meals, but the tricky thing about that (at least where cooking is concerned) is that I have to leave the house for groceries, and this weather makes me not want to go outside. Obviously I have to, but I'm doing it as little as possible, so instead of heading to the grocery store every time I feel like cooking, I've started turning to Julia Child instead. Her memoir <i>My Life in France</i> (written with her nephew Alex Prud'homme) is full of food and warm weather and it is exactly the kind of delicious escapist read I need to get me through the depths of winter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">In a nutshell, <i>My Life in France</i> is the story of the Childs' (Julia and her husband Paul) life abroad. They moved to Paris shortly after the Second World War and Paul worked as a cultural diplomat while Julia cast about for something to do. When she set upon cooking, she signed up for the Cordon Bleu and as dismayed to find she'd been placed in a class for housewives. After some trouble from the woman who ran admissions, she managed to be transferred into the main chef's class and although she didn't find success immediately, she was so determined to learn and so interested in everything that she, of course, was successful in the end. She became friends (as much as you can be, I suppose) with the chef who taught her class, and began working on her own recipes and versions of recipes in the evenings after class. She was, in a word, obsessed, and it was an obsession that drove her for the rest of her life. </span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">Julia Child was 91 when she sat down with Alex to write this book and I have to say, her memory is extraordinary. Although she had many, many letters to refer to, as well as photos to job her memory and, of course, her copious notes from the years she spent writing <i>Mastering the Art of French Cooking</i>, that does not entirely explain how she can remember such precise details about meals she and her late husband Paul ate some sixty years prior. It is astonishing, and from the very beginning it draws you in to her love affair with French food so completely that you'll wonder why you don't approach cooking with the same spirit of dogged determination and adventure. (You'll certainly be embarrassed you're avoiding the grocery store because of the cold.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The first part of the book is mainly about Julia's introduction to French life and learning to cook and all the many amazing meals she and Paul enjoyed. It is also about their marriage, and their life together, which adds a perhaps unexpected love story to a memoir largely about food. It is so vivid and exciting to read that, really, you feel you could step right into that Paris and bump into her on the street. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The second half of the book – no less enjoyable – is about the famous cookbook, or "cookery bookery," as Julia called it. <i>Mastering the Art</i> was an enormous undertaking. During the writing of it, the Childs were transferred from Paris to Marseille, meaning Julia was quite some distance from her writing partners (who, I should say, were the original forces behind the book, although that largely changed when Julia joined the team). The number of hours and ingredients that went into perfecting each recipe is unimaginable, and that these women did all this work without a proper commitment from a publisher is crazy. For a long time, it looked like the book might never even be published, since it was so long and detailed, and the market for that kind of cookbook didn't really exist in 1950s America, where they were hoping to sell it. Nonetheless, they persevered, and although the Childs were then transferred to Germany, and then to the U.S., and then to Norway (I had no idea they'd moved around so much), they didn't stop working.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Although non-fiction is not generally painted as an escapist genre, <i>My Life in France</i> is absolutely a book that will whisk you away and drop you into Julia's kitchen. The writing appeals to every sense, and if you have ever heard Julia Child speak, her voice will follow you loudly through the pages. As memoirs go, this one is detailed and fun without losing the narrative and becoming too revealing. It is a delicious read, and I heartily recommend it.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">My Life in France</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Julia Child, with Alex Prud'homme</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2006 (cover image shown from Anchor Books edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-32172396549345078882013-02-14T10:03:00.000-05:002013-02-28T11:22:35.607-05:00Sleeping Funny<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">I am not a particularly strategic reader. Okay, that isn't entirely true, but I don't feel strategic when I choose books. I do make an effort (although it's hardly a chore) to read predominantly female authors and also focus on Canadian lit. This doesn't mean I won't read men, or that I don't read international offerings, but there are a lot of books out there and, consciously or not, most readers have a way of narrowing down what makes it into their to-be-read pile. Sometimes genre can be enough, but whatever way you choose your next read, chances are that a strategy is involved. In the last while, part of my strategy has been to read more short story collections. I really like short fiction, so it has been a happy turn of events that CanLit Knit has embraced short stories as well. Most recently we read Miranda Hill's <i>Sleepy Funny</i>, and although it wasn't everyone's favourite so far, it was mine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The first story is set in a tony neighbourhood in a city I feel I should recognize, but can't quite (it could be Toronto or Vancouver, or a fictional mash up, but I'm not sure it quite matters). The neighbourhood is a cul de sac on which all the families are friends, the women are all successful, and everyone follows a sort of unwritten code. And then a new family moves in. The premise is not unique, but the way the story unfolds is nonetheless satisfying in the way Hill uses and subverts the tropes were accustomed to. The story is told from the perspectives of several of the women who live in the niehgbourhood, offering insight into their lives and children and views of the new neighbour, Michal Revivo-Smitherman, her husband, and their three children. </span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">In a story like this – where Michal's perspective is never given – it would be easy to make her a sort of manic pixie dream girl for the neighbourhood, where her bohemian life inspires the other women to change and her character remains nothing more than an archetype. But Michal is very much a person in this story – the longest in the collection – and by the end you feel you know her as well as you know the other women. By and large, this is a story about how neighbourhoods work – those tacit agreements we make to keep the peace and ensure property values remain high. It's a sort of domestic drama, and Hill's teasing out of the small details is beautifully done.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">By the end of this first story, you really think you know where Hill is going with <i>Sleeping Funny</i>, and then you start the next story and find yourself somewhere entirely different. It's a jolt, but it isn't jarring – it's refreshing, really, to read a collection that really is just that. This is not a series of connected short stories or a collection of work in a certain style or on similar themes (although there are themes that run through many of the stories, family being one), but rather a collection of various stories that can be read individually or all at once. It has been a while since I read a collection whose stories weren't group by theme or style, and it was fun. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I would like to say that I had a favourite, but each story, in the moment I was reading it, defined the collection for me. The only weak link (and weak only in the context of how strong the rest of this collection is) was the titular story, which is also the last. It felt a little more obvious, a little more set up and spelled out than the other stories, but the writing was still so engaging I didn't really mind. <i>Sleeping Funny</i> is a collection I will hold on to so I can reread its stories in five or ten years. I suppose that counts as a strategy for reading, but I'm okay with that; I can only imagine this will get better with time.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">Sleeping Funny</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Miranda Hill</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2012 (cover image shown from Doubleday Canada edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-24256504027805864962013-02-01T12:13:00.000-05:002013-02-14T10:03:36.353-05:00Speaking from Among the Bones<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">So, I'm not totally sure what happened to January except that it seems to have blown by and, despite my best intentions every week, I never managed to make it over here. My work schedule has changed a bit, and I was away, and there are lots of reasons that January was a bad blogging month, but that stops now, because it's February and high time I got my act together. January was, I should say, an excellent reading month, and one of the definite high points was Alan Bradley's latest <i>Speaking from Among the Bones</i>. I am generally quite sceptical about series. I don't like getting sucked in and feeling obliged to read each new book as it comes out, especially since I tend to outgrow series and then become increasingly disappointed with each book as I (and likely the author) get tired of the characters and the plots. All of that being said, Flavia de Luce has yet to disappoint, and although we're getting to the point in the series where Bradley must necessarily offer the background of his previous books as little asides, his plots and intrigue remain as fresh and fun as ever.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The novel opens with Flavia and her sister Ophelia in St. Tancred's church, where Feely (as she is affectionately/not-so-affectionately know) is practicing on the organ and Flavia is contemplating the grisly scene of St. John the Baptist's decapitation. Feely is practicing the organ because she has taken over as the parish organist, the previous organist having gone missing about six months previous. It's a week before Easter and, on top of that, mere days before the tomb of St. Tancred is to be opened. Feely, though, is complaining about the sound of some of the pipes, so she and Flavia go into the organ – something Flavia didn't know was possible – to check things out and find a bat inside there with them, which terrifies Feely and sends them both home. I had no idea such a thing was possible and, I have to say, it's little value-added details like the names of the organ pipes that make Bradley such a good read.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">But, the mystery doesn't start in the organ; rather, it's the next day when Flavia returns to the church to investigate how a bat got into the organ that things get exciting. St. Tancred is about to be exhumed, and despite some setbacks from the church bureaucracy, things eventually go ahead and she is invited down to watch (the idea being that the youngest person on hand should be a witness, as they'll be around the longest to tell the tale). So, down into the crypt goes Flavia with the vicar et al. and, after the stone covering the crypt has been pried almost open, Flavia sticks her head inside and discovers the body of the dead organist, wearing a gas mask. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Flavia, naturally, is on the case, but it seems she isn't alone. In addition to the police – with whom she has very little interaction in this novel, a little change from the last few that indicates Bradley hasn't yet totally fallen into a formula – Rev. Richardson's old friend Adam Sowerby, an anthropologist specializing in plants (and a private detective) is on hand, as is Miss Tanty, the head of the church choir and quite a fan of detective novels. Flavia and Adam form a friendly, if suspicious, partnership, sharing notes on their findings. One such detail is that St. Tancred was buried with his staff, which was rumoured to hold a large diamond, and additionally that St. Tancred may well have been a de Luce. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As good as the mystery always is, it's the domestic side of Bradley's novels that really make these must-reads. Flavia's life at home, with her two sisters, father, Dogger, and Mrs. Mullett, is the heart of every novel. The de Luce's financial problems have been a feature since book one, and the possibility that Buckshaw, the family home, maybe sold is a very real presence <i>Speaking from Among the Bones</i>, as is, as ever, the mythology of Flavia's missing-presumed-dead mother Harriet. As part of her sleuthing, Flavia discovers some new details about her mother, and that additional puzzle offers a through-line to the novels that makes them best read in order. Truly, for all my wariness about series, I can't help but be pulled into Flavia's adventures, and upon finishing each one, sincerely hoping Bradley has another novel waiting in the wings.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">Speaking from Among the Bones</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Alan Bradley</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Published 2013 (cover image shown from Doubleday Canada edition)</span><br />
<br />Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-66167866643853574602013-01-03T10:36:00.002-05:002013-01-03T10:37:15.752-05:00My year in reading<span style="font-size: small;">Happy New Year! I have been a bad blogger (read: AWOL blogger) recently, and there are many reasons for that. One of the big ones, though, is that my life has changed a lot in the last eight months and that has thrown a lot of my reading habits into disarray. I love reading and I love blogging about it, so I'm going to really think about how to better prioritize those two things in 2013.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">In the meantime, here's what I read in 2012:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Death and the Penguin</i> by Andrey Kurkov (translated by George Bird) <br />
<i>The Winter Palace</i> by Eva Stachniak<br />
<i>The Year of Magical Thinking</i> by Joan Didion<br />
<i>The Antagonist</i> by Lynn Coady<br />
<i>The Elegance of the Hedgehog</i> by Muriel Barbery<br />
<i>The Mysteries of Pittsburgh</i> by Michael Chabon<br />
<i>The Paris Wife</i> by Paula McClain<br />
<i>Dr. Brinkley’s Tower</i> by Robert Hough<br />
<i>Coventry </i>by Helen Humphreys<br />
<i>Radio Belly</i> by Buffy Cram<br />
<i>Irma Voth</i> by Miriam Toews<br />
<i>Touch</i> by Alexi Zentner<br />
<i>Alone in the Classroom</i> by Elizabeth Hay<br />
<i>Seen Reading</i> by Julie Wilson<br />
<i>Hark! A Vagrant</i> by Kate Beaton<br />
<i>Instruction Manual for Swallowing</i> by Adam Marek<br />
<i>The Headmaster’s Wager</i> by Vincent Lam<br />
<i>Magnified World</i> by Grace O’Connell<br />
<i>Franny and Zooey</i> by J. D. Salinger<br />
<i>A Complicated Kindess</i> by Miriam Toews<br />
<i>All Wound Up</i> by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee<br />
<i>Above All Things</i> by Tanis Rideout<br />
<i>That Summer in Paris</i> by Morely Callaghan<br />
<i>Open</i> by Lisa Moore<br />
<i>The Professor and the Madman</i> by Simon Winchester<br />
<i>The Reading List</i> by Leslie Shimotakahara<br />
<i>Better Living Through Plastic Explosives</i> by Zsuzsi Gartner<br />
<i>The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry</i> by Rachel Joyce<br />
<i>The Art of Fielding</i> by Chad Harbach<br />
<i>One Good Hustle</i> by Billie Livingston<br />
<i>The Blue Book</i> by A.L. Kennedy<br />
<i>The Deception of Livvy Higgs</i> by Donna Morrissey<br />
<i>Gone Girl </i>by Gillian Flynn<br />
<i>Mister Roger and Me</i> by Marie-Renée Lavoie<br />
<i>Too Much Happiness</i> by Alice Munro<br />
<i>The Age of Miracles</i> by Karen Thompson Walker<br /><i>Ender’s Game</i> by Orson Scott Card<br />
<i>The Blondes</i> by Emily Schultz<br />
<i>My Life in France</i> by Julia Child<br />
<i>Leaving the Atocha Station</i> by Ben Lerner<br />
<i>84, Charring Cross Road</i> by Helene Hanff</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">That's 41 books. I'm partway through the 42nd book I started in 2012 (<i>Sleeping Funny</i> by Miranda Hill) and also listened to 3 audiobooks (<i>When You Are Engulfed in Flames</i>, <i>Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim</i>, and <i>Me Talk Pretty One Day</i> all by David Sedaris, who I think his hilarious). </span>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">As a total number, it's fewer books than <a href="http://www.booksunderskin.com/2012/01/what-i-read-in-2011.html" target="_blank">last year</a>, but in a way I'm happier about what it represents. It can get really easy to start reading for numbers – choosing short or easy books because you know you'll get through them quickly and they'll pad your total. Competitive reading may sound silly, but on the Internet there is always someone to compare yourself to, especially if you admire them. Certainly one of the reasons my reading list is shorter this year is because I have partially changed jobs and thus have much less of a commute during which to read. Another big reason is because of <a href="http://pansneedles.com/2013/01/01/the-year-in-knitting/" target="_blank">all the knitting I did</a> (that, at least in part, explains the audiobooks). I also joined a couple of book clubs, and experience I'm really enjoying because they push me to read outside my comfort zone. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Here's what my reading looks like, by the numbers:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Novels: 27</span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Non-fiction: 7</span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Short-fiction: 6</span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Comic: 1</span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Female author: 28 (two novels by Miriam Toews)</span>
<span style="font-size: small;">Male author: 12</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">I had a great year for short-fiction and non-fiction, and I can remember plot details about every novel I read, as well as how I felt about them, which is pretty great. Overall, I'm happy with my reading, and that I let myself linger with books I loved rather than trying to race through them on some self-imposed deadline. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">2012 was, for me, a great year for reading. I've been debating whether to do a best-of list, and I think instead I'll just make a list of the books that still stand out as memorable and recommendable now that I have the whole list in front of me (it's easy to be enthusiastic while reading or just after finishing, only to have the book recede after some time has passed). In no particular order, here are the books I read this year that I want to reread (or want you to read, so we can talk about them):</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Antagonist</i> by Lynn Coady (I stil think about Rank sometimes and wonder how he's doing.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Irma Voth</i> by Miriam Toews (She needs to write something else soon!)<br />
<i>Touch</i> by Alexi Zentner (I still get a little breathless when I think about this story.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Seen Reading</i> by Julie Wilson (So inventive and fun – as a TTC rider/reader, this is omnipresent.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Above All Things</i> by Tanis Rideout (Mountaineering is fascinating, and the writing is so excellent.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Blue Book</i> by A.L. Kennedy (More than any other book this year, this one threw my heart around.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Gone Girl </i>by Gillian Flynn (It pissed me off and you should probably read it.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>My Life in France</i> by Julia Child (One day, I will live in France again.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Leaving the Atocha Station</i> by Ben Lerner (The writing is so, so beautiful and frustrating and real.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">What were your top reads of 2012?</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-12463220422922441432012-12-14T13:20:00.001-05:002012-12-14T13:24:10.596-05:00Q&A with Melissa Leong/Wynne Channing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;">It has been radio silence over here for a couple of weeks and I'm sorry about that. December has been a little nuts – <a href="http://pansneedles.com/tag/christmas/" target="_blank">I'm knitting all my Christmas gifts</a> (if you're a family member, do not click that link) – and although I've been reading a tonne, I haven't had any time to write about it. I am super looking forward to lots of book writing (that is, writing about books) in the New Year, but in the meantime, how about we turn things around a little.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">I met Melissa Leong when we sat two desks away from each other in the <i>National Post</i> Arts & Life section a year and a half ago. We've both since moved (she to Financial Post and I to news), but let me tell you, she's an excellent writer. When I heard that she'd self-published a YA novel, I was both impressed and not surprised – Melissa always comes across as one of those amazingly energetic people, and that she'd want to branch out from journalism seemed natural. Anyway, <i>What Kills Me</i> was released earlier this year (under the pseudonym Wynne Channing) and tells the story of a 17-year-old exchange student who accidentally becomes a vampire and then has to fight for her life when the vampires think she is embodiment of an ancient prophecy and destined to kill them all. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">If you're thinking that doesn't sound like normal Books Under Skin fodder, well, you're right, but I always have time for good writing, and something different. To that end, Melissa and I did a little Q&A about her book, the process of self publishing, and how she found time to write a novel while also working full time. If you have a vampier fan on your Christmas list (and these days, who doesn't), I can't recommend <i>What Kills Me</i> highly enough – not only will you be buying a well-written, fun novel, but you'll be supporting a great author. How can you go wrong?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Q</b> There are a lot of vampire novels out there and it would be easy to think the market was saturated – what prompted you to write your novel? Did you think there was something lacking in the genre (are vampires even a genre)? <br /><b>A</b> I was told that that the market was saturated with vamps; but this was the story that lived in my head and the story that I wanted to tell. I didn’t write it in response to Twilight or to push new boundaries. I wrote the novel as if there was no comparison.</span>
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Q</b> Okay, that was three questions in one, sorry. During the day, you work as a reporter – did you find it hard to slip off that writing style for fiction?<br /><b>A</b> No worries. I’m a reporter. I love questions. I don’t find it hard to put my author hat on. Storytelling is storytelling. But being a young adult author is starting to affect my day job: I talk a lot with my fans via Twitter, Facebook, and emoticons and exclamation marks are creeping into my work emails. (Hi Mr. Cabinet Minister, I’d LOVE to interview you about the budget :-P TTYL!)<br /><br /><b>Q</b> As a full-time reporter and a dance instructor, when did you find time to write a novel? <br />
<b>A</b> I have no clue. Seriously. No clue. Someone needs to tell me how I did this so I can do it again and finish the sequel. I think I mostly kept the hours of a, uh, vampire and wrote in the middle of the night.<br />
<br />
<b>Q</b> In your <a href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/12/07/how-and-why-i-self-published/" target="_blank"><i>National Post</i> article about self-publishing</a>, you give a really good primer of sorts on what to think about then going that route. What surprised you most about the process? <br />
<b>A</b> did not anticipate two things: Promoting your novel is a full-time job (see earlier comment about vampire hours). Second, indie authors are freakishly friendly. They rally around you with advice and support. I’ve never experienced anything like it. And I’ve totally drank the juice — I’ve got the “welcome” sign on my chest for newbies and I’m happy to lend a hand.<br />
<br />
<b>Q</b> You mention in the article that you have a second novel as well. Now that you know the ropes, do you think you'll continue to self-publish? <br />
<b>A</b> Right now, I enjoy being an indie author. You have total control of everything: price, timelines, the cover, etc. And I’m really excited to put out the sequel next year. Now that I know what I’m doing, the entire journey will be that much more awesome.<br />
<br />
<b>Q</b> Speaking of second novels, all the reviews I've read about <i>What Kills Me</i> end with the reviewers' eagerness for book two. Is this destined to become a series? <br />
<b>A</b> I wrote it as a three-part series. The reason for the delay is that I wanted to gauge reader reaction before I continued with Book Two. You never know what people will like, right?<br />
<br />
<b>Q</b> Officially, <i>What Kills Me</i> is by Wynne Channing, which is obviously not your name. I always thought pen names were to distance an author from a novel, but you've shown no signs of that. Why did you choose to use one? <br /><b>A</b> Since I was writing about my experience for the <i>National Post</i>, I wanted to choose a neutral name, one that had no attachment to my journalist self. I wanted to see if I could make a run at this publishing thing all on my own. And my journalist self might want to write non-fiction one day so this leaves all doors open.<br />
<br />
<b>Q</b> Not that I think of you as especially scandalous, but has engaging with a younger, YA audience made you think differently about the way you present yourself in public (social media, and whatnot)? <br />
<b>A</b> I’m not scandalous but I swear. A lot. I work in a newsroom. We use profanity as much as we use punctuation. That, I’ve had to cut down on via Facebook and Twitter. Not that I think the YA crowd can’t handle it, it’s just not nice.<br />
<br />
<b>Q</b> That age group tends to be very good at fandom – do you hear from your readers? <br />
<b>A</b> Several times a week! It’s my favourite thing in the universe: fan mail. And it comes so readily through social media.<br />
<br />
<b>Q</b> Where can people find your book? I know <i>What Kills Me</i> is available for the Kindle, but if you don't have an ereader, is there a way to buy hardcopies? <br />
<b>A</b> Yes! It comes in digital form, and in paperback for traditionalists.</span><br />
<br />
<a href="http://wynnechanning.com/" target="_blank">Click here </a>for more about <i>What Kills Me.</i>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com82tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-75850442507344566062012-11-30T14:41:00.000-05:002012-12-14T13:20:32.643-05:00The Blondes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">As far as I can remember, I've never dyed my hair. It's possible I used one of the 12-wash dyes in the summer once, but I have no real memory of doing so. This is less a style thing than a laziness thing, since once you start dyeing your hair you kind of have to keep going, and because I'm one of those people who only gets two or three haircuts a year, it just wouldn't work out. How is any of this relevant to a book blog? Well, after reading Emily Schultz's novel <i>The Blondes</i>, I haven't been able to stop thinking about hair colour and natural vs. synthetic colours, and it has made me think more deeply than I would have thought possible about my own dyeing choices.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Off the top, I should say this isn't a non-fiction book about the history of hair colour or anything like that. It's a novel, and although it has various plot lines, the one relating to the title is that of an epidemic affecting only girls and women with blonde hair – either dyed or natural. This "disease" – dubbed Blonde Fury because it drives these blonde women to attack others – spreads like wildfire around the world, forcing airports into lockdown and governments into creating "containment areas." The pandemic, though, is only half of the story, which is narrated by Hazel Hayes, who has just discovered she's pregnant.</span><br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">Hazel, a natural redhead who dyes her hair brown, is doing her PhD in cultural studies at the University of Toronto. The novel starts with Hazel alone in an isolated cabine telling her unborn child – "You: strange seven pounds of other" – the story of the last seven months. The cottage belongs to Hazel's thesis advisor (also the father of her child) and his wife Grace, who has recently vacated the premises for unknown reasons. So Hazel is alone, and in an effort to keep herself occupied and not panic, she starts explaining things to the baby. She was in New York, on a research grant, when she found out she was pregnant. A few days later, she was in a subway station when she witnessed a blonde woman attack a 17-year-old girl, throwing her onto the subway tracks and then jumping down after her. The Blonde Fury wasn't a thing yet, so it was viewed as a bizarre and unsettlingly random act of violence. Then more attacks started to crop up, and soon women with blonde or light-coloured hair were encouraged to either dye it dark or shave it off. Hospitals and clinics were in chaos, and when Hazel tried to go to a women's clinic to have an abortion, she found it closed – there had been an attack, and it was too risky to reopen.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Hazel is a little neurotic, and with nothing to do in the cottage but think and talk to herself, she covers a lot of ground: her affair with Karl Mann, her married thesis advisor; her relationship with her mother, a hairdresser in Windsor, On.; her desire not to be pregnant; the awkwardness of sharing a one-room cottage with her lover's wife; her detention in a Canadian "containment" facility for women at risk for the disease (red hair is borderline); various theories about the genesis of the blonde pandemic; and more. Her voice is so real, and the craziness of her story so compelling and believable, that it is almost impossible not to imagine yourself in her place. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> <i>The Blondes</i> came out in the summer, and it would have been a great vacation read. As it was, I read it recently, when the outside weather almost matched the dark, cold winter of the novel's present. As an added bonus, I had the flu, which matched up frighteningly closely to the symptoms of the Blonde Fury (I was not filled with rage, though, so I think I'm safe). Although it might sound dark and/or overly serious, <i>The Blondes</i> is a really fun, fast-paced read that covers a lot of ground about culture, public policy, government reactions, and various kinds of fear. It's the perfect mix of thoughtful depth and pulpy fun, and I loved it.</span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: small;">The Blondes</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Emily Schultz</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">first published in 2012 (cover image from DoubleDay Canada edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-56385404750762130592012-11-16T13:52:00.001-05:002012-11-30T14:41:31.878-05:00Ender's Game<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">It will shock approximately no one when I say that I am a public reader. That is, I do most of my reading in public, especially during my work commute, although I also happily read in cafés, on the street corner, and while waiting in line. I read everywhere, and generally, no one notices. Or, at least no one obviously notices. I do see people peaking at my book cover from time to time, but only very, very rarely does anyone ask me about my book, or try to use it to start a conversation. (This is where I should add that every single time someone has asked me about my book, it has been a man. I'm not saying they're trying to pick-up, but it does seem fishy.) Anyway, all of this is to say that I rarely get interrupted when reading in public; that is, until I started Orson Scott Card's <i>Ender's Game</i>. Apparently it's a sort of seminal text for men of a certain age, because in one week I had at least three men tell me what a good book I was reading. One guy didn't even stop: I was standing on the subway platform and, somehow he caught the cover and timed his "that book is awesome" comment for just when he was walking down. It wasn't a conversation starter, it was a commendation, and while it was surprising, it was kind of nice. Who doesn't like a little positive reinforcement every now and then, after all?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Anyway, enough of that. The novel, written in 1985 but set well into the future, presents an Earth that has barely survived two massive wars with the extra-terrestrial buggers and is on the verge of a third. It is the fear of this third war that has led them to start training children – some as young as five or six – to be soldiers. These potentials are connected to a monitor (and by connected, I mean it's attached to their brain stem and thus records both what they see and what they think and feel) so the adults in command can determine whether the child has potential. The book opens with Ender Wiggin, age 6, having his monitor removed. He assumes this means he was a failure and is simultaneously pleased – it means his older brother Peter (also a failure) might stop bullying him – and disheartened (he is a Third, the third child born to his family despite the two-child policy, and the only reason his birth was permitted was because of his brother and sister's potential). Of course, this wouldn't be much of a novel if Ender wasn't recruited, so when it turns out that the military merely removed his monitor to then see how he would handle himself when no one was watching, it all makes sense. Ender is recruited and taken to military school in space.</span><br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">The school is a pretty brutal place, all things considered. To start with, Ender is small, and because he's the military's last hope (not that he knows that), they're especially hard on him. He's kept pretty isolated from his peers, worked harder than everyone else, promoted crazy-early, and despite all that, he thrives. It isn't easy, of course, Ender's mostly a natural, but he also puts in a lot of extra hours and, for the most part, is more than happy to help others learn his skills. Perhaps his most important talent is being able to think beyond the familiar. This becomes especially handy when playing war games in the anti-gravity room. While most of Ender's peers are stuck thinking of everything as up or down, and are thus easily disoriented, Ender quickly realizes that in zero-gravity, you decide where up and down are, which frees his perspective to craft new and innovative battle strategies. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">His rise to prominence is relatively quick, but it certainly isn't easy. More than one student would like to see Ender killed for his success, and although Ender is a soldier, he's also a little boy, and not having friends puts a real strain on his mental health. Apart from short snippets and a couple of chapters on Earth (involving the exploits of Ender's brother and sister), we spend the novel seeing everything from his perspective.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">I don't read a ton of science fiction, but when I do, this is they style I like. For one thing (and this may just be me), I really appreciated that all the names were pronounceable (even Ender is just a nickname – his real name is Andrew). Additionally, the Earth is still recognizable. The novel is set in the future, so there are changes (and especially so from 1985), but a population boom seems not unreasonable. Similarly, Scott Card seems to have extrapolated from the state of world politics in '80s to create the world of his novel, specifically that Europe and much of North Africa are now under the Warsaw Pact and North America is unified under an American Hegemony. It's the Cold War gone large, and the only thing keeping the peace on Earth is that both sides have united to fight the buggers, a common enemy. Thus, ending the bugger war will mean chaos and war breaking out on Earth. It's a precarious situation, and a really interesting one to watch play out in the background of Ender's training, which fulfills the more gadget/futurey side of the story.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Ludwik has been telling me to read <i>Ender's Game</i> for years, and I will admit that I put it off thinking it was one of those books you have to read by a certain age in order for it to be awesome. While that may be true for some people, I have to say that it was highly entertaining, and certainly hooked me after only a few pages. Ender is a great character, and the future he inhabits is so fully realized that you'll suspend your disbelief without even realizing it. I now totally understand why those guys were so enthusiastic about the book that they would stop to tell me so, and even if that isn't quite the approach I'll take in the future, I will say that if you're on the fence about it (there's supposedly an <i>Ender's Game</i> movie forthcoming), I'd say go for it. It's a fun and interesting read, and who couldn't use that?</span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: small;">Ender's Game</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Orson Scott Card</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">first published in 1985 (cover image shown from TOR edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-50996997360607796462012-11-09T12:06:00.001-05:002012-11-16T13:58:21.194-05:00The Essential Tom Marshall<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Kingston, Ontario, has got to be one of my favourite cities in Canada. For one, it's beautiful – think old limestone buildings covered with ivy overlooking the lake – and for another, it's where I did my undergrad, so I had four years to properly explore and get to know it. I even spent a summer there, something many undergrads never do in their university town, and I have to say, it just got better when the population dipped and the temperature soared. Above all, maybe, Kingston had a lively and varied arts scene, with both bands and authors constantly visiting (and, also making it there home). In all this richness, then, it is perhaps understandable that some of its artists would be forgotten; or, if not forgotten, at least not actively remembered. Such is the case with the poet Tom Marshall, who also first went to Kingston to attend Queen's, and ended up making his life there. Although I studied English at Queen's and was active in the creative writing community there, I don't recall ever hearing of him, which is quite surprising since, if the new collection <i>The Essential Tom Marshall</i> is to be taken as representative, he wrote a great deal about the city.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The poems in the collection were chosen by authors David Helwig and Michael Ondaatje, friends of the late Tom Marshall, and while it isn't clear whether the poems are presented chronologically, there is a cadence to their progression as Marshall's tone rises and falls. It is a slim collection, though, and as a result cannot feature many of of Marshall's longer poems – although a few are included. Reading through it, then, you almost feel you are reading many verses of a larger work, which allows the poems to both sit by themselves and slot into one another as images and emotions are repeated. </span><br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">Although many of the poems are about Kingston, offering anyone familiar with the city a twinge of recognition at certain landmarks – and especially the parks, which haven't changed much since Marshall's time there – some of his travel poems are also included, my favourite of which is the short excerpt "<i>from</i> Summer of '77." It's just two stanzas, subtitled July 1, 1977, about a visit to Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia. I haven't been there since I was a kid, but his description of the rocks and the waves struck me as both wholly familiar and unique: "The huge / textured rocks! Bold stones! Great speckled eggs or / bones of of female earth!" The staccato description seems to fall into the rhythm of the waves crashing against the shore, and the way the wind buffets around so your sentences come out only as sharp snatches. It's vivid and immediate, and there are elements of that in many of Marshall's poems.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The collection is published by The Porcupine's Quill, a small publisher in rural Ontario that operates its own press to print the books and then sews up the bindings on a 1905 book sewing machine. The result is a physical book whose care and aesthetics mirror the quality of the work it holds. <i>The Essential Tom Marshall</i> is thus a lovely book both in terms of its content and its appearance, making it quite a pleasure to read, and the kind of book you'll pull off your shelf again and again.</span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: small;">The Essential Tom Marshall</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">selected by David Helwig and Michael Ondaatje</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">first published in 2012 (cover image shown from Porcupine's Quill edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-51383206839471742402012-11-02T10:17:00.002-04:002012-11-02T10:18:24.433-04:00The Age of Miracles<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Sometimes the time at which a book makes its way to the top of my to-read pile is downright eerie. This week, for instance, during the "Frankenstorm" that was Hurricane Sandy – possibly the worst natural disaster to hit New York City in the last century – I was reading <i>The Age of Miracles</i> by Karen Thompson Walker. I would have thoroughly enjoyed this book even if I hadn't been reading it with the backdrop of a hurricane and days and days and days of rain, but all of that gave the novel a kind of spooky feeling, as if I'd stumbled upon some kind of weird prophecy. I know it isn't really possible for a book to decide when it should be read, but I've had <i>The Age of Miracles</i> on my shelf for four months, so picking it up now makes me wonder a little.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Anyway. Thompson Walker's novel is set in more or less present-day California, where everything is just as it is now, except that the Earth's rotation has started to slow down. At the beginning of this slowing, days get longer by a half hour or forty-five minutes, and people start stocking up on canned food. When the news is broadcast for the first time, the narrator, 11-year-old Julia, runs outside to see if she anything looks different, but everything is just the same. Soon, though, the slowing becomes more noticeable. The days and nights start to stretch out until the clocks cease to make sense – 3 a.m. falls in the middle of the afternoon, noon in the morning, etc. The start time for school is announced each morning – that is, after sunrise – and a lot of kids stop showing up. Then birds start getting sick and falling dead from the sky.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The slowing, it seems, has started to affect the magnetic field, causing what is dubbed gravity sickness in people, and wreaking havoc with birds' navigation. In barely a month, there are almost no birds left in Julia's California town, and she's heard that it's like that elsewhere too. The longer days and change in gravity have also served to play with the tides, which are larger and fuller than ever. People have been forced to abandon their seaside mansions, which are now covered at every high tide.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Eventually, the days and nights grow to such exaggerated lengths that the government announces the country is going back to clock time. The rise and set of the sun will no longer have any bearing on what is day or night, they decide, on starting on a Sunday, the U.S. and countries all over the world, return to the clock. Floodlights are set up around Julia's school to when the students have to attend during dark days; quilts are hung over windows to block the sun on white nights, and soon the light and dark periods stretch to 48 hours each. Crops start to die, trees whither, and people begin to invest in green houses; Julia's mother's emergency stash of non-perishables spreads to the guest room.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As if all this weren't enough to try and deal with, Julia is in Grade 6, at that liminal age between being a kid and being something more grownup. Julia's best friend Hannah is sleeping over when the slowing is announced, and after she goes home that morning Julia doesn't see her again for months. Hannah's family is Mormon, so they return to Utah to prepare for the end of the world. When the rapture doesn't happen, Hannah comes back, but she has a new best friend now, leaving Julia more alone that ever. Julia's mother is sick – with gravity sickness – and as the slowing continues, Julia feels increasingly isolated. Until one day, when Seth Moreno, a boy from two streets over who Julia has been watching, invites her to the beach after school. A pod of whales has beach itself, and he wants to go and see and try to help. Although it doesn't happen right away, Julia and Seth become friends, best friends, half in love the way you only can be at 12 years old.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Thompson Walker so completely captures what it's like to be in Grade 6 – strangely aware of yourself and insecure and unsure and defiant – that even if you haven't thought about that time in years, Julia pulls you back there. It's this hyper-realistic experience that grounds the novel, making the other half of it seem not only plausible but frighteningly possible. This gives the title a dual significance, as <i>The Age of Miracles</i> is both the time of the Earth's slowing and puberty, when your body and emotions and everything seems to change both incrementally and overnight. It almost makes you wonder if the slowing is just a metaphor for what Julia is going through personally, but, of course, that it isn't makes the novel all the more fascinating. It is, I think, one of the most inventive novels I've read this year, and I can't imagine that you wouldn't enjoy it as much as I did.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">The Age of Miracles</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Karen Thompson Walker</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2012 (cover image shown from Doubleday Canada edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-30840380552746855822012-10-29T10:07:00.000-04:002012-11-02T09:35:58.027-04:00Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies on tour!<div>
It has been quite a while since I posted on a Monday, but when Todd from <a href="http://www.theworkhorsery.ca/TheWorkhorsery/home.php">The Workhorsery</a> e-mailed me about a Halloween blog tour he was planning, I couldn't say no. <i>Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies</i> by Victoria Dunn is The Workhorsery's third book and, while this is unrelated to the blog tour, given the <a href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/10/22/douglas-mcintyre-files-for-bankruptcy-protection/">recent</a> <a href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/10/29/penguin-random-house-to-merge-to-create-worlds-largest-consumer-book-publisher/">craziness</a> in publishing it is really awesome to see an independent continuing to publishing interesting and fun Canadian work. The Workhorsery released a book trailer for <i>Alice</i> four months ago. It was the first book trailer I ever watched right the way through and then rewatched immediately. If you haven't seen it, it's posted below. </div>
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So, with all of that in the background, when Todd asked me what I was interested in doing for my stop of the tour (today is Day 1) I knew I wanted to talk about the trailer. The impetus for promotion is increasingly placed on authors as publishing houses lose those resources (both staff and money) and I wanted to explore that a little. I was initially just going to post the e-mail Q&A I did with Victoria Higgins and Meghan Dunn (collectively known as Victoria Dunn), but they got into it even before my questions started, so I've included that part of the e-mail too.</div>
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Finally, before the questions start and the book trailer rolls (you really should watch it – the song will be stuck in your head all day), one last bit of business. The Workhorsery is holding a blog tour contest. Whoever comes up with the best answer to the question the best answer to the question "should zombies have human rights?" will receive a special Workhorsery prize pack, which will include: <br />
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<li>autographed copies of all three of our novels (Victoria Dunn's<i> Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies</i>; Derek Winkler's <i>Pitouie</i>; and Jocelyne Allen's <i>You and the Pirates</i>)!</li>
<li>a genuine zombie crotchet doll, possibly from the book trailer itself, definitely specially-crafted by the author(s) herself/themselves! </li>
<li>some other secret stuff related to the novel that we're keeping top secret!</li>
<li>a hand-made, super-limited addition <i>Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies</i> Workhorsery tote bag to carry it all in!</li>
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To win, e-mail your answer to read@theworkhorsery.ca or tweet them @theworkhorsery before Nov. 7.</div>
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Alright, let the blog tour begin!<br />
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(E-mail correspondence below. I'm in black, Victoria Dunn is in purple.)<br />
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First, I’m not sure if you would rather answer as Victoria Dunn or as Victoria and Meghan, so I’ll let you choose.<br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">We answered as Victoria Dunn, our evil hive mind, using the royal we. But we’re not stuck up, honest.</span> <br />
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But, can you let me know? If you choose to answer as yourselves (or, individually, as the case may be) can you indicate who is saying what? That way, if you squabble about an answer, we can all be in on it.<br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">Victoria Dunn frequently argues with herself. Although rarely about anything pertaining to writing. The most recent argument was whether the cups suit in our zombie tarot deck represents sex, or if zombies and sex are two great tastes that do not taste great together. However, we do agree that tasting zombies is not generally a good idea.<br />Some background for your readers: <i>Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies</i> began life as an entry in the 2009 International 3-Day Novel Contest, a Vancouver based contest held every Labour Day weekend. We won 3rd place in that competition, and we’ve been doing all of our first drafts this way ever since. We’re both big fans of the creative rush of writing tens of thousands of words all at once, and the inevitable sleep-deprivation leads to some inspired – and occasionally insane – plot twists. </span><br />
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1. When you were writing/had just finished <i>Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies</i>, did you give any thought to how you might promote it? Did you know that might be part of your job, as authors? <br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">We were working on the promotion before the book was even done. Victoria works at a bookstore, so we understand how important it is to make sure the book gets into people’s hot little hands. We were stalking Trevor Strong of the Arrogant Worms before we even had a publishing contract, having discovered that he writes songs to order (after all, every novel needs its own theme song…). So, at our first meeting with our publisher, the Workhorsery, we were able to propose some ideas for promoting the novel including the book trailer and zombie beauty contests etc. </span><br />
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2. Whose idea was the book trailer? Had you seen any previously?<br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">The problem with having an evil hive mind is that it’s impossible to figure out which ideas belong to which person. Or even who wrote what originally! Certainly the book trailer was something we agreed on from very early on, sometime between the midnight deadline of the 3-Day Novel contest and beginning the second draft a few months later. Which was, incidentally, when we noticed that in the first draft our airplane had crashed upside down, but had magically righted itself by the end of the chapter. It was several more months before we noticed that we’d accidentally handed a suicidal character a fully loaded gun. You’d almost think it had only been written in three days… </span><br />
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3. As compound authors, you’re obviously okay with collaboration, but were you ever worried about letting someone else handle to creative process when it came to the video?<br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">We trusted Trevor completely, especially as neither of us has any musical ability at all. We still suffer flashbacks to traumatic middle school music classes. One of our music teachers was a Hungarian who’d fled the Soviets and liked to make students cry– this is when young Victoria became a Communist sympathizer. <br />The rest of the video was entirely our creation. In fact, it was the first video we’d ever made! Can you tell? (The constantly shifting light levels might be a clue.) </span><br />
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4. Where was it filmed?<br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">On the floor in the room at the front of Meghan’s house that really doesn’t have a name. She has fantasies that someday it will be a library with built in shelves and a sexy rolling ladder. Meghan believes in dreaming big! </span><br />
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5. The very, very catchy song was written and sung by Trevor Strong – did you consult? Were you ever worried he wouldn’t “get” your book?<br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">It’s quite the earworm, isn’t it? <br />When we hired Trevor, he gave us the option of telling him as much or as little about the book as we wanted. Some people who have hired him have apparently only shared the title of the book, but that seemed counterproductive to us. We wanted more than “Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies is a book! Please buy it!” on an endless loop. So we gave him characters and the basic plot, and confessed our ambitions for becoming fabulously successful authors and selling the movie rights. He ran with it, and we were delighted with the result. </span><br />
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6. Whose idea was it to crochet the characters? <br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">Meghan was already making little TV characters out of crochet, such as tiny crocheted Starsky and Hutch facing off against little crocheted Satanists. Since we couldn’t afford to pay actors, it wasn’t a stretch to think that we might as well make them. </span><br />
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7. I see you’ve made the zombie pattern available on your website – are you hoping to inspire some <i>Call Me Maybe</i>-esque spin-offs? <br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">That’d be wonderful! We’re also completely cool with fan fiction, even the really smutty kind (especially the really smutty kind). We promise never to stalk our fans and issue cease-and-desist orders, unless they’re making money off of our book and won’t give us a cut! <br />We’re also encouraging our friends to come up with creative book covers, like the literary one on our website. One of our friends is currently working on a pulp 1950s magazine style cover. Can’t wait to see it! </span><br />
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8. With a story this fun, I feel like the sky is the limit when it comes to promotion. Besides the trailer and the blog tour, what do you have planned? <br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">We’ve got more ideas than we have time or energy to execute. But on Halloween night we’ll be doing zombie tarot card reading at Collected Works bookstore. We’ll also be attending the Small Press Book Fair, Fall Edition in November, and in December we’ll be teaching teenagers how to crochet their very own zombie Christmas ornaments at a local high school. <br />We really enjoy events like the Ottawa Geek Market and Toronto Word on the Street. We also visit bookstores, and have been known to pounce on complete strangers in the street and terrorize them into buying our book. </span><br />
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9. Both the book and the book trailer have been really well received. What do you think makes the zombie so appealing? <br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">Zombies are adorably tenacious. It doesn’t matter if they lose an arm, a leg or half their body, they never give up on their goals. They don’t get stressed out about failure, either. Despite the whole hunger for human flesh, zombies are never malicious. They don’t hate you. They’ll never judge you. They just want to get up close and personal, because they think you’re a tasty treat. And that’s really a compliment when you think about it. </span><br />
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10. Will you be dressing up for Halloween? <br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;">Thanks to the zombie novel, we’ve been hanging out at the local Punk Flea Markets and buying pretty dresses with skull and zombie prints. Also, we have a growing collection of zombie t-shirts. It’s amazing how often zombies are exactly the right fashion statement to make. <br />Zombie wear also works as a marketing tool, too! If someone asks about the t-shirt or the dress, it’s an opening to hand-sell the novel, or at least give them a bookmark.<br />Meghan’s considering handing bookmarks out with the Halloween candy this year. If she does, she’ll definitely give them with candy, not instead of candy, because she doesn’t want her house egged.</span><br />
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<i>Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies</i> is available from your local independent bookstore. PLUS, the tour continues tomorrow and Wednesday! Check out <a href="http://the-eyrea.blogspot.ca/">The Eyrea</a> on Tuesday and <a href="http://openbooktoronto.com/">Open Book Toronto</a> on Wednesday for more about Victoria Dunn, <i>Alice Hearts Welsh Zombies</i> an, well, zombies in general.</div>
Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-4449920595752066792012-10-25T17:51:00.002-04:002012-10-29T10:14:44.627-04:00Too Much Happiness<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">It's funny how certain books seem to just have a right time to be read. Often, these are books that you buy with the full intention of reading them immediately, and then for one reason or another, they sit on your shelf unread for years. This is not unusual with gifts – books that look interesting and suit your taste, but that weren't on your mental (or perhaps physical) to-read list, and so get slotted in and then put aside until their time comes. For a book purchased with excitement, though, it seems strange that you wouldn't open it right away. Nonetheless, that's what happened to my copy of Alice Munro's <i>Too Much Happiness</i>. I bought it the Christmas after it came out – soon enough that it's a hardcover, but late enough for it to have a cover line announcing its Man Booker win. I have meant to read it many times since then, but it wasn't until we decided to read it for CanLit Knit that I finally cracked the cover.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">In classic Munro style, the majority of the stories in the collection are set in southwestern Ontario, and while some are contemporary, many are set ten or twenty or thirty years ago. The collection opens with one of the more contemporary stories.<i> Dimensions</i> is the story of a young woman who, at the beginning of the story, has clearly survived some kind of trauma. She is visiting someone, or trying to, and she has a therapist she has talked to about it. She has cut her hair short and dyed it – very different than the way he liked it, whoever he is – and moved towns. She is quiet and fragile seeming. And slowly, Munro unfolds her story. Doree met Lloyd when she was 16 and he was much older and a nurse looking after her dying mother. They get married, she gets pregnant, and three kids later she's in her early 20s and living in a farm house, largely cut off from other mothers and people her age. Lloyd is controlling, although she doesn't see him that way, and their household swings from fights to uneasy peace. When Doree meets a fellow home-schooling mom, who has a van and can help her with the kids, she allows a tentative friendship to form and one night, after fighting with Lloyd, she goes to Maggie's house to wait it out. He calls, Maggie tells him Doree will stay the night, and in the morning, Maggie drives her home and Lloyd is sitting on the front step. Inside, Doree's children are lying dead. </span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">That isn't where the story ends, but it is nonetheless an appalling, devastating, and extremely gutsy way to open a collection of short stories, but Alice Munro isn't one to shy away from difficult subjects. Certainly, not all of her stories are quite so shocking, but each carries a unique kind of one-two punch that hits you with beauty and its opposite. And although each story has a classic kind of twist, the structure never becomes formulaic or routine, because in Munro's hands, each story becomes its own little world, so certain of its details that you wonder how it isn't true.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The collection really shines when Munro is telling small stories. My favourite story in the collection was <i>Wood</i>, about a man (which in itself in unusual for Munro) who ears a living restoring and repairing furniture, but who has discovered his passion is going out into the bush to cut and collect firewood. In the choosing of the tree and the process of cutting it down and then chopping the lengths into pieces useful for burning, Roy has transformed a mundane chore into a kind of artistic process. Chopping wood, though, is also an escape from home, where his wife, once feisty and active, has turned quiet and distant. When he feels his hobby and passion is threatened, his anxiety leads him toa kind of hysteria and reckless action, which quickly lands him in trouble, though he manages his way out in the end. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Of all the stories in <i>Too Much Happiness</i>, it is the titular story (also the last, and more than twice as long as most of the others) that feels the most out of place. For one, it is set in Europe, in the 1800s, and, while it tells the story of woman at a kind of crossroads, unlike the characters in the other stories, Sophia was a real person. I hadn't yet read the story when we met for CanLit Knit, and although the others said I shouldn't bother, I went ahead and read it anyway (I've been waiting around to read this book too long to not finish it). It is very different, than all the preceding stories, and if you're not expecting it, it would be quite jarring. As it was, Munro hooked me in, and I enjoyed it right up until the end, which was abrupt. It was an interesting experiment, and although I think I prefer Munro when she's inventing her characters and can thus take them where she pleases, I wouldn't avoid her historical fiction in the future, either. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">To be honest, I'd have a hard time avoiding any Alice Munro in the future, in part because she is prolific and everywhere, but mostly because every time I read one of her stories I can't get it out of my head. She is so good at pulling you into the centre of an emotion – whether joy, sadness, fear, or whatever – that her stories leave the same kind of signature in your mind as events that you experience firsthand. It's astonishing, really, and it makes me wonder how exhausting all this must be for her. At any rate, I hope she doesn't tire of it anytime soon.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">Too Much Happiness</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Alice Munro</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2009 (cover image shown from McClelland & Stewart edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-54266794288377881282012-10-11T18:47:00.000-04:002012-10-25T18:06:58.910-04:00Mister Roger and Me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Last year, my friend Wendy and I went to the New Yorker Festival. The first event we saw was a panel discussion with the <i>New Yorker</i>'s books editor and Jhumpa Lahiri, Geoffrey Eugenides, and Nicole Krauss, about what it meant to be a writer's writer. While the entire discussion was really interesting, one of the things I remember most was Jhumpa Lahiri talking about the power of the first novel. It is, she said, a book you write only for yourself, often for years, sometimes without anyone else knowing, and that kind of hard work and lack of outside pressure can make for a kind of purity. She went on to say that writer's writers were authors who were able to get back to the mindset of writing only for themselves, but I have to say that her idea that there is something pure about a debut novel (as opposed to tortured and agonized over, I suppose) has changed the way I read first novels. When I picked up Marie-Renée Lavoie's <i>Mister Roger and Me</i>, translated by Wayne Grady, I didn't realize it was her debut, but knowing that now makes me think Lahiri was really on to something.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Mister Roger and Me</i> is set in Montreal in the early 1980s, and is the story of Hélène – although she would prefer you call her Joe – and her family and their neighbourhood. The story is told by the grown up Hélène (who is okay with being called that), and although there are a few times when she steps out of the timeline to reveal a detail about what happens in the future, the novel is a mostly linear account of her childhood, between the ages of 8 and 11. To begin with, I'll explain the name. Hélène is obsessed with a TV show on the Family Channel that features a young woman who, disguised as a man named Oscar, serves as one of Marie Antoinette's guards. For Hélène, Oscar is the absolute role model, and exactly the kind of man/woman she would like to be: brave, strong, in disguise. To begin her transition to an Oscar-type character, Hélène convinces people to call her Joe. She is quite disappointed by the lack of suffering and hardship in her life, but she does notice that her mom doesn't always have the money to purchase the necessary dinner items, so she lies about her age and gets a paper route.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">Up at the crack of dawn, Joe makes her deliveries before breakfast, carrying the heavy sack up and down the streets of her slightly seedy neighbourhood. The bag is just heavy enough to cause her some requisite suffering, which pleases her, and during her route she can go over the latest Oscar storyline and imagine herself there too. Then, one morning, a man moves in next door. He's old, he's rude, and he spends much of the day sitting in an old chair in the driveway drinking beer. His name is Roger and Joe doesn't think he'll last long – that apartment, she says, is notorious for hosting tenants who leave in the middle of the night. Imagine her surprise, then, when, after her little sister drinks a bottle of Javex, her mom sends her to Roger for help. From then on, they have a truce, and a friendship, which is further cemented when Roger (who has been keeping an eye on her), saves her from being attacked during her paper route one morning.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The attack, and the attempted assault, shatter Joe's sense of security. She becomes so afraid that, after a week of delivering papers with her dad, she quits. Her next job is at the Bingo hall, and she plans three routes home, and then alternates them in no particular order. Just to be safe. Meanwhile, the French Revolution is gearing up and Oscar is discovering she may be on the wrong side.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The degree to which Joe fixates on Oscar – a detail not lost on her unforgiving older sister – grows as Oscar's life becomes more complicated. Not only is her role within the nobility and the royal guard looking less noble, but she is falling in love with her best friend, André, the only man under her command who knows she is really a woman. This complicates her stance as a man, and similarly causes Joe to feel the occasional wavering. As she grows older and her body starts to betray her, she is even more confused, especially as she looks as Oscar's sleek cartoon self, with nary a bump to give her away.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Joe's love of Oscar and ability to simultaneously believe she's real and also that, because she is fiction, she will have a happy ending is perfect, and Lavoie captures so well that sense that, as a child, your life is a kind of show or movie, in which everything is both real and pretend. In that time before we understand consequences in a real way, it's easy to get mixed up. Despite Joe's grown up responsibilities – working and helping out around the house – she's still a kid, and the maturity/childishness that Lavoie captures in Joe is so refreshing precisely because of how uncertain she is. It's rare to read a book centred around a child, who speaks like a child without being overly precocious or adult-ish. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Mister Roger and Me</i> was exactly what I wanted it to be when I picked it up. I wanted something entertaining and light, but not weightless, and Lavoie delivered. That I describe this novel as light is not meant to be a pejorative – maybe bright would be a better word – because truly, Joe is a character you enjoy spending time with. She is bold and young and desperate to experience the world. She is, in other words, a character who really lives on the page, and though she has ups and downs, her mood never tarnishes for long. She is a beautiful character, and one everyone should have in their lives.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">Mister Roger and Me</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Marie-Renée Lavoie, translated by Wayne Grady</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2010 (cover image shown from House of Anansi Press edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-79130614380505491362012-10-05T10:23:00.000-04:002012-10-11T18:47:44.848-04:00Gone Girl<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">I have a tricky relationship with crime and detective fiction. On the ond hand, I love a good mystery. It is, in a way, the ultimate escapist fiction because a good mystery can pull you entirely away from real life while you're reading it, and then keep you thinking about it long after you've put the book away. Intelligent detectives/sleuths, good writing, a little humour – yes, I enjoy that very much. Then, though, there's the more extreme end of the genre, where the reader bounces back and forth between the detective and the killer (it's almost always murder). Generally, the level of detail is extreme, the plot is that much more suspenseful, and the outcome that much more bloody. Not to say those books are bad – I've just lost the stomach for them. This was the general duality of crime thrillers I understood to exist, and then I picked up Gillian Flynn's <i>Gone Girl</i> for a book club and everything went pear-shaped.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Gone Girl</i> was not on my radar at all (despite it being a <i>New York Times</i> bestseller), but as a book club pick I was duty bound to pick it up. It begins on July 5, the day of Amy and Nick Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary. All is not well in the Dunne household, that much is clear, but it seems as though some kind of uneasy truce has been reached for the anniversary, and when Nick wakes up, Amy is in the kitchen making crepes. We are in Nick's head, in his first-person, when he goes downstairs for breakfast, which is how we know that the vision of his wife inspires dread. Later, when Nick is at work – he and his twin sister Go (short for Margo) own a bar called The Bar – he gets a call from an alcoholic neighbour saying his front door is wide open. Not thinking much of it, Nick drives home to check up on things and finds that the door inside is indeed open, that the living room furniture has been overturned, and that his wife is nowhere to be found. He calls the police.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">The novel is written in three parts, and in the first section, the story is told in chapters that alternate between Nick's first-person, present-day experience, and entries from Amy's diary. Through Amy's diary we hear about how they first met, the early days of their relationship, how it felt to have her life fictionalized and cleaned up in her parents bestselling series <i>Amazing Amy</i>. We also learn that both Amy and Nick used to be journalists in New York – Nick wrote for a magazine and Amy wrote personality quizzes for women's magazines – before the recession hit and they both lost their jobs. Then Nick's parents both got sick – his mother had cancer and his father got Alzheimer's – and Nick decided they should move back to Missouri to take care of his mom, something his sister had already done. Amy didn't like it, but she went along with it, and then once they were back their marriage just got worse: he was surly and unavailable, seeming to hate her, and she felt isolated and out of place. It's a sad story.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">And then, Part Two starts, and everything you thought you knew or understood or intuited about Nick and Amy turns out to be a lie. Well, maybe you got a couple of things right, but most of it is a lie. I won't tell you what happens, but I will say that when I read it, I actually said, out loud, to the book: "What the fuck." And I am not a sweary person. The novel goes from clear-cut to totally messed up in one page, and somehow Flynn keeps the story together so tightly you cannot stop reading.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">That's the thing about this novel: it's really, really well written. There are no shortcuts, there are no accidents – for example, when the police find Amy's diary, you know just how damning it is, because it's how you got to know her: you read it first. And the cops aren't morons. It's true that they probably don't have a ton of experience handling murder, or psychopaths, but nonetheless, their investigation is pretty clean. But of course, you only hear about it from the outside, because as the story flips back and forth between the perspectives of Nick and Amy (a structure that continues throughout the novel), their isn't space to inject the police. They would, in effect, break up the power struggle over whose narrative of the marriage is accurate, which would break the spell of the novel. Similarly, the portrayal of the media, and the discussions Nick has with his lawyer about how to play the media, are fascinating. It places <i>Gone Girl</i> into an utterly contemporary setting, where fingerprints are both physical and digital, and have the public believe in you is as important as having the police on your side. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I won't lie, I found <i>Gone Girl</i> to be an infuriating novel. The kind of malice it represents is frustrating and painful to read, and the realistically cynical portrayal of the U.S. justice system is distressing. But for all that, it is gripping. Even now, weeks after finishing, I can't stop thinking about it, wondering what could have been done to gain a different outcome. The trouble is, Flynn just doesn't leave any holes, which is proof that excellent writing can make for annoyingly compelling reading.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">Gone Girl</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Gillian Flynn</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2012 (cover image shown from Crown Publishing edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-19816571128846056282012-09-20T12:23:00.000-04:002012-10-05T10:24:29.882-04:00The Blue Book<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">When I was a kid, I went through a bit of a ghost phase. You know, played with Oiuja boards and read ghost stories and that kind of thing. Weirdly, though, I never really thought about death, it was more about the "life" that comes after that, if that makes sense. Death is a tricky thing for kids to understand, and while most people grow out of that – come to understand the completeness of death, to a degree at least – not everyone does. Or, they do, until someone close to them dies, and then they can't bring themselves to believe that person is gone. This, of course, is where the industry of mediums and psychics comes in, which is a business I am very skeptical of. It's also a practice I would never seek to read a novel about, but nonetheless, that is, in a way, what I got myself into when I picked up A. L. Kennedy's <i>The Blue Book</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Wait. Let me back up. <i>The Blue Book</i> isn't precisely about mediums, though that's part of it. The novel itself, though, starts with a line-up to get on an ocean liner. The novel itself is entirely contemporary, except for this quirk of people travelling from England to the U.S. by boat. It's a seven-day journey, and not a cruise since the final destination is New York and there are no little sight-seeing ventures on the way. It is, in a way, a very long ferry ride, and Elizabeth Barber and her boyfriend Derek are along for the ride. In line, Derek is a total grump and Elizabeth is approached by a youngish man who introduces himself as Arthur, call him Art – about her age, which in itself is notable since everyone else seems to be pushing 70 – who asks her to pick a number between one and 10. It's a magic trick of sorts, and although Elizabeth finds it tiresome, she plays along right through to the end, by which time the line is moving again anyway.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">Not long after they're aboard, they run into Art again, and he invites himself to dinner with them. He's strange and overly chatty, and when Derek goes to find the washroom, he immediately chastizes Elizabeth (who goes by Beth)'s taste in men. Beth and Derek go back to their cabin, where Derek succumbs to seasickness, leaving Beth free to wander the ship – and go find Art. It is hardly a total surprise that he should become a central character; however, Kennedy's deft handling of their apparently random meetins belie their long and fraught relationship of nearly 20 years. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Art is a medium. Or, rather, he works as one. He is highly skilled at reading people – something Beth is very much aware of during their interactions – and able to pull just the right strings to get people to open up. Not that he would try that with Beth, though, because she knows his game too well: for many years, she worked with him, as an assistant of sorts, travelling around the U.K. and selling the possibility of reconnecting with loved ones dead and gone. Behind the scenes, they were lovers. And then she couldn't handle it anymore, and she left. And now, here they are, stuck on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic for seven days, with Derek laid up with seasickness, and no real escape from one another.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I'll admit that the setting isn't new. But, oh, what Kennedy does with it. Much of the novel is written in second person (and in parts, the book actually addresses you directly), but Kennedy mixes it up by diving straight into Beth's thoughts and memories and sensations, taking you deep into her first-person experiences. It is incredibly intimate to be given that kind of access to a character as rich and real and complex as Beth, whose breath you can practically feel wafting through the pages. She is a real and vivid personality, and she is captivating. Art gets similar treatment, although we don't get to go so deeply into his here and now. There are sections, though, about his life and his work that blew me away with their emotional punch. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">It is rare to read a novel that feels entirely unique, but truly, <i>The Blue Book</i> is astonishing, and when I finished it, I quite literally gaped at it. I thought, you see, that by the end I had it all figured out, but instead, Kennedy slid in there again and in just a few pages, the entire tone of the story shifted and blocks that I didn't think of as out of place, slid into alignment. In a way, it's like looking into a kaleidoscope: you think the picture is whole and unchanging, and then with one twist new colours and shapes burst to life. Sometimes, when an author does this, you wonder what the point of the preceding 300 pages was – but Kennedy knows better, and like a good magician, the reveal simply enriches everything that came beforehand. It is stunning.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">All this rambling praise aside, <i>The Blue Book</i> probably isn't for everyone. I enjoy a challenge, and a novel that doesn't unfold in a linear or expected manner, and I especially enjoy an author who takes creative pleasure in his or her craft. I realize, though, that not everyone takes this approach to reading, and if you don't, <i>The Blue Book</i> might be a bit lost on you (which is not a judgment). However, for the adventurous and/or patient reader, I really can't recommend this highly enough. It took me days to catch my breath after I finished, and part of me just wants to pick it up and start it all over again.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">The Blue Book</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by A. L. Kennedy</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2011 (cover image shown from House of Anansi edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-6944930543947508482012-09-13T11:53:00.000-04:002012-09-13T11:53:13.685-04:00S.T.E.L.L.A.A. & Child Literacy<span style="font-size: small;">Not that long ago, I listened to a <a href="http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/">Radiolab podcast about colour</a> and it blew my mind. Now, I'll be the first to admit that their brand of science-y storytelling can often do that, but this was different. In the show (which I highly recommend you listen to), they talked not only about how colour works and where it comes from and that sort of thing – they also talked about the language of colour. Specifically, they spoke to a linguist Guy Deutscher about William Gladstone's reading of <i>The Odyssey</i> and how, even though that book takes place mostly in locations surrounded by water, the word "blue" is never used. Not once. The conclusion? That blue didn't exist for Homer. He didn't have a word for it, so he couldn't express it (he instead describes the sea as "wine-dark"). Colour words, it seems, develop in stages that are consistent across cultures, with blue being the last major one to come into play. Crazy, right?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I have been thinking about this a lot since I listened to that podcast, so when Carrie MacMillan contacted me about being part of the <a href="http://www.stellaa.org/blogtour2012.html">S.T.E.L.L.A.A. blog tour</a>, the two ideas meshed. S.T.E.L.L.A.A. works to eradicate poverty in Africa by providing literacy and educational tools to communities. It's a small thing, but it can have a huge impact. One of the ways S.T.E.L.L.A.A. provides these tools is through books donated in Canada and delivered to various African communities (part of their philosophy is to promote environmental responsibility, and reusing books is a great way to do that).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to grow up in a house filled with books. My parents were (and remain) readers, so from the word go I was surrounded by books. I was read to, I was encouraged to pick up books and flip through them (and later, of course, to read them myself). For me, books were a way to go somewhere else. I was never going to experience 19th century Prince Edward Island or the pioneer days in the U.S. for myself, but Lucy Maud Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilder could take me there. I was never going to take a boat past Patagonia, but thanks to Sue Scullard's <i>Miss Fanshawe and the Great Dragon Adventure</i> I not only got to see the mountains of Patagonia, but also to follow along as the heroine discovered dragons at the centre of the Earth. I still have never been to the Netherlands, but because I was read (many, many times) <i>The Cow Who Fell Into the Canal</i> by Phyllis Krazilovsky, I was given a way to imagine it anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">That's the point, really. Reading, and being read to, as a child feeds your imagination with a world of images and and situations and places that you might never experience first-hand, but can dream about nonetheless. As kids, my sisters and I weren't allowed to watch much TV, so our free time was spent reading and playing, and the vast majority of our games were fuelled by our incredibly active imaginations. Even though there were certainly times when, like Homer I suppose, we lacked the word for whatever it was we wanted to describe, we had the imaginations to come up with something else.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">In Orwell's <i>1984</i> there is the suggestion that if we lack the word for something, we can't think it; fostering active imaginations in children defeats that, because if you have an imagination, there is always a way to express yourself. (No word for blue? Fine then, I'll say it's "wine-dark.")</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As my contribution to the S.T.E.L.L.A.A. blog tour, I'd like to encourage you to donate your (gently) used books to their cause. Local libraries are certainly deserving as well, but even if you put every second or third book aside, it makes a difference. In addition to picture books and fiction, S.T.E.L.L.A.A. needs text books. Subjects such as math and basic science – in which not a lot really changes between editions – are greatly appreciated, and put to excellent use. Education and imagination are extraordinarily empowering, although it's easy to forget that living as we do in a society where both those things are so normalized.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Now, it's tempting to say that every book will be appreciated, but it's important to remember the context in which these books will be read. Cookbooks, books about home decor, etc. are of little use to communities looking to improve education. Yes, they can be tools for imagination, but they depict a reality so incredibly different that at best they are useless and at worst, insulting. S.T.E.L.L.A.A. also stays away from evangelical and political work, so please consider that when planning books to donate (an illustrated book of parables may have been a family favourite in your house, but may not jive with a community it's sent to, and respecting that is important). The full list of <a href="http://www.stellaa.org/donationguide.html">guidelines for donation</a> are here – for the most part, your books are welcomed with open arms.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">All the drop-off points are in Toronto; however, I asked about sending books by mail, and was given this address:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">STELLAA </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">9200 Weston Road</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">PO Box 92092</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Vaughan, ON L4H 3J3</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">If it's a big donation, though, they ask that you <a href="http://www.stellaa.org/Connect.html">get in touch</a> with them about sending it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Although I often have the opportunity (both through this blog in in my day to day life) to champion books and literature, it's rare that I get the chance to do more than simply recommend a book or encourage someone to shop at local independent bookstore. If you feel similarly, consider donating books S.T.E.L.L.A.A. – <a href="http://ayoungvoicereads.blogspot.ca/">Allegra Young</a> is planning to run a book drive in the New Year, so perhaps I'll talk to her about co-hosting. Either way, stay tuned!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Also, this is the second-last day of the blog tour, but if you'd like to read more about S.T.E.L.L.A.A., and learn more about the organization, please take a tour through all the stops:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Sept. 8: <a href="http://terryfallis.com/2012/09/08/kicking-off-the-stellaa-blog-tour/">Tour launches with Terry Fallis</a><br />Sept. 9: <a href="http://mypenmyvoice.com/2012/09/09/i-love-stellaa-and-i-dont-mean-artois/">Vanessa Grillone</a><br />Sept. 10: <a href="http://amckiereads.com/2012/09/10/stellaa-stellas-training-education-literacy-learning-and-academic-assistance/">Amy McKie</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Sept. 11: <a href="http://www.jennsbookshelves.com/2012/09/12/stella/">Jenn Lawrence</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Sept 12: <a href="http://ayoungvoicereads.blogspot.ca/2012/09/my-interview-with-stellaa-co-founder.html">Allegra Young</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Sept. 13: Here!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Sept. 14: <a href="http://www.beniceorleavethanks.com/">Mara Shapiro</a></span></div>
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Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-17189291114960907982012-08-30T17:11:00.000-04:002012-09-13T11:53:32.718-04:00One Good Hustle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Stories about con artists, hustlers, and small-time thieves are usually pretty happy go lucky. I remember picking up <i>Paper Moon</i> as a kid and being totally fascinated by the world of tricks and sleight of hand that saw a father and daughter travelling around the country to make their fortune. For the most part, their crimes seemed victimless, and you just knew everything was going to work out. If this is what you're expecting when you pick up Billie Livingston's new novel <i>One Good Hustle</i>, prepare yourself: her perspective on cons is totally different.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The novel is the story of Sammie, the 16-year-old daughter of hustlers, and takes place during the summer between Grades 11 and 12. Sammie is living at a friend's – almost more of an acquaintance at the beginning – because her mother is depressed, suicidal, and has substance abuse problems. When Sammie decided she couldn't take it anymore (her mother could kill herself, but she didn't want to be there to watch), she left. Of course, that doesn't mean she isn't thinking about her mother, or worrying about her, or wondering where her dad is (her parents split up years ago), or hoping he'll come and take her away with him.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">As the story unfolds, Sammie takes us through what happened. As readers, we're in her head, so when she remembers or mulls or rants, it's to herself, we're just there to hear it. The affect of this is a kind of unfiltered view of her life, and more specifically, her moods, personalities, and memories. Sammie has a lot going on – her childhood wasn't easy, and her parents aren't easy, and she's living with a family that has a totally different life than hers, and that isn't easy – and Livingston handles all of this with a great deal of style. This is not a lessons book, or some sort of teen case study, this is a kind of gritty realism that pops with humour and insight and confusion.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Part of this is because Livingston based aspects of this story on her own life. That isn't to take anything away from her writing (why it would, I'm not sure, but anyway), but I do think that experience gave her insight into the emotions of a girl who is, in a way, waking up to how her life is both totally messed up and complicated, and also not a disaster. For example, Jill (Sammie's friend) and her parents seem on the surface to be a perfect, functional family, but as Sammie spends more time with them she realizes some of their values are pretty strange – Jill's mom, for example, tells Sammie not to wear revealing clothes or else she might be the cause of someone else's rape, a comment Sammie finds preposterous.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>One Good Hustle</i> is a generous book and a quick read, and Livingston's writing is strong and clear and without pretense. For a kid raised by hustlers, Sammie is remarkably straightforward and well adjusted, which isn't to say she doesn't have issues (she is a teenager, after all), but rather that there is more to the novel than a simple coming of age story. It's complicated, I guess, but that suits this book just fine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>One Good Hustle</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Billie Livingston</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2012 (cover image shown from RandomHouse edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-78313086226761271472012-08-16T12:48:00.000-04:002012-08-30T17:11:41.116-04:00The Art of Fielding<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">It is no secret among those who know me that I love baseball movies. I love them. Not more than all other movies, but definitely more than all other sports movies (as a group, anyway, specifics can prove to be exceptions). I think some of that has to do with being a kid in the late-'80s and the '90s, when movies like <i>The Sandlot</i> (probably my favourite childhood movie), <i>Rookie of the Year</i>, and <i>Angels in the Outfield</i> all came out. When I got older and realized that all the great baseball classics started either Kevin Costner and Robert Redford, I was hooked. I mean, <i>Bull Durham</i>? <i>The Natural</i>? <i>Field of Dreams</i>? Do sport movies get better than that? Anyway, the reason I'm bringing any of this up on a book blog is because I only recently discovered baseball books, and, at least as far as Chad Harbach's <i>The Art of Fielding</i> is concerned, the appeal is much the same.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">What I have always loved about baseball movies, and now books, is that they are never really about baseball. Baseball is the catalyst, it happens regularly throughout the movie, but it isn't what the thing is really about. Or, maybe it is, but it manages to tie in so many other things that it doesn't matter how much about baseball you know in order to enjoy it. Everyone gets the baseball metaphor, and that's enough grounding in the sport to understand any action that takes place on the diamond. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a name='more'></a>To that end, in Harbach's novel, baseball is the point around which the plot pivots, but the climax is not the big game, and that is immensely satisfying. <i>The Art of Fielding</i> follows the story arcs of five characters (and is told using four of these characters' voices), and is set at Westish, a smallish mid-Western college that has adopted Herman Melville – who once gave a lecture there – as its symbolic hero. Thus, the baseball team (and the other teams, but who cares about them) are the Harpooners. Henry Skrimshander, Mike Schwartz, and Owen Dunne all play for the Harpooners baseball team, which at the beginning of the novel, hasn't had a successful season in about 100 years. Guert Affenlight is the college president, who, as a Westish student, actually discovered the transcript of Meville's speech that led to the rebranding of the school in his honour. His daughter Pella, recently returned, rounds out the top five. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As in all baseball stories, the surface plot is simple. Henry is baseball genius. He plays shortstop and basically nothing can get past him. He plays errorless game after errorless game, and he brings the team together to boot. He was found (and recruited) by Mike Schwartz, the team captain, who takes Henry under his wing, training him hard, bulking him up, and being an all around pal. Own is Henry's gay roommate who also plays on the team – he's a good batter, but otherwise spends his time reading in the dugout. Although the novel begins at the beginning – with Mike recruiting Henry, with baseball tryouts, etc. – it fast forwards through two intervening seasons in order to get to the meat. It's Mike's last year on the team, they're playing gorgeous baseball, and then Henry misses a throw (his first missed throw) and the ball rockets into the dugout where it hits Owen in the face, and Henry's world falls apart.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Based on that description (which I admit is quite baseball-heavy) it would seem that Henry is the centre of the novel. And, in a way he is. That being said, though, each of the three other perspectives we get (Mike, Affenlight, and Pella) are equally as well-rounded and filled out as his, with none falling into a subservient role. I don't know how Harbach manages to keep four such distinct and full stories running at the same time, but it's a marvel to read. Each character has their own concerns, their own life, their own landscape, and their own voice, and although you're constantly cycling through perspectives (each chapter is written from the point of view of a different character), you never lose track of what's happening with anyone, or what they're dealing with. The rhythm of the novel is extraordinary.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">One of my favourite things about <i>The Art of Fielding</i>, besides the baseball and the relationships and the writing, is the way Harbach portrays life at a small-ish self-contained university. I went to Queen's for my undergrad, and I was constantly reminded of that world while reading the novel. The way that buildings and lawns and bars are all communal, that success and failure in school can feel like your whole life, that you can go out to the one really nice restaurant in town and you're almost guaranteed to see one of your professors there – I love that. It's a different scene than going to a big city school, and Harbach captures it perfectly, without romanticizing or disparaging it. It's beautiful, really, and it made me miss Kingston in a way that I haven't since I left.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I think I could probably talk about <i>The Art of Fielding</i> for the rest of the month and not run out of things to say. And I'm sure that by the end I'd find something negative to say – even if it was just that I was ready to talk about something else – but right now I'm still basking in the glow of a really good story. There's something a little old fashioned about baseball, and although Harbach's novel is very much set in the present day, it retains a little patina of tradition, both in style and content. Honestly, I can't recommend it highly enough.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">The Art of Fielding</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Chad Harbach</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2011 (cover image shown from Back Bay Books edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-28040592271432382612012-08-02T13:35:00.000-04:002012-08-16T12:49:31.588-04:00The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Every once in a while, a book comes along that challenges the way I see myself as a reader. I like to think that I'm a good reader, that I'm generous to authors and open to unusual scenarios or styles, and able to tease out allusions and images and all that "between the lines" stuff. I probably don't get everything (hence my continued joy of rereading), but I usually feel like I do okay, which means it's rare for me to have a complete turnaround on a novel when I'm more than halfway through. This is why I was so surprised by my experience reading Rachel Joyce's novel <i>The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">It's possible that I got stuck on the simple-seeming premise: essentially, the novel is about Harold Fry, who one day receives a letter from a woman he used to work with who is dying. He's very upset, and when he leaves to walk to the post box to mail his reply, he decides to instead walk to see her in person. This doesn't sound like much, but Harold is in his 60s, has no history of taking long walks, and lives in the south of England. Queenie Hennessy, however, is in a hospice in the north of England, practically on the border with Scotland. Harold doesn't return home to equip himself, and instead just continues walking in his yachting shoes, wearing a shirt and tie, with a rain jacket slung over his arm.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">The thing is, we don't really know why Harold is walking. It seems a bit unbelieveable that a colleague from 20 years ago could rouse such activity in a man who is otherwise leading a fairly sedentary, boring life. Harold is retired, and although he's married it's pretty clear he and his wife don't have much to say to each other anymore. They have a son he never sees, and who only his wife talks to, and once the grass is cut he's at a bit of a loss as to what to do with himself. It did require a little suspension of disbelief for me to get over that, but once I was there, I very quickly became wrapped up in the story.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Harold spends most of his time on the road alone. He isn't a experienced walker, which means he's both slow to cover ground and quick to develop blisters and muscle pain. Alone with his thoughts, Harold starts reflecting on his life, and slowly his past is revealed in a tangle of memories. Harold's mother walked out on he and his father when he was a boy, and his father turned into a womanizer with no interest in his son. Then Harold met Maureen and fell in love. They married and eventually had their son, David, whom Harold loved very much but couldn't relate to. David was dark and moody, and very smart, and although Harold was filled with thoughts and feelings, he couldn't express them, which led to a great gap forming in their relationship. Because his estrangement from his son, Harold and Maureen grew apart too – she sided mainly with David and couldn't understand what was wrong with Harold.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">This sad and unchangeable past is balanced out by Harold's walk. He called and told the hospice to tell Queenie that he was coming, and that she needed simply to keep living until he arrived. Of course, the walk isn't all roses, and Harold has many moments of uncertainty, pain, and fear that what he's doing is a complete waste. He makes it about a third of the way to Queenie before a newspaper does a story about him, and then things explode. People start joining him, calling themselves pilgrims for Queenie, and slowing him down. Harold doesn't like the big group or its slowness, but he feels responsible for them and can't bring himself to leave. Every town they pass through requires photos ops, and before he realizes what's happening, Harold's quiet little walk has been co-opted and sponsored and taken over. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As I was reading the novel I found myself wondering when a newspaper would cover the story, and how it would go, and Joyce's portrayal of how quickly things get out of hand is perfect. But, what I most enjoyed about the book (the pleasing surprise) is how the tone and momentum of the novel build the farther Harold has walks. It's a clever and lovely construction, and Joyce uses it to great affect. I don't want to spoil the sensation of reading this central part, but suffice to say, Joyce subtly opens up the novel bit by bit as Harold himself opens up to both his past and the world around him. It's a great marriage of content and form.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry</i> is told mostly from Harold's perspective, although as the novel builds Joyce does slip in chapters from the perspective of his wife Maureen. Without these, it would be easy to blame Maureen for Harold's unhappiness, but the carefully two-sided story of their empty (though not loveless) marriage is all the more real and heartbreaking for knowing both sides. Similarly, the reveal at the end, which does explain Harold's compulsion to walk to Queenie, is striking in how it manages to be both very simple and hugely difficult. That's a balance Joyce plays with throughout the novel, always managing to withhold a little bit while still offering up an engaging story about a man trying desperately to do something different.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Rachel Joyce</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">first published 2012 (cover image shown from Doubleday Canada edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-33439335464653629142012-07-26T10:30:00.000-04:002012-08-02T13:35:41.119-04:00Better Living Through Plastic Explosives<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Short stories, as I said in <a href="http://www.booksunderskin.com/2012/07/summer-reading-list.html">my last post</a> (sorry that it was two weeks ago – summer is messing with my schedule), make for great summer reading. Generally speaking, they require much less commitment than novels, meaning that if you forget your book at the cottage, or put it down for a few days, picking it up again is easy and relatively guilt-free. For more or less the same reasons, I think short story collections make for great book club picks. If someone can't finish (or has barely started), they can still be part of the discussion, there's less pressure not to spoil the ending, and chances are even if all the stories aren't universally liked, everyone will find one or two they connected with. At least, that's certain to be the case with Zsuzsi Gartner's <i>Better Living Through Plastic Explosives</i>, which was the pick for the inaugural <a href="http://pansneedles.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/book-report-canlit-knit/">CanLit Knit book club</a> meeting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I have been reading a lot of untraditional short stories lately (both successful and less so), but Gartner's collection was by far the most intriguing. Her stories are set largely on the West Coast, and mostly in Vancouver in a sort of present-adjacent. That is, the world of her characters is, on the surface at least, not very different than ours, but things happen that are just strange enough to make you question whether they're possible in the world we know. This kind of questioning, though, is what I loved most about Gartner's stories, because it forces you to wonder whether the action is actually happening, or if it just appears that way to the narrator.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">Take, for example, her first story <i>Summer of the Flesh Eater</i>. Like many stories in the collection, it is set in a yuppie suburban cul de sac, where families eat local organic food, take their children to art camp, etc. In this particular cul de sac, however, a new person moves in to one of the houses. He is large, hairy, and not particularly sophisticated. He doesn't mow his grass, he keeps an old truck on his lawn that he tinkers with periodically. He drinks beer. He wears sweat pants. This could easily be the set up for a <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlandia_(TV_series)">Portlandia</a></i>-style parody, but instead, through the eyes of one of the hapless neighbouring husbands, it's threatening. Their neighbour, the narrator and the fellow husbands, insist, represents a kind of de-evolution. Things start off okay, they invite him to one of their dinner parties, and instead of bringing local wine he brings beer. They serve foam canapés and bite-sized main courses, and it's fine. Then he invites everyone to his house for a barbecue and he serves slabs of meat, so rare it's almost dripping. Then the stops cutting his lawn. He appears to be getting hairier. They swear he has started grunting more than speaking; his arms seem to have grown longer, hanging past his knees; their wives seems strangely fixated on him. <span style="background-color: white;">This continues for the entire summer until the Darwin-quoting husbands decide to take matters into their own hands.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">It's shocking and strange and uncomfortable to read, but also strangely gripping. Gartner uses her narrator to draw the reader into his paranoia and the husbands' xenophobia, only to then shake you out of it well and completely at the end. It's almost science fiction, and then it suddenly isn't, and you're forced to wonder how much of what you've read is based on the distorted perception of the narrator and how much was real. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">That kind of unsettling uncertainty pervades the majority of the stories in the collection, and even after reading several, it can still catch you off guard. Gartner so fully realizes the twisted and neurotic worlds of her narrators that it's almost impossible to see through them until she lets you, and although that doesn't always make for enjoyable reading, I found it impossible not be impressed by her story construction, which offers a different kind of enjoyment, I suppose.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Better Living Through Plastic Explosives</i>, which is also the name of the final story in the book, is a challenging read. Gartner doesn't shy away from difficult topics – foreign adoption, the cult of the inspirational speaker, kidnapping and terrorism all take a turn – and she refuses to let either her characters or her readers off easy in the end. There are no pat messages or morals, but there is something satisfying in reading about issues so current no solutions have been found yet. Despite its not-quite-in-our-time feel, Gartner's stories are thoroughly contemporary, as are her societal critiques. Not everyone wants to read something challenging in the summer, but I think never approaching something challenging is a mistake. This makes <i>Better Living Through Plastic Explosives</i> all the more appropriate, then, because it permits you to pick it up and put it down at will, although I would be surprised if you manage to do so without reading a few stories at a time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Better Living Through Plastic Explosives</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Zsuzsi Gartner</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2011 (cover image shown from Penguin edition) </span></span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-89467669057334157842012-07-12T13:41:00.000-04:002012-07-25T12:58:36.797-04:00Summer reading list<span style="font-size: small;">Instead of the regularly-scheduled review I would normally run, today is going to be all about summer reading. If this seems like a cop-out, well, it is and it isn't. Besides being a place where I get to think and write about books every week, this blog is where I point people who ask me what I've been reading lately and ask what they should read next. Never do I have this conversation more than in the summer, when people want to know what to bring with them to the beach or the cottage, or just what they should be reading on the weekends. It seems that, even when people aren't on vacation, summer is their designated time to read for pleasure, whether that means it's filled with guilty-pleasure books of just time to read, period. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">So, in the spirit of summer, I thought I'd do what I did last year and recommend some great summer reads, and also come clean about what I'm planning to read (I mean, you'd find out soon enough, but I guess this way you can track my success, or read along with me). <a href="http://www.booksunderskin.com/2011/06/its-time-to-read-in-sun-summer-reading.html">I did this last year</a> as well and people seemed to like it, so I thought I'd try it again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Six books you might want to read this summer:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.booksunderskin.com/2012/02/antagonist.html"><i>The Antagonist</i> by Lynn Coady</a> – Suitably set in the summer, <i>The Antagonist</i> is a one-sided epistolary novel about Rank, a one-time enforcer, who is trying to set the record of his life straight. It's funny, it's heartfelt, and Rank is so fully-realized you'll almost think you've stumbled across a trove of someone's private correspondence. It's riveting.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.booksunderskin.com/2012/03/irma-voth.html"><i>Irma Voth</i> by Miriam Toews</a> – The story of Irma, a mennonite living in Mexico, has a lot of elements that, now that I'm thinking about it, hearken back to the summer books I loved as a kid. It's a kind of coming-of-age story – certainly it's about discovering who you are and what you're capable of – and it's filled with Toews' signature humour and insight. It's exactly the kind of book that offers up equal parts excellent writing and entertainment, and it is not to be missed.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.booksunderskin.com/2012/04/touch.html"><i>Touch</i> by Alexi Zentner</a> – If you are not such a fan of the heat, perhaps you can take vicarious comfort in the dark and freezing winters Zentner evokes in his haunting, beautiful, and magical story about family legends and how thin the line between folklore and reality becomes in the dark, empty woods. It's a masterful story, beautifully told, and offers a little something different if you're a fan of the mysterious but tired of detective fiction.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.booksunderskin.com/2011/08/up-up-up.html"><i>Up Up Up</i> by Julie Booker</a> – Summer reading is often done either in long leisurely chunks, or in short breaks in between lots of activities, and a short story collection is an excellent way to bridge the two. Booker's stories are especially suited to summer because many of them have to do with travel, as well as how to fill the boredom that can set in when our regular schedules are suddenly altered. It's great reading, perhaps even better because it gives you the space to pick it up and put it down guilt-free.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.booksunderskin.com/2011/06/forgotten-waltz.html"><i>The Forgotten Waltz</i> by Anne Enright</a> – Romance is traditional summer fare, but Enright turns things around a little by writing about a relationship that began as an affair, told from the perspective of Gina, one of the lovers. I've written quite a lot about it already, but suffice to say, it is a gorgeously constructed novel and will more than hold your attention wherever you engage in your summer reading.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.booksunderskin.com/2011/11/paper-garden.html"><i>The Paper Garden</i> by Molly Peacock</a> – Non-fiction doesn't make everyone's summer reading list, but it almost always makes mine. This is an alternate to the juicy celebrity memoir, telling instead the story of an 18th century woman who invented her own art form. Truly, Mary Delaney's life story is absorbing and juicy enough to stand up on its own, that she managed to become such an incredible artist is the icing on the cake. I'm tempted to point this book toward gardeners especially, since Delaney's art was the immaculate recreation of flowers out of paper, but really it's the kind of intricate and inspiring story that would capture the attention and imagination of almost any reader.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Five books I'll be reading:</b>
<br /><i>Better Living Through Plastic Explosives </i>by Zsuzsi Gartner<br />
<i>The Art of Fielding</i> by Chad Harbach<br />
<i>The Water Rat of Wanchai</i> by Ian Hamilton<br />
<i>The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry</i> by Rachel Joyce</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i>The Age of Miracles</i> by Karen Thompson Walker</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">(Obviously I will be reading more books than this, but these are at the top of my list.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">So, there you go. What would you recommend people read this summer? What do you plan to read? And, perhaps most importantly, where do you plan to read your books and does that affect what they are? (For example, I try not to take hardcovers to the beach so I don't get sand in the spine, but maybe that's just me?)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-43167694834786054142012-07-05T11:59:00.001-04:002012-07-12T13:41:25.747-04:00The Professor and the Madman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">I'm not sure its really possible to be an avid reader and not love words. Oh sure, you can get caught up in a plot or start to fee at home with certain characters, but deep down, there has to be some kind of abiding word love, or you'd just watch lots of movies. Some people write interesting words down in lists, either to remind them to look up their meaning or just as a reminder to try using them – whether you do this or not, it is proven that readers have much wider vocabularies than non-readers (although whether or not that vocabulary is on display is another thing entirely). I am not someone who compulsively looks up words, but when I need to, I go to the dictionary – the OED, to be precise. For simple spelling, it is sometimes easiest to just use Google, but for meaning, or if there's likely to be a disputed spelling (American vs. Canadian, for example), I pick up the hard copy. I have been told that this is "old fashioned," but I don't care; there is something so lovely about leafing through pages and finding new words and/or discovering new meanings for words you thought you understood. But for all this, I never put that much thought into how my little dictionary came to be, which is why Simon Winchester's <i>The Professor and the Madman: A tale of murder, insanity and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary</i> was so particularly attractive to me when it first caught my eye a few years ago. (Nevermind that it took me years to actually pick it up and read it).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Winchester splits his narrative, more or less, between two men (as indicated, I suppose, in the title): James Murray, the titular professor who helmed the OED through the majority of its making, and William Minor, the American "madman" who helped. The relevant thing here, if you are only familiar with the concise or "little" versions of the OED, is that in the big, authoritative volume, the words are all accompanied by several quotations from literature that indicate not only their meaning(s), but also their history of use. It seems like no big deal now to find any old quotation, but in the late-1800s and early-1900s, when the dictionary was being compiled, everything had to be discovered manually, which required a whole lot of readers.</span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">As Winchester explains, there were other dictionaries before the OED, but most of them were not concerned with quotations and, although this seems funny now, only included words that were deemed interesting or exotic. There was no need to define, for example, "take" or "bread," because people knew what they were. The OED was a departure from that style of dictionary making, and as a result, much more labour intensive and time consuming. There was a call for volunteer readers (the dictionary should be democratic, after all) who were encouraged to read certain books from certain time periods and then take accurate note of the occurrence of certain words. William Minor, an avid reader and an inmate in an asylum for the criminally insane, saw one of these notices and immediately offered his services.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">It is around this point that Winchester's interest deviates from my own. His history of the dictionary, in general, is fascinating, as is his explanation of how the OED was even begun and the background of Murray, the man who left school at 14 and then rose to the top of the philological field anyway. All of that, as well as the chapters about Minor's early life, were quite interesting, but this is a case of one stream of the narrative interesting me more than the other, and I have to admit that I cared more about the dictionary than Minor's sad decline, which clearly was of more interest to Winchester. That being said, the story is compelling, and as a history of how we understood and treated mental illness, Minor's side of the story is certainly interesting and, I gather, largely untold. Certainly his contribution of thousands of quotations is astounding, as is the fact that he managed to be so productive in such an unfortunate condition.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Structurally, <i>The Professor and the Madman</i> mostly alternates between Minor and Murray. Each chapter begins with a keyword of sorts, which is accompanied by its etymology and its relevant definitions. In some cases, these words are unusual, or out of common speech, and in others they are everyday words, but in all cases they are in some way relevant to the following chapter, and in the cases of the rare words I enjoyed keeping an eye out for them. Beyond the definitions, Winchester can get a little explain-y about some things, but considering that he's writing about the dictionary, perhaps the explainiest book ever written, I suppose that makes sense. Overall, though, <i>The Professor and the Madman</i> is a fascinating book, both about the OED and the history of asylums and mental illness, and I am very glad I finally read it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I tend to take the dictionary for granted – as if it just sprung up out of thin air – because it seems like such an obvious and necessary tool (working as a copy editor means I use it everyday, so it is literally a tool of my trade). Having read Winchester's account of its creation, though, has changed the way I think about it though. Its concise definitions seem more like an art, now, and I find it very difficult to imagine a time when no such authoritative source existed. That it was so greatly helped by the work of a man suffering from what we might now term schizophrenia is even more astonishing, and makes me want to make a trip to the reference library where I could sit with the one of the full volumes to just marvel at the amount of work that went into it.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">The Professor and the Madman</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Simon Winchester</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 1998 (cover image shown from Harper Perennial edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-23460803840657208362012-06-28T13:00:00.001-04:002012-07-05T11:59:57.258-04:00Open<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">It's strange how, sometimes, a book you really want to talk about leaves you without the words to do so. Certainly there are books that leave you so shellshocked that the very idea of starting a new one seems crass and somehow inappropriate. It's too soon, you think. At the opposite end are those books most often referred to as "beach reads," which hold you in their thrall until the last page, at which point you toss them aside and pick up another, typically only remembering their finer plot points when walking home by yourself late at night (assuming, of course, that your beach reads are terrifying, which mine almost always seem to be). There are, I'm sure, lots of kinds of books in between these two extremes, but the two I most often seem to encounter are books I can't stop talking about, and books I want very much to talk about but can't manage to do in a sensible way. Even that sentence borders on what I'm talking about. It's as if you want your words to be so precise, to do the book justice, but in the face of this author you feel yourself unworthy. Bare with me, because this is how I feel in the face of Lisa Moore, and most recently about her short story collection <i>Open</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Open</i> is so hard for me to talk about, I think, because Moore's style is so distinct, and her characters so full, that it's very hard to step away and shake your head clear in order to engage in any kind of critical thinking. The layered descriptions, the scraps of memories, the various characters, all continue to play through your imagination long after you've finished reading. This is something I love about Moore's writing, but also something that frustrates me. The through-line that binds the stories in <i>Open</i> together is relationships. In each story, a relationship – and often more than one, with friendships balanced against marriages – is in flux; in all the stories, characters' memories are overlaid with their present circumstances, which creates a swirl of images that can at times be disorienting for both the character and the reader. </span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">Take, for example, the fifth story <i>Natural Parents</i>, ostensibly about a couple going to a dinner party. They have a baby in the backseat and they're driving, talking about the meal, and then the scene shifts and Anna is remember the night previous, when the baby wouldn't sleep and they were both awake and mad at each other because of the exhaustion. And then the perspective shifts to Lyle, that night, going to get the baby's bottle and stopping in the room of their 11-year-old daughter, only to be swept up in a memory of the two of them spending a day reading at the cottage, and a neighbouring boy coming to visit and taking his daughter away to play. Lyle never wanted kids, he reveals, before running through his sexual history and revealing that, actually, he had a baby before he was with Anna, with a girl he only casually slept with in university. All this backstory, waves and waves of memory, and then they arrive at the party. The story continues, but I don't want to give it all away. The idea, though, is that memories can be a vortex, with one leading you into another and into another, until something abruptly pulls you out, and something always does, because Moore's stories are about the way the present plays with the past (and vice versa), and there is always a reason something wells up when it does.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Moore uses this technique in various ways in all her stories, although she often changes perspectives. Most of her stories are told from the perspective of one character, often a woman, but Moore moves between first-, second-, and third-person narration, offering the reader different a viewpoint to match the story. As such, although all the stories take place in Newfoundland and all the characters are of a similar age, they each feel distinct, and none of the voices or backgrounds feel they could have belonged to any other character. Each person is whole and unique and filled with their own past – memories that haunt them or snippets that rise to the surface unbidden to captivate them. Often, there is a sensuousness to these memories – a first kiss, the shame of new breasts, sex – that gives them their own heartbeat and cuts through the haze of ensuing years to make them feel immediate and vivid. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Open</i> is kind of a bonfire of a book. The intensity of Moore's prose doesn't waver, but there are certainly moments when it cracks and pops, offering unexpected bursts of light. Finishing the collection made me want to flip it over and start again, and it makes me fervently hope she will have something new out soon. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">Open</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Lisa Moores</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2002 (cover image shown from House of Anansi Press edition)</span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7304495595578918168.post-63408284002096577972012-06-21T11:15:00.000-04:002012-06-28T13:01:02.431-04:00Above All Things<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">As the world gets smaller, it seems that of all things, Everest is what gets closer. I know a disproportionate number of people who have been to the Everest base camp. When I was in Nepal volunteering a few years ago, a helicopter ride around Everest was a fairly common tourist activity, if an expensive one (I did not to it). Beyond base camp, though, it seems to be more a matter of money than one of skill to actually climb the mountain. Since the last Everest tragedy, numerous reports have come out from experienced climbers who have watched as first-timers have used oxygen the entire way up, or are learning to belay (a fairly basic technique) on the upper slopes. The reality of Everest today loomed large for me while I read Tanis Rideout's debut novel <i>Above All Things</i>, in part because her ability to carve out the historical grandeur of Everest is all the more impressive for its modern ubiquity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Above All Things</i> is the story of George Mallory's third and final Everest attempt in 1924, and Rideout divides the narrative between the mountain, moving between George's perspective and that of young climber Sandy Irvine, and England, where George's wife Ruth waits for news. The division is beautifully done, and allows Rideout to maintain the tension and suspense of the climb while providing different insights in what was at stake as well as rounder perspective on George Mallory himself. That being said, Ruth's presence in the novel is not simply to serve as a vessel for facts about her husband: she is as deep and broad a character as he is. </span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">Rideout's structure goes beyond alternating perspectives, though. In the George chapters, we're taken through all the details of the climb, from the boat leaving England to the people entertaining them on their way through India, to all the set up and intricacies on the mountain, to the climbing itself. His chapters have changing altitudes, varying weather, multiple locations. The Ruth chapters, though, all take place in a single day, as we follow her from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night. This structure does a few things (at least for me). First, it sets up how very far apart they are. News takes weeks (sometimes longer) to arrive in England from the mountain, which makes knowing anything concrete very difficult. Second, it shows how differently time passes depending on what you're doing. For Ruth, waiting at home for news, time drags, and days seem interminable; for George, though, the days are never long enough, and are filled alternately with activity and waiting, but seem always over in a blink. Finally, it juxtaposes the hype and excitement about the climb in England with the realities of the climb itself – both those of the climbers and those left to wait for them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Typically, in this kind of layered narrative, there is one strain of story that hooks you, causing you to race through the other sections so you can continue whatever part is most compelling. Strangely, though, it seemed that whatever voice I was reading became my favourite in that moment. I almost felt I could have read an entire book about Sandy's insecurity, or George's torn desires, or the way Ruth's careful routine was being torn apart by anxiety. But then, none of those books would have felt like the bigger picture the way Rideout's does because, for her, the bigger picture isn't only the climb, it's about the relationship between George and Ruth, which is one of those beautiful and ordinary and enduring love stories that often get forgotten by history. Their memories of each other are one of the most compelling aspects of the story.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Above All Things</i> is a novel, and although Rideout did extensive research, it is a work of fiction (she notes certain things that she deliberately changed in service of the story at the end). However, because it is based on a real expedition, which had a real outcome (even if you don't know what happened to Mallory, you probably know that Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay wer the first to be credited with reaching the summit of Everest in 1953), you can find out what will inevitably happen in the end. That I could know this and still be so rocked by what happened is a testament not only to Rideout's writing but also to her ability to bring her characters so thoroughly to life. I have never cried like that for a fictional character in my life. Never.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">I expected to like <i>Above All Things</i>, which has a lot of literary elements I enjoy: layered narratives from different perspectives, romance, adventure, a basis in fact, and all the small period details and personality-specific traits that make something come alive. I expected to like it, but I didn't realize how deeply involved in it I would get, or how it would make me want to reread all the books I've read about Everest and then seek out more. Without warning, a mountain I've never had a huge desire to visit has taken over my imagination, and even if this feeling doesn't last, I can certainly say that I will never think about Everest the same way again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Above All Things</i><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">by Tanis Rideout</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">First published in 2012 (cover images from McClelland & Stewart edition)</span></span>Angela Hickmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11839296133218496234noreply@blogger.com0