What I Read in 2011

I've been doing this list since I started blogging and, I'm pleased to say, every year the number of books I get to read in a year has increased. I was a little worried about this year, since I had a master's thesis to research and write (and none of that work really qualifies here), but I managed to make up for my slow start. In all, I read 51 books (I'm part way through the 52nd), which is pretty alright I think. I'll break down the list at the bottom, but in the meantime, here's what my 2011 bookshelves look like (with links to relevant reviews that I wrote for Books Under Skin) in chronological order of reading. As always, a star indicates a reread, of which there were surprisingly few this year.

Why that book changed your life

When people ask me what my favourite book is, I'm a little proud not to have an answer. There are a lot of books that I reread annually, and there are many more that greatly affected me while I was reading them, and continued to afterwards. I like to think I'm lucky that no one specific book stood out. The question, though, of our favourite book(s) is implicitly tied to the bigger idea that a book can change you somehow. I looked into that question for the National Post and here's what I found:

The claim that a book can change someone’s life is one that’s made over and over again. Usually, we brush it aside as a cliché, but what if it was actually possible?

“The idea was to say, ‘OK, now what really are the psychological effects of reading?’ ” Oatley says. To try and work out an answer, he and Maja Djikic put together a study to measure how personalities can be changed by literature. Participants were given either Anton Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Little Dog” or a version of the story rewritten in a nonfiction style by Djikic, which included all the same information, was the same length and at the same reading level. Participants did personality tests before and after reading. 

The question of the psychology of fiction is one that Keith Oatley, professor emeritus in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, has been working on for 20 years. He and some colleagues started the website On Fiction in 2008 to track work related to the psychology of fiction.

“The people who read the Chekhov story, their personalities all changed a bit,” Oatley says.

Read the rest on The Afterword...

It's time to read in the sun: Summer reading recommendations

Tomorrow is July 1st, which is Canada Day and therefore kicks off the first long weekend of summer, and despite whatever your calendar says, it's the Canada Day long weekend that really kicks off the season. Also, a note on calendars: it seems I should buy one. I got myself all in a flutter yesterday and published by Thursday book recommendation a day early. I know. But, maybe it was fortuitous, because now I can write about summer reading right as people are about to get down to. The National Post, Globe and Mail, and NPR have all published their lists, so here is mine.

Five novels I recommend for the summer:
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt – revisit the Western and be amazed.
The Leopard by Jo Nesbo – a Nordic Noir crime thriller set during a Norwegian winter – it'll cool you off maybe?
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley – another mystery, but in an entirely different style. Also the first book in a series of three (so far), which is nice if you want to spend the summer getting to know some new characters.
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington – be prepared to laugh until you cry.
The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery – set in Muskoka, this is an entirely different side of Anne Shirley's creator.
Bonus non-fiction:
The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean – if you thought flowers were boring, prepare to have your mind blown by the incredible history of orchid hunting.

I always feel like summer reading should be fun, quickly-paced, and not completely fluff. We only have so much time to read, so even though it's generally agreed that summer should be for lighter fare, light doesn't have to mean mindless. That's the balance I was trying to strike with this list, while also covering a variety of genres. 

In Other's Words: When iconic literary characters outlive their creators

I wrote a feature for the National Post's summer Books Extra about writers who write about another author's characters. Sometimes these are one-off deals, sometimes authors make a career out of it. I talked to Jeffrey Deaver about writing the new James Bond novel, Budge Wilson about write a prequel to Anne of Green Gables, and Max Allen Collins about his posthumous collaborations with Mickey Spillane. You can read the piece in this weekend's Post or online.

Here's a preview:

In art, tributes are pretty much de rigueur. As consumers we’re accustomed to cover songs, tribute bands and flawless copies of famous paintings. In literature, though, that expression of adulation is less common. Certainly, there is a wealth of fan fiction and series written under a common nom de plume, but perhaps for fear of accusations of plagiarism, writers tend to steer clear of writing too much like one another.

Nonetheless, some series and characters take on a will of their own — or rather, the fans do. This sometimes leads to the publication of unfinished novels, or, as the latest James Bond novel indicates, to continuations of an author’s work.

The latest Bond is Carte Blanche, which essentially describes the conditions under which American crime novelist Jeffrey Deaver worked when writing it. Deaver is the fifth author to write about Bond since Ian Fleming died in 1964, and the first to fully embrace a contemporary version of the famous spy.

Read the rest...

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Sometimes when I'm reading I don't want to think about the bigger picture of the book, I just want to be plunged into the life and emotions of one character and then spend the day there. It's escapism in its purest form, because to experience the intensity of emotions rolling around in someone – fictional or no, because biographies can be great for this too – is a kind of catharsis rarely available to us; rather than reliving moments from our own life, we can simply experience moments from theirs. Perhaps the best novel for this kind of immersion is Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. 

Written entirely in prose poetry, Smart's novel tells a fictionalized account of her real-life love affair with the English, married poet George Barker, with whom she had four children (for the purposes of scale, he had fifteen children, with various women). In the novel, the unnamed narrator is a young woman who falls in love with a married man and, in the short version, she becomes pregnant, has the child, but never sees him again except in her imagination – he, it seems, is institutionalized. It is a heartbreaking story, if a familiar one. What sets By Grand Central Station apart from the genre of cliché love-triangle narratives, though, is the voice at its centre.

Grief and anger and confusion and bliss and myriad other emotions bubble, not under the surface, but in force throughout this story. The narrator is written with such passion that her feelings read like the purest, most broken expressions of loss and love ever committed to the page. She is not a cliché character; she is a woman in love who has been decimated by it, rejected from society as an unwed mother. Smart's descriptions of her narrator are beautiful in their ability to place you in her position, wondering what will come next and unsure whether the fantasies are real life, what's yet to come, or devastating and impossible dreams. 

In the forward – and I recommend you pick up a copy of this book that has one – Brigid Brophy lays the novel bare. Her writing is perfectly matched to Smart's and the cadence and imagery that she sets up in her note prepares you to enter the encompassing world of Smart's prose poem. I rarely read forwards because I don't like to have the story spoiled, but Brophy has no desire to tell you what to think about By Grand Central Station; rather, she wants you to read it with your eyes open, so you can experience the story on two levels: that of the narrator, and that of Smart's own experiences.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a novel in which it is not so much the story itself, but the way it is delivered that draws you in. Knowing the back story is almost a prerequisite to understanding the novel, because Smart doesn't waste her breath laying things out for you. This is not a step-by-step confessional, this is a rolling, turbulent and vivid account of the defining moments of this young woman's life. The story is, of course, present, but its details are not always clear. And that is maybe one of the defining things about grief, anger and love: our feelings are so raw and real that we cannot believe that everyone else isn't feeling them too.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
by Elizabeth Smart
First published in 1945 (cover image shown from Grafton Books edition)

The Books Everyone Should Read?

Click to enlarge.

Lists like 'The Top-100 Books Everyone Should Read' come out every year, and often feature more-or-less the same sets of (mostly) novels. Sometimes they're in a different order, sometimes they spice it up a little (Sense and Sensibility instead of Pride and Prejudice, of 1984 instead of Animal Farm, etc.). I tease mostly because these lists make me feel a little inadequate – and I have an English degree, which feels like it should mean I've read most of these books.

Anyway, The Guardian has put together a word cloud (see above) featuring the titles of the must-read books from "over 15 notable book polls" and arranged them so that the titles that appear most frequently appear largest and boldest (essentially the same idea as my tag cloud, to the right of this post). Seeing the titles arranged like this makes me feel like maybe the lists are a bit less repetitive than I thought, and also that some stories are widely considered necessary reads. To Kill a Mockingbird is the clear winner, which is interesting because, compared to some of the other titles, it is relatively contemporary. I also find it rather amazing that Le Petit Prince (or The Little Prince) has made so few lists, as well as the fact that Twilight shows up at all. It is so interesting to examine what other people/organizations deem to be must-reads.

What makes this data extra-interesting is that The Guardian also provides a spreadsheet with all the lists on it, which means that if you wanted to read your way through one of them, you certainly could.

Little Women

I'm not sure what it is about cold weather that makes me want to read stories about families, but there you go. I suppose it could be related to fond memories of winter fun as a kid: board games after dinner, building snow houses with my dad and sisters, baking cookies with my mum, and, of course, reading in front of the wood stove. That is a very cosy feeling, and nothing quite brings it back like a dip into Louisa May Alcott's classic, Little Women. Perhaps I'm slightly biased because I have sisters, but Little Women has to be one of the best books on how the relationship between sisters works, at least based on my experience.

Alcott's story of the March sisters Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, their Marmee, and their neighbour, Laurie. It's a coming-of-age story, really – a bildungsroman with a composite cast, although it focuses most on Jo, the second-eldest of the sisters. Jo is a dramatist, a writer, and a bit of a free spirit. The novel is set, as best as I can tell, during the American Civil War (not that war has much to do with the story, except to explain the father's absence for most of it as well as the March family's relative poverty); this kind of explains why the family, despite seeming modern in its sensibilities, remains staunchly conservative in many ways. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. A novel about the tension between propriety and impropriety, about women who are growing up in a world that is subtly changing, makes small details (such as the whereabouts of a glove) rather shocking and exciting.

Of course, Little Women hinges on the relationship between the sisters and Marmee. As in every family, there is jealousy and favouritism (Meg and Amy together, Jo and Beth together), but mostly their is camaraderie and love. There is no real mention of outside female friends, which leads the reader to the conclusion that the sisters really just have each other and Marmee to rely on and learn from. But, of course, there is also Laurie, their handsome scamp and kindred spirit from next door.

Laurie's name is actually Theodore Laurence. He lives with his grandfather and is tutored by Mr. Brooke so that one day he can take on the family business. Laurie, like Jo, has a great imagination and as an implied only child, he delights in the company of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. After gaining entry to the sisters' secret world of games and society, Laurie quickly becomes a focal point. His grandfather helps out when Beth falls ill, he creates some romantic tension, but mostly he is a wonderful friend, in on all the jokes and rather desperately in love with Jo. I must admit – and I'm sure I'm not alone here – that I had quite a crush on Laurie through most of the book, a feeling that would be inevitably dashed by the end, only to return with each subsequent read.

And that is the power of Alcott's story. She makes you believe that this time, for this one reread of the story, things will work out differently. Maybe this time you'll find out what would have happened if Jo had married Laurie (although, secretly, I was always glad she ended up with an intellectual); maybe this time Beth won't die, I mean, she makes it through her first illness, right? Little Women is such a rich and textural story that Alcott gets you all caught up in the detail and carefully woven fabric of her characters' lives – really, you don't stand a chance. Even though you know what will happen, you still hope it might not, or hold your breath until it does, squirming at the edge of your seat.

Little Women was originally published in two parts: Little Women and Good Wives, but most versions are sold as a combined story under the better-known title. Together, the story carries you from youth into adulthood. The March sisters grown and change, but don't let go of their childhood personalities completely. In many ways, Alcott's characters are real people in their habits and styles, and by allowing them to grow into, rather than out of, themselves, they become more like friends or family than names on a page – perfect for visiting on a cold and snowy day.

Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott
First published in two parts in 1868 and 1869 (cover image shown from Signet Classics edition)

Le Petit Prince

It's the first week of the New Year and, for many people, New Year's resolutions are still somewhere near the front of their mind. Their desire to get fit, or save money, or travel, or whatever, is still jostling for space with their grocery list, work to-do list, and the million other things that will eventually crowd out their resolutions. But the thing is, if resolutions were more interesting (or seemed like they would be more fulfilling) they might be easier to follow-through with. What if we decided to see the world the way children do? For starters, I would suggest revisiting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince.

I didn't read Le Petit Prince as a kid, so I'm not sure how I would have viewed it in the context of a children's story, but as an adult reader it stunned me. The story is, on the surface, a simple one. Adults, the narrator tells us at the beginning (he is an adult, himself), are boring because they need everything explained to them. The implication here is that children, despite their constant repetition of "why," just get stuff. The narrator sees himself as the grown-up version of these children; he is bored by adults and their lack of imagination and as a result lives alone and only makes cursory efforts to interact.

The narrator is a pilot, and after crashing in the Sahara, he sets about to repair his plane before his water supply runs out. But he is interrupted by a small voice saying (in one of the story's more famous lines) "dessine-moi un mouton" (draw me a sheep). After several failed attempts – one that's too sick, one that's actually a goat, one that's too old – the narrator gets a bit frustrated and draws a box; the sheep, he says, is inside. Of course, the recipient is delighted, because now the sheep, no longer constrained by outward appearance, can be exactly the sheep he wants. Of course, this small-voiced recipient is the Petit Prince himself. 

The Petit Prince has come from another planet – asteroid B 612, the narrator guesses – and wants the sheep to keep him company when he returns. His only friend there, he says, is his flower, which he will protect from the sheep. The Petit Prince tells the narrator all sorts of details about his planet, about the baobab trees, about the volcanoes he has to deactivate, about how lonely it is to be the only inhabitant, despite all the maintenance work the planet requires of him. The Petit Prince tells the narrator about harnessing a flock of birds to visit other planets, where he discovered numerous personalities: a king, a vain man in search of an admirer, a drinker, a businessman, a lamp-lighter, a writer, and finally the Petit Prince found his way to Earth, where he encounters the narrator, a pilot.

The Petit Prince's story is a strange one and, although the narrator fancies himself quite imaginative, I always got the impression that as he listened to the Petit Prince he did so with that kind of indulgent, wide-eyed look adults sometimes have when listening to children. But, as the Petit Prince's story takes him farther and farther away from his beloved flower and his little planet, the tone shifts from the excitement of adventure to anxiety and sadness over a home he can't get back to. By the end, the narrator is quite as serious about the Petit Prince's story as the Petit Prince himself.

There are a lot of ways to interpret Le Petit Prince –  is the Petit Prince the representation of the narrator's childhood self? Does he represent all childhood on the inevitable, and irreversible, path of growing up? Is it just a bedtime story to delight children and open up their dreams to new possibilities? Is he a hallucination of the recently-crashed pilot, our narrator? – but the nice thing about this sort of literature is that you don't have to decide what it means in order to enjoy it. Rather, like the narrator, simply allowing yourself to be taken into the world of the Petit Prince without that adult, indulgent smile is enough to prove that beyond all the day-to-day stuff you deal with, your imagination is still happily alive and waiting to be exercised.

Le Petit Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
First published in 1943 (cover image shown from Folio edition)

My Bookshelf, 2010 edition

I'm not sure how I managed it, but somehow in 2010 I worked my way through thirty-four books. To be fair, some of these titles were lighter than others, but still, I think that's a pretty good number. I'm not really someone who goes for those year-long reading challenges (a book per day or a book per week, etc.) because I expect it would make me a less attentive reader, more concerned with the number of pages left than the page I'm reading. 

Anyhow, here's what I read last year (excluding, of course, magazines and newspapers). Of the thirty-four titles on the list: 11 are rereads, 8 are non-fiction, 2 are poetry, 23 are novels, and 12 are Canadian. Clearly, I need to improve my poetry and short-fiction reading in 2011. All in all, though, those numbers indicate a reasonably balanced bookshelf.

Just like the last time I did this, the stars indicate rereads – can you believe that until this year I'd never read a novel by Margaret Atwood or Kurt Vonnegut? Consider those holes filled.

What I read in 2010:

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire*

Abel’s Island by William Steig*

American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center by William Langewiesche

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed by John Vaillant

How Soccer Explains the World: An [unlikely] theory of globalization by Franklin Foer

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

The Adventuress by Audrey Niffenegger

The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden*

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

The Boy in the Moon: A father’s search for his disabled son by Ian Brown

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem

The Dog Who Wouldn't Be by Farley Mowat*

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman*

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

Summer Sisters by Judy Bloom*

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald*

The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White*

The Princess Bride by William Goldman*

The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis*

Bloom by Michael Lista

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Pitouie by Derek Winkler

Annabel by Kathleen Winter

February by Lisa Moore

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson*

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

This year, I'm looking forward to lots of new reading (and some rereading as well). At the top of my list are:

The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud

Storyteller: The authorized biography of Roald Dahl by Donald Sturrock

Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant

Tiger by John Vaillant

Here's to another great year of reading!

The Railway Children

Something about the holidays makes me want to read old children's books. It probably has to do with being at home in my old room, surrounded by my old books, many of which I received as Christmas gifts. Christmas is a pretty nostalgic season anyway, and if you throw old books into the mix, I'm toast. One of my favourite books when I was a kid was Edith Nesbit's The Railway Children, which was given to me by my mum's sister the Christmas I was 6 (I know this because, like a good book-giver, my aunt wrote the date and who it was from on the first page).

The Railway Children tells the story of a well-to-do London family who are forced to move to a small country cottage after the father is arrested on charges of espionage. This is all set pre-WWI, so the transition from the city to the country is quite a shock, not simply because the children have lost their father, but because they are living in very different circumstances. They no longer have the money for fancy food or large closets, which is hard on the mother but kind of an adventure for the three children, Roberta (Bobbie),  Peter and Phyllis. 

At the bottom of the garden of the new house ran the railway, and the children became fascinated by the trains and all the regular passengers, especially a man they called The Old Gentleman, who always waved back to the children, who would stand on the fence and wave at the trains. It didn't take long for the Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis to become a regular fixture along the railway line, and soon the conductors and the local station master came to know them quite well. The novel is filled with adventures the children had along the railway line, including one that involved the girls tearing up their red petticoats so they could flag down a train after they saw that a rockslide had buried part of the tracks. 

Of course, this is a story about family as much as childhood adventures, and a lot of it takes place in and around the little cottage. Details such as how the mother is concerned about money around birthdays and how Peter injured himself with a garden rake are as central to the children's lives as the railway that they love, and Nesbit manages to wind the adventure around the mundane in such a way that the story seems as if it could really be true. 

Nesbit's descriptions of Three Chimneys (the family's country cottage) and the nearby town and the countryside are just so vivid that I have to believe it's all based on somewhere real that I would very much like to visit. When I was a kid I dreamed of having the sorts of afternoon adventures Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis had, and now when I read this book I rather taken by how nice their cottage sounds. There's a bit of romance around the penny-pinching the family is forced to do, and Nesbit plays on the idea of a simpler life in the country without losing sight of how financial matters and worry over the father would have made life less than idyllic. That day-to-day awareness, and the fact that the children's adventures aren't too outrageous, pull the story into the realm of the plausible, which makes for a much more compelling read.

Behind the scenes of all the happy and sunlit adventures the children have, though, is a kind of political story that I totally missed as a kid. The father is arrested at the beginning because he has been charged with spying for the Russians, and later in the story the family takes in a Russian man who they find half-dead. He tells them that he is a writer and was thrown out of his country for the stories he told. The Railway Children was published in 1906, and Nesbit seems to have been working out some political backlash in the edges of her children's novel. The political in no way overtakes the more light and cheerful story of the Waterbury family, but it does add just a hint of something weightier that sets this novel apart from many of the other children's books of the time. That being said, you just know that Nesbit worked out how to give the family a happy ending.

The Railway Children
by Edith Nesbit
First published in 1906 (cover image shown from Scholastic Canada edition)

The Hobbit

I don't know what it is about fall that makes me want to read The Hobbit, but almost without fail the end of September rolls around and I start thinking about Tolkein's woods, and about how I'd rather go on some adventure than think ahead to the term papers I have coming up. Well, I say that. I think I'd be equally happy if I could spend a few afternoons just reading in a sunny chair next to a pot of tea. This, I suppose, makes me rather like Bilbo Baggins, hobbit extraordinaire and central character of the novel.

Tolkein's follow-up novels (and their movie adaptations), The Lord of the Rings trilogy, made the setting of Middle Earth and its reknwoned wizard, Gandalf, quite famous. But Gandalf's first appearance is in The Hobbit, as is the discovery of the ring that causes so much trouble later on. In The Hobbit, though, the ring is more of a parlour trick. Before I go into all that, here are the plot points.

Bilbo Baggins is a fairly typical hobbit, in that he isn't particularly adventurous. He's curious, but not curious enough to actually check anything out, if you see what I mean. He likes his little home and his little life and is rather attached to his undemanding routine. Of course, all of that is taken away from him when Gandalf pays him a visit. Shortly thereafter, Bilbo is roped into an adventure with a crew of dwarves hungry to recover their treasure and their home. 

And so it begins. Bilbo and the dwarves, all twelve of them, set out for the Lonely Mountain – where Smaug the dragon lies on top of their treasure. The journey takes them through all kinds of terrain and in contact with all manner of characters – some friends, mostly foes. They steal weapons from trolls, spend time with some friendly elves and later imprisoned by others, are captured by goblins (in the midst of which, Bilbo acquires the ring that allows him to disappear – making him a much more successful burglar).

The ring becomes a central part of the action in this story. Bilbo's disappearing tricks save the dwarves many times and add a lot of fun to the story of a nervous, but excited, little hobbit getting his first big taste of the outside world. There's lots of literary theory about this novel, and Tolkien's work in general, but when I read it, I'm reading it for fun. 

Usually, I'm not a huge fan of fantasy stories, with made-up worlds and languages and species. But Tolkien's Middle Earth is so nested in the look and feel of Europe (and mostly England) and the creatures (elves, hobbits, dwarves, goblins, men, etc.) so well described, both individually and as they compare to each other, that the story isn't weighed down by them. Instead, it's enjoyable to read, and the pace of the writing and the vivid descriptions catch you up in the action the way Bilbo gets caught up by the expedition. I read it for the first time when I was in elementary school, but I have to say that I enjoy it far more now than I did then. Now when I read it I catch the subtleties of Tolkien's allusions and language play, and understand the larger story he's building. The thought of yelling "attercop" at a spider still makes me laugh and I get just as much joy out of the image of Bilbo at the top of the Mirkwood Forest canopy as I once did, but I also see the danger that lies beneath the surface of that world, which makes the adventure the characters are on that much more exciting.

The Hobbit does what the best fall-weekend novels do: it whisks you away from where you are and gives you something to think about afterwards. It doesn't demand anything from you but a sense of fun and the ability to see how Tolkien's careful parallels to the real world are meant to unburden you, not call you to action. And really, although it may be appropriate for children, content-wise, it's an eminently satisfying adult reread.

The Hobbit
By J. R. R. Tolkien
First published in 1937 (cover image shown from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt edition)

The Magician's Nephew

There's something about early August that makes me very nostalgic for my childhood pre-working summers, when this would have been just the mid-way point and not on the tail end. This is the time of year, more than any other (even Christmas), that makes me want to revisit kids' and YA novels. Last summer it was rereading the last two Harry Potter books over a three-day stretch; this year, I hunkered down and reread C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew in an afternoon (I could have sworn it was a longer read).

Despite what the movies would have you think, The Magician's Nephew (not The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe) is the first book in Lewis' famous series. And it wasn't until rereading it that I finally saw how religious his books are. Certainly, I had heard about the religious aspects, but they didn't strike me as particularly extreme in the other stories. Generally speaking, religion was a much bigger deal during the time period the stories are set in (prior to WWI) so it always made sense to me that religious details would be incorporated.

Well, rereading The Magician's Nephew really casts a different light on the rest of the series. It isn't obviously more religious, I guess. The characters don't quote passages from the Bible or anything, and in some ways all the magic that Lewis conjures up is rather anti-Christian doctrine. But the last half of books makes it clear that The Magician's Nephew is decidedly Biblical, and is quite literally the Book of Genesis for the series. But I'll get to that in a minute.

The story is fairly simple. Digory and Polly are neighbours living in London. Digory has only recently arrived, though, and is staying with his aunt and uncle (brother and sister, not married couple) because his mother (their sister) is gravely ill and his father has gone to India to work. So, Digory is not at all happy with his situation, but he and Polly become friends and start exploring the attics of their rowhouses. Digory's Uncle Andrew fancies himself a magician, and at the first opportunity he gets, he tests out his magic on the two children. Uncle Andrew has created rings (yellow ones and green ones) that will take you to another world. He, of course, is too afraid to try them and instead tricks Polly into putting on a yellow one. She vanishes immediately, much to Uncle Andrew's delight and Digory's dismay, and Uncle Andrew persuades Digory to go after her because she doesn't have the green ring, which will supposedly bring her back. Digory heads off into the unknown and discovers the Wood Between Worlds. 

I love the structure Lewis constructed for his magical travel. The Wood Between Worlds is a beautiful forest, filled with little pools. Each pool is the entrance to another world, which is how the children discover that their green rings will take them to any world they desire (put them on, choose a pool and jump in) and the yellow rings will always return them to the Wood. Genius. Looking to have some fun before heading back to Uncle Andrew, they children go and explore a world that is dying. In it, they discover Charn, an ancient city filled with no one; that is, until Digory rings a bell and awakens the Emperess Jadis, who is also a witch and quite evil. By unhappy chance, the children accidentally bring Jadis back to London with them, where she wreaks havoc.

They decide they need to lose her somewhere, so they use their rings and take her back to the Wood and into a new pool. But this world is dark, and the children worry they've somehow stumbled upon a place that doesn't exist. Then they hear a song, low and lovely, and slowly light comes into the world, and then water and mountains and plants and trees and animals and all the other things that make up a world (sound familiar?). Of course, the singer is Aslan, the great lion, and he is creating Narnia. The story really becomes very Biblical at this point, and Digory even has to go pick an apple from a far-off and walled garden in a task that tests his faith and belief in Aslan. It's interesting to read, actually, because although it seems heavy-handed now, I'm sure I didn't notice any of the allusions as a child (of course, I was not a religious a child, but still).

The ending, which manages to explain The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, before that book has even come out, is perhaps the best example of foreshadowing I have ever read. Really, anyone looking to write a series should study Lewis' technique of subtly couching future details into otherwise relevant descriptions and explanations. In many ways, The Magician's Nephew is just an extended prologue to the rest of the stories; it works best when you know what's coming, which rewards rereaders who come back to books many years after first enjoying them. It's really a perfect little reread: it's quick, it's interesting, and it reminds you of just how wonderous and new stories felt when you were a kid – before images and ideas seemed familiar – and you could just get lost in the world of the story.

The Magician's Nephew
By C.S. Lewis
First published in 1955 (cover image shown from HarperTrophy edition)

The Sword in the Stone

Sometimes it just works out that you discover a great book because of a movie, and not the other way around. That is the case with T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone, which first made itself known to me (and, I'm sure many other people) through the Disney movie of the same name. But as good as that movie is (I love it as a kid), the book far surpasses it.

Generally, the story goes like this. Wart lives in Sir Ector's castle in the very ancient times of England when there were still valiant knights and dragons to fight and wizards and witches and Robin Hood (excuse me, Robin Wood – White clears history's name fumble quite nicely). Wart is not Sir Ector's son, though, that honour falls to Kay who is a couple of years older and despite all of his advantages, at least eight times more insecure. Anyway, Wart goes into the Forest Sauvage (old England has some suspiciously French names in White, which I suspect is a nod to the original Morte d'Arthur) and, after spending a rather harrowing night in the wild trying to retrieve a lost hawk, he stumbles upon Merlyn.

Of course, Merlyn knew he was coming because he ages backwards and because he's a magician. Wart and Merlyn head back to the castle and Merlyn becomes the boys' tutor. And, sure, he teaches them both all sorts of important things, but really he saves the best – and most cryptic – lessons for Wart. Merlyn, of course, knows that Wart is going to become King Arthur (his real name being Arthur) and he goes about preparing him for the job by turning him into various animals and letting him learn indirect lessons about valour and bravery and history.

The lessons are one of my favourite parts of the book. I like the way White has imagined the the different social codes and ingrained memories of the various animals. I also like that Wart isn't a natural as any of them. He has to learn to swim like a fish; he has to be taught how to fly; he is conscious of the way the shape of his body changes and White describes it all in a way that makes you think of how weird it would be to suddenly become a snake (or whatever). 

My other favourite part are the anachronisms. The story is full of them – because Merlyn a) ages backwards, and b) is not always very good at his spells, which means sometimes bowler hats end up in the 12th century – and the characters' reactions are perfect. Usually, they don't even notice because whatever is being mentioned or conjured is so foreign that they can't even begin to understand it. Merlyn, though, goes into fits over it, which is hilarious. Additionally, because the book was written in the '30s (prior to the outbreak of WWII), a lot of the anachronisms now seem really old fashioned, which adds another level of humour to the references.

Of all this, though, I'm not sure how much younger readers pick up. There are certainly points that are obviously funny and meant to make kids laugh, but there's a lot going on that would be so far over their heads that it can only have been written for their parents. It's a pretty quick read – certainly as face-paced as any thriller – and it's the sort of perfectly engaging book to bring on a picnic or something, during which you'll chuckle about something and the person you're with will want to know what's going on, so you'll have to explain to them something about a giant, at which point you'll realize that White has cleverly inserted a Hitler-Mussolini figure into the story who gets defeated before he does any real damage, and you'll wish that were really the case. And that's when it will strike you that, for all the lightness and the adventure, White's retelling of King Arthur's coming-of-age is also about England itself.

It's quite ingenious, really, how he buries that metaphor. And it works perfectly, elevating a children's story into something much greater and, in some ways, much sadder – but always gripping and almost always hilarious.

The Sword in the Stone
by T.H. White
First published in 1938 (cover image shown from Laurel Leaf edition)

The Great Gatsby

The real joy of rereading a book is getting to experience it in a different way; generally, you already know what happens, so instead of concentrating solely on the plot, you're free to notice other things. For me, in the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, it was the other way around. The first time I read the novel I was so struck by the language and the imagery Fitzgerald conjured up that several months later my memory of the plot was hazy at best. Although Fitzgerald's prose didn't dull with time, by my second reading I could give myself over more to the characters because I already knew what to expect from the language.

It a strange way, The Great Gatsby is a love story both on the surface and at its core, but less so in all the layers between the two. Fitzgerald sets up levels of emotion and depth of feeling, and in between them he slots all the other details of day to day life. It's a curious thing, really, because conventional wisdom says not to waste time explaining how characters get, physically, from one place to another. But Fitzgerald's characters always seem to be in motion; they walk across lawns, drive places, take the train, walk up steps, etc. And instead of being dull, all their movement heightens the story, making it about real people instead of just archetypes of the upper class in the roaring '20s.

The story goes like this: Nick Carraway, who comes from money in the mid-West, moves east to try out the bond business. He fought in the war and is well educated, but finds himself restless. So, he moves to Long Island (living on West Egg) and works in New York. As luck would have it, the little house he rents is next to an imposing mansion, which happens to belong to a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby. Gatsby throws wild, sprawling parties, but despite the debauchery, remains aloof. Most of the people who attend have never really met him and there are many, many rumours about who he is and what he's done. On East Egg, directly across the sound, live Nick's second-cousin Daisy and her husband Tom, with whom Nick went to school. Tom, who is seems has a history of philandering, has a mistress who he meets up with in New York. There are other characters as well – Jordan Baker, Nick's sort-of love interest and a friend of Daisy's, for example – who are necessary to the plot, but who don't capture your attention the same way. 

As I mentioned, this is a novel about love (as well as excess, the trappings of wealth, deceit, etc.), and mostly about the love of one man. Gatsby is in love with Daisy. They had an affair years ago, before she was married, and he never got over it. Neither, it ought to be said, did she; although, she managed to move her life along, nonetheless. Gatsby's fantasy is that he will be able to whisk Daisy away from Tom (and, I assume, her daughter) so that they can live the life he always dreamed of. It's a beautiful fantasy and really makes Gatsby the saddest character in the story, because you just know that things won't work out for him the way he's planned.

But Gatsby's love is quite straightforward compared with Tom's. Tom is not a character you warm up to, which almost seems intentional on his part (as if he wouldn't let Fitzgerald write him any other way). And yet, for all his distain and disinterest and fooling around, when his life with Daisy is threatened he seems genuinely wounded. True, Tom is jealous of possessions (his wife, no doubt, falls into this category at least some of the time), but when it comes down to it, he sees Daisy as more than a status piece and his hurt at hearing her say she never loved him surprises him as much as it does us. Then, of course, there's his mistress, Myrtle. There is nothing rich or status-enhancing about her (her husband runs the local gas station), but Tom dotes on her and has a life with her that suggests the attraction is more than physical. 

The plot is incredibly intricate, and just like in real life, certain things couldn't happen without what happened four steps back. But Fitzgerald's foreshadowing is very subtle, and although you know a story about this kind of lifestyle can't have a happy ending (that would just be too boring), the ending you get is quite unforeseeable until you're there, at which point you're stuck – like Nick – watching with shocked eyes and uncomfortable posture.

But the plot all winds together and comes back to the same themes. Love, is certainly one of them, but perhaps the most important element of The Great Gatsby is beauty. Fitzgerald's prose is beautiful, and he uses it to invoke a kind of unexpected beauty – the kind that hides the mundane. The settings are beautiful, the clothing is beautiful, the cars are beautiful. And, at the beginning at least, it seems the characters are all beautiful too. But as their safe, lovely little world erodes, the beautiful characters become less entrancing. There's nothing obvious about it; Fitzgerald certainly doesn't come out and comment on it, but you can tell that their formerly pristine edges are wearing away in places, that there are scuff marks and the like.

It's that decline in beauty that allows the shocking end to the story. In this world, beautiful people are untouchable, except by love, and for anything truly horrible to happen they must be exposed as regular. Their money doesn't insulate them, but their beauty does, until it can't any more. Because of its beauty, The Great Gatsby is more than a love story and a tragedy, it is a story about people. And strangely, for all the light and beauty and love, it's and a rather dark portrayal of humanity.

The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
First published in 1925 (cover image from 1995 Scribner edition)

Summer Reading

It's true that newspapers and magazines and publishers have been releasing "summer reading" lists since the beginning of May, but I prefer to hold off until summer has actually arrived. According to the calendar, that happened last week and since July 1st is just around the corner, I think it's safe to declare the season of summer reading open.

For me, summertime reading is about picking up forgotten books from around the house – books I've been meaning to read, books I stumble upon when rearranging and want to read again and, of course, those books that have achieved annual read status. Summer reading is also about books found at yardsales, picked up in borrowed or rented cottages and/or swapped with friends. In short, despite what most publications would have you believe, I am convinced that summer belongs to the well-loved and battered books, not the new blockbuster bestsellers.

So, what will I be reading? Here's my realistic list (that is, books I have and can read in the space of two months):
The Princess Bride by William Goldman – This has been an annual read for a long time now; I don't see that changing any time soon.     
Summer Sisters by Judy Bloom – It's been a few years since I read this and I'm ready to dig it out again.     
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges – A birthday gift; I do love short fiction.     
Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski – Some journalistic non-fiction for good measure.     
Bloom by Michael Lista – Summer is a great time for poetry, because you can read it at a leisurely pace.
I figure a book every two weeks is an achievable goal. Generally, though, I read faster than that, so if I get a chance, I'll read some of the other books on my to-read list, which never seems to get any shorter.

Now, besides what's on my little list, I would recommend the following as great holiday/beach/cottage/hammock reads:
The Boy in the Moon by Ian Brown – Engaging and award-winning.     
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones – Be prepared to pick this up and not be able to put it back down.
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro – It's a short-story novel and it's a classic of CanLit for a reason.     
Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden – Gripping stories deserve the space and time afforded by long summer weekends.     
Not Wanted on the Voyage by Timothy Findlay – Dramatic and suspenseful, it's brings a little weight to the sometimes too light/sweet summer fare.      
The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel – It's a little smutty, but that's well balanced by the engrossing story well-imagined pre-historic setting.

For other, perhaps more contemporary, summer reading lists, check out The Walrus, NPR, Salon, The Globe and Mail, The Gazette and The New York Times. 

Image shown a photo of books at a yardsale, on sale for $1 a piece.

Mister Pip

When I decided to start a book blog, I wanted to write about the books that worm their way into your everyday life. Of all the books I've read, Lloyd Jones novel Mister Pip might demonstrate that side of literature – the side that is all-encompassing, that draws you in and makes you feel like you know the characters as if you are a part of their world as much they've become a part of yours – better than anything I've ever read.

Mister Pip is set on a small island in the South Pacific in the early '90s. The island, which used to be home to a major mining operation, has fallen into a kind of civil war, with the "red skins" (an army from an undisclosed country) fighting the rebels. Jones focuses his story on one village on the island, which sounds pretty primitive in terms of its amenities (a collection of houses and a school building) but has enough to keep the residents happy.

When the story opens, the school has just been closed. Our narrator, Matilda (about 11 at the beginning of the story) is not lamenting this fact. In fact, she enjoys the freedom. So when her mum tells her that Mr. Watts - also known to the villagers as Pop Eye - the only white man in the town, is going to start teaching, she isn't sure what to expect. Mr. Watts isn't particularly qualified to be a teacher, so rather than try to give them lessons in math and science, he reads them Charles' Dickens Great Expectations. Because the story takes place in a world that the children have never experienced, Mr. Watts teaches them how to use their imagination. He asks them to close their eyes and say their name, just in their head. No one else can say your name like that, he tells them, explaining that Dickens (Mr. Dickens to all concerned here) did that until he could find Pip's voice and that they can do that to see England.

Mr. Watts doles out the novel one chapter each day. To fill in lesson time, he invites the mothers and grandmothers of the students to come in and tell them about things they know. One woman comes in to talk to the children about the colour blue; another recites recipes; Matilda's mother, who does not approve of Great Expectations, nor her daughter's infatuation with Pip, is a frequent visitor to the class. Dolores and Matilda have a strained relationship, and Dolores blames Mr. Watts for that. Matilda would rather hear about Pip than Jesus, and Dolores is a religious woman who resents Mr. Watts influence over her daughter.

After Mr. Watts reads the book to the class once, he goes back to the beginning and reads it to them again. The class reads it all the way through more than three times before disaster strikes.

The red skin army descend on the village. They make everyone line up and give their names. At first, they seem not so bad. But then a soldier discovers Matilda's shrine to Pip on the beach. Who is Pip, the army commander demands. Where are you hiding Pip? The children explain that Pip belongs to Mr. Dickens and Mr. Watts (who the army now think is Mr. Dickens) explains that Pip is a character in a book. But when Matilda runs to the school building to retrieve the book and clear up the confusion, it isn't there. So, in retaliation, the army ransacks all the homes in the village and burn everyone's possessions. Then they leave, saying they will be back and Pip had better be there.

In the meantime, Mr. Watts tries to keep moral up among the students. He tells them that if they can't read the book, they will have to recreate it through memory. He charges the children that they are responsible for making sure Dickens' masterpiece isn't forgotten. Of course, when the army returns, there is no Pip. So the army burns down their homes. And, without giving everything away, things go from bad to worse for the villagers.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mister Pip is how Jones puts you in exactly the same place as the villagers. Like them, and especially like Matilda and the other children, you know the situation on the island isn't good, but you have no concept of how bad it is. Like the children, you are shielded from reality by their fixation on Great Expectations. As the book moves farther and farther from their lives, your view on the violence occurring around them broadens. I don't want to give everything away, but the last 50 or so pages are shocking.

I thought I was reading Mister Pip because I needed a lighter book. I was wrong. Jones' story is incredibly compelling and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. The characters are wonderfully described and as a storyteller, Jones has serious guts. He isn't afraid to tell a story that might not be comfortable, but is nonetheless stunning. And, if you ever needed to be reminded of the power of literature, this book will do that for you.

Happy Birthday, Scout

That's right, this is the season of Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch's 50th birthday. Of course, because it's the anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, it's also the 50th birthday of all the novel's characters, including Atticus Finch, Jem, Dill, Boo Radley, Calpurnia and the Ewells, just to name a few.

In some ways, it's hard to believe that Harper Lee's classic has been around for half a century. In a lot of other ways, it's hard to believe that its only 50 years old. I've written about To Kill a Mockingbird before, so I won't go into the plot points again. It is one of my most-read books though. I can't remember how old I was the first time I read it, but I think it must have been either grade 5 or grade 6. By the time I was reading it under my desk (instead of paying attention in class) in grade 8, my copy was already well-worn. When we studied it in class the following year, I was the only one in the room who had already read it.

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most challenged books in North America, and I would like to think that celebrating its 50th anniversary - and recognizing why it has remained a relevant story for so long - will change that. It won't, I'm sure, and the thought of kids growing up without the novel makes me very sad indeed. That being said, I had been reading it for years before I ever studied it in class, so perhaps I needn't worry.

Happy Birthday To Kill a Mockingbird, you wear your age well.

Image shown the cover image of the Lippincott edition of To Kill a Mockingbird.