#53 - The Retreat

This may be hyperbole, but I think David Bergen is a national treasure. It's quite a statement to say that over the course of reading four of his novels, his Giller winner (The Time in Between) remains my least favourite. People, it won a major prize! Overall, I devoured A Year of Lesser and See the Child, and thought they were both excellent. But The Retreat might just be my favourite Bergen novel so far -- but I haven't read The Matter with Morris (just the first 50-odd pages for work), so I am reserving judgment until then.

The majority of the action in The Retreat takes place at a camp, the retreat of the novel's title, near The Lake of the Woods, just outside of Kenora. The landscape, having spent about a week there at a cottage of an old ex-boyfriend way back in the way back, is beautiful. The Lake of the Woods itself is huge, with crisp blue waters, but the pond close to the property isn't. It's murky, filled with reeds, and just as dangerous -- it's an important distinction, because major accidents and/or incidents happen throughout the book on or close to the water, and Bergen's ability to weave such an archetypal theme (man vs. nature) within his more specific, personal story, remains one of the book's true accomplishments.

But let me digress. Raymond Seymour, an 18-year-old Ojibway boy, finds himself embroiled in an love affair with niece of the local police. Their relationship -- hot and heavy -- burns out quickly, and not just as a result of the intervention of her father and uncle but, because, it's just not meant to last. Alice's uncle takes Raymond out onto the Lake and dumps him on an island -- expecting him not to return. This dynamic, bad cop/good kid, feels familiar, and it should, the relationship goes exactly where you expect and the penultimate action remains utterly heartbreaking. It's 1974, and Bergen chooses as a secondary background of sorts, to wrap The Kenora Crisis around his story, even though Raymond and his brother, who has just returned from being "raised" (read: forcibly removed) by a Mennonite family in the south, are tangentially involved in the uprising.

When Lizzie Byrd (17) and her family arrive at The Retreat, a quasi-commune run by "the Doctor," a self-important, psycho-babbling fool who cons people into believing he can heal their souls by "talk" and the simple life of camp, she's reluctant to participate. The births of her younger siblings have been hard on her mother, and her father desperately tries to save his family and her sanity by granting her every wish -- in this case, it's to spend the summer at The Retreat. Lizzie meets Raymond and a cautious friendship evolves into something more substantial. As the summer progresses, their feelings grow deeper, regardless of whether they truly understand one another's complex situations (her crazy family; his unfortunate situation with the cop that never seems to end). But as the season comes to an end, the novel finds its conclusion -- the characters, distraught, damaged and utterly changed by the events of the summer. It's an amazingly quiet novel for the amount of emotional damage that is wrought on the people within, which remains Bergen's exceptional ability as a writer -- to place people in crisis and not let them entirely recover.

This is my favourite kind of book, a great setting, a complex, real issue that meant something in history, family dynamics that remain complex and difficult, and action that's both believable and well-paced. In short, it's an excellent read, probably one of the best books off my shelf. The Bs have been utterly kind to me (Barnes, Bergen, brilliant!).

#17 - Arthur & George

Oh, Julian Barnes, how I adored Arthur & George. From its opening pages right up until the end, it's a complex mix of the fictional and the historical, a comment on colonialism/literature, and a rollicking good adventure. The novel even encouraged me to download The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to my iPad (it's on the 1001 Books list anyway). I'm not quite sure how to alphabetize my ebooks into my reading yet so it might remain unread for some time, but I digress.

Told from either man's changing perspectives, with a few odd other characters thrown in, the novel brings to life to exceptionally interesting characters: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, among others and George Edalji, a half-Scottish, half Parsee solicitor wrongly accused of a number of heinous crimes.

Doyle's a larger than life character -- both in the book and in his own mind, to a degree. He's the prototype for the colonial British man: athletic, sharp, intelligent, opinionated, moral, and just (to his own sense of duty and accomplishment, if that makes any sense -- we might question his upstanding "Britishness" under a post-colonial analysis and discover his beliefs lacking a broader, more realized context) and his confidence spills over every page. He marries a lovely woman because he should; and then promptly falls in love with someone else (but never acts upon his feelings in anyway that could be considered ungentlemanly). He strives to clear George Edalji's name because it's the right thing to do but doesn't believe in the suffrage of women. And it's these contradictions that make him such a fascinating character caught within Barnes's rollicking story.

George Edalji, a firm believer in truth with a capital "T" finds himself in quite a pickle when the local constabulary arrests him for mutilating animals and sending horrible, harmful prank letters to his own family. George, a solicitor by trade, firmly believes in the good, just righteousness of the legal system. It will save him. What he doesn't count on is the racism that feeds the decision to imprison him. Even when further animals end up mutilated, there's a "viable" explanation as per why George is still guilty of the crimes.When Sir Arthur reads about his case in an obscure newspaper, he sets his mind upon clearing George's name and helping him seek restitution for both his wrongful conviction and his imprisonment.

Even though their lives and personalities couldn't be more different, when they finally meet, their actions -- Doyle's "investigation" and subsequent attacks in the press and George Edalji's further insistence of his innocence -- challenged and then changed the existing legal system. But it is the personal lives of both men that keep the narrative from feeling dry and/or crisp. Barnes remains rich in his description of their lives, their wants, their needs, their loves (or lack thereof in the case of Edalji). He's also careful to keep a narrative distance. While we feel and know the racism behind George's conviction -- the staunch way that George himself refuses to believe it had any part in his troubles, how George firmly believes (and was brought up to be) himself to be an Englishman first, remains a fascinating part of his character. Goodness, I enjoyed this novel -- its pacing, the characters, the setting, the "investigation," -- all of it. It was a bright and welcome change -- to race through a book that you felt was somewhat flawless in terms of its prose and presentation.

I've never read any other Julian Barnes. I'm glad there is at least one other on my shelf that will be tackled the next time I reach the British section. It shouldn't take me too long. I can't believe that after finishing In the Time of Butterflies, I'll be back reading Austen again -- the last on my shelves.

#11 - The Very Thought Of You

When I got the British/Irish/Scottish section of my shelves, the book that came up first was Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You. At the time, I couldn't remember a) why I had this book in the first place or b) where it came from. Most of the books on my shelves are from various jobs I've had, things I've traded with friends at other publishers, blogger review copies, you get the idea. But this novel was a rarity, something I actually bought. I think I was trying to read all of the Orange Prize novels for some challenge I had invented for myself, or something.

Annnywaay, I was ultimately disappointed in this book, and found myself, more often than not, rolling my eyes at her prose and complaining, loudly, to my husband about how melodramatic and often nonsensical the book was as I was reading it yesterday while we were playing Scrabble on the iPad as the RRBB slept (you get a pattern here... a LOT of reading goes on while the RRBB sleeps these last few days). The story of a young girl evacuated from London at the start of the Second World War, The Very Thought of You simply tries too hard to capture the essence of the time and place. The novel opens promisingly -- echoes of The Remains of the Day float through the book as it describes the fall of the house of Ashton, whose last remaining heir, Thomas, had just died leaving the house to the National Trust and its inevitable treasures up for auction.

Thomas, and his wife Elizabeth, opened their home to 80-odd boys and girls during the war. With his body destroyed by polio, and the remaining members of his family dead, Thomas and his wife, Elizabeth, who is, natch, beautiful but damaged, find solace in children roaming the halls and playing outside while the war rages around them. Anna Sands, a quiet, contemplative child, misses her mother desperately but finds her way at Ashton Park. The girl gets drawn into the complex adult relationships between the Ashtons and the various other people embroiled in their unhappiness.

There are way, way too many characters in this book, and much of the narrative consists of awkward, cliched prose that melodramatically describes not only the failing relationship between the main characters, but also the multiple extra-marital affairs that seem to happen all over the place. No one is happily married in Alison's novel, and it gets a bit tiresome after a while. The story could have been simpler, the prose more direct, and then I could actually understand its inclusion on the Orange Prize longlist last year.

The author does an exceptional job of getting into the mind of Anna as a child, but then falls down by dragging the reader through the rest of her life in a Titanic-like moment that feels very put upon as an ending. There's no doubt that Alison has talent, but the novel suffers from a lack of true perspective, it tries too hard, which ends up meaning a lot of it just isn't believable. There's a point where too much tragedy between the pages simply becomes too much tragedy. I felt something similar when watching The Company Men last week at Stars and Strollers. Sometimes, the reader just needs a break from all awful things humans can do to one another, they need to actually love their partners, and someone, somewhere needs to find a bit of happiness, even if it's only for a moment. I'm not saying that Alison's characters don't -- I'm just saying that it's all a bit overdone.

London during the war is a fascinating subject for me. One of my favourites to read about, and the idea of the novel works, as does its basic plot -- but there were two secondary characters, Norton, a diplomat with whom Thomas Ashton worked, and his wife Peter, whose lives would have made for a far more interesting novel than the sappy "love gone wrong" and then "love lost forever" storyline occupied by the Ashtons, the two main adult characters. It's a shame when one gets to the end of a book and all one has to say for it is, "well, I'm glad that's done." And considering the other Orange Prize nominees, including Barbara Kingsolver's exceptional The Lacuna, I'm surprised that the panel included this book at all. However, despite Alison's first novel jitters (overwritten sentences, the tendency to say something, then repeat it just in case the reader didn't get it the first time, introducing bucketloads of characters that never appear again, the need to tell the WHOLE story), I'm curious to see how she matures as a writer. I'm sure her next novel will straighten out some of the above and what great exposure for an up-and-coming writer regardless of how I ended up feeling about the book.

#5 - Abide with Me

Elizabeth Strout is the kind of writer whose novels have such a solid moral core that you don't even realize their depth until you're at the end, teary-eyed, and wondering how she managed to be so subtle in her prose, yet so overwhelmingly apparent in her themes both at the same time. But wait, let me back up a little. There's a subset of American fiction, primarily written by literary writers, people like Strout and Marilynne Robinson, that I would equate to the "old woman on her deathbed" narrative that sometimes defines our Canadian canon, and that's the "pastor going through crisis" trope (would we call it a trope? Do I even remember what that word means?) that you find in novels like Home or Gilead. So, when I first started Abide with Me, I thought, 'oh, here we go, Strout's just putting in her two cents worth in terms of that American tradition.'

But what a rich tradition it is, and what a rich novel Abide with Me turned out to be. The story of a widower who is the minister of a small town in New England where the rustic setting not only traps its inhabitants during the long, cold winter, it turns them, often, against one another through fits of gossip, jealousy and petty indiscriminations. Tyler Caskey arrives young, bright-eyed and newly married. His wife, Lauren, is almost too big for the town with her bushels of red hair and big city ways. She spends too much money and isn't all that interested in being a minister's wife. Not to mention the fact that the town isn't all that crazy about her, either. But then, she dies a horrible, tragic death (and I'm not spoiling anything here), and Tyler's lost his way, and the novel turns -- it becomes about grieving, about loss, about life after tragedy, and the subtle ways Strout moves through Tyler's experience don't even become readily apparent until the end of the novel, when you fully understand how hard it must have been for him to lose the woman he loved, but also the life he expected to lead.

Not only is Tyler suffering from the loss of his wife, but it seems everyone else in town has undergone some sort of trouble. From adultery to actual crimes, Strout's novel pits the concept of grief up against some very real problems that exist within the human condition, perhaps to explore how grief affects people in many different ways, that it comes in many different forms. By the end, the book moves into a separate stage, and it is through the idea of healing, whether it's by telling the truth finally, by allowing yourself to be forgiven, or by respecting the fact that sometimes you simply can't continue, the entire town can't help but move through Tyler's grief with him, and it has a very poignant impact on everyone.

I adored this novel. I was so taken by the character of Katherine, Tyler's five-year-old daughter, who so vicerally experiences her mother's death that my heart broke on every page, and the sheer inability for the people around her to see how and why she's suffering (with the exception of her father who, while baffled by his daughter's behaviour, clearly loves her more than life itself) or to give her the hand she needs felt so real to me, primarily because I too lost my mother, but not at such a young age. All in all, the novel, set in the 1950s, explores gender roles, explores the banality of small-town life, the suffication of spending so much time indoors when the snow is piled high and all the women can do is make beds and polish floors to keep themselves sane, and it also explores the idea of faith, how it can stretch and bend, but also break, just at the very moment when you need it the most -- and this is a theme for which I am quite familiar with in my own life these days.

I'm amazed that I had these novels just sitting collecting dust for so long. But I am a true believer in fate when it comes to reading. You pick up a book at the right time for you to be reading that book -- if you don't finish, it's not always the book's fault, it's just perhaps not the right moment to be reading. I needed both Amy and Isabelle and Abide with Me this month. They have enriched my life in ways that I find hard to express -- and given me something to aspire to, Strout's writing is simple exquisite.

READING CHALLENGES: Off the Shelf.

#67 - Amy And Isabelle

After suffering through Pearl, was I ever grateful for Elizabeth Strout's excellent Amy and Isabelle. When I was combing the shelves for something to read, I had forgotten that Strout wrote the excellent Olive Kitteridge, and you can see similar themes in her earlier novel: small town life, history repeating itself, the problems of parenthood, mother-daughter relationships (even though Olive had a son, correct?), so I should say parent/child relationships.

Regardless, Amy and Isabelle remains a thoughtful, engrossing novel that takes place, I think as the 60s are turning into the 70s. Isabelle, the mother, and Amy, the daughter, each live with their own internal restrictions that affect their relationship. Isabelle is strict, complex, sad -- she tells everyone she's a widow, but you know that's not the whole story -- and is in love with her boss at the shoe mill where she works as a secretary. So proper she always wears pantyhose in the heat of summer (the hottest on record), her thin brown hair consistently pulled into a French twist, she's unprepared for the issues that arise over her daughter: typical teenage stuff, lying, inappropriate love affairs, and then a shock that changes everything.

Amy's naive in an intelligent way. She was raised by an honest, forthright person (for the most part) and believes that when someone says something, they mean it. And her good heart, her good nature, gets her into a situation that ultimately disappoints her, it's heartbreaking for both mother and daughter.

Strout has a gift for small town life, like in Olive Kitteridge, she intersperses the story of the main character with other colourful people -- people like Amy's best friend Stacy, her parents, the church women and a truly delightful character called Fat Bev (who comes from French Canadian stock; naturally).

Shirley Falls, Maine might be experiencing a heat wave but the weather isn't the only thing stagnating. As the summer progresses, and as the lies pile up both for Amy and for Isabelle, it's a relief when the truth rains down, both metaphorically and literally -- the storm breaks not just the weather, and it's glorious. The novel itself reads like that moment just after a storm when everything feels fresh and renewed. I honestly enjoyed this novel so much that I spent the few spare minutes finishing it yesterday morning when I should have still been sleeping. I did regret this for a moment when the RRBB had such a rough night last night, but good lord, it was a good read. I honestly think that Alice Munro is an excellent comp for Strout, so if you're a fan, I'd be curious to see what someone else thinks.

READING CHALLENGES: What else? Off the Shelf!

WHAT'S UP NEXT: I started Joyce Maynard's The Good Daughters and am already finding it a bit lacking. The prose feels a little sloppy and repetitious at the moment, but I'm hoping the further I get into the actual story, the more this will abate.

#66 - Pearl

Oh, this book. OH THIS BOOK. I wish I had better things to write about Mary Gordon's Pearl. I know how hard it is to write a novel, and I always try to judge books with that thought in mind, but I couldn't get over how annoying I found the narrative voice in this book. Gordon uses the second person, a device that rarely works beyond Choose Your Own Adventure, and the narrator TELLS the entire story. I know it's obnoxious but it's the kind of writing I hate -- the storytelling, the David Adams Richards-esque, perspective that ultimately means that the writer doesn't trust the reader to GET it.

Pearl, the title character, is a, natch, beautiful young woman in her twenties; she's impressionable but brilliant at languages, so she's studying Irish in Ireland in the 1990s. Taking a very tragic accident to heart, she chains herself to the American embassy after putting herself on a hunger strike for six weeks. She's going to die for a cause -- in a roundabout way, the Peace accord that Sinn Fein signed -- and feels her actions are right and just. Her mother, Maria, a strong-minded, strong-willed woman who came of age in the 60s, flies to Ireland to try and save her daughter's life.

The premise feels so forced, in fact, the melodrama of the entire story degrades the very real politics in the novel. It belittles them to the point that I was a little offended. That Pearl invokes Bobby Sands, that she is so taken by his very real and very necessary actions, isn't what bothered me, what bothered me the most is the arrogant way the narrator speaks from her perspective. It's not that Gordon is a bad writer -- she's just far, far too precious of a writer. It's as if she's in love with every single sentence and doesn't have the heart to cut to the actual story, which, had it been allowed to be shown instead of told, could have been quite affecting.

There's also a moment of such pure absurdity, I mean, eye-rolling absurdity, between Pearl, Maria and Joseph, Maria's quasi-adoptive brother (he's the son of her housekeeper; Maria's mother died when she was two and her father employed Joseph's mother; he became like Maria's brother, caretaker, and so much more), that put the nail in the coffin for this novel for me. I almost didn't finish but I am on a mission and I stuck with it. But I'll tell you one thing -- it's hellish to try and read a book you really aren't liking at 4 AM. On the whole, I didn't find a single part of this book believable, not the characters, not the situation, and especially not the intrusive, annoying, overbearing narrator who just wouldn't remove themselves and let me enjoy the writing. It's the first dud from my shelves. How disappointing, eh?

#60 - A Long Long Way

Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way surprised me, and that's not easy to do. Yesterday, I had plucked it and Sarah Waters's Affinity off my shelves to start reading upon finishing up the Mo Hayder. I don't know why I chose one over the other -- except the beginning passages of Barry's novel reminded me in a way of A Star Called Henry, and once I started, I couldn't put the book down until I was weeping at the end.

Willie Dunne, the son of a police commander in Dublin, hasn't grown tall enough (you must be six feet) by his teenage years to join the constabulary so, instead, he joins the army at the very beginning of the First World War. Willie and his three sisters live in the Police Castle with their father, their mother having passed away in childbirth years before. The Dublin before the war is a very different Dublin during the war and even more so once the war is over. Home Rule becomes an issue, and the Irish soldiers fighting for freedom, country and King, go from heroes to villains in one fell swoop. And while Willie is far away from the politics invading his country, his life, his identity, stuck in the mud at the Somme, breathing in mustard gas at Ypres, and seeing death and destruction all around, the very nature of the issues are never far away either.

Barry, from what I can gather from his short bio at the beginning of the novel, is a playwright, and often you can sense this throughout. The dialogue and characters are so very well developed, so pristine in their environment, that you know there's been a sure hand in their creation. But, often, much of what sits outside the characters and their dialogue, and this is a rare criticism for I enjoyed this novel very much, feels like stage direction -- a lot of repetitive details, re-used observations, and a little bit too much of a dependence on heavy metaphors.

Yet, you can't help but have your heart on your sleeve when reading Willie Dunne's story. He has tender feelings for Gretta, a girl whose father was injured by Willie's dad himself during a particular uprising; and this love keeps him alive as he sits covered in lice, grime and his own piss at the bottom of a trench. The horrors of the First World War have been fictionalized by Canadian writers so exceptionally over the course of our literary history. The horses sinking into the mud in The Wars, the morphine-addicted character in Three Day Road; the First World War defined Canada as a nation, we were exhalted for our bravery, we held positions, and this is how I'm used to reading the events. Yet, Barry has an entirely different perspective -- Willie's split in two. He's on furlough when Easter 1916 happens, and he sees the violence in a way that changes his mind about how or why he should be fighting. But it's so easy to be political when you're not the one in the trench, in a way, when you're the one throwing the rocks and refusing to go, abandoning the boys that went -- but those boys are still suffering, barraged by mortars and attacked at every corner by the enemy, their lives are not their own, but they must own their actions.

And when Willie is left for his second furlough, and aspects of his homecoming are inevitably difficult, your heart breaks for him. Nothing has stayed the same in Dublin during the time he's been at war, but he needs the stability, and needs to come home. What happens to a man no, rather, a boy born into his manhood by seeing and participating in unspeakable horror, who can't go home again? It's fitting when he arrives upon his doorstep that his youngest sister doesn't recognize him, and when everything he hoped to come back to falls apart, Willie still does the honourable thing -- he goes and visits the family of his fallen Captain, a man he respected because he held the line during the first instances of the gas when everyone else, rightfully, fled to save their lives.

There's a cast of motley characters that survive alongside our hero. My favourite, Christy Moran, the second in command, a brash, ballsy, opinionated brave fellow who hands away a medal as easily as he would share a ration, manages to add a lightness to many situations. There's the usual stereotyping of the Irish by the brass -- and by some of the other soldiers -- but the perspective on this war, the sacrifices that these boys made, and how it all changed because of what was happening at home, well, I've never read anything like it. While Henry Smart was holed up in the Post Office in A Star Called Henry, Willie Dunne was holed up in a trench in France and Belgium. They come from different places but they represent two very distinct aspects of Irish history, and Barry, alongside Roddy Doyle, creates an interesting, almost bookended reading experience should one choose to tackle the two novels together.

In the end, I wept, and wept, and there was more than one moment where I put my hand over my heart and held tight to my baby. This is not a post-partum emotional reader talking -- this is the result of a powerful story wrapped in a wonderful character. In the end, I was very sad to see his story close.

READING CHALLENGES: The Off the Shelf Challenge of course, and as Barry is Irish, I'm counting A Long Long Way for Around the World in 52 Days. Over the last couple weeks, I think I've managed to get through about 10 books from my shelves. There are hundreds more to go but I doubt I'll make my annual reading goal of 100 books. Simply too much went on this year. I think, too, I'll forgo my annual top 10 books list as well -- I'm just going to keep plowing through titles in the wee hours of the morning and actually enjoy the fact that our baby still wakes up a couple of times in the night to give me those stolen moments when everything is so quiet and my mind can wander over words, imagination, and impressive stories I don't expect to enjoy as much as I do.

#59 - Birdman

Mo Hayder remains one of my favourite crime writers. I had the good fortune to interview her a couple of years ago when she was in Toronto promoting the Walking Man series, still Jack Caffrey mysteries, but with the introduction of Flea Marley, the police diver, who becomes the other central character in the books. She's self-educated, incredibly smart, and it was one of the best interviews I had ever done (and she was very gracious when she signed my book).

Annnywaaay, I've had Birdman, the first Jack Caffrey mystery, on my shelf for about four years. Every time I look through my books to see what I should pick up next, I think, I should really read that Mo Hayder novel. I guess, with everything, and with my own superstitious nature about reading (books are ready for you at the right time in your life and never before... that's why you can't finish them if you start and put them down again , and why it took me at least seven tries to get through Crime and Punishment; it just wasn't the right time), it languished. There were always other books to read first. But I had just finished The Post-Birthday World and wanted something that I could read in a day -- and grabbed Birdman on a whim.

I don't know what it is about motherhood that inspires me to want to watch and read about murder and mayhem. I've been only keeping up with shows like Law and Order UK, Detroit 1-8-7, and watching the boxed set of Prime Suspect. My friend Duncan suggested it's because crime novels are easy to pick up and put down. You feel like you've accomplished a little something when you get to the end of a police drama: there's a mystery, it gets solved, people are punished. It's all my overloaded, exhausted brain can handle. Well, he's got a point. And maybe the escapism I used to get from watching movies, I'm finding in a good, solid, mystery/thriller here and there.

So, Birdman. It's a fairly typical crime novel, of course, because it's Mo Hayder, it's extremely well written and utterly readable. It charges along at a fast clip and before you know it, Jack's done it again: ruined another relationship, pissed off a whole bunch of people, and solved a heinous crime (in this case a lot of dead prostitutes/strippers/addicts) involving a serial killer (or killers). In a way, this novel is more structured than Hayder's later books. I'm not sure if this is part of a series with anything more linking it than Caffrey as the main character because it's all tied up very neatly at the end -- that's not to say it's a happy conclusion -- but there's a finality to this book that the Walking Man novels don't have. They all seem to pick up where the other left off in a deliciously addictive way.

Jack's new to the force in London, and it's his first big case. When they uncover the bodies of five women, all mutilated, all murdered, there's conflict in the force. There are clues that lead a racist, repugnant DI Diamond in the wrong direction and Jack, along with his partner Essex, have to fight against the curve to get everyone working in the right direction. His profile is correct, and when we meet the villain about eight pages in, you get the feeling that it's all coming together a bit too quickly, you know, like when the cops disappear too soon on Law and Order, and you know there's trouble with the case...and low and behold, once the villain becomes known to the police, the killing doesn't stop. So who is the real Birdman? Of course, it's a race against time for Caffrey and Essex to figure it out because there are real people involved now -- not just victims, but people with personal relationships to these officers.

Part of Vintage Canada's World of Crime series, I love how the jacket copy says, "For some killers, murder is just the beginning..." It's a pretty terrific tagline and utterly relevant to this particular book. I love it when there's a twist that's hinted, ever so slightly upon toward the beginning of the novel, and explodes at just the right time in the reading. Hayder's exceptional at creating completely creepy villains who do absolutely disgusting things. Yet, the level of (for lack of a better word) "grossness" that Hayder employs in her writing is consistently balanced with razor-sharp prose, snappy dialogue and intense research. These novels are solid, have ripping plots (how else do you read them in a night while breastfeeding a baby?) and hinge upon a fascinating character that she's created in Caffrey. I mean, he does remind me a little of Jackson Brodie -- Kate Atkinson's protagonist -- they're both damaged in a way that makes them so good at their job. In Caffrey's case, it's the disappearance of his younger brother when he was eight and the passionate way he's convinced his next-door neighbour, whom he still lives beside, is responsible for his murder.

Unlucky in love seems to be the MO for these kind of men, which, of course, makes them irresistible on the page, both to the reader and to just about every woman in their path. But romance never works out for Jack and it's a good thing too because how else would he solve the crime and save the day? I'd highly recommend any Mo Hayder novel for the crime/thriller lover. She's such an exceptional writer that it'll totally satisfy your craving for good sentences as much as your craving for, as my grandmother used to say, "a good whack on the head."

READING CHALLENGES: The Off The Shelf Challenge, of course. I already have a British writer for my Around the World in 52 Weeks, so I can't double count Hayder.

WHAT'S UP NEXT: I started Sebastian Barry's A Long, Long Way this morning and it absolutely reminded me of one of my all-time favourite books, A Star Called Henry, and so I'm hoping to continue it this evening. Not too much time to read today as I was alone with the baby and we took an amazing nap this afternoon. How delicious is it to lie in bed with your baby tucked into your chest, and then wake up with him snuggled right into your arm all smiley and sleepy when you both wake up. Even if the moment only lasts for about five minutes before he wakes up fully and discovers he's got shitty pants and is starving and, therefore, starts screaming, but it was a bit of bliss on a cold blustery day.

#58 - The Post-Birthday World

The Post-Birthday World, like many of Lionel Shriver's novels, manages to defy the reader's expectations both in its construction and its central thesis -- that a life can change drastically based upon one split-second decision. This is no rom-com, and while it might feel like Sliding Doors, there's little beyond the premise, that to act or not to act (and in Shriver's novel, it's very much an action that splits the protagonist's life into two distinct futures vs. happenstance, Gwyneth missing the tube or not missing the tube), in that one moment can change your life forever.

Irina Galina McGovern, children's book illustrator and common-law wife of Lawrence, both American ex-patriots living in London, against her better judgment, goes for a birthday dinner with the infamous, rakish, handsome professional snooker player, Ramsay. Lawrence is away on business. They have a standing birthday dinner date -- but it used to be a couple's thing. Ramsay's wife, Jude, was a collaborator of Irina's, and when their marriage fell apart, it fell to Lawrence and Irina to entertain Ramsay (who'd always pick up the cheque) on his birthday.

The story splits into two over a kiss: something much more than a birthday peck on the cheek, a knee-shaking, earth-shattering, fall-in-love-on-a-street-corner kind of kiss, that will determine two very different futures for our Irina. If she kisses Ramsay, she says good-bye to her lovely life with Lawrence; if she doesn't kiss him, she would be denying herself the chance to feel passionate love, one that involves great, great sex.

As each chapter vacillates between the two realities, each relationship breaks down and apart for different reasons. Love becomes deconstructed through the everyday reality of what it means to make a choice to be with someone. Irina's not a woman who can live without a man yet she isn't an anti-feminist character -- she's someone who has always prized life with someone above life on her own. Her past butts up against her future in various places throughout the novel: a self-obsessed Russian dancer of a mother; a life that she left behind in the States; the need to assimilate in some ways to her new life in London.

In a way, Irina is always in relation to something, to someone -- whether it's her art (and the forward momentum of her career) or the two men in her life. The chapters that deal with her life with Lawrence, are deemed "safe" -- he works for a think tank, is intelligent, but he's also controlling in strange and obstinate ways, turning his moral eye upon a drink in the afternoon, calling her a "moron" every now and again. And it's a relationship without passion. For years, Lawrence hasn't kissed her, I mean, really kissed her, and Irina misses this desperately. When she asks if they can't get married, his utterly crushing response is, "okay."

Her relationship, and subsequent marriage to Ramsay, is the polar opposite, even when it runs along the same time line -- Shriver is careful to keep the details just the same so the book does veer off and the reader gets lost but she also makes the two storylines distinct enough that you truly get a sense of how disparate Irina's life becomes from that fateful moment -- it's passionate, vibrant, even violent (with wicked fights; not fists), and full of absolutely fantastic sex and happy moments (when the two aren't battling).

Two sides of the same coin, Irina remains the same person, the same character, but the subtle changes in her that you see when she's with either man bring her sharply into focus throughout the novel. Success means different things in either of her worlds and aspects of her personality get lost in either relationship. Shriver is keen to point out that love is sometimes separate from sex and other times as tangled as your bodies get. She writes of mature, intelligent, adult relationships -- and she's the only author with her sort of aesthetic, her brutal honesty, her ability to make things palatable even when you dislike so many of the characters and their decisions, but still keep you utterly engaged as a writer. Irina is flawed, deeply, and you are the more interested to read each chapter for this reason.

There's no doubt in my mind that Shriver is one of my favourite working novelists. I adored So Much For That, especially in light of my own health issues, and the very essence of her writing always boils down to one thing for me -- if we can harken back to my second-year university course on existentialism -- Shriver writes so very convincingly of the human condition that I would challenge anyone to find a contemporary writer better. It seems she tackles an issue with each of her books, plants it solidly in a plot that would seem tepid to a lesser novelist, and while the themes might be love, relationships, sex and marriage, you know instantly that you aren't reading the Jennifer Weiner or Jodi Picoult versions of reality. There's depth and heft to Shriver's sharp intellect and the piercing nature of her pen ensures that no characters comes out unscathed.

In the end, it's up to the reader to imply, in a way, which was the right choice for Irina Galina to make, but the ending is just so satisfactory, and being a woman, I know what kind of relationship I'd prefer, but I don't want to spoil it -- it's actually worth getting through the 500-odd pages. And it's not often someone in my particular situation would have the patience to read a) a book this long and b) be willing to give up precious bits of sleep (like the hours between the feeding at 3 AM and the 6 AM feeding; it wouldn't have mattered, I'm on so much prednisone that sleep is hard to come by anyway, I'm no martyr, I'm just on meds) just to finish it.

READING CHALLENGES: The Off The Shelf Challenge. Yes, another one bites the dust or, rather, another book is banished to the magic box in the basement that every single guest coming into my home is forced to go through. My high school friends brought brunch over today and left with over 15 books between them. Go baby go! There will actually be space for dust to collect on my shelves by Christmas (if I have anything to say about it).

#54 - Started Early, Took My Dog

Kate Atkinson remains one of my favourite writers. I will drop any other book I've got for her new novel -- she's a lot like Laura Lippman in that way. She writes engrossing, utterly readable, quasi mystery books with flawed protagonists (ahh, Jackson, I knew exactly when you showed up in the narrative and it actually made me smile) and great, rollicking plots. In her latest, Started Early, Stole My Dog, Jackson Brodie is no longer a true private eye, semi-retired but working the odd case, he's on a road trip inspired by a case: a young woman wants to find out more about her birth family. Seems simple, right? But, of course, this being a book with Jackson Brodie as the main character, there are twists, turns, and some solid punches before he gets to the bottom of the mystery.

There are plenty of other stories woven into the narrative... a retired DCI, Tracy Waterhouse, does something so out of character, she has to go on the run. And then, she's chased. The group of police Waterhouse worked with, the old boys' club, has something to hide that Jackson stumbles upon. Lastly, an actress on her last legs, literally, as her mind starts to wander due to dementia, and the way her final action turns the tide on the entire story feels shocking, to say the least. Of course, Jackson, even when he tries his damnedest, can't stay out of the middle of all of it, and how Atkinson pulls it all together remains impressive throughout the novel.

It's the kind of novel that you can read in one sitting, the perfect for a book-a-day challenge. It just breezes along, pulls you in from the beginning and doesn't let go of your hand until you're absolutely on the last punctuation mark of the very last page wishing that you didn't read so bloody fast. There's really not much more to say except I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and won't spoil it at all for those of you who haven't discovered Atkinson yet.

Lastly, she was born in Scotland, which means that Kate Atkinson's novel counts as another Around the World in 52 Books, which means, maybe I'm at seven or eight now... Yay!

#53 - The True Deceiver

Trying to read more books published by NYRB remains one of the never-ending "should-do's" on my reading life. I admire just about everything about the publishers: the packages they create, the books they choose to publish, the authors they choose, and the quality of the writing. Yet, I never seem to get around to reading, well, ANY of them. So, I was pleased when our book club, The Vicious Circle, picked Tove Jansson's The True Believer as a monthly pick.

Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki, and she was an illustrator as well as an author. She grew up spending the summers on the Gulf of Finland, in a small fishing cabin, and the setting of The True Deceiver seems absolutely informed by the time she spent in that kind of an environment. The setting is stark, snow-filled, cold, and austere. The novel opens, "It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling." The darkness isn't frightening, it's not meant to create the Let the Right One In kind of environment, it's a fact of life, a season to get through -- life still goes on, groceries need to be delivered, dogs need to be walked, boats need to built. I like how Jansson creates the setting, it informs and layers the story but it doesn't overwhelm the novel.

The story revolves around two women who live in the small village. A strange, awkward girl named Katri Kling who lives above the general store with her brother, Mats (whom everyone thinks is simple but is truly just quiet and introverted). And Anna Aemelin, a relatively wealthy (as compared to the people in the rest of the village) children's artist who is a bit of a recluse. From the beginning of the novel Katri has a plan -- she wants to gain an "in" with Anna, she has a very specific, calculated plan to ingratiate herself into her life, and nothing will stop her from getting her way. The entire village thinks the girl is strange. She has a gift with numbers and with honesty, and so many people come to her for problems: is so-and-so cheating on me, was I charged too much by the grocer, is blah-de-blah taking advantage -- the villagers are ashamed to ask for Katri's help but they continually do it. With this premise, she begins to be helpful to Anna. There's just one difference, Anna didn't ask for Katri's help, and doesn't necessarily want it. She lives in her own kind of blissful ignorance, like the dark of winter, Anna closes herself up in her house, illustrates her woodland characters, idealizes the childish way she has of creating a world in the undergrowth of the forest, and wishes she could do it differently, but change isn't something that comes naturally to Anna.

Eventually, Katri and her brother move in with Anna, into her house. Gossip starts. But as with anyone who sets out with a plan, things go astray. And the spareness, the sparsity of Jansson's prose nicely echoes the setting. Her words are cruel when they need to be, sparingly kind in places, but always clean, if that makes any sense -- she's an incredibly clean, crisp writer, she sort of writes like the snow itself, cold, but melts when the temperature reaches a certain point. The title refers, naturally, to Katri, but it's also pointedly about Anna, as well -- deception when it comes to yourself, deception concerning another person, they are both themes that run from beginning to end. What's simple doesn't always seem so, and telling the truth, and then recognizing the truth about yourself, both happen to these characters by the end. Overall, I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this novel, I read it quickly, in every spare moment I had, and I do have them these days, not necessarily to write long blog posts, but to read at 2 AM when the RRBB is breastfeeding. It's very easy to balance a book on The Breast Friend, let me tell you, as long as it's a teeny paperback. I'm having a little more trouble with my giant hardcover copy of The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell.

Also, Jansson was born in Finland, which means I can use this book for the Around the World in 52 Days challenge I do every year. I am sure I have managed about six weeks in total, but, still, I don't think I've ever read a Finnish author before. And I am sure I would read more of her books in a heartbeat considering how much I loved this one.

#20 - Wolf Hall

As a part of the "The Orange Prize is Definitely the New Black" challenge that we started over at the work blog, I finished reading Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall, last weekend. And then couldn't put it down. For days. On end. Now, that's saying something for a giant hulking 650-page tome about Thomas Cromwell, of all people. Mantel's certainly not the first, nor the last, to dramatize the Tudor period in literature. The lives and wives of Henry VIII have been immortalized, studied, fictionalized and melo-dramatized for our modern age -- movies, TV series, novels abound about Katherine, Anne, Jane, etc., to the point of overkill. I reached my Henry VIII peak after seeing about three episodes of the current series The Tudors on the Ceeb a couple of years ago, and it all felt wrong, wrong, wrong. First off, and I know it's me being far too literal, but as attractive as Jonathan Rhys Meyers might be, he's just not Henry VIII material -- and neither, for that matter, is Eric Bana -- not in looks, countenance or bearing. I mean, can't Hollywood even get the hair colour right?

Annnywaaay, like most history, pop culture weeds out the most salacious aspects and runs with them, and it's not like the Tudors were lacking in dramatic moments that would work well in terms of adaptations, but it all started to feel a bit tired. I mean really tired. Like The Other Boleyn Girl might just be one of the worst films I've ever seen kind of tired. So when Mantel's novel won the Booker, I kind of thought to myself, "Really, another novelization of the Tudors? Really?"

How wrong I was.

While this is a novel very much about the Tudors, it's from the perspective of an outsider. Someone who came from nothing to make something of himself, who used his very sharp mind to control people and situations to his benefit, and not necessarily with the ulterior motives that tend to drive most characters in historical fiction (sex, greed, lust). But what I really, really enjoyed is that this novel didn't focus entirely on the melodrama, it's actually devoid almost completely of it, and instead turns its focus to relationships of all kinds and how life functioned for these characters at this epic moment in time. It's not about the romance between Henry and Anne and what it means for love and betrayal; it's about how the romance between Henry and Anne changed everything -- and the man who not only made most of these changes possible, but who also participated in creating the whole background of the time period, was Thomas Cromwell.

The novel starts off with a young Thomas getting the stuffing knocked out of him by his brute of a father Walter. Soon, he takes off into the great big world to make a name for himself, and when the story picks up again, he's done just that -- found himself a position working for / serving Cardinal Wolsey, and when that turns sour, for the king himself. Politics, or political machinations rather, take centre stage in this novel. It's about maneuvering situations more than anything, about how to be a man, and how to teach his children to be good in life, but it's also about power -- finding it, taking it, destroying it -- and all the ways it contributes to the ups and downs of the Tudor court.

It's hard to describe the novel as anything other than engrossing. I found myself totally sucked in and read the first 300 pages in just over a day -- sometimes the narrative's a bit muddled (Mantel uses a lot of pronouns and the "he's" get all mixed up sometimes. I just decided that if I was remotely confused that the "he" in question was Cromwell and that seemed to work for me) and the book's unquestionably dense -- but I couldn't put it down. When I gave my copy away mid-read to a friend (I had another at work; we'd save on mail that way), and decided to finish the McEwan novel that I'd started, I found myself longing to know what was going to happen next to Cromwell. Would he convince More to change his mind? Would he ever find a second wife? Would these ghosts ever stop appearing in front of him? Who would he marry his son off to (we didn't get that far; it must be in the second book).

ALL of these questions are answered in history, yet I longed for Mantel's perspective. I loved how she would add rich description to scenes, sum everything up with a brilliant sentence, and keep my interest in her novel far passed my bed time. This book? Definitely better than TV.

WHAT'S NEXT. I've started Attica Locke's Black Water Rising. That's #2 of the Orange Prize nominated books. Will I make the June 9th deadline, probably not. But maybe...

Like I Need Another Reading Challenge

But I can't resist. I'm going to try to read all of the six Orange Prize-nominated books before the June 9th deadline. I figure, if the jury can do it, so can I. Right? And, plus, we publish three of the books through work, so that makes it easy to at least procure the first three on the list. Like I said, I've started with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, and it's a massive, massive book (645 pages) but it reads so well that I'm already three-quarters of the way through. Thankfully, the other novels aren't as daunting (one would hope).

#16 - Sylvanus Now

Rachel loaned me Donna Morrisey's Sylvanus Now when we went to see (shhh! keep your thoughts to yourself) this in the theatre back when there was still snow on the ground. She gushed. I tucked the book away and meant to get to it sooner. But once I started reading it, not even the exhaustion of sales conference could stop me from finishing. It's addictive, sad, aching in parts and absolutely worth forcing yourself to muddle through the somewhat gross mass market edition (why this format; a TP could be so lovely!).

The novel takes place in Newfoundland in the mid-to-late 1950s when the government all but ruined the fishing industry and forced inhabitants from their outports into communities. The novel very much relates a society in flux: from fishing by hand in a little boat to giant trawlers with destructive nets; from an industry built up around drying salt cod to fish factories; from community built around family, neighbour and self-made lives to roads, towns, and government subsidies. Parts of the novel are achingly tragic, and Morrisey's descriptions of the havoc "new" "industrial" fishing has on the lives of her characters broke my heart into pieces.

The story centres around Sylvanus Now, the youngest son of Eva, a widow who had already raised many, many children by the time he came along. He's a fisherman, of the old-school variety, who prefers to go out with line in hand and fish the coastal waters near his outpost. The apple of his eye, Adelaide (Addie) sets herself apart from the rest of her kin almost immediately. She loves to be alone (almost impossible in a house full of so many kids) and wants to stay in school. When they marry, their relationship is all heat and tragedy, happiness and sorrow, but it's also about the essence of marriage -- the coming together in so many different aspects of life, how your lives become so entwined and in ways you never expect, and what it means to love someone over years and years instead of months and months.

The driving force of Sylvanus's life seems to be resisting a certain kind of change. I'm sure, we can all relate. The way of life, salted cod and all, has sustained his family for generations, and his obstinance to evolution seems level-headed in a way, knowing what we know now about the depleted state of our oceans and how we're fishing ourselves into extinction. Those were the most poignant moments in the novel -- how Morrisey describes the differences between how Sylvanus fishes and how it's done industrially. Like anything, progress comes at a cost: smaller fish in coastal waters; mothers harvested before they've had a chance to spawn; the decimation from trawling nets, all parts of what we sacrifice to have fresh fish on our plates.

It's an unbearably human novel, somewhat like Kevin Patterson's excellent, excellent Consumption. Morrisey does for Newfoundland what Patterson does for the Arctic, describe in indelible detail the destruction of a way of life, and while we're richer for her work, I'm not sure if our country's richer for the loss of Syllie's sustainable fishing industry. Maybe I'm making terrible generalizations, but this felt like a very fitting book to read one month away from celebrating the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, where we need, more than ever, to think about where we've come from and how we want to leave this earth for the next generations. Like Addie, I'd never leave the outpost either -- its beauty seemed breathtaking, regenerative and part of her, just like my cottage is part of me.

All in all, I'm so pleased I found time to read this book in between conferences, pet peeves, rain, sun, antiques, plane rides, train rides and uncomfortable hotel rooms.

READING CHALLENGES: Yet another for the Canadian Book Challenge. I wish I had a better idea of how many Canadian books I've actually read since last July.

#14 - Cool Water

Dianne Warren's new novel, Cool Water, tells the story of good people, a whole town full of them. That's not to say their lives are easy or to be taken for granted, sure her characters have strife, but they also have substance and decency. Set in Juliet, Saskatchewan, the multi-perspective novel takes place over the course of about thirty-six hours. When I first started reading, and especially because the book opens with a horse race between ranch hands, I thought the book definitely had tones of Annie Proulx, all windswept, sand, and sorrow. But while the introductory vignette introduces us to the setting, the small town (population 1,100 or thereabouts), none of the characters reappear, except in story, during the rest of the book.

The intertwining stories of Norval, the bank manager; Blaine and his wife Vicki, a couple losing everything; Lee, a young man who just inherited everything; Marian and Willard, wife and brother of the deceased Ed; and Hank, an ex-rodeo cowboy-slash-farmer, unfold slowly, in delicate increments. Many have trouble sleeping and the whole book rolls out like those long hours in the night when one feels as though they're the only person on earth awake. Warren has a delicate touch, but that doesn't mean her writing reads overtly flowery or painfully self-aware (like so many Canadian novelists sometimes come across). In no way is this novel overwritten, either.

In fact, there's a patience to these stories, and the truth of the lives of these characters comes out in the details of the day-by-day. There's a beautiful line midway through the book that goes something like this -- that the nature of the day can change easily over night, day separate from night, like how one breath separates life from death -- I didn't mark it so I can't find the exact phrasing, but it struck me as unbearably true.

Lee's story resonated especially with me. Both of his quasi-adoptive parents have passed away and he's left behind on the farm; it's where he wants to be, but he's finding life alone in the house a difficult transition, dust collects, clothes go without being mended. When a grey Arab horse magically arrives in his front yard, he sets off for a marathon ride that echoes the book's first chapter. It's not even that the journey is epic -- 100 miles -- it's more what it signifies for Lee, a final transition from boy to adult, a man on his own farm, a man with his own horse. Lee's not the only one making a transition to a new chapter in his life throughout the book.

Cool Water remains full of characters whose lives are changing, sometimes irrevocably, but the novel's also about the small decisions that make up a day: whether to go to town or do your chores, whether to finally finish your to-do list, whether to round up the cattle immediately or get back together with a nincompoop ex-boyfriend. When you put them all together, the picture that unfolds isn't epic but human, and there's something utterly familiar throughout the pages -- but at the same time, interest in the story never wanes. It's a hard balance to strike.

The other parts of the book that I truly enjoyed were the will-they / won't they between Marian and Willard. They've been living together, without Ed, the actual person who brought Marian into the house in the first place, for nine years. She's desperate to tell him something; he's desperate for her not to leave now that her husband has passed away. Their stories are full of feelings that go unspoken and unleashed potential -- it's truly delightful.

I'm not going to lie, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. My intern, Amanda, who's reading it too, said that it's Annie Proulx meets Alice Munro, and I think she's right, except much of the story lacks the latter's biting sense of humanity, if that makes any sense. When one reads Alice Munro, and I'm not for a minute suggesting she isn't the best short story writer in the history of Canadian literature, there's always an underlying toughness, a sense that life always takes a wrong turn, disappoints. In Cool Water, life's disappointing for some, but that cynical streak isn't as present. I'm rambling, I know. Let me finish by just saying that Warren's novel was a truly lovely surprise this week.

READING CHALLENGES: Well, indeed, this title would count towards this year's Canadian Book Challenge. I'm not even sure where I am with that one...maybe this weekend I'll take a moment to figure it out.

MOVING ON: I'm still trying to get through The Third Policeman and The Wig My Father Wore as my Irish reads for March. I'm also compiling poetry for April. Happy St. Patrick's Day peeps!

#12 - Invisible Man

My goal for February was to read a couple books for Black History Month. Not surprisingly, I managed one: Ralph Ellison's classic, Invisible Man. The novel is substantial, both in its scope and narrative approach. It took me ages to read--and I abandoned it at one point and picked up a different book, read magazines, anything really to escape the relentless story.

The title, metaphorical, not literal, refers to the narrator's lack of identity as a black man. He can walk down a street and no one sees him. He can stand on the street and people will pass on by as if he wasn't even there. Invisibility -- blessing and a curse -- defines his life. And what a troubled life, kicked out of school (not his fault), and settling in New York City, things go from bad to worse for the man. The novel, which was first published in 1952, and it was interesting to read it now, over fifty years later. Ellison's writing style, while imbued with the tone and tenacity of the time, doesn't feel dated. In fact, the book reminded me a lot of The Best of Everything, not in its subject matter, characterization or plot, but more because of its uncanny ability to bring the story to life and embed in a very particular time and place.

My 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die tome suggests the novel has existential themes, and I'd agree, the narrator can't help but contemplate his existence; it's the purest form of a Manichean dialogue, race goes beyond allegory, it's essential and he's essentially being defined against it by just about everyone he comes into contact with him. There were moments when the cruelty of the world became almost too much for me to bear -- I turned away like I did when I watched Inglorious Basterds, when the violence, meant to be too much, shocked me into tears.

I was first supposed to read Ellison's masterpiece in university. At the time, I was too wrapped up in Faulkner, a writerly obsession I carried with me from high school. Since then, I've carried my same copy around with me from apartment to apartment, keeping it on that metaphorical 'to be read' someday shelf with many other books from school. Slowly but surely, I'm working my way through a lot of them. Because I read so much modern Can Lit, and let's face it, books that are published by the houses where I worked over the last five years, I've been rebelling a little. When I go to the shelf I'm inspired to pick up big, heavy books like Invisible Man and give my brain a work out. I imagine writing a paper filled with literary theory, can smell the air in the library as I do research, and think that Invisible Man does exactly what a classic piece of literature should do, it lasts.

READING CHALLENGES: 1001 Books, natch.

WHAT'S UP NEXT: I can't blog about the book I read this week, Emma Donoghue's Room (#13), because it's not out until Fall 2010. But I will say this, it's exceptional -- a literary page turner of the likes I've never read before, and it's become one of my favourite new books of the year. I can't wait to talk to people about it once it's actually published. So I'm going to try to finish the totally absurd The Third Policeman (also a 1001 Book), and a couple other Irish writers because it's March and my theme is, well, Irish writing this month.

#9 - The Value of Happiness

The subtitle of Raj Patel's The Value of Nothing questions 'why everything costs so much more than we think.' It's an intelligent, dense book that explores our modern society, its economic context, and the very real implications of our lifestyles. Patel sustains his main thesis, that the true value of goods and services are completely at odds with their prices as set out by the market, while people never give it a second thought. Patel wrote an amazing piece of added-value content for our Book Guide here that explains, in short, the kinds of material things we pay heavily for but that are relatively cheap.

I'm not going to lie, this isn't an easy book to read -- Patel looks at everything under a microscope, he digs deep into economic theory and pushes the reader to think hard about what he's saying. The very idea that, as a society, we are blind to the terrible impact our consumerist ways are having on the world around us despite seeing it, literally, every day, is compelling. In ways, it's easy for me to support Patel's work. I believe in his politics, sit slightly to the left, and have already been convinced that we need to change as a society before we ruin everything. Like Patel, I believe the first step to change is concerted dialogue about the issues, exactly the kind of thinking that is represented here.

However, what really struck me about the book concern post-colonialism. It's not surprising to me that issues with modern economics are so essentially tied up in old colonial models. We don't think about it everyday. We don't turn on our work blackberries and think, "hey, I'm exploiting the Congolese today." Has anyone else out there read King Leopold's Ghost? Hasn't the Congo been through enough? But I can't stop it -- I don't have a personal cellphone but I do have my BB and I use it all the time, every waking moment, and I don't think twice about what went into building it or sourcing it or the power that it takes to use it. I send money every month to David Suzuki and the WWF to try and balance out my consumption. Somehow, I feel ashamed that I'm not doing enough.

You can't be faint of heart when you read this book. You can't expect to be unchanged. And you can't imagine you'll keep living your life as you had been living it. Once you know the true value of what we consume, the cost to human life, the cost to the planet, you'll think hard and then you'll think twice.

READING CHALLENGES: The Better You Read The Better You Get. Oddly, I'm, um, not actually finishing the books from my shelves. However, I do feel like reading more nonfiction has reminded me that it's important to challenge yourself with smarty-smart material every once in a while. School's good.

Read an excerpt of The Value of Nothing here.

My David Bezmozgis Weekend (#8 - Natasha)

Ever since we did the Summer is Short - Read a Story promotion at work, I've had David Bezmozgis's Natasha and Other Stories on my TBR pile. You can read one of the stories from the collection here, at the Globe, from when we expanded our promotion in their online books section. The stories are sparse but not sparing, swift without feeling rushed, and amazing portraits of a family in flux -- immigrants new to Toronto managing to balance their lives on the cusp of old and new.

The collection contains seven linked stories and you simply fly threw them. His prose manages to get to the heart of the human condition without feeling preachy. In style, his writing reminds me a little of Alexander Hemon, although I couldn't put my finger on why. The central characters in Bezmozgis's stories, Bella, Roman and Mark Berman, are Russian Jews who have come to Canada from Latvia, leaving behind their home, their family (although by the end of the book many have migrated as well), and trying to make their way in Canada. I find these in-between stories, from the perspective of first generation immigrants, absolutely fascinating. There's something about the in-between perspective that illuminates parts of Canada, of being Canadian, that those of us born here take for granted. I always liken it to the idea of speaking another language -- it's as if it's a different world.

There are deep similarities between Victoria Day, Bezmozgis's first feature film, which I also watched this weekend on TMN, and the stories. An only child, Mark (the stories) and Ben (the film) struggle with adolescence, balance parental expectations and eventually find a way to define themselves by being inclusive of everything they are. Victoria Day's more of a coming-of-age tale than is contained within the stories. The film resonated because I was a teenager then, and even remember the news stories surrounding the disappearance of Benji Hayward disappeared after a Pink Floyd concert. In the film, Ben loans his hockey teammate some money and then deals with his conflicted feelings once it surfaces that the teen too has gone missing.

The movie has echoes of The Ice Storm and other atmospheric films about teenagers finding their way. Far, far less "teen" than say John Hughes (and I LOVE John Hughes -- it's a comparison point not a criticism), the picture manages to feel Canadian without the earnest-ness of so many of our native pictures (I did love One Week, but man, holy Canadian batman). There are moments of pure beauty within the film making -- even if the performances feel a bit stiff at moments. Regardless, I very much like the ambiguity within the picture, something that Bezmozgis imbues in his fiction as well.

If I had to pick a favourite story, it would be the title tale, "Natasha." But coming a close second would absolutely be "Minyan," the story that closes the collection. Annywaay, I truly enjoyed my David Bezmozgis weekend, I'd highly recommend you give it a try, maybe next weekend?

READING CHALLENGES: I'm counting this towards this year's Canadian Book Challenge. At some point I'll tally up exactly where I am with this but there are other things to write at the moment.

#1 - Dracula

For the majority of my life, I've associated with Dracula (the character) with scary things I'd rather not imagine thank you very much. "I vant to suck your blood" refrains and the truly awful Francis Ford Coppola movie that I remember seeing in the theatre did nothing to help the cause. Bram Stoker's (pictured left) book was mentally filed, "never going to read."

And then.

#1. The Undeath Match happened.

#2. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die happened.

#3. The Strand happened (and I fell a little in love with the TP edition I found sitting a top a pile of totally unrelated books).

#4. "My RRHB read the book in one sitting and wouldn't stop talking about it" happened.

Which meant I simply couldn't ignore it any longer.

And rightly so. It's an excellent novel. Echoes of one of my all-time favourite books, Frankenstein, are found within the epistolary format; the novel contains a truly kick-ass female heroine (why was that never portrayed in any film who actually stands up and fights both for her life and for her friends [in a totally appropriate 19th century way, of course] in a way a certain, modern character [ahem, starts with a "B" and ends with a "hella" er "ella"] never does); and there are some really fun, creepy scenes of Dracula making his way to England (the boat, ahhh, the boat) that actually made me shudder and I flipped the pages. Put all of it together and I'm kind of shocked to say that I'm really glad I finally finished Dracula.

If I have but one criticism of Stoker's work, it would have to be the bits of the book told in colloquial dialogue. I found Van Helsing's sections hard to understand and the way he spoke to be kind of silly and affected (not his character; that's exactly the opposite of this). But I got over this quickly as the book's action and pacing ripped me along on another part of the adventure. The story's so rich, so layered and so utterly engaging that my own preconceptions about affected speech/dialogue in novels can be set aside.

Also, it's pretty neat to see the literary evolution of the vampire from the sort-of beginning. I'm sure there were earlier moments in terms of the vampire appearing in literature, but I like thinking about all the moments in pop culture that has sprung from this particular text. Annywaaay, I just loved it.

READING CHALLENGES: 1001, baby.

WHAT'S UP NEXT: Reading The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt, Clean by Alejandro Junger, the first Sookie Stackhouse book and Sometimes a Great Notion. Yes, we'll see which one I actually finish first. Your guess is as good as mine.

#67 - Little Black Book of Stories

Have you ever noticed I generally start all of my reviews with some long, rambling introduction? Today will be no different.

I'm reading about 4 different books right now (What Should I Do With My Life, The Law of Dreams, Slowing Down to the Speed of Life; can you sense a theme there?), including the only one I've finished so far, A.S. Byatt's engaging short story collection, Little Black Book of Stories. Monday was spent in transit (doctor's app't, to and fro from work), which ensured I had a few spare moments to read (and by spare I mean an entire hour in the middle of the day waiting for the damn doctor).

We were at a birthday party this summer when the sister of a friend of mine was telling me the book that she had most enjoyed reading so far in 2009 was A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book. As I don't have a copy that book in my possession, when I found this book just sitting on my shelf, I thought, "yes, that's it for this week." Because if you can't have THE book why not at least try A book by one of the year's most celebrated writers?

Comprised of five lengthy short stories, Byatt's expansive imagination coupled with her never-ending quest to aptly describe human saddness (or longing, that might even be a better word), the book reminded me a little of Too Much Happiness. Every single character in the stories has been marred emotionally by their lives -- happiness isn't expected and nor is it gained. Life is rough, untidy, difficult and downright miserable in places. But because Byatt's an exceptional writer, the undercurrents running through each story, the little bits of lives that exude joy, are there as well. She also has some lovely fantastical elements in each -- the stories themselves tend a little toward fairy tales for adults.

My favourite of the five would have to be "Body Art": an aging doctor released from an unhappy marriage but not his religious convictions finds himself entangled with a young (apparently almost-homeless) artist charged with "brightening" up the ward. Universal questions like how and why is art important to a life are, of course, raised, but the unlikely relationship between the two resonates even more. The central tale, "A Stone Woman," has lovely fantastic elements, and "The Pink Ribbon" too -- even if that story is achingly sad (it too reminded me of Munro, specifically, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain").

On the whole, this collection was far more satisfying to read than Nocturnes. Because, holy cow, what a snoozer of a book that was.

READING CHALLENGES: Cleaning Out My Closet -- a book from the dark corners of my bookshelf, for once. And because this book just feels so British (along with A.S. Byatt being born in England), I'm tagging it for Around the World in 52 Books too. My only reading challenge for next year? To keep up with all of my other reading challenges. Or maybe even finish one or two.