#54 - Suddenly

First, I am going to preface this review with a statement: I adored Bonnie Burnard's The Good House. It's a novel I picked up on a whim from Book City when it was first published and sang its praises to everyone who would listen for years. It's a classic, right up there with The Stone Diaries, Clara Callan, and Away (book I read all around the same time), and so I was excited to read Bonnie Burnard's latest novel Suddenly, if only because it's the first one she's published in 10 years. That's a long time to wait.

Sadly, I probably never should have read this book. It's neither the right time of my life (it's a novel about truly middle-aged women) nor am I in the right frame of mind (having spent the last nine months battling my own life-threatening disease, I couldn't quite cope with the breast cancer victim at the centre of the novel) to appreciate the gift of Suddenly. There's no doubt in my mind that Bonnie Burnard's a wonderful writer. She has an ability to bring the everyday to the page that's unparalleled by many of her contemporaries. It's a unique gift, and her voice reminds me deeply of Carol Shields, which is why I was so very disappointed in this book.

Sandra, our heroine, finds an evil lump in her breast at the end of the summer -- her grandchildren have just gone back to the city with her husband, and she sits alone after a swim contemplating the hard reality of her future. Of course, her friend Jude has battled breast cancer and survived, and Sandra hopes she will too. Alas, it is not to be, and the majority of the novel takes place on her deathbed, that awesome Canadian-woman-writer-trope, where the family rallies around and all of the action takes place in reverse as the dying go through their lives, their relationships, their happiness and their regrets with a fine-toothed comb.

But one remains easily lost within this book because the point of view isn't that simple, it switches from Sandra, to her best friend Colleen (who is beautiful, but childless, natch, and married to Sandra's brother, the surgeon Richard), to her other best friend Jude (the ex-hippie, jilted by a Texan lover who left her on a farm to go fight the Vietnam war after casually fathering her son), to her husband Jack, and back again. It's all over the place and the pronoun "she" doesn't help matters when all three main characters are women...

It's a tedious book, with tedious, unbelievable characters: Sandra's a saint; so's Colleen only she's beautiful too, Jude's "wild" but reformed, and they all feel so old they're covered in a layer of dust. These are the women of my mother's generation, one of them could have been my mother, and yet they have no sense of humour, no sense of adventure and really no life in them at all -- even when it's "flashing" before them as their best friend fades away in a cloud of morphine and horrible pain from an awful disease that takes far too many women. The title confused me for nothing happens quickly in this book -- Burnard takes pages and pages to describe the most mundane aspects of everyday life, episodes that would have been best excised, and the whole novel would have been better for me if it read chronologically, if I got to see these women through their lives and not just as flashbacks in Sandra's journals, which, of course, she kept religiously her entire life.

But I feel bad being so critical, which is why I think that my original statement, that it's neither the right time of my life nor am I in the right mindset to contemplate a novel about someone so willingly giving in to a disease -- not fearing death is one thing but Sandra's utterly unrealistic in terms of her approach to illness; no one is as saintly as she's portrayed on the page, no one. There's no anger, and even when there is, it's slightly ridiculous -- two women having slight "words" during a winter storm and then poof, it's back to celebrating Sandra and her ability to hold the other two women together. Yawn.

I much prefer Lionel Shriver's approach to illness: frank, honest, angry, and also accepting -- there's something raw and real to how she writes about sickness, and I appreciated it. There's tedium to being sick, to having tests, to being stuck in a bed, and anger, relentless, unceasing anger about the fact that your body just isn't doing what it's supposed to. And I'd hope that Sandra would have a glimpse of this throughout the book, that someone, anyone, might rage against the dying of the light just a little before rubbing more lotion on her cold feet or recalling some other wonderful thing she did during her abnormally normal life and marriage.

So don't blame Burnard -- it's a great book club book for women of my mother's age, it's a terrific book to give your mother-in-law for Christmas, and it would have done wonders if Oprah's Book Club still existed and ever considered that Canada has a literature from which to choose reading material. But Suddenly, with its long, drawn-out conclusion (Sandra dies! People mourn!) just didn't cut it for me, a girl of a certain age who has battled a mean-ass frustrating disease for months.

#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!).

#52 - The Uncommon Reader

Sleep refused to settle upon me last night, and I finished The Leopard, and went to my shelves to carry on trying to find something alphabetical that I could read at 2 AM. Luckily, Alan Bennett's deliciously short The Uncommon Reader was almost next on my British shelf and its 119 pages meant that I finished it just before I finally drifted off to sleep. It was a cute book to read upon as we (Canada) are in the midst of a royal visit (in fact, I heard on the CBC yesterday that over 120 foreign bureaus/journalists will follow the couple on their visit as compared to the 24 that applied when the Queen visited was it last year? We're all a little entranced by the Duke and Duchess. As Lainey says; it's good for gossip...).

So, The Uncommon Reader of the book's title is The Queen, who has never truly read before -- for reading isn't necessarily "doing" anything and she's been a "doer" her entire life. An ode to reading with a cheeky sense of humour, Bennett's novella remains thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. Goodness, it's even got a fascinating vein of literary criticism -- of course The Queen wouldn't understand the nuances of Austen at first, having never lived among the lower classes. Of course, if she started her ready odyssey with Henry James, well, she might as well have given up all together.

One day, a travelling library shows up at Westminster and The Queen, on a whim, picks p a book by Ivy-Compton Burnett. Soon she's having Nathan, a former dishwasher and avid reader thus promoted to page, finding books for her from libraries all across London. They read books in aid of royal visits, they read popular fiction, they read the classics and all the while The Queen philosophically comes to understand the power of the written word in a way that was never presented to her before. The more she reads, the more she begins to write, and the more she begins to write, the more she decides she has something to say -- a voice, shall we call it.

I won't spoil the cheeky, cute ending but I will say that I smiled a lot while I was reading this book, even at 2AM when I really should have been sleeping. And, I've knocked another one off my shelves!

Yet Another Review Catch-Up #s48, 49, 50

Well, we were up north for about two weeks and got home the other day. A massive storm hit the greater Peterborough area, and so many trees were knocked down on our property that we were lucky that no one was hurt and/or no buildings were damaged. But goodness, as my RRHB exclaimed when he drove up just after the storm, "It's like the apocalypse hit." There are empty spaces where trees have stood my entire life. My uncle took this picture -- this pine tree just caught the edge of our sun deck and it took my husband and brother the better part of a day to chainsaw it out of there. For a while, my aunt and uncle were trapped as about six huge trees fell right by our gate making sure there was no way to drive out. I kept exclaiming, "Oh my god!" when the baby and I drove up on the Sunday after the storm. It was crazy. The biggest storm anyone has seen in 40 years. What up weather?

I did very little reading. The RRBB is a moving maniac, inches away from crawling, he's a going concern. You can't leave him alone on the floor any more. Within moments, he's miles away from where you first put him down, and he's going through a funny stage where he fusses a little if I'm not sitting right behind him as he plays. That, my friends, can't continue. But I indulged him a little only because we were at the cottage for the first time and he needs to be comfortable there.

Anyway, I am, of course, behind in my reading, my reviewing, my list-making, my life, my correspondence, just about everything. So here are some mini-reviews:

#48 - The Shape I Gave You - Martha Baillie
I have almost completely forgotten about this book, which doesn't bode well for an extremely positive review. Half-way through reading it, I decided, absurdly conceitedly, that I had solved all of the issues with Canadian publishing, it's that we read far too many Canadian books, publish far too many semi-high-brow literary novels, so that just about everyone, myself included, thinks that's what they should write. First of all, any of you who know me as a reader, know how frustrated I get on occasion with modern novels in epistolary format. It's a rare format one can make successful. This novel, the bulk of which is a long letter from Beatrice Mann (who lives in Toronto), a middle-aged woman who has just lost her teenage daughter, to Ulrike Huguenot (who lives in Berlin) explaining everything about her marriage, her motherhood, and the affair she had with Ulrike's father. It's an odd book -- a little too Ondaatje-esque for me, heavy on "literary" and light on plot, which, in my early years, I adored, I emulated, in fact. But as I get older, I like simpler prose, novels that are well paced and jolt like lightning. This isn't a fault with Ballie's writing -- it's more a personal preference. Anyway, it's not that I disliked the book, I just found it a little rough around the edges, and really wanted it to get to the point.

#49 - Voyage in the Dark - Jean Rhys
This is one from the shelves too, thank goodness, at least I am clearing off some books, even if I skipped my alphabetical order. Funny, just sentences above I lamented about authors who are heavy on the literary and light on plot, and now I am about to confess that modernist writer Rhys (whose lilting, patient sentences might define "literary") is one of my favourites. I might have read this book years and years ago; I picked up my copy to find all kinds of sentences tucked away inside the back cover -- not related to the book, just odd thoughts I must have climbed over a pillow or two in the middle of the night to scribble down on the nearest paper. They don't make any sense now. Anyway, the novel, the story of a young West Indian girl who loses herself in London and becomes a "fallen" woman, caused quite a controversy when it was first published. Now, with the state of the world almost completely fallen, and the stereotypical "hooker with a heart of gold" making an appearance in many George Clooney movies (well, maybe just in the terrifically boring The American), the fate of poor Anna Morgan isn't necessarily shocking, it's more tragic. Truly, honestly, utterly tragic -- if only because of the naivety, the utter essence of the girl's misery (a lack of fortune and a misunderstanding of her place in the world) comes across in every single page. She's displaced, disorganized and utterly incapable of unassisted survival -- yet, you can't help but ache when she makes poor decision after poor decision. Your heart pulls when she describes the relationship with Francine, a black servant in her father's house, with whom she was very close. And when the inevitable happens, and Anna finds herself in a world of trouble, it's not surprising the lengths she goes to fix the situation, and even less surprising, is the outcome. Rhys, whose stream of consciousness style isn't for everyone, inhabits Anna like a tic in a mattress, and its amazing how deep the character runs through language alone, not necessarily action (if that makes any sense). It took me ages to finish this book, both because I was up north alone with the baby and also because I kept starting and restarting paragraphs just because I liked them so much. She's such a wonderful writer.

#50 - Sisterhood Everlasting, Ann Brashares
There's not much to say about this book, it tugged away at my heart because I am sentimental about these novels. I think they are great YA fiction and wished I had them to read as a young girl (vs. the trashy Harlequin-esque crap I filled my brain with). I love their magical quality, and the ethereal nature of all of the characters -- but it isn't necessarily down to earth. Yes, it'll make you weepy, especially because Brashares does something shocking (even if her readers are now mature enough to handle it -- what happens still smarts) and forces her characters, through tragedy (and not just the loss of the pants) to truly grow up. It's a sweet book, a sweet read, just perfect for lying immobile after a kidney biopsy, and that's all I really have to say. Wait, just one other thing to note, having met Brashares in person, I will say that she is as lovely in person as her books, which is always a blessing and means I am ever-inclined to continue to read said author's work...

#25 - The Incident Report

Sometimes, there's a clear reason how and why books end up on my shelves. Mainly they're inherited from friends in publishing, rarely they are gifts, and often they are books that I've purchased for some reason or other. But when the time comes to actually reading and reviewing them, I can't remember the impetus -- the review, the award nod, the discussion -- that precipitated the book collecting dust over the months and months it lingers on my shelves. Such is the case for Martha Baillie's The Incident Report. I know it was long-listed for the Giller in 2009, and the Globe review must have intrigued me, but having never read The Shape I Gave You (it's on the shelf; don't worry, and I know exactly where it came from), I'm surprised I'd have two books by one author unread...usually I'll at least try to read something by an author before buying another work.

Annnywaaay.

At first, I didn't know what to make of the book: is it a novel, a collection of linked short stories, the dreaded micro-fiction? Instead, I'm choosing not to put a label on it or to define it in such a way because I think it takes away from what Baillie was trying to do. I enjoyed the book very much overall, especially the vignette-esque parts to the story -- those little episodes that took place outside of the main character's life itself (they reminded me of the interviews in Up in the Air with the employees who had been let go; that was my favourite part of that film, I think, also, the most original). Each morning, Miriam Gordon rides her bike to the Allan Gardens branch of the Toronto Public Library, where she works as a newly rebranded "Public Service Assistant." When anything untoward or out of the ordinary happens at the library, said "PSAs" are required to fill out an Incident Report, which is how the collection is organized. Short, snippets of incidents that make up a life -- both in terms of work (the strangers that come in and request and/or do strange things) and her personal life (a burgeoning relationship with a younger cab driver named Janko, with whom she falls in love).

Because this is a Canadian novel, there's a lot of tragedy, which to expand upon would ruin the book, so I won't say anything beyond the fact that, as a reader, I have grown a little weary of reading about "damaged" people. I know pain makes for exceptional sentences. Yet, I am craving a little everyday in my books these days...maybe because I'm living so much in the day-to-day myself, and have had enough tragedy in my own to fill fourteen lifetimes that I am sometimes exhausted with it in novels. However, the nature of the narrative in Baillie's book isn't exploitative -- it's simply stated, matter of fact, even -- and that helps to dampen the emotional overbearing nature of the events themselves within the incident reports.

Some of the novel remains unresolved. Miriam's finding notes in various places around the library -- hidden in books, left behind on the photocopier -- that have echoes of a Rigoletto opera that her father once loved, and she's reimagined as the heroine. This was the weakest part of the book from my point of view. The mystery isn't necessarily solved nor is it suitably explained but, in a sense, that's okay, because it's more about how Miriam perceives what's going on than what actually happens that seems important. It's a way for her to explore her relationship with her father and for the reader to know more about the background of her tragic life -- how she ended where she is emotionally.

The love story is sweet, and Janko and overwhelmingly lovely character. Some of the passages had echoes of Ondaatje for me, "The Cinnamon Peeler"-type stuff, and I didn't mind it at all (only rolled my eyes once, and for those of you counting, it was, yes a "ride-me-like-a-stallion-Morag-moment within the book"). In a way, Janko was such an innocent character, consistently reading children's books, living in a small, small apartment, someone displaced by the ideals of a better life -- there was a story behind his life that we never got to know, only because this is Miriam's life, and so we know him only in relation to her. Had the novel been more traditional, I'm sure we would have known far more of his back story but then I think we would have lost the beautiful sense of wonderment that comes across throughout the sections of the reports dedicated to their relationship.

So, I wouldn't say I was swept away by The Incident Report like I was with the next book I read, Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, and how much I appreciated its brevity. Also, it's another book off the shelves and into the box of books to be donated, shared, shipped off, and/or sent away to anyone who might be interested.

#23 - You Or Someone Like You

I'd never heard of Chandler Burr or Your or Someone Like You before our sales conference, maybe a year ago, maybe longer. A friend in the office read and adored the book, so I ordered a copy in to read and there it sat on my shelf at work, and then at home, for months and months. So, coming to the "Bs" meant finally reading it, and what a surprise, it's actually a terrific novel, and completely not what I expected.

In a way, Burr's narrator, Anne, reminded me of a character Lionel Shriver would create: intelligent, uncompromising and, at times, aggressive in terms of what she wants out of life. At it's heart, this is a book about words, what they mean, how we use them, and how books enrich a life. Anne's got a PhD in English Literature. She's been married to Howard Rosebaum for years. He's a huge Hollywood producer and they've been living in LA for years. They are the elite of the elite of LA, they know everyone, and everyone knows them.

Anne's background, British by accent, raised around the world by her parents as her father served in the Foreign Legion, has taught her that home is always where you choose to be; Howard, her husband, feels like home is where you go back to, where people always have to accept you. This fundamental different might not seem like much, but when religion becomes involved (Anne never converted; Howard is Jewish but not Orthodox or necessarily practicing), it becomes a fissure that threatens to tear the couple apart. And when their son Sam announces that he's going to visit Israel, to explore his roots, something happens to shake Howard and Anne's marriage to the core.

Surrounding the family drama, Anne begins a book club -- more like an intense canonical reading group -- and she takes directors, screenwriters, producers, line producers, and the like through the books as a means of self-improvement and understanding. From there, it gets out of control, an article in Vanity Fair, and then all of sudden she's about to produce her own movie. Not always likable and not always saying things that prove popular, when Howard has a crisis of conscious, Anne breaks all boundaries to get him back. In a way, she has chosen love and family above all else, and without Howard, she's not home, she's not where she wants to be. But how she gets there, and her opinions, and what she has to say to impact him, to pull him back from where he ended up, well, it's neither politically correct nor all together sane.

The book is delicious in its irony, and carries the weight of its words very well. It's hard to write a book about high literature, about some of the greatest books ever written, include many of their words, and not expect the book to hold up to the same kind of scrutiny. I didn't agree with a lot of what Anne said sometimes, especially towards the end, but that's the point -- she was trying to be argumentative, fighting with all of her words to get her husband back, and regardless of the outcome (SPOILER: she gives a disastrous speech in front of a lot of truly "important" people), you can't fault her reason or her passion. But I think the most successful aspect of the novel is the fact that it truly doesn't go where you expect a simple story about a marriage either falling apart or coming back together goes. In fact, there's nothing simple about this book, and that's to be celebrated.

CHALLENGES: Off the shelf...

#21 - The Lemon Table

My bookish love affair with Julian Barnes continues, and I thoroughly enjoyed his short story collection, The Lemon Table. It's funny, a lot of the criticisms that I leveled against Sarah Selecky's work -- mainly its use of the second person, a story in epistolary format, and general the "twee-ness" of much of the stories -- can be set against this collection as well. Barnes uses the second person, which normally makes me crazy; he has a story that's all letters from a kooky old lady to himself, wherein the self-referential nature of it all would usually enrage me; and the last piece could be described as microfiction with no "real" plot per se but a selection of descriptions that come together to tell the tale of an egotistical composer. All of the above normally have me throwing the book against the wall and giving up in exasperation. But gracious, these stories are excellent.

The last story, "The Silence" tells me that lemons are a symbol of death in Chinese culture -- I'm not sure how reliable the narrator is in this last piece, so I am not going to take that verbatim. But it does give the reader and understanding of the general theme that pervades the entire collection. Musings on the ends of lives, on divorce, on death, on widows and the children left behind, on relationships that could have been but never were -- and I imagined 'table' more of tableau -- of that terrible acting exercise where your teacher yells "hold" and everyone freezes in whatever position they landed upon.

It's a terrific collection, cohesive even though none of the stories are linked; rich in language and metaphor; paced brilliantly and truly honest in its interpretation of the human condition. In a way, these stories reminded me of Alice Munro, only there's a little bit more sex and bad language, especially in "Appetite," which like her story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," deals with the tragic and debilitating affects of Alzheimer's. Both Barnes and Munro have a distinct talent when it comes to creating characters and situations that highlight the slightly awkward and sometimes terrible aspects of human nature. In this, the stories feel real, they feel relevant, and they feel complete, but not overwritten.

On the whole, I can't get over the immense breadth of Barnes's talent for creating characters that cross decades, even centuries, are so wholly different in voice, and are so utterly believable (even when he writes from a woman's perspective). In the epistolary story, entitled, "Knowing French," a spunky pensioner sends the author Julian Barnes a number of letters, each progressively more familiar, with little gems of humour and slices of life: "What I was trying to say about Daphne [a fellow "inmate" at her home] is that she was always someone who looked forward, almost never back. This probably seems not much of a feat to you, but I promise it gets harder."

Indeed!

And then, in an amazing story about misguided and unrequited love, "The Story of Mats Israelson," he writes, "Barbro Lindwall was not convinced of her feelings for Anders Boden until she recognized that she would now spend the rest of her life with her husband."

Exactly!

And then my last favourite line from the book, it's from the last story, the microfiction-like one about the egocentric, aging, and silent-for-years composer: "Geese would be beautiful if cranes didn't exist."

You see!

I can't stop. I earmarked a half-dozen, maybe more, pages, and kept putting the book down on my chest just to savour particular passages. In "The Things You Know," two elderly widows sit down for a terribly polite breakfast once a month and what comes out of their mouths is completely different from the thoughts in their heads: the resentment towards one another only palpable as a fork stabs an egg or a waiter brings hot water instead of a purely fresh pot of tea -- it was actually one of my favourites among an already rich collection.

Overall, now I think I want to read every single book Julian Barnes has ever written. It'll be a challenge to find books this good on my shelves as I continue through them. Thankfully, I've got a few books from publishers to get through before I get back to my challenge. I need a bit of a break from the pressure of the 300-odd titles staring at me day after day from my desk chair.

#20 - Turtle Valley

I really must confess that the last couple books have really been not up to snuff in terms of the quality of reading that I've been finding on my shelves -- I mean, I've discovered some truly excellent authors I had never read before (Julian Barnes) and inhaled the backlist of others that I had come to love (Elizabeth Strout). I really wanted Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz to turn things around for me. Alas, it did not.

Sigh.

Turtle Valley has to be one of the most frustratingly erratic novels I have read in a long time. The narrative suffers from a distinct lack of focus and can't really decide what it is -- a ghost story, the tale of a woman's marriage falling apart, a story of seemingly never-ending family tragedy? Instead, all of these plots and themes are muddled up together in a rushed, convoluted, awkward book that had so much promise.

But let me digress. I really loved The Cure for Death by Lightning. And, if I can remember, I enjoyed A Recipe for Bees too. Anderson-Dargatz is a talented writer, no one is denying that fact, but this is not a cohesive novel that shows off her storytelling ability. Kat, short for Katrine, arrives home to Turtle Valley with her preschool-aged (I'm imagining; his age is never given) son Jeremy and disabled husband Ezra in tow (he suffered a stroke; tragedy #1) to help her aging parents pack up their house as a forest fire rages in the area. The natural disaster provides an excellent backdrop to the story, and allows a sense of natural urgency and drama to inhabit the narrative -- this is the good stuff. But where the novel falls completely apart is how Kat unravels the mysteries of her family's past, hidden letters, hidden stories, unforgiven truths, and a ghost that haunts them all.

There's no straight shooting in this novel. Anderson-Dargatz wants to tell things slowly but then there are places where the book just doesn't make sense, where it would have benefited from a serious sense of grounding just so the reader can believe what's going on. In one scene, Kat's lifting dinner out of the oven (wha?) and then discovering her grandmother's letters and racing off to the neighbour she once had an affair with (tragedy #2, lost love) and then suddenly the fire's on top of them and her father's dying (tragedy #3). Then she's telling her older sister about a moment of tenderness between she and her husband (marital discord and eventual divorce; tragedy #4), which is a scene we READ, that had nothing to do with the retelling or any of the moments she described, and this goes on throughout the entire novel.

Far too many scenic moments and heavy-handed imagery plague the narrative (how many times can we be told about the ladybugs, how many!!!) and, in places, the dialogue is terrifically awful, and I found myself doing the patented eyerolling, yelling in my head, "people don't talk that way!" as I was reading. The whole book would have benefited from a far more dedicated sense of time and place, and there needed to be far more attention to detail. Maybe if there wasn't so much going on -- ex-lovers and dying fathers and dead grandfathers haunting the place and half-bonkers mothers and angry husbands and ever-looming fires getting closer -- the book wouldn't feel so all over the place. In a sense, I felt overwhelmed by the trouble in the novel, by Kat's inability to actually cope with one aspect of her life at any one time -- she's racing around like a firebug, jumping from thing to thing, and we barrel along with her, much to the novel's disadvantage.

The real fire in the Shuswap happened in 1998 and, like I said, Anderson-Dargatz uses the event well, but I often wonder if so much tragedy feels or reads realistically -- it all felt so forced: her husband's stroke (how old was he, how did they explain the stroke, what was his prognosis, how long has he been sick, none of this is explained); their marital problems (which, of course, led to her wanting to rekindle a relationship with the hot potter next door whose own wife suffers, OF COURSE, from MS); the drama surrounding her grandfather's death (that's the big family mystery); her father's cancer and her mother's increasing dementia, that there are just too many awful things happening in this novel.

I know life is like that sometimes, terrible tragedy upon terrible tragedy, but I just didn't get Kat. She pleads with her husband to let her in, to let her love him, and then she cheats on him; her family keeps secrets upon secrets from her, and then they spring the truth on her at the very moment the fire's about to take all the proof away. And when they finally discover the love letters between her grandmother and her great-uncle (her mother's mother; her father's uncle), she races off with them even though, as I said above, she just took a pot roast out of the oven. And no one says ANYTHING. All in all, the erratic, convoluted nature of this book disappointed me throughout. I wanted to love it. I wanted to be swept away in the scenery and the shock of the fire -- I wanted to believe in the ghost story, the haunting, and I wanted Kat to redeem herself by the end, but there's too much in this novel for it to be wrapped up quickly, and yet, that's what Anderson-Dargatz attempts to do. The end of Kat's marriage is glossed over in one sentence, and then wrapped up awkwardly, as if it was simply a tool to insert even more drama into an already conflict-heavy, relationship-based family story.

All in all, I'm not sure how I feel about the book. I sped through it, so it definitely grabbed my attention, but I definitely expected more from this book, and this author.

READING CHALLENGES: Off the Shelf, and if I was doing a Canadian challenge, it'd be one for the books there too. I skipped the 1001 Books section of the shelves this time around, I really want to save those chunky books for the summer at the cottage, so I am trying to power through the Canadian, American, International and British sections over the winter/spring. Also, I only have one Austen left, Mansfield Park, and I don't want to read it just yet. So I might skip the "As" and come back around to it when I'm not so disappointed in my reading. Thank goodness for Julian Barnes. I'm reading his short story collection, The Lemon Table, now and it is excellent.

#19 - In The Time Of The Butterflies

When tackling this whole "off the shelf" challenge I have consigned myself to this year, I've been judging books by their page length, which, in my reading world, translates to how long it'll take me to get through it. In the Time of the Butterflies, from start to finish, clocks in at 324 pages. That's about three hours for me -- so maybe a day and a half in baby time. But GOOD GRIEF this book took me forever to read because I just couldn't get into it.

While I have no doubt it's an important novel -- the weight of the language, the heavy-handed metaphors and sentences dripping with meaning, tells me as much -- and the history that forms its central plot, the murder of the Mirabel sisters in the Dominican by the ruthless dictator Trujillo, is actually really fascinating. But the book does not, in my mind, "[make] a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression."

In a way, this is women's history. The novel centres around the 4 sisters and their daily lives -- their marriages, the birth of their children, and it's a domestic novel for the most part. And all the while, the four sisters are charging forward with a revolution. I just wish there was more revolution in the book and less meandering. I wanted to know more about the revolution and less about ribbons. I know that's probably quite sexist of me, that the fact that these were women revolutionaries challenging the male-established dictatorship means the novel should necessarily include discussions of the domestic, but it slowed down the action to a crawl. And by telling the story from all four of the sisters' points of view, Alvarez manages to disjoint the narrative so completely that you only get a fraction of each of their lives. Personally, I would have preferred the novel centre around Mirabel, the most dynamic and active of the four sisters. But, I didn't write this book.

First published in 1994, I think this book suffers a little from the trappings of the time -- long-winded and overly descriptive, I'm reminded of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine goes to see The English Patient (let me just state, for the record, that I loved both the book and the film), rolling her eyes the entire time in boredom. At least I think that's what happened -- I think that might be the only episode of Seinfeld that I've actually seen from start to finish. Annnywaay, she just doesn't get what the big deal is, and I feel that way about this novel. It's a national bestseller, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and blah de blah, accolades and great blurbs. Yet the book failed to keep my interest and over and over again I found myself not wanting to finish. It was written at a time when long, flowery sentences and the cult of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was going strong. And the importance of the novel, the politics, the very real struggle, the incredibly tragic murder of these four women, gets lost within the precious nature of the prose, the inevitable storytelling that never seems to actually tell a story but circle around it, planting pretty flowery sentences along the way.

Overall, I was disappointed, and found myself just wanted to get to the end, to see how they die -- and then, of course, it all happens off stage, which made me furious. They died violently, brutally, unnecessarily, and Alvarez should have had the bravery to write it. Instead, the book simply stops and then switches perspective again, heads back into its dreary narrative and tries to cover it up by describing their dead bodies as the remaining sister, Dede, identifies them. There's no power to this narrative; the power is in the truth of the events themselves, and Alvarez coasts along because of it. I know it's harsh but, again, books should stand the test of time, prose shouldn't feel dated, and a story of such importance should actually read that way, and not hold itself up on some bronzed pedestal.

READING CHALLENGES: Off the Shelf, and Around the World in 52 Books. Alvarez was born in the Dominican, and I usually really love Caribbean literature, but not so much in this case.

#18 - Pretty Little Dirty

If I remember correctly, I wasn't terrifically enthralled with Amanda Boyden's second novel, and so I let Pretty Little Dirty languish on the shelves for, well, years. And while there were a few problems with the novel, I found myself reading it well into places in my life where I should have been sleeping, and that's got to be a sign that it moved me in some inexplicable way.

Lisa Smith (oh what a placid, everyday name) has been best friends with Celeste Rose Diamond (yes, you read that right; the names are terrible, I know) since they were both in grade six and moved to Kansas City from other, larger cities (Chicago and New York respectively) before the start of the school year. Their friendship is epic: they are destined to love one another in ways that only schoolgirls can -- utterly and completely, beyond a familial relationship and creating a bond that best friends know is there, even if they can't explain it -- they love one another above and beyond anyone else.

Celeste, of course, is utterly beautiful, and both she and Lisa are gifted academically -- so they excel at school, when it's in their interests. They are suburban girls looking for adventure, and they find it the summer before they graduate from high school in the form of an teacher and his students from the local art college. Experimenting with sex and drugs, Boyden's narrative matches the feverish way young girls have of barreling into adult life -- it rolls around and around, often repeating similar thoughts over and over again -- much like a conversation between girlfriends. She has a strange tick to her writing -- keeps telling us, the reader, that Celeste's story is far more interesting than her own, but then we never get the full story when it comes right down to it, because the book is told from Lisa's perspective. Celeste remains at arm's length from us, and maybe that's the way Lisa likes it -- she's as much in love with being Celeste's best friend as she is with the idea of friendship itself. The ultimate unreliable narrator, in a way, putting her subject on a pedestal and then never really letting the reader see how the sculpture came into existence.

I also like how, while there's very typical things in this novel that even reminded me a little of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides (minus the very important Trip Fontaine character, naturally) -- mother's with psychological problems, broken families, fathers that hold on too tight to their daughters, sex with older men -- Boyden intersperses this with the punk scene in the 80s, something that's kind of close to my heart. Not because I was remotely a punk, but there was a time when I used to sneak downtown to hang out with skin heads at a bar called Michael's on Queen Street across from the Big Bop, and grew up just at a time when the wrong Doc Marten's could get your head kicked in -- so much of this book, while set earlier than my own teenage years, reminded me of my youth. I didn't do nearly the same amount of drugs, and never dropped out of university, but the struggle to find myself, to define myself outside of the tragedy that defined my own family, as Lisa attempts to do by attaching herself to the Diamonds, well, that rang incredibly true.

It's hard to write teenage angst without it coming across as melodramatic, and Boyden does it so very well in this book -- there were problems with the book in places, mainly the sex scenes (they were a bit too much and a little "ride me like a stallion Morag" for my liking) -- but overall, once I started this book, I couldn't put it down. I actually avoided sleep training the RRBB so I could read more, which meant we spent a lovely few hours with him sleeping on me as I powered through the pages. Lastly, I really, really wish people would stop using the second person. I don't know why it bugs me so much, but it does. However, I would have given my left shoe to be at some of the shows Boyden describes throughout the narrative. Black Flag in 1982? Probably way too violent for me but what an experience.

The Summary: Another Off the Shelf book down, and while the alphabetical reading is now weighing me down a little (I'm really not liking my current book, In the Time of the Butterflies), I am getting through the books much quicker than I thought. I might start reading 2 or 3 in a row from any particular shelf just so that I'm not bouncing around so much and can get through a letter before moving on to the next. In fact, maybe that's what I'll start now and pause my current book because it's seriously boring.

#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.

The Shelves: Their Glory

Here they are in all their glory: my beautiful, alphabetized books. My challenge: read every single one before I go back to work in October. Will I get there, doubtful, but I'm going to give it my all, or my eyeballs, so to speak. I probably will not read that Kleenex box, though. I didn't count the books but I estimate there's over 300 titles here, which is daunting, to say the least considering I've never even made it to 100 in a calendar year. Oh boy. What have I done?

#16 - Showbiz

I'm not going to lie -- I cursed my "I am totally determined to read everything on my shelves" challenge a little bit with Jason Anderson's Showbiz. Part-fan fiction, part faux-history, and part "journalist that gets caught in a thriller," the book, well, simply felt implausible to me. I'm not saying that Anderson isn't a good writer, and that he doesn't have one wickedly fun imagination -- both of these things are true, but this book wasn't for me.

Nathan Grant's a Canadian ex-pat journalist attempting to make it in NYC. He's broke, needs to find a job, a girl, a life. And when he stumbles across an old comedy record by a fellow named Jimmy Wynn -- he finally thinks he's getting somewhere. See, Wynn used to do an impersonation, a really good act, based around his contemporary president -- Cannon (who bears a thinly veiled resemblance to Kennedy). After Cannon's assassination, Wynn's act is ruined and he's on the run, disappeared into pop culture oblivion, because of a "secret" the president apparently imparted to him.

What Nathan knows he's got is a story he can sell to the magazine where his friend Colin works: The Betsey. It's dedicated entirely to the life and times of President Cannon. Bingo, he's pitched it, it's accepted and all of a sudden he's in Vegas trying to track down an aging comedian among bucket loads of aging stars all kicking out their last legs on the strip.

But where there's Cannon, there's conspiracy, and where the book turned into a strange film-like mess for me. I just didn't believe it, and that's my fault. I couldn't get passed the whole "faux" world in which it was written -- and Anderson heads off on a lot of tangents. The reader doesn't necessarily need to know the plots of every single B film that Wynn, in one of his many disguises after being disgraced, and nor do we need to read every single article or have each clue spelled out so exactly. The pop culture stuff within the novel was interesting but I've never been one for conspiracy theories and prefer to read my history straight -- not that I don't believe that fan fiction, which I kind of somewhat consider this to be, isn't a worthy enterprise, it completely is, but you have to accept and believe the action for it to work, and I just didn't with this book.

In the end, I finished it, but I did a lot of complaining while reading. I knew when my RRHB said, "What a great cover," that the book probably wasn't going to be for me -- and even though I enjoyed Nathan's almost hapless way of finding himself in the middle of the action and, like I said, am in awe of Anderson's amazing pop culture inventive imagination, on the whole I wanted just a tad bit more resolution and reality within this book. He could have gone even further with the satire and I would have enjoyed it more. I guess, that's what I'm trying to get at -- this book just didn't know exactly what it wanted to be (from my perspective). So, I have mixed emotions about this book. I want to support the writer, I think he's got an interesting talent, but the novel, overall, didn't really work for me.

But I think I'm a better person for reading it. It's important to read out of your comfort zone (literary fiction) and see what other kinds of novels are being published. See what other writers are coming up with in the wee hours of the night when their imaginary characters are being chased down by men with not-so innocent motives. If I were to give a good comp for this book, it might be the film St John of Las Vegas, which I actually enjoyed a great deal. It's got the same quirky, "mis-happenstance" feel to it that the novel strives for.

WHAT'S NEXT: I've started the utterly delightful Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, and am already enjoying it immensely. Then, we're into the Americans: Amanda Boyden's first novel, Pretty Little Dirty I think it's called.

#14 - Emma

When I was younger, much younger, the first time I went to university, I sort of decided that "old" books weren't worth studying. I did my whole English degree trying to avoid anything remotely written before the 21st century. It wasn't easy. I think I had to do a Romantics and a Victorian class, along with Shakespeare, but I filled every elective with Post-Colonial, American, Modern British, anything to avoid what I perceived to be "boring" books.

No one ever said I was particularly smart in my youth.

But what it means is that I haven't read all of Jane Austen. I've barely scratched the surface of some of the best work in the English language, actually. And it's a good time of my life, two degrees later, working in publishing, to be reading these books for the 1001 Books list. So, in my quest for alphabetical order in my off the shelf reading, Emma came up first.

We all know the story: Emma Woodhouse makes all kinds of matchmaking mistakes, often puts her foot in her mouth, gets jealous, and sometimes becomes a person she doesn't like very much. Emma takes the young, impressionable, yet pretty, Harriet under her wing (a girl with lesser prospects and an unknown lineage) and finding her a suitable husband (first Mr. Elton, then Mr. Churchill, then, disaster when Harriet falls for Mr. Knightley and Emma is not particularly pleased with this turn of events) becomes her goal. Throw in a little petty jealousy when the talented and accomplished Miss Jane Fairfax arrives on the scene and there's plenty of picnics and parties to entertain the romantic in everyone. Of course, there's a happy ending, and much emotional development upon Emma's part. In a way, it's a little bit of a coming of age novel -- as we watch Emma develop from girl to woman.

Any critical analysis of the novel on my part would be ridiculous, I'm sure there's nothing I can add to the conversation. We live in a society that's already Austen-obsessed: There are mugs (of which I own four), multiple movies, numerous (far inferior) books, and a whole host of ivory tower work surrounding her life and her novels. But I will say this, from a format perspective, in terms of pacing, humour, theme, and depth of character, Austen certainly defined the novel for, well, just about every novelist to come after her writing in this genre. The more I read, the more I am astounded at the depth of her structure, how it perfectly suits the characters, and reaches a conclusion, while completely predictable only because I've seen Clueless about a half-dozen times, that made me smile.

I read in the introduction that Jane Austen, while writing Emma, that she was creating a character that people wouldn't like very much -- and I heartily disagree. I loved Emma, couldn't stand Mrs. Elton (as I am sure I was supposed to), and thought that Jane Fairfax should just come clean already -- she'd feel so much better. See, how you just get caught up in them like they're real people? Sigh. So, I've got two more Austens on my shelf, so by the time I get back to the 1001 Books section, I'll have two more delightful reads before I get into the real down and dirty stuff that I've been avoiding reading for years (like Murakami -- I honestly have zero desire to read Murakami, but it's on my shelves and I will at least attempt it. But, luckily, it's in the "M's" so it'll take me months to get there. I've barely scratched the surface of the first letter of the alphabet on any shelf).

WHAT'S UP NEXT: I'm reading the new Per Petterson, I know, it's out of order, but I've got to read the books sent to me from the publishers -- they do get priority. Then I'll be back on my Canadian "A's", which I think is a novel by Jason Anderson from ECW.

#12 - Purple Hibiscus

Purple Hibiscus is an assured and impressive debut from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: what a difference between it and the other first novel that I just finished reading, The Very Thought of You. There are none of the first novel jitters in Adichie's work: the plot and pacing are excellent; the story crescendos at exactly the right moment, her prose is bright, lively and interesting; and, layers upon layers of fascinating observations exist between the essence of "family" and the breakdown of the "state" as Nigeria becomes subjected to a military coup.

Kambili and her brother Jaja, along with their mother, Beatrice, live in constant fear of their father, Eugene, a complex, difficult and deeply religious man. His Catholic faith sustains him, but it also represses his family, creates a power vacuum, and ultimately results in some of the most gut-wrenching violence (not related to a crime novel) I've read in a long, long time. Eugene rules his household with an iron fist, one clasped entirely to a rosary, and when his wife or children stray -- whether it's to talk to or see their "heathen" grandfather or to not become first in their class -- the consequences are dire. The children, aged 15 and 17, live in constant fear of their father's fists, his belt, his whip, and there's no telling exactly what will set him off. Set against his rigid rules and regulations, Kambili and her brother find a few weeks of freedom when they go to visit their aunt, Eugene's sister, Ifeoma. The time they spend with her changes them forever.

The backdrop of the family drama is set against a military coup happening in Nigeria. It's fascinating that Eugene, so brave (he runs a newspaper as well as owns a number of factories that make food) in his intentions to resist the powers of the regime. He refuses to bribe the police officers, sends his newspaper editor into hiding, and remains incredible generous to the people who work for him. Yet, when it comes to his family, he simply can not see that subjecting them to the extreme Catholic values that he believes, in his heart, will save his and their souls, through the violence and an extreme restriction of their basic human rights echoes the very nature of dictatorship. I think this dichotomy, for me, strikes a cord that resonates throughout the entire novel.

Kambili can't speak without stuttering, doesn't smile, lives in constant fear of her father's punishment, but she also loves him, as a daughter would. Her father's violence whether it's towards her, her brother or her mother, is simply another facet of everyday life. In a sense, I think this is why her voice feels so much younger than 15 -- she's suspended in a strange, awkward childhood, and only begins to blossom when she stays with her aunt and sees how normal teenage girls act. Kambili's a lovely character -- bright, intense, open, honest -- and when you feel her father's blows upon her back, you want to cry out for her to run away, to fight back, and when she finally does, it's a revelation.

There's so much to love about this novel, the setting, the way Adichie uses traditional language, the explanations of food, of their daily lives, and the rich landscape soiled, in a way, by the corruption that's all around. Violence, at home or by the state, is an everyday part of life, yet Kambili can still see the beauty in a simple, special purple hibiscus. It's an impressive thing to not have your spirit broken -- something I admire intensely about this book, and something that I strive for in my own everyday life. And even when things are truly, truly horrible, there's still a goodness in Kambili that can't be broken, scarred maybe, but even those find a way to heal eventually.

READING CHALLENGES: Around the World (Nigeria) and Off the Shelf.

WHAT'S NEXT: I'm on "A" from my 1001 Books shelf, so I started reading Emma this morning. I love that I have spread out the Austen to read in my lifetime. I would be sad if I had already read them all. I'm exited I still have three to go.

#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.

#10 - The Reserve

Well, let me be honest, Russell Banks' The Reserve totally surprised me. The only other novel by Banks that I've read was The Sweet Hereafter and, while I enjoyed it at the time, the only reason I had for reading it was to compare it to the film, which was excellent. I tried and abandoned Cloudsplitter, and never went back to Banks. But, I've got my new reading approach, and B is for Banks in my American fiction section, and hence, The Reserve.

Not unlike Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife, The Reserve has a totally unreliable and somewhat wicked female protagonist. Beautiful, charming, and terrifically disturbed, Vanessa Cole has returned to her parents' summer home after her second divorce. It's 1936, and her behaviour remains scandalous throughout the novel. And when artist Jordan Groves flies in to see her father's art collection, he's lured into a dangerous relationship with the woman that has far reaching consequences for both of them, and for their families.

There's a Gatsby meets Hemingway feeling to this novel. The Coles are of the upper classes, and it's not just money that separates them from the locals. But the fact that they own a section of an exclusive property in the Adirondacks called The Reserve. The locals work there; the summer people only vacation, and this dichotomy is explored throughout the novel, especially when Vanessa turns to the guide Hubert St. Germain to help her with the tragic situation that becomes the pinnacle moment in the book. When her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, Vanessa's demons, whether real or imagined (the novel only hints at the truth), are unleashed. And her actions are shocking.

Banks excels at plotting and the novel simply draws you in from start to finish. His descriptions of the setting are incredible and do much to add to the atmosphere that surrounds Vanessa's questionable actions. The fog that lies low over the lake echoes her state of mind kind of thing, and while it might sound sound cheesy when I write it here, I'm not doing Banks' exceptional prose justice. There's not a hint of melodrama, and there could be, and even though you feel you know these characters -- the flighty socialite, the rugged outdoorsman, the unhappy wife, the "artist" as "man" (aka Jackson Pollack), Banks has a way of twisting them just slightly to the left or the right, whether it's by their dialogue, or the actions that ultimately unhinge them, that casts them away from type.

I roared through this book. Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. I left the RRBB sleeping on me for hours so as not to disturb either his napping (I should have put him in his bed as we're trying to do more of these days) or my reading time. At one point, he was curled up on the bed beside me as I dove through the final thirty pages or so, with me rubbing his tummy so he would sleep just that little bit longer and I could finish. I was that engrossed. Sure, there are loose ends. Sure, there were things that could have been tidier, but on the whole The Reserve is damn fine novel, and it makes me actually want to read more Russell Banks. Thankfully, I've still got a copy of Cloudsplitter, as it's a 1001 Books book, which means it's now in alphabetical order -- and once I've finished my International "A" selection (Purple Hibiscus), I'm on to 1001 Books titles. But it'll be a while before I get to the "Bs". I've got three Austen novels to get through first.

Sigh. My life is rough, isn't it?

#9 - Weight

So, before I hit upon my latest reading strategy, I was at a loss for what to read next. I was in the bedroom with the baby and said to my RRHB, "just get me a book, any book." He picked Jeanette Winterson's Weight. As part of The Myths series, I'm not sure how to categorize this book -- part fiction, part philosophy and part mythology, Weight re-tells the story of Heracles, a scoundrel of a god, and Atlas, the man charged with holding up the world.

Again, this was a short book, so it took me merely an evening to read (including breastfeeding bouts throughout the night). Overall, I enjoyed Winterson's re-telling, and while I have read very little mythology in my lifetime and have only the cursory understanding of these stories in the first place, I liked the moral underpinning she employs here -- that we all have our own burdens, and like Atlas, we can choose or not choose to hold them up or simply let them go. Winterson relates everything back to her own life throughout the telling, and there are chapters where she explains her history, and how and why she came to write as she does. The personal element adds a little something to the tale and there are whimsical elements (like Atlas finally getting some company in the form of a pet; I won't spoil it, it is very cute) that I also enjoyed.

After reading The City Man, it's interesting that I got through another book so quickly -- and pleased to have read something slightly different than pure fiction. I have one more book from the series on my shelves, Karen Armstrong's, and will probably get to that shortly as well. For now, I'm moving on to American fiction and have started Russel Banks' The Reserve. Lots to get through!

#8 - The City Man

When trying to figure out what to read next from my shelves, I have come upon a master plan. I am going to alphabetize my books in somewhat of a Deanna-inspired Dewey system. Canadian books are gathered together, as are Nonfiction, American, British, International, 1001 Books titles, and Lifestyle. I know "nonfiction" covers a wide, wide, wide selection of titles, it's just easier than subdividing them even further. I'm also going to start a new section called "Writing" (books about writing, dictionaries, etc but I've already read all of those -- and unless people give me more of them, that section won't increase). This might take me a while but I bought the baby an activity mat yesterday (Baby Einstein's 'Baby Neptune') and he played on it for 45 minutes last night when he was exhausted, which means I might get even more time when he's awake and active! Hello more writing time! Then I think I'll start reading one from each section in their alphabetical order and go from there. I've been having a hard time choosing books, standing in front of my shelves for hours, baby on my shoulder, and I need to be quick and decisive these days. My brain is mushy enough.

Annnywaaay. Long, rambling digression aside, this is why when In the Company of Cheerful Ladies fell behind the couch and I seriously DID NOT have the energy to get it before bed, I picked up Howard Akler's completely riveting The City Man before bed the other day. It was one of those nights where I didn't sleep either so it meant I read the whole book in pretty much one sitting -- it's a swift, stylized 150-odd pages, so conducive to a night where your meds are keeping you up and you have to feed the baby anyway.

The novel is told in vignettes, or what I'd call micro fiction, short paragraphs that create the sense of a novel because they are all ultimately related but that could be read almost separately because of their coherence and beauty. Akler's created a world within these pages of Depression-era Toronto where pickpockets embroil themselves in the "whiz", grift at Union Station, smoke like fiends, and where one post-treatment (for "exhaustion" as we'd say in this day and age) reporter named Eli chases and then breaks the story. Of course, there's a love story, and pool halls, and a great Dame of a housemother -- in all the book feels like a great period film, complete with humour and heightened vocabulary.

Akler must have done a tonne of research, but that's not what I liked the most about the book. I mean, sure, the atmosphere is effective, the story sharp, but he writes clean, clean, clean prose -- and I admire that among all else. In a way, this book felt a little like that terrifically underrated George Clooney movie, Leatherheads . In full disclosure mode, Akler is a friend of one my closest girlfriends, and I've met him socially over the last few years, I'm just sorry that it took me this long to read his novel. I know he's working on another, and the moment it's out -- I'll be on it.

Another for the 2011 Off the Shelf Challenge.

#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.