Bookphilia.com

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this special bulletin

2009-07-15T15:37:00.006-04:00

Here's some sweetness: Moony over at The Book Lover just passed on to me the One Lovely Blog Award. Teh cute! I think it's awfully nice of her because "lovely" isn't an adjective I would have chosen in relation to Bookphilia.com. In any case, thank you, Moony! It's nice to get some love.

The deal with this award, though, is that I pass it on. My favourite blog writers get to post or not post this frilly thing on their own website, as they see fit. And they are:

Amateur Reader - AR would be getting this award from me just because he's chosen the best title, like, ever - Wuthering Expectations - but his blogging is super-fantastic too. His reading lists are endlessly interesting and new to me, and his writing kick-ass.

Rohan - This is the only blog I read with any regularity that is allowed to remind me of my former academic life. Novel Readings is penned by a Real Live Victorianist! and her musings are a pleasure to read, always. Any other musings on academic topics, however, give me hives.

Geoffrey Chaucer - Didn't you know that the father of English poetry hath a blog? Well, he doth. He doesn't post often and sometimes the topics make me a little itchy but come on! This nerd takes the time to write extra-long sermons on various topics in Middle English. Have I mentioned that I think nerds are hot?

So, there you go. Some love in the blog world. And friends, I need all the love I can get right now. Why? Because there's a garbage strike in its 3rd week raging in Toronto. I go outside and I can't always see the garbage but boy, I can smell it. And sometimes I do see it and it makes me sad; here's a photo courtesy of my dear hubby:

That's Queen Street West, which is usually awesome. Sigh.

Besides blog award lovefests, I am going to depart even more from our usually scheduled program here at Bookphilia.com to give you a random list of words, words that I think are gorgeous or hilarious or in some way empowered to counteract the evil that is seeping into my nose courtesy of no garbage pickup. Here we go, in no order.

Rubbish (ironic, isn't it?)
Pants
Leafy
Doily
Cozy
Aphasia
Asterisk
Dolphin
Plum
Scream (for some reason, I think this word is hilarious - in grade 4 (I think) I got detention for laughing uproariously in class because the book I was secretly reading under my desk contained the word "scream")
Bloated
Flotsam
Brash
Brusque
Aviator
Flood
Flute
Bragadocious
Mingle
Mellifluous
Aardvark
Frantic
Falafel
Bluesy
Jezebel

I could go on all day. Share the love, peeps - what are some of your favourite words?

I feel weird

2009-07-14T18:30:00.007-04:00

Apparently, if I want to read books un-fraught with uncomfortable ideological weirdness, I shouldn't go for the kiddy lit. I picked up The Cricket in Times Square last week during my yard sale road trip extravaganza near Parry Sound. It's one of those classics I managed to miss out on and so I decided to expedite the reading of it.

I read it yesterday and today at the store (interspersed with Henry James - see below for an update!!) and it's made me feel confused and a little upset.

I think the next bit is plot spoilerish
Things didn't start off in a complicated way: The Cricket in Times Square began simply as a story about a country cricket who, through a horrible accident of fate (and as retribution for his covetousness - kidding! sort of), ends up being transported from rural Connecticut to New York City. He's rescued by a boy who works in the subway station at Times Square, where his family owns a newsstand.

Chester cricket likes the boy and quickly makes friends with Tucker and Harry, a mouse and cat, respectively, who also live in the station. Things are going well, if predictably, when Mario (the boy) decides to get Chester a cricket cage, for which he must go to Chinatown.

It's Sunday and so nothing's open except for Sai Fong's novelty shop; at this point, Selden becomes a racist muthafucka for a little bit. I cringed, I winced, I hissed, I covered my eyes. Here's how Sai Fong responds when Mario asks if he has any cricket cages and shows him Chester (up to this point, slumming it in a match box):

"Oh velly good!" said Sai Fong, and a remarkable change came over him. He suddenly became very lively, almost dancing a jig on the sidewalk. "You got clicket! Eee hee hee! Velly good! You got clicket! Hee hee!" (p. 45)

Making Sai Fong imbecilic in the most racially stereotypical way is then counter-balanced by making him seem wise and sage in the other most racially stereotypical way. Having told Mario about the first cricket ever created (by the gods), Sai Fong says (in response to Chester's chirp at a key point in the story) "Ah so...Clicket has understood" (p.50). Oh no you dinn't! You dinn't just drop the "Ah so"!! Oh, but you did, George, you did.

At this point, I almost gave up on The Cricket in Times Square but I decided to see what else it had to offer (plus it's really short) - and it got better. I think this is actually a very good book for the childers when Selden isn't working out some of his issues with Chinese immigrants. In fact, there's one scene near the end of the book that I liked so much I wept a little over it! Chester turns out to be a musical genius and can learn any song by heart just by hearing it once. To make up to Mario and family for almost accidentally burning down their newsstand, he becomes their dancing monkey, providing concerts every day in the subway for thousands of enthralled fans. Indeed, everyone's so quiet one day that his music can be heard above ground (via the grates or something) and something amazing happens. Check it:

Traffic came to a standstill. The buses, the cars, men and women walking - everything stopped. And what was strangest of all, no one minded. Just this once, in the very heart of the busiest of cities, everyone was perfectly content not to move and hardly to breathe. And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was as still as a meadow at evening, with the sun streaming in on the people there and the wind moving among them as if they were only tall blades of grass. (p.140)

I'm a little bawl baby, I know. I wouldn't say I like to cry, but it sure happens a lot, even with books I'm not so sure about. But I think the utter impossibility of this moment made me sad. A few years ago, I was walking through the busiest subway stop in Toronto (Yonge and Bloor) on Xmas eve. The buskers that play in the subway here have to be licenced and so are often very good.

One of my favourites - a 40-something man who plays an er hu (I think) - was there playing the most ridiculously beautiful stuff ever (as he does, but he was really going for it that evening). I stopped and listened and actually closed my eyes and when I opened them all I saw was the usual Toronto subway scene: everyone looking pinched and annoyed and hurrying like hell to get somewhere because being where they are is never no good. It made me sad for Torontonians.

My, I am a maudlin one, aren't I? Here's some good news:

HENRY JAMES - T MINUS 106 PAGES and 18 DAYS!!! (As a challenge, this does seem a little ridiculous all of a sudden, given the progress I've made in the past two days - but I've got 2 library books on the way and one in hand and I worry about the lengths I might go to to avoid reading James, even though I always enjoy him. There's just so much of him, and all at once.)

If you're in Parry Sound and need good reads...

2009-07-12T14:32:00.012-04:00

I have a fair bit of catching up to do so this post is going to be crammed full and displaying all the characteristics of a split personality. Besides telling you about bookstore heaven and hell in Parry Sound, ON, I need to briefly discuss a few books I've recently read...and one which I've abandoned.

Last weekend, I went up north for some sweet cottage r&r. Parry Sound (pop. approx. 6000) has two bookstores (that I saw anyway). One is awesome and one terrifies me. The good news first.

Bearly Used Books is on the main street (of which I can't currently remember the name) and it is just what you'd expect and hope a small town used bookstore to be: low prices and a lot of fiction. For my tastes, it didn't have nearly enough literature but I did pick up a few Ellis Peters books there. Also, the owner was super nice and the place was packed.

My friend Jason, who I was with, bought a Grisham novel and I laughed at him a lot. But he repaid me at the end of the weekend by laughing at me for reading at a normal human pace, when he'd expected me to read 39 books in my brief stay at cottage heaven central. What can I say? Sometimes deck chairs can be too comfortable, and spontaneous napping is both required and irresistible.

Parry Sound Books is the town's purveyor of new books and I didn't like it. It's not that it didn't have some books that I would read, it's that it felt like the Stepford wife of bookstores. It felt very sterile and controlled, like a hotel gift shop (and I would know, having had the misfortune of working in one.)

While working at said shitty job (it was in Halifax), I read a book on sale there that I can't recall the name of. It was about press gangs in Halifax and in it there was a description of someone being flogged which made me nauseous and pale. The boss thought that would be bad for business and so ordered that employees could no longer read the books on sale there. You will be terribly surprised to hear that I quit that job completely sans notice and guilt.

Anyway, about Parry Sound Books. It had a great location and pretty good decor but the atmosphere was icky because it was so obviously geared towards the cottage/tourist crowd and everywhere there were cheap do-hickies that kids of tourists like. I'm sure if I lived in Parry Sound, I'd just learn to love the place, but as one of the tourists it was ostensibly geared towards, I wanted to run away crying.

Luckily, Parry Sound also has a really nice library, which is surprisingly big given the number of people who actually live there. And the coolest thing about the Parry Sound Public Library is that the kids' section has a gigantic boat right in the middle of it, a boat filled with books. Yaaar, that be my kind of boat! (I was trying to look terrified and on the verge of shipwreck in this photo but by the time Angela snapped the shutter, I just looked really drunk. Le sigh.)

The other place to buy books in the Parry Sound vicinity is to go to the eleventy thousand yard sales that take place every single Saturday. We went to all of them and I got a cartload of goodies for the bookstore and a few for myself. We did so much driving that day between yard sale events that I managed to read the entirety of the incredibly lengthy and dense Esio Trot, by Roald Dahl.

Esio Trot's a particularly strange one, I think. It's got the usual pleasing Dahl whimsy but it's about a guy who tricks his neighbour into marrying him by kidnapping her turtle and replacing it with increasingly larger turtles, all after he gives her a made up magical spell to help him grow. Er, what? This is creepy on several levels. Perhaps it's a big seller at Parry Sound Books, eh?

I also began a silly vampire book on the bus up to the cottage and finished it at the cottage: part two in Barb & J.C. Hendee's Noble Dead saga, Thief of Lives. As you may recall, I read the first book, Dhampir, at a rather low mental point but it was enjoyable so I figured I'd keep going with the series.

Thief of Lives was good but not as compelling as Dhampir. But maybe Dhampir wasn't good and I was just much more desperately in need of escape when I read that one? I don't know. I was irked by certain plot choices in this one. I wondered if I should bother with the third one, but suspect I'll eventually get to it, the next time I need some silly fun.

Also, I took Pride and Prejudice and Zombies back to the library unread because I found the first few pages too gimmicky to bear; so I had to find another library book, stat! and this was it.

I also began a famous classic of SF while kicking back in the clean air of northernish Ontario (and which I finished a few days ago): Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz. This was an extremely enjoyable novel. I think had I read it when I was a teenager it would be in my top 10 of all time. As it is, I respect it highly as a post-apocalyptic nightmare that had a lot of disturbing relevance to its time (published 1959) and was a great story AND was well written.

I think what I loved best about this novel was Miller, Jr.'s examination of how relics become sacred...based as these processes so often are on complete misunderstanding. I thought it was a fascinating look at the ways humans use the past and why it's so important to us, even as we imagine we're evolving and leaving it behind.

And finally...the book that I've closed the cover on. I'm feeling disappointed in myself for this one but it can't be helped. As I mentioned last week, I think, I was going to be reading Charlotte Bronte's Villette in order to participate in Rohan's summer discussion thereof over at The Valve.

That won't be happening and here's why: I read the first 8 chapters as per the schedule and then on Tuesday, I went to The Valve and read the comments already there and tried to say something coherent myself and then went back later...and started to freak out. Because even though it's not school, it felt like school and I couldn't deal. It's too soon. But not only can I not participate in this event, I can't even read the book, dammit, for after freaking out upon reading the comments, I freaked out again when I tried to go back to the book! :( Sad times.

But I'm going to try to do the optimistic thing in response to this backsliding: my plan is to finish my Henry James short stories by my birthday, which was 3 weeks from yesterday!!! It's more than possible as I have only 210 pages left - but then it's been more than possible for months now. So, friends, I'm going to need your help. Send me pep talks to help me put the Henry James to bed! I'll post updates on my progress that will look like this:

HENRY JAMES - T MINUS 210 PAGES and 20 DAYS!!!

Curious/Creepy: can't we try just a little bit harder?

2009-07-08T15:34:00.010-04:00

Aha! So, I had occasion yesterday to take the subway during rush hour and was given the opportunity to behave like a creep and gain several book-reading sightings. Curious/Creepy is down but not entirely out, friends, so give it the love it deserves. All these books were being read between 4:30 and 5pm on the northbound Yonge line. (For all you non-Torontonians, this may be translated as "exceedingly f***ing crowded".)

Filthy Lucre by Joseph Heath. I don't know this book at all, but I commend both its title and its cover. Especially the cover, which makes me think of a crazy and amazing novel co-written by George Orwell and P.G. Wodehouse. You know you want to read that book too.

In fact, Filthy Lucre is non-fiction, and is all about helping people gain even an iota of real knowledge about how economic systems work. This is one of those "I feel like I should read this but I can't because it's not a novel, which yes, I know, makes me a lazy git" kind of things. I'm not going to read this. Unless the author, who teaches at the University of Toronto, emails me and tells me why I should, even though I'm allergic to non-fiction. Yes, Dr. Heath, that's a challenge from Dr. Shea, who like you, can't do anything about medical emergencies on aeroplanes but went to school for a horribly long time.

Incidentally, the woman reading Filthy Lucre book was a dirty hippy.

Shopaholic and Baby by Sophie Kinsella. If the person reading this schlock had also been a dirty hippy, I might possibly have become too happy to live. Alas, she was very sleek and expensively dressed and I laughed in my black, black heart at her for lo, she was still riding public transit with the rest of us grubby poor folk.

I know I'm a snob and close-minded - also, I hate shopping, even when I'm flush with cash - but how could shopping as a central trope possibly make for interesting fiction? I just feel as though the popularity of Sophie Kinsella's books must herald the end of days complete with the full locusts, plagues, and horsemen bundle.

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. I'm much more allergic to books that look like this than I am to non-fiction, Dr. Heath, so don't give up before you even try. Even though American Wife looks like a 1950s how-to book for newly married young women with no clear idea what to do after being instructed to shut their eyes and think of England (er, in this case, Abraham Lincoln's eyebrows), it's actually a novel. And according to the Amazon dot see-ay, not a very enjoyable one.

Well, duh. But seriously, I think there was a movie made out of this "Now my husband's the president, look how beautiful and well-coifed my life is!" starring Annette Bening long before Curtis decided she (yes, she) should blow the book world apart with this novel. Having seen the time-travelling film adaption of this one (plus the cover), I think I won't pick this one up for my own TBR pile. Unless TBR stands for To Be Rended.

Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer. This is book number something or other in the immensely popular Twilight series, which I also will not be reading. Why, you ask? I am generally rather surly and resistant when confronted with things that are this popular but that's not actually why. I like me a good vampire story and so wouldn't say no if the Twilight books were good. But I did a few page 40 tests and oy vey! the Meyer makes Jasper Fforde look like a ffacking genius! The writing is too much of the shit.

Indeed, a friend of mine who lurves the vampire books like no one else, told me she read the Twilight series but tried to hide them when she was perusing them in public because they embarrassed her. I think the young lady I saw reading Eclipse yesterday may have felt the same, for it took me a lot of creepy doing to find out what she had in hand. The dust jacket was at home and her hand was placed protectively over the spine; only by staring intently at her did I find out what the book was, when she briefly shifted positions to let someone sit down next to her. (No, not me! I'm not that creepy...yet.)

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. People come into my bookstore approximately every 3 days asking for this one and I never have it. This book is so popular that the only thing it now requires to be declared a saint by the Vatican is to be chosen for Oprah's book club.

No, I haven't read this one either and am not like to. I am curious and the fact that it's received mixed reviews (the less than positive ones coming from people who aren't afraid of being tarred and feathered) make me more inclined towards it. BUT I won't read it ever, because I can't. I simply can't because I recently learned that Lawrence Hill is the brother of Dan Hill, who used to sing excruciatingly terrible love songs in the 1980s (or was it the early 90s?). When I see The Book of Negroes, I get an awful earworm that begins with the plaintive lyrics

I see your face cloud over like a little girl's
And your eyes have lost their shine
You whisper something softly I'm not meant to hear
Baby tell me what's on your mind

This is how committed I am to my art, my blog art, let's call it my blart - I knew I'd get this wretched ditty in my head if I wrote out the opening lyrics for you but I had to, so you'd know why I can't read Dan's brother's novel.

Friends, I don't know when I'll have the opportunity to take transit at a busy and flustered time of day again, so it might well be another 6 months before I skirt the line between merely curious and disturbingly creepy but when I do...prepare for some more abuse being heaped upon books you may well adore. Until then, peace, love, and happiness.

The Reading Lamp: not internet pr0n

2009-07-06T07:46:00.006-04:00

Raych is the queen of the book blogging world and now she's here on The Reading Lamp. I would start hyperventilating a little if I weren't too wrecked from my cottage weekend. (No, the irony of being exhaustilated from vacation doesn't escape me. But then I do *heart* irony.)

Also, I swear I didn't pay her to say that you should immediately drop everything to read David Mitchell's Black Swan Green but because it's Raych, you should do what she says. Now.

Your name: Raych

What are you currently reading? Jose Saramago’s The Double.

Where are you reading it? ON THE DECK IN THE SUNSHINE in an teeny bikini, but I have an irrational fear of being turned into internet pr0n, so alls you get is my sheet-toga.

What do you think of it so far? Remember how you saw The Ring and then burned all the VCRs in your house so that you wouldn’t die, only to realize that you needed them to watch The Jungle Book because Disney hadn’t released the DVD from the vault yet, and so you bought a new one? You will burn that VCR again.

What is the one book you love so much that you can’t be objective about other people not loving it as well? Have disagreements ever come to blows? The Chronicles of Narnia. If I ever meet Philip Pullman I will make out with him for having written His Dark Materials and then I will punch him dead in the face for the things he’s said about Narnia.

How do you choose what to read next? Book blogs, yo. Book blogs will sneak up on you and make you read books without your permission. I just placed a hold on The Knife of Never Letting Go because Nymeth posted the Nietzsche quotation that opens the NEXT book in the series, and which scared the ever-living hell out of me and also which I will reproduce for you here:

Battle not with monsters
lest you become a monster
and if you gaze into the abyss
the abyss gazes into you.

THE ABYSS GAZES INTO YOU!!! Sleep lightly, kids.

Do you generally borrow books or buy them? Why? I borrow. We are both students with no gainful employment on the horizon. Also, we move every six months or so, and for every box of books he has to carry to the van, I think my husband loves me a little bit less.

Favourite childhood book? Narnia (see above). Also, Blueberries for Sal.

Who is your literary boyfriend or girlfriend? (They need not still be living, or they can be a character in a book.) This list would overwhelm the interview. Let’s say Mr Rochester and Jamie Fraser to cover both the dark-and-brooding and roguish-but-still-gallant bases. Also, there are many people in the bloggonets whose babies I would willingly have.

What is your favourite either unknown or underappreciated book? If you have not read David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green you need to stop doing whatever else it is that you are doing and do this thing. I’m not a bit of joking, do it now. Also, if you were not aware that The Princess Bride is a book as well as a movie, you owe me your first-born child for having apprised you of the fact.

What book would a prospective lover/marriage partner/friend have to say they loved for you to end your relationship with them immediately? My taller half loves almost indiscriminately books that I hate, including The Da Vinci Code and Grisham’s The Innocent Man, but he is also ridiculously good-looking and can cook a frozen pizza better than anyone I know, so I think I’ll keep him.

If you're interested in being featured on The Reading Lamp, just drop me a line at colleen at bookphilia dot com!

Daisies opening in sly lust

2009-06-30T16:59:00.006-04:00

I'm just going to say it: I think Stella Gibbons was a comic genius, in particular, a genius of the funny/mean variety (my favourite, as you know). It's disturbing to me that of all the novels she wrote, only Cold Comfort Farm is still in print. Not only that: while the TPL has many of her books, except for Cold Comfort Farm, they're all represented in single copies at the non-circulating Toronto Reference Library. Le sigh.

I may be forced to spend heaps of cash buying her other books on the interwebs because, you see, Stella Gibbons wasn't just funny and mean; she was also funny and mean about books, and a damned good writer to boot.

Cold Comfort Farm tells the story of Flora Poste who at 19, having recently been orphaned, decides that "whereas there still lingers some absurd prejudice against living on one's friends, no limits are set, either by society or by one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose upon one's relatives" (p. 13).

All spoilers from here on in!
Having dropped this sage tidbit on her friend Mrs. Smiling, Flora promptly writes to all her eligible relations and decides, upon receiving a number of offers, to go to the Starkadders in Sussex, who inhabit the justly named Cold Comfort Farm. As someone who likes things to be very tidy and proper, Flora finds herself with a great deal of work to do, for all of said relations turn out to be terrifyingly hilarious character types drawn from the kinds of novels earnestly penned by Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. There are earthy folks, wild poetry-writing folks, over-sexualized folks, and emotionally imbalanced almost incestuous folk. For Flora, this simply won't do, and so she commences helping everyone liberate themselves from the bonds of family, the land, and novelists who may arguably have no sense of humour whatever. (Not that I don't enjoy Hardy and Lawrence; I do. But you must admit, they're both rather dour.)

Gibbons won me over with her dedicatory epistle in which she outlines how her book will serve as an antidote to those turn of the century novels so invested in Meaningfulness and Spiritual Struggles. She also helpfully notes that what she considers to be the "finer passages" in the book have been marked with stars (p. 6). And oh, friends, the passages she marks with stars are truly brilliant in their bitchiness a la making fun of the staid Hardy and Lawrence and their ilk. For example:

At the farm, life burgeoned and was quick. A think, shameless cooing was laid down, stroke on stroke, through the warm air from the throats of the wood-pigeons until the very atmosphere seemed covered with a rich patina of love. The strident yellow note of the cockerel shot up into the sunshine and wavered there, ending in a little feather-tuft of notes. Big Business [the bull at Cold Comfort] bellowed triumphantly in the great field. Daisies opened in sly lust to the sun-rays and rain-spears, and eft-flies, locked in a blind embrace, spun radiantly through the glutinous air to their ordained death. (p. 193)

I am so happy right now. I can't stop giggling at this novel's sheer abundance of hilarity. Besides Gibbons' sending up of Hardy and Lawrence, I think she was also sending up Austen, which is likely not news to anyone but I haven't read anything about her or this book excepting the distressing news noted above, i.e., that all her other books are out of print, and that she makes fun of Hardy and Lawrence. I'm pretty sure I would have gotten the Hardy/Lawrence thing if I hadn't read about it.

The novel's main character, Flora Poste, is to me the most un-Austen-ish character imaginable but also and more specifically, the quintessential anti-Emma. Flora intrudes smoothly and intently into everyone's business precisely in order to change their lives in ways she sees fit but unlike the bumbling and annoying Emma, Flora is always fantastically and gracefully successful. More importantly, there are absolutely no lessons to be learned here; Flora is very charmingly pure id, as are all the characters around her and she simply helps them to fulfill their desires. And her desire for order having been satisfied she makes haste to boot it back to London (in style, of course).

Unlike Austen, Gibbons doesn't allow her characters to embody some heavy-handed pedagogical lesson and unlike Hardy and Lawrence, she doesn't allow her characters' pleasures to be in any way diminished by either spiritual concerns or consequences. Cold Comfort Farm is a good romp and a mighty fine satire.

So, fellow babies, I am off to a cottage for a few days where there will be no interwebs access whatsoever. I plan to loll about and read, perhaps a vampire novel and definitely Charlotte Bronte's Villette for Rohan's summer reading event at The Valve. But mostly it'll be about the eating and sleeping and hopefully playing card games or summink.

O-fune-sama

2009-06-26T11:29:00.003-04:00

Friends, the hellish hot heat in Toronto is addling my brain. I tried to write a post about Akira Yoshimura's wonderful novel Shipwrecks yesterday and was just too zoned out. I woke up later in the day when I heard that Michael Jackson, the soundtrack of my childhood, had died but that was exactly the wrong kind of waking up for writing book reviews. I ate a bowlful of chocolate chip cookies and then spent hours chatting with similarly startled friends who consoled themselves and me by teaching me how to do the moonwalk.

But about the novel in question. My friend Vee suggested this book to me years ago and I've had it in my jealous possession for a long time, but you know me and my neuroses - I basically have to let a book simmer for a few years and can only choose it if I look at it only out of the corner of my mental eye. Direct eye contact leads to shame and self-loathing and the need to hide in an Ellis Peters or P.G. Wodehouse novel or something.

In any case, Shipwrecks was worth the wait. The cover sensationalizes the story quite unnecessarily, loudly proclaiming that this is "A THRILLING TALE OF MURDER AND RETRIBUTION SET ON THE WILD SEACOAST OF MEDIEVAL JAPAN." Wow! I expected pirates and people being strung up and blood everywhere and lots of weeping and wailing and maybe even some supernatural stuff, a la From Dusk Till Dawn.

In fact, this book is a very quiet one which tells the story of young Isaku's hard scrabble life by the sea and how he, his family, and his tiny village spend literally all their time trying to draw enough sustenance out of the sea and the barren rocks to survive. Many people send their children or spouses off to be indentured labourers for years at a time as the only alternative to the entire family starving to death.

The only respite the village ever gets from their horrible life, which they cling both tenderly and tenaciously to - their love of their land is personal and ancient and profound and therefore impossible to abandon in favour of more hospitable living conditions elsewhere - is O-fune-sama. O-fune-sama refers to the shipwrecks that sometimes occur on the village's shoreline, as the result of the sharp reefs hidden beneath the water and the village's policy of luring ships in during storms by keeping fires burning on the beach. When ships founder there, the villagers pillage the ship and use everything on board; they also kill any crew members so that word of their practice won't leak out. Isaku, at 10 years old, witnesses and benefits from the village's first O-fune-sama in 8 years but disaster isn't long in following their new found prosperity...

What I think I loved most about this book is how gently Yoshimura treats his characters. They do unspeakable things but he completely normalizes the human tendency to do absolutely anything to survive without either condoning or distancing himself from it. Although told in the third person, the perspective is so convincingly from the point of view of the villagers that I began to feel the desperation of their hunger and separation from indentured relatives, and their horrified powerlessness when faced with the repercussions of taking such morbid advantage of O-fune-sama.

I think I've run out of mental steam again. Back to dozing in the overheated bookstore while customers move in slow motion around me.

More "swindling and scoundrelly trickery" please

2009-06-22T14:35:00.004-04:00

On a friend's advice, I've decided that I won't always stick to the strictly chronological approach that I'd planned to follow for my French literature reading project. The next chronological book that I should have been reading over the weekend is The Conquest of Constantinople, but I don't want to read that until I've finished Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, which I'm only about halfway through. Revising my original plan hasn't been so difficult for my addled brain to consider and accept, in the end, for as may be totally obvious, I'm pretty easily distracted these days.

Having abandoned all order, I picked up the French book nearest to hand which was Abbe Prevost's Manon Lescaut, first published in 1731. Prevost was apparently torn between the pleasures of religion and being a libertine and this short novel is thus at least in part autobiographical.

Manon Lescaut tells the story of Chevalier des Grieux, a teenager who, on his way to join a seminary (I think - dear gawd, I'm already forgetting the book's details!), sees a beautiful young woman (Manon) at the port and in approximately 5 minutes, abandons his family and prospects by convincing her to run away with him. The rest of the book details their pleasures, troubles, blunders, and general idiocy that (in books written in the 18th century anyway) tends to accompany extreme passion.

This novella was only 156 pages long but I have to admit that in the second half it began to drag for me. At first, I was really happy to be reading some Richardson-esque moral tale that tends more towards the lurid and sensational no matter how much the author insists it's meant to be cautionary. (Prevost, in his preface, describes Manon Lescaut as "a moral treatise entertainingly put into practice" (p. 5).)

The thing is, the lurid wasn't lurid enough and the moral not terrifying enough; I feel that the structure and writing style of Manon Lescaut were rather too bland for such visceral subject-matter - the young couple's passions were just not convincing to me, and without being caught up in their passion it's hard to think of anything but the stupidity of it all.

Mind, there were points at which I found myself really enjoying this book but I feel that overall, Prevost could have paid closer attention to what Richardson was doing - although I don't know how that's possible given that Prevost was the guy translating Pamela, etc into French during this period. Ah well. I knew I wouldn't always enjoy my reading for the French literature project, but that I would always learn something. And what I learned from Manon Lescaut is that in the 1730s, the English perhaps did morastic kink better. Sorry, Abbe!

Ffack you, Jasper!

2009-06-19T11:00:00.006-04:00

I think I'm about to lose some friends here. As far as I can tell, everyone loves Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. It's considered to be one of those la-la-la, light, happy, and hilarious books that no one could possibly not like because it's the perfect beach read, but a beach read for people who really like books, so that much more of a perfect beach read. An uber-beach read for nerds who don't want to slum it too much, even when on vay-cay.

Well, I suppose it's these things but it's also (much more) full of a hell of a lot of filler (really, what was the point of all that dodo stuff?), mediocre writing (at best), a knowledge of classic literature that seems like it may well have been gathered entirely from the Wikipedia, and an embarrassingly ham-fisted handling of one seriously contrived plot.

Or, to put it another way: I like the idea of a world where the boundaries between literature and reality are blurred and literature has a living significance in everyone's lives. The problem is, I don't think Fforde is very smart; I wish someone with a much higher IQ had written this book or something like it.

And because Fforde ain't so ffriggin' smart, The Eyre Affair reads to me like the offspring of a homeless man's Woody Allen short story and a Ritalin-inspired Artemis Fowl novel. (The latter being a problem because the Artemis Fowl books are for kids and they're about a bazillion times cleverer than this (which is for adults), and the former being a problem because Woody Allen is funny, but he's not unapproachably funny; he shouldn't constitute an unreachable standard. Know what'm sayin'?)

So, yeah, unimpressed, both because this book sucked and because Ffoolish Jasper the buffle-headed book-ffucker probably has more money than Gawd at this point and is therefore an example to other young semi-literates who think (rightly!) that if they write some crap they might well get a huge following anyway.

There. Rant over. Now, back to good books and happier times.

Power, responsiblity, fear, anxiety, weeping, wailing, thumb-sucking

2009-06-17T11:30:00.008-04:00

Peter Parker's Uncle Ben (Uncle Ben? Really? You couldn't come up with something less cheap rice-y, Stan Lee?) was like SO right when he said that "With great power comes great responsibility." I feel this burden every day. Every day, my friends. Because unlike when I was teaching university English courses and approximately half my students read the assigned readings (and usually not all of said readings), people read what I tell them to now.

On my blog, I'm obviously not telling people directly what to read; however, several people have read or are now reading both The Immaculate Conception and Bel Canto just because I liked these books so much. This both pleases me and makes me extremely uncomfortable, although not because I feel a kind of pitying scorn for people who don't like the same books I do (which is the sort of reaction, at best, I got re: my dislike for McCarthy's The Road).

Rather, this sort of influence makes me uncomfortable because I fear wasting people's time with things they don't like. Also, I don't want them to think I'm crazy because I like books about setting things on fire (see Soucy).

(So far, things are split evenly down the middle on The Immaculate Conception and the jury's out on Bel Canto. But I fret and bite my nails. I mentally sit in a corner rocking back and forth and sucking my thumb while I wait for the damnation and resentment to descend.)

I try to remind myself that people choose to read my blog and have absolutely no reason to trust me and if they hate the books I like, it's one of those caveat emptor thingies. But it doesn't really work and I can't even pretend to have that kind of distance in the store. People ask me to choose books for them all the time here. They tell me they like books I haven't read and would never read myself and then I have to choose something for them. Or they tell me they like books I hate and then I have to choose something for them. I've had a lot of success and a few startling failures but even with the odds in my mind-reading favour, I still quail whenever someone asks me to determine the course of their immediate reading future.

And the reason is this: knowing what books people have enjoyed doesn't mean I understand why they enjoyed them, and in my experience, most people don't easily convey that information. For example: a woman came in last week and told me she loved Samuel Richardson's Pamela. I was floored and excited because I think I'm the only other person I've ever met who also loves this book. So, I recommended Fanny Burney's Evelina to her which she informed me yesterday when she returned, she also loved. Great success!

BUT it wasn't until yesterday, when we were having big chats, that I found out why she loved Pamela, and it made me sick up a little. Another customer overheard us and started skewering poor Pamela. Customer who loves Pamela says "Ah, but it's so cute and you never meet people that like morally strong anymore!" while I say at pretty much the same time "But it's so kinky and weird about gender and class imbalance, how can you not like it?"

She didn't seem bothered that we weren't even in the same universe re: reading Pamela but it frightened me not a little. How am I to recommend books to people without that debilitating lower brain stem kind of terror that arises from knowing that while all the words are the same in books we share, all their individual and collective significances appear entirely differently to us?

Obviously, I won't refuse either to make recommendations or to give my real opinions on my bloggy but what to do with this awful (in the more archaic and sublime sense of the word) fear accompanying these activities? Like Spiderman, I may be reduced to wearing stretchy pants and confusedly contemplating my unevenly sized hands. (I know, I know - that was a lame way of getting this photo into the blog, but I like this photo; it's pre-fatty, hot Spiderman and he looks kind of how I feel right now.)

As if the singing would save their lives

2009-06-10T11:57:00.004-04:00

I've begun and erased this post about 5 times already. I like this book so very much that I don't know where to begin. How about this:

If someone tells you that this book is about a hostage-taking, don't worry about that; don't not read it because you imagine it's going to be cheap and sensational and shallow. It's none of these things.

But Ann Patchett's Bel Canto is about a hostage-taking, which begins at a party in a South American country (which is never named); a terrorist group breaks in looking to kidnap the president who has, at the last moment, decided to skip the party in favour of watching his favourite soap opera. The terrorists panic a little and take everyone at the party hostage, including a world-famous opera singer, and the rest of the story goes from there.

The kidnappers and the hostages spend many months together and the novel delves into the seemingly impossible relationships that can be established in extreme circumstances. Professionals would undoubtedly refer to what Patchett describes in this book simply as Stockholm Syndrome, but I think that Patchett treats her characters with too much gentleness and respect, as well as invests them with too much complexity, for such a blanket psychological term to be applied comfortably. And because that unspoken term isn't allowed easily to be applied, the term "terrorist" (which she does use) is also constantly problematized. There is no dehumanizing of anyone in this book; indeed, what makes it compelling to me is how insistently human she makes every character she creates.

The primary medium for the humanization of all these characters is music, particularly the voice of Roxanne Coss, a world-renowned soprano who's been brought to the party to try to convince opera aficionado and businessman Mr. Hosokawa to build a factory in the country. At the party, her singing is concluded by all the lights going out and the hostage-takers busting in - all of whom have spent the whole party hidden, forced to listen to and begin to be transformed in some way by her voice.

So, yes, this book about a hostage-taking is not only refreshingly human and gentle, but it is also a meditation on art and what it means to people, even (especially!) people who have never been privileged enough to really experience it before.

I know I'm not doing this book justice; I don't seem to have the vocabulary required to write positively about a book without sounding quite bland. And maybe that's one of the reasons why I love this book so much: Ann Patchett can write about things like love and care and hope and desire without ever sounding pat or bland or maudlin or hokey. She has a sort of magic that I think very few writers do. She makes my heart contract when she writes about a hug, whereas most writers treating the same material or situations would incense me with their sentimentalization of things we all know are beautiful in reality.

I think Patchett is able to do this in part because her writing is so good. And a large part of what makes it good is that it doesn't draw attention to itself. There are no Rushdie-esque moments of "Hey, look at how utterly brilliant, charming, and clever this writing is!" It's gentle and quiet, and if this is something that can be said about writing, vulnerable. I know that doesn't make sense and yet I somehow feel that's the right word, or at least close to the right word.

And of course, things end badly. As Patchett tells us right at the beginning, all of the terrorists end up dead. What's amazing to me is that, knowing that, I was still able to believe completely in what becomes almost every character's impossible dream - that somehow they'll be able to spend the rest of their lives together listening to music and being innocent.

And innocent, in the most fundamental way, is what everyone described in this book becomes. For me, that's what's truly painful about the impossibility of it all - that human beings might have more than very rare and brief moments of pure freedom from what degrades our humanity and makes us stupid, selfish, and violent.

I don't think Patchett was ever going for realism here, even though she treats her characters with a complexity I didn't expect. No, I think what she was going for here was a sort of wild and profound hope - indeed, this book may have arisen out of one of those rare and profound moments of innocence which her characters are allowed to enjoy for such an unnaturally and unrealistically long period of time.

Saturday night's alright for fighting with Leo Tolstoy

2009-06-06T20:26:00.003-04:00

Oh damn. It's Saturday night and I'm sitting on my ass with the TV on and the computer playing videos on YouTube. I'd planned to make dinner for my hubby, who will be returning from PEI this evening. I'd planned to pack for my trip to Kingston which involves me being on a train at an offensively early hour tomorrow morning.

Instead, I laid down for 5 minutes and woke up 2 hours later, had a peanut butter and jam sammich for dinner, and am now about to write what may be the lamest post ever while simultaneously watching Lady GaGa videos. All these factors combined may constitute a spiritual bottom for me.

I was incredibly excited to read Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection, my first Russian novel in about 3.5 years - the last being Anna Karenina, which I read while taking trains through various eastern bloc European countries. Creepily apropos, yes. Anyway, I really, really enjoyed Anna Karenina, even though I understood why some people I know found it a little too heavy-handed in its moralizing.

I was able to get past the pedagogical in Anna Karenina because it was so chock-full of story. I like morals, when told in a compelling way that involves a denouement wrapping up a bunch of interesting Happenings. Not much Happens in Resurrection; indeed, in this book, there's not much room for Happenings what with the whole boat-load of Lessons (called "Learnings" in the corporate world. *Shudder*) that keeps crashing up on the shore. (I don't think I like this metaphor even though I'm sure you get what I mean. But I'm not going to change it because that wouldn't be in keeping with the whole "spiritual bottom" aspect of this post.)

Spoiler galore from here on in!
A rake and all-around upper-class meathead named Prince Nekhlyudov is doing jury duty when he realizes that one of the people he's helping to try is Maslova, his aunts' former ward/maid who 10 years before he seduced and then abandoned. Having been seduced, abandoned, impregnated, and lost the baby, Maslova, of course, has turned to prostitution and is on trial for murdering one of her clients.

She's innocent of murder, but the jury being given incomplete instructions from the judge, and the meathead saying nothing because he's worried people will figure out what he did 10 years before, manages to find her guilty without meaning to and she's sent off to Siberia. In the meantime, Nekhlyudov is walking down memory lane remembering how much finer a fellow he used to be and also remembering what a cad he was to Maslova. Based on said stroll, he decides to try to make right by taking on the appeal for her case and by sacrificing his life by marrying her.

The prince is very pleased with his re-emerging spirituality and has very tender and loving feelings for himself and all the good he ends up trying to do for his former conquest and some other prisoners she draws his attention to. The prince is a very self-satisfied shit and Tolstoy treats him with irony once or twice but not really enough for this book, with its earnestness and not-Happenings, to be a very good and - for Tolstoy I think this would matter more - convincing read.

And Nekhlyudov's transformation into a spiritual being isn't just unconvincing, it's incomplete but not, I think, because Tolstoy intended it to be so. Rather, faced with having a member of the gentry marry a fallen servant girl, Tolstoy lets the prince off the hook by having Maslova refuse to marry him because she doesn't want to ruin his life. The problem with this is that he gets to feel a great deal of self-satisfaction for having felt differently but without his life being materially affected by his feelings (much like when he seduced her) - while she, of course, remains in exile for a crime she didn't commit. What makes this worse is that by having Maslova refuse to marry the prince for the above reason, and by having him accept her refusal, the class imbalances that Tolstoy so earnestly and strenuously damns and laments up until the book's conclusion are made to look as explicitly empty as they just quietly seemed to be throughout the book.

I would love to think this book wasn't only a harsh critique of late 19th-century Russia's penal system and the severe class imbalances reflected and perpetuated therein, but also of upper-class sentimentalists who have the privilege of dipping in, empathizing, and helping when they feel like it precisely because they can return to their easy lives whenever they like. But it just didn't feel like the latter at all, and for me, that severely undermined the effectiveness of the former two.

Also, not much Happened.

A light summer fling

2009-06-04T11:34:00.006-04:00

Back in December, I decided to join this Support Your Local Library Reading Challenge, and pledged to read at least 20 library books in 2009. The year is now officially half gone and I am only on book #8. It's not impossible that I'll reach my goal but it'll certainly take some doing.

But such doing is not something I'm entirely sure I want to engage in given how many kick-ass books are currently moldering in my personal collection and making me feel desperate and panicky about them in particular and the fact that there are more books I want to read than can be managed before I die at the ripe old age of 102 in general. (That run-on and grammatically mutilated sentence reflects the depth and breadth of my anxiety on this front. Sigh.) (I've got Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on hold at the library so I know I'll at least make 9!)

Not that I won't also borrow more Wodehouse from the library, of course; I love his stuff but he's not really a re-read or a keeper, you know? Reading Wodehouse is like having a light and happy summer fling when you're 17 - all fun and happiness, no complications, and fond though often vague memories to think back on later.

Blandings Castle was not the Wodehouse I was hoping to read this time around. I really wanted to pick up Psmith in the City because Book Psmith said it was almost as good as Leave it to Psmith, which is still my favourite Wodehouse novel. Alas, my public library doesn't currently own a copy of Psmith in the City and so I was left to find something else, and also to tear my hair, gnash my teeth, and rend my cheeks. No, of course, I didn't wail and beat my breast - it's not that serious.

Anyway, much to my disappointment, Blandings Castle turned out to be a collection of short stories. I'm really not interested in anything but novels these days and so the only thing that got me reading at all was the fact that it was Wodehouse and I love Blandings tales. There were laughs and giggles and fond smiles and silent titterings. It was good. But then there were several Mulliner stories and I have to say, I don't love the Mulliner stories the way I love the Blandings tales or the way I loved the one Jeeves tale I've read thus far. I don't find Hollywood hi jinx so effective when it comes to working the giggle reflexes. There were moments, yes, but I found myself yearning for more news of The Empress of Blandings (Lord Emsworth's prize pig) or The Efficient Baxter.

In spite of my lamenting for something more thoroughly Blandings-ish here, I have been very grateful for Wodehouse's timely intervention in my reading. I'm also reading Tolstoy's Resurrection, which is heavy stuff, which would be more than fine if it were even half as awesome as Anna Karenina, which I read a few years ago while honeymooning with hubby (perhaps a strange choice for the circumstances, I realize). I'll keep plowing through the Tolstoy but more comic diversions may be required to complete it.

The Sarazens head without New-gate: Between the covers

2009-06-01T12:49:00.004-04:00

No, unfortunately, this isn't going to be a post about sexy book-selling experiences because I suspect there's no such thing. This post is about the strangest, most interesting, loveliest things I've so far found in books that are for sale in my book shop.

Last year, when I wrote the questions for The Reading Lamp, I gave interviewees the options of describing cool things they've found in books. When I posed that question, I didn't know I was going to buy a bookstore myself and end up finding interesting things all the time myself, or indeed, just how interesting they would be.

At this point, I don't have any photos to show you but I will eventually as an artiste friend of mine is taking the strange treasures I find and photographing them alongside the books I find them in. The idea is that these will form the art work gracing the walls of my shop! For now, though, you'll have to enjoy only the descriptions.

Colleen's List of Favourite Items Found in Shop Books, Part One (because I suspect this will have to be updated regularly)

1. A perfectly preserved, dried purple lily in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Given Dorian's attempts at preserving his youthful beauty, I thought this was both beautifully apropos and a little creepy.

2. A bookmark featuring a bunch of Japanese text I can't read and an angry monkey on a unicycle in The Diary of Anne Frank. I think I find this to be my most mind-blowing find so far because of the surreal contrast between the bookmark and the book. I feel as though I would be incapable of marking my progress with this book with such a bookmark; it would make me feel either guilty or plunged into some kind of self-induced Kafka-esque nightmare.

3. Two Canadian two dollar bills in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The Canadian two dollar bill was retired in 1996, so these bills have been waiting a long time to be found and spent. Can they even be used as legal tender anymore? But the real question is, why hide $4 in a book you're clearly not into enough either to read again (thus discovering the money) or to keep (it came into the shop just this morning)? Speaking of money...

4. One of my first finds after taking over the shop was a $10 Monopoly note in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I feel like this choice of bookmark revealed the reader's true, if subconscious, feelings about this book; indeed, I'm sure there's a Psychology paper to be written on people's choices of bookmarks.

This one didn't end up as part of the art project because it hadn't been conceived yet, and because I thought it would be funny to put the Monopoly money with the real good luck bills we received upon taking over. So, sitting proudly next to two Canadian one dollar bills, one Canadian five dollar bill, one Canadian ten dollar bill, and a Mohawk Nation one dollar bill, is my Monopoly tenner. Even though the Monopoly tenner is there for good luck, we must have a lot more of them as that's the currency my pay cheque comes in every two weeks.

5. A photograph, from 1897, of a family with their French first names written above their heads in a very old copy of Felix Holt (vol. 3 only). The photo was very faded but the inked in names clearly legible still. Everyone wore hats and corsets (when appropriate) and looked stern, to scare the camera out of any thoughts it might have about stealing their souls.

6. A copy of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy bound in a cover meant for Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdue. Let me explain exactly how weird this is: I was adding books to inventory and found, hidden in a 10-foot pile, A La Recherche du Temps Perdue in hardcover, no dust jacket. The title and author's name were printed as part of the cloth and board cover.

I started flipping through the book to check its condition and became quickly confused as the text was in English. Flipping to the title page, I saw Sterne credited and a quick read of the first page and search for the all-black page confirmed that this was, in fact, Tristram Shandy. What the hell happened here anyway? How many of these are out there, causing French readers' brains to short circuit?

I'm keeping this one because I think it is absolutely necessary that I walk around looking posh because I appear to be reading Proust in French all the while laughing hysterically because I'm reading one of the funniest books ever written in English.

So, what do you say? What's the most amazing foreign object you've found in a book?

Arthur, le roi

2009-05-28T12:40:00.003-04:00

I think it's ironic and intriguing that, working as I am on my French Literature reading project, I've just read a set of romances which deal with subject matter central to England's national mythology.

The introduction to the Penguin edition of Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian Romances indicates that, in fact, "Chretien de Troyes was the inventor of Arthurian literature as we know it" (p. 1). Indeed, Chretien was responsible not only for the form - the combination of courtly manners and love, and tests and displays of physical violence - but also for many of the elements now considered integral to Arthurian tales: for example, "He was the first to speak of Queen Guinevere's affair with Lancelot of the Lake, the first to mention Camelot, and the first to write of the adventures of the Grail" (p. 1).

Apparently, Chretien spent time in England and was thus familiar with English history and literature, which may explain how he became interested in the story of Arthur and his knights via Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (p. 6). How his works remained on people's radars as prose romance replaced poetry (which Chretien wrote) in popular esteem was via Thomas Malory, who ensured that Arthur remained central to literary production in Britain even as stories about him were eventually almost entirely forgotten in France (p. 22).

So, extremely fascinating history aside, I found Chretien's romances, as literature, to be generally incredibly good reads. I say generally, because I absolutely loved the first four (Erec and Enide, Cliges, The Knight of the Cart, and The Knight with the Lion - especially The Knight with the Lion) but found the final romance, The Story of the Grail, to be irritating and unpleasant to immerse myself in.

The first four romances had everything: i.e., plot and style, as well as fascinating meditations on the inherent impossibility of behaving courteously to everyone all the time (for more, see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which also features a talking severed head!), how courtly social ties become almost mystical in their power to determine people's behaviour, and the ability to help me pass a lot of time at work enjoyably when I don't feel like earning my pay.

But The Story of the Grail was really disappointing, and not just because it's incomplete; I can't blame Chretien for that, given that he likely didn't finish it because he died. It was disappointing because Perceval is stupid, rude, and generally unlikable - and yet he's somehow lauded by other characters as a very courteous knight and ladies want to sleep with him, insufferable idiot that he is.

It was disappointing because structurally, it didn't make sense. Three quarters of the way through, the narrator began focusing all his attention on Gawain, and he and Perceval had barely spoken to one another. Did I mention that Perceval was a twat? Anyway, it was somewhat souring to end a fantastically good collection with this wankerish character (pictured below).

Almost as satisfying as Chretien's first four stories was the way in which a customer in the shop responded one day when she saw me reading Arthurian Romances. Having walked around the store with her friend being loud and exuberant about a book she was about to start reading - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - she walked by my desk and asked me what I was reading. I showed her the cover and she positively roared, "AAAAAAAHH! I thought that's what you were reading! BEST BOOK EVER!!!!" and then left. People have approved of my reading choices before but I think never with so much loud or unpolished enthusiasm; it was kind of nice.

Respectability and insipidness

2009-05-25T17:20:00.004-04:00

W.E. Williams, the editor of my copy of George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody, before I began reading this novel, informed me that unless I was British and middle-class, I couldn't possibly understand or appreciate the incredible hilarity of the book I held in my hands.

With that stern warning in mind, I proceeded to find this book to be entirely unfunny, even though I "got" quite a number of the jokes. Either Williams is remarkably prescient OR his irritating pride in the specificity and insularity of British comic fiction put me off too much for me to even contemplate enjoying myself.

For not enjoy it I did, maybe not intensely, but entirely. I found The Diary of a Nobody to be generally quite boring, even when I found myself thinking, "Oh yes, the Grossmiths are now sending up middle-class pretenders to Society and this is why diary-writer Pooter's present faux pas is amusing."

Besides Williams' either prophecy or command about colonials like myself being incapable of enjoying The Diary of a Nobody, I think I was also put off because Pooter was unbearably conservative and un-ironic, very much like a few real people I've met over the years and couldn't abide. For me, I think realism when combined with a satirical humour (even a gentle one, as this book evinced) must not be too real - otherwise, I stop enjoying what I'm reading and begin thinking about how I'd like to punch hyper-earnest So-and-So in the neck if I ever have the misfortune of running into them again.

Nonetheless, I am doubly disappointed, for on top of not enjoying this book, it has shattered my notion that the Victorian period presented a literature sans crap - for indeed, this is the first Victorian novel I have failed to very much enjoy. This is a sad day, my friends.

A ghost that casts a disproportionate shadow beside our social reality

2009-05-21T16:51:00.005-04:00

No, there are no ghosts in Miyuki Miyabe's novel All She Was Worth, but there is a shady financial underworld which is often linked to violence and murder most foul.

In this case, the "ghost" is an increasingly dangerous money market which allows people who can't afford it to buy more and more on credit. Having over-extended themselves, they end up turning to the grey market of loan sharks, etc, which increases the problem exponentially.

Such a context doesn't make an obvious choice for a thrilling detective novel but All She Was Worth was a really enjoyable read. Honma, a detective on leave after being shot in the knee, is approached by a distant relative of his deceased wife - Jun needs helps tracking down his fiancee who has gone missing with no warning and has left no traces.

Honma's search for Shoko, the missing woman, quickly turns into more than a missing person hunt as Honma learns all about the disturbing holes in the country's protections on privacy in financial matters and how easy it is to take over someone else's identity at any cost...and how Shoko's involved.

Knowing several people who've had their identity stolen or partially stolen (self included), I suspect that the social disaster Miyabe sees occurring in Japan is pretty easily reflected in North America. So, in spite of being highly cerebral and pretty much devoid of action of any sort, All She Was Worth was actually a pretty terrifying - and therefore enjoyable - read.

I feel a rather extreme measure of relief here for having enjoyed this book, given how dismal my last foray into Japanese pulp was. I just want to know that if I feel like reading pulp, it's more likely to be good than otherwise; and right now, the balance is tipping in favour of the positive view.

2 wins, 1 fail

2009-05-19T14:00:00.009-04:00

This post title is brought to you by a website called FailBlog which I really enjoy browsing; it's a collection of, well, utter failures. Check the site and you'll see what I mean; it's the combination of funny and horrifying that I find particularly compelling. Admittedly, my liking this site makes me a bit of a jerk; but you already knew that.

If the third book I'm going to discuss in this post were either funny or horrifying in an even slightly compelling way, it might not be a fail. However, it's a FAIL in all caps because it straight up sucks too much for me to even bother finishing it. It sucks even more than that previous sentence.

WIN: Suggestion by Illegal Art. This book came into the store last week and I was intrigued as I often am by community arts projects. (Yes, I read PostSecret faithfully, but I find it a little repetitive sometimes. I didn't use to find it repetitive but I think it's perhaps time it was retired. It may be going on too long, like Friends or Star Trek: Voyager.)

Illegal Art is a group from NYC who took gigantic suggestion boxes and writing implements to the 5 Burroughs and hounded people to write something for them. They then picked as wide a variety as possible submissions from their collection to make up this book.

By turns hilarious, maudlin, offensive, weird, and rude (all at varying levels of literacy), the suggestions in this book made me think that perhaps humanity is more interesting than I've assumed (or than PostSecret makes it seem). Here are some of my favourites:

Free pumpkin pie every Thursday. (p. 15)

Always keep a bucket of bleach on hand. (p.83)

That the world be covered in linoleum so we could tap dance all day! - Adam (p. 89)

More Bollywood. (p. 99)

It shouldn't be called "blue". It should be called "ronk". (p. 189)

My friend, Jonathan, should kiss me. (p. 271)

I'd like to suggest that the Hassidic men consider a lighter summer look. (p. 298)

We suggest to take down the man. (p. 333)

Bring back the Pancho Villa mustache - by any means necessary. (p. 342)

I sejust they put more fish in it. (p. 392)

More Fellini. Less trophy dogs. (p. 407)

All good suggestions these, especially the ones involving pie and Bollywood. Ooooh, oooh! I suggest Bollywood/pumpkin pie/Pancho Villa mustache evenings! I'll be at your place at seven on Thursday!!

WIN: The Snapper by Roddy Doyle. I plucked this off the shelf to give myself a little break from Troyes' Arthurian Romances and it was a nice light snack - a BRILLIANT nice light snack. I mean that in a "what Adrian Mole or Harry Potter would say about something that really pleased them" kind of way, not a "genius" kind of way.

I'm embarrassed for myself a little. I read The Commitments back in 1994 or so and loved it and somehow never even tried to read any more Doyle after that. This book made me laugh SO MUCH. Customers would walk by in the store and see me reading The Snapper and tell me that they love it so much they've read it 5 times!

I don't know if it's good enough to be a 5-timer, but The Snapper has some of the best dialogue I've ever seen in a novel. Ever! I can't wait to read The Van, which my gushy customers assured me I couldn't deprive myself of. Right you are, gushy strangers, right you are.

FAIL: The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature by Neal Pollack. I'm not sure why I picked this one up. In any case, it doesn't recommend trying to read random things from my store just because we have two copies.

I got about 40 pages into this one before I decided (this morning) to kick it to the curb. This is another McSweeney's h-....er, guy trying his hand at the funny - so, a bunch of essays written with Hilarious Intentions and significantly too much self-assurance.

At first, I found it kind of funny (even though I'd already read a few of the pieces in Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans and didn't find them funny there) but then realized that Neal Pollock has only one joke (sending up literary pretension) - and I'm sorry, but there's only one person who can get away with telling the same joke repeatedly and that's Napoleon Dynamite. And also maybe my dad.

The Reading Lamp: history, mystery, and magic

2009-05-16T12:31:00.007-04:00

It seems that this spring, the sunshine is as elusive in Oregon as it is here in Ontario. Luckily, readers are out in abundance for here's another committed book-lover from the west coast.

Besides the readers, Oregon seems to have its share of well-established indie bookstores - young man, I may just have to advise you to go west.

Your name: Helen

What are you currently reading? The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell.

Where are you reading it? In the elusive Oregon sunshine.

How did you discover this book? My favorite place to buy books is Broadway Books (Portland Oregon) where the newest selections are laid on a table for easy perusal and I always seem to find something I like. The staff also recommends books they have enjoyed. They have an excellent blog where they list and describe newly arrived books and upcoming events. That is where I bought The Pig Did It. I had just finished reading City of Thieves by David Benioff and although I enjoyed it, I wanted to read something lighter.

What do you think of it so far? Well it was off to a good start, but the pig has disappeared from the scene and he provided the comic relief. I am almost done and I hope the pig returns soon!

How do you choose what to read next? I check a great local website for tips called Reading Local run by Gabe Barber to see what he or his followers recommend and/or I just go back to Broadway Books and see what looks good. They once had a display of mystery books by writers from around the world and that is where I found The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill which I highly recommend. It takes place in Laos after the Communist takeover and it combines history, mystery, and magic.

What is your favourite indie bookstore? Why? As I mentioned earlier, I love to shop at Broadway Books. They celebrated 17 years of business this year and here is video, made by my husband Mario, of their 15th anniversary party. The staff is knowledgeable and very helpful in recommending books.

Who do you talk to about books? Anyone who will listen but now in the age of the internet, I exchange ideas with other readers on blogs and websites such as Reading Local.

If you're interested in being featured on The Reading Lamp, email me at colleen AT bookphilia DOT com!

If you're in Nova Scotia and need good reads...

2009-05-13T08:59:00.009-04:00

As promised, here is my little homage to the kick-ass used bookstores that make Nova Scotia (well, Halifax and Wolfville, anyway) a seriously dangerous place for my bank account. As I've mentioned before, I bought a lot of books for myself when I was on vacation last week...and there's no shortage of books where I live and work already. It's just very difficult to resist the random finds in shops that I only get to once a year or so. Halifax, my home town, has a fantastic collection of used bookstores, but at the top of my list is Back Pages on Queen Street.

Back Pages is a tiny place, comprising only 3 small rooms, but I always find books I can't resist there. During this visit, what I couldn't resist were some Ellis Peters novels and that Hardy book which I hope I'll read before my next visit to Halifax.

The past 3 or so times I've been in Halifax (so over the past 3 years), I've noted that Back Pages always had the same copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel prominently displayed in the literature section. I always felt tempted to buy it but never did; this time, however, I vowed that if it was still there, I would have to buy it, because clearly it was the subconscious inspiration for my French Literature Reading Project. But alas, or thankfully, it had finally found its way out the door.

My other favourite tiny Halifax used bookstore, which is even tinier than Back Pages as it consists of only one room, is The Last Word on Windsor Street. That this shop has been thriving for at least ten years (run by a former sea captain, yaaaarrrr), is a testament to how kick-ass it is - Windsor Street is kind of a weird place to have a business, and many have tried and failed. It's sort of a major street but it links up primarily with residential streets and is mostly residential itself, at least at The Last Word's end of it.

I didn't actually buy anything at The Last Word this time around, but in the past it's been one of my best sources of Japanese literature, and the cap'n and I have spent a lot of time discussing our favourites. I think he might be hiding them behind the counter now, which is fair; in the past, I've forced him to sell me his stash of Japanese novels, which made him look quite demoralized and downtrodden. This time around I didn't have the heart to do it; also, my suitcase was already getting pretty full.

Right on Barrington Street, which used to be the heart of downtown, and then died, and which now appears to be reviving itself somewhat, is the gargantuan J.W. Doull's Books. The ceilings are 20 feet high and the bookshelves the same, the stacks on the floor are 3 feet high, and the space itself is about 3 times the size of my bookstore - and we have about 35,000 books in stock. Yes, Doull's can be a little overwhelming.

But in a place this size that hasn't given in to the selling remaindered bestsellers racket/cop-out, the treasures to be discovered are endless. This is where I got my new Gaetan Soucy novel (yay!), as well as some later Ellis Peters, Diary of a Nobody, and My Cousin Rachel. I could have bought a lot more, especially because they had a big sale going on but I had to show a little bit of restraint...because I was worried Porter Airlines would tell me I couldn't check my baggage on the trip back because it was too heavy. Also, I was shocked to discover that they didn't currently have any Wodehouse in stock, which I likely wouldn't have been able to resist either.

My friend Yuri and I took a road trip when I was down east and we ended up in Wolfville, where he took me to a great used bookstore called The Odd Book. It's not located on the main street but it seems to do well enough anyway.

It's also not at all pretty on the outside, and the lighting inside is rather too bright for my tastes (I like used bookstores with dark corners and an abundance of dust), but the selection was great - this is where I got The Vinland Sagas, which I'd never even heard of. Presenting previously unknown reading gems is, to me, one of the most important functions of used bookstores.

It may seem as though all I did in Halifax was go book shopping, and that's almost true. But I also ate and so that you don't think that my book addiction is endangering my health, here's proof that I sometimes put down the book to feed the machine:

Murdere and mayehemme

2009-05-11T11:16:00.005-04:00

I'm so pleased to have found a copy of Ellis Peters' Saint Peter's Fair (the fourth Brother Cadfael medieval whodunnit) when I was in Halifax last week, because all of my attempts to find it in Toronto failed. I had a customer at the store who also likes Ellis Peters tell me knowingly and somewhat pityingly that Saint Peter's Fair can be quite difficult to find. I may have felt a measure of panic at this grim proclamation, but I tried to play it cool.

It took 3 bookshops in Hali, but I found it and then read it in a day and a half. As always, Peters' writing and story-telling were excellent; indeed, Saint Peter's Fair was rather more excitingly action-packed than the first three Cadfael books were - and the first in this series to see Brother Cadfael incorrectly read someone's personality, and to almost fatal effect! It was very good.

In some ways, the denouement was rather too exciting for me, for I was reading it while flying home to Toronto and my attempts to finish this novel were continually interrupted by the worst air turbulence I've ever experienced. People's water bottles went flying up into the air when we made our first dramatic and unexpected drop and a few people screamed. It went on like this, off and on, for about an hour and while most people were very quiet about it, they were generally so (within my view, anyway) in a determined kind of way. One guy was trying to pray or meditate. The woman next to me was crying silently but with the utmost despair. I was aggressively believing in the plane's ability to remain aloft, for someone I know who hates flying once told me that he was certain planes only flew because everyone on board believed they could and would. And nothing whatsoever from the flight crew except we should put our seat belts on! Bastardoes!

I made it back alive, obviously, with no crashing involved. It didn't make me eager to fly anywhere again though, in spite of the fact that my trip to Halifax was both relaxing and lucrative in terms of the stack of books I bought myself.

I'm glad to be back, to see my hubby, our catties and bunnies, and the cherry blossoms which bloomed in my absence, and to begin the next book in my French Literature Project! So far, Chretien de Troyes is rocking my world.

Beautiful man

2009-05-08T08:42:00.003-04:00

Well, sweeties, my vacation is almost at an end: tomorrow morning, at the obscene hour of 8:30, I will be flying on a jet plane back to Toronto, work, and my dear hubby. It's been a good rest - I've slept and read a hell of a lot and allowed myself the pleasure of going a little crazy in all my favourite Halifax (used) bookstores. (I'll be doing a little feature on said bookstores sometime next week so stay tuned!)

This is what I've purchased for myself: Gaetan Soucy's Vaudeville!, Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes, Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel, George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, 5 by Ellis Peters (!!!), and my mother gave me her copy of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise. Of course, except for the Ellis Peters novel I'm about to begin reading (the fourth Brother Cadfael mystery, which it took me ages to find), it'll likely be 6 months to a year before I read any of these.

As is the case for Rose City Reader, books usually need to sort of percolate in my brain for awhile before I'm ready to read them. For example, I bought Jorge Amado's Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon just about a year ago now, when I was working at Bay and Bloor and going out every three days to spend my hard earned cash on more books. I wanted to read it immediately, but just somehow didn't...

But my goodness, it was worth the wait. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon is just a beautiful novel. The writing and translating are amazing and the story so utterly compelling that absolutely the only thing I've wanted to do for the past 2 days is sit alone somewhere and lose myself in it. This novel tells the story of a coastal cacao town in Brazil in the 20s and the resulting pains and joys as it strives against the old guard to become a modern city. Amado presents a very large cast of characters, all of whom are entirely unique and completely unforgettable, but at the centre are Nacib and Gabriela, a local bar owner and his cook/lover/wife (briefly).

As Ilheus is figuring out what it means to civilize itself in terms of politics and commerce, it's also figuring out what for it civilization means in terms of relationships between men and women. Nacib and Gabriela cause each other a lot of bliss and agony as they figure things out (well, while Nacib does - Gabriela is always just herself, which Nacib takes a long time to accept.)

I think I like this book almost too much to say anything about it. I still feel as though I'm there, in Ilheus, with the flowers blooming in the plaza and the dust blowing down the streets and Gloria looking longingly out of her window and the men in the Vesuvius looking longingly back at her. I'll stop. I'm going to become insufferably gushy and maudlin if I don't. The only other thing I'll add is this: Gabriela always refers to Nacib as "Beautiful man", and because I am a little in love with Jorge Amado and maybe a little with Nacib as well, that will be the title of this post.

The experience of reading

2009-05-06T16:44:00.008-04:00

This is Keats; this pic is one of the first things that came up on Google when I looked for images using the terms "absorbed" and "reading." I don't know if I like Keats, to be honest, because I think I've read only one thing by him and I was teaching it to the laziest first-year English class that's ever existed. Nonetheless, he's going to be the mascot for this post.

Here at my "vacation resort" I have been pretty much trapped inside all day because the city's being pelted with southeast Asian-style torrential rains. I've been reading, of course - Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon is very, very good - and I've created version 2.0 of my questions for The Reading Lamp.

But I just noticed the following comment was posted to my entry on Dracula and instead of answering Kevin's questions there, I thought I'd do so here so more of you will be likely to weigh in, as Kevin (and I) would like you to. Here's his message:

Hi Colleen,

I have a question, not about Dracula, but about the experience of
reading Dracula, in fact, the experience of reading any book, for that matter.

You say you read for hours in one sitting, which raises a series of
questions for me concerning the psychology of reading, in part because I can no longer read for hours, to sit motionless and disappear into fictional worlds entire, sadly.

When you read, do you see the scene unfolding in your mind's eye? Does the scene take on a life of its own, as it does, say, in a hypnogogic dream state? After you read a particularly beautiful sentence, can you recite it without re-reading it? Or only the gist?

I'm often astonished by how little I remember of a book, not only words in sentences but incidents and names of characters, not to mention the qualia of their inner lives. Very frustrating. Do you have this "problem?"

Maybe others will weigh in, too.
Regards, Kevin

First, let's bow our heads in mourning for Kevin's inability to sit reading for hours anymore. Joking (sort of) aside, I didn't actually think I could do that anymore, until I did so on Sunday. The pleasure of the experience was pretty closely linked to my surprise about its occurrence, to be honest.

I think I was able to do it precisely because I'm on vacation and not being confronted with work, in any of its myriad forms; in other words, I'm in an artificial situation that likely won't be reproduced until the next time I go on vacation. Once I'm back in the bookstore, in Toronto, I'll likely go back to snatching an hour or 45 minutes here and there between more pressing commitments. Being an adult kind of sucks, doesn't it?

But to answer Kevin's questions:

For the most part, yes, I do see the scene unfolding in my mind's eye, unless the book isn't entirely good - i.e., if the writing is bad or inconsistent, I keep becoming aware that I'm reading words on a page, which can be incredibly annoying. This happened several times while I was reading Dracula, particularly when I found myself distracted by the inconsistencies in Van Helsing's grammar noted in my previous post.

That said, I'm usually never completely unaware that I'm reading; when I have become entirely unaware of the fact that I'm engaged with a book, I've lost track of time and space, and have found a book to be counted among my all-time favourites: The Brothers Karamazov, Cloud Atlas, and Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio come to mind.

Next question: No, I can never recite sentences after just reading them, no matter how beautiful. The lines that have been seared into my memory are the ones I've also taught: e.g., when standing on the stage of the Globe Theatre in London with a tour group I was able to roar out that "You do me wrong to take me out of the grave!", etc, but that sort of conscipuous display of readerly nerdiness is an exception for me.

The final question, which isn't phrased as a question: I don't remember a lot about most books I read either, but the more I remember of a book is generally reflective of how much I enjoyed it, how much it affected me. And my memories of books are almost always of how I pictured scenes in my mind rather than the quality of the writing or examples thereof, even though writing quality will make or break a book for me.

So, gentle readers, what say you? Can you read for hours? Quote beautiful passages? Remember the minutest of details? Do tell!

Vacation reading gush-fest

2009-05-04T20:51:00.008-04:00

Oh sweeties, I can't tell you how happy I am right now. I am on vacation! This is my first post-grad school vacation, i.e., the first trip I've taken in about a hunnert years during which I haven't spent any time feeling guilty about the grad schoolish work I should be doing.

Let me tell you about my glorious Sunday. I slept in. I ate a lot. I went for a long walk around my native city of sunny, tropical Halifax, NS (the city that never sleeps except at night, and sometimes for naps as well). I sat in a cafe and read Dracula. I walked more. I came back to my mom's place and then I did something I haven't done in about 10 years: I laid in bed - FOR HOURS - reading. It was so amazing to be relaxed enough to do that; and not being sufficiently relaxed is the only reason why I haven't done this is an age and a half.

I finished Dracula yesterday during my relaxed, layabout reading love-fest and it certainly added to the dreaminess of this whole vacation experience. When I began this novel, I assumed I couldn't possibly be surprised by anything Stoker could throw at me but I was constantly surprised and generally incredibly pleased (and often jumpy). It was a damned good read and there were some incredibly interesting things going on with gender (female agency in particular) that I am currently too happy and glutted to either contemplate or discuss.

But two things did stand in the way of this being a 5/5 book for me (were I given to rating books, which I'm not). The first was how inconsistent Stoker was about representing Van Helsing's English (as a second language) skills; sometimes Van Helsing's grammar was perfect and sometimes it was laughably poor. I feel as though Stoker's editor should have bonked him on the head a little. But this was pretty minor.

Spoiler Alert! Less minor was the major plot hole surrounding Mina's victimization at Dracula's hands (er, teeth. Sharp, pointy teeth). As the reader, I had the exact same information as Van Helsing, Harker, Seward, Goldaming, and Morris had - the narrative structure was such that there was no room anywhere for an omniscient narrator that could provide me with info the characters lacked.

The erstwhile vampire slayers all knew that Dracula was able to get into spaces that happened to house vulnerable female characters, as Lucy was already dead and they'd pooled their info when they congregated at Seward's asylum. AND YET, they all insisted on sending Mina off to bed every night unguarded while they went sniffing after Dracula's trail! And then were surprised and CLUELESS when she started to look pale and behave lethargically in EXACTLY the same way Lucy did when Dracula was victimizing her.

I have to say, this mis-step drove me a little crazy. Given how clever and thoughtful these characters were, this blindness was just too unbelievable - less believable even than the possibility of blood-sucking vampires. I'm sure Stoker could have found another way to make Mina into a victim - required for the tense climax of the novel! - in some way more suited to not making the genius Van Helsing and his semi-genius helpers look like complete and utter dolts.

Still, a good read which is helping to sustain my return to the Victorians love-in. But next, I have some decidedly 20th-century lit to wrangle with.

Vitriol, I has it

2009-04-30T12:33:00.007-04:00

Remember when I was reading 6 books at once? Me too. It wasn't pretty, and not just because there were too many books in play; of the 6, I hated one, and was alternately pleased and disappointed by another. Both of the books I'm referring to were short story collections, so it's not entirely their authors' faults; nothing short of 400 pages of sustained YARN can truly satisfy me these days.

The Paper Door and Other Stories by Shiga Naoya
I was SO excited to discover this at a local bookstore (no, not my own) because I've had it on my mental TBR list for years now. Naoya was a literary disciple of Soseki Natsume, who is one of my favourite writers and so I assumed Naoya would be comparable, at least in terms of quality.

Wrong. I put way too much pressure on Naoya. This poor guy could have helped himself by symbolically killing his teacher in some way; instead, he was so overwhelmed by Soseki's brilliance that he wrote almost nothing until after his teacher died and I suspect he missed out on the best years of his writing life for doing so.

The Paper Door and Other Stories wasn't bad; indeed, it was quite good at points but the energy and beauty weren't sustained and I found a number of the stories to be frustratingly similar to one another. Most annoying, Naoya's characters seemed to feel only "loneliness" (his - or the translator's - word, not mine), and never anything else. I don't know about you, but I think "lonely" isn't the most evocative of adjectives.

I think I'd read more of Naoya's work if it were presented to me, but I don't think I'll seek any out.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Yes, I know, I'm a little late to the party on this one. I think Carver's heyday was in the early 90s; at least that's when I recall all my friends raving about him; I once even found a collection of his works in the Halifax Public Library sporting in abundance the very recognizable handwriting of my friend S. But I resisted the hype, as I tend to.

But recently, I thought I'd finally give him a try to see what all the fuss was about, because a bunch of his stuff came into the store, including two copies of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The best I can say is this: thank goodness it was really short.

At first, I felt the same sort of nothing reading this that I felt reading The Virgin Suicides. But that comfortable enough nothing too soon turned into exasperation, and ultimately disgust.

It was just so boring. Aggressively boring. The stories were all very similar, and all about characters who were usually despicable, but never interestingly so. As far as I'm concerned, this is unforgivable because as any reviewer, blogger, lit critic, half-way competent fiction-writer and Erasmus knows: it's much easier to bring the vitriol with passion and originality than to bring the praise with the same.

In one or two cases, I could see where Cormac McCarthy (in The Road) was lifting Carver's style directly and then turning it up to 11, to which I say: if you're going to be bad, at least do so with gusto, like McCarthy does; at least, have an interesting idea, like McCarthy does! I have new respect for McCarthy's brand of bad, because at least The Road didn't cause my synapses to stop firing out of sheer disinterest.

I think I'm going to stay away from the short stories for awhile...which, of course, pushes my projected completion date on the Henry James collection into 2017. At least there are about eleventy-thousand good novels for me to read in the meantime.