I'm Sorry I Can't Read The Luminaries

I tried to read The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, I really did. I'm intrigued when any book raises a little controversy--the debate over whether the author, born in Canada, but an inhabitant of New Zealand, actually qualifies as being Canadian seems such a Canadian controversy. I was more curious as to why there was such a long waiting list at my local library for such a big book; lugging home a tome of 832 pages is surely a strain on the Smart Car's suspension and honestly, how many readers are really that dedicated for an unknown author? Even one that's won the Governor General's Award?
I wasn't put off by the size--a good book is never long enough and I loved The Goldfinch, The Poisonwood Bible and The Crimson Petal and the White precisely because of their length (the closer to the end of each I got, the slower I read). But there didn't seem any point to the wordiness of The Luminaries and when I dove in, I nearly drowned. The only thing that saved this Victorian style novel was the idea of editing.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry is the complete opposite in brevity of both length and depth.  I have to admit my personal prejudice for a story about a sales rep and bookseller and I was prepared to like this book a lot. So my disappointment was just as great. The story was all there on the surface, as likeable as a Hallmark card. But the bit about the abandoned baby in the bookstore--and baby makes three!--was just too movie-of-the-week for me.
I liked this book about as much as The Bridges of Madison County. And probably other people will too.

What more could you want than a dog, a book and a blog?

Disappearing Summer Days and the Stacks of Unread

It's amazing what I haven't read this summer. Now that I don't have the regular commute from the West Island, my reading has fallen off dramatically. And something has happened to my attention span that makes it hard to stick to a single book. I've always layered my reading with several books on the go, but one has never detracted from the other. Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's the fact I haven't quite settled into my new home but I just can't seem to read.
I heard great things about Joe R. Lansdale's Edge of Dark Water but I just couldn't get into it. I heard not-so-great things about Lars Kepler's second book, The Nightmare, but so far I like it better than the first. 
Movie trailers have inspired me to try The Life of Pi once again and once again, I come to a dead stop in exactly the same place as before, with the poor zebra. Maybe the entire movie will pull me past that part but right now, I just haven't the heart.
The preview of The Cloud Atlas looks so wonderful that it makes me want to save the book for a time when I can begin and just read right through the night. I've already had a peek and can't quite figure out why I didn't pick up on this years ago.
 I'm halfway through Tana French's Broken Harbour and all I can think is, it isn't The Likeness. Of course it isn't and I like the book fine, if I can keep that out of my mind. Comparisons to Asa Larsson's The Black Path is what ruined Until Thy Wrath be Past for me. Well, that and the awkward title.
The new Arnaldur Indridason, Black Skies, has just arrived on my desk and I'm trying very hard not to even crack the cover.
 In the meantime, I'm concentrating on I Feel Bad About my Neck. Nora Ephron makes me laugh and that's all I want, or need, for now. 

What more could you want than a dog, a book and a blog?

My Summer Reading List

I'm always surprised at other people's reading lists, particularly those published in The Globe and Mail which read like a marketing person's Canlit or classics list. I'm not going to even pretend to read War and Peace or attempt to get through The Golden Bowl. Even the movie was a slog (the latter, not the former) and I always thought Henry James was in dire need of a good editor.
So here's my list and no surprise, it's mainly mysteries.
Camille Lackberg's The Drowning, which I grabbed as soon as I saw it was out. The blockbuster ending leaves the reader salivating for next Spring's follow-up, The Lighthouse.
Helen Tursten's Night Rounds made me very happy to see her back on Canadian bookstore shelves. Readers discovering the Inspector Irene Huss series for the first time will want to search out The Torso and The Glass Devil.
Tana French's Broken Harbour. I have mixed feelings about this author--though The Likeness was absolutely fantastic, I just couldn't get into her last book, Faithful Place. So maybe that's another to add to my reading list.
Ake Edwardson's Sail of Stone and Jo Nesbo's  Phantom because I love the Scandinavians.  
Then there's always the books I'd happily reread like Ami McKay's The Virgin Cure and The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber ( now out in an excellent Masterpiece Theatre adaptation). Since Case Histories came out on DVD, I think I'd reread Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie mysteries because when I first read them, I never thought of them as mysteries. 
And though I'm not tempted at all by any Shades of Grey, I admit my guilty pleasure is men in armour, ergo George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones and all the rest of the series because I can't wait for HBO.

What more could you want than a dog, a book and a blog?

  

A Couple More Scandinavians and a Fake

There's obviously an appetite for Scandinavian writers as more and more make their way to our shores. Award winning Arne Dahl has published lots in his native Sweden: Misterioso is his first one here. And despite the at-times awkward translation, it's the top of the genre.
Businessmen are being murdered to the tune of a jazz standard. Detective Paul Hjelm is part of an elite team assembled to discover why but in uncovering the secrets of the victims, the question becomes more of why not.
The translation of The Boy in the Suitcase is done by one of the authors herself and this is what makes the novel read so well. The authors, Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis, have worked together before and their writing is seamless. The desire for a 'dream family' is the tragic irony behind the title. Nina Borg is only doing a friend a favour when she picks up the suitcase from a train station locker. Her discovery unravels a horror of child trafficking and illegal adoption. But even in this, the villain is sympathetic in his desire for a family and picket fence life.
It's another English writer who proclaims, on the cover of the book, no less, that "Michael Ridpath is on the warpath, trouncing the Scandinavians on their home turf." Hardly. (Aggressive marketing has always made me flinch. One can just imagine the marketing person pumping her fist in the air over copy!) 
Ridpath writes like a visitor, a well-versed one but still...he's got the addresses but not the atmosphere, the vocabulary but not the cadence of language of the native Scandinavians. There is some reason for this, besides the obvious fact of the author being English: the main character is Icelandic born, transplanted as a child to the States, then as an adult threatened in his job as a cop, transferred over to Iceland. The logistics are unlikely, the juxtaposition, awkward. Regardless of geography, Where the Shadows Lie reads like an American thriller. A bad one.
"There are two things that a cop hates more than anything else. One is a crooked cop. Another is a cop who rats on one of his colleagues."
Whatever happened to the cardinal rule of writing: show, not tell? The reader is constantly being told how Icelanders 'are', whether it's their sex habits, their drinking, their superstitions. Ridpath should stick to his home turf and leave Iceland to the Icelanders. They've already got the best in Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Arnaldur Indridason, and Ridpath, quite frankly, just doesn't compare. 

What more could you want than a dog, a book and a blog?

For Masochists Only

For some reason my favourite novels deal with death: Joyce Johnson's In the Night Café (the movie starred me and a much younger Robert Redford; in real life it was me with my late boyfriend David), Anne Patchett's lovely The Magician's Assistant, which I read lying in bed next to David--him annoyed that I had lost myself in a book that he himself had given me. Ignoring the flesh for the word. Dreaming of life in print. While death in print is but a prod. A prod to memory but also an electric prod. Manna for masochists.
Which makes none of these an easy read much less a comfort, unless that comfort lies in knowing someone else suffers just as much, even the rich, especially the rich. They may have their money but they're not exempt. Pain is never personal though it sure feels that way.
I remember when John Kennedy Jr. died, the televised days they searched for his plane. (It was after David died; Princess Diana's death was the bracket before.) Carole Radziwill's book is a personal story about John Kennedy's death: Radziwill was married to his cousin, Anthony, and best friends with his wife, Carolyn  Bessette. Her husband was dying of cancer when the couple went missing.
"I had prepared for an approaching sorrow, but not, as it turned out, for the one that was nearest."
That awful moment when you think things can't possibly get worse. And then they do.
The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights by Joan Didion is the prose of  a  beloved's angst. Didion's husband had a bad heart and had been through surgery when their daughter was mysteriously struck down; still, neither was expected to die, both did.
"John was talking, then he wasn't."
'Magical'  thinking is the only way to carry on, an elaborate form of denial, keeping his shoes in case he returned.
Blue Nights, which details the death of her daughter, Quintana, is overwhelming in its sadness. The reader knows the ending from the beginning: it is the exact opposite of Quintana's philosophy, "Like when someone dies, don't dwell on it."  As a mother and writer, Didion can do little else.
Say Her Name has more a desperate, violent edge to it. Goldman lost his young wife in a freak accident, one that he takes blame for, one that he replays over and over and over again. This book may be a purgative but it is definitely not a curative; the pain in print is too pervasive to ever disappear. But it does keep her name alive, not said but howled.
So read it and weep.

What more could you want than a dog, a book and a blog?

The Icelandic Unknown

"All she had to show for the day's labours were the bones in the desk drawers and the photograph of the frozen hand. Thora drifted off to sleep wondering how long a corpse could stay suspended in ice."
With all the fuss over the year's top ten or hundred bestsellers, a few really good new releases have slipped in all but unnoticed. Yrsa Sigurdardottir is an Icelandic author who's finally coming into her own with the publication of her fourth novel The Day is Dark. (Arnaldur Indridason may be better known but Sigurdardottir is catching on quick--try saying that 10 times!)
Lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir has been recruited to lead a team to investigate the mysterious disappearance of two workers in deepest Greenland. It isn't long before other bodies begin to turn up and the team itself is threatened. The plot may sound familiar, with elements of horror akin to John Carpenter's The Thing, but it's really the historical and cultural details that set this book above the genre. The names are a bit difficult to follow (ie. two characters with the unfortunately similar names of Alvar and Arnar) but any Montrealer in winter can empathize with the setting.
"So tell me about the head that you went to collect without knowing anything about it", is Thora's question to new client Markus, implicated in a crime that took place decades before. The backdrop of a volcanic eruption has helped to conceal multiple murders recently uncovered by excavations in Ashes to Dust and the only witness has just been discovered, an apparent suicide.
Sigurdardottir's third crime novel has somehow snuck in under the radar at the same time as her fourth. Luckily it's not really necessary to read her books in order. I'm just glad I can finally pronounce the author's name.

What more could you want than a dog, a book and a blog?

And Now For Something Completely Different

I discovered Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People at my local public library and it gave me new respect for librarians. Who could have guessed their taste to be so eclectic and irreverent as to choose a book so completely true to its title.
Author Douglas Copeland has come a long way since Shampoo Planet and his pairing with illustrator Graham Roumieu is a marriage made in heaven--if your idea of heaven is a bulimic bacchanalian fest of rudeness and gore.
Stories include Sandra, the Truly Dreadful Babysitter who turns her charges into shoplifters and arsonists. (Isn't that precisely why they invented nannycams?) Mr. Fraser, the Undead Substitute Teacher convinces his students to submit essays on their tastiest classmate with graphically hilarious results. And I must admit I'm tempted to read Donald, the Incredibly Hostile Juice Box to my seven year old nieces who would roll around on the floor with glee but no doubt, in their parents' eyes, that would turn me into Sandra.
Roumieu--whom readers will recognize from cartoons for the Globe and Mail--is a genius, no less than the Edward Gorey of our times. Tales is undoubtably geared towards the same fanbase as The Gashlycrumb Tinies and Roumieu's own Bigfoot books, written in deliciously bad taste.
It will make you laugh until you pee. Definitely not for kids or their parents.

                                      What more could you want than a dog, a book and a blog?