Death Before Dishonor, 50 Cent & Nicky Turner

This is pulp fiction at its worst.

I had to read it. Toronto's lit geek community is all over the series as surprisingly funny beach reading, and I'd have to agree with them. It reads like a bad book geared toward grade 6 kids. Some of the writing literally makes you cringe.

The storyline is pretty basic: gantsta finally finds a bitch who gives him a run for his money, they fall in love, mess with a local drug lord and have to pay the price. Throw in some pimped out rides and a helluva lot of bling and there's the book.

It is also filled with life lessons. For example, when dressing to impress, choose chinchilla and mink furs. Accessorize. If your car is blue, buy a suit, cane, and hot twins wearing blue contacts to match. If you see a new Hummer, chances are it'll have a secret compartment for drugs and/or guns. Don't date gold diggers; they'll sell you out for a little cash.

To get all the entertainment value out of this baby, you have to embrace how terrible the writing is. It's well worth the effort.

3 gangstas out of 10

Steph

The Queen's Fool, Philippa Gregory

Set in the mid-1500s, The Queen’s Fool follows a young girl, Hannah though her service in Queen Mary’s court. Hannah and her father have fled to England from the Spanish Inquisition, guilty of their Jewish ancestry. Shortly after they arrive, masking as reformed Christians, Hannah is discovered by a Lord and his tutor as a holy Seer, and they see her hired as the royal fool. Her job is to say what she thinks, tell of her visions, to inspire and amuse the Queen. In court, Hannah finds herself drawn into the confidence of the lord who discovered her, the queen, and her step-sister, all of whom have conflicting interests. Meanwhile, her father and husband-to-be have their own opinions of how she should be employed and to whom she should be faithful. She is forced to balance her obligations to each, while ensuring that her past is not discovered.

I’m going to employ the sandwich technique of praise, criticism, praise:

I really enjoyed the fact that Gregory didn’t allow Hannah to always follow what the reader wanted her to do. It would have been easier to tie it up halfway through with a bow, but taking the harder route made for a much more gratifying read.

About 2/5 of the time I was reading it I remained mildly frustrated with how slow the story moved, how repetitive the wording was and how certain thoughts or words were not in keeping with the time period of the novel. The trouble is that this was written in bite-sized pieces, structured like a Hardy Boys novel, where details are repeated for the sake of those readers whose attention has drifted or who haven’t picked up the book in days. For a historical novel, it could have gone into more detail about the history.

That said, the romances were highly entertaining.

5 of 10 white horses

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

This is one of the most heart breaking novels I have ever read.

Amir, 12 when we meet him, lives in Afghanistan with his wealthy father and their two servents, Hassan and Ali. Amir and Hassan grow up together but find it increasingly difficult to remain friends, Amir being Pashtun and Hassan being Hazara. Amir is eventually forced to choose between protecting himself or Hassan and their friendship. At the start of the Soviet invasion, Amir and his father flee to California. Years later, Amir is called back to Afghanistan to help make amends for his past.

This novel helped put into perspective the past few decades of Afghan history. If only for that I would recommend it. But Hosseini's characters are so wonderful as well. I suspect that most people see a bit of themselves in Amir, both as a young boy and as he matures. I hope that when I reread this book in a few years time, I will see more of myself in Hassan.

My next project, after my current book is to read Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

8 kites out of 10.

Steph

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling

Are you surprised this is in here? You shouldn't be.

I'm not entirely sure where to start because, as always, I read this book at whirlwind speed, sacrificing sleep to finish it. And while this technique quells my need to know exactly what happens now, it isn't quite as useful for reporting back on the specifics.

I think the first book will always be my favourite, if only for its novelty, but this is probably second. I really don't want to say anything more about it. Harry Potter is so publicized and so personal that it wouldn't really matter anyway.

Steph

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Part I

I tried to read it. I really did. But it's taken me so long to get to page 90, and so much frustration because I'm not committed to Crusoe as a character, that I can't finish the book right now.
That Crusoe is ingenious in his design of his camps and producing various crops is marvelous and I always get excited during these descriptions. But apart from these, I found the pace of the novel maddeningly slow.

I'm sure in the future I'll pick it up and the story will resonate in a way it didn't before. But for now I'm going to have to accept that reading novels is only helpful if you take something from them.

I can't even rate it yet. You'll have to wait for Part II for that.

Steph

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

What a wonderful bedtime story.

It has to have been at least 13 years since I’d read this last. And even though I was obsessed with the TV version (Irwin Allen’s 1985 gem), I found I’d forgotten a lot of it. For example, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum don’t appear until Through the Looking Glass, which is another post entirely.

I think everyone should read this again as an adult. It’s still as wonderfully funny and whimsical as you remember and even better now that you know why the Mad Hatter is mad.

You know, I was about to write a beautiful, eloquent blog about this novel, but my family is discussing the intricacies of removal of varicose veins (slice above, slice below, fish out offending vein) and I’m quickly becoming sick. So I’m going to have to leave it at that.

4.5 hair ribbons out of 5. It would have been 5 of 5 had I been born at a time when the rhymes in the book were still being taught and I understood more of it. Though of course that's my fault, not Carroll's.

Steph

Anthem - Ayn Rand

This was a rather hard book for me. It reads easily, and it's only really about 70 pages long, but my problem was with its politics. You see, Rand was a staunch capitalist and she puts forth a brilliant argument for capitalism as being a form of individuality. Thats what the dust jacket says anyway. The truth in my mind is that Rand was arguing only for individuality, not for capitalism at all. Rand see that there is a huge amount to hide behind when the word "we" is used. It makes fools smart and the cowardly brave. Intellectually, this is entirely correct and I agree with her entirely that in the academic world there should be a struggle to be the best yourself, without relying on other people for your intelligence. Economically, I disagree entirely but that really isn't the point of this book. I think that it has since been construed to being a capitalist book by a bunch of capitalists who want to justify their existance, but in reality, this is just a book about not letting the man get you down and homogeonize you until you can't use your brain to the fullest extent of its capabilities. Not letting yourself getting caught up in the lie of "we" so that you never produce anything yourself.

I would definitely recommend this as it really can be read super quick and you get a lot out of it. I would be interested in reading her other works if they were 7gazillion pages long. I'll have to eventually I suppose.

Good readin.

Andrew

Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen

A very simple and fun book about the circus. It really seemed to me like the writer did it just kind of like a newspaper article. She wrote it very acurately, made sure to get the emotional hook in, but didn't have any real substance in my opinion. The basic premise is that a young man runs off to the circus, crazy, fun antics ensue and then the other half of the book (intermingled) is spent reminiscing about his time in the circus as a 90 year old. I think the most interesting part about the book is this commentary on life as a series of memories which lose value the more aged they are. Very entertaining and simple book that is a really easy read but it was too much of a cut and dry, obvious attempt at writing a book club novel. She even had a list of book club questions that could be asked at the end. Seemed like a lady that has had a really simple, secluded life sitting in her friends living rooms and talking and finally deciding she should write a book to make a few bucks and a name for herself.
Fun to read but don't expect more than a simple narrative.

Andrew

Englsih Passengers - Matthew Kneale

This book reminded me a bit of Cloud Atlas in that it is a pretty complete romp over a huge amount of distance (and pages) but the comparison stops there. This book has a rather simple theme where as Cloud Atlas I still havn't totally figured out. English passengers is a book about racism, colonialism, and the prejudices of science and religion. Very interesting book with clear but sweetly paradoxical morals that are really quite enlightening. The real fun in the book is that its about a huge journey across the world in the time of pirates and "savages" and excitement. This book is great for someone who loves adventure but also has a proper conscience or at least cares about other people to the slightest extent. Great to see a book that deals with Tasmania and the extinction that occurred there.
One of the most interesting couplings is between a priest and a scientist who are both totally self righteous and enormous jerks. Hard to read because you hate them so much but it makes you think of how people think when they're commiting attrocities. A few other characters give a really interesting tinsight into how westerners think when they're helping the "less fortuneate."
Recommended for someone who has a lot of time, especially if they're currently on a boat. At 500 pages its not for the faint of heart.
not blow away but enjoyed reading it for sure.

Andrew

The Fabulous Girl's Guide to Decorum, Kim Izzo & Ceri Marsh

I truly think everyone should read this, not just fabulous girls to be. It's quite literally a guide to navigating every day in a positive, productive, and of course, polite, manner. And who doesn't need that?

With chapters on the workplace, friendship, and dating, this book covers everything from dealing with nightmare bosses to how to ask for a raise, from what to do when a friend is being cheated on to handling toxic friends, from what to serve sleepover guests for breakfast to how to tell them you're just not interested. All, of course, while being perfectly considerate.

My favourite feature is the lists of wardrobe, bedroom, kitchen, and bar necessities (bar: whiskey, red vermouth, white vermouth, vodka, gin, angostura bitters, brandy, red wine). Especially when you're young and money is tight, it's great to have an idea of what purchases will carry you through until your bank account expands.

Let me dispel any notions of this book being full of shallow self-help tips. I guarantee you will learn a thing or two about how to conduct yourself. And at some point, when you find yourself in a tricky situation, you'll be glad you read this.

Four and a half martinis out of five

Steph

The Talented Clementine, Sara Pennypacker

I started reading this to my 8-year-old cousin last night and had to borrow it to read it all the way through. It might have taken me half an hour, but it was half an hour of trying desperately to muffle my laughs, trying not to wake anyone else in the house. Because Clementine is beyond hilarious. She's mad that her parents named after her a fruit, so she never refers to her 3-year-old brother by his name, only by vegetables, which, she thinks, are the only names worse than hers. Also, she names her cats after bathroom products. Somehow Sara Pennypacker has taken that kid we all pretended we weren't - the one with leaves in their hair and two left feet and zero ability to concentrate in class - and made a hero out of them. Which is pretty freaking fantastic, if you ask me. My cousin thinks so too. He's adopted her speech patterns.

This is the second (and sadly, last) of the Clementine books, which means I'll be picking up the first book at the library today and won't get anything else done until I've read it. I really can't say much more about it, so I've included an excerpt from it. Don't worry, it won't ruin it for you. You should absolutely read it.

"Juggling was a good talent...
"Luckily, I found everything right away. My mom's pocketbook was right on her drawing table, and next to it was half a cup of coffee. The phone was under my bed - probably String Bean left it there, because I'm sure I didn't. Then I found Moisturizer and scooped him up.
"Okay, fine, a kitten isn't the same as a poodle. This is called Making Do.
"Let me tell you, it's pretty hard just holding all those things at once. And before I could toss everything into the air and start talking on the phone, Moisturizer saw a bird outside the window. He jumped out of my arms, and everything else crashed to the floor.
"And then I learned the difference between crashed and smashed: crashed is easier to clean up. Also, I learned that coffee is easier to clean up when you spill it on a new brown rug. You hardly have to touch it at all!"

As far as kids' books go, which I am already quite fond of, this is for sure 24 bottle caps out of, well, 24.

Steph

James and The Giant Peach - Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl is the greatest children's writer of all time for two really solid reasons. Reason the first, he has the greatest imagination of any adult I have ever encountered. His books are simply so wonderfully fantastical that there is no comparing them to anything else. They seem to be imbued with a silliness that mocks the serious fantasy novels that should really just be playing.
Reason the second is that he's pure badass. People die in his books. Like actually just die instead of the disney version where everyone lives happily ever after. Here some people live more happily after others have died. Dahl was a fighter pilot in the second world war and I would think that his close experiences with death taught him how simply unavoidable it really is.
Dahl's books are fantasy but they paint a more accurate world than conventional fantasy does. Dahl even swears in his book (not badly) but he seems to be part of the last generation who thought that kids didn't need to be sheltered, but instead educated and taught how to interpret the things that they read.
I love all the books I've ever read by the guy and I think that absolutely everyone would gain something by reading even a page of his prose. Quick read too, only about an hour or so.
9 centipedes out of 10. Good book. Read it.
Andrew

Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

This was a pretty interesting book. It was a total pulp read (New York Times Bestseller) and it was super short with massive print, wide spacing and only 200 or so pages with lots of charts. The kind of thing that you can read while waiting for a doctors apointment (you would finish it if you were at my doctor's office). There is no real unifying theme but it is well written and just is chock full of interesting tidbits. It mainly analyzes our culture's standard block of conventional wizdom and gives some actually scientific answers to very basic questions.

There's really nothing more to say about this book because it is so self explanitory. It's not actually the hidden side of everything, that's just hype of course, but there are really a huge amount of ideas that aren't generally looked at. Alright. Short like the book I guess.

Talk to you soon.

Andrew

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray is an old novel, something like 1895 or something, but it has an interesting implications in the present as well. It is full of all the quotes that are now attributed to Wilde, and that is really what is has boiled down to; a book of quotes. It seems like a very young, audacious and supremely confident novel that spews broad sweeping adages that are very interesting to go through. I like reading short stories because every single word has significance to the themes that the stories are trying to put forward. This book somewhat reminded me of James Joyce's collection of short stories "Dubliners" just in its time period and its modern, moral plots.
This book is an example of art that is supposed to influence. One of my policies is that I don't review books when I have them in front of me. I try to write on only what I can remember distinctly from the novel. This is not only why I'm not putting in many of the potent and apt quotes that I could, but this statement also, ironically, serves to demonstrate the kind of statements that appear in the book. One of the main characters, Lord Henry, is an extremely opinionated man who feels it necessary to tell others what he thinks about everything. One of his founding ideas is that life is for pleasure. That we should always strive for pleasure and experience through any means necessary, but he also uses many paradoxes that according to him are the only things that hold truth. It is hard therefore, to express their meaning without simply expressing the paradox. Anyways I feel like I'm rambling. I have a bit of a head ache tonight and tomorrow I have to work twelve hours. I tell you this not to excuse my writing, but to give an insight into the mind of the writer.
I found that the morals exposed in this novel were the kind that can't really be debated but aren't necessarily correct. They are broad sweeping enough into the general ways of life that they're applicable to many situations in their ideal, but in practice, they aren't reliable as actual modes of life. I can just see the guy who, when confronted by a life problem, whips out his handy copy of Dorian Gray and checks the chapters for something and ends up spewing something about how one should never do anything that one couldn't talk about after dinner then getting kicked in the balls by his girlfriend.
It really seems fun to look at this private school curriculum novel and praise it for being the answers to all of lifes moral dillemas but I think this kind of British writing needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Don't get me wrong, I think that countless people could be helped by reading this book, but I don't necessarily think that it should be taken in as dogma. I guess that applies to everything. Ok maybe that didn't help.
I'm going to bed. Yeah I know its quarter to 9, but I have to get up at 512 tomorrow morning.

Read it because it's 200 pages and anyone who would read this site should be intelligent enough to be able to sift through it.
talk to you soon
Andrew

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

I found The History of Love in the back of a friend’s bookshelf, and wasn’t really sure of what I’d find. It turns out I found one of the most remarkable novels I have read in years.

Even now I’m not sure I can adequately express even a portion of it. It truly is a history of love, beginning with a little boy’s love for a girl, which is also every boy’s love for every girl. His love leads him to write the girl a book; he wants to make her laugh. Years later and a continent away, a young man buys the book and gives it to his girlfriend. They name their child Alma, after every girl in the novel. As Alma struggles to find something or someone to take away her mother’s loneliness, she starts unraveling the history of the book, and of its author, and of his love, and every love that was and will be.

I was reminded of Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer when I read this. It shares a humour and depth that demands attention but doesn’t take itself too seriously. After all, love, with its weighted consequences, doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is truly one of the best novels I have ever read. It’s complicated and confusing and at times I couldn’t keep track of the chronology, but the confusion only strengthens the characters and heightens the sense of love as a remarkable negotiation of chance.

I’d give it an immediate 9.5 strings of yarn spanning oceans between a girl and a boy. Or rather, the 9 would go between the girl and boy. The remaining half would go between Alma and Misha. Please read it.

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and Margarita is of the brand of Russian literature that explains everything about life. Along with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and of few other Eastern Europeans, you can apparently get all you need to know about the world. This book is about the devil, but more so it's really just about good and evil. When I was doing this FYP thing at King's, one of the biggest things that I really got from it was from reading The Confessions by St Augustine and realizing how much of modern Christianity just isn't based on founding principles. The Confessions is a canonical book of Christianity yet it is entirely contradictory with modern beliefs. One of the things I find most interesting, is the idea of a Devil. One of the strongest sentiments in The Confessions and in Dante's Divine Comedy and for that matter, part of The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, was that there is no evil. The Hell is a creation of mankind with the purpose of allaying the consciousness' of humans who don't fully understand God. Now I don't really believe in any of this but it lends itself well to the idea of an attempt at balance instead of a war between good and evil.
The Master and Margarita is a book of fiction and fantasy that takes many ideas that we think of as flightful such as the devil, and interchanges them with ideas that we think of as solid and unquestionable such as reality. The whole book has a very interesting play with metaphor and with the fantastic. I found that this was a great book about not beating you over the head with its morals and yet being able to figure out what the hell the theme of the book is. This being said, I think it would be less enjoyable if the reader hadn't already encountered Geothe's Faust and Marlowe's Dr Faustus (again thank you FYP).
One of the classics and though it is heavy in meaning, it is a quite enjoyable and thoroughly readable without getting a headache. I would advise having a browser open with wikipedia though because some of the Russian terms and the references are hard to catch. Make sure to look up why the devil keeps referring to poodles if you do read the book.
7 cat-demons out of 8

Andrew

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

A book swirling in controversy, a million little pieces delivers a brutally frank and at many times disgusting account of a 23 year old's 6 weeks in rehab. This book has been called "A million little lies" by many because it was discovered that Frey "embelished" his account. He never went to jail (while he claims to have done a 3 month stint) and some of his accounts are beefed up to make him seem cooler. In my opinion, it's a damn shame that this was exposed as not entirely true. If the book were real or at least people regarded it as true, I think that a huge number of people could be helped and encouraged by it. It is really an envigorating and empowering novel that is thoroughly heartwrenching.

Frey employs a few gimicks that I think he could have done without such as not putting quotation marks around those who were speaking, which I think was intened to make the account more human but in my opinion just made him seem a little dumb.

Nothin much more to say because it's essentially a biography and you really just read about his life. Doesn't have much literary quality but has some nice practical applications. Fun romp through the ghetto too which is probably where most of the appeal comes from.

Would have liked it way more if I'd thought it were real. Honestly I don't think I would have entirely believed that it had happened if I hadn't already known since its just a bit too far fetched, not in the details of his life story, but in some of the ways people around him respond, and how he himself responds. A bit too cliché almost. I'm not sure and I don't have enough experience in the matter to really be making all that much of a judgement.

whatever

Worth a read if you're ok with reading about brutal violence and hard drugs. An emotional rollercoaster for sure.

3 crack rocks out of 6

Andrew

Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World - Haruki Murakami

There is a line, kind of like a timeline but more like an umbrella, over which stretches the literary quality or esoteric substance between pulp fiction (stephen king etc) to hard philosophy (Heidegger, Nietzche etc). Now, not all pulp fiction is bad and not all phlosophical books are good obviously, and there are definitely connections between them. It seems like the best possible outcome would be a novel that combines interesting, entertaining story line with meaningful understandable philosophical content. Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World delivers astoninshingly well. A captivating plot that drives forward (and often sideways) to fulfill a supremely metaphysical goal. This book is a very interesting look into the human psyche and how the subconscious and conscious minds interact and what the hell they are for that matter. By no means an easy read but at the same time an enjoyable one and you really feel like you've gotten something out of it by the end even if all you're getting is a bewildered afternoon.

What I would be interested in doing would be to go through the book and pick out every literary and cultural reference and amassing them into one room. Then spending the next month going trough it all. Dozens of books, TV shows, musicians. Really quite interesting how Murakami really brings all of these thoughts together as if he were writing a paper and substantiating his arguments. He does it well though because he picks at so many well known pieces. He does what many bibliophiles do by offering insight into other books that someone might have missed or understood a different way. Interesting to think of books as a culture and a community.

Anyways, quite good and though I think I need a bit of a rest I'm definitly going to have to pick up some more of his books.

15 unicorns out of 16

Andrew

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

This book is literally so good that I can't tell you anything about it. Knowing anything about it going it would ruin so much of the surprise and intruige that fascinated me about this book. I stand by the fact that you should never read the dust jacket of a book. I mean never. It can totally destroy a book. I might even say decimate. "How can I decide if I want to read a book then?" you might ask. This answer is hard for some and easy for others. You have to know someone who's read the book. Even if you just have a great bookstore in your town (Page and Turners is a good example for Barrie) then you can just go in and ask what they think you might like. Try them out and see if they know your taste. If they do then you can go to them for advice in the future and then you have a stead flow of books coming in. This website might be a guide too. I could probably give a better recommendation in person but I stand by my opinion and I welcome you to go out and find the books I say are good and read them. Refute me if you must but then at least you'll know if our opinions differ. To start with, read Cloud Atlas. Now that's a good book.

Andrew

Pastoralia - George Saunders

I'm sorry but I didn't like this book at all. Its a collection of short stories that I found blunt, boring, uninsightful and just plain pedestrian. It seemed like Saunders was using a few tricks to captivate the reader but never got beyond that. Some interesting ideas but not very well written and not that well executed either. Gimicky but the one thing that I will give it is that it shows a side of western culture that isn't often seen. It seems that most books are written about a tightly perscribed subject matter. Kind of like the people who write books know exactly who their audience is, and in a way only hold up a mirror. Thats where you get all these books written about writers. In Pastoralia, you get to see the slums. Lots and lots of dumb people too. This is the group of people that when you talk in academic circles, noone really believes exists. You try to ask "Who the hell elected George Bush" and none of your friends can answer because for the most part, they all think like you do. It's very hard to get this portion of the population represented in literature because the people who usually write literature don't associate with "low-lifes". Cool to see a huge sector of the voting power that usually isn't seen but otherwise, this collection of short stories just falls flat. Characters are thin, plots are far out but totally bogus.

Read it if you want to see the people who think being in the Iraq war is a good thing, but otherwise, I'd stay away from it.

Andrew

ps sorry James I liked the other books you recommended.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch - Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

Despite being the written by the man with the most impossible to spell last name, this book is actually quite cool. Its totally out of print according to amazon.ca and I had to get this picture from Wikipedia. This is a very short book (around 150 pages) that is literally the single day of a prisoner's term. It is based in a soviet work camp of the 1950's and demonstrates, with complete lack of context, how brutally they were treated. This is how prison was for a long time. Hard as hell. No one expected you to live through it and no one was responsible for legal concerns ie fair treatment etc. No TV either. It seems also to continue on with the theme of how we spend our lives. One of the ideas that is brought up is one of religion. The basic idea is that they should be glad that they are in prison since then they wont be tempted toward sin. Total bs in my opinion but its an interesting idea and one that many people probably believe. Very harsh and very real and quite scary but at the same time its a testament to human endurance yada yada yada. Well written and it seems to hit you on a fundamental level that many russian novels do. Seems like they have the secrets of the universe all pent up.

Thats it. 6 out of 7. Something to read but not life changing in my opinion.

Andrew

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

The remains of the day is a book about an aging butler. To me it has three themes.
The first theme is that of how we use our time. In a somewhat similar way to Paul Auster's mystery novels, this book goes into the idea that a butler is really giving away his best years simply in order to fulfill the lives of their employers. Their lives in themselves have little meaning. This also relates the idea of democracy
put forward in the book, which is in some ways said to be an outmoded tool since the populace doesn't follow politics. I wonder with this book if the author doesn't like the butler. That he is in fact setting him up as a negative stereotype as a warning to others. I am not sure because this may be my will being forced on that of the author. Some of his opinions I find myself hoping to be satirical in nature. This puts an interesting perspective on the value of a human being in either case.
The second theme ties in greatly to the first. This is the theme of romance and of putting on airs. The butler in question is of the opinion that he must always have the air of dignity about him or else he doesn't reach his aspirations of great butlerness. This is an exaggeration of the British concept of propriety that seems more and more silly to us nowadays. It is because he is unwilling to break down and be the human he is at heart, that he loses the love of his life and really a great amount of the potential he had. He may have had modest achievements as a gentleman's gentleman but he barely has a happy life.
The third theme I see is that of war. This is probably the most obvious but nevertheless important, you book snobs. Its an interesting look into how politics are rarely confined to the house of commons and are, in fact, often situated in the houses of the rich and influential. These somewhat despotic power plays are seen in the novel as limiting of the British political possibilities as it keeps the power in the hands of few and doesn't allow for a failsafe. In this case, certain events during the second world war are shown as preventable and unfortunate.
Quite an interesting novel, at least four notches above what the "British" are writing about themselves.
5 yes sirs out of 7

Andrew

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

There are a whole bunch of one liners I want to get out of the way. Paul Auster is a badass. This is the only type of post modern literature that I like. Toronto is scary.
Ok now we can get down to business. This is a trilogy of dectective like mysteryish novels that use the idea of a private eye or detective as a literary tool. Auster takes the idea of shadowing someone, really delving into their lives, and makes a really hard hitting commentary on modern life. A lot of other post modern fiction that I've read (Don DeLillo in particular) is brutally depressing and gives life a sense of pointlessness. This is said to be characteristic of post modernism, and something that I really don't like. Modernism was supposed to be the age of perfectibility. The idea that there is right and wrong, a god who knows all, a meaning to our lives. What I understand of post modernism is that there is more of an emphasis on how unoriginal and entirely original each of our lives can be. There is also often self reference within these novels, and a playful element (and Auster does this brilliantly) that makes the reader wonder if in fact the events that are occurring were actually real and happened to the author.
New York, and in my Canadian equivalent of Toronto, exemplify this sort of disconnected, disaffected view of life. In a place like Toronto, there are so many people that it's very hard to know many, let alone anywhere near, all of the inhabitants. If all of the inhabitants can't communicate, the modern ideals fall apart and you get more post modern, seemingly unimportant lives. Each person goes about their own business. Lonely in a lot of ways because if you aren't part of the initiate, its hard to get entrenched in all the happenings that you know are going on right outside your door in the metropolis.
What this trilogy highlights, is that each person's life is important only to themselves. That they are in a sense distinct and untouchable to the outside world. In the trilogy, the protagonists (all men) try desperately to form bonds with the women they love but find that their true passions lie in their individual pursuits and ambitions. They find that they are the only ones that they are ultimately answerable to.
The reason I say Paul Auster is a badass is because he really seems to empower his characters, and in some ways, his readers, into doing what they want with their lives. Reminds me a bit of Neal Stephenson in the way that his writing style answers to know one. In an interview once, Stephenson, when asked how he did the research for his historical novels, he responded "Oh I make most of it up." Pure Badass.
Extremely esoterical look into how we live our lives, and the idea of "spending" our time doing something "worthwhile."
Another example that convinces me that we get out of a book exactly what it is that we're looking for.

eight haphazard detectives out of nine. an author to look into.

Andrew

Geek Love - Katherine Dunn

"Geeking" a popular carnival attraction in the mid 1900's in America in which a "Geek" would bite off the head of a live chicken. This book is about freaks and norms. Norms in the sense of mores and as a pseudonym for normal people. A young man inherits a family carnival from his father and decides after some hard times that he should start to build or breed his own freaks. He and his wife start experiments in which the mother is subjected to a number of severe drugs, such as cocaine, methadone, heroin, uppers, downers and everything in between while she is pregnant with her children. The children all come out "hideously" deformed and are then trained to become acts in the carnival. The narrative is from the point of view of one of these children.
Every child, since they are growing up in a suitable environment, considers themselves as masterpieces depending on their magnitude of deformation. The narrator is only a dwarfed albino with a hump so she considers herself practically worthless and does chores for the other children who are much more gifted than she. The premise of the story is trying to look at what might hold us back or prevent us from fully enjoying enjoying life. There are two sources of forced deformation presented in the novel. Both are performed surgically. One is performed on people who are deemed too sexual and are wasting their lives fawning over the other sex. They are deformed so that they wont be bothered by their hormones anymore. The other source of deformation is from one the carnival children who encourages people to "become more like him." He is essentially a torso with fins where his arms and legs would be on a "norm." He encourages people to amputate their limbs to be freed from the burden of being able to do things. It really doesn't make all that much sense but it is definitely a plausible cult scenario. It kind of reminds me of part of some eastern religions who preach that our physical bodies are filthy and hold us back and if only we could cultivate only our mind and soul we would reach enlightenment. This sort of just takes what billions of people worldwide believe and exacerbates it. The power struggles in this novel are just fascinating. The character representing the leader of the cult is close to the most interesting. One would suppose that the narrator would be the most intricate, and as I think about it, she certainly has many layers but I think I'm discounting them because many of her layers are so foreign to me. But at the same time her blatant disregard and really ignorance of societal norms may be the most successful aspect of this novel.
Very interesting analysis of human beauty in a way that is a lot less condemning that other, less complete books.
Overall, kind of hard to read, not necessarily a very nice writing style in my opinion, but very inventive and provocative.
6 lizard-children out of 10

Andrew

I feel so cynical when I'm reading dystopias. Animal Farm was no exception. This short novel provides a heady dose of reality's perversions. It is the story of a revolution that begins, succeeds, and quickly decends back into the evils that spurred it on the in the first place. As a reader I found myself in the frustratingly real position of watching the pigs, the farms ingenious leaders, use rhetoric to make the animals more submissive, more trusting, and more productive, while considering themselves free. I like to think the parallels between the conditions on the farm and our own world as self-evident, at least for whoever is reading this site. Which I seem to think is just Andrew and I. And so I really don't have much more to say on it. It's one of those books you put into the "classics to read" pile and read for its quick and dirty account of how terribly selfish power can make people. Thankfully, I find myself preferring the comradery of the "lower" animals. But beyond that, it wasn't one of my favourites. I found 1984 more enjoyable, and I wouldn't read Animal Farm again, and yet I'd recommend it to anyone with an hour to spare to read it. 7 of 10.

Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

An epic read. This novel tracks a mutant gene through three generations of the Stephanides family, until it finds itself expressed in Calliope, our narrator. As the book opens we find Callie is in fact a pseudohermaphrodite, equally male and female, who has been raised as a girl, and at the age of 14 finds herself identifying as a man. It is the middle-aged Cal, now a diplomat working in Berlin, who takes us back to the mountain village in Greece where his grandparents were born, through their incredible escape to America, to a world war, the births of Cal's parents, the Detroit race riots, the tempering of his grandparents' love and the budding of his parents', through the LSD haze of the 60's, the creation of the Intersex Society of North America, all the way up to 2005, where Cal is still finding himself adjusting to the reality of his rogue gene.
What is wonderful about this book is that the family history and Cal's story of coming to recognize her rare condition could each stand alone; that they are interconnected is a thrilling bonus. Eugenides has an amazing ability to write characters so real that I found myself wondering if the Stephanides family is simply his own, and he himself is Cal. Perhaps for this reason, the children's hospital in Halifax referred to the novel as a source when deciding how to treat an intersexual infant. This is one of the only novels written about intersexuality, and I think Eugenides did a wonderful job picking apart the overwhelming intricacies of one small instance of it.
A solid nine paternalistic doctors out of ten

Steph

The World According to Garp - John Irving

The World According to Garp has been hailed as the best book about women written by a man. That was the same thing they would later say about "She's Come Undone" by Wally Lamb. I guess for the late 70's when this was written it must have been extremely hard hitting. I think Lamb's book was more enthralling about women's issues, but this book has many other qualities to it as well.

The literary devices that Irving uses greatly enhance how his message is put across. Instead of doing an in character narrative of the continuous plot line, Irving uses the fact that many of the characters are writers to use their future writing to comment on the current situation. This does two things, one it gives a sense of destiny and drive to the novel which appears in many of Irving's novels, but more importantly it takes the reader back from the action. It puts the reader in the position of someone analysing the events instead of participating in them. Through this, and through the direct wiritings of the characters, he can make huge controversial statements that are associated with the character and then respected or depised in their own right, instead of making Irving the one to hold all the blame. The way he does it gives a great amount of thought to the reader.

I was looking at a wikipedia article about this and I came across four quotes that they used that I think exemplefy the "themes' of the book.

The first was Garp's first line; "Mom." I thought it was interesting that they would be so interested in just the first line but i'm going to extrapolate the thought much farther to say that this book can be seen as a coming of age novel. It follow's garps life from his mother's conception, all the way through his death. At first you get many glimpses that are similar to "the dead poet's society" of a small private boys school, but then it does something beyond the capacity of most novels (which may be why this one was 600 pages) and it actually grows up all the way. Usually a novel will end when the young man has finally grown to become a mature person and leaves the reader to imaging what they might go on to do. This novel goes until you experience Garp's anxiety over his children as they grow up and his very mature relationships with other characters.

The second of these quotes is "beware of the undertoad". The "undertoad" is a mispronounciation of the undertow experienced at the beach that Garp's family often frequents and a symbol for the anxiety of Garp and his wife Helen. Garp is about the most paranoid parent there can be and thats coming from me who thinks he has the most paranoid parents in the world. They stunt and eventually very badly hurt their children despite and sometimes because of their worry which to me is very alarming and very plausible. It seems that many partents these days don't really let their kids do what they want which can be good and bad I suppose. Its good because it keeps the kids a bit more safe while they can't make proper decisions, but bad because it can maim them. I wonder how I will feel about this in 20 years.

The third quote is "Three quarters isn't enough" which refers to the amount of penis which was bitten off by one of the characters. This is the theme of "lust" and in many ways feminism that show up in the book. Lust is a constant topic of Jenny Fields who at first simply doesn't understand it and is marginally annoyed by it and then begins a crusade against it with her other feminists. Lust causes a huge amount of problems for the characters in this novel, from rapes to affairs it screws royally with people, but I don't know if I agree with the simplification of lust being a deeply unavoidable problem, mainly centred around these despicable men. Though Irving shows women in the grips of lust as well, it seems he is scolding men for much of it who force women to deal with their lust. I think it's ok though because though it seems he is saying all men are pigs, he is only showing a portion of the population, and is also showing that this lust isn't the end of the world. Very difficult topic for sure and I really don't fully grasp it.

The fourth quote it "In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases". As we watch Garp growing up, we enjoy his successes and ambitions in a way that motivates us to accomplish more with our lives. As the novel comes to a close and people drop like flies, energy and production become increasingly important. Garp spends much of his life furiously trying to write more and more and more and yet life gets in the way and he doesn't write much at all, then he dies young. His children feel that they have to live up to the "energy" of their father who was always running, always going. THe running seems interesting to me, as does the idea that comes up late in the book that Garp "is just fucking around in the garden". These are seemingly pointless and repetitive endeavours that never really change much of anything. There is nothing really gained by these activities, at least nothing produced. The emphasis is put on creative processes like writing or painting and when someone isn't doing their purpose in life, they are wasting time. One of those eternal questions it seems, like what is worth while to do? Should we just try to have as much fun and happiness as possible or should we get going on our life's work? I keep a list of all the books I've read and I wonder if its worthwhile to read these books that so many other people have read as well, that are seemingly pointless at times.

I was listening to CBC radio when I heard an interview with a concert pianist who said that his teacher had forced him out into the world because he was too technical. His playing was "right" but there was not personality behind his music. He had to develop as a person to be able to play the piano as well as he wanted. I like that a lot.

Book was great.

Five out of six encyclopedia britannicas.

Andrew

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

I read the book after having seen the movie years ago. It was the perfect situation: I could only remember fragments of the movie, and only vague glimpses of the characters, so I can say the book is better than the movie, but the movie's interpretation didn't infringe on mine. I still had room to imagine.
The novel is Eugenides' first, and I'm reading it at the same time as Middlesex, another of his. The narrative styles are similar, and there is crossover in details, like his use of Detroit and Greek mythology and history. It's really interesting to read them at the same time. Give it a try.
A group of boys follow the lives of the Lisbon family, the father, mother and five teenage daughters, aged a year apart from thirteen to seventeen. Under the strict surveillance of Mrs. Lisbon, the girls go from school to home, school to church, and very few places in between. When Cecilia, the youngest kills herself at her own party, the girls withdraw from the few activities they're involved in. And after a brief window of freedom to go to the only school dance they'll attend, their house is kept on lockdown. The remaining girls fill their time silently watching the boys who are watching them. Finally the girls make contact with short notes and coded light flashings, convincing the boys their love is returned, only to take it away, just as silently.
And despite all this, the book isn't stiflingly depressing. The back of the book sums it up well: "a tender, wickedly funny tale of love and terror, sex and suicide, memory and imagination". Somehow Eugenides makes the suicides survivable through the boys whose obsession with the five girls leads them to collect every memory of the girls' life they can.
I'm giving it 8 70's records out of 10.
Steph

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid - Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is an excellent story teller. Given any subject, literally any at all, and he weaves a hilarious tale that is just so damn fun. He also wrote 'A Short History About Nearly Everything' which is a science novel, but his main area of expertise if he can be said to have one is travel books. I've never read any of them but I could see how he could make any locations seem somewhere I would like to go. His language is very commiserate and makes even the world of science personal and understandable.
Thunderbolt Kid is his autobiography and general memoir about the 50's when he was growing up. I really think that it would have been helpful to read this book when I was younger so that I might have been able to grow up in my parents' house with a little bit more understanding. That's not to say that my family is anything like Bill Bryson's but I think the book serves as a time capsule to really let others know what it was like to grow up during that time. His somewhat depressed views of the downward trends he has seen in American society are balanced by the lighthearted optimism of a superhero. He sees the loss of the downtown to a car driven society a huge loss but at the same time offers great possibilities of fun and foolishness that give heart to youngsters such as myself who seek to be as playful as possible in a world of serious business. His commentary strikes frankly and simply at the centre of what I think is a developing problem in our society; that there is way to much homogenizations and all together far to little fun being had. As a whole it seems we may have lost a whole lot of innocence and giddy playfulness that really should be desired. I still haven't seen a happy business man out there who wouldn't rather be doing something else with their lives. I just don't see how we can let ourselves be pushed around by the need for money but I think this is maybe to big of a problem for me to deal with in anyone's life but my own. Bryson, however, at least eloquently states the case.
Though Bryson's writing talent is a rare one that is simply enjoyable in its essence, I have to say that I am somewhat glad that he only writes non-fiction. Not glad so much as understanding. Though the art of a novel can be highly debated obviously, I think it can be agreed that his novels lack a solid substance or literary message beyond that one plainly told. Nothing wrong with that, and he doesn't claim to be a literary novelist, but it must be known that it is just a simply, straight forward story that one might not learn more from than a good TV show. There is no essence to the story, no central driving theme. He jumps around from topic to topic just telling stories about this or that.
Worth reading just for his great wit and hilarious writing, but there is little substance beyond that.
Four jade plants out of five; almost the level of Calvin and Hobbes but just not quite.
See you space cowboy.

Andrew

Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

Surfacing is a short read, only 208 pages. Don't be deceived by this cover with its depiction of the clean, controlled body of the woman. My copy was printed in the 70's and is much more indicative of the nature of the book. Mine depicts a woman in her late 20's, paddling a canoe with a bright pink evening sun behind her, her face covered by her paddling arm. In the novel, the heroin stays strangely hidden. We never know her name. The writing is choppy, not always finished, so that we experience the heroin's thoughts with her.
The woman leaves the city, presumably Toronto, with her lover, Joe, his friend David, and David's wife, Anna. Set in the late 60's, early 70's, we quickly get a feel for the anti-American, anti-capitalist sentiment popular of the time. They drive then boat to the woman's childhood home in rural Quebec, where her father has recently gone missing. The woman's intent is to find her father, whom she hasn't spoken to in years, and who she secretly feels is still alive. Her mother died a few years ago, and her older brother is surveying in the Australian Outback. To the group, parents are embarrassments. "They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to", she says. "Joe never mentions his mother and father, Anna says hers were nothing people and David calls his The Pigs". The cabin is extremely secluded, impossible to reach safely without knowledge of the area. When the boat delivers the group onto the dock, the woman looks for signs of her father. After a thorough search of the house, she comes across a map and drawings, nonsensical shapes, like fish, but with antlers, like human, but with too many appendages. She discovers these are studies of cave drawings in the area. Obsessed with finding her parents, we get the first impression she could be mad. While exploring a site marked on the map, she has a vision of first her father, then drowned brother, then her aborted child. She becomes more and more drawn to the land, to the plants and animals, believing herself to literally be one of them, and less and less attached to her friends. As a full week plays out, the relationships become unfixibly soiled, and the woman, convinced the friends are plotting to trap her like an animal and take her back to the city, runs to the woods. There, her madness cannot be mitigated by the rationality of human contact, and the woman gives into it.
It is a difficult book to get into, because unlike many novels, the narrator does not take time to explain to the reader all of her thoughts. They happen and we have to keep up. But despite its abrasive nature, I found myself drawn into her head, feeling her fear and madness incredibly palpably. It is very expressive of political, social, ecological and moral values, and hauntingly written. Not my favourite Atwood, but I'd give it 7/10.

Bel Canto - Anne Patchett

This book is a thoroughly character based novel which uses the plot to condense the emotions of a lifetime into a short readible span. This is the formula for all character driven books, but Bel Canto does this especially well. Set in an equatorial country filled with the obligatory civil unrest and poverty. The idea of the story is that a powerful Japanese businessman is kidnapped along with the other guests of the birthday party that was being held in his honour. Among them is the opera singer who was specially hired for the gig. That is the entire plot of the story. It is deceptively exciting, because an extremely small number of events actually take place. From the moment the terrorists burst from the air vents onwards, it is a story solely about the people in the house (in this case, the vice-presidential manor).
This is both good and bad. It's good because its really interesting and it puts the people in a very evocative situation that makes them mature and grow very quickly for the entertainment and education of the reader. It's bad because it is unrealistic and pretty hard to believe. It is understandable that the terrorists would like to stay in the manor instead of going home to their hovels in the countryside, but it's hard to believe that this could cause so little of a stir. Most terrorist encounters last at most days by my understanding. Bel Canto would lead you to believe that this precarious relationship could go on for weeks. In the isolated narrative view from inside the manor, it is believable that only the interactions of the people are important, but if the outside world is even remotely considered it all falls apart.
Only the plot falls apart however. If you ignore the implausible nature of the scenario, it is actually an extremely well written book with rich and believable characters. The characters all have cheesy life-altering experiences (which is badly ameliorated by a disappointing ending) but the meat of the story is very intriguing.
Patchett doesn't have the technical aspects down pat - unbelievable plot and bad ending, but her characters are great.

Four Knife Wielding Terrorists out of Five
Adios

Andrew