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