junior fiction - tally: 2
a drowned maiden's hair by laua amy schlitz
a straighforward story about a 3 sisters, conwomen, adopting an orphan to help them in their fake seances. read it for the mother/daughter bookclub, it didn't really capture my attention
warhorse by michael morpurgo
read before fierce and i went to the famous play, this book was so-so. i'm not a big horse lover to start, so having a book where everyone falls over themselves for a horse is foreign to me. set in WWI, i had hoped for a little more history in there - but besides the terrible waste of war, the description of no man's land, and the quicksand that was the mud - there weren't any other lessons.
YA - tally: 2
the last brother by nathacha appanah-mouriquand
it's a little known fact that jews were detained and imprisoned on mauritius, a colony of great britian, when their refugee boat to palestine was refused. this book uses this piece of history, and the subsequent death of 128 prisoners, as the backdrop to a story of a young boy looking to physically and emotionally replace the brothers he lost in a flood. there is much sadness in the piece, but it was repetitive. this may be attributed to it's translation (it was originally written in french). maybe the french have a deeper vocabulary for grief? but for me, there was too much grief, and no distraction from it.
prom by laurie halse anderson
this was a disappointment. written by the same author as speak, i was looking forward to a much deeper book than this superficial tromp through promland. plus her characters were not appealing: an angry, disinterested near graduate (her anger never explained), a frenetic best friend (their relationship never given a base) and an boyfriend that doesn't seem like the heel (helping her dad with home renovations for free) that everyone - once she dumps him - finally claims he is. huh?
i guess it's a case of riding for free on her own coat tails... but she risks losing her audience as i'll be less likely to pick up anything else by her
graphic novels - tally: 8
Y the last man - book 5 by brian k vaughan
book 6 book 8 book 10
book 7 book 9
yay! my library has purchased the series! after a quick check at the first 2 volumes i read, i saw there were 2 'books' in each volumes. so that places me at book 5 as my starting point. great series - i laughed; i cried. the ending was as satisfying as it could be: many explainations for the plague are offered but none are confirmed as the truth; the expected love story takes a turn for the worst but delivers an even better outcome (for a short while anyhow, and then the ensuing tragedy is felt deep enough to produce tears), the themes of who we are in the face of expectations/namesakes/cloning are explored, and we get to fast forward 60 years, stopping at spots along the way to see the various story threads comming to a end. and we are there for beloved ampersand's death and it's more touching than the lover's ending.
yes, a very satisfying series indeed
the pride of baghdad by brian k vaughan
based on a true story of 4 lions escaping the baghdad zoo during the armed conflict in iraq, there is alot of symbolism here: pacifism vs rebelling, the idea of HOW freedom is actually won (like if it's given - as opposed to taken, or fought for - is it real?) and how to keep your humanity/morals in the face of war. of course the lions are shot dead in the end (obliterated actually) and their beauty, and nobility, and tenacious loyalty are for nought.
pretty much the summation of war.
barefoot serpent by scott morse
this book is out of print and not in my library so i did an interlibrary loan to get it. touted as a classic, i was curious to see it
i connected more with the story set on hawaii, but i'm guessing someone who is familliar with the films of akira kurosawa, or even just a film studies student, would get alot out of it
novels and memoirs - tally: 13
ready player one by ernest cline
great gimmick in this book: a bill gates type guy in the future has created the most successful and popular way to utilize the internet up and dies. he has no heirs and his will is readaloud in said popular/successful simulation game: his fortune and controlling shares in his company will be awarded to the player who can locate 3 hidden keys inside the game. add an evil corporation that wants to gain control of the game and start monetizing it (and will do anything, include kidnapping and murdering lay gamers), and you've got a race.
but that's not the gimmick. it's the game creator's obsession with 80's pop culture, movies and music that makes this a fun run. 80's references are everywhere and it's like a trip down memory lane as lyrics are unfurled, and the dolorian from back to the future drives up, and brundle-fly pops up. it was light on actual believable plots - real sci fi geeks will be able to punch holes in the story immediately - so i was surprised to find it in the science fiction section; it read like a YA novel - especially given it's teen protagonist. but hey, i can't fault a book that is so obviously aimed at ME :)
a visit from the goon squad by jennifer egan
this was a real puzzler. i picked it up because i'd heard some buzz about how the author used a powerpoint presentation within the book (it was quite effective as poetry, but it could have stood alone: it didn't need the novel to contain it, or vice versa) anyhow, the powerpoint thing is the second last chapter, and then the last chapter goes into the future, with hints of science fiction and a mild armageddon in the past. it was WEIRD to have a novel just switch genres on me.
there were also plenty of characters - most that just showed up for one chapters, and were referenced once or twice more in a subsequent chapter, so i had a hard time keeping all their stories, and their relationships, straight.
ultimately, i wouldn't reccommend it but that won't stop me from reading this author again - she's got promise. and i did like finding the unexpected
the virgin cure by ami mckay
everyone knows what the virgin cure is, and with the main character of the book being sold - first into servitude, then into whoredom -you just know what is going to happen. and so you spend a great deal of time holding your breath - trying not to care too deeply for a character that is going to get the titular comeuppance. in the end, i mostly feel ambivalence about this novel. ok, the main character escapes the title, but her sweet, innocent friend does not. and then this main character parlays her beauty into a huge payout. i doubt there could have been THAT happy an ending (forgetting of course, the innocent friend - which is what the main character - rich and maybe now able to offer some comfort - does) the more i think about it, the less ambivalent i feel - that main character is a fraud
east of eden by john steinbeck
my first steinbeck; he's quite readable. i wonder if he's the origin of the sweeping, epic novel that spans generations? using the cain and abel story, and applying it to 2 different sets of brothers, steinbeck seems to reach a different conclusion each time. in between the 2 sets of conflicts, the characters actually talk about the significance of the cain and abel story and decide the story is not about cain's evil past and subsequent 'mark', but that cain may actually be favoured through his ability to choose his recourse - and this is how the cain (caleb) of the second set of brothers acts: starting as mean, he recognizes his own weakbess where his brother and father are concerned and tries to become a better man. yes, he stumbles and ultimately causes his brother's death, but his intentions are mostly for the good and he feels genuine remorse for his actions. i think the author means to tell us we are all decended from cain's blood but that we each can make a choice in life, and not be victim of whatever bloodline we have.
although this novel has many christian allegories in it, i think steinbeck is more of a secular humanist. especially with his character of lee: intelligent, well-read, non christian, foreign and posibly gay.
this beautiful life by helen schulman
i found this plot of a teenage boy forwarding a suggestive email/video for his classmate relevant and current - and i like how the author broke down all the characters motivations and reactions. i even found a few gems in there: like how you can't keep both your butt and your face, and how when you are older, you get too hard and set in your ways to make new friends - i've discovered that on my own too.
so the disappointing part of the book is that i liked it and thought it was a good idea/plot, but i found the writing just meh. i can't put my finger on it exactly, but it felt dumbed down.
a thousand cuts by simon lelic
i loved this book! a school shooting that is told in numerous, present tense voices - the story trickles out and the reader is hooked. the 'bad guy' is identified early on, but the backstory of his systematic bullying causes emotions of pity, anger, and even a moment of wanting retribution.
in fact, the whole book is about bullying - in schools and in the office. through sexual harrassment, and in positions of power. bystanders as adults as well as students. it addresses physical bullying as in beatings, emotional bullying through humilations, and even touches on cyberbullying. the book was published in 2010 - so i imagine the author penned it in 2008 - and it feels like it's lifted off of today's newspapers. it was stacked in the fiction section, but - given the school setting, and the value of the lessons - i think it should be categorized as YA
the gathering by anne enright
initially i was put off by this book's heavy focus on the blood and biology of sex - if the author had been a man, you'd have thought there was something wrong with him - here are a few tidbits:
p. 7 i am a trembling mess from hip to knee. there is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig between my thighs, it is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.
p. 35 ...the dark light in her eyes as she looked at him, like she saw right through to his bones. his own puberty going unnoticed - almost to himself - as her little breasts swelled under the nightdress. she moved towards death and womanhood at the same pace, the nipples like a spreading bruise, the breasts growing, and failing to grow, over lungs hard with disease.
...that is when he holds his penis in the nighttime, it feels like her thin skin; always damp, never sweating.
p. 52 the man beside me on the train lifts his pelvis slightly, and settles it back down. he is dozing in the flickering, sexual sunlight, lulled and unsettled by the movement of the train. i can sense the blood pooling in his lap; the thick oblong of his penis moving down the leg of his suit
but no, the author is a woman, and irish. and by the time i realized that her turns of phrases were NOT disgusting or overly/unnecessarily sexual but were actually a distinctive irish prose, i was already 1/2way through the book and was too lazy to start re-reading it. but boy this book deserves a second look. and man, what balls it takes to be a woman and set down such stripped, naked thoughts.
the leftovers by tom perrotta
i'm not sure if he was successful with this one. i'd say his themes are grief and calamity and - while illustrating the various reactions to it - at some point, the alarm becomes more background noise. ultimately we are hardwired to persevere, to continue. and the characters that make an active choice to turn their back on hope start a chain of reactions that make that hopelessness justified.
what makes the book NOT as successful is the fact that he's used the supposed rapture as the starting point calamity. 911 was just as devastating but can at least be seen as real. most people will have a hard time wrapping their head around a christian bedtime story. is it religious? anti-religious? so much baggage involved with either of those propositions (and yet most people will have to see it as black or white)... but that's probably the author's point: that even something SO crazy as the rapture (or believing in the rapture) can still, in the passing of time, be made 'normal'
cloud atlas by david mitchell
like the nesting russian dolls, each chaper of this book is separate but linked to the whole. i've never read such a creative piece - using different countries and time periods (even turning futuristic/sci-fi-sh at times) and using different writing styles that would be compatible to the time period - this author manages to pull all these stand-alone stories into a cohesive narrative. his recurring themes are the constant braying that society as we know it will be extinct within this century (whether it's the 18th or the 22nd), the repeated act of enslaving another nation/race, and the contradictory of our beliefs to our actions: the belief that we are powerless to change the future while we behave like our actions really can yield a change... my favorite part(s) was how we got to revisit the chapters (which ended - each - with a great sense of doom) to have each of them come to a satisfying conclusion.
let's pretend this never happened (a mostly true memoir) by jenny lawson
at first i found this audiobook laugh out loud funny. but things started to turn on me when victor - the author's boyfriend and root of many funny stories - became her husband. that's when he stopped being a 'character' and became a real person for me. and, to put it simply: it's not nice/fair/financially equitable to use a real person - someone who didn't ask for fame or attention - as a prop in your book/blog/schtick.
if, as i've surmissed, the author is a popular blog writer-turned-author, then this is likely her one and only book. blogs get old, and their older content gets buried in the new content. a blog can even be anomynous. but a book is forever and it's her name (and photo) on the cover. all other real people mentioned in the book are forced to come along for the ride. that sort of thing makes me queasy.
also, she uses the word vagina alot. a little bit is funny, but after the 57th time, it feels like an easy laugh (except that it's no longer funny). ironically, i was already annoyed about her overuse of this word and then her epilogue was a huge rant about how someone might take offense at her use of 'my vagina' (could she hear me complaining? that was freaky) then in her defense of 'my vagina', she uses the word another 107 times. in one chapter.
bossypants by tina fey
this one i liked. and she - like the author above - mentions her husband a few times. so what's the difference?
well, the husband was in 2 or 3 stories, not 1/2 of them. and he was a peripheral character in those stories - not a starring role. and she wrote about lots of other people: her parents, her boss, her fellow writers, her co-stars, her daughter, her nanny, etc. plus she is tina fey - an actual celebrity. so being married to her already puts you in the limelight... and heck, if she'd avoided mentioning him at all, that would have been weird.
something fierce: memoirs of a revolutionary daughter by carmen aguirre
felt out of my depth for most of this memoir. here is a teen that joins her mother's underground fight against pinochet and i know very little about south american politics. and it wasn't like it'sjust chile i'm ignorant about. she lives in boliva and peru and argentina and all their leaders are mentioned. AND when she is a teen, it's quite vague what her parents are even doing as rebels. about 2/3rd through she herself becomes an adult and takes the oath of a revolutionary. then she writes with authority - smuggling what appears to be arms, procuring fake documents, flying supplies over the andes to rebels in chile. that's when the story finally got my interest.
but too little, too late. i found this mostly a chore to get through (and as an aside, her writing style annoyed me after awhile: heavily relying on the tactic of starting the story in progress and then backtracking to fill in all the details. it's how lots of long magazine articles suck you in, but overused - and in a novel - it got old quick)
life of pi by yann martel
chosen for the mother/daughter bookclub, it is a testament to it's original enjoyment/quality that i chose to re-read this book rather than start a new one. poetic in story and in it's flow - the author has a talent for words and imagination. having read beatrice and virgil, and seeing how the author insistently inserts himself into the narrative, i could now envision how this novel slowly, painfully, came to him. very clever. authors do it all the time now - inserting their voice to imply they they just telling someone else's story - but i think yann martel was one of the first to do so.
i'm looking forward to watching the movie to see how the director interprets the 'two' stories and how the violence of man willbe portrayed.
non-fiction: tally - 4
modoc: the true story of the greatest elephant that ever lived by ralph helper
what a load of crap. the cover of this book has a young boy sitting on a bench beside an elephant with his arm stretched around her back in a gesture of comraderie. the elephant is sitting as well - looking very much like a weary old man, taking a load off. except this is NOT an old man; this is an elephant and there is nothing relaxing about elephants sitting down, or we'd see them doing it in the wild! in fact, i'm sure the act of sitting down (then getting up) is a circus trick that an elephant does with discomfort. it is our human interptretation of the photo that gives this false sense of ease and friendship. and that is what's wrong with this entire book. modoc and his trainer 'love' each other through thick and thin - but can we quantify specific behavior in an animal as love? can we equate a different set of behaviours as self defense and justifify an act of violence as an exception to love?
(and should a quote from betty white on the back of a book qualify as a literary recommendation? if anything, that tells me they needed to fluff out the back page and had no better material)
by the author's own reckoning, modoc murders at least 3 indians early in the book, but then he tries to paint an additonal act of violence (this time in an american setting) as a one-off. how about an animal acts like an animal??
and it's not simply implying that an animal is capable of acting and loving like a human being - there's seems to be a vault over mankind, like the animal is more human, more pure, more deserving of our love and respect. this is what drives me bananas.
and then's the author's incredibly predictable writing style - no flare, no poetry, nothing but the usual, expected adjectives for his nous. bo-ring. and his own editor must have been bored too; he/she didn't even catch the spot where the elephants are poisoned and cured through a vaccine. a vaccine for god's sake! you'd think someone who loved animals so much would have an ounce of science in their education (but maybe not - maybe that's where the new agey/spiritual/mystical stuff comes from - in the rejection of rational, testable thought)
get out of my life, but first could you drive me and cheryl to the mall? by anthony wolf
this was a load of crap with little or no statistics to back up his theories. most of the sample dialogue between teens and parents were so vile, you cannot help but be comforted that at least you didn't inherit that demon child.
at some point he says that teens will lie and just get over it. when a child throws out 2 notice that informs his parent that he's failing a class in school and then lies - repeatedly - about ever receiving such notices, the author says the real issue is the failure, not the lie. uh-uh. the failure will be rectified on his own - he fails, he'll have to redo the class. easy peasy consequence. but the lying? that is serious damage to the parent/teen relationship.
but there was a kernel of gold amongst all that crap - tactics teens use to keep the 'battle' going on (because if the battle is still happening, they don't and can't act on the request you gave them). i recognize them already: ending their rant with a hugely disrespectful comment (to encourage parent to chew them out for it) and turning the tables into a pity party (where the parent has to counterargue that - no - they don't think the world would be better off without them)
graphic novels: a genre guide to comic books, manga, and more by michael pawuk
i used to be one of the naysayers who said that graphic novels were nothing but thicker comic books and there a waste of both library shelf space and money. then i read blankets, a coming of age story that using illustrations and i fell in love with the genre. this guide tackles the old me, and the many naysayers still out there... it also addresses the potential pitfall of the graphic novel: assuming something in the comic book family is suitable for children. (i made that mistake with blankets as well - passing it to pepper before reading it myself. the content was NOT age appropriate!)
anyhow, this is a great reference to have as it divides the genre into categories, then lists the general concept and any award the work has won. it also lists the appropriate ages - and this is where it is a keeper. i recently brought home dragonball for bosco thinking the slim volume and word heavy book would be a great way to feed his comic book appetite with more actual reading. but the author lists this series as 'teen', meaning 13 and up.
i'll be using this reference to find my next reads - i'm especially fond of 2 of the 9 categories that author has laid out: non-fiction and contemporary life. these titles are often hard to find buried amongst all the superheroes, fantasy, and alternate worlds.
campus confidential: 100 startling things you don't know about canadian universities by ken coates and bill morrison
excellent book. i loved how the authors started the book by saying university isn't for everyone. and then went on to ask: do you like to read. not harlequinns or davinci's code, but real, books - because that's what ALOT of university is: reading. also, do you read the newspaper? are you interested in the world? there must a desire to learn if university is in your future.
here's lot's more i took in while readng this book:
* SO many highschool graduates are going to university now. it used to be 15%, now it's over 50%
* the new standard of education is now TWO degrees - the secondary degree, or additional college certificate (practical application of the knowledge), has replaced the regular undergraduate degree
* the 'entitlement' generation is changing how universities work - with helicopter parents supported them, and lower respect for authority - they are making demands (higher marks, less work) and getting their way
* it used to be standard that for every hour spent in class, another 2 were required in study / outside-of-class work. yet todays' university students spend a mere total of 14 hours in out-of-class work
* universities, desperate for bums in their seats (and tuition in their bank accounts) are lowering their entry academic standard (that, and high schools marks are creeping up even though ability/excellence is not)
* 1/2 the first year students will have their grades drop by one letter - another quarter will have then drop by 2 letter grades
* many students fail to graduate; many students falter in their first year (think of that THAT waste of money!)
* colleges suffer from low self esteem, meanwhile they can offer alot of value for money
* it costs about $1000 to court an international student but universities think it's a fine payoff for the increased tuition they'll pay. except most will apply for landed immigrant status after they've arrived and then they qualify for the local tuition cost
* quebec has lower tuiton fees, yes. but only for quebecers - it costs more to come from out-of-province
* the enrollment of men (in university AND college) is declining. what is the future career for these boys? not to mention - in the past, degreed men married lesser-educated women, but now degreed women marry men with an equal education as them... so who are these educated woman going to marry?
* some university graduates lack basic grammar and writing skills - these are things that need to be in place BEFORE you enter uni...
now i did take exception to their statement that universities don't like 'victory lap' students because, for the moment, the victory lap students DO get higher marks than their grade 12 classmates and DO fare better in acceptance to their uni of choice... but their idea that universities may, at the drop of a hat, only accept the marks from the first 12 years of schooling is a possibility that students should be prepared for.
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