Category: Book Reviews (Page 26 of 45)

I always cite 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as my favourite book and Alistair Macleod as my favourite author. To have lost both authors in such a short span of time is heartbreaking even though it’s been years since either put out a new work. What I loved about both was that neither ever misplaced a word. The sentences were tight, the quality of the storytelling was epic and their magnitude as authors was greater than great.

I never met Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I did spend 2 months in his country of birth and the culture of that part of South America was heavily infused in his writing. Reading Marquez was a way to venture back to that place and to basically feel like a time traveller.

A Nobel Literature prize winner. A great author. He died on April 17 at the age of 87.
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/04/17/gabriel-garcia-marquez-dies-at-age-87/

My favourite copy of 100 Years of Solitude is in shabby condition, thanks to an ill-fated lending of said copy to my now husband. I should note that he bought me a lovely collector’s edition as an apology, but I held on to my original version and still prefer it.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Love in the Time of Cholera are two other favourites. And there are countless scenes that will stick with me forever, in particular the clouds of yellow butterflies.

I wish Alistair Macleod had stayed with us until 87 but he was only 77 years young when he passed away on Easter Sunday, April 20.
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/04/20/alistair-macleod-author-of-no-great-mischief-dies-at-age-77/

His first short story collection, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, is a slim volume that packs a hefty punch. Each story is a masterpiece. Before I was properly introduced to Alistair Macleod’s writing in a Canadian literature class in university, I was familiar with the cadence of his voice from listening to some of the stories read on CBC radio. Every time I read Macleod’s writing, I can hear his voice. It’s a wonderful experience.

When he published No Great Mischief in 1999 I had the pleasure of meeting him at BookExpo in Toronto. I had two girlfriends who were working at McClelland & Stewart at the time and one had the task of typing up pages and pages of text from Macleod’s handwritten, yellow foolscap. When he won the $10,000 Trillium Book Award, he chuckled that the kids could get another topping on their pizza now. I have my signed copies of Lost Salt Gift of Blood, No Great Mischief and Remembrance.

Macleod and his economy of words will always be my barometer for good writing. Be brief, be brilliant, be gone. I suppose it’s fitting that the last time I saw Alistair Macleod was at the Vancouver International Writers Festival and he read from his short story “Remembrance.”

Officer of the Order of Canada and multiple award winner, Alistair Macleod will be greatly missed.

Absolutely hilarious.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette: A Novel

You can tell from the writing style that Maria Semple writes for tv (Mad About You, Ellen, and Arrested Development. There’s the charm and gentle funny nature of Mad About You, the snark of Ellen, and the quirkiness and mindboggling reality checks of Arrested Development. The basics of the story are this: Bee is 15. Her mother has disappeared. Her father is cagey about the reasons. The novel is pieced together in emails, invoices and the absolutely funny school memos.

Quote: Dear Parents,
This is the clarify that Bernadette Fox, Bee Branch’s mother, was driving the vehicle that ran over the other parent’s foot. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend despite the rain.
Kindly,
Gwen Goodyear
Head of School

Some of the funniest moments, without spoiling the story, are about blackberry abatement, 5-way corners in Seattle, and parenting in a world without school grades.

I highly recommend this for people who like funny, quirky characters, non-traditional novel writing and are generally willing to laugh at themselves. Undoubtably there’s something of all of us in these characters.

All the Broken Things is this month’s Vancouver Sun Book Club read. Since the book club members get a say in what we read, I’m predisposed to like the books we pick and All the Broken Things by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is no exception. It’s well written, the story is interesting, the characters are true characters and parts of the book are stuck in my mind.

All the Broken Things is about a Vietnamese family who moves to Canada in the early 80s. They are suffering in various ways from Agent Orange. The father died on the boat. The mother has sores that she keeps from the children, the youngest was born deformed and the boy Bo is mentally scarred by the experience. Bo oscillates between fight or flight and after one particular bout with a boy named Ernie, he’s picked up by Gerry who’s working the circus circuit and is looking for a bear wrestler. No seriously.

Although the book is set in 1984, Kuitenbrouwer mentions in the introduction that bear wrestling was a fixture in Ontario sideshows until 1976 and she’s simply shifted the timeframe to suit the story.

Bo joins the circus and the rest of the novel is about the tension of two captive bears, a boy who feels like a captive, the atrocity of war and circus Freak Shows. It’s strange and beautiful at once. The majesty of the bear, the hilarity of her on a bike. The beauty of Bo’s mother, the sullen, drunk. Orange the sister, Agent Orange.

I’m looking forward to what my fellow Book Club members have to say about the novel.

Well, Perfect by Rachel Joyce is a perfectly sad little book. Perhaps sad isn’t the best word, morosely melancholic?

Perfect opens in June 1972 with 11-year-old Byron worried about the addition of 2 seconds. Apparently the 2 seconds will be added to bring clocks back into line with the movement of the Earth. His best friend James has read about it in the paper and Byron can’t stop worrying about when those seconds will be added. “It’s the difference between something happening and something not happening.” Indeed!

What does happen is that Byron stabs his wristwatch in front of his mother Diana while she’s driving and she hits a little girl. Diana doesn’t realize she’s had an accident until Byron’s anxiety about it spills out a month later. What transpires over the next 4 months is the undoing of this little family.

Byron and James plot a way to save Diana from persecution but instead drive her into the hands of the seemingly distraught (yet totally conniving) mother of the little girl.

I missed reading Rachel Joyce’s first novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry so I’ll have to it pick up.

Perfect is quirky, well written and, I suspect, just as great a book club selection as Harold Fry. If you like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time you’ll also like this title.

Mark Medley @itsmarkmedley has compiled the 25 most anticipated Canadian books of 2014 along with the best reads of 2013. Of course I want to read all of them, but there are a few on that list that immediately stand out. Also, I’m looking forward to what 49thShelf.com calls out as the top reads since they often has a handle on the smaller presses as well.

1. Frog Music, by Emma Donoghue (HarperCollins Canada/April) I didn’t read Room but this topic is intriguing: 3 former circus performers in 19th-century San Francisco.

2. The Confabulist, by Steven Galloway (Knopf Canada/April) I have loved all of Galloway’s novels, in particular Finnie Walsh and The Cellist of Sarajevo. This novel is about the life and death of the legendary magician Harry Houdini.

3. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, by Heather O’Neill (HarperCollins Canada/May) I enjoyed O’Neill’s Canada Reads-winning debut Lullabies for Little Criminals. It was dark. Not sure if this one is as dark but it’s about the twin children of a famous Quebecois folksinger.

4. Walt, by Russell Wangersky (House of Anansi Press/September) Anansi always publishes very clever, quirky fiction and I’m really looking forward to this one about a grocery store cleaner who believes the police are trying to frame him for his wife’s disappearance. And as Medley says, “Oh, I forgot to mention his peculiar quirk: He collects discarded shopping lists people leave around the store.” Love it.

5. The Doomsday Man, by Ian Weir (Goose Lane Editions/September) Weir’s debut, Daniel O’Thunder was a pretty fun read. I’ve been participating with Ian in the Vancouver Sun Book Club and having heard about the novel first hand, I can’t wait to read his exploration of early surgeons and amputations. Seriously.

6. Into the Blizzard, by Michael Winter (Doubleday Canada/November) Winter is a crazy guy and I enjoyed The Big Why and All This Happened. I haven’t read Minister Without Portfolio so I’ll have to add that to my list as well. This book explores the history of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment.

More to come once I see what 49thShelf is touting!

Leaving the Sea: Stories

Love this cover. Reminds me of The Flame Alphabet, which is his previous book. I loved the writing but couldn’t get into the story (too dark for me as a new sleep-deprived mom, it was about children’s voices killing their parents) so I’m looking forward to reading these short stories instead.

Considered one of the most innovative and vital writers of his generation, Ben Marcus’s new collection showcases 15 tales of modern anxieties and peculiarities.

Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction: The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and The Flame Alphabet, and he is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, Electric Literature, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Conjunctions. He has received the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love was The Afterword Reading Society book club selection for Nov 26. I stupidly, and for a second time in a row, was not my usual 100% and I missed submitting my information. That said, my untimeliness in no way represents how much I enjoyed this book, nor how much I appreciate receiving a copy of this fine novel.

Alma Whittaker, born Jan 5, 1800, bears witness to the vast changes taking place in science, religion, commerce and class, all without leaving her home White Acre. Ok, she does leave near the end of her life, but what leads her to that point is such a sweeping tale of botany, early childhood education, colonization through cultivation of plants for medicine and food, charity (misplaced or not) and a family lineage that is fearsome in its tenacity. The story is told through Alma’s interactions with a number of visitors who come to White Acre to meet with Alma’s father Henry Whittaker. Henry Whittaker made his fortune travelling the seas as a young lad on behalf of Joseph Banks and the Kew Gardens. He was a swift learner and had few scruples so he quickly used his knowledge of botany and commerce to his advantage. When the time was right, he picked a wife, moved to America, set up a partnership for a profitable pharmaceutical company and continued to add pennies to his pockets through his expeditions.

The story moves from Henry’s travels to London to Peru to Philadelphia, then follows Alma’s trek to Tahiti and Amsterdam. There are beautiful descriptions of orchids, mosses and other botanicals. There’s adventure on the high seas, a retracing of human history, Darwin’s theories of evolution, and the push by abolitionists and adventurers to reconsider the world.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It reminds me of Anna Pavord’s The Tulip, which was a nonfiction look at the cultural baggage this bulb brings with it. The Signature of All Things: A Novel is The Tulip’s fictional counterpart.

Check it out on ElizabethGilbert.com along with the reading group guide and other goodies, including a Signature of All Things cocktail. Yum.

Todd Babiak’s latest novel about a Canadian family accidentally caught up with mobsters in the south of France needs to be read with the lights on and the doors locked!

This is not earnest Canadiana. Babiak has written a spine-tingling, torture-ridden, political drama about the Kruse family who end up hunted by a Corsican crime family hired by a political party with connections throughout the country and in the gendarmerie.

Christopher and Evelyn Kruse bring their 4-year-old daughter Lily to South France in an attempt to rekindle their love. Instead they are driven apart when their daughter is hit and killed by a drunk driver who happens to be their landlord and the poster-boy candidate for the Front National party, Jean-Francois de Musset. The next morning Jean-Francois and his wife are found brutally murdered, Evelyn is on the run, and Christopher discovers Russian goons hired by a Corsican crime family are hunting his wife. He must draw on his security forces training and own investigative skills to find her before they do.

Come Barbarians is a fantastic thriller where South France is as much a character as Christopher himself; dark, mysterious and desperately seeking some form of stasis.

If you like The Wire tv series, you’ll like Come Barbarians.

I think I also enjoyed this novel because we were in South France last year and visited many of the towns mentioned in the book, including Vaison-la-romaine where the book opens.

Come Barbarians by Todd Babiak
Published by HarperCollins

The Edmonton Public Library is celebrating 100 years and one of my favourite writers is the author of the Library’s grand story. Just Getting Started: Edmonton Public Library’s First 100 Years, 1913-2013 by Todd Babiak is published by the University of Alberta Press.

If you live in Edmonton, U of A Press has released 17 copies of the book “into the wild”, one for each branch of the library. The idea is for people to take a photo of the book and share it on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest are all good spots), then leave the book somewhere new. Use the hashtags #epl100, #eplbooktravels to spread the message.

The launch is part of LitFest, on Tuesday, October 22 at 7 pm at the Stanley A. Milner Library Theatre. The event is free, and everyone is welcome. You should RSVP asap though at http://litfestalberta.com/events/just-getting-started#.UlwR1WRAQi4.

Regardless of where you live, the EPL is also allowing free downloads of the ebook (PDF, EPUB, and Kindle formats) from its website. EPL.ca/100/book. Look for the tabs with extra content, excerpts, contests, etc.

I don’t have any connection to Edmonton personally but I do love Babiak’s writing and he’s brought the EPL’s story to life through a series of stand-alone, yet interlinked chapters. The archival photos are wonderful and the story of the Library is really the story of a city.

I really liked this chapter “The Violinist with a Broom,” which is a story about one of the library’s janitors turned music director. Russian-born Nicholas Alexeef was hired by the library as a janitor in 1928 but nobody knew, or asked, about his training, which happened to be as a violinist. He was trained by a professor from the Paris Conservatory, took his examinations at the Petrograd Conservatory, and for one winter lived with one of the greatest teachers of the century, the Hungarian violinist Leopold Auer, in Saint Petersburg. But a year before he could complete his studies, he was drawn into military service, fought on the anti-communist side, fled, and arrived in Canada in 1924. I won’t tell you how he became the music director because you should really just read the story. In fact, read the whole book! It’s filled with really interesting stories of the people of Edmonton and how the Library played a central role in the politics and development of the city.

simplebooklet.com

Here’s Todd Babiak talking about the book.

Todd Babiak is the perfect author for this book because he’s a great writer (check out his new book Come Barbarians or my reviews of his previous books, The Garneau Block and The Book of Stanley), plus he lives in Edmonton and was a columnist for the Edmonton Journal. Did I mention, I love his writing?

Hey, my friend Annemarie wrote a book that I can now fully appreciate it. Healthy Mum, Happy Baby is part anecdote and part cookbook for moms who are breastfeeding.

First, I had no idea how hungry I would be all the time. The anecdotes from other moms were funny and reassuring. By 4 pm I am hangry (this is hungry + angry for those of you fortunate to not know this word). I was diligent about food and exercise before being pregnant, during pregnancy and I’ve been pretty good post pregnancy as well. Although really, I owe all my thanks to James. Annemarie’s book is for anyone who doesn’t have a “James” who cooks awesome food and slides healthy snacks across the table at the right times (being mindful of keeping his fingers out of the way).

Second, of course I am aware that my diet affects the baby’s diet. But as an exhausted new mom who is low on energy, making decisions is hard. Annemarie’s book offers some delicious meal options that make it easy to flip through and say, “ah yes, I’ll have that for dinner.” I appreciate the legend showing the prep and cook time for each recipe. I mostly flagged the 30 min or less recipes but I did drool fondly over the 60-min recipes while daydreaming about the days when I’ll have time to actually do some dinner prep.

Overall there are 35 recipes that don’t require exact measurement and will be tasty immediately or sometime later that evening when the baby has nodded off and you can still function to lift fork to mouth. Hands down, the list of healthy snacks is worthy of space on the fridge.

Also good, this book comes in whatever print or digital format works for you.

Healthy Mum, Happy Baby
How to Feed Yourself When You’re Breastfeeding Your Baby
by Annemarie Tempelman-Kluit
Published by Random House

Good job Annemarie! Thanks for this lovely, and timely gift.