Category: Book Reviews (Page 40 of 45)

I first heard about Ann Patchett from my friend Jennifer who adored Patchett’s novel Bel Canto. I’ve never read the book but I feel that I intimately know the story and I’ve been anxious to read Patchett ever since.

Today I finished Ann Patchett’s latest novel Run.

Run is stellar. And Ann Patchett is an author whose backlist I’m now going to seek out. In particular I want to read The Magician’s Assistant.

But back to Run. This is a beautiful book. The structure is an example of fine writing. Although the story follows chronological order there are nice loops back to the present. At no time do you feel like you know the whole story or where it’s going to go.

What’s the premise of the Run?

Bernadette Doyle is a loving mother who wishes to have more children and cannot. She and her husband adopt a black boy and a short time later they are contacted by the agency asking if they would take the older sibling. The birth mother wishes the boys be raised together. So Tip and Teddy join Mayor Doyle, Bernadette and Sullivan. Sadly Bernadette dies early of cancer, leaving the boys to grow up without their mother. The story picks up again when the boys are in university and one gets hit by a car.

Run is well constructed, the characters are interesting, and the dynamics between the characters are a powerful representation of the alliances and enemies that form in all families.

I first heard about this book when I stumbled across the book trailer for Run on Facebook.

I’m not a fan of most book trailers but I did like this one from Harper Collins. I liked that it used images and quotes from the book to convey the story. I also liked the simple piano soundtrack.

Watching the book trailer now, it’s even more powerful because the images make more sense and I can attribute the quotes to certain characters.

Watch the trailer.

Run by Ann Patchett (Harper Collins Canada) is definitely a top 10 book for the year.

Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo of Capulet Communications recently released an ebook on social media marketing, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook.

First, Darren and Julie are my friends. We shared office space at one time. We’ve brainstormed projects together. I went to visit them in Malta. I’m quoted in their ebook (pages 74 & 75). So if we’re talking about Getting to First Base, I’m their wingman.

Quote: Wingman: A wingman is the guy or girl you bring along to the bar when you’re single. This person’s job is to help bring over potential dates. The wingman may provide comparison shopping. For example, the wingman can act more stupid than you, thereby impressing the potential date. Or better yet, the wingman can sing your virtues. This allows for bragging opportunities that are not self-prompted. There’s a whole art to being a good wingman. A delicate balance. Just like in flight operations, the wingman positions himself/herself outside and behind (off the wing) of the leader. The wingman is your best support. Here I go.

The Introduction: Who are Darren and Julie?
Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo run Capulet Communications, which is a great web marketing and social media relations company. They are usually located in Vancouver, BC, but, more recently, have been living in Malta.

Both come from strong writing backgrounds and this strength plays out nicely in their ebook, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook. It’s 100 pages of information and entertainment.

Matchmaker: Who is Getting to First Base for?
Basically anyone who is newly experimenting with social media marketing will benefit from reading this book. If you’re wondering whether you should start a Facebook group for your company, if you’re thinking about blogger outreach campaigns, if you want to make viral YouTube videos–this book is a great primer. Even if you’re a social media diehard, there are lots of interesting quips in the book from social media gurus who aren’t typically in the limelight. Every social media marketing book quotes Seth Godin. That’s great for Seth, but there must be other social media savvy folks out there?

Absolutely, there are.

Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook presents a balanced mix of wisdom from social media marketers who run the fame gamut. One of my favourite quotes is from Dave Olsen, Community Evangelist at Raincity, who responded “no idea” to the question “what’s the reach of your social media projects?”

No idea.

Why is that great wisdom? It’s great because Dave goes on to illustrate the importance of qualitative metrics vs. quantitative metrics. People who don’t get social media or online marketing just want to see the numbers. “How many hits did we get?” This is so misguided for many reasons. But without getting side tracked, let’s get back to Dave.

Dave continues with “what matters to me is that people from diverse culture and locations genuinely enjoy what I produce and respond with postcards, emails, dinners and gifts, or best yet, tell how important my ‘stuff’ is to them.”

What Darren and Julie illustrate in Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook is that the “stuff” has to be important enough that people are interested in talking about it. This is the key to social media marketing: first, having a good product or service; second, having something interesting and valuable to say about it; third, telling that story in ways that make it easy for people who like that story to say so and pass it on.

Even as someone who makes my living teaching people about social media marketing, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook was a good read. In some cases the examples illustrated points that I’ve been making in presentations–it’s always good to have a variety of examples. In other cases, there are glossaries or quotes or links that I can suggest people look at–I like it when I can point to good sources of information. Most important, the book helps readers understand the tone and approach required for successful social media marketing campaigns.

So if you’re new to social media, if you want a baseline understanding of where and how to start, get the Social Media Ready ebook Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo. It $29 of goodness.

(I want to make a joke about a steal of a deal and stealing a base, but I think it will come out wrong. Please insert your own joke. Then laugh here.)

Hey, I was going to quickly come back and update this post on Thomas Wharton’s novel Icefields (NeWest Press). I can’t believe that it’s Thursday. I must have been caught in a ripple in time.

Let me tell you more about how I came upon Icefields by Thomas Wharton, which, if you don’t know, is a CBC Canada Reads pick for 2008.

Last Friday I was in Toronto presenting a session on online marketing to the Literary Press Group book publishers. I illustrated a point about how fast it is to create a blog post and to use Amazon Associates program. That was the post you saw, which, of course, needed a lot more work.

Now how did Icefields come up?

I asked the audience if anyone had a hot book this season. Lou from NeWest Press piped up with “Icefields!”

About Icefields

Quote: NeWest Press book description:

At a quarter past three in the afternoon, on August 17, 1898, Doctor Edward Byrne slipped on the ice of Arcturus glacier in the Canadian Rockies and slid into a crevasse…

Nearly sixty feet below the surface, Byrne is wedged upside down between the narrowing walls of a chasm, fighting his desire to sleep. A stray beam of sunlight illuminates the ice in front of him with a pale blue-green radiance. There, embedded in the pure, antediluvian glacier, Byrne sees something that will inextricably link him to the vast yet disappearing bed of ice, and the people who inhabit this strange corner of the world.
Read the full description …

Thomas Wharton also has a blog, logogryph.blogspot.com.

And I learned that a logogryph is a mythical creature that lives in books. Cool.

Thomas Wharton says some interesting things abuot writing Icefields…

Quote: During the writing of this book my wife and I moved to Peace River, six hours north of Edmonton. I had just finished my Master’s degree and was an unemployed at-home father in an isolated northern town. I suddenly had lots of time for writing, in between looking after a child all day. That’s one reason why the chapters of the novel are so short.
He goes on to talk about his writing room and rugged, mountain climbers who would show up at his readings … check it out.

I’m excited about this book and really looking forward to reading it. Thank you Lou for the copy.

Original Post
——————-
I’m coming back to talk about this title.

Go Canada Reads.

Icefields

Soucouyant is a novel about memory by Vancouver author David Chariandy. Soucouyant is Chariandy’s first novel, but I suspect that it’s his first published novel. I imagine he has a trunk full of manuscripts and journals chock full of notations about characters.

Soucouyant was shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General”s Literary Award and longlisted for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Award nominations don’t normally impress me but to have two nominations for the top Canadian prizes and to be a first-time author–that’s impressive.

There’s good reason for the nominations. The novel is a twisting plot of memory fragments. Adele is suffering from dementia, she is near the end of her life and her son has returned home to care for her. The fragments of memory that tell the story are those of Adele’s childhood in Trinidad during the Second World War, of the son’s childhood in Ontario, in a house near the Scarborough Bluffs, and of both characters’ present day experiences.

The memories that comprise the whole are about discord, displacement and distance. The discord appears in stories of racism and classism that the characters suffer. The displacement is the us vs. them, the plight of immigrants, the settling in that never quite happens for this family. And the distance is that which they create between themselves. The mother’s dementia distances her mentally from the present, the father dies, which pulls the family slightly apart, the oldest son leaves home to become a poet, the youngest also flees but later returns, only to distance himself again by being emotionally guarded.

Quill and Quire did not give the book a great review, although the reviewer Dory Cerny certainly agreed that it was worth reading.

The Tyee does a much better job of getting in touch with the plotlines Chariandy is experimenting with. I highly recommend checking out what The Tyee has to say on this one. It’s a great interview with David Chariandy.

Soucoyant by David Chariandy is published by Arsenal Pulp Press, a great Vancouver publisher. If you want more about David, check out CBC Words at Large.

And, I thought the book was great. It would be an interesting book club pick because the writing is strong and the story provides ample topics to discuss. It reminded me a little bit of At the Full and Change of the Moon by Dionne Brand.

Canadian author.

I like to review a book after I’ve read it. I hope that’s a standard course of action for most reviewers. The problem is that I have a full-time job, which means that you are left to the whims of my schedule and reading habits, and this particular book cannot be washed away or soaked too long.

Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Mourner’s Dance, has published a new book with Knopf Canada, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History.

As a cautionary sort with germs, I’ve often reflected on the origins of my cleanliness. It’s the fault of my mother and uncle. As a school kid, I came home for lunch. My mother, like all good mothers, would tell me to wash my hands. I’d run upstairs, turn the tap on, play with my hair, turn the tap off and run downstairs for my lunch. Notice there was no hand washing.

My uncle was a regular lunchtime guest. He was studying science at the university and one day brought along some books for me inspect. Science books. Science books, full of microscope photos of germs. Germs on your hands. Germs in your snot. Germs on school tables and door knobs.

I was a princessy girly-girl. I barely liked fuzzy caterpillars.

From then on I scoured my hands raw.

Did I mention that I was a child of extremes?

Katherine Ashenburg can relate to my experience. In the introduction of The Dirt on Clean, she talks about standards of hygiene reaching absurd levels in the late 50s and early 60s.

Quote: The idea of a body ready to betray me at any turn filled the magazine ads I pored over in Seventeen and in Mademoiselle … A long-running series of cartoon-style ads for Kotex sanitary napkins alerted me to the impressive horrors of menstrual blood, which apparently could announce its presence to an entire high school.

Oh, the hysteria. Imagine smelling offensive and not even knowing!

The Dirt on Clean is a history of cleanliness from a Western perspective, and what I like is Katherine’s writing style. She’s chatty yet thorough, gossipy yet respectful. She shares, for example, without naming names, some of the stories people confess about their own overly enthusiastic cleaning rituals or, more frequently, their avoidance of soap and water.

In the closing paragraph of the introduction, Katherine refers to Benjamin Franklin, who said that to understand the people of a country, he needed only to visit its graveyards.

Katherine says, “show me a people’s bathhouses and bathrooms, and I will show you what they desire, what they ignore, sometimes what they fear–and a significant part of who they are.”

So what smell are you? Mango, vanilla, smoke and sweat?

What would Katherine find in your bathroom that would betray your true colours (or smells).

I was looking for a Dan Brown-esque novel to read while in Malta–you know, a light read on goddess worship–and I found this in a bookstore in Valletta, The Maltese Goddess by Lyn Hamilton.

I was looking for a goddess worship book so that I could remind myself of some minor historical points that were alluding me, and so that I could think more about goddess worship on Malta, which seems to have been a big deal. Malta is home to the oldest freestanding structures in the world. The temples of Malta are over 5,000 years old, much older than the pyramids and Stonehenge. And the big find has been thousands of female statues.

The Maltese Goddess was an ok read. It’s labeled an archaeological mystery but really it’s a mystery set on an archaeological site–at one of the temples. The book is set initially in Toronto, where the heroine has an antique shop. Martin Galea comes in, “Mr. I’m So Wealthy I Can Fly You to My Home in Malta to Decorate.” That’s all cool and dandy until Mr. Galea turns up in Malta dead as dead is and stuffed into a dresser.

As I say, it’s light on the goddess worship but was a fun find nonetheless.

A couple of years ago I was in Calgary at the Writers Festival, and I had the good fortune of meeting Rawi Hage in the Author’s Lounge.

I was inspired to hear his talk on a panel about “writers writing from away”. Since then I’ve wanted to read De Niro’s Game, but for some reason it’s taken me until now to do so.

De Niro’s Game is set in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and 80s. De Niro is actually George, who is friends with Bassam, our narrator.

George and Bassam are just kids when the war breaks out. They hunt around for bullet casings, which they trade with neighbourhood kids. George and Bassam grow up to be thugs, the kind of thugs that develop because of civil war. George, I think goes a bit further than Bassam, joining the militia, doing cocaine, experimenting with–who knows what. Bassam is more silent. Perhaps he is just as bad but since he’s the narrator we don’t know about it.

De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage is the story of George and Bassam and their escapes from the war. For Bassam, it means being smuggled out of the country to France. His escape and time in Paris forms the last third of the book, which I felt was the strongest writing in the novel.

A talented author, Rawi Hage is dynamite at conveying the complexities of his narrator’s character and the betrayals of war. The earlier part of the novel though was riddled with adjectives, annoyingly so:

Quote: Ten thousand bombs had landed on Beirut, that crowded city, and I was lying on a blue sofa covered with white sheets to protect it from dust and dirty feet.

Either the adjectives decreased throughout the story or my patience with them increased. Regardless, I did enjoy this tale of one man’s struggle with identity, war, friendships, betrayals and growing up.

Have you read it?
De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage

Australian author Danielle Wood has created a series of interconnected anecdotes about the lives of women: naughty ones and nice ones. Rosie Little is our connecting character, sometimes a character in the story, sometimes just a narrator.

Wood certainly has an eye for detail and an ear for dialogue. The moments portrayed are pitch perfect. There is a story about a bride in full wedding dress, stuck in an airport during the wee hours of the morning when nothing is open, which cracked me up. There is a story about a nurse for chronic-care patients who is secretly buying baby clothes and storing them in a suitcase under her bed, which made me very sad. Each story struck a chord. And the opening story about fellacio is damn funny.

The packaging of the book is definitely worth mentioning. This is a sturdy little hardcover book. It is super attractive.

Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls on Random.ca

Turpentine by Spring Warren is a Western set in the 1870s. Edward Turrentine Bayard III (“Turpentine”) is our tragic hero. He’s a coward and thinks himself otherwise. He’s misguided and thinks himself enlightened with manners and fortune. This is a cyclical story. Turpentine’s fortunes rise and fall depending upon his decisions, and unfortunately for Turp, he can be a bit of a twerp.

Although Turpentine is tragic, the novel is not. Spring Warren is a fine storyteller and she paints a Wild West worth visiting.

The story is this: Turpentine is sent on a train west by his doctor. He is to attend a sanatorium and improve the health of his lungs. He ends up in the Wild West skinning buffalo and courting girls. Turpentine, being of better means earlier in life, is an artist. His sketches catch the attention of a Peabody Museum scholar who is studying fossils. Turpentine is invited to the Peabody as an assistant. It seems his life is about to change, and yet this is just one of the many ups soon to be followed by a down.

In some ways Turpentine reminded me of The Englishman’s Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe. This is a literary Western with a lot going on if you choose to read it that way.

Two pistols up.

A couple of weeks ago I received a lovely email from Don Bailey, who is publishing his third novel, The Good Lie, with Turnstone Press, the same company that published James’ book Up in Ontario.

Don asked if I’d mention his book. I normally don’t feature a book until I’ve had a chance to read it, but there are certain books that come to my attention that I do want to share. In this case, Don Bailey. Why? Because Don Bailey sent me a nice note complementing SoMisguided and its support of Canadian publishing, because his book is edited by Wayne Tefs, who is another author I love (check out his novel Red Rock) and who played hockey with James in Winnipeg and also who edited Up in Ontario, and because Don has created a website for The Good Lie that tells some stories about the story of The Good Lie, and I enjoyed reading the behind-the-scene stories.

All good things, I think.

So I’m going to check out the novel, and if you have a chance to before me, let me know what you think.

Also I heard that Turnstone Press published Todd Babiak’s first novel, which is another reason to support Canadian publishing.

So I’m sorry if I’m light on witty commentary, I’m trying to blast out the door to Malta, but I did not want to leave without mentioning The Good Lie.