Category Archives: 100 Books of 2011

January 24, 2011 · 11:45 pm

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol 3: A Most Impressive Business

               I downloaded the audio book of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from the very tech-friendly Hamilton Public Library and delighted in listening to some British accented fellow read me bite sized mysteries. I took the voice and the book first to the grocery store (but not *in* the grocery store; I detest listening to anything whilst shopping – far too distracting), then to cook a cake, and then about the library browsing books. I ended up relistening to the browsing books story, as it turns out I am not capable of attending to two things at once (somehow walking doesn’t count as a ‘thing’ – I seem capable of walking and listening. thankfully.). 

I enjoyed both the pace of the stories – neither too winding, nor too abrupt – the tantalizing clues that you just *know* are clues, but cannot work out, and the focalization of Watson. I was telling M. yesterday that I like Watson’s point of view because it somehow subjects Holmes to the same kind of scrutiny Holmes brings to mysteries, clues, witnesses and suspects. I dig the relationship between Watson and Holmes both because its represented as simultaneously intimate and utterly professional: a careful balance to strike and one which I admire in a narrative ostensibly about other matters.

Oh, and clearly from the tenor of this post (or perhaps only clearly to me) I enjoy the diction of the stories. I’d support the return of the countenance and the aspect and the most serious and grave business. Perhaps not the damsel in total distress. The representation of women is my chief complaint with the stories. Hapless and helpless women abound. All too often they are also waif like. I don’t go in for the waifs. I suppose this criticism could extend to include the non-British (villains appear from South America and India) and the physically impaired (“cripples” and “hysterics” populate two of the three stories), but I was most bothered by the women, perhaps because they were always the victims. Not that I expect one of them to spring up and solve the mystery – I fully accept that Holmes and Watson are a (homo-social) male partnership, but I could do with a story where a big brutish man falls victim to a hysterical bout or comes to the two cold with fear.

That said, I’ll be downloading another set of of Holmes/Watson for my walks about. Check of the HPL for your own out-and-about-town Adventures.

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January 22, 2011 · 4:53 pm

The Unwritten: Okay, okay, stories matter

         Mike Carey’s and Peter Gross’s The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity is my first read in the “books with illustrations” category. I started reading an illustrated book of an evil Peter Pan (The Child Thief), but found myself hating it, and so I replaced Peter Pan with Tommy Taylor on P’s recommendation.

I have to admit to be a little underwhelmed. The cover of the comic proclaims “Wired” thinks its “one of the most interesting comics of the year,” and I’ll admit that it is a clever weave of “reality” and “fiction,” with surprising comic inclusions of television broadcasts, web pages, newspaper reports and stories-within-the-story that do add a metatextual element of “interest” in literary/cultural collage. That said, the central message of the comic = stories create the world = is overdone, or maybe more accurately, is the only thing to be done in the narrative. I suppose the effect of this single thematic focus and set of questions (what kind of world can a story create? what power do stories have over lives? politics?) is to ensure the reader “gets it” —> stories create the only meaning we have access to <— but has such little faith in a competent reader that the comic belabours this point rather than exploring the consequences of story-based-reality (for instance, the beginning of the narrative starts to consider the ‘mob’ effect of changes to popular and accepted stories, but only in terms of Tommy Taylor and doesn’t extend this discussion to the other, not strictly ‘literary’ stories that circulate in a given society).

I did like reading a book in pictures.

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January 18, 2011 · 2:43 am

The Girl With the Glass Feet: Okay.

My brother gave me Ali Shaw’s The Girl With the Glass Feet for Christmas, and so I slotted it in to “First Novels,” for no other reason than I wanted to read it and it fit the category. Turns out it really is a wonderful first novel (the New York Times say so too), full of imagination and magic. The plot is the title: a girl (Ida) has glass feet, a problem because the glass spreads and cannot be ‘cured’ (though the novel goes to some pains to remind the reader that the glass is not a disease, it is part of Ida, not a disease to be cured or caught – something to be lived with and accepted).

It’s a novel about how to be in the present. Midas – the erstwhile emotionally stunted photographer and eventual lover of Ida – must abandon photography as the barrier between himself and human connection; other men must figure out how to be in relationships, how to confront their pasts and the failures of their (misguided) choices.

And Ida, while, Ida more or less serves as the metaphor/tool by which the men figure out how to be whole, feeling people. Sure she feels love and gets consumed by glass, but I can’t help but wonder whether she isn’t the one-dimensional fairy tale figure who enable plot action and character change at the expense of having these things happen for herself. Such is her lack of depth (if her solid glass-ness wasn’t enough) when she concludes she will die she writes a letter to her father and this reader gasped – having forgotten Ida might have a family, connections, feelings (fears!) about her own death. And this reader wasn’t at all moved by her death, more a reaction of wondering how Midas will respond.

I will say the richly imagined world that sees cow-dragonflies and a creature that turns all other creatures white on sight is pretty neat: though the (apparent) lack of connection between these magical things and the glass feet left this reader a little bewildered as to what all the magic was meant to (thematically?) achieve. Nonetheless, cow-dragonflies: pretty cool.

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January 15, 2011 · 10:19 pm

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Too many ships; so much brilliance

                                    So it’s something of an admission to confess I’d never read a full collection of Alice Munro’s stories before now. The thing is – as faithful readers will know – I dislike short stories, even (or maybe especially?) short stories by brilliant authors. Before this collection I’d read one of Munro’s stories (“Boys and Girls”) for a class I taught, and really enjoyed it, but all the same resisted reading a full collection because, as with all short story collections, I feel (violently) opposed to the brief introduction to characters, which must inevitably end too early. I appreciate the short story as a compressed form, one which achieves great thematic feats in a short space, and yet all the same, I can’t help feel cheated by what I’ll never find out about characters (this from someone who writes her own – shoddy – short stories).

In any case, this collection (poorly named, I think – far too many ships) almost makes up for the failings of the form by introducing brilliant characters and having some long (novella length?) stories. I even took the new e-reader into the tub because I couldn’t wait to finish a story (new splash bag for the reader comes this week, have no fear).

I will say that amid the triumph of rendering nuanced and hopelessly believable characters in heart-breaking situations, I loved the collection, but didn’t always like it. I felt that after another hopeless ending where things don’t quite work out, or people aren’t reunited, or are miserable, or find their lives are not the lives they ought to be, that I could do with an ending where things work out. And maybe Munro’s talent is in capturing the reality of lives – the impossibility, the failure, the absence, the missed connections – and perhaps I ought to turn to another author if I want to read stories were things feel resolved, but all the same, I wouldn’t have minded a couple of stories to pick me up along the way, to restore some faint sense of hope in humanity. L. suggested that I might read one Munro story a month rather than a whole collection at once, and perhaps she’s right (but there’s no time for that kind of spacing in a year of 100 books…). Maybe I can only handle a confrontation with what is true in small, once a month doses. A complaint about me then, I suppose. Me and my desire – my commitment? my faith? my hope? – for a happy ending needs monthly dosing with Munro. Maybe all of us need monthly Munro to help us find out about others and to remind us that we are, all of us, after all, always in some kind of ‘ship,’ always colliding with others. 

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