Category Archives: 100 Books of 2011

October 16, 2011 · 9:12 pm

Leviathan: WW1 caused by Germans

       Steampunk! It’s a genre distinction I’d never heard named before, or if I had, I’d never connected it with those novels that imagine the past and the future melded together, or imagined the past as if the future had already happened, a future the present doesn’t know about yet. A sort of past-future? Maybe because “steampunk” doesn’t really describe or evoke those webbed chronologies? Whatever. The name for the genre far less exciting than the genre itself, which is, to put it simply, terrific. Terrific for me anyway, one who adores all things historical (all of it, you understand? if it happened in the past, I adore it.) but who also admires, appreciates, nay, celebrates, those bastardized histories that don’t feel any more allegiance to “fact” than necessary to be historical (okay, a tautology if there ever was one – stuff it). And so I get really excited when I read a history that is historical in all the ways that matter, but includes – get this! – battles between aircrafts made of whales and other organic business and cyborgesque monster machines made of metal.

Leviathan is the first in Scott Westerfeld’s trilogy narrating some of the events of WW1, particularly those that pertain to the (fictional) son, Alex, of the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his team of allies, whom include a cross-dressing fourteen year old girl-pilot who you just *know* is going to end up madly in love with Alex, because it wouldn’t be a fun story if she didn’t (how/when will he discover she’s really a woman? When will she recognize the tingles she feels when he’s near as hormonal reactions and not a rash?). Add in stellar descriptions of battles between organic and metal, headstrong and meddling adults, and descriptions of journeys that require eating over fires (!) and you have yourself a winner of YAF.

Also a winner in the category “wars of the 20th century,” if you ask me. Of those books I’ve read in the category, this one does (by far) the most entertaining and soothing job of introducing senseless destruction and death. It also does a fine job drawing out the sometimes opaque causes of World War One, and concludes, as do so many eighth grade history teachers, that while no one can be blamed, the Germans can probably be blamed. So let’s blame the Germans! and keep reading this terrifically entertaining, smart, and well paced series. In January.

Leave a comment

Filed under 100 Books of 2011, Young Adult Fiction

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 16, 2011 · 9:12 pm

Empire State: A Love Story (or not): Annoyingly charming?

                         So it took me the first half of Jason Shiga’s Empire State: A Love Story (or not) to work out the split chronology. Had I been more sensitive to the (in retrospect) obvious division of time (divided not just by plot events but by colour) I might have enjoyed the book the whole way through. As it is, I found the first half to be closer to pretensious and annoying than endearing or charming. But by the time our protagonist arrives in New York I cared about him and wanted his love plot to resolve in making out and babies. It doesn’t. Not a spoiler, folks, the parenthetical title gives it away.

The parenthetical title also gives away that this is a book by and for hipsters who like to read McSweeny’s and drink lattes that are appropriately foamed. Perhaps the best panels in the book (okay, a stretch and a lie) are those that depict a conversation about how annoying hipsters are when they’re talking about how annoying other hipsters are, not realizing they are the annoying hipsters about whom they complain. That Shiga is conscious of his hipster-ness and doesn’t (with the exception of those ironic panels) apologize (as he should!) being hip, is okay with me.

I loved the panels of Jimmy arriving in New York. Some might find the panels annoying because they are not oblique (and so hip), but far from annoying the scope entirely matches the experience of feeling small on arriving in a new city. In short I appreciated that form and content aligned, especially when I could see evidence elsewhere in the text of wanting to be jarring so as to jar. Annoyingly jarring.

I also loved the unapologetic consideration of what it means to be grown-up. A bit of a cliche at this point to describe a 20-something realizing that they’ll never feel properly grown-up (or at least a cliche for me because I think about it all. the. time) and not trying to resolve these feelings with any kind of revelation or grandiose decision to Act Differently, but just allowing that some people feel disoriented by their age and the expectations the world attaches to that age. Like having a bank account. Or knowing about espresso.

I also loved that it took me 1.5 hours to read. Something of a gift at this point in the reading challenge. Less than 20 remaining, folks!

1 Comment

Filed under 100 Books of 2011, Book I'll Forget I Read

Tagged as , , , ,

October 15, 2011 · 3:27 pm

Night: Uncomfortable

     Elie Wiesel’s Night is my cousin’s favourite book. My cousin who has read, I’d guess, somewhere in the neighbourhood of five novels in his lifetime. But he read Night because it’s one of the book we’re all meant to read. And so I read it, too, anticipating it as depressing and unsettling. What I couldn’t have anticipated – and this causes me great discomfort to admit to myself, let alone on a public forum like this – was that I also found it boring. 

My familiarity with the events and tropes of Wiesel’s book arise, no doubt, both from the years I spent absorbed by Holocaust fiction (13-18?) after reading The Diary of Anne Frank and from a culture saturated with the story that, with minor variation, we are all meant to know. But simple familiarity should not so fully dull my emotional reactions, right? And so the way I’ve been able to understand my reaction in a way that doesn’t cause self-loathing or deep concern about my continuing existence as an empathetic and affective individual is through philosophies on boredom (principally Heidegger) that suggest it is when confronted with the profoundly meaningless that individuals resort to a passive indifference: when set against an existential void a (reasonable?) response is boredom.

I’ll also understand my reaction as one to literary form. The narrative tone is, appropriate to the subject matter, flat. The same diction, pace and tone is employed in describing rations of food as is the death of Wiesel’s father. Perhaps it is the case that as all events are treated and narrated as equally affect-less the reader might find the form of the text, if not the content, dull.

This ambivalence, then, is how I’m prepared to understand the book and my reaction. And I’ll entertain conversations with those of you who might have read the book, too, or who might want to comment on my apparent lack-of-feeling. Perhaps I just want to be reassured that I am not callous and am not maliciously, only defensively, indifferent.

Leave a comment

Filed under 100 Books of 2011, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , ,

October 13, 2011 · 8:58 pm

Still Life: Charming

      Set in a quaint Quebecois village, Louise Penny’s Still Life narrates the murder and murder investigation of the beloved town resident, Jane Neal. Of the books I’ve read so far in “Spies and Detectives,” Still Life most closely aligns with what I’ve always imagined as a classic “whodunnit”: the gradual introduction of a cast of characters and their possible motives, the inclusion of red herrings, and a measured and generous chief investigator.  To the mix Still Life adds the sub-plots of negotiating queer identity in a small town, young people struggling to find self-acceptance and self-worth, and the assurance offered by a good cup of tea. Okay, not really a good cup of tea, but rather, the tensions of French-English loyalties in (rural) Quebec.

I enjoyed the book a great deal for its mystery – trying to work out the killer, putting the book down so I could puzzle out new clues and then reading oh-so-rapidly so that I might find out who really did it, the surprise and delight of an ending I hadn’t expected, but still believed – but I also enjoyed it for its unabashed Canadian setting. The chief inspector drinks Tim Hortons coffee, the townspeople debate Quebecois language laws, the second in command argues against the displacement of indigenous people from the Montreal area, even Margaret Atwood has a (dubious) cameo! I like these things not simply because I’m a Canadianphile, but because they contributed to a convincing setting both in time and place, that allowed the crime, the townspeople, and the investigators to read not as characters easily cut-out of yet another mystery novel, but as products and contributors of a singular set of circumstances. No surprise then that Penny’s novels – Still Life is the first in what is now the “Inspector Gamache” series – are as wildly popular as any Canadian mystery series can be said to be wildly popular. If it’s any confirmation of worth, I’m planning to read another in the series come January.

Leave a comment

Filed under 100 Books of 2011, Canadian Literature, Fiction, Mystery

Tagged as , , , , ,