Category Archives: Book Club

May 17, 2023 · 1:54 am

The Last Thing He Told Me: A Forgettable Title, for a Memorable Book

It is an extremely good feeling when a person you love loves a book that you love. Orders of magnitude better feeling when a person you love who does not normally (ever) read books (1) reads a book and (2) loves a book and (3) that book turns out to be one you don’t mind/enjoy (I want so much to go so far as to say love, but… #integrity).

I get that this is what it means to share passions and that this is so much of what does underpin close relationships – I do. But so many of my recent friend additions have been ones where the first point of connection is being Adults With Small Dependents And Too Many Responsibilities, and not The! Joy! Of! Reading! (though to the credit of K. and K. this *is one of our shared connections, and I’m grateful for it).

Enter Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me. Our ill-named book club (famous for never picking, never-mind reading a book) decided we’d had enough mockery, and so we’d read a book. Problem: C. who refuses to read (anything? that can’t be true. But made up things where you might feel something). So we gave her the power to choose the book, and she did. And she loved it! (though, she – like me – couldn’t remember the name of it two weeks after reading it, so maybe something to take back to the focus group: get a better title).

I won’t tell you it’s the best book you’ve ever read, but it is a romp. The sort of thing you can immediately see being turned into a miniseries (oh wait, it has been already?) starring someone and someone and extra tall wine glasses. It follows Hannah and her step-daughter Bailey in the days after Hannah’s husband/Bailey’s father, Owen, goes missing – oh he leaves behind some notes, some cash, and is wanted in connection with a collapsing ponzi scheme (though maybe all ponzi schemes are collapsing? anyway).

While tripping along the thriller-suspense-can’t-put-it-down-just-one-more-chapter-I-swear lane, the book stumbles into some interesting thematic questions about what it means to be a parent – like literally in the sense of the limits of biology, but of course more in the sense of what responsibilities, what sacrifices, what ways of thinking-being are required. It makes a reasonably good case that ‘parent’ is to be – the verb, I mean – and has almost nothing to do with the noun.

And if you’re not into books with parenting themes there’s still lots of quasi-car chase scenes to keep you entertained, and modestly interesting other threads about identity and starting over. Perfect book for a beach or airplane.

But mostly? It’s a lot of fun. And so much more fun when your not-a-book-club people read it with you. Thanks, C.

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March 26, 2023 · 5:38 pm

David Copperfield and Demon Copperfield: Truly Genius

Ahhhhhhhhh.

I know generative AI is all like ‘I can write a thing in the style of so-and-so’ but with due respect to the robots, you cannot write like THIS. Jesus but Barbara Kingslover Hit It Out Of The Park with Demon Copperfield.

I’d heard it was good – well reviewed and on all the lists from last year, plus some personal recommendations – but felt held back by having not read David Copperfield. Some told me you didn’t have to have read David to appreciate Demon, but I thought I’d better check out the original just in case. And well. Guys. Did you know Dickens was a pretty good writer? Like I know you ‘know’ but maybe you’re like me and you haven’t actually read anything by him (or if you did it was a 100 years ago and a blur of high school English) and so you don’t really know. I mean don’t go out and drop what you’re doing, but I’m here to report: Charles Dickens was no slouch. But then, I cheated. I listened to it on audiobook (double speed and it still took 40 hours) and so maybe I’m a fan because of the British accent reading it to me and the aid of different voices. But probably it’s just a good one.

Anyway. So David Copperfield if you missed it: not an orphan from the outset, but an orphan, spends some time hungry, doing child labour, exploited, left for lost by institutions that should have – could have – protected him. Demon Copperfield? Same plot a few centuries later and this time it’s opioids and underfunded schools and exploitative companies and willful neglect that take center stage for judgement. [As an aside, if you don’t to read David Copperfield, then please, please, read Empire of Pain before you read this one – as it contextualizes (and layers the outrage) in incredibly helpful ways.]

Even while both books brilliantly attack institutions for the unmitigated failure (and not just passive failure, but active harm) of the young and the poor, they simultaneously argue for the profound – life changing – impact of individuals on one another. What harm, what hope might be possible in how we show up (or don’t) for one another.

So sure, all the institutions you can think of are (probably) failing, but they’ve been failing for centuries! Optimistic spin! AND as it always was and is also now true – we aren’t helpless in the face of it. While Demon and David both narrate exceptions – characters who are themselves exceptional and find themselves surrounded by others who – despite the structural failures that crumble – are kind. Kindness and caring are very small in the face of it all, and what we really need is revolution. And still. This reader clings to that tiny thing. Being kind, showing up, despite it all, holding hope.

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February 13, 2023 · 2:56 pm

Lessons in Chemistry: When You Have a Six Hour Flight

I suppose on a six hour flight there are a lot of things you could do. Watch 1/3 of the Lord of the Rings movies. Contemplate mortality. Crotchet a hat. OR you could read Bonnie Garmus’ entirely fun Lessons in Chemistry and you might not notice the cramped seat and tiny cup of cold coffee meant to sustain you for the duration.

It is a very fun romp through the the 1960s as we follow scientist, Elizabeth Zott, who encounters sexism and gender-based violence in all the usual places, and some extras, in her efforts to simply be who she is: a scientist. The first half of the novel is something of a rom-com heavier on the rom. With the second half taken up with the shine of celebrity after Elizabeth becomes – and not too much of a spoiler here as I think its on the front cover or maybe in the prologue – a celebrity chemist-chef, maybe famous primarily because she imagines (apparently for the first time) that women might just like someone to talk to them like adult humans.

There are some lovely characters – a Mary Poppins-esque neighbour who saves Elizabeth and whom Elizabeth saves in return. A heroic dog (as a person long on the record for distrusting dogs, even I found this one endearing). A precocious child. Some rowers who – for whatever reason – are not subject to the same misogyny of the rest of their societal peers and are instead just interested in good rowers.

It is problematic in ways that we can just skip over so as to enjoy the book for what it is. But worth noting that the plot arc of individual who persists amid challenge demands a lot from individuals to pull up their bootstraps etc etc – which isn’t to say the novel isn’t aware of the structural impediments to Elizabeth’s success – quite the opposite! or that it’s not interested in how Elizabeth relies on others in a community for her eventual triumph – she does! or that there aren’t examples of other individuals who learn and grow – there are! more that in celebrating this exceptional woman – incredibly smart and tenacious – there’s something of a thread that the people likely to succeed, and those who can do the work of change, are those of the talented genius. Rather than a collective effort of community. And that if you happen to be someone who doesn’t learn to read by age 3 you might not change the world.

What a relief for me, then.

All that said: fun and absorbing and you’ll thank me when your plane is delayed for deicing and you have something to sustain you for the extra seventeen hours.

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June 12, 2022 · 12:25 pm

The Pull of the Stars: Pandemic, Abortion and… 1918

Historical fiction. Such a great genre. Have I said it before? I have? Well, I’ll say it again: such a great genre. Something about the space to explore the impossible problems of the present in the safety of the past. Not sure what we should do with the right to abortion? Worried about the lasting impacts of a global pandemic? Fretting about the crumbling of institutions like Church and marriage? To the past! Where we can hod these problems and turn them around without the delightful haze of knowing these are both immediate to our own lives and yet so distant as to be cute: how sweet, they just figured out they should wash their hands before surgery.

So right, what’s the book, Erin. It’s Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars, released in summer of 2020, but written pre Covid. Though someone should by Donoghue a lottery ticket (or start calling her prescient instead of Atwood) for the cluster of issues explored in this book. Set in Dublin in 1918, it is the height of the influenza pandemic. Our protagonist, midwife and nurse Julia Power, is on her own on the influenza maternity ward, where we meet a series of women who have had too many children for want to bodily autonomy or reliable birth control. Julia trades off her duties with another nurse, a nun from a neighbourhood ‘house for women and babies’ where unwed mothers are sent and their children then taken into servitude, and so the narrative probes the consequences of Church and moral absolutism on women’s bodies and family. One of these grown children, Bridie, comes to help on Julia’s ward, and (I’ll admit somewhat unexpectedly – my fault as a reader or that of Donoghue?) introduces questions of sexuality and redemption as she and Julia come to find one another. Which is to say, it is a book thick with Issues for Discussion.

And while I expected to be struck by the similarities to our present moment with respect to the pandemic – the eerie familiarity of advice to keep distance, the shuttering of schools, the terror of a loved one with a cough – and I was, it was the exploration of women’s ability to choose the course of their lives that I found most relevant. The series of women that pass through the maternity ward come as a type: married woman subjected to domestic violence; married woman with 10 babies already; unmarried ‘fallen’ woman bound to a life of shame and exclusion; married woman has stillborn baby but must go home and Carry On. Each of them share in small descriptions of their lives the ways the babies they carry are – whatever else – expected – that even if they are unplanned (as in our ‘fallen’ woman) that there should be a baby born Out of Wedlock, is itself a certainty. That there would be a choice about having the 10th baby or an ability to decide instead of staying with an abusive partner you might… not. These women are contrasted with Julia, of course, but also the woman doctor on the ward – Kathleen – who is literally on the run from the police for her involvement in political ‘crimes’ while she cares for patients with compassion, competence and curiosity.

This contrast serves to sharpen the sense of oppressive constraint and claustrophobia following all of these women. That even those who appear to have the most freedom – Julia who can for some pages ride a bicycle! – are limited by institution and by expectation.

And while it is a wildly topical book that would serve your book club discussion well, it wasn’t fabulous. Parts dragged and some of the passages read as too aware of their own Significance. And there are better (much better ) books about reproductive choice to read right now. But if you find yourself with this one you I suspect you’ll find a certain relief. Things feel bad; things are bad. And perhaps they’ve always been that way.

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