It’s hard to read a book like Crazy Rich Asians while living a decidedly middle class life. It’s probably harder still if you’re not the beneficiary of a defined benefits pension plan and in a unionized position like I am. The book sets out to be fun [insert jazz hands]! To introduce the west to contemporary Asia! To put displays of excess on the page for ogling. Because if you can’t have your own billion dollars, the next best thing must be to read about it, right? Continue reading
Category Archives: Book Club
The Hours: Reading Deja Vu
I think I might have read Michael Cunningham’s The Hours before. I know I’ve seen the movie. And I’ve read Mrs. Dalloway a few times. So maybe that’s it. Or maybe the scenes of Mrs. Brown, at home, baking a cake, taking care of her kid, and wishing she was reading just echo my current life too closely? Continue reading
Filed under Book Club, British literature, Fiction, Prize Winner
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: If You’re Not Sure What to Choose for Book Club, Read This.
I fell behind on posting. I’m catching up, but I knew I’d read at least three things that I needed to post about, and I tried to remember the book I was forgetting. I eventually came to it – Bryn Greenwood’s All the Ugly and Wonderful Things – and then bam! the whole novel was back with me. So it was at once forgettable (in that the story obviously didn’t linger in my mind), but wholly memorable (in that once triggered I could recall the whole thing). Continue reading
Filed under Book Club, Fiction, Prize Winner
Last Snow, First Light: I read a book! I read a book!
It has been… weeks. And weeks. Months, maybe. But I did it. I cracked my reader’s block, which is a real thing, I’ve come to understand. Thanks to the many of you who wrote with suggestions and sympathy for my vexed state. Ideas on how to break reader’s block included: read non-fiction, read a graphic novel, re-read an old favourite, read something short, read articles. While I appreciated all the advice, I ended up just… taking it slow. I read a few pages at a time and stopped putting pressure on myself to be reading. And worrying about why I wasn’t (had I broken my empathy?).
The book I eventually finished, Wayne Johnston’s Last Snow, First Light isn’t one you’d think would break reader’s block. It’s what you might call a slow burn. A mix of character study, realist drama and story-of-place there is – over the 400 odd pages – something of a mystery to be unraveled: what happened to Ned Vatcher’s parents, who disappear during a snow storm never to be seen again. But it’s mostly about the characters: the increasing weirdness of Ned as he gets richer and lonelier, the journey of Fielding (who some readers will recall from The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Navigator of New York – though tbh I’d forgotten almost all of both books. Barely a glimmer of The Colony except that Smallwood stamps around Newfoundland) to reconcile with her past by way of truth-telling and sharing, the re-defining of family from genetic bond to affiliative relations.
It’s a book that invites going slowly, and so suited my reader’s block recovery. With careful and scene-setting writing, the reader is on a leisurely pace to unravel the mystery, certainly not of the page-turning, heart-palpitating variety (and this reader could be contented whether or not it is ever solved (though Ned can’t be).
Well suited to a winter curl-up and a book club (I guess you could talk about the role of religion, the exploration of ‘family,’ and how much it is possible to drink without dying), I’m happy to recommend this one for a good read, if not a zippy one.
Filed under Book Club, Canadian Literature, Fiction, Mystery
Literary Vice 