Category Archives: Book I’ll Forget I Read

October 27, 2011 · 5:26 pm

The Sunday Philosophy Club: Meh.

                              So my office has a shelf of donated books that we exchange with one another, and last week I found myself – unusually and unexpectedly – without a book in my bag, so I picked up Alexander McCall Smith’s The Sunday Philosophy Club, having heard good things about The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency and being keen to work on my “spies and detectives” category. Let this be a lesson in choosing books: do not choose out of expediency and do not choose out of the vague remembrance that someone once said the author was “okay.” Let it also be a lesson to always have an emergency-back-up-just-in-case-the-bus-breaks-down-or-your-meeting-is-cancelled book.

The Sunday Philosophy Club suffers from boring characters and so an unengaging – and it’s a mystery! – plot. I struggled to care whether Isobel was murdered in the night, was profoundly indifferent to whether the murder was solved because I didn’t get to know the victim and didn’t believe Isobel was all that interested in being a detective in the first place, and was annoyed by Isobel’s niece, Cat, in no small part because she’s named Cat, but more precisely because she “pops round for tea”: I distrust characters who show up without invitation.

It’s true I didn’t care about the mystery because Isobel is boring and her investigatory skills are suspect, but it’s also true that I didn’t care because Isobel doesn’t seem to care. Every chapter she vacillates between absolute commitment (a moral imperative, she thinks) to investigate the crime and a willingness to drop it altogether because it makes people uncomfortable. What made me uncomfortable was her apparent willingness to do all this investigating as if she had license to do so. Rogue detective!

Other point of annoyance:the so-called “philosophical” basis of the novel are Isobel’s occasional musings on the ethics of particular situations. She considers the ethical principles of lying and seems surprised when she receives articles for her journal about lying: is this a coincidence she wonders? Well of course it isn’t. McCall Smith must think we’re thematic dopes for this, and other, heavy handed displays of the moral and thematic questions. Hint for the the thematically uninitiated: the book is about deception!

Finally, I don’t like that the red herring woman is named Minty. I don’t know why. I just don’t.

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October 19, 2011 · 3:26 am

What is Left the Daughter: Undecided.

                     So if we’ve spent any time together you’ll know that I (occasionally) refer to the book I’m currently reading as “the best book ever.” I recognize I have a problem with hyperbole; I’m conscious of my excesses (most of the time). And so it happens once again that of late I’ve been talking up a novel as perfect and exquisite, in this case, Howard Norman’s What is Left the Daughter. But then! Circumstances conspired such that I boarded a bus, finished the last three pages of the novel, and had an entire hour and a half WITHOUT A BOOK with nothing to do but stare out the window and contemplate the book. And the more I sat and thought about What is Left the Daughter the less satisfied I became, the more contrived the ending, the more affected the tone, the more moralistic the plot (as if morals were, in their own right, dissatisfying).

And so I find myself at something of a loss writing this review.

Norman does tremendous, really tremendous, work grafting small, quotidian moments together to form rich, idiosyncratic yet utterly believable characters. Tiny scenes, like that of eating lunch on a bus, paradoxically distill and explode character in ways typically reserved for the best short stories.

On the other hand the setting of small town – Middle Economy – Nova Scotia during WWII reads as a cliche of every small town you’ve ever read (think of a blend of Richard Russo, Alistair MacLeod and Anne Tyler), complete with tiny diner and eccentric neighbours (so much so, in fact, that for the first 30 pages I wondered – truthfully – whether I’d read the book before).

The plot, too, balances the brilliant with the bland. I won’t spoil the climax – as it is – but I was left gasping, shocked, and yet, convinced that it should happen that way (and so brilliant). But then the ending falls short. Another case of an author unwilling to do what is necessary in order to be truthful to the plot that’s preceded and to the created characters. And with that said, the last two sentences are thematic perfection.

And Norman’s book raises all kinds of interesting questions about a national literature: is it setting that determines national lit? author’s nationality? duration of an author’s visit? thematic preoccupations? what’s the point of national literature anyway? I’ll not answer any of those questions, because I don’t have to anymore. 

So without being able to articulate a decisive reaction to the text I’ll ask instead ‘when do we stop reading?’ as I have a suspicion the characters of What is Left the Daughter and their decisions will continue to populate my waking thoughts for days to come – and maybe that means I’m still reading? And so I can hold out hope that I’ll make up my mind about the text sooner or later – except not wanting to actually have to decide. Maybe this is what we readers owe the brilliant (or the almost-brilliant in this case) books in our lives: that we take them around with us after, never wanting them to feel wholly settled, but rather perched just this side of comfortable.

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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!

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October 11, 2011 · 1:14 pm

How I Live Now: Gets it all right (almost)

                    There aren’t many books that I wish I’d come across earlier in my life. Every so often there’s a book that arrives at just the right time (A Jest of God for instance), but more often then not what I read offers something in the present, and then – if it’s any good – becomes a narrative I circle back to when necessary or prompted. But I do wish I’d had Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now between the ages of 16-21 (which maybe makes the title into something of an oxymoron – to have wanted it *earlier*, but there you go). I wish I’d had it then because it perfectly captures the terror of having to find a way to adapt and to live in novel, unpredictable and entirely beyond-your-control situations and environments (re: being a teenager, or rather, being a person).

Our protagonist, Daisy, is remarkable for what she doesn’t find remarkable about herself. She’s anorexic, in love with her cousin (and he with her), having sex at 14, sent away from her home in New York for being ‘difficult,’ yet none of these ‘things’ about her are presented in the narrative as in any way exceptional, or understood by her as exceptional. Rather, the introduction of successive plot moments and character traits – a war! an eating disorder! incest! – that in another text might dominate the narrative, are here simply further instances of how Daisy – how we all – must find ways to live in the unexpected, unchosen and unforseen.

Though I’m very glad to have read the book now I wish I’d be able to read the book when I was a teenager because Daisy doesn’t always triumph, or manage to “live well” in these uncontrollable circumstances. She makes mistakes, she’s scared, she’s selfish. But she also doesn’t make apologies for these less-than-heroic reactions, instead she makes subtle changes, trying always, it seems, to find ways to live as well as she can – even if that isn’t an accepted or ideal way: an admirable model for any teenage girl (or 20-something woman…).

I found the tone of the novel initially disconcerting (in the same way as Going Bovine, come to think of it, so maybe I’m just not hip anymore?). Rosoff uses Random Capitalization and odd. punctuation. in order to capture the rhythm and tone of her protagonist, but for whatever reason (poor editing?) these affectations are all but dropped in the latter half of the novel as the plot picks up. A generous read might draw a relationship between Daisy’s developing sense of individuality and personal strength and the emergence of a traditional (and hence more confident – I think anyway – tone), but given the spotted lapse back into Serious Thought Are Capitalized I suspect instead that the affected tone got in the way of the more compelling plot moments. I’m open to disagreements on this one (if only because I liked the book so much that I’d be happy to find a way to redeem this otherwise bothersome aspect).

So should you be a young adult yourself, or should you know one that is finding it all too much, let me urge a read of How I Live Now. There’s some kind of inimitable comfort in reading a novel that reminds you that no matter how unpredictable, unconventional or uncontrollable your life feels (and is), it’s livable, when living means fucking it up, imperfection, risk, and knowing what you’re doing doesn’t make any sense (at all), but doing it anyway.

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