May 15, 2011 · 7:04 pm

Read a Few: Wrote Little

               Okay. So I started a new job. And am set to defend T. in three weeks. And it’s taken away some of my time usually spent reading and writing. Time now taken up with matching my Reitman’s “office lady” wardrobe, packing a lunch box, and sifting through mostly dull paperwork.

I have been reading, I just haven’t been posting. I feel sort of like this cow – only eating good books and not trash – but a heap of good books, so heaped that I have trouble seeing the end.

I read Katrine Raymond’s Preservation an amazing first novel set in Toronto and populated with academics, ghosts of Canadian history and marvelous diary entries. It’s a fabulous mystery with careful plotting and sensitive characterization. I’d tell you to go out and read it, but it’s not published (yet) and only available through the author. So… stay tuned.

Then I read Siddharatha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which in addition to making it difficult to fall asleep because I became so paranoid that I have cancer, provided a fascinating and rich history of the disease. I was particular struck by the descriptions of early manifestations and treatments of the illness. I was less taken with the second half of the book focusing on the present iterations of the disease and advances in chemotherapy because they drifted to the too technical. I was also less taken with the occasional melodrama about cancer “survivors” and their “bravery” a narrative which seemed to intent on dictating a “proper” form of engagement with the disease, and left out the possibility of not wanting to “fight” or not being “brave.” I was surprised, too, but the scant mention – in the latter half of the book – of cancer consumerism, the sense that certain cancers (breast, for instance) receive the lion’s share of fundraising support (or crass consumerism depending on your view) at the expense of other less popular, but no less prominent cancers (e.g. lung or colon). Wish he’d gone into that.

I’m just finishing up (like last ten pages, so I’m posting now in case I drift into another abyss of no-posts) Keith Leckie’s intoxicating Coppermine – a book which, despite my mum’s recommendation, I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy, but holy man is it ever good. So good! Like stop reading this blog and get to your local library good. It’s set in 1913 and details the murder investigation of two french missionaries in the Arctic by Corporal Creek of the Northwest Mounted Police. It’s impossible to put down both because the plotting is so good, but more because the characters are so rich. That the plot follows “real history” makes the mystery and suspense all the more intense. I really can’t recommend this one highly enough.

Leave a comment

Filed under 100 Books of 2011

Tagged as , , , ,

April 25, 2011 · 9:51 pm

Animal: Sad Aborted Puppies

     I think Alexandra Leggat’s Animal is about more than abortions and puppies. In fact, I know it’s also about uneven expectations in relationships, compromises, and the lies that appearances belie, but when I think of my overall impression what comes to mind are abortions and dogs. I don’t even think the short story collection has a single story with an abortion in it (miscarriages, yes) but somehow many of them contain the same kind of sadness: aborted love, aborted futures, aborted choices. As for dogs, characters routinely long for particular dogs. Not in the way a teenage girl longs for a prom date, but in the way older women long to return to their younger bodies so as to live in them with pride and confidence: that is, a frustrated, anxious and sad kind of longing. I’m not sure why it’s dogs they long for, and not, say, other people. Perhaps because the collection as a whole suggests other people ought not to be trusted, ought not to be relied upon, because they will inevitably be selfish.

I preferred stories in the middle section of the collection – no good reason why. On the whole I felt too many of the stories ended with a “This is a very symbolic ending!” kind of wrap-up, and that characters received uneven development. All the same, the rich thematic scope and some brilliant descriptions of suffering women makes the collection a worthwhile read if you’re into depressing scenes in bathtubs.

Leave a comment

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

Tagged as , ,

April 20, 2011 · 3:39 am

Freakonomics: More Freak than Nomics

      Freakonomics proudly proclaims in its introduction, and again in its conclusion, that it is a book without a unified theme. This being the case, telling your reader there is no unifying theme (re: point) does not make this lack in any way… okay. While I enjoyed the disparate sections of the book for their confident tone, measured pace and didactic, (albeit sometimes overly hand-holding) explanations of everyday phenomena, I found the overall absence of an argument/organizing idea/central question to be frustrating and perplexing.

I am bothered by a book that claims to be about looking for relationships between far-fetched phenomena when it is really about an author having noticed two similar phenomena, having deduced plausible explanations, then grouped the two things together only to claim that the deductions came about as a result of novel questioning (questions like: what do a drug dealer and a sumo wrestler and an aborted fetus have in common?). Novel questioning might better be thought of as something like this: what makes this book without a theme, or apparent point, a bestseller?

Further minor complaints: “economists” are credited with doing much of the work of sociologists; cause-and-effect is not the same thing as “incentive” based decision making; causality and correlations often mysteriously swap when the given example requires.

Minor praise: a collaborative book always impresses me.

Leave a comment

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

Tagged as , , , ,

April 17, 2011 · 12:20 am

Gorazde: Difficult

           War correspondent Joe Sacco’s graphic novel, Gorazde, is difficult to read. It reports on the experiences of Edin, a Bosnian Muslim, during the siege of Gorazde and describes in text and image the atrocities committed during the siege of the city and of neighboring towns, and of the violence of diplomatic decisions that favoured political expediency over human life and well-being.

As I read the book (in a single sitting, it’s entirely captivating) I asked myself what made the graphic form so effective in expressing the individual and collective suffering as compared to text-based reportage. I’m not sure I have a good answer (again, see my comments on my new-to-graphic-novels) though I suspect that it has to do with pacing. Sacco does well to slow down the pace of reading in scenes of high tension and great suffering, and in so doing required this reader to pay – uncomfortable – attention to scenes I might have more readily surged through in a text-based version. With little choice but to read snippets of sentences set against black-and-white images of intense action, the graphic version demanded my investment in each character, and in each scene that I certainly wanted to avoid reading about.

While I found Sacco entirely effective in using graphics to describe and pace his narrative, I also admired the text of the book, which did an admirable job contextualizing the conflict, while also attending to individual stories and experiences (one two-page spread, in particular, featured a compendium of “interviews” which aptly captured shared and different responses to the return of Serbs to Gorazde).

I’m not sure I appreciated Sacco’s sometime self-congratulatory digs at other reporters who “only” came to Gorazde for one or two days, while he spent considerable time in the city and made multiple trips. I appreciate the difference such reporting experiences must effect in the kind and quality of writing produced, however, I nevertheless felt these comments were less effective in attacking the West’s apparent disinterest in the suffering and death of others (as was perhaps the intent) than they were in conveying Sacco’s confidence in his reportage expertise. While many of Sacco’s self-reflexive comments approach the difficult question of why he should be able to leave and return to safety with little trouble, I do not think the text goes far enough in interviewing the reporter himself.

That said, it’s an incredibly compelling story and one, oddly I suppose, made better still by the difficulty of its reading.

Leave a comment

Filed under 100 Books of 2011, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , ,