Tag Archives: best books

September 6, 2026 · 1:22 pm

Whistler: I Loved It

Did I love Ann Patchett’s Whistler for the book itself or for the experience of reading it? Hard to say. It’s been so long since I’ve read a book in deep immersion. You can blame the pandemic, or parenting, or divorce, or the interet, or the deterioration of all our attention spans wrought by smartphones or all of the above, but long gone are the easy days of picking up a novel and just… reading it until it ends. Now I read in fragmented chunks of a chapter at breakfast, a few pages before passing out asleep, a few pages when I sit myself down and firmly insist I Am Going To Relax And Read.

Cue bringing Whistler on a six day canoe trip. Here, I thought, will be where I read. And for the first four days I had the same problem as at home, only here the distractions were the need to hang bags in trees to keep them from the bears or the pure exhaustion of having portaged for 75km. Until the fourth day when we were spoiled with only two hours of paddling and arrived at a site where I could hang my hammock and just… read. And guys, I read that book and was immersed in it and time disappeared and everything was bliss.

You knew there was going to be an Until.

Until the book itself failed me. Oh but it’s perfection in narration – story telling at its best with funny and full characters that make their truth known in small actions and perfect dialogue. A plot that understands its scope – girl reunites with long forgotten third step father and recalls and then explores a trauma they shared alongside revisiting and reinterpreting family dynamics and forging new ones – and executes with brilliant pacing. Terrific writing that is neither showy nor wasted.

*spoilers ahead

But then Patchette can’t seem to clinch it. Unwilling, I guess, to kill Eddie *which BY THE WAY the only time I stopped reading was to take a break to tend to the fire because I knew (or thought I knew) that Eddie was about to die and I couldn’t accept it and didn’t want to. Oh there’s an elegant and literary way of explaining this ending – the precision of knowing ‘when to stop,’ and the genius of exploiting the core theme that we are all writing our own stories, we are all deciding at any given moment what part of our story matters to ourselves and to others and what to do with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and other people (I am not kidding, the theme here is brilliantly done and stays with you) but it felt like such a cop-out, like an unwilligness to give this reader what she yearned for: a big cathartic cry on a hammock overlooking an Alogonquin lake lol

Alas, I was left to imagine my own ending – and if I were in a book club that read a book we could talk about it. For now, maybe you tell me: what was it like to read this one? what did you make of the ending?

Yours in the temporary bliss of deep reading. And here’s hoping this sets the pattern by reminding me of the exquisite joy of being in a great book.

Leave a comment

Filed under Erin's Favourite Books, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

July 19, 2024 · 12:47 am

James: Just excellent

I’d requested Percival Everett’s James from the library before my week of holiday, but it didn’t arrive on time. Oh well, I thought, it’ll take me a month of reading six pages at bedtime to get through it. Not so! The kind of book – the excellent, brilliant, unstoppably great – book that you hungrily read in snatched seconds before someone-needs-help-with-their-sunscreen or you-work-a-regular-job-and-have-to-do-that-job-and-that-job-is-not-regrettably-reading-this-excellent-book.

A rewriting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a story I know well because I had a record – a record! – recording of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as a kid, and listened to that record until it was beyond scratched and no longer playable, but could still recite long stretches – and if this was the 80s answer to the exhaustive library of audiobooks R and L listen to I’m not sure who comes out the winner as That Was a Good Record. ANYWAY), but told from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s slave.

The early ‘adventure’ narrative of Jim attempting escape and Huck joining him while he tries to escape the inevitable violence of his father, continues with the set-piece adventure scenes you’d expect: near misses, narrow escapes, and confounding characters up to no good. All the while the book explicitly and implicitly explores how race means, how it matters and when and to who and what the literal and bodily consequences of racism and violence look like. And how utterly absurd – and crushingly consequential – slavery is as an idea and a practice.

Perhaps not more than race, but alongside it, James is a book about the significance – and here I mean importance and the quality of signifying or giving meaning – of writing, reading, naming, crafting, telling and hearing stories, speaking – and how you speak – and of representation. Scenes of James claiming his name, or the costs of keeping a pencil, or the risks of telling – or not telling – Huck of his family. All wrapped up in what power is made and held in those who own narrative in who they will write/tell about, when and how (in a way that is obvious in a book that is a retelling of the story from the perspective of the historically marginalized-dehumanized Jim into the protagonist, author and creator but is nevertheless threaded consistently and brilliantly throughout the book).

As I write this I worry you will think this is a dry, boring book that is meant to be taught in second year literature courses (it is definitely not dry or boring but will also almost certainly be – or already be – taught in second year literature courses). Not so – this one has plot pacing that moves, all the while dropping impeccable sentences that just hang with gut pulling perfection.

So stop reading this rambling but enthusiastic review and go get the book already.

Leave a comment

Filed under American literature, Erin's Favourite Books, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

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.

2 Comments

Filed under Bestseller, Book Club, Erin's Favourite Books, Fiction, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , ,

March 11, 2023 · 3:35 am

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow: high school math and Mum and I disagree

I have this memory of being in Mr. Lowe’s OAC (yes, OAC) Calculus class. I got back another test where I had managed a 70 something after a thousand hours of studying and fretting and worrying and fretting. And feeling like #why. At the time the why was this vision that if I didn’t take OAC Calculus I wouldn’t be able to take Psychology courses at University and become a therapist*. Then I discovered a University that would let me in to their Psych program without Calculus. I digress. I’m sitting in this class and I get the 70 and I’m just Done With Calculus (despite Mr. Lowe spending hours of his own time helping me, and my friends J. and J. spending hours of their time helping me). So I go to the office to call my mum (or maybe it was a pay phone) and ask her – crying in this memory – can I please drop Calculus, I don’t think I’ll need it to be a therapist and it’s making me miserable. I don’t know if my mum remembers the call, or knows how I’d spun out the different versions of my life that hinge(d) on her Yes or No to Calculus. But she supported me and said, of course, do what you want to do. And so I dropped Calculus. Like right after I hung up I walked over to the counselling office and dropped it. Probably for Latin. Very useful. (actually) (as useful as Calculus?) (what do you want from me)*

WHY THE LONG RAMBLE, ERIN.

Well, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, in addition to being (or maybe mostly being) a book about friendship and its boundaries, and a book that intentionally or not tries to capture the mood of A Little Life (credit to mum for pointing out this parallel which is Spot On), is also a book about women in math.

Our protagonists, Sam and Sadie, spend the book falling into their friendship and then creating wildly successful video games together. Their lives are peppered with the accidents of circumstance and the mistakes of choice that make for any life, and their friendship is one of the accumulation of small moments layered on a true connection. The book is mostly about this friendship – how they come to be friends, how they betray one another (or think they’ve betrayed one another), how other people interrupt and intersect with their friendship, and what the boundaries of love in a friendship fall. It is a beautiful story on this thread – even if, again credit to mum, Sadie’s grudge against Sam midway through the book stretches the boundaries of plausibility.

And it is also a book about what Sadie has to experience and respond to because she is a woman who is very good at math, and one who loves video games, and one who wants to make those games in an industry and institutions full of men. I’d forgotten I read this book, truthfully, but then remembered when reading a list today of top books of last year, and was like oh right, that one. And then found myself tonight listening to a podcast about how boys are struggling in school and how this is impacting men’s outcomes in a bunch of domains. And truly – I’m a mother of a self-described boy and am not dismissing the (surprising to me) information about the widening gap in gendered achievement in schools. But was also like Come On. I suppose I can accept two things at the same time: women are doing better at school/university across a wide range of metrics AND the programs that men dominate are still the ones preferentially valued. The glut of women in universities is hardly yielded Power to the extremely well educated, and extremely underpaid teachers at my daughter’s daycare.

So maybe that’s the thing I liked best about Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: its careful exploration of how Sadie navigates computer science programs, video game making/marketing and Silicon Valley. The way she finds herself used, abused and manipulated by men with power and then ‘lucky’ to find the good ones. The way efforts at ‘wokeness’ risk violence, and the tension between what we know about our friends as individuals and the way we let their individual identities influence our perception of their actions (like: did he do that because he’s my friend, or did he do that because he’s a man?).

And there’s more someone else would read into this book about race and class and orphan-hood and disability. There’s a heap to think through and plenty to enjoy. It reads quickly, is absorbing, and in the end – I think – satisfying.

But for me? I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Lowe. And what we tell ourselves about math.

*I did not become a therapist. But Latin probably got me the degree.

Leave a comment

Filed under Bestseller, Fiction, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , ,