Tag Archives: book club

May 31, 2015 · 5:17 pm

The Green Road: What we mean when we say ‘a good book’

Imagine you’ve just finished reading a good book. You put it down and you think to yourself, ‘gosh, that was a really good book’ (okay, you probably don’t say ‘gosh’). You try to put your finger on what made it good. If someone asks you about it, you don’t hesitate to tell them to read it, but you probably don’t go out of your way to recommend it. You think about the characters again for a few days, but then the specificity of their story seeps into a wider feeling you have about the book: it was good.

I’ve just finished Anne Enright’s The Green Road and I can safely report it’s a good book. The writing is at once grand in its capacity and small in its attention on detailed, particular moments. With a compelling use of a shifting third person limited narration, the plot traces the Madigan family over decades. Each long chapter follows one of the four children in a specific moment in time, richly evoking place and character. Each successive chapter moves chronological leaps forward, always toward something. That something is the eventual family reunion when all children are gathered at their childhood home for Christmas.

It wouldn’t be an outrageous argument to claim these chapters are linked short stories, such is the telescopic focus on the one child, the particular time and place. For instance, the (best) chapter following Dan through the gay community in the 1980s, AIDS ravaged New York, is a tight story unto itself. Even while the development of Dan’s character comes to have resonance in the eventual reunion chapter such that this earlier chapter is necessary for the latter, the chapter could be self-contained for its own sake.

To this point on the function of the character-focused chapters: Perhaps because the mother in the story, Rosaleen, does not get a chapter onto herself (in this way the form mirrors the message that she has devoted her sense of self entirely to serving her children), the climactic moments that focus on her feel less pressing than they might had we had time to connect with her first-hand. That said, the children’s reaction to these climactic scenes give the reader a firm sense of the importance and reverberations of the moments.

It’s a good book for exploring questions of familial loyalty, of how and when identity becomes fixed, of who we want to be versus who we might actually be, and of what we owe our family (read ‘owe’ as broadly as you can: what debts we aim to repay, what we have because of them, what obligations are due). These questions get worked out in individual chapters and across the whole with each successive chapter adding layer and echo as the reader comes to piece together both chronology and family hierarchies.

A good book, then, is one that is well written, with strong character development and thematically rich. It’s not a great book because it doesn’t quite leave you shaken, not changed by the beauty of the work or by the questions it explores. This one then is good, and given the profile of Anne Enright, will probably be described as great. You be the judge.

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May 22, 2015 · 8:35 pm

The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing: If Sex and the City Was Literary Fiction

Melissa Banks’ A Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing is a novel about a young woman figuring out what she does and does not value about herself, and about her self-in-relationships. It’s a novel that makes the case for ‘being yourself,’ and ‘having experiences,’ and ‘dancing in the rain.’ That’s not fair of me, it’s not that pat – our protagonist Jane Rosenal has nuance and develops. There are touching scenes that left me feeling things (in particular the scenes with her father). I did, however, feel like it was a book trying very hard to be Serious, and Important, and Moving.

If nothing else there’s this one line that will stick with me for a good long time: “Too late, you realize that your body was perfect – every healthy body is” (218). (this from a chapter with second person narration – didn’t I say it was Deliberately Literary?) I know that the sentence privileges ‘healthy bodies’ (and the attendant ideas that go along with ‘health’ and ‘healthy.’) But as someone who complicated feelings about perfect bodies, it was a sharp sentence (amid a chapter about breast cancer no less) that reminded me – and all the 20 somethings the book is aimed at – that the epic struggle to find the perfect body is not Odyssian, but rather Sisyphean. So sure, we’d all be better off recognizing the perfection that is our body when all of its parts are working the way they’re supposed to and/or without pain. And yes, it’s a sentence I’d like to internalize by way of the story that accompanies it. The story tries to get there, tries to show that acceptance of self is the real route to perfect happiness. The only trouble is that for the protagonist here, that real self is one of utter privilege (in all categories) and so acceptance is about accepting yourself as the normative ideal (what’s the hierarchy of self-acceptance?)

All this to say I’m not urging you to go read this one. I think you’d be better off reading Anne of Green Gables. But I would say if you’re a 20 something, or you’re looking for a book for a 20 something, you could do worse than this one.

Side note: I did not realize the book was understood by some to be a collection of linked short stories (aren’t they all?). I obviously would not have read it if that had been the case (see: my long standing and utterly unjustified hatred for short fiction). I don’t think it is, but worth pointing out that Amazon will confuse the genre for you.

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May 7, 2015 · 2:39 pm

Sorcery: Reading Games; or how I read something other than a novel

Thanks to another GPW reader request, I found myself “reading” in an entirely “novel” way (haha – reading? novel? hilarious). The suggestion was for me to invest in a $5.99 tablet-based game “Sorcery!” and “read”/”play” the game. the book. the gook. the bame.

Before I tell you about my reading experience and my impressions of the text let me tell you about the text itself (already realizing how reading a non-traditional text is prompting me to right a non-traditional blog post. Normally I’d dive into telling you my impressions of the merits of the work, but somehow in this instance I feel like I need to give you a version of a plot summary.

So what’s “Sorcery!”? My impression (caveatcaveatcaveat about this being my first book/game): It’s Choose Your Own Adventure, meets RPG, meets fantasy. The game begins with character selection (but mercifully free of the tedious selection of hair colour or wardrobe). Once selected the text appears describing the character’s circumstance (aka: the conflict) in which the character (now *me*) must journey across the land to warn some people about an impending attack. To get there my character has to also battle some dragons (which can only be killed after collecting clues and objects-of-dragon-slaying). This little plot summary would be entirely different – or perhaps incrementally different – depending on the choices you might make playing the game. The real delight for this chronic-second-guesser and terrible-decision-maker is that you can ‘rewind’ the game at any and all points to go back and make different decisions to see how the narrative changes. It takes the impulse of childhood Choose Your Own Adventure flipping-back-and-forth and brings it to the digital space with slightly less ease and slightly more satisfaction (there isn’t the instant and you died that so dominated the CYOA of the past).

You might be wondering how does this game differ from other digital efforts at narrative/game hybrids. And in this respect I have very little to offer. I recall reading Patchwork Girl in a MA course in visual culture (think graphic novels) and this game reminded me of that experience – the sort of confab of visual/text/reading/viewing. I would say in this game there’s more reading than viewing, more decision making than passivity. Less empathy for a character’s circumstances than desire to beat dragons (which suggests the game has, after all, achieved its aims in that I am embodying my character rather than vicariously observing and empathizing).

I do look forward to an experience of reading/playing such a game that isn’t set in the fantastical realm. I suspect the power of identifying with a character through RPG and coupling this with the intensity offered by narrative would – in a narrative set in the realist realm – offer a different (if not more vibrant) empathetic experience.

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April 25, 2015 · 3:17 pm

A Tale for the Time Being: You Probably Haven’t Heard Of This Book; Here’s Why You Should Read It

Or maybe you have heard of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. After all, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, hyped in all of the right places. All the same it slipped through my Canlit net, and seems to have for all those I’ve talked about the book with as I’ve been reading it, and so I’ll assume you haven’t heard of it either (you’re my made-up audience, so I may as well, right?).

This idea of the reader-audience and how readers make novels mean something by reading them is one of the (many) preoccupations of this fantastically rich and layered story. At one point our protagonist-cum-author notes “Surely a reader wasn’t capable of this bizarre kind of conjuration, pulling words from the void? But apparently she had done just that, or else she was crazy. Or else… Together we’ll make magic… Who had conjured whom?” (392). The role of reader in the novel is complex: with two threaded narratives – that of Ruth, an author living on an island in British Columbia who finds a diary washed up on the beach and that of the diarist, Nao, an American-Japanese schoolgirl – that both reflect, influence and respond to one another, one of the questions the novel asks is how readers determine and impact the meaning and influence of a story. Within the novel itself this question is explored in the relationship between Ruth and Nao, but the novel expands this question with metafictional play and probity to include this reader, too. So you ought to read it because the novel presupposes its existence depends on your reading it.

You ought to read it because the philosophical questions it explores like the nature of time and quantum mechanics; the role of animals in the interconnected web of being; restitution, responsibility and war; the relationship of class and identity (and bullying); the purpose of art and art-making; – are those questions that make both for great dissertations and for great discussions (and I know you have a thesis you want to write or a book club to attend [*cough* this was a book club choice for the book club I attend]). These questions look esoteric when I write them down, and there are moments of the novel – like reading the Appendixes on Schrodinger’s Cat – that stray in that direction, but the overwhelming feeling this novel evoked for me was exhilaration: it’s simply thrilling to see a masterful exploration of questions of time, identity and the nature of meaning in life through grounded (if somewhat fantastical) story.

And you ought to read it because I say so. Okay, not that. But because it’s beautiful.  Layered with complexity and richness, yet not so dense as to be inaccessible or off-putting. And you see it and think 400 pages, really? And I say, consider the time it takes to read. No really, consider “time” and “takes”: what does it mean to “take time”? Once you’re asking that question you may as well be reading the novel because in reading you find time, time-taking, time-making – well, you might have a different feeling on the other side (which assumes you ever leave a novel once you’ve read it… another question for another time being).

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