Tag Archives: books

August 10, 2025 · 3:21 am

The Burgess Boys: If You Don’t Like Elizabeth Strout I Don’t Want To Hear About It

For years if someone liked a food I found disgusting I’d explain to them why they were wrong and how whatever it was was gross. Turns out this is neither a polite, nor particularly well received exchange. You’re meant to just say ‘oh’ and privately think the other person is wrong and their food choices disgusting. Is it different for book (and movies and TV)? Probably it’s meant to be the same. But my face clearly outwardly flinches when someone tells me how much they enjoyed a book that is objectively bad . (And this from the reader who unashamedly told her boss about the glories of Fourth Wing.)

All this to say I love Elizabeth Strout and at the park the other night was explaining to some other parent (who, to be fair, definitely didn’t care about the book I was reading and definitely didn’t want to be listening to me *at length* describing how great it is, but was trapped both by my enthusiasm and No Clear Exit) and she told me she just didn’t care for Olive Kitteridge. The moment was worse – surely worse – then some partisan political exchange. I looked at her with utter disbelief. What is wrong with this woman, I thought, and thankfully didn’t say. But surely my face and eyes did because I am me and I cannot control my face.

All this to say. I loved The Burgess Boys as I have loved everything else Elizabeth Strout and I do not want to hear about it if you didn’t.

I’ve said before that books find me (all of us) at odd times. Or maybe we read into them whatever it is we need in that time. With The Burgess Boys when the young nephew of Bob Burgess is arrested and detained for throwing a pig’s head into a mosque, and then is surprised by the scale of reaction and consequence and the rest of the book follows how this one decision reverberates through a family I thought ah. Ah.

Which is all to say had I read it another time, or in different circumstances, I might have been struck instead by the way Bob’s entire sense of identity is shifted by his brother Jim’s revelation about the death of their father. Or the thread of the novel that is about how we make our own stories and that these stories are all that matter (not any fact you might claim as such). Or the thread of a marriage betrayal. Or that of discovering love when you aren’t expecting it. Or of the gap between celebrity and individual experience. Or.

But we find in great novels what we need in the moment we read them. And in this Strout novel I found consolation, and beauty, and the reminder that whatever we are in – it is already changing. And that these, the stories we tell of ourselves, our mistakes, our worst moments – are ours to make.

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August 10, 2025 · 12:51 am

The Emperor of Gladness: Such poetry in fast food

Ocean Vuong is a poet, and The Emperor of Gladness is a novel infused with poetry. Such beautiful writing. I was tempted to try to explain how beautiful, but the irony of poorly trying to explain poetic beautiful language was too great a risk. Suffice to say: gorgeous.

And such an odd little plot to have such beauty. The novel opens with our protagonist, Hai, perched on the edge of a bridge ready to jump. Saved instead by an old woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia and ready to be saved, herself, too. The rest of the book follows how they care for one another and try – often failing – to care for themselves and the people around them. Most memorable, I think, is the cast of characters at the fast food restaurant where Hai works – finding among the connection, reciprocity and care he’s been missing.

Of course in a book opening with a suicide attempt, much of the book is spent wondering if Hai will find a way back to stability – and how he will get there. And how Grazina will be allowed to live and die with any dignity. How any of his colleagues will find their way to their specific and relatable and earnest hopes – my favourite being starring in amateur women’s wrestling – along with the dignity of doing work that supports security. In a way I was reminded of Demon Copperfield in the way the novel holds up the failures of systems and structures – health care, justice, education, social services – and the way these failures are felt by individuals.

And so rather then believing in any system that you’ve been told you should trust, The Emperor of Gladness offers instead the fragile security of other people: flawed, ailing, constantly letting us down out of their own hurt and inadequacies – and yet better, ever better then the imagined farce that we can do any of it alone.

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July 16, 2025 · 5:50 pm

The Ministry of Time: Such a great premise and yet

Kaliane Bradley’s Ministry of Time promises to be such a great read from the plot description. It’s the near future and things are Not Good politically or environmentally, but Britain has discovered time travel. The appointed Ministry of Time is responsible for bringing back a sampling of historical figures as an experiment to see how they handle the journey through time (like does it destroy their bodies or minds?). Each figure is assigned a ‘bridge’ – a contemporary person who will be their translator for the present and who will live with them for the year helping them understand all the intervening years and discoveries since their historical time (as well as their own sense of self and identity displaced by centuries). Our protagonist is one such bridge, paired with a British naval officer from the lost Franklin expedition. Their romance is at once inevitable and a slow burn.

There are attempts to make the book political – with nods to contemporary crises of refugees, climate wars and deteriorating democracy. But most of this gets lost in the weave of trying to literally understand what is happening in the plot of the novel where the story gets muddled with explanation of time travel (or failed explanations), too much cloak and dagger spy missions where the reader is (I guess) meant to understand in the limited narration way of our protagonist but is – at least I was – just confused about what is going on and why. It culminates in a climax where I remain entirely unsure what happened in terms of basic plot points, nevermind if it was a satisfying ending for the affective threads that had been – at least at first – so carefully stitched.

So sure – if you happen to be very focused and willing to take notes and maybe to just give up on the idea that there’s understandable world building to be had then maybe it’s enjoyable? At the very least it’s an enjoyable first 70 pages as you’re absorbed in the novelty of the plot. And then it’s just… not.

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April 25, 2025 · 1:53 pm

North Woods: Do you believe in ghosts.

It’s an odd time to be Canadian and reading a deeply American novel. Is there such a thing as reading patriotically? Even when you’re someone who feels discomfited by nationalism and patriotism? I suppose there must be if my reading of Daniel Mason’s North Woods is to be believed.

The book itself – held apart from reading it in Ontario in 2025 – is beautifully written. The kind of thing where you admire the writing as art and pause at particularly striking descriptions and are moved.

And then the story – or many stories, I guess – is one of all the lives that pass through a particular patch of forest and a house built there in the New England woods. Each chapter offers a new moment in time and new lives led there (sometimes the decedents of previous owners, sometimes newly ‘discovering’ the house and its forest). While each chapter brings a selection of plot and affect (ambition, murder, betrayal, madness, grief) the thematic question of *what endures* persists both bubbling below the surface and explicitly called up in the form of ghosts, found artefacts, bones and hallucinations.

It’s an American novel for its geography, to be sure, but also for this fascination in legacy and ambition – of conquering and taming the land (though the land has something to say about that) and ownership and triumph. So you can know that going into it and read it alongside whatever feels you may have about that nationalist aspiration.

And you can also read it as an ecological narrative of land and nature having a much, much more expansive sense of time and scale. Where the house crumbles, where the sharp focus of one life that we intimately explore in a chapter is literally and figuratively subsumed under layers of dirt, where the trees persistently enclose and crowd out the human. And while their are moments in reading that this expansive sense of time and natural power reads as (unexpectedly, perhaps) claustrophobic, for the most part this reader found it entirely hopeful. Perhaps its the Unitarian in me that believes in that interconnected web of all living things less troubled by the smallness of one life and more optimistic in the eventual and inevitable dissolution of the one life into the natural whole. Or perhaps this is what the book best offers: you are small, your time is small, and yet all still vivid and worthy.

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