Tag Archives: Summer Reading

February 16, 2025 · 2:38 pm

Pineapple Street: Not good, and hard to put down

What is the name for the genre of book that is not good, but you don’t want to stop reading, and you feel the whole time as if you are already watching the movie adaptation of the thing? Or the kind where the writing is verging on good and interesting, but is mostly just descriptive in the most obvious sorts of ways? Or where the characters change, but that change is at once extremely obvious from the outset and also simultaneously not convincing when it happens (like the crucial event(s) that force the change are just so predictably ridiculous)? Or where the way to hook the reader is through descriptions of how the ultra wealthy live – of their tablescapes (a word I didn’t know existed), their vacations, their clothes and their houses? Where you read the thing quickly and when it’s over feel faintly irritated with yourself for having given over the time to a book that is so clearly not good but is – nevertheless – hard to put down?

Jenny Jackson‘s Pineapple Street embodies this whatever-genre it is. It is – as was the case for me yesterday – an ideal book for a snowstorm where time vanishes in shovelling, sledding and fort building – and further funnels away in reading a book that when it ends you find yourself flummoxed that you didn’t just return it to the library. Perfect for an airplane, a beach, a doctor’s office where you expect to wait forever.

Oh sorry, did you want to know what it’s about? I’ve already given more time to this book then I’d like, so quickly: ultra rich family lives in Brooklyn Heights (which I’ve since gathered is a fancy neighbourhood in New York) and the millennial children lightly struggle with the Torturous Burden of being born extremely wealthy and the Guilt of not deserving such privilege. The end.

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September 15, 2024 · 8:14 pm

August holiday reading round up: Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit, Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, the Peacock and the Sparrow, The Darkness and one I can’t remember

I took a heap of holiday in August – much of which was taken up with canoeing, camping, splashing, napping and, of course, reading. Dear reader ask me what the book was that I brought on the canoe trip and really loved? I can’t remember! I know I loved it and that my mum recommended it, but it’s been three weeks and I’m back to routines and it’s just vanished. Proof that one should not procrastinate on book reviews.

So onward!

Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit: Do Not Go Gentle

Nadine Sander-Green’s Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit is good, but I wonder if it shouldn’t have been a short story. Following Millicent as she begins her first ‘real’ job working as a reporter at a tiny, independent paper in the Yukon, the story is one of a casual slide into domestic violence. I heard a woman describe it to me that way, she was telling me how she found herself in an abusive relationship – “a casual slide,” she said, like the way you might ease from one conversation topic to another. And for Millicent there is some of that – where one behaviour or one situation makes her wonder, another where she is uncomfortable, another where is afraid – but by that point she feels so alone and so isolated as to not know what else to do but to keep going, and when she does know to leave, does want to leave, she instead leaves and comes back leaves and comes back leaves and comes back as so many women do. Not for want of courage or of awareness, but for Millicent for some confusion of love and a certainty that there is no where else. The geography of the Yukon is its own powerful character – the winter cold snaps off the page – holding this isolation like the best of pathetic fallacy. What and how the conclusion comes to Millicent I’ll leave you to read because it’s a well-imagined and written ending. But throughout the book there are these threads – like Millicent’s relationship with her mother, or the idea of newspapers in a digital news era – that get picked up and seem to be Significant (and maybe they are and I just didn’t do the interpretive work to parse it) but don’t realize into anything. All in a way that made me wonder if the whole thing could have been tighter in a different form. Anyway, you read it and let me know.

Fourth Wing and Iron Flame: Don’t Judge Me For How Much I Loved These Books

If you wanted to find the exact opposite of the Literary Effort of Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit you’d find it in Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing and Iron Flame. Described to me (where?) as a mashup of Harry Potter, Game of Throne and 50 Shades of Grey, the books easily pull you in and suddenly hours later you realize no one has been watching your children and everyone has a sunburn. Truly, there is nothing substantive here. You could probably make an argument that there’s something about who is on the ‘right side’ of history when it comes to war (and whether if you were on the ‘wrong side’ you’d know it or not), something about the authority afforded to those who write that history, something about disability and ability, maybe something about feminist dragons. But what you’re really signing up for is the same promise of anything that just feels good to read/watch: violence, sex, and the little guy triumphing by doing the Right Thing (and the Right Thing is not complicated). They are books you want to read because they take you out of the moment you’re in and remind you of the time decades ago when you read for a few hours at a time without wondering what was happening on your phone. (Not that the only kind of book to do this is… fantasy-romance – just that this one does it particularly well). I will say that having read Iron Flame at a family resort that it’s the kind of book you want to be thoughtful about where you find yourself reading it as you will absolutely blush and wonder just how many synonyms for ‘quivering’ there might be. Turns out: many.

The Peacock and the Sparrow: Stay sharp!

Okay, so we’re on a bit of a trajectory here – from Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit that wanted (and was?) to be Serious and Literary, to the absurd, ridiculous and utterly absorbing Fourth Wing to an extremely complicated and equally delightful mystery in The Peacock and the Sparrow. Author I.S. Berry is a former CIA agent and reviews make much of this because the book certainly feels (to this decidedly Not CIA agent reader) to capture the detail of an overseas CIA agent from the kind of drink, to the way an ‘exotic’ job is to our protagonist Just a Job in the way we are all working Just a Job. Set amid the Arab Spring we follow our washed up agent as he hangs on to his job (and his sense of worth and purpose – not necessarily tied to that job) and then finds himself swept up in making change in ways he never intended or imagined. Sort of inspiring to all who might be wondering just what the point of any of it is (surely we’re all wondering that?) to see in the narrative that impact and change are still possible. If not… quite as anticipated. And a fun mystery in that it’s not about a murder, but instead about a revolution (I didn’t quite get that from the description on the back and so kept waiting for a murder investigation to start, so be warned: not a murder mystery). And fun, too, because the breadcrumbs to sort it out are not impossible to follow and you can with a bit of careful reading keep up with the twisty-turns.

The Darkness

Which takes us to our final (remembered) book of vacation Ragnar Jónasson’s The Darkness (which don’t google because even when you try “The Darkness book” will still just take you to Heart of Darkness because the internet is broken – you have to try The Darkness Iceland book). It’s such a weird little book. Our protagonist, Helen, is strange and sad and this reader wondered if she wasn’t always on the brink of some kind of…. something bad. Her panic about retirement – the loneliness, the purposelessness, the claustrophobia of solitude – helps the reader see how much of her narration is untrustworthy. Her sense of isolation from her colleagues we (eventually) understand as self-narrated and self-fulfilled; so, too, her guardedness from those efforts to connect with her. With the backstory of her childhood interwoven we start to see her caution as explainable (and deeply sympathetic) and to see her as a rich and full character. Making the conclusion of the book – and here we have an actual murder mystery! – all the more powerful. I finished it while out with S. and put it down with a “huh.” Just like… rare to get a book (and a murder mystery for that matter) that offers an actually surprising – and satisfying? – ending.

And that one I can’t remember…

I read another one. I can picture it – green on the cover. I returned it like a snap from the library but because the library (only) remembers the last 300 books I borrowed it’s not in the history anymore (seriously – we have a Picture Book Problem in my house) and so it will be forever in that did I read that? void. If you saw me in early August and I was talking about a book I loved maybe you could remind me…

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July 18, 2017 · 1:58 pm

Song of Achilles: Worth interrupting your vacation

So I know I said I was (I am!) taking a blog holiday, but I couldn’t resist checking back in to let you know about the excellent Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. You’d think that a novel about the life of Achilles and the Trojan war could only be dull (that was certainly my impression going in), but wowbamzonk but this book is great. (I’ll admit I decided to read it because it won the Orange Prize – one of the few literary prizes that I find consistently delivers an exceptional read). I’d especially recommend it for a trip to the cottage as it’s entirely engrossing, and is neither candy-fluff-mindless, nor emotionally/mentally taxing. It strikes an ideal cottage/beach balance of smart, character-driven (with the well established plot) and entertaining. 

Narrated from the point of view of Patroclus, Achilles’s companion and lover, the novel explores the great love of these two figures and the way ‘forbidden’ love is navigated by family, nation and gods. The novel is roughly divided in two with the first half setting up the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, along with establishing Achilles’s god-like (or godly?) powers and the future the two men want for themselves (along with the likely future). The second half takes on the Trojan War itself, narrating battles, but more interested in how a ten year war/seige is waged and the impact on the local communities/the flourishing of camp life. 

Fascinating throughout is the extent to which Achiells is motivated by his desire for historic longevity – to be known as a hero on par with Hercules (the reader is of course more than aware that he certainly succeeds in establishing himself as a legendary hero) – and his willingness to sacrifice – almost – anything to gain this longevity. For Patroclus motivations are more nobel, but no less ambitious: he wants the same for Achilles, but he wants – more modestly – their life together to continue in perpetuity. The way the two work together to secure Achilles his heroic claim is a study in expressions of love and sacrifice for love. I do think the rendering of Patroclus as (ultimately) the ‘greater’ Greek is fascinating as it sets up an alternate portrait of heroics: not battle success, but self-sacrifice, gentleness and, crucically, care for the vulnerable. 

So yes. I resolve to get back to vacation, but let my eagerness to post this be evidence of the quality of the book and not (as is also likely the case) my inability to take a proper rest. 

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August 15, 2015 · 5:29 pm

Station Eleven: Why are you having a baby when the world is ending?

I’ve wanted a baby since my lady bits started twitching in my late twenties. I’ve been asked – and had trouble replying – why I want a baby. It’s a good question, and one we (collective humanity we and my partner-and-me-we) should probably be able to answer before we go ahead and have one. Enter me reading Emily St John Mandel’s (excellent) Station Eleven and feeling ever more sure that the world as we know it is ending, and that having a baby is… [enter your adjective]: risky, selfish, hopeful, terrifying, absurd, brave. Sure, when I was born in the 80s my parents must have felt a similar sense of foreboding: the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation probably made it feel pretty scary to have a kid. And without the same frame of reference, I can’t be sure, except the arrival of disasters brought on by global warming makes the ‘threat’ not a possibility, but a reality.

So what does my baby-end-of-the-world-angst have to do with Station Eleven? The book narrates the post-apocolyptic world of a mix-matched cast of characters for whom the mantra “Survival is Insufficient” prompts them to not just survive, but to make and appreciate art, to maintain friendships and romances, and to form complicated relationships with ideas of past and future. It also gave this reader the scope and space to consider the [enter your adjective] of being a parent in any world, the massive responsibility and the abnegation of self called for by culture and circumstance (am I more or less likely to have a baby now? Time will tell).

With characters scattered in time and geography, the novel moves back and forward as readers are invited to piece together the events surrounding the collapse and the journies and connections of different characters (much, I might add, as one of these characters might be positioned to try to make sense of their world). We witness a magnificiently drawn setting of winter Toronto (really, not since the mostly wretched The Night Circus have I enjoyed a setting quite so much) and scenes along the north-east seaboard of North America (less brilliant than that of Toronto). Our characters are a little uneven in how successfully they’re drawn, but for the most part their motivations are well grounded in past events and rich personalities. (I would add that the narration of the lives of these characters ‘before’ the collapse is excellent – our knowledge of the imminanent end to their existence through the juxtaposition of their present adds urgency and poignancy to already great narration).

The past is captured in the creation and curation of the “Museum of Civilization” – an effort on the part of a few characters to preserve the history of the world that was lost, and to teach future generations about the cultures destroyed through their objects. The Museum is contrasted with characters who have ‘lost’ memories of the first years after the collapse. A sense that while remembering and presevation is a critical part of rebuilding culture, so too, an active forgetting (of the violence and isolation, we presume) is required for the same.

The future gestured to at the end of the novel is one of an expansion of connectivity (the lights go on again), the spread of ideas (the creation of a newspaper) and expanded travel (the networks of roads grow). It is a future, though, predicated on the tenacity and hope of its populace. The willingness of each character individually, and the groups collectively, to learn from one another and to trust one another (as in newspaper interviews and expansions of communities).

More than the (truly excellent) video game The Last of Us, the TV series The Walking Dead and the host of other post-apocolyptic futures we’ve encountered in recent years, Station Eleven calls on us to consider not only the everyday marvels and luxuries that surround our priviledged lives, but the threads of civilization that make a human life worth living: art, community, a connection to the past, a sense of hope for the future.

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