Possession A.S. Byatt

Nope, not a book about demons, but something like a cross between possession and obsession - specifically, the dangers of obsession in my line of work.

Two Literature professors teams up to uncover what they think is a secret affair between two Victorian poets - one of whom is married. It's a kind of literary sleuthing, but of the academic kind, unlike The Eyre Affair which was just plain fun spoofing.

No, sad to say, this literary sleuthing is closer to the real thing - but its ntot the kind of literary scholarship I'm really interested in. The textual stuff is fun, but I don't have enough interest for the kind of detail oriented work this requires. The long and short of it is that the contemporary scholars end up tracing the steps of the lovers and having an affair themselves (a kind of history repeating itself I suppose). What I found most interesting were the 'samples' of writing by these two Victorian poets - all of which were created by Byatt. But it's a long read, and there were times I had to force myself to keep at it, so unless you're a Victorian buff, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

The Dark Tower VII Stephen King

Why did I read this book? Well, mostly because I'd read the previous six...and the fact that I'm writing a paper for a conference in March on the book. But this book takes some turns that the previous ones hadn't prepared me for.


The first three books of the series are very well integrated with each other (if you forgive the minor inconsistencies present in the first one that result from its original publication in serial form). The narrative follows Roland through his adventures, adding characters along the way. The first three books provide some of the best description of Roland and were all published within four (five?) years of each other. The fourth book was another six years coming (after the cliffhanging ending of the third book) and fills in back story. I remember when I first read it, I was disappointed by the amount of back story in it - this was when I first wrote about the series for my honors undergrad thesis.

Then there's a huge span of time till the fifth book, but the final three (V, VI, VII) are all published within two years of each other. I actually found V and VI rather dull, it seemed like King was trying to just fill pages and even though he kept me reading, I certainly had the sense that the books were very different from the earlier. Then came book seven.

All I can say is - Wow! I sure didn't expect the book to end that way. Though I suppose if I had thought about it, the ending of the book itself, or the end of the Coda were really the only possible ways out. They just weren't satisfying, at least at the moment I was ready to close the book. On retrospection, neither was bad, and I suppose I would've been disappointed had I actually gotten the end I wanted, but I must say, after seven books and twenty-odd years, it seems just a bit - just a tiny bit - like a lame attempt at injecting some kind of metaphysical grandeur into the text.

I'd read it again - actually, I'll be reading the first four again for a paper anyway, so this won't be the last time I think about the book.

The Eyre Affair Jasper Fforde

I had heard about this book a few times, but nothing really specific until a couple of weeks ago when I read a review that talked about the way literature and life get mixed up together in the text. I figured that was good enough reason to give it a try.

The book was a fun read - it is highly fantastical, which requires a significant suspension of disbelief, particularly since the premise for many of the differences between the Britain of the text and the one we know is not well fleshed out. (The book is the beginning of a series, so perhaps it gets explained better later on)

*spoiler* Thursday Next works for SpecOps (short for Special Operations) in a Britain very different from today's - after WWII, the Goliath Corporation helped rebuild Britain, and in exchange, it now runs most of the country - an excellent example of the possibilities of conglomerate corporation governing multiple industries. One of the differences also lies in the continuing British fascination and love of its literature. Marlovians clash with Baconians and Shakespeareans while Bronte lovers decry the disappointing ending of Jane Eyre when Jane decides to follow John Rivers to India as his helpmate. Thursday is in pursuit of an arch criminal, Acheron Hades, who kills her partner and leaves her ill. Because people time travel (her father works for the Chronocorps) she is warned by a future self to take a job in her hometown of Swindon after leaving her unit of LiteraTecs in London. She does so, re-establishing relationships with an ex-boyfriend, and her uncle, who has invented the "proseportal" and bookworms - a combination that can send anybody into a book. There is leakage from books to reality and back as Rochester saves Thursday during an attack by Acheron and she herself entered Jane Eyre, changing the way Jane and Rochester meet by causing his horse to slip in avoiding her.

Acheron kidnaps Thursday's uncle and the portal, sending himself into Jane Eyre, but Thursday follows. Meanwhile, the Bronte society monitors the changes in the text from the lobby of an old hotel in the Republic of Wales (unfriendly to its English visitors, which Thursday has had to sneak into). Hades causes the fire and death of Bertha in our version as well as the blinding and maiming of Rochester, and Thursday provides the ghostly voice Jane hears that draws her back to Thornfield. Having improved the ending and ensured Hades death, Thursday reunites with her ex-boyfriend (engaged to another woman) with the help of Mr. Briggs (the same solicitor that broke up Rochester and Jane's wedding and who is sent out in to the world by Rochester).

The whole play with literature, the porous boundaries between the world and lit, and the thought of a world in which literature is still very much alive were all elements that delighted an egghead like me reading this book.

Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie

I picked up this book because I knew it was about nationhood and its connection to everyday life, specifically of the character, but the magical realism in the text grabbed me by the collar and sent me off to my shelves to pull out my textbook on the subject.

That was a good thing though, because it helped me develop an alternative arrangement of my reading list, and reminded me again why I like magical realism. I even considered becoming a Rushdie specialist. I haven't entirely rejected the idea, but I think I would need to read more than two of his books to make up my mind fully.

The story follows Saleem Sinai, born just after midnight on the day of India's independence. He, like all the children born in the hour after midnight, is endowed with special powers, which he uses to try to rally all the children to a significant political action. Needless to say, this action doesn't come, or if it comes at all, it comes as passivity on the part of the group (originally 1001). The story is convoluted, and I was particularly intrigued by its narrative strategies: a very present narratee, a narrator who admits to altering the past to make a better story (yet who worries about getting the historical details just right), and the jumps and back-slides to keep the narrative linear when it seeks to jump out of sequence. Now I want to read The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

The Buddha of Suburbia Hanif Kureishi

The title to this one is a bit misleading since the 'buddha' of suburbia is only present during the first half of the book. And he doesn't get the role of narrator either - his story, the parts of it that you do get, are told by his son.

The Buddha of the title is the father of Karim Amir, the narrator of the story. His father and uncles emigrated from India as young men - his father married an white woman and his uncle another Indian. Uncle Anwar ran a store with his wife and daughter Jamila while Karim's father worked as a civil servant and his mother in a shoe store. The story begins when Karim is 17 (and ends about three years later) and his father takes up buddhistic principles, going so far as to lead a meditation group with a friend, Eva (whose son Charlie Karim admires greatly, not only for his style but because he's attracted to him - the feeling seems mutual). Karim accompanies him to Eva's house (they all live in South London) one night for one of these sessions which is when he discovers his father is having an affair with Eva. He leaves his wife, moves in with Eva, and Karim bounces between Eva's house, his uncle Ted and Aunt Jean's house (where his mother is staying) and Jamila's house with her parents (he sleeps with Jamila on a regular basis, even after her arranged marriage to Changez, someone who Karim actually likes).

Eva encourages him to enter the theatre, while moving his father and him into the city from the suburbs. His first role is to play Mowgli in Jungle Book, but then he lands a role with a more prestigious company led by Matthew Pyke. He falls in love hard with one of his co-actresses, Eleanor, but she sleeps with Pyke because he is powerful and interesting, so he breaks it off, but not until he has had group sex with Matthew, Eleanor and Matthew's wife. Meanwhile, Charlie has realized his glam band isn't making it and takes up punk instead, becoming the hit singer "Charlie Hero" and moving to New York. The second play Karim is in is highly successful and runs in New York for a month, where he hangs around with Charlie until one night when he watches Charlie in a sub sex role with a dominatrix and realizes that he doesn't care for Charlie anymore. Returning to London, it seems different to Charlie and he realizes it is him that's different.

The story describes not only differences between London and New York, but also class differences between groups in London (and the suburbs).

The book was made into a stageplay by Kureishi, which was produced at the time of a hate-crime in Britain against a young man, Stephen Lawrence, and this created a lot of critical response to the play (and the book).

The Quality of Life Report Meghan Daum

Another book club book that I guess for the most part I enjoyed, though I really have difficulty in classifying my response to it.
I found myself caught up in the story - it was easy to ignore the wackos, loud teenagers, and smelly people on the bus while I was reading it - I was able to easily lose myself in the story. But I also found myself terribly annoyed at the narrator for being such a stupid woman.
I suppose ease of read and capturing my attention is probably indicative of the simplicity of the prose? It didn't challenge with complex sentence constructions or difficult concepts (which of course provide their own sense of delight when you master them) but I'm sure that the plot will not stick with me and I can feel it fading even now, only a few weeks later.
The premise is that a New York morning show reporter becomes fascinated by "Prairie City" in the heart of the midwest during a news story and moves there, ostensibly to write a series of reports - "quality of life" reports - for the show in which she demonstrates to New Yorkers how quality of life improves out in the midwest. Her life does improve in some ways, but she brings her annoying self and her urban assumptions to the prairie city, which gets her into trouble in reading people, danger, and motivations.
The character annoyed me, but it was a fun "plane ride" kind of book.

American Gods Neil Gaiman

This is my third Gaiman book - though I still would say Neverwhere was a more enjoyable read, I liked the Teutonic mythology in this one.

What I especially enjoyed was the transposition of the teutonic gods onto another landscape, in this case, the landscape of those out of the way tourist attractions and corners of the US that get lost on maps. After all, the transposition of the teutonic pantheon to another story is what my MA thesis was based on - in that case, it was Attansio's use of Woden et al in the Arthurian story. The gods of this text aren't just teutonic - they span almost every belief class (aside from christian for good reasons) - but the main characters are such, and it's the pantheon I'm most familiar with (next to the ubiquitous Greek and Roman ones). The most powerful places in the US, where these gods still exercise some of their influence, are the backrooms and backroads where few travel, and locals (except for the more in-tune ones like Samantha, the Native American character) traverse blindly, not noticing the oddities that are strewn across these out of the way places.

This attention to the corners and out of the way places, both in cities (eg the morgue) and in the country, is astute and I can't help but think that if Gaiman was American, he would've taken these places for granted as everyone else does and the book would be less rich - the description of these places is made through the eyes of someone for whom they were new at one time.

The critical attention to geography is matched by the cultural criticism of the 'new' gods of modernity - the car, beauty (though she comes in and out of fashion), and technology. Their threatened replacement of the old gods is well captured - it is not a wholesale replacement, but a change in paradigm that shifts as people's attention (and worship) moves from the old and to the new.

Great idea for a book and well executed (though it was billed as a 'scary' book, which I didn't get).

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner Alan Sillitoe

This series of short stories reminded me of Trainspotting with its hints of hope glimmering through a pervasive nihilistic attitude adopted by the young people in the text.

In Sillitoe's case, a touch of nihilism affects not only the young characters but their older counterparts. What's remarkable about this is these books were published forty years apart. It's as if the despair Sillitoe is expressing (as one of the "Angry Young Men" of mid-century British fiction) is still reflected in the former colonial realms that form the landscape of Trainspotting and other texts like it.
The nine short stories of this volume share not only location but in part character as well - although each character in each story is depicted as a different person - differen name, family situation, occupation etc. - they still all sound like the same person. The despair and degradation of institutionalized poverty and children who grow up in families on the dole is pervasive. The narrator's voice, particularly in the title piece, sounds like the disenfranchised Alex in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (published three years after Sillitoe's volume).
"The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner"
The narrator is an inmate in a home for juvenile delinquents, telling his story at the end of his time there. During the course of his incarceration, he was given the opportunity to do long distance running, and the governor was eager for him to win the race and the cup. In his mind, he must be honest, and to be honest, he cannot win the cup for the governor. The story is a first person narration, written as a memoir/confession shortly after the events it describes.
"Uncle Ernest" Third person narration describes the life of a lonely upholsterer who is temporarily lifted out of his loneliness by befriending two sisters and buying them gifts and lunches instead of spending his cash on beer. He is warned off the friendship by policemen and returns to beer drinking.
"Mr. Raynor the School-Teacher" The teacher scuffles with his students, not caring whether they learn or not while he spends his day watching the young girls who work in the store across the street.
"The Fishing-Boat Picture" A postman is left by his wife after nine years of marriage when she runs off with another man. She comes back ten years later, visiting him every week and borrowing money. She likes the picture on the wall of a fishing boat and he gives it to her but buys it back from the pawn shop a few days later. They say nothing about it to each other. Ten years later he gives it to her again. This time she is hit by a bus on her way home and dies. He tells the story twenty-eight years later.
"Noah's Ark" The narrator is a ten year who describes how he and his cousin beg and steal money to go to the fair. They eat and ride on the Noah's ark carousel, but in an effort to evade the ticket taker, the narrator falls off the ride, injuring himself. They head home at midnight, disappointed in the way the day ended, but contented at having been to the fair.
"On Saturday Afternoon" The narrator again is a young boy who watches his neighbor attempt to commit suicide by hanging himself from a light fixture. Although the young boy tells him the fixture won't hold, he tries it anyway, falls to the floor and is arrested for attempting suicide. The narrator hears that a few days later, the neighbor succeeded by jumping out of the sixth floor window of the hospital he was taken to.
"The Match" Lennox, the narrator, is a nearsighted middle aged man who, after watching his team lose their football match, goes home to beat his wife after verbally abusing her and the children. His neighbor, a newlywed, cannot understand how two people would treat each other that way.
"The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale" Jim is an only child, and shocks his mother by announcing he is going to marry. Everyone expects the girl to be a loser like Jim, but it turns out she is very well educated. She rapidly turns derisive and abusive when she realizes that Jim doesn't fit her idealized version of a working class man and that he has no desire to rise up and overthrow his bourgoise masters. Jim returns home to his mother who works hard to keep a good house for him.
"The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller" Frankie is a twenty year old who leads his gang of younger boys on adventures around the town, small mischief but nothing big enough to get him in trouble. The narrator admires him, but when he meets up with Frankie ten years later, after getting an education and reading books, he realizes how simple Frankie was and how their childhood is not able to be recuperated.

Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry

I read this book, thinking I would put it in under my Contemporary Brit Lit list, but I'm not sure if that it's a valid text to include. I'm finding lots of places where the author is considered Canadian, not British (he was born in England, but lived for the longest stretch (and died) in Vancouver).

Not that I couldn't include Canadians on the Brit list - there's certainly precedent for that, but that would also mean that I would need to include some secondary readings in postcolonial theory (the variety a la Stephen Slemon that includes Canada as postcolonial nation) in the list. The department has just approved an ad for a Brit/postcolonial hire with interviews at this year's MLA, so including him or not might just depend on who we get in po-co (and how long this process will drag out). But anyway, back to the book...

The point of view most frequenly adopted in the text, what Mieke Bal calls "focalization" is that of a drunk. He interpretst everything around him through a haze of alcohol, which provides the reader with some interesting opportunities to play a guessing game to determine how skewed his perceptions really are. Geoffrey is a British consul in Mexico, and his duties are (obviously for a drunk) very light... pretty much non-existent. His wife, who left him a year earlier, has just returned to attempt to renew their marriage (though why she wants to do this is something I could not understand - even when she is the focalizer of the narrative). Yvonne, the wife, is also attracted to Geoffrey's younger brother (not an alcoholic - no surprise why she might be attracted to him), who has recently moved in, partly to take care of his older brother, and partly because he's lazy and hasn't decided on a career.

The book apparently started as a short story but Lowry expanded it to a novel, changing some of the characters (Yvonne was originally the consul's daughter), and expanding upon the existential angst that Geoffrey contemplates during some of his more lucid moments. It is an admirable pice of work - describing the world through a drunk's eyes - and I certainly wonder, given that Lowry himself lived in Mexico and ended up in B.C. while his character lives in Mexico and dreams of Canada - how much of that facility in imagining the life of a drunk might come from personal experience.

Even though it is written in the style typical of its era (mid-twentieth century), I enjoyed this book. Hopefully it will fulfill my mid-century requirements and I won't have to read other, less interesting, books instead.

Atonement Ian Mc Ewan

There's another person in the book club who wants to read this book, so I might get a chance to revisit it (which I would love to do, since there's a lot in there that I think really will only begin to make sense in the context of discussion with other people who have read it). We'll see if I can get anyone interested in a secondary go-round.
The novel is about story writing. The protagonist first writes stories as a child, and her view of the world is affected by her understanding of the events around her as a novel as well as her difficulty in separating the reality of her life, actions and their consequences, from the fiction she writes.
The novel is constructed in three parts with an epilogue - the first part, comprising almost half of the book describes a family and their hired help in 1935. 13 year old Briony Tallis witnesses an argument between her older sister, Cecilia, and their charlady's son, Robbie Turner, but she is far enough away that she only sees the action without hearing what they say. Her active imagination (she aspires to be a writer), imagines a scene in which Robbie threatens her sister and she interprets the rest of the events of the day in light of this supposition. But Briony is too young to understand adult motivations and she gets it all wrong.
Her older cousin Lola and two younger twin brothers Pierrot and Jackson, have come to stay with the family while their parents separate (their mother is in France with another man). She is enraptured by the scene, imagining it as a scene in a novel, something she has decided she will write because she is currently frustrated with playwriting (at least the directing and producing part). Robbie is not threatening her sister, he is in love with her and they've both just discovered it. During the evening, the twins, in frustration and homesickness, run away and a search party is sent out into the night to look for them. As everyone separates, Briony wanders for a while until she comes upon what she thinks is a bush, until it separates, revealing itself to be a man and a prone figure on the grass. The figure is Lola and she has been attacked. Briony, with her newly formed ideas about Robbie as a madman and her desire to protect her sister, names him as the attacker. The section ends with him taken away in a police car, and enough foreshadowing of Briony's actions and complicity in accusing him for the reader to clearly know he is sentenced for the 'crime'.
The second part describes Robbie's trek across France to Dunkirk as part of the retreat of May 1945 after he was offered the chance of commuting his sentence by working it off in the army. It describes the horrors of war, the camraderie, the numbness that he feels as he walks, despite a wound full of shrapnel across the landscape and how he hates Briony for what she has done and loves Cecilia, who has promised to wait for him and loves him. It ends with him dreaming of rejoining her (a feverish dream in a burnt out basement), on the beach awaiting evacuation the next day.
The third section describes Briony's decision to forego university and sign up as a nurse instead, her decision to recant her testimony and her confrontation with her sister and Robbie in her sister's flat. They tell her what she must to do recant, and she leaves them to pursue their own lives together. She decides she must write the story as well as part of her atonement. This final section is signed "BT 1999".
The fourth part, the epilogue, is Briony's reflection on the fiction she has written in which she reveals that she is dying but Lola and her husband Marshall (her actual attacker) are still alive, so she cannot publish the account, and, unlike parts of the third section, we find out that Robbie dies of septicemia that day and Cecilia in a bomb raid a few months later (a bomb raid at a Tube station that she wouldn't have been taking if she and Robbie had gotten together and moved to their cottage as the fiction that Briony created had them doing). Briony realizes in the end, that she will be dead before the novel can be safely published and her atonement will make no difference. (There are also discussions of whether the writer can atone, since the writer has the power of god in writing the story and one can never know what is true and what is not.)

She H. Rider Haggard

This book was very difficult to read.

Not only were there several typos in the copy I had (along with some agonizingly complicated sentences) but the misogyny that literally dripped from the pages was really hard to swallow - no matter how much I focused on its status as a piece typical of its genre and period.

If you saw the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you met a Haggard character, Alan Quartermain (played by Sean Connery). Haggard likes his men virile (even when they are bookworms like the narrator of this book) and he displays a very Victorian euro-centrism in his treatment of natives. I think though the hardest part of the book to swallow was the fact that Haggard didn't bother to create an African society for his Englishmen to interact with, he just took elements of a 'savage' society (cannibalism and women who make decisions) and pasted them onto an English society.

Case in point: The narrator is horrified to find himself in a matrilineal society in which the women choose their mates and can divorce them as easily as turning them out of the house. BUT, he also has those women acting like sychophants toward the European men, not speaking till they're spoken to, following the men around, being excluded from important discussions etc.

Really, really hard to just read as a period piece and get beyond the misogyny.

Lord of the Flies William Golding

Another book club book. It was a quick replacement last month because the woman who recommended the book that we were supposed to read wasn't going to be at the meeting, and it was difficult to get ahold of. So we thought we would re-read a classic that most of us had read earlier in life.

The consensus was that the things that struck you about the book as a kid were not the same things that stood out as an adult. What was traumatic as a kid was almost de rigeur as an adult, and what was insignificant (or perhaps just confusing) as a kid seemed monumental as an adult. It's the same experience I had re-reading 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World as an adult. That probably says something about the social commentary in those texts.

That same social commentary is in Golding's text too of course. The force of his argument - that society is degenerate and easily could become so - is diffused by the time frame of the novel. It's difficult to know if the boys are on the island for only a few weeks, or a few months or even a year, and so the speed at which their schoolboy manners and sense of society deteriorates is hard to guage. If only over a few weeks, the criticism that society is degenerate is more potent. If over months, or even a year, well, then the boys actions seem more comprehensible simply as the kind of degeneration that any human being might experience in the same time frame, and excusable since they are after all boys and not men who are trying to deal with being stranded on a deserted island.

Useless aside: ["Stranded on a deserted island" - now there's a cliched phrase if ever there was one. After all, have you ever heard of anyone stranded on an inhabited island? It's not really stranded then, is it?]

One thing that the group did discuss (Angela was there too, to provide a young person's perspective) was whether the story would unfold differently if it was a group of girls stranded on the island. We decided it would.

For one thing, the conflict would likely not have been over hunting, even if it had been about food. We also figured that girls would dig an animal trap for the pigs rather than go after them with sharpened sticks. And instead of warpaint, feathers and braided hair. They may have been even more afraid of the 'beast' than the boys and that might have been what the conflict that led to the split would have been about. And they would have likely (or at least some) been a bit more maternal about the 'littluns'. The conflict might then have arisen between the ones who wanted to take care of the littluns and those who expressed an everyone-for-herself kind of attitude.

But the one thing we decided is that conflict would have happened regardless of gender. [There wouldn't be much of a story without a conflict for one thing] Though the more I think of it, the more I wonder if the conflict would have had to have happened if adults were stranded. Not that I'm saying adults don't have egos that would lead them into conflict, but adults also usually have developed more skills for avoiding open conflict either through compromise and concilliation, or through subterfuge. Kids just aren't that subtle. The boys responses on the island are perfect examples. And Ralph's 'blank' moments when he can't think of what to say next are probably signs of immaturity, not of some kind of mental illness or disability (as they would be, say, in an adult). It would make for an interesting re-write/take-off on this classic story.

Ever After Graham Swift

This is my second Swift novel. I read this one because it has historical elements to it that I think might be useful in my study of twentiety century British literature.

Bill Unwin narrates the events of his life, his research and muses on the correlations between the two. His wife recently committed suicide, and he tried to follow but survived. Thanks to his stepfather, a plastics manufacturer, he has a chair at a prestigious university (not sure which one) and is working on preparing the diary of a Victorian relative, Matthew, who left his wife and family after revealing to them (and his rector-father in law) that the theory of evolution had persuaded him to the point of losing his faith in creationism. His wife kept the notebooks, a love letter, and the clock that his father had built, passing the clock down to Bill and his wife Ruth (who died childless). Bill interprets this to mean that she still loved him when he died. Bill draws parallels between the family's sense of destiny and his own, and in particular, he wonders at his wife's profession of actress - a putting on of characters that other people see, but Bill thinks repeatedly of the woman he knew - the one who studied her lines by pacing through the backyard, smoking and gesticulating as she memorized and tried out out different versions of them.

Bill accuses/muses that his stepfather is guilty of a kind of reverse colonialism (Sam, his stepfather, is American, was carrying on an affair with his mother in Paris, when Sam's spy-father shot himself, either out of guilt caused by spying, or because his wife was having an affair).

Most of the narrative is a recollection, and in its telling, Bill seems to work through some of the parts of his grief. In other ways, the narrative seems to deny knowledge, such as when Bill tries to imagine why someone would kill themselves (even though he presumably should know why he tried). He frequently leaves words unsaid, represented by the "--" but it is always clear what word he has omitted. This activity does not introduce confusion or multiplicity into the text, it rather induces in the reader as sense of Bill's squeamishness in dealing with emotions and relationships - some of the more delicate parts of life.

In producing large parts of Matthew's 'diary', Swift introduces the inventor Brunel, the Victorian debates about God and evolution, and their attitudes toward nature and society, and it reproduces Victorian attitudes to life. In reading these passages, it is easy to forget that the did not exist outside this text, and the parallels with the angst that Bill is working through are frequently drawn. Some of the connections made are less clear. Bill grows up in Alderston, a town that had a reputation later for protest but the reason for the introduction of this parallel is not immediately clear.

Having just read Golding's The Paper Men, I find similar sentiments expressed by both protagonists - which begs an interesting question about the motivation/attitude of the author's writing the stories (Bill also sounds a lot like the narrator of Swift's Waterland).

The Player of Games Iain M. Banks

I read this book right about the same time I was reading some theory on gaming, which was actually an interesting juxtaposition, since there are plenty of places in this text where gaming itself is discussed from both a philosophical and practical player-oriented point of view.

Jurnau Gurgeh lives in the Culture, a society in which there is no need, no poverty, no battles, no strife and whose occupants challenge themselves by playing games and creating art (including terraforming). Jurnau's friends include Yay, a terraformer, and Chamlis, a sentient machine (most machines in the Culture are sentient). This society has evolved to the point where people no longer need to work - what little work they do is in the form of hobbies more than necessity and therefore they have developed elaborate games.

But Jurnau is getting tired of games; he finds them unchallenging and after he allows another sentient machine, Mawhrin-Skel to help him win a difficult game against a newcomer, Mawhrin blackmails him into helping the drone get back into Contact, the interstellar branch of the Culture. In return, Contact challenge Gurgeh to a game unlike any other. It is a game played by another culture, one that bases its entire way of life, its merit-promotions, positions within government and society, on who is the best game player. The supreme ruler of this culture, Azad, is elected every game cycle (four years) as the person who wins the game of Azad.

Gurgeh agrees to the lightyears-long journey to play this game where he encounters a culture much like ours, with all the strife, jealousy and fighting that is absent in his own Culture. He performs much better than expected, and although according to the media, he has officially withdrawn, he actually beats the ruling monarch, Emperor Nicosar. In playing the game through its many stages and elimination rounds, he comes to realize that the game is actually a battle between his Culture and Azad, and Nicosar also understands this, attempting to assassinate Gurgeh and everyone watching the game by allowing a natural firestorm to overtake the castle in which they are playing the final round.

As I said, game theory is found dispersed throughout the text; at one point, the narrator tells us that the games a society plays reveals "so much about its ethos, its philosophy, its very soul". Makes me wonder what our games reveal about our souls?

Bringing Down the House Ben Mezrich

Book club book. Very popular. Had to request it from my library as interlibrary loan.

When I opened the fly leaf after getting it and read that this is the author's first non-fiction book and he's usually a fiction writer, I thought, 'Maybe I'll check out some of his fiction after reading this book'.

I'm not going to read any of his fiction. If he constructs a fictional story the way he constructs a non-fiction narrative, I will be bored to tears. I realize that sometimes when you're working with non-fictional material it's difficult to craft it into a narrative that people might want to follow. Sometimes it might not lend itself well to story telling.

But if you feel that the way to keep readers reading is to constantly hint that things might not turn out all rosy in the end, over and over and over again, well, then you're just not a very good storyteller.

Of course I know it's not going to turn out 'alright' in the end - if the MIT students that this book is written about were still fleecing Vegas casinos at the blackjack tables, well, they wouldn't be telling the world about it now, would they? That would give away their secrets and provide too much competition.

Now I'm not an expert in non-fiction prose - my work is primarily in fiction - but since when did it become necessary for the non-fiction writer to become an apologist? Over and over again, Mezrich defends card-counting as not cheating. Fine, great, if that's what you believe, great! But whether it's cheating or not should not get in the way of a good story. I'm willing to read about cheaters if it means I'm reading a good story. Hell, some of the best works of fiction I've read are told from the perspective of murderers and thieves. I don't need to condone the actions of the character in order to like the story.

But you have to be able to tell a good story! This is not a good story. It's interesting, true, but not in the I-can't-put-it-down kind of way, nor the all-my-friends-have-to-read-this-book kind of way. But, now I've read it and when the book club meets, I'll see if anyone can provide me with arguments to redeem it. For now, I'm sorry I spent time reading it.

A Pale View of the Hills Kazuo Ishiguro

Every once in a while, a book surprises you on the way to its ending. After the first few pages of this book, I figured I knew what to expect - a well written realist novel about a displaced Japanese woman in England who reminisces about her youth while contemplating the choices her children have made. And for most of the book, that impression is borne out. It nicely describes the two countries, how people act and react, and what life has been like for this character throughout her time in both places.

The novel even does a very good job of replicating the varying syntax between English and Japanese - in the reminiscences, the dialogue does not flow as it would in English, and the translation is in some cases very literal, which makes the dialogue reflect the difference in thought patterns that speaking (and thinking) in another language requires.

Then, only ten pages from the end, the pronouns change. Where you expect 'she' there is 'the child' and where you expect 'you' there is 'we'. And all of a sudden you're unsure who is talking to whom, and when, and you start to realize that you have been taking what your narrator says at face value when perhaps you shouldn't have.

After all, the narrator of the story tells us more than once that perhaps her memory is faulty, perhaps she is mixing things up. But such a confession, such reluctance to appear certain, such a recognition of the false nature of memory, does the opposite of what the words should do. Instead of making the reader doubt the narrator, such qualification about the haziness of memory leads the reader to trust the narrator, after all, she has recognized that she's telling a story, and because she's telling a story, we're willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Then suddenly, the pronoun shift at the end introduces the possibility that not only did the narrator perhaps get some details wrong, leave some things out, change some names, be not as innocent as she seems, but maybe these omissions and alterations weren't accidental and we've been led to believe her a good person when perhaps she was lying about those details because she wasn't such a nice person after all, in fact, maybe she was a really nasty person.

I'm sure if you haven't read the book, all this sounds a bit confusing, and you might be wondering what the deal is anyway, but from a narrative theory point of view, the ability of such a small thing - a few pronouns - to throw the entire preceeding narrative into doubt is pretty impressive.

I think I will need to reread this book to figure it out. And although when I first picked it up I didn't think it would be useful, it just might go onto the Contemporary Brit Reading list - at least as a subsidiary text.

The Celestial Omnibus and The Machine Stops E. M. Forster

The Celestial Omnibus is a delightful (did I just say delightful? ugh! but it really was sheer pleasure to read) short story about a boy who visits heaven and returns with wonderful stories that no one will believe. It's nicely crafted, concise, and highly imaginative... heaven is a sort of literary haven for heros, gods, and good writers. It's only about 15 pages, but lots of fun.

The Machine Stops is another short story that I'd read before. It was included in the Science Fiction Research Association anthology (published in the nineties). It tells of a machine dependent society that fails when the machine fails. Nothing real imaginative there, but Forster wrote it in 1928, when machine dependence had not reached the supercomputer-phase yet and I imagine it's warning was more potent at the time (and it also hadn't been done to death by then either). What I like about it is its bleakness about the whole possibility.

Both stories are found in the Penguin Selected Stories of E. M. Forster, so it's cheap to pick up. Even though these are the only two of the collection recommended to me, it's likely that I'll read more of them. And maybe one of his novels. I like the way he writes.

England, England Julian Barnes

One of the challenges for a reader with a book written about a country that she hasn't lived in before is frequently that there are references to cultural habits and practices, terms, or ideas, that she isn't familiar with but that are crucial to understanding the story. This book doesn't present any major problems in that category.

The book is about England, but it's about the England that tourists might be familiar with (at one point in the book there's a list of the top 50 things people think of when they think of England). So, it talks about people, places, and ideas a non-English person can understand. And it doesn't seem to stray from those (which of course makes me wonder what it IS like to read this book if you're English).

The book spends time philosophizing about history, sexuality, childhood, happiness, but the digressions aren't too long and most of them fit well with the narrative.

It's written in three sections - the first two I found very engaging. The last one, I was unconvinced by - not by the character, since she remained fairly consistent in the final section - but the political events that are supposed to explain what happened to England I found unconvincing. First, because they happen too rapidly to be believed - and the idyllic situation at the end, if it arose from such rapid social and economic change, would likely be highly volatile and unstable, as most regime changes are when they happen quickly. There certainly would be more aftershocks than are described. The second, because although one of the political alliances in the book might have seemed plausible when it was written in 1998, it is an unlikely arrangment after the events of the last few years. But that's history itself, and I can accept that when Barnes wrote it he could not have anticipated the political re-alignments of the last few years.

One other thing bothered me - it has nothing to do with the story, but the jacket blurb. I reproduce the blurb here:

Picture an England where all the pubs are quaint, the Royals behave themselves (more or less), and the cliffs of Dover are actually white. Now imagine that the principal national treasures - from Stonehenge to Buckingham Palace - are grouped together on the Isle of Wight.
This is precisely the vision taht Sir Jack Pitman seeks to realize: a "destination" where tourists can find replicas of Big Ben, Wembley Stadium, the National Gallery, Princess Di's grave, and even Harrods (conveniently located inside the Tower of London), and visit them all in the course of a weekend. As this land of make-believe takes on its own comic and horrible reality, Barnes delights us with a novel that is at once a philosophical inquiry, a burst of mischief, a hilarious romp, and a moving elegy about authenticity and nationality.

Okay, so what bugs me about this? Sir Jack Pitman is the driving force behind the vision of the Island, but he does not narrate the story at any point himself. The narration flips between omniscient narrator (a non-character telling the story) and narration by one of the characters... who is NOT Sir Jack Pitman but a woman named Martha. Not only is she the only character who gets to speak, she is the first and last character whose life we hear described. Why is she not important enough to go into the blurb? She's the one who most frequently embodies the "philosophical inquiry" of the blurb.

I find bad blurb writing annoying. After all, it should actually give me a good idea of what to expect. (I'm also not sure how the "burst of mischief" fits in - strikes me as more than just mischievous... but then again, I'm not English)

Glad I read it, but don't go run out and pick it up.

Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood

Why have I not read any Atwood since Surfacing? Reading this book, I realized what I've been missing for the last few years. I have got to get me some more Atwood!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Although Atwood has been very vocal about identifying her work as not science fiction, this book can certainly hold its head up against any other science fiction that I've read. It has what good sf should have... plausible characters put in unusual circumstances and enacting their lives the best they can given those circumstances. That is what science fiction is all about after all (aside from the gee-whiz rocket science stuff of the Gernsbachian era) - stick people in a situation that is not like our lives, but close enough to our world to be recognizable as a society as such, and see how they might react.

A Handmaid's Tale imagines what life would be like in a theocracy that is obsessed with a declining birth rate. Neuromancer imagines what life would be like in a society where we can implant all kinds of fabulous devices into and onto our bodies, with a concomitant reduction in the value of those bodies. The Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy imagines what life would be like if we could manage interstellar travel only to realize life as we know it is a prolonged experiment. The Left Hand of Darkness imagines what life would be like if our genders weren't fixed.

Each of these stories (and all the rest) simply change one or two key elements about life as we know it and imagine how things might be different, how people might act differently, how social norms and institutions might develop differently, how life might look a little different.

Aside from my argument that Oryx and Crake is indeed science fiction, it is some of the sf I like the most in that we don't get lengthy explanations about the genetic engineering that takes place in the story (much of the description that we do get is from the point of view of a child, and later, a non-specialist, a word smith who 'never was good with numbers'). What we do get is details about how it affects the characters of the story, their relationships, both intimate and social, and the world in general - boy! does it ever affect the world in general!

As usual, it is well written, with an eye for demonstrating internal states of mind and feeling without waxing poetic or metaphoric (or at least not in excess).

A friend tells me she saw lots of people reading it on the plane when she flew last week - it's definitely good plane reading material.

White Teeth Zadie Smith

First off, wow! I'm pretty impressed by the writing in this novel. While there may be a few rough edges as far as plotting and characterization go, the actual writing is very well done. Wish I could write like that.

Zadie Smith's novel begins with an attempted suicide, and although the sensation wanes shortly thereafter and doesn't rise again until the very end, the story is so well told that the characters take over and the plot becomes less important in the middle of the story.

*Begin Spoiler*
The text is divided into four sections based on some of the main characters: Archie 1974, 1945; Samad 1984, 1857; Irie 1990, 1907; and Magid, Millat and Marcus 1992, 1997. The story begins with Archibald Jones sitting is his car preparing to die of carbon monoxide poisoning but being prevented by a shopkeeper who shooes him away. He meets his future wife Clara, a second generation Carribean immigrant, daughter of a Jehovah's Witness named Hortense who was born during the Jamaican earthquake of 1907.

The narrative then tells of the friendship that sprung up between Archie and Samad Miah Iqbal, during WWII when their tank broke down in a Bulgarian village. Samad talked Archie into killing a French spy, Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret, who they discovered there. The two men went home - Archie to a first marriage that failed, and Samad, to marry his wife Alsana in an arranged marriage. We learn that Archie has a daughter Irie and Samad twin sons Magid and Millat during the same year.

The children grow up in North London with Irie experimenting with how to rid herself of her curly hair and Samad sending off Magid to the old country to make him more religious (he can't afford to send both sons) in an attempt to keeping him from becoming Westernized. As they grow, Millat has a penchant for trouble, but eventually joins a radical islamic group: Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (KEVIN), though he has difficulty adhering to some of the tenets. Magid returns to London an atheist intending to pursue a law degree. The twins and Irie have meanwhile met the Chalfens - Marcus, the father, is creating a genetically programmed oncomouse, Joyce writes about botany and tries to nurture everyone around her, and their four sons, one of whom, Josh, becomes disillusioned with "Chalfenism", the family's own egocentric belief in the rightness of the rationality and forthrightness, and joins a radical animal rights group: Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation (FATE) because he's obsessed with the group leader's wife.

Irie, in a fit of anger/angst, sleeps with Millat and then Magid in the same day. At the end of the novel, we find she is pregnant but doesn't know by whom, and of course a DNA test won't be able to tell the difference. Everyone comes together at a press conference Dec. 31, 1992, when the oncomouse is revealed; KEVIN and FATE to disrupt the proceedings, Hortense and her Witnesses to spread the word about the end of the world, and the Iqbals and Joneses to hear the announcement and be with their children. Millat intends to shoot Chalfens, but shoots Archie instead, who realizes what he is about to do and blocks the shot at the same time as both he and Samad realize that Marcus Chalfens mentor is Dr. Perrot, who Archie did not kill back in 1945.

*End Spoiler*

The text makes commentary on the nature of families, history, memory, genetic engineering and science, while pulling it all together in one final confrontation.

It's a fascinating story about the immigrant experience, the cross-generational conflict that affects immigrant families, and the desire to find a place where you belong. The anxiety of all adolescence is to find your niche, but when you are trying to define your ethnic identity at the same time, it gets even harder, something this book does a pretty good job of starting to describe. And the bits about genetic engineering and Samad's obsession with history certainly add to the overall problem of identity formation (in particular, national identity formation) that's treated in the book. I'm glad the book club read this, even though I'm also going to put it on my contemporary brit lit list as well.

I know I'll be looking forward to her next book.

UPDATE: Post book club - I have to add this comment from a book club member. "Reading White Teeth was a bit like taking vitamins. You know they're good for you". Interpret as you will.

Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner

Yep, another Faulkner book. This one was very different from the earlier one in that the story provided an overload of information where As I Lay Dying left you in the dark sometimes, trying to figure out what was going on behind the scenes. This one did that too on occasion, but if you missed it the first time (which was easy to do), you still would get it by the second, or third, or fourth iteration.

At one point, one of the early narrators says that some stories can be told in three words, and for those stories three words would be too many, but other stories might be told in three thousand words and those three thousand words wouldn't be enough. I think that's a really good way of describing Faulkner's writing in general, and more specifically, the difference between these two texts.

The story is all recollection, with the activities of the various narrators who tell the older story playing a small and for the most part (except at the very end) unimportant role in the way the novel is put together. It questions the construction of history through the multiple narrations - at times, several events are told from multiple perspectives, with an extreme case of narrator embellishment when a character who has only heard the story, begins to tell the rest of it, even though he has never heard anyone tell how it ends.

The Faulkner course is over now, so I doubt I'll read more of his work, but I'm going to continue to try to add American writers to the list of texts I'm familiar with.

As I lay Dying William Faulkner

I've realized over the last couple of years, that my definition of literature, having attended primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools in Canada, is distinctly Commonwealth/British. I took one American lit class as an undergrad (and loved it! but that's because the prof was amazing - too bad he moved on to bigger and better things). But aside from that, most of the American lit I've read is SF or other popular fiction. There's a huge segment of literature written in English that I know little of. Hence, reading Faulkner.

Since a colleague and good friend is teaching a Faulkner class, it seemed the perfect opportunity to read at least some Faulkner, and start expanding my American lit repertoire beyond SF.

As I lay Dying employs multiple narrative voices, and Faulkner is able to balance those voices in such a way that they each project a unique image of the character who speaks them, but he also makes each narrative work to fill in gaps left after the narratives of other characters. Case in point: The "I" of the title is Addie Bundren, who dies in the first 20 pages; from there, the story follows her family's journey with her body to her hometown where they intend to bury her.

The narration moves between (I think 17 total) narrators, but primarily through her children, which means that most of your impression of Addie comes from her family, people who presumably have either affection for her, or a sense of obligation toward her. As each narrator takes his/her turn, the reader begins to develop a sense of what this family is like. Dysfunctional isn't the right word for it, since 'dysfunctional' implies a kind of active inability to function, an attempt to function that goes awry. These characters are far too lackadaisical, particularly Addie's husband Anse, to be described like that. A better description may be "inertia-sensitive" since when they are at rest, they tend to stay there, but when they get going, they stubbornly continue going despite good advice against such action.

The family's sensitivity to inertia and the dearth of emotional expressions of mourning, make them seem cold-hearted in the face of their wife/mother's death. Until Addie narrates her own story.

Then the reader realizes that the feeling is mutual. Addie never cared much for her husband or for her family, and her response (after a brief affair) seemed to be to distance herself from everyone around her, including her family. The only time she seems connected to them is through bodily pain or suffering.

This revelation, which comes at the center of the book, and is the only time Addie speaks, changes the reader's perception of her family's narrations till the end of the book.

In the undergrad class that I sat in on (the one my friend is teaching), they seemed to think that Anse's actions at the end of the novel were justified, or at least that they could empathize with his decision. I was disturbed by what I saw as his callousness however. Is that because as a mother I could understand Addie's attitude to her family? Is it because I'm older? What is it that I bring from my own experience, whether personal, or my experience of reading other books, that compels me to read Anse's final actions of the book as a betrayal, rather than a suitable ending that they seemed to see? Perhaps not all of them felt that way, or perhaps they discussed the ending more when I wasn't there, but I certainly had a different opinion of the ending when it came up in the discussion that I attended.

I will admit it was a difficult book for me to get into. If I'd been browsing in the library and picked it up, I would've put it down again because it took me a while to get into it, but the multiple voices of the text started to fascinate me and kept me going through the rest of it. I'm glad I read it.

Lullaby Chuck Palahniuk

Aside from not knowing how to pronounce this author's last name, reading this book was quick and easy (I read it in three days worth of bus rides to school and back). But just because it's an easy read doesn't mean it's not thought provoking.

Palahniuk wrote Fight Club which was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. (If you haven't seen the movie, go see it - it combines the uncertainty of a Sixth Sense or the confusion of a Memento with the light hearted social critique/commentary of Trainspotting or The Big Lebowski.) The movies I choose as metaphors to describe Fight Club probably say something interesting about me, but I'd rather not psychoanalyze myself right now.

Anyway, Lullaby is about what it sounds like, a lullaby, but it's also about death, guilt, and the corruptive force of power as it affects a reporter, a real estate agent and a couple of vegan Wiccans. It begins with an unexpected twist, and shortly follows that up with an explanation of what the lullaby is all about. At this point, after only about 20 pages in, you begin to wonder what Palahniuk was thinking when he wrote the book since he seems to have thrown all the good stuff into the beginning. But it continues to mystify, and then reveal those mystifications at odd moment throughout the novel, with the final twist being held off until the last few pages.

If you're looking for a quick, easy summer read and something a little edgier than a romance, feel good story, or chick lit, this is a quick and dirty book I would recommend reading, particularly if you liked Fight Club or you're looking for something out of the ordinary.

Book club update: My tolerance for "ickiness" seems to be much higher than some of my book club members because the overwhelming response to this book was that there were some really despicable and graphically descriptive parts (despicable characters and a lot more description of dead/damaged bodies than some people cared for). I was the only one who found the main character, Streacher, interesting. Although I couldn't condone the character's behaviour, I could certainly understand it, and I think Palahniuk did a pretty good job getting into the mind of an uptight middle-aged man with an excessively large amount of emotional baggage. So a caveat to my sense of the book would be that if you don't like to hear icky descriptions of the body, don't read this book... though if you've seen Fight Club, you've already seen that kind of icky when Robert gets shot, or when Norton's character pulls out his tooth.

Dracula - Bram Stoker

I'm still reading this book three weeks after I started it. [Ed: It actually took 4 months total to finish the book] Right now it's taking forever to get through it... mostly because there's a lot of other stuff that I must read (usually on a deadline), but part of it is becaues it's also a very long and very Victorian novel as well, which means it packs a lot of detail in - not descriptive detail, but detail of the sympathetic kind. By sympathetic detail, I'm referring to the literary identification of the relationship between characters in Victorian novels that is revealed not through their actions toward one another, but through their thoughts and refined sensibilities.

Dracula is narratively interesting from a structural point of view. It employs multiple narrators (which means if you gloss over the section headings, which I sometimes do, you can become very confused about who it is who's speaking), and it presents their narrative view through written texts, mostly journals and diaries, but newspaper accounts are also brought in at times.

There are only three primary journal writers in the text, so everything is from their point of view, though they also report second hand what other people say they have done or felt. These reports are in addition to their own reports, which leads one to trust these multiple narrators, particularly since they reinforce what other writers have narrated before (which also contributes to its 500 page length).

There are also situations where an alternate narrator fills in what the previous one could either not know, or might not be able to be honest about. In this case, the flitting between narrators increased verisimilitude and also narrator reliability - narratoring characters aren't required to step beyond the boundaries of their own experience and personality to relay information that might otherwise be difficult for that character to describe.