The Sign of the Four - Arthur Conan Doyle

I'd read The Speckled Band before, but never any other Holmes story. This one was right up my alley with a whole bunch of imperialism stuff.

But even without, it was a fun Holmes story. What made it neat for my reading, and which is why it ended up on my reading list, is because it has an aboriginal in it. He's the one who commits murder and attempted murder, not the Englishman that he's affiliated with, which keeps the white man's hands clean in this one.

So, in this story, Watson goes ga-ga over the woman whose case they're working on, but since she stands to inherit a whole bunch of money, he's depressed because she's way out of his league. Consequently, Watson is delighted when the thief throws the entire treasure overboard during a river chase down the Thames because now he can marry her. Ugh! I realize it fits perfectly with Victorian sentiments about class, marriage, women etc., but I still get disgusted reading that kind of drivel.

Holmes is his typical logical, dramatic, and ennuistic (is that a word?) self though, which of course is meant to counter Watson's realism and is waht the stories are all about. Holmes is why Conan Doyle had to resurrect him, even though he detested the character and didn't wish to write any more Sherlock Holmes stories after the first.

Ulysses James Joyce

Believe it or not, this is my first encounter with Joyce.

It probably won't be my last however, since one of the people who I want on my dissertation committee is teaching a Joyce class this fall which I've asked to sit in on.

If you ask me my overall impression of the book, I would only be able to give you a sense of how it felt to read it rather than a plot since of course there's little plot. In fact, after the first three chapters, I gave up trying to follow the characters' movements through the city and simply enjoyed the language and the way ideas and feelings were conveyed in the text. It certainly was a text where I read large spans of it without caring what was actually happening, just enjoying the prose. Having said that, there were also places where the prose was very difficult, and I prepared myself to some difficulty when I approached the last chapter, thinking that the stream of consciousness-five-pages-per-sentence format might be hard to follow, though it was actually fairly easy, even with the unclear antecedents throughout. I remember reading a short while ago about a writer who was always asking his wife whether his female characters would do certain things, or how they would think, and the article's author stating that no male writer has adequately captured the female mind. I would disagree. Mollie's thoughts as she lies in bed seemed spot on to me.

Glad that I can say I've read this one.

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

I like Dickens; I've got to admit that at the outset. And Oliver's a pretty likeable kid, even if he lays the big eyes on a bit heavy at times. But there were times during this novel that I found myself wondering what the point of it was.

I like Dickens humor, that sneaks up on you in the midst of such thick description of the place and psychology of his characters, that you're often not expecting it. I also love the way the narrator intervenes to poke fun at characters and those around them. And he does turn a nice phrase.

But I found myself about three quarters of the way through the book wondering what the point of it was. Most Dickens ends up as social commentary, and although there are the portraits of poverty and squalor that are characteristic of Dickens portrayal of the city (one of the things I like about him), this one felt shallow. The story began to strike me as melodramatic, the sort you find in those bad movies where there's not enough dialogue or action between plot points to give you an idea of why a character did a certain thing. You get that the character is mad, but you don't know why. Here too, there seemed to be gaps like that - not big ones, but places where I wondered why some of the characters did the things they did, like why Nancy gave herself away by being so anxious to make her first meeting with Mr. Brownlow, or why Monks was such an ass to Oliver, who he didn't know and could have stayed far away from without worry of interference (I mean, after all, in the end he goes to the new world to spend what's left of his fortune - why didn't he do that earlier and avoid any possibility of Oliver's true parentage being discovered and coming back to haunt him?) Small things, but they really made me feel let down. Perhaps I'll just stick with later Dickens from now on.

The Jungle Book and Just So Stories - Rudyard Kipling

I'd never read Just So Stories before, though I think I'd heard of one or two of them, and The Jungle Book is far more interesting a broader than Disney's version of it.

The Jungle Book has the adventures of Mowgli, but the Disney version only spans the first chapter and an episode in a subsequent one, but Mowgli's adventures in the book also relate how he killed Shere Khan (of course in Disney we just get the episode where he scares him off) and also how he tried to integrate into the village. In the book, Mowgli doesn't fit in with the wolves, or with the people.

But there's also this great story about Rikki Tikki Tavi, a mongoose that kills an entire cobra family, saving a little boy and his family from certain death. Don't you love the words "Rikki Tikki Tavi"? Great name for a lovable mongoose. So imagine my surprise when I watch a movie trailer while I'm still finishing the book in which Billy Bob Thornton tells a kid that it's okay to lie to his dad because he's from rikki tikki tavi or someplace like that! (Bad News Bears remake obviously). Spoiled the deliciousness of the name just a little. But not too much 'cause Kipling's got a real flair for storytelling and I loved Rikki Tikki Tavi (the name and the character).

Just So Stories is a series of "How the Leopard got his Spots" kind of stories, but the interesting part about these is the extent to which the narrator of the stories is engaged with the audience (a child, from the sounds of it). He repeatedly interrupts the narration to explain things, humorously, and in great detail to the child who the story is directed at. He also very humorously, and in great detail again, describes the drawings that accompany the stories, making comments about the limitations of working in B&W and the difficulties of representing things accurately. Very interesting from a narratological perspective.

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Book club choice - but I'm really glad I read this one and if I'd ever had more time for pleasure reading, it would've been on a TBR pile anyway.

The book isn't for the fainthearted. I've been told it's not as bad as The Lovely Bones, at least not the first chapter of that one, but I think it's overall effect is much more disturbing in a long-lasting way. It's a story of betrayal, and the narrator's attempts at restitution for that childhood betrayal echoed a bit thin for me. I wasn't convinced he did enough to make up for his actions, even if he discovered that he wasn't fully responsible for the bad stuff in the book.

I don't care that he got beat within an inch of his life - he wouldn't have been there in the first place if he hadn't betrayed his friend as a child. Deciding to take the beating wasn't heroic, it was simply the wheel coming back around.

Well, as you might be able to tell, I really disliked this narrator, though I enjoyed the book and am glad that I read it. Perhaps that was the point however, to dislike the narrator. And the next book club book is Atonement, another book where I didn't really care for the narrator and didn't think she'd done much to atone for what she'd done wrong.

Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

I'd never actually read this book before. I think I'd only seen movie versions of the story - which meant that I heard Tim Curry's voice everytime Long John Silver opened his mouth to speak.

Despite this distraction (and yes, I loved the muppet version of the story), I was able to get into the story for its own sake. I found the first person narration by Jim the best part of the book because of the perspective it gave the whole adventure - after all, Jim's in it for the glory, as a boy would be, and not the money that his adult companions obviously hope to make. Jim's view is vindicated in the end as well when all the bad or questionable guys in the book end up blowing their wad, while he and the good guys are 'richer' for the experience.

I enjoyed Jim's narration so much that I was disappointed when the episode in the stockade shifted from his perspective instead of just being told retrospectively. Seeing the action from Jim's point of view also allowed the reader to anticipate Jim's own responses. For example, as an adult reader, the sailors (pirates) "inability" to capture Black Dog after chasing him out of Long John's pub confirms the reader's suspicions about Long John (they'd been aroused earlier, but without substantiation) but Jim, being a child, takes a little longer to realize it. This creates a kind of narrative tension that's thoroughly enjoyable and is obviously what Stevenson wanted to do in choosing to narrate from the boy's perspective.

Fun book - almost as much fun as the muppets!

Briefing for a Descent into Hell - Doris Lessing

This is one odd book. I had a real difficult time getting into it, but once I did, it had me hooked.

It's hard to tell exactly what's going on because it's told from the perspective of a mental patient. But just like Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, the reader is invited to imagine that the fantasies of the madman/woman are actually an alternate universe. Except in Lessing's novel, which alternate universe we're referring to is unclear, since there seem to be several of them, or at least, the protagonist has travelled through several of them before the narrative begins.

Very different novel than The Fifth Child, and even than Memoirs of a Survivor, which employs a similar technique of unexplained reality, but to a lesser extent than this novel. Once you figure out what's going on, it gets interesting.

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

Of course at some point in my childhood, I read this book, and its sequel, but as is often the case with books that you read in childhood, when you read it as an adult, it sounds so much different.

The one thing that I found most striking was the way I paid attention to scenes that I had thought irrelevant, or uninteresting as a child. Probably some of the disinterest stemmed from an inability to interpret the scene from a child's perspective. For example, the scene in the Duchess's kitchen with the pepper in the soup. Remember that one? I didn't from my childhood reading, but then as an adult, I read all kinds of class and gender stuff in that scene that helped in part to explain the text. And the child that turned to a pig?

Well, as a kid, it was just a bit weird but seemed unconnected to anything else, but as an adult, when you couple that with the Duchess's response to her cook and the summons of the queen, well, it seems that the Duchess's kitchen is a kind of liminal space. It's a place where the Duchess is in charge and she sees her kitchen through a kind of rose-colored glasses. She seems not to notice the pepper, though the stranger who enters, Alice, does. She also lords over the cook, who actually is pretty abusive back, not a good example of Victorian ideals of servant management. And her child is a yelling little brat, but human nonetheless (and her lack of response to the child also follows Victorian homemaking instruction manuals that warned against spoiling children with attention). So when Alice takes the child out of the fantasyland of the kitchen, it becomes a pig, running off to root in the forest.

Okay, so maybe that interpretation's a bit weak - I haven't carefully thought it out. But it was an interesting experience rereading the text.

Cross Channel - Julian Barnes

Short story collection, so a fast read. I enjoyed probably 60% of the stories, and I did like the little things that linked some with others in the collection. But I had problems reading this one - probably because I'm Canadian.

More specifically, probably because I'm not English or French. There were a lot of references to the history of these two countries, many of which were the linchpin for the story, and if you didn't know the history, it took a long time to figure out the story, sometimes not till the end of it. I'm sure as an Englishman/woman, it would have been much more enjoyable, but for someone who doesn't know enough about the two regions, it was a disappointment. Made me want to learn a bit more though, so I suppose that's all good.

News from Nowhere - William Morris

I first read this book years ago in a Utopian lit class (really fabulous class with a great teacher), so I remembered some of it, but as usual, my leaky memory meant that a second read through revealed far more stuff than the first time around.

One thing I'd forgotten that I found interesting this time was the construction where the book is very specifically written about 'a friend' and isn't the narrator's experience directly. Since the book takes the form of a dream anyway, I'm not sure why the second distancing effect of the story of a 'friend' was necessary. I suppose it reflects the social position of the Socialists in Victorian England - obviously they weren't too reputable. Perhaps it's akin to writing a book about communism during the McCarthy era.

The premise is a simple one, that socialist reforms of the Victorian age give rise to a kindler, gentler, less polluted, less densely populated England in the future (early twenty-first century). It's an idyllic vision, but as a reader at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a bit hard to swallow sometimes - not the socialism, but the population. In the book, the population of Victorian England is spread out across the country in small communities, which means everyone has lots of room to roam (especially the kids), but given the kind of population growth the Victorians were experiencing, it's hard to imagine why Morris thought it would remain stable (unless this was an unspoken assumption of socialism). With all these little villages too, it makes it difficult to imagine what international relations might be like, since there's no centralized (or even just plain central) place in which trade might take place. But it's a lovely fantasy nonetheless.

The Island of Dr. Moreau H. G. Wells

There's something problematic about watching movies that reference stories before reading those stories. All the way through this one, I kept picturing Marlon Brando whenever Dr. Moreau would speak, and not even the original Brando, but South Park's version of him!

Nevertheless, I was able to enjoy the book and shut out the visual representations of Dr. Moreau long enough to get a good sense of the original story and the horror the audience must have felt along with the protagonist, Edward, in seeing the creatures that inhabit the island. The most horrific thing of course is the transgression of the line between human and animal, and Wells' morality play creates the kind of horror that makes this transgression clear without bashing the reader over the head with it, in part, because Edward Prendick, through whose eyes we see the events on the island is a bit of a prude and unimaginative while being highly superstitious. It's one of those books where they choice of narrator lets the author pull off what might otherwise fail if the action were seen through another character's eyes.

The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro

I had read so much about the story, I felt like I knew it before I read it.

Nevertheless, there's a good reason why I heard so much about this story - and that's because it's a well constructed and narrated story. I don't want to go through all the plot points, other than to say that I agree with the critics who say that this isn't about the difference between Japanese dignity and English reticence. I think it's more about the individual characters of the story, and to read national characteristics/critique into the story reduces the richness of it to an allegory, which this most definitely is not.

A Maggot John Fowles

I'd never even heard of John Fowles before I started reading post WWII Brit lit criticism, and then he popped up all over the place. He's better known for The French Lieutenant's Woman, but I chose this book to read first because it seemed more relevant to my purposes (of course I read this for a reading list, what else do I read anything for? Oh, yeah, and bookclub)

It's a strange story - a combination of epistle, deposition and narration, that tells the story of what is either a science fiction first contact story OR the ramblings of an insane woman. It's nicely ambiguous that way. And it tells the story of one of the founders of the quakers, which was interesting for me, since I knew nothing at all about that sect (though this isn't a big part of the book). The structure of the book contributes to its ambiguity because it does not rely on a single narrative voice.

The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood

Reading this book over a decade after I read it the first time, gave me a different perspective on it. Reading it living in Massachusetts instead of Canada also made me think differently about the story.
I didn't pick up on the fact that the Rachel and Leah Centre where the women in this reproductive dystopia are taken for their retraining is actually Harvard University. When I first read it, I imagined it was set in a generic or Toronto-like city (Atwood after all seems to like Toronto), and recognizing the few features that are described made the second read through a very different experience than the first.

It was as creepily dystopic as I remember it, if anything, I think if was more eerie for me reading it as an adult rather than as a teenager. When the handmaid loses her job and is reduced to a nobody, an extension of her husband, his response to it hit me harder this time than the first time that I read it.

I also loved the "Historical Notes" at the end in which academics 150 years later attempt to reconstruct the history of Gilead, in part from the testimony of the handmaid (the narrative is revealed to have come from the transcription of a set of tapes found in a trunk in Maine - the researchers actually needed to construct a tape recorder to play them). It's so similar to what we frequently do in literary studies, and it made the relative nature of the story so much more realistic for me. Not only is the story fragmentary and unorganized, but it also clearly depends on the narrator's memory, which is demonstrably false sometimes, for example, when she tries to imagine what has happened to her husband, or when she writes, "I don't want to tell this story anymore".

I'm very glad I reread this book, aside from the fact I've included it in one of my reading lists.

The Mimic Men V. S. Naipaul

I think this is one of the first books I've ever read (at least that I'm consciously aware of) that won a Pulitzer Prize. I can see why it won it. I can also see why popular fiction will never win the Pulitzer.
The novel tells the story of a Caribbean politician and his life "in parenthesis" on his home island and in London. The narrative voice doesn't shift from place to place, which keeps the focus on the cohesiveness of the personality that moves between the two spaces. The narrator's depiction of his own life is strangely muted at times, as if he really doesn't ever care what happens to him. He never seems to get angry for instance, even at things he should be angry about, and when people around him express other strong emotions like anger or jealousy, he is terribly uncomfortable with it.

The narrator is fascinated with the quality of light in both places, but most particularly in London, something shared with some other postcolonial writers, and his depictions of landscapes frequently employ light as a descriptor of the mood that each place evokes. It's a very interesting engagement with the physical, yet non-tangible element (light) of landscape.
This is certainly one of those books that sticks with you after you've read it and worthy of a reread at some future point.

Lady Audley's Secret Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Victorian novel, so of course it's a long one, but it's also sensationalist fiction, which makes it fascinating reading.

I'd read Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White whcih is the other great Victorian sensation novel, but I think this one was better crafted. I especially liked that the villain in this one was a woman, but because a woman also wrote it, she is portrayed as a criminal without all the misogynistic Eve-spawn crap that most men (at least in the Victorian and earlier eras) wrote into any depiction of evil women. I actually rather admired Lady Audley at times, even though she was a horribly spoiled young woman who could not be content to live with the decisions she's made in her life (the limited nature of those options in the society depicted does somewhat mediate this problem, but she still takes the lowest road possible).

I read Collins in a Victorian lit class, but I think if I wanted to include a sensation fiction novel, I would include this one rather than Collins, just as I would replace Rushdie as a representative postcolonial writer with Zadie Smith.

One Thousand White Women Jim Fergus

What an odd title for a book. It sounds racist at the same time as it's a very dull description of what the book is about (which is to say, the book is far more interesting than its title).

When book club first selected this book, I was somewhat skeptical about it, since I hadn't heard of the author before, and usually don't read 'historical' fiction of this sort. It's pseudo-autobiographical nature usually would turn me off, but I found myself very immersed in the book, to the point where my family had to repeat themselves to get my attention while reading it. Such immersivity is something I associate with my happiest reading moments, particularly as a teenager when I was beginning to discover my own reading tastes, and it's always a joy to just read a book without worrying about remembering the details or making notes as I go along.

That's not to say I didn't cry while reading the Codicil. I did. But that was a good thing - the book had drawn me into its world very effectively by that point.

The way I felt so immersed in this book made me think about the difference between reading it and Heart of Darkness. Part of my complaint about Conrad was that I had read so much theory about the book that I found it got in the way of just enjoying the story. And I find it difficult to really become immersed in a book when I'm constantly thinking 'Is this an important detail?' 'Should I underline this line?' 'How would a deconstructionist/feminist/post-colonialist read this passage?'

That got me thinking about whether it is only my aproach to a book: as scholarly text to take notes about, or as book to just enjoy (sans pencil), or the actual 'quality' of the book that affects its ability to be read critically or immersively. In other words, are 'good' i.e. literary books better adapted to critical response because they are harder to read and the construction/ideas of the book interrupt immersivity, or are they just somehow categorically 'better' written? This is a question I have difficulty deciding. I happend to like popular lit, and find it an interesting source for cultural critique, but in that sense, am I ignoring its actual 'value' from the point of view of literary or well-crafted text?

I haven't decided this question yet, but I have decided I like this book. It was about something I would not have naturally picked up (frontier woman confronting 'Indian wars' in nineteenth century America) but it provided me pleasure in reading, in part because I think it was indeed well written, so I would recommend it to other people.

Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad

Another Conrad. Well, why not? I have to read them both, so I might as well read them back to back. I know this is the most frequently read Conrad, but as I said, I think I liked The Secret Agent better.

The psychology of The Secret Agent is more subtle than in this novel, and I think that makes for a better book. The later book also spells out specific behaviours and attitudes that reveal that psychology better than Heart of Darkness does. It's a case of show, don't tell, creating the more interesting narrative.

Having said that, Heart of Darkness is still indisputably the most frequently read of Conrad's novels - case in point, my Intro to Lit Theory class used this text as the example text and applied various theories to its interpretation. This theoretically-heavy sense kept creeping into my reading of it this time around, and I found myself paying a lot of attention to passages that various critics have (famously) referred to, which annoyed me a bit because I suspect that there are other just as interesting passages that I should/could attend to, but the authority of those critics who have written about the book kept overriding my own critical response to it. Really annoying.

Not that that's the book's fault - it's mine as a reader. But since the reader and writer collaborate to produce the received text, it contaminated my reading of the text.

I also read the book (with Introduction) within a single day - I started in the morning and still finished in time to go out for the evening - so it was a very compact reading - something I certainly don't always accomplish while reading, which made the sense of alienation and the horror of the narrator very clear for me - I never had time to come up for air. The narrator's interjections into the story (when he returns to the Nellie and describes Marlow as he tells the story) were the only breaks from the Congo that I got in reading the book. This at least did help to minimize the authority of those critics that kept crowding into my reading and interrupting its immersive properties.

Classic. Well worth a re-read. Maybe another re-read would even be in order.

The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad

Secrecy abounds! Though the 'secret' in secret garden has little to do with the 'secret' in secret agent.

Even though this text is on one of my reading lists, I hadn't scheduled it into my reading for another month or so. I moved it up because I kept thinking about it when I read Kim. I kept thinking about the different constructions of spying in each of the books. In Kim, spying is a 'game', involves a lot of costuming, knowledge of the habits of the 'enemy' and an ability to move and react quickly to the unfolding events of the 'game'. In The Secret Agent, spying is about indolence, a lot of talk and very little action, strange motivations, and the maintenance of an appearance of domesticity.

This difference is likely the reason why Kim is a successful secret agent, whereas Verloc isn't. Kim only plays the game, and the only personal tie he makes is with the lama, whose own quest parallels Kim's playing of the 'game'. Verloc on the other hand, has 'infiltrated' the anarchists, but it is a group a talkers, not doers. They talk incessantly of the need for revolution, but never take action. In fact, it is when Verloc is pushed into action because his financial remuneration is threatened that things go terribly wrong and he ends up murdered, not through the game, but by the wife who he tried to keep in the dark about his secret life. His mistake lies in his attempt to play the spy game while maintaining an ordinary domestic life.

Conrad, as usual, is a writer who entices you into the space of his story, in this case, the space of London (particularly the east end, always the spicer part of town for novelists), and the city is so vividly described that it seems to come alive on the page. I think I like this book even better than Heart of Darkness.

The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett

When my youngest daughter saw me reading this, she scoffed, "You haven't read that? I've read it AND seen the movie!" Guess I'm falling behind! When I first considered reading this (on the syllabus of a course I'm auditing) I seriously considered just not reading it and skipping the class when it would be discussed (ah! the beauties of auditing!). But I'm glad I didn't.

There's a lot of stuff going on in this text that I ended up finding was fascinating. For one thing, it led me to investigate some children's lit theory, which is interesting and a potentially useful angle for one of my reading lists. But it also employs these children and their garden in ways that allow for subtle critique and commentary on the construction of Englishness and the endless contradistinction between the rural and urban (or urbane in this case).

One of the things I've learnt (and yes, it may seem self-evident, but I never really thought of it before) by reading about kids lit is that most children's literature is non-experimental, both in its form and its ideas (most). In other words, if an idea/moral/value pops up in a children's book, then it is probably fairly mainstream. There are children's books that are written with an agenda or polemic that don't fall into this kind of category, but these books are usually all about whatever it is that they're trying to make a point about: blended families, diversity, changing definitions of family, identity politics (teens) etc. When an idea pops up in a children's book that isn't ostensibly about that idea, then you can be pretty sure it's mainstream.

For example, in this novel, there is a distinct connection made between the 'unhealthy' atmosphere of India, and the 'healthy' climate on the English countryside. It's a given. Also, (and slightly disturbing) is the emphasis on the novel on the boy, Colin, at the end. The novel begins with Mary's story, but once she has become healthy enough to find both the secret garden and Colin (and tell Colin about the garden), she fades into the background, her role is complete. Says a lot about patriarchal assumptions of mastery and place from what I can see.

But it's also a fun little book of kids being kids, playing around with each other and discovering life. And of course it has a strong 'useless adult' fantasy in which the kids constantly out think and out manouevre the adults in the book (who I suspect really aren't quite as dumb as they're made out to be).

The Lost World Arthur Conan Doyle

Reading this book kept reminding me of She, and yet it was very different at the same time. The sense of adventure and exploring new places is there, but it was written after Heart of Darkness, and it has inherited some of the darkness of that novel.

What amazed me was the callousness that pervaded the novel when dealing with anything out of the ordinary. The Professor callously mocks other intellectuals and the adventurous group casually help a tribe of Indians wipe out their rival tribe of ape-men, the "missing link" between apes and humans. An entire species is eradicated by a group of scientists without any comment from the narrator/reporter on the scene. He describes how he always wanted to be a war correspondent but didn't imagine this conflict to be his first experience doing so. He describes the confrontation as a war, not the genocide/annihiliation of an entire species that it is. Mind boggling for an early twenty-first century reader.

The movie (which I'm sure I've seen bits of as the kids watched it on tv) was probably quite different, at least visually, than what I imagined because the only scene that I 'saw' as I was reading was the final one when the pterodactyl escapes into the skies over London (I have an image of Bob Hoskins's character jumping around shouting at someone to close the window.) Strange, disturbing and sometimes fascinating book. Glad I read it.

Bitten Kelley Armstrong

How could I not love a book about a female werewolf? But saying it that way makes it sound all cheesy and badly plotted like most horror novels are (not all, I said most). This was a fantastic book though!
Just how fantastic was it? Well, I read it in two days. That's unusual for me. I am usually reading three books concurrently and take an average of a week to finish any one of them. I started this one during one of my March trips and stayed up till after midnight (when I should've been reading more important things) just to finish it. That's how much I enjoyed it.

Sure, the plot's not super complex, though I had to dig the fact that she's a Canadian female werewolf living in Toronto when the book starts (how cool is that?), but it was the story that kept me going. A friend says she figures the sex scenes are the best she's ever read. I don't know about that (not that any others come immediately to mind), but there were some very nicely written scenes, and some of the best confrontation scenes I've ever read.

I wish I had a good excuse to write about this book (there's a series as well apparently) 'cause there's some really interesting but also fun stuff going on in it. Traditionally, werewolves are male, both in myth and in this particular book - she's the only female werewolf in existence. Werewolves are rarely made werewolves, they're usually born to werewolf fathers - the narrator/female werewolf talks about there only being a handful of made werewolves because most people who are bitten either don't survive the bite or can't handle the psychological effects of the change. They can control it to a degree, but they need to transform at least once a month to feel healthy.

Another feature of the werewolves in this novel is that they form a pack, with a few outsiders, usually werewolves whose fathers have chosen to leave the pack for some reason. There's an intense loyalty within the pack, and as a female werewolf, the narrator is part of that loyalty, but also separate and unique in her status as a female werewolf.

Very interesting story premise and I'm looking forward to reading the sequel.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams

Of course this one is a re-read, but it was so very long ago that I'd forgotten large pieces of this very small book.

What a fun book!

It certainly is timely to reread the book since the movie remake is coming out in the next little while. It's not the kind of book that you really want to spend a lot of time talking about afterwards. It seems to me that the delight of the book lies in the individual experience of reading it and "getting" the jokes, allusions, parallelisms, and just plain outrageousness of it. This is an excellent "what if?" kind of book in that it gets you thinking about the most improbable things. But what is interesting about that process is the way they are presented. It gets you thinking that there's no reason why the universe doesn't act in such a wacky way, and that in turn gets you questioning why it is that the universe acts the way that it indeed does (including asking why humans act the way they do - always a good thing to question).

But even this bit of philosophical musing is too heavy for this book. If White Teeth is like eating vegetables - good for you but hard to enjoy (not my words, I loved it!), then The Hitchhiker's Guide is like a favorite comfort food that you pull out when you're feeling low.

Bel Canto Anne Pratchett

Book Club book - probably wouldn't have picked it up otherwise, though I'm glad I did. I enjoyed it (except for the ending).

I read the book in an entire sitting (sometimes it's nice what flying across North America can do for you), which is unusual for me, but I think I got so much more out of it that way. I wish I had more time to read entire books at one time like that in my regular life. It wasn't necessarily a realistic book; there were certainly times that I thought "that character wouldn't do that" which usually means their actions are there only for the convenience of the plot. I find this kind of unexplained character motivation is more prevalent in movies (probably simply because there isn't time to properly develop a reason for character motivation) but when it crops up in novels, it makes you wonder why. Sometimes it's something I missed as a reader (I somehow missed that Kim was Irish in Kim the first time round, so that really confused me), but sometimes it's just not there. Since other people in the book club felt the same, it wasn't just me.

But there were other parts that although they were far-fetched, I was able to accept because they were, after all, in a very unusual and stressful situation.

But I hated the ending. It didn't seem real to me. Or maybe it was real. But that would mean the rest of the book was unreal, and I don't want it to be. In that way, the book was a bit like The Life of Pi in that you had to choose which version to believe in the end. I had a hard time giving up the first version in that case too.

Border Crossing Pat Barker

I had to sit down after reading this book and seriously think about what the title meant because there aren't any obvious borders in the book.
There are lots of boundaries though, and I suppose a book called Crossing Boundaries would sound too sociological to be a novel, so she chose the word "border" instead. But it made me have to think long and hard about what the title meant.
I liked Barker's Regeneration and The Eye in the Door (still haven't read Ghost Road) but this novel is very different. It has a plot, but it's the kind of plot that doesn't really have any kind of conclusion that makes you feel like things are okay now. It's more like a story that begins in media res and ends the same way. I found myself wondering what was going to happen to one of the characters now that the story is over, and that rarely happens to me. The strength of the story lies in the subject matter ("criminality" and "youth" respectively, though not necessarily "juvenile crime") and the depiction of the characters. It was also a pretty quick read, mostly because it kept me pretty interested.

Kim Rudyard Kipling

Another re-read, but I had forgotten so much of the book, that at times it was barely recognizable and I enjoyed being surprised and reminded about events as they unfolded.
Part of the reason why the book was 'forgettable' wasn't because the book was terribly bad, but just because it is highly episodic. I remembered distinctly the visuality of the scenes (the descriptions are luxuriously complete), but I could not remember what order things happened, since all but a few are indistinguishable in their creation of the character of Kim. He grows up, but the events that are part of the bildungsroman aren't connected - rather, they accumulate so that the Kim at the end of the book is a wiser, but not radically different Kim than the one who began the book.
I kept finding myself comparing this book to Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, partly because both are about spies, but also because both are in some senses about what it means to be "not-English". Each author takes a radically different approach to the second question (and the first I suppose) - Kipling seems to admire imperialism and its possibilities, but recognizes the huge pitfalls. For him, Her Majesty's Secret Service is the epitome of what is good about being English (in part because it allows you to selectively 'go native'), but for Conrad, the spy game is all about misunderstanding, egos, and individual foibles. In Conrad, idealism has a specific role to play (and usually a different role for each participant), but in Kipling, the idealism inherent in spying is the same (mother England), but the methods employed by its practitioners simply vary.
All this talk of comparing the two books makes me think I should now go re-read Conrad. I'm curious how fruitful it might be to pair two books like these (or other pairings... like Slaughterhouse Five and The Wars).

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time Mark Haddon

The narrator is by far the most interesting part of this book, as are most narrators who occupy a very different space than the typical reader does.
The book does not feature a spectacular plot (or even a terribly interesting one - the exegesis would run something like: dog is killed, narrator asks questions about dog's death, fights with father, runs away to mother, comes back home). What is interesting is viewing the characters through the perspective of a narrator who is incapable of deciphering the subtle visual and social cues that most of us would pick up on. In this way, he is a bit like Brittany, the narrator of Atonement, who misinterprets her sister's sexual engagement with a man as a victimization.

Here, the book employs first person narration by Christopher John Francis Boone, 15 years old, who doesn't understand much of the world around him. He observes everything, unselective in what he attends to, which overwhelms him sometimes. He is not good at reading emotions other than very basic ones and doesn't understand idioms. When frustrated or touched (he doesn't like to be touched), he screams, or groans, or does math problems (in a kind of trance). He's very good at math because it has a right answer all of the time whereas human relationships don't always have a right answer. He decides whether it will be a good or bad day depending on how many cars of a certain color he sees on the way to school (he likes red but hates yellow and brown).

He comes across his neighbor's dog Wellington stabbed with a garden fork and decides he will solve the mystery of who killed Wellington. He uses itineraries, maps, and logic to determine who might have killed the dog. He even goes door to door though it scares him to talk to strangers. Encouraged by his teacher, Siobhan, he decides to write it as a mystery, but his father finds the book and takes it away. When Christopher goes to look for it, he finds it in a box full of letters from his mother, and decides this is another mystery. Despite solving both mysteries, Christopher's relationship with his family has deteriorated by the end of the book and the final scene has Christopher discovering he got an A on the exam and determining he will write his A levels in physics and go to university when he is done school.

Fire and Ice Michael Adams

First non-fiction book to get on the list this year (may be the last too for all I know). The full title is Fire and Ice: The United States Canada and the Myth of Converging Values and its all about what the full title describes.
Written by a social economist, the book is a report of thousands of surveys of both Canadians and Americans over the last decade. The surveys rated respondents on social values scales like violence, religiousity, independence, idealism and survivalism. It is probably the most interesting and well written book of statistics I have ever seen.

Adams doesn't pull any punches when it comes to pointing out the negative values that emerge from the surveys, something that seemed to irritate many of his conservative reviewers, but this book explains in clear language what I have intuitively felt and failed to be able to express since arriving here. His injection of humor into what could be a dry analysis of how Canadians and Americans aren't becoming more alike makes this a very easy to read book.

My favorite quote from the text: “…we Canadians sometimes find our neighbours baffling. Between their rhetoric and our own (the left’s admonitions about the dangers of convergence with the gun-toting free marketers to the south, the right’s insistence that we shed our outdated national differences like garments on a long-awaited wedding night and join our industrious, innovative Yankee friends in an orgy of free trade and economic growth), Americans are reflected in so many funhouse mirrors that it would be remarkable if we saw them, collectively, as anything other than caricatures” (20).

What was really interesting for me, coming from Alberta to New England was the way in which the entire U.S. is far more conservative than the whole of Canada (generally speaking of course). Even liberal New England (the most liberal of the seven 'sections' of the U.S.) was more conservative than Alberta (the most conservative 'section' of Canada).

In some ways, this feels like a vindication of sorts. At least I know I'm not wacko or just overly sensitive, my sense of the difference between these two places follows what these statisticians have found out.

Regeneration Pat Barker

A re-read, but well worth it. There were things I picked up on that I hadn't earlier, partly because I was paying more attention to the details, but also because other things I've read since the first read through have influenced my thinking about topics in the book.

The book's setting is Edinburgh during the middle of the "Great War" (1917), a setting which has everything to do with the plot. It's a fictional story, but uses real people - Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, William Rivers - which makes for an interesting effect. My online book club discussed this book recently (which is part of the reason I re-read it, the other part being the neverending comps), and the consensus was that in using real characters, Barker infuses an extra level of vitality in the story that wouldn't have been there without those people. The use of historical characters resonates particularly with the purely fictional characters and gives the whole book a sense of historical accuracy, even if fictionalized, that if would not have had if the characters were purely fictional. It's the mix that gives the book the power it does.

I've also read The Eye in the Door which is the next book in the series, but I have yet to read Ghost Road (the final book and the one that won a Booker). I suppose now would be a good time to do so.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet Salman Rushdie

My third Rushdie book - it's good, but of course different from Midnight's Children or The Satanic Verses.


The Ground Beneath Her Feet in reviews is always touted as the first novel by Rushdie written about America. The book jacket describes it as a "gift" to America. Not to be one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I wonder if the blurb writer who wrote that actually ever read the book. I would use the word "critique" rather than "gift". But it's a "critique" that, not surprisingly, was better received than the "gift" of The Satanic Verses to the Muslem world. In other words, there's perhaps a bit less to get insulted about... or perhaps a bit more.

The novel follows the intersecting lives of three characters: two lovers who form a rock band that becomes even bigger than the Beatles or the Stones, and their childhood friend, a photographer who captures not only their images, but also the standard images of the photojournalist covering news (i.e. catastrophes and wars) around the world. The story is about their love story, but it's also about culture, it's about revising history (political, rock & roll, even literary), and also a critique/celebration of the immigrant experience and international politics. It's also about the upheavals in our lives (embodied in the earthquakes of the novel) that forever change our lives.

Told by a photographer, the novel is surprisingly scant in visual trompe d'oeil, or cinematic scenes, though there are a few. His secrets, his involvement in the story, and the history that he describes - similar yet different from our own - make him a highly unreliable narrator, and the ending thus seems just a bit too pat. I found myself wondering what he was hiding.

I found the first hundred or so pages a bit rough going... and was unimpressed with the ending, but in between, the skill of a the writer and his play with cultural referents and how we use them to make meaning are absolutely delightful. They are so plentiful that no one will get them all, but that's okay, it's clear the writer is playing and when you're reading it's easy to be convinced to go along for the ride.

The Afterlife of George Cartwright John Steffler

Unlike the previous book, I did not get around to reading this one until over a decade after its publication (even though I owned it for the greater part of that time). Another very interesting book in many ways - traditional and postmodern (to use those terms loosely) at the same time.

The author's note at the end of the novel explains best what the story attempts to do - he was trying to capture the flavor and sense of exploration and adventure available during the eighteenth and nineteenth century as the northern part of the Americas were colonised. To do this, he tried to balance actual exerpts from George Cartwright's journal (yes, he really lived) with a narrative that filled in the blanks and made for a good story. I think he succeeded.

The novel is structed as a combination of three types of narration. Third person 'objective' narration of events (both in the 'present' and the past), George's journal entries after his death (observations of the contemporary world when he encounters it as well as recollections of his earlier life), and George's 'original' journal entries from when he was alive. The last of these would seem to be the most objective since they are descriptions of his actions as he undertakes them, but as we discover near the end of the novel, he published these journal entries. While he claims he was scrupulous in not changing them, he also reveals that he made up almost half of the journal entries that he originally published. He returned to London from Labrador in 1779 but in his published journal, he has Labrador entires dating till a 'retirement' in 1786.

The concept and construction are novel and interesting, but the writing also is as well. At times it reads drily like a journal, but the jumping from narrative form to form and the simple adventure of following George are enough to keep you interested and reading, even though George as a character is not necessarily very interesting.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Susanna Clarke

This is one of those rare times that I actually have read a book when it first comes out...and I'm really glad I read this one. It appealed to me on many levels.

I liked how the book was structured.
I liked the narration.
I liked the writing.
I liked the concept (historical revisioninsm)

I know some people who read it hated the footnotes, but I loved them. They weren't disconcerting because I'm very used to dealing with footnotes and deciding when to read them and when not to. It helped that they were actual footnotes and not endnotes, otherwise I'm sure I would've read much fewer of them, even if in being footnotes, there were places where the narration was suspended for pages just to make room for the footnotes.

Not only did I not mind the footnotes, I found myself fascinated by their function in the book. At one point, the story makes reference to Merlin the magician (who we all know from King Arthur) and the footnote attached to that reference is a sentence explaining how Nimue (sorceress apprentice to Merlin) trapped him in a tree with his own magic. It's a story that anyone who's read Arthurian lit might know.

A few pages later, there is reference to a story of a magic ring. This story is not one imported from out culture like the Arthurian one, so the story of the ring (no, it's a different ring...) is footnoted in great detail - the entire note takes several pages to tell this piece of folklore. In one way, it's a bit like all the extra mythology that Tolkien created around his basic story. I found it delightful.

I also was impressed with the care Ms. Clarke took in creating the manuscript, and her understanding of the ways that we gather knowledge about societies that have gone before us. In literary studies, the lives of authors long dead (especially those who didn't have biographers when they were alive), are frequently reconstructed through the letters they wrote and received. [Possession also played with this epistolary-biography assembly]. In one footnote, the source for the information is given as a letter written by Strange to Segundus - it's the kind of footnote one might see in a biography or a historiographic analysis. Thing is, there is no mention in the story, no scene, where Strange writes a letter to Segundus. It takes place behind the scenes, but in including that reference in a footnote, Clarke draws attention to the artificiality of our 'reconstructions' of someone's life through their letters. At the time, the letters weren't worthy of note - years later, they become the cornerstone of our understanding (in some cases at least) of what a writer's life was like.

Even if that last paragraph made no sense, what I'm trying to say is that this book appealed to me as a lover of fantasy fiction, it appealed to me as a lover of a good story (as a reader, you might say) as well as appealing to me as an academic. What more could I ever want from a single book? If you read for any or all of these reasons, you might just love this book as much as I do.

Odd Women George Gissing

I'd never heard of George Gissing before I picked up this book (I'm piggybacking onto a Victorian fin de siécle class), and even then, I assumed the George in the author's name was a pseudonym like George Eliot or George Sand (both women writers). Even though he's not a woman, Gissing is able to write about women in a way that surprised me.

When I finished the book, I originally thought he had done a better job of portraying the women than the men, but after listening to others talk in the class, I realized his men were more complex than I had perhaps at first given them credit for being. Although I still think his women were better characterized (mostly because they get all the interesting plot lines), the gap between how men and women are portrayed in the novel is smaller than I thought at first.

The Introduction of the critical edition that I read describes it as "the novel most fundamentally attuned to late Victorian culture and to the social issues defining that culture" because of its attention to detail (geography, willingness to describe vice) and its depiction of the issues facing women.

Odd Women in the title refers to the excess number of middle class women who had no hope of marrying, hence 'odd' not paired. This was in part due to emigration of men to the colonies, attrition through war, and the variable birth rate of men and women, but in the novel it meant that these women, who traditionally depended on men to support them, were often left in extreme poverty. The book not only discusses marriage, but the training of these odd women for work (other than the badly paid and overdemanded governess and nurse positions). It also presents arguments both for an against the idea of free unions (common-law marriage) which was beginning to emerge during the period, though usually not with favor.

Orlando Virginia Woolf

Wow! Second novel by Woolf in about a month. I guess I'm getting a good dose! This is one book where I liked the movie better.

I saw the movie made of the book, oh, probably a couple of years ago. It was on tv, so I was doing other things at the same time, but I do remember it being a beautifully shot film spanning the decades that Orlando lives through. I found the gender switch quite believable in the film as well.

Not that I had problems with the gender switch in the book, it just was introduced in an odd way with an allegorical "staged" interlude - by that I mean I found the entry of chastity, purity, and modesty that precedes the change to sound very much like the entry of a chorus in a Greek play - to explain or set up the action that's to follow.

Part of the reason the book is so difficult is because it is trying to represent everything. Even with the multitude of detail, there still seems to be more lying beneath the surface and this is confirmed by the narrator's statement that he/she is a biographer, but a biographer who only describes six or seven of the lives of her subject, not the thousands that each person is comprised of.

This narrator is an intrusive presence, not only dictating what a narrator should do, but introducing side stories, stating a refusal to introduce other side stories because they detract from the subject at hand, inserting allegorical sequences, conflating history/story, incorporating excerpts from other texts, and a refusing to finish a list because it takes up too much space (just when he/she gets to the best part of the list).

The text insists that time is subjective as well as that gender is for the most part constructed (clothing creates it), while accepting that there are differences in ways of thinking between the sexes.

Very interesting as a 'project' kind of book.

The Story of an African Farm Olive Schreiner

Coincidentally, this is a re-read book too (no, this won't be a trend), but I didn't pay really close attention to it the first time around, and frankly, I don't think I actually finished it. So in that sense, it's a bit like reading a book for which you've already seen the movie - you've got a basic idea of what's going on in the story, but the details aren't there.

The 'novel' not only tells a story (or more accurately, stories) but also in several chapters, moves into philosophical and aesthetic discussions, something not surprising for a Victorian novel. But this is a novel of the periphery. It's author lived in South Africa before venturing to London to try and sell the book, and the novel features a glossary of Dutch and Afrikan (Boer) terms to help oreint the reader.

What for me was remarkable about this book was the way it dealt with the lives of the characters. Although there was a foray into allegory, into philosophical rants on the rights of women, and even historical asides, what kept me reading was the characters. They all seemed so willing to accept their fate, and even the 'New Woman' at the center of the novel, the one who wants an education and not to be just someone's wife, aspires to more, but accepts that her aspirations don't necessarily match the society she lives in.

This was an unusual book in many ways - not like other Victorian novels, yet not like a contemporary novel either. It anticipates modernist writers, especially feminist ones, but it also contains several formal elements that reminded me more of an eighteenth century novel than one written at the close of the nineteenth.

The Gunslinger Stephen King

So, in my first post for the 50 book challenge (I won't count Talisman since I began it before the end of the year even though I didn't finish it till last week), I actually have a re-read. But it is an interesting re-read since I have not read it since the late eighties, and I have read the subsequent seven books of the series since then, which lends the first book a whole new flavor.

I understand there is an updated version of the book. I read the original edition, the one that has all the minor inconsistencies and retains the flavor of a serialized production (which is how the stories were first released). Re-reading this book, almost two decades after I first read it, and after having read the rest of the series, restored some of my respect for Mr. King.

I've always liked his writing (and most specifically, his fantasy writing like The Stand or The Eyes of the Dragon), but going back to his early work made me appreciate its relative brevity. The scope of the books to follow doesn't weight heavily upon the first book of the series, and even knowing how many thousands of pages were to follow, I got the sense that the story could end in another couple hundred words. It would be a different story then obviously (and probably not a Stephen King story) but it could be complete in a few more scenes - it would look much more like Browning's poem that inspired it in that case.

The Coda of the final book points back to the beginning of this first book, and I found it interesting to see how the intervening pages changed my perception of Roland when I went back to look at him here at the beginning. And yet, he remained so much the same. I think that's likely because he doesn't remain the hero of the story for the rest of the series, he takes a back seat to other characters for a while. That's probably good, 'cause it would be hard to keep writing about a character like him without sooner or later getting into his head, and then you would ruin the character, because he has no significant psychological depth.

The Talisman Stephen King and Peter Straub

Having read the entire Dark Towerseries, I felt it necessary to read this book, since it seems to anticipate much of what King writes later in the Dark Tower books.

The sense of imitation is eerie at times, and I found myself wondering more than once what Straub's other writing is like (since I've never read anything by him) because the novel felt overwhelmingly King-ish. It is a similar story to Roland's, though the hero in this story is a twelve year old boy (he turns thirteen on the final day). Jack and his mother are escaping his evil 'uncle' and he discovers he must go on a quest to retrieve the talisman of the title in order to save his mother (who is dying of cancer). Most people in the story have a 'twinner' in the 'Territories', another world that is similar to ours and yet much simpler, less poluted, and much more medieval. He 'flips' for world to world as he travels from New Hampshire to California, has many adventures along the way (including befriending a werewolf and being locked up in an 'orphanage'), retrieves the sphere, defeats the bad guy, and saves his mother. The story itself isn't a parallel for the Dark Tower series, but the idea of alternate (and connected) worlds is.

The fact that this book was written part way through the sequence of the first three Dark Tower books leads me to suspect that is was an exercise in which King tries to work out the ideas behind the Dark Tower's alternate worlds (something which I think he does more skillfully in the Dark Tower series than here, but hey, he's working out the kinks, right?)

I wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you're a big King fan, or a big Dark Tower fan. I don't think it explained the Dark Tower any better than I had already gotten from the series.

To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf

I have to admit that I had never read anything written by Virginia Woolf before I picked up this book. Having said that however, I found the book felt very familiar at times.

The familiarity seemed to stem from a combination of elements: a strong reaction to the stream of consciousness style of writing, and an overpowering awareness of a female voice throughout its narration. Another critical component is gender relations, particularly as experienced by the artist, Lily Briscoe; she has difficulty at times reconciling her creativity with her femininity.

One of the discussion questions for this book was whether it was a triptych, which emphasizes the visual nature of the text. If I remember right, the triptych is frequently associated with religious themes or found above altars and either consists of a single scene spread over three panels, or three separate but interrelated images (i.e. three saints - one per panel). In this novel, the lighthouse would of course have to be represented, but in the background. There's just way too much more going on in the foreground that is integral to the story, mostly to do with character interactions. The placement of the tree that troubles Lily in the first section (and which she solves by moving the salt shaker) would also have a prominent place, since once she 'solves' its placement in the final section, she seems satisfied with the painting (and maybe the reader is thus satisfied with the ending as well?) Perhaps the tree and lighthouse represent two goals/desires in the novel? James is finally praised by his father as they reach the lighthouse and Lily seems to find some inner balance between her role as
artist and as woman in the completion of the painting.

The dinner party scene, emblematic of the relationships in the novel seems central, while the lighthouse and Lily's tree frame these relationships and provide concrete connections to the surrounding social and physical landscape, something lost in the central section of the novel (a section I have difficulty imagining represented in a painting).

Or perhaps Lily's painting is itself a triptych? The ekphrasis is incomplete, but I could also imagine a painting that includes Lily painting the scene in front of her - the artist within the painting. There's a specific term for that, isn't there?

The idea that this book might be represented visually was very thought provoking for me.

Summary:
Three sections: The Window; Time Passes; The Lighthouse
The Window James Ramsey wants to go to the lighthouse but his father (and the annoying dissertation-writing Mr. Charles Tansley) tell him the weather won't be good. Lily Briscoe visits the Ramsey summer house as well and paints (though Tansley claims women can't write or paint). Mrs. Ramsey is deferrential to Mr. Ramsey who needs constant personal assurance even though he's a brilliant philosopher. William Bankes, a widow, is a perfect match for her according to Mrs. Ramsey. Paul Rayley falls in love with Minta while James and Camila are afraid of the dark. Pru is beautiful.
Time Passes is 10 years long (yet the shortest section of the book) Mr.s Ramsey had died, Pru married and died in childbirth; another son Andrew was blown up in the war.
The Lighthouse finds the remainders Mrs. Ramsey, James, camilla, Lily and Mr. Carmichael at the house. Ramsey, Camilla and James go to the lighthouse while Lily continues the picture she began 10 years before. The novel ends with Mr. Ramsey complimenting James's piloting as the reach the lighthouse (something James has wanted from his father since childhood) and Lily successfully finishing her painting.

My favorite quote (probably because I read it so near my holidays): "So coming back from a journey or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one's ease"

A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens

Apropos for a December read... But the story was in subtle ways different from what I remembered.

For one thing, I hadn't read the story for many years, and then I watched the Muppet Christmas Carol many times in between (definitely the BEST adaptation of the story and my all time favorite). The major difference between contemporary adaptations of the story and the original was the latter's emphasis on a broad definition of family. Usually at the end of an adaptation, Scrooge goes to Cratchitt's house, or through the town being nice to people, giving away money, smiling, patting little kids on the head, etc. to demonstrate how he is a changed man, and more importantly, a charitable man. The idea that Scrooge now donates cash, his time, and attention to the poor is the biggest 'lesson' at the end of most adaptations.

In the original story, Scrooge doesn't go on a yuletide philanthropy spree (though we are told he does look out for his 'fellow man' in the coda). In Dickens's story, he sends the turkey to the Cratchitt's and sets out in the street where he meets the men he turned away the day before and makes a donation. But he heads out in the street to spend the day with his nephew, not to find random people to be nice to. The story reads "He was at home [in his nephew's house] in five minutes. Nothing could be heartier...Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness!" and invokes through its repetition the earlier (long) description (while with Christmas Present) of the celebrations that take place in that house.

In most adaptations, the sequence in which the nephew's party is shown emphasizes the word game where the guests disparage Scrooge as a cranky old man, but in the story, the word game is just a small part of the description of the celebration and the impression is that family time (even if it is with distant family relations and friends instead of a nuclear family) is critical to a festive spirit. Adaptations tend to focus only on the nuclear family of the Cratchitts and because Scrooge does not have a nuclear family (and presumably never will), his charitable acts have to turn to strangers and the people of the town, not to his extended family. I think that says something very interesting about the cult of the family that has grown in our culture in the intervening years.

The Journal of Mortifying Moments Robyn Harding

Fun book and quick read. I would definitely recommend this as a plane ride/road trip/doctor's office wait book - highly immersive novel.

Some of the immersivity created by this novel comes from the straightforward writing, some from the character, and some from the humor in the book. Together, they produce a really pleasant and fun read. I found myself trying not to laugh aloud at times (because it would've been pretty embarassing) and although I've never really been in the situation that the single protagonist is, I still found I could relate very well to her self-deprecation and the (sometimes) ridiculous things she did.

Having read The Quality of Life Report just a short while ago, I found myself comparing this book to that one... and the comparison was favorable to The Journal. I had a harder time relating to the arrogance and cosmopolitanism of the character in Daum's book - her New York disparagement of the Midwest was just too political for me. In Harding's book here, the character's anxiety was more closely aligned with her personal life. It is after all set up as alternating chapters of the "Journal of Mortifying Moments" and narrated action between the writing sections. The character, Kerry, is advised by her therapist to write down her most mortifying sexual/relationship moments in a journal in an attempt to help her see that her relationship difficulties aren't a personal defect but rather these events are just combinations of inexperience, bad luck, and occasional lapses in judgement. The story unfolds as first person narration (the journal) as well as narrated "first person" story that tells of events in Kerry's current life from her point of view.

The character is lovable because she's so much like the rest of us... maybe with a bit more bad luck, but entirely human. What she discovers about herself at the end is just the kind of thing that everyone seeks at some time or another during their life. Sure, the end is a tad sappy, but the book has to end somehow, and a sappy ending is one of the easiest ways of ending the story sometimes.

I won't hold it against this book.