Review: Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories

Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"I will have to come to grips with the real world, which is composed, I know, not of words but of drainpipes, holes in the ground, furiously multiplying weeds, hunks of granite, stacks of more or less heavy matter which must be moved from one point to the other, usually uphill." --"Unearthing Suite"

I was vaguely unsatisfied by each of these stories because I wanted to know more. They were not, for the most part, complete narrative arcs, but rather glimpses into the minds and lives of various women and they seemed rather voyeuristic. Taken as a group the women depicted in each tale blended together a bit, which is unfortunate as each could probably have sustained her own novel.

This is my 13th book for the 8th Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust

As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust 
by Alan Bradley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel was a bit of a departure from the other Flavia de Luce novels in that it was set at a boarding school in Canada instead of in the small English town Flavia is from. The regular characters, like Dogger, are referred to fairly often but don't actually appear and I didn't think the new characters that were introduced were as interesting. They weren't very detailed which could have been the problem. The mystery here was well constructed.
There were, as I have come to expect from Bradley, some wonderful observations.

"None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I had begun to realize why librarians are sometimes able to achieve such pinnacles of crankiness: It's because they are in agony. If only publishers could be persuaded, I thought, to sramp all book titles horizontally instead of vertically, a great deal of unpleasantness could be avoided all round." (p.343)

I also learned (though have not verified) that the first electron microscope in North America was built by a couple of students at the University of Toronto.

This is book 12/13 for the Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: The Guilty Plea

Guilty Plea by Robert Rotenberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was the story of a murder trial from the point of view of the lawyers (mostly) and was excellent. Detective Ari Greene is also part of it and is an intriguing character who I liked in Old City Hall. There were a lot of neighborhood details about different parts of Toronto as well. I'm looking forward to the next Rotenberg novel.

This is book 11/13 for the Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: St. Urbain's Horseman

St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Overall I would say that this is a book about heroes and how they do and do not help a person deal with their life. It took me a while to figure out what was going on in this book, it seemed to just wander for quite a while but, as with Barney's Version, once I adjusted to the lack of linear plot and just went with it things got better. I thought the generational position of the characters, they are a bit older than the baby boomers, was very similar to Gen-X in being ahead of a huge cohort. Jake provided a good perspective on the world around him as he was between a lot of different cultural groups (British and Canadian, 2 generations, the film world and his old neighborhood, Jews and Gentiles, etc.). Once again Duddy Kravitz is a character--I really need to read his story.

This book counts toward the Canadian Book Challenge and is 10/13 with less than a month to go.

Review: If...

If... A Mind-Bending New Way of Looking at Big Ideas and Numbers by David J. Smith; illustrated by Steve Adams.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise of this book is that you can understand huge concepts, like the whole of human history, by scaling them down to an image, like a tape measure. The author, who lives in British Columbia, takes facts about a variety of things and describes them this way. For example, if all the energy sources in the world were represented by 100 lightbulbs only 2 of them would be powered by hydroelectric power. The illustrations, by Steve Adams who lives in Montreal, are nicely done and are the key to grasping this visualizing method of grasping big numbers.
There were a few things that kept me from loving this book. Some of the illustrations weren't proportional--like the continents which were depicted as portions of the page, but the ones with larger % didn't have larger sections, they were different from each other, but not matching their proportions--which bothered me since the point is to present a visual depiction of the relative sizes. I also thought that the history pieces, inventions through time as a tape measure was one, were less helpful visualizations than the more proportional ones.
Overall I did like this book, and I thought the page about the relative size of the planets as sports balls (earth is a baseball, mars is a golf ball) was brilliant.

This counts toward the Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: Who is Wayne Gretzky?

Who Is Wayne Gretzky? by Gail Herman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My nephew (he's 8) liked another book in this series so when I came across this one I picked it up for him. "The Great One" played hockey from the time he was a little kid and broke all the records. I like the format of this book--the biography is mixed in with sidebars on related geographic and historical info--and learned not only about Wayne Gretzky but that Alexander Graham Bell was also born in Brantford, Ontario.
This counts toward the Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: Last Night in Montreal

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There isn't really a main character in this book, which is one of the things that makes it amazing. There is a central story, but like most of life more than one person is involved in the story and the omniscient narrator moves from person to person (and back and forth in time) to give us different perspectives on the same events. It has been astoundingly cold and snowy in New England this winter and the parts of this book that are set in Montreal during the winter were easy for me to identify with. I loved the way Mandel ended the novel -- it goes a little way past where you think the end is and then backs up just a bit to show you another view of what you think went on.

"Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas; someone has to remember them. Or perhaps it's just this: memory is too unreliable to entrust a story to the hero alone. Someone else has to have observed the chain of events to lend credibility; if no one else remembers your story, how are you to prove it was real? The witness, the man in the car in the parking lot told himself miserably, is not unimportant." (p. 188)

Mandel is from British Columbia which makes this a Canadian Book Challenge title.

Review: Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Defining science fiction is complicated (see BBC piece if you doubt this), but I think applying that label to this novel is a mistake. It is set in the future after a flu pandemic has wiped out most of the world, but it is mostly telling the story of people in our time who are leading their lives and making connections with other people in a very every-day way. The power of this story is in its ability to depict the important role other people play in our lives. The importance of place in making us who we are is also a recurring idea in the story.

"'You know where I'm from," he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these things too, and here in these lives we've built for ourselves, here in these hard and glittering cities, none of this would seem real if it weren't for you." (p. 207)

I was struck by how true this insight is that someone else knowing where you come from makes it real. I feel that way about the "hard and glittering" city I grew up in which is the one this character is talking about.

The structure of this novel is also perfect for the story. The action moves among many people (3rd person omniscient narrator) and back and forth through time, but it was never confusing and it gave a nice "unfolding" quality to the story of the flu pandemic and the characters' interconnections.

Mandel was born in British Columbia and has written several previous novels. This is an amazing book and I look forward to reading more of her work. This book counts toward the Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: Barney's Version

Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The rambling back and forth narration took a bit of getting used to, but once I got into the rhythm of it I enjoyed the quirky, cranky point-of-view of Barney, who may or may not be a murderer. The novel is presented as the autobiography of Barney Panofsky with footnotes and an afterword by Michael Panofsky. There is a TON of Canadian hockey information in this book as well as several sections about Quebecois secession. There are also random observations about all sorts of other things as well as a definite voice of the author interjecting opinions into the narrative.

"I understand why our most perspicacious men of letters object to the current trend in biography, its mean practitioners reveling in the carve-up of genius. But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit. I'm a sucker for studies of those who, in the words of that friend of Auden's (not MacNeice, not Isherwood, the other guy) '...travelled a short while toward the sun / And left the vivid air signed with their honor.' But took no prisoners en route, now that the facts are known." (p. 235)

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was recommended to me by a friend but I haven't been able to find it yet. Duddy Kravitz makes a cameo in this book and I look forward to reading his story.
This book counts toward the Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: Birdseye

Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Birdseye's life was interesting, but perhaps not eventful enough to support a full biography. The book seemed a bit thin on substance. The side-trips into Labrador history and the histories of the various businesses Birdseye was connected to made for good reading, but the connection to the subject of the book didn't seem all that strong.
I listened to the audiobook version of this and the narrator, Jon Van Ness, did a good job with it. However, he had a midwestern-sounding accent and that seemed out of place to me as he was narrating the life of a New Englander.

This book counts toward the Foodies Read Challenge and the Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book reminded me a lot of Oryx and Crake (and the rest of that trilogy). It is an early (1986) work and is a tale of a dystopian future world, a place called Gilead, but is a sly commentary on the world as it was going along at the time the book was written. As I was reading I couldn't figure out how Atwood was going to conclude her tale given the perspective of her narrator but she (as usual) came up with a clever way to wrap up the novel. I like the way Atwood takes ordinary things and turns them around in her poetic writing, looking at them from different angles.

"Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling: darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanker. I wish I could see in the dark better than I do. Night has fallen, then. I feel it pressing down on me like a stone." (p. 191)

Atwood lives in Canada, so this book counts toward the Canadian Book Challenge. There are also points in the story where Gilead is compared (unfavorably) to Canada.

Review: All You Need is Less

All You Need Is Less: The Eco-friendly Guide to Guilt-Free Green Living and Stress-Free Simplicity
by Madeleine Somerville

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book reads like a blog--a very funny blog. The author is a Canadian woman with a husband and a baby and a big dog who is trying to live as "green" as she can and to share her hippie wisdom with the rest of us. There are a lot of useful tips in this book and a lot of self-help-book-type sections where she assures us that our efforts are good and we shouldn't feel guilty (mostly, there are a few things about which she is very clear that we should feel guilty, like clay kitty litter.) Overall this is a funny and useful book that provides the reader with a lot of practical steps they can take, in their actual lives, to help the planet.

Here are the things I am going to do based on this book:

• use cloths on my Swiffer instead of disposable sheets (someone was going to knit me a swiffer cover ages ago, but I think she forgot)
• stop using dryer sheets -- I always thought they were a waste, now I know they are also gross
• try her magic silver cleaning solution (aluminum foil and baking soda)
• look into whether I need microfiber cloths (I'm pretty on-board with not buying stuff already, so am not sure about this as I have lots of old T shirts around already)

This book counts toward the 8th Canadian Book Challenge.

Review: The Cunning Man

The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love the way Davies wove the story of his narrator's life in and out of the lives (and letters) of other people in this book. As always he played around with words and made lots of sly observations about the human condition and made Canada, Toronto in particular, a character in the story. I could be totally wrong (as I have no actual knowledge of it) but I feel like I learn so much about what makes Canadians Canadian when I read Davies.

There were lots of great lines in this book and I want share some of them:

"I suspect you of having a nice, happy uncomplicated home. A terrible start in life, let me tell you. The more tough-and-tumble you experience early in life, the better armed you are against what's to follow." (p.122) 

"I was a great reader in my childhood. I knew a lot of poetry, not all of it good, but there is an astonishing amount of nutrition in second-rate poetry." (p. 152) 

"There is a lot of schoolgirl still left in her, and she wants to do something outlandish and mess with unlimited butter." (p. 348) 

"Every love affair is a private madness into which nobody else can hope to penetrate." (p. 461) 

"To have watched my city change from a colonial outpost of a great Empire to a great city in what looks decidedly like a new empire; to have watched the British connection wither as the Brits grew weary under Imperial greatness, and the American connection grow under the caress of the iron hand beneath the buckskin glove -- that was to have taken part in a great movement of history." (p. 468)

Robertson Davies is a Canadian author, and this novel is set mostly in Toronto so it counts toward the 8th Canadian Book Challenge. This is also my contribution to the August Books You Loved Link Up.

8th Canadian Book Challenge

Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, photo by Lisa North

The start of July means the start of another Canadian Book Challenge at The Book Mine Set.

Lisa and I both completed the 7th Canadian Book Challenge and are signing up for #8.

Canadian Book Challenge 8 has a new approach for the logo, there were a variety of images (all of Canada, obviously) you could choose from or you could use your own. We are using a photograph of Peggy's Cove in Nova Scotia that Lisa took.  This logo is now an option, in addition to the original 8, for anyone who wants to participate in this challenge (it's a great way to learn about Canadian books and authors).

2014 Challenges - The Half-way Point

The end of June was half way through the year so it seems like a good time to check in and see how I am doing with my various reading challenges and projects.

• I successfully completed the 7th Annual Canadian Book Challenge (which ended on June 30) by reading 13 books set in Canada or by Canadian authors. I will be joining in on the 8th Canadian Book Challenge, but haven't written my sign-up post yet. 
• I have read 56 of the 101 books (55%) I pledged to read this year on GoodReads.
• For the Postal Reading Challenge I have read 3 of the 4 books I committed to. I have several more "letter" books on my reading pile so I may upgrade my level on that one.
• I have read 5 out of 6 books in the What's In a Name Challenge. I still need to find (and read) a book with a reference to time in the title. 
• I have read 6 of the 12 books I committed to for the TBR Pile Challenge. I realized that a lot of the books I pulled from my shelves for this challenge have been sitting there for so long because they are long, or seem depressing, or both. This challenge is becoming more difficult as work my way through the less daunting titles in the list.
• For the Foodies Read 2014 Challenge I signed up to read 9-13 books (what was I thinking!?) I have read 6 so far. I need to find more foodie books and actually read them. I have had several checked out of the library this year that went back unread because I wasn't in the mood for them. 
• I have read 5 titles from my Classics Club list since the beginning of the year. I have read 19/50 since I began the project. I will be half-way through my time on that project in March 2015, so I'm in good shape with that one.

Overall I feel like I am on track with my reading challenges and am enjoying most of what I am reading for these projects.
How are you doing on your 2014 reading projects?