Page Twenty

Atonement by Ian McEwan

The book begins in 1935, England. 13-year old Briony Tallis has a very vivid imagination, which is revealed in the short plays she writes to perform for her family. Briony reads a letter meant for her older sister, Cecilia, from Robbie, the son of the Tallis' servant, and also witnesses an encounter between the two of them. Her overactive imagination and misunderstanding of the situation sets in motion an accusation that unravels the Tallis family and changes the lives of everyone involved. The book moves forward five years into WWII, and then jumps ahead to 1999 briefly at the novel's conclusion.

This book is a nice challenge, because, to me, it is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's writing. But readers beware: this book is also completely heartbreaking.

Page Nineteen

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

This book follows the life of Aminata Diallo. It begins in her small village in West Africa when she was abducted at age 11 and forced to walk for months, naked and in a coffle, to a slave ship bound for the US. She is sold as a slave to an owner of an indigo plantation in South Carolina. The book follows her life from there to Charles Town, to New York, to Nova Scotia - as she becomes one of the many black Loyalists whose name was penned in The Book of Negroes - to Sierra Leone on the back-to-Africa exodus, and finally to London.

A must read for any lover of historical fiction.

Page Eighteen

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I read Hosseini's The Kite Runner a couple of years ago; it was a very powerful book. When I heard his new novel was released this year, I knew I had to read it. A Thousand Splendid Suns may not deliver the same "literary punch" as The Kite Runner, but it's definately a book that will give you pause. This book deals with the women of Afghanistan and what they had to endure living under Taliban rule. Reading about what these women had to endure makes me feel an overwhelming sense of appreciation for having been spared a life of such unspeakable attrocities. I feel sick to my stomach even thinking that people lived and are living with anything even close to what the two protagonists of this novel had to live with. On the other hand, I think the past several years have made Afghanistan out to be a place solely of war, death, and tyranny, but Hosseini also draws attention to the fact that it was, and can be, a lovely place.

This is a sad read, but there are many moments of triumph and beauty as well.

Page Seventeen

Smoke by Elizabeth Ruth

This books grabs you from the first paragraph where Ruth describes how Buster, the main protagonist of the story, drops a lit match while in bed and catches on fire as his parents try to save him. The book chronicles Buster's emotional recovery from the incident as he has to learn how to rejoin his small Southern Ontario community as someone phyically different. To help him, he has the support of the elderly town doctor, Dr. Gray, a man who spins yarns about the Purple Gang from the 1930s in order to keep Buster focussed on something other than his physical scars and emotional detachment. It was during these excerpts where Ruth lost me a bit, but the main plot of the story reads fairly smooth and she gives you quite the interesting revelation at the end of the book.

This book was the "One Book, One Community" read for this summer. Currently, the author is traveling around Southern Ontario and I will have the chance to chat with her next week.

Page Sixteen

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

This story is written from the perspective of Christopher, a 15-year old boy who has Asperger's Syndrome. Christopher loves Sherlock Holmes, and so when he finds a garden fork stuck into Wellington, his neighbour's dog, he decides to solve the mystery and write a book about it. His investigation leads him to solve many other mysteries that pertain to his family, and leads him on the biggest journey of his life thus far.
This is the second time I have read this book. The first time I read it I didn't really like it, and this second time around I appreciated it much more (maybe because I have to teach it soon), although I still got a bit glassy-eyed when Christopher went into his many mathematical digressions. I won't pretend I know a great deal about Asperger's, so I'm not sure if Haddon did the description of a boy with Asperger's justice or not, but I like the book because it will allow students to get inside the head of a new kind of hero, and attempt to empathize with someone their age who has a disability, and also to empathize with parents of children with Asperger's.

Page Fifteen

Blindness by Jose Saramago

A man at a red light suddenly goes blind, and soon so do others. The blind and the contaminated are taken to an old mental asylum and guarded by soliders who shoot them if they try to leave. Inside the asylum, as more and more people arrive, a small group of people band together and try to survive starvation, living amongst disease, filth, excrement, rape, and violence. Only one woman's sight remains intact. Lying to the authorities in order to remain with her husband, she becomes the eyes of the reader and a witness to the horrors that have befallen her unnamed city. She also becomes the eyes of the seven people who have banded together during this terrible catastrophe, and leads them throughout the city streets after the asylum catches on fire. It becomes apparant that everyone in the city and, likely, country has gone blind. As they travel through the city scavenging for shelter and food, they pass sights that become more horrifying than those in the asylum, one hell being replaced by another.
Similar to We Need to Talk about Kevin, this book is not for the faint of heart. It is also challenging because Saramago does not use any punctuation when people are speaking, and prose often runs on without stopping. While I started to get a little impatient for the novel to wrap up near the end, I do think it is definately a book that will hold your attention and keep you thinking long after you've finished it.
"Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be as they truly are, said the doctor, And what about people, asked the girl with the dark glasses, People, too, no one will be there to see them" (114).
"Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see" (292).

Page Fourteen

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

I would never have picked this book up had I not read many reviews that praised this book. Even my own librarian said to me "Ooh, you're going to like this one!" when I went to pick it up. Classified as a "ghost story," or "mystery," or "a return to a rich vein of storytelling we loved as children," the book tells the tale of Margaret Lea, a young woman who works with her father in their antiquarian bookshop, who is asked to write the biography of a famous Yorkshire writer, Vida Winter. Winter's books are eaten up like today's Harry Potter series, and yet no one has ever been able to get the true account of Winter's life. Now, at the end of her life, frail and dying, Winter finally reveals her story.

I suppose I would agree that the book reads like an "old fashioned story," and that it is indeed a mystery (a genre which I rarely, if ever, read). However, I had high hopes for this book which were not fully met. In fact, I found the story a bit forced and a bit of a letdown to be honest. Setterfield's main contentions centering on the separation of twins and "twin-ness" became a bit annoying. In the end, merely "mildy entertaining."

Page Thirteen

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

This book was the most satisfying book that I've read in a long time. It's one of those books that you can't wait to get back to once you've put it down, and when it's done you feel cheated and left wanting more, even with its 519 pages.

The book may be difficult at first to follow, not due to the language but due to the fact that Henry, one of the main characters, has a genetic disorder which causes him to time travel, mostly due to situations or feelings of high stress (sounds sci-fi dorky, but keep with me). So, keeping track of dates and ages can be a bit confusing. Henry's time travel causes a whole heap of issues, since Henry doesn't want to time travel, does so sometimes at very awkward moments, and cannot take anything with him during these time travels, including clothing. So, he plops down in past, present, and future completely naked, having to pick locks, steal, etc to get food, clothes and other necessities. At the heart of the book, however, is probably the best love story I've ever read. Henry and Clare "meet" when they are 28 and 20, respectively, but Clare has known Henry since she was 6, when he travels back in time during his later marriage to Clare to get to know her younger self. Later, in "real time," the couple tries to grip on to a normal life, never knowing when Henry is going to exit suddenly, or for how long, or how much danger he will be in wherever he goes.

This book wins the prize of being my favourite read of the summer. I highly recommend it. Read it before the movie comes out!

Page Twelve

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

If you want to be seduced by words, read Ondaatje. This was my introduction to him, and I was immediately reeled in by how beautifully he writes. The strong presence of a poet is embedded in each line.
The plot of the book is rather difficult to explain, however. From California to Nevada to France to alternating points of view, back and forth and further back, we become folded in the lives of Anna, Claire, Coop, and Lucien and yet their stories are left dangling, like loose threads and it's up to the reader to make sense of how they all fit together. This is one book that I think would need a second read to be fully understood, but only one read is needed to appreciate the voice of Ondaatje.
"[. . .] sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third person voice protects us" (142).

Page Eleven

Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Well I definately needed to read something that was a complete 360 from my previous choice, and as I was nosing around the shelves at Chapters I came across Alice and thought: have I actually ever read these? Of course I know the plot, and the characters, but I couldn't remember having ever sat down to read these books. And what an absolutely absurd, nonsensical read they were. Can children even comprehend this? A hookah-smoking Caterpillar (I must admit, my favourite character), a Hatter and a Hare, both completely off their rockers, a Duchess who finds mind-boggling morals to everything . . . I could barely keep it straight. But what is so interesting is how Carroll captures the dream-like quality of everything, so that you the reader almost feel like you're caught in a dream yourself, "dreadfully puzzled."

Page Ten

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Why did I pick this book up? I kept asking myself that after I got to around page 100 of this book, and then for the next 300 pages after that. I had heard about it through a colleague, and when I was mucking about Chevalier's website I saw this book listed on her reading list. Beside it, in parentheses, she had written "Not for the faint of heart." I admit I was enticed.

I had nearly given up and tossed it aside when I first began. The writing seemed pretentious. Shriver seemed to be trying to get across how smart she was instead of writing a book. I was annoyed, and bored. I picked it up the next day, after having read about 60 or so pages. And I didn't put it down until midnight that night when I had finished it. I had to read it in one day, because extending reading it would prolong the dark, depressing, frightening feeling it gave me.

The book is narrated by Eva. She is married to Franklin (the book is actually a series of letters written to her, we are led to believe, estranged husband). She is in her 30s and goes through questioning if she wants a child. She obviously doesn't, but ends up pregnant with Kevin, a boy who from the start is obviously disturbed. Eva finds out she doesn't really like her own son. After all, she never really wanted him. But she tries. She even becomes a stay at home mother in an attempt to bond with him. It doesn't work. The novel becomes confessional, as Eva writes to her husband in an attempt to explain her feelings towards Kevin and motherhood (her husband, having been at work during the days, and always, madenningly, sticking up for the two-faced Kevin, didn't know everything that went on when he left the house) as well as an attempt to try to understand why Kevin did what he did - was it caused by a mother who never really wanted him?

What Kevin did, and what the novel grimly leads up to, is how he went on a rampage killing seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a teacher, just days before turning sixteen. The novel also foreshadows something equally, if not more so, horrific, that becomes the official, shocking climax.

Do I recommend this book? If only for having someone else to discuss it with, then yes, but if it's pleasure reading you're after, you're likely better off if you didn't talk about Kevin. Don't get me wrong - it's well-written, even witty in some parts, and there is something oddly delicate at the novel's conclusion, but it really is not for the faint of heart. It forces you to wonder: what if you genuinely don't like your own child? What if you feel you give your child everything, and he or she just turns out wrong?

Page Nine

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

Chevalier owns a copy of Johannes Vermeer's painting Girl with a Pearl Earring. She became quite fascinated with the look the girl gives in the portrait: at times vulnerable, seductive, happy, and sad. She began to speculate who the girl was and decided that it was a servant in the Vermeer household. She named the servant Griet, and began to write the story around how Vermeer's famous 1665 portrait was created. Combining both historical fact and fiction (much of the latter, as not much is known about Vermeer and basically nothing is known about the girl in the portrait), Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring is engaging in a simple, somewhat slow-moving way. It definately piqued my interest in Vermeer's other paintings mentioned in the book, and I almost felt a little sad that Griet never actually existed. I do think Chevalier's story is quite plausible, however, which is what makes the book as engaging as it is.

Page Eight

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Finally! At long last! I feel like I am one of the last people to read this book (it's popular with the high school girls). The book is a bit difficult in the first few chapters. It begins with the rape and murder of 14-year old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") and the book is about her watching her family and friends from her quasi-heaven. The book explores loss and the devestation of the loss of a child on a family, but it also explores Sebold's ideas of heaven and the afterlife.

I think the book is intended more for a younger adult audience, even with its subject matter, and I say that because I've also read Ann-Marie MacDonald's The Way the Crow Flies, which also deals with the rape and murder of a young girl (based loosely on the Steven Truscott case) and that book was so difficult for me to get through I had to keep putting it down and almost feared picking it back up to keep reading.

Page Seven

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

I know I keep saying this about most of the books on this blog, but this is another engaging, quick read. The book begins with a 90-, or 93-, year old Jacob Jankowski who is a cantankerous patient of a nursing home. He tells the reader that he has kept a secret all his life, and thus begins his narration of when he ran away, after the death of his parents and weeks from finishing a degree to become a vet, to join the circus: The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. The book chronicles his first few months in traveling with this circus during the Depression in the United States. Since the book deals with the lives of circus workers and performers in the 20s, it is not without gritty, sometimes hard to swallow, details. I found it especially difficult reading about the mistreatment of animals. However, Gruen has obviously done her research and it was a successful mix of repelling and intruiging.

Page Six

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

I picked this book up because I wanted to see the film, and I rarely like to see a film of a book before I've read the book. I approached the book almost apprehensively, afraid to find it slow-moving and dull (why, I'm not sure). Instead, I found this to be another quick read and quite engaging. Kitty is the shallow, self-centred wife of Walter Fane, a bacteriologist. She marries him because she is getting a bit desperate. She is in her mid-twenties and her younger sister has just become engaged: she thinks her time is running out, and her mother is not about to continue to support her. The couple moves to Hong Kong and within the first two years of marriage Kitty, who finds Walter a bore, begins a passionate affair with Charles Townsend. Walter, who has treated Kitty with nothing but kindness, finds out and gives her a choice: she can divorce him if Charles agrees to divorce his wife and marry her, otherwise she must move with him to Mei-tan-fu, a cholera-infested area of China. Since much of the book/movie depicts their time in Mei-tan-fu, I think the outcome is clear (as is the true character of Charles Townsend).

I loved this book because I kept having to remind myself that a man wrote it. At the beginning of the book you think Kitty is fairly useless and cruel. Near the end you still may have ambivalent feelings towards her, but her self-discovery is quite intruiging and the mistakes she makes are very human.

I actually did not like the movie, but I wonder if I would have had I watched it before reading the book. The book delves into Kitty's psyche and self-realizations, and the movie highly romanticizes . . . pretty much everything.

Page Five

Dream When You're Feeling Blue by Elizabeth Berg

I first picked up a book by Elizabeth Berg when I was in early undergrad. It was called Talk Before Sleep, and if I remember correctly it was about two friends, one who had cancer. I think I bawled my way through a lot of it. It was a very pathetic read. I read others of hers soon after, as they are amazingly quick reads: Joy School, Range of Motion, Durable Goods. Recently my librarian told me about her most recent work, Dream When You're Feeling Blue. It had been a few years since I had picked up a Berg book so I thought I'd give it a shot. I ended up reading it in two days (like I said - if you're looking for quick reads, pick up a Berg book). It was, just as her others, immediately engaging in a somewhat simplistic, "guilty pleasure" sense. It follows the story of three sisters. The beaus of two sisters have enlisted in the war, and they must deal with the aftermath. The book had me entertained and then I got to the end, which had me incredibly befuddled as to why in the world Berg chose to end the book in the way she did. If you read it, I'd be interested in hearing what you think of the ending.

Page Four

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

This book begins on a winter's night in 1964, when twins are delivered by their father, Dr. David Henry. The first, a boy, is healthy, but the second, a daughter, has Down's syndrome. Fearful that this second child will destroy his wife and his family, he asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby to an institution. Instead, Caroline leaves the city and takes the baby with her.

I've started this book, and so far it is a real page turner!

Page Three

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

I think this book will be quite a shift from the previous one. I chose this book because of how much I've heard about in the past year. If you look at any book list, or any bestseller list, from the Globe and Mail to the New York Times, you will see Suite Francaise listed near the top. Something drew me to this book, so I hope it delivers.

The book was originally intended to have five volumes, but was published with two; Nemirovsky, from what I gather, was arrested and died in Auschwitz before she could complete the final three. The first volume bounces back and forth between various families and social classes, as it describes the evacuation from Paris in 1940. The second volume describes a German-occupied village and a love affair between a German soldier and a French woman.

"If you read only one piece of fiction this year, read Irène Némirovsky’s miraculous last novel. Suite Française is miraculous for the power, brilliance and beauty of the writing, and for the very wholeness of the work, despite its being less than half the 1,000 pages its author intended. . . . Némirovsky’s novel speaks as resonantly today as it would have had it been published in the year of her death: It is a stunning denunciation of the hypocrisy and greed of the ruling elites who make, but never seem to suffer from, war."—The Globe and Mail

Page Two

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

This book takes place in nineteenth-century China. It is the story of a friendship between two Chinese women who send messages to one another on a silk fan. Their bond grows until a misunderstanding occurs that threatens to tear their friendship apart.

This book looked pretty sitting on a shelf in Chapters so I decided to judge it by its cover and pick it up at my local library. Let's see if it's as pretty inside as it is outside.

Page One

Okay, so the initial idea for this blog fell apart, but that's okay. Instead I've decided to keep an online book journal. Hopefully, dear reader, you will be inspired to read a book I've listed and leave your thoughts. In the meantime, happy reading!