Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Priestdaddy
by Patricia Lockwood
Riverhead Books, May 2017
336 pages

This book. Is so. Funny heartbreaking beautiful. It is about family, warts and all. It's about religion, and being female, and writing, and poetry, and memory, and growing up, and going home. It's about love, and all the good and all the pain that can bring.

Priestdaddy is technically a memoir, but if you're looking for a straightforward, average memoir, this is not that. You had better be prepared to let Lockwood take you on her journey in her way, because she's not going to conform to your expectations. The writing is spectacular, unsettling, and bursting out at the seams. She spirals into digressions with the virtuosity of a scatting jazz vocalist, like she's galloping through the English language with her hands white-knuckled on the reigns, leaving this reader breathless and slightly disoriented and utterly thrilled. Sometimes she writes like her father, the titular priest, plays guitar: with gratuitous effusion in a way that almost (but not quite) makes sense.

Lockwood's family has an astonishing number of warts. They are eccentric in a way that is so astounding, sometimes shocking, that it's almost hard to believe - Lockwood is a standard-bearer for the adage that "truth is stranger than fiction" because I'm pretty sure some of the things she writes about would be considered too outrageous to be allowed in a novel. Nothing escapes her sideways gaze; the gaze is both pointed and compassionate. Sometimes she is full of anger. But she also loves expansively, if in complicated ways.

This whole book is complicated. It's funny and erudite and full of light and sometimes she's talking about things that are crass or horrible. She writes about her childhood in ways that the memories come across as both sharp and slightly unreal, as childhood memories often do. She indulges extravagantly in hyperbole, such that sometimes you're not sure when to take her seriously, and then she will reach right into your chest cavity and grab hold of your beating heart with a furious concision and you take everything absolutely seriously and feel sick. And then in the next paragraph you will love the people in her life, because she obviously does, and she is holding them tenderly so that you do too.

I know this is not a book for everyone; if you are easily offended by coarse language or bodily functions or any whiff of blasphemy, you will probably not make it past the first chapter. Likewise if you can't handle chronological jumping, digressions, or someone poking and prodding at language just to see what she can make it do. But I loved it, and I can't stop talking about it or thinking about it, and I am delighted at the feeling that Patricia Lockwood is just getting started.

Love in Lowercase by Francesc Miralles, translated by Julie Wark

Love in Lowercase

by Francesc Miralles, trans. Julie Wark

Penguin Books, 2016; original publication 2006

224 pages

I first heard about this book at the end of librarian Annie Spence's Dear Fahrenheit 451, which I could basically have read and called it work time. It's full of library shop talk, but anyone who loves books as objects would find something to enjoy about Spence's book. At the end, Spence puts together a series of reading suggestions - basically readers' advisory in book form, and I decided to try a couple of the books that she recommended.

I decided to try Love in Lowercase by Francesc Miralles, which has been described as a "Rosie Project-esqe" read. I wouldn't know, because I haven't read The Rosie Project, but lots of people seemed to like it, and Spence talked about how books, language, stories, and culture play a large role in Love in Lowercase, on top of it being a romance. Usually my sort of thing. Once started, though, this had more of a Paulo Coehlo-esque feeling for me, which - not my sort of thing. But there was enough to it, and it read easily enough, for me to keep going, and it's not very long.

It is a romance, but unlike my usual feelings about romance in books (which can be boiled down to "more please") I hardly cared what happened to this one. At the most it was a catalyst to get Simon, bachelor professor of German at a university in Barcelona, to get out of his comfortable routine. It was one of those insta-love (though with a small twist) things that seem so far-fetched that it stretches even my incredibly stretchy suspension of disbelief, and Gabriela doesn't quite get fleshed out enough to make sense, though - as I think about it, I suspect that's at least a little on purpose, because Simon doesn't know her at all either, despite being wildly in love with her. She puts up with it very well.

More interesting to me was Simon himself, on his own. As the book begins he's a very crabby young-ish man who has a comfortable life: he's a professor, who teaches his classes, feeds himself, occasionally goes out for a drink or a walk on his own, likes classical music and film, and generally has a very low opinion of the rest of humanity. But at the same time, he misses human connection, and he almost knows it; he spends New Year's Eve panicking about his own mortality, but he doesn't seem to realize that what's missing is relationships that mean something to him. Enter the cat.

Simon doesn't like cats, of course; he thinks they're dirty, but out of some sort of soft, human impulse, he puts a saucer of milk out for an orange tabby that shows up at his door on New Year's Day, and suddenly things start to happen. Coincidence leads to coincidence, plus Simon actually starts trying, after finding himself drawn into relationships with both his elderly upstairs neighbour and the vet who gives Mishima the cat his vaccinations. His most fascinating interactions come in the form of Valdemar, a physicist-turned-fugitive author who may or may not be experiencing a serious break from reality.

A warning for those of you who find unresolved endings frustrating: this is not the book for you. But it does leave the reader feeling like Simon's life is at least going to be quite a lot more interesting, and like he has the tools now to actually have friendships and relationships, as awkward as they're going to be while he's still learning. And by the end of the book I was glad of that; I didn't love this book, but I liked it, and enough that I can see myself picking up Miralles' book Wabi-Sabi, which also involves cats and relationships and will likely be a mildly entertaining and fast read.

three great graphic novels

Daisy Kutter 1: The Last Train
by Kazu Kibuishi
Bolt City Productions, 2012
153 pages

So, I hadn't realized this was re-released. I first started following Kazu Kibuishi online years ago, before Amulet was a thing, by reading his Copper comics. (I've got those in printed form too, now, so that will be reviewed here at some point.) But by the time I realized I was in love with his style and his sensibilities, his first graphic novel, Daisy Kutter, was no longer in print and unavailable anywhere. I was always sad about that because it looked fantastic.

Well, it is. One of my local comic stores supported Kibuishi's Kickstarter to reprint Daisy and I got their last signed copy, which you can imagine made me feel like queen for a day.

It's a steampunk western. Daisy is an ex-con who owns and runs a general store. It's pretty clear she's bored out of her skull by it, but it's a legit living. Her excitement comes from playing poker. So when she loses the store in a high-stakes poker match, she has no choice but to take up the winner's offer to give her the store back - if she participates in one last heist.

There are a few plot holes and the ending wraps up incredibly quickly, but this is the first in (I hope!) a series, and it was extremely enjoyable. Daisy's got depth, as does Tom McKay, the local sherrif who also happens to be Daisy's ex-partner in crime, and ex-partner, period. There are lots of questions to be answered, lots of fleshing out to happen with both characters. The world, while somewhat sketched-in for this first instalment, has a huge amount of promise. Very much looking forward to the next book.



Friends With Boys
by Faith Erin Hicks
First Second, 2012
220 pages

I find it hard to write about this one because all I want to say is LURRRRVE. This is a sweet, funny, quirky, sensitive, wonderfully-drawn coming-of-age graphic novel about a girl who is starting high school after being homeschooled her whole life. She has three older brothers whom she adores, and hasn't really ever felt the need for any friends outside of them. But they've all got their own lives and challenges at school, so she's kind of on her own. Lucky for her, she's not the only one in need of a friend.

What's nice about this is that it's not really deep or difficult, but it's still a portrait of a kid trying to find her place and fit in, while dealing with stuff - some mundane stuff, like dealing her mother's decision to leave the family or her first year at school, and some not at all mundane stuff, like the strange ghost who keeps following her around. Maggie's got challenges but she's competent, and her family (with the notable absence of her mother) is loving and supportive. This makes the book feel safe and a bit gentle, which is sometimes a nice thing in a coming-of-age book about outsiders.

This book is also really funny. The art supports the characters' development in the best way possible. Hicks can express a huge amount about a character just with facial expression and small gestures, and she uses that to full effect. It's an easy-to-follow style, too, meaning this is a great entree into the world of graphic novels. Excellent amounts of geek humour and an affirming message that being "weird" - however one defines it - is okay.



Ms. Marvel Vol. 1: No Normal
by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona
Marvel, 2014
120 pages

I'm not sure I really need to introduce this book. It's gotten a lot of attention because Ms. Marvel is Kamala, an American-born Muslim teenager of Pakistani decent, who in addition to having to deal with the sudden onset of superpowers and the appearance of a supervillain, has to deal with obnoxious, racist classmates, a fairly traditional family, a diet that forbids bacon, and a curfew. It could have smacked of diversity lip-service, but it was so well-written it didn't.

The book lives up to the hype. There are a lot of things to like here, from the fast-paced plot and the bright, stylized art, to the way it handles what shouldn't be a sensitive issue (Kamala's race and religion) but really is. But what I really appreciated was how realistic the whole thing feels from an emotional perspective, which is not something one can always say when reading superhero comics (or fantasy novels, for that matter.) While the title of the volume is "No Normal" what is refreshing is just how normal Kamala is, right down to the fights she has with her parents when she breaks curfew and is then punished for it. She's got superpowers and she handles their onset in a believable way. She's a teenager and she feels like a teenager.

Also, on a very frivolous note, I dare you to read this one and not fall a little in love with Boris.

Will definitely be following this series.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

Redshirts
by John Scalzi
Tor Books, 2012
318 pages

Oh John Scalzi. You are one of the big Good Guys in my world. There are so many reasons to be impressed with Scalzi and his writing, most of which one can glean from his blog and his Twitter feed, both of which I follow daily. He's not universally loved - someone with a blog tagline of "Taunting the Tauntable since 1998" is not going to be universally loved - but for someone with my sense of humour and sociocultural views, he's brain candy.

So are his books. They are clever, funny, extremely well-written, entertaining, thoughtful, and often moving. Well, the three I have read, one of which was non-fiction, so I suppose my sample size is limited, but I have faith. Old Man's War remains one of my favourite science fiction novels ever (and it's military SF, no less!) and holds the distinction of being the most fully genre-y book that my entire adventurous book club agreed was great.

Those of you who have watched Star Trek (any iteration) will be familiar with the concept of the redshirt, whether you know it by name or not. These are the minor characters, the ones who might not even have a name, who are along for whatever away mission might be happening, and who generally end up dead in order to prove that there's some sort of danger. Notice that with extremely rare exceptions, the main characters don't end up dead. They might end up injured, but not dead. It's the low-ranking extras who bite it.

Redshirts is about the ones who end up dead. Scalzi imagines them with real lives and loves and ideas, histories that are more than just pertinent to the storyline, and a realization that the way things are happening on their ship, the Intrepid, is statistically totally improbable. They are fighting to regain control of their lives, which means they are literally fighting for their lives - fighting The Narrative, an unseen menace that takes over people's minds, bodies, and even the laws of physics with disturbing regularity. And what's worse, as Jenkins, the conspiracy theorist who eventually convinces our main characters says, is that the sci-fi television show they're all living in isn't very good.

This is very clever, loving satire. It pokes gleeful holes in all the SF television tropes, but it does it in a way that is thoughtful - it really follows the consequences through - and what I really appreciated was that it wasn't only about the satire. It was also a book about friendship, love, and loyalty; about peeling back layers and asking the important and sometimes difficult questions. It was about fate versus free will, and even about what it means to die, and what it means to live.

I think having more than a passing familiarity with Star Trek in its many incarnations helped in the enjoyment of this book, because I really got it. I got the jokes, I got the references, and I appreciated all of them. It added an extra layer of glee.

But - and this is important - because of all the other wonderful things about this book, and the fact that it isn't just about the satire, you don't have to be familiar with Star Trek to enjoy the story. Or even get most of the jokes, because the relevant parts are explained. This is a funny book whether or not you know the backstory, and it contains far more than it appears at first glance. Highly recommended for science fiction buffs, and definitely readable for those of you who don't read sci-fi but think you might like it. It's an excellent entry into the genre.

Lords and Ladies by Sir Terry Pratchett

Lords and Ladies
by Sir Terry Pratchett
Corgi Books, 2013 (originally published in 1992)
400 pages

LOOK! More Pratchett! I haven't forgotten about the Discworld. In fact, I think it basically stays in the back of my head all the time. I putter about my library and in my head, I am always on the watch for the Librarian. I would welcome him with a banana. I would never dare call him a monkey.

One learns all sorts of things from the Discworld, you see. I've been trying to explain these books to a few non-converts lately and I just can't seem to get it right. I'm too deep into the Discworld at this point to be objective, and while I objectively recognize that these books are not for everyone, emotionally I just can't understand why everyone doesn't adore these books the way I do.

In Lords and Ladies, we're back with the witches Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick, who, if you recall Witches Abroad (and you should; it's one of the best) went on a trip, leaving the tiny country of Lancre to get about on her own. This, it turns out, was maybe not such a good idea. It's circle time, meaning the walls between universes are becoming thin. Those walls are there for good reason. On the other side of those walls are laughing, merry, beautiful elves. Beautiful, bloodthirsty, greedy, amoral elves.

As with most Discworld books, amid the merrymaking (some of it quite bloody) and the madcap, slapstick, and occasionally subtle humour, there are serious notes. As with Witches Abroad, Pratchett peels back the layers of stories and what they mean and what they can do, but in a different way here. Memory and its failings is part of it: it's been so long since the elves were in Lancre that no one remembers them as they truly were. They have become laughable and cute, and in some cases glamourous - because elves can make themselves look like what the humans observing them desire. The point that no one remembers the hidden horrors because all they remember is the surface beauty and class of the elves is made a couple of times. Elves are compared to cats: beautiful, classy, charming creatures when they want to be - and mercilessly cruel, deadly, and capricious, too. When all that's left are the folktales and the superstitions, the tales of heroes and villains, then it's quite possible for history to repeat itself. One knows one is supposed to leave milk out for the fairies. One forgets that's because one really doesn't want the fairies to have to come in to the house to get it themselves.

Surfaces and what they mean also make an appearance - what elves are on the surface, what each of us is on the surface. Hard to explain this more without spoilers, but let's just say that when it comes to Magrat Garlick, surfaces matter a lot. And changing the surface helps her change the interior when she needs that change the most. We've probably all been in a situation where the clothes we're wearing help us feel up to the task (or not) - at a job interview, or meeting an important personage - and Magrat suffers an extreme case in the latter part of Lords and Ladies. To cathartic effect.

In the end, I liked this book but I didn't love it the way I've loved some of the other Discworld books I've read. I'm not entirely sure why, though I did find it a bit hard to follow towards the end and had to read a couple of sections two or three times to get exactly what was going on. The danger never felt particularly acute, not in the same way it has in some of the earlier books; I always figured something was going to happen to fix the situation. The solution was telegraphed a bit, too.

But as always, saying that this particular Disworld book isn't quite as good as some of the others is like saying that coconut cream pie is all right: I might prefer pumpkin, but coconut cream is still pretty delicious. And contains enough cream to keep the fairies sated.

Apologize, Apologize! by Elizabeth Kelly

Apologize, Apologize!
by Elizabeth Kelly
Knopf Canada, 2009
320 pages

This is a book that, like the family it chronicles, is a little dysfunctional. It has a severely split personality and I felt quite strongly that it got away from the author around the 3/4 mark, but she did bring it back, in the end. It's possible I was so thrown by those sections because this is not a usual kind of read for me, but despite the fact that I was a little blindsided it felt a little formulaic, too, which is a very odd juxtaposition. I saw it coming but couldn't quite believe it when it happened.

See, the thing is, a book tends to have a certain tone. And as much as explicit foreshadowing can, the tone can set the stage for what comes; the reader knows that there will be something of a certain magnitude and a certain temperament down the road. Part of an author's job is managing these expectations, I think. What happened to me as I was reading this book was that I did hit the crisis of a certain magnitude, as I expected - it was heavily (but not heavy-handedly) foreshadowed, the tone and early plot very nearly demanded it - but then rather than maintaining the level, several other events of enormous magnitude and very different temperament happened, and they felt out of place, though I understood where Kelly was trying to go with them. We veer crazily from madcap family tragicomedy to a war zone to medical malpractice before we finally come back to our senses, rather than unfolding in a way that feels both logical and emotionally true. I ended up with whiplash.

Which is not to say that this book doesn't have it's excellent moments, and I read it very quickly, almost compulsively, and I liked it, in the end.

So, the summary: Collie (yes, named after the dog) is a first-person narrator, detachedly telling us about his early life and his loudly dysfunctional, incredibly wealthy, strangely endearing (most of them) family. He sees himself as the sane one, the normal one, but he loves all of them, even his emotionally and sometimes physically abusive mother (I didn't see anything likeable about her at all; she had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, which makes her the odd one out in the book) and he spends a lot of his time wanting to crawl into a hole to die of embarrassment, attempting to contain the damage, or trying to coax some sort of order out of the chaos. He's a very sympathetic narrator, and he doesn't spare himself. Dysfunction has made him who he is and he's benefited hugely from the wealth and profile of his family, but he's also very aware (and the reader more so) of just how destructive the dysfunction he grows up around is to everyone touched by it. It's not harmless, even if it is really funny a lot of the time.

One of the blurbs compares this to a Wes Anderson film, and while I try to take those with a grain of salt, I think that one is quite apt. The madcap antics of the eccentric characters that appear harmless on the surface, the underlying melancholy, the peaceful moments, the black humour, the slow unfolding of a tragedy that seems inevitable. That's the first part of the book and it holds up as a comparison. The rest of it not so much.

Collie is the most relatable character in the book, perhaps excluding the verbose, blustering but quietly tender Uncle Tom (acting as the family's live-in maid and servant, pigeon racer, alcoholic.) But getting back to my point that the dysfuction, while amusing, is not harmless: Collie is also incredibly dysfunctional in his own way. Because of the way he has grown up and the personality he has, he is a person whom things happen to; he is at the mercy of everyone around him. He is not forceful - almost religiously not forceful - and he doesn't hold convictions, and he doesn't have any follow-through either. He's a limp fish and while he doesn't ever ask for exoneration, it is not hard to imagine him saying "really, it all had to turn out like this."  And yet somehow I still liked him.

Tonally the book is uneven, but I did enjoy it for what it was, and I'm glad I read it. Mildly recommended to fans of contemporary dysfunctional family narratives (it's a whole genre!); you won't find it a difficult read, and it's got some lovely moments.

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp by Kathi Appelt

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp
by Kathi Appelt
Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013
336 pages

This is a book that kind of surprised me. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about it, but in the end I enjoyed it very much. The thing was, when I started, I was kind of - meh. The dynamic in this book is often found in children's books with an environmental theme: little guy, loves the swamp, all good; big bad guy, inexplicably hates all nature, and is totally, almost comically, irredeemable. Little guy through dint of hard work and some luck shows up the big guy, who vanishes from the picture, never to return. Paradise is saved.

I find this plot and character dynamic really problematic for a couple of reasons, but let's flesh out The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp a bit first. The success of this book is in the details. And do not get me wrong: this book is successful. It's funny, tender, clever, creative, and hugely enjoyable. I'll get my vent off my chest first, but then I'll get to the good bits.

In this case, the "little guy" is actually played by three characters in two separate but connected storylines: Bingo and J'miah are the titular true blue Swamp Scouts, raccoons who have taken an oath to protect the swamp and serve the Sugar Man, the giant creature who mostly sleeps but occasionally wakes to eat some delicious sugar cane or deal out some mayhem to enemies of the swamp. Chap Brayburn is the 12-year-old grandson of a man by the name of Audie, proprietor of Paradise Pies Cafe, birdwatcher and swamp dweller. Audie is recently deceased. So now, enter Sonny Boy Beaucoup, our first big bad guy, owner of the swamp who is about to repossess Paradise Pies Cafe and turn the whole mess into an alligator wrestling stadium and theme park with his business partner and World Champion Alligator Wrestler, diminutive, unsavoury, and fierce Jaeger Stitch. Our second strand of big bad guys, to counter Bingo and J'miah, are the Farrow Gang, a family of big, bad, itinerant wild hogs bent on eating the swamp's delicious muscovado sugar cane. The swamp is in terrible, terrible danger from foes human and not.

Okay, so my problem with setups like this is that there are never any grey areas, and maybe for children's literature that's okay, sometimes. Kids do have a more defined idea of right and wrong in situations like this, and cut-and-dried "swamp/other undervalued natural area = good, development of said area = bad" with heroes and villains really does appeal. Heck, it appeals to adults; I felt as satisfied as anyone when Sonny Boy gets his. And I am a naturalist, I would even go so far as to call myself an environmentalist: I am all for anything that celebrates nature and the environment and touts its value. I can enjoy a wish-fulfillment fantasy where the developer who hates nature gets his ass kicked in the end.

The problem with this kind of black and white situation is that it exists essentially nowhere in reality and while it's fun to play that wish-fulfillment game, it's also destructive. Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that there are quite so many supervillainous, obsessive nature haters out there as environmentally-themed fiction would have us believe. People who don't see the value of a meadow, yes; people who want to destroy the meadow because it's a personal affront to them that it exists? Who rub their hands together, revelling in their gleeful evil plans? I am not so sure. Perhaps I am wrong.

The thing is, this black and white rhetoric isn't limited to fiction; it's been a staple of some segments of environmental movements, and that kind of rhetoric doesn't generally win friends or supporters. I did genuinely believe as a kid that people who built parking lots and malls were evil and actively hated the planet, but as an adult I can see that's not the case; they simply don't see it, I think, and sometimes they do see it but they also see jobs, economy, and yes, personal cash. (As an aside sure to win me friends, I do still occasionally wonder if the tar sands operators and their political champions do actively hate nature; I am not quite sure how they can justify what they do without some sort of pathological issue.) I can see where jobs and economy and protecting nature intersect, I can see where there are no simple solutions and where pretending there are does everyone, including the environmental movements, a disservice.

All right, so there, in a too-big nutshell, is my problem with this book, which is mostly a problem with this type of book. On the surface this is a simple, moral-heavy story with incredibly simplistic solutions. I want a little more nuance in the discussion, because I think kids can handle the nuance. I think adults need the nuance. Let's get to the parts that I liked, the parts that had me reading quickly and past my bedtime and occasionally giggling out loud.

The narrator's voice. And I know I'm not going to be joined in this by everyone who reads this book, but I really, really enjoyed the narrator's voice. Perhaps it puts me in mind a bit of a very Southern US E. Nesbit, with its empathetic warmth, the comic asides, and chattiness, and I like that sort of thing. The narration should have seemed hokey and overdone, but it didn't. To me, it added to the charm and the atmosphere of the book. And the narrator keeps the pace moving at a good clip; I can't believe how quickly I read once I got going. I didn't want to put the thing down.

Many of the sections are told from the point of view of the raccoons, and these were by far my favourites, though I liked Chap a lot. The raccoon storyline was what brought originality to the book, made it something beyond the little-guy-vs-big-bad environmental fable. It's a bit coming-of-age, a bit of myth-making, with the denizens of the swamp heavily anthropomorphized but still animals. I developed an incredible fondness for Bingo and J'miah and that could be because I do have a bit of a fondness for raccoons in general (while still recognizing they can be terribly destructive, even slightly malicious little jerks) but it's also because Appelt makes them relatable, charming, full of mischief and also full of good intentions.

I loved how human ephemera plays a roll in the ecology of the swamp. Bingo and J'miah live in an old Chrysler De Soto, and J'miah discovers some treasures in it - to tell what they are is to spoil it, and part of the joy of the narration is the way it hops around, lighting on things and connecting them, bit by bit.

And - slight spoiler - I loved that Appelt felt that the existence in the swamp of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, that elusive but perhaps still-extant dweller of the deepest parts of the swamps of the southern States, could remain a question mark. That kind of ambiguity and subtlety is missing from the overall plot and I would have liked more, but I am happy with what I got.

Recommended and I'm really looking forward to hearing what the parent-child book club has to say about this one. If the cut-and-dried environmentally-themed narrative with bad guys and good guys doesn't appeal to you, this will probably irritate you on some levels, and if you're not a fan of folksy narrators this book will drive you up the wall and likely over it. People who have problems with anthropomorphized animals will also want to steer clear. But if you're curious about an original story, steeped in atmosphere, told with warm humour and charm, this is a good choice. If you like an environmental message and like it when people get their nature facts right, this is also fun. If you like rattlesnakes, if you wish the bad guys would just be unsympathetically bad and lose a little more often, if you want to believe that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is still there somewhere in the deepest, darkest part of the swamp, pick this one up. Many thanks to Cecelia for bringing it to my attention in the first place!

The Mummy Case by Elizabeth Peters

The Mummy Case (Amelia Peabody 3)
by Elizabeth Peters
Blackstone Audio, 2009
11 discs, unabridged

I was thinking that perhaps I view the Amelia Peabody mysteries as a "guilty pleasure" the other night, and then I realized that I don't actually feel terribly guilty about enjoying them so much. They are tremendously campy, silly, and grossly far-fetched, but what's wrong about enjoying them for that? Coming from someone whose reading motto resembles something like "never apologise" it seems odd that I should view reading anything as a guilty pleasure.

I get such a kick out of these books, and just that makes them worth reading. They are mysteries, sure, but it's not the mystery that's the draw. There's very little serious suspense, other than wondering exactly how the Emersons going to pull things off this time, and maybe sometimes a bit of wondering over the details of the cases. For whatever reason, what I would regard as unforgivable forebludgeoning in most other books gets a free pass here.

No, not for "whatever reason," actually. It's the characters, Amelia specifically, but the others as well. Amelia is the first-person narrator: the books are her journals. And Amelia is blessed with copious amounts of self-confidence and a finely honed sense of Victorian melodrama, leading to lots of "It did not occur to me to be concerned... at the time..." sorts of statements. Forebludgeoning, yes, but perfectly in character. And since I don't read (er, listen to) these books for the plots I don't particularly care about being heavily spoiled in advance.

Amelia Peabody is one of the great characters I have encountered, I think. She is somehow endearing in her brash sense of oblivious superiority (which is always played for laughs at Amelia's expense, except for one moment in this book, where Amelia's confidence in herself and her countryfolk is thrown back at her, and well-deserved, too) and her sharp intelligence. She would probably be less bearable except that she is often right. And not only that, she's willing, if extremely reluctant, to admit when she's wrong, too. Or at least lead the reader of her journals to draw that conclusion on their own, even if she won't explicitly say it. She is a well-defined, larger-than-life woman who both leaps off the page and feels real enough that I am willing to suspend any disbelief in following her around.

Aside from the character, I love the setting. Victorian-era Egypt and archaeology are fascinating places to visit (I wouldn't have wanted to live there.) Peters always brings it alive. She knew her archaeology and her history, and she uses Amelia's enthusiasm and passion to share some of that with us. I will admit that if anyone gave me a test on any facts I should have picked up from this book I wouldn't fare so well. It turns out I'm not reading to learn about Ancient Egypt either, though I find it fascinating at the time.

I should warn: anyone who has not read the first two books will necessarily encounter spoilers for those first two in the following paragraphs.

In this book, Amelia and Radcliffe (hereafter referred to as "Emerson" since I can't think of him any differently) are heading back to Egypt, and have decided to take their terrifyingly precocious son Ramses with them. Emerson is determined that they shall dig at the pyramids at Dahshoor, but instead they are relegated to the "pyramids" at Mazghunah, a field of rubble that may in fact once have been pyramids, but now bears little resemblance to the structures Amelia is so taken with. Despite her disappointment, Amelia at least has a mystery to keep her occupied: a suspected ring of antiquities thieves are flooding the market with some very choice items that are thus lost to science forever, and she suspects the murder of an acquaintance - a not-quite-honest antiquities dealer in Cairo - is connected.

The fact that even though things get just completely, utterly ridiculous at the end I still ate this up, and happily, suggests the power that Amelia Peabody (and Elizabeth Peters) has over me. I believe I even shouted "Are you serious?!" at the CD player in the car at one point because Amelia, despite not being stupid, does some incredibly rash things and I could see, clear as day, that things were not going to go well. The fact that she's cheerfully upfront about this (dissecting the situation postmortem, as she is) goes some way toward mitigating my mildly appalled astonishment. The other thing is that Amelia doing incredibly rash things near the close of a book (and upfront too, really, if we're counting) is hardly out of character.

I suppose one could start at this book quite comfortably in the series. I do think that the relationship between Emerson and Amelia, and the relationship they have with their son, is portrayed strongly enough in this third book that one wouldn't need to have a background in it, though I do think that Crocodile on the Sandbank is the stronger of the three books and would certainly recommend starting there instead. This, however, is a perfectly adequate outing in this series, neither surprising nor disappointing, and as entertaining as I expected and hoped.

Earlier books in the Amelia Peabody series:
1. Crocodile on the Sandbank
2. Curse of the Pharaohs

Coal Dust Kisses by Will Ferguson

Coal Dust Kisses: A Christmas Memoir
by Will Ferguson
Viking Canada, 2010
57 pages

Evidence that science doesn't know everything: Science will tell you that the Northern Lights are silent, cherry blossoms have no scent, and the likelihood of Santa Claus actually existing is low, to say the least.

But in each case I can assert the opposite, just as firmly and with something approaching empirical certainty. For I have heard the Northern Lights, caught the scent of cherry blossoms on the wind, and seen the evidence for Santa Claus firsthand - in the mirror, written on my very skin, a faint but undeniable smudge, Christmas, made manifest.

So begins Will Ferguson's very short and very charming little Christmas memoir. The first thing that struck me was the writing. I've never read anything by Will Ferguson before, though he comes highly recommended by many both for his nonfiction and his fiction. The reputation, if this tiny slice of holiday life is to be trusted, is well-earned. Not only does he write with clarity and gentle humour, his turn of phrase is graceful. His writing feels good to read.

(Or perhaps I am just partial to it because in this little informal piece he uses a lot of parentheses, and we all know how fond I am of parenthetical asides.)

As one might expect from a book that is a scant 57 pages long, there isn't a lot here to write about. I read this with one of my book clubs and we didn't have a lot of discussion on the book itself, though we went a lot of tangential directions from it. Ferguson is talking about Christmases he remembers, tradition, and family; he is drawing a faint arc from his great-grandfather in Cape Breton, west with his grandfather, and around the world with Ferguson himself, then back to Western Canada with his own children. There is, because this is a book about family and tradition, a slight melancholy to accompany the sweet and the gently funny. One gets the impression that Ferguson is working through something, not just writing for the benefit of the holiday reader. Or solely for the benefit of his own boys, though one gets the impression that this is a book written specifically for them and the dedication confirms it.

This is, though, a book that couldn't have been any longer. I didn't really want more. (As one of our members said, "Sometimes I wondered... what's the point of this book?") Well, it's a memoir. It's someone telling stories and making that telling look very easy, writing with an ease that if I know anything about writing is anything but easy. But any longer would have been more than necessary, would have made it less enjoyable and more work to read. Its aim isn't just to entertain, though it does that, nor is it to make the reader think, though it does that too at points. It's a sweet little record, a sharing of something special. You are being let in on the story, allowed to peek through the frosty window, just for a little moment in time.

Enjoyable, not unmissable. If you like a little amusing holiday reading that won't take long (perfect for such a busy time of year, really) go ahead and pick this up. It's liable to make you laugh out loud, and it may make you think about the traditions that surround this time of year, that seem so vital to our own holiday experiences, and how those come about and how those change over time. I will certainly be reading more of Ferguson's work; perhaps one of his travel memoirs next.

Winter by Adam Gopnik

Winter: Five Windows on the Season

by Adam Gopnik

House of Anansi Press, 2011

210 pages

Disclaimer: I love winter. So does Adam Gopnik. And I have decided that I'm going to try to stop apologising for this love of mine, as fashionable as complaining about the snow and cold weather is: winter is a wonderful season, and Gopnik spends quite a lot of time validating my fondness of it. If you thought that maybe five lectures and 210 pages was too long to spend talking about winter, you would be wrong. Gopnik manages it and one gets the impression he could have kept going. And this reader - and most readers, I'd wager, even those who have no love of cold and ice - would have been pretty happy to keep following.

Winter is part of the Massey Lectures series, the printed version of the spoken lecture series heard every year on CBC's Ideas. I quite like the idea of reading each of the lecture series, although I haven't gotten very far with this mission and they just keep on piling up (there is a new one every year. How am I supposed to keep up with that?) 

Gopnik's love for this season - this accident of nature, this clockwork shift to ice due to an axial tilt as our planet orbits the sun - is incredibly well-informed. If you look at the tags on this post, you'll get an idea of the sorts of range this book has. He starts with an exploration of the way the way winter has been viewed through the years has shifted, from being a season of bitterness, loss, and hardship, to being a season of warmth, light, and fellowship. He proceeds to an investigation of the polar winter, winter as place, and specifically the draw it held for Victorian explorers. The third lecture is essentially about Christmas, and the place it holds in the Western secular holiday year, as our festival of cold and light. Then there is an extended digression into winter sport, which is mostly about ice hockey, though he spends a serious amount of time looking at the advent and evolution of ice skating period. (Gopnik is a hockey fan, and is quite clear about that, so the entire chapter devoted to expressing his love of the game is not a surprise.) And finally he looks at what it may mean to us to lose winter, either by moving away from it, or by the self-inflicted wound of climate change. Throughout each chapter he is looking at the psychology of winter; that is, what does winter instill in us, culturally, individually? What ideas and thoughts and meanings do we instill into the season? What is winter, exactly, and what has it been?

Books like this that investigate a single idea from so many angles tend to really capture me, particularly if they're done well, and I think this book is. The writing style is very informal - Gopnik's introduction explains that things, as written out, are essentially transcripts of some practice lectures he gave, with a bit of tightening for readability. At times, when a sentence construct felt a little weird, I read it out loud to myself and that fixed the problem. Gopnik is thoughtful, funny, insightful, and relaxed. He circles around particular points and draws his arguments tighter and tighter. He lets the reader in on secrets, he tells us fascinating facts, he laughs at the absurd even as he respects it.

But there was a bit of a thing, and I almost hesitate to even bring it up, because the problem with noting something like this is that, these days, it can be enough for people to pillory the book and the author unfairly. (It can also be enough to earn me the label of "too sensitive" and I hope I don't deserve it in this case, but I am wary of that too.) It was noticeable, and it did bug me, so:

Gopnik is looking a lot at history, and it is a primarily male history. There are not a lot of women in this book. Franny Mendelssohn, sister of the more familiar composer, gets a brief, positive mention. Anna Brownell Jameson, the writer of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada - her diary, essentially - gets a lot of page time in the first lecture. And that is about it, except for some nameless skaters flirting with men in images of skating in Central Park, affectionate mentions of his wife and daughter, the Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen, and then - the throwaway and unnecessary reference that solidified my feeling that maybe Gopnik should have been paying a bit more attention to the issue of gender in his lectures - a Playmate makes a very baffling metaphorical appearance. It's not that the book feels like a frat party, exactly. I don't think Gopnik is generally disrespectful of the female, the feminine, and certainly not of individual women. But I was noticing a lack, and then the Playmate comment made me actually wince. It wasn't offensive on its own, but given the lack of female presence in the book, it took on a bit more of a profile than it should have.

The thing is, history, as written by most, and as enrolled in these lectures by Gopnik, is very heavy on men and very short on women, and these lectures are a look into the history of our relationship with winter. Men feature prominently. Women don't as much, so when they do feature, I'd like it to matter. I'd like it to not be played for laughs. I'd like it to not feel a little bit as though we are the temptresses, the objects of desire, that our only relationship with winter is as it allows us to express our otherwise forbidden sexuality (as in his argument about the social role ice skating fulfilled for women and gay men around the turn of the twentieth century). Given his admiration and respect for Anna Brownell Jameson, I don't actually think Gopnik really does think of women only in this way. Unfortunately the book doesn't quite reflect that.

There is still lots to love about this book, and lots of really excellent things about it. Sure, Gopnik overreaches his point sometimes, or gets a little repetitive as he circles around his argument; but mostly it's well-written, very accessible, entertaining, thought-provoking, funny, gentle, kind. He captures the feeling of winter, particularly in his first chapter and the chapter on Christmas, the awe and wonder and affection and respect that I hold for the season. It is hard for me to know if someone who isn't as fond of winter as I am would be swayed by his argument, but I think it would be pretty difficult not to be touched by it. Recommended, for Canadians especially: we whinge a lot about this season. I don't think it would hurt us to think about it a little more deeply than just complaining about shoveling and cold.

Terroryaki! by Jennifer K. Chung

Terroryaki!
by Jennifer K. Chung
3-Day Books, 2011
144 pages

The trouble with reading this while spending the day in bed with a flu-like bug is that it will make you hungry. It will make you very hungry, even though eating sends you into unpleasant spasms. You will not care about the spasms. You will just want to eat chicken teriyaki, preferably the soul-destroyingly good kind.

So, this is not a very scary book, and it's not a very deep book, but it is rather a lot of fun, and it was, aside from the hungry-making bit, the perfect read for a sick day. It doesn't make you think too hard and it moves along at a good clip. The humour is easy-going and the characters easy to like. The plot will not make you work hard, and the writing is good enough to keep this reader engaged, if not in love.

It is helpful to come in with a certain set of expectations, mind you: this is a book that was essentially written in three days. Did you know there was an International 3-Day Novel Contest? There is. And has been going on for a while - Terroryaki! was the winner of the 33rd annual contest. It is therefore a slender little offering, and while clearly polished up a bit, it does have a few rough edges. I learned about it from Pickle Me This, quite a while ago, and when the opportunity came for me to get hold of it, I took it.

Daisy is our first-person narrator, and she is a twenty-four-year-old slacker, a daughter of Taiwanese parents who wants to be an artist, but without much idea of how to get there, or how to break it to her family. She's also a foodie, a teriyaki connoisseur. Her overachieving elder sister Sam is getting married to a man whom their mother holds in the highest contempt, and the story is structured around the months and days leading up to the wedding. Throw in a mysterious, creepy teriyaki truck that appears and disappears on a whim, and a wedding planner straight out of a Norse epic, and some blog reviews of restaurants I desperately want to visit, and you have the cheerful, somewhat frenetic book that is Terroryaki!

The negatives: everything is out there on the surface, and some things don't quite make sense. There's a scene in a nail salon that makes absolutely no sense, and appears to have just been for laughs and to add a bit more mystery around the teriyaki truck, but it didn't really do either for me, particularly as the followup to the scene just confused things a bit more. The relationship that develops between Daisy and the teriyaki truck guy is kind of ... baffling, in that it didn't really get developed so much as assumed. Also, the teriyaki truck guy talks in such an odd cadence and it felt painfully artificial, even in a book that is pretty silly.

The positives, which in the end outweigh those negatives for me: the food, the humour, the family (particularly the dynamic between Daisy and her dad) and the fact that silly or not, things work to create an entertaining story. But especially the food. As I mentioned, Daisy is a foodie, and she blogs about her favourite (and not-so-favourite) restaurants, and we are treated to a sampling of her blog entries. (And no, they don't really have much to do with the plot, except that they allow for a bit more character development of Patrick, Sam's fiancee, than the rest of the book could squeeze in; this is okay, as they are humourous and delicious.) Daisy's got a good sense of how to be entertaining without being nasty, which is a good thing in a restaurant review. She's also enthusiastic, which is also key. And her good reviews make me want to eat the food she's talking about, badly. She also talks lovingly about the art of teriyaki right in the text, and about other foods too.

A sidenote, but worth noting: the production quality of this little gem is quite impressive. The cover is perfect, the paper weight is lovely, and the watermarks on the first pages of each chapter actually really add to the experience of the book, for some reason. The blogging sections are different enough but not gimmicky. This was a nice book to hold in the hand and to look at.

Something a little different, something a little fun, something a lot tasty. Recommended if you have an afternoon to spare and need something to take your mind off anything but your stomach.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

The Phantom Tollbooth

by Norton Juster

Harper Children's Audio, 2008 (originally published in 1961)

4 discs, unabridged

When I saw this audiobook was narrated by David Hyde Pierce, I had reservations. I wasn't sure how I felt about Niles Crane reading to me for the entire length of a book I'd been looking forward to for ages. I shouldn't have worried. This was one of the most enjoyable audiobooks I've run across ever, and Pierce can take a fair chunk of the credit for that. He is a wonderful reader.

The narration makes it, but the book itself is just fantastic too. It is silly but substantive, clever without being obnoxious about it, incredibly imaginative, strangely relevant, and often wise. Also, puns. Many, many puns. The wordplay is everywhere.

Milo is bored. He is a boy for whom life holds no joy: he is not interested in anything, he is always in a hurry, and he is never satisfied. So when a mysterious purple tollbooth shows up in his bedroom one day, the only reason he attempts to use it at all is because there is simply nothing better to do. But the tollbooth is no ordinary toy, and Milo is transported to a world where things start to interest him in spite of himself. This is the Kingdom of Wisdom. He is caught in the Doldrums, visits Dictionopolis and meets King Azaz the Unabridged, makes his way through the Forest of Sight and the Valley of Sound, encounters the Mathemagician in Digitopolis, and finally takes on the Mountains of Ignorance. For all is not well in the Kingdom of Wisdom: a horrible mistake was made, and the princesses Rhyme and Reason have been banished, and everyone is counting on Milo to bring them back.

Most criticisms I have seen of the book lie in the fact that it is too clever for its own good; the words are too long, the concepts too difficult, for children to understand. These criticisms started when Juster released the book back in 1961 and they continue today. I think this is incredibly unfair. Not to the book, because it is indeed full of delightful words and challenging concepts, but to the children whose parents (or teachers, or librarians) decide not to attempt it because they think it will be too hard. This is a book that has many charms, and if a child doesn't get all the jokes, they'll still enjoy the adventure story. And frankly, most children I know love a good joke. (And lots of bad ones, too, and lots of things that aren't really jokes at all...) And many of them have no trouble taking things literally, as Juster often does with his idioms (how do you get to the Island of Conclusions? You jump there, of course.) So what if they don't pick up on everything the first time through. Let them read it again. This book has staying power. My suspicion is that they will want to read it again. And they will get more out of it the second time through. And yet more the third time.

I say this because I was actually scared off reading this with my parent-child book club for a couple of years because of the suggestion it might be too hard for kids to enjoy. What a shame, because there are kids who have moved on from the group and won't be reading this with me now, and I regret that. Checking in with the kids who still come to book club, all of them adore it so far. None of the parents in the group were more than passingly familiar with the book either, and certainly hadn't read it. Those I have talked to are loving it, too. I should know better than to fear the appropriateness of a book because it is "difficult." I should trust my instincts, but I should also trust the kids themselves.

My criticism doesn't lie with the supposed difficulty of the book. My criticism lies in the fact that there is a Message, and very occasionally the plot serves the Message rather than the Message coming out of the plot organically. There were moments when it was clear that Learning is Good and Fun and You Should Do It Even If You're Not Sure Why You're Doing It Right Now, and Also Pay Attention Kid. It was just that I was enjoying David Hyde Pierce's reading so much and the inventiveness of the plot and world so much that I didn't much care about being Messaged At. The other important point here is that the book isn't trying to be coy; it knows it has a Message. It's pretty clear on that. The major win is that it also tries hard to be an enjoyable story, and succeeds 99.5% of the time. 

This is a book I will buy so that I have it lying around. I will reread it myself (and I suspect reading will be a different, but still very enjoyable, experience, not least because I missed out on Jules Feiffer's illustrations) and I look forward to reading it with others, too, and reveling in the sheer silly joy of the English language.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen, narrated by Nadia May
Blackstone Audio, 2005 (originally published in 1813)
10 discs, unabridged

What can one possibly say about Pride and Prejudice? Well, lots, but someone like me, a lightweight fan of Jane Austen with a particular love for this book, is highly unlikely to say anything new or exciting. I did realize, though, I've never talked about this book on my blog, despite it being one of my favourite books of all time. I'll ruminate instead on the experience of "rereading" something by listening to it, and some of the bits that struck me particularly forcefully this time around. I'm sure that most of what I say here has been hashed through in first year English Literature classes the world round -- forgive me, I never took one of those, and my reading of literary criticism of Jane Austen has been very sparse (I haven't even read the introduction to either of the editions of Pride and Prejudice I own, though I would like to). There will be spoilers for the entire book here, so watch yourself if you haven't read it and have managed to avoid knowing anything about it.

Though it seems a little ridiculous to attempt a summary, here we go: Pride and Prejudice follows the romance, among other adventures, of Elizabeth Bennet, second of five daughters born to a quiet, intelligent, and rather lazy nobleman and his loud, foolish, and rather hysterical wife. She becomes aware of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy near the beginning of the book, but not in a positive way -- he snubs her terribly at a ball, and she spends the greater part of the book quite disdainful of him. This is a rather unusual romance in that most of the falling in love takes place while the hero and heroine are separated, at least on the heroine's side. Also touched upon are the manners and conventions of the time, the status of women, education, morality, marriage, and female relationships -- both sisterhood and friendship.

Mrs. Bennet's prime goal in life is to see her daughters married; this is not as ridiculous as it sounds, given that we're talking Regency England here, and any unmarried daughters would be in a very perilous state indeed once Mr. Bennet died. Because has no male heirs, his estate, Longbourn, will be entailed to a distant male relative once he dies. The injustice of this is never commented on in much seriousness -- it is Mrs. Bennet who does most of the complaining, and she complains about pretty much everything -- but this is perhaps one of the better examples in the book of showing and not telling. The distant male relative is a buffoon and it does, in fact, seem rather awful that Mr. Bennet's generally (not universally) lovely daughters will become homeless, or at least entirely dependent on the goodwill of their brothers-in-law or, less likely still, the distant cousin, based solely on their sex if they do not marry.

And the book spends rather a large amount of time looking at what marriage can be. I am not sure if it was the mode of ingestion -- listening versus reading -- or whether it was that it's been quite a while since my last ingestion, but this seemed very clear to me this time around. Elizabeth explicitly thinks about the relationship her parents have in uncomplimentary terms, noting that the match has not been kind to either of them; her father has retreated into sarcasm and indolence; her mother, unrestrained by good sense (or the good sense of her husband), is more of a hindrance to her daughters than a help to them, and is also plagued by real or imaginary nervous ailments. She is determined she will make a better match than this, and in fact refuses a proposal relatively early on in the book that would have secured her future comfortably (and set her up to be mistress of Longbourn at her father's passing) but would have made her absolutely miserable otherwise. When Elizabeth's close friend Charlotte accepts the same man's proposal, it causes Elizabeth an enormous amount of turmoil, and she loses a great deal of respect for Charlotte.

This whole episode with Charlotte fascinates me, because Elizabeth Bennet is not stupid and must be able to see why Charlotte did what she did; and I've thought that perhaps she was just more of a romantic than she thinks she is. The idea of marrying someone to satisfy a financially stable future is completely abhorrent to her. Or at least, that's what I thought it was, but on listening to the book again I think I've got to modify my conclusion. It's not just that Charlotte is so mercenary -- though that does bother her -- it's that she knows Charlotte can have no respect for her husband, and I think that is what really bothers Elizabeth.

I think it is rather more than romanticism; Elizabeth moderates her own affection for Wickham based on his lack of prospects, despite the fact that she is indeed attracted to him. This is mercenary too, ignoring the desires of her heart because her head reminds her that marriage to Wickham wouldn't be a comfortable place for a lady who is used to a certain kind of status and society. It's the lack of respect for one's husband that bothers her -- and I think it must be at least partially because she's seen how that plays out in her own parents' life.

Austen never seems to condemn Charlotte in the same way that Elizabeth does; and indeed, she makes it quite clear that Charlotte, if not in raptures, is quite content with her lot. Her temperament is certainly much more suitable to the challenge than Elizabeth's, who doesn't have the patience to deal with either Mr. Collins or Lady Catherine de Burgh for the long haul. I have wished that Elizabeth could be a little more sensible about things, and understand that her friend still needs her, probably more than ever; but the relationship is never fleshed out fully either pre-Mr. Collins nor post-.

I've got lots more to say, but I'll spare you this time. The audiobook I listened to was quite serviceable, and I actually tried a couple before hitting on this one. I wish I could say that this book would be awesome no matter who reads it, but that is simply not the case. The first was abridged. (BAH.) The second had a narrator who was a little too excited about her role. This third was mostly good, though Nadia May doesn't distinguish between speakers maybe quite as much as she could (better than the over-distinguishing of one of the other narrators I tried.) Her smoky voice takes a bit of getting used to, but overall she's a great narrator for this tale. Highly enjoyable.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen
Naxos Audiobooks, 2007 (originally published in 1817)
7 discs (unabridged)

Here is a case where an audiobook works a lot better than the print version for me. I've tried picking up Northanger Abbey a couple of times over the years (this book has the distinction of being one of the earliest entries on my formal TBR: number 7, to be exact) and it just never worked out between us. And the beginning, even as an audiobook, is a bit dry. But the wonders of a good reader reading an excellent, scintillating, clever story have once again pulled me through. I loved this whole experience.

Which is not to say that we always got along, the reader, the story, and I. I found Juliet Stevenson's delivery of Catherine Morland's voice to be irritating at first. But there are some subtle variations that start to make a great deal of sense, and by the end of the seventh disc I was mostly won over, though I still think she sounds stupider than the book (having read a few passages since) seems to suggest. Also, the story gets a bit... flat at the end. Almost like the author is in a hurry. Or perhaps she is pulling back, letting her characters get on with things without too much interference. (Now I know where Mary Robinette Kowal gets it from, I'm inclined to forgive her a bit for it.) At any rate, it's a wee bit unsatisfying.

But enough of the bad! Shall we see which passages I particularly enjoyed? Or perhaps a summary first?

Catherine Morland is a lovely, unpretentious, and perhaps just a bit callow young woman of seventeen, who is on her way to Bath with family friends, the Allens. She is quickly delighted and extremely impressionable, but also easy-going and generous with her affections. Not, perhaps, as the narrator might wish, an exactly perfect heroine for a Gothic novel... but entertaining nonetheless. In Bath she meets a number of new friends, chiefly Isabella Thorpe, who shares her love of Gothic novels, and Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who are well-off, intelligent, and good-natured companions. When Catherine is invited to spend time at the Tilney estate, grandly called Northanger Abbey, her imagination takes hold: the ancient Abbey holds terrors everywhere for a young, unattached woman... doesn't it?

It's actually all fairly complex, Austen-like, and there's a fair bit more going on here than first appears. It's a pointed skewer of the immensely popular Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe et al, surprisingly postmodern (Jane got there first!), a romance, an examination of reading and language, an examination of the state of women, a look at friendship. And probably more, but I was only listening to this, after all, not doing a close reading. Oh, and it's funny. It's really quite funny, in that perfect, almost surprising way -- sometimes sly, sometimes droll, and every once in a while full-out amusing.

And as a lover of books since childhood, there are a number of parts that are entirely, utterly relatable. Catherine is convinced that she shall be the one to discover the Abbey's deep, dark secrets, just by virtue of... well, she's not sure exactly what virtue is going to help her, but it's what happens in all the books, is it not? Catherine: I have been there.

Perhaps I shall let Jane do the talking now. There are a number of quite quotable bits, things that delighted me quite a bit. The narrator is rather put out that her heroine is not quite a perfectly accomplished, desperate, and desperately unhappy Gothic heroine, and we get some rather ... shall I say gently exasperated? asides from her. Very dry humour, of the sort that likes to lull the reader into complacency and then give her a bit of a poke.

The progress of Catherine's unhappiness from the events of the evening, was as follows. It appeared first in a general dissatisfaction with every body about her, while she remained in the rooms, which speedily brought on considerable weariness and a violent desire to go home. This, on arriving in Pulteney-street, took the direction of extraordinary hunger, and when that was appeased, changed into an earnest longing to be in bed; such was the extreme point of her distress; for when there she immediately fell into a sound sleep which lasted nine hours, and from which she awoke perfectly revived, in excellent spirits, with fresh hopes and fresh schemes.

And this... Catherine speaks first, Henry Tilney second.

"... But you never read novels, I dare say?" 

"Why not?" 

"Because they are not clever enough for you -- gentlemen read better books." 

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."

It's harsh, but I laughed out loud. Not that I would ever suggest someone who doesn't like reading a good novel is necessarily stupid, myself. Lots of very smart people prefer nonfiction. Some smart people don't like reading at all. Although there is a reading snob in me who whispers that someone who doesn't like reading at all... well, I shouldn't say it out loud. Bad librarian! I have to be aware of my prejudices. Apparently that is one. And not a helpful one, in my line of work.

This was a bit challenging to get started on, as I stated above. Now that I've been through the whole thing, I can totally see reading it (or listening to it) again. The payoff is entirely there, and it's a wonderful book. There is a good reason Jane Austen is still so popular after all these years. Dare I try Sense and Sensibility next? Because that truly is not one of my favourites. Or perhaps Love and Friendship? Or... well, the truth of the matter is that I'm already listening to Pride and Prejudice. Again.

Bellwether by Connie Willis

Bellwether
by Connie Willis
Bantam Spectra, 1996
196 pages

Have you ever had that weird thing happen where something you've read or heard in one part of  your life connects randomly and neatly with something in a completely different part of your life? For example, I finished reading Bellwether and then CBC's The Current had a major piece on the ethics of corporate policies preventing the hiring of smokers the very next morning. It was startling. It was also very, very cool to see how prescient Willis in fact is. And it gave me a whole different perspective on the real-life issue. And hearing people discuss the real-life issue gave me a bit of a different perspective on the book, too.

I adore To Say Nothing of the Dog. I was therefore very keen to get to this book at some point, and I was kind of feeling stuck with my reading. Darla had reviewed it not long ago, so it was on my radar. And my local library had this available as an eBook and it wasn't on hold, either. And like To Say Nothing of the Dog, this book is an ideal combination for me: amusing and not totally serious about itself, but with some serious intellectual meat and chock-full of literary references. Even better, this book is steeped in the poetry of Robert Browning and science lore.

Sandra Foster, our first-person narrator, is a sociologist and statistician working for a company named HiTek. She researches fads, and is currently trying to find the source of the women's hair-bobbing fad of the 1920s, a task she likens to the historical task of trying to find the source of the Nile -- but more difficult. In addition to her research project, she is coping with a hopelessly awful interdepartmental assistant, attempting to discover the secret of a chaos theorist coworker who seems to be totally immune to fads, and trying to rescue classic novels and poetry from being discarded from the local library due to lack of popularity.

There is not a lot at stake here, except for perhaps Sandra's funding and therefore job, and the extreme long-shot odds of winning a Neibnitz Grant, the most prestigious and lucrative scientific award around. Sandra is an engaging narrator, taking us on wonderful, erudite tangents that circle around to the relevant; sharp, funny, and sarcastic. So it becomes quite important to us that she get her funding, that she find the source of the fad, that she is happy. It is impossible not to root for her, even when she is a bit clueless (very rare) or a bit prickly (not quite so rare). It's also hard not to root for her because the things she's up against are often totally ludicrous.

If I had one complaint, and it's not even really a complaint so much as an observation, I don't think this book is quite as subtle as To Say Nothing of the Dog. (I know, I know, I keep comparing, and it's not entirely fair.) It's a short book, and the things Sandra is up against are so over-the-top it becomes almost impossible to believe that she wouldn't be able to overcome them. Management at HiTek is an amalgam of all of the worst possible things about management in a large corporation. Dr. Alicia Turnbull is terribly one-dimensional. Flip, the interdepartmental assistant from Hell, is ... well, the interdepartmental assistant from Hell. She's so awful it's almost impossible to comprehend how she could even make it through a day, doing things like feeding herself and walking up and down stairs. On the other hand, she is not one-dimensional. She's actually a pretty interesting character. Awfully horrifying, but interesting.

The thing is, it's fun. It's smart fun. It's satirical fun. So I can forgive the unsubtle, larger-than-life ridiculousness of what Sandra ends up observing and coping with herself. I can forgive the dig at libraries discarding unused materials, even the really good ones, to save shelf space (because it is uncomfortably true) and I can agree that there is a disturbing analogy to be made between human behaviour and the behaviour of a flock of sheep. It's funny, and it's not, because it's true.

Suffice to say, I think you should read this. It's not long and it's totally, wonderfully worth it. I have purchased Blackout sight unseen (while I was purchasing Bellwether at the same time) and I don't do that often. But Connie Willis is turning out to be an author I want to have on my shelves. She re-reads well, if both To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether are any indication -- I finished Bellwether the first time, and am already halfway through it again. I've read To Say Nothing of the Dog three times now, with a fourth coming up when I inflict it upon my long-suffering genre book club. With both there are new things to be discovered, and wonderful writing to be savoured. And you will come out the other end feeling just a little bit smarter, and maybe even a little bit wiser.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
by Barbara Robinson, narrated by Elaine Stritch
HarperChildren's Audio, 2006 (novel originally published 1971)
2 discs

This is a clear case, for me, of the narrator of an audiobook making a story. From the minute Elaine Stritch's delightful voice began this tale, I was hooked. I think I would have enjoyed this mildly if I'd read it myself, but having it read to me in a dry, wise, and perfectly-timed way elevated the experience.

The story is short: there is a family in town, the Herdmans, made up of six delinquent children and their absentee mother. We meet them through the eyes of our unnamed narrator after they have burned down a neighbour's toolshed and absconded with the donuts delivered for the firemen. These kids are notorious and nasty, bullies at school and general troublemakers everywhere else. So no one expects to see them at church (reasonably; they're only there because the narrator's little brother boasted there were refreshments) -- and no one expects them to be interested in the church's Christmas pageant. The pageant has been the same year, after year, after year... but with Herdmans in the starring roles, this year's pageant is going to be something else entirely.

I am not sure there is a whole lot of meat here for discussion with my parent-child book club. A number of the kids are in Christmas pageants of their own, so that will be fun to compare; and I'm going to be interested to hear what they have to say about the Herdmans. From an adult perspective, it's clear the Herdman kids have some serious behavioural issues, possibly stemming from poverty and neglect at home, and it's just as clear that they're not getting the kind of help they need from the adults in their lives. I'll want to hear what the kids have to say about that. The message of redemption will also be interesting to talk about even though the book ends before we find out of the Herdmans are really changed by their experience. And we can talk about how changing things unexpectedly can lead us to see things clearly, how it can lead us to understand things we've never understood before.

All this said, it's a funny book, and it's supposed to be funny. I want to look a little bit behind the funny, but I also want to leave the book intact for these kids to enjoy. It's a sweet story, religious (it's about a church Christmas pageant, after all) but not pushy, and extremely short. It ended so quickly and with so many unanswered questions on this adult reader's part. The build up to the pageant was pretty big, and the pageant itself felt a little bit anticlimactic. But I still thoroughly enjoyed myself, in large part thanks to Elaine Stritch. I can totally see myself borrowing this little gem of an audiobook every year around this time to get myself into the spirit of the season. If you've read the book or seen the TV movie but never listened to the audio, I highly recommend finding yourself a copy and having a listen. It won't take you long, and it's worth it.

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

The Anthologist
by Nicholson Baker
Simon & Schuster, 2009
243 pages

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

I think I should by rights hate this book, since it's the narrator talking directly at me in stream of consciousness, and that's an unusual and very difficult conceit to pull off... but the further I get into it the more I like it, and suddenly I find myself grinning and nodding along like an idiot. It's a courageous choice, and having worked, it brings the reader so close to the narrator that one can't help but love him and feel for him, even if we are well-acquainted with his foibles and flaws, both the ones he points out to us and the ones he inadvertently reveals.

Paul Chowder is, above all, easily distracted. Teaching us about proper poetry meter and having just blasted iambic pentameter to pieces, we end up in a totally different (and totally recognizable) place:

See those four numbers? Those are the four beats. Four stresses, as we say in the meter business. Tetrameter. Four. "Tetra" is four. Like Tetris, that computer game where the squares come down relentlessly  and overwhelm your mind with their crude geometry and make you peck at the arrow keys like some mindless experimental chicken and hurry and panic and finally you turn your computer off. And you sit there thinking, Why have I just spent an hour watching squares drop down a computer screen?

Heh. And also, sigh.

Another note that keeps cropping up is birds. Paul is not (or claims not to be) a big fan, which is one place where he and I differ. Frankly, we differ on a lot of things, although not on our computer game-playing habits.

You hear that bird? Chirtle chirtle chirtle chirtle. With birds it's different. Birds are very different than we are. They don't know what an upbeat is. They go, Chirtle chirtle chirtle chirtle. And then the next time they might just go, Chirtle -- chirtle chirtle. It's like some kind of wigged-out aimless Gregorian chant. And then sometimes: Chirtle chirtle. And then: Chirtle chirtle chirt? Questioning. You don't know where you are with that.

This is an interesting book in that I kind of want to quote all of it for you. It is extremely meandering, so there's not a lot of forward momentum, other than the fact that I am enjoying Paul's thoughts so much I want more, more, more. And sometimes I go backwards and read bits over again. It's not a very efficient way to read, all this stopping and quoting. This is not a very efficient sort of book, though.

There is a kind of tenderness here, an exposure that is both sweet and sad. Paul is a lovely man, a poet suffering from an absolutely debilitating case of writer's block over a summer during which his partner of eight years has left him and he has to write an introduction to his anthology of collected rhyming poems. At the beginning he seems like he's a run-of-the-mill procrastinator, but the further we get into the summer and into Paul's story we understand that he's not just procrastinating. He's having a true crisis. It's not the sort of crisis he respects -- most of his favourite poets were true sufferers, and he doesn't count himself among them either as a good poet or a true sufferer. But he is suffering, and the reader sees that, and even as the reader shakes their head at his folly they also understand, completely, that he just can't write.

And then we get further in and little pieces of mystery begin to unfold; why did Roz leave? Does she still love him? Why can't Paul teach? Why rhyme? What's wrong with iambic pentameter? What on earth has happened to shake Paul's confidence so badly?

And when the answers are revealed -- not with drama, but in tiny ways that could easily slip by without the reader's notice, except that the reader has been paying close attention because Paul really does know how to use language -- they are perfect and understated and understandable and sometimes not singular, but a confluence of factors leading to the present circumstance.

This is an intimate book, a splendid book that goes on just long enough and drifts to a close in a beautiful way. There is subtlety, a careful scrutiny of the small, and an acknowledgement of the absurd and the universal. I know much more about poetry than I did when I started it, too, but that's totally beside the point. It is a gift to spend a week in Paul Chowder's gentle, distracted, intelligent, funny head and I will be coming back to this book again. This is one of those books that makes it hard for me to decide whether or not to search out more by the author; what if his other books aren't anything like this one? I can't imagine that there's anything else out there quite like this one. But then, if this book is anything to go by, Baker knows how to write. I'm looking forward to reading more.

Spud by John van de Ruit

Spud
by John van de Ruit
Razorbill, 2007
331 pages

It's late and I probably shouldn't be writing this right now, but I doubt I'll sleep until I get some of this out of my system. This book has done its level best to destroy me, and I'm fighting back. Talk about reading outside one's comfort zone.

It's hard to talk about this. Did I love this book? Certainly parts of it. Did I hate this book? I'm not sure, but there were parts I think I can fairly say I hated. And whether I love it or hate it, this book has caused me no end of trouble since I picked it off the shelf, a lot of that my own damn fault.

To begin with, I did a thing that no librarian should do: I recommended this book to my brand-spanking-new after school club without having read it myself first. Now, to be fair, it is highly recommended by many whose opinions I respect, and its "target age" is between 12-18, which puts it right about in the ballpark for a book club of 12-13 year-olds. What I should have recognized, and did pretty much from the outset once I had started reading it is that my particular group of 12-13 year-olds isn't ready for Spud. I am a proponent of reading fearlessly, I am not a fan of censorship, I think there is space for controversy in every librarian's job. I also think that reading the right book at the wrong time can be a disaster for the reader and the book. (See: my long-held hatred of Bridge to Terabithia.) My librarian-spidey-senses are telling me that for at least five of the nine kids in the group, this is really not the right time.

So now, of course, I have to go back to them with a mea culpa. I plan on being totally honest with them: I recommended this book based on the information I had, but I hadn't actually read it, and now that I have I'm not comfortable with the choice. They're welcome to read it on their own, but I've got a couple other options for our book club that will scratch the same itch. (Schooled by Gordon Korman will be arriving just in the nick of time, I hope.)

And that's just the first bit of trouble that Spud has caused me.

Summary time!

John Milton is a very bright thirteen-year-old prepubescent boy heading off to a very prestigious all-boys boarding school in South Africa in 1990. While he is there for his first year, Nelson Mandela will be released, apartheid will start to unravel, he will fall in love with two different girls (not counting Julia Roberts), and encounter sex, great literature, death, cricket, theatre, vicious enemies, and good friends. And we have access to it all, because John "Spud" Milton is a crack diarist.

And when I say all, I mean all. Spud lets us in to his very deepest thoughts and desires, as well as chronicling everything he sees around him, leaving nothing out. It's crass, tender, brilliant, occasionally sad, often completely horrifying, and wickedly, wickedly funny. It's easy to read, even when Spud is going places I fear to tread, and he makes such an engaging, sympathetic narrator that right from the first entries the reader is rooting for him.

It's an interesting book to read right now with the bullying issue so prevalent in the media. As with Spud's friend Gecko, I cannot imagine a worse Hell than an all-boys boarding school; Spud is far more resilient than I could imagine being, far more brave (despite seeing himself a coward), and far more humane than I could imagine being under the conditions he describes. This isn't the happy boarding school world of Hogwarts. This is a viciously mean-minded place, where your friends are just as likely to turn on you as your enemies and going for help is considered a punishable betrayal. There's chronic physical and sexual assault, verbal taunts, daily humiliations... it's foul. And reading about it leaves one vaguely horrified because one knows that it's not really made up. This stuff happened. Happens. What is amazing is that anyone can come out of a situation like that and not end up a sociopath. It does become abundantly clear why kids in bad situations like this don't stand up for the bullied, though, or go to adults for help. They simply can't.

It's not all terror and misery, and Spud manages to walk just this side of the line of being the smallest and most pathetic, easiest to pick on. He's got characteristics that give him some street cred, despite his size and beautiful soprano voice. He's likable, he's clever, he's brave enough. He's a good cricketer and he's got some sort of attraction for the female sex, which while being more trouble than it's worth is also his ticket to being accepted by his peers. And it's refreshing to read a book directed at kids between 12-18 that deals so frankly and honestly with the physical as well as the mental aspects of budding sexuality. Spud doesn't think about sex all the time, but it's not that far from his thoughts ever, which feels about right for both males and females of his age.

Happily for the reader, Spud is really, really funny. Not always on purpose, but he's generally pretty good at seeing the amusing side of things, too, so the reader is laughing with him rather than at him, as he incredulously reports the madness of events around him. His family is utterly dysfunctional; his father is a drunken, paranoid wannabe who is somehow fairly harmless in spite of himself. (Talking point for book club discussion: his father is pretty racist, and I use the word "harmless" -- but even if his father is totally ineffectual and a laughing-stock, is he truly "harmless" in his bigotry?) His grandmother, "affectionately" called Wombat, is convinced everyone is stealing from her -- things like her yoghurt. As Spud says, he's pretty capable of taking what school throws at him because he's used to the complete insanity of the world. And Spud is also compassionate and considerate, trying to do the right thing while maintaining his own grip on sanity, which he (not unreasonably) tends to think he's losing at various points.

John van de Ruit, as one might guess, has inhabited Spud so thoroughly that he disappears into the text. There doesn't seem to be an author, just a kid writing in his diary. Which is mostly good, but can also be a bit difficult in that Spud sometimes can't or won't go places an author could; the depth and seriousness sometimes gets undercut or ignored. Sometimes it feels like it gets undercut for laughs, but one could read that as Spud trying to use humour to cope.

The ending, which I absolutely will not spoil for you, felt very sour compared to the rest of the story because the crisis event happens so close to the end of term that Spud doesn't really get a chance to work through it to this reader's satisfaction. Sitting back a bit, I realize that it would be unfair to ask Spud to be more thorough in his analysis and recovery, because he's a 14-year-old kid writing in a dairy. So it's authentic, perhaps, but it's abrupt. I felt like I was left hanging. And not in a way that leaves me clamouring for a sequel; it's not that kind of hanging. I'd say more but I'll start to give things away. However, I'm writing this review at midnight even though smallfry is asleep and I should be too, because I needed some time to deal with what happened.

Do I think you should read this book? Yes. Read this book and then come back here and talk to me about it. This is a great, refreshing, darkly funny, extremely-well-written book. As you can probably tell from the length of this entry, I want to talk about this book. I think there's incredible amounts of fodder for discussion here, and perhaps someday I will take a crack at it with a book club, when the time is right.

UPDATE: Since writing this, I've had my book club meeting, and explained my discomfort to the kids; they promptly asked why, so I explained that too. Then instead of telling them we weren't doing the book, I said I wasn't going to tell them they had to read it, but they could choose to read it or Schooled. Of the seven at the meeting, two took Spud home, and five took Schooled. Kids are the best judges of their own comfort levels. I'm looking forward to our discussion!