Literature

Don’t let the ridiculous title (or the appalling cover) fool you; this book is more Catch 22 than The Bathroom Reader. In fact, it’s so much like Catch 22 that the protagonist may as well have been named Yossarian rather than Doyle Coldiron (it’s no coincidence that there is a plug from Heller on the front cover). Doyle is a US Secret Service agent who suffers from depression and loneliness that result, in part anyway, from the secrecy surrounding his job. Where the book differs most from Catch 22 is not in the specific characters and situations (I mean, they are different, of course, but that has little impact thematically), and not in the prose style (which is incredibly simple and straightforward and logical to the point of absurdity), but rather in the fact that the sense of insanity and futility comes, not from a ridiculous and high-stress situation, but… Continue Reading →

I actually finished this book on Monday night, but have not had the time to write about it until now. Smith is a favourite of mine, one of my very favourite living Canadian writers, in fact, and this was the last of his fiction that I had to track down. I’m not sure if it’s available from another publisher, but this particular copy was from The Porcupine’s Quill. For anyone not already familiar with TPQ, some explaining will be necessary. They are a small Canadian press, notable for two things: first, they publish well-written books by emerging or under-appreciated authors, and second, in terms of their status as objects, they publish the ugliest books known to man. This seems like an exaggeration on my part, and I assure you that it is not. I have several TPQ books, but let’s just use Noise as an exemplar, as it is fairly… Continue Reading →

I’m lucky enough to own a first edition of this book (well, first edition in English), so the cover isn’t what one would normally expect, although my copy is in better shape than the copy shown. It’s intimidating trying to write about Nabokov’s work. He’s not intimidating to me as a reader, but he’s such a sneaky old bastard that every time I open my mouth about one of his books (and this is the sixteenth, that’s right, the sixteenth that I’ve read) I’m terrified that I’ve missed something strikingly obvious. It’s less likely with King, Queen, Knave, because it’s such an early book, but still. The plot, like with Mary, is absurdly simple; a young man moves to the city to start a new life with the help of his successful uncle. He and his aunt eventually fall in love and hatch a scheme to dispose of the uncle,… Continue Reading →

I am reading, and rationing, the Bond novels as a way to slow down and possibly even switch gears between more serious books. Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy them; I enjoy them tremendously. They are taught, exciting, and paradoxically both spartan and decadent at the same time. As they go on, though, Fleming includes more and more non-Caucasians (and now, in Goldfinger, a lesbian as well) in his roster of villains and henchman, and he is very much a product of his time in that his racism is both casual and startlingly complete. Certain passages about Goldfinger’s Korean henchmen are downright uncomfortable—or should be—for any modern reader. This, the seventh of the 007 books, was also a bit less compelling than many of its predecessors because, like Dr. No, it begins very reasonably but slips into an almost film-like parody of itself. Goldfinger’s schemes are unreasonably… Continue Reading →

For various reasons this book, for me, is always connected with other books. I first learned of it just before Christmas, when I was in a bookstore in Waterloo and commenting to my father that I had just read On Beauty and enjoyed it considerably. A staff member came rushing up and gave The Emperor’s Children a hearty “if you liked On Beauty, you’ll also enjoy…” kind of recommendation. I didn’t buy it then, but in early January another bookstore (here in Toronto) was having a sale to welcome the new year, so I picked it up, along with a copy of the much talked about Special Topics in Calamity Physics. In between those two bookshop experiences I had been absolutely bathed in publicity about both books, and they had become inextricably linked in my mind (along with On Beauty). I know that doesn’t seem especially relevant, but I thought… Continue Reading →

This is the first, and hopefully one of the last, re-reads for this year. I don’t often go back and read a book again; the circumstances under which I do so are surprisingly rare. I must either have absolutely loved the book and found it a quick and easy comfort read, or I must have hated the book and then let a few years pass in order to allow myself to change enough that I might gain new insights (this worked for Dubliners, which I initially disliked but now love, but not for Catcher in the Rye, which I hated as much last summer as I did when I first read it ten years ago). Good Omens falls into the former category, as my all-time favourite humour book. This particular re-reading was predicated by my finding a copy of the new hardback version for next to nothing in a used/remaindered… Continue Reading →

I think this is the first time, and by that I mean the first time ever, that I have read an award-winning book while it was still the most recent book to have won that award. In this case the award is of course The Scotiabank Giller Prize, a.k.a. The Friends of Margaret Atwood award (I’m really going to have to look into whether I coined that, or whether I picked it up from somewhere—a quick search on Google tells me that I probably coined it. Hooray for me!). I had mixed feelings about the idea of reading this book. Partly I was afraid it would be cold and full of shop-talk, afraid that Lam, an emergency room doctor “in real life”, wouldn’t be able to escape his own subject matter and delve into human consequences beyond the physical. But of course a big part of me wanted to see… Continue Reading →

Spoilers! There’s a lot going on in this book that can’t be dealt with unless you give away the major “surprise” of the book (although at this point I really doubt it’s much of a surprise). But if you haven’t read the book yet, or heard the buzz and would rather approach it with a clean slate, turn away now. Everybody else, here goes: the narrator and most of the other main characters (the “students” at the Hailsham boarding school) are clones created so their organs can be harvested when they mature. Isn’t that topical? I was one of the folks who was aware of the premise going in, and I was quite surprised at how muted and taken for granted it was in the book (although I shouldn’t have been, Ishiguro being the writer he is). Instead of a book filled with fiddly medical bits and soul-searching passages of… Continue Reading →

It’s hard not to wonder sometimes about the topics Christopher Moore chooses for his humour books. The last one I read was, after all, about Christ’s childhood, and this one… well. This one is about, in various ways, a cargo cult in Micronesia, a heavenly game of poker, genital mutilation, cannibalism, organ harvesting, promiscuity, the impact of large civilizations on smaller ones, a rather toothless parody of Mary Kay cosmetics, and of course, a talking fruit bat. With a list like that, where to begin? (Also, I’ve got to say pretty much every cover was much cooler than the North American paperback edition pictured.) Let’s start by saying it wasn’t as funny as the other book. Which is not to say that it wasn’t funny at all, but there were very few laugh-out-loud moments in the book, and I cringed a little when the protagonist’s back-story turned out to be… Continue Reading →