Reading 2007

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 →

First, some caveats: I’ve been ill over the last few weeks and so it took me significantly longer than it normally would to consume this book. I also don’t recommend reading semiotics, even informal semiotics such as what is present in this book, with a bad sinus cold. My concentration was not what it could have been, to say the least. Also, I firmly believe that we are all better readers of one or another sort of writing than we are of others. I am not a particularly good reader of non-fiction, and my ability to process academic work has gone down quite a bit since I left the university environment. Anything I write about this book should therefore be read with those factors in mind. The dust jacket billed this book as a collection of informal writerly essays, although with a few exceptions (“On Some Functions of Literature”, “How… Continue Reading →

I’m not entirely certain what to make of this book. It’s technically not the first Terry Pratchett novel I’ve read. Good Omens, the novel he did with Neil Gaiman, is one of my all-time favourite humour books, and in early high school I picked up one of the Discworld novels that featured Death (I can’t remember which novel), and to be honest it didn’t really strike my fancy, and it wasn’t exactly a memorable experience. It probably doesn’t help that I’m not exactly a dedicated reader of fantasy. One of my professors at UW once told me that her experience reading Tolkien when she was younger is among the reasons she decided to study literature for a living. I didn’t get around to The Lord of the Rings until I was in my early twenties and I disliked it so much that “hate” might actually be the most appropriate descriptor.… Continue Reading →

I actually finished reading this last night, but was simply too tired to post about it. I originally picked this book up because of Stephen Soderbergh’s adaptation, which I very much enjoyed, although I know I am in the minority on that score. I haven’t yet seen Tarkovsky’s 1972 film, but I plan to rent it on the weekend. Soderbergh’s adaptation wasn’t quite true to the novel in terms of plot, but I find that it did manage to distill a lot of the atmosphere and thematic thrust of the novel. The novel itself was as advertised: depressing as hell. Reading about a man dealing with the re-incarnation of his dead wife triggered some painful memories from my own life, but ultimately it was an incredible experience to read about a man being destroyed, essentially, with a direct, physical encounter with the deeper layers of his own mind. The book… Continue Reading →