Reading 2008

When I bought this book, it was, as Steven admits to sometimes doing, mostly because of the cover. Really, who can resist a barely-clad woman in black? Not I. It wasn’t solely because of that, though. Part of it was the quotation from Timothy Findley on the back, and part of it was because there aren’t many Canadian novels (well, far fewer than those of our British and American cousins, anyway) that take the urban experience seriously, and I’m becoming more and more an urban creature since moving to the south. This novel, if nothing else, promised to be intensely urban. I was therefore quite saddened to find that the novel was pretty terrible. Indigo Blackwell, our protagonist, is a vapid character living a more or less meaningless existence, working a not-very-satisfying job and married to a husband (Sam) who is selfish and mildly manipulative. He’s doing research for his… Continue Reading →

I bought this book because it was the only volume of science fiction in the entire Canadian section of my favourite neighbourhood book store, and I had never before read a Canadian novel that was deliberately labeled as SF. The reviews plastered all over it (from publications as diverse as Analog and Quill & Quire, though strangely no indication of what the book was actually about) were from sources I respected and more than piqued my interest. It turns out Phyllis Gotlieb is fairly well-known in SF circles, but I am an interested outsider at best. Everything I’ve read about Gotlieb’s work, and about this novel in particular, suggests that it is violent and highly sexual, though not necessarily erotic, and I found those statements to be true. It took me a good thirty or forty pages to get the hang of the book, but after that it took me… Continue Reading →

I received this book as a gift several years ago, but the subject matter (a country and western singer from Toronto) put me off it, as well as the fact that it’s a pretty ugly book with uncomfortably tight binding. Those may be stupid reasons to put off reading a book, I guess, but those are the kinds of things that can go through your mind when you’re looking for your next reading experience. It’s right up there with “am I in the mood or action, or contemplation?” I also think that I may have insulted the person who gave it to me by not reading it right away, which was not my intention at all. But I guess there’s no going back to those moments, right? So a few days ago I finally felt it was time, and here we are. Robertson’s protagonist, James, is in fact a country… Continue Reading →

I only just recently tracked this novel down, an old professor of mine having recommended to me two or three years ago. I had been sitting on a comfortable but somewhat worn green recliner in his office, discussing my disappointment with how parochial and predictable and just plain bloodless the CanLit scene had become, when he pulled this book from his shelf and had me read a section near the beginning in which Russ Littlebury, the protagonist, assaults a funeral director. He challenged me: how often do you come across something like this in a Canadian novel? The answer was almost never. Canadian novels, with a few notable exceptions (Robertson Davies and Russell Smith both come to mind) are seldom boisterous and even more seldom dangerous. We seem to excel at expressing quiet dignity, quiet pain, quiet lives. If we tackle large themes at all, or the messiness and violence… Continue Reading →

At last the trilogy is over. The more I read of this third book in The Fionavar Tapestry, the more I was reminded of The Lord of the Rings, and certainly not in a good way (I am not a fan). Obviously Kay is a fan; he helped Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion, after all. But I think what he wound up doing with this trilogy, his first attempt at long-form high fantasy, was take his fan status too far. So much of The Fionavar Tapesty can be paralleled directly with events in The Lord of the Rings. There is the same sense of a world obsessed with the past, there is an ancient and beautiful/powerful race journeying to a land of their own in the West (the lios alfar in Fionavar, but plain old elves in Tolkien’s world). Each includes dwarves under the mountains and riders on the plain,… Continue Reading →

I was talking last night with someone about the fact that I was reading The Wandering Fire, and not enjoying it very much, and that I was disappointed, particularly since I enjoyed Tigana so much, and Kay came so highly recommended. In him I found a kindred spirit, and he proudly proclaimed that The Fionavar Tapestry, of which this book is the second part, is a pile of wank. Good call, that. I think, if anything, The Wandering Fire was worse than The Summer Tree. The one character that I had held out hope for, a Toronto law student named Kevin Laine, suddenly became another high fantasy puppet. Up until this book he was the only one of the five transplanted Torontonians not to have unlocked secret knowledge, discovered godlike powers, or become a Conan-like action hero in the space of a few days. Up until this book. Midway through,… Continue Reading →

You’ll notice that the cover on the left doesn’t match the title of the book. That’s because The Summer Tree is in fact the first book in a trilogy called The Fionavar Tapestry, and my copy has all three parts of the trilogy bound together in a single volume. I list them as separate books, however, because even within this single volume they are broken up with separate title pages, acknowledgments, tables of contents, etc. It’s three books bound together as one; that’s my policy on this stuff and I’m sticking to it. With that out of the way, I can talk about the book itself. It’s the second thing I’ve read from Canadian fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay, the first being a quite good novel inspired by Italian history called Tigana. I didn’t realize until I was more than half-way through that The Summer Tree was Kay’s first novel.… Continue Reading →

I don’t have the dust jacket for this book at present, but I read a summary of it online, and the conclusions that others have drawn about these stories, the certainties about things left unsaid, made me feel like I did when I was a child, when in the movies an actor and actress would embrace and the screen would go dark. I know now, as an adult, that it meant they were having sex in whatever magical land existed off-camera, but as a child I had no idea, and so missed several rather important plot points. Reading those other peoples’ impressions I felt like I had misunderstood when things faded to black. Reflection makes me think that perhaps I didn’t misunderstand. Quite a bit occurs in the unstated moments of Munro’s short fiction. What she leaves out is as important as what she describes, but I don’t get the… Continue Reading →

I’ve never been particularly touched by Holocaust narratives, and though strictly speaking this isn’t a Holocaust narrative, I was finally able to emotionally connect with the event. Nathan Gelder is a half-Jewish Dutchman (his mother is Dutch, and I thought that Jewish ancestry was matrilineal, but I could be wrong) who loses his family in the Nazi invasion of Holland, while he is sent to live with his rich uncle in Canada. My mother’s family comes from Holland as well, and we lost a great deal of family as a result of the Nazi regime, although we’re gypsies and not Jews. I’m too young—far too young—to have felt the impact on a personal level, but still I think there’s a movement, not in an organized sense or anything, but more like a general feeling, among people of my generation to want to feel involved and connected somehow to events of… Continue Reading →