Category: Reviews
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
“Maybe I could take you seriously if you wore a smaller hat.”
My rating: 3/5 stars
Published in: 1855
Synopsis (via Wikipedia):
Forced to leave her home in the tranquil rural south, Margaret Hale settles with her parents in the industrial town of Milton where she witnesses the harsh brutal world wrought by the industrial revolution and where employers and workers clash in the first organized strikes. Sympathetic to the poor whose courage and tenacity she admires and among whom she makes friends, she clashes with John Thorton, a cotton mill manufacturer who belongs to the nouveaux riche and whose contemptuous attitude to workers Margaret despises. The confrontation between her and Mr Thornton is reminiscent of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, but in the broad context of the harsh industrial North.
North and South is the first classic I read in 2013, and I haven’t been moved to write about it. My 3/5 star rating is a pretty big burn – I expect the 1,001 Books to be at least a 4. Otherwise, I simply don’t agree that I must read it before I die. I can wait till another lifetime to read books that are just “good”. Continue reading
Belinda’s Rings by Corinna Chong: Review, Author Q&A, and Giveaway
My rating: 4/5 stars
Release date: March 15, 2013
Publisher: NeWest Press
Thank you to NeWest Press for sending me this book in exchange for an honest review.
Synopsis:
Half-Asian teenager Grace (but she’d prefer it if you called her “Gray” instead) is not a perfect little supermom-in-the-making like her older sister Jessica, and would rather become a marine biologist than a mother—although she does understand how to take care of her special-needs kid brother Squid better than anyone else in her family. When her mother Belinda abruptly runs out on her family and flies across the Atlantic in order to study crop circles in the English countryside, Grace is left alone to puzzle out her life, the world, and her unique place within it. With a warmth and a boisterous sense of humour reminiscent of Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness and Peter Hedges’ What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? author Corinna Chong introduces us to two lovable and thoroughly original female characters: persnickety, precocious Grace, and her impractical, impulsive mother Belinda—very different women who nevertheless persistently circle back into each other’s hearts.
Before I start the review proper, let me get a few cliches off my chest: Stunning debut. Unflinching. Courageous.
Belinda’s Rings is about a lot of things. It’s about being a parent and being a sibling and being a child. It’s about mental illness and race and marginalization. It’s about perfect circles on the ground and lights in the sky and creatures in the sea. But most of all, it’s about mothering. And in a media environment that is sorely lacking in any nuanced discussion of motherhood (“Mommy Wars,” anyone?) it is so satisfying to read a take on motherhood that had me nodding in agreement and wincing in horror all at once. Continue reading
The Fault in Our Stars: Use Your (Literary) Allusion
Rating: 4/5 stars.
(Yes, I’m going to start giving ratings. Rating scale to follow, but it’s pretty self-explanatory. Also, spoilers. In case there are few of you who haven’t read this book yet. )
The Fault in Our Stars is a great book.
That may seem like an obvious thing to say. It is a bestseller, received rave reviews, and is a top ten list favourite. But I want to be clear. It’s a great book, no qualifiers. It’s not a great YA book. It’s not a great cancer book. It’s a great book. Continue reading
Review: The Night Circus
Reviews for The Night Circus ranged from the breathless to the middling to the damning, but popular opinion leans towards the breathless. “Beautiful!” “Magical!” “Like watching a movie!”
For me, this doesn’t bode well. I tend to look down on books that are “too” popular (book snob, remember?) and when I DO believe the hype, I’m often let down. I tried to go into The Night Circus without expectation, but I did buy into the idea that this would be a heavy-on-imagery, light-on-plot kind of book; and that was just fine, after reading a book that was very heavy (literally.) I looked forward to losing myself in a Victorian romance. Continue reading
What’s The Deal With Infinite Jest?
I just finished Infinite Jest, and I have questions.
I finished the book early one morning, before the kids were awake. The first thing I did was Google “what happened in Infinite Jest.” The second thing I did was Google “Infinite Jest WTF” and my own blog was the fourth result. Gulp.
I started to read some blog posts and critical reviews, and quickly realized that if I just read what other people think, I’m not going to draw my own conclusions. So, I quickly wrote down my questions and impressions so they’re as fresh as possible. I don’t want to sound smarter than I am because I’ve read a bunch of other people’s thoughts.
(As an aside, 101 Books identifies this, reading reviews before forming an opinion, as a sign that you might be a book snob. Well… I’ve come to terms with my book snobbery, so I’m okay with that!)
This post is for other people who finished Infinite Jest, and, like me, were like “WHAT HAPPENED,” so you’ll feel better; for people who finished it and totally understood everything, so you’ll feel smart; and for people who haven’t read this book, so that maybe you’ll be intrigued enough to pick it up. Despite not understanding everything, I think this is an important book for all of us borderline millennials and, well, everyone. To paraphase DFW himself, this book is about what it is to be a fucking human being.
In no particular order, here are my questions, impressions, thoughts, and feelings upon finishing Infinite Jest. Spoilers, etc:
- What is the significance of TEETH in this book? Off the top of my head, the ADA forgives Gately for causing his wife’s obsession with cleaning her teeth, one of Himself’s films was about teeth, one of ETA staff is obsessed with teeth, Mario is “homo dental” which I don’t even know if that’s a thing, and every time I read “Ortho Stice” I thought of braces. This may seem like a weird thing to fixate one, but it is really bothering me!
- These is a serious lack of female characters in this book. The settings are primarily male: A tennis academy and a drug recovery house, both of which of course have female residents, but are male dominated. The primary females are damaged or physically different – Joelle’s face (both as PGOAT and UHID), Avril’s height, Pat’s limp. Continue reading
Mo’ Kobos, Mo’ Problems
I was hoping to get this review out before Christmas for gift-giving purposes, but perhaps you Boxing Day shoppers can make some use of it.
I got a Kobo Glo for my birthday and was pretty excited, and not because it came in pink (well, not only.) My first generation Kobo was slow, glitchy, and poorly designed, but it served me well over the years. The Kobo Glo addresses a lot of the issues I had, and some that I didn’t even think of, but after a few month’s use, I’m frustrated again.
Most of the new features are great. Obviously it’s better to have a touch screen and wireless capability. It handles footnotes and moving between sections with ease (Infinite Jest style footnotes are an exception, probably.) The battery life is great. The built in light is a GODSEND. And it’s FAST.
BUT…
- The touch screen is too sensitive one moment, and totally unresponsive the next. I’ve had five pages skipped because I brushed my sleeve against the screen, and I’ve had to touch the screen five times to make it turn, within the same chapter.
- The annotation feature. I WANT to love it. It’s got such potential. But the highlighting and typing is ATROCIOUS. Like, I can’t imagine someone, or more likely, many someones, signed off on this as good to go. It’s nearly impossible to highlight text with any precision, and once you do, good luck typing up your thoughts. The keyboard is slooooow. And you have to flip to the alternative keyboard for periods or commas.
- It’s glitchy. Sometimes annotations work, sometimes they don’t. Turning it off and on fixes it, but it’s super annoying.
I’m in love with e-readers as a product because they allow me to read while co-sleeping with a baby. But the Kobo Glo just hints at their true potential. I don’t know if I’ll stick it out through another generation (or two) to see if they can get it right.
REVIEW: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice
I post on a women’s forum that runs very much to the mainstream. The posters tend to be married with children or heading that way. When a poster went “undercover” to post about her secret life as a submissive, it caused a bit of a sensation. She has a “taken in hand” marriage, which means her husband calls ALL the shots. They discuss things, but he has the final say. Period. And that might mean deciding what car to buy, where to live, or it might mean whether they have sex tonight.
It doesn’t much concern me what consenting adults do in their homes. However, the definition of consent in this scenario makes me nervous. The poster said that she gave her husband “blanket consent” for sex, whenever, where ever, and however he wants. But is consent still consent when it’s given in advance? How do you get out of this agreement if you want – isn’t it sort of, too bad, you gave your consent, so now what I say goes? To me, consent is rooted in the present tense. I can consent to sex now, but I can’t give consent for sex that’s going to happen tomorrow. Anyway, Drama Ensued. There were even accusations that this poster couldn’t be for real, but, a quick search of the internets tells me that “taken in hand” is a thing.
As I read The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, I thought about consent quite a bit. Sleeping Beauty was my first erotic novel. I admit to reading the odd, shall we say, flash fiction erotica, but it’s not a genre I ever considered for a literary experience. I chose Sleeping Beauty because it has a reputation as a literary Fifty Shades (I know, I know).
I knew that the story was based on Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, and that it would have a BDSM element, but I was not expecting so much cruelty and so little tenderness. I don’t have a problem with BDSM, and I understand this is fiction; however, when presented with non-consentual, penetrative sex with a minor, or if you wanna get real, a child being raped, on PAGE TWO I was taken aback. Context: “Beauty” is fifteen and unconscious.
He mounted her, parting her legs, giving the white inner flesh of her thighs a soft, deep pinch, and, clasping her right breast in his left hand, he thrust his sex into her. Continue reading
REVIEW: From Away by Michelle Ferguson
“There is no law past here.”
My husband (then boyfriend) and I passed the hand-lettered sign on a dark stretch of highway on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. The whale watching tour we’d planned was cancelled due to rain, so we decided to go off the tourist path to Dark Harbour. This side of the island was rough and isolated. After passing the sign, the road simply ended at a beach. This was not a tourist spot. The people there were working – getting on or off a boat while dulse was drying on racks. No one said hello or smiled. There was something about the situation that screamed “leave,” and we did.
Dark Harbour, NB. I took this picture just before the road ended. This place gave me the creeps.
The rest of our trip was all quaint B&Bs, cafes and gift shops. But we’d seen something else. Something that wasn’t meant for us. Some of my family had told us about a group of local vigilantes who burned a drug house down recently. Did the sign have something to do with that?
I thought about this experience as I read From Away. I share a lot in common with Marion, the main character. We are both from Alberta, but feel some claim on the East Coast, because “our people” are from there. Like Marion, I visit every couple of years and consider myself an honourary Maritimer. The premise of this book, an outsider trying to find her place in a small maritime
community, was interesting. Continue reading
Keepin’ it Real. Magically Real.
Jason Lee Norman’s short story collection Americas was brought to my attention on Twitter. When I found out that Norman is a local author, I was inspired to write a post about reading local.
I really had to restrain myself from calling this post “Americas! Fuck Yeah!”
I read Americas right after a three-month slog through The Idiot, and didn’t know what to expect. I knew it was a collection of short stories, with one for each country in North, Central and South America. I didn’t expect to find magical realism. I associate magical realism with South American authors, and with epic novels that follow a family across generations. It was surprising to find it here, though the opening quote from Jorge Luis Borges should have been my first clue.
For those who didn’t study magical realism in school (thanks Mr. Jefferies of Grade 12 IB English), here’s the wikipedia definition:
…an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the “real” and the “fantastic” in the same stream of thought.
Americas starts with Canada and works south. Canada was my favourite, because it was so familiar. Those “A Part of Our Heritage” commercials play a prominent part. I had vivid memories of sitting on my couch at home, watching The Simpsons after school. A nice, safe feeling.
From there, things get weird. Magically weird! By the time I got to Venezuela, I knew something was up. It starts with “In Venezuela, all the children are adopted from South Korea.” In my sleep deprived brain, I actually wondered for a moment if there was some adoption agreement between these countries. Each chapter begins this way; “In [country], [absurd statement].” There’s something really disarming about such a simple structure, and such short stories, taking on the magical realism genre. Chile’s story mixes real life (the Chilean miners who got stuck underground) with the fantastic (window washers stuck in the sky at the same time) and gets it just right.
The stories are really, really short. They’re more like scenes or maybe dream sequences. You will finish this book in one sitting.
Read this if you’re a fan of magical realism. Read this if you want to try magical realism, but are scared of long, translated-from-Spanish family sagas (I don’t blame you.) Four stars!
Further reading: Here are my favorite magical realism books from the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die:
Maybe I didn’t like it because the cover is so ugly.
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is in my top five books EVER. I have read this multiple times, and will read it many more. It’s that good. See my post about it here.
100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I was forced to read this in grade 12. Everyone in this book has the same name, which is a challenge, but it’s worth it.
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel. I read this last year in my bid to make it to 100 of the 1,001 books read. It was much quicker, easier, and less dense than the Marquez books, but still has that elusive magical quality.
The House if the Spirits, Isabel Allende. I think I read this for high school English. Mr. Jefferies was kind of into South American literature. This was my least favourite of the bunch, but upon reading the plot summary, I think I need to revisit it. Lots of pregnancy and child birth symbolism!
The Merchant of Venice: Quick Summary
Guys: Life sucks. I’m going to die. So it goes.
Girls: Um let’s just trick everyone and save our dumb husbands
Everyone: Jews are evil
The only other thing I have to say about this book is that I read a 1903 edition, and it is staying on my bedside table even though I’m finished because we’re trying to sell the house and I think it makes me look smart.
Old-Timey!
Reading in Bed 