The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

By Antonio Tabucchi
translated by Tim Parks
Archipelago Books
2012


I have had a review copy of this book in PDF form for ages. It should have been a hot-button draw, but I just never seemed to feel like opening it on my desktop, despite its brevity. Finally, to clear up my obligation, I opened it, and found it delightful.

It seems that the writer, with  great sensitivity, wished to explore the imaginative space around certain historical objects, or episodes; he wanted to fantasize about the creation of art and history in a way that would feel like a real imaginative moment in the period. I found the little stories exquisite and evocative and delightful. Bravo. It is an exercise I enjoy, too, imagining the meetings in which movies are scripted, ads are planned, books are edited; imagining acts of imagination on their way to becoming realities.

I always try to capture my thoughts and impressions before researching or looking at other reviews. It was gratifying to realize that despite this book's appearance of being a self-published and self-indulgent effort, Tabucchi was actually a very respected academic and writer of literary fiction, and was nearly a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. This book was written about 25 years ago, and only pulled into English now.

Is it a coincidence that Tabucchi found his heart in Portugal, and that his post-modernism in these stories, many of which are set in Portuguese history, reminds me of Saramago? What is in the air/soil/food/water/wine of Portugal that fosters this art? My home language and culture is SO English, but I actually believe that literary art is happening elsewhere.

As someone always looking for a new thrill, I am pleased to have a new author to chase down and read through.

Now the marigold is wondering nervously about finding Tabucchi in a bookstore, about having this fixation with old guys writing about Portugal, about whether I should think up a thesis and aim for some sort of degree...

PS I have not yet found the shred of Fra Angelico that appears on the cover of the book, but I am looking. When I find it, I'll update this post.

LibraryThing Early Review

Hijacked: How Your Brain is Fooled by Food
by David A. Kessler MD,
Young Readers Edition adapted by Richie Chevat
from The End of Overeating
Tundra Books, 2013

This is an adapted version for kids, and, sadly, it feels like it was adapted by the "rules" method rather than ability to communicate with kids, with bullet point shout-outs, and breaks in the text. The ideas here are quite interesting, although, like many (if not nearly all) non-fiction books, it should actually just be a long article, as there is too much repetition used to flesh it out to book length. I can only imagine the grown-up version is even worse, with more anecdote and more repetition. (Should I say that again?)

The one key idea is that foods offered by industry with the magic fat:sugar:salt trio are nearly impossible to resist, especially, but not only, if you are not blessed by an inborn ability to govern your appetite. This is an idea to talk with kids about, and teaching my kids to mind themselves and have respect for the temple which is the body feels to me like one of my main jobs as a parent.

My mother is a dietitian, and I am a little jaded about food science, and a bit of a know-it-all, too, but even I was surprised by the fact that processed food is designed to be chewed and swallowed faster SO YOU EAT MORE. I imagine that just pure knowledge of this, and observing it next time we eat something processed, will help move my kids' tastes a little bit back toward food from processed food.

I was also interested to be tuned into the idea that a cute and clever way food companies get around the obligation to list ingredients by amounts is to break up "sugar" into brown sugar, honey, high fructose corn syrup and so on, so each one appears as a much less important part of the food, rather than showing us as a single dominant mass at the top of the list. Food label reading is something we do, especially of breakfast cereals, but I think we might read together labels on bread and ketchup to share that thought and increase our awareness.

I was also interested to think about the paradigm of "eatertainment" used by the restaurant industry, and this is certainly a weakness of mine, rather than that of a fussy kid. Not just a hot dog, but 12 varieties of hot dogs, with exotic topping. And what about serve yourself fro-yo in a dozen flavours to be added to your cup. (Have you seen the shock on faces at the cash register when the fro-yo cups are weighed for payment? There should a calorie counter by weight, too.)

The question is, if your kids are not already fighting a weight battle, which has its own motivations, will knowledge be sufficient to retrain their tastes? I will be following some of the suggestions in the book's final section, "Food Rehab", and I was glad to see exercise there as a twin pillar of food management. We'll see. Knowledge is power, and governing one's appetite is a life-long part of good health, so worth some effort and valuable in any quantity.


I keep a few food-health books handy in the kitchen for reference and recipes, The South Beach Diet (for heart health as well as weight control) by Arthur Agatson






and Ultimate Foods for Ultimate Health: But Don't Forget the Chocolate, by my friend Liz Pearson and her friend Marilyn Smith. This little book will join them so we can check things out right as they occur to us.

LibraryThing Early Review

Pazuzu's Girl
by Rachel Coles

Although the name is not catchy, this book definitely is! The story of a mortal-ish daughter of an ancient god has been done - think Neil Gaiman, think Rick Riordan - this was still original enough to read and enjoy, And...a character in the book is a D&D player who recognizes Pazuzu, (and the antagonist, Lamashtu, his "ex-wife") lifted into the book and into Dungeons and Dragons from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, so the title itself may actually attract some readers.

I found some of the writing quite awkward, and some of the exegeses into politics a little under-developed and unnecessary both, but I think it could be suitable for editing and publishing at a different quality. (I'm thinking of the Trylle trilogy by Amanda Hocking here.)

It also began to feel like a gaming environment, with the names and alternate names and overlaid histories, and world-wide geography. Having read and loved ReamDe by Neal Stephenson, I have a new appreciation for that part of culture, which is not my home, and I think the feeling of traveling there in this book was part of its appeal for me.

And although the title character is a teen-aged girl, and the book indicated as Young Adult, one of my categories of interest, there is really nothing that restricts this book to kid readers, which is another pleasure. YA literature is often so programmatic, trying to teach thru a fictional setting, hitting a matrix of Politically Correct qualities, and this book had none of that vibe.

Once again, the very convenience of having the e-book version on my phone was a pleasure, and the book kept me great company while I was spending a lot of time in waiting rooms without my own stuff. After the last couple of e-book duds, it was refreshing to find a little unexpected nugget of quality. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and looking at a phone full of writing and games, I chose to keep reading Pazuzu's Girl. There you go! Uptwinkles!

Book bonus feature: some cute attention to the world of butterflies, if you like that kind of thing.  Which I do. Needless to say. Then why am I saying it?

LibraryThing Early Review

Domina: Society's Ilk
by Edmund Alexander Sims



My trip through E-books has been like eating too many sugary snacks.

You never know where the thrill of the unexpected comes from: by definition you can't chase it, but sometimes you stumble across it. I have absolutely reveled in the frontier feeling of reading current e-books (by which I mean neither classics nor literary fiction in an e-version). It makes me feel like I am sharing in what must have been the thrill of the first Victorian pulp publishing, or the first detective pulp or the first of the sci-fi pulp. These are highly individual, unpolished, self-published (or nearly so) and cheap. Super fun. More exciting than roaming a bookstore or a library.

Additionally, you all know by now that I’d rather be offended, even by faulty or irregular grammar, than bored by mass-marketing.

However, with this book, I found myself scraping the bottom of the barrel. It was below even my accepting standards on all accounts. Silly, pretentious, unintelligible. Unreadable. Unfortunate evidence for the old saying: you get what you pay for. A free sample of a book that retails for $1.99. Never mind. Time to go on a diet.

The marigold wonders nervously if this is perhaps a diet tip that can be turned into a book. No?

LibraryThing Early Review

The Textile Planet
by Sue Lange




It took me a while to catch up with the process of reviewing an e-book. First I found it, in iTunes. Next item on the agenda was finding it and opening it on my iPhone. Then: reading it and reviewing it. I loved the idea and hoped it worked.

A friend finally tipped me off to the real advantage of reading an e-book on an iPhone: when you stop reading (and touching the screen to turn the pages) the book, which is the light by which you read the book, TURNS ITSELF OFF! Is this  not the ideal way to read in the middle of the night?

Once I got into it, I gave this book a try, and right away it showed itself to be a kind of new category: distaff-dystopian. Shall I create a new tag in LibraryThing?? Must rummage around for that.

In the end I found that this book gave me an insight into how short the curve is in e-book publishing. It was actually like reading a promising but unedited manuscript. Lange created a fully realized future universe, but the book needed a strong hand to rein it in a make it a complete winner.

For example, the narrative voice moved smoothly between an omniscient narrator and the stream-of-consciousness of the main character. It was interesting that way, and it worked well. except for the stumbles which could have been fixed. The F-word appeared in full several times but also as "what the eff?" but neither phase of the voice demanded a euphemism.

The characters were believable, but the dialogue was naturalistic to the point of sloppiness, ("Don't try that ol' guilt trick.") with slang of exactly TODAY ("You got the shaft, didn't you?") mixed with self-conscious futurisms ("It was a faster boat, one equipped with a turbo time driver...") Huh?

And there were other glaring anachronisms, as when a character preparing merchandise for inter-galactic shipping marks them with sticky notes and a sharpie–brand-names pin-point-able to our time–while the writer also made up future trade names and marked them with an ®, in itself something that seems like it might not last 100 years let alone 1,000.

I think what could have been useful would have been a rubric to govern future-speak in all its phases–narrative, descriptive and spoken. It would be such a fun project it is almost tempting to just do as an exercise. If only time permitted...

This did turn out to be a fun try at reading an e-book, and how better to enter the immediate future than with a science fiction work on a multi-purpose hand-held device?

The marigold is wondering nervously about "distaff-dystopian".  Am I overstating it as a category? Aside from this book I can only think of The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, yet it seems as though it should be valid as a tag. Are there others? No-one seems to be categorizing anything similar. Help!

Notes from Italy - Good and Bad - 2011

 Good - Food, of course! Burro di Bufala (butter made from buffalo milk [as in the mozzarella]) is awfully good. I think it might be a new product even here, as I have never noticed it in the stores here before. I had read about it in a magazine not long ago, and possibly it is available all over the world by now. It takes a lot to get me to pass up my beloved Burro Sorresino, which comes in an adorable old-fashioned yellow tin, but I had to try it, and it was worth it. Even the butter, on toast, has that slightly “farm-y” taste that I love in mozzarella di bufala. I am keen to try making a spaghetti alla carbonara with it. I love butter with the eggs and bacon of carbonara, even if olive oil might be more authentic.

I am always impressed with the care given to every part of food here. I live in a more northerly climate, in the middle of a big industrial city. Everything is grown elsewhere and shipped in, except for a very few precious items, which can be found in a very few precious restaurants. Food pleasure is available, and must be taken where you find it, but fresh and local, it mostly ain’t.  On the other hand, here everything is fresh and local, and that actually can be so extreme as to limit the menu. It makes me laugh (on the inside) when people are asked to describe what is served at a new restaurant in the area, because the local menu is already set. 

BUT, when you shop at your  little local grocery, the farmer picked the figs (ficchi bianchi - white figs in this case) this morning, and brought them in to his friend at the store (in a kind of gray market transaction). The shopkeeper asks if you are eating the melon right now, because she wants to sell you one that is PERFECTLY ripe right now. The different plums have different seasons a few weeks long and different names, and the nearby town of origin is indicated (or the province of Italy, if they happen to come from that far away – which is still only something like identifying peaches from Niagara in Toronto). The bread has to be eaten today, and all milk is only sold by the litre, and lasts only 3 or 4 days. That’s pretty fresh, and unpreserved.

Bad - Internet access. Will the torture never end???? Somehow trying to arrange for internet access showcases the worst of Italian organization. So much potential, so much openness to new technologies, so much bureaucratic bungling and delay. The past couple of years I have really been excited by the prospect of mobile internet access, and I even bought a device that not only receives a mobile internet signal, but broadcasts to its own little wireless network. Isn’t that awesome for a family of tech users – one little mobile key, powering the internet on a number of devices, and portable to boot? Last year we arrived in mid-July. By the time I purchased the device and tried my best to set it up, fruitlessly, it was already August, the Italian vacation period (yes – all of August) and no qualified help was available. I limped along, at least, with one wireless connection to my device. OK. This year we arrived good and early. I went in good and early to get help setting up the network. No problem. Bought a new sim card, loaded in unlimited data for 30 days. 36 beautiful hours of a mobile wireless network. Then…it died. And the bill had gone home to Canada, and there is no recourse. Now I am in the midst of trying transfer of the sim to my iPhone, in order to take advantage of the access I have paid for, but it does not seem to like it. Of course - the is phone locked! Should I try putting the sim in my old phone, in case unlocking an iPhone buggers it up for use when I return to Canada? Another visit to the stupid store, to figure it out; I almost can’t face it. Many of our favourite bars offer free wi-fi, but…access is complicated and many of the baristas don’t know how to sign you in, and…there are unexplainable periodic interruptions in service, and…we don’t usually go around with computers, for writing, but rather iPhones for jotting. However…

Good – Opportunity to read! I don’t know if it is the heat, or the freedom from the school schedule or the small town pace we are forced to adopt, or our lack of access to TV during all this spare time, but I feel such a sleepy torpor here (is that redundant?) that I spend a lot more time reading than I usually can. I find I am totally able to read whatever I want, no matter how challenging, or silly for that matter. Shout out to Gil here: I finally understand how to enjoy reading an e-book.

If you read an e-book in bed, when you are tired, and you stop touching the screen to turn pages because you are falling asleep, the BOOK SHUTS ITSELF AND TURNS OFF THE LIGHT, so you don’t have to! Oh yes! I had a some books that I was waiting to get at: a couple of LibraryThing early review titles, and I had bought an indie book from Amazon, on principle, from a girl who wanted to share her writing at the price of a tune on iTunes. You go girl! (This is a screen shot of Amanda Hocking's book on my phone.) And then the book turned out to be fun enough for summer reading, when I got around to reading it last week, that I went ahead and bought the 2^nd book of the trilogy. Then I uploaded a couple of sample books from my desktop into iTunes to sync over, and I plan to grab a couple of public domain classics if I can. Now all of you nay-sayers that say “Oh, it’s too small” and “I could never get used to it”: nonsense. Self-shutting-off-reading-light-and-book in one? Doesn’t get better than that at 2:00 a.m. (Said by a person who has always envied insomniacs their extra reading time.)

Bad – No bird watchers among our acquaintances. I think that Pesaro might be quite a diverse mini-eco-system? bio-zone? –sea and shore and rivers and hills, with quite a large nature park nearby. I feel that the birds have multiplied in number and kind over the years I have been coming, probably due to deliberate action to preserve the biosphere, and possibly by the dwindling of the fashion for hunting and eating them. I have a guidebook, but I find I like to look at a few guides to compare for identification purposes, and I can hear lots of birds that I can’t identify through a book. I need a knowledgeable person to tell me which bird makes that trill I am hearing and what bird makes that croak, and whether those large black-winged gulls that I see, which seem to really be northern birds, do in fact range down here now. On fish and shells, a lot of people are pretty good. Birds – still looking for someone.
(PS This is a Blue Tit, the local chickadee, and I have actually seen and identified one this summer, as I usually do. It is just that my list here is so short, darn it!)

Good – The local art shows look promising this year. I plan to attend an opening at the civic museum on Friday, and I have an acquaintance who told me about a small kind of private museum of works restored on behalf of the city by a local business association, and the "new art" museum in town, Centro Arti Visive Pescheria, which is the old (ancient) fish-market is closing a show of documentary photos (yawn) and opening something to do with Rossini that looks fun (yay!)

Bad – None of the music on offer looks like it will offer the thrill of the new that we have enjoyed other years. The Rossini Opera Festival seems to be scaling back (I imagine it’s all about the money). The ancient music series that we have loved in other years is all out of town, so less amenable to impulse. I might try to catch a performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solonelle, which is beautiful, and is usually offered several times by several different performance bodies. I've already missed one, but we’ll see,

LibraryThing Early (Late) Review

A Man in Uniform
by Kate Taylor

I enjoyed Taylor's first book, Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, and looked forward to reading A Man in Uniform, but it had to wait until I returned from vacation, and actually waited until it is no longer an early review. Oh well.

The book is set in a charming place and period of history, one that Taylor also mined for her previous book, Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, Paris in the late 19th C. There is no shortage of delightful material written about the period by authors actually of the period, and those writers avoid the trap of the anachronism, which possibly no contemporary writer can.

I once had a professor who remarked that as citizens of the post-Freudian world, we simply cannot get out of our minds the Freudian paradigm and imagine Hamlet, say, without Freudian overtones. Similarly, conversations written by writers of our time set in other times, often sound either too modern or stilted, and I found this to be the case here. As well, and related, the editorial decisions about when to insert French words and titles seemed quite irregular and puzzling. No help for it, really, and I know it makes me kind of an old pedant to notice and care. Oh well to that, too.

On the other hand, how interesting to read a story about the Dreyfus affair that had LITERALLY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE STORY OF THE DREYFUS AFFAIR! It was about the personal journey of some characters who were tangential to the main issue. I have to say that, in itself, this is an appealing and contemporary approach, one that would never have been considered by writers of that time.

I do not imagine that my criticisms are of things that would stop if from appearing on many bedside tables, as the Globe and Mail's blurb on the book has it. I can see it being a very pleasant and easy glimpse into the period, as enjoyable as having a postcard of Monet's water lilies on your bulletin board at work, and as much an actual piece of art.

As a true LibraryThing devotee though, I have to make some recommendations: Of course it is better to read Proust on his period than some Canadian woman of the 21st C writing about his time. Less forbiddingly, if only for its length, one of my all-time favourite books happens to be In the Land of Pain by Alphonse Daudet. He was a writer, a contemporary and friend of Proust and the Impressionists. He kept a journal while he sickened and died of syphilis. It is a small beautiful volume and describes the daily routine of the haute-bourgeois, with the big lunch at home prepared by a cook, and the afternoon visits to a mistress, by one who lived it. (In fact, I wonder if Taylor has read it and used it to inform her writing.) In addition the expressiveness of Daudet as he worries, and sickens, and wonders, and despairs, is indescribable.

In other words, go ahead and read A Man in Uniform if it comes to you, but if you are seeking out books, you can do better.

Library Thing Early Review

 
The Rehearsal
by Eleanor Catton

I saved this for summer beach reading. I heard it was really fun. A reading buddy of mine offered to share her (signed) copy, but I already had this one to take away. It almost seemed a shame to wait, but it turned out to be perfect for summer.

It is engaging and eyebrow-raising, without being challenging. The narrative is original, with a number of convincing voices. It's quite interesting to see the taboo treated as something ordinary that just happens, that it changes everything but not the essential character of life.

The story concerns the aftermath of an affair revealed between a senior student and a male teacher in a private girls' school. I have an unusually good view into life in girls' schools, and I just loved the not-politically-correct tone of the book. It struck me as nuanced and accurate rather than stereotypical and formulized for instruction (which feels rare, especially for this kind of loaded topic, set in a girls' school environment, let me tell you).

Catton also managed to write in a post-modern, that is to say non-linear, fashion that felt fresh. It did add a level of challenge to the book that I also found extremely compelling. It's just not that often that you need to scroll around in a book to re-orient yourself because the points of view are dizzying.

In a world where there are a lot a lot a lot of fabulous first books (not to mention first singles, first films etc), you have to wonder if the writer will be able to stay interesting. Here's hoping.

LibraryThing Early Review

You Comma Idiot
by Doug Harris

Received. Looks funny.

Is funny. One funny cool thing is that the publicity person responsible for sending out review copies is already a person whose judgment I trust in choosing the funny: Corey Redekopp, author of Shelf Monkey, one of my all-time favourite book-books (and one of this year's Canada Reads Top 40! Yeah!)

This book manages to be funny and Canadian-local, without being parochial and I'm-Canadian-look-at-me. It reminds me of the experience of reading Michael Chabon - I feel an absolute homegrown sense of the accurate ear of the writer. I am not a Montreal small-time drug-dealer/loser (shocker, I know, right?) but as a Canadian adult I find the characters and dialogue totally believable.

I also really love the take on the narrative voice. I seem to mention that a lot in my reviews. It must be hard for a writer to come up with (and therefore hard for a reader to run into) a fresh style of narrative voice. There are already a lot of good books in the world, after all. Although the device chosen by Harris has been used before (rarely), this is one great new version. It is...well...I guess it has to be called an interior monologue. Harold Bloom (one of my reading heroes) cites Hamlet as the first character given an interior monologue, and it is the paradigm. Hamlet wonders aloud, abstractly.."Is it...?" Harris has his character Lee address himself as "you" as in "You are running down the street..." The reader is not watching the character talk to himself - the reader is inside the conversation, he is an interlocutor with himself, the character. Cool.

I have no way of judging if little Canadian books become successful and I don't have much time to devote to checking whether they receive good critical notices. However, I can rave as Souci on LibraryThing, and The Nervous Marigold. I can tell my reading buddies, and I can lend my copy around to the worthy.

This is a super book, and it is satisfying to know that there are new Canadian writers that are outside the canon (for now), outside the political-book complex, just writing good books that READERS ENJOY!

The marigold wonders nervously if it would be overstating it to mention the indecisive loser-ishness of Hamlet being a germane reference in You Comma Idiot, or if that is perhaps reaching a bit too far.

LibraryThing Early Review

Illustrado
by Miguel Syjuco



I am always looking for the thrill of reading from a culture I am unfamiliar with, so I jumped at the chance to read a Man-Asian prize-winning novel by a Filipino, albeit one living in Canada, and with advanced degrees from a couple of big-time schools. However, I am unimpressed. The faux-document-pastiche style is not new, and I find that Syjuco has not handled it adroitly nor is the treatment particularly humourous or ironic. Somehow, more interesting than the book itself (to me, at least) is the question that came to mind while I was reading it.

This book got me thinking about colonialism. I have always thought we are still living out the colonial era, and someone suggested to me recently that we will, in a way, never leave the colonial era. It encompasses the past 500 years of world history.  Perhaps it will never "end". Where actual colonies have become obsolete, the feeling is like the son killing the father - everything is done to obliterate the influence of the colonial, in a way that attests to the strength of the influence.

What really got me wondering is that this book is written by an ethnically Spanish Filipino, not an indigenous Filipino. I was disappointed. Canada is one of the countries that has accepted many many Filipinos, a little bit through the back door, as caregivers. They are seeking a middle-class life unavailable to them in the Philippines, and they now form a large and stable community here. The children of these workers are integrating everywhere, but that had not happened in my generation. I thought this book would satisfy my style of thrill-seeking curiosity.

So, the book violated my expectations, and when I realized it I started asking myself why.

I am a Canadian, and I don't consider the only interesting or authentic cultural voice of Canada to belong to the indigenous people. Nor do I expect it from the United States or Mexico or Australia. Or Brazil, for that matter. And, it must be said, there are indigenous writers to be read in all these countries, but they stand alongside a multiplicity of immigrant voices, albeit many with hundreds of years of history. Yet there are certain places where writers of European background feel colonial, even when they have been established for many hundreds of years.

For me, I found out, the Philippines is one of those places. Shall we say, so is all of Africa, with the exception of South Africa, which was colonized differently? The middle east and far east have never really been colonized, although there are some small spots - Israel comes to mind - where an immigrant voice is natural. The Caribbean is different again - the actual natives wiped out, the colonialists sort of chucked out, leaving behind only a flavour, and the dominant population descended from immigrant slaves seems to own the native voice.

So, what is the difference? It isn't really the class difference between the colonialists and the natives - historically all the indigenous groups were treated with disdain - although it is somehow more marked in this second group. I was stumped for weeks. I finally thought up an answer. Maybe it is a numbers thing: where the colonial population overwhelmed the indigenous, the colonial voice feels native. Where a minority (or slim minority) of colonialists maintains a separate superiority over a majority (or vast majority) of the indigenous, it feels wrong. The numbers idea also explains the Caribbean situation.

The marigold's nervous questions are these: Is that enough of an explanation? And I feel I have to ask myself should it feel wrong? Is it perhaps not just a kind of honesty? We are here, we colonized, we did not integrate, but we neither did we obliterate.

And maybe it feels wrong to me because another of my ideas is that Canadians are deeply and truly egalitarian. More so than all but the most northern of Europeans, more than Americans, and South Americans. Maybe my view is a minority one, not even common to other westerners.

I think Syjuco means to discuss the ambivalence of his cultural identity, but it was that identity itself, not his art, that piqued my interest. I can't recommend the book, but I welcome any comments on this idea.

The Nervous Marigold's Top Eleven Fiction Reads of 2009

(Complete with bonus listings)


Ah. Finally done. I read about 80 books this year, including a number of "young adult" novels. There was a lot of fiction this year - I guess I needed the escape factor. The eleven books on this list are mainly not books released in 2009: they are the best books I read this year. The list is organized in alphabetical order by author. I will mention the best few non-fiction books I read this year in a separate post.




Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with
Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (2009)

A brilliant piece of conceptual art. The thrill is in the concept of a literary mash-up, there is no need to actually read it to enjoy and even wonder at the idea. I, however, did read it, as I have never gotten around to Jane Austen (gasp!) and, after checking, I realized her part was perfectly and sufficiently faithful. Fantastic way to catch up. Having said that you don't need to read this book, I confess that I also have on my pile Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Jane Austen and Ben Winters, and I will probably get the prequel to P and P: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, by Jane Austen and Steve Hockensmith because it looks and sounds so funny too. So rare to find something new in writing!


The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery (2008 in English, translated from French)

This year's book that got me thinking about the best books of the year. That this book could be a huge seller restores one's faith in the existence of a clever reading public, one that delights in its own cleverness. Interesting. This is a book I will keep in my permanent collection, most unusual for current fiction.


The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz (2007, won the Pulitzer in 2008)

A book both street and scholarly, and totally fabulous, but again all us clever readers are congratulating ourselves for being both clever and cool. Oh well. The book is still fantastic.


Mountain Man
by Vardis Fisher (this edition 2000)

This is an old book, written in the mid-60's, but this new edition only recently came to me, loaned as a favourite by a friend. This book is the opposite of clever and cool. It comes from a world-view which is both harsh and lyrical. It feels unvarnished and honest: a strange book to read amid the current values of eco-this and that, plus politically correct reverence for aboriginal peoples of the world, an attitude which implies that less development of technology equals moral superiority. It requires an honest reader to recognize our current paradigm as nothing more than a paradigm, and re-evaluate the way we see the world. An amazing book. (Side note: he is one of the authors most often shown as a favourite author among LibraryThing readers! And I had never heard of him.)


Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures: Stories
by Vincent Lam (2006)

This is a book of inter-linked short stories by a Canadian writer who is also a physician. I had it on my pile a long time, and then when finally got around to it, I really loved it. Lam is adroit and convincing as a writer, and the physician characters are human but not weak.


The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet
by Reif Larson (2009)

This is an extraordinarily beautiful book, narrated by compulsive 12-year-old mapper, illustrated with maps and diagrams of daily life on nearly every page. The boy has some difficulties relating to people, and I group it with books about people with Asperger's syndrome, (although no-one else seems to have) so it is not new in that aspect, but the graphic treatment was really lovely, particularly appealing to readers who are semi-compulsive organizers and/or art-appreciators as well. Ahem.


Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Steig Larson (2008 in English, translated from Swedish)

Absolutely deserves to be the phenomenon that it is. Really blew open the "Nordic Crime Fiction" category in North America. I love mysteries and thrillers. I once read about Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie (I think) the idea that in formulaic fiction, one is not looking for pure creativity, but for deftness with the formula. I often think of that benchmark when reading genre fiction of any kind (like stories about people with Asperger's? hmmm), and I think Larson succeeded beautifully.


Pretty Monsters: Stories
by Kelly Link (2008)

Surprise last-minute entry. This writer could pick up the baton that has passed from Stephen King to Neil Gaiman, stopping briefly at Clive Barker. Short stories, just over the edge of reality, with a wonderful ear for tone in a number of genres. This is her first book, so it remains to be seen if she can maintain her unique strangeness over the long haul.


The Road
by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

A true tour-de-force by a rare writer who is changing English letters. One thinks (everyone who reads thinks) of Hemingway simplifying written English into a terse American voice, and McCarthy takes that up to the present, and projects it into the future. In fact this book is post-apocalyptic science fiction, but I understand that is not his usual genre. I plan to read his biggest book, All the Pretty Horses, and I have high hopes for it. (PS The Road also has one of the all-time great covers.)


Shelf Monkey
by Corey Redekop (2007)

This book should be compulsory reading for all LibraryThing devotees. It is about loving the books more than the readers. It is a kind-of absurdist view of the future of book-retailing, a fearful vision that is probably shared by most passionate readers. It is so funny and so throw-away clever. It encompasses a delightful and broad reading list. It's written by a guy whose day job is librarian in New Brunswick, and who has a great book review blog (called Shelf Monkey) Can't say enough good things. Can't wait for the next book. A total and delightful surprise.


The True Meaning of Smekday
by Adam Rex (2009)

This is a kids' novel by someone I think is a genius: he writes, he illustrates, he rhymes, he is funny, he is literate. This book moved into our family vocabulary in number of ways. We also adore his kids' book Frankenstein Takes the Cake, which every literate lover of horror should read, if not own. No other writer shows kids the fun of having an education as well as Adam Rex.


Greatest disappointment of the year:
The Watchmen
by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons (1986)

I am trying and trying to get a thrill from graphic fiction. I am working on Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. I have bought half a dozen of the most famous works, recommended by the young guys at the local independent comic store: Sin City; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; Fables: Legends in Exile; The Last Man: Unmanned and The Watchmen. I already had 300. So far, all I've managed to do is slog through The Watchmen. I will watch the movie, if I come across it. I will ask to borrow a friend's copy of Watchmen and Philosophy. I love Shakespeare manga and opera manga. I try the kids' stuff like Bone. (Bleah! How can they get it? What do they see in it?) I am determined not to be left behind by current culture, especially print culture. I study art. I should be able to "get" it, but I can't find that thrill. If I can get around to these other books, maybe I'll find it. I dunno.


Funniest reading experience of the year (maybe actually ever):
Afraid
by Jack Kilborn (2009)

I requested an Early Review copy from LibraryThing of this book. It was soooo scary, I was too afraid to read it. End of review. Note: best viral pick-up among my friends.



Final note:
I was holding this list to see if any of the books I would read during this last restful, reading-full part of the year would qualify. They did not, but...thinking over a top one hundred books of the decade that a friend sent me, and realizing we have spent 10 years in the 21st century already, gave me a kind of time-crisis, so I read two near-future books and one millennial book to help me cope, and they were perfect: Spook Country by William Gibson, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and Gentlemen of the Road: Jews with Swords, by Michael Chabon. It's been a good holiday.

The marigold wonders nervously:
Is it OK if I give a shout-out of thanks to my reading doppelgänger for sharing much of this list with me, you know who you are, and say "love ya babe! first up for the new year is Bang Crunch Stories by Neil Smith?" I think it's OK. It's OK right?

For comparison purposes, last year's list here:
The Nervous Marigold's Top Ten Reads of 2008

LibraryThing Early Review

Afraid
by Jack Kilborn

Well titled!

Although I love scary and I say I'd rather be offended than bored, for the first time in my life I have had to say this book was TOO FRIGHTENING to read. I only managed about 50 pages. I actually imagine that this comment is a confirmation of the intent of the author. The combination of suspense, horror, science gone mad and gore is keyed to an insanely high degree.

I will now pass it on to the most adventurous reader I know, see if she can manage it. I'll try to remember to append her comments.

The marigold wonders nervously: is this, in fact, the PERFECT review for this book?

The other reader of my copy did finish reading the book, and said the relentlessness of the gore was remarkable. It didn't stop her from reading it, though. AND another reading friend asked me about "that book you were too frightened to read" because she was intrigued enough to think she would pick it up is she ran into it in an airport bookstore. Well, whaddya know? My review is working!

LibraryThing Early Review

Pygmy
by Chuck Palahniuk

This book is not unfunny, but I mean to damn it with faint praise.

As soon as I started reading it I wondered if it would have been published before the success of Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, which already richly covered the ground of fractured English.

Then I thought of the Simpsons episode with the foreign exchange student. I looked it up on TheSimpsons.com. It was episode 111, from 1990: "...the Simpson family takes in Adil, a student from Albania, who's actually a spy stealing the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant's secrets." The very cover summary of this book could be applied to the TV show "...this cunning, double-edged satire of a xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified...For Pygmy and his fellow operatives are cooking up something big...that will bring this big, dumb country and its fat, dumb inhabitants to their knees." Hello Homer.

I guess Palahniuk has a kind of trademark violence and vulgarity that has made him a cult figure. It shows in this book. THAT makes me think of Matthew Collings, the art critic, saying something like :...when everyone is transgressing, then it is no longer transgression." In other words, boring.

This experience won't stop me from giving Fight Club a try, if it falls into my hands, or any book of Palahniuk's that a friend might recommend, but this book is slight, derivative and formulaic.

On further thought, I have to mention that the one really interesting idea is that the Deity has made us in his image, and He plans to kill many of us by cancer or war etc, and thus we are obliged to both imitate Him and deserve His treatment of us. It is the justification internalized by the spy Pygmy for the havoc he is meant to wreak. It is a clever inversion of a kind of received truth, that requires faith in God, rather than understanding of his mysterious ways.

There. I've given you the best part. I recommend you pass.

LibraryThing Early Review

Hoffman's Hunger
by Leon De Winter

It is always a bonus to read a book in translation from another culture, and I am always delighted when they cross my path. Hoffman's Hunger was written in Dutch and was also a best-seller in German. For example, English-speaking writers seem to write freely about non-English characters, but it feels funny to read an American character sketched by a Dutch writer. That is one sort of insight that can be gained from reading literature in translation.

Another foreign-feeling emphasis comes in the concentration in this book on toilet activities. Granted a story about physical hunger standing in for emotional hunger would generate a certain amount of digestion-talk, but to me it feels like conversations I have with Italian acquaintances, in which I have to give up my Anglo bodily-functions reserve.

Then there is the thriller aspect - not only foreign characters, but foreign characters in countries foreign to them. Like a taking a little trip!

It took me a long time to get around to reading this book, but I guess I was ready to really enjoy it when I got to it. Now my mission is to figure out which friends to lend it to, or how to recommend it. Let's see - a great book for Europhile-traveller/foodies, a quick read and not challenging (except for the digestive parts) so good for vacation reading, but for readers, OK so...my mom, maybe a couple of my best friends from high school...

I would definitely be glad to encounter another of Leon de Winter's books. No better praise than that.

The marigold is wondering nervously:
There are only 2 reviews on LibraryThing, ARC says due out in 2007, but the ARC itself was sent out in the summer of 2008. Has this book been, in fact, published?

LibraryThing Early Review

Garner on Writing and Language
by Bryan A Garner

What a fabulous book!

I love and collect books about English usage and history, but this one is unique. I was surprised to receive the envelope from the American Bar Association, as I had not picked it up as being targeted at legal writing. However as Bryan Garner says somewhere, law is traditionally considered an educated profession, and thus I conclude that the book is suitable for any person wishing to write in an educated manner. And yet, having challenged my expectations for a book on language by being about legal writing, it then challenged my expectations for a book on legal writing by being fun and funny. Just check out "octopus, octopi, octopodes" in the index, to see what I mean. There are extensive and useful lists of references and suggestions, and it is fun to think that I might have to write Mr Garner a note suggesting a couple of books he should look at, if not include in future editions.

It is also worth saying that I was strongly and delightfully reminded of the tone of Strunk and White in "The Elements of Style": both practical and American in character.

This book will be a pleasure to keep by the desk as a reference, and to rummage around in during a spare moment, for fun. And I will be suggesting it to the school library where I volunteer as a reference work to acquire.

LibraryThing Early Review

Tales from Outer Suburbia
by Shaun Tan

This is an incredibly enticing book. My kids started reading the stories immediately, and I have been glancing though it looking at the illustrations. Can't wait to start the stories.

Twenty-four hours later, I too, have read this delightful book. It is whimsical and surreal and slightly melancholy. It is absolutely OK for kids, yet absolutely more subtle and sophisticated than almost anything I have ever seen offered to children.

I feel the need to check out Tan's other books in order to find out if this is his "look" or if he learned ephemera from Nick Bantock's book URGENT 2ND CLASS.

The question is: why did it require funding to get it published in his native Australia, and even more, why did it require so many levels of funding to be published in Canada, since he is not Canadian and the book was printed in China. Surely this is a book that could and will sell purely on merit, with enormous shelf appeal.

In any case, my suggestion is get a copy and spend an hour with it. It will take you to a unique and wonderful headspace: another score of the offbeat from the LT Early Reveiwer's program.

Books In, Books Out, Part II

I have been fiddling around with LibraryThing again. I feel myself to be obsessed with data-mining my own reading patterns. It's so much easier to talk about reading ideas if you have already sorted out the way they make sense. I enjoy looking at other people's libraries and tags too, but then I am often searching for new ways to sort my own. (Like adding the tag "epistolary". Fun. Or updating my tag "to read" to the tag "unread" which LT mentioned as a meme attracting attention. It's more meaningful to tag with the crowd.)

I found out that there is a way to figure out how many books came in over the transom in a certain period by checking the entry date on LT. Thus, when September felt like a huge intake month, I could check.

I guess it is because a number of friends handed over books after summer holidays, plus I was back in the school library surfing the action, plus I was catching up on some summer book thoughts that I could not pursue at the time. So, 28 books in! A minimum of dollars out! I think I have read all or part of, maybe, a third of them.

Looking back through the record, it seems like I usually take in about 10 or 12 per month, still far too many to read. One trip to the bookstore sale tables is good for half a dozen; plus my lovely spouse probably shows up with one or two presents each month; the school library is a source of one or two books each weekend; and I often get a book or two loaned or passed on from one friend or another; not to mention the odd LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy!

It's a good life.

The marigold wonders nervously:
If I read somewhere between 6 and 10 books a month, when will I actually drown in the to-read pile?

LibraryThing Early Review

Doctor Olaf Van Schuler's Brain
by Kristen Menger-Anderson

Finally! An Early Reviewer book that conforms to my credo: I'd rather be offended than bored.

This debut book is quirky, providing a kind of personal history of New York, seen through episodes in the lives of one family, starting from the time when New York was a Dutch colony. It reminds me of Muybridge's moving pictures - light flashing through slits - anything but continual, yet elegantly fascinating. The points of view shift, the focus is on the smallest details of everyday life: smells, moments of experience. Interesting enough as that is, when you add in the obsession of the main family characters with the brain, and the changing paradigms that prevail over history, the book moves into the truly engrossing. I have read a couple of pages straight away of each ER book I have received, and this was the first that I had to continue reading immediately. In other words a great score for me and a great read.

Actually, it was not offensive, really, it was just not at all boring.

The marigold asks nervously:
I had a feeling that these books would be a fabulous source of new reading. So far, apart from Doctor Olaf Van Schuler's Brain, I seem to find that they fall into the acceptable but boring category, rather than the offensive but interesting category, which I prefer. The books vary from perfectly all right to pathetically awful. Not good enough! Where are the truly interesting books? Where?

LibraryThing Early Review

The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future
by Thomas Nevins

This title was so attractive to me that the Librarything algorithm got it just right to pick me as an early reviewer. I was really excited to have scored this book. However, the best thing about this book was the title.

The whole work felt expeditiously executed. The ideas seemed both too numerous, and vague, the predictions unsupported. The writing was poorly edited: so much so, that I wondered if the writer's pals at Random House, where he works, didn't want to hurt his feelings with corrections.

For a start, Nevins's version of the future is already out-dated – imagine that in 50 or so years there would still be cell-phones in use and old computers lying around with email capability!

The dystopia Nevins envisions is an America bankrupted by the meeting of massive boomer pension requirements with decades of personal borrowing beyond assets, winding up with CEOs of powerful companies "united in greed" taking over government and operating the country as a "Conglomerate", to their own continued personal benefit. Not a bad idea, although anti-corporate in a juvenile way. However, the lifestyle achieved does not seem consistent with personal benefits accruing to these leaders.

The action plan of the "Conglomerates" involves the appropriation of the assets of the elderly and their resettlement into camps; the genetic modification of the children of the rich, to order; and the family-requested and paid-for resettlement of unmanageable children, ostensibly to other camps, but actually to dumps in the New York subway. Whew!

The inelegance of the writing is well-demonstrated in the tin-eared use of the casual "Coots" as the official word for the elderly, apparently a homage to the writer's father, and "Dyscards" for the cast-off children, a term one could imagine they would like, but would be too biker-glam for the "Conglomerate" bureaucracy, surely.

The main characters are part of a family that conveniently embodies each of these categories, and consequently the family dynamics are forced off-key: the grandparents, old "Coots", are fabulously in love, still. Their daughter (invisible and unexplainable in the story) is unable to stay married, and has had one natural child who is possibly the highest-ranking geneticist in the country (ie a key "Conglomerate"), and two genetically-modified children, one of whom is a "Dyscard", a wild punk. (How did that happen? The mother has already paid once to have this child. Shouldn't she get her money back instead of having to pay to discard her? What can the explanation be?) Neither of the older children can stand their mother or each other. Whew, again!

And what about the handful of genetically-modified mutant babies that the "Dyscards" are trying to save from the "Conglomerates" at all costs? Where does that come from? Although they have no connection to any part of the story, they appear suddenly to provide the locus for the narrative, which improbably winds this family's lives back together as the writer works them through the scenario of the "Coots" and "Dyscards" needing each other to fight the "Conglomerates". Enough said.

I see that the other reviewers are forcing themselves to finish the book responsibly, as I am, but I guess there is not much to look forward to in the last 20 pages.

Nice face, shame about the legs. ( 1/2)