Category: 10-pages-in

One of the best parts of the holidays is having a little bit of extra time for reading, once the chaos that is Christmas abates. By sheer luck, my turn in the queue for Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down came up after a wait of several weeks just in time for me to indulge in a little holiday reading, and I’m just far enough in to offer the latest in my ongoing series of 10-pages-in book reviews .

Even if you don’t recognize Nick Hornby’s name, you’ll recognize the titles of some of his books that have been made into movies: Fever Pitch , High Fidelity , and About A Boy. I have to admit, I’ve never read any of them, but High Fidelity is one of my favourite movies – mostly because I have a thing for John Cusack. But when I realized that the same person had written all these books, I had to take him out for a spin and check out his goods for myself. And that’s how a literary crush is born.

But back, for a moment, to the book. A Long Way Down is the story of four people whose lives, on an ordinary day, would likely never intersect. But this is no ordinary place, and no ordinary day. It is, in fact, New Year’s Day, and our four protagonists meet on the roof of a 15-story building in London, where each of them have come to commit suicide.

The story is told, by turns, through each of their eyes in a first-person narrative. Hornby does a wonderful job of making each character’s voice distinctive, so you never have to flip back to the beginning of a chapter to see who is speaking.

Martin is a smart, bitter C-list celebrity, a former breakfast television host who has become more infamous than famous after getting caught having a fling with a fifteen year old. He says of his suicidal tendencies: “On New Year’s Eve, it felt as though I’d be saying goodbye to a dim form of consciousness and a semi-functioning digestive system – all the indications of a life, certainly, but none of the content. I don’t even feel sad, particularly. I just feel very stupid, and very angry.”

JJ is an American who had aspirations to be a rock star but finds himself delivering pizzas. He quotes Oscar Wilde but can’t utter an entire sentence without using fuck as an adjective or an adverb. He tells us, “The trouble with my generation is that we all think we’re fucking geniuses. Making something isn’t good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something; we have to be something. It’s our inalienable right as citizens of the twenty-first century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol jerk can be something, then why can’t I? Where’s mine, huh?”

Jess is a wild and unstable young woman. I know her type so well, and yet am having a hard time describing her. She inhabits the polar opposite of my life of stability, sunshine and acceptance. She is shallow and thoughtless, and says whatever comes into her head. When another character mentions being engaged, Jess is shocked by the concept: “You did? Really? Okay, but what living people get engaged? I’m not interested in people out of the Ark. I’m not interested in people with, with like shoes and raincoats and whatever.” People with shoes and raincoats don’t deserve respect in Jess’ world.

And finally, there is Maureen, a middle-aged woman who has spent the last 20 years of her life as a single mother caring for a severely disabled son who can neither move independently nor communicate with her. Her innocent naivety born of inexperience is a foil for Jess’s overly well-informed naivety. In considering JJ, Maureen thinks, “without knowing anything about him [I thought] that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion.”

(Sorry for the extensive quoting, but really, I could go on for days pulling lovely little bits out of this book.)

Their lives intersect on the roof, where each has come to commit suicide – some with more forethought than others. Distracted by their shared misery – misery being about the only thing they have in common – the unlikely quartet find that the moment for suicide has passed. Suspended in a strange limbo of thwarted suicidal intent, detached from the painful reality of their lives at least until the sun comes up, they band together for a kind of quest, and set off into the darkness of New Year’s Eve to find the fellow who has broken Jess’ heart. Really. When you read the book, you’ll get it. By turns madcaply comic and painfully insightful, it’s a moving and unforgettable story.

I officially have a crush on Nick Hornby now, in much the same way I have a crush on Douglas Coupland. (Is it weird that I don’t have much patience for chick lit, but am developing a thing for lad lit?) Hornby and Coupland are, in fact, very similar writers. They have the same ear for dialogue and eye for quirky characters, and both have their finger firmly placed on the pulse of modern culture. They both use humour and pathos to evoke how it feels to be alive and watching the world in the twenty-first century. Where Coupland’s work clearly echoes his own Canadian-ness, Hornby’s book is infused with what he referred to in a Guardian interview as “English miserablism”. I love this term – it captures perfectly the distinctive flavour of this novel and its characters.

I haven’t been this excited about a book since The Time Traveler’s Wife. Hornby is such an excellent writer that I’m disappointed I haven’t discovered him before now. I could go on – there’s so much more to say. Except I have to get over to the library Web site and reserve a few more of Hornby’s books, because I’m going to need a really good book when this one is done.

Time for another 10-pages-in book review. I’m a little less than a third of the way through Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, but it’s a surprisingly quick and easy read and if I don’t write this now I’ll be done the book soon.

The Penelopiad is one of the first three books in an ambitious series called ‘The Myths’ from Canongate Books. According to publisher Jamie Byng, “From the outset the idea was to approach topclass writers from all over the world and invite them to retell any myth in any way they chose. And in turn their myths would be published all over the world… By my calculation we will publish the 100th myth in this series on March 15th 2038.” I love the idea of retelling myths and finding relevance for the modern reader.

That’s exactly what Margaret Atwood has done. Penelope is the wife of Odysseus, hero of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. The Penelopiad is her story, from her unhappy childhood (her father tried to drown her) to her marriage to Odysseus (he won her in a footrace, after drugging the other competitors), her lifelong rivalry with her cousin (the beautiful and infamous Helen of Troy), and her struggle to manage the household for 20 years while Odysseus runs off to fight the Trojan war.

I remember struggling through The Iliad and The Odyssey in school. Matter of fact, I think I gave up and read the Coles Notes of The Odyssey to get me through the exam. While I’ll read just about anything, epic poetry has never been something I’ve enjoyed. I studied ancient mythology from dozens of perspectives in my academic career (I was a liberal arts student, after all), but no telling of these stories was ever so interesting, so compelling and so real to me as this version.

The story is told first person by Penelope from her current home in the afterworld, in a dry tone that is by turns imperiously detached and conversationally witty. You can’t help but laugh when she talks about the gods having sex with mortals: “To watch some mortal with his or her eyes frying in their sockets through an overdose of god-sex made [the gods] shake with laughter.”

Penelope’s unique perspective from Hades gives her insight into our modern world. She tells the reader, “More recently, some of us have been able to infiltrate the new ethereal-wave system that encircles the globe, and to travel around that way, looking out at the world through the flat, illuminated surfaces that serve as domestic shrines.” In Hades, she inhabits the past and the present simultaneously, making her voice resonate with the modern reader.

Hers is not the only perspective on the retelling of the Homeric myth, however. Every so often, Penelope’s murdered maids take over the telling, interrupting with skipping rhymes, poems and ballads. They are not so much a greek chorus as a chorus line, as cheeky as Penelope herself.

I got this book as a stocking stuffer, and that’s just about as perfect an origin for it as I can imagine. It’s light reading on a heavy subject, an enjoyable telling of a well-known myth from a fresh perspective. It’s clear Margaret Atwood had fun in turning Homer’s epics inside out, and I enjoy her work most when she doesn’t take herself too seriously.

And oh, how I wish I could turn a phrase like she does. That alone makes this book worth reading, just for the sheer joy of seeing words strung together with such effortless beauty by someone who truly has the gift.

By special request for James, who happened to ask the other day if I had any forthcoming 10-pages-in book reviews just about the time I was thinking of writing one.

I come by my love of reading honestly – one of my dominant memories from childhood is of my mother curled up around a good book. I used to read a lot of what she left lying around, which explains why I was reading Stephen King by age 10 (which, in turn, probably explains why I am to this day afraid of the dark. But I digress.) I invoke my mother here because she is still my ‘dealer’. She buys paperbacks like other people buy groceries, and every few weeks I come home with a shopping bag full of hand-me-downs, most of which I never get around to reading.

I never have to buy the latest James Patterson or John Grisham or Janet Evanovich or Patricia Cornwell or Richard North Patterson (I could go on, but you get the point) because I know the week it comes out in paperback, Mom will aquire it and send it my way.

All of this by very long way of introducing the fact that it was her who got me reading Greg Iles, and I look forward to his new material via my dealer. I’m about 160 pages in to Blood Memory, which is a little more than 10, but since the entire novel weighs in near 800 pages, I’m following the spirit if not the letter of my own formula.

It’s a good read. I’m having a hard time putting it down. The main character, Cat Ferry, is a forensic dental expert with a penchant for self-destructive behaviour. The novel is unfolding as two stories, one a set of serial murders in present-day (but hurricane-free) New Orleans, and the second the mysterious death of her own father 20 years before. Early in the story, Cat stumbles across evidence that makes her question the fact that her father was killed by a burglar, but her pursuit of the present-day serial killer and her myriad personal problems interrupt her quest for the truth.

It sounds a little formulaic when I lay it out like that, but it’s a compelling story well told. Cat is the kind of protagonist that a lot of male authors seem to create – smart, sexy, and stormy. She makes some irresponsible choices that make me cringe, but I can still relate to her on the smart and sexy parts at least. (Stop laughing. My book review, my bias.)

At least twice so far, Cat has made mention of Thomas Harris’ book Red Dragon, which is interesting because the story reminds me a lot of Silence of the Lambs. (Red Dragon was the prequel to Silence of the Lambs, where the character of Hannibal Lector is introduced. All books I also got from my mother, for what it’s worth.) Strong, smart lead takes on creepy psychotic guy. I’m sure if I picked up on it, the allusion was intentional on the part of the author, since I’m not one to catch subtleties.

There’s lots of delicious tension in this novel. The past intrudes on the present with an unsettling randomness that seems to be getting less and less random as the story progresses. I’ve lost my taste for a lot of the FBI/serial killer type novels lately, but this one has enough real character development and actual story behind it to make it compulsively readable.

My only complaint is that my wrist gets sore holding an 800 page paperback in bed, although I am grateful for the well-spaced font as I read blearily late into the night. I’ve been up past 10 pm twice this week reading it – that’s the wee hours of the morning by my standards!

Edited to add: I finished this one over the holidays. I kept finding excuses to hide in a corner and read a few more pages. In the end it was a real page turner, but also very disturbing. I didn’t really see anything come of the allusions to Thomas Harris, and the book went in a different direction than I was expecting. It was good, though, and I’ll look forward to the next wrist-breaking Greg Iles book when it comes out in paperback.

Categories: Books

I love character books. A book doesn’t have to have a strong narrative structure or a lot to say, but I do love a book with endearing characters.

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is a charming, unique book full of quirky characters. I first heard about it from a classmate in my French class a few months ago. Her linguistic skills are a little bit more advanced than mine, but I did manage to understand and retain the fact that this book is part of a series written by a Scotsman who grew up in South Africa about a woman who inherits a considerable sum from her father and uses it to open a private detective agency – the very first one operated by a woman in all of Botswana, maybe all of Africa. Seemed a little incongruous at the time, but then my translation skills are questionable at best.

When I picked this book up, I was expecting something along the lines of Stephanie Plum in the books by Janet Evanowich. I like her books because they’re quirky and funny and fast-paced. The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is definitely quirky, but it is almost plodding in an endearing sort of way. Mma Ramotswe is insightful where Stephanie is dippy and polite where Stephanie is hopelessly crude. She’s also likely the size of three Stephanies put together. They’d probably like each other a lot, but I can’t imagine a universe where they’d intersect.

Having said all those nice things, I must now admit that I’m stalled about a third of the way into this book. I really like it, I would recommend it to you in an instant, but I’m not sure if I’m going to finish reading it. My number came up for The Kite Runner in the public library queue (I started at 585th in line back in the summer) and I dropped this to read it. Looking back, I’m not so sure I should have bothered, but that’s a blog review for another day. Even though I genuinely like The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, I’m having a hard time convincing myself to pick it back up again.

A question for the commenting crowd: when you read, do you choose things that are familiar and to which you can relate, or do you like to read about people who are completely different from you, whose life experiences are completely dissimilar to yours? I was initially doubtful about both The Kite Runner and The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency largely because they are set in a world completely different from mine. What do I know of Botswana or Afghanistan? And yet, I found the setting and the striking differences from my experience to be one of the most compelling things about these books.

Categories: Books

I’m reading two CanLit memoirs right now, one forgettable and one fabulous. So while I’m considerably more than 10 pages in to either of them, I can’t help comparing and contrasting them.

The first is David Layton’s 1999 memoir and first book, Motion Sickness. It’s mostly the story of his childhood living with and without his father, famous Canadian poet Irving Layton, and his slightly off-balance mother. Because I so liked his debut novel The Bird Factory, I thought I would enjoy his memoir as well.

Not so much.

I’m about two-thirds of the way though, and I’ve actually stopped reading it. It’s a library loaner, so I’ve renewed it for another three weeks in case I work up the stamina to see it through to the end, but it’s probably going back unfinished. After quite liking his first-person protagonist in the fictional Bird Factory, I find his autobiographical self quite unlikeable. The story of his childhood, which mostly seems to consist of his mother dragging them from Toronto to Britain to Greece and points in between, is considerably less interesting that you might expect.

On the other hand, I am completely in love with the rather unlikeable Canadian author Matt Cohen only half way through his memoir, Typing: A life in 26 keys. He weaves his own “how I became a writer” story tightly into the coming of age of nationalist Canadian literature, against the backdrop of free love and free drugs in 1960s and 1970s Toronto. I’m half-way through, and with each passing page I further regret that Cohen died only two weeks after this book was complete. It’s a compelling story well told – what more do you want from a book?

If nothing else, these two stories are a good illustration of why you should write your memoirs at the end of your career and not at the beginning.

Do you read more than one book at a time? I usually have one stashed beside my bed, and another tucked into my bag for reading on the bus. I try to read non-fiction during daylight hours, because by the time I’m tucked into bed I want sheer escapist entertainment with no thought required. In general, aside from the slew of writers’ memoirs and manuals I’ve read lately, I don’t generally like non-fiction. What’s your favourite genre?

Categories: Books

I’ve just started reading Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland, so here’s my 10-pages-in book review, at about 30 give-or-take pages in.

I should admit a bias up front. I have a sentimental thing for Douglas Coupland, and he could write the instruction manual for my sewing machine and I’d read it three times. And because I have such a fondness for him, I tolerate, in the way we tolerate the idiosyncracies of the ones we love, a certain amount of quirkiness that I might not take from an off-the-shelf new author.

The thing about Coupland is that he writes to a me I sometimes wish I were. He writes to a me that is a little more hip, a little more jaded, a little more cynical. His work appeals to the slacker in me that rolls her eyes at the bright-eyed enthusiast who is usually in control. And yet, the same thing that draws me to his work is what makes me impatient with it. Sometimes it is too laissez-faire, too negative, too bleak.

This book seems a little bit less hipster than some of his other work, but his voice is so incredibly distinctive that I’m sure I could pick his style out anywhere. Ironically, voice is my only complaint with this book. The main character Liz Dunn is, demographically at least, quite a bit like me. She’s a mid-30ish Canadian working girl. She also happens to be friendless, incredibly lonely, and by her own description, quite fat, three things which I am gratefully not. But her voice lacks the insecurity that a lonely, overweight woman of my age would have. In fact, she doesn’t ring true to me at all. Then again, that divergence from what we might expect from stereotypes seems to help keep me interested in what happens to Liz.

It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but isn’t She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb also about a lonely fat woman? I hated that book. Found it depressing and pointless. Eleanor Rigby, at least, has some potential. Although I am having a hard time connecting with the protagonist, I at least am curious about her and wonder what her story is. It’s enough to keep me hooked.

I need some new suggestions. What have you read lately that you loved? I’ve requested The Kite Runner and Will Ferguson’s Happiness and Yann Martel’s Self from the library, but am queued at 302 for the former and 12 for the latter, so I need some instant gratification with vacation time coming up. Any recommendations?

Categories: Books

This review is a bit of a cheat on the 10-pages-in formula I set up for myself. I started reading Stephen King’s On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft on the bus on the way home on Friday, and I simply couldn’t stop reading. By the time I went to bed Friday night I was more than 50 pages in. It’s that good. I’m now 174 pages into it, much more than half way, and it was a struggle to decide whether to write about it or just curl up and enjoy it. Something that rivals blog for my attention must be good.

It’s quite strange, in fact, that I haven’t read this book before now. I’ve consumed voraciously almost everything else Stephen King has written. I clearly remember reading Firestarter when I was about ten years old, and I’ve been working my way through his oeuvre ever since. I don’t understand why people denigrate his work as populist, and I don’t understand why fiction has to be onerous to be well-written. I think he drifted away from his muse back in the 1980s and into the 1990s, but after reading Hearts in Atlantis and From a Buick 8, I can clearly see he’s back in form and scaring the hell out of me.

So even though I would easily list him in my top five favourite authors, and even though I am always hungry for advice on how to improve my writing, somehow I never connected these dots before. My loss, at least in time. I should have read this years ago!

But it’s not just a collection of writer’s tips, which is what I was more or less expecting. There are some side-splittingly funny anecdotes from his childhood, a few of which I tried to read out loud to Beloved on Friday night. I couldn’t get through them without gasping through my laughter, and we laughed so hard we even brought a previously bedded Tristan to the top of the stairs to see what his parents were going on about.

Aside from the memoirs, it’s got some great writing tips. He covers everything from knowing your tools (grammar, vocabulary, etc.), to using active voice, to avoiding adverbs in dialogue attribution. (He argues that adverbs in dialogue attribution are superfluous, and the reader should be able to tell from your context whether she shouted menacingly when you write ‘she shouted’.)

The section I’m reading right now covers my big questions: what to write about and how to find your muse. It’s heady stuff, and he presents it in a way that has you convinced all you need to do is set yourself up with a keyboard, a couple of hours a day and a half-baked idea with potential, and you’re on your way to your first best-seller.

So since I’m more than half way through, I’ll go out on a limb and assume this one is going to be golden all the way through. If I change my mind in the last 20 pages, I’ll be sure to drop back in and let you know.

(On that note, I’ve taken Troy’s excellent suggestion to heart, and after I finish the books I’ve talked about in my 10-pages-in reviews, I’ll go back and edit in a follow-up to see whether my final impressions matched my first ones. I’ve edited the review of Case Histories just now to add my final thoughts.)

Have you read On Writing? What did you think? Have you read any other ‘writers on writing’ books and would you recommend them?

Categories: Books

I had an idea!

I feel like Archemides. I’m so excited! I had an idea, and I think it’s an original idea at that. (Feel free to disabuse me of that notion if you must.)

When I posted my review, if you could call it that, of The Time Traveler’s Wife, I was only about 1/10 of the way into it, which for me is actually a pretty good time to write a review because much like Marla, after I read the last page and close the cover I promptly forget almost all the details and nuances of the story.

And then I started reading the next book on my list, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories and I almost put it down after 15 pages because it just wasn’t floating my boat. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I think a lot of the problem was because it was transitional book after my love affair with Time Traveler’s Wife, and you know that transitional book never stands a chance.

So I got to thinking – don’t you find that early in a book there’s a tipping point where you decide whether a book is worth the effort? At 10 or 20 pages in, you can still comfortably walk away and not feel like you’ve invested too much to quit. Or, like with Time Traveler’s Wife, you know you’re so hooked that you start canceling playdates and dental appointments just to make more time to read.

And that, in no shortage of words, is how I came up with my new trick, the “ten-pages-in review.”

Aren’t I clever?

The review doesn’t necessarily have to come at exactly the 10-page point, but early in the book, before you lose your objectivity and are determined to finish a book more from stubbornness than enjoyment and anticipation. Besides, calling it the “57 pages-in book review” didn’t roll off the tongue quite the same way.

And I even figured out how to subvert Blogger’s lack of categories and keep a running list of my soon to be famous ’10-pages-in reviews’ in the sidebar. Sheesh, I don’t usually have this many synaptic successes in a month!

So I’ll post this first, and then I’ll post the second instalment of my new series, the 10 pages in review of Case Histories. Whaddaya think?

Categories: Books

I’m about 40 pages into Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories.

I can’t remember where I read the recommendation for this book, and I wish I could. The person making a recommendation has a lot to do with my frame of mind when I start reading a book. I didn’t know a thing about it when I started reading, hadn’t even read the Amazon reviews.

(Sidebar: do you like to read a lot of reviews or talk to a lot of people who’ve read the book before you read it, or do you prefer a blank slate? Just curious.)

I almost put it down within the first two chapters. I just couldn’t see where it was going. More accurately, I wasn’t sure it was somewhere I wanted to go. But there’s just enough in it to make me curious. I think it’s going to be a series of linked short stories, and I’ve always been a fan of short stories. The tone is very sombre, though. Not nearly as uplifting as that other book I can’t stop thinking about.

One thing I do find quaint about this book is that the edition I’m reading hasn’t been edited to take out all the charming little British colloquialisms. You can feel the cadence of the British speech rhythms in the writing. (This is the same reason I liked Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone so much better than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.)

So I’ve decided to stick with it.

Hmmm, after getting all this down, I’m beginning to doubt just how clever my new little trick is. Not much meat, is there? Speak, bloggy friends: what say ye? Shall we give it one more try?

Edited 19 June to add this conclusion:

I was wrong. This is really quite a terrific book! I got so wrapped up in the quirky characters and their odd entanglements that I was sad when the book ended. I wanted to know more about them, their lives, and where it all ended up.

Definitely worth reading!

Categories: Books