20-22) I Am Not Ashamed

Book(s) Read: New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn

Author: Stephanie Fucking Meyer
Pages: 1,937


Five Feminist Rules to Live By in the Twilight Series:

---If your boyfriend suddenly up and leaves you in the forest one day, the only recourse, obviously, is to try and kill yourself by riding motorcycles and jumping off cliffs until he hears that you're trying to kill yourself and tries to kill himself.

---If you are freezing to death, you can make your vampire boyfriend jealous by asking your werewolf friend to "come and warm me up" in your sleeping bag. Because werewolves are extremely hot and comfortable. Fuck Snuggies. Get me a werewolf.

---Girls don't care about awesome vampire-on-vampire fights that result from tensions that have been simmering for thousands of years. No, girls don't even care if the werewolves and vampires form an ALLIANCE for the fight (heretofore unheard of, as we all know vampires and werewolves are MORTAL ENEMIES.) No, all girls care about is being whiney in a tent and willfully trying to freeze themselves to death while forcing their vampire and werewolf boyfriends to hang out in a tent while they miss all the awesome fighting going on in the woods. Yep---in the Twilight universe, girls are kind of shitty.

---Having babies is very important, even if your baby is quite possibly a gross, dirty monster!

---It is perfectly okay for an 18-year-old werewolf to fall in love with a baby.


---It is not at all terrible or embarrassing to combine your mother's name with your mother-in-law's name and give it to your firstborn. (An aside: According to this Yahoo! Answers entry, many fans of the series are indeed weighing the pros and cons of "Renesmee." My favorite quote from a contributor: "One last suggestion: the name Renesmee is proving not to be very popular with fans, which could add to teasing when your daughter grows up.")

---It is clear that as the literary leviathan known as the Twilight series continues to lurch forward, immortalized in books and films and magazines and makeup and dildoes, teenage girls and their moms will now officially rule a huge chunk of popular culture for probably the next two to five years. I don't know whether to rejoice or flee in the corner to hunch, shuddering with fear and remorse--for vampires, for gender, for literature, for the world---until the trend falls out. But hey. Three more "books" to add to the total. Okay!

19) Music is My Boyfriend

Book Read: Our Band Could Be Your Life
Author: Michael Azerrad
Pages: 522 (incl. index)
Music to Blog By: Grinderman, "Depth Charge Ethel"

Method of Acquisition: During my honeymoon this past May, my husband and I made a stop in Kingston, Ontario. We both lived here for four years attending undergrad and met during our final year (I know. Awww! Retchhhh!) Like most former Kingstonians, we retain an eternal fondness for the Limestone City and our favorite haunts within.
Along with drinking pints of 50 at the Toucan, Brian's Record Option ranks as one of the most quintessential Kingstonian experiences. Basically, it's like a pack rat's basement vomited all over a tiny shop. You can navigate it yourself, stepping over treacherous piles of records, stickers, posters, cats and assorted detritus, or you can ask the impressively-bearded Brian, who somehow knows where everything is and is happy to jaw your ear off while he searches. (I was amused to discover that the store---and its owner---have been immortalized on Youtube.

OK, so the point of this unnecessarily long and indulgent introduction is that we went there and asked Brian for good music books. He recommended Our Band Could Be Your Life and Last Night A DJ Saved My Life. It's hard to say no to Brian. He once encouraged me to buy the CD version of the Pump Up the Volume (!?) soundtrack because it featured Henry Rollins and Bad Brains doing a cover of "Kick Out the Jams." (Last I heard, my dad now uses it as a coaster, and Christian Slater's sly mug is now buried by a thin, omnipresent coating of cigarette ash.) But this time, that bearded pack rat steered me right.

A lot of books about bands and scenes and music history are dodgy. For every Hammer of the Gods or The Dirt you'll get a This Must Be the Place (where author David Bowman succeeds completely in draining all vitality and wit from the story of the Talking Heads) or Ray Manzarek's blah-tastic book about the Doors (although I did enjoy one bit where he called Oliver Stone a fascist.)

When it comes to music books, dear readers, it would seem you're better off if you stick to a) Cultural critics and historians, who are generally pretty good at situating an artist's place in a particular historical context (and hopefully with a bit of literary flair) b) Nick Hornby, or c) Pure, unadulterated trash. Tell me about the record label tangles, the drugs, the babes, the overdoses, the near-fatal car accident, and the subsequent detox and relapse(s) and resulting incorporation of Ashtangi yoga, Kabbalah and psychotherapy into your Much Better, Arguably Less-Rockin' Life, with an afterword that features you sitting in your mansion with your Playboy Bunny-blonde wife, six absurd toy dogs, and plans for a VH1 series to hire a successor. Hire Neil Strauss to edit it all and you're set.

Our Band Could Be Your Life is a perfect mix of all these things. It's a book that tells the following bands' stories, in about a chapter each: Mission of Burma, Butthole Surfers, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Big Black, Black Flag, Fugazi, Husker Du, Mudhoney, Minor Threat, Beat Happening, The Replacements and Dinosaur Jr.
And it's amazing how much he's able to pack into a single chapter. I thought I knew most of the important stuff about these bands, but every chapter held at least one revelation. (Literally every hardcore punk band in the book lists Creedence Clearwater Revival as a major influence! Greg Ginn is kind of a prick! Lydia Lunch once propositioned Steve Albini in a newspaper column!) The whole book is wonderfully researched and about as complete as any book on the subjective history of the American underground scene from the mid-to-late '80s could possibly be, ha-ha. He talks to all the surviving members from these bands as well as associates, old friends, parents, ex-girlfriends: You name it, he's spoken to them---and managed to make even the most tight-lipped players spill it. (The Big Black chapter, featuring Steve Albini's trademark I-don't-give-a-shit bluster, was hugely entertaining---and more than a little disturbing.)

Azerrad is also honest with us from the get-go, and I liked that. He admits as much in the introduction: He's not trying to do something comprehensive. (That's why, for example, there's no chapter on Bad Brains or D.O.A., even though many would argue they're equally as important in punk as Black Flag and Minor Threat, or why the Pixies have been left off the list.) He's just focused on a group of interesting bands who had a lot of crossover, supported one another through labels or just word of mouth, and who remain influential and relevant to this day. And without sounding gossipy or salacious, he presents the break-ups, the inter-band conflicts, the sordid road tales (the Butthole Surfers chapter actually made my hair stand on end) and the drugs and drink that, in some cases, led to a tragic downfall (like The Replacements! Well, shit!)

The best thing about reading Our Band Could Be Your Life, though, is that it encourages you to re-listen (or discover) these bands and form your own personal soundtrack alongside the book. Azerrad's writing has an infectious, Lester Bangs-type quality that makes you want to buy these albums and listen to them, right now.
Here's an excerpt from his description of Husker Du's Flip Your Wig:

"Except for two instrumentals tacked on to the end, every song sounds like a hit in some alternate world where the rivers run with an equal mixture of battery acid and honey."

I know, some may scoff. But for those of us who regularly struggle with music writing, trying to make it artful but not pretentious, trying to balance astuteness and wit with YOUR ACTUAL FEELINGS ABOUT THE SONG, that phrase is a fucking beautiful thing. I listened to the album (I had previously not heard any Husker Du except for the brilliant album everyone already knows/owns, Zen Arcade) and he was right. It was amazing. So was reading about the sad and abrupt end of The Minutemen (NO SPOILERS!) while listening to Double Nickels on the Dime. And after reading the Sonic Youth chapter and then listening to this year's release, The Eternal, even though everyone and their mother has written a book or an article or made a movie featuring Sonic Youth, the chapter somehow helped me understand them a little better.

Okay. Most boring review ever. What I'm trying to say is that I enjoyed this book because music is an enormous part of my life. Quite a few of these bands had a huge formative effect on how I feel music should be--sound-wise, business-wise, appearance-wise, all of that. Azerrad's book is not only a useful time capsule for fanboys and girlies. It also hearkens back to a day when DIY was just starting and it wasn't yet feasible to go out on your own, manage your own tours, and press and mail your own records on your own label. But people like Fugazi and Minor Threat and Black Flag did it. The Butthole Surfers, in their early days, toured on their own terms. They were all dirt-poor, but they had control over their destinies in a way that some of their peers didn't. And that's kind of exciting. In a climate where music is more of a commodity than ever, Azerrad's book is an excellent primer on how to find your own way in one of the shittiest businesses of them all.

18) Do You Like Women? Read This Book.

Book Read: Half the Sky
Author(s): Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Pages: 294

For the sake of context, I will precede this review by saying when it comes to aid, I think Westerners should fuck off.
The reason: Two years ago, I spent eight months in Ghana working for a Canadian NGO called Journalists for Human Rights. I lived in Accra, the capital city, which also happens to be the hive for most major local and international NGOs in West Africa. And yes, I had a wonderful time and made some solid friendships, but I also learned that most Western notions of aid are fairly ridiculous. Most Ghanaians I met told me they felt Westerners were on holiday under the guise of volunteerism, living in luxurious conditions while working at orphanages and NGOs and radio stations, doing work that would ultimately not be sustainable because they'd leave after a few months.

With a lot of foreigners I spoke to, volunteering was sort of an ego thing---who doesn't want to be a "hero" roughing it in the big bad African bush? (Accra, like most African cities, is of course much more developed than most media reports would have you believe.) It seemed to be a case of glamour over goodwill. Most Ghanaians were right. And this is a microcosm of what happens when Western forces attempt to intervene in third world countries on a larger scale. At best, it's a short-term solution. At worst, we leave with things in shambles. A few Westerners have managed to create some lasting changes (Stephen Lewis and his work with AIDS, Jimmy Carter and his tireless---and fairly successful---attempts to wipe out guinea worm) but for the most part, I left my time in Ghana feeling like local solutions must be effected by local people.

The authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide (who actually know what they're talking about) echo these feelings. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are Pulitzer Prize winning journalists who spent years in China covering human rights abuses. (They're also married.) Kristof in particular has devoted his career as a New York Times Op-Ed columnist to exploring women's issues all over the world. Half the Sky shares stories of women Kristof and WuDunn met during their travels all over the world, with the purpose of sharing their struggle and the importance of female education.

All of the women the two journalists spoke with faced extraordinary challenges, and not all of these stories have happy endings. Some will make you blanch (like the young woman who is forced to abandon her children in a Thai brothel, or a woman who is ostracized from her village in the Congo because she was raped and developed a fistula, which is basically when a woman's vaginal and anal tissues are so torn that urine and feces run nonstop down her legs.) Some are incredible---like the group of women who took mob justice in their own hands and murdered a known rapist, killer and druglord in a public courtroom.

But most of all, many of the stories are purely and wholly inspirational. I hate that word---"inspirational." It brings to mind Richard Simmons, or Dr. Phil. It's used to describe well-to-do celebrities who visit villages ruined by typhoons in smock shirts and Wayfarers.

That's not inspirational, my dear friends. Inspirational is a Burundi woman who went from having no say in her household's income to growing an entire farm's worth of crops, contributing food and wealth to her neighbourhood and giving handouts to her husband. Inspirational is Angeline from Zimbabwe, who grew up not having enough money to buy underwear to wear to school and ended up becoming the executive director of the NGO that funded the remainder of her schooling. Or the soft-spoken Afghan woman who risked death over and over to start a chain of girl's schools at a time when female education was banned by the Taliban. These were the stories that made me sneak into an airplane bathroom and cry silently to myself---the ones of the women who succeeded quietly and humbly to change their surroundings. Inspirational is having nothing and defying the odds, the law, your culture, your religion, and more often than not, your own family, in order to do what you think is right.

That's the best part of Half the Sky---these women did what they did because they had to. They had no interest in being celebrated, or being heroes. They simply could not remain silent and continue living in the situations they were given---and so they changed them. The book will inspire you to do something, anything---and thankfully, WuDunn and Kristof do not lecture, but instead give some options for ways that you can help if you feel inclined.

Off the soapbox now, with one more point: I loved this book, and I hate pretty much everything. Really. I'll lend it to you. Read it.

17) Marisha Pessl's "Literary Pyrotechnics"

Book Read: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Author: Marisha Pessl
Pages: 514
Method of Acquisition: Harrison was over one night. We were pre-drinking some lousy wine left over from my wedding (Vat #7, if I recall correctly.) She passed me Special Topics ("I liked it! I want it back!" she said) and What is the What? ("Blegh. Just keep it," she said.)
As I Write This Hasty Blog, I Am Listening To: The Wind Whistles.

Blue van Meer is a reclusive, brilliant teenager who moves to a mountain town in North Carolina with her eccentric, mysterious literary giant of a dad. She develops a strange and instant connection with her beautiful, mysterious English teacher Hannah Schneider, who invites her to her own personal version of the Algonquin Table with a quirky cabal of kids she quickly dubs "The Bluebloods." The events that follow are rendered in joyfully reference-laden language (every chapter is named after a Great Novel and references to both high and low culture are sprinkled through the narrative like blueberries on cornflakes, and yet the story never feels dated---an impressive achievement in itself.) I found that mentally I needed to be firing on all cylinders in order to unearth the intriguing plot---this is a novel where truly nothing is as it seems. Although the end of the book is a little unsatisfying (MAYBE SPOILER ALERT: After nearly 400 pages of buildup, I was expecting some bigger revelations about two of the book's key characters) the journey is rich and delightful, and you'll linger over some of the book's more humorous and elegant passages for long minutes, wishing you had the same ability to turn a phrase so cleverly.


I've reached my word limit, and I think this was kind of a sucky review in terms of letting you know what you're in for, so I will let a passage from Pessl's tome speak for itself. Here, Blue describes her childhood crush on her dad's gardener, Andreo. Here, you will see an example of the embedded referencing that takes place throughout the novel (using both real and invented books by experts.) You can see how it would be exhausting, but it's also wholly unique and kick-starts the reader into wakefulness.

His name was Andreo Verduga, and he was the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen (see "Panther," Glorious Predators of the Natural World, Goodwin, 1987.) He was tan, with black hair, gypsy eyes, and from what I could deduce from my upstairs bedroom window, a torso smooth as a river rock. He was from Peru. He wore heavy cologne and spoke in the language of an old-fashioned telegram.
HOW DO YOU DO STOP NICE DAY STOP WHERE IS HOSE STOP.


It's cute, right? Special Topics is for all the weirdo, bookish girls who wore the wrong clothes in high school, and the pale boys who made fun of the jocks but still secretly wished they had more friends. This book will make your fine hearts sing.

This Slow Tomato's Gonna KETCHUP!

I realized if I keep writing these long essay-style reviews and boring you to death, I will never get caught up on the hideous backlog that trails me around this apartment like my cats when I forget to feed them. It's a prison of expectations, people, and I'm getting locked in by FAILURE. So I decided it would be best to do bunch of mini-reviews in order to play catchup. I decided I would limit myself to five sentences per book - a bit like Ten Word Reviews, but more long-winded, completely unedited, and emphatically BLARGH-y. I hope to have them all posted by Thursday. There will be an update about where I'm at, reading-wise, at the end of the last mini-review, because I know you're hanging on tenterhooks in WAIT. OKAY. LET'S DO THIS.

16) Life Is A...Highway?



Book Read: The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Pages: 287
Favorite Line: "You're kind of weirded out, aren't you?"

I won't bore you with a plot summary (you can Google it) but everyone I know who has read this has loved it. I suppose, in regards to The Road, love isn't the right word. As you trudge bleakly through McCarthy's ruined, ashy landscape full of cannibals and people blinded by their own need, his twisting, broken, glittering prose will hypnotize and save you. His similes float up to the surface of this black, gory mess like bits of carrion, and bring you to the surface, fortifying you just as you reach the brink of your own horror and despair as a reader. It doesn't matter if the forthcoming movie adaptation doesn't work, because The Road is one of those very specific reading experiences that will be burnt into my brain forever.

15) The Twentieth Century, I Have Delivered It

Book Read: From Hell

Author/Illustrator: Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell
Pages: 590 (incl. Appendix)

When I was sixteen, my dad got laid off from his job. He and my mom took our family's collective savings and took myself and my three brothers on a trip to Europe: Paris, London and Scotland. It was one of the best trips of my life. To visit such amazing cities at an age where cynicism has not yet clouded the perceptions and everything is still wild and lovely was incredible. The trip was also a little desperate, I think, because of the circumstances surrounding our hasty departure. It was with this mindset that we embarked on a Jack the Ripper tour of Whitechapel in London at about the halfway point of the trip. Our guide was a short, white bearded Beefeater with an encyclopedic knowledge of 19th century London. He would finish each story and beckon us onward with a guttural spitty noise he made with his throat, sort of a "HRRRRCT!" sound. "Let's go down this street, shall we? Hrrrrcht!!" he would say, and the enthralled, disgusted crowd would follow. We finished the tour at the Ten Bells tavern where my brother got a taste of his first-ever English pint.

The bar is immortalized in From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's amazing graphic novel about the Jack the Ripper murders. Ten years later, as I read the novel and came upon the bar's first appearance, I was struck by how closely it resembled the bar I had had the good fortune to visit on that heady, terrifying, breathtaking trip. The entire novel throbs---sometimes literally---with this vividness. It's a perfect combination of dramatic license and historical fact, showcasing the true breadth of Moore's obsession with metaphysics, the moribund, and his talent for storylines that weave and snake around each other and collide over and over with awful, brilliant power.

Most of us know bits and pieces of the story of Jack the Ripper and some may be familiar with the multiple theories devised by "Ripperologists" about who the killer actually was. Moore has followed the theory raised in Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution that labels Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria's surgeon, as the killer.

Moore's Gull is a hulking, eloquent madman who worships art, nature and the occult (as attested by his alleged ties to the Freemason), a delicate soul who also happens to believe that his bloodlust is dictated by the gods themselves. He is a brute and a misogynistic monster. His lonely death in a madhouse---where his spirit moves through space and time, vaporizing and becoming, he believes, exalted---moved me to tears. He is the perfect Alan Moore villain---a man caught up in the misery of his time, held prostrate and completely helpless by his obsessions.

Of course, the story isn't just about Gull --- it is about the dour police inspector who returns to Whitechapel to attempt to solve the murders, only to resign from the police force in complete disillusionment. It is about the five prostitutes who fall victim to Gull's Liston knife. Moore's characterizations of these women, full of sickness and struggle, give them dignity. But again, as with all of Moore's writing, the story and characters become part of a larger understanding, a foreshadowing of what horrors are yet to come. The denseness of characterization, English history, backstory, the birth of Hitler, war, the soullessness of the future---it is overwhelming. So wisely, Moore and Campbell break the story up with panels of blackness and silence, and it's here that the story simmers with dread:



I don't know much about comic book artists, so I don't really know how to talk about the illustration above. I can say that Eddie Campbell's art is profoundly moving, and deeply disturbing. I have never seen anything like it, and to be honest, I'm not sure that I want to again. Blood has never appeared bloodless, so precise. His rough pen and ink scratches are almost painful to the eye. You feel he is taking you deep into the filth of Whitechapel---into its dirt, its despair, the consumptive, syphilitic heart. Moore usually does these stories that swirl with colour and life (the exploding flora and vitality of Swamp Thing come to mind) but this unusual match serves his style and the subject matter perfectly.

I can understand why From Hell hasn't gotten as much interest as, say, Watchmen or V for Vendetta . Although the subject matter in all three books is equally dense and rich, From Hell is a diseased, bleak and sprawling beast, graphic and unrelenting. It's a long, slogging read at times. But it is brilliant and meticulously researched, and I suspect that in its melancholy, its myth and conjecture, you may find a gleaming kernel of truth, and that is what makes the work rewarding.

14) The White Tiger is...Just Fine

Book Read: The White Tiger

Author:Aravind Adiga

Pages: 276


I really wanted to like The White Tiger. I have enjoyed a lot of work by Indian writers (Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, Hari Kunzru, Anita Rau Badami, Jhumpa Lahiri) and Adiga is of Indian descent, he won a Booker Prize, and lots of Indian writers have won Booker Prizes and other important literary awards, and the people who judge these sort of awards generally seem to know what they're doing, and so I bowed my head and bought the book.

The White Tiger certainly isn't bad. The narrator, Balram, relates his story through a series of letters to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabo, who is expected to visit India to learn about the new entrepreneurial class. Balram grew up in what Adiga calls "The Darkness" - a rural town called Laxmangarh - the son of a rickshaw puller. His father's pitiful death spurs Balram to learn how to drive, and through his ambition and charm, he manages to secure a post in Delhi ("The Light") as the driver of the son of a wealthy landowner from his village. It's here that the novel's sharpness unfolds and we see the bitterness and deceitful behaviour shared by both the upper and lower class characters. We also see Delhi - the new India - through Balram's eyes. He mentions "hospitals with lobbies as clean as five-star hotels" and provides lingering, loving descriptions of newly-built strip malls. Adiga wants us to know that India isn't all back roads, landfills and poverty - the country is growing.

The expanse of the country also matches Balram's rising ambition, and his loyalty to his wealthy but spineless boss begins to quaver beneath his own desire for Money and Power. The novel's conclusion won't be a surprise (it's revealed early on in the book) but the gradual course of Balram's changing personality may be.

I feel like this novel will be taught in classrooms and passed around overeducated, underemployed, middle-class North Americans (of which I include myself) who will be impressed and charmed at this "gritty depiction" of modern India. When The White Tiger is compared to the magical realism by Salman Rushdie or the romantic, damp family tales of Anita Rau Badami, it does come across as a little rawer, a bit more unflinching. But I also agree with the Guardian's first review of the novel, which pointed out that there are so many alternative Indias, uncontacted and unheard. Adiga's viewpoint is a very particular one---it should not be considered the ultimate truth.

A confession here, and a diversion: I found myself praising the book to others even as it became more and more milquetoast and less spectacular than I wanted it to be. With each successive page turn, I read frantically, groping for something better: better writer, a sharper wit and conclusions that were a little more revelatory. Now that I'm done, I feel a bit like a fraud.

Adiga has also been criticized in the press for being an Oxford-educated upper middle-class journalist; what does he know about being a poor, paan-chewing driver in Delhi? I'm of the view that this is irrelevant. The story is convincing. And authenticity isn't really Adiga's problem. For a novel that has been labelled as at least partially satirical, The White Tiger isn't very funny or particularly acerbic---and that is a problem. It was actually a bit tasteless, not in the sense of being uncouth, but rather because mostly it sat bland and dull on my tongue, like uncooked bread. Where's my fucking spice?

With that being said, a few parts work. It's genuninely agonizing to witness Balram's employer become more vulnerable and stupid in his eyes. In the same way, it's sad (but also vaguely interesting) to watch the deterioration of his character (or is it a strengthening?) His dubbing of a sleazy fellow driver "Vitiligo-Lips" is funny the first four or five times it's mentioned, and I also enjoyed every time the drivers brought up their favorite local periodical, Murder Weekly.

Overall, though, I wasn't attached to any character enough to care about their well-being or demise. Even Balram, who at least had the benefit of being interesting, became tedious until the novel's final, decisive act. I actually found myself skipping his repeated proclamations of enterpreneurial skill and ominous foreshadowing to Mr. Jiabo. I found myself wishing there had been more ACTION and less nostalgic blather - more little shocks to rouse the reader out of a bit of a stupor.

I ultimately feel the success of The White Tiger is due in part to the Slumdog Millionaire-ization of popular North American culture at the moment. Any story about downtrodden people in the Third World seems to get our attention, tug our strings, prod that little bruise of white guilt. Such stories are entertaining, certainly---but do they deserve all these accolades? Haven't we already seen these ideas paraded before us, and done better?

Roundup Time

Books read and blogged:

JPod - Douglas Coupland
Running With Scissors - Augsten Burroughs
I'm With the Band - Pamela Des Barres
DaCapo Best Music Writing 2008 - Various
Helpless - Barbara Gowdy
House of Meetings - Martin Amis
Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden
Flight - Sherman Alexie
Twilight - Stephanie Meyer
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill
George Elliot Clarke - I & I
Cintra Wilson - Colors Insulting to Nature

Books read, blog entries pending:

* Michael Azerrad - Our Band Could Be Your Life
* John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
* Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the Savannah
* Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger
* Alan Moore - V for Vendetta
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Danny Sugerman - Wonderland Avenue

Total Books read thus far:

20

Books left to read by January 2010 (to meet goal, ostensibly)

80

Amount of books I need to read per month to make this goal:

13 (roughly)

Amount of books I probably will read per month, realistically:

Depending on the month (and my job status) 0-15


Books I'm super keen on reading in the future:

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
From Hell - Alan Moore
Fool - Christopher Moore
Columbine - Dave Cullen
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
The Drive-In - Joe R. Landsdale
Starved for Science - Robert Paarlberg
Rashomon - Akutagawa Ryanosuke
Miles: The Autobiography - Miles Davis


Books I am not so hot on reading but feel weirdly obligated to read anyway because I know their long-term effects will be important and I WILL LEARN TO ENJOY THEM:

What is the What - Dave Eggers
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
Look, Homeward Angel - Thomas Mann
New Moon - Stephanie Meyer (yes. I HAVE TO.)
Where Angels Fear to Tread - Joseph Conrad
Too Fat to Fish - Artie Lange
The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell
One of the Obama biographies


Books that I will under no circumstances read this year because they are too large and will make me feel bad about myself (but I would like to try them sometime):

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susanna What's her last name

People who seem to be into the blog despite my infrequent posting:

Around 10. This is actually more than I expected. Thanks guys!

People who seem to be secretly competing with me but are not saying this outright (judging by some sly, friendly but slightly edgy and always persistent lines of questioning)

25

If you're one of these, good on ya. Keep going, and keep telling me what you're reading and how long it took you, in your slightly detached, bored-seeming but still weirdly intense emails. It's funny. I support your efforts.

Keep on keepin' on, you all!!!

What Number Am I On Now?

I don't even know! Things have been busy, kids. I got married and then we had a honeymoon. Before that there were all of these getting-married type things that you need to worry about (karaoke machine! tequila!) But one of the blog's two regular readers (and an actual, real journalist) Mr. Brendan Kennedy mentioned that he'd be happy when all the wedding shit was over "so you can start blogging again." His words have haunted - HAUNTED - me. And as it happens, when you drive across Eastern Canada for your honeymoon, you have a lot of time to think about your life, think about what's wrong with it, and read books to distract yourself from these things. I've got four new reviews coming up, fools. This be review the first:


Colors Insulting To Nature
by Cintra Wilson

Pages: 346
How: My friend Harrison, she of rock-bandery, puckish attitude and impeccable taste in music and writers, brought it over. Thanks M.


So I was wary about this book when I first started, and that was due almost entirely to one quote on the back cover. "The Dorothy Parker of the Cyber Age!" gushed the San Francisco Chronicle. Errr.....really? Yeech. Another one that threw me for a loop was in the first few pages, where one reviewer chimed in that Wilson was the "female David Foster Wallace." Ergh. The last time I heard these kind of accolade-amalgams thrown about was when Jonathan Safran Foer first appeared. And I fucking hate Jonathan Safran Foer. Say what you want about my level of insight or whatever, but you can't argue that Everything Is Illuminated is kind of a gigantic pain in the ass that I still do not believe is worth the work. Plus, dude is like, what? Thirty? Shut up.

Anyway, that's how I felt when I started Colors Insulting To Nature;it was going to be work. I was going to have to work to pay attention so I could get the grand payoff. Sometimes you have to do this with certain writers. Everyone has different levels of tolerance---as you guys know, Martin Amis' latest had me grinding my teeth at various junctures. Some friends have told me they really had to slog to get to the creamy centers of Infinite Jest (and no, I'm not there yet) or Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. For much of Colors, I felt like Wilson was settling into her very specific stylistic voice---or maybe it was just me needing to get used to it.

You see, Wilson used to write for Salon. (She might still write for them, but I haven't seen her around there for awhile.) If you go by her website and mini-bio/interview at the back of Colors, she used to write a lot about celebrities, culture and related ideas. Her first book was the hilariously-titled A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As A Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Revelations. The woman can clearly speak with authority about fame, image and the ridiculous possibilities that lie therein. And that is exactly what Colors deals with.

The story is about young Liza Normal, born to the impossibly-named Peppy Normal - a failed showgirl who is on a hell-worn, lifelong attempt to recapture her dreams of celebrity. Most notably (and most important to the novel's development) is her revival production of "The Sound of Music" at a worn down playhouse attached to the family home. A ragtag summer stock troupe of children form the cast, including Peppy's own two kids, Liza and Ned (whose complete and total shrinkage from society results in his character's development as a reclusive but wholly successful outsider artist, in one of the novel's more obvious ironies.) This was my favorite part of the book - the time-honoured musical becomes delightfully twisted with a cast of queers, weirdoes, perfect stage children, deviants and Liza Normal. Liza's relentless and dogged pursuit of fame is hatched during this production and continues through the novel through a series of loosely-linked, bizarre and hilarious incidents (and a healthy amount of inspiration from Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam.)

Wilson's writing is so loaded - with cultural references, with zippy dialogue and with her occasional attempts to hijack the narrative with authorial asides - that it's hard to explain here. That's not the best part either. The best part is seeing Liza go from one humiliation to the next (a near-rape at a high school party, a sex romp with a drug dealer, attempts at acting, acid-fuelled sublets with a San Francisco elven cult, rehab, and - at the novel's climax - the transformation of her basement apartment into an inferno) and see Liza reinvent herself into a Wendy O. Williams-inspired punker, a hippie, a coke queen, and finally a Vegas S & M showgirl - and emerge triumphant.

Wilson's true accomplishment here appears in her creation of a character who, despite being likeable and relateable, is also so fucking ridiculous that you can't help but laugh at her. She's effectively erradicated pathos from Liza's story by making the character so fucking determined to be FAMOUS - the ultimate parasitical disease. The fact that she remains intact by the novel's completion is a miracle. The fact that the novel somehow remains readable and delightful is a triumph. If you can get past the loaded prose, Colors Insulting to Nature is a brilliant tribute to ego-fuelled girlhood, fame-whoredom, drug mayhem, and yes - even wisdom.

13) Jumping The Shark, Crawling Back on the Board

I admit it. I've been extremely lax with my posting. But I've still been reading. I'm currently on book #16, which I admit is sad...it makes me sad. But I was jarred after an dear former schoolmate told me that she was secretly reading the blog (hi Rosel) and so I decided to start posting "reviews" again, as it were.

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with George Elliot Clarke. He's kind of a literary giant here in Nova Scotia so I was aware of him before reading I & I. And afterwards --- well, wow. It's unnerving to have someone write so boldly and beautifully about the place you're living in. Elliot's Halifax in I & I is filled with drunken louts, gunslingers and romantics. He writes about the neighbourhood he grew up in (and now my adopted neighbourhood) the Halifax North End with such agony and love. The writing is painful and drippy. It made me hungry. Here's my review of the prose novel, originally published in The Coast a month or so ago. Upon re-reading it, I feel it doesn't give the plot, nor the writing, enough justice. Go and read it yerself, and don't just take the word of this hack.



At first glance, George Elliott Clarke's prose novel I & I seems to follow a familiar formula. Boy meets girl, girl's family doesn't approve, boy and girl run away, and after a seemingly accidental violent incident, both go on the run. And as the tragic romance of rich, white Betty Browning and the black boxer Malcolm Miles unfolds, Clarke indeed makes the requisite nods to Romeo and Juliet and Bonnie and Clyde. But in a novel jam-packed with cultural and literary allusions, these references swirl by in a maelstrom of blood, booze, sex and food.

Even Clarke's version of 1970s Halifax feels deliriously alien; north end gangs dig up corpses in order to bury them properly while "brass knuckle pimps" and other lowlifes rule the streets. Clarke lets the story unfurl with his trademark gusto, lingering over scenes of beauty and gore with the lip-smacking verve of a bawdy Wilfred Owen.

Strangely, though, it's his rendering of the book's biggest villain, the libidinous bible college professor Lowell, that rings the most sharply. When Lowell meets his inevitable end---with his gaping mouth "hot and raunchy/Inside, an adult, genital pink"---it comes across as the most obscene act in a story filled with vile characters and dirty deeds.

I've Been Drawn Into Your Magnet Tar Pit Trap

Author: Joe Hill
Book Read: Heart-Shaped Box
Pages: 382


My attention was drawn to Joe Hill when I read the first in a series of graphic novels he's working on called Locke and Key (mentioned in this entry.) I liked his style. He's not doing anything mind-bogglingly original with the ghost story genre, but his stories are propulsive and well-paced, with interesting characters. This continues with Heart-Shaped Box. I read this in an evening while coughing up my lungs from a brief cold that felt menacingly tubercular. The book suited my mood.

Judas Coyne is an aging Alice Cooper-esque rock star living in a decaying upstate New York farmhouse with a twenty-three-year-old Goth girl named Georgia (the latest in a series of young Goth girls, we learn.) He's tough and burnt out from thirty years of hard rocking and partying and now lives his remaining years in a creative rut, treating his Gothy live-ins like garbage, remembering his youth as an abused farm child, avoiding email and daydreaming over various gross artifacts he's collected over the years (skulls, snuff films, books of the dead, etc). One day his puppy-dog-like overeager manager Danny shows him a link for an online auction site, where someone has put their dead stepfather's suit up for auction. Judas orders it to add to his collection. It arrives - and guess what shape the box is in? And guess what else has come to stay in his house with the suit? I JUST DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT!

What comes next is many pages of trashy fun. If you like horror, this is probably the cream of the most recent crop, and you won't be able to put it down. Now, I won't say that Heart-Shaped Box isn't a guilty pleasure. Any book that can be read in under six hours while piled under blankets and gulping NeoCitran most definitely falls in that category. There aren't any heart-stopping literary endeavours happening here. There is, however, some ripping good storytelling, characters that you care about (despite not necessarily being able to relate to them) some huge scares and some shocking moments of violence. The ghost's first appearance should be predictable, but Hill lets it creep up on you, and when the moment comes - teased through agonizing, minute description - it's very scary. This shit will suck you in. Even as you sit shaking your head and thinking "I should read Invisible Man" or "Wow, that copy of The Crying of Lot 49 is just on my bookshelf, sitting there," your body-heart will chide your mind and roar, "Quiet, fool! I need to read the next part!"

I Don't Hate Joan Didion Anymore

Book Read: The Year of Magical Thinking

Author:Joan Didion

I really like Joan Didion's writing. Technically, she is nearly flawless. Her sentences are characterized by her careful word choices and restraint, and yet her profiles of people and situations are close. They seem true. Like most people I prefer her journalism from the '60s, especially the stuff collected in The White Album. Dark tales drenched in California sunshine. Murdering housewives, Charles Manson, the shifting faces and allegiances of the Beatles. Didion has a way of making everything seem iconic. There's also a backside to this. Emma Brockes hit it dead on in this Guardian interview:

While many of her journalistic peers got carried away in the 60s, Didion wrote with a cool head in accordance with the principle that the lower the temperature of her prose, the higher the emotional voltage it could carry. Her self-possession is such that the mere act of breathing in her presence feels like a vulgar transgression.

Although I loved the writing, the fragility of its author didn't sit well with me. And it confirmed my suspicions that this clean, laboured, clipped prose came from a detached, stingy, frail hypochondriac. Knowing this made the writing more interesting. It did not make me warm up to Joan Didion herself.

Flash forward to The Year of Magical Thinking. In 2004, Didion is sitting with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in their New York apartment, eating dinner, making idle conversation--the things that couples do. Suddenly he keels over, having suffered a heart attack. He dies that evening. Meanwhile, Didion's 39-year-old daughter Quintana is in hospital suffering severe complications related to pneumonia. Magical Thinking deals with Didion's life after Dunne's death, and to a certain extent, her memories of him and Quintana both. (Quintana died a few months after the book was written, and Didion opted not to revise it to include this information.)

Yeah, it's a heavy book. But not as heavy as it could be. As most of you know (or can probably guess) Didion applies her finely-honed journalistic detachment to these traumatic life events. In a sentence, it's simply a thoughtful, well-researched account of a personal crisis. Early on after Dunne died, Didion lapsed into what she calls a sort of "dementia." She refuses to throw away Dunne's shoes (despite having donated the rest of his clothes to charity) because she wholeheartedly believes he "might need them later." She is aware that rationality, at this moment, is not there, and continues to maintain her cool exterior. Her form of grief is, in her words, entirely American. This detachment helps her come off as a "cool customer" to doctors, nurses, and worried friends. It helps her scrape by.

At the same time, Didion researches the ins and outs of virtually every aspect of both Dunne's heart condition and Quintana's various operations and complications. She feels knowledge is power. She needs to know everything to feel in control. This is where the book hits its emotional mark. Although Didion's writing is entirely sober and almost numb in its impassiveness, I sucked in a breath at the point where she recalls asking Quintana's doctor delicate and nauseating questions about whether her brain has shifted, or swollen, or have both her pupils fixed yet, or just one?

Didion's ruminations on her grieving process show up in the novel's last few chapters. It was the first time I had encountered her "real voice" and I welcomed it. It is good to learn that an author you previously felt was unapproachable--and indeed, completely unreachable as a relateable person--indeed understood grief, and guilt and her own state of unravelling. It's bleak, but not despairing; sad but not saccharine. We know Didion well enough at this point to know she will get through. It is the process that compels us to turn the page, and I suspect comforts as well.

There are many terrible books about grief, mourning and death out there---self-help manuals and Christian or new-age edicts disguised as meaningful literature. Magical Thinking is only the second book I've encountered that has presented the process in any kind of graceful and honest way. (The first is Banana Yoshimoto's beautiful Kitchen .) The book has an immensely calming effect, and you don't have to be mourning a recent loss to take something from it.

I Suck At Reading

Well, I could make up a litany of excuses as to why I have not been reading Hard Times by Charles Dickens (or much of anything else for that matter.) I had my wisdom teeth out a week ago, the economy is shit, I'm worried about money, blah blah fuckity fuck. Generally, I've been looking for distractions. Any kind of distraction. And, well, Hard Times is a shitty book to read if you are in pain and depressed about money. I guess that's sort of obvious.
Anyway, I am not at the moment feeling so good about books I think I "should read" because of one reason or another. There is a time for that, but it's not now at this particular moment. If I'm going to get anywhere in this competition, I need to focus on my natural inclinations - which are not always the most, uh, lofty. (gleefully claps hands together)TRASH TIME!

Anyway, instead of Dickens I've been reading and doing other things that do not fit into the parameters of this competition because they are less than 200 pages or are not books. So I can tell you what those are. Then I'm going to put Dickens aside for the moment and read something less weighty. Yeah? Good.

Locke and Key:Welcome to Lovecraft - Joe Hill


Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft is the first issue of a 24-issue series written by Joe Hill, who happens to be Stephen King's son. He has won a bunch of Bram Stoker awards for his short fiction and this is his first comic. A co-worker and comic freak lent this to me. Her taste is very good, but I took one look at Gabriel Rodriguez's cutesy art and was like "Augh! This looks like Bratz! Terrible!" and didn't pick it up for two weeks. Then I started reading and finished it in two hours. It's damn good.

I wish I hadn't known that Hill was King-spawn, because I can't help but make comparisons between the two of them. Hill has King's knack for dialogue, especially with kids. A lot of the story comes from the perspective of a small child so this is important. And the story ultimately belied the cutesy artwork by being very, very dark, dealing with kids and murder and unspeakable paranormal terrors. And yes, it's not an accident that the town the story is based in is called, uh, Lovecraft. The Lovecraftian elements especially ring out when one character discovers a secret door that literally turns people into omniscient ghosts. The supernatural elements never overwhelm, though. It's heartfelt, too, and not in the melodramatic way that some horror comics are. Hill pitches his tone in a way that somehow matches the medium and the artwork perfectly. I don't know anything about comics, so whatever, take this as you will. But I eagerly await the next installment.

Elmore Leonard - When the Girls Come Out To Dance



I generally find I'm in the minority here, but I just fucking love Elmore Leonard. His books are so satisfying. I love the way his characters talk and always say the right thing. I love how most of his female heroines either carry guns or know how to shoot them. I love that the assholes in the stories always get their comeuppance in a very classy and/or hilarious way. I love that all his characters talk hard and drink ten of the hardest drinks in a row (generally made with some kind of horrible whiskey like Tullamore Dew with a twist of lime) and they can still rattle off one-liners. So all of these things happen in this collection of short stories and I was tickled, amused, saddened and most of all wistful. That's what Elmore Leonard does to me. He makes me wistful for experiences I couldn't possibly relate to. And yet I DO. Let's all quit our jobs and be con artists.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

I used to hate silent films. The few I had seen (mostly in some film class or another) struck me as cheesy or painfully melodramatic. And worst of all---unnecessary. I thought I was a "dialogue person." Then last weekend, I was supposed to go wish a friend farewell. I was vaguely anxious about this and drank a bunch of wine and watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on YouTube with extremely low expectations. I was completely mesmerized. Everything about this film is mind-boggling. The acting, the music, and most of all, the shots and the set-pieces:



YES. So beautiful and ahead of the times. Imagine an entire film designed like this about a hypnotist, his sleeping and very creepy subject, and MURDER. Also, there is a twist, and I found it genuinely SHOCKING. Who thought a movie could be so shocking in 1919? My goodness. After it was all over I was terrified and immediately went to the party because I had to be around other people. Also, I felt like an artless troll. Never again will I doubt the paralytic power of the silent film era. No, really.

Oh, and here's the YouTube link.

Ok. Thanks for indulging this diversion. Hopefully I will be back on track in a few.

9) I Hate Myself

Book Read: Um, Twilight. Book the first.

Pages: Enough.

Preamble: So you guys know the basic story, right? This is the book that has been on the New York Times bestseller list for like, five years, has made millions of girls cry and do obsessive fan art, and culminated in three sequels and a movie that got terrible reviews but made millions of dollars and broke a box office record in its opening weekend. Damn. I've been curious about this phenomenon for awhile now, stole the book from Bea, and began. I have used images from the film to illustrate my hack plot synopsis, which is as follows:

Girl moves to sunless Washington town, meets strange boy, who, according to the film version, looks like a glam rocker with ridiculous hair:



She spends half the book wondering why he's so weird and superhuman and can crush moving cars with one hand (HE'S JUST NOT LIKE THE OTHER BOYS!) and realizes he's a vampire with agonizing slowness (she meets a werewolf, who tells her this) and then the vampire takes her to a treed area where he shows her that in direct sunlight, contrary to popular misconception, vampires sparkle. Then he explains he's a "vegetarian" vampire, which is a stupid and nonsensical way of saying that he and his family drink the blood of bears instead of humans.

Then (and as I understand it, this is the driving conflict of the entire series) he explains that he craves her blood more than other humans' blood, which makes her love him all the more. Because it's dangerous, see?

And then there's a vampire baseball game.



Then some other vampires show up and everyone almost dies, but then no one dies and Edward and Bella go to the prom. THE END.

Distraction level: The first 40-odd pages of the book took me a few hours. I spent two hours putting it down and getting up to eat crackers, smoke cigarettes, make tea, watch videos of cats sneezing, make tomorrow's peanut butter sandwiches and basically do anything that did not involve me reading any more of this book. The third hour, I threw it at my boyfriend with glazed eyes and shouted in an unfocused manner while he listened politely.

You see, Twilight is not a good book. It is not good at all. It is in fact very, very bad. I am an ardent fan of bad, at times, but it must be followed by the qualifier "good." Bad-good. Craptastic. Some other examples of craptastic work in the florid goth-romance genre include anything by Poppy Z. Brite, or, say, Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews (the novel AND the movie, natch!). The thing is, I'm not sure whether Twilight (the novel) qualifies as good-bad or just bad-bad.

The Bad-Bad, The Good-Bad, and the Just Shitty: One trait that may qualify the novel as bad-bad are the many, many long passages where Bella dwells on Edward's handsomeness and godlike perfection. There is also many long conversational passages where Bella and Edward talk about how she likes him, how he likes her, and how he wants to drink her blood all the time because it's like "heroin" (that's a direct quote) and how she doesn't care because she loves him so much, over and over and over and oh hell I'll just show you some of my favorites.

In no particular order, these are three of the passages that made me basically stop reading and sent me into a fit of laughter/incredulous coughing sounds.

Page 91: Bella(girl who likes vampire) and Edward (vampire she likes) discuss driving to Seattle over the weekend.

Edward: Well, I was planning to go to Seattle in the next few weeks, and to be honest, I'm not sure your truck can make it.
Bella: My truck works fine, thank you for your concern.
Edward: But can your truck make it there on one tank of gas?
Bella: I don't see how that is any of your business.
Edward: The wasting of finite resources is everybody's business.

Page 331: Bella and Edward in the midst of one of about 60 conversations about liking each other, or something:

Bella: Well, do you find me attractive, in that way, at all?
Edward: I may not be human. But I am a man.

Page 357: Bella confesses to her father (who up to this point in the novel has shown no discernible personality) that she likes Edward.

"You are going out with Edward Cullen?" he thundered.
Uh oh. "I thought you liked the Cullens."
"He's too old for you," he ranted.
"We're both juniors," I corrected, though he was more right than he dreamed. (BECAUSE HE'S A VAMPIRE GET IT)
"Wait..."He paused. "Which one is Edwin?"
"Edward is the youngest, the one with reddish hair." The beautiful one. The godlike one.

Page 476: After some vampire-related adventure and near-death experiences, Bella explains to Edward for the first of the 600 times that she wants him to turn her into a vampire, too.

He rolled his eyes and set his lips. "Bella, we're not having this discussion anymore. I refuse to damn you to an eternity of night and that's it."

Flowers of Romance? This is the type of writing that is making girls all over North America insane. They are going insane over the character of Edward Cullen---his beauty, his perfection and his raging inner conflict over whether he should like Bella or eat her. As The Guardian astutely observes, Twilight is nothing more than a romance novel packaged cleverly as a young adult book. The bad dialogue, poor character development, cheesy attempts at humor and lingering passages of Bella smelling Edward's breath and Edward breathing on her face all sexy-like remind me of every bodice-ripper I've ever read in the bathtub.

Despite all my sneering, I have to admit this isn't necessarily an awful thing. V.C. Andrews employed the same trick and I loved her novels during my most hormonal years. And the bitch of it all is that Twilight is absorbing---absorbing in an addictive, soul-sucking sort of way. Once I got past my initial horror, I tore through the thing in about three hours. The book weaves a sickening sort of spell that you can't escape even as you curse yourself for ever picking it up in the first place. A reviewer at Pajiba put it aptly:

That’s Twilight. It’s intoxicating. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s intoxicating like convenience-store malt liquor — you get a hangover before you’re even drunk. It’s addictive. Like crack cocaine, only you don’t get to experience the high, you just skip straight ahead to the blackout and wake up in a stranger’s bed with a matchbox car six inches deep into your rectum. But you can’t turn away.

Bella Swan: Empty Vessel: I can understand why teenage girls---and all girls---eat this up. One of the big reasons is that the main character, Bella, is so passive and indistinct that you can literally insert yourself into her body---and thusly into the handsome Edward Cullen's arms. My friend Bea made a good point as she was tearing her way through the beast, saying that Bella is nothing but a vessel for the readers' own unresolved romanticism and adolescent crush tendencies.

That's the one thing Meyer does well: she helps you remember what it was like to be a teenage girl having a crush on the cute boy at school. We were all there. The constant hopefulness that the boy would be in class, pretending not to notice him so he wouldn't notice you, the hours of thought devoted to what is he doing? where is he right now? what is he thinking? and being generally irrational and insane. I remember being there (although my objects of affection were not nearly as cavalier and indestructible as Edward Cullen. Also, at Bella's age I looked like the dorky kid from The Wonder Years in drag, so my crushes were largely unrequited.)

There's been a lot of arguments amongst friends of mine and in various media about Bella's passivity and vaguely nauseating role as the sacrificial lamb here. She loves Edward so much that nothing else matters in her life: not her goals, her dreams, college, anything like that. Her dream is to be with Edward forever. That kind of supplication definitely made me queasy as I read. I also found it compelling.

I have never read a young novel in which a female character was so passive. Most of the authors I read as a young girl (S.E. Hinton, Roald Dahl, Gordon Korman, shit, even Stephen King for Christ's sake) featured women who were strong or vengeful or brilliant or sassy or quirky. Bella is none of these. She is simply a simmering cauldron of love for Edward, who lets him save her over and over again. Others will find this completely objectionable or irrelevant. I'm torn between both of these sentiments. Either way, I would kill someone to get ahold of the next book. And yep, I kind of hate myself for it.

Final Numbers for January

Well hot dog!

Total books read: 8

Total pages read: 2612

Number of books left to read: 92

Goals: More Charles Dickens, less HBO on DVD, Joan Didion...and a certain insanely popular young adult novel that has kicked off three sequels and a movie and made a star of a tall gaunt young man with incredibly shitty hair. Guessed yet?

Double Book Attack: 7) Three Day Road and 8) Flight

Book(S) Read/Authors: Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, and Flight by Sherman Alexie

Pages: Three Day Road (382) Flight (181) And yes, I realize Flight is a little short for the, uh, RULES, but I figure TDR's whopping girth more than makes up for it.

Distraction level: Um, I dunno? I managed to negotiate the reading with a vigorous schedule of listening to the new Bruce Springsteen album (meh) watching Takashi Miike films (and enjoying the resultant nightmares) and drinking gin and tonics with Bea and Eric. Yep. Vigorous.

Method of Acquisition: Three Day Road has been recommended to me by a few people whose tastes I completely respect. Thanks Mike and Keith! Meanwhile I picked up Flight on a whim in my local library's Native section.

Flight and Three Day Road are both about the Native experience, but that comparison is extremely broad. They're both very different books. Three Day Road deals with two Cree best friends who leave Moose Factory to go and fight in France during World War One; Flight is set in 2007 and follows a half-Indian fifteen-year-old pimply protagonist and budding criminal who experiences time travel. At the same time, the boys in these books are also linked by their overwhelming awareness of their culture, its rituals and the stereotypes born from those rituals.

Three Day Road was an interesting read. It's one of those critically adored sprawling Canadian novels that will no doubt find its place in the canon of very good, enduring historical Canadian literature, snuggled alongside In The Skin of a Lion and The Wars. In that light, it is a very good book indeed. Boyden writes in sparse, controlled sentences. He doesn't waste a word. Considering that two of the three main characters have only a rudimentary grasp of English, the simple prose makes sense---the characters speak, think and reflect with a necessary economy.

I read a review somewhere that pointed out that although Boyden is dealing with stock characters---the mysterious native medicine woman, the two best friends destroyed by a war, etc etc---somehow it doesn't feel tired. I wouldn't entirely agree with this. But that's a personal thing. I'm pretty numb towards the World War One theme as rendered in literature and film, even one as well-conceived as Three Day Road. At risk of sounding a bit callous, I've simply seen too much of it. Although the scenes in the trenches are well-plotted and occasionally wrenching, I couldn't get entirely swept up in them. I was more taken by the smaller moments in the book...the moments lost in translation as a white sergeant shouts at one of the boys, who curses at him in Cree while the other boy snickers...the medicine woman whispering in the ear of her morphine-addled nephew, her arm slung across his body as he lies half-dead in a sweat lodge...the boys pushing a canoe through a shallow lake as a forest fire rages around them. Boyden is able to inhabit the brains of his characters and push breath through them. It's here where he really shines, and I think he'll only get better as time passes.

Flight styles itself like Russell Banks' Rule of the Bone crossed with a Kurt Vonnegut novel, but without the whimsy. This is a dark book that makes no bones about the intensity of its subject matter. Alexie says it loud and clear: White people fucked Native Americans up first, but Native Americans have also fucked themselves up. Who's to blame? Where does this cycle end?

Zits is Alexie's antagonist. He's smart and funny but he's been delivered a shit deal in life with a dead mother and a father who ran out on him the day he was born. Zits bounces from foster home to foster home and occasionally prison with seeming aimlessness, but we soon see that beneath the cratered skin, there is a rage quietly seething. After hooking up with a white cellmate during a stint in "kid jail," Zits begins developing a political and historical consciousness that culminates with him marching into a bank: a paintball gun in one pocket, a real .45 in the other. As he draws the guns and gets ready to shoot, he blacks out and wakes up in Red River, Idaho in 1970 in the body of a burly white cop. And---to whorishly cop some Vonnegut---so it goes.

Like Boyden, Alexie attempts to re-create historical situations---although he does it much more quickly and in fragments due to the nature of Zits' predicament. Most effective is the scene where Zits finds himself in the body of an elderly white Indian tracker in the 19th century. The battle that follows is more visceral and immediate than many of the war scenes in Boyden's novel. There's a lot of high points like this in the book but it's also really uneven. Alexie's super-blunt style is both exciting and off-putting: After a certain point, I started to get sick of Zits yelling at me through the pages. At the same time, there's no denying that what he's witnessing through these various bodies is affecting. It's 2007 and native Americans and Canadians are still living in third-world conditions, shouldering the burden of a heavy past and the continued platitudes of politicians. (Ahemcough, Stephen Harper!) Alexie is an able and entertaining guide through these worlds. I just wish he was a little more subtle in his methods. In that regard, he could certainly use a lesson from Joseph Boyden. But Alexie also shows a fearlessness that Boyden doesn't quite attain in Three Day Road, and in that sense, Alexie's hammer-over-the-head approach has resonated longer with me.

6) The Good Ol' Gulag: Martin Amis and House of Meetings

Book: House of Meetings

Author: Martin Amis

Pages: 240

Distraction level: High. I'm into the fourth season of The Wire and so far it's my favorite. (Little kids struggling to get by! The guy from Queer As Folk running for Mayor! It's too much! It's like heroin!)I'm also fighting a cold and a general sense of wintertime malaise, which is not an ideal state of mind to be in when you're reading a novel about Russian prison camps in the Arctic Circle. I should just get it over with already and pick up How Stella Got Her Groove Back or something.

Favorite quote:Gaaahh. It's so hard to pick a favorite from a Martin Amis novel. Even if it's not his best book (and this one is not, Spoiler Alert!) he always packs 'em full of lines full of hilarious nastiness and underpinnings of deep sadness. Witness:

"The only impulse resembling desire that Tanya awoke in me was an evanescent urge to eat her shirt buttons, which were made from pellets of chewed bread."

"Zoya was not an acquired taste. He face was original but her figure was a platitude---tall and ample and also wasp-waisted. Every male was condemned to receive its message. You felt it down the length of your spine. We all got it, from the street draggle-tail who pleaded to carry her books and hold her hand, right the way up to our pale and ancient postman who, each morning, stopped and stared at her with his mouth unevenly agape and one eye shut, as if over a gunsight."

And later:
"The great shaft of her throat was like an aquarium of shifting blues and crimsons."

Before I sat down here at the old computer to wrestle with House of Meetings, I was listening to the Grinderman song "No Pussy Blues." Grinderman is fronted by the incomparably awesome Nick Cave, who throughout his various years, projects and musical incarnations has succeeded in becoming even cooler in his wiry, dirty-moustachioed old age. It struck me (as it has struck me a few times before) that there are many similarities between Nick Cave and Martin Amis. They even look alike:

Mr. Amis:




Mr. Cave




Ahh, the unabashed cigarette smoking, the naturally quiet and British demeanors (and yes, Nick is Australian, but he's practically British in my books), the dark clothes and dark brows, the receding hairlines that somehow remain sexy.
And yeah, both have been objects of my embarrassing lust and fangirly dad-crush type affections for some time, now. I have written love letters to them both (In case you were wondering: I sent Nick Cave his, but never had the cajones to slide my page of shitty, breathless prose into an envelope postmarked to Amis' British publicist.) And both survived a lecherous and debased youth, but grew to retain the best parts of their artsy intellectual backgrounds. Amis was a womanizing literary enfant terrible in his day with a writer dad (Kingsley Amis) while Cave more or less wrote the book, so to speak, on how to be a post-punk and heroin-addicted sex fiend while also writing amazing songs, a novel, a fucking amazing Australian Western (The Proposition) and performing university lectures on the construction of the Love Song. His dad was a teacher.

And both produce their most satisfying work when they stick to what they know best. Nick Cave's latter-year ballads alternate between embarrassingly maudlin and breathtaking, but after 20 years on the road, his renditions of dirty-as-hell songs like Stagger Lee and Deanna still turn me into a blithering pile of lusty goop. Amis' early novels The Rachel Papers, Success and Money are so very, very nasty, full of misanthropic, hateful characters doing terrible things to each other. But they're also just so fucking good. Amis is often considered quite a dick, and for all intents and purposes, he still seems to be one, especially when answering questions posed by fans, but he's also acerbic and much smarter than I am, and he's very good at what he does. So I forgive.

I had been waiting for House of Meetings for a long while. It continues with Amis' latest obsession with mass genocides, Soviet Russia, the facists and the mongrels, or, as he puts it in the book, the brutes versus the bitches. (If you're interested, Amis previously walked through this desolate and bloody world with Koba the Dread, a subjective history of Joseph Stalin.) In House of Meetings he's attempted a fictional rendering of the time period, focusing on two half-brothers who somehow survived a prison camp near the Arctic Circle and Zoya, the beautiful woman who haunted them both.

But it's not a love story, as the back cover of the book seems to suggest. None of Amis' books really are, although they might wear that premise as a thin shell. Nope---it's all about hatred, misery, regret, and some thin kind of survival. Amis' narrator (the handsome brother, if you believe his amusingly narcissistic description of himself as "six foot two with thick black hair and orderly features") survived, but he also ranks as one of Amis' all-time Grade A wankers. In letters to an unseen daughter that serve as the narrative to the tale, the guy freely shares stories of rape and beatings, withering appraisals of his brother, sister and even Zoya, the object of his so-called affections.

Hmm. I'm never sure how to reconcile or forgive Amis' characters. He doesn't write books where the characters possess some innate, highly visible vulnerability that might account for their behaviour. They simply are---and the narrator of House of Meetings simply is. I'm sure surviving the gulag would make me a bit of a shithead, for example, but Amis' character is a shithead before he even arrives---it's a trait that's directly attributable to his survival. I think we're supposed to try and understand that living in Soviet Russia itself made men do terrible things and act out in ways that defy self-control and rationality. This aside, this narrator is the first Amis character I couldn't hang onto. It was extremely difficult to keep holding his hand as he marches through the book's various miseries. I couldn't do it---and I have always had a high tolerance for the misogyny and self-loathing of Amis' characters, because it seemed to lead to something larger, something more, something satiric. But with this guy, I was, for the first time, repulsed.

It also doesn't help that this guy is supposed to be a hardcore Russian and yet he talks like an PhD candidate at Oxford. This is, of course, the undeniable Amis-ness coming out. Amis has such a beautiful command of the language that his characters can't help but sound highly learned (I think the one exception might be the working-class lady cop of Night Train.) This has often been criticized as being a detriment to his novels by critics, and in House of Meetings, it distracts and tortures the reader with wincing, agonizing clarity.

Amis knows he can't match the veracity and distinct vernacular of his literary heroes Dosteyovsky, Nabokov and Conrad (and well, shit. Who can?) which is perhaps why his character name-drops all these venerable authors on a nearly constant basis. To be honest, all the Britishisms and self-awareness is fucking annoying. The worst parts are when the narrator addresses his young, apparently hip daughter directly---a tirade about her generation's tendency towards self-mutilation and whining about her nose piercing made me throw the book across the room. For fuck's sakes, Amis, you're a canonized British author, you hang out with Christopher Hitchens and Philip Roth and you've almost won the Booker Prize, like, ten times. You don't need to make a Bill Cosby-esque comment on intergenerational quirks.

Of course, there is a very sad and tragic story in all of this, and Amis occasionally knows how to bring our faces straight into the gulag and the shittiness of the political situation, kneading us down into the stink of it all. And occasionally, the story rises with a mounting, Poe-like dread that sticks leaden in your throat (especially as the book's climactic encounter between the narrator and Zoya nears completion. It will make you squirm.) But overall the book left me feeling detached and frustrated, and that's an extremely difficult confession for me to make about one of my all-time literary heroes. I left the book thinking, "Well, fuck. Is Amis on a downturn? Is he too old for this game? Am I too young? Too stupid?" To be honest, three days later, I still have no idea.