Lori’s Book Nook

I have a confession to make…I’ve not read anything new for months! I’ve been re-reading all books by Lois McMaster Bujold, almost obsessively, and in the last couple of weeks, the Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper, one of my favourite authors as a child. (They pass the test of time though, still tasty books!)

Last week, for a couple of reasons, my reading life has changed:

• I took a mid-week Greyhound trip to Vancouver, and finally picked up a Christmas book: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Finished it yesterday — very good. If you haven’t picked this one up, thinking it had something to do with 18th Century England (I did…I wasn’t too terribly enthused about what I expected to be an Austen-wannabe.), do so now. It’s unexpected and a great yarn — wide-sweeping epic-like with very intriguing characters.
• I did recently read Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, and while I was in Vancouver, I stopped at my favourite 2ndhand bookstore there, Albion Books (Hi Dave!), and found a copy of Bourdain’s next book, A Cook’s Tour. Just finished that one this morning — again, very good. Bourdain writes food porn — his relationship to food is definitely not one of merely fuel. If he did write regular porn, it would be nice and earthy, with all the fluids and smells lovingly recorded. His descriptions of the food he eats around the world are bloody, alcohol-soaked, crud-encrusted meals of absolute delight. I dare you to read this without wanting a bowl of fresh pho and a pint of tequila.

• I have also picked up a copy of Anna Gavalda’s Ensemble, c’est tout — quite a popular French novel. Discovered while searching up a link to give you, that it has just been made into a movie with the irrepressible Audrey Tautou.

So, I’m reading new stuff again. Hopefully this will mean that I’ll be posting here more often!

Can you?

More and more the author is required to pull together much of their own marketing, and the really savvy ones will come up some really imaginative ideas — like a website. But is a really good web-presence enough to inspire you to buy a book?

Check out this one: a novel entitled Specialty Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. I had never heard of the book until I stumbled upon this brilliant website. It appears to be a mystery, with a very literary main character…and if you dig a bit, you’ll find some tasty buzz for it.

Has anyone out there read this one? I must admit I’m tempted.

Your comments?

A while back I wrote about dictionaries, as all bookish bloggers are wont to do (aren’t they?). I really enjoy having dictionaries, knowing they are there for when I need them.

I like them in person, hard and weighty tomes. I enjoy contemplating what they represent — the unfathomable hours of labour by word enthusiasts, the preserving of ever-changing nuance, the slanting of opinion, even the dictating of form and sound.

I have physical dictionaries, dictionaries on my computer, and links to numerous language resources in my bookmarks.

And of course, there are the thesauri, word lists, menus, reverse dictionaries…ooh! I could go on forever!

But then, there are the visual dictionaries. The online Visual Thesaurus used to be something free, but now you have to pay. I’ve never been able to justify it, as I would not use it as intended, I would just follow the visual trails for hours, ignoring the original need for a synonym.

Today I stumbled upon another online dictionary: Merriam-Webster’s Visual Dictionary.  Probably more nouns than you’ll ever possibly need, but just in case you needed to know the name of the doohickey on a whatchamacallit, now you can just look for it.

One of the books I’m reviewing is, well, rather brilliant — mesmerizing even. Zed, authored by Elizabeth McClung (Arsenal Press).

If you can read the first paragraph and not be drawn in, then okay, you don’t have to buy it. But if you can’t wait to read more, here’s the first chapter online.

Her name? Zed. Age? Eleven, twelve, maybe thirteen – it wasn’t like she was getting three square a day and multivitamins. She was small, four-foot nothing: thin, grubby, but with a thrust to her chin which told you, as you saw her beetling down the hall towards you – best step aside. Most people were fairly certain Zed was female. Her soft features and long lashes were contrasted by grey uniform coveralls, slick and shiny from constant wear. The hair was the deciding factor, because it fell, wildly uneven, to shoulder length. Once a year, Zed assaulted it with her knife, hacking it back above her ears. She had a habit of tilting her head down and staring up at people from under her bangs. She just showed up one day – no relations, no history. No one knew much about her, and those who did never passed it on. People didn’t gossip about her, at least not more than once, because if she caught them she’d stick her knife point somewhere soft on them and ask, “Got anything more to say, Chuckles?” which, invariably, they didn’t.
Yes, she fit right in with the Tower.

C’mon, Elizabeth! Get working on another one!

A co-worker and I have discovered that we both read fantasy novels. She took it upon herself to lend me a rather silly series, by a writer I’d never heard of before — Tamora Pierce. A quick Google search tells me that she is a fantasy author who writes books for young people. That just tells me that publishers don’t think young people can handle any richness to their writing. Here’s her motivation for writing, from an interview (quoted here):

I got into this to write about girls who kick butt. In the mid-’70s, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Sheri Tepper, C.J. Cherryh, that crowd particularly, started to change the field. For me, there was a problem that a number of these characters were gay or celibate female warriors, and I was neither. So I wrote fantasy with female warrior heroes who like guys. Robin McKinley and Barbara Hambly both started to publish their fantasy at the same time, so I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

Is she comparing herself to Robin McKinley? Author of The Blue Sword? Funny though, how Pierce’s heroine, Alanna — who isn’t a lesbian, no way no how! — has a series of adventures very similar to those of Harry/Harimad-sol in McKinley’s book. Desert adventure, finding her powers…

Thank goodness, she’s not comparing herself to Bradley, Tepper, or Cherryh!

What problem do I have with this writer?

• She takes absolutely no time to develop her characters beyond the bare minimum.
• She tells, and tells, and tells, and never once shows.
• The plot points are so transparent it’s annoying — since she doesn’t take any time to develop the world or the characters, when someone blinks, you know it’s significant.
• Three words: Deus ex machina. Magic is unexplained, it just bang! is there to save the day.
• Each of the 4 books in the series I read (oh yes! All 4…I’m not complaining on the strength of only reading one — not too onerous, they were quick reads), had enough action for 3 or 4 books. Huge quest material, dealt with in 4 chapters. Move on to the next with a “And they all went back to the city.” Come up with another 3 adventures, some innocent shtupping (’cause remember, she’s not a lesbian. NO. Not a lesbian!), some more ways for Alanna to be utterly wonderful and perfect and strong and the best fighter and . . . ingredients for one more Tamora Pierce book, 3 more for any other writer with a modicum of talent for exposition.

I wish I could say I was exaggerating. But if I’d been introduced to this as a pre-teen, I would have been scarred for life, my ability to appreciate good writing forever damaged.

I’ll go back to Lois McMaster Bujold (or Sheri S. Tepper or . . .) any day.

I interrupted my reading of this tripe to pick up one of Bujold’s latest, that I’d been trying to ignore, trying to prolong the anticipation — The Sharing Knife: Beguilement. (Read the first couple of chapters here!)

Bujold really takes the time to develop her characters, and their world. In one sequence, 2 of the characters ride 3 hours into town…it takes 15, beautifully written pages.

Pierce would have done it more efficiently: “They rode three hours to town.”

Gads. I don’t usually write negative reviews, but I need something to show for the wasted time!

I realized this morning that the world had lost yet another artist — spoken word artist Sekou Sundiata. (The Chicago Tribune) [Weird, the editors of Wikipedia waste not time in updating their entries.]

I first heard his work in the Bill Moyers’ book The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (Here’s a discussion group page.) That book has a companion audio format — I’m not sure which came first, the audio or the book. I, luckily, have both.

Listen to him on Salon Audio, or on the NPR Fresh Air podcast, a compilation of interviews held with him over the years.

Art lives on.

I found a guy I like online — the Burgomeister, and his books. Not only is he a reader, he’s someone who prefers to read online (I’ve been looking for one!):

I love the great novels on my computer screen because, for me, paper is passé.

So, here we’ve got a reader who has found a solution to the problem of friends borrowing books and not returning them. (I just realized last night that I loaned out my only copy of Sei Shonogan’s The Pillow Book.) He is lending out his ebooks to anyone who wants to borrow them.

Brilliant. Not only is he cool, he’s got similar taste in reading to me…lots of SF and such.

Go visit, follow his guidelines, and read.

I write book reviews for the Canadian Book Review Annual, a very comprehensive publication — reviews of all books published in Canada in a given year. It’s a huge mandate, and we reviewers get paid in books and experience…and it’s a truly wonderful thing to get a package of books in the mail.

Anyway, one of the latest books that arrived via Canada Post was Lost Girls and Love Hotels by Catherine Hanrahan.

Wow! I could not put this book down. All the fun and despair of the expat community in Asia, without dealing with the alcoholism yourself. Get this book for someone who has lived overseas, and those who are trying to make the decision to go — this book will help them decide, one way or another!

And no, this is not my CBRA review. It’ll be more literary, hopefully.

Well, Booktalk.org is at it again. This time, one of the books is Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben. (Here’s the link to the Booktalk.org discussion forum.)

This one is hitting me close to home. I worked the opening day of the local Farmers’ Market (I’m the manager), came home, and picked up Deep Economy to read McKibben’s discussion on farmers’ markets — and the studied fact that people have 10 more social interactions there than they do in a supermarket.

I could’ve told  him that!!

McKibben believes in communities — the idea that as individuals we make decisions that (seem to) affect only us, but with an awareness of our community, we make decisions that have deeper consequences. [It's a big book, lots of ideas, and I'm writing this in an office with no circulation on a hot day at 6 p.m.. Bear with me on my simplistic synopses. ]

For example, if I’m just thinking of myself, then I’ll go to the local Walmart and buy the cheapest coffee on the shelf. But, if I were aware of my local community, I’d go to the grocery store in town that may have a higher price tag, but where I know that the management cares about their staff and pay good wages. If I were thinking of the broader community, I’d go out of my way to buy fair trade, shade-grown coffee, and by-pass the big corporations abusing the people of the coffee-growing nations. But, if I were really thinking of the greater community, I’d stop drinking coffee altogether, as the fossil fuels needed to bring that coffee to me, no matter how it’s grown, are damaging our environment. (Plus, they’re running out. Might as well overcome the coffee addiction now, before I’m forced to, down the road!)

This is a huge discussion…that I don’t feel like undertaking at this moment. Perhaps in the comments??

How can I resist an //engtech contest?!? Especially one where I can talk about my other favourite thing — movies!

Okay — on to the list. Let’s assume that LOTR is in the list somewhere, but that it’s been over-blogged in the last couple of years. And when I say ‘memorable‘, I mean my memory!

No. 1

I Capture the Castle. The Dodie Smith book of the same name is a delight. It’s in diary form, written by 17-year-old Cassandra, who lives with her rather eccentric family in a broken down old castle. The strength of this rather quiet movie lies in Smith’s background as a playright (and writer of The One Hundred and One Dalmations) — I’ve never seen a movie capture the characters, plot, setting, and essence of a book so well. At no point does it slap you in the face and say “hey! I’m literary! Can’t you tell?” (Unlike the first Harry Potter film…which I watched, anticipating each scene: “Ho hum…now we’re going to get ___ scene.”)

No. 2

A Little Princess (the 1995 version). From the book by Frances Hodges Burnett. Okay, so they added a little dramatic ‘hanging-from-the-eaves’ scene — I don’t mind. At that point in the movie, you’re really in the mood for it. The Miss Minchin character is wonderfully done by the great actor Eleanor Brun. You feel for her and hate her at the same time — brilliant! The story-telling, the ‘magic’, and the relationship between all the girls is beautifully represented. And the colours…each scene is shot with either a dark, earthy green that menaces, or a sunny golden glow that, well, glows.

No. 3

The Power of One. Is this a great movie? No. It’s got some brilliant moments, but overall, I wish it had been more…meaty. Gutsy. Longer. The treatment of the material was sketchy — it’s obvious that Bryce Courtney’s greatest book needs to be made into a BBC mini-series (a la Dune or Gormenghast), not relegated to a shortish Hollywood film. But, they manage to get some of the best bits right in this one — it definitely captures the feel of the book, even though they totally botched the story.

No. 4

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. Is this movie based on the biography Dorothy Parker: Oh What Fresh Hell Is This? by Marion Meade? [ooo...a triple whammy. A movie based on a biography of a famous writer!] It doesn’t say that the movie’s writers used the book, but it is the most common biography on Parker, and many of the anecdotes from the book are reproduced verbatim in the movie. (Of course, that means nothing, as all of her friends were literary, everyone in that crowd wrote everything down…) Anyway, it’s a great film, representing the life and times of a great if tragic woman, played with utter perfection by the indomitable Jennifer Jason Leigh!

No. 5

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Okay, I’m cheating on this one. In a sense, the movie came first. But, the author of the movie (and the supposed file cabinets full of material on this character), Earl Mac Rauch wrote a ‘novelization’ of the movie, like no other I’ve ever seen! Usually, a book-from-a-movie is a scene-by-scene rehash of the action. Cheesy. Badly written. Who reads them??? (Okay, I admit, the first book I read in Portuguese when I was living in Brasil was the novelization of ET…and I highly recommend them to language learners because of their screen-to-print regularity.) But this one is different — written from the point of view of one of the main characters, it’s his version of events. And, it’s as wonderful as the film. (If I have to convince you, you’re really not a geek.)

What are your movies?