Cool Water, Dianne Warren

Marlys Farn-Guillette, The Fence Is Down

(December 25) Got this when I heard it won a 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. Can see why it won something -- it's very serious (reminds me of Ann Patchett) -- everything happens in one day and everything that happens echoes an event that occurred in the area 100 years ago (to the day) -- so the Saskatchewan landscape never changes and is the ultimate victor over puny human happenings à la Ozymandias -- and so on and so forth.

But a book like this -- you can never stop being aware that you are reading a book that has been carefully crafted to evoke all this symbolism -- it never lifts you out of yourself and out of the feeling that you are reading a carefully crafted book and into the realm of vicariously lived excitement, and that's what I really want from a book.

However, I was surprised and enchanted to learn that there's a desert in Saskatchewan. Everyone in the book acknowledges or comments fleetingly on the fact that no one knows there is a desert in Saskatchewan, and they are right. Which is kind of cool.

Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese

Aleka Gebre Selassie Adil, Mother Ethiopia, 1960

(December 6) Really liked it, especially at first: for about the first two-thirds, it was wondrous... vivid and evocative in a way that reminded me of Half of a Yellow Sun, with a mild hint of magic reality to it à la Gabriel García Márquez, which was lovely. (I'm thinking of the story of the parents, particularly.)

But then, once it left Ethiopia, the story seemed to think it was about medicine primarily; instead of being about people who also practiced medicine, it morphed into a creaking, artificial set-up for a medical drama. The symbolism groaned at you.

But the first two-thirds -- gold.