The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks

Will Davies, Harlequin Romance cover

(May 21) OMG.

I wanted to read this because I’d heard so many mildly disparaging comparisons -- “oh, this is sentimental, like The Notebook,” or “this has same kind of blind devotion from fans as The Notebook.” I wanted to know exactly what kind of sentimental this was, or what kind of oxycontin it was. It seemed like a cultural touchstone.

But OMG it was so bad. The opening acknowledgements sounded like they were written by one of my former C students, which was very alarming.

However, the story itself was written more competently than the acknowledgements -- the expression of the ideas is quite competent, in fact. It’s just that the ideas aren’t very powerful or even interesting.

I kept waiting for something “big” to happen, but suddenly the book was over and nothing “big” had happened at all. Everything was just perfect in a Redbook magazine kind of way.

At the end we find out that Sparks based this story on his grandparents’ actual lives, and that makes you wince and think, oh that’s cute, and maybe it explains why Sparks kept everything so generic … he just didn’t want to go there about his grandparents.

But then he did go there -- or somewhere -- with several hot sex scenes. So.

And that’s all the characters do -- eat, have sex, wear nice outfits. There is nothing else going on. The “events” are like snapshots described to us -- which might be an interesting idea in the right hands, but here is just really only about the clothing, the food and the mild porn. Nothing deeper.

Maybe it made for a great movie -- I haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to now. Maybe the movie injected some life into the story... because it is a cute concept and could be really powerful... and I think the movie must be better and that that is what everybody thinks of when they think of The Notebook, because the criticisms are really mild. People have ragged on Twilight so harshly, and I think it’s superior, creatively, to The Notebook.

So either the movie is acceptable and that’s what people identify as The Notebook, or people feel bad that it’s about real-life old people and therefore let it off the hook. Maybe people see it as a blank canvas and inject their own powerful imaginations into it. I cannot otherwise account for its huge, huge popularity.

About a third of the way in, I started to think, “This is just like The Bridges of Madison County,” which is a real insult, ay. But by the end, The Notebook made The Bridges of Madison County look good. O_o

Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster

John Singer Sargent Hylda, Almina and Conway, Children of Asher Wertheimer, 1905

(May 20) All these terrible things happen; and yet it is very funny. O_o

Silk, Alessandro Baricco, translated by Ann Goldstein

(May 13) What an amazing and powerful little book. It’s only 132 pages, but it packs the kind of wallop you might expect only from long, pretentious sagas or old masters.

And it’s written so sparingly! It’s like living in a haiku for a little while. Even though it’s a translation, the book is nothing but the plainest and most common words in English, so you suspect that in the original Italian it would also be plain, unadorned vocabulary. So it doesn’t feel like you might be missing nuances. Although with this kind of book you probably are.

The story seems completely original when you are in it, but within a few minutes of finishing it, I realized it was another form of “The Beast in the Jungle,” and a story about limerence.

Andrea (from whom I got this recommendation) thought it was like music -- the pacing, the repetitions, the flourishes -- and with this I agree.

Easy Way to Stop Smoking, Allen Carr

American Cancer Society, "Smoking Is Very Glamorous," 1972

(May 9) Well, it worked for me -- so, to be fair, I've got to give it 5 stars. I didn't particularly expect it to work, and I didn't particularly care if it worked, and it certainly didn't work right away -- but 11 days after I finished this book, I just spontaneously stopped smoking (and have remained non-smoking till now, four months later).

The "switch" flipped for me, the way the book mysteriously hints it will. I'm not sure just exactly which idea it is among all the ideas that Allen Carr drills into you that does the trick, but he does harp on some basic concepts over and over. Some of them are old chestnuts, but a couple of them were interesting new points of view for me ("a cigarette's sole function is to create the desire for the next cigarette" and "you think quitting smoking is hard because everyone tells you it's hard").

Still, none of these saws seemed transformative at the time of reading. Something unknown just kicked in after 11 days.

The Sentimentalists, Johanna Skibsrud

Jeff Greenberg, Silhouette of Man Fishing, Lake Erie, Lorain, OH

(May 2) I read this because it won the 2010 Giller Prize, but I am totally shocked that it did so.

Because it was one of these pointless wandering tales of people dealing with emotions that are never spelled out for the reader, other than to refer us to a boat or a swinging light bulb or a can of ham. How are we supposed to know what these things mean to characters when we never get to know them as other than shell-shocked?

It was like Housekeeping or Tinkers or The Patron Saint of Liars. The genre confounds me.

Lady Susan, Jane Austen

George Goodwin Kilburne (1839-1924), Penning a Letter

(April 20) I heard of this for the first time only a few weeks ago -- so glad to learn there was a Jane Austen I hadn’t read! Love her. This is great. Epistolary novel, which is such an interesting way of doing point of view.

Ah, how dull life would be without the unprincipled schemers among us.

The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Bruce Onobrakpeya, Ibiebe ABC III, 2007

(April 13) I love Adichie’s voice and the way she describes Nigeria.

This is a collection of short stories, mostly about the interface of Nigerians and the U.S. (two or three are set in Nigeria only), but all are sad-sad-sad... bittersweet, really, for there is sweetness. But it’s often wives learning about husbands’ faithlessness, women being oppressed by men, everyone being oppressed by politics.

Nonetheless, I wished with each story that it would turn into a big long novel ::sigh::

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, The Double Comfort Safari Club, Alexander McCall Smith

Terry Kobus, Nguni - Sideways Glance

(April 4, April 17) Read these out of order -- was halfway through The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party before I realized I didn’t really remember what happened to Phuti’s foot nor that his aunt had a vendetta against Mma Makutsi. What does that say about how these books are going?

The “mysteries” are more and more Isabel Dalhousie-y every day... The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party was particularly like an Isabel story, not really about its title at all.

But I am not yet tired of these people and this scenario.

Kim, Rudyard Kipling

Edwin Lord Weeks, An Open-Air Restaurant, Lahore, 1889

(March 30) Enjoyed this book so, so much, and was totally surprised by this.

I somehow got away with never reading any Kipling till now, but you can’t help knowing who he was and what his most famous books were about. I was put off by an impression that Kipling would be sentimental and imperialist... and maybe too juvenile. But Kim was being discussed on BookCel and sounded interesting... and was easy to get... so.

I picked it up ...and was not able to put it down. There are maybe the slightest bits of sentimentality, imperialism and boys'-adventure-taleism to it, but it is not juvenile at all... and the reading experience is so rich.

First, Kim is utterly adorable and it feels like he would be no matter where or when he grew up. But, second, he is in India, which Kipling paints as this phantasmagoria, this kaleidoscope, this panorama, this feast! of vivid sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings, overflowing with culture and history... and drama and comedy... where people love their loved ones deeply but hide it behind amusing jokes and cheeky teasing... (A Fine Balance and A Suitable Boy do this so well, too)... it’s very endearing.

Basically, a great novel, and now I get why K. is so revered.

All the Living, C.E. Morgan

Matt Schwartz, Girl With Piano, 2008?

(March 22) Thought I got the recommendation for this from Decorno, but now I can’t find any reference to it on her blog. It was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Best Writers Under 35, and a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished book of fiction, and it won third place in Fiction for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award... so these may be reasons she recommended it.

I liked it a lot. It reminded me of Cool Water (backroads small lives) and Gilead (backroads community plus preachers plus American) and maybe a little Edgar Sawtelle (the wonders and beauties of farm life)... and it was so slow to start, and then over too fast. But Aloma’s choice was kind of riveting and it was never a gimme about how it would end... so that was very satisfying.

Symbolism is very, very strong -- in the weather, the scenery, the two houses, and on and on. Really sympathize with Aloma, even though she is a bit dissociated, as is Orren. They have good reasons to be.

The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, Diane Ackerman

Vilhelm Dahlerup, Elephant Gate, 1901

(March 9) Really heart-warming and really scary at the same time... how did people live like that? Even though war stories were part and parcel of my childhood (TV, movies, Life magazine), it’s hard to go chapter-and-verse through the sufferings of a family you get to "know" intimately.

When I heard about this book through BookCel, I imagined it as a story of Jews and underground activists living beneath, or in, the cages of lions and elephants, having to crouch in fake caves or float under the surfaces of ponds and so on to avoid detection. But it’s really about how the Żabińskis were able to shelter people because of the large footprint and variety of buildings of a zoo. The exotic animals are long gone by the time the Żabińskis start harbouring people, and the people rarely stay in the out-buildings.

Actually, there are a lot of interesting stories about the exotic animals at the beginning, but what I found even more interesting and touching -- to my surprise -- were the stories about the very mundane, unexotic animals the Żabińskis managed to keep around them during the occupation of Warsaw... Borsunio the badger, Moryś the pig, Piotr the hamster, Wicek the rabbit, Kuba the chick, Balbina the cat... they had a mini-zoo going on during the war! And all these little animals’ activities are so heartstring-tugging.

Of course, the human activities during the German attack on and occupation of Warsaw are pretty amazing. It’s unbelievable what people can do with passion and numbers.

Ackerman has a strange style, though, one that took me a while to get used to. Strange imagery starts in the very first sentence: "At dawn in an outlying district of Warsaw, sunlight swarmed around the trunks of blooming linden trees..."

Sunlight swarms??

The brutal nature and weather imagery continues apace. According to Ackerman, nature and the weather are scarier than war, it seems, and she doesn’t drop this trope for long. The following tiny sample of strange imagery took me only seconds to gather:

p. 41 "...she realized that for Ryś the Baltic Sea he’d visited three years earlier probably existed only as a hazy memory that included the crashing surf and the glassy heat of noon sand."

Glassy heat? OK... just strange, not scary.

p. 51 "Tall lindens had begun turning bronze and oaks the burnt maroon of stale blood..."

There is so much blood in her nature descriptions -- this is just one of many images in which trees or plants are "blood red"! And not because of the war! Just because it’s autumn!

p. 125 "As the nights crackled with cold and frost feathered the windowpanes, winds knifed through the rinds of wooden buildings and slit life from the piglets."

p. 301 "Flocks of crows circled the sky before landing in the snow-covered fields, on one of those claggy, warm January mornings when dark tree branches glisten through fog and just breathing feels like inhaling cotton."

I, for one, don’t know "those" January mornings, don’t know what "claggy" means and can’t remember not being able to breathe in a fog. Smoke, car exhaust, hairspray, yes, they feel like inhaling cotton.

It all makes Ackerman’s book memorable, anyway (though not in the way I think she meant).

The Charming Quirks of Others, Alexander McCall Smith

Henry Raeburn, Mrs. Alexander Allan With Her Granddaughter, Matilda, 1815ish

(February 15) Love, love, love Isabel. But was a little disturbed in this book by how faithless she was about Jamie, and how she went to others first the moment she heard news that made her doubt him. Also noticing for the first time (or it feels like it) that Isabel is almost always 100 per cent wrong with her first conjectures. She is anti-Holmes, who always knows immediately who’s done the deed and only reveals it later. It’s a different way of keeping the reader in suspense, because you always want to agree with Isabel and her first conjecture.

Stories and misunderstandings were interesting as usual and Isabel is so charming in the way she thinks.

But she is always wrong and I think she always was and I just didn’t absorb it till now -- I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Jamie cries a lot in this book. Thought that was going to come to something.

Also, garlic gets dwelt upon a couple of times, and I thought that was going to come to something, too.

Neither did.

And, in fact, a lot hinges on a visual impairment that we don’t know about till the very end... so... ::head tilt::.

Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work, A Guide to Taste, Quality and Style, Tim Gunn with Ada Calhoun, Kate Moloney

(February 4, February 16) I really like Tim Gunn -- he’s open, naive, he enjoys a good story, he loves pasta and meatloaf. In Golden Rules, he says he’s revealing his secrets for good manners, which surprised me -- I thought it was going to be a fashion book --, but really he wants to dish the dirt on people, well-known and anonymous, who have been rude. There is some anger there, some love of revenge, so it made me a bit squeamish... until this sentence at the end:

But let’s talk some more about the bad ones, because they’re the most fun to gossip about, and they deserve a little public shaming.

and he’s right, so, OK.

Contains the most unexpected sentence ever:

Sometimes it takes two years for these patients to build up the strength in their stumps so that the prosthetics will work.

O_o

A Guide to Taste, Quality and Style was much more the style guide that I expected with the other, but I still felt less style-guided than I did with the Nina Garcia books. This book is very witty and fun, like the other. His beliefs about posture jive with all my own beliefs about posture, and this was very gratifying.

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Forgotten Goddess, Blue Morgana

(February 19) This took months to read -- it’s an enormous book and I had to put it down several times to read other books that were on tighter deadlines at the library, but I kept on coming back to it enthusiastically.

What a saga -- not just because it’s long and has two or three perspectives (two major, one minor), but because Zimmer Bradley has incorporated all the old sagas known to English lit into one big ball of cohesive saga-material. I was really impressed by how she endeavoured to “make sense” of the many contradictions in Arthurian legends.

She tries to do the same with all Western religions while she’s at it.

I was also impressed by Zimmer Bradley’s ability to capture the “feel” of Old English narratives in speech and dialogue -- there was enough OE vocabulary and sentence structure to sound “right” but not so much as to become unintelligible or twee or ridiculous.

I called it “The Mists of Estrogen” in my head because it was dripping with '70s - '80s feminism -- the idea that women are run by (and have power because of) their menstrual cycles and birthing and breastfeeding and being receptacles of the creation of life -- the Gaia-Goddess-Fecundity-Vegetation Mystery Tour. From reading just a little background, I think she may in fact have had a big hand in creating that gestalt.

Anatomy of the Spirit, Caroline Myss

Fernando Vicente, Deslenguado, 2008

(January 19) This book was a roller-coaster ride, if a roller-coaster ride can be thought of as starting off in a mildly exciting way, then becoming totally disappointing, and then turning out OK.

A Greener Tea recommended this, and it sounded vaguely interesting (spiritual, in an Eat, Love, Pray kind of way), but when I got it home, it turned out Myss is an amazing mystic intuitive, able to diagnose illnesses and physical problems simply by meeting a person and even by just hearing about a person through a certain person. And she said that this book would teach you how to become one yourself!

But after a few amazing stories of her diagnoses and cures of various people, the book got severely disappointing. It suddenly appeared that she wanted to do an exercise in comparative religions -- she was going to show us how the seven Christian sacraments, the ten Jewish sefirot and the seven Hindu chakras were all the same thing. (She didn’t add in Islam because she doesn’t know anything about it. :/)

So she goes through all these moral truths and shows how they relate to the sacraments and the sefirot, etc., but she really isn’t teaching us to be medical intuitives! And some of the so-called parallelisms between the three religions were pretty forced. And what about those of us who don’t need to have ideas legitimized by Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism?

It was very strange. It was a sudden shift and a kind of incoherent one.

But then about two-thirds through, the stories about people who were sick or in trouble because of something they screwed up in their chakras seemed to become more interesting. So... OK.

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.

One Day, David Nicholls

Niki Sands, Love's Melody

(November 16) This book surprised me in two ways: first, I didn't realize it was a rom-com till I was well into it and really liking the characters. It was written by a man, after all! But it was totally rom-commy ... so light, so like a Sophie Kinsella book ... but with just a slight bit more.... complexity? I had to keep looking at the book jacket photo to make sure Nicholls was a man.

It was so likable. When at one point I had to return it to the library half-read, I really missed Em and Dex.

Second, this book blindsided me like no other in a long time. Well, Fingersmith blindsided me only six months ago... but, really, only those two books in my whole life, I think.

Ape House, Sara Gruen

Marc Johnson, Smoking Monkey

(October 21) She had me at "Ape," plus I already loved Water for Elephants.

This book was worth it for the information about bonobos alone, but Gruen also kept a few plot-plates spinning with great flair.

The book did devolve a bit into TV-sitcom territory eventually, but I was fine with that since the alternative might easily have been animal abuse and too much drama.

There were ironic-twist sub-stories showing how an L.A. lifestyle compels people to change everything that's unique and lovable about them (for example, the parallel between two characters who get a lot of plastic surgery, one because of injuries from an explosion and the other because she's trying to make it in Hollywood) and questioning whether prestige and integrity go hand-in-hand in the media (a writer only finds himself when he stoops to work for the worst rag in the country).

But mainly, it was the bonobos.

The Global Forest, Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Laura Milnor Iverson, Nature's Bright Peace

(October 13) Heard her interviewed on the CBC and was entranced with her descriptions of the biochemistry of trees, wanted to read more.

And this book is interesting, eventually... but I had a hard time getting past the style at times. She wants to invest her remarks with "ancient wisdom" and tries all sorts of methods of doing this -- writing in the style of fairy tales, children's readers, the Bible, and so on. (She even tries an erotic style once or twice.)

A favourite style is to machine-gun you with a lengthy series of short declarative sentences. I enjoy a short declarative sentence, but more than 10 in a row and you begin to think a writer's first language is not English. Sample:

There is a new violence in the world. This violence stands apart from all the other familiar forms. This one is silent and it shows no mercy to the young and the old. It is in the air we breathe. The air is no longer clean.

The new violence is measured in microns, a size smaller than a pollen grain. The violence is particulate pollution. This form of pollution is composed of tiny fragments of matter that will become airborne. Anything can become airborne if it is small enough or light enough or has the right kind of aerodynamic form to fly. These tiny particles are now finding a new name depending on their diameter, expressed as particle microns, or PM for short.

Size matters. Any pollution particles that measure PM 2.5 or less are lethal to the human body. They are also lethal to much of the rest of the animal kingdom.

The book is billed as a collection of essays, so I guess this entitles a writer to try different techniques of infusing grandiosity, but since none of the essays repeat information, you know they were intended to be published together, so "collection of essays" just becomes a license to not have a more intrinsic structural plan.

Plus, overall, there is this cliché of "we are destroying the planet" at every turn. I could maybe forgive her if the book were five years old, but the publishing date is 2010, and, lady, we've heard this refrain.

Don't know why the biochemistry of trees can't be treated as interesting for its own sake.