Archive for May, 2007
May 25, 2007 at 10:54 pm · Filed under Books Etc, Miscellanea
Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. (yes, that publisher) is apparently based here in Toronto, and has been since it was moved from Winnipeg in 1969, 20 years after it was founded in that city. And apparently has published the Mills & Boon novels in the UK since 1971 (I knew that M&B and Harlequins were the same type of books, but I didn’t realize that they’re actually published by the same company.) And Harlequin is owned by the same corporation that owns the Toronto Star, the city’s main newspaper.
The things you don’t know, huh?
May 24, 2007 at 7:48 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Canadian Literature, Favourite Books, Historical Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
44. Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay (Fantasy)
I adore Guy Gavriel Kay; I really do. Ten novels so far, and the lowest rating I’ve ever given him is 4/5 (for The Summer Tree,) because the man just writes so well. I know I’ve said this before, but one of the best things about Kay is how obviously he cares about his characters, all of them, even the villains. Not only enough to make them real people with real problems and emotions, but enough not to make bad things happen to them just for the sake of advancing the plot.
Fifteen-year-old Ned Marriner is spending two months in Provence with his father, famous photographer Edward Marriner, while he works on his latest book. He’d be having a great vacation, missing two months of school and excused from his exams, except that his mother, a doctor, is working with Doctors without Borders in Darfur. In the cathedral of Aix-en-Provence he and his new American friend, Kate Wenger, meet a strange man in a leather jacket—a man who is a part of a very old story. As the past begins to bleed through to the present, Ned finds himself unwittingly drawn into that story.
I thoroughly enjoyed Ysabel. Not as much as The Lions of Al-Rassan or A Song for Arbonne, but certainly as much as The Last Light of the Sun. In fact, like the latter, it seemed somewhat simpler than Kay’s earlier work, possibly because both are told primarily from the perspective of adolescent protagonists. Which is not to say that teenagers lead less complex lives than adults in Kay’s books, but that they themselves are less likely to see the world that way. I think that it’s this telling of the story from their point of view that results in a less nuanced narrative than in Kay’s more masterful works.
Still, what’s less complex from Guy Gavriel Kay is just this side of awesome from anyone else.
Books read: 44/100
Pages read: 12, 450/25,000
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Guy Gavriel Kay
May 22, 2007 at 11:46 am · Filed under Books Etc, Favourite Books
A book that made you cry: The Kite Runner is my favourite made-me-cry book so far. I tend to avoid books that might make me cry, which unfortunately probably means I’m missing a lot of excellent reads.
A book that scared you: I was just thinking about this the other day. Anything by John Bellairs, who is the only horror novelist whose work I’ve ever enjoyed.
A book that made you laugh: Anything by Terry Pratchett. That man is a comic genius.
A book that disgusted you: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Racism, yuck.
A book you loved in elementary school: Anything Nancy Drew, particularly the old hardcovers. In grade 6 three of my friends and I had a Nancy Drew club. We even kept track of which ones we’d read.
A book you loved in middle school: Pride and Prejudice. First read it when I was thirteen, and it’s been my favourite book ever since.
A book you loved in high school: What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin. I already loved her book of short stories, English Lessons and Other Stories, and I’d read the novel once but hadn’t really fallen in love with it when I decided to compare it to Brave New World using feminist theory and post-colonial theory for my big grade 13 English essay. I read it twice more in the course of completing that assignment, and that’s when it became one of my favourite books.
A book you hated in high school: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Racism, yuck.
We had to read it for grade 13 English, and I’m not exactly sorry we read it, since it was a necessary prelude to the awesomeness that is Things Fall Apart. But Heart of Darkness was such a pain to read: it’s short, but so gratingly awful that it seemed much, much longer. I don’t know why I found this book so much more offencive than others; after all, both the Sherlock Holmes and the Father Brown stories can be quite disgustingly racist, and although the instances of it make me uncomfortable, it doesn’t stop the books from being some of my favourite mysteries.
I also hated E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, but since I only read the first 50 pages or so, I can’t really count it.
A book you loved in college: The Caesars (or The Twelve Caesars) by Suetonius. My god, is it ever funny.
A book that challenged your identity: You know, I can’t really think of any, perhaps partly because I’m not entirely sure what the question is asking.
A series that you love: Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, which is not at all my favourite series, but it is my guilty pleasure. I continue to read it despite the fact that it is going rapidly downhill in terms of plot, and was already in hell in terms of grammar and punctuation. Seriously, has the woman (or her editor) never heard of the semi-colon?
Your favourite horror book: I don’t really read horror, although I guess Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere qualifies. Fantastic book.
Your favourite science fiction book: Something from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga. Either Mirror Dance or A Civil Campaign, probably.
Your favourite fantasy: The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. Or if that’s too much on the historical side of historical fantasy, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry: The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road.
Your favourite mystery: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, by Laurie R. King. Not only is it my favourite mystery novel, it’s also the first book in my favourite mystery series. None of the others are quite as good as the first, although O, Jerusalem comes very close.
Your favourite biography: I don’t read biographies, although I do remember enjoying one about Helen Keller when I was very young.
Your favourite “coming of age” book: The Only Alien on the Planet by Kristen D. Randle. I don’t know that it’s exactly a “coming-of-age” book, but it’s my favourite YA novel. I suppose The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm fits the criteria better, and I love it just as much.
Your favourite classic: Pride and Prejudice, no question. Jane Eyre, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park are also good.
Your favourite romance book: Pride and Prejudice, no question.
Your favourite book not on this list: Robertson Davies’s Deptford trilogy: Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders.
If you feel like doing it, consider yourself tagged, and please leave a link to your response in the comments so I can read it. I love reading memes like this.
May 22, 2007 at 10:48 am · Filed under Miscellanea
So, Literary Acquisionist tagged me for the eight things meme:
1: Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2: People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3: At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4: Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
1. Even though both of my parents were raised Catholic, neither of them ever so much as mentioned religion to me as a child—the idea of God was simply never raised as a possibility. Religious members of my family have encouraged me to become a Christian, but talking myself into a belief in God has always seemed to me to be a bit like talking myself into a belief in unicorns or fairies. I mean, I probably could do it, if I wanted to, but why would I? (Which kinda sounds like I think believing in God is as silly as believing in unicorns or fairies, which I don’t.)
2. I will always be sad that I’ll never get to live in the Star Trek universe. For some reason, it’s always seemed more real to me than other science fiction. And maybe it’s because of my age, but I always liked DS9 and Voyager better than TOS and TNG.
3. I love green olives, and I eat way too many of them. It’s kind of sad that my favourite food is really just a snack.
4. I pretty much stopped watching television about six years ago, mostly because I couldn’t be bothered to keep up with shows. I’m actually too lazy to watch TV—isn’t that sad? I never turn on the TV anymore, although I will sometimes sit down with someone while they’re watching a show. The consequence of this is that the only show I’ve seen more than two or three times a year in the past six years is America’s Next Top Model, of which both my roommate and my little sister are fans.
5. Lived experience suggests that I have an honest face. Store owners who watch customers suspiciously inevitably dismiss me as a threat. In a line where bags are being searched, I am always the one let through unchecked. When there is a need for someone to look after keys or money or anything like that, I am always the one chosen. I don’t understand why this is. I am a very honest person, in the sense that I would never steal or conceal bombs in my backpack, but there are plenty of similarly honest people who never receive this consistent absence of suspicion.
6. I don’t drink alcohol, because I hate the taste and because the idea of being drunk repels me. Very drunk people make me nervous, because I’m never sure what they’re going to do, and I’m always conscious that they may suddenly throw up.
7. I swore for the first time when I was three years old. My aunt and I were in her car, when I suddenly exclaimed, “Damnit, Marianne, I left my money at the bank!”
8. My favourite book as a toddler has been the subject of library censorship debates, on the grounds that it’s too violent and that it promotes cannibalism. I think Lizzy’s Lion (by Dennis Lee) is one of the best books ever written for young children, especially with Marie-Louise Gay’s fantastic illustrations.
I’m not tagging anyone, because I have no idea if there’s anyone left who hasn’t done it, but if haven’t and you’d like to, consider yourself tagged.
May 21, 2007 at 8:20 pm · Filed under Miscellanea
To all my fellow Canadians, at least.It’s nice to be back in the city after a weekend away, even if I did have a good time with my aunts in St. Catharines. I was going to say some stuff about books and do the eight things meme, but I’m too tired to think about what I want to say, so I’ll leave all that for tomorrow.
May 18, 2007 at 11:24 am · Filed under Miscellanea
While a completely book-unrelated but interesting discussion at Alas, a Blog entitled Legal & Personal Definitions of Rape, it suddenly occurred to me that although I am in no way politically conservative, there is a way in which I actually am a conservative: I am grammatically and orthographically conservative! My realization was sparked by this bit from comment #78, posted by Richard Jeffrey Newman:
At the same time, however, Sailorman’s desire to control the meaning of the word rape, to limit its definition with that kind of legal precision, needs to be recognized as a fundamentally conservative move. It is no different in its underlying structure than the attempts by people on the right to control the meaning of the word marriage or, for that matter, than the now defeated and futile attempts by grammatical purists to maintain the distinction between who and whom.
Never in a million years did I think I might share an ideological perspective with the anti-SSM crowd.
May 14, 2007 at 10:48 pm · Filed under Miscellanea
(Here follows a long, rambling post that is only tangentially related to books or reading.)
Maybe it’s because so much world lit, especially that which is written in or translated into English, involves immigrant narratives, but I’ve been thinking about immigration and my own Canadian identity.
Perhaps I should start by explaining where I’m coming from—or in this case, where my parents came from. My mother was a typical white Ontarian: blonde, blue eyes, fair skin, ancestors all from the British Isles, mostly England and Scotland. Her grandparents were all born here in Southern Ontario, mostly in the Golden Horseshoe. So on my mother’s side, I’m at least a fifth-generation Canadian.
My father was born in Accra, Ghana in 1951, and emigrated to Canada in 1969, at the age of eighteen. He attended university here, and has had Canadian citizenship for three decades. The last time he visited Ghana was for his father’s funeral in 1982. English is his first language (Ghana, unlike most countries in West Africa, was colonized by the British rather than the French, and English is its only official language.)
So where does that leave me? I was born in Toronto in 1984, and I’ve lived here in pretty much the same neighbourhood almost my entire life. I’m a very light-skinned black woman, with black hair and brown eyes. My hair is naturally as curly as anyone whose ancestors are from Sub-Saharan Africa, although I have it chemically straightened. I could never pass for white (nor would I wish to.) It wasn’t until I was twenty that it occurred to me that I could actually be considered a second-generation Canadian.
Now, the point of all that background information was to make the point that, like the Molson commercial says, I am Canadian. 100%. Which maybe goes a long way toward explaining why I get ticked off when a fellow Canadian (usually one who hasn’t really heard me speak) asks me where I come from.
Here, you idiot. I was born here, I’ve lived here my whole life, and I will probably die here.
Of course, part of what angers me about people who ask this is that they’re making an assumption that because I am not white, I must be an immigrant. In Toronto, this kind of assumption is not only a kind of racial profiling, it’s also moronic; Toronto is supposedly the world’s most multicultural city, and most non-white people my age are at least second-generation Canadians.
I don’t want to make it sound like this happens often. It doesn’t, at all, and although Toronto isn’t a perfect place when it comes to ignorance, we’re improving all the time. I can remember, as a child, being asked many times what my background was, and on answering that my father was from Ghana, would usually then be asked where that was. (This excludes the rather disturbing number of times that adults insisted that, “you mean Guyana, dear.” Or Guinea, or Gambia, etc. At which times I had to insist that yes, even though I was only eight, or ten, or twelve, I did in fact know where my own father was from, and even how to pronounce it.) I soon learned to append “in West Africa” to any mention of Ghana.
Now, a decade later, when someone asks about my background, and I tell them that my father is from “Ghana, in West Africa,” the reaction is invariably an irritated and impatient, “I know where Ghana is!” So things have changed. (Sadly, my answer hasn’t; ten years may have improved the average Canadian’s knowledge of African geography, but childhood habits die hard.)
Anyway, I know that that I am bothered by the automatic equation of non-whiteness with immigrants because it reveals an essentially exclusionary and regressive view of what Canada is, but is that the only reason behind my ire? Is my attitude really any more enlightened than that of the person questioning me?
Sadly, I have to say that the answer is “no.” Because as quick as I am to claim immigrants as Canadians in other contexts (authors I like and respect, for example, like Shauna Singh Baldwin, Rohinton Mistry, or Michael Ondaatje—although Canadians in general are notorious for this (this funny post by an American living in Vancouver provides a good example)), I still seem to have internalized the mistaken idea that people who weren’t born here can’t be as Canadian as those of us who were. (I realize that even the concept of national identity is problematic at best, and the Canadian national identity is a problem of a wholly different sort, but I don’t see the world shedding them anytime soon.)
So where does that leave me? What does it make me?
As capable of acting on moronic assumptions as anyone else, I suppose. Something I’ll have to work on. 
May 14, 2007 at 5:12 pm · Filed under Books Etc
Now that I’ve rediscovered the joys of world literature, I’ve found that the biggest problem is finding good books to read. Not that there aren’t many wonderful books out there, and not that I haven’t solicited/stumbled across lots of great recommendations. The problem arises when I decide that I want to read literature from a particular country, one of whose national literature or popular authors I know nothing.
Wikipedia’s a good place to start, and reading lists from university course websites are a great resource, but those sources rarely have summaries of the books I’m interested in, nor do they offer recommendations. I have yet to find my dream site: a multi-author world lit book blog, with reviews organized by country. Perhaps one day someone will start one, but in the meantime, I’ve looked through quite a few blogs from around the world, always hoping that the next one will contain book reviews. And you know, even the ones without a single review often turn out to be great gems.
Still, that doesn’t always solve my problem—I have a birthday coming up, and I need to have my book list ready. My family is not enthusiastic about giving gift certificates, nor do they like me to know what I’m getting beforehand. Since I’m quite picky about what I like, especially as regards the edition and the cover, we’ve reached a compromise. I give them a long list of books, specifying precisely which edition I want, and they’ll pick and choose from that list, so it will still be something of a surprise.
Many of the works in translation that I’m interested in aren’t available in the public library, so if I want to read them, I’ll have to own them first. But if I’m going to rely on purchases to make up most of my world lit reading, it’s more important than ever to weed out the duds before I compile my final list.
That’s why I was so excited to discover Laila Lalami, through a Moroccan non-book blog I found while googling for english fiction morocco. It turned out that the post that caught google’s attention was about an English bookshop in Rabat, Morocco, and not about any specific author or novel.
Still, I wasn’t daunted. Anyone who takes the time to blog about her favourite English-language bookshop, and raves about the multiple copies of obscure and hard-to-find books it has, must be a kindred spirit. Surely she must have reviews or recommendations of some of her favourite Moroccan books. Well, she may have, although I didn’t find any. She did, however, mention that author Laila Lalami has a blog. Well, she wouldn’t mention her if she didn’t like her book, right?
So I followed the link to Lalami’s blog, and I’m so glad I did. Aside from her book, , which sounds interesting (and is probably excellent if the writing on her site is any indication), her blog has intriguing mentions of many non-English authors, Moroccans and others, as well as links to articles she’s written for various newspapers. It’s the latter that interest me the most at the moment (although I’ve put her book on my wish list), and one article in particular.
The Missionary Position (The Nation, June 19, 2006) is both a (seemingly) insightful critique of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam and Irshad Manji’s The Trouble With Islam Today, as well as an incisive analysis, and rejection, of the burden of pity foisted upon Muslim women by many Westerners. She makes a good point about the way Muslim women are seen by many in the West:
Why, they wonder, do Muslim women not seek out the West’s help in freeing themselves from their societies’ retrograde thinking? The poor things, they are so oppressed they do not even know they are oppressed.
Lalami points out the factual inaccuracies and gross generalizations about Islam and the Islamic world in both books. While she doesn’t doubt the authors’ sincerity, she does question the quality of their work:
These activists are passionate and no doubt sincere in their criticism of Islam. But are their claims unique and innovative, or are they mostly unremarkable? Are their conclusions borne out by empirical evidence, or do they fail to meet basic levels of scholarship?
Since I’ve never read either book, I can’t judge how relevant the points she makes are in terms of proving or disproving the author’s assertions. Still, I found the article a fascinating read. I’m almost tempted to read the books, just to see if I agree with her analysis, but her negative review has been too effective: I’m repelled, and don’t think I’ll ever read either work.
I’ve been debating with myself over whether I should change my objectives with regard to my world lit challenge. The idea was to read at least one book from each of five different countries on each of the six continents. The other twenty books could be free choices. Due to a 2-month hiatus from recreational reading soon after I started the challenge, I’ve only finished nine books, which is about half of what I should have read by now to stay on track. That’s not a problem; I have plenty of time to catch up.
It’s just…as soon as I finish either Snow or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I’ll be finished with Asia. And I’m not ready for that yet. I want to read more books from China, India, and the Middle East. I want to read books from the places whose books I haven’t found yet, like Korea, Vietnam, Nepal, Armenia, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine…. I’ve started reading books from Egypt, and I have a feeling that I’m going to want to spend lots of time on North African fiction.
Of course, there are lots of books from all over the world that I’ve heard great things about. Books I really want to read. But I guess I want to read them in my own time—I don’t want to have to put off reading the last two volumes of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy just because I’ll be finished with Egypt for the year. I don’t want to put off reading all the exciting new books I’ve found when I’ve hit my quota for the region. So maybe this kind of challenge just isn’t for me. Still, I like the idea of pushing myself to read authors I’ve never heard of, to try books I never would have looked for otherwise. So I guess the verdict for now is: I’ll see how it goes.
May 13, 2007 at 3:48 pm · Filed under Books Etc
(Just because I love book lists. Books I’ve read are in bold; books I’ll almost certainly never read are crossed out.) Read the rest of this entry »
May 13, 2007 at 3:16 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Fiction and Literature, World Literature
43. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (Fiction) 184 pp.
World Lit Challenge: China
Two teenage boys from the city, their parents branded “enemies of the people”, are sent to a remote mountaintop village for re-education during the Cultural Revolution. The book is semi-autobiographical; Dai Sijie was himself sent to the countryside for re-education in 1971, remaining there for three years. He has an interestingly direct narrative voice, which isn’t all that unusual in a first-person narrative, but combined with the quality of his writing, it hooked me right away.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress paints a masterful portrait of the cruelty of Mao’s re-education program and the anti-intellectual ideals that fuelled it, but I found that it also gave me a better idea of where the PRC was coming from. The narrator and his friend are separated from their families, not knowing when, or even if, they will ever be reunited, but their lives in the village are scarcely harsher than those of the peasants who live there. Knowing the incredible poverty that the average Chinese person endured at the time, and the relatively luxurious lives led by intellectuals and “enemies of the people”, the PRC’s attitude becomes much less surprising.
This book reminds me of Reading Lolita in Tehran, in that they both explore the use of books as keys to new worlds when real life becomes unbearable. I suppose that’s what makes this book so popular; ultimately, every reader can identify with the need to escape through reading.
Books read: 43/100 (43%)
Pages read: 12,034/25,000 (48%)
Days passed: 133/365 (36%)
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Dai Sijie, World Lit Challenge
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