thorasbook

Welcome to Thorasbook

2010-12-30T22:11:00.000-08:00

There are many problems in life but the one that this blog addresses is one of the most delicious: namely WHAT DO WE READ NEXT? And we mean, what BOOK, printed on paper with ink and bound with glue, not any cancer-causing, eyesight-destroying, short-attention-span-pandering battery-using gadget that serves up digits for a new generation that probably spends most of its time time playing mindless computer games on their i-Pads while only pretending they are reading a book. Is true book reading a dying art? NOT FOR US! We just want to cram as many great reads into our lives as we can. So many books, so little time....

LET THORA RECOMMEND A BOOK

Thora is a veteran librarian-cum-longtime bookstore owner who has been answering the question, "What should I read next?" for most of her adult life, which, not to let out any secrets, is quite a long time. She will be happy to answer the same question for you if you simply reply to this post in the "Comment" space together with a list of the last five books that you have really enjoyed. Thora will then reply with one book you might try based on what you've told her. Go ahead,you are unlikely to find anybody with more experience at recommending the right book!

Let Thora Recommend a Book

2010-12-29T14:32:00.000-08:00

Thora is a veteran librarian-cum-longtime bookstore owner who has been answering the question, "What should I read next?" for most of her adult life, which, not to let out any secrets, is quite a long time. She will be happy to answer the same question for you if you simply reply to this post in the "Comment" space together with a list of the last five books that you have really enjoyed. Thora will then reply with one book you might try based on what you've told her. Go ahead,you are unlikely to find anybody with more experience at recommending the right book!

Funny but Smart: The 2010 Booker Winner

2010-10-14T08:53:00.000-07:00

Howard Jacobson is tonight (Tuesday 12 October) named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Finkler Question, published by Bloomsbury.

London author and columnist Howard Jacobson has been longlisted twice for the prize, in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now, but has never before been shortlisted.

The Finkler Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship, and explores what it means to be Jewish today.

Said to have ‘some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language', The Finkler Question has been described as ‘wonderful' and ‘richly satisfying' and as a novel of ‘full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding'.

This is the third Man Booker winner published by Bloomsbury. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood won the prize in 2000 and The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje in 1992. The publisher has had six shortlisted books including Cats Eye (1989), Alias Grace (1996) and Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood, Lies of Silence (1990) by Brian Moore, Crossing the River (1993) by Caryl Phillips and The Map of Love (1999) by Ahdaf Soueif.

Sir Andrew Motion, Chair of the judges, made the announcement, which was broadcast by the BBC from the awards dinner at London's Guildhall. Peter Clarke, Chief Executive of Man, presented Howard Jacobson with a cheque for £50,000.

Andrew Motion comments ‘The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize.'

Over and above his prize of £50,000, Howard Jacobson can expect a huge increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer-bound edition of their book.

The judging panel for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was: Andrew Motion (Chair), former Poet Laureate; Rosie Blau, Literary Editor of the Financial Times; Deborah Bull, formerly a dancer, now Creative Director of the Royal Opera House as well as a writer and broadcaster; Tom Sutcliffe, journalist, broadcaster and author and Frances Wilson, biographer and critic.

Sales of the books longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize have been stronger than ever before, with sales over 45% higher than last year.

Guardian First Book Award Longlist

2010-08-31T11:33:00.000-07:00

Best Firsts According to the Guardian

The past vies with the future and poetry with prose on the longlist of the 2010 Guardian first book award, which was announced today. The 10 debut titles in the running for the £10,000 award range from dystopian fiction to popular psychology, and span the globe from Somalia to Finland, Kashmir to Winston Churchill's family home in Kent.

The longlist

Fiction

Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt (Fig Tree)

Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman (Sceptre)

Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam (Harvill)

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman (Cape)

Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed (HarperCollins)

Non-fiction

Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two by Daniel Swift (Hamish Hamilton)

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz (Portobello)

Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson)

Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir by Basharat Peer (HarperCollins)

Poetry

The Floating Man by Katharine Towers (Picador)

Booker Longlist: The Long Song Is No Long Shot

2010-07-28T17:27:00.000-07:00

Bookmakers William Hill have installed Andrea Levy as the favourite to win the 2010 Man Booker Prize following the announcement of the longlist today. David Mitchell, is the second favourite in the betting for his novel The Thousand Autumns Of Zacob de Zoet.

"This is one of the hardest longlists that we have had to price up, but the early stand out is Andrea Levy and it will be very interesting to see who the money comes in for," said Hill's spokesman Graham Sharpe.

William Hill odds - to win Man Booker Prize:

4/1 Andrea Levy - The Long Song

9/2 David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Zacob de Zoet

5/1 Helen Dunmore - The Betrayal

6/1 Rose Tremain - Trespass

7/1 Peter Carey - Parrott and Oliver in America

8/1 Howard Jacobson - The Finkler Question

8/1 Paul Murray - Skippy Dies

12/1 Emma Donoghue - Room

12/1 Tom McCarthy - C

12/1 Alan Warner - The Stars in the Bright Sky

16/1 Damon Galgut - In a Strange Room

16/1 Lisa Moore - February

16/1 Christos Tsiolkas The Slap

Man Booker Dozen Announced

2010-07-28T17:22:00.000-07:00

The judges for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction today, Tuesday 27 July, announced the longlist for the prize, the leading literary award in the English speaking world.

A total of 138 books, 14 of which were called in by the judges, were considered for the 'Man Booker Dozen' longlist of 13 books.

The longlist includes:

Peter Carey Parrot and Oliver in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan - Picador)

Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin - Fig Tree)

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Books)

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy The Long Song

(Headline Publishing Group - Headline Review)

Tom McCarthy C (Random House - Jonathan Cape)

David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Zacob de Zoet (Hodder & Stoughton - Sceptre)

Lisa Moore February (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin - Hamish Hamilton)

Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic - Tuskar Rock)

Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky

(Random House - Jonathan Cape)

The chair of judges, Andrew Motion, comments: "Here are thirteen exceptional novels -books we have chosen for their intrinsic quality, without reference to the past work of their authors. Wide-ranging in their geography and their concern, they tell powerful stories which make the familiar strange and cover an enormous range of history and feeling. We feel confident that they will provoke and entertain."

This Just In: American Novel Dead

2010-07-05T15:58:00.000-07:00

Book pundits in the United States are being urged to line up on one side or other this summer: Is the American novel finally dead or not? The row began when the controversial critic Lee Siegel wrote a piece for the New York Observer declaring that the American public no longer talk about novels and that this creative form, once so full of fire, has lost its spark for ever.

"For about a million reasons," Siegel claimed, "fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the non-fiction writers."

As the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, awarded on Thursday in London, recognised the importance of the new book by American journalist Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, the debate Siegel has re-started raged on in books pages and on literary websites. Will American fiction ever compete again with non-fiction for contemporary relevance, critics in both camps are asking.

Siegel's assault on America's novelists was prompted by the publication of the New Yorker's annual "20 Under 40" list of new writers, but it has exposed a bitterness at the heart of the world of books.

Railing against "the New Yorker's self-promoting, vulgar list" of favoured newcomers, Siegel smears the whole literary pack as being damagingly self-referential and led by the nose by publicists. Calling for new talent and new genres, he laments the fact that nobody bothered to question the "20 Under 40" selection.

The British critic James Wood, now perhaps the leading voice in literary journalism in America, is at the centre of the row. For Siegel, the prominence and fame of Wood – who writes for the New York Times – sums up the current crisis in fiction.

"May the gods bless my former New Republic colleague, and may he keep reviewing novels for another hundred years, but the very emergence of Mr Wood signals the decline of fiction, his driving passion," Siegel claims, going on to argue that the death of an artistic form is evident when the analysis of it has become so top-heavy.

But the literati have hit back. They argue Siegel is using his contentious thesis to get at a rival publication and a rival critic. A riposte published in the Los Angeles Times first pointed out that other journals had criticised the New Yorker's selection of writers and then took on Siegel's theory, point by point. Another response to Siegel carried online in the Huffington Post last week went so far as to suggest it is not the American novel we should mourn, but the American literary scene.

Critics like Siegel, it urges, "have refused to even open the curtains in their ivory towers to see the wonderful, burgeoning literary world that has sprung up around them. They are dismissive of book blogs, of genre fiction, of pretty much anything that, say, wouldn't be covered in the New Yorker".

Declaring the death of the novel is now almost as much of a literary tradition as the novel itself. American writers, proud of their canon – from Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway, to John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller and Saul Bellow – are, alternately, eager to kill off the genre and exasperated by their long wait for the next big writer.

Back in 2003, a column by renowned critic Harold Bloom decried the National Book Foundation's decision to give Stephen King an award for a "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters". Attacking JK Rowling in the same article, Bloom suggested that good literature could never be as popular as King's horror stories and Rowling's Harry Potter books. Andrew Marr, writing in this newspaper in 2001, also declared the British novel dead.

For the author Geoff Dyer, speaking this weekend, the problem now lies much more in the flawed category of literary fiction. "I don't have the patience to read novels these days unless the author has either jettisoned most of the stuff that is considered essential to novel-writing or is a complete and absolute master, like Alan Hollinghurst, say," he said.

"So-called literary fiction seems a particular degraded category in the UK these days, often devoid of any and all things literary in so far as the word suggests some kind of value judgment." But the publisher Jamie Byng, head of Canongate, said Siegel's reasoning was "preposterous", adding: "There is important, challenging thought-provoking fiction out there, just as there is non-fiction. I just don't buy any broad-brushstroke statement like 'fiction is dead'."

It could be that Siegel simply hoped to shake novelists up. The critic Frank Kermode once said the novel was a form that revived itself periodically. "The special fate of the novel, considered as a genre, is to be always dying; and the main reason for this is that the most intelligent novelists and readers are always conscious of the gap, consisting of absurdity, that grows between the world as it seems to be and the world proposed in novels," Kermode wrote. As a result, writers, from Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne to JD Salinger, plan to write an anti-novel and then end up, Kermode said, pointing "the way to a new novel, a new convention".

Beryl Bainbridge dies, aged 75

2010-07-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

The grande dame of British literature passed away in the early hours of this morning, her literary agent has confirmed.

Writer Beryl Bainbridge at home Grande dame of British literature ... Beryl Bainbridge.

Maverick, unique and horribly funny, according to her fellow authors: the world of British literature felt an emptier place today following the death of Beryl Bainbridge, aged 75.

She was admitted to hospital last week following a recurrence of cancer, and died suddenly in the early hours of this morning.

One of the grandes dames of the UK's literary scene, Bainbridge was a prolific writer whose short, dark comic novels – which invariably included a streak of tragedy - landed her five shortlistings for the Man Booker prize (and the label of perennial Booker bridesmaid), made her a two-time winner of the Whitbread award and saw her awarded a DBE in 2000.

"She was a wonderful writer in the tradition of British petit guignol that included Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark: coolly stylish, meticulous, beady-eyed and horribly funny. I would have wished her more injury time, but her record stands," said the Man Booker prize-winning author John Banville. "I met [her] on a couple of occasions and was much taken with her manner of stark lugubriousness tempered with high and subversive irony - just like her books."

"Beryl had an absolutely original voice: she was a serious comedian, all of whose novels ended tragically," said the biographer Michael Holroyd. "She presented herself sometimes as a clown, an entertainer, but behind that mask was a committed novelist. She was unique."

"What was so splendid about her was that she was completely maverick," agreed the novelist Penelope Lively, winner of the Booker and Carnegie awards. "When she first began you were very aware of her fresh, startling voice. I remember coming across her first novels and thinking 'goodness, I haven't read anything like this before'."

"Very sad," tweeted Margaret Atwood of her "old pal" Bainbridge this afternoon. "Wondrous original, great sport, loved her books. Hope she has champagne in heaven & a smoke..."

Bainbridge's literary career can be divided neatly in two: her earlier novels, from The Dressmaker and Sweet William to Guardian fiction prize winner The Bottle Factory Outing, drew on her own life – her upbringing in Liverpool, her time working as an actor (including a stint on Coronation Street), her life in Camden in the 1960s. She then began to write historical novels, tackling Scott of the Antarctic in The Birthday Boys, Samuel Johnson in According to Queeney and the voyage of the Titanic in Every Man for Himself, and died with 18 novels, two collections of short stories and a handful of plays for stage and television to her name.

She was, said Lively, "so versatile". Her historical novels "were completely different from her earlier books. She had a distinctive voice, but also a wonderfully pliable and versatile one".

Bainbridge was "putting the finishing touches" to a novel – her 19th – which she had been working on for the last six months when she died, said Ed Wilson at her literary agency Johnson & Alcock. Little, Brown will publish the book, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress – about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy - next year.

It's "fantastic - more like her early, more comic work", said Richard Beswick, her editor at Little, Brown, who called her "a one-off, a total original, a legend that deserves to be a legend". "I don't think anybody else writes like her [although] she's got elements of other people - bits of Harold Pinter and Kafka, that morbidly humorous take on life, that very dark humour," he added.

Known to chain-smoke while she wrote her novels (at an ancient computer), Bainbridge gave up smoking in 2004 but took it up again - "though I smoke far fewer now - about six a day", she told the Observer last year. She was also a keen whisky drinker, getting through half a bottle a week. "It began as a social thing because if you go out to launches you were always offered a drink," she said. "I never saw the point of drinking wine, because you have to drink so much to get that feeling, so I'd always have a whisky."

Lively said that Bainbridge "was always good fun at a party - and unexpected, because you never knew what she was going to say or do".

"I have huge admiration and respect for her," she added. "She was someone who, when she entered a room, you thought 'oh good, there's Beryl'."

Bainbridge told the Guardian in 2007 of how she had become convinced that she would die at the age of 71, like her parents and grandparents. "My generation weren't expected to get as old as this; they all died off quite soon," she said. "I've always been interested in death."

In an interview with the Guardian in 2005, Bainbridge said that she had "everything ready" for her death. "In files. I'm extremely ... no, I'm very ordered in that sort of way. I think it's important. You have to know where things are and how and what."

North Korea book wins top non-fiction prize.

2010-07-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

An account of life in North Korea drawn from interviews with defectors has won the £20,000 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.
Nothing to Envy, by Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick, beat five other works to the accolade.

Evan Davis, presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today show and chairman of the judges, called the book "gripping and moving".

He said it was "a real testament" to Demick's work "that a book on such a grim topic can be so hard to put down".

This year's winner was announced at a ceremony at the Royal Institute for British Architects (Riba) in London.

Subtitled Real Lives in North Korea, Demick's book tells of six North Korean citizens living in the only country in the world not connected to the internet.

Its title comes from a song North Korean children are taught entitled We Have Nothing To Envy in the World.

"Nowhere will you find a better account of real life in North Korea," said Davis, who scrutinised the shortlist with Financial Times arts editor Jan Dalley and historian Stella Tillyard.

"I think we knew this book had something when we found ourselves reading it out loud to spouses and partners," he added.

The five runners-up - whittled down from an original longlist of 19 books - each receives £1,000.

Worst Writing Prize Goes to Gerbil-Kiss

2010-07-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

A gerbil in a cage Love rat ... Judges praised Molly Ringle for her gerbil-based lampooning of public displays of affection. Photograph: Paul Brown/Rex Features

A sentence comparing a kiss to the sucking of a very thirsty gerbil has won Seattle-based novelist Molly Ringle the world's worst writing contest.

Ringle, who says she only writes bad fiction when she fails at good fiction, took the Bulwer-Lytton prize for the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels yesterday with: "For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss – a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

Given annually since 1982, the competition, sponsored by the English department at San Jose State University, is inspired by the melodramatic first line of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford: "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Ringle, the author of the published novel The Ghost Downstairs, in which the romance between a nurse and a houseboy is played out against growing paranormal activity, is the 28th winner of the contest. "I feel quite ridiculous. But there are definitely worse ways to get 15 minutes of fame," she wrote on her blog.

The author told the Seattle Times that she had been inspired to write her winning sentence as she nursed her infant son. "Something about his attitude and posture ... It reminded me of those guinea pigs we used to have as kids," she said. "I've asked myself, probably belatedly, is that what I want to be famous for? But hopefully people in the publishing world know it's all in the name of comedy."

And anyway, she added, "you kind of have to have a certain amount of skill to write a sentence so bad it would win. You have to work at it."

Contest judge Scott Rice, a professor at San Jose State University, praised her "outlandishly inappropriate comparison" to the paper. "It is a send-up of writers who try too hard to be original, and it is a send-up of those revolting couples whose public displays of affection make them poster children for celibacy," he said.

The runner-up in this year's competition was Tom Wallace with: "Through the verdant plains of North Umbria walked Waylon Ogglethorpe and, as he walked, the clouds whispered his name, the birds of the air sang his praises, and the beasts of the fields from smallest to greatest said, 'There goes the most noble among men' – in other words, a typical stroll for a schizophrenic ventriloquist with delusions of grandeur."

Will a Crime Novel Win the Booker?

2010-06-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

Literary awards have been one of the last bastions of high culture, but in the week when the crime writer Peter Temple took Australia's top literary prize, the Miles Franklin award, Alison Flood examines whether a detective novel could ever win the Booker

When the Australian crime novelist Peter Temple heard that one of his detective novels, The Broken Shore, had been longlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin award, he "thought it was a clerical error". So when his latest novel, Truth, made this year's Miles Franklin shortlist, Temple had little hope that this time Inspector Stephen Villani, the brooding head of the Victoria homicide squad, could bring off his greatest coup and go on to win Australia's most prestigious literary prize.

"I read the other shortlisted authors, on the basis you should know who the people are who are going to beat you, and I was quite confident that at least three were going to beat me," said the author, speaking from Australia. When the judges for the prize opened the envelope to read out his name, "Booker-style", on Tuesday night, he was "absolutely humbled".

Temple is the first crime novelist ever to win the Miles Franklin, setting him in a canon of former winners including Peter Carey, David Malouf and Patrick White.

"It is a very bold thing for the judges to do. They really are the custodians of Australia's oldest literary prize, they decide who should be admitted to the contemporary canon. So to admit a crime novelist, they've put their lives on the line," said Temple. "It's a fairly small panel [of previous winners] but the writers are all of quite extraordinary talent and quality ... I don't know what on earth I'm doing there."

Back on this side of the world, no crime novel has ever won the Man Booker prize, and the former chairman of the Booker judges John Sutherland isn't expecting it to happen any time soon.

"The twice I've been on the Booker panel they weren't submitted," he said. "There's a feeling that it's like putting a donkey into the Grand National."

According to Sutherland, the perception in the UK is that there are enough specialist awards for crime fiction. The barriers to genre writers are also higher. "They just don't have quite the same class system in Australia, and perhaps they don't have the same class distinctions in Australian letters," he said.

Sutherland also worries that awarding a mainstream literary prize to a work of genre fiction, particularly one which is part of a series, would devalue its reputation. "There is a dilution effect," he said. "Series have tended to inhabit the lower reaches of literature."

But according to the bestselling crime novelist Ian Rankin, attitudes towards genre fiction are slowly shifting in this country as well.

"Things are changing," Rankin said. "The old canards are that crime fiction is plot-driven, thin on character, populist: a lesser calling. But that no longer holds true. Kate Atkinson's last three novels have been crime. Ian McEwan's Saturday is a crime story. William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms is a thriller. Slowly, the barricades are tumbling. You can now study crime fiction in some universities and high schools. At least three PhDs on my own work are currently under way. A St Andrews lecturer has written a book about one of my novels. Thirty years back, 'modern literature' at St Andrews meant Milton."

According to the crime writer Val McDermid, the chair of the Booker judges pointed to her novel A Place of Execution in 1999 as an example of great writing, but dismissed it as a contender for the prize "because ultimately it's a genre novel". "It made me feel cross more than anything – a good piece of fiction is a good piece of fiction, whether there's a dead body in it or not," she added. "I think perhaps in Australia there is slightly less of a literary snobbism than there is, still, in this country."

According to Rankin, Ruth Rendell should have been regularly shortlisted for the Booker, while "in the USA, the likes of Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos are writing fiction that is Pulitzer-worthy, but I don't see them winning it".

Temple said the situation was similar in Australia. "The feeling is there is a very clear line of demarcation between the two things. With crime, romance, science fiction, we are considered to be writers within a formulaic genre, whereas literary writers are considered to be 'moving freely', as it were," he said. "There has always been a feeling that literary fiction is improving, that you come away from reading it and you're a better person for it. No one ever said that about reading a crime novel – although maybe you come away feeling happier."

Although no crime novel has won the Booker in the past, Tom Rob Smith's thriller Child 44 was longlisted in 2008 – and that year's winner, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, follows the story of a murderer. To add to the sense that attitudes might be softening in the UK as well as in Australia, the judges for this year's Orange prize shortlisted Attica Locke's thriller Black Water Rising.

Ion Trewin, who judged the Man Booker prize in 1974 and who, as administrator for the award, has sat in on many a judging session, said approaches to genre fiction have changed greatly over the years: Sarah Waters, for example, has been shortlisted twice for the Booker, "and if she'd been published 40 years ago she would never have been considered, people would have said she was just genre fiction".

"In 1974, the idea of genre fiction of any kind being considered for a 'literary' prize was just unthinkable. When the Booker began in 1969, Rebecca West was one of the judges and she made it absolutely clear that as far as she was concerned this was a prize for literary fiction, and that this very much excluded anything thought of as a crime novel, thriller, or genre. If you'd said science fiction, she would probably have gone into orbit," he said.

But John Sutherland's experience of literary judging panels suggests this thawing in the attitude still has a long way to go.

"They're very tolerant towards crime fiction until they come to the final judging," he said, "when they start to ask 'Is this really a serious contender?'" There may be a shift in the literary atmosphere, he continued, but "climate change is very slow, and this is no exception."

For Morag Fraser, a Miles Franklin judge for the past six years, it is simply a question of quality. "Most crime novels that I have read (and I read one a week, often more) will never win the Miles Franklin or any other 'literary' prize because they do not work language hard enough, and they do not think originally and with sufficient depth and imagination," she said. "They may gratify but they do not surprise the way great literature does."

"In the case of Peter Temple's Truth, the divide was so comprehensively crossed that we did not think much about the conventions of crime fiction except to note that Temple was able to observe them rather as a poet observes the 14-line convention of the sonnet or a musician the sonata form: as a useful disciplinary structure from which to expand, bend or depart."

Former Pulitzer judge Catharine Stimpson, dean of the graduate school of arts and science at New York University, agreed, as well she might: in 2007, when Stimpson judged the Pulitzer, the panel awarded the prize to Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road. "All wonderful writing subverts and transcends generic boundaries, although it is always fun to play the genre game and to stick books into categories," she said. "Amusing and historically interesting though this game might be, the vital distinction among texts is not the genre per se but the degree to which the writer either sticks rigidly to the formulae of the genre or to which the writer upends the formulae."

John Banville, who won the Booker for his novel The Sea, and who writes crime fiction as Benjamin Black, was absolutely in agreement, saying that "there is only one distinction, and that is between good writing and writing which is ... not good".

"I see no reason why a so-called crime novel should not win the Man Booker prize," said Banville. "I suppose an objection that might be raised is that crime fiction always has a prior commitment, as it were – there can be a non-crime novel that has a crime in it, but there cannot be a crime novel that has not a crime in it, and perhaps this could be a hindrance to a freely and purely imagined work of art. But as EM Forster among many others has pointed out, the novel's requirement to have, for instance, a plot of some kind is already a burden."

For the newly crowned Miles Franklin winner, Temple, crime was just "an excuse to write". "It gives a sense of urgency, of narrative drive. My characters have a reason to get up in the morning. Ian McEwan, who I think is wonderful, his characters do not really have an urgent reason to get up in the morning," said the author. "There is only one judgment for the value of a book, and that is what sort of emotional response it elicits in the reader. That's down to the quality of the writing."

His UK publisher Quercus is submitting Truth for this year's Booker prize, raising the prospect that Temple could go on to complete a memorable double. "Just to make the Booker longlist would be a wonderful thing," he said. But is he in with a genuine chance to be the first crime writer to take the Booker? "We shall see," said Trewin. "I've said to the judges each year that there are no exclusions at all. If you consider a novel – whether it's crime, romance or science fiction – is really fabulous in every particular, then judge it with the same criteria you'd use for a literary novel, and if you agree, you must include it … It would be great if a genre novel was to win the Booker one day and I hope that's the next stage. It would be rather like having the first woman prime minister, and it will be terrific when it does happen."

Atwood, Sawyer Shortlisted for SciFi Prize

2010-06-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

Four Canadian authors have been nominated for the American John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel: Margaret Atwood for The Year of the Flood (McClelland & Stewart), Cory Doctorow for Makers (Tor Books), Robert J. Sawyer for Wake (Viking Canada), and Robert Charles Wilson for Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (Tor).

The award will be presented during the Campbell Conference awards banquet at the University of Kansas on Friday, July 16. Other finalists include:

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books)
Iain M. Banks, Transition (Orbit)
Nancy Kress, Steal Across the Sky (Tor)
Paul McAuley, Gardens of the Sun (Gollancz)
China Mieville, The City & the City (Del Rey)
Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia (Gollancz)
Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo’s Dream (Spectra)
Bruce Sterling, The Caryatids (Del Rey)

Brown, Solie among Trillium winners

2010-06-24T10:59:00.000-07:00

The 23rd annual Trillium Book Awards for the best book from the universe (Toronto, in case you didn't know!) have just been handed out and are:

English-language book award: Ian Brown, The Boy in the Moon (Random House Canada)

French-language book award: Ryad Assani-Razaki, Deux cercles (VLB éditeur)

English-language poetry award: Karen Solie, Pigeon (House of Anansi Press)

French-language poetry award: Michèle

Ten Top Intergalactic Summer Reads For Kids

2010-06-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

The Reading Agency names its top space-themed summer reads as the 2010 Summer Reading Challenge prepares for blast-off
As libraries across the UK prepare to launch the popular nationwide Summer Reading Challenge, organisers at The Reading Agency have put together a list of top 'space-themed' summer reads for children to get stuck into during the long school holidays.

The list has been compiled to coincide with the 2010 Challenge's space theme, SpaceHop, after asking children in their Chatterbooks network of reading groups which books they have most enjoyed reading recently.

The full list is:

Space Pirates by Scoular Anderson

Henry's House: Space by Philip Ardagh

Disappearing Moon by Simon Bertram

Stink: Solar System Superhero by Megan McDonald

Milo and the Moon Kangaroo by Dan Taylor

Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Astrosaurs: Riddle of the Raptors by Steve Cole

Larklight by Philip Reeve

The Story of Astronomy and Space by Louie Stowell & Peter Allen

Krazy Kow Saves the World – Well Almost by Jeremy Strong

"This is by no means an exhaustive list as there are so many fantastic books out there to keep children reading over the summer, however the youngsters in our reading groups have told us that they love these books in particular; we hope that the list will give a flavour of the intergalactic treats in store to inspire all those taking part in the Summer Reading Challenge this year," says Anne Sarrag, Summer Reading Challenge director for The Reading Agency.

"Children really enjoy taking part in the Summer Reading Challenge and it is completely free to do so, which is why we want to encourage even more families to go along to their local library and get involved. Not only is the Challenge a great way to keep children entertained over the holidays, but also we know that those who take part read more books and read more widely than those who don't, with potentially life-changing results."

The Summer Reading Challenge is an immensely popular and successful reading initiative. Now in its twelfth year it is expected to reach over 750,000 children aged four to 12 years via the UK library network. It is created and run by The Reading Agency, the independent national charity working to inspire more people to read more, and is supported by children's publishers.

Children are encouraged to read six or more books of their choice during the holidays with collectable incentives and rewards, plus a certificate or medal for every child who completes the Challenge. They can sign up at their local library as the school summer term draws to a close (from approximately 16 July in England and Wales, and from 25 June in Scotland and 30 June in Northern Ireland) and all materials are absolutely free to children.

The 2010 Summer Reading Challenge has the space theme, Space Hop, which will enable children to boldly go to new worlds, discover the joy of books and nurture a life-long love affair with reading. Illustrated by leading children's book artist Tom Percival, Space Hop coincides with the 350th anniversary of The Royal Society's scientific endeavours and the 2010 BBC Year of Science.

The adventure starts in their local library, where young Space Hoppers will meet Finn, Jessie, Nabil and Safiya – the crew of the Ex Libris – as they embark on their mission to set up the first lunar library. Unless the dastardly Spacekatz lead them into the nearest black hole...

An interactive website www.spacehop.org.uk links children and their families with top authors and illustrators. The site offers them a space to talk about their favourite books and to share reading ideas. The Summer Reading Challenges (which takes a different theme each year) also helps local libraries promote themselves as a place of wonder for children, where librarians can offer invaluable advice and guidance to help them complete the challenge.

"The Summer Reading Challenge helps you to read and it makes you want to read more. That's really fun, and I like getting the certificate and medal at the end," said Sulaimaan, aged 11.

Crime Novel Wins Aussie's Top Award

2010-06-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

IT BEGINS with a dead body but Peter Temple's Truth - which created history last night when it became the first crime novel to win Australia's most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award - defies convention.

''I am very humbled to win the award and I never expected to have a chance,'' Temple, 64, said after receiving the $42,000 prize at the State Library of NSW .

The former journalist, who has won five Ned Kelly awards for crime fiction, emigrated to Australia from South Africa.

Wolf Hall Continues to Mop Up Awards

2010-06-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

Author Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall has won the inaugural £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.

The book, set in the 16th century, previously won the £50,000 2009 Man Booker Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange prize.

Judges praised Wolf Hall as "compulsively readable" at a ceremony at Sir Walter Scott's home in Abbotsford, Scottish Borders.

Ms Mantel said she was "astonished and delighted and gratified".
'Compulsively readable'

The prize, for novels set at least 60 years in the past, was awarded during the Brewin Dolphin Borders Book Festival.

Wolf Hall, about Henry VIII's adviser Thomas Cromwell, had been selected from a shortlist of seven, by authors including Robert Harris, Adam Foulds and Simon Mawer.

Judges said all had been deserving but Wolf Hall was "in a class of its own".
Continue reading the main story

"This is as good as the historical novel gets - immersive, constantly engaging, beautifully crafted, and compulsively readable," they added.

"Mantel's empathy for, and assimilation of, her world is so seamless and effortless as to be almost disturbing."

Ms Mantel, who was unable to attend due to illness, said 2010 was perhaps "a turning point year" for historical fiction and praised the new award for stimulating interest in the genre.

She added: "Much the best thing that has happened for lovers of historical fiction is the founding of this prize.

"In the years to come, this prize will magnetise attention and stimulate debate."

The award is sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, distant descendants of Scott.

$100,000 Impac Prize Won by Novice Novelist

2010-06-20T12:57:00.000-07:00

June 17, 2010 | 4:34 PM | By Stuart Woods

For the third year in a row, the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest fiction prize, is a debut novelist. Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker (and translator David Colmer) accepted the €100,000 prize for The Twin, about a Dutch farmer named Helmer who is forced to return to his family farm after the death of his brother in a car crash.

Last year’s winner was Michael Thomas’s first novel Man Gone Down, and Canadian Rawi Hage’s debut, De Niro’s Game, was the winner in 2008.

According to juror Anne Fine the jury’s citation, The Twin is “sparely written” and “rich in detail.” Fine continues, “The writing is wonderful: restrained and clear, and studded with detail of farm rhythms in the cold, damp Dutch countryside. The author excels at dialogue, and Helmer’s inner story-telling voice also comes over perfectly as he begins to change everything around him.”

From The Guardian:

The idea for the book came to Bakker on a holiday in Corsica in 2002. Hiking through the mountains, he had the idea of a son “who was going to do something terrible to his father.”

“It stayed in my mind for months and I got so frustrated – nothing was happening with the idea. Then I just sat down and got writing. I didn’t know where I was going, I just started – for me that’s a good way to write,” he said.

Books are Still Best

2010-06-14T09:35:00.001-07:00

Books to have and to hold
Sam Jordison
Author and journalist

June 10th, 2010

At the moment I’m working on a website – Organic Peas And Orderly Queues – all about the agonies and absurdities of middle class life.

Running a website is very rewarding. For a start, it’s all mine. I decide how it looks, reads, feels and when it gets updated. Thanks to twitter and facebook I even have a degree of influence on who reads it and when. I get hundreds of visitors every day. I get immediate feedback and people even feed me new ideas. I can build up a rapport with my online visitors that I will never have with a book. That terrible sense of working in a vacuum – that no one will ever read or care about my ideas and that I’m heading in entirely the wrong direction – is absent. I can hone my work in public and with public support. I can even sell them a suitably over-priced middle class t-shirt or mug from an online store that gives me a far better financial cut than most royalty deals.

Even so, the truth is that my ultimate goal is to get a book deal. Like most writers, I’ll only consider my work truly validated when I see my name on the cover that wraps it. Why this should be so is an increasingly interesting question, given the amount of time we all now spend online compared to holding a book in our hands. Why bother with old fashioned paper? Why would punters want to pay for a physical incarnation of something they can get on the web for free? Why too would writers want to go through the agonies of publication? Why put themselves through that painful birth and then see their brainchild try to make its way in a world already bursting with similar products? Where the almost entirely arbitrary decisions of the book buyers in Waterstone’s and can make the difference between success and abject failure? Where they lose control of a project that has, until then, been all their own?

Partly, it’s to do with ego – and the way a book massages it. You can’t touch the internet. You can’t hold it in your hands. You can’t sign a copy of it. A book remains a far more concrete achievement than a website.

But there are also good practical reasons writers prefer communicating on paper – and will do for a long time to come.

The simple truth is that it’s still more enjoyable to read things in book form – and it’s a more effective way of taking in information. Pleasurable as it’s been to put together organicpeasandorderlyqueues.com, I’m all too aware of the site’s drawbacks. Most people will only read two or three articles on the website in one sitting. It’s not impossible that they would engage in the same way with the book – especially, since it’s the kind of literature that people like to take in the smallest room. But even if they do, they will still get a bigger sense that it adds up to a coherent whole and that it’s a satire on societal values as well as a series of jokes. The turning of pages engenders a sense of purpose and continuity that clicking from page to page on the web just can’t replicate. Physical pages also offer many opportunities for visual jokes and jokes to do with order and place that don’t work on a screen. They allow for time and continuity – a sense of building and development. A blog only exists in the present moment, since you have to assume that a healthy percentage of people reading your front screen are there for the first time. There are no last pages. And when those people move onto a new website, or turn off the computer, your work disappears from their life. Completely.

And that brings me to the other reason writers prefer books. They’re more durable. Websites disappear. Long before the Friday Project started, stalled, then started again I was devising a web project called Crap Towns (which can lay a pretty good claim to have been one of the first to make the transfer into best-selling book territory). While Crap Towns has long since ceased to be a meaningful online presence, the book is still out there. People still take it from libraries. Some still buy it. Others at least have it on their shelves. There’s still a hope that they’ll refer to it sometime. And even when no one reads it any more, I’ll still have copy on my own shelves. I’ll still be able to use it to bore my grandchildren. I won’t be able to send them to the URL.

There’s also the fact that books still have a far bigger reach than websites. Before the book came out, the visitors to Crap Towns could be measured in the hundreds. The book sold more than 120,000 copies and reached many more people thanks to the associated publicity and furore. There’s also the simple fact it was there in shops – a tangible physical presence. People have to look for you online, or at least be directed to you, but with a book there’s always that wonderful chance that someone will pick you up entirely by chance. That they will be sucked in by the cover and maybe, just maybe, fall a little bit in love with your ideas. For a writer, there’s no bigger thrill.

Biblioracle: New Internet Fount of Book Tips

2010-06-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

by Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn

As a child—an easily bored, semi-feral child without a TV—I spent a lot of time in the local bookstore. The store had a large children’s section, with rows and rows of chapter books that led out to a small café, but by the time I was eight or nine, I would peruse the stacks and come away with the distinct impression that I had read everything there. The only thing—or, rather, person—that stopped me from giving up and turning to some other sort of entertainment was the children’s bookseller, a short black-haired woman who had read everything and could, if I told her some books I liked, recommend a new one to me—inevitably a more obscure but equally good one—with seemingly magical accuracy, the way that other adults enjoy pulling quarters out of kids ears. It was astonishing.

The recent appearance of the Biblioracle www.metafilter.com/92310/Biblioracle had a similar effect on me. Offering to suggest a book based on one's last five reads, he was impressive in his range, perfunctory in his responses, and quick on the draw. (Though I did wonder whether the public nature of the enterprise altered the responses. Were these really the last five books people had read, or only the ones they wanted to openly confess to? It’s like having your admired English teacher ask you what you have been reading: you aren’t going to confess it was "The Carrie Diaries"). And the oracle was prophetic in more ways than one: he didn’t just recommend books, he also showed that something is lacking in the way we buy books now, namely that black-haired woman. The oracle was quickly overwhelmed by demand, and queries began to go unanswered. One reader had a suggestion of her own for those stranded: “What to do if you don't get your Biblioracle recommendation request in during the designated window? Go talk to a librarian. They've been doing this sort of thing for decades.”

Of course, friends recommend books—but usually based on their tastes, not yours, and then reading can feel onerous, like a book report crossed with a blind date. There are also algorithms and Web sites intended to provide this sort of service, but I find them unreliable and broad. The suggestions on Amazon, for instance, are limited—they tend to pound me over the head with new releases, analogizing books based primarily on sales rankings—and often odd (this morning, in a rise-and-shinish sort of mood, my Amazon site recommended that I might like pancake mix). I’m sure someone could build a better program—a sort of Pandora for books, with user-feedback creating an increasingly subtle set of recommendations—but the rate at which we read books is simply slower than the rate at which we plow through songs, and thus it would take a lot longer to develop a truly sensitive system. It’s one thing lost most in the age of the Internet, and it makes the Web seem like a place very far from that cozy children’s bookstore, and much closer to some of the fearsome landscapes described within it—in the most literal sense, bewildering.

Note: Biblioracle is still working, but closes to traffic at 12:00 noon coast time.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/06/the-trouble-with-recommending-books.html#ixzz0qTQxpmrp

Lacuna Beats out Wolf Hall for Top Novel by a Woman

2010-06-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

An epic, ambitious novel that straddles the Mexican revolution and the crazed communist witch-hunts of 1950s America was tonight named winner of this year's Orange prize for fiction.

Barbara Kingsolver took the £30,000 prize for The Lacuna, her eagerly awaited first novel since 2000.

The American novelist held off heavyweight competition from Hilary Mantel, for Wolf Hall, and Lorrie Moore, for A Gate at the Stairs, to take what is the biggest literary award for women writers.

Daisy Goodwin, the TV producer who chaired this year's judges, praised The Lacuna's "breathtaking scale and shattering moments of poignancy" and said the winner was only ever between the three books. "It was a bit like trying to choose between your three beloved children," she said.

"In the end I suppose that while a couple of us felt very passionately about The Lacuna everyone was happy for it to be named winner. They were three of the finest books I've read in a long time. It wasn't like we were scraping in any sense."

The Lacuna, made up of memoir, diaries, letters, newspaper reports and congressional transcripts, is arguably the most demanding of the six books on the shortlist. It's a doorstopping novel that needs to be read properly rather than in snatches and tackles big subjects that resonate today – not least, the media creation of, and obsession with, celebrity.

Beginning in 1929, it follows the life of Harrison Shepherd from his sensitive teenage years in Mexico to fame in 1950s America as the reclusive author of Aztec swashbucklers. In between – and central to the story – Shepherd gets work in the bohemian household of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo while they entertain house guest Leon Trotsky, for whom he becomes a scribe.

Some readers have found it heavy and daunting, but Goodwin said: "I'm a book slut, I'm not high minded and I'm happy to read anything and everything from Dan Brown to Georgette Heyer to Ian McEwan, and I loved The Lacuna."

Goodwin said she also discussed the shortlist with her book group – "a random collection of non-literary people" – and they all said "it was one of the finest books they had ever read. It's such a fascinating and beautifully constructed book. I don't want to sound wanky but the architecture of the book is fantastic."

All six shortlisted books have seen a marked sales increase and Jonathan Ruppin, of Foyles bookshop, said The Lacuna had been "by far the bestselling title on the shortlist". He added: "It's a daunting read, which fans of her hugely popular novel The Poisonwood Bible won't all take to, but it rewards patient reading. It would be good to see more British writers and more women coming up with fiction as ambitious as this."

The Kingsolver was not a unanimous choice but Goodwin said no vote had been taken. The decision was a consensus. "As a jury we argued passionately about the books and we agreed that we wanted a winner that at least some people were passionately committed to."

Goodwin said she was proud of all six books and the three other books on the list would not be selling anywhere near what they are without the Orange. In particular, the curve ball of the shortlist, Rosie Alison's old-fashioned romance The Very Thought of You, which had not even been reviewed by a national paper when it was chosen, could have slipped off the radar. Instead, Amazon, revealing different sales figures from Foyles, said it made up a fifth of the sales of all six books combined over the past month – Wolf Hall sold 53% and The Lacuna 8%.

The inclusion of a thriller was also a surprise – Attica Locke's 1980s Houston-set Black Water Rising, which interweaves black activism and corporate dirty dealing. Then there was the page-turningly enjoyable The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey, telling the story of a white couple who move to Trinidad for a new life they love and loathe in equal measure.

In a way, Mantel had the least to gain. Her novel won the Man Booker last year and is already a soaraway sensation. "There's no doubt that Wolf Hall will become a classic," said Goodwin.

This is the Orange's 15th year and there have been notably fewer voices speaking out against it. For some, it is simple discrimination to exclude men.

But Goodwin called the argument boring and said you could just as well complain the Man Booker prize excluded Americans, which it does.

She said the Kingsolver and Moore novels would sell nowhere near what they deserve to in the UK if it were not for the Orange.

Kingsolver was presented with her prize by the Duchess of Cornwall after a champagne reception at the Royal Festival Hall [wed].

Irene Sabatini won the Orange award for new writers, for The Boy Next Door. Anne Michaels won the youth panel award and Anna Lewis won the short story competition for unpublished writers.

The other judges who helped plough through the 129 submissions this year were: Rabbi Baroness Neuberger, novelist Michèle Roberts, and journalists Miranda Sawyer and Alexandra Shulman.

Goodwin attracted headlines this year when she complained about the misery and despair and lack of humour in so many of the novels written by women being published. Today she admitted the next book she read would be a Jane Austen novel.

The New Yorker talks about its young fictioneers list

2010-06-08T18:46:00.000-07:00

"...these twenty men and women dazzlingly represent the multiple strands of inventiveness and vitality that characterize the best fiction being written in this country today.' --Editors of the New Yorker on their new 20 under 40 list.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/06/14/100614taco_talk_editors

A Readers persepective on New Yorker fiction:

"Say what you will, The New Yorker is one of our culture’s most stalwart curators of this type of literary experience. For that reason, its editors’ vision of the future of fiction is worth considering. It’s my hope that, like the 1999 issue, the 2010 version will include some surprising treats that open up new readerly enthusiasms for me..." Frank Kovarik, The Millions http://www.themillions.com/2010/06/the-risks-of-fiction-on-the-new-yorker-writers-under-40-list.html

Do today's young writers bear up? Looking at 20 under 40 lists from the past, real and imagined:
http://www.themillions.com/2010/06/a-speculative-20-under-40-from-40-years-ago.html

Gibsons Writer Wins $10,000 Danuta Gleed Award

2010-06-08T18:36:00.000-07:00

B.C. writer Sarah Roberts has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for her debut book of short fiction, Wax Boats (Caitlin Press). The award was announced at The Writers’ Union of Canada’s annual general meeting this past weekend in Ottawa. Roberts receives $10,000 for the prize, which was established in 1997 to recognize a debut collection of fiction. Wax Boats is set on a remote island community in B.C., and features characters caught between modern life and the wilderness that surrounds them.

Roberts beat out Victoria’s Deborah Willis for her collection Vanishing and Other Stories (Penguin Canada), and Toronto’s Joey Comeau for Overqualified (ECW Press).

Are Literary Prizes Reserved for Boring Books?

2010-06-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

Martin Amis has claimed that only “unenjoyable” books win awards because judges do not appreciate fun literature. The author, 60, has never won a major literary award such as the Man Booker or Costa, despite his popular appeal. The closest he came was in 1991 when Time’s Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker.

He made the comment during a speech at the Hay Festival in Wales.

“There was a great fashion in the last century, and it’s still with us, of the unenjoyable novel,” he said.

“And these are the novels which win prizes, because the committee thinks, 'Well it’s not at all enjoyable, and it isn’t funny, therefore it must be very serious.’ ”

He said such an approach was wrong because literature should reflect life’s humour.

During an hour-long talk he also criticised the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett — considered by many to be among the most influential writers of the 20th century — for not being entertaining enough.

“It all started with [Samuel] Beckett, I think. It was a kind of reasonable response to the horrors of the 20th century — you know, 'No poetry after Auschwitz’. He described it as a mistake, saying: “You look back at the great writers in the English canon, and the American, and they are all funny.”

Writers such as Dickens, Jane Austen, and George Eliot all shared that trait, he said.

“The reason for that is that life is funny. It’s horrible, and there are disgusting atrocities etc, but we all know that life is very funny — that’s its nature.”

Despite his criticism, for the past two years the Man Booker has been awarded to novels generally considered “good reads” — Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel last year and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga in 2008.

The previous year, however, it was won by Anne Enright’s bleak novel The Gathering.

Amis made his claim while talking about his relationship with the reader, which he likened to a host wanting to entertain a guest. “I want to give the reader the best glass of wine I have, the best food in my kitchen,” he said.

“Some writers clearly don’t feel that way at all. When you visit the later James Joyce, you knock on the door and there’s no one there.

“Eventually after you have wandered around for a bit you hear him in the other room mumbling to himself as he prepares a snack of two slabs of peat around a conger eel and some homemade cider that is absolutely undrinkable.”

Amis also admitted he was afraid of his own gifts deserting him. “Writers now have to endure the loss of their talent,” he said. “This is horribly evident when you read the later novels of any writer who lived beyond 70 … writers die twice.”

He said he held out hope that he could emulate his father, Sir Kingsley Amis. “My father wrote his best novel when he was 65, The Old Devils,” he said.

Solie Wins $65,000 Poetry Prize

2010-06-04T18:29:00.000-07:00

TORONTO — A poet first discovered in an anthology published by BC press Harbour Publishing, a sponsor of Thorasbook, has won one of the world's most lucrative poetry prizes. Karen Solie was named the Canadian winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize at a gala ceremony in Toronto on Thursday night, eight years after first being nominated for the country’s most prestigious award for poetry.

The 43-year-old Solie was honoured for her collection Pigeon, published by House of Anansi Press. The other poets on the Canadian shortlist were Kate Hall of Montreal, who was nominated for her debut, The Certainty Dream, and the late P.K. Page, for Coal and Roses.

“I see so many people here whose work I have read and learned from and made it possible to live,” she said in accepting her award. “I feel very grateful that I have found something that, while it doesn’t always make a living, it’s a way to live.”

Born in Moose Jaw and raised on a farm in the southwestern Saskatchewan, not far from Medicine Hat, Solie was a relative latecomer to poetry. She spent three years reporting for the Lethbridge Herald before enrolling at the University of Lethbridge, and later pursued graduate work at the University of Victoria.

She burst onto the Canadian poetry scene in 1995, when her work appeared in Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets (Harbour), a landmark anthology edited by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane. “That was my first publication,” she told the National Post last month. “I thought there had to be some luck involved.” The book was published by Harbour Publishing

Solie — who lives in Toronto with her husband, fellow poet David Seymour — didn’t have much chance of winning the first time she was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2002, her debut collection, Short Haul Engine, was up against Governor General Award-winner Eirin Moure and ultimately lost to Christian Bok’s Eunoia, one of the most successful poetry collections of the past decade.

Speaking minutes after she was declared the winner, Solie admitted she never thought she’d be back in the same position: “For one thing, it was so extraordinary, that whole thing. I really felt and appreciated it as a once-in-lifetime thing, for this to happen, and to have it happen again totally melts my brain.

“But I don’t think anybody ever writes or paints or designs buildings with a goal of being nominated for a prize. I don’t think that ever happens. It’s kinda of useless to the process of making anything. So when this kind of thing comes along, it’s encouraging and it’s spectacular.”

Solie was also a judge for the 2007 prizes, which went to Charles Wright and Don McKay.

Eilean Ni Chuilleanain was awarded the international prize for her collection The Sun-fish (published by the Gallery Press). An associate professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, she is the author of several previous books of poetry and an editor and publisher of Cyphers, one of Ireland’s most long-standing literary magazines.

The other finalists on the international shortlist were the American poet Louise Gluck (A Village Life), Scotland’s John Glenday (Grain) and Susan Wicks and Valerie Rouzeau for Wicks’ translation of Rouzeau’s collection Cold Spring in Winter.

A jury consisting of Canadian poet and past Griffin Prize winner Anne Carson, Scottish poet (and past Griffin Prize nominee) Kathleen Jamie, and American poet Carl Phillips chose the winners. The judges read close to 400 books of poetry from 12 countries around the world before settling on this year’s shortlist.

Solie and Ni Chuilleanain each receive $65,000 for winning the Griffin Prize. Earlier this year, the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry doubled the prize money to $200,000. All finalists received $10,000 at the Griffin Poetry Prize readings on Wednesday night, therefore Solie and Ni Chuilleanain take home $75,000 in total.

At the readings, “the doyenne of North American poetry,” Adrienne Rich, was given the Lifetime Recognition Award, which has previously gone to Robin Blaser, Tomas Transtromer, Ko Un, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Griffin Poetry Prize, which was founded in 2000 by industrialist and philanthropist Scott Griffin, who is the chairman of the Trust.

The idea for the prize grew out of a dinner he had with Michael Ondaatje and David Young, who both serves as trustees.

The prize is one of the most lucrative in the world, and one of the most respected.

The Griffin Poetry Prize is awarded annually to two books of poetry, including translations, published in English the previous year. Past International winners include Paul Muldoon (2003), Charles Simic (2005), John Ashbery (2008) and C. D. Wright, who won last year, while past Canadian winners include Christian Bok (2002), Margaret Avison (2003), Roo Borson (2005) and A.F. Moritz, who won in 2009 for The Sentinel.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/Sask+native+wins+Canada+Griffin+Poetry+Prize/3111415/story.html#ixzz0pwD8S6KS

Griffin Fever

2010-06-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

June 3, 2010 | 1:38 PM | By Zoe Whittall

The 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize will be handed out at a ceremony in Toronto this evening. Verse lovers are making bets on who will take home the world’s most lucrative award for a collection of poetry in English. One prize honours a Canadian poet, and another is awarded to an international poet. This year the prize money has increased from $50,000 to $65,000 for both recipients, with each shortlisted author receiving $10,000.

The Canadian shortlist includes debut collection The Certainty Dream by Kate Hall (Coach House Books). The judges wrote in their citation: “I like the feeling her poems give that as we read them we are amidst an actual process of thought.” The book is regarded as a long-shot by some, as a first collection has yet to win a Griffin.

Coal and Roses by the late P.K. Page (Porcupine’s Quill), is a collection of 21 glosas by the iconic poet. “How heartening to be reminded that creativity, zest and curiosity can endure, even flourish, into great old age,” wrote the judges. Page’s collection Planet Earth was nominated for the Griffin in 2003, and some are speculating the 2010 award will go to her in part to honour her considerable life’s work.

Pigeon (House of Anansi Press) is Karen Solie’s third collection of poetry. This is Solie’s second Griffin nomination, and some surmise this one might secure a win. From the judge’s citation: “Among the greatest of Solie’s talents, evident throughout the poems of Pigeon, is an ability to see at once into and through our daily struggle, often thwarted by our very selves, toward something like an honourable life.”

Over a thousand people attended last night’s Griffin readings at the Telus Centre for Performance and Learning. American poet Adrienne Rich was awarded the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award.

The judges for this year’s prize are Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie, and Carl Phillips.

2 Young Semi-Canucks Make New Yorker's Top 20 List

2010-06-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

Two young semi-Canadian writers have made the prestigious New Yorker list of 20 writers under age 40 to watch. They are David Bezmogis, author of Natasha and Other Stories (Harper Collins, 2004), who was born in Latvia but grew up in Canada before decamping to the US; and Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) who was born in Toronto but left for the US as an infant. Too bad, but face it, if they'd stayed in Canada they would never have made this list, even though they would have been just as good. C'est la vie.

The New Yorker's editors chose its “20 Under 40” list via a lengthy, secretive process that has provoked considerable anxiety among young literary types in the big show. The list will be published in the double fiction issue of The New Yorker that arrives on newsstands Monday. All of the writers were told two weeks ago that they had made the cut.

The complete list is: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37.

It has been more than a decade since the magazine has published a “20 Under 40” list. The last one, in 1999, included some future literary stars who were then relatively unknown, like Jhumpa Lahiri, Nathan Englander and Junot Díaz. (Relatively established authors like Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and David Foster Wallace were also on the earlier list.)

The new list has its own distinctions. A significant number of the writers hail from outside the United States or have parents who do. All but two (Ms. Obreht and Ms. Russell) are in their 30s. And there is an even number of men and women, a characteristic that Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s fiction editor, called “a rewarding accident, in terms of what it says about equal opportunity on the literary playing field these days.” (The 1999 list included only five women, The New York Observer noted in May.)

Beyond their age, the writers on the list have nothing in common, said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker.

“If they had too much in common, it would be really boring,” he said in an interview. “This is not an aesthetic grouping. The group is a group of promise, enormous promise. There are people in there that are very conventional in their narrative approach, and there are people who have a big emphasis on voice. There are people who are in some way bringing you the news from another culture.”

It is no secret that publishing these kinds of lists can be tricky. Whatever the intention, they sometimes resemble a publicity stunt. The age cutoff, whether 25 or 35 or 40, can feel capricious. After a list is made public, there is the inevitable sniping that some writers on it were too famous to have been included and that others were unfairly excluded.

“For those people who feel they already know Writer X or Y or 1 through 20, so be it,” Mr. Remnick said, naming Mr. Foer as one writer on the new list “who would be, to many, predictable.”

Bill Buford, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker who led the compilation of the list in 1999, said he had no regrets about who was chosen for it.

“By gathering up these writers and gathering them up with some authority and some panache, and saying, with all the stuff that’s out there, you’re saying, here are 20 you should pay attention to,” Mr. Buford said, “it’s a way of getting those authors to a bigger audience.”

The process began in January, when editors in the fiction department started brainstorming. By e-mail they asked literary agents, publishers and other writers to suggest potential candidates.

The editors eventually whittled the possibilities down to a shortlist of roughly 40 eligible writers. A few prominent fiction writers, including Colson Whitehead and Dave Eggers, were slightly too old to make the cut, Ms. Treisman said.

“It’s a little agonizing,” said Willing Davidson, associate fiction editor at The New Yorker. “We’re trying to think of what has this person already done, but also, what are they doing right now that we can put in the magazine?”

Each person who made the shortlist was asked to produce a piece of writing that could be published, whether a short story or an excerpt from a novel. Some had nothing to submit and were taken out of the running.

“The whole thing was so cloaked in weird secrecy,” said Ms. Russell, one of the eight writers on The New Yorker’s list who also landed on Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists” list in 2007. “It’s such a wonderful compliment. But there’s a pressure too. You want to honor that vote of confidence. You’re like: ‘Thanks for putting me in the game, coach. Oh God, I hope I’m not going to be one who is distracted by a butterfly and drops the ball.’ ”

Behind the scenes the process predictably aroused some competitive jealousies and angling. “Basically everybody I know whose work I like has been scrambling for a spot on this,” said Mr. Englander, who appeared on the 1999 list. “If you get on it, then it’s a nice confirmation. If you don’t get on it, then it doesn’t mean anything.”

Mr. Ferris, a novelist who made the current list, submitted a short story in April that he began writing in February. “I knew if I made the list, I’d be very happy,” he said. “It was the anxiety that it’s so utterly out of my hands in the same way that a review might be.”

Eight of the writers’ pieces of fiction will run in the fiction issue next week; the remaining 12 will run in subsequent issues of the magazine over the course of the summer.

Mr. Díaz, one of the writers on the 1999 list, said that he felt it was a “deep honor,” but that he wasn’t sure it had an immediate impact on his career.

“I had written a book of short stories about Dominicans,” Mr. Díaz said. “I can promise you that there was no bump in sales after the list came out.”

2010-05-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Last Week's Abebooks.co.uk Top Ten Bestsellers
----------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Troubles by J.G. Farrell
2. Dark Sun by Robert Muchamore
3. Effective Coaching by Myles Downey
4. The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis
5. Foxes Book of Martyrs by John Foxe
6. Collins Scottish Wild Flowers by Scott Michael
7. How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge
8. The Singapore Grip by
J.G. Farrell
9. The End of the Street by David Dobereiner
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Fiction Sales in Canada Week ending May 16, 2010:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Larsson, Stieg
2. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Larsson, Stieg
3. Savor the Moment, Roberts, Nora
4. Heart of the Matter, Giffin, Emily
5. Run for Your Life, Patterson, James
6. Wicked Prey, Sandford, John
7. Dead in the Family, Harris, Charlaine
8. Relentless, Koontz, Dean
9. The Forgotten Garden, Morton, Kate
10. Best Friends Forever, Weiner, Jennifer
11. Secret Daughter, Gowda, Shilpi Somaya
12. The Host, Meyer, Stephenie
13. Pirate Latitudes, Crichton, Michael
14. Just Take My Heart, Clark, Mary Higgins
15. One Fifth Avenue, Bushnell, Candace
16. Guardian of Lies, Martini, Steve
17. The 9th Judgment, Patterson, James
18. Beatrice and Virgil, Martel, Yann
19. Innocent, Turow, Scott
20. The Last Song, Sparks, Nicholas
21. Assegai, Smith, Wilbur
22. Sarah's Key, Rosnay, Tatiana
23. The Best of Times Vincenzi, Penny
24. Twenties Girl, Kinsella, Sophie
25. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Larsson, Stieg
26. The Book of Negroes, Hill, Lawrence
27. Summer on Blossom Street, Macomber, Debbie
28. Return to Sender, Michaels, Fern
29. Trial, Patterson, James
30. This Body of Death, George, Elizabeth
_ _ _ __ _ _ _
BC Bestsellers
- - - - - - - -
For the week of May 16, 2010
Adult Bestseller List
1.The Shores We Call Home by Carol Evans
2.Trauma Farm by Brian Brett
3.Darwin’s Bastards ed. by Zsuzsi Gartner
4.Quinoa 365 by Patricia Green & Carolyn Hemming
5.The Best of Chef at Home by Michael Smith
6.Policing the Fringe by Charles Scheideman
7.Small Beneath the Sky by Lorna Crozier
8.The Way of a Gardener by Des Kennedy
9.In the Fabled East by Adam Shroeder
10.Incontinent on the Continent by Jane Christmas
Children’s Bestseller List
1.The Little Hummingbird by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
2.Field Guide to the Identification of Pebbles by Eileen Van der Flier-Keller
3.Miga, Quatchi and/et Sumi by Michael Murphy & Vicki Wong
4.Island Kids by Tara Saracuse
5.Fraser Bear by Maggie de Vries

Ian Thomson wins £10,000 Ondaatje prize for "spirit of place."

2010-05-26T11:12:00.000-07:00

Almost eerily topical, The Dead Yard, Ian Thomson's book about the gritty underbelly of Jamaica, hailed for its candid portrait of a 'corrupted Eden' Ian Thomson's investigation into the gritty underside of "corrupted Eden" Jamaica has won him the Ondaatje prize, which goes to the book which has best evoked the spirit of a place.

Thomson's The Dead Yard sees the author walking the streets of Jamaica, describing its poverty, gang rule and police brutality, meeting its people and exploring how the country has changed since its independence in 1962. "'You visitors are always getting it wrong,'" he is told by one Jamaican. "'Either it's golden beaches or guns, guns, guns, guns. Is there nothing in between?'"

Beating shortlisted titles including Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting's "biography of an English acre" The Plot, Kachi A Ozumba's novel of contemporary Nigeria The Shadow of a Smile and Daniyal Mueenuddin's short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, The Dead Yard "will be a revelation" for those "to whom Jamaica means only music, sunshine and cricket", said judges Kathleen Jamie, Steve Jones and Penelope Lively in a statement.

"His candid portrait – vigorous, illuminating and sometimes shocking – allows Jamaica to speak for itself," they said. "Thomson is a brave writer who takes himself into unexpected, sometimes edgy places. The island he describes is a place of verdant beauty; history-ridden, post-colonial with an undertow of disappointment and violence. This is the best kind of travel writing: stimulating, educative and evocative."

Thomson, who has also written a book about Haiti, Bonjour Blanc, and whose Primo Levi biography won him the WH Heinemann award seven years ago, was announced winner of the £10,000 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje prize last night. He joins a roster of previous winners which includes Adam Nicolson, Graham Robb and Hisham Matar.

BBC Samuel Johnson Non-fiction Prize shortlist announced

2010-05-26T11:11:00.000-07:00

Andrew Ross Sorkin Andrew Ross Sorkin was published in the New York Times while he was at school

Andrew Ross Sorkin has been shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction for his first book, charting the financial crisis.

The US writer's best-seller is up against five other works, including an account on North Korea and a maths made simple book by Alex Bellos.

A look at the life of King Charles II and Luke Jennings' coming of age and fishing book are also in the running.

The winner will receive a cheque for £20,000 at a London ceremony on 1 July.

This year's shortlist is completed by Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham, in which he argues cooking civilised early man.

Sorkin, 32, has written for the New York Times since 1995 and had more than 70 articles published by the time he graduated from high school.

The award-winning business reporter looks at how the financial crisis swept around the world in his book.

Evan Davis, presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today programme and chairman of the judges, said the shortlist was "an extraordinarily eclectic selection of books".

He added: "There is something for everyone, whether it be maths or fishing.

"Perhaps the only common feature of these books is the passion and sheer enthusiasm of the authors for their subjects."

Ian McEwan novel gets top pig honour

2010-05-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

Ian McEwan and the Solar book jacket McEwan beat four other novelists to the peculiar porcine prize

Booker-winning novelist Ian McEwan has brought home the bacon thanks to a quirky literary prize that will see a pig renamed in his honour.

The writer has been named the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for his comic novel Solar.

As part of his award, a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig will be renamed Solar at the Hay literary festival this week.

Now in its 11th year, the prize honours novels thought to have best captured the comic spirit of PG Wodehouse.

McEwan, whose other novels include Atonement, Enduring Love and Amsterdam, will meet the pig on Friday during a visit to the festival in Hay-on-Wye, Powys.

He will also be presented with a jeroboam of champagne and a collection of PG Wodehouse works.

David Campbell, judge and publisher of Everyman's Library, said the decision to reward Solar had been "easy [and] unanimous".

"This is a brilliantly funny book by a great writer," he added.

Focusing on the issue of climate change, Solar tells of a Nobel prize-winning physicist who gets the chance to save the world from environmental disaster.

Previous winners of the prize that also had pigs named after them include DBC Pierre's novel Vernon God Little and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka.

New UK Novelists

2010-05-21T16:26:00.001-07:00

Three novelists vie for £10,000 Desmond Elliott prize
Maria Allen taken by Richard Tatham, Jacob Polley taken by C.Sandy Friend
Jacob Polley, Maria Allen and Ali Shaw and will find out if they have won in June.

A former bookseller, an acclaimed poet and a teacher have made the final shortlist for the Desmond Elliott prize for first time novelists.

Bookmakers have made Before the Earthquake by teacher Maria Allen favourite to win the £10,000 prize.

Talk of the Town by poet Jacob Polley and The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw make up the shortlist.

The prize was set up in 2007 in honour of the publisher and literary agent Desmond Elliott, who died in 2003.

The three shortlisted books cover a range of genres from a coming-of-age tale to historical fiction and magical realism.

"Bold, original and ambitious"

The judging panel is made up of writer Elizabeth Buchan, literary editor of The Observer William Skidelsky and leading independent bookseller James Daunt.

Speaking on behalf of the judges, Elizabeth Buchan said: "We were struck by the boldness, originality and ambition of the three finalists."

She continued: "With settings ranging from early twentieth century southern Italy, to Carlisle in the 1980s to the mysterious St Hauda's Land, their novels make up a diverse, intriguing and hugely rewarding shortlist."

The winner is announced on 23 June at Fortnum & Mason, in London.

Author Edward Hogan won last year's prize for his novel Blackmoor, set in a fictional mining village against the backdrop of the miners' strike.

Australian Book News: Coetzee Wins $40,000 Prize

2010-05-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

CATE Kennedy didn't have any delusions that she would win the NSW Premier's Prize for fiction from heavyweight fellow-nominees David Malouf and J.M. Coetzee. After all, although her intriguing, spare and essentially Australian short stories are widely admired, the novel in contention, The World Beneath, was her first.

Winning the People's Choice Award at the NSW Premier's Literary Prize award ceremony in Sydney last night, however, seems to have pleased her even more than the big one would have.

"Readers are the very people you're writing for," she said. "You're writing because you want to be read, to have your book thought about and talked about.

"And these people have taken the trouble to go to their computers and vote. I'm really pleased and gratified."

Adelaide-based South African writer Coetzee won the $40,000 Christina Stead Prize for fiction for Summertime, the third instalment of his autobiographical trilogy that began with Boyhood and Youth.

Fairfax foreign correspondent Paul McGeough won the $40,000 Douglas Stewart prize for non-fiction -- and Book of the Year -- for King Khalid: Mossad's failed hit . . . and the rise of Hamas.

Jane Campion shared the $60,000 script writing award for her feature film Bright Star with Aviva Ziegler for her ABC television documentary Fairweather Man on painter Ian Fairweather.

No award was given in the playwriting category, for which, controversially, no short-list was nominated this year.

Andrew Croome's Document Z, a fictionalised account of the Petrov affair that won The Australian/Vogel award for an unpublished manuscript in 2008, won the $5000 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing.

The $30,000 NSW Premier's Prize for Literary Scholarship was awarded to Philip Mead for Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry.

Kennedy's sharply observed writing is the result perhaps of a particularly wide exposure to life. An airforce child born in Britain, she moved around bases in Australia before finishing her education in Canberra.

She worked in community theatre and as a librarian, living in rural Victoria and Mexico, before fetching up in Benalla, northeast of Melbourne. She married a farmer and has a four-year-old daughter.

The World Beneath has been shortlisted for the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award.

Nebula Awards Winners

2010-05-18T18:43:00.001-07:00

This year's Nebula Award winners, who were honored Saturday by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, include:

Novel: The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)

Novella: The Women of Nell Gwynne's by Kage Baker (Subterranean Press)

Novelette: "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" by Eugie Foster (Interzone, February 2009)

Short Story: "Spar" by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, October 2009)

Ray Bradbury Award: District 9, Neill Blomkamp (director) and Terri Tatchell (writer)

Andre Norton Award: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

The Real Story Behind Stieg Larsson And The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

2010-05-04T16:18:00.000-07:00

----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Real Story Behind Stieg Larsson And The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Conspiracy theories rage about his death

http://www.booktrade.info/i.php/27121

The Echo Makers by Richard Powers

2007-08-25T07:34:00.000-07:00

Richard Powers was awarded the National Book Award in 2006 for this compelling novel.
Set in Nebraska on the Platte River at a place where migrating cranes stop, this remarkable novel tells the story of Martin Schulter, a 27 year old man who rolls his truck. He is diagnosed with Capgrass Syndrome. People and objects that were important to him before the accident like his sister, his home and his dog, he now rejects. His gut feelings tell him that they are imposters.

In desperation, his sister Karen, turns to Gerald Weber an Oliver Saks like character who is intrigued by the case. It is not often that a scientist can observe Capgrass up close.
Gerald Weber, however, has his own problems. His latest book is not selling well. He worries about his own brain functions and his once solid marriage is on shaky ground. He seems unable to help. Karen then turns to Mark's old friend, environmentalist Daniel Riegel. She re-establishes a relationship with an old lover, a successful real estate developer.

There are mysteries. A note left by Marks bedside on the night of the accident possibly holds a key to what happened but no one can explain it. Who is the very competent care-giver Barbara Gillespie and what impact does she have on the lives of both Mark and Gerald Weber?

Powers explores themes of the human brain and how it functions, environmental concerns, and stewardship. He looks at how people attempts to make sense of their individual worlds.
This is a brilliant read.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hossieni

2007-08-25T07:25:00.000-07:00

The world of Afghanistani women from beind the burka is the subject of this very fine book by
the author of the best-selling Kite Runner. Set after the Russians have left Afghanistan the novel explores the lives of two women who have the misfortune of marrying Rashid a cruel man.
Miriam, 15, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man is forced into marrying Rashid a man of 40. He demands that she wear a burka and isolate herself from her neighbours. Unable to bear children, she is the object of Rashid's anger. 18 years later, Rashid, takes a second wife who is even younger. Leila, the educated daughter of a teacher, has been separated from her lover.
Pregnant with his child, she sees that her only hope for survival is marriage to Rashid.
Slowly, the women forge a bond which stands them in good stead. As the violence escalates both in Kabul and in their own home, the women act to create hope for a child.
Kabul and Herat as they once were come alive. The depiction of the daily life of these women is well done. This is a heartbreaking story, set in an impossible place about women who finds ways to rise above cruelty.

Wash this Blood Clean from my Hands by Fred Vargas

2007-08-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

I loved The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas. Wash This Blood Clean from my Hands introduced me to Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, a clever, intuitive policeman who is obsessed with what he believes is an unsolved case. Between 1943 and 2003, nine people have been stabbed with a trident. In each case, a conviction has been made by a person who has no memory of the event. Adamsberg's brother narrowly missed being convicted in one of these murders- due to the efforts of Adamsberg.

Adamsberg and his team of officers are scheduled to leave Paris in order to take advantage of a forensic training course in Quebec. While in Quebec, Adamsberg befriends a young women. She is found stabbed to death by a trident and Adamsberg has no memory of the evening before.
He is accused of the murder and must flee the Quebec police so that he can prove his innocence.
Adamsberg is convinced he knows who the perpetrator is, but very few people are willing to accept his theory. Seemly on the edge of a nervous breakdown, Adamsberg embarks on a wild
journey into the United States and then back to Paris. As in the Three Evangelists, Vargas has
populated her book with marvelous eccentrics: the loyal and precise Capitaine Danglard; convinced he will never survive a plane trip to Canada; a hefty Captain Violet Betancourt, whose ingenuity is invaluable; the astonishing computer geek, Josette; and the warm and motherly
Clementine. Vargas keep the suspense level high.

Remembering the Bookstore on Bastion Street

2007-08-23T13:07:00.000-07:00

(A reflective essay Thora wrote for BC Bookworld's 2007 Reckoning Symposium)

“We celebrated almost every book published by a Nanaimo writer for 21 years.” – Thora Howell

When Jerry and I bought The Book Store (yes that was its name) in Nanaimo in 1978, we didn’t know anyone in town so our lives were built out of that store that was established in 1962. Purchased from Michael and Margo Mann, it had 1,000 square feet of hand-made shelves and a well-established clientele.

It could not have been a better time to buy a book store. Although Nanaimo was a boom or bust town, heavily reliant on the pulp mill, it was home to Malaspina College and its splendid English and Creative Writing departments. It was also home to Jack Hodgins, who had published Spit Delaney’s Island(1976) and Invention of the World (1978), and Anne Cameron ( known to us as Anne Hubert in those days), who had just published Dreamspeaker and Tem Eyos Ki and the Land Claims Question (1978) with Clark-Irwin.

Cam’s typewriter gave out often from hard use and on the days when she had to visit Brian Ball’s stationery store to get it fixed, she would come by to share a cup of coffee and tell me the stories that later became her series of children’s books. I can still remember one of our first readings featured Cam, reading from poetry that later became Earth Witch. About twenty of us crowded together in the Children’s Section, captivated by her delivery.
Jerry and I knew very little about the business side of books, both having come from larger institutions. It was a long and steep and sometimes painful learning curve. Reps made the difference for us. Their regular calls, spring and fall, ensured that we knew what was being published. We experienced the over-enthusiastic reps as well as the realistic ones. Ian Cameron, one of the best, always took my order and cut it mercilessly. He had a good instinct for what we could sell well and I learned early on to pay great attention. In fact, the great reps were the ones who knew our store so well, they could do the orders. Kate Walker’s rep, Caroline Woodward, still keeps me abreast of new Canadian titles eight years after we closed the store.
One of the reps’ great gifts to us was making it possible for authors to read in Nanaimo, convincing publishers it would be worthwhile. Even though I constantly badgered reps and publishers for writers, it astonished me that such well-established writers would come to Nanaimo. Fortunately, the people of Nanaimo supported the readings—and us. In 1981, when our first store over the infamous bingo hall was to be demolished to make way for a multi-storied hotel, our customers came with shopping carts to help us fill the shelves of the new store, a heritage building across the street that was renovated by Boh Helliwell of Hornby Island. It was three times the size our first store, on two levels, so our opportunities for events multiplied. We converted the upper floor to an extensive children’s department and there among the picture books, we listened to poetry, and launched new books.

Through the efforts of McClelland Stewart, Harper Collins, Pengui, and a host of other publishers we heard from, among others, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Denise Chong, John Ralston Saul, Thomas Berger, Leon Rooke, Hugh Brody, Edith Iglauer, Wayson Choy, Michel Tremblay, Dennis Lee, Guy Vanderhaege, John Mortimer, Graham Swift, and Wade Davis. Imagine hearing Timothy Findley read from The Wars on November 11 at 11a.m.
Denise Chong brought her mother to Nanaimo when The Concubine’s Children was published. Winnie had grown up in the tea houses of old Nanaimo and had wonderful stories to share. And in addition she has the best chicken recipe in the world--it has something to do with a touch of Scotch. Graham Swift desperately wanted to catch salmon—in exchange for a reading—and he did. Jack Hodgins brought Alistar MacLeod and Ireland’s James McGahern. Louis deBernieres was visiting family when a writer friend made a connection for us.

CBC writers Stuart McLean, Arthur Black, Alan Maitlin and Peter Gzowski all read/spoke to us, and Bill Richardson came many times. It was very special to have him recite from memory several pieces of writing by Canadian authors that had been banned at one time or another.
Of all the wonderful experiences, the best by far was celebrating the work of our wonderful local writers. We celebrated almost every book published by a Nanaimo writer for 21 years. When Jack Hodgins published Broken Ground about Vancouver Island post-war pioneers at Merville, people brought in deeds and artifacts of all kinds with stories of family settlements on the Island. Anne Cameron’s Daughters of Copper Woman, an underground classic across the continent, was so important to people that at one reading a woman produced a photocopy that she wanted signed. This was not a smart move on her part and to this day I am sure she will remember Cam’s animated and stern lecture on the fundamentals of copyright.

Lynne Bowen, in writing Boss Whistle and Three Dollar Dreams, gave back the painful story of early coal-mining days and thus gave the community a history that had been largely ignored. A group of mature women who took a course from Kevin Roberts at Malaspina College in the ‘70s have stayed together as a writing group and have all published beautiful books of poetry. That group includes Haiku award-winning Winona Baker, the very funny and thought-provoking Mildred Tremblay, and newer members Alison Watt, Leanne McIntosh and Ursula Vaira, who is both a poet and a publisher of Leaf Press.

Randy Fred started Theytus Books in Nanaimo and it is now a flourishing press publishing First Nations work from Penticton. Ellen White, in her stories Kwulwasulwut has given us a look at the world of the Coast Salish. For a few years, in cooperation with Kate Braid in the Creative Writing Department at Malaspina, we hosted a Poetry festival that became a community event. The book launch we held last year for Carol Windley, a finalist for the 2006 Giller Award, was a far cry from one 28 years ago that we hosted for Elizabeth Norcross, local historian, when all the women wore hats and gloves. The talks with Sheila Watson, first over glasses of red wine and onion soup, and later over coffee and cinnamon toast, were treasured times.

One memorable afternoon, Howard White brought Robert Swanson to read his logging poetry. I realized how powerful poetry could be as I listened to the loggers sitting at the back of the room, reciting Swanson’s poems along with him as he read. On another occasion Al Purdy, Robert Swanson and Joe Garner had a wonderful time upstaging one another. Hearing deficits seemed to add to the general chaos. In the audience was Barry Broadfoot who had moved to Nanaimo and was still writing oral history. Possibly the funniest story I have heard was Howard White reading “Morts” from his book Writing in the Rain.

I learned about loyalty from our customers. It was not uncommon for someone to return from a trip to Victoria and ask us to order a book they had seen. Why they were willing to wait the weeks it took in those days, I will never know. It made such a difference to us. Many facets of the book publishing world have improved and a major step has been speeding up the shipping of books to the West. Book Express and Raincoast made life much easier.

Oolichan Books, the Lantzville publisher, has a remarkable record of publishing local work. There wasn’t a season that went by that Harbour, Douglas McIntyre, and Orca didn’t bring authors to talk about their new work. Orca, one of the great Canadian publishers of children’s books, got its start in Nanaimo when Bob Tyrrell published his Pub Guide to Vancouver Island
Small booksellers had a difficult time accessing co-op book promotion money. It seemed to take more time that it was worth. We needed any and all promotion we could find. I was among many people who felt we needed to have more communication and cooperation among the principals: the publishers, their reps, the book sellers, and librarians. It was just over 20 years ago that a meeting was held in Nanaimo, facilitated by Marilyn Ross, to discuss ways of promoting BC books. Ventures like B.C. BookWorld and the B. C. Book Prizes have made an enormous difference in public knowledge of our writers.

A city the size of Nanaimo lends itself to cooperative efforts. In 1986, we hosted the first Children’s Book Festival in Nanaimo, co-supported by the Nanaimo Roundtable, School District 68, Vancouver Island Regional Library, Malaspina College and The Book Store. For 21 years we have been able, through the support of Canada Council, to bring the best Canadian childrens’ writers, illustrators and storytellers to Nanaimo Each year 11 14 guests come from all across Canada, to share their art with our children. Not only are they hosted by the community but many schools invite them to read.

The book business is a tough business. With all the ups of author readings and customer loyalty, there was always a fight to keep cash flowing. The GST was a devastating blow to the book industry. As predicted, the accountants took over the book world. Terms tightened. The breaks that Chapters has been able to insist on, could have made life much easier for the independent. Because we were so reliant on special orders we were always desperate to keep bills paid. Had we not had an astonishing staff in Kitty Bonham, Robin McKay and Deborah Ferens as well as a host of young people who worked part time, life would have been much more difficult.

We had very good times and some difficult ones. Jerry and I know that being part of the book business gave us an opportunity to have a great partnership with our community, our writers, publishers and their reps. Life doesn’t get much better than that. Meanwhile British Columbia publishers and writers have reflected our world back to us, not only with the West Coast books that they publish but also by their promotion. It’s essential that a community know its history and its stories. What a wealth of literature we have. The stories of fishing, logging, First Nations, poetry and novels have given us our place in the universe.

Missing by Karen Alvtgen

2007-06-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

Karen Alvtgen is another terrific mystery writer from Scandinavia. Sibylla Forestenstrom,
32 years old, has been an invisible person for 15 years. All her belongings fit into her rucksack and she spends her days foraging for food and finding safe shelter. The daughter of well-to-do
parents, she has disappeared from the world.

Suddenly she becomes the most wanted person in Sweden when one of her schemes to find a
place to sleep goes awry and is she found in the wrong place at the wrong time. She is accused
of a brutal murder. When a second similar murder takes place, she finds herself in a desperate
situation. Staying alive and well in the streets of Stockholm is a challenge for a homeless
person at the best of times, but for Sibylla, it becomes an overwhelming task. Seemingly friendless, she meets a surprising ally. As Sybilla struggles to extricate herself, using money she has hoarded for a sanctuary for herself, we learn of the events of her life that lead to her estrangement with her family.. She finds she must take on the almost impossible task of solving the murders. And therein lies the danger. Great read.

Sun Storm by Asa Larsson

2007-06-06T12:53:00.000-07:00

Asa Larsson, winner of Sweden's Best First Crime Novel, has written a spell-binding mystery set in the Lapland village of Kiruna. Sanna Strandgard finds her brother's mutilated body in
'Source of All Our Struggles Church', a revivalist church he helped to create. When Sanna is identified as a suspect, she calls her friend Rebecka Martensson, a tax attorney in Stockholm.
Rebecka left Kiruna years before under a cloud and dreads having to face her past. To save her
friend, Sanna, Rebecka returns and works through a conspiracy of deceit to confront a devious killer. The winter landscape, the aurora borealis, the village and it's people come alive in this intriguing mystery.

Son of Kahunsha by Anosh Irani

2007-06-06T12:45:00.000-07:00

Ten year old Chamdi has spent his life in in orphanage in Bombay. He loves the smell of the rain, the red of the bougainvilleas and the statue of Jesus in the orphange prayer room.
He clings to a fantasy of Kahunsha "the city of no sadness" which is his Bombay. When he hears that the orphange will close, he decides go off on his own to explore the city of his dreams and to search for his long-lost father.

The Bombay he finds is dirty and mean. Desperate with hunger, Chamdi is taken in by two street children, Guddi and Sumdi, who lead him into the brutal life of the city's homeless and into the web of Bhai, the don who takes money the children earn.

When the three young people make a plan to escape the streets, the find themselves caught up
Hindu Muslim violence that engulfs the city. This is a story of the terrible reality of children in the streets in Bombay and the ways they find to cope with impossible circumstances.

By A Slow River Philippe Claudel

2007-06-06T12:37:00.000-07:00

Retired French gendarme, Dadais, is haunted by the events that took place in a
small unnamed village in th winter of 1917. Close to the Western Front battlefields of World War , a ten year old girl is found in an icy river "slow river", strangled. The town's residents, curiously unmoved by the victims of the war that pass through their community, are stunned by the death of the beautiful child. Many years later, Dadais spends his days going over three deaths that occured at the same time: the little girl, Dadais wife, who died in childbirth and the suicide of the enchanting school mistress from the north. Was the right person convicted in the death of the little girl? What was the motivation for the school mistress' death? As Dadais struggles to make senses of it all, the circle of sadness widens. This is a dark beautifully written novel that has at it's heart, man's humanity to other men.

RESTLESS by William Boyd

2007-05-17T09:47:00.000-07:00

Sally Gilmartin, a widow living in the Cotswalds, reveals to her daughter that she has been living a lie. Her real name is Eva Delctorskay and she worked for the secret service as a highly trained spy during World War II. She used safe houses, had access to fake passport and her modus operandi was to trust no one.

Thirty years later, Sally believes that someone is trying to kill her. She decides to reveal her identity to her daughter in order to get help.

Ruth, the daughter, a single parent mother of a little girl, is astonished as she is drawn into the details of her mothers previous life. She simply had no idea. Ruth's uneventful life suddenly becomes more dangerous as she attempts to help her mother.

Much of the book is given over to Sally's life as a spy. It is a wonderful recreation of that world, an enthralling story of espionage: the distrust, the paranoia and the politics of war. It's a marvelous read.

BIRTH OF A BOOKWORM BONBON ASSORTIS by Michel Tremblay

2007-05-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

Michel Tremblay has written four magical autobiographical narratives: Birth of a Bookworm, Bambi and Me, Twelve Opening Acts, Bonbon Assortis.
The first, Birth of a Bookworm will be treasured by anyone who has fallen in love with words on a page. As a young boy, Michel loved the library and went to great lengths to be admitted to the adult section. He tells of being captivated by among others, Jules Verne, The Brothers Grimm and Robert Louis Stevenson. These great writers inspired his imagination and eventually led him to begin his storytelling through novels and plays that reflected his particular culture and his world. He talks of the relationship with his mother as he journeyed through his reading.

Bonbon Assortis, the fourth narrative, recounts his early years in Montreal It is filled with vignettes featuring his much loved and indominable mother who kept her (bonbons) chocolates under her bed, the aunt who inspired the character Albertine, and his prickly grandmother. As well there are other family stories such as the escapade of the uncle who contrives to have Santa call Michel from the North Pole and has to deal with the complications he sets in motion. Michel fondly recounts the moments he spent with his father.
From his favorite place under the dining room table, Michel views the interaction of the nine members of his family. On one occasion, he was summoned to deliver a wedding present to the neighbours. It is a story, both funny and poignant, of how a proud family attempts to hide its poverty.

Tremblay's two other narratives:
Bambi and Me is his memoir of his early interaction with film.
Twelve Opening Acts relates his first encounters with the theatre.
Through these books we enter the world that inspired this gifted writer.

Natural Flights of the Human Mind by Clare Morrell

2007-05-09T07:50:00.000-07:00

Believing that he is responsible for the deaths of 78 people, Peter Stryker moves to a lighthouse on the Devon Coast. Peter speaks to no one. His guilt has driven him to investigate the lives of the people who died and to keep them alive in his dreams.

Imogene Doody, suffering from the suicide of a sister and angry after being abandoned by her husband many years before, finds herself in the small community when she inherits a run-down house and barn. Despite her abrupt, off-putting manner. Imogene strikes up a relationship with the silent Peter as they work to restore the house and find a surprise in the barn.

As the 25th anniversary of the accident approaches, the families of the victims of the accident
are intent on revenge. They descend into the village. Their destination is confronation at the lighthouse, which is now in a precarious state.

This is a superb read. Morrell's themes of anger, guilt, revenge and forgiveness are worked out
beautifully. I heartily recommend it.

B. C. Book Prizes honour Nanaimo and Gabriola Island writers Carol Windley and Katherine Gordon

2007-05-03T19:25:00.000-07:00

Two of the 2007 B. C. Book Prizes went to mid Island writers. Carol Windley, author of Home Schooling, took home the Ethel Wilson prize for literature. Carol's book was short-listed for
the Giller Prize. This is a special book of short stories which I have written about earlier.

Katherine Gordon, a Gabriola Island resident, was awarded the Roderick Haig Brown Prize for
Regional writing for Made to Measure, A History of Land Surveying in British
Columbia. I will be writing more about this.

WordStorm Rocks!

2007-05-01T17:16:00.000-07:00

WHERE? ACME FOOD COMPANY in the Bombay Lounge, 114 Commercial St.
WHEN? The LAST THURSDAY of every month except July, August & December
WHAT? An electric evening of spoken word
WHY? To ENTERTAIN, INSPIRE & to have FUN!
COST? $3.00 (See Reservation information below)
CONTACT: David Fraser at: ascentaspirations@shaw.ca or
Cindy Shantz at: cindyshantz@shaw.ca
WEBSITE: www.ascentaspirations.ca/WordStorm.htm

WordStorm is raging in Nanaimo! Since WordStorm’s premiere in January, all types of spoken word artists including poets, story-tellers, song-writers and dramatists have performed on our stage to sold-out audiences—in fact we have had to turn away people at the door. That’s why we have a reservation system which is described at the end of this blurb.
WordStorm has two components: a prearranged reading series, and an exciting open mike competition evaluated by three astute judges picked at random from our audience. All judges are issued their proper regalia of bunny ears, or a pilot’s helmet and goggles, or a purple wig and glasses, depending on the component they are judging. (Entertainment/Inspiration; Delivery; Quality/Imagery)
Open mike material must be the reader's own work and be read without props or instruments. Sign-up begins at 6:30 PM on the night of WordStorm.
Admission to WordStorm is $3.00 and the bulk of the money collected will go to prize winners with a small amount set aside for administration.
The Bombay Lounge has a capacity of about 45 people. You can take your chances at the door or avoid disappointment by reserving ahead through the PayPal link on the Website. All reservations must be picked up before 6:30 or they will become void, and spaces will be given out on a first come, first served basis. Sorry—no refunds. You can reserve for future events at the reservation table on any night of WordStorm by giving our Meeter/Greeter your name and contact number and your $3.00 admission fee.
Come out to listen and be entertained, or sign up to be part of the entertainment. Everyone is welcome!

The Final Solution, A detective Story by Michael Chabon

2007-04-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon is set in a village in the South of England in 1944.
Linus, a nine-year old refugee from Nazi Germany, is placed in the home of a Malayan minister.
Linus, a clever youngster, is mute. His constant companion is an African parrot, Bruno, who mouths long
strings of numbers in German interspersed with little songs and bits of poetry. Mr. and Mrs. Paniker
and their obnoxious son have other boarders sharing the house. When the parrot disappears and one
of the boarders is murdered, the local police enlist the help of an old, pipe-smoking beekeeper who is
referred to as "the old man". "The old man" has a formidable reputation as a detective. Could it be a
beloved, well-known, retired sleuth? The detective who sympathizes with Linus ,agrees to help but
only to find the parrot. Is national security involved? The old man must use all his analytical skills to
solve the mystery. Chabon is a fine writer. One of the chapters tells the story from the parrot's
point of view and it works. This novella is great fun.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

2007-04-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Murakami for years and Kafka on the Shore is one of his best. It is the entrancing 'coming of age' story of Kafka Tamara, a fifteen year old boy who runs away from his home in Tokyo, and old Nakata who was changed by a mysterious incident during World War II that left him 'simple'.

Kafka is running away to find his mother and sister who disappeared when he was very young. He is estranged from his father and is desperate to escape an oedipal prophecy. Nakata, mentally challenged and unable to
articulate his thoughts is able to talk to cats. He is on a journey to find "the entrance stone".

Murakami weaves the journeys of these two beautifully. Each of them is haunted by a brutal murder. Both characters find people on their journeys who support, guide and protect them. Kafka is befriended by a young woman, a librarian and a librarian's assistant when he finds refuge in a private library. Eventually he journeys into a forest from which people have never returned.

Nataka's friend who goes awol from his job to accompany Nakata makes possible his journey. Nakata knows he must find "the entrance stone" that connects the parallel worlds of Kafka and Nakata.
There are wonderful philosophical discussions in the book. What might seem like unbelievable happening in the plot work well in the hands of this great storyteller. It's hard to put the book down once you've dipped in.

Still Life by Louise Penny

2007-02-25T16:52:00.000-08:00

When JaneNeal, beloved teacher, is found dead in the woods near Three Pines, Quebec, Armand Gamache of the Sorete du Quebec, is the homicide investigator assigned to the case.
It appears that Jane Neal died of a wound from an arrow.

Gamache is a wonderful character, thoughtful and decent, who quickly uncovers secrets and unknown relationships, loves, hates and regrets among Jane's friends and aquaintances.
Penny is a master at revealing the tensions between French and English which inform the story. There are also tensions within the Gamache team, that lead to a serious error.
The memorable characters include a gay couple who run the cafe, an obnoxious estranged niece, Jane's closest friend, an expert bowman and his sullen son.

Jane's art figures in a story that is immensely rewarding.

Louise Penny, a Canadian writer unable to find a Canadian publisher, entered her novel in a British competition and was immediately recognized as a find,. Still Life was published and won the Crime Writers Dagger Award in 2004.

Borkmann's Point by Hakan Nesser

2007-02-25T16:27:00.000-08:00

Haken Nesser is an award-winning Swedish crime writer ably translated by Laurie Thompson. Chief Inspector Van Veeterin's vacation is interrupted when he is called in to help find an axe murderer in the small town of Kaalbrenger.

Van Veeterin, a veteran of 30 years as a police detective, has only one unsolved crime in his career. He is a believer in Borkmann's point: in every case a point is reached where enough information has been gathered to solve the crime and nothing more is needed except decent thinking.

This case is challenging. Another axe murder occurs and there seems to be no relationship between the two events. When the best police investigator goes missing, Van Veeterin must use every bit of logic and intuition he has to sift through the information that he has gathered.

This is a riveting police procedural, with a compassionate and wise investigator at it's heart.
It's bound to please mystery buffs.

Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert

2007-02-25T16:12:00.000-08:00

Stumbling on Happiness provided me with one of the more interesting reading trips I have had. I am somewhat skeptical of books that discuss happiness. Dan Gilbert, a psychologist from Harvard, has written a clever, scientific explanation of how our brains work. He draws on research from the field of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy to talk about the brain and how it functions.

According to Gilbert, it is when we try to predict the future that our brains make mistakes. Our inability to fully imagine the future finds us surprised by what transpires. Just as we have trouble rememering the past, we can only see the future in today's terms. Our brains desire to control is so powerful, it believes it can control the uncontrollable. I was surprised to find how hard our brains work to protect us--something of which we are not concious.

Gilbert is a witty writer, able to keep us entertained as we learn why the conjoined twins we might pity, feel as happy as the rest of the population. He pressents wonderful examples of what happens when our eyes don't agree with our brain.

If we really want to understand what the future holds--which for some people translates into happiness, Gilbert suggests that rather than relying on the brain we would be better off to ask people who are in like circumstances how they feel.

Off to the Caribbean

2007-02-02T17:06:00.000-08:00

It's true we are off for a 22 day cruise in the Caribbean. I have few clothes but many books in my bag.

More from the sea.

Thora

Can you Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami

2007-02-01T14:56:00.000-08:00

Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? tells the story of three women born in India, two of whom come to Canada. The novel covers the period of time from the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 to the explosion of Air India in 1985 . Bibi-ji, a beautiful young woman, steals her sister's finace and returns with him to Vancouver where through initiative, ambition and enterprise, she builds a financially secure future and with her husband becomes a pillar of the Vancouver Sikh community. Her sorrow is her inability to have children. She suffers from guilt of cheating her sister and is troubled when she looses contact with her. When Bibi-ji returns to India, she makes arrangements to adopt the oldest son of Nimmo. Nimmo, orphaned in the aftermath of the partition of India and Pakistan, lives a marginal life in Delhi. Married with three children, she agrees to allow her son to go to Canada with Bibi-Ji where he can be educated. The third woman, Leela, comes to Canada reluctantly. She enjoyed the security of her husband's family in India and felt no desire for a new world. For her life in Canada is a half and half life.
Each of these women endures horrific hardships and shattering experiences, many the result of the violent history of India and Pakistan and the clashes between Hindus and Sikhs. Badami is a wonderful writer and her insights allow us to better understand the burdens that immigrants may carry which are not of their own making.
This is a terrific book not only to read but to share with young people. It belongs in the libraries of all high schools.

The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez

2007-02-01T14:31:00.000-08:00

The Last of Her Kind is a compelling account of the America of the 1960's, the turmoil and the counterculture that it produced. Nunez brilliantly explores the political climate in America during the 60's and 70's through the eyes of two young women. Georgette George, a product of an impoverished an abusive family, arrives at Barnard College for her freshman year to find she will share her room with Ann Drayton, white, rich and angry about the injustices she sees in the country. Ann rejects her family and sets out to make the world a more egalitarian place to live.
Georgette is appalled at the way Ann romanticizes poverty but becomes mesmerized by Ann's single-minded committment to issues of class, race, gender politics and social justice. George marries twice, has two children and a career in journalism and one great love affair. Nine years after their freshman year Ann murders a policeman in an attempt to rescue her black boyfriend from a confrontation with the police and spends many years in jail. There she continues to advocate for women, even when her services are not requested or wanted. She is in fact "the last of her kind"

Nunez has written a remarkably readable story of the last three decades in America, the divisiveness of the Vietnam War, and the violent idealism that existed. She has created two women from opposite sides of the economic spectrum whose lives are informed by their early relationship.

Sigrid Nunez has received several awards for her work including a Whiting Writer's Award, The Rome Prize for Literature and a Berlin Prize Fellowship.

MYSTERIES by Paul Adams, Kate Atkinson, Peter Robinson, Fred Vargas,

2007-02-01T13:40:00.000-08:00

The long foggy, rainy, nights have given me a chance to discover two new (to me) mystery
writers and wallow in the works of two old favorites.

The Rainaldi Quartet by Paul Adams is set in Cremona, Italy. Gianni Castiglione, a violin maker, plays in a string quartet with fellow violin maker Rainaldi, the parish priest, Father Arrighi and police detective Gustafeste. Rainaldi, an authority on violins, is found murdered. Why anyone might want to murder this older unassuming fellow is a puzzlement.

Gustafeste is charged with solving the crime and he asks Castiglione to assist him when he interviews veteran Venetian violin collector, Dottor Foriani. The mystery deepens when Foriana is murdered. Because Castiglione is a walking encyclopedia on the violin, who understands not only the technical aspects of construction but the history of the instrument, both those that are legitimate and those that are forged, he continues to work with the police detective. Their journey to solve the mystery takes them across Italy and England, to auction houses, tombs and an estate in England.

This is a wonderful read, full of fascinating detail about an aspect of classical music that we don't often hear about in the mystery genre.

Fred Vargas, a historian and archaeologist by profession, has written The Three Evangelistas. Set in Paris, it tells the story of three poverty-stricken historians, Mathias (Matthew) Marc (Mark) and Lucien (Luke), the three evangelistas, who live next door to
Sophia Simeonidis, a Greek opera singer. When a tree suddenly appears in Sophia's yard, she asks her neighbours to dig around the tree to see if something has been buried. They find nothing, but when Sophia's body turns up weeks later burned beyond recognition, they along with Vandoosier, an excop who lives in the same house, decide to investigate. The reader is treated to a wonderful romp through Paris and into the countryside. Vargas who is well-known in Europe, has created several eccentrics characters and has brought Paris alive. I am looking forward to reading her police thrillers featuring Chief Inspector Adamsberg.
The best way to obtain this book is to order through your local library. It doesn't seem to be available in book stores.

One Good Turn, Kate Atkinson's new thriller, brings back Jackson Brodie, former detective and now millionaire. He has accompanied Julia, his girlfriend to Edinburgh where she is performing in the Edinburgh Festival. On his arrival, he observes an act of road-rage that has far-reaching effects. Paul Bradley, a mysterious thug, is knocked unconcious with a baseball bat. Dectective Brody is reluctant to become involved but he has no choice when he is hired as a bodyguard. Other bystanders to the accident include shy Martin Canning, writer of historical mysteries who saves Bradley's life and Gloria Hatter who is plotting to end her marriage. Stories of the tough detective, Louise Monroe and her teenaged son, Archie; a fraudulent real estate developer; an obnoxious stand-up comedian and Russian prostitues all share parts of the story. Atkinson develops the plot by shifting points of view, eventually linking the stories of all the characters. Along the way, she explores their lives and their relationships and has a great deal of fun skewering real estates developments and drama troupes.

Peter Robinson's, Pieces of my Heart, is the 14th novel to feature Yorkshire police detective
Alan Banks. In 1969, the body of a young women is found stabbed the night after an outdoor rock concert in Yorkshire. Stanley Chadwick, the detective assigned to the case, is a tough cop with little sympathy for the hippies he must interview. His life is complicated by the behavior of his daughter, who is spending a great deal of time with members of a rock band.
Thirty-five years later, Alan Banks and Annie Cabbot, are investigating the murder of a music journalist in the same community. Banks discovers that the journalist may have uncovered information that relates to the earlier murder. Robinson develops parallel plots, one set in
1969 and the other in the present day giving readers two exceptional thrillers. Robinson recreates the hippie culture-- music, sex, drugs and the strained parent-child relationships of the late sixties.

Heart Matters by Adrienne Clarkson

2007-01-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

In her memoir, HEART MATTERS, Adrienne Clarkson, tells her story beginning with her life in Hong Kong and her family's escape from the Japanese occupation. Growing up in Ottawa, studying in Toronto and Paris and finding her vocation as a broadcaster helped to shape the women who became Governor General.
Clarkson's relationship with her parents had much to do with the person she would become. She adored her father who inspired her. Her complicated relationship with her mother was challenging for her.
Clarkson assumed the role of Governor General, applying her language skills, her knowledge of the country and her understanding of the role of the Governor General. She and John Ralston Saul used Rideau Hall to showcase the artists and writers of Canada. They travelled the length and breadth of the country giving Canadians an opportunity to be seen and heard by their Governor General. Finally they carried the message of Canada abroad.

I have admired Adrienne Clarkson and was looking forward to her story. I believe she understood the role of Governor General and truly carried out her mandate. It was unfortunate that she was caught up in the politics of the time and was treated unfairly. It is true that no undertaking of the Governor General happens without the approval of the government.
This is an informative look at the role of the Governor General in Canada.

The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards

2007-01-08T19:10:00.000-08:00

What a remarkable read this is. THE FRIENDS OF MEAGER FORTUNE, by David Adams Richards is written in almost biblical form and shares many of the elements of other Adams stories. He understands the poverty-stricken souls of small, insulated communities. The characters in THE FRIENDS OF MEAGER FORTUNE are larger than life loggers, working in New Brunswick in the first part of the 20th century. I am not a "horse person" but I was awed by Adams descriptions of horse logging on one of the most dangerous mountains in New Brunswick at a time when teamsters drove great black Perchons, Clydesdales and teh Belgians, small, tough draft horses. In this novel, the loggers, the teamsters and the horses do the impossible.

The Jamesons, Will, the older son who is well-suited to the world of logging and is now as the "great Will Jameson" dies suddenly at a very young age. His younger brother, Owen, bookish, not meant for logging, returns from World War II, with an injury, and must take over the business. A prophecy made at the time of Will's birth drives the story.

In a novel of less than admirable characters, Meager Fortune stands as a force for good, caring for all.
One of the great gifts of this book is the depiction of logging. Canadaa's strength and wealth has come from our natural resources. Richards brings to life the heroic work performed by flawed souls.

Pettiness, waywardness, betrayal, selfless caring and a doomed love story. You'll find it all in this magnificent novel.

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures: Stories by Vincent Lam

2007-01-08T18:54:00.000-08:00

Lam's book, BLOODLETTING AND MIRACULOUS CURES, winner of the 2007 Giller Award tells the story of four individuals, Ming, Fitz, Chen and Sri, bound for a career in medicine. We follow them through their preparations for medical school, their training and ultimately their practices. We are introduced to the lab, where students dissect a human cadaver. We experience the impossible world of the emergency room doctor and begin to understand the juxtaposition of traditional and modern medicine. The pressures of the training and the practice of medicine colour the lives of each of the doctors. This is a gripping read that keeps one turning the pages.

Home Schooling by Carol Windley

2007-01-08T13:33:00.000-08:00

If I had to choose the best book I have read in the last few months, it would be
Carol Windley's HOME SCHOOLING. Selected for the Giller Prize short list, it is an exceptional collection of seven short stories steeped in the landscape of Vancouver Island and the West Coast. --"Graeme made it as far as the ravine, a strange geological feature, an abruption cutting deep into the earth. He was looking down at huge moss-covered erratics, rocks deposited here centuries ago, at the end of the last ice age, and the luxuriant bracken fern, downed trees, mossy and rotten--nursery trees they were called--host to an astonishing variety of life forms: hemlock and maple seedlings, ferns and lichens and fungus.

The characters in these stories are in states of transition; families are in disarray often dealing with loss, upheaval and sometimes tragedy.

The story "What Saffi Knows" is remarkable. Saffi, 7 years old, is aware of a great tragedy. A young boy has disappeared and she has seen him hidden away. She is sure that her parents won't hear her if she tells them what she has seen and she also is aware that if she doesn't say what she knows, perhaps it might not be true.
As an adult, she comes to terms with the haunting memory through dreams.

Windley's stories are not without hope. Characters often find resolution, often in unexpected ways. The stories are beautifully crafted.

From The Globe and Mail:
"HOME SCHOOLING, is nothing short of an exceptional collction of beautiful words and resonant insights. Every single story is worthy of reading, and once read, returned to, whether for ambience or intelligence of thought and language, Carol Windley's gift with narrative and images give truly inspired meaning to "creative writing" "

Carol Windley was born in Tofino. She attended Chemainus Secondary and graduated from Malaspina College, where she later taught Creative Writing. She has worked as a radio station copywriter, and as a librarian. Her short stories have appeared in 1995: Best Canadian Short Stories (Oberon) and the fifth Journey Prize anthology. She won the first prize in CBC's Radio Literary Competition for the short story. Her first collection VISIBLE LIGHT (oolichan 1993) was shortlisted for a Governor General's Award, a BC Book Prize and won the Bumbershoot Weyerhauser Publication Award. One of her stosries set in the Pacific Northwest for HOME SCHOOLING, received the Western Magazine Award for Fiction in 2002. Windley lives in Nanaimo

Doris Lessing Nobel Acceptance Speech

2006-12-10T17:23:00.000-08:00

Saturday December 8, 2007
I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in 1956, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.
This is north-west Zimbabwe early in the 80s, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa", as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like every other built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books or Biros. In the library there are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or titles like Weekend in Paris and Felicity Finds Love.

There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The headmaster has embezzled the school funds and is suspended. My friend doesn't have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from him when he is paid and will probably never pay it back. The pupils range from six to 26, because some who did not get schooling as children are here to make it up. Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can't study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they set off for school and when they get back.
As I sit with my friend in his room, people shyly drop in, and everyone begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London," one man says. "They taught us to read but we have no books." Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.
I was there some days. The dust blew. The pumps had broken and the women were having to fetch water from the river. Another idealistic teacher from England was rather ill after seeing what this "school" was like.
On the last day they slaughtered the goat. They cut it into bits and cooked it in a great tin. This was the much anticipated end-of-term feast: boiled goat and porridge. I drove away while it was still going on, back through the charred remains and stumps of the forest.
I do not think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes.
The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens. The children here have a visit from some well-known person every week: these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils; a visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.
As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: "Please send us books." But there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.
Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?
I do my best. They are polite.
I'm sure that some of them will one day win prizes.
Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. "You know how it is," one of the teachers says. "A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used."
Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men's libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.
We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.
Not long ago, a friend in Zimbabwe told me about a village where the people had not eaten for three days, but they were still talking about books and how to get them, about education.
I belong to an organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grassroots. They told me that the villages, unlike what is reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey to discover what people in Zimbabwe wanted to read, and found the results were the same as those of a Swedish survey I had not known about. People want to read the same kind of books that people in Europe want to read - novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective stories, plays, and do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account. All of Shakespeare too. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a set book, like The Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular simply because it just happens to be there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons, is the most popular of all novels.
Our organisation was helped from the very start by Norway, and then by Sweden. Without this kind of support our supplies of books would have dried up. We got books from wherever we could. Remember, a good paperback from England costs a month's wages in Zimbabwe: that was before Mugabe's reign of terror. Now, with inflation, it would cost several years' wages. But having taken a box of books out to a village - and remember there is a terrible shortage of petrol - I can tell you that the box was greeted with tears. The library may be a plank on bricks under a tree. And within a week there will be literacy classes - people who can read teaching those who can't, citizenship classes - and in one remote village, since there were no novels written in the Tonga language, a couple of lads sat down to write novels in Tonga. There are six or so main languages in Zimbabwe and there are novels in all of them: violent, incestuous, full of crime and murder.
It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe's regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.
This links up improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls - Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.
Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. "I shall be a writer too," they say, "because I've the same kind of house you were in."
But here is the difficulty. Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.
I have been looking at the speeches by some of the recent Nobel prizewinners. Take last year's winner, the magnificent Orhan Pamuk. He said his father had 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition. Take VS Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write, and when he got to England he would visit the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition. Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes; taught by that wonderfully brave, bold mind. In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the tradition.
I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well-cared-for huts of the better off. There was a school, but like the one I have described. He found a discarded children's encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.
On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites - the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe, not easily, not under Mugabe.
All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to becoming writers. I would say learning to read from the printed labels on jam jars and discarded encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education beyond them, living in huts with many children - an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.
Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than 100 years before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations, the transition was made from these stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books.
Books were literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book quite another. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.
Here I am talking about books never written, writers who could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.
Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration." If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"
Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire: "Is she good-looking?" If this is a man: "Charismatic? Handsome?" We joke, but it is not a joke.
This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of hype begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening. He, she, is flattered, pleased. But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me."
Some much-publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: "Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don't let it go."
My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa that I can revive and look at whenever I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading across the sky at evening? How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the pale grassy banks of the Zambesi, the water dark and glossy, with all the birds of Africa darting about? Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars?
There are other memories too. A young African man, 18 perhaps, in tears, standing in what he hopes will be his "library". A visiting American, seeing that his library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young man had taken each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. "But," we say, "these books were sent to be read, surely?" "No," he replies, "they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?"
I have seen a teacher in a school where there were no textbooks, not even a chalk for the blackboard. He taught his class of six- to 18-year-olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting: "Two times two is ... " and so on. I have seen a girl - perhaps not more than 20, also lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros - teach the ABC by scratching the letters in the dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.
I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.
The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn out of a book. She is reading Anna Karenina. She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman's headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines of people, all thirsty, but he doesn't have enough water for them. He is angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds.
This man is curious. He says to the young woman: "What are you reading?"
"It is about Russia," says the girl.
"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.
The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity, though her eyes are red from dust. "I was best in the class. My teacher said I was best."
The young woman resumes her reading: she wants to get to the end of the paragraph.
The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother says: "Fanta makes them thirsty."
The Indian knows he shouldn't do this, but he reaches down to a great plastic container beside him, behind the counter, and pours out two plastic mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is she.
Now she hands over to him a plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman and the children watch him closely so that he doesn't spill any.
She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly but the paragraph fascinates her and she reads it again.
"Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same time visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man she cared for, Varenka looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a smile that said too much."
This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies of magazines, some pages of newspapers, girls in bikinis.
It is time for her to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off back along the four miles to her village. Outside, the lines of waiting women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it will cost this girl, going back home with the two clinging children. He would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really understand it.
Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenina stuck here on this counter in a remote Indian store? It is like this.
A certain high official, United Nations, as it happens, bought a copy of this novel in the bookshop when he set out on his journeys to cross several oceans and seas. On the plane, settled in his business-class seat, he tore the book into three parts. He looked around at his fellow passengers as he did this, knowing he would see looks of shock, curiosity, but some of amusement. When he was settled, his seatbelt tight, he said aloud to whomever could hear: "I always do this when I've a long trip. You don't want to have to hold up some heavy great book." The novel was a paperback, but, true, it is a long book. This man was used to people listening when he spoke. When people looked his way, curiously or not, he confided in them. "No, it is really the only way to travel."
When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the airhostess, and sent it back to his secretary, who was travelling in the cheaper seats. This caused much interest, condemnation, certainly curiosity, every time a section of the great Russian novel arrived, mutilated, but readable, in the back part of the plane.
Meanwhile, down in the Indian store, the young woman is holding on to the counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans, since she is a modern woman, but over them she has put on the heavy woollen skirt, part of traditional garb of her people: her children can easily cling on to it, the thick folds.
She sends a thankful look at the Indian, who she knows likes her and is sorry for her, and she steps out into the blowing clouds. The children have gone past crying, and their throats are full of dust anyway.
This is hard, oh yes, it is hard, this stepping, one foot after another, through the dust that lays in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard, hard - but she is used to hardship, is she not? Her mind is on the story she has been reading. She is thinking: "She is just like me, in her white headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry him. (She has not finished more than that one paragraph). Yes, and a man will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the children, yes, he will love me and look after me."
She thinks. My teacher said there was a library there, bigger than the supermarket, a big building, and it is full of books. The young woman is smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school. My children will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers - my teacher told me I could be a teacher. They will live far from here, earning money. They will live near the big library and enjoy a good life.
You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store?
It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it.
On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she would give her children once home, and drink a little herself. On she goes, through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.
We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.
We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.
Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.
© The Nobel Foundation 2007

Malaspina Answers Anne Cameron

2006-12-02T15:16:00.000-08:00

(In response Anne Cameron's letter to BC Bookworld nominating Malaspina University-College for the "Spud-Butt Award" over its treatment of authors, Frank Moher, Chair of Creative Writing and JOurnalism at Malaspina, submitted the following letter to BC Bookworld)

Dear Editor: As an admirer of Anne Cameron, I was sorry to see in your last issue that she had somehow got the idea that Malaspina University-College is anything other than a major supporter of writers and writing in British Columbia. Even before the creation of the Department of Creative Writing and Journalism in 1990, Malaspina regularly hosted readings by myriad writers, including Earle Birney, Michael Ondaatje, bp nichol, Jack Hodgins, Gary Geddes, Alice Munro, and, yes, Anne Cameron. As Randy Fred noted at your recent Reckoning 07 conference, Malaspina faculty assisted with the creation of Theytus Books, the first aboriginal press in Canada. Malaspina has presented honorary doctorates to Jack Hodgins and Carol Shields, and administers the Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Chair of Poetry, which in recent years has brought BC poets Patricia Young, Susan Musgrave, Gary Geddes, Patrick Lane, Robert Bringhurst, and Tom Wayman to our community, among others.Each year, at the launch of Portal, our annual literary magazine, we welcome a guest reader; these have included Christian B?Wayde Compton, Sheri-d Wilson, and bill bissett. And then, of course, there's the fact that Malaspina currently has 15 BC writers on its staff, delivering one of the most comprehensive, four-year undergraduate creative writing programs in Canada. In addition to the work they do with the most important writers we support -- our students -- Malaspina's Creative Writing and Journalism faculty supervise the Poets on Campus reading series in Nanaimo, the Cowichan Campus Reading Series in Duncan, the New Waves Festival of new plays, the Institute for Coastal Research chapbook series, and Incline, an online magazine written by our journalism students, among other ongoing projects.I'd like to invite Anne Cameron to attend the launch of the 2008 edition of Portal on April 8, at which Vancouver poet and MC Baba Brinkman will perform his Rap Canterbury Tales. I expect that event alone might give her reason to reconsider her remarks.

Sincerely,
Frank Moher
Chair, Department of Creative Writing and Journalism, Malaspina University-College

Venice: Good reads and good guides

2006-11-12T14:35:00.000-08:00

If Venice was captivating on our first 3 visits, is was a haven after the bustle of Rome. Bells, footsteps, lively voices and street music greeted us. One of the bars close to us was a meeting place for men who met late in the afternoon to sing. Venice is a city for people who walk--there is really no alternative except for the vaporetto.
We have always booked an apartment in one of the neighbourhoods and this year we chose to book through Cheap Venice, so it was with some trepidation that we approached it. We were pleasantly surprised. The apartment was well appointed and scrupulously clean. The kitchen had two espresso pots, a fine gas burner and a comfortable bed and bath, a hair dryer and a washing machine. Ludovico, our precise and helpful guide, met us at the Fondamento Nuovo vaporetto stop and guided us to the ground floor apartment on Calle Gabrielli. (www.cheapvenice.com)
This was a new neighbourhood for us. We traded our campo life in San Giacomo dell'Orio for the street life of Cannaregio. At 8 a.m. the calles teem with parents walking their children to school, often stopping at the little bakery across the street for a fresh bun. Next door, the bar is open for men to get their first ombre of the day. On our foray out each morning to pick up the International Herald Tribune at our neighbourhood kiosk, I could choose our morning rolls from three different bakeries.
We were surrounded by food markets of all kinds -- fruit, vegetable, meat, cheese, and a few supermarkets including the Coop store. Venetians do not handle fruit and vegetables with their bare hands. In the outdoor markets customers point to the produce they wish, and in the supermarkets, everyone wears a plastic glove. It's a serious matter when one disregards this custom.

In London, I picked up a paperback copy of CITY OF FALLING ANGELS by John Berendt. As Raincoaster suggested some time ago, it is a good choice to read in Venice. Berendt made a name for himself, writing about Savannah, Georgia in MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL. The fire which destroyed the Fenice Opera House in Venice some years ago, provides the framework for his new book. He includes other stories: that of a family of glass makers in Murano, a poet in Giacomo dell' Orio and in one of the most fascinating parts of the book he tells of the relationship between the administrator of the Guggenheim and his wife and Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound's companion. We found the home of Olga Rudge in Dosoduro and were thrilled to find her name on the door. She died some years ago but I think her family still owns the apartment. If you read Berendt's book you will understand the significance of this.

Having read the story of the fire and the restoration of the Fenice, we were enchanted with our tour of the theatre. We were interested to find that the huge clock above the stage had been replaced. The Fenice traditionally was not so much a place to hear opera as it was a place to see and be seen. Many years ago, it served as a community centre, where people met to play cards and gamble during the day. The clock was installed to let people know when it was time to leave. The architects have been faithful in its reproduction as in every other aspect of the building.

Years ago, before our first trip to Venice, I read Sally Vickers, MISS GARNETT'S ANGELS. Gardi's paintings of "Tobias and the Angel" are an important part of her novel. On each of our 3 previous trips, I have trudged over to Chiesa San Angelo Raffaele and always found it under wraps. This year to my delight, the church was open and I spent considerable time taking in the paintings.

I found two book outlets, one of which opens on to a canal on Calle Lunga Santa Formosa. There I found, William Rivere's BY THE GRAND CANAL, a marvelous novel that captures the beauty and mystery of the lagoon, the dynamics and decadence of family and the sense of the city. In the book stall next to Chiesa di Maria dei Miracoli, the jewel box church, I found HENRY JAMES VENICE and a copy of the poem CITY OF THE MIND.
Elizabeth Spencer's LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA is as good as it was the first time I read it. Her stories are set in Florence and Rome.
On a previous visit I was captivated by Barry Unsworth's STONE VIRGIN, a haunting book, that brings together Venice's past and present.
A THOUSAND DAYS IN VENICE by Marlena de Blasis recounts the true story of an American writer and chef who gives up her restaurant and home to move to Venice and marry a Venetian banker. It's an adventure that gives one a glimpse into how a change in culture and language can affect one's life. DeBlasis is at her best discussing food and the great Rialto market. I can vouch for the recipes at the end of the book, especially, the osso buco and the mushrooms.

Other books that have enriched my time in Venice include:
VENICE REVISITED by Paolo Barbaro comes closest to capturing those things about Venice I have never been able to articulate. Barbaro is an engineer who grew up in Venice, moved away to practice his profession and returned with his family. He knows and loves the city, has seen the change from what it was to a mainly tourist destination. He discusses the magic and moods of the city, the failing lagoon, the friends he has kept from childhood and the changes in their lives.

Teresa Aubin de Teran captures the city in her book of photographs
VENICE THE FOUR SEASONS.

VENICE THE COLLECTED TRAVELLER by Barry Kerper is a collection of writings about
Venice and the Veneto by the likes of Jan Morris ( who has a book on Venice)
Mark Bittman, Andrea Lea, Fred Plotkin, and Paul Hofmann.

Paul Morand, friend of Proust and Malraux had a lifelong attachment to Venice which is recorded in VENICE

J. G. Link's very fine VENICE FOR PLEASURE, is an excellent walking guide, bringing the city and its history to life. I found it easier to use after I had learned how to get around.

John Ruskin's STONES OF VENICE, takes on special meaning when one sits having coffee in front of the Calchina, his residence in Venice.

NOVELS

The only way to read Henry James is: first read Colm Toibin's THE MASTER, a good portion of which is set in Venice. Next read THE ASPERN PAPERS and finally
WINGS OF THE DOVE. Berendt draws an interesting parallel between the ASPERN PAPERS and the Olga Rugge story.

Donna Leon has written at least 15 mysteries set in Venice and if you are a mystery buff, read them whether you go to Venice or not. She captures the city in all seasons, and all its states of corruption, through the eyes of Commissario Guido Brunetti, his wife and university professor, Paola and their two teenage children.

David Hewson placed LUCIFER'S SHADOW in Venice. I haven't read it yet but it's on my list.

I loved AN EQUAL MUSIC by Vikram Seth and AS IT WAS IN HEAVEN by Niall Williams. Both are set partly in Venice.

GUIDEBOOKS

Besides J. G. Link's VENICE FOR PLEASURE, I found
VENICE THE KNOPF GUIDE to be especially good. Whether you are travelling down the
Grand Canal,trying to identify the palazzios and their architecture or the paintings by Bellini , Cannelleto and Tintoretto in various churches it is very helpful. It's a good guide to The Accademia (art gallery) and Peggy Guggenheim's Museum.
LONELY PLANET VENICE is terrific for practical information.
Sandra Gustafson's GOOD EATS IN ITALY took us to wonderful gelaterias, wine bars,
enotecas, osterias, pasticceris, and food markets. It took us on a journey by vaporetto to Sant'Erasmo, the garden island where we had an authentic Venetian multicourse seafood meal at Ca'Vignotto Reservations are required. The food is excellent, and being in the company of large groups of Italian families and friends is great fun.

We purchased weekly vaporetto passes. They are expensive but worth while if you are staying for a week or two. We were able to travel to the airport, all the outlying islands: Murano, the glass island, Burano, the colourful fishing village, and Torcello which reeks of ancient history as well as Sant'Erasmo. The passses also allow free entrance to the city washrooms, which are well maintained.

A good map of Venice is essential. The best one I found is
INSIGHT FLEXIMAP TO VENICE. It's plasticized and every street is named.
There is no question everyone except Venetians get hopelessly lost--when it happens relax because there will be a wonderful sight just around the corner, perhaps a church with a Bellini painting or a Moldavian trio playing gypsy music. There are signs throughout the city that point the way to vaporetto stops and if you follow them you will find your way out. Really all one needs to do, is fall in step with the crowd (it's all single file) and surprisingly you will find the shortcuts. One of the secrets to enjoying the city is to find your favorite coffee bar, wine bar or park bench in a campo and watch the life of the city pass before your eyes. Venice is a remarkably small city of neighbourhoods, everyone worth exploring.

Rome -Travel guides

2006-11-12T13:34:00.000-08:00

Guidebooks that suggest one can pop into Rome for a day or two should be highly suspect. One could spend all that time in a line at the Vatican Museum.

We had 9 days in Rome and we spent the first 3 exploring our neighbourhood. I found our apartment on the internet on HOLIDAY RENTALS.COM.UK ROME & LAZIO and selected
property 57930. It was an excellent choice. Margaret Merode, the owner was most helpful.(merodepratesi@tin.it) The apartment besides having a small kitchen and a bathtub, is close to many sights. It is reasonable, and blissfully quiet, an uncommon state in Rome.

The most useful guides book were:
LONELY PLANET ROME
RICK STEVE'S ROME His little drawings are very helpful--especially those that
explain the bus system
EYEWITNESS TOP TEN ROME This also has a guide to the buses.
DORLING KINDERSLEY TRAVEL GUIDE TO ROME or THE KNOPF GUIDE TO ROME
The Casa per Ferie S. Maria Alle Fornaci dei Padri Trinitaria puts
out a terrific small guide and map. I suspect you have to stay there
to get this.
MAP: LET'S GO ROME plasticized map is readable.

The best guide to restaurants in Rome is
BEST EATS IN ITALY by Sandra Gustafson
We had a wonderful dinner on the patio at Al Fontanone in Trastevere
--an antipasto plate, lasagne, Roman artichokes, succulent roast lamb
and vignole, a vegetable stew accompanied by the house wine. Pino, our lovely host brought us glasses of limoncello and vin santo with biscotti after dinner. Needless to say we returned.

We had terrific pasta and pizza at Da Francesco, located near the Pantheon.
Both restaurants are busy and reasonable.

Because I love to cook, I wisely took along
ITALIAN FOOD by Elizabeth David and I found a copy of
THE CONCISE GASTRONOMY OF ITALY by Anna del Conte.

Other reading:
I took along two Ian Pears books, but wasn't as taken with them as I expected.
I enjoyed David Hewson's SEASON FOR THE DEAD. Nic Costa, detective and
Caravaggio buff, finds himself caught up in several murders which echo some of the content of Caragaggio's work and have lots to do with Vatican politics.

Reading my way through Rome

2006-10-20T04:14:00.000-07:00

October is a wonderful month to be in Rome. But is one ever prepared for one's first trip to this magnificent city? I found I was overwhelmed by the history, the art, the museums, the campos, and the churches. We had booked our trip some months in advance and our very comfortable apartment was on the tiny Calle Orbitelli just off Via Guilla, a street laid out in the 16th century. We were within walking distance of the Pantheon, Piazza Navona with it's magnificent Bernini fountains, Campo Dei'Firoi and its energetic outdoor market, St Peters and the hip Trastevere.

It took a day or two to find our way around the neighbourhood, locating a supermarket and vegetable stand, a wine bar and a pasticceria.

Before we left, I had assembled a sizeable bibliography of fiction and non-fiction set in Rome. It wasn't easy to choose 'THE' books for the trip. Heavy suitcases are responsible for havoc on vacations. I decided to focus on Caravaggio's paintings. Jonathan Harr's wonderful THE LOST PAINTING, and Sally Vicker's THE OTHER SIDE OF YOU, piqued my curiosity. I chose to bring Francine Prose'
CARAVAGGIO PAINTER OF MIRACLES. In 146 pages, she succinctly discusses his life which was chaotic, and guides the reader through his paintings giving us insights into why many people think he is the first modern painter. She highly recommends a long work, CARAVAGGIO A LIFE, by Helen Langdon, which I will read on my return.

My first stop to see a Caravaggio was the Palazzio Corsini, only to discover that they had shipped it off to Dusseldorf for a big show. I did enjoy this lovely palazzio built in 1510 and displaying paintings by among others, Rubens, Murillo and Reni. Reni painted at the same time as Caravaggio and Caravaggio disliked his work, but I loved it.

Not all the Caravaggio's in Rome had been shipped to Dusseldorf and I found some in the Borghese Gallery, The Palazzo Barbarini and the Vatican Museum. It was an education for me that I thoroughly enjoyed.

GENIUS IN THE DESIGNS, BERNINI, BORROMINI AND THE RIVALRY THAT TRANSFORMED ROME by Jake Morrissey was my next book. It was, if I say so myself, a brilliant choice.
Talented and ambitious, these two larger than life architects could not have been more different. While Borromini was difficult and prickly, Bernini had the skills of a diplomat. They met in the building yard of St. Peters and soon became bitter enemies. As the greatest architects of their era, they designed some of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Morrissey interweaves the lives of each with the politics of the time so dependent on the currrent pope's priorities.
This book proved to be a wonderful guide through St. Peters and the great Piazza.
Much of Bernini's work including The Baldacchino, the stained glass window, the sculpture of Alexander VII, was explained by Morrissey.

In Piazza Navona, home of the great Four Rivers fountain designed by Bernini we found, Sant'Agnese in Agone, the facade of which was designed by Borromini, using concave and convex shapes. Close by is a miniature masterpiece of Baroque, St. >Ivos designed by Borromini. In fact everywhere we went we found the brilliant creations of these two men.

MICHELANGELO AND THE POPE'S CEILING by Ross King brings alive the four years in Michelangelo's life as he created the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Visiting the Sistine Chapel was not the great experience I expected. The crowd and guards trying to keep everyone quiet took away from the experience. That aside, King in his book,
writes of the politics of the church, the pressure on Michelangelo, Michelangelo's own ill health and financial difficulties, and his differences with the young Raphael
I made the world of Michelangelo come alive.

More later on the guide books and maps we used as well as some fiction.

Bus Griffiths

2006-10-20T04:01:00.000-07:00

Bus Griffiths was a gift to the book world. We met Bus and Marg when Harbour Publishing put out NOW YOU'RE LOGGING. It was our first fall in the book store and I expected a logger--one of those big strapping fellows. When Bus walked through the door, imagine my surprise, to find this slight gentle man introducing himself.
And what a lovely man he was--he doffed his cap and sat to exchange stories with some of the old loggers who dropped in. Some years later when we saw him again, he told the story of having an art show in Vancouver. Some of his old friends spent a very long time examining one painting. Then they came and said "You know Bus, I don't think you got that rope quite right." I expect they were wrong. The reviews for Bus's book commented on the the astonishing detail he included and praised dit as an invaluable tool for researchers. It was very special to have met Bus and
and learn about logging from a pro.

Windley makes the cut!

2006-10-03T15:35:00.001-07:00

Break out the champagne! Nanaimo author Carol Windley has made the Giller shortlist!

Toronto, ON - Today, in a morning press conference that drew over 100 media and members of the publishing industry, The Scotiabank Giller Prize announced its 2006 shortlist. Selected by an esteemed jury panel comprised of The Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson and distinguished Canadian authors Alice Munro and Michael Winter, the five finalists were chosen from 101 books submitted for consideration by 36 publishing houses from every region of the country.
The jury named the finalists. They are:

Rawi Hage for his novel De Niro’s Game, published by House of Anansi Press
Vincent Lam for his short story collection, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, published by Doubleday Canada
Pascale Quiviger for her novel The Perfect Circle, translation by Sheila Fischman, published by Cormorant Books
Gaétan Soucy for his novel The Immaculate Conception, translation by Lazer Lederhendler, published by House of Anansi Press
Carol Windley for her short story collection, Home Schooling, published by Cormorant Books

Two BC Writers on Giller Longlist

2006-09-17T14:49:00.000-07:00

Two BC authors appear on this year's Giller Longlist, just released. David Chariandry, who is listed for his first novel, Soucouyant (Arsenal), is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University. Claire Mulligan, who is listed for her rollicking tale of the BC gold rush, The Reckoning of Boston Jim, lives in the US now but came originally from BC.

2007 long list includes:
David Chariandy, Soucouyant.
Sharon English, Zero Gravity.
Barbara Gowdy, Helpless.
Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air.
Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes.
Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather.
D.R. MacDonald, Lauchlin of the Bad Heart.
Claire Mulligan,The Reckoning of Boston Jim.
Mary Novik, Conceit.
Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero.
Daniel Poliquin, A Secret Between Us.
M.G. Vassanji, The Assassin's Song.
Michael Winter, The Architects Are Here.
Richard Wright, October.
Alissa York, Effigy.
Author and 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner David Bergen, writer Camilla Gibb, and poet and artist Lorna Goodison are the 2007 jury.

Cam Stirs the Pot

2006-09-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

Our dearly beloved Nanaimo-bred author Anne Cameron, now of Tahsis, has struck some sparks (No! Not Cam! Shocking!) by announcing in BC Bookworld's 20th Anniversary issue that "For me, the Bookstore on Bastion Street was the best damned bookstore in the country and did far more for writers in B.C. than Malaspina College, which should get the spud-butt award for the spread of illiteracy in thisprovince. They, and some other colleges and universities, have acted as ifthe printed word was dinosaur dung..."

This has elicited a query from a defender of Malaspina to the effect, "Will you tell me why you think this of Malaspina?"

To which the mild-mannered author replies: "Sir:For absolute years I made sure Malaspina College knew the Canada Council would pay writers to give readings, workshops, etc., and for absolute years if it hadn't been for The Bookstore On Bastion Street there wouldn't have been a Canadian writer doing anything at all in Nanaimo.Malaspina College has done amazingly little to recognize the writers in the region, on this Island, on this coast or in this province.At a time when JACK HODGINS, one of the finest Canadian novelists, was teaching at NDSS, Malaspina College could not seem to find time, or interest, to have him do a reading.I have done one reading at Mal Col. in more than twenty years.I don't actually think Malaspina College deserves the Spud Butt award. I don't think it deserves any awards at all."

So what do you think, dear readers? With all due respect, Cam has not been around the Malaspina campus much recently, and perhaps things have changed from the era she references. We would like to think so. But the question is fair: has our local u done its part to recognize and nurture local lit?

And dare we ask what the Spud-Butt award is?

Sally Vickers, Dede Crane, James Lasdun, Jonathan Harr and a Magical Experience

2006-09-11T18:21:00.000-07:00

Hi Raincoaster:

I think we may need to hear more about The Forsythe Saga--I suspect I missed out on it along the way. I do agree with you about Bill Gaston--he is very special--more about that later.

I walked into the Vancouver Public Library in July. I spent a good deal of my time in Vancouver at the Library wondering how to approach writing a blog. On the way to my favorite corner, I passed by the New Book Shelf and found an old friend, Sally Vickers,
in the form of her new novel The Other Side of You. A few years ago just as we were about to leave for Venice, I discovered Miss Garnet's Angel and I loved it. Because we don't have interlog yet (interlibrary borrowing), I stashed the book and returned to read it the next day. Alas, I had barely begun before we had to return to Nanaimo. , I immediately ordered it from the Vancouver Island Regional Library. It has arrived and not only have I read it but I have had the magical experience of reading it in conjunction with three other books that build one upon the other.

Sometime ago, I talked about The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr. This is the mesmerizing tale of the discovery of a Caravaggio painting, The Taking of Christ, that had been missing for over 200 years. Harr introduced me to Carvaggio and his life.
Caravaggio and many of his works particularly the "Emmaus" paintings as well as "David" and others are at the centre of The Other Side of You by Sally Vickers. It's astonishing how Vickers has brought Caravaggio to life.
David McBride, a psychiatrist, has as his patient Elizabeth Cruickshank. Elizabeth is suicidal and non-communicative. It is only when she mentions Caravaggio that McBride finds a way to interact with her and discover her great loss. McBride is also haunted by death. As a youngster, he witnessed the death of his six-year old brother and has carried the emotional baggage all his life. It is through the remarkable Thomas Carrington, an art historian, that Carvaggio's paintings and their meanings come alive for the characters in the book and for the reader. Vickers explores the power of art, passion, love and truth. As an added bonus she sets much of the book in Rome where we accompany her characters as they experiencence the art, sculpture and history of this glorious city.

I was reminded of Dede Crane's splendid book Sympathy just released this year. At the heart of this story is the relationship between a physician Dr. Michael Myatt and Kerry Taylor, a severly damaged woman. Kerry's life is shattered when her husband and son are killed in an automobile accident. Kerry, a retired ballet dancer, is in a catatonic state. Dr. Myatt's therapy is considered controversial and some of his colleagues are suspicious of his methods of treatment but his work has produced positive results. Myatt has much to learn about his life as he comes to terms with a childhood trauma that puts him at risk. In addition to dealing with the death of her husband and son, Kerry has to work through a difficult mother-daughter relationship. It is in a diary to her great friend Hugo, former dancing partner, that we learn about Kerry's life and her struggles.
Crane has peopled her book with wonderful characters; the belligerent Marcus, Johnny B, the victim of a terrible anxiety, and obsessed with Kerry, and Norma who is grieving the death of her daughter from breast cancer.
This is a story about the relationship between the mind and the body and how the wisdom of the body can aid in the healing of the mind. Crane's intimate knowledge of the world of dance informs the book and its structure. As in Sally Vicker's book, as both doctor and patient became aware of hidden secrets they are better able to heal. Dede Crane writes with humour and compassion.

In the midst of all this reading, the library called to let me know that Seven Lies by James
Lasdun had arrived. The book has had wonderful reviews and is on the Booker Prize long list.
What a startling contrast to all of the above. The title is taken from a quote by Martin Luther
"Every lie must begat seven more lies if it is to resemble the truth and adopt truth's aura."
Stefan Vogel grows up in East Germany. As a very young man he finds himself in a situation where the first lie takes hold. He longs to live in America and fantasizes about what his life might become. Through a series of dangerous maneuvers, he realizes his dream and makes his way to America with the wife he adores. His life begins to unravel when secrets he thought were locked away behind the Berlin Wall surface after the Wall comes down. Most of my favorite novels are ones in which I can find at least one character I like. This is not that kind of book, but it is deeply engaging. Just as Sally Vickers' The Other Side of You is concerned with finding
truth, Seven Lies, is about the destruction of a human being when lie builds upon lie.

It's not often that the books I read at any one time, build so beautifully on one another.
I have found that I have become preoccupied with how the stories compliment one another.
When that happens for me it's magical.

This blog began with " a woman walked into the library-- In the new Martha Grimes
"a man walked into a pub" but that's for another day.

The Lost Painting Jonathan Harr available in paperback this fall
The Other Side of You Sally Vickers harcover available from the library
Sympathy Dede Crane paperback available now
Seven Lies James Lasdun hardcover available from the library

Nanaimo Celebrates with its Authors

2006-09-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

Over 100 people turned out for a celebration of Grandparent's Day with a reading by
Carol Matthews from her new book The First Three Years of a Grandmother's Life.
Rick Scott opened the afternoon with his song "Grandma". The reading ended with a standing ovation for Carol. If you were up and about at 7:00 a.m., you may have heard Sheryl McKay's interview with Carol on CBC.
Some of the proceeds of the book sales will benefit the work of Adrianne Dartnell and Rick Lennert who spend several months each year working in Cambodia and other South-east Asia countries building shelters and supporting women and children.
To order the book contact:

Carol Matthews
102 Pirates Lane
Nanaimo, B. C. V9R 6R1
wayword@telus.net
Book cost 15.95
Postage 1.75

Total 17.70

Nanaimo writer Carol Windley on the long list for the Giller Prize

2006-09-11T14:52:00.000-07:00

For the first time the Giller Prize jury has released the long list.. There is great cause for rejoicing in Nanaimo --Carol Windley's book Home Schooling, one of the 15 books selected, is a collection of short stories published by Cormorant Press. It is interesting to note that 7 of the titles are published by Canadian literary presses.

Carol Windley Home Schooling
David Adams Richards The Friends of Meager Fortune
Caroline Adderson Pleased to Meet You
Todd Babiak The Garneau Block
Randy Boyagoda Governor of the Northern Province
Douglas Coupland jPod
Alan Cumyn The Famished Lover
Rawi Hage DeNiro's Game
Kenneth J Harvey Inside
Wayne Johnstson The Custodian of Paradise
Vincent Lam Bloodletting and other Cures
Annette Lapointe Stolen
Pascale Quiviger The Perfect Circle
Gaetan Soucy The Immaculate Conception
Russsell Wangersky The Hour of Bad Decisions

Philosophy Made Simple by Robert Hellinga

2006-09-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

There are two books entitled Philosophy Made Simple. This book is a novel by Robert Hellinga, who in the mid-90's, wrote The Sixteen Pleasures. In The Sixteen Pleasures, he writes of Margo Harrington who leaves for Italy after the death of her mother. In Florence she participates with many other to rescue works of art and books that have been ruined by floods. When her money runs out a friend suggests she move into a convent. Among the books in need of repair, she finds a priceless volume of 16 erotic drawings that accompany 16 sonnets by Pietro Arentino. She restores the volume and arranges for it to be auctioned for a great deal of money. The convent which has faced closure now has the money to continue to operate. Hellinga brings alive the world of book and art restoration.

Hellinga's new book, Philosophy Made Simple, takes up the story of the Harringtons focusing on Margo's father. Rudy, now 60, is still grieving the loss of his wife, a real presence in this book. He finds himself bogged down by memories. His daughters are leading busy lives. Rudy decides to leave his job at Becker's Wholesale where he has been in charge of buying avocados and find an avocado grove in Texas where he can grow them. He takes with him the book Philosophy Made Simple written by Siva Singh. As he reads each of the philosophers from Plato to Schopenhaur, he meditates on the meaning of his own life.

Rudy's life is full, learning how to grow avocados, dealing with his health problems and making arrangements for his daughter Molly's wedding to TJ, a wedding which has its own complications--the ceremony is to be Hindu.

Rudy's new friends include Menardo, who besides managing the avocado grove introduces Rudy to "cultural Fridays" at an elegant bordello across the border.
Then there is his next door neighbour, the Russian who looks after Norma Jean, an elephant who paints. Nandini, mother of the groom, who owns a tea farm in India also becomes a wonderful friend. The star of this novel is Norma Jean a loveable, smart elephant.

All in all it's a wonderful novel, full of humour and wisdom.

Sixteen Pleasures is available in paperback

Philosophy Made Simple by Robert Hellinga is still in hardcover.

History of Love by Nicole Kraus

2006-09-03T13:55:00.000-07:00

The plot of The History of Love is so complex that it is difficult to do a summary that does it justice. If you decide to read it and I hope you do, I suspect you will feel compelled to re-read it.

Leo Gursky, now in his 80's, arrived in New York from Poland after World War II. He feels so invisible that when he goes out he creates disturbances just to assure himself he is alive. Leo has lost three things in his life: the woman he has always loved, the son who doesn't know that Leo is his father, and the novel he wrote as a young man entitled The History of Love. He has no idea that this book has been published in Chile under another person's name.

Charlotte translated The History of Love for an South American contact. She named her daughter Alma after the heroine in this book. Teen-aged Alma, while trying to cope with her
unstable brother and her widowed mother, is determined to find the story behind her name.
Leo and Alma find one another and Leo finds his book is not lost.

You can see what I mean about a complicated plot and there's more. Kraus's characters are eccentric. She brings the stories of each together brilliantly, exploring love and loss in each of their lives. She explores the power of imagination to provide for loss.

History of Love is available in paperback

Big Bookie Baffled By Booker

2006-09-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

If you guessed wrong about the booker shortlist, don't feel bad. One of London's top bookies picked a book to win all themarbles that didn't even make the cut. Prior to the announcement of the shortlist today, London bookie William Hill made 'The Nightwatch' by Sarah Waters and 'Black Swan Green' by David Mitchell the 5/1 joint favourites to win the Prize. The former is in the running, but Mitchell was bounced.
Hills odds on all longlist titles:
6/1 Peter Carey - 'A Love Story',
8/1 Andrew O'Hagan - 'Be Near Me',
10/1 Barry Unsworth - 'The Ruby In Her Naval',
10/1 Howard Jacobson - 'Kalooki Nights',
12/1 Clare Messud - 'The Emperor's Children',
12/1 Hisham Matar - 'In The Country Of Men',
12/1 Kiran Desai - 'The InheritanceOf Loss',
14/1 Edward St Aubyn - 'Mother's Milk,
14/1 Kate Grenville - 'The Secret River',
16/1 Naeem Murr - 'The Perfect Man,
16/1 Jon McGregor - 'So Many Ways To Begin',
16/1 Mary Lawson - 'The Other Side Of The Bridge',
16/1 M J Hyland - 'Carry Me Down,
20/1 Bar the rest

The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr

2006-08-29T17:19:00.000-07:00

The Lost Painting will be available in paperback in November.

The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr

2006-08-29T16:40:00.000-07:00

In 1994, Jonathan Harr had just completed but not published his wildly successful book A Civil Action. Finding himself out of money, he accepted an assignment to write a piece for the New York Times, telling the story of the recovery of a Caravaggio painting, "The Taking of Christ" that had been missing for 200 years. Harr was so taken with the story that he decided to pursue it in more depth. He returned to Italy, studied Italian and began to put the pieces together. The result is The Lost Painting. And what a wonderful exploration of the art world it is. I don't know much about art but I am interested in all things Italian. Harr brings to the book, a portrait of the tempermental and sometimes violent Caraveggio, who roamed the streets
of Rome, drinking and carousing, often causing a great deal of trouble. He has been identified by some as the first "realist" painter. The people in his religious paintings are the people you would have found in the streets at the time. He invented the dark background with a single source of light outside the painting. Very few of his paintings remain so finding a lost one is of tremendous importance to the art world.

Francesca Cappeletti, a young art researcher from Rome, working with her friend and colleague Laura Testa, were researching two identical copies of "John the Baptist" trying to identify the authentic one. While examining archives in a dank palazzio belonging to the Antici-Mattei family, they stumbled on a clue as to the origins of another Caravaggio "The Taking of Christ".

Harr takes us from the Roman world of Caravaggio to libraries in London and Scotland and finally to a small gallery in Dublin. He brings to life the personalities of the important people in the story: Francesca Cappeletti who doggedly follows clue after clue; Sir Denis Mahon, an elderly, English art historian who provides important information and help to Francesca; and finally Sergio Beneditti, an Italian art restorer working in the Art Gallery of Dublin. As well, the author gives us an insight into the world of art, its politics and jealousies. The book reads like detective fiction. Proving a painting is authentic is an onerous task. Whether you are an expert in art history or a novice you will find it is impossible to put this book down once you have dipped into it.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville

2006-08-29T16:15:00.000-07:00

Kate Grenville, the Australian author who won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection, has written a remarkable book based on the story of her ancestors. Set in Australia in the early 1800's, The Secret River tells the story of William Thorton and his wife Sara who come from a poverty-stricken life in London where William was convicted of theft. A life sentence in the penal colony saves him from the gallows. Life is not easy in the colony and it takes years for Thornton to earn his freedom. When he does, he becomes a trader on the river. His dream is to find land of his own. He finds that land on Hawkesbury River and takes Sal and his growing family to live in an unprotected area. It is a crude and uneasy existence. Aborigines do not take well to the interlopers, cutting down the brush and planting fields of corn. Grenville is brilliant at portraying the conflict between the illiterate Thornton, who is desperate to find a way to accomodate the aboriginal population, other settlers who are much more antagonistic and militant and the aborigines who are determined to drive the settlers away. Sal and William have the grit and determination to survive in this hostile environment. Ironically as Thornton realizes his dream of owning land, he also understands that Sal feels is imprisoned by it and longs to return to London.

Securing the land comes at a terrible cost that takes its toll on William and Sal. Grenville explores marriage and the pressures it must absorb with sensitivity. It's a wonderful read.

The Secret River was published this year and is available in hardcover.
Kte Grenville is a Booker Prize nominee.

Poet of Tolstoy Park

2006-08-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

I read the Poet of Tolstoy Park by Eric Brewer when it first came out in hardcover, about a year ago and because it is now in paperback, I think it's a book worth searching out.

It's the story of 67 year old Henry Stuart who has been diagnosed with terminal, non-contagious tuberculosis. It's 1927 and Henry, a retired professor lives in Idaho. His doctor has recommended that he move to a warmer climate and Henry, a widower, chooses to leave his home, his two sons and his best friend to journey to Fairhope Alabama, an intentional community near Mobile. He divests himself of everything, except at few clothes (giving away his boots to a porter on the train as he approaches Mobile) and a few books, including Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom, a book of poems by Rilke and a small sketch book. He does have his loom sent, so that he can continue weaving.

Inspired by Tolstoy's beliefs about land and wealth, Henry purchases 10 acres and builds a small round house of concrete block. His journey is to "perfect" the soul awarded to him." and he believes that one's unwillingness to give up possessions is the true spiritual burden.

Henry reclusiveness is hard for his neighbours to understand as is his distain for wearing shoes or purchasing those things that might make his life easier. This philosopher -poet is however happy to talk his ideas, which are not always popular.

Sonny Brewer, a bookseller in Fairhope Alabama has done a remarkable job of telling Henry's story. He brings to life the important people in Henry's life both in Idaho and Alabama. Interestingly 'those last few months of Henry's life' stretched into years and included visits by people like Clarence Darrow.

The First Three Years of a Grandmother's Life

2006-08-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

Grandmothers are truly coming into their own. Many of us have had experiences with our grandparents that have enriched our lives. I had two remarkable ones. From one I learned how to get things done and from the other I learned about the power of stories. Stephen Lewis is working with grandmothers to solve many difficult problems in Africa. In Canada and around the world, grandmothers are taking on the task of bringing up children who are parentless.

So it is timely to find the book, The First Three Years of a Grandmother's Life, written by Carol Matthews. Carol has worked as a hospital social worker, an Executive Director of Nanaimo Family Life, and as an instructor and Dean at Malaspina University College. It may be that as Charlotte's grandmother, she has entered the steepest learning curve of her life. This book, based on a series of articles that were written for the journal Relational Child and Youth Care Practice, is illuminating. Charlotte is her own person, as Carol recognized from the moment Charlotte was born. It's not every grandmother that celebrates a granddaughter's ability to say "no" but Carol understands how important it is for Charlotte to do just that. Matthews brings the role of grandmothering into the 21st Century. When Carol and Charlotte view the Vancouver Santa Claus Parade at Christmas, Carol experiences the anomalies of the season: the two kinds of bag people--the shoppers, and the homeless. Over and over, Carol brings an awareness of the complex world our grandmothers find themselves in, a world that can be depressing and demoralizing. Somehow, the wonder and magic, and the fiddling angels that a child sees makes the world a better place to be. There is wisdom, humour and compassion in this book.
Carol will celebrate Grandparents Day, September 10, with a reading at 3:00 p.m. at St Pauls Anglican Hall in Nanaimo. Do join us.

Technology!!!

2006-08-16T20:59:00.000-07:00

I have loved hearing from all the people who have responded to this site. The design is due to the genius of Howard White who understands how a site can work. Last night, I found the Booker long list but I also found I couldn't find my way to post it. It takes a great deal of courage to tell you how hopelessly illiterate I am when it comes to technology. If my good neighbour, Mark, and my good friend Howie weren't close at hand I would be in deep trouble. I do love this site and eventually I hope to master it. Finding books, that are exceptional, is one of life's greatest highs. Having the opportunity to tell people is very special.

Booker Longlist

2006-08-16T09:51:00.001-07:00

Here it is! The Mann Booker Prize has just announced its longlist of nominees for 2006. In some ways this is the most useful part of the whole Booker process for booklovers. The final choice is inevitably controversial, and even the shortlist often seems to be curiously arbitrary. But the longlist does serve as a pretty interesting roundup of the year's top novels. In English. By Commonwealth writers. Here it is:

Carey., Peter Theft A love story
Desai, Kiran The Inheritance of Loss
Edric, Robert Gathering the Water
Gordimer Nadine Get a Life
Grenville, Kate The Secret River
Hyland, M.J Carry me Down
Jacobson, Howard Kalooki Nights
Lasdun, James Seven Lies
Lawson, Mary The Other Side of the Bridge (Canadian)
McGregor, Jon So many Ways to Begin
Matar, Hisham In the Country of Men
Messud, Claire The Emperor's children
Mitchell. David Black Swan Green
Murr, Naeem The Perfect Man
O'Hagan, Andrew Be Near Me
Robertson, James The Testament of Gideon Mack
St Aubyn, Edward Mother;s Milk
Unsworth, Barry The Ruby in Her navel
Waters, Sarah The Night Watch

If you use Vancouver Island Regional Library you will be able to
order about 10 of the titles. There is no listing for the other 9.

Bus Griffiths dies

2006-08-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry to have to say Bus Griffiths died Sept. 25. Bus was a lifelong logger from Fanny Bay who painted and drew in his retirement years, publishing the classic graphic novel Now You're Logging in 1978 and illustrating Bush Poems by Peter Trower as well as Patrick and the Backhoe by Howard White. His meticulously detailed oil paintings showing old-time logging scenes and wildflife are avidly collected by conoisseurs of logging and of folk art. Bus was a privilege to know, a simple, sweet guy who somehow was never sullied by the moral confusion of the age he passed through. To him the original good guys were still the good guys and the bad guys the bad guys, just like they told him in school. And somehow when you looked through his eyes, you could still see that uncomplicated, uncompromised world as well. It is there in all his pictures and stories, and that is their magic. He loved nature and his love of it shines through in his meticulous detailing of weather, of the bark on trees and in the posture of the proud four-prong buck. It is there in the innocent satisfaction he took in his work as a logger, only concerned with doing his job to perfection and never conflicted by the latter-day controversy that surrounded it. He was short, but built like a fireplug and took endless pride in his physical strength. Even as a very old man, there was something of the little boy about Bus. He enjoyed the celebrity his art brought him in his latter years, and kept up his spirits even after a series of strokes landed him in extended care three years ago, but he'd had a rough time the last six months and only a few days ago told Marg he was ready to go. The memorial will be in the Union Bay Church Oct. 21 at 1 PM with a reception at the Fanny Bay Hall follwing at 2 PM.

Contributed by: Raincoaster

HEAT Bill Buford

2006-08-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

Five years ago, on a visit to Venice, we hopped aboard Vaporetto 13 to have dinner at Ca' Vignotto on Sant'Erasmo Island. The meal, served in the early afternoon, included three pastas. The lasagna was unlike anything I had ever tasted, tissue-thin layers of pasta enveloping a delicate besciamella sauce. I have dreamed about that pasta.

After reading HEAT by Bill Buford, I know why I haven't experienced the taste since and why I am unlikely to even in Italy. The tradition of hand-made foods is declining.

Bill Buford, formerly fiction editor of the New Yorker magazine, is a home cook.
He invited Mario Battali the infamous chef of Babbo Restaurant in New York City to dinner, and somehow, gained permission to become a "kitchen slave" at Babbo.
Buford brings alive, the larger-than-life genius that Batalli is. He introduces us to the many cooks that make the restaurant function: the impossible Frankie; Andy,
whose obsession is to open a Spanish place, and the Latinos who truly make the kitchen work. As Buford, moves from kitchen slave to line cook we learn about the politics of the business, the sexism, the impossible standards for performance.
Along the way, Buford has many lessons to learn: he destroys 18 branzini, his first night on the fish station. Finally, he masters his station "cooking, fast, hard, effectively --the most satisfying evening of labor I'd ever experienced".

Not satisfied with the knowledge he has gained in his long apprenticehip, Buford decides to travel to Italy to learn pasta-making from Gianni and Betta, Batalli's teachers. It is there that he learns that the success of the pasta is due to the "pastina", a local woman who uses special rollers to produced the tissue-thin dough. In the process, he spends a great deal of time learning Italian so he
can read 15th century manuscripts, hoping to discover when eggs were first used in
pasta making. Obsessive!!

Buford returns to Italy, first to master the butchering of pork and later beef. The gifted, Dante-spouting butcher is his teacher but his real lessons come from the Maestro, the meat-cutter. He's is terribly disappointed to find that when he returns to New York, no one understands the cuts of meats he has learned about. There is much about the importance of local products in Italian food preparation.

The book is full of in-depth profiles of everyone he meets. The humour and there is alot of it, is mostly directed at himself. Amateur cooks will read and reread the
techniques and procedures he describes.
As Buford said in an interview, " One of the great charismas of food is that is about cultures and grandmothers and death and art and self-expressions and family and society and at the same time--it is just about dinner.

Buford is an exceptionally good storyteller. I borrowed this book from the Vancouver Island Regional Library, but I must have my own copy.

CERTAINITY by Madeline Thien

2006-08-12T16:17:00.000-07:00

When Madeleine Thein's short story collection, SIMPLE RECIPES, appeared a few years ago, I became a fan. CERTAINTY, her first novel is terrific. It takes place over a period of 50 years in Canada, Asia and Europe. Thein handles the transitions seamlessly.

Gail Lim, daughter of Chinese immigrants is looking for the untold stories in her family. As a radio documentary producer, she is obsessed with finding a way to decode a diary written during World War II by a POW in a Japanese camp in Asia.
A friend in Amsterdam is working on it with her.

Gail's father, Matthew, was a child in North Borneo during the Japanese occupation. To protect his family, Matthew's father collaborated with the Japanese. When the war was over, Matthew, unable to deal with the shame of his father's actions, left his village, first for Australia where he attended university and subsequently, Vancouver accompanied by his wife, the Hong Kong born, Clara. He is haunted by scenes from the war and by the relationship he had with his beloved childhood friend, Ani.

Gail travels from Vancouver to Holland to read the diary that has been decoded and then to find Spike Vermeullen, a photographer from Jakarta, who married Ani.
The story is told in turn by Matthew, Clara, Ansel, Gail's physician husband, Ani and Gail. Scenes set in the jungles of North Borneo, Jakarta during the riots, and Strathcona in Vancouver are filled with wonderful detail. Bit by bit we discover the hidden stories that haunt each of the characters.

With war much on our minds these days, this novel brings alive the terrible costs to
it victims, especially the children. I think you will enjoy it.

The Attack

2006-08-12T14:51:00.000-07:00

As the tragic war has been unfolding in Lebanon these past few weeks, I have been immersed in THE ATTACK by Yasmina Kadra. Some of you will recognize him as the author of the SWALLOWS OF KABUL. Kadra is the pseudomym of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian army officer.

The novel begins in Tel Aviv, at the Ichilov Hospital where Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli surgeon is working to save the lives of victims of a suicide bomber.
A suicide bomber has entered a fast food restaurant and killed 19 people, 11 of them children.

Dr. Jaafari's nightmare begins when his wife, the beautiful Sihem, is identified as the suicide bomber. He cannot comprehend what has happened. He had no inkling that his wife lived another life. Jaafari felt he had successfully bridged the Arab- Israeli divide by becoming a respected surgeon in an Israeli hospital, and making friends within his community. He and Sihem lived in a lovely home and he had realized the dream of his father, becoming a healer. Now he has lost everything. A note posted by Sihem just before the bombing convinces him that in fact she was the bomber. He is obsessed with finding out how Sihem could have
belonged to a terrorist cell and carried out this barbaric act while she seemingly lived an idyllic life with him.

His journey takes him from his home in Tel Aviv, where he was arrested, interrogated and badly beaten by his neighbours to a seaside village accompanied by his friend and doctor, Kim. He continues on to Bethlehem, a city "filled with hordes of refugees living in hovels". He finds his brother-in-law, Yassar who will provide some information and more importantly confronts the radical Imam Marwan.

We the readers are on a journey with Dr. Jaafari to discover what fuels terrorists
and terrorism. In exchanges with the Imam, his cousin, Adel and with a commander who
captures and tortures him, Jaafari must come to grips with the fact that his people are consumed with anger, hatred and rage from the humiliation they have suffered. When he chose to become a doctor, he distanced himself from the the rage and need for
retaliation. But in fact he can not escape. Sihem believed " there could be no happiness without freedom" and "no dreams were possible without freedom". Thus she was compelled to act.

The novel comes full circle. The characters, both Israeli and Arab are believable and the communities of the Middle East come alive. This book is an interesting exploration of how complex and difficult a world both the Arabs and the Israelis must deal with. I found it fascinating.

Talking about Books

2006-08-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

It's taken me a bit of time to get used to the idea of a book blog. I have procrastinated knowing that once I start, I will be committed to posting notes regularly. While I enjoying talking about books, I have reservations about my writing skills.

I hope to used the blog to talk about books that I have loved or that have intrigued me. I look forward to feedback, discussion and recommendations.

I am grateful to Howard White for getting me started.

Book Talk Coming...

2006-07-18T12:12:00.000-07:00

I have a bunch of books I'm just dying to talk about but I've been so busy I just haven't had time to get down to it. I catered a wedding for 100 at the Beacon House last week and then this weekend we had two concerts at our house, one of them with dinner for 35 (pulled pork, pasta salad, green salad, cheescake for dessert)but this week coming up looks like things will calm down a little. The new Julia Glass is just soooo amazing....I can't wait to tell you about it.

Guest Blog: On Beauty by Zadie Smith

2006-07-09T17:19:00.000-07:00

This was my first taste of Zadie Smith and I quite enjoyed it. Basically, it's a slice of life in the ethnic stew that is modern big-city America, although the main characters are transposed Londoners. But the main protagonists are well-heeled academics whose spoiled offspring only encounter the "street" as an exotic experience that impinges around the periphery of the story. There are a few underprivileged immigrant characters, but they are minor. The main action takes place in the bitchy committee rooms of British/American academe made over-familiar by the Amises and Albees where the men are pompous asses and the women scheming bitches. The main variation on this stock theme are two middle-aged black women, one a Caribbean earth-mother who awakes some vestigial remanants of soul in Kiki, the over-educated wife of her husband's nemesis. The moving relationship that develops between these two is one of the book's successes. The more central struggle of the leading couple to repair their affair-shattered marriage doesn't come off quite so well. The best part for me was the constant chafing between Kiki's three half-caste college-age children, the stand-offish Jerome, the ambitious but under-endowed Zora and the young trickster Levi, who wishes nothing so much as to be accepted as a bro by Haitian street people. All in all a spirited romp. It wasn't as edgily multicultural as the hype led me to expect, being mainly from the viewpoint of privileged upper-middleclass families some of whom just happened to have coloured skin, and mostly set among the oft-satirized groves of academe. And it has some amusing moments, the best of them involving young Levi, but I don't know that it deserves the "comic novel" label. There are some chuckles but no out-loud laughs.

Raincoaster

Guest blog: Everyman by Philip Roth

2006-07-08T16:47:00.000-07:00

This is one of Roth's shortest books and that is one of the best things about it. I have been a devoted fan of Roth's late period, even after slogging through Sabbath's Theatre, but I didn't wish this one to be a page longer. The story, which Roth himself gives away in the first few pages, is about a man who dies, finally. The rest of the book is about all the ailments he had along the way to his final one, which are many. It has the form of one of those nursing home conversations where the inmates show their scars and try to outdo each other with the saga of their many operations. Well this is the story of the champ, the unhealthier of two Jewish brothers, one of who became a succesful business man and the other of whom, the sicko, who became a commercial artist. But you don't hear much about anything artistic; the hero spends all his life labouring in the public relations salt mines planning to someday return to his painting, but when he finally does of course all his inspiration is gone. So is the family he had sacrificed it to support; despite his bad health this guy manages to maintain the record of all Roth heroes for indulging in self-destructve philandery. I don't know what to say about this book. It's like Roth had written about absolutely everything he had to write about except all his ailments, so he decided to do a book on that. I guess the generous view would be that he is trying to show just how hollow life can be in your average middle-class American suburb these days, but it's not a very compelling picture.

Raincoaster

Guest blog--Thoughts on jPod

2006-07-04T08:34:00.003-07:00

While Thora studies the blog-driving instructions I'll come up with a few inane reflections to fill the space. My wife likes to say I never read anything but that is not true. In fact it is a cruel infamy. It's true I don't read books in the ink-on-paper sense but ever since the advent of talking books so I can get them through the realm of gadgetry, I have been getting in on the scene. You'd be surprised what up-to-date literature I can find on audio book now. For instance I just finished the brand new Douglas Coupland opus, jPod. I am a big Dougie fan. I appreciate a writer who can show you a good time, and he comes through every time. Although I have to say, this time he didn't come through for me as well as other times. I liked it and would recommend it and all, and it had all the patented Coupland smartass-isms that make him so entertaining. I guess my complaint is that, more than his best books, this one ONLY had smartass-isms. The story itself is a kind of throwaway, as if he wasn't even trying to make you believe these are events that truly could have happened somewhere. He seems to have read Post Modernism for Dummies before setting to work and indulges in all sorts of fancy tricks with the narrative line such as breaking off to talk to himself, and saying "if this were a responsible novel, the next thing that would be happen would be such and such, but in fact what happened was my sweet old middle class mother who normally wouldn't hurt a fly murdered a Hell's Angel, whom it turned out she had been sleeping with while he marketed her basement grow-op..." I have never bothered my head to about what post modernism in writing could all be about because from the start I marked it as one of the sillier literary fads that is sure to be over soon, like it already is in architecture. I still need willing suspension of belief to really enjoy a novel and when the writer keeps breaking in to say, "I'm just writing this, you know, I can do anything I want, ha ha, I'm toying with your gullibility, you stupid reader..." there's no way you can get the 'ol WSOD happening. And I think there's another place this book fails to measure up to Dougie's usual performance. His characters aren't as great. I mean, I am still in love with Miss Wyoming. I still ache for those two young people who got schmucked in Hey Nostradamus. I still muse over those bright lab-rat types in Microserfs. But I could never quite get the hang of these people in jPod. He does his great thing that he always does, he penetrates a significant social scene and reveals its absurdity in stark relief using his razor-sharp satirical eye, and here he does make me think of all the computer nerds I know, in the mass, but they never come alive individually for me the way the tinsel stars of Miss Wyoming did. They all seem two-dimensional, like the characters in their own computer games, who merely act out propositions and never really breathe. Perhaps this is some intentional very clever literary device, but I miss breathing. As I said at the top, I still enjoyed it more than about 80% of the novels I've read in the last 12 months. If it were DC's first novel instead of his umpteenth, I would probably be saying here's a brilliant new writer instead of saying Dougie didn't quite reach his personal best in this one. Not that it seems to matter. To judge by the bestseller lists, it is going through the roof. If old patterns hold true, the Giller and GG people will probably choose to make up for ignoring his better books by smothering this one with honours. Which would be ok by me, because I think he has been one of Canada's top five fiction writers for the last twenty years and the CanLit establishment's denial of him is its folly, not his. I mean do they think that because you're funny, and popular and fascinated by contemporary society, you can't be good? That would be news to Sinclair Lewis, the Waughs and the Amises, not to mention Jonathan Swift.

Raincoaster

US Book production dives; UK takes over

2006-07-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

How many books are there? Well, according to the following article, there were 172,000 new ones published last year in the US alone--and this was considered a bad year. Britain out-booked the US, with 206,000. Typically, nobody seems to know how many are contributed by Canada. The last statistic available from Statistics Canada seems to be for 1998, when just over 20,000 were produced.

New Providence, N.J. – May 9, 2006 – Bowker, the world’s leading provider of bibliographic information, today released statistics on U.S. book publishing compiled from its Books In Print® database. Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that U.S. title output in 2005 decreased by more than 18,000 to 172,000 new titles and editions. This is the first decline in U.S. title output since 1999, and only the 10th downturn recorded in the last 50 years. It follows the record increase of more than 19,000 new books in 2004.
Great Britain, long the world’s per capita leader in the publication of new books in any language, now replaces the United States as the publisher of most new books in English. 206,000 new books were published in the U.K. in 2005, representing an increase of some 45,000 (28%) over 2004.

Only the very large academic, professional, and trade publishers managed to publish close to the number of new titles and editions that they did in 2004. Output from the smallest publishers dropped by more than 7%, while new titles from the small-to-medium and medium-to-large publishers declined by 10% and 15% respectively.

The number of new titles released by the largest general trade houses decreased 4.7%, to 23,017. University presses increased their title output 1.8% to 14,746, their largest annual total since 2000. Since 1995, new titles have increased 51% for all U.S. publishers, 17% for the largest trade houses, and 14% for university presses.

General adult fiction and children’s books, two of the bellwether categories in U.S. book publishing, showed double-digit decreases in new titles and editions. Virtually every broad publishing category tracked by Bowker except legal showed significant decreases. Among adult non-fiction categories released by all U.S. publishers in 2005, religion, biography, history, and technology suffered the steepest declines. The largest general trade houses, on the other hand, did have a few bright spots. Sports & recreation led all categories with a 22% increase in new titles, followed by an 18% increase in new medical & health titles, and a 6.9% increase in adult fiction releases.

Meanwhile, university presses showed some growth in most categories, with science and law enjoying the largest increases.

In 2005, the average suggested retail price for adult hardcovers released by the largest general trade houses increased 3 cents to $27.55; adult fiction hardcovers decreased 7 cents to $25.01; and adult non-fiction hardcovers increased 3 cents to $28.52. Adult trade paperbacks increased 1 cent to $15.77; adult fiction trade paperbacks decreased 2 cents to $14.76; adult non- fiction trade paperbacks increased 10 cents to $16.26; and adult mass-market paperbacks increased 7 cents to $7.42. The average list price for juvenile hardcovers decreased 1 cent to $16.08. In all, the largest general trade publishers released 345 more titles as adult trade paperbacks and 301 fewer as adult hardcovers.

Additional charts and statistics can be found at Bookwire.com by clicking “Book Industry Statistics”.

“In 2005, publishers were more cautious and disciplined when it came to their lists,” said Gary Aiello, chief operating officer of New Providence, N.J.-based Bowker. “We see that trend continuing in 2006. The price of paper has already gone up twice this year, and publishers, especially the small ones, will have to think very carefully about what to publish.”

“The sudden and steep drop in the number of new books published in the U.S. last year was surprising,” said Andrew Grabois, a consultant for Bowker. “Yet 2005’s book output was the second highest total of new books ever recorded, after 2004’s record year. The reappearance of limits was the most interesting thing about publishing in 2005. Even an industry that produces more new products than any other must make choices. The question is, will British publishers face a similar market correction, or have they figured out how fewer publishers can publish more books for even fewer readers?”

The book production figures in this preliminary release are based on year-to-date data from U.S. publishers. If changes in industry estimates occur, they will be reflected in a later published report. Books In Print data represents input from 83,000 publishers in the U.S. The data is sent to Bowker in electronic files, and via BowkerLink™, Bowker’s password protected Web-based tool, which enables publishers to update and add their own data.

Guest blog: The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

2006-06-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to get Thora to read this book because she's going to Venice this fall and even though I agree with all reviewers it's not as good as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it does give you a whole new understanding of the living city of Venice that still hangs on amidst all those crumbling castles with their falling stone angels. There is obviously an ancient and extremely peculiar community still persisting, and it makes very good reading whether you have the great good sense to be planning a leisurely stay there this fall or not. There are several fascinating subplots involving the burning of the big opera house (it turned out to be arson, did you know that? I didn't), Ezra Pound's love nest, Peggy Guggeheim's legacy, nobilty who believe in aliens, etc. The usual Berendt mix. Recommended.

Raincoaster

Guest Blog: Shalimar the Clown

2006-06-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

For a book that was shortlisted for the Booker by a writer who is considered a shoo-in for the Nobel, I had thought I was noticing a dearth of excited talk about Rushdie's latest but decided it was my duty to check it out if I want to be up on what's happening. This is the second Rushdie book I've read and I'm afraid I can't remember the title of the other one, but I do believe it was set in Bombay, which is plausible because that is where he's from. This one is set in a couple of ancient, competing villages in the northern, Pakistan-bordering province of Kashmir where the terrorists who performed the recent series of Mumbai bombings hail from. Of course the book was written well before that happened, but the same folks that did that bombing are behind the action in this novel.

I have about the same feeling this time out as that other time. The guy is impressive. He paints a broad canvas. He has a tall forehead. The thing is like a mini War and Peace. These third-worlders have so much more to write about, with such deep culutral roots with village traditions going back thousands of years,and all of that civilized seniority dissolving into absolute barbarity and destruction due to Muslim-Hindu warring. It ought to be an epic theme and it is. They make our books about interminable bored affairs seem so trivial. But does it pass the exercise test? I get most of my books on unabridged audio and listen to them as I walk around Francis Peninsula. Some books aid fitness because they make me want to go out every day and stay out longer. Other books reinforce my natural tendency to shirk exertion because I can't face another hour of them. I'm afraid good ol' Shalimar fell into the latter category. I was so glad when it was over and I could get onto Everyman by Roth. Why? I was impressed this time as last at how impressive Rushdie can be without being appealing. As a novelist he is a better social philosopher than an artist. He tends to marshal a vast army of characters but not make them very three-dimensional. They tend to be defined by their social roles more than their personalities. The central character in this book, Shalimar, remained an enigma to me, and not an inigma I was all that keen to resolve. He was there obviously to give some insight into the making of a terrorist, but he wasn't very convincing in that role because he remained a man driven by his own personal demons who joined the jihad for cynical reasons of his own, rather than giving himself over to the holy cause. In fact Rushdie's view of all the combatants is that they are all a bunch of self-serving fools and madmen, which doesn't provide all the insight into the cultural forces that drive them one might wish. Indeed, Rushdie's final epigrph is "A plague on both your houses." I guess it's ok for him to say this where it certainly wouldn't be for a white writer, but you have to question how helpful such an attitude is. A final comment on Rushdie as a great writer. I'm not so damn sure he is one. He has great energy, and great power of imagination. He is admired for the richness of his language but I find flamboyant expression comes a bit too easily to him, and often serves in place of more precise perception. And the plot. I really felt there was a disconnect between this book's rather sensational and melodramatic plot and the social revelation that was it's main subject. Okay, maybe his point is that these obscure ethnic battles touch even the glitziest American enclaves, but the way he made it happen was just too contrived. So, what do you have when you have a writer who churns out novels that tackle the clash of civilizations but fails the exercise test? A great writer who isn't?

Raincoaster

2004-08-24T12:55:00.000-07:00