BOOK LIST FROM FALL 2008

Here are 12 books I really enjoyed.  By the time you’ve read them all, I’ll probably have another 12!

Three Day Road – Joseph Boyden  .  Set in Moosonee and the trenches of World War I, this is the story of two native boys. 

Rockbound: Frank Parker Day.  Canada Reads winner in 2005. Rockbound is an island off the south shore of Nova Scotia.  It’s the story of two families.

The Birth House - Ami McKay. The story of a midwife in Nova Scotia, her friends, neighbours, and their lives as wives and mothers.

Water For Elephants – Sara Gruen.  Life in a circus: the animals, the workers.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan- Lisa See . Set in China, it’s the story of a friendship between two girls. Foot binding is described at length: and I complain about bunions!

Shadow on The Wind- Carlos Ruiz Zafon. A boy searches for the author of a long-loved book and stumbles on several mysteries about the book and the author. A juicy, long read.

The Way The Crow Flies – Anne-Marie MacDonald. A fictional representation of the Stephen Truscott case.

An Audience of Chairs – Joan Clark.  The story of a woman who is bipolar and how in the end she saves herself, mainly because she enjoys life so fully and completely.

Late Nights on Air- Elizabeth Hay.  The story of a radio station in Yellowknife, the people who work there, and a long, momentous canor trip.

The Book of Negroes – Lawrence Hill.  Aminata, abducted into slavery at age 12, the sea voyage to North Carolina, and her life in America and Nova Scotia, then back to Sierra Leone.

The Law of Dreams- Peter Behrens.  Peter is 15 when his family starves to death in Ireland as a result of the potato famine.  This is the story of how he survives to eventually come to Canada.

Strawberry Fields – Marina Lewycha.  A group of berry-pickers in England and their road trip through England. Very entertaining and illuminating.

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

This was a re-read, to prepare for our Book Club presentation this coming Saturday.  I enjoyed it even more the second time.  I think this must be historical fiction at its very best, because the story is woven through the historical events so well that the two are almost inseparable: one is not the vehicle for the other, at least not obviously so.

There are events here I never knew about: the Black Loyalists most obviously, plus the fact that the slave trade started so early and was so widespread. It was the Portuguese who first sailed away from Africa with captives in the 15th century!

The author really cares for his subject, and this has been borne out by the related reading that I have done.

It should be a good discussion at Book Club this Saturday!

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

I'm quoting Lisa Genova:

STILL ALICE is about a young woman's descent into dementia through early-onset Alzheimer's disease.  Alice is a 51 year old psychology professor at Harvard when she starts experiencing moments of forgetting and confusion....she at first attributes these signs to normal aging, too much stress, not enough sleep, and so on.  But as things get worse....she eventually sees a neurologist and learns that she has early-onset Alzheimer's."

This was a scary book to read, because I can see little things I do that are similar, and it makes you wonder.  I think the author is more of a professor than a writer, but she has found a way to communicate to her audience how the patient feels: how she matters: to herself, her family, her colleagues.  The speech  Alice gives, starting on page 250 is quite illuminating, as is the conversation with the author at the book's conclusion.

I just didn't feel it was a "novel": it wasn't literary at all, but I understand what the author was trying to do.

Book Count as of today

I think I read 24 books in Florida! Amazing!

MIDDLESEX: Jeffery Eugenides

I've known about this book, and its central theme, for some time, but I didn't think I'd like it.  I didn't like the title, or the author's name, believe it or not: I thought it would be too intellectual, deeper than I wanted to go in my reading.  Mildred read this, and mentioned several times last summer how much she enjoyed it, so I was a little more interested.  When I had a coupon for Borders, I bought it, and read it while returning home from Florida.

Am I ever glad I did!  I loved it: it's a big, rich, funny, touching family story, beginning with Desdemona and Lefty, who are brother and sister, also third cousins, who end up marrying one another.  Calliope, the "girl" in the novel, is their grand-daughter: raised as a girl, she discovers her true sexuality on her 16th birthday. Calliope has inherited a recessive mutation gene, passed on through families where there is incest or inbreeding.

This is a Greek-American family: the story starts in Greece before the first war, then continues in the depression years in Detroit.  Middlesex is the name of the family's street addres in Detroit"; it's an unusual house, without any standard doors; Calliope's father has made his money  in hot dog stands all across America.  The fact that the street address is used as the title  is significant, because so is Calliope: with characteristics and physical traits both male and female. Calliope, incidentally, was the name given to the Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry.

Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel and deservedly so: it is a sweeping portrait of America: its politics, sexual mores, coming- of-age, cars, scams, hitch-hiking, a real trip through time. Eugenides, in his interview with Oprah, which is worth a second-look online, calls the book " a modern myth".  He also acknowledges that, although the word "hermaphrodite" was chosen because of its Greek derivation: the Greek god Tiresias was a hermaphrodite, he does acknowledge that a better word, and one without  pejorative connotations  would be "intersex".

CUTTING FOR STONE: Abraham Verghese

A family saga , set mostly in Addis Ababa,  with medicine at the central focus.  Sister Mary Praise gives birth to twin sons, Shiva and Marion, delivered by the twins' father, Dr. Thomas Stone.  Sister Mary dies in childbirth, Dr. Stone disappears.  The twins are raised by two other doctors, Hema, a gynecologist, and Ghosh, a GP who becomes the surgeon at the Missing Hospital after Stone leaves.

The twins grow up to become doctors themselves; Marion comes to America after he is threatened by arrest after being unwittingly implicated in a rebellion.  Shiva is also a doctor, but not formally trained as such. Typically, the twins are mysteriously connected , coming to age as Ethiopia is on the brink of revolution, but a shared passion for Genet, their childhood friend, tears them apart. 

Marion finally meets his father, and they are reconciled, but not before Marion's life is threatened with illness, an illness which brings the twins back together again.

There is some excellent story-telling in this novel, although I found the medical parts somewhat lengthy and boring.  Verghese is himself a medical professor, so he is very familiar with the field. I've never read a book set in Ethiopia, and I remember Haile Selassie from my own girlhood, so I found that interesting.

Not riveting reading all the way through, but I'd give it three stars for sure!  The novel is well-organized to keep the reader on course: we don't find out near the end what really happened between Sister Mary Praise and Thomas Stone.  I just found there were parts when I thought" Ho-hum, this is boring" and then he'd catch my interest yet again.

The term "cutting for stone" comes from the Hippocratic oath, and the inference is that a surgeon must always think of the overall well-being of his/her patient.  The Stones were surgeons, and one Stone saved another by cutting away part of himself.

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM by Kate Atkinson

Well, well, well, yet another book by Kate Atkinson, this one her first novel, and  not a mystery novel, as were the others I read this winter.  

From the book jacket:   Ruby Lennox begins narrating her own life at the moment of her conception and from there takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of a girl determined to learn more about her family and the secrets it keeps.

Set in Yorkshire, the book is extremely rich in detail and wit.  It's Atkinson's wit that I enjoy the most, I think: the scenes when the family goes on a summer farm trip with the next-door neighbours, the wedding scene in Chapter 10, are hilarious as much for her wry observation of life with the Lennox family as for the situations.

The novel is about family, but more specifically, I think, the relationship between mothers and daughters.  Ruby's mother, Bunty, was about as bad a mother as you can get, but there were reasons for her behaviour.

This is worth considering as a recommendation for Book Club next year. There is a Readers' Guide available on-line at Picador: I bookmarked it.

The book was published in 1999, and Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread Prize for best first novel in Great Britain for this book.