The Passionate Reader

This London, England teacher of creative writing wrote this novel as a former basketball star and white shoe lawyer. Twelve years after his wife has had an affair and his children have become adults, he decides tentatively to leave her and goes on a long uncharted car trip to Las Vegas and Los Angeles with no definite plans for his future.

Everything about his life is tentative, including his vague plans to write a story about crossing America and playing pickup basketball as he does so, and meeting up with old friends, and former lovers.

The writing is set in modern times and mostly narrated in short sentences in the first person singular. He is self-absorbed and describes many mundane shallow everyday life events. There is nothing approaching any deep overriding philosophy. There is little mention of any country other than the U.S.A.

The medical problems he encounters near the end of the book are so rare, but precise, that I doubt anyone who has not experienced them could have dreamed them up, but any doctor who still does physical examinations should be able to diagnose it easily. Apparently few do. But some of the hospital experiences seem unrealistic. Is this at least in part autobiography?

In short, I did not enjoy this book.

3/5

Thanks, Goodreads.

An Arizonan adventurer outlines his experiences in hiking the length of the Grand Canyon and the multiple hazards that inevitably entails. The title subtitle is misleading in that the “spectacular misadventure” should be pluralized.

The history of the small long-persecuted Havasupai and larger Hualapai native tribes is interesting, but somewhat peripheral to the story, although the latter’s air-tourism of the canyon is difficult to justify.

In only one way can I relate to these multiple stories of misadventures. I have visited the Grand Canyon and can appreciate why people become addicted to the views- its beauty can never be adequately described in either words or pictures. About 14 years ago in late winter or early spring my daughter and I hiked down the Bright Angel Trail about half way to the canyon floor. When she slipped on hidden ice under red dust, and fell, she fortunately fell uninjured to the right as to the left would have been a 2000 foot drop. At that point we turned around – I found the climb up easier than the descent. She is much fitter and athletic than I am and has done several hikes there, including the Rim-to -Rim hike.

The writing is chronologically straightforward mostly first person singular, but also wordy. It could easily have been trimmed to 300 pages if an editor or publisher had insisted. The Epilogue adds nothing to the story.

4/5

Thanks, Lois.

This London, England’s science fiction can only be described as weird, and even that does not describe it adequately. Spanning over one thousand years and based in part on the sizable worldwide perfumery industry’s search for the perfect ingredients to put into their products, it includes mainly such efforts in Seattle, New Orleans and Paris. But it includes people who live for over a thousand years.

The missing ingredient seems to be some product of the lowly beet, mentioned repeatedly, but is elusive.

There is abundant graphic casual sex, and magical encounters, but also deep philosophical musings about the meaning of life and death, with ghosts, nymphs and gods all contributing their thoughts.

Of Buddhist teaching one character comments “They teach that much of existence amounts only to misery; that misery is caused by desire; therefore, if desire is eliminated, then misery will be eliminated… if a person forswears pleasure to avoid misery, what has he gained? A life of neither misery nor pleasure is a empty neutral existence…”

The story is so bizarre that at several points I was almost ready to give up, but then I would encounter beautiful puns and similes such as “He was as nervous as a praying mantis at an atheist’s picnic” or “Death is a mistake” or “ She was thick- thighed, broad- hipped and heavy-breasted but so slender of waist that a snail with a limp could circle her belt-line in two minutes flat.” Or there would be more deep philosophical musings.

One of the most bizarre books I have ever read, but with beautiful almost poetic language, I had trouble giving it a rating, but ended up giving it a 4/5

Thanks, Mike and Dirk.

This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is set in the late author’s native Tennessee in 1915, with the iconic loving Folette family, Jay, his wife Mary, and their two young children, Rufus and Catherine. When Jay drives to visit his ailing father, he is involved in an accident and is killed instantly. What evolves from there, is seemingly endless waiting to hear the news, then equally long periods of time as Mary attempts to explain the finality of the tragedy to the children, too young to fully conceive of the concept of death. There then ensues the funeral, with conflicts over the officiating.

The writing is poetical (and in part actual poetry) and the pathos is heart-wrenching. Deep different interpretations about the finality of death are discussed in detail.

Long sections in italics outline the children’s experiences and understanding. (These could be skipped or just skimmed over by the reader who wants to deal only with the main plot.).

There are many Bible quotes that seem to give Mary some comfort, but just annoy others in the extended family.

This was a reread for me as I had read it many years ago, but it is well worth the effort.

4/5

This old classic is narrated by 15 different individuals in Yoknapatawpha county, Mississippi, as they try to get their dear late Addie, mother, grandmother and wife to her designated burial site.

The extensive dialogue is loaded with local jargon and frequent disagreements. The long section as they attempt to get her coffin across a swollen and violent river is just confusing. In fact, I found the whole book to be confusing, even though there is supposedly some deeper hidden truths to it according to other reviewers. There are lots of past secrets of the characters revealed, but they don’t seem to be connected to the main plot.

I cannot recommend this book.

2.5/5

In this Irish/Scottish novelist’s emotionally loaded tale, Jerry, a happy, loving and contented alcoholic Irish architect, and his enabling but somewhat bossy retired teacher-wife, Stella, both from County Londonderry, visit Amsterdam in mid winter.

Jerry uses all the tricks common to alcoholics around the world to conceal how much he drinks. He frequently mocks his wife’s devout Catholicism, while she attempts to repay for what seems to have been a miracle escape from death in her youth, by trying to join a holy order of pseudo-nuns.

The unique geography and tourist attractions of Amsterdam are all on display. Their visit to the historical museum of Ann Frank’s house is particularly touching and emotional, with attempts by Stella to connect to the late famed Nazi victim, through prayer, while he mocks the Church as a bunch of hypocritical, misogynous pedophiles.

There are no dates provided but the plot dates it too before widespread availability of cell phones, and the writing is linear except for Stella’s frequent flashbacks and nightmares, especially when they experience a long delay on returning due to a severe storm.

Thanks, Jean.

4/5

An updated documentary of Trump’s presidency to the end of March this year, from the same NYT reporter who wrote Confidence Man, with the addition of her colleague, Johnathan Swan.

Carefully researched, the extent of Trump’s greed, capriciousness, and willingness to break any law in pursuit of revenge and further his own agenda is on full display. There are revelations that leave no doubt about his sinister intentions to establish an absolute dictatorship. But revelations in this book convinced me that J.D. Vance, though a deeply flawed opportunist, would be theoretically less dangerous than Trump as POTUS.

There is no doubt about the authors’ political allegiance. What is missing from this book is any suggestion of alternative actions to the many foolish actions of the Trump regime.

4/5

When I previously reviewed another book (Women Talking) by this Canadian ex Mennonite, I stated that I would not be reading more of her books. Unfortunately a Goodreads review made me change my mind.

This book is said to be nonfiction and is in part autobiography. It attempts to answer the questions about why she writes at all and what writing, and silence means. She travels the world and receives therapy from a Russian Jungian while dealing with the suicides of both her father and her sister. The time shifts range from the 1970s to 2023. In places, she seems to be psychotic herself with dreams of establishing a museum of the wind and is overpowered by panic attacks. The whole book is laced with foul language and strange sexual encounters.

The answer to the question about why she writes at all is not forthcoming except in a banal and incomplete way, and constitutes a small part of the story. Repeated references to the visits of a demented skunk, and the underground river beneath their Toronto house serve no useful purpose that I could discern.

In short, I did not enjoy this book.

2.5/5

No one recommended this old classic novel, the only book by the young author who died at age 30, but, with nothing on my wish list currently available at the OPL, I decided to try it. Most of it is narrated by some kind of head servant either at the mansion of the title, on the barren English moor or the nearby Thrustcross Grange.

The plot almost entirely features the interaction of the many characters who seem to either passionately love each other, or equally passionately, hate each other with nothing in between, and no tolerance of differences. The hierarchy of British society is on prominent display, and the extreme emotions ascribed to the subjects seemingly on their own can lead to the death of the subject. The psychotic ravings of a Mrs Linton and the garbled speeches of the servant, Joseph, made no sense. I even got confused as to where the action was taking place, as characters are banned or welcomed to Wuthering Heights or Thrustcross Grange, depending largely on the dictates of the dour irascible unlikeable but powerful Heathcliff.

In the style of writing of the day, there are far too many exclamation marks for my liking. I don’t know why the SNL comedian Chevy Chase is mentioned but the script was rewritten with the 2012 edition perhaps with the help of AI.

I did not enjoy this read.

2/5

Full disclosure. Not only is this my much younger 75 year old sister’s contemporary debut novel, published last month, but it is also published by the same publisher who published my first book although the name and location of the company has changed.

The plot gets quite complex with a lot of characters, some despicable rogues and some angelic saints, and some with in-between and changeable traits. However, the reader should be able to keep them straight by paying careful attention to the dates (May, 1990 to the summer of 2013), and locations (Toronto or Montreal), at the start of the 30 chapters. Fortunately there are no time shifts which I personally don’t like, other than in the flashbacks and nightmares of the main character, Hannah Brown.

The first few chapters seem to point to a past incestuous relationship or at least some sexual abuse, and indeed this is confirmed gradually as Hannah learns to accept her past. Even these are described discretely without the pornographic details common in many modern novels.

I won’t give away more of the plot except to point out that there is a distinct feminist flavour to it and many wise insights into the characters, some smart advice for parents of rebellious teens, and some surprises in the simple genetic information those teens uncover. Even the nouns in the title seem to take on new meaning.

Hannah could be accused of being overly introspective, emotional and dramatic in her reactions but they are in response to emotional and physical trauma worse than 99% of readers will ever experience, and these traits are made to seem realistic.

The writing is gripping and there are dozens of surprise twists with no loose ends that I can recall.

4.9/5

Congratulations.

This is a novel of protest by the Métis/Ukrainian Assistant Professor of creative writing at the University of Alberta.

Narrated by a young male Edmonton Métis excon and a female university graduate, also a Métis, they plot to drop a herd of bison into downtown Edmonton parks to protest the theft of Native lands. They both have a checkered past, and pay little attention to the colonialist laws or way of life, devoting their time to any protest going. When they try a second time, an accident results in a severe injury a murder, and arson. There is scorn for the white man’s cops or laws, courts, social workers and foster parents and one of them is repeatedly jailed. The bison protests ultimately spread to Saskatoon and Regina.

The unique culture of the natives is praised in considerable detail, although the natives of the story are without exception lawless, drunks, drug addicts, thieves, or murderers, with no stable family life. This too is blamed on the white colonialists.

I have great sympathy for the natives of our country who have been robbed and mistreated over centuries. However, if a novelist wants to emphasize this injustice, could he not have portrayed at least one of them as having some moral fortitude?

I quite enjoyed this book, with some reservations as noted.

3.5/5

Thanks, Stuck in a Book.

In this novel a couple who have been forced to live in their car are offered residence in the dystonic gated futuristic all-seeing and all controlling town of Consilience, but lose all contact with the outside world, and spend alternate months in a prison called Positron. Talking heads come to life. Sex robots, electronically matched to residents, and copulation with chickens seems natural They both have extramarital affairs, and . Prostibots programmed by laser brain surgery alter specific personalities, memories, and sexual attractions. Possibilibots, and a whole troupe of robotic Elvis lookalikes control the sex lives of the couple when they individually escape to Las Vegas.

This may be the best of dytonic fiction, and it would be very arrogant of me to diss a writer as talented as Atwood (I unite enjoyed her semi-historical Alias Grace) but this is not my favourite genre and I found the female narrator’s high pitched voice to be shrill and irritating.

3/5

No one recommended this book to me, but I found it in my granddaughter’s street side lending library and, curious, realized that I had never ever read any of Henry Miller’s books (not to be confused with Henry James, of several generations earlier but a similar genre) although I recognized the name as a classic writer. He lived mostly in Manhattan and California.

After reading about 60 pages, I realized the wisdom of avoiding Henry Miller’s’ writing. At that point he is entirely negative about everything, including life itself.

Writing in the first person singular tense, there is little plot but what there is him working to hire employees for the Cosmodemonic telegraph company. The main narrative is nothing but a free flow of random thoughts, with a stream of consciousness that defies any logic. Later there are snippets of family history and perhaps some autobiography. Sex-obsessed, almost the whole book is loaded with the most explicit pornographic description of casual sexual encounters that you will ever read. (The book was banned in the U.S. until 1961.) Women and girls are just play toys, apparently always available.

In the last 50 pages or so, he develops some semi-sensible reflections of a philosophical nature about trying to become a writer albeit still abstract, contradictory, and negative, but at least without pornography.

To give a sense of the schizophrenic goobledygook, surrealist free association, and mysticism that comprises much of the book, one quote will suffice: « From Times Square to 58th Street, all that Saint Thomas Aquinas forgot to include in his Opus Magnus is here included, which is to say among other things, hamburger sandwiches, collar buttons, poodle dogs, slot machines, grey bowlers, typewriter ribbons, oranges sticks, free toilets, sanitary napkins, mint jubes, billiard balls, chopped onions, crinkled doilies, manholes, chewing gum, sidecars and sour-balls, cellophane, cord tyres, magnetos, horse linament, cough drops, feenamint, and that feline opacity of the hysterically endowed eunich who marches to the soda fountain with a sawed off shotgun between his legs ».

Suffice it to say I will not be reading more of this author.

1/5

In this memoir, the now 28 year old Muslim girl and Nobel Prise winner who was shot by the Taliban at age 15, comes to terms with her altered life, her fame, and the consequences of that shooting. Trailed by security guards everywhere, and with almost no private life, she has continued to help girls become educated citizens around the world, meeting with world leaders, while dealing with panic attacks from PTSD, and living in a world where girls are still subservient to men and boys. She has experimented with marijuana, graduated from Oxford, dealt with trivial conflicts with family and Muslim friends over customs and clothing, and with a somewhat domineering mother. Most importantly, she has married a man who seems to consider her his equal or superior. She concludes that her life is better than it would theoretically have been had she not been shot.

It is not clear how much of the Muslim faith she actually believes, and I suspect that, being very clever, she is has major doubts about all of it and may secretly be close to being an agnostic. However, it is also clear that were she to acknowledge any doubts publicly, she would not only be completely ostracized by her family, but she would loose much her effectiveness as an advocate for girls education. But it still galls me when she thanks Allah, rather than the Birmingham surgeons for saving her life.

4/5

I

The 70 year old Berkley professor is back with a detailed erudite (and at times very obscure) discussion about consciousness. Interviews with a wide variety of scientists, researchers, philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists and mystics around the world, and liberal reference to the writings of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Joyce, Darwin, Proust, and James, the book is divided into four chapters titled Sentience, Feeling, Thought, and Self, with a long Introduction, a short Coda, and 37 pages of notes, bibliography, and index.

Early in the first chapter, deviating from the anthropomorphic medical model of searching for the site of sentience in the human brain, he provides convincing evidence of some at least rudimentary sentience, in « lower » life forms, including plants, and even bacteria and viruses.

The following chapters become so rarified and opaque as to lose me in many places. His efforts and those of others to lose ego completely by indulging in various psychedelics, and extensive meditation give them impressive insights, but that is not something I will ever try.

There is an abundance of sometimes astounding factual knowledge from the natural world, but I am left with the thought that much of the controversy is bound up in semantics and linguistics, that must have different nuances for different people and in different langages. Not his best book.

3.5/5

Thanks, Andra

This British/American journalist wanders the globe in search of cultures and practices that are both ancient and endangered. The ten here included are: ancient musical instruments of the Malian empire; Scandinavian coastline night watchmen; Incan bridge builders using plant fibres in Peru; pasta production on an Italian island using ancient techniques; mirror production in India; painting film billboards in Taiwan; informing bees of family developments in England; the only democratic job in Cuba (reading to cigar workers); making special soy sauce on a Japanese island; and mail sevice to an oak tree in Germany to facilitate romance.

There is a lot of history included in these stories, and a lot of folklore and mythology. Some of the practices cannot be justified as worth preserving in a threatened world; others are just silly. My favourite was the talking to bees as part of the family, as I grew up with a beekeeper next door, and they are indeed fascinating, but they certainly don’t hear our stories.

No one recommended this book to me but the title was intriguing. However much of it is really not worth reading.

2.5/5

Deep character development, a failed cross-cultural teen romance, the horrors of war, deep sea misadventures, the geography of the upper west coast of the U.S. mainland, an apparent murder mystery at sea and subsequent trial, and deeply entrenched racism are all part of this very well written novel.

The setting is the fictional Mystic Harbour on an island somewhere in Puget Sound, and most of the main action takes place as a consequence of the murder/accident at sea in 1954, with flashbacks to WWII. There are many plot twists to this and the outcome of the trial is not predictable until three pages from the end, but there are no loose ends except for the continuing bachelorhood status of the newspaper reporter/owner.

As an example of the intricate physical and emotional character development:

« The veins on his cheeks were broken and smashed flat and appeared as a sort of blue paste below his skin; his Adam’s apple bulged lie a toad’s. He looked to Ishmael, vaguely like an alcoholic scarecrow. »

« The heart of every other, because it had a will would forever remain mysterious. …..he understood this too; that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the human heart. « .

4.8/5

Thanks, Vera.

The authors of this novel are Christine Hobbs and Lauren Billing’s, longtime writing partners living in Los Angeles. I had limited access to books while on a cruise, and so read most of this one before the cruise ship pulled into Montreal port and I had to return it to the limited on board library. I then found it in the OPL and read the rest.

An amiable separation after three years of a marriage of convenience of college roommates is renewed when the man, now a Stanford professor returns with an unusual request to accompany him on a potentially very lucrative trip to a family wedding on a remote island, maintaining the illusion of a happy marriage, although they are worlds apart. He is the scion of a billionaire CEO of a food store chain and she a recently fired unemployed convenience store clerk, and medical school dropout. From there, the plot gets much more complex with hundreds of millions of dollars of family wealth and prestige at stake.

I won’t give away more of the intricate plot, but the pitting of love against money becomes central. There are a number of seemingly inevitable endings that fail to materialize, and layer upon layer of surprises.

One interesting quote: «; when you can afford anything, nothing becomes interesting and there is something sad about that. ».

Some of the plot twists seem far fetched, there is overabundant very foul language by everyone, and very graphically described sex. In spite of this I kinda, sorta enjoyed this book.

4.0/5

I am currently on a cruise ship for which I did not adequately prepare reading material and have no access to the Ottawa Public Library or internet. So I am limited to the small library onboard. From that I first picked Samantha Irby’s Quietly Hostile but never ever read such filth, disguised as cheap standup slapstick, and abandoned it by page 80. Even the flawed New Yorker, Truman Capote, seemed preferable.

C’est In Breakfast At Tiffany’s, his first and favourite novelan enigmatic Holly Golightly, shares a brownstone apartment in NYC with a neighbouring aspiring writer, as he tries to figure out her background and how she earns a living. She frequently visits a mafia boss in jail and eventually flees the country-only the reader knows her destination. Her safe favourite location to dine is said to be Tiffany’s.

In Other Voices, Other Times, his second novel, here combined with his first, a New Orleans 12 year old boy, orphaned when his mother dies, travels to rural Missouri to stay with his father whom he has never met, only to be stymied by well-wishing but suspicious servants. What little plot there is then gets completely lost as it becomes bizarre ravings of disconnected characters and dreams that I can only conclude are the hallucinatory dreams of a drunken cocaine addict, at times overtly homoerotic, which I suspect they really were. The mystery to me is why any publisher would deem this trash fit to publish. Perhaps it related to the early success of Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

I will give Breakfast At Tiffany’s a reluctant 3/5, but can’t get beyond 1.5/5 for Other Times, Other Voices.

In contrast to his other books, Capote’s In Cold Blood is a very well written chilling true account of a multiple murder, although a bit fictionalized.

In this historical account of the air wars, General Curtis LeMay is pitted against Carl Norten, the Dutchman who almost singehandedly developed a bombsight, that aimed to allow precision accuracy bombing of enemy targets in daylight from 30,000 feet. In contrast, the carpet bombing of broad areas of cities without discriminating civilians from military targets, advocated and employed widely by LeMay was justified in his mind because it would end the war faster. The best examples of the devastation wrought by this is the Allied bombing of Dresden and LeMay’s B-29 bombing of Tokyo in 1945 which killed more civilians in one night than did the atomic bomb of Hiroshima.

Although LeMay’s indiscriminate bombing was not morally justified by today’s standards, he was widely praised, and reliable precision targeting only became a reality much later, with radar, heat sensing and GPS guided bombs, the horrors of all wars is starkly outlined in this book, and Carl Norton has never been adequately acknowleged for his efforts.

This is not the best of Malcolm Gladwell’s books nor the worst. It will be of interest mostly to military historians and planners.

3.5/5