etc.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
Unabridged Audiobook 2003

Haddon has done quite a remarkable job with this book. It is told from the point of view of Christopher Boone, a 15 year-old with Asperger’s Syndrome who lives with his parents and attends a school for kids with special needs. When the book opens, Christopher finds the body of his neighbour’s dog on her front lawn with a pitchfork sticking out of it, and he takes it upon himself to find the dog’s murderer and write a book about his investigation. Haddon is amazingly deft at getting you inside Christopher’s head, revealing his idiocyncracies (he likes prime numbers and hates the colours yellow and brown), and sympathetically exposing his unique view of the world. My favourite part? The way he manages to communicate Christopher’s difficulty in relating to and dealing with the people around him, as well as the trials those same people go through in dealing with Christopher.

How to be Alone, Jonathan Franzen
Unabridged Audiobook 2003

review soon

Bella Tuscany, Frances Mayes
Unabridged Audiobook 1999

This is a lovely book. Almost too lovely, in fact; I’m not used to reading books with this much flowery prose and over-abundance of adjectives. In Bella Tuscany, Mayes picks up where she left off in Under the Tuscan Sun (which I haven’t read), with continuing renovations to her Tuscan villa and travels further afield in Italy. It made for pleasurable listening on my mundane highway drives to and from work (especially all the gastronomic details, which made me hungry on my way home every evening), but I have a feeling it would have been a bit too saccharine to sustain my interest in print.

Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
Unabridged Audiobook 2003

I’m reading again, woot!

If my life sucked, it would suck a little bit less after reading this book. As it is, my life doesn’t suck at all so many of the extremes in this books (and it’s all extremes) mostly made me sit up and think “huh. what are the chances?” That one person could have met so many dysfunctional people and had so many bizarre experiences in his life is almost beyond belief. Burroughs recounts his days living with psycho lesbian mum, alcoholic dad, wacked out shrink’s family (who communicate with God through their excrement) and a whole sundry bunch of utterly marginalized human beings, all the while keeping his narrative somewhat pitiful and always deadpan funny (reminded me a little of Naked). I might not have liked this book as much as I did if Burroughs was any more upfront than he already is. That is — he holds no punches in spelling out the Truth of his experiences but he resists labeling them and the people who populate his life. So his 34-year old homosexual lover is merely obsessed/obsessive and possibly capable of homicide, and it was only after I finished reading the book (and thinking about it for this review) that I realized that he was more than just obsessive and slightly manic – he was also a pedophile. So, yeah, Burroughs does a great job with things like that.

Atonement, Ian McEwan
Unabridged Audiobook 2003

I’m not sure why it took me four tries to get through this book. By the time I was on track 14 on disc 10 (I “read” it on audio), I was tightening my grip on the steering wheel, pursing my lips, and willing it not to end. It’s been a little while since that happened and it almost never happens with audio.

The book is set in the summer of 1935, Briony Tallis is a precocious 13-year old aspiring playwright/author who has written a short play to honour the return of her brother. A lot of the action, probably all of Part 1, takes place on the day of his arrival, which is also the day the young Tallis cousins from the North arrive for a respite away from their feuding (and divorcing) parents. Briony enlists her cousins to act in the performance but a series of events makes the impending performance fall apart, and her ensuing actions make most everything else fall apart too. One element that struck me about this book was the way McEwan managed to capture the melodrama and euphoria of youth which left me partially annoyed with Briony but also rooting for her all the way. And no more spoilers, the narrative has a delicious what’s-next feel to it, in the manner of a lot of good, Victorian storytelling, and I’m wont to give any of it away.

Stitch n’ Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook, Debbie Stoller
Published October 2003

I have limited knitting experience and a bit more book experience, but I think it’s justifiable for me to say that this book is a veritable bestseller as far as craft books go. Debbie Stoller is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bust, so her take on what it means to be a rabid knitter and a feminist, outlined in the first chapter of the book, is interesting and compelling, and gives hope to the rest of us knitters and feminists. I say “us knitters” with a sheepish chuckle because while I first learnt to knit when I was a teenager, I’ve only just become a committed knitter so using the “us” in this context feels a little disingenuous. Still, I’m going to use it and get used to it because, thanks in large part to this book, I’m hooked (terrible pun, sorry).

The book is split into two equal-ish parts: all the basics and how-tos up front and funky patterns in the second half. Again, my experience with knitting is nascent at best, and this is the first book on the topic that I’ve read cover-to-cover, but some of the things I really appreciated in the first half of the book: the instructions and handy illustrations of things like how to hold the needles, how to distinguish a knit from a purl stitch, how to weave in yarn ends, and other such helpful tidbits that the experienced knitter wouldn’t need and perhaps wouldn’t think to point out. Oh and, did I mention that it’s all smart and humourous? And that after waiting months and months for a copy off the hold list at my local library, I went out and bought my own copy a mere handful of days after I’d already fawned breathlessly over the library’s copy? Yep, it’s that good.

Dancing in my Nuddy Pants: Further Confessions of Georgia Nicholson, Louise Rennison
Unabridged Audiobook 2003

This was a very difficult book to listen to. In fact, I’d venture to recommend that if you enjoyed the first two Georgia Nicholson books, you should do yourself a favour and read this book in print and give the recorded version a miss. I did enjoy the first two and feel somewhat regretful that I opted for the audiobook for this installment because the clunky teenager-isms that made the books funny just makes the audiobook spectacularly annoying. What a shame.

Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris, Sarah Turnbull
Published August 2003

Today was a good day. I woke up early, spring-cleaned the deck, brewed tea, pulled up a freshly-hosed deck chair, and read in the warm sun all day. This is one of the books I read. Sarah Turnbull is an Australian journalist who took a year off to travel the world, serendipitously met a Frenchman in Bucharest, planned to visit him in Paris for a week, and ended up never leaving. Her portrait of Paris is earnest and resolute, she holds no punches in articulating the many frustrations of living in a city that isn’t patient with expatriates, yet she manages to do justice to the rapture of someone who finds herself accidently living in the most beautiful city in the world. I couldn’t help but compare this book to Gopnik’s, which I also liked a lot, but probably not as much as I liked this one. Gopnik certainly doesn’t glaze over the particular annoyances of French bureaucracy or their often insular culture, but whereas these annoyances are humourous anecdotes in Gopnik’s narrative, they play a very real role in Turnbull’s honestly recounted expat-experience. Most of all though, this book made me long to be in Paris again, more than any other Paris-lit has (and I’ve read a number) and, in my mind, that alone is enough to recommend it.

First Have Something to Say: Writing for the Library Profession, Walt Crawford
Published June 2003

First off, me liking this book has nothing to do with my name showing up in the index. Really it doesn’t.

I can’t think of a better person to write a how-to-write book. Walt Crawford has to be one of the most prolific people in the library-world; he also has to be one of the only people who can be engaging and thought-provoking for more than 20-pages a month. So it was with great anticipation that I ordered a copy of his book and cracked the spine last week. One word of advice: if you’re thinking about doing any library-writing, you’ll want to own a copy of this book. Those of you who read these pages with any regularity know that it’s a rare book I would recommend for purchase over a library loan, so act accordingly. Walt’s slim volume is chockful of valuable words of advice, some of which made me regret not having read it before getting into publication myself (mostly the bits about rights to your work, I realise now how naive I was about ownership over my own words and ideas). One of the main reasons why I enjoyed this book is also one of the main reasons why I enjoy most of Walt’s work and that is his ability to strike the perfect balance between palpable enthusiasm (“everyone can write”) and candid realism (“not everyone should write”). And that’s my clumsy paraphrasing, not Walt’s.

Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach
Published April 2003

This book is as morbidly interesting it sounds. Roach covers what she calls “notable achievements made while dead”, everything from cadavers used for practice face lifts, to victims of airplane crashes whose bodies tell the story of the crash, to crash-test-dummy cadavers and cadavers used for the study of human decay, all the while tapping into that base human curiosity that accounts for our inability to look away from a bad car accident.

A lot of the time the most interesting bits of the book are the bits about the people who work with cadavers: the guy who watches bodies decay in the sun, the woman who saws heads off for plactic surgeons to practice on, the guy who pieced together the the cause of the TWA flight 800 crash by examining the cadavers and coroner’s reports, and all the historical figures that play a part in the story. The one unfortunate thing about the book is that while Roach insists that she is never disrespectful of the people who once inhabited the cadavers she researches, there are times when her double entendres and misplaced humour made me cringe, not so much for her poor taste as for her poor judgement.