The Passionate Reader

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

One should not expect that this married openly bisexual writer of several novels would write a conventional romance and in this book nothing is conventional. She has been widely praised for her liberal and controversial views on religion, philosophy and sexuality, which also feature in this book.

A diverse group of potential astronauts at the Johnson Space Center, in the 1980s compete for various positions in the space shuttle program. Inevitably bitter rivalry but also romance develops, including an intense clandestine lesbian relationship greatly complicated by interfering relatives and a child.

There is pedantic endless self-analysis of ambitious insecure women as they compete for roles. One minute they are affectionate and the next they are consumed by biting sarcasm.

In the second half, sure enough, a deep philosophical outlook on religion through the words of one participant develops. This seems to be a way of discussing her own vaguely humanist philosophy of life. I cannot fault humanism generally, but here it is couched in contrived and unrealistic deep emotionality that seems artificial.

There is a valiant attempt to develop mystery as the shuttle develops life-threatening problems, but this seems highly unrealistic to me.

The overused literary device of time shifting does not benefit this story and I do not understand why it is used extensively. That and artificial unrealistic emotionality limited my enjoyment of this book.

3.5/5

Thanks, Goodreads

This is a delicious political satire from a native Neufie, told as only the Neufie co-host of This Hour Has 22 Minutes could.

The chapter in which Crirch discusses the Canadian traitors Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, Kevin O’Leary and Danielle Steele as they cozy up to Trump is full of biting sarcasm, but also serious and unique insights.

The13 page chapter on the CRCT, Canadian content and innumerable historical TV shows drags a bit, and the penultimate chapter where Santa gets detained by border agents as he drives the sleigh over the sky border is just silly nonsense, but perhaps appealing to toddlers.

One quote will demonstrate his delectable humour: “He said that he had a map of Canada on his behind, so that every time he bends over, Quebec separates.”

No one recommended this short book to me but I am glad I found it and am pleased to recommend it to everyone.

4.5/5

The first part of this memoir is almost entirely composed of short clipped factual sentences about growing up in poverty in India. As the story of her remarkable life unfolds, she is tormented by mixed feelings about her egotistical, volatile, abusive and unpredictable mother and her alcoholic absent father. She experienced several doomed relationships, become a qualified architect, a briefly lauded movie star, and then found her niche as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, writing the Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The God of Small Things which got her out of poverty. She then became a vocal activist against the injustices and cruelty of modern Indian society.

She eventually seems to come to appreciate her mercurial mother’s values more than would seem approriate, and mourns her death.

The writing style is certainly engaging and makes the book readable and enjoyable. A couple of quotes: “…. I have concluded that I grew up in a cult. A good cult, a fabulous one even, but a cult nevertheless, in which the outside world was a fuzzy entity, and in the inside world, unquestioned obedience and frequently demonstrated adoration of the Mother Guru were the basic requirements for membership.”

“She [her mother] had learned early what a powerful weapon physical vulnerability could be if it was properly deployed.”

I think my wife enjoyed this book more than I did, but I nevertheless give it a.

3.5/5;

Thanks, Vera.

In this double biography, Carlton University professor, and author of ten books of history, tries to rehabilitate the lives of the mothers of Winston Churchill and of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In my opinion she fails to do so.

She conveys a lot of information about the culture and times, and I learned a lot of history. However, the superficial aristocratic world that both women grew up in leaves a lot to be desired. Vain Jeanie Churchill spent recklessly on herself, was extremely promiscuous, while one of her husbands, the father of Winston, probably died of tertiary syphilis. Sara Delano Roosevelt was a control freak, unconcerned about the poor around her and for much of her life, opposed to any of the social programs that made her son’s New Deal famous.

The numerous affairs that almost all of the characters engaged in, including FDR, make it seem that marital vows were only for others, and not applicable to the rich and famous, and they seem to be just accepted and even expected by the author.

With my background, I wondered if Jeanie Churchill had Fitz-Hugh-Curtis syndrome (gonococcal perihepatitis) and the passing mention of FDR’s kidney problems following a bout of scarlet fever make it likely that he had post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis which may have contributed to his death from a hypertensive stroke years later. The latter is speculative.

I did not enjoy this book, although I learned many details of history.

3/5

Thanks, Kit.

An older but still good Bryson nonfiction book. His eccentricity lies in part in his habit of asking questions that few if any others had thought to ask, and then attempting to answer them with deep scholarly digging into archaeology and history. In this story, he first relates the history of establishing a home, and then tours the remodelled rectory that is his home, and documents what might have gone on in different rooms, over eons of time and around the world, in similar rooms, or those of wealthier Brits.

At times the discussion is tangential to the topic of rooms; in the 32 page chapter on the drawing room, he delineates the origins of many similar names, discusses the eccentric characters responsible for designing many elaborate houses and furniture and barely mentions the rooms.

The chapter on cellars really has nothing much to say about cellars and is mainly about building materials, from stucco, brick, iron and steel.

There must be a lot of exaggeration. A surgeon claims that he performed 200 amputations in 24 hours or one every 7 minutes and 15 seconds.

Not as good as A Brief History of Almost Everything, but still very informative and entertaining.

3.8/5

Thanks, Mike.

This Canadian/British/Taiwanese author provides a personal family history intertwined with the troubled history of the island of her ancestors, including the experiences of her grandfather, a fighter pilot in the shrinking Chinese Nationalist army in the civil war, pre 1949.

There are some brief perceptive comments about global warming, seismic activity, industrial development, biodiversity, and sea water rising as they pertain to the shores and the volcanic activity of Taiwan.

The pathos of excessive nostalgia permeates this story. Although looking back may be important to see the way forward, too much of it can paralyze you.

A book that does not fit neatly into any one genre, this one may have bits of useful information for historians, and be of interest to diverse Chinese folk, but provides little new of interest for reasonably educated others.

2/5

In this novel by a British NGO who worked with Syrian asylum seekers in Greece, a young Syrian, Nuri, refuses to join his father’s business and becomes a beekeeper instead. When the civil war breaks out, he is forced to become a refugee, fleeing with his family to Turkey, Greece, and ultimately Britain.The narrator is Nuri and the story is entirely related in the first person singular.

Flashbacks provide a vivid picture of that horrible experience. But they also confused me as his PTLD dreams and nightmares seem to occur at random and I found it difficult to distinguish them from the reality and profound vulnerability he experienced. It seems that his wife has suddenly gone completely blind as a hysterical response to the trauma of the bombing.

I suspect this plot would be easier to follow as a written work, but it does expose the horror of what millions of people experienced in 2015-16.

3.5/5

Thanks, Goodreads & Book Browze.

I cannot recall ever reading a book with more interesting and erudite information about geology, evolution, paleontology, physics, anatomy, chemistry cosmology, life, and humanity’s place in the world. Not only is it highly informative, Bryson’s perspective is insightful and unique. His vast knowledge of many subjects is sprinkled with humour while he outlines the extreme improbability of our existence, and the uncertainty of any future for us as a species.

I was already a fan of Bryson having read The Body: An Owner’s Manual and A Walk in the Woods, but this is by far his most important and best work.

This book may be confusing and dense for some nonscientists but it is worth the effort to read it. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

5/5

Thanks, Goodreads