At Work Upstairs

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a…book meme

Instructions: in bold=have read the book; in italics=want to read the book; with crosses=own the book; with asterisks=unfamiliar with the book. (Via Little Professor.)

(There’s no way I’m marking books that I want to read. Such lists breed with “ought-to-do” lists and, wham, most of the fun of a trip to the library is gone.)

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)

2. †Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)

5. †The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)

6. †The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)

7. †The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)

8. †Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)

9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)

10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)

11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)

12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)

13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)

14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)

15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)

16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)

17. †Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)

18. The Stand (Stephen King)

19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)

20. †Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

21. †The Hobbit (Tolkien)

22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)

23. †Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)

24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)

25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

27. †Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)

28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)

29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)

30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)

31. Dune (Frank Herbert)

32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)

33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

34. 1984 (Orwell)

35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)

36. *The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

37. *The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)

38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)

39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)

40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)

42. †The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)

44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)

45. †Bible

46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)

47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)

48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)

49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)

51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

52. †A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)

54. †Great Expectations (Dickens)

55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)

56. †The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)

57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)

58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)

59. †The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)

60. †The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)

61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)

63. †War and Peace (Tolstoy)

64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)

65. †Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)

66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)

68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

69. Les Miserables (Hugo)

70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)

72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)

73. Shogun (James Clavell)

74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)

75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)

76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)

77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)

78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)

79. †The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)

80. †Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)

81. †Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)

82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)

83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)

84. *Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)

85. †Emma (Jane Austen)

86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)

87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)

89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)

90. *Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)

91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)

92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)

93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)

94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)

95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)

96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)

97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)

98. *A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)

99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)

100. †Ulysses (James Joyce)

Heather

When in doubt, RBOC:

• The flu is a pernicious thing. It zapped me over the holidays and I’m still dragging around. Some people around here think I stay inside too much. It’s the flu, I tell you, the flu, not fear of -30 weather or sloth. The flu.

• Why oh why are people seduced by Flash?

• I seem to have come down with a slight case of compulsive behaviour. First it was cataloging the books (just over 1900, and, no, I don’t really think that’s a lot of books). Then it was Weffriddles which passed quickly. Next up: editing Wikipedia pages. And now, God help me, Second Life looks interesting.

• Inquiring minds want to know: Why does anyone want to be a dental hygienist?

On the reading front

• McCarthy’s The Road was gruesome what with the roasted baby and the basement full of “provisions” and I haven’t read enough apocalyptic science fiction to place it in the range of pessimistic and dire warnings. The ending disappoints in the same way that the end of Beasts of No Nation disappoints. McCarthy’s prose is interesting tho–both spare and lyrical. I’ve not read anything else of his but I can see that I probably should.

• Sangster’s history of women in Canadian Leftist politics was another one of those books that are alternately very interesting since the cover topics I’m dreadfully ignorant about and very frustrating because they’re surveys. I’m still curious about Annie Buller and more curious about Beckie Buhay, who was, it turns out, Tom McEwen‘s common-law wife in the early 30s. Then there’s Gladys MacDonald, who spent a year in the Battleford Jail for her newspaper work and once released she was interned in the Kingston Penn for being a Communist.

• I’m reading other things in a desultory fashion. Not much seems compelling enough to spend large chunks of time on it. That’ll change I hope cause grasshopper brain gets tiring after a while.

One last thing: why do people dislike the bagpipes? How could you sit still to something like this.

Heather

I picked up Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation last week nudged by a memory of the positive press the book got in late 2005.

“Astonishing,” “staggering,” “harrowing,” “startling,” and “stunning” ring through the mostly positive reviews. Maslin’s unfortunately titled review praises the book while pointing to its lack of subtlety. The subject matter—child soldiers in Africa—is dire and the prose distinctive. Unlike other readers, though, I found Iweala’s avoidance of the past and future tenses annoying: there’s only so much present and past progressive I can take. And in the end, I don’t think the stylistic choice solved the difficulty of representing an African child’s war history.

This interview touches on one of the women whose war history inspired the story; and this longer one explores the novel’s language . And here’s an NPR interview which like much of the other coverage focuses as much on the child soldier problem rather than on the writing.

It’s odd where reading will take you.

I started with Bock’s A Communist’s Daughter and then dissatisfied with its portrait of Jean Ewen, I moved on to Ewen’s autobiography, China Nurse. From there, I went to her communist father Tom McEwen’s autobiography, The Forge Glows Red. And from there I ended up reading an uneven biography of Annie Buller.

Buller died thirty-four years ago today. Most of the photos I’ve seen of her are, like this one, very unflattering. (Photo source)

A founding member of the Canadian Communist Party, she was an union organizer who seems to have moved between Ontario and Manitoba in order to organize the needle trades. Like many of labour activists of the period, she spent time in jail. She did two stints–for a year after the Estevan Coal Miners Strike and for two years during the early WWII crackdown on the CPC party. (Her husband was interned at the same time.) After that, more CPC work, including a run in a federal election.

She must have been a woman with a great deal of energy.

Heather

I’ve been carrying the Repka book about the internment of Canadian leftists during WWII upstairs and down with the computer for a week or so. Physically it’s not very prepossessing. Dun cloth covers and sadly yellowing paper: published by a small BC Press nearly a quarter of a century ago. I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about it. It’s both fascinating and annoying.

Annoying first: since it’s basically an oral history, it’s missing some of the apparatus you’d find in more formal studies: indications of how the accounts were collected and how much editing was involved; framing text placing the people and events in the social and political context of the time; or a consideration of the strengths and gaps in the accounts.

It’s not so much that I want to know if the memories were one-hundred percent accurate. No memory is. But I wanted a greater sense of their experiences–something a bit bigger in scope. There’s not much to be found online and it’s hard to imagine myself immersed in military history. But you never know where curiousity leads.

The barbwire-surrounded cabins of Kananaskis where they stuck one Canadian anti-fascist in with eleven fascists are long gone but this is what the camp looked like at war’s end.

(source)

Camp 33 at Petawawa housed German PoWs, Italian-Canadians, Japanese-Canadians and Leftist-Canadians. It has a long history as an internment location.

(source)

The Camp 32 (the source for this bit of philately) was in the Hull Jail which probably was pulled down when the Ottawa River’s edge shifted from industrial to bureacratic.

The men in these camps wore uniforms made by these war workers.

I saw this in St. Vinnie’s and I had to have it. Told myself it would be a gift for someone else. We don’t have a dog; not likely to ever have a dog. But for $2 I have a book full of pictures of dogs and fedoraed men with trousers hoicked up to their armpits.

And as a bonus, I have learned of and now covet Crow Shooting, a book which my father could have used when he wasn’t concentrating on porcupines or beer cans. It covers: “individual and flock habit, sets eight crow calls to music, tells how to locate and recognize roosts, build blinds and employ cover, and use various decoys.”

Must now find Popowski on crows.

Some crazy person had access to my library card and requested way too many books. They’re always on the verge of breeding with the others stacked in every room in the house. Good thing I had some time last week to take a few of the top of the piles.

• James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack invokes Scott, Hogg, and Stevenson in its account of a Presbyterian minister’s account of meeting the devil. Amusing enough in its exploration of the ways people will believe in the idea of a God but refuse the idea of a Devil. And interesting in the way it uses the literary conventions of demonic or faerie encounter to deal with social changes in Scotland over the last fifty years. Reviews here and here; an interview here; a supporting site here; and best of all, Itchy-Coo with its braw books for bairns o aw ages.
• I followed this one with Before I Wake by Robert Wiersema which also tackles issues of faith but with a trebling of voices. I’m not fully persuaded that the voices of all the characters are as distinct as they could be but I quite liked meeting the Wandering Jew with his troupe of unseen homeless men whiling away the latest bit of eternity in the public library. A review here, a profile here; an excerpt here;
• Madeleine Thien’s Certainty is one I’m likely to buy a copy of and am most likely to re-read. There’s something about it besides rough geography that reminds me of Daivd Bergen’s The Time in Between. Thien’s treatment of grief and the past is unsentimental as is her treatment of the uncertainty produced by hidden pasts. Reviews here and here; a profile here; an excerpt here.
• I’m ambivalent about Clare Morrell’s second novel, Natural Flights of the Human Mind. I’d been looking forward to it since I thought her first novel was very good. This one suffers I think from including not one, but two. coincidences to make the plot move forward. One McGuffin is fine; two is a problem. Reviews here, here and here.
• Martin Millar’s Good Fairies of New York was a light read, uneven in parts, but just the thing if you’re looking for punk Scottish fairies who get up to no good with fiddles, banners, magic mushrooms, and whiskey. I’m saving my copy to corrupt my now-small-soon-to-be-teenage relatives.

Heather

I was admittedly ambivalent about Bock’s Communist’s Daughter but it led me to Jean Ewen, one of the women on the right in this photograph (orginal here).

Bock, like most people who write about Bethune, includes Ewen as a peripheral character. Being cast as a bit player in Bethune haigiography must have been both tedious and annoying to Jean Ewen since she had been in China longer than Bethune, spoke Chinese, and came from a family with multi-generation involvement in communist and socialist politics (her father spent three years for sedition in Kingston along with Tim Buck).

Jean Ewen (1911-1988) recorded her memories of her years or wartime nursing in China Nurse 1932-1939 (1981). Her prose isn’t as smooth and polished as Bock’s but it reveals multiple layers of conflict when dealing with “authorities” of one sort or another. It’s oddly fascinating as she tries to balance her frustration with Bethune’s high-handedness with an acknowledgment of his medical skills. Agnes Smedley, like anyone who tried to manipulate Ewen by referring to her father’s expectations, evokes a similarly conflicted response. The conflicts in her narrative voice are clear from her memoirs opening

My father and I had never been close. After my mother died in the flu epidemic of 1919, he took my brothers, sister, and me to live on a ranch in Saskatchewan where he worked as a blacksmith. While we lived there, the rancher’s wife introduced my father to socialism, which she had studied at the Rand School of Socialism in New York. Before long, my father was reading Das Kapital, and by the time he left the ranch in 1924, he was ready for the Revolution, in which he could play a more interesting role than that of being a father to his four children.

Unlike Bock’s novel, Ewen’s unpolished memoir has made me more curious about China during the Sino-Japenese war and more curious about her life. She claims on multiple occasions to have been a coward but i doubt it. I suspect she was curious, sturdy, skeptical, and determined.

I’m still dragging around even though I’m in bed before 9 most nights. When my monkey brain races into hypochondria, the fragment of rational brain I have left remembers that September featured a upward spike in workload accompanied by an equally charming upward spike in conflict, a less than restful trip to Nova Scotia, a couple of trips to the world’s friendliest dental office, and general misery in the world.

Given that my brain was thus diverted I’ve trundled my way through a relatively small number of books.

Droughtlanders‘ (a YA fantasy novel) use of Cirque de Soleil as a model for one social group was amusing but the woodeness of the negative characters less so. Mostly positive review here. An author profile here.

The Communist’s Daughter was disappointing and I haven’t quite figured out why. One of Bock’s goals was to write something similar to Robinson’s Gilead, an extraordinary novel, a book he calls a “cathedral”. Writing from the inside out, from a single character’s perspective, especially when the character isn’t particularly likeable, is a difficult art. And Norman Bethune was not a likeable man. Somehow between the reader and the fictional Bethune’s self-excusing voice there’s not enough of a gap, not enough possibilities of alternate voices, to make the book work. Reviews here, here, and here.

The Bullet Trick was an amusing enough mystery (reviews here) though I may have gotten more mileage from the occasional Scotticisms and its portrait of seedy Glasgow. For contrast, there was the cozy, reworked Christie found in Still Life set in the autmnal Eastern Townships.

Let’s see what else.

Consolation I enjoyed, though I suspect I’m one of the few people who would identify it as a profoundly regional novel in the same way that much of Atwood and some of Ondaatje are regional. (It’s a mytho-myopic peculiarity of Canadian literary criticism that books from the West or from the Atlantic provinces are typed as “regional” but books from Ontario are “Canadian”.) Interviews here and here.

And I’m still working on Kirkton. The slower pace demanded by 17th-century prose is nicely balanced by nuggets of Scottish turns of phrase. I think I’ve found the passage I need for the much-delayed-much-prolonged editing project but I need to make my way through the rest of it just to make sure. My favourite bit so far

In fine, the eagerness of their longing was so great, some would never cut their hair, some would never drink wine, some would never wear linen, tlll they might see the desire of their eyes, the king.

Weell: when time was ripe, there was a sort of parliament conveened in England . . . .

Not sure which I admire most: the “I’ll tell you a story” rhythm in the list of of things the Scottish Royalists would not do until Charles II came back or the precise puncturing of all that foolishness by “weell”.

It was a slow week for reading around here and several books went back to the library unfinished. From the portion I read, I’d say Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls Fat and Thin covers similar ground as Veronica in its exploration of two unlikely friends. The reworking of similar characters was part of why I wanted to read it. I may borrow it again when I’m in the mood to put up with the Ayn Rand character that drives the early parts of the plot.

The most interesting thing I did finish was Gather Beneath the Banner, a catalogue from a 1999 Textile Museum. The catalog is strong on the images; high-level on the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; and oddly light on the details of the construction of the banners. Not a single photo of the back of a banner. (Why, yes, I have made security guards nervous by trying to peep around at the backings of tapestries. Looking very closely is not touching.)

While my great-grandmother belonged to a temperance society (somewhere around here I have her pledge card), it’s unlikely that I’d ever pass muster. Even so, I’m curious about the contradictions at the heart of the nineteenth-century WCTU: I’d like to better understand how its members sustained the contradiction between arguments for equality when it came to female suffrage and arguments of difference with when it came to race and eugenics.

(Note to self: some research possibilities identified here.)

(Another note to self: wonder if there’s a text out there somewhere that talks about the way politics and textiles intersect in public spaces (banners, expedition flags, badges). Must be. )