About Christie

Book lover. Tea Drinker. Teacher. Writer. Mother. Canadian.

What You Have Left by Will Allison

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Christie

Will Allison’s debut novel What You Have Left, reads like a series of connected short stories. When the book opens, five year old Holly has just been dropped off at her grandfather’s dairy farm. Her father says he’ll be back, waves good-bye and disappears from her life for thirty years. What follows are alternating narratives of the years both before Holly’s birth (concerning her parents Wylie and Maddy) and after, concerning Holly’s relationship with Lyle.

Holly is a bit of a train wreck. She drinks too much and abuses Lyle both before they marry and after. Of course, she has abandonment issues.

I really liked the first chapter of What You Have Left. Allison captured young Holly’s voice (although I have to admit that at first I thought the narrator was a young boy) beautifully. The first chapter mainly concerns Holly’s relationship with her grandfather, Cal, a kind man who tries to be both mother and father to Holly. His death sends Holly on a course of recklessness that seems to take her years to pull out of.

It’s not always easy to like Holly. She’s one of those chip-on-her-shoulder types of characters who doesn’t seem to take into account anyone else’s feelings but her own. Her husband, Lyle, is a saint – even when he, too, seems to make stupid decisions.

I also appreciated hearing her father’s story. I think we tend to forget that parents have lives before they become parents and sometimes it’s hard to reconcile that. Children can be selfish. Parents, too.

In the end, I liked What You Have Left. Perhaps not everyone will like the narrative, but the voices are distinct and compelling and this slim novel has a lot to say about family and forgiveness.

Girls by Frederick Busch

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Christie

The best word I can think of to describe Frederick Busch’s novel Girls is muscular. The novel has certainly received much higher praise than that. Glamour Magazine called it “powerful,” and went on to describe it as an intriguing crime story although the novel’s real strength lay with the main character’s “growing insight about his marriage, his town, and himself [which] transforms this page-turner about lost children into a tender and eloquent examination of the even greater mystery that is the human heart.”

Jack is a somewhat cantankerous Vietnam veteran who is currently a campus cop at a small college in upstate New York. His wife, Fanny, is an emergency-room nurse. Jack and Fanny are mourning the recent loss of their infant daughter, Hannah. They can barely be in the same room with each other and so they work opposite shifts, drifting past each other in a haze of exhaustion and grief.

Then a local girl goes missing and someone suggests Jack help out with the investigation, ostensibly as a way of working through his own issues.

The characters in Busch’s novel are all messed up. Jack and Hannah are locked in a grief-fueled stalemate and neither seems to know how to make the first move. As Jack observes:

I thought, as I stayed where I was, that somebody ought to walk around the table and hug this woman hard and just hold on.

Instead, Jack fills his days helping cars up icy hills, rescuing suicidal co-eds, drinking sour coffee with his confessor, Archie, and trying to figure out just what happened to the missing girl.

Girls is a atmospheric and tragic story and the characters, particularly Jack, are well-drawn and convincing. The novel is often funny, too. In one scene, where Jack runs a drug-dealer off the campus, I laughed out loud.

Busch is a new-to-me writer, but he’s written 20 other novels and he’s impressed me enough to look for more.

The New York Times has a terrific review of the novel here.

The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre

Posted on March 31, 2010 by Christie

The Bishop’s Man was the 2009 Giller Prize winner. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Giller, it’s Canada’s largest annual prize for fiction, netting the winner $50,000. MacIntyre, a well-known Canadian journalist who has won nine Geminis for broadcast journalism, beat out Anne Michaels, Colin McAdam, Annabel Lyon, and Kim Echlin.

I’m not sure The Bishop’s Man is a book I’d pick up on my own, but it’s this month’s book club pick. Still, the novel’s opening pages had me intrigued. Its narrator, Father Duncan MacAskill, is an intriguing character, but then he starts to spiral out of control and so does the book.

MacAskill is known as the “Exorcist.” The Bishop sends him to clean up after fallen priests – men who have sullied the name of the priesthood by engaging in sexual relationships with – well – anyone. As we all know, celibacy is one of the tenets of the priesthood.

MacAskill isn’t without his own secrets, though. When the bishop decides to send him back to his childhood home, MacAskill is forced to confront his own demons. Isolated from the world in backwoods Cape Breton MacAskill suddenly realizes how lonely he is and he begins to drink heavily.

The Bishop’s Man is a page-turner. Lots of things are hinted at, enough to make the reader wonder: about the suicide of a young man and his relationship with a charismatic priest who has since left the order and married; about MacAskill’s time in Honduras, revealed in snippets from his diary; about where his relationship with Stella, a woman in the village, might be headed; about his childhood.

MacIntyre juggles all these various threads and I guess this is where the book failed for me. I’m not a moron, but sometimes the out of sequence narration was really a pain-in-the-ass. I’m all for the elliptical, but I’m not sure it served the story in this instance (unless MacIntyre was trying to mimic the disordered state of MacAskill’s mind.)

I haven’t read the other novels on the Giller shortlist and so I’d be curious to see how they stack up against this one. I guess the one thing The Bishop’s Man has going for it is a sense of immediacy. The Catholic Church has certainly had its share of troubles. Whether or not the novel’s verisimilitude is enough to overlook its other issues is up to the reader, I suppose.

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Christie

Just Listen is my first Young Adult novel by Sarah Dessen, although I was certainly aware of her name. She’s always on Best Books for Young Adults lists and so I figured that, as a teacher of young adults, I should at least see what all the fuss was about.

It also gave Mallory and I another opportunity to share a book. She read this one a couple weeks ago, but I was in the middle of something else which I had to finish first.

I’ll let Mallory start by telling you a little bit about the novel.

Mallory: This book is about a model named Annabel Greene. She’s the youngest of three girls and both of her older sisters are models, too. Even though on the outside it would seem as though Annabel’s got it all (the looks, the best friend, the beautiful house, basically a charmed life) she’s actually going through some pretty serious things. For one thing, her middle sister, Whitney, has an eating disorder that weighs down the whole family. Secondly, Annabel’s best friend is no longer speaking to her. In fact, no one is speaking to her. This is a book about how Annabel learns how to express her true feelings about things.

Christie: That’s a good summary of what the book’s about. One of the book’s main points is about how appearances can be deceiving. Annabel often comments about the glass house her architect father has built and how people slow down when they drive by. What they might see is a family sitting down together to dinner, but Annabel knows that it’s much more complicated than that.

Did you like the book?

Mallory: Yes, I liked the book. I’ve read a couple of books before this one about eating disorders. They’re pretty scary, but this one seemed easier to read. Instead of describing everything Whitney does to deprive herself of food, it explains how even though she’s beautiful, she’s still struggling with her appearance. I really liked that part of the book. What about you?

Christie: Well, what I liked was that Whitney’s struggles were only one part of the book. What I liked was how Annabel struggled to make her own voice heard. Something horrible has happened to her (something I found sort of easy to guess at), but she isn’t able to say anything. Instead, she lets her former best friend, Sophie, treat her badly. It isn’t until Owen, the school’s misunderstood ‘thug’ (by reputation only) befriends her, that she allows herself to be more assertive.

Mallory: I agree. Owen seemed to open up something that Annabel didn’t even know was inside of her. Even though she and Owen only talked about music, she was allowed to express her opinion (mostly about her hate of techno) without any repercussions. And I also predicted the reason for the fallout between Annabel and Sophie, but I knew all along that Annabel was the real victim, not Sophie. She just didn’t know how to explain the truth.

Christie: There are lots of novels out there that deal with these subjects: eating disorders, failed friendship, parents who don’t understand their kids (although I have to say that the adults in this novel were decent)…what do you think Dessen did well in Just Listen?

Mallory: The main thing that I loved about Just Listen is the way Dessen built up her characters’ personalities. By the end of the book I knew that Annabel was a complicated person on the inside, Owen was extremely misunderstood, and Sophie was crazy — basically a wildchid. She made it so clear who each one of these people were. It makes a book so much more enjoyable when you feel like you know the characters. Like they’re your friends.

Christie: I agree. I think Annabel’s voice was well done here. And I have to admit that I fell in love with Owen from the very beginning. I guess I have a soft spot for big, hulking, slightly off-center guys.

Mallory: I must say that I also knew that Owen wasn’t a ‘thug’ or anything that people had said at the start. I always try to see the character in a couple different ways before really deciding if they’re the good guy or the bad guy in a book. I didn’t really have to do this with Owen. He was the quiet, music-lover that was stereotyped for his height and tough persona. Just by Dessen’s description I could tell that Owen was protective, but gentle. And I loved his little sister from the very moment her name was mentioned. Mallory. That says it all.

Christie: So – overall…would you recommend this book?

Mallory: One of my friends is a Sarah Dessen fan and she raved about this book when she saw me reading it at school. She pulled out Dessen’s novel Someone Like You and said “You must read this when you’re done.” I think she basically recommended it for me. But I would like to add that if you can sympathize with the characters in this book, and the situations that they’re in, you’ll love it. It has a moral, it teaches a lesson, and it’s a great read for young adults. I’d definitely say that if you’ve never heard of Sarah Dessen you need to read this book– and check out her other books as well. They look very promising.

Christie: I don’t disagree. I think she’s topical. The writing is generally crisp. The characters are well drawn. Young adults could do far worse.

The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Christie

The Secret of Lost Things is a quiet book inhabited by a cast of eccentric characters who all work in a labyrinthine book store in New York City.

If I start with my own beginning you will understand how I came to the Arcade, and how it came to mean so much to me.

18-year-old Rosemary Savage leaves her homeland of Tasmania after the death if her mother. Rosemary really only knows two things: the hat business (her mother was a milliner) and books (her mother’s only friend , Chaps, owned a bookstore.) Upon her arrival in New York, Rosemary stumbles across the Arcade and lands a job.

The Arcade reminded me immediately of The Strand. Any book lover who’s spent time in NYC has likely visited The Strand. It’s a sprawling, book-crammed paradise for bibliophiles.

As it turns out, Sheridan Hay actually worked at The Strand for nine months, so the similarities I saw in her fictionalized bookstore were no doubt based on her real-life experiences at The Strand.

Rosemary’s colleagues are a strange crew. There’s Pearl, the man transitioning to become a woman. There’s Oscar, the beautiful gay man in charge of the Non-Fiction section. And there’s Walter Geist, the bookstore’s manager who is an albino.

Although the blurb on the back of The Secret of Lost Things makes it sound like a literary thriller, that’s not what the book is really about. The characters who work at the Arcade are bookish types, more comfortable with the dusty tomes they sell than with each other. Each of them guards their little book store nook like jealous lovers. Rosemary’s arrival awakens all sorts of feelings and pettiness and passions. Rosemary develops a crush on Oscar even though he’s clearly not interested in her. (In fact, he’s downright mean.) But it’s Geist whose life is forever changed by Rosemary’s arrival. In retrospect she remarks:

Walter Geist’s blindness is important, but it’s my own with regard to him, that remains a lasting regret.

The Secret of Lost Things is a coming of age story. It’s a story about loss and grief. And it’s a story about the transformative power of literature. While there is a literary mystery at the book’s core, it’s not nearly as interesting as the mysteries of the heart.

An unexpected gift…

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Christie

A colleague presented me with a gift the other day. While digging through the books at The Salvation Army, she came across the book Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. As English teachers, we’re always looking for books to add to our collections and she thought this might be a good one for me (I’ve only just returned to teaching after many years doing other things.) She bought the book and then, while flipping through it, discovered that the book had been mine!
No joke – my name and student number and dorm name and room number were printed on the inside front page. That younger version of myself is 25 years ago…at least! And I’ve lived all over in the interim. What a strange and wonderful thing to have the book back.

Have you ever had a book reunion?

Here’s a novel idea…

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Christie

Novelist Fiona Robyn is releasing her new novel Thaw via the blogsphere and I’m thrilled to be able to offer the first part here. You’ll be able to continue to read the novel by following the link at the end of the first entry.

These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.

I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for’, before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.

Continue reading tomorrow here…

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Posted on February 28, 2010 by Christie

I still remember the feeling I had the first time I read The Diary of Anne Frank. I was probably about 11 or 12. No teacher could have explained the horrors of Nazi Germany to me as well as Anne did. She was speaking to me. Many years later, I visited her attic annex and it was a profound experience.

Reading The Book Thief was also a profound experience for me.

I don’t even know how to begin to talk about The Book Thief. The New York Times said it was “the kind of book that can be life changing.” I mean, you start a book like that with a little trepidation: can it really live up to all the hype? For the first 30 pages or so I thought, “no.” Last night, as I closed the book and wiped the tears away I thought, “every person alive should read this book. I want to teach this book.”

The Book Thief has so many things going for it, I’m not sure where to start singing its praises.

The Book Thief is the story of Liesel Meminger. Liesel is almost ten when she ends up in Molching with Hans and Rosa Hubermann, her new foster parents. It is 1939. In Nazi Germany.

Readers are either going to be totally enchanted or annoyed by the story’s central conceit: the novel is narrated by Death. “Here is a small fact, ” Death tells us. “You are going to die.” For the next 500-plus pages, Death is our constant companion. Sometimes the action unfolds without commentary, other times he weighs in. Although I found the first 30 pages or so a bit of a slog, I soon settled into the book’s rhythms.

Then I fell in love with Liesel. And Hans. And Rudy. And Rosa.

Liesel is extraordinary. She and Hans bond late at night, when Liesel’s nightmares wake her, and Hans teaches her to read. Books and words are central to Liesel’s story. So is her friendship with Rudy, the boy next door. Through their eyes we see Hitler and Nazi Germany; we experience the atrocities and the small kindnesses. Zusak’s story is mostly about everyday things: hunger, pettiness, laughter, hope, cruelty and kindness.

Liesel is sustained by the books she steals and anyone who loves words will appreciate and understand their ability to comfort Liesel. But she is also intelligent enough to understand how words can be used to hurt and coerce.

Where is Death in all this? He carts the souls of the dead off and is, in this story at least, a loving and benign figure.

Death gets the last word. He always does.

Books and movies…

Posted on February 27, 2010 by Christie

I finally bit the bullet and rented The Time Traveler’s Wife a few nights ago. I didn’t go see it in the theatre despite my deep and abiding love for the book. Mostly I was afraid that the film wouldn’t do the book justice…and I was right. I really like Rachel McAdams and although Eric Bana might not have been my first choice for Henry, I don’t mind him either…but the movie just wasn’t good. Maybe it’s impossible to create a faithful adaptation of a novel like TTTW, I don’t know. That said, Peter Jackson did a pretty impressive job with Tolkien.

In any case, it got me thinking about other book – to – film adaptations. What works and what doesn’t?

An example of one that works which immediately springs to mind is Ordinary People. The book, by Judith Guest, was published in the 1976. The film, directed by Robert Redford, came out in 1980. I’d read the novel and I went to the movie. You’d be hard pressed to say which is better. The film stars Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore (I know!), Timothy Hutton and Judd Hirsch. I can highly recommend the film because it’s so faithful to the novel and the performances are so rich. The book’s excellent, of course. Back in the day, Mary Tyler Moore’s performance garnered all sorts of praise as the character she played was so different from the one we were used to seeing on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Really, rent the film. (It won four Oscars: Best Director, Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Best Screenplay)

I also think Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County is terrific. The book is actually on my Reader’s table, but not because I think it’s great literature. Nevertheless, that novel made me cry so hard. And so did the movie. I loved that they didn’t try to pretty it up. Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood played the title characters, two people who fall in love — deeply and unexpectedly– later in life. Clint Eastwood is a terrific director anyway and this movie was simple and beautiful and hey, is there any character Streep can’t play?

Speaking of Streep, I was first introduced to her back in the 70s through a film called Sophie’s Choice. That film was based on a novel by William Styron, which I read after I saw the film. The film is a doozy. The book, although excellent, is slightly drier.

One author whose work has often been adapted successfully is Stephen King. The Shawshank Redemption based on King’s short story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” is fantastic.

So is Brian De Palma’s adaptation of King’s novel Carrie. I saw this movie when it came out in the theatre back in the 1970s and it scared the living crap out of me.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJe0iVo8y3A&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

One thing I’ve realized doing this is how much movie trailers have changed!

What about you? Do you have any favourite film adaptations? Any movies you felt really didn’t capture the essence of the book? I’d love to hear about them.

Freedom to Read…

Posted on February 22, 2010 by Christie

Freedom to Read Week is an annual event that encourages Canadians to think about and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom, which is guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. – from the Freedom to Read site

I personally don’t believe in censorship; I’m a pro-choice chick all the way. I agree – there’s a lot of abhorrent crap out there, but my problem with censorship is who gets to decide whether it is or isn’t abhorrent crap. The closest I’ve come to questioning the merit of a book was reading about Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, a married couple responsible for the death of three young girls including Homolka’s sister.

Freedom to Read has a wonderful list of writing that has been banned over the ages including:

“George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede was attacked as the “vile outpourings of a lewd woman’s mind,” and the book was withdrawn from circulation libraries in Britain.

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (published in 1833) was threatened with banning by Boston’s district attorney unless the book was expurgated. The public uproar brought such sales of his books that Whitman was able to buy a house with the proceeds.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was banned by the governor of Hunan province in China because, he said, animals should not use human language and it was disastrous to put animals and humans on the same level.

D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the subject of a trial in England, in which Penguin Books was prosecuted for publishing an obscene book. During the proceedings, the prosecutor asked: “Is it a book you would wish your wife or servant to read?” Penguin won the case, and the book was allowed to be sold in England. A year earlier, the U.S. Post Office had declared the novel obscene and non-mailable. But a federal judge overturned the Post Office’s decision and questioned the right of the postmaster general to decide what was or was not obscene.”

And here’s a real shocker…”The U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, 2001, passed by the American Congress in response to terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, gave the FBI power to collect information about the library borrowings of any U.S. citizen. The act also empowered the federal agency to gain access to library patrons’ log-ons to Internet Web sites—and protected the FBI from disclosing the identities of individuals being investigated.”

The Ludic Reader

Author Archives: Christie