Nose in a Book

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future by Michael J. Fox

Read for: Canadian Book Challenge 4

Intended for recent graduates, this quick little read is a little bit funny and a little bit advice and insight.

Even though I’m not a recent graduate, I definitely found this book to be a worthwhile read. Despite dropping out of high school, Fox argues that he still managed to learn everything he needed from life.  As the subtitle suggests, he learned from the twists and turns.  And he takes this opportunity to share those lessons with the reader.  The thing that makes this book different than the 37 million other advice books out there is Fox’s humour and his attitude.  As we all know, Fox is funny, and this book doesn’t disappoint in that corner.  But what surprised me (but probably that’s just me – apparently he’s known for being an optimist?) was how positive he was about life in general and his in particular.  A lot of times I avoid advice type books because I wonder what makes this guy so great that he thinks he can give me advice?  (For example: I read The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and while it had a lot of god stuff in it, it mostly just annoyed me.)  But something about Fox’s attitude and his sense of humour made this one readable and enjoyable.

Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge

Hmm…I’m not really sure where to start with this one.  At first, I didn’t think I liked it, but as I thought about it more and read about it, it’s starting to grow on me.

So, Henry, an author, published a book a few years ago – a super famous, well loved book about animals (coincidence?  I don’t think so…)  Anyway, he’s got his second book all ready to go when the publishers shoot it down because it’s a little unconventional (ok, a lot unconventional).  It’s two books in one – an essay about the Holocaust and a fictional story about the Holocaust.  He wants it published as a flip book.  Meaning that you would read one part of the book from the beginning to the middle and then you’d flip the book to read the other part of the book from the beginning to the middle again.  (Guess who else wanted to write a flip book?)  After this disappointment, Henry decides to quit writing and move away to some unnamed big city.  There he meets a taxidermist who is writing a play that on the surface is about a donkey and a monkey (Beatrice and Virgil) who live on a shirt just talking, but is actually about “The Horrors” – the holocaust (and other similar “Horrors”).

I’m still not sure I liked the book but I think that Martel accomplished what he set out to do in spite of his publishers not enjoying his original idea (I don’t know the whole back story – I’m just going on other reviews I’ve read -and of course a lot of assumption based on the actual novel).  And I like that.  And I think that makes it a successful book.  It was also pretty short and besides that it was a quick read which also works in its favour.  Also, apparently Martel’s original story was about a talking monkey and a talking donkey and it seems he was able to get a lot of their conversations published anyway as they were part of the taxidermist’s play.  I love that.  (And, honestly, I don’t know if the publishers really did tell him that his flip book idea sucked but I’m assuming because that’s what happened in the book.)

It’s also a smart book, almost to the point of pretentiousness.  In fact, it is pretentious but not overly, annoyingly so.  There is one scene from the play (the first one Henry reads) where Virgil describes a pear to Beatrice because she’s never seen one before.  I really liked it, it was very well written, but somehow it knew it was well written and it came through in the writing.  (Make sense?)

I guess I would reccomend it but not as a fast paced, can’t put it down, gripping type of story.  More as a story that says something important and also happens to be entertaining.

Would You by Marthe Jocelyn

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge

This book is about a teenage girl whose sister is seriously injured when she is hit by a car and the week immediately following the accident.  The book was really short and there really wasn’t much more to it.

I didn’t really like this book.  I think it needed more.  I think I know what the author was trying do with this novel but it needed more depth, more character development, more time.  After reading a book, I like to feel I’ve been entertained or that I learned something or that I gained some new understanding but after reading this one I felt none of that.  I don’t want to sound rude but I’m not really sure what the point of this book was.  It was well written and if there had been more depth of the characters and the story I could see it being a really good book.  As it is though, it just didn’t do anything for me.

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge and What’s in a Name Challenge

In Sarajevo a cellist is sitting at a window watching his friends and neighours in line for bread when they are all killed by a mortar.  He decides to go out into the streets every day at the same time for 22 days to play and Adagio for each person killed in the attack.  The novel tells the story of three people living in Sarajevo during the siege in the 1990′s.  Each of them is affected by the cellist and his actions.  I actually found that although the book was named after him, the cellist wasn’t actually the focus of the book.  It was more about living and surviving in the city during the siege.

It was interesting (that’s not quite the right term but it’s the best I’ve got right now) to read about living in Sarajevo at the time.  In the past few months I’ve also read Left to Tell about the Rwandan genocide and A Thousand Splendid Suns about the Taliban in Afghanistan (and last year The Book of Negroes about slavery).  I’ve known that these kind of things were happening in the world but reading about them inspires me to find out more about what really happened and why and because they are so much more modern than books I’ve read about WWII or other conflicts they hit so much closer to home.  I am consistently amazed at the incredible cruelty that human beings have the ability to inflict on each other.  It’s really disgusting.

I think it’s really important to read books like this and feel that disgust and anger about the atrocities that occurred.  We need to remember so we can try to prevent these kinds of things from happening in the future.  A common theme in these books is the people who never thought it could happen to them.  That really hits close to home because that’s what I’m constantly thinking as a I read these novels.  “That could never happen in Canada.”  But who knows, maybe it could?

Anyway, back to the book!  I thought it was well written but sometimes I felt it was a little contrived.  It just didn’t feel completely sincere to me at times.  Possibly that’s because it’s impossible to write a book about something you don’t know.  It sounds like Galloway did all the research he could but I just don’t think it’s possible to really understand what it’s like to go through something like this unless you’ve actually experienced it.  (Not that you’d ever WANT to!)

The thing that’s cool about this book is that there really was a Cellist of Sarajevo.  The details aren’t exactly the same but there was a man, Vedran Smailovic, who played Albinon’s Adagio during the siege.  Apparently Smailovic wasn’t too pleased about the book though!

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge

It is in the future (the near future according to the book jacket) and the bees have all disappeared.  Then randomly (or not as it turns out) five people across the globe are stung.  Each of them are then brought into special isolation rooms to be studied to find out why they were stung and how this information could be used to bring back the bees.  I found this part of the book interesting but then it took an odd turn.  After the stingees are sent back to their normal lives, they are again gathered up, and this time brought together on a remote island and told to tell stories to each other.  Then there are a bunch of their short stories in the book (which I’m sure had some deep meaning to the story but it wasn’t readily apparent and I just didn’t feel like thinking that hard to figure it out).    Then after all that weirdness, there’s some zombie references and then you find out why the bees disappeared and how the scientists plan on getting them back.

So, how did I feel about this book?  I’m still not sure.  It’s taken me a while to get to this review because I’m still deciding what I think.  I did enjoy the first half and I was satisfied with the ending, but the middle part was strange.  And I can’t decide if the beginning and the ending make up for the strangness of the middle. you know?

As always with Coupland, though, there were definitely parts that made me laugh out loud and many of his characters were pretty witty which made for enjoyable reading even in the weird parts.  I think overall it was a decent book and it wasn’t too long or deep so I can see past the middle part (which wasn’t bad – just different and isn’t that just typical Coupland?)

Note: I’m labelling this as dystopian fiction because it kind of has that feel, but it’s not typical dystopian either.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Read for: Canadian Book Challenge 3, What’s in a Name? 3 Challenge

I loved this book!  I don’t know how I haven’t heard of it sooner, I know people have been blogging about it because I just read a bunch of reviews, but somehow I’ve missed them all.  Last month at book club a couple of people mentioned it and I decided it sounded interesting.  I’m so glad I picked it up!  I’ve been having a rough week (nothing serious – just adjusting to life with three kids) and it’s been the only thing that’s kept me sane (besides bedtime!).

Anyway, what made the story for me was Flavia, the main character.  She’s an incredible intelligent eleven-year-old who loves chemistry.  She’s inherited a very well appointed chemistry lab (seriously, I used to teach chemistry and some of the equipment she had was better than we had!) and she know how to use it.  I think what I liked best about the novel were all the little chemistry references that were woven into the story.  At one point she’s in a classroom and notices a mistake on the periodic table.  This is too much for her and she has to correct it.  I was cheering her on at that point!

But that’s not even the most important part of the book.  One afternoon, the housekeeper finds a dead bird with a stamp on its beak on the front step.  The very next morning, Flavia finds a dead man in the garden.  After calling the police, she decides that she takes it upon herself to find the murderer.  As I mentioned earlier, Flavia is very intelligent, but she is also eleven and this equals funny!  Another reviewer said the story wouldn’t have worked if she had been older and more mature and I totally agree.  The humour comes from her age and immaturity combined with her intelligence.

The book was fun and humourous and light but still had a great plot and a mystery with an unpredictable ending.   I’m looking forward to reading more about Flavia!

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Read for: The Canadian Books Challenge

I find the more Atwood I read, the more I appreciate her writing.  Sometimes I don’t love the plot but her writing is brilliant.  If you’ve read Oryx and Crake you might recognize the setting and some of the characters in this novel.  It took me a really long time to clue into this though.  I did read Oryx and Crake right when it first came out so it’s been a while.

In this novel, there’s been a supervirus (the waterless flood) that’s spread through out a large majority of the population.  The story is told through two of the survivors, Ren and Toby who have managed to avoid the plague by being isolated from the general population.  Through flashbacks we learn that Toby and Ren were once part of the same religious group – called the Gardeners – and have since left for various reasons.  Eventually, Ren and Toby are forced to leave their respective hideouts and they are able to find others from their pasts and eventually each other.

I really liked this novel.  I sometimes have a hard time reading dystopian literature because it can be so disturbingly accurate.  Somehow this one didn’t get to me the way others have. (And not because it’s unrealistic.  Maybe I’m just becoming desensitized to it because I’ve read so much lately!)  With people making such a big deal over the swine flu and a possible pandemic it becomes a lot more real to read about a virus that killed huge portions of the population.

The characters in the book were likable and realistic.  It was really interesting to read how Toby viewed  Ren after they were reunited and see how different it was of Ren’s own view of herself.  I think this is quite often true in the real world.  How we see ourselves can be very different from how others view us.

I have a really hard time writing reviews of Atwood’s work because there is so much to talk about that I just don’t know where to start.  I also feel like I don’t want to give away too much of the story because it’s so much better to read it without knowing what’s coming next.  So for those reasons I think I’ll stop now.  Just read the book yourself!  It’s good.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Read for: Banned Books Week, 1% Well Read Challenge, Canadian Books Challenge

The more I read of Atwood, the more I come to realize what a brilliant writer she is.  I read a few of her books about ten years ago and I think I just wasn’t ready for them yet.  Everything I’ve read of hers recently (even the ones I haven’t enjoyed) have really struck me in some way or another.

Most people have read this one, and those who haven’t usually know what the general plot is so I’m going to make my summary brief.  This one is another dystopian society – Gilead.  Offred is a handmaid which means that her sole purpose is to procreate.  Handmaids are sent to Commanders and their Wives in the hopes that they will conceive a child.  If she does, she bears the child and then moves on to another Commander.  Handmaids (and in fact all women) are allowed almost no freedoms and are carefully watched to be sure that they do not  step out of line.  As the novel unfolds, Offred, whose real name is never revealed, reveals Gilead came to be.

I really liked this book, actually a lot more than I was expecting to.  Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down (which for me and Atwood is rare).  As I mentioned earlier, Atwood is a brilliant writer, but besides that she has the ability to tell a really great story.  Even though, Offred was in a truly depressing situation, Atwood kept giving little hints that all was not lost, there was hope yet.  Offred clung to the hope of her daughter and husband from “before”.  She was able to find friendship in unexpected places.  I liked that in the darkest of times, Offred was able to see the simple beauty in the flowers (or perhaps she imagined them, which makes it that much more amazing).

On the other hand, parts of this book were terrifying because Gilead is so plausible.  Almost every part of this society has some historical (and some not-so-historical) counterparts.  There have been times in the past and in the present in parts of the world, where women have been treated as less than human, as just bodies to clean up, cook and have babies.  Even the way Gilead was formed was scarily real and even reminiscent of certain incidents following 9/11.

I am really glad I finally took the time to read this book, but I’m also glad I waited until this point in my life because I don’t think I would have understood it as well without the lens of experience I’ve been able to view it through at this time.

Other reviews:

• Book Nut
• things mean a lot
• read_warbler
• it’s all about me

If I missed yours, please leave a link in the comments.

Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel (sequel to Airborn)

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge

This one was almost as good as the first one.  Right from the first page it was action, action, action!  This time around the legendary ship Hyperion has been spotted in the air and Matt is the only one who knows the coordinates.  The Hyperion is rumoured to be carrying a fortune in gold.  And whoever gets to it first gets to keep the riches.  The Hyperion is also said to contain quite a nice collection of animal artifacts, which surprise, surprise, Kate is dying to get her hands on.  The only problem is that the Hyperion is drifting at an impossible height so Matt and Kate have to find someone to help them who owns a very specialized ship.  And of course, Matt, Kate and their two new companions aren’t the only ones on the world searching for the Hyperion. So you can imagine all the action and adventure that is packed into this novel.

If I hadn’t just read the first book I don’t think I would have found this one to be lacking at all.  But since I did just read it, yesterday, I remembered the suspense and tension I felt while reading Airborn.  But Skybreaker was still amazingly entertaining.  I’m already deep into the third book of this trilogy and loving it just as much.  Of course, there’s a little bit of romance thrown into these books, but it’s done well.  There are no over-the-top declarations of love and it doesn’t seem to be an add-on to the plot.  It flows well with the story, without taking over.  And I love Oppel’s writing.  He has a way of describing things that allows me to see the events unfolding in my mind without getting too bogged down in long, flowery explanations.  This one gets a 10/10 too.

Other Reviews:

• Canuck Librarian
• A Book a Week
• Goddess Librarian
• The Inter-Galactic Playground

Did I miss yours?  Please post a link in the comments.

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel

Read for: Canadian Books Challenge

Why haven’t I read this sooner?!  I loved the Silverwing books and somehow I just forgot about Kenneth Oppel.  Then just last week I read a review somewhere (sorry, I can’t remember where) for the third book in this series and remembered that Oppel is Canadian and realized I’d better get on these books! I read this book in a day and I couldn’t put it down!

Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on a luxury cruise ship but this cruise ship doesn’t float in the ocean, it floats over the ocean!  From the first page Matt and the crew on the Aurora are in for some major adventure.  And just when one mishap (or worse) seems to be just about cleared up, something else comes along to cause more mayhem and definitely some of the most captivating story I’ve read in a long time.  I don’t want to give anything away about what happens to Matt and the rest of the crew so I guess that’s going to have to be my summary for this one!

Not only was this book very well written, it really was adventure from start to finish.  And I just felt like I was right there in the middle of it.  And it was truly unpredictable, I was never sure what was going to happen next.  As I read, my heart was pounding, I was chewing on my thumbnail the suspense was so great!  (And it’s not often a book can do this to me!)

Overall this book was amazing.  My library had it shelved in the juvenile section but I’m not sure it should be there.  Not that there is any mature themes or anything, I’m just not sure a younger child could understand everything that went on.  (And there were people killed in the book.)  All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t read it to my 6 year old.  I remember the Silverwing books to be aimed at a younger audience.  Overall I would give this book a 10/10.  I’m so glad I have the next two sitting on my night stand waiting to be read!

Other reviews:

• Bart’s Bookshelf