I should always review a book right after I finish it. In the case of Robert J. Wiersema’s Bedtime Story, I wrapped it up in late November on a late, late night of reading. I couldn’t put down Bedtime Story and I recall closing the book and saying “wow.”
Now, why was it so awesome? I should have taken notes, but I didn’t so all we have is my faulty memory and an email I wrote to Rob after finishing the book. Let’s piece it together.
Structurally, there are 3 stories going on. I found this a bit weird at first. The first chapter introduces one boy and his family, the next chapter introduces another boy and his family, then a couple chapters later boy 2 starts reading a novel about another boy. What happened to the first boy? Good question—and one that is ultimately part of the mystery unfolding. Am I’m making it sound more confusing than it is?
Boy 2 is David, who is reading about Boy 3, who is named Davfd.
Boy 2 and 3 are essentially the same boy, living in different times. The book David is reading is a trap, a magical trap for little boys. David, like the boy before him, has a seizure that pulls him into the storybook, leaving his body functional in the real world but without spirit.
As I read Bedtime Story, I wondered about the mastery of storytelling and a storyteller’s ability to pull you into the narrative. I starting thinking about the length of Davfd’s sections and how frequently they occurred in the narrative. I noticed that before David’s seizure, I was really pulled into Davfd’s section of the novel. It seemed like there was a period of greater attention on that story. Like David, I was sucked into the story of Davfd. But then after David’s seizure, I felt more in David’s father’s world as he tried to sort out the cause of David’s seizures.
Robert’s latest novel is like the confluence of two rivers. The storylines run together in the most fascinating way. I still remember it as “wow.”
Thankfully Pickle Me This finished the book around the same time I did and wrote an excellent review.
Bedtime Story by Robert J. Wiersema
Published by Random House
(Robert J Wiersema’s is also the author of Before I Wake.)
I’ve never read a Mary Higgins Clark book, and according to the jacket copy she’s the author of 29 suspense novels, 3 collections of short stories, a historical novel, a children’s book and a memoir, plus coauthor with Carol Higgins Clark of 5 holiday suspense novels. Prolific. Was I missing out?
My preference is quirky fiction by new authors and a handful of books by authors who I can’t pass up, but I’m always willing to try something new. So when Mary arrived in the mail as a suggestion from the folks at Simon and Schuster, I thought I’d give it a try.
At 82, Olivia Morrow is terminally ill and debating whether she will leave the world with or without sharing the secret that her cousin, the soon to be beatified nun, had a son out of wedlock. That son’s daughter stands as the rightful heir to what remains of a great fortune.
Not really the kind of plot that interests me, but I was pleased by the immediate suspense established and I can understand why Mary Higgins Clark’s books are bestsellers. They’re certainly page-turners!
I liked the plot twists and turns, was surprised by the number of characters added late in the novel, pleased by the neatly wrapped ending and a bit appalled at the number of people who end of dead in the story. It was what I expected—easy read, good suspense, more action than character development and formulaic (but without disappointment).
If you’re looking for a good candy read, this one goes well with ginger snaps and a hot toddy.
When Salman Rushdie published Haroun and the Sea of Stories, I wondered what it would be like to have Salman Rushdie as my father. And I wondered again with Luka and the Fire of Life. I suppose it would be like having a ringleader or parade master as a parent (like the Pied Piper but the nice fairy tale version, not the one where the kids die).
If you’re too pressed to watch the trailer, know this ... at the age of 12 Luka’s brother Haroun crossed the border into the magical world, and such is the case this year for 12-year-old Luka. The adventure begins one fateful day in the land of Alifbay, when Luka curses a circus master and causes mass revolt by the animals. A bear named Dog and a dog named Bear (who dance and sing) become Luka’s loyal companions. And it’s a lucky thing too because shortly after Luka’s father Rashid, the legendary storyteller of Kahani, falls ill and only Luka can save him by entering the magical world and stealing the fire of life. It’s super handy to have a magical dancing bear and singing dog.
Parents (like children) can often be very demanding.
Luka’s exceedingly treacherous task is recorded as a series of video game levels with lives earned and lost. And, it doesn’t feel like a forced metaphor. Rushdie neatly brings this element to the story in a mad-hatter kind of way that really works.
I love quirky, magical books and Luka and the Fire of Life is no exception. Delightful, magical, and, as expected, well written.
Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie
published by Knopf Canada
Fans of The Time Traveler’s Wife will not be disappointed by Audrey Niffenegger’s latest novel Her Fearful Symmetry.
Julia and Valentine Poole are 20-year-old sisters who are mirror twins. They are identical but also mirror images of each other. Valentina’s organs are even in the wrong spots. The twins are the daughter of a twin and the story opens with them inheriting the aunt’s apartment in London.
The English aunt, Elspeth, has very specific instructions. The girls must live in the flat for 1 year before selling it and under no circumstances is their mother Edwina to enter the apartment.
The flat borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Robert, Elspeth’s lover works. He also happens to live in the flat below theirs.
To say the least, without giving things away, this is a modern-day ghost story with twins. Smart, eerie and a nice page turner.
Certainly a weirdly good read. Charles Yu first came to my attention with Thrid Class Superhero, his collection of short stories. Now, he’s on the radar with How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe, his debut novel.
Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space with interconnected yet separate universes. It’s a time when time travel is something anyone can do, like microwaving food. People have a personal time travel device, which they mostly use to visit moments in the past that they want to relive—usually bad moments that they are hoping to change or from which they hope to gain insights.
The base model TM-31 [TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device] runs on state-of-the-art chronodiegetical technology: a six-cylinder grammar drive built on a quad-core physic engine, which features an applied temporalinguistics architecture allowing for free-form navigation within a rendered environment, such as, for instance, a story space and, in particular, a science fictional universe.
A box. Get in. Push some buttons. Visit different times. The operating system is called TAMMY (or TIM—depending on what you chose at start up).
Charles Yu, time travel technician, saves people from themselves. Or rather, he fixes their time travel machines that break due to human tampering. But ultimately he ends up trapping himself in a time loop.
If you’re not a fan of science fiction, then this is a good literary spin on that genre. If you are a science fiction fan, I think you’ll enjoy the science and philosophy described in the novel.
1-line summary: This novel is The Big Bang Theory meets a dysfunctional Family Ties, without the laugh track, although there are some funny moments.
Clever. Geeky. Nostalgic. (Can you be nostalgic for the future? In a science fictional universe, I think you can be.)
James and I often rant about unnecessary quotation marks. “Who is being quoted,” is our common refrain.
Bethany Keeley took her curiosity about this phenomenon to new heights and after years of blogging, compile the best examples into The Book of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. (Guest post by Bethany on the Chronicle Books blog.)
When quotation and attribution is unnecessary
According to the Chicago Manual of Style, “commonly known or readily verifiable facts, proverbs, and other familiar expressions can be stated without quotation or attribution unless the wording is taken directly from another source.”
Which makes me wonder, what unverifiable fact makes a “hamburger” and to whom are we attributing “live” lobsters?
I don’t trust the editorial wisdom of Wikipedia, but according to the masses, common use for quotation marks is apparently “to call attention to ironic or apologetic words.”
Day Old “Bread”
Ironic or apologetic?
Unverifiable fact?
Unfamiliar expression?
I love the quotation use in this one:
Do “NOT”
PARK here
Please
THESE PARKING SPACES ARE FOR
“CUSTOMERS”
Are we calling attention to the irony that this place has customers? Perhaps it’s all just apologetic.
Bethany Keeley’s The Book of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks is a collection of photographs of signs in stores, offices, streets and “facilities” making interesting use of our favourite punctuation mark.
And just because quotation marks can be so confounding. Here is some fun with single and double quotation marks.
“Don’t be absurd!” said Henry. “To say that ‘I mean what I say’ is the same as ‘I say what I mean’ is to be as confused as Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. You remember what the Hatter said to her: ‘Not the same thing a bit! Why you might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!’ ”
Mary McCarthy’s most celebrated novel follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates (Class of ‘33), known simply to their classmates as “the group.”
The tangled stories of eight different lives are united by the pivotal figure of Kay Strong—the first of the group to break from the traditions of society by getting married without parental guidance.
The social history presented here, pre-World War II, is equal in period quality to that presented in the tv show Mad Men (if not moreso).
The girls are all middle-class or upper-middle class, growing up during a revolutionary period in American life where women are forming an identity beyond their social class, beyond their parent’s social aspirations.
They work outside the home, they travel abroad alone, they philosophize, they use birth control, they buy this new thing called margarine.
All eight are in some way breaking with the past and forging a new status quo while at the same time falling into prescribed roles.
The language choice is striking and the novel’s structure of twists and turns reveals layers of insights into each character through the commentary and interior monologues of other characters.
McCarthy’s novel was published in 1963, thirty years after the time described in the novel, but the picture she paints of the times seems complete as well as insightful. (I particularly enjoyed the incredibly rich word choice and complex sentence structure. This is a novel written in a different time and its structure is reflective of the times represented.)
It was plain to Polly that many of her married classmates were disappointed in their husbands and envied the girls, like Helena, who had not got married. In June the class would have its fifth reunion and already it had its first divorcees. These hares were discussed wistfully by the tortoises of the class. It was felt that they at least had ‘done something.’ Norine Blake’s divorce—she had gone to a ranch outside Reno and now called herself ‘Mrs. Schmittlapp Blake’—had earned her a place of renowned in alumnae affairs equal to that of Connie Storey, who had become a model for Bergdorf, or of Lily Marvin, who dressed windows for Elizabeth Arden, and outranking poor Binkie Barnes, who was working as CIO organizer, and Bubbles Purdy, who was studying to be a preacher.
“A witty, moving, instructive and wise novel—a gem of American social history as well as very good fiction.” —The Nation
Ordinary Thunderstorms is a well written book with a horrible, morally short premise. I did not like this book, but I’d still recommend it. How’s that for conflict?
Adam Kindred happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In shock, he makes a serious of choices that make his situation worse. Throughout the book he continues to make poor decisions and yet the novel ends with no dire consequence to him. This is what I didn’t like.
What happens? (If you don’t like spoilers, stop now.)
Adam Kindred happens to meet Philip Wang in an Italian cafe. Wang forgets a file at his table. Adam decides to call him and personally return the file. He arrives at Wang’s apartment only to find Wang murdered, well, he’s not quite dead. Wang asks Adam to remove the knife stabbed into him, which Adam does. Adam’s finger prints are now on the murder weapon. Adam flees.
Adam continues to flee throughout the book. Wang’s killer continues to track Adam. The police bollocks things up. There’s conspiracy theories and secret agents. It’s all stupid, really. Adam continues to make dumb mistakes. I continued to read.
And as I mentioned, nothing really happens.
I tried not to spoil the details for you. I disliked this book, but if you like random, literary mystery stories, this is well written.
The day job requires me to pretend like I know how to manage employees so I subscribe to a number of newsletters for HR, entrepreneurs and managers. I don’t find a ton of useful information, although it is good reinforcement that in all situations common sense should prevail.
What I learned was that whether it’s lateness, harassment, poor behaviour or lousy productivity, you should do something, and you should do it sooner rather than later.
Paul definitely has a “corporate America” take on how to have these conversations, but I still found value in his guidelines and the sample dialogues.
I was eagerly looking for anything to read in the Denver airport. I’d lost my previous book on another flight and wasn’t anticipating success in the airport bookstore. But I did spot Little Bee and picked it up because a woman in my row on the last flight had been reading it.
The first page and the back cover sealed the purchase.
We don’t want to tell you WHAT HAPPENS in this book.
It is a truly SPECIAL STORY and we don’t want to spoil it.
NEVERTHELESS, you need to know enough to buy it, so we will just say this:
This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face. Two years later, they meet again - the story starts there ...
Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens. The magic is in how the story unfolds.
Chris Cleave has created an English garden maze of a novel. At each page-turn you are introduced to a new path, another piece of the puzzle, a possible way out.
Madame de Stael: The First Modern Woman by Francine Du Plessix Gray is a beautiful book. I picked it up in McNally Jackson in Soho. Lovely. And the writing is, of course, equally fabulous.
What I love about bookstores are these types of discoveries. If McNally Jackson wasn’t such a gem of a store, and didn’t have interesting tables of books and little nooks to display staff favourites, then I would not have purchased this book or even known about it. Thank you McNally.
Madame de Staël was a legendary conversationalist. Schooled by her mother and well versed in the salon by the time she married, Madame de Staël was known for her intelligence, enthusiasm and eloquence—and natural conversation skills, unlike her mother’s, which were quite forced.
De Staël was passionate about politics, women’s rights and her father. The first part of the book details her childhood at the hands of her demanding mother and how she doted on her father, who was Louis XVI’s minister of finance. I just got into the section about her marriage, many affairs and motherhood then I misplaced my book! It’s lost somewhere in Florida so I have another on order from McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg (the parents of Sarah McNally, who runs McNally Jackson in Soho). Until then I shall have to wait to read about her battle of wills with Napoléon Bonaparte and the epic tales about her salon.
In the meantime, could everyone go find a gem in their local bookstore please. I would like them to remain in existence—both the gems and the bookstores.
Back in December I previewed The Dread Crew, and I’m thrilled to say that it’s every bit as wonderful as I’d hoped. The Dread Crew are a bunch of wily backwoods pirates who go around mucking up the place and being general nuisances and bullies. They take what they want and do what they want and are rather miserable about it all.
The Dread Crew are what Max and the Wild Things would have become if Max stuck around as their king.
Thankfully, good ol’ junk collector Joe knows just how to turn a brawling bunch of junk-hunting pirates into eccentric, and adored, members of the community.
The Dread Crew is a funny book that’s good for little people who like to be read to and big people who like a good laugh. For example, the most feared pirate punishment is office work.
If your kids are still enough to enjoy chapter books, then they should be game for this one. There’s nothing about it that reminds me of Charlotte’s Web, but I feel like it’s that kind of book, one to remember and to read and re-read.
I adore the Dread Crew: Hector the Wrecker Gristle, Slime Bucket Sam, Cranky Frankie, Fetchin Gretchen, and the whole pirate gang.
The Dread Crew: Pirates for the Backwoods by Kate Inglis
Published in Canada by Nimbus Publishing
Click the cover to browse inside (opens new window).
I came to know Chuck Klosterman through his fiction work, Downtown Owl,. Because I loved his novel so much I started seeking out his other works, which seemed to be nonfiction essays. Eating the Dinosaur is one of those collections and it’s brilliant. Not a day goes by that I don’t quote something from this book.
Eating the Dinosaur is the Chicken Soup for the Smarty-pants Soul.
I used to be annoyed when James constantly quoted or mentioned essays in this book. He read the book first, But I adopted these habits after finishing the book. Dammit, Klosterman is smart, or at least his ideas are compelling, which makes him seem smart, and by default makes me feel smart. Hence the smarty-pants comment above.
Chuck Klosterman has good journalist written all over him. He’s covered music, film, and sports, and remembers the details. He dissects pop culture the way miners pan for gold. After clearing away the dirt and shifting away the common things, Klosterman holds up the nuggets. And those nuggets are the totality of perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that make up our understanding of the world, and by world I mean world of culture consumption.
He talks about why music fan’s hate their favorite bands. Why superstars aren’t paid enough. Why singers are compelled to try out different personalities. Why interviewees want to tell the truth. What the truth is. Why Germans don’t laugh at nervous North American laughter. Why North Americans laugh. Why Ralph Nader is a literalist and how that makes him unlikeable. How the Unabomber could be wrong in his actions but right in his thoughts. Why TV is bad and the Branch Dividian not so bad. And why politicians are terribly sorry, and alcoholic.
This is my favourite nonfiction book of 2010. (The Waterproof Bible is my favourite novel, in case you’re asking.)
Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman
Published in Canada by Simon and Schuster in hardcover, paperback and ebook.
Sarah Waters is a lovely writer. She has written four bestselling novels: Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith and The Night Watch. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith were by far my favourites, and those rankings stand.
The Little Stranger is a dark, and maddeningly compelling, read. Set in post-World-War-I rural Warwickshire, the dumpy, semi-successful bachelor Dr. Faraday has the hots for plain-Jane, fallen-from-riches Caroline Ayres. It’s an Austen-esque affair with a Mary Shelley monster story as a plot driver.
The Austen Element: Dr. Faraday becomes interested in Caroline Ayres, or perhaps the status she represents (even though she’s poorer than a church mouse). Caroline is interested in Dr. Faraday as an exit route from her dire circumstances and family burdens. I won’t spoil the romance tale by telling you what happens here.
The Shelley Element: Hundreds Hall has been home to the Ayres family for centuries. It’s a grand mansion that’s crumbling without dignity. An eyesore, a money sinkhole and an emotional burden (how can you give up the family home even as it drags you down), the home has personality and character in ways that become hauntingly evident throughout the novel.
As sinister things occur to each family member, it is Dr. Faraday, our trusty narrator, who is left to rationalize the happenings. But is he so endearing? Is he an infallible narrator?
Again, I won’t spoil it by telling you my thoughts here. Instead I’ll say that although the narrative was eerie and formed a great literary suspense story, I found Dr. Faraday exasperating. Not enough to stop reading, but enough to feel like he was an unwanted guest at an afternoon tea party from which I couldn’t extract myself.
If you like Sarah Waters, definitely give this one a read. If you haven’t heard of her before, start with Tipping the Velvet or Fingersmith, then make your way to this novel.
Plain Words, Uncommon Sense A blog on books, writing, tap dancing, technology, and the other amusements of Monique Sherrett (or Monique Trottier in unmarried form).
Monique Sherrett lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada and is a litblogger, among other things. Find out more ...
"So misguided." A comment often uttered in my eclectic salon.
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