A Life In Books

One of my book clubs had originally planned Joanne Harris’ Chocolat for our February discussion, but due to the discussion host being in China during that week, we postponed it until June. The film that is based upon the novel is one of my favorite movies, so I was very much looking forward to finally reading the book. I know I will probably have several people disagree with me, but this is one of those rare instances where I actually prefer the film over the book.

Vianne and her daughter Anouk arrive in the small French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes at the onset of Lent, much to the dismay of the local priest and several of the villagers. She decides to open a chocolate shop and soon many in the village are won over by her charming, warm and unconventional ways. But the priest is determined to ruin Vianne and drive her from the area, cloaking his malevolency in the guise of morality. Vianne, of course, triumphs over the priest, bringing life and vitality back into the village.

The book is a modern fairytale of sorts, and so things happen that would be farfetched in a more realistic novel. I don’t take much issue with those details. By far, what bothered me most was the portrayal of the character, or should I say, caricature, of the priest. He was too one-dimensional to even be interesting, and as he is such a major force in the novel, I think that is the book’s greatest weakness.

So, what did I enjoy about the book? The rich detail given to the chocolaterie and its sweet temptations had me smelling the sensuous aroma of chocolate as I turned the pages, and I liked the background story of Vianne and her mother, something missing from the film. As with the movie, the old woman Armande is my favorite character - her feisty, prickly personality shines through in both mediums.

I’ve come to realize that Joanne Harris is a writer who runs hot or cold for me, and her books that contain religious elements are, so far, the ones that run cold. Although I didn’t dislike Chocolat, I did feel that way about Holy Fools, but I very much enjoyed both Sleep, Pale Sister and Blackberry Wine. Incidentally, I have a copy of The Girl With No Shadow on my bookshelf, and am curious to see how it compares to its predecessor.

I had heard that Lucy Grealy had died, but until I read her memoir Autobiography of a Face, I had no idea of the years upon years of pain and suffering she endured, nor of her superior gift for writing. As a young girl, Grealy was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that would take half her jaw, and forever impact her life. Her writing is poetic and pure, caustic and witty. Her portrayal of her childhood reminded me a bit of Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, in that neither seemed to lose themselves in the traumatic events of their past, or put the reader through a self-pitying diatribe of all that went wrong and all who wronged them. It is clear in Grealy’s book that she is being extremely selective in what she shares and remembers, and I had to wonder at how much and what she left out, a case of the silence speaking more than the words. Still, through what she did choose to tell, I came to admire her, even as I felt sympathy.  

At the same time I was reading Grealy’s book, I checked out a copy of Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, which is her account of the friendship between Grealy and herself, thinking it would provide a suitable balance to Grealy’s memoir. And it probably does, but within a couple chapters, I knew now wasn’t the right time to read it. In just the first few pages, Patchett comes off as needy and indulgent, and Grealy as demanding and insufferable. My negative reaction was so strong that I felt I needed to put the book aside for at least the time being, and perhaps return to it at a later date.

And with that, I’ve completed the In Their Shoes Reading Challenge - my first successful challenge in quite some time. Hurrah! Since it was up to us, I chose to read five books for this challenge:

Traveling Mercies
In Beauty May She Walk
Chosen by a Horse
Leaving Church
Autobiography of a Face

It’s obvious that my penchant is for the memoir, rather than the biography or autobiography; I’ve never much been a reader of those types of books. My favorite was In Beauty May She Walk, although I enjoyed all of them in varying degrees.

Although I didn’t managed to complete these two challenges the first time they ran, I enjoyed reading books for them so much that I can’t resist trying again for Round Deux. Without further ado, here are my preliminary (i.e. subject to change) choices for the Book Awards Reading Challenge and the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge, Eh?

Birds of a Feather (2004 Agatha Award)
Half of a Yellow Sun (2007 Orange Prize for Fiction)
The Janissary Tree (2007 Edgar Award)
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2005 Hugo Award)
Life of Pi (2002 Booker Prize)
The Little Friend (2003 WH Smith Literary Award)
Love in the Time of Cholera (1988 LA Times Book Prize)
March (2006 Pulitzer Prize)
The Tenderness of Wolves (2006 Costa Book of the Year)
Three Cups of Tea (2007 Kiriyama Prize)

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson
Creation by Katherine Govier
The Custodian of Paradise by Wayne Johnston
The End of the Alphabet by C.S. Richardson
The Girls by Lori Lansens
How to Be a Canadian by Will Ferguson
The Museum Guard by Howard Norman
Open Secrets by Alice Munro
The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney
Theatre of Fish by John Gimlette
The Town That Forgot to Breathe by Kenneth J. Harvey
Unless by Carol Shields

Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church was the July selection for my church book group. The book is Taylor’s account of her journey to the Episcopal priesthood, and how her path then lead her away from the church. From the busy streets of Atlanta to the seemingly bucolic north Georgia mountains, Taylor comes to realize how demanding the vocation of being one of God’s ‘offical’ representatives is, regardless of location or setting, and that where she’s meant to be is perhaps not where she was.

I didn’t understand or support all the decisions Taylor made, but I appreciated her honesty in sharing them in this book. Perhaps what resonated with me most was the deep connection she feels with the earth and the life it supports. I am still a bit of a pagan in that respect, in that I feel everything has something of the divine in it, and God is not separate from the earth but part of it, as are we.

And here is one passage from the book that I bookmarked as a particular favorite:

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, “People of the book risk putting the book above people.” (p. 106)

And another:

… salvation is not something that happens only at the end of a person’s life. Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.

This memoir of faith counts as one of my In Their Shoes Reading Challenge selections, which means I have just one more book to read in order to complete the challenge - woohoo!

First up in my quest to complete Maggie’s Southern Reading Challenge was On Agate Hill by Lee Smith, which takes place in North Carolina in the decades after the US Civil War. The novel begins with a letter from a modern-day college student, Tuscany Miller, writing to her professor about some old diaries and letters found during the restoration of an old plantation home. In fact, my only quibble with the book would be the presence of Tuscany’s letters interspersed throughout the book, cluttering it up with an unnecessary and awkward metafiction device.

The old diary entries and letters form the bulk of the novel, beginning with the childish diary entries of young Molly Petree, an orphan living on a dilapidated estate with an assortment of extended family and freed slaves. Molly is a precocious tomboy with a sense of adventure and determination not found in most girls of her age and time. As I read her young diary, I wondered where she would go, what she would do, not thinking that I would be surprised by anything that befell her. But I was wrong. Instead of venturing out into the world and living the life she envisioned as a child, she becomes a schoolteacher in a remote mountain village and falls in love with a man who can be described as a mountain dandy. While it wasn’t the life I thought she would lead, it was no less interesting for its lack of exotic locales or glittering lifestyle. Molly fulfills her role as an eccentric character surrounded by other odd and unusual characters, and each time I thought I knew what path the story would take, it forked in some other unseen direction.

On Agate Hill was an immensely enjoyable, almost unputdownable book that also served to fulfill one of my Historical Fiction Challenge spots - bonus!

Shelving books recently in the New Fiction section, I came across a book called The English American by Alison Larkin, which is Larkin’s fictionalized account of her own experience as an American baby adopted by British parents. In the novel, Pippa Dunn is a 20-something Londoner who has always felt out of place among her more refined, yet loving, family. She decides to seek out the American woman who gave her up for adoption all those years ago, and so begins a journey that will take her across the Atlantic and back to her roots.

Pippa is an agreeable heroine, especially contrasted with her birth mother, who is shockingly selfish and intensely dislikeable. There are several moments during the course of the novel, whether it’s when she’s allowing herself to be mistreated by a woman whose claim to her was relinquished long ago, or when she’s being farcically obtuse to the attentions of an eligible male friend, when my patience with Pippa grew exasperatingly thin, but all in all it was an enjoyable book. Pippa learns to accept who she is, where she came from, and where she belongs, and has the reader rooting for her the whole way. A fun, quick and satisfying summer read.

As I commented in my post about The Kite Runner, I knew as soon as I finished the last page of that book and saw that Khaled Hosseini was writing another one that I would read it. Then time passed, and Dreaming in Titanic City did not come. I’d about given up on it when the publication of A Thousand Splendid Suns was announced. By that time, my fervor for his writing had waned, and while I knew I still wanted to read it, I didn’t rush out to get it. In fact, if it hadn’t been chosen as one of my book club’s selections, I don’t know how long I would have gone without reading it.

Anyway, I checked a copy out from the library one afternoon, and spend the better part of the evening reading it. It kept me rivetted, although there were times when I had to put the book down, not sure if I could keep reading, because I just knew that something terrible was about to happen and I couldn’t bear to read it. But of course, I did, finally turning the last page somewhere around 2am that morning.

Hosseini returns to modern Afghanistan, with the past thirty years framing the personal lives of two women, Mariam and Laila. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter whose mother proclaims “Women like us. We endure. It’s all we have.” That fatalistic statement mirrors the path of Mariam’s life for the next two decades. Laila is the spirited young woman whose love affair is torn apart by the ongoing fighting that is destroying her beloved city of Kabul. Once again, Hosseini manages to create a deep sense of empathy for these characters as they are swept up into the terrible and tragic events taking place around them. As different as the Afghan culture is to our own, as much strife and warfare they have endured, we still share the ability to love, the capacity for hope, and the resilience of the human spirit.

I’ve read a few of Neil Gaiman’s books, counting Neverwhere among my all-time favorites, but had never really given Coraline more than a passing glance, since the version I saw in the bookstore was the children’s picture book. But then a friend at work (the same one who raved about another of my recent reads, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) recommended this one as well, saying it scared her so much she could barely bring herself to turn the pages. Who could pass up such an enthusiastic reaction?

The version we have is not the picture book, rather it is a simple trade paperback with creepy black and white sketches scattered throughout. Coraline lives in a multi-family style house with her parents. Their neighbors include an eccentric old man who is training his mice to perform a circus, and a pair of elderly sisters, both former stage actresses. There is a door in Coraline’s house, that opens onto a brick wall, put there when the huge house was parceled up into smaller dwellings. Then one day, when Coraline is bored and restless and her mother has gone to the store, she goes exploring, and opens the door to find the brick wall gone and a dark hallway in its place. What she finds on the other side is a funhouse mirror-world of her own, where things are almost - but not quite - the same as in her world. The mice are menacing rats, her ‘other’ bedroom is filled with strange animate toys, her neighbors are sinister caricatures of themselves and worst of all, her ‘other’ mother and father are paper-white, with button eyes and an overwhelming desire to keep Coraline with them. Her ‘other’ mother is particularly frightening, and so with the help of a talking cat, Coraline must use her wits to rescue her real parents and return home.

There’s an interview with Neil Gaiman at the back of the book, and he says something along the lines of how when adults read the book, they read it as a scary story, but that when kids read it, they read it as an adventure story. And that’s quite true, I imagine - I certainly did. Coraline is a modern fairy tale in the traditional sense, not the watered-down versions we’ve come to know.

The June selection for my church’s women’s book club was Chosen by a Horse by Susan Richards, a book that honestly I was not looking forward to reading, for two reasons. Firstly, I’m not a big fan of abuse memoirs, which Richards’ book appeared to be, and secondly, I’m not that interested in horses, or books about animals period. Yes, I have cats and like dogs and other animals, but that doesn’t automatically translate into wanting to read about them. So, I put off reading until just a few days before the book club met. Then, I was surprised and pleased to discover that the book is neither maudlin nor dull. Instead, it is a humorous and touching account of one woman’s personal journey and the horses she loves.

Richards takes home Lay Me Down, an abused, starving and sick mare, and the two forge a deep and emotional bond that transcends the simple role of animal and caretaker. There were several times, particularly near the end of her story, that Richards had me in tears, yet I never felt that she was playing for sympathy. She is obviously intelligent, witty, strong and resilient, but what I admired most was her ability to finally open up to the pain of loss, to experience it fully rather than turn away and try to hide from it. Too often, I think we are guilty of subverting those emotions such as anger, grief and sadness, pushing them down deep and avoiding them, so then they manifest themselves in self-destructive behavior and even illness. Richards finally comes to realize that strength and emotional wellbeing lies not in denying those feelings, but in allowing yourself to have them.

This book, which I had looked to reading with a mild sort of dread, instead provided one of the more lively and interesting discussions at our book club, as the women of the group shared some of their own experiences, both equine and personal. And once again, a book club selection broadened my reading horizons and exposed me to a book I would have passed by otherwise.

I first heard of Val McDermid’s novel The Grave Tattoo in a 2007 issue of Bookmarks, added it to my wishlist, and then promptly forgot about it. Then I was doing some reshelving at the libary and came across a copy of it in our stacks. The cover art itself was enough to pique my interest once again.

Jane Gresham is a young Wordswoth scholar whose pet theory is that Fletcher Christian (of the mutiny on the Bounty fame) returned to his native Lake District and told his story to a childhood friend, William Wordsworth, who wrote it all down in an epic poem that has remain hidden for two centuries. This theory becomes a bit more plausible and a lot more intriguing when a preserved body is uncovered in an area peat bog, complete with South Sea-style tattoos. Suddenly Jane isn’t the only one interested in the possiblity of this long-lost poem, and so begins a story that has as many subplots as possible villains. But McDermid ties the tangents nicely together, and even though I rightly suspected who the real villain was about halfway through, it was still very much an enjoyable mystery with a literary twist.