James and the Giant Peach

It's been a rolled-up-in-a-blanket, Roald Dahl kind of day, dahling.

James and the Giant Peach was the other Dahl treat that I packed into my backpack for my week at home. I remember reading this book in grade 3 and being scandalized by the fact that a school book had the word "ass" in it. (The centipede has a bit of a sass-mouth, what can I say?)

Anyway, having read the book in grade 3, the plot was a bit foggy for me. I didn't remember the ending at all. But I did remember particular parts of the story and how absolutely enchanting I found them as a 9-year-old. This book falls into the "good books to read aloud" category and, if I ever end up teaching 3rd or 4th grade, there is a very good chance that this book will be among the books we study.

The Twits - Roald Dahl

Pre-read:
I've got a 76-page pleasure read in front of me, heavy on the illustrations. I'd like to say that my whole reason for choosing this book is to discover another piece of children's literature that I can use while teaching next year. While this may be true, my real reason for reading it, is simply because I want to.

There's a line in Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast by Bill Richardson, that states something to the effect of, "a large part of reading used books is finding treasures inside--receipts, bookmarks, notes in the margins, etc. This particular copy of The Twits was purchased at a Goodwill store. "Marcie" is neatly but crudely inscribed on the inside cover in multi-coloured gel pen. It's a Scholastic publication and, nestled between the pages of this book is the Arrow Book Club order form from September 2001, with "Twits" neatly checked off, at the list price of $2.00. (I love book orders!)

Well, here we go: off to devour this little snack before lunch time!

Post-read:
Yup, you really can't go wrong with a little Roald Dahl. This book has the usual twistedness of a Dahl plot, but it also has the usual humour and simple language. Very cute! In sum, the twits are these two cruel and stupid people who are mean to each other and to the animals and children around them. Thanks to their meanness, Mr. and Mrs. Twit get what's coming to them.

As a p.s., the official Roald Dahl site is info rich and adorably entertaining. (It even has teacher resources!)

The Well of Lost Plots

My 2nd foray into Jasper Fforde's insanely delightful, imaginative book world ended up being the 3rd book in the series. (The 2nd book wasn't among the $5.99 bargains at Benjamin Books, but the 3rd and the 4th ones were.)

Grown at least slightly accustomed to the bizarre-ness of Fforde's fiction, I was worried that this book would be slightly boring, or simply old tricks beneath a new cover. Happily, this is not true!

The Well of Lost Plots combines a plethora of English Lit. classics, including:

• Macbeth
• Wuthering Heights
• Alice In Wonderland
• Great Expectations
• The Mill on the Floss
  

It also combines a plethora of characters from literature:

• Sir John Falstaff
• Ms. Havisham
• Mr. Toad (from Wind and the Willows)
• Beatrice and Benedict

etc.

I am going to start recommending that every English Lit. grad add the Jasper Fforde series to their post-grad reading list as a means of entertaining --"silly reading for smart people" as the back cover review puts it.

3.5 / 5 stars for this lovely book.

Eats Shoots and Leaves

I think my roommates like it when I'm reading. It keeps me quiet. Today, while halfway through The Red Tent, Jer dropped another book in my lap. "It'll probably take me two years to read this," he said, "but my Dad says it's really good."

Having had little contact with this book--aside from an occaisional brief browse through its pages once or twice at the bookstore, I'm up to the challenge of reading a second book this weekend.

Eats Shoots and Leaves shall be my dinner companion....

The Red Tent

I just finished reading The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.

This book was left on my desk with a note from Jenny, shortly after I finished reading The Da Vinci Code at her urging. I will happily take any scraps of praise I tossed at Da Vinci and heap them on top of the loads of praise I'm bestowing upon this novel.

Following on the tails of another between-the-lines Biblical narrative that I read earlier this summer (Findley's Not Wanted On the Voyage), Diamant uses the story of Dinah--and the stories of Rachel, Leah, Jacob, Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph--as the basis for a creative imagining of everything that happened in Dinah's life, aside from the brief mention of her rape and her brothers' revenge.

Like the women in her work, Diamant is a skilled storyweaver. She portrays womanhood eloquently, beautifully, and powerfully. She makes no claims to truth telling: her story isn't meant to be Biblical, but it is meant to be humane--and she succeeds.

A couple of things I want to make note of, from the cover and included notes, before returning this book to Jenny's shelf:

-According to the cover, this was a NYT Bestseller.

Excerpt from the included readers' guide:

Anita Diamant says it was the relationship between Leah and Rachel that stimulated her thinking about The Red Tent. "The Biblciacl story that pits the two sisters gainst one another never sat right withme. The traditional view of Leah as the ugly and/or spiteful sister, and of Jacob as indifferent to her, seemed odd in light of the fact that the Bible gives them nine children together. As I re-read Genesis over the years, I settled on the story of Dinah, their duaghter. The drama and her total silence (Dinah does not utter a single word in the Bible) ried out for explanation, and I decided to imagine one."

Aiding her work was "midrash," the ancient and still vital literary form, which means "search" or "investigation."

"Historically, the rabbis used this highly imaginative form of storytelling to make sense of the elliptical nature of teh Bible--to explain, for example, why Cain killed Abel. The compressed stories and images in the Bible are rather liek photographs. They don't tell us everything we want or need to know. Midrash is the story about what happened before and after the photographic flash."

She points out that "The Red Tent" is not a translation, but a work of fiction. Its perspective and focus--by and about the female characters--distinguishes it from the biblical account in which women are usually peripheral and often totally silent. By giving Dinah a voice and by providing texture and content to the sketchy biblical descriptions, my book is a radical departure from the historical text."

Links of Note:
(1)Online preview has cover shots, prologue, family tree.
(2) Book info on the author's website.
(3) Reading Group guide

DreadfulWater Shows Up

"So, your sister likes to read?" my little sister's boyfriend's mom asked her.

"Yes. A lot."

"What does she read? Mysteries?"

"Um...not really."

(Katie and I snickered about this little bit of conversation later. And in honour of this little bit of conversation, I decided to read a mystery.)

The latest book to move off my "To Read" list is DreadfulWater Shows Up by Thomas King, writing as Hartley GoodWeather. I didn't know that T.K. wrote under a pseudonym, and actually, the copy of the book that I have has THOMAS KING in giant letters across the top, so I guess his publicists decided the pseudonym wasn't working? (Is King that much of a name brand?)

Anyways, it took me a long time to get into this book. I read bits while waiting at bus stops, etc. but continually shoved the book back in my bag with no real desire to continue. Today--a sick day, without a TV--I decided to truck through it, and I actually kinda sorta got into it.

I'm not a fan of mysteries, so this book isn't exactly my style. And well, I'm not really sure that the mystery novel is King's key genre. But I still like his sense of humour that pervades all of his writings, and I love the way he peppers even a mystery with social commentary.

The basics: Thumps DreadfulWater is a retired cop-turned-photographer, who gets himself involved with investigating a murder case at the new casino/condo development on Native land in the U.S. Originally, he shows up at the scene to take pictures of the body, but when he finds out that his girlfriend's son, Stanley, is the prime suspect--and when his gut instinct tells him that Stanley's being framed--he starts back on the detective beat again.

After finishing the book tonight, and while washing dishes, I flipped on the CBC and was entertained by T.K. once more. I had forgotten about King's return to radio: "Dead Dog in the City" is pretty decent!

Currently on the Go:

The Self-Completing Tree by Dorothy Livesay.
Thumps Dreadful Waters Shows Up by Thomas King, writing as Hartley Goodweather
Women of the Bible - Jean E. Syswerda
The Red Tent
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Impact Teaching

Literary Lapses

Lord love Leacock! This book is brilliant.

Today, I'm going to aim to be a little more Leacockian in my words and deeds.

Here's a small sampling of some favourite quips:

"If a girl desires to woo you, before allowing her to press her suit, ask her if she knows how to press yours. If she can, let her woo; if not, tell her to whoa." (So sexist, but such fun with words that I'm willing to let it slide...) (p. 29)

"You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won't; but how few boys stop ot think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be? These are awful thoughts." (p. 19)

My favourite stories:
-My Financial Career
-The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones
-How to Make a Million Dollars
-The New Food
-A New Pathology
-Number Fifty-Six
-The Conjurer's Revenge
-Hoodoo McFiggin's Christmas (this will be read aloud this December, I promise you that)
-The Life of John Smith
-On Collecting Things
-Borrowing a Match
-Helping the Armenians

The Inimitable Jeeves

I just finished The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. This is my first foray into the Peej's stories and i think it's safe to say that my curiosity has been satiated.

Although my conclusion's a bit backwards (having read Alexander McCall Smith's stuff first), I'd like to assert that the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series that I read earlier this summer is decidedly Wodehousian.

Anyway, The I.J. was 50c well spent at the Rockliffe Book Fair last fall.

The best things about Bertie Wooster are:

-his penchant for short forms ('I could feel the persp. starting on my forehead' and 'that was understandable, given the circs')

-his illuminating nicknames ("I took a sip of the fragrant and steaming")

-and also his love of flashy fasions: mauve shirts, purple socks, blinding cummerbunds, and jazz spats in Eton's trademark hues. (Life's better in colour; I'm with you on that one, Bertie, buddy.)

Not Wanted on the Voyage

My first foray into Timothy Findley has left me with mixed feelings. Not Wanted On the Voyage has an incredibly appealing preface, but after that, things get a little too bizarre and (on occasion) a little too boring!

I have a deep respect for any artist willing to explore the gaps in long-accepted truth, to feel around in the dark caves of uncertainty and make guesses about the odd shapes they're grabbing at (that's what I call creativity), so when I started this book, I had incredibly high hopes.

The Preface is brilliant. It gives good reason to hope so highly. Here's a taste:

"And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him into the ark, because of the waters of the flood..." (Genesis 7:7)

Everyone knows it wasn't like that.

To begin with, they make it sound as if there wasn't any argument; as if there wasn't any panic...

...like an excursion.

Well. It wasn't an excursion. It was the end of the world.

After that, things get a little depressing. There are some beautiful, bleak moments, such as this one:

Mrs. Noyes was all at once acutely aware of the darkness and the walls around her and the roof above her and the floor below. Her arms ached -- and part of the ache was the memory of why they were in pain. We are truly captives here, she thought; every one of us -- and yet they have called this: being saved.

Maybe that was what she had meant by safety and sadness: that she and all these creatures with her shared their captivity in a way they could never have shared the wood. That when you are caught in the same trap, you share the same fear of darkness and of walls and you also have the same enemy. You fear the same jailer. You share the dream of freedom -- waiting, all together for the same door to open. You also learn to survive together in ways the uncaged would never think of.

The ultimate message, however, that God is dead and that this God-less world, where compassion must bow to paranoid patriarchal fanatics, doesn't exactly make Mr. Findley's novel good bedside reading material.

It is, however, simply because of its subject matter, a fun book to read in the tub. (I'm not the first to admit that: Bill Richardson's Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast makes a similar proclamation...)

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

And the trilogy comes to a close. I don't have too much that I really want to record, except that Alexander McCall Smith's set is preposterously delightful. There are no consequences to reading these books, except a brief experience of intellectual vocabulary, and a temporary escape from anything stressful.

That, and I most enjoyed Professor Igelfeld's ironic disgust at British humour (all of the stories, being overtly humourous in that stiff-lipped, heady, British sort of way...)

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

It just gets better. Book 2 in the series is a continuation of the hilarious antics and characters of book 1 (go figure) and Germany's finest feature--sausage dogs--plays an important part.

I haven't laughed aloud at a book in a long time...

Portuguese Irregular Verbs

I did some shopping in downtown Guelph today and lost all willpower in a used bookstore. The first of my purchases--Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith of No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency fame has made its way from the "want to read" list to the "have read and would recommend" list.

I read this book aloud, perched in the oversized armchair in my mom's living room, to the respectfully quiet audience of the two family cats--Simon and Harley--while home visiting this Mother's Day weekend. The cats didn't laugh along with me, but I'm sure they found it entertaining all the same. Alexander McCall Smith has such a delightful innocence to his writing, employing delicious words and eccentric characters in preposterous plots. I love it.

(I also love the fact that I picked up all 3 books in this set this morning--and that they all match and will look fantastic when I line them up on my bookshelves in Ottawa tomorrow. Vanity revealed.)

the curious incident of the dog in the night-time

So, I was curious enough about mark haddon's novel to swallow my pride and read it even though everyone (and I really do mean everyone) who saw the book in my hand with my eyes flitting across the page had the nerve to tell me that they could not believe that they had read a book that I hadn't. (I think this book--or rather the mass of people who have read it--is responsible for me grinding about 3 mm off my molars...)

End verdict: neat concept, but I was bored before the end of the story. There were some good quotes at the beginning, but my interest sorta faded as the story progressed. Here's my favourite few lines:

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

There. That's about as mathematical as I get.

I think I need to mix things up with some non-fiction....

Ten Good Stories, Those Ones

I think that Thomas King is a genius. I've finally read all the stories in his short story collection that was given to me as a birthday gift a couple of years back. The book was actually a replacement gift, since two friends ended up getting me the same book--the children's version of A Coyote Columbus Story, which I suppose offers some evidence of my esteem for King's stories.

Two stories to highlight are: "The One About Coyote Going West" (I read it aloud to my roommate, who loved it, although she was a bit disturbed by the singing butt hole) and "Joe the Painter and the Deer Island Massacre" (I love the way it portrays the gruff elderly man and calls the reader to examine his/her own unexpected biases).

The Shipping News

This is a beautiful book that I've taken great pleasure from reading over the past few weeks. E. Annie Proulx carries a beautiful metaphor of knots throughout the book and gives language you can savour--words that your imagination can use to create something richer and truer than a picture alone. Here are the opening paragraphs, just to give an example:

Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.

Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence. Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life, counting on nothing. He ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckel, buttered spuds.

His jobs: distributor of vending machine candy, all-night clerk in a convenience store, a third-rate newspaperman. At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to Newfoundland, the rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he had never been nor thought to go.

Early on in the book a widowed Quoyle heads off to a new job in Newfoundland with his two young children, Bunny and Sunshine, and an eccentric old aunt, who appears out of the woodwork, with a tragic, secret story of her own. Proulx proceeds to write life into the people of The Rock and creates an endearing community of characters that are, at one and the same time, both bizarre and beautiful.

What I enjoyed most about this novel was the equation of becoming a Newfoundlander with entering a new religion. Quoyle is baptized in the briny sea, pulled from the water by a man who then symbolically becomes his father figure, hauling him from near-death into rebirth. The same father figure--Jack Buggit--is included in a bizarre reworking of a resurrection scene (I'll leave out the details to save the plot).

There's also an interesting juxtaposition of Newfoundland old and new. I think I'll need to think this through a little more before I can write comments.

I guess the last thing that I'll write for now is that I don't understand how a film could ever do this book justice: it's the text that brings it alive, and there's way too much happening to cram into a 2-hour film. Still, I suppose I'll have to watch the movie version made a few years back and see how it compares...

Before there was Brokeback...

After the mediocre at best writing of Dan Brown, I'm spoiling myself with the wordsmithery of E. Annie Proulx. Yep, she's the author now famous for penning Brokeback Mountain but another book of hers became a movie as well. Remember The Shipping News?. Despite its success as a movie, there's more than just plot happening here. I'm only 1/3 of the way through (I fell asleep on yesterday's train....) but more to come.

al purdy, you coarse, crass, eloquent beast, you

rooms for rent in the outer planets. Go. Read. Now.

Da Vinci: Decoded

The Davinci Code is done. Stay tuned for details...

Da Vinci Got Me

Okay, so I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I'm currently reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. I had promised myself I would never read it, basically, because I consider myself a bit of a book snob and I leave the bestseller list for those who are just looking for something trendy and discounted at Chapters.

I am intrigued, however, by the hoardes of people who are reading this book and all the vague comments from my fellow English majors about its "spiritual profundity." My roommate is also hounding me to read it because she thinks its great. So, I'm making an attempt...

I'm reading it in private, though. I don't want any public eyes casting judgement on my choices of literature. (I'm kidding. Sort of.)