I just had a conversation on Facebook about the novel Catcher in the Rye. It seems that some people really dislike Holden Caulfield (gasp!).  In my defense of Catcher in the Rye, and Holden, I argued that, regardless of whether or not Holden is likable, he is most definitely memorable.  Of course, when speaking of unlikable protagonists, I immediately jumped to Ignatius Reilly as the perfect example of a well-crafted unforgettable character who happens to be a complete jerk.

After my Facebook debate, I went looking for lists (oh, how I love a good list) of memorable fictional characters. I found a good one on NPR: check it out here

I’d like to know what you think of this list. Do you agree/disagree with the ratings? Are there any great characters missing from the list? NPR only includes characters from works published between 1900 and 2002, so if you have earlier or later additions, I’d love to hear them.

A few that I would include are Frances Piper from Fall on Your Knees, Hagar Shipley from The Stone Angel,  Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables, and YT from Snow Crash.

A couple of weeks ago (I meant to post this sooner!), I attended a show called Bookworm at the Hamilton Fringe festival, and it was 9 bucks well-spent.

In Bookworm, musician Corin Raymond recalls his childhood through books. Corin grew up with an amazing father who loved literature and passed that love onto his son. In the one hour show Corin talks about his favorite books, his love of reading aloud, Spiderman, Greek myths, and growing up in a library. He is born storyteller and I could have listened to him all night.

The one part of the show that stuck with me was Corin’s passionate argument that favorite books, like good friends, should be revisited periodically. I too like to reread my favorites, but, until now, I have always felt slightly guilty about this practice. I have a whole bookcase full of unread novels after all.

Bookworm got me thinking about my favorite books, old and new, and I want to share some of my favorite rereads with you.

Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood: this novel captures the cruel social world of preadolescent girls, and the terror that comes from being ostracized by the in-crowd at school. My stomach does flips whenever I read this novel, and, like everything Atwood does, the writing is beautiful.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: a masterpiece that I read over and over for its beauty and magic. This is an epic novel of family, colonization, political corruption, and love. I’ve read this four times and I still can’t keep the characters straight in my head, but I don’t think we are meant to tell them apart, and that is the point: history, for better or worse, repeats.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: do I even need to explain? I didn’t think so.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien: better than LOTR in my mind. When I first read this in junior high, I was terrified by Gollum, and the dragon, Smaug. The last time I read this (a few months ago), I was struck by Tolkien’s manipulation of the hero’s journey. In Bilbo, he created the reluctant hero who does not slay the dragon, but, instead, overcomes his fears. I also love that Bilbo doesn’t receive a proper hero’s welcome when he returns to the shire. Instead, his family and neighbours are selling off his stuff and seem rather put-out by the idea that he is alive and well.

Charlotte’s Web by E.B.White: I still cry at the end.

What are you rereading?

For a great review of Bookworm check out the blog “Not my Typewriter“

I watched Blade Runner long before I’d heard of the novel that inspired it.  I also came late to Blade Runner. When it was released 1982, I was eleven years old and more  interested in Michael Jackson, roller skating, and ET.

It would have been the early 90s when I first saw Blade Runner, the director’s cut, which I watched on my television one Sunday afternoon while nursing a particularly punishing hangover. It is the perfect hangover movie: dark, melancholic, and more than a little pessimistic.

I still love Blade Runner for its cinematic beauty and the renegade sexiness of Harrison Ford, but it just barely skims the surface of the themes explored in the novel.

The novel is, of course, the cult classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. I recently read the novel for my book club, and many of us were surprised by how much it differs from the film. Most notably, the plot of DADES is very much concerned with animals, or lack of animals. Deckard hunts and retires androids to in order to acquire enough money to purchase a real live animal, which are rare in the post-nuclear war world, and therefore very expensive. He owns an electric sheep, which grazes on the roof of his half-empty apartment building, but still, the heart longs for something authentic.

The question of authenticity runs through the core of this novel. All science fiction probes for expanded definitions of what makes a human being human, but Dick is preoccupied with the more specific questions of what is real, and what is fake? In DADES, he asks, if the fake is indistinguishable from the real, does it matter?  This question plagues our protagonist and makes it difficult for him to “retire” the escaped slave androids and fill his quota.

By the novel’s end, Deckard questions his own humanity, the reality of his world, and the authenticity of his experiences and relationships. He wants to quit his job as a bounty hunter; however, he still wants a real animal of his very own, and a bounty hunter’s salary is the only way he can make the money for such a luxury.

There are other themes in DADES, such as the human desire to believe in something bigger than ourselves, which is explored through the cult religion of Mercerism, the role of empathy in humanity, and the authenticity of human emotion, which is brought into question by the characters’ use of a “mood organ” (a metaphor for mood- altering pharmaceuticals).

This novel makes for a fantastic book club discussion; it operates on several levels and raises challenging and interesting philosophical questions. I am glad, however, that I saw the less-complex (but equally enjoyable)
film adaptation first. In 1990, I don’t think my booze-addled brain could have handled Dick’s allegorical storytelling and deep probing into the human psyche.

Conclusion: Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? is perfect book club material, but far too complex for a lazy hangover Sunday riding the couch; that’s what the slick movie adaptation is for.

Edition pictured here:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick, Gollancz 2010, 208 pages, £7.99, trade paperback (SF Masterworks). ISBN: 978-575-09418-5

Related articles

• Deckard Discovers a Toad in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Comics Finale (wired.com)

Today, I am perfectly happy. Sitting here in my living room, surrounded by books, and drinking champagne.

I spent the morning buying books with abandon, without the guilt that usually accompanies a large literature purchase.  Why? Because I am going to open a used bookstore.

That’s right. The husband and I bought a commercial/residential mix property (closing today), and I will eventually turn the store front into my version of heaven on earth.

I likely won’t open my shop until early 2012, so for now, I am collection books and logging them in an inventory system (Excel is a wonderful thing), and storing them in large plastic bins. This is proving harder than it should be. There are many books in my personal collection that I fully intend to read, and if I put them in storage, how ever will I find them when I want to read them?  

I have decided to hold off packing up the books I want to read right away. So far, I have put aside To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf — I have been meaning to read this for ages– and Catch 22 — I know it’s hilarious and so famous, I really must get to it this summer. And Possession by A.S. Byatt which I will read immediately. And, I must leave out my copy of The Shadow of the Wind by Carols Ruiz Zafon, which I have been reading forever and am still only half-way through. Also, I was at a church sale the other day and picked up a book called Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns by Cheryl L. Reed. I have never really cared about the hidden lives of nuns, yet, for some reason, I can’t seem to pry this one out of my hands. I am intrigued…..into the reading pile it goes

As my reading piles grows, I begin to wonder if I’ll be one of those shop owners who can’t part with her stock. That’s just silly though. I’m sure the lure of a sweet $5 in my cash resister will override my book hoarding tendencies.

For now, I can indulge in my favorite pastime: buying books and not reading them.

I’m living the dream baby. 

Recently, I read two books recommended by the two institutions that have the greatest influence on book sales in Canada: The Sentimentalist, which won the Giller Prize for 2010, and Essex County, a contender for Canada Reads 2011.

Well, I must come clean and admit that I didn’t read all of The Sentimentalist. I tried but it kept flying out my hands whenever I threw  them up in frustration. So, for the sake of my sanity, I only read half of this slim 215 page novel.

The Sentimentalist is the 2010 recipient of the most prestigious literary prize in Canada. So why didn’t I like it?

First, it’s not what it promises to be. Second, it’s self-indulgent. I also found the hype surrounding this little novel to be overdone; the book itself falls short of the accolades. The book jacket describes this novel as the story of an adult daughter trying to reconnect with her father by learning about his  experiences in Vietnam. It’s not about that though; it’s about the author indulging in some serious navel gazing. Most of the novel centered on the protagonist’s internal feelings and childhood memories, many of which involve her father’s obsession with building a boat. The Vietnam story did materialize early enough for me and I lost interest.

To say that Skibsrud is an introspective writer is an understatement, but that alone does not make a book unreadable. For me, it was the long awkward sentences that made it difficult to stay tethered to the story:

“A sad and irreversible change had occurred, it seemed, and the great and open space which I had always felt within me, that I had thought, in fact, had been me, had disappeared, so finally that I could not hope, I thought, to resurrect it, or feel again that lightness at the exact centre of my heart as I had on so many occasions before.”

Wow, check out all the commas. Every writer indulges in this sort of meandering prose from time to time, but it becomes a nasty habit with Skibsrud and the novel repeatedly runs off course.

On the other hand, Essex County by Jeff Lemire is engaging and surprisingly touching. Where Skibsrud uses too many words to say very little, Lemire uses very few words and stark black-and-white illustrations to convey a whole range of human emotions.

I found myself caring deeply for Lemire’s characters — Lester, the ten-year-old orphan living with his Uncle Ken on a farm in southern Ontario, Anne the county nurse, and Lou LeBeuf, an aged hockey player looking back on a life of what-ifs and regrets. Whenever I put the book down, I had to shake myself out of Lemire’s melancholy world before returning to the mundane tasks of my own life. After finishing the book, the images and story lingered in my mind for weeks — a sign of a very good read.

For those of you who follow Canada Reads, you will recall that Essex County was the first book cast of the literary island. Panelists Debbie Travis, Ali Velshi, Georges Laraque, and Lorne Cardinal resoundingly agreed that it was not a “real” novel and therefore not worthy of the Canada Reads title. The defender of Essex County, Toronto musician Sara Quin, declared that she was not surprised to see it go so soon. She implied that the rest of the panelists were old and therefore more comfortable with  “traditional and safe” literature (ouch). She’s not wrong though; Essex County was the best of the bunch and only got the heave-ho because of a lack of familiarity with the graphic novel form.

I am grateful to Canada Reads, and Sara Quin, for introducing me to Essex County; I hadn’t heard of it before it was chosen for Canada Reads. It’s a beautiful book that makes me want to explore and enjoy more graphic novels.  The Giller Prize, however, will have to serve up something pretty spectacular next year to make up for the time I wasted with The Sentimentalist.

About a year ago, I started a book club at my local cafe Heart of the Hammer. The idea being that social pressure is a great motivator, which will ultimately help me get through some of the tomes on my bookshelf.

The book club did help me get through James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a young man, and we sort of read Doctor Zhivago, but everybody hated it and most of us didn’t finish.

Last night, however, we had a fantastic time discussing Natalie MacLean‘s Red, White, and Drunk all Over. The best parts? First, we drank a couple of bottles of wine out of respect for the subject matter. Second, we really didn’t talk about the book all that much.

Cover via Amazon

For anybody out there who is thinking of starting a book club but doesn’t really like getting into technical or overly philosophical discussions about literature, think about restricting your book selections to those dealing primarily with booze and food. Trust me, you’ll have fun.

Some of things overhead at our meeting last night:

Before reading this, I didn’t know you shouldn’t keep wine in your damp basement. That’s where I keep mine, although, it doesn’t sit down there for long.

Hmm, interesting. Who’s drinking red?

Hey, did everybody know that champagne is made using pinot noir?

Pinot noir? Do we have some of that?

Not sure but this French, um, whatever-the-hell-it’s-called, pairs beautifully with the brownies.

The author makes Robert Parker sound like an ass. I bet he’s a jerk.

Screw the Parker rating system! Mmmm, this chardonnay is delicious.

We should rent a van and go wine touring.

Right now.

ROAD TRIP!!

Hiccup!

Our neighbour Steve is a nice man who just happens to be my favorite sort of person: he is a librarian. Recently, when I was laid up at home recovering from surgery, he was the first of our neighbours to visit. He brought me a book to read from his own bookshelf; it was Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves.

Cover of The Swan Thieves: A Novel

Last year I read Kostova’s immensely popular The Historian, which I blogged about here. I had mixed feelings about The Historian; my main criticism was related to the pacing, which I thought was too slow. Based on the length of The Swan Thieves (about 600 pages), I suspected this book might have some of the same issues. Brevity is clearly not Kostova’s thing.

As it turned out, I enjoyed this second book a lot more. It uses some of the same devices as The Historian — shifting pov, old letters that tell part of the story, and yes, the pacing is slow — but I loved the subject matter and themes of this novel. Instead of hunting vampires, Kostova’s wades into the murky waters of love, obsession, madness, and French impressionism.

The frame of novel is a first-person narrative told from the pov of psychiatrist Andrew Marlow , who takes on a new patient, a well-known painter named Robert Oliver, after Oliver is hospitalized following an incident at the National Gallery of Art – he attacked an impressionist painting with a knife. Oliver has a history of mental illness (obviously) and, following the episode in the gallery, refuses to speak. The plot revolves around Marlow’s attempts to unravel Oliver pathology and determine why he chose to attack an obscure 19th century painting. Deepening the mystery, Oliver begins painting in his hospital room, obsessively, several canvases depicting the same dark-haired woman in 19th century dress.

Marlow contacts Oliver’s ex-wife, Kate, and ex-girlfriend, Mary, and both of these characters are given chapters in which they detail their relationships with Oliver in their own voices. These sections are some of the most insightful and engaging parts of the novel. Kostova’s detailed accounts of the paintings, and her descriptions of the act of painting, are also compelling, and I really wanted to visit a gallery after reading this. I had this insane idea that somehow, like Kostova’s characters,  I too had developed a keen and romantic appreciation of art. (not true btw)

A fourth pov is introduced in the form of old letters (Kostova loves this device). Oliver has in his possession a cache of old letters written by a woman painter and her much older lover, who is unfortunately her husband’s uncle. These letters bring the different narratives together and solve the mystery of the woman in Oliver’s paintings.

Some reviewers (see The Globe and Mail) have been critical of Kostova’s somewhat clumsy and contrived use of old letters as a plot device to move the story along to its conclusion. I can see their point, but it didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of this novel. Kostova is, above all, a beautiful writer, and she really captured the romance of fine art, the pain of love, the self-destructive nature of obsession.

The languorous pace didn’t concern me either. Part of the reason for my patience can be attributed to my convalescent state. I had nothing else to do but immerse myself in this story, and that’s what I did. Books and Tylenol were my only distraction and I fully indulged in both. I read this novel in three days; an impressive feat for me, the woman who usually takes six weeks to finish a novel.

I can’t help but wonder if I would have enjoyed The Historian more under similar circumstances. Not that I am suggesting anyone undergo surgery just so they can enjoy Kostova’s novels; however, maybe her novels are better savoured in times when one is not overwhelmed with the mundane activities of everyday life. The Swan Thieves would make a good beach vacation read, or a book to enjoy during a week at the cottage.

I also think I enjoyed this book so much because my neighbour gave it to me. I tend to be less critical of books other people give me than I am of those I choose for myself. It feels lovely when someone gives you something to read because they enjoyed it, and want you to enjoy it too. I was touched that Steve thought of me and brought me a book when he knew I wasn’t feeling well. And isn’t that what it’s all about?: Sharing books with each other.

Related Articles

• Review: The Swan Thieves (jackieisreading.wordpress.com)

My last post — an angry rant about the commercialization of 2011 Canada Reads — was intended to be my last post, period. I was, at the time, crawling to the finish line of an English degree. Overwhelmed with papers and exams, I didn’t have the time to write for fun, or more importantly, to read for fun, a vital component of my blog’ s theme.

Nevertheless, here we are, and here I am, sending my inane thoughts out into the ether. Why? First, I finished that pesky university degree. Second, I found myself in a situation that demanded a good deal of bed rest and lazing about.

The upside of major surgery is the vast acres of time spent with books. I spent a lot of time over the last two months sitting front of the fireplace, propped up with pillows, drinking tea and eating toast, with a stack of newly acquired novels at my side (mostly gifts from well-wishers, thanks everybody!).

In explanation of why I had surgery, I will try to be brief. I was born with a faulty heart valve, and, for many years, I managed  with this dysfunctional valve, until I didn’t. So I had my aortic valve and part of my aorta replaced with mechanical parts. Yup, I had open heart surgery. The grandaddy of surgeries.

The downside of open heart surgery: the medical team cracked my chest open like a walnut, stopped my heart, took a bunch of stuff out, and replaced it with foreign objects, wired my sternum bone back together, and sewed me up.

If that’s not enough, they put me in a hospital room with a 75 year-old Italian lady with a voice like a Muppet, who never stopped talking, even when she was sleeping, and who did not have the decency to hold the back of her gown together when she took trips to the washroom.

THEN,  after I was discharged, I had to go BACK into the hospital (I got to ride in a speeding ambulance, wheee!) and have a pacemaker implanted to correct a post-op complication called “heart block.” Basically, pre-pacemaker, I had the heart rate of a geriatric sloth.

Prior to this traumatic  experience, I was forced to reevaluate some of my values and beliefs. I knew I was going to have a bit of hospital stay, which meant I would require books. But books are cumbersome, and I never really know what I’m going to be in the mood to read, and I didn’t want to make the husband lug my entire library to my hospital room. So, I bought an eReader. I know. I know! I once wrote a post in which I poo pooed the digital book.

Regardless, I have a Sony Reader Touch and, well, I love it. It’s very compact and light, which I thought would be important. And, it can be easily read one-handed, which really came in handy (ha!) following the pacemaker surgery when I couldn’t really use my left arm because it felt like someone embedded a brick in my shoulder.

eReaders are still relativity new technology, so they are also good conversation pieces. Having the reader with me in the hospital gave me something to talk to the nurses about other than my bowel movements.

Thanks to Sony Corporation, I had lots of literature to keep me amused during recovery. As part of my pre-op preparation, I loaded up my reader with a dozen or so books including Kafka on the Shore by Murakami, Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro (which, in retrospect, was a mistake considering all its references to organ donation surgeries), and the teen sci-fi thriller The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Cover of The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games was particularly fun and I finished it in under two days. It’s my favorite genre: the dystopia  universe novel. Just in case the one person who is not familiar with this book is reading this blog, I will give a brief synopsis: North America doesn’t exist anymore , and the totalitarian Capitol rules all. Regions are divided into districts where people are deprived of basic necessities. Every year the government hosts a survivor-type game show in which two teens (aged 12 to 16) from each district are chosen (by lottery) to play. The game involves hunting and killing each other until one kid is left standing. The winner receives a lifetime of spoils (food, clothing, shelter) and his or her district receive extra rations for a year.

As I lay in my hospital bed reading The Hunger Games, a small concern popped into my head. No, I was not worried about hungry teenagers trying to kill me, nor was I worried food shortages, and I was not particularly worried about how I was going to recharge my new favorite toy, the Sony Reader, in the uncivilized world. My thoughts turned again and again to one nagging little question: Who the hell is going to recharge ME after the apocalypse?? Pacemaker batteries only last five years.

The Canada Reads 2011 book selections and celebrity panelists will be announced on November 24. Oh, the anticipation, the excitement, the endless possibilities! No, not this year.  

This year the brain trusts at CBC broke with traditional and added some seriously lame gimmicks to the mix. First, they asked the public to choose “40 essential Canadian novels of the last decade.” Second, they again asked “the public” to narrow those 40 down to the REALLY essential 10. Now the panelists for this year’s debate are being asked to choose the 5 books from this list of 10.

I don’t like this arrangement for three reasons: (1) whenever you ask the general public to choose books you inevitably end up with a homogeneous list of the usual suspects. (2) my understanding of, and hopes for, Canada Reads is that panelists choose and defend books that (a)hold deep meaning for them personally, and (b) are underappreciated or little-known. (3) where is the element of surprise? Instead of imagining what will be picked out of ALL the published Canadian fiction in the world, it’s which out of these 10 recently published books will be selected. Ho hum.

And the list. Two of these novels have been chosen for Canada Reads in past years. Boring. Personally I don’t think I can sit through another week-long debate listening to some Canadian “personality” defend the merits of The Book of Negroes. Seriously.

Toronto book blogger Kerry Clare has blogged about this very topic and shares some of my concerns, which she articulates in a much more diplomatic and intelligent manner than I. Check it out here.

As part of my official protest, I have come up with my own list of essential Canadian fiction, from which I have purposely excluded the immensely popular authors such as Atwood, Laurence, Shields, Munro, Ondaatje, etc. We all know they are great so you don’t need me to tell you. Granted, Robertson Davis is a Canadian icon but Fifth Business is just so GOOD and I think his notoriety has waned in recent years. And okay, yes, Gabrielle Roy is well-known but, again, so good. I also haven’t followed the “rules” established by the Canada Reads bureaucrats; the books I chose were published between 1925 and 1993. None of this only-from-the-last-decade-crap. If you are as uninspired by Canada Reads this year as I, think about giving a selection or two from my list a read:

1. Fifth Business, Robertson Davis (1970)

2. Wild Geese, Martha Ostenso (1925)

3. Drawing Down a Daughter, Claire Harris (1992)

4. The Almost Meeting and Other Stories, Henry Kreisel (1981)

5. The Road Past Altamont: Gabrielle Roy (1966)

6. Caprice, George Bowering (1988)

7. The Studhorse Man, Robert Kroetsch (1969)

8. Black Madonna, F.G. Paci (1982)

9. The Double Hook, Shelia Watson (1959)

10. Chorus of Mushrooms, Hiromi Goto (1993)