This week I am reading…..
September 24 2011 Cool Water is set in the Sasktchewan town of Juliet; a place where cruelty and injustice are external, employment prospects are almost 
non- existent and years of drought have taken their relentless toll.
The book opens with the local legend about Henry Merchant and Ivan Dodge who competed in a horse race to ride a hundred mile square across country full of untapped promise, land that will one day be settled and optimistically named Juliet. A hundred years later, young farmer Lee Torgensen repeats this ride on a mysterious horse who has wandered into his yard. This is the novel’s framework.
Cool Water reminds me of looking at a drop of water under a microscope and discovering it’s teeming with life. Ten characters tell their stories, all within a twenty-four hour period. The measured pace is almost leisurely and the drama of each character’s life, however small, is deeply felt. There is Norval the bank manager, the arbiter of so many of the townsfolk’s’ fortunes, especially Blaine and Vicki Dolson and their six kids. Norval says, “It’s not your fault” but feels the burden of his responsibilities and pays the ultimate price.
The landscape is as much a character as the people and when Warren says “the land forever changing shape,” what she is really talking about is the nature of farming, its corporatization, the impact of climate change and its economic fallibility.
Each of us exists at the centre of our own drama and Warren’s ability to reveal these lives and show the passions and failures demonstrates her finely tuned emotional antenna. Cool Water is understated; the narrative voice controlled making the writing disappear as her characters lift off the page. If you haven’t already guessed, Cool Water was a deep pleasure to read.
August 31 2011 Read Watch Out for Me and it will come as no surprise that Sylvia Johnson studied screenwriting at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. This novel sizzles and crackles running at a pace few writers dare sustain. This is book is visual and visceral. Whether it is 1967 at Bradleys Head or 2005 in Morocco, Sylvia Johnson had me there. She is a writer who has something important to say and executes it with incredible control.
However, pace is only one element that makes this book work. It allows Johnson to change points of view and time signatures every few pages which in turn allows her to paint bold pictures of her characters from the mouthy Hannah, her sister Lizzie trapped in a ryad in Morocco , their brother, the man-child Richard and the novel’s touchstone of innocence, their needy cousin Toby. Johnson flips between their corrupted imperfect adult selves and the incubation of cruelty in their childhood selves. With echoes of Lord of the Flies, Johnson looks at the idyllic summer holidays of youth through the lens of developing prejudice, belonging and exclusion, power and its absence and the shaping of futures as she draws the story to its inevitable conclusion.
This is a novel very much of our times, dealing with a world that has lost its moral compass, collectively and individually. Tell everyone you’ve left town for the weekend and turn off your phone because once you start on this ride you will resent any interruption.
August 27 2011 I had never heard of Cynthia Ozick until I read this book- which is much more a comment about me than this amazing American writer. I’ve only just found out she is 83!! Just goes to show that age doesn’t weary a writer, only arthritic fingers. Here’s what I thought…
Set in 1952, Foreign Bodies depicts an America prospering in the 
post war era and a Paris still recovering from the grim war years, its victims haunting the streets and dark holes of the city. Paris is central to this story. It is where a young Julian has fled his Californian upbringing to shake off his father Marvin’s expectations. It is in Paris that Julian marries the enigmatic Lily who, herself damaged by the war, spends her days helping displaced people find new beginnings. As such, she also becomes Julian’s saviour. In counterpoint to Lily we have Julian’s sister Iris who is beautiful, smart and somewhat cool and indifferent to the world around her: she is all new world and Lily is the old.
The thread that pulls the story together is Aunt Bea- a 48 year old English teacher, divorced but in truth abandoned by her musician husband too many years ago for a career in Hollywood. She has stayed in the tiny apartment they was once their love nest, even keeping her parents wedding gift to them of a grand piano. Bea is New York to Marvin’s California. When her demanding and pugnacious brother sends Bea to Paris as his emissary, insisting she returns with Julian, Bea determines a different outcome. She finds civilization unraveled and remade by the war in the character of Lily and Julian made European under the influence of his older wife. By the end, lives have been irrevocably altered and remade, some for the better and others more brutally dealt with. Love is challenged and sometimes found wanting. No one remains untouched.
Much is made of Foreign Bodies being thematically related to Henry James’ The Ambassadors and indeed the book opens with a quote from James’ novel. However, I think Ozick has created a stand-alone piece wrought from her own experiences as a child of Russian immigrants and Jewish heritage. I finished this book and went “Wow!” Wow because of the elegant powerful language, characters drawn with simple brush strokes and subtle shading, a story that unfolded like a handkerchief until the whole fabric was laid before me. Foreign Bodies is simply a beautiful piece of literature.
August 15 2011 I can’t believe a month has gone by since I updates my Book Log. I have read so many books: Ophelia in Pieces, Season to Taste, The First Time amongst them and 
today I finished a beautiful book- Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. Set in Seattle in both 1942 and 1986 it explores what it means to be an America in times of great social upheaval, told through the voice of 12 year old Henry who is American born to Chinese parents.
As The US enters the war post Pearl Harbour, Henry’s dad makes him wear a badge stating I am Chinese. As China is an ally, this is supposed to protect Henry from anti Japanese sentiments. However, Henry’s days as the only Chinese student in all-white Rainer Elementary school are pure torture up until the day Rainer’s only Japanese student starts- the lovely Keiko.
Thus unfolds a story that spans forty years, treading carefully through the issue of the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans and the destruction of their homes and communities. A love story, a story of identity, a story about being true to yourself. Ford has blended together a tale that is touching and beautiful and yes, I shed a tear. It was no surprise to me that it spent nearly a year on the New York Times best seller list.
July 17 2011 I have been reading like mad with all the great new books coming out. Stay tuned for review alerts.
July 4 2011 This week I read Grace Williams Says It Loud by Emma Henderson. Fresh and insightful, it deserves all the praise heaped upon it. Read my review coming up on The Hoopla.
June 26 2011 Finished Kevin. Loved it and highly recommend it. A hard, uncompromising book with a cast of largely unlikeable characters. Shriver exposes the conflicts inherent in school shooting sprees and gets inside the characters heads which made me flinch and made me think.
June 12 2011 Shriver manages to make me cranky, exasperated and empathetic with her characters depending on what they are up to. Not only is Kevin completely unlikeable with no (as yet) redeeming features, his parents Eva and Franklin are also hard to feel much regard for. It makes me wonder what mood Shriver was in when she wrote this stark tale. Overall, I am loving We Need to Talk about Kevin but how will it end?
June 12 2011 I have finally moved on and what a move it is. I have started Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. It promises to be an interesting corollary to Franzen in the exploration of American culture.
June 5 2011 I am still reading The Corrections (yeah, yeah I hear you but give me a break, it is 650 pages long) I love it. Franzen is cruel but fair, if that makes sense, in his depiction of the Lambert clan. It is also utterly hilarious. Although I do feel sorry for any Midwestern Americans because Franzen is pretty savage with them. A lot of people who know about books say The Corrections is a better book than Freedom. Freedom would have to exceptional reading to beat this work.
May 22 2011 I’m about 250 pages into The Corrections now. At first I found his style a bit forced and in places it is. Other times I reread a paragraph just because it was so beautifully written. The Lambert Family are an atrocious bunch. Every member is insufferable. I wonder where Franzen is taking me?
May 15 2011 I have just started reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen because all the literary critics rave about it. No, I haven’t read Freedom yet. I’ll see if I like this earlier Franzen first.
May 8 2011 Reading On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. Almost claustrophobic in it’s detail. An excruciating examination of being young and constrained by expectations, yours and the worlds, at the beginning of 1960s Britain.
May 1 2011 I can’t believe I am still reading When We Have Wings. What have I been doing with myself? I’m not going to answer that. I have 35 pages to go so I promise you there will be something new to read about next week.
April 17 2011 I finished The Year of the Flood. Loved it and recommend it to any who enjoyed the earlier Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. If you haven’t read any Margaret Atwood and love speculative fiction, give this one a try. The esteemed Ursula K. Le Guin wrote this review for The Guardian.
This week I am reading another spec fiction (I don’t read spec fiction I can’t figure out what is going on here!) the debut novel by Claire Corbett, When We Have Wings, being published by Allen & Unwin in July 2011. I’ve read 105 pages out of 461 and am loving it. A talented writer who has created a detailed and believable world for her characters to inhabit. The title gives you a hint of the terrific tale about to unfold.
April 10 2011 This week I am reading Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. As usual, Atwood has created a complex world and time in which her characters operate. As always, she is clever and entertaining. I am a big Atwood fan from way back and half way through I can say “Long may she reign!”
meredithjaffe 