by Diane Wild | Apr 1, 2007 | Books
I didn’t pick up a book called The Hopeless Romantic’s Handbook expecting anything other than fluff. I wasn’t expecting the fluff to be so … fluffy, but perhaps my expectations were as unreasonable as the protagonist of the book’s. While it’s poking fun at an anti-feminist 1950s sensibility, it’s also conforming to that sensibility.
Kate is an interior designer on a third-rate home decorating makeover show, where she clashes with the C-list celebrity host and longs to do something more meaningful, like renovating a hospice for cancer patients. She’s a self-described hopeless romantic, looking for a fantasy, a man who will rescue her. Do women actually think like that? If they do, do they admit it?
To help her in her medieval quest, Kate picks up a book on eBay that comes with a find-love-or-get-your-money-back guarantee: The Hopeless Romantic’s Handbook, which Gemma Townley’s novel takes its name from. Many chapters start with excerpts of the fictional book-within-the-book, obviously ridiculous snippets of advice meant for 1950s wannabe housewives. It’s likely no more ridiculous than The Rules or any of those other tomes meant to make women disguise who they are in order to find a man who will love them for who they are, but the old book’s out-of-date advice has even Kate skeptical.
Yet she follows its advice and meets the man of her dreams instantly, or so she thinks. After a week of dating a man she’s shoehorned into the knight in shining armour mold, she’s ready to contemplate marriage, because of course it’s not really about loving the man himself, it’s about loving the fantasy.
Her friends Sal and Tom have their own love woes. Sal is married to a financier and struggling with the idea that perhaps she settled for safe. Oncologist Tom is romantically scarred from being abandoned by his mother as a child.
There’s no surprises along the way to the conclusion, as every plot development is both telegraphed in advance and part of the familiar pattern of every cliched chicklit-lite book.
The Hopeless Romantic’s Handbook, published by Random House Canada, is a fluffy diversion that doesn’t take itself serious. There’s nothing wrong with a little harmless fun, but you might have to check your brain and any even remotely feminist ideas at the cover.
by Diane Wild | Feb 24, 2007 | Books, Travel
I have serious vacation lust right now and serious indecisiveness about what to do with myself.
The lust comes partly from the February doldrums, partly from the long stretch between New Year’s Day and Good Friday in BC’s stat holiday calendar (one reason to miss Alberta: Family Day in February), partly from the fact that my boss has told me I have two vacation days I need to use by March 31, partly from the reminder on my paystub of my new vacation allotment for the year, partly from the fact that I just reluctantly said no to an all-inclusive Dominican Republic vacation with a friend because the timing was off, the price was off, and it wasn’t quite what I was craving.
But the lust comes mostly from the book I’ve been slowly reading while also devouring novels like Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (didn’t love it) and Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal: What Was She Thinking (loved it). I’ve mentioned it before, in the Bolivian prison tour posts – Pico Iyer’s Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign. It’s a book of essays on his trips to some of the poorest places in the world, where he sees the light and the dark coexisting:
The physical aspect of travel is, for me, the least interesting; what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don’t know, and may never know. Confronted by the foreign, we grow newly attentive to the details of the world, even as we make out, sometimes, the larger outline that lies behind them.
He visits Leonard Cohen in a Zen monastery, the Dalai Lama in India, sees a Cambodia recovering from the scars of the Khmer Rouge, talks politics in Ethiopia, all the while examining “what was central, what the margins, and how “the two circle around one another like fascinated strangers, each haunted by The Other.”
He hits on one of my favourite reason to travel:
We travel, some of us, to slip through the curtain of the ordinary, and into the presence of whatever lies just outside our apprehension. … The beauty of any flight, after all, is that, as soon as we leave the ground, we leave a sense of who we are behind.
The exotic vacation I’d been dreaming about since getting back from Peru and Bolivia years ago was to Egypt, but that was put on hold when I decided to move to Mexico instead. And it will have to wait a little longer, but there are many other options closer to home.
Now if only I could decide on one of them.
by Diane Wild | Feb 3, 2007 | Books
Willy Muller is an ass. Recovering from a recent heart attack, he belittles his faithful if stupid girlfriend Penny, avoids ghostwriting a celebrity biography even though his deadline has long passed, and is both repulsed by and drawn to the diaries of his estranged daughter Sadie, who killed herself a few months prior.
He flees to Mexico to recuperate and spend more time avoiding the book and the notes on his screenplay, based on his own autobiography where he details his strained marriage, and his imprisonment and later exoneration for killing his wife. Because Penny isn’t immediately available to join him in Mexico, the unfaithful Willy brings the even stupider girlfriend Karen to keep him company.
While juggling his career and relationship issues, Willy struggles with a central philosophical question — if he can’t classify himself as a good man, is the only other possibility that he’s a bad one?
“I have to be — because there’s only that or being good, right? It’s like when you see the news reports about men who go rushing into burning buildings to save their kids or whatever. And you think, okay, so that man’s a hero — but what is the man who didn’t rush in? Is he a coward? Because it seems like there should be more options on the moral menu. If doing the thing is so bloody extraordinary, then not doing it should just be considered regular.”
The heart attack and the diaries from the dead put him face to face with mortality, and force him to re-evaluate his life, reluctantly and nearly subliminally.
Reflecting on his notoriety following his imprisonment and tell-all book, Willy says: “It was as if, having been tested once, and found so sorely wanting, I was now forever exempt from any cramping expectation of good taste or virtue.”
But Willy is not that sanguine anymore. Everything he knows, everything he thinks he knows, is perhaps not the complete picture of the man. And reading about Sadie’s childhood, a childhood he largely missed, Willy finds himself contemplating how much his past dictates his present and future. If you’ve done bad things, as he undeniably has and does, can you still be a decent person?
British writer Zoë Heller, author of Notes on a Scandal, convincingly gets into the mind of a misanthropic, selfish man who is, nonetheless, appealingly self-aware, funny, and sharply intelligent.
The book is infused with snide humour and vivid comic images, such as: “And the cockroaches! Vast, shiny brown things that stroll nonchalantly along the street, like ambulatory patent leather handbags.”
Heller’s sympathetic yet critical portrayal of her protagonist makes it a pleasure to read the witty, thoughtful story of a man’s slow realization that he may not be quite as much of an ass as he thinks he is.
Everything You Know by Zoë Heller is available from Vintage Canada, a division of Random House Canada.
by Diane Wild | Jan 25, 2007 | Books
It’s impossible to write a review of Julian Barnes‘ intriguing novel Arthur & George without giving away just who Arthur and George are, and yet the slow, sly revelation is part of the book’s considerable merits. I was lucky enough to have approached it completely oblivious to the plot, marketing, or reviews. You seem to be not so fortunate.
I could say: Stop here and go read the book. I’ll wait. Come back when you’re done.
But I know you won’t listen to me on that, so I’ll just get on with it, and console myself with the fact that you’ve been warned.
Actually, die-hard fans of Sherlock Holmes may already have identified Arthur and George. Because the boy Arthur we meet at the beginning, the curious boy who “wants to see,” the boy who became a doctor and then a novelist, is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Still, even most fans of Doyle may not be familiar with the real-life story of George Edalji, accused of mutilating livestock. Though Doyle was constantly approached to apply the mind that created Sherlock Holmes to actual cases, Edalji’s was the only one he agreed to investigate.
So George is the boy we meet in the initial chapters, short chapters that alternate between “Arthur” and “George” without revealing how these two very different Victorian childhoods could possibly intersect. In contrast to young Arthur the storyteller, George is a boy who literally can’t see well, and who figuratively sees only bare facts, devoid of imagination.
The novel builds slowly to the inevitable collision of the two title characters, much later in their lives. And it is a novel, for while Barnes did considerable research, the book delves into the largely forgotten history of Edalji, and imbues both George and Arthur with fully formed personalities and motivations Barnes could not possibly find in the historic record – unless he, like Doyle, communed with spirits.
Arthur & George has the trappings of a mystery novel. We have a crime. We have a seemingly innocent accused. We have a famous novelist, creator of a famous detective character, investigating. Barnes himself, though known primarily for more stately literary fare, has written potboiler mysteries under name of Dan Kavanagh.
Yet the book is so much more than a mystery novel. The whodunnit is central to Arthur, and George, and perhaps even the reader, but the author has a larger plan in mind. The essential question at the heart of the story is the gap between what we believe and what we can prove, and the sometimes-distant relationship either of those things has with the truth.
Barnes adds questions of faith, prejudice, and social structure to the gripping tale of two men fighting for the same goal, but who see the world very differently. It’s a book both entertaining and wise, one that helps the reader see that essential question a little differently, too.
Arthur & George is available from Random House Canada.
by Diane Wild | Jan 21, 2007 | Books
Despite portioning most of my reading into bite-sized chunks of a book before bed (with bigger bites the more appetizing the book), I have never been drawn to short story collections, preferring to sink my teeth into plots of novel-sized proportions.
Vincent Lam’s short story collection Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is the exception that makes me want to reconsider the rule. His interconnected stories following a group of medical students as they become doctors are both finely realized, self-contained morsels and part of a larger, satisfying whole.
It’s not hard to see why this 2006 Giller Prize winner was recently snapped up for development into a TV series, a medium that thrives on distinctive characters, settings containing a bottomless well of dramatic moments, and the potential for individual stories to coalesce into a bigger picture.
Lam demonstrates a polished, profound touch unexpected in a first book (though he’s previously written articles about real-life medical issues such as SARS and ER overcrowding for national newspapers, and subsequently co-wrote the non-fiction book The Flu Pandemic and You). He also demonstrates an insight and precision not unexpected in someone intimately familiar with the science and art of medicine. If his writing career fades after its spectacular debut, he still has his not-too-shabby job as an emergency room physician to fall back on.
The stories revolve around the personalities of Ming, Fitzgerald, Sri, and Chen, their careers, passions, and obsessions – which are not necessarily three distinct things. Their romantic entanglements and professional dilemmas are presented with an almost clinical detachment that paradoxically doesn’t take away from the emotions brewing under the surface. If there’s such a thing as scientifically poetic, Lam’s style fits that description.
These are characters struggling with the dispassion expected, even necessary, in the medical profession and the messiness of human emotion. We can chart their progress from the driving passion to get into medical school, seen in “How to Get Into Medical School, Parts I and II,” a passion that either mutates into a passion for medicine itself, or mutates into something a little less noble, as in “Night Flight.” In the earlier stories, we can see the traces of the doctors these medical students are to become in later ones.
The book delves into questions of medical ethics and human ethics, and gives an accessible insider’s view into the strained Canadian medical system, touching on the Toronto SARS crisis in “Contact Tracing,” a crisis Lam saw first-hand in the emergency room. But primarily, it is a highly entertaining tale – or rather, they are highly entertaining tales – of life and death and the meaningfully mundane moments in between.
The story behind the stories is nearly as compelling as the collection itself. The tale is that he met Margaret Atwood on a cruise ship where he was working, and convinced her to read his manuscript. She admired it enough to act as a mentor to the younger writer and introduce him to his publisher.
Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam is available from Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House Canada.
by Diane Wild | Jan 19, 2007 | Books
I may never have to write another post again. I’ll just continue to exploit my brother for material. Some day he’ll stop sending me e-mails for fear they’ll all end up on my blog. (Actually I ask him before posting. Honest.)
When I saw him at Christmas I gave him a shoebox of some of the review materials I didn’t know what to do with. I made it very clear these cast-offs weren’t his real present. His real present was a half bottle of rum. I got thirsty.
He rarely watches TV (well, he watches a few TV shows, just not on TV. Shhh.) so I passed on some of the CBS screeners I’d gotten in the fall, and he reads voraciously, so I passed on some books I didn’t necessarily want to keep for myself. Here’s his shoebox reviews, with links to my reviews, where available (CBS sent me a swack of “premiere week” screeners for returning shows, which I received after premiere week became old news week, so I never did end up writing about them):
The Class
I didn’t come to “The Class” with any expectations, and hated it in the first three minutes. It looked like another terrible sitcom with a laughtrack. But after watching it for a bit there were actually some clever bits in it, and some interesting characters. It never really did it for me entirely, but it looked like there was some promise there.
I felt kind of the same way. I’ve watched it a couple of times since seeing that batch of the first three episodes, but it hasn’t really improved. It’s still pretty hit and miss.
The New Adventures of Old Christine
My god, this was unwatchable. Seriously, I couldn’t make it through the entire episode. Specifically, it was bad. I’ve said enough.
I didn’t review it, but I saw it a couple of times last year and thought it was OK. Definitely not that bad.
Jericho
I’ve already mentioned “Jericho” tells us the apocalypse will be really boring.
I called it the tale of the feel-good apocalypse. I didn’t mean it as much of a compliment. I think I liked it a bit more than Steve did, though.
Shark
“Shark” was really good. I could watch more of it.
I liked it too. And then never saw it again after the pilot. I guess I didn’t like it that much.
3 lbs
“3 lbs.” was actually better than I expected. Ya, comparisons to “House” are inevitable, but it would have been interesting to see a show that concentrated on broken brains. Broken brains are cool. 3 episodes? How can they decide a show is worth keeping or not after 3 episodes?
The perennial question. Which I can’t answer. I didn’t not like 3 lbs, but it didn’t live up to the premise. I was really looking forward to more exploration of the Oliver Sacks type broken brains too, but all that mediocre writing got in the way.
The Unit
“The Unit” looked like it might have been okay, but obviously I was coming in the middle of the story and didn’t really connect with the characters. Little less talking, little more shooting. And robots, too. It needed robots.
I didn’t see the episode I passed on to him – it would have been the second season premiere – but I did see the series premiere and was underwhelmed. Little more talking, little less shooting. That’s what it needed. And more robots.
Smith
“Smith” was really good, even if they copied the “Reservoir Dogs” plot thing. Umm, was this also canceled after 3 episodes? Too bad, it looks like it would have been interesting.
I didn’t like Smith much. I heard it was really expensive to produce, and the network didn’t like what they saw in unaired episodes. But that’s hearsay and would not stand up in court.
How I Met Your Mother
“How I Met Your Mother.” Umm, frankly I don’t remember much about it. I know I watched it, I don’t think I hated it. Just didn’t make much of an impact, I guess.
That’s kind of how I feel about the show overall. It’s likeable, but it just doesn’t grab me enough to watch all the time. Except the Robin Sparkles thing.
Fry and Laurie
Very funny, even if sometimes I didn’t get the references. Stephen Fry is really good, and his sidekick didn’t annoy me too much.
This wasn’t review material, and I haven’t written about it. And I didn’t give him my copy of it. It’s mine. All mine.
The Big Happy
“The Big Happy”. Well, I read the entire book. At first it seemed the author was trying too hard with his wacky humour, especially when he’s doing things like making fun of Alanis Morisette’s idea of ironic. Wasn’t that funny last century? but then either he relaxed or I just accepted it. Not the kind of book I normally read, and I didn’t hate it, but didn’t think there was a lot of point to it in the end. I mean, I got a point (perhaps not THE point), but it seemed a little mundane. Needed robots.
I didn’t really review it, just mentioned it here. I didn’t love it in the end, despite the promising start.
JPod
I really really liked this. It’s almost a fantasy that could actually happen. If things like that actually happened. You could just read it to see what other bizarre thing was going to happen and forget the plot. I’ll find myself rereading this.
The typographical tricks reminded me of Alfred Bester’s stuff from the 50’s (I didn’t read it in the 50’s, that’s just when it was written). It annoyed me when he did it too.
He liked it more than I did, but I liked it against my will.
In summary
So, not so much reviews as “Oh, I liked that” and “Oh, that sucked”. But isn’t that what a review really is? Anything else is just the reviewer trying to impress you. And trying to give you specific details about why it sucked and why it was good, and why it should be so in order to help you make a decision. But I won’t fall into that trap.
Yeah. That kind of review is lame. Ahem.
