What’s not to love about a book with a first chapter entitled Lutefisk, when a Danish-Norwegian marriage is described as mixed race, and two children are named Rothko and Bracque (OK, the father is an art history professor). This is a book about the modern foodie culture, with a wise treatment of life in the Mid-West. The reading is very satisfying with some ridiculously funny parts and then amazingly poignant sections.
Category: Book themes
The Past – Tessa Hadley
This is a perfect introspective story of family relationships in the present and past. There are secrets, things that are observed but not spoken of. The point of view of the children is most extraordinary – what they observe and what they keep secret. This is a very English story with some surprises – overall a very fine read.
A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
This is a powerful and also profoundly disturbing book, a guy book about 4 male college friends, with a detailed (1352 pages in my digital library copy) account of their relationships with each other mostly: intense friendship and sometimes love. There are essentially no important relationships with women. At the core of the book is Jude, who undergoes horrific abuse as a child that will bring you to tears. Predictably, Jude suffers pronounced attachment disorder which makes his subsequent relationships with his friends very complicated. One of the brilliant features of this book is the ability to illustrate how someone who is very very intelligent can repeatedly engage in completely irrational behaviour: Jude knows this but can’t stop. This should produce a pause in those who think that abuse can be trivialized by “just get over it”. This is a tough read for emotional reasons but very worthwhile. This book is a Man Booker finalist.
The Sky Is Falling – Caroline Adderson
Adderson writes perfect novels of time and place, in this case Vancouver in the early 1980s. A group of young people share a home in Kitsilano, and the description of their lifestyle is fantastic. They are preoccupied (obsessed) with concern about war and the nuclear arms race, and their confusion and angst drives the plot. This is an under-rated novel, so highly recommended.
Slade House – David Mitchell
An imaginative story about soul vampires who lust for immortality. Parts of this book are similar to The Bone Clocks, but the story is much shorter, more like a novella.
Amy notes: David reads so voraciously that I rarely get to say this: I read this book before him!
Gracekeepers – Kirsty Logan
At the end of the book mentioned above
, Swyler is interviewed and gives a list of some favourite books with circus themes, and Logan’s remarkable first novel is from that list. It is some time in the future when rising sea levels have eliminated most land masses. Thus people are divided between the land lockers who live on islands, and the seagoing damplings. A circus troupe travels by boat; the sail becomes the big-top tent. And there is a marked plot change half way through the book that enhances the story – a very satisfying book.
The Book Of Speculation – Erika Swyler
This is an excellent first novel about librarians conducting genealogical research based on a mysterious old book. And there is magic, circus performers and even a curse: what’s not to love! Parts of this book remind the reader of The Night Circus, high praise.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing – Madeleine Thien
Thien has written some fine books (Dogs At The Perimeter, Certainty), but this new book is her best yet – an epic story of China. The evocative writing describes the agony of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s leading up to the horror of the Tiananmen Square massacre. There are three central characters that are linked by their passion for music.
The coda at the end of the book describes the first time a lost composition for violin and piano is played: “At first, the violin played alone, a series of notes that slowly widened. When the piano entered, I saw a man turning in measured elegant circles, I saw him looking for the centre that eluded him, this beautiful centre that promised an end to sorrow, the lightness of freedom. The piano stepped forward and the violin lifted, a man crossing a room and a girl weeping as she climbed a flight of steps; they played as if one sphere could merge into the other, as if they could arrive in time and be redeemed in a single overlapping moment. And even when the notes they played were the very same, the piano and violin were irrevocably apart, drawn by different lives and different times. Yet in their separateness, and in the quiet, they contained one another”.
This book has great story telling with some transcendent writing – highly recommended.
The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson
Simonson wrote the delightful “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand“, and this book, only her second, is even better. The story takes place in an English village (Rye, in Sussex) before WWI, with all the snobbery and vicious gossip that characterized Downton Abbey. The description of the limited role of women is particularly well-told in this pre-suffragette era. The book ends with a graphic description of the horrors of trench warfare; belligerent and ignorant troop commanders are particularly odious. This is an excellent read.
What David Read 