Seems like summer...

It’s an unseasonably warm October afternoon, but the breeze is nice and the birdies and squirrellies are busy collecting seeds, so I thought I’d take advantage of this opportunity to write while Riley is busy watching them.  It’ll have to be a quick post, though, as he loses interest in them quickly and then usually wants “mama bonding time” with me.  I have two books to tell you about, both by Chinese Canadian authors. 

The first is called Red Pockets:  a tale of inheritance, ghosts and the future by Alice Mah, Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies.  Following a year of record wildfires, Mah visits her great-grandfather’s rice village in South China as an extension of her research trip to a petrochemical plant where she measures toxic pollution. Her visit coincides with the Qingming Festival, a time when family members sweep the tombs of their ancestors.  Mah doesn’t know if she should sweep the tombs of her ancestors or what exactly she should do to meet the expectations of the villagers - should she give out “red pockets”, red envelopes containing money, or will that set a precedent for future visits?  She worries about the “hungry ghosts”, ancestors whose tombs have been neglected and often cause misfortune.  Her story then moves from China to England, to British Columbia, then to Scotland, where she now teaches at the University of Glasgow.  Throughout her story and locations, though, are several themes, including the desperate state of the climate and the lack of response from industries and governments, feelings of despair and hopelessness, and ultimately ways to cope with eco-anxiety and look forward to some sort of future that is worthy of generations to come.  Depressing?  Yes!  Well-written?  Yes!  Intriguing?  Absolutely!!  It was a small book packed with plenty of big feelings, and made this eco-anxiety-stricken reader feel a bit less alone.  I’d definitely recommend it! 

And my Volunteer Book Club met yesterday to discuss Denison Avenue by Christina Wong and illustrated by Daniel Innes, which was a hit.  Told in the first section by Wong in prose and in the second section by Innes in illustrations, this novel/graphic novel explores grieving, vulnerability and the resilience of the human spirit, told against a backdrop highlighting the gentrification of Toronto’s Chinatown.  Wong Cho Sum, an elderly, childless Chinese-Canadian, suddenly loses her husband in a car accident, and she must cope with this loss and learn to carry on.  Her reliance on her husband makes this difficult, as she never really learned to speak English fluently and she is unprepared for the rapid pace of the changes in the neighbourhoods with which she is familiar.  Over the course of a year, we follow Cho Sum’s gradual trajectory from loneliness and isolation to connection as she meets new people and reconnects with community members, forming new routines and building new relationships, sometimes with the most unlikely people.  This was a great book for discussion, as we could all relate to the facts of isolation of our most vulnerable populations, often seniors, and even more often immigrant seniors.  We all found it difficult to get into the book, but once we passed a certain stage (different for each one of us), we were sucked right in and couldn’t wait to finish.  We all felt for Cho Sum and hoped that her life turned out ok.  We liked the character of Chloe, not often heard about but certainly significant.  This, too, is a book I would highly recommend. 

Riley’s on my lap now so I’m typing with one hand, which means it’s time to sign off.  Happy Fall and Happy Reading! 

Bye for now… Julie

Goodbye summer, hello autumn...

It’s the last day of summer, and it’s certainly still felt like summer these past few weeks, with only the cooler mornings and the changing leaves hinting at the season to come.  I’ve got three books to tell you about, but I also want to get outside and enjoy the day, as we’ve got a couple of days of rain coming, so these entries will be brief. 

The first book is The Believers by Zoe Heller.  I read What Was She Thinking:  notes on a scandal a number of years ago and really enjoyed it, so when I happened to see it on my bookshelf, I thought that surely she’s written other books, too.  The Believers was written after Scandal, but was just as intriguing.  It follows the Litvinoff family, wife Audrey, husband Joel and their three children, daughters Rosa and Karla and adopted son Lenny, after Joel has a heart attack and is in critical condition in a hospital in New York.  Audrey is a reluctant mother at best, and she is critical of everything her daughters do and believe in, but willingly indulges drug-addict Lenny and continues to sing his praises.  Joel and Audrey married after a brief acquaintance when he visited London to speak at a Socialist rally in the 1960s, and after being uprooted to New York, she’s been a devoted supporter of Joel's for 40 years.  So when a woman appears claiming to be his mistress, Audrey is in shock.  How can she not have known this about her husband?  And how can she go on, with the knowledge she now has?  This book was incredibly engaging, and while I didn’t really like any of the characters or condone their actions or attitudes, I felt compelled to get to the end and find out how things got resolved.  I would highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys books dealing with family secrets, especially those told with a side of satire. 

Then I read a book for my Volunteer Book Club, Anthony Horowitz’ Magpie Murders.  I watched the PBS series and really enjoyed it, and I had the book on the shelf but had surprisingly never read it, so I was delighted to pick it up and dive in.  This book tells the story of Susan Ryeland, an editor who is reading the latest in a mystery series featuring fictional detective Atticus Pünd (think Poirot but Greek-German instead of Belgian), but she reaches the end of the manuscript to find that the final chapter is missing.  When she tries to find this missing chapter, she discovers that the author, Alan Conway, has died in much the same way as the main character in the manuscript, also called Magpie Murders.  As Susan tries to discover the truth behind Conway’s death, she begins to spot parallels between fiction and reality, and is drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery until she must back away or risk her own safety.  Oh, and Conway’s entire book is presented within the book, making this one of the cleverest novels I’ve ever read, a true example of meta-fiction.  It was a great hit with the book club members, and would be an excellent choice for any book club. 

And I just finished the book for tomorrow night’s Friends Book Club meeting, Harriet Tubman:  live in concert by Bob the Drag Queen.  This novel tells the unlikely story of Harriet Tubman and her band, the Freemans, and their efforts to record a rap album and go on tour in order to reach young people and tell their story.  A phenomenon called The Return makes it possible for historical figures to return and live among us in the present day, and Harriet reaches out to Darnell, a music producer, to help with this project.  Darnell thinks of Harriet as a Black superhero, and is thrilled and more than a little nervous to take on this project, as he’s been writing advertising jingles for the past 15 years due to some personal crisis years earlier.  This may be the thing that puts him back on the music map, but will he overcome the obstacles he’s facing in order to complete this momentous project?  Can Harriet help to lead him to his own freedom?  You’ll have to read this strange, interesting novel to find out.  It was certainly not something I’d pick up on my own, but was definitely worth reading. 

That’s all for today.  Get outside and enjoy the sunny day! 

Bye for now... Julie

First post for September…

It’s September 1st and Labour Day Monday, and the new school year is upon us.  It’s early evening and I have to be at work tomorrow morning, but I wanted to take this opportunity to write a very, very brief post about the last two books I read.  I’m sad that I don’t have more time to talk about them because they were both awesome, but if I don’t do this now, there will be no other time for a while and by then I’ll have forgotten what the books were about!!

The first book I reread was A Sudden Light by Garth Stein.  Here’s what I said about it when I read it the first time in February, 2018:  

“I just finished the book, A Sudden Light by Garth Stein (you may be familiar with this author’s name associated with his most popular novel, The Art of Racing in the Rain, told from the point of view of a dog).  I’m not quite sure why I had A Sudden Light on my shelf, but I picked it out along with a pile of other books I know nothing about.  I decided that I needed to weed out some books, so I read the first few pages of each and either kept it or brought it to the Little Free Library that is at the end of my street.  This one I stuck with, and finished reading last night.  It is told from the point of view of Trevor, an adult looking back on the summer he was fourteen, when his father took him to his Grandpa Samuel’s estate just outside of Seattle, an estate that seemed to be suspended in time, having never moved beyond the night Samuel’s wife, Isobel, passed away, leaving their son Jones and daughter Serena motherless and in the care of Samuel.  But sixteen-year-old Jones is sent away to school shortly thereafter, leaving eleven-year-old Serena to care for drunken Samuel, causing her to feel trapped and embittered.  Nearly twenty-five years later, she wants to sell the North Estate, a crumbling mansion surrounded by 200 acres of pristine forest, and develop it into 20 lots of 10 acres each for the newly-rich to build their McMansions on, making her rich and allowing her to travel the world.  But Jones’ ancestors, in particular his great-grand-uncle Ben, had other ideas:  they wanted to return the estate to its natural state and preserve it, a repayment for the rape and pillage of so much land, as well as the exploitation of the men they employed, that made the family rich in the timber industry in the early 1900s.  Grandpa Samuel is suffering dementia, and Serena needs him to sign over power of attorney, which is where Jones comes in.  Jones and his wife Rachel are experiencing marital problems after their personal bankruptcy, and are in the midst of a trial separation, and all Trevor wants is for them to get back together and be happy again.  He believes that money is the solution, but can money truly buy happiness?  Through letters and diary entries, Trevor pieces together the intentions of his ancestors, and must struggle to reconcile his desire to stay true to his dead family's wishes and his need to try to bring his living family back together.  This sprawling, multigenerational story exploring the consequences of wealth and greed and the search for redemption, with a supernatural twist, is totally not my type of book, but it had me hooked!  Stein’s exploration into the motivations of Trevor, Serena, and to some extent Jones, was riveting, and this book reminded me in some ways of The Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche, also about a wealthy, powerful American family with dark secrets, although Marche’s book was more literary, more of a “Lee Valley” book, than Stein’s “Canadian Tire” bestseller.  Still, it was an enjoyable read, and while I felt it dragged a bit, I still wanted to find opportunities to read and get to the end to find out how things are resolved.  There were also times, particularly in the first half of the book, when it reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, probably because both books involved a father and son on a quest to discover the true meaning of value and integrity.  I would definitely recommend this book to just about anyone, as it defies categorization:  it’s part historical fiction, part ghost story, part domestic fiction, part psychological fiction, and so much more.” 

I pretty much agree with everything I said above, and it was exactly the type of book I needed as we’re facing Doug Ford’s Bill 5 here in Ontario.  I think I enjoyed it even more this second time around, although I’d forgotten about the ghost story parts. 

And the second book I read was also amazing.  Sandwich by Catherine Newman tells the story of a single week spent at a cottage in Cape Cod.  Rocky and her husband Nick have brought their children, Willa and Jamie, to this cottage every summer for the past two decades.  Now the children are adults and living their own lives, Rocky is experiencing the emotional and biological changes associated with menopause, and Rocky’s parents are getting to that age when everything causes her to worry.  Divided into days of the week, with flashbacks interspersed throughout, this book focuses on Rocky’s experiences as she deals with her empty nest and her emotionally wrought responses to everything that is happening around her, from her adult children’s life journeys to her husband’s seeming lack of biological changes with aging, while also coming to terms with her own regrets from her past.  I wish I had more time to tell you about this amazing book, sandwiched between FIC NEV and FIC NEX on the library shelves (I couldn’t resist!!), because it really, really spoke to me in a way that I could totally understand and empathize with.  I look forward to the sequel, Wreck, coming out in late-October.  I would highly recommend this to any woman who is approaching mid-life or is in the middle of this tumultuous time.  Newman nailed it, managing to pack a whole lot of insight into a very small, compact novel.  PS Even the elderly cat, Chicken, got a "speaking" part in the book, which was a delightful addition!! Every time my Riley sits on my lap, I am reminded of Chicken asking if his neck smells like cheese!!

That’s all for tonight.  Happy September, everyone!  Bring Fall on!!

Bye for now...

Julie

Short post on a perfect summer afternoon...

It’s a lovely summer afternoon, not too hot or humid, very sunny, with a mild breeze blowing through the leaves, and I have to say that these practically perfect days make me wish the summer would go on and on… but alas, this weather is impermanent, so I must just enjoy the moment. I have two books that I’ve read this week, now that all my Silver Birch reading is done (I sent in my top choices last Thursday and we have a meeting tonight to decide on the final list of nominees for 2026).  

I’ve learned to think philosophically about both life and death from two small but nonetheless powerful books.  The first is The Secret Life of a Cemetery:  the wild nature and enchanting life of Père-Lachaise by Benoît Gallot, current curator of the most famous cemetery in the world.  Located in eastern Paris, this cemetery is most well-known for being the final resting place of Jim Morrison of The Doors, but it is obviously so much more than that.  As Gallot writes, cemeteries have become more than resting places for the dead; they are also places for people to come to find peace and silence, for flora and fauna to thrive, and to offer green spaces to residents, as well as being tourist attractions and film settings.  He notes that since the ban of pesticide use in cemeteries in France in 2015, the grounds have returned to their more natural state, where wildflowers and trees spring up seemingly out of nowhere and find their place in the already-wilding setting.  He’s noted that a family of foxes call Père-Lachaise home and he’s been able to take photos of these wild furry friends which he posts on his Instagram account and which are included in the book.  He and his family live in an apartment in the cemetery overlooking the ground and he contemplates this proximity to death, deciding that it has helped him accept and feel at peace with the inevitable end to life that comes to us all, and to which many of us look with fear.  This short, historical, philosophical, whimsical, insightful book is a must-read for anyone who has already visited or hopes one day to visit this famous cemetery, as well as anyone who is interested in finding peace and joy in unexpected places. 

This search for peace led to my next book, one that has been on my personal bookshelf since last summer.  No Mud, No Lotus:  the art of transforming suffering by Thich Nhat Hanh is a brief introduction to the Buddhist teachings about suffering and ways to approach this uncomfortable emotion in a way that leads to happiness.  The saying “no mud, no lotus” basically sums up the fact that we can’t have one thing without its opposite: the mud smells bad, but is necessary to grow the lotus, which smells good.  I’m very new to the concept of mindfulness and living in the present moment, and don’t actively, consciously participate in this practice, so I was pretty much a black slate when I opened the book. When I purchased it last summer, I was very often in a state of severe anxiety and worry.  I guess I’ve come out of that on my own over the past twelve months, but it was still worth reading.  I learned many things, such as mantras like “this is a moment of happiness”; that all things are impermanent; that we all have seeds of positivity and negativity within us and we can choose to water the seeds of positivity so they can grow into positive aspects such as compassion and joy.  When I finished reading it this morning, I went out for a walk to try walking meditation and realized that I already do this, but not always, as I can be easily distracted.  I will go back and do some of the exercises and activities suggested in the book, but for now I’ve got a few tenets that I need to work on as I think about heading back to work next week (it’s easy to be peaceful and mindful when you’re on your own a lot during summer break with no schedule and no pressure to be anywhere or complete anything!). 

That’s all for today.  Get outside and enjoy these last days of summer before they’re gone! 

Bye for now… Julie

Short post on a long weekend...

I know… every weekend is a long weekend for me in the summer, but this one seems to hold greater significance because it’s heralding the end of summer, so I’m particularly grateful for the amazing weather we’ve been having and will continue to have this week, and for the opportunity to plan so many fun things in the coming weeks to make the most of the rest of the summer break. 

I had a book club meeting on Friday to discuss RF Kuang’s book Yellowface, which was a really great book club choice, as it generated amazing discussion.  June Hayward is present when her friend, best- selling author and rising star Athena Liu, dies.  Both are aspiring writers but Athena’s made it and June hasn’t yet achieved the fame which she believes she’s owed.  When circumstances create an opportunity for June, she grabs it and all her dreams seemingly come true, but at what cost?  This book gives a glimpse into the cut-throat world of writing and publishing, and everyone agreed that it would be a terrible business to be in.  None of us liked any of the characters in the book, and felt that some of the scenes made us uncomfortable, as themes of diversity and positive discrimination, as well as racism, were explored.  I found the book to be compulsively readable, and while I didn’t like June, I felt that I learned so much about the publishing industry, which I think was fairly portrayed, although I hope the reality isn’t quite as dire as Kuang suggests.  One of the questions we pondered is whether you can still enjoy a book when you don’t like the characters, and we decided that the answer is “yes, sometimes, depending on the story”.  The irony was not lost on this reader that in the story June, a white woman, is criticized for writing about Chinese labourers in WWI, but yet it’s ok for Kuang, an Asian American writer, to have as her protagonist a white woman.  Anyway, I thought this book was great… until it wasn’t, but the part that wasn’t so great was brief, so it was a totally worthwhile read and I would highly recommend this book for anyone looking for an interesting book about the publishing industry, or for anyone who enjoyed Jean Hanff Korelitz’s book The Plot. 

That’s all for today.  Get outside and enjoy every moment of this lovely day, every drop of sunshine, and every ripple of every leaf on every tree!

Bye for now... Julie

Mid-summer post...

This is the middle of my fourth week off, which means I have another four weeks to go before I head back to work, so for me it’s the middle of summer, even if I’m off by a week or so on the actual calendar.  I’ve got so many Silver Birch books to read now that this may be my last post for a couple of weeks, as I can’t talk about those books and the pressure’s on to finish them and make my final lists.  But I wanted to talk about the book we read for our Friends Book Club last week. 

The Last Party by Clare Macintosh opens with Detective Ffion Morgan waking up on New Years Day and slipping out of the arms and bed of a guy she met at a bar the night before.  She rushes home, only to be called in to investigate a suspicious death.  The body of washed up singer-turned-land developer Rhys Lloyd is found in an icy lake by some villagers in North Wales taking a New Years Day plunge, and Ffion is assigned to the case, but she’s to have a partner in this investigation:  Detective Leo Brady from the Chester Major Crimes division is also assigned to the case, as Rhys’ home, and the likely crime scene, is on the opposite shore of the lake, which is in England.  When Leo arrives at the scene, it turns out that he is the very man from whose flat Ffion was fleeing just hours earlier.  Despite these tensions, they must figure out a way to work together to solve this crime.  It appears that Rhys had no shortage of people who wanted him dead.  As owner of The Shore, a series of upscale resort-style cottages on the English side of the lake, Rhys was the target of hatred by all the residents of North Wales’ village of Cwm Coed, who opposed this destruction of the pristine land surrounding “their” lake.  They also saw this as a desecration of the land on which Rhys’ father lived, land that was meant to stay in the family but remain intact.  You see, Rhys’ family grew up in Cwm Coed and he was their big success story, a singer who acquired international fame but whose career had pretty much ended by the time of his death.  The residents of the other cottages in The Shore are also suspects, each with their own motives for killing him.  Which of these suspects (and there are a lot of them!) did it?  Will Ffion and Leo find a way to work together to solve this crime before more people are hurt?  You’ll have to read the book to find out!  This book was a bit dense, with a lot of back story and so many characters that it may at first seem difficult to keep track of them.  I actually started this book some time ago, as I enjoy Macintosh’s books, but found it to have way too much detail for me to stick with it.  But then it was selected for our book club so I had to get back to it and get to the end, and I’m so glad I did.  It was complex yet credible, with interesting characters and storylines, and so many suspects that it really kept all of us guessing to the very end.  And none of our group saw one of the “big reveals” coming, which put yet another twist into the tale.  We all agreed that there was a bit too much detail at the beginning of the book but that it was worth the effort to get to the heart of the story, and felt that it was a satisfying conclusion.  We're even considering reading the next book in the “DC Morgan” series for a future meeting (there are three in the series at this time).  If you like complex mystery/thrillers with interesting characters, lots of suspects and webs of deceit, this could be the book for you! 

That’s all for today.  Get outside and enjoy the fabulous summer day! 

Bye for now… Julie

Quick post about book club...

While my cat is contentedly watching the birdies and squirrelies at the patio door this morning, I thought I’d take a minute to write a quick post about last Saturday’s book club discussion. 

We read and discussed the YA novel The Winnowing by Canadian author Vikki Vansickle, a dystopian story set in Darby, New Mexico in 1989.  A fertility crisis happened after WWII, and with no babies being conceived anywhere in the few years after the end of the war, scientists were getting desperate.  Then a group of scientists known as the Barton Five created SuperGen, a hormone drug that was given to women wanting to get pregnant… and it worked!  But there’s something a bit unusual about these children:  when they reach adolescence, they start to have strange experiences, like vivid dreams which they refer to as “going ACES”, and they develop nearly super-human abilities, or “imps”, such as the ability to run quickly when you weren’t able to run at all before.  When this happens, these children are sent to the Barton Clinic to undergo a surgery called “winnowing”, which basically cuts these dreams and abilities from the individual’s brain, leaving them with no memory of the surgery but basically normal.  When our main character, twelve-year-old Marivic, experiences her first vivid dream, she asks her grandfather, Gumps, to bring her to Barton to join her friend Saren, who went there the night before, but he seems reluctant and has her dropped off there that night by a friend.  Marivic and Saren, along with a couple of other youths, begin to question this whole process, and what begins as a routine admission for assessment and surgery turns into the uncovering of a huge governmental conspiracy.  I’ve read this before on my own and with my student book club, but I forgot many of the details, so I was blown away once again by the excellence of this novel, especially considering Vansickle usually writes coming-of-age stories and romantic teen books.  Not all of my members loved the book, but they all finished it and we had a great discussion about so many topics.  One of the main things we discussed was how our response to things we don’t know about is often fear, when it should be curiosity, and how that’s so applicable today, especially in the US.  We compared this novel to others that we’ve read, but which I can’t tell you about for fear of giving away the big secret, and we discussed the characters of Marivic, Saren, Abbot, Ren, and others, and what roles they played in the novel.  It was a great book, and I would highly recommend this to anyone if you’re in the mood for an easy read that has a lasting impact on the way you see things. 

That’s all for today!  Enjoy this beautiful summer day! 

Bye for now…

Julie