Quick post on a perfect summer morning...

The birds are singing, the sun is shining, it’s not too hot or windy… I couldn’t have asked for a better summer morning!  I’ve got just a short time to write this post, as I’m going away this weekend and am heading to the airport in just over an hour, but I wanted to tell you about a real page-turner that I finished last night. 

After two weeks of reading, reading, reading Silver Birch books, I just needed to dive headlong into an adult book, preferably a mystery, so I headed to my shelves and found a book I don’t remember purchasing (maybe it was from the big CFUW book sale in April), The Woman Outside my Door, a debut novel by Irish author Rachel Ryan.  This novel tells the story of Georgina, Bren and their seven-year-old son Cody, an ordinary family living an uneventful life in Dublin until Cody comes home from the park one day with a lollipop.  When Georgina asks where he got it, he tells her that his “new granny” gave it to him, which shocks her because both Cody’s grandmothers are dead.  Bren explains this away by claiming that “new granny” is probably an imaginary friend that Cody made up to deal with the recent loss of Georgina’s mother, an explanation she reluctantly accepts.  But when strange things keep happening, Georgina’s suspicions grow, despite Bren’s rationalizations.  Is she right to suspect that something strange is going on, or is she just being paranoid?  And if Cody is in danger, will she be able to figure out what’s going on in time to save him?  This was an absolute page-turner, which I read in one day while waiting for the Rogers tech to come and set up our new system, as well as during the many, many, many hours I waited on hold with other Rogers customer service people as they tried to figure out a way to make it work, which was incredibly frustrating. But on the bright side, it provided lots and lots of reading time!  Once again, a good book cheered me up and saved the day from being a complete write-off!!  Anyway, if you’re looking for a good mystery/thriller that features an unreliable narrator, and if you’re planning to call Rogers (or Bell, or your bank, or Service Canada!), this might be a good choice for you!

Bye for now... Julie

It’s been a month since my last post, and that’s due to a combination of factors.  It’s been super-busy with the end of school prep, so more busy on the weekends and less time to read.  I’ve also been reading Silver Birch contenders, which I can’t write about.  I’ve been in a rut for adult books and audiobooks, too, so that was quite a frustrating waste of time.  But the main reason I haven’t posted is because of my cat, Riley, who comes and lays on my lap whenever I sit down.  Well, I can’t very well have him on my lap and type a post, can I?  I blame it all on Riley - he just got up to have something to eat, so I’ll have to make this a quick post! 

The first two weeks of June I spent reading Silver Birch books, then for the next two weeks I tried and failed to get into a few adult fiction titles from home and from the library.  I hate wasting valuable reading time, so on a Friday afternoon that I had off work, I wandered into my favourite used bookstore end ended up buying Less by Andrew Sean Greer, a light, comedic novel about Arthur Less, a failed American writer who, as his fiftieth birthday approaches, receives an invitation to his ex-boyfriend’s wedding.  Unable to decline but also refusing to attend, Less agrees to speak at all the various awards ceremonies he’s invited to and accepts the invitation to teach a creative writing course, all in various parts of the world, making him “unavailable" to attend the wedding.  These romps around the world, including Japan, Germany, Italy, Morocco and India, lead Less to personal discoveries as his birthday nears, arrives and passes.  This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was not, as the cover boasts, “hilarious”, but it was light reading that still had enough substance to keep me reading until the last page.  There’s a sequel, Less is Lost, but I won’t be reading that - Less was good, but in this case, Less was also enough. 

And I just had a book club meeting this morning to discuss Michelle Good’s Governor General Award-winning novel and CBC Canada Reads winner, Five Little Indians. This novel follows five young people after their release from a residential school in BC in the 1960s until they are older adults several decades later.  Having been brutally ripped away and kept separated from their families, each of these children experienced physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of the nuns and priest at their school.  In their mid- to late teens, they were then thrust into the world with nothing but a bus ticket to downtown Vancouver, no money, skills or experiences to help them get on with their lives.  Each young adult copes in a different way, from drinking and drugs to running away to lashing out, but they manage to maintain connections that (mostly) help see them through the worst times.  No one was looking forward to reading this, probably because the last book we read by an Indigenous writer, The Break by Katherena Vermette, was so difficult to read and so utterly depressing, so it was wonderful to hear that everyone loved it.  We all loved the characters, and while they all suffered trauma and developed coping strategies that may not have been the healthiest of choices, we felt for all of them and agreed that there was quite a lot of hope in this book.  It was definitely a great book club choice and I’d recommend it to anyone.

Oh, Riley's back so that’s all for today.  Happy Summer, everyone!  Stay cool and don’t forget to read!

Bye for now... Julie

Quick post on a rainy Sunday night...

It's raining and it's late so I've given myself five minutes to tell you about the books I've read over the past few weeks, both for book club meetings.

The Librarianist by Patrick De Witt was a mostly interesting book - I enjoyed the 75% that was more realistic fiction, but the 25% that veered off into the realm of the absurd was tedious enough that I won't recommend it to anyone.  This author is known for his absurd plots, but this one had me mostly fooled, which was a good thing, as it kept me reading and I experienced what a brilliant and talented wordsmith he is.  Too bad his stories are not for me.

And Spare by Prince Harry was the other book I read for my Volunteer group.  It was so long but soooo good!  Of course it was biased, but I have to believe that, since he's putting it out there, most of it must be true, at least as Harry experienced it.  It was so revealing, so detailed, so informative, and so well written!  We all agreed that we didn't think we'd like it but that it surprised us and far exceeded our expectations.  I hate memoirs, so this is high praise from me indeed!

That's all for now.  Happy June!!

Bye for now...
Julie

Post on a sunny Sunday morning...

It’s a perfect spring morning, a welcome change after yesterday’s rain.  Everything is green and blooming, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing… it doesn’t get much better than this. 

I promised that I’d let you know what my book club ladies thought of our last selection, Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Canadian author Karma Brown.  This novel, told in alternating chapters, tells the stories of two women who are both trying to make the best of their situations.  Alice is a 30-something woman who has recently moved with her husband Nate from an apartment in New York to an old, run-down house in a quiet town outside of NYC.  She is trying to determine who she is and struggles to figure out what she should do with her life now that she is no longer an up-and-coming editor.  She claims to want to write a book, and Nate initially seems supportive of this, but he also wants them to start a family and Alice is not sure she’s ready for that.  One day, while searching through some of the boxes in the basement left behind by the woman who lived there before and who died a year earlier, she discovers a box of old magazines and cookbooks from the 1950s and begins reading them.  This is the beginning of Alice’s immersion into the life and experiences of Nellie, the former owner of the house.  Nellie and Richard lived in this house in the 1950s, when societal expectations of what makes a perfect wife were very different from what they are today… or are they?  Nellie is expected to look good, cook well, entertain her husband’s friends, and basically be subservient to her husband, all with a welcoming smile and the right words, even if they are delivered through gritted teeth.  As her story progresses, Nellie’s situation is revealed to be more and more unbearable, until she is finally forced to act.  Alice tries on many of Nellie’s characteristics and immerses herself in 1950s’ culture, claiming that it’s research for her book, but her husband and best friend don’t necessarily buy this explanation.  While Nellie’s struggles are clear, Alice’s issues are less obvious, which may seem frustrating to some, but this also serves to remind us not only of how far we’ve come in the past 70 years, but how far we still need to go.  My ladies mostly enjoyed this book, saying that Nellie’s situation reminded them of their own mothers (the cooking, not the abuse!).  Two members did not really take to Alice, and I’d have to agree that she’s the more complicated of the two main characters, as her situation is more ambiguous.  We discussed the parallels of the two women’s lives, and everyone really liked the older women who ended up befriending them.  We thought the inclusion of recipes and quotes on how to be a good wife, all from the 1950s, were particularly effective in highlighting the changes over the past seven decades. Over all, it was a good book club selection, and led to a lively discussion about cooking, gardening, and women’s rights. 

And I read another book by a Canadian author, Glass Boys by Nicole Lundrigan, one of the books I bought at the big CFUW book sale.  This novel tells the story of two dysfunctional families living in a small village in Newfoundland.  Eli Fagan is an unsavoury man who despises his step-son Garrett.  One day he follows Garrett and discovers a secret so abhorrent he must destroy all evidence, including Garrett himself.  Lewis Trench is back in the village as the new police constable, and on this day, he is drinking and fooling around with his brother Roy.  When they stumble onto the Fagan farm and the scene with Eli and Garrett, Roy confronts Eli and is killed during a struggle.  Deemed an accident, Eli walks free and Lewis holds onto his anger for years.  The incidents that take place on this single day serve to alter the lives of both men and their families.  Can they eventually find a way to get past this, or will it end up destroying everything for both of them?  This book was a mostly-riveting family saga that delved into family secrets and explored various relationships through the lens of a small village.  I found it a bit long, with the story dragging a bit in the middle, but overall, it was interesting and kept me turning pages to reach a satisfying conclusion.  

That's all for today. Happy Mother's Day and Happy Spring!!

Bye for now... Julie

Not a "real" post for the last Sunday in April...

Between the big CFUW book sale last weekend, the Spring Pottery Sale this weekend, and weeding so many dandelions, there’s no time to write a post.  That’s ok, since I’ve mostly been reading Silver Birch books anyway.  I’m about halfway through rereading my book club book for next Saturday, Karma Brown’s Recipe for a Perfect Wife, which I listened to a while ago and loved, loved, loved.  I’m loving it in print, too, and will make time next weekend to tell you all about our discussion.  From the book sale, I restrained myself from attending on both Friday and Saturday, and was able to whittle down a full box full of books to just eleven:  

*All the Beautiful Lies Peter Swanson
*The Safe House  Nicci French
Borkmann’s Point  Håkan Nesser
An Unthinkable Thing and Glass Boys  Nicole Lundrigan
Autopsy of a Boring Wife  Marie-Renée Lavoie
Frida Barbara Mujica
*The Brooklyn Follies Paul Auster (one I haven’t read yet!)
The Ghost Bride  Yangsze Choo
Lying in Wait  Liz Nugent
*Coronation Year Jennifer Robson

* authors I’ve read before, but all of the above titles are new to me

That’s all for this afternoon.  Gotta get back to learning how to be a "perfect wife”!!

Bye for now…
Julie

Short post on a Spring-y Monday evening...

It’s late-ish on a Monday evening, but I wanted to get a quick post written before another week goes by.  I was reading Silver Birch contenders last week, which I can’t mention, but the week before, my book group discussed Katherina Vermette’s The Break, which I can talk about.

So The Break is the story of a young Indigenous teen who was raped after going to a party.  This incident was witnessed by another Indigenous woman who called the police but didn’t go out into the winter storm to check on the girl, choosing to stay inside to care for her two young children instead.  The two police officers who took her statement were not completely convinced that she really saw what she thought she saw, but the young Indigenous officer was more inclined to believe her and pursue the investigation, while the older white officer just wanted to close the case.  What follows is details of the official investigation and the response, processing and acceptance of this horrific event by the Indigenous community (mainly women).  Told from many varying points of view and including stories and memories spanning generations, this novel was heartbreaking and hopeful, horrific yet necessary.  My book club ladies found it so sad and difficult to read, but we all agreed that, while we knew about the stats regarding the increased likelihood of Indigenous women being sexually assaulted, we admitted that we didn’t really know much about it at all.  It’s the kind of book that needs to be written and read, but it was certainly not uplifting.  We found it confusing because there were so many characters who were all related, mothers and grandmothers, daughters and grand-daughters, and they were not always referred to by their proper names, so that, along with the fact that there were multiple points of view, made for a challenging story to follow.  I think that we had it all figured out by the end of our discussion, but we each had points that needed clarifying as well as each adding information that led to clarification for someone else.  It was a great book club selection, but I don’t think I’ll be reading the sequel, The Strangers, at least not any time soon.

And this weekend is the big CFUW’s book sale, Friday from 9am-9pm and Saturday from 9am-1pm:  https://www.cfuwkw.org/book-sale.  I’ve got the afternoon off work and am looking forward to leisurely browsing the aisles and checking out the thousands of books on offer.  

That’s all for tonight.  Have a great week!

Bye for now... Julie

First post for April...

It’s Tuesday evening and I’ve had a busy day at work so I’m not really in the mood to write a post, but it’s been more than two weeks since my last post and I don’t  like to leave it too long.  So, since I spent last week reading Silver Birch contenders which I can’t tell you about, here is a very brief post about one book I finished two weekends ago. 

I finished reading Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, and I have to say… WOW, it was all I was hoping for and so much more!  Unfortunately, I can’t even begin to describe the plot, so here’s a quick summary:  a young girl living on a potato farm in small town Idaho gets involved in a difficult relationship and runs away from home.  Twenty-five years later, she is called upon to return home because her father is dying, which she agrees to do, although she is filled with unresolved angst and does so reluctantly.  When she returns with her three children in tow, she is surprised to see that everything and nothing has changed.  Throw into this mix of nostalgia and recollected nightmares a trailer full of tree-hugging activists who are fighting the evils of big agribusiness and monoculture and you’ve got one heck of a story.  It is a story about biodiversity and the importance of saving seeds, about what it means to be family, about love and friendship, connection to the earth and each other, oh, and a lot about potato farming… I’m not kidding!  Despite that, this book was riveting from beginning to end, at times very funny and at others heart-wrenching and deeply moving.  I would highly recommend this book to just about anyone, and I think it’s going to be my Friends’ Book Club recommendation for our July meeting. 

That’s all for tonight.  Stay warm and pick up a good book!  

Bye for now... Julie