A quick reminder: if you are participating in the Nerdy Friends Book Club, remember to stop by over here and leave a comment about stories 3 and 4!
Meanwhile, don’t ask me how, but I somehow managed to plow through eight (8!!!) books in the past 6 weeks. I only cover 6 of them here because the other two need some time to simmer. Plus, I don’t want to bore you to death! There are no particular themes this month. An autobiography, a science fiction, a mystery, a love story, an obsessive love story, and one that made me SMH. You’ll be able to figure them out.
Woman, Watching, by Merilyn Simonds
An autobiography of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a Swedish aristocrat born in 1890 who ends up moving to North Bay and living her life out in a log cabin where she becomes a dedicated and celebrated bird watcher and expert in her research, publishing scientific papers in various journals. But all this is after she trains and works as a nurse in a Denmark Red Cross hospital during WW1, falls for a Russian patient, follows him back to Russia where he ultimately perishes in the Russian Civil War, and then makes her way to Canada where she becomes nursemaid for the Dionne Quintuplets! This is a must-read for a true and astonishing story of a very unique individual. I do have one bit of feedback for Merilyn Simonds: while it is obvious she admires, even idolizes, Louise, the book gets a bit long in the tooth by the end, and it would not have taken away from the amazing accomplishments of Louise’s life to end the book 3 or 4 chapters earlier.
Long Division, by Kiese Laymon
This book was recommended several times by my book readers podcast “Reading Glasses”. It’s an interesting idea – two separate books that can be read either front to back or back to front (what they really mean is that book one starts at the front of the book and ends at the halfway point, and to read book two you have to flip the book over and start from the back, so that it also ends at the same halfway point). I, of course, started at the back, just to be contrarian, but truthfully I think it works better reading them in proper order. It’s a clever science fiction story involving time travel (and the requisite paradoxes that result), and deeply thoughtful. But is written in a very colloquial style that made comprehension a bit tricky. I had to pause often to look things up, but as one of the characters says in the book, it gave me a chance to linger.
“I hate the answer because I don’t believe in mastering the smaller steps,” she told me. “They never teach you to like, you know, linger in the smaller steps.”
“Linger? What’s that mean?”
“They just tell you that you gotta master the small steps if you wanna get to the big answer,” she told me. “But I wish we could really pause at each step in long division and talk about it.”
Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan
We learn a new disorder: de Clerambault’s Syndrome, described as “homoerotic obsession with religious overtones”. Precisely the kind of person I want lurking on the sidewalk outside my home, day after day after day. Ian McEwan is a wonderful writer, and he manages to perfectly capture the escalating feeling of fear and frustration when the protagonist is stalked by man who wants to “lead him to God through their mutual love” (gack!) and yet nobody believes him when he goes in search of help.
The Magician’s Assistant, by Ann Patchett
I didn’t love this book as much as my absolute favourite Ann Patchett book (Bel Canto), but it was still lovely. The lead character, Sabine, is the assistant to her husband Parsifal, the magician. It’s a marriage of convenience, because Parsifal is gay, but he is also Sabine’s one true love. After he dies somewhat suddenly, Sabine finds out that the family he always told her was dead is actually very much alive. The story is of her journey to find and know this family, and finds herself in the process.
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
A book in keeping with the “My Dark Vanessa” theme of books about disturbing and predatory men who prey on young girls, in this case the man’s 12 year old step-daughter. To make matters worse, he only marries the girl’s mother in order to be able to have closer daily contact with the girl. Ew. I have one thing to say about Nabokov: he is a fantastic and immensely witty writer. I also have only one thing to say about this book and it’s directed to men: look, dude, I don’t care if a girl strips naked in front of you and begs you to sleep with her, you DO NOT HAVE SEX WITH YOUR 12 YEAR OLD STEP-DAUGHTER you predatory freak (you might want to pay attention, Woody Allen).
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss
Imagine this. What if, in some of the greatest horror stories of all time, the disposable female characters where, in fact, not disposed of, but instead came together through circumstances surrounding a series of unsolved murders in Whitechapel, London. And what if the detective who steps in to investigate the murders is none other than Sherlock Holmes himself? Well, I’d say you have yourself one heck of a fun, “not your average” murder mystery!