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Sunday, March 30, 2008

Goodbye to some memorable books

I’ve been thinning out my books - I don’t want to grow into one of those old women who end up surrounded by stacks of books, cats, papers, and piles of “stuff” - and had to admit that there were a couple of books that I knew I probably wouldn’t read again but that I enjoyed immensely the first time around. A lot of the time, these books are picked up during my travels because I finished the book I took with me and needed something to read on the flight home, or because the topic was something I was curious about and a book came up on the topic, or because the title was just too good to walk by.

Here are a few of my faves:

Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods---My Mother’s, My Father’s, and Mine by Noelle Howey - An autobiography by a teen who goes through her adolescence (an awkward time at best) at the same time her father goes through his own form of style adolescence as he prepares for trans-gender surgery. Told with a wry sense of humour that lets you in on her adolescent angst without too much earnestness.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman - The first premise of the book is that someone will eventually ask him if he’ll now recant something he wrote years ago, that no woman could ever satisfy him, and he’s say, of course, because he’s now married. But of course, no one would ever know if he’s telling the truth because there is public pressure to say the right thing. The whole Emo angst (hmmm, there’s that word again) about fake love drew me in, and then the titles of various chapters made me curious. Lise Loeb and Ice Planet Hoth ... Toby over Moby - OK, I kind of knew who Moby was ... I felt I needed to get out of the middle-aged closet, at least a little bit. I now read way more blogs and watch a lot less TV.

Black Rubber Dress, by Lauren Henderson - A whodunnit set in London where the protagonist is a low-rent, edgy sculptor of gigantic mobiles. She’s a bit of an anti-hero, so has the usual accoutrements like a male nickname and, if I’m not mistaken, tattoos and promiscuity, not to mention recreational drug use - the better the contrast to be able to critique the well-heeled crowd that make up the rest of the crowd in the book. A refreshing airplane read.

Genderqueer, edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins - I picked up this book because it’s subtitled “beyond the sexual binary” and discusses transgendered and intersexed issues intelligently, as well as the usual gay, lesbian, bisexual, and even quirkyalone, in a way. I bought it in Baltimore, where I was speaking at a conference, and used the book to describe situations where we except binaries and are made to stretch our minds when presented with more options. I was surprised at how many feedback forms involved a comment about how the presenter talked about (gasp!) sex! Really ... the inability to relate concepts ... but I digress.

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson - I couldn’t put this book down. It’s been a couple of years now since I read it, but I still remember the characters vividly. For weeks afterwards, I would wonder what happened to Ivy, Cayce, and Parkaboy. I wanted a sequel. That reminds me to check out Gibson’s latest.

The other two boxes of books will go into the donation box without fanfare. Some are well-loved, like Ann Marie MacDonald’s books, that I hope will be equally enjoyed by their next owner, and others I hope will be better enjoyed by the new owners.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

The Starbucks Experience, by Joseph Michelli

The first time I encountered Starbucks was when I moved to Vancouver in 1992, and Starbucks was a cool, little company in the Pacific Northwest. I didn’t know the words “user experience” then, but even in 1992, realized then that it was a company that created an in-crowd feeling by using its own vocabulary and in-store culture. I was curious, then, to read The Starbucks Experience to see what the deal was. I’d lost a few feel-good points over Starbucks, but not because it had grown to be a large chain - I never got that “now that you’re successful, we have you” vibe. My beef was that Starbucks sued a little coffee shop inside a kids’ clothing store, in some remote B.C. town, that called itself Starducks or something similar. This from a company that has a name from a character in Battlestar Galactica? In the vein of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I didn’t shutting down a little puddleduck shop was a very good corporate move. Aside from that, however, I was impressed with what the book outlined as their five corporate principles for creating great user experiences. I wish all executives with retail operations would read this book and implement the principles throughout their organization.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Blowing My Cover, by Lindsay Moran

Sometimes you’re in an airport, looking for a book to read, and a book cover just tickles your interest. Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy, by Lindsay Moran, was that right book at the right time. It’s a fast read that puts the CIA into the perspective that we long-in-the-tooth office workers suspect exists everywhere: it’s a bunch of workers who worry about things like employee reviews and paper pushing, who get budgets for some things that seem really bizarre while other necessities are denied them, whose corporate cultures claim to be one thing to the outside world while employees experience something completely different. The big difference, of course, is that most of us leave our dysfunctional workplaces behind at the end of the day, whereas Moran describes a bunch of workers who carry a world of deception around with them, weaving a world of lies and, more often, avoiding entanglements that would eventually expose them. It’s funny, in that cynical sort of way - just my type of humour.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong

Whenever I go into Little Sister’s bookstore, I make a point of buying at least one book, and this time it was Monique Truong‘s The Book of Salt. The premise is that the protagonist is a Vietnamese cook hired by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. This fellow, Thinh Binh, is a gay lad, and so understands his employers, yet doesn’t, as they are a gender and two cultures away, as he filters their behaviour as Americans living in Europe. Truong counterpoints Binh’s experiences in Vietnam with those in Paris, in the French countryside, and en route. There are multiple worlds inside this book, and the travel is seamless. In fact, I’m planning to send this book to a friend of mine who loves language and would completely enjoy this book.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man, by Charles Barkley

I picked up Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man, by Charles Barkley, on a whim at a bookstore in Oregon. Not being a sports fan, I had no clue who Barkley was, but I’m always interested in understanding more about the current state of race relations in the US, so the subtitle drew me in: race, power, fame, identity, and why everyone should read my book. As I started reading the book, I actually liked who he interviewed, how he structured the interviews, and what they had to say. It was a little depressing - if these prominent people can’t make society move, even a little teeny bit - then how stuck is the US in its social rut when it comes to racial tensions? Yikes! The funniest line in the book is George Lopez recalling a telephone conversation with a restaurant hostess who, upon hearing his surname, declared, “oh, you don’t sound Latino.” At which point he said (or perhaps thought), “and you didn’t sound stupid - until you said that.”

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin

Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin, is a remarkable book. Larkin is a pseudonym, which you start to understand the necessity for as you read the book. She searches for George Orwell on three levels - first, searching for traces of Eric Arthur Blair, the police officer stationed in Burma before becoming George Orwell, the writer; second, searching for people who have read George Orwell’s works, and finding a virtual literary underground of readers who hide their libraries of western classics from destruction by the natural elements and the ever-present spies; and third, searching for the the truth about how the Myanmar society bears out the dynamics of George Orwell’s book 1984. This kind of look inside of a closed culture is invaluable to understanding the dynamics of the world better, as much as we can ever understand it. I highly recommend it.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Night, by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel’s Night was a hard book to read. I got the book for my birthday, but put off reading it for a few months because reading anything about the Holocaust tends to give me recurring nightmares, but that’s a whole other story. The book was an extremely powerful read - I read it sometime in March but couldn’t review it till now. The seemingly sparse style is actually quite packed with detail; a single sentence says as much as another author might say in an entire paragraph. So this slim volume of about 120 pages packs a huge emotional whollop. And yes, recurring nightmares ensued for about a month. But it was worth it.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood is a book I picked up last year and read during a business trip. I remember that a couple of women came up to me to say that they’d just finished it and recommended it as a good read. I agree. I think my fascination with memoirs set in other countries, on other continents, has to do with an overexposure to North American coming-of-age narratives. It’s good to know what was happening in the rest of the world while I was growing up in my little corner of a Canadian province. Of course, the narrative reflects the sentiments of the day - the good and bad, the strong and feeble, the racist and ... what is the word for “not racist” or at least “understanding race dynamics” - and putting them into a context that gives us a look into the complexities of existence as a white farmer in an African country in the late 20th century. Read an interview with author, Alexandra Fuller, by an interviewer from Powell’s Books.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

A Conspiracy of Paper, by David Liss

This was a book I picked up at the airport, or perhaps it was on a sale rack of a bookstore. A Conspiracy of Paper isn’t the sort of book I’d generally pick up, but I thought I’d move a little outside of my usual realm.  What a great read. It’s a book about the history of London in the 18th century, and to illustrate the history, the author, David Liss, weaves a tale that has characters from various classes so we can get a cross-section view of the stratas of society.

The protagonist is a a Jewish ex-boxer who has become a combination private detective / debt collector for wealthy clients. As he interacts with aristocrats, merchants, streetwalkers, petty thieves, and dilitantes, the reader is given a look into the legal, economic, and social workings of England at various levels. The author is a historian, and his attention to historical accuracy makes this book a particularly interesting read.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The Falls, by Joyce Carol Oates

For many years, I’ve counted Joyce Carol Oates among my favourite authors. In The Falls, a story set in Niagara Falls of the 1950s and 1960s, she reinforces all the reasons why I keep coming back to her work. In a pararaph, Oates can set the scene, create its context, and build enough of a character profile to draw you in. Her writing is rich, but doesn’t drawn you down. It’s smooth without being slick. She tells a story in a personal way that can yet have enough dispassionate narrative that you as reader become enraged on behalf of the characters. You want to write letters to the editor, but wait - you remember it’s fiction. Based on facts, yes, and that’s what flames the passion that is stoked by Oates. The story of The Falls is a story of a woman in love, a woman loved, a woman abandoned by betrayal and death, but also the story of a player played, a town corrupted, a population poisoned, and a price extracted at every opportunity for a toll.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Obsan, by Joy Kogawa

Obasan, by Vancouver-born Joy Kogawa, is a book I’ve meant to read since somewhere in the 1990s when I first heard about it. But it wasn’t until I was at the Steveston Cannery to see a multimedia exhibit by artist Florence Debeugny this summer that I finally picked up a copy of the book in the gift shop. What a powerful story! I knew, intellectually, about this shameful chapter of Canada’s history (not that it’s Canada’s only shameful chpater, but that’s a whole other post) but Kogawa’s book really brought home the absolutely overwhelming grinding down of spirit and soul. The telling of the story from the perspective of the young protagonist, whose lack of information definitely affects her development, is reflected in the lives of the people around her, as well. It’s not often that I leave a book feeling so heavy that the story haunts me for months. This is one of those books.

Friday, December 01, 2006

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, by Vincent Lam

Just finished reading Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, a novel by Vincent Lam that just won the prestigious Giller Prize. Very interesting book - a series of short stories from the perspectives of a series of connected people in the medical profession. Each story puts forth the doctor as a person as well as a professional, and it’s easy to become engrossed in both the characters and their journies. In fact, I was counting on reading this book on the plane on the flight home, but I finished it at the hotel.