Men are from Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, Women are from Venus

The Conversation went like this.

"Say Honey, What would you do if you had Telekinesis?"

"You mean moving things with your mind?"

(Beaming) "Yeah!"

"Dishes"

"Dishes?  You have the most powerful weapon ever, and you're going to Bibbity Bobbity Boo?"

"Hmm."

"No wonder there aren't more women in politics.  I'd rob a bank in the first 20 minutes.  Then I'd tear the livers out of anybody who had a problem with it."

But now that I think about it, it's kind of nice.  My wife is nice.  A superhero comic about my wife would be about heroes solving infrastructure problems and conquering the meddlesome inefficiencies in review processes.  Being married to somebody who's not mad with hypothetical power is swell indeed.    

(Plus that means I wear the world conquering pants in this family, huzzah)

The Jade Peony: Canada has Read!

Another years worth of Canada Reads in the bag.  The Jade Peony is about a Chinese family in Vancouver during the dirty thirties and forties.

It breaks down into three stories seen through the eyes of the younger siblings of a less than nuclear family.  Each story has an ending that's sort of heartbreaking, you get to watch people get squeezed pretty tight by the community, and though the reader is left with a certain fondness for the overall Chinatown of the author's imagination, the pressure points get rubbed raw.  

I guess there's something to be said for universality, but I thought two of the three crisis were tired.  I won't spoil it, but in terms of plot it's about as close to an episode of Chinese Picket Fences as I've ever wanted to be.  The plot is really just a vehicle for the author to paint a picture of the community and the history of the place.  That doesn't mean there isn't some great characters peopling this book, and lovely descriptions of the time and the place.  I didn't know the first thing about Chinatown, and now I am led to believe I do, such is the veneer of authenticity on these stories.

If I was a betting man, I'd put this book making it deep into the playoffs.  It's not the worst of this year's crop of novels, but it's not really anything special either.

  

The Long Slide by James Grainger

In Two Naught Naught Four *ECW published a selection of short stories by James Grainger. The Long Slide.

The year is 2010.  I'm looking for something I can't find in Chapters... but can still find on Chapters.Ca (that's here for anyone feeling thoughtful).  You know, really digging.  

That means the last of my gift card scratch went straight to Grainger's pocket and in four to six weeks the package arrived.

In a half dozen stories you can lick in a sitting each, Grainger took a bite out of his twenties, chewed it over good and used his readers as a spittoon.  Equal parts self-loathing and arrogant.  I liked it.   

It's pieces of love through different spectrums of neurosis.  Filial, romantic and other.   Maybe all his characters sit in the director chair beside you and give the "Get a load of these guys" nudge, but you get a naked shot of some real neutral human beings. 

His first story, the title track, is pure Salinger minus all that classy stuff.  If you've ever spent a summer day that turned into night hanging out North of Bloor you're bound to be able feel your way around his character, you'll know his swagger even if you don't like it.    

The Government of Spiders is a love affair gone bananas.  It's about the mental illness and the straws that break backs.  It plays as the most bizarre allegory for procrastination I've come across.

A Confusion of Islands should be read aloud to anybody who can't get After the Goldrush out of their heads.  A road trip to put road trips to rest.  

The book is arranged in ascending order of the responsibilities of the protagonist, from tongue-in-cheek hedonism (picture cruel intentions in the College St. Set.) right up to single-parent widowhood. All of his characters are done the first leg of the race, and they aren't moving until somebody tells them their score.  The sort of Spiritual fermentation that grows furious buried under student debt.  This is the book I'm going to push on my friends when I see them.  

*ECW is the subpop of Toronto Lit, or so a handful of black-rimmed Devil-may-care head shots would have me believe.  

The Wire: WHOA

Good people told me it was terrific.  I dismissed them.  I thought "you've seen fifty cop dramas, you've seen them all".  I was wrong.

I am the better part of two seasons into The Wire, and I just got it.   I don't mean to tickle you, I didn't mean I just figured out that it was worth watching;  I've been glued to my TV since my first hit.  I knew it was good, but I spent a good three weeks trying to think of a cognoscente way of nailing down why it's so special.

I got my answer tonight.

While one Mr. Cash and his bag-of-sex-and-nails voice walked the line,  the humble audience is treated to machinations of good honest-to-Christ detective work in action.  They bug, they snap, they follow and they track bad guys who are every bit as smart as they are in an opening act montage that belongs on the Mount Olympus of Television moments.  It's gritty, it's mean, it's funny and if it's missing anything in terms of realism, it makes up for it with believability.  Every character in this show is patiently thought out, interesting and believable.    The show can embrace such an amazing scope, an cast of journeymen and amateurs alike playing "real" people in so many different stages of "the Game" and never once make me feel like they're skimping, on a story line or a character.  There are certain personality traits (McNaulty's libido and Rawls' angry) and even some characters (Omar, Ziggy and Brother Mouzone) that are over-the-top, but the urge to roll my eyes is mercifully absent.   

They just show love for every character on the screen.  It is badass to be good at what you do, and on every level from criminal to copper to politician, every character on this show is firing on all cylinders.  Even the junkies and baby mommas are playing the game.

The natural reflex I and everyone I've run through this with is to compare The Wire with The Sopranos.  I think that's fair, but only because both shows took a formula buried with examples of mediocrity and made it enthralling on all levels, but that's where fair comparisons have to end.  Where Sopranos was operatic in everything it did, from violence, to story, to comedy to the absurd, the Wire can be understated and still pull off the same greatness.  The Sopranos is about Tony, and because of that they got away with a stable of one dimensional characters filling up the cracks.  The Wire is about Baltimore, and that's where it's special.  Any character could get shot and the show could go on without a snag, because it's a big city and for all the work, and the violence, the net result of whoever wins or loses is inconsequential in the end.

So, since I'm only 2 seasons into it, and since Tony and Malfi have come to occupy the same place in my mind as Lucy and Charlie Brown playing football (thus rendering it sacred), I cannot and need not pick a favourite.

All I can say is, there is no Janice in The Wire.

Spring Tides: Read with Warm Feet

This could very well be the first book review I've done where you've probably never heard of the book in question.  I got it on the recommendation of the proprietor of Different Drummer Books in Burlington.  It is my favourite book store by a long shot and I've been meaning to blog about it for some time.  I digress.  This book is a translation from the original French and the translation is published by Archipelago Books in the States.  The copy I got was oddly shaped and had the most pleasing textured cover you've ever seen.  It might be a bold thing to produced a book differently, but I don't think it's gimmicky, and it's is in perfect keeping with the insides.  This is one of those books with both feet in the Allegory river, with the absurd always peeking in through the windows, testing the locks from time to time and stealing food left unattended.  I shall make every effort to describe the book without revealing spoilers, in spite, or because it's really not the sort of book you could spoil that way.

The point is, that's not the point.

Our main character is a partially infirm translator of comic strips (word play is a distraction in some chapters, entertaining and all the more commendably so because its an English translation of a French novel about translating English Comics into French) who at the bequest of his well-meaning patron lives alone on an island on the St. Lawrence with a cat and a Tennis Machine named "The Prince".  Because the millionaire owner understands his employee to be unhappy he sends a number of people, each one more archetypical and disruptive than the last, to cheer him up.

Equal parts Kafka and Wes Anderson, but pleasant at all times even when it comes to breaking a few eggs in the name of progress.  The imagery is layered and at times accusatory, but playfully so, the way you picture an funny uncle poking a snotty niece until she giggles.

I've mentioned it before, but I am going to great lengths to read indy lit this year (Canada reads notwithstanding) and if this is any indication of the stuff I've been missing, I'm obliged to burn down nearest Indigo (perhaps I'll start a facebook group, perhaps not).  So I cannot recommend this book highly enough, it's a warm blanket that's sad and comfortable and lovely.  I'm quite sure I'm a better person for having read this book, though the improvement is certainly an immeasurable and trivial quality.

Good To a Fault

The last temptation is the greatest treason
    To do the right deed for the wrong reason.


T.S. Elliot Murder in the Cathedral


So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.


Matthew 6:2-4

Number 4 of 5 in Canada Reads 2010 is Marina Endicott's offering.  

This book was sold on the nature of good deeds and of selflessness.  The theme is pasted as big as the title inside and outside the cover.  It's a huge challenge to write about and one of the central themes of sin, but in the text there isn't really any conflict of the sort.  The main character is completely sympathetic, she takes in a family of three children, partly because she feels responsible and partly because having a newfound family is profoundly life affirming for a very lonely woman.  When the children's mother recovers from a near-fatal bout of the Big C, Clary feels horribly as the children she has grown to love over several months instantly disappear from her life forever, and harbors mean feelings towards their actual parents for all of 5 minutes.  

Very early in her story, a mean church lady tells Clary her good deed doesn't count because she's just grandstanding.  Although this eats at the protagonist the whole novel, from the reader's perspective it's never the case and therein lies where the book is lacking.  This gal doesn't have a malicious bone in her body.  She is doing the right things for the right reasons and suffers heartbreak when her job is made redundant.  On top of it all, one of the children, the baby, has spent so much time with her that they've bonded the way babies and mothers do, so the reader instantly forgives Clary's moment of weakness even when she doesn't, because every parent knows exactly how horrible a feeling that must be.  The story is very pretty and pretty sad, particularly when told through the eldest daughter's perspective, but the characters never really move out of the first dimension.  It reads like Club Soda tastes.  I liked it, but it took me longer than I figured to finish it.

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