L Makes out like a Bandit at the Raise-a-Reader Book Sale

The Raise-a-Reader book sale was held this past weekend at the Windsor Crossing Outlet Mall, and not one to miss an opportunity to pick up books dirt cheap, I stopped by Saturday and bought an armload full.  Paperbacks as cheap as $1???  Can’t beat that!

 

I picked up several Canadian authors, many new to me, among them being:

 

Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006 and was made into a series on CBC.  Lam was born in my home town of London, Ontario which is pretty cool J

 

Emma Donoghue’s The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits.  Donoghue has received some press lately for Room, a dark, disturbing book about five-year old Jack who’s locked in a small room with his mother, which I’m dying to read.  It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the 2010 Governor General’s Award, and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.  Hoping Rabbits is just as good.

 

Jane Urquhart’s Away.  Urquhart is a Canadian author I’ve heard much about, but never read, so I was pleased to pick up this title.

 

Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.  Ondaatje is best-known, I think, for The English Patient.  I have not read him yet, so was happy to pick up one of his novels.

 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s best known work, One Hundred Years of Solitude.  A Columbian writer and a book I’m very much looking forward to.

 

Joyce Carol Oates We Were the Mulvaney’s.  I may have read something by Oates in school, though nothing readily comes to mind.  She’s a rather prolific American author and I’m quite looking forward to reading her.

 

And of course, I picked up a classic, Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady.  I tend toward more 18^th Century and early Victorian novels, but just couldn’t resist James when I saw him amongst the piles of books on sale.  Can’t wait to tackle this classic.

 

And finally the piece de resistance, Paul McCartney’s Blackbird Singing: Poems & Lyrics 1965-1999.  Being a HUGE Beatles fan, this is a true book sale find!  

 

Now I know my TBR reads are woefully limping along behind my WPL reads this year, but summer is finally here, bringing with it no classes, lots of vacation, and lazy weekends spent reading on the patio and with these new tempting additions to my TBR bookcase, I hope to balance out those reading stats as soon as!  That is, of course, after I finish reading the three library books I already have checked out. *blush* (once an addict always an addict….)

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L J

 

“Hello, my name is Lisa, and I am a library-oholic.”

L Reads a Classic

I was first introduced to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in Louisa May Alcott’s delightful novel Little Women.  Whenever I read great works of literature, I like to pay attention to novels the characters are discussing, because it gives depth to the novel by showcasing the thoughts and feelings of the day.  In Little Women, the four sisters, Amy, Jo, Beth and Meg act out scenes from Bunyan’s pivotal spiritual work, The Pilgrim’s Progress. 

 

Many Brits immigrated to the new world due to religious persecution and in North America, they were free to practice their Quaker and Puritan beliefs, without pressure to reform to the Church of England.  Bunyan was the son of a tinker who was exposed to different forms of worship when fighting for the Parliamentary Army, who wanted to depose King Charles I.  Imprisoned for his beliefs, Bunyan wrote several books of spiritual discourse, The Pilgrim’s Progress being his most famous and most read.

 

In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is on a quest to relieve himself of the burden of sin and enter the kingdom of heaven.  With him, he carries the Bible, the book that will tell him how to get from this world to the next.  Along the way, he encounters many barriers and obstacles in characters like Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Obstinate, Pliable, etc., that attempt to dissuade him from his purpose as he traverses through dangerous places like the Hill Difficulty, the Valley of Humiliation, Vanity Fair, etc.  The journey though is not so much a physical path, as a spiritual one.

 

It’s a simple story, of course, an allegory of spiritual belief, that by reading the Bible, one will discover the secrets to the Kingdom of Heaven, but if one strays from the right and true path, then therein lies death and perhaps even Hell, and eternal life will be forever lost.

 

In its day, The Pilgrim’s Progress was a lesson every young child needed to learn, as religion played a huge part in each and every life.  Today, however, this cynical, non-religious mind determines it’s an interesting tale, one worth reading for its classical and historical significance, rather than any religious lesson.

 

Note: The edition I own carries both The Pilgrim’s Progress and its sequel, The Pilgrim’s Progress Part II in which Christian’s wife and children attempt to follow him from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.  As I had many library books piling up, I decided to split the reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress into its two parts, and blog about them separately as two individual books.  As they were technically originally written and published separately, and although they are now often published in one volume, as one complete work, C says it’s perfectly okay to treat them as two separate entities.   So I will.  Talk to her if you have a problem with that. ;p

 

Till next time, happy reading.

L J

 

TBR = 8

WPL = 16

Another off the TBR pile

Okay, so I can’t say I always pick winners, and admittedly read some really odd stuff, but British writer Jonny Glynn’s The Seven Days of Peter Crumb has got to take the cake for the weirdest book I own.  Definitely bizarre, disturbing, and horrifically graphic, Glynn tells the tale of a bereaved father descending into psychotic hell and taking unsuspecting citizens of London with him in a week of terror told with the blackest of humour and in very graphic detail.  This is not a book for the faint of heart.

 

That being said, I did enjoy it.  There are moments of such abject humanity, that you can’t help being drawn in.  Peter Crumb has lost his five-year-old daughter in a most horrific crime.  His marriage and life have fallen apart, and he now lives in a basement flat dealing with a splintered psychosis.  The story is told from Crumb’s perspective, and so you witness first-hand that psychosis, the movement between rational and irrational thought and action, and Crumb’s splintered personality becomes a separate character, alive and breathing, at turns lurking in dark corners and overtaking Crumb’s body.  Fascinating stuff.

 

Till next time, happy reading.

L J

 

TBR = 7

WPL = 16

L Reads New CanLit for April

I was extremely excited to read Alexander MacLeod’s collection of short stories, Light Lifting, for my April CanLit selection, especially after I was introduced to it as a selection for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize.  MacLeod is the son of veteran Canadian short story writer Alistair MacLeod who is something of a local legend in my adopted city of Windsor, Ontario.  You will sometimes find Alistair in the University of Windsor’s English Department, where he is Professor Emeritus, and I had the very great fortune and pleasure of meeting him several years ago when he sat down with Marty Gervais’s (another local author and publisher) writing group to discuss his writing methodology.  There is nothing more fascinating than listening to a published author discuss how they come up with story ideas and their work habits.  I can still picture Alistair’s 8.5 x 11 exercise book in which he writes all his stories by long-hand.  He writes on one side of the page only, leaving the other side blank for edits and revisions.  That night, he talked about a new story he was working on and the struggle to find descriptions for snow.  Fascinating!

 

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to begin reading Light Lifting, stories written by his son Alexander, who was raised in Windsor, Ontario.  The collection is locally published by Dan Wells’ Biblioasis press, and is filled with references to local sites, which thrills this reader.  I love reading books with local flavor and Light Lifting doesn’t disappoint, from the title story about bricklayers working during one of Windsor’s boom times, laying down driveways in Southwood Lakes, among other neighbourhoods, to the boys racing trains long the underground rail line between Windsor and Detroit, to the story about accidents on Number Three highway and the protagonist who walks down University to Huron Church and along Huron Church to the 401 overpass, heading for the Number Three highway and describes, as he passes, the University buildings, the malls and strip club, Tim Horton’s and McDonalds.  I’ve driven this route, which made the pictures so much more vivid in my head as I read MacLeod’s story.  So much of the CanLit fiction I read is Toronto-based and so it’s nice to read something local and close to home, to remember that Ontario is more than just Toronto, and great fiction can be written about this province’s smaller towns.

 

A delightful read that will bring back memories for many Windsor and Essex County residents, Light Lifting is Canadian fiction at its finest.

 

Till next time, happy reading.

L J

 

 

TBR = 6

WPL = 16

L Reads One of Her Own

Claudia Casper’s The Reconstruction was meant to be my March CanLit read especially since my TBR numbers are lagging behind the WPL books and this is a title I actually own, however, between classes and falling ill, I only just finished it now.  But since I started reading it in February, and read half of it in March, I’m still counting is as March’s book (plus I have April’s CanLit waiting in the wings….)

 

There’s a lot going on in this tiny book.  So much so, that I very nearly abandoned it.  I haven’t wanted to be very cerebral of late, being quite depleted mentally and physically, but I’m glad I stuck it out, because it really is a gem of a book, if you can get past the graphic dental detail.

 

I hate dentists and avoid them like the plague, visiting only under duress.  It stems from childhood trauma in which I had the dentist from hell dig around until he found a cavity, no matter how miniscule, just so he could drill, drill, drill.  Blech.  So when Casper started with her female protagonist, Margaret, in the dentist’s chair, I was quite put off.  But I persevered, and despite Margaret’s repeated visits to the dentist, all richly detailed in Casper’s masterful voice, I did end up enjoying much of the book after all.

 

Margaret is an artist whose husband of ten years has announced he wants a divorce.  This emotional punch leaves Margaret spinning down into depression and apathy as she struggles to redefine her life as a newly separated woman.  When asked to reconstruct an Australopithecus afarensis based on the fossil Lucy, for a display in the Natural Museum, Margaret begins to reawaken a primal being within herself that allows her to face important truths about the past as she places herself firmly within the chain of evolution.

 

As always, happy reading!

L J

 

 

TBR = 6

WPL = 15