Indigo Lakeshore Book Club reads: The Dovekeepers

This was a disappointing read for me, made more so, I think, because it kept getting truncated by class reading.  I’ve never been a huge fan of Alice Hoffman.  I find her characters are weird.  A couple of years ago I read and reviewed The Ice Queen, and found it a decent read, but odd, with the main character emotionally frozen in ice.  But Hoffman is also the author of Practical Magic, a book I also didn’t particularly like, but which was made into one of my all-time favorite chick flicks staring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.  It’s a great sisterhood movie and so because of that, Hoffman will always hold a special place in my virtual bookshelf, but when it comes to actually reading her….well…..

 

In The Dovekeepers, Hoffman attempts to bring to life a major event in Jewish history and write the women’s story.  History is rampant with tales of man’s doing, with little emphasis on the lives and deeds of women, so Hoffman’s book is quite ambitious and from a feminist perspective is to be applauded.  However, and I think I’ve made my opinion on this clear in the past: authors who set out to deliberately write a tale based on some real-life event, no matter how talented, always, for me, take a great risk.  I am a firm believer in the organic style of writing where the story presents itself out of the ether and is naturally birthed rather than forced from some notion that “this” whatever that may be, would make a great story.  (and maybe that’s why I’ve never finished a book of my own lol). 

 

The real-life events inspiring The Dovekeepers is the attempt of the Romans to drive the Jews out of Judea, culminating with a massacre at King Herod’s desert stronghold, Masada.  At the end of the day, two women and five children survive this war.  Their tale is recorded by Josephus, a 1^st century Romano-Jewish historian, and it is this recount of events which Hoffman tries to bring to life with a fictionalized account of the lives of four women trying to survive events beyond their control from 70 – 73 C.E.

 

Hoffman’s novel is separated into four books, each one told in the first person voice of one of the four women.  It begins in 70 C.E. when Yael and her father are driven out of Jerusalem, crossing the desert to find refuge at Masada, where others fleeing the Roman army have created a self-contained community.  The following books are stories of three women she meets and forms friendships with at Masada.  Each book tells the individual tale of the life of each woman and the atrocities this war has wrought upon their lives and families. 

 

The problem for me in reading this book (and isn’t there always a problem? lol) was that there was no distinct voice between each book.  Each woman’s story started to run together as one tale (and perhaps that was Hoffman’s goal, to show that her story is the tale of all women during this time in history, not just these mere four).  But with the four distinct stories, I found there to be a fair bit of retelling, as each told her story prior to Masada, but also her daily life and events living in Masada that intersected with the other three women, which became repetitive at times.  Hoffman’s writing chops did, however, show themselves in her ability to weave together and intersect the lives of all four women, so that the novel came to a decent conclusion.

 

What my fellow book clubbers had to say:

 

It’s was a small group that met at Indigo Books in Lakeshore last night.  Two of us had finished the book and two hadn’t.  Spoiler alerts were not needed as the two who hadn’t finished the book had no interest in doing so.  Yikes.  We were all in agreement that the first book, Yael’s story, was the toughest to get through, and that though the book improved slightly, it really wasn’t escapist reading.  If you enjoy reading historical fiction and learning about other cultures, or more about historical events, then this book would probably be your cup of tea.  However, if you’re looking for an enjoyable story, to take you away from it all, you might want to give this book a pass.

 

Highlights of the evening included some beautiful pictures of places mentioned in the book, which K brought to share, and which helped bring the book to life, and made it for me, a somewhat more interesting read.  As well, there were some delicious Vanilla Chai Tea samples to partake of, which the lovely Starbucks girl passed around.  And that rather says it all, doesn’t it?

 

Next month we’re reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, an author I’ve not read before, but as the book does look interesting, I’m quite anticipating it.  Why don’t you read along with us?

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L

 

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.”

~ Jane Austen, Persuasion

L Reads Alex Cross #10: London Bridges

In this tenth installment of the Alex Cross series, Cross once again battles the Wolf, the villain of the previous book.  In London Bridges, the Wolf turns terrorist and holds several large cities hostage (New York, Washington, London, Tel Aviv and Paris), threatening to blow them up if he doesn’t received a whopping four billion dollar payout and the release of several hostages held in the Middle East.

 

James Patterson has clearly bought into the war on terror in writing this novel, as the Wolf is seen schmoozing with Al-Qaeda and several Middle Eastern heavyweights while threatening to end of the lives of tens of thousands of Westerners.  While the Wolf very blasély blows up bridges and kills those few who can identify him by sight, Cross races against time to find and stop this Russian madman.

 

Filled with Patterson’s unique brand of red herrings that make no sense and go nowhere, and do nothing but confuse and frustrate the reader, London Bridges was just an okay read.  Blame it on the fact that I’m a girl, but I became quite bored by the constant descriptions of weaponry, vehicles and military maneuvers.  International terrorism just isn’t my cup of tea.

 

One more Alex Cross book read, only eight more to go, until Patterson publishes another of course.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L :)

 

Emma Donoghue's Room

Emma Donoghue’s Room was getting a lot of blog press last year as well as it won a number of literary awards and was shortlisted for The Governor General’s award 2010 and the Man Booker prize 2010.

 

I bought into the hype and added it to my to be read list, talked it up to people as a book I really wanted to read, had heard was really good.  Well I finally read it over the Christmas break, and it is good.  Just not as good as I’d led myself to believe it would be.  Room just doesn’t live up to the hype.

 

Told from the point of view of five year old Jack, we discover he and his mother live in Room, a small shed in the backyard of the man who abducted Jack’s mother seven years earlier.  The first third of the book explores the day to day life of Jack and his mother, the weekly schedule of chores they keep, the hour of TV Jack is allowed to watch each day, the books they read over and over and over, and the various Sundaytreats they’ve received in the past and what should be asked for next Sundaytreat.  Each night at nine o’clock, Jack must be in bed, in the bottom of the wardrobe because that’s when “he” would visit and Jack would count the creaks of the bed on his fingers, waiting until it was safe to come out and join mommy in bed.

 

It’s a disturbing life, made more so by the fact that it’s told from such an innocent perspective.  Jack knows of no other life.  Everything outside Room is either on TV or in Outer Space.  He has no concept of the real world and so when his mother devises a plan to escape, a plan in which Jack must be the hero and bring the police to free his mom, he has to learn very quickly that more exists outside Room’s four walls than his mother ever let on.

 

I guess this is where the plausibility of the book broke down for me.  The time line is very brief, between the hatched plot and its execution, all hinging on Jack’s ability to escape from the man and alert the authorities, people he’d only ever known to exist in TV land.  While having the story told from Jack’s five-year-old perspective added an interesting twist, there were just some details that when revealed, were hard to take coming from that perspective.  I think the book may have worked better if both Jack and his mother’s voice could have been heard.  But that said, it’s still a book worth reading.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L J

 

Unbearable Lightness – Portia de Rossi

Portia de Rossi candidly shares her struggle with anorexia and bulimia in this candid memoir.  As a young girl growing up in Australia, Portia knew she wanted to be a model.  Attending photo shoots and runway shows, the naturally healthy 11-year old was told to lose weight. She was given false measurements to put on her modeling card, then had to “fit” into the sample sizes provided for her fashion jobs.  Wanting to help Portia realize her dream, her mother helped out with quick diet advice, sending Portia on a decade and a half long spiral into an unhealthy eating regime that saw her restricting her calorie intake to 300 a day while exercising for hours at a time prior to a photo shoot or audition (once she began acting), to binging on thousands of calories of food at one sitting after her “work” was done.  These binges were followed by purging sessions so she wouldn’t gain any weight, and although she landed a job on the hit show Ally MacBeal at a healthy size 8, Portia was convinced no one would accept her as an actress until she could fit into the sample size clothing (usually a size 4) sent to the set.

 

Portia de Rossi openly describes her crazy thought processes and insane diet and eating plans that kept her losing weight until she was an incredibly unhealthy 88 lbs, but still pinching the stomach fat she saw in the mirror.  The secret of her sexuality and her family’s refusal to acknowledge that she was gay fueled a lot of Portia’s inability to love and accept herself, and see herself for the beautiful, healthy woman she was, and it wasn’t until a major health scare that threatened lupus and organ failure, did Portia enter counseling and begin getting help for her disordered eating.

 

A truly remarkable book, Unbearable Lightness is a must read for just about every woman I know.  So many of us struggle with weight and acceptance and trying to fit into the very unnatural and unhealthy Hollywood or fashion industry image of what a woman should look like that we fail to recognize we are already beautiful, and much healthier just as we are, regardless of the number on a scale or clothing tag.

 

To every woman everywhere who has been brainwashed by fashion magazines and the diet industry into thinking you have to be a size 4, 2, or 0 to be beautiful and accepted, please, please, please!! read this book!  Hopefully it will help change the way you think and feel about yourself…for the better.

 

Till next time, happy reading,

L :)

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."

            ~ Elie Wiesel

   

Windsor Book Club Reads: Night by Elie Wiesel

I first read this book a few years ago, when it was making a splash on Oprah’s book club (not that I follow Oprah’s book club, but I was in Chapters with a friend at the time who mentioned this book because everyone was talking about it and well, you know me, talk up a book to me and I’m there!)

 

Reading it a second time for January’s meeting of the Windsor Book Club didn’t lesson the horror of the novel any.  Night is Wiesel’s true story account of his life in the concentration camps during the Holocaust.  Although he and his family came late to the camps (in 1944, when German soldiers finally made their way to his family’s small village of Sighet in Transylvania), the story is no less harrowing or heartbreaking, and the atrocities experienced by himself, his father and others in the camp no less significant than stories of those who spent the entire war in the camps and survived to tell their tale in order that history would never repeat itself.

 

From the descriptions of the train journey from Sighet to Auschwitz, cramped together in cattle cars with little food and less water, where many Jews perished, to the daily life in the camps, Wiesel spares few details.  What stands out for me, as a modern day reader with no firsthand experience of this time in history, is that Wiesel’s words ring with compassion.  It is evident he writes his story because such horror to a people must be recorded and learned from, yet there is no anger in Wiesel for the people who perpetrated this crime.  Instead what Wiesel struggles with is faith.  He questions a God who would choose to allow this to happen to the “chosen” people.  His very faith is shaken to the core, yet when he is finally liberated from the camps, he says:

 

“Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions.  That’s all we thought about.  No thought of revenge, or of parents.  Only of bread.

And when we were no longer hungry, not one of us thought of revenge.”

 

I am not a religious person.  A spiritual person, yes, but I follow no organized religion, but to me, these few sentences from Wiesel are what religion and faith should be about and what Wiesel never fully puts into words, but rings clearly for me:  forgiveness.  It is this message, I think, that makes the book resonate with so many readers.

 

What my fellow book clubbers had to say:

 

It was a very small, intimate group at last night’s meeting, which made for some great discussion.  We all to a one enjoyed reading Night, and for some, learned more about this period in history.  When asked what the defining moment in the novel was for us, many talked about the relationship between father and son, and how basic survival outweighed family loyalty and what that must have been like for these sons, who chose life over saving their fathers.  There is one rather harrowing scene in the book where

Elie’s sickly father is beaten to death in front of him, calling out to his son the entire time.  Unable to go to his father, paralyzed with fear that he may be killed too, Elie remains still and silent, and afterwards feels relief over the death of his father, for the sickly man is no longer a burden to Elie.  From our modern day, comfortable viewpoint, it is difficult to imagine being in Elie’s position and making that difficult choice.  That utter destruction of man, turning him into a mere beast intent on nothing more than pure animalistic survival, is one of the things that truly make the Holocaust so incredibly horrific.

 

Till next time, happy reading.

L J

Indigo Lakeshore Book Club Reads: The Paris Wife

Okay, so I needed to join another book club like I need another hole in my head, but I just couldn’t help myself when I saw the list of titles this book club, which meets out at Indigo Books in Lakeshore, have been reading.  So here I am, reviewing their January selection, The Paris Wife.  And a fine read it was too!

 

Paula McLain’s debut novel is a fictionalized tale of Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage told from the point of view of wife Hadley Richardson, and let me tell you, McLain has done her research!  Hemingway was a larger than life literary figure in the early half of the 20^th century, and he simply jumps off the pages of McLain’s book, but Hadley is no less an intriguing character, and together, their love story simply unfolds from page one, right through to the end.

 

Hadley and Ernest meet in Chicago in 1921.  Hadley is eight years Ernest’s senior, but has lived a rather sheltered life, looking after an ailing mother.  Ernest, a young, exuberant writer falls for Hadley and convinces her to marry him.  Unwilling to spend a lonely spinsterish life living in apartments above her sister’s family, Hadley agrees and together they sail for Paris, where the next few years Ernest hones his writing skills amongst literary greats as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  The two travel to various locales in Europe (Pamplona to the bullfights, which inspires his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises, and skiing vacations in the Swiss Alps).  It is a carefree time when expatriates can live relatively cheaply abroad, and where artists flock together to feed off each other’s collective genius. 

 

Unfortunately, Ernest is not as carefree as his surroundings.  Troubled by his experiences in the Great War, and cursed with literary genius, he relies heavily on Hadley to calm his soul.  Unlike the progressive women around her, who wholeheartedly embrace the ideas of first wave feminism, Hadley is content to be a supportive wife to Ernest, keeping his house and propping him up whenever needed.  Theirs is a marriage harking back to earlier values, and at odds with the rampant infidelity in their circle of friends.  It is not long, however, before the cracks begin to show as Ernest falls under the influence of the company he keeps and Hadley must evaluate what’s most important in life.

 

McLain writes beautifully of the early stages of Hemingway’s career, and showcases not only a remarkable love affair, but the dissolution of a marriage that under other circumstances could have lasted forever.  Hadley may have been Ernest’s rock in a creative tempest, but it is her own journey to find herself that fascinates and makes this more than just another tragic love story.

 

What my fellow book clubbers had to say:

 

I have to say I very pleasantly enjoyed myself with the ladies of Lakeshore last night.  They are a very friendly and welcoming bunch and we had a good chat about the book.  The book club moderator went above and beyond with setting up a Parisian bistro scene (red-check cloth draped our table, and candles in wine bottles were nicely accented centerpieces) around which we could discuss the art scene in that great city in the 1920s.  The only thing missing, upon general consensus, was the absinthe.  Ah well, perhaps another time we will raise a tipple to Hemingway and friends.  Our discussion was also greatly enhanced by pictures of the people we read about in the book.  It was really nice to put a face to such familiar names and enriched our reading experience and discussion.

 

The group overall liked the book, but didn’t consider it a must read.  We all liked the fact that neither of us knew much about Hemingway, and certainly his early life as depicted here, despite having read him in school, so for that alone, the book was worth our time and would be recommended.  We felt that none of the people portrayed in the book turned out to be favourite characters, perhaps with the exception of Kitty who plays a small role as Hadley’s friend but who came off as the most genuine, and nicest person in the book.

 

With our more modern, 21^st century sensibilities and stereotypes of the early part of the last century, we were all to a one shocked at the openness of Gertrude Stein’s homosexual relationship, and the rampant affairs and infidelity practiced by this group of artists in 1920s Paris.  We concluded that though societal mores and norms were much more open and different in Europe at that time from North America, the Great War likely played a large part in the behaviour of those who had faced death and survived.  The war certainly played a huge role in Hemingway’s own character development and his choices in life.

 

Of the relationship between Hadley and Ernest it was felt that it was one of convenience on each of their parts with Hadley narrowly avoiding a life of lonely spinsterhood and Ernest getting to live off her inheritance while pursuing his writing.  It was suggested that Ernest never loved Hadley, and could never love any woman, being far too concerned with his own interests and desires.  Re-reading my review above, which I wrote shortly after reading the book last month, I’m not sure I completely agree that there was no love present in their marriage.  Should you, dear reader, read this book, please do let me know what you think.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L J

 

 

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating – Elisabeth Tova Bailey

Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s beautiful novel The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is simply a delight to read.  Findng herself stricken by an unidentifiable virus which leaves her bedridden for months at a time, Elisabeth’s entire world changes.  During one episode of lengthy recuperation, she relocates from her beloved farmhouse to a city apartment.  Confined to the living room sofa, her day is brightened by the few visits she receives from friends and a caregiver.  Unable to sit, stand or walk and with limited abilities to adjust her position on the sofa, Elisabeth’s days are spent staring at the wall in front of her until one friend brings her a transplanted wild violet and a snail randomly picked up from the forest floor.  Unable to read or watch TV due to the debilitating nature of the disease, which cuts her concentration in half and impairs her cognition, Elisabeth finds herself fascinated by the snail and its movements.  Before long, her world is condensed to the size of that belonging to the snail as she becomes mesmerized by its activity and life.  In the encompassing years between her illness and writing this book, Bailey researches snails and other mollusks, peppering her book with interesting facts about the gastropoda that never fail to impress or enlighten the reader.   

 

This book is fascinating in so many ways.  It’s a great resource for snails, yet it also tells the story of Bailey’s life at a time when her quality of life was very poor, but she infuses the book with such an upbeat personality and enthusiasm, you stop thinking about her illness and its restrictions and become immersed in the daily life of a common forest snail, much like Elizabeth did herself.  A truly captivating read, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating will have you looking with renewed interest at those amazing little mollusks we share this planet with.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L J