Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

I was less than two pages into this book before I found a sentence that so utterly took my breath away that I sat staring at the page, and eventually had to walk up the stairs so I could show it to my husband. This was merely the first time - every couple of pages collections of words that were like a punch in the gut kept coming, and each time, I fell a little more in love with this book.

There is just something bold and difficult and straightforward about Winterson's writing that hits me really hard. I'm contemplating recommending this book for our next round at the book club, because I so desperately want to discuss it with people.

(That first sentence, if you are interested, was:  "I used to think of marriage as a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.")

I am so intoxicated by this book. It's sardonic, it's sexy, it's difficult. It's about love, and cheating, and grief, and loss, and realizing that what you thought was heroism wasn't. It's not easy, at any point. It's thorny, and that reminds me of another paragraph that almost had me gasping for air, about the difficulties of outdoor sex. 

Winterson just keeps pushing, past platitudes, past pat phrases, past what we think is going to happen or how it should happen to create something so raw, so intense, so hard, and loving, and contradictory. 

I am trying to tell you why I loved this book, and I feel like I'm doing a terrible job of it. Yet I don't think a synopsis is going to help. I will try anyway. 

The narrator is genderless, but I will fully admit I always perceived them as female. Perhaps because of what I know of Jeanette Winterson, and reading that into the text. Still, the entire book never genders the narrator, although it definitely does gender their lovers, predominantly but not entirely female. 

The narrator has had a lot of affairs with married women, and we hear about many of them, but then there is one who means it when she says she'll leave her husband and go away with her lover. There is the messiness of that emerging relationship, what it does to other relationships, the joys and sorrows and mundanity of breaking someone's heart while finding your own.

And then there is illness, and tough decisions, and mourning, and trying to do what's right, but realizing later that there is no such thing as right, and your decisions were not heroic but brutal.  

That's about all I can give you. This book, it's all about the prose. The prose and the way it made it difficult for me to breathe as I negotiated my way through it. (It's also far far sexier than the book of erotica I just posted a review of before I sat down to write this.) Just...read it. I finished it a few days ago, and there are still not the words. It has taken the words from me.

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

In a way, it's amazing it took me this long to get to this book. My husband and one of my best friends had both read and really enjoyed it. It's about cholera in England, and I have that weird sort of interest that comes from having played a roleplaying game in which my teenage vampire slayer and her cohorts in the Royal Magisterial Corps were tracking a vampire who had been possessed by a cholera spirit. Plus, it's history.

Still, I felt a bit reticent to start it. The Devil and the White City was okay, but didn't really hang together. (I know it's by a different author. I'm not saying this was a logical reaction.) Mary Roach's books are popular science, not popular history, but I've gotten tired of how surface her books are, refusing to engage with complexity. And I'm a historian by training. Could I possibly enjoy this one?

Well, the answer ended up being yes, I could enjoy it quite a lot. Johnson is a much better writer, and manages to grapple with difficult issues accessibly. And, endearing him to me forever, he doesn't stop at "weren't people in the past silly?" that so much popular history falls prey to.

He actually does a very good job of looking at miasma theory, and instead of using that as a whip to lash the doctors of the past for being stupid, takes a look at why it was so widespread, why it was so powerful, and what was strange about the mavericks that let them look beyond it. That takes nuance, and I appreciated it a lot.

This book centres around a cholera outbreak in London, spread through a pump that had waste from the first victim seep into its source water. Poverty and cleanliness had no connection to who died and who lived, confounding the theory that the poor were just dirtier, if people had been able to see it.  One doctor, who had already had the theory that cholera might be waterborne, was able to track virtually every case to one pump that was known for having particularly pure water, and hence, used by some people outside the geographic district, who also came down with cholera.

He was challenged by many, including the medical establishment, but also by a minister who had been on the ground during the outbreak. The minister set out to prove him wrong, and ended up believing he was right. The two of them worked on the map that would, over time, come to prove the theory of how cholera was spread.

Johnson argues that it took both the ability to think outside the box and the individual knowledge of the streets, using the strengths of both men, to accomplish the task. He looks at who they were, their backgrounds, and their actions. It's all readable.

The epilogue is a bit long-winded. Johnson is passionately pro-urban, which is nice to see, in a world that still has a remarkable bit of 19th c. idealization of the pastoral hanging around it. He goes through what he sees as all the potential dangers to urban space and ways that where we are now might counteract them. It's interesting, but it's very long.

Overall, good popular history that embraces complexity instead of trying to make us laugh at those silly people in the past.

People of the Book edited by Rachel Swirsky

Another collection of short stories I picked up on sale at the local comic book store during that one sale every year where such things appear. I thought Jewish science fiction sounded really interesting, and the authors on the cover sold me.

Of course, having read it, this book is mostly Jewish fantasy, folklore brought to life. There are only, if I'm remembering correctly, two science fiction stories in it. That's a little disappointing, but in general, the quality of the stories in the collection was very high. Still, there isn't more Jewish science fiction out there?

Of what stories there are in this books, some are historical fantasy, like Rachel Pollack's take on Jacob. A fair amount is set during the Holocaust, including a really interesting story about cities dancing that I quite enjoyed. The Niels Bohr story was not as interesting, although not terrible.

Much of it is modern, relying on aspects of Jewish folklore coming into the contemporary world. There are a bunch of golems, at least two dybbuks, and one kibbutz. (Although that one is actually one of the two science fiction stories, written by Lavie Tiddhar. Also one I liked a lot.)

There is a sense of melancholy about many of the stories, of separation from the world. I've been trying to put my finger on it more precisely, but I wouldn't want to rely on stereotypes instead of puzzling it out, and so I will only say that as a collection, there is something in the writing that makes this hang together than some other anthologies I've read.

Perhaps my favourite story, though, deals with a classic of Christian children's literature. I love C.S. Lewis' Narnia book, but apparently Gaiman was bothered by the same aspect of it I am - that Susan gets exiled from Narnia because she becomes too obsessed with material things. For circumstances in which "material things" are synonymous with "girly things," bringing a troubling level of gender judgment into the mix.  His short story deals with that, and I don't know if it would be appealing to someone who didn't know the Lewis books, but I was very taken by it.

I've read very little Michael Chabon, which is strange, given how much I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It would perhaps surprise no one that his story circles around golems. It's presented as a non-fiction Golems I Have Known. And who am I to nitpick his stories of finding golems and having their power sources show up in his mail?

I realize I am pretty much just talking about the big name authors, and that's fine, because I'm not going to stop when I get to Peter S. Beagle's short story, which is an interesting mix of angels, art, and something else. I liked the twist, is all I'm saying, and I will not give it any more away than that. But if an angel shows up claiming to be sent by God to be a Jewish painter's muse, what are you going to do?

Overall, a strong collection. I just wanted a teensy bit more science fiction. (I'm not counting that sort of steampunk tale as science fiction. To me, that's still fantasy.)

Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett

*Some Spoilers Below*

Chasing Vermeer is a fun children's book, easy to read, with pictures that involve some thought, if you want to put that thought into it. (I am lazy, I did not.) I have some overall questions about the tack the book takes on Charles Fort and how it veers a little bit into magic without ever exploring that, but hey, a children's book that might introduce kids to Charles Fort? I'm pretty much in.

The two main characters, Petra and Calder, are those kids who don't quite fit in. Petra is interested in art, Calder in math and puzzles.  They go to a Montessori school, it appears, but with a new teacher? Wait, that doesn't make sense. Unless I missed the part where their old teacher left for some reason, because my understanding of Montessori schools is that the teachers move with their classes through the grades. Yes? No?

At any rate, they have an awesome teacher who lets the kids explore and get excited about learning and that all sounds great. Then, out in the real world, a Vermeer painting is stolen, and letters are sent to the newspapers saying the painting won't be returned until all the galleries of the world look carefully at their Vermeers and reattribute some of them.

Three people in their neighbourhood are somehow involved, and Petra and Calder set out to figure it out, and find the painting. On the way, they run into a book by Charles Fort and his ideas about ideas science damns because it can't explain them. Including synchronicity.

However, the author's idea of Fort tends to shade over into magic, without acknowledging that that's what's happening. The kids start to dream about paintings they've never seen, figuring out where to look for the painting by looking at unrelated puzzle pieces and just knowing. That's intuition, not damned science. Fort was about examining the actual evidence and then drawing conclusions based on that, not necessarily on the next clue just literally popping into your head, and you knowing, not based on evidence you didn't know you had, but based on nothing at all.

If you want to go this way, explore it. Just shouting "Charles Fort!" at the page doesn't really further anything.

There are lots of puzzles including a cipher to figure out, and shapes and animals in the pictures that are supposed to reveal something, but I was not curious enough to find out. It's a cool idea though, and great for kids with that kind of bent.

However. The blurb talks about the mystery coming together with a satisfying "aha!" and I would disagree. Having mentioned the person who will turn out to be the art thief just once at the start of the book completely incidentally does not make this into a mystery the reader feels like they could solve. The fact that the characters have never really met the person who turns out to be the art thief (well, Calder may have, but the readers certainly never do) makes this not so much a mystery, more an adventure story.

In conclusion, it's not superb, but it is a fun children's book, and it makes art attribution interesting, which is a bit of a feat. If only they'd stop using Charles Fort as a shorthand for otherworldly knowledge, I'd be happier. (Fort still wanted explanations, he just didn't want to dispose of evidence that didn't fit the theory. So get into some explanations, please. There is no theory as to why the kids know where the painting is hidden. They just suddenly look at an unrelated puzzle piece and know it's somewhere they didn't even know existed.)

S.E.C.R.E.T. by L. Marie Adeline

I was wrong. This was the last of my reviews of books picked from bestseller lists, not The Rosie Project. I figured, given how much smack I talk about Fifty Shades of Grey without having read more than small excerpts, I should read this. Particularly given that my normal line is that it's great if people are reading erotica, but couldn't they read good erotica? So this book was on the Globe & Mail bestseller list for quite a while, and it's erotica, so why not give it a try?

On the plus side, this book is super consensual! It's all about getting explicit permission before any sexy times take place, and checking on the other person's boundaries every step along the way. The main character is a divorced widow (yeah, I had to puzzle that one out too - she only had one marriage) who has sexually shut down. But then she gets invited to join a sexytimes club run by women who are out to create situations to reawaken (or awaken) her  sexual self.

She gets nine sexual situations set up, then for the tenth charm on the bracelet (see the cover, above), gets to decide whether to leave the club behind, or join it to help other women out. As far as ideas for erotica go, not bad. And it isn't that this is bad, per se.

It just didn't do anything. I read it, sitting in the living room, and my husband across the room was disappointed that it provoked nary a reaction from me. It's just a little too nice. I like all the consensuality, but then the sex was just a little too pedestrian. Or the fantasies not my particular thing. Or the description just kind of lacking.

It's just a tiny bit coy, and that's kind of the death of erotica. There are also ways to be absurdly explicit, but too coy is not great either.

Let's take the first situation. This is so damned nice. A guy shows up to her house with a massage table and gives her a back massage and oral sex. That's lovely. In real life, I'd totally be in for that (are you reading this, honey?) (I'm kidding, he already knows.) She's never had either before, ever in her entire life. Which makes me very sad.

But the way it's written, it just didn't really...do anything for me. It's a situation that would be lovely in real life, and maybe I want my erotica to be a little further out than that, or maybe it was how it was written. On the other hand, if that's the kind of scenario that gets you going, read this book!

There's absolutely nothing objectionable about this book. No abuse of power, just situations set up in totally safe ways for the main character to relax and enjoy. No BDSM, so no perversions of kink that involve no conversations or give and take at all. It just comes down to personal preference.  I don't think I'll bother to read the sequels.

Interestingly, or perhaps weirdly, or maybe...look, I don't know if I'm cool with this or disturbed by it. Women looking great and enjoying looking great, I'm all for it. But there's this equivalency of being sexual with being a knockout, and the book spends as much time describing the outfits she's wearing as it does the sex. The fashion is as sexual as the sex, and there's this equivalency of being all dolled up with being sexual.

Which is not to say that being dolled up can't be fun. However. However. I don't know. I'm just vaguely uncomfortable with the idea that you have to be the kind of woman who just doesn't realize how beautiful she'd be in a tight dress and some makeup to have a sexual awakening. Or to really enjoy it. (I mean, there is that one scenario where she's dressed up as a soccer mom, so maybe I'm making too much of this. Still. There's enough that...oh for goodness sake. I don't know what I'd be happy with.)

I'll just say that while I haven't entirely worked out my feelings on that one, I'm still a bit uneasy. But, lamentably, not turned on. However, that is such an individual thing that this may indeed do it for other readers. Be assured that the prose is not painful, and the sexual politics not troubling.

The BBC Big Read

I read a lot of books, and a lot of different books. I like to mix it up, and draw from a bunch of different sources. One of those sources is the BBC Big Read list, which I am getting very close to being done. I started it because my sister had read many more on the list than I had, and I'm just a teensy bit competitive. Now I'm winning!

Thoughts on this list: obviously a lot of books that have the popular support to win a list like this are children's books, classics, and a certain kind of bestseller. Overall, though, I've enjoyed a lot of the books I've read on it!

Many of the books on this list I read before I started writing reviews, but I've added links to the ones I have written. (unread) marks those few I still have left to go!

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Winnie-The-Pooh - A.A. Milne
1984 - George Orwell
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Middlemarch - George Eliot
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Story of Tracy Beaker - Jacqueline Wilson
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Dune - Frank Herbert
Emma - Jane Austen
Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
Watership Down - Richard Adams
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Animal Farm - George Orwell
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Goodnight, Mister Tom - Michelle Magorian
The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Stand - Stephen King
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The BFG - Roald Dahl
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Noughts and Crosses -  Malorie Blackman
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough
Mort by Terry Pratchett
The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton (unread)
The Magus - John Fowles
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Perfume - Patrick Suskind
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
Matilda - Roald Dahl
Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Ulysses - James Joyce
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Double Act - Jacqueline Wilson
The Twits - Roald Dahl
I Capture The Castle - Dodie Smith
Holes - Louis Sachar
Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Vicky Angel - Jacqueline Wilson
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Magician - Raymond E. Feist
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
The Godfather - Mario Puzo
The Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M. Auel
The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
Katherine - Anya Seton
Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Girls in Love - Jacqueline Wilson (unread)
The Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (unread)

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list from which to pick, of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Chris.

It has driven the recommender a little crazy, I think, that it has taken me so long to get to this one. It's just a picture book! I could read it in about 10 minutes! He's not wrong, but I'm stubborn. I waited until it came up on my list, and then I read it. Which is now. Over a year after he recommended it.

Of course, this all leads to the question, how do you review a picture book? They're short, they're mostly pictures, and I'm pretty much the opposite of a visual thinker. (Doesn't mean I can't see the pictures when I'm reading, but it does mean I'm unlikely to retain more than a very fuzzy memory.) (Seriously, I've filled out questionnaires for the aphantasia study going on right now, and everything.)

Of course, even without remembering exactly what the pictures looked like, I have a sense of Dr. Seuss and how he draws in general. I mean, just look at that little guy up there! It's all shaggy and fuzzy and pretty damn adorable, and probably bends in interesting ways. Wow, do I not have a lot more to say, except that how can you not love Dr. Seuss illustrations.

This is not one of his books that formed a big part of my childhood, although I do remember reading it before, probably past childhood. It is, of course, the most overtly environmental of Dr. Seuss' books, with the ongoing rapaciousness of capitalism making goods no one wants moving into an area, stripping it of everything, displacing the animals, and cutting down all the trees, and then moving on, leaving it barren and sterile.

It's not a subtle message, although it is probably a necessary one. Let's bootleg a little anti-uncontrolled capitalism into every child's life, shall we? (I'm serious. We should.) It's accessible, and I'm pretty sure kids reading this book would be outraged at that damned Onceler.

The biggest thing, though, is the ending, which is catchy and memorable, and would be great if it stuck in everyone's mind. I've seen it since, just as a quote. It's the part that goes:

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, 
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.

Bringing it back to the reader, even as a child, that this is something preventable, and encouraging them to see themselves as part of the solution as well. It's a good message.  So yeah, I like this picture book. If I had kids, I'd get it for them. (Of course, were I a parent, I'd eventually probably get very boring and talk about how that individual action has to be gathered into collective and governmental action, and my kids would probably start rolling their eyes pretty damn hard.)

I'm very glad I never saw the movie that was made of this. I don't really intend to ever see it.