Book 27 – Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

By Matt Ridley

Ok, so this book was published way back in 1999. I especially like how on the final page the author makes a point of how this book will be out of date before it even gets published… and here I am reading it more than a decade later. That’s ok cuz I know next to nothing about genetics, and what little I know I’d forgotten in Biology 11. So really now I’m just a dozen years out of date as opposed to +20!

Genome is categorized as “popular science” but this doesn’t quite do it justice. Not only does Ridley explain scientific phenomena clearly and concisely for the average layperson, he also writes beautifully and eloquently. Even when describing homogentisate dioxygenase, a “boring gene, doing a boring chemical job in boring parts of the body, causing a boring disease when broken” it’s all quite fascinating. Right off the bat, he lays out what he wants to accomplish in Genome :

A coherent glimpse of the whole: a whistle-stop tour of some of the more interesting sites in the genome and what they tell us about ourselves. For we, this lucky generation, will be the first to read the book that is the genome. Being able to read the genome will tell us more about our origins, our evolution, our nature and our minds than all the efforts of science to date. It will revolutionize anthropology, psychology, medicine, palaeontology and virtually every other science.

This is not a book about the Human Genome Project –about mapping and sequencing techniques-but a book about what that project has found. Some time in the year 2000, we shall probably have a rough first draft of the complete human genome. In just a few short years we will have moved from knowing almost nothing about our genes to knowing everything.

He was right. The HGP completed this goal in April 2003. As the HGP website states: Though the HGP is finished, analyses of the data will continue for many years. And since I have a better understanding of genetics, I can see how the HGP will be busy for a while yet!

The bibliography is also impressively well laid out, including websites the author visited in order to get up to date information as he was writing his book. Not only does Ridley want to share the knowledge with his readers but encourages them to do research on their own, if they feel inspired to further their understanding. I can attest that as a non-sciencey layman, I have learned a good many neat things about genetics and how they play a part in the human condition. Here are just a few things that particularly struck me:

a) Ridley repeatedly states “genes are not there to cause diseases”. Read up on it if you want to find out more!

b) Genes don’t just work together but they can also conflict with each other, like a kind of battlefield between parental genes and childhood genes, or between male genes and female genes. This was “a little-known story outside a small group of evolutionary biologists. Yet it has profoundly shaken the philosophical foundations of biology.”

A quick google search of “genes in conflict” resulted in a recent scientific discovery that was published earlier this year in March:

Traits that help one sex can harm the other, resulting in conflicting evolutionary pressures on males and females…This battle of the sexes is thought to extend to the genetic level, with individual genes favoring one sex over the other. Some of the strongest evidence for these sexually antagonistic genes comes from studies showing that fruit fly lines with high reproductive success in one sex typically have low reproductive success in the other. Thus, if males in a particular line have many offspring, the females do not and vice versa.

The genes underlying this sexual tug-of-war, however, have been difficult to find. Now, Paolo Innocenti and Edward Morrow reveal this conflict's genetic basis by linking the expression of sexually antagonistic genes in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to the reproductive success of one sex at the expense of the other.

Pretty neat stuff! This goes to show that Ridley was onto something, since the theory of sexual antagonism as an important evolutionary force was open to debate in the 1980s, but it was only in the first decade of the 21st century that the subject has gained substantial attention.

c) I have wondered why people have different blood types and I’ve read articles about studies where men and women actually prefer the body odour of members of the opposite sex who are most different from them genetically. Since blood groups tend to be linked to cultural groups, this has not only provided insight into the history of human migrations, but since the 1990s they “promise understanding of how and why our genes are all so different. They hold the key to human polymorphism.” Ridley further states “Variation is an inherent and integral part of the human – or indeed any – genome”!

d) The fact that what we know as “personality” is to a considerable degree based on mere brain chemistry, in how our system manages serotonin levels. Romantics and spiritualists may cry “our behavior isn’t based on mere biological determinism!” and may never bother to delve any deeper than that since it’s easier to be in denial. But Ridley explains this does not mean, as it is usually assumed to mean, that our behaviour is socially immutable. Quite the reverse: our brain chemistry is determined by the social signals to which we are exposed. “Biology determines behaviour yet is determined by society.” He further clarifies by saying:

There are a score of different ways in which this one chemical, serotonin, can be related to innate differences in personality. These are overlaid on the score of different ways that the mind’s serotonin system responds to outside influences such as social signals. Some people are more sensitive to some outside signals than others. This is the reality of genes and environments: a maze of complicated interactions between them, not a one-directional determinism. Social behaviour is not some external series of events that takes our minds and bodies by surprise. It is an intimate part of our make-up, and our genes are programmed not only to produce social behaviour, but to respond to it as well.

e) “ … so close are the similarities between genes that geneticists can now do, almost routinely, an experiment so incredible that it boggles the mind. They can knock out a gene in a fly by deliberately mutating it, replace it by genetic engineering with the equivalent gene from a human being and grow a normal fly. The technique is known as genetic rescue. …Indeed, they work so well that it is often impossible to tell which flies have been rescued with human genes and which with fly genes.

This is the culminating triumph of the digital hypothesis with which this book began. Genes are just chunks of software that can run on any system: they use the same code and do the same jobs. Even after 530 million years of separation, our computer can recognize a fly’s software and vice versa. Indeed, the computer analogy is quite a good one.”

f) I have often wondered by different species of animals can have such different life spans. A trio of evolutionists separately put together the most satisfying account of the aging process: “Each species, it seems, comes equipped with a program of planned obsolescence chosen to suit its expected life-span and the age at which it is likely to have finished breeding. Natural selection carefully weeds out all genes that might allow damage to the body before or during reproduction… But natural selection cannot weed out genes that damage the body in post-reproductive old age, because there is no reproduction of the successful in old age… A mouse is unlikely to make it past three years of age, so genes that damage four-year-old mouse bodies are under virtually no selection to die out. Fulmars are very likely to be around to breed at twenty, so genes that damage twenty-year-old fulmar bodies are still being ruthlessly weeded out.” Well, how about that!

g) There is a little protein called P53 which is also known as ‘Guardian of the Genome’, or even the ‘Guardian Angel Gene’ because it regulates the cell cycle and plays a role in apoptosis, genetic stability (apoptosis is the suicide of cells and is Greek for the fall of autumn leaves – pretty ,no?). In fact, apoptosis is the most important of the body’s weapons against cancer, the last line of defence. But what’s interesting is that for a while, many people including specialists, did not fully understand how therapeutic cancer treatment worked against cancer. It’s only been quite recently that chemotherapy works not in killing cancer cells, but because it induces apoptosis by alerting P53 and its colleagues.

h) Instinct versus learning. “The two have little in common, or so the behaviourist school of psychology would have had us all believe during much of the twentieth century. But why are some things learnt and others instinctive? Why is language an instinct, while dialect and vocabulary are learnt? “ Ridley’s book explains very eloquently!

i) How baffling and unique these protein-y genes known as prions are. Prions cause neurodegenerative disease, such as BSE (aka mad cow disease) in cattle and CJD in people. They are not only not like viruses, they replicate in a protein-like manner that nobody quite knows how exactly, thus undermining one of the messages Ridley has been evangelizing throughout his book, that the core of biology is digital.

Here, in the prion gene, we have respectable digital changes, substituting one word for another, yet causing changes that cannot be wholly predicted without other knowledge. The prion system is analogue, not digital. It is a change not of sequence but of shape and it depends on does, location and whether the wind is in the west. That is not to say that it lacks determination. If anything, CJD is even more precise than Huntington’s disease in the age at which it strikes.

More than a decade later after the publication of Genome, not much more is known about prion disease. Yet Ridley holds nothing but humble respect for mysteries that cannot yet be explained by science, he is still able eloquently explain how:

Prions have humbled us with our ignorance. We did not suspect that there was a form of self-replication that did not use DNA—did not indeed use digital information at all. We did not imagine that a disease of such profound mystery could emerge from such unlikely quarters and prove so deadly. We still do not quite see how changes in the folding of a peptide chain can cause such havoc, or how tiny changes in the composition of the chain can have such complicated implications. As two prion experts have written, ‘Personal and family tragedies, ethnological catastrophes and economic disasters can all be traced back to the mischievous misfolding of one small molecule.’

Another reason that compelled me to read this book is my self-education on the science of evolution. Many of the theories Charles Darwin had were proven by genetic discoveries in the 20th century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that for the first time, evolution became genetic. In the 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins wrote what many evolutionary biologists at the time were just starting to grasp: that evolution by natural selection was not much about competition between species, not much about competition between groups, not even most about competition between individuals, but was about competition between genes using individuals and occasionally societies as their temporary vehicles.

When scientists started reading the code for life, they found that each gene is far more complicated than it needs to be: it is broken up into many different chunks with “long stretches of random nonsense and repetitive burst of wholly irrelevant sense, some of which contain real genes of a completely different (and sinister) kind.” In fact, 97 per cent of the human genome does not consist of true genes at all, but rather “a menagerie of strange entities called pseudogenes, retropseudogenes, satellites, minisatellites, micrsatellites, transposons and retrotransposons, all collectively known as ‘junk DNA’, or sometimes, probably more accurately, as ‘selfish DNA’. Some of these are genes of a special kind, but most are just chunks of DNA that are never transcribed into the language of protein.”

Nobody predicted that when we read the code for life we would find it so riddled with barely controlled examples of selfish exploitation. Yet we should have predicted it, because every other level of life is parasitized. There are worms in animals’ guts, bacteria in their blood, viruses in their cells. Why not retrotransposons in their genes?

So what does it all mean then? I suppose nothing and everything, depending on how you want to look at it. Once more, Ridley brings it all home:

The truth is nobody is in charge. It is the hardest thing for human beings to get used to, but the world is full of intricate, cleverly designed and interconnected systems that do not have control centres.

Book 26 – The Incredible Journey

By Sheila Burnford

A good animal story is always welcome, and this 1960 Canadian classic is no exception. This little novel was quickly consumed in a day while I was sick at home with an early autumn viral attack. Not only that, it takes place as summer is transitioning to fall - perfecto! In case you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about three friends: an old pit bull terrier (Bodger), a Siamese cat (Tao) and a young Labrador retriever (Luath) who travel almost 300 miles of Ontario wilderness to find their long lost human family.

Their journey is indeed incredible in distance as well as hardship and adventure. But what I like best about the story is that the animals never “talk” to one another. They are just ordinary animals that communicate realistically with body language and vocalization. Burnford made the brilliant decision to simply describe the animals’ actions and emotions in her deceptively straightforward and naturalistic style.

Burnford is also very knowledgeable about the personality traits inherent in popular dog and cat breeds, yet she endows each animal character with unique characteristics and histories. And of course special attention is given to the royal lineage of the Siamese cat, my favourite! She also writes of the affection and camaraderie the animals have for one another with a genuine fondness that is never phony or saccharine. It’s obvious she’s a big dog and cat lover.

I never saw the 1963 Disney adaptation and I’m curious about it, but would never bother with the 1993 remake since they cop out with voicing the animal characters.

Book 25 – The Stepford Wives

By Ira Levin

There’s already been two movies based on this novel by Ira Levin, who also wrote Rosemary’s Baby. Published in 1972, Levin captured the zeitgeist of his time with this dark, satirical thriller. It’s been nine years since Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came out and sparked a new wave of feminism in America. In 1969, Friedan helped organize the nation-wide Women's Strike for Equality and then in 1971, she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus.

So it’s not surprising that Levin references Friedan a few times in his novel. The Stepford Wives is also a horror story about the extent of what certain men are willing to do to prevent women from taking away what they feel is theirs by right. Although there is no outright hatred toward women expressed by any of the male characters á la Stieg Larsson, the undercurrent of creepy misogyny is definitely felt throughout the book.

When Manhattan couple Walter and Joanna Eberhart and their two children move into the quiet suburban community of Stepford, Connecticut, it seems they have timewarped back at least a decade. Walter and the kids seem to be happily adjusting to their new home, but for Joanna, there’s something about the Stepford community that isn’t quite right.

Hmm, could it be that the only thriving club in town is the men-only Men’s Association? How archaic is that? And why are all the housewives in the neighbourhood obsessive-compulsive housecleaners? And despite scrubbing floors well into the night how do they manage to look so perfectly coiffed and maintain their knockout figures? But what really makes Joanna suspicious is that none of the Stepford hausfraus are the least bit interested in forming a women’s club with her!

The Stepford Wives, in this day and age, does come across as a little simplistic and naïve. But I think the novel was quite successful when it came out, mostly because it hit the right note at the right time. The novel’s title even entered into the modern American lexicon where a Stepford wife is used to describe:

1.) a servile, compliant, submissive, spineless wife who happily does her husband's bidding and serves his every whim dutifully.
2.) a wife who is cookie-cutter & bland in appearance and behavior, like an attractive robotic doll devoid of emotion or thought.

Hmm, with the cultural phenomena of Japanese men vacationing with and even marrying their $16,000 silicone sex dolls, perhaps Levin’s novel is not so archaic after all! In any case, it was an enjoyable story with a nice pace, tight structure, good characterization and a nicely ambiguous ending. Perfect for a movie adaptation - I may even check out the 1974 version some day (not so sure about the newer one).

P.S. this 1973 Fawcett paperback edition was acquired at a neighbour's garage sale for a whopping 25 cents.

Book 24 – The Girl Who Played With Fire

By Stieg Larsson

Even though Chainon had $1 books out on the street for August Main Madness, I went inside for the non-discounted books anyway. At the end of the month, you never know if someone moving house will be offloading some books or what. My instincts proved right – I hit pay dirt – before my eyes lay a pristine paperback of The Girl Who Played With Fire as well as a hardbound of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. Since I wasn’t interested in owning a hardcover, I just got the former. I would later regret this and become The Girl Who Kicked Herself For Not Getting The $4 Hardcover When She Coulda!

While still inside the thrift shop, two old ladies saw TGWPWF in my hand and had to comment on the fact that they have read all three Millenium books and how much they enjoyed them. The first was a francophone lady who worked there and she told me the books are “so much better than the movies” and the latter was an English visitor: “I love it when a book keeps me up all night!”

I mean, I liked The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo well enough, in a gripping and page-turning way, and enjoyed the parts where Lisbeth kicks some men-hatin' ass. But it was also at times cheesy and fantastical, and the themes too simplistically tied together. I guess I like my suspense to be more subtle and grounded in reality. That was part of the reason why I held off on getting the hardcover. Maybe I was in a better frame of mind, but TGWPWF proved to be ass-kickingly awesome! It helped that the 2nd book focuses on mysterious Lisbeth Salander instead of “Mikael fucking Blomkvist”, who thankfully beds only one new conquest this time instead of every frackin' female character that makes an appearance in the storyline.

Anyway, in the 2nd book, Larsson really fleshes out the character of Lisbeth as well as her entire back story. The novel starts off about a year later with Lisbeth vacationing in the Carribbean - alone of course. Larsson really takes his time describing Lisbeth’s almost day-to-day activities and has her involved in a murder-mystery side story that is not directly connected to any later events in the novel. In fact, that section could well be its own short story. When Lisbeth returns to Stockholm, there is a lot of detail about her apartment hunting and shopping for furniture and new car (since she’s now armed with Wennerström’s billions) in her methodical, calculated way. This may be deadweight to some, but I found this “Lisbeth makes a life for herself” section quite fascinating and in fact, this may be my favourite part of the book! I wonder if the two old ladies I met thought the same?

Soon enough, Lisbeth gets herself into trouble. Big Trouble with a capital T! I won’t say anything more, except that Larsson does a great job juggling the other characters and storylines to make it all mesh. And of course, he makes attacks on his favourite hot button issues, including the media machine à la Season 5 of The Wire.

I will repeat again the manner in which the novel ends really left me with bitter regret that I did not buy the 3rd book when I could have. Unlike the first book where everything was tied up neatly, the ending of TGWPWF really left my hanging! Damn I should’ve just gotten the hardcover!

Book 23 - The Talented Mr. Ripley

By Patricia Highsmith

I’m surprised at myself for not being aware of Patricia Highsmith sooner - she has such a deliciously sardonic yet razor-sharp view of human nature. I’d already seen the Anthony Minghella movie when it came out in 2000, and even though it was a very good film and quite well-cast, it nevertheless tainted my own personal envisioning of the novel. I can’t help but picture the big stars Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow in their respective roles. I hate it when that happens!

In any case, TTMR was excellent. I’ve mentioned before in my review of A Suspension of Mercy how Highsmith has a way of making you relate to her characters, no matter how unlikable or despicable they may be. When characters get themselves into crazy or self-destructive situations the choices they make, however irrational, are understandable according to their motive and reasoning. This makes for intelligent and satisfying suspense.

TTMR was published a decade before ASoM, so Highsmith was on the right track for her characterization of Tom Ripley. The title itself describes the basic premise of an ordinary young man who discovers he has some special talents indeed. In a way, the novel is like a twisted version of A Portrait of the Serial Killer As a Young Man. By all accounts, Tom Ripley sounds like a very scary dude. But the story begins with Tom leading a rather unhappy mediocre existence in NYC and you kinda feel sorry for the guy as he seems kind of stuck in a rut and lacks the resources to get himself out.

Then our dear Tom is presented with an opportunity to go to Europe for the first time with the task of bringing home an errant millionaire’s son, Dickie Greenleaf. Tom is completely enthralled by Dickie and wants more than anything to be his friend. At first Dickie genuinely enjoys Tom’s company, but soon enough gets the creepy feeling that his new friend may like him just a little too much. And of course it doesn’t help that Dickie’s girlfriend Marge insinuates that Tom might be gay. It’s in meeting Dickie that Tom realizes his true nature. Does Tom really want to be with Dickie, or does he actually want to be Dickie? Creepy!

The novel smoothly vacillates between you feeling repulsed yet fascinated by Tom Ripley. When Dickie distances himself from Tom, you really do feel Tom’s torment at the possibility of being rejected and alone again.

Tom felt a painful wrench in his breast, and he covered his face with his hands. It was as if Dickie had been suddenly snatched away from him. They were not friends. They didn’t know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.

When Tom assumes Dickie’s identify, not only is he uncannily good at impersonating the one-time friend he murdered, he also relishes being him, like how he spends his evenings “handling Dickie’s possessions, simply looking at his rings on his own fingers, or his woolen ties, or his black alligator wallet”. Creepy!

And then, when it looks like Tom has to give up Dickie's identity because the police are closing in, you go back to feeling bad for Tom again:

This was the end of Dickie Greenleaf, he knew. He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them like a clown, feeling incompetent and incapable of doing anything with himself except entertaining people for minutes at a time. He hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when it was new.

It’s a real tribute to Highsmith’s skill as a writer. As another reviewer sums this up rather well:

What the reader has to remember again and again is that you are inside Ripley's head, and that every word is skewed toward his notion of reality. Reader's can conclude for themselves Ripley's motives and feelings, as he will never tell them outright. This, I think, is the most intriguing quality of reading the novel -- what the reader brings to the book and their own perceptions of emotion and morals informs the story almost more than anything Highsmith lays before you. In that way, she manages to insinuate just how much Ripley is like the reader, and as uncomfortable as that may be to conclude, it also rings impressively true.

Reading the book also inspired me to finally see the 1960 film adaptation by Rene Clement, Plein Soleil (aka Purple Noon), which was in itself a good film, but it disappointingly over-simplified or white-washed some key elements of the novel, namely replacing any homosexual undercurrents for friendly male competition and conceding to the conventional need for the murderer to get caught. Perhaps this was an indication that having a complex yet sympathetic protagonist-villain was still an unthinkable concept, at least in cinema, a few decades ago.

My only complaint is that the 1992 Vintage Crime paperback edition had a fair number of typos in it. It made for distracting reading!

Book 22 - The Little Friend

By Donna Tartt

Finally! Here is what I think of the 600+ page tome I’ve been laboring thru for bloody weeks. The one where I had to take two breaks for some needed levity and brevity, even if to endure subpar werewolf fantasy. Despite the fact that Tartt is a wonderfully gifted writer, her long-awaited second novel has some huge flaws – it's much too wordy and hubristically long-winded for its own good. If only she had a Nazi editor to mercilessly trim down 200 pages, The Little Friend would’ve been a less torturous read. I much admired her debut novel The Secret History and considered it a bit of a masterpiece, as did legions of fans and critics. It must have been a Herculean task for Tartt to equal or surpass TSH (and a decade later too), and unsurprisintly her sophomore effort received a deal of buzz and fanfare. Ironically, what I enjoyed most about TLF was reading the divided yet entertaining reviews it generated at the time. One Guardian reviewer summed up quite well how I felt:

No [worthy fan] is going to let the author of The Secret History's second book pass by unread, though what they will find is frankly frustrating. For most of its length, The Little Friend lacks the drive of a book that needs to be written, even if it offers the considerable pleasures of being the work of someone who knows how to write.

On the surface, TLF takes a familiar premise—the plucky child sleuth—to a new literary level—kind of like a twisted Southern Gothic fairy tale meets Harriet the Spy. In a backyard somewhere in Alexandria, Mississippi, a little boy named Robin is found dead hanging from a black tupelo tree. Ten years later, the mystery of Robin’s death remains unsolved and the various members of the Dufresnes and Cleve clan are still struggling to move on from that tragic event. The story centres on Harriet, who was only a baby when her brother died. She grows up to be a highly precocious yet troubled 12-year-old who becomes obsessed with finding Robin’s purported killer. She enlists Hely, her best (and only) friend, to exact clumsy, misguided vengeance.

The first half of the book moves along languidly yet interestingly. Tartt does a meticulous job recreating Southern society in the 1970s with its decaying colonial houses overtaken by bland suburbia. Tartt grew up in Mississippi, so she’s obviously writing what she knows. Her treatment of societal subsets -- the tottering spinsters clinging to what’s left of their Southern ways and aging black maids, or the poor white trashy folk who live on the edge of town -- verges on caricature at times. But she take a lot of care in her depiction of Harriet’s dysfunctional, female-dominated family: comatose pill-popping mother, Charlotte, dreamy older sister, Allison, indomitable grandmother-matriarch, Edie and the cluster of doting great-aunts.

Tartt also mines the vast body of juvenile literature to make her own unsentimental, anti-coming-of-age novel and she does a great job portraying Harriet as an anti-heroine who is more hedgehog than Nancy Drew. According to her friend Hely, who is also her secret admirer:

There were plenty of girls at school prettier than Harriet, and nicer. But none of them are as smart, or as brave. Sadly, he thought of her many gifts. She could forge handwriting—teacher handwriting—and compose adult-sounding excuse notes like a pro; she could make bombs from vinegar and baking soda, mimic voices over the telephone. She loved to shoot fireworks—unlike a lot of girls, who wouldn’t go near a string of firecrackers. She had got sent home in second grade for tricking a boy into eating a spoonful of cayenne pepper; and two years ago she had started a panic by saying that the spooky old lunchroom in the school basement was a portal to Hell.

A NYT reviewer described TLF as a young-adult novel for grown-ups and how Tartt bestows Harriet with a

fierce, adolescent sense of right and wrong and [a] dangerous habit of sticking her nose where it doesn't belong. If these aspects of her personality make her recognizable, they also make her memorable and unique: she is part of a literary sisterhood of smart, prickly loners, and as such she is likely to attract generations of loyal followers.

But somewhere around the halfway point, I didn’t feel like reading TLF anymore. I became impatient and frustrated at how slowly events were unfolding. I started skimming through the densely descriptive passages because I had enough of the precious atmosphere and just wanted to find out what happens next. Looking back, I pinned down the key events or turning points:

p. 150 - Harriet pins Robin’s old classmate Danny Ratliff as the murderer.

p. 234 - Harriet and Hely stalk out Danny for the first time.

p. 370 - Harriet and Hely make their first clumsy and failed attempt to kill Danny.

There are 220 pages between 150 and 370, and I started losing interest around p. 300.

Now I understand that TLF isn’t meant to be a plot-driven novel, but there was definitely an overwhelming amount of exposition to muddle through, and worse, it was bogged down by overindulgent prose, which did not go unnoticed by reviewers, one of whom was rather unforgiving by describing TLF as a pretentious, incoherent melodrama as well as “an extended prose catastrophe”, where Tartt has strained too hard to create an air of unreality at the expense of plot and character:

Characters say things ''soberly,'' ''belligerently,'' ''faintly,'' and ''impassively,'' while exhaling ''audibly'' and stuffing bills into pockets ''laboriously.'' That's just page 204. Laughingly, I turned to discover Danny twisting ''rather spasmodically.'' Dumbfoundedly, I wondered how a mosquito might sting someone ''luxuriously.'' Such prose events disqualify ''The Little Friend'' as literature and also rule it out as decent trash. It's hard to dive into an action scene when people running for their lives turn to notice ''the path they'd beaten through the yellow-flowered scraggle of bitterweed, and the melancholy pastels of the dropped lunchbox....''

Even those who liked the book couldn’t help but notice “her tendency to describe things in threes, in arching adjectival triplets”:

Someone’s heart "vaulted up for a soaring, incredulous, gorgeously cruel moment".
A china dinner service that is "heavenly, glorious, a complete set”
A photograph in which the light is "fractured, sentimental, incandescent with disaster".

But despite Tartt’s overwrought writing style, the same reviewer also thought she ultimately succeeded in creating a richly detailed universe.

Even if she stumbles over details, the pace of this novel remains impressive. Tartt is able to make "reading time" slow down, so that you feel you are experiencing the events she describes in real time, or even more slowly than real time. This groggy, dreamlike pace is particularly effective at moments of high drama. One action scene, in which Harriet and her best friend are caught for a few hours between a set of poisonous snakes and two violent criminals high on drugs, takes up 24 pages of unflagging description, which will speed your pulse as if you were trapped along with the children.

And here is someone actually defending Tartt’s overwrought writing style:

Critical puritans (or merely Yankees) will point to its Dixie weakness for verbosity, caricature and melodrama. Yet the verbosity yields passages of mesmerising beauty; the caricature, stretches of delirious comedy; and the melodrama, moments of nerve-shredding excitement. At its close, few readers will wish The Little Friend a page shorter, or a shade paler.

TLF also made me think of the disappointing The Lovely Bones (TLB!), which was also published the same year in 2002. Both novels received mucho hype, both are set in 1970’s suburbia and present realistic portrayals of a family dealing with the tragic aftermath of a murdered son or daughter. More significantly, both are burdened with glaring flaws that pretty much ruined the entire reading experience for me. Also interesting to note that the killer in both novels never gets caught. But where Sebold resorts to a consolatory ending: the killer gets his comeuppance and the victim finds heavenly harmony, Tartt offers no such reassurance nor does she feels a need to assuage her readers in such romantically saccharine notions.

So let’s close with this fair assessment from the NYT :

What this all adds up to is a tragic, fever-dream realism. Though the world Harriet discovers is unquestionably haunted, there is nothing magical about it, or about the furious, lyrical rationality of Tartt's voice. Her book is a ruthlessly precise reckoning of the world as it is -- drab, ugly, scary, inconclusive -- filtered through the bright colors and impossible demands of childhood perception. It grips you like a fairy tale, but denies you the consoling assurance that it's all just make-believe.

Book 21 - Stolen

By Kelley Armstrong

(interesting how the cover design of this 2009 trade paperback reprint has the same blood-red monochromatic look of the mega successful Twilight books)

So this next installment continues with Elena, our very special female werewolf, resuming her Pack duties by sniffing out misbehaving mutts and researching the internet to see if anyone’s got any dirt on werewolf activity. The Pack must protect their secret identify at all cost!

Elena follows a lead and encounters an elder witch and her young apprentice, who seem to know everything about Elena and her Pack. Once upon a time, reps of various supernatural races would gather together to share info and discuss issues about potential exposure – like a “Supernatural United Nations”. This is no longer the case, which is a bit odd considering how easy it'd be for undercover supernaturals to exploit today’s technology in order to communicate with each other, so you’d think the situation would be the reverse. Anyway, the witches warn Elena that human bad guys are kidnapping shamans and half-demons for nefarious purposes. And witches, vampires and werewolves are next. What’s more, the whole operation is funded by an evil Bill Gates-type billionaire named Ty Winsloe!

Soon enough, Elena gets caught in a trap and spends the bulk of the novel imprisoned inside a high security underground research facility along with other fascinating nonhumans. Sound familiar? Buffy fans will recognize this premise from Season 4 which aired in 1999 (Stolen was published in 2003). Vampires and demons were captured by a secret military project called "The Initiative" and imprisoned in cells within a high tech underground complex. In good form, Armstrong meta-references this fact but she also makes a cheap diss: her heroine blithely quips about how subpar that season was and how she fell asleep for half the episodes.

Ok, I understand that Season 4 was voted least favourite by a number of Buffy fans, but when it’s so obvious that you’re basing an entire storyline on a season’s premise from a well-regarded TV series, wouldn’t you want, at the very least, to pay it some respect? Especially how even the worst S4 episodes have been funnier and more entertaining than any passage I’ve read in Bitten and Stolen so far.

So that confirms it for me: Kelley Armstrong is a misguided snob who’s really a square. I understand not everyone can be Anne Rice or Stephen King in terms of writing quality genre fiction, but if you can’t reference pop culture properly, then don’t do it. At their best, Joss Whedon and Sam Raimi have taken the horror/sci-fi genres to new levels while at the same time giving respect where its due. Armstrong, at best, merely recycles already tried and true tropes, and worse, seems ignorant of the influences she’s drawing from (at least this provides unintentional meaning to the title Stolen). With this in mind, I can see how Armstrong wants to model Elena as a smart-talking Buffy-esque heroine (Elena the Mutt-Slayer doesn’t quite have the same ring), but lacks the referential know-how and finesse to make her novel truly playful and clever.

On a more positive note, I did enjoy the setup and pacing of Stolen much better than the previous Bitten. Perhaps this was due to there being less romantic Elena/Clay time (sadly they had to have corny reunion sex like multiple times for what seemed like pages and pages; there was even a scene where Clay feeds Elena ham and pancakes as he’s penetrating her, I kid you not). And this time, there were some interesting (mainly supernatural) characters introduced during Elena’s imprisonment at the nefarious research facility. Armstrong does a competent job in weaving together the various character dynamics and motivations. But again she doesn’t explore her universe deeply enough and focuses her attention on action and plot.

For one thing, almost every human portrayed in Stolen is basically bad, since they are all involved in the nefarious research project, with the exception of one resesarch assistant, who gets killed anyway. The three or four dozen human stormtroopers, I mean, guards employed at the nefarious facility are basically faceless entities, like the Mutts. And if they do have a bit of characterization, they are violent would-be rapists in the guise of military men. In Stolen, Elena is just starting to feel like she belongs to her werewolf pack, but you’re not sure if she still considers herself part human, since she already killed a couple of guards without any remorse. When the baddest military dudes, under Winsloe’s command, cruelly kill a Mutt (even though this Mutt tried to rape her too), Elena draws the line between us (the supernaturals) and them (human baddies who try to mess with supernaturals).

Eventually, Elena escapes (I don’t think I’m giving too much away) and subsequently returns with the Pack and some supernatural friends to infiltrate the nefarious compound and a bloodbath ensues. After a particularly violent confrontation, she thinks about all the stormtroop— I mean, guards she has killed and wonders “if they had wives, girlfriends, children”. But then she justifies it by telling herself: “They had to die to protect our secrets. They’d understood the danger when they signed on to this project… there was no other way. Everyone had to die.”

So Elena has a pang of conscience for a few sentences, and then she promptly moves on, taking disappointing revenge on the billionaire Ty Winslow . So a potentially complex moral grey area is conveniently left unexplored, given over by the need to deliver mediocre action and drama. It also makes for boring reading.

Stolen was interesting enough to pass the time, but it also relieved me of any remaining interest in pursuing the next Otherworld installment. I’m glad because there are way better books out there to explore. In fact, after reading Bitten and Stolen almost back-to-back, I really need to immerse myself in some high-caliber writing again - a tautly structured thriller by a writer who can really delve into the complex psychological examination of a character's amoral universe - Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley!

Book 20 - Bitten

By Kelley Armstrong

I had only a hundred pages left of the “serious” novel, but then it took yet another dark and heavy turn. Damn this 600+ tome which has dramatically reduced my reading rate to ONE book for the month of July. Then a friend lent me Bitten, the first book in the Women of the Otherworld series about werewolves, witches, necromancers, and vampires struggling to fit into contemporary human society. Perfect – just when I needed to take a break with something fluffy!

And did it deliver some fluff. Bitten introduces us to Elena Michaels, the only female werewolf in the world. Cuz one, the werewolf gene only gets passed from father to son. Two, werewolves don't have long-term relationships but they can mate with a human woman. If a male baby pops out, the father kidnaps said baby and boy is secretly raised with his werewolf brethren. Three, humans can turn into werewolves by getting bitten, but the majority do not to survive their first agonizing transformation. And it’s super duper rare for a woman to survive a werewolf bite. This is why Elena is so highly coveted in the werewolf world, they all want to do her.

The back-story is told via flashback when our heroine falls hard for Clayton Danvers, a blonde curly-locked academic with piercing blue eyes and a body straight out of Baywatch. Clay has a dirty little secret: he is actually the Beta male of the only werewolf pack in the world, aka the Pack, as well as the foster son & bodyguard of Jeremy, the Alpha (leader of the Pack :-). Clay may lack basic social skills and possess a disdainful attitude towards people, but Elena would never suspect this is because her BF is more wolf than man! Did I mention that on top of Clay’s wolfish sex appeal, he is also a brilliant academic who earned his Ph.D. specializing in ancient anthropomorphic religions?

When Clay ends up biting Elena without her consent, she doesn’t exactly embrace her newfound wolfenness. Instead she spends much of the novel being pissed off at her BF. It isn’t so much that he lied to Elena about his true identity, but he had to thoughtlessly ruin any chance for her to attain the normal happy human life she never had. How bloody inconvenient is that? Elena may not get past the indignant “how could you!” phase but it doesn't stop her from having hot outdoor sex with the guy (in bipedal form unfortunately). You see, our heroine was orphaned at a tender age and subsequently suffered abuse in the hands of foster daddies. After surviving her childhood she became a strong, independent woman, yet she still longs for acceptance and belonging. So Bitten begins with Elena having left the Pack to salvage and resume the ordinary life she was having in… Toronto (what better place to live out a bland, conformist lifestyle?).

Of course, Elena’s attempt at a normal lifestyle gets kiboshed when Jeremy summons her back to his estate in upstate New York to deal with an emergency. Non-Pack werewolves are stirring up trouble in their territory of Stonehaven, perhaps even staging a coup. Pack werewolves use the more derogatory term – mutts (I know, don't laugh) - for these problematic lone wolves. To keep mutts in check, the Pack routinely seeks out and punishes those who try to settle down, since making a home for oneself means claiming territory - and only the Pack could claim territory. As a result, mutts drift from place to place, stealing and killing humans for food.

Armstrong has a couple of interesting spins on the werewolf mythos, but she doesn’t delve into her universe deeply enough for me. The Pack versus Mutts issue plays out like werewolf politics, where the Pack is like a fascistic oligarchy, but I’m not sure Armstrong sees it this way, therefore dodging any complexity by portraying mutts as bad werewolves who really just want to kill people whenever they want, just like in the good old pre-Industrial days.

Pack werewolves are more highly evolved somehow and they also have successful careers in the human world (due to the ability to live in one place and cultivate yourself). Since all mutts live by their own rules, they aren’t exactly team players and thus, not worthy of the Pack. What’s more, murderous mutts call attention to themselves and threaten the safety of all werewolves, so this gives reason for the Pack to eliminate them with impunity. So yes, the Pack is good, Mutts are baaaad. There is no comparison, I know, but if you really want to read a meaty novel about how otherwise civilized people succumb to the pack instinct and transform themselves into barbaric murderers, I suggest you read The Secret History.

But what if there are mutts who don’t want to kill, keep a low profile and want a bit of territory? Just enough land to hunt some wild game, so they don’t have the urge to kill humans. This way the Pack won’t have to waste time traveling around the world rousting out stray mutts, and werewolves can all live happily ever after… oh but wait, we won’t have much of a story then, will we?

So a few conniving mutts want to either destroy the Pack or negotiate territory for themselves, so they come up with the brilliant idea of turning human serial killers into werewolves and sicking them on members the Pack. This would be an exciting plot device but the villainous mutts and serial killers-turned-werewolves are disappointingly two-dimensional characters. Come to think of it, the good guys aren’t very dynamic or charismatic either, but at least they're given a little more development and back-story.

There are also some nagging logistical omissions in the storylines. Since bodies can pile up during werewolf skirmishes, the narrator explains it can take at least half a day to make a body disappear. When Pack brother Logan gets killed, they just bury him in the forest and move on. But didn’t Logan fly in from Los Angeles in order to help his pack? In the human world, didn’t he have a successful career as a lawyer and a long-term girlfriend in Albany? If he had loved ones, they’d want to know what happened to him. His law firm would no doubt report him missing. Yet the novel conveniently avoids going into the ramifications of dealing with the recently deceased.

Another issue I have is the interpersonal dynamics within the Pack itself. Armstrong models much of these dynamics on real wolf behaviour, ie. the pack hierarchy. If Elena is the only female werewolf in existence, then wouldn’t wolf behaviour dictate she belong to the Alpha male, and not the Beta? When Clay betrays Elena and Jeremy spends time taking care of her and teaching her the ways of the werewolf, wouldn’t he want to claim Elena as his mate? Oh wait, but the Alpha is conveniently beyond that, ie. the bonds of brotherhood is stronger than succumbing to instinctual behaviour, or whatever. And why can’t mutts claim any territory again? In any case, it is more convenient for Jeremy to be the benevolent father-figure than for the story to have a potentially interesting love triangle.

I’m also not big on Armstrong’s writing style and Elena’s smart-alecky sense of humour is more jarring than amusing. What’s more, the author’s few attempts at pop culture reference backfires. Badly. When Elena tells her hohum human BF that she’s watching Evil Dead 2 on TV, she quips: “This one’s pure camp… It’s a sequel. Horror sequels suck.” Armstrong may have wanted our heroine to sound clever, but she is embarrassingly unaware that ED2 is the rare classic sequel that surpasses its predecessor in sheer awesomeness! But that isn’t the worse offense. She had to have another character proclaim that Scream 2 is actually superior, pretty much destroying any hipster or geek cred she may be trying to grab.

There was another thing about the novel that bugged me, but I couldn’t put a finger on it until near the end, when Elena’s Pack brother Nick confesses:

“I don’t know how you did it in Toronto all those months,” he [Nick] said with a shudder. “I had to do it a couple times last winter… Anyway, I had to Change by myself…. It was awful. It was, like walk out to the woods, Change, stand there until enough time passed, Change back. It was about as much fun as taking a shit… I’m serious. Come on, Elena. Admit it. That’s what it’s like if you’re by yourself.”

I guess if you’re a Pack werewolf there is no joy in embracing the freedom of running in solitude. Elena ends up making fun of her Pack brother because she was a true loner, not by choice, but by circumstance. What Elena ultimately wants is to belong to a community or family because she never had those things growing up. The running theme of Bitten may be about how supernatural beings (outsiders) try to fit into normal society, but it seems the idea it's perpetuating is that the desire to belong to a group is normal and good. To want to be alone, or worse, to want to live a fulfilling life alone, is bad or undesirable. For me, it seems that Armstrong is an extravert who does not understand non-extravert mentality.

As a werewolf, Elena still clings to the artifacts of human society, like wanting to celebrate Christmas every year. Eventually her werewolf family replaces her need for a human one. But the novel provides no option for her to reconcile her humanity with her werewolf side. Genetic werewolves do not identify with humankind, which makes sense, and neither do made werewolves like Clay, who were bitten when they were young. But what about werewolves like Elena, who were turned as adults, what's more a female adult? Sadly, this potentially interesting theme isn’t explored as deeply as I'd like either, or in the way that I was expecting.

I guess the reason I’m giving this book a hard time is because I was really looking forward to reading this book, and it’s the first in a series of like a dozen. But Armstrong’s universe just didn't turn out as rich and rewarding as I hoped it’d be. Her style, humor and aesthetics seem to be opposite of mine and I didn't find anything particularly remarkable or different in her take on the werewolf mythos. Even though I’m already reading the next book, Stolen, it’s mainly because it's already been lent to me, it’s a quick read and I have a mild curiosity in wanting to know what happens next. But it isn’t strong enough to sustain an interest in following the rest of the Otherworld series. One thing Bitten did do for me though, was to rekindle my interest in going back to the ordinary, yet ultimately much more complex, world of my “serious” novel.

Book 19 – The Spellmans Strike Again

By Lisa Lutz

The fourth installment of The Spellman series!

Hardcover was published earlier in March, pristine copy discovered at fave thrift shop Chainon (Olman was there as I gasped aloud in delight upon sighting it) and reading commenced the next day. After weeks of reading and only getting halfway through a 600+ page novel, TSSA was a welcome break.

If you recall, the first installment was The Spellman Files followed by Curse of the Spellmans. The third in the series, Revenge of the Spellmans was reviewed just last February.

The latest Spellman book does not bring anything startling new. As our protagonist and narrator Isabelle Spellman explains:

I suppose the most defining characteristic of my family is that we take our work home with us. If your family’s job is investigating other people, you inevitably investigate each other. This single trait has been our primary point of conflict for most of my life.

This single trait is also what makes the continuing saga so entertaining and is the primary source of humour (and misery) in this dysfunctional family saga. Isabelle is busy as ever juggling cases both paid and pro bono, getting dirt on her enemies (and family), keeping current boyfriend from becoming Ex-Boyfriend #12 while appeasing her mother by embarking on a series of “lawyer dates”. Not only that. In order to prove to her mother she actually went on said dates, she has to ask her “date” if she can record part of their conversation.

The purpose of the recordings was to prove that the “dates” had the feel of dates – the uncomfortable, bio-swapping, dead-silent, ice-clinking, dread-filled feel of a date. As far as I could tell, I only had to be myself to bring about all that and more.

And that’s not even reaching the first half of the book. After the halfway point, our (anti)heroine “can barely keep track of the galaxy of investigations, deceit, turmoil, clashes, and chaos that [she travels] through every day…” At some point, she even resorts to making a to-do list, itemized in descending order of urgency:

• Free Merriweather.
• Destroy Harkey.
• Discover Mrs. Enright’s angle.
• Solve the doorknob conspiracy at Spellman headquarters.
• Find out what dirt David has on Rae to explain extra gardening.
• Take shower.

Yes, this latest edition is not short on the usual comic hijnks we’ve seen in previous installments, nor any of the usual pop culture references, such as Get Smart and Doctor Who, not to mention some witty homages to Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein and The Wire.

But at 32, we finally see Isabelle starting to grow up, just a little, both personally and professionally (since for the Spellmans there is no separation between the two). Although Isabelle has gazed at her obsessive-compulsive abyss in the past, she has never really confronted or gotten over it, despite the court-ordered therapy sessions. Not only that, her dear old friend (old as in he was an octogenarian) Morty succumbs to “the cancer” at the same time everything else seems to be falling apart. Then her younger sister Rae locks her up in a filing room all night, and she kind of has an epiphany. It sounds messy and all over the place, but eventually, Isabelle ends up solving her cases and tying up some of her personal loose ends -- but in her own terms.

In case you’re curious, I didn’t tell my parents the whole story. They like to keep their cases out of the gray area. You serve the client and the client only. But I lived so many years of my life in that land where rules exist only to be broken that I still sympathize with those who can’t seem to follow them all, including the law breakers. I was one of them once. I guess, if you think about it, I still am. I know that a world of people ignoring absolutes could create a society that cannot function, but I am so sure of my ideals that I make this choice. If, one day, I notice the world slipping and feel that I am truly part of it, I’ll snap back in line. Until then, this is how I’m going to play the game.

Book 18 – Jesus’ Son

By Denis Johnson

I had two doubles and immediately it was as if I’d been dead forever, and was now finally awake.

I had seen the 1999 film adaptation but can’t say I really remember it. When a pile of copies were discounted at the very cool Dog Eared Books in San Francisco, I thought why the hell not? And it was a breezy read made up of chronologically nonlinear, interconnected stories told from the perspective of FH (guess what it stands for), a rather muddled and detached individual due to his being a recovering/relapsing heroin junkie.

This is why drug addict stories can be so oft-putting. A character in a foggy drug haze is like an indulgent excuse to write elliptical narratives full of obliquely descriptive prose. Yet Johnson seems aware of this tendency and for the most part, he strikes a nice balance in his Pacific Northwest indie version of a bildungsroman.

All in all, they were still kind of vaguely boring stories randomly punctuated by bizarre occurrences and thoughtful, sometimes brilliant, prose. The kind of writing that tends to impress and/or inspire college students. Don’t get me wrong, there were some memorable moments, such as when FH becomes obsessed with spying on a Mennonite couple at their home after catching the wife singing in the shower through an open window. I enjoyed the stories well enough, but the writing is the kind that leaves an impression on you, rather than any kind of significant impact.

One thing I will give Johnson credit for is how he describes remarkable events - hilarious or tragic - witnessed by FH at the hospital. It wouldn’t be surprising if the author had also worked as a hospital orderly himself.

One time a man arrived at the emergency ward with a hunting knife stuck in his eye - it was buried to the hilt! - courtesy of his wife. The whole incident – arrival, diagnosis, cure - was described in less than four pages but was worth possibly all the anecdotes combined in Vincent Lam’s novel Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures.

Both books are like collections of well-observed moments and vignettes that sometimes work but are also sometimes uneven in their delivery. At least when Johson writes from the perspective of a mentally unstable person, it rings truer since you get the sense that he’s really been lost in those deep dark places before.

Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn’t know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.

Book 17 – A Fine Ending

By Louis Rastelli

I remember seeing copies of Rastelli’s book on display a couple of years ago at Expozine, the annual small press/comic/zine fair held in a church basement near where we live. I wasn’t curious enough to shell out the 13 bucks for it back then, but I sure didn’t hesitate when I saw it going for $2 at my fave thrift store Chainon. I learned later that Rastelli actually co-founded Expozine, and he was also involved in launching Distroboto, the network of converted cigarette vending machines that sell artwork, comics and other neat stuff all over the city. So Rastelli is a bit of a fixture in the local arts community, the kind of all-encompassing guy who’s dabbled in a little bit of everything. A Fine Ending is his first novel, which is a fictionalized account of his experience living in the Plateau as a struggling young musician.

I was sort of curious about this book because it takes place in and around Montreal’s Plateau as the 1990’s were drawing to an end. I remember visiting Montreal in the summer of 1991 as a fresh-faced high school grad. The Anglos were getting the hell out of dodge, “Á louer” signs were everywhere and it was possible rent a sweet apartment for $200 a month or less. This was back when the Plateau was still considered a working class neighbourhood and beer n’ weed were sold openly at Parc Mont-Royal during the Sunday tam-tam. It was also the best time for non-French speaking students, artists and musician to be living in Montreal, as you could live pretty well on next to nothing since there weren’t a lot of quality jobs going around.

But I also had my trepidations embarking on this novel, as it’s also been described as “a timeless portrait of the spirit of bohemia” and “a warm-hearted account of an artistic community’s defining years.” Ugh. Thankfully, A Fine Ending wasn’t as annoying as the blurbs made it out to be and turned out to be a very unassuming account of the life of a thoughtful, happy-go-lucky twenty-something guy. Rastelli did do a good job in capturing the vibe of that time and his novel is punctuated with interesting descriptions of old landmarks and establishments. Highlights include a first-person account of the ice storm that hit the city in winter of 1998 and the discovery of an abandoned warehouse called the Darling Foundry and the subsequent raiding of its contents.

The parts that most affected me most, unsurprisingly, were the ones about the cats. Cats appear throughout the novel as a kind of litmus test of variable morality and hypocritical values that can be so infuriating in certain people. Rastelli obviously loves kitties and he writes about looking after his friend’s cats while they’re away on tour or taking his cat Bindy for autumn walks in the park. But he also depicts some heartbreaking passages about cats dying needlessly, not due to any blatant cruelty, but from neglect and indifference from self-absorbed twenty-somethings and drug-addicted roommates. You have a feeling those horrible stories were probably all too true.

My only real complaint is the lack of any discernible style in Rastelli's writing, which has a straightforward expository manner but comes across as rather bland. Though the tone is colloquial, there is little in the way of certain turns of phrases that marks a novel with a distinctive voice. Perhaps this was done consciously, to make the story more universal, or perhaps this has something to do with Rastelli being a fully bilingual Montreal native. Here’s a sample:

“I’d recently grilled my own parents for stories from their past, and told Rick about how much more clearly I could imagine the old city from these first-hand stories than I could when reading about it in books. They explained how, in the days when there were still more horses than cars, every few blocks, on the main streets, there would be cisterns full of water for the horses to drink from. When my dad tried to get my mom to remember a particularly large cistern on the corner of Sherbrooke and St. Laurent, I was able to picture the scene perfectly – all these horse-drawn carriages would have been idling right where that big gas station now sits. “

It's an interesting passage about Montreal's past but it also feels like reading a journal entry from an educated European who writes in perfect English, but English isn’t his first language. Which is kind of ironic, considering that Rastelli consciously omitted any Francophone presence, even going so far as to not mentioning the 1995 referendum. Rastelli explains:

“…the fact is that our circle was overwhelmingly anglophone. I used to joke that it was impossible to meet anyone who was actually from Montreal. It was when the Plateau started becoming a melting pot of other Canadians. I can hardly count the number of people I know here from Halifax, Winnipeg, Victoria. In a way that serves the story well, because it keeps it more universal. It's obviously very strongly tied to Montreal, but other cities and artists' scenes aren't terribly different - cheap rents, fairly typical cliques of people."

A Fine Ending was enjoyable, but it’d probably only interest those who are curious to get a feel for what the Montreal scene was like in the 90’s or for those who were actually there and would like to rekindle a bit of nostalgia.

Book 16 - 101 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die

Steven Jay Schneider

I must admit this caught my eye when shopping at Winners - of all places - since books are rather uncommon there and you don’t often see a freaky close-up of demon-faced Linda Blair staring at you from a pile of girlie consumer items!

Though pocket-sized, it was a dense and informative 400+ pages, which I proceeded to actually read from front to back. Here is a fair review, which I think pretty much sums up how I felt. With contributions from over three dozen film critics and academics, the book did a great job appealing to a range of readers, from those with a casual interest in horror flicks to more dedicated cinephiles.

For a general cinephile like myself, I’ve seen over half of the 101 films listed, with over 80% of the ones between 1970 and 2007 (the cutoff year). I discovered more than a handful of films (mostly earlier classics) which I’m curious to check out. But what’s more, the book inspired me to revisit some oldies which disturbed me as a kid on late-night TV (like The Omen and The Howling). Sure, I could easily have discovered some of these eventually for free on the internet, but sometimes it's just nice to have a fun, glossy book to flip through on the couch.

Most naturally, any remotely serious film fan is going to argue about what did or didn’t make the cut. I felt there were definitely some serious omissions, such as:

• Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• Alien
• John Carpenter’s The Thing
• The Changeling (the George C. Scott one, not the Angelina Jolie one)
• Near Dark
• Misery

These could have easily replaced Dellamorte Dellamore, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Hellraiser, the Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters, Ju-On, or The Descent. With the exception of Dellamorte (which was atrociously cheesy and not scary at all - I don’t understand why film geeks love this flick so much), these films were generally okay or pretty good, but they don’t merit as must-sees before you die! Not when you've got some serious classics listed above that have been criminally omitted ;-)

If anyone is curious about the almost full list (it’s missing The Island of Lost Souls), I found one here.

Book 15 – The Glass Castle

By Jeannette Walls

The Glass Castle came to my attention thanks to Kate’s review . I almost picked it up when looking for something to read at the airport (I ended up getting Shutter Island instead), but I’m glad I refrained since I found a cheap copy at my reliable neighbourhood thrift shop Chainon!

I wholeheartedly agree with Kate that this is an excellent memoir. “What I found most moving about this book was the fact that Walls was able to write so openly and honestly about such horrific events in her childhood, but in a way where she was not asking the reader for pity or sympathy. Her life just was what it was, and the events that she survived were heart wrenching, but also freeing and deeply moving.”

Indeed. This is also the best memoir I’ve ever read only because it’s the ONLY memoir I’ve ever read. So I’ll have to be quite discerning if I’m going to read another one! Walls’ story about her family and childhood was compassionate and inspiring and it opened my eyes a little more about the resiliency of people, especially children. I can totally see how this book stayed on the NYT bestseller list for a hundred weeks.

The bulk of the book is about the author’s childhood, the first one-third comprised of when she was between 5 and 7 years old. There is some preternaturally precocious insight, which is likely due to projected hindsight. Which is why memoirs can be so suspicious. It can be difficult to immerse yourself in a self-proclaimed memoir because you suspect some measure of fabrication or embellishment. Or the author must have had a remarkably photographic memory for a child that age, as many of her recollections are quite detailed. In interviews, Walls’ admits she had many reminiscing sessions with her brother Brian, who has “a steel-trap memory”. She also reveals how she left details out of some events because her brother and mother remembered them differently, ie. petting the captive cheetah at the zoo. Since all her family members have read TGC (with the exception of her late father), I would wager that the events in Jeannette Walls life is as true as she could make it out to be.

I think if Olman were to read this, he’d quite admire Rex and Rose Mary “I’m such an excitement addict!” Walls, as they share uncannily similar world views, esp. opinions on parenting. Mama Walls always thought people worried about and fussed over their children too much, which only reinforced their negative behavior. In a sense, she was of the extreme laissez-faire style of parenting - to the point of serious neglect!

And Papa Walls had zero patience for "namby-pambies" - the kind of people who drive everywhere in air-conditioned cars or coddle their kids. He's the kinda dad who throws his own kid in the deep end of the pool and yells "it's either sink or swim, kiddo!". Instead of protecting his children from harm, he taught them to confront their fears on their own. When the Walls lived in Phoenix during summer, the parents insisted the windows and doors be kept open when they slept to let in the fresh air, even when drunks came in to molest 7 year old Jeannette in her bedroom at night! Instead of locking down the house, Rex took the kids out on a Pervert Hunt. Or Jeannette and her brother Brian resorted to chasing out the pedos with a baseball bat.

Despite some deep psychological scarring, the Walls children did grow up to be pretty tough and fearless individuals. They also got fed up with ransacking garbage bins at school, living in a rotting shack and having their alcoholic dad steal their escape money when he needed booze. When barely out of high school, the eldest child, Lori, escaped to New York City (she eventually became a successful illustrator of fantasy books and gameboards). Then when they were old enough, Jeannette and the remaining two siblings followed suit.

Trauma and scarring aside, there was still plenty of love and a refreshing lack of sentimentality. Walls wrote her memoir as really a homage to her parents. Despite their atrocious parenting skills, they were intelligent, open-minded individuals. Rose Mary definitely thought outside the box. And Rex Walls was an almost brilliant, self-taught engineer. They in turn home-schooled all they knew to their children, and taught them a lot about life, things that you’d never learn at school.

We might enroll in school, but no always. Mom and Dad did more of our teaching. Mom had us all reading books without pictures by the time we were five, and Dad taught us math. He also taught us the things that were really important and useful, like how to tap out Morse code… He also showed us how to aim and fire his pistol, how to shoot Mom’s bow and arrows, and how to throw a knife by the blade so that it landed in the middle of a target with a satisfying thwock. By the time I was four, I was pretty good with Dad’s pistol, a big black six-shot revolver, and could hit five out of six bottles at thirty paces… It was fun. Dad said my sharpshooting would come in handy if the feds ever surrounded us.

In a way, the Walls children enabled their parents to also find themselves... when Mom and Dad followed their kids all the way to NYC! They promptly resorted to their old habits, eventually becoming homeless (Rex & Rose Mary lived on the street for two years) and ending up as activist-squatters. In contrast, this was right when Jeannette was living in a swank Park Ave. apartment and married to a safe and steadfast guy. Her parents always refused her offers of financial help, and they eventually found their own community of like-minded counterculture types. When it boiled down to it, Rex and Rose Mary had always stayed true to themselves and never compromised their values. After her father died, Jeannette finally found what was true within herself and this memoir gradually came out of that.

And what a wonderful memoir it was.

Book 14 – The Flying Troutmans

By Miriam Toews

My desire to seek out dysfunctional family fiction in books or movies is pretty limited. First, there’s no need to if you already have one in real life (har har). Second, when you do feel a need, it’s usually because it’s comforting to know there are families out there that are way more dysfunctional than yours. Third, it’s hard to find dysfunctional family dramas that are both good and funny. So I was curious about The Flying Troutmans due to the fairly positive reviews it’s been getting.

After the death of her parents, Hattie Troutman managed to escape to Paris to make a life for herself. One day she gets an emergency call from Winnipeg. It’s her 11 year-old niece, Thebes, calling to say that her mother, Min, had another breakdown and is back at the psych ward. This time it’s serious: Min doesn’t want to see her kids anymore and she wants to die. Hattie comes back home to become the reluctant guardian of Thebes and Logan, her 15 year-old nephew. With Min institutionalized and her length of stay indeterminate, Hattie is more than a little freaked out by her new responsibilities. Impulsively, she embarks on a road trip with her niece and nephew, driving across the States in their beat-up Ford Aerostar in search of their estranged father.

TFT reminded me of another Canadian novel called Skinny . Both stories are about a family torn apart by mental illness (be it anorexia or depression), and both stories focus on the relationship between two sisters: the older being the afflicted one and the younger struggling to get away from the big sis's destructive influence and have a normal life.

Where Skinny was self-conscious, serious and unsympathetic, I found TFT to be fairly heartfelt, engaging and even outright hilarious. There were self-conscious moments for sure, but my overall enjoyment overcame some of its flaws. TFT’s humour also reminded me very much of the Spellman series by Lisa Lutz. You know, the kind of hilarity spawned from an eccentric family dynamic that’s deeply dysfunctional yet also loving at heart. The comedic bantering was so familiar, I wouldn’t be surprised if Toews was already acquainted with The Spellman Files (FYI, Isabel “Izzy” Spellman is also a not-quite-grownup 28-year-old woman).

That being said, Toews nevertheless has a distinctive writing style which can be described as quirky but not annoyingly so. However the technique of using no quotations for dialogue seems to be proliferating amongst contemporary authors, and TFT is no exception. I don’t really mind it so much, but as a trend it’s starting to get a little worn.

I gave her a nudge under the table and passed her a paper bag to wipe the stuff off her face. She put it over her head and drew a face on it, blind. Big cartoon eyes and a mouth where the nose should be. I told her to go get the Frisbee, and without removing the bag she stumbled and weaved and crashed her way to the van. She finally took the bag off her head and she and I threw the Frisbee around for a while before Logan joined in… he decided that we should play Frisbee through the van, with both side doors open and Thebes sitting on the seat in the van. She was entirely down with that and Logan had a blast whipping the Frisbee inches from her face, until he accidentally hit her and her nose bled, she cried, he apologized, said she was stand-up for playing the game, apologized again, and again, she forgave him with a karate kick to the ‘nads, which he handled with an off-hand grace, said he deserved it, the old people shook their heads like bobblehead dolls and we all hit the road once again.

TFT definitely isn’t for everyone. Reviewers from major rags generally disliked TFT mainly because they found the characters and situations improbable and/or trivial. One NY Times reviewer blames “the disagreeable company and the vapid conversation.”

Toews’s penchant for summarized dialogue becomes tedious and distancing, turning scenes into virtual digests, and her inability, or unwillingness, to describe or contextualize — or even to gaze long upon — the passing countryside, is a real handicap when you’re writing a road novel. ‘I drove through the park as fast as I could, which was excruciatingly slowly because the road was narrow and curvy and park rangers were all over the place. It was all desert and sky and scrubby bushes and some oddly shaped trees.’ And that’s it for the spectacular Joshua Tree National Park.

I beg to differ. I actually found the LACK of descriptive flourishes refreshing! Not every writer can pull off prosaic descriptions of stunning landscapes without boring or annoying some readers and this style wouldn’t suit The Flying Troutmans anyway. I don’t necessarily want to be bogged down by exposition when I just want to enjoy the spirited misadventures of an ad hoc family unit and find out what happens next.

And a rather feeble-minded Telegraph reviewer wonders why “it never occurs to Hattie that she could help Logan and Thebes in far more practical ways than taking a road trip.” She found the novel amusing and fluently written, but felt manipulated because as a reader she was forced to “suspend disbelief until every imaginative muscle burns with the effort”. Does this person only read nonfiction and very dry literature or what?

But many open-minded reviewers were more positive, with some female readers absolutely loving it. Perhaps it’s similar to how women have a tendency to find the quirky talkativeness of The Gilmore Girls endearing while many men (and some close-minded women) find it grating. But if you’re one of those who do get TFT, it is a worthwhile read for sure.

As one Quill and Quire reviewer puts it: “This is a book that builds its complexity so subtly and imperceptibly that the inevitable sense of deep engagement feels almost like sleight of hand.” Cuz once you get past the charming humour and wacky veneer, there is also some real emotion to be found there.

Book 13 – Crime Scene Investigation

Crack the case with real-life experts 

Edited & introduced by Cyril H. Wecht, MD, JD 

 A xmas gift from Olman (I don’t normally read Reader’s Digest publications), seeing how I watch those CSI shows somewhat slavishly. I admit it - I enjoy relaxing to the plethora of forensic procedurals available on the idiot box most week nights, such as CSI (I prefer NY over the original Las Vegas). 

 Almost every single episode faithfully follows the same template: 

* a grisly homicide is perp'd n’ portrayed

* elite and smartly-dressed forensic team arrives on the scene 

 * lead investigator makes pithy comment 

 * cut to opening credits 

* back to crime scene where clues and DNA samples are discovered 

* segue to sweet high-tech lab where forensic specialists individually process and examine the evidence and/or 

* segue to over-edited autopsy montage timed to trendy electronic music where nerdy pathologist examines bloody stab wounds and/or  damaged organs * witnesses and suspects then brought in and interrogated by stern-looking yet hunky detective 

* depict flashback of victim’s sordid past before he/she bit it 

* depict chase scene and/or gun fight as police close in on suspect

* perp(s) gets caught and arrested 

I find this very comforting. 

After reading Wecht’s CSI book, which takes a step-by-step look at how a crime scene is undertaken by science and the law, I realize that the CSI and Law & Order type TV shows are merely emulating the sequential stages of an investigation: from the first responders to the crime scene to the inquiry and subsequent forensic analysis to the arrest and painstaking preparations for going to trial. 

Wecht is a well-known and, at times, controversial forensic pathologist and coroner who consulted in some high profile cases, including the JFK assassination and the unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsay. He does a very nice job of gathering noted specialists from various fields across North America and the UK to make contributions, such as the “a day in the life” sections, where we get brief, first-person accounts from a detective inspector, a criminal intelligence analyst, a forensic photographer, a forensic odontologist, a toxicologist, a pathologist, a barefoot morphologist, a geographic profiler and a knot analyst, to name but a few! 

Obviously the book is designed to appeal to the average reader who is into CSI, Law & Order, Criminal Minds and Bones. There are plenty of illustrations, as well as graphic photos of the requisite money shots, ie. crime scenes, dead bodies, bullet wounds. There are also fun little inserts featuring high-profile cases that bear some relation to the subject, ie how Ted Bundy’s dental cast proved that he inflicted the bite wound on one of his victim’s in the chapter called “The Autopsy”, or how profilers predicted that Paul Bernardo, then known as the “Scarborough Rapist”, would become progressively more violent in the chapter about the psychology of crime. 

 Though the final chapter about preparing for the trial was rather dry and ended rather abruptly, I found the book quite engaging and informative and as enjoyable as the best CSI shows out there!

Book 12 – Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures

By Vincent Lam

I was looking forward to reading this debut novel by an emergency doctor who had always fostered a childhood dream of becoming a writer. The story of Lam's literary rise to prominence is interesting: how he caught the attention of Margaret Atwood, who helped him get his book published, the critical accolades which followed, as well as the prestigious Giller Prize and now the television series, which just recently premiered on HBO Canada.

I was also looking forward to this because it’s supposedly be based on Lam’s real-life trials and tribulations as a medical student and eventually an emergency doctor. He also covers his experiences as a physician in international air evacuation and being caught up in the SARS crisis when it hit Toronto.

Yet another reason was because an old friend was coming to visit from Winnipeg and this friend is now finally getting her career going as a GP. I thought reading this book would give me some perspective on her medical background as well as something to talk about as we caught up on our lives. When I brought up that I was in the middle of reading Bloodletting, she merely responded with, “Oh that”.

What do you think of it so far? she asked.

Well, I’m only half way through. But so far, it’s kind of frustrating, I replied.

In what way?

I was hoping it’d give me some interesting insight about being a doctor that’s a little different from what I see on TV. But it’s just annoying people doing stupid things. Like do I have to read about a guy obsessing over a girl who is just awful to him? It kind of skips over how he goes thru med school and how he becomes a doctor, which is what I’d rather read about.

Yeah, my medical friends were all reading it when it came out and had the same opinion. They felt that it was very superficial in its treatment of certain subjects or made an unnecessary big deal about other things. I suppose the book is more interesting to an outsider, but a lot of doctors I know weren’t very impressed. Where are you now in the book?

I’m at the part where Dr Sri is dealing with a potentially schizo patient.

Oh right. The patient who might be schizophrenic, whooooo. She rolled her eyes.

--

I could totally see what she meant. That section where Lam attempts to take the perspective of a mentally deteriorating young man who gets increasingly paranoid of his upstairs neighbours. Awkward. And you never see how Dr Sri deals with this delicate situation. One day Sri shows up at his home to check up on him, and the guy has suddenly gone wacko, screaming and throwing furniture around. The medics arrive and take him away. Cut from Sri to another doctor story. Anti-climactic to say the least.

I think this is the problem with Lam’s book. He wants to squeeze in his collection of personal experiences, but through the perspective of four different characters who are all connected to one another. You have all this range of experiences being portrayed, - some better than others - but you never get a sense of what each character is really going through because Lam lacks the depth and maturity to really take you down that path. He doesn't give you a chance to feel any connection to these characters. Instead he opts to give you vignettes of situations, and ultimately it is very unsatisfying.

SPOILERS AHEAD…

Take Fitzgerald for instance. Here’s a poor sob who never got his girl and you see the first inkling of a developing drinking problem, then the narrative cuts to the experiences of the other characters and when it finally gets back to Fitzgerald, he’s a full-blown alcoholic. Next time you get back to him, he’s caught SARS and requests a “Do Not Resuscitate”. Then he’s gone… like not dead, because you NEVER SEE HIM DIE. He just disappears from the narrative.

Then there’s Sri and Ming, two colleagues in the same dissection class who can’t be any different from each other. Ming is whip-smart, efficient and practical while Sri is more emotionally intelligent. They are interesting foils for each other and could have made the novel more narratively engaging. Like will they become great friends, or lifelong enemies for the rest of their medical careers? But no, these characters become MERE FOOTNOTES for the rest of the novel, becoming background characters for Fitzgerald and Chen.

Oh yeah and then there’s Chen. I suppose he’s somewhat modeled after the author himself, as the final segment of the novel deals with him doing his daily routines at the emergency room, and then he drives home in his BMW, exhausted and sleep-deprived, blasting U2 and repeatedly slapping himself to stay awake. And then it just ends! You never find out if he survives his SARS infection either, or whether he managed to save Fitzgerald.

On the surface, this book has everything going for it, but I didn't really like it. One time, before I had even read this book, I gave it as a birthday gift to a (non-medical) friend, based purely on its consistently high critical praise. And this person also didn’t like it very much either. I’m afraid many otherwise discerning readers were suckered into an over-hyped debut. A quick search on the internet did not find a single bad review of this book. What’s the deal with this?

I don’t necessarily regret reading this novel, as there were interesting parts to be sure, but on the whole it was disappointing and unsatisfying. I could see how this collection of vignettes would translate well on television, and I’d be curious to see how this plays out on the small screen. Let's hope that the over-hyped praise won't affect Lam's potential for becoming a better writer, as he obviously has a bright literary career ahead of him.

Book 11 – Shadow Dance

By Angela Carter

Early in high school, I read a fair bit of high fantasy books. Angela Carter, with her Gothic and surrealistic tendencies, helped me to transition from fantasy into more, well, serious literature.

As her early novels were hard to find, I began by reading her later, more ground-breaking work from the mid-70's to the mid-80's: The Bloody Chamber, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and Nights at the Circus.

Shadow Dance was Carter’s first novel, and has been out of print some time after it appeared in 1966. Apparently Carter was not particularly proud of it. Since her death in 1992, Virago Press had since re-published her early work, which I’m now starting to come across in used bookstores (though I couldn't find the cover of my book to display here). I think these would have been more appropriate for a younger reader, as they didn’t have as much of the intellectualism of her later work.

Similar to her second novel, The Magic Toyshop, Shadow Dance is a piece of Sixties Gothic set in a dismal working class town full of eccentrics and deadbeats. It starts off with a beautiful young woman named Ghislain, who has just been released from hospital and shows up at a bar looking for Honeybuzzard, the man who permanently and savagely mutilated her face. So far so interesting. But the story proceeds to follow the life of lowly antique dealer, Morris. He may look like an El Greco Christ, but he’s trapped in a loveless marriage, racked with guilt because he's partly responsible for Ghislain's attack, yet he still pathetically pines for his missing friend, none other than the mysterious Honeybuzzard. When Honeybuzzard returns to town with a new girl (and cat) in tow, things heat up a little more and get a little more twisted, but not by much. The story is ultimately about Morris and his codependent relationship with his unpredictable, amoral friend, and how he eventually frees himself from all his emotional baggage.

Even though, plot-wise, Shadow Dance was a little disappointing, I still enjoyed reading it. As with many of Carter’s books, reading her stories is like an experience. She once said, "a good writer can make you believe time stands still” and her books always have a kind of timeless way about them. Another critic also wrote: “Few writers have as successfully told stories within stories, created dense, baroque prose, and still, in the end, delivered on an emotional level.”

As a teenager, I always felt a little more grownup reading Carter’s books but there were times where I felt I wasn’t quite mature yet to fully appreciate her work. Now that I’m much older, I’d like to revisit some of her later novels and stories again.