Published: January 28, 2015Dimensions: 5.50 x 8.25 in x .75 in
331 pages
ISBN-13: 9780981052595
Format: Trade Paperback
Binding: Perfect Bound
$25.00
Juvenile Fiction 7+
Full-page colour illustrations
Distributor for Wholesale Orders:
Jenn Sallans, VOLUMES
Tel: 1-888-571-2665
From the Publisher:
Includes the six books in the series: Babysitter Out of Control!, Looking for Love on Mongo Tongo, The Improbable Party on Purple Plum Lane, What Happened in July (selected for Best Books for Kids & Teens - Spring 2013), The Sinking of the Wiley Bean, and, The Queen of Second Chances.
About the Author:
Canadian author, Margaret J. McMaster, published her first book of middle-grade fiction, Carried Away on Licorice Days, in 2008. It was nominated for three literary awards: the Canadian Library Association's 2009 Book of the Year for Children Award, the 2010/2011 Hackmatack Children's Choice Book Award, and the 2011 Rocky Mountain Book Award. In 2009 she started writing the Babysitter Out of Control! series of early chapter books. These amusing, fast-paced adventures include: Babysitter Out of Control!, Looking for Love on Mongo Tongo, The Improbable Party on Purple Plum Lane, What Happened in July (selected for Best Books for Kids & Teens - Spring 2013), The Sinking of the Wiley Bean, and, The Queen of Second Chances. She is a past contributor to the Canadian Children's Annual and her creative non-fiction piece, After All These Years, was shortlisted for the 2006 CBC Literary Award. So Much Potential, a novel set in the Lake Erie fishing industry, was published in 2013. It was a Starred * Selection in Best Books for Kids & Teens - Spring 2014.
Published: September 8, 2014
Dimensions: 5.25 x 8.5 in
43 pages
ISBN-13: 9780981052588
Format: Trade Paperback
Binding: Perfect Bound
$12.95
Distributor for Wholesale Orders:
Jenn Sallans, VOLUMES
Tel: 1-888-571-2665
From the Publisher:
In this thrilling conclusion to the Babysitter Out of Control! series, Stewart finds himself in an unusual predicament as Mrs. Chairbtottom and Colonel Peabody put the finishing touches on their upcoming wedding.
Book Six in the Babysitter Out of Control! Series
About the Author:
Canadian author, Margaret J. McMaster, published her first book of middle-grade fiction, Carried Away on Licorice Days, in 2008. It was nominated for three literary awards: the Canadian Library Association's 2009 Book of the Year for Children Award, the 2010/2011 Hackmatack Children's Choice Book Award, and the 2011 Rocky Mountain Book Award. In 2009 she started writing the Babysitter Out of Control! series of early chapter books. These amusing, fast-paced adventures include: Babysitter Out of Control!, Looking for Love on Mongo Tongo, The Improbable Party on Purple Plum Lane, What Happened in July (selected for Best Books for Kids & Teens - Spring 2013), The Sinking of the Wiley Bean, and, The Queen of Second Chances. She is a past contributor to the Canadian Children's Annual and her creative non-fiction piece, After All These Years, was shortlisted for the 2006 CBC Literary Award. So Much Potential, a novel set in the Lake Erie fishing industry, was published in 2013. It was a Starred * Selection in Best Books for Kids & Teens - Spring 2014.
Date Published: July 8, 2013
Page Count: 91
Dimensions: 5.25 x 8.5 in
Binding: Perfect Bound
ISBN13: 9780981052571
Ages: 12+ (Hi-Lo)
$12.95
Distributor for Wholesale Orders:
Jenn Sallans, VOLUMES
Tel: 1-888-571-2665
(also available from Library Services Centre)
From the Publisher:
Andy Towell's dream of becoming a commercial fisherman is jeopardized when a co-worker goes missing.
About the Author:
Kingsville author, Margaret J. McMaster, published her first book of middle-grade fiction, Carried Away on Licorice Days, in 2008. It was nominated for three literary awards: the Canadian Library Association's 2009 Book of the Year for Children Award, the 2010/2011 Hackmatack Children's Choice Book Award, and the 2011 Rocky Mountain Book Award.
In 2009 she started writing the Babysitter Out of Control! series of early chapter books. These amusing, fast-paced adventures include: Babysitter Out of Control!, Looking for Love on Mongo Tongo, The Improbable Party on Purple Plum Lane, What Happened in July, (selected for Best Books for Kids & Teens - Spring 2013), and, The Sinking of the Wiley Bean. She is a past contributor to the Canadian Children's Annual and her creative non-fiction piece, After All These Years, was shortlisted for the 2006 CBC Literary Award. So Much Potential is her first novel for teens.
Available at Chapters and Amazon
E-book available at Kobo and Kindle for $3.99
Children's authors in Canada are blessed with outstanding children's choice literary awards. What makes these programs so special is that the children themselves do the reading and the voting - truly a win/win situation for both the authors and their young readers.
It takes a great deal of organization to make these book award programs a success. To start with, volunteer committees read the many titles submitted, and, after much debate, choose what they consider to be the ten most suitable. Once the libraries and schools have the books in their possession, groups of students meet with a librarian or teacher at regular intervals to bring the books to life through activities and discussion. Children are also able to post reviews online.
This process starts in September after the students start school and finishes in April when the children vote for their favourite books. Before the awards are handed out, the authors go on tour to meet the students and, hopefully, inspire the next generation of authors.
I have been thrilled to have Carried Away on Licorice Days a part of the children's reading experience and would like to thank everyone who has given so selflessly of their time to make the Hackmatack Children's Choice Book Award and the Rocky Mountain Book Award such a rewarding experience.
If you'd like to read more about
Carried Away on Licorice Days, as well as my other children's books, please click
here.
In this week's column, Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente tells her Facebook Friends: "I love you, even if I don't know who you are. But you're really not that interesting. And to be honest, neither am I". She goes on to say that "self-disclosure is highly overrated" and "narcissism is the signature pathology of our time".
Many of my flesh-and-bones friends have these views. In fact, I did too until I asked myself what would make Facebook a valuable experience. For me, it boiled down to being part of a community of fellow writers. They are "Friends" because that's the term Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, gave them, but they might be more correctly termed "fellows", defined as persons in the same position, involved in the same activity, or otherwise associated with one another (Oxford dictionary). Of my Facebook Friends, there are probably fewer than five I know personally, although most I am familiar with professionally. Included in the fellowship are writers of children's books, crime novels, romance novels, and literary fiction. There are broadcasters, columnists, academics, and actors. By and large, their posts have to do with their current project, daily word counts, interesting articles they've come across, and, blessedly, little diversions that bring a smile and help to break up the long, solitary hours of writing.
Mark Zuckerberg is Time magazine's Man of the Year for 2010. Margaret Wente makes the observation that Time's circulation has dwindled to 3.4 million while Facebook has 500 million users. Perhaps it would have been more significant if Facebook had made Time its Magazine of the Year. The point Wente makes is that people don't really care what Time has to say any more. They want to know what their Friends have to say.
I am one of those people that finds their Facebook Friends witty, inspiring, and extremely talented. It astounds me to learn what author Jane Yolen can produce in a day, what fantastic dishes Margaret Buffie has come up with this week, what lovely quilts Barbara Haworth-Attard is designing, and the trials and tribulations Giles Blunt is experiencing in his travels. Andrew Pyper and Susan Juby are wickedly funny. Paul Nicholas Mason posts the best YouTube videos. I'm grateful to them. When I was sick for two weeks with laryngitis and a sinus infection, I consoled myself with the Vicar of Dibley, which someone on Facebook introduced me to.
Even though I don't post regularly, I hope that I've passed along a thought or greeting or reference that touched someone else. Perhaps, like life itself, Facebook is what you make it. I've enjoyed Margaret Wente's keen observations in her columns and books throughout the years. I think she would be a fascinating Facebook Friend to have, because my Friends are the best.
A helpful thing to know if you're scrounging around the library trying to find Alexander McCall Smith's books, is that the author's last name is not Smith, but McCall Smith, so you need to turn yourself around and head for the McC section.
The Charming Quirks of Others is the seventh instalment of the Isabel Dalhousie series, a comfortable set of books you can read for their philosophical arguments without having to worry about impending distress. There is a little mystery to be solved but it does not involve police departments, S.W.A.T. teams, or the forensic sciences. Everything will be worked out in such a patient, civilized manner that the reader will scarcely be aware of it. In fact, many reviewers have mentioned that in this particular series of McCall Smith's, nothing really happens, and while this is not exactly true, it seems true. Part of this, I think, has to do with McCall Smith's splendid control, piloting the reader down a meandering river on a slow barge, with instructions to take in the sights and relax.
Alexander McCall Smith has been so successful in his writing that he could very well sit back and relax himself, but he maintains a hectic schedule of public appearances, and is, as his appearance at the
2008 National Book Festival demonstrates, a very witty and engaging speaker. This is, indeed, a charming man, with a charming book to sell.
What happens when you put two of Canada's most accomplished writers in a car and set them off on a road trip through the United States for a couple of months? You get a book. In the case of Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds, you get Breakfast at the Exit Cafe, a fascinating memoir peppered with historical and literary references, not only of the states they travelled in, but of their lives as well.
They set out from Vancouver on December 21st, 2006 after Simonds' three-month term as writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia expired. Home is a small town near Kingston, Ontario. They figured they could escape Canada's treacherous winter driving, take a languid break from their prolific writing careers, and experience American culture firsthand, by taking the southern route. It didn't work out exactly as planned. Canada enjoyed unseasonably balmy weather while bizarre climate-change patterns wreaked havoc on American roads; far from leaving writing behind, a book, this book, started taking shape; and culturally, discovering whether there is any "steak" at the heart of the infamous American "sizzle", proved to be a meaty exercise.
Grady and Simonds' trip takes place during Bush's second term in office. "Shock and awe" has proven expensive beyond even the wildest estimates. Having stripped its own coffers, the administration is borrowing heavily from China, and while the economy's official collapse is a couple of years away, grassroots' America is already as depleted as the soil on the Southern plantations. Eventually the electorate will take the keys away from the guy who wrecked the car, but at this point it is a mere speck of optimism on the horizon.
It is in this setting that Grady and Simonds travel the country as curious outsiders, assessing the state of the union, one American at a time. The pair are comfortable bedfellows, committed and tolerant of each other despite their dichotomies. Undeniably though, the Canada/U.S. marriage is more complicated, with Canadians prone to offer unbidden directions to the driver from the back seat of the car, and Americans, distracted and disinterested. Sometimes it truly is the steak that is sizzling, sometimes not.
Like all journeys, all good stories do come to an end, as, regrettably, Breakfast at the Exit Cafe does. But perhaps Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds could be persuaded to take another trip somewhere, someday, and let us all ride along in the back seat once again.
When you are mentally ill, escape is on your mind most of the time. To escape the thoughts in your mind, to escape the people, the way they look at you, to escape the unhappiness of your life.
So writes Margaret Trudeau in
Changing My Mind, a chronicle of escapes tempered with the reasons behind them. There are apologies for bad behaviour and hurts caused; recognition of two failed marriages and bewildered children; an inability to cope. When the history of your life has been dished out over the years in largely snide and snippy journalism, a book is a chance to tell your side of the story.
Surprisingly, Pierre and Margaret Trudeau were together only nine years. Margaret married too young; Pierre, too old. They were polar opposites trying to operate in a pressure-cooker environment. Postpartum depression from a rapid succession of babies went unheeded. A spell had been cast over the enchanted kingdom. Fortunately for Margaret, a couple of brave souls along the way had the temerity to suggest that she might have bipolar disorder. This gentle steering had a positive effect, even if treatment options were primitive in the beginning.
By no means is Changing My Mind the complete story. The husbands left behind in the escapes end up raising the children. Margaret's second husband, Fried Kemper, is dismissed very lightly. The years when Sacha and Justin brought wives and children of their own into the picture are dropped in almost as afterthoughts. In a book heavy with the retelling of Beyond Reason and Consequences, it is too bad. I'd already read those books. I wanted to see how the present was working out. Ironically, it isn't until the anecdotes in the Afterward that the book takes on a certain charm. And then, abruptly, it is over. Hopefully there is a follow-up piece in the making.
On June 18th, 1940, four days before France surrendered to Germany, Churchill announced to the British people: "... the battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin." As a result, the period from July to mid-September, when Hitler tried to crush the Royal Air Force and bring the British people to their knees by bombing them to smithereens, became termed, "
The Battle of Britain".
With Wings Like Eagles is Michael Korda's account of how 1,000 RAF pilots and a population as pugnacious and stubborn as its leader, fought back under relentless day and night bombing attacks.
Huge areas of London including Buckingham Palace, the Parliament Buildings, Westminster Cathedral, the East End docks, the area around St. Paul's Cathedral (except, miraculously for the Cathedral itself), blocks of office buildings and residences, airfields, radar stations, factories, and fuel storage depots, were pummelled. Although the cities of Southampton, Liverpool, Manchester, Swansea, Cardiff, and Bristol were also hit, London was bombed for 76 consecutive days. By the time it was over, 23,000 civilians were dead and 32,000 were wounded.
Author Vita Sackville-West and her husband, MP Harold Nicolson, watched the aerial combat above their heads from their famous garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. They, like the rest of the population of England, grew accustomed to seeing things fall out of the sky: airmen, empty cartridge cases, downed planes. RAF pilots would be shot down in the morning and be back in the air by afternoon. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding would not let his pilots fly over the Channel because he had no way of retrieving them before they died of hypothermia if they were shot down. At least if they came down over land, they could be put back into action. Heavily outnumbered in both planes and pilots by the Germans, the RAF could not afford to lose even one. Downed Spitfires were quickly patched and put back into service or salvaged for their metal.
It was a different world from the one we live in today. Linda Lear reports in her biography of Beatrix Potter that electricity arrived at Potter's Lake District farm in 1936, just three years before the war started. Television had not been invented. There was no penicillin yet. Radar was brand new but pilots didn't have it in their planes at the beginning, and what was eventually installed was rudimentary.
By September 1940, Hitler realized that the British were not going to surrender and the storms in the Channel were now too fierce for him to launch an invasion. The Battle of Britain ended. Although bombs continued to fall on Britain for the remainder of the war, nothing like those relentless bombing raids would occur again. In a speech to the House of Commons, Churchill acknowledged his country's debt to the RAF by saying, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." No mean writer himself, Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his account of the war.
In With Wings Like Eagles, Michael Korda makes the Battle of Britain come alive, with all the excitement, fear, and courage that was its trademark. Korda, who was once the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and is the author of many books, has an easy and engaging style.
My curiosity about Lady Antonia Fraser started with the tour of her writing space or "Eyrie" as she calls it, at the top of her Holland Park house. She refers to her husband, Harold Pinter, occasionally dropping in and opening the window, so it must have been filmed prior to Dec. 24th, 2008. Must You Go?, the title of her tribute to Pinter and their life together, is the question that he posed thirty-three years earlier that shook up their lives.
It was 1975. Pinter was already a famous playwright and Lady Antonia was, and still is, one of Britain's most readable historians. Both were eighteen years into marriages with other people. She had six children ranging in age from 8 to 19. What their reactions were is a mystery. Apparently things were dissolved and resolved in very civilized fashion on her side with Pinter and her husband, MP Sir Hugh Fraser, hashing things out over drinks. By contrast, Pinter's wife, actress Vivien Merchant, refused him a divorce for years then drank herself to death; his son changed his name and cut himself off. Lots of relationships are dragged to their death by much less but Pinter was steadfast in his devotion to Lady Antonia and they weathered it through. His poetry to her alone is the stuff that makes the hardest heart swoon.
Professionally, Lady Antonia never took a back seat to her husband's career but her own prodigious writing is barely touched on in Must You Go?. She edited her diaries to capture the essence of the love story and focuses sharply on Pinter and his career, to which she supplied copious support. It is obvious that they loved making their lives with each other.
A lovely read like this is prompts further research. When I dug into Lady Antonia's life I discovered that she ascended from a talented and well-connected family: her mother, Lady Elizabeth Longford, being a historical biographer herself, and two of her seven siblings, Robert Pakenham and Rachel Billington, authors as well.
No doubt official biographies of Lady Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter are in the works. I will be first off the mark to read them, my appetite having been whetted by Must You Go? which leaves out a good deal more than it explains, but which is fascinating nonetheless.
Margaret Atwood a sheet-shifter? Who knew? Actually, I didn't know what that was until I read Marjorie Harris' book, Thrifty: Living the Frugal Life with Style. The writers, artists, and actors who contributed their tips to augment Harris' have clever ideas, from how to throw a party to how to pack a suitcase. Like them, I was raised in a DIY household where making something from "scratch" was a given and nothing went to waste.
Thriftiness is not to be confused with cheapness. "Thrift is so muddled with the idea of cheapness that it's a source of great irritation to frugal types. Cheap is someone who buys based only on price, whose life experiences are guided by price, and who would probably give up something sublime because it costs too much," Harris maintains.
I know both types well, having vacillated between them myself. At this time of my life, which I call the third trimester, I'm leaning heavily on the thrift side because I'm not about to give up the occasional indulgence for the sake of a dollar. I've also found the simplest pleasure in conferring with friends on how they save money, time, and aggravation in their day-to-day living. Over the past week I discovered that I've unnecessarily lost accumulated Aeroplan miles because I thought I had to take a flight every year when all I had to do was give over the card when making a purchase at one of its sponsor businesses. I also learned how to earn reward miles at the same time I'm accumulating points for groceries. Fortunately, it's never too late to learn.
For readers unfamiliar with sheet-shifting, it refers to the practice of taking the bottom sheet off the bed for laundering and moving the top sheet down. Atwood recommends getting rid of fitted bottom sheets for this reason. And for those of us who have more queen or king-size sheets than we need, these can be cut down and hemmed to twin-size.
There are, of course, too many practical ideas in this book to cram into this short space but there are a couple of web-sites Harris mentions that I'll pass along, such as www.couchsurfing.org and www.homelink.ca for free room and board when travelling. And if you want to see what a great idea, a sewing machine, and some ingenuity can do: www.theuniformproject.com.
Thrifty concludes with The Top 20 Tips for Living The Frugal Life with Style. Number one, and to my mind, the most important, is understanding the difference between a want and a need. The book handily covers how to satisfy the needs so that there'll be something left over for the all-important wants.
There are 572 pages of writing. I didn't skip a word. All I knew about Roald Dahl when I started was that he wrote James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and that his wife, the actress Patricia Neal, had suffered a massive stroke. I wasn't sure the rest would be interesting. It wasn't. It was spellbinding. Author Donald Sturrock, a self-admitted neophyte in the biography game, held me until the last word.
At six-foot-five, Roald Dahl was a giant in the field of children's literature, long before it had any cachet. In fact, he had already achieved success writing short stories and screenplays for adult audiences but not to the same fame. He was of Norwegian stock, living first in Wales, then in England, and his father died when he was three. His education at English boys' schools was brutal and sadistic. His flying career during World War II was terminated in a plane crash that left him with headaches and chronic back pain for the rest of his life. His subsequent posting in America afforded him access to millionaires and movie stars. His life with one, Patricia Neal, was tested by the death of his daughter Olivia, a freak accident that almost killed his infant son, and a stroke that temporarily paralyzed his wife. After 30 years of marriage and five children, he divorced Neal and married Liccy Crosland, whom he adored.
He was a determined man in everything he did and a colossal pain in the neck when he felt circumstances warranted it. The book provides valuable insight into the tricky author/agent/publishing world and is a wealthy historical reference on British/U.S. secret intelligence during the Second World War. Interestingly, Dahl's daughter, Tessa, became an author herself, as did her daughter, Sophie, who is a world-renowned model.
Sturrock took pains to unravel fact from the fiction on this famous storyteller. The research and construction of the tale are meticulous; his writing, inspiring. I came away from it wanting to read it again.
When you're reading one of Louise Penny's Armand Gamache mysteries you naturally want to eat. Her latest, Bury Your Dead, is full of aromatic coffees and flaky croissants. It is also replete with one of the most detailed and imaginative plots she's ever cooked up; or rather, three intricate, interwoven plots. In order to follow one of these plots it's best to read The Brutal Telling beforehand.
Penny has had trouble with readers and reviewers revealing too much, which is why I was careful not to read anything before I got the book. (Rest assured, there are no spoilers here.) In her appeal for discretion, which can be found on her
blog, she asks the public to take into consideration that
Bury Your Dead took her a whole year to write. Just a year? That's a remarkable feat considering the amount of planning and research involved and says something about Penny's discipline and drive. In the process, she has created an international audience interested in the culture of Quebec and its relationship with the rest of Canada - illustrating again that we need not be so sensitive about setting our novels in Canada. Readers will figure it out, just as they've figured out novels set in just about every other location around the world.
Bury Your Dead is meaty, cosmopolitan, and intriguing. Quebec City, which provides the setting of the central plot, is portrayed as the cultural treasure that it is. And indeed, that is one of the wonderful things about living in Canada. You don't need to go to France to immerse yourself in the French language and food and overall French-ness. You don't even need a passport. And Penny is doing wonders for Quebec's image worldwide while at the same time establishing herself as one of the world's best crime novelists.
Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived. Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and aspiring writers and dog lovers; together we became a small corporation.
So writes Gail Caldwell about her friend, Caroline Knapp, in
Let's Take The Long Way Home. Caroline died in June 2002 of stage-four lung cancer at the age of forty-two. Gail was fifty-one. They were both writers who lived alone and cherished their dogs. After their daily solitude of writing, they'd meet to walk the dogs on the path around the Cambridge reservoir; or they'd scull the Charles River. These fresh-air passions grounded them.
They'd met briefly at a party in the early 90s when Caroline was a columnist for The Boston Phoenix and Gail was the book review editor at The Boston Globe. A few years later they connected at the reservoir, referred to each other by their dog trainer who thought they'd like each other. Caroline's memoir, Drinking: A Love Story, had just been released and she was on the talk show circuit. If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs: publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave, Caldwell writes.
Underpinning Caldwell's artful words is the finely-tuned emotion of a parting that came too early and too unexpectedly for anything but the hard cry of sorrow. What makes this such an overwhelmingly good read is the story of Gail and Caroline's friendship, because not all promising friendships endure, and it's satisfying to read of one that did.
When Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme unravelled in 2008, writer, artist, and former editor-in-chief of Self magazine, Alexandra Penney, was one of its victims. She had been invested with Madoff's firm for 20 years, earning a reasonable 10% return on her life savings. Overnight, it was gone. Actually, it'd been gone for some time but that wasn't known until the financial meltdown when panicked investors tried to redeem their holdings. Understandably, she was thrown into paralyzing shock.
Penney started climbing out of the hole by writing a blog called
The Bag Lady Papers, which has evolved into this book. The title refers to Penney's lifelong fear of ending up a bag lady. Reaction to her blog was not all sympathetic. Some readers snickered at her having to sell her Florida house, fire her housekeeper, and use the subway, and it's true that Penney had to recalibrate her privileged existence to live ... pretty much like the rest of us. Taken another way though, she had further to fall, and that can hurt the most.
The Bag Lady Papers is subtitled: the priceless experience of losing it all. Ironically, what Penney discovered was that she still had her education (which is one thing no one can take from you), her reputation, and supportive friends. These have helped her turn things around.
Although she takes the reader through her life before and after the fall, I wondered why her long-time companion and her son were largely absent from the text. These were odd omissions but did not detract from this story of a woman not content to wallow in despair.
Unlike the Italians, who are renowned for their coffee, the French cannot make a decent cuppa. With all those lovely outdoor cafes and sumptuous pastries, they've got all the visuals going. Why can't they follow through with the coffee? David Lebovitz, in The Sweet Life in Paris, can't figure it out either. Is it the type of beans? Do they roast them too long? Are they reusing them?
After I read his take on French coffee, I realized that I was asking myself the same questions after my transatlantic crossing on board the Queen Mary 2. Everything about this voyage was first rate: the food, the service (words cannot express), the room, the entertainment - I haven't stopped raving about it since I got home - but the coffee was terrible. It was sour, bitter, harsh. My mouth puckered when I sipped it. I wondered if they were making it out of seawater. I can testify that the QM2 chefs can make everything else under the sun (and I came home with the waistline to prove it), but a decent cup of coffee seems to elude them. Switching restaurants or ordering espresso didn't make a difference.
In The Sweet Life in Paris, David Lebovitz exposes France's idiosyncrasies in his easy and entertaining manner; as in the Catch-22 of getting a visa: you need an electric bill to get your visa, but you can't get an electric bill without a visa. Then there was the painter who wouldn't leave until he was thrown out. Of course, a lot of things that make you tear your hair out provide amusing anecdotes down the road.
I think that Lebovitz writes with the same intensity as Mireille Guilliano (of French Women Don't Get Fat fame) in trying to explain the uniqueness of French culture to the rest of the world. Actually, I get that part. What I don't get is why the French, and the QM2, can't make a decent cup of coffee.
David Lebovitz's specialty, of course, is food, and if you'd like to indulge in the food he talks about, access his
web-site. You won't regret it.
Last weekend I was treated to a wedding ceremony in the park as I read two motivational books, The Power by Rhonda Byrne, and, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Future by Michael J. Fox. I was sitting in my umbrella chair enjoying the breeze off the lake when a bridal party swooped in, had a lovely 20-minute ceremony, then swooped up to the Lakeside Pavilion for drinks and hors d'oeuvres. All were invited, they announced, but I didn't want to spoil my supper.
It seemed to me that Byrne's book reworked the themes in her bestseller, The Secret, but these are principles I heartily subscribe to. I don't think The Law of Attraction and the Power of Gratitude
originate with her, but it was good to be reminded of how they work in my life, even if it's in a subtler fashion than her examples. One that I seem to have mastered is visualizing the parking space I'm going to need as soon as I start my journey. This works even with the impossibly full hospital parking lot.
In The Power, she introduced me to something new:
If someone has something you want, be as excited as though you have it. If you feel love for it, you are bringing the same thing to you.
Be glad for another's good fortune, in other words. The universe will see that you
Sarah Blake's debut novel, The Postmistress, has justifiably garnered many excellent reviews. In my opinion, it is the perfect book club selection, which is why it is going on the 2011 list. Set in Cape Cod, Europe, and London in 1941, two years into the Second World War and just before the United States became fully committed, the book is sure to evoke many memories.
In the
trailer, Sarah Blake describes watching a postmistress in Cape Cod sorting mail and wondering whether she ever read the postcards coming through. This became the heart of
The Postmistress: a decision to hold back a letter that was going to cause grief at a precarious time in a person's life.
Authors are invariably asked where they get their ideas. In my experience, ideas come from the "what if" questions. What if the mail wasn't always delivered? In what time in history would this really matter? What would the news be? A question I posed to my mother when I was a child and first learned about the concentration camps was: Why didn't somebody do something about it? For me, this was the most significant question Sarah Blake tackled and I thought her prose hit the mark.
When you wake up in the middle of the night after a fitful sleep, you wage a debate within yourself over what to do. I decided to go back to the sunporch and open the sliding glass doors to the cool night and finish reading Anna Quindlen's new novel, Every Last One. When I finish it, I'm going to start Ayelet Waldman's Red Hook Road that just arrived from the library. Both these books involve a family tragedy. Having read the reviews, I know that Waldman's is set at the beginning. Quindlen's is about halfway through. Both writers excel at portraying family dynamics and internal angst. I wonder whether they live their lives at this level or are just extremely intuitive. How much do you have to bleed for your work?
My sunporch looks over our small private garden that is very black right now. During the day it is too hot and humid to open the doors. There is no stillness over four central air conditioners humming in the vicinity. Right now though, all I can hear are the night noises, mostly funny little insects that prefer to tell their stories at night, a dog that barks for fifteen minutes until someone lets it in, some light traffic in the distance. I think of my horse pastured down the road and hope he is enjoying the coolness before the bugs and heat start tormenting him. His pasture is located near the mushroom farm, which, at this moment, my olfactory glands tell me, is being aired out.
I'd read half of Every Last One on vacation, mildly wondering where this lovely family's life was going to lead, a little fearful that subtle clues were suggesting something ominous. I fervently wanted to believe that nothing bad was going to happen. But, having read other of Quindlen's books, I was pretty sure I was wrong. And I was. Something bad does happen. I'm at the part now where the mother is trying to cope with her guilt. What's happened is going to preclude the possibility of a happy ending. You wouldn't read it for that. You would read it to see how Quindlen does it. You'd read it to touch on emotions in yourself that might be dormant. You'd read it because you're up in the middle of the night.
A bird has just started chirping to let me know that dawn is breaking. I'm tired enough now that sleep might take. The roosters have starting crowing.
Again, while vacationing, I brought along my Kobo eReader and read
Tom Rachman's debut novel,
The Imperfectionists, in record time. I don't think I'm imagining things when I say that I read faster with the eReader. Yesterday I read that eBook sales are now surpassing hardcover sales, so it would make sense for these formats to be released simultaneously. Still, some publishers insist on lagging behind a couple of months until they sell those hardcovers. I'm glad Random House didn't wait.
Aptly enough,
The Imperfectionists is the story of the transitions an international newspaper out of Rome makes through the years as it's pummelled by the same outside forces pummelling the book industry at present. Rachman tells the story through the mini-biographies of people connected in one way or another with the paper. The effect is much like
Paris, Je T'aime in that these little vignettes tell their own story and a much larger story.
Rachman is receiving well-deserved praise for this novel. He lets the story progress through dialogue and internal dialogue, keeping the description and backstory light. This technique gives immediacy and tension to the work and I have no difficulty adding my praise to those of the critics.
At the time that John Irving's The World According to Carp was published in 1978, 912 followers of the religious leader, Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced punch; the serial killer, Ted Bundy, was captured in Florida; the world's first test-tube baby was born; and, Harvey Milk was assassinated. Jimmy Carter was president; the first personal computer, the Commodore PET, had just come on the market; and a little startup company called Apple was launched. If I looked through Irving's interviews I'm sure I could discover whether he handwrote or typed the manuscript but certainly there was nothing but a literal interpretation of "cut and paste" available.
You can certainly read The World According to Garp without understanding the social context. Yes, I was alive then, with a husband and two small children, and it was very different from life today. Ever conscious of his children's safety, Garp would certainly have his kids outfitted with cellphones; have a Twitter account that he'd update daily, then update again when he realized he'd been too flippant with words; never let his kids go swimming where there's an "under toad" unless he wanted a visit from Children's Aid; and harbour secret messages regarding his relationship status on his Facebook account. And the book would have been so safe and so dull.
Life abounds in The World According to Garp because it, like life in the 70s, was so serendipitous. I'm not the least bit sorry that I found this treasure now, thirty-two years after its publication.
*** Camilla Gibb is back with a new novel, The Beauty of the Humanity Movement. She's featured in today's Globe and Mail and is on the cover of Quill & Quire. She's been busy behind the scenes for some time, serving as a judge for a couple of literary awards and working on the educational front, but for fans like me it's been too long since Sweetness in the Belly. I had the pleasure of hearing her speak at the Lakefield Literary Festival a few years ago and discovered that her dynamic writing comes from a highly-evolved mind. ***
*** Big buzz right now too for Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists. The preview in MacLean's magazine was sufficiently enticing for me to put it on reserve, until I found that it's already available as an eBook on the library site. Obviously few people have discovered it yet, as I was able to download it right away onto my Kobo eReader. While I was doing this, I discovered that the Kobo upgrade is available which, among other things, makes it possible to change the font size of any download. Previously there was a problem with some eBooks coming from Adobe Digital Reader, but that problem has been rectified. ***
*** Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny, which is being released in September, is now available for reserve at the library, as is The High Road by Terry Fallis. ***
*** What has happened to the North American distribution of Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser? There's a big hold-up getting it from the library or buying it on-line from Chapters/Indigo but it's readily available in the U.K.. I spent several moments fondly turning its pages in Harrod's Waterstone's store last month. ***
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