First off, I’d like to say that two books with graphic scenes from WW I is too many for one Canada Reads year.
Second off, it’s not too often that a book manages to work in trench warfare, residential schools and morphine addiction.

That said, this was actually a pretty enjoyable book, with attention to detail, and a cultural sensitivity that I really enjoyed. In fact, I was completely fascinated by the ‘bush Indian’ segments of the book and would have enjoyed seeing more of that instead of all the war stuff, but I guess then it would have been another book, so what the hell.

It was really well written though, flowing seamlessly between settings and narrators, as though set upon the river used to symbolize the character’s progress through the novel.

There’s a lot to think about in there, and a lot of commentary about war that might make some people think hard about world events these days. Sadly, the people in charge there aren’t the types to read books with this many pages…

That’s three of five down for Canada Reads. I’ve finished Al Purdy, but I want to flip around and read a few poems over again before I review it. Cocksure is in the living room waiting for me.

And then A Fine Balance, for whoever said I should read that…

First things first.
I put a bunch of Wolf on hold at the library in a fit of interest, and now they’ve all come in at once, so I might get all militant on you all. How about that.

Misconceptions tracks Wolf’s journey through her first pregnancy and delivery, and gives her considerable and considered insight into the experience, as well as the experiences of her friends and colleagues. She looks at the parts of the experience that the baby books don’t – the loss of self, the fears, and the like. She talks about things we’re all familiar with thinking about now – the infantalization of the mother, a society that claims to revere mothers and babies, but can’t consistantly provide changing tables, and expects her to breastfeed in a public washroom – from an intense and personal place.

And then there’s the part where she talks about her experience of giving birth. Which, as someone who’s considering embarking on the path to having children, struck terror into my heart. The American system, in any case, still routinely handles labours in an illness model that rushes women through, and subjects them to medical procedures that may very well be unnecessary most of the time. She talks a lot about how things are better in Europe, where women take as long as they need, labour standing or sitting or in water or whatever they want, where episiotomy rates are low, and c-section rates lower. She compares it to drug and scissor happy American obstetricians… and never mentions Canada. In any case, I wouldn’t want to have a baby in a US hospital after reading this book.

And I’m not sure that Nova Scotia, where midwives are not licensed to practice, will be much better.

The third part of Wolf’s book discusses her experience as a new mother. The isolation, the depression, the changes in a person’s marriage, all disected minutely, the loss of the pre-motherhood self and selfishness quietly mourned.

I’d recommend the pregnancy and post-partum sections of this book to most any woman (or man!) who’s considering starting a baby. The part about the actual birth process though… well, let’s just say that it’s going to be at least a year before I start to think seriously about conceiving and I was traumatized. So I don’t think I’d want to be reading it if I were pregnant.

It’s compelling and well-researched, and I read it in basically one day, so I think that speaks well for it overall.

Maybe I am exceedingly jaded. Perhaps. Because, while I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy this book, I can’t claim it made much of an impact on me.

I’m sure you’ve heard of it by now… Young man spends time with an old professor engaged in the business of dying, and learns many lessons about living life well. It’s all sensible advice, and some of it is poignant.

But ultimately forgettable. And yeah, I’m a cynic. I’m just not sure I buy the guy’s transformation… did it even really change the writer’s own life?

Yeah.

I would have read this book in one shot, except I started at 7 p.m. on a weeknight, and at nearly midnight, with only about 100 pages left to go, my husband suggested that we might want to sleep at some point.

Oh Ruth Reichl, who can write so eloquently about restaurants and food and people and relationships, words skipping across the page like drops of water in a hot frying pan. Your voyage of self-examination, put down in a way that the reader can’t help but feel your joys, sorrows, triumphs, and disappointments. Where each of us feels keenly the sinking feeling in our bellies that comes from acting so unlike our true selves.

Thank you for this book. Even without the super! bonus! recipes, it’s a marvel.

I think this book was spawned from the success(?) of ‘French Women Don’t Get Fat.’ I assume that the latter book was equally vapid, but I can only hope it was better written.

Don’t get me wrong, the book made some interesting points… well, the same ones about saturated fat and processed food, to be fair… but it was sort of drowned in a lecturing style. There was good info in there, but it was the same 5 pages worth of good info repeated at you over and over and over, the way your mother always told you to stand up straight, thereby guaranteeing you’d slouch even more, just to spite her.

I guess it’s not good if the main thing a book instills in me is the urge to rewrite it, better. If she repeated herself less, got some more good anecdotes (preferably ones that didn’t involve herself, her husband, or her mother… and for heaven’s sake, grown men should not be referred to as Billy, OK) and boosted the number of recipes threefold… it would have been a good read.

Which is to say, that this mostly just saw me through a spell where I was about to climb on a plane and didn’t want to start anything hefty. Yep.

This is great beach or airplane fodder. It’s the perfect light little chick novel (let’s not even call it Chick Lit, because… yeah) for when you have a couple of hours to be distracted.
I mean, to be perfectly fair, at least this one stars French girls in Paris, and a big old dog, and at least this one is genuinely funny. And to be perfectly fair, the initial premise for much of the action that ensues made me laugh out loud, on an airplane, and so it could be a lot worse.
I don’t really remember it, particularly, but I did enjoy the process, and really, what more can you ask?

I bought this one a long time ago and just now got around to reading it. To be honest, it took a while, and a lot of it was pretty dry. But I really liked the opening 150 pages or so. Unfortunately, it’s nearly 600 pages long, and a lot of that is taken up with the monotonies of life in a war-torn / revolution-torn country, and a lot of people expositing on random philosophical ideals. Not to mention that main characters are often referred to by as many as three different names, and that they keep disappearing and showing up again throughout the novel, only to be smooshed together in dozens of strange and wonderful ways….

Some of the writing and descriptions are beautiful and poetic, very pleasant, but then the conversations are stilted and the action, for pages and pages, goes nowhere, and scenes jump from one to the next with little or no connective tissue… And then there’s the stack of poems at the end, allegedly written by the eponymous main character, and to be perfectly honest, by the time I’d finished, I just didn’t have the patience for them.

Overall, I enjoyed long stretches of it and I think I’m glad I read it. But I wouldn’t necessarily suggest you do the same.

The process of reading this book was a strange amalgam of vague pleasure and intense annoyance.
Pleasure because the book was interesting enough, chronicling the efforts of a nearly-30 New York desk jockey deeply rooted in her discontent to escape by cooking all 524 of the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Annoyance because her stupid book contract stemmed out of the stupid blog she conceived to chronicle it originally. And if she can get a book deal for that sort of thing, what the hell is wrong with me?

Anyway, it’s full of that blog-world angst we all know and love, a plethora of culinary disasters, strange characters, family dynamics, offal, eccentric cats, swearing, ranting, small-scale drama, and the word kattywhompus. So obviously it’s got stuff going for it. And I got through it in just a few hours. Though I must admit that I was speed-reading at the end because I wanted it to be over with and off my plate.

It was interesting… but no Ruth Reichl.

So there you have it. I need to get a haircut and get a real blog.

First off, I don’t watch TV (much, if at all) and yet I read John Doyle’s television column in the Globe and Mail with great zeal. There’s a certian wry panache to his writing that fills me with glee over my morning cup of coffee, and I always sigh when I shake open the paper and it’s that other guy’s column instead.

So yes. John Doyle’s writing makes me happy.

And so I had high hopes for his memoir, subtitled, “Growing up Irish in the television age,” and yet… and yet… I have to admit I was a little disappointed. It wasn’t particularly funny… It wasn’t all that wry… It wasn’t filled with that sort of minute detail that delights…

The last few chapters, about Bloody Sunday and what came later, were much better. Finally, something moving to the book. But on the whole it was a little vague and rambling…

So… I don’t know… John Doyle, John Doyle, what can I say. I guess I still love you, since it’s Valentine’s Day, and all.

But I can’t reccomend your book… sorry.