Reading is sexy XIX
[image: by Olaf Hajek via the prosperous_fox]
Dear Friends,
Please make some book suggestions for me! I need to tell my father what to buy me for xmas as he seems incapable of thinking about this for himself.
Thanks!
minouette
This edition of Reading is sexy is all about titles. Terrible, no? Anyway, I finished East, West by Rushdie and needed something lighter than Anna Karenina and asked reynardin who lent me #42 and #43 this year. I complained in hindsight that she had lent me me two memoirs about people who tragically lost members of their immediate family when young and were raised by alcoholics. Fun times. But, reynardin reminded me that I turned my nose up at the Brit-chick-lit fare she had offered. So, clearly, this is my own responsibility.
42. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius I know. Everyone and their dog ... wait, probably not Uncle Bob* has read this book, but not I. I had not read the book because I was turned off by the title, even though it was clear that was half the intent. The self-conscious faux/real vanity was too clever for its own good. However, it is of course an incredible book. I am just the sort of person who would love the fact that he uses the copyright page to add commentary, and makes abundant footnotes and random irrelevant drawings of staplers. If you actually have avoided this book, it is more-or-less non-fiction, account of his early adulthood, the sudden loss of both parents to cancer and his guardianship of his much younger brother. It is quite raw and honest, despite the self-consciousness (his only real tool for keeping the readers at arm's length) and the way in which he purposefully reminds you this is a novel with devices. He tells a story that feels real. His mother in particular is someone you begin to feel that you know. He tells about his family and their failings and dysfunction. He writes about how he was young and did all the stupid things one does in one's first apartment - but he did as parent to his brother. It is like the running dialogue in one's head - he is his own worst critic. He reveals all his fears. His childhood friends are his substitute family. And of course, for all the disgusting young bachelor living, mistakes and false-bravado, he is of course quite amazing himself - starting a magazine with his friends and giving his all to life and parenthood while grieving.
43. Alexandra Fuller. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood reynardin has been trying to get me to read this for some time. It is really quite an amazing and evocative memoir of a hard but full life in a series of countries, beginning with Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Alexandra 'Bobo' Fuller and her older sister are the two surviving children of her parents, who are farmers during the independence struggle. Her father fights the 'terrorists' (who in turn are fighting for majority rule). Her mother can run from charming to relentless drunk, recounting the loss of children and home country. Bobo grows up to see the people of the countries where she lives (Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia) more fully than she was able to in her largely segregated colonialist childhood, and yet is able to make her family seem like full, lovable people.
44. J.J. Steinfeld, Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown. I confess -this one I bought at the U of T bookstore because it was so ridiculously reduced in price and had a marvelous title. It is a book of short stories. There is humour and hidden menace, and terribly earnest Canadian things like Tim Horton's, and whether the péquistes hide anti-semitism, and also many playwrights. Chekhov and Chekov come up again (of The Seagull and the Enterprise fame), as in Rushdie's book of short stories East, West. Steinfeld is more awkward, of course, but he's got something.
*Everyone has an Uncle Bob. I, for instance, have three... though one is a great uncle (who married his brother's fiancée) and is now deceased and one is his son-in-law, the husband of my mother's first cousin, which I think makes him my first-cousin-once-removed-in-law, but a) that's just silly and b) he's almost 80, so I call him Uncle. I always liked him. When I was a child, he tried to teach me Cockney rhyming slang, insofar as was more-or-less suitable to reveal to children. All I remember is "apples and pairs; up the stairs" and trying to wrap my head around a culture for which upstairs required a new moniker. My 'real' Uncle Bob is my father's brother-in-law and he is a character. He was once in the navy and has tattoos and speaks English the way people speak French in rural Gaspésie and is extremely mischievous - a real foil to my dour Aunt Norma. Of all the W family, he, one of the 'out-laws' (in-laws to other families) is the only one who remembers my birthday. This is because he had a major heart attack right before my birth and was air-lifted to Toronto General from the Soo. After a double bypass, he got someone to take him to the maternity ward to meet his new niece. I rather doubt Uncle Bob read this book, but you get the point.