listersgirl | Booktalk

Margaret Atwood Moral Disorder

This is a collection of short stories, in chronological order, about one woman and her life growing up. I didn't realize that right away, and the first half of the book is in the first person, so I thought I was really clever when I made the connection. :D The benefit (to the reader) of doing it as short stories instead of a novel is that each piece was perfectly formed on its own, and all the boring bits of life could be skipped, without it seeming uneven. My only real complaint is that the move from first person to third person was jarring, and I felt like I lost something of the narrator.

Christopher Brookmyre A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil

Oh, I read this far too fast and then it was over and I was sad, because I love his books so much. This one worried me a little at first, because it was partially about a group of kids (and then about how their lives intersected through a violent crime later in life), and I was concerned it would be too far out of his zone of excellence. But I shouldn't have worried. I totally enjoyed it.

Christopher Buckley No Way to Treat a First Lady

Funny, although not as good as some of his other novels. Clearly inspired, at least in part, by the Clinton administration, although he takes pains to refer to the Clintons in various parts of the book so that he can point to them and say "see, not about the Clintons at all, because there they are!"

Joshua Ferris Then We Came to the End

This I picked up because it was mentioned in one of Nick Hornby's collections of book columns. It's about a group of ad execs in a dying ad agency, told in the "we" voice by an unnamed narrator (or possibly a little bit of every character -- that's one of the things I really liked about it). It slipped occasionally when the reader got to see/hear things that the narrator(s) wouldn't have seen, but generally it was great.

William Gibson Burning Chrome

Short stories. One of the things I love about Gibson as a scifi writer is that he doesn't explain, and nowhere is this as obvious as in his short stories. He writes as though the world he's created, with all of the technology and resultant social changes, is the world that we live in. Basically, he assumes you'll catch up, and that the story is the important thing, not the setting. It's great.

I'd Kill For That

I'm still working my way through books foisted upon me at the ChickLit bookswap. This one was a collaborative murder mystery, with each chapter written by a different female mystery/suspence/used-to-write-romance-but-has-sadly-drifted-into-suspense novelist. It was pretty back, with way too many characters to keep track of who was who, and a TERRIBLE final chapter that completely killed the characterization of the female police detective. Jennifer Crusie's chapter was immediately recognizable, though, for being funny, irreverent and actually well written.

Kazuo Ishiguro When We Were Orphans

Much like the one other book by Ishiguro that I've read, this book frustrated me somewhat by having the (first-person) narrator refer to events and then deliberately drop any further explanations. It seems a little like creating suspense through cheating. But I got over that, because he's an excellent writer. A good story about a detective who returns to Hong Kong from England, in order to investigate the disappearance of his parents when he was very young.

Stephanie Laurens The Ideal Bride

I had 20 minutes to waste and I was right beside a library, so I grabbed a romance novel off the rack to keep me occupied, and then was entertained enough to check it out when I had to leave, so that I could finish it at home. I particularly enjoyed the point that the author was clearly trying to make about how important women were to political life in the early 1800s.

Yann Martel Self

I was reading this at the same time as another fictional first-person autobiography (that I had to give back to the library before I could finish it), and I kept getting confused about which bit of personal history belonged to which narrator. Oops. Anyway, this book was great. Martel has an easy writing style, fluid and engaging. So even though I didn't always have a lot of interest in or sympathy with the main character, I still wanted to keep reading.

Terry Pratchett Hogfather

I think this is the last old Pratchett that I hadn't read before -- I avoided it because I don't generally like Christmas themed stories, but it was pretty fun.

Terry Pratchett Jingo

I remember not liking this much when I read it before. It is incredibly heavy-handed -- I prefer my parables slightly more masked, thank you -- but I do love the City Watch beyond all reason. Far more entertaining this time around.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough The Godmother

You know you are in for a world of cheese when the titular character is described as having hair in every shade of silver. I mean, really. The book just got more fantastical from there, and was very clearly wish fulfillment by the author. Briefly diverting on a Saturday afternoon, but seriously not worth reading.

John Sewell The Shape of the City

I have become a little obsessed with city histories and the development of neighbourhoods. The really interesting (and depressing) part of this book was seeing how all of the current problem areas of Toronto come from a deliberate set of decisions in the mid-20th century to develop a certain style of closed neighbourhood, shut off from the natural flow of the city. The planners really thought they were doing the right thing by creating these entirely residential areas that had no relation to the exiting roads, with limited access, but the past 50 years have shown that they don't work.

Spacing magazine

I've been reading the Spacing blog for a while now, but I'd never picked up a copy of the magazine, and then this issue was about neighbourhoods and intersections, and I was there. Because as well as being a bit of a transit geek, I'm also fascinated by neighbourhoods and demographics and neighbourhood shift. It was excellent -- the best part was that there weren't just articles on the familiar favourite areas of Toronto, but some of the forgotten and ignored areas. I'm going to pick up the next issue, but I doubt it'll be quite so perfectly designed for me.

James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds

Some of this book was interesting, but I felt that the author used examples that didn't always back his central idea (that a group of people will make more accurate decisions than any individual person).