November 2010
The Tin Flute, Gabrielle Roy
Even more depressing than “As For Me And My House.” More depressing, because it’s set in Quebec, and so there are French-Canadians crawling all over it. The original title is “Bonheur D’Occasion” (second-hand happiness, also happiness that you only feel for a second). Yeah, I’m really talking this one up, huh? No, it’s a truly good novel, you...
As For Me And My House, Sinclair Ross
This is exactly the same book as “Roughing It In The Bush,” (like many Canadian novels and memoirs) except it was written in 1941, and is from the point of view of a miserable minister’s wife, who I think winds up screwing around with some random guy, but mostly it’s about the horrors and boredom of the Puritanical west. It’s hugely depressing, and the only detail I...
Extraordinarily Embarrassing Admission
I have purchased so many books (and rolls of paper towels, and bags of almond meal, and electronics) from Amazon.com that I received a hand-written note of thanks from Seattle earlier this year. Apparently, even though I have broken the Prime Shipping business model, I am single-handedly responsible for keeping the entire company in the black.
I’m holding out for one from Jeff Bezos.
October 2010
I also just read the Battlestar Galactica...
myvivavoce:
(Because I live and thrive on and frankly love spoilers- how the show/book/movie gets there is so much more important to me than finding out chronologically how things happen.)
And WHAT? I have to say, I’m already really disappointed by the ending, just because (as an avid reader of certain narrow areas of classic sci-fi) that trope has been done to death. Maybe they do it better or...
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Stephen...
Your Lazy Reviewer is in a state of bliss, being waited on hand and foot by her mother in her ancestral home, as is clearly her due. She takes back everything she said about French-Canadians in the heat of her travel-induced bitchiness, as the intrepid wait staff on her train responded to the THREE AND A HALF HOUR delay on the tracks near Guildwood by plying their trapped passenger with generous...
anechka27 asked: do a tom robbins!
lazy reviewer is my hero!!
lazy reviewer is my hero!!
Look Homeward, Lazy Reviewer!
Ugh. While boarding my train to the rural hamlet which is my ultimate destination, I noticed several massive bottles of Clamato lining the walls of the galley.
This is due to the bizarre national dominance of the ‘Bloody Caesar’ over the already only situationally-indicated ‘Bloody Mary,’ a travesty beyond human reckoning.
Having just endured a shrieking-based...
Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
I’m stuck on the tarmac, so I thought I’d work my way further down the LRC 100.
So, obviously, this is THE Canadian young adult series. Worshipped by the Japanese. Why? People usually say something vague about ‘respect for the elderly,’ but you can draw your own conclusions. UPDATE: There are many, many reasons.
When I was little, I had a cookbook which contained recipes based on...
Actual Magazines Packed For Flight To Toronto
Men’s Journal
Esquire
Outside
GQ
Horse & Rider
Practical Horseman
Equus
Dressage Today
Vogue
Elle
Allure
Women’s Health
Fitness
Self
America’s Horse
Roughing It In The Bush, Susanna Moodie
Okay, right away, TWO THINGS.
First thing: I’ve decided to work from the LRC’s list of the 100 most important Canadian books, which was a mistake, as it begins with “Bref récit et succincte narration de la navigation faite en MDXXXV et MDXXXVI” by Jacques Cartier. But if you skip the first four, the fifth is “Roughing It In The Bush.”
Second thing:...
Oh, No Way, That Sucks
Lazy Reviewer is flying to Canada tomorrow, but I promise a slew of all-Canadian book reviews over the next two weeks.
Wait, let’s dial expectations down a bit - I promise a slew of reviews written by authors who were born or make their residence in any Commonwealth country. Possibly former British protectorates.
Requests taken.
Tweak, Nick Sheff
Interviewer: What are your goals as a parent? Lazy Reviewer: For my children not to write memoirs about being addicted to meth. Interviewer: Right. Lazy Reviewer: And even then, you know, if your kid gets hooked on meth, your best case scenario is actually that they eventually write the memoir. Because that suggests that a) they quit taking meth, and b) they didn’t lose their arms to...
I Don't Care About Your Band, Julie Klausner
This was part of a concerted and successful push on my part to read more awesome books by young women, especially young women who write about themselves. I don’t want you to get the impression that this was a particularly laborious task to set for myself, like, “sweet Jesus, this time I really will get past ‘Swan’s Way,’ you motherfuckers.”
No, it’s...
Weekend Reads
theatlantic:
What are you reading this weekend?
Nova, Samuel Delany
My father lobbied really hard, almost certainly while high, for my mom to consent to naming me “Nova.” Because of this book. She actually liked “Esmeralda,” so I’m glad they met somewhere in the middle. William Gibson was obsessed with it too, and you’ll see a lot of “Nova” in “Neuromancer.”
Not only is “Nova” incredible...
Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an...
This book is like crystal meth for old people. I don’t know if you’ve read “Cell,” the recent Stephen King novel about a mutant mobile phone pulse that turns everyone who answers it into a zombie, but the zombie hive mind is expressed through a single zombie, some random guy in a hoodie, who speaks for the horde.
Mildred Armstrong Kalish is that hoodie zombie, but for...
The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy,...
It is highly unlikely that anyone drawn to this blog by my review of “Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror” will take me up on this recommendation, but should you wish an exhaustively researched, exquisitely written 848 page history of the landed gentry’s slow erosion from 1880 onwards, of which the New York Review of Books has stated, “No praise can be too high,” uh, read...
Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
These are all very very bad books. I will not insult you by saying much more on the topic, other than admitting that I have read all of them, including the novella about the baby vampire who gets taken out by Dakota Fanning, despite having surrendered.
What I really wanted to share with you is that my first (first) time reading “Twilight” corresponded with a time juuuuuust before I...
Have You No Shame?: And Other Regrettable Stories,...
I am not one of those people who emails writers to say “gosh, your book really brightened my day,” partially because a) weird, b) uhhhh kinda stalkery? c) it’s such a freakish spinoff of modernity that we now think of writers as people we could email, as though we have a two-way relationship. Like, “heeeeey David Foster Wallace, how come you don’t write some more...
Celine Dion's "Let's Talk About Love": A Journey...
Oh, yes. This exists. You do not need to buy it merely for the name, you need to buy it for the trenchant commentary on modern conceptions of musical taste and quality. Classism, international relations, the human spirit - all are embraced within, and bathed in the glow of Celine Dion.
The Gormenghast Novels, Mervyn Peake
TFgfhdhhst! Gormenghast. Mostly, the first of the trilogy, “Titus Groan,” and the second, uh, “Gormenghast.” I never really bother with the third, “Titus Alone,” which goes all steampunk for no reason, even though it was written in 1959. He had a LOT of Parkinson’s by then, so people usually just ignore this one.
It will mess you up. People are...
Headhunter, Timothy Findley
If you’ve ever worried that a paranoid schizophrenic woman might have the ability to release fictional characters from works of literature into the real world, this might not be the book for you. Especially if you’ve ever thought, well, surely, even if fictional characters might be released into the world, it wouldn’t be a dystopian world full of diseased birds carrying a sort...
The Dionne Years, Pierre Berton
Check it. You Americans think you’re soooo crass and exploitative, and that your reality programs ruin lives, but Canada was showing you the way in the nineteen thirties.
I’ll mention, first of all, that absolutely every book written in Canada until 2004 was by a man named Pierre Berton (since then, Margaret Atwood has really stepped up to the plate). In his 84 years, he pumped out...
The Devil's Teeth, Susan Casey
I mentioned “The Devil’s Teeth” briefly, and favourably, in my review of “The Wave,” but I’d like to very quickly mention my favourite part, which is the offhand hypothesis bruited about by some biologists that the ol’ “bump and bite” things sharks do to people, where they take a huge chunk out of you and leave, actually has nothing to do with...
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn
My parents, partly through laziness, and partly through awesomeness, decided at some point in my infancy that I could read anything I wanted. They had billions of extremely random books, read to me every evening from about forty seconds after conception on (gross), and had a very explicit “if you are capable of reading one of our books, by all means, go to town” policy.
My husband...
A Way of Life, Like Any Other, Darcy O'Brien
You probably think you’re all that, because you’ve read “The Day of the Locust.” Well, you’re not. First, obviously, you should read “Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney,” and then you should read “My Sister Eileen,” so you have some idea who Eileen McKenney was in the first place, before she died in a...
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
I am IN NO WAY trashing it. It’s really gorgeous and probably very helpful to the grieving.
But I’d love to write a play in which a character has recently lost a loved one, and says something like, “the worst part, of course, is all these copies of that fucking Joan Didion book showing up on my doorstep.” And they could, you know, have a little table built out of the...
I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe
I have not strictly read it, per se, but it has been a most excellent doorstop for me since I lived in Hoboken, and I shan’t hear a word said against it.
And The Heart Says Whatever, Emily Gould
This book took a lot of shit, though less shit, I think, than The Article, for which comments had to be eventually turned off because the old people could not deal with the fact that This Is How We Live Now, which I can’t blame them for, because old people never can, just as they are bad at nose-hair maintenance. And, obviously, plenty of people are saying wonderful things about the book. ...
MEG: A Novel of Deep Terror, Steve Alten
Remember how I said that “Middlesex” was not a bad novel? This is a bad novel. Perhaps the worst novel! How exciting for you!
I first read “MEG” (and yes, I just said “first”) on a ski trip, when my brain was too coked out from exhaustion to process something as complex as “Us Weekly” (you laugh, but Angie and Brad have many, many children...
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
It’s just not a great book. It’s not a *bad* book, not at all, but if you’re going to use it as the justification for taking Eugenides seriously as a critic, it needs to be better than this. It’s very sprawling-ethnic-I liked “Ragtime”-multigenerational saga, and the end result is Amy Tan grafted onto “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.”
...
Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and...
Strange! Delightful! Like nothing else.
You probably have to be, as I am, the very worst kind of Anglophile to REALLY get off on this book, but, you should be anyway. And if you do read this, and love it even a little bit, immediately buy the delightful “Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages” by Katie Roiphe, especially if you find other peoples’ marriages as fascinating as...
Pet Sematary, Stephen King
People sometimes ask me, “Lazy Book Reviewer, you read a great number of really trashy books. How?” There’s a very simple, two-part answer. First part, I don’t have a job. Second part, since early early childhood, it’s taken me approximately 1.5 hours to read a novel. I don’t see words, I see four-line chunks of text. Always have, don’t know...
Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer
I live in Utah. I am not from Utah, nor am I a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but I live amongst them. They are very very very very nice people, who, at least in Utah, have not said boo to me about getting on the Joseph Smith Good Time Family Band Solution.
And the mainline LDS church is vehemently anti-polygamy, and super embarrassed by it, and so on, and so...
Good Calories Bad Calories, Gary Taubes
I actually really hesitated to review this, one of my favourite books, and certainly my own nutrition bible. I think we’re overly obsessed with nutrition in this country, either fleeing vegetables at all costs in favour of squeezable froot-flavoured yogurts, or thinking that we need to be accountable each second for the healthfulness of anything we put in our bodies. It’s really no...
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
This really has nothing to do with “Black Beauty,” iconic though it may be. Or, perhaps it does.
Your intrepidly lazy reviewer is having a particularly wretched day, so bear with me as I am briefly less good-humoured. My mare, Bella, who is the finest of all horses, despite a crippling fear of the out-of-doors and upholstered couches, suffers from a nasty little genetic condition...
THOSE SWEDISH BOOKS, Stieg Larsson
Whee! Oh, my God, I didn’t read them forever, and had already given them to people as gifts, because, you know, everyone loves them, and then I brought them on a plane, which is what I do when I want to force myself to sit and read something, and not say “I wonder if Hyperbole and a Half has updated her blog? What is the weather in Peru? I bet I could beat Hateris, if I really...
Handbook, Utah Department of Motor Vehicles
I have never driven. I have never driven a car, boat, golf cart, or dune buggy. The dune buggy omission can be excused due to my great love for the late Frank O’Hara, but the others have become humiliating.
My mother does not drive; she did, briefly, in her twenties, owing to a boyfriend with severe narcolepsy. The experience of shrieking “John? JOHN?” and grabbing the wheel did...
Dune, Frank Herbert
You know how Colbert does that “Great president, or the greatest president?” thing? That’s how I ask people their opinion on “Dune.”
“Dune” is my favourite. I have read “Dune” eighty billion times. When I was little, I used to finish it, and then just start again. If you are my real-life Facebook friend, you already know that I list my...
Papillon, Henri Charrière
If you read just one somewhat-true autobiographical account of a man who successfully escaped the Devil’s Island penal colony in French Guiana after eleven years and numerous failed, completely gross attempts at freedom (leper colony hideouts, and the like), this is the one. Apparently there’s some kind of Steve McQueen movie, but Charrière’s charming original should probably be...
Wild Romance, Chloe Schama
I’m going to come off like a bitch here, but I was thismuch hoping not to really enjoy Chloe’s book, because I went to school with her, and she’s extremely attractive and smart and sweet, and, you know, women be crazy.
But girl-on-girl whining must be rooted out vigorously, and “Wild Romance” is adorbs and super fun, and you spend most of it shrieking:...
Secretariat, Bill Nack
I’m not even going to pretend this isn’t a particularly weak excuse for unfavourably reviewing the recent film adaptation of Bill Nack’s readable and factual take on the life of Secretariat. So, let’s just get on with it.
They don’t make a lot of horse movies, which doesn’t particularly upset me. This isn’t the 19th century. The vast majority of...
Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
I should now point out that I have my own, completely bad novel. Or, for greater accuracy, I have two chapters of a novel, which I cheerily rewrite on a biannual basis, and then step back to look at, as though it will magically have become a good novel as a result of returning to first-person from third-person from first-person for the ninetieth time.
This is all relevant to “Fifth...
Animal Liberation, Peter Singer
I, as a former vegan, no longer care about The Animals as a concept (as opposed to my adoration for the various mammals who live in my house/barn), but that doesn’t mean that Peter Singer is less correct. We really shouldn’t eat them. Or, we should eat them, but then we should also eat the elderly and the disabled. Something like that - it’s been a long time since I read the...
Raise The Titanic!, Clive Cussler
I have read all of Cussler’s atrocious and diverting books, mostly because I have an extremely large, aging Irish Catholic family. You spend enough time in hospitals and airports on the way to hospitals, you’re eventually going to buy a Dirk Pitt (tm) novel.
The L.A. Times has run a series of fun snipey pieces about how Clive Cussler managed to completely hose the filmmakers who...
Saveur Cooks Authentic American: Celebrating the...
It’s usually a bad sign when your Amazon page misspells “celebrating,” but it’s a worse sign when you have a recipe for an iceberg wedge salad; a recipe that offers zero variations on the standard “cut a head of iceberg lettuce into wedges, then pour prepared blue cheese dressing over it. Serve.”
That’s really all I have to say about this cookbook.
The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm
There’s really just one thing wrong with this relatively brief treatise on journalistic ethics, which happens to be a particular favourite of mine, and that is a niggling little complaint with Malcolm’s decision to take no stance on the guilt or innocence of Jeffrey MacDonald.
Malcolm uses Joe McGinniss, the slightly sleazy author of “Fatal Vision,” one of the better...
Role Models, John Waters
I don’t even watch the man’s movies. I have, obviously, but they don’t hold any particular charm for me. The important thing about John Waters is that he periodically writes things which are just amazing. He clearly has profound, profound issues, but they’re the kind of issues I imagine I would have if I didn’t live with someone. You can just...
The Camera My Mother Gave Me, Susanna Kaysen
You must never read this book. Not because it’s so terrible (it isn’t, really), but because it will destroy your soul. This is an obligatory sort of spoiler alert, but it’s a memoir by Kaysen, who you may remember from Winona Ryder comeback vehicles (that didn’t really work, because, come on, does anyone remember her in that?) in which she tells the terrible tale of her...
