I actually listened to this one as an audio book, but I’m still going to write it up in here. I haven’t quite decided whether I think that listening to a book is the same thing as reading it. I think that for me, it’s actually more challenging. Regardless, I’m reading through it in book-format now.

For all that I love Shakespeare, I’d never read a biography of him before. This one came quite highly recommended by quite a few people, and as I really like Bill Bryson, and was curious to hear him read his own work, I decided to listen to his book. I was surprised to learn as I started listening to it how little I actually knew about Shakespeare.

Bryson’s work emphasizes the fact that I’m clearly not alone in this. Very little is known for certain about Shakespeare at all. I loved the way that Bryson exposed this fact while still managing to put together a coherent biography, and simultaneously avoided making assumptions as many other scholars have. He also filled in the gaps in Shakespeare’s life with a fascinating sketch of London as Shakespeare would have known it.

I think the part of the book that surprised me the most was the section about the Sonnets. I’d never read the Sonnets before, despite having taken a class on Shakespeare alone in university, and never read about them either. So I was surprised to learn about the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady, and interested to hear the theories about who these subjects may have been in Shakespeare’s life. Regardless of who they were, or if they even had counterparts in Shakespeare’s life, I am grateful for this section of the book for introducing me to the Sonnets. I’ve fallen in love!

My one complaint about this book is that when discussing possible likenesses of Shakespeare, Bryson failed to mention the Sanders portrait. I don’t generally approve of scholars making unfounded assumptions, but I still do it myself, and to me, the Sanders portrait is the face of the Bard.

Ever since I discovered Sherlock Holmes back in December, I can’t seem to get enough of him! I haven’t been reading the stories in any particular order, as I began with the Adventures and Memoirs of Holmes (together in one volume), went back to A Study in Scarlet, where Holmes was first introduced, and finally came to this last collection of short stories that Conan Doyle published about Holmes a few years before his death.

I found that this particular collection had a completely different feel to it, especially compared to the Adventures and the Memoirs. Part of this can be explained by Conan Doyle’s experimentation with different narrative voices, as unlike the previous collections I read, the entirety of this collection was not narrated by Watson. A few were recounted by Holmes, and one was in the third person omniscient voice. While it was really interesting to read the unfolding mystery from Holmes’s perspective, it definitely gave a completely different feel to the stories (particularly because, unlike Watson, Holmes always knows what’s going on, and has to be careful not to reveal everything from the outset!).

But more than the different narrative style, I found that overall these stories seemed both more dark, and less like adventures. It seems a bit silly to remark that the Adventures has a more, well, adventurous, feel to it than the Case-Book, but that’s really the best way to describe it. Even though eleven out of the twelve stories are titled “adventures” rather than “problems”, they read more like puzzles to be solved. I’m not sure if I felt this way because I’m becoming accustomed to Holmes’s problem-solving style, or if they’re really objectively more like puzzles. I’m not sure how to determine this.

In any case, I still found the stories extremely enjoyable, but would again recommend starting your aquaintance with Sherlock Holmes by reading the Adventures or the Memoirs rather than the Case-Book or A Study in Scarlet.

The ideas of my friend Watson, though limited, are exceedingly pertinacious. For a long time he has worried me to write an experience of my own. Perhaps I have rather invited this persecution, since I have often had occasion to point out to him how superficial are his own accounts and to accuse him of pandering to popular taste instead of confining himself rigidly to fact and figures. “Try it yourself, Holmes!” he has retorted, and I am compelled to admit that, having taken my pen in my hand, I do begin to realise that the matter must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader.

This one came recommended to me by my mum and one of her co-workers, and I thought it would be a good read to follow up One Hundred Years of Solitude. And it was! It’s a light, sweet, children’s book about a family of four sisters and their father who go on a family vacation. They’ve rented a cottage, sight unseen, and what they don’t realize is that the cottage is situated on the grand and beautiful estate Arundel. The book tells of the adventures the sisters have on their summer holiday.

If I didn’t know that the book was written in 2005, I might have thought that it was a lost work of Edith Nesbit or Edgar Eager, (whose books I loved as a child) without the magic. Overall, I found that it was a lovely book!

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall

The sequel to The Penderwicks. I liked it because I missed the characters from the first book but overall I preferred the first book. The sequel just didn’t have the same element of old-fashioned charm. However, Birdsall’s characters are consistent from the first book to the second, so it was still an enjoyable read.

I can safely say that I have never read anything like this book before. I thought that I understood the genre of magic realism prior to reading this, but it turns out that wasn’t quite true. Had I the task of explaining the traits of the genre to someone who hadn’t heard of it before, I should rather hand them a copy of this book.

To summarize the story would actually be quite simple. The book tells the of the Buendía family’s history in the town of Macondo. But to summarize the uniqueness and appeal of this book is much harder.

Is it possible to explain something that you can’t put into words? I feel that the only way that I can convey my appreciation for the book is by lifting three images from the book itself that have made a distinct impression on my memory.

1. Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers. (11-12)

2. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roof and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so the funeral procession could pass by. (140)

3. The yellow butterflies would invade the house at dusk. (I would expand on this, but I don’t want to give away important plot points!)

In addition to these kinds of images that run throughout the narrative, I feel that another unique aspect of this book is its structure. At one point in the story, the character Ursula “shudder[s] with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle” (335). This statement gives a good idea of the overall narrative style. García Márquz often reveals the outcome of a situation long before the reader is aware of the circumstances or relevance of this disclosure, and it often isn’t until much later that the story circles around to explain these circumstances. In this way, the novel gives the impression of moving linearly through the family history of the Buendía family while simultaneously drifting backwards and forwards through time.

I definitely recommend this one.

This entry will be proof that I should really write these up as soon as I’ve finished a book, and not a month later after I’ve already returned the book to its owner and forgotten whatever it was that I intended to write about it. (Unfortunately both of these things have happened, and the book does not seem to have made a lasting impression on my memory, even though it really only has been a few weeks since I read it!)

I think that this is probably my favourite of the books by Coupland that I have read so far. I still haven’t entirely made up my mind about how I feel about his writing, even though I’ve now read four or five of his books. I keep reading them because they come so highly recommended to me, and because I feel so ambivalent about the previous ones I’ve read. (This is precisely how I felt about Margaret Atwood until I read Alias Grace.) It’s not that I didn’t enjoy reading Eleanor Rigby but I don’t think that Coupland is my kind of writer.

I can’t quite put my finger on what it is about his books that I don’t like. I think that a large part of it has to do with his pessimistic attitude toward modern society that I don’t entirely agree with. I do believe that our society has its problems, but instead of feeling motivated to fix things after finishing his books, I just have an overall feeling of negativity. I found that Eleanor Rigby was actually better for that than some of his other books.

I realize that this entry makes it sound like I really didn’t enjoy Eleanor Rigby, which isn’t true. It’s more that it didn’t stay with me at all, and now my memory of it is vague and clouded, but I have no intention of revisiting it to clarify my feelings toward it.

I started reading Katherine Mansfield a few years ago because of Virginia Woolf. She once famously wrote: “I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” (This quotation appears in the mini-biography of Mansfield at the beginning of my Penguin edition of her Collected Stories.) I’m not sure where I first read this, but this was such an intriguing comment that I absolutely had to find out what Woolf was jealous of!

I think that whoever wrote the blurb on the back of my Penguin edition had it right when they called Mansfield’s stories “graceful, delicate, and quietly devastating, they observe apparently trivial incidents to create sensitive, often painful revelations of her characters’ inner lives.” I absolutely agree with this. Each story seems to recount some small, insignificant moment of everyday life that turns out to be a moment of clarity to the main character of the story, who then comes to a painful conclusion about society or their own life. I found this really surprising at first, because the stories really don’t start out with a sad feel to them at all. But there comes a turning point in almost each tale where you realize that things are not going to work out quite how you expected or hoped, and this is usually not for the better. In addition, I felt that these endings came somewhat abruptly, and left me wanting the story to continue because I wasn’t ready to part ways with the characters she introduced. In fact, when I was most of the way through this collection I was taken aback by a tale that had an indisputably happy ending, with no bittersweetness to it at all.

Even though these tales are quite sad, I still love them. Each story offers an intimate and detailed glimpse into a person’s life, almost as though you were given a window into someone’s mind that only lasted a few hours, or a day at most. I came to love them for their feeling of incompleteness, as though these stories were interesting people I had encountered on a train in another country, and would never meet again.

I agree with Woolf – this is writing to be jealous of! (But unlike Woolf, I must admit to a similar jealousy when it comes to many other writers!).

Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling – how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again …

I’ve had Alice Hoffman in the back of my mind as an author I wanted to check out ever since I saw the movie Practical Magic, which is based on her novel of the same name. I actually meant to start out with Practical Magic, because I just love that story, but I guess it just became one of those many books that I mean to read and then never quite get around to reading. Mum had an advance reading copy of The Third Angel lying around the house, so I borrowed it from her at her recommendation.

The novel tells the stories of three women all in love with men who are somehow wrong for them. As the book unfolds, it becomes apparent that these women are interconnected in surprising ways. Their individual stories build on each other and form the pieces of another, larger story that involves all of them. The book works backwards in time, beginning with Maddy Heller’s experiences when she stays at the Lion Park Hotel for her sister’s wedding in 1999. The novel then deals with a significant event in Frieda Lewis’s life when she worked as a chambermaid in the Lion Park Hotel in London in the mid ’60s. Finally, the book takes us back to twelve-year-old Lucy Green’s trip to the Lion Park Hotel in 1952, where she witnesses a tragedy that will influence the lives of both Maddy and Frieda when they come to the hotel.

I had some trouble getting into the novel at first, mostly because I wasn’t all that engaged with Maddy’s story. I wasn’t sure what to make of the elements of magic and the supernatural events that were running through the story, either, because at the outset the book appears to be simply realistic fiction. Once I got to Frieda’s section of the book, I got really immersed in the story, and accepted the magical elements without trying to figure out their exact role in the story. I actually grew to really enjoy the magical element of her work. Furthermore, I loved that there was a fairy tale called The Heron’s Wife that figured in some important way in each story. Overall, I found that the three individual stories fit together extremely well, with each story leaving a trail of clues for the subsequent tale.

Everything was yellow in the park. When it rained, leaves came swirling down. When it was sunny everything looked golden. Frieda Lewis was nineteen and had been working for four months at the Lion Park Hotel in Knightsbridge. Her favourite rooms to clean were teh ones on the seventh floor. From there, she could look out the windows in the back and see the little courtyard park with its stone lion. From the front rooms, she could see the tops of the trees in Hyde Park. Once she climbed onto the ledge and stood there for a moment, above the traffic and the fumes, mesmerized by the movement of the trees and the clouds in the sky.

The reason I read this book is quite simple: I love Virginia Woolf. I’m slowly making my way through everything she wrote, and I hadn’t read any of her personal writing before this book. I was originally going to start with her diaries, but the letters begin when she was younger so they seemed like a more logical place to start. Besides, I’ve been having difficulty finding copies of them, so I wanted to read at least the first volume while I had access to my university library.

There are 638 letters included in this volume. The first was written to her godfather when she was only six years old, and the last when she was thirty on the day before her wedding to Leonard Woolf. I would guess that the majority of letters in this collection were written to her older, close friend Violet Dickinson. Indeed, Virginia wrote to Violet so frequently for much of this period of her life, that it is possible to get a good sense of her day-to-day life from these letters.

What struck me the most from reading these letters was how Virginia’s voice spoke to me so clearly across the years. Even though these letters are old, and Virginia Woolf has since passed on, and the letters were not written for me in the first place, I feel as though I have become her correspondent in a very one-sided exchange. Reading her letters makes years separating the moment when she laid her words on paper with pen and ink, and the the day when I picked up a copy of this book, typeset and bound, collapse and fold up like a telescope. She can travel time to speak to me as though we were only separated by distance.

A true letter, so my theory runs, should be as a film of wax pressed close to the graving in the mind; but if I followed my own prescription this sheet would be scored with some very tortuous and angular incisions. Let me explain that I began some minutes since to review a novel and made its faults, by a process common among minds of a certain order or disorder, the text for a soliloquy upon many matters of importance; the sky and the breeze were part of my theme. A telegram however, with its necessary knock and its flagrant yellow, and its curt phrase of vicious English — I know not which sense was most offended — hit me in the wing and I fell a heaped corpse on the earth. The sense, if that can be said to have sense which has so little sound, was to discredit the respectability of a house in Fitzroy Square. And there you see me in the mud.
- to Clive Bell, February 1907

I read this on the recommendation of a friend, who mentioned that the book is set at a Toronto university. This was one of the main draws for me, because I’m almost always interested in reading about scholarship, and academic intrigue. I’d enjoyed Fifth Business when I read it a few years ago, so I was familiar with Davies and already knew I liked his style. Besides, I always feel vaguely guilty for not reading more written by Canadian authors, and am trying to read more.

Until I was about two thirds of the way through the book, I probably couldn’t have told you what I thought the plot was, and once I did get to that point, the story took veered off in a completely unexpected direction. Basically though, the book deals with the interactions between several professors at this unnamed Toronto university, an old acquaintance many of them went to school with, and a graduate student they all teach.

One of my favourite things about this novel was the way Davies told the story alternating from the perspectives of the grad student Maria Magdelena Theotoky, and one of her teachers, professor and priest Simon Darcourt. I often rather dislike this, but I felt that in this case it was both well done, and that it added to the overall mood of the book. I liked that their narratives overlapped enough to demonstrate their different interpretations of the same events, and diverged enough to move the story along and keep things interesting. I also really enjoyed reading about the academic pursuits of all the various characters, and about the passion and mystery that came about as a result of their rather intense academic devotion.

Autumn, to me the most congenial of seasons: the University, to me the most congenial of lives. In all my years as a student and later as a university teacher I have observed that university terms tend to begin on a fine day. As I walked down the avenue of maples that leads toward the University Bookstore I was as happy as I suppose it is in my nature to be; my nature tends toward happiness, or toward enthusiastic industry, which for me is the same thing.