Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig

Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An interesting concept and an interesting story that fails in a way to come together in the end.

The story is clear and the writing concise, but in the end the author turns it into a more abstract finish, where one is left to pick out the pieces that can be understood and guess at the others - to assign your own level of meaning with the clues given.

I could see if the writing had been clouded with mystery and symbolism before the end, but it really wasn't. So I'm left with the pieces I can understand, which is a story about girls falling down, a story definitely rooted in my city, Toronto, and elements of a love story with an unlikeable female.

These elements were good and well written, and the parts I understood of why girls fall down was intriguing so I am giving three stars, removing two stars for a narrative concept that may be understood fully only by the author herself, if then.

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Signed: The Jade Peony and All That Matters by Wayson Choy

I met the amazing, incomparable Wayson Choy last night at an event with the Toronto Library.

A gifted author and storyteller, Mr. Choy received the Order of Canada for his contribution to Canadian literature.  He spoke about his life and career for an hour or so and I was rapt with attention the entire time, I laughed, I cried, I can't wait to read the book.

Mr. Choy spoke of finding out he was adopted at the age of 56, of winning the lottery will all the numbers in the 1980's, of being a banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside), of family and love and what is important. 

At the end there was a question and answer session and someone asked about writing.  I asked him how you get the courage and strength to relive the bad moments.  My philosophy has always been that I lived them once, why would I want to go through it again.  So when you're writing a memoir or a book based on personal experience, how do you go through it all again?

Mr. Choy said it all depends if you want to actually know yourself, if you want to learn the lesson.  He told the story of a time he was teaching a writing class and a woman was having a hard time with her story.  She had been abused by her uncle and was becoming mired in the details, the girl in her story was guilty and a victim and she didn't know how to proceed.  He said she should use her creative side and write the story from her uncle's perspective.  The woman said she couldn't do that, and he said if she did, the girl in the story would change from a guilty victim to an innocent.  She could take back the power.

This was an eye-opening moment for me, a life changer.  I believe no one is ever "evil" or "bad", that we all have our perspectives, that we are all a combination of our DNA and our upbringing.  By going back to the times in our life when we were hurt, by taking the other person's perspective, we can reclaim whatever power they had over us.  We can see that we were in the better place, that we were glad we were not them, we can start to forgive, and that's really the essence of taking control of your life, of turning from a constant victim to your true benevolent self.

Thank you Mr. Wayson Choy.

Signed: Touched by Scott Campbell

I am starting today a new feature on this blog, signed items.  I have quite a lot of signed books and a few other items and I hope to present them here and tell a little story about the signing.
Posts will be tagged "Signed" so they can easily be found.

I start first with the book Touched by Scott Campbell.  About 6 months ago or so I decided to send out about a dozen books to about a dozen authors through the mail in the hopes of getting some books signed by people who I would not likely be able to meet.  One of the hinderances of such an endeavor is I live in Canada and you need to send a postage paid envelope.  If the author is American, that would mean I would need American stamps, so I sent many of the books when I was on vacation in New York City this past September.  I took the books with me in my suitcase and bought the postage there, which was in itself a lengthy process as I had to buy postage for the interior envelope and the exterior times about 12 and it had to be stamps, not metered postage, as metered postage is only good for the day it is printed, then there was all the customs forms, etc. But it all worked out. 

I think of the dozen or so books I sent to America, I got them all back.  I also sent three to England, you can buy British postage online, and got back two of those.  The one I did not get back was Vincent River by Philip Ridley.  I also contacted Dennis Cooper, who lives in Paris, and he sent me his address.  I sent him two books and as you cannot buy French postage online, I also sent him Euros to cover the cost of the postage, about $50 CDN worth of Euros, and despite repeated follow-ups and promises by Mr. Cooper to send the books back - nothing yet.

Another American author, Scott Sherman, I contacted by email and he agreed to sign my book, he was so happy to be contacted he said he would sign any book by any author.  When I emailed him back for his address to send the books to, no response.  Repeated follow-ups, nothing, nada.  Why say you will sign and then ignore me?

The one Canadian author I wanted to send a book to, Daniel Allen Cox, said instead I should come to meet him when he comes to Toronto to promote his next book, which is actually happening this weekend on Saturday.  I read in the paper he has had trouble with over-eager fans, so perhaps he didn't want to give his address.  Perhaps Scott Sherman felt the same way, who will ever know as he never wrote back, but he gives the name of the small town where he lives in his book bio and I easily found his address online, so what's the point of that.

The first book I have chosen to feature from the dozen sent to Americans is Touched by Scott Campbell.  The book sounded good from the description online and although I have yet to read it (need more time!), I look forward to it.

Here is a brief description of the book followed by images of what I received back.

"When twelve-year-old Robbie Young comes home and tells his mother "Jerry Houseman's been touching me" the lives of both families fly out of control. Scott Campbell's first novel is a sometime shocking but always the insightful and moving story of a sexual relationship between a young boy and an older man. Told from the points of view of the man, his wife, the boy and his mother, Touched is never sensationalistic or sentimental. Campbell knows how to tell a story, and his innate empathy with all of his characters shines through on every page. Touched might disturb the reader, not because of its subject matter, but because Campbell understands the human heart and its desires all too well."

In One Person by John Irving

In One Person by John Irving
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I was looking very forward to reading this book before I got it. The last John Irving I had read was The Cider House Rules and My Movie Business about making the movie for Cider. Both were good books, not excellent, but very good. Irving has a unique style of writing, some writers occasionally go off on tangents, for Irving the whole book is a tangent. The plot is moved ahead by rememberances of this that have passed in a usually non-linear remberence.

What I ultimaely liked about Cider House was that you could write a novel about abortion and make a 500 page book contain 495 pages that were not about abortion, with so many side roads and side stories you get lost on the way. But the thing that I think held the book together was the abortion thread, that despite the many pages about things like the main character's first fumblings with a girl in a drive in movie theatre ( I remember that from reading the book 10 years ago), the book was going somewhere.

With In One Person, who knows where the book is going, and frankly, who cares. I got this along with two other people I know and all of us have put it down and stopped reading. I had been determined to plow through until I hit page 180, and the person the narrator had sex with was just to ridiculous, so unbeliveable, I gave up. I am done.

The main character is not relatable or nice, or anything other than bland. The only character I cared about was Kitenridge and even him I couldn't remember his first name - and he says in the beginning nothing ever happened with Kitenridge so I knew it wasn't going anywhere.

The book is a hodge-podge of genders and crushes and Shakespere and summers in Austria, but it really doesn't go anywhere, it's not going to be anything you care about, and while I would have brief moments where I cared about what happened, something else would turn me off and I would always be looking for any excuse to read something else.

Untimately as I said, despite all this I was still determined to get through it, then the sex on page 180 happened and I was done. The spell, however lightly cast, was broken.

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Hue, Tint and Shade by Jordan Castillo Price

Hue, Tint and Shade by Jordan Castillo Price
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my first entry into reading this genre, gay themed fiction written by women for women. There's quite a lot of it out there and I always assumed it was too heavy on the romance for me so I never picked it up.

This book is the first entry in a series and is the perfect length for an introduction to this genre. The story moves quickly and the author creates some believable scenes and interesting characters.

Basically a shy man meets another through a chance encounter, they make a date, they have sex (the sex was good!) and end of book, with a couple plot twists along the way.

I found the romance was not too heavily pushed, the characters were fully formed and I enjoyed the author's note at the end explaining where the characters and story came from.

I will read more from this series, good job.

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The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this book for my book club. I knew two things going in, one that is had placed first in Entertainment Weekly's top 100 reads of the last 25 years and secondly I had heard by word of mouth the book was "dire".

I started the book last night, paused only to sleep, and finished it this morning. The book is an excellent read and you are unable to put it down once you start.

Sparse prose in a sparse world, the simplicity of the story is the hook. The journey you embark on with the main characters is so harrowing you can't look away.

Themes of the book reminded me of Steinbeck's East of Eden, the essence of humanity is laid bare, stripped to it's foundations, and consequently we think of life, of purpose, of our place in the world. A specific story made universal and something I'll carry with me always.

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The Cult of the Purple Rose: A Phase of Harvard Life by Shirley Everton Johnson ebook MOBI

This book was printed in 1902 and is available from Google for free here.  But while Google's pdf scan of the original is priceless, their MOBI version is a disaster.  They didn't edit the OCR, it's full of errors.

I cleaned up the MOBI file and you can get the good version here.

This is one of the first American books ever printed about Homosexuality.  A group of gay Harvard students starts a gay themed club with purple as the signifier. This book hasn't been re-printed.  So it's cool that Google provided the scan.

From Google "the story of a gay alliance at 1890s Harvard".