Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling by Rick Whitaker

Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling by Rick Whitaker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ugh. Pretentious, short, filled with unnecessary quotes from long dead authors in the public domain.
The best line in the book I thought was went he went to a drug counsellor and said he was addicted to meth and doing it twice a day. The drug counsellor says So? How's that working for you?
There's this moment when you realize your problems are not someone else's, that you can't blame your childhood on your current lifestyle forever, that no one cares or will care except yourself. And this is touched on for like 2 paragraphs, and then back to Nietzsche quotes, irrelevant notebook entries from years ago and lines that start with "Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in the diary he kept during the First World War...".
Your eyes will be rolling as you read.

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The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this book, it's one of my favorites. I just finished another book I compared to Catcher in my review and thought to myself it had been 20 years since I last read Cather. I thought I should re-read it to see if I still remembered it accurately.

"He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God, I hate that stuff."

The king of hyperbole, I identify so much with Holden.

"But my parents, especially my mother, she has ears like a goddam bloodhound. So I took it very, very easy when I went past their door. I even held my breath, for God's sake. You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you."

I love the wording, the language still feels fresh and new 75 years later. This is the original teen angst book that started the ball rolling for generations of copy cats.

I think this also may have been the first book I read that dealt with homosexuality.

Fuck you.

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Cabbagetown Diary: A Documentary by Juan Butler

Cabbagetown Diary: A Documentary by Juan Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My favourite book of the year. I loved it.
This is the best book I’ve ever read about Toronto. The author takes you there, to the Cabbagetown slum of 1968 and describes the landmarks of the time so well it’s like you’re there. Picture Yorkville as the author describes it:
“Yorkville Avenue. Two blocks of discotheques with the music blaring out onto the street; sidewalk coffee houses where you can watch people who watch you as you drink a fifty-cent coffee; art galleries full of modern painting that looks like the stuff we did in grade one; a poster store where my friend George got his posters; and about half a million people and cars moving up and down like a permanently flowing river.”
A lot of books have been compared to Catcher in the Rye and to me this one is the closest. The short vignettes, the sense of humour. This to me is what a first book can be. Too often I feel Canadian authors get too swept up in their own lives when writing their first book. I was young, I was depressed, I took drugs, the end. This book isn’t all about the author. A part of it is but it’s also his life, his humour, his friends, and the city.
Some passages still ring true today:
“But just think of all those joes that work in offices. They live in some stupid suburb ten miles out of the city. They have to get up at six in the morning, drink an instant breakfast, kiss wives whose faces are covered in beauty cream so you can’t even see them, run like hell so they don’t miss the bus, and spend an hour on it with about ten thousand other joes all crammed in like so many sardines in a can, fight their way into a subway car, get their feet stepped on about twenty time, and all that so that they can arrive thirty seconds late for work and have the boss give them a dirty look and write their name on a piece of paper.”
I’ve often thought of these self-obsessed pretentious first novels that it’s like depressing fish in a barrel. When you add in the humour, the work can really shine:
“Mrs. Waddling’s caught a cold and every time she blows her nose she reminds me more than ever of a duck. Honk. Honk. She better not leave the city in duck-hunting season or they’ll get her for sure.”
On the St Charles Tavern:
“I went in there one day with a friend. It’s dimly lit and except for the perfume you’d think you were walking into a straight bar. Then, as your eyes get used to the light you see that there’s nothing but guys in the place. Hundreds of them. They look you up and down as you walk towards the end trying to find a seat, and you realize what a broad in a miniskirt feels like on a windy day.”
An elephant in the Riverdale Zoo:
“He’s covered in shit and dirt and he looks about as happy as a hungry Jew with nothing but pork to eat in the house.”
“We walk past a baboon who’s picking his ass for fleas and throwing them at the spectators. Each time he does it, he smiles, his top lip lifting up a foot, exposing buck teeth that would make Jake jealous. Some little kid throws a stick at him and he picks it up, looks at it, then throws it back at him, hitting the kid’s mother. The kid laughs and the baboon smiles. It’s obvious that they’re in on this together. It’s probably the baboon that thought up the whole idea cause the kid doesn’t look too smart.”
Yes there is some anti-Semitism and racism but it seems casual to me and I wasn’t there in 1968 to gauge the mood of the populace so I don’t know how commonplace it was. I feel I can’t judge.
There’s so many great scenes in the book, the author going for a drink in a rowdy tavern, seeing hippies on the street, walking in Allen Gardens.
Loved this book. For me required reading for those living in the city.

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A Marriage Made in Heaven: Or Too Tired for an Affair by Erma Bombeck

A Marriage Made in Heaven: Or Too Tired for an Affair by Erma Bombeck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like many of the reviewers on here read Erma Bombeck as a teenager. I think I may be the only boy to do so. I don't know how many other 12 and 13 year old boys were reading Bombeck in the late eighties.
This being said I remember her very fondly and when a friend picked up this book recently, and it coincided with my recent wedding, I picked up this book and couldn't put it down.
Although it was nice to reconnect with the author, I don't think this was one of her funnier books. Near the beginning of the book I was on the subway reading and I was crying I was laughing so hard. I had to stop! The bit about her husband saying "Why did you wait until you were married to get the mumps?" or sneaking up behind someone and giving them the Heimlich manoeuver were priceless.
Later the book moved into more personal experiences that were nice to share but harder to relate to and therefore less funny. I still had a smile on my face the whole time I read it though.

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The Last Juror by John Grisham

The Last Juror by John Grisham
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There are a couple kinds of revisionist history. There's the kind found in Song of the South or Gone With the Wind with happy darkies singing and picking crops while Miss Scarlet throws a fit. There is also the kind found here, in The Last Juror, where an author writes himself into history and always comes down on the good side. Blacks good, whites bad. All whites that is except for the author.
I hadn't read Grisham for a while but I wanted something light so I picked up this book. I found the whole thing misleading. The back of the book describes a man sentenced to a crime who gets out to exact revenge. That doesn't happen until the 84% mark in the book! Talk about spoilers! In between there's a lengthy, too lengthy, Tuesdays with Morrie section where there hero learns the true plight of blacks in the South is paying more for groceries. There's also lengthy sections on the Vietnam war, Lord knows what else. It all started to run together for me as I rolled my eyes at yet another side tangent. Oh, 80 churches visited. Just a lot that has nothing to do with moving the book forward.
The characterizations were good but the book was so light it was like swiss cheese with holes in the page. There was no moral ambiguity here, the people were either angel good or low down bad. And in the end it's proven vigilante justice and guns will solve all problems. Hurrah.


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Kicking the Sky by Anthony De Sa

Kicking the Sky by Anthony De Sa
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was looking forward to reading this book as I had heard of Emanuel Jaques and the murders and their effect of the gay community of the time, culminating in the bathhouse raids of 1981 and the real beginning of gay rights in Canada. This was truly a watershed moment, but no book has ever been written on the case and details are hard to find. When you talk to local gay Torontians about the murder, there is still a lot of emotion around the treatment they were subjected to at the time, being lumped in with pedophiles and murderers and several said they couldn't read this book.
The book starts off very well, painting an incredibly vivid portrait of Toronto's Portuguese community that leaps off the page. The book is set in the year I was born, but images like "the lid of a Bick's pickle jar held tightly under his arm. I could see bugs trying to climb up the side of the jar, only to slip down before they reached the top" still rang very true to my life.
The book continues and we meet Antonio's father, one of the most lovable characters with Ricky, and his broken English. The author recounts a protest march the Portuguese community held with signs like "TAR AND FATHER THEM" which is great.
The book starts to falter with more characters being introduced. Although the author writes description and setting amazingly well, human interaction seems forced. The characters communicate with each other at breakneck speed and while I had the impression the author was clear on what was happening to whom, the reader doesn't always. Many times I found I didn't know who was speaking or what they were talking about or what past event they were referencing. Everyone in this book has their secrets and it's just overdone. Antonio for example goes through far too many things to be believable and with all the action the characters come off underdeveloped. I agree with another reviewer who said the author did too much and too little. Too many events, too many secrets, I couldn't keep them all straight. Was the mother having an affair, and how is there 50 pages of exposition over witnessing one kiss? It seemed like there was a whole backstory there we never got to here. Similarly James, we're set up by the book to like and believe Edite and when she tells Antonio early on he's a good guy, we believe her. I've finished the book and I don't think he was.
Near the end I was just reading it to finish it. The book got outlandish with the patron saint Antonio, and while I found the part with Ricky moving I found it a bit manipulative. I would suppose the moral of the story is that children are taken advantage of by adults in lots of ways, just like the Jaques boy, but I don't know that that is the moral I wanted.

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Emanuel Jaques, Toronto Shoeshine Boy Murders and Kicking the Sky by Anthony De Sa

Just over half-way through Kicking the Sky and I wanted to check out what the local Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives has on the case.
I find it remarkable there isn't another picture of Emanuel, called Manuel on the first newspaper stories about him. 
When you speak to any gay man in Toronto about the case, the first thing they say is the boy was no saint. This to me is a knee-jerk reaction to surviving through that period and the attack on gays that followed. Lost in this seems to be the fact that the boy didn't deserve to be murdered.
I'm glad to read this book and learn more about that period of Toronto's history. I enclose some articles I found in the Archives on the case, there is very little around on the internet.
Will post a full review when book is finished.