The Thirteenth Tale

What I Read: The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield. 408 pages. Anchor Canada, 2007.

Rating: 5/5!


Happy coincidence! I finished Diane Setterfield's stunning book, The Thirteenth Tale, this weekend, on Friday the thirteenth. How mysterious: the first of three verrry mysterrrious things to be found in this blog post.

The second mysterious thing is this: how, with less time to read and more pages to get read, did I manage to devour The Thirteenth Tale so must faster than Red China Blues, you may ask? Well, you should have seen me! And in fact if you're reading this you probably did. Quickly and at every opportune moment (and at a lot of very inopportune moments, as is my very bad habit), the pages slipped by and the weight of paper in my right hand became less and less. The story grabs you, makes you read on, constantly engaging your mind and making the clogs of your brain turn wildly, trying to solve the mystery of the novel.

That mystery is the third verrry mysterrrious thing. There is so much to uncover and piece together in this twisting novel of twins, bookstores, creaking old houses, and the foggy, melancholy Yorkshire moors. I could go on and on and on about this book: suffice it to say that I loved it, and felt completely at home in it. And I now have a fierce desire to book a ticket to England and go roaming about the moors with an old copy of Jane Eyre! Read this book and let's talk books and ghost stories!

Happy reading, and have a great day!

Erin

A Fine Balance

What I Read: A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry.
Rating: 6/5! :)

So, I've never been really good at math (i.e. I was beyond terrible and the bane of my math teachers' existence), but for some reason when Rasha and I started this site we chose to use a fractional scale to measure our like, dislike or indifference to a book. Why would we do such a thing? Does it suit either of our natures to say that we love a Salman Rushdie book with four fifths of our being? That out of our capacity to like we only like Breaking Dawn to the second degree of five? I think not. I bore myself just writing those two lines. So with Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, I chose to break the laws of math and fractions and maybe even of book reviewing and give this book a 6/5 because, to put it in language that suits me, I really really REALLY love this book and think that every literate person should be given this book for free to read. I love this book so much that I would volunteer to be the supplier of said free books, if my bank account didn't just reprimand me for even thinking such a thing.

There was SO much pressure on me to love this book. Everyone I met, from family members to friends to random strangers who approached me and wanted to talk about the book I was reading, said the same thing: this book would change my life. Which was kind of dramatic, I thought. Don't get me wrong, books have changed my life before, but usually because they caught me by surprise and opened me up when I wasn't looking for it. It seemed too easy to get a book that promised to change my life that actually would change it in some way. Am I making sense? In any case, I won't tell you that this book will change your life. I don't want to put the fear of letdown in you, or make you skeptical and guarded. But even if I do, even if you approach this book the way I did, extremely on guard against life-changing influences, then this book is hard to resist.

Mistry writes so cleanly and elegantly. The book is full of vivid description, yes, and of complex characters, scenes and stories, but the writing is never flowery or pompous or self-aware of its life-changing potential. Mistry tells stories, Canterbury Tales-style; he tells the histories of four people living in India in the 1970s, and then weaves together their lives to show how their stories change on contact and how they run parallel and intertwined with each other. Through four stories Mistry takes his readers on a carefully constructed but seemingly effortless whirlwind tour of every possible facet of humanity; we see the depth of the human heart, with all its capacity for anger, hatred, cowardice, cruelty, courage, love, hope and faith.

AND (I promise, no spoilers follow), the last five pages... talk to me when you've made it to the end, and you need someone who understands how you feel. Seriously. :)

In other words, think about reading this book. (It just took all my willpower not to write REEEEEAD THIS BOOOOOK, but I don't want to pressure you.) (I guess I just did by telling you what I really wanted to write. Sorry!) Thank you to those who finally talked me into tackling this 700+ page book! :) And thank you, Mom, for the too-brief debriefing session after the last five pages were read.

So, while you all get on A Fine Balance, I'll be working on Jan Wong's Red China Blues and James Clavell's Shogun, both of which are currently making my bus rides very enjoyable. Happy reading,

Erin

A Fabulous Find and Fugitive Pieces

What I Read: Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels

Rating: 5/5!

Okay, this post is partly to share the excitement of a fun book room find and partly to rave about a book I read years back but just recently recommended to Sonya (Hi, Sonya!). First, you must hear about this fabulous find we, well, found. Rasha and I were going through book donations as per usual, oohing and aahing as is to be expected when two bibliophiles are paid to sort through books all day, when we came across a rather strange offering. A book called Steamboat Gothic by Frances Parkinson Keyes, which Rasha picked up, oohed and aahed over, and tried to open… but the book wouldn’t open! (Duh duh duh…) She tries again, but only the first few pages move at all, and then I clue in, because I watch a lot of old movies where the characters have to… but I’m giving it away too soon. Anyways, so I clue in. She passes me the box, I shake it around a bit, and out comes a card, reading: “We hope you enjoy this book. We found the contents inspiring and relaxing during times of stress. Put this book on a shelf at the school. You will find it very handy. Have a good summer, thanks for your help and advice.” And it turns out that the inspiring and relaxing contents of this book are… a bottle of aged Canadian Forty Creek premium whisky! In a sealed bottle! And so, Watson, that is how old films about bootlegging and hollow Bibles helped to solve the case of the book with the really stuck pages.

After more sleuthing we found out that the book was made by this really cool Canadian company called The Book Box, which sells books to the public at www.secretstoragebooks.com. Normally I greatly disapprove of book vandalism, but this company seems to take fairly new antiques (which is kind of a contradiction of terms, I know) and books that have multiple copies of that edition in print. They also do a lot of newer books that have a wide circulation: I guess books like The History of Golf blend in better on some people’s shelves. The copy of Steamboat Gothic we found was from 1954 but looks like it’s older… I’ll have to see if I can get a picture of it on here. Anyways, the company advertises itself as “Recycling for Book Lovers”, which I think is adorable and makes me look more kindly on the destruction of the book for the sake of storing booze. If you have a book lover in the family, this would probably make them an amazing gift! No, that is not a hint.

To my second order of business: Fugitive Pieces. I’m still reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, which, by the way, is AMAZING and has already inspired two strangers to approach me to talk about how much they loved the book AND made me miss my bus stop once AND caused me to almost walk into a parked van on my way home. It’s a dangerous book. But so worth it… pick it up, you won’t regret it. But I digress. Fugitive Pieces was recommended and lent to me by my beautiful sister Sarah a couple of years ago, and she couldn’t have picked a more perfect book for me. It is so lyric and poetic in its writing style (Anne Michaels published poetry before this book, her first novel, which I must get my hands on), but the images are still so vivid and relatable that you can’t forget what you see through her writing. It tells the story of a poet who lives through the Holocaust as a boy, and tells of his journey from there through Greece to Canada to Greece again. It is a love story, a story about survival and endurance, a story about poetry and art, a story about the past and the changeability of the past, a story about family and history. I cannot recommend this book highly enough: you will lose yourself in her beautiful writing and the beautiful story.

And once you’re finished, read her newest book, The Winter Vault. She made us wait for years between Fugitive Pieces and this latest masterpiece, but it was well worth it! Anne Michaels, teach me your ways! And take all the time you need on your third book, we’ll wait.

As a note, I’ve been recommended to read Shogun by James Clavell and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (which I’ve found at the book room, yay!), so I’ll be diverting from the reading list I posted to read these two (thank you Dan and Katrina!). And yes, Jon, to finish Jim Butcher’s fantastic Alera series. (I promise you you’ll get those back, although I like them, so you might need to sneak them off my bookshelves.) And also The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, which I started too (will I ever learn?). I have waaay too many books going right now, but that makes me quite happy: during the year we English majors have surprisingly little time to read books that we want to read outside of our school texts. For now I’m going to finish A Fine Balance, because it is just so good. Here’s hoping I don’t walk into traffic or into a stampede of rampaging elephants because I’m so deep into my read!

All the best, and happy reading!

Erin