The Qallunaat
by Mini Aodla Freeman. U Manitoba Press, 2015 [1978]
4 stars – Oct 2018
This remarkable book is a young Inuit woman’s memoir of going to work in Ottawa for the Federal Government in the 1950s. The book was actually suppressed (physically sequestered by the Ministry of Indian and Norther Affairs) when it was first published, it is a collection of amusing, troubling, and fascinating tales of cultural collision.
March (Books 1, 2, 3)
by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. Top Shelf, 2013–2016.
5 stars – Sep 2018
This three-volume graphic novelization of Congressman John Lewis’ memoir of the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s is stunning, powerful, moving. Should be required reading for everyone.
Sealskin
by Tyler Keevil. Locarno Press, 2018 [2014]
4 stars (avg 4.18) – Sep 2018
This book was previously published in the UK as Burrard Inlet; this is the new Locarno Press edition. A collection of stories, almost all set in North Vancouver, which provide facets of the narrator’s experience in a variety of work settings. This is almost all about men – there are very few women in this book, and they’re kind of stand-ins. But what this book does well is to showcase a lot of different versions of masculinity in tension or sometimes conflict. The strongest stories to me have the narrator as a university student on a summer job in some declining industrial setting (shipyards, barges) and dealing with aging working-class curmudgeons – sometimes unionized workers, sometimes fiercely non-union – and having to navigate that political environment. At one point I found myself thinking the narrator’s voice didn’t feel quite authentic, but then it hit me that this is actually appropriate: I remember being in these same situations in my 20s, and having to construct my own voice very carefully to try to fit in (and minimize conflict) in these same work situations: in my case, pulp mills and construction sites, but with the same kind of broken, aging guys who late industrialism hasn’t been good to. And as such, I think this is a pretty damn good book; there’s a lot here, and I certainly recognized myself in it. (Full disclosure: I know the publisher, and he handed me this copy.)
Wanting
by Richard Flanagan. Knopf Publishing Group, 2008
2 stars (avg 3.53) – Sep 2018
Sigh. Another extended treatment of solipsism in fiction. Completely cardboard treatments of various historical characters and their complete inability to think about anyone but themselves. And in doing so, because the internal narrative is paramount, everyone’s well-documented sins are of course understandable in the end, no matter what horrific violence they have inflicted on everyone else. Oh, and the black people have predictably awful experiences, because apparently that is just their lot. Why do we read this stuff? Why do people like it?
The Beautiful Summer
by Cesare Pavese. 2018 [1949]
4 stars – Aug 2018
Almost indescribable narration of a few weeks in a young girl’s life and her coming to terms with other people.
What is Landscape?
by John R Stilgoe. MIT Press, 2015
3 stars (avg 3.76) – Aug 2018
Odd book about the vocabulary of landscape in English, written by the emeritus Harvard professor of exactly this subject. Snarky, if you can believe it, and really very erudite.
Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning
by Daniel Hobbins. U Pennsylvania Press, 2009
5 stars (avg 4) – Aug 2018
Five stars for a wicked-dense scholarly monograph on the early 15th century? Yes, because it changes the way I see the world. This book has WAY more detail than I ever needed on the life and work of Jean Gerson, the most important fifteenth-century academic that I’d never heard of before (he was, at the height of his career, Chancellor at the relatively new University of Paris). But the point of the book is to trace the evolution of the ideas of publishing, publicity, and authorship before Gutenberg. We typically think of these things as being characteristic of the age of print – and indeed a ton of writing has simply assumed this. But the example of Gerson, who flourished as an international celebrity scholar in the late 1300s/early 1400s shows the mechanisms of authorship, publishing, and distribution fifty or more years before the advent of print. The models are highly recognizable; it’s just slower, and a lot more human-powered than it was after printing became common. In any case, this is surprisingly readable book, even though its scholarship is almost impossibly thorough (sixty-four pages of endnotes). Hobbins’ other book is on the Trial of Joan of Arc, which I’m reading next.
Brother
by David Chariandy. Bloomsbury USA, 2018 [2017]
3 stars (avg 4.04) – Aug 2018
I heard Chariandy read from this and thought it sounded excellent. He is indeed a fantastic storyteller; this book was gripping, the story is a real ride, and he builds a vivid and complex world of the book’s outer-Scarberia setting. But it only gets three stars from me because, apart from the narrator and his Brother, I didn’t think any of the characters were believable; the Brother’s character mostly succeeds because of his mystery. But the other characters in the book feel like so many stage props, and I found that nagging at me as I read it. I’d be interested to read more of Chariandy, though.
The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke
by John Willinsky. U Chicago Press, 2018
4 stars (avg 3.5) – Aug 2018
This is a book with mammoth scope and ambition: to survey the intellectual history that underpinned the development of modern copyright laws. As the title suggests, Willinsky starts with St Jerome and takes it up to the first modern copyright legislation in the early 18th century, which provides an enormous amount of background context. It’s a dense work, stuffed full of footnotes, most of which present tantalizing branches off the main argument, but Willinsky holds to his key questions, which have to do with how intellectual and learned communities, from the early monastic tradition forward, thought about the ownership of ideas. The book picks up a lot of steam in the early modern period, covering the rise of humanism, the flourishing of European universities, and the role of scholarly societies. He also helpfully notes the nastier entanglements with colonialism, slavery, and the rise of industrial capitalism through this period, but stays true to the theme of learning and the ways in which the infrastructures of learning have been valued – differently but consistently – throughout the past fifteen hundred years of Western history.
Women & Power: A Manifesto
by Mary Beard. Liveright, 2017
3 stars (avg 4.07) – Jul 2018
Sometimes lectures that are gathered into books become more than the lectures they began as. Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own is a great example of that. Most of the Massey Lectures fit that bill too. This, unfortunately, reads very much like the text of a couple of lectures. I really like Mary Beard, and I was hoping this would be a great Manifesto. But, I was underwhelmed by this, sorry.
It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels
by Robert Penn. Bloomsbury USA, 2011 [2010]
3 stars (avg 3.96) – Jul 2018
This is a book about cycling in which he does not concern himself with cyclists (neither the various “tribes” of contemporary two-wheelers nor the famous racers, except in passing) but instead focuses on the hardware: the design of the bike itself and its constituent parts. In doing so, Penn covers a good amount of the history of bike design. Cool anecdote: Sr. Campagnolo was inspired to create a gear changing mechanism after reaching the top of a snowy mountain with fingers too cold to undo the wingnuts on his wheel, which would allow him to flip his rear wheel around and so engage the faster cog on the other side (early racers had an uphill and a downhill sprocket on either side of the rear wheel). So he went home and invented… the quick-release! (the derailleur took another decade). I would have liked this better if the author had any concern for the kind of bikes I like to ride: mountain bikes and their ‘hybrid’ brethren. Penn is a dedicated roadie. A pretty good read, in any case.
On Beauty
by Zadie Smith. Penguin Books, 2006 [2005]
4 stars (avg 3.72) – Jul 2018
I found this – big fat hardcover – in our AirBnB in the UK and sat down and read it. And loved it. Terrific story, terrific characters, complex and tangled plot, excellent narrative arc, and some justice at the end. By my standards, a properly done novel (I’m often disappointed by novels, especially the endings).
The Final Solution
by Michael Chabon & Jay Ryan. Harper Perennial, 2005 [2004]
4 stars (avg 3.32) – Jul 2018
A mystery novel that doesn’t read like a typical mystery… yes there’s a grisly murder, but it gets dealt with relatively early on and the so the book is about the characters and their motivations, and Chabon’s amazing ability to pull off what would be atrocious purple prose in anyone else’s hands.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys
by Viv Albertine. Faber & Faber, 2014
5 stars (avg 4.24) – Jul 2018
This was ferocious and amazingly satisfying. The first half is about her roots as a poor girl with no apparent future and then she winds up at the very centre of the 70s punk scene in London, with an almost violent drive to be in a band. The result is The Slits – although interestingly the Slits don’t actually get that much coverage in this book. The second half, in which she tries extremely hard to have a baby, enduring IVF for years, and then manages to pull herself through a horrible cancer experience, is brutal to read. She ends up rediscovering her creative self, at the expense of a bunch of the stable things in her life (e.g., her marriage), but this is entirely in keeping with the utterly driven young girl from the first half of the book. The writing is spare and completely candid; she pulls no punches, leaves nothing out in recounting her experiences – except, as I say, in her treatment of her bandmates in the Slits, about which she says little.
Wolf Solent
by John Cowper Powys. Vintage, 1998 [1929]
3 stars (avg 4.08) – Apr 2018
An amazingly microscopic novel about an utter drip of a main character. Luckily there are lots of other characters who are also microscopically examined, as well as an English countryside who figures as a main character as well, producing an incredibly rich evocation of a semi-mythic time and place. Too bad Wolf himself didn’t drown in the damn pond about halfway through.
Break Beats in the Bronx: Rediscovering Hip-Hop’s Early Years
by Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. U North Carolina Press, 2017
3 stars (avg 3.88) – Mar 2018
Second in my current jag of reading hip hop history. This is a super interesting book. It’s a scholarly monograph, from UNC Press, which gives is a little different tone than some… he stops talking about DJ Cool Herc and suddenly goes off about Pierre Bourdieu in a couple of places. This book is, apparently, about the third generation of scholarly history on hip hop… this is heavily cited and footnoted. Ewoodzie’s quest is not to tell the history, as that’s been done copiously already, but to ask why things worked out the way they did and not somehow differently… how, for instance, in the mid 70s, there was a vastly different musical culture in the South Bronx than in Harlem, just on the other side of the river. His answer delves minutely into the social fabric of the tragically bombed-out Bronx neighbourhoods of the time. Very in-depth, very interesting and full of fascinating details. A little heavier read than most, though.
Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
by Ahmir Questlove Thompson & Ben Greenman. Grand Central Publishing, 2013
4 stars (avg 4.1) – Mar 2018
Third of my recent hip-hop reading. This is a pretty fun and extremely entertaining book, tracing his life from early days as a musical brat in Philadelphia (and on tour around the US at a very early age) to the origins of The Roots and then their many years of navigating the changing course of hip hop culture. The first half of the book, with Questlove as a kid and a teenager trying to figure out what he’s about is the most fun to read. The second half is deeper and more introspective, as he looks at the changes in hip hop in the 90s and 2000s, the politics, the dominance of the gangsta image, and the rise of multi-millionaire tycoons. And then they fall in with Jimmy Fallon for a happy ending.
Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger
by Nigel Slater. Avery Publishing Group, 2005 [2003]
3 stars (avg 3.73) – Mar 2018
I’m a huge Nigel Slater fan. I have read and re-read The Kitchen Diaries (both volumes) and loved his writing and his approach to food. Toast is his memoir of childhood. He is a great writer; it is a painful memoir to read, because his childhood was both tragic and stultifying; his portrait of staid mid-century middle-class UK culture is brutal. This troubling beginning of course sets up his glorious coming of age as he discovers the joy of cooking (and the joy of other things). The first half of this – his early years as little boy oblivious to how his life is falling apart – is so depressing and hard to read; only afterward did I recognize Slater’s talent in conjuring up such a compelling and believable atmosphere on the page. It ends well, though.
Serve It Forth
by M.F.K Fisher. North Point Press, 2002 [1937]
3 stars (avg 4.19) – Jan 2018
This is not nearly as polished as Fisher’s Consider the Oyster, which is my favourite of hers. This one is earlier, in fact her first published book, and it is patchy. In places she writes with a pretentious mock-scholarly tone which is nonsense. But in other places her raw talent as a writer (WH Auden apparently considered her the best writer in America) shines through. The short story, “Standing and Waiting,” is absolutely singular; one of the greatest pieces of short narrative I’ve ever read. After reading three of her books (plus her translation of Brillat-Savarin), Fisher has moved into “collectable” for me. She’s got a couple of dozen titles to her name; I imagine I’ll be reviewing more of them here in months and years to come.
How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks
by Dave Tompkins. Stop Smiling Books (Melville House), 2010
5 stars (avg 3.87) – Jan 2018
This is an extremely hard book to describe or even categorize. I f’ing loved it. Tompkins writes a non-linear social history of the vocoder, encompassing both its WWII-era origins (as a proto-digital means of effectively scrambling high-level communications between, say, Churchill and Roosevelt) to its celebrated role in early 80s electrofunk and hip hop, and manages to convince us that all of this happened simultaneously, these two vastly different cultural moments somehow in two-way (yet totally scrambled) dialogue with one another. As a piece of 20th-century technology history (I always wondered why the guys leading the ARPA project in the early 60s were all into psychoacoustics) this is first rate: he digs through the archives, and also digs up the few old, old men who are still alive and asks them about their work (while playing Afrika Bambaataa at them). As a guide to the embryonic Detroit, NYC, and Miami techno/dance scenes, this is just brilliant. I assembled a Spotify playlist to accompany my reading… you know where to find me on there if you’re interested. This is 5 stars, because it changed the way I see the world.