The Rebel Bookseller
by Andrew Laties. 7 Stories Press 2011 (2nd ed)
3.5 stars - Dec 2021
This was surprisingly readable, but it is really a collection of war stories (or perhaps one long war story) that illustrates the perpetual innovation and struggle of indie booksellers. The message seems to be that indie stores are always threatened but always have the means to fight back, even if it pretty much kills you.
Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
by Glen Sean Coulthard. U Minnesota Press 2014
4 stars - Nov 2021
This is maybe the best book of theory I’ve ever read – that might be because, unlike most if not all books of theory I’ve ever read, this is grounded in material and political situations that I care directly about. In any case, Coulthard is a fabulously lucid writer, working through Marx, Fanon, Benhabib, Sarte, and other heavyweight authors with precision and forthrightness, while bringing Indigenous scholarship directly into dialogue with these traditions. I will probably read this – or at least consult it – again and again.
Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mossess
by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Oregon State U Press 2003
4 stars - Oct 2021
This is like Braiding Sweetgrass in miniature – focusing even more closely on one tiny plant, but still refracting it into myriad angles, each with a literary layer. Not a bad natural history book on its own; I learned a lot about moss. But more than that – more like her later literary work. Very personal, very human, very engaged.
Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds
by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa. Minnesota 2017
4 stars - Oct 2021
A difficult book, which I wanted to read because it promised to approach care ethics through Haraway and Latour – which it does – but is hard to read because the scope is so incredibly broad and the author is struggling with the language to shape such broad thinking. So there’s a certain amount of Haraway-esque word- and grammar-play here but not, unfortunately the kind of creative troping (or figuring) that Haraway and Latour excel at. The final two chapters on permaculture and on the various temporalities of soil and indeed soil science are the best parts here, probably because the scope is brought back to something more reasonable. Hard to pull a real message from it - beyond the expansion of “we” to include “more than human” actors, but the scholarship represented is rich and fertile.
My Rock’n’Roll Friend
by Tracey Thorn. Canongate 2021
4.5 stars - Sept 2021
An absolutely lovely handling of a complex bit of memoir/history/biography. The subject is Lindy Morrison, drummer for the Aussie band The Go-Betweens, who was a close friend of Thorn’s in the 80s and 90s, and again more recently. Partly, this is Thorn’s biography of Morrison as a fabulous rock and roll character and an inspiring feminist figure as well. But it has several other layers: notably, it is a corrective to a latter-day narrative that has largely written Morrison out of the history of the band – a band which had enough of a cult following and critical acclaim to inspire a fair bit of journalism and indeed a handful of books. So Thorn is interested to give Morrison her due in the musical history, and by extension, to give women in general their due in rock and roll where they are so often ignored, glossed over, or pigeonholed. Third, it is a memoir of Thorn’s experiences in this odd friendship between two very different personalities, and the myriad lessons she has taken from that friendship over (on and off) forty years. Beautifully written, full of fascinating stories, and with an almost satisfying sense of justice at the end.
First Dog on the Moon’s Guide to Living Through the Impending Apocalypse and How to Stay Nice Doing It
by First Dog on the Moon. ABC/HarperCollins 2017
4 stars - Sept 2021
This is surprisingly good. It starts out rather dark, channeling all sorts of contemporary anxiety and talking a lot about “preppers” (who are like survivalists but not as good?), but as it goes through a dozen or so apocalypse scenarios, you begin to get a good deal of perspective on anxiety, doom, and the things that are actually important (dogs, neighbours). FDOTM’s trademark humour helps a lot too. Everyone should read this book.
Shroud for a Nightingale
by P.D. James. Faber&Faber 1971
3 stars - Aug 2021
So, around page 375 you finally learn what the case is about, which means that the first two thirds of this 500-page doorstop are all just stage dressing for the actual mystery, which unfolds in the last hundred pages or so. Sigh.
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke. Bloomsbury 2021
4.5 stars - Aug 2021
A masterpiece of original world and character-building. This was just majestic, and such an interesting journey through. The ending was a bit underwhelming (hence 4.5 stars) but I would recommend this to everyone.
Off With His Head
by Ngaio Marsh. 1958
5 stars - Aug 2021
Maybe 5 stars is a lot for a genre book, but gee this was good!
The Other End of the Leash
by Patricia McConnell. Ballantine 2002
4 stars - Aug 2021
Best dog book I’ve read yet (and the only one worth reviewing so far). This is very rich, written by an animal behaviour researcher who aims to help expose how dog psychology and communication works on the dog’s end. That is, not content with training the dog to pay attention to human cues and commands, she is interested in how we might be more attentive – if not actually competent – at understanding dogs’ more innate motivations and communications tactics. It’s full of really rich anecdotes from her considerable and broad experience.
Cards on the Table
by Agatha Christie. whoever 1936
4 stars - Aug 2021
I picked this up for free at an un-staffed yard sale giveaway. It was yellowed and worn. I loved this one! It had my head spinning right to the last page!
When Species Meet
by Donna Haraway. Minnesota 2007
4 stars - Aug 2021
This is partly a revision of things she wrote in The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) – which is to say it mostly deals with dogs – and partly a collection of other essays on animals (primates, chickens, cats, breed genetics) she’s published. There’s a lot of scope. Parts of it hang together in a whole, and other parts seem like add-ons. I was surprised that she re-edited a good deal of the story of her experiences in dog agility games (which was related in the Manifesto) down to a series of emails to the agility mailing list. Still, this is extremely rich. Haraway is best known for her trope-heavy dissections of technoculture. Here, the tropes are just abundant, but her affect is pretty different, and a lot of this book is about love.
Swamp Angel
by Ethel Wilson. M&S 1954
5 stars - Jul 2021
I re-read this, after many years, and found it even richer than before… such a masterpiece of tension, subtlety, drama, and vision.
No One is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood. Penguin 2021
5 stars - Jun 2021
What a shockingly awesome novel, about twitter and social-media headspace where it runs up against the real world of life and death. Surprising on many levels, sublimely written and multilayered. Best novel in many years for me. Just noticing too that this is three 5-star books in a row for me!
The Book of Difficult Fruit
by Kate Lebo. FSG 2021
5 stars - Jun 2021
This is a book that was written just for me. It’s an abecedary, with each chapter about a kind of fruit (more or less, and with the clever renaming of Dandelions to Faceclocks because D was already taken by Durian, natch), and it’s almost local (her setting is either Seattle or Spokane) and it’s so perfect. Each chapter has recipes too! As well as amazingly touching personal stories from her family that, when you stand back to think about it, don’t really have anything to do with the fruit, but as you’re reading it, it totally seems like they do. Lebo is a clever and subtle writer; many a reference or a double-meaning is almost made but never obviously, so you again and again feel like you’re making the double-entendres yourself as you read. But it happens so often you eventually start to appreciate how smartly she sets them up for you. A beautiful, beautiful book, and just for me.
Nishga
by Jordan Abel. McClelland & Stewart, 2020
5 stars - Jun 2021
Jordan Abel is a superstar. This absolutely heartbreaking story of his dispossession, via the intergenerational trauma that rips apart communities, families, and individuals apart, would be a terrible dreary tale in most hands. But here, it is scintillating. His deft weaving of several simultaneous thematic lines, through both text and image (and beautifully produced by M&S) makes this a masterpiece of reflection on representation and the quest for identity . The “double displacement” of urban Indigenous lives is starkly put; it couldn’t be more clear.
Agnes, Murderess
by Sarah Leavitt. Freehand Books 2019
4 stars - May 2021
This stark, black and white graphic novel is about evil – a case study of the life of the sort-of legend of Agnus McVee, who apparently murdered many of the guests who came to her inn at 108 House in gold rush times. How does a person come to be a serial killer like that? Leavitt creates a story that makes it almost make sense in a terrible and tragic way.
Landmarks
by Robert Macfarlane. Penguin 2016
3 stars (re-read) - May 2021
I found myself thinking about this, and so I picked it back up, just months after reading it the first time. I wondered if it would strike me better this time, and that I’d begin to agree with all the superlative blurbs on the cover. It didn’t. I still think the chapters in which he talks to and about real people are strong, and the ones where he’s talking about people he has only read are quite weak. I think too that he is too over-exuberant about all his subjects – they all come across as eccentric superheroes. Not recommended.
Glass Houses
by Louise Penny. 2017 Minotaur (Macmillan)
4 stars - May 2021
First class plotting, and very exceptional in letting out only a bit of the story at a time – in a complex timeline, too. Overall a great read for a mystery story. The characters, however, are pretty hard to believe, and the dialogue – the things these dubious characters say to one another – is pretty ludicrous. Still, as an escapist novel, pretty enjoyable. Don’t think too hard about it.
As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance
by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. U Minnesota Press 2017
3.5 stars - May 2021
A difficult to read, as Simpson writes adversarily and defensively of her perspective and point of view – this is a scholarly monograph, and so she seems to feel the need to scrappily carve out her place. That makes it a hard read for someone prepared to listen openly to what she has to say. Oddly, this book is largely theory, abstract, even while she repeatedly refers to “grounded normativity,” Dene scholar Glen Coulthard’s term for Indigenous praxis. She talks about the importance of being out on the trapline, in the canoe, in the woods, but none of those places find their way into this book; its location is strongly in the office at the Uni. She makes a strong argument against letting “cultural resurgence” take the place of other, deeper, more radical kinds of resurgence – which is a facet of an anticapitalist argument that runs through here: “We have no such thing as capital. We have relatives. We have clans. We have treaty partners.” Sample sentence: “Withdrawing our considerable collective efforts to ‘Indigenize the academy’ in favour of a resurgence of Indigenous intellectual systems and a reclamation of the context within which those systems operate goes much further toward propelling our nationhood and reestablishing Indigenous political systems because it places people back on the land in a context that is conducive to resurgence and mobilization.” As with Noopiming, a bunch of this has no doubt gone over my head and this may be worth multiple readings.
These Mountains are our Sacred Places
by Chief John Snow. Samuel Stevens 1977
5 stars - May 2021
I got this because it traces the Indigenous history of the places my father worked, so it is directly part of my settler heritage. Chief John Snow is from the Stoney (Nakoda) people, who traditionally inhabited the Rocky Mountain foothills from south of the Bow river up to the Brazeau. Snow tells the story of the missionaries, the Northwest Mounted Police, the surveyors, the treaty commissioners, and the Indian Agents who slowly and by treacherous degrees dispossessed the Stoney from their lands and their ways of life, confining them to two small reserves, at Morley and at Bighorn, leaving them broken and destitute. They were somehow encouraged to attend the signing of Treaty 7 in 1877, which largely dealt with the Blackfoot confederation in Southern Alberta, and in signing Treaty 7 (even the Canadian authorities seemed confused about why they did) the Stoney lost access to their traditional territories in Treaty 6 land. A long and almost fruitless campaign eventually brought them a tiny reserve up at Bighorn (in what would be Treaty 8) downstream from their beloved Kootenay Plains (which were by then in protected Rocky Mountain parkland). And then Calgary Power built Bighorn Dam in the early 70s and flooded out most of that valley anyway. My dad worked for Calgary Power, not at Bighorn but at Kananaskis, Seebe, Ghost, Horseshoe, and Brazeau, all of which were within traditional territories of the Stoney. So this book has personal resonance. More broadly, though, Snow’s story is a laser-sharp case study of how the various forces of colonialism converged to pacify, dupe, and ultimately rob an Indigenous nation of their land and livelihood.
Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō
by Haruo Shirane. Stanford 1998
3.5 stars - May 2021
After reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches I wanted to read something more, something deeper about the cultural history of Bashō’s world. This book isn’t quite that; it’s much more about the poetics and how that aspect evolved from the middle ages into Bashō’s time (when mass literacy and print were introducing major changes into Japanese literary culture). I did learn a lot, though, about the haikai practice of collaboratively composing linked verse (the precursor to modern haiku) and, significantly, that haiku wasn’t really about “the moment” and the perfect zen experience where subject and object merge – which is what modern, western treatments of haiku tend towards. Rather, he makes the case that the haikai poets were bringing the ancient classical tradition into modern vernacular (and down-class) life. Which means that haiku is as much about witty and ironic allusion than anything else. Great stuff, but I still want to read something about life on the Five Roads (Gokaidō) in those days.
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami. Vintage 2005
2.5 stars - Apr 2021
Ugh. Another solipsistic story by another solipsistic writer. Why are there so many of these? Why can’t we have literature about people who are interested in other people instead of this inside-out fantasy projection nonsense? Nice readable prose, but a ridiculously heavy-handed thematic treatment and just dreadful characters (or should I say non-characters, since none of them are even intended to be real).
Death in the Truffle Wood
by Pierre Mangan. Vintage 2006 [1978]
4 stars - Apr 2021
I read this first about fifteen years ago, and liked it then. I like it now. Mangan’s depiction of rural France and its insular, distrustful truffle farmers/hunters is pretty great. The crime/mystery is pretty interestingly done too, with a lot of incidental black humour around the edges.
A Drifting Life
by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Drawn and Quarterly 2009
3.5 stars - Apr 2021
This magnum opus – 825 pages of panel-by-panel autobiography – is an amazing achievement. It’s a fascinating account of this man’s life. But it’s also a bit boring. He is at the forefront of a new comics movement, and that comes with challenges. But his response to almost every challenge is to just work harder… so he has little life outside the drawing of the comics. The result is that it reads like a potboiler, as opposed to a story with an arc.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
by Matsuo Bashō. Penguin 1967
4 stars - Apr 2021
I have read and re-read this several times over the years and each time I get more out of it. It is so deceptively simple – a straightforward travel diary interspersed with poems – and yet it reveals treasures to the careful (and repeat) reader. This time I began to wonder if there were other, better translations in the world (this one by Nobuyuki Yuasa).
The Clerkenwell Tales
by Peter Ackroyd. Nan Talese/Doubleday 2004
4 stars - Apr 2021
Enjoyed this, as I have other Ackroyd books. He makes historical seem contemporary, for better or worse.
Most Secret War
by R.V. Jones. Coronet 1979
5 stars - Mar 2021
This autobiography, of the WWII head of British scientific intelligence, is astounding in its detail and the clarity of its thinking. That Dr Jones was able to do what he did in the war is amazing; that he could tell this story doubly so. What mars the story is his vanity: so much of the book, especially in the second half, is his accounting of how he was right, and others wrong. This is always presented as essential to the war effort, but he allows for no other accounts to be worth considering. That said, his unique position makes this an incredibly compelling read.
Not on my Watch
by Alexandra Morton. Random House Canada 2021
4 stars - Mar 2021
A shocking and heartbreaking account of Morton’s three-plus decades of work on whales, salmon, and, ultimately, fish-farms in the Broughton archipelago. Her detail and comprehensiveness is stunning, having never once taken her eye off this ball as well as pursuing this work on an incredible range of levels, scientific, legal, cross-cultural. Her representation of DFO is hard to fully take, though – either DFO is absolutely criminally corrupt, to the point of real evil, or else she’s missing some perspective there. Hard to tell from this one account – it will be interesting to see if any legal challenges follow this book.
The Walls Have Ears
by Helen Fry. Yale UP 2019
4 stars - Mar 2021
Fascinating account of recently declassified logs and records from the UK’s POW bugging program in WWII, which produced – almost passively – an incredible amount of critical intelligence.
The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir
by Sherry Turkle. Penguin Press 2021
5 stars - Mar 2021
What an amazing story, and how well told, and how enmeshed are its elements with my own intellectual upbringing. Turkle’s astounding life story – and considerable struggles – illuminate and animate her groundbreaking work on digital culture in the 80s and 90s.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
by Jenny Odell. Melville House 2019
5 stars (re-read) - Mar 2021
Still the richest self-help book I’ve ever seen. The parts in the middle on retreat, refusals, and bioregionalism are particularly excellent.
The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge
by Peter B Kaufman. Seven Stories Press 2021
3 stars - Mar 2021
This is a disappointing book. It is heavy on the rhetorical flourishes, heavy on the Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, and especially Richard Stallman, but light on the political economy analysis. Besides one pointless sideways jab against Marx (not even Marxism), it seems to live in a world where politics don’t exist; rather, there are only good guys (in favour of free knowledge) and bad buys (against free knowledge). There are no reasons why the world might be divided up so, which, especially given the thoughtless jab at Marx, is ironic. The best part of the book is probably its championing of Wikipedia as the realization of Diderot’s dream.
The Living
by Annie Dillard. Harper Perennial 1992
3.5 stars - Feb 2021
I read this twenty-odd years ago, the first Annie Dillard book I read – and I subsequently read almost everything of hers. This book is too long, frankly. It covers fifty years in pioneer Bellingham in excruciating detail, following the fortunes of three families, from the 1850s, attempting to burn down the cedar stumps to let enough sunshine in for their gardens, to the point when the big challenge they face is the 1890s’ banking crisis, which evaporated all financial liquidity and turned all the real-estate speculators (that is, almost everybody) into penniless shake-and-shingle cutters overnight. The novel is most obviously (as per the title) about death in all its weird and wondrous modes; people really do die in this book, and the living, they keep going. But more importantly it’s a book about race relations: between the white settlers and, varyingly, the various Indigenous nations; between white settlers and their Chinese labour; between different European (and indeed American) ethnicities; and how this all shifted over time. It is, on top of that, a critique of capitalism, for it is explicitly capitalism that produces the majority of suffering in this book (that is, apart from the sheer meanness of fate in taking lives). It is also a book about women, for although the ‘main characters’ are men, their lives are mostly seen through women’s eyes, and are anchored by women’s solidity and relative longevity. But as I said, it’s too long. The 450+ pages produce a vivid and detailed picture of a place and time, but there’s no storyline as such – apart from the chronicle of the challenges that made these people who they are and made this part of the world what it became.
The Most Beautiful House in the World
by Witold Rybcynski. Viking 1990
4 stars - Feb 2021
I would mark this as a re-read, but I first read it in the early 90s, and I don’t remember much. Rybcynski is a first-class NF writer, effortlessly weaving his own tale – of the slow development of a plan to build something of his own – into his interpretation and appreciation of architectural history. Ridiculously erudite and pure mind candy to read.
Landmarks
by Robert Macfarlane. Penguin 2016
3.5 stars - Jan 2021
I didn’t like this as much as most people, apparently; certainly not the people who reviewed and blurbed it, and celebrated it with all sorts of superlatives. It’s got some interesting stuff in it, to be sure – a collection of chapters, thematically arranged by general landform category: mountains, rivers, coasts, etc. Each chapter an essay, focusing mostly on Macfarlane’s encounter with a particular nature writer, some in person and some just by reading. And then each chapter contains a glossary of terms taken from a variety of UK languages and dialects, that illuminate the local and specific in that chapter’s theme. The chapters which deal with writers he actually met and encountered (e.g., Roger Deakin), are far stronger than the ones he didn’t (e.g., John Muir). This is, I think, because the actual human being grounds the story, and the study of landscape and nature, in the specific and the local. Which is what bothers me about the rest of this book. While one might think that a book that so celebrates the specific and the local would practice what it preaches, it just doesn’t. So Macfarlane’s vast Oxbridge perspective allows him to breeze over enormous scope and scale, dipping in now and then to slum it with the actual localities. The glossaries, bristling with words from Galloway and Kent and Exmoor and “Gaelic,” are a tourist’s guidebook – an armchair tourist’s guidebook. We don’t go to Kent to really dig in to the why of the language there, we just collect it in our scholarly case and present it, decontextualized, like hors-d’ouvres – terms from Kent sitting on the place next to words from Cornwall, or Suffolk, or wherever “Gaelic” is (the far north of Scotland? the Isles? the Highlands? he never says). Better to read the landscape writers he talks about in the original; they are the people that spent the time in the places. Better to read Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose book does a similar kind of work, but really putting place – with all its struggle and messiness – first. Where this book is much more poetic and picturesque than Stilgoe’s What is Landscape, the latter book does a much better job of tracing the connections between the terms it presents.
Talking Animals
by Joni Murphy. Book*hug 2020
4 stars - Jan 2021
It starts out as a poetical essay on the history of Manhattan, albeit with a lot of animal references. Then we meet the main character, an alpaca who works at city hall and suffers from all sorts of ennui and self doubt. At first you think it’s a cute modern fable full of terrible puns. But then the crises get serious and this book becomes a hopeful allegory of the present, although it’s set in the present and in the real world. Except it’s all animals. I liked it.
Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon
by M F K Fisher. Touchstone (S&S) 1991
4 stars - Jan 2021
MFK’s late-in-life recollections of her early twenties in Dijon, when she was newly married and knew nothing about anything. It’s very much up to her excellent standard (although it admittedly includes some anecdotes lifted from her other books), and also benefits from sixty years of hindsight. I learned a lot about France in 1930, and also a lot about Fisher’s formative years. OMG I wish we could travel right now.
Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction
by Richard Jean So. Columbia UP 2021
5 stars - Jan 2021
This is shockingly good. It articulates an argument about the sheer persistence of gross racial inequality in American publishing and literature over 50 years by attending to a variety of distant readings – of publishers, reviewers, awards, and canon-makers – arguing that the close reading of the race issue in literature has been all very well, but it’s always missed the big picture. This ambitious book addresses just that. I’m not sure about the robustness of all his data models and sets, but his argumentation is sure and erudite. Even without the numbers this would be a terrific book on the topic, but his attention to the large data makes it a groundbreaking one.
The Map the Changed the World
by Simon Winchester. Harper Perennial 2001
3.5 stars - Jan 2021
The amazing story of William Smith, a nobody who single-handedly figured out how geological strata work and drew the famous map of English rock… with enormous implications for industry, science, etc. Winchester really loves this story, and he loves Smith, and it’s pretty purple in some places … “The entire and newly fashionable discipline of geology was about to be riven by arguments between the horny-handed toilers in the fields and the more fragrant dilettante practitioners…” but it’s a pretty fascinating story. I’d give it 4 stars if (a) the chronology were laid our more clearly and (b) the images were reproduced larger. Much of this story is set in Somerset; I wish I’d read this before we visited.
Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
by Svante Pääbo. Basic Books 2014
4 stars - Jan 2021
A surprisingly gripping story of real lab science, telling the story of the race to sequence the Neanderthal genome by the scientist who led the lab that did it in 2010. There is so much detail here: about prehuman evolution, about genomics, and about the raw detail of how to effectively pull DNA out of 40,000-yr old bones. One might think it’s horribly dense and technical. And it is, yet somehow Pääbo makes a page-turner out of it. No small feat. There’s lots here about the competition and personalities that drive high-profile science, and also lots about how to drive the narrative through strategic publication. He’s a bit of an odd duck, commenting on the physical appearance of most of his colleagues along the way, and, rather tragically, breezing right past some substantial ethical issues in his cheery acknowledgement of Richard Ward’s native american DNA inventory, which led to lawsuits from the Nuu-chah-nulth nation from whom it had been taken. Pääbo is all about the thrill of the chase… he’s not concerned with things outside his world of research. Still, the story is so detailed and so readable, it’s an amazing book.
We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir
by Samra Habib. Viking 2019
3 stars - Jan 2021
I was disappointed by this. It’s actually a really fascinating story, but her telling of it is so paper-thin, and with such huge gaps and begged questions, I found myself scratching my head at so much of it. The title, I had thought, promised some kind of historical/cultural discovery, but the book doesn’t really deliver on that. Rather, she manages to construct a queer, hip (although, Bauhaus in the 90s? really?), jet-setting identity for herself without giving up her faith, and then goes looking for more people like her. We don’t get much about those people, though, except for the fact that a lot of people agreed to be photographed for her project. What happened to the various people we meet along the way in this story – her parents, her sisters, her first and second husbands – is by turns puzzling or completely absent.