November 2010 Books

November 1
The Voyage of The Narwhal by Andrea Barrett

My boxes of books from August continue to provide me with excellent re-reads, this being way way up there on the list. You guys, this book…this story…I mean Andrea Barrett does what she does so right and I’m always really made when I come to the end of this, like I just want to know more, about everyone. This is about the so-called Golden Age Of Exploration, and also about fame-whoring, for lack of a better word, and cultural appropriation, and technology, and lots of other things. The plot is fantastic, here, in a full-length novel, and the historical detail is so compelling, like when the stranded sailors make ice castles on the icepack or Zeke’s informational lecture schedule. I can’t decide if I love Erasmus or Alexandra more, and you know what, it’s the rare ‘happy ending’ that makes me go “YES THAT COMPLETELY MAKES SENSE’ because such things are often really sort of off-key and off-balance. Not this. No no, not this. Damn I love this story.

November 2
Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett

I got this at the used bookstore so I think I’ve probably read it this year but I don’t care, I was so excited about reading The Voyage Of The Narwhal that I had to jump right in. My favorite of all the stories in this selection—many of which deal with overlooked or otherwise disappointed (or sometimes disappointing) scientists—is the title one, which has a connection to the plot of The Voyage Of The Narwhal, and has several salient public health themes to it, oddly, as well as the usual awesome historical detail (how would people have kept quarantine during the Irish potato famine, you ask? This story posits a theory!). Andrea Barrett, I bow before you.

November 4
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Another one from the book box, I can’t remember when I first read it but I want to say end of high school, beginning of university? Whhhhoooooooooo girl. This is not for the faint of heart, this story; it’s about the nature of freakdom, I guess, and also about different types of love and survivor’s guilt. There’s nothing lovely or heartwarming about this story—I can think of several characters who would grimace and spit at the very idea of ‘heartwarming,’ now that I think of it—and the writing—or to be more precise, the language—is so visceral and heartbroken and sarcastic that it can …I don’t know, it can twist a little inside you. Which is to say I recommend it very much, but preferably when you have some time to devote to it because you will cancel all your plans for the weekend once you get into this, I assure you.

November 12
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

This set of stories came out last year I think but it’s apparently just got to the Wellington City Libraries and you best believe I pounced on it when I wandered by the Librarians’ Recommend section the other day after work (I wanted to borrow Servants Of The Map by Andrea Barrett, because I am feeling pretty into her right now and I somehow do not own that book). So you can imagine how excited I was to truck on home with two of my favorite authors in my bag, like I was really impatient to get into the bathtub and get into these stories as I have never been disappointed by this writer ever. All the familiar Alice Munro stuff is there: moving from the farm to the city; Toronto and Vancouver; being a poor girl at university; family relationships and hidden histories; running into people from childhood you’d forgotten completely. I happen to like all those Alice Munro things so I was very happy getting to know these new stories—few pleasures like that one, right?–but I was also blown away by the title story, the last in the set, which is about a female mathematician in the late nineteenth century and somehow echoed some of the Andrea Barrett stuff as well, in some sort of perfect amalgam of everything I seem to feel like reading lately. Such a happy sigh when I got into bed last night to finish that story.

November 14
Servants Of The Map by Andrea Barrett

This was the first collection of stories by her I ever read and by which I was introduced to the families I can now see are all related and intertwined: the Marburgs, the Kynds, the Wells. I can’t say enough about the connections between the title story, “The Cure,” and “Ship Fever;” I really feel like I’m getting to know these families and their worlds and I can’t get enough of it. This woman is a genius, that’s all there is to it. I keep thinking about Arctic voyages and geographic botany and chromolithography and everything else and I never want it to end. I wish she would just write about these people for the rest of eternity just so I could get to know them better.

November 15
The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett

And the hits just keep on rolling! All the families from all the other stories are all brought together in this one, at—awesomely—a tuburculosis sanitarium in upstate New York in 1905. The details are amazing (people who hook up—and they’re all always hooking up because they’re not supposed to do anything except lay around and eat–at the sanitarium are known as ‘cousins’ instead of bf-gf) and there’s a female scientist, as we’ve come to expect, and the family tree at the front of the book was maybe even the best part, if you’ve spent any time with the characters and started to get to know what I want to call the in-jokes, for lack of a better phrase. I want to learn more about the TB sanitariums, now (more public health themes!)…reading Andrea Barrett makes me want to learn more about pretty much everything.

November 20
The Birth Of Love by Joanna Kavenna

Oooh, eee. I was on quite a roll there, but I’m sorry to say this month ends with a whimper not a bang. Sigh. I wanted to like this book–I don’t know, maybe I should have just quit while I was ahead. Anyway, this has some similar themes and structure to Cloud Atlas which is one of my favourites and which I guess I’ll just have to buy again or something, but…yeah, nah. I mean I am all about the miracle of birth, honestly, but I’m not sure I need to read about someone’s cervix painfully dilating over like twelve pages. And I did straight up roll my eyes when one of the protagonists waxed rhapsodic about the joys of living seasonally in what used to be the Arctic and described her fellow automatons in the big grim futuro-city as wearing ‘drab little smocks,’ like OF COURSE they wear smocks in the grim future. Sigh. I hate writing not-very-good reviews. I’m sorry! I can’t help it that I didn’t like the smocks!