| For most of us, December’s a slow month. It’s a good time to hibernate with a few good books (especially if you get gift certificates), but after awhile the traditional list of holiday favourites can leave a stale taste in one’s mouth. Yes, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is a witty if moralizing read, but what if you’re in the mood for something a little different? I offer up a few unorthodox choices to aid in your holiday reading.
One of the few books I pull off the shelf on an annual basis, The Angel on the Roof by Russell Banks remains the most beautiful and heartbreaking collection of short stories I’ve ever read. With pieces culled from his previous three collections, Searching for Survivors, Trailerpark and Success Stories, plus nine new ones, Angel shows Banks at his best. Stories such as "Firewood" and "The Rise of the Middle Class" explore the themes of common brutality seen in novels such as Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, but their brevity lessens the extended cruelty that his longer works invoke.
After reading Sian Rees’s swashbuckling history of 18th-century female convicts, The Floating Brothel, you might not feel as uncomfortable when dealing with a harsh Calgary winter. The book follows the lives of 237 female prisoners sent from England to Australia in July of 1789, never once shying away from the grittier details of sailing on a grungy, dysentery-ridden vessel. The ways in which these women dealt with menstruation, men and, yes, childbirth, are remarkable.
I know, I know: a book about Stalin at Christmas? Horrible! But now that David Cronenberg has announced his next project will be an adaptation of Martin Amis's London Fields (the first film of an Amis novel since the awful Rachel Papers – anyone remember that flick?), the author's work will see a little surge in popularity, and his 2003 book Koba the Dread is one of his best. This is less a detailed account of Stalin's reign than a look at how the public, and particularly Western intellectuals, fell under the sway of the brutal dictator, including Amis's own famed novelist father, Kingsley. A meditation on the immutability and mask of evil, perfect for our own surreal times.
Finally, a 19th-century classic worth rediscovering is Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, a gothic thriller that ushered in the serial "sensational" novel in England. Collins and Dickens were good friends, and the latter’s last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was written as a homage to Collins. You’ll find everything from Peter Carey and Patrick McGraw’s gothic horrors to a foreshadowing of modern soap opera in Collins’s book, which might cause your head to spin if you’re only familiar with more rigid contemporary narratives. There are a lot of characters here, spinning their own versions of a ghostly spirit’s presence amid murders and bouts of insanity.
One event of note this week: Canadian SLAM poetry champion Brendan McLeod will be in town on Friday, December 23 for a spoken word event at The Soda (211 - 12 Ave. S.W.). Now based in Vancouver, McLeod (member of the spoken word troupe The Fugitives) is back from a tour of Europe, where he finished second in Holland’s World Slampionship competition last June.
Bestsellers for December 12 to 18 at Pages on Kensington
Fiction and Poetry
1. Dave Cooks the Turkey
by Stuart McLean
2. On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
3. Memories of My Melancholy Whores
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. The Penelopiad
by Margaret Atwood
5. Three Day Road
by Joseph Boyden
6. Eldest
by Christopher Paolini
7. Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
8. Grizzly Lies
by Eileen Coughlan
9. High in the Clouds
by Paul McCartney
10. Operation Red Jericho
by Joshua Mowll
Non-fiction
1. Race Against Time
by Stephen Lewis
2. Freakonomics
by Steven Levitt
3. Talk to the Hand
by Lynne Truss
4. Ideas
edited by Bernie Lucht
5. Outside of Ordinary
edited by Catherine Bancroft
6. The Dolphin's Tooth
by Bruce Kirkby
7. On Bullshit
by Harry Frankfurt
8. Why Do Men Have Nipples?
by Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg, M.D.
9. The Bedside Book of Birds
by Graeme Gibson
10. Teacher Man
by Frank McCourt |
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