Month: October 2019

The Road Review

This book gets 2 creepy human skulls out of 5.
[The caption speaks for itself: there is a dyptich of a skull, old and brown, reminding us of our mortality and why it’s so weird to be obsessed with post-apocalyptic narratives.]
  • Why did I pick this book up?

Now, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has been on my radar for quite some time. I have taken a few dystopian/post-apocalyptic literature courses in my academic career, and this novel comes up a lot in discussion and theory.

I thought I would really like it. It’s a ‘seminal’ text. Alas, as with a lot of canonical literature, I was disappointed. It’s prize winning. Pulitzer Prize winning, and my copy has praise that says “it might very well be the best book of the year”. So some people really fucking loved this book. I will not be counted amongst them.

But I picked it up because I am starting to run out of books that I have not read in my collection, and am finding myself too cheap to go buy books, and too lazy to go to the library (also I owe them money, which factors into the too cheap category as well, ha). Also, again, did not know I would be disappointed in this book.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

Although I personally did not really find this book to be amazing, some people who have either read no post-apocalyptic literature, or who are super fans of the genre (two opposing categories, I know) may really enjoy this novel.

If you like really sad stories about people that you are pretty sure from the start are doomed, you should read this text. I found it to be a bit too depressing, and I also knew what the stakes were: these people are not going to have very many good moments in this book.

It does have some good descriptions of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and this could also be a reason to read this book. However, I found these descriptions to eventually get overly repetitive, and by the end I was just ready for the book to end, for the misery and monotony to come to a close, and for me to see if there would be any kind of climactic or super significant ending that could perhaps change my opinion of the book.

Alas, it did not do this for me. More on that further down.

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The book begins some years after a world-ending environmental catastrophe of some sort. Everything is grey and ashy, there are no living plants or animals to be found, and most people are dead. The ones who are still living are probably the unlucky ones; we follow a man and his unnamed son (very Birdbox haha), two of the ‘good guys’ (the ‘bad guys’ being depraved people who are resorting to cannibalism and insanely gruesome murders to survive) as they try and get further South (for a not-totally clear reason) and literally not get eaten by crazies.

We find out that the boy has lived his whole life in this post-apocalypse and that his mother committed suicide at some point before, tasking the husband with protecting the boy but also maybe killing him should it come down to it? Like she doesn’t want the boy to be left alone, so if the dad is in danger he should kill the boy so they both die? Both of those requests are super fucked up for someone to ask of their partner. Like, jesus.

Anyways, they basically just go through miserable day after miserable day of travelling by foot through a wasteland, starving and searching for food, getting sicker with every day, and being set upon/followed by cannibals and other even more desperate and less scrupulous survivors?

  • Overall brain gushings :

Ok. Here are the reasons why I don’t like this book, even though it’s a best-seller, a classic, and apparently something I shouldn’t like.

It’s basically torture porn. You are reading about a father and his son who are starving and running away from cannibals, vaguely going South. And they do this day after day. With no actual hope. And they have been doing this for years. Literally that little boy’s whole life. And the dad has a bloody cough from the beginning of the novel.

So we know he is going to die. And leave this little boy alone, or have to kill him too. So that’s nice. I understand that a lot of the novel is about ‘the miracle of goodness’ but there isn’t that much goodness in this book. To me this book says that our obsession with post-apocalyptic narratives is foolish, because the stories that exist after the end of the world are fucking terrifying, and again, literally just waiting for these characters to die. There is no hope that the world will come back or improve in McCarthy’s apocalypse.

As mentioned, I literally wanted the book to end. I wanted the dad to die, because I knew it had to happen at some point, and unlike this man and little boy, didn’t want to keep being tortured by this story. My favourite post-apocalyptic text – Station Eleven – uses a quote from Star Trek as its guiding motto, and I need my post-apocalyptic texts to hold to it in some way; “Survival is insufficient”. There has to be some hope. Although The Road does have some love, even the love is so full of fear and pain, that nothing in this book really made me feel good.

Here is a picture of The Road in front of a road. Unlike the roads in The Road, this road is pretty and welcoming, and also flaunts the great fall colours happening in Ottawa right now.
[A hand holds a book in front of a road. There is a massive tree behind it, full of vibrant yellow, orange, and green leaves. The Road is just a black book with its title splashed across the center in all caps, white font.]
  • What does it mean?

I have touched on what this book means and is about a decent amount in my synopsis of the book, and also I will touch on its themes a bit in the ‘favourite passages’ section below. The book’s Wikipedia page (which when too lazy to do research on a text and its meaning is a great source) basically says that people loved this book because it was ‘heartbreaking’ and ‘stark’ and it was those things, but I still don’t think it was a ‘good’ book. It was ok. Honestly, I was tempted to give it a 1 or 1.5 rating, but then thought that based on its critical response and importance to the genre bumped it up a bit.

Other things the book is concerned with (but in my opinion does not offer a ton of insight or concrete opinions on): the meaning of life, whether mankind is fundamentally good or evil, and the inexplicably strong yet painful bonds between parents and their children.

  • Favourite passages :

Alright, so there weren’t a ton of dog-eared pages in this book, which reflects me not feeling it. Also, all the passages mimic McCarthy’s punctuation and spelling, such as his misspelling of “don’t” to “dont”. There are some interesting statements on trauma and memory:

A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.

You forget some things, dont you?

Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Cormac McCarthy, pg 12

After they leave a man to starve, against the boy’s wishes:

He was just hungry, Papa. He’s going to die.

He’s going to die anyways.

He’s so scared, Papa.

The man squatted and looked at him. I’m scared, he said. Do you understand? I’m scared… You’re not the one who has to worry about everything…

Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

pg 259

Then, a passage on stories and living in the post-apocalypse:

Real life is pretty bad? [the man asks]

What do you think?

Well, I think we’re still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here.

Yeah.

You dont think that’s so great.

It’s okay.

pg 269

Also, I agree with the little boy! At what point is life worth it? This is an existential question that I do not have the answer for, but goddamn!!

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you want to read what I think is better post-apocalyptic/dystopian literature check out Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. It has a lot in common with The Road; both are very graphic and sad in their portrayal of humanity gone depraved, but Parable has a more exciting narrative. It also has more interesting themes of afro-futurism and is more explicitly sci-fi, so that may either be a bonus or a deterrent to you.

For another tale of familial love and the ties that bind us (and a definite tear-jerker of a read) check out Cordelia Strube’s On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light which is one of the best books I’ve ever read, about a girl and her younger brother.

Stay tuned for my next review, Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a book about living in Nigeria and the gender dynamics of a family affected by wealth and religion.

Heart Berries: A Memoir Review

This book gets 4 out of 5 deliciously juicy and somehow painfully tart berries. Like when you bite into a raspberry and your taste buds sing but also you want to cry.
[The photo is a grid of pints of assorted beautiful berries: blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and something that looks a little like salmon berries?]
  • Why did I pick this book up?

This book has been on my radar for quite some time. In fact, in January, I made a list of books I wanted to read, and Heart Berries was pretty high on that list from the get go. It’s a critically acclaimed memoir by a woman who grew up in British Columbia – something I did as well (the living in BC, not the writing a critically acclaimed memoir) – on an isolated reservation. It was also praised by another amazing indigenous writer – Eden Robinson, writer of Monkey Beach – that I love, so I was honestly so pumped to start.

However, a bit of a *trigger warning* is necessary, as Mailhot is writing about some pretty traumatic events, mental illness, and the deep effects of colonialism in Canada.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

I would definitely recommend this book! If you live in Canada, or the United States, then you live in a settler colonial state. If you live in a culture of settler colonialism and are white, you may not even realize the impact it has on the whole fabric and day to day life of your society. Heart Berries will help show you why behind every “drunk Indian” story is a legacy of cultural genocide and continued forced poverty and marginalization.

I would also recommend this book if you like reading about people who are incredibly talented and creative, but also in a lot of pain and distress. This may not sound appealing to some, but there is nothing like a good writer describing difficult emotions and situations.

I guess do not read this book if you are too triggered by reading about alcoholism, sexual assault, and manipulative relationships.

This is also a pretty slim book, so even if it isn’t something you would normally read, you should give it a go, because it ends quickly – too soon, if I may say.

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

Heart Berries is the result of Terese Marie Mailhot being hospitalized for her suicidal ideation and bipolar disorder in the wake of her relationship with a man named Casey breaking down. Put a pin in that.

She is encouraged to write about her feelings while in the hospital; most of the writing we read are ‘letters’ to Casey, explaining herself and her life. Nothing is revealed to us linearly, but eventually we discover that Mailhot was raised on a reservation by her wonderful and contradictory mother. Her mother is an activist, an addictions counsellor, and a woman who loves problematic and dangerous men. She is a woman who fights for marginalized people, loves her children fiercely, but has a tendency to neglect them and put them at risk. Mailhot writes about how her mother’s death led to one of her biggest breakdowns, around the birth of her first son.

We learn that Mailhot – at the beginning of writing Heart Berries – has two sons, one of which she does not have custody of. We see into the trauma that Mailhot has experienced, and how her academic pursuits seemed like a lifeline for her in a time of crisis. We also see how the academic world treats Mailhot as a second-class citizen, and how men treat her like shit, not only because she is a woman, but because she is an indigenous woman.

She then writes about her relationship with Casey, before and after winding up in the hospital. We see how her bipolar disorder and trauma affect her relationships and mood. She gets pregnant with Casey’s child and they get married. Mailhot keeps writing, and the memoir ends with a letter to her mother, explaining her grief for her death, as well as her grief and anger over the abuse she experienced at the hands of her father, also a complex figure: he is an artist, an alcoholic, and an abuser who died tragically.

I wanted to showcase the cool metallic owl art we have in our apartment. I have two other ones like that!
[A hand holds a small black book in front of a groovy piece of art of an owl sitting on a tree. The cover of the book is black, except for a outline of red strawberries on the bottom right corner. At the top ‘heart berries’ is written in a small white scrawl that is obviously meant to look like notebook scribbles.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

Guys, this book is good. Like very good. It is a very heavy book for something so thin. There were certain things I didn’t like about it, but that’s because it’s a memoir and real people are not perfect. One example of this is Casey. I find him to be very manipulative, and sometimes pretty much a garbage man. This is pretty judgemental of me, because I don’t know the guy, and he and Mailhot are still married, so what do I know. But I do find him act shady at times, and to be emotionally manipulative of Mailhot, which I find particularly saddening to read considering her personal and intergenerational trauma.

Mailhot writes about the isolated reservation of Seabird Island was also heart-wrenching, and key to read for people who are uninformed about the crisis happening in reservations, or for those who think indigenous people are “just so lucky and get so much free stuff from the government”. The statistics for how many First Nations are under water advisory warnings is staggering, and as the article I’ve linked to concludes; “the water crisis was created by Canada and has been maintained by Canada for decades, with devastating but predictable outcomes”.

  • What does it mean?

This book is a meditation on the impact of trauma on mental health. It is a meditation on the violent and lasting impact of colonialism on indigenous people, and in particular indigenous women. There is a really interesting link to Paul Simon and this musical he ‘wrote’ that demonstrates how much women and racialized people get exploited by white men, and how this erasure is a violence, an aggression.

Heart Berries also shows the ways in which love is insanely complicated, particularly when the people in the relationship are dealing with mental illness and intense trauma. It’s a memoir, so Mailhot has to work with her version of the truth to make a narrative, and so unlike a fictional one, it may be lacking in plot or resolution or things that ‘make sense’, and that is ok. It is part of the journey of reading about someone’s life, and I honestly can’t express how brave Mailhot has been for publishing something so raw and uncompromising.

  • Favourite passages :

Honestly on any given page I could have picked a sentence that I wanted to showcase, but in the end I settled for transcribing the passages on pages I had purposefully dog-eared.

A lot of these passages support my decision to not like Casey, which is maybe a jackass judgement on my part, but I am admitting to it freely, so there.

When you loved me it was degrading. Using me for love degraded me worse. You should have just fucked me. It was degenerative. You inside me, outside, then I leave, then I come back, get fucked, you look down at me and say, ‘I love you. I love you.’ I go home and degenerate alone.

Terese Marie Mailhot, pg 46-47

Mailhot has an excellent no-bullshit therapist in this passage:

‘I’m worried that he’s using you.’

‘It’s much deeper than sex. He tells me that he loves me and explains carefully why he can’t be with me. He considers me.’

‘You’re in a vulnerable position. Months ago, you were in the hospital with suicidal ideation. He should consider how telling you that he loves you could make you feel. He should consider how having sex with you, and then explaining why he can’t be with you, is manipulative.’

pg 58

This passage does prove my judgement of Mailhot and Casey’s relationship to be somewhat self-righteous, and by the end of the novel, I put my judgement aside somewhat.

For you, and our child, and my sons, I said what happened up and down on the page. Because, if my sons want to see how terrible our love was, and why we chose it, they can see us closest here.

pg 68

My mother didn’t feel like mine as much as I wanted to belong to her – to be inseparable from her.

She taught me that I didn’t own things. I really liked the idea of possession. We don’t own our mothers. We don’t own our bodies or our land – maybe I’m unsure. We become the land when we are buried in it. Our grand-mothers have been uprooted and shelved in boxes, placed on slabs of plastic, or packed neatly in rooms, or turned into artifact – all after proper burials. Indians aren’t always allowed to rest in peace. I want to be be buried in a bone garden with my ancestors someday. I’d like to belong to that.

pg 73
  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you liked this book, consider reading a book that has been mentioned in this book before: Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach! It is full of amazing descriptions of coastal British Columbia, ghosts, and is just an all around excellent book.

If you want to read another excellent and slim book about the effects of abuse and living in isolation (but it’s about so much more than that too), is Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed.

Another excellent memoir about a completely different side of poverty in Vancouver is Amber Dawn’s How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir. This book also has interesting parallels to Heart Berries in relation to the impact of literature on life and coping with trauma. Yay books and writing!

Also I’m proud that all these suggestions are Canadian, and excellent. Canadiana is not all Susanna Moodie!

Stay tuned for my next review, Cormac McCarthy’s critically acclaimed and often discussed novel, The Road. Post-apocalypse, oh my!

Decorum Review

This book gets three gorgeous gowns out of 5. I couldn’t find anything that fit the 1890s style, but these dresses are all so pretty I don’t even care.
[There is a triptych of gowns: a purple ruffly dress, a pale orange gown, and a white long-sleeved wedding dress with buttons all up the back. I would wear all these dresses if I had the money/reason to.]

Apologies for running a little late with this weekend’s review… my work schedule has been insane and all over the place which has delayed me. I have also fallen behind on my reading and am finally at the point where my blogging has caught up to my reading so I need to set aside some real reading time this week to get back on track. For you readers, I’ll do it!

  • Why did I pick this book up?

I started reading Kaaren Christopherson’s Decorum because it was another one of the 3/$10 books I bought recently. Also, I was in the mood for some historical fiction, and seeing how I’ve blown through Sarah Waters’ catalogue this spring, this was my most handy option. The protagonist is also a woman named Francesca Lund, and I grew up in a village called Lund, so this happy coincidence didn’t hurt.

I have a lot of love for novels set in the Victorian era, because I am one of those rare English scholars that HATES Victorian lit, but loves historical fiction set in that time. I hate Jane Austen, and I think part of it is because I am too dense to pick up on all the subtleties that happen in high society, so I’d rather read a contemporary take on the era and its behaviours. I need that shit spelled out to me, and also want to read a ton of descriptions of masked balls and corsets. This book does a decent delivery of those things.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

I would recommend this book if you are into romantic intrigue and mysterious marriage schemes, but also like reading about fancy parties and 1890s America. That is very specific, I know. I would not recommend this book if you have no interest in love or romance, or marriage or whatever, because this book is pretty full of all that. I myself found myself getting bored for the last hundred pages of the book: the big scheming and intrigue had reached its climax, and I found the romantic subplot that took over to be a bit tedious. The book could’ve ended with the big reveal, and left the reader (that is me) to imagine that the romantic subplot would resolve itself in some fashion that would push the two characters who are ‘obviously’ supposed to wind up together into their proper places. Instead, I had to read another hundred pages of feelings and to me the only redeeming factor was that this was occurring in Banff, Canada, so that was neat.

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

Broadstrokes here. Francesca Lund’s parents die in a tragic accident. We really start the novel five years later, when Francesca is finally back to living in her family home after being taken in by family friends. She is set to be engaged to a man named Edmund Tracey who has been pursuing her for years. It is quickly implied that Tracey is a cad who is maybe just after Francesca because she is loaded. I ain’t saying he a gold-digger… except that he totally is. So there is a ton of investigating into his past that goes on, and it’s pretty fun and enticing.

At the same time, the novel follows a man named Connor O’Casey, who I don’t think I really like, even by the end of the novel. Anyways, he is trying to be a self-made man, nouveau-riche in a world of old money. His ‘companion’ is a widow named Blanche, and she has a pretty cool backstory. I think she is my favourite character in the novel. Anyways, he is trying to build a fancy hotel in New York with some rich men, and he comes into Francesca’s orbit. He totally has the hots for her, and drama ensues in a crazy love… pentagon? It’s definitely more complicated than a love triangle.

Anyways, as mentioned, drama, big reveals, and even crime ensue. Eventually, the drama is resolved, a bunch of the characters go vacation in Banff, Canada (which is pretty neat and all about how fucking cold it is there, ha) and resolve their differences so they all end up happy and/or in love in some shape or form.

I apologize for the subpar photo… I snapped this in the early morning before running to work. A bad photo is better than no photo? Also I chose to feature our cute flower pot by Wildtreeceramics who is a local Ottawa artist.
[A hand holds a book that has a drawing of a woman in a pink dress. Behind the book is a succulent in a ceramic pot that says “zen as fuck” on it.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

My favourite aspects were the descriptions of clothes and society rules: the book’s chapters actually all begin with excerpts from an etiquette book and I found this framing device to be interesting and enlightening to the manners of the time. I definitely never would have made in far in that society; would have been so easy for me to put my foot in my mouth.

There were also some pretty funny tongue-in-cheek moments that pointed fun at gendered double standards, but also at times the book fell into its own traps. Just felt a tad sappy at times, and no character (except my main chick Blanche) seemed particularly exciting or progressive.

  • What does it mean?

The book is concerned with double standards and their affect on men and women’s abilities to pursue their desires, both in the Victorian era and the 21st century. It assesses how wealth and its pursuit transform people, but does not judge them, instead critiquing the fabric of society that has a tendency to make people miserable and insecure more than happy.

Buried in the novel are some interesting comments on “propriety”, and Decorum shows that manners do not make the man, or woman.

Here are some things I think the novel said to me, even if that wasnt Christopherson’s intent:

– You never really know someone! People change and are insanely good at hiding their true selves!

– Prenups are a good thing!

– And never trust a man who has a bunch of mysterious “friends” that he spends all his free time with, but that you never get to meet.

  • Favourite passages :

A lot of my favourite passages wound up being the excerpts from the etiquette book, because they were interesting commentaries on the novel and its plot, and also very enlightening for a ‘modern’ reader such as myself.

A man does himself no service with another when he obliges him to know people whom he would rather avoid.

Kaaren Christopherson, pg 65

This quote really spoke to the grouchy person that lives inside me, and my attempt to refuse fake and superficial interactions. It may make me seem like a jerk, but I’d rather seem like an honest bitch than a fake one.

There are two things that make people crazy — having money and not having money. If they haven’t any money of their own to control, they want to control somebody else’s.

Christopherson, pg 76

I feel like the following passage is something a lot of men could stand to learn properly.

If you are a gentleman, never lower the intellectual standard of your conversation in addressing ladies… When you ‘come down’ to commonplace or small-talk with an intelligent lady, one of the two things is the consequence, she either recognizes the condescension and despises you, or else she accepts it as the highest intellectual effort of which you are capable, and rates you accordingly.

Christopherson, pg 345
  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you want to read some more historical fiction, I recommend anything by Sarah Waters! She is easily one of my top ten writers, and probably my favourite writer of historical fiction. If you want to stay in a similar time period as Decorum, read Waters’ Affinity.

Otherwise, The Wonder by Emma Donoghue (author of Room) is an interesting tale about 1860s Ireland and the tensions between science and faith. Stephen King reviewed it and liked it so there’s another reason to read The Wonder!

You could also read Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty and its sequels; these were my favourite books as a young teenager, and I remember it being my first great introduction to historical fiction.

Stay tuned for my next review, Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot. Mailhot is a woman who grew up on a reservation in British Columbia and her memoir has received a ton of accolades in Canada; it was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and is easily the book I’ve been the most excited to read all year.