Book Club Exchange and Update

I've been a bit slow to blog lately, mostly due to the busy holiday season that is upon us. But also, I have been working to learn how to crochet lately. I got it in my head that I wanted to learn, so I shared a cup of tea with my friend Karen, and after a few bumps in the road, she got me going in no time.

I'm proud to say that I've made a few hats and a head band, and I am frantically finishing a bunny and his carrot home--Alex, my son requested this one! It should be done this evening, and safely under the tree for tomorrow night.

I have updated my Book Club's reading list for 2014. If you scroll down, you will find on the left side of the screen, a widget that lists our reading for the upcoming year. We had a great book exchange meeting early on in December. I received A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett. I will be sure to get to it early this year.

My gift from the Book Club 

(Just finished Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, so I'll be reviewing it very shortly.)

I wanted to share a few random snaps from around town:

My local library's idea of a Christmas Tree. I love it!!!

My Friend Kim's idea of a Christmas Tree (It's Jack Daniels)

My Kids love when I set up my Christmas Village

I took my daughter Abi down to the CBC radio open house called Sounds of the Season earlier this year. She loved seeing how radio is made.  They had a display of the 5 finalists for Canada Reads. Here they are:

I am going to try to read these before the jury debates and selection. I have already read Half-Blood Blues, and will continue with Annabel next.

Also while shopping at VV, I found a quirky looking book that I bought solely based on it's cover: Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Not sure what it's about, but I want to give it a go!

Looks Like a Bit of Fun!

A Giant Haul: Victoria College Annual Book Sale

Fall is my favourite time of year. The weather is more temperate, the leaves change into a beautiful palette of golds and reds, and I get to go downtown to the University of Toronto's Victoria College Annual Used Book Sale.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with this sale, it is like a book bonanza on steroids. All year, the large alumni community at Vic collect used books from their membership and donations, and they diligently sort and store them. Then, in conjunction with the famous book fair, Word on the Street, they hold a huge sale that takes over their central building and sprawls over several huge, old lecture halls. The books are sorted into fiction and non-fiction, and range in topic groups from a-z. 

This year, I invited my friend and co-member of our book club, Karen S. to join me in this pilgrimage. She was happy to explore as it was her first time attending the sale. We took our time with our rummaging, spending about two and a half hours milling around, and I have to admit that we scored many great reads for the upcoming year.

I haven't taken snaps of all of the books (there are a few too many and I don't want to admit that I bought 20+ books in one day!), so here are a few of the ones that I can't wait to read:

Non-fiction about a woman's trip to China to find relatives.

An award winner...we'll see if I agree.

This will be the first read from my purchases.

This one is our December book club read.

Can't wait to read this one.

I want a dog...Still working on it with my husband.

Sounded like a bit of fun.

Nice cover...We'll see about this one.

One of my favorite books ever. Nice cover art.

A Christmas Present for my Mom.  The surprise won't be spoiled...She doesn't read my blog!!!

Total Guilty Pleasure: Boggle to Go! I bring this in the car so I can keep busy waiting at the bus stop for Abi!

The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler

Shortlisted for the 2012 Giller Prize, The Imposter Bride was one of the hot books at my Book Club's Christmas Exchange this past December. It made it's way around the room at lightening speed, and eventually went home with someone else (I can't find my meeting notes right now! and no, I don't keep notes...no worries!!!)

I bought this one and enjoyed it quite a bit. I have been spending a lot of time at the hockey arenas lately with 3 kids playing winter hockey, I am invariably at an arena at least 3 times a week. When tournament season hits, it's awful--the expectation is for the players to arrive an hour early, and then play for an hour. Rather than squander the time away, I like to find a quiet spot and bang off a few chapters when possible.

The Imposter Bride kept me company this week, as my daughter Abigail was playing in the Leaside March Madness Tournament. Their team didn't fair very well, but I made good progress with my book!

Here's a quick summary provided by Book Browse:

"An unforgettable novel about a mysterious mail-order bride in the wake of WWII, whose sudden disappearance ripples through time to deeply impact the daughter she never knew. 
The Imposter Bride blends gorgeous storytelling and generation-spanning intrigue in the story of Lily Azerov. A young, enigmatic woman, Lily arrives in post-WWII Montreal on her own, expecting to be married to Sol Kramer. But, upon seeing her at the train station, Sol turns her down. Out of pity, his brother Nathan decides to marry her instead, and pity turns into a deep - and doomed - love. But it is immediately clear that Lily is not who she claims to be. Her attempt to live out her life as Lily Azerov shatters when she disappears, leaving a new husband and a baby daughter with only a diary, a large uncut diamond - and a need to find the truth. 
Who is Lily and what happened to the young woman whose identity she stole? Why has she left and where did she go? It's up to the daughter Lily abandoned to find the answers to these questions, as she searches for the mother she may never find or truly know." 

(I actually take issue with the term "mail-order bride" as stated in the above review.  It's an awful, pejorative term that really doesn't have any place in describing the influx of immigration to Canada of young adults who are left without family after WW2.)  

From the author's own website, here's a much better summary:

"In all my writing I explore the slipperiness of morality and identity in the face of extreme loss and threat, though the settings and circumstances change with each novel. The Imposter Bride is set in the postwar Jewish community of Montreal, the setting of my own childhood. Here, too, one of the igniting sparks was an event in my family history: My paternal grandmother immigrated to Canada for the purposes of marriage, only to be rejected by her prospective bridegroom at the moment of her arrival in Montreal. The young woman who arrives in Montreal at the beginning of The Imposter Bride faces the same crushing rejection that greeted my grandmother at the start of her new life in Canada, but her circumstances are entirely different. The arrival I depict in that opening scene is drawn from my mother’s descriptions of greeting relatives who came to Montreal in the late forties, having survived the Second World War in eastern Europe. The Montreal that I describe grew out my own experiences and memories of a community where loss and dislocation lay at the core of so many people’s lives."  http://www.nancyrichler.com/bio.html

Here's a brief interview with the author about her latest work:  

I enjoyed this story. It was mysterious, and engaging. The author draws clear characters and describes several distinct perspectives during the course of several years. I was fascinated to explore the issue of child abandonment and the fall out created by such unnatural actions. I truly saw the depth of Lily's despair and grief, and Richler does an excellent job of painting the picture of a young woman who is struggling with PTSD. There was no such label for shell shocked civilians in the late 1940's but there was an entire generation and their families were left to pick up the pieces.

This story also examines the effect on the daughter who is left to grow up without a mother. Ruthie is a resilient child who questions why Lily simply walked out of the apartment and never returned. She internalizes a great deal of guilt about not having a mother and imagines the negative reactions of others. 

It was a well written novel and I would recommend it as a good read. I will read her first novel Throwaway Angels because I believe that the media may have passed over it as a result of the sexual orientation of the protagonist....I'll let you know what I think!

The Butterfly House by Marcia Preston

Originally, I had planned to save this for summer reading, (see Dec's post), but I changed my mind. Having just finished Wally Lamb's novel, I was in the mood for something a bit lighter. (i.e. no killing, raping, cheating, insanity etc). I guess I avoided a couple of those  topics, but got another bid dose of the "neurosis"...

The Butterfly House was given to me at my Book Club's Christmas book exchange. It's not a book that I would have chosen myself, but that's why I looked forward to reading it! A Harlequin book (not the romance type), I have to admit having never read anything from this publishing house. That's the beauty of the book club...I am willingly forced to try new genres and read authors that I would have previously dismissed.

Here's a quick summary as per Goodreads.com:

"As a child, Bobbie Lee found refuge from her lonely life at her best friend's house. Rockhaven was a place of magic, colored by the butterflies that Cincy Jaines's mother, Lenora, studied. Her friendship with Cincy and Lenora soon became Bobbie's compass. But the tangled intimacies between them began to unravel, and in one night, Rockhaven became a place of unspeakable tragedy. Now, a decade later, the long shadows of that night continue to haunt Bobbie, despite her attempts to hide from the past. When a stranger with ties to Lenora and Cincy arrives at her doorstep, she is forced to confront the memories she has tried to avoid, and the dark secret at the heart of the tragedy slowly emerges"


Marcia Preston

This novel is an easy read. It's about two childhood friends who grow up together and both suffer from absent fathers. Their mothers are both struggling financially and they both have very little material wealth. While Bobbie Lee's mom struggles with severe alcoholism, Cynthia's mom takes on the nurturing role for both girls. Lenora is an unemployed butterfly researcher who conducts experiments on her sun porch. The central metaphor is thus established between Bobbi Lee's coming of age, and the butterfly's metamorphosis.

There is an interesting, brief interview with this author at: http://www.trashionista.com/2008/06/author-interv-1.html

The author also has a website that shows she is quite prolific: http://www.marciapreston.com/

Anyhow, this novel has left me yearning for a strong, stable and intelligent protagonist, who isn't loosing her mind, temper, husband or morality. As you can tell with my reading list, it's been a while since I've enjoyed a strong, solid female character.  Not sure if I'm on track with my next novel, but I'll let you know!

December's Book Club Exchange

December's Book Club Exchange is always a fun one. This year was not exception.

I've been very negligent of my blog lately and I have a lot of catching up to do. Maybe it was the busy Christmas season, or maybe a hit a few books that I didn't necessarily enjoy...I find it harder to write about the ones I don't like. Never mind, I will try to get caught up over the next few days.

I received Marcia Preston's The Butterfly House and hope to enjoy this one over the summer.

Book Exchange Summary 2012

I love my Book Club, and the December meeting is one of the social highlights of the feastive season. It's the annual book exchange where each lady brings a new, wrapped book and we draw for selection order. Basically, it becomes a game of either choosing a wrapped book from the pile in the middle of the room, or "stealing" from someone who has already unwrapped and revealed the title of the book.

Most years there are a couple of "hot" titles that rip around the room, and cause great commotion on how to get the book back. It's always a good laugh and everyone leaves with a new book to read over Christmas!

Here's a list of the books that were offered in this year's exchange:

1.  The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler (I wanted this one so much that I went and bought myself a copy for my book pile.)

2. Anna Karenin by Leo Tolstoy (Old classic that I have on my Kobo--I read it a long time ago, and I'm not sure I want to read the Russian classics again for awhile.)

3.  Still Alice by Lisa Genova (Already read it, and loved it. Of course, I always think I'm losing my mind, but that's part of the process of reading it!)

4.  Astray by Emma Donahue (My contribution to the exchange as we read and enjoyed her earlier title "Room" this year)

5.  Canada, Richard Ford (yikes, Richard Ford is following me...I recently crawled through his "Independance Day", and I'm not signing up for more from him!)

6.  Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (Not sure I'll ever take her seriously since Harry Potter)

7.  The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis (?)

8. The Shoemakers Wife by Adriana Trigiani (Nice cover...I think Lorece got this one and enjoyed it)

9.  Magnified World by Grace O'Connell (?)

10.   The Butterfly House by Marcia Preston (This is the book that I received, and I just finished blogging about it, See Feb 8 2013)

11.  The Secret Daughter by Shula Gowda (Loved this book, and think it's one not to be missed)

12.  The Twelve Tribes. (Duplication of books...must be a popular one in the book stores.)

13.  Inside by Alix Ohlin (?)

14.  The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom (shortish novel, and heard it was ok)

15.  The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman (I have this one on my list to read also.)

16. Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel (On my side table, just waiting to read it. My mom keeps asking me if I have read it yet. I think it's a really good one.)

So as you can see, there are some really good titles that came up at the party. I look forward to reading them, and will enjoy selecting my contribution for next December's exchange.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Lemmon

As you may know from previous posts, I recently went on vacation with my family for two weeks. We had a lovely time in Florida, and on a Royal Carribean Cruise. It was truly a beautiful break away. In preparing from our trip, I chose to bring the following books: Mockingbird, Half Blood Blues and Dressmaker of Khair Khana. I read them in this order, and WOW, was it great to finish with such and incredible book!

A  Fabulous Read...
Couldn't Put it Down!

Gayle Lemmon's non-fiction Dressmaker of Khair Khana is spectacular. I couldn't put it down! Ironically, I contributed this book to my Book Club's Christmas Book Exchange party. My friend Anna ended up selecting it, and she tore through it in only a few days. She gladly lent it to me for my vacation, and I'm sure that she knew I would love it!

This is the true story of five sisters living in Kabul, Afghanistan during the invasion by the Taliban in the late 1990's.  Kamila, the industrious leader of the household is determined to earn a living and provide food and shelter for her siblings. Although the Taliban's rigid Sharea laws forbid women to work or attend school, they are forced to use the chadri in public and are not to leave their homes unless escorted by a man. Women are not allowed to speak to men, listen to music, show any of their skin in public.

Kamila Sidiqi: The Dressmaker

Dressmaker showed me how industrious women can be when they are challenged by the system. They find ways to feed and educate their families. They see the obligation to work for the betterment of their society.

Woman Wearing Chadri

The PBS article covering this book is worth a read: PBS Article on Dressmaker.

I was so disappointed in the Canada Reads competition, that eliminated this book so early on in the first round of debates. I think it should be used in schools to educate our youth on the differences that women and children face in different cultures.

I highly recommend this book. It's a MUST READ.

The Sisters Brothers--Prize Winner for a Good Reason

BTW: Happy New Year to All! All the Best for 2012...

Just finished Patrick DeWitt"s The Sisters Brothers, winner of the Governor General's Literary Award in 2011 for Canadian Fiction.  I typically enjoy reading the GG Award winner's, and this novel is no exception.

The Sisters Brothers is a very creative story of two brothers who are hired killers (hitmen) in the wild Western Gold Rush era. The main plot is that the two Sister Brothers must find a prospector in California, steal his secret gold finding technology, and kill him. They leave their home town in Oregon City and travel south to San Fransisco. On the way they have many adventures and challenges.

Although I have been told that this is a "western" style novel, I would really hesitate to label this work as a western. There`s a lot more going on than your typical shoot `em up novel. It's central characters, Charlie and Eli, are very well constructed. We understand their personalities and quickly learn to see events from their perspectives.

Through DeWitt`s seemingly effortless writing, he creates a highly entertaining and well written story.  But where many easy reads become mindless, this novel is very engaging and substantial. There are gun fights, whore houses, horse chases, and tense show downs...All great, fun scenes. However, the central protagonist continually struggles with his chosen field of work. Eli is lonely and sick of killing people for his boss, the Commodore. He yearns for closeness and friendship. He struggles with his thought of leaving this work and building a new lifestyle with his brother. He feels trapped, and unable to break away from a life of crime.

I have also included a review by The Globe and Mails Robert Wiersema, who provides greater detail and insight:


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/the-sisters-brothers-by-patrick-dewitt/article555760/

DeWitt has also written a critically acclaimed novel Alutions, which I hope to read in the future.

Thanks to Franca for lending this novel to me. It was her choice of books in the Christmas book exchange. I hope she enjoys it as much as I did!