urbanmoms.ca Book Club

The Glass Castle

What is your first childhood memory? Your favourite? Your strongest? What if your first memory is of setting yourself on fire in a trailer while cooking hotdogs at the age of three because your mother thought you were old enough to deal with your own meals? What if your favourite memories are of loading up in the family car in the middle of the night to go on an "adventure" because your parents had to leave town? Or if your strongest memories are of rooting through the school garbage for lunch or wandering through town trying to find your dad in a local bar because he hasn't been home for three days?

My childhood memories include ski weekends, cottage summers, hockey house league with my father coaching, overstuffed Christmas stockings and bellies, back to school shopping, kick-the-can, Brownies and Guides.

But the memories of Jeannette Walls are those listed above. These details and many more are retold in her beautifully touching and unsentimental memoir, The Glass Castle.

Jeannette's parents are a disturbing combination of free spirits and stubborn resistors. They don't belive in rules, structure, and most forms or pressures of organized society, but they love their children very much.

When the four children are young, this non-conformity manifests itself in a nomadic lifestyle that borders on the unsafe, but as the children get older, money becomes more elusive and Rex Walls' drinking escalates, Rose Mary and Rex selfishly drag their children to a level of poverty and subsistence with which few of us are familiar.

There are many opportunities for this book to become a "Parent Dearest" for the unfamous, or an emotional diatribe of a family gone wrong, but the matter of fact prose and attention to detail make it this memoir so much more.  The Walls children are some of the most riveting and determined characters in literature. And Jeannette's love for her mother and adoration for her father resound throughout every painful detail, even as she begins to realize her parents no longer have the best interest of their children at heart.

The Glass Castle is not a silly summer dock read, but it is a must read nonetheless.

The National Posts "50 Books to See You Through the Summer"

This is the time of year when msot publications print their book lists. I always find these very stressful because there are usually 20, 25, or in this case, 50 books you should read over the summer. I am a very prolific reader and, as a teacher, I am not even working over the summer, but there is no way, I can read 50 books. If you manage to read the 50 recommended by the Post, I will send you a copy of Meg Wolitzer's new novel, The Ten Year Nap (to be reviewed next week), as your 51st.

Intimidation by the sheer numbers aside, over the next few weeks, I will try and keep up with the links to summer reading suggestions so you can choose a few texts t accompany you on your holidays.

Here is the link for the Post's 50 Books To See You Through The Summer.

There was also a great collection compiled by Jesse Kinos-Goodin on page 4 of The Weekend Post of well-known authors and book lovers and the one book that "changed their lives, that they've read a dozen times without ever getting old."

Here's a summary ( I have asterisked the ones I have read):

Gail Bowen          -        Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Simon Armitage translation)

Kevin Newman      -       Gates of Fire (Steven Pressfield)

Abigail Carter        -      The Egg and I (Betty MacDonald)

Augusten Burroughs -     Midaq Alley (Naghib Mahfouz) *

Mary Swan            -       The Pumpkin Eater (Penelope Mortimer)

Andrew Westoll     -       Fugitive Pieces (Anne Michaels)*

Todd Babiak          -      The Great Gatsby (F.Scott Fitzgerald)*

Reva Seth           -         How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food  (Nigella Lawson)                              
Mark Kingwell     -         Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis)

Shelagh Rogers    -        No Great Mischief (Alistair MacLeod)*

John Moffat           -      Space, Time and Gravitation" An Outline of the General Relativity Theory
                                   (Sir Arthur Eddington)

Anne Simpson       -       D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths (Ingri and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire)

Christopher Shulgan   -  Lenin's Tomb (David Remnick)

Kildare Dobbs        -      What is Life? (Erwin Schrodinger)

Ibi Kaslik               -      The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) *

Bob Rae                -       Homage to Catalonia (Michael Knight)

Taras Grescoe       -        Dispatches (Michael Herr)

I'd love to read some reviews if you have read any of these. Feel free to add your own summer reading recommendations.

Happy Reading!

And The Winner Is...

Lientje,

 

Lientje guessed 4 of the books that were picked by members of my book club as their desert island books:

Pride and Prejudice

A Fine Balance

In The Skin of The Lion

Suite Francaise.

 

Congratulations Lientje, Things Go Flying is all yours.  I've noticed a penchant for Can Lit. in your list so I'm excited to share this novel by a new, not only Canadian voice, but Torontonian as well!!!

 

Stay tuned...new contest next week for copies of Meg Wurlitzer's Ten Year Nap.

Dick Lit

 This is  Tom Cavanagh.

You may know him as Ed Stevens from the eponymous tv series

Ed , or as Tom Farrell from the television show The Love Monkey.  I knew him as Tooooom Caaavanaaagh (you have to sigh when you say it) although I am fairly certain he has absolutely no idea who I am.

 

We were at Queen's University at the same time and he used to play piano and guitar and sing in the Quiet Pub. I would giggle with my girl friends at the back of the pub, down three ounce drinks in glasses that looked like fish bowls and swoon over Tom while I should have been at my German language labs - could be why I don't have a credit in my transcript for that cold harsh language!

 

One night, when it was pouring rain and Tom and I were both leaving the Purple Passion Pit at the same time (aka Douglas Library) he walked me to Alfie's, another pub, under his umbrella. My knees still go weak at the memory.

 

Tom won the role of Danny Zuko in the Queen's production of Grease along with Heather Farrow as Sandy (a girl I actual knew and worked with at yet another campus pub - Clark Hall) and has been making girls from much farther away than Kingston, Ontario set their PVR's and settle in for nights of cute dimples, gorgeous blue eyes and great Canadian humour.

 

It is that fond memory and great affection for all film Cavanagh that led me to pick up  some Dick Lit,  in the form of Kyle Smith's novel, Love Monkey. I was thinking I was pretty cool coining this new literary term for a boy's version of Chick Lit when I discovered that not only was I not the first to think of it, Dick Lit had even made it onto Amazon'S LISTMANIA.

 

 Fortunately, the entertainment of reading Love Monkey got me over my dick-appoinment (not only a bad pun, but a terribly forced one). I dated men like Tom Farrell, the erstwhile writer and hapless protaganist of Smith's look at love among 30 something's from the male perspective, I have been "the Bran", the girl who waits while he gets over "the Julia"...although they seldom get over "the Julia" and when they finally do, they almost never go for the girl who has been holding their hand all the way through it.

 

In his analogies and reflections on his life as a Tabloid headline writer, Tom reflects on the Simpsons, Nick Hornby novels, R.E.M. and Bugs Bunny. The voice that Kyle Smith creates through Farrell is witty, self-deprecating and rather naive as to how things really go on in the real world.

 

I'm sure some reviewer somehere has labelled Love Monkey, "The Bridget Jones for Men." and that reviewer would be fairly accurate. As much as women love to read about themselves hidden in the nuances of female fiction creations, they love to read about the men they know as well. The trials and tribulations of Tom Farrell and his quest for love are just as entertaining and touching as Bridget Jones and Rebecca Bloomwood (Shopaholic)  and maybe even slightly more neurotic since we don't expect it from men.

 

A strange title, but a light, fun, humourous read.  Perfect for a hot sunny day with a tall cool drink!

Lists, Lists, More Lists and a Chance to Win a Book

For those of you great friends and readers who have been following my "This Life" blog since the beginning may remember This List from my New Year's Eve entry:

Twenty Things I want to Do in 2008

1. Adopt a baby
2. Adopt a baby
3. Adopt a baby...OK, so this is my primary focus!!!
4. Run the San Diego Rock'n'Roll Marathon
5. Lose 50 pounds
6. Sell a freelance article to a major magazine
7. Finish my book or scrap it all together and start a new one
8. Stop obsessively worrying about the kids
9. Stop obsessivley worrying about the kids
10. Stop obsessively worrying about the kids....another huge area for concern
11. Try and sell my Muskoka Alphabet book to a publisher
12. Declutter my entire house
13. Finally decide if we are renovating or moving
14. Put decision into action
15. Put friends further up on my list of priorities
16. Create new and more exciting lessons for work
17. Keep car clean!!!!
18. Be more patient with myself (my priest told me at confession that if I was more patient with myself, I would be more patient with others)
19. Finish decorating the rooms of the Gaffer and Sirtalksalot
20. Find and be myself more often...this I hope is actually inherent in all 20!

 

I have actually accomplished one and here is my photographic proof that I did indeed run, finish, lose 20 of my fifty pounds and and beat my previous marathon time.

So that is the first list from the title and the reason I am talking about lists instead of an actual book.

The Second List comes from the May issue of Real Simple magazine that I was reading on the plane. It had a number of lists of books for summer reading by noted authors. Here's the link if you are looking for some reading ideas. Real Simple Summer Reading.

 

The Third List is the one that my book club is putting together of each of our top ten favourite novels of all time.  There are fourteen of us and we are each submitting ten. As one who can never quite follow the rules properly, I submitted a few more than 10. Kate, one of our members is putting the list together to distribute to all of us at our next meeting on the 10th of June.

 

And that leads to your Chance to Win a Book. Shari Lapena has kindly given me an  extra copy of her fun novel, which I will happily send off to the urbanmom who comes closest to choosing the most number of books on the top 10 list. The odds for this are about as random as a lucky draw since I am revealing nothing about my book club, its members or the type of books any of us like to read but I do want to share this great book with one of you and I can't wait to hear some of your desert island lists.

I will post my book club's recommendations on the 11th of June so you have until then to post your choices in the comment sections. 

What are your top ten choices for the desert island?????