THE CHALK CIRCLE MAN by Fred Vargas

posted by Jennie

I love everything by Fred Vargas, especially the quirky Chief Inspector Adamsberg series. The Chalk Circle Man is the best of the lot.

Publisher Comments:

Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is not like other policemen. His methods appear unorthodox in the extreme: he doesn't search for clues; he ignores obvious suspects and arrests people with iron-clad alibis; he appears permanently distracted.

The Chalk Circle Man is the first book featuring Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, one of the most engaging characters in contemporary detective fiction.

When strange, blue chalk circles start appearing overnight on the pavements of Paris, the press take up the story with amusement and psychiatrists trot out their theories. Adamsberg is alone in thinking this is not a game and far from amusing. He insists on being kept informed of new circles and the increasingly bizarre objects which they contain: empty beer cans, four trombones, a pigeon's foot, four cigarette lighters, a badge proclaiming I Love Elvis, a hat, a doll's head. Adamsberg senses the cruelty that lies behind these seemingly random occurrences. Soon a circle with decidedly less banal contents is discovered: the body of a woman with her throat savagely cut. Adamsberg knows that other murders will follow.

Vargas' novels have a specific kind of appeal: they are, of course, superbly constructed puzzles, but above all they're wholly original crime novels with a different kind of outlook on the form: they're a bit bonkers, a bit maddening, a lot gripping, and vastly entertaining. They're not for people who demand gritty realism from their crime fiction, but as exercises in the flightful pleasure of reading a crime novel written from a slightly different angle, they are the absolute best you can find. This is a superb first entry in the Adamsberg series.

Fiona Walker
March 2009

IN SEARCH OF SMALL GODS by Jim Harrison

posted by Jennie

I like everything that Harrison has written except his last fiction which I didn't like at all. Maybe it was a test. I like this book of poetry very much.

"Jim Harrison has probed the breadth of human appetites - for food and drink, for art, for sex, for violence and, most significantly, for the great twin engines of love and death. Perhaps no American writer better appreciates those myriad drives; since the publication of his first collection of poetry . . . Harrison has become their poet laureate." - Salon.com

Maybe the problem is that I got involved with the wrong crowd of gods when I was seven. At first they weren't harmful and only showed themselves as fish, birds, especially herons and loons, turtles, a bobcat and a small bear, but not deer and rabbits who only offered themselves as food. And maybe I spent too much time inside the water of lakes and rivers. Underwater seemed like the safest church I could go to . . .

SKELLIG by David Almond

posted by Jennie

I loved this story. For ages 9-12.


review by Jill Murphy at The Bookbag

... a sensuous, magical book and a fantastic introduction to David Almond's work.


Michael's life is turning upside down. His mother has just had a baby - a new sister for him. But she was an early baby, far too early, and she's very, very ill. She's is in and out of hospital and there is a great fear she might die. His mother and father are distraught and they're living in a tense atmosphere of fear and worry. They're a close family but it's hard to keep it all together under such circumstances and sometimes Michael feels lonely and left out. Then he feels guilty for being so heartless. Making matters worse is that they've just moved house, right across town. Michael elected to stay at the same school but he needs to take a long bus ride to get there and he can't just walk out of his house to join a football game with his friends any more. The house is in need of complete renovation too and it seems to Michael as though all his familiar comforts have deserted him.

And then, one day, Michael goes into the derelict garage at the bottom of the garden. It's an adventure - he's not allowed down there at all for the structure is dangerously unstable and could collapse at any time. While he's exploring Michael discovers another derelict - it's a man living in the garage, feeding himself on the flies and spiders he finds within. It's Skellig. Skellig begs him to tell no one that he's there and instinctively Michael senses that there's something strange, something special about this scruffy, ragged man and he keeps the secret from his parents. He tries to help Skellig, although he's half afraid and half excited, bringing him medicine and food and drink.

I closed my eyes and tried to discover where the happy half of me was hiding. I felt the tears trickling through my tightly closed eyelids. I felt Whisper's claws tugging at my jeans. I wanted to be all alone in an attic like Skellig with just the owls and the moonlight and an oblivious heart. And then Dad's car came, with its blaring engine and its glaring lights, and the fear just increased and increased and increased.

more on THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER by Stephen Chbosky

Jennie loves this book.

reviewed by jingle at revish.com

A book for your soul

Have you ever thought to yourself, "I'm so lucky that this person came into my life," and if you had been in a different place at a different time, you wouldn't have met, and how unsettling that feels? That's how I feel about The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I am very glad that I happened to be in the library and that I randomly found this book out of all the other books in there. It is a book that reaches to your soul and makes you feel.

The book is about a young teenage boy called Charlie and is in letter format. Who does he write these letters to? We don't really know. They always start with "Dear friend," and always end with "Love always, Charlie." Once I got into the book I found that I ignored the letter format and it read like a regular 1st-person story.

The character of Charlie is a very interesting and likable character. He is honest, blunt, emotional, and deeply caring of others. From the start it seems that Charlie has a unique way of thinking and acting, and you may spend a lot of time trying to work out what's "wrong" with him. Does he have some kind of mental illness? After a while I realised that I related to Charlie a lot more than I thought, and that we all probably relate to Charlie in some way or another. Sometimes we can feel alone in how we think, and we keep things to ourselves because we don't believe that anyone else thinks that way. We don't want to be seen as a freak.

Ayn Rand and Ralph Nader?

Posted by Josee Corrigan

I was driving back from what was possibly my last camping trip of the year - wah! - and listening to one of my fave radio jockeys on CBC, Jian Ghomeshi. He was in discussion with Ralph Nader about Nader's new book entitled Only The Super Rich Can Save Us! While Ghomeshi teased him about the title, Nader elaborated on topic of his book - that the wealthiest 1% have the power to change the world and are beginning to care. Of course the four-time US presidential candidate's new book has a special focus on our American neighbours to the south, regardless Nader's theory about wealth and responsibility is worthy and timely during an era in which the rich have been demonized for their lack of altruism (see Michael Moore's new film Capitalism: A Love Story) .
Interestingly, Ayn Rand and her famous novel, The Fountainhead, emerged throughout the conversation, at which point I really perked up my ears. Synchronistically, over the past few weeks I've picked up a biography of Ayn Rand by Anne C. Heller called Ayn Rand and The World She Made. Rand was a fascinating writer and theorist who expounded the themes of narcissism, capitalism, and individualism through the characters in her novels. According to both Heller's biography and Ralph Nader, her book The Fountainhead is one of the top five books read in America and has had a profound influence on the cultural development of the United States since its publication. With this in mind, it's interesting to examine Nader's arguement that it is the richest 1% who should and are, in some cases, promoting altruistic cultural action in this tragic age of disintigrating American values. Hmmmmn. So, what do we all think about that?

For more interesting facts and info about Ayn Rand look to the Ayn Rand Institute at www.aynrand.org
To listen to Jian's interview from this morning go to www.cbc.ca/q

On another note entirely, Jennie lent me an excellent book from the coming-of-age genre. The novel is called The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. The anti-hero, Charlie, describes his life in the form of letters written to "Dear Friend," from the perspective of a highschool student/teenager. I love him! Although perceived by the 'cool' crowd as a loser/freak/weirdo, he is sensitive (cries a lot), smart, and perceptive. The novel details his life including descriptions of his group of similarly mifit, but also wonderful friends; a boy-crazy sister; a college-attending jock brother; a wacky, embarrassing, exended family; a set of unbelievably chill parents; and one thank-god-for-him english teacher. I really enjoyed the books that this kid reads and reviews as his teacher assigns them for extracurricular - Ayn Rand's Fountainhead being one of them. This book is worth reading, especially for those who are currently experiencing the joys and pitfalls of highschool.

OUT STEALING HORSES by Per Petterson

Posted by Jennie

Last year my favourite literary fiction was Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. It takes place in Norway and gives us a man's life, how everything changed when he was fifteen and out stealing horses, and how that change echoes in his old age. It's a simple story, quiet and intense at once.

--Review by Ken Worpole on 31/05/2006

This fine novel, translated by Anne Born, was the surprise winner of the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and it really is a book to cherish and remember.

Out Stealing Horses eschews the knowing realism of much contemporary fiction in favour of the episodic ebb and flow of the "unending conversation" in the mind of the narrator, as he looks back upon a series of traumatic war-time incidents in the past, and in the face of approaching old age. The narrator, Trond, has returned, following the death of his second wife, to a remote settlement in Norway where he and his family spent their childhood holidays under German occupation. Not only do old faces re-appear, but he has to try to finally understand the familial and political betrayals of that bitter period of resistance and collaboration, and the breaking of families.

The detail of the daily round of wood-chopping, shopping, cooking, dog-walking and immersion in the life of the forest of an ageing widower is beautifully achieved. There is also the occasional drink with a neighbour, and a nightly reading of Dickens, the novelist whose work shaped the imagination of the young Norwegian who, like David Copperfield, desperately hoped to become the hero of his own life. That question overshadows the whole novel: did he achieve this heroic role?

Tragedy and epiphany recur in equal parts, though the deep forest interiors seem to absorb all of human hope and suffering. In his childhood Trond remembers the milkmaids singing the cows home every evening just as vividly as the presence of the Germans and the secretive night-time manoeuvres of local partisans. However, there was one terrible incident involving the accidental shooting of a child by its twin brother, that provides the fulcrum of the novel, and seems to instigate a pattern of family ruptures that marks the lives of nearly all of the male characters we meet. The narrator, like his father before him, and his best friend, at some point in his life walks out on his family, never to return or even maintain contact. Going missing seems to be the price men under stress have to pay in these taciturn, unforgiving times and places.

There is salvation in this world through physical labour. The scenes of harvesting and tree-felling (and the subsequent rolling of the trees into the river to be manoeuvred downstream to the sawmills) are imbued with a Tolstoyan love and deep nostalgia. If these days are happily foreshortened by the blue hour of dusk "when everything draws closer", so too are the final days and months of the narrator as he slowly untangles the mysteries of childhood; the threads of fragmented family and village relationships are gathered in again, and finally understood.

Don't be put off by the title and its unfortunate echoes of Cormac McCarthy's overly poeticised All the Pretty Horses, nor the jacket photograph of the author in full horse-whispering mode. Inside is the real thing, a novel artfully conveying a profound sense of time passing, the consolations of landscape, and a prose style and folded-in geology that makes every sentence do the work of ten.

THE LAST SAMURAI by Helen DeWitt

Posted by Jennie

One of my favourite books is back in the store. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. It has a most clever method for learning a new language. It has single mother angst and single child quest. I loved it so did all my friends, well, the ones that read it. It's not the movie script, but it is all about it. It's very original and very good! And it seems to be going out of print...


Helen DeWitt's extraordinary debut, The Last Samurai, centers on the relationship between Sibylla, a single mother of precocious and rigorous intelligence, and her son, who, owing to his mother's singular attitude to education, develops into a prodigy of learning. Ludo reads Homer in the original Greek at 4 before moving on to Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse, and Inuit; studying advanced mathematical techniques (Fourier analysis and Laplace transformations); and, as the title hints, endlessly watching and analyzing Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, The Seven Samurai. But the one question that eludes an answer is that of the name of his father: Sibylla believes the film obliquely provides the male role models that Ludo's genetic father cannot, and refuses to be drawn on the question of paternal identity. The child thinks differently, however, and eventually sets out on a search, one that leads him beyond the certainties of acquired knowledge into the complex and messy world of adults.

The novel draws on themes topical and perennial--the hothousing of children, the familiar literary trope of the quest for the (absent) father--and as such, divides itself into two halves: the first describes Ludo's education, the second follows him in his search for his father and father figures. The first stresses a sacred, Apollonian pursuit of logic, precise (if wayward) erudition, and the erratic and endlessly fascinating architecture of languages, while the second moves this knowledge into the world of emotion, human ambitions, and their attendant frustrations and failures.

The Last Samurai is about the pleasure of ideas, the rich varieties of human thought, the possibilities that life offers us, and, ultimately, the balance between the structures we make of the world and the chaos that it proffers in return. Stylistically, the novel mirrors this ambivalence: DeWitt's remarkable prose follows the shifts and breaks of human consciousness and memory, capturing the intrusions of unspoken thought that punctuate conversation while providing tantalizing disquisitions on, for example, Japanese grammar or the physics of aerodynamics. It is remarkable, profound, and often very funny. Arigato DeWitt-sensei.

Review by Burhan Tufail at goodreads.com