No Relation

The title: No Relation
The author: Terry Fallis
Publication: Douglas Gibson Books, 2014
Got it from: Terry Fallis podcast

Terry Fallis writes the kinds of books you like to read when you need something to ground you: something light, funny and uncomplicated, where everything will be tied up in a happy ending.  Although it didn't have the feminist humour of Pole to Pole or the biting satire of The Best Laid Plans, I enjoyed listening to Terry Fallis reading No Relation on his podcast. 

The basic joke of the book is that the protagonist is named Earnest Hemmingway.  Spelled differently from the famous author and "no relation," as he would have you know.  There are a lot of classic Fallis tropes on display here.  The protagonist starts out with a rotten string of bad luck, losing his job and his girlfriend on the same day.  But in typical Fallis fashion, he turns it around to his advantage.  After a video of him getting to a fight with a DMV clerk about his name goes viral on YouTube, Earnest starts a meetup group for people with famous names called Name Fame. Befriending Diana Ross (who really can sing), Mahatma Gandhi (who has anger management issues), Mario Andretti (who can't drive) and others, Earnest must exercise the ghost of the real Earnest Hemmingway to find his inner writer.  As his travels take him to Paris, Pamplona and Key West, he also has to deal with his dad's expectation that he'll take over the family underwear manufacturing business.

It wasn't my favourite Fallis, but it was enjoyable in a comforting, lighthearted way.

Poles Apart

The title: Poles Apart
The author: Terry Fallis
Publication: McClelland & Stewart, 2015
Got it from: The library

I really enjoyed Terry Fallis's political books, The Best Laid Plans and The High Road, which poked gentle fun at Canadian politics with a healthy dose of liberal idealism thrown in (that's big "L" and little"l" liberal.)  Surely Angus McLintock, the grizzled feminist engineering professor/MP at the heart of these novels, would approve of our new PM.  Wait, did I say feminist engineering professor?  You mean an actual male writer has a feminist character in a mainstream novel?  That's just one of the many delightful touches in Fallis's stories that elevate them to must-reads, at least in this feminist's eyes.

So imagine how excited I was that a male feminist was going to be the main character of Fallis's new book, Poles Apart.  The title is a double entendre, as the hero lives (by accident) above a strip club.  Everett Kane is a freelance writer who's drifting in life.  The only time he ever felt enthusiastic about something was in his university days, when he worked as a crusader for women's equality.  His dad is an old-school misogynist, his mom a high-powered businesswoman (they're divorced).  Everett moves to Florida after his father suffers a stroke.  At the rehab centre he meets Beverley Tanner, a feminist from the heyday of second-wave feminism and an idol of Everett's.  Beverley inspires him to write passionately about feminism, which he does on his new blog, Eve of Equality (which uses both the phrase "on the eve of equality" and Everett's name).

In true Fallis fashion, the blog goes viral and everyone is trying to figure out the author's identity.  Everett is desperate to keep it secret, as he wants the message and not himself to be the focus of attention.  Matters get worse when the owner of a nation-wide strip club he lambastes on his blog ends up moving his strip club below Everett's apartment.

Strip clubs?  Ugggh.  I hate that tired trope, but at least here's it's used ironically (a feminist living above a strip club?  Say what?).  Naturally, Everett befriends the hooker with a heart of gold one of the strippers, but thankfully that doesn't go the way I expected it to.  Along on the friend train is a gentle giant of a bouncer and the strip club owner's young and attractive lawyer.

Naturally everything gets wrapped up in a neat package at the end but I like that don't tell anyone.  I could have done with a lot less of the macho dad, although he does undergo a conversion of sorts.  I would have loved to actually read Eve of Equality's blog posts but the book doesn't even give us so much as a paragraph.  But all that pales in my excitement about a mainstream, funny book about feminism.  Like the hero, I also think that humour and feminism go hand in hand, and that men can and should get involved.  Now if only Fallis would write a book from the actual perspective of the badass older women in his novels, that would be amazing.

Step Aside, Pops

The title: Step Aside, Pops
The author: Kate Beaton
Publication: Drawn & Quarterly, 2015
Got it from: Amazon

Happy Thanksgiving!  

I'm late with this review and I'm just realizing I never reviewed Kate Beaton's first comic collection, Hark! a Vagrant back in 2011.  Which is a crime, considering it is one of my go-to books when I am in need of a good laugh.  If you haven't heard of Kate Beaton or Hark! A Vagrant, the website that houses her cartoons, here's what you need to know: she's a Maritimer (like me).  She loves history (like me).  And she draws cartoons that feature the absurdity of a lot of things in history.  They're sometimes Canadian-based, sometimes not, and they often feature badass historical women, but sometimes not.  (The sassy cover model for this collection was taken from a Victorian-era cartoon about the horrors of women cyclists.  In Beaton's interpretation, the woman quips, "You see me rollin up pops you step aside," as she nearly bowls over an outraged gentleman.  He later grumbles, "bloody unbelievable," as another woman cyclist goes strutting by carrying a blaring phonograph.)

There's a goldmine of humour here if you're a general history and literature buff, and the few references I didn't get I ended up researching.  I didn't know a thing, for instance, about Ida B. Wells, but Beaton does a great job at exploring the frustrations of being a black feminist in 19th century America while still being genuinely funny.  She's also at her biting best during her extended "Wuthering Heights" saga and definitely nails all the issues I had with the book back when I was an undergrad.  Even when she's skewering you can tell Beaton genuinely loves the subjects she's writing about.

It's hard to say what my favourite cartoon in this book is.  She's unbelievably funny when she's drawing her own interpretations of classic Nancy Drew and Edward Gorey covers.  (My husband and I are obsessed with one featuring a simple scene of a woman feeding a pigeon bread crumbs.  "Aw yiss," struts Beaton's pigeon excitedly.  "Motha. Fuckin. Bread crumbs."  That's the extent of the joke.)  The prize might go to the multi-arc "Founding Fathers (In a Mall)" and "Founding Fathers (Stuck in an Amusement Park)", which features Washington, Jefferson, Franklin et al inexplicably hitting up modern locations a la Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.  If you love Revolutionary history as much as I do, prepare to be seriously amused.  "Here is a chain of carriages that will take us home!" Madison says, pointing to a roller coaster.  "Nay," disagrees another of the Fathers.  "It is merely a circle of violence, and then you retch."  I could read a whole book featuring the Founding Fathers in the 21st century.

At the outset, the cartoons seem silly, filled with sometimes crude humour.  But look beyond and you'll see how expressively the characters are drawn, how brilliant the jokes are, how deftly she skewers familiar tropes.  I know I'll return to this collection again and again.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

The title: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage
The author: Sydney Padua
Publication: Pantheon, 2015
Got it from: The library

Ah, Ada Lovelace.  Daughter of Lord Byron, the original Queen of Steampunk, arguably the world's first computer programmer.  Is there anything she can't do?  Sydney Padua doesn't think so, as she sets out to prove in this graphic novel/alternate history/adventure/science and math lesson.  Yes, it's all over the place, as hard to pin down as Charles Babbage's never-finished Analytical Engine.  This graphic novel is really a series of vignettes of "what might have been" if the computer had actually been built and was used to solve crime and various economical woes.  Interspersed are a whole lot of background notes (seriously, at one point I was in the footnote of a footnote of a footnote).  Various Victorian personages drop in and out, including Queen Victoria (apparently the world's first fan of LOLCats), George Eliot and of course the Romantics. 

It's all a lot of silliness, of course, but oh my goodness is there a lot of math and science.  I encountered terms I haven't heard since school and didn't know I even remembered.  After reading detail after detail of how the Analytical Engine was designed, I think I may actually have a slight grasp of how computers work.  Don't worry, it's not all dry mathematics, there's actually some pretty great historical humour in here that Victorianists will appreciate.  I particularly love a scene where actual computers (people who did computations) try to wreck the machine Luddite-style and Babbage sits them down to tea to reason with them.  Both Babbage and Lovelace were fascinating characters who make excellent heroes this quirky and fun book.

Ella Minnow Pea

The title: Ella Minnow Pea
The author: Mark Dunn
Publication: Anchor Books, 2001
Got it from: The library

Word play is at the heart of this delightful little novel written entirely in letters (one of my favourite kinds).  The heroine, Ella Minnow Pea (get it?), lives with her parents Amos and Gwenette Minnow Pea on an island off the coast of South Carolina.  The citizens of the island revere language and one of their founding fathers, Nevin Nollop, the man who invented the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."  The island has been isolated to the point where the citizens are trapped in a Victorianesque society that shuns technology.  As the story opens, 18-year-old Ella writes to her cousin on another part of the island to tell her the letters of Nollop's famous pangram have started to fall off a memorial plaque in the town square.  Their fall has been interpreted by the sinister High Council as a sign from the dead Nollop that the letters should be banished from the island.  Use of the letters in either writing or spoken word result in the stock, a public flogging or even banishment.

As the first letter (Z) is made illegal, the word disappears from the letters and hence, the novel.  As they begin to drop one by one, the citizens try to band together to help one another.  Meanwhile they have to become more and more creative in their writing to avoid the "illegabeticals".  It gets particularly comical toward the end of the novel when Ella and a local university student try to conduct a romance using just a handful of letters (he refers to himself as her "amigomate.")  I was also amused when two of the villagers changes their names from Buzz and Zeke to L'il Tristan and Prince Valiant-the-Comely. 

Lurking behind the silliness and clever word tricks is a greater theme about the blind adherence to religious cult.  There is also more than a smidgeon of similarity to totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, where everyone lives in fear, neighbours turn on neighbours , and people are banished or disappear under a brutal police force.  But read it how you will, this is one for us logophiles.

The Rosie Project

The title: The Rosie Project
The author: Graeme Simsion
Publication: HarperCollins, 2013
Got it from:  DC, Xmas 2013

I got The Rosie Project for Christmas this year and read it in three days.  Three days!  As Don himself would say: Incredible!  I think it was a combination of having time off and being starved for an actually fun book.  I loved it all the way through.

(Here's another 2014 resolution for me: stop reading books I'm not enjoying.  I do it all the time, like I'm going to win some sort of medal for it.  For instance, before Christmas I was reading What Happens at Christmas by Victoria Alexander.  And it was just...fine.  It was okay.  The old me would have just kept dragging on with it.  But here's the thing: if I have to keep checking how many pages are left, that's not a good sign.  So eff it.  You know what?  According to Goodreads, I personally own 191 books that I have yet to read.  There are plenty of books in the sea.  I am thirty-one years old and I'm tired of reading books that don't do anything for me.  It's going to be hard to break this habit.  I will have to keep reminding myself - put down the book and walk away.  Even if I spent $20 on it.  Even if it was a present.)

I'm probably the only person on the planet who hasn't read The Rosie Project yet, but I say meh. I read a book when I'm good and ready for it.  I'm never going to be one of those cutting-edge people who stays ahead of the book curve.  I read what I like, when I like, at my own sweet slow pace.  Having said that, this book was a breeze.  It's about a genetics professor, Don Tillman, who is extremely rigid and organized and guided by logic and science.  He has difficulty making connections with others, but nevertheless feels that he would like to have a wife.  So he develops The Wife Project, a detailed questionnaire to help him find the perfect mate.  Naturally, the woman that he does end up falling for, Rosie, fails the questionnaire and is all "wrong" for him.

The Rosie Project reminded me of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon,  with the story told from the perspective of a somewhat autistic hero.  But where I wanted to strangle the brat from The Curious Incident, I really liked Don.  For one thing, he does have emotions, albeit ones he's not particularly in touch with.  One of Don's few friends, an elderly woman in his apartment complex, has lost her husband to Alzheimer's and misses getting flowers from him on her birthday.  Don is perceptive enough to bring joy to her life by buying them for her himself.  In contrast is Don's other friend, fellow professor Gene.  Gene is a complete sleazeball who regularly cheats on his wife and is Don's foil is every way.  Gene is ruled by emotions and instincts alone, with disastrous consequences for everyone around him.  It's no coincidence that I hated Gene as much as I did, as it helped me sympathize with Don more.

Naturally this book has a lot of humour as Don uses logic to try to figure out illogical human emotions.  I wouldn't classify this book as a romance per se, rather a romantic comedy. (If it had been written by and about a woman, it would have been classified as chick lit, a term I abhor).  It's really all about Don and I never really got a feel for Rosie as a character, other than that she's supposed to be a free spirit.  But this is really about Don and his discovery of himself and his capacity to love.  It sounds serious, but it only feels like fun.

Quick reviews: Sex, Pirates and Mr. Darcy

I didn't want to go into full reviews for any of these books so I'm introducing quick reviews!

The title: The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists
The author: Gideon Defoe
Publication: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2004
Got it from:  The library

Ridiculous is not too strong a word to describe this silliness.  A whopping 135 pages long (with comprehension exercise and words to know included), the joke of this whole book revolves around how absurd pirates are.  The Pirate Captain and his crew live in a strange 19th century/modern world hybrid where people are dispatched in various gruesome ways and their love of ham is a running joke. Sprinkled throughout are factual footnotes on historical personages appearing in the book - or, indeed, anything.  Most of the humour is groan-worthy bad, but there are some genuinely funny moments such as when The Pirate with a Scarf and Erasmus Darwin play a game of Animal, Vegetable or Mineral while meeting their doom strapped to the cogs of Big Ben.  Special note should be made of the fact that the chapter titles (Battling the Octopus!, etc), while appropriate to most pirate adventures, have absolutely nothing to do with the content of the respective chapter.  Teenage boys and pirate fanatics will love this, everyone else can skip to the cute Aardman movie released last year based on the book.

The title: Mr. Darcy's Guide to Courtship
The author:  Emily Brand
Publication: Old House, 2013
Got it from:  AG, B-day 2013

Speaking of foolishness, we have this book, written as if it had been dictated by a pre-Lizzie Mr. Darcy.  "The Secrets of Seduction from Jane Austen's Most Eligible Bachelor" reads like a one-note joke - he's a jerk!  Ha ha!  It stretches the limits of credulity to suppose that a man who could fall for Elizabeth Bennet would ever advise women to not be opinionated and lively.  But no matter how tongue in cheek this book is meant to be, there is simply no excuse for paragraphs like this: "Ladies, if you have failed to secure a husband by the age of thirty - at which point the bloom of youth will fade most desperately - admit defeat and harden yourself to the idea of not being worth looking at.  A single woman of nine and twenty ought not to expect to feel or inspire real affection again."  Here's some advice of my own: "Young women of six and twenty should not attempt to imitate the wit and genius of Jane Austen.  Wait a few more years until you have something better in you in than this unfunny, tiresome book."

   
The title: The Read Deal
The author: Debbi Rawlins
Publication: Harlequin, 2010
Got it from:  MC, B-day 2012

I enjoyed this book much, much more than I thought I would.  Emily Carter is hoping to break out of her stay-at-home rut so she signs up for a sightseeing adventure in New York City over Thanksgiving.  On an impulse, she buys a copy of Erotic New York and accidentally ends up leaving it behind in the cab she's sharing with a good-looking guy.  The guy turns out to be Nick Corrigan, a star baseball player.  I don't normally go in for sports-themed romance but this one worked for me as it takes place in the off-season.  It dealt a lot more with the realities of sports fame than the game itself.  What really worked for me is how darn likeable the characters were.  The romance was definitely pure fantasy, but the warm-and-fuzzy kind that felt so feel-good and satisfying.  And I love holiday getaway romance, especially the cold-weather kind.  Total thumbs up.

Everything I Know About Love

The title: Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels
The author: Sarah Wendall 
Publication: Sourcebooks, 2011
Got it from: Amazon

Sarah Wendall, the co-founder of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, has written a guide to the life lessons romance novels teach us.  I've been a regular follower of the site since 2006 and very much enjoyed their previous book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms.  This book was a much more serious defense of the genre and I was disappointed that there wasn't the same high level of hilarity.  A notable exception was a list of problems the protagonists might face in a romance novel, including, "he is buying her father's company, and he's only doing it because he hates her old man, but secretly he lusts in his pants for her." (p.148).

The book is broken up into chapters highlighting the different ways romance novels are good for us: they help us learn how to solve relationship problems, what to look for in a man, how to have good sex, etc.  The only problem is that for those of us who read the site all the time, it feels like walking down the same path.  A lot of the quotes lifted from readers were taken directly from discussions on the site, which I've already read.  Passages from various novels only highlighted authors the Bitches have been praising since the beginning (Cruisie, Chase, Roberts, et al.)  Readers unfamiliar with the site or readers on the fence about romance may find it refreshing, but for the rest of us it feels like preaching to the choir.

Beyond Heaving Bosoms

The title: Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels
The authors: Sarah Wendall and Candy Tan
Publication: Fireside, 2009
Got it from: Amazon

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the website Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, here's the rundown: it's basically two women singing the praises of the good and trashing the bad of the romance novel industry. The site features book reviews, cover snarking, lots of swearing, contests where readers can earn dubious-sounding peerage titles (see my sidebar for details) and, well, man titty. This is their book.

If you're looking for a dead serious outline of the genre, complete with reading lists, I'm afraid you're out of luck. If you've ever been teased for your love of romance novels, don't take them too seriously and enjoy things that make you laugh, this book is for you.

And oh, did it make me laugh. I kept going into my husband's office with, "you have to hear this!" so many times, eventually he grabbed the book from me and started reading it himself. I knew when the back cover promised to examine, in detail, the "hero's untamable Wang of Mighty Lovin'" that it was going to be a good time.

The SB's are at their best when they're (lovingly) tearing apart the worst of the worst. You know all the clichés about romance novels: the impossibly beautiful women, the oiled men sporting mullets, the stock storylines: they're all examined with much snarkage. They hit the nail on the head in their discussion of Old Skool vs. New Skool romances and why women today wouldn't put up with the heroes of Old Skool romance (raping ahoy!). Their discussion of how romance covers are made is actually quite informative and I loved their interview with John DeSalvo, who's posed for approximately 1 trillion romance novel covers. (He's right behind Nathan Kamp, who's posed for 1 scrillion covers. My goodness, that man is everywhere!)

The weakest chapter by far is Chapter WTF: Defending the Genre. I've always been a little dubious about the SB's claims of being feminists. Anyone who admits to admiring Dan Savage and giving her husband's friends Playboys as gifts (ew! And gross!) is immediately suspect in my opinion. They give a good analysis of why the genre is degraded by so many but fail to offer any really good comebacks. I was really disappointed in their discussion of how to defend yourself against charges that romance is chick porn. Their answer (porn is in the eye of the beholder) was lame. I can think of two good defences: the sole purpose of romance novels is not to titillate, and it doesn't do so at the humiliation and degradation of another human being. Oh well. I can't expect everyone to have the same grasp of Feminism 101.

That chapter aside, there's some great stuff in this book. The Choose Your Own Adventure parody at the end, "Choose Your Own Man Titty," was worth the price of the book alone ("How angry is the captain when you're finally unceremoniously dumped back in his cabin? a) coldy furious or b) blazingly angry?") Hilarity aside, the writing was actually quite good. They may just have a career for themselves should should they decide to give up their website.

Rating: Eight man titties out of ten.

43. Notes From a Big Country

The title: Notes From a Big Country
The author: Bill Bryson
Publication: Doubleday, 1998
Got it from: My book club

Now that the "lazy" days of summer are over (ha ha - what a joke) my reviews are going to start to come in fast and furious. Watch this space.

I really enjoy Bill Bryson's writing. It's usually fun and light-hearted and I can really relate to it, in as much as I can relate to a privileged middle-aged white guy. His A Short History of Nearly Everything still ranks as one of my top five favourite non-fiction books. It may even be my top one, I haven't decided yet. In this book he tackled American life with his usual folksy style. Some of it is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. As a librarian, I cracked up at this: "...I took the book to that reading area libraries put aside for people who are strange and have nowhere to go in the afternoon but nonetheless are not quite ready to be institutionalized..." Oh. Yeah. He loves pointing out the absurdity of beauocracy (which I think we can all relate to), how awful American TV is (really, really bad) and the mindlessness of the American justice system. He also loves America in many ways: how trusting the people are, the junk food selection, the fall colours, the convenience of everything. And he's just spot on when he talks about the decline of small-town America and how awful everything is when it's homogenized. It's clichéd, but it really was hard to put down. Kind of like M&Ms. B+

24. Our Dumb World

The title: Our Dumb World: Atlas of the Planet Earth
The author: The Onion
Publication: Brown and Company, 2007
Got it from: Library

Although I found some parts funny, I have to say that on the whole it would have been a lot better had it not been written by the same liberal white doodes who write everything. C+

3. Rick Mercer Report:: the Book

The title: Rick Mercer Report: the Book
The author: Rick Mercer
Publication: Doubleday Canada, 2007
Got it from: La Bibliotheque

I think I realized I was humourously/intellectually in love with Rick Mercer when I was about thirteen. That winter, I came down with a whopper of a cold and was forced to spend several days in bed. I was deluged with Canadian culture because a) I had to read The Cremation of Sam McGee for English class and b) my TV only got the CBC, leaving me to watch reruns of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which remains to this day one of my favourite shows. The reason I know anything about anything in politics is through 22 Minutes and Rick Mercer in particular was always my favourite satirist.

Who could forget him taking then-prime minister Jean Chretien to Harvey's? Or how he got a million signatures to change Stockwell Day's name to Doris? (Think about that one if you have to). Or his signature rants? When Rick started Made in Canada, I watched it because I knew if Rick was involved, it would be hysterical. And it was. When he left 22 Minutes, I followed him to The Rick Mercer Report, his current show. The man is a Canadian icon. If he ran for prime minister, he would win.

This book is basically a collection of his rants from the show's past four years. As always they are short, razor sharp and absolutely on target. No politician or party is sacred. He's gone skinny-dipping with a Liberal, had the Conservative prime minister tuck him in bed and ridden a tandem bike with the leader of the NDP. And they all get skewered - deservedly, but never with malice. The only thing I wish about the book is that there had been more new material. For someone like me who had practically memorized the rants, it felt more like a reread. Doesn't matter. A for Awesome.