Twilight

Against my better judgment I bought and started reading Twilight this weekend. I had heard it was bad but I also heard from a few people that it was awesome and since it is looming large on our cultural landscape at the moment I decided I should be versed in all things vampire. Good God this book is bad. I mean, really, really bad. I honestly thought that since it would have been edited (professionally!) several times and eventually published that it would at least be grammatically correct with decent sentence structure. I was wrong.

I really can't believe this book made it to the marketplace. Harry Potter was simple in structure and obviously geared for younger readers but it was complex in plot, well-developed and solidly written. This drivel is badly written and seriously lacking in plot. Nothing even really happens for the first three hundred pages - unless you count swooning as plot development. The main character, Bella, has got to be the weakest most un-feminist character I've come across in a long time. She is basically treated like dirt repeatedly and keeps coming back for more...because he's hot. She lacks any self-respect or instincts for self-preservation and is willing to endanger her life...because he's hot. The quickness with which these poorly developed teenage swooners fall for one another is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet and about as believable. Ugh.

I thought this book would be simple but good, written for young adults, but with elements of style that might explain its popularity. Instead I feel like I'm reading Sweet Valley High all over again and I honestly don't know if I'll be able to finish it. Stephenie Meyer should be ashamed of herself for inflicting such saccharine, poorly-constructed and misogynistic garbage on the young women of this world. As ashamed as I am for picking up the book in the first place.

A Book Suggestion

Books are normally something I deal with on my other blog but every once and awhile there is a book good enough to straddle the line between sites. This is one of those books:

The Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama

Seriously - so good. It's the story of a family in Japan and it spans the time before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and extends into the 80's. It's just one of those books like The Corrections that tells a simple story about people's lives and leaves you feeling lonely for your new found friends when you close the back cover.

It is beautifully written, poignant, profound, inspiring and personal. I have never read Tsukiyama before but I will certainly read her again.

You know what sucks?

I have been reading Ian McEwan's Atonement for several months now. I haven't taken that long with it because I wasn't enjoying it but because it's been my bath book. I only read it in the bath. As of late I have really started getting into it and it managed to find itself transported from the tub and next to the bed. Then Brian and I went to a movie and they showed the preview for the new Atonement movie. And ruined the entire damn story. The two young people that I was just starting to think might hook up? They fall in love and there is betrayal and lies and a war and family tragedy. End of story. I now have absolutely no desire whatsoever to finish the book. Out of the bath and into the toilet.

Precious Visit

On Thursday we went to see Alexander McCall Smith do a reading. We have both been reading his books for the last year or so and really enjoy them. He writes a lot about Botswana, a place we have visited and are familiar with. There are so many shared interests and history between myself and Smith that I feel a sense of kinship with him. He is from Scotland (and now lives in Edinburgh) and grew up in Africa, much like my mother. He studied law (as does my husband), writes from a woman's perspective (I am a woman...okay, I'm reaching with that one) and writes children's books. To top it off, he did his reading at KNOX United Church. Weird, huh?

So I was happy - I got to hear McCall Smith and better yet I got to hear him talking to Eleanor Wachtel as the reading will be featured on CBC's Writers and Company. Life is good.

Fun With Flipping Floaters

The weekend is over and for some reason I feel very tired even though I had a fairly relaxing time. On Friday I went for dinner with a friend I hadn't met yet. I am good friends with her son and she reads my blog...I had such a nice time talking with her. We had a good meal and laughed and shared stories and I felt like I had known her for a very long time. We probably wouldn't have met if it hadn't been for the internet...nice internet.

On Saturday I decided to embark on a project I shouldn't have even considered let alone embarked at. I replaced the burner on our barbecue. Sounds easy right? After battling with a can of degreaser, wrestling with rusted metal wing nuts and finally begging for compliance from a pair of metal venturi, I finished. Five hours after I started. I was covered in black grease. But the barbecue works. Then again, it worked before I started. Look what five hours of hard work will get you.

Yesterday we headed to Bowness Park to relax and read in the sun. (I am reading the most incredible book right now called "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss. It's probably some of the best writing I have read since Alistair MacLeod's "No Great Mischief" although of a different type.) We had been laying there in the hot sun for a few hours (me, basting in SPF 30 of course) when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, came this gale-force wind. In seconds the temperature dropped, the sky turned black and our mouths were filled with a fine grit. We, along with half the park, ran for our car, dodging falling tree branches as we went. Water Rescue trucks, with sirens blaring, headed to the water to rescue the floaters. It was like Armageddon...I kept waiting to see naked bodies floating up into the heavens (especially the family picnic to the right of our spot who prayed/sang loud enough that even the Muslims at the Islamic Centre barbecue felt shamed), but alas, it was just a summer storm.

Big People in Little Bodies...Revolt!!

One of my favourite things when I was a child was going to the public library. I bloomed under the potential of all those books and the knowledge that I would be taking at least some of them home. My Mum would often tell us we had a limit of say, five or ten items and I would spend the next hour agonizing on what books I was going to check out. Would it be too quick a read? Was it funny enough? Hard enough? Would I like it? I would read the description on the back and maybe the first few pages trying to extrapolate what the rest of the experience would feel like. Usually I ended up with five books and a list of another 50 I would have to get next time.

I still love going to the library. I still bring home too many books and end up with late fines. Just last week I returned James Gleick's Isaac Newton only half-finished. I really enjoyed it...but now I don't know what happened to Newton. I can only assume he died.

Last night I went to the library because I had a whole list of books I wanted to get and I managed to get a bunch of them. Unfortunately I stumbled across something while I was there that made me feel angry and a little sad. The library has a new "Kids Bag" program where parents can go in and grab a bag that contains five books and an audio-visual item. The bags are all lined up along one of the shelves and labeled according to gender and age. What the hell? What happened to choosing books with your child? What happened to the idea that kids are actually little people who have preferences, tastes and varying abilities? Can you imagine if I handed you a book and said "Here you go. I have no idea what this book is about but it's geared towards your generation and gender so you're bound to like it." How are you supposed to learn about yourself and develop a relationship with reading if you're just handed an arbitrarily assigned plastic bag of reading materials?

If parents don't have time to even pick out the books for their little ones I can bet they aren't reading to them either. Sometimes I wonder how we all ended up doing things so ass backwards and why nobody seems to notice.

Bros and Books

I spent last weekend in Edmonton with my not-so-little-little brothers. I honestly can't remember the last time it was just the three of us. Boyfriends, girlfriends or parents are usually present so it was really great to just hang out with both of them. Craig leaves for Nepal on the 31st and is getting really excited for his trip. It's his first big adventure and what a place to start with!

I just finished A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews and I actually cried at the end. It was so good! It's written from the perspective of a young Mennonite girl in Manitoba (I think) and it has been resonating within my little head ever since I finished it. It was nominated for the Giller Prize so I assumed it was well written (and it was) but I never thought I would be so moved and drawn in to the lives of the characters. Awesome.

Reason for not writing much? Life is deliciously, boringly, perfect. Pain breeds literature, perfection breeds sex.

God Rest Ye Merry Heathens

I'm sitting here at my brother's house in Edmonton, pecking away at his beautiful iBook...Mac makes amazing things. We drove up to Edmonton yesterday on a sunny, warm winter day. The prairies were never prettier and it was great to hang out with Brian (and my new Eminem CD).

The flooring is down in our living room and dining room! Brian worked all day Thursday and when I came home, he had installed all the flooring. It looks so great and the house is really starting to come together. I stood there on Wednesday evening with the Christmas tree lights on and I almost started to cry. Our house looks like a home.

I went to the library last week and it was like I had died and gone to Chapters. Twelve bucks a year and I can take out 99 items at a time! I'm a quick and voracious reader but I don't think I could read 99 books in a three week loan period. At any rate, it's nice to know the possibility exists. There were about a dozen Mormon missionaries at the library, all checking their email and writing home. A whole flock of them were standing right next the evolutionary biology section and I couldn't help but giggle at the irony. Elder's Smith and Tanner leaning on the likes of Darwin and E.O. Wilson...it was too much to handle.

It's my Mum's birthday today! When she was a child she used to think she was a day older than Jesus.

Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays and spending time with friends and family. Have a wonderful Christmas and remember, keep the "mas" in Christmas.

Hey! Nice Thai!

Thai food has always been my favourite "ethnic cuisine" (if that term still applies these days) and today I learned how to cook heaps of it. We took a cooking class at Pad Thai Cookery school and learned how to make curry pastes, carve vegetables (for some reason, my carrot "Man looks over bridge contemplating his existential self" didn't fare as well as some chicks tomato rose...what can you do?), make soups, stir fry's and some very yummy deserts. I am excited to go home and cook up a big Thai meal for my friends and family. Maybe I'll open up a restaurant and call it Thai, and Thai Again. Groan.

We also went to see The Island. It's funny being all the way over here because we end up missing all the hoopla and buildup to a typical Hollywood movie. We end up watching it through naive eyes and I can tell you, it makes a difference. I have never been a huge Hollywood fan but lately the movies are worse. Fight scenes that go on for hours, car chases that break the rules of physics not to mention the laws of good film making. The dialogue is horrendous and the plots, predictable. The Island wasn't so bad (it had the sci-fi element of science and ethics which engaged my brain a little bit) but there were definitely some laughable scenes. Like when the two main characters fall 70 stories off the side of a building (hanging onto a billboard for safety) and manage to escape unharmed.

As contrast, I offer my most recent read The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester (also the author of another favourite, Krakatoa). What an interesting book. It tells the story of Dr. Minor and James Murray, two men responsible for the Oxford English Dictionary. Sounds a bit boring, but it's not. A true story, full of madness and murder, about something we all take for granted. I had never really thought much about dictionaries until I read this. Can you imagine not having one? Shakespeare apparently did not have access to a dictionary...he couldn't check to see if he had used a word correctly or check its spelling. He couldn't even "look up" a word or a thing (like "elephant"...how the hell would he know what an elephant was!?) because the concept didn't even exist. There was no where to look. In a word like ours where we can find out anything about anything in a few minutes, that blew my mind.

A big Happy Birthday to my not so little, little brother...wish I was there kiddo!