Canadian Blogs.net

The fourth book in my series for CBC Canada Reads is The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy. Let’s cut right to the chase: This was an okay book, but not a favourite by any means. Of the four books I’ve head, it’s sitting solidly in third place. Nikolski and Fall On Your Knees both had some resonance with me through their stories and memorable characters, while Generation X inspired an intense repulsion. The Jade Peony was just… meh. The novel is told through the eyes of three children in the same family in the roughly 5 to 15 age range, living in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s. On the face of it this could have had very similar results to Nikolski and Fall On Your Knees, which featured multiple points of view and stories that connected in different...

I am only 80 pages into The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and I’ve been completely enchanted for most of that. Is this too soon to start writing a review? I was struck immediately by the richness of language. Despite the fact that the music being played at the Starbucks I was reading it in clashed completely with the warm prose I was lost in it. It is obvious that this is a carefully crafted story. Not only do the main characters experience a non-linear timeline, the reader is introduced to their story in a different but still non-linear timeline. That any of this makes sense is astounding in itself. The only part I’m hesitant about so far is that the preliminaries pointing at the actual mechanism which will make the time travel premise possible are much...

The first thing I have to ask is what’s the deal with the paragraphs? Not having chapters is one thing, I don’t think anybody cares whether the breaks in text are numbered or not, but the lack of standard text formatting did bug me from time to time. Anyway, if you can get past that, there’s still the problem of sorting through the numerous characters. I just finished the book a couple days ago and, though I can remember a fair bit of what happened, and I can remember a fair number of names, I still don’t have straight in my head who did what. I did enjoy it when occasionally the narration of one character’s point of view would mention people in the background which I recognized to be some of the other characters I had read about in a previous scene (even...

This is the third novel in my Canada Reads 2009 series of posts. I’ve heard a lot of good things about David Adams Richards. I don’t remember any of them off hand but I at least have this idea in my head that he’s supposed to be a decent author. He spoke at my high school graduation, but I don’t remember anything that he actually said, so I have very little to go on here going into this book. Unfortunately I don’t have my copy handy, so I can’t go back and look for all my little bookdarts, reminding me of what I liked and didn’t. What I do remember is that most of it falls under the latter. There were many simple reasons I didn’t like this book. I found the narration dull, and I tended to notice how the writing style was annoying me more...

The Outlander by Gil Adamson is the second of the selections for this year’s Canada Reads that I tackled. The blurb on the back of the book certainly made it sound exciting, but it didn’t quite live up to the hype. From the beginning I was definitely interest. The anonymity of the main character meant I always wanted to know more about her. We begin the story only knowing her as “The Widow”. On top of the questions we have right from the start—why is this woman being chased, what is she running from—we now have this odd clue, and must wonder, “what does being a widow have to do with it?” Unfortunately these and other tantalizing clues, references to her past and the excitement we get from the pursuit, come very infrequently. At times I...