“Nosy Parker” by Lesley Crewe

 This is a story about a year in the life of a girl in NDG, during Expo 67. She did not know a thing about her mother, and her father was quite old. She made good friends, the neighbours were very kindly, and there was some darkness thrown in for good measure. The dialog was not very realistic, and an unusual number of characters were unusually nice. But the story was interesting enough that I read it rather quickly (for me).

“All Families are Psychotic” by Douglas Coupland

 A brilliant astronaut daughter with a missing hand because her mother took thalidomide. Two loser brothers and a loser father with new wife. People with aids. Pregnant people. An ultra wealthy Swiss pharmacist. The list goes on. Needless to say, the book was interesting, but I found the writing style to be quite cold and clinical. As a result, I never really got into the book, though I did enjoy the jaded, intelligent mother, who got aids via a bullet which passed through her son. She hooked up with the ultra wealthy and unscrupulous pharmacist, who was able to cure the family of aids, and in the case of the father, of terminal liver cancer.

'The Capital of Dreams" by Heather O'Neilll

 This seemed like an odd book at first. A girl wandering through a war, accompanied by a talking goose, and remembering her life with her intellectual mother. As is usual with O'Neill, the book becomes more complete and moving the closer you get to the end. The goose was a figment of the girl's imagination, to help her cope with having turned her mother in to save herself. The ending is beautiful.

The war theme was moving to me because my parents and relatives lived through a war.

“How to Read Buildings: a crash course in architectural styles” by Carol Davidson Cragoe

 It literally took me years to finish this book, which I bought in the National Art Gallery. It did contain some information which was interesting to me, but sadly, I don’t think I retained anything. 

It did not help that the book has the format of cobbled together lecture notes. As a result, some things are not well explained at all, and some illustrations, which would have worked well as slides, don’t really have much effect on a small page. That said, if this book is indeed based on a university course, I would have enjoyed taking that course.

“Valentine in Montreal” by Heather O’Neill

This was a pleasant, whimsical read, about a girl named Valentine, who had spent most of her life in the Montreal metro. She met a double, who turned out to be her second cousin, and the adventure commenced. The book began as a serialized story in the Montreal Gazette, much in the fashion of many of Charles Dickens’ writings. I loved O’Neill’s beautiful metaphors for what Valentine was seeing.

“Babel” by R. F. Kuang

It took me months and months to read this book, and I almost gave up several times. The closest was when I reached the section about Letty’s betrayal leading to the killing of key members of the Hermes Society. The book is very long and pedantic, and the subject matter, colonialism and exploitation, is described in all its horror. As I said, it took me forever to find the emotional strength and interest to finish Babel.

That said, I must also add that the book is very well written, though I did get tired of reading about match pairs of words, and their effects on silver. The characters are well developed and very realistic. The protagonist is Robin Swift, who was the result of a commercial sexual union between a Chinese woman and an English professor, who planned to put the resulting child to work as a translator at Babel, at the University of Oxford. Babel’s function was the manipulation of silver to augment all aspects of the infrastructure making up England. A vey few benefitted, while most suffered from lost jobs, overly fast machines causing injury and death etc etc.

“Pearly Everlasting” by Tammy Armstrong

 I bought this book because it took place in New Brunswick, and the word ‘gothic’ was used in its description. I guess I’m glad I read this story about a girl and her bear “brother” and their lives in a logging camp, but I did find it to be somewhat slow. I never did bother to look up some of the very technical logging vocabulary that the author used, and her descriptions, though evocative, were sometimes unclear to me. There were, of course, cruelty and sorrow in the book, but love as well. Logging was a very hard life indeed.

And I must say, there was less of the gothic than I had hoped for. I guess it resided in the tall tales/myths of creatures living in the forest.