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Bookmarks

Pique Newsmagazine staff review this year's best book bets
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Twelve Books of Christmas

Books are always a good bet as Christmas gifts, whether it’s a board book for a six-month-old niece, a graphic novel for the alt teen, a novel for an aunt or poetry for grandma. In this expanded version of Bookmarks, Pique Newsmagazine staff review some of the new books published this fall that will make more than satisfying choices for under the tree.

A Three Dog Life

By Abigail Thomas

Harcourt Books, 2006

182 pages, $27.95

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

Some people live unperturbed lives: a steady career, safe home, well-adjusted children. But every now and then one of those uneventful lives runs smack into a catastrophe and that’s where the real living unfolds.

Such is what author Abigail Thomas encounters when her journalist and editor husband, Rich, is struck by a car while walking the dog one morning, incurring a massive brain injury.

After many surgeries Abigail tries to care for Rich at home but then with resignation has him confined to an institution. She moves from their urban New York City home to be closer to him and visits regularly the man who can’t recall what happened a day or even an hour ago. Subject to fits of rage and despair yet blessed with a gift for poetry Rich is not the husband Abigail married yet is still a different kind of remarkable.

This is not a memoir to read so you can sigh and say thanks for your own unstartled existence. It’s a book that makes you question your depth of morality but also one that acknowledges tender mercies. A short but not inconsequential collection of essays that overlap and interweave in just under 200 pages, A Three Dog Life is quick to read but one with a delicate, reverberating resonance.

Every Inadequte Name

By Nick Thran

Insomniac Press, 2006

71 pages, $11.95

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

“It’s hard not to get published as a poet in Canada, if you’re any good,” Canada’s former poet laureate George Bowering once told me — a polite way of saying perhaps too much dreck is published in Canada.

But Nick Thran is one of those gifted young Canadian poets especially deserving of being published. Every Inadequate Name is a more than adequate debut collection that speaks about everything from inane thoughts at the laundromat to the joy of hands around morning coffee mugs. A West Coast poet now living in Toronto, at 26, Thran is one who knows how to say a lot with the slimmest of words, as he does in Bird Time: The streetlight’s lamp on the cherry tree dresses/the night in a pink feather boa./It all looks ridiculous from where I’m standing./That’s part of the reason I called.

World Climbing

Images From the Edge

By Simon Carter

Onsight Photography and Publishing, 2006

192 pages , $28.57

Reviewed by John Blok

A rough definition of a coffee table book is that it has far fewer words than pictures, its cover is glossy and spectacular, it has WOW factor to a cross section of readers and it looks expensive.

It is also presumed that the book is on the coffee table for the benefit of guests, maybe to impress them of the exotic places you’ve traveled while you prepare a delectable feast.

But how many of us have actually worn climbing shoes or even thought they would like to Spiderman their way up a piece of vertical granite? Simon Carter’s World Climbing – Images from the Edge is a book that will provoke such thoughts.

We have all been fascinated by the Chief, Squamish’s great granite face we see driving down Highway 99, and many of us have shared stories of the climbers we’ve seen clinging to tiny cracks so high up that we were sure their survival must have been questionable. Within the covers of this book are similar “gone to heaven” paradises for rock climbers, beautifully photographed in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Every page is filled with landscapes of beauty, pillars high and vertical, smooth and shear-rock faces and the men and women instilled with the skill, strength, and courage to face themselves and the idea that maybe this rock can be climbed.

World Climbing is an adrenaline rush in your own living room, a WOW in your soul, and a comfort in knowing your guests will be absorbed for a while.

Lucky

By Gabrielle Bell

Drawn and Quarterly, 2006

111 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

The graphic novel is an evolution of the comic book, geared to adults and riskier than its mainstream origins. Risky in a sense that the genre deals with unsolvable but omniscient questions like “What’s it all about?”

In Lucky, Gabrielle Bell’s personal journal set down in classic four squares to a page segments, Bell chronicles her seemingly mundane life about her and boyfriend Tom’s attempts to find a decent place to live in New York City. Along the way we learn about nebulous 20-something lives as she clomps between jobs (working in a jewelry factory, nude modeling) and she and Tom learn the basic footwork of a grown-up relationship.

Lucky is an initial quick read, but one readers should return to, with its detail (front and back inside cover illustrations of anxious and contented artist) that speak to evolution, not only of a genre, but of an author.

A Good Death

By Gil Courtemanche

Douglas & McIntyre, 2006

270 pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

There will be similar Christmas dinners like the one drafted in A Good Death . A family gathered round aging parents should be a contented scene, but it isn’t when the adult children hold grudging memories of their dysfunctional childhood that include a bullying father, passive mother and malignant memories that haunt in an endless loop of recrimination.

Such is the case for Andre, the eldest of a troubled but not atypical Quebecois family gathered for the feast around a father stricken dumb by Parkinson’s and a seemingly pathetically enduring mother. Throughout the evening Andre drinks, eats, and thinks too much while cultivating old hurts yet discovering he now has the power in the family to return the same. (“Why is it that some men are so fascinated by violence?... What pleasure does a child get from pulling the legs off a frog or torturing a cat? Is it a way of taking one’s place in a world in which one knows nothing about frogs, or cats? Or women, or children?”)

How we break debilitating family ties while maintaining our innate need for pattern and ritual is what Gil Courtemanche explores in this bittersweet novel. The Montreal writer received acclaim for his first novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali , and deserves equal notice for this compact, elegant novel.

The Book of Cities

By Philip Dodd and Ben Donald

Anova Books, 2006

512 pages, $44.95

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

The Book of Cities is an excellent choice for those who have the time and money to go anywhere but don’t have a clue where to go. (Think the recently retired teacher couple who’ve spent their summers gardening but now want to get out there.)

Authors Dodd and Donald have created an appetizer guidebook to 250 cities, from Ottawa to Kathmandu. A hefty 512 pages, this is not a book to slip in your back pocket. But its concise yet quirky observations of cities both familiar and foreign, its almost poetic borrowed intros (“It is simply a rather large, village, set in the middle of some forests and some lakes. You wonder what it thinks it is doing there, looking so important.” – Ingmar Bergman remarking on Stockholm) and clipped yet bemusing observations will make this book one to keep by the armchair to ruminate over in the midst of Whistler’s mid-winter cloying greyness.

Night Cars

By Teddy Jam. Illustrated by Eric Beddows

Groundwood Books, 2006

25 pages, $9.95

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

One of Canada’s finest novelists, Matt Cohen, died too young in 1999 at age 56. Known for his novels The Disinherited and Elizabeth and After, which won the Governor-General’s award for literature, Cohen also published this lovely picture book in 1988 under the name of Teddy Jam. Re-released this year in a sturdy board book edition, Night Cars is about the world a toddler discovers with his father when he can’t sleep on a snowy night. A book I first read to my daughter, now 19, as a baby, this is a keeper not only for illustrator Eric Beddows’s muted but lively renderings of street scenes that include snow plows, fire trucks, and garbage trucks, but also for Cohen’s gentle poetic text (Night cars shining in the night/stop and bow at each red light/engines roar/lights turn green/night cars on their way again/) that will be sure to entice any baby to the comforts of bed and night time.

Gargoyles

By Bill Gaston

House of Anansi Press, 2006

251 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Vivian Moreau

For too long the Canadian short story canon has been stuffed with dark, morose litanies in which humour was viewed as presumptuousness. Bill Gaston has broken that mould, first with his 2002 Giller-nominated Mount Appetite and now with Gargoyles , a collection of stories slyly perceptive and witty yet respectful of the craft.

Divided into three-act sections of attributes rather than themes, these 12 stories speak to extraordinary moments in ordinary lives that both haunt and illuminate.

Although many fiction writers, including Gaston, lean to the more saleable novel as their nirvana, Gargoyles is an example of what short stories can and should achieve: a resilient compactness of prose that rely on nebulous but defined parameters for impact.

In The Night Window , teenage Tyler treks off from a campsite where his mother and her boyfriend are engaged in too much nudge-nudge and comes across a fabled cottage in the forest with its own B.C. twist. In Forms in Winter , a father who’s lost his runaway son in a bizarre accident drives around the city shooing kids off the streets. “He’ll spot one and pull up to the curb and roll his window down and she will step through the ghost of her own breath, closer.” The Beast Waters his Garden of a Summer’s Eve is a chair-squirming, dialogue-focused exchange between two brothers, one of whom has committed a beyond tasteless public faux pas. Gaston’s characters are both loveable and abhorrent, much as how gargoyles, those immortal spirits confined to protect mortal lives, might view themselves.

The Art of Rough Travel: From the Peculiar to the Practical

Advice from a 19 th Century Explorer

By Sir Francis Galton.

The Mountaineers Books, 2006

180 pages, US$15.95

Reviewed by G.D. Maxwell

While exploring darkest Africa in 1850, it struck Sir Francis Galton that the general world could profit from what he’d learned mounting expeditions of geographical discovery. The resulting volume, The Art of Travel: Shifts and Contrivances in Wild Countries , was published in 1855 during the height of the Empire’s quest to shed light on the unmapped corners of the globe.

Abridged and adapted from the book’s 1872 fifth edition, The Mountaineers Books’ slim edition is a compendium of practical, if dated, information. Galton explains and opines on everything from best clothing choices to making friends with the elephant you’re riding to preparing proper tea on the trail to eating “revolting” food when the occasion demands. “Carrion is not noxious to starving men.”

Anyone who’s ever worked out the logistics of a wilderness trip longer than a few days and dismayed over the prospect of eating freeze-dried food will find this time capsule thoroughly enjoyable.

Strange and Dangerous Dreams:

The Fine Line Between Adventure and Madness

By Geoff Powter

The Mountaineers Books, 2006

256 pages, US$22.95

Reviewed by G.D. Maxwell

Geoff Powter is a climber, adventurer and clinical psychologist in Canmore, Alberta. When risk-sport disasters occur, he’s the kind of guy media people seek out to help explain why people are drawn to such endeavours and, well, whether or not they’re simply crazy.

In Strange and Dangerous Dreams , he examines the lives and follies of 11 adventurers. From the marvelously successful but suicidally morose Meriwether Lewis to the totally bizarre life and mountaineering exploits of Alister Crowley, Powter tries to flesh out the answer to the why-did-they-do-it question.

Whether driven by a crushing need to succeed, burdened in Powter’s classification, or a “deeply-seated malignancy in their psychological make-up”, the bent, or those adventurers playing out scripted, rudderless lives, the lost, these fascinating journeys into the fine line between adventure and madness are entertaining if ultimately unsatisfying. Always the question acknowledged by Powter looms large: had their adventures or lives “succeeded” would these adventurers not be celebrated as heroes?

Joy of Cooking: 75 th Anniversary Edition

By Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker

Scribner, 2006

1,152 pages, $22.00

Reviewed by G.D. Maxwell

Oh comfort and Joy. Whether you’re an accomplished cook, a dabbler or especially if you don’t know braising from broiling, Joy of Cooking is the one book that ought to be in your culinary collection. It won’t turn you into a Cordon Bleu chef; though it may take you far enough down that road to discover that’s what you want to become.

What Joy will do is teach you how to feed yourself, your family and your friends — for life. It’s not so much a cookbook as it is a how-to-cook book. From cooking your first meal to creating your own signature recipes, Joy will give you the knowledge you need to understand the complex alchemy that takes place when heat is applied to food. It’s extensive Know Your Ingredients section will grant you insight into what goes with and doesn’t go with what. Hell, it’ll even tell you how to skin a rabbit and turn it into a week’s worth of Liftie Stew.

Dirty Blond, The Diaries of Courtney Love

By Courtney Love

Faber and Faber, 2006

292 pages, $43.95

Reviewed by Andrew Mitchell

“I am a public figure unhappy with my share of the American dream. There can be only one reason for this. I am on drugs and have the morals and mentality of a cartoon character.” – Courtney Love

Don’t pick up Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love if you’re looking for any kind of profound insight into the life of one of America’s most famous/infamous personalities.

That’s because Dirty Blonde isn’t an autobiography and has none of the navel gazing that comes from looking back on your life with any kind of wisdom or perspective.

Instead, Love’s book is a collection of pages ripped from a lifetime of diaries, as well as a collection of letters, lyrics, and moments of spontaneous reflection from a life that has swung from the lowest lows to the highest highs and back again too many times.

Although better known these days from her brushes with the law and the tabloids, Love was and still is bigger than life, and remains fearless to a fault. She has literally seen and done and felt it all, and presents her life honestly, without an ounce of shame or regret.

Just as the cover of her memoir shows the backside of a naked Courtney Love, lying on a carpet strewn with orchids, the inside reveals Love’s most personal writing, naked on the page. It can be uncomfortable at times, but impossible to look away.