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Content by Kelly Rossiter
Commentateur n° : 81
Votes Utiles:
103
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Reviews Written by
Kelly Rossiter (Toronto, Ontario Canada)
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Reviewer Rank:
81 |
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Mothers and Sons
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de Colm Toibin
Édition : Hardcover |
| Price: CDN$ 18.89 |
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| Availability: Usually ships in 2 to 4 months |
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Call your Mother, April 11 2007
Colm Toibin is a great favourite of mine. His novel The Master was one of those exquisite books that you read slowly so it won't be over. This book of short stories Mothers and Sons is also a work of great depth and beauty. The relationship between mothers and their sons is a complicated and profound one and each story reveals something of the inherent struggle for balance, for love, and for power. This a nuanced book and there is much to think about. In a really strong collection of stories A Long Winter stands out as a particularly wonderful piece. A young man waits for winter to be over to recover the body of his mother who leaves her family to return to the house of her brother, haunted by how it might all have been different.
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The Law Of Dreams
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de Peter Behrens
Édition : Hardcover |
| Price: CDN$ 20.76 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
The Journey not the Arrival Matters , April 11 2007
I loved every minute of this book. The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens had me transported instantly to Ireland. Set at the time of the potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century the book is beautifully evocative. My daughter and I spent some time in that part of Ireland and visited the heartbreaking Potato Famine Museum in Skibbereen, but we were most surprised travelling around the country side to see that there were still small stone dwellings dotting the hills, abandoned and unchanged for the past 160 years. The history of the place is everywhere and the unthinkable poverty and squalor in which these people lived is still evident. The novel follows the character of Fergus as he is buffeted through this despairing time like so much flotsam. He is a young man with nothing left to lose and so is willing to risk his life just to be gone from the place. Poverty, starvation, illness, and betrayal are his lot. There is a lot of page turning plot to this novel, but it's really the characters that make it come alive. Even the minor characters stand out in your memory. A really wonderful book.
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The Blood Spilt
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de Asa Larsson
Édition : Hardcover |
| Price: CDN$ 17.64 |
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| Availability: Usually ships in 1 to 3 months |
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A new Scandinavian Mystery Writer, April 11 2007
I seem to have quite a lot of Scandinavian mystery stories on my reading pile these days. I find them very different in tone from English or North American mysteries. There is a kind of formality and perhaps more civility to them. I'm not sure if that comes from their society or if it is a function of reading a work in translation. The urban mysteries don't have the kind of nastiness and grit you associate with Ian Rankin or Ken Bruen and the small town mysteries don't have the kind of fey charm of something by Simon Brett. There is also a very strong sense of place in most of these novels. This seems to me to be true of The Blood Spilt, the second novel by Asa Larsson. I enjoyed this book, but my biggest complaint is that the plot is too close to her first novel, Sun Storms. I should let you know that if you read this book first, then you'll know who committed the murder in the first novel. I always find that annoying in mysteries with recurring characters, but in this case you can see that Larsson wrote herself into a corner and really had to reveal the information, otherwise the behaviour of her main character wouldn't make sense. I'll certainly give her third novel a try when it appears.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Sequels are never as good as the Original, Mar 14 2007
n 2001 XS: Big Ideas, Small Buildings by Phyllis Richardson created a sensation. Small, light prefab buildings were so 21st century and it was an inspired collection. Now, She has written a followup: XS: Small Spaces, Green Architecture and we wish we could say we are as excited as we were with the first volume but alas, we are not.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that whoever wrote the dust jacket description does not appear to have read the book. "The design goals of the 40 houses included here are to build as small as possible, to harmonize with the site, to use natural heating and cooling techniques, and, above all, to combine aesthetic beauty with ecological sensitivity. The houses are striking in appearance, inexpensive to build, and totally functional, and will serve as inspiration for architects and potential owners."
The book has garden pavilions, sculptures, cameras obscura and treehouses but there is nary a totally functional and inexpensive to build house to be found. That is fine, there are some lovely, innovative and inspiring structures that are worth the price of admission. There are also some of questionable green credentials and others that have been around the block a few too many times.
But while it may be true that "a new generation of architects and builders is creating warm, inviting homes that cause only a fraction of the ecological impact of conventional building methods," they aren't here. The author might have been better served if the blurb said what her introduction does: " almost none of the projects here is an end in itself. Rather, each suggests inroads in a journey to a host of answers."
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A Year of Cooking and Eating , Mar 14 2007
When my son first started showing an interest in cooking in his mid-teens I gave him a cookbook by Nigel Slater. Slater's attitudes encompass all of the cooking things that make sense to me - use what you have on hand, understand simple ingredients that taste good together, toss things in and don't worry about it and if you make a mistake don't spend the whole dinner apologizing. Dinner is about sharing, not about showing off (although there are many who would disagree with that). This new book by Slater entitled Kitchen Diaries follows a year of his cooking and has the hallmark of those earlier books but with the added idea that he wouldl use local ingredients in season when he could and that he would avoid supermartkets as much as possible. Kitchen Diaries is a beautiful book filled with all kinds of insights about eating and cooking and thinking about cooking. Slater isn't a fussy cook and that is one of the great strengths of this book. There are a lot of recipes and most of them have very few ingredients. He does assume that the people who use his books know their way around a kitchen, so he doesn't go into exhaustive detail about how to do things, but that's okay - if you are a beginner, you can figure it out. Really. Unfortunately I don't live in the same place as Slater so I can't follow his dinner suggestions by the calendar. His March 19 diary exaults in the first alfresco dinner of the year - I live in Canada and March is still ski season. The photographs are beautiful and show simple food that looks like someone made it rather than some food stylist putting the photo together. My one quibble with the book is that the photographs aren't labelled so you don't know which recipe it is depicting, but that's a minor fault. I've tried a bunch of these recipes and they are simple, straightforward and taste great. What more can you as for at dinner time?
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Bang Crunch
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de Neil Smith
Édition : Hardcover |
| Price: CDN$ 18.87 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Very nice on the outside, Mar 6 2007
There is a particular merit to the short story form. It allows you to skate by on pure literary talent when purpose you are working with a premise that would not stand up to anything longer. Neil Smith has clearly perfected this art; Bang/Crunch is a collection of stories that are charming, perfect, and beautifully written, but would be completely insufferable were they any longer.
Of the nine short stories in the collection, there are a few that have frustratingly mundane concepts including the after school special topics of a teenager questioning his sexuality and one about surviving cancer. These premises, although dull, are rescued to a one by delicate and finely crafted prose; there're few words out of place in the book, and not a sentence that doesn't feel like it has been distilled down.
Those stories where the quality of the concept matches the writing the title foremost among them are marvelous things, and all of the stories do end up compelling. I don't mean this to be a negative review, because Bang/Crunch is wonderful to read and the product of a spectacular writer. It's just that it feels a bit like a nice new paint job on a rickety shack. Very nice on the outside, but I wouldn't want to stay long.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Stick with it - it's worth it in the end, Mar 6 2007
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl is a book that I was really looking forward to reading. I loved the character of Blue and her pedantic professor father. I loved Pessl's writing style, her imagery, her language. The love affair lasted until roughly the end of the first third. Then I considered writing to the publishers to suggest that they retitle it Marisha Pessl's Big Book of Similes. By page 200 I was counting the number of similes per page, then by paragraph. This was not a good sign. By page 250 I was ready to throw the book across the room and I was only about half way through it. I get annoyed when authors write very long books when it isn't necessary. I get annoyed when editors don't say "You know this book would be much better minus about 150-200 pages". I start mumbling under my breath about Tolstoy. The centre section of this novel had me thinking that Pessl is a clever writer but more flash than substance with a certain amount of self conscious "look at what I can do" to her. But I thought about how much my son said he loved the book so I plowed onwards. And I'm glad I did. Around the beginning of the final third of the novel Pessl throws in a plot twist (whatever you do, don't read the back of the dust jacket) and the book takes off. Suddenly I was totally engrossed in the story and back in love with our narrator, Blue. The writing became tight and focussed with somewhere to go and something to say. That part of the novel met my expectations.. This is a first novel for Pessl and I'm hoping she will realize that she can write and that she doesn't need to put in every beautiful phrase that has ever come to her. She can save some for her next novel.
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Restless
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de William Boyd
Édition : Hardcover |
| Price: CDN$ 20.76 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A Terrific Literary Page Turner, Mar 6 2007
What a fun ride it was reading Restless by William Boyd. A bit of a mystery, a bit of an English spy story and a bit of a family drama all rolled into one. The book is broken into two narrative streams. The first is Ruth who teaches English to foreigners rather than finishing her doctorate. The second is the story of her mother Sally (real name Eva) who in fact, was a Russian who gets hooked into spying for the English immediately prior to and during World War II. The sections surrounding Ruth are fine and have the aura of a small town mystery story as she is surprised to learn about her mother's past, but it is really Eva's story we want to know about. Those sections crackle with a real sense of danger as Eva makes her way through the world of espionage while trusting no one. I liked the juxtaposition of Ruth's mundane, simple post-war life with the covert life of Eva, truly surviving only by her wits. I'll never look at a very sharp pencil the same way again. The story is clever, as are the historical twists and Boyd tells it in an engaging style. This is a something akin to a literary page turner and it's about the length that you could curl up one evening and devour whole.
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The Library at Night
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de Alberto Manguel
Édition : Hardcover |
| Price: CDN$ 22.05 |
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| Availability: Usually ships in 1 to 3 months |
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Inspiring book about books, Feb 26 2007
The Library at Night is for anyone who has ever said "Yes, actually, I do need all of these books." Alberto Manguel has written an inspiring book about keeping books. He explores all aspects of libraries dropping little facts and bits of wisdom that he has gleaned over the years from collecting and living with printed material. He has so many books that when he lived in Toronto he was forced to shelve them on his front porch. His children complained that they felt the need of a library card in order to enter their home. There is plenty of information here regarding the history of libraries, great collections, famous library buildings, great librarians and certainly Manguel's own library. A charming and erudite writer, Manguel is no book snob. Detective fiction, poetry, history, fiction, non-fiction all have a place in his book room. One of my favourite chapters was about organizing libraries - do you organize them by language (Manguel reads in 5 or 6 languages)?, by country of origin?, alphabetically by author?, by category?, do you separate works by best friends because they don't write in the same category? These are weighty issues for anyone with more than a handful of books. I have a library and I have a lot of books, although not nearly as many as Manguel, so I was interested in his response to the ever popular question "Have you actually read all of these books?". His simple reply is "Well, I've certainly opened them all".
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A Good Life
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de Leo Hickman
Édition : Paperback |
| Price: CDN$ 23.91 |
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| Availability: Usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks |
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Learning to Live an Ethical Life, Feb 18 2007
Every week we turn to the Guardian for the latest missive on ethical living, a subject introduced by Leo Hickman and carried on by Lucy Siegle. Many of these have been collected and published in A Good Life. The book attempts to "explain in detail some of the problems and injustices our habits and lifestiyles are causing and them presenting practical solutions to reducing their impact, from eating less meat and lowering car emissions to domestic cleaning advice."- it is not just about global warming, it is about the state of the globe and what we can do to make it, and our lives, better.
Graphically, it is more of a magazine format, with lots of sidebars asking questions like "should I eat the New Zealand organic apple, the Kent non-organic apple or the Fairtrade apple from South Africa?" or dotted with windows with tidbits like "driving a 13 MPG SUV instead of the average 22 MPG care for one year wastes more energy than if you left a fridge door open for six years or left a TV on for 28 years"
It looks as good as a book printed on recycled paper with vegetable inks can, with chapters covering all aspects of living one's life ethically. Yet it is accessibly written, broad in scope and full of useful information. Each chapter has extensive references and links to sources and shops, but it is all UK based.
Leo Hickman is an excellent writer and takes what could be a dry and depressing subject into an invigorating and optimistic challenge. More importantly, the concept of "ethical living" is broader and I think a better description, a better phrase than "greening" which so many in North America think of as putting solar panels on their monster homes. The book is very British in its writing and content, but it appears that a new addition is in the works.
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