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Reading Wednesday
Feb. 24th, 2021 04:02 pmJust finished: Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth. I ended up really enjoying this—it's funny, it's dark, the language and the characters were engaging, and it's gay as fuck. But—there's always a but lately—I'm noticing an epidemic lately of books where I read the first few chapters and I'm in love, and by the end, the book ends up being less than the sum of its parts, with an ending that feels just kind of...okay. And I'm wondering if it's because authors are sending out the first chapter or two of their manuscripts, which are workshopped and brilliant, and the rest of the manuscript isn't held to that initial standard.
Because the first two or three chapters of this are incredible, and while the rest of the book is strong, it doesn't end on the same kind of high. Specifically, by the end I was unclear as to why ( spoiler ) This said, it was still very entertaining and I'd recommend it.
Civil Elegies and Other Poems by Dennis Lee. I very seldom read poetry these days but one of my novel characters has a tattoo of the line: "And best of all is finding a place to be /
in the early years of a better civilization," so I figured I'd better re-read the whole thing.
It's a hell of a poem. It's basically Toronto's "Howl" or "Waste Land"—a lament for a Canada lost to American influence and late-state capitalism. It's kind of ironic given how old it is—the Toronto that Lee describes is in decline, but a thousand times more human than what we have now. There's no condos built without hot water because they were only ever meant as investment properties while a carpenter building tiny shelters for homeless people faces charges from the city. Lee wrote his epic in the shadow of Rochdale, a free radical university that he'd help found that became a drug den and finally the target of state violence, and the grief is fresh in his words.
The rest of the poems are good, but more what I'd expect from Canadian poetry of that era—poems about place and relationships. Worth reading, but lacking in the searing intensity of the title poem.
Currently reading: The Forgotten Daughter by Joanna Goodman. Ugggh this is such a frustrating book. There's very little fiction (at least English-language fiction) that deals with the FLQ and the October Crisis, so of course I wanted to read it. And it also deals with the Duplessis Orphans, which I barely know anything about and is yet another fascinatingly horrific episode of Canadian history. This book is about Véronique, the daughter of an FLQ member who killed Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. Véronique is a drug smuggler and a passionate separatist. For reasons unknown to me, the reader, she falls for James, a half-English journalist and Liberal. Meanwhile, James' older sister Elodie, a Duplessis Orphan who was declared "mentally r*tarded" and institutionalized as a child, struggles for justice for her lost youth.
My big problem with this book is that I can't buy Véronique and James' relationship at all. I don't see what she sees in a guy a decade her senior with opposite politics to hers when her big thing is politics. He doesn't seem to like her, beyond that she's beautiful. It might work if the relationship was portrayed as the deeply dysfunctional hot mess that it would be, but I think they're supposed to be star-crossed lovers or something. I also just find James awful. Véronique is also awful but she's supposed to be a disaster trash baby so I'm fine with that. And again, I'm all for awful characters but not when the author seems unaware of their flaws.
I'm also slightly jealous every time I read a published novel that breaks the kinds of rules I always get called on for breaking in my writing. Like James' journalism does not read as realistic or accurate, and there's a lot of telling rather than showing, and I'm fine with those things but people keep on critiquing me for doing them.
Basically, fascinating story, but I would have done a major structural edit to it and I'm annoyed at the Canadian publishing industry doesn't hire structural editors anymore.
Because the first two or three chapters of this are incredible, and while the rest of the book is strong, it doesn't end on the same kind of high. Specifically, by the end I was unclear as to why ( spoiler ) This said, it was still very entertaining and I'd recommend it.
Civil Elegies and Other Poems by Dennis Lee. I very seldom read poetry these days but one of my novel characters has a tattoo of the line: "And best of all is finding a place to be /
in the early years of a better civilization," so I figured I'd better re-read the whole thing.
It's a hell of a poem. It's basically Toronto's "Howl" or "Waste Land"—a lament for a Canada lost to American influence and late-state capitalism. It's kind of ironic given how old it is—the Toronto that Lee describes is in decline, but a thousand times more human than what we have now. There's no condos built without hot water because they were only ever meant as investment properties while a carpenter building tiny shelters for homeless people faces charges from the city. Lee wrote his epic in the shadow of Rochdale, a free radical university that he'd help found that became a drug den and finally the target of state violence, and the grief is fresh in his words.
The rest of the poems are good, but more what I'd expect from Canadian poetry of that era—poems about place and relationships. Worth reading, but lacking in the searing intensity of the title poem.
Currently reading: The Forgotten Daughter by Joanna Goodman. Ugggh this is such a frustrating book. There's very little fiction (at least English-language fiction) that deals with the FLQ and the October Crisis, so of course I wanted to read it. And it also deals with the Duplessis Orphans, which I barely know anything about and is yet another fascinatingly horrific episode of Canadian history. This book is about Véronique, the daughter of an FLQ member who killed Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. Véronique is a drug smuggler and a passionate separatist. For reasons unknown to me, the reader, she falls for James, a half-English journalist and Liberal. Meanwhile, James' older sister Elodie, a Duplessis Orphan who was declared "mentally r*tarded" and institutionalized as a child, struggles for justice for her lost youth.
My big problem with this book is that I can't buy Véronique and James' relationship at all. I don't see what she sees in a guy a decade her senior with opposite politics to hers when her big thing is politics. He doesn't seem to like her, beyond that she's beautiful. It might work if the relationship was portrayed as the deeply dysfunctional hot mess that it would be, but I think they're supposed to be star-crossed lovers or something. I also just find James awful. Véronique is also awful but she's supposed to be a disaster trash baby so I'm fine with that. And again, I'm all for awful characters but not when the author seems unaware of their flaws.
I'm also slightly jealous every time I read a published novel that breaks the kinds of rules I always get called on for breaking in my writing. Like James' journalism does not read as realistic or accurate, and there's a lot of telling rather than showing, and I'm fine with those things but people keep on critiquing me for doing them.
Basically, fascinating story, but I would have done a major structural edit to it and I'm annoyed at the Canadian publishing industry doesn't hire structural editors anymore.
