I am not predisposed towards magazines. They have too many advertisements and those that don’t, like Bitch and Adbusters and The Walrus, I let my subscriptions lapse with a stack of issues I never even got around to starting. I cherry pick my way through The Economist most weeks, half-finishing articles and sections. I’ve never read every article in their China section. I don’t think I’ve read their Obits in ages. So even the magazine I “read”, I don’t really read. Something about magazines and their stories just doesn’t gel with me.

But, break outside your comfort zone and all that. A Best-Of Collection means I won’t have to be wading through the trash, thought I. It’s curated, to use web 2.0 (or are we on 3.0 now? n.0?) lingo. Such a collection will inspire me to explore more long-form journalism. My horizons will be expanded and I will be all the richer.

Except, well, not really.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the stories in The Best American Magazine Writing 2015. They aren’t riddled with typographical errors or unsubstantiated claims. They aren’t unnecessarily fanciful or overwhelmingly dour. They are perfectly adequate technique pieces. I could imagine journalism students dissecting them in little work groups and giving powerpoint presentations afterwards.

But I can’t say that, with the exception of Brian Phillips’ The Sea of Crises, about Sumo wrestling and Yukio Mishima, that I enjoyed reading any of these articles. That I felt that feeling you get after reading something that knocks your mind into the next level, like an energized electron. Most of the time, I just felt annoyed. Or forgetful. Three times now I’ve looked at the table of contents, baffled by Love and Ruin. Three times I couldn’t remember what that piece was about, including about half an hour after I read it. I think I’ve finally got it down though. Love and Ruin is about Afghanistan.

But annoyed. For example, the initial essay, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations. I found the argument muddled and unconvincing even though I am pretty much for reparations (or at least, as the article points out, I am completely open to studying the possibility of reparations via studies that are continually voted down by congress or the senate or whatever it is in the US that vote on these sorts of things. I’m Canadian so that whole governmental process is somewhat mysterious to me). The winning essay didn’t convince someone who already believed in the possibility. Things like this annoy me. The articles instantly stopping when, I guess, they’ve gotten to five thousand or seventy-five hundred or whatever their word limit is, rather than letting the piece be as long as it needs to be, annoyed me. Having to read three short articles on art criticism, written for other art critics, so me having really no clue what was being talked about, annoyed me. Having to read four hundred pages on my iPad rather than my kobo and getting eye strain and headaches annoyed me (although, that really isn’t the fault of the essays in this book, more the publisher. I hate reading on my iPad).

So The Best American Magazine Writing 2015 did not change my opinion of long-form magazine journalism. I’m just going to go back to flipping at random through The Economist‘s articles on the bathroom floor while waiting for Tesfa to get out of the tub. Maybe, when I stupidly request to review The Best American Magazine Writing 2016 next fall, that will be the collection that inspires me to love this type of journalism.

But probably not.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2015, Sid Holt editor went on sale December 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I always find it harder to write reviews for good books than for poor ones (perhaps I should really say books I enjoyed versus books I disliked since no one has, of yet, made me the supreme arbiter of what constitutes a good book. Perhaps that email mistakenly got routed to my spam folder? Feel free to send it to me again universe.) A bad book I can pick apart and be sarcastic about. A good book, what is there to say except I have read a good book?

So I have read a good book.

In A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, Ludovica Fernandes Mano, a Portuguese transplant to Angola builds a wall separating her apartment from the rest of the building during the Angolan war for independence. She stays there for thirty or forty years later until everything in the story comes together, a bit like in the most absurd of French movie farces, but more like in the tiny patterns of a pysanka, all small and perfect and fit together just so.

Okay, I went away and looked at buzzfeed for fifteen minutes. I’m back. This is what I mean, what am I supposed to say about a good book other than it’s a good book? I read it in an evening. It isn’t heavy or long. It’s like bubbles of air. It’s like reading Gabriel García Márquez — I wrote that in the margins, then saw that other reviews said that too — but other reviews also talk about magical realism and I guess I don’t know what that means because unlike in Gabriel García Márquez, there are no shrinking women or marveling at ice or ascending into the heavens. There are coincidences. There is that farce in the denouement. Like with Gabriel García Márquez, one needs to suspend disbelief, but A General Theory of Oblivion is so deftly drawn that suspending one’s disbelief is a pleasure rather than a chore, like with Gabriel García Márquez. Is that what magical realism is: an enjoyable suspension of disbelief?

I liked A General Theory of Oblivion. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t put the book down once from the first page to the last, so what I will say is what I have said: I have read a good book.

A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa went on sale December 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Why do I do things? My head is filled of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stuff right now, so I feel like Zaphod when he realizes he’s locked off part of his brains from himself. But, instead of stealing space ships, I’m like why did I request a six hundred page Austrian satirical play from the 1920s to read? What possessed me to do that? At least I managed to request it in English and didn’t get six hundred pages of Austrian-German vernacular when my German skills are roughly on par with reading books in German that have one noun per page, i.e. Katze (underneath picture of cat), Hund (underneath picture of dog), etc.

So why do I do things? I don’t know.

So I spent the past week reading my six hundred page Austrian satirical play from the 1920s. I read an act a day, plus the intro and the glossary at the back. I have an epub and there doesn’t seem to be any clever way of getting back and forth between the glossary and the play itself (am I missing something on my kobo or is it really just not possible to do this simply), so I simply read the glossary after finishing the play. That was no real problem. Likely I missed a lot of the specific political jokes, but I don’t feel like I was really missing that much. Most of what the play says is this: the war benefits the rich, manipulates the press, and sends the poor to their deaths. So lots of fat men bemoaning a lack of butter while war amputees wander about in the foreground. About five hundred pages of this reiterated, then a descent into a Boschian bacchanal of talking hyenas and Martians. I seem to read a lot of books where aliens suddenly appear. Do I have some subliminal interest in surprise aliens? I’ll add that question to the why do I do things one.

Basically The Last Days of Mankind is an unperformable play. There are stage directions such as continue for two hours and I think something like forty googol characters. I don’t even know how one would stage certain parts, although I guess projecting film on a screen behind might solve that problem. I couldn’t help thinking that if one is going to write an unperformable play, why not recast it as a novel? I guess art comes to the artist as it comes, but essentially, long soliloquies in the play are taken from newspaper articles of the time, so there are pages and pages that already reads less like a play and more like a creative non-fiction essay. But it’s a play. So a play it is.

I know I’m sounding really down on The Last Days of Mankind, but it ends up transcending a lot of my complaints (not the one about surprise aliens though). I gave it four stars out of five. It’s surprisingly prescient for a play from the 1920s. There’s the foreshadowing of Nazis with the casual antisemitism (although Kraus was ethnically Jewish, so it isn’t necessarily his antisemitism, more a comment on the antisemitism of the time). There’s a harsh critique of globalisation. The Grumbler, Kraus himself inserted into his own play, has media critiques that would fit into any modern issue of AdBusters. It’s surprisingly readable, in part due to Kraus and in part due to the translation, which has been, as the translators explain, modernized for an English speaking audience. But it is long, and it hits many of the same points again and again: War is Hell, in a democracy we are all complicit, and those who profit from it aim to keep it going for as long as they can. I don’t know if I needed six hundred pages to hammer that point home.

And Martians.

The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus, newly translated by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms went on sale November 24, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I took my Brownie troop to the Observatory last week (twenty-four seven year olds in a tiny, enclosed space — not my smartest idea), so it seemed fitting that the next book I reviewed was about the Cosmos. In German, the universe translates to das All, which I also wonderfully appreciate. Einstein spoke German, so there we have it — tying everything in together!

So The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe (ellipses in a title; really? Really?) reads like a science article run a little amok. It has quite a readable, polished, and leisurely tone; a bit chummy, which isn’t a problem. The odd changes in tense to present whenever something happens is off-putting. But, basically, even for a short book, it seems too long. I can see it being an article in a magazine. A book seems a stretch.

The title too seems a bit of misnomer. Einstein’s destruction of Vulcan, a purported unsighted planet between the Sun and Mercury necessary to account for Mercury’s orbit under Newtonian laws of physics, was hardly a Godzilla-Einstein coming in and purposefully stomping out Vulcan. Vulcan’s non-existence came as a consequence of Einstein’s theories of relativity, and ends up being almost a non-event. A good deal of the book is about pre-Vulcan: the initial sightings of Neptune and Uranus and how those fit so perfectly into Newtonian physics, so not even falling into the title at all. For me, I didn’t need the huge background sections on earlier astronomical outings. I mean, ha ha ha Edison shot a stuffed jackrabbit, my life isn’t changed for knowing that.

Finally, we get to Einstein and the two halves of the book: the hunt for Vulcan and let’s follow around Einstein for a bit, came together rather ineptly. It seemed like Levenson was torn between which story he wanted to tell. Both are worth telling. In a magazine article maybe. Or in a longer book with deeper focus. But in this book, it feels both like a tease and like a slog.

I don’t often read popular science books, so this was good for me, at least, even if I wasn’t particularly taken with the book. I expanded mein All, but I often skimmed the science explanations. I should work on learning how to read science. As a former scientist, I am quite lazy about that. I don’t know if, in this case, it’s me or Levenson. Did I gloss over the science because I need to work at reading non-narrative or because Levenson’s explanation didn’t grab my interest?

And, from a technical standpoint re: epubs; someone’s got to get footnotes and endnotes less awful on my kobo. Computer scientists: you have your goal!

The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe by Thomas Levenson went on sale November 3, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A few months ago, when I reviewed The Skeleton Road by Val McDiermid, I mused a little on what it would take to put something horrific into your novel. The Skeleton Road had the Balkans conflict, and I used the word, albeit kindly, disrespectful to describe its inclusion. I don’t think I’ll use words like that to describe the inclusion of the Balkan conflict into The Little Red Chairs. There’s nuance here. The horror here doesn’t supplant character development. There is horror in this world, The Little Red Chairs says. And I don’t have to justify or relativasize or explain it to you. O’Brien is smart enough and trusts us enough not to need explanation. We can be confronted with it. She trusts us to do that.

I’ve only read O’Brien once before, The House of Splendid Isolation, which took me something like six tries to get past page twenty. I couldn’t see it with that book, but with this one, I can see why she is considered one of the greats. She takes apart the narrative, the point-of-view, the tense, like threads all placed next to each other. But instead of a jumble, it’s like an abstract painting you can’t turn away from. A car wreck. You can see it coming, the downfall. O’Brien doesn’t hide who Vuk is from the reader. He’s a wolf. He’s a criminal. He’s an exterminator of people. He exists as he is, without, as I said before, explanation or justification. Evil is there. How easy it is though, like Fidelma who starts an affair with Vuk when he arrives as an alternative healter in their sleepy Irish town, to see something different. It isn’t that Fidelma is willfully blind to her lover’s past. It isn’t that she knows but chooses not to. She just doesn’t know. But can you know someone though? Ever? Truly? Always? Does Fidelma know her husband Jack? Does she know the people she meets in London? In The Hague? Anywhere? Do we know her? We all keep things from each other. The beauty of The Little Red Chairs is that what we are given of the characters is enough to support a novel that shimmers and clings like gossamer. It makes you sick but you keep reading.

So it would be perfect but isn’t. There are *shudder* dream sequences. Dreams that have meaning. Dreams that offer insight into characters. I hate that. I hate it so much. So I took away a star. The Little Red Chairs is four stars out of five. Please don’t put dreams in your novels.

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien went on sale October 29, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Since one of the stories in Past Habitual has the word topology in the title (a rather surreal story about dental cleaning and a meditation about M and W’s and dental hygienists’ bosoms), I feel justified in using topology to describe my feelings of Past Habitual by Alf Machlochlainn.

Yay math!

Let’s take the earth. I’m going to assume that most of you agree the earth is round. But locally, it doesn’t feel round. It, generally, feels pretty flat wherever one is standing. The curvature of the earth is so massive compared to a teensy-tiny person that it can feel mind-boggling that really, we’re on a big (almost) sphere when it really seems, in our perspective, to be a flat plane. Such is it with my enjoyment of Past Habitual: give me a page of the book and I’ll like it. I’ll like the writing. I’ll like the words. I’ll like the way each page pulls you right into Ireland, one of my favourite places to read about, with its complex history and shifting loyalties. But pull back far enough and I’m like “What the f*ck is going on?” because the stories tend to jump, these massive, unprepared, leaps of logic and time and characters and style and I just don’t know. I do not know how to describe it other than baffling. Globally, in respect to Past Habitual, I spent a fair deal of time being baffled.

As for style, there’s a lot of almost stream-of-consciousness, memory. The ones focusing on Ireland’s past could all be linked, all told from the same characters one may suppose. Themes reappear: the Irish War of Independence and Civil War of the 1920s, Germans coming to Ireland during the Second World War, the Catholic Church, sentences here and there in Irish. The book doesn’t explain Ireland for the non-Irish. I don’t mind that. I like the narrator’s voice most of the time — not so much when he offers to kill the kittens, but most of the time. It’s rural without being idyllic. Most of it feels true, at least, as I’ve said, locally. Globally? Incomprehensible.

Past Habitual by Alf Machlochlainn went on sale April 13, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

(I haven’t even managed to read my O. Henry Prize Stories 2014 and already 2015 has come out. I’m never going to catch up.)

I like short stories. They’re my potato chips or candy, snacking for my brain (even the serious short stories that should be more like a lump in my stomach). I pick up short story books or request them as ARCs because I like reading them. That’s why I asked for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, okay Introduction? I don’t need twenty pages of an English professor rah-rah-brigading me about short stories, then summarizing each story, then explaining to me why each story merits inclusion in the collection. Just let me at the stories! I hate introductions.

So let’s get to the stories. Hooray! Stories! But they are American. I always struggle to articulate my feelings towards American fiction. The best I’ve ever come up with is insular. There’s a self-importance too, but no one that is mean-spirited. It’s not bragging or even humble-bragging. But it’s whatever comes with the knowledge that due to population and money and global positioning and power: that being American can mean forcing an influence on the rest of the English speaking world that say me, as a Canadian, cannot force. The stories here vary between US-born to those who have chosen (or are in the process of choosing, as in Manuel Muñoz’s “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA”) to locate themselves in the States, and this tone of American-ness washes the stories out. Even the ones that are stylistically different (the first person plural of Naira Kuzmich’s “The Kingsley Drive Chorus”, the fairy tale world of Elizabeth McCracken’s “Birdsong from the Radio”, the East Africa of Lionel Shriver’s “Kilifi Creek”) are still similar. One might believe that these were all written by the same author, each story investigating the subtle. It’s like there was a memo in 2015: Forget what they told you in high school about short stories. No changes, epiphanies, or surprises. I can’t say there are a lot of surprises here. There are a lot of abrupt endings in surprise’s place. Many of these stories simply stop in another shared stylistic quirk. I can’t be satisfied with a story that simply stops. I feel ripped off.

I should also crown my favourite, simply because the three person jury each wrote a little paragraph at the end regarding their favourite and I guess that’s the thing one is supposed to do in collections like this. I’ll pick the fairy tale monstrousness of Elizabeth McCracken’s “Birdsong from the Radio”. That one didn’t need to be an American story, in the way some of the other stories needed to be set in the States or inhabited by US-ians. It chose to be an American story. That made me like it best.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 edited by Laura Furman went on sale September 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Let’s be honest: I don’t really understand how publishers choose reviewers on Netgalley. When I signed up, I figured I’d mainly get books from small-time, Canadian, publishers, but no, they reject me more often than not. Penguin Canada rejects me a lot too. But Random House seems to like me, and so gives me a new David Mitchell book to read, in August, asking nicely for me to wait to review until the week of the release. I put off reading it for as long as I could, even though the book sat there on my kobo, mocking me while I read books I didn’t really like.

You can read me Slade House whispered. But you can’t talk about me yet.

You can read me Slade House whispered. But I’m a secret.

But now, in two days, release date! I can talk talk talk about Slade House all I want!

So we have the new David Mitchell novel. After the dumb-bell weight of The Bone Clocks, Slade House is a much slighter commitment. My epub has 151 pages, 6 of which are copyright and publishing info and TK‘s. So it’s a quick read and now this is what I’ll say:

It’s a David Mitchell novel. We have the chummy, lad-like style, not too approachable, and not too posh. Like every David Mitchell novel, characters from other David Mitchell novels pop-up, mainly from The Bone Clocks. Our characters are soul vampires that appear every nine years, with a shifting narrative told three-quarters by the people they will feed upon, somewhat like Under The Skin from the victims’ standpoint. Slade House could be read as a companion, or a prequel/sequel to sections of The Bone Clocks. If you haven’t read The Bone Clocks though, it likely stands-alone. Everything is more-or-less self-contained, and the ties to The Bone Clocks (Horologists and schisms and Atemporals) don’t really need more explanation than what Mitchell gives here. The fact that this is less daunting that The Bone Clocks works in its favour: one doesn’t have to remember loads and loads and loads of stuff to enjoy the creepiness.

And, of course, I love creepiness. I also love solid, literary writing. Slade House gave me a solid, literary, creepy story, so I was happy. A+, thumbs up. Of course, nothing’s perfect — there was some weird, dream, logic and after The Unconsoled, I’ve had enough of weird, British, dream logic to last a reading lifetime. But, come on, there’s an info dump that feels natural. I could never write an info dump so beautifully. I was halfway through the dump before I realised I was in an info dump. David Mitchell is my writing G-d.

Good writing. Spooky story. It’s almost Hallowe’en. A book to read on a rainy, October evening, curled up in bed, with my USB slippers on my feet (they warm your toes!).

Slade House by David Mitchell goes on sale October 27, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

So look out boy you’re heading for the mainland

In 1985, Jack and Angela take their family from The Rock out to northern Alberta to work in the gold mines. Of course, nothing good comes of it because this is a morose melodrama, like a bad CBC tele-movie from the eighties. If one enjoys melodrama, then Saltwater Cowboys is almost a textbook example of it: exaggerated characters, caricatured villains, sensationalist plans for wealth, sex (although off-page), punishment for said sex (a very graphic detailing of a miscarriage in very stark contrast to the complete non-description of the extra-marital coitus almost immediately preceding it), poverty, despair, the pounding of chests and the falling to the knees surrounded by shouts of Why God why?

Okay, that last bit is somewhat of an exaggeration. No one bemoans God directly. But had they, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I am not the audience for melodrama. I almost always choose characters over plot, and the characters here exist only as tools of the plot. Plus the plot is nothing special. The writing is too flowery (is there a page that doesn’t have either a metaphor or a simile on it? I can’t tell). Almost from the get go, the writing has all those tics that annoy me. Let’s take an example: we start off by learning Jack has arctic-blue eyes; for some readers, knowledge like that helps them build the character. For me, I’m like Unless the colour of his eyes becomes a significant plot point later on, I do not need to know about it. And I’m not a fan of the point-of-view used here. It’s third-person veers in and out of focus, going down into one person’s world, then zooming back out to focus in on another. I would have done a tighter, sole-focused narrative, but that’s just me. And as I said, I don’t think I am the audience for this book.

The acknowledgements section says she did the Humber School for Writer’s Program. I did too, and didn’t have a helpful experience, and definitely didn’t get a novel out of it. I’m glad Dayle Furlong got a book out of it though. That warmed me up to her and made me want her to succeed. But Saltwater Cowboys read like a first draft that needs serious, and difficult, edits. Or it needs to be made into a bad CBC tele-movie staring Paul Gross. It’s that type of thing.

Saltwater Cowboys by Dayle Furlong went on sale February 28, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.