Lord Vishnu's Love Handles by Will Clarke

Here's a book that started out self-published, made it to commercial publication and deserves to be made into a movie too. It's a comedy, a thriller, a spy novel and just plain good fun to read.

Travis Anderson is your average schmuck - a dot-com millionaire living in a pretentious Dallas suburb with his wife and young son. Unfortunately, Travis has been cursed with an unusual gift; he gets psychic visions showing him all kinds of interesting (and often unpleasant) possibilities for the future. Travis copes with his unwanted visions by drinking almost constantly. When the IRS comes after him and his business partner for tax evasion, Travis discovers that his unique talent can save him and his family from financial ruin, and gets sucked into a secret organization of psycho paranormal spies who promise to fix his problems if he'll just do a little bit of work helping them. As you'd expect, he finds he's gotten way more than he bargained for and it's up to Travis to save his own sorry ass and fight to keep his family intact.

Lord Vishnu's Love Handles was difficult to put down; once the story got going, the pace kept picking up and I found I was waiting with increasing amusement to see what kind of wacky mess Travis would get into next. Travis is the kind of main character who wins you over even while you want to smack him, and the bizarre collection of people that he meets during his work as a psychic spy make the story even more readable. Highly recommended!

The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans

When I started this book, I had no idea what it was about. The dust jacket had been removed, and I haven't seen the movie based on it. A friend loaned it to me and said she'd liked it, and that was enough for me.

By the time I was halfway through chapter one, I was completely sucked in. The story was vivid, the characters were so deftly described that in just a few sentences I understood what kind of person each was, and the action picked up pretty quickly. I was so enthralled by this story that I realized it had been a very poor choice for reading on the ride up to campus, because I have to switch from bus to train to bus and there was a pretty good chance I'd miss my stop. Still, I persevered with both my journey and my book, though I was resentful of the need to pay attention to the outside world.

At some point halfway through The Horse Whisperer, though, something changed. At first, I was reading a compelling story about a New York City family with one beloved child, a family struggling to overcome a shocking tragedy and move on with their lives. A story about Pilgrim, a horse that had been through such severe trauma that everyone had pretty much given up on him ever being able to go back to his former life. And a story about the "horse whisperer", the man with a gift for taming the wildest and most nervous horse with his gentle, empathic approach. So that was all good. But then... Sometime after Tom, our horse expert, is reluctantly hired to work with Pilgrim, suddenly I found myself reading an entirely different book. Equally well written, but... well... it was a sappy romance! Featuring adultery! With lame, poetically written justifications for it!

And geez, I just didn't want to read a romance novel; I wanted more of what there was at the beginning of this book. So, in spite of the great writing, the characters, the vivid descriptions, in the end I felt somewhat let down by The Horse Whisperer. At least Evans had the courtesy to tie up the loose ends, to give us a happy ending for some of the characters (and I guess it makes me just a tad sappy to like happy endings and loose ends tied up), but... geeeeeez. Enough with the long meaningful looks, the desperate lovers, the hot sex scenes. I want to hear more about the horse, dammit!

The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith

This book was in some ways a departure from the series, in other ways not.

For one thing, instead of being asked to investigate some outside mystery, Isabel Dalhousie is instead preoccupied with matters of the heart in this book - her own heart, as well as the hearts of others. Her traditional nosiness - err, curiosity about the doings of others, I should say - comes into play here. The book focuses far more on character development than the previous two titles, and I enjoyed getting to spend some time focused on Isabel instead of on whatever matter she is investigating this time around.

On the other hand, The Right Attitude to Rain continues in the thoughtful and contemplative tone that I expect from this series. Being a moral philosopher by profession, Isabel Dalhousie can't help but consider the ethical implications of her actions, and she spends a fair bit of time thinking about general moral and ethical issues as well. Although this means the series will always be short on action, long on navel-gazing, it's an interesting sort of navel-gazing that gives you a glimpse into the curious, observant and gently mocking mind behind these books. I offer you a sample of these unique musings on modern life, as Isabel goes about her part-time job of editing the Review of Applied Ethics:

By lunchtime she had read and corrected almost half of the issue. Several of the authors' footnotes had been mangled in the setting, with page numbers disappearing or inflating impossibly and requiring to be deflated. Page 1027 could not exist; page 127 could, or page 102 or 107. This involved bibliographic checking, which took time, and sometimes required getting back in touch with the author. That meant e-mails to people who might not answer them quickly, or at all. And that gave rise to the thought that an article on the ethics of e-mail would perhaps be a good idea. Do you have to answer every e-mail that you get? Is ignoring an electronic message as rude as looking straight through somebody who addresses a remark to you? And what, she wondered, was a reasonable delay between getting a message and responding to it? One of her authors had sent her an enquiry only two hours after sending an initial e-mail. Did you get my message? Can you give me a response? That, thought Isabel, could be the beginning of a new tyranny. Advances in technology were greeted with great enthusiasm and applause; then the tyranny emerged. Look at cars. They destroyed cities and communities. They laid waste to the land. Our workship at their altar choked us of our very air, constrained us to narrow paths beside their great avenues, cut us down. And yet... she thought of her green Swedish car, which she loved to drive on the open roads, which could take her from Edinburgh to the west coast, to Mull, to the Isle of Skye even, in four or five hours, just an afternoon. The same trip had taken the choleric Dr. Johnson weeks, and had been the cause of great discomfort and complaint. it was an exciting tyranny, then, one which we liked.

I have to admit that this series isn't my favourite by Alexander McCall Smith - I read it mostly because I'm waiting for the next No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novel - but it does have a unique charm that makes for a fun and restful (though not thrilling and action-packed) read.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

Nadezhda has a problem. Well, a few problems. She's still recovering from her mother's death two years ago, she is barely speaking to her older sister Vera, and now her 84-year-old father has dropped a bombshell; he is importing a young, buxom new bride from the Ukraine, his motherland. Her name is Valentina, and according to Pappa, she is an angel. All Nadezhda can see, though, are her father's home, pension, and minimal savings being sucked away by the opportunistic, big-breasted Valentina.

Nadezhda's efforts to get Valentina out of her father's life have some unexpected consequences. She's never seen eye to eye with her sister, but now they have something in common. Pooling their strengths and resources to evict the enemy from their mother's home, the sisters discover a way to see past their differences, and Nadezhda begins to piece together the story of her family's past. Slowly, she begins to understand some of the dynamics in her family as she learns about their wartime life in the Ukraine and the hardships involved in their trek to England.

At first I had mixed feelings about this novel; while it was charming, the characters weren't people I could really connect to or empathize with. Once I got into the book, though, I became intrigued by the situation that this family was in. I wanted to know what would happen. Would Valentina settle down and become a caring wife to her elderly husband during his final years? Would Nadezhda and Vera succeed in bringing about a divorce and having Valentina expelled from Britain by the immigration authorities? And what were the awful secrets buried in this family's past? Most importantly, would the slightly loopy Pappa ever complete his book, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian?

Finding out the answers to these questions made this book a satisfying read. If you're in the mood for a touching, occasionaly hilarious immigrant family drama, you might want to check this out.

About a Boy by Nick Hornby

This is a book that I re-read often enough I had to google my blog to figure out if I'd written about it already!

About a Boy is a charming tale of Will, a vapid, thirtysomething Londoner who has created a nice solitary life of doing absolutely nothing, being shallow, and avoiding being part of any intimate relationship. Will doesn't quite know what to do when twelve-year-old Marcus, an oddly perceptive child, pushes his way into Will's life and insists on being friends. Marcus's relentless campaign to make Will part of his own life - and Will's reaction to suddenly finding himself caring about people - is the basis of this funny, touching novel. A fine example of Nick Hornby - if you haven't tried his books yet, this is a good place to start, along with High Fidelity.

Love Over Scotland by Alexander McCall Smith

Imagine my delight when, browsing in a bookstore in cold and rainy Middlesbrough a few weeks ago, I came across this book. I didn't realize this before, but the "44 Scotland Street" books are published in hardcover in the UK almost a year before we get them (in trade paperback) in Canada. So only weeks after finishing Espresso Tales, I got another dose of this wonderful series.

Things seem to pick up in this book after a bit of meandering in Espresso Tales. Each of my favourite plots was advanced, and I was left feeling extremely satisfied. Wonderful things happen to Matthew, Domenica, Pat and Bertie; and yet there are some sad events too, as one character dies, Big Lou's hopes for love turn sour and Bertie's mother persists in seeing his life as a project. I encourage you to pick up this series if you haven't before, to meet these charming characters, get to know Alexander McCall Smith's Edinburgh and be treated to his wry and funny observations about human nature.

Hy Brasil by Margaret Elphinstone

Having enjoyed The Sea Road last fall, I was delighted to come across another Elphinstone book in a used bookstore not too long ago. With great anticipation, I packed it into my suitcase for some good holiday reading.

I have to admit that for quite a few chapters, I couldn't quite work out what type of novel I was reading. The Sea Road is a beautifully written piece of historical fiction; Hy Brasil is something quite different. Hy Brasil is a fictional mid-Atlantic island nation, populated with the descendents of pirates and shipwreck survivors. Sidony Redruth becomes fascinated with the place and manages to convince a publisher to give her an advance to write a travel guide. When she arrives in Hy Brasil, she meets Jared Honeyman, a young man obsessed with finding Spanish treasure amid the many shipwrecks surrounding his home country. The narrative switches back and forth between Sidony's and Jared's perspectives, as they both become caught up in a deadly series of political events that threaten to expose some secrets that have been hidden nearly as long as the treasure Jared seeks on the ocean floor.

Once I got caught up in this book, I found I couldn't put it down. The characters are well drawn and realistic, and the culture of Elphinstone's fictional nation is both believable and fascinating. I managed to pick up another of this author's elusive novels at a bookstore in York, so you can expect to read about it here very soon.

Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith

This sequel to 44 Scotland Street feels like the way my summer has been - a series of reunions with old friends. In Espresso Tales, I get to catch up with people I haven't "seen" for a long time, and find the answers to some questions I've longed to know the answer to. For instance: will the narcissistic Bruce ever get his come-uppance? Will Pat find true love? Will Matthew, the aimless art gallery owner, discover his calling? And what of Bertie, the exceptionally gifted five-year-old - will his mother abandon her project to raise him as an ungendered, bilingual saxophonist who does yoga in his spare time?

It's funny that a book so episodic in nature (each chapter is published separately in The Scotsman newspaper) should be so riveting, but Alexander McCall Smith has a way of creating characters who have an appealing authenticity (even the most ridiculous among them, like Ramsey Dunbarton, the writer of hilariously dull memoirs). Their foibles are sketched out in a gentle, teasing manner. While the novel as a whole skips from one story line to another, it doesn't feel disconnected, because the setting of Edinburgh geography and culture helps to tie everything together.

Reading this book gives me a sense of the personality behind the writing, but McCall Smith is never intrusive and doesn't feel the need to hit you over the head with his observations about human nature. This is why I enjoy his novels so much; he's not above philosophizing, but he never takes himself or his characters too seriously.

Blessed are the Cheesemakers by Sarah-Kate Lynch

Abbey is a displaced Irishwoman living on a remote tropical island with her distant, obsessive husband, who is not everything he seems. Kit is a drunken New York City investment banker who has recently lost his wife, who was not everything she seemed, either. Both Abbey and Kit need to get away and start a fresh life.

Meanwhile, over in County Cork, Ireland, Abbey's grandfather Corrie and his lifelong friend Fee have realized that their time as artisan cheesemakers may be coming to an end soon. They need someone - or preferably two someones - to take over their world-famous cheesemaking operation and carry on a longtime tradition of taking in unwed mothers who milk the cows in exchange for room and board during their pregnancies. Hmm... I wonder who those two someones will turn out to be?

This book, as you probably guessed, is rather predictable, but it's a cute and fun read all the same. Since "funny, fluffy chick lit" seems to be the order of the day for me right now, I was happy that I'd selected it from my overflowing shelf of unread books and brought it with me on this vacation. Although the plot of Blessed are the Cheesemakersbrings no surprises (I guessed how the whole thing would work out, right up till the last scene, and I'm not someone who is too great at that - I didn't even figure out Professor Lupin's secret in the third Harry Potter book... duh!) , the characters are appealing. I found myself simultaneously caught up in Kit and Abbey's eventual coming together in mutual happiness, rooting for them while at the same time groaning inwardly over how predictable the whole affair was.

Next up - more fluffy fun courtesy of Sophie Kinsella!

Blue Shoes and Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith

I have been in quite a slump recently when it comes to reading, and so when I found out this book was waiting for me at the library on Saturday I was hoping it would be just the thing I needed. In many ways, Blue Shoes and Happiness did not disappoint; it was lovely to be back with all the familiar characters, and to learn more about the small but satisfying triumphs of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. These books are relaxing and undemanding reading. They won't win any prizes for great literature, but they have a way of drawing you in irresistibly with their quirky fluffiness.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that Blue Shoes and Happiness grabbed me in quite the same way as many previous installments in this series. I can't quite put my finger on what was "off" about this book. Maybe it was just a bit too formulaic, maybe the author was trying too hard, I don't quite know. All I can say is that many of the things that I found appealing in previous No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books just didn't quite work this time around. I wonder if Mr McCall Smith is getting tired of his characters; at times he almost seemed to be mocking them, and the character development this time around was pretty much nil. I was also disappointed that he seemed to need to knock me over the head with his message about how lovely Africa and the African people are; in past books, this was made clear through loving descriptions of the landscape and through the behaviour (and, occasionally, the internal monologues) of the people themselves. This time, that subtlety was gone, which had the effect for me of making the country and its people less charming.

Overall, then, this wasn't *quite* what I needed to get me out of my slump... but I will keep looking for that book.

Isn't That Bigamy? by Mike Vogel

Since this book was one of the winners of POD-dy Mouth's 2005 Needle Awards (for those of you who don't feel like following the links, the site is a blog that offers reviews of books published through Print-on-Demand companies such as Lulu and iUniverse), I was expecting it to be good and I wasn't disappointed. Isn't That Bigamy? is a delightfully absurd suspense novel about a federal agent (Becky Li, who happens to be a lesbian with a gun fixation) forced to move to a remote town in Utah, posing as the wife of a witness she is protecting (Stan Smith, who happens to be a constantly horny heterosexual with a commitment problem). You see, Stan accidentally saw the head of an Armenian crime syndicate executing an undercover agent, and now the crime boss is not too happy with Stan and would prefer to see him dead - preferably before Stan can testify against him. To that end, he hires his favourite hit man, "Mad Dog" Moogalian (who happens to be a homophobic ex-wrestler who smokes Virginia Slims) to find Stan and eliminate him.

Unfortunately for everyone, Becky and Stan end up in the wrong town and find themselves caught up in the very weird polygamous subculture of Tamarin, Utah. I'm not sure that I need to say much more for you to understand why this book is so hilarious.

I hear that after winning the Needle Award, Mike Vogel found an agent to represent him, so I expect this book will be picked up by a major publishing house and available more widely in the next year or so. But if you feel really compelled to buy it before then, it's available through Amazon.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Bel Canto is the story of a birthday party gone wrong. Mr. Hosokawa, the president of a large Japanese corporation, is convinced to celebrate his birthday in an impoverished South American country which is so desperate for foreign investment that it coerces Hosokawa's favourite soprano to come and sing for him. A botched kidnapping attempt at the party turns into a months-long hostage crisis, the party guests trapped in the home of the country's vice-president as the government and the terrorists exchange increasingly impossible demands. Out of this nightmarish situation comes love and compassion, connection between people from different worlds, and a strange, beautiful tale, as the hostages and terrorists gradually become companions in a dreamlike existence whose days are structured around the beauty of opera.

I'm not sure what more I can say about this book that won't sound like one big long gush, but I'll try. It's beautifully written, the characters are very real, the story is compelling and just a tiny bit magical and somehow, all together, it works very very well. This is a truly immersive work of fiction, something lush to wrap around yourself like a big, soft blanket on a cold day, so that you become completely unaware of the world around you and in fact would very much prefer that it leave you alone.

Hmm... I think I'm gushing now! You can probably tell that I liked this book a lot and think that you should go and read it. When you do, come back and leave a comment in the blog so I'll get to hear what you thought. :-)

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

If I hadn't had to read it for a book group, I would never have gone past the first hundred pages of this novel.

Ultimately, I found a lot to appreciate about this story; Jeffrey Eugenides can write well, and creates vivid characters. The problem with Middlesex, for me, is that Eugenides is just a bit too heavy-handed with the way he tells the story. First, he grabs your interest on page one by introducing the narrator, Cal. Born Calliope Stephanides, Cal is a hermaphrodite (though I believe the term "intersexual" is becoming more commonly used) - he has both male and female sex characteristics. He was raised as a girl, but once puberty kicked in, things changed. This is an intriguing premise that made me eager to read on; but then, before I could find out much about Cal, warm to him as a character, I was suddenly presented with the story of his grandparents. Now I like to think of myself as an open-minded, accepting person, but I was pretty squicked out by the fact that Cal's grandparents were brother and sister. Ewww - Too Much Information! I didn't think this was at all necessary for the story. It's clear that there was so much intermarrying in their village back in Turkey that the genetic anomaly that led to Cal's predicament would certainly have been passed along through one or other of his ancestors. Anyway, reading about this incestuous relationship was pretty gross and distracted me from the story to the extent that I didn't have any feeling for the characters.

Yet, mindful of my need to be able to discuss this book intelligently with the other people in the book group, I read on. It turns out that this book is more a story of a Greek immigrant family in 20th-century Detroit than a story about a hermaphrodite. Cal's part in the story is reduced to occasional, jolting reminders of his narrative presence. I wish that I had been allowed to fully appreciate the experiences of Cal's grandparents and parents as they are related in the story, instead of having to see it all through Cal's not-very-believably-omniscient lens. Eugenides also has a tendency toward "information dump" which I found very annoying; he can go on for paragraphs or even for pages giving you information about this, that or the other historical event or demonstrating the research he did into sexual disorders. I often found myself feeling quite irritated at being distracted from the story by Cal's little "asides" and Eugenides' need to pad the story with unneeded detail.

Ultimately, Cal's story doesn't really start until Book Four, 401 pages into the novel. At this point, I found my mental editor thinking that this should have been the start of the book, when Cal's anatomical differences are finally revealed to him and to his family:

The Oracular Vulva

From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn't do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me. Some people inherit houses; others paintings or highly insured violin bows. Still others get a Japanese tansu or a famous name. I got a recessive gene in my fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed.

From here, Cal's experiences become the focus of the story; we find out what it's like for him to learn to live with a new definition of himself after fourteen years of believing he is a girl. Now that is what I wanted all along - why did Eugenides string me along for 400 pages before he got to it? It's definitely hard to get "sucked in" to a good book when I'm constantly revising the manuscript in my head, thinking of a better way the story could have been presented to me.

At any rate, I'm glad I stuck with this novel, because I'll have a lot more to say at the book group meeting; but I'm very sorry that so much of what I have to say is negative. Book Four, the last section of the book, was great and I was sad that Eugenides held out on giving his readers the full benefit of his writing abilities until 400 pages in.

P.S. I just noticed that the last time I actually finished a book was April 4! This has got to be a record for me. I blame my final exams for first taking up all my potential reading time with studying, and then frying my brain to the point where I couldn't string two thoughts together for several days... No wonder there is such a backlog on that bookshelf of mine. Time to go waste a few perfectly good weeks inhaling some (hopefully) good books.