A loosely connected series of 10 1/2 short stories, art reviews, re-imagined histories, personal ramblings, epistolary travelogues and personal anecdotes; this is the epitome of post-modern fiction. Julian Barnes ties together his mish-mash of tales with the recurrence of woodworm & reindeer, pilgrimage & shipwreck, doubt & faith.

Eclectic. Unorthodox. Not to every taste. Let me say up front, if you like linear plot development, THIS IS NOT FOR YOU.

Settings include Mount Ararat (where the Ark made landfall), the moon, heaven, a jungle, a monastery, and a French courthouse. My main obstacles to enjoyment were the arrogant, foolish and misogynistic male narrators (complemented by the delusional, judgmental female narrators) and the author’s struggles with religious belief and Biblical history.

The voices are mostly male, including: a worm, an academic, a lawyer, an actor, an astronaut and the author himself. The story about the egotistical academic and the psychology of self-interest made me cringe and nearly put down the book altogether. In a similar way, the stories told from Barnes’ own point of view felt highly self-indulgent, like intellectual masturbation.

I did like the piece on Gericault’s “Scene of Shipwreck” which looked at the wreck of the Medusa and told the story of the boat, the survivors, the artist and the process. Nice bit of art analysis. I also thought the concluding story about the difficulties of making Heaven satisfactory was a fun little thought-experiment.

Putting on my feminist glasses, I have to suggest that the women in the book – an insane cat-lady obsessed with her ex-boyfriend, a religious fanatic obsessed with her dead father, a deceitful and narcissistic astronaut’s wife – are all utterly despicable and essentially defined by their relationship to significant men in their lives. Loathsome.

If you want something similar, only better, try the following…

1) Retelling of Noah’s Ark – Timothy Findley’s ‘Not Wanted on the Voyage’

2) Funny fake legal trials – Ian Frazier’s ‘Coyote V. Acme’

3) Bold, multilingual Victorian-era female explorers who brave exotic lands – Elizabeth Peters’ ‘Crocodile on the Sandbank’

4) Crazy American astronauts – Stephen King’s short story “I Am the Doorway” in the collection ‘Night Shift’

2 of 5 stars / bookshelves: read, 320 pages, Publisher: Vintage Canada (1990)
Read from April 2 to April 22, 2012

Interesting to read these stories of deprivation, oppression and rebellion against a sinister but elusive “Big Brother” during the heyday of ‘The Hunger Games’. It’s not exactly post-apocalyptic, but Chernobyl is a close call.

Marzi’s Poland is a real world parallel to Katniss’ Panem, but told from the perspective of a small child who doesn’t understand what is happening around her. Marzi is not an emotionless warrior: she’s scared of spiders, likes sitting in trees and imagines the rich inner lives of ants and mushrooms in the forest. As an only child and a little girl in a big family, Marzi is awed and confused by her mother’s passionate Catholicism, but loves her factory-working, cigarette-smoking father and fears for his safety when the labour strikes start. She plays pranks like a brat, envies her neighbors, is a picky eater who hates meat. We read about her pets, her games, her clothes, her friends, her passion for France. All the things that make Marzi both unique and universal.

As an added bonus, I learned quite a bit about Polish history and geography including a mini-tour of Krakow with its fire-breathing dragon statue, Polish customs like the Christmas Carp, Polish farm life, and most of all Polish politics. Hard to believe that Marzi was born in 1979 and I was born 1977, and that all these things – Communism, Chernobyl, Catholicism – were impacting another little girl at the same time as my safe, plentiful, church-free Canadian childhood was taking place.

Liked this? You might also enjoy: Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’, Jason Lutes’ ‘Berlin: City of Stones’, Chester Brown’s ‘I Never Liked You’, Jason Little’s ‘Shutterbug Follies’ or David Small’s ‘Stitches’.

4 of 5 stars / bookshelves: graphic-novel, 240 pages, Publisher: Vertigo (Oct 25 2011)
Read from February 21 to March 01, 2012

Published in 1993, I didn’t hear about it myself until I started working at Quest Books in 1995. My Manager, Susan, enthusiastically hand-sold it to almost every customer who walked in the door, like so: “Buy this! It won the Leacock Award for Humour! You’ll LOVE it, I promise!”

People would squint at the uninspiring beige cover with it’s wild, unevenly-kerned, hand-penned fonts and inky-scribble men floating in a vaguely soixante-neuf pose, like a bad Chagall, and start looking nervous. They’d cast about for a shelf or big vase to hide it behind where Susan might not notice they’d abandoned it. Some would turn it over, and seeing that these stories started out as CBC radio pieces would mutter “Vinyl Cafe” in disgust and drop it like an old rag.

Yes, the cover is abysmal. (Sorry, Rose Cowles, but our design sensibilities do not agree). Yes, it started out as broadcast fodder. But please don’t let that stop you from enjoying this Canadian jewel.

Do you love books? Live to read? Are you a rambly absent-minded professor type? Feel that you belong somewhere quieter, more studious, more chivalrous? THIS IS FOR YOU.

While I enjoy clean, spare prose in my fiction, you won’t get that here. This is whimsical, dreamy, borderline florid writing. It meanders. It reaches deep into the lint-bottomed pockets of the English language for words that suit its purpose. It’s not afraid of a few extra syllables.

Here’s a sampling of the majestic argot found at the Bachelor Brother’s B&B: disapprobation, atavistic, sacrosant, tinntinnabular, lugubrious, cosseting, intuits, recalcitrant, expatiate, deracination, ruminant, braggadocio, febrile, comestibles, licentiousness, apogee, superannuated, seriocomic, nascent, intransigence, concupiscent AND… autodidact!

I enjoyed the mental workout. I even had to pull out Ye Olde Dictionary to look up the word ‘neurasthenically’ (p25), which is a rare occurrence for me these days. FYI, it’s an obsolete technical term for a neurosis characterized by extreme lassitude and inability to cope with any but the most trivial tasks – nobody uses it anymore, but since Virgil pulled it from the mothballs to describe his granny’s decline, it suits.

Author Bill Richardson seems to have a particular soft spot for large words beginning with the letter ‘P’. Witness: Patrimony, predilection, parochial, pernicious, peripatetic, pileated, preprandial, prophylaxis, patrilineal, ponderous, purdah.

I like any book that can make me question my own mastery of English. When I found a typo on page 25, a missing letter ‘S’ in the word “palimpsest”, I wondered for a brief moment if it was really a mistake, or just a very obscure variant I had somehow never heard of. I’m still willing to give credit that it might have been a very subtle pun, referring to a twin pair of palimpsests as a “palimpSET”, but probably it was just a standard boo-boo and I’m reading too much into it.

“It was as though we were some kind of palimpset, [sic] and she regretted or resented the evidence of his authorship.” – p. 25

The only pieces I really did not enjoy were “The Songs of Solomon Solomon” (p83-93), which was a thinly manufactured shell to showcase the author’s attempts at comic doggerel verse, and “Brief Lives: Beth” (p115-120), which had a hateful, racist, David Sedaris-style set of characters that felt utterly out-of-tune with the rest of the book, especially considering that it was really about Jane Austen’s “Emma”.

Overall, a solid read that provides genuine entertainment, a vocabulary refresher, some solid recommendations for other books to read when soaking in the bathtub, and a nice banana muffin recipe. Can be read in one sitting or taken in small doses, as needed.

Liked this? You might also enjoy: Garrison Keillor’s ‘Book of Guys’, Stephen Leacock’s ‘Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town’, or Stuart McLean’s ‘Stories from the Vinyl Café’.

4 of 5 stars / bookshelves: comedy, 152 pages, Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre (1993)
Re-read from February 21 to February 27, 2012

In 1991, I was 13 years old and Wil Wheaton was about to retire from Star Trek at the ripe old age of 18. My friend Alyssa and I went to a convention in Toronto to hear Wil speak.

I was floored by the difference between the character I’d seen on TV – clean shaven, immaculate spandex attire, smiling, polite and dripping with 1950s ‘Leave It To Beaver’ purity – and the brash young man standing on the stage, decked out in a Canadian tuxedo (head to toe denim), black leather jacket and backwards baseball cap, affecting a slacker drawl.

Who WAS this man? This wasn’t Wesley! He was wearing LEATHER!!!

(Please note: I am not the lady with the silver ponytail photobombing Wil)

Wil Wheaton was the first celebrity I ever met in person. The experience caused me to wonder about the huge divide between the media I consumed in theaters and on TV and the people who worked to create them. He woke me up to the Industry side of magic, fame and alternate reality. It was a key moment for me, and kept me from wetting my pants later in life when I got to meet Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver!) and Kevin Smith.

These days, you can follow celebrities on Twitter, watch interviews on YouTube, read about an actor’s life history on Wikipedia, or connect with him on his mad popular blog, WWdN. Information was far more limited in my teens, so it was a unique revelation to have this insider peek into what was happening to Wil back in the 90s.

Wil Wheaton had debt issues? He had stepsons? He fought court battles with his wife’s ex? WHAT? You mean, he wasn’t regularly enjoying tea and crumpets with Patrick Stewart, in a band with Jonathan Frakes, attending Levar Burton’s friends-only bookclub? Damn. Life is cruel.

At points, the tone of this autobiographical work became a bit too sentimental, too whiny, waxed political, waned wistful, grew sassy, felt self-important. But I forgive those wee faults because they are human and true, and they live up to the title: Wil Wheaton is really just a geek, looking for love and acceptance and some money to pay his bills.

The happy ending comes in real life, knowing that he’s now doing well, showing up as Evil Wil Wheaton on TV in ‘Big Bang Theory‘ episodes and on the web in ‘The Guild’ with Felicia Day.

Four solid stars: not big on fancy style, but clean, honest and intimate.
Read the FAQs at the end, some of his best writing is in the ultra-short answers IMHO.

4 of 5 stars / bookshelves: read, 269 pages, Publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc (2004)
Read from February 16 to 20, 2012

Well… maybe you’re thinking: it’s winter, it’s cold, I’m miserable.

Maybe you want to read a comic set in a place where the weather’s even WORSE than where you are. Make yourself feel better. Good idea.

You have options. You could truck across the futuristic Siberia of Enrico Marini & Thierry Smolderen’s ‘Gipsy’. You could fight off Alaskan vampires in Steve Niles & Ben Templesmith’s ’30 Days of Night’. You could explore shipwrecks in the icy Arctic waters of Jacques Tardi’s ‘The Arctic Marauder’.
Or… you could solve murders in Antarctica with Greg Rucka’s troubled U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko in Whiteout. I recommend that you do.

Rucka is known for his strong female characters, and after reading this I bought the whole Queen & Country series — great spy thrillers.

Steve Lieber’s art is solid work: from parkas, guns and airplanes to sexy yet believable women who can kick ass. And of course, snow & ice.

Bought at the Silver Snail back in 2003, it was already a few years old then (published 1999). Reading it in 2012, I still enjoy the story; it’s aged really well.

Apparently, a movie version of this was made in 2009. The bloody Casting Director chose Kate Beckinsale to be Carrie(!) and replaced Lily Sharpe, the other female lead, with a guy. WTF? Awful, terrible, no-good idea. Part of the fun was the sexual tension between Carrie & Lily, their isolation in a place where men vastly outnumber women. Bah.

I love Kate B, but her face and body are all wrong for this role, and she’s English. Ms. Stetko is 100% pure U.S. Marshal. Personally, I’d have chosen Jorja Fox of CSI fame. She’s perfect – the right freckles, the badass / troubled history thing, the right hair and eyebrows, the right body type, knows how to play law enforcement. She’d also probably have been easier on the budget.

4 of 5 stars / bookshelves: graphic-novel. 128 pages, Publisher: Oni Press (Apr 15 2001) Read from February 07 to 17, 2012

Observe:

The first half of the book is full of wearisome internal monologues that sounded in my brain like chewed nails on a wet chalkboard.

Here, a brief sample of the naval-gazing rot that infuriated me:

“Am I therefore so used to the eternal repetition of the same old things that the prospect of a change that is as yet hypothetical plunging me once again into the river of time serves to remind me of that river’s currents?”

Perhaps that sounded better in the original French, but damn.

The attempt to construct a mirrored storyline between a disaffected, suicidal teenager and a paranoid, narcissistic 50-year-old woman, loosely connected by their secret intellectualism, made for exasperating reading. I found the narrators to be obnoxious and pompous.

How can one possibly warm to an emo 12-year-old who unabashedly criticizes everything and everyone, and also makes comments like this?

Exhibit A: “I think that it was at the age of two, when I first heard grown-ups speak, that I understood once and for all how language is made.”
Exhibit B: “I wonder if I am not turning into a contemplative esthete. With major Zen tendencies and, at the same time, a touch of Ronsard.”

Go away, you irritating little child. Shoo. Disappear. I loathe you.

Chapter 11 opens with “What is the purpose of Art?” (thanks for the Capital Letter!) and proceeds to answer that question as well as “How is Art born?” and as an added bonus, “What does Art do for us?” — all in the opening paragraph. Goodbye, Hubris. Hello, Absurdity.

Name dropping is used like a blunt instrument to create a false atmosphere of educated elan. Kant, Marx, Taniguchi, Tolstoy, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Purcell, Ockham, the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, the Coue method, the fraternal prayer ritual of the Gagauz tribes(!). There’s some fierce self-aggrandizement happening. Pseudo-philosophy litters the text, which is already bogged down by turgid prose.

Observe this selection of florid diction lifted from the book:
indigent, autodidact, syncretism, inculcate, trenchancy, appanages, exeunt, pithiatic, asthenic, obdurate, sudatory, lavaliere.

I relish a good vocabulary as much as the next English major, but no amount of $100 words can conceal the fact that there’s almost no plot for the first 150 pages, except the “will she/won’t she?” of the young girl contemplating suicide and the “why the fuck is she faking watching television?” of the old woman who mistakenly thinks people care what she does in her free time.

The last 150 pages DO tell a story… barely. I could see this being turned into a successful script for a small art film, as long as the director had the sense to keep voiceovers to a minimum. There’s a twist at the end, which did not redeem the rest of the book for me.

Here’s an awkward quote from the book that sums up the problem with characters whose sole distinguishing feature is hidden “supersmarts”:

“Fascination with intelligence is in itself fascinating, but I don’t think it’s a value in itself. There are tons of intelligent people out there and there are a lot of retards, too. I’m going to say something really banal, but intelligence, in itself, is neither valuable nor interesting.”

If my arguments have not moved you to understand my one star rating, let me conclude with a short excerpt. Hopefully, this will explain:

“”Mildly hemmoragic urine” is, to me, a form of light entertainment: it has a nice ring to it and evokes a singular world, a brief refreshing change from literature. For the very same reason, I enjoy reading the leaflets that come with medication, the respite provided by each technical term, which convey the illusion of meticulousness and a frisson of simplicity, and elicit a spatiotemporal dimension free of any striving for beauty, creative angst or the never-ending and hopeless aspiration to attain the sublime.”

Whaa? Ugh.

1 of 5 stars / bookshelves: read, 325 pages, Publisher: Europa Editions (Sept 1 2008)
Read from December 20, 2011 to February 14, 2012.

Frankly, my enjoyment of this book is nothing short of a miracle, considering my appalled reactions to animal violence in Steinbeck’s ‘The Red Pony’ and eyeball-removal in David Sedaris’s ‘Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk’. You get all that and much, much more grossness here, but I assure you despite the mounting violence it is still a worthwhile read.

Quiet humor mixes up with brutal beauty in these tales. One moment you’re laughing at a tubby gunslinger trying to go on a diet while riding through border towns on the frontier. The next, you’re cowering in fear from a hungry bear or witnessing the madness of panning for gold. This is true adventure: villians, narrow escapes, brothers fighting, horses, a quest for a magical invention. Good stuff.

The calm and philosophical voice of the narrator was so compelling that he carried me safely through many distressing moments, including several that rank 10 out of 10 on my personal Nasty Scale: venomous spider bites, primitive dentistry, bullies, bad coffee, and of course, eye damage.

Terrific cowboy dialogue (especially in the first 100 pages) rife with dry humor kept me laughing through grim events, and great pacing moved the plot along quickly. Could have done without the creepy “Intermission” sections, did not feel they contributed in any positive or informative way.

Decent ending; not too dark, not too syrupy. A fast read, 3 days or less. The story has stuck with me.

Liked this? You might also enjoy: Michael Ondaatje’s ‘The Collected Works of Billy the Kid’, Bruce Campbell in ‘Adventures of Brisco County Jr’, Joss Whedon’s ‘Firefly’, Deadwood, Carnival, Sergio Leone, Griffin & Sabine, or the video game ‘Red Dead Redemption’.

4 of 5 stars / bookshelves: Canadian, read, 328 pages, Publisher: Granta Books (May 1 2011)
Read from January 14 to 18, 2012.

I had to get away; away from my too-familiar city, away from the barking dog in the apartment downstairs, away from my darling partner whose comings and goings to the daily grind of his office reminded me of the routine, society and paycheck I’d abandoned. I needed to know: would writing be easier if I changed settings? If I removed the temptations of cooking, cleaning and reliable Internet?
Just like that, I bought a cheap flight to the Dominican.

The salt air blowing off the sea is soft and moist, impregnating the paper of the books I brought along, bending the pages into curvy waves. By noon, everything looks like it has been dropped in a bathtub, including me.

My body, unprepared for a sudden thirty degree change in weather, is sweating like a bucket that has sprung multiple leaks. My hat, shirt and shorts are soaked in a potent stew of sunscreen, bug spray and intermittent rain.

Hours of grinding my teeth over downtown noise pollution seem hilarious now. I should know better; planet earth is noisy by nature. You can’t travel expecting silence, just a change of audio scenery.

Leaving behind the week-long fire alarm testing in my condo, I now have the operatic yawps of tree frogs in the bamboo outside my mesh-screened bedroom window. Instead of wailing sirens I have the roar and bellow of tropical storms, rain pounding on the metal roof, winds howling through the palms. In place of the high-pitched yapping of a toy canine, there are the mournful caterwauls and angry hissing of feral felines, and the distant boom of Latin beats from trucks parked on the beach.

On my first night, I lay awake, not so much from the new sounds I could hear, but straining for one that was missing. Staring up at the gauzy curtain of the mosquito net I’d brought from home, I waited for the tell-tale bzzz alerting me to the fact that I was about to donate blood without consent. I heard nothing.

My bug fear approaches the levels of paranoia that some people have about zombies, nuns, or republicans. I can’t help myself, the little bastards terrify me. But the beach is not the jungle, and armed with an extremely liberal coating of DEET (I spray my legs and feet so vigorously that they look shellacked – my toenail polish has melted off in several places from the chemicals) I have so far managed less than 10 itchy bites, all on my legs. We’ll see how I fare over the next 10 days.

There are, of course, other bugs. This is the tropics; living things of all shapes and sizes thrive in a hot, damp climate. Unseen but distantly present are the creatures of nightmare: tarantulas, cockroaches, millipedes. Ever present but equally invisible are minute sand fleas, midges and ants so incredibly wee that you could easily mistake one for an eyelash or a speck of dirt until you see them moving.

While not as small as the head of a pin, Dominican ants are smaller than the head of a pen, and move easily under and over my laptop keys looking for who knows what. Miniscule vultures of the bug world, they collect trash and keep things tidy. In a real-life Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I’d killed the one mosquito I found and left its tiny carcass on my desk, as a warning to other winged marauders. Within twenty minutes it had vanished, carried away like Gulliver by the Lilliputians.

Beauty is extravagant here. Lizards and geckos repose on shady branches and sun themselves on red tiles. Hummingbirds sip from hibiscus blooms. Carved wooden parrots look out at trees rustling with yellow-bellied Bananaquits and the abundant brown-and-cream streaked Palm Chats, beaks chattering, feathers fluttering.

Gardening in the Dominican is not the delicate activity of care and preservation that it is in Canada. Back home the tools of the trade are greenhouses, watering cans, fertilizers, shovels and hand-held pruning shears. In the tropics it boils down to two essentials: the machete and the rake. First you chop back, then you clear the debris.

Plants I know only as indoor exotics grow in the open air here, and seem to have been fed magic growth serum. Avocados are massive, the size of a child’s head, falling with a heavy thud from roadside trees. Coconuts abound, and I’ve been warned not to fall asleep under any shady fronds in case a ripe husk succumbs to gravity and plummets to earth, delivering a fatal conk to my head. At the market, fat plantains and jumbo papayas sit on the shelf next to massive jugs of vanilla extract, green and brown bottles of cerveza and fragrant bags of rich, cheap coffee.

Eating has been entertaining. I’ve tried the traditional meal known as La Bandera (“The Flag”), which is a simple, inexpensive and tasty dish of rice, beans and meat. Yesterday I had a bony but delicious goat stew with arroz (rice). My first night, on a gourmet splurge, I had coconut shrimp with Cuban appetizers full of taro and plantain at a patio on the beach. I’ve enjoyed the local beers, Presidente and Bohemia.

Tonight I hope to taste the local wine. There is only one; grapes aren’t a big crop on this island. Made in Puerta Plata, it’s a light red – just 8% alcohol, but the packaging is pure genius.

Here is my description of the label: A smiling bodybuilder with a physique like the Incredible Hulk and a face like David Hasslehoff flexes his muscles in front of a violently yellow background. Below, a slender purple band insists that this is not actually liquid steroids, but in fact, red wine or “vino tinto”. At the bottom, a bright red band tells us the macho brand of this honest brew: La Fuerza! This translates to “The Force”, suggesting that drinking enough of this stuff will help you perform Jedi mind tricks.

Despite the compelling name, I strongly suspect that this will not be the wine I am looking for, and that I will move along, shortly after my first sip.

Hasta luego, Pipes.

I’ve never been into sports – I don’t like watching them on TV, I don’t read the Sports columns in the newspaper, and I don’t play any.
But I do run. I ran my first 5km race in 2001, at age 23. Since then, I’ve run over 20 chip-timed races, including four half-marathons. I’m no legend, I’m not even vaguely fast, but I relish the feeling of my body moving and breathing and speeding along.

This book interested me for several reasons: I had just finished Haruki Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”, which was a personal memoir of a man who got addicted to running when he started writing. I was curious to see a view of running as sport and science, and had heard rumours that this book dealt with the big controversy of shoes vs. barefoot, so I took it out of my local library.

The first half of the book was a bit of a slog, given my motivations. A series of rich character sketches and blow-by-blow rundowns of ultramarathons, it seemed to forsake science for legend, and it reeked of the locker room. It read like an old fashioned “ripping yarn” by H. Rider Haggard, with ancient tribes and hidden knowledge, and cliffhangers scattered about as though in homage to Dan Brown or the Celestine Prophecy. Chia is the answer! Drink corn beer, it’s magic!

“When it comes to running shoes, all that glitters isn’t gold.”

As soon as I reached what many people would likely pass over as the “dry, boring stuff” in chapters 23 to 25, I got excited. This is where Chris McDougall gets down to the business of talking about barefoot running and the associations between injury and running shoes.

“Covering your feet with cushioned shoes is like turning off your smoke alarms.” – Barefoot Ted

McDougall pulls out studies and statistics, but divests himself of the responsibility of owning the theory by making it something that crazy “Barefoot Ted” has been pursuing. I suspected this might be a ploy to avoid divorcing himself permanently from the athletic gear companies that provide the financial support for the magazines he sometimes writes for, but he does come down on Nike pretty hard, so maybe not.

“The barefoot walker receives a continuous stream of information about the ground and about his own relationship to it, while a shod foot sleeps inside an unchanging environment.” – Dr. Paul Brand, US Public Health Service

McDougall lays out his findings as three “painful truths”: 1) the best shoes are the worst, 2) feet like a good beating, 3) human beings are designed to run without shoes. This posits the clear conclusion that we should all ditch our new Asics, and either keep on running in those ratty 10-year-old Nikes, or buy a pair of Vibram Five Fingers.

“If there’s any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.” – Dr. Daniel Lieberman, Harvard

In discussing the various training methods of world-famous runners and their coaches, he also stirs the pot of omnivorous diet vs. veganism. The final conclusion is never firmly drawn, but a lot of positive things are said about a diet consisting mostly of seeds, nuts and grains.

Chapter 27 is where Chris finally starts telling the bulk of his own story. We hear occasional snippets about his chronic injuries at the start of the book, and there’s a moment of hope when he meets Caballo Blanco and does some successful runs in Creel, but it takes the wisdom of coach Eric Orton and his “going tribal” methodology to correct McDougall’s stride to the point where he can enjoy the sport he’s just written 200+ pages about without suffering intense pain. This is covered somewhat vaguely with a short training montage, but hill running, weight loss and flat shoes seem to play a big part in his recovery.

And then we hit the really nerdy bits at the end of the book, where chapter 28 talks about the mystery of human evolution and whether or not homo sapiens are walking or running creatures. This piece on persistence hunting, which is literally running after an animal like a deer or gazelle until it collapses from heat exhaustion and then you eat it, was made more interesting because I watched the author’s TED talk and an amazing David Attenborough video about hunters in the Kalahari that shows what McDougall describes.

Finally, there’s the big race at the end where the author gets to go for a jog with the Tarahumara, the secretive run masters he’s made famous with his fanboy gushings in magazines and now a novel. I won’t give away the ending – you’ll have to read the book to find out if he collapses and dies a hot, copper canyon death or makes it to the finish line.

To conclude, an interesting read, and very motivating for those of us who choose to continue our species’ long-term love affair with running. Alas, I fear I may never expunge from my brain the vision of a cheetah on a treadmill with a rectal thermometer up its ass. Boo! But at least I learned that flapjacks need boiled rice, bananas, cornmeal and goat milk to achieve authentic Mexican greatness. Win!

3 of 5 stars / bookshelves: read, 287 pages, Publisher: Knopf (2009)
Read from October 30 to November 14, 2011 .

In case you haven’t heard of it, NaNoWriMo is an annual (November) novel writing project that brings together professional and amateur writers from all over the world. “Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!” they proclaim on their site, as folks who feel they have a book in them try to squeeze, wrench, pry and jackhammer it out over the course of 720 grueling hours. That guy who cut his arm off after a mere 127 hours knows nothing of our suffering. No time for editing. No time to reach for a thesaurus. Just write, write, write.

My modus operandi does not often result in linear storytelling, so I shudder at the idea of trying to patch together dozens of disjointed scraps of scenery and dialogue into a publishable piece in just 30 brief days. However, I do like the immediacy and panic of the thing, and the sort of wartime “we’re all in the trenches” mood brought on by thousands of disenfranchised literary souls striving together to carve their letters into the shining firmament, etc. etc.

So, in honour of this month of extreme creative force, I will try to post some writing tidbits for the enjoyment of the public, in a serial fashion, just like early Charles Dickens only with fewer coal scuttles and absolutely no monetary compensation for my pains. Here is today’s short piece (about 600 words), brought forth by my excruciating afternoon encounter with a car alarm. Enjoy!

~~~
THE FOLLOWING IS MOSTLY FICTION, EXCEPT THE BIT WHERE I IMAGINE HITTING THE CAR, WHICH WAS BASED ON ACTUAL RAGE. I DID NOT COOK A TURKEY TODAY. ALSO, MY NAME IS NOT DREW.
~~~

The car alarm had been going off for two solid hours now, blaring away, a demonic metronome. Drew stood, teeth clenched, eyelids narrowed, and glared out the window at the street below. The offending Audi was flashing its hazards on and off, on and off. It reminded her of the annoying light show at a downtempo rave she’d attended during her unfortunate teen years. No menacing thief skulking nearby, no apologetic owner fiddling with the lock; no silence in sight.

She wanted to run outside and wreak havoc on the car with a blunt instrument. In her mind, she envisioned the baseball bat or broom handle or rolling pin smashing down on the hood, breaking through the windshield with a satisfying crunch, peppering the dashboard with shattered glass and all the while, hitting, hitting, the flailing rhythm of her devastating blows keeping perfect time with the incessant honking like a mad animal percussionist.

The pounding would continue until her makeshift weapon ploughed deep enough into the car’s circuitry to find and destroy the Central Honk Apparatus or whatever that damned evil source of noise was called. Then, bliss, as the honks hushed to a hoarse flatulent whisper, falling out of tune, and at length the three-thousand pound steel music box from Hell would wheeze its last foul breath.

It was probably for the best that she had a turkey slow-roasting at 325º, and water boiling on the stove, as overseeing the kitchen meant Drew could not follow through on her dark fantasies of vehicular annihilation. Snap! On went the oven light, a quick bend at the waist, and she peered upside-down into the greasy darkness. The bird was browning nicely, oozing clear juices into the pan where they bathed waiting carrots and parsnips, releasing a pungent smell of sage and pepper into the air.

Striving for holiday cheer, Drew took a calming breath as she straightened up, and exhaled into sudden, peaceful silence. The racket had finally stopped! She peered out the window, but the driver was nowhere in sight. Either the coward had used a remote-control keychain to deactivate the alarm, or else the kind manufacturing engineers at Audi had built a pity-timer into their anti-theft system.

Drew gathered a dishtowel into her hand, reached over the front burner, and lifted the heavy lid to check on the potatoes. Hot clouds of steam billowed forth, revealing dancing vegetables bouncing up and down in their salty, starchy tub. Done. Boiling water was sluiced off into the sink, and the resulting roar seemed to resolve itself into the resurrected rhythm of the car alarm.

“Lord, no!” Drew thought, “Please not again.”

She held herself rigidly still and listened, muscles tense with expectation, but the alarm was no more: it was only the ghost of the dreaded sound, haunting her. Sailors often feel waves under their legs long after leaving the sea for the steady shore; so did Drew’s ears now play ventriloquist’s tricks on her, projecting phantom sounds into her brain. Time to quit cooking and take a walk, perhaps.

Checking the turkey with a fork, she covered it with tin foil and let it rest. Nothing else needed urgent attention; broccoli could be steamed later, cheesecake was chilling in the freezer. Pulling off the apron her brother had given her last Christmas that read, “I like cats, too! Let’s exchange recipes,” she washed her hands, pulled on her black pea coat and purple mittens, and decided to treat herself to a seasonal latte. Something spiced or maple-flavoured, full of syrup and joy.