The Secret Life Of Bees

Fourteen year old Lily Owens lives with her abusive redneck father on a peach farm in South Carolina. After an incident she goes on the run with her black nanny and sets up residence with black bee-keeping, madonna worshipping, calendar girls (May, June and August Boatwright). Motherless Lily finds a whole bunch of mother substitutes and as well discovers that the mother is deep within herself (yuck!). Sue Monk Kidd set this novel against the backdrop of civil rights unrest in the mid-sixties. The book got a lot of buzz and it seems most people read it long ago but I had to wait for it to appear at the Book Depot (everything shows up there eventually). Did I like it? It is a very girly book meant to appeal to the sisterhood and sometimes is as cloyingly sweet as the honey the bees produce. Oprah would love it: child abuse, racism, motherlessness, female mysticism, secrets, trust, the triumph of good over evil, all her favourite themes are present. Some reviewers say they were moved to tears by it, I wasn't but then I'm a nasty, narrow-minded jade. I'm not sorry I read it but it's certainly not a keeper, I'll pass it on to my son's girlfriend.

n a b o k o v ilia

"Nabokovilia is a haphazard collection of quotes by writers who have snuck references to Nabokov and things Nabokovian into their work. "

The GG's

Barry Dempster, a friend of mine back in the day, has been nominated for a poetry GG for The Burning Alphabet. He wrote
poetry when we were in school and encouraged me to do the same. He was a nerdy guy, an only child of older parents. One thing I remember is that his mother had a weekly menu plan that never varied i.e. Wednesday was meat loaf day. Such regimentation was anathema to me then (actually it still is but was more so in the 60's). I'd go home from school and try to decide whether I should go for stuffed squid at El Cid, a wooden plate at The Continental or stay at home, smoke some reefer and mix up some sour cream and onion soup dip. Our friendship ended when my boyfriend dumped me and Barry chose to remain friendly with him. I hated him for that.

It's the critics at Sea

"Observers were divided over John Banville winning the Man Booker Prize. But the judging process was surprisingly smooth, says one of the five judges, Rick Gekoski."

2005 National Book Award Finalist

" Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill


From Publishers Weekly Imagine that Edie Sedgwick penned a roman a clef in her 50s, and that she discovered, in her ugly, diseased decrepitude, that celebrities and downtown loft spaces and skuzzy rich hangers-on were the nadir of existence."
The author actually attended a party at my humble apartment on Tichester Ave. in Toronto many years ago. An ex of mine (sort of), Steve, brought her from the Blackhawk Tavern, north of the city, where she was stripping (I believe that this was some sort of social experiment). She arrived in hot pants and thigh high boots. Where did Steve, a dweeb if ever there was one, find her? She'd just written a story called "Christy, the Aggressive Scarf", for children, I think.

On Bullcrit: How Uninformed Judgment Drives the Book Business

"Bullcrit. Ever since I first heard the term a few years back, I instantly recognized the genius in its coinage, it's sheer high-concept needfulness. When the culture truly requires an emerging concept to find definition, it throws up a term like this. Bullcrit is what you call an opinion someone expresses about something,usually a work of art, but, really, it could be anything,about which that someone has no actual firsthand knowledge or experience. It's kind of like gossip, except that it's cheaper and comes from a more vain, more fearful and more desperate place in its perpetrators. "

Dylan's wife 'drank him under the table'

Dylan's wife 'drank him under the table': "Gwen said the legend of Dylan the drinker, had grown largely because the public expects poets to be wild. She said it had been fuelled by what she claims are 'inaccuracies' by the late Elizabeth Reitell, who was with Dylan when he collapsed on November 4, 1953, and remained with the 39-year-old at St Vincent's Hospital, New York, before he died five days later."

Ginsburg's HowlTurns 50

"Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix,"

chatwin
After reading Chatwin's "On the Black Hill" I wanted to know more about the author of this sensitive, old-fashioned novel. Nicholas Shakespeare, himself a novelist, has written an exhaustive, and exhausting, biography of Bruce Chatwin. It is a long one and I had to buy stronger reading glasses because the font was so small. I regret spending so much time reading about a guy who resembles so many others that I know and sometimes wish I didn't. He was selfish, self-indulgent, exploitive and claimed to be an expert on almost everything, although I suspect his knowledge of many things was a mile wide and an inch deep. He married a woman who is surely a masochist and mostly ignored her until he needed her to bathe and change him at the end of his life. That said, I'll probably read more of his works, but not too soon, while trying to forget all I know about the author.

Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read

I'm a socialist but I don't read science fiction unless it's cleverly disguised as something else. When I was young all the guys I knew read sci-fi. I'm not sure what the girls read, maybe nothing. I liked romance or stories of people who escaped their working class roots and began angst ridden lives in big cities where they met mentors and stuff.
"This is not a list of the best fantasy or SF. There are huge numbers of superb works not on the list. Those below are chosen not just because of their quality which though mostly good, is variable but because the politics they embed (deliberately or not) are of particular interest to socialists. Of course, other works by the same or other writers could have been chosen: disagreement and alternative suggestions are welcomed. I change my own mind hour to hour on this anyway."