American Book Review

100 Best First Lines from Novels
1. Call me Ishmael. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buenda was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
10. I am an invisible man. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)"

The worst word in the language

"Wog. Spastic. Queer. Nigger. Dwarf. Cripple. Fatty. Gimp. Paki. Mick. Mong. Poof. Coon. Gyppo. You can't really use these words any more and yet, strangely, it is perfectly acceptable for those in the travel and hotel industries to pepper their conversation with the word "beverage".
There are several twee and unnecessary words in the English language. Tasty. Meal. Cuisine. Nourishing. And the biblically awful "gift". I also have a biological aversion to the use of "home" instead of "house". So if you were to ask me round to "your home for a nourishing bowl of pasta" I would almost certainly be sick on you. "

Election all about Log, frogs, and a stork: Atwood

In her newest literary offering "The Tent" , a collection of bite-sized science fictions, poems, animal fables and satiric musings , Margaret Atwood relates the tale of the lay-about King Log, who is deposed as monarch of the Pond by the resident frogs in favour of the experienced and efficient King Stork.
The amphibians' joy at the coronation soon turns to dismay as their new sovereign summarily gobbles up his subjects. (Ex-king Log rolls off and retires to a villa in the Alps to write his memoirs.)

Top non-fiction shortlists announced

Two major Canadian book prizes, the Taylor and Gelber awards, announced their lists of finalists yesterday.

Writing Wrongs

CBC.ca - Arts - Books - Writing Wrongs: "Earlier this week, news broke of two literary fakeries. On Sunday, an exhaustive expose on the Smoking Gun website alleged that bad-boy writer James Frey exaggerated and fabricated details in his best-selling addiction-and-redemption memoir , and current Oprah Book Club pick , A Million Little Pieces. It seems Frey's violent and drug-addled youth , which the book at once embraces with a macho swagger and denounces with pious contrition , might not have been as harrowing or eventful as written.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that HIV-positive, androgynous author JT Leroy was himself a fictional creation. It appears 25-year-old Leroy's "autobiographical" fiction about his life as a truck-stop hustler and homeless drug addict is actually the work of Laura Albert, the 40-year-old woman Leroy claims rescued him from the street. Meanwhile, Albert's sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, has been exposed as the mysterious figure in wigs and sunglasses that makes public appearances as Leroy, who along the way has befriended celebrities like Courtney Love, Billy Corgan and writer Mary Gaitskill.
Writers with a hard-luck memoir in the works may want to wait until the dust settles before approaching a publisher. With both of these swindles, industry insiders have spent the week alternately claiming they "suspected all along" that something was up and nervously defending their fact-checking processes. As for the rest of us, we can sit back and relish the juicy details of the latest incidents in the long, illustrious history of literary hoaxes. Here are 10 of the best. "

Border Crossing

I've been meaning to read something by Pat Barker for a long time, having heard so much positive feedback about the Regeneration Trilogy. Border Crossing didn't live up to my expectations. It focuses on a young man, Danny, who spent twelve years in a correctional institute for killing an elderly neighbour when he was just ten years old. But the story is really about Tom, a psychologist who assessed Danny prior to his court appearance. Danny has been released from prison, is living under an assumed name and identity and through coincidence?? meets up with Tom again. Danny is charmingly manipulative and shallow (they used to call people like this sociopaths). Perhaps because I worked so long with troubled children I found the book superficial and wouldn't recommend it. We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver is, I think, a better, if more sensational, examination of a deeply troubled boy who commits violence. It left me feeling disturbed and even, as the mother of two boys, a little guilty. A book about youth violence should make one cringe and reflect. Border Crossing left me neutral.

The Darling

I've never wanted to visit Africa. As a child I was petrified by movies about African jungles with their snakes, huge insects and carniverous animals, to say nothing of natives cooking missionaries in pots (shades of Mel Lastman!). Russell Banks' The Darling does nothing to change my opinion. Liberia is a sweltering hell hole whose smells and sounds are described in vivid and often horrific detail.
The protagonist, Hannah, is spoiled and self indulgent but altogether believable. Her life is compartmentalized like a series of loosely connected railway cars. She changes names and lives like others change vehicles.
Her childhood was one of privelege. The character of her father seems based on pediatrician Benjamin Spock who was prominent in the American anti-war movement (read Mailer's Armies of the Night). Her mother lives to serve him. Hannah, like many young people, resents her parents for trivial reasons: dad accidentally runs over her dog, they don't write to her or their letters are irritatingly worded, her mother is superficial, her father removed, etc. Hannah seems inordinately piqued by their shortcomings until, faced with their deaths, she reconciles her feelings.
Once in college she becomes involved in the civil rights movement and the Weather Underground. After some botched bombings she becomes a fugitive living in safe houses. She ends up in Africa where she marries a Liberian government minister and becomes a dutiful, if distant, wife and mother to three boys, reprising, to an extent, the role of her own mother. She sets up a chimpanzee refuge and finds this work emotionally rewarding. Indeed she seems to bond more strongly with the chimps (who she calls "dreamers") than to her own family.
Set against the brutal backdrop of a Liberian revolution the story devolves into tragedy. She witnesses the savage execution of her husband, the disappearance of her three sons and the killing of her beloved dreamers before she is forced to flee to the US. Once there she begins another new life as a landowner/ farmer in the Adirondacks and it is from this vantage point that she narrates her story. The one false note in the novel is the prison break she masterminds, setting a series of events in motion.
I was drawn in and engaged. We learn a lot about African politics, American involvement in Liberia's civil unrest and man's capacity for violence. Had I not been exposed, through the media, to the atrocities of Rwanda and Darfur I might have found this book too horrific to be believable. Unfortunately, the story rings all too true.

Irving Layton Dead at 93

TheStar.com - Irving Layton, 93: Canada's trailblazing poet: "Irving Layton, one of the first Canadian poets to gain international stature and a controversial presence on the national scene for decades, died in Montreal yesterday at the age of 93. "

The best books to look out for in 2006

Guardian Unlimited Books Special Reports : "Over the next few months, despite the brave claims and rash promises you made last night, you will probably not be learning Japanese, slashing your body mass index or abseiling down Hadrian's Wall. We will be charitably optimistic and assume that you may, indeed, succeed in kicking the cigarettes and you will be kinder to small children. But some resolutions are easier to stick to than others, and what we can help with is that far more important pledge to keep abreast of the latest literary dispatches."

Hard Case Crime

Hard Case Crime: "Hard Case Crime brings you the best in hardboiled crime fiction, ranging from lost noir masterpieces to new novels by today's most powerful writers, featuring stunning original cover art in the grand pulp style.
Authors include award-winning modern masters like Stephen King, Max Allan Collins, Ed McBain, and Donald E. Westlake, Golden-Age pulp stars like Erle Stanley Gardner, Donald Hamilton, and Wade Miller and newcomers we predict will be the next generation of hardboiled bestsellers. "