As I mentioned in my last post, Bookish Beck’s variation on Phyllis Rose’s The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading is for any set of four books in a row on my own shelf. I decided to choose from the books on my fiction shelves, filed by author surname. The letter M was my first dip.

The first book I tackled was Such a Long Journey which was Rohinton Mistry’s first book, published in 1991 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, which was won that year by The Famished Road by Ben Okri. Mistry had published two short story collections prior to this first novel, but it was the magnificent A Fine Balance that catapulted him to fame in 1995.

Such a Long Journey is classic Mistry: straightforward in plot development, but taking the time to build the settings, as well as the characters. Mistry is a genius in drawing us pictures of everyday 20th-century India. We can feel Gustad’s frustrations, his fears – and his loyalties to old friends that embroil him unwittingly in dangerous activities. It was important for us to realize the corner that Gustad was in and that, despite the questionable nature of the deliveries he has to make, we are fully on his side.

I have also read Mistry’s third novel Family Matters, and recommend any of Mistry’s fiction to anyone interested in late twentieth century India. A Fine Balance appears on my list of all-time favourites. His marvelous writing talent is on in display in all of his books, although the circumstances of A Fine Balance (during the Troubles and Indira Gandhi) make it the most powerful of the three.
4 stars

Anything for Billy is the first of author Larry McMurtry’s books that I’ve read. I seldom hear much about it so I assume it wasn’t his best or, at least, his most popular. The book is fiction, based loosely (very loosely) on the last few days of the life of Henry McCarty aka William Bonney aka Billy the Kid. Billy was killed in a shoot-out at the age of 21, and that much remains the same in this book. But everything else is changed and/or imagined. Since we know how the whole mess ends, it’s almost painful to watch Billy swagger toward this death.

The narrator of Anything for Billy is spinning a yarn for us. It’s a yarn that is likely pretty accurate about the Wild West, but it’s just a yarn. 3½ stars

I have more books by McMurtry on my shelves and will definitely read them.

 
I had a choice of three books that W.O. Mitchell wrote and chose Jake and the Kid.

According to Wikipedia:

“An author of novels, short stories, and plays, Mitchell is best known for his 1947 novel, Who Has Seen The Wind, which has sold close to a million copies in North America . . and later a collection of short stories in 1961, Jake and the Kid which subsequently won the Stephen Leacock Award.”

Also, according to Wikipedia, I was really wrong in a previous post when I said ´My bet is that in the prairie provinces, the stories [in the Star Weekly] were by W.O. Mitchell.’ These stories were actually radio broadcasts of a series of the same name, which aired on CBC Radio between 1950 and 1956.

Mitchell grew up in Saskatchewan and most of his stories reflect a boy’s experiences growing up on the prairies. As I said in that earlier post, I’m keeping this book ‘forever’. 5 stars
 

And finally, there was The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell. This novel won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize regional prize (South Asia and Europe); was long listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, was one of Time Magazine’s “Best Books of the Year” (#4 Fiction), was a Globe & Mail best book, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the 2011 Walter Scott Prize. It’s also my brilliant cousin’s (well, one of my brilliant cousins) favourite book so I approached it with some degree of trepidation, fearing that in my ignorance of the finer points of literature, I wouldn’t properly appreciate it.

The amount of research that had to have gone into The Thousand Autumns is phenomenal. Not only did Mitchell have to authentically create the Dutch East Indies trading post of 1799, and also Japan (not limited to the port of Nagasaki) of that time but, as well, the complicated relationships that the Japanese had with any foreigner to their land.

In the Reading Guide at the end of the book, Mitchell posits that historical fiction endures in popularity because “it delivers a stereo narrative: from one speaker comes the treble of the novel’s own plot while the other plays the bass of history’s plot.” Mitchell seems to have done a masterful job of all of these details and the book is fascinating for the window it opens onto the land and the time. It plays the treble and the bass equally well, and blends them into a harmonious whole.

The only complaint I have is the ending that seemed rushed to me – although at nearly 500 pages the story was probably long enough as it stands. 4½ stars

 
Now I have an empty space on my book shelf that I’m actually quite proud of and, surprisingly, have no urge to fill again. What about you? Would you want to get more books to fill that empty space?

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