On the way to the nearest town 45 minutes away, the highway runs by a field in which there is often a white horse. And if the horse is there, so is the goat, following the horse around like a shadow. This summer, there is a new addition – the goat’s kid, who is not visible in the photo.

I think people must stop often for photos and the horse is fed up. Nearly every time I took a shot, he moved his rear-end to the camera. Not amused by the paparazzi , I guess.

Genre: Fiction

Note: This review contains spoilers.

Room: A Novel is the story of five-year-old Jack and his mother and their life as prisoners in an 11×11 foot storage locker (the titular Room). Eventually, they devise a plan for escape and make it out into the world.

Jack narrates the story and, told from his point of view, the horror of the prison sinks in only slowly. Ma was kidnapped before Jack’s birth and he has known no other life. The room contains his life and his world, and he is satisfied with it. They do have a television but Jack thinks of as being ‘outer space’(outside his ‘world’) and not real.

At first, it is a little annoying that Jack speaks of the objects in Room without definite articles. But the reason for that oddity in language is that these objects are who occupy his life.

For TV, I go in Rocker but Ma sits on Bed with Kit, she’s putting the hem back up on her brown dress with pink bits. We watch the medical planet where doctors and nurses cut holes to pull the germs out. The persons are asleep not dead. The doctors don’t bite the threads like Ma, they use super sharp daggers and after, they sew the persons up like Frankenstein.

Jack is slightly precocious but we must remember that Ma has had exclusive one-on-one time with him for five years to teach him, and she has tried to provide instruction, routine and life skills.

The story of Jack & Ma’s life in the room is compelling, and their escape attempt is suspenseful. But I found the really thought-provoking issues were the ones that Jack faced once he & Ma were in the outside world.

Everything is new for Jack – the people, the noise, the sun, even having to wear shoes. As he faces these challenges, Ma struggles with her own re-entry problems.

After some months in his new world, Jack needs to see Room to tie up emotional loose ends. This is heart-wrenching.

We step through the door and it’s all wrong, Smaller than Room and emptier and it smells weird. Floor’s bare, that’s because no Rug, she’s in my wardrobe in our Independent Living, I forgot she couldn’t be here at the same time. Bed’s here but there’s no sheets or Duvet on her. Rocker’s here and Table and Sink and Bath and Cabinet but no plates or cutlery on top, and Dresser and TV and Bunny with the purple bow on him, and Shelf but nothing on her, and our chairs folded up but they’re all different. Nothing says anything to me. “I don’t think this is it.” I whisper to Ma. “Yeah, it is.” Our voices sound not like us. “Has it got shrunk?” “No, it was always like this.”

I’ve spoken to a lot of people who’ve not read Room because they feel it’s too ‘dark’. On the contrary, this is a book about the indomitability of the human spirit, the capacity to adapt, and the power of love. Recommended.

Links for my Canadian readers:

Room

Genre: Literary Fiction

The Stone Angel is a tour de force of Canadian literature. I read this several years ago and then again this past month. The rereading exceeded my memories and expectations.

The book is the story of 90-year-old Hagar Shipley, told in flashbacks as she struggles with her declining abilities.

Hagar was born around 1875, the only daughter of a haughty and stern Scotsman, in the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba. Her mother died in child-birth and her father spoiled her and taught her to be proud:

God might have created heaven and earth and the majority of people, but Father was a self-made man, as he himself had told us often enough.

Hagar learned pride well—too well—and pride is her downfall throughout her life. Pride prevents her from taking her father’s advice not to marry Brampton Shipley; pride thwarts her from love in her marriage; pride keeps her from finding joy in her sons. Ultimately, Hagar has lived a loveless, unhappy life largely due to her own haughtiness and resulting failure to recognize and communicate her feelings.

Although she has accumulated wisdom from her mistakes, she seems to stubbornly refuse to relate it to herself, while liberally applying it to others.

Stupid girl. She knows nothing. Why won’t she praise him a little she’s so sharp with him. He’ll become fed up in a minute. I long to warn her—watch out, watch out, you’ll lose him.

Well, the poor thing…Fancy spending your life worrying about what people were thinking. She must have had a rather weak character.

Once strong and self-sufficient, Hagar now depends on her son and his wife, both in their sixties, for care, projecting her self-loathing at her physical infirmities onto those who try to help her.

She can’t sit still an instant, that woman. She’s like a flea. I am under the impression that I myself am sitting quite composedly on this uncomfortable chair until Doris turns to me with a faintly puckered forehead. “Try and sit quietly, Mother. The more you fidget, the longer a time it seems.”

Laurence writes in an authentic voice, with brevity of words but deep insight. Sometimes the sentences are so brief that one can miss the breathtakingly precise understanding of life.

It doesn’t seem so very long ago.

Things never look the same from the outside as they do from the inside.

Nothing is ever changed at a single stroke, I know that full well, although a person sometimes wishes it could be otherwise.

As Hagar’s life draws to a close, she seems to finally admit her failings to herself and the regret and anguish she felt touched me deeply:

Every good joy I might had held, in my man or any child of mine or even the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by some brake of proper appearances—oh, proper to whom? When did I ever speak the heart’s truth? Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear.

Published in 1964, The Stone Angel has been on Canadian high school English curricula for decades and, despite its eloquence & power, has earned the derision of many students. I think this is because youth doesn’t identify with aging, with the regrets of life, or long-term consequences of things done when they are young.

I maintain that The Stone Angel is Canadian Literature (CanLit) at its finest.

Link for my American readers:

The Stone Angel

Exurbanis is featured today on The Scene of the Blog over at Kittling: Books. Each week, Cathy, who runs my favorite mostly-mystery book blog, profiles a book blog space somewhere in the world. Go on over and have a look at mine!

I’ve been reading books since the middle of the last century, and for all of that time the physicality of books has been important to me.

I have sweet childhood memories of the smell of the old library in St. Thomas Ontario where I whiled away many a summer afternoon, and the weight of the four precious books we could check out and carry home. I love the look of the books on my shelves. I love the feel of a book in my hands-especially one with linen pages and deckled edges.

So, over the past few years, I’ve approached the idea of e-books with mixed feelings. I intensely dislike reading on a computer screen and assumed that an e-reader would give me the same type of experience. But that’s no longer so, if it ever was. And I’ve been increasingly drawn to the convenience of an e-reader. When we went on our road trip to Ontario last month, I filled an entire tote bag with my reading material. It was just one more bag to lug around.

Once I made the decision that I’d like an e-reader, I was frustrated by my budget. So I began entering contests on-line to win one. And—surprise—I did – from Kindle Nation on Facebook. Kindle Nation has frequent posts and newsletters with all the details of the latest Kindle books, especially the free ones. (Pop on over and enter this month’s contest for yourself.)

It’s the latest Kindle with 3G reception which runs off the cellphone network. In the country, any sort of wireless coverage is iffy, but if I aim my Kindle out my open office window, it downloads just fine. And it’s so easy! I can browse from my Kindle or from my Amazon account on my laptop. I choose a book, click ‘purchase with one-click’ and sit back & watch it appear on my Kindle, ready to read. So far, I’ve ‘bought’ only free books, but I’m sure the day is coming when I make the digital equivalent of an all-day trip to Chapters.

As I ferried my new Kindle about, showing it off, I was constantly aware that I could be damaging the screen and that it should be in a cover. But again—the budget! Then a dear friend gave me a surprise gift on Thursday evening – a DEE-LUXE leather Kindle cover with a light for night-time reading. To say I was thrilled is putting it mildly. I’ve already used the light, reading in the car on the way home from the movies on the weekend.

My Kindle (or any e-reader) will never replace books for me. But it’s a great addition for certain circumstances. It’s about ‘versus’ after all. Welcome to the twenty-first century, me.

I first posted about the great Community Supported Agriculture project in Tatamagouche in June, when we received our first box of vegetables. Since then, there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of change in what we get each week, although the last few weeks we’ve seen such diverse food as broccoli, kohlrabi, fennel, and kale.

The problem is the wet weather we’re experiencing here in Nova Scotia this year. It seems like the rain started in early May and hasn’t stopped since. For instance, last week we received 4 inches (100 mm) of precipitation. Then, after a couple of sunny days on the weekend, it started raining at seven o’clock Monday morning and continued steadily all day, giving us another 2 inches this week. And there’s still no sun in sight.

Most of the rest of Canada is having an extremely dry summer and although rain threatens, there hasn’t been enough. When we were in southern Ontario in late July, we saw lawns and gardens, ditches and roadsides burned brown by the sun. Although I’d rather be here with too much rain (at least it’s not enough so far to cause serious flooding), it’s getting to be too much of a good thing – and it’s having a drastic effect on the vegetable crops.

Cammie, who runs the local CSA, advised us in late July that she had lost about 70% of her early crops in the wet and muddy spring (peas, beans, cabbage, broccoli, spring turnips, beets, salad mix, pac choi, Chinese cabbage, & radishes). But the summer really hasn’t been much better weather wise. This is the first week we’ve received beans in our harvest and there have been no peas at all.

But that’s the risk of a CSA program: farmers and members share in the risk of a bad year, as well as the bounty of a good one.

This week we received carrots, ruby-stemmed chard, a lettuce head, cilantro, broccoli, green & yellow beans, and fresh garlic.

Even though the weather and the resulting harvest have been a little disappointing thus far this year, I’m still keen on the CSA program and will join again next year (providing we have the cash in March). And I’m looking forward to many more weeks of superbly fresh and interesting vegetables this harvest season.

There are only a few books I’ve encountered in my life that merit rereading multiple times—Mrs. Mike and Gone with the Wind spring to mind—but A Dog’s Purpose: A Novel for Humans by W. Bruce Cameron is definitely one to add to my list of favorites.

I’ll admit upfront: I’m a dog lover. Over the last twenty years, we’ve owned five dogs (two of them currently) and, although I think these guys are our last, life without a dog is difficult to imagine right now. So my feelings are ready to be drawn into a story about a dog that loves his people and longs to find his reason for living.

The story in A Dog’s Purpose is told from the point of view of the titular dog throughout his four lives. Okay – I don’t believe that humans are reborn, let alone animals. If you feel like I do, don’t let that stop you from reading this book anyway. Although the premise of the dog’s four lives is integral to the story, the story isn’t about that.

Cameron keeps the concept of a canine narrator from becoming overly cutesy by keeping the dog in character as far as understanding what humans are saying. Although he’ll quote their conversations for us, he relays them rather than comprehends them. What he understands of human language is what an average dog would: his name and the commands that he’s been taught.

But the dog fathoms humans and their interactions with each other, and with animals, through other means: mainly scents (and emotions give off scents). He understands other animals in the same way, although he relates to them more on a peer level.

Tinkerbell needed constant assurance from me now that she was the only cat—several times a day I’d awaken from a nap to find her pressed up against me or, even more disconcerting, standing and staring at me. I didn’t understand her attachment to me and knew it was not my purpose in life to be a substitute mother for a feline, but I didn’t mind it much and even let her lick me sometimes because it seemed to make her happy.

The dog also learns from his experiences in each life.

I was beginning to realize that life was far more complicated than it had appeared to be in the Yard [in his first life] and that it was people who were in charge of it, and not dogs. What mattered was not what I wanted, what mattered was that I was (with) Ethan… being his companion.

And, again:

I understood that what was expected of me was to live with the new rules, the way I’d learned to live with Ethan going to do college… a dog’s job was to do what people wanted.

I read A Dog’s Purpose while we were driving through eastern Ontario on a road trip. I laughed out loud many a time and wanted to read passage after passage out loud to my husband; a few minutes later, I’d be sobbing uncontrollably with tears streaming down my face. When we made pit stops, I frantically wiped away streaked mascara and powdered as much of my face as I could to hide the red blotches. The roller-coaster emotional ride of reading this book is much like owning a dog: lots of fun and joy throughout its life, and grief at the end of it when you lose a dear companion.

I borrowed this book from my local library but I’m going to buy a copy for my shelf, to have on hand to lend to friends and to reread myself. Is this great literature? Heck, no. A great read? You bet! I recommend it for all readers, of all ages, who have ever loved a dog.

Links for my Canadian Readers:

Gone with the Wind

What would you do if you suddenly lost your high-powered, high-pressure job in a declining industry, and received a year’s severance pay? Hit the pavement? Take up a hobby? Stay under the covers?

The author of Unfinished Business: One Man’s Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things, Lee Kravitz, faced just such a situation in his mid-fifties. After taking stock of seemed to be a very successful life, he decided to spend that year reconnecting to the people in his life. As he says:

As good as my life looked on paper, it was sorely lacking in the one area that puts flesh on meaning: human connectedness.

We all have the kind of unfinished business to which Kravitz refers in the title of his book—emotional loose ends: old friends we’ve lost touch with, promises we made but didn’t keep, family we’ve grown apart from, things unsaid that need saying.

By the time we reach our fifties, most of us have accumulated a long list of such items, partly because we think we’ll get to them later, we need our own time, we’re busy with other things, or it’s just too difficult to or embarrassing to carry through. It’s true that as Kravitz says,

If we remembered how we could be separated from our loved ones at any moment, we would accumulate a lot less unfinished business.

In Kravitz’s year of making amends, he set out on ten ‘journeys’, including catching up with a loved aunt who had drifted out of his life, making an over-due condolence call, paying a 30-year-old debt to an associate, looking up a mentor of his youth, and visiting a high-school friend who is now a Greek Orthodox monk. Along the way, he gains insights into himself and into what really makes a life – his and ours.

Reading this book has made me aware of the emotional loose ends in my own life, but being aware and taking the time and effort to do something are two different things. Kravitz recognized how much of a struggle it would be to keep up the rekindled relationships on an on-gong basis once he ‘re-entered his life’. He determined to make time, and so should we all. I would be interested in a follow-up from Kravitz: how has he handled that intention?

Of course, you’ll relate to this book if you’re a baby-boomer, beginning to question the value of what you’re achieved thus far in life, but don’t wait until then. Read this at twenty, thirty, or forty and perhaps you’ll prevent some of the regret that comes of losing touch over the years with the people you care about. After all, as Kravitz says:

Life goes fast. Click. You are fifteen. Click, click. You are fifty-five. Click, click. You are gone. And so are the people who loved and nurtured you.

Link for my Canadian readers:

Unfinished Business

Note: Amazon.ca is charging twice as much (19.44) as Amazon.com ($10.00 for hardcover), so if you’re in Canada, I’d suggest the Kindle version:

Unfinished Business: One Man’s Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things

Another road trip to Ontario in July helped me up the number of books read for the month – and I read a lot of GOOD ones! I hope you get some ideas for your TBR list.

I’m really behind in my blogging because of the road trip and a really bad cold that laid me low before we left, but I do hope to publish detailed reviews of all or most of these titles throughout this month.

1. A Dog’s Purpose: A Novel for Humans by W. Bruce Cameron

Just released in paperback. A wonderful story told by the dog in question: Toby, Bailey, Ellie, Buddy – well, you’ll see….

It made me laugh out loud and sob uncontrollably. It’s my pick for my book of the month – which says something given the quality of the others I read. If you’ve ever loved a dog, you will love this book. My review is here.

2. The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
It’s been several years since I read this Canadian classic and it has held up even better than I could imagine. Told by elderly Hagar Shipley, it’s her story – of love and loss, and the tragedy of not communicating. See my review.

3. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Set in WWII Germany, the story of a young girl and her best friend, the boy down the street. If you love to own books, you’ll appreciate this. In a twist that makes it stand out from other books in this genre, the story is narrated by Death.

4. Room by Emma Donoghue
A gripping story told by five-year-old Jack, of his life in “Room” with his Ma who was kidnapped before his birth and has been held for seven years in this one-room prison. Not nearly as dark as it sounds. Jack will warm your heart. You can read more about what I thought.

5. To Fetch a Thief by Spencer Quinn
The third in the Chet & Bernie mystery series, of which I am a huge fan (as you may know). In this story, the intrepid detectives track a stolen circus elephant across the California desert. Chet is, as ever, endearing.

6. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
My third reading of another Canadian classic by wordsmith Shields. Described as a family album set to a novel, this account of 90-something Daisy Goodwill’s life is rich and real.

7. The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen
The gentle story of two elderly sisters, Twiss and Milly, who live alone in the house where they grew up in Spring Green, Wis. Ultimately, it’s a portrayal of sacrifices made for family – and the roads that lead from them.

8. Unfinished Business: One Man’s Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things by Lee Kravitz
After losing his job, Lee Kravitz—a man who always worked too hard and too much—took stock of his life and decided to spend an entire year making amends and reconnecting with the people and parts of himself he had neglected. Much to ruminate about here as Kravitz reaches out to family & old friends, caught up on commitments he meant to keep but didn’t, and looks at roads not taken. My review is here.

9. Diary Of A Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Originally published in 1931 and surely the basis for Bridget Jones’s Diary and like books. Wry, clever, and, ultimately, more sophisticated than current versions.

10. Gator Aide by Jessica Speart
First in the Rachel Porter mystery series. Novice U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent Porter is called to attend the murder investigation of a stripper because the victim’s pet alligator was found dead at the scene. Rachel’s likable, if a little less-than-mellow in her attitude toward equality with the good ol’ boys.

11. Nancy’s Wedding Feast and Other Tasty Tales by James O. St. Clair & Yvonne C. LeVert
Historical narratives from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, accompanied by recipes that complete the tales, to give the full flavour of Cape Breton’s rich and varied cultural palate. An interesting foray into the history & culture of the island.
This a stop on my Atlantic Canada Literary Road Trip.

12. The Magnificent Spinster by May Sarton
I didn’t finish this so won’t rate it, but did read 260 pages of it, so feel it should count. In response to my request for reader feedback, I received a lovely email which has encouraged me to pick this up at another time, and give it another try.

Links for my Canadian readers:

A Dog’s Purpose

The Stone Angel

The Book Thief

Room

To Fetch a Thief: A Chet and Bernie Mystery

The Stone Diaries

The Bird Sisters

Unfinished Business: One Man’s Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things

The Diary of a Provincial Lady

Bridget Jones’s Diary

Gator Aide

Nancy’s Wedding Feast and Other Tasty Tales

The Magnificent Spinster

There’s thunderstorms somewhere around here this evening – we hear them in the distance and every so often see a faint flash of lightning. The dogs are not happy, as unused to the sound of thunder as they are.

Meanwhile, sunset came and went behind the clouds, lighting up the western sky with these gorgeous colors.

I never tire of sunsets; in the city, we seldom saw them as the buildings blocked our view.