★★☆☆☆ Misery, Canadian style

The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories

Margaret Atwood (Editor), Robert Weaver (Editor)

I read The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories, (eds Margaret Atwood, Robert Weaver) because it is the textbook for a community college course I've registered for this winter called "Writing Short Stories". This is one of the worst short story collections I have ever read in my life.

I noticed early on that it appeared to be the same story over and over again. A man and a woman are trapped in a desperately unhappy marriage. Maybe something happens, or maybe not. It is evident that for Atwood and Weaver plot is entirely optional. Some of the stories had one, and some did not. There were rare exceptions to the desperately unhappy marriage storyline, in which the characters were miserable for other reasons.

You know that feeling of relief as you approach the end of a really bad book? I had that feeling 45 times in rapid succession as I worked my way through this dog. The book contains 47 stories. There were thus two stories I was able to read without longing for the end. The first was "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa", by W.P. Kinsella, which is the story behind the movie Field of Dreams. This is in fact quite a good story, and was unique in this volume in not being a portrayal of misery. The other story I quite liked was "Making It", by Margaret Gibson.

My problem with the book is not that the stories are all sad. I can love a sad story as much as anyone. My problem with the collection is the lack of variety. Surely not every good Canadian short story is a dreary portrayal of crushing misery.

In fact, I know they are not. William Gibson's Burning Chrome contains a bunch of good stories. Of course, Burning Chrome is science fiction, and Atwood and Weaver apparently scorn "genre literature". The only non-mainstream lit story in the collection is "Shoeless Joe Jackson." (Shoeless Joe comes back from the dead. That's fantasy in my book.) It is strange, considering that Atwood's most famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale, is science fiction. (She denies this, saying it is "Speculative Fiction" but not "Science Fiction", but that is only the universal human urge to see oneself as a unique snowflake. The Handmaid’s Tale is firmly within the social science fiction tradition of such works as Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.)

Do not read this book if you don't have to. If you're a writer and value my advice (and there is no reason on Earth you should), don't write like this.

The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories on Amazon

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★☆ Hanging out with Death

Reaper Man Terry Pratchett Death (the character, not the phenomenon) is the only real hero of Terry Pratchett 's Discworld . Unlike every other Discworld character (with Granny Weatherwax and Lord Vetinari as sporadic but unreliable exceptions) Death is relentlessly competent and by his lights ethical. He's also a kind of cool guy to hang out with. Already he has developed a personality. Although Reaper Man is only the second book in the Death subseries , we readers have seen quite a lot of him. In a series in which violence plays as important a role as Discworld , and in which in addition there is a specific character who shows up every time someone dies, you can safely bet that Death is going to have at least a cameo in each Discworld novel. Not everyone loves Death. There is a body of people -- well, not people, best just call them entities -- called the Auditors of Reality who take it on themselves to make sure the universe runs as it ...

★★★★☆ Go, Team Weird!

Premeditated Myrtle Elizabeth C. Bunce Probably when you were a kid there were times when you felt you were not like other kids. (I may be wrong, but I'm guessing this is a universal human experience.) Myrtle Hardcastle (the hero of Elizabeth C. Bunce 's Myrtle Hardcastle series is a precocious 12-year-old girl, the daughter of Prosecutor Arthur Hardcastle. His position is something like that of a District Attorney in the modern US legal system -- a government lawyer whose job is to prosecute criminals in court. As Elizabeth C. Bunce explains in an Author's Note, such Prosecutors were a relatively new thing in England in 1893. Myrtle is motherless -- her mother, who studied to be a physician, died of cancer some years ago. Myrtle's ambition is to be a detective or prosecutor or something like that. (She probably knows precisely what she wants -- that would be like Myrtle, but she was not entirely explicit about her plans, hence my vagueness.) To this end sh...

★★★★★ Enjoyable guide to vegan nutrition

Laurel's Kitchen Laurel Robertson, Carol Lee Flinders, Bronwen Godfrey I do not cook, I don't want to cook, I don't plan to cook. (Very happy to buy my whole wheat bread from the bakery at my big box grocery store thank-you-very-much.) I have never tried a recipe from Laurel's Kitchen , and I never will. So why, you ask, am I reviewing a cookbook? Because I read it with pleasure, and I am here to tell you that it is worth reading, even if you don't cook. I was a grad student in Biochemistry at Stanford when I read Laurel's Kitchen , probably around 1980, not many years after it was published. Many of my friends were dance and drama students. This was very much the astrology and granola crowd. (I was the token hard scientist of the bunch.) They alerted me to the existence of Laurel's Kitchen . Laurel's Kitchen was a surprisingly good read. It was as entertaining as a novel, indeed, more entertaining than many novels I have read (looking at you, Fifty...

★★☆☆☆ Death and What Comes Next is the thing it mocks

Death and What Comes Next Terry Pratchett Death and What Comes Next is a short story (which you can read for free here ) in Terry Pratchett 's Discworld . It is a conversation between Death (a character well known to Discworld readers) and a recently deceased philosopher. The philosopher spews a lot of vapid sophistry in which he argues that he might NOT be dead -- the word quantum is involved. Death responds with equal vapidity. Death has the last word, because... Duh... Usually, even in the worst Discworld production, you can rely on some Pratchett verbal fireworks to make it amusing. I am sorry to say that is not the case in Death and What Comes Next . It's a dead loss on all counts, except that it is only one page long, so it is but a small waste of time. Death and What Comes Next on The L-Space Goodreads review

★★★★☆ Be vicious, be loved, and be lucky

The City in Glass Nghi Vo Nghi Vo 's The City in Glass , which she describes as "my pandemic book, the thing I wrote while cooped up in my apartment with only my cat for company, and ... just about the hardest thing I’ve ever written." is the story of an angel, a demon, and a city. The demon is Vitrine and the city, Azril, is her city, the city she made. We never learn the angel's name. Vo is a writer whose work I love, almost despite myself. She is very self-aware as a writer. Gotta tell the truth -- usually that annoys me. Writers who seem consciously to be trying to produce capital-L Literature strike me as pretentious. But I can't argue with Vo 's results. She is the most versatile producer of varied and creatively told stories I can think of. And her language! Vitrine ... heard the sound of crying below. It wasn’t such an uncommon thing for someone to cry through Summersend, but giving the cat one last scratch, Vitrine wound her way like smoke into the...

★★★★★ Finding a home

The Blue Sword Robin McKinley When I was growing up my father's job kept my family moving. Mom and Dad eventually settled down, but just when they did I became an itinerant academic, moving to study and work at various research institutions. I was a 27 year old grad student at Stanford when I first read The Blue Sword and the longest I had ever lived in one place was six years. (Understand, I am not complaining -- I was and am a Happy Nomad.) There's a peculiar type of homesickness experienced by rootless people. One usually thinks of homesickness as being away from and missing a very specific place -- the place one calls home. But I had no place to call home. And yet I sometimes felt homesick -- I felt the lack of a home -- all the more because there was no home where I longed to be. In the first few chapters of The Blue Sword I immediately recognized this feeling of rootless homesickness in Angharad (Harry) Crewe, the hero of the book. As the book begins Harry ...

★★★★☆ Confusing and violent

Saga, Volume 5 Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples (Illustrator) This was the first installment of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples ' Saga that I considered rating less than four stars, although I finally decided not to. ( Vaughan and Staples are wiping sweat off their brows and heaving big sighs of relief at that near-miss.) This is the first volume of Saga after Marko and Alana split up. They split up at the end of Volume 4 not because of marital disharmony, but because Alana blasted off to take Hazel away from danger -- at least, that was the intention. Marko is left with Prince Robot IV, who is pursuing them. And the story of Gwen, The Brand, and former slave girl Sophie continues. We swap back and forth among them frequently, and Marko spends much of the story experiencing flashbacks under the influence of fadeaway. Marko, as was previously established, is a kind of super-warrior when he can be convinced to fight...

★★★☆☆ The Saint of Steel formula for romance

Paladin's Hope T. Kingfisher The novels in T. Kingfisher 's Saint of Steel series have a consistent formula. (I speak only of the first three, since I have not yet read the last one.) They are told from two points of view: that of one of the paladins of the late Saint of Steel and of the paladin's romantic interest. This is an unusual (to me) form for a romance. Because we are in the heads of both the putative romantic partners, we know from the start that they find each other attractive. Now, I am not a big fan of romance novels. And when you eliminate the "He loves me, he loves me not..." suspense for the reader you take much of the air out of the romance plot. The characters themselves are left in suspense, they do a lot of "He loves me, he loves me not..." agonizing, and since you're in their heads, you hear all about it. Add to this that the paladins share a history and certain personality traits. This was not a big problem in book 1, Paladi...

★★★★☆ An excellent first act for a new series

Pinquickle's Folly R.A. Salvatore Pinquickle's Folly: The Buccaneers is the first novel in a new fantasy series by R.A. Salvatore . Therefore it has two jobs: introduce new interesting characters and their world and tell a story about them, and also solve the Act One problem for the series as a whole. I confess that before Pinquickle's Folly I had never read anything by Salvatore . But it was immediately apparent that this was not his first rodeo. Thus, for me, Pinquickle's Folly was an unusual combination of two pleasures: that of recognizing that I had put myself in safe, experienced hands, and that of a new (to me) voice. Pinquickle's Folly takes place in the world of Salvatore 's DemonWars Saga -- a useful thing to know if you want to find maps. The principal characters of Pinquickle's Folly , pictured on the cover, are the Xoconai sailor Quauh (pronounced Coo-wow or Coo-ah) and the powrie sail...

Search This Blog