What Musicians Think about River Music

It's always nice when people that you write about like what you write.  I'm no musician, and one of the big unknowns about River Music was what musicians might think.  In fact, I was so unsure that I went out of my way not to ask musicians I knew what their opinion was.

But to my great delight, the reaction of musicians has been spontaneous and very positive. Here are three:

From pianist Jana Stuart: 

"Mary, I just finished River Music. I could not put it down. I related so much to the character of Gloria Murray and the plight of the young pianist. I loved it to pieces. "

From Madeleine Owen, lutist and artistic director, Ensemble La Cigale:

"Gloria, is tough and not always likable and yet, I had to recognize some of her  difficult choices as merely typical of what a musician, especially a woman, has to do in order to succeed in the competitive world of music."

And Cléo Palacio-Quintin, flûtiste-compositrice says: 

"River Music nous emporte dans le flot d'une vie musicale riche en émotions. Dans un rythme fluide, Mary Soderstrom transcrit avec finesse la passion intime d'une interprète pour sa musique...difficile de poser le livre avant la fin."

Progress on the Road through Time

This week I finished the revisions on Road through Time, and sent it off to the University of Regina Press which will publish it in Spring 2017.  The book, about roads as vectors of change and exchange, now has a subtitle:The Story of Humanity on the Move.   I hadn't given it one before because when I started writing I wasn't quite sure where I was going.

Now I know.

It begins with a trip my mother, my younger sister and I took in the mid-1950s from San Diego CA to Walla Walla WA. (The photo is of Laurie and me at about that time.)  It ends with the trip to South America I took two years ago, travelling a newly opened highway across the Andes from Peru to Brazil.  In between I explore where humans have wandered from the time our ancestors stood up through the Great Expansion out of Africa to the Age of the Automobile.

The book will be illustrated with some photos I've taken, some archival images and, I hope, this snapshot of two girls near the beginning of their respective journeys through life.

Coming in Spring 2017: My Next Non-Fiction Book

Pleased to say that I've just signed a contract with the University of Regina Press to publish my next non-fiction book Road through Time, probably in Spring 2017. It's about roads as vectors for change and exchange over time. The photo is of the Andes cordillera that I crossed on a bus just two years ago shortly after the new highway from Cuzco into Brazil was opened.

Another Kind of Competition: Behind the Scenes at a Literary Prize

Fall is literary prize time, for better of worse! Here's a novel that may confirm everything you suspected about them.

A  writer friend suggested Lost for Words by Edward St.Aubyn just after the short list for the Canadian biggie, the Scotia Giller, was announced.  She said it was a great spoof of how prizes are given out, and since she is usually a good judge I checked it out of the library immediately.

Takes place in  the UK and the prize is something called the Elysian Award,  The contenders in  2013 are a varied lot: among them are  a slice-of-life saga wot u looking at? that purports to be by a member of Britain's under class but which is really by a medieval scholar; the story of young Will Shakespeare that appears to be composed of lines lifted from the Bard, and an Indian cookbook, entered by mistake.

The judges are equally diverse, but all with their own axe to grind. There's a fair amount of sex along the way--chiefly between a young woman whose novel was omitted by accident from the competition and her several lovers--and some nasty depictions of spoiled remnants of the British Raj, British diplomats, and French intellectuals.

In all, quite funny if you're cynical about the literary world.  Or, conversely, annoyingly precious if you think there are far too many people with big heads writing, reviewing and judging books.

The Best Laid Plans: What Elections Frequently are Really about

Since I knew there'd be a federal election October 17, I put Terry Fallis's The Best Laid Plans on the reading list for one of my October book group discussion groups. Right now I'm about half way through it, and until this point I've been amazed at how many resonances this book, published in 2008, has with what's going on now. 

True the event that seems to insure that the candidate who only agreed to be a candidate in order to get out of teaching English to Engineers. i (Hint: a sex scandal involving his opponent, leather and nipple rings are involved.) But the vagaries of public opinion as well as the inner workings of political campaign are well portrayed. (Hint: there's quite a bit about lawn signs, telephone canvassing and door to door.)

Of course, I have to confess that in another life I spent far too much time organizing political campaigns and tried in one of my first novels (Endangered Species) to give a taste of the rush a political junkie gets from filling out phone canvass forms. My editor that time around made me cut a lot of the details. Fallis either was smarter than I or had a good editor too, because this novel is mostly fun. 

Should also add that this is a very Canadian book: I can't imagine what Fallis would do with Donald Trump.

End of Summer Reading: Stories

The heat broke in Montreal overnight, so this is a day that maybe be liveable, sans air conditioning. Makes reading a lot easier, too. 

Nevertheless I read during the heat wave, and not just sitting on the stairs underneath the fan. Finished Mavis Gallant's excellent Montreal Stories (edited by Russell Banks whose introduction is interesting and who did a marvelous in choosing these stories from Gallant's many, many stories.) In the book discussion groups I lead, a question often asked is "Why does an author write short stories, and not novels?" It's one that I'm sure will come up when we discuss this collection. 

The stories concern clusters of characters, and one could argue that Gallant might have made a big, sprawling novel out of them. She chose, however, to explore various facets of her people's lives, without a real narrative thread. It's up to the reader to make the connections, and in so doing reflect more deeply on their lives and times. The experience is that much richer, since the reader becomes a real accomplice in the telling of the story. 

These stories also appear to have been written over at least a 20 year period, and it's possible that Gallant saw more and more in her characters as she lived with them. That's something to be thankful for too, as her writing grew more nuanced, her tone surer with the years.

Definitely worth sitting down to read. I'd recommend not reading more than two stories at a sitting, in order to give yourself time to reflect on the stories

Novels to Accompany an Election Campaign

Now that Canada is gearing up for the longest Federal election campaign in memory, and the American Republican Presidential hopefuls are set to debate this week, it's time, perhaps, to think about what one might read while observing the parties' shenanigans.  Here are half a dozen, enough to keep you reading through all those weeks of campaign.

1. The ultimate political junkie's novel is Primary Colors, by Joe Klein.  It was originally published with "Anonymous" listed as the author, but Klein was eventually outted.  Several of the characters are clearly modelled on Bill and Hillary Clinton and their friends.

2.  Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings' Men, about an initially idealistic, but ultimately corrupt Southern politician.

3. The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon. An American POW from the Korean war is brainwashed  and programmed to kill a U.S presidential candidate.

4. Wag the Dog by Larry Bienhart.  Getting George Bush elected by staging a war.

5. The Suffrage of Elvira by V.S. Naipaul.  A slapstick, cynical novel about the first popular election on a newly independent island in the Caribbean.


6. And I'll throw one in that I did a long time ago: Endangered Species.  It  takes place in 1990 during a by-election that was inspired by the one where Gilles Duceppe was elected for the first time as a Bloc Québécois MP.  Worked a lot on the NDP campaign that summer  which was a disaster, but times change, don't they?

The book appears to be out of print, but you can still get it in some libraries, and I have a lot of copies in the basement, should anyone want one. (Price: $2 plus postage.)

The Corrupt and the Foolish: Becky and Emmie in Vanity Fair

This summer, as I said earlier,  I'm reading about corruption for a new fiction project. I asked friends (real and virtual) to suggest books that dealt with the topic in June and got a most interesting list. One of them was the classic, Vanity Fair, which I thought I'd read before.

But I discovered I hadn't, and I'm very glad that I decided to check it out "again." 

Two women are at the heart of this huge book: poor and clever Rebecca Sharp and poor and boring Amelia Sedley. The time is the beginning of the 19th century, roughly between 1815 and 1832, and the scene is England for the most part. Published in 1848 in installments, the novel is well over 800 pages long but the reader shouldn't be scared off by its bulk. It's full of humour, irony and sly comments about how the rich get rich and the poor get poorer, that resonant in this time of rising inequality. 

Becky Sharp, who at the beginning is just a poor orphan girl who has to look out for herself, becomes a schemer, and--we're led to suspect--someone not above a little creative chemistry in order to keep herself in the styler to which she'd like to become accustomed. Emmie is a fool for love, but luckily has protectors who keep her from "falling" into the sort of behavior that is Becky's lot. Becky is corrupt, I suppose, but it's perfectly clear why she is, and my sympathies are with her far more than with the saintly Emmie. 

It took me ten days of reading evenings to get through  the book.  The fact that I went through it so quicly says a lot about how engaging it is.

River Music Giveaway Results, and a Nice Review

In the flurry of activity around here, I forgot to post the Goodreads Giveaway results.  The lucky three winners of a copy of River Music are:

Barry Kazimer of Campbell River, BC, Kelley Burrow of Morenc, MI and Caitlin Wardle of Adelaide, SA.   The books will be in the mail in a couple of days. 

And the latest on the review front:

Ian McGillis writes about River Music  in The Gazette. "Swept up by River Music: Mary Soderstrom's new novel charts course of pioneering pianist.:

Just Hours Left in the River Music Giveaway.

At midnight it will be all over, so enter now for a chance to win one of three copies of River music.  Just click here.

Corruption, Or What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men

The Shadow was a radio program that I loved to be frightened by when I was a child.  It began with a voice (in some cases that of Orson Welles, I just discovered) asking "who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men: and answering after a wicked laugh: "The Shadow knows."

And evil what's I've been thinking about it lately as I start to work on a new fiction project.  The characters are going to be wound up somehow in a skein of corruption.  How they get there is something I'm trying to determine.

Listening to the radio shows, I see that it's all too easy to paint things in sharply contrasting colours.  Getting from good intentions (with which we all know the road to Hell is paved) to outright corruption is considerably more complicated.  So a few weeks ago I sent out a Facebook request for suggestions on how other writers have dealt with the whole idea of corruption.

The list my FB buddies came up with very interesting.  Here it is, in no particular order.

Lady MacBeth, Shakespeare
Solomon Gursky Was Here and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Mordecai Richler,
Morvern Caller, Alan Warner;
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald;
The Man Who Corrupted Hadleysburg, Mark Twain;
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray;
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren;
F, Daniel Kehlmann;
JR, William Gaddis;
Faust, Goethe;
The In-Between world of Vikram Lall, MG Vassanj;
Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe;
La Curée (The Chase in English), Emile Zola;
Freedom, Jonathan Franzen;
Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene;
What's Bred in the Bone,  Robertson Davies;
Two Solitudes, Hugh MacLennan;
Un homme et son péché, Claude Henri Grignon


And to top things off, a whole list of list of political novels, some of which deal with corruption, and some not.

I've been making my way through the list, although I realize with some of them as I  read just a few pages that this is not what I want/need to know.  But it makes an fascinating reading program with no time to listen to radio drama.


s

All about Them Books. No Kindle

No Reviews But Good Comments from Friends

One of the thing I learned a long time ago is never to ask a friend if he or she liked one of my books.  If they did, they'll tell you.  If they didn't, well, they're going to be reluctant to say.

So it has been a great, great pleasure to have several messages from friends who have read River Music and really liked it.  A couple have ordered the ebook version, while others have sought out copies in local book stores.  "A page turner," one friend said.  "Very, very, very good," another wrote.

There have been no formal reviews yet.  The Montreal Review of Books and The Gazette are supposed to have ones too.  It would be lovely if they were as positive.

The Morning after....

Great launch at Librairie Drawn and Quaterly last night.  Now to get back to reading and writing normally.

Debussy, Bach and Vivier: Music in Gloria Murray's Life

Pianist Gloria Murray, the heroine of my novel River Music, specializes at the beginning of her career in Debussy with a bit of Bach thrown in.   But as she develops musically, she branches out until in her late 50s she encounters the music of Quebec composer Claude Vivier.

By chance she hears his  Lonely Child, a work for voices and orchestra, in a broadcast of  its first performance in Vancouver.  The work speaks to her because she, too, was a lonely child.  Then the story of this tortured man becomes tangled with her own....

To find out more, all are invited to the launch party from 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday May 27 at the Librairie Drawn and Quarterly, 211 Bernard West, Montreal.

Okay, River Music Has Arrived

This photo's pretty poor, but I had to post it because it gives some idea of the lovely time I had on Thursday, May 14, presenting River Music to about 60 people in the Atwater Library.

The books arrived the day before, and I only saw a copy a bit before I began to talk about the book to the bibliophiles present.  (Jana Stuart, by the way, beautifully played Debussy's The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, a piece important to the story, as part of the presentation.) 

There will be more copies in stores soon, May 27 we'll celebrate with a launch party at Librairie Drawn and Quaterly.

Out of Character: Maureen Forrester's Autobiography

The life of a great artist is never easy, particularly when he or she must fight for training.  The Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester is a brilliant example, and she also had the wit to write an engaging autobiography about how she succeeded.

Out of Character was published in 1986, 
when she was at the height of her career.  Funny, frank and full of insights into what it takes to forge a musical career, the book details her struggles at the beginning, her marriage to violinist Eugene Kash, the birth of her five children and her distingished international presence.  She lived another 24 years, dying in 2010 of dementia-related problems. 

When I first read this book well before she died, I was impressed by how determined she was to sing, and how she tried to balance her career with her personal life.  Ten years ago when I started thinking about writing a book with a concert pianist as the principle character, I returned to it.  Forrester's autobiography gives much  insight into what it's like to build a world-class career--and how hard it is for a woman to balance passion for an art and love in all its forms.

If my novel River Music is any good, I owe a lot to Forrester's generous sharing of her life in this most entertaining and insightful autobiography.

River Music Countdown Begins

All right, it looks like everything's a go.

Monday I signed off on the copy for the cover of River Music, and Alessandra Ferrari, Cormorant's publicity director, just wrote that copies of the book will be shipped to arrive in Montreal May 13.

That will be perfect for the Words and Music even the Atwater Library is planning for Thursday, May 14.  That's when I'll present the book at 12:30 p.m., and pianist Jana Stuart will play some Debussy that is very important in the novel. 

Then we'll have an official launch party at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 27 at the Librairie Drawn and Quarterly, 211 Bernard West, in the Mile End district of Montreal. 

And to whet your appetite, here's an excerpt from the publicity bumph:

"Set against a backdrop of war, economic changes, and social upheavals, River Music explores the sacrifices that women make to fulfill their destiny, the wildcards of sex and passion, and the complicated relationships between mothers and their children.   

After an adolescence playing in churches and hotel lobbies, Gloria Murray  prepares to study in post-World War II France, but tpassion intrudes and, halfway through her year abroad, she finds herself forced into a hard choice that she shares with no one. Back in Canada, her career blossoms, she marries and has two children, and her secret seems best forgotten — until, thirty years later, her past and her career collide."

The End of Empires: Thoughts on the Armenian Genocide

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Turks, as the Ottoman Empire entered its death throes.  There are a number of articles and programs about the event, but here are a handful of books that give a wider
context to what happened.

1. The Ottoman Empire began in the heyday of the Mongols: its dates are usually given as 1299-1923.  To understand who the Mongols are, read Jack Weatherford's excellent Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.  The great Khan was a Mongol chieftain who believed that he and his people were chosen by heaven--The Great Blue Sky--to conquer the world. By the end of his lifetime he and his four sons held sway over the greatest empire the world knew until the Britania ruled the waves 400 years later. They and their mounted followers went as far as the grasslands of Eurasia extended. Only the forests of Europe and the heat and humidity of southern India and Southeast Asia--both unwelcoming to mounted warriors--limited their advance.

Cruel in the extreme to those who refused to surrender, they searched talent wherever they went, and, Weatherford writes, produced a body of law that was relatively egalitarian and allowed considerable religious freedom.

2. Ali and Nino  by Kurban Said. The Romeo and Juliet lovers of this novel set in Azerbaijan are Georgian and Muslim, but the uneasy relation between Armenians and their neighbors is in the background.

3.  The Goodtime Girl by Tess Fragoulis. The Armenians were not the only victims of Turkish agression in the early 20th century: the Greeks of Anatolia also were chased and kill.  In this novel, the main character is a young woman who was her father's darling in the early 1920s in Smyrna.   When Greeks were driven from the city by Turks in 1922, she escaped to Pireaus and Athens where she ended up singing other people's songs of distress and love.

The worst of the story happens off stage.  Kivelli has wiped part of it from her mind.  It resurfaces in her dreams and in an abbreviated version told about half way through the book.  But we know always that a number of people were beastly to a number of others for reasons which in no way justify what happened.

Kivelli is a survivor, and sings her sorrows so movingly that she is able to escape. That she sings the songs of other people is also poignant, because Fragoulis makes it clear that while many people may have stories to tell, not all of them have the voice to tell them.

Novels about Art and Artistic Vision

The informal French language reading goup I belong to--called the Durochères because when it began more than 30 years ago all its members lived on avenue Durocher--just finished reading and discussing La beauté m'assassine, a novel about Delacroix (self portrait to the right.)  Written by Michelle Tourneur, it is told from the point of view of a young woman dying to become an artist, and who figures out a way to work in Delacroix's studio at a time when no woman could study painting seriously.

The book hasn't been translated into English, but those who read French will find it fascinating.  A good companion that deals with the artistic temperment and process is The Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated from Spanish (in French it's Le  Paradis, un peu plus loin), the novel tell two stories, that of Paul Gauguin (self portrait below) and his proto-feminist grandmother Flora Tristan. 

The painter, who deserted his wife and children to go print in Tahiti and environs, comes off as a thoroughly unpleasant, irresponsible person who (nevertheless? because of which? inspite of this?) painted some marvelous pictures.  His grandmother, married off when a teenager to a terrible man, escapes to South America, but ends up fighting for the independence necessary to rear her children away from her violent husband.  Along the way she writes a couple of muck-raking books about the conditions of the working class in England and Franc of the 1830s, and about the condition of women. 

Delacroix, at least in Tourneur's fiction, comes off as a more sympathetic character by 21st century  standards.  Both artists revel--frequently too much--in the flesh of young women, though.  Where to draw the line between artistic vision and lechery, beween beauty of form and colour and obsession with the flesh?  Don't know.  But these two books are good places to start a reflection on the topic.

Two Novels by North Americans That Shine Spotlights on Africa

The news yesterday was full of images from Nigeria, where people were marking the sad anniversary of the kidnapping of 132 girls and young women by Boko Haram a year ago.  What is going on with fundamentalist groups is extremely hard for me to understand.  The BBC recently did a piece on the Nigerian group, which gives some context.  The aim is a caliphate where Sharia law rules, it seems.  Everything Western should be forbidden.

But Muslims are not the only terrorists in the world, as witness Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group operating on borders separating Uganda, Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ostensibly motivated by Christian revelations, it uses child soldiers with impunity.

Inter-ethnic violence also is a curse, and probably to date conflicts like those which have pitted  Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi have killed and displaced more than the Muslim groups have.

How did things come to this?  Two novels I read recently give a little insight.

The first is Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron. It tells the story of Jean-Patrick Nkuba, a Tutsi in Rwanda who wants to run.  He has a chance to represent his country in the Olympics, but is caught up in the 1994 genocide.  Much of his family is wiped out, but he escapes.  The frenzy that led up to killing spree--estimates are that at least 500,000 people were killed in three months--is portrayed in terrifying detail.  The story is not all horror though because it ends with a certain hopefulness that forgiveness is possible.

The subtext is that competition for land can be manipulated to profit the self-interest of individuals, and that vestges of colonial domination have exacerbated things.

The second is Three Weeks in December   by Audrey Schulman  takes place in Rwanda and Kenya. There actually are two "three weeks," the first at the end of the 19th century and the other at the beginning of the 21st.  In  alternating sections, Schulman tells the story of an engineer from Maine who heads up the team building of a railroad from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to what would become Nairobi, and of a brilliant woman ethnobotanist who has Asperger's Syndrome and who is searching for a medicinal plant in the mountains where the last mountain gorillas live.  

There's an O. Henry-like ending that ties things up which I won't spoil, but I think it's fair to say the two stories point out what colonialism has done to the people and ecosystems of  Africa.  The dignified, wise hunter-gatherers of the first period contrast drastically with the drugged children's army, the Kuti, that Shulman has invented, who thrash about, trying to recreate a pre-colonial state. Similarly, the starving lions who ravage the railroad workers in the first story presage the sorry state of the gorillas that the ethnobotanist hopes to protect.

Both novels are good reads.  The Schulman one, however, is plagued by sloppy editing that casts doubt on the background research that she's done.  The two that bothered me the most were the reference to iced tea being drunk in 1899 on a ship in the Indian Ocean (where'd the ice come from?) and the repeated reference to jerricans, those useful metal containers that weren't invented until the 1930s. 

Book List Time

When you lead book discussion groups in libraries, this is the time to think about what is going to be read next season.  This week I've promised to come up with the dates for 2015-16, and also to begin looking to see which of the suggestions are available in sufficient quantity to provide a copy for the group members.

So far here is what I and my bookie friends have come up with:

Cain by José Saramago:

"In this, his last novel, Saramago daringly reimagines the characters and narratives of the Bible through the story of Cain. Condemned to wander forever after he kills Abel, he is whisked around in time and space. He experiences the almost-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, the Tower of Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Joshua at the battle of Jericho, Job's ordeal, and finally Noah's ark and the Flood. And over and over again Cain encounters an unjust, even cruel God. A startling, beautifully written, and powerful book, in all ways a fitting end to Saramago's extraordinary career."--

A Beautiful truth by Colin McAdam

This is an edgy, epic, and heartfelt story about parenthood, friendship, loneliness, and conflict, about the things we hold sacred as humans and the facts that link us inevitably to a nature we often ignore. Told simultaneously from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, and in a way that only a literary master such as Colin McAdam can, A Beautiful Truth is a novel of great heart and wisdom that exposes the yearnings, cruelty, and resilience of all great apes.

Caught by Lisa Moore Fresh out of jail, Slaney sees the world with pin-bright clarity. As the plot tightens like a pair of pincers, Lisa Moore's prose is worth lingering over"

The Narrow Road to the Deep North  by Richard Flanagan

The book tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor haunted by a wartime love affair with his uncle's wife. Post war, he finds his growing celebrity as a war hero at odds with his sense of his own failings and guilt.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River.

The 100-year-old man who climbed out the window and disappeared  by Jonas Jonasson

Allan Karlsson is about to celebrate his hundredth birthday, and a birthday party is planned at his retirement home. Allan is alert despite his age, but not so interested in the party. Instead he steps out the window and disappears. He gets hold of a suitcase of drug money and becomes chased by both drug dealers and the police.

The good luck of right now by   Matthew Quick

            When his mother dies, 38-year-old Bartholomew Neil, who doesn't know how to be on his own, discovers a letter in his mother's underwear drawer that causes him to write a series of highly intimate letters to actor Richard Gere, while embarking on a quest to find out where he belongs.

The Husband's secret        by  Liane Moriarty

            Discovering a tattered letter that says she is to open it only in the event of her husband's death, Cecelia, a successful family woman, is unable to resist reading the letter and discovers a secret that shatters her life and the lives of two other women. By the author of What Alice Forgot.

Before I go to sleep   by  S.J. Watson

            Without her husband's knowledge, Christine, whose memory is damaged by a long-ago accident, is treated by a neurologist who helps her to remember her former self through journal entries until inconsistencies begin to emerge, raising disturbing questions.

Us Conductors by Sean Michaels

Us Conductors takes us from the glamour of Jazz Age New York to the gulags and science prisons of the Soviet Union. On a ship steaming its way from Manhattan back to Leningrad, Lev Termen writes a letter to his “one true love”, Clara Rockmore, telling her the story of his life. Imprisoned in his cabin, he recalls his early years as a scientist, inventing the theremin and other electric marvels, and the Kremlin’s dream that these inventions could be used to infiltrate capitalism itself. Instead, New York infiltrated Termen – he fell in love with the city’s dance clubs and speakeasies, with the students learning his strange instrument, and with Clara, a beautiful young violinist.

And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini  

Khaled Hosseini's novels have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide. Now, six years after A Thousand Splendid Suns debuted at #1, spending fourteen consecutive weeks at #1 and nearly a full year on the hardcover list, Hosseini returns with a book that is broader in scope and setting than anything he’s ever written before.

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence,

The Stone Angel, first published in 1964 by McClelland and Stewart, is perhaps the best-known of Margaret Laurence's series of novels set in the fictitious town of Manawaka, Manitoba. In parallel narratives set in the past and the present-day (early 1960s), The Stone Angel tells the story of Hagar Currie Shipley. In the present-day narrative, 90-year-old Hagar is struggling against being put in a nursing home, which she sees as a symbol of death. The present-day narrative alternates with Hagar's looking back at her life.

Montreal Stories by Mavis Gallant,

Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The complexity of the very idea of home is alive in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal. Montreal Stories, Russell Banks’s new selection from Gallant’s work demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer’s singular art.

The Best Laid Plans by Terri Fallis,

“This is a funny book that could only have been written by someone with firsthand knowledge of politics in Canada, including its occasionally absurd side. This is a great read for anyone thinking of running for office, and especially reassuring for those who have decided not to.”

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

Set during the Japanese occupation, The Garden of Evening Mists follows young law graduate, Yun Ling Teoh, as she seeks solace among the plantations of the Cameron Highlands. Here she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the secretive Aritomo. Aritomo agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice “until the monsoon” so that she can design a garden in memorial to her sister. But over time the jungle starts to reveal secrets of its own…

Butterflies in November by Audur Ava Ólafsdóttr.  From the Icelandic writer who brought us The Green House. "Anyone who’s fallen inexplicably in love with a European road-trip story will be vulnerable to this fictional journey around Iceland’s Ring Road."

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguru. The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England.

The Headmaster's Wager by Vincent Lam. The author takes full advantage of the inherent suspense as the fall of Saigon looms and Chen finally realizes that he and his family may not survive the violence of the Viet Cong.

Reading, Not Speeding: What a Good Story Deserves

This is book discussion week, and I'm rereading Anne Enright's The Gathering and François Gravel's Adieu, Betty Crocker.  Both of them I enjoyed on first reading, or I wouldn't have included them in the book lists for the discussion groups I lead.

Sometimes when I do a re-read I find myself struggling with the book which I now find less interesting than I did when I was setting up the lists.  Occasionally I've been so un-enthralled this second time that I've resorted to reading every other page, or even just the final 40 or 50 pages.  This lack of enthusiasm doesn't mean the discussion won't be good, since often the best ones are about books that at least some of the people in the group don't like.

But this time I'm taking my time, really enjoying the story.  These are two books which are quite different, but each has layers of language and meaning that delight. And while I sometimes bewail the fact that there are "so many books, so little time," I'm not at all sure that speed-reading is what one wants to aim for.  Better to savour what you read, taking your time to think.

Happy Endings and Atul Gawande

At the moment I'm between writing projects--or rather I'm trying to decide which direction to go in.  One possibility is a longish short story to be called "Happy Endings:" I don't know anything more about than the title, but I like it a lot.

At the same time, a book group I belong to has just read Atul Gawande's latest, Being Mortal.   It's an essay about how we deal with the end of life now.  A surgeon, writer, and public health researcher, Gawande is thought-provoking and extremely readable.

This last quality comes in part because he's thought a lot about the story that each of writes in our own lives.  He writes:

"For human beings, life is meaningful becaue it is  story.  a story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens...

"A semingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted ot a great cause. ...Unlike your experiencing self--which is absorbed in the moment--you remembering self is attempting recognize not only the peaks of joy an the valley sof misery but also how the story works out as a whole.  That is profoundly affectedby how things ultimately turn out.  Why would a fooball fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss? Because a football game is a story. 

" And in stories, endings matter."

Worth thinking about, whether you're contemplating your life or those of others.

What I Read...

I'll go into more detail later, but here are a couple of interesting (and extremely different) books I read over the last few months:

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
From the Library Journal: "Every now and again a literary work changes the way people think. Abulhawa...has crafted a brilliant first novel about Palestine... [This] intensely beautiful fictionalized history... should be read by both politicians and those interested in contemporary politics.”

Every now and again a literary work changes the way people think. Abulhawa...has crafted a brilliant first novel about Palestine... [This] intensely beautiful fictionalized history... should be read by both politicians and those interested in contemporary politics.”  - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mornings-in-jenin-9781608190461/#sthash.6cgzRfTl.dpuf

“Every now and again a literary work changes the way people think. Abulhawa...has crafted a brilliant first novel about Palestine... [This] intensely beautiful fictionalized history... should be read by both politicians and those interested in contemporary politics.” –  Library Journal - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mornings-in-jenin-9781608190461/#sthash.6cgzRfTl.dpuf

Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron
A novel about Rwanda which won the Bellwether Prize, awarded biennially by Barbara Kingsolver for an unpublished novel that addresses issues of social justice.

And for something completely different

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
A romantic comedy featuring an oddly charming, socially challenged genetics professor,   as he seeks true love.

More Book Talk Coming up, Now That I've Got a Lot of Book Work Done

This morning I sent off a draft of my new non-fiction book Road through Time to a publisher who seems interested in it.  What a great feeling!

Reading it over for one last time before I let it go, I was rather pleased with what I've done.  Will be interesting to see what the publishing guys say.

This last couple of weeks I've also beeing working revisions and copyreading proofs of my novel River Music, which should be available in mid-May.  That, too, was a very interesting experience, as it had been more than a year since I'd read it.  Marc Côté at Cormorant Books had done an excellent job in editing it, and I was pleasantly surprised at how good the book was--like reading somebody else's work!

So now that things are more or less back to normal, I'll be posting more often.  My work schedule hasn't kept me from reading other things, so I've a great backlog of comments on books to share.

The photo, by the way, is of the Andes, taken on my research trip to South America a year and a half ago.

Preview of What's Coming: River Music

Here's the cover for my new novel River Music, scheduled to be published by Cormorant Books this spring.

I'll be talking about the long road that got me to this point on at 7 p.m. Wednesday, February 4, 2015 at the Roxboro Public Library, 110 Rue Cartier, Montréal, QC H8Y 1G8.

There are a limited number of places, so to reserve contact the library at: 514) 684-8247.