More recent reading

Here are brief notes on some books I've read recently. 

Behind the beautiful forevers, by Katherine Boo is brilliant narrative journalism by a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist of Dutch origin (hence her name) about a few families and young children  living on their own in the sprawling shanty-town slum I remember seeing - and smelling - on the approach road to Mumbai (Bombay) International Airport. The "beautiful forevers" are the high painted fences that prevent the slum from encroaching on the airport. The inhabitants of this slum are at the very bottom of the socio-economic heap, a bad place to be in any country, probably worse in a huge Indian city like Mumbai than almost anywhere else. Somehow they survive, much of the time anyway, though many die too, confronted by universal corruption, merciless bullying, cheating, robbery, to which they are subjected. This is an outstanding book, hard to put down to eat or sleep.

419 by Will Ferguson won the Giller Prize last year.  I think it's over-rated rubbish, strains credibility beyond breaking point. Real people would have to be extraordinarily naive and very stupid to behave as do some of the characters in this implausible story of Nigerian con artists who loot the savings of gullible Canadians.

Still life and A Trick of the Light are two elegant who-dunnits by Louise Penny, set in the fictional village of Three Pines, home to artists and writers in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. They are part of a series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec. Two may be enough for me but if I feel in the mood for more, there are several, all reputedly as good as these two.

Essays of E B White.  I read some of these when they appeared in the New Yorker in the late 1940s. It was a nostalgic pleasure to reread them.; and they took me back to archy and mehitabel as I've already related in an earlier post 

Things I didn't know, by Robert Hughes, the Australian art historian and public intellectual. is a memoir that, like Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton,  opens with an account of a life-changing crisis - a near fatal road traffic crash - then traces the course through life from childhood onward, of Robert Hughes.  Like The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes's account of convict colonization of New South Wales, it's beautifully written, an ideal memoir. I am following this model in the latest revision of my own memoirs and intend to test drive some opening paragraphs of this revision in a forthcoming post on this blog.

Alexander McCall Smith's series about Isobel Dalhousie, independently wealthy editor of the fictitious Journal of Applied Ethics is highly addictive- for me anyway, and I imagine for many other lovers of Edinburgh who have the misfortune to be exiled from that loveliest of cities.  The latest in this series is The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds, but when I sing the praises of this series in particular, I suggest to anyone unfamiliar with Edinburgh and with Isobel Dalhousie, start at the beginning with the first book in the series, The Sunday Philosophy Club.  Was there ever a more prolific author?  I doubt it. And his books, though light, always contain skillfully wrapped moral and ethical conundrums that add heft to their seeming light weight. They are well written too.

Did I mention Carmen Aguirre's memoir, Something Fierce in an earlier post? This won the Canada Reads contest on CBC Radio, deservedly so. It's a rattling good yarn about a girl, exiled with her family from Pinochet's Chile, daughter of opponents of the regime, who spent her early childhood in Canada and became a revolutionary in adolescence.  It's a coming of age memoir with hair-raising accounts of gun-running and other adventures, illicit journeys into Chile, a catch-as-catch-can education acquired in Bolivia, Argentina as well as Canada; learning to fly so she could pilot plane-loads of guns into Chile.  I suppose most of it is true.   

What else?  I've reread a biography of Tommy Douglas, founder of Canadian Medicare and voted the Greatest Canadian in a CBC-sponsored poll.  I struggled through Eugenia, by Mark Tedeschi, an Australian book that brother Peter sent me, about a transsexual woman who lived as a man for many years and 'married' two women, one of whom he/she was accused and convicted of murdering. It's interesting mainly as a reflection on the quality of Australian justice and forensic investigation in the 1920s,  the time of the events described. It's very well written. I don't know what it's like now but in my youth, Australian justice often resembled the frontier justice depicted in Hollywood movies, and clearly Eugenia Falleni was a victim of primitive justice - as would have been the case had the trial taken place in Canada, USA or the UK in the 1920s or before. I like to think we've advanced in the last 90-100 years. I liked the sympathetic discussion of gender identity in this book, and I'll share it with someone I know who has been struggling though problems associated with this state of affairs.

I almost forgot the iPad and e-books!  Many classics are available free from the Gutenberg  Collection; I've just finished Voltaire's Candide, and before that I read Pride and Prejudice (of course!); several of James Joyce's short stories, some of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; Fanny Hill; and a big chunk of Tristam Shandy; others too, but I forget exactly what.  I must have read a dozen or more other books since I last posted a 'book report' on this blog, but that's all I can recall for now.  Reading is my greatest pleasure and I do a prodigious amount of it, should use e-books more, but I love the sensuous pleasure of holding a book in my hands and turning the pages.