What I am reading

This biography of Trudeau covers the period from his birth in 1919 to 1968 when he won the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada. English proposes this as the first in a two volume study. He has access to personal and family documents which have not been available to other scholars.

What do we hope for in a biography? Unless we are out to sharpen knives or to burnish haloes, we want an honest disclosure and an intelligent assessment of the life of the subject. English has done his job. The book is an encompassing study. It reveals a real person, virtues and vices, successes and
failures. It probably won’t settle any arguments, but the
Trudeau-philic will find all they need to see his glory and
forgive his frailties; the Trudeau-phobic will find the evidence to support their vitriol and to downplay his accomplishments. What more could we ask for? This is a serious read with a substantial discussion of Trudeau’s beliefs and philosophy. This makes it more of a cerebral study than a venture in the bedroom gossip (though that is there too) but for me the effort required was worth it. I found new insight into the man and his behaviours.

Chandra is new to me though he has an impressive international reputation, so when I picked up Sacred Games and found myself facing 900 pages plus an additional 16 page glossary of foreign words, I felt a degree of trepidation. My fears were quickly calmed. I started checking unfamiliar words, but soon found that I could understand most from context. And the 900 pages turned out to be no problem because Chandra is masterful. The dialogue is compelling and the story moves along quickly.

You could call Sacred Games a crime story - cops and robbers - but that would be like saying The Sopranos is about the Mafia. The plot is simply a frame from which the writer displays India for our view. A friend told me about travelling to Calcutta as a tourist and feeling swamped, almost drowned, by the crowds, the sights, sounds, smells of a foreign culture. I had that feeling reading this book. I found myself in the midst of an exotic trip where memories of the past are hand-in-hand with the challenges of modernization in an ancient, multi-dimensional culture.

The history of India is entombed in every character, in every event, in every line of this book, and it is a troubled history - violent, corrupt, at times evil. But the writer’s vision is one of hope. He sees redemption arising from the decay, despair, and corruption he describes. He believes that events, before, during and after Partition are leading to a new society. A society without sectarian hatred. Let’s hope that he is right.

This is a terrible book - and I could not put it down.

There has been a huge world-wide catastrophe, perhaps an atomic war. Civilization has ceased to exist. Only ragged remnants remain - those who were not killed in the fire bomb,
those who have not yet starved, those who have not been killed and eaten, and those who have not committed suicide. Two of these, the man and the boy, are walking to where it may be warmer, perhaps even safer. They are on The Road.
Their’s is a fate you would not wish upon anyone. And here is the irony, McCarthy is such a great writer that, despite the horror and the terror, I had to keep on reading. I guess the Pulitzer people liked it too. They gave him the 2007 award for fiction for this book.

This story, set in a remote settlement in rural Nova Scotia, gives us the life of a young woman during the First World War. It is a book about beginnings: at this time Canada began to come of age as a country; folk medicine began to give way to scientific approach; North America experienced the initial stages of the fight to establish women’s rights. McKay links these themes with her heroine’s struggle to establish her own identity as a person. At times the narrative is gritty and explicit, but I thought it witty, whimsical, funny and sad; filled throughout with life and love, pain and sorrow.