Some people shop for clothes or shoes when they travel. I mostly shop for books. They have become the focus of any trip, partly so I can find books I never see at home and partly to enjoy and to celebrate the remaining bricks and mortar book stores. On trips to Asia I pack my suitcase with toiletries for my son that are either expensive or unavailable there, and then bring books on the flight home.

I don’t pretend to have visited all the book stores in Canada, where I did most of my travelling before buying books became so much of a focus for me. There are certainly fewer than when I was young. Of stores I have visited in the past few years, the McNally Robinson ones in Winnipeg and Saskatoon have been a highlight. I am disappointed that White Cat Books in downtown Saskatoon has hit the dust, glad that Westgate Books seems stronger than ever in its new location.

I was struck by the scarcity of book stores in my last two visits to Vancouver. Perhaps people there are too busy with their outdoor lifestyle to read, too poor from the high cost of living to buy books, only read books from the library, or buy them on-line. On my visit in January of this year I felt that the Book Warehouse on Broadway had improved dramatically since the previous January and that it deserved a more imaginative or more accurately descriptive name.

When my husband and I were in Las Vegas in 2008, we toured a number of second-hand book stores that gave us a totally different view of the place than we got from the casinos and the Strip. He made a map, we took a taxi to the farthest one and then walked back to our hotel, stopping at all the stores along the way. We got a sense of a rooted reading culture, a feeling that people actually lived there.
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By John Irving, 2015

I started reading this book back in December, for the meeting on the 22^nd of the book club I think of as the Eating and Drinking Women.  Usually I read every book through at least once before the meeting and often twice.  Last month, though, I got to only page 170 before the discussion, which turned out to be brief and perfunctory.  This was especially striking in comparison to the previous month`s discussion of Harvest by Jim Crace, which had evoked passionate debate.  I had enjoyed that book although I had failed to see the deeper meanings that others did in that particular book.

The discussion of Avenue of Mysteries was perfunctory not just because we were even more focused than usual on eating and drinking because it was our Christmas meeting, but also because of the kind of book it is. Book clubbers who had read much more of John Irving than I have said Avenue of Mysteries is not his worst and not his best.

I remember reading The World According to Garp  shortly after it came out in 1978 and enjoying it. I don`t remember much about it except that it was a good story with a lot of characters and a lot of plot.   I have never gone in for reading bestsellers or books by very popular writers.  This type of book gets plenty of attention and hype without mine and there are so many books to read. Continue reading →

By Rosemary Sullivan, 2015

The subtitle of this book is no exaggeration.  In this winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Rosemary Sullivan brings together a huge amount of published and archival material, letters and interviews to create a compelling portrait of one of the most complex and tragic figures of the 20^th century.

Svetlana is best known for her defection in New Delhi in 1967, and for her autobiography Twenty Letters to a Friend.  She was in India to take home the ashes of her fourth (and common-law husband) and had already had three brief legal marriages.

A mother at 18, like most of the Soviet elite Svetlana took little interest in the day-to-day lives of her children. Her son and daughter from her early marriages were young adults when she left them behind, and distance and the KGB prevented her from ever establishing a better relationship. Continue reading →

In my long career as a reference and reader’s advisory librarian I had many conversations about books. Wide reading outside of work and a master’s degree in English enhanced these conversations. Over the years books took on new formats and digital sources of information appeared, but books and conversations about books were always central to my work. Some of these conversations were with co-workers and some were with library patrons.

Now that I no longer work at the library, I feel free to call them patrons rather than customers—a word to me redolent of McDonald’s and Walmart. Although better than customer, even the word patron fails to capture the nuances of many of these interactions but it’s the best word I have found.

There was tremendous satisfaction in sharing the intimacy of reading with near strangers. Not only did I make recommendations to them, my own reading took on new directions in response to patrons’ suggestions. During these years I kept a journal about almost every book I read, and a running list of titles and authors I wanted to look at.

In retirement I have found new joys but nothing to replace the camaraderie of the workroom and the satisfaction of talking about books with people I barely knew. Often the talking about books was a way to get to know interesting but shy people.

My participation in two book clubs is a boon in my current life. These groups meet intermittently, though, and do not replace the conversations I used to have every day. I confess that some of my ideas about books come from the women in these clubs; I hope no one will sue me for stealing her ideas.

This blog is an attempt to have a new kind of conversation and to keep track of my reading again. I am calling the blog Intoxicated by Books because I have been passionate about books since I learned to read more than six decades ago. I am crazy about books and could not live without them or imagine what my life would have been without them. To read is to live.

Through this blog I want to share some of my passion with other readers. It is a passion tempered by age, experience, education, and what used to be called taste. I was fortunate to have a mother who did not have the time or energy to censor my reading and I read practically anything that came my way during my book-starved rural childhood.  At school and later at university I had some excellent teachers and professors who helped me understand what makes a book good, mediocre, or bad.  I believe it’s necessary to read a lot of all three kinds of books to develop taste.

There will be no rating system, as I will discuss only books I feel are worthwhile. Books are essentially about life and reading is central to my life, so bits about my own life will be included.

If you are put off by books on serious subjects, you will not want to read this blog. I do not consider most of the books I read—which feature social dislocation, family dysfunction, torture and genocide—to be depressing. Reading on heavy topics is ultimately uplifting because it expands my humanity. I will read anything that speaks to me in what sounds like a real human  voice.  Depressing books give balance to my happy and privileged existence.

These are the books I have beside me as I begin this blog.

By Thierry Cruvellier, 2011

In my five trips to Asia, I have found the crowding and the humid heat of the places I have visited hard to bear. Had my younger son not chosen to live and work in Asia, I would probably never have gone there.

It was while touring Angor Wat in Cambodia in 2012 that I picked up pirated copies of First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung and The Pol Pot Regime by Ben Kiernan.  I was so affected by being in this ravaged country that I had to start learning more on the spot (while balancing out my reading about horror with British fashion magazines I got in the airport).  Years earlier I had read a library copy of the 2006 book The Lost Executioner by Nic Dunlop, the Irish photographer who tracked down Comrade Duch, whose trial for crimes against humanity is the subject of this book.

Thierry Cruvellier is a French journalist who previously wrote about the Rwandan and Balkan war crimes trials.  A reader needs a strong stomach to take in the details or even the broad outlines of the horrors Cruvellier has spent his working life recounting.

Comrade Duch spent the years of the Khmer Rouge regime as head of a prison of which the only survivors were seven prisoners whose professional skills were deemed essential. Like many totalitarians, Duch kept meticulous records of interrogation and torture, records which included individual photographs.  This record keeping was made more challenging by the fact that most of the regime’s best workers were illiterate.  A hatred of education, even of basic literacy, was at the heart of the regime, with even the wearing of spectacles being suspect. A competent and caring teacher in his previous life, Duch proved his orthodoxy by the zeal with which he threw himself into the work of extracting confessions. In a comment about another intellectual who zealously supported the Khmer Rouge, but that applies equally to Duch and to many Soviet revolutionaries, Cruvellier says, “Nothing is more chilling than a Communist intellectual.  Because an intellectual is, by definition, a member of the bourgeoisie, he must persuade others of his proletarian transformation.” He must, in essence, show his hatred of his own class and thus of himself.

At his trial Duch admits that no more than 10 or 20 per cent of any confession was actually true (make enough wild accusations, one or two of them may be true), but that was enough.  He shows something like regret only in the case of a respected professor, part of Cambodia’s small educated elite, who left the safety of Paris to discover the fate of his wife and seven children back home.

The Vietnamese invasion happened so suddenly and unexpectedly in January of 1979  that the prison was abandoned along with all its documentary evidence. Duch disappeared under an assumed name and went back to teaching.  When discovered by Nic Dunlop, Duch had  converted to Christianity after two weeks of instruction by an American evangelist and had himself  become a proselytizer. Cruvellier posits that Duch converted to spare himself the ordeal of the endless reincarnations his crimes would have warranted in Buddhism. Karma would not have been kind to one who had committed such terrible crimes. He would have been lucky to be reborn as a louse in the hair of one of his victims.

With the exception of the professor, Duch exhibits little empathy for the people he killed or for their survivors. He is the epitome of the separating off of different aspects of the personality. His expressions of regret seem to be nothing but words, and his conversion too convenient to be true.  As a Christian, although not a  conventional one, I reject the notion that in a moment the most terrible sins can be forgiven.  I am sorry if I forget my friend’s birthday, I am sorry if I step on a stranger’s foot on the bus, sorry if I say or do anything unkind. Sorry does not begin to atone for the crimes of Duch. Sorry means nothing if it does not include empathy.

Like the Nazis, Duch used the defense that he was just following orders.  He was part of a whole system based on obedience and unquestioning acceptance of authority. Many of those who died were devout pretty much illiterate communists; their zealousness did not save them but Duch somehow believed his zeal was going to save him and his wife and children.

I try very hard to distance myself from the crimes of Duch, to see them as beyond the pale of anything I or anyone I know personally could commit. In considering the actions of Duch, we have to look inside ourselves and seriously consider what we could be capable of, given the worst possible circumstances.  Writing of the historian David Chandler’s book on the history of Duch’s prison, Cruvellier says: “In order to find the root of evil that was implemented every day at S-21, we should not look any further than ourselves.”

There is no punishment that would fit such horrible crimes. The main purpose of war crimes and genocide trials is to establish the facts and to give the survivors a place to be heard.  The testimony of the daughter of the murdered professor Phung Ton is particularly heart-rending. Duch says he had no idea the man he respected so much “ . . . was incarcerated in his prison. The face-to-face between the torturer and the victim’s daughter ends in stalemate.  With cold reserve, she looks into his eyes, then turns her back on him forever.”

My parents raised me to believe I have a human duty to be informed about what goes on in the world.  The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia is one of those preventable tragedies that everyone should know about. When I began reading the books I bought at Angor Wat, I beat myself up for being only vaguely aware of the events of 1975 to 1979 while they were happening.  Western intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky were apologists for the regime, and they were aided in their denials by the sheer unlikelihood of a government starving its own people to death and of killing millions by hitting them on the back of the head with a shovel and then slitting their throats.  And the country was so cut off that even Cambodians abroad could get no news of their families.

During these years I had just embarked on my career in libraries, and for two of these years was in library school.  If family members of the victims were in the dark, how could I, a university student and library worker in Edmonton, Alberta, in her twenties, have known more?

The best I can do is to know more now.

By Edith Hahn Beer with Susan Dworkin, 1999

I am fascinated by spy stories, and find stories of double agents the most engaging of all.  I am sure I give myself away in trying to pass off even a small white lie, so reading about someone whose whole persona is an elaborate tissue of lies takes me away from myself.  I also am practically addicted to Holocaust and concentration camp memoirs, and my book shelf contains a number of both kinds.  These kinds of books are  removed from my own life while they make statements about the universality of pain and inhumanity.

I picked up The Nazi Officer’s Wife at the Whyte Avenue Value Village, and thought I would give it a quick skim through.  In fact, I read every word.

Edith has a happy childhood in Vienna in a basically secular family.  Her happiness ends when the Nazis come to power in 1938. Edith escapes removal to the east by adopting the identity of an Austrian women who swears she lost all her papers in the Danube while boating. With these papers Edith does her best to disappear into provincial life in Germany. Her disguise  involves being as quiet, pleasant, and apparently dull-witted as possible.

When a German man becomes her lover, Edith is trapped in what is essentially an abusive relationship, but it is the best she can do under the circumstances. She throws herself into being the perfect German housewife as a means to survival.  Her lover Werner—eventually her husband and the father of her child—is an angry, powerful man who is protective of those he loves. Early in the relationship she tells him about her Jewishness and he does not betray her.  He could be killed for consorting with a Jew, he could also be killed or at least severely punished for the elaborate highly convincing lies he tells to get off work in his job painting Luftwaffe bombers.  And eventually they listen to the BBC together with the radio under the pillow. Blind in one eye because of a motorbike accident, Werner is drafted and quickly becomes an officer when German is losing, and is soon a prisoner in the Soviet Union.

The complexity of Edith’s relationship with this man kept me reading.  She is frank about enjoying sex with him, saying it was the closest thing to freedom she knew during those years. While he is still a POW, she draws on her previous legal training to become a family court judge in the GDR and remembers this job as the most satisfying time of her life.  She is able to pull enough strings to expedite her husband`s return but the marriage quickly falls apart, as he cannot accept having his previously subservient wife working outside the home in a position of power. When the Party puts pressure on her to pull strings back, that is, to inform on her neighbours and co-workers, she escapes to West Berlin with her daughter.

From the daughter`s prologue I get the sense that the rest of Edith’s life was nowhere near as vivid or as oddly satisfying as the years of her first marriage and her work as a judge. As Ian Buruma says in his history of the year 1945, many people had a difficult time making the transition from trauma to everyday life.

Source: Amazon.com

By Christos Tsiolkas, 2008

In a week when I gave away three books while managing to acquire seven more, I got this one at the Value Village on Whyte Avenue.  This seems to be a place where people drop off recent  books when they have finished them.

A dark tale set in contemporary Australia, the novel is the story, told by eight narrators, of the reverberations of an angry man slapping another guest’s horribly misbehaving child at a party.  The host, a sleekly successful Greek-Australian named Hector with a beautiful veterinarian wife named Aisha of South Asian origin, narrates the first chapter.  His cousin, the man who delivers the slap, is the second narrator. Connie, an orphaned student who works at the veterinary clinic who has been molested by Hector (her boss’s husband), is the third.  The fourth chapter is told by Rosie, the mother of the misbehaving child. The most engaging chapter is narrated by Manolis, Hector’s Greek immigrant father. There is a striking contrast between Manolis’s view of family as almost a full-time job and his daughter-in-law’s sense that family is the friends we choose.

Class, religious, gender, ethnic and racial tensions are front and centre at the party where the slap occurs, and in the characters’ reactions.  Hugo, the child who gets hit, is a horribly spoiled and unappealing brat, still breastfeeding at the age of four, to the disgust of mostly everyone except himself and his mother.  His unattractiveness makes taking a side more difficult.

Everybody in this novel casually uses drugs, smoking marijuana or popping ecstasy, even at family parties. Adults usually get to work and kids usually get to school in spite of all the drugs and alcohol consumed. The teenage Connie and Richie attend a drug-fuelled party where the parents are intentionally away overnight. For all their drug taking, the teenagers seem more wholesome than the adults, and if there is hope in the novel it resides with Connie and Richie.

Read this book only if you can handle the f-word and the c—t word used over and over again.  The repeated use of the latter word may reflect the misogyny of Australian society or of these particular characters. Perhaps I move in extremely wholesome circles, but I found both the language and the drug taking hard to take at times.

Nevertheless, I am glad I read the book because of the provocative issues it raises.

I have seen neither of the two TV minseries based on the novel.  A  friend says the Australian one is much better than the American

By Plum Johnson, 2014

This book  was discussed in both my book clubs. The winner of the RBC Taylor Prize in 2014, the memoir could hardly be more timely. Half the people I know have or will soon find themselves cleaning out their elderly or deceased parents’ houses. This book is the story of one woman’s sixteen-month journey in that direction.

It is full of detail about an interesting family. Johnson’s father Alex was upper class in origin but from a family that had come down in the world. As a young man he led an escape from Japanese captivity by boat. Her mother Anne could hardly have been more different from the disciplined, careful, ascetic man she married. Anne was a Southern belle, spontaneous, messy, disorganized, funny and good natured, never a cook or a housekeeper,  just short of being a pathological hoarder. Anne’s family of origin was so influential that even at 93 she saw herself as only a phone call or letter away from effecting change. Her suggestion to the Stratford Festival they use the term “Shakesperience” to enlarge their audience gave me a good chuckle.

The parents were united and fairly typical of their time in the way they managed the disciplining of their children. When Alex returned from his work day at an insurance company, Anne reported to him on the misdemeanours of Plum’s four younger brothers. The father beat them with a bamboo cane, then the mother comforted the boys and dried their tears. It’s amazing anybody grew up to be even sort of normal after such craziness.

Although Johnson makes much of how ordinary and typical her family is, they are far from either.  The house she is cleaning out has 23 rooms and a view of Lake Ontario. She attended Havergal College, and the family has silver going back to the 17^oos. By remortgaging the house, the family was able to afford twelve years of in-home care for the father and three more years for the mother. Most middle-class families I know would struggle to manage six months or a year. They also seem atypical in how well the siblings get along, in how peacefully they manage the division of property at the end.

The death of our parents infantilizes all of us in some sense, while turning us into their parents if they hang on long enough.  Johnson often comes across more like a petulant person in her thirties than a woman in her sixties. Her parents are more interesting characters, and the house itself becomes the strongest character in the book.  The sorting through of the rooms gives the book its structure. The discovery of a huge stash of letters, many of which the recipients returned to her mother because they felt they should be preserved, moves Plum forward by leaps and bounds in understanding her mother.

I freely admit to some sour grapes in my response to this book.  I came into the world in a two-room shack on a poor farm, quite unlike the mansion at the centre of this memoir. Our family did get away from this farm, but never had any valuable silver or paintings. My parents left me intangible riches, but in the end there was little property to divvy up. My family is not typical; neither is Plum Johnson’s.

We all have mothers, and the mother-daughter relationship is often the most fraught, as it is for Plum and Anne.  This relationship is a universal theme in literature, and it is well developed here. We all leave some sort of property to be divided, and that is the secondary theme of the memoir.

This book made me wonder what will happen to my things when I am gone. I am just beginning to figure out what to do with 40 years of letters from my mother, letters which are both a huge blessing and a bit of a curse.  The fact that one of my sons lives in the same city I do, and that I communicate with the other mostly through Skype, means my sons will never have many letters from me or me from them. I am determined the boys will have only a few papers to sort through, and for a “paper” person I do not have many.

I cannot say the same about books and dishes.  Will anyone want the set of Royal Doulton Rondo china I bought at a consignment store in Winnipeg at a good price?

They Left Us Everything will evoke such musings in many readers.