Tag: book talk

reading

Book Talk: High Fidelity

Sue

“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time.” ― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

I’ve been on a reading binge lately. This tends to happen more in the summer when it’s light enough to relax on the porch with a book after dinner. Lately I’ve had the urge to revisit both contemporary and classic novels I read a long time ago. Not sure why exactly, though I’ve been doing the same thing with music so maybe it all comes down to age and nostalgia. A couple of weeks ago, I came across Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity while browsing the shelves of the same bookstore I used to work at when this book was released in the mid-nineties. I stocked the fiction shelves then and no doubt kept restocking this one at the height of its popularity. Nice that it’s still there.

The narrator Rob is thirty-five, a little older than me the first time I read it, and we had similar taste in music and I suppose we still do. Rob owns a failing record store in London, which reminds me why I never watched the movie version of the book. In the movie John Cusack owns a record store in Chicago. The main appeal of this novel for me is that the characters and setting are delightfully British. Rob’s longtime, live-in girlfriend Laura has just left him and he is both miserable and relieved about it until he begins to search a little deeper for the reasons why all of his relationships have failed so miserably. For once he can’t seem to find refuge from his problems in his huge record collection or by working in his store. Even his two offbeat employees and quirky customers have begun to infuriate him more than normal. The premise reminds me of Hugh Grant in the movie Notting Hill–the way Hugh’s character only stocked travel books and would grumpily chase out visitors who came in asking for popular fiction. Rob does the exact same thing if a customer has what he considers bad taste in music. Since High Fidelity (the novel) came before Notting Hill, is it safe to assume Hornby’s character Rob was the inspiration for Hugh Grant’s reserved bookstore character? Interesting…I hadn’t made that connection until now.

One day Rob takes a hard look around and notices this about his business, “The shop smells of stale smoke, damp, and plastic dust-covers, and it’s narrow and dingy and dirty and overcrowded, partly because that’s what I wanted–this is what record shops should look like, and only Phil Collins’s fans bother with those that look as clean and wholesome as a suburban Habitat–and partly because I can’t get it together to clean or redecorate it.”

Like Rob, I’m not a fan of Phil’s band Genesis, so this paragraph made me chuckle and it probably did in the nineties, too. It also effectively shows us that the state of Rob’s store mirrors the current state of his mind. While he tries to sort out the reasons why Laura suddenly dumped him by visiting former girlfriends who did the same to him over the years, he meets a free-spirited, female American recording artist, who’s just moved to his neighbourhood and performs often at the local pub. In my imagination I kept picturing the character of Marie as a young Joni Mitchell. I wanted much more of Marie’s background story! What about her romantic hopes and music dreams? Why doesn’t any of that matter when her character is pivotal to the plot? Anyway, Rob and Marie begin a casual relationship, and while it seems it’s what Rob has always wanted–no strings, no commitments–he soon realizes that the things his ex-girlfriend Laura wants (marriage, kids, stability, soft rock music, etc.) aren’t quite so terrifying to him anymore. Can he get Laura back or is it already too late? (No ending spoilers here.)

Rereading this book was a different, more thoughtful experience. Rob’s snarky attitude and self-absorption certainly irritated me now, although I found myself laughing all over again at his sarcastic observations about pop culture and some of the music that came out of the eighties and nineties. I still admire the way Nick Hornby wrote this book–with unflinching, biting honesty. He doesn’t turn Rob into a likeable guy as the character searches for deeper self-awareness. He keeps Rob grumpy, neurotic, and reluctant to change. I still rooted for him, though, because change at every stage in life is hard. I like to think even Rob in his later years would find his younger self irritating and sometimes cringy. Like reading a stream of consciousness page in an old tattered diary penned a lifetime ago. Before we discover we’re not the centre of the universe.

It feels like a mellow Joni Mitchell kind of afternoon as I write this post. I’m not sure if Rob the record store owner would chase me out for asking for this amazing album, but I wouldn’t hesitate to debate him (or anyone) about the genius of Joni’s songwriting. That’s the beauty of the albums we treasure, each song is a marker tucked between the pages of some of our fondest memories.

Rob asks us this, “Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.” 

reading

Book Talk: The Best Of Everything

Sue

“It was funny, she thought, that before she had ever had a job she had always thought of an office as a place where people came to work, but now it seemed as if it was a place where they also brought their private lives for everyone else to look at, paw over, comment on and enjoy.” ~ Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything

“The Best of Everything” by Rona Jaffe was published in 1958. Jaffe herself worked at a publishing house in her early twenties that was the model for the fictional Fabian Publications in this story beginning in 1952. She relied on her own background and her young life experiences to write the novel in her mid-twenties, but also interviewed many of her peers about their individual experiences working at the time as secretaries and assistants in New York City. The result is a well-developed and portrayed cast of twentysomething, female characters: Caroline, April, Gregg, Barbara and Mary Agnes, each with their own ideals, career pursuits, dating mishaps, and dramatic struggles within sexist workplaces, while appearing to live glamorously in crummy apartments with only big dreams and no money to show for it.

The novel was long out of print until, rumour has it, Don Draper was seen reading it in his pyjamas in an episode of “Mad Men”. Perhaps that’s what prompted Penguin to eventually reissue it as 65th-anniversary classics edition. It’s the gorgeous cover art (by Michelle Thompson) of this particular edition that caught my eye and reminded me that I’d read it in my teens, twenty or so years after it’d been published. I didn’t have any lasting memories of it until I picked it up again just last week and found myself hooked from the first paragraph: “You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls. Some of them look eager and some look resentful, and some of them look as if they haven’t left their beds yet.”

Strong imagery for anyone who has ever had to commute long distance by transit in the wee hours of the morning, just to make it to work or school by eight or nine o’clock. For a brief time in my late teens–at the start of the eighties–I commuted by bus to downtown Vancouver five days a week from way out in the burbs to an office job I needed but hated. There wasn’t rapid transit in my area quite yet and this was not my dream job. Thankfully, I soon found an office job closer to home; also not an ideal situation, but it paid the bills a little better and prevented me from getting up every weekday morning at 5 on the dot. One time while commuting that very long way to the downtown core, I managed to get a spot in a bench seat that ran sideways and faced the open aisle at the front of the tightly packed bus. I used to fight to stay awake, terrified I’d miss my stop and end up alone in the far side of the city and, even worse, late for work. It always got harder to sit upright once the bus reached the freeway and there weren’t regular stops to jolt passengers out of their restless, forward head-bobbing.

On this particular morning, I’d stayed out too late with friends the evening before and therefore only had myself to blame when I woke up suddenly on hands and knees in the middle of the aisle. I was too shocked to be embarrassed at first, until I saw others around me snickering and pointing. Dazed and also dying a little inside, I struggled to get up off my knees in a suit skirt and heels. A kindly, older gentleman rose from his seat to help me up in the speeding, swaying bus and I still remember what he said, “Don’t sweat it, honey, we’ve all been there before.” Now I still can’t be sure if he meant on hands and knees dying of embarrassment or so exhausted in the moment that the only way was down. Regardless, it’s a fitting statement for how I felt while reading this novel again–we’ve all been there before.

And if we haven’t been there before, then that’s probably due in part to women like the friends group in this novel, who struggled and fought professionally to be taken seriously or paid even half as well as their male co-workers and superiors. At the time there were only two ways out of that particular rat race, either over it by getting married or through it by sheer guts and tenacity. I couldn’t put this book down. Yes, I cringed at some of the outdated language and viewpoints, but I felt empathy for each of the characters in a strong, emotional way I haven’t found lately in some of the newer fiction I’ve been reading. I doubt I felt so emotionally invested when I first read it years ago. I think it may have been considered a scandalous kind of read once upon a time. This time it was like looking at an authentic black and white snapshot, one you stare at in amazement, thinking how mature and sophisticated young people seemed back in the day. Like they had it all figured out. One chapter into this book and you remember (or realize) they didn’t and circumstances could be truly heartbreaking for everyone involved.

Note: highly recommend the Penguin Classics black and white edition, published in 2023. Not only is the cover lovely, the introduction by Rachel Syme is rich in background information about the book and includes a foreword written in 2005 by the late Rona Jaffe.

reading

Book Talk

Sue

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I don’t often read fantasy novels, so I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the author lives in my neck of the woods, on Vancouver Island.

It’s a cute, cozy fantasy about a young, introverted Cambridge professor named Emily Wilde, who embarks on her toughest field work yet: collecting data during the harshest part of winter about the illusive faeries residing on a remote Scandinavian island. Emily is writing the world’s first encyclopedia of faerie lore. She’s a genius scholar, engrossed in her life’s work, and doesn’t have time to make friends with the quirky human townsfolk, who seem to have more secrets than the Hidden Ones themselves. With only her dog Shadow for companionship, she gets straight to work, fighting the frozen elements at every turn. Things are moving along fairly well until her handsome and mysterious academic rival arrives unexpectedly all the way from Cambridge to offer his assistance in her research.

Wendell Bambleby (love his name!) is the bane of Emily’s existence. She suspects he’s trying to ride the coattails of her hard work, since she already knows he’s lazy, yet insufferably likeable to everyone except her. It isn’t long before he’s charmed the townsfolk and at the same time muddled all of Emily’s research. Exactly who is this strange, enigmatic man and why is he determined to take care of her? This becomes the biggest mystery of all–will they remain scholarly rivals or is there something magical going on between them?

The pace was slow-going for me at first, but quickly picked up once Wendell arrived on the scene and the characters became more interesting and their witty banter entertaining. I didn’t know this is the start of an ongoing Emily Wilde series, which would explain why the pace was slow at first and the ending felt rushed. A light, whimsical story to read before bed. Now I’ll wait patiently for the second book.

I finished it last night, while my reading companion loudly snored. Will I have time to squeeze in one more book before the end of February? I decided to include this book review as a blog post rather than just as a sidebar link to my Goodreads account. Please let me know if you’d enjoy seeing Book Talk as a regular short feature here. I read a variety of fiction and nonfiction and always enjoy chatting about books.

Happy reading! ~Sue

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