Novel-tease

Friday, January 9, 2015

Ripper by Isabel Allende ~ Reviews

Here are two reviews of Ripper:

Washington Post: In ‘Ripper,’ Isabel Allende sends up the mystery tradition

The Guardian: Isabel Allende's San Francisco serial-killer story displays her customary gift for strong characterisation and fine narrative detail

Ripper by Isabel Allende ~ Reading Group Guide

from: http://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/ripper-0/guide

1. Describe Amanda Martin. Think about the adults in her life. Who has the most influence on her? Compare and contrast Amanda to her parents. How does she favor her homicide detective father, and how is she like her free-spirited mother?

2. As we come to know Amanda, we learn that she has trained her senses in a variety of ways, including cataloging people by scent. If you were to categorize the people close to you, what scents would you ascribe to each of them? Choose a few family members or friends and share your insights with the group.

3. Have you ever played a mystery game? Is Ripper a good outlet for Amanda’s intelligence and curiosity? How might it be detrimental? How does playing the game help her solve the mystery at the center of the novel? Track her steps and how she compiled the clues.

4. Consider the novel's structure. How does Isabel Allende build suspense as the story proceeds? Does she use red herrings? Were you surprised when the killer was revealed? If you guessed, what clues led you to the killer?

5. While RIPPER is about Amanda, it is also the story of her mother, Indiana. What is your opinion of Indi? Is she too trusting? Too open? Too free? Or do you think the world would be a better place with more people like her?

6. When we are introduced to Amanda’s mother, Indi, we meet a woman with the soul of a hippie, who believes in peace and love. Do you think her experience with a serial killer changed her?

7. Consider the men in the book --- Amanda’s father Bob Martin, Navy vet Ryan Miller, and the elusive and wealthy Alan Keller. What attracts Indi to each of these men? What is it about her that draws them? What qualities does Indi need in a man?

8. The city of San Francisco is not only the novel’s setting, it’s also a character. If you have been to San Francisco, how does the city in the pages of RIPPER compare to your experiences? If you haven’t been there, what impressions did you get about the city from reading the book?

9. If you have read other Isabel Allende novels, how does this compare to them? What elements carry through her books, and what is different in RIPPER?

Thursday, November 20, 2014

What to Read After the Orenda and Three Day Road?

What to Read After The Orenda and Three Day Road?

Novels about FIRST NATIONS

Kiss of the Fur Queen, by Tompson Highway. This is not just my favourite First Nations book, it's one of my favourite books of all time.

"Tomson Highway's prose is beautiful, lyrical... Emotionally complex, witty, symphonic and sad, Kiss of the Fur Queen is a remarkable novel, filled with blood and guts, life and love." —The Vancouver Sun

Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King. Actually, everything I've read by him has been really, really good. He recently won the Governor General's Award for his latest book,The Back of the Turtle.

What I loved about Green Grass, Running Water and The Kiss of the Fur Queen is that although they tackled difficult aspects of life today for indigenous Canadians, both novels also had very funny aspects (something that was entirely lacking in the Joseph Boyden novels, I thought)

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WWI Novels and Memoirs

I've read a bunch of really good WWI novels and memoirs. Here are my favourites:

Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road, the last which won the Booker Prize. Personally, I think that the award was meant to cover all three books of the trilogy.

The Regeneration Trilogy is interesting because it deals with the effects of the war on the soldiers, rather than talking about their exploits in battles. (Maybe these novels focus on the psychological over the physical because they are written by a woman?)

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The Wars, by Timothy Findlay. Winner of the Governor General's Award.

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Good-bye to All That, by Robert Graves. Probably my all-time favourite WWI book, but that might be because it was my first.

"The quintessential memoir of the generation of Englishmen who suffered in World War I is among the bitterest autobiographies ever written. Robert Graves's stripped-to-the-bone prose seethes with contempt for his class, his country, his military superiors, and the civilians who mindlessly cheered the carnage from the safety of home. His portrait of the stupidity and petty cruelties endemic in England's elite schools is almost as scathing as his depiction of trench warfare. Nothing could equal Graves's bone-chilling litany of meaningless death, horrific encounters with gruesomely decaying corpses, and even more appalling confrontations with the callousness and arrogance of the military command. Yet this scarifying book is consistently enthralling. Graves is a superb storyteller, and there's clearly something liberating about burning all your bridges at 34 (his age when Good-Bye to All That was first published in 1929). He conveys that feeling of exhilaration to his readers in a pell-mell rush of words that remains supremely lucid. Better known as a poet, historical novelist, and critic, Graves in this one work seems more like an English Hemingway, paring his prose to the minimum and eschewing all editorializing because it would bring him down to the level of the phrase- and war-mongers he despises." --Wendy Smith

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All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. Probably the most famous WWI novel of all, this one was written by a former German soldier. Interesting how similar his story is to the soldiers fighting on our side.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Wab Kinew & Stephoen Lewis on The Orenda II

http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Canada+Reads/ID/2440240230/

Another link to the Wab Kinew & Stephen Lewis discussion of THE ORENDA (I'm getting a temporary off line message at the other link right now).

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Reading literary fiction improves empathy, study finds

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/literary-fiction-improves-empathy-study

Excerpts:

New research shows works by writers such as Charles Dickens and Téa Obreht sharpen our ability to understand others' emotions – more than thrillers or romance novels . . .

Have you ever felt that reading a good book makes you better able to connect with your fellow human beings? If so, the results of a new scientific study back you up, but only if your reading material is literary fiction – pulp fiction or non-fiction will not do.

Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York, have proved that reading literary fiction enhances the ability to detect and understand other people's emotions, a crucial skill in navigating complex social relationships.

In a series of five experiments, 1,000 participants were randomly assigned texts to read, either extracts of popular fiction such as bestseller Danielle Steel's The Sins of the Mother and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, or more literary texts, such as Orange-winner The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht, Don DeLillo's "The Runner", from his collection The Angel Esmeralda, or work by Anton Chekhov.

The pair then used a variety of Theory of Mind techniques to measure how accurately the participants could identify emotions in others. Scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.
"What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others," said Kidd.