The Mysterious North - Pierre Berton

Berton's a darn fine story teller, and here he is telling the story of his time in Canada's North from 1947 to 1954, with retrospective chapters from 1989, where with the hindsight of 25 years, he can comment upon what he's written.

I can't help but be a bit jealous of ol' Pierre - what an interesting batch of stories. Imagine, getting a phone call from a buddy who's flying to Baffin Island in a few hours, and he asks you if you'd like to pop along for the ride? Of course you do - and later on you fly around the Rockies in northern BC looking to prove/disprove the existence of an Eden-like valley amidst the rock and snow.

The way things used to be... I couldn't really imagine if it wasn't for stories like these.

And a special thanks to Simone for bringing this book home one day.

Overthrown by Strangers - Ronan Bennett

This was a pretty good book - a bunch of people get mixed up with each other, and they are mostly non-descript and utter unremarkable in their abilities - strange for a book about people taking on the forces of evil (normally there's a trump card in their character that allows them to overcome). Not so these sad sacks. They seem clever at times... but is it enough?

I kind of enjoyed it for the unconventional ending, which is probably pretty realistic given the subject matter - the exercising of power in developing countries, and the naivete of starry eyed idealists who hop on in trying to make it all right.

This story actually drew me in enough to care about the characters - it starts off like any old thriller good vs. evil plot, but as I got into it, the story was like one of those stories but just enough not like the norm to be interesting.

Naked - David Sedaris

This isn't a bad book at all, although it was not 'sidesplitting' as the NYT book review declares on the back cover.

Step one: Take the wave of memoir-itis where everyone thinks their life story is interesting enough to write a book about.
Step two: Write a whacked out parodic example of said wave.
Step three: Publish "naked".

What's so brilliant about it - that it's taking the mickey out of narcisism, or that it's a 'gay book', or what?

A nice light read, but if this is the freshest in American writing, the genre's getting pretty worn out.

The Abomination - Paul Golding

This is a gay book (literally) about a Continental boy dropped into a proper English school system (like his dad was), but his character is more like that of his Spanish mom. So he doesn't really fit in, which is exacerbated by his homosexuality. As he grows older, he doesn't become any more interesting.

Once the mild shock of the more graphic descriptions had worn off, it wasn't all that impressive, and again, I found myself not really caring too much about the character. Through his trials and tribulations, self-loathing, self questioning, defiance, I didn't feel like there was any great insights made, no profound linkages between the retread of a hard time in school and being gay (other than the other boys call you specific names).

I actually felt most for the mother. In the beginning, she's a bit of a character, to the end she's a shell of who she was, and she loses the spark of liveliness that made her interesting at the start. The father's just a bit of a twit, and while I think the reader's meant to loathe him in the same way the main character does, I couldn't muster the enthusiasm to really feel anything in this regard either.

So, overall not nearly as good as the cover quotes would suggest.