Book Twelve - Lost Girls and Love Hotels

I don't know exactly what I was expecting with this novel, but I was pleasantly surprised with what I found within this book. Lost Girls and Love Hotels by Catherine Hanraham was a great book for me and the pages just flew by. I had a great time reading it today. It rekindled my younger self's Japanophilia. Growing up, my mother taught English to Japanese exchange students and I was always fascinated by all things Japanese.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels gives us a glimpse into the life of Margaret, a young woman living in Japan, interspersed with vignettes of various times in her young adulthood back in Canada. Margaret is an English coach at a flight attendant school, and in her spare time she is a bit of a lush and so forth. At one point she meets a Japanese gangster type and they begin a relationship, meeting mostly in love hotels. I had never heard of these before, but the book's description of them is quite interesting. All the theme rooms that you could want, charged by the hour or for the night, or for rest or for stay.

I very much enjoyed the window into the life of a young Canadian woman living in Japan. How tempting it is for us all to think of just leaving it all behind to be anonymous in another part of the world. When asked, Margaret said that she came to Japan to be alone, her counterpart was surprised to hear that such a populated place would be somewhere that she felt alone.

The vignettes into the past are mainly her dealing with various traumatic events, and the descent of her brother into an unnamed mental illness. They were an appropriate length, so as not to take away from the main story, and yet were detailed enough to let us get to know the protagonist better.

It was a great diversion for the day, and the book rekindled my desire to visit Japan. And now that I am older, I have yet another place I want to visit when I go there. Now all I have to worry about is which room to choose (and about the cleaning procedures).

Book Eleven - Joyland

Joyland By Emily Schultz, with illustrations by Nate Powell is a coming of age type novel, set in the end of the arcade days of the 80s. The titular "Joyland" is an arcade in a small Ontario town, the type where teens spend many a day trying to beat high scores, or just to flirt and waste away some time in a town with not a lot else going on.

At the beginning of the novel, Joyland closes down and we follow the aftermath throughout the summer for our two protagonists, identified within the chapters as player one and player two. Player one is the older brother 14 year old Chris, with player two being the younger sister 11 year old Tammy. Having two narrators can be confusing, but the separation into two "players" is both helpful to the reader and clever within the framework of the novel. The chapters are also named after different video games, which is also a nice touch.

There is not a lot in major plot until quite near the end, and I almost wish that the author had left it that way. Schultz is an excellent descriptor, she has a real way with words, and I would have been happy just to have a look into this world, where nothing of note really happens. I think that this novel could just be about growing up and not have to have some kind of big third act tragedy. Said tragedy seemed tacked on towards the end, maybe Schultz was not confident enough to just leave it as it was.

Overall, Joyland was a good novel. I would recommend it for just the descriptive writing alone. It is a good take on a coming of age tale and I enjoyed reading it.

Book Ten - Impossible Motherhood

I found this book at the library and had to pick it up, it fascinated me that someone would publicly admit to having 15 abortions in 17 years and I wondered how they could possibly sway me to empathize with them.

Impossible Motherhood by Irene Vilar is a biography of sorts, but mainly deals with her "addiction" to abortions. Personally I have not been through that experience myself, but at a certain age I often found myself often being worried about being pregnant and what I would do should that happen. I am pro-choice and I consider myself to be fairly open minded so I tried to understand why someone would undergo this again and again.

It is rather disturbing to think that someone could continually become pregnant as a means of exercising control over their life and body. More disturbing is that she did view the fetuses as possible children, even going as far as putting clothing on layaway for them. She has reasons aplenty for her behavior, but in my opinion they are really not good enough.

Having said all of this, Vilar is a very talented writer and the book was a smooth read. The other parts of her life are easier for me to empathize with, her mother committed suicide when Vilar was 8 years old, she left home at a young age as well and again left for college at 15 years old only to be preyed upon by an older professor that she later married and whom she allowed to control many aspects of her life.

It is easy to sit from afar and judge someone as we have not lived their life. However, it is difficult not to be appalled at her experiences. She is now a mother and admits in the book that she considered a late term abortion for her first daughter, even going as far as describing photos that she has hanging up and that the ultrasound was taken at a point where she could have aborted her daughter. Imagine the grown up daughter someday reading this.

I think that this book is a form of therapy for Vilar, and a cautionary tale for women finding themselves in a similar situation. I came out of it with respect for Vilar as a writer, but an extreme contempt for her as a person. She seems to be to be selfish to the extreme. She describes, late in the book, caring for her dying dog. She seems to think that caring for this animal at the end of her life, is some kind of redemption. But seeing as I have worked as a veterinary assistant, I know that all she did was cause extreme suffering and pain to her animal, and has again been extremely selfish and cannot see past her own needs. Even after her daughter is born, she is more concerned with the separation anxiety than being pleased with the growth and development of her child.

Like it or hate it, this book did inspire a lot of emotion in me. Vilar is a powerful writer and I would enjoy reading more of her writing. I didn't expect to be on her side and that is how I felt after reading it. I have never read a book where I hated the protagonist as much as I did here, biography or not. I would recommend reading it, but only if you can handle feeling quite a bit of emotion, as it will be sure to provoke a lot.

Book Nine - I, Lucifer

I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan started off as a very humorous and well written novel but lost its way somewhat towards the end in my opinion. The premise is that the devil is offered a deal wherein he is to spend 30 days in the body of a human, at the end of the month he is given a choice; to live out the human life and if he doesn't sin too badly, then he can be admitted to heaven, the alternative is to return to hell.

I very much enjoyed the description of what a fallen angel would think of the human experience. The sights, the textures, the temptation to just let one's trousers hang to expose the flesh to the cool breeze and so forth. It is also amusing to hear how he spends his time, all the pleasures that one could dream up, drugs, sex, food, booze. Lucifer, in his human form is even writing a movie about his side of the story of how it all went down with the big guy upstairs. Also he is writing the book that is being read.

It is very clever and tongue in cheek, and there are parts of this that I greatly enjoyed. However, towards the end it got to be a bit nonsensical. Perhaps this was intentional, and meant to represent Lucifer's declining hold on reality, but I found it tedious. There were minor errors in grammar and loose parentheses as well, but it was not glaring enough to be intentional necessarily and to me just felt awkward and distracting.

Overall it was entertaining but towards the end I just wanted it over and done with, had I not been doing this challenge, I may not have finished reading it at all.

Book Eight - The Anger Solution

I have never really thought of myself as an angry person, but after reading "The Anger Solution: The Proven Method for Achieving Calm and Developing Healthy, Long-Lasting Relationships" by John Lee, I am starting to recognize patterns of behaviour in myself that I have missed in the past.

I have not read any self help books before, but I do consider personal growth to be very important and I am continuously looking to further my understanding of myself. I think that some may look too much into books like these and look at them as the only way to maintain relationships.

The anger solution has some good suggestions, and it helps point out behaviours in yourself and those around you and gives you communication tools to improve your angry feelings before they turn into rage and get out of hand. This book also addresses setting healthy boundaries and limits, which is something that I need to work on.

I was married to someone who would rage at least once a week, I did everything I could to try and help him, but now I have learned that helping can sometimes be just as bad, especially if in helping someone else, you are failing to look inward and work on your own issues.

A lot of the book is about regression, and how when someone is "raging" they are most often not even raging directly at you, they are stuck in the past, stuck as their former self. This is helpful for me, and it also makes you think of times where that has happened in my personal experience. The book also gives methods to get out of these regressions and in doing so, helps to prevent them from occurring as often.

I will take some of what I have read in this book and apply it to my current life and hopefully it will help me on my everlasting journey to myself.

Book Seven - Heavier Than Heaven

As a music lover of a certain age, I was indelibly affected by the suicide of Kurt Cobain in 1994. I was 16 at the time and I remember being very distraught and wounded. The years have gave me some perspective on the situation, but it is still a time that I vividly remember and even listening to recordings of radio coverage and tributes that were played at the time can take me right back there. Reading certain passages of the book moved me to tears, reading that Courtney Love was pregnant and how excited they both were and knowing how it all turned out. Reading about the public memorial and remembering watching the coverage on TV back when it all happened, and how it made us all feel united in our mourning for this rock idol.

At the time, we all put Cobain on a pedestal, I was and still am so moved by his music, that it is difficult to imagine Kurt as just a man. After reading Cross' book, it is easier to picture this man, and he was a very flawed individual indeed. He chose to hide behind drugs, even after Love became pregnant, even though it lead her into temptaion during that critical time in her life. He did nothing but complain about the fame that he worked so hard to achieve, almost instantly after he attained it. Yet he was very conflicted and wanted even more fame, and made choices to make this happen.

Now that I am older, and also a mother, it breaks my heart that someone would take their life and leave their child to someone as unstable as Love. As a teenager, I also felt personally betrayed, as I am sure many did. Who among us has not suffered as a child, having read what Cobain went through, I could personally claim that my childhood trauma was even worse than his. Suicide is such a desperate act, it is very sad that he felt that his daughter would be better off without him, that the world would be better without him.

The most surprising thing about this book for me was that it made me support Courtney Love more than I have previously. I have not seen the documentary "Kurt and Courtney" yet, but I have plans to do so after writing this review. I have, in the past, read some of the conspiracy theories and I must admit that at the time of Kurt's death I thought that it seemed that she was using her position as rock widow to further her career. Love is certainly a very troubled individual to put it mildly, but this book did paint her in a very flattering light. That may have been necessary to obtain certain inside information. It has prompted me to want to do more research into the subject before fully forming my opinion on the situation.

All in all, Heavier than Heaven is a book that I recommend to music lovers and children of the 90s. I now see that Kurt was just a man, just another screwed up individual that made some amazing music, art and also made a lot of bad choices. He has an amazing daughter and hopefully she will prevail and lead a better existence than both her parents.

Getting Back in the Groove of It

Well I haven't been reading very much as of late, but that is about to change. I finished my math course and I got my A, and then I took a much deserved break from it all. But now my lazy time is over and I am ready to get back on track. I almost finished reading I, Lucifer and it is a good read, but I had to take it back to the library so I will have to check it out again once I get a few others off my list completed.

Heavier Than Heaven is coming along, I had planned to finish reading it today as I should have a little bit of free time, however I could not find it anywhere this morning. I looked all over, and I was just reading it last night, so it must have grown legs and wandered off.

But I have a good one to read and I think that I should be able to read the whole thing today, it is my challenge, let's see how I make out shall we?