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Book review: Stuck in Downward Dog

My first book to review from MiniBookExpo, and I picked a light “chick-lit” read to complement the summer weather: Stuck in Downward Dog. Chantel Simmons’ debut novel is a pleasant, humourous read about Mara Brennan, a mid-20’s woman who hits a rough patch — job, boyfriend, apartment, friends — and gets through it while learning something about herself and her friends.

There were a lot of things that I liked about this book. First of all the Toronto setting was used well, and there were great insider references, such as when Mara’s friend tried to pass off her new Mississauga location as “Port Credit” (an accurate place name, but to anyone who lives in the 416 area code, it’s all just undifferentiated suburban wilderness). I was pleasantly surprised to find out that a new boyfriend does not figure in her miraculous turnaround — in fact, Mara does it pretty much on her own, with a bit of help from her friends. There’s a nutritional epiphany about a healthy-sounding smoothie. There’s some great inner monologues of Mara’s thoughts during yoga class.

There were parts of the storyline that could have been improved. First, Mara spends 25 years getting herself into a complete disaster of a life, including the worst two months of it chronicled in the first part of the book, then manages to turn the entire thing around in 3 weeks. A bit unrealistic, considering that she comes off as a bit of a naive pushover. The two girlfriends were painted as cruel caricatures; if they were really such bitches, I can’t believe that Mara, pushover that she is, would have been best buds with them all this time. She refers to her size 10 body as if it were bordering on obese, which is not a great message to be sending to her target audience, even if they are pigging out on those calorie-laden smoothie.

In spite of its flaws, I found Stuck in Downward Dog to be a fun read with lots of laughs, and may even be inspirational to young women who are looking for the courage to find the right job, the right apartment and the right relationship with their friends.

2008 07 14 Comments (1)

MiniBookExpo for Bloggers

Wow, it’s been over 3 months since I posted here: work and travel have taken up most of my time. I have a ton of billable work to do over the summer, but there’s always time for reading. A couple of years ago, I rediscovered the Toronto Public Library, which was a godsend for me when I was young, providing me with an endless source of books to feed my voracious reading habit. Now, they have their catalogue online, and I can order a book from anywhere in this huge system and have it appear at my local branch.

This week, I saw a link to MiniBookExpo for Bloggers, which promises to be another source of interesting books. They list books that are available for review from the publishers, you add a comment to the post about the book in order to claim it, they send you the book, and you review it. Shipping is free, and there’s nothing about having to return the books, so I can pass them along to the book collection in my condo, or even donate them to the public library if I can figure out how to do that. Looking forward to receiving my first book for review!

2008 07 07 Comments (0)

Cory Doctorow’s Overclocked

Cory Doctorow has released his latest book, a collection of short stories called Overclocked. I’ve listened to most of these short stories on Doctorow’s podcasts, but I like to read things in print as well. Luckily, he gives us a choice: buy the book, listen to the stories in podcast installments (for free on iTunes), or download it for free in PDF and a number of other readable formats.

2007 03 30 Comments (0)

The Emperor’s Children (Claire Messud)

I know that I said in my review of jPod that there are few books that I don’t finish once starting them: The Emperor’s Children is one of those rarities. I struggled through about half of the book, wading through the overly-complex and pompous wording and characters that I really didn’t care that much about, until I read something that made me realize what a bad writer that Messud actually is, and what a crappy editor that she has: “is comprised of” when she meant “comprises“. Twice. I put the book down and backed away, slowly.

2007 01 20 arts challenge Comments (0)

jPod (Douglas Coupland)

My LibraryThing icon in the sidebar has been pretty busy lately; I arrived home on the 10th after being away for a month and found that three of the books that I had put on reserve at the library had already come and gone, and four more were ready to be picked up. I love the reserve system, and owe it all to Ingrid for telling me about it: just get your TPL library card and sign up online, then search away. When you find something that you like, you can put a reserve on it and it magically shows up at your local library branch when it’s available. The system sends you an automated phone message (which I wish was email) when there’s something for pickup, or you can login and check online. The unfortunate part is that after months of waiting for some of these, they all seem to be coming in at the same time: I have four things out on loan now, and another five waiting at the library for me (although two of these are DVDs).

The first one that I attacked was Douglas Coupland’s jPod, and I have to admit that I was disappointed; although this is called “Microserfs for the age of Google”, I found it inferior to Microserfs. I actually liked most of the story and the characters: a group of Vancouver-based game software developers who were building an entire evil subplot into what was supposed to be a children’s video game, and some of their strange companions. However, there were some really stupid page-wasters, such as when one of the characters created a challenge related to the first 10,000 digits of pi, it was accompanied by the entire 10,000 digits. Yawn, interrupted only by the fast flipping of pages past this nonsense. The largest of these went on for several pages, and became more than a little annoying. The most annoying thing, however, was the way that Coupland wrote himself into the book as some sort of evil genius. Not funny, not even interesting.

There’s very few books that I haven’t finished, once I pick them up, and I did finish this, although I don’t recommend it. Also, I wanted to include it the arts challenge (although I figure it’s cheating a bit, since that I can pop off 50 books pretty quickly and wouldn’t consider that to be fulfilling the arts challenge obligation).

2007 01 19 arts challenge Comments (3)

Funny, funny writer

I’m not sure how funny that John McPhee intends to be in his book Uncommon Carriers, which I’m reading right now. It’s a book wherein he travels around in all sorts of unusual vehicles, starting with a cross-country trip in an 18-wheeler. His prose is really lovely, very readable, and occasionally very funny. For example, he talks about father of the trucker who he was driving with:

He became the editor-in-chief of Screw Machine Engineering, a magazine whose name a hyphen would have improved.

ROTFL.

2006 12 08 Comments (0)

LibraryThing

Check out the new widget in my sidebar, just below the photos, called “What I’m Reading”. It’s generated from LibraryThing, where I can enter in books that I have in my library — using some very easy search tools that check Amazon and a number of other sources, so that I can just enter the title or author and see a list of hits — then create a widget for my sidebar that shows my recent books. By just adding in each book as I’m reading it, and setting the number of books to display to 1, it always shows what I’m reading right now. Okay, it shows one of what I’m reading right now, since I often read more than one at a time.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I really need some sort of social networking mashup around the Toronto Public Library site, where I could show the list of books on my hold list, and see those of my friends in order to get ideas of what to line up next. I have to check out more of the LibraryThing functionality, but this might serve a similar purpose.

2006 11 27 blogging Comments (0)