Books shelved under “Historical Fiction”

A good book works because it tells a good story about interesting people. Full stop. These two qualities, narrative and personality, intertwine to create a unique and worthwhile experience. If the story isn’t compelling or the people aren’t interesting, then all the tricks and gimmicks and set pieces are not going to elevate the book beyond mediocrity. That being said, I don’t think that the best books are always those with the most hyper-realistic characters.…

World War II is understandably an attractive point of divergence for writers of alternative history. "What if the Nazis won?" is a compelling question that has been explored many times over. Dominion takes a slightly different tack, imagining instead that the war itself was largely averted through appeasement. C.J. Sansom takes as his point of divergence the fateful meeting in which Churchill, Halifax, and Chamberlain decide who will succeed the latter as Prime Minister. In …

So far I’ve been reading George Eliot’s work in a reverse-chronological order. For my third experience I’ve chosen Adam Bede, her first novel. I didn’t realize this until I read the introduction after finishing the book. In hindsight, I can see how her style is less polished than her later works; however, at the time, I was captivated by all the hallmarks of Eliot’s writing that make her my favourite Victorian novelist.

The plot…

I always feel a twinge of pity when someone tells me, “I don’t read for pleasure any more” or “I only read non-fiction.” Most of the pity is sympathy for the fact that, in today’s busy world, we just don’t have the time. Whenever someone expresses awe at the number of books I read in a year and asks me how I do it, I say, truthfully, that I make the time to read, just…

I saved this book for a weekend. I knew this was not something I wanted to read in bits and pieces of time snatched, sneaked, and cobbled together during the commute to and from work or the hour before bed. My previous experiences with Jhumpa Lahiri’s sumptuous prose meant I would need a certain type of stillness in order to appreciate this book. I needed the luxury to linger over each page and absorb the…

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this, at all, going into it. I’ve never heard of Mark Frutkin. I saw A Message for the Emperor on my library’s new books shelf, and the description sounded intriguing. I wasn’t quite sure about it. The slimness of the volume seemed suspect. I was worried that I would have a hard time enjoying or following the plot, that the characters would be too stylized and not very…

I missed my Xbox while I was in England. I had access to one for the first half the year, during which time I managed to be completely disappointed by Assassin’s Creed 3. Then I moved, and Xbox-playing became a faded memory for a while. So when I came back home for the summer, one of the first things I sat down to do was play Xbox—and specifically, to play Mass Effect through from…

Sometimes you just know you and a book aren’t going to get along. I debated giving Of Blood and Honey a miss after a few chapters, and I’m still not sure I made the right call to soldier on. I finished the book, and I kind of understand the plot. To say that I enjoyed it or got much out of the story would be an overstatement, though, and that’s a shame. Stina Leicht is…

The description of The Shadow of the Wind reminds me of Foucault’s Pendulum, another literary-themed thriller in which the protagonists find that the events in a conspiracy-theory manuscript they acquire are coming true. When ten-year-old Daniel acquires a book, also called The Shadow of the Wind, he attracts the attention of all manner of mysterious people who want the book—or its author—including a disfigured man going by the name Lain Coubert, the name…

There's just something about faeries and Elizabethan England that mix, isn't there? It seems like I can't turn around without tripping over a book that involves the two. And that's not necessarily a bad thing; I like faeries, and I like Elizabethan England. But as with most trends, it can become hard to find writers who are using the material in inventive ways. Fortunately, that's just what Seanan McGuire does with "Rat-Catcher". There are beings…

We all want things. Sometimes the things we think we want are not the things we really want. Usually, the wanting is better than having. These are all familiar feelings that Richard Flanagan plays with in the aptly-named Wanting. His exploration of these ideas is deft and interesting, but the book lacks an overall unity to make it truly memorable or amazing.

I’m perplexed by Wanting’s structure, which is split between the early…

I read some series like River Song travels with the Doctor: out of order. I’ve dipped and dallied with various books in the Falco series, but most recently I read Venus in Copper before going back to the source, Falco #1: The Silver Pigs. Here we meet Lindsey Davis’ private eye: Marcus Didius Falco, an informer in the first-century Roman empire. Falco is constantly on the hunt for new clients and new income, lest…

My Carnegie-nominated reads continue with Code Name Verity. This book cut me up. I thought it unlikely that any of the nominees could best Wonder’s worthiness for the award; I was wrong. I’m going to festoon this review with spoilers like they are going out of style, because I want to talk about what happens in this book and why that makes it so good.

Code Name Verity excels on multiple levels. It’s…

I did not finish this.

It’s a nominee for the Carnegie Medal, which is why I started reading it. Unfortunately, it didn’t engage me enough to make me want to keep reading.

Nick Lake does a good job creating character and setting, and he makes a fair stab at plot. In Darkness is split in two time periods: one follows the Haitian Revolution; the other is set during the most recent Haiti earthquake. Through…

I used to work at an art gallery. March and May usually see exhibitions of art by our local university and high school students, respectively. Across the two exhibitions, at least one would usually contain rendition of Girl with a Pearl Earring, after Vermeer. I would stare at the pencil, charcoal, or painted work and wonder what secrets it contains. To be honest, visual art can intrigue me but isn’t my favourite medium; I…

John Irving is a master of the messed-up. A Prayer for Owen Meany is a careful, tightly-managed piece of stage magic wrapped up into a book. The eponymous character in this book has a distinctive, almost shrill pre-pubescent voice, even into adulthood. It’s impossible to convey that on the page, but Irving tries by rendering Owen’s dialogue in ALL CAPS—during Owen’s few speeches, these can run to paragraphs or a page. I don’t visualize things…

There are a few different types of people who read War and Peace. I am some of them. I am a rigorously-educated, uber-literate intellectual who lives high enough up the ivory tower to get nose bleeds but not so high that I need an oxygen mask. I am intensely but not indiscriminately interested in history—not just the particulars of history, mind you, but the ways in which history happens. I take perverse enjoyment from…

I'm so thankful that I can read. I'm thankful that I happened to be born and grow up in circumstances that allowed me the luxury of literacy and the free time required to exercise and hone my reading skills. Books are a tool for education, a refuge and a means of escape, and a powerful drug that entertains and empowers. I can only imagine what people who grow up in circumstances more abject than mine…

I have been meaning to revisit John Irving lately. I’ve been re-reading War and Peace over this Easter break, but I wanted to take a break between each book within the novel and read something else. So I took a look at what the library had to offer for Irving, and I thought this would be a good time to re-re-read The World According to Garp. This is the first Irving novel I ever…

Multigenerational family epics are difficult. One of the most powerful things a writer can do is create a protagonist the reader can invest in. Multigenerational stories spurn this wisdom for a different kind of magic, one that relies on the reader to follow the threads that connect the family members over years, decades, sometimes even centuries. If not done properly, the result can be messy or just uninteresting. Every once in a while, however, I…