Us Conductors: A Novel by Sean Michaels (2014)

Photo via the Globe and Mail

This book won the Giller Prize! Which is pretty much the biggest award for fiction in Canada. I had already read (and reviewed) All My Puny Sorrows and I was sure it was going to win. So did a lot of other people, according to this pic (from the Globe and Mail). So an upset is always fun! Plus it bumped Us Conductors to the top of my to-read list.

This is a story about the inventor of the theremin, which is a sort of instrument you play by manipulating the electrical fields created by the antennae. The characters in the book are based on real people, and although parts of the plot really did happen, it’s still a work of fiction. (The notes section states the lack of evidence that our protagonist ever learned kung fu, for instance.) (Do other people actually read the notes sections in books? Or the acknowledgements section? Because I feel like most people don’t and I feel like they’re missing out. Anyway.)

The rest of these books on the list above are on my to-read list as well, except for one that I started and actually gave up on about halfway through, which I almost never do. But I just didn’t care about the characters, so I couldn’t be bothered to find out what happened to them. I’m not going to tell you which book this was, because I don’t want to ruin it for you — that would just be mean and unCanadian. And I’ve heard from a number of other people who really liked it.

Here, a video of Leon Theremin playing his own instrument:

Roost: A Novel by Ali Bryan (2013)

The thing about reading books published by a small, local press is that it’s sometimes very obvious that a particular book has been published by a small, local press. This is disappointing. I’ll give two particular examples that stuck out to me in this book:

• One of the main characters has a skin condition. This information is introduced at the very beginning of the novel in such a way as to seem like a major plot point. The skin condition is never mentioned again.
• The main character flies on a plane. When the flight attendant comes around with the drinks cart, the main character orders ginger ale. (Fun fact: I always drink ginger ale on airplanes.) LITERALLY ON THE NEXT PAGE, maybe three paragraphs later, it says “she downed all her orange juice in one gulp”. Gahhhh

She ordered ginger ale.

Stuff like this drives me absolutely nuts. Independent publishers do good work, don’t get me wrong — they’re the first to support local authors and they work hard to get their authors’ books out in the world. (How else would I have seen/heard of this book?) I know indie presses aren’t exactly made of money, but you cannot skimp on editing. You just can’t.

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (2014)

So I started reading this book a few nights ago, and it was so good that I was planning on spending my Friday evening curled up on the couch until it was done. Which is exactly what I did, but I had to contend with my roommates having an impromptu get-together with buddies of theirs to eat pie. As in, they showed up at the door, pies in hand, right when I was getting to the saddest part. (All My Puny Sorrows is about a woman who’s trying to keep her suicidal concert pianist sister from killing herself; it’s loosely based on the author’s real life. So yeah, it’s a tear-jerker.) Luckily my roommates’ friends brought two pies (blueberry AND lemon meringue) and they were all pretty focused on those, so I could basically just cry in the corner without anyone noticing. I think.