Category: book recommendations

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For the love of Stanley Tucci

I have proof She Who Must Be Obeyed is my soulmate: At Christmas, I bought this book for her and she bought a copy for me.

Last year, I rhapsodized about Taste by Stanley Tucci. It’s part memoir, some family history, and delicious Italian recipes. Stanley has a dry wit, a fascinating life and career, and very strong opinions on which shape of pasta should go with what sauce. What I Ate in One Year picks up where Taste left off. It’s a near-daily diary of the trials, tribulations, travel, projects, rewards, and feasts the Internet’s boyfriend is heir to. If you’ve watched his series Searching for Italy, it’s impossible not to hear his dulcet tones as you read. Love that!

Reading this book in Cuba was particularly poignant and pointed. It was poignant because Stanley dwells on his mortality quite a bit. His first wife died of the disease and he is a cancer survivor. Meanwhile, I was far from home, sick and waiting to die by a tropical pool. Weak, cursing, and coughing, I was reminded of my father’s telling of how incredibly ill he was at sea. Flat on his back at the bottom of a fishing trawler in high seas, Dad told me, “First, I was afraid I was going to die. Then I was afraid I wouldn’t.” He survived the seasickness, and I survived my virus. Almost ninety years later, Dad was faced with the same feeling. He chose the needle rather than endure what sadists call “a natural death.” (Jury’s still out on my eventual exit, but I hope I go with the same eagerness and dignity, instead of screaming in childish protest, as is my wont.)

Stanley’s love of food was especially pointed in Cuba because he would starve to death there. When a meal fails to rise to his standards, Stanley refuses to participate in such abominations unto the Lord. He doesn’t hold back, reporting, for instance, that a meal was not just awful, but “fucking awful.” Mostly, he dines very well. As for us on vacation in Cuba, the pork was good a couple of times. Mostly, we survived the week on buttered buns. The buns were good, but I’ve had a much more delicious and authentic Cubano sandwich from Starbucks.

No matter what I ordered on this trip, I couldn’t receive the same thing twice. A cafe bombon was first a delicious ice cream treat (not what I envisioned, but great). Then, it was merely iced coffee. Intrepid and trying again, a cafe bombon became a foamy thing sort of like the first attempt, but without ice. A proper cafe bombon should be an espresso with sweetened condensed milk. (Full details here. You’re welcome.) I finally got a decent cafe bombon when I flew home and made it myself. (Note to self: Learn Spanish before heading south again.)

It’s tempting to say, if you’re traveling to Cuba, bring food. I’m being a little unfair. On my first Cuban trip to a different resort, I enjoyed the meals. Our last meal in Cuba eight years ago turned me on to Italian food. I didn’t think it was special until I savored shrimp on angel hair pasta. This most recent trip was a gastronomic disaster, but the food wasn’t the point of the escape. We got to spend more time with our kids than we get all year, and that was wonderful. The weather was great, and we needed a break. I wish we hadn’t been sick for most of the trip, but I don’t regret going. SWMBO remarked she caught the virus from me, but in deference to my long history of service, devotion, and conviviality, she agreed to never say that again.

Travel and Book Recommendations

If you plan to visit Cuba, the country has a lot of supply problems. For instance, there’s no Kleenex, a fact we lamented deeply as our illness progressed. The staff appreciate over-the-counter medicines that are often unavailable to them. Besides tips, we left the staff a miniature pharmacy. For money, they prefer American dollars, but they graciously accepted our Canadian currency.

Wherever you live, on vacation or hard at work in air traffic control, read Stanley Tucci’s What I Ate in One Year. Okay, maybe not while you’re controlling air traffic, but otherwise, I highly recommend it. I devoured this book in a couple of days. I didn’t want it to end. And I really wanted to devour the great food he wrote about. A person can survive on buttered buns alone, but after a while, you don’t want to.

Home again, I’m back to the business of writing novels. The food tastes even better than I remember. I am grateful.

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The Two Keys to a Great Vacation

One of the pleasures of a vacation is to limit your choices. In our daily lives, we have to make decisions constantly. We have to choose what to do and what to do next. How will we fit in all we’re supposed to do? It often feels like we got too much to cram into our waking hours. Gotta exercise, gotta get groceries, be responsible, shovel snow, pay bills, cook, clean, and deal with a plethora of stimuli (much of it upsetting). The world is a firehose blasting away at the teacup that is your brain. On vacation, all you really have to decide is where and when to eat. Then, it’s that rare and precious commodity: free time.

As reported yesterday, my spouse and I spent most of our time in Cuba as sick as sick dogs. The dark hours filled with coughing and night sweats were the worst. The rising sun brought some peace. We crawled out to the pool’s edge, blew our noses into napkins, and lounged. And we read books.

I’m a bibliophile, but vacation days yield more time for getting lost in books. Uninterrupted days filled with the tasty consumption of words are great days, even when you aren’t feeling your best. In today’s example of something good to read, I suggest Bunny by Mona Awad. This author was new to me, but a glance at the first few pages told me I would enjoy her wordplay. It’s reminiscent of Heathers, the 1988 movie starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater (and 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, I might add). If you’ve ever felt like an outsider standing too close to a snooty clique, you’ll enjoy all the delicious evisceration of the in-crowd.

No spoilers. I despise spoilers.

Bunny tells the story of a young woman studying creative writing, and she’s surrounded by assholes. Anyone who has participated in a writing workshop will relate to her hatred of the worst people who show up at writing workshops. Her school has more than its fair share of fake, nasty, and cloying student writers.

Awad’s writing style is clever and hip. (Is it okay to say hip? Is that not hip? No? Okay, it’s bussin’! It’s gas! It’s buttah! Cool? Okay. Far out, groovy, and fresh!) I digress. Go read Bunny.

The keys to a great vacation are (A) not having to make decisions, and (B) a good book. Make time for reading when you aren’t on vacation, too. It’s good for your mental health.

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Review of Lily King’s Writers & Lovers: A Page-Turner

I just finished reading Writers & Lovers by Lily King. I don’t read a lot of literary fiction. I find that many writers of the genre favor character so much that little actually happens plotwise. Things do happen in this novel. The details are so well-observed and resonant that it’s a pleasure to read. I burned through the story quickly and didn’t want to put it down.

The best description of Writers and Lovers is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. King accomplishes what I love about writing. Though much of the book’s exposition is interior, the author puts a movie in your head. There’s much to admire in her writing style and eye for detail.

Writers of a certain literary bent drop ambiguous endings on their victims/readers. King doesn’t do that. This novel has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Best of all, King gives us a self-sabotaging protagonist we can root for. We want her to win, so we follow her journey, hoping things will work out okay. It works because we’re all hoping things will work out okay.

Find Lily King’s author page on Amazon here.

Lily King’s website is here.

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Why The Grapes of Wrath Still Resonates in 2024

Rereading The Grapes of Wrath after many years, it hits differently now that I’m older. The novel hits so hard, it could have been published yesterday, eerily relevant to our world in the present.

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was originally published in 1939. That is startling given its empathetic allegory about forced immigration and the dangers of unbridled capitalism. This was written long before laypeople had the vocabulary of “late-stage capitalism.” Certain passages are worth reviewing many times.

I was especially taken with how people are transformed into cogs in a machine. When the bank takes their homes, there’s no one to resist. Responsibility falls like a hammer on the most powerless. Evicted from the land they’d worked for generations, the farmers are ground under the weight of an uncaring bureaucracy.

In another passage, car salesmen take advantage of desperate people. The sole focus is money. In pursuit of profit, the salesmen’s contempt for their hapless customers is ferocious. People are dehumanized. The system only serves itself and a select, faceless few. The victims are oppressed, but they don’t understand that which uses and abuses them.

The Grapes of Wrath reflects problems that are easy to see today. You’ve watched the news. The mercilessness of the American health insurance system is evident. A health insurance company denies 32% of claims and becomes startlingly wealthy. It’s an unusual funeral they give their victims, isn’t it? The afflicted are buried in paperwork first, then they die. Kill someone with a gun, and the press goes mad. Kill ill people with paper, and all we get are shrugs of “Well, it’s legal.”

Most frustrating, I still hear media people and pseudo-intellectuals pretend to be mystified when the public shrugs off the assassination of one CEO. They aren’t discussing why people are so fed up they don’t have the spare energy to care. The media isn’t delving into the why of that stance. They aren’t showcasing any of the many cases where people in need are denied tests and treatments they need to survive. Instead, the public’s lack of empathy has become the story. We have twenty-four-hour news channels, but they make no time for the bigger story.

A bunch of pearl-clutching journalists and commentators need to read The Grapes of Wrath. Maybe they’ll glimpse themselves reflected within those pages. Maybe then they’ll better understand our wrath.

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Five Times Art Imitated Life

Some readers mistake a fictional character’s opinion for that of the author. Were that true, I’d be in prison by now. My plots are full of characters living on the edge of society…okay, that much is me. Let’s start again: Not every thought a character espouses reflects my values. However, some books strike closer to home than others.

My mission is to entertain. I’m not trying to predict the future. I do extrapolate plenty, and in the last few years, reflecting reality has become more unsettling. Inevitably, my political views slip in where appropriate. No apologies or regrets on that front.

“I don’t try to predict the future. All I want to do is prevent it.”

~ Ray Bradbury

Here are five times my work reflected reality closer than I expected:

In Our Alien Hours, the alien threat rises from ocean. Seen the news lately? Nobody seems to care, but I’m prescient!

The Night Man cover

In The Night Man, the dad is a drug smuggler, but he’s just trying to get cheap Canadian drugs to Americans who are in need. The protagonist is a wounded veteran with few choices after he is medically discharged.

The genesis of Endemic is a virus that kills billions. Many of the survivors suffer cognitive impairment. Long-COVID (and repeated infection) gives some people brain fog, and since the disease is now endemic, we will continue to see such ill-effects to brain health.

In This Plague of Days, paramedical professionals were recruited to make do and join the fight against a pandemic. Long ago, I sat in a meeting about pandemic preparedness. This was part of the plan. I informed those in charge that this was a terrible idea and gave multiple reasons why. I was fired for it. In This Plague of Days, a non-medical person works in a hospital. She and her baby are infected because of that ill-conceived strategy.

Citizen Second Class is unfolding now. The uncaring elite are building bunkers and fortifying their islands, while the lower classes worry about providing for their families.

Then, of course, there’s my upcoming thriller, Vengeance Is Hers.

Given all that’s happening in the news and the many failures of the justice system, I predict there will be an appetite for vigilante justice thrillers.

Coming in 2025. Buckle up!

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Weekend Reads: Embracing Literature for Escape

Coffee and a book or two are great ways to start a Sunday morning. I’ve found my escape from the news, at least for a little while.

I just got these this morning, and I already know Writers and Lovers is a binge-read.

Sunday Morning, back home in Nova Scotia

When we weren’t arguing about whether I should be imprisoned in the car and taken to church, Sunday mornings used to be magical. Sunday mornings meant listening to CBC’s Sunday Morning and Dad cooking up a hunter’s breakfast. The theme music was “English Country Garden,” a very civilized and incongruous opening for a series of radio reports about the state of the world. My clearest memory of the show comes from November 1978. I know the date because it was when I first heard the gritty details of the Jonestown massacre. Many years later on the same program, they read a letter I wrote on air. It was an ode to my beloved journalism prof, Walter Stewart, upon his death. Read the second paragraph under Early Life and Career on his Wikipedia page, and you’ll understand why I loved him.

Sunday morning: today.

This morning, I awoke to news of rebels capturing Damascus and Bashar al-Assad fleeing to parts unknown. I had to shovel the end of the driveway again because the plows came through. That done, I headed out as CBC reported on the abuse of First Nations people by police. As I drove home from the bookstore, the cantankerous and fun Fran Lebowitz was interviewed. “English Country Garden” is long gone, but the journalistic standards remain.

I was once a journalist and columnist. Now, when I get a weekend newspaper, I skim the news and head for the Books section. I wonder if I’ll pay so much attention to politics and world affairs for the next couple of years. I love to be informed, but I write fiction. It occurs to me that many of my happiest times were when I retreated into the safety of books.

Books are Milestones of Nostalgia

One Christmas, when all I wanted was a train set, I was sick. I went to bed with a tall canister of Smarties and read Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming. Later, I would read all the James Bond books. They had so little to do with the movies I loved, but I loved the books no less.

University was me putting off toiling in the workforce for four years. It meant hiding in my dorm and reading In Cold Blood and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Once I graduated, I moved to Toronto to work in publishing. I was selling American Psycho and arguing with my bosses about censorship (Them: for; Me: Against).

I ate up Bright Lights, Big City, and related to the story so hard. On a summer night on the 28th floor of my apartment building in downtown Toronto, I devoured my favorite novel, The Color of Light by William Goldman. When I realized he had fooled me again, right down to the last line, I threw the book across the room, partly in exaltation, partly in admiration.

Chase the Cozy

Losing oneself to a novel, there is a coziness that feels like sitting by a crackling fire as a storm rages, a storm you don’t have to face. If you have the privilege of ignoring the violence and disappointments of current events, even for a little while, cherish it.

I encourage you to check out my books and retreat into fictional worlds for some solace. There are plenty of links to your right.

Failing that, here’s a link to Lily King’s Writers and Lovers. Think of it as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. I’m only 30 pages in, and it’s delightful.

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What holds up?

When I was in university, I loved Crime and Punishment. I loved In Cold Blood. I tolerated Good Guys Don’t Dance. Recently, I found out Spotify offers audiobooks. I was curious to see what classics from dead authors I might devour as I worked out and did the dishes.

Since Crime and Punishment was a hit with me, I decided to commit to Dostoevsky’s much-admired masterpiece, The Idiot. I’m not far into it, but the listening experience has me doubting myself. I read Crime and Punishment in paperback. Listening is much less demanding, and yet I find I don’t have the patience for The Idiot.

The ponderous character descriptions do not end. The exposition falls flat. Was I more patient in the ’80s? Have I changed that much, or is it the text? Maybe I’ll have to reread Crime and Punishment to test my mettle. Am I the idiot now?

A recommendation



Meanwhile, I just began Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible. The Midnight Library was good. I find myself charmed by this story of an elderly woman solving a mystery in Ibiza. You know how a certain turn of phrase can catch you? That’s what happened to me with The Life Impossible. To paraphrase, “The woman spoke with a voice so cool, her words might have just been pulled from a refrigerator.”

Nice. I wish I’d written that.

To my question: What book do you read and reread that holds up years later? I welcome your recommendations.