Ten intriguing books for beach or balcony

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      Who knows how this summer is going to play out weatherwise? Luckily, books work just as well on rainy days as they do in sunshine. Here are a few fine ways to pass the day, no matter what the cloud cover.

      The Thing Around Your Neck
      (By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Knopf Canada, $29.95)

      The Nigerian-born, Connecticut-based author of the 2006 novel Half a Yellow Sun offers 12 compelling stories that shift between the two countries she calls home. Returning often to the promises and disillusionments of immigration, Adichie has a clear, forceful style and a wide-ranging sense of empathy, as much at ease in Philadelphia as in Lagos. These are rare things in a 31-year-old writer, and they suggest that a long, celebrated career is just getting started.

      26 Feet to the Charlottes: Exploring the Land of the Haida
      (By June Cameron. Heritage House, $19.95)
      A veteran sailboat racer recounts her 1983 voyage aboard a 26-foot wood sloop, from Vancouver to the rough and rocky western coastlines of Haida Gwaii. When Cameron and her shipmate aren’t battling to keep their boat intact on windswept stretches like Hecate Strait, they’re dropping anchor at a string of remote, deserted Haida villages, where many of the wood-carved remnants of the old ways are “little more than bulges under the moss”.

      Osama Van Halen
      (By Michael Muhammad Knight. Soft Skull Press, $19.95)

      With the title of his self-published 2002 debut novel The Taqwacores, the ever-abrasive Knight coined a term that was to become the name of a small but boisterous Islamic-American punk movement. In this latest piece of fiction, he brings back two of The Taqwacores’ main characters—burqa-wearing rebel Rabeya and Iranian skinhead Amazing Ayyub—for a rowdy, provocative tale crowded with zombies, jinns, a kidnapped movie star (Matt Damon, in fact), an Islamic pop-punk band called Shah 79, and a doomed figure named Michael Muhammad Knight. Like all punk worthy of the name, it’s bound to pull readers in even as it pisses them off.

      The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors
      (By Hal Niedzviecki. City Lights, $18.95)

      The Toronto-based founder of Broken Pencil magazine wades into the show-and-tell world of reality TV, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, and chat rooms—all of the virtual public places we go to spill our guts and witness others spilling theirs. Between interviews and descriptions of his own posting-and-tweeting habits, Niedzviecki outlines the concept of “peep”, calling it “the backbone of Web 2.0” and explaining its “whispered, hypnotic idea: You need to know. You need to be known.” Although the book is anything but an anti-Web polemic, Niedzviecki raises troubling questions about the way these new social spaces “can instantly evoke transparency, transgression and totalitarianism”, all at once.

      February
      (By Lisa Moore. Anansi, $29.95)

      Time passes differently in the world of emotions than it does on the calendar. In this moving novel by the St. John’s–born author, a widow carries on with daily life surrounded by children and grandchildren, while her thoughts continually circle back to the winter day when her husband disappeared with the rest of the crew of the Ocean Ranger, the oil rig that sank off the Newfoundland coast in 1982. Expect the unflinching psychological insight that won Moore the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Canada and the Caribbean for her 2005 novel Alligator.

      Map of the Invisible World
      (By Tash Aw. McClelland & Stewart, $32.99)

      This follow-up to the Malaysian-raised novelist’s much-lauded 2005 debut, The Harmony Silk Factory, offers a rich vision of Jakarta in the 1960s, during the upheavals of the Sukarno era. Aw’s admiration for writers like Graham Greene shows through here as he mixes vivid street scenes with finely drawn characters in a story about two orphaned brothers and the divergent paths their lives take during Indonesia’s struggles with its colonial past.

      American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime
      (By Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O’Keeffe, and Christian Red. Knopf, $33)

      For millions of baseball fans, what would summer be without afternoons at a sunny ballpark? Then again, what would pro baseball be without constant suspicions that a history-making player has injected illegal substances into his butt? In this forensically detailed account, a team of investigative reporters from the New York Daily News chronicles the scandal that engulfed a seven-time Cy Young Award winner whose fastball suddenly got faster as he neared the age of 40.

      Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture
      (By Kaya Oakes. Henry Holt, $15.50)
      It was easier to figure out what the term indie meant back when underground art, music, publishing, and fashion were actually underground, and not part of the vocabulary used by advertisers and corporate-owned media to move product. Berkeley, California–based writer Oakes tries to clear things up by tracing the bloodlines of these subcultures, interviewing figures like author-cartoonist Daniel Clowes and Bikini Kill vocalist Kathleen Hanna along the way. The result is a guaranteed conversation-starter at a point when “technology and changing times have made the line of demarcation between mainstream and indie almost unrecognizable.”

      Heaven Is Small
      (By Emily Schultz. Anansi, $29.95)

      Gordon Small, the hero of this smart, deadpan novel by Toronto’s Emily Schultz, makes the same mistake Bruce Willis did in The Sixth Sense: he fails to notice that he’s dead. But Gordon, a frustrated writer, does manage to land himself a job in his new circumstances, as a proofreader with the Heaven Book Company. And just as he still has to deal with a human resources department, despite having passed on, he still has a chance to revive his writing career.

      Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits
      (By Barney Hoskyns. Broadway, $37)

      Two things stood in British journalist Hoskyns’s way when he set out to write this full-length bio of the famously enigmatic musician. For one thing, Tom Waits has long been one of the most skilled creators of personas in the business—he rarely makes a public appearance out of character. For another, Waits and the people around him are notoriously tightlipped about the man behind those battered-boho masks. All the same, the author finds plenty in the songs, performances, and old interviews to piece together a revealing portrait of the artist.

      Comments