Although not my favourite book in this series, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour was a pretty solid conclusion and was fairly emotionally satisfying. For me, the most interesting part of this series is the characters and the pop culture/Toronto references. A good chunk of this book delved too strongly into the sci-fi/comic world for my tastes, but it did pull itself back on track with wrapping up the emotional arcs of the characters at the end. The ending was, however, rather predictable and didn’t throw as many surprising punches as I would have liked, but alas. Still a really fun series as a whole that I’d love to read in close succession again one day.

View all my reviews >>

I am extremely excited to announce that I am going to be co-writing a companion guide book to Glee along with fellow gleek Erin Balser for the fabulous Toronto-based ECW Press! Don’t Stop Believin’: The Unofficial Guide to Glee will be in stores in Fall 2010!

Yes, all my rantings and ravings about Glee are actually going to be contained within the covers of a physical book! I am really beyond excited for this fantastic opportunity. ECW Press has published companion guides to tons of popular TV shows over the years (Buffy, Lost, and Gossip Girl to name a few), so I’m thrilled to be a part of this great family.

This book truly will be a must-have for all gleeks, featuring cast and character bios, behind-the-scenes trivia, interviews, and, of course, in-depth guides to each episode of the first season. If you’re a Glee fan, you’re definitely going to want to check this out (and you’re also going to want to check out my blog, Gleeks United, and Erin’s blog, Glee Dork)!

Have any fantastic ideas of what you want to see in a Glee companion guide? Feel free to send me your thoughts via the comments or by e-mail!

Some of the Books, Etc. ladies (L to R: Jen, Jenna, Kendra, Chantal, me, Bonita)

Today on the CBC Books site, blogger Julie Wilson (@BookMadam) interviews me about my book club, Books, Etc. Julie asked some great questions about our club and I had tons of fun answering them. I love hearing about other book clubs and why people join them, so I really enjoyed sharing my own insight on that. One of my favourite parts, where I talk about what I get most from my book club, is below:

Q: What do you get most from your book club?

A: Aside from great discussions with great friends, what I love most is the opportunity to read books that I might otherwise never have chosen for myself. Many of us have very different tastes from each other, and I thrill at the opportunity to be forced outside my comfort zone. For example, Push is a stream-of-consciousness novel narrated by a 16-year-old illiterate girl from Harlem who has been repeatedly raped (and twice impregnated) by her father, and physically and mentally abused by her mother. That description alone would usually scare me out of reading the book, but it was very powerful.

Read the full interview here. Thanks again, Julie!

Lemon

I didn’t really know what to expect when I started reading Lemon, my first foray into Cordelia Strube’s oeuvre, even though Lemon is her eighth novel. The plot seemed like one I’d read before, yet it intrigued me nonetheless: misfit teenage girl with the odds stacked against her attempts to get out of high school in one piece. But upon reading the first few chapters, I quickly realized that Lemon herself was a far more complex and interesting character than any plot summary could have explained to me. Lemon buries herself in classic literature while complaining about the weak women within these tales. Lemon spends her spare time volunteering at a local hospital and creating a strong sisterly relationship with a young girl with cancer. Lemon truly doesn’t want to fit into the oversexed, overviolenced world of adulthood and doesn’t understand why her peers are so desperate to age themselves. And when you see the world through Lemon’s eyes, you’ll wonder why you were once so anxious to grow up, too.

Strube does a fantastic job of writing in the voice of a teenage misfit as she deals with difficult issues ranging from gang violence, to rape, to cancer, to dysfunctional families. While a few scenes are undeniably disturbing and painful to witness, the opportunity Strube gives us to view our world through a fresh new lens makes this book an incredibly worthwhile read. Lemon will punch you in the gut and rip your heart out, and yet somehow, you’ll be a better person because of it.

Links:
Buy Lemon on Amazon.ca
Check out more reviews of Lemon on Goodreads

Now, I wonder: How many of my Canadian to-read books are short story collections? I just read about The Short Story Reading Challenge run by Kate of Kate’s Book Blog and, being a lover of the genre, figure that I might as well add another challenge to my existing one! To help make the challenge accessible for all, Kate’s provided potential participants with a range of different options on how to complete the challenge, and I’m planning on going with options 3 & 4:

Options 3 & 4: If you’ve got a bit more time to devote to this endeavour, you can commit to reading between five and ten short story collections over the course of 2010. Again, if you’re a short story novice, the world is your oyster as far as selection is concerned. But if you’re a seasoned short story reader, you’ll want to choose collections by writers whose short stories you have not yet encountered.

As of yet, I’m not 100% certain of what collections I’ll be reading, but I can guarantee that they’ll all be Canadian! And I can also guarantee that I will be sure to include Emily Schultz’s Black Coffee Night, Anik See’s Postcard and Other Stories, Rhonda Waterfall’s The Only Thing I Have, and Rebecca Rosenblum’s Once. Anyone have any other suggestions of must-read Canadian short stories? Some of my favourite Canadian collections include John Gould’s Kilter 55, Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method, Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, and Annabel Lyon’s Oxygen.

Interested in joining The Short Story Reading Challenge? Comment on Kate’s post to let her know. And be sure to stick around here for my short story reviews throughout the year! Also, I’m almost finished up with my first book of 2009, so expect a review of Cordelia Strube’s Lemon sometime this week.

What's more Can Lit than moose bookends?

For the first time in a long, long time, I’m making a new year’s resolution. And due to my love of reading and writing (as well as due to having a wonderful blog which I never get around to updating), I’m going to roll those loves together into a resolution that will be entertaining, will be educational, and, perhaps most importantly, will be something I can actually stick to through ’til the end of 2010. So, without further ado, my reading challenge resolution for 2010:

Read Canadian.

Okay, so maybe that was a bit of a long lead up for a rather simple challenge. There is only one key rule to my reading challenge this year, and that is that all the books I personally choose to read* must be written by a Canadian or have significant Canadian content. From Canadian classics I’ve never gotten around to reading,** to small-press gems from indie presses across the country, I want to show my love for all things Canadian, as well as gain further knowledge of the diversity of our nation’s written works. I’m a patriotic girl and a book-loving girl, so I figure I might as well combine the two for good rather than evil, right?***

Over the course of the next year, I hope to read a wide cross-section of Canadian books, and although I already have a huge to-read list (my to-read shelf on Goodreads is fast-approaching 800 books, and I’d wager that a sizable number of those are Canadian), I always love great personal recommendations. I want to read the best that Canada has to offer, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. I’m primarily a fiction lover, with a special love for short stories and YA, but I’d love suggestions in all areas, because although I plan on picking some books that are high on my to-read list, this challenge is also about broadening my horizons and stepping outside of my reading comfort zone every now and again.

So have at it! Suggest to me some of your favourite Canadian works both new and old, fiction and non-fiction. I already have plans to read this year’s Canada Reads picks, as well as many on the Canada Also Reads list. And if you’re not sure what to suggest just yet, feel free to comment along the way (maybe one of my new favourite reads will inspire you to recommend a related book!) or send me an e-mail.

To document my progress, I’ll be blogging right here at suzannegardner.ca. All reviews and commentary-related to the challenge will be posted on the blog’s main feed, which you can subscribe to here. I’ve also created a Canadiana Reading Challenge 2010 page which will feature a continually updated list of what I’ve read (with links to the reviews) and an archive of my commentary on the challenge. While I won’t be able to do a full review of each book, my goal is to write at least a few sentences on everything that I read, and longer reviews when time allows. I love writing reviews and I know that the only way I’ll improve my skills is to keep on writing them.

I hope you’ll all enjoy reading about my challenge as much as I’ll enjoy reading the challenge itself! Please feel free to suggest books to me whenever the mood strikes you, either in the comments, via e-mail, on Twitter, or wherever you might meet me in real life. Happy new year to you all and a very happy year full of reading!

* My reading challenge only applies to books I personally choose to read, meaning that books chosen for me to read by my book club or by any employer, are exempt.

** In other words, I’ll finally read a Margaret Atwood book.

*** I’m not actually sure how one would go about combining their Canada love and book love for evil. But it’s an intriguing idea. Suggestions?

All this is why, my friends, I will be bringing a designated amount of money with me to WOTS this Sunday, and will not allow myself to take out any additional cash or use any credit or debit cards. Because as much as I’d like to leave the festival carrying as many books as the guy pictured on the right, I’d probably break my back (and my bank account).

Whether you’re a book lover or a magazine lover, if you live near Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax, or Kitchener, get yourself to The Word on the Street festival this Sunday.

{Photo by Garry Knight}

The good
The awesome décor/creativity blog decor8 writes about a community bookcase in Hannover, Germany, with contents that are 100% free to the public. No library card or money is needed – all this bookcase requests is that you add a few books of your own to replenish its supply. What I love most about this project is that it actually works. Europe wins this round, folks – I really don’t think this would be as successful in greedier North America.

The bad
The Boston Globe writes about a library with no books, as a New England prep school eliminates their collection of more than 20,000 books and replaces them with three flat-screen TVs projecting data from the web, 18 e-readers (a mix of Kindles and Sony Readers), and a coffee shop with a $12,000 cappuccino machine. Words cannot explain my disgust, and no, the disgust isn’t all because of my hate for coffee.

The super fun

{Photo by Thorsten Becker}

First, Pages. And now, TYPE on the Danforth.* My book-loving heart can’t handle all this pain!

Also, if you don’t have any plans for next Tuesday night in Toronto, come to Afterword: A Celebration of 30 Years of Pages at the Gladstone. The vast majority of the book-loving community in T.O. will be there, so you’ll surely meet some great people while you raise a glass to one of the country’s best independent bookstores.

* May I also note that this is the Michael Jackson – Farrah Fawcett phenomenon once again. Or, as we decided it should be called at the Quill office, the Ted Kennedy – Dominick Dunne phenomenon. Much more high-brow.

{Photo by jenkim}

Apparently, HarperCollins has beat everyone else to the punch, and the results of their redesign efforts can be seen above with the Harper U.K. cover in the middle and the Harper U.S. one on the right. And everyone is talking about it.

From the gag-worthy, undead-inspired tagline, to the stamp of approval from Twilight’s star-crossed lovers, these covers are just dripping with sugary sap. And then there’s the overly gushing product description from Amazon:

Love the Twilight books? Then you’ll adore Wuthering Heights, one of the greatest love stories ever told. Cathy and Heathcliff, childhood friends, are cruelly separated by class, fate and the actions of others. But uniting them is something even stronger: an all-consuming passion that sweeps away everything that comes between them. Even death!

But let’s put all that aside. Sure, Wuthering Heights definitely doesn’t need a vampire-esque redesign. But, according to the Guardian, the strategy, so far, is working:

A new edition of the novel, repackaged in a similar style to Meyer’s Twilight books – black cover, white flower, tagline “love never dies” – was released in May this year, and has already sold more than 10,000 copies in the UK, nearly twice as many as the traditional Penguin Classic edition, making it Waterstone’s bestselling classic.

And really, why shouldn’t it be selling well? Teens love Twilight, so if you throw more books at them that look just like their treasured love story with claims of support from their favourite hero and heroine, naturally these new books are going to sell like hotcakes. Even if the new books are, in fact, actually old. And again, what’s so bad about this after all? Sure, it’s just a cash grab scheme for HarperCollins, but on the positive flip side, it’s also encouraging young readers to pick up the classics. It’s the exact same thing that happens when Hollywood turns the works of Shakespeare and Austen into blockbuster flicks. And if all these tricks lead to more teens reading great classic works of literature, then who really cares what the original motive is, as long as increased literacy is a side-effect?

Is Brontë rolling in her grave? Perhaps. Or maybe she just wishes she was alive to be rolling in all her vampire-infused dough.

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