Mind Picking : Farewell 2013

Last day of 2013, time to reflect I guess (that's what bloggers do, right?) On my "The Big Who" section I describe myself as "a little bored" and that is certainly true -- life doesn't change too much for me day after day or even year after year. But I don't say that with a baleful tone -- my life is happy and stable and utterly free from tragedy. The most tense and unhappy time for me and my family in 2013 was when my father-in-law had his (third) bypass operation in November, but since he was able to travel to our home for Christmas, I'll call that a happy ending. 

This is primarily a book blog, so it feels appropriate to make a Top Ten list out of the 111 books that Goodreads says I read this year -- but that's easier said than done. I tried to sort my reading into a Top Ten of books written in 2013 and another Top Ten for earlier publishing dates (because I couldn't decide on just ten books), but that felt arbitrary in the end: I would have needed to include more from this year than I really loved and fewer from earlier years. So after much internal debate, I have a Top Five for 2013 and Top Fifteen for other years:

Top Five Books Released in 2013

 The Orenda

My absolute favourite book of the year, based on its plot and writing and how important it felt to me. My pick for the GGs.

  Harvest

A portrait of an inevitable downfall that would have been my pick for the Man Booker.

 The Crooked Maid

Perfectly captures a fascinating time and place. My pick for the Giller Prize.

  Hellgoing: Stories

Disturbing short stories that lingered in my brain.

  Night Film

Plain fun.

Top Fifteen Reads From Earlier Years

  February

My other absolute favourite book of the year -- made me cry and marvel in equal measures.

  Come, Thou Tortoise

This is the most affected I have ever been by an essentially funny book; laughing through the tears.

  1Q84

Totally messed with my brain. And I liked it.

  The Fire-Dwellers

Something about this feels like my story, even though it's nothing like my story. It's a shame that I read/re-read all of the Margaret Laurence this year since I decided to limit myself to one book per author for the sake of variety -- this is one of my very favourite authors, and I feel guilty not including all of her works on my "best of" list. Honorable mention to: The Stone Angel.

  Away

This also felt incredibly personal and intimate.

  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I flatter myself to think that this is exactly the book I could have written in my 20s if I had had the confidence (and, you know, the talent).

  The Stone Diaries

Simply one of the most perfect books ever written.

  Gargantua and Pantagruel

Historically interesting and (mostly) funny.

  The Master and Margarita

A sly peek into Stalinist Russia.

  A Good Man

Another pure Canadian story by one of the masters.

  Farewell, My Lovely

I don't know what I regret more: That I waited so long to read Raymond Chandler or that he wrote so few books. OK, it's the latter because I want to read and read and read Chandler, and then read him some more.

  The Dinner

Totally intriguing.

   Anansi Boys

Fun and interesting.

  Shake Hands With the Devil

The most important nonfiction book I read this year.

  Bossypants

My favourite memoir of the year, and I listened to quite a few memoirs (27 according to Goodreads) since they are easy to listen to (no character voices that usually bother me in audiobooks).

And now a look back at 2013 in (mostly fuzzy cellphone) pictures.

We started the year in Orlando. The girls pointed out that it had been 8 years since we had last taken them there and that they would really like to go again (imagine being bored of our Caribbean resort vacations?) So we rented a house and invited Dave's parents to meet us there (since they always rent a trailer in Clearwater for a few months and they couldn't get into it this year until the 8th of January). We went to Disneyworld and Universal Studios -- and, of course, Hogwart's was the big hit. Since our preordered Universal tickets were messed up, they compensated us by giving us "skip the line" passes for The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and it was decadent to be able to wander through the castle, pausing to see the things that interested us, and passing the hundreds (thousands?) of people corralled in the regular, snaking lineup. When we went on the ride, no one took our special passes, and I must tattle on myself and say that we came back at the end of the day to skip that line again. Another life-hacking highlight: When we went to Planet Hollywood at Downtown Disney with the inlaws, after waiting what seemed like quite a while for our meal, we watched in horror as our lunches slid off the waiter's giant tray and landed on the table and laps of a different family. We could appreciate that they would have been compensated for the accident, but we were gobsmacked when the manager came running over to assure us that our lunches would be free as well.  We played cards and drank champagne as a family to bring in the New Year, and another highlight, I got to take Kennedy to buy her prom dress. A big success!

Butterbeers at Honeydukes.

Yep, that's what I call a prom dress and Kennedy had a great time, attending with her boyfriend, Zach, and co-hosting the party as one of the Presidents. Soon after Prom was Graduation, and Kennedy took home a pile of awards and scholarships.

This was also the year that Dave's parents celebrated their 50th Wedding Anniversary and preparing their party was a big job in which I participated.

Summer brought Canada Day and our annual pilgrimage to Nova Scotia, where the highlight was Pop's new pontoon boat.

And like most years, my favourite part was a mini-vacation just for the four of us on the way home. This year was a stop in Sudbury and this turned out to be an inspired choice -- great museums and scenery and food. (Especially The Laughing Buddha!)

Fall came too soon: 

 Kennedy started university at Guelph:

And Mallory took home her own academic awards:

We had fun at Oktoberfest, Thanksgiving and Halloween:

Grandpa had his health scare, but it all worked out fine.

And this was the image I put on a mug for him for Christmas, lol

And we were grateful that the pretty icestorm didn't affect our power right before Christmas:

And I suppose we end the year with Christmas, and I am so happy that the girls still insist that their Dad read to them The Night Before Christmas before they go to sleep, that they still wait on the top step, asking when they're allowed to come downstairs in the morning, and also that they'll permit me to put them to work in the "cookie factory".

Christmas in July with all the Jonses.

So, there it is: A totally typical year, and while it may not seem terribly exciting, it was a year with many laughs and few worries. A year that, once again, filled me with gratitude and joy and lots of time to read and, for the first time, the gumption to sit down and write about it. 

Gone Girl

What to say about Gone Girl? I read it because it seems that just about everyone has read it, it's a bona fide phenomenon, so at least now I'm up to date with the (previous year's) zeitgeist. The entire novel can be summed up by this one, non-spoiler, quote:

All this time I'd thought we were strangers, and it turned out we knew each other intuitively, in our bones, in our blood. It was kind of romantic. Catastrophically romantic.

Gone Girl is a he said/she said book, alternating between the points of view of a married couple, Nick and Amy. Soon after the book begins, Amy goes missing (on the day of their fifth anniversary) and the narrative is told in a linear timeline from Nick's point of view (as the investigation proceeds) and in diary entries written by Amy, starting with the day the couple first met seven years earlier. As this section of the book unspooled, discrepancies between their two versions became obvious and it is apparent that at least one of them is lying. Eventually both Nick and Amy are exposed as unlikeable and unsympathetic characters, but even so, I was fascinated to find out what would become of them.

The police investigation, and Nick's shadow investigation through the treasure hunt clues Amy left behind for him (as she left for him on every anniversary), were interesting puzzles -- since the husband is the number one suspect in every missing wife case, the more I learned about Nick the more conflicted I became about whether or not I wanted him to be revealed as a murderer. Nick's situation and Amy's journal provided opportunities for the characters to ruminate on the nature of intimacy, fidelity, fame, the media's effect on public mood and justice, the internet's effect on the changing economy, the snobbishness and reverse-snobbishness of New York City vs small town Missouri -- there were so many big themes, with smart sounding observations made by seemingly smart characters, that at the time this felt like a weightier book than it does in retrospect. This passage struck me, at the time, as profound:

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A commercial. You know the awful singsong of blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality really can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared scripted.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

I would have done anything to feel real again.

Like I said, that felt profound at the time because I know I've felt that way, probably everyone has felt that way -- and the more I think about what a common experience that must be, then it's about as profound as saying, "Ice is cold". Yes. We all can feel that. 

The writing in Gone Girl is certainly interesting, with delightful metaphors like:

In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you'd never guess from looking at me.

But as much I did like "belly-basement", the following was just bizarre to me:

Nick and I fit together. I am a little too much, and he is a little too little. I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.

So with good writing, a twisting and turning plot, a tense whodunnit element, social commentary that does capture elements of our society -- this should have been a slam-dunk for my affections. But, even though I powered through the last quarter of the book, fascinated to know how Gone Girl would end, it left me dissatisfied, and not just because of the lukewarm ending. The plot sparked my imagination, and I was almost disappointed that what I thought was going to happen didn't: I really thought that Andie would somehow be killed -- I was expecting her (incriminating) corpse to be what Nick found in the woodshed. Then, I really thought that Desi would kill Amy and dump her body in the Mississippi, putting the final nail in Nick's coffin. Failing that, I expected Nick's father to kill Amy, a karmic retribution for her trying to brainwash the old man into visiting their house -- and by that time I did want Nick to be free of her. And while I can't blame Gillian Flynn for not writing the ending I was expecting, there's one, fundamental plot twist that I just can't buy: Not even Amy, the chilling sociopath, would be so egotistical as to believe that Nick was sincere when he was apologising to her on TV, begging her to come home so he could treat her the way she deserved. No way would she come home based on that, after all her months of planning and work. And more minor complaints: How did the brilliant Amy allow herself to be robbed by the Ozark hillbillies? I hated the "She must have put my fingerprints over all the swag while I slept" plot point. Who was the moustached man creeping Amy out at the casino? Why does Nick's mistress have to be named "Andie" (as in Able Andy)? Why, when Amy said she was pregnant, didn't Nick work twice as hard to find a way to put Amy in jail for Desi's murder so he could have the baby to himself ? Oh right -- because he's a better man when trying to keep up with his crazy wife.

A he said/she said between two unlikable characters left me with no one to root for, and in the end, where justice itself was the only thing to hope for, I was left wanting.

She said: Committing to Nick, feeling safe with Nick, being happy with Nick, made me realize that there was a Real Amy in there, and she was so much better, more interesting and complicated and challenging, than Cool Amy. Nick wanted Cool Amy anyway. Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you? So that’s how the hating first began. I’ve thought about this a lot, and that’s where it started, I think.

He said: You stopped loving me. We're a sick, toxic Möbius strip, Amy. We weren't ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves - surprise! - we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way. You don't even really love me, Amy. You don't even like me.

How catastrophically romantic.