STICKBOY

 

Shane Koyczan. Stickboy. Parlance, 2008.

I have been a fan of this BC writer for 25 years, since I first heard about his win in San Francisco of the top Slam Poetry prize. Saw him perform at an early-century Café Deux Soleil on Commercial, Vancouver. Read & enjoyed Visiting Hours. Acquired some sort of CD, since disappeared. Revelled in his 2010 Olympics ceremony performance which includes this same theme of bullying. Watched the doc about his search for a father on Knowledge Network. Followed him on IG, when it worked. And jumped on this copy of Stickboy found at the Rotary Book sale.

I really enjoyed this book. Read most of it aloud to myself. It is smooth and affecting at the same time. I kept thinking: should be required reading for every teacher-in-training. Shane takes us inside the head of an unhappy child and how that unhappiness manifests in the real world of school and sport fields.

For a bit, I thought I must have missed the reference explaining the title, but info on Amazon or Goodreads suggests: an ironic reference to “sticks & stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”; an ironic contrast to nicknames “Fatboy” or “Fatass”; & a stick-drawn figure with firecrackers and dynamite sticks as appendages, ready to explode at any moment.

Accessibility. Insight. Humour. Survival.

A THOUSAND MORNINGS

 Mary Oliver. A THOUSAND MORNINGS. Penguin, 2012. 

Book sale find. Turns out to be a duplicate. Reread it anyway. Mary Oliver never disappoints. 

LILAC GIRLS

 Martha Hall Kelly. LILAC GIRLS. Ballantine/Penguin, 2017.

Book Club selection for September meeting, Lilac Girls, is almost 500 pages. It is based on true stories of a New York philanthropist & the Polish women in a Nazi concentration camp, Ravensbruck. After Born a Crime, this is my favourite book club book so far. It follows the lives of three women, American, Polish, & German, through WW II and after. Although some of the info about experiments on human guinea pigs is tough to read, it seemed important not to turn away from truths of history nor to blind myself to the reality that similar challenges are being lived today in Ukraine, Gaza, and America (and probably many other places we hear less news from).

TOOTH & NAIL

 Ian Rankin. TOOTH & NAIL. Orion, 1998. Originally published as WOLFMAN, 1992.

An early Rebus novel, re-titled. I had not read it before, even with the former title. Rebus is a younger inspector seconded to London to help with a serial killer case. The story has more sex and more "action" than later works, I assume because Rebus is younger although already worried about aging and not keeping in shape. Muscling. Car chases. A sub-theme is the early introduction of "psychological profiling" on police work. The tooth motif is used nicely throughout--bite marks on the corpses, dental care, etc. 

AT A LOSS FOR WORDS

 Diane Schoemperlen. AT A LOSS FOR WORDS. HarperCollins, 2008.

This is my first reading of this author although her  Forms of Devotion awaits. I suspect that this first-person narrative of an affair (a lover returned after decades) is an effort to write a novel with an unsympathetic and often irritating protagonist who learns nothing but diagnoses the lover with a personality disorder. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. 

WHAT DO I KNOW?

 Michel de Montaigne. WHAT DO I KNOW? Essential Essays. Pushkin, 2023.

I bought this book in Village Books in Bellingham in 2023 because it was a beautiful copy and contained the one essay I have worked with, "On Cannibals". It is missing one I think is as important--"On Education". Some were less enlightening than I had hoped, hindered for me by all the allusions to writers of Greece and Rome. But the similarities to issues of today is still over-whelming, as is the obvious sources in Montaigne of many Shakespearean characters and phrases. First versions of Montaigne's essays would have been published in French when Shakespeare was about 10 years old. 

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

 Anthony Burgess. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Penguin, 1972. (originally, 1962)

Language: This volume has waited for years in my TBR pile. I feared that the language would defeat me as Burgess had devised a futuristic British teen gang slang for his narrator Alex's telling of his early years of "wilding" and incarceration in a future dystopian Great Britain. The language proved to be not a problem. It was readable without making my own glossary. Unfamiliar words were usually in context and the specifics not that necessary. The reader gets the violence. Someone did something to a victim. The introduction which I always read afterwards was useful. 

Title: Another language mystery for me was the meaning of the title. It turns out that what we here in Canada call a "wind-up toy" is referred to in the UK as a "clockwork" toy, wound like a clock by a key. And that a clockwork orange would be the height of uselessness, not to mention its disrespect to the idea of an orange itself. It becomes a metaphor for society's shortcomings, mistakes, especially the way we expect humans to act, to behave, as obediently as mechanical toys. Stupid mechanical toys. 

Themes: A third hesitation I had was memories of the violence associated with the 1970s movie (starring Malcolm McDowell, now the grandfather on Son of a Critch). There are scenes of violence, somewhat mitigated by being related by the perpetrator himself and thus "minimized". B&Es, assaults, rapes. And violence inflicted on the convicted Alex, offered as a way out of prison. It seems Burgess objected to the way the movie seemed to glorify the violence and failed to deal with the more important issues: why they do it, and what it means to be human. This is especially related to the treatment (aversion to violence therapy) offered to convicts, turning them into a mechanical toy who rejects violence because it makes him sick, not because of any moral or ethical reasons. Alex has become the clockwork orange.