Hey Mr. Green on Canadian Living.com

Hey Mr. Green, by Bob Schildgen
978-1578051434 | $16.50 pb | in stock
Sierra Club Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Canadian Living.com recently reviewed & excerpted Hey Mr. Green:

Got questions? Ask Mr. Green

I came across a great little book recently called Hey Mr. Green. Mr. Green is Bob Schildgen, who has a column in Sierra magazine (put out by the Sierra Club) where he answers reader questions about living green – everything from finding nontoxic deck sealer and recycling old computers to choosing the best type of logs to burn in your fireplace. This book is a collection of those questions and answers plus a selection of his top tips on living green. The questions go from the standard (why we should turn off lights) to the obscure, and you’re sure to find the book both informative and entertaining.

For a sneak peek, we’ve picked out a couple of excerpts to get you started:
• 10 ways to save money on gas
• 8 steps to a healthy, eco-friendly lawn

Chabon’s Maps & Legends in the Free Press

Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon
978-1932416893 | $26.50 hc | in stock
McSweeney’s / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

The Winnipeg Free Press reviewed Chabon’s first collection of essays on June 1:

Chabon essays full of writing joy

Reviewed by Jill Wilson

NOVELIST Michael Chabon used to have a website, now sadly defunct, whose homepage contained this epigraph from S.J. Perelman: "Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws."

The Berkeley-based author has always gloried in the pulpy trappings of genre fiction, from the comic-book-creating heroes of his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to the Raymond Chandler-esque hard-boiled detective in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

His novels have all the high-minded literary merit in the world (see: Pulitzer) but they also have big, juicy plots that crackle with the promise of atom-smashers and damsels in distress.

In Maps and Legends, his first collection of essays, his intentions are signalled by the book jacket itself, a typically beautiful McSweeney’s creation that layers three different-coloured jackets like overlapping worlds, wherein Viking ships, sea monsters, ogres and monkey kings co-exist.

In its pages, Chabon addresses the role of the storyteller, and explores how writers lead the reader into different worlds by examining some of his own influences (Arthur Conan Doyle, comic-book genius Will Eisner) and authors he admires (Cormac McCarthy, Philip Pullman of the His Dark Materials trilogy).

In Trickster in a Suit of Lights, Chabon laments the short story’s evolution into contemporary plotlessness. The intention to entertain "came to seem suspect, unworthy, and somehow cold and hungry at its core," he writes. "No self-respecting literary genius, even occasional makers of avowed entertainments like Graham Greene, would ever describe him- or herself as primarily an ‘entertainer.’ An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket, singing She’s a Lady to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their underpants up onto the stage."

His essay on Conan Doyle has the enthusiasm of a fan letter, while it makes a case that the Sherlock Holmes author invented a certain way to nest stories within stories that raised the detective genre into a perfectly driven narrative machine.

His writing, as ever, has a kind of controlled exuberance; every word is meticulously chosen, but the reader can still sense the joy Chabon takes in finding that perfect turn of phrase. In making the argument that "all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aenid forward, is fan fiction," he claims that writers seek out the maps left by those who came before them and take a different route in the same country. "All novels are sequels; influence is bliss."

The latter part of the book is dedicated to pieces about Chabon’s own writing: how he came to abandon a Sherlockian science-fiction novel set on Mars and instead write his acclaimed debut, the Fitgeraldian and decidedly Earthbound The Mysteries of Pittburgh; how The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’s fanciful world of an alternate Jewish homeland in Alaska evolved out of a Yiddish phrasebook.

Most interesting, perhaps, is the final essay, Golems I Have Known: A Trickster’s Memoir, in which Chabon addresses the way autobiography and pure fiction meld in an author’s work. It’s an especially relevant observation in this era of faked memoirs that it’s the novelist’s job to lie in order to entertain.

Jill Wilson is a Free Press copy editor.

 

Globe & Mail reviews On the Road Again!

On the Road Again!, by Marie-Louise Gay and David Homel
978-0888998460 | $15.95 hc | in stock
Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)

The Globe & Mail’s Susan Perren reviewed On the Road Again! on May 31:

Charlie, the young narrator in this family saga, a sequel to Travels with My Family, is excited by the news that his family’s next trip will be to France. That brings thoughts of Paris – climbing the steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower, looking "at the spot where the Hunchback of Notre Dame took the plunge," taking a boat ride through Paris’s sewers. "Not to mention French Disneyland." The truth about the proposed trip is less than thrilling for Charlie. The plan is that he, his younger brother Max and their parents – writer dad and artist mum – will spend a year "somewhere in the hills in the southern part of France." The name of the remote village is Celeriac. "Sell-air-ee-ack," is how Charlie pronounces the name. "I think," he says, "that’s some kind of a vegetable. Imagine coming from a village that’s named after a vegetable. And not even a famous one either!"

Of course, getting settled into school and friends and life in general in Celeriac is fraught – and hilariously so – at first, but then Charlie’s sense of dislocation evolves into a sense of belonging, what with mushroom hunting, and collecting chestnuts, village eccentrics, new friends and the Christmas Eve service at the local church whose heretofore unopened door had been used as a goal in the village games of street soccer – such a sense of belonging that the thought of travels farther afield to Spain, for instance, is slightly horrifying.

Embellished with Marie-Louise Gay’s pen-and-ink squiggle drawings, full of good humour, much of which involves the Charlie-Max sibling relationship, and keen observation of Celeriac’s flora, fauna and humans, this novel will hit a home run with almost any reader, but especially one facing a "sabbatical" year away en famille.