The Advent Book Blog is a which runs from December 1st through the 25th. It’s run by Books on the Radio and Book Madam, and it’s now in its third year.

It offers reader-sourced recommendations – ad-free. I’ve just recommended The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern (click here to find out why). If you’re interested in sending in your recommendation, you can do so here.

I’m also helping out as an elf, so I get to see behind the scenes. There’s a ton of great stuff lined up, and I highly recommend checking it out and following @AdventBookBlog on Twitter.

Happy holidays.

As this is the fourth edition of Shelf Life, if you’ve been reading this blog with any regularity, you probably have a pretty good idea what it’s about. If you don’t, check out past editions for more info.

I’m going to try to make this as brief as I can, as we’re almost halfway through November, and I still have to get October’s written as well.

Onward:

96. Summer of My Amazing Luck, by Miriam Toews

I read A Complicated Kindness after it won the Governor General’s Award and loved it. When The Flying Troutmans came out I devoured it and declared it my favourite read in 2009, so I was eager to read Summer of My Amazing Luck when I stumbled across it in a used bookstore.

Unfortunately, this story wasn’t up to par. I wasn’t buying Lucy, the down on her luck single mom who doesn’t know who the father of her child is, and isn’t interested in finding out.

She becomes enamoured of Lish, who seems to be the heart of the novel, but I had such difficulty with Lucy that it just didn’t work for me. She lacked personality, and I never felt like I got to know who she was, and therefore, why I should care. It sounds harsh, but I adored the first two books I read from Toews, and I’m still looking forward to reading more.

Irma Voth, I’ve got my eye on you. Continue reading »

June marked the first edition of Shelf Life, and July the second, so with August I bring you the third collection of brief notes on what I read this month.

You’ll notice this month’s list has gone up in a much more timely fashion. This time I took my own advice and wrote these notes as I went along. Much easier to remember and comment on the content of what I’m reading as I go, rather than long after the fact.

Some good stuff stands out this month, among them The Lacuna, and, surprisingly, The Chairs Are Where the People Go.

Onward:

80. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A book club pick.  We’re trying, in fits and starts, to make our way through a list of “30 books everyone should read before 30″. There are various incarnations of the list, but most include overlapping titles, so we pick randomly from the list, as we’re all still below that dooméd age. So far the results have not been overly gratifying.

A family saga told from the founding of a town in an undisclosed South American country in an undisclosed province, to its ultimate destruction – both of family and town. At the end of the book a baby is killed and carried away by an army of aunts.

It has gypsies, flying carpets, revolutionaries, war, lots of sex and an obscure mysticism. It should be a deeply interesting book, but it’s not. Instead it was universally “mehed” by the group. We’re switching back to CanCon for September’s pick. Continue reading »