I found this review from May 2010 in my Drafts folder. It was whole and complete, but for some reason or another it remained unpublished.

It’s a great book, so I thought I’d post it as is. Better late than never, right?

As mentioned earlier, our book club pick for May was The Complete Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi.

Satrapi is an Iranian living in Paris, and Persepolis is an autobiographical graphic novel, originally published in French in two parts (as Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return), and is now available in a single volume.

Persepolis begins with her childhood in Tehran, and carries her story through the Islamic Revolution, and to her university days in Vienna. It’s a tale beautifully told with stirring images and humour.

I’d read a few pages the night before, and with six minutes left on the washing machine, I thought I’d read a few more while I waited for it to finish. Suddenly I realized I’d finished the book and it was well after one in the morning. Oops. Continue reading »

Toronto’s often called a city of neighbourhoods. According to Wikipedia, there are more than 200 distinct neighbourhoods within its boundaries. One of my favourites is the Annex.

I love it for its concentration of bookstores, coffee shops, sushi bars and cheap martinis on Wednesdays.

My BFF and I started a little tradition (partly captured in “Au Natural“), where go book shopping at various place along Bloor, most notably Seekers, Book City and BMV, then end up at Hey Lucy’s, where martinis are half-off on Wednesdays.

Since we’ve started doing this, we’ve expanded our little circle, and now a few of us go off and on, roughly monthly. It’s a wonderful thing. Continue reading »

I haven’t done well with updating the blog about the book club a friend and I started since the first meeting.

A brief survey of what we’ve read since: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (we loved it), Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels (excellent), Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree (well liked, but I felt it over-rated), Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake (I loved it, but this had our lowest attendance), E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View (not universally loved), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (adored and it made for great discussion).

These summaries are necessarily brief, but we’ll see about doing more complete write-ups of what we’re reading. ⁽¹⁾

Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness: Stories was our latest book club pick. I’d not read anything by her before, but since reading this I’ve picked up more. I love her style, perhaps because she scares me.

As advertised, she’s an amazing writer who, with but a few sentences, can capture the essence of an entire relationship. Witness this scene from “Deep-Holes”: Continue reading »

Footnotes:

1. For the nerds interested in what I’ve been reading, I keep a list here. [↩]