Up with the Lark

::XS: Small Structures, Green Architecture

This review was written by Lloyd Alter for Treehugger.com

In 2001 XS:  Big Ideas, Small Buildings by Phyllis Richardson created a sensation. Small, light prefab buildings were so 21st century and it was an inspired collection. Now, She has written a followup: XS: Small Spaces, Green Architecture and we wish we could say we are as excited as we were with the first volume but alas, we are not.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that whoever wrote the dust jacket description does not appear to have read the book. "The design goals of the 40 houses included here are to build as small as possible, to harmonize with the site, to use natural heating and cooling techniques, and, above all, to combine aesthetic beauty with ecological sensitivity. The houses are striking in appearance, inexpensive to build, and totally functional, and will serve as inspiration for architects and potential owners."

The book has garden pavilions, sculptures, cameras obscura and treehouses but there is nary a totally functional and inexpensive to build house to be found. That is fine, there are some lovely, innovative and inspiring structures that are worth the price of admission. There are also some of questionable green credentials and others that have been around the block a few too many times.

But while it may be true that "a new generation of architects and builders is creating warm, inviting homes that cause only a fraction of the ecological impact of conventional building methods," they aren't here. The author might have been better served if the blurb said what her introduction does: " almost none of the projects here is an end in itself. Rather, each suggests inroads in a journey to a host of answers."  Buy at Amazon

 

Ragged Islands

Ragged Islands by Don Hannah is a novel of secrets.  The story follows the thoughts and memories of Susan Ann as she lays dying in a Toronto hospital.  There are many things about her life that she doesn't understand and in her mind she goes through time searching for meaning. She is trying to make sense of the secrets in her life and in the lives of those around her.  Her parents give her away to relatives to be raised and although she is neither the first nor the last of their children, no one ever tells her why she is the only one to be sent away.   We are also led into her past through the cards and letters and scraps of things that her son Carl finds as he is cleaning out her belongings.  Unlike Susan Ann who wants to unravel her mysteries, Carl has no questions about her life, or indeed, his own.  He reads through all the things his mother has kept for upwards of eighty years and then tosses it all out as junk. Hannah writes about the secrets, the grief and the knowledge that people take to the grave - including their own identity.  Susan Ann doesn't really know anything about her real parents and nothing at all of her grandparents, not even their names.  My grandmother who lived to 102 told me once that she was sad that there was no one left in the world who knew her as a little girl.  That particular sense of loss permeates this book. Set in rural Nova Scotia and covering roughly the period from World War II to current times the novel teems with a sense of history and of family.  What I do not understand is why Hannah has seen fit to toss in 9/11.  I've noticed a number of writers who include event this in their work without it having any bearing on their story - The Emperor's Children being the most recent I've read. It doesn't work thematically or in terms of any of the characters or in the setting and I just found it annoying.  For the life of me I can't figure out what the life and death of an elderly rural Nova Scotian woman has to do with a terrorist attack in New York.  Perhaps Hannah is linking the effects of the two World Wars on Susan Ann's family and suggesting that this is her grandchildren's armageddon, but I don't it doesn't work for me. Buy at Amazon

Arlington Park

About 5 pages into Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk I thought - this book will have a character named Jocasta -  and sure enough, 50 or so pages later on she comes (albeit in a bit part). If you laughed in recognition then that's probably all you really need to know about this book.  If you didn't get it then I'll tell you that Arlington Park is about a bunch of women. These women are English, middle class with certain pretensions and aspirations thwarted (they feel) by marriage and motherhood. These women are unhappy, unfulfilled, resentful and sometimes downright angry.  I've read a few of Cusk's books and she seems quite put out by children, although she's had a lot of publishing mileage out of them.  As a writer she always strikes me as a surly adolescent screaming "alright I'll have a sodding baby, but you can't make me like it!"  What exactly are these women in Arlington Park so miserable about?  I don't know.  Their husbands are not philanderers. They are not physically or emotionally abusive and they all have responsible, respectable jobs.  Their children are not handicapped, chronically ill, autistic, or even particularly plain looking.   I've read critics of Cusk's previous work who talk about social satire, but I don't find it here.  Cusk is a really tight, insightful writer - her prose is quite wonderful to read and she doesn't waste a lot words, but thematically I find it a bit hard going.Buy at Amazon

Kitchen Diaries

When my son first started showing an interest in cooking in his mid-teens  I gave him a cookbook by Nigel Slater.  Slater's attitudes encompass all of the cooking things that make sense to me - use what you have on hand, understand simple ingredients that taste good together, toss things in and don't worry about it and if you make a mistake don't spend the whole dinner apologizing.  Dinner is about sharing, not about showing off (although there are many who would disagree with that).  This new book by Slater entitled Kitchen Diaries follows a year of his cooking and has the hallmark of those earlier books but with the added idea that he wouldl use local ingredients in season when he could and that he would avoid supermartkets as much as possible.  Kitchen Diaries is a beautiful book filled with all kinds of insights about eating and cooking and thinking about cooking.  Slater isn't a fussy cook and that is one of the great strengths of this book.  There are a lot of recipes and most of them have very few ingredients.  He does assume that the people who use his books know their way around a kitchen, so he doesn't go into exhaustive detail about how to do things, but that's okay - if you are a beginner, you can figure it out.  Really. Unfortunately I don't live in the same place as Slater so I can't follow his dinner suggestions by the calendar.  His March 19 diary exaults in the first alfresco dinner of the year - I live in Canada and March is still ski season. The photographs are beautiful and show simple food that looks like someone made it rather than some food stylist putting the photo together.  My one quibble with the book is that the photographs aren't labelled so you don't know which recipe it is depicting, but that's a minor fault.  I've tried a bunch of these recipes and they are simple, straightforward and taste great.  What more can you as for at dinner time? Buy at Amazon

Bang/Crunch – Neil Smith.

Hugh Alter wrote this review.

There is a particular merit to the short story form. It allows you to skate by on pure literary talent when purpose you are working with a premise that would not stand up to anything longer. Neil Smith has clearly perfected this art; Bang/Crunch is a collection of stories that are charming, perfect, and beautifully written, but would be completely insufferable were they any longer.

Of the nine short stories in the collection, there are a few that have frustratingly mundane concepts – including the after school special topics of a teenager questioning his sexuality and one about surviving cancer. These premises, although dull, are rescued to a one by delicate and finely crafted prose; there're few words out of place in the book, and not a sentence that doesn't feel like it has been distilled down. 

Those stories where the quality of the concept matches the writing – the title foremost among them – are marvelous things, and all of the stories do end up compelling. I don't mean this to be a negative review, because Bang/Crunch is wonderful to read and the product of a spectacular writer. It's just that it feels a bit like a nice new paint job on a rickety shack. Very nice on the outside, but I wouldn't want to stay long. Buy at Amazon

Special Topics In Calamity Physics

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl is a book that I was really looking forward to reading.  I loved the character of Blue and her pedantic professor father. I loved Pessl's writing style, her imagery, her language.  The love affair lasted until roughly the end of the first third.  Then I considered writing to the publishers to suggest that they retitle it Marisha Pessl's Big Book of Similes.  By page 200 I was counting the number of similes per page, then by paragraph.  This was not a good sign.  By page 250 I was ready to throw the book across the room and I was only about half way through it.  I get annoyed when authors write very long books when it isn't necessary.  I get annoyed when editors don't say "You know this book would be much better minus about 150-200 pages".  I start mumbling under my breath about Tolstoy.  The centre section of this novel had me thinking that Pessl is a clever writer but more flash than substance with a certain amount of self conscious "look at what I can do" to her.  But I thought about how much my son said he loved the book so I plowed onwards.  And I'm glad I did.  Around the beginning of the final third of the novel Pessl throws in a plot twist (whatever you do, don't read the back of the dust jacket) and the book takes off.  Suddenly I was totally engrossed in the story and back in love with our narrator, Blue. The writing became tight and focussed with somewhere to go and something to say.  That part of the novel met my expectations..  This is a first novel for Pessl and I'm hoping she will realize that she can write and that she doesn't need to put in every beautiful phrase that has ever come to her.  She can save some for her next novel. Buy at Amazon

Restless

What a fun ride it was reading Restless by William Boyd.  A bit of a mystery, a bit of an English spy story and a bit of a family drama all rolled into one.  The book is broken into two narrative streams.  The first is Ruth who teaches English to foreigners rather than finishing her doctorate. The second is the story of her mother Sally (real name Eva)  who in fact, was a Russian who gets hooked into spying for the English immediately prior to and during World War II.  The sections surrounding Ruth are fine and have the aura of a small town mystery story as she is surprised to learn about her mother's past, but it is really Eva's story we want to know about.  Those sections crackle with a real sense of danger as Eva makes her way through the world of espionage while trusting no one.  I liked the juxtaposition of Ruth's mundane, simple post-war life with the covert life of Eva, truly surviving only by her wits.  I'll never look at a very sharp pencil the same way again. The story is clever, as are the historical twists and Boyd tells it in an engaging style. This is a something akin to a literary page turner and it's about the length that you could curl up one evening and devour whole. Buy at Amazon