There and Back Again

The Hobbit or There and Back Again
J.R.R. Tolkien

This is the fourth time I’ve read The Hobbit. Or the fifth; I can’t remember. I’m not exaggerating or embellishing—that’s just the truth. For me, The Hobbit was one of those books I grew up with and have no problem reading repeatedly. That book, the one that has been so well loved that the cover is falling off, is probably different for you. This is the book that you fell asleep to, that you could imagine in vivid detail. It might be The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe or The Golden Compass.  It might be about Peter Rabbit, Harry Potter, or Wild Things. 

Even though I can’t remember how many times I’ve gone back, I will never forget the first time I read The Hobbit. Or, rather, when my father first read it to me. Being a theatre and English teacher at the time, he didn’t just read the book, he put on a show. He sang all the songs and did all the voices. I can still hear the tune to the dwarves’ song, which is uncannily similar to the one recently featured in the new film. Curious. So with these vivid childhood memories, I was ready to crack the cover again and see if The Hobbit held as much magic as I remember.

It holds so much more. Just like I couldn’t comprehend the blatant religious undertones in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe upon reading it for the first time, at ten, I had never fully grasped the grandness of the world Tolkien created. Being about ten times shorter than The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit is not nearly as detailed (and by that I mean containing minute descriptions of the specific variety of pipe-weed that is preferred among Hobbits – Old Toby in case you were wondering) even though the journey is quite as spectacular.

The fantastic thing about The Hobbit is that it was specifically constructed with children in mind—indeed Tolkien’s own children—where each chapter is a short adventure story, self-contained and satisfying. You might read about an encounter with three trolls in the moonlight, or a whole army of goblins hidden inside a mountain. Tolkien’s writing is so masterful that it can content both the child listening, the parent narrating, and the twenty-something cracking the cover for the umpteenth time. For the more mature reader, there are larger plot arcs and subtle connections to the sequel, The Fellowship of the Ring, where readers are rewarded for their attention to detail. So upon my latest reading of The Hobbit, I was contented to experience a healthy dose of nostalgia, a rejuvenation of childhood wonder, and a smug sense of “oh, that’s what that means.” 

Enjoyable, there and back again.

-Michelle Hunniford

We Learn Nothing

We Learn Nothing

Tim Kreider

We Learn Nothing reads like the internal dialogue we all have with ourselves at some point, usually during moments we feel will define not only our lives, but who we are. Kreider finds inspiration in life’s toughest stuff—finding your birth family in midlife, grappling with changing conceptions of our closest friends, feeling helpless as our parents age, and facing our own flaws and self-deceptions—appealing to himself and his readers through humour, candour, and an offbeat, self-effacing assuredness that everything will work itself out in the end.

Like the front cover depicting Kreider jumping off the edge of a cliff, relying only on a pair of makeshift wings, terra firma nowhere in sight, much of Kreider’s charm lies not in his ability as a fellow human to provide us with answers to life’s most persistent dilemmas, but in his comforting us with the knowledge that we are not alone with our fears of life’s many unknowns. Like his title, which dispels the myth that knowledge and certainty accumulate with age, Kreider seems to suggest that it is, in fact, this uncertainty that characterizes much of the human experience. Kreider’s writings provide a remedy not for this uncertainty, but for the discomfort that accompanies it, suggesting that sometimes the very best we can do in our very limited positions as human beings is to close our eyes, take a deep breath, and jump.

- Sarah Walker

Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa

Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa 

Benjamin Constable
 

It had been a long time since I read a really good mystery book, so I was quite excited when given the opportunity to review this novel. The book starts with Tomomi and Ben in Paris, going about their every day average business. Ben’s life is utterly turned around when he receives a letter from Tomomi: she has killed herself and has an adventure for him. After a long healing period filled with disbelief, Ben decides to take Tomomi up on her offer of adventure. Uncovering the mysteries of Tomomi’s short life, Ben travels throughout France and to the United States of America. 

Benjamin Constable

What stood out to me most about Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa was how well Constable completely grasped the friendship between Tomomi and Ben. When Ben is reflecting on his experiences with his late best friend, it was easy for me to compare his stories of Tomomi to stories with me and my good friends. The strength of writing made the book very difficult to put down, as I wanted to continue to watch the friendship grow as Ben continued to learn more about his friend.

In his travels to solve Tomomi’s mystery, Ben meets several other fun characters and the reader is even introduced to his cat, Cat, whom no one else can see. The book is filled with friendship, trials, attempts to conquer fears, mystery, and there is a little violence thrown in there, as Tomomi’s secrets begin to unravel. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes a story that fits like a puzzle; the pieces gradually come together as the story unfolds. Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa is for adults, who enjoy mysteries and stories of friendship and loss. Benjamin Constable has truly written an entertaining book that teaches you about friendship all over the globe.

Wesley Wilson is a zoology student at the University of Guelph and works on campus at a microbiology lab. When Wesley isn’t studying away, she spends most of her time reading. Anna Karenina is her favourite book, but she enjoys reading a variety of different genres.  

Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor

Fingal O’Reilly, Irish Doctor
By Patrick Taylor

The eighth installment to Patrick Taylor’s Irish Country series is what I would call, if I were one of his characters from Dublin, Jus what the Doctor feckin ordered. With perfect portrayal of the Irish country folk and the Ulcer and Dublin dialects, along with the purely fulfilled lives of Doctor O’Reilly and the characters adjoined to his journey, it is tough for yet another story from this series to not intrigue readers, raise laughter, and warm the heart.

Fingal O’Reilly, Irish Doctor follows Dr. O’Reilly in the newly remarried chapter of his life (to his long lost sweetheart, “Kitty” O’Reilly née O’Hallorhan in Ballybucklebo) while sharing stints from the Doctor’s earlier days testing the waters as a General Practitioner in the Liberties of Dublin. Throughout Taylor’s novel, we see how the experiences of his youth remain with Fingal, how they shape him as a person, prepare him for further practice as a GP, and teach him that “sometimes difficulties to which he could see no solution happily solved themselves.” Many of the favoured characters of the series like “Kinky” Kincaid, Dr. Barry Laverty, Dr. Jennifer Bradley, and Donald Donnelly, reappear along the way with new happenings in their lives which, of course have the good ol’ Doctor himself involved.

A story you will invest yourself in, a story to which you will share with your children and friends in hopes that, just as you had, they will learn and strive to be better people from the exemplary lives portrayed within the pages; Fingal O’Reilly, Irish Doctor is a classic.

A man of many interests, Joseph Cassidy is; A Star Wars fanatic; Maple Leafs fan to the core; musician; and a lover of literature, just to name a few. Brought up in the country side of Bruce County, Joseph has had the fortune of witnessing and existing in the humbly rich small town communities, the privacy of 100acres and the wonderful nature, landscape and wildlife that surround it. This in addition to his Irish ancestry, could perhaps explain his love and appreciation for Patrick Taylor's Irish Country book series.

Check out Joseph's review of An Irish Country Christmas:     http://bookshelfreaderreviews.blogspot.ca/2012/12/an-irish-country-christmas.html

A Breast Cancer Alphabet

A Breast Cancer Alphabet
By Madhulika Sikka

I approached the book with mixed feelings. Part of me wanted to put it back on the shelf and move on to the fiction section, but my well-honed left brain couldn’t resist passing by an Alphabet guide to any topic. In this case, I was very familiar with the topic and had actually lived through many of the experiences described in the twenty-six chapters.

Madhulika Sikka and I belong to the same club. We are breast cancer survivors.

As I approach the ten-year survivor mark, I struggle to recall the specifics of my journey and often wish I had kept a journal. Reading through A Breast Cancer Alphabet, I found myself nodding and smiling at Sikka’s lively and slightly outrageous commentary. I would love to have read this book while waiting for biopsy results, dealing with the side-effects of chemo and radiation, or simply resting at home.

Like most women who have been diagnosed in the twenty-first century, I was inundated with literature about mastectomies, chemotherapy and radiation. At times, it was overwhelming and I could feel my eyes glazing while reading through the information. It would have been comforting to read short and breezy chapters with such tantalizing titles as E is for Epiphany, I is for Indignities, and P is for Pillows.

In A Breast Cancer Alphabet, Madhulika Sikka provides “a little pick-me-up...for anyone who has been diagnosed with breast cancer and needs a companion.”

After retiring from a 31-year teaching career, Joanne Guidoccio launched a second act as a writer. Her articles, book reviews and short stories have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online. Last month, Soul Mate Publishing released her debut novel, Between Land and Sea, as an ebook on Amazon. You can visit her website at www.joanneguidoccio.com

Smarter Than You Think

Smarter Than You Think

by Clive Thompson

Predicting the future is a strange thing. No sooner do new developments in technology (or anything else, for that matter) arise, than they're accompanied by an entourage of talking heads forecasting either a glorious new dawn or total societal collapse, depending on which channel you're tuned to. In Smarter Than You Think, Clive Thompson takes an optimistic view of the digital technologies of the past two decades. By complimenting our uniquely human faculties, he believes that they may offer us solutions to problems that have long troubled us, and expand our capabilities beyond previously assumed limits.

I was initially concerned that STYT would be a light-weight version of the heady and analytical book by Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant, especially when Thompson declares that despite the book's subtitle of “how technology is changing our minds for the better”, he decides to wilfully exclude any mention of neuroscience or brain imaging. However, my fears were revealed to be unfounded: not only does he competently defend his decision, but in being selective about the domains addressed, he frees up additional space for in-depth analysis of the societal application of these technologies, rather than parroting a list of contextually divorced lab studies. STYT makes a point that I feel many social commentators miss: technologies (whether paper, pens or the information-sifting chimera that is Google) are tools. It is in our application of them in our daily lives that we derive their positive or negative effects.

In defending this thesis, Thompson draws from a wide array of examples. Some of the most interesting include the usage of programming classes to teach children logical thinking, and to demonstrate the underlying principles of mathematics in a more concrete and meaningful way. Here, the children are shown in real-time how the modification of different variables (in the form of a simplified coding language) create different results on-screen. They guide a small turtle around via the functions students input, and as turtle draws a line (much like an etch-a-sketch) behind it, different inputs will create different “flight paths”, resulting in different pictures. I, for one, wish that these innovations had been around when I was in elementary school.

Examples such as this abound, including the Internet's capacity for creating an ambient awareness of global events, allowing for sociopolitical action on a number of different scales at a speed scarcely fathomable before the information age; the proliferation of smartphone cameras forces accountability on normally unwilling police forces and politicians, for fear that Big Brother is being watched with just as much vigilance by his younger siblings. In all honesty, the book's subtitle may be inaccurate, as Thompson's arguments show that rather than changing the way that our minds work, technology is allowing us to make the most of the cognitive resources we already possess. With the staggering array of tools at our fingertips, the challenge now is to develop the skills to know which is the best to use for a given task. Rather than blaming the tech that we currently use, Smarter Than You Think places the responsibility on our shoulders. It’s up to us to pick the right tool for the job, even if our eventual choice is to forgo modern tech for simpler, analog methods. It is for this shift in perspective, as well as the fair-minded discussion of issues surrounding the development and usage of new machinery, that I believe Smarter Than You Think makes a great addition to any bookshelf.

Vincent Smith is a taoist, aspiring writer, and dyed-in-the-wool psychology geek at the University of Guelph. You can find his writing on video games, comics, movies, and all things geek over at The Rogue's Gallery.   

The Curiosity

The Curiosity

Stephen P. Kiernan

Stephen P. Kiernan’s debut novel, The Curiosity, about a man who died in 1906 being revived in modern day America, is being sold as a thriller—a “poignant and thoroughly original” one, at that. But this is not really the case; rather, let’s classify The Curiosity as science fiction. No, not far future, off earth science fiction; this is certainly not Star Wars. On the contrary, The Curiosity is a compelling and thoughtful exploration of the scientific, ethical, and human consequences of reanimating the deceased. In other words, we’re talking old school sci-fi here—a story of scientific discovery.

The novel follows three key members of the Lazarus Project who, after successfully reanimating dead plankton and shrimp, are given an opportunity to up the ante when they discover a man frozen in an Arctic iceberg. Despite the possible moral objections, the frozen man is revived. As we soon learn, the man’s name is Jeremiah Rice, and the last thing he remembers is falling overboard into the Arctic Ocean over one hundred years ago. What will he make of his second chance at life? What will he make of life in the twenty-first century? And how will he respond when one of the scientists responsible for his reanimation falls in love with him?

Smart, evocatively written, and a joy to read, Kiernan’s The Curiosity shouldn’t be missed.

While a glass cutter by day, by night Z.S. Roe spends his time writing fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.  His writings have appeared in various publications, including the Cambridge Times, The Silhouette, and The Toronto Sun, among others.  Most recently, his short story “Peeping Tara” appeared in issue 13 of Dark Moon Digest.  You can visit his blog at www.zsroe.com