City of Thieves by David Benioff

Posted on by


Set aside the wartime heroics, the picaresque buddy story which undoubtedly has its roots in Cervantes, the burgeoning of love in mid-winter. Set it all aside and just admit that this is a story about the power of literature to raise us beyond ourselves in order to create something new. In the prologue to City of Thieves, David Benioff’s grandfather, in response to his grandson’s importuning questions about his time during the siege of Leningrad, exhorts him: “’David,’ he said. ‘You’re a writer. Make it up.’” It’s good advice. And also lucky for us as readers because the story he goes on to make up is compelling, thoughtful, witty, and tragic. In short–brilliant!

Teenager Lev Beniov is forcibly paired with Kolya Vlasov, a verbose private from the Red Army who has inadvertently gone AWOL. Colonel Grechko tasks them with securing a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake. They can find the eggs or die. Of course since they need to find these eggs in the besieged city of Leningrad, whose inhabitants have been starving for the past ten months, both options look to amount to the same. Fortunately Kolya considers their being alive to be already an improbability, so they might as well get on with the task.

Kolya leads Lev from one adventure to another in the few days they have been given to complete their task. Along the way they debate Russian literature from Goncharov’s Oblomov to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Relevancies abound but are never laboured. Benioff maintains a light touch that keeps the action to the forefront and lets the erudition coast along in the wake. It lets the story be enjoyed on many levels at the same time. This is ‘making it up’ the right way. Highly recommended.

Now adding selected reviews

Posted on by

After a bit of thinking and some useful input, I’ve made a couple of changes to the blog. First, I am now showing a list of all of the books I have read in the current year in the left column. Although it isn’t obvious, if you click on the title of the book you do get taken to my review of it. Second, I will begin to add selected reviews as blog posts. I’ll be selecting those reviews where I think I had something useful to say, good or bad, about the book. I have written reviews of every book I have read this year and will continue that habit. So there are lots to choose from.

My reviews are not the final word on a book, of course. Lots of people see different things in the same book. That can lead to markedly different opinions. So feel free to comment on a review, if you like.

Finally, just a brief note on the star system you can see in the LibraryThing widget on the left. Long ago, when I first started using LT, I established my own idiosyncratic evaluative system and blogged about it. For me, 4-stars is really positive. Almost no books receive 5-stars. At the other end of the scale, 1-star either means I absolutely hated the book, or it could mean that it is a book from a series which doesn’t rise above its formula (even if that is a formula I enjoy). So, is that clear? Good.

I’ll start posting reviews soon. I will add a “review” tag to each review so that it will be easy later to look at all of the reviews posted simply by clicking on that tag.

Thinking about my LibraryThing reviews

Posted on by

This past year I have been writing reviews on LibraryThing for each book I read. My reviews are between two to five paragraphs in length and, I hope, useful and sometimes fun. A regular visitor to this page can see a snippet of each review to left of the page placed there via a useful widget from LibraryThing. Click on the snippet and a window pops up with data about the book and my review. I think it’s cool.

At first I was writing these reviews as a kind of exercise. Gathering one’s thoughts about a book helps, well, to gather one’s thoughts. Putting those thoughts into words helps refine one’s impressions, and sometimes it can provoke a bit of rethinking. Plus it’s fun to look back six months or a year later and remind yourself what you thought of that book that is now propping up the far end of your bookshelf.

But now, some 57 books later I find that I’ve produced a fair amount of material – more than 30 pages in the file in which I draft my reviews. I’m wondering whether there would be any sense in repurposing that material here on my blog. I’ve already got the LT widget. Would it make sense to produce a blog post as well for each book? (Copyright is retained by the reviewer on LT, so there is no issue raised by doing this.) Is there a good reason not to do this?

On the other hand, is there a good reason to do it?

The old switcheroo

Posted on by

This past weekend the beating heart of Waterloo briefly stopped. I’m exaggerating, of course. Words Worth Books is only a bookstore. It may also organize numerous author events, host book clubs, and provide knowledgeable advice on books that will dazzle and delight. It may be packed with friendly staff. And, oh yeah, it is most certainly an independent local business. But maybe it’s just me that thinks of it like the beating heart of Waterloo. If you do think this way, then it’s a momentous event when the doors close for good.

Don’t panic! A new set of doors opened almost immediately just down the street. In less than two days Words Worth Books shifted all of its stock and displays to a new location only a couple of steps from the old one. How is that possible?

I don’t know the details. But there must have been some serious planning and preparation by the staff. Let’s just say a lot of things happened behind the scenes. And then, early Sunday morning, like the crocuses and tulips that are bursting out all over what with our early spring weather, people, by which I mean volunteers, started showing up at the ‘old’ store. In what seemed like no time at all books were boxed, shelves were dismantled, shelves were remantled (?) at the ‘new’ store, and books were unboxed. I’m compressing things a bit. I was only there for the first couple of hours. I departed once I was secure in the knowledge that the fiction books, at least, were safely in place in the new locale. It looked to me like an unbelievable amount of work remained. Reader, it got done!

I dropped by the all-new Words Worth Books today and it looks fabulous. Congratulations to all involved. Long may this beating heart keep on pounding.

The new location of Words Worth Books is 96 King Street South, Waterloo, Ontario.

Market Research – writing contests

Posted on by

The well-meaning and generous-minded colleagues in my writing group sometimes encourage me to submit my short fiction to writing contests. I am reluctant. And not merely because of the disappointment that would ensue should I not be successful. That disappointment is readily available elsewhere. Rather, my reluctance is due to an insufficient understanding of the efficacy of such contests.

To be clear, I do not doubt the legitimacy of (many) writing contests. Indeed, virtually all of the Canadian literary journals and magazines that I previously canvassed host at least one contest for either poetry or fiction and several host multiple contests. The entrance fee for submitting your fiction to these contests is always somewhat more than the cost of a one-year subscription to the journal or magazine. But in most cases your entrance fee entitles you to a one-year subscription. So even if your work does not win, at least you get something valuable. Indeed, if you wish, you could consider the entrance fee as merely a market research expense. Of course this is somewhat more expensive than subscribing directly. But you do have at least the chance of having your submitted story selected for publication. Think of that!

There are also writing contests unconnected to literary journals or magazines. The CBC Canada Writes competitions are a good example. This year there were more than 3000 entries for the short story competition alone. I have no idea how that number compares with journal competitions but I suspect it must be somewhat higher.

I was going to ask who enters such competitions. But with the numbers entering the CBC competition, it must be nearly everyone. Amongst the ten finalists, there are numerous published authors as well as some first-timers. The published authors tend to have had a few stories published, possibly a collection, but they do not appear to be well-established writers. I’m guessing that at some point in one’s career it becomes either unnecessary or unseemly to continue participating in such contests.

That brings me back to the question of efficacy.

What is the relative value of a competition-winning work? Winning the CBC Canada Writes competition will certainly raise awareness of your work, and to a lesser extent I imagine the same is true for winning one of the literary journal or magazine competitions. And of course there is the publication itself, which in most cases is accompanied by either prize money or the standard remuneration that the journal or magazine offers. No doubt there is some residual effect, as you may forever after be apotheosized as “the past winner of …”

But how does this compare with the value of getting a story published in a journal or magazine through the non-competition route? Is the competition story published in the same journal issue with three non-competition stories considered to be of lesser, equal, or greater value? That’s what I don’t know.

And it makes a difference. There is no entrance fee for the submission of one’s work to a journal or magazine, other than the normal cost of preparation time and the cost to one’s ego when the rejection follows later.

Disappointment, as noted earlier, is ubiquitous. But is the disappointment I would receive from the rejection letter following a non-competition submission different in kind or quantity from the disappointment I would receive in not winning a writing contest?