yeah, so i suck. whaddya gonna do?

it's been forever i know. things have been very blah recently, and i haven't been in the best of moods for blogging about my boring days. i will blog more. i can't promise to try, but i'll try to try. so a couple of things. in the future i may refer to the following characters:

1) crazy mary - an old woman who pushes a shopping cart heaped with sleeping bags and all her worldly belongings. she likes to yell at people on the street and point out how many hookers there are just walking around pretending not to be hookers. recent quotes from crazy mary: "school abc"; "dislocated thumb"; "it has its mother". more to come...

2) greasy coconut man - he's always in the park when i'm walking home from work. the sun brings them all out. he's a hairy older man with white hair on his chest and shoulders and even a bit on his head. he wears short shorts. he lies on his side, red as a lobster, reading a book, smelling like coconut oil. need i say more? perhaps...yes.

i'm part of the mcclelland & stewart 100 readers club. they asked people to email a few lines to explain why they should get free books and write reviews of them. my lovely entry was one of the chosen ones. it went something like this: "i'm popular, i swear. please pick me." i just finished my first book: the time in between by david bergen. it'll be out in august, and i have a fancy shmancy advance reading copy. it just looks cool. to the bookies anyway...

i've become so used to analysing novels on a technical level that i'm not even sure i know how to talk about how i feel about a book. but here goes...

charles boatman is first a father, and secondly a vietnam vet. it's sometimes painful to watch the story reveal what it is this man has done and how he finally admits to his family the truth of his time in the war. like so many vietnam vets, boatman has returned to the scene of the crime to find redemption or some kind of therapy to help him come to terms with what he's done. but, also like so many vets, he doesn't necessarily find what he's looking for. following their father's disappearance, two of the adult children go to vietnam to find out what has become of their father.

i'll admit that if i read the back cover while in search of a good read, this is not a book i would generally think of picking up (i have to be very lame for a moment and say that i'll try not to judge a book by it's cover from now on). however, i found it engaging, honest and intimate. bergen is a lovely writer. the novel sometimes feels like it was written in a feverish state. half dreaming half awake. anyone who has been to asia will know this surreal feeling that is captured so well here. at times, as the characters develop, david bergen's description of the boatman family relationships is uncomfortable, almost too intimate, too stifling and yet at the same time, this is a family whose members don't truly understand one another or themselves.

so there's my plug. i liked the novel. read it. bring on more free books!