Charlie N. Holmberg’s Paper Magicians Trilogy: A Page-Turning Fantasy with Both Heart and Brain

I love books – both paper and electronic. Paper books and e-books provide different and unique experiences of reading, and I am often at pains to explain that the fact that I am joined at the hip to my e-reader does not mean that I love paper books any less. Living in an urban condo with limited space, e-books help me to feed my reading addiction while maintaining some semblance of floor-space. And precisely because it does not contribute to the clutter (my current desk is in fact about to literally collapse under the weight of stacked books), I will often let myself just try out a book on the e-reader that I might not have brought home from the bookstore. If I am feeling able to spend three to five dollars on a book, I can curl up and browse through the bookstore and pick something, virtually at random, to try out. That is precisely how I stumbled last November onto The Paper Magician, the first book in Charlie N. Holmberg’s Paper Magician Trilogy (published by 47North, an imprint of Amazon Publishing). I read it fast enough that I was disappointed when it was over; it was good enough that I was thrilled to find that the second book in the series, The Glass Magician, had already been released, and when I finished that one I immediately went ahead and pre-ordered the last book in the trilogy, The Master Magician, which was magically delivered to my e-reader on June 2nd. (And yes, the thrill of having a pre-order appear just when you have forgotten about it is one of the greatest things about e-readers.)

Magnificent Century: The TV Show Iran, Israel, Vietnam and the Rest of the World is Watching

Turkish television's Magificant Century has reportedly over 200 million viewers worldwide.

In our current age of interconnectivity, the vast majority of media is almost universally accessible, at least by those privileged enough to have internet access. We are no longer surprised to find out that Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones is almost as popular in England or Russia as it is in the United States or Canada. But while downloads and online streaming have increasingly allowed us to make educated forays into foreign cinema and television, those of us in the English-speaking world often remain woefully ignorant of trends – or manias even – sweeping the rest of the world. Just recently, as the result of a spontaneous Facebook post, I discovered that my guilty television pleasure is in fact a worldwide phenomenon. For years now I have been captivated by the show known in English as Suleiman the Magnificent or, more literally translated from the original Turkish (Muhteşem Yüzyıl), Magnificent Century. I watch it dubbed into Syrian Arabic, where it goes by the title Harim as-Sultan (The Sultan’s Harem); it has also been made available (dubbed or subtitled) in over a dozen other languages. The plot of the show is deceptively simple: it is the story of Sultan Suleyman (1494-1566, reigned 1520-1566) and his relationship with Hurrem Sultan, the Christian slave girl who eventually became his wife and a powerful political influence.

Unsentimental History: Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall

David Ben-Gurion (left) and Golda Meir as she shakes hands with Moshe Sharett (right) after signing Israel's Declaration of Independence, in Tel Aviv, on May 14, 1948. (Photo: Frank Scherschel)

The trouble with unilateral action is that it holds out no hope of real or lasting peace because of its denial of justice to the other party.

– Avi Shlaim, Epilogue to the 2014 edition of The Iron Wall

I should begin this review with a disclaimer: I am a news junkie. I was raised by journalists, and the first thing I do in the morning is check my top three news sources. In the last decade, I’ve also begun to do a quick check of Twitter and whatever is dominating my Facebook feed (for actual news, not of the Kardashian-related variety). So I like to think that I am relatively well-informed about what is going on in the world, and fairly up-to-date on major developing stories. Nevertheless, there are moments in every news junkie's life when you open up the paper/webpage/link and have what can only be described as a “WTF moment.” I had one about a year ago when I opened up the New York Times app and saw that Russia had invaded Ukraine – that WTF moment led me down the rabbit hole of books on Russian foreign policy. This is the only appropriate response I have ever been able to formulate for my WTF moments: to recognize that my surprise and shock is largely a result of my own ignorance, and attempt to repair that particular problem. For the most part, what happens in the world – in various countries and between them – is only shocking if we don’t know the history that has led up to it. Knowing some of the history behind a place, people, or policy usually reveals that however crazy certain developments look on the surface they are in fact a reasonable (though not necessarily positive) evolution of what has come before.

A Peace Built on Buried Bones: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant is his first new novel since 2005. (Photo by Francesco Guidicini)

Even so, sir, isn’t it a strange then when a man calls another brother who only yesterday slaughtered his children?

–  Master Wistan, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

There was a time when I used to dream about becoming a professional book reviewer – I like to think I had no illusions that it would be easy, but to make a career of reading books and helping other people decide what to read seemed very attractive. But the more that I have come to write about fiction, the more I have come to appreciate the fact that I am not a book reviewer by profession along the real privileges that come with my amateur status. I was recently made aware of those privileges when I encountered Kazuo Ishiguro’s recently published novel, The Buried Giant (Knopf, 2015).

Unexpected Joys: Honoré de Balzac’s The Vendetta

Very few book-lovers actually disdain the classics – your Victor Hugos, your Dostoyevskys, your Henry Jameses – but they can be difficult to pick up and really enjoy. This is not because of any fault in their writing, but because there is nothing quite so capable of sucking the joy out of a new book like being told over and over again what an ‘important’ book it is. Almost anything from the canon of classic fiction authors is going to be important – we all know that. But the joy of a new book is also the joy of uncovering something new and unexpected, however famous the author might be. For several years in my teens one of my favorite books was Anna Karenina, and I would ascribe the great love I had for that book to the fact that I picked it up almost entirely blind, without knowing the first thing about Tolstoy, Russian literature, or really anything at all. If I remember correctly I was about to go on a trip and could only take one book… so I decided to find a nice long one.

Honoré de Balzac is an author that I was never really attracted to – I’m guessing my disinclination can be partially explained by the fact that I was assigned selections from his magnum opus, The Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine), in my high-school French classes. (Books assigned in high school never get the love they deserve. My recent advice to a 15-year-old book lover about to be assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in English class was to read the book beforehand so she could actually enjoy it.) The Human Comedy is a massive compendium of almost all of Balzac’s works, broken down into sections and subsections, containing in the final analysis over 2,000 individual characters. As epic and challenging as such a work is, there is a problem with approaching Balzac through such a tome: it is just too damn much. In the flurry of narratives and characters (though they are almost uniformly wonderfully written and remarkable stories) the individual tales get lost. Such is the case with The Vendetta, written and first published in 1830 and included in Scenes from Private Life in 1833 before being final subsumed into its eponymous section of The Human Comedy. It’s re-release in 2008 by Herperus Press, with a new translation by Howard Curtis, gives us the opportunity to appreciate this novella on its own.

On the Altar of Perfection: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Satan in Goray

Isaac Bashevis Singer, in New York City in 1975. (Photo credit: Bruce Davidson)

Messiahs are seductive characters, for at least one very obvious reason: the Messiah, by definition, perfects the world. Different religious traditions have different understandings of what (or who) the Messiah is, different estimations of the amount of blood and gore that will precede the Messiah, and different illustrations of what the world that the Messiah ushers in will look like. But they agree that the coming of the Messiah will in some way make the world the way it should be, and could be if it was not for the imperfections of human beings and human leadership. If we are being honest, this Messianism is not limited to religious traditions – the notion that there is one person, one idea, or one system that, instituted perfectly, can obliterate the injustices in the world is also found in apparently secular political theories like capitalism, Marxism, and fascism. In all its forms, Messianism encourages a single-minded devotion to a particular future, encouraging those entranced by that vision to devote all their energy to its fulfillment. In Satan in Goray (1955), Isaac Bashevis Singer illustrates the ways that Messianism can inspire and destroy a community. Few novels so well demonstrate the destructive power of inspiration itself, while giving just due to the brilliance and beauty that makes such inspiration powerfully seductive. 

Sensuous Glaciers and Imminent Violence: Uzma Aslam Khan's Thinner than Skin

Author Uzma Aslam Khan at the 2014 Karachi Literature Festival. (Photo by Aliraza Khatri)

I prefer novels that leave me wanting more. While I like a strong narrative and enjoy being able to describe ‘what has happened’ in a book, it is not usually the narrative that renders a work of literature truly memorable. Most plots, it has been noted, have already been used. Loss and lust and love and larceny, murder and mayhem and marriage: authors change the time period and location, but the basic themes stay the same. Sometimes the choice of time period and place, when taken seriously, reveals new manifestations of these themes – but usually that is not enough. That lust is not the same in San Francisco as it is in Karachi is important, and the authors who delve into those differences are usually on the right track. But that respect for context must be combined with that real skill in writing and description, the ability to use language to indicate empathy and frustration and fear without using those tired terms. In Thinner than Skin, Pakistani author Uzma Aslam Khan has crafted a world in which the classic themes of literature appear fresh, surprising, and often painfully sharp.

The Evolving Female Detective: Cara Black’s Aimée Leduc Novels

Novelist Cara Black (Photo by Michael Allen Jones)

From a doorway, Aimée saw the flic round the corner, then stop and question a woman with shopping bags. Quickly, Aimeé slipped inside the tattoo parlor. […] Seated before the mirror, a tanned, topless woman fanned herself with a Paris Match magazine. From the edge of her left shoulder to the top of her spine, an intricate lizard design was etched in green-blue. Fine droplets of blood beaded the edges. Hunched behind her, a man with a whirring instrument started intently at her back.

Aimée winced. The price of adornment was minimal to some.

Not to her.  
[…] 
The coppery smell of blood made her uneasy.

Outside the curtain, she heard the flic questioning the makeup artist in the next room. No way she could go out there now.

The tattooist tapped his fingers on a Formica table lined with instruments. 
[…]

Footsteps approached.

“Go ahead.” She nodded, then put her head down. She covered her face with a towel and pulled a sheet over her leather skirt, praying it would be over quick. And that the flic would leave.

– From Murder in the Sentier, the 4th book in the Aimée Leduc Investigations by Cara Black

If you are a voracious reader – and when I say voracious, I mean the sort of person who dives headlong into a new book full of hopes (often to be disappointed) – there are few things more satisfying that finding a genuinely rich and satisfying series character. While single works of literature often provide new best friends or lifelong influences (Pip, Elizabeth Bennet, Madame Defarge, Butt the Hoopoe…), our relationship to characters who we encounter in book after book may be less dramatic but far deeper. Granted, series’ characters are often less dramatic in their emotional impact – it is hard to imagine Oliver Twist retaining his impact if we were to follow him into middle age and the onset of rheumatoid arthritis. But a good recurrent character, the kind that is hard to build and even harder to maintain, can impact the reader more softly, more slowly, the way that an old friend does. They may rarely surprise us, but they are a joy to be around, and when they do surprise us the revelation may be all the more shocking by virtue of its unexpectedness.

Recurrent characters are generally to be found in the mystery/detective/thriller genre of novels. One of the earliest paragons of this type is without a doubt Sherlock Holmes, who set a standard for recurrent detective fiction and actually introduced the idea of narrative continuity into the genre. The brilliant, addicted, and socially dysfunctional Holmes has been followed by a host of remarkable characters – among them Sayers’ Lord Peter Whimsey, Christie’s Miss Marple and Poirot, Parker’s Spenser, Grafton’s Milhone, and Camilleri’s Montalbano. Cara Black’s Aimée Leduc is an important voice in this chorus, and it is through Aimée that Black’s books illustrate both how far the genre of the recurring detective has come, and how much room there still is for it to evolve.

Impossible Belonging: Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular

Writer Sayed Kashua (Photo courtesy of Die Welt)

The world of fiction is replete with novels about ‘identity’: sometimes it is about gender, sometimes about the place of a character in a family, or city, or even time period. In other texts the character is concerned with their religious, ethnic, or national identity. All such books point to the fact that our identity is fluid. How we define ourselves, and what content we give to those definitions, changes throughout our lives and is often very (if not wholly) dependent upon the situations in which we find ourselves and to which we must respond. Not only does our ‘identity’ change over time, but we contain multiple identities at any given moment – we dress, speak, and respond to other people differently depending on the context, we consider certain behaviors appropriate in one context and not in another… and this is not a demonstration of our hypocrisy (which would assume that there is some stable identity to which we are being unfaithful) but a demonstration of our multiplicity. Fictional works that focus on identity illuminate the extent to which we human beings, for all of our vaunted uniqueness, are rarely ever the ‘same’ person for two moments in a row.  Sayed Kashua’s most recent novel, Second Personal Singular (published in Hebrew by Keter Books as Guf sheni yaḥid in 2010, and in English by Grove Press in 2012), charts the permutations of his characters identities in a unique context, and with a unique style, that is all the author's own. 

On Sacrifice, Slaughter, and War: Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Thirst

Author Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (Photo by Chris Higgins/NYTimes)

When a person who is smitten by words is given a pen, he will not stop writing even if threatened by a blade.  – from Thirst, by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi.

The world is inundated with bad news.  For the most part, we specialize (professionally or personally) in one or two conflicts (perhaps in addition to what is trending on Twitter). More than that and we become overloaded. The Syrian Revolution and its evolution with ISIS, recent events in France and its contexts of both racism and secularism, not to mention the Ukraine, Kurdish movements, the Columbia FARC treaty, Tibet, Boko Haram, and Hindu nationalism… we only, albeit to our shame, have attention for so much. As conflicts move into the past, we retain a few impressions about what happened, but our engagement in the conflict (and its aftermath) becomes more distanced, and we become less invested. The more such conflicts appear firmly in the past, the less likely it is that we will know anything about them at all. How many people can simply call up an interesting or relevant fact about the Crimean War (1853-1856) or the Thirty-Years War (1618-1648)? A more recent example of a conflict that has quickly passed of concern for many (particularly in North America) is the 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq. This is the setting of Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s most recent book, Thirst (Melville House, 2014). At minimum it will make the reader stumble over the indifference with which we dismiss any of the wars in our world. 

First-Person Singular: Anita Diamant’s The Boston Girl

Anita Diamant's newest novel, The Boston Girl, was published by Scribner on December 7. (Photo: Dominick Reuter)

Novels that take us back in time are a pleasure for a number of reasons. They provide window into worlds which are no less complicated than our own, albeit usually without internet and smart-phones. But the best of these novels are not about gimmicky and nostalgia-inflected descriptions of fashion and ‘quaint’ transportation. In the tradition of Wild Swans and Angela’s Ashes (both of which have notably autobiographical elements) the best invocations of the past are about characters and people. By slowly bringing the reader from the past into the present, such books make the present richer, inflecting how we think of the people around us with an awareness of the depths of history which each of us bear. Anita Diamant’s newest novel, The Boston Girl (Scribner Publishing, 2014), is just such a book—but it also stands out for its writing, sharp pace, and a few other quite remarkable features.  

A Journalist’s Legacy: Anthony Shadid’s House of Stone

Anthony Shadid (1968-2012) in Libya, March 2011. Photo by Fohlen Corentin.

There are some people who, at least retroactively, define a period in your life; you look back from a later vantage point and realize that they impacted you in ways that you were completely unaware of, and that their influence on your life continues to evolve. Anthony Shadid is one of those people for me.

In 2002, I was a raw almost-adult living in California as the Second (or al-Aqsa) Intifada raged in Israel and Palestine. My father was covering events there for an American newspaper. One day, on the way home from school, I heard a brief mention on the radio: “A journalist for [my father’s newspaper] was shot by Israeli forces outside the residence of Yasser Arafat. His status is unknown.” And I completely freaked out—several frantic phone calls to the Foreign Desk later, I got through to my father, sounding tired and exhausted. “It was Anthony,” he said. “We got him out, and he’s in surgery.”

A Very Human Princess: Louise J. Wilkinson's Eleanor de Montfort

My first entrée to the adult section of the public library where I grew up was Queen Elizabeth I. I don't remember how I first encountered Good Queen Bess – doubtless it was some reference in another book, probably a novel. But when I grew frustrated with the books available in the children's section (a brightly lit annex attached to the main building full of primary colors), most of which featured cartoon illustrations of the Spanish Armada, the kindly library suggested (somewhat doubtfully) that I should check the grown-up books. I still remember climbing the staircase that connected the children's annex with the main library – I had to climb the carpeted steps, past the posters for Laura Bush's literacy campaign, to get to the marble and wood chamber of treasures. The big-people librarian wouldn't give me an adult card (I was ten or eleven, and the circulation desk came up to my nose) but my mother arranged for me to have access on my children's card. It was a small library – to get to the non-fiction and history you went up a circular staircase to a balcony with carved wood railings that circled the entire room. I still remember where the Elizabeth books were – right across from the entrance, on a top shelf that I needed a footstool to reach. And there I plopped my small self to read about Elizabeth, her tragic mother Anne Boleyn, her insane sister Mary and the treacheries of her cousin, Jane Gray.

Eventually I burned out on the Tudors, and somehow – probably at the suggestion of the librarians, bless their souls – I moved on to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Elizabeth I is an easy hero for a young girl. After all, she was a Queen in her own right! Eleanor of Aquitaine was slightly more complicated. She also exercised power in her own right, but often had to use the sort of 'soft power' available to women in the medieval period. I still love both Elizabeth and Eleanor, but I have learned in the intervening twenty years how unusual they both were. Most women in the pre-Modern period didn't wield great international influence, or even much autonomous domestic influence. But that doesn't mean that they were not important and influential in both international and domestic spheres. As Louise J. Wilkinson demonstrates in Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (2012) powerful women abound. But unlike Elizabeth I and Eleanor of Aquitaine, it takes dedication to learn about these influential, flawed, and fascinating women  of the Middle Ages. This is certainly the case for Eleanor de Montfort, granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and an absolutely spectacular character in her own right.

Speaking Silence to Power: Jean Guéhenno’s Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944

German soldiers enjoy ice creams in occupied Paris in 1940

Words matter. Words teach, extoll, blame and praise. At their very best and in the hands of those who know how to speak and write, they can open our minds to ideas and possibilities that we never dreamed of. Words are means by which we are alerted to the fact that the world can be other than it is, whether for better or for worse. And using words means assuming a formidable burden of responsibility. When we convince someone that things could be better, we are persuading them that how things are now is not right, or could be changed, encouraging our audience to think about how things could be better and by association what they might do to make that better world a reality. When we convince people that things could be worse, we encourage a certain satisfaction or acceptance of the way things are now, disinclining our audience to action by dangling before them the danger that any action they might take could have negative consequences.

This is not a new insight—philosophers and dramatists throughout the ages have been aware of the dangerous power of words. From Plato and Aristophanes to Leo Strauss and Salman Rushdie, novelists, poets, philosophers, and politicians have understood that words can catalyze and control. But what they have also known is that words are not just volatile for those who hear them—they can also be a danger to those who write them. Jean Guéhenno, the author of the diaries which make up Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford University Press, 2014) was very well aware of this fact, and of the fact that his diaries would have warranted a death sentence if they had been uncovered. But he also knew that there were other ways to write—perhaps light comedies with traditional plots to make people laugh, or even serious essays that didn't address issues of the day. And yet, drawing on his own sensibilities and the works of the great French philosophers who influenced him, Guéhenno came to the conclusion that to write as though there was no Occupation would be like aiding in an infection of a hallucination. The Germans needed French authors to publish, to create the illusion that they were allowing France to be France. Every word made the Occupation more normal, "not so bad." And so, Guéhenno did not write.

The Best Book to Read to Your Child, or to Yourself: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories

A hoopoe in flight

When I was about eight or nine years old, my father and I realized that our tradition of reading together had to change. We had long left behind picture books, and he had little patience for the transitional books that are suggested for children of that age – books written for children who are just learning to read for themselves, books usually remarkable for their recycled narratives and limited vocabulary. Perhaps he had came across Haroun and the Sea of Stories in the time he'd spent traveling in the Middle East, or because it was the height of the Rushdie affair, or perhaps it was because, as a parent who was often away overseas, he wanted to read me a book written by an author who was separated from his own children. Either way, that was when I met Haroun.

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.

A Streak of Light through Damascus: Samar Yazbek’s Cinnamon

Author Samar Yazbek (Photo: AFP / Joel Saget)

There are novels about revolution, and there are revolutionary novels. Both kinds of novels have their own appeal; novels about revolution allow us to feel like we are a part of contemporary or historical events, and their fictional frame introduces a human and subjective quality to events that history texts are often lacking. Novels about revolution, at their best, allow for greater ambiguity than reportage, and they are incredibly valuable as such – one such example is G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen. Revolutionary novels are not the same thing – they are ‘revolutionary’ not necessarily because they depict a revolution, but because they change the way we think about a person or a place, or because they illuminate individual people in ways that cause us to question or rethink what we know either about certain places, certain classes, or certain figures. Samar Yazbek’s Cinnamon is a revolutionary novel, set in a Syria before the current revolution began, but which is enriched by our recognition that the world of Cinnamon may be one that no longer exists.

Yazbek is a remarkable figure in her own right. Born into an upper-class Alwaite family (the same religious sect as the notorious Syrian ‘President’ Bashar al-Assad), Yazbek grew up being conditioned to support the regime, which is often credited with dramatically improving the social and economic status of the Syrian Alawi community, and with ensuring their safety (Alawites have historically been persecuted by other Muslim groups). Yazbek broke with her family when she began to protest against the regime in 2011, a political stance that initiated a cycle of social ostracization and military detention that she could only break by leaving Syria for Paris with her daughter. Her most famous work is a non-fiction account of her experiences as a protestor and dissident, A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, but Yazbek has a pedigree in fiction as well. She belongs to that small group of writers who deserve to be classified as both a writer of revolution, and as a revolutionary writer.

More than Just a New Perspective: Jo Baker's Longbourn

In the interest of full disclosure, a confession: I love Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I loved it when I read it for the first time in fifth grade, I loved it even more when I understood it more fully in high school, and that love only grew deeper during re-readings in college and afterwards when I could reflect more consciously on the gender and class dynamics that the original novel depicts. And I will defend the novel, on literary and social grounds, before all comers. It is, for one, set in a remarkable context – the family at the center of the novel are not members of the 1%, where most of the novels of the period take place, but members of the 15% where the pressures from below and above are most keenly felt. Every devotee of Pride and Prejudice will tell you that it is Elizabeth Bennet who is the heroine of the story, despite the fact that the narratives of her older sister (Jane) and younger sister (Lydia) both follow the more standard trajectory of romantic and moral narratives. But the reason I, and generations of other women, love Elizabeth Bennet is because she is capable of saying ‘no’: without blushing, and without prevaricating, she is a wholly feminine, intelligent woman who has no qualms about refusing the narrative that has been laid out for her. And while her opposite number, Darcy, begins the book as a rude misogynist, he too is worthy of continuing affection, if only because he is a man who respects (or at least, learns to respect) a woman who says ‘no.’

Because I love Pride and Prejudice, I am wary of adaptations and spin-offs. I enjoyed the two most famous movie adaptations of the novel (1940 and 2005), and Melissa Nathan’s modern and layered retelling in Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field (HarperCollins, 2001). But I have not read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Quirk Books, 2009), and I feel no great urgency to do so. I’m sure it is, on its own terms, a remarkable book, but I have no particular desire to remake the world of the original. And this is the distinction for me between good and bad sequels or adaptations: does they break the original? Or do they widen the readers’ perspective on the original without resorting to interventions that undermine Austen’s text? It is in stretching the world of Pride and Prejudice without breaking it, in preserving the original in the service of creating something genuinely new, that Jo Baker's Longbourn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) excels.

An Epic Sans Nostalgia: Yves Beauchemin’s Charles the Bold

One of the most fascinating dimensions of Canadian history, at least for those of us who did not grow up in Canada, is the history of Quebec and its relationship to the rest of Canada. While those south of the border are aware of Montreal as a cosmopolitan, French-speaking, “European-style” city that doesn’t require a trans-Atlantic flight and where the legal drinking age is 18, a deeper appreciation of Quebec – and the economic, religious, political, and cultural transformations it has undergone in the last 70 years – is much more rare. One way to cultivate such appreciation is certainly reading some of the numerous and fascinating histories that are available. A difference approach is available in Yves Beauchemin’s multi-novel series, Charles the Bold (Charles le téméraire).

Beauchemin is the premier Quebecois author of our time: his most famous novel, Le Matou (1981: translated into English in 1986 as The Alley Cat and adapted for film in 1985) is also the most widely-translated work of French Canadian literature of all time, currently available in more than 16 languages. He has received numerous literary awards in both Quebec and France, and the University of Bordeaux organized a colloquium on his work in 2000. Born in 1941, Beauchemin has a degree in literature and art history from the Université de Montréal, and has worked as an editor, journalist, and a researcher. Charles the Bold is not an autobiography, but Beauchemin’s familiarity with the places and communities present in his work make them richer than they might be otherwise, the streets, cafés, and bars as multi-dimensional as the characters.

"There are Always Choices": Margaret MacMillan's The War that Ended Peace

Author and historian Margaret MacMillan (Photo by Brett Gundlock)

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Jessica L. Radin, to our group.

For those of us who love to read, finding a work of history that is that perfect combination of well written and well researched is something of a Holy Grail. Well-written histories often tend toward the personal, and, while such books are enjoyable, the knowledge that they yield is often at best sparse, and at worst dubious and ideologically inflected. Well-researched histories, full of information, can be so dry and so lacking in narrative that they suck the life out the stories that they (barely) tell. It is tempting to resort to summaries – and particular this month, with the world commemorating WWI, such summaries abound.

But, if you can find a history which is well written and well researched, there is almost nothing more satisfying – those are the texts which illuminate moments, facts, and people that perhaps we have heard of, have seen illustrated in photographs and paintings, but about which we know very little. Margaret MacMillan’s two books on WWI provide precisely that illumination and, with a light touch that always avoids pedantry, can remind readers of why the Great War still has lessons to teach us today. While Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (Random House, 2003) – MacMillan's award-winning account of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the war – is perhaps the more famous of the two, in this centenary year it serves us best to start at the beginning. In The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (Random House, 2013), MacMillan provides a riveting account of how the world went to war.