Books Are Easy to Wrap - Page 2

The other non-fiction title that has been many-times-given is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. Just the other day, I had yet another chance to use (ie, be a tedious know-it-all) with information gleaned from that book. I found it a bit of a slog at times, but it was worth it, to get Diamond's take on why wealth, the trappings of modernity and fancy-pants progress have come to the places that they have... and why other civilizations — established, sophisticated civilizations like the Maya — never took the same steps and were ultimately steamrollered by those that did. Diamond's book attempts to use adult reasoning to address a fundamental child's question: Why is there so much inequality in the world? It doesn't tell us why we don't fix it, or how to fix it, but it certainly gives perspective on how we got to here.

In the fiction realm, there are also two stalwarts. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-winning novel about... well, that's the thing. It's both an intimate, personal story and a huge, sweeping history. You could say it's the history of comic books, or Jewish America, or of New York City. It's about the life cycle of dreams, about imagination and possibility and friendship and love. It is a book with the potential to be all things to all people, and yet it is still a good book. A damn good book. Possibly my favourite book. I feel duty bound to share it.

The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. has a similarly epic scope. The first book in Ottawa-area author Sandra Gulland's triology about Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de Beauharnais, aka Mrs. Bonaparte, this was one of my working-in-a-bookstore finds. I would never have picked this one up on my own, not with its woman-on-a-sette painting cover and its historical subject matter, and especially not with the assumption that it was about the Napoleon/Josephine love affair. But a coworker raved and raved and raved about it (the same coworker, incidentally, who encouraged me to read Harry Potter, and we all know how that turned out) so I borrowed it from work. I was transfixed. I didn't leave my couch until I was done. Gulland's writing is beautiful, and she creates a Josephine who is so much more than Napoleon's wife. In fact, Napoleon doesn't even show up until quite a ways into the first book. I warn everyone I give this one to that they'll be hooked and that I cried my way through the last two-thirds of the final volume. Everyone who has been given the first one by me has gone on to read the rest of the series. (Ironically, I don't own any of these books, having borrowed the first one from work and the second two from an ex-boyfriend's mother.) This is a series that hasn't gotten anywhere near the attention it deserves.

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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