The Keepin’ It Real Book Club is all about what we love about books. But enough of playing nice. What makes your skin crawl and your eyes roll? What would you never be caught dead reading? What do you HATE in your fictional universes? Do you avoid poets-turned-writers, Oprah-approved books, or tea cozy mysteries like the plague? Do child narrators, paranormal romances, or multi-generational family sagas give you a rash? Well, if we have it our way, that will happen no more! Be prepared to have your reading world turned upside down with KIRBC’s Reading Roulette!
No, it doesn’t require a trip to Vegas or reading at gunpoint, but it could be almost as risky, and just as sexy.
In the spirit of Keep Toronto Reading, we need your help to get this gambling party started. Here’s your mission should you choose to accept it:
1) Send us your literary pet peeve (and pretty picture) in 140 words or less. These will be shared with the world on the KIRBC site. But that just gets the party started . . .
2) Those eager to prove you wrong can step up to the plate and recommend a read that just might turn your loathing in loving. Recommenders can utilize any form they want anywhere on the world wide web: a blog post, a video, a webcomic, a sonnet, a song . . . whatever you think will persuade the hater to take a chance and reconsider. Stalking of blogs and Goodreads profiles to further determine your target’s tastes is encouraged.
3) Should the challenge be accepted, we enter the third, and most interesting, stage. Erin and I will try to hook up the reader with a copy of the recommended book. Then it’s up to them to read it and post a response (again, in any form they’d like, anywhere they’d like).
So what’s in it for you? Well, you could discover great new books where you least expect them or turn a hater of a genre into a true believer. Not enough? How ‘bout prizes? Reading Roulette will run from September 2nd to November 2nd, and every time you recommend or review in that time, you’ll be entered to win a fabulous prize pack of books. Erin and I will also award a jury prize to the best recommender and the best response (judged by our own highly subjective criteria).
We’ll post all the Reading Roulette challenges, recommendations, and responses here so you can follow everyone’s spin of the wheel here.
But we wouldn’t make you guys do it if we weren’t going to do it too. So to kick things off, here’s the list of grievances we’d nail to the library’s door:
Jen Knoch (@jen_knoch) will cross a bookstore to avoid Can lit pre-1970; action that is field-of-grain adjacent; and cover art involving half-naked modelesque types, shopping bags, wedding rings or stiletto shoes. On the other hand, she’s a sucker for a strong authorial voice, poetic prose, forbidden love, tear-provoking scenes, and satisfying endings.
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Erin Balser (@booksin140) is not a fan of historical fiction, especially those written in the epistolary form. When she’s not avoiding historical fiction, she dodges horror, fantasy and Harlequin romances. If it happened before she was born or it’s completely implausible, she doesn’t want to hear about it. Additionally, talking animals, precocious children, wizards, ladies-in-waiting, plagues, doomed romances, poor sentence structure and anything and everything that takes place in rural Canada need not apply. However, if you’re really well written, laugh out loud funny, trim and work every last word, borderline experimental and written by an author that’s on the verge, call me. Beach-ready guilty pleasures are open to apply for one night stands only.
Feelin’ lucky? Email me (j.k.knoch@gmail.com) your literary loves and hates. We’ll post our first round of challenges next week.
Welcome to another edition of Books in 140 Seconds, the your biweekly book club blast, where Erin and I give you the goods on a book in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee. This week the Washington Post‘s Ron Charles joined the YouTube book reviewing party, recording a one-minute review of My Hollywood. Oh, it’s pretty good if you like your videos edited, rehearsed and in a Masterpiece Theater type setting. Sure he has theme music, a budget, and multiple set changes . . . but we keep it real. And we’re adorable. As for 60 seconds, I say, been there done that. 140 is the new 60. But if it really came down to a head-to-head book reviewing video showdown (as we may have suggested to Ron Charles on twitter, and he may have accepted), Erin and I are pretty sure we could take the cake with just one awkward frame.
Speaking of cake, this week we’re talking about Sarah Selecky’s first-rate short story collection,This Cake Is for the Party. Watch it to see us cram as many cake jokes as possible into 140 seconds, and eventually dissolve into laughter at our own cleverness:
For more on This Cake, check out my review from last week. We’ll see you again in a fortnight, when we’ll go back to high school in the eighties with Candace Bushnell’s The Carrie Diaries. Tune in to see what we think of this prequel in the wake of this summer’s SATC sequel.
In 1914, famous explorer Ernest Shackleton placed an ad in London newspapers. It read:
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in event of success.”
“Participants wanted for journey to the center of the earth. No wages, constant wet, cold, and darkness. Weeks underground. Safe return doubtful. (Honor and recognition equally so.)”
And these casually enumerated conditions are only the beginning of the challenges facing those willing to crawl, climb, rappel, dig, and dive their way up to two miles beneath the earth’s surface. These veteran divers and climbers spend weeks in complete darkness, using light only when absolutely necessary. They’re often wet, soaked by underground rivers and magnificent waterfalls, with little hope of drying out. They transport heavy equipment, fuelled only by freeze-dried food and chocolate bars, shedding up to 25 pounds on one expedition. All of this in the name of exploring earth’s final frontier.
Tabor’s book serves as a good introduction to supercaving (likened to climbing a mountain in reverse . . . in the dark . . . with the hardest part — the ascent — left for last) and offers contrasting profiles of two successful cavers — the aggressive American Alpha explorer Bill Stone, and the soft-spoken Ukrainian scientist Alexander Klimchouk. Granting each man a section of the book, detailing their backgrounds and various expeditions, Tabor explores each man’s personality, leadership style, and accomplishments as both men race to map the deepest cave on earth.
Tabor starts with Stone, opening his section with a quote from the larger-than-life personality: “Rule No. 1: Nothing is impossible (unless it violates the laws of physics). Rule No. 2: Bend the laws of physics if you can.” After 150 pages with Stone, the reader may begin to imagine this type-A approach to caving is the only way, making Tabor’s focus on Klimchouk for the next 100 pages that much more fascinating. While both men focus on the scientific motivations for caving, we see that for Stone, science is just a means to make adventuring possible, whereas for Klimchouk, science is the reason for the adventure itself.
Blind Descent is also a cautionary tale as it plumbs the depths of its two lead explorers, shedding light on the not only the risks to life and limb but upon the toll that cave-obsession can take on personal relationships, team dynamics, and sometimes international politics, tainting even record-breaking achievements. And in a pitch-black underworld where every second is risk-laden, where people can risk their lives for a few meager feet of advancement, the achievements themselves are sometimes even secondary to the relief that comes from surviving weeks of high-stakes, high pressure, high-impact toil in the darkness. It explains the ambivalence that can strike even the great Bill Stone. Tabor writes, “Their six day Huaulta effort was a monumentally stunning accomplishment, and yet Stone’s happiest moment came not during their exploration of the great cave but upon their return from its darkest heart.”
Tabor does a good job balancing information and exposition, and though sometimes the logistics of caving can be hard to imagine and I’d get a little snagged, the author offers up the information in small chunks, using effective similes to help the reader gain some footing in unfamiliar territory. The cast of Blind Descent is rather large, and though Tabor endeavours to describe most of them, I found I’d lose track of who’s who. Not that it matters much: in the darkness faces are indistinguishable, and it’s the pinpoint of light shed on their skill and brazen courage that is most illuminating.
The closest I've been to supercaving: Exploring the Jenolan Caves in Australia's Blue Moutains.
Though I did miss the adrenalin-laced immediacy of a first-person narrative (the best ones make you forget that the person has lived to tell the tale), Tabor brings the reader into many all-too-common life-and-death moments: people stricken by The Rapture (an mental sickness with similar affects to the oxygen deprivation that imperils mountaineers), divers snagged in rocky tunnels, climbers hanging by improperly secured equipment over gaping canyons . . . even a simple trip to the toilet is potentially fatal as a caver slips near the makeshift latrine. These precarious moments inject essential life into the narrative, and provide perfect fodder for short chapters with cliffhanger endings (which have never been this literal).
One part balanced, informative biography and supercaving primer, and one part high adventure, Blind Descent certainly has “shades of Indiana Jones,” though for the courageous (indeed perhaps crazy) people haunted by the echoes of the earth’s caves, something like dropping into a pit of snakes would be child’s play.
Jen Knoch (@jen_knoch) will cross a bookstore to avoid Can lit pre-1970; action that is field-of-grain adjacent; and cover art involving half-naked modelesque types, shopping bags, wedding rings or stiletto shoes. On the other hand, she’s a sucker for a strong authorial voice, poetic prose, forbidden love, tear-provoking scenes, and satisfying endings.
Erin Balser (@booksin140) is not a fan of historical fiction, especially those written in the epistolary form. When she’s not avoiding historical fiction, she dodges horror, fantasy and Harlequin romances. If it happened before she was born or it’s completely implausible, she doesn’t want to hear about it. Additionally, talking animals, precocious children, wizards, ladies-in-waiting, plagues, doomed romances, poor sentence structure and anything and everything that takes place in rural Canada need not apply. However, if you’re really well written, laugh out loud funny, trim and work every last word, borderline experimental and written by an author that’s on the verge, call me. Beach-ready guilty pleasures are open to apply for one night stands only.
