I'm not punk, or indie, or anything like that. There's aspects of those cultures, or counter-cultures I guess (same thing, really), that I feel an affinity for, but they're not really my scene. Indie culture is what Broken Pencil does, though, and therefore you're not going to find much in the way of mainstream fiction in Can'tLit, and anthology of fiction from the magazine. That's both awesome and frustrating.

There's two ways to think of taking risks in fiction. There's the obvious way, which is writing against mainstream literary expectations, and I have a lot of respect for that, especially when it's done here in Canada, because, well... yeah. CanLit can be boring and predictable as shit sometimes. Maybe even most of the time. (Rosenbaum's foreword even starts with the words: "CanLit sucks.") There's a whole bunch of that in this collection; in point of fact most of the pieces could fall under that heading. Then there's the other way, which is when an author writes against or outside of their comfort zone, and that's a harder thing to do (and gets a hell of a lot more respect from me), and harder to determine from an anthology. The only person represented in this anthology whose work I've read before (aside from Hal Niedzviecki, who only wrote an introduction) is Zoe Whittall, and I don't feel like I've read enough of her work to make a determination on that front.

Anyway, there are some great stories here, in particular "Amsterdam at Midnight," which was very atmospheric, and though I can't speak for that particular city, really captured being tired and awake and aimless in an urban landscape at night, that kind of echoey darkness, the cool stillness with the occasional flush of humidity. And then you've got Joey Comeau's great "Giraffes and Everything," which brings with it an unexpectedly dark catharsis, and Christopher Willard's "Little Wite Squirel Angel," which at first I kind of hated, because it stuck me as plucking at satirical low-hanging fruit, but then won me over as it became less an expression of class contempt and more an argument about media repositioning itself in our lives, and the class implications of that.

But in any anthology of forty-seven stories, they aren't all going to be brilliant. And some of them really weren't. There were several (I'm looking at you, "Dandruff") that seemed kind of pointless, like someone said to themselves, "okay, stories are supposed to do X, so I'm going to do Y, even though Y doesn't really make any sense and is kind of dull and meaningless." In a sense that's a stereotype of the punk ethos, and though one tries to avoid thinking in stereotypes, it's hard to avoid with some of these stories.

Overall I enjoyed Can'tLit, and got to read some really daring stuff, but to be honest some of it felt like filler, present for attitude rather than quality. (In retrospect, that may have been part of the point; even the dimensions of the book are just unusual enough to be awkward.) The cover is gorgeous, though.

Can'tLit was my thirteenth and final selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

So here we have another gorgeous book. This is a thing that CZP does, create beautiful books that is, a logical consequence of hiring Erik Mohr to design covers, and the picture that I have posted here does not do it justice (it includes spot varnish!). Creepy in an awesome kind of way, yeah? Anyway.

The World More Full of Weeping is only about eighty pages, so I don't know whether to call it a novella or a short novel, but I don't care, because it's really good. There's also a short essay on the psychogeography of his work in the back that actually stands on its own, so, you know, bit of a bonus there.

I loved Bedtime Story, and really enjoyed Before I Wake, but I think The World More Full of Weeping is my favourite of his books. The central concern of Wiersema's work is families in crisis while children are in jeopardy, and this is no exception. Brian Page goes wandering in the woods behind his father's house with a young girl named Carly, and together they explore the Forest. I put this in capital letters because it's not the just forests of rural British Columbia, but all forests, a kind of Platonic ideal of what a forest should be, a never ending green, lush and misty and dappled and with birds and flowers and streams. One day Brian just doesn't come home, and while they search for him, his father learns that he too disappeared into the Forest when he was young, and has blocked the memory.

When I was a young boy, a very young boy (we're talking maybe five years old at the most), I had a recurring dream. Sometimes it comes back to me when the sleep is deep enough and my life is in turmoil. In this dream I'm running through the aisles of the old IGA in my hometown, the one that burned when I was still in grade school. I was pursuing—and being pursued by, in a kind of game—a young woman whose face I never quite saw. I loved this girl like a mad person, and to this day I still do, and I feel it down in my bones, like an echo reverberating through my life and relationships. The iconography of my dreams made her out to be a kind of Fae woman, and here's where we get to the part that's actually applicable to The World More Full of Weeping: Brian's relationship with Carly reminded me so much of the way this dream infiltrated my life over the years it was more than a little... I don't even know what it was. Just kind of unsettling, but in a really good way.

The World More Full of Weeping was my twelfth selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

I'd passed Before I Wake in the bookstore umpteen million times, and it itched at me, as books do, but I passed it by. If you read the copy on the back of the book, it will tell you that young Sherry Berrett gets struck by a car and falls into a coma (yes, Robert, a coma, not a catatonic state—fool me once, etc). Her parents eventually make the heart-breaking decision to take her off life support, and then—when she doesn't die—there's all sorts of talk about miracles and whatnot. At the time I was walking past Before I Wake in the bookstore I had a "no Jesus" policy. A friend and I had been talking, and we noticed that in the popular media—television in particular—religion seemed to be tacked on to everything, whether it needed it or not, and particularly a sort of lukewarm, non-committal Christianity. Regardless of whether or not this actually describes Wiersema's book (and it doesn't), that's what was going through my head when I read the word miracle. I finally picked it up because Quill & Quire had asked me to review his latest novel, Bedtime Story (review here), and I wanted to get a handle on his previous work.

It's not often I make a positive comparison to Stephen King. The man is sometimes a great storyteller, but he long ago became more of a commercial entity than anything else, and I want to make it clear that I'm talking about King back when he was merely a famous writer and a not a franchise. Anyway: onward.

Wiersema writes in a very clear, straightforward voice that does its damnedest to get out of the way of the story and the characters without ever succumbing to the airport-bestseller sloppiness that such a style can sometimes slide into. Before I Wake was an engrossing, King-ish page-turner (I think I read it in just two sittings) that actually made me care about the characters. Simon and Karen Barrett's pain felt genuine and they never devolved into engines of grief (a phrase I stole from a review of the season finale of The Killing that I can no longer find the link to), and the big surprise was how much I began to sympathize with Henry, the driver who struck down Sherry. Henry enters a kind of shadowy world of lost people reminiscent of London Below from Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, but less magical and more genuinely disturbing. I won't spoil it for you, but there was just the right amount of Jesus to make everything fit together nicely.

Before I Wake was my eleventh selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

I read The Waterproof Bible so long ago now that it feels like forever, but it's so good, and since I'm already behind schedule anyway, I thought, fuck it, let's write about it. I sprung for the hardcover, which I almost never do, but in this case it was worth it. Rather than your typical big-publisher hardback with an undistinguished cloth cover and a dust jacket with a pretty picture that will get ignored or damaged or lost, Random House made something that looks like the kind of thing McSweeney's would have put together, with some really lovely gold leaf and a clever belly band that's actually thematically relevant. The stock isn't quite as good as what McSweeney's would have used, but then McSweeney's would have charged an additional ten bills for it, too. Anyway, the thing is gorgeous.

This is the bit where I'm supposed to tell you what the book is about, and who Kaufman is, and things like that. All I know about Kaufman is that he's written a couple of novellas (All My Friends Are Superheroes, in 2003, and The Tiny Wife, in 2010) and that he's got a Twitter account. And really, that's enough, yeah? So the book: The Waterproof Bible is about some extraordinary people who are also incredibly ordinary. Or something. It's about a frog driving a car, who is not really a frog, but is really driving a car. It's about a woman who projects her emotions into the world in the most literal of ways, and who protects herself and her memories with talismans. It's about a man building a boat in the middle of the prairie, and it's about some people—also not really frogs—who live under the sea, and about people who can call down the rain. The way I see it, you've got two ways to go: you can be intrigued by this information, as I was, or you can not be intrigued by this information, and let one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of the last two years fly right on by. It's up to you, really. And by that I mean shut up and buy the book.

It's really, really tempting to read The Waterproof Bible as an allegory, or collection of allegories or extended metaphors or something. Kaufman invites the reader in, with Rebecca and her emoting in particular, and he makes you want to try on their circumstances like a suit, to see how they fit and where things line up, and to see what that tells you about yourself. They won't fit. You can understand Aby's crisis of faith, or Lewis' revelations, but no matter what angle you choose to approach them from, they're never going to be able to say anything about your own faith directly. What they will do is nag at you and make you dig deeper and make you look at yourself and think about things and ask questions you maybe didn't know were yours for the asking. I found this to be particularly true when reading about Rebecca, her dead sister Lisa, and Stewart, who stayed out there in the drought and waited for Rebecca and the storm.

Kaufman will do all these things, and you won't even know it's happening, because The Waterproof Bible reads like a light, mostly comic romp. It doesn't feel like this big weighty thing that will command feelings to rise up from the bottom of wherever to stir up some silt, it feels like the kind of book you'll take the to the beach to read in an afternoon with a glass of zinfandel and some wasabi peas, chuckling softly to yourself at the funny bits. That's what I did. Well, not really what I did; my life doesn't look anything like that. I read it in a damp basement with some music on, a glass of Coke, and some Creamy Dill Old Dutch potato chips, but you get the idea.

The Waterproof Bible was my tenth selection for the Fourth Canadian Reading Challenge.

Over the last year and a half or so I've read at least two dozen crime novels, and what sets this first Chief Inspector Alan Banks novel apart from all of them is how low the stakes are for most of the book. Almost every crime novel I've ever read involves a murder at some point (I'm hard pressed to think of one right now, but there may be a Chandler novel without a murder that I'm just not remembering; I read most of those ages ago), and Gallows View features only a single accidental death, and for most of the novel it feels like a peripheral concern. Alan Banks' biggest concerns (despite the accidental death of an elderly woman, which one would think takes priority, but then one would be wrong) turn out to be a Peeping Tom and a ring of thefts. Well, to be fair the thefts turn to robbery and sexual assault, at which point obviously the stakes go up and that becomes the priority, but that's fairly late into the novel and signals a shift in the tone and sets everything that comes after it apart. If that makes any sense at all. If you're a TV watcher at all, think more Foyle's War rather than Luther.

Though a Canadian, Robinson shows a lot of affinity for British crime writing, and the influence of greats like P.D. James is clear, but Gallows View, at least, is not quite there. It dates itself just as obviously as the work of Chandler or Cain or even David Montrose, though it was only published in 1989. Banks consults a female psychologist named Jenny Fuller who is a member of the "women's lib" movement, and was only brought in to appease local women's rights activists (I was ten years old in 1989 and even I, living in a town so small people from the middle of nowhere thought of it as the middle of nowhere, knew the word feminist). Fuller is smart, strong, capable, beautiful (natch), and of course the first thing she does, as a good feminist, is to decide she wants to shag our hero, Chief Inspector Banks, and really, she doesn't go in for all that anger and what not like the other women's libbers, she's got more common sense, and really blokes are just decent people who will do the right thing if you give them half a chance. She—and all the other women in the book, really—were off-putting in the extreme, if only because they seem to embody stereotypes from a generation before the book was written. Jenny Fuller was a perfectly interesting character until Robinson had to go and make her a potential, if unrequited, love interest (whom, I may add, Banks had to later go and rescue). It was still fun to read, and got quite unexpectedly energetic and exciting at the end, so I'm going to move on to Robinson's other books eventually, but it was almost enough to spoil it altogether.

Gallows View was my ninth selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

I've spent the last year or so—and especially the last six months—introducing myself to the world of crime/mystery fiction. (I don't really know what to call it; there seem to be a number of genre subtypes, and I'm not familiar enough to be able to sort them out.) I've been having a great time with the genre, a far better time than even I expected. I think I went through ten novels in March alone. I picked up this book, the first of several Canadian noir reissues, based on a post on The Dusty Bookcase, a blog run by Brian Busby, who just also happens to be the series editor.

The Crime on Cote des Neiges was first published in 1951, and is one of three detective novels set mostly in Montréal that Charles Ross Graham wrote under the nom de guerre "David Montrose." (The others are Murder Over Dorval in 1952, which is currently on my stack, and The Body on Mount Royal in 1953, which I don't think has been released yet.) Montrose's Russell Teed is almost like Canada's answer to Philip Marlowe, a few decades late. Montrose writes with the same kind of wit and hardboiled energy as Chandler, but Teed is better dressed, more polite, has a swankier office and typically deals with a slightly higher class (and less risky) clientele; a Canadian vision if ever there was one. The dialogue dates The Crime on Cotes des Neiges pretty badly, and Detective Sargeant Framboise has an accent so ridiculous it borders on being offensive, but otherwise it's pretty taut.

The plot is a little messy; there are body doubles and more bullets than holes (or is it more holes than bullets? I can't quite recall, only that they don't match up), and some clever maneuvering with family trees and girls in wet frocks, but all in all it's a worthy addition to the crime canon. It's unfortunate that it was so long out of print, but I'm very glad that Véhicule Press launched their Ricochet Books line, because I'd not only place this novel in the same tradition as Chandler, I'd put it on par with some of his lesser books (with the understanding that even lesser Chandler is better than your common noir novel).

The Crime on Cote des Neiges was my eighth selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

The initial reviews of Light Lifting were excellent, but largely lacked the critical language that entices me to pick up a book. I don't know if it's a shortcoming on my part, or the way the literary conversation goes here in Canada, but I got the distinct impression that MacLeod's stories were just very well executed variations of standard Munrovian realism. Because the book is published by Biblioasis I felt sure I'd agree that it was an excellent book (I have yet to be disappointed by anything of theirs), so I dutifully bought it, thinking I'd get around to it in the fall when that sort of thing seems to appeal to me a little more than usual. When Bronwyn and others started raving about it on Twitter in way that felt different, exciting, I knew it couldn't wait and I wanted to be involved in the conversation, so I moved it to the top of the stack. That was months ago, but I've been a little blocked this year, so my review is coming very late.

Light Lifting is an astonishing achievement. I almost don't even know where to begin. There's certainly an element of Munrovian realism, but it's foundational, built so deep into the structure of the book that at first you're lulled into thinking that's all that's there; you get inside these stories and walk around in them for a while, and no matter what strange and wonderful things you see, there's no danger of them collapsing on you, and you know that there's no danger—of that kind, anyway—because that realism is there with you too. Most of these stories have a darker element to them, though. An edge that you don't always see coming, and conclusions that could have gone shaggy dog in lesser hands.

The strongest story in the collection is probably "Adult Beginner I," which was anyway my favourite by a wide margin. Stacey is a new swimmer, conquering a long-held fear in a class full of old folks who are just trying to keep busy. At first she can't seem to make anything happen, but the good-looking instructor helps her make that first step, and afterwards she becomes kind of a savant. The water helps her get braver, and MacLeod takes her through the delicate steps of realizing a crush and figuring out what she's going to risk, and how far she's going to let her body take her, with its newfound grace and power, which contrasts excellently with the elderly swimmers who are just trying to maintain a basic level of fitness without compromising their safety. Treading water, essentially. The dark turn the story takes during the midnight swim is surprising, and continues to surprise as it develops and as Stacey finds herself quite literally in deep water, but it feels natural, inevitable—no, inexorable. It was incredible.

Several of the stories in Light Lifting follow this pattern. MacLeod starts of with what could be considered a fairly straightforward, almost domestic premise; a track star with his best days behind him (but only just), a child doing work well beyond his years, a university student taking on a summer job, a parent with a sick child. He explores each of those subjects with insight and subtlety, and then takes it one step further. The world doesn't exactly shift, but that one extra step never seems like it's a step too far, never seems out of place or unbelievable, no matter how unlikely the circumstances become. "Adult Beginner I" and the titular "Light Lifting" almost read like the embodiments of a parent's worst fears, but in MacLeod's hands they don't seem paranoid; rather they are eminently reasonable, and doubly terrifying as a result.

The closest thing in Light Lifting to a weak story is "Wonder About Parents," which is about a family facing the reality of a seriously ill child. It's written in abrupt sentences and sentence fragments, short on pronouns and adjectives. It's a style that emphasizes the immediacy and the frustration of the situation, but it is much longer than it needs to be (all the stories in Light Lifting are very long), and though MacLeod sustains the style admirably across all thirty-two pages, I think if it had been even one paragraph longer it would have been too much, and the whole thing would have fallen apart.

Light Lifting is a brilliant debut collection, so brilliant it's hard to believe it's MacLeod's first book. Once I started reading it all I wanted to do was talk about it and share the experience with others, and I had some really invigorating conversations on Twitter with Bronwyn Kienapple, who had some excellent insights into these stories (I wish she would write about them).

Light Lifting was my seventh selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

Can I tell you what surprised me most about this book? Because months and months after I read it (I know, I'm sorry, I'm late with everything these days) the shock is still with me. What Boys Like isn't funny. Well, okay, it isn't primarily funny. There are bits in these stories that are meant to be funny, especially little bits of dialogue, which Jones has a wicked gift for, and those bits are funny, but these stories show a considerable range in terms of tone and emotional direction, just as you'd expect from a Metcalf-Rooke award winning collection. The reason this surprised me is because my primary experience of Amy's writing is her blog, which is basically the funniest thing ever. I—honest to God—got the sense that she was first and foremost a humourist (and the one reading I went to, where I totally chickened out and went slack-jawed when it came time to meet her, she was clever and charismatic in a way that was mostly humourous), rather than a writer in the Munrovian tradition, and so that was what I was expecting.

Which is not to say that I was disappointed by What Boys Like, because I was not at all. In point of fact, "A Good Girl," the story that opens the collection, hit home for me in quite a serious way. Leah, the titular "good girl," is exactly the sort of woman I tend to fall in love with, and seeing how horrible she was to Alex, and how Alex, who didn't really deserve to be treated so badly, also didn't really deserve to be treated a whole hell of a lot better, sent me into a fair bit of personal turmoil.

"Twelve Weeks" was a great exploration of loss and how parents and children fit together. It was another one of those stories where I found myself in a complete state of turmoil because it resonated so strongly with experiences from my own life, and I have no doubt that there will be a lot of readers out there—particularly from my age group—who will read this story and find in it a serious and sensitive treatment of their own circumstances.

The only story in What Boys Like that I didn't really care for was "Miriam Beachwalker." It was very well executed, but it was still a young-girl-from-the-Maritimes-looking-for-a-way-out story, and that's generally the sort of thing I try to stay as far away from as possible. It's good for what it is, but every other piece in the book was more original and inventive, and for that reason I think I found this story even less interesting than I would have if the whole book had been closer to "Miriam" in tone.

Jones, as I said, writes astonishingly convincing dialogue, and she is especially adept at capturing characters in their teens and early twenties (even when she reaches back to the death of Kurt Cobain). She also handles her characters' sexuality beautifully, in a way that's frank and inclusive and even at times pretty goddamn hot, but it's pitch-perfect, and is always in service to the story, never just to shock.

What Boys Like was my sixth selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

I'd never read anything by Zsuzsi Gartner until now, except a few smatterings of the Darwin's Bastards anthology she edited, but I had heard her name, and heard good things about her first book, All the Anxious Girls on Earth. Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is a title to inspire, and as reviews and comments came flooding in from friends and associates who'd acquired advance reading copies (as indeed my copy is), it seemed exactly the sort of thing I'd want to read. Gartner did not disappoint.

The collection opens with a story called "Summer of the Flesh Eater" satirizing class conflict in an upper middle-class suburb. It's clever, and biting, and a tad ridiculous, and remains the piece I remember most vividly. A motorcycle driving, steak-grilling, lawn-ornament-owning, working-class man moves into a cul-de-sac populated by unimaginably twee upper middle-class men and their amorphously defined wives. Told from the point of view of one of the upper-crust husbands, it also reads as a comic send-up of different notions of masculinity. Since feminism shattered the concept of gender as strictly dualist, femininity has become a multiplicity of identities, some more stable and socially accepted than others (and few, of course, being entirely accepted by everybody, but that's just people being people), but (straight) masculinity hasn't made that same transition anywhere near as successfully. Only a few 'masculinities,' stable or otherwise, have achieved any kind of social acceptance, and those tend to line up pretty clearly along class lines. I'll get into this a little deeper when I finally write about Girl Crazy, because I think a lot of what's going on in that novel comes from that, but "Summer of the Flesh Eater" is an excellent, funny, and subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) disturbing exploration of the intersections of class and masculinity.

There's an ambivalence about class that runs through many of the stories in this book. "Investment Results May Vary" is about a great many things (paranoia, mental illness, family, and desire), but underneath it all there's the reality of being economically vulnerable, the strange, visceral combination of envy and contempt and anger like you can't really know until you've experienced it. (I know many people who like to say they know what it's like to be poor because they were broke in university, but that's like saying you know what it's like to live in Beijing because you shop at Dragon City Mall;* the few tiny similarities that exist between those two experiences are so astonishingly superficial it's too absurd to contemplate—unless, of course, you have no clue what you're talking about.) Gartner never cheapens any of that experience by being heavy handed, but she doesn't let anyone off the hook for it either. Almost nobody can do that well, but she makes it look effortless.

Another of my favourite pieces in the book is "Floating Like A Goat," which feels a lot like a Lydia Davis story, but not so pared down. It's written as a letter from a mother to an elementary school art teacher with the brilliant name "Mrs. Subramanium." Again Gartner gives the reader ambivalence rather than a clear path towards some definitive reading. The narrator could easily be seen as an aging art snob going slowly off her rocker as she obsesses over her daughter's first art class, but it's also an absolutely brilliant and moving treatise on the complexity of art and why art actually matters.

But what struck me the most about Better Living Through Plastic Explosives was how much I wanted to compare it to the recent work of that other West Coast author, William Gibson. I think the thing that makes Gibson's recent work so strikingly now (and he has said that he does this deliberately, but has always done so, even in his books that were explicitly about some other, more imagined, time) is that objects and spaces that are designed, and used, and layered populate his books. He's not afraid of technology, and he's not afraid of exploring what it really is or what it means or how people use it in a way that's organic to the world he's writing about, rather than as props or window dressing, as so many literary authors do. Of course this means they lack the timeless quality that so many strive for, but it makes their settings intensely authentic. Gartner does much the same thing, to a lesser extent, but leaves out the architecture of the popular thriller. I can't even tell you how deeply, deeply satisfying that is to me as a reader. I'm not constantly trying to puzzle out, as if stranded in some thick literary fog, which of the last two or three decades the author is vaguely gesturing at, assuming she's actually got something that specific in mind. Cellular phones, email, GPS grids and the Internet are all native to Gartner's fiction, and it makes me tingle right down to my toes. Better Living Through Plastic Explosives is one of the best books I've read so far this year, and I'm sorry it took me so long to finally write about it.

Update: I was going to give this a pass, but it's stuck in my head, and I can't let it go. I think Better Living Through Plastic Explosives could be very satisfyingly read alongside Hal Niedzviecki's most recent short story collection, Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened (you can read my review of it here). Gartner and Niedzviecki tackle a lot of the same material, but from different directions. In particular, the titular "Better Living Through Plastic Explosives," which closes Gartner's book, and Niedzviecki's "Special Topic: Terrorism," which closes his, are so conceptually and thematically similar that they could have been composed in tandem.

Better Living Through Plastic Explosives was my fifth selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

*For non-Torontonians: Dragon City Mall is a small shopping centre on Spadina Avenue, the main thoroughfare of our local Chinatown.

Sent to me by the fine folks at Invisible Publishing, L is the surreal story of Henry, a man with a troubled home life, the woman called L who moves into the cramped room above his café, and how the café and the city seem to shift and respond to their relationship and their emotions. At first I didn't like the book at all. It felt awkward and lacking direction, and it didn't help that Orti's prose is incredibly strange. More than once I caught myself checking to see if L was in fact a translated work, because it had all the signs of having a serious case of translationese. And then, about halfway through, it hit me: L is a piece of French New Wave cinema. It is a Goddard film that has been transliterated from celluloid to paper. Once I realized that, everything made sense, and I found the book to be quite beautiful.

The unnamed city is itself a character, its denizens seemingly as mutable as its streets and walls, the café itself. The sense I get of the city is that it's more kind to Rome or Venice than Paris, but the overall aesthetic of L is more À bout de soufflé than Ladri di biciclette. Or possibly Dave McKean's Mirrormask.

I'm going to have to read this again, and that's not a bad thing. I can't decide if L or the city exist on—or in some way because of—the manuscript pages that characters keep finding floating loose throughout the city, but it seems to me a viable reading. More importantly though, I got the sense that there was more to this book than I was seeing in that first reading, and that's always a good sign, even if the immediate outcome is that I have trouble talking about it. I think this is one of those books that you just have to read for yourself. And you should; it's something truly challenging and original.

L (and things come apart) was my fourth selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.