The Lazy Reader just finished a delightful novel called The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty. It is a character piece about the relationship between two women. Cora is a sensitive and conservative wife and mother in 1920's Wichita, Kansas. A fictitious character, she offers to accompany a real person, future screen actress Louise Brooks, to New York for dance training. Cora has a personal motive for offering to play chaperone which she is too private to reveal to Louise. I would recommend this to readers who like character driven historical fiction. There isn't a tightly wound plot, but evocative scenes that convey rare moments of understanding between people, and how two people influence each other. I enjoyed the setting of New York in the 1920s, when social mores were shifting.

Review of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I read Cheryl Strayed’s book almost the way that Cheryl hiked the Pacific Crest Trail: hard, with not too many stops, and with a devotion that bordered on the maniacal. It is a good book in that it accomplishes what she wants, to bring to life the hardship and wonder of pushing your body to unendurable limits. I mean, the name of her knapsack was Monster, and I would have given it a few more besides if I’d been her. With no real experience of backpacking she hikes for 1100 miles from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State in boots that are too small and a packsack that even veterans of the trail could hardly lift. At times, she believes the spirit of her dead mother is watching her, sometimes helping her. At other times, I would assume that she’d blush to have her mother watching over her, as she rashly decides on one-night stands.

Her old life would catch up to her at the most inconvenient times: when she was 22 her life was veering out of control with a marriage that was over, her mother dead, her family scattered and her drug abuse mounting. To say that she was impulsive is an understatement. How does this all tie up in her memoir? Each chapter is both a struggle with her hiking, (the boots, the endless urgings for Snapple and food, the weight of her pack) and with coming to terms with her past. Each chapter has a person’s name associated with it - her father’s and those memories, her ex-husband’s, her mother’s. Each one is grappled with and then closed as the chapter closes. She finds closure with her past and as she does so her journey becomes bearable.

I wouldn’t for all the world want to come to terms with my grief the way Cheryl did with the endless torture of walking, the way the body breaks down under stress and all the haunting memories, but it seemed to release her from her self-destructive tendencies in a remarkable way. This is what I loved most about this book; there is no psychobabble in it, no big ahah moment, no one to take the camera picture. She is just there, constantly improving with no visible understanding of why.

- Laurie Schut

Gil Scott-Heron was a unique voice during America's turbulent years of social upheaval in the 1970's. Musically, he was way ahead of his time. In the year 1970 he released his debut album, Small Talk at 125th and Lennox, which contained the song The Revolution Will Not be Televised - cited by many people as the first rap song ever recorded. Scott-Heron has been called "The Godfather of Rap" and when he passed away in 2011 pop superstar Usher, among many others, cited him as a major figure in 20th Century music.

So why wasn't he more famous? Part of the answer may be that a drug problem he developed in the seventies made him difficult for promoters, record companies, and other musicians to handle. He went through several configurations of band mates before his record company, Arista, dropped him in the mid-eighties. His strong opinions about politics and civil rights hardly made him a mainstream media darling - in short he was probably just "to hot to handle" for AM radio, which dominated what the public listened to in those times. Despite all of that his music has stood up remarkably well, and I am glad to see that several of his CDs are available for you to check out from the Calgary Public Library.

Also available from the library is "The Last Holiday: A Memoir", a biography that focuses on the time he spent on Stevie Wonder's Hotter Than July tour - a time when Wonder was the strongest voice speaking out for a holiday to commemorate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King. It is an amazing book that will fascinate anyone remotely interested in the social changes that happened through the seventies and early eighties.

So today, Martin Luther King Day, why not check out the words and music of a man who did his part in making this holiday come to pass? Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to listen to some Stevie Wonder or read the words of Dr. King himself. While this may not be a holiday here in Canada, I think we can all agree that the example Dr. King set has had a great positive effect that does not stop at the borders of the United States.

Review of Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romance novels

I hesitate to write of Georgette Heyer’s novels in that they resemble nothing more than pale shadows of Jane Austen at her not very best. Heyer’s novels centre around getting married in the time of the Regent, 1795-1837, in England. The plots are improbable, the dialogue gets tiring and yet, and yet, they are delicious. No less a writer than A.S Byatt, among others, has sung her praises and I can definitely recommend them for those readers who have worn out Pride and Prejudice on their CD players. Georgette never fails.

Let’s be clear. The heroines are always virtuous, if a little careless, and the heroes, are not... That makes for some interesting stories. Kidnappings, near rapes, some interesting duels, getting into scrapes with the law and (more importantly) people of the Ton, getting out of scrapes, getting money, losing money and then, of course, shopping. It is rather dizzying. Heyer is good with details, bad with editing. She goes on at length about the way a ball gown is draped, but neglects to do the one thing that all good novelists should do, move the plot along. So, perhaps perceiving that the reader is lost somehow in the folds of a necktie, she retrieves him, (or her), stuffs her in a coach with her heroine, and drops them in a Vauxhall rout. Wait, weren't we supposed to be eloping with Valdor? Or was it Charles? The other problem with Heyer is that she loves to stuff us full with dainties - characters that are either straight out of Dickens or out of Bronte. A harsh villain may bear a close resemblance to Heathcliff while another father figure seems a tad like Daniel Peggotty. We do love these characters, but perhaps not quite so many in such short novels all enacting such Cheltenam tragedies! Her use of the vernacular of the times is brilliant, I want to be bedeviled, blue as begrim, or perhaps have a fit of the vapors. Life was so much more lived then. There were orgies, balls, duels, gaming, rakes and penitence. Above all, in Heyer, there is penitence.

Laurie Schut Louise Riley Library