Our 2013 Bookshelf

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Our 2013 Bookshelf

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on April 11, 2012 at 4:17 pm | Reply Suzanne Fisher Staples

I’ve just discovered this blog via Ken Cadow – and it’s something I’ve been looking for – thank you, Ken!
If you haven’t read Michael Ondaatje’s THE CAT’S TABLE I hope you’ll put it on your must-read list. Admittedly I am nostalgically biased, having spent a lot of time in Sri Lanka, where Michael Ondaatje begins this wonderful journey as a feral boy in a shop with two other feral boys. His homesickness awoke a latent homesickness for Serendeep in me. Being by Ondaatje, of course, it’s beautifully written, but also the most piercingly bittersweet coming-of-age memoir I’ve read – maybe ever. My reading group didn’t select it as one of our selections this year, but our discussion of it as a candidate sent everyone out to get it – and many of us now have read and loved it.
- on April 15, 2012 at 4:19 pm | Reply lisalisabookjam
  
  Thanks so much for your comment and recommendation, Suzanne. And what an amazingly interesting childhood you must have had! I (Lisa Cadow) did in fact read – and enjoy – Cat’s Table. The following is the blub I wrote about it back in December on The Book Jam’s “2011 Bookshelf”. I thought including it in this comment stream might help readers deciding whether or not to add it to their own lists:
  
  The Cat’s Table (2011) by Michael Ondaatje. This novel has received a tremendous amount of attention and is listed on many “best of 2011″ lists. I really enjoyed it for the journey it offers readers on board a ship bound for England from Ceylon in the 1950′s. It is masterful in the way it seamlessly plays with time and memory, for the main character is recalling this trip as an 11-year-old boy from the present day and understanding the impact the voyage had on his life.
on April 15, 2012 at 4:32 pm | Reply Suzanne Fisher Staples

One thing I forgot to mention – because when I think of CAT’S TABLE I forget that it’s true – is that this is a novel. But Michael Ondaatje did make this voyage, and there was a ship called the Oronsay. He says in a note at the end of the novel that this is an imagined rendering. I was shocked when I read that – even though I’d heard him say the very same thing in an interview on NPR (The Diane Rehm Show on WAMU) many months ago. And despite the many unlikely coincidences and extraordinary things that the character Michael and his friend Cassius overhead from a lifeboat suspended over the deck of the Oronsay late at night. I wonder whether other readers were able to suspend disbelief as completely as I did. I’d love to hear more reactions to this book.