Journal Entry 1 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Tuesday, April 13, 2004

I read this book shortly after it was first published in 1993, and liked it very much. That was before Shields was awarded the Governor General's Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize for the book (she was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year, but lost to Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha).

I re-read this book this spring, from the different perspective that comes with another ten years of living, and awareness of the international acclaim received by the book after '93. (In fact, in the decade that followed, Shields became a household name in the world of literature, not just in Canada but internationally. Her death last year was mourned around the world.) If anything, I enjoyed The Stone Diaries more the second time.

You can view the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's commemorative piece on Carol Shields here. Shields also wrote The Republic of Love; Small Ceremonies; Swann; Happenstance; Larry's Party and Unless. 

Journal Entry 2 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Saturday, May 01, 2004

Journal Entry 3 by BookGroupMan from Woodbridge, Suffolk United Kingdom on Thursday, June 10, 2004

Ah, bless, book arrived safetly after 'her' long journey by husky & sled ;) I'm gonna put this quite close to the top of Mt tbr, and *will* post a review l8s. Thanks for any special onward/return instructions

Aaaannnnndddd, thanks very much for extra gift and package decorations... er...so you're quite a patriotic Canadian, then?? 

Journal Entry 4 by BookGroupMan from Woodbridge, Suffolk United Kingdom on Friday, November 12, 2004

Ha, reading this at last (so an update for the patient goatgrrl). I've spent months sort of skirting around this, taking it more than once on the long round trip commute from Suffolk to Cambridge, unopened; maybe nervous about starting out on such an expectation-charged treat?

A few pages in, and i've met the 'extroadinarily obese' sugar-bingeing Mercy Goodwill, and her lonely neighbour, "Why don't you call me Clarentine" Flett. Delicious characters, I know i'm going to enjoy it here :) 

Journal Entry 5 by BookGroupMan from Woodbridge, Suffolk United Kingdom on Wednesday, November 24, 2004

This is not a review, I'm too emotional right now do this fine book justice. I've just spent nearly 9 decades with Daisy Goodwill, now turned to stone. I've come to know her friends, family and acquaintances as my own.

But, the heroine; the enigmatic; the biddable, the cipher that is Daisy, I’m not sure I really *know* her at all. I shall have to think about this a bit more before writing a real review ;)

(25/11)

What Carol Shields does with this very clever novel, is create a whole believable life, from a traumatic birth in a small quarry town in Manitoba to a lonely death in a Florida nursing home. We follow Daisy Flett (nee Goodwill), and her extended family, and see friends & acquaintances come and go. But Daisy herself remains slightly blurred around the edges, not a victim (she seems mostly satisfied, and regrets little until the very end), as much as an outsider in her own life. Things happen to, and around, Daisy, like she isn’t there, she’s somehow ‘undefined’ other than by the roles she is given or adopts by default; Child, Bride, Mother, Employee, Grandma etc. Someone smarter than me can unpick the allusions about her stone worker father, her mother, the orphan Mercy ’Stone’, and Daisy herself dreaming of a final carved sarcophagus and being metamorphosed into a solid, mineralised, calcified state. Why 'The Stone Diaries' anyway?

A very minor criticism, some of the chapters are a little bit over-elaborate as CS tries out different narrative styles; one chapter views an event (or rather a condition) from lots of different viewpoints, another is a series of letters. Although well done, they detract slightly from the clean powerful ‘lines’ of the majority of this novel. I love that such an personal, emotional & approachable book can win a major literary prize (The Pulitzer). Our own Man Booker tends to go for the politically correct, the fashionably erudite, the contrived - do you agree Goatgrrl?

One last thing, which contradicts my earlier point(!); I thought the last chapter was brilliant, a persons life distilled into an inventory of addresses, books reads, missed opportunities, tributes; the people left behind raking among the ashes of ones life for some clues, and some sense of the meaning of it all; it *is* true that only in death can we truly understand life.
 

Journal Entry 6 by BookGroupMan at on Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Released on Tuesday, December 14, 2004 at about 1:00:00 PM BX time (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada) at The Knights Templar pub, 95 Chancery Lane in London - Chancery Lane, England United Kingdom.

RELEASE NOTES:

Taking to London meet-up or will release wild sometime today...