August 31, 2006
Eureka!
Taking a break in the sunshine reading my book, the ending of my thesis-project story –which has so far been elusive– hits me with a flash in full glorious orchestration, and I am so excited you don’t even know.
August 31, 2006
Spare Ribs
I have been quite busy lately, mainly trying to get the first draft of my thesis project completed by September 10. This goal is distinctly possible but requires maniacal devotion for the next week or so, and that is where I will be. But on top of that, we’re quite busy at work scrambling to finish our final project before the end of the summer, I am reading voraciously, there are final days of summer to be lived inside (though bad weather the last two weekends have scuppered some of those plans, and more of the same is promised for the long weekend), and Stuarts must be enjoyed. An end-o-summer night out with my co-workers yesterday, and Katie came over for an indoor picnic on Tuesday. She brought with her my bridesmaid dress, and it looked like I will have to have some ribs out if I ever intend to actually wear it.
The Great Summer Rereading Project ends today, with A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence, which is an incredible novel. I reread The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion before that. It’s been wonderful to revisit these books, and I will do a rereading project every summer now, though only for one month from now on, as I’ll have less to catch up on. Stay tuned for more thoughts on the rereading experience, as I reflect upon them. And then I start my new Hilary Mantel tomorrow!
Terrible news times two regarding The Murdermobile. First, after a year of living in my neighbourhood, I had never seen anybody driving this most sinister vehicle. It seemed to move between parking spaces between murders on its own accord, and that was fine with me. That was a legend. And then last week, I walked past it and saw a woman inside. She was dressed all in pink, and she was strapping her baby into a child’s seat on the passenger side, and I was gut-wrenchingly disappointed. Neither pink woman nor baby appeared particularly murderous, and they sort of disproved my thesis that the Murdermobile is self-propelled. Moreover, the Murdermobile is for sale, for about $3500. It’s described as a “vintage delivery van”. I don’t know about that. In any case, the dream is over, or at least the nightmare.
(Oh, the my new Drabble is pre-ordered. Sweet anticipation!)
August 27, 2006
Private Universe
Our weekend has been full of little things. Reading and writing of course, and Little Miss Sunshine (which was brilliant), the orientation for my new volunteer endeavour at Culturelink, I got quite a haircut (and not by Stuart), a birthday dinner for Carolyn (which was hilarious), followed by a going-away party for Steve (which was well attended by some of my favourite people), The Big Chill on our way home, fun at Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington, and an entire watermelon (devoured).
I reread a number of books last week. In particular, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. I first read this book in the early 1990s; my mom bought it for me once when I was sick in bed, and I have this pre-Pulitzer, small, hardcover edition that I am awfully fond of. It’s a great book- so prescient. It was 1993, and Shields was writing, “When we say a thing or event is real, never mind how suspect it sounds, we honour it. But when a thing is made up- regardless of how true and just it seems- we turn up our noses. That’s the age we live in. The documentary age. As if we can never, never get enough facts.” A bit eerie, when I think of now. I loved this book for its factualness, though, that such fact can come from fiction. For a similar reason that I loved Possession last week. These stories are so firmly planted, in place and time. The authors have created an entire universe to accommodate their people, and that universe is so very similar to mine. The Stone Diaries, with its lists, photographs, family tree and extensive documentation; it is uncanny in its reality. I bet it drives some people absolutely mad. I’m now reading The Middle Ground by Margaret Drabble. Drabble also does some fine universe building. She has invented places and people that continually pop up throughout her body of work. Characters turn up, twenty years on from when we last met them, and they’ve changed accordingly. Her world is such a terribly intricate web, of incredible connections which are far too connected to be really plausible in fiction, and that’s what makes that world seem so very real.
On the L Woolf bio. Here for how to read a novel. New Can-Lit! I loved the Michael Ignatieff feature in The Globe, solely on the basis of it being a good story.
August 23, 2006
Mood
I’ve been trying to post photos of fun at the CNE for three days, but they won’t upload, and so you will have to wait in order to see the baby pigs, the butter scupltures and Stu at the Princes Gates. Otherwise, I’m home sick today and have been in a mood of late, which I intend to cast off presently. They’ll be tea drunk in the meantime.
August 20, 2006
Non fiction
Here for Joan Didion in The Observer. And Toni Collette too! Hilary Mantel reviews Andrew O’Hagen’s new book. Margaret Atwood in The Globe.
I am reading Possession by AS Byatt, which I purchased at the Nottingham Oxfam in late 2002 and read voraciously during the odd Christmas I spent in Cambridge with my friend’s brother-in-law’s extended family. I think Bronwyn may have read it around the same time, and even if she didn’t, we loved it much together. I keep having to put it another room because if it’s at arm’s length, I will pick it up and read it, and nothing will ever get done. At the moment, the idea of inventing history is resonating with me. I just completed a story about a girl who works as a “historical interpreter” at a pioneer house in small-town Ontario, what I’ve really enjoyed inventing the history of that house and the people who lived there. Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill were my inspiration (I grew up in Peterborough after all) but the rest I made up, as you do, and there is something in the detail necessary for such an endeavour that I find irresistible. I think Virginia Woolf felt similarly, her short story “The Diary of Mistress Joan Martyn” makes that evident. And I feel like Byatt must have read Woolf’s story before she wrote her novel, and had it in even the very backest of her mind. I love the creation necessary for rendering Ash and Christabel Lamotte, and the liberties Byatt would have had with them. I love that the air of history about them gives their story an authenticity that fiction usually lacks. I love it for the same reason I enjoyed creating fake newspapers when I was ten years old. There is something quite delicious in making a reality right out of thin air, which of course one does with every story, but the obviousness of this exercise is why it’s so much fun. The line between fact and fiction is not just blurred, but suddenly there is no line at all, nor was there ever such a thing.
August 19, 2006
Stretch on
Oh, Saturday afternoon post-brunch, post-hangover, post-being peeled off the pavement come sunrise. And now the day stretches out with nothing in it, save for stories to read and stories to write, with the Lego Star Wars soundtrack buzzing in the background.
August 18, 2006
Gluttony
Sometimes I know that systematic reading is just an excuse to be a book glutton. Don’t think I don’t know this. I love hotdogs more than anyone I know. I am a bit out of control; I’ve taken up reading whilst walking home from work, but I haven’t been hit by a car yet. Has actually been quite fascinating. I have no problem following the text and navigating myself through the world, and everybody gets out of my way. It adds five minutes onto my half hour walk, but the five minutes are well spent.
Margaret Drabble is just as bookishly gluttonous as I am however. I know this because I got my latest letter from Bronwyn today, and my text-based treat was Drabble’s essay “The Radiant Way and After”, from the 1999 anthology A Passion for Books by Dale Salwah. Containing such declarations as “I am unhappy unless I have a book about my person”, and such fears as being caught in a lift sans book. She goes on to write about not loving books themselves so much, and vandalizing them something terrible, how our early reading affects us, desperation for (any) books while abroad (the same desperation that led me once to read “The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe” in Salzburg). And how it’s not a passion for books she has as much as “a passion for print”. When she was in Japan, she wrote, being unable to read was akin to being deprived of a sense and she found it hard to function. She finishes, “I need print like an addict. I could live without it, perhaps. But I hope I never have to try.” And now why I love Bronwyn is evident.
Now rereading Franny and Zooey. I read Wonder When You’ll Miss Me by Amanda Davis yesterday, and really enjoyed it. I wasn’t expecting to, and didn’t at first. This book was an expansion of a short story I had already read, and I found it difficult to get past that. I sort of felt like I was trespassing. And the beginning of the book was awkward, disjointed. I knew that the main character would run away to join the circus, which I didn’t think would be particularly interesting. I feel the same way about books that take place at circuses that I do about books that take place a magical boarding schools in mystical lands, but this is where the combination of Davis’s extraordinary story-making, story-telling and writing skills proved enormously effective. This was an excellent book. It made circus sideshow performers absolutely human, and had plenty of pachydermic content, which is always important to me.
Books in the news: On that difficult second novel. I like the idea of book biographies, but then again, I would. The Geek hierarchy. Poetry workshop in The Guardian. Most these links stolen from Bookninja and Maud Newton. I’ve been busy. Now that Stuart has a job, I have to do housework again. Yawn.
We are going to the island this weekend!
August 17, 2006
More Drabble Mania
For the first time ever, it appears that a Canadian book cover is far prettier than the UK edition. The above cover is from the UK Amazon site, and the one below from the McClelland and Stewart catalogue. How lucky then, to be on this side of the ocean.
August 16, 2006
It is out of necessity that I read excessively
(My frequent ramblings upon reading rendered into a vague coherence)
Bookishness has gone hardcore, if the broadsheets are any indication. John Allemang reads a book a day in The Globe and Mail and Jane Smiley is tackling one hundred novels in The Guardian. This year I also decided to read a little less leisurely, set a goal of 200 books read in 2006, and since then it has occurred to me that these reading marathons might be the literary equivalent of competitive eating. Champion eater Takeru Kobayashi devours fifty hot-dogs in twelve minutes and I wonder if my reading goal is similarly excess for the sake of itself. Six months in, however, I have found something to be said for taking reading this seriously.
Merely tracking my reading habits has been worthwhile, revealing patterns I would not have otherwise noticed. That I am clearly too prone to leaping onto bandwagons of the just-deceased, as indicated by the appearances upon my list by Muriel Spark and Jane Jacobs. I note further, the gender imbalance in my author selection— by May, I had only finished one novel by a man, assigned for a class no less. I realized that my library was saturated with recent works by Canadian women in particular. That it is a miracle that I’ve managed to read anything at all from abroad.
A record of books read has proved practical to have on-hand. (I am not alone in such obsessive documentation. The writer Annie Dillard has kept a list entitled “Books I’ve Read Since 1966”.) My list has distinguished stories and characters, long after I’ve scanned the last line and slammed the book shut. One day I was straining my mind one day to remember who had left her umbrella on an omnibus and upon reference to the list, of course, I realized that Virginia Woolf herself had done so, in the fifth volume of her diary, back in March. From the list, I realised that Grace Paley’s short stories in February were what had made Jane Jacobs’ New York so familiar when I encountered it in May.
The list also serves as a diary, of sorts. Upon reference, I remember reading Zadie Smith’s On Beauty just after New Years, or devouring Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly on a bus ride to Ottawa during Reading Week. I recall the rainy day I read The Accidental by Ali Smith in its entirety, while I should have been doing my homework.
And what of the marathon itself? After nearly eight months, its most profound impact has been quite simply that I have read a lot of books. I rarely watch television or movies, and I always carry a book in case a reading opportunity suddenly arises. Admittedly, I’ve become a bit stupider socially and accounts of how I spent my weekend are often concerned with the adventures of fictional people. But I bet I’ve read a book lately that is relevant to any conversation you might wish to engage me in. These days, so attuned to reading, I’ve come to approach the world a bit like it is a book, interspersed with details to be noticed and facts to be learned.
Of course, the problem with any marathon is how fast the scenery flies by. So quantifying books threatens the quality of their readings, which is why I embarked upon The Great Summer Rereading Project. I have devoted my reading this summer to becoming reacquainted with books I read too long ago and have forgotten, books read too quickly and not adequately absorbed, or books I read when I was too young to understand them.
I started with Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, which I first read at fourteen years and probably missed the point of. I’ve since revisited quite a few others, including Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby and In The Skin of a Lion and each was so different from what I remembered. What was once romantic now seems trite, the dull is illuminated and strange endings make sense. Rereading has been an exercise in self-discovery. I’ve also enjoyed deciphering my marginalia, and finding lost treasures between the pages, like the two dollar bill stuck inside The Robber Bride.
I am aware that there is probably fault to be found with such systematic reading. Is it an affront to its very leisureness to render reading such a chore? Surely a book is to be savoured. As with the competitive eaters, are hardcore readers testing limits that really need not require challenge?
But then again, any media consumption is a serious business, if the exhaustive cataloging of TV guides and the emergence of Personal Video Recorders are any indication. Music lovers obsessively compile playlists from thousands of tracks. Blogs punctiliously link to the corners of the universe. One could spend a lifetime reading magazines produced in a single week and the internet is bigger than the sky. And there is no business more serious than book reading.
In addition to the overwhelming number of wonderful books being published all the time, a reader has to contend with all the books published for thousands of years previously— the classics, the obscure, and the still-to-be-discovered. It is out of necessity that I read excessively. My list of books-to-be-read will always be longer than “Books I’ve Read Since 2006”. The sole problem with my reading marathon is that life is too short. And so however long mine stretches, I shall fill it with books.
