July 25, 2011
Best Book from this week's library haul: Cats' Night Out by Stutson/Klassen
There was no sticker on the cover, so it was only just now that I learned that our Best Book from this week’s library haul was awarded the 2010 Governor General’s Award for Illustration. The book is Cats’ Night Out by Caroline Stutson and illustrated by J. Klassen, which we love for its verse: “Two cats samba, dressed in white/ on the rooftop Saturday night.” It counts up by twos to, “Twenty conga left and right/ in splashy florals, plaids and stripes”, and I am especially partial to the twelve town tabbies doing the twist. Anyway, the neighbours start complaining and the show gets shut down, but the illustrations of the nighttime cityscape are marvellous fun, it’s cats after all, and the verse has a jazzy rhythm even we like, and we hate jazz. We were happy to find this book, though we had plenty of gems this week– Harriet has discovered Corduroy and is in love, and we’re also reading Katie-Morag based on Melanie’s recommendation.
July 25, 2011
Alas
I was expecting to have a brand new book review for your reading pleasure today, except that in the space of 36 hours this weekend, I gave up on three (3) books. One wasn’t a bad book, but it just wasn’t interesting for me, and you’d wonder why I was reviewing it; the second was a flawed first book that I might have stomached (it had worth) but it wasn’t up my alley; and the third was a very popular book whose author’s prose had me grimacing in the forward and it was only more of the same– I gave it until page 6. So no new book review, but now I am reading Kate Christensen’s The Astral, and I think it’s her best book yet. I hope I’m able to fit in one more book before we leave for vacation on Saturday (when I will disappear off the edge of the internet for a week, by the way).
And do check out what I’ve been cooking up over at Canadian Bookshelf lately: I wrote about the nonfiction writers event at Ben McNally’s last week with Sarah Leavitt and Andrew Westoll; a guide for short story reading novices; and this fabulous guide to 2011 Canadian literature festivals. See also great guest posts by Rebecca Rosenblum, Jessica Westhead and Robert J. Wiersema.
July 23, 2011
"A good democratic system is polyphonic…"
“A good democratic government is polyphonic. It doesn’t speak with a unified voice but contains numerous ones of genuine power and high pitch that aren’t under the sway of a central conductor. The idea of real competition within an elected government is the great development of the parliamentary system.
This sometimes produces ugly dissonance – as we saw in Washington this month as the many competing voices of Congress and the White House nearly disagreed their country into bankruptcy – but it’s crucial to have laws and structures that allow competing claims to power among different groups of elected officials. When I hear people calling for “consistency” in government policies, I worry: The best and least corruptible systems are those that produce the least consistency.”– Doug Saunders, “The Week the Yanks saved the Brits”
July 22, 2011
The Vicious Circle reads Hotel World by Ali Smith
It did not bode well f0r a fantastic meeting of The Vicious Circle. It had been hottest July 21 ever, and everyone was either away or unwilling to take on Ali Smith’s Hotel World, so there would be just three of us. But what a three we were! Each of doing our part to eat much cheese and cake and make up for the others’ absences, and there was so much conversation, bookish love and Ali Smith illumination.
I picked this book. I found it in a box on a curb ages ago, and it’s been kicking around ever since. Book club finally gave me a the push to actually read it, and as I did so, there were parts I loved. I was more forgiving with this flawed book than I have been with the other flawed first novels our book club has read recently, first because I’ve read Ali Smith’s second novel The Accidental and it’s wonderful, so it’s easy to forgive any novel that grew into that. And also because she’s Ali Smith– her talent abounds. Even if I hadn’t read The Accidental, it would be clear to me that this is an author whose talent is going to take her somewhere great.
But Hotel World? Not so great. One of us had barely been able to stomach it, and then the entire chapter without punctuation just proved to much. And the other of us began to read it only to realize that she’d already read it about five years ago but had no recollection, which is never a good sign. It’s an experimental novel, and it’s not quite pulled off– its fragments are too fragmented, and in places they come together in artificial ways, and there were so many things we just didn’t get. The book would probably demand a second reading, but none of us had come away with the inclination to go there.
But then we started talking about what we liked about the book, and the talk kept coming. The punctuation-free section that had so frustrated one of us had delighted another– finally, plot! It gave us so many answers to the questions the other sections had posed. We liked the humour, the absurdity. We thought about how Smith is like Nicola Barker, and also Kate Atkinson, though the latter is much more mainstream. Also, Hilary Mantel. We noted the morbid streak, the play with language, that language is not merely employed but is the story, that these writers know their tools. We wondered why all the British writers writing like this happened to be female. We wondered why nobody writes like this in Canada. It occurs to us that in Canada, no big publisher would take a writer like Ali Smith on. If there is a Canadian Ali Smith, she’s being publishing by a small press we’ve never heard of. We want to send out an alert to the big publishers in Canada– Ali Smith is what happens when you push a weird and wonderful writer who challenges her readers. People actually buy her! She becomes mainstream because her work is out there, and is therefore commercially successful. We realize that someone will answer that British publishing has such a wider readership that they can afford to push weightier writers. We will answer them that we don’t care. Ahem.
One of us brings out Ali Smith’s story collection The Whole Story and Other Stories, which two of us swear is her best, and we see that it is dedicated to Kate Atkinson, so the connection is definitely there. We think a bit about Muriel Spark, and remember that Smith wrote the forward to The Comforters, which we read last year. We spend a lot of time talking about the ambiguous parts of the novel that each of us had interpreted differently. None of us are entirely sure what to make of the final section. We all like this book much better than any of us did going in, and we’re so happy we read it, that we made the trek in this heat. We just decide not to discuss how much cake has been eaten between the three of us, but we’re not sorry about the quantity at all.
July 22, 2011
In search of a cool breeze
Yesterday, when the temperature “felt like” 50 degrees Celsius, I kept thinking about Booky, and her depression-era family, and this one vivid scene I remember in which they had to close the drapes, and everybody slept in the front room where the fans were. We are depression-era in that we don’t have air-conditioning, though this usually isn’t a problem. Our second and third floor apartment is ensconced high up in the branches of several enormous trees that shade us, and a breeze flows through our three big front windows out the wide-opened kitchen doors. No one wants the 50 degree Celsius breeze however, so yesterday I countered all my ideas of common sense and shut all the windows, closed the blinds first thing in the morning, had the fans going in every room. It worked– we came home after lunch yesterday, and our house was much cooler than the outside (though this wasn’t really saying much). It was a bit like living in a dark and windy cave, but not sweltering at least. By bedtime, however, the heat was uncomfortable.
But when Harriet woke up for something at 4:30 this morning, I came down to check on her and then noticed the blinds at the front blowing in a breeze, and I could feel it, and it was lovely. I went into the kitchen and opened up the doors (we don’t have a window in our kitchen. It’s the doors or nothing) and suddenly air was flowing through the house again, and I was in a quandary. I couldn’t possibly close the doors, but I also couldn’t go back to bed and leave them open, though I longed to, but I read someplace once that we’re not meant to leave our doors wide open in the middle of the night. I decided that one would be unlikely to rob us, however, if one arrived at the doors to find me asleep on the kitchen floor, so that’s what I did, with just a pillow for comfort (and the company of several moths).
It was kind of glorious, and from where I lay, I could see the moon. The breeze was nice. I didn’t sleep so soundly, however, as the kitchen floor is as uncomfortable as it is filthy, so once the birds had brought the sun up with their incessant singing, I decided the time from robbery had probably passed, and returned to the comforts of my mattress.
July 20, 2011
Support the Toronto Public Library
I can’t bear to talk muncipal politics here, because it absolutely breaks my heart. Must urge anyone who hasn’t yet, however, to sign the petition supporting Toronto’s incredible public library system. I’ve never been shy about my love for Toronto’s libaries, mostly because they saved my life once, and I think that it’s tragic that some of our fellow citizens don’t know the value of the treasure in our midst. If you do know the value, however, I urge you to make your voice heard. (And then our voices will be dismissed because we’re a weird fringe special interest group of librarian patrons who, with our library cards, have a conflict of interest anyway, and no right to impinge our beliefs on the taxpaying majority. [Sob])
July 18, 2011
On Victoria Glendinning's biography, and my own journeys with Elizabeth Bowen
I’d never heard of Elizabeth Bowen until I read Susan Hill’s Howard’s End is on the Landing when we were in England in 2009. Hill refers to Bowen as “one of the writers who formed me” and writes about how her novels are difficult but not obscure, and so when I had a ten pound note to get rid of at WH Smith at the airport, I sprung for a gorgeous Vintage Classics edition of Bowen’s The House in Paris. I read about 25 pages on the plane journey home (a fantastic achievement, actually–I had a five month old at the time) and it dawned on me that I hadn’t read a decent novel in ages, that I’d forgotten what literary was, what it meant to be challenged (in ways other than those presented by five month olds).
Back in Canada a few weeks later, I picked up Victoria Glendinning’s biography Elizabeth Bowen: A Writer’s Life. There it languished on my shelf until last summer when it was joined by two of her novels which I knicked (for a small fee) from a dying woman’s house. I finally read one of them, The Heat of the Day, during the last few days of 2010 which I was ill and didn’t want to be challenged. By the end of the novel, I was convinced of its worth, but the convincing had been hard-won and the book was so weird in inexplicable ways. And then I mightn’t have ever read Elizabeth Bowen again, except that I’m reading my shelves in alpha order now, and Bowen starts with B. And then The Last September was so extraordinarily good, that I couldn’t wait to get to the Glendinning G, and my anticipation was not for nothing.
I don’t read enough literary biographies, and should really change that, because what a remarkable way to discover a writer who’s still new to me. To get a sense of Bowen’s historical context (Glendinning writes, “She is what happened after Bloomsbury; she is the link which connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark”), and to get also a context for her weirdness, the weird convolutedness of her sentences and the daringness of her subject matter (she was just totally weird. But also amazing). And to understand her wider context too, which I’d begun to learn through reading The Last September–the Anglo-Irish tradition, and what that meant, and how it changed with the 1920s.
Anyway, I’ve come away entrenched as a Bowen devotee (what Susan Hill started two years ago!). I am looking forward to rereading The House in Paris, and Bowen’s The Little Girls, and some of her short stories. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more Bowen at the college booksales in the Fall. And for more Victoria Glendinning biographies too, and also Hermione Lee, who I’ve never read before.
Two important things about the Elizabeth Bowen bio: this was first published in the late ’70s, reprinted in the ’90s with an author bio explaining that Glendinning is married to “the Irish writer Terence de Vere White”. Which was kind of weird because White is referenced several times in the book, never in familiar terms (obviously) but so often that it was sort of conspicuous. I consulted Wikipedia later to learn that Glendinning wasn’t married to White at the time she wrote Elizabeth Bowen’s bio, and all’s I can say was that anyone could have seen that they were going to end up together.
Also, that the Igor Gouzenko case features in Elizabeth Bowen’s lifes story! (Bowen was close to the novelist John Buchan, who became the Governor General of Canada, and through him she met her lifelong intimate friend Charles Ritchie, who was a Canadian diplomat.)It would have better had Glendinning and her editors known how to spell Ottawa, but this last is only the one small point that sullied my reading of this wonderful book.
July 18, 2011
More Camilla than Kate
Many of you will no doubt recognize this dress as the dress I wore to *your* wedding!
With my usual knack for doing it wrong, I am more Camilla than Kate, but I like my hat anyway. It’s how I represent my English-ness (via marriage) at weddings. And this wedding was particularly extraordinary as we left Harriet at home and went away overnight (and then Stuart spent the wedding being barfed on by someone else’s baby, and I kept hiding in bushes in order to stalk another wedding guest who was exactly Harriet’s age, save for one week). We had criminal amounts of fun, the wedding was fantastic (with no actual wedding component, but with lobster, chicken wings, cupcakes, a live band and swimming), and Harriet had a time just as splendid with her grandmother. And in the twenty-four since we returned home, Harriet has appropriated my hat, clutch purse and high heels, and I don’t think she’ll be returning any of these items anytime soon. (And congratulations to our friends Erica and Alex who sure know how to throw a party!)
July 17, 2011
Wild Libraries I have known: The Southern African Wildlife College Resource Centre
In what is no doubt the wildest installment in the series yet, Valli Fraser-Celin brings us The Southern African College Resource Centre (and a lion):
The idea of a “wild library” has extra meaning for me, since since I work in a library that is literally in the wild. I work at the Gold Fields Resource Centre at the Southern African Wildlife College (SAWC), which is situated in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. We are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of hectares of wilderness and a large quantity of wild animals including lions, elephant and rhinos (amongst many more). The SAWC trains natural resource managers from all over Africa by developing their skills in areas such as anti-poaching, animal studies, conservation management, ecology and environmental 
education. The extensive range of courses allows students to return to their workplaces with a greater knowledge of how to protect the valuable parks and reserves they work in. The Resource Centre supports their curriculum through conservation management focused materials and provides a space for students to work and study.
So, how did a Canadian librarian end up in this African wilderness?
Well, I’ve always loved traveling and after having traveled to Africa a couple of times, I became obsessed with returning to this beautiful continent. While completing my Master degree in Library and Information Studies at McGill University, I continually searched for ways to combine librarianship, travel and opportunities to experience different cultures. One of the ways I did this was by joining the Librarians Without Borders McGill student chapter, of which I became the President in 
2009. In 2010, the first service learning trip to Guatemala was organized to help the Miguel Angel Asturias Academy develop their school library. This was my first experience with international librarianship and just as I imagined, I really enjoyed it! Although I loved volunteering in Guatemala, I desperately wanted to go back to Africa, so when a volunteer opportunity became available at the SAWC, I grabbed it.
Living in the African bush is such a special experience; I never get tired of hearing lions roaring and hyena and jackal calling at night, seeing beautiful African sunsets and starry night skies. The Resource Centre is really a pleasure to work in: we have huge windows that look out onto the bush, we can hear birds singing outside everyday and we have bush babies living in the roof. Not only is our collection full of materials about the environment and conservation but we also have novels and games for those who need down time from their intensive work schedules. We also have a movie area with beanie bags so that students can watch educational movies and a computer lab where they can work on their assignments.
Working in a “wild library” has made me want to enter the field of environment and conservation, but through establishing 
environmentally oriented resource centres for organizations that focus on environmental education and research. I doubt that after this experience I’ll ever be able to work and live in a big city again. Being in a place where nature surrounds you and is a part of your daily life becomes addictive and I know I’ll always be striving to work in another “wild library”.
My blog: http://whereisvalli.wordpress.com/
Blog posts can also be read at A Hopeful Sign: http://ahopefulsign.com
Librarians Without Borders: http://www.lwb-online.org/
Twitter: @vallifc
