September 15, 2014
The Busy Bookshop
This morning, Iris had a doctor’s appointment with a specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital (which is notable for being the birthplace of Harriet) in order for us to confirm that she does not in fact have an allergy to parmesan cheese, and the best part of our appointment (apart from her diagnosis) was that we got to stop in at the wonderful Ben McNally Books beforehand. Where I found this treasure, The Busy Bookshop by Marion Billet, part of a series of board books, but clearly this is the best one. It is a bookshop! With bunting! And if you can’t take your toddler to a bookshop every day, you can read this book on the days in between because it’s important to indoctrinate early. The book is utterly charming, delightfully bookish, and robust; unlike others that we like to call “rip the flap books”, this one comes with slidey pieces whose destruction would have to be really hard won. And with the slidey bits, books and their contents pop off the page (times two), making for a most engaging read. I love this one. Add it to the list for all your favourite book-loving babies.
September 14, 2014
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
On Saturday morning, I read the newspaper and cried, so overwhelmed was I by despair, three articles in a row—David Gilmour teaching classes again this year at my alma mater; a certain male sportsperson not convicted of violence upon the girlfriend he shot to death; 10 people charged in the attack of Malala Yousafzai, a child shot for the crime of going to school. Not to mention the sad circus of municipal politics in my city, a state of affairs that has led me to abandon Twitter for awhile because I just cannot stand the onslaught of awful, this horrible misogynist idiot whose supposed tumour will never alter my conviction that he’s a dangerous shitty human being who says horrible things about women and whose wife has had to call the cops on him more than once. This man has forever viewed himself as beyond reproach, and now that he’s ill, we’re all meant to finally agree with him? I cannot.
It is also relevant that my baby keeps terrible hours and I’m very tired. But it’s relevant too that I spent last week reading A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, yet another piece of evidence that affirms that we live in a world that treats girls and women like garbage. And maybe it was just a coincidence that I was reading this book as I was sent into despair, a testament to its power perhaps. But I don’t know, because whenever I was asked about, I’d respond with, “The book is…well. It won the Bailey’s Fiction Prize.” Otherwise, I probably never would have read it. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone. It’s interesting, yes, but underwhelmingly so. The prose is as half-formed as its girl is, deliberately. Sentences stumped off, broken, truncated. There is no evolution, no progress. Even McBride’s girl’s life, in all its sordid detail, is not abject in anyway—there is cruelty, abuse, the usual litany of terrible things. But I’ve read worse, rendered in prose that stunned me, rather than this prose, which numbed me. Or I thought it had at least, until I found myself crying over the newspaper.
I don’t think I could properly write a review of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. For a good example of one, however, read Anne Enright’s, in which she so perfectly articulates what I can only throw my hands up and gesture about in regards to this book. What I am reviewing here is more my own reaction to this book, which confuses me. I recoil from it, not because its so difficult. Yes, the prose is difficult to find one’s way into, but once you’re in, you’re in, and there is a peculiar rhythm and rhyme to it that make the pieces fit. Perhaps it was the unrelentingness of it all, that there was progress after all, but it was always going toward the same place and I was longing for any moments of light. What a courageous author who dares to give her readers none of that, to hold back on everything we’re hoping for to save us. To tell the story she wants to tell, and it’s true that I never wanted to put the book down. I don’t want to open it again, yes, but that’s a different thing.
I didn’t like this book. I didn’t like it at all. But I read it and I’m glad I did, because it’s like nothing else that’s going these days, and because there was nothing half-formed about the book itself. (Read McBride’s profile in The Guardian: “I think the publishing industry is perpetuating this myth that readers like a very passive experience, that all they want is a beach novel. I don’t think that’s true, and I think this book doing as well as it has is absolute proof of that. There are serious readers who want to be challenged, who want to be offered something else, who don’t mind being asked to work a little bit to get there.”) I’m glad I read this book because the fact of whether or not I liked it doesn’t really matter at all, and I like any book that shifts the conversation away from that point, such a sad and tired place from which to embark upon a literary discussion.
September 11, 2014
Colville
I don’t know if there is a better exhibit than Alex Colville (now on at the Art Gallery of Ontario) to take your five year old and one year old to, because the latter will be gripped by all the images of dogs, while the former sees her own world reflected in the paintings, but rendered just unfamiliarly enough to warrant another look. We note people and animals suspending in space, captured in motion—horses, dogs, a little girl with her skipping rope. “What do you think’s going to happen next?” Which is the very point. Plus the defiance of gravity. And the strange ugly beauty, hydro corridors, overpasses and smokestacks. The sky’s enormity. We found it fascinating to learn that Colville’s art was so informed by his commute to work, that same stretch of road, a seemingly dull track. And also the sea pictures, all that blue.
Andrew Hunter’s new book, Colville, designed to accompany the exhibit, gives a marvellous sense of the artist and his power, and just as the exhibit does, of his context as well. In his essay in the book, Hunter posits Colville as a place, and finds connections to that place not just in geography, but also in literature, music, film and popular culture. As befitting a man whose own life was so often his subject, the book embraces Colville’s biography as well, and more than 100 reproductions of his work. It’s a really wonderful complement to an extraordinary show.
September 9, 2014
Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder
I spent the weekend reading Carrie Snyder’s new book, Girl Runner, a novel about Aganetha Smart, a 104 year old Olympic medallist who was briefly the nation’s sweetheart during the 1920s. It’s a book that has a map inside (!), which shows a lighthouse in the middle of a farmer’s field, so clearly this is a book that is constructed of mysteries and wonder. It begins with Aganetha being taken from her nursing home by two young people who are strangers, but she doesn’t have the wherewithal nor stamina to protest in any way, and besides, she is intrigued by being taken anywhere. From the book’s beginning: “All my life I’ve been going somewhere, aimed toward a fixed point on the horizon that seems never to draw nearer.”
The narrative shifts between Aganetha in the present day, being taken on her strange journey, and her memories of the past, growing up on her family’s farm and in Toronto, where she moved during the 1920s. Notably, the flashbacks occurs outside of chronological order, which isn’t the way this thing is usually done, and makes much more sense as being a story as constructed by a somewhat patchy 104-year-old mind. Plus it’s just pretty interesting to have all the pieces come together in a (seemingly) random order until we realize that Snyder has been placing these pieces like a puzzle, and just how they all fit together proves most surprising, and plotted by a decidedly deft hand.
The novel spans more than a century, and there’s a swiftness to it that befits a story about a girl whose feet made her fly, though I wanted more depth at times, more meat and grit. Because there is so much to delve into—Snyder weaves fascinating stories into Aganetha’s timeline, including her mother, a midwife, who performed abortions for local girls in trouble; the story of a doomed stepmother and her parade of dead babies; the reality of life working at a factory in Toronto in the early 20th century; what it was to be a female athlete at that time; complicated dynamics between Aganetha and her siblings; her dreamy father and his crazy inventions (and just why he built a lighthouse in their field); and also a glimpse into the poverty and desperation of the urban poor. All this and more, and this isn’t even a long book. The pages fly on by.
I first encountered Carrie’s work with Hair Hat back in 2010 when we did the Canada Reads Indies, when the title of her blog was even a little bit true. Since then, she found great success with her second collection, The Juliet Stories, and it’s also a sign of her kindness and generosity that she contributed her wonderful essay, “How to Fall”, to The M Word. And I’m particularly excited about Girl Runner, whose rights have been sold in countries are over the world, that it’s everybody’s chance to encounter Carrie Snyder now. Because the hallmark of all of her books has been their prose, vivid imagery, and characters’ strange tendencies to fly off the ground… and off the page.
So readers, get ready to be dazzled.
September 9, 2014
In Which I Meme: Ten Books….
I don’t meme much. I don’t like memes. I like the internet best when everybody is doing her own thing, but I got tagged twice on Facebook, and I’ve been thinking for awhile about how I don’t know how to answer the question of what are my favourite books. For me, the books all blend together, their connections to each other and to the facts of my life all cumulating to pave the path of my progress. It’s not about the book but about the reading. I love books more than I love any one book. But I also love rereading, and so my list of books that have stayed with me (whatever that means—I think any book that’s any good would do such a thing) or a list of my favourites would be a list of books I’ve read more than once, and will continue to revisit to find out how they change as I do. They’re the books I’ll never get over being over.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple : Partly circumstantial—I read this in the hospital after Iris was born, and had a very visceral connection to everything was reading then, but I just loved it so completely. It was so funny, smart, and fresh, and I’ve been longing for a book to love this completely ever since. Will definitely reread.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion: I’ve read this book about six or seven times, and return to it to fall under the spell of the rhythm of Didion’s prose, and to admire the precision with which she arranges details in order of giving her stories the illusion of telling themselves.
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala: I was so afraid of this book, my worst nightmare, the story of a woman who loses her entire family in the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004. I finally obtained a library copy and was bowled over by the brilliance of the book, and so I had to buy my own copy. I haven’t reread it yet but I will. It’s a a heartbreaking tragedy, a litany of sorrows, but also beautiful, magical celebration of love and life.
The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble: This was my first Margaret Drabble novel, which I bought at a used bookshop in Kobe. Had no idea what to expect, but fell in love with its writer, and the book too, for its vividness and how it reflected and engaged with the world.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: The one book I’ve read more times than Slouching… and it just gets more and more profound and lovely. I read it most recently in July, having replaced my battered and stupidly marginalia’d university copy. It’s the thinking woman’s beach read.
The Crack in the Teacup by Joan Bodger: I’ve read this one twice, and think about it all the time. It’s about being a woman in the 20th century, about loving books, about heartache, about this city. And about the life of an extraordinary woman who was of her time and also never quite, always in a way that was fascinating.
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood: (And also The Robber Bride). Of all the books on my list, I was youngest and stupidest when I first read these, but also so young that they became foundational in my understanding of the lives of girls and women.
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver: This was one of those books I was never going to read, because I found all the hype at the time annoying, but I came to it somehow, and have read it five times since. I discover a whole new layer of complexity every time, and have determined that it’s just about marriage and womanhood as it is about motherhood. Also worth noting: still a gripping excellent reading when fully aware of its great twist, which is quite a literary feat.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson: I will never forget the moment of Ruby Lennox’s conception, which was also my introduction to the inimitable Kate Atkinson, whose boundless enthusiasm for pushing the limits of what a novel can do makes her one of my favourite authors. Have read this a few times. It contains the seeds of every single wonderful thing she’s written since.
Unless by Carol Shields: I’m a bit of a zealot when it comes to this book, which I’ve read so many times that its pages are covered in scribbles, and whose subtle tricky complexity continues to amaze me.
*And don’t get me started on the children’s books, Anne of Green Gables, Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, A Handful of Time, Booky, etc. Plus Flowers in the Attic. And so many more…
September 7, 2014
The Opening Sky by Joan Thomas
I was so pleased to review Joan Thomas’s new novel, The Opening Sky, in this weekend’s Globe and Mail.
““Never explain, never apologize,” is part of a quotation attributed to Nellie McClung, the title of a chapter in Joan Thomas’s novel The Opening Sky, and an admirable motto, unless one happens to be parent to a young person whose behaviour embodies it. Which is the predicament in which Aiden and Liz find themselves.”
September 7, 2014
Super Red Riding Hood
As mother of a child who loves any hero in a cape (particularly if she is female, and sporting Wonder Woman-esque motifs), I knew that Claudia Dávila’s Super Red Riding Hood would be right up our street. Dávila is the former art director for Chirp and Chickadee magazines, a seasoned book designer and illustrator, plus author/illustrator of the The Future According to Luz graphic novels series, but Super Red Riding Hood is her first picture book. It’s about a little girl called Ruby who likes to fancy herself a defender of justice and imagine stories in which she gets to prove her super-hero mettle. While a trip through the woods to collect raspberries isn’t quite the mission she’s been fantasizing about, Ruby makes the most of it, rescuing small creatures and being brave in the face of weird woodland sounds. And so she’s totally ready when she stumbles into a situation requiring actual super-heroics, and has to stare down a ferocious wolf.
Turns out all that Super-Hero practice has paid off—Ruby stands up for herself, and learns that all her Wolf prejudices aren’t exactly accurate. And the wolf’s impressions of little girls are transformed by his encounter in the woods with Ruby—indeed, little girls can be Super Heroes after all. Which is a lesson that Harriet was already well aware of, but it was awfully nice to have it affirmed.
We turned up at Claudia Dávila’s launch yesterday at Little Island Comics, because the store is around the corner from our house, and we were fans of Super Red Riding Hood already. Harriet brought her own red cape, because we assured her that this was a cape-friendly event, though she was apprehensive about its lack of hood.Turned out this was not a problem, and she had fun posing in the big dark woods (with not a big bad wolf in sight, thank goodness).
Harriet and Iris enjoyed colouring Super Red Riding Hood, and Harriet made her own Big Bad Wolf puppet, while Iris was chased around the store in circles. Later, we all settled down to listen to Dávila read to us from her book, and she was wonderful, and Harriet had a good time reading along to the parts she knew off by heart already.
We have two birthday parties to attend this weekend, and both friends will be receiving their own copy of Super Red. Dávila’s fantastic illustrations are matched by a fun and inspiring story that never gets too scary, and reminds boys and girls of all ages that caped crusaders come in all kinds of excellent packages.
September 4, 2014
First Day
First day of Senior Kindergarten, which proceeded with no trauma or drama, unlike last year’s. Except that I am missing my big girl terribly (never mind that now I have to spend the day making conversation with a baby), and sort of considering that someone as averse to change as I am probably should never have embarked on parenthood. I could have just avoided mirrors, and, well, windows, for that matter, and lived comfortably in a blissful bubble imagining that everything was ever the same. Instead of meeting each day with this marvellous piece of irrefutable evidence that life is going, going, going (but, happily, not yet gone). Anyway, onward. We were contemplating all the things she didn’t know how to do one year ago, and wondering what miracles this next year will bring.
September 3, 2014
Interference by Michelle Berry
Edgewood Drive is a leafy street, the kind of place where one could rake all day, and there’d still be leaves all around. Which is where Michelle Berry begins her novel, Interference, in the fall, neighbours with reason to be out of doors, waving to one another across driveways, while the faces of their houses—all windows and doors—reveal nothing at all. The scrape of their metal rakes on sidewalks just the one thing about the scene that is a little bit “off”, until a strange man appears, a scar right down the middle of his face revealing everything, or at least some kind of brutal tragedy in his past. He’s looking for work, and there’s more than enough leaves to go around. The man helps out, bagging leaves, though there is something particular about the way he looks at the children, and then he disappears without waiting to be paid. And this is only the first of a series of disquieting events that occur to the residents of Edgewood Drive, imbruing everything that follows with a slightly sinister edge.
Sinister coupled with comedy though—not everything in the book is dark. Interference is a novel comprising short stories, and in between them appears correspondence from the school principal, the ladies’ hockey league coordinator, email exchanges. The everyday absurdity of these messages gives the novel an additional layer of ambiguity: is modern life, with its stranger-danger warnings, just one giant farce? Are we to laugh at the residents of Edgewood Drive, with their silly preoccupations and neuroses, for playing into it all? Or are we to actually feel for them?
Claire. who’s countering cancer with a ferocious anger; Dayton, who has fled her cheating husband but not before stealing his money, is aware the past is going to catch up with her soon; Trish, who’s on the verge of a breakdown, her custom-teddy-bear company being services from a big-bear-conglomerate; their husbands, and their children; all of these lives weaving together and apart over the course of a fall, and winter, and into spring. The usual domestic upsets countered with darker things, reverberations from the appearance of the man with the scar—men lurking about school yards, news of a local child porn/pedophile ring; a strange little man who speaks with a peculiar tic who keeps turning up in odd places and upsetting people with lurid images in the pamphlets he displays.
As a native of Peterborough, I enjoyed Michelle Berry’s thinly veiled portrayal of my hometown, with its hockey culture, small town principles, and strange characters. The connections between her character are surprising and illuminating, rounding out the book into a convincing whole. Berry shows that the domestic setting is one worth examining, that home is not always a safe place, that the tangles of family and neighbourly relationships are unfailingly interesting, particularly in a plot so charged with suspense. Though there were times when the drama verged on melodrama, and each chapter seemed to end with a revelation, which felt a little pat. The characters were all so passive too, necessitating the addition of the underlying plot, which seemed manufactured. They were all such great characters—I kept waiting for them to do something.
But the passiveness was deliberate to the construction of the novel, that these are characters for whom life comes along to do some interfering with, best laid plans interrupted. And still the seasons go on changing, as though none of it matters at all. The one thing anyone can count on: that the world will go on; there will be leaves to rake again.
September 3, 2014
Lottie Dolls and the Holiday Adventure Story Writing Competition
I have changed my mind about a lot of things I was quite sure when I first became a mother, but one principle I’ve been quite unbending about is the matter of my children’s toys. We don’t spend a lot of money; I like good, solid toys that last; we live in a small apartment; I don’t like crap that’s on the fast track to being landfill; I have strong feelings about the representation of women and girls in children’s play.
Another principle I’m pretty sure of: I don’t use my blog as a platform to flog commercial goods.
But when I received a PR pitch from Lottie dolls last week, I was really intrigued. Lottie is a doll made to look like a child, whose wardrobe doesn’t include fishnets and heels. The line from the promotional material that had me hooked was, “She can stand on her own two feet (always a useful life skill for all girls, big and small).” Lottie models include lighthouse keeper, karate student, pirate queen, robot scientist and butterfly protector, among others. She’s designed to stimulate creative play, to encourage girls not to grow up too fast. Her tagline is, “Be bold, be brave, be you.”
More than that, the pitch was about a Lottie story writing competition. Accompanying the competition is the Great Books for Girls list, books with strong female role-models. The whole thing was right up my alley, but I’d never heard of Lottie. For the sake of research (!), I ordered two dolls from an online toy retailer (and another appealing aspect of Lottie is that she sells for $19.99, a reasonable price).
The dolls arrived, and my children were immediately hooked. At first glance, the dolls aren’t so revolutionary, though this helps them to fill that Barbie-shaped void in my children’s toy box—and pivotally, the dolls aren’t Barbie-shaped. The dolls are also available in hair colours other than yellow (with dark-skinned ones too). They don’t stand up quite as well as I’d hoped, but Harriet wasn’t interested in leaving them unattended anyway. She was excited to play with them immediately, her Snow Queen Lottie engaged with elaborate plots of Autumn Leaves Lottie (whom I selected because I liked her tights). My only complaint is that the doll clothes are bit fiddly for tiny fingers, and that the fastening bead on Snow Queen’s fur cape needs re-sewing already.
We’re already quite besotted with our Lotties, and I have no doubt that Harriet will be able to come up with exciting Lottie tale to enter in the story competition, which closes September 12. The prize is ten titles from the Great Books for Girls list, which sounds good to me!
Find out more about the contest at the Lottie Facebook Page.
