December 15, 2014

All those dreams I saved for rainy days

One day I want to write about how I met Stuart and life properly began, and how all the energy that I’d previously directed toward trying to make people fall in love with me (and despairing when I always failed) became channelled into useful things. I stopped thinking that “Angie” by the Rolling Stones was a really romantic song. Suddenly my eyes were open and I could see the world, and we began travelling together, learning and growing. I spent a long time before that convinced that I wouldn’t really exist until somebody loved me. This was stupid in retrospect, and contrary to all my feminist principles, but my experience has proven that there was some truth to the notion—that I needed somebody. He’s my enabler in the very best way. And because we met when we were 23, we’ve also grown up together, which is an extraordinary thing to share with someone. When we met, our cumulative possessions would fill two backpacks. Which made it pretty easy for us to run away to Asia a year and half after that, and those experiences would cement our relationship. We’d never argued before—there was so much negotiating and learning involved in figuring out how to live together, and in a foreign country at that. But we made it, stronger for the struggles, and at the end of that adventure, we were yearning for home, so we got married, and began the process of making one here in Toronto, and for two years, we had no money and lived off chickpeas and couldn’t afford to take the subway, and were oh so slim. Whenever I think back to that time now, a part of my brain spends a split-second trying to remember where the children were, until I realize the unfathomable fact—they weren’t there. We didn’t know them. And the paradoxical thought that comes with that one—how miraculous that they’re here at all. I read a line in Gilead today that made me nod, the narrator writing to his son: “…it’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.” I know precisely what he means, but I feel it toward my children’s father as well. That there is a Stuart in the world—I will never quite stop marvelling at that. And that he wasn’t always in my world, when he seems as much a part of me as my limbs are—how did I ever get around? Which was probably much of what Mike Reno and Ann Wilson were getting at in their hit song “Almost Paradise (Love Theme From Footloose)”, which is a part of the repertoire in every karaoke room I’ve ever sang in. It’s curious really, because there is no place else you ever hear that song, but it is a karaoke mainstay. We sing it every time we go, at my insistence, and Stuart goes along with it. Though we hadn’t been out for karaoke in ages—not since before Iris was born. But on Saturday night we went out after the children were in bed and we celebrated 12 years since the night we met, and we made wonderful, sweet, terrible unmelodious music together, and came home after midnight.

December 14, 2014

2014 Books In My Head List

I feel strange about this list. First, because my reading seemed less monumental this year—I missed the blockbusters like The Goldfinch, or The Interestings.  Second, my local bookshop closed, which is from where so much of my zest for reading came—I am sure I missed many books that in previous years, Book City staff would have kept neatly stacked on their new books table. And third, there are so many 2014 books I haven’t read yet. The scramble to get them all read was making me crazy, so I gave up, and now they’ll have to wait for the new year.

Luckily, books keep. Case in point: there are books here on the 2014 list that weren’t published in 2014 at all.

While this is kind of my Top Books of 2014 list, I’m thinking of it more as The Books In My Head list. The books whose reading experiences I remember so vividly, the books I kept talking about, whose characters, stories and ideas have lived on in my mind long after the last page was finally read.

In a particular order, which is alphabetical.

Fitting though, that Caroline Adderson’s Ellen in Pieces is topper most. It may well have been. This is the book that was oddly overlooked by awards juries, and yet readers have embraced it, Ellen love-ins taking place on Twitter and Facebook quite regularly, I am finding. I have recommended it widely, and only received glowing reports back. It’s a funny, brutal, rich and challenging book. I’ve never read such an unflinching story of cancer (and love, and aging, and motherhood, and mortality). As I wrote in August, “It’s a brave take on things, really, but typical, because the exquisite nature of the entire book comes from Adderson defying her readers’ expectations, surprising you with every line, with every turn of the page.” I do think that Ellen in Pieces is THE book of the year, and you’re missing out if you haven’t read it yet.

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I read Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Just Pretending in May, starting it while we were visiting Winnipeg, and just after reading Pat Barker’s Union Street, a collection that situates the lives of working-class English women similarly to how Bird-Wilson presents First Nations women in Canada. At the time, we were promoting The M Word and it was Mother’s Day, so Bird-Wilson’s themes of motherhood resonated with me, and complicated my own understanding of these themes in my comfy middle-class context. The stories in Just Pretending portray “the wholeness of marginalized women’s experiences, experiences which hinge on maternity, on motherhood and daughterhood, and on what happens when these connections are broken,” and they’re so important now with untold stories of Canada’s Indigenous women’s experiences finally being brought to (some) light.

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It was on Mother’s Day weekend that we visited Blue Heron Books in Uxbridge, the same day that Steve Burrows was appearing there to promote his book, A Siege of Bitterns. I was happy to buy a copy, as I’d been intrigued with his novel about a birdwatching detective, and I was so pleased to absolutely adore it. Unsurprisingly—the book has received rave reviews. The crux to the mystery’s solution involved not just birdwatching, but grammar. This book is a geek’s paradise. I’ve also been pleased to have happy readers reporting back after following my recommendation for this one. And good news: Burrows next title in the Birder Murder Mystery series is A Pitying of Doves, out this spring. I am so excited.

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I’m so grateful to the good people at All Lit Up, without whom I might never have discovered Megan Gail Coles and her story collection Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome. Which contains this paragraph: “The reason Garry did these things was ’cause he couldn’t afford any better. Half of what he earned over at Pretty Paws was carted off to Newfoundland. Child support for an autistic kid he had with Slutty Marie down Gilbert Street, this the result of a one night stand./ Have you ever heard a sadder story, Dame? I mean, really? I barely poked her. We weren’t even lying down. It’s like her body sucked me sperm right inside her that night, vacuum cunt on her. Don’t ever have a go at the neighbourhood whore in an alley. Nothing good will come of it.” How could you not want to read this book?

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Unfortunately, as 2014 progressed, Karyn L. Freedman’s One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery only became more and more important. I read it last spring as I pushed my baby in a swing. “The world, [Freedman] tells us with two decades of perspective in addition to her own violent rape, is a dangerous place for women, as statistics demonstrate in places as close as our own neighbourhoods and as far away as the war-wracked Congo. But nobody talks about these experiences, suggesting that such incidents are rare, suggesting to those lucky enough to not know better that sexual violence is a crime of circumstance, that it’s something most of us should be able to sidestep. It’s why newspaper columnists suggest that if a young woman refrains from drinking to excess, she might not get raped, and if she is raped, she should have known better. Thereby perpetuating victim’s sense of her own complicity in the crime against her, ensuring her silence, and so the cycle continues.” I’m so pleased that this book has been shortlisted for the BC National Non-Fiction Award.

Purchase One Hour in Paris from McNally Robinson

I read Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood by May Friedman in September, and it was huge for me for all kinds of reasons. It laid the framework for the latest session of my blogging course, convinced me of the usefulness of academic theory for the very first time, and also that the history of women and blogging is one that is seriously under-documented and certainly worth telling. While Friedman’s research pertains to mommyblogs in particular (and her conclusions are always surprising, illuminating—if mommyblogs seem tired to you, she invites you to think again), it’s also hugely relevant to women and blogging in general, and is a fascinating and nuanced depiction of 21st century motherhood. And mostly, I am so struck by her notions of the usefulness of uncertainty (which reminded me of Rebecca Solnit, and ultimately led to cake): “In trying to form conclusions about mommybloggers—and about mothers—I am reminded of my children attempting to jump upon their own shadows: I am attempting to trap an essentially untrappable form of knowledge. After the initial discomfort and frustration that this inconclusive conclusion elicits, however, I have found that there is much to gained, as a researcher in general and as a motherhood researcher in particular, in looking instead at uncertainty as a valuable critical lens.” Feminism desperately needs this kind of approach, which is a fitting response to the complexity of actual people and the world.

Purchase Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood from McNally Robinson

I remember reading In Love With Art by Jeet Heer on one of the first few days this spring when it was warm enough outside to walk and read without mittens, or it’s possible that it wasn’t actually that warm, but I was just enjoying the book so much. Francoise Mouly is a fascinating biographical subject, and I’d never heard of her, but unbeknownst to me, I’d seen her work—she was a long-time Art Editor of The New Yorker, and she’s the founder and Editorial Director of TOON Books, whose books we’re in love with at our house. And thisbook found its way into my (cold) hands just as Harriet was started to really get into comics, so I was pleased to learn so much about comics as an art form, and also the process behind comics creation, and what is  entailed by the role of their editor. It was an excellent book, part of Coach House Books’ Exploded Views series of short books about big things, and I do love me a paperback that fits in my pocket.

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I only read The Bookshop That Floated Away last week, but I was so taken by Sarah Henshaw’s book, and I think that I’ll continue to be as much. We’re planning at trip to the UK in the spring, and top of my list of things to do there is tracking down the book barge. It’s the ideal book for anyone who ever thought that opening a book on a boat sounded like a perfectly sensible idea, and I loved its unabashed oddness, the absurd adventure, and all the references to books and reading, and also to Victoria Sponge Cake.

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Plum Johnson’s They Left Us Everything was the most terrific memoir, ostensibly the story of a woman cleaning out her parents’ house after their deaths, but it’s also a record of a wonderful family history, about the curious shape and contents of archives and the stories they tell, about caring for aging parents, coming to terms with the past, the complexities of daughterhood and motherhood, and understanding our parents as people in their own right. I’m so pleased that it’s been nominated for the 2015 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction.

Purchase They Left Us Everything from McNally Robinson

Hermione Lee’s biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, was the first book I finished in 2014, and it was how I spent my holidays—so so delightful. And anti-social. Biographers don’t come much better than Lee, and lives are rarely more interesting than Penelope Fitzgerald’s—though hers did pose a challenge for the biographer considering that all her early papers were lost when her houseboat sunk on the Thames during the 1960s (where she was living in abject poverty, barely supporting her three children. She went on to publisher her first book at age 60, won the Booker Prize at 7o). Fitzgerald’s novels had always seemed obscure to me, but their author’s life story has cast them in a new light (and I am excited for the new editions with covers by Julie Morstad).

Purchase Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life from McNally Robinson

And oh! Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald, the book that inspired me to write over 1300 words in response. I love how this book has been everything to everybody—I read the review that said it was about anxiety, the one that said it was about being queer, and to me it was all about motherhood. What a fascinating book that can be read through so many different lenses. I also am intrigued by the weird and wonderful ways Adult Onset flirts with genre, oh so subtly. It’s a book about parallel lives and parallel universes, ordinary city sidewalks rendered fantastic.

Purchase Adult Onset by McNally Robinson

Speaking of sidewalks, I still remember walking up Bay Street toward the subway in August reading Thunderstruck and Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken, a hardback no-less. I was hooked from the first delicious sentence: “Just west of Boston, just north of the turnpike, the ghost of Missy Goodby sleeps curled up against the cyclone fence at the dead end of Winter Terrace, dressed in a pair of ectoplasmic dungarees.”  I loved this book, and its stories: “Many of them are about grief, about the peculiarity of details during the times in life in which we’re grief-struck, or stricken at all. They’re about human connection in surprising places, about misunderstandings in which the connection is missed. Their about the things that get lost and what we choose to preserve. They’re funny even with the sadness, a many sided shape. And they’re absolutely extraordinary.”

Purchase Thunderstruck from McNally Robinson

Last summer I reviewed All Saints by KD Miller in The Globe and Mail. “Most of [Miller’s characters] are searching for meaning; Miller – in language that doesn’t draw attention to itself, but bends to suit her purposes – uses the small moments in life to illuminate big questions. Where did the story start? What is destiny? Is there an order to the universe, to a life? But a life, we learn, is only a piece of the puzzle, meaning and wholeness only emerging when separate lives connect. Crucially and compellingly, such connections are mysterious – Miller shows how we are all figments of one and other’s imaginations.”

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For a few weeks in February, I was deep into the memoir Know the Night by Maria Mutch, which I reviewed for The National Post,  a book I read twice and puzzled through with so many notes, and figured out like a complicated math problem—so utterly engaging. All to the soundtrack of “Mercy Mercy Mercy” by Cannonball Adderley. “Know the Night, a memoir about a boy who doesn’t speak, is in love with language. Mutch’s prose is electric (when describing her relationship with her partner, she writes of “that ingredient vital for love, which can best be described, I think, as conspiracy” — my favourite line in the book) but the book is more concerned with words than the stories they tell. Mutch probes the connections between words and what they symbolize, as well as other connections for which words are a conduit.”

Purchase Know the Night from McNally Robinson

Another winter book I read around the same time was Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk. Nappaaluk had been asked to write down some Inuktitut phrases for a missionary to learn, but didn’t stop at simple grammar exercises and went on invent a whole cast of characters and create the first Inuit novel. “The narrative skirts omniscience in a way that seems curious to the reader who is accustomed to the English novel. There is a matter-of-factness to the telling, perhaps related to its origins—it was written in a shorthand that can be written as quickly as it is spoken, and so this written novel has an oral nature. There is also a simplicity to its delivery that only comes across as such because a whole layer of the narrative is inaccessible to me as a reader (and I think that this is the challenge for this reader that Martin was writing about in her review). Saladin d’Anglure’s foreword makes clear that the apparent simplicity of Nappaaluk’s novel is undermined by the Inuit symbols and stories referenced, as well as details of Nappaaluk’s own life and members of her community. In short, this is only a straightforward story because I’m not smart enough to know it isn’t otherwise.”

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Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy Snow Bird was one of my vacation reads this summer, and I was enthralled by its twists and turns, and by how the British-born Oyeyemi channels American-ness in this novel. That it was based on a fairy tale might have had me supposing a certain shallowness to the narrative, but Oyeyemi drills down deep to show why an archetypal story like Snow White has such cultural resonance, and then introduces race as a theme to add a whole new layer of relevance. This novel was smart, sharp and gorgeous.

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I also adored Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, which I read in April. Late to the party (because it had already been internationally celebrated by then) I read it for own pleasure, and realized it deserved all the hype. At heart, this is a novel about quantum physics, which shouldn’t scare you off. It’s a weird, wonderful story about the whole wide world, which is as terrible as it is beautiful, and it’s brilliant how Ozeki manages to knit it all together.

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I haven’t talked much here about Chez L’Arabe by Mireille Silcoff, which I read this fall, but I loved it and my review is forthcoming in Canadian Notes & Queries. From my review: One can read Silcoff’s collection as a catalogue of beautiful well-made objects…Which is not to say that the stories lack depth, that they skim along their lush or shiny surfaces, but instead the things themselves are invested with meaning, each one “permeated with some little, important, imported world of its own.” “Materialist” is hurled as a slur more than once but, as a character replies (she of the sugar sifter), “I don’t see why anything should be considered less meaningful just because it’s concrete.””

Purchase Chez L’Arabe from McNally Robinson

Deborah-Anne Tunney’s The View From the Lane was another recent read, but one I’ve not been able to shake off yet.  It was a promising first book more than a perfect one, but a huge part of its promise is the atmosphere that Tunney creates. It reminded me of Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Isabel Huggan’s The Elizabeth Stories in all the best ways. The night I finished this book, I stayed up late searching for the streets she writes about on Google Maps—I was left with such a sense of the place, and I wanted to see it for myself.

Purchase The View from the Lane by Deborah-Anne Tunney

And finally, My Real Children by Jo Walton, a book I loved so very much and have given as a gift at least three times since I read it (and I replaced my ARC with a hardcover). Lots to say about this one—it connects interestingly with Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Just Pretending in its notion of real children (those we give birth to) as opposed to those who are miscarried or adopted and the “unrealness” that pervades these relationships through semantics. And with Ann-Marie MacDonald’s book, which also explores queer relationships and parallel lives. I reread this book for my book club and realized that while Walton’s strength is not as a prose stylist—there are a few lines in the book that are a bit painful to encounter—she has performed something remarkable in her creation of Patricia Cowan and her lives, so much so that this book reminded be of Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald biography (Fitzgerald and Walton’s Patricia are near contemporaries). I’m going to be returning to this book again and again for the enthralling nature of its story, for its genre blurring and alternate histories, and for what Walton has to say about the shape and the details of an ordinary woman’s life.

Purchase My Real Children from McNally Robinson

December 13, 2014

If you need me… Marilynne Robinson Update 2

I finished reading Housekeeping last night, past midnight even. And I’m left with more than a few impressions. The first a bit incidental, but we started reading The Children of Green Knowe last night, so it seems there is water water everywhere (in books, at least). And as I continued through Housekeeping, marvelling at the ghosts and spectres, I thought of Shirley Jackson more and more, and so I was so pleased to find this piece about the connections between Housekeeping and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, of which there are many. I appreciate too the discussion of Housekeeping and genre, fantasy in particular. It is such an oddly situated book in terms of genre, which was my trouble with the novel in my first reading of it—it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Its situating of the domestic is particularly peculiar, and I love the image of Sylvie opening the windows because she believes in the virtues of fresh air, and forgetting to close them for no good reason except that she forgets. I’m struck by the strange notions of housekeeping as an occupation in both Housekeeping and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And this too—I am always less interested in a book whose characters are disconnected from society. For example, By the Shores of Silver Lake is my least favourite Little House book, and when the Ingalls finally moved to town in time for The Long Winter, I was so relieved. So as Sylvie and Ruth spun farther and farther away from Fingerbone, I found the story less compelling. I remain so intrigued by the town, the curious descriptions of its inhabitants, who remain so unclear to me, probably because of how the descriptions were filtered through Ruth’s strange perspective. And her perspective was really so strange in a way that the reader doesn’t entirely realize, because Ruth herself rarely refers to herself singularly—she is always part of a “we” collection, which lends credence to her point of view. She is persuasive, explaining matters and circumstances in a way that seems logical, is always measured, until we examine her ideas properly and determine they don’t make so much sense at all. While remarkably different in nearly every respect, she reminded me a little bit of Nora Eldridge from Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs in this respect. The power of the first person narrator, our propensity to trust the voice speaking directly into one’s ear.

Anyway, Housekeeping truly is a masterpiece, a baffling, strange and beautiful one. So glad I read it again.

Next: moving onward to Gilead, which I’m nervous about. Not being altogether familiar with the Bible, beyond Sunday School lessons, I’ve always been inclined to think I’m not quite its ideal reader.

December 11, 2014

Alfie’s Christmas

“And then I knew, Tom, that the garden was changing all the time, because nothing stands still, except in our memory.” –from Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, which we just finished reading tonight

Alfie never gets older. We’ve been reading his books since Harriet was baby, and I love them impossibly. Their stories are as familiar to me as stories from my own family. I know the corners of their house so intimately—the teapots, and the toy teapots, and Flumbo the elephant, and Willesden the consolation prize, and I’ve speculated aplenty about Maureen McNally, whom I suspect is actually a cat-burgler. And speaking of cats, I know that Alfie’s is called Chessie, and I remember when he comforted his friend at Bernard’s birthday party, and how he likes to play This Little Piggie with his baby sister’s pink toes.

Stuart’s aunt gave Harriet and Iris a book voucher for Christmas, and I ordered them a copy of Alfie’s Christmas, which came out last year. And it arrived today and I opened it at once, because this is one Christmas present we’re going to enjoy before Christmas. It’s a lovely simple story of the countdown to Christmas in Alfie’s house, and all his preparations—his advent calendar, and drawings of stars, and songs at school, baking cookies and putting up the tree. Iris is drawn to the book for the cats in the pictures, and as we were reading the book, we’re realized that she’s probably the age of Annie-Rose, precisely (and she similarly gets into boatloads of mischief).

Harriet liked the book too, which I was relieved about, because I’ve been sensing lately that she feels a bit too old for Alfie and his tales. “Isn’t he in nursery school?” she asked me the other day at the library when I’d proposed taking out one of his books. As a Senior Kindergartener, I think she regards consorting with nursery schoolers, even in literature, as kind of insulting. But I think she still does like these books as much as I do—they really are our foundational texts. And the Christmas in this particular volume won her over, so she was totally game.

It makes me sad though to think that someday Alfie might really be outgrown. It’s inevitable, of course, but it’s also kind of lonely—this wonderful world I’ve discovered through her that we won’t get to share anymore.

I feel as though Aflie’s Christmas might be one that lasts though, having taken up residence in our Christmas book box. A book that will be pulled out again every year, a process whose very appeal is nostalgia. And one day we’ll be telling a wholly different version of Iris, pointing at Annie-Rose, “Once upon a time this was you.”

• Check out Shirley Hughes’ 12 Days of Alfie’s Christmas Gallery for images from the book

December 11, 2014

If you need me… Marilynne Robinson Update 1

If you need me for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be reading nothing but Marilynne Robinson.

For no good reason, except that I want to, and I think it will be good for me, and I have a bit of space for a focussed reading project, which I’m so pleased about, because I feel as though my reading lately has been scattered and something of a mad scramble.

I first reading Housekeeping perhaps in 2006, and here’s my shameful confession: I didn’t like it. I had been expecting something light and straightforward from the novel, which was not at all what it delivered. I was also not as smart a reader then as I am now (and it is my hope hope that I can continue to say this about every decade that passes in my reading life.) When I read Home in 2008, I was much more appreciative, though I don’t remember anything of the book now. Plus, I missed Gilead in the middle. I wonder now though how Robinson’s work changed between her first and third novel—is there a reason beyond my improved sensibility that had me like the latter book? And now the world has been imploring me to read her latest book, Lila, which reviews have noted as having thematic connections to Housekeeping, a cyclical structure to all four novels. So this is why I’ve decided to go back to the beginning.

I’m about halfway through Housekeeping now, and so pleased with what I’ve embarked upon. The book is unbelievably strange and really quite difficult—sentences that require much concentration to make sense of (though following their twists is such a pleasure). Part of the problem is the complex sentences used to described really odd images—that strange house with its sloped floors. I can’t visualize the trapdoor at the top of the stairs no matter how hard I try. Perhaps another trick of the book is that its difficulties are subtle, just under the surface. They’re a little bit like traps. It’s so Biblical too, but in a contemporary setting, without male characters—we’re not accustomed to this.

But what pleasures we reap from careful reading. Really beautiful, inside-out sentences that reframe the familiar in surprising ways. I loved, “And then the library was flooded to a depth of three shelves, creating vast gaps in the Dewey decimal system.” And that image of the sodden curtains’ weight bending the curtain rod. There is something slightly Shirley Jackson-ish about this household, which reminded me of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. No one there is quite right, but the terms of the characters’ difference is never quite clear. An anxiety underlying everything that is never really explained—the reader intuits. And I am impressed by the fleeting descriptions of motherhood: “She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace.”

And oh, sentences like, “There would a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplace spectacles, of neighbours and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole.” You could think on that one over and over again.”

I came across a passage when I was reading last night:

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.

And it seemed so familiar; I was sure I’d read its echo recently. And finally I realized where it was from:

The dead live on in the homeliest of ways. They’re listed in the phone book, They get mail. Their wigs rest of styrofoam heads at the back of closets. Their beds are made. Their shoes are everywhere.

Which is altogether different, but not altogether altogether—I mean, those shoes? It’s from Elizabeth McCracken’s Thunderstruck and Other Stories, which Housekeeping recalls to me in more than a few places.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Chapter Six.

December 10, 2014

Great New Blogs in the Neighbourhood

Cake and cookies from our final class!

Teaching The Art of Blogging at UofT’s School of Continuing Studies this fall was an incredibly inspiring, enjoyable, and educational experience. I was pleased to be teaching the course again after a hiatus, and to be changing my approach based upon the blogging workshops I’d done over the past two years. Our class turned out to be a group of wonderful, generous and intelligent writers whose approaches and backgrounds were so diverse and complementary. Our class readings ranged from blog posts on tech by Mathew Ingram and Navneet Alang, to a Rebecca Solnit essay, posts by Bonnie Stewart, Kyran Pittman, and Shawna Lemay, and my own blog post of preservation and the work of Mary Pratt. I was also tremendously inspired by having just read May Friedman’s book on Mommyblogs, which really gave me the confidence to follow my own instincts about what blogging is and can be, and to celebrate the form as Friedman approaches it: “It is precisely because it is impossible to say anything generalizable about the mamasphere as a whole that it is a radical maternal space; not as a result of the activism of individual mothers, but because of the implications of all these narratives coexisting, and the endless unspooling dialogue that therefore emerges.”

And now with the course completed, I am really pleased to share with you some of the blogs that have emerged from it. I hope you will add them to your bookmarks.

• Check out gem city, a literary blog with a singular point of view, a wonderful and wondrous take on books and reading, and such haunting kazoo solos like you won’t believe. I’m excited that this excellent writer has recently settled in Toronto and look forward to seeing where her blog takes her to.
• Peas and Honey is the most curious hybrid, about aging parents and old houses, grief and memory, and full of really good story telling, and the most surprising connections, which is what the best blogs do.
• a dainty dish is a blog that owns my heart already, a baking blog whose recipes are inspired by beautiful picture books by writers (so far) including Sara O’Leary, Julie Morstad, Cybele Young, and Jon Klassen. It’s so gorgeous and original, and I’m finding that I’m always hungry for her next post.
• For those of you who like to gaze upon beautiful things, here is Barbara Ishwerwood’s blog, whose short and perfect posts offer insight into art and art history. Check out the links to Barbara’s courses too!
• And you’ve never had a friend like Marina Hasson, whose own stories and experiences have powered her remarkable approach to life. She’s inspiring, lovely and hilarious, and there is such a generous spirit to everything she does. You can befriend her here—and lucky you! 

The Art of Blogging will be offered next in September 2015.

December 9, 2014

The Bookshop That Floated Away by Sarah Henshaw

The trouble with being a little bit odd is that my book recommendations are not always universal, and so it is useful when I encounter a book as odd as I am, to which I can point and say, “This book is not for everyone. BUT.” Say, if you are the type who can identify with a woman who finds an injured pigeon (while travelling on her canal boat, which she has converted into a financial under-performing bookshop) and then decides to uncover all references to pigeons in the Western canon, then The Bookshop That Floated Away by Sarah Henshaw is definitely for you. It is definitely for me. My husband is a bit relieved that I’ve finally finished it, because for the past few days, I’ve been reading him passages from every other page, and while he conceded that they were indeed quite funny, he found the whole thing rather strange.

Last night in particular was the part in the book that was narrated from the perspective of the boat itself (oh yes—and its narration replicates Black Beauty, with which the boat [called Joseph] shares a colour) in which Henshaw comes home traumatized by having found “a discarded sanitary towel pressed between the pages of a reference book on cowboys… [S]he said that book vandalism was the devil’s own trade mark, and if we saw any one who took pleasure in leaving menstrual paraphernalia between pages, we might know to whom he belonged, for the devil was a murderer from the beginning and a tormentor to the end. On the other hand, where we saw people who loved their books and were kind to hardback and soft cover, we might know that was God’s mark; for ‘God loves books.'”

To be fair, that’s probably the oddest part of the book. I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. But still….

The premise of this book initially put me in mind of Penelope Fitzgerald, with the offshore and the bookshop, and everything, and while Henshaw doesn’t reference Fitzgerald, The Bookshop That Floated Away still did not disappoint. It’s not really a book about a premise anyway, but instead very much of itself, about the curious incidents that transpire when the strange and insular worlds of books and canal boating connect. The latter is not always romantic—in Burnley, they have to navigate over a sofa, and then she fears a human head has become stuck on her propeller. And then there are the locks, so many locks, mostly manual, which is no small business when you are a solo journeyer and your boat is sixty feet long. It’s a different kind of off-roading, which results in travel book that reminded me of Beryl Bainbridge’s English Journey, if Bainbridge had been travelling by canal boat and had a propensity for hosting book clubs on her boat and imbibing far too much wine.

Henshaw’s journey comes about when her plans for opening a bookshop on a barge aren’t as lucrative as she’d supposed, the problem perhaps exacerbated by a conspicuous lack of business savvy—her one qualification for the gig is a voracious appetite for books, and the ability to see the whole world through a bookish prism. So she decides to go on a six month journey from the Midlands to London, then to Bristol, back through the Midlands to Leeds and Manchester, and then home, bartering books for Victorian sponge cake and spreading the word about the importance of independent bookshops.

On the way, she has good days and catastrophes, the boat indeed floats away, people vomit on its astroturf roof, she finds three injured pigeons, the boat is stolen, vandalized, the Mayor of Bath calls Joseph a “she”, and they are banned in Bristol. She tells her own story, and is so deft with allusion that she successfully navigates a Heart of Darkness meets Scuffy the Tugboat set-up. The narrative is further powered by other references to boatish and adventure books—Treasure Island, and The Wind and the Willows, plus Anna Karenina, The Count of Monte Cristo, Dick Whittington and His Cat, Our Mutual Friend, but not The Complete Guide to Starting and Running a Bookshop, because Henshaw couldn’t get into it.

The book is crazy wonderful, if you’re a certain kind of reader, though I suspect that if you’re reading this, you might well be. I discovered The Book Barge (which is misnamed, Henshaw tells us, and is actually a narrow boat, the discrepancy causing much consternation among boating purists) from The Bookshop Book, and was pleased to find out (spoilers!) that Henshaw decided not to jump ship at the end of her journey, determining that there was indeed nothing else worth doing as messing about in boats, as both Mole and Rat will attest.

• Discover The Book Barge online.
• learn more about The Book Barge
• PS In an ironic twist of fate, The Bookshop That Floated Away is not available outside the UK (or not here at least), so I was unable to order it through my local independent bookshop, and had to get it through The Book Depository instead. But I am so glad I did…

December 7, 2014

The Return by Dany Laferriere, and books in translation

For all kinds of reasons, I am so pleased to have finally read Dany Laferriere’s The Return. Not least because Laferriere is one of Canada’s most internationally celebrated writers—in its original French, The Return won the Prix Médicis (France) in 2009, the International Literature Award (Germany) in 2014, and Laferriere was elected to the Académie française a year ago, the first Haitian and Canadian writer to receive this honour. It was kind of ridiculous that I’d never read him before.

I’m pleased mostly to have read The Return because I liked it so much, a novel that blurs boundaries in all kinds of ways—between fiction and autobiography, poetry and prose, home and exile, belonging and displacement, and also bridging the extremes in common perceptions of Haiti. It’s a novel whose prose is both stirring and lulling, easy to read and rich with wonderful lines. It begins when Dany, our protagonist, receives a phone that tells him his father is dead, a father he hardly knew, and even still, this begins a journey out of exile, back to the Haiti that Dany had fled decades before, to bring the spirit of his father home. So he goes back to a home that is no longer home, driven by a relationship with his father mostly constituted of absence and silence. It’s not a straightforward journey, and nothing is ever merely one thing or another, and I love that.

I love also how the book is so curious in its construction, how it tears down and reconstructs all my ideas of just what a novel is shaped like, which is what I wanted to have happen when I resolved to read more books in translation in 2014. And so I am also glad to have read The Return because it’s one more translation on my reading list, to which I can point now and say that my 2014 goals were met in a way that was not entirely half-assed. Just a modest success, but I did so appreciate the books in translation I read this year—and I like that most of them were Canadian, translated from French (The Return, by David Homel), French via Inuktitut (Sanaaq), and Chiac, an Acadian-French dialect spoken in New Brunswick (For Sure). I also read The Dinner by Herman Koch, translated from Dutch, which I liked a lot, and Viviane by Julia Deck, translated from French and first published in France.

So 5 books out of a hundred and some, which is a bit meh, but alas. I’m going to keep seeking out books in translation in 2015, and I already have a copy of Dany Lafferriere’s I am a Japanese Writer waiting to be read.

• Further: if I could read French, I would pick up a copy of “Les tranchées: Maternité, ambigüité et féminisme, en fragments” by Fanny Britt, who wrote the award-winning graphic novel, Jane, the Fox and Me. This other book is also illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault. The very poor translation in this article gives the book’s title as “Trenches – Maternity, ambiguity and feminism into fragments .” It sounds very much like a Francophone companion to The M Word and I would really love to read it. It sounds wonderful.
• Read JC Sutcliffe’s translations of excerpts from Michel Noel’s In Search of the End of the World, which won last year’s TD Children’s Literature Prize.

December 6, 2014

Songs of the Sea

I got some books to talk about before I sum up my (as always, very good) picture book year, and for no very good reason, all the books I have for this post are all about fish. Which delights me.

The first one is Fishermen Through and Through by Colleen Sydor and Brooke Kerrigan, which is just brand new (and has a string of bunting on its cover). It’s a storied story, rich with allusion, but in the most unostentatious way. It’s about three fisherman called Peter, Santiago, and Ahab who “were rough and weathered as a twisted stick of driftwood… Which is not to say that they didn’t sometimes dream of things other than fish, knotted nets, and saltwater.” The three fisherman dream their dreams of a different kind of life, and while under influence of dreaming, they come across a bright white lobster in one of their nets. The men decide to share the wonder with other people, so they bring the lobster to shore, where it creates a media furor. For the lobster, they’re offered enough money to make all their dreams come true. So what are they going to do, these friends, who are fishermen through and through?

The illustrations are gorgeous and dreamy, in particular the subtle shades of the sky. And the prose: lines like, “Man and crustacean sailed this way, admiring one another until the sun got snoozey and settled down, down on an orange cloud, toward the lip of the sea.” I loved this one, and Harriet did too, for it’s a story full of magic and meaning.

It immediately put me in mind of A Fish Named Glub by Dan Bar-El and Josee Bisaillon, which came out in the Spring. Which was a book I didn’t first know what to make of—it’s really weird, more like a Wes Anderson film than a picture book. It deals with big existential things in a manner that struck me as a bit twee the first time I encountered the story, but it’s grown on me, and Harriet likes it. Similar to Fisherman Through and Through, it’s a story about dreams and friendship and lessons learned from those confined to an aquarium, and it’s got more than a little magic too.

Another book that’s new to us but is familiar to lots of other readers is Down By Jim Long’s Stage by Al Pittman, with illustrations by Pam Hall, subtitled, “Rhymes for children and young fish.” It’s a Newfoundland classic, a wonderful and silly accounting of the subaquatic social scene, with rhymes like, “A lobster named Larry/ so wanted to marry/ Lila the lobster next door./ That when he proposed/ and she turned up her nose/ he wept all over the floor.” Such pathos! Such rhyme! Many times since we picked up our copy, we’ve read it cover to cover.

And finally, There Was an Old Sailor by Claire Saxby and Cassandra Allen, which I’ve rounded up before, and most certainly deserves a place in this mix. It’s a quite preposterous redux of “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” (which is pretty preposterous in itself, but come on, it’s not like she swallowed a whale, for pity’s sake…), with a maritime theme. We love to sing this one, and tickle our children with the line about the jelly “that wriggled and wriggled and jiggled his belly” and then to revert to all serious when we come back to the same line each time: “I don’t know why he swallowed the krill—It’ll make him ill.”

Plus the illustrations are so so wonderful. Check out the squid to find out precisely what I mean:

December 5, 2014

There comes a time…

There comes a time in every family’s life when their copy of Janet and Alan Ahlberg’s The Baby’s Catalogue needs replacing. “Uh oh,” said Iris, pointing to where the book had split in two, on the “Accidents” page, no less. Though we’d seen it coming—this was the book I took care to always have in my bag when Harriet was a baby, so that when Iris was born, the spine was already shredded, and she took great pleasure in furthering the damage herself. Until the whole thing had come to pieces.

It’s a turning point, and we’ve been encountering a lot of these lately. Iris turns 18 months old exactly today, and I’d forgotten what a huge turning point this age is. Her words are coming fast (and often furious): car, and truck, and yuck, and cheese, and banana, and please, and Mommy and Daddy and Hatty, and her grandmothers’ names, and shoes, and book, and most curiously of all is “hockey”. We have no idea where she learned that one. She loves cats and dogs and babies. I take her to the library baby program, where she ignores all programming and instead walks around the circle tickling the other babies’ feet.

She sees the whole world as a series of climbable objects, and while her compulsive climbing instills fear in all those who love her, it’s true that she rarely ever falls. She knows the right techniques for capturing out attention: teetering on tabletops, screaming in quiet restaurants, and placing tiny objects inside her mouth with a defiant gleam in her eye. She gives excellent hugs, is a champion napper, has her teeth coming in in all the wrong order, and usually tries to give gentle touches instead of hitting and biting (though she doesn’t always succeed). She gets less bald with every passing day. She is at that age at which sitting at the table for more than three minutes at a time is impossible, so she comes and and goes. She just recently learned to jump. We adore her, and are blown away by how smart she is and her insistence on doing everything herself—well, even. But we’re never having another child, because our children seem to get increasingly Iris-ish with every one, and an Iris who out-Iris’d Iris might kill us. So we’re just content to love this one madly.

And then there is her very patient sister, who turned 5 and a half last week (which is 66 months old, for those of you keeping count). She continues to be excellent with just the right amount of naughtiness that we’re sure she’s a real child. She likes school and watching her learn to read is so exciting (and it’s also so exciting to see how useful Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie books are in this process. We’ve enjoyed these books for years, and that such good books can also be the best reading tools is amazing). We’re reading Tom’s Midnight Garden at bedtime now, which is exciting because there’s a literary Harriet in it, and also because it’s the second book I read right after she was born, a time I was thinking about last night as Tom and his Uncle discussed there not being just one time but instead all different kinds of time (and his Aunt pointing out that it all leads to indigestion—it’s such a good book!). Harriet has reached this marvellous age where she wants to be helpful, and she actually is. I like her so very much, and adore her company. It’s not a lie when I tell her that picking her up at kindergarten is the very best part of my day. (Well, after bedtime, of course).

Technically, now that Iris is 18 months old, there’s no resident baby at our house anymore (though I don’t believe this, of course, and Iris’s baldness is permitting the illusion to be sustained). Just because we’re running low on babies though doesn’t mean we don’t still need a copy of The Baby’s Catalogue, so we bought another one, a pristine edition that is sure to get a bit battered, but probably not as battered as its predecessor. This wonderful book is full of the ordinary moments—all the incidents and accidents—of ordinary family life, and it’s such a part of ours.

I hope it always will be.

• Purchase The Baby’s Catalogue from McNally Robinson