December 13, 2010
Advent Book Blog recommendations
The Advent Book Blog has been going on for the last two weeks, its second season as proving to be as effective as its first. As in, what happens when wonderful people recommend the books they’ve best loved lately? And what happens is something along the lines of got, need, need, got, need, need, got, got, need, need. etc.
My “needs” have been as follows: Reality Hunger by David Shields recommended by Sean Cranbury, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. by Sam Wasson recommended by Natalie St. Pierre, The Death of Donna Whalen by Michael Winter recommended by Samuel Thomas Martin, A Village Life by Louise Glück recommended by Beth Follett, What It Is by Lynda Barry recommended by Sarah Selecky.
A lot of my “gots” are there too, and you’d probably be well served to get them for yourself.
December 13, 2010
On "discovering" Bronwen Wallace
I read Bronwen Wallace’s People You’d Trust Your Life To this weekend, and I’m still a bit overwhelmed by the experience. As a first book, it reminded me of Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting (an anchronistic reference, I realize, but humour me)– a writer who has been saving up the goods, writing that is remarkably assured, and doesn’t have to even try. A collection of short stories and not a dud in the bunch. I suppose if one had to publish just one book of fiction in one’s life, it would be tremendous for it to be this one. But then how tragic for a reader to get to the end and realize it’s all there is. (Wallace died shortly before the book’s publication in 1990.)
Not that there is not enough, no. There is everything here, a web of characters and relationships, and the stories become illuminated by moments of connection, between characters, and between the reader and the work. These connections so acute that, for example, you will be reading this book in line at the crowded supermarket on a Sunday afternoon and the cashier closes her till and you’re left standing there with your groceries, and you won’t even notice and, moreover, you won’t even care.
Funny, these are stories of their time (references to Michael J. Fox on television, girls with bright green hair clips, when Swiss Chalet waitresses had to dress like Swiss milkmaids [which I’d forgotten]), which serves to locate them but not to date them. Probably due to the universality to the experiences they depict– mother/daughter relationships, the anguish of having a child with food allergies, negotiating terrain with a new partner, processing nostalgia and what we’re to do with memories we’re holding on to.
I loved the stories of Lee Stewart, which recur throughout the collections, and whose whole life we come to understand, her childhood, early motherhood, life post-divorce. I loved the recurring image of her enormously pregnant, floating in an inflatable pool and sipping a beer. I loved the Carol Shieldsian illuminations of the lives of ordinary people. I loved the multitudinousness and contradiction the collection embraced, and once I got to the end, I reread the epigraph, and I completely understood, and I was stunned by the solidity and coherence of Wallace’s message and this collection.
From Adrienne Rich’s “Integrity”: Anger and tenderness: my selves./ And now I can believe they breathe in me/ as angels, not polarities.
December 12, 2010
Imagining Toronto by Amy Lavender Harris
Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto is one of the best books I’ve read this year, blowing my mind with its gorgeous prose, fascinating facts, stunning narrative, and sheer readability– I was absolutely lost inside it. Which is fitting for a book whose author/narrator implores her reader to: “descend until we lose our bearings, until the landscape merges with the base of the bridge, and the sounds of trains, traffic and the river grow almost indistinguishable from one another. We have reached the city at the centre of the map: let us begin.”
Though its bibliography is 24 pages long, Imagining Toronto is no catalogue, or dry academic treatise, but instead it is a story, and the story is a city (and the city is a story, but we could go on like this forever). Harris has not merely written a book about Toronto, but she has written the city itself, from the depths of its ravines to the tip of the CN Tower, 1815 feet up in the sky. Her raw materials are the city’s fictions, and the city is rendered by these poems and stories in glorious concreteness.
Though it was fascinating to realize the volume of literature that has been written about Toronto, to encounter books I’m familiar with (The Robber Bride, Moody Food), books I need to reread urgently (Headhunter), and books I simply must read now (What We All Long For, The Torontonians etc.), the greatest delight of Imagining Toronto was what these fictions had to tell me about the city itself. About its geography– the true location of Cabbagetown, for example. About the infamous Ward slum (finally razed with New City Hall) which Harris intriguingly refers to not as the city’s “other”, but as its shadow. And about the migration of its residents westward toward Kensington Market, and then eventually out to the suburbs. About multiculturalism, which Harris shows through various works is our “creation myth”, suggesting more productive ways to understand our neighbours and negotiate this space we all share. She writes about situations in which fact and fictions fail to gel, in particular with the portrayal of Toronto’s homeless populations in works such as Carol Shields’ Unless and Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig, and the virtual silence in our stories from characters who’d reflect the reality of homeless people’s lives.
Harris is utterly in command of her material, her footnotes populated with engaging asides. She leads her readers on a tour across Toronto’s varied topography, through its neighbours, and along its “desire lines” (“despite their lyrical nomenclature, we owe these cartographies of desire not to poets, but to transportation engineers […who] used the term to refer to the informal footpaths worn by pedestrians deviating from paved pathways…”). She writes about “Desire’s Dark Side”, and highlights that missing children are prominent in the city’s history and in its stories– Shoeshine Boy and Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless among others. We are taken to the Toronto Islands (the number of which, I was surprised to learn, is anybody’s guess), and not only learn of the stories the islands have told, but the story of the islands themselves, and of the artists and writers who’ve lived there. In “City Limits”, Harris highlights another disparity between fact and fiction– “The Myth of the Monocultural Suburb.” And what it means that so many places once at the limits of the city have now been absorbed into the city proper.
Just as you have to walk a city to gets its sense, so too do you have to actually read this book to understand its comprehensiveness. References are current to August 2010, and include recent books such as Alissa York’s Fauna. (And though the works within Imagining Toronto seem an exhaustive list, Harris includes an ever more complete Toronto Library on her website.) One gets the impression that this is the kind of book an author could have gone on writing forever (Volume II, anyone??), but reading it is a similar experience. With every page, we discover a new dimension of the city to explore, another book to add to our list to-be-read, and when we reach the conclusion, we realize we’ve been transported somewhere new.
Or perhaps we’ve been here all along, but we’ve only just starting noticing, and imagining. And then we realize that noticing and imagining are so often the very same thing.
UPDATE: See Harris’ piece from The Toronto Star this weekend, Best kids’ books based in the GTA.
December 9, 2010
I love my book club.
I didn’t sum up our latest meeting of The Vicious Circle, because I only caught an hour of it. A few weeks before, we’d realized that my husband would have to work late the night of our meeting, which had brought forth much distress at our house: I love my book club, and my husband knows how much I love it. So we came up with a compromise that suited everybody (except my husband who’d have to come home from an extended work day to put the baby to bed, but alas, he is a kind man): I’d book an autoshare car and dash out the door the instant he came in, and then drive like a law-abiding demon out to the west end where I could join The Vicious Circle for the last hour or so of our meeting. These are the lengths I go to, and if you were a member, you would understand.
I love my book club. I feel the need to voice this after reading “I broke up with my book club” in the Globe and Mail today, and after reading “Behind Enemy Lines: My life in an all-woman’s book club” in CNQ (though I feel the latter would have been better titled “I don’t like women, or most people, and I am smarter than you”). I understand why book clubs are derrided– I used to run them down myself. I was always an annoyingly obstinate independent reader (which is the reason I have still not read A Complicated Kindness), and the idea of being told what to read and then discussing said reading with a group of stupid people never held much appeal to me.
And then one day last winter, a group of distinctly non-stupid people asked me to join their brand new book club, and though my instinct was to run for hills, it was the kind of honour one couldn’t turn down. Some of these people were survivors of bad book clubs, and were determined to forge something different with this new experience. They’d chosen members carefully, each of us passionate about reading and connected to the literary life in various capacities: we have authors among us, of picture books, abridged classics and short stories; an illustrator; most of us blog about books; a lot of us work in publishing, in publicity; one of us is a journalist. Though we are bookish, we are various, and that none of us would be considered a casual reader is probably the one thing we all have in common.
We capped ourselves, because the survivors had learned that book clubs fall to pieces once there are too many to focus on one conversation. We picked our books casually, choosing from a pile of paperbacks we brought to the first meeting, and we’ve read all novels so far, contemporary or less-so. We do enjoy visiting one another’s houses, and snooping through nooks, and crannies, and bookshelves. Wine and cheese is popular, and so is dessert. We’re fond of gossip, and our name isn’t just clever– it’s apt. As the evening grows later, the talk gets louder, and more and more inappropriate.
But the best thing about book club is that we talk about books. Our conversations, our various points of view, approaches, and backgrounds all opening up new avenues in the works we’d never have found whilst reading alone. We challenge one another, ask questions, disagree and shout a lot. No one shuts down discussion: if you don’t like the book, let’s talk about why. We show up most excited for the meetings at which we’ve loved the books, but it’s true that the talk is always best at the meetings where we’ve hated it. There was one meeting where a blah book hadn’t elicited very much response, and admittedly that one time we did focus mostly on the guacamole. But it must be said that the guacamole was really very good.
So the problem is not book clubs, the problem is YOUR book club. The problem is that you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you shouldn’t be in a book club at all? (Book clubs should be the endeavour of choice for those who read already, not those who merely wish they did.) My book clubs exists as living proof that the institution itself is not to blame.
December 9, 2010
Course Offering: The Art and Business of Blogging
I am very excited to announce that I’ll be teaching the course “The Art and Business of Blogging” at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies in the spring. The course runs from April 11-June 13, and will explore the various uses of blogging, the blog as community builder and as a tool for promotion, the blogging gamut from Dooce to Gizmodo, the importance of storytelling in blogging, how to craft an excellent blog post, and the technical aspects of the blog. Among other things, syllabus still being under construction. Anyway, the course is still a while away so I’ll be mentioning it again in the next few months, but I just wanted to get the word out now, mostly because I’m thrilled about it.
December 7, 2010
Canada Reads Independently Spotlight: Lynn Coady's Play the Monster Blind
If I ever write a book, I would like Sheree Fitch to write a blurb for it. Though any “blurb” by Sheree Fitch would probably take the place of a whole back cover, but that would be all right. Because she would write something like, “Meet a world of big dog rage and oversized underpants, boozing, boxing, irreverence, complicated sex, cheap hotel rooms and searching men and women. Coady’s east coast of Canada , especially industrialized Cape Breton, is a landscape populated by the never get ways, the come from aways and the go aways. In Coady’s world there are razor -edged, truth-saying tellers; the smart and sassy, the off kilter and quirky and ordinary.” But only if I’d written Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind.
Play the Monster Blind was published ten years ago to much acclaim and bestsellerdom and, for some reason that stupefies anybody who has ever read the book, is no longer in print. Which is odd for a book so vital that the Giller-shortlisted writer Alexander MacLeod just six weeks ago cited it in an interview as one of his favourite collections. Chad Pelley’s affection for the collection was apparent in the interview he conducted with Coady just last summer, in which he remarked, “I loved every single story…”
In her review, Karen Solie called the book, “a sure-footed dance to the often painful music of the working class of the Canadian East Coast, a tough but graceful negotiation of the living rooms, bars, workplaces, and childhood haunts where violence and tenderness, hilarity and despair, belonging and alienation coincide.” Margaret Gunning writes in January Magazine that “Coady has a deeper-than-intellectual understanding of human ambiguity which resonates in her audience as a sense of recognition”. Jim Taylor noted in The Antigonish Review that readers “should rejoice in the humanity of the Cape Breton characters who come to life in her landscape.” Open Book Toronto called the book “a keenly observed, imaginative collection”. Play the Monster Blind received a starred review in Quill & Quire, which found Coady’s “emotional arm’s length narrative style” even stronger here than in her award-winning debut novel.
Margaret Gunning writes: “To label [Coady’s] fiction “comic” is to do it a great disservice, because there is always so much more going on: delicate underlayers, dangling nerve-endings and things noted and remarked upon that the rest of us are trying to forget. Without the belly laughs to punctuate the unbearable truth-telling, her work might be too uncomfortable to enjoy.”
I’ve read Coady before in a few anthologies, and also in her novel Mean Boy which delighted me back in 2006 and was one of my favourite books of that year. My experience with that novel and my love of short stories in general leaves me with every expectation that Play the Monster Blind will be a book that I love.
December 7, 2010
Our cities unfold
“…the cities we live in are made not merely of brick and mortar, or bureaucracy and money, but are equally the invention of our memories and imaginations. We realize that our cities unfold not only in the building but in the telling of them.” –Amy Lavender Harris, Imagining Toronto
December 6, 2010
Scientifically conclusive long-term effects of horizontal parenting
When I first began horizontal parenting, I admit that I was far more lazy than I was confident. For seven months, my child would only nap whilst lying on me, and I wondered if I was setting myself up to become a doormat (albeit a mattressy one). For ten months, my child spent most of many nights in bed with me and breastfed like a drunkard, and I wondered if this was going to be the rest of my life (plus, my shoulder hurt, but it was better than not lying down at all). Though I gave my child everything she demanded of me (because I was too tired to challenge an indomitable infant, and whenever we made it into a power struggle, she won every time), I wondered what kind of pattern we were be setting. Would I be that mother with the screaming toddler in the grocery store pleading for a small piece of our power-share? Was I falling down as a parent in failing to set boundaries with my six week old? Shouldn’t I be encouraging her to be an independent six month old? Was this the precedent, and now forever I’d give her everything she demanded with a screech?
The thing is though, and I know this now and I didn’t know it then, that your six week old is a whole other person three weeks later, and that six month old is such a more completely evolved amazing being in comparison that you can’t remember she was ever small. And then six months starts being small, because your baby is a year old, and a year and a half old, and she’s walking, and talking, and pouring you endless cups of imaginary tea. And you’re now negotiating with someone altogether different than that screaming newborn, and it is here where setting boundaries and discipline does become important, but now you’re dealing with a(n almost) person rather than a helpless creature. It’s a whole different game– certainly not an easier one, but one that is not very much affected by anything that came before.
When my daughter was six weeks old and I was racked with guilt over my desire to buy an infant swing rather than rock her to comfort myself, somebody told me to do “Whatever works” and thereby set me on the road to horizontal parenting. I trusted the advice because it was easy, but eighteen months later I can now report with scientific conclusiveness that she was right. There are no harmful long-term effects to taking the easy way out in babyhood and shutting that screaming kid up however you can manage it. Hooray for soothers, and co-sleeping, and baby swings, and long walks in the stroller. Hooray for putting the baby to sleep in a sling, having her eat only avocado for a week, and for having the baby nap on your chest while you lie on the bed gyrating your hips to put her to sleep with the motion. (It works. How did I discover this works? I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.)
December 6, 2010
On reading independently
For me, the most fascinating thing about Canada Reads is how it’s everything to everyone. For me, a chance to pick up some obscure books I might just fall in love with; for others a chance to champion the books they’ve read already; for the more competitive among us, the fun of listening to panelists hash it out, employing nefarious strategies to ensure their own book’s dominance. And it’s interesting to me that the general vagueness with which Canada Reads Independently has been presented has brought forth much of the same variety of interpretations confusion.
There is one reason why Canada Reads Independently isn’t a chance to exclusively showcase books published by independent presses: I don’t think independent presses are in need of a special showcase. I thought a bit differently once upon a time, but I’ve evolved as a reader since then, plus I listened carefully when Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells once took me to task for segregation, and I realized that he was right. Independent presses in Canada are producing books every bit as good as, if not better than, in many cases, books being published by major publishing houses. This year’s Giller shortlist (and long list even) was a testament to that, and now everybody knows. Independent presses are amazing, and this is hardly news.
What I do want to do with Canada Reads Independently, however, is choose panelists who are well-read enough to know what’s going on in the CanLit scene beyond the Giller shortlist (whether that list happens to be indie-dominated or not), and I think I’ve done well with what we’ve come up with. Two books by indie presses, the CanLit stalwart is a book many of us haven’t read, an out of print book by a vital (and underrated) contemporary author, and a book usually only read in grad school (which is not necessarily to appreciate).
So officially indie or not, I still think we’re off the beaten track. Which is the very point of (my personal interpretation of) Canada Reads.
