January 22, 2010
An admission and some understanding
I have an admission to make, one that will win me no friends. And while usually I do not knock the books I hate here, this book is so well-loved, I think it can take it. I HATE The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. I got this book free out of a cereal box in 2003 (true story!), and have received it as a gift no less than three times since then. I read it once and found it so boring, I found it offensive, not credible as literature. And I know this will rankle many a reader now, because people love Precious Ramotswe and Alexander McCall Smith, but for the life of me, I could never undertand why.
Until now. I get it now! I still hate The Number One Ladies Detective Agency, but I think my love of Flavia de Luce and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is analogous to how other readers must feel about Precious and Number One… And not just because they’re both books with colonial flavour, written by old white men in unlikely voices (whether they be those of Botswanan lady detectives, or eleven year-old English girls). I think neither book is meant to ring especially true, authenticity is not the object, that these books get by on their charm, and charming is most definitely in the eye of the beholder.
Stay tuned for a review of Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie from the perspective of this beholder. I loved that book indeed.
January 22, 2010
Escape the ego
I was surprised to be impressed by Elizabeth Gilbert in her recent Chatelaine interview. I am one of those irritating people who has never read Eat Pray Love but holds strong opinions about it anyway, so the interview was the first time I’d ever been exposed to Gilbert directly (as opposed to via one of her ardent devotees). She seemed terrifically level-headed about the impact of her book upon her fans, noting that readers who’d decided to follow in her eating, praying, loving footsteps were probably insane. She had smart things to say about women and their expectations for relationships, for happiness. But what I noted most of all was the following: “I don’t think women today read for escape; they read for clues.”
I loved that. Because it’s exactly the way I read, I think, to break it down and enable me to see the world in miniature, as manageable. Which, however conversely, is to be able to look at the big picture and regard it all at once, perhaps for the very first time. Fiction is a study in the hypothetical, a test-run for the actual. An experiment. What if the world was this? And we can watch the wheels turn and this bit of sample life run its course to discover. And I don’t mean that literature is smaller than life, no. Literature is life, but it’s just life you can hold in your hand, stick in your backpack, and I’m reassured by that, because the world is messy and sprawling, but if you take it down to the level of story, I am capable of some kind of grasp. Of beginning to understand what this world is, how to be in it. Certainly, I read for clues.
But then Elizabeth Gilbert went and ruined the whole thing, continuing, “The criticism of memoirs is that people read them to be voyeurs. But a lot of people read them for help and answers and perspective.” So she wasn’t actually talking about fiction, which takes the wind of out of my sails, and now she’s relegated reading in general to the self-help rack. Which is boring, troubling, limiting. So there ends my love affair with Elizabeth Gilbert, perhaps because I’m skeptical of memoirs and the kind of truth any reader might hope to find there.
And then I came across this video of Fran Lebowitz on Jane Austen (who Lebowitz says is popular for all the wrong reasons). Lebowitz says, “To lose yourself in a book is the desire of the bookworm, to be taken. And that’s my desire… [which] may come from childhood. The discovery of the world, which I discovered in a library– I lived in a little town and the library was the world. This is the opposite way that people are taught to read now. People are consistently told, ‘What can you learn about your own life from the novel?’ ‘What lessons will this teach you?’ ‘How can you use this?’ This is a philistine idea, this is beyond vulgar, and I think this is it is an awful away to approach anything… A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door.”
Which was something I could get behind. I was finished with Elizabeth Gilbert, and was about to jump on the Fran Lebowitz reading-wagon, when it occured to me, “To lose yourself in a book is the desire of the bookworm, to be taken.” And is that not the very definition of “escape”? Escapism, which is all about stupid women reading pink shoe novels on the beach, with Fran Lebowitz alongside them? I couldn’t see it.
But escapism is surely what she’s advocating, however much “the world” is what she is escaping to. And it occurs to me that Elizabeth Gilbert’s clue-seeking readers are escapists just as much, however in a far more literal sense. That they’re plotting a way out of their humdrum lives, just as Lebowitz was doing back at that small town library. Searching for different kind of place for themselves.
Do I read for escape? I don’t know. Does reading for fun count as escape? Does reading to relax? Interestingly, the books I’d read for fun or relaxation are those that would make me “lose myself” the least, which would make them the least escapist of all. I just finished The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, for example, which was fun and fluffy as you like, but Century is a book that’s more taken me away of late. You wouldn’t call it escapist though, because that’s such a pejorative term, but now that I’ve thought about it, I’m not so sure it should be, and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the divide is not so firm at all.
It’s about time for a Diana Athill reference, I think. Though she’s a memoirist like Elizabeth Gilbert, and one that people rave about with just as much enthusiasm, but for some reason I actually do plan to read Athill’s memoir one of these days, and I trust the wisdom implicit in what she has to say. My impression is that by reading Athill, we learn about the world through her prism, where in reading Eat Pray Love, we get Elizabeth Gilbert over and over. (Forgive me as I speculate about two books I haven’t read. And correct me if I’m wrong). Perhaps also it’s important that Athill is old and has years of experience, while Gilbert just once took a really great vacation.
Athill is quoted as saying, “Anything absorbing makes you become not ‘I’ but ‘eye’–you escape the ego.” And so is this the kind of escape we’re talking about? What Lebowitz is after? That with the best kind of books we get the world, get out of ourselves for a while, forget our problems.
Perhaps reading is a bit like love. Just when we’re not actively out looking for “help, answers and perspective”, that’s when we might actually stand a chance of finding it.
January 21, 2010
Apart from the soul
“The fortunate thing about lab glassware is that it boils water at the speed of light. I threw a spoonful of black leaves into a beaker. When it had gone a deep red I handed it to Dogger, who stared at it skeptically.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s Tetley’s.’
He sipped at the tea gingerly, blowing on the surface of the drink to cool it. As he drank, I remembered that there’s a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty’s Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes– or so the Vicar had remarked to Father, who had told Daffy, who had told me.” –from The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
January 21, 2010
Pre-Swiftian Love Story
Poet P.K. Page, who died last week, has been eulogized aplenty since then, and I don’t really have much to add to the chorus, except that she was certainly an extraordinary person (as demonstrated by this brilliant obituary by Sandra Martin at the Globe & Mail) and I’m glad I got to meet her once. Though I spent only a little time in her presence, that presence was unforgettable and she was everything they said.
Less eulogized, however, has been Erich Segal, author of the novel Love Story, who died the other day at the age of 72. When I was twelve, I found a library copy of this novel in a desk at school (checked out under someone else’s name) and I stole it. Proceeded then to worship it through my unlovable teen years in hope that a hockey-playing, MG-driving, heir to a great fortune might just fall in love with me before I died of leukemia, even though I was neither Ali McGraw nor a musical prodigy. Even though I didn’t love Mozart or Bach, but I did love The Beatles, and I would have loved Oliver too, given the chance.
I haven’t read this book for quite awhile, but I read it so often back in the day that my original copy fell apart and I had to replace it (which wasn’t difficult. Love Story is always readily available used, usually displayed along with poetry collections by Rod McKuen). I am pretty sure that Love Story was not a great book, but I really loved it, and I must give credit to the man who wrote the book I’ve probably read more often than I’ll reread any other book in my life.
Though the book was wrong, and love does mean having to say you’re sorry, as unromantic as that sounds, but seeing as Jenny was only 25 when she died, perhaps she just didn’t have long enough to figure that out.
January 20, 2010
Book charm
On an ordinary day, Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion would have been the most interesting book of any stack I picked up from the library. (I found out about this book from the Louisa May Alcott bio. It has the best cover I have ever seen. And that I am excited about a book with such a cover really does catapult me into a new league of nurd. Fortunately, I’ll keep it to myself and no one will ever know…).
But today was the day I also came home from the library with the gorgeous Bothered by My Green Conscience, the less gorgeous might be stupid but it was sitting on a table so I picked it up Sleep is For the Weak: The best of the mommybloggers, and Sheree Fitch’s book of poetry for adult readers In this house are many women.
And just when you thought books couldn’t be anymore charming, I’ve just joined the league of people who’ve discovered Flavia de Luce. Now reading the Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, which I have a terrible suspicion might be a literary love letter only for me: literary Harriets, a nod to Harriet the Spy herself (perhaps not on purpose, but still…), references to tea, and to pie, and literary allusions, and libraries to get lost in, plus she has a bike called Gladys. When I used to have a bike called Gladys, pink with a basket when we lived in Japan. Anyway, the connections are uncanny, delightful, and maybe Alan Bradley and I are long-lost somethings. The book is wonderful. I’m zipping through it and will be posting a review in days to come.
January 20, 2010
Books in Motion #2
Today was a girl in her twenties, carrying a shoulder bag with a picture of a golden retriever puppy on it, racing across Bloor Street on foot and then heading south on Robert Street. Didn’t even stop to talk, and all the while she had her nose stuck in a copy of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne as if her life depended on it, and maybe it did.
January 19, 2010
Family Literacy ALL WEEK LONG
Next Wednesday (January 27th) is Family Literacy Day, but we’re turning it into a week-long celebration here at Pickle Me This. Stay tuned for lots of children’s literature love, including an interview, a party and a fieldtrip. Check out their website to find an event where you can take part, or register your own.
January 19, 2010
Plenty of novels to choose from
“As with most [Lorrie] Moore characters, her dialogue– witty, allusive, never merely expository– is less a reflection of how real people speak than how they should. (This is sometimes said as a criticism of Moore, but it shouldn’t be. For readers who prefer their narrators to be drearily realistic mediocrities, there are plenty of novels to choose from).” –Deborah Friedell, “The Family That Slays Together” (review of The Gate at the Stairs) in the London Review of Books, 19 November 2009.
January 18, 2010
Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE 2
I’m going to be reading Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat in just a book or two, which I’m looking forward to, particularly to seeing how another collection of linked stories compares to Century. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this kind of exercise is having to compare books that are worlds apart, and yet it is looking for commonalities that opens up all kinds of avenues that might not otherwise be explored. It is definitely, I think, a worthwhile exercise.
Though it’s going to be tough– last year, when I read the Canada Reads books, at least I had the benefit of hating one book, and not being terribly impressed by two others, which made deciding my favourite not altogether difficult. Probably my feelings towards this year’s picks are going to be a little more passionate, and rankings will be infinitely more brutal to decide.
My other updates are fairly close to home– my husband is currently reading and loving Moody Food. This week, my mom has read How Happy to Be and Wild Geese, and was pretty crazy about the latter. Steven W. Beattie dares to offer a bit of support to Ray Smith’s Century with a wonderful comment on my review. Century champion Dan Wells’ responds to my Century reaction. And I know some other marvelous readers with the Canada Reads Independently stack just ready to be delved into; are you one of them?
If you’re reading along, do email me your reactions to the books and I’ll include them in the weekly updates, or leave a comment on the blog. And stay tuned for details of how to vote for your favourite Canada Reads Independently pick to decide who comes out on top.
