December 7, 2007

Now reading finally

I’ve been a bit deranged lately, and Stuart says I’m missing fiction. He keeps trying to foist novels upon me because I’m annoying to live with, but I am bloody minded and as I resolved to read six non-fiction books in a row, surely I will. I am not really convinced the derangement has to do with the non-fic anyway– more instead with Seasonal Mania (which I do seem to come down with every single season).

Anyway, finally, after ages and ages, I am reading Guns Germs and Steel. It has been sitting on my bedside for ages– for so long in fact that the person who lent it to me (Curtis) moved away months ago. 56 pages in, I am enthralled and learning so very much about things I can’t believe I don’t know or never thought to ask. Today as I read it on my lunch break, two strangers stopped me to tell me what a great book it was. Which was strange, really, because the only other time that has ever happened to me was way back when I was reading The Selfish Gene and nobody would leave me alone with it. Strange because you wouldn’t think these unliterary books would be the ones to inspire such bookish enthusiasm. What to make of that?

I am wary though, as both people who stopped to rave about Guns Germs and Steel admitted they hadn’t been able to get all the way through it. And both Curtis and Stuart said pretty much the same, though they enjoyed it still a great deal. Doesn’t bode well though, does it? What if nobody has ever finished this book ever? And as I’m so bloody-minded, what if I end up reading it for the rest of my life?

December 3, 2007

Too much totalitarianism

This weekend was Christmas parties and bridal showers, the wonderful Bite Noodles and Rice, snow falling outside, and then some rain. Christmas cards sent, decs up, The History Boys, corn muffins and wine. I am very distracted by a variety of things, and wish the days were longer.

Book trauma again– I have been way too immersed of late in totalitarian regimes. Now reading Villa Air Bel by Rosemary Sullivan, and I keep spouting totalitarian tidbits when I’m out in public, which is a good way to kill a mood (or at least a good one). My next non-fic pick is The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasure of Obituaries, which, though it is about death, hopefully will be lighter? Villa Bel Air is really fascinating though, and look for a review maybe Tuesday.

August 9, 2007

Claudia's room

I wish I could say that I read well as a child. That I not only precociously toted Shakespeare around, but actually read him. That I delighted in the classics: Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. I definitely regret throwing a tantrum the year when I received Swallows and Amazons for my birthday, instead of The Truth About Stacey. I did manage some good contemporary fiction: Jean Little, Judy Blume, Norma Klein, Berniece Thurman Hunter, Betty Miles, Marilyn Sachs. And of course there was LM Montgomery, and I covetted anything at all with her name attached. But in general, my taste in books was crap. If I have children I will have to work very hard to remember that bad reading is not necessarily a lifelong affliction. Archie comics were once my heart’s desire, and now I have an MA in English lit, so anyone can turn around. If I could get over The Babysitters Club, there is hope for us all. And just to show how far I’ve come, I give you this blog, in which a young librarian revisits the BSC novels she devoured in her youth. Her reviews are terribly funny, the books are atrocious, and the blog is addictive.

Thanks to Leah for the link.

Update: In related news, everything we ever learned from Judy Blume is profiled here.

July 23, 2007

Things fall apart

Joan Didion is not best read, I find, when one’s recent grasp of good sense has been tenuous. Or perhaps she is best read in such a state, but then the reader is not so great to be around after. As I should know, having spent the last day with me. Neuroticism is contagious, but then Didion’s writing is so absolutely fine-picked and lovely, it seems a shame to let it go to waste. And so I’ve been rereading Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and have been immersed in that world of thirty years ago where “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” It seems it’s same as it ever was, and I don’t know if such a constant should be reassuring or otherwise. And I am thinking differently about “On Keeping a Notebook” than I did, and “remembering the me that used to be” seems less important that it used to. And all the California bits, which seem more pressing having read Where I was From.

(“You see I still have the scenes, but I could no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.”)

Next up I will reread A Big Storm Knocked It Over, which, hopefully, will put me back in my mind.

May 29, 2007

Summer on the Shelf

I mentioned before the psychological problems books can cause me– when I read Fight Club and became psychotic, and how prairie fiction puts the weight of the world on my shoulders. Here’s a new one, though I can’t blame it on the text. Remember a few weeks back when I said I was going to read Summer? I really had the best intentions, and even went and picked it off the shelf. So far so good, and I opened up the book. I was surprised by the dedication on the inside cover, by a friend who was once a best friend, and is now a friend no longer. I had forgotten the book had come from her, and to read her words and how sad they’ve come to be with time was positively devastating. I am not so much in the habit of losing friends, you see, and blantant proof of that loss was hard to take. And so I put the book back on the shelf where I suspect it will remain.

April 30, 2007

Summer

Myself was grappling with the problem of Tolstoy, and how I want to read Anna Karenina, but just not now while I’m returning to the world of 9-5 (which is going to cut into my reading), and I’ve got a too many other books I am dying to read to devote myself to such a big one. Which I guess makes it sound like I don’t really care if I read Anna Karenina at all, which also might be true. But the great thing about self-discipline is that you can give it a break just to keep things fun. And so I am totally cheating for my May Classic. I’m going to read Summer by Edith Wharton, which is so tiny and not even old enough to actually qualify for my Classics Challenge, but oh well. I was inspired to read it after reading about Hermione Lee’s new Wharton bio in the LRB. (As an aside, predictably I am obsessed with the LRB, which so far has led me to read with fascination about things in which I have little to no interest– case in point Colm Tóibín on Beckett’s Irish Actors). And so that is that, which is all she said.

April 19, 2007

Take another chance on the prairies

I’m starting to read The Horseman’s Graves today and I’m feeling nervous, which you might understand if you’re aware of the problems I’ve had with prairie fiction. Prairie fiction makes me absolutely crazy.

However I was somewhat reassured by this (rave) review of the book from The Globe this past weekend. Particularly by this bit: “Though the geographical, cultural and temporal setting of The Horseman’s Graves might generate comparisons to early 20th-century practitioners of “prairie realism,” Baker displays little of their inclination to romance, nor does she set up the prairie landscape and community to represent oppressive forces to be succumbed to or transcended. Her judicious plotting avoids parable and object lesson, and insists that the story of these people in this place is worth telling for its own sake.”

I do hope so. And I suspect my long-suffering husband hopes so too.

April 1, 2007

Chick-Lit/Lit-Fic Showdown

In this post from a couple of weeks back, I took offence at this kind of attempt to blur the chick-lit/lit fic divide. By all means chick lit deserves to thrive, but the divide is important, and essential. All lit is not created alike, said I, and when the plots of two books from different sides of the tracks are so similar, here is a chance to pinpoint what distinguishes a work of chick-lit from one of literary fiction. And I suspected the difference was language primarily, so I read both books to be sure.

The literary book was Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World, and I’m going to call the other book MVM. You can find the book’s actual title by going back to my previous post, but I don’t think it’s fair for me to identify it and slag it off for being nothing more than what it purports to be– chick-lit. Because the author of MVM makes no attempt to blur the lit divide. She publishes under an exclusively chick-lit imprint after all, and the genre seems to have been good to her.

Upon first glance MVM does bear a resemblance to The Post-Birthday World. In the first book, character G finds herself inhabiting two realities as she is unable to make the choice between marrying her boyfriend in Arizona, and pursuing her career in New York. Somehow she gets both options (through a wish upon a star, I believe), and hilarity ensues. In PBW, at the choice of to kiss another man or not to kiss, Irina’s life splits in two and the reader follows each outcome in alternating chapters. As she is unaware of her dual realities, very little hilarity ensues, and as I wrote in my review post, what we have instead is an examination of intimacy, and the sombre reality that life is generally trying no matter which way you cut it.

I think it is unfair to compare MVM to PBW, but it wasn’t my idea. And yes, my hypothesis that language is the great divide between these two novels is partially true. Partially, because that divide is a veritable grand canyon, but nonetheless. Lionel Shriver’s book is a tad overwritten in places, and I did come away with a list of fourteen words I had to look up in the dictionary afterwards. Some of them were very good: post-prandial. Whereas in MVM the author does not rely so much upon words to emphasize ideas, but rather prefers to repeat phrases, in the manner of “He’s funny. He’s really really funny.” Or preface unbelievable ideas with “Hello?”, as in “The women make brunch while the men watch sports on TV. Hello, stereotype?” Which brings me to the question marks. Character G talks in permanent unspeak. Reading her first person narrative is sort of like eavesdropping upon the soliloquy of a rambling idiot.

There aren’t a lot of metaphors in this book, but here’s one: “I close my eyes, squeezing out the annoyance like that last drop of toothpaste”. G is able to dismiss the challenges of her new life in New York with a simple “Whatever”. She uses a similar ease to deal with the fact she is now inhabiting two alternate universes, consulting wikipedia to learn a bit about “quantum mechanics (whatever the hell that is)”. She learns that there are many theories of alternate universes and therefore her own strange reality might have some precedent. She says, “You can’t rule out something just because it can’t be proven, can you? There are like a million religions and none of them can be proven!”

The PBW is quite unsentimentally full of sex, description and analysis, while MVM tends to gloss over it. I will give you a sex scene verbatim: “Afterward we go to bed and I seduce him immediately. ‘That was fun,’ he says afterward.” Those two “afterwards” and an “immediately” in two sentences give you some sort of an idea of this books pacing, and the consideration allotted to its scenes. We have such devices as “As I sat waiting for my appointment, I thought about my entire life up till now just to get my reader up to speed without having to impart these details subtly”. We learn what G’s future mother-in-law thinks about her because the woman keeps expounding on G’s flaws when G is standing just around the corner. We know the mother-in-law has bad taste because she is partial to orange. We know that characters are surprised when their jaws drop.

For the first two third of this book, I hated it, and I very nearly abandoned it except I thought maybe it got better. It didn’t, really. I did like G’s “psycho roomate” however, who was very funny, but hardly a developed character and her tricks wore thin eventually. I also liked the plot twist as G’s maid-of-honour in one reality starts dating her ex-boyfriend in the other reality, and G’s resentment bubbles into both worlds. However she only deals with this by ignoring her maid-of-honour altogether, which doesn’t exactly make for compelling fiction. Oh, and the end? Hello, spoilers ahead! In the ends G learns that you can have it all and lives happily ever after. And (presumably) loses her best-friend/maid of honour.

This next paragraph would be diatribe on how truly crap is MVM, but I think I’ve made my point. PBW took me four days to read, and inspired me to think about the nature of choices, the possibility of destiny, different kinds of love and fulfillment, and what it means to share a life. I read MVM last evening and it made me depressed that such trite can pass for lit, chick or otherwise. As I said in my previous post, readers should demand better of themselves and their books.

March 25, 2007

Prairie Fiction should come with a warning label

I had book trauma this weekend. I don’t mean this lightly. As I have mentioned before, reading prairie fiction sends me into despair. Which I always forget about until I’ve nearly finished the book and am filled with deep sadness for the human condition. And I never stopped to think that Obasan is actually prairie fiction too, as well being, well, Obasan. Which, when read following my recent Burmese prison tale rendered the world pretty bleak. And the sky was the colour of paper, and I kept staring out the window pondering the meaning of it all. So in other words I was in dire need of a good slap, and around people far too kind to administer one. Luckily life got better.

First, I’m now reading Orphan Island by Rose Macaulay which is a delightful and interesting romp. You can read the 1925 review from Time Magazine here (ain’t the tinternet grand?) I’ve not read Macaulay’s novels before, though her Pleasure of Ruins is the most beautiful book I own, and I loved her essay on English “Catchwords and Claptrap” (which you can read here). I am reading this novel on the recommendation of Decca who acknowledged it in one of her letters as a favourite. It’s simply lovely.

And next up is The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver (who I hope to go see read at Harbourfront next week).

Second, I watched Stranger Than Fiction last night, and I can’t think of the last time I enjoyed a movie so much. And it’s a bookish film, but I watched it with two boys who are a little less bookish than I, and they liked it as much as I did. I found it purely enjoyable from start to finish, I didn’t get bored once, and part of the reason I was so engaged was I had no idea how the plot would sort itself out. But it did perfectly, and all of us were so engrossed in the story that when we feared one character would meet an untimely (or timely, in this case, I do suppose) demise, we were out of our minds with agony. And I like a movie that allows you to care so much. Lately we’ve renting movies last minute with little selection, and then yelling at the screen begging the characters to off themselves so we wouldn’t have to watch them any longer. So it was very nice to feel differently, and of course the bookishness was ace. Six thumbs up.

The sky is still the colour of paper, but my outlook has greatly improved.