December 29, 2012

Treasures and others

I’ve decided to remain unabashed about my propensity to read only/mainly female authors, at least until most of the literary world clues in to the fact that they’ve got the same prejudice but just in opposite. And now, apropos of, um, something, a few highlights from the Globe and Mail’s year-end book recommendations list, which I always enjoy and has found me some treasures in years past.

From Robert Hough: “One of the best is Any Human Heart, by William Boyd, all the more so because the central figure is male – a growing rarity in an industry that falls all over itself trying to please female readers.” Charming.

Miriam Toews sells me on Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, though I suspect Miriam Toews could sell me on anything.

Sarah Polley reads while breastfeeding! And while she recommends we read Anton Piatigorsky’s The Iron Bridge, which I really do want to read, but she notes we should wait ’til baby is weaned: “Generally it’s best to save books about how dictators become dictators for times when you are not lactating – this is something no one told me.”

From Ian Baruma: “Alas, this left little time for contemporary fiction, most of which seems to pale in terms of daring and ambition compared to Melville or Joyce…” Yawn. Though both he and Laura Penny recommend Moby Dick, and my feeling is that Laura Penny never steers one far wrong.

I loved Katia Grubisic’s recommendation of Patrick Warner’s Double Talk, which I’ve been interested in and now I absolutely want to read.

And thank goodness for Lisa Moore: “I choose books by Three Wise Women…” Zadie Smith, which I already know is great,Christine Pountney, which I’m getting a feeling about, and you can always trust a reader who is recommend Elizabeth Bowen, oh yes, you can. I also think that if I spent the rest of my life only reading what Lisa Moore told me to read that I would probably be all right.

And Martin Levin was good enough to recommend one book by a woman, “the great Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter,” which I totally want to read now and Gardam is great indeed, though I am beginning to suspect that Jane Gardam is Martin Levin’s go-to woman writer (at least when conversation necessitates), what Woolf is to so many others, but at least he’s read her.

December 12, 2012

Book picks at Vitamin Daily

I’ve been recommending books left, right and centre lately (which doesn’t really make a change, does it?). Check out “Book Report: 5 picks for winter break” at Vitamin Daily for a particularly delightful selection.

November 19, 2012

Reading in the First Trimester

I have so much trouble reading when I’m 6-12 weeks pregnant. As I’ve done it twice now, I can say for a fact that I am the problem and it’s not necessarily the books I encounter, all of which seem to me to be absolutely intolerable. In my first trimester of pregnancy, I completely lack the patience required to overlook the (often obligatory) parts of any book that are intolerable, and understand its fundamental goodness. I can’t read a book that’s very long either, because eventually it becomes associated with nausea and even the thought of the book makes me want to puke. I have a similar relationship with Calgary– every time I go there, I’m 6 or 8 weeks pregnant, and I can’t even think about it anymore. And with Cloud Atlas, whose first pages I read in Calgary and therefore never again.

Another book I can’t handle is Cybele Young’s A Few Bites, which is so so good! But the book came into my life when I was six weeks pregnant and when Ferdie is presented with his lunch of broccoli, carrot sticks, and ravioli, my stomach heaves. I can no longer eat broccoli, which is bizarre because I’ve always loved it, but no longer, temporarily I hope. We’ve had to ask our organic food delivery to stop bringing it because every week I threw it out.

There is Nicola Barker’s The Yips, which I bought in Calgary but Calgary was not even the problem. The biggest problem I think is that it was not as good as Burley Cross Postbox Theft or Darkmans, and I was so unhappy (and feeling sick) while I was reading it. There were a few weeks where I hated everything, and not just books, but then I started reading A Very Large Soul: Selected Letters of Margaret Laurence, and began to feel better. Correspondance and short stories were the trick I guess, fragments, and perhaps this was why I was so elated to discover Isabel Huggan’s The Elizabeth Stories–finally a book to fall in love with. And the Susans anthology. And slowly, slowly, I was happy to find that I could love books again. (I am not sure that Calgary will recover so easily.)

So yes, this is a round-about way of saying that after being the first woman ever to have a baby three and a half years ago, I am going to pioneer the act of having a second at the end of May. Literary trauma aside, I’ve had a relatively easy first trimester and have been so grateful for Harriet’s mornings at school so that I’ve still been able to get my work done. Grateful too that we dragged out Harriet’s napping through the weeks when I needed it most. Also that emotionally, I’ve have a much easier time of it this time around–with a three year old running around, less apparent miracles are easier to believe in. I have faith this time, and it’s so refreshing not be crazy (though we’ll see how long the sanity lasts. In my experience, it comes in limited quantities only).

I am excited and terrified, and hoping that everyone who promised it would be easier second-time around wasn’t lying. I am really excited for Harriet to become a sister. And most of all, I just feel enormously lucky, that this decision whether or not to have a second child was one we had the freedom and good fortune to make for ourselves.

November 2, 2012

Where my tea rests

I don’t have a desk. In another life, I worked in a closet, but now the closet is stuffed with baby paraphernalia and there is no room for me and mine. Which isn’t bad, in fact it’s fine. For the past three years, I’ve made the western half of our couch my working home, which you’d be able to tell if you ever sat on it. The springs are shot. My seat is right beside the tall bookcase which houses authors A through H, with a table nearby to pile books and set my laptop on. Often, my husband is situated nearby too, which makes for an optimum working environment. I like it also because I get to work whilst lying down.

What I appreciate most truly, however, is the place where I rest my tea. From my Random House mug, of course, because what’s a point of a teacup if it isn’t enormous? But not so enormous that it can’t perch exactly within arm’s reach, right beside Anne Enright and Alice Thomas Ellis. I think my tea keeps really good company– the gorgeous spines of my Anne Fadiman books, and even Deborah Eisenberg. It’s always right there when I need it. But not so near within my reach that my flailing arms have ever knocked it over. Yet. Knock on (bookcase) wood.

October 14, 2012

On Barbara Gowdy, cut-out cookies, and other decapitations

Over the weekend, I read Barbara Gowdy’s We So Seldom Look on Love, which readers and writers I admire have been talking about for years. In a collection full of devastating stories, I was most devastated by “Lizards”, in which a woman’s very tall lover decapitates her baby daughter by carrying her on his shoulders and walking too close to a ceiling fan. For some reason, I thought this was an essential plot point to share with my family, including those among us who are 3.

Harriet, whom I’ve accidentally given a fascination for all things macabre, couldn’t get enough of this story. “What happened next?” she asked. “Well,” I said. “The baby died. Her head fell off.” And no, it couldn’t have been put back on. Harriet eventually suggested that they should probably get a cutting board and cut off its arms and legs for good measure. And then we decided it would be an excellent idea to bake some gingerbread men.

Well, not gingerbread, exactly. We made “chewy oatmeal” cut-out cookies, but we call them gingerbread men anyway. Even the women. Their chewiness was part of their appeal, but it also meant that the men were partial to losing limbs and that the day’s focus on decapitation continued. Stuart and I surreptitiously gobbled up the casualties, which meant that by the time the cookies were all decorated and Harriet was permitted to have her “just one”, we were about ready to be sick.

Incidentally, this version of The Gingerbread Man story is our favourite. As with Gowdy, its author doesn’t shy away from darkness, but points out that a cookie getting eaten is far from the worst way a story could end.

September 5, 2012

All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuzsi Gartner

Last week, I couldn’t focus, and suffered that “couldn’t get into it” reading affliction that you hear about so often. I don’t know if the problem was the books’ or mine, but regardless, there was no hope until I turned to my to-be-read/not-new-releases shelf and picked up All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuzsi Gartner (whose Better Living Through Plastic Explosives had been so admired by both me and Giller Prize judges last year). And suddenly, the world was steady again.

Except, of course, that it most definitely wasn’t. As with her second, Gartner’s first book of short stories is rife with explosions, decay and unsteady earth beneath our feet. It’s that same dystopian Vancouver which looks suspiciously like reality (and sometimes it’s also Toronto). There is weirdness (a woman swims in her mother’s womb with a fetus who’s a brother long ago stillborn) , and humour (another woman programs a film festival and has to content with terrible would-be filmmakers showing up at her door– “I made that film about the dude who goes through all this bad shit and then wakes up and finds out it was all just a dream… Just watch it backwards.”), and violence (when the woman who threatens to set herself on fire if her film isn’t programmed [“Her eyes were a living room of despair, full of mismatched furniture and candles stuck in Chianti bottles, dripping all over the place, a syringe under the wicker chair, a Ouija board on the coffee table.”] follows through with her threat).

It’s possible that short stories were just what I needed, albeit good ones meticulously curated into a seamless collection. A book to sink in and out of, which was about all the attention I could muster at the time. And the vision, the writing! “Lewis worked in a place that looked like a cheese shop but sold soap. A cosmetic deli.” Sentences that jumped off the page, treasures themselves. I also appreciated the many connections between All the Anxious Girls and Better Living, the evolution of Gartner’s preoccupations, how the latter is an extension of the former and they illuminate each other. I’m fascinated in particular with Gartner’s treatment of terrorism, an idea whose definition took on radically new proportions in the time between her books. How has a changing world changed what she’s writing about?

Yesterday, the Giller Prize longlist was revealed, and though people are careful to be polite about these things, the list bowled me over with its unremarkableness. And yes, excellence means different things to different people, and what this prize is all about will change every year depending on the jury in question. But I was disappointed by this list because it’s been a stunning year for Canadian literature and not one of the books I’ve loved best made it into the spotlight. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, I’ll never read any of the nominated books, and no amount of acclaim will ever change that. How glad I am that I know my own mind (and the terrible books that knowledge will same me from!). Though it occurs to me, as it did last year, that perhaps I live too deeply in my own bookish bubble to pay much attention to prize lists anyway. I’m buying books all the time, so I’m not who Giller is trying to woo. Further, I’ve got so many books to be read that I’d be reading into the next year or two with what’s lined up already, so in a way, prize lists are just a distraction. Perhaps it’s a blessing that a list like this is so incredibly easy to tune out.

The point of all this being that there is such tremendous pressure to keep on top of new releases, to read even the books that don’t interest one much. And that tuning out from that buzz can be such a liberation. If any of the Giller longlisted titles are truly for the ages, then I look forward to getting around to them in a decade or so, when it will be like the discovery of something quite precious.

• Check out my Anxious Girls reading list here.

August 9, 2012

On cracking the code of Canadian literary criticism

When I started paying attention to Canada’s literary conversations about five or six years ago, it was quickly evident that I had a whole lot to learn. Until that point, my reading tastes had been determined by prize lists, by what was front and centre at the bookstore, and what the Globe & Mail saw fit to review. I didn’t know that it wasn’t all right to love In the Skin of a Lion or that The Stone Diaries didn’t set every reader swooning. I had no idea of the vast richness of books being published by Canadian small presses like Goose Lane, Anvil and Biblioasis. I still connected House of Anansi to Yorkville hippies. In short, I didn’t have a clue.

So I started taking notes, trying to pin the whole thing down. There was a code, I was beginning to understand, and if only I could get it right. Books with rural settings were bad, and prairie fiction was a crime, I was starting to see. We wanted our books urban. We especially wanted them to be about young men in their twenties. But then it got confusing because it turned out that the prairies were okay as long as they were written by Robert Kroetsch, and even small town fiction about women’s lives were fine as long as it was written by Alice Munro. It got confusing too because it turned out that urban fiction was bad after all, particularly Toronto’s which wasn’t authentically Canadian.

Whether David Adams Richards was okay depended on your point of view, because while he was ticking all the right boxes, he wasn’t ticking them correctly. Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House was a shorthand for all that was wrong with the world. And it turned out that while small press books were really great, small press books were also terrible, and while it was really wonderful that Gaspereau book had won the Giller, did it have to be that Gaspereau book? And who fucking cares about the Giller anyway? You will disdain the Giller. Until your book ends up on its longlist (and not even by popular vote).

Eventually, it became clear that there was no code after all, and that instead we had a whole lot of critics shouting at each other, discussing work in theory, but with no one actually talking about books. That there are as many points of view regarding Canadian Literature and literature in general as there are books themselves, and that is okay. I disagree, however, that all this shouting/debate has made for a healthier literature, mainly because nobody ever listens in a debate, being too busy planning their rebuttal, and the arguments were rarely about reading after all.

It’s such a narrow way to approach literature, to think of it first in terms of themes and tropes. And it’s even narrower when you don’t bother to read the books in question, dismissing them outright based a sentence or two from a publisher’s catalogue. Or because they happen to be set in the past, or on a prairie, or in Toronto, or in a lighthouse, or because people like them, or because women like them (which is usually the worst crime of all for a book to commit).

It may always be 1955 in CanLit, as some say, but I can’t say our sorry excuse for criticism is much more progressive.

July 1, 2012

The seas inside my soul

As a rule, the seas inside my soul are so far from frozen, which is why I always roll my eyes at the Kafka quote about the book as ice-axe. And it occurs to me that while I have no need for an ice-axe, that perhaps I tend to employ my books as paddles, life buoys, fishing nets, and also that what I want from a book more than any other thing is for it to grab my soul and hold it steady for awhile.

June 25, 2012

Summer summer at 49thShelf

I’m in love with the main page of 49thShelf this week, with its Summer Summer list front and centre. Images of docks, beaches, summer reading, barbecues, the Beach Boys and a swing. I’m looking forward to reading Tricia Dower’s Stony River in the next week or so– I enjoyed her first book and interviewed her in 2008. Right now I’m reading Emily Perkins’ The Forrests, which starts slow but becomes enthralling. Also, I received Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl for my birthday, which is my cottage reading set. She’s got blurbs by Kate Atkinson, Kate Christensen and Laura Lippman, which is some pedigree, I think. Can’t wait to be beach-side with this one.

June 24, 2012

On slow-reads, and Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels

I spent most of last week reading Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels upon the recommendation of my book club-mate Patricia, who mentioned it after we’d read Lucky Jim and talked about campus lit. And it is just a coincidence that I’d read it after Sue Sorensen’s A Large Harmonium, which was another campus satire, and also mentioned Patient Griselda, who I’d never even heard of (and which is really a terrible story, actually). It also mentioned Cornelius Agrippa, who I’d read about in Frankenstein, the other book I’ve just finished. And then there were the references and allusions I didn’t get or didn’t pick up on, and there were plenty. But I still enjoyed The Rebel Angels very much, my first Robertson Davies beyond the Fifth Business I read in school. It’s a slow read though, slow to start and packed with detail. And because I’m a notorious speedy reader, it was a bit hard to get used to the pace. To just let myself give into it, to stop thinking that slowness was a problem, or a sign of one. To be patient and realize that I really do have all the time in the world to get through it, that the other books can wait. To realize that this book was demanding time and patience of me, but delivering richness in rewards. And it did.

Whereas Frankenstein, the book I read before it, was a book with a deadline, to be read before our book club meeting last Tuesday. On Saturday evening, when I’d only read 30 pages, it wasn’t really looking likely that I was going to get it read, and so I got down to it. I read most of Frankenstein in 24 hours, and what a joy to get so solidly inside a book, to take it in in almost one gulp, without distractions. Speedy reading can be wonderful.

But yes, there is a place for slowness, for stories that have to steep. I’m grateful to Robertson Davies for reminding me of that.