September 16, 2010
9 Tips for the Book Blogger in your life
I’m going to feign me some authority now, because this October marks ten years since I started blogging, and also because CBC Books so kindly just included me in their list of “Book Blogs We Appreciate”. This on the occasion of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, because apparently it’s been 52 weeks since the last one, and I thought that since I appreciate book bloggers too, I might impart a little bit of what I’ve learned in my career as a world-famous, would-be pickler. Feel free to chime in and let me know any I got wrong, or any you think I missed.
1) Book bloggers are not unpaid substitutes for publicity people or literary critics (and see here for an interesting piece on book blogging as unpaid labour). We are readers, and this is the best thing about us (and see here for a talk I once gave on this very subject, and Virginia Woolf’s quote about the responsibilities of the common reader: “The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work”).
You do have a responsibility– take it seriously. But also, don’t take yourself too seriously.
2) In line with the first point, our obligation to the publishers that send us free books is to be the best and most honest readers we can be. This can be difficult– initially, I found making contacts with publishing people a bit overwhelming, and this was all happening as I was still finding my feet as a reader. I think some of my early reviews were too generous, though perhaps hindsight will always have that effect. But it took me a while to get confidence in my own opinions, to understand that while publicists are just as concerned as I am with fostering a strong literary culture, they’ve also got a product to sell. Our priorities are not always exactly the same, but that is okay. You’ve just got to know what your own are.
3) We have to buy books. Lots of books. Free books aside, if we don’t buy books, who will? Buy new books, and used books. Shop at Chapters if it’s the only show in your town, but if it isn’t, shop somewhere else. Buy books from small presses, buy poetry. Buy translations. I once read a quote by Annie Dillard regarding karma, and the obligation to buy new hardcovers if you ever hope to make money from the writing life yourself, and I think she’s right. If fostering a strong literary culture is what you’re after, buy lots of books (at full price!). If you are broke, then buy just one.
4) Accept free books with discrimination. It is expensive for publishers to ship books to us, so we’re doing not them a favour by receiving a book we have no intention of reading. Also, accept free books with discrimination because your time is valuable, and why read something that you’re not interested in? And because one person’s house can only hold so many books, and eventually, your postman will hate you.
5) Original content!! Don’t copy text from the publisher’s website– write about the book in your own words. Don’t merely recap literary gossip– what is your own particular take? And if you don’t have a take, the world won’t end because it’s lacking your two cents. You don’t have to write about what everybody else is writing about. What interests you? Write well, and write long (but not too long). And aim to be a better writer all the time.
6) Read an author or a book first before you agree to take part in promotions. Don’t be afraid to say no if the author or book is not your thing, or is not in keeping with your blog’s focus. We should aspire to mean everything we write on our blogs.
7) We should all blog like nobody is looking, if only because very often, nobody will be. We should write only to satisfy ourselves, so that the writing is inherently worth the trouble, and also because that kind of writing has a passion that shows.
8) Avoid taking the link bait! Very often, desperate newspapers will write terrible articles that insult us and ours in an effort to enrage us. They don’t actually mean what they’re saying– they just want hits from the links you post, but don’t lower yourself. Only link to awesome.
9) And along those lines, make your blog a portal rather than a virtual brick wall.
August 19, 2010
Sometimes just laziness
Hmm. I’ve written before about how much I love recurring secondary characters throughout an author’s works, which creates the sense of a self-contained universe with millions of tiny whirling lives that I’m privy to glimpses of– in books by Margaret Drabble, and Barbara Pym. But how interesting then to read in a letter from Pym to Philip Larkin: “With me it’s sometimes just laziness– if I need a casual clergyman or anthropologist I just take one from an earlier book. Perhaps really one should take such a very minor character that only the author recognises it, like a kind of superstition or a charm.”
July 30, 2010
The Proust Questionnaire
For my entire life, I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me The Proust Questionnaire, and so you can imagine my joy when Open Book Toronto came calling. Read my answers here!
July 27, 2010
Books I am taking away
All right, I have settled on the books I am taking away with me next week on vacation, none of which I’m reading for any reason except for pleasure (hooray!). And yes, I am being too optimistic with the amount of reading I expect to get done (because there will be swimming, and canoeing, and Scrabble, and… no other distractions. Oh, except Harriet). But can you imagine if I happened to get through all the books, and there was nothing next to turn to?
I am taking The Millstone by Margaret Drabble, because I love the Drabble and reread one of hers every summer, and have chosen to reread this one because someone loved its literary baby. And to read for the first time, Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith, A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym, Darwin’s Bastards by Zsuszi Gartner (ed), and At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman.
July 25, 2010
What I expected
Harriet (aged 14 months) likes teacups, Miffy, and books, and so my job here is basically done. And though she’s changing all the time (starting to walk, starting to talk!), her recent engagement with books has been particularly fascinating. She’s started to make real connections between the books we read and the actual world, pointing out dogs within pages as she does on the sidewalk. When we pull out Hand Hand Finger Thumb, she goes to get her own drum off her shelf so she can play along with the monkeys. We’re rereading The House at Pooh Corner at the moment, and she points up at her mobile when she hears Pooh’s or Piglet’s name. When we read Kisses Kisses Baby-O by Sheree Fitch, and get to the “slurpy, burpy” page, she starts pointing to her breastfeeding pillow. When we read Ten Little Fingers, Ten Little Toes, she shows us all the appropriate digits. Tonight when we read Goodnight Gorilla (on the occasion of a trip to the zoo) she went insane, but I think that was only because she was tired.
It’s all very exciting though, partly because there was once a time when Harriet was about as engaging as a wall. But mostly because I love books and she seems to like them too, and they’re such a wonderful thing for us to enjoy together. It’s the one of the few illusions I had pre-motherhood that has turned out exactly as I’d expected.
July 24, 2010
The extended lives of books
As I’ve previously complained, the worst part of being a fan of Barbara Pym is that her books are hard to come by. Most new bookstores don’t stock a big selection, and the used bookstores don’t either because Barbara Pym is not disposable and people who own her books usually have to die (or be put into a home) in order to be parted with them. Such a parting precisely the way I managed to add six of her novels my library this morning.
No, I didn’t have to murder any little old ladies, and the one in question is still alive, but she’s reached her “put into a home” years. The contents of her home for sale around the corner from my house, and her books! In alphabetical order! All the novelists that I like best (and then some). I picked up two more Elizabeth Bowen books too, Silent Spring (which I’ve read and loved), What Maisie Knew to reread and The Wings of the Dove for the very first time. And Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. All paperbacks, and therefore fifty cents each.
I’m currently reading The Yellow Lighted Bookshop and just finished the bit about the long, long lives of books, and how they’re recycled like almost no other object. I think that Mary Hackney would be pleased to know that her books (and the various scraps of paper she left within them) are going to another good home where they’re sure to be alphabetized.
I picked up The Complete Works of Shakespeare further down the street. It was sitting on the roof of a car. I know the etiquette for books in boxes on the sidewalk (though you do have to watch it– someone might be moving) but not for books sitting on the roofs of cars. So I made up my own rule, and it was “Yoink”. Which might be another case of bibliokleptomania.
Oh well.
July 23, 2010
To get to Faulkner, start with Nancy Drew
“Parents didn’t have to read the New York Review of Books or James Joyce, and they didn’t have to make their kids read Treasure Island or Greek Myths. Parents simply had to read for themselves, and to make sure there were kids’ books in the house. Children had only to see that reading was something adults did for pleasure and, following this example, would begin to read on their own.
…What were her most important books? Nancy Drew mysteries, Gone With the Wind, and a hulking anthology, Twenty Five Tales of the Weird and Supernatural. Not Faulkner, not Proust, but Nancy Drew; the first rungs on the ladder are often the most daring. To get to Faulkner, start with Nancy Drew. Or books about horses. Books by Kurt Vonnegut, or Ayn Rand, or A Wrinkle in Time, or On the Road, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Goosebumps. It’s entirely possible that some of tomorrow’s voracious readers will cite the Harry Potter novels as important, but just as many might cite a novel not found in every house on the planet.”–From The Yellow Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee
July 5, 2010
Reading like a pirate
Harriet has learned to point, so now she’s the master of her index finger, and this afternoon she mastered it directly into my left eye. Which means that I’m just now back from the walk-in clinic, after four hours of being last in the queue because everyone else was hemorrhaging. It was the longest uninterrupted stretch of reading I’ve had for as long as I can remember, even better than the two hours I spent waiting for a passport last summer. Someone reading a Nora Roberts novel kept trying to talk to me, but I was hardly going to waste such a precious opportunity on small talk, particularly not with someone reading a Nora Roberts novel. No wonder she was distracted, but I wasn’t, which was wonderful. To read for hours, without stopping, without the compulsion to check my email, lacking the means to do so. Seated in a comfortable chair just made for ophthalmology, never minding the fluorescent lights, or that I periodically had to cover up one eye and read my book like a pirate. I read the second half of Katha Pollitt’s book, and reread (for the fifth time) the first third of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I was actually disappointed when the doctor finally arrived, but not so much when he told me that I was fine. Just a tiny scrape on my cornea, and nothing a little over-the-counter wouldn’t fix, and then it was out of the air-conditioning and and into the heat, and onto the subway to read my way home.
June 28, 2010
Big Brothers
“Inside the bus, he sat several rows ahead of me and I settled behind a girl singing a pop ballad into her collar. Kids around snapped bubble gum and yelled out jokes, but Joseph held himself still, like everything was pelting him. My big brother. What I could see of his profile was classic: straight nose, high cheekbones, black lashes, light-brown waves of hair. Mom once called him handsome, which had startled me, because he could not be handsome, and yet when I looked at his face I could see how each feature was nicely shaped.” — from Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
And it occurs to me that everything I know about big brothers I know from fiction, because I never had a big brother myself. But I want one, because of Rose’s brother Joseph, and Sally J. Freedman’s brother Douglas, and Elaine Risley’s brother Stephen in Cat’s Eye, and Madeleine’s brother Mike in The Way the Crow Flies. Gawky boys in ill-fitting sweaters who collect things and understand physics. Who are not quite of the world as their sisters are, always just out of reach, whose attention is coveted, elusive. Their protection a kind of talisman. These mysterious boys with pimples and secret girlfriends, twelve-years old and there’s nobody wiser in the world.
June 22, 2010
Important Artifacts 2
I’ve been thinking more about “thingness” as narrative since reading Carin’s comment on my last post (and it was her review that brought me to read Important Artifacts and Personal Property… by the way). She remarked that the hipster aspect of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris’ life together was probably to emphasize its emptiness, that it all looked very slick but was without substance. That a couple can’t build a life together on vintage bathing suits alone. And so Shapton’s text was to be a counter-narrative to the thingness then, making clear what was going on beneath surface? I’m not totally convinced, but it’s an interesting idea to consider.
What I am convinced of, however, and what the book makes clear, is that these glimpses we’re given into other people’s lives (whether by auction catalogues, lit windows or Facebook data) is often so deceiving. Partly because what we glimpse is so contrived, (which is Shapton’s entire point), particularly since social media is such a performance. Because I’m all too aware of the view of my window from the sidewalk, because I’ve actually spent my whole life cultivating such a view, but you’re never really going to know what happens when I pull the blinds down, are you?
Motherhood is the best example of this, particularly its presentation via social media. I was devastated last year when my daughter was born, and I found my feelings in the days afterwards so far from the obligatory “Kerry is totally and utterly blissed out and in love with her gorgeous new daughter” status update. Everybody writes statuses like that, and I absolutely couldn’t, and at that point I didn’t know how many moms were just more capable of lying than I was (or of being “blissed out in love” in addition to having a pretty terrible time, but the terrible time itself they never cared to mention). All all of us have a “just given birth, baby on the chest” photo somewhere in our Facebook stash, but it so doesn’t begin to tell my story. We let it stand in for the story, because it’s more comfortable that way, but that doesn’t even begin to stand in for the real thing.
Of course, it’s not supposed to. Online anywhere is not the best place for private life anyway, and there is something to be said for keeping some things to yourself. But I must say that I was fooled by the Facebook motherhood narrative. The blissed out love, the dreamy photos, the quiet baby asleep in a bouncy chair– it did not convey the effort it took to get that baby to sleep. The effort it took to get that mom out of her pyjamas. I felt so incredibly inadequate for not being able to put myself back together as easily as my FB friends had, for being thoroughly miserable when I should have been blissed out in love. I had been expecting blissed out love because I’d perused so many of the pictures. And how could a picture lie?
But they do. They don’t just withhold– they totally lie.
There is no longer such thing as a candid shot, if there even ever was.
