August 28, 2009

RIPs

Must admit that fateful day that took Farrah and Michael had me rolling my eyes only, but it does seem a bit much that Wednesday saw the deaths of Ted Kennedy, Ellie Greenwich and Dominick Dunne, each of whom meant a lot to me. Kennedy by virtue of being a Kennedy alone, and there was a time in my life when I lapped up Kennedy bios like they were fiction (and they sort of were). I know Ted Kennedy was both a hero and a dastardly villain, but I’m most amazed by a story I once read alluding to about him having sex with a woman in a crowded restaurant. I could find no further details, but it’s the best story I’ve ever heard. As far as I know, Ellie Greenwich got up to no such thing, but her music has been part of the soundtrack to my life (“I met him at the candy store, he turned around and smiled at me. You get the picture?” “Yes, we see.”)

But since we’re talking literature here, let’s focus on Dominick Dunne. Which means we’re not talking literature with a capital L, but I loved his books. When we lived in Japan, we frequented Wantage Books, a used bookshop in Kobe. Wantage Books was an English bookshop, which was rare and wonderful, and we’d buy at least ten books per visit. (It’s odd to remember what a precious commodity readable books were then, and how easy it was to take them for granted again). It was at Wantage where I found Various Miracles, my favourite Carol Shields book, discovered Margaret Drabble, and bought up every Dominick Dunne novel in the store. Stuart and I were obsessed with them, and remember reading them on my train commutes to work, gripping mass-market paperbacks that fit perfectly into my purse. The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, and A Season in Purgatory (speaking of Kennedys), People Like Us, and besides, he was Joan Didion’s brother-in-law, so I felt better about the whole thing.

There was something about the foreigness of our every day surroundings that made Dunne’s novels like a tonic. American, and glamour, and scandal, and intrigue– we devoured it like the books were bad for us, and perhaps they were, but they satisfied. They were delicious. And then I remember, after a string of Dunne novels, reading something else finally and being confused when there was no fil*tio by page three. I’ve since adjusted back, but I’ll always remember how perfect his books were at the time.

August 14, 2009

Children's Writer Mem Fox

Our next-door neighbours were having a clear-out this week, and found a copy of a book they thought we might be interested in. Harriet, You’ll Drive Me Wild! is a delightful little picture book about a pesky little girl and a mom who loses her cool. Spoiler alert: happy endings in sight. We love it, and I’m quite happy that through this book, I’ve discovered its author, Mem Fox too. She’s an Australian writer of 33 children’s books and a literacy educator as well. Her excellent website features her full bibliography, biographical information, and lots of other fun stuff, including articles and addresses she’s written for parents and teachers about promoting a passion for reading, including “Ten read-aloud commandments”, “If I Were Queen of the World (…on how to read before school)”, and “Winning the War Between Books and Television” (which acknowledges that television is an excellent medium for turning children onto books). Fascinating stuff, all of it, and because I’m so glad to have found it, I wanted to share it with you.

August 10, 2009

T is for Toronto books

Oh, no one tagged me, but I want to play too. To join Rebecca and Kate in compiling their top Toronto books. I’m not sure I can come up with fifteen, but this is the best I can do off the top of my head. (Update: Fourteen. I’ll do my best to think of another. Update Update as inspired by Rebecca: YES! BOOKY! Update 3 see below).

1) A Big City ABC by Alan Moak: I have the original edition of this book, with Exhibition Stadium instead of the SkyDome under “B is for baseball”. And I is for island ferry indeed. The illustrations are beautiful, and I remember spending considerable time examining them closely when I was small. (This book was re-released in 2002, and will be coming out in paperback in October).

2) The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood: I love the depictions of Ward’s Island (I is for island ferry, see above) especially, but the entire book captures the city’s neighbourhoods brilliantly. I was also quite fond of the university setting when I was getting ready to become a student in Toronto myself.

3) Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood: Shows the fringes of the city back when the fringes were newly constructed bungalows in a sea of mud up around St. Clair Avenue. And the ravines! And then revisits to find the city changed by the 1980s, with grey skyscrapers that were like tombstones.

4) Headhunter by Timothy Findley: For a course I took called “Reading Toronto” in university, I read works including some Morley Callaghan, Fugitive Pieces, Alias Grace, The Swing in the Garden by Hugh Hood, and this book. I’m not cheating by stocking this list with my course syllabus, but Headhunter has to be included as it’s stayed with me ever since I read it, particularly the scenes in the Toronto Reference Library.

5) Stunt by Claudia Dey: I is once again for island ferry, and P is for Parkdale. Eugenia Ledoux’s narrative is Toronto as an underwater dream.

6) Muriella Pent by Russell Smith: The reason I ever took a walk to Wychwood Park, Smith’s most recent novel is Russell Smith the novelist coming into his own. Also notable for Brian Sillwell’s basement apartment.

7) Helpless by Barbara Gowdy: Once again, the neighbourhoods. Here is Cabbagetown, the dodgy end, portrayed as a place where people live and where community happens.

8) Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig: Toronto underground, in the deepest ravines and down in the subway’s depths. Helwig creates an unfamiliar city out of Toronto in the grip of panic.

9) When I Was Young and In My Prime by Alayna Munce: P is still for Parkdale, and for poetry too, Munce’s poem/fiction hybrid an extraordinarily rendered feat. Toronto stands for onward and away as the narrator grapples with her grandparents’ decline.

10) The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper: Terrifying! And you could plot it on a map, which is Terrifying! doubly.

11) How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad: Here is great urban fiction, undeniably set in its place. Which is Toronto ’round the turn of this century as lived in by a media/culture/cool savvy journalist who’s less savvy about where her life is headed.

12) Minus Time by Catherine Bush: I found this to be an imperfect novel with so many perfect components, one of which is its depiction of Toronto. Particularly a Toronto not-too-long-ago already lost, the Robert Street tennis courts/ice rink which had been the home of the narrator’s now-demolished childhood home. And not just because it’s around the corner from my house.

13) In The Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje: I know it’s cliched, we’re supposed to hate this book, and though I’ve loved it less with each reread, it still makes the Bloor Street Viaduct magical to me, as well as the majestic RC Harris Water Treatment Plant (which I despair they no longer offer tours of).

14) Unless by Carol Shields: Much of it takes place in a fictional small town north of the city, but the heart of it is set on the corner of Bloor and Bathurst, just across from Honest Ed’s.

15) The Booky Trilogy by Bernice Thurman Hunter

15.5) Jonathan Cleaned Up and Then He Heard a Sound (or blackberry subway jam) by Robert Munsch

August 7, 2009

Now reading/not reading/etc.

I am now reading Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and I’m loving it, loving it, loving it. The “book reports” it contains remarkable, not just because Lizzie Skurnick indulges in good nostalgia, but because of the subtext she unearths the second time around– her treatment of classics, including Daughters of Eve, Harriet the Spy, Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade, and The Cat Ate My Gymsuit demonstrate something wildly substantial (and subversive) going on in YA literature back in the day.

I’ve not managed to read through a single magazine/periodical since my daughter was born, and so I’ve got a stack beside me on my desk right now and no clue when I’m going to get to them. (FYI: my “desk” is now an end-table beside my gliding chair in the living room, which actually works out quite handily.) There are so many books and so little time that periodicals hardly seem to factor into the equation. I should probably make a new blog label called “Not Reading” and then I could write about it all the time.

Last Friday I had to spent two hours waiting at the Passport Canada office, and they’d probably never seen anyone happier to wait. Mostly because I HAD A BOOK IN MY BAG and BABY WAS ASLEEP IN HER PRAM. Baby stayed asleep for two hours (and then, having exhausted her patience/goodness resource, proceeded to be horrible for the rest of the day, so much so that I was destroyed by evening, but alas) so that I had more uninterrupted reading than I’d had in 2.5 months. It was extraordinary, particularly as I was reading the marvelous Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood. Only problem with that being that the book was so engaging, I felt like I’d lived the lives of 31 mothers that day, which probably contributed to my destroyment by 5 pm.

Anyway, speaking of waiting, Rona Maynard on waiting-room lit and Marilynne Robinson’s Home. Rebecca Rosenblum’s submission tips for aspiring writers is also worth a read. The great Lauren Groff, illuminatingly, on rejection notices. What’s wrong with charity book shops? is an interesting (though not conclusive) response to questions raised in the thought-provoking article “Selling Civilization” from Canadian Notes and Queries.

Now, must wake baby, feed baby, change baby. For we’re off to a program at the library that promises songs, and stories and “tickle rhymes” for all. (I’m not sure if it’s sad or amazing that this is my life now.)

August 5, 2009

Family Fun

Harriet can’t wait to learn to read so that she can join in the family fun.

August 3, 2009

Weed whacking?

From Alex Good’s piece on negative book reviews: “Critics in this country are often accused of enviously cutting down our tallest poppies. For the record, I don’t see a lot of this happening, but even if I did, I would be inclined to think it good horticulture rather than conduct motivated by one of the seven deadly sins. The tallest poppies are precisely the ones that need the attention of a critical weed whacker. They suck up all the oxygen and take the most nutrients from the soil, crowding out all of the up-and-coming green. Better to pull such plants out of the ground, shake the dirt from their roots and toss them on the weed pile.”

Inarguable. The problem, however, is that Good’s metaphor is all too apt, and “whackage” seems to all too often pass for literary criticism in Canada, all clumsiness, frantic motion and violence implied. Is a poppy always necessarily a weed either? All thoughtfulness and consideration go out the window, and we’re left with paragraphs such as the following (from here):

“For Atwood, despite her dowager status in Canlit, is a writer who, with very little in the way of linguistic flare and visionary intensity, writes (or wrote) a kind of period poetry that gives the impression of having long passed its “best before” date. As with most of the characters in her novels, so with the words in her poems: predictable, unvarying, wooden, truncated, connotatively flaccid, oddly nasal in their timbre, and devoid of real signifying power because relying for their effect on a near-perfect correlation with the cultural temper of an audience desperate for corroboration. Owing to this bizarre resonance, Atwood was spared the labour of development as she was exempted from the struggle with language. She had only to be herself as she was – facile, clever, priggish – for the reader’s easy identification with a recognizable and idealized self to occur – but a self not qualitatively different from the one already in place. Atwood owes her success to the fact that the reader does not transact so much with the poetry or the fiction as with a privileged double with whom she or he merges and assimilates, doubt assuaged and dispossession overcome, whether as a woman, an intellectual or a Canadian. Readers of Atwood merely impersonate themselves at a slightly higher elevation but undergo no spiritual change or evolution whatsoever.“

I have chosen this one example (which, admittedly, comes not from a review, but from an essay about Canada’s critical climate) because it’s so typical. The writer engages not at all with said poppy’s work, but instead their reputation. One could get the sense from these generalities and such immediate dismissal that the writer has read very little Atwood, actually, or none at all, relying instead on quipsy barbs overheard at literary dinner parties. This sort of thing is boring, lacking substance, and also alienating to readers who will read it and, no doubt, regardless of where their sensibilities lie, will then “merely impersonate themselves at a slightly higher elevation but undergo no spiritual change or evolution whatsoever.“

Whacking, no. Pruning, perhaps, which in lacking bombasticism will earn the reviewer far less attention, but might begin a literary conversation that actually takes us somewhere.

July 29, 2009

Two months

On Sunday we celebrated two months of Harriet being born, of me being a mom, and of ours being a family of three. And even a month ago, I could not have forecast how full and rich life would become again, so I’m so proud of how well we’re all doing. Of course, chaos reigns, but it’s at a level I can live with comfortably. One qualm being that I am not managing to read nearly as much as I’d like to be, and yet I keep buying books/requesting books at the library at much the same pace as ever, and it’s a little overwhelming. Unless board books count– my favourite is On The Day You Were Born by Debra Frasier. “On the day you were born/ gravity’s strong pull/ held you to the Earth/ with a promise that you/ would never float away…”

July 23, 2009

Weird Books I've Loved

I like to say that I love books of all kinds, though that’s not strictly true. There was a time, however, when it almost was, when I was little and covetted the most bizarre volumes. Books I’d snobbishly deem unworthy of capital-B Bookishness if I was consulted now. But then, oh. My library contained numerous books such as Mysteries of the Unexplained (“How ordinary men and weomen have experienced the Strange, the Uncanny and the Incredible”). I was obsessed with these books, and they always had photos of “ghosts” on staircases, and even kind of looked like ghosts if you just squint your eyes a bit (and otherwise they looked like a white glare). Also stories of children as reincarnated witches, and green children discovered living alone in the countryside.

I also had a book that explained the meaning of one’s dreams. I’d covetted this, hoping that the underlying theme of all my dreams would turn out to be, “You’re going to have a boyfriend one day”. I think my book was a Dream Dictionary, alphabetical, of course. With entries like, “Dreams of unicorns symbolize a longing for an idyllic age”, or perhaps something that makes even less sense, like “Unicorn dreams mean you’re worried about rain.” Trouble was, I never dreamed of unicorns, or anything else that could be alphabetized. And I never really needed a dictionary to decode the fact that perpetually dreaming of being chased by outsized dogs might mean acute anxiety.

I also had a baby name book. This was long before babies were a remote possibility (though don’t think I didn’t go through the entire volume to figure out the perfect first and second names for each of my four (!) future children. I think that was around the time I wanted to name my kids Bianca). I really did read the whole thing multiple times, and I’m still not sure what the attraction was. How helpful was it really to know that Margaret meant “pearl”? Name meanings are about as helpful as dream analysis. But I might only think this because my name is a kind of terrier.

July 21, 2009

On women's fiction or women in fiction, again

“Lisa Moore gets better and better,” I wrote last month under “Recently Discovered” whilst reading her latest novel February. And then an esteemed acquaintance of mine emailed me asking, “When?” For he was reading February himself at that moment, and wasn’t getting into it at all. “A fairly conventional historical romance” was his initial assessment, disappointingly, because he’d enjoyed Moore’s previous work, and he wondered when he’d discover the brilliant bits of February that had so appealed to me.

I probably shouldn’t have told you that. What I really want you all to do is go out and read February, and to love it just as much as I did. In fact, I really thought that love would come with no trouble, that my feelings towards the book were so straightforward as to be universal. “It’s a rare thing,” I’d written, “a perfect book”, and I really thought that much was obvious. (And reviewer Caroline Adderson certainly thought so too.)

So I was surprised to find that another fine reader had found the book so unappealing. “When does the book get good?” he asked, of this book that had won me over with its very first sentence, “Helen watches as the man touches the skate blade to the sharpener.” Here was a book very much in the present, very much in the physical world, and I’d never read a novel that started as such, and so I wanted to read on.

Perhaps it was lazy to just figure the differences in our opinions had to do with gender. “Maybe this is a women’s book?” I suggested, and he replied a bit put-off by both my suggestion and also by a writer who would write a book that would shut male readers out. Turns out reviewer Alex Good had made an assertion similar to mine in his Toronto Star review: “This is a deeply maternal universe. Time and again, sympathy, solicitude and kindness for strangers are evoked. There are “geysers of love” and motherly feeling for vagrants, gas station attendants and of course the unborn. There is no sense of evil, aside from nature’s rage in the sinking of the oil rig, and hence no conflict. The narrative doesn’t progress so much as gestate, roiling around through a series of flashbacks until the hatching and matching at the end.”

Exactly! Good has encapsulated what I loved about the novel exactly: the pervasive good, the ruminating narrative, the sense of gestation resulting in such a satisfying conclusion. Except, of course, he means none of this in a good way. And I wonder about this, and reviewing in general– about how a description such as his is shorthand for “this book is bad/not literature”. And about how “this book is bad/not literature” gets to be a shorthand for simply, “It didn’t grab me.”

Is a novel bad because it’s a “women’s novel” or a “man’s novel”? As a woman, I don’t find Hemingway bad, even with all the bullfighting. Of course, there are novels that don’t fall into gendered catagories, and though universality is to be desired, I think that my very favourite novel Unless by Carol Shields (which is a maternal universe, if ever you’ve read one) is actually better for its specificity. I can understand how Unless might not be immediately appealing to a lot of men, but surely they could overlook that to see its literary merit.

But then, what is “literary merit”, right? Someone will inevitably argue “aesthetics”, but no one has ever been able to explain to me how “aesthetics” is not just a fancy way to explain away books one doesn’t like. In his review, Alex Good faults February for lacking conflict and a “fast-paced, forward moving” plot. So, in essence, he faults the book for not being a different book altogether, for not being the kind of book that would appeal to him, and I’m not sure that’s altogether fair.

I write this not as an attack on Alex Good’s review (which was actually far more interesting than most reviews I read) but to expand upon the ideas the review prompted for me. To remark upon my surprise that February did not appeal to everyone, and to ponder what “gendered” writing is all about. Good says the gendered nature of the book is not what bothered him, but rather “that those [gendered] parts of it are so transparently the stuff of commercial fiction.” But what does that mean? Rings, to me, like that common dismissal of women’s writing in general being un-literary and merely the stuff of commerical fiction. (Strange that Good suggests a fast-paced, forward-moving plot would have saved the material from being commercial fiction, for isn’t plot what commerical fic is made of?)

Has Lisa Moore let her readers down by writing a “women’s novel”? This very question, I think, is dismissive and sexist. But irrelevant, then, if there’s no such thing as a “women’s novel” at all. And is it dismissive and sexist to say that there is?

July 16, 2009

Good Text

From the Descant blog, Katie Franklin on her feminist erotic bookclub and desire for books: “In The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes insists, “the text is a fetish object, and the fetish desires me” (Barthes 27). As a librarian I see how the public forms relationships with their books. Patrons come in exacerbated if the paperback they’ve put on hold hasn’t come in yet: “What do you mean my book hasn’t come in? I need it now!” Such outbursts of desire, which may seem more natural in the bedroom, are often common expressions at the circulation desk of the library. However, I don’t blame them for their yearnings. Everyone is entitled to some good text.”