November 28, 2008
Reading in Bed
I think that except for the obvious things, like eating, and sleeping, and breathing, etc., I haven’t been doing anything as long I’ve been reading in bed. Not continuously, of course (unfortunately, though I do give it a run for my money most every Saturday morning– am I ever not late for brunch? I don’t think so. Now you know why) but nearly every night for about twenty five years, I’ve propped my head up on two pillows and read by the light of a bedside lamp. These days I do so beside my husband, and such symmetry is all the domestic bliss I ever dreamed about as a girl. He usually turns off his light before I do mine, but he understands that no matter how late it is, no matter that I might get just a page or two read, that for me reading in bed in just as much a part of getting ready for bed as is flossing (though I remember to read in bed much more often).
I used to get in trouble for reading in bed. I used to go to school and tell my teachers that, so they’d feel sorry for me, and were usually uncomprehending about how any parent could be so cruel. No one understood, however, that without the “lights out” call, I would have never gone to sleep. So I used to have to resort to extremes in order to keep reading– under the covers with a flashlight, hiding in my closet with the light on, or demanding that the door be left open a crack and reading in the dimmest of light. (I used to get in trouble for this too, for reading in the dark. “You’ll need glasses,” my parents warned me, which was the wrong thing to say. Because I lusted after glasses, they were my very heart’s desire. I resolved to start reading in light that was only dimmer).
Reading in bed has gone on through a variety of living situations. My parents stopped with the lights out, eventually, and I used to fall asleep in my cereal instead. I see now that I was lucky that my roommate never complained about how the light shone on and on during my first year at university. When I traveled in Europe, I read in my bunk with a flashlight. During the three months I lived in a youth hostel in England, a cheap and tiny reading lamp that clipped to my bed stand was my most cherished possession. When we lived in Japan and slept in a loft that we could hardly sit up in, we read by a thin florescent light on the wall that buzzed on with the pull of a chain, and when we were finished went out with a pop. Recently I was reading and my lamp’s light bulb burnt out, without a spare in the house, and I was so distressed and would not rest until my husband gave me his. We were less symmetrical that night, but I felt better, and he got to go to sleep…
Reading in bed in the mornings is something different– more indulgent, less essential. It can never be just a page or two either, and time always stretches on for hours. Until so much light comes in through the window that I don’t need my bedside lamp at all, and then I start to see the point of getting out of bed. Eventually.
November 28, 2008
The Children's Book Bank
This morning on the radio I heard about The Children’s Book Bank, an amazing initiative offering free books and literacy support in downtown Toronto. The Book Bank operates much like a bookshop, or a library, except that the books are free.
From their website: “A visit to The Children’s Book Bank is much like a visit to a familiar and well loved children’s book store. The space is safe, warm and inviting and is intended to create a wonderful oasis for the children; a place where they can relax and experience the magic of books and enjoy reading.”
Those of us who love books very much can certainly imagine the pride these children must take in owning their own libraries. For information on how to donate money or “gently used, high quality children’s books” to the Children’s Book Bank, click here.
November 21, 2008
Aspiring to be literature
Stuart Evers at The Guardian Books Blog on “The good side of bad books”: “I think it’s worth pointing out here that not all bad books are properly bad. I’m not talking about Jefferey Archer or Harold Robbins, Danielle Steel or Norah Roberts. Their books have a specific function, a specific readership and for the most part they deliver what their readers want and expect. For me, truly bad novels must want or aspire to be literature, rather than simply product. Take By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart, for example…”
November 18, 2008
Satisfied
Now reading and being absolutely blown away by Anne Enright’s collection Yesterday’s Weather. I just finished reading Justine Picardie’s Daphne, which was a wonderful literary mystery ala Possession except the sources all were real– remarkable, and I loved it. I also just finished The New Quarterly 108, and Kristen Den Hartog‘s “Draw Crying” was so awful, beautiful and perfect that it had me crying, and not just because I’m pregnant.
Also my dinner was really delicious.
Further, there are good things to read everywhere. Fabulously, on Iceland’s economic meltdown, and its ancient sagas, and its literature today. Who’s reading what at TNQ. Globe reviews this week: When Will There Be Good News, and Lucy Maud Montgomery: Gift of Wings. Good heavens: a book by a woman put forth as one of the 50 greatest. On snow books, and what to read in the darkness of winter. Miriam Toews (of the remarkable Flying Troutmans) wins the Writer’s Trust Award for Ficion. Listen to Esta Spalding reading Night Cars by Teddy Jam (who was Matt Cohen— I didn’t know!).
November 16, 2008
That vantage ground
Of the many fascinating stories within Mary Henley Rubio’s biography Lucy Maud Montgomery: A Gift of Wings, I was perhaps most interested to learn new things about Canadian literary history, and of William Arthur Deacon in particular. Henley Rubio writes of Deacon’s early ambition to establish himself as “Canada’s pre-eminent literary journalist”, at which he succeeded, as he would be book review editor of The Globe & Mail for over thirty years.
From A Gift of Wings: “Deacon was ‘infused with a sense of mission for the establishment of an entire, self-contained, dynamic Canadian cultural milieu– a Canadian authorship, a Canadian readership, a Canadian literature– and sometimes he called himself its prophet.'” “Deacon wanted to develop the literary consciousness of Canadian readers, educating the Canadian public into more ‘sophisticated tastes'”. “Deacon regarded hopelessly old-fashioned the readers who appealed only to ‘low-brow’ unsophisticates… He described these readers as a national embarrassment. In particular, he regarded [Montgomery’s] books as shallow sentimentalism and the ‘nadir’ of Canadian writing.”
Of course it struck me that literary arguments have gone much unchanged in the last eighty years. This point not unknown and particularly vexing to critics who still echo Deacon’s opinions today. One could be asking why Canadian literature refuses to evolve, to unfold, and yet to me, as a reader, it is also particularly telling about the ephemeral nature of criticism itself.
Deacon’s attacks on Montgomery (which were extensive, and went on for the latter part of her career) were intensely personal. On both accounts– that a writer whose work is so decidedly targeted becomes a target herself, and that Deacon’s approach was just as much about himself, his provocations an attempt to be noticed at the beginning of his career. And here I get as sentimental as they come– it was really mean. It was sexist, petty, small-minded, narcissistic, and self-serving, wreaking tremendous havoc on Montgomery’s mental health. One could argue that such is the way this literary game works, but nearly a century later– as the writers touted by Deacon are as unknown as he is, and Montgomery is still internationally read, now regarded as a writer whose work is worthy of serious academic pursuit– Deacon is scarcely a player. So what on earth was the point of him?
We need critics, of course, however wrong they might turn out to be. We need the kind of critics Virginia Woolf wrote about in her essay “How It Strikes a Contemporary”, “the Dryden, the Johnson, the Coleridge, the Arnold… [whose] mere fact of their existence had a centralizing influence.” But what kind of centralizing force would someone like Deacon have had, someone who made his career out of iconoclasm, out of destruction for its own sake? History shows now what a centralizing force was that.
There is a stupid confidence necessary to appoint oneself iconoclast– how can anyone be so sure? Seems to me the wisest critic would bear in mind the lesson Woolf put to writers in her essay “Modern Fiction”:
“We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving… but with a circular tendency, should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat in the crowd, half-blind with dust… It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert…”
November 16, 2008
Oh, I do love me a good literary mystery
“Ok, I’m sorry, there are a lot of librarians in this story, and libraries as well (which maybe doesn’t bode so well for originality). People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries– as if the words are synonymous with boredom or timidity. But isn’t that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along and wants to borrow them.” –from Justine Picardie’s Daphne
November 7, 2008
HCC's "Prosecast"
This afternoon I’ve been enjoying HarperCollins Canada’s Prosecast, in particular conversations with Francine Prose (Goldengrove) and Helen Humphries (Coventry).
November 5, 2008
The only character who really gets to talk
(Via The Pop Triad) Lionel Shriver on quotation marks and why their absence is off-putting: “The appearance of authorial self-involvement in much modern literary fiction puts off what might otherwise comprise a larger audience. By stifling the action of speech, by burying characters’ verbal conflicts within a blurred, all-encompassing über-voice, the author does not seem to believe in action — and many readers are already frustrated with literary fiction’s paucity of plot. When dialogue makes no sound, the only character who really gets to talk is the writer.”
November 4, 2008
Novel About My Wife What Happened?
At least a few times a day, according to my webstats, somebody will land on this site because they want to know “Novel About My Wife””What Happened”. And these poor people must perpetually go away quite disappointed, because neither my book review nor interview with the author are especially illuminating in that respect. I mean, if you’re looking for some plot summary, then I’m your man, but I’ve a feeling these people are seeking something a bit more specific. Something more like, what in heaven’s name was all that chaos at the end?
Full disclosure: I’ve got NO idea. Author Emily Perkins knows, and I know this because I asked her. In the vaguest terms though. What a waste! I had in front of me the only person who could answer that all-consuming “What happened?” question, but I thought it would be rude to pry. I figured if she’d wanted me to know, she would have put it in the book, but I did want to know if she knew. If what happened to Ann Wells was ever nailed down as a fact.
Perkins said, “No, I do have it. And I had written versions where the gaps were more filled in, but in the end I just thought the thing about Tom is that he is trying to investigate or work out the truth of his wife, but the point of the book for me is that he’s left it too late. He had his chance to look her in the eye and be with her in a real way and he was so busy, caught up in himself, romanticizing her and being in love with the mystery and not wanting to know. I didn’t want to let him off the hook for that…”
And so we’re implicated too as readers, because the text is Tom’s creation. His blindness becomes our own, which is annoying for a reader who has been invested in Ann as much as possible, unlike Tom. Annoying that we’re invested in Tom’s point of view rather than Ann’s, but that’s interesting too. A pretty powerful narrative device.
I can be a generous reader. If a book or a story is good enough, I am willing to make concessions. The best lesson I ever learned as a reader was in my graduate creative writing workshop, when we were told to look at what we determine as flaws in our classmates’ stories,
and to try to understand what the writers might have been doing. Not even what they were trying to do, but just imagine everything is deliberate. Imagine this author actually knows what she’s doing, and as a reader that was such a revelation. It wasn’t as though the stories became perfect then, but new doors were opened for analysis and understanding. We learned that just because a story isn’t the way you’d like it to be doesn’t necessarily mean that story isn’t the way it is supposed to be.
Which means that when I first read Novel About My Wife, and when I read it again, though I was not wholly satisfied with so much unknowing, I thought the narrative gaps had some purpose. Of course I had suspicions of what might have happened to Ann, and with the rest of the story so full, I was content with my own speculations. (I have also learned to love short fiction, as I’ve mentioned before, which has well equipped me to be able to make much of pieces I am given.)
Not everybody else was so content though. I started thinking when I read this review, and the following line in particular: “Perkins’s attempt at ambiguity draws the reader in, but does not completely provide the insight needed to satisfy.” Which is entirely right, and I had really failed to consider whether satisfying the reader might be the point. I still don’t think it’s the entire point, but perhaps it’s more important than I considered. Alternatively, could readers be looking for satisfaction in all the wrong places?
Update: for a bit more insight on what happened to Ann, check out the fascinating comments on Rachel Powers’ blog.
October 31, 2008
Someone left The Good Book out in the rain
On Sunday during a walk in the rain, I came across The Good News Bible lying on a ledge. Perhaps a sign, but I didn’t notice it; I took a photo instead.
