December 9, 2008
For the journey
I catch my train to Ottawa in just a little while, though I still have to shower/dress, pack, and shovel snow in the meantime. My stack of books, however, has been prepared. As this is a train journey I am taking all by myself (which happens rarely) to a most special event, I decided that now was a fitting time for me to finally read Carol Shields’ Dressing Up for the Carnival— the last of Shields’ books I had to be read. I am also bringing Darkmans by Nicola Barker, and Consequences by Penelope Lively, The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 1, and a stack of periodicals that I’ll probably ignore just as I have done so during the last two months they’ve been sitting at my bedside.
December 4, 2008
Notable
What are the odds? That for the second year in a row Pickle Me This has read six (6) books out of the New York Times 100 Notable. And that also for the second year, I’ve read the first and second books listed (which raises one’s expectations a bit, no? But then they’re in alphabetical order). Books featured that we love including American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen, Home by Marilynne Robinson, Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson, and Yesterday’s Weather by Anne Enright. The list also includes Richard Price’s Lush Life, which I just might be receiving for Christmas.
From the Globe and Mail 100, we’ve read a far more respectable 12, having noted here The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio, The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters by Charlotte Mosley, The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews, Stunt by Claudia Dey, Coventry by Helen Humphries, The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan, Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith, Home by Marilynne Robinson and Goldengrove by Francine Prose.
Stay tuned for the Pickle Me This Picks of ’08, still to come.
December 2, 2008
Truly reflective reading
“I should know by now that I can’t read a book by Virginia Woolf in the same way that I may read any other book. This is truly reflective reading, little instalments which plant seeds of brilliant word-thought long after the page is turned, and in this case the on-off beam of the lighthouse lamp feels like a constant and perfectly regulated shaft of light alternating with darkness throughout the book and I’m starting to ‘get it’. In fact I think I’m ready to set off To the Lighthouse again now.”– today at Dovegreyreader Scribbles
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).
