March 10, 2008
Digging Out
Heather Mallick on the fake memoir craze: “The phenomenon is interesting, but the reasons behind it are fascinating. Is it mere animal spirits? Or is it what P.G. Wodehouse called the craze for notoriety, the curse of the modern age?”
Ali Smith on Carson McCullers: “She was capable of reading so deeply that she wouldn’t notice her own house go up in flames around her, as once happened when she was lost in Dostoevsky. Unable as a child to stop reading Katherine Mansfield’s stories when she went to the store for groceries, she carried on as she asked for the goods at the counter, then under the street lamp outside. As a fledgling writer, she was sacked from her day job as a book-keeper for a New York company when the boss found her deep in Proust’s Swann’s Way under the big ledger.” (I am going to try this trick, and hopefully be sacked from my day job too.)
The Monsters of Templeton, which I adored upon reading, is called “a pleasurably surreal cross between The Stone Diaries and Kind Hearts and Coronets” in The Guardian. More on Alan Sillitoe on his 80th. Janice Kulyk Keefer’s wonderful novel The Ladies’ Lending Library is awarded (and you might recall I adored that one too).
And I am very excited because I just put Katrina Onstad’s novel How Happy To Be on hold at the library, as well as Rebecca Rosenblum‘s favourite novel Weetzie Bat, and Mom the Wolfman and Me (for old time’s sake). Now reading Zoe Whittall’s novel Bottle Rocket Hearts.
March 9, 2008
Underlining my point
Check out this photo (I assume it to be stock) from the front page of yesterday’s Globe & Mail. Yesterday at the Descant blog I wrote about the resonance of 1970s YA fiction, and the effect of writers like Norma Klein on our formative years. More of an effect than I imagined, however, if this photograph is anything to go by. But then Girls Can Be Anything was published in 1973! I wonder, are we holding onto these books out of nostalgia, or has nothing as good or better come along since then? I’ve not actually been paying attention, and hope indeed something else has come along. These are things that can’t get lost. Liberal propaganda it might have been, but then my own indoctrination into Free to Be… You and Me, for example, only ever had the effect of teaching me how to be happy.
February 22, 2008
When whole cities fit into books
I’ve recounted already how we spent our last vacation day scrambling around San Francisco in search of a used Tales of the City. The novel of San Francisco, according to our guidebook, and I just had to have it. A piece of San Francisco to take home with me.
I usually have little interest in reading about a place whilst I’m in it, but once I’m far away and homesick, novels and stories can be the next best thing to being there (which is why I now love Haruki Murakami). And I knew San Francisco homesickness would be long-lasting, so I wanted the remedy on-hand. I was also excited to purchase a book from the Gay Lit section (though such a label seems a bit reductive so far– is a book considered Gay Lit because there are gay people in it?) because it made me feel open-minded in that way gay people probably find inordinately irritating.
As a reward for accompanying me on my scramble, I let Stuart read the book first. He quickly forgave me for scramblage, loved the book, and said its lightness might be a nice way to follow The Poisonwood Bible. And now I’m halfway through, prepared to read the rest this evening in a hot bath (which is interesting because I’ve just learned from a wise source of a connection between this book and The Serial, which I read in another bathtub six years ago, but I digress).
The story is light indeed, and it’s a perfect book for a bathtub, but it’s delightfully entertaining and how brilliant that it establishes a map of the city in my mind.”Valencia Street, with its union halls and Mexican restaurants and motorcycle repair shops, was an oddly squalid setting for the gates of heaven.” Absolutely! Although for me heaven was bookshops, not steam baths, but alas. I’ve sat in Washington Square too, and I can see Coit Tower, and Marina, and the Castro, and even the Safeway on Market, where we bought rice-a-roni the San Francisco treat (not half bad, by the way). Polk and Hyde, The Mission, from the Tenderloin to Nob Hill.
That a whole city disappeared from my horizon can live on in my mind is really nothing short of a tremendous thing.
February 19, 2008
Accidentally Bookish
Read my Descant blog post about my trip to San Francisco, regarding my (mostly) purely accidental bookish adventures whilst travelling.
February 18, 2008
Zadie etc.
Another looong listing of reader comments at Bookninja. (See my post below). I find it interesting that these topics which have incited such debate are both in regards to women who other people think are much more successful than they deserve to be. Zadie Smith, in this case, who I personally believe is every bit as successful as she deserves to be for she is a legend. I heard her speak at Harbourfront two years ago, and I swear I would pay her anything to sit in my house and lecture me. She is fascinating, and oh so smart. Her books are some of the most exciting and inspiring I’ve ever encountered in literature, contemporary or otherwise. And yet there are those who’d see fit to knock her off her star.
Such as this commmenter: “… while I’ve picked up a couple of Smith’s novels to skim them, I’ve not read nor purchased one because I find them similarly lacking in quality, much less greatness.” He who could detect “greatness” in a skim? Perhaps he is the legend after all.
My friend K, who attended the Z. Smith Harbourfront reading with me, has recounted in her blog the horrible incident that took place in the Q&A. In which some jackass thought it be clever and/or polite to ask if Smith supposed she would have had the success she’s had were she not so physically attractive. It was mortifying. I mean, what this woman has to deal with. That after three novels, short stories, editing of anthologies, incredibly astute literary criticism, marvelous and generous work as a public figure, that it would all come down to her face. There is an underlying sense here that as a woman Smith is incapable of greatness on her own terms. The same sort of sense you get from a guy who’d dismiss the possibility of her greatness having not even done more than skim one of her books.
It makes me angry.
Margaret Atwood hating is exactly the same. It’s so stupidly easy, you know. Hating Margaret Atwood or Zadie Smith is not the express ticket to clever. Hating them without having read their books could possibly make you the least literary person ever, and the stupidity is only underlined by being in this position and even supposing you’ve got something to say.
February 11, 2008
Bookish Updates
Very cool: Bang Crunch is a staff pick at the shop around the corner from here. (Read my review). And my favourite book of 2008 is out now: The Monsters of Templeton gets an absolutely stellar review in The Globe. Just finishing Arlington Park, which I’ve loved. And today I purchased Housekeeping Vs The Dirt.
February 6, 2008
Credible space flight
I’m on the tail end of a short story run– I finished Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien (whose Certainty was one of my favourite books of last year). Now reading Bang Crunch by Neil Smith, now out in paperback. And then back to novels come Saturday morning, as I’ll have airport waiting and flights to pass (dance dance dance). But lately I have found the short story quite delicious– perfect. Which is probably very fitting, as lately I’ve been writing quite a few of my own.
Fabulous things read lately include from Hilary Mantel’s review in the LRB, “Until the idea of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods.” The Judy Blume profile that Kate was talking about. Boys don’t get it, do they? Bookninja thought the profile went on “a tad lengthily”. And I do wonder if it is girlishness that kept the Guardian Books blog’s celebration of Anne Shirley as one of the few pieces ever there whose comments didn’t descend rapidly into a churlish a*shole contest. Which is not to say that boys are as*holes, but the ones commenting over there usually seem to be. Or commenting most places, actually (but of course, dear readers, not here.)
Also, though I don’t agree with all she says here, I have fallen completely in love with Tabatha Southey. My love for columnist Doug Saunders is much older, but his piece this Saturday comparing today’s terrorists with those of the early ’70s was fascinating.
And also this stellar piece on the Munich air crash 50 years ago in which 8 Manchester United football players were killed, along with the crew members, team supporters, reporters and coaches: “On February 6, 1958, however, the news has only just begun to find the means of spreading itself at speed through the global village. An international network exists, although it is a primitive and unreliable mechanism compared with the digital world of the future.”
January 25, 2008
My new quest
I had to go into a bookstore today to pick up a gift for a friend, and of course, while I was there, why not get something for myself? For this is how my mind works, and why bookstores– for me– require infinite will not to go broke in. But I got The Paris Review Interviews vol. II, which I think was most sensible. For they’re interviews with writers, of course, and good ones, and one of my favourite book bloggers has raved about it. So there is learning aplenty, but multitudinously, for this book shall also be the textbook of my new quest to learn to interview.
Interviews are the one written form I’m afraid to take on– I’d sooner write a play (which is not to say that I’d be good at that either). They’re an art-form, I think, and a difficult one done in dialogue. A dialogue in which you must be the guide… or do you follow? I just don’t know. Learning to interview will also challenge my tendency to break off into long-winded tangents about lies I told when I was seventeen, or my new favourite pop song, or whatnot. I also think it will make me a better storyteller, socializer, and writer in general. It will also be fun.
The plan is to post an interview monthly, once I’ve got some study under me belt. How exciting. Maybe I’ll even interview you!
January 17, 2008
Uncommon
My upcoming Descant blog post will be a celebration of the commonness of reading, but I want to briefly celebrate The Uncommon Reader before then. (Which doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon.ca, and I don’t know why, but I am sure it’s out in Canada). Oh, the book is extraordinary and perfect, and not just because of its gorgeous endpapers. Or because Alan Bennett wrote The History Boys (who knew?). Rather I love the book for its acknowledgment and celebration of what I call “serious reading”.
The uncommon reader in question is Queen Elizabeth, who stumbles upon a mobile library by mistake. Not much of a reader is she, but she soon finds that one book leads to another. That books can inform the whole wide world, rendering it more complicated, perhaps. Reading, she finds, is a muscle, and she exercises it by reading with a pencil in hand (which you might recall is my New Year’s resolution). And as a reader she becomes “uncommon” not by her pedigree, but by her devotion to bookishness. By treating reading as a most serious task, not reading willy-nilly, by exploring through the doors books open for her, thinking about connections, ideas, suggestions that books bring forth, and indulging the curiosity towards the world that books awaken within her.
There are so many of us “uncommon readers”, at various levels of uncommonness– with our books clubs, book logs, book blogs, reading challenges etc. Though Steve Jobs may suggest otherwise, in my experience uncommon reading is remarkably common. But then this, of course, is a post for another time.
January 15, 2008
Rosie Alert
Rona Maynard has been reading Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, pronouncing Danielle Wood as “mordantly original.” Remember Rosie? Oh, what a book that was.
