May 21, 2007
Bang
I really should have known. The Girls came recommended by Patricia Storms, Richard and Judy, and everybody else in the whole wide world. If, like me, however, you were put off by all the hype, and by the prospect of a story about craniopagus twins, you really have been cheating yourself. Lori Lansens’ The Girls casts a perfect spell, expresses every lovely notion I’ve ever had about the world, and says so much about perspective, writing, and love. (Those of us who love Kate Atkinson will definitely find something to love here.)
I was under that perfect spell from the very start, probably due to Lansens’ dramatic beginning. A lot gets said about great opening lines, but what about great opening scenes? It’s actually the second chapter of The Girls: “A tornado touched down in Baldoon County on the day Ruby and I were born”. And Lansens’ describes the tornado with such energy, intricacy, and action, I could almost feel the wind. I was hooked from then on. It was the best story opening I’ve read since Arthur Seaton fell down a flight of stairs in the pub and puked all over a woman in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Since the moment of Ruby Lennox’s conception in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Sometimes it pays to start with a bang.
Bookwise, what’s ahead? Cease to Blush and then The Children of Men (upon the recommendation of my husband!).
May 19, 2007
Tempus does not fugit
“And then, suddenly, I realized it meant nothing. Tempus did not fugit. In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time. There is time to sit on a houseboat for a month reading novels. There is time learn another language. There is travel time and there is stay-at-home time. Shallow time and fallow time. There is time in which we are politically involved and other times when we are wilfully unengaged. We will have good years and bad years, and there will be time for both. Every moment will not be filled with accomplishment; we would explode if we tied ourselves to such a regimen. Time was not our enemy if we kept it on a loose string, allowing for rest, emptiness, reassessment, art and love. This was not a mountain we were climbing; it was closer to being a novel with a series of chapters”- Carol Shields, “Afterword” from Dropped Threads
I love this. Though Shields’ own tragically shortened life gives this a sad resonance, I think it still stands. Though there is never enough time, at the same time life is long. Every day is bursting with hours, and weeks with days. That you make the time you have enough. And I love that idea– if I only had a houseboat.
May 19, 2007
It's all summers
My beloved Bronwyn is getting married two weeks from today, and I am so thrilled we’re going to be there. Since we met six years ago, Bronwyn’s and my lives have been much entwined: we moved to England at the same time, fell in love with Northern boys, she even came to stay with us in Japan for two weeks. And even now, when our lives are quite divergent (I moved back to Toronto, whereas she is living a sweet London fairy tale), we’ve remained so close. She was there on my wedding day, and I am honoured that I’ll be there for hers. That we’ll share in wifedom, which seemed a million miles away, or even impossible, back when we met. And we look forward to our parallels continuing; she emailed me a few weeks back and said, “When I think about it I think of sunshine, which can only be a good thing. Looking forward, it’s all summers!” I imagine the future the very same, and I am so excited for it.
I am going to be doing a reading at Bronwyn’s wedding, however, and I went a bit insane trying to locate something good. When thumbing through my own library turned up nothing, I turned to the internet. Who would have thought? The “Unique Wedding Readings” on Google turned up nothing spectac (unless Kahil Gabran is your bag). I wanted to find something lovely and fitting, and I eventually did (but it’s a secret for now). I really wanted something from Carol Shields, because really who knows more about love and marriage than she did? But nothing was quite right for a wedding ceremony. Still, however, some of what I did find needs to be shared nonetheless. Stay tuned then.
May 17, 2007
A little pocket of time
Do check out the third installment of What is Stephen Harper Reading? Politics aside (though not that they should be), Martel has enclosed a wonderful letter along with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, celebrating books and reading. He also has photos of the library at Laurier House in Ottawa, which was home to Sir Wilfrid and William Lyon Mackenzie King. Martel writes, “How did they manage to read so much? Perhaps Laurier and King were excellent at time management. Certainly television wasn’t there to inform them in part and otherwise fruitlessly devour their hours. Or was it that reading was a natural and essential element of being a respectable, well-rounded gentleman? Was it some ingrained habit of the privileged that gave these two prime ministers permission to spend so much time reading?”
Martel continues, “Reading was perhaps a privileged activity then. But not now. In a wealthy, egalitarian country like ours, where the literacy rate is high (although some people still struggle and need our help) and public libraries are just that, public, reading is no longer an elitist pastime. A good book today has no class, so to speak, and it can be had by anyone. One of the marvels of where I live, the beautiful province of Saskatchewan, is that the smallest town—Hazlet, for example, population 126—has a public library. Nor need books be expensive, if you want to own one. You can get a gold mine of a used book for fifty cents. After that, all that is needed to appreciate the investment is a little pocket of time.”
May 11, 2007
Friday morning
Zadie Smith has a short story in The New Yorker. They’re going on about novel first lines over at The Guardian Books Blog; I was pleased that my personal favourite was noted (“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York”). And we’re away to Peterborough this weekend (the ultimate tourist destination). It’s a long weekend too, because we made it that way. Tra-la.
Oh, and log on now to Diggerland.com.
May 10, 2007
Stories in the Air
What a treat was mine this eve, as my fairy godmother had delivered me her ticket to the Kama Readings; she couldn’t attend. And so I went in her place, and saw/listened to Camilla Gibb, David Adams Richards, Thomas King and M.G. Vassanji. The readings were an absolute pleasure. Gibb read from Sweetness in the Belly (my favourite book of 2006); Richards read a beautiful passage from The Friends of Meager Fortune; King and Vassanji both read short stories from recent collections. I do like to sit and listen– it is a test for me, as anyone who has ever been interrupted by me would surely realize. It requires effort, but I always feel wonderful after– like I’ve been working a muscle. And I like the idea of readings, of stories in the air. The ones floating about were certainly wonderful tonight.
Now reading A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor. The man in the elevator today examined my cover (quite forcefully), and said “You’ve got to love the Irish”. I really didn’t know what to tell him. Coming up: Poppy Shakespeare and then The Girls— both popular novels whose premises have kept me shying away, but I’m finally too curious. And I’m still reading Stephanie Nolen’s 28 Stories of Aids of Africa which is amazingly captured, and I’m slowly working through.
David Adams Richards amused everyone tonight with his story of the time he set his hair on fire. Guffaws all around. Though some of you will remember why my laughter was very much in sympathy. He, however, did not set his aflame at karaoke.
May 8, 2007
Hollaring Comrade
The girl walking across Queen’s Park shedding tears over the death of a man in a book? She would be me. And that book (84 Charing Cross Road) was absolutely lovely.
PS- Anyone know what “book post” is? It sounds like the most wonderful system in the whole world.
UPDATE: Someone has made an 84 Charing Cross Road website!
May 8, 2007
In my bag
Today 84 Charing Cross Road came in for me at the library (on Claire G’s recommendation). A bookish book! I am looking forward. I also brought home The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield to reread “At the Bay”, to which Janice Kulyk Keefer acknowledges her debt in The Ladies Lending Library. Stay tuned for a review tomorrow of that book, by the way. And I am now much intrigued to read Kulyk Keefer’s overtly Mansfieldian Thieves. Oh books books books. Thank heaven I plan to live for a long long time.
May 7, 2007
Final Shift
Tomorrow morning I will work my final shift at the library— five years after the last time I worked my final shift at the library. I think this time I mean it, however, as I don’t foresee myself returning to school anytime soon (or ever again), and it’s time I moved on from student assistantship. But I am going to miss it so. To be paid to walk up and down shelves and shelves of books. When I worked there as an undergraduate, I found “shelf-reading” quite tedious– reading call number after call number for about a half hour each shift to make sure the books were in their right places. But on my second run, I delighted in it. To run my thumb along the shelf and give a little attention to books no one has touched in years, the obscure volumes and authors Woolf’s essays taught me such an appreciation for, to return wayward books to where they belong, to blow the dust off. I loved shelving, and filling in the gaps. I never came up from the stacks without a stack of my own to take home. I liked working at circulation, where my duty was to be handed books (what a dream!). Checking books out, and imagining the connection between the book and its borrower. I revelled in Special Collections– I got to shelf the Woolf Collection when the library moved in 2001, and that I have touched these rare, beautiful volumes, books that SHE touched, is one of the penultimate features of my life. Today I held in my hands a book that had belonged to Coleridge and Wordsworth, and that was just an ordinary day.
I was not meant to be a librarian for innumerable reasons, but I do harbour dreams that the career ahead of me be bookish, however so, because then no day could ever truly be ordinary. There is no other object I’ve ever known that is invested with the magic of the book.
April 30, 2007
Summer
Myself was grappling with the problem of Tolstoy, and how I want to read Anna Karenina, but just not now while I’m returning to the world of 9-5 (which is going to cut into my reading), and I’ve got a too many other books I am dying to read to devote myself to such a big one. Which I guess makes it sound like I don’t really care if I read Anna Karenina at all, which also might be true. But the great thing about self-discipline is that you can give it a break just to keep things fun. And so I am totally cheating for my May Classic. I’m going to read Summer by Edith Wharton, which is so tiny and not even old enough to actually qualify for my Classics Challenge, but oh well. I was inspired to read it after reading about Hermione Lee’s new Wharton bio in the LRB. (As an aside, predictably I am obsessed with the LRB, which so far has led me to read with fascination about things in which I have little to no interest– case in point Colm Tóibín on Beckett’s Irish Actors). And so that is that, which is all she said.
