March 28, 2007
The Republic of Spring
As a symptom of springtime, I’ve been oddly compulsive lately. I’m not sure if that’s the word I mean, but I saw a picture of a horse recently and now I’m determined to ride one this summer. I’ve never ridden (rode?) a horse in my life. A similar obsession has taken me over regarding Carol Shields. Now I’ve always loved Carol Shields’s work and she wrote the one book I could classify as a definitive favourite, and her short story collection Various Miracles is a masterpiece, I think. I could go on and on here. I intend to reread The Republic of Love soon. And I’m currently reading Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life, which is inspiring, interesting and wonderful. The quote below from Anne Giardini came from her essay (she is Shields’s daughter, and her beautiful piece is about sharing a love of reading with her mother). I think that as a woman who writes, and as a woman in general, there is so much to be learned from the life and work of Carol Shields. Like Laurie Colwin, I think, Shields was a writer who could capture joy.
Further signs of springtime, last night I could be found drinking too much wine on my front porch. We had to go in once the sun was gone because it was too cold then, but before that the world beyond the porch had been swarming with joggers, dog walkers, a skanky couple making out against a fence, neighbours, strangers, cats, cyclists, cars with the windows down, hipsters, nerds, babies and the elderly. It seems like everyone else was just as eager to get outside as we were.
My husband is on holidays this week, and we’re going out for a sushi lunch. Sugoi.
March 26, 2007
Straight back into the arms of a stranger
“Reading is usually thought of as a solitary act, although a reader in the act of reading is the opposite of self-absorbed. A reader journeys infinitely further from self than can be achieved in travelling across the globe or into space. A reader interrupted can be vague, disoriented; she has been returned abruptly, without benefit of decompression or debriefing, to one specific point in geography and time, from somewhere else altogehter. To admit to having been lost inside a book is not to resort to metaphor but to admit the turth. A reader reads blindly (even books that have been read before hold new directions and dimensions) and so must have confidence in the writer. Reading is like a game of trust in which one person falls straight back into the arms of a stranger whose job it is to catch the faller and hold her fast”. Anne Giardini, “Double Happiness”
March 25, 2007
Prairie Fiction should come with a warning label
I had book trauma this weekend. I don’t mean this lightly. As I have mentioned before, reading prairie fiction sends me into despair. Which I always forget about until I’ve nearly finished the book and am filled with deep sadness for the human condition. And I never stopped to think that Obasan is actually prairie fiction too, as well being, well, Obasan. Which, when read following my recent Burmese prison tale rendered the world pretty bleak. And the sky was the colour of paper, and I kept staring out the window pondering the meaning of it all. So in other words I was in dire need of a good slap, and around people far too kind to administer one. Luckily life got better.
First, I’m now reading Orphan Island by Rose Macaulay which is a delightful and interesting romp. You can read the 1925 review from Time Magazine here (ain’t the tinternet grand?) I’ve not read Macaulay’s novels before, though her Pleasure of Ruins is the most beautiful book I own, and I loved her essay on English “Catchwords and Claptrap” (which you can read here). I am reading this novel on the recommendation of Decca who acknowledged it in one of her letters as a favourite. It’s simply lovely.
And next up is The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver (who I hope to go see read at Harbourfront next week).
Second, I watched Stranger Than Fiction last night, and I can’t think of the last time I enjoyed a movie so much. And it’s a bookish film, but I watched it with two boys who are a little less bookish than I, and they liked it as much as I did. I found it purely enjoyable from start to finish, I didn’t get bored once, and part of the reason I was so engaged was I had no idea how the plot would sort itself out. But it did perfectly, and all of us were so engrossed in the story that when we feared one character would meet an untimely (or timely, in this case, I do suppose) demise, we were out of our minds with agony. And I like a movie that allows you to care so much. Lately we’ve renting movies last minute with little selection, and then yelling at the screen begging the characters to off themselves so we wouldn’t have to watch them any longer. So it was very nice to feel differently, and of course the bookishness was ace. Six thumbs up.
The sky is still the colour of paper, but my outlook has greatly improved.
March 23, 2007
Full of the World
From The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly.
~His hard little hands hold a book– but never, ever upside down. Once he held a book upside down while reading and the warders made such fun of him that he retreated into his house in rage and didn’t go out to piss for hours. Now, by carefully examining the cover of the book and the first pages, he knows if the letters are right side up. On the threshold between his shack and the prison compound, the boy’s eyes maneuver over the page slowly, laboriously, like two ants carrying a piece of food many times their own size.
The candle gutters again on another draft of air, but the boy ignores it. He has a very important job to do now: reading. Letters make words and words tell stories. Books are full of silent stories. Chit Naing explained that to him too. It was the one thing he really understood, because the cage is full of storytellers, men talking all the time, telling their lives large and small about the time before the prison so they remember that world and the people Outside. That’s why prisoners and warders alike are hungry for books, these very ones, this wobbly altar of musty paperbacks. Without making a sound, they are full of the world.
The boy holds the book and believes it: I am reading I am reading~
March 23, 2007
Dreams
I implore you to read The Lizard Cage but you’d best not finish it right before bedtime, or your dreams will be strange. Mine certainly were. Otherwise, I have to cram some CanLit into my weekend as my TA office hours start next week and I’ll be marking the week after. I shall be reading Obasan and Elle. And now it’s totally spring, so we’ll spending this weekend throwing open the windows and roaming outdoors.
March 23, 2007
My non-response and my endorsement
I’m not going to respond to Orange Prize hoopla again, because I still feel the same way I felt last year and the year before. This year let me just say that I like anything that promotes good books, and as good books by women tend to be my favourite kinds, this list is usually the one I like best. The longlist is a brilliant selection of books to be read and three I’ve read already that wholly deserve to be included.
I’ve read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngochie Adichie, Alligator by Lisa Moore, and Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert. Each was extraordinary in its own way, I loved the first and third the best, and I am totally putting my bets on Adichie. If the right people her book, I think it could change the world.
March 20, 2007
Reality is Ralph
From Lisey’s Story by Stephen King:
~He didn’t even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly coloured string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes– if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you perservered– it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book.~
March 19, 2007
Living Properly
The more I think about About Alice by Calvin Trillin, I realize this tiny memoir is actually a guide to living properly. Seriously, lately I’ve found myself thinking, “What would Alice do?” in a variety of situations. I have a hunch I may be better for it.
March 18, 2007
New books brought home
Last day is tomorrow for the half price sale at Balfour Books (601 College St.). We went yesterday, and I was devastated to find that the Penelope Liveleys and Virginia Woolfs I’d been hoping to buy were all gone. Clearly the shelves have been well picked over this week, but treasures remain. I was pleased to pick up so many books I’d borrowed from the library recently and subsequently fallen in love with. Even Stuart got in on the fun. He got two James Bond novels and The Water Method Man by John Irving. I got The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing, which I’ve never read and I bought mainly because I wanted an old school orange Penguin cover. And the rest, I got Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe, and Huckleberry Finn. Sugoi! The shelves are happy to have them.
March 17, 2007
On the other hand…
Considering my just-below post, I will consider accusations of hysteria and melodrama. And history will inevitably tell a story so different from what we consider the state of literature to be today.
It reminds me of when today I read “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” by Virginia Woolf, or any of her attacks on Wells/Bennett/Galsworthy. I almost feel sorry for them, with her scathing critiques. Because what is this triumverate really, compared to the Great Virginia Woolf? An unfair pitting, so it seems to modern eyes.
But then back then she was all David, and they were decidedly Goliath.
So the moral of that story is that you never really know.
