January 27, 2010
Guh-gung
I have this terrible habit of finding certain things terribly funny in theory, but not considering the long-term consequences of following through on my actions. For example, when I was #143 on the holds list for Patrick Swayze’s posthumous autobiography Time of My Life, it was a funny story. But that hold was going to come in sometime, and that sometime is today, and now, with all the books in my life to be read, I’ve got to add Time of My Life to the teetering stack. A book with such lines as, “It felt like an electric charge suddenly coursed through my body. I looked into Lisa’s eyes, and it was as if I was seeing her for the first time. We moved together as one, and I felt a stirring deep in my soul.” And then a few pages on, he woos her to the sounds of Bread’s “Baby I’m-a Want You.” When they finally have sex on page 46, “it was like a dam had broken and the flood came rushing in.”
This is either going to be the best book ever, or the worst.
January 24, 2010
Kettle from a headlight
Today I loved Cut/Paste: Creative Reuse in Canadian Design, an exhibit on at the Royal Ontario Museum until the end of the month. Featuring a gorgeous quilt made out of ugly one size-fits-all t-shirts, a toaster fashioned illicitly in penitentiaries out of a cigarette tin, guitar string and a shingle, a lamp made out of a chair, jewelry made out of skateboard decks, and a coffee table made from a toboggon. But my favourite was the K-42 Electric (tea!) Kettle manufactured by GE in the 1940s. Materials were scarce due to wartime, so the kettle was made from a recycled car headlight, but it would set a standard for kettle design throughout the 1950s, and become iconic in kettlish realms. (Image taken from The Canadian Design Resource).
January 22, 2010
An admission and some understanding
I have an admission to make, one that will win me no friends. And while usually I do not knock the books I hate here, this book is so well-loved, I think it can take it. I HATE The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. I got this book free out of a cereal box in 2003 (true story!), and have received it as a gift no less than three times since then. I read it once and found it so boring, I found it offensive, not credible as literature. And I know this will rankle many a reader now, because people love Precious Ramotswe and Alexander McCall Smith, but for the life of me, I could never undertand why.
Until now. I get it now! I still hate The Number One Ladies Detective Agency, but I think my love of Flavia de Luce and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is analogous to how other readers must feel about Precious and Number One… And not just because they’re both books with colonial flavour, written by old white men in unlikely voices (whether they be those of Botswanan lady detectives, or eleven year-old English girls). I think neither book is meant to ring especially true, authenticity is not the object, that these books get by on their charm, and charming is most definitely in the eye of the beholder.
Stay tuned for a review of Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie from the perspective of this beholder. I loved that book indeed.
January 20, 2010
Book charm
On an ordinary day, Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion would have been the most interesting book of any stack I picked up from the library. (I found out about this book from the Louisa May Alcott bio. It has the best cover I have ever seen. And that I am excited about a book with such a cover really does catapult me into a new league of nurd. Fortunately, I’ll keep it to myself and no one will ever know…).
But today was the day I also came home from the library with the gorgeous Bothered by My Green Conscience, the less gorgeous might be stupid but it was sitting on a table so I picked it up Sleep is For the Weak: The best of the mommybloggers, and Sheree Fitch’s book of poetry for adult readers In this house are many women.
And just when you thought books couldn’t be anymore charming, I’ve just joined the league of people who’ve discovered Flavia de Luce. Now reading the Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, which I have a terrible suspicion might be a literary love letter only for me: literary Harriets, a nod to Harriet the Spy herself (perhaps not on purpose, but still…), references to tea, and to pie, and literary allusions, and libraries to get lost in, plus she has a bike called Gladys. When I used to have a bike called Gladys, pink with a basket when we lived in Japan. Anyway, the connections are uncanny, delightful, and maybe Alan Bradley and I are long-lost somethings. The book is wonderful. I’m zipping through it and will be posting a review in days to come.
January 15, 2010
i hated wolf hall is it me
I could write a post every day of strange internet search terms that bring folks to Pickle Me This. I don’t do this every day, however, because it’s lame, easy, and gets old fast. These terms are sometimes educational though– it’s only through my stats I realized that people are really interested in Leah McLaren’s marital status and in Burmese sex. But could you please indulge me this one day? This one day in which people arrived searching for “masterful literary blogs” (oh, and have you ever arrived!), “i got an incident report at work how bad is it”, and my very favourite (do you think they found what they were looking for?) “i hated wolf hall is it me” (and I doubt it).
January 13, 2010
The library is doing nothing
The library is doing nothing to relieve me of my obsessive compulsive bookbuying ways. Instead, the library is widening my exposure to books I will DIE if I do not own. Lately, in this way, the following books have made their way into my library and into Harriet’s: Kiss the Joy as It Flies by Sheree Fitch (about which more is to come), 365 Activities You and Your Baby Will Love,
Baby Sign Language Basics, Ten Little Fingers Ten Little Toes by our beloved Mem Fox, Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers, and How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad. And now I also really think I need a copy of The Sleeping Life by Kerry Ryan. I’m not going to mention the two novels I picked up at the used bookstore this morning (Small Ceremonies and Muriella Pent, borrowed from libraries year ago; how did I live this long without them?) because I don’t want my husband to find out about them. (If he happened to, however, read this far in this entry, he’d be relieved to know at least that I’ve read both of them already so the to-be-read shelf has not grown at all.)
Anyway, that is it. I am cut off. No book buying until March.
January 13, 2010
Can-Lit and the Teenagers
“Upon reflection, I wondered again why Canadian literature isn’t able to connect with the teenage audience,” wrote Michael Bryson on his blog a while ago, which I thought was an interesting thing to wonder. And certainly not anything I’d much wondered about myself, because I rarely think of teenagers very much anymore, except to be a bit intimidated when I squeeze by them on the sidewalk.
Oh, teenagers, ye of the famously undeveloped brains. Though why did nobody tell me then? When I was a teenager, full of angst, and pain, and feeling, I do wish that someone had pointed out the fact that my brain wasn’t actually built and so nothing I felt really mattered yet. Which turned out to be quite true, in retrospect, but I might have been unwilling to face such a fact at that time. A time in which I was ready to die for the right to talk on the phone for six consecutive hours, and my favourite TV show was Party of Five.
The number of things that annoy me are legion, but up at the top would be people who carry with them any negative literary opinion formed by high school English class. No, worse– people who claim they don’t read because their high school English teachers broke down literature into such tiny pieces that they ruined the whole sport. (You can find evidence of this “breaking down” in any text annotated by a high school student, wherein each instance of “light” and “dark” is highlighted, for example. Or wherever there’s a mention of “river” and someone has written “=life”.) These people not understanding that high school is to teach you to learn how to learn first and foremost, and that perhaps all our closest-held opinions could serve to be re-evaluated once a decade or so.
Still, the greatest literary tragedy of them all, I think, is The Stone Angel as taught in Canadian high schools. Does this still happen? Is there a more inappropriate book out there? I reread it recently, and found it powerful (though far from Margaret Lawrence’s best), but could not understand how it could be expected to resonate with a sixteen year old. An extraordinary sixteen year old, perhaps, but most of us were far from that.
So what would be better? What’s a fully-grown Canadian book that could rock a teenage world? And don’t just think any old book with a youthful protagonist will do– a teenager can spot a phony a mile away. You know, the youthful protagonist who is always the cleverest person in the room (and in the book) so as to a) avoid complexities of character b) make sure we know the author is smart and not just writing YA pap c) reinvent the universe to realize ex-nerd author’s youthful fantasies concerning triumph and domination of a just world.
Help Me, Jacques Cousteau by Gil Adamson might work though. Fruit by Brian Francis. When I was in high school, I thought Atwood’s Cat’s Eye is as wonderful as I still do. Maybe Stunt? Alayna Munce’s When I Was Young and In My Prime? Rebecca Rosenblum’s Once. I think Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are would be better than Lives of Girls and Women. The Diviners instead of The Stone Angel (if they could stomach Morag’s stallion). And Lisa Moore’s Alligator, perhaps? Lullabies for Little Criminals?
Or am I mistaken, to suppose that a teenage reader requires a protagonist with shared concerns? Could teenagers be smarter or dumber than they look? What are they (and we) missing? And I know I’ve got some high school English teachers among my readership of six, and I’d be interested to know your opinion, as well as that of anyone else who has one.
January 11, 2010
A recent bookish intersection
“It is past midnight. One of the joys of marriage, thinks Roger, is this late night dissection of events in the privacy of bed, and the glorious intimacy, when the rest of the world is locked out and only you and she exist.”
–from Penelope Lively’s novel Family Album
**
all day
i wait all day
for these ten minutes
awake in our bed,
your minted breath,
lick of dark
across my eyelids,
and the little clicks
your glasses make
as they’re folded
and set on the nightstand
— from Kerry Ryan’s collection The Sleeping Life
January 11, 2010
Tricks of Perspective
It’s a strange trick of perspective, and I can never quite figure it out: is Harriet tiny or enormous? It changes from moment to moment, day to day. And I do like this picture, because I so rarely get to see her from a distance, for the individual person she is and will grow to be, as opposed to my forever appendage. She truly is one of the funniest and most interesting people I have ever met, through her staying-asleep skills are appalling. But how I admire her excellent posture and her perfectly round head.
Bookishly, my books to-be-read seem much less overwhelming today, mostly because I cleaned my house this week. I am not sure why there is a link between the two, but I’ll take ease wherever I can find it. And in a similar trick of perspective to the paragraph above, I am now reading Kiss the Joy as it Flies by Sheree Fitch, because I’m altogether intrigued about what a novel would be were it written by the author of Kisses Kisses Baby-O (one of our favourite bedtime board books). And so far, it’s as marvelous as expected.
I discovered Fitch had written an adult novel when it made the longlist for Canada Also Reads, The Afterword‘s response to CBC Canada Reads. It’s an intriguing list, packed with many books I’ve loved before, including The Incident Report, Stunt, Come Thou, Tortoise, Girls Fall Down, Coventry, February, Cloud of Bone, Too Much Happiness, The Killing Circle, Bang Crunch, and Yellowknife. Looking forward to seeing the shortlist.
January 8, 2010
A bit overwhelming
“Maybe–“, I said to my husband last evening. And then I couldn’t go on, because to do so would be to put a name to the problem that mustn’t be named (or at least not by me. Husband names it frequently, which is the problem). But I can’t hold it in anymore: “Maybe there are too many books in my life at the moment.” Because it’s gotten a bit overwhelming. Would be less so if I could stop requesting books from the library all the time, and if the Toronto Public Library holdings didn’t contain every one of my heart’s desires. (I am now hold 34 of 161 for Patrick Swayze’s autobiography. Yes, I too am not sure if this is really necessary).
I am currently reading Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen. I’ve also been reading the poetry collection The Sleeping Life by Kerry Ryan, which is pretty wintry so far, so it feels like the right book for now, though my life hasn’t been very sleeping for a long time. Progress is slow on the Alcott book, which is no matter on one hand because the book is very good, but then I’ve got such a backlog of books waiting. Like the Canada Reads: Independently books, which I’m going to start shortly. Beginning with Ray Smith’s Century, I think, because that is the one I’m most scared of.
And to make up for the dullness of this post, I give you a glimpse of me and technology circa 1987.
