October 13, 2007
Summer
I don’t very often refer here to the bad days: to the month spent waiting for test results, for example, or to when my husband was so bored at work, he couldn’t be happy while he wasn’t at work. I don’t very often refer here to the bad days, however, mostly because we don’t have them very often. Because my test results came back negative, and Stuart got a promotion. Because we have had an extraordinary summer full of good fortune, and now that the weather outside appears absolutely autumnal, I can look back and be so grateful.
Of course it’s not all just a given: you’ve got to know enough to appreciate the day you’re in. And as a Canadian I know that sunshine is fleeting. From that first gorgeous day in April I knew enough to put on some shorts, to go outside and enjoy it. But the rest, oh the rest. Any season that begins with celebratory High Tea at the Four Seasons is bound to be exquisite. Frisbee in Trinity Bellwoods Park with Curtis, High Park Picnics before we had leaves on the trees, backyard barbeques with so many friends, the garden born, lobster dinners, and city rooftop summer nights.
Our trip to England in June was a magical story, beginning with the car rental mix-up when we got a Saab Convertible instead of an economy car. That countryside: Yorkshire Dales, Lake Windermere, the Pennines in a thunderstorm, and the seaside. Bronwyn’s wedding on the village green. The night we drove four hours from one side of the country to the other, with Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs and Rhianna on the radio, and there was family at the end of the journey. A week in which I ate scones and jam nearly every day.
This summer we were both working for the first time in over two years, and then suddenly my job became permanent and Stuart was appointed to a position that he loves. We had some money again, to get out of town or to enjoy town whilst we were in it. Trips to Toronto Island and the beach at the bottom of Spadina. To Massey Hall for Crowded House in August. Dinners out with friends, just because we wanted to. Our amazing Muskoka weekend back in July, with friends oldest and dearest. To Quebec for Susannah and Loic’s wedding, against the most gorgeous backdrop you could imagine. Trips to Peterborough to see my family, camping on the shores of Rice Lake, infamous Mothers’ Day drunken shenanigans. Montreal in September, and a whole new city to see. The trip on the train.
Summer stretched on this year, from April and into October. That’s seven months of perfect bliss– more than half the year, and we’re lucky just for that. And for the evenings which got colder and darker, and the crunch of leaves beneath our shoes. To wear scarves, and sweaters, and having knitting projects on the go. Oh for October, the best of both worlds. New shoes and warm jackets. To take long lingering walks, still holding hands without our gloves.
October 4, 2007
So much history
“Was there so much history in Britain that it could be treated casually? There weren’t enough glass cases to hold it all”. –Kate Grenville, Search for the Secret River
October 3, 2007
An ideal marriage
An ideal marriage I have discovered, as indeed I am longing to get through the nonfiction books in my stack, but I can’t bear to give up lies for too long. So I am reading two books at once now, nonfiction complemented by a collection of short stories: the former being Kate Grenville’s Searching for the Secret River, and the latter is Jack Hodgins’ Damage Done by the Storm. Perfect! Why didn’t I think of this sooner?
Grenville’s book is wonderful so far, though I am approaching it from a strange place having never read The Secret River. It’s asking a lot of the same questions as Bernice Morgan’s novel Cloud of Bone, but from an Australian point of view, about remembering and forgetting, and the price we pay for either. Even some of the scenes are reminiscent, which is strange for two books of nonfiction and fiction respectively. And just getting into the Hodgins (one story before bed, you know). I’ve read his A Passion for Narrative before, and am excited to see his theory in action.
I have also become a compulsive squash buyer. Soon this will have to stop.
September 28, 2007
Thinking back and forth
I’m now reading Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights On Air, which is to say I’m positively bewitched. 100 pages from the end, and expect a review sometime tomorrow. I am positively enveloped; I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. To have a story so gripping and writing so good is rare, really. And the book has been doing strange things to me. “After a while it grew on them, on some of them at least, on the ones who would never forget, who would think back on their lives and say, My time there was the most vivid time of my life.”
That passage set me thinking about the most vivid time of my life, and last night around 10:30 I was digging through boxes to find my journal from September 16th 2001-May 31 2002. The exact dates were incidental, but that time was on fire. Anyone who was there would know that, and it seems I remember it very poorly upon rereading my journal. Stories and anecdotes I have no recollection of, which is strange. Though the writing is good– this surprised me. When I read my fiction from that period, I want to bury myself in my backyard, but the journal was really lovely in places. The stories it told were often sad too. Funny with vividness– I think it comes from the whole spectrum of emotions, confined to a small space. “My time there was the most crazy time of my life.” Vivid, yes, but I wasn’t happy. I remember those days epically, but they were tough to be in the thick of.
Whereas. Tonight, in my less vivid life, I arrived home with my husband, who takes the subway to my work every day so we can walk home together. “I need to read,” he said, when we got in the door. He is currently enthralled by Little Children. So we sat down on the couch together, books in hand, the kettle on for tea. A straight hour of nothing but books, tea, and biscuits, and perfect quiet. Elizabeth Hay has created something amazing. And the sweet bliss interrupted only to get up get the pumpkin risotto started.
September 21, 2007
You must
Because I read so much, so fast, I am quite well-versed at moving on. Books end, books shut. But one book has been positively haunting me since I read it more than a month ago. You might remember that I wasn’t so impressed as I read Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I didn’t know where the tale was leading, and the narrative seemed lacking in complexity. The prose was good, but it was all so weird. Intriguingly so, though, and I read to the end. That end. It shocked me, as it was meant to. Not with horror, but with power. Vida took everything I’d ever supposed about fate, family, obligation, story, history, and she turned it on its head. The phrase still resonates: “And when I hear people say that you can’t start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think You can. You must.” Nothing else has ever been so wise, and the power of that moves me to tears if I think too hard. Of course you must, and I cannot wait to reread the book, galvinized by its now-inevitable close.
September 21, 2007
Friends
Ah, friends– the sugar on my berry. I received an envelope in the post today from one of my oldest friends (“since we were girls” I am nearly old enough to say), inscribed with the same symbolism we used to affix to notes passed in grade nine math. Indeed, I am a great appreciator of history. But then also of new friends: what kind of a miracle are they? Is it not enough that I met brilliant people when I was twelve and was smart enough to discern they’d be good to know, but that I continue to meet brilliant people to this day? How could such a miserable bloody world manage to be so brilliantly peopled, and bloody all the same? That I do not know, but I do know that I came home tonight from an evening with a new friend, quite hysterical with joy. My new friend. All right, I’ve known my new friend for two years now, but for me most friendships require a while to bud. And in the last few months this one has bloomed, positively. La la la my new friend. Our conversations set the world on fire.
September 7, 2007
If memory were a colour
“Something of my grandmother was sealed here in ink: in her careful, controlled penmanship, in the choices she made over what to set down. She had preferred a fountain pen over a ballpoint; the evidence was here, in the flow of ink from a fountain pen, as she wrote this recipe on how to preserve a rose: Dip the whole blossom and stalk in melted wax, coating completely to seal from the action of air and the passage of time. If memory were a colour, it would be this blue, the colour of the ink my grandmother used to preserve her treasured memories from the wasting effects of time.” –Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Turtle Valley
August 22, 2007
Big Book of the Berenstain Bears
So I’ve been giving some thought to the types of books I read as an adolescent, but what about the books from even earlier? The picture books? Once again I wish I could tout some high-falutin lit cred from way back in the day, but what I come up with is almost just nonsense. Bookish poppycock, oh, but GOOD bookish poppycock. I loved Amelia Bedelia, Jillian Jiggs, Miss Rumphius (who was not nonsense). Etc. etc. But most of all I did love The Berenstain Bears.
And so I was excited about the re-issue of Big Book of the Berenstain Bears by Stan and Jan Berenstain, and by the chance to go back in time and remember why I liked these books so much. This book is actually five books in one, in which the Bears have a new baby (she appears while Brother and Papa are in the woodshed), get a sitter (nicer than she seems), are afraid of the dark (solution=nightlight), go to the doctor (won’t hurt a bit), and clean their room. A little preachy (life is better when you keep your closet tidy), and not so fashionable in terms of gender roles, but still these are nice little stories. Perhaps they are more suitable for application to real life than flights of the imagination, but this big book would strike me as sensible to have around in the event of children, and five in one is good value to boot.
So where did my fierce love of this series stem from? Upon careful consideration of this compendium, I have managed to trace my attraction back to the Berenstain Bears’ tree house. Marvelously pink with chimneys and windows in the boughs, I wanted to live in a house just like it. I think I also used to be fascinated by the way the Berenstain Bears kept popping up in Dr. Seuss easy-reads, thus existing in multiple literary dimensions. That Brother Bear was never identified by name in the Dr. Seuss books only added to his allure, and made him much more cool and mysterious than might be suggested by the stories in which he collects birds’ nests, or peels down to his underpants for a booster shot.
July 24, 2007
Bruising
Kim, of the marvelous Kimbooktu Book Gadget Site, has set up a new page featuring home libraries. Mine’s there, and you can submit yours too. Voyeurism at its best. Due to my current line of work, I found this article on CEO libraries particularly fascinating (via Bookninja). I thought David Halberstam’s essay The History Boys in the latest VF was just extraordinary.
July 9, 2007
Completely a fool
Reading a classic every month takes up so much reading time and reading effort, but oh the payoff. I adored The Portrait of a Lady, which I hardly remembered from my first reading seven years ago. Oh, the mastery. And that Henrietta Stackpole was redeemed in the end; it pleased me that my younger self was not completely a fool. It was interesting, by the way, to see how self-reflexively I used to read my books– the lines underlined. It was as though I used to read seeking myself (“Yes yes yes! That’s meeee!” my notes appear to shriek. “That’s just how it is!!”). Any line that summed up my experience, my struggles, my pain. I once read a book where a character had the same name as a boy I loved, and I underlined every single instance of that name. How ridiculous. And so we’ve come full circle, I suppose. It seems that my younger self was indeed completely a fool.
Now reading a new novel–Salt Rain (from Australia!) by Sarah Armstrong. And so the alternating rereading begins, and next I will get to We Need to Talk About Kevin.
