August 27, 2009

Alternate Endings

“You know all those blank pages they have at the end of books? I always thought they were there so that if you didn’t like the way the book ended, you could write your own ending. I wrote rediculous alternate endings on those pages to pretty much every book I ever read as a kid… I pretty much made everything a happy ending. Leslie dying in Bridge of Terabithia was just a dream; Winnie decides to drink from the spring and run away with Jesse in Tuck Everlasting; Elizabeth returns to Frobisher Bay forever in The Other Elizabeth; Walter’s death in World War One was just a case of mistaken identity in Rilla of Ingleside. Oh, and the end of every one of my Nancy Drew books now features a love scene between Nancy and Ned. I was so frustrated that he was supposed to be her boyfriend, yet we never saw them kiss!”– Amy Jones from “Amy Jones in Conversation” by Katia Grubisic, in The New Quarterly

August 27, 2009

The Mem Keeps Coming

Sometimes one thing leads to another, or else it just leads to the same thing over and over again. The latter in this case, which is the case of children’s author Mem Fox, beginning with her book finding its way into my house quite indirectly. From reader comments, I discover that everybody loves Mem Fox, and get some further Mem recommendations. The next week at the Library Story Time (which was incredible, incidently, are we ever lucky to have the Toronto Public Library system available to us!), the librarian pulls out Fox’s latest Hello Baby, as well as Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes. (They are so good!) And then today I walked into a bookshop near my house and found a copy of Mem Fox’s Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever. Naturally, I bought it. Tomorrow I expect I’ll run into Mem Fox in the grocery store, never mind that she lives in Australia…

August 24, 2009

Define "tuffet"

“The conventional wisdom is that a precocious reader is a child in possession of a prenatural grasp of both the facts and features of the adult world. This may well be true of some, but was not true of me. My reading list didn’t grant me access to the particulars of adult life, but to its moody interstices, the dark web of complex feeling that apparently suffused life after grade school. Like a child reciting nursery rhymes, I was consumed by the music of the words, not the circumstances surrounding Miss Muffet and her actual tuffet. (Well, can you, even now, define “tuffet”?)” –Lizzie Skurnick, from Shelf Discoveries

August 14, 2009

Children's Writer Mem Fox

Our next-door neighbours were having a clear-out this week, and found a copy of a book they thought we might be interested in. Harriet, You’ll Drive Me Wild! is a delightful little picture book about a pesky little girl and a mom who loses her cool. Spoiler alert: happy endings in sight. We love it, and I’m quite happy that through this book, I’ve discovered its author, Mem Fox too. She’s an Australian writer of 33 children’s books and a literacy educator as well. Her excellent website features her full bibliography, biographical information, and lots of other fun stuff, including articles and addresses she’s written for parents and teachers about promoting a passion for reading, including “Ten read-aloud commandments”, “If I Were Queen of the World (…on how to read before school)”, and “Winning the War Between Books and Television” (which acknowledges that television is an excellent medium for turning children onto books). Fascinating stuff, all of it, and because I’m so glad to have found it, I wanted to share it with you.

August 7, 2009

Now reading/not reading/etc.

I am now reading Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and I’m loving it, loving it, loving it. The “book reports” it contains remarkable, not just because Lizzie Skurnick indulges in good nostalgia, but because of the subtext she unearths the second time around– her treatment of classics, including Daughters of Eve, Harriet the Spy, Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade, and The Cat Ate My Gymsuit demonstrate something wildly substantial (and subversive) going on in YA literature back in the day.

I’ve not managed to read through a single magazine/periodical since my daughter was born, and so I’ve got a stack beside me on my desk right now and no clue when I’m going to get to them. (FYI: my “desk” is now an end-table beside my gliding chair in the living room, which actually works out quite handily.) There are so many books and so little time that periodicals hardly seem to factor into the equation. I should probably make a new blog label called “Not Reading” and then I could write about it all the time.

Last Friday I had to spent two hours waiting at the Passport Canada office, and they’d probably never seen anyone happier to wait. Mostly because I HAD A BOOK IN MY BAG and BABY WAS ASLEEP IN HER PRAM. Baby stayed asleep for two hours (and then, having exhausted her patience/goodness resource, proceeded to be horrible for the rest of the day, so much so that I was destroyed by evening, but alas) so that I had more uninterrupted reading than I’d had in 2.5 months. It was extraordinary, particularly as I was reading the marvelous Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood. Only problem with that being that the book was so engaging, I felt like I’d lived the lives of 31 mothers that day, which probably contributed to my destroyment by 5 pm.

Anyway, speaking of waiting, Rona Maynard on waiting-room lit and Marilynne Robinson’s Home. Rebecca Rosenblum’s submission tips for aspiring writers is also worth a read. The great Lauren Groff, illuminatingly, on rejection notices. What’s wrong with charity book shops? is an interesting (though not conclusive) response to questions raised in the thought-provoking article “Selling Civilization” from Canadian Notes and Queries.

Now, must wake baby, feed baby, change baby. For we’re off to a program at the library that promises songs, and stories and “tickle rhymes” for all. (I’m not sure if it’s sad or amazing that this is my life now.)

July 30, 2009

Bookish books in the post

I only just noticed that the two books I received in the post today both have books on their covers. On the left, we have The Incident Report by Martha Baillie, a library-set novel. I’d actually requested it from the library, which was fitting, I thought, but when I found I was 146 on the holds list, I decided to buy the book instead. I discovered this book via Melanie’s review— it’s structured as a collection of incident reports logged by employees at a public library. As a former library employee myself, I can vouch that these might be as bizarre as you like, and wonder if the fiction will be as wild as fact is. The other book is Shelf Discovery by Lizzie Skurnick, whose Fine Lines column I absolutely adore. As she does in the column, Skurnick rereads “teen classics” in this new book (with guests columnists including Meg Cabot, Laura Lippman and Jennifer Weiner). The reviews are hilarious, insightful and bring back long misplaced memories.

I think that both of these books are going to prove delightful in their own particular ways.

July 29, 2009

Two months

On Sunday we celebrated two months of Harriet being born, of me being a mom, and of ours being a family of three. And even a month ago, I could not have forecast how full and rich life would become again, so I’m so proud of how well we’re all doing. Of course, chaos reigns, but it’s at a level I can live with comfortably. One qualm being that I am not managing to read nearly as much as I’d like to be, and yet I keep buying books/requesting books at the library at much the same pace as ever, and it’s a little overwhelming. Unless board books count– my favourite is On The Day You Were Born by Debra Frasier. “On the day you were born/ gravity’s strong pull/ held you to the Earth/ with a promise that you/ would never float away…”

June 9, 2009

Out of Time

I’m now rereading Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, prompted by the Harriet/Hatty character within (though ours will be a Hattie, we think, when she’s at home). And the book is more pertinent to my current experience than I would ever have imagined, though it could be said that my mind is so mushy and needy that I could be identifying with pretty much anything right about now. But Tom’s isolation speaks to me, and his insomnia, and the secret world he creeps about in at night when everyone else is asleep. The secret world wherein the clock strikes thirteen, and I feel like I’ve been there lately, up with the squalling baby who refuses to eat properly or be satiated. “Only the clock was left, but the clock was always there, time in, time out.”

I loved this book as a child, absorbed as I was by all stories of time travel. From Back to the Future to Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, and A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson, and many more I’ve surely forgotten. It’s odd because I’ve never liked science-fiction or fantasy in my fiction, but this one element of genre fiction, I’ve always found so irresistible. Perhaps because the alternate world it plays with is still the very one we live in, which is really the only one that ever interests me, however out of time.

April 18, 2009

It's Useful to Have a Duck by Isol

It’s Useful to Have a Duck by Isol is one of the best things I’ve come across lately, and not just because ducks are my second-favourite animal (after elephants). Here is a book that is two stories in one, accordion-style, one half the story of a boy and his duck and the various ways he uses it. As a hat, to dry his ears, and after the bath is almost drained, the duck plugs up the hole. A familiar-enough tale, but then turn the book around to read It’s Useful to Have a Boy, the same story but from the duck’s perspective. This duck is not a hat, but uses the boy’s head to see the view, he uses the boy’s ear to wax his bill, and the little duck is not a plug, but is instead seated comfortably in his sleeping hole.

What a delightful book, whose simple drawings will appeal to children, whose story is playful nonsense, who takes such advantage of its bookish form to contort into something quite wonderful. These two mirror stories rendering the “playful nonsense” so much more than that, offering a lesson on perspective that seems miraculous dawning on the adult reader. A child probably would only catch this lesson in glimpses, but how remarkable is any book with depths still to be plumbed.

April 2, 2009

Preferring chocolate cupcakes

Lovely that Shirley Hughes’ Dogger has been reissued, though I hope my baby is content with an older edition, as I’ve been saving it all this time. On Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, and it really is about time I read that book. Annabel Lyon’s review of the new Mary Gaitskill collection is one of the most entertaining reviews I’ve read ever, as well as quite persuasive: “Short story fans like things short, so here’s the skinny: Buy this book. Now, for the rest of you, the fat…” Craig Boyko on the short story, which I only read because of cupcakes in the headline, but I’m glad I did: “If stories do not sell, I guess it must be because people prefer to read novels. As someone who enjoys short stories, I find this preference odd. It’s like preferring chocolate cake to chocolate cupcakes. Aren’t they the same thing?” (They sort of are. Except that cupcakes are their own particular brand of amazing.)