May 27, 2008
Links for Today
Links for today: we’ve got Emily Perkins’ Novel About My Wife racking up great reviews in The Guardian and in The Toronto Star. (Read my review, and interview. An aside: very exciting, my copy of Perkins’ first book Not Her Real Name arrived in the post today.) Somewhat dissimilarly bookish, how to make a hardback into a handbag (via The Pop Triad) and I’m going to do it! Baby Got Books celebrates the death of the death of online criticism. Mrs. Dalloway Digested is funny. Hilary Mantel remembers 30 years of Virago. Lizzie Skurnick rereads The Girl with the Silver Eyes.
And one of the many highlights of my weekend was reading the actual printed Guardian Review, particularly Zadie Smith on Middlemarch. Citing Henry James’ 1873 review: “It sets a limit,” he wrote, “to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.” Writes Smith, “It’s strange to see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man’s certainty of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant.”
May 14, 2008
Unless
This past weekend has ruined me, and I remain in a coma. Or perhaps I just can’t stop reading Rebecca long enough to focus on anything else. And I have a stack of books-to-be-read up to my elbows, so thankfully this weekend is a long one and I can fill it well.
Last evening I attended the Fiery First Fiction event, and it did not disappoint. I particularly enjoyed hearing Nathan Whitlock read from A Week of This (which I read last month), Shari Lapeña read from her book (which I’ve got upcoming), and then there was Claudia Dey who must have sold her book a thousand times. Personally I’m not sure how I’d live long without it– her reading was unbelievable. Coach House is publishing wonderful books these days; remember Pulpy and Midge? And I also want to read Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig.
Read Claudia Dey profiled in The Toronto Star. Watch “the list of books that make the best use of their type” at Baby Got Books. Lorrie Moore’s Collected Stories reviewed. Margaret Drabble is characteristically excellent in “The beginning of life should not be a subject for a crude polemic”.
Today whilst reading The Danforth Review on A Week of This, I was surprised to see my own review referenced. Bryson’s points are interesting, and I found quite illuminating his assertion that novels “are fictional inventions of imagined worlds. They are performances of language, and the references they make to each other– explicitly or implicitly– are of greater interest than a novel’s photo realism.” True enough, perhaps, but then isn’t the novel quite a multitudinous thing? And don’t we all approach it differently?
And like Heather Mallick, I’ve noticed this month’s issue of The Walrus is decidedly short on women writers. “Apparently you can’t have a good magazine unless women are writing it,” writes one of Mallick’s avid readers. But you sort of can’t, actually, in this day and age. Not if you’re writing a general interest/current events magazine, and women are writing practically none of it– is this really surprising? The only pieces written by women are two of four “field notes”, one of four book reviews, a poem by P.K. Page, and one of nine letters to the editor. (Perhaps the whole issue is the answer to Austin Clarke’s story title, “Where Are the Men?”) What all this signifies exactly, I cannot venture to say. But then to me the facts appear as such, I don’t actually need to say anything.
In related news, I’m looking forward to reading Why Women Should Rule the World by Dee Dee Myers. Check out coverage at The Savvy Reader.
May 6, 2008
Some links
Scroll down for Margaret Drabble’s letter to editor about sorry states of affairs at the British Library. More on Virago Modern Classics– this time from founder Carmen Callil. Listen to an interview with Sharon Butala on Sounds like Canada (from April 29). Writer Rebecca Rosenblum on creation (but not creationism– which is really a strange ism when you think about it). Crooked House passes on some Olivia love, among other children’s lit links.
April 25, 2008
We lay no claim…
Today’s Globe F&A essay “Degrees of Separation” is reaching towards the ideas so deftly explored by Sharon Butala in her brilliant new book The Girl from Saskatoon (read my review here). Writer Bob Levin writes, “This isn’t our tragedy, of course – it’s her family’s, her friends’. We lay no claim to it…” But then, what do we do with these connections?
The Girl in Saskatoon is currently #7 on the Globe & Mail Bestseller list for non-fiction.
April 22, 2008
Life is too short
That I’ve never read Eat Pray Love doesn’t mean I’m not amused by furious tirades against the book: lately, “Eat Pray Love Shut the Fuck Up” and “Eat Pray and look at me.” Stephanie Nolen’s blogpost: “one tiny source of levity amidst the heartbreak… the Zimbabwean flare for names.” Ivor Tossell’s, “They’re never gonna give you up Rick Astley” is brilliant. How your home library is a real estate selling point (via Stuart, though I’m not sure why he was reading The Telegraph‘s property section). Though at said paper, I came across this fascinating Doris Lessing interview. The work of the great Grace Paley surveyed (and I am excited, for I’ll be rereading her collected stories soon!): “”Art is too long, and life is too short… There’s a lot more to do in life than just writing.”
April 16, 2008
Notable things I've encountered
I’ve just finished reading Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb, and am now thrilled to be starting The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Also catching up on periodicals, just finishing LRB and due to read Exile and Walrus.
Notable things I’ve encountered of late as follows: a short story by Hilary Mantel, “Offenses Against the Person”; celebrating postcards (sending and collecting– you might remember that I’m fond of such things); Jhumpa Lahiri in The Star; Justine Picardie on Virago Modern Classics; Orange Prize shortlist; Erica Jong on the sorry state of things, Polly Toynbee’s response (reader commenters: why are you all so angry?) and from the Guardian Blog: “Women don’t secretly hate each other. But they rightfully hate a society that limits them as workers, as writers, as thinkers. Any fight that looks to really change that, count me in.”
April 8, 2008
Sark: The World's Newest Democracy
Am I ever excited to pass along a link to Sark: The World’s Newest Democracy, a short documentary film by my friend Paul Kutasi. Partly because I take every opportunity to brag about my clever friends, but also because the film is fabulous. Sark is a small island in the English Channel, and the last feudal state in Europe– but not for long. Well done Paul.
March 30, 2008
Isn't twenty-first century marriage just grand
The very best thing I’ve read lately is Andrew O’Hagan’s “Iraq, 2 May 2005” in the LRB, and it seems to be available online. A stellar piece of journalism, standing as evidence but not of anything too obvious.
This week I was interested to hear Diane Francis on The Current talking about her new book Who Owns Canada Now, for these are the details my job concerns.
Margaret Atwood on Anne of Green Gables (which I’m looking forward to rereading this summer). Lizzie Skurnick on Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game (which is one of very few of my YA books that came with with me into adulthood, even surviving through the age in which I thought I was over all that.) Middlemarch celebrated. Justine Picardie guests at Dovegreyreader’s today.
Must get up now. My husband has just cleaned the whole of oven/stove and I’m still in bed (oh– but isn’t twenty-first century marriage just grand! He’s even brought me my tea. Can’t take this for granted though, or he’ll leave me for a cleaning lady).
March 26, 2008
Just in
I’m just in from the Exile launch, which I left all too soon as I have 600 impossible things to accomplish before bedtime. Had the great pleasure of hearing Rebecca Rosenblum read though, and I picked up the new issue of the Quarterly— it’s beautiful.
In others, I am thrilled that writer Justine Picardie has started blogging. I fell in love with her writing when I lived in England, particularly her memoir If the Spirit Moves You and I look forward to reading her new novel Daphne. Maud Newton on Laura Lippman (whose What the Dead Know made for a perfect cottage read last summer). The Great Gatsby celebrated in The Globe & Mail. And Steven W. Beattie reads Nikolski.
March 19, 2008
The best things
The best things I’ve found online of late are as follows: a link to a fabulous radio interview with Lois Lowry. Spitzer through the prism of fiction (via Kate). Rona Maynard’s considered response to The Sexual Paradox. The Orange Prize longlist. Smut of my youth: My Sweet Audrina reread. Anne Enright profiled.
