January 14, 2008
Sadness and Guilt
My weekend contained best friends at brunches and lunches, perfect chocolate cake, delightful cousins, new shelving units, knitting, reading, jobs done and a bath-to-come. This weekend’s Globe and Mail was terrific. Stephanie Nolen’s “An Inuit Adventure in Timbuktu” is the most amazing piece of journalism I’ve (ever?) come across. (“I wasn’t really intending to read this,” my husband said to me, “but once I started I just couldn’t stop”.) Well-written, beautiful, fascinating, and will make you think of things you’ve never considered before.
And then the books section– G&M Books, what’s happened to you? For you’re becoming sort of wonderful, it’s true. More than an assemblage of watered-down reviews by friends of friends, and paragraph-length excerpts. The 50 Greatest Books Series is terrific, and not just because the first week’s choice is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Oh it’s been done before, I know, but don’t you find that great books can be discussed forever and ever?
And then the reviews themselves, epistolary goodness. Reviewing The Mitford Letters (which I loved), Graham Greene’s letters (which I’m reading), Eleanor Wachtel’s Carol Shields book (which is a treasure), Four Letter Word (which I can’t wait for). It was as though the Books Pages had tapped right into my heart.
I’ve also really enjoyed the latest Vanity Fair, whose lives of rich and famous feature such gems of phrase as, “Robin was an ongoing source of sadness and guilt to Lady Annabel after she allowed him to enter the tigress’s enclosure at Aspinall’s.” As they say, you really couldn’t make this up.
January 11, 2008
Wonderful Things
There is turmoil at our house, as a new computer arrived (not for me). Therefore boxes of boxes are everywhere, and no one’s washed up from dinner. Also the phone was just fixed after three days of deadness, so there was catching up to do. The wind outside is blowing, and I’m afraid the house might fall down. But still, there are links.
Some wonderful DGR posts of late: discovering Grace Paley, on the Reading Cure. At the Guardian Books Blog, on enjoying arcane how-to books (which reminded me that I still have to-be-read my copy of How To Run Your Home Without Help). Jeffrey Eugenides on his new book (the anthology of love stories My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, which I cannot wait to read). And please, Chelsea C. vs. D. Huckabee.
And today’s G&M Facts and Arguments essay was amazing: “Nearly Lost at Sea”. About a love letter, returned to sender. “Inside the envelope was a typewritten note from the Returned Letter Section: ‘It is regretted that the enclosed air letter has been damaged by water in transit.” Handwritten across the note in blue ink was the explanation: “Salvaged mail from Comet crash off Elba.’ The love letter John had written had sunk to the bottom of the sea.”
Speaking of love letters: how brilliant is this, Four Letter Word: Original Love Letters. And of course, I knew as soon I glimpsed it: designed by Kelly Hill.
January 4, 2008
Where to go
Do you dare to use a one-sentence paragraph? Crooked House on “the ‘we’ point of view and E. Nesbit” (“We were the Bastables”). Heather Mallick’s year that was. CBC.ca/art’s 2007 in pop culture. And did Unity Mitford have Hitler’s baby? (I’m inclined to say no– though imagine finding out you were Hitler’s baby?). Check out “the manliest cookbook of all time”. Headline of the day is “Circus School Seeks Students”. Marchand’s year that was: on “grace” as the ultimate gift of Divisidero, “Some readers would have been satisfied with a good novel.”
I recently found reference in a book to pudding finger-painting, which has relieved me of a nagging fear that I’d been a paint-eating child. And though I’m despairing about returning to work on Monday, we’ve got planned in the meantime an afternoon tea at the Four Seasons as consolation.
December 31, 2007
Year-End Reading Recap
I do my best not to be a passive reader. To select what I read carefully, to engage with what I’m reading through my blog, to read carefully and critically, but also joyfully, and to keep track of what I’m reading. I’ve been reading most actively during the last two years, since I started my list “Books Read Since 2006”. The list from which I was able to discern last year that I read hardly any books by men and/or writers not from three certain countries whose names start with A, B and C. And that though a book or two had been written pre-1900, you’d be hard-pressed to notice from my list.
At the beginning of 2007 I resolved to read more slowly, and to read a “classic” monthly. I was sort of untriumphant on both counts, though the first one I couldn’t really help. I tried. The second, I ended up reading about six classics, falling in love with Middlemarch and Huckleberry Finn in particular. I never did get to Anna Karenina and maybe I never will, but once again I intend to (and will that eventually cease to mean something?). Though I got around to Guns Germs and Steel so anything is possible.
I am also sorry to have not yet read Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park, which I read described as “If Virginia Woolf were alive in 2007…what she would be writing”. Did you know that I nearly bought it in the Southport Waterstones, but bought a hat down the road instead? And they didn’t have it at the airport bookstore, and back in Canada it could hardly be found at all, and I wanted the paperback, but I think I might spring for the hardback now. If I’ve wanted something for six months, it must be worthwhile.
Regrets aside, it’s been an awfully good year though. Before we go out to dinner this evening, I’ll have finished reading Kate Sutherland’s utterly enjoyable story collection All In Together Girls, which will be #339 on my grand list. (Though I will not enter it until the book is done– the one thing in the world about which I’m superstitious). Which means I’ve read 166 books this year, not bad since I spent 7 months of this year working full time. Not bad in particular since so many of the books I read were brilliant.
This year my reading resolution is quite simple– to read with a pencil. For notes, to underline new words, to deface my books and make them mine. An active reader would do that. Oh there are so many fine books just ahead. And I will start the new year just like I started the old one, with Francine Prose’s wonderful Reading Like a Writer.
Oh and also– not only is my novel entitled What Comes Down, but it is finished.
December 17, 2007
Diamond sharp
The Globe books pages were exciting this weekend. Rebecca Rosenblum’s story in The Journey Stories 19 is called “diamond-sharp”. A great review of When To Walk which I enjoyed reading this Fall. And a review of a new by book by Andrea Barrett whose Servants of the Map I so adored.
Beyond books, Joanna Schneller should be lauded for her article “A Culture Saturated by Sexism”. Though one of Schneller’s most intriguing points was an aside. “In three popular films this year – Knocked Up, Waitress and Juno — women who find themselves accidentally pregnant dismiss the option of abortion almost immediately.” Which is a bit disturbing, but understandable really, and for a most assuring reason: abortion makes for such boring narrative. Or at least everyone I’ve ever known to have had one has just gone on happily with the rest of her life.
December 12, 2007
Education, Enlightenment and Delight
Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech was so urgent. Indeed I’m not sure how one could learn to be anything without a houseful of books (as insulation and inspiration), however metaphoric or otherwise.
She writes: “We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”
She raises the question, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
And it’s an interesting question. Lessing is right, though even if I didn’t think so, she knows better than I do. There is something to be said for listening to one’s elders. The world is where it’s at, and books are its closest cousin, but though I do suspect that a whole day passed on the internet would not be one most productive, so often does the internet manage to serve as a portal not only to literature, but also to the rest of the whole wide world.
Of course my perspective is probably skewed– I tend to stick to bookish blogs and websites anyway. But all the same, just look what I’ve found there lately: Lessing’s speech for starters, which was published in a newspaper halfway around the world; fascinatingly on “little people” in British literature; thoughts on readers within literature; on friendship and what poetry can do; a video of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on African writing; some book recommendations.
This year internet sources have pointed me towards books as follows: here for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; here for anything by Kate Christensen; here for Lucky Jim; here for Penelope Fitzgerald (and how fitting! She’s blogged about her today) and Persephone books; I found Laurie Colwin here; and I could go on, but now, in fact, I am beginning to waste time. (See Ms. Lessing, I am listening).
Just as I believe there is no great disconnect between literature and the world, neither does the internet exist in a vacuum; these are worlds which can feed one another. Of course it’s possible to to waste time on the internet, as it’s possible to waste time anywhere, but if you’re discriminating and discerning enough, you can harness the medium. Look around and see that the internet can take you exactly where you want to go– not just towards amusement, but onwards to sources of education, enlightenment, and delight.
November 27, 2007
Charming lunacy
I do hope that India Knight and Andrew O’Hagan are still friends, even though they’re no longer an item. Only because O’Hagan’s piece in the LRB and Knight’s latest column are so complementary– and particularly timely as I’ve just started reading The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters.
In his review of the book O’Hagan gets Mitfordness just right: “Never… have sentences appeared so rhythmically in tune with a sense of the ridiculous, or so ready to snigger at the disaster of common beliefs. In that the sense the book is a masterpiece– it contains the DNA of a national style– and in the future people will read it to understand both the charming lunacy of English manners and how a singular mode of self-hood could shape the language.”
And India Knight bemoans the end of letters, writing: “This is a plea for a return to pen and paper. Admittedly I am almost fetishistic in my love of stationery but there is nevertheless a real pleasure to be had in writing someone a proper letter and in taking care over it. And it’s likely to end up, well-thumbed and cherished, in some cache of effects for your grandchildren to find – as opposed to expiring when your computer does, lost for ever, disposable and ultimately meaningless.”
November 27, 2007
Board Games
It’s not bookish in the slightest, but I’ve certainly been doing a lot of reading since I started my job in May. Mostly proxy circulars from TSX composite which don’t tend be exciting, but today is exciting as the results of our research are published in the Globe & Mail‘s Board Games 2007. A must-link for all you who are passionate about corporate governance.
Which is, um, anyone?
Long live day jobs!
November 25, 2007
RR and Cake
My infinite list of favourite things about Rebecca Rosenblum includes the fact that we once decided our Serious Thursday writer meetings would involve cake in celebration of all our literary successes. A smart decision, I say now, considering the accomplishments of said Rosenblum and my love of cake. Congratulations to her on winning the 2007 Metcalf-Rooke Award for her brilliant collection of short stories.
