October 21, 2008
Dad-Lit, it seems
This weekend I read The Child in Time by Ian McEwan, which I was surprised to see acknowledged itself as indebted to Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies. I’ve not read my copy of Dream Babies yet, but will do soon due to the rave reviews I’ve seen by others. Anyway, the McEwan book was really wonderful, and perhaps my favourite of his since I read Saturday. (I really didn’t like Atonement that much; is there a terrible place where they put away people like me?). I don’t know that I’ve read such a thoughtful book by a man about parenting and childhood. And then without even thinking, I picked Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York to read next. It seems I’m really on a Dad-lit kick, but I am loving the perspective. “Whatever the origins– and I leave it to some meatier-minded cultural historian to trace them all– what child rearing is, when you live it, is a joy. It should be seen as we really do feel it– less as a responsibility imposed than as a great gift delivered up to us… [Children] compel us to see the world as an unusual place again. Sharing a life with them is sharing a life with lovers, explorers, scientists, pirates, poets. It makes for interesting mornings.”
October 1, 2008
Boydens
Currently reading the like-nothing-I’ve-ever-read-before Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden. Boyden and her husband Joseph Boyden are profiled at the CBC.
September 14, 2008
Unremarkable
Unremarkable weekend, whose highlight was the purchase of trackpants. Which was actually all I wanted from a weekend, we’ve been so busy lately. And also because I was reading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I didn’t want to do anything but read it. Now reading I Know You Are but What Am I? by Heather Birrell, and I love it– does Coach House ever fail? A short kidlit kick after that, with Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change by Louise Fitzhugh, and Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains by Laurel Snyder. And then I have to read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly because my husband’s been nagging me to do so for months.
September 3, 2008
Links and more links
The best thing we read all weekend at our house was “Just Two Clicks: The Virtual Life of Neil Entwistle” in the LRB. Hilary Mantel’s “In the Waiting Room” (not avail. online) was similarly awful, but beautiful to read. Katherine Parrish thoughtfully raises the topic of gender and The Salon Des Refuses, which I didn’t mention, but it certainly occurred to me: “John Metcalf’s excoriating indictment of the Penguin Anthology accuses the publishers of “pulling a Binchy,” comparing their choice of a mere practitioner like Jane Urquhart to a hypothetical decision to ask Maeve Binchy to edit a comparable Irish anthology. Why not Frank McCourt, I wondered… Whimsical women with their stories. Serious men with their ideas. Ahhh. The good old days.” Rona Maynard’s “Dear Governor Palin” is powerful and smart. And Lynn Crosbie on the resurrection of Brenda Walsh. Now reading Hilary Mantel’s novel An Experiment in Love.
August 27, 2008
Schedules Amok
Schedules are all running strangely of late, because we have a house guest, because she arrived in the middle of the night Sunday night, because we keep going out for meals with her and feel as though we’re on vacation too. I’m currently rereading A Prayer for Owen Meany and just not getting into it. I always loved John Irving, but I’ve not read him for years, and I feel I may have lost the habit. It’s also looong and I am eager to get through it in order to reach my final reread (The Long Secret), and then begin to tackle the wonderful stack of unread books on my shelf that have been gathering there since the end of June.
And so I’ve made no time for writing these last few days (here or anywhere) and consequently we’ll all have to make due to with links. Oh, like Lizzie Skurnick revisits Flowers in the Attic. Nigel Beale refuses the Refuses. Laurel Snyder interviewed at Baby Got Books (and I’ll be reading her book v.v. soon). Why postscripts still matter in the digital age. Rebecca Rosenblum is a Reader Reading (and now she’s got her own Facebook group too).
August 22, 2008
Alternatively…
Alternatively, from a rather strange book called Great British Short Novels (circa 1970, which I bought for a quarter and from which I am currently rereading Heart of Darkness) we find this:
“Given its narrow confines, a short story cannot probe character beyond a few basic traits. It cannot allow for great scenic detail or elaborate plot to illuminate the conduct of its protagonist. Effective as a means for providing sudden insight or creating a powerful emotional impact, it cannot diffuse its focus to include anything beyond the immediately relevant.” –from “Introduction: The Art of the Novella” by Robert Donald Spector
August 1, 2008
On finding math in my book
It’s amazing, rereading, how it takes you back in time. Providing intimate encounters, so unexpected, with the yous you used to be. For example, yesterday I opened my copy of The Stone Angel for the first time since I read it in my grade twelve English class. First, on the first page is written in my (still) best friend’s hand: “I hate this book because I can’t read it because I am illiterate,” ascribed to me, which must have been funny once. (What is funny, of course, is that illiterate was spelled wrong.) And then how about the trigonometry on the inside cover?? At least I think it’s trigonometry, and the most remarkable thing about it is that it’s my handwriting! That once upon a time that gibberish meant anything at all to me, and I struggled over it, slaved over it, vandalized my very own paperbacks with it (and for naught, I think I see now considering I don’t even know what it is. Though did anybody even pretend that trigonometry was going to be useful?). What a strange life I must have lived then, and no wonder I sort of missed the point of the book, and we’ll just add this to the exponentially ever-growing list of reasons why I’m glad I get to be an adult now.
July 30, 2008
That's what I love about reading
“That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive– all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.” –from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.
July 22, 2008
So much can slip on by
I’m now rereading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, which is a very different book from the one I first encountered last May. Partly because I’ve visited California since then, and therefore have a more concrete image of what she describes. Which is not to say Didion’s descriptions are inadequate, but rather now I see something different. In addition, I just finished Sharon Butala’s The Garden of Eden, which has provided Didion’s consideration of California agriculture-culture with a context. I’ve also found that Joan Didion is always worth a trip back to, for she is so subtle that much can slip on by.
Good things on the web of late: I also thought Feist singing “One Two Three Four” on Sesame Street was truly lovely, and will link to Carl Wilson’s post about this because it contains some other vintage Sesame Street counting hits. My new favourite website is Fernham, by Woolf scholar Anne E. Fernald. Writer Margo Rabb’s struggles upon discovering she’d written a YA book, and Laurel Snyder understands.
