April 30, 2008
A dozen more
Just when I’m down to just one book, I begin to read a dozen more. With great pleasure, I’m finished up The Picnic Virgin, an anthology of new New Zealand writing, edited by Emily Perkins. Also just began Volume 2 of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. And the new issue of Descant— last night I read R. Samuel Bongard’s “The Eye of the Beholder” and it was everything. I’m also rereading Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?”, for I am curious. I am going to be reading Gale Zoe Garnett’s novella Room Tone, rereading Novel About My Wife, and also starting The House at Midnight, which is said to cross Richard Curtis with Donna Tartt, so I am intrigued.
April 27, 2008
Snail's pace
Today was a bit ridiculous, in that I woke up, went to brunch, and then came home and had a nap. And after that I prepared a tea-party. The whole weekend similarly low-key, mellow and pleasant with flowers in bloom and brunch on the patio. Last night was just as crazy, as I stayed home to watch Michael Clayton, and what a movie that was. That so much was going on but so little had to be explained was a wonderful for lesson for this apprentice writer.
This weekend my Emily Perkins kick continued, as I read her first novel Leave Before You Go and absolutely loved it. I’m now reading her second book The New Girl, and as I can’t find her 1997 short story collection Not Her Real Name anywhere around here, I’ve ordered it used off the tinternet, because now I’m quite sure that I can’t live without it. I also read Pulpy and Midge by Jessica Westhead, whose receptionist didn’t even have a name but whose disdain at having to cover the desk during cake-occasions was truer than life.
April 25, 2008
Currently mad for
I am currently mad for Emily Perkins, whose A Novel About My Wife is soon released (and it comes dovegrey recommended). Very exciting also to announce that I will interviewing Emily Perkins in the very near future. And so I’ll be blasting through her back catalogue in the meantime: I’ve got her previous novels The New Girl and Leave Before You Go, as well as The Picnic Virgin, an anthology she edited of contemporary New Zealand short stories. Stay tuned for news and reviews.
I’m now reading Jennica Harper’s The Octopus for the fourth or fifth time.
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 11, 2008
A room of one's own
The New House tour continues, and now I take you to my garret. For yes, it is true– I have a garret. Actually the tail end of a very long strange half-gable off our bedroom, through a secret door in the wall. (What quirks have old houses with dubious renovations of yore!)
We use this long strange room as our closet, which contains two dressers, a long rack of hanging clothes, and a whole mess of things like Christmas lights and suitcases, things you’d expect to find in an attic. And in late February when we saw the apartment for ten minutes and decided to make our home here, I didn’t realize how big this room was. Didn’t consider that it could possibly accommodate my desk and a bookshelf, but it does.
My husband was a wee bit disconcerted at the idea of me setting up shop in the back of the closet, but this is not just any closet, and it has a window. And there wouldn’t have been room downstairs for the bookshelves and both our desks (for he requires a desk too, of course, being a brilliant graphic designer). It’s not much to look at, I know, but it’s mine, and really I’m just fond of saying “my garret.” I think I’ve wanted one forever without even knowing it.
(And if anyone’s asking, I’m now reading A Week of This by Nathan Whitlock, and The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder.)
April 10, 2008
My bookish friend
I am now reading The Girl in Saskatoon by Sharon Butala, which combines my loves of literature and True Crime respectively, the latter borne out of the paperbacks my Dad has always kept precariously stacked by his bedside. I finished reading Rose Macaulay’s My World my Wilderness, which read like such a precursor to the more contemporary British novels I adore so much– in particular a few by Hilary Mantel, Esther Freud and Penelope Lively. Also fascinating that it shares an epigraph with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, and considerations of good and evil that tie in so well with Brighton Rock (both recent reads of mine). Oh books…
And oh, bookish friends: I’ve got many of those, with varying degrees of obsessions, but all of whom appreciate the pleasures. My friend Bronwyn, though, might be my one relationship that completely began and grew with a love of reading. We worked together as editorial assistants during the summer of 2001, our first conversation was about The End of the Affair, and we used to go out on our lunch breaks and spend too much money at bookshops like Nicholas Hoare, and (the late) Little York Books. We also shared a love for John Cusack, and were especially enamoured of the scene in Serendipity in which he went into Little York Books. We both moved to England in 2002, which only served to cement our bookish bonds, as bookishness is hard to avoid in England.
And I am so thrilled that in a month or so, Bronwyn is moving back to Toronto. With her darling husband in tow, of course, and she’s home again. We’ve been living oceans apart since 2004, and it will be a pleasure for our togetherness to once again be ordinary. Our bookishness live and in person, and Bronwyn’s not lost any of hers– in her email today she reported that she’s “packed up eleven boxes of books and barely made a dent”, and keep in mind that she is relocating continents. What a formidable book lover. Whenever I report any classic book that I’ve fallen in love with lately, she’ll usually be able to say that she was obsessed with it when she was eleven.
Anyway, I am doubly excited, because not only will she be back in town, but when I reported my absolute failure to turn up any copies of Rebecca at used book shops, she told me that has two in her collection (she was apparently obsessed with this one at age thirteen) and that I am more than welcome to one of them. How lucky!
April 7, 2008
Sidewalk Sale
One of the best things about being settled in our new home is that we can start acquiring books again– particularly since we got rid of so many before we moved, because the new house has shelves built into every nook and cranny and we don’t plan to move again for sixty or seventy years. The memory of packing boxes upon boxes is beginning to fade already, and so today I was quite happy to buy new books from a sidewalk sale. Stuart picked up The Cider House Rules, as we both like John Irving and neither of us has read it yet. And I seemed to be on a British female novelist kick– I got The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, under the influence of one of my favourite book bloggers; Virgina Woolf’s Orlando (though if I’m not careful I’ll have all of her novels read, and then what will I do?); and In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill, who I’ve never read before.
I’m still reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Unaccustomed Earth, and loving it, though I wish I’d given it to a week that was not so manic. Also reading David McGimpsey’s Sitcom (it is Poetic April after all), which is something else but I’m not sure what (which is not to say that it isn’t good, oh no).
And next up I am going to be reading The World my Wilderness by Rose Macaulay, because it’s the one “Virago Modern Classic” I own, it’s still unread, and everybody’s talking about Virago lately. To those of you who were wondering why we need an Orange Prize, do read the piece by Rachel Cooke, and perhaps you’ll understand, for not that much ever changes in the course of 30 years
March 30, 2008
Moving begins
Our packing is nearly done, and the moving begins tomorrow evening. This means I’ll be off-line (and off-phone!) until Thursday or Friday. If anyone needs to get a hold of me, send carrier pigeon. I’ll begin writing my Poetic April poems as scheduled however, and this just means I get three extra days before I have to expose myself.
I’ll also be reading Unaccustomed Earth, a new book of stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, which might just mean no unpacking gets done. I love Lahiri, who wrote my all-time favourite short story “The Third and Final Continent”. In addition, I love how I found Lahiri, the day I was at the Victoria College Book Sale with my friend Kim who picked The Interpreter of Maladies out of the pile and said, “You have to read this.” On the back of the book, a blurb by Amy Tan: “Jhumpa Lahiri is the kind of writer who makes you want to grab the next person you see and say ‘Read This'”. Of course. Anyway, I am excited, about a variety of things.
March 28, 2008
On the attack
I read Rachel Cusk’s memoir A Life’s Work this week, after reading this piece on its reception. How curious the way some people read– I cannot fathom. To have your judgment on a work come down to whether or not your liked its characters, for example. Which is even more ridiculous in the case of fiction, but strikes me as dangerous all the time. To read a memoir is not to stage a character assessment. Maybe I just don’t read enough books that are enraging so I can’t understand why you’d write a letter to an author that read “Frankly, you are a self-obsessed bore: the embodiment of the Me! Me! Me! attitude which you so resent in small children.”
It seems that some people so ready to judge are incapable of grasping any point of some complexity. It isn’t even ambivalent, Cusk’s portrayal of motherhood, but something richer, truer in its depth. And then that she is accused of coldness, of being unloving, all the while love shines through in every word. When she writes, “I realise… that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. And she has wrought me, too, because although I have not helped or understood, I have been there all along and this, I suddenly and certainly know, is motherhood; this mere sufficiency, this presence.”
It is interesting also, “self-obsession” being knocked about when it was the very point of the exercise. I’ve also just read Diane Schoemperlen’s At a Loss for Words, which could probably pick up some of the same criticism. But what you miss, I think, reading on the attack. People’s capacities to miss the point are quite remarkable.
March 25, 2008
Coming Home
I am now reading Salvage by Jane F. Kotapish, and I am totally hooked. Her language is mesmerizing, and the story is edge after edge.
And now living amongst gargantuan chaos, as perhaps two thirds of our apartment is packed up, and only a narrow path is cleared to walk from room to room. I keep thinking of new reasons to break into the boxes I sealed two weeks ago, and of new boxes to fill with things I’d forgotten we owned. I keep thinking of new things to own, and other things to shed. Of the light in my new kitchen, which I’ve only ever seen in February, and how they’ll get the sofa out the door.
I think about losing our big storage closet, and where will we store our baseball gloves now? The exposed brick and the fireplace, and the roof beams in our new bedroom. The ugly carpets, for which we’ve traded our hardwood, but then the Mexican tiles in the kitchen, the cupboards in the bathroom, the two decks, and the premise of laundry without coins or going out of doors. The “spare room” and “library” and that they’ll be one and the same doesn’t make me swoon about it any less.
And to be settled down again. This is how I function best, how I write best, and for the past month, we’ve been positively in-between. My brain moved out the day we gave notice, and I hope it’s packed somewhere too, in a box I’ve just forgotten to label. I’m looking forward to being home again, to the day the apartment stops smelling like someone else’s, to the familiar sound of rain on that roof, to the lazy easy light of Sunday morning. And not only to being home, but I’m looking forward to coming home, day after day. Counting the stairs, my key in the lock, somebody’s already put the kettle on to make a cup of tea.
