March 21, 2008

Immediately enthralling

My books are packed, though I’ve kept a few out to sustain me for the next while. One of which was The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing, which was recently cited by Globe Books as an essential read to understanding modern Zimbabwe. It was immediately enthralling. I also like that it’s an old orange Penguin, whose biographical note concludes with the fact Lessing has just finished a new novel called The Golden Notebook.

March 15, 2008

Distastrous Combination

I am sick, driven to bed by a disastrous combination of galloping consumption and the dreaded lurgi. Today I got to work from home (but note: not even in quotations) which meant I was done and supine by 3:00, and having since read The Walrus, The London Review of Books, Weetzie Bat and Mom the Wolfman and Me. Now reading Paul Quarrington’s new novel The Ravine.

March 10, 2008

Digging Out

Heather Mallick on the fake memoir craze: “The phenomenon is interesting, but the reasons behind it are fascinating. Is it mere animal spirits? Or is it what P.G. Wodehouse called the craze for notoriety, the curse of the modern age?”

Ali Smith on Carson McCullers: “She was capable of reading so deeply that she wouldn’t notice her own house go up in flames around her, as once happened when she was lost in Dostoevsky. Unable as a child to stop reading Katherine Mansfield’s stories when she went to the store for groceries, she carried on as she asked for the goods at the counter, then under the street lamp outside. As a fledgling writer, she was sacked from her day job as a book-keeper for a New York company when the boss found her deep in Proust’s Swann’s Way under the big ledger.” (I am going to try this trick, and hopefully be sacked from my day job too.)

The Monsters of Templeton, which I adored upon reading, is called “a pleasurably surreal cross between The Stone Diaries and Kind Hearts and Coronets” in The Guardian. More on Alan Sillitoe on his 80th. Janice Kulyk Keefer’s wonderful novel The Ladies’ Lending Library is awarded (and you might recall I adored that one too).

And I am very excited because I just put Katrina Onstad’s novel How Happy To Be on hold at the library, as well as Rebecca Rosenblum‘s favourite novel Weetzie Bat, and Mom the Wolfman and Me (for old time’s sake). Now reading Zoe Whittall’s novel Bottle Rocket Hearts.

March 9, 2008

Better late than nevah-evah

I’m now reading Michael Redhill’s Consolation, the book chosen for Keep Toronto Reading One Book 2008. Which, of course, was in February. I am never terribly good at these communal reads– like Canada Reads, just barely mentioned here though it went on last week (and was very well documented by others). Though I do delight in them– bookishly saturated media and all that– and so I’m a bit ashamed to never take part.

But then not ashamed enough to start (alas the Tournament of Books will have to go on without me.) I blame the weather, mostly. I use up too much energy trudging through snow and slipping on sidewalks to be so focussed. I suspect that any Bookish Extravaganza during sunlit months might enthrall me, but now I’m just too tired. Further, I’m pretty choosy about what I read. You may notice the overwhelmingly-positive nature of my reviews, which is a product of me never ever reading books I don’t want to read, or books I think I should.

Finally, my t0-be-reads are stacked to the roofbeams (note: oh wow, in my new bedroom roofbeams will no longer just be metaphorical!). I’m pretty inflexible when it comes to said stack (someone once loaned me a book without asking and I almost had a nervous breakdown). I don’t have a lot of space to play with bookwise, my life span being limited and the number of brilliant books out there decidedly not.

So yes, I am blaming my own mortality for me not having read Consolation when I should have. And indeed, I should have read it in February, not only because The Toronto Public Library is my world favourite institution, but because the book is wonderful. I was a bit apprehensive because I’d thought it was historical fiction. (I don’t like historical fiction. This annoys people, as does the fact that I refuse to read books containing dragons. I am way more willing to bend on the historical fiction, however.)

However Consolation turns out to be about the engagement between modernity and its history– my most beloved literary pre-occupation! (The reason I love British fiction). And you get so little of that stuff, really, in CanLit, perhaps there not being quite enough history yet to go around yet. (The few exceptions I can think of are books I didn’t like). Sure we are focussed on our past here– you can’t go 5 miles without falling over a pioneer house– but only in the sense that it’s “there”, set up behind a velvet rope. Whereas in Consolation, history is right here– almost literally, in my case. Which is something I find tremendously exciting.

March 6, 2008

Tired of snow

Did you know I’ve never read Harriet the Spy? I don’t even know why, especially since I had this peculiar obsession with its sequel The Long Secret. Anyway, recent events have inspired me to give Harriet a try at some point soon. And Kate’s post has inspired me to add The Stone Angel to my list of summer rereads. I’m now reading Brighton Rock, and I get excited every time it mentions the hotel where I spent my honeymoon. Yesterday was Allan Sillitoe’s birthday and on why he’s still an angry young man at 80. (Indeed, his Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was one of the most powerful books I read last year.) And I am terribly tired, as well as tired of snow.

UPDATE: Holy Louise Fitzhugh! Lizzie Skurnick on The Long Secret. And then read more on our YA favourites. (This via Kid*Literary).

February 28, 2008

Reading without gravity

I was fascinated to read Astronaut Steve MacLean’s blog post on reading in space (from Canada Reads). The wonderfully inspiring Rebecca Rosenblum has written a wonderfully inspiring post on being short-shortlisted for The Journey Prize. I am excited to now start reading Belong To Me, particularly after Deanna’s endorsement. (And not because the cover is of Wellington Boots, which are a few of my favourite things.) A wonderful post at The Pop Triad about the music we find in films.

February 24, 2008

Julia Darling

I first learned about the poet/novelist Julia Darling in early 2005, when she was instructing a Guardian Poetry Workshop, and something about her voice, even the prose in her instruction was so compelling, that I became interested in her work. Only a few months later Darling died of breast cancer at the age of 48, and the remembrances on her personal website (as well as her own blog) are a testament to her spirit, to the power of her writing.

I’m now reading her novel Crocodile Soup, which I picked up in a booksale ages ago. Oh, it’s such a pleasure. Hard and funny, reminiscent of Kate Atkinson– always a good thing. I’m just getting into it, but I expect to be recommending it wholeheartedly very soon.

February 22, 2008

When whole cities fit into books

I’ve recounted already how we spent our last vacation day scrambling around San Francisco in search of a used Tales of the City. The novel of San Francisco, according to our guidebook, and I just had to have it. A piece of San Francisco to take home with me.

I usually have little interest in reading about a place whilst I’m in it, but once I’m far away and homesick, novels and stories can be the next best thing to being there (which is why I now love Haruki Murakami). And I knew San Francisco homesickness would be long-lasting, so I wanted the remedy on-hand. I was also excited to purchase a book from the Gay Lit section (though such a label seems a bit reductive so far– is a book considered Gay Lit because there are gay people in it?) because it made me feel open-minded in that way gay people probably find inordinately irritating.

As a reward for accompanying me on my scramble, I let Stuart read the book first. He quickly forgave me for scramblage, loved the book, and said its lightness might be a nice way to follow The Poisonwood Bible. And now I’m halfway through, prepared to read the rest this evening in a hot bath (which is interesting because I’ve just learned from a wise source of a connection between this book and The Serial, which I read in another bathtub six years ago, but I digress).

The story is light indeed, and it’s a perfect book for a bathtub, but it’s delightfully entertaining and how brilliant that it establishes a map of the city in my mind.”Valencia Street, with its union halls and Mexican restaurants and motorcycle repair shops, was an oddly squalid setting for the gates of heaven.” Absolutely! Although for me heaven was bookshops, not steam baths, but alas. I’ve sat in Washington Square too, and I can see Coit Tower, and Marina, and the Castro, and even the Safeway on Market, where we bought rice-a-roni the San Francisco treat (not half bad, by the way). Polk and Hyde, The Mission, from the Tenderloin to Nob Hill.

That a whole city disappeared from my horizon can live on in my mind is really nothing short of a tremendous thing.

February 17, 2008

Abundance

It might be surprising, all the reading I’ve got done this week all the while touring, unless you consider that for me “touring” consists of reading a lot of books in sunny parks whilst sprawled out on green grass. And that there was an abundance sun and grass in our San Francisco.

I’ve got a lot to say about the books just done, which I will do in posts to come. This week I had the pleasure of Arlington Park, Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt, Hobart 8, San Francisco Poems and Anagrams (which was the entire plane journey home). And then home again, I’ve just finished Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, which has been ongoing for ages. It has been my “dipping into” book, to be now replaced by The Paris Review Interviews Vol. II. And I’ve finally started The Poisonwood Bible, which so many people rave about that of course my expectations are high.

February 11, 2008

Bookish Updates

Very cool: Bang Crunch is a staff pick at the shop around the corner from here. (Read my review). And my favourite book of 2008 is out now: The Monsters of Templeton gets an absolutely stellar review in The Globe. Just finishing Arlington Park, which I’ve loved. And today I purchased Housekeeping Vs The Dirt.