September 28, 2007
Thinking back and forth
I’m now reading Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights On Air, which is to say I’m positively bewitched. 100 pages from the end, and expect a review sometime tomorrow. I am positively enveloped; I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. To have a story so gripping and writing so good is rare, really. And the book has been doing strange things to me. “After a while it grew on them, on some of them at least, on the ones who would never forget, who would think back on their lives and say, My time there was the most vivid time of my life.”
That passage set me thinking about the most vivid time of my life, and last night around 10:30 I was digging through boxes to find my journal from September 16th 2001-May 31 2002. The exact dates were incidental, but that time was on fire. Anyone who was there would know that, and it seems I remember it very poorly upon rereading my journal. Stories and anecdotes I have no recollection of, which is strange. Though the writing is good– this surprised me. When I read my fiction from that period, I want to bury myself in my backyard, but the journal was really lovely in places. The stories it told were often sad too. Funny with vividness– I think it comes from the whole spectrum of emotions, confined to a small space. “My time there was the most crazy time of my life.” Vivid, yes, but I wasn’t happy. I remember those days epically, but they were tough to be in the thick of.
Whereas. Tonight, in my less vivid life, I arrived home with my husband, who takes the subway to my work every day so we can walk home together. “I need to read,” he said, when we got in the door. He is currently enthralled by Little Children. So we sat down on the couch together, books in hand, the kettle on for tea. A straight hour of nothing but books, tea, and biscuits, and perfect quiet. Elizabeth Hay has created something amazing. And the sweet bliss interrupted only to get up get the pumpkin risotto started.
September 26, 2007
Books in my life
I’ve got all these books in my life, and not necessarily just the ones I’m reading. Books I’m not reading seem to have just as much a presence. Oh, reader’s compunction. I get it rarely, reading as swiftly as I do, but a couple of tomes have been lurking lately, and I know it is absolutely imperative that I get to them, and they’re piled on my bedside, but the dust on their jackets is now this thick. I’m talking nonfiction, usually, when I talk like this. To begin a long nonfiction book is a tremendous commitment, requiring sacrifice as to how it keeps me away from fiction. A Short History of Everything and Guns Germs and Steel are way overdue. I’ll get around to them. This might be absolutely a lie, but I really intend that it not be.
And then books I should be reading. And not should as in “ought to be but won’t” as above, but rather “must” be read, as the whole universe is saying so. Like with Great Expectations quite recently (and yes, I’ll get to that book too). Now it’s Lucky Jim, which Rona Maynard recommends. And in this interview Kate Christensen cites it as an influence on her In The Drink, which I’ve just read. (Do read the Christensen interview [via maud newton] by the way, for a fantastic example of chick lit’s cannibalistic tendencies, which I’ve mentioned before.) So I suppose Kingsley Amis is in the cards for me.
As is Raisins and Almonds, which comes recommended by Becky Rosenblum‘s mother.
Exhausting. But now I actually am reading Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay. Or at least I will be before the night is out. This book has had rave reviews all around, and so I am looking very forward to it.
September 22, 2007
I have to hope
~Before I could say anything, she declared, ‘Personally, I have an ignorance towards books. Don’t ask me nothing about books. I only read magazines.’
‘I write for magazines,’ I said at once. ‘That’s my job.’
‘Kidding me,’ said Mrs. Shaw. ‘What ones?’
I hoped I wouldn’t lose cachet by showing her. I have an unfiled heap of them on one of the counters right there in the kitchen, where they sit like beached jetsam above a swill of more mobile rubbish.
…[I]t pleases me to know that, technically speaking, ‘jetsam’ is the matter you throw out of a ship when you’re afraid it’s going to sink, whereas, if the ship sinks anyway and is destroyed by the tides, ‘flotsam’ is the debris of the smashed vessel itself.
I have to hope my work is jetsam.~
Rebecca Gowers, When to Walk
September 13, 2007
Elusive boys are hard to find
Now reading Gifted, which has been wonderful from the start, and, interestingly enough, wholly in compliance with my previous observations regarding the difference between British and American fiction about immigrants. The British is so much grittier. Tonight I went out to Le Bar a Soup with my friend Jennie, and then we had coffee and dessert on a patio, staying out talking until it was too dark to see.
September 7, 2007
Mini-Break
We’re on vaca for the weekend, off to Montreal. Thanks to Chapati Kid for her suggestions of what to do there, and to my other friends who offered advice. I am taking Atonement and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian for the train, and is it strange that I am as excited about the train as I am about everything else?
September 5, 2007
New Season
My second summer of rereading proved as fulfilling as the first, though it was not as concentrated. But it was a joy to revisit classics: The Portrait of a Lady and To the Lighthouse, which I’d previously just read as a student, but it was something different to approach them on my own terms. My regular rereads: Slouching Toward Bethlehem and Unless were better than they’d ever been. Books I’d read but forgotten, and certainly not because they were forgettable: The Summer Book, and The Blind Assassin. I have a theory that you’ve never really been anywhere until you’ve been there at least twice, and I think this might very well be the case with books.
But now it is September, and new books are blooming. I’ve been binge reading lately– what else are holiday Mondays for if not a book in a day? Looking forward to the long train journey this weekend to get some more books under my belt. Oh, there are some wonderful books coming out this Fall, so stay tuned here and I’ll recommend the best ones. Watch for my review of Richard B. Wright’s October very soon. I am now reading Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz, who I’ve never read before.
After reading under restrictions for the last two months, being able to read so freely feels deliciously licentious.
September 3, 2007
To be read
Just finished Mister Pip, and now on to October. In both books characters are reading Great Expectations. The universe appears to be sending up flares then, and I found a copy of Great Expectations at my mom’s. Officially to be read.
August 31, 2007
The Source
Now reading the Man-Booker longlisted Mister Pip. DGR enjoyed it in July, and reviews have been rave. I am enjoying the story so far, and believe the rest will fulfill. It’s yet another book, however, that I am reading without knowledge of the source material– last, of course, was when I read The Seven Sisters without The Aeneid. Mister Pip, obviously, references Great Expectations, which I’ve never read. And so I suppose that now I have to…
August 29, 2007
Incendiary vs. harmonic
Now reading If Today Be Sweet by Thrity Umrigar, the story of a Parsi woman from Bombay who must decide whether or not she should move to be with her son in America after the death of her husband. And it’s strange reading this, so soon after Digging to America by Anne Tyler, and not so long after Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake too. Of course I realize that a Parsi family, an Iranian family, and a Bengali family are each entirely separate entities, but what is interesting is the way that together these books might suggest otherwise, forming what seems to be a generic perspective of the American immigrant experience.
In each of these books a widowed woman somewhat acclimatized to America must approach it as someplace new following the loss of her husband. She must grapple with the American-ness of her beloved only son, and find her place within his family and his new life. Son must struggle between his mother and his wife, and their differing values. A grandchild will be the subject of misplaced adoration and expectations. The woman and her husband will have been upstanding, as immigrants themselves working hard and succeeding. Their son will live in an even nicer neighbourhood in Ohio, Baltimore or Massachusetts, and have two cars in the garage. He will sometimes question the American dream, and his mother will wonder if it was all worth it in the end.
The same-ness is phenomenal. Each of these stories has its own merit (and the Tyler and Lahiri in particular are amazing books), but it is almost as though American immigrant fiction has fallen into that proverbial melting pot.
Further, to compare it to the similar British literature I can think of off the top of my head– White Teeth and Brick Lane. These novels are so much more gritty and their narratives take such incendiary turns, in great contrast to the bird-chirping harmony almost audible in the American books. What does this tell us about each country then? Are the stories really so different, or is it just in how they’re told? Do these works function in respective British or American literary traditions?
I may have to sleep on this one. Or you could tell me?
August 26, 2007
Please walk on the grass
Take a Canadian, a Brit, and a Japanese girl– all homesick for Hyogo, and throw them into Toronto. To Korea Town, the Annex, the University, Yorkville, Chinatown, Kensington, and home again. Feed with sushi, crepes a go go, good coffee, and then DIY okonomiyaki for dinner once we’re home again– oishi desu! Sunday afternoon on Toronto Island, and walking on the grass. Home once again, and tonight there’s a bbq, topped off by very Canadian Portuguese tarts.
I am now reading Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, and why aren’t you?
