July 2, 2007
When the sun shines
We went down to the new HTO Park down at the bottom of Spadina today, and loved it. Sitting underneath one of the fabulous yellow umbrellas, feet in the sand, reading away (Stuart is now reading Before I Wake and is stuck to it as much as I was). Boats were going by, planes overhead, and the expressway out behind us, and so clearly were we in the world– but what a perfect little part of it.
Such has been the whole weekend, really.
June 26, 2007
Making It Up
Time has been running away from me lately– a symptom of June. I am now reading Lionel Shriver’s Double Fault and loving it. It’s my take-out book (paperback) whilst I’m reading A Memoir of Friendship, which is too big to carry around with me and really I’d just like to stay home until I finished it.
And last week I had the great pleasure of reading Penelope Lively’s Making It Up. I’ve never read anything else like it, nor was I originally compelled by the premise, but I had to read it anyway because, after all, Penelope Lively is one of my favourites. And fail me she didn’t– she never has.
Billed as “an anti-memoir” in our very age of memoirs, and I loved that idea. Lively takes pivotal points in her life and contemplates could-have-beens. What if her family had escaped Egypt via another route, and gone down in a boat sunk by the Germans? What if she’d gotten pregnant at eighteen? What if she had emigrated to America? But I was concerned as to how this would function in practice; how could this stand up as a book beyond the novelty of it all? And really I just wanted to read a Penelope Lively novel. Why couldn’t she just have written one?
But as I’ve already said, Penelope Lively is not in the business of disappointing. What the anti-memoir tag fails to convey is how truly “anti” these memoirs are; Lively herself is peripheral in most stories, absent from others, long dead in one. In fact this is more a collection of short stories, each with differerent characters, no continuity, and Lively herself as a character doesn’t ever appear. She understands that different versions of herself along other roads would have been someone else altogether. And so she has invented these people, as well as the people surrounding them.
These fictions are build upon the very opposite of fact, and are therefore the ultimate feat of imagination. Conjuring notions of story, of fate, what we are constructed from and where we go, as well as being a solid collection of stories in their own right. And I loved them for that, and for everything. For their authenticity, and for Penelope Lively’s nerve– to tell stories– which are more honest that any truth I’ve ever been told.
June 24, 2007
Assemblage
We get all celebratory come June, and today is my birthday. I made a project of keeping it quiet this year, which I thought would be somewhat mature of me and worthy of a woman of twenty-eight years. And so this weekend has been easy and sunshine, and full of the things we like best. We’re just back from brunch and are set for bbq tonight. And with all our celebrations, we’ve got a regular shrine going on at our house. A lovely assemblage of cards here, as well as the two splendid flower arrangements which were such a surprise. The tall, gorgeous wild one was courtesy of my sister, and the other in the magnificent vase was from Bronwyn. They’re not normally side by side, and it’s rather glorious to have flowers all around the house. In none floral news, I received so many lovely things (incl. a Miffy umbrella!), but one in particular I’ve got my nose stuck in. Stuart got me A Memoir of Friendship: The Letters Between Carol Shields and Blanche Howard. But then that much goodness is certainly overwhelming, and I have to put it down for a breath every moment or two.
June 20, 2007
I've got a bucket of berries
We’ve been terribly busy around here of late, mostly with celebrating whether it be our anniversary, fathers, or my cousin’s upcoming nuptials. Last night Stu and I had dinner out at Kensington Kitchen, whose patio is entirely not overrated. We were in Peterborough for the weekend where fun was had, and we went strawberry picking with my dad on Sunday. Indeed, I had a bucket of berries and if all goes well (fingers crossed), by this time tomorrow I should have four tubs of jam. How exciting! I am obsessed with learning how to preserve, and one day I’ll have to tell you the story of of how Pickle Me This got its name. Among other stories to be told within the next few days. I’m bursting with them, but I just haven’t had the time. Things are promising to wind down soon, and this weekend we’ve got on nothing. Which is perfect.
Just finished reading Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland, and I’ll review it here tomorrow. A little poetic action, also reading It’s Hard to be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst, and loving it– strikes me as early Nora Ephron in verse. And tonight, a page or two before I fall asleep, I will begin Making it Up by Penelope Lively, who I’ve never failed to love. I’m looking quite forward to that.
The garden is desperate for weeding.
June 14, 2007
Remember when the boys were all electric?
What a good lunch break I had today, dropping out of a brilliant game of catch to read in the grass until the boys were ready to go back in. Sunny with a breeze. Now reading So May Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor, which connects me to the England I’m missing furiously post-vacation*. The book is wonderful so far. I read McGregor’s first novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things a million years ago, and though I enjoyed it and McGregor himself was doing something remarkable, the book wasn’t perfect. Whereas the sense I’m getting so far is that in his second novel, he’s finding his feet. Which is so exciting, and it’s wonderful to think of his career still ahead of him and books books to read. It will be nice to follow along, just as it has been so far.
And I was very happy to see that Madeleine Thien’s Certainty was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Pleased that Heather O’Neill’s much-deserving Lullabies for Little Criminals is on the list as well, but I’m rooting for Certainty. O’Neill’s had plenty of fun already, and Certainty is the very best book I’ve read this year.
*Ah, missing furiously. I listen to BBC Radio1 at work, and every since Monday have heard the songs we listened to as we drove across the North of England with the top down, and never in my life have I felt such nostalgia for a last week.
June 9, 2007
Home Again
It’s bad to be home, only because away was so extraordinarily good. Our landing was delayed by last night by a fierce thunderstorm which forced us to land for an hour in Ottawa. We finally got home to find that lightning or wind had wrangled with our tree, knocking most of it down, which is quite sad. But otherwise all is fine, and we’re exhausted after a week of super touring and nonstop fun. Stay tuned for pictures, and for more pictures throughout the summer as I extend my vacation in spirit. Now rereading Bliss and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield, on the tale of the marvelous Thieves. Coming up: On Chesil Beach!!
June 5, 2007
Northern Reads
We’ve gone all thematic here on our Northern English tour, as I’ve just started Lancashire Where Women Die of Love by Charles Nevin, and Stuart is reading Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North by Stuart Maconie. Hooray for common ground.
May 31, 2007
Google is the lamest plot device
I am now completely absorbed by Janice Kulyk Keefer’s Thieves, which is an extraordinary literary mystery along the lines of Possession, but, dare I say, more enjoyable to read? And formidable based upon the fact that Kulyk Keefer writes about characters who actually lived. Layer upon layer of story, and what fun to unravel.
And it occurs to me that the internet might just be the worst thing that ever happened to narrative. I’ve been thinking about this as I read Thieves, which takes place in the late 1980s, and whose questions have to be answered without the convenient aid of a google search. I read a novel last week that did employ the google search as its primary plot device, and the whole thing was just way too easy, shapeless. Can you imagine Atwood’s Cat’s Eye if Elaine had been able to track down Cordelia via the tinternet? If Anne Shirley had googled a potion to darken her red hair to auburn, rather than purchasing said potion from a peddler. If Roland and Maud Bailey had used the internet instead, bypassing the need for them to meet. If any of Reta Winters’ immense knowledge and wisom in Unless had come from an internet search, rather than from her very own mind. Because a character’s store of knowledge tells us so much about them, and what they don’t know too, and to have a whole world of answers at their fingertips almost takes away the very point of a story.
May 29, 2007
Books on a plane
Just beginning Thieves, which must be finished before we go to the airport on Thursday. For one cannot take a library book away on a plane. What if one lost it?!
I’ve still not decided what to bring to read on the plane. I’ve got an issue of Vanity Fair, and it also might be the best time to finally read my beloved copy of Lancashire Where Women Die of Love. I do suspect it will be an awfully curious book.
May 28, 2007
Positively transporting
After Dark is the first novel I’ve read by Haruki Murakami. Previously I’ve read his short story collection After the Quake and his nonfiction book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. And it’s strange that it’s taken so long for me to start reading Japanese fiction; while I lived there, I hardly read any, too busy overdosing on fiction from the Britain I had left behind. Sometimes, I think, reality was something too much, and I wanted something different. But now that that world is far away from me, I am turning back to it through fiction. Positively transporting.
“Our line of sight chooses an area of concentrated brightness and, focusing there, silently descends to it– a sea of neon colours. They call this place an ‘amusement district.’ The giant digital screens fastened to the sides of buildings fall silent as midnight approaches, but loudspeakers on storefronts keep pumpingg out exaggerated hip-hop bass lines. A large game center crammed with young people; wild electronic sounds; a group of college students spilling out from a bar; teenage girls with brilliant bleached hair, healthy legs thrusting out from micro-mini skirts; dark-suited men racing across diagonal crosswalks for the last trains to the suburbs. Even at this hour, the karaoke club pitchmen keep shouting for customers. A flashy black station wagon drifts down the street as if taking stock of the district throuigh its black-tinted windows. The car looks like a deep sea creature with specialized skins and organs. The young policemen patrol the street with tense expressions, but no one seems to notice them. The district plays by its own rules at a time like this. The season is late autumn. No wind is blowing but the air carries a chill. The date is just about to change.”
