April 15, 2015
Vacation Book Three: I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill
I love the cover to Susan Hill’s I’m the King of the Castle, designed by Zandra Rhodes as part of Penguin’s Decades series. I’m halfway through it now, although my book a day record is about to be stymied by us actually doing things other than spending the afternoons reading. (I know!!!) Today we went to Lancaster where my sister-in-law lives in an adorable terrace with a park across the street. “This house only has two rooms,” Harriet whispered when we went inside, and then Iris literally somersaulted down the steep staircase and now half her head is purple. It was terrifying for everybody involved. Lancaster is wonderful because they have an amazing Waterstones, an Oxfam bookshop, a castle, and a market with stalls and stalls of meat pies on sale. Unfortunately, all the books on my list don’t seem to be in stock anywhere—”They’ll be out in paperback in September,” I keep being told, which isn’t very helpful. I want Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey and Rachel Cusk’s new novel Outlines, or anything from the Bailey’s Prize shortlist except the novel from the perspective of a bee. But I did get The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns (who wrote Our Spoons Came from Woolworths) and I have high hopes for stock at The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley tomorrow and the London Review Bookshop next week. I shall not go bookless, rest assured.
April 13, 2015
Vacation Book One: Dear Life, by Alice Munro
Airport book buying was a little bit disappointing—anything that looked compelling, I’d already read. Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore was a contender but I was concerned it wouldn’t hold up to my expectations. I’d already read Gone Girl and Gillian Flynn’s first book, and The Girl on the the Train, so I was pretty much out of luck. But luckily, there was Alice. Whom I really haven’t read an awful lot of, so it was Dear Life. A bit of an anti-climax. I’d been picturing something more culturally appropriate for the UK, but alas. I read half of the first story on our very uneventful and pleasant flight. On Saturday morning, we arrived on our friend’s doorstep at 8am and then the children and we spent the whole day awake after a sleepless night (though Iris slept in the stroller while we were on a walk through town). The weather was sunny and beautiful, and it kept us alive as the day went on—another set of houseguests from California arrived at our friend’s that afternoon, and Harriet and Iris had an ecstatic day of play with other kids. I couldn’t have read a word because when I sat down my eyes closed. At 7:35, we all fell asleep on the second page of This Can’t Be Happening at MacDonald Hall, and then mostly slept all night, the best night’s sleep I’ve had in 2 years. Yesterday, we went to visit Stuart’s friend who lives in the middle of the Oxfordshire countryside and had a splendid time at their house before driving up north. We arrived here at 7:30 last night, the children enthusiastically received by grandparents, and now my reading vacation truly begins. I love Dear Life, which is more interesting and less samey than Munro’s fiction is often accused of being. I have hopes of reading all morning while the children are taken to the beach, and then I’m going to move on to Book 2, which I bought at Waterstones in Windsor on Saturday morning—The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. The first Penelope Fitzgerald book I ever read, and I look forward to revisiting it now that I’m more familiar with her. England is lovely, sunny and beautiful, and all the daffodils are in full bloom.
December 13, 2014
If you need me… Marilynne Robinson Update 2
I finished reading Housekeeping last night, past midnight even. And I’m left with more than a few impressions. The first a bit incidental, but we started reading The Children of Green Knowe last night, so it seems there is water water everywhere (in books, at least). And as I continued through Housekeeping, marvelling at the ghosts and spectres, I thought of Shirley Jackson more and more, and so I was so pleased to find this piece about the connections between Housekeeping and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, of which there are many. I appreciate too the discussion of Housekeeping and genre, fantasy in particular. It is such an oddly situated book in terms of genre, which was my trouble with the novel in my first reading of it—it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Its situating of the domestic is particularly peculiar, and I love the image of Sylvie opening the windows because she believes in the virtues of fresh air, and forgetting to close them for no good reason except that she forgets. I’m struck by the strange notions of housekeeping as an occupation in both Housekeeping and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And this too—I am always less interested in a book whose characters are disconnected from society. For example, By the Shores of Silver Lake is my least favourite Little House book, and when the Ingalls finally moved to town in time for The Long Winter, I was so relieved. So as Sylvie and Ruth spun farther and farther away from Fingerbone, I found the story less compelling. I remain so intrigued by the town, the curious descriptions of its inhabitants, who remain so unclear to me, probably because of how the descriptions were filtered through Ruth’s strange perspective. And her perspective was really so strange in a way that the reader doesn’t entirely realize, because Ruth herself rarely refers to herself singularly—she is always part of a “we” collection, which lends credence to her point of view. She is persuasive, explaining matters and circumstances in a way that seems logical, is always measured, until we examine her ideas properly and determine they don’t make so much sense at all. While remarkably different in nearly every respect, she reminded me a little bit of Nora Eldridge from Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs in this respect. The power of the first person narrator, our propensity to trust the voice speaking directly into one’s ear.
Anyway, Housekeeping truly is a masterpiece, a baffling, strange and beautiful one. So glad I read it again.
Next: moving onward to Gilead, which I’m nervous about. Not being altogether familiar with the Bible, beyond Sunday School lessons, I’ve always been inclined to think I’m not quite its ideal reader.
December 11, 2014
If you need me… Marilynne Robinson Update 1
If you need me for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be reading nothing but Marilynne Robinson.
For no good reason, except that I want to, and I think it will be good for me, and I have a bit of space for a focussed reading project, which I’m so pleased about, because I feel as though my reading lately has been scattered and something of a mad scramble.
I first reading Housekeeping perhaps in 2006, and here’s my shameful confession: I didn’t like it. I had been expecting something light and straightforward from the novel, which was not at all what it delivered. I was also not as smart a reader then as I am now (and it is my hope hope that I can continue to say this about every decade that passes in my reading life.) When I read Home in 2008, I was much more appreciative, though I don’t remember anything of the book now. Plus, I missed Gilead in the middle. I wonder now though how Robinson’s work changed between her first and third novel—is there a reason beyond my improved sensibility that had me like the latter book? And now the world has been imploring me to read her latest book, Lila, which reviews have noted as having thematic connections to Housekeeping, a cyclical structure to all four novels. So this is why I’ve decided to go back to the beginning.
I’m about halfway through Housekeeping now, and so pleased with what I’ve embarked upon. The book is unbelievably strange and really quite difficult—sentences that require much concentration to make sense of (though following their twists is such a pleasure). Part of the problem is the complex sentences used to described really odd images—that strange house with its sloped floors. I can’t visualize the trapdoor at the top of the stairs no matter how hard I try. Perhaps another trick of the book is that its difficulties are subtle, just under the surface. They’re a little bit like traps. It’s so Biblical too, but in a contemporary setting, without male characters—we’re not accustomed to this.
But what pleasures we reap from careful reading. Really beautiful, inside-out sentences that reframe the familiar in surprising ways. I loved, “And then the library was flooded to a depth of three shelves, creating vast gaps in the Dewey decimal system.” And that image of the sodden curtains’ weight bending the curtain rod. There is something slightly Shirley Jackson-ish about this household, which reminded me of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. No one there is quite right, but the terms of the characters’ difference is never quite clear. An anxiety underlying everything that is never really explained—the reader intuits. And I am impressed by the fleeting descriptions of motherhood: “She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace.”
And oh, sentences like, “There would a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplace spectacles, of neighbours and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole.” You could think on that one over and over again.”
I came across a passage when I was reading last night:
Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.
And it seemed so familiar; I was sure I’d read its echo recently. And finally I realized where it was from:
The dead live on in the homeliest of ways. They’re listed in the phone book, They get mail. Their wigs rest of styrofoam heads at the back of closets. Their beds are made. Their shoes are everywhere.
Which is altogether different, but not altogether altogether—I mean, those shoes? It’s from Elizabeth McCracken’s Thunderstruck and Other Stories, which Housekeeping recalls to me in more than a few places.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to Chapter Six.
November 20, 2014
I’m Doing It All Wrong
Lately, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m doing it all wrong. I’ve been feeling strange about books, less in love with many I’ve encountered that I’d expected to be (and certainly less than last year when my Top Ten Books of the Year List Had 22 Books In It). We’re coming up to year-end, when we start taking stock, but only a few books are standing out in my mind, and I’m bothered that these weren’t better celebrated by Canadian literary prizes this year. I have also come to the conclusion that there are too many books in my house, which means we should probably call a doctor. Plus I bought 20 new ones last weekend, and I want to read these because perhaps they’ll be the ones I’m waiting for, earning a coveted place on my year-end list.
But I’m not reading these, instead choosing to read The Stories by Jane Gardam, a doorstopper of a book. It comprises stories from over Gardam’s career, as selected by Gardam herself on the occasion of her shortlisting for the Folio Prize for Last Friends last year (which I loved—I read it in March at Futures Bakery on a rare Saturday morning spent alone). An uneven collection, as reviews have declared, but fascinating in that, and such a joy to escape in.
“Of course, the best antidote to the disappointment of the literary life is to read.” –Caroline Adderson
And so I’m reading, reading, reading, and I don’t even want to talk about what I’m reading. But I do suggest that if you’re a Jane Gardam fan that you should check out this book yourself.
April 13, 2014
Crossing to Safety
My reading life has belonged to me lately, after a very busy few months during which I was lucky enough to be reviewing one book after another. Even luckier—the books I’ve reviewed this spring were all really good. (My review of Miriam Toews’ wonderful, heartbreaking, hilarious All My Puny Sorrows will be out in Canadian Notes & Queries in the distant future.) But now I’ve got nearly all my deadlines out of the way, and I’m free to read whatever I choose. Whatever I choose from the 50+ books waiting for me on my t0-be-read shelf, not to mention the books I keep finding on the curb and bringing home (’tis the season!) and the books I’m buying too (my copy of Penelope Fitzgerald’s Collected Letters finally arrived last week at the Bob Miller Book Room!). I’m reading lots of new books for review here on my blog, and also older books for my interest only. If the number of books I have before me are any indication of my lifespan, I am probably going to live forever.
In spite of all this, when I read Sarah’s blog post the other day about Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, my immediate response was, “I’ve got to have this.” And not just for one of these days, but for right now, this moment. I’ve loved Wallace Stegner’s books, which were introduced to me by Julia, who has delivered me to so many wonderful things. She gave me his All the Little Live Things, which I liked much more than his Pulitzer-winning Angle of Repose, and Crossing to Safety seemed similar in approach to the former.
Sarah explains:
It’s a writerly book, one that puts a writer at its centre and continually draws attention to itself as something written: “How,” asks the writer-narrator Larry Morgan, “do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect?” It’s a strategy that might have failed in lesser hands. But with Wallace Stegner it feels hard-earned and true. He was 78 when Crossing to Safety came out in 1987. It was his last novel. His first novel was published in 1937. The wisdom and sensibility of Larry Morgan is hard not to conflate with Stegner himself. Aging, and often looking back on days long past, Larry is able to take the long-view of the lives of the two couples, with all their ups and downs: “If we could have forseen the future during those good days in Madison where this all began, we might not have had the nerve to venture into it.” I sometimes wonder how any of us has the nerve to go on, when we know that, at any moment, we stand to lose those we love or the life we know. In fact, losing those we love and losing, at least to some extent, our youthful vigor are inevitable corollaries of a living a long life oneself.
I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot lately, where that nerve to live at all comes from, and the way I live always a little bit terrified of reality coming along to snuff out my illusion that it’s all still basically worthwhile. (I think it is. I don’t ever not want to think so. Hence the terror.)
I also enjoyed Sarah’s story about how the book came into her life, got recalled to the library, how she ordered a copy online, found another in the Oxfam bookshop and had to buy that one, only to have the first book in the postbox upon arrival back home. So now she has two, and I wanted one too, so we ventured out yesterday afternoon to see if Seekers Books had one in stock and they did! I started reading last night and less than 24 hours later, I’m more than halfway through, absolutely adoring it. So happy to be reading it, besotted with its beautiful cover, a window. How perfect. We had an absolutely terrible night’s sleep last night with two coughing children, and so I was left alone to linger in bed this morning until 9:15 when I was delivered Iris for her morning nap, and there I was reading more until 11am when she woke up. I’ve not stayed so long in bed in years, and it was wonderful, and this book was the perfect accompaniment exactly.
April 1, 2014
They just happened to be standing nearby
“Strictly speaking…. this book is not about [my children]; they just happened to be standing nearby while I looked for illumination, and so they cast their moving shadows.”
March 3, 2014
Reading when the world seems unsteady
That time does fly is demonstrated by the fact that once again, I am waiting for test results on my thyroid lump (as I will be six months from now, and six months after that, and if this schedule alters, it’s probably not a positive twist in the story). It is no fun waiting for test results, I am learning, no matter how routine it becomes to get needles stabbed in one’s neck. It is no fun getting needles stabbed in one’s neck either. But the very worst is waiting on test results when one is reading a novel that isn’t very good.
I was reading that not very good novel yesterday when I wasn’t waiting for test results, and while the novel wasn’t good, reading it wasn’t so bad. But once I’d had the tests and things got heightened, I started to feel resentful.
We turn to books for certain things–for entertainment, for wisdom, to pass the time. Sometimes the right book comes along and offers all the answers that infinite existential google searches might fail to turn up. But to need some such thing and find yourself instead in the hands of an author whose book is carelessly constructed, sloppy, superficial, thoughtless. I don’t have time for that. The amount of understanding I’m willing to extend as a reader shrinks to about none.
When my world seems unsteady, I don’t want to read for escape. Instead, I require literary foundations solid and deep, something sure beneath my feet.
Is it too much to want a book to capture my attention, and also save my life? Anything less is just bookish jetsam.
Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be reading the new Lorrie Moore.
November 27, 2013
Reading is where the wild things are.
“The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture–exploit the new thing then move on.
There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.
Reading is where the wild things are.”
–Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?
September 4, 2013
Easing isn’t always easy
Oh, summer summer. This week we’re easing out of the bliss that was. Harriet starts kindergarten on Friday, she starts her afternoon play-school program tomorrow. Stuart goes back to work on Monday, and things look interesting on that front, plus he is taking a college course that starts next week. I am also easing back into my role at 49thShelf, and looking forward to some really cool projects this Fall. And Iris is still figuring out how to be in the world, though it helps that she knows how hands and fingers work. She is 13 weeks old today, 3 months old tomorrow, a second tooth just breaking through and making the nights hard. Starting Monday, I’m going to be taking care of her solo, which is a whole new ballgame.
Today we tried out the backpack position in our Baby Trekker for the first time, and I am quite confident that it will be my liberation, by which I mean I will use to wear Iris while I make dinner and clean the house. She still takes her naps lying on my chest, and so nap-time will be me-time, by which I mean that I intend to get a lot of reading done. And I am writing these facts down here because really I’m just a bit anxious about settling into a new routine, a routine whose shape I haven’t glimpsed yet. I have a fantasy of dropping Harriet at kindergarten, Baby falls asleep in her stroller and then I head to a coffee shop to write for an hour. Though it’s probably more like 25 minutes, considering Iris’s naps. Fortunately, I have had a child before who naps for just 25 minutes, and it got better, so I am not so worried about this. I am confident the mix of working and taking care of Iris will figure itself out, but I am still not quite sure how this will happen.
I am routine-obssessed, as anyone who has ever tried to make plans with me on a Friday is well aware. (No thank you. On Friday afternoons, I clean my house, of course!) This is both a blessing and curse as a parent, the former because it gives an awfully chaotic universe a fundamental shape, and the latter because the shape is an illusion after all, and life requires flexibility. Not yet knowing what my routine will be is resulting in me creating manic posts like this one, and compiling lists like a mad-woman in the hope of feeling like I have some kind of a handle on it all. It is not yet clear that I do…
This transition from the bliss of summer has been nice. I am reading Louise Penny’s new mystery How the Light Gets In, which is so so enjoyable, the perfect kind of book with which to ease into anything. Perhaps I’ll even be able to post a review here in response, my first review in ages, because after a few weeks of summer reading, all the new releases I’ve been intending to talk about have failed to inspire much in me beyond a shrug. I keep blaming the books, but maybe I am too impatient right now. (With some of these I am being too generous though, and it is absolutely the book…)
So yes, transition is a fine thing, but I have never been good at transition. I think everything will be clearer when I’m right back in the thick of it.
