December 24, 2011
Blue Christmas
Christmas Eve is my favourite day of the holidays, and with yesterday being a holiday too, it’s like we’ve had two of them. But with Christmas Day nearly upon us, it means it’s time to get down to the holiday reading I’ve been saving. It is by coincidence only that all these books are blue, but I like the connection. I’ll be reading ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which I bought on clearance ages and ages ago and am finally getting to because I’m at P in my to-be-read pile. And I’ve been looking forward to this one. The Louise Penny book I tried to read in the summer during that time when the temperature was 50 degrees celsius, and it just didn’t work for me. With the cover so wintry looking, I’m thinking now is a better time to try it, and don’t mysteries just seem somehow more December-ish anyway? And finally, I’m going to read A Family of Readers by Roger Sutton and Martha Parravano (in fact, I’m probably going to read it first), which was a gift from Nathalie Foy (and this is the part where you get to envy me for not only having Nathalie as a friend in my online life, but also as a friend in my neighbourhood).
I hope you have a holiday just as lovely. xo
September 7, 2011
September is insane, no?
September is insane, no? And I don’t even have children going back to school. (I do have one child who has recently gone onto a playschool wait-list for next September however, which has been a more emotional experience than one might expect. It looks like I’m going to be one of those parents after all). Anyway, for some reason, I decided that now would be the best time for me to read Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove, that reason being that I’d come to James on my to-be-read shelf, and to skip him for something lighter would be a violation of book selecting rules, and also an indication that I’d probably never read Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove ever.
So I’m reading it. It’s pretty wonderful. I do sometimes wonder if there aren’t ways Henry James could have expressed his ideas with a bit more clarity, but I’m enjoying the book much more than I liked What Maisie Knew when I reread it a while ago. Progress is slow, and I’m about halfway through. Also finding that avoiding reading James is enabling me to get a lot of other work done, plus I’m reading Granta 116 and Stephanie Bolster’s remarkable collection White Stone: The Alice Poems.
Anyway, the day after I started reading The Wings of the Dove, four books came in for me at the library, I got two freelance review jobs, and now I also have to read Rebecca Rosenblum’s new book The Big Dream in the next very little while because I’ve been honoured with the task of conducting an interview with her at her book launch on September 20th. The Canadian Bookshelf wheels are also spinning madly at the moment, because it’s publishing’s big season and so much is going on. Case in point, the three literary events going on tonight, each of which I’m longing to attend, but there will be just one, alas.
The opposite of all this, of course, would be a life devoid of everything I’ve ever wanted, and so you won’t hear me complain. Let’s take up a bit more Henry James now while the baby’s asleep, and my tea has just cooled enough to drink.
July 25, 2011
Alas
I was expecting to have a brand new book review for your reading pleasure today, except that in the space of 36 hours this weekend, I gave up on three (3) books. One wasn’t a bad book, but it just wasn’t interesting for me, and you’d wonder why I was reviewing it; the second was a flawed first book that I might have stomached (it had worth) but it wasn’t up my alley; and the third was a very popular book whose author’s prose had me grimacing in the forward and it was only more of the same– I gave it until page 6. So no new book review, but now I am reading Kate Christensen’s The Astral, and I think it’s her best book yet. I hope I’m able to fit in one more book before we leave for vacation on Saturday (when I will disappear off the edge of the internet for a week, by the way).
And do check out what I’ve been cooking up over at Canadian Bookshelf lately: I wrote about the nonfiction writers event at Ben McNally’s last week with Sarah Leavitt and Andrew Westoll; a guide for short story reading novices; and this fabulous guide to 2011 Canadian literature festivals. See also great guest posts by Rebecca Rosenblum, Jessica Westhead and Robert J. Wiersema.
June 21, 2011
Where I'm at
Where have I been? For the past week, I’ve been (finally) reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, which is very good because this was one of my new years resolutions. Even better, that I’m enjoying it absolutely, delighting in bits, finding others amusing. Pip has just discovered the identity of his benefactor, and I’m as disgusted as he is at the whole thing in regards to his treatment of Joe Gargery (who I’ve sort of fancied from the start). I have also discovered that I’ve unknowingly modelled my parenting style on Mrs. Pocket, who ignores her children while she lounges and reads, which is pretty much my lifestyle. I’m on page 360 of 536, and still enjoying the ride (and I’m not sure that Dickens creates suspense as much as just making things so incredibly weird, there’s no knowing what happens next [which is kind of something different, no?]).
It’s nice to be reading a long book, and finding the length incidental to the book’s goodness. Though it certainly does cramp my style bit as a person who gets by on reading a lot and writing about it here– I do get impatient as I watch my to-be-read shelf get dusty…
Anyway, the book I’m reading is a battered old paperback whose origins I have no idea of. It was published in 1964, and the spine is bent into a U shape. It has an introduction by someone called Kellogg W. Hunt (and why aren’t more people named Kellogg anymore? Or ever.) The internet seems to be devoid of images of my book’s cover, but in searching for it, I’ve remembered that there exists a modern film adaptation of Great Expectations, and that I’ve even seen it. And that I remember absolutely nothing about the movie, except a scene with explicit oral sex. I don’t think I’ve arrived at that part in the book yet.
May 10, 2011
Making progress
I am making no progress with my to-be-read shelf, mostly because I keep buying new books and getting others from the library. (For example, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, which I’m going to be reading shortly). While there are books on the shelf that have been sitting there for years, and that I have every intention of reading but just haven’t had the inclination to do so. (And please do not mention all the unread (to me) books that my husband has read, and have therefore left the shelf and blended into our collection, fooling me into think I have less unread than I really do).
So I have alphabetized these books, and will go through them one by one, so please do forgive me if my reading tastes seem a bit random and/or alphabetical in the coming weeks. It is my pleasure that Caroline Adderson’s Pleased to Meet You is at the front of the pack, mostly because I’ve been saving it anyway as a treat. And that Rachel Cusk’s latest novel follows not too far along. And if I stay on track, I may finally read Great Expectations and Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney, or else I’ll just give up on books entirely out of fear of being conquered by D.
May 10, 2011
California, on the page
I am currently reading Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things, which was given to me by the singular Julia. I’d previously only heard of Wallace Stegner House in Eastend Saskatchewan, and only because I know Eastend through Sharon Butala. Anyway, through the book I’m discovering that Stegner was a magificent writer, so masculine but in the most unlimiting, wonderful way. And how he writes of place, here California in particular, which I only know through literature, save for our one week to San Francisco in 2008 (and I’ve learned that San Francisco is not so much California anyway).
California, whose geography I know through the poetry of Brian Wilson, and Jan and Dean. And through the prose of Joan Didion, a land of dams and aquafiers, a desert by the ocean with a mountain range. And the stucco houses in Los Angeles, which I know from Weetzie Bat, and The Peculiar Sadness of the Lemon Cake, and Meghan Daum’s latest book. Not to mention 90210 and Melrose Place. Such a literary land– Cannery Row, and that sign that said Robert Louis Stevenson had lived there for six months some year in the 19th century. And yes, Jack Kerouac Way.
April 18, 2011
Mired in the fat books
Since I had a baby two years ago, my pile of books to-be-read has never been less than 50 books long. And the books that tend to have lingered have been long, non-fiction, or Great Expectations. This past week, I’ve made a point of picking up some of these (but not Great Expectations), so that’s what I’ve been doing. First, I read Irene Gammel’s book Looking for Anne of Green Gables, which I had trouble with, but ultimately enjoyed. I don’t have much truck with the idea of decoding fiction from clues in the author’s personal life. I mean, understanding an author’s background can provide a fictional work with new dimensions, but it’s not like the solution to a mathematical problem, and sometimes Gammel wrote like it was. (Sometimes she even knew how flimsy was the ground beneath her feet, so revelations would come with a caveat like, “Or maybe Maud never ate tofurkey, but it’s certainly something we can think about”). The best part of the book was the sense it provided of the literary world Anne of Green Gables was born into– what books and magazines had LM Montgomery been reading in the years before she wrote the novel? What with the proliferation of fictional orphans called Ann in the late nineteenth century? I also loved that Montgomery’s kitchen was also the Cavendish post office, and how handy that would have been for keeping private the arrival of rejection letters.
Next, I read Joan Didion’s After Henry, which hadn’t been lingering on my shelf but rather was too tall 
for the shelf, had been resting on top of the books, then had fallen behind them. So I’d forgotten I’d even had it, and picked it up without hesitation when I found it because it was her third collection of essays (after Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album). It lacked the magic of the other two, perhaps because it was not nostalgic and I think nostalgia is what Didion writes best. But it’s smart, and its treatment of the 1988 Democratic and Republican conventions was incredibly timely as we are in the midst of our own federal election. The essay “Insider Baseball” said it all. I loved her criticism of Patty Hearst’s memoir. And the final piece “Sentimental Journeys” kept me up well into the night on Friday, wrapt by her brilliance and challenged by so many ideas that made me uncomfortable. Didion is such an extraordinary writer.
And I decided to follow that with a collection of her late husband’s work, Regards: The Collection Non-Fiction of John Gregory Dunne, which is American-sized, but I love it, and is exactly what you’d expect from somebody who was Dominick Dunne’s brother and Joan Didion’s spouse. I spent this afternoon enjoying his essays about baseball, which is saying something. Now onto a bunch of book reviews. And when I finish this book, I’m going to move onto one that is going to take me ages, but if I don’t get around to it now, I never will. The Collected Stories of John Cheever for the love of the short story, and for its Mad Men-ishness. I am looking forward. Bear with me.
April 14, 2011
In which Joan Didion articulates my lack of interest in federal politics
“When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life. “I didn’t realize you were a political junkie,” Marty Kaplan, the former Washington Post reporter and Mondale speechwriter who is now married to Susan Estrich, the manager of the Dukakis campaign, said when I mentioned that I planned to write about the campaign; the assumption here, that the narrative should be not just written only by its own specialists but also legible only to its own specialists, is why, finally, an American presidential campaign raises questions that go so vertiginously to the heart of the structure.” –from “Insider Baseball” (which I’m reading in After Henry).
April 10, 2011
Carol Shields, yard sales, departures and arrivals
When I looked out the window at our gorgeous Saturday, I had a craving for a yardsale, but suspected it was too early in the season. Not too early to get outside though and take in that glorious sunshine. We walked down to Kensington Market after breakfast, determined to spend no money, but then got hungry, went to the bank, and bought an empanada, a peanut butter and jam cookie from Miss Cora’s Kitchen, and a block of cheese. In retrospect, it was a very positive change of heart.
Then walking back up Major Street, all my dreams came true. A woman was selling a pile of stuff out on her sunny lawn, and so we crossed the street with glee. There wasn’t much that caught my interest, however, though it’s the browsing that’s half the fun anyway. But double the fun when I see that Carol Shields’ Collected Strories is on sale for 50 cents. Which is not only a bargain, but it contains an unpublished story. What a prize! I couldn’t think of a better find.
And it was the perfect day for it, because I was reading Carol Shields’ play Departures and Arrivals, which I bought at the Vic Book Sale last fall. I wasn’t sure about the play at the start, but I warmed to it quickly– absolutely Carol Shields, about conversations between friends, family, lovers and strangers in the middle of a busy airport. I’d say there were about 30 Carol Shields novels contained within this slim volume, and I am so pleased that I got a chance to read it.
For the next week or so, I will be focusing on my unread books before new releases, trying to clear a little space on my shelf before things get (even more) out of control. It’s funny, there are books on that shelf that have been sitting there for years, and I’ve even tried to get rid of them but can’t, but it seems harder to actually read them. I should have one of those rules like for closets where you have to pitch anything that’s been sitting untouched for a year. And it’s true, there are these books I know in my heart I will never, ever read, but I haven’t quite come to terms with it yet. The others, however, I’ll be getting to soon.
April 3, 2011
A good list
I am currently reading Must You Go? My life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser, even though to me, Harold Pinter belongs to that subcatagory of Unknown Literary Harolds (a diverse assortment inc. Robbins and Bloom) and I don’t know who Antonia Fraser is either. I’m enjoying the book, however, and reading it because it was cited in a feature in the Globe and Mail on New Years Eve, “My Books of the Year: The Literati Name Names“. I read that article with my laptop open to the Toronto Public Library’s requests page, and added one book after another that had caught my attention. It’s the reason I read Charlene Diehl’s Out of Grief, Singing (upon the recommendation of Alison Pick) and why I’m still waiting on Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture by Jim Collins (which had been Kate Pullinger’s selection).
