August 16, 2024
Good Time
Am I having a good time because the books are so good, or are the books so good because I’m having a good time?
The proverbial question, one that seems more pressing when I’m in a funk and the books are terrible, but it’s worth asking too when I just keep opening one fantastic novel after another. And it’s true that our summer has been quite glorious, last week ending a string of four delightful getaways around Ontario, each one with reading as sparkling as the lakes were. A month ago, I was raving to you about Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a read that felt like the springboard to my summer, and now I’m back with another pick that read its way straight into my heart, so much so that I’m imploring everybody around me to read it, read it, read it. (So far, my husband and daughter have done so, and loved it too, along with Barack Obama, so I’m currently working on a 100% approval rating.)
I read Liz Moore’s novel God of the Woods during a camping trip to Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron, and I thought I knew what I was getting into. I’ve read books about missing girls before, you see, and I’ve read books set at summer camps, and I know how such a setting can be both creepy AND perfect for exploring class divides, and this is also a book about a great house belonging to a wealthy family—naturally the house has a name, and that name is, absurdly, “Self-Reliance.” I’ve read detective fiction before too—the detective working the case of the missing Barbara Van Laar in this book is a young woman eager to prove herself, whose talents are undermined by her colleagues. This novel, I supposed, would be just a book jam-packed with all my favourite literary elements. And it is, it really is, but what makes it so exceptional is what Moore does with those elements, how she manages to take these familiar devices and tell a story that’s suprising and subversive, like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. How the dripping blood on the cover is in fact dripping paint, is the kind of thing I’m talking about. A thumb to the patriarchy, wonderfully queered, and so fiercely feminist, plus it goes down a treat. It’s so fresh, and so interesting. (Read it, read it, read it.)
(This post was a Free Post on my Substack this week! Sign up to receive Pickle Me This directly to your inbox.)
August 12, 2024
The Holiday Reading Round-Up
If appears like I’ve spent the last six weeks mostly on vacation, YOU WOULD BE CORRECT, and what a trip it’s been, so many good books. And some of the books I read last week on our cottage holiday in Haliburton will be familiar if you read my July Substack Essay, “How to Build a Summer Reading List,” beginning with Family Pictures, by Sue Miller, who has only been a summer holiday reading mainstay for me only since 2020, but it feels like since forever. Like so many of her books, this one is a complicated family saga spanning decades, about a marriage that becomes derailed with the arrival of a son who is “different,” Randall, the third of six kids, eventually diagnosed with autism. The problem with this book is that Randall is a device instead of a character, the book and its characters pre-supposing any notion of Randall could be a person with his own consciousness, let alone narrative perspective. But it’s an interesting treatment of how autism was considered in the 1950s, and the ways in which mother were to blame for their children’s diagnoses. Even without Randall, the marriage in this story would have been a complicated one, however, and this nuanced treatment of family dynamics (especially from the point of view of their adult daughter who eventually comes to view her parents, and all their mistakes, with some sympathy) is what makes the story so interesting.
My next pick was Dominick Dunne’s A Season in Purgatory, a totally battered copy I bought for three dollars at The World’s Smallest Bookstore near Kinmount on the way to our cottage. I can’t remember when Dominick Dunne came into my life, but I think it was via his Vanity Fair columns, which then led to me obsessively reading his fun and trashy novels (which, like Sue Miller, I remember lying around our house in paperback during my childhood). I’ve not read him for years though, but I’m on wait-list to receive his son’s memoir The Friday Afternoon Club, so thought a reread would be meaningful in the meantime, and I loved it just as much as I ever did. What is most remarkable is that I have been totally oblivious and only learned a few weeks ago (while listening to Griffin Dunne on a podcast) that Dominick Dunne was gay, and I really can’t believe I didn’t get it, because in the book (whose narrator is a fictionalized version of Dunne) IT’S NOT EXACTLY SUBTLE, but I also can believe I didn’t get it, because I spent most of my life in the most heteronormative bubble….
Next I reread The Joy Luck Club, which came up for me when I published my own book about women’s friendships and someone mentioned it to me, and I realized I hadn’t read it since everybody was reading it in the early 1990s. When I was, of course, a literal child, and I see now how the most interesting parts of the story would have gone over my head at that point. There is a line from Elisa Gabbert’s new book about some books reading up best when you’re too young to really understand them—her example was The Catcher in the Rye, and I concur—but The Joy Luck Club was not one of them, a story of mothers and daughters, and women’s lives, and very complicated friendships. Rereading was a lesson in how much of my earlier reading life must have gone straight over my head.
Next up was A Kind of Intimacy, by Jenn Ashworth, an English writer whose depictions of Lancashire and the northwest have been really important to me. This is the fifth book by her that I’ve read, her debut novel, and it was as easy to read and absolutely uncomfortable (seemingly a contradiction) as all her novels are. This one is set in my husband’s hometown of Fleetwood, Lancashire, which gets described as “dismal,” which it can be, particularly if you’re any of the characters in this book. Annie is an unreliable narrator hoping to put the trauma and violence in her past behind her and make a brand new start, but she becomes strangely fixated on her new next door neighbour and things go awry in ways that will even surprise the readers who’ve seen her coming.
Next was another reread, Brother of the More Famous Jack, the 1982 award-winning debut novel by Barbara Trapido, which was like nothing I’ve ever read before, and so when I read it for the first time, I was mostly baffled. Trapido’s novels are ribald and theatrical, not exactly shaped like English novels at all, and this coming-of-age story unfolds over more than a decade, as daughter of a grocer Katherine becomes enveloped into the eccentric Goldman family. Absolutely nothing is above reproach in this novel, where characters joke about rape and the Holocaust, and the death of a baby and stay in a mental hospital are passed in a few paragraphs (albeit frightfully felt). Politically correct, this novel is not, but neither is it boring or derivative. Having read three other of Trapido’s works, I was finally in a place to properly appreciate it.
And Marian Keyes’ Again, Rachel, was a fairly fitting book to read after it, another ribald story that touches on infant loss, and oh my goodness, Keyes is brilliant. Such a sparkling sense of humour, but the books are containers for such difficult and weighty subjects, and she does such justice to them. There were so many threads in this novel that it seemed impossible she’d work them just right, but she did. These books are so wonderful, and complicated, full of nuance, and worthy of serious attention. They’ve got heft, but they’re also fun to read, which is the only remotely fluffy thing about them.
And then I picked up Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan, which touches on the same lack of regard for novels about women that I alluded to in the previous paragraph, except that this is a debut novel and Sullivan is trying to prove herself, wanting to be taken seriously, while Keyes has no fucks to give nineteen novels in. I’d read Sullivan’s novel Maine last year, a summery pick, and enjoyed this too, their contemporary feel but gesture toward a saga.
And finally, Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, by Claire Pooley, which was our audiobook for the drive, and we all loved it so much. It can be challenging to find a pick to suit readers from ages ranging from 11 to 45, and it’s mostly Agatha Christie books that get us through, but I was desperate for a book that wasn’t an Agatha Christie, so decided to take a chance on this one. Which, hilariously, begins with an Agatha Christie epigraph and some fascinating allusions to Murder on the Orient Express, which has been one of our faves. This novel is very different, of course, but we adored it, so utterly engaging, so laugh out loud funny, and I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an audiobook more. Warmhearted and a little edgy at once—we were all delighted.
And one more, because I can’t resist. We just passed the four year anniversary of Taylor Swift’s Folklore, an album that felt like such a gift during that very hard year and its cruel summer, and so we were listening again because it’s such a midsummer album, and also the song “August,” which has been in my head since the calendar turned. Swift is one of my favourite storytellers, the Bruce Springsteen comparison totally apt. Lines like, “You heard the rumour from Inez, you can’t believe a word she says—most times, but this time it was true.” Or, “Back when we were still changing for the better, when wanting was enough, to believe it was enough. To live for the hope of it all. Cancelled plans just in case you call.” Songs like “Mirrorball” and “Epiphany”—so much feeling. So many stories. We were listening again, when we weren’t listening to Iona Iverson, and I just felt so glad to live in a world where there is such thing as Taylor Swift.
August 1, 2024
SHARK HEART, by Emily Habeck
One of my most frequent experiences of nostalgia is biblio-nostalgia, the longing to be returned to a particular book in a time and place that felt especially sublime. The August I read MALIBU RISING at a rented cottage and could not put it down, the long weekend two years ago when I read Jennifer Close’s MARRYING THE KETCHUPS at the beach, the particular camp chair I was slumped in years ago as I was hastily turning the pages of Amber Dawn’s SODOM ROAD EXIT (lesbians, vampires and abandoned roller coasters on the shores of Lake Erie, oh my!). And yes, while it’s only been a month, I’m still not over having read Shelby Van Pelt’s REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES on our camping trip over the Canada Day long weekend and—especially as we departed on another camping trip last Saturday—I felt the desire to have it happen all over again, the perfect book in the perfect place and time. But this is the kind of experience it’s impossible to manufacture; it either happens or it doesn’t.
But it did, because en-route to our campsite on the banks of Lake Huron, we stopped for in the town of St. Marys, precisely because it was home to a bookshop I’d never visited before, Betty’s Bookshelf, and the town turned out to be wonderful, the bookshop itself just absolutely perfect, stocked with excellent picks (including my own novel!), and every single member of my family left with a title we’d never heard of before.
Which for me was SHARK HEART, by Emily Habeck, enthusiastically recommended by bookseller Wren, a book that MIGHT have been a hard-sell considering its premise (this is a novel about a newlywed couple whose plans go awry when the male partner is diagnosed with a rare disease in which he mutates into a great white shark, yup, really), but Wren promised me that this was a novel about love, and grief and life, and the mutation is a metaphor of sorts, and then I read the back and saw a blurb by none other than Shelby Van Pelt, and decided that this might be the closest I’d come to reading REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES for the first time all over again.
I will say that this is a very different kind of book, far more strange and lyrical, if similarly preoccupied by the desires of sea creatures and blurry lines between us and them, but it similarly hit just perfectly, and as I devoured it (I sound like a great white shark now; it was less bloody than that, I promise). Like Ann Patchett’s TOM LAKE, it’s also about a production of OUR TOWN, which I’ve now even read. This is a novel about the paths in life that take us places where our loved ones can’t follow, about how to face the unimaginable, about how some people are unlucky over and over, terrible patterns repeating, the unfairness of fate, the beauty that’s possible anyway.
I loved it. You should read it. Thank you to Betty’s Bookshelf’s Wren.
July 23, 2024
We Are Already Ghosts, by Kit Dobson
Imagine—structurally speaking—To The Lighthouse a century later, Woolf’s modernist masterpiece transposed from Cornwall to rural Alberta, the story of a family cabin, a summer idyll, one precious week a year in which time appears to stand still and nothing ever changes. Except, of course, the children are growing, and parents get older, marriages end and new loves begin, and babies are born, and people die, and all of this flurry of action—in Kit Dobson’s cerebral and tremendously moving first novel WE ARE ALREADY GHOSTS—takes place in the “corridors” between the narrative’s main sections, each corridor spanning a five year gap that brings us back again to the cabin that once belonged to Clare’s parents, where now she comes with her own family and those of her husband’s brothers. The novel begins in 1996 and returns us—at five year intervals—to the family at this place so removed from the world, and yet part of it enough that the world creeps in, and I’m thinking about the attraction of summer places like these, the places we return to, the illusion that anything can ever stay the same, or that any of us might outwit the human condition of being mortal, and how the reality of the matter can shock us every time. GHOSTS is an enveloping story of love and family, of parenthood, and also time, and CanLit tropes, and war, and history, and bears at the dump, and what it means to live on stolen land, and everything that’s eternal, and everything that isn’t, and I loved it all so much.
July 15, 2024
FUNGAL, by Ariel Gordon
Ariel Gordon is my favourite force of nature, a poet and essayist whose enthusiasm is a chief characteristic, matched only by her abundant generosity and community spirit. A spirit that extends to trees, as reflected in her previous essay collection Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forest, and now mushrooms in her latest, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest. Which is a book about seeing, and looking and finding, and making connections (another item in the Ariel Gordon skill set—in 2020 I ran a series at 49thShelf featuring brand new books with their authors and Gordon was cited as a mentor/supporter/champion/inspiration over and over again, when most other figures didn’t turn up twice), and taking wild leaps. My favourite part of the book (or maybe the part that most resonated) was when Gordon makes a soup from foraged verpas and is torn between a fear of poisoning herself and her aversion to food waste (spoiler: the latter wins. And Ariel lives). An essay collection about mushrooms, it turns out (no surprise, like essays about trees) is an essay collection about everything, about family life, riverbank explorations, about the TV series Hannibal, about mushroom kitsch, about not doing shrooms. Gordon meets other Winnipeg mushroom enthusiasts. She learns to grow her own mushrooms. She receives mushroom stuffies in the mail. She gets a job in a mushroom factory actually harvesting mushrooms. She feeds her book Treed to fungi, which grows mushrooms, which she gets to harvest and literally eat her own words. She collects mushroom lore, mushroom books. She speaks to Ukrainian immigrants whose own mushroom traditions can be replicated on the prairies. She sits in poison ivy, has to remove so many ticks, drives her car so far off-road in search in morels that the CAA won’t cover her towing-job, and these essays are foraged from all these adventures, all of them a fascinating delight to behold.
July 4, 2024
Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books, by Kirsten Miller
‘”I think of every bouquet as a little story,” Betsy told her, “and stories are the most powerful things in the world. They can mend broken hearts, bring back good memories, and make people fall in love.”
“Or convince them to do the right thing,” Nahla added.
Betsy Wright shot Nahla a look. “Sometimes. But the trick is getting to know people well enough to tell their stories. You can’t just assume you know what they’re like. You have to pay attention. You got to watch and listen.”‘
Kirsten Miller, born and raised in North Carolina, follows up her bestselling The Change (which I LOVED!) with LULA DEAN’S LITTLE LIBRARY OF BANNED BOOKS, set in the fictional town of Troy, Georgia, home to a Confederate statue, a savvy postman, an elderly lawyer whose family are intent on her inheritance, and many other colourful characters, Lula Dean among them, who has organized a committee to remove “controversial” titles from school libraries, books considered corrupting for children, books about things like menstruation, gay people, the Holocaust, racism, history and rape. To promote her message, Lula Dean erects a little free library on her property and fills it with what she considers more suitable titles. The novels begins when somebody switches the books in Lulu’s library with the books she’s banned, but keeping the dustjackets so the titles appear innocuous. And as those contested titles make their way into the community, radical things start happening, dangerous things start happening, all of this underlining the power of books to shape the story of who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.
“I want to make it perfectly clear,” Miller writes in her Author’s Note, “that the issues addressed in this novel—book banning, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, etc.—are by no means unique to the South, These are American problems. Pretending the only occur in the South has allowed them to flourish unchecked elsewhere in the United States.” And so for the 4th of July, I bring you this funny, edgy and altogether timely novel, though I’m not sure the people who really need to learn its message will be the ones to pick it up. Maybe we need to switch up the cover with that of a novel by Newt Gingrich…
June 27, 2024
STROLL, by Shawn Micallef
Toronto’s St. Anne’s Anglican Church—lost to a devastating fire on June 9—was a sacred space, but not necessarily for the fact of it being a church, and I was thinking about this as I took in the widespread grief people were feeling in the aftermath, surprised too by the weight of my own grief. I am not religious, I don’t live near St. Anne’s, its iconic dome never factored into my personal cityscape, but I’d been inside the church once, years ago, when it was home to the Brockton Writers Series, and the experience was awe-inspiring, unforgettable. I’d also dropped at least one of my children for Girl Guides at the nearby Parish Hall, and I think it’s this element of community, of openness and accessibility, in addition to the treasures of its art and architecture, that made St. Anne’s a sacred space. The fact too of such an extraordinary building in a pretty ordinary setting—at the end of a row of houses in a residential neigbourhood, across the street from a chocolate factory.
The Ontario Science Centre—abruptly closed last week by a government that’s never earned our trust—is not so different, and public outcry at this loss has been just as intense. A centennial project built in a Toronto suburb by one of Canada’s most famous architects, the building is a testament to progress and technology, to the benefits and necessity of science education. I was last there three weeks ago as chaperone on a school trip, and as we rode the escalators up through the ravine—cardinals, redwing blackbirds and sparrows—I was as awe-struck as I’d been in the St. Anne’s sanctuary. Like St. Anne’s, there is nothing else like it, and to imagine it to be replaceable, even disposable. I can’t fathom the lack of vision required for that.
But maybe all places are a little bit sacred, places where people go and people are. Places which are homes to our memories, our stories, proof we cling to of some kind of solid foundations in the whirlwind of time.
And what a whirlwind it is!
I bought the updated edition of Shawn Micallef’s STROLL five weeks ago, and was not expecting to read it cover-to-cover. I thought it might be more aspirational, that it would be good company on walks I’d be unlikely to take, but then I started reading, and I didn’t stop. A walk a day. And while it’s still unlikely I’ll ever venture on a hike from Sherway Gardens, I’m curious now, and I’ve already made a trip to Bathurst and Lawrence inspired by Bathurst Walk. I especially enjoyed the walks about areas that are already familiar to me, deepening my connection to my own local geography, but I just as much loved reading about walks in places further afield, neighbourhoods with names like Bendale, West Hill, Willowdale, or the spot in the north of the city that, Micallef declares, brings him, “as close as I’ve ever come to feeling like…William Wordsworth, [wandering] through the rural Lake District in England.”
Cities, as Micallef knows, are never static, are layer upon layer of history and meaning, and his wild connections are my favourite part of the text: “When CHUM’s tight rotation allowed them to play Bowie’s ‘Rebel, Rebel,’ it would’ve been easy to pretend it was an homage to William Lyon Mackenzie’s rebel forces, whose advance was stopped here in 1937.” Or, regarding the O’Keefe Centre, which hosted Mikhail Baryshnikov following is 1974 defection from the Soviet Union: “That Cold War drama was able to play out down here because Victorian-era Torontonians decided to extend the city south of Front Street, where the original shoreline of Lake Ontario was located.”
Apart from a few exceptions (that North York trip for lunch at the United Bakers Dairy Restaurant), I’ve not yet gone far out of my way to partake in one of Micallef’s strolls, but reading the book has already changed the way I see my usual circuit. A trip to Harbourfront two weeks ago had me noticing how buildings around the ferry docks turn their backs on the city, because when they were built in the 1970s, there was very little city immediately for them to see. I saw the Gerrard Street gates to Chinatown on a streetcar journey up Broadview Avenue on Sunday, something I’d never noticed before. The way he writes about Dupont Street, “As with the servant’s side of a British manor house, things get taken care of on Dupont: it’s a working street that keeps the prettier parts of the city running.”
Even Dupont Street is sacred if you quint.
June 25, 2024
SANDWICH, by Catherine Newman
On Sunday night, the evening before my 45th birthday, which is “halfway to 90,” as my youngest child keeps noting, that very same child’s tooth fell out, an occasion that was once momentous in our household, but has ceased to be. I ended up breaking a ten dollar bill with coins from her piggy bank in order for the tooth fairy duties to be fulfilled, and it occurred me that it won’t be long now before my tooth fairy days are behind me, which felt especially poignant since I was in the middle of Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a novel that is both a beach read about a Cape Cod family holiday and an exploration of the “reproductive mayhem” that is the female experience. Told from the perspective of Rocky, stuck between love and obligation to her elderly parents and her just-grown kids, all of whom have joined her and her husband at the cramped seaside rental as she grapples with hot flashes and menopausal rage, and long-hidden secrets come back to the surface.
“Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still, and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course, You have to.”
This is a novel about the enormity of human experience, about ideas that are terrible, heavy and monstrous—the Holocaust, the Patriarchy. It’s about miscarriage, and death, and something called “vaginal atrophy,” and the fragile nature of the human heart, literally and otherwise. It’s about how to love is to lose, eventually, and how far away the overwhelming experiences of early parenthood (experiences that Newman documented in her own popular blog back in the day) eventually becomes, which seems impossible when you’re in it, and about the delights and frustrations of adult children, and the heartache of seeing one’s parents get old. And it’s all so fun, and so breezy, like your best friend is writing you a chatty letter (like a blog), you’ll even laugh, just as you will likely cry, and that balance is a seesaw too, and Newman gets it exactly right.
“It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human… But also so terrible and ridiculous.”
June 5, 2024
These Songs I Know By Heart, by Erin Brubacher
“Enthusiasm is actually the most important gift,” is a line I underlined in THESE SONGS I KNOW BY HEART, the debut fiction by multidisciplinary artist Erin Brubacher, which I think is true, and also might be why this book shone for me in a way that other autofiction usually doesn’t—though how would I know, really, considering that I almost never read it? But when I think about autofiction, I think of characters who are cool and detached, bored and languid—watch the me who is also not me while I lounge on a chair and do nothing—and so I rarely think about autofiction at all, but this book was different, vulnerable and earnest, about collaboration, about creation, the work of creating community, of creating a family that is part of a community, about friendship, and rituals, and all the acts that infuse our existence with meaning. The narrator is enthusiastic, that gift. She feels things, she wants things—which also means that sometimes she doesn’t get what she wants, or she loses what she has. Though what she really wants is a camping trip in Algonquin Park with her friend Alice, and much of the first part of the novel finds her there, reading and thinking and planning; hanging Alice’s lily-pad paintings up on the line with clothes pegs. The narrator spends a lot of time ruminating on her friendships, her connection to her ex-husband, her connections to strangers, her connections to the children in her life.
And then the narrative zooms out a bit, and back in time, and we learn the camping trip is situated during the uncertain summer of 2020, Brubacher telling the stories of the months leading up to it, the context, the narrator moving into a new home with her partner and stepchild, beginning the processes of IVF, her big beautiful world of art and company made tiny when the world shuts down in March. (“We’d managed to come up with the worst possible staging for the moment: the audience and performers were to be seated right next to one another…with a 150 person choir occupying the seats around the perimeter of the crowd, singing at them…. I’m levelled by the idea that, in this moment, a choir is the most dangerous thing… Everything in me wants to fight for the choir. I’m trying to figure out what that might mean, to fight for the choir.”)
Enthusiasm is a gift, and so too is this novel, which is steeped with enthusiasm, passion and feeling for extraordinary ordinary things, which is fighting for the choir.
June 3, 2024
You Are Here, by David Nicholls
Okay, I think I did read David Nicholls’ novel US, though I don’t remember it, but I do remember seeing his novel SWEET SORROW in the window of Palmerston Library in 2021 when the library was closed to patrons but we could point to items in the window and staff would bring them to us at the door and the set-up was a bit speakeasy, and I’d only selected the book because the cover was pool-blue and at first glance the two figures are floating in the water, except that they’re wearing clothes and reading books and it turns out this isn’t a swimming book at all, but I loved it anyway, SO MUCH, and its rich emotional tapestry was still on my mind when I decided to pre-order Nicholls’ new book, YOU ARE HERE, plus Katie Clapham had written about it, explaining, “David Nicholls writes the romance of reasonable people, and that’s very sexy to me.”
She also wrote: “Sometimes things are popular because they’re excellent. Sometimes the experience eclipses the hype. Sometimes you should just buy the new book from the number one best selling author of global sensation One Day and sometimes, only a David Nicholls novel will do.”
And I think she’s right. I read YOU ARE HERE this weekend, and adored it, and was also put through an emotional wringer, laughed out like a lunatic, and temporarily through that walking England coast-to-coast might be something that I want to do (and then I changed my mind).
It’s the story of Marnie and Michael who are connected by a meddling friend who is trying to set each one up with somebody else, and the two end up on a walking trip together, both forced by the meddling friend into breaking out of post-pandemic malaise and isolation. Both are divorced, Michael freshly, Marnie otherwise, and both bring four decades of life lived to the present moment, to their complicated and gorgeous textured connection, the chapters moving back and forth between their different points of view, the particular circumstances in which they find themselves leading to real vulnerability and introspection and epic cock-ups and misunderstandings, and kissing, a brush with death, and chance for both at happiness again. “Even with her sore eyes and hot, aching head, she felt that time was passing quickly and lightly and that a real summer, the first for many years, lay ahead.”
