August 23, 2006
Mood
I’ve been trying to post photos of fun at the CNE for three days, but they won’t upload, and so you will have to wait in order to see the baby pigs, the butter scupltures and Stu at the Princes Gates. Otherwise, I’m home sick today and have been in a mood of late, which I intend to cast off presently. They’ll be tea drunk in the meantime.
August 20, 2006
Non fiction
Here for Joan Didion in The Observer. And Toni Collette too! Hilary Mantel reviews Andrew O’Hagen’s new book. Margaret Atwood in The Globe.
I am reading Possession by AS Byatt, which I purchased at the Nottingham Oxfam in late 2002 and read voraciously during the odd Christmas I spent in Cambridge with my friend’s brother-in-law’s extended family. I think Bronwyn may have read it around the same time, and even if she didn’t, we loved it much together. I keep having to put it another room because if it’s at arm’s length, I will pick it up and read it, and nothing will ever get done. At the moment, the idea of inventing history is resonating with me. I just completed a story about a girl who works as a “historical interpreter” at a pioneer house in small-town Ontario, what I’ve really enjoyed inventing the history of that house and the people who lived there. Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill were my inspiration (I grew up in Peterborough after all) but the rest I made up, as you do, and there is something in the detail necessary for such an endeavour that I find irresistible. I think Virginia Woolf felt similarly, her short story “The Diary of Mistress Joan Martyn” makes that evident. And I feel like Byatt must have read Woolf’s story before she wrote her novel, and had it in even the very backest of her mind. I love the creation necessary for rendering Ash and Christabel Lamotte, and the liberties Byatt would have had with them. I love that the air of history about them gives their story an authenticity that fiction usually lacks. I love it for the same reason I enjoyed creating fake newspapers when I was ten years old. There is something quite delicious in making a reality right out of thin air, which of course one does with every story, but the obviousness of this exercise is why it’s so much fun. The line between fact and fiction is not just blurred, but suddenly there is no line at all, nor was there ever such a thing.
August 19, 2006
Stretch on
Oh, Saturday afternoon post-brunch, post-hangover, post-being peeled off the pavement come sunrise. And now the day stretches out with nothing in it, save for stories to read and stories to write, with the Lego Star Wars soundtrack buzzing in the background.
August 16, 2006
It is out of necessity that I read excessively
(My frequent ramblings upon reading rendered into a vague coherence)
Bookishness has gone hardcore, if the broadsheets are any indication. John Allemang reads a book a day in The Globe and Mail and Jane Smiley is tackling one hundred novels in The Guardian. This year I also decided to read a little less leisurely, set a goal of 200 books read in 2006, and since then it has occurred to me that these reading marathons might be the literary equivalent of competitive eating. Champion eater Takeru Kobayashi devours fifty hot-dogs in twelve minutes and I wonder if my reading goal is similarly excess for the sake of itself. Six months in, however, I have found something to be said for taking reading this seriously.
Merely tracking my reading habits has been worthwhile, revealing patterns I would not have otherwise noticed. That I am clearly too prone to leaping onto bandwagons of the just-deceased, as indicated by the appearances upon my list by Muriel Spark and Jane Jacobs. I note further, the gender imbalance in my author selection— by May, I had only finished one novel by a man, assigned for a class no less. I realized that my library was saturated with recent works by Canadian women in particular. That it is a miracle that I’ve managed to read anything at all from abroad.
A record of books read has proved practical to have on-hand. (I am not alone in such obsessive documentation. The writer Annie Dillard has kept a list entitled “Books I’ve Read Since 1966”.) My list has distinguished stories and characters, long after I’ve scanned the last line and slammed the book shut. One day I was straining my mind one day to remember who had left her umbrella on an omnibus and upon reference to the list, of course, I realized that Virginia Woolf herself had done so, in the fifth volume of her diary, back in March. From the list, I realised that Grace Paley’s short stories in February were what had made Jane Jacobs’ New York so familiar when I encountered it in May.
The list also serves as a diary, of sorts. Upon reference, I remember reading Zadie Smith’s On Beauty just after New Years, or devouring Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly on a bus ride to Ottawa during Reading Week. I recall the rainy day I read The Accidental by Ali Smith in its entirety, while I should have been doing my homework.
And what of the marathon itself? After nearly eight months, its most profound impact has been quite simply that I have read a lot of books. I rarely watch television or movies, and I always carry a book in case a reading opportunity suddenly arises. Admittedly, I’ve become a bit stupider socially and accounts of how I spent my weekend are often concerned with the adventures of fictional people. But I bet I’ve read a book lately that is relevant to any conversation you might wish to engage me in. These days, so attuned to reading, I’ve come to approach the world a bit like it is a book, interspersed with details to be noticed and facts to be learned.
Of course, the problem with any marathon is how fast the scenery flies by. So quantifying books threatens the quality of their readings, which is why I embarked upon The Great Summer Rereading Project. I have devoted my reading this summer to becoming reacquainted with books I read too long ago and have forgotten, books read too quickly and not adequately absorbed, or books I read when I was too young to understand them.
I started with Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, which I first read at fourteen years and probably missed the point of. I’ve since revisited quite a few others, including Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby and In The Skin of a Lion and each was so different from what I remembered. What was once romantic now seems trite, the dull is illuminated and strange endings make sense. Rereading has been an exercise in self-discovery. I’ve also enjoyed deciphering my marginalia, and finding lost treasures between the pages, like the two dollar bill stuck inside The Robber Bride.
I am aware that there is probably fault to be found with such systematic reading. Is it an affront to its very leisureness to render reading such a chore? Surely a book is to be savoured. As with the competitive eaters, are hardcore readers testing limits that really need not require challenge?
But then again, any media consumption is a serious business, if the exhaustive cataloging of TV guides and the emergence of Personal Video Recorders are any indication. Music lovers obsessively compile playlists from thousands of tracks. Blogs punctiliously link to the corners of the universe. One could spend a lifetime reading magazines produced in a single week and the internet is bigger than the sky. And there is no business more serious than book reading.
In addition to the overwhelming number of wonderful books being published all the time, a reader has to contend with all the books published for thousands of years previously— the classics, the obscure, and the still-to-be-discovered. It is out of necessity that I read excessively. My list of books-to-be-read will always be longer than “Books I’ve Read Since 2006”. The sole problem with my reading marathon is that life is too short. And so however long mine stretches, I shall fill it with books.
August 14, 2006
Secret History
The Booker longlist! (And I have read none of it). I am rereading The Secret History by Donna Tartt at the moment, and loving it. I read it last in November of 2002, right before I met Stuart and while my home was a bunk bed in a youth hostel. I’ve blocked most of that period out. It’s a great book, and I am speeding through it. It’s more about story telling than the story itself- a little bit Heart of Darkness/American Psycho. Definitely worth a reread and the shortest 600 some page book ever.
Oh, and as of tomorrow, the entire Clare-Lawler household will be gainfully employed. That’s right, double income no kids! Conspicuous consumption, here we come. Well, at least until I go back to school. Wonderful news though. It has been a long long road.
August 14, 2006
Tea cups
I’ve recently developed the habit of inheriting tea cups, an odd legacy. Now I love tea as much as the next man (more perhaps), but I drink mine from tremendously cavernous coffee mugs that would horrify The UK Tea Council. These delicate cups with their tiny saucers are from a different world and I am not sure how to fit them into mine. For the time being, they live on the top shelf of my cupboard, but I wonder what they will come to mean eventually.
August 13, 2006
Not the bookshelf that killed Bast
The big news is that we acquired a new bookshelf this weekend, and now the books are stretching out and revelling in their new abundance of space, that is until I fill up this one too. But I think that will take some time. Though the Vic Book Sale is just around the corner, so you never know. The other news is that this weekend was full of funerals, families and birthday cake, and though I am supposed to go to another birthday party today, it’s all just been a bit much and I don’t think I can make it.
I finished reading Howards End this weekend. I read it in 2001 for a university course, and I liked it. I found having read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty has had an enormous impact on the original book, which was surprising. Obviously, Smith borrowed from Forster, but that in the borrowing, she can make a near-100 year old book so much richer was an interesting idea. It’s a very cool relationship, and I believe the subtlety of Smith’s borrowing is what made the exercise so effective. Anyway, I also noticed how much Howards End was far more about property than people, and it made me think about connections also with television shows such as my beloved Location Location Location, because I was reminded of Phil and Kirstie all the way through this book. Oh the connexions abound. Such fun…
