April 18, 2024
Book By Book: An English Journey
I wrote about our trip to England via the books I read on our travels, and you can read it on my substack. It was really long and kudos to anyone (everyone?) who reads all the way through. Check it out here.
April 11, 2024
Back Again!
In case you missed me, I was busy buying books all over Northwest England, and having a grand time while doing it. Full report to come in my newsletter on Monday—make sure you’re on the list!
November 29, 2023
7 Books and 7 Drives
Gary Barwin, in a typical act of originality, has created a wonderful list at 49thShelf called “Six Books on Six Trails,” matching his audiobook listening to the places where he walked with those books in his years. He writes, “There’s an intimate pleasure in listening to books as one walks. The voice speaks only to you. What it is telling you colours your surroundings. It’s a narrative soundtrack, mood music in words. Certain places become associated with certain events in a story or certain ideas discussed in a podcast. And these may pile up to become sedimentary auditory formations… It’s a literary trail map, a walking footnote.”
Which reminded me of the bend of highway that will forever remind me of poor Anne Innis Dagg trapped with a predatory man in an isolated cabin facing a choice between sharing a bed with him or sleeping on the floor with spiders (or something—the specifics have escaped me) even though the highway is in the middle of southern Ontario and the cabin was somewhere in Africa, but the highway just happened to be the place where I was listening to the book.
I don’t listen to audiobooks very often, but when I do it’s in the car with my family on any journey that will take more than a couple of hours, and these books are always a highlight of our trips, becoming intricately connected with the experience, however incongruous the place and subject matter.
*
The Penderwicks series, by Jeanne Birdsall
Highway 11 north of Gravenhurst
We’d listened to audiobooks before, but The Penderwicks series were the first books that really “took” for us, because both our children were old enough to be engaged, and because the stories were interesting and nuanced enough to engage their parents as well. I know we read the first in the series from a book borrowed from the library, but I think all the rest were on audio book. We listened to these books on our summer trips to Muskoka and I remember the dips in the road when Mr. Penderwick was referring to his girlfriend Marianne Dashwood and how I was pretty sure I was onto him. The very last book in the series has little Batty Penderwick all grown up, and I recall finishing it just as we came off Highway 400 to join the traffic of the 401—for both the holiday and the series, we still wanted more.
*
The Watsons Go to Birmingham, by Christopher Paul Curtis
Highway 400 through Barrie, ON
This book was from the same route on the map but during a more recent summer, and I recall driving up through Barrie and listening to the part where (I think it was) the big brother gets his tongue stuck to the wing mirror on the family car in the dead of winter. This is very much a book about the automobile, the Watsons coming from Detroit, as they do, and their huge family car being pivotal to the plot as they family makes its way south to Alabama in 1963. Their father rigs up a system where they can have an actual record player on the dashboard! On the way back a week later, we were driving through Barrie again when we got to the part about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, and this novel brought that story to life for me in a way I’d never experienced it before.
*
Pursuing Giraffe, by Anne Innis Dagg
Highway 35 through Norland, ON
We listened to this memoir on our very first trip to Big Hawk Lake, a new journey for us, and that feeling of not knowing where we were going with the story in our ears has woven the two together, so much so that every time we’ve driven by the end of the 404 ever since, I’ve recalled the specific point where Anne Innis Dagg’s boyfriend was being such an absolute jerk as she left him to fulfill her dreams of studying giraffes in the wild during the 1950s. (Spoiler alert: Reader, she married him!) And see my aforementioned point about the predator as we were making our way through Norland, ON, on Highway 35, not a giraffe in sight.
*
Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
Limberlost Road, near Huntsville, ON
I can’t remember who recommended Agatha Christie to us for family audiobooks, but we’re forever indebted to them. We borrowed this one from the library and it was not the Kenneth Branagh version, but we loved it all the same, and only got part way through on the journey up to the cottage and throughout the week kept thinking about reasons to jump back in the car and take a trip to town—just so we could hear the next part.
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Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie
Highway 7, near St. Mary’s, ON
We listened to most of Death on the Nile this summer on our journey to and from Muskoka, but had some still left over for our camping trip to Pinery Provincial Park a week later (which is a really long trip). When I think of this novel set on a cruise ship in Egypt and all its nefarious characters, I think of the rural roads of Perth county, green fields and tobacco farms, no doubt just as Agatha Christie planned.
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The Infamous DNF
Highway 35 just south of Dorset, ON
The trouble with the Agathas is that now we don’t want to listen to anything else, but all Agatha all the time gets a little samesy. So we tried a different book for our getaway in August, and perhaps it might have been fitting if our children were younger and we were not all so primed for stories stacked with sex and murder, but we were all bored out of our skulls, and every time we thought the plot couldn’t get any less interesting, it did. We are persistent people and dogged in terms of books, but finally we just couldn’t take it anymore. We’d just taken a little trip to Dorset, ON, and as we drove out of town, we reached our limit. If that audiobook had been a physical thing instead of a file on my husband’s phone, we would have tossed it out the window.
*
Bonus track:
Folklore, by Taylor Swift
On Route on Highway 401 near Port Hope
The ramp up to the Port Hope On Route on the 401 East is where I first heard the beginning to “The Last Great American Dynasty” and though that possibly this surprise Taylor Swift album, released in the middle of the pandemic summer of 2020, might grow on me, and did it ever. Not an audiobook, but literary in its scope and depth, we were listening to this on the way to our camping trip, one trip uncancelled in that year of cancelled things, and by the time we were driving back again a few days later, “Exile” was a song I was singing along to, even if the words weren’t right yet, and we’d come to fall in love with every track, each of which could be its own novel.
August 23, 2023
Another Week in Paradise
A+ vacation reads last week. Laura Lippman never disappoints. I LOVE Sue Miller and am reading through her backlist; this one was my favourite Marian Keyes novel I’ve ever read, about a depressive Private Investigator trying to find a member of a reunited boy band all the while experiencing suicidal ideation; my fourth Barbara Trapido novel, a contemporary story told in the fantastical structure of a Shakespearean comedy; THE GREAT CIRCLE, which I did enjoy but skimmed in parts; Andrew O’Hagan’s truly beautiful story of lifelong friendship; and William Trevor, William Trevor Forever! I love him.
July 27, 2023
Wilderness Tips
“Camping in the wilderness is no reason to let culinary standards fall,” read a blog post I found last week while searching for an easy one pot recipe for pasta. “All it takes is some prepping before you go…” And I read this line aloud to my husband, who was packing the cooler, and we laughed and laughed and laughed.
Until the end of time, I will be indebted to the families we went camping with when camping was new to us, about ten years ago, for not murdering me in my sleeping bag as I too was quite sure that camping in the wilderness was no excuse to let culinary standards fall. The first time we went camping I brought a dutch oven and cooked a pork roast on the fire, and I remember our friend pointing out the one fact that had never occurred to me, which was that someone would have to be there to watch that pork roast for hours and hours and hours, and maybe there might be better things to do on a camping trip. The second time we went camping I prepared all these little foil packets with meat and vegetables that we roasted on the fire. The third time we went camping, we went alone (I know, so shocking) and I made little foil dishes of macaroni and cheese in advance which were cooked on the fire, and they were very good, but also the day before we left I’d spent hours and hours “prepping before we go” and arrived at our holiday exhausted, which is NOT GREAT when you’re about to spent the weekend sleeping on the ground.
Over the past decade, we’ve evolved naturally, little by little. It started with hot dogs, I think, instead of fire roasted pork, and ham sandwiches instead of campfire burritos. And I’ve realized how good simple food can taste, and how nice it is when things are easy, which is the whole point of a holiday anyway. Last weekend, our camping menu was was the least fancy yet—dinners were hot dogs (of course!), campfire nachoes, and pasta mixed with a jar of alfredo sauce. On our very last morning, we warmed up grocery store cinnamon buns on our fire, and it was one of the most delicious breakfasts I’ve ever had.
I’m still a little bit annoying though—old habits are hard to shake. Campfire muffins are one of my favourite things, not just because they’re delicious, but also because they necessitate lazy mornings around the campsite, which is one of my favourite things.
June 12, 2023
PEI Mini-Break
I try not to work too hard to ensure absolutely that my children get everything divided right down the middle, because life isn’t like that, and their needs aren’t always 50/50 either, and who has the time for that? But there are two instances in which it’s been important to me that Kid 2 gets what her sister had—the first was their baby books, and I remember scrambling to add to Iris’s in a sleepless exhausted haze quite convinced that my effort would be worth it once she was old enough to appreciate, and how right I was. And the second instance was the 10th Birthday Trip, a tradition we began with a long weekend in Manhattan when Harriet turned ten—it was magic! And four years later, especially after everyone missing out on so much, I was committed that Iris get her mini-break too, even if the cost of travelling has skyrocketed.
And thankfully, a solution arrived. A very cheap flight to the magical land of Prince Edward Island, where we were lucky to have cousins host us for three nights and even lend us the use of their car. It was amazing, and while this was a different kind of island than we visited before, it was no less exciting to experience and also there was a very good bookshop.
March 20, 2023
March Break
I loved our March Break holiday this year, a March Break so normal that I even forgot to find “normal” remarkable. Our kids brought their indoor shoes home, but not because we weren’t sure they might ever go to school again, and that Friday was a blizzard, and if I’m talking about it like it was 187 years ago, it’s because it feels like it, because our holiday was relaxing, a proper reset, but also because a week after that blizzard (which we weathered while eating pizza and watching Newsies [omg, so good, first time I’ve seen it in 30 years!]) there were crocuses in bloom, and it feels like spring. No doubt winter still has a few wallops in store, but spring feels possible now, and getting here feels like an achievement.
I handed in edits for my book just before the holiday and so I had the luxury of working half days in the mornings (after 8 am swims!) and spending the afternoons with my children on local adventures. They loved it too because it was just the right balance of lazing around playing video games until their eyes glazed over, and fun being out in the world (with friends!). And I liked that I genuinely had less to do, so it wasn’t me scrambling to fit everything into a smaller time-frame (which would make me very grumpy). It was a holiday for all of us, even Stuart, who still had to work while we were gadding about, but having no weekday activities in the evening was a break for everybody.
We went swimming at the community centre; went to see Winter Stations at Woodbine beach and went out to lunch with friends; our kids had friends over to help us eat our chocolate pie; we went to Leslieville to meet our pals and for cookies, book buying, and thrifting; our kids got awesome new haircuts; on Friday we went to see The Parent Trap at Paradise Theatre; more community centre swimming; and then we closed off the holiday yesterday with the T. rex Exhibit at the ROM, where I learned why it’s T. rex and not T-Rex, ie why T. rex isn’t J-Lo.
We had lots of time to laze, to rest, to read, to sleep, to visit, to sing, to whiz across town on transit, to snack, to wonder, to climb, to dance, to build, to spin, to dream, to be. I even got my taxes done! It was a very good week.
February 14, 2023
Swimming in Pee
We had the kind of weekend this weekend that hasn’t been possible in such a long time, the kind of weekend that we were wondering if we’d ever have again, even just a year ago, and it felt really good, to be so full of joy, our time full of fun, everything carefree. And something I can write on my blog that I would be less comfortable posting to social media, which is so much more amplified and devoid of context, is that we thoroughly forgot about Covid this weekend. 24 hours in Niagara Falls, staying in a hotel, visiting an indoor water park, and eating in restaurants—the object was enjoying ourselves and beyond packing hand sanitizer, we were going to not worry so much, leave our masks in our pocket for once.
Which I know is something we’re very lucky to be able to experience, but anyone who reads here often also knows what a terrible time I’ve had with anxiety over the last few years and how Covid absolutely fucked with my brain, made me think that keeping our health system functioning was my personal responsibility, and that every single one of my actions was so gravely consequential that I eventually was unable to do anything except walk around weeping at the sadness of it all, crumbling under the weight of this imagined burden of personal responsibility and my own catastrophic thinking. It was really bad, and terribly debilitating, and also really freaking hard for my family, and no doubt my kids will be talking about this in therapy for decades to come.
(I really really hate the way that bad actors hijacked the conversation around the pandemic and mental health right out of the gate so that it became impossible to have good faith conversations about any of this, to acknowledge that Covid is real and threatening, but also that there are dire consequences of having an entire society living under a perpetual emergency for literally years.)
And so it was actually really important, and even healthy, to have this little holiday away from it all, a bit like tearing off a band aid, pushing myself out of a strange uncomfortable comfort zone. If we got sick this weekend, we reasoned, so be it. Which is the kind of gamble that’s always been necessary for a trip to an indoor water park anyway, right? We were pretending that there was no circulating respiratory viruses, just as we were pretending that the wave pool wasn’t populated by people (hopefully mostly just the small ones, which is somehow less disgusting!) who were freely urinating without compunction.
So naturally, my youngest child woke up this morning puking—an inevitable water park aftermath. (She has been well since mid-morning, however, and will likely be returning to school tomorrow.) And then I headed to the hospital for my annual thyroid check, where it was found that one of my nodules had grown larger and so I had to have a biopsy (which I have had fairly often, and they’ve always been benign, thankfully), cystic liquid being sucked out through a needle in my neck.
And in the lab where I was sent for routine bloodwork, the technician was dressed in red for Valentines Day, just like I was, and we remarked on how we matched my blood, which filled four small vials for testing, and it somehow seemed fitting on Valentines Day, it being about hearts and all, my heart and your heart doing the amazing work of keeping our remarkable blood pumping through our gross and awesome bodies, and how all of us are connected, for better or for worse, most irrevocably.
I took the subway to the hospital for my appointment this morning, the first time I can recall riding transit at rush hour in such a long time, and the subway cars were packed, and more people than not with masks on, including me, and far more people with masks on than I ever see at off-peak hours (which makes a lot of sense!), and the subway was also so audibly quiet, people possibly on alert and good behaviour due to recent acts of violence on transit, and maybe that calm and quiet was what made it a little extra easy to feel in love with everybody today. All these people who’d woken up and had their breakfast and gotten dressed, and maybe nursed sick kids, or walked their dogs, or watched the sunrise with a cup of coffee, and now they’re out in the world, surrounded by strangers, following the rules, going through the motions, minding the gap.
It isn’t necessarily how badly our society functions that is remarkable, all of its faults and flaws, as I’ve written many times before, but instead that it functions at all. That most days in this city hundreds of trains take people places, and those people make room for each other, and move over on the stairs to let others pass, and help somebody up who has stumbled and fallen. That lab techs who dress up in red to make someone’s day a little brighter, going to work to poke needles, drawing blood, performing work that just might mean the difference between life or death. The miracle of socialized medicine and that I get the care I need to stay healthy. The miracle of ultrasound. The mask I continue to wear, when it makes sense, in my day-to-day life, and the knowledge that all of us, always, are swimming in pee.
And somehow, this is love.
This is life.
Happy Valentines Day.
January 9, 2023
Holiday Reads
Our holiday break started a day before it was supposed to, as a blizzard raged outside and cancelled school and I curled up with THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS, by William Maxwell, a novel set against the Spanish Flu Pandemic and made me wonder why the word “unprecedented” was used at all in March 2020, because it really wasn’t.
And I read and I read, books I’ve been picking up here and there over the last year and finally time away from work (and social media) gave me time to delve into them. Some new books, others authors I love whose backlists I still get to delight my way through (Sue Miller! Toni Morrison! Natalia Ginzburg!). Barbara Trapido, whose work I’m falling in love with. I read HAPPENING, by Annie Ernaux, 2022 Nobel Prize Winner. OMG, SONG OF SOLOMON! GIOVANNI’S ROOM! Connie Willis’s time travel epic (and I have its conclusion still before me).
What a satisfying stack this is, a stack that’s inspired me to read (even) more off the beaten track in 2023, to pursue my own curious avenues.
Also now my “to be read” shelf is as spare and orderly as it will be for at least another year, and so before the deluge of new releases begins, I want to take a moment and appreciate that.
