February 27, 2011
Can Lit?
I br0ught a few Canadian novels with me, but have actually forgotten that Canada was ever such a place, so they’ve remained unopened in my suitcase. Instead, I’ve delighted in three epistolary novels in a row. The first was Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster, which wasn’t remotely English, except for the umbrellas on the cover, and that was enough– I really liked it. Next was Burley Cross Postbox Theft, which was absolutely brilliant– I loved the ending. And on Friday, I read Felicity and Barbara Pym by Harrison Solow, which was even stranger than Nicola Barker’s novel, if such a thing was possible, but I adored it. The novel consists of correpondance from an 
academic to a student undertaking the study of liberal arts at an American university who is about to begin a seminar on Barbara Pym. Who is unclear about why she should bother to read Barbara Pym, and the academic is unscathing in her criticism of the student’s point of view, of her limitations. Unbashedly snobbish (but not in all respects. She recommends Miss Read and Jilly Cooper’s Class in order to understand Pym’s world), as she takes down the student for her own provincialism and then proceeds to outline why we should bother reading Barbara Pym, as well as how we should approach the liberal arts, which is by drawing a connection between impeccable literary analysis and the wider world. Connections between the insular nature of Pym’s village life and ideas of the earth-centred universe, and the island mentality of the English anyway. Absolutely fascinating, and though I appreciated Barbara Pym before I read it, I picked up her Less Than Angels next, of course, and I am a better reader now.
This weekend, we had a wonderful time in Glasgow with good friends (two of whom hopped over from Ireland for the occasion). The drive was lovely, the city was so vibrant and beautiful, and the sun shone and shone and we haven’t paid for it yet. Plus, we had afternoon tea at the Willow Tea Rooms, and had the kind of fun last night that is only possible in the company of the Scottish and the Irish. Tomorrow, to Yorkshire, and then a drive down South, then a day in London, and a day in Windsor, and before we know it, we’ll be home again, home again (and happy to be there. Though apparently, there is snow?).
February 24, 2011
Report from the (wrong side of the) road
The most amazing thing that ever happened to me happened on our trip to the UK in 2007 when I predicted that our car rental would be upgraded to a Saab convertible, and it was, and so we drove with the top down from North Yorkshire over the dales, across the Pennines until it started to rain– it was perfect. Similar fortune wouldn’t have worked as well this time, as the carseat would have been a tight squeeze in the Saab, and there would be no room for our enormous suitcases. Besides, the Saab was far too wide for maneuvering down English roads, I kept scraping the alloy wheels against curbs, and got charged 200 pounds (which brought our total up to the cost of a Saab in the first place, and so it goes).
No, this time I predicted that we’d get upgraded to first class on the flight over, and I’m not sure if I’m psychic, or merely good at conjuring realities, but it worked again, and our flight was a dream. We were not so first class that we got to sleep in pods and actual silverware, but we got comfortable seats and foot-rests, and a kit with earplugs and an eye-mask. We actually slept! Arriving in London on Sunday morning, feeling much better than we’d ever imagined we would.
Since then, we have seen old friends, Harriet has played with scores of children, we have driven 
from Berkwhire to Lancashire, I have mastered round-abouts, I avoided hitting a pheasant on a very scary journey along a two lane road with brick walls built up on either side, many twists and turns, a 100km speed limit, and some points at which the two lanes were narrowed to one. I am reading The Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker, which is the best possible book I could be reading at this time. Tomorrow we are driving to Scotland to see friends from our Japan days who we haven’t seen since our wedding five and a half years ago. Today we walked along the sea front, and Harriet watched the tide come in, and the sun shone, and it was lovely. When the sun shines here, people like to tell you that we’ll pay for it later. We have been eating copious amounts of cake and tea and scones. On Monday, Stuart and I are taking a trip for afternoon tea in at Bettys in Ilkley, because Ilkley is the constabulary serving Burley Cross. We’re looking forward to a day in London near the end of next week, and another day exploring Windsor.
And most of all we’re looking forward to the fact that we’ve been away for nearly a week, and our vacation isn’t even half over.
February 19, 2011
If you need me…
…I will be beside the seaside. In February, no less! And with my computer, so you’ll be hearing from me from time to time.
February 16, 2011
Light at the end of the tunnel
On Saturday, we are going to England, baggage handler strike notwithstanding, and don’t worry, I have a new spring coat (the Christine trench, in geranium) because the weather is calling for rain. We are going for two weeks! I have never gone on a two week vacation in adulthood– this is a monumental occasion. I am exited about numerous things, and terrified about others (round-abouts!). But mostly at the moment, I am excited about books. I had a bunch of books to read for various reasons in the last two weeks, and then all my Toronto Library holds came in at once, so that reading is about all I’ve been doing this last while. But as soon as I’m finished with my final library book, I am going to read magazines until our departure, because, of course, I have to start every journey with a fresh book. It’s a superstition of mine.
I am going to take Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs with me to read, and on a six hour flight with a toddler, my goal is to read at least five pages. Once we’re settled and Harriet is in the care of her grandparents, however, there will be reading time aplenty (fit in around trips out for cream teas). I am also going to read my final Canada Reads Independently book, Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind, and I am bringing an ARC of Timothy Taylor’s new book The Blue Light Project.
Whilst in England, I plan on buying Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker, a novel by Rachel Cusk (but which. Any suggestions? I’ve only read Arlington Park and A Life’s Work), and a very odd book called Felicity and Barbara Pym by Harrison Solow, which isn’t actually British, but oh well. I will probably buy many other books too, especially since we are going to visit the London Review Bookshop (which is also a cake shop).
Once I’m home again, there’s a packed shelf of books I’m looking forward to bringing in the spring with, books that are too big for travel: Allison Pearson’s I Think I Love You, the new PEN Anthology Finding the Words, and Zsuzsi Gartner’s story collection Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. Among others, oh yes. Many, many others.
September 28, 2010
When Fenelon Falls
I wrote about my adventures this summer in the land of (almost) no bookshops, and had determined that this area of the Kawartha Lakes region was about as unliterary as they come. And then, this Sunday at the Word on the Street Festival, I discover hot off the Coach House Presses is When Fenelon Falls by Dorothy Ellen Palmer– somehow this unliterary land has generated a book of its own. Having spent about fifteen childhood summers in the vicinity, in addition to a week in August, this book is now a must-read, and though Palmer’s story takes place long before I came along, I am sure some bits will still be quite familiar.
August 9, 2010
Adventures in the land of (almost) no bookshops
So we made a major error when we went away on vacation, assuming that the second half of The News Where You Are, a magazine, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo would be books enough to tide Stuart over. It distinctly wasn’t, and though he came to the end wanting to find that girl who played with fire, he said he’d be content with any book, and so we went searching. We spent a couple of hours in Bobcaygeon on Tuesday, where Stuart was generally irritable because The Tragically Hip had got his hopes up. In amongst many stores gone out of business, there was one bookshop, but it was so crap that my one purchase there was a wind chime. Not knowing then quite how much desperate times would call for desparate measures, we’d had the nerve to turn our noses up. (I had also been promised $30 Birkenstocks at Bigleys. We really did leave Bobcaygeon terribly disappointed).
The next day we went to Fenelon Falls, which had been pretty central to my childhood summers, and I was sad to see the main strip had become a bit bleak, with Canadian Tire and the grocery store moving into bigger stores on the outskirts, leaving a few (very) poor man’s Bargain Harolds in their midsts. We thought maybe the grocery store might stock a novel or two, but they didn’t, and they didn’t even have good magazines. I kept driving up and down the one street in Fenelon Falls, willing a bookshop to appear, but one didn’t and I was so sad. “What kind of town doesn’t have a bookshop?” I kept railing, slapping the dashboard. “What does this say about us as a people?” Fed up with my melodrama, Stuart asked a passer-by if there was a bookshop. The woman shook her head, said we could try the library, but it was closed by now. Which made us even more depressed, because it was only 3:00.
“Maybe Coboconk has a bookshop?” I wondered, which is when you know you’re really desperate. At the very least, we thought it might have a Shopper’s Drug Mart, which does stock mass-market paperbacks. So we drove into town, and noted they had a Rona AND a Home Hardware, but no bookshop. So we turned around to go back where we’d come, when Stuart noticed a dilapidated warehouse with a sign that said, “BOOKS!”. It was one of those places that sold liquidation stock, with other signs including, “WINDOWS!”, “TIRES!” and “FIREWORKS!”. Not holding out a great deal of hope, we stopped and went in. They had a toilet seat section. The books section was totally bizarre though, comprising mainly horrid romance novels and study guides for 19th century classic novels. There was a massive stack of a book about Grace Paley’s short stories. There were three copies of the Louise Fitzhugh biography for $2 each. Of the lot, we found one novel which Stuart might have contemplated reading not under duress (or even reading for pleasure) and it was Watchman by Ian Rankin, so we bought it for a grand six bucks.
That night, back at the cottage, I was recounting our adventures, and somebody said to me, “Why didn’t you just go to Bob’s?” Which, apparently, is Fenelon Falls’ great used bookshop, across the road from the library even. A few blocks off the main strip, around the corner from the LCBO, and Fenelon Falls grew eight sizes bigger in my estimation at that moment. The world was a less bleak place, where the crap books aren’t always on sale with the toilet seats. (We also phoned my mom, and asked her to bring up the next Steig Larsson when she came).
We went to Bob’s on Friday, which is actually Bob Burns’ Books, and it was everything I’d been promised. Big and bustling, stocked with cottagey tomes, yellow paperbacks in alpha-order, but also a wonderful selection of literature, and children’s books, and plays and poetry, and coffee. I wanted to kiss the ground it stood on, or at the very least its floor, but I didn’t. Instead, I bought The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner, because I am enamoured of commercial fiction short story collections, and The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, because I’d heard him on the CBC the week before and it sounded interesting. Though I read now that the book might be misogynistic, and that India Knight hates it, so it’s probably not my usual thing, but should make for something interesting.
August 8, 2010
Not glad to get home at all
Interestingly, this last week of going along, listening to all the things we couldn’t hear and not bothering turned out to be quite monumental. During our escape to the wilds of The Kawarthas, Harriet learned to walk, learned to dance, and made her first friend, who was called Izzy and is two. (Harriet has other friends, but I have for the most part projected these friendships upon her, whereas Izzy was friended independently. Harriet was totally in love, they hugged each other good-bye at the end of the week.)
Stuart and I spent a week without the internet, and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, in particular our games of Scrabble on the porch in the evenings. We were both unsurprised to come home and discover we’d missed not much at all while we were away.
And to my great benefit, Stuart started reading Stieg Larsson en vacance, which meant that for a few days my husband loved reading just as much as I did. This was how I managed to get almost five books read during Harriet’s naptimes (which were made expansive by her running around like a wild animal when out of doors, and thus becoming exhausted). It also led to some book-buying adventures, which I’ll be recounting here in coming days.
It was a wonderful week, everything we wanted and needed, and also full of corn-on-the-cob and fresh peach pie. And no matter how often we swept the floor, there was sand underfoot, and there was sand in the shower, and on the table, and finally throughout the bed, so we were glad to get home and lose the grit. But other than that I really don’t think we were so glad to get home at all.
August 8, 2010
From what I read over the past week
Another literary lost umbrella(!), this time in Barbara Pym’s thoroughly enjoyable A Few Green Leaves: “It was not until she had gone too far along the street to turn back that Emma realised that, possibly in the stress of some obscure emotion, she must have taken Claudia’s umbrella in mistake for her own. And it was an umbrella of inferior quality. She wondered what the possible significance of that could be.”**
(**Update: Upon reading Pym’s autobiography, I learned this was based on an actual incident reported in her notebook, which, I think, constitutes *another* literary lost umbrella)
And then I fell into At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman, my one complaint about being that its lovely cover got a bit manky when I used it to kill a mosquito. “One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights– which in Emerson’s case expired long ago– a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer. The greater the work, the wider the ownership, which is why there are such things as criticism, revisionism and Ph.D. dissertations. I will not ask the sage of Concord to rewrite his oration. He will forever retain the right to speak his own words and to mean what he wished to mean, not what I would wish him to mean. But I will retain the right to recast Man Thinking in my mind as Curious People Thinking because time has passed and the tent has grown larger.”
Then I turned to Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (except that my copy is called Thank You All Very Much, which was the title of a film upon which The Millstone was based). “I was not of course treated to that phrase which greets all reluctant married mothers, “I bet you wouldn’t be without her now, so often repeated after the event in the full confidence of nature, because I suppose people feared I might turn on them and say, Yes I certainly would, which would be mutually distressing for questioner and me. And in many ways I thought that I certainly would prefer to be without her, as one might prefer to lack beauty or intelligence or riches, or any other such sources of mixed blessing and pain. Things about life with a baby drove me into frenzies of weeping several times a week, and not only having milk on my clean jerseys. As so often in life, it was impossible to choose, even theoretically, between advantage and disadvantage, between profit and loss: I was up quite unmistakably against No Choice. So the best one could do was put a good face on it, and to avoid adding to the large and largely discussed number of sad warnings that abounded in the part of the world that I knew.”
Next was Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind, which was beautiful and difficult, and uncannily channelling Joan Didion in spots. “‘Blackness’, as [Zora Neale Hurston] understood it and wrote about it, is as natural and inevitable and complete to her as, say, “Frenchness” is to Flaubert. It is also as complicated, as full of blessings and curses. One can be no more removed from it than from one’s arm, but it is no more the total measure of one’s being than an arm is.”
And finally, Darwin’s Bastards, which I’m not finished yet, but how (in particular), I’ve loved short stories by Jessica Grant, Douglas Coupland, Mark Anthony Jarman, Timothy Taylor, and Elyse Friedman.
Such fun. Honestly, my vacation books could not have been more perfectly chosen.
July 27, 2010
Books I am taking away
All right, I have settled on the books I am taking away with me next week on vacation, none of which I’m reading for any reason except for pleasure (hooray!). And yes, I am being too optimistic with the amount of reading I expect to get done (because there will be swimming, and canoeing, and Scrabble, and… no other distractions. Oh, except Harriet). But can you imagine if I happened to get through all the books, and there was nothing next to turn to?
I am taking The Millstone by Margaret Drabble, because I love the Drabble and reread one of hers every summer, and have chosen to reread this one because someone loved its literary baby. And to read for the first time, Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith, A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym, Darwin’s Bastards by Zsuszi Gartner (ed), and At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman.
