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 24, 2024
Summer Reading
Earlier this month I wrote a substack post (available to all readers) about Catherine Newman’s SANDWICH as an ideal beach read. You can read it here!
Paid subscribers can read my July essay, “How to Build a Summer Reading List,” which went up yesterday, and you can read it here. (Thank you to new subscribers! It means everything.)
And finally, there’s a Canadian Goodreads giveaway of my novel ASKING FOR A FRIEND, which makes for an ideal summer read, I must say. Enter before July 29 for your chance to win!
July 3, 2024
Camping With Bright Creatures
My family worked really hard to buy me a book for my birthday that I would like, but hadn’t directly asked for. This process required looking up titles in line with my interests, and then examining our bookshelves to ensure I didn’t own it already, and then carefully studying my reading log to ensure I hadn’t read it in the last two years. A chancy endeavour, this was, but they were fairly confident. “Either you haven’t read it,” my husband told me, “or you just hated it so much that you eliminated any and all evidence of ever having come into contact with it.”
Fortunately, it was the former, but then everybody was quite nervous to find out if I would actually ENJOY the book, REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES, by Shelby Van Pelt, a book that got lots of hype when it came out, but more on the periphery of my experience. This weekend, on our camping trip, I finally dove in….and I loved it so much. The kind of rich, absorbing reading experience I hope for when I’m on holiday. (My daughter said she was pretty sure I would like it because it sounded a bit like @amlaujo’s PEBBLE AND DOVE.)
And can I just take a moment to note how much the poor books we bring on camping trips have to go through? Look at that crumpled cover, not to mention bugs smushed between pages, the parts that end up waterlogged, the spills and dirt, and sand between the pages? Books on camping trips are some of the most hardworking, bedraggled books in the world.
Which is also to say that they are LOVED, and become irrevocable parts of the holiday memory, memories of reading as vivid and essential as those of the gorgeous sunsets, the indelible smell of campfire smoke, the sound of birdsong (very) early in the morning.
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.
*
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.
*
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.
