September 19, 2022

One More Time

For the second year in a row, we went camping in September, the kids taking a day off school before they’re even just two weeks in, just to prove to ourselves that we can, that we’re not fixed in place, that summer doesn’t end with Labour Day, or that it’s even the only season in which freedom is possible. Cozy in warm pants and sweaters, the campfire necessary because it’s cold, and dark by 8pm, so we sit around it, attuned to something primal, the rest of the world gone, and it’s only us, which is also everything.

August 30, 2022

More Vacation Reads

For the second summer in a row, we’ve gotten away for two one-week-holidays at a cottage, and I feel so lucky that this is possible for us and will go out of my way (if necessary) to continue to make it so because it’s just the very best thing, so relaxing and restorative, which has been the theme of my summer in general, and what a gift. And not just because I got nine whole books read!

The first was The Smart One, by Jennifer Close, which I stole from the resort library of the cottage we stayed at in July (though I left two books in its place, so that’s okay, right?). Since reading Marrying the Ketchups in July, I’ve been wanting to launch a Jennifer Close kick, because I enjoyed it so much. The Smart One, her second novel, is similarly a book about adult children coming home again after failures to launch, and it started out fine enough, very typical commercial fiction fare, I thought, but then I started to notice the thread of thoughtfulness that wound the different parts of this story together, and the questions the book asked about what it means to be “the smart one” or “the pretty one,” and the impossibility of any woman making the right choices. Surprise pregnancies, Catholic guilt, people called Cla(i)re and the ties that bind were introduced in this novel, themes that would appear in subsequent books I read.

In Watermelon, by Marian Keyes, the pregnancy is not, in fact, a surprise, but what is a surprise is that Clare’s husband announces he’s leaving her right after their child is born. (He didn’t want to mention it before, because it might have been a risk to her health then.) And so Clare decides to pack up her London life and head home to Dublin, to the house that she grew up in with her legion of sisters, and there she proceeds to drink away her pain and then plot her way toward a better life, so that when her husband finally appears to win her back he’s not really sure what’s happened. I will confess that this is not the best Marian Keyes book I’ve ever read—and I found it in a Little Free Library anyway, so no matter. It was entertaining enough but also utterly implausible—Clare’s newborn baby seems remarkably independent and leaves her mother with plenty of time and space to explore her own needs, which was certainly not my postpartum experience. I also found it very amusing when everyone in this book from 1996 worries that their bum looks big from the vantage point of the 2020s when big bums are all the rage and unflattering jeans are where it’s at. This book was something of a relic but also a perfect diversion for a summer’s day.

Next I read Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, which was the odd man out of these books in many ways (such as, I didn’t find in a Little Free Library), but had more in common with Marian Keyes’ Watermelon than you might imagine (and intersected with Aminatta Forna’s Happiness in interesting ways). It’s true that this is not a novel about ties that bind, instead it’s about being free of those ties, which doesn’t always feel like freedom. Intimacies is a novel about exile, about belonging nowhere, and features a protagonist who’s dating a man whose wife has left their family, inviting some of the parallels to the Keyes. It’s a curious and alienating novel, one just a little too cold and precise for my liking, but that’s not a criticism, just taste.

After that I read Siracusa, by Delia Ephron, who I’ve never read before, and I think I found this book as a secondhand bookshop. It’s a novel, like Intimacies, with an atmosphere that feels oppressive, but far more revealing, and actually intimate. Could be described as a taut thriller, but it’s weirder than that, about two couples who travel to Italy together and whose lives seemingly unravel on the journey with players being played and too many secrets threatening to be revealed. Quick and eerie, I really liked it.

And remained by the Ionian Sea for my next book (or at least it’s beginning), Julia Glass’s Three Junes, which I knew nothing about, except that it won the National Book Award in 2002, and my friend Marissa recommended it to me (and she never steers me wrong). I loved this book, which comprises three distinct sections—the first of Scottish widower Paul on a Greek holiday months after the death of his wife; the second from the perspective of Paul’s son Fenno, a NYC bookseller coming home to Scotland after the death of his father five years later; and the third set five years after that when a character we glimpse in the first section meets Fenno on Long Island where she is accidentally pregnant (and there’s a pro-life activist; curiously, there is not an abortion in any of the books I read in this bunch, truly a holiday indeed) and waiting for her boyfriend to return home from Greece so she can tell him about the baby. This novel is a bit strange, and its connections aren’t always clear, but I found it utterly absorbing.

And then I read Frankie and Stankie, by Barbara Trapido, which blew my mind. I read Trapido’s reissued debut, Brother of the More Famous Jack, when we were in the UK in April, and while I enjoyed it, it was so unlike anything else I’ve read before that I had trouble placing it in my mind. This novel, written more than thirty years later, is helping me do so, however, because it’s brilliant. Ostensibly a coming of age novel set in South Africa during the 1950s and 1960s, it manages to be a fascinating (and hilarious) character study, story of a family, but also the most interesting history of South Africa I’ve ever read at once. (In her notes at the end of the book, Trapido explains that the forty years that she’s spent in the company of her husband, Stanley Trapido, a professor of South African history at Oxford, certainly informed her point of view.) I learned so much from this book, but it was also delightful, and now I am officially Barbara Trapido-obsessed.

All the while we were listening to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express in the car on audiobook—it was so good!! We all kept coming up with reasons to go somewhere just so we could get in the car again and hear what happened next. Truly a delight for the whole family, even Stuart, who had watched the movie recently so had a good idea of what was coming.

And then I read Happiness, by Aminatta Forna, which I purchased at the Toni Morrison event I attended at Luminato in June, and like everything associated with that event, it was just so fantastic. As unfathomable as it seems, a novel about urban foxes in London, coyotes in the northeastern United States, and PTSD from war in Sierra Leone, amongst many other things, the novel becomes a study of wildness, of humanity, of love and goodness. Part of it also spoke directly about my own anxiety, my fear of hardship and suffering, a fear of trauma which is seemingly a condition of white, middle class, privileged people in the West, which might cause us to turn our backs on those for whom trauma is lived experience. And trauma also doesn’t have to be destiny—it changes one, but it doesn’t necessarily leave one damaged, as psychiatrist Attila explains. There’s so much to unpack here, but I’m looking forward to reading it again and getting to work.

And finally, Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan, which I’d saved for the end, something light and easy, another seaside book with Catholics, accidental pregnancy and someone called Clare, though it was probably the most forgettable of the bunch, so I’ll leave it at that.

Hooray, hooray for holiday reading.

August 25, 2022

There are no edges.

I was reading Katherine May (again; I am nothing if not consistent), a post about how her people are “edge people,” about how she’s drawn to margins as a result of growing up far from the centre, and it made me think about how growing up smack dab in the middle of a continent (I didn’t see the sea until I was 10) might have informed my own tendency to adhere to the status quo, to centre my own experience instead of seeking a broader understanding (though I think a lot of people do that; though isn’t that just what somebody with such tendencies would think?!?), but also how it has truly left me hungry to know the edges of places sometimes, which is why—in my most pivotal moments—I find myself so drawn to the Great Lakes shores, to their infinite horizons.

The lakes more familiar to me, however, provide a very different sense of being in the world, instead of edginess, immersion. (And maybe this is what you love when your people are middle people?) The lakes of Haliburton, ON, in particular, just north of the Kawartha Lakes I grew up with, and different too, more rugged with such rocky shores, self-contained instead of each lake merely a conduit to another place, water instead of a waterway. The cottage we’ve rented there for the past three summers does not have a beach, instead a dock with a ladder at the end, so you’re either in or out, there is no in-between, and when I’m in, I feel like I belong to the world in the most peaceful and meaningful fashion.

There are no edges, the lake a giant rocky basin that turns into trees that turns into sky that turns back into trees again as you trace the shape of the visible universe, everything a circle, leading back to the lake, leading back to me there, buoyant and held, connected to all of it, grateful to be one with these waters, clear, silky and cool.

July 29, 2022

Summer Reading

I would say that time’s gotten away with me since my week in Muskoka earlier this month, but that’s not strictly true. In fact, time has very much been on my side these last two weeks, which means that I’ve not been very busy, had enough time to do the things I need to do, and haven’t pushed myself to accomplish very much extra, such as recapping my holiday reads. But I’m finally going to get it done right now, because the reading was just so excellent.

I started with a reread of Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters, which was published in 1998, and I don’t recall the circumstances under which I read it the first time, except that I think it was a book I enjoyed along with my mom and sister. And when I read it again, I was surprised to find out how much of it was still so familiar to me, even though I probably haven’t read it or even thought about it much in the last twenty years. Such a great summer book, rich and sweeping and just a little bit trashy. Holds up entirely, except for Vix’s reference to that Cherokee ancestor who’d gifted her those cheekbones, because we just don’t do that anymore. Lots of swimming in the pond on Martha’s Vineyard.

And next was Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson, which I found absorbing, even if the storytelling style didn’t really work for me, skimming a (too) broad surface instead of plumbing depths. But it was still really fascinating, first with lots of ideas about food and colonialism and culinary history, and one of the characters is even an ocean scientist—there’s a whole lot going on. My favourite part, though, was the swimming, which I wasn’t expecting, because most Black characters in Caribbean-set books don’t get to swim so much, but swimming is a big part of the storyline here, as well as surfing, and I loved that.

And then I read Ghosted, by Jenn Ashworth, which I bought when we were in the UK because it was shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Northern English writing. I also bought her novel The Friday Gospels, and loved it, so expectations were high—and oh, she delivered. Ghosted is about a woman whose husband disappears, and she doesn’t tell anyone, which is kind of suspicious, plus she leads a pretty isolated life anyway and has a complicated relationship with her ailing father. There are secrets, but just like in Gospels, they’re not what you think they are, and Ashworth has such a gift for crafting suspense and writing sympathetic characters who are heartbreakingly human. No swimming, but scenes set in Morcambe and Brighton mean beaches definitely factor.

Following that, I read Tara Road, by Maeve Binchy, whose books I always dismissed with literary snobbishness, but I’ve come round, though hers is a curious kind of storytelling, very much telling. But what a wondrous tapestry of family and community Binchy weaves here, and I was utterly absorbed in this story which sweeps decades and continents, with women at the centre. Wasn’t expecting much swimming in this one, but there is a scene at the beach which inspired the opening scenes of James Joyce’s Ulysses!

Another Irish novel up next, Love and Summer, by William Trevor, the third novel I’ve read by him, and the least subversive, though it was in its own way, just more subtly so than the others (Miss Gomez and the Brethren and Death in Summer, both of which had evil lurking on its fringes and such wonderful dark humour). I think I love the works of William Trevor, and want to read them all. No swimming here, but there is a lake where Florian Kilderry walks his dog, and this is very much a novel about the pains of restraint and so nobody dives in.

I’ve already written about What Storm, What Thunder, by Myriam J.A. Chancy (SO GOOD!), which is definitely not a swimming novel. The one character who ventures into the sea ends up in a tsunami, so consider that a warning, but oh, what a book.

And finally, Every Summer After, by Carley Fortune, which is a much hyped book of the summer, perhaps too hyped for my liking, but I enjoyed it well enough, and its main character swims across the lake every summer, which is the kind of project I can get behind.

May 5, 2022

Good Things About England

I’ve always lived by the proverb, “Go to England for a week, and you’ll have a nice holiday. Find an English husband, and you’ll be going to England frequently over the course of your lifetime.” But it had been far too long since our last visit, our trip scheduled for March 16, 2020, having been cancelled when the entire world shut down. Sometimes it felt like we might never get to go again….but we did! The long-awaited April 2022 trip happened, and it was incredible, so excellent to be back out in the world again, having adventures, smack dab in the middle of springtime.

Things we loved about our trip to England, in no particular order.

1. The weather. It was sunny every day and we came home with tans and new freckles on our noses.
2. Our flat. We stayed at the most wonderful Air BNB around the corner from Lancaster Castle, with a ten minute walk to the city centre in one direction and a ten minute walk to Stuart’s sister’s house in the other. It was so comfortable and filled with light.
3. Swimming!
4. We drove an electric car and it was so much fun, and I ended up spending a grand total of $45.00 on charging for the entire week.
5. Our family! We got to visit again for the first time in so long, and also meet our three-year-old niece/cousin, who was more than worth the wait and we adore her.
6. Bookshops! Lancaster features a Waterstones AND a wonderful Oxfam bookshop, where I was able to pick up two novels by Barbara Trapido. And one morning we drove to Lytham St. Ann’s for a visit to Storytellers Inc, which I picked up a veritable tower of titles.
7. Special dinner on the canal. We didn’t dine indoors while we were in England, but thankfully were able to enjoy picnics, and other outdoor delights, including a dinner at the Water Witch on the Lancaster Canal, which is where it dawned on me that my children were old enough now that travelling with them was just so thoroughly a delight instead of a chore, and I felt very lucky. Plus the lamb shank was so good, and we had stick toffee pudding for dessert.
8. The blossoms. Bluebells, pink trees, camellias, even an early lilac, and so much more. It was a floral feast.
9. How relaxing it felt to get away…especially from Covid. I read the Saturday Guardian while we were there, and it didn’t mention Covid at all? My jaw didn’t hurt from stress clenching for the first time in two years. Honestly, the fact that we all ended up getting Covid didn’t even damped the moon.
10. To remember that good things are possible. Oh, it felt so wonderful.

September 28, 2021

Getaway

“I can’t believe we’re going camping tomorrow,” Iris kept repeating on Thursday as we moved through the motions of a perfectly ordinary weekday. (A perfectly ordinary weekday. Can you imagine? Getting breakfast on, walking kids to school, greeting friends at the school gate? And can you imagine what a pleasure are these motions, especially after so many months without them?”) And I felt exactly the same as she did, back on the roller coaster of work and school, deadlines and dates on the calendar, even if that roller coaster moves more cautiously than it once did, easier on the twists and turns. Because once we’re stuck in our routine (and I love our routine. For months and months, the familiarity and support of our routine was everything I longed for, but still) it seems impossible to imagine any other way of doing things. But in July, with still no idea what the near future would hold, I’d booked a camping trip, just to keep summer going for a little bit longer, and because I had this suspicion we might find ourselves in need of a getaway.

And so we went, impossibly. On Thursday both children were learning at their desks, and on Friday they were helping us pitch a tent on the shores of Lake Erie where we spent two days offline and in nature, and it was wonderful, and significant for being our first off-season camping venture. Even more significantly: our last outdoor swims of 2021 as well in the churning waters of this great lake (our third Grade Lake in as many months!).

A reminder that sometimes what makes the impossible possible is one simple thing: you just do it.

August 23, 2021

Holiday Reading Part 2

There were no duds in this stack, and even the title I was most intimidated by (hello, novel about the Trojan War!) blew me away. Every single one of these very different books was an absolute stunner, and the connections between them (as always!) were fascinating—see chart below. I was also so happy to reread Turning, which I’d read on vacation three or so years ago, and which I enjoyed but found so SPECIFIC that I wasn’t quite sure it would resonate again, so I gave it away, which I regretted for years. A new copy found its way back into my life this year, however, so I was happy to read it again. By a lake, of course.

I LOVED Malibu Rising—while I liked her previous novel, it didn’t quite live up to the hype for me. This one, however, was amazing. Every Sue Miller book I read is a pleasure. The Laura Lippman book was the most wonderful mindfuck, as was The Other Black Girl, both of which take on writing and publishing. Happy to read my second Marian Keyes—she’s really so good. A Thousand Ships was incredible, and Stuart and Harriet both devoured it after I did. Wild Swims was weird, but neat, and short, which is just the kind of portion I can take my weird in.

And finally Deacon King Kong, which I heard of somewhere, and then found in a Little Free Library shortly thereafter. It was rollicking, kaleidoscopic, huge in its scope, and tragicomic brilliance. Absolutely amazing.

July 30, 2021

Summerlong

Summer continues! We had a lovely long weekend on Lake Huron recently, and I brought ATTACHMENTS, the first novel by Rainbow Rowell, and loved it so much. I’d had a rough week before we’d headed out of town and so even though I’ve gathered a pile of newly-released thrillers, I knew I wanted something more cheerful. The Rainbow Rowell book was not immediately appealing, however, because I’d found it in a Little Free Library and someone had spilled water on it once upon a time, but it turned out to be perfect, and now I keep recommending it to everyone. Such a great book that manages to be about work and friendship AND a romance all at once. It definitely brought back memories of nascent online culture in the workplace circa 1999/2000. Remember when your emails used to get flagged for using certain language? I worked in an office once where I inadvertently downloaded something that turned my cursor into a fairy wand, and somehow the IT guy knew immediately, and it was very embarrassing, and we didn’t end up dating, but they do in the scene from my next novel that I created out of this situation.

July 19, 2021

Getaway

How I spent my summer vacation! So nice to read such an eclectic selection of fiction.

The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is one of the most hyped books of the season, and I really liked it. A fictional oral history of a 1970s’ pop act, it’s also a fascinating treatment of how race and gender can eclipse talent, and a withering indictment of white allyship.

I picked up Picnic at Hanging Rock after it was included on the Topaz Literary Summer Reading Round-Up, and I am so glad I did, because indeed it’s a sultry, languid read, weird and disturbing, the story of the unsolved disappearance of three school girls in turn-of-the-century Australia.

Single Carefree Mellow was everything I was hoping for in a Katherine Heiny book, so sparkling and weird, and definitely a riff on Laurie Colwin who knew better than to assume that love and infidelity were interchangeable, because real life is more messy and complicated. The only problem is that now I’ve read all her books, and so she has to publish another one pronto

I read Burnt Sugar next, by Avni Doshi, so unrelentingly bleak, kind of holding up a magnifying glass to its characters so we could see ever errant hair and enlarged pore, and there was so much ugliness. I didn’t like it, but that’s not to say it wasn’t really good.

And then I read Long Live the Post Horn next, by Vigdis Hjorth, and wasn’t crazy about it initially. I am allergic to the works of Ottessa Mosfegh, and this was kind of similar in the beginning, not far from the bleakness of Burnt Sugar, with characters numb and detached, but then it clicked for me, mostly because it’s about hope and the postal system, which is definitely my jam. And I don’t think I’ve ever read a Norwegian novel before.

After that: Maeve Binchy! I read Circle of Friends years ago when I was a teenager who cut out pictures of Chris O’Donnell from magazines and hung them on my wall, but never read anything else, deciding that Binchy was for biddies, but for the last few months I’ve been listening to the You’re Booked podcast and they talk about her all the time, and so when I found Light a Penny Candle in a Little Free Library, I brought it home, and it was delightful, which I don’t say about most books more than 800 pages long, and it only became COMPLETELY ridiculous in the last few chapters, which is pretty impressive. A really wonderful look at friendship, and also of women who are allowed to be different and now just foils.

And finally, Astra, by Cedar Bowers, which I started on the last night of our trip, a novel in pieces, and I am waiting until I get to the end of give my assessment, but maybe smart people are saying many good things about this book.

July 24, 2020

122 Days

I don’t remember my last swim, though I remember the date. March 11, which stands out for many of us in all kinds of ways, and it was the last day of a lot of things—that evening I would run my cart through the grocery store heaped with cans of beans and bags of chips (necessary supplies for impending disaster). It was the last day my children were both at school, because Iris woke up with a cough on Thursday and I didn’t want to chance it. It was the last day of normal life still seeming like a possibility, through we had cancelled our trip to England, which was due to happen the following week. But on Wednesday March 11, we still weren’t sure we weren’t overreacting. By Thursday morning, I would be overwhelmed with dread and skipping my swim (why chance it?), my towel and bathing suit hanging over the railing in my bedroom where they would stay for the next four months.

I need to have a towel hanging on the railing, even when I’m not swimming at all.

But then last week at the cottage (I think it’s interesting the way we say “at the cottage” as though there were one, as though the specificity mattered in the slightest), there were towels hanging on the railing all week. There were bath towels too, but we didn’t even use them, because nobody is required to shower when you swim in the lake every day. Every day twice a day.

We’ve never had our own personal waterfront before, been just 47 steps from a swim. Though it wasn’t so much more than that in that 100-days-ago era, back when I used to swim every morning, when I would leave the house at 7:00am and be in the pool by 7:15, pushing off for my very first length, never once taking such an extraordinary privilege for granted.

But on summer holiday, there is no such need for early rising, and it’s far more vital to linger in bed with refilled cups of tea. Finally making our way down to the water mid-morning once the heat of the day had started rising, and leaping off the end of the dock. Every day I got to fly.

Truth be told, I’ve been able to fill the swimming void. We do yoga every morning and it makes my body feel the same way swimming does, stretched and limber. For exercise, I’ve been riding a stationary bicycle, which I don’t like—but at least it permits me to read at the same time. It turns out that as much as swimming itself, I missed the aesthetics of swimming. I saw an illustration of a blue circle back in the spring, and it moved me to tears. We bought a smallish pool for our backyard, and while I can’t swim in it, I can sit on an inflatable tube and float, which fulfills nearly all my aquatic needs.

But there is something about a lake, particularly one that’s 47 steps down from the door. A lake on such rugged terrain that there is no seaweed, but instead rock-faces, rocks themselves, and long lost tree trunks. The water so clear that I could see down to the bottom: a kitchen sink, a sunken rowboat.

Every day, I swam across our bay to the beach on the other side, equipped with goggles and earplugs. Last summer I could swim long distance, all the way to the island where we picnic, but now I’m out of practice. There was a point where our inflatable flamingo was taken by the wind, and I chased after it, caught it, so I’ve still got it, is what I’m saying. Not much of it, mind, but it was the most exhilarating swim of the holiday for sure.

I’d wondered about renting a cottage without a beach—it was a “con” as we were choosing a place. But it turned out to be the best thing ever—no sand, not a grain of it, which under normal cottage week situations would be caught up in my bed sheets by Tuesday, and I’d be sweeping the floor at least five times a day. Okay, we were still sweeping the floor, because whoever owned the place appears to have had a very, very fluffy white dog… But the lack of sand was amazing. Who needs sand anyway? Beaches are nothing compared with the end of a dock, the leap and the plunge. The kids who get to show off their swimming skills, nervous as the holiday began, but by the end of the week, they were fish.

We had one last swim before we left on Saturday. (I have completely forgotten about the horseflies, as I knew I would. You can’t see them in the photographs.) Like all the other swims, this one was perfect. Smallish lakes are always the nicest temperature in July, invigorating but inviting. When we got home that afternoon, the towels were still damp, like a memory.