January 8, 2016
All Year Round, by Emilie Leduc
The new year is a perfect occasion to pick up All Year Round, written and illustrated by Emilie Leduc and translated from French by Shelley Tanaka. While it’s a truth universally known that there is no months-of-the-year book as perfect as Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup With Rice, it’s nice to also have another book that actually makes sense. Even if it fails to contain the line, “Whoopy once! Whoopy twice!”—my one criticism of this book. And most books, actually.
Each month includes a prose poem and beautiful celebratory illustration from a child’s point of view. Plus, a glimpse of a cat called Clementine, much to any young reader’s delight.
Every month and every season contains something wondrous, and that each month hinges on a non-secular occasion offers this book a perfect universality.
This book is a story about the rhythms of our world and of our lives—just as good as riding a crocodile down the chicken soupy Nile!
January 6, 2016
Today’s Teacup
I read this article by Globe and Mail reporter Janet McFarland years ago about children’s birthday parties gone wild and learning to take joy in small things. Her line about “an ‘ooh, doesn’t that look lovely’ contentment with a cup of tea or a few biscuits on a plate” (inspired by Bill Bryson’s thoughts on the English) has stayed with me ever since, and I’ve long made a point of trying note the smallest of ceremonies, the secret pleasures of the every day, even if sometimes it’s a ginger snap. I mean, as opposed to a chocolate digestive.
But I also have a sizeable collection of mugs and teacups, which I’m conflicted about. The teacups and their saucers less so because they’re delicate and lovely, and get pulled down and dusted off for special occasions. But yes, the mugs, because there’s really nothing sadder than a mug, stained, unwanted, abandoned in an office cupboard. The most depressing kind of gift—World’s Best Dad. I mean, I love mugs—some mugs. My mom gave me the most wonderful ceramic mug for my birthday, and it’s nearly replaced my Cath Kidston mug with the crack in it in terms of mugs of my heart. But then there are the mugs that slip on in to the back of the cupboard and all they’re doing is taking up space, and some of them are even wonderful—the Pyrex mug that Stuart found on the street and brought home because these are the mugs that remind me of summer, and the Miffy mugs we got in Japan, and my Diamond jubilee mug, and the mug with the M on it that my friend Jennie bought for me when we published The M Word. But what am I supposed to do with all these things?
I’ve been helped out of this philosophical quandary, however, with the help of Instagram. Because I am WILDLY SPONTANEOUS, I mixed up things mug-wise after receiving a gorgeous new orange mug from my friends Erin and Rebecca this weekend. This mixing only caused me a minimal amount of anxiety, until I realized that I could actually mix up mugs all the time (I know—crazy) and feature my eclectic mug/teacup collection on Instagram (because I’m in the posting-cups-of-tea population of Instragram users, as opposed to the taking-shots-of-myself-doing-yoga-on-a-beach crew). The trouble with mugs, I think, or at least the ones in the back of the cupboard, is that they serve no purpose, but they’ve been purposed now. Because #todaysteacup has been born.
Silly, frivolous, meaningless—but I don’t think so. It’s about the ceremony. About taking stock of the moment, the light, the cup of tea. It’s about using what you have, and having things that matter.
January 5, 2016
Lottie: Empowering Girls from Outer Space
We discovered Lottie Dolls over a year ago, and their premise intrigued me. A proper alternative to Barbie, designed to empower girls and their play. I wrote about them here (and check out the pictures! Iris was still a baby! Harriet was so little). It could have been a one-time thing, but I return to Lotties because now it’s my girls who are crazy about them. They’re the one toy, along with Legos, that gets returned to again and again, and they play with them together, which I love so much. We have five or six of them, and received more for Christmas, along with two new Lottie outfits, including the Superhero Lottie suit shown above, which has proven very popular—this is the one Lottie who never gets her clothes changed. When Harriet and Iris received Christmas money from their grandfather last week, they knew what they wanted to buy with it—more Lotties. And so we’re currently awaiting Rockabilly Lottie and Spring Celebration Ballet Lottie in the mail, expected delivery scheduled for tomorrow. Everybody is very excited.
Though we’ve also got our eye on Stargazer Lottie, who was sold out from Indigo.ca when we made our order last week. (Darn!). Like all the Lottie dolls, she’s designed around what she can do and be rather than how she looks (although admittedly, once they’re indoctrinated into Harriet’s play, the Lottie dolls also take on peculiar new identities…) I was so interested to read this post about how Stargazer Lottie was designed in consultation with an astronomer, and even more thrilled to learn that a Stargazer Lottie doll was currently in space with British astronaut Tim Peake on the International Space Station.
And most remarkable? That none of this would have happened at all without a six-year-old girl from Comox, British Columbia, who helped dream up the Stargazer Lottie doll. I showed the video below to Harriet who had her mind blown, and then went to put on her own dress with a space print and proceeded to have her head in the stars for the rest of the day, totally inspired.
January 4, 2016
Holiday Reading Joy
One day back into our routine, and I find I’m happy to be here. It’s been so long, with the sick-filled holidays and my three-plus weeks of pneumonia, and while I was nervous about this return to the real world, I find it much more pleasant and even more relaxing than where we’ve been lately. Although, granted, this is after just one day. Get back to me, perhaps, at the end of the week. But the one thing I do miss about the holiday was the reading—it was wonderful.
I was reading not-new and not-notable books in the weeks before Christmas, and enjoying the experience entirely. But then I picked up Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken, and found myself reading notably in spite of myself. It was so terrific. I’d adored McCracken’s short story collection, Thunderstruck, and I spent last Christmas Day sobbing while reading her exquisite memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. I read her The Giant’s House last summer, and liked it well enough, but it lacked the immediacy of her other books. And I had been reluctant to finally pick up Niagara Falls… because it was about men, a comedy team who find fame on the vaudeville circuit and in the golden days of Hollywood—nothing about that grabbed me. But the book did. Oh, its pacing, and energy, and to be so sad and so funny, and so completely realized. Truly, one of the best not-new books I read in 2015, and I’m so pleased that I finally did.
After that, I read Cassandra at the Wedding, which I bought at Ben McNally Books right before Christmas. I bought this one on the recommendation of Sarah from Edge of Evening, and was so pleased that I did. As Sarah writes, Dorothy Baker conjures Joan Didion in her setting but is entirely different in tone and approach—more wry than wrought, humour bubbling to the surface even in the darkest moments. It’s a book about twin sisters that seems like a great companion to Libby Crewman’s new novel, Split. About the connection between sisters and what happens when it’s severed, and how one person’s reality can be interpreted by another. Like so many books published by New York Review Books, Baker is doing fascinating things with narrative voice, and I appreciate how hearing from the slightly-deranged Cassandra’s sister Judith turns the whole story on its heel.
Then I read Inside Out, which is an essay by Rebecca Solnit with paintings by Stefan Kurtan. I’d asked for it for Christmas because I love Rebecca Solnit and wish to read everything she’s ever written, and also because it’s an essay on the subject of houses and homes, which I find really interesting. And it was. I loved her thoughts on materials and materialism, and the home as an extension of the female body while the automobile is that of the male (and therefore mobile), which connected to all kinds of things I’ve been thinking about Mad Men as we’re rewatching Season 1. Reading Rebecca Solnit is never not satisfying, and the book is beautiful.
I read Because of the Lockwoods next, by Dorothy Whipple. A Persephone Book, which is never short of extraordinary. I bought it in April when we were in London, because we’d been visiting Lancashire and she’s a Lancashire author and also because she is compared to Barbara Pym, similarly ripe for a revival, says Harriet Evans, but even a better writer. Whipple (whose unfashionable name is perhaps part of the reason she’s so fallen out of favour, writes Evans) is meant to be utterly readable, her novels absorbing. But I was dismayed to discover that they’re also 500 pages long, and you know how I feel about long books. It was one thing to carry such a doorstop across the sea, but then to actually pick it up and read it? Clearly I needed a holiday, a bit of space in which to make the long read happen—but then the book turned out to be everything Evans said. I read the whole thing in 2 days and now want to read everything in print by Dorothy Whipple. The novel was engaging, surprising, rich with complex characters and situations. I really loved it. Was dismayed to read that Virago Books was so thorough anti-Whipple. Thank goodness for Persephone for bring her back in print.
And then finally, I read The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, by Laura Miller, which was a marvellous celebration of reading, of literary criticism, and of the Narnia books and their creator, as well as critiquing the considerable problems with the two latter points. As we’re smack in the middle of reading the Narnia series (all of us for the first time!) in our family, I was glad to learn so much more about them and their context, and there was no shortage of fascinating Narnia and CS Lewis trivia, so that I become as uninteresting as I always do whilst reading excellent non-fiction (avidly sharing details, beginning every sentence with, “Did you know…) We’re reading Prince Caspian now, and I’m loving it all the more for Miller’s book.
December 31, 2015
New year, new books, new teapot, etc.
We have had a stupidly crummy holiday, mostly for non-monumental reasons. A year ago I wrote this post about our family’s talent for leisure and enjoying ourselves—we were skating, movie-going, relaxing, lunching, going offline for an actual week, etc.—but we were showing none of those tendencies this time around. Things got off to a good start, but Harriet came down with a stomach bug on Christmas Eve that stayed around for a few days. Iris stopped sleeping over Christmas, and was conspiring to kill me. Stuart was diagnosed with strep throat, and while I was pretty well post-pneumonia, I was so tired and crabby. We weren’t terribly ambitious then—some days our big outing was to the grocery store. Though there were a few highlights—before it all went wrong, we had a fun day downtown(er) and got to visit Ben McNally Books, where I picked up Birdie by Tracey Lindberg, which I’m about to begin as soon as I publish this post. We had nice visits with my parents, who braved our company. Lunch at Fanny Chadwicks yesterday, though Stuart is still unable to eat solids, so he didn’t have the greatest time. Tonight we’re going to our friends for a New Years get-together, though we won’t be staying too long (and I am sure nobody else at the party is too upset about that. We’ve become social pariahs).
I did, however, get a lot of reading done, mostly because my evening companion took to going to bed at 8pm, and I took a holiday from work things and read all through nap times (bliss!). My holiday reads were not at all disappointing, mercifully, and I look forward to writing a post about them this week. My final read of the year was a gift from Stuart (who got me so many excellent bookish things), The Magician’s Book, by Laura Miller (and we’re going to be starting Prince Caspian in a few days and I am so excited). My final read of 2015 then, followed by my first read of 2016—Birdie. I really want to keep a focus on reading First Nations women writers.
Anyway, a disappointing holiday is winding down on the right note. Iris’s weird rash (of course she has a weird rash!) is clearing up, if that’s any indication. Today I did receive the great joy of not only a pair of Hunter wellies in the post, but a brand new teapot. And why did I need a teapot, you might ask, seeing as I came into possession of the greatest teapot on earth just six months ago? Well, on Christmas Day, my teapot got smashed, which led to sulking and petulance on my part, and put a damper on our holiday on top of everything, because I am shallow and materialistic. (But it’s a teapot! Not just any ordinary material.) The bright side of your teapot smashing though is that you get to wait for a new one to come in the post. (I wanted a London Pottery teapot, you see.) There seemed to be no more white polka-dots to be had for love nor money, but I was able to order a plain red one from the shop I’d bought the last one from in Bobcaygeon. And it arrived quickly and intact, alongside my new wellies which replaced a) the wellies I’d got for Christmas that didn’t fit and b) the wellies my mother-in-law bought me for my 26th birthday a decade ago and whose image was for a time my blog header and can still be seen if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, and which finally started leaking after many years of service. So things are certainly on the up-and-up.
I’ve had a good year, even though it’s gone out with pneumonia (but then having pneumonia was terrific, from a reading point of view…). I am pleased that I sold my novel and am excited to turn it into an actually book over the course of this year, though I still can’t quite believe that’s going to happen. I read a lot of good books. I had a splendid trip to England, the land of teapots and wellies. I learned to write profiles, which was a new challenge—I wrote about Julie Morstad in Quill & Quire and have a cover story forthcoming in my alumni magazine. I’m pleased with my review of Marina Endicott’s new novel in The Globe and really, really proud of my essay on Ann-Marie Macdonald’s Adult Onset, which was another challenge and I’m so happy to have met it. I want to keep expanding my writerly horizons. Readerly ones too.
This fall has been exhausting. When I look back, it seems like getting pneumonia was inevitable. It doesn’t help that Iris’s sleep is so patchy, as it’s ever been. My resolution for 2016, if I had one, would probably involve getting more sleep, if that weren’t at the expense of so many things, but I will make an effort. It might also involve baking fewer cakes, but this kind of thing is why I don’t go in for resolutions in the first place.
Happy New Year to you, and thank you for reading!
December 21, 2015
Merry Christmas!
Today we went to the 12 Trees of Christmas display at the Gardiner Museum, which was amazing, and will most likely become a new family tradition. It’s on until the beginning of January, and definitely worth a visit—Harriet and Iris thought the trees were great, and this one was my favourite, for obvious reasons. Tomorrow we’re venturing into ROM holiday madness, and then to the Maurice Sendak Exhibit at the Toronto Reference Library (because when we tried to go yesterday, the library was closed…). Days that follow will feature AGO Brunch, Christmas windows at The Bay (and a trip to nearby Ben McNally books, eh?), skating at City Hall, and lots of do-nothingness too. And reading. Always, reading.
See you in the new year.
December 21, 2015
The Adventures of Miss Petitfour, by Anne Michaels, illustrated by Emma Block
While The Adventures of Miss Petitfour is indeed world-renowned writer Anne Michaels’ first book for children, it might be as accurate to state that it was written exactly for me. Bizarrely so. Right down to the bunting and teapot and caked goods on the endpapers. There is a jumble sale in the second chapter, for heaven’s sake, and every adventures ends with a tea party. There is an entire chapter about cheddar cheese. This was the other book that I bought last week, and we spent every night reading it together, being positively delighted. (Please do read this post by Lisa Martin, inspired by Doris Lessing, on the necessity of the capacity for delight as a precondition for resilience.) If a Barbara Pym novel married Mary Poppins, this book would be their progeny.
“Some adventures are so small, you hardly know they’ve happened… Other adventures are big and last so long, you might forget they are adventures at all—like growing up. And some adventures are just the right size—fitting into a single, magical day. And these are the sorts of adventures Miss Petitfour had.”
Miss Petitfour travels by table cloth, which is a terrific twist on the magic carpet, and much more scientifically plausible. She holds the table cloth just so and lets it fill with wind, and then up she goes (after she has taken “a measure of the meteorological circumstances, that is to say, the weather”), her sixteen cats trailing along for the journey. And their adventures are rich with digressions, narrative and actual, as well as bookishness, confetti, misdirections and festoonery. Charged with whimsy and fun, there is an underlying intelligence to these stories, which are so very much about words:
“People often say that children have no use for long words, but frankly, Mrs. Collarwaller [the bookseller] found this never to be the case. In her vast experience, children loved books that contained words such as propitious, perambulator and gesticulate, especially if they all ended up in the same sentence. The kind of word your tongue could get tangled up and lost in.”
In Miss Petitfour’s local bookshop, there are two sections: one side for adventure books and the other for books in which nothing happens (“the hum and the ho-hum”). In the most perfect way (in addition to the story about cheddar, there’s one about a runaway postage stamp, for example), this books manages to be both.
December 19, 2015
Light the Darkness
But of course, lighting the lights isn’t all of it. Marsha Lederman wrote a great column in the Globe this weekend about how terrible the holiday season can be for those whose spirits are far from bright. The example she gave of someone having to linger in the grocery store deli listening to “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” after having lost a loved one. Harriet’s school choir sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in their concert this year, and while it’s long been one of my least favourite Christmas songs (I’m more of a “Silver Bells” kind of gal), I kept choking on the line about, “Through the years we all will be together—if the fates allow.” An ordinary wish, I suppose, though the older one gets, the more you realize how extraordinary a fortune is such a thing. It reminds me of Joan Didion writing in Blue Nights about her daughter’s wedding, not long after which her daughter died. She wrote, “Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as ‘ordinary blessings.'”
It’s been a weird few weeks. We have friends who are facing merciless illnesses at the moment. I think about the loved ones of those killed in Paris a month ago, and in the shootings that are happening in America all the time. I think of the people I know, many parents of young children, who’ve died in the last year or two. Friends who’ve recently lost their parents. Last week, a colleague of Stuart’s—by all accounts a truly excellent human being—was killed in a random stabbing while out for an evening walk. There is so much inexplicable sadness, so much darkness, as, I suppose, befits this time of year.
But isn’t that why we light the lights? Last Sunday on the last night of Hanukkah, our neighbours invited us over and let Harriet light their candles. I stayed upstairs battling it out with stubborn shortbread while listening to Darlene Love, but the sounds of their singing came up through the vents, and I caught the sparkle and glow of our own Christmas tree down the hall, and it all seemed to me quite sensible why we do what we do at the darkest time of year, not frivolous at all. With the winter solstice just days away, the sun down before five p.m. every day, we light candles, turn on lights, and we sing together, songs about tidings of comfort and joy.
Life is hard and the world is cruel—and yet I’m so glad I get to live in it.
I reread Rebecca Solnit’s “Woolf’s Darkness” again. I find myself returning to that essay, reading it over and over again, getting lost inside its twists and turns. I read it for comfort and insight, for the way it lights the darkness. For the situating of hope as somewhere between the certainties of despair and optimism. “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.” I think about the line that follows the “through the years…” one in “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”: hang a shining star upon the highest bough. A song I hate a little less now.
For those of us who can, we have to light up the darkness. And then find as many ways as possible to let others in on the glow.
December 19, 2015
Light the Lights
A lot has escaped my attention these last few weeks, including that Coach House Books had a pop-up shop in their warehouse throughout December, but I heard tell of it yesterday on Twitter, a few hours before the whole thing was finished, and decided we would stop in on our way home from fetching Harriet from school, in order to satisfy my holiday book retailing fix. I got a book for Stuart and two books (surprise, surprise!) for me, and then we walked down the lane and my children began playing hopscotch on bp nichol’s poem, which really is the most practical purpose imaginable for concrete poetry, and I don’t why it had never occurred to me before.
So now school’s out, and we came home from hopscotch to a mailbox stuffed with cards and parcels, as it’s been all week. Our kitchen features ridiculous amounts of chocolate and cookies, all of these balanced out by the proliferation of clementines. The Globe and Mail holiday crossword arrived today, so we now what our preoccupation for the next while will be. We began watching Mad Men from the very start last night, because I am longing to write about this series and the depth of my feelings for it, as well as to deepen my understanding, so it’s back to the beginning, little Sally Draper with a bag over her head. I think it’s the third or fourth time I’ve watched Season One, and it only gets better and better.
Plus there’s Baileys, and I’m no longer on antibiotics. And while Stuart does indeed have to work on Monday and Tuesday, we’ve already gone into vacation mode. We took a trip to the library this morning and followed with lunch out at Caplanskys, because going out for lunch is our main vacation occupation. We’re looking forward to lots of fun with friends and family this week, and skating, and going to see the Christmas windows at the Bay, and finishing our chocolate and buying more, and getting to the bottom of Betty Draper, and wrapping presents tonight (in the Saturday papers) and listening to the Phil Spector Christmas Album and Elizabeth Mitchell’s The Sounding Joy, and there will be more lunches, lazy mornings, too much indulgence, and maybe even the possibility of snow.
December 16, 2015
When Santa Was a Baby
The only thing I like better than a bookshop in general is a bookshop in December, when the lines at the till are long, the floor is buzzing, and everybody’s walking around with arms full of books. Lying in bed these past few weeks as December began to eke out, day by day, it was holiday bookshops I was missing. I used to do all my Christmas shopping at Book City around the corner, and feel ridiculously smug for buying so locally that the distance could be measured out in metres, and while I miss Book City all the time, I do so particularly at this time of year—this will be our second Christmas without it. So yes, I’ve been feeling a dearth of bookshops, so when I went to the doctor on Monday to have my lungs examined (and receive the all-clear), I made a point of skipping across the road to the nearby Indigo, to purchase gift cards as end-of-year presents for Iris’s teachers, of course, but also to do some book buying.
I bought two books, both of them “for my children” (ha ha) and I’ll be writing about both titles, the first one being the wonderful When Santa Was a Baby, by Linda Bailey, illustrated by Genevieve Godbout. Cheerfully illustrated with a delightful vintage vibe, it’s the story of a little baby who was unusual from the start:
“Look at those dimples,” said his dad. “How merry!”
“And his dear little nose,” said his mom. “Like a cherry!”
Instead of coo-ing, Baby Santa booms an enormous, “Ho, Ho, Ho!” He refuses to wear any colour but red.
And he has a curious preoccupation with the chimney.
Santa’s parents never waver in their pride for their unusual son, even when he insists on standing naked in front of the refrigerator for a little chill to escape the summer heat, or when he gathers all his birthday presents into a big sack and goes about distributing them to neighbourhood children. They think their boy is pretty terrific, and so creative, and curious, and they’re willing to do whatever they can to make him happy.
Children will find the idea of a Baby Santa quite hilarious, with the bare bums and all, and it’s wonderfully novel to recast such a familiar cultural figure as a child. But for parents, it’s the unconditional, ever-elastic, infinite love of Santa’s mom and dad in the story that will so resonate—and quite possible inspire.
