October 14, 2014
The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell
I was always going to love this book. Would have loved it for the cover alone, the colours, the jumbled shelves, even if it weren’t a celebration of bookshops, which are things I like to celebrate better than almost anything else. “Some Wonderful Things” is a collection of bookshop facts appearing every few pages throughout the book, and I adore any mindset that collects under such a designation. Under which the entire book should appear, probably, because it’s that good, a variable delight. The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell, which asserts that bookshops are here to stay and more excellent than ever, and such a vital part of communities and our reading and writing lives.
I dare you to read this book and not start planning trips around the world to the incredible bookshops featured within its pages—I’m already planning a trip to Silverdell Books in Kirkham, Lancashire, which is a bookshop/ice cream parlour; and how have I never been to Munro’s Books in Victoria BC; and a trip to Parnassus Books in Nashville has never been so necessary; and Libreria Acqua Alta in Venice is the most exquisite sight I’ve ever seen. Campbell shares short profiles of bookshops on six continents (because sadly, there’s not one on Antarctica yet). I do appreciate that at least one shop in the book is within walking distance, The Monkey’s Paw here in Toronto getting special treatment, and I want to go back to Re:Reading on the Danforth, in particular since I read that owner Christopher Sheedy rejigged his store’s layout to accommodate families with strollers (so nice!).
More than just a travel guide, The Bookshop Book is a history too, of the history of bookshops in general and the stories of remarkable ones (which is most of them—including a bookshop on a boat, a bookshop without an address, a bookshop that only stocks one book, and many many more). Campbell talks to writers including Tracy Chavalier, Bill Bryson, Ian Rankin and Ali Smith about their bookshop thoughts.
Ali Smith: “If I owned my own bookshop? I remember when I first found a copy of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, a slim Penguin from the 1970s—you wouldn’t even notice it on a shelf. My bookshop would be full of those types of things: the books that, when you picked them up, you knew immediately that that was the book you were going to read that day. Moreover: whatever you’d been planning on doing, you’d just sit down with that book you’d picked up by chance and read that instead. The days when we sit down with a books o good we don’t get up until it’s read—those are some of the best days of our lives.”
The Bookshop Book made me think of my own bookshop stories: marvelling at The World’s Biggest Bookstore as a child, compulsive book buying at Nicholas Hoare the summer I spent the paycheques I should have been saving for university tuition, the Waterstones in Nottingham and having money after a long bout of poverty, Shakespeare and Company in Paris where my husband and I had our very first fight, discovering Margaret Drabble at Wantage Books in Kobe, and when Harriet ate a sandwich she found on the ground under a table at the Waterstones in Edinburgh, The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley, an altogether delightful place. It made me think of the bookshop stories I’m passing onto my own children, the bookshop adventures we go on together, even though the destinations are getting rarer. But bookshops, this book and the voices within it assert, will never disappear altogether.
Unsurprisingly for a book that heralds places in which the book as object is their reason for existing, this book as an object is a most remarkable one. Hardcover, gorgeously designed, with two sections of colour photographs that make clear that these bookshop are as lovely as Campbell says they are. The prose is something else that falls under the category of “some wonderful things” and the whole thing is a delight to encounter, something I first intended just to dip in and out of, but I couldn’t help myself and read the whole thing. You will probably have a similar experience.
Want to know something really wonderful though? I’m in it. I’m even in the index (and yes, there is an index. In fact, there are two. Because this is the very bookish of books.) I wrote a small piece about my sadness at losing our beloved Book City last winter, which is included on page 176. And I appreciate that while Book City Annex is gone, my love for that place has been immortalized within The Bookshop Book, a most fitting place for such an ode. Good company too, and it’s an honour to be a part of project like this, celebrating places that are the best places in the world.
The Bookshop Book is out in the UK now. It’s coming out in Canada in the new year. Make sure you pick up a copy. This is definitely a book you will treasure.
October 12, 2014
Best Book of the Library Haul: You’ll Soon Grow into Them, Titch by Pat Hutchins
I love Pat Hutchins’ illustrations, their slightly ugly 1970s aesthetic. (Her book Bumpity Bump was the very first Best Book of the Library Haul, way back in 2011). And apparently Titch was part of a series, though You’ll Soon Grow into Them, Titch is the first of it I’ve encountered. (Titch was also subject of a TV series in the UK with the most poorly sung theme song in the history of music—has one voice ever been so flat?).
From page one, this book delighted us, poor Titch with his pants so absurdly small, his father with the waving teacup, the knitting and the cat.
Titch’s siblings’ solution to his sartorial woes is to pass down their clothes, in which poor Titch is swimming. Any complaints are dismissed: “You’ll grow unto them, Titch!” Until the matter gets entirely ridiculous and Titch’s father consents to take him to a department store for some new clothes of his own—that actually fit.
It’s a good story, but my favourite thing about it is the story going on in the background, the trees, garden and mama’s belly all, little-by-little, burgeoning with new life, the narrative of one boy’s growth linked to the whole wide world.
It ends with a tidy, if slightly evil resolution. Titch decides to foist his own old clothes on the newborn baby who, of course, does not fit into them. But no matter, decides Titch, finally coming into his own, the baby of the family no more: “He’ll soon grow into them.”
October 12, 2014
Family Photos
A few weeks ago, while looking for a family photo to accompany our contribution to the 1000 Families Project, I realized that we had no such photo, and then my attempts to come up with such a photo turned out to be futile, save for the selfie that made the grade only because the smiles were real (and that’s something, least). I also started realizing that both my children at the moment are more photogenic than they’ve ever been (I am still not sorry we never did professional photos when the children were babies and looked like ALF), and the colours outside are peak gorgeous. So I booked a session with the amazing Tracey Nolan, whom we all promptly fell in love with when she showed up at our door the other day, and who managed to trick Harriet into channeling her inner-model and not pulling the wonky face she usually turns on in view of a camera lens. And oh, did we have fun, walking up and down the streets and laneways of our beautiful neighbourhood, and then the results of the session turned out to be more gorgeous than I’d dared to dream. What a wonderful record—I’m so glad we did this; we never have before, and I’d always supposed that photo sessions were a bit canned, but I think I was wrong about that. I’m so glad to have photos of me I like so much, to have photos of the four of us together, photos of Stuart and I without the children, even. Photos of us being ourselves along the sidewalks of streets that we love—it really doesn’t seem so contrived. It’s just that we’re not usually quite so attractive…
October 11, 2014
The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter
In the latest issue of Quill and Quire, writer and editor John Metcalf writes of the short story that it “does not translate us to another world; it drives us deeper into this one.” Depth being the object, rather than anything sweeping. As a reader, an advantage of the short story over the novel is one can read it once, and then promptly read it again, “read it again” being the best advice to anyone complaining about a short story being over too soon, about being left wanting to know what happens next. That reader so intent on what happens next, it might be suggested, is focusing on all the wrong details—what’s outside of the story rather than what is within. It’s a curious perspective. But I understand it, in part.
I understand it, in part, because I too like sweeping, especially when I’m turning the pages of a book. The short story collection often lacks momentum, its stories not necessarily meant to be read one after the other, each one considered singularly instead. But it’s a book after all, and its service then is less for the reader than for the stories themselves—a thoroughly worthy mission, to deliver them from ephemera. And deliver them to the reader too, yes, but we like one page to lead to another. An unlinked short story collection can be a bumpy road, so it helps when the stories are good, as is the case of The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter (and edited by John Metcalf, no less).
My favourite story in this collection was “Flyaway”, a bizarre, twisted story of motherhood from the perspective of a woman who is not a mother and therefore has a most objective point of view on the subject, her objectiveness not entirely undermined by the fact that she deranged. I also loved “Every Waking Moment”, a love story told outside the lines, and so are most of these tales, actually.
“The Freedom in American Songs” recounts a long-ago love between a high school boy and his flamboyant classmate, a story full of yearning and which ends in heartbreak. “Of the Fountain” concludes with a similar gut-punch, a woman’s fascination with a neighbourhood eccentric causing them both trouble, and teaching none of the lessons the story’s beginning supposes. “You Seem a Bit Sad” comes from the same kind of point of view, illuminating the strange intimacy that arrives between people who brush past one another in day-to-day life, those small reprieves from loneliness. In two of “The Marianne Stories” that begin the collection, the title character’s loneliness is self-imposed, resulting from her move to a small village whose inhabitants aren’t sure of her intentions (and neither she of theirs), and she aches to be among them just as much as the chasm between them is gaping.
These are stories of misfits, though never for the usual reasons, often for small reasons that stay under the radar. These are stories that start off with remarkable first lines and paragraphs, lines that don’t pull you in necessarily, but they make you want to follow them. These stories are steeped in details, page 32 standing out in particular as the greatest inventory of a streetscape that I have ever encountered, right now to knickknacks on a mantlepiece spied through a window with its curtains open. Stories whose narrators’ intentions are never entirely pure, these characters standing on the cusp of self-awareness. Stories whose revelations are never the obvious ones, or the easy ones. Stories about the possibility of change, rather than change itself. Stories that each stand on their own, and are difficult to thread together in a paragraph. Or a sentence.
Except that each of them begs to be read once, and then again.
October 8, 2014
Light Light by Julie Joosten
Yesterday’s announcement of the nominees for the 2014 Governor’s-General literary prizes seemed the occasion I’ve been waiting for to reread Light Light, by Julie Joosten, which is one of the contenders for the poetry award. I first read Light Light in the spring, on the recommendation of some of my cleverest friends, and while I adored it just as much as they’d predicted I would, I wasn’t ready to write about it yet. It’s a collection about intangibility, so it’s fitting that I wasn’t sure how to hold it. Though I confess that sitting down to reread it last night in a sitting hasn’t brought me closer to an understanding of what’s going on at the heart of this collection—at the heart, I suppose, there is mystery, and while I’m baffled by so much of it, I am just as much in awe.
In awe of the connections Joosten makes between ecology, history, natural history, technology and language. At how she uses the smallest and most ordinary words (and things) and obfuscates them by subtle arrangements. The idea of gentle as a verb. The sentience of plant life: “A violet trumpet vine extends a tendril, gentles into a hole/ withdraws.” The word tendril. “The pleasure that you exist/ You a source of thought, not its object/ It rains/ You reach for an umbrella and open it.”
My favourite parts of the collection are the stories of Maria Sibylla Merian, a 17th century botanist (who was “Enchanted by subtleness”), and Anna Atkins, the first female photographer with her cyanotype images of algae. Since encountering Victorian entomologist Eleanor Ormerod in Virginia Woolf’s “Lives of the Obscure”, I’ve been fascinated with these stories of early female scientists, and I particularly love that Joosten has de-obscured these figures by including them with the more familiar touchstones of Darwin and Thoreau. The effect of her subtle subversion is remarkable.
I love the final poem, “the lighthouse revolving,” though I do not profess to able to keep an image in my mind of what is illuminated, which is mostly the point. Its final lines: “In lightning/ flashes to escape the laws of the world, these flashes lightening/ us.”
October 8, 2014
California Dreaming at The New Family
The New Family is a really neat project by writer/editor Brandie Weikle that features all the wonderful ways that modern parents are remodelling family life, a project underlined by the challenge: “I bet we can find 1000 ways to be a family.” And I’m so pleased that today, my own family is in the mix, a family whose constitution is not unusual by any means, but I’m glad to tell the story of how our family began with a decision we made in 2008 not to buy a house.
“It was almost Copernican. Because there’s an order to the universe: we hook up, we move in, become property owners of an impossibly small space equipped with a windowless den. We wait until that small space acquires enough value that we’re able to trade up for a proper home, albeit a starter one. And only then are we ready to start pondering such a thing as the future, to put down roots and maybe even have children.”
But we decided to do it another way, and I am so happy we did.
October 6, 2014
Bunk Beds
“Do you remember,” I asked Stuart on Saturday, as we were assembling the bunk beds, the whole room in disarray around us, our baby climbing in and out of the half-built bed frame, placing her life in peril as usual, Harriet making up dance moves in the doorway, “Do you remember when we painted this room?”
When we moved in, this second bedroom had been blue with brown trim, ugly industrial shelving along one wall painted grey. It was terrible, but I had a soft spot for this room, which was the computer room, and where our books would live. I really had a soft spot for this room because it was going to be our baby’s room, although the baby was still 100% hypothetical. We spoke about the baby to nobody when we painted that room later that summer, but we were thinking about her. The couple in my mind who painted that room were ridiculously, impossibly young.
Although when the baby was born, she didn’t move into her room for almost a year—it was easier to have her upstairs sleeping with us. And then once she started sleeping, we moved her down, moved the books and computer out. We put up colourful curtains and a bright carpet, and those ugly shelves—now white and less ugly—were packed with books and toys. About a year later, we put away the crib and our futon became Harriet’s bed—our futon, which was the first piece of furniture we’re ever bought, just after we got married in 2005 when we were so poor, and it was the cheapest in the store and it would become our living room couch. And it’s been her bed ever since, the perfect size bed for the whole family to assemble on at story time, and it’s been a stage for her theatrical and dance performances, as well as the one piece of furniture that Harriet is permitted to jump on when friends come over (and why is it that any time a friend comes over, they all start jumping on beds?).
We love our apartment. We made the investment of a custom-built kitchen table last winter in order to make our kitchen a more liveable space for us, a space we can use in the long-term. And the next project would be the bunk beds, because we were determined to make it work in this place as a family of four, and it’s not impossible that Iris may one day not be sleeping in a crib at the end of my bed. (In the past week, Iris has slept all night twice. So there is a modicum of hope.) We finally bought the bunk beds last weekend on our way home from an apple orchard, from a somewhat dodgy showroom that was actually a garage on a dingy post-industrial stretch of Finch Avenue. But they had low-priced bunk beds with stairs, which were the bunk beds I wanted. Because one who climbs stairs to her bed is afforded a bit more dignity that she who must make do with a ladder. And it turned out to be legit, because the bunk beds were actually delivered, except that then we had to build them ourselves, which was the entire story of Saturday.
This is one of those “we bought bunk beds to create space” stories that turns into the bunk beds taking up the entire room. Yes, I intended there to be more space between the bunk bed and the window than there actually is, but then it could have been worse—for a few minutes, we were terrified that the drawers inside the staircase would not even have room to open. I guess this is why some people measure their rooms before they buy really large pieces of furniture, but we don’t like to worry about details in our family. The bunk beds have cleared up space on the floor, however, and the drawers in the staircase have enabled us to get rid of the Ikea dresser we built really really badly before we decided not to buy things from Ikea anymore. (Preferring dodgy garage showrooms, obviously.)
Harriet loves her new bed, which she refers to as “my cozy den”. She’ll move to the top bunk when Iris moves in, but for now the entire bed is her ship, and she is the captain, and the stairs are blocked off so Iris can’t climb them, even though the first step is too high for Iris to mount anyway, but if we leave her alone for a minute, she’ll sprout an inch and/or construct a step-stool out of her First 100 Words book. In even better news, Stuart and my marriage seems not only to have survived an entire day spent constructing bunk beds, to have grown stronger from the experience. We only said “fuck” a couple of times, and even had fun. We’ve gotten over our shock at having inadvertently bought the largest piece of furniture on the planet, and we’re pretty happy with it. We look forward to the day when the bunk beds actually do sleep the two children they’re intended for and our bedroom is our own again, though that’s looking a long way into the future, and let’s just take each day as it comes.
Mostly though, I’m just amazed, at how the years pass, and the memories accumulate, and the children grow, and how this house contains so many our stories, like layer upon layer of invisible paper on the walls, and there’s some crazy archeology at work here, scraping the surface to rediscover our ancient civilizations, right down there at the the bottom of it all that stupid happy couple with their yellow walls, and absolutely no idea of what the years would have in store.
October 5, 2014
Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald
I’ve been frustrated lately by hearing authors complain that their books about motherhood aren’t being treated as “literary,” as though any story with a tricycle and a diaper pail is by definition silly and shallow, for lactating readers only. Though I sympathize—the few times I’ve seen my book catalogued with “Essays” instead of “Parenting”, I’ve been overjoyed at the inclusion in the wider realm. It’s certainly true that stories about motherhood are ghettoized, but then almost every time I’ve read the books in question by the complaining authors, I’ve wanted to reply that the reason their books aren’t regarded as “literary” is because they’re not literary. Because these authors have gotten confused about novels, and written a catalogue for a hipster baby boutique instead whose characters are stereotypes and mannikins. (There is also a trend toward making postpartum depression the thing that explains everything else, when in fact, in a book, it should be just the beginning…)
So perhaps the real conversation should be about how it’s difficult to write literature about motherhood. Which is true. Part of it is because the early days of motherhood are a journey away from language—the words don’t work here, they don’t even apply. Rachel Cusk writes about reliving her own evolution towards language as her baby grows, “like someone visiting old haunts after an absence.” And even then, the words come together to mean something different than before, something perhaps intangible to a reader who has never lived it.
The fragmentation of a novel like Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, say, is not surprising. A novel whose form and language are shaped by the character’s experience is motherhood, just as much as her life is, the plot is—here is a book demonstrating that not all stories of motherhood are relegated to the literary dustbin. That literary motherhood is possible after all.
And here is another, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Adult Onset. If her previous novel, The Way the Crow Flies, was about post-war family, coming of age in technicolour, their parents’ valiant efforts (and failure) to to be ones who got it right—shiny cars, green lawns, and lacquered hair—then here is the story of the trauma of the aftermath. Though ostensibly, this is also a novel about a week in the life of a mother, Mary Rose MacKinnon, a writer who has taken early retirement to be home with her kids, usually alone, while her partner directs plays in a city across the country. It’s a life I recognize, very much, partly because I walk the same streets Mary-Rose walks, my kids play in the same parks, and I walk by the blue door of her kids’ Montessori School every day en-route to get my own daughter to and from kindergarten. And partly also because I know the trial of trying to wrench an unwilling two-year-old into a pair of boots, or what it is to race across town before the nap window shuts and the whole day is shot. Though even if you don’t know, MacDonald will show you.
Of course, the blue door of the Montessori School is is not exactly the same one I walk past, because the one in the book is fictional. Which sounds like an annoying author trick, but then MacDonald goes and does something so interesting with all the connections between fiction and reality, between her novel and her life. Mary-Rose MacKinnon is author of two books in a (hypothetical) trilogy about a girl who discovers a long-lost brother in a parallel universe. In Adult Onset, we are privy to sections of these novels (which are quite compelling—not something you can say about all books within books) and eventually it becomes clear that MacDonald’s own novel, with all its vivid realism, is operating with a vaguely sci-fi subtext, that indeed this novel takes place in a parallel universe (which is slightly askew—though what universe isn’t?). Geographical details are altered slightly to suggest that this is time out of time. The Balloon King on Bathurst becomes a Starbucks in the course of a day or so. But then isn’t that what happens in a city? Not just that everything turns into a Starbucks, but that the street-scape is ever-changing, a time lapse photograph in real time. Everything is neither here nor there.
Can you tell yet how much I am fascinated and in love with this novel? I started out unsure though, not convinced by MacDonald’s command of her structure. Each chapter a day in the life of Mary-Rose, parenting solo as per usual, going through the motions and tedium of her days, but something is stirring beneath the surface. An ache in her bones, the bones in her arm, which were operated on twice in her childhood. The novel flashes back to her childhood, to her mother’s miscarriages and stillbirths between Mary-Rose and her older sister, and the dead babies after. Before Mary Rose, there had been another Mary Rose, who’d been stillborn and not baptized, and so Mary-Rose inherited her name. These stories are their family lore, the details hard to keep straight anyway, never mind her mother’s deepening dementia. And Mary-Rose is feeling similarly troubled neurologically—there are gaps her days and in her memory, just like the holes in her bones that ailed her in childhood. It is disorienting how the narrative dips in and out of time, into Mary Rose’s childhood and her more recent past. Everything is connected to everything else, and to scratch at the surface is to dare to disturb the precarious arrangement of mental stability, of family harmony.
There are other traumas. Mary-Rose is troubled by the mellowing of her parents in old age, the disappearance of her mother’s rage, her parents’ ease and happiness with their grandchildren, considering how fraught was her own childhood, and also her parents’ reaction to her coming out as a lesbian years before. The cruelty with which they’d treated their daughter, wishing she’d had cancer instead, refusing to acknowledge her relationship, to visit her home. Not banishing her altogether, which might have been simpler, but treating her personal life with a certain coldness, taking years to come around to it. And then finally, there they are in love with the biological child of their daughter’s wife—here we are in the 21st century. It gets better. But how does one heal from that, Mary Rose is asking in Adult Onset (which MacDonald herself asked in a Globe and Mail article last summer during Pride Week in Toronto)? Can we ever forgive our parents for the ways they failed us? And are we destined to repeat their mistakes with our own children, personality as much a part of our genetic legacy as everything? Can we forgive our parents and love our parents, but still seek out lives that are different from theirs? Is it possible to choose our own destinies? Are there lessons for us in parallel worlds after all?
In its details, Adult Onset is certainly a novel about the minutiae of motherhood, the kind of thing Shirley Hughes chronicles in her picture books. Maternal ambivalence isn’t named, as it really shouldn’t be in literature, or the world for that matter, because what in life do we ever not feel two ways about? Instead, the life of a person with children is explored, her complex feelings toward her children a bit interrogated, a bit taken for granted, all of this connected to deeper things, because just as no mother is an island, neither is her maternity in relation to the rest of life. A mother is never just this one thing, even at the worst times when she imagines she is.
In a really wonderful conversation, Jenny Offill says, “If you look at literature on motherhood, there’s still some very interesting space to be filled. In Grace Paley’s stories she’s a mother, an activist, and a wife, with this amazing and relentless observing eye. She writes how it feels to be in the middle of all this. That’s what we need more of.”
In this, and in so much more, Ann-Marie MacDonald has delivered.
October 3, 2014
30 Years with Anne Shirley
The last time I read Anne of Green Gables was in 2008, when I came away struck by how much it’s actually Marilla’s story, her own transformation, the softening of her heart. All the things she feels about her adopted daughter but will not say, but she feels them—the narrative articulates the complexity of her emotions. Reading it again now, I laugh at the paragraph from Rachel Lynde’s perspective about Marilla’s definite ideas about how to bring up children, and how only people who’ve never had children can ever have these. I also notice how silly Anne is; with all her big words she gets so many wrong (though whether these are actually typos is hard to tell. My edition is appallingly edited)—she’s a more realistic version of a 12 year old precocious child than I’ve ever noticed before.
This time, I am rereading Anne of Green Gables (the book I’ve been reading and rereading for 30 years now) as I never have before—aloud. It’s our current chapter book for bed time, joining a canon that includes the Little House books, Ramona, The Willoughbys, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Through the Looking Glass, and so many more. When we started reading it, I was surprised to discover I wasn’t sure it would work—there is so much description, so many words, in particular huge ones that no five year old has ever heard of. As we read through the first couple of chapters, it dawned on me that I’d come to the book at age 6 or so (first reading an abridged version) after being familiar with the Kevin Sullivan film—all the characters in my mind are precisely as cast therein. Would the story “take” the same without the cinematic precedence, I wondered? But it was the evening that we opened the book and Harriet had remembered the exact title of the chapter we’d left off at that I knew the story was resonating just as I’d hoped it would.
Reading Anne of Green Gables aloud is such a pleasure. So many words, as I said, but I get to say them. I’ve never had such a feel for the strength of Montgomery’s prose, and how effectively she communicates Anne’s incessant chatter. Reading aloud too, I get to convey the humour, of which there is so much, and it thrills me when the best jokes are met by Stuart’s laughter. Because he’s listening too, this being his first time “reading” Anne of Green Gables, as well as Harriet’s. He grew up in England, where Anne would be even more foreign to boyhood than usual. So I love that he’s enjoying this very Canadian experience, and Harriet too. (Iris spends story time entering and leaving the room, scattering chaos in her wake.) There are so many wonderful parts of the book that I’ve forgotten about, and when I glimpse an episode to come, I tell them, “Oh, this is going to be a good one.” When Anne turned her hair green, and jumping on Aunt Josephine’s bed, getting Diana drunk and saving Minnie May Berry, the mouse in the pudding and the lineament cake. The puffed sleeves. She’s just about to reconcile with Gilbert, and I absolutely cannot wait. We are enjoying this book so very much.
There is something to this book, which is far more than childhood nostalgia or attraction to a cultural touchstone. Anne of Green Gables is so familiar to us all that it gets written off more often than not, but that’s such a mistake. It’s a good-enough kids’ book, but there is so much going on in the text that a reader doesn’t notice when she’s young, and even when she’s not young. It’s a book that’s worth a reread every decade or so, at least.
October 1, 2014
Neat Things
Blogging is all about immediacy, and I love that, though it’s hard when plans are brewing in other less-immedate media that I can’t tell you about for months and months. But I have couple of neat things now. The first is that I reviewed The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton in Chatelaine, which is one of “9 Hot Books to Read in October“. The review is also in the print issue of the magazine, in which you can also read this story about a woman who climbs trees for a living. I enjoyed the book a lot, and it’s receiving some excellent buzz (not just mine).
The second thing is that I helped to make this list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime for 49th Shelf and amazon.ca, which is a very good answer to the question, “Does Kerry have the best job ever?” So pleased to have come up with a list with favourites and curiosities, which will no doubt irritate people, but we all know that it’s THE definitive list, so no matter. You can also add your own picks to the mix, which is fun. And I do so appreciate anything that gets readers excited about books.
