December 6, 2011
What I Hate About Book Bloggers
It’s certainly not a secret that publishers send me books to review. I’m currently indulging in a Goose Lane binge because of a package that arrived on by doorstep last week. Most of the new releases I review have come my way via my mailbox. But I don’t make a note in each post of where my books came from, because I promise you that it really has no bearing on how that book gets reviewed. Also because professional book reviewers are not required to disclose that they were also sent the book for free, so why should I have to? I don’t regard the books I receive in the post as compensation– books don’t pay the rent, my friend. I’m not obliged to do anything with the books that come my way, to review positively, or even to review at all. Regardless of how these books found their way to me, I am beholden to nobody.
Which is not to say that this has always been the case. Of course, I’ve never received compensation for a review on my site– that’s so not my style, plus the very best books don’t have to pay people to like them. But when I started receiving books from publishers about 5 years ago, I found the whole process pretty overwhelming. I was flattered by the attention, and anxious to please, and though I was never dishonest in my early reviews, I was sometimes more generous in my assessments than I should have been. Though I also think I was a more generous reader then– 5 years of reading so many middling books does tend to make a reader rather crabby. But I’ve also found my footing as a reader, as a critic (though it’s still evolving; it has to be), I’ve read so much more, and learned so much more that I feel more comfortable to simply term a book a disaster, rather than trying to puzzle through the writer’s intentions as I might have done once upon a time. Though I don’t often declare a book a disaster here on my site, partly because it’s inconsistent with the tone here, and also because I don’t have enough free time to devote to writing reviews of books that are terrible.
During the past week, book bloggers have been getting some attention after many received a letter from William Morrow laying down the laws of book bloggerdom– reviews must be posted within a month of the book’s release, failure to adhere to these rules will result in getting bumped off their mailing list. To be honest, I didn’t find the letter or its tone too surprising– since the economy broke in 2008, I’ve noticed a similar reining in of bloggers by the big publishers I deal with. Gone are the days when they’d send me any/every book in the catalogue (and sometimes screw up the ordering so I’d end up receiving the same books twice, or three times). And obviously, I’m not exactly heartbroken about this, because the three-book thing never really seemed like an excellent business plan anyway. Also because there were so many books that I was often overwhelmed, and I ended up reading books I wasn’t even particularly interested in, which didn’t make me happy at all.
The problem with the reining in however, in letters like William Morrow’s and elsewhere, is not that publishers are asking more of bloggers or that bloggers are practicing book banditry, but rather that the publishers are treating the bloggers like kindergarteners. There is an abject disregard here by publishers of what bloggers do, no understanding of their function beyond that of unpaid publicists, and it’s clear that bloggers are not being taken seriously as the force they are. And when I look out at the book blogosphere these days and see such an abundance of unfortunate blogs (enacting many of the problems William Morrow notes in their letter), I’m not sure the bloggers themselves are entirely to blame. Sure, there seems to be a lack of responsibility on behalf of the bloggers, but the publishers are doing absolutely nothing to cultivate an alternative, which it will be very much in their purview to do.
The upside to beginning to receive free books on my blog, along with the overwhelmingness and dangerous sense of flattery, was the notion that someone was taking what I was doing seriously. It was a revelation! And the individuals I was dealing with at various publishing companies did take me seriously, working to create a genuine relationship, reading and engaging with my blog, suggesting books that they’d considered and thought that I would like. Many of these individuals were book bloggers themselves, rather than marketing types straight-up, and so they understood how it worked, that a book blogger requires the autonomy that any reviewer does.
Of course, the book blogosphere was smaller then, so such relationships were easier to foster, and I know that publishers’ resources have become unbelievably stretched in recent years. But I can’t help thinking that publishers themselves could have had more control over what has been the general decline of book blogs (or maybe what I mean is that they had more control than they imagined in the decline itself). Why, for example, do they send books to bloggers whose blogs are terrible? Does it still count as “buzz” if it’s generated by idiots (and it’s probably at this point that you clue in to the fact that I’m really not a marketer, no?)? Why send books to those bloggers who think a “review” is a 50 word assessment, and a pasting of the book’s marketing copy? Why do you send YA books about dragons to 35 year old men who like reading Malcolm Gladwell? The point of bloggers is to create buzz, yes, but that buzz is only going to buzz if it’s coming from a legitmate conversation. And publishers have missed their opportunity to heighten that converation’s tone.
Now I’m sounding like Jaron Lanier, I think, sitting back in my rocking chair wearing my enormous black t-shirt. Back in my day, I’ll tell you, things were different. I lament the decline of the individual voice in book blogs, I hate the standardization, the memeishness. I can’t stand the “In My Mailbox” meme, and I do wonder how anyone finds the times to read all those books, which are so often the very same books that other bloggers are receiving, so that the conversation is an echo chamber, and what is lost for that.
I do hope that the bloggers receiving so many free books continue to do their share as readers by actually buying books– I certainly did my bit with a $240 splurge at Book City last week (and hey everybody, guess what you’re getting for Christmas from me this year!). I want bloggers to keep exploring the fringes of the literary scene, whether it be with new books by independent presses or dusting off old books from the shelves. Blogs have always been interesting for being an alternative to what we might find in our newspaper’s dwindling review pages, and not simply a regurgitation. For the discoveries they yield that no mainstream medium would have been able to bring forth, and for the small, specialized communities they foster. For the genuine connections that happen.
And I don’t hate book bloggers at all, of course (though I am well-versed in writing an attention-grabbing title). I have as much hope for the what we can offer to books and literature in general as I ever did. But I just think that when publishers ask more of us, it should be about not simply towing their line, and that it’s most important that we never stop asking more of ourselves.
December 5, 2011
Kalila by Rosemary Nixon
Earlier this year when I read Charlene Diehl’s memoir Out of Grief, Singing, I marvelled at the way that fiction holds writers to certain constraints, on the way we have to bend life and draw out connections to build a story. And Rosemary Nixon is aware of this in her novel Kalila, the story of a couple whose daughter is born with inexplicable complications and spends her life in an isolette in the NICU. A novel like this refuses to conform to narrative expectations; as Nixon’s protagonist Maggie tells us, “Stories are meant to lead somewhere. To rising action. Climax. Closure. And they lived Happily Ever After.” Of course, a story like Kalila’s takes on a different shape.
Which means that as a novel, Kalila is not immediately satisfying, that the narrative is set up in a way that puts the reader at a distance, that the approach is clinical, but this was never a story that was going to satisfy. And Nixon knows exactly what she’s doing here: if Maggie appears to be a protagonist in a trance, it’s because she is. If she and her husband Brodie appear to be disconnected from the world around them, from the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, even from the story they find themselves in the midst of, it’s because they’re meant to be. They feel like strangers in their own story, a story in which they never would have cast themselves, one so entirely different than everything they ever expected when they imagined their baby being born, and a reader’s experience is analogous.
Brodie is a high school physics teacher, and his classroom scenes are beautifully choreographed (and they reminded me of Monoceros in this respect, another Calgary book, and Nixon thanks Suzette Mayr as “my writing buddy”, which wasn’t actually a huge surprise). He keeps his mind off his wife’s pain and the plight of his tiny daughter by focusing on particles and waves, on the sound of his students’ happiness, and the strangely bending laws of the universe. And though as a scientist, he knows the way things fall apart, when he’s alone with his daughter, he resorts to fairy tale narratives, and he tells her a story of a tiny princess in a glass castle locked away.
Maggie doesn’t have the diversion of work, but rather the conspicuousness of being a mother without her baby. She struggles with her displacement as nurses and doctors assume care of her child, doctors and nurses who don’t even know what her name is. She longs to love her child in the proper way, but “it’s too late for love at first sight”, she says at one point, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Though she notes that the doctors and nurses don’t quite know what to do with her daughter either, whose problems are innumerable and indecipherable, and who isn’t getting any better.
The baby herself is at a remove from all of this, both literally and figuratively. In every sense, she is the unknown variable. There is a coldness to the parents’ approach to their child, a measuredness. They are wary, weary, heartbroken, and numb all at once. An actual acknowledgement of the workings of their hearts at this moment in time would cause either one to stop and break down, but breakdowns aren’t what Kalila is all about. This is a novel about going forward into the unknown, about how a new mother occupies herself at home during the day when her daughter has needles stuck into her head, and about remembering to put the dog out, to eat, to make small talk with acquaitances in the grocery store.
The novel’s restive pace shifts about 2/3 of the way through when Brodie and Maggie decide to bring their daughter home after five months in the hospital, to have the empty space in their lives finally filled. And though they don’t dare utter the word “miracle”, they’re both thinking it. But as Nixon, of course, has already told us, this rising action is never going to lead to closure, to happily ever after. This ending has always been an inevitable thing.
I’m attracted to stories like this for less than savoury reasons perhaps. There’s a voyeuristic element to it, and one with especially self-serving motives. To me, reading books like these is a way to stare down my very worst fears, to not look away for as long as I can, and imagine that somehow this staring might prepare me for all those things one can never be prepared for. Though I’m not fooling anyone, of course, let alone myself. Further, Nixon writes with a precision that doesn’t really tolerate such self-indulgence on my part. In Kalila, there is no such thing as indulgence– it’s all about the story, and the peculiar shape that lives take on when stories shift into such unimagined terrain.
December 4, 2011
On urban picture books, and concepts of home
I was holding Harriet’s hand the other day as we walked up the flight of stairs to our door when I heard her say under her little-girl breath, “four flights of stairs to family’s apartment.” I recognized it as a line from Corduroy, and asked her, “Whose apartment?” She said, “Lisa’s.” I said, “Did you know that we also live in an apartment?” She said, “No. We live at home.”
I appreciate Don Freeman’s illustrations in Corduroy, probably for similar reasons black parents would have appreciated them when the book was published in the 1960s: here is a picture book that reflects the reality of my child’s life. Lisa’s is an urban world, with stairwells, department stores, laundromats and sidewalks. And it’s a world far removed from the one that I grew up in, at the end of a cul de sac, with a big backyard. I grew up in neighbourhoods where they didn’t even have sidewalks, and the only store nearby was a Beckers. The families we looked down upon were those with single-car garages, and the families who looked down on us had driveways made from interlocking brick.
Such a childhood served me well– who needs sidewalks when you can play in the street? And manicured lawns are fine and well when there are ravines to explore, and creeks to wade in, and games of Nicky Nicky Nine Doors to be won. But the choices we made for our family would be different– we want to be able to walk to our places of work, and not have to work so much, and not working so much means we don’t own a house, and not owning a house means we get to live in the apartment of our dreams in a neighbourhood close to the places where we work, and so it goes, a most unvicious cycle.
Ours not such an unusual choice, of course, and this is underlined by the so many wonderful children’s books these days depicting urban life. In fact, some of these books commodify urban life to such hipsterish effect– I’m thinking about Urban Babies Wear Black, or the various board books we own about sushi. We’re big fans of Mo Willems’ Knuffle Bunny Books, and for a long time, I would read these and wonder if Harriet’s urban life wasn’t urban enough, and were we denying her a proper childhood in a Brooklyn brownstone? And then I read an article about the time Willems has to spend photoshopping the unsavoury elements of his neighbourhood out of the books’ photographic illustrations, and came to terms with our urban life as it is.
Urban life presented how it is is why we love Bob Graham’s Oscar’s Half Birthday, with the graffiti in its streets and the wonderful rumble of the train overhead. It’s why we love Subway by Anastasia Suen and Karen Katz (“We go down to go uptown. Down down down in the subway”). Joanne Schwartz and Matt Beam’s City Alphabet and City Numbers present city grit in all its glory. And Don Freeman’s contemporary too, Ezra Jack Keats, whose sidewalks and alleys are ways of delight. Even Shirley Hughes’ books with their domestic focus have the city as their backdrop– buses, stoops, parks and traffic.
We are fortunate that some of our very favourite urban stories are set in the city where we live: Allan Moak’s A Big City ABC, poems from Alligator Pie, Who Goes to the Park by Warabe Aska, Jonathan Cleaned Up and Then He Heard a Sound by Robert Munsch, and when Harriet’s bigger, I hope she’ll enjoy Bernice Thurman Hunter’s Booky books as much as I did. One of our favourite books of all time is Teddy Jam’s Night Cars, set against a Toronto streetscape, and we love the familiar TTC as presented in Barbara Reid’s The Subway Mouse. (Find more Toronto kids books as recommended by Imagining Toronto‘s Amy Lavender Harris.)
The urban setting in children’s literature has become one we can almost take for granted over the past 50 years, thanks to pioneering author/illustrators like Freeman and Keats. These days, children’s books are working to further broaden notions of home in stories like Maxine Trottier’s Migrant, about a young girl belonging to a family of itinerant workers. In Laurel Croza’s award-winning I Know Here, a girl whose home is a trailer in Northern Saskatchewan contemplates a move across the country to Toronto, and takes stock of all she knows and loves about the place where she lives. Martha Stewart Conrad‘s books (we like Getting There) show children from communities all over the world enacting various versions of every day life, portraying the fascinating ways in which we’re all alike and different at once.
How wonderful that my child’s storybook worlds can be as diverse as the one we see outside our window. And once she understands that home is a concept that is broader than just this place where we live, she’ll know how hers fits in with all the rest of them.
December 2, 2011
Our Best Book of the Library Haul: 9 Magic Wishes by Shirley Jackson
Harriet is amazing, and so too turn out to be the books she randomly plucks off the shelf at the library. And this week it was 9 Magic Wishes by Shirley Jackson, a book I didn’t even realize existed. This new edition is illustrated by Miles Hyman, Jackson’s grandson, who so perfectly managed to capture the essence of Shirley Jackson: the Gothic architecture of the house, the cat’s constant presence, the weirdness. But there is nothing sinister here, and the book is absolutely charming. The prose displaying Jackson’s skill with cadence and euphony. It’s the story of a strange day during which all the trees were flying balloons, and a magician came down the street granting 9 magic wishes, but what if you only want 8? (My favourite wish was “a little box, and inside was another little box and inside is another little box and inside is another little box and inside is an elephant.”)
December 1, 2011
Big Town: A Novel of Africville by Stephens Gerard Malone
I read Stephens Gerard Malone’s Big Town: A Novel of Africville this week as the story of the crisis of Attawapkiskat unfolded in the media, and each story so illuminated the other. The story of a Canadian community whose people live in unheated shacks with no running water, with no access to safe drinking water. A community of people treated as second-class citizens by the rest of the world– Malone writes about how hydro lines were down, Africville was always the last place the electric company came to, and usually when you called the police, they never came at all. A community for which the outside world purports to know what’s best, applying simple solutions to complicated problems, solving exactly nothing, and never mind all that gets lost.
Africville was a black settlement outside of Halifax Nova Scotia, razed during the 1960s by the city for reasons of public health and progress. Malone situates his novel in the community’s dying days, showing that social order had broken down by this time, as it had in so many communities during that turbulent decade. Africville had become conspicuous by its proximity to the town dump, and to the unsavoury characters attracted to its fringes, like Early Okander’s father.
However, Early himself, who is white, a white simple-minded teenager devoted to his young friend Toby, is embraced by the community, and cared for by its residents all the while his father beats him and prostitutes him to his poker buddies on Saturday nights. In contrast to the trailer where Early and his father lives, Toby’s home with his grandfather Aubrey is a domestic oasis, supplied with nourishing food by neighbouring Mrs. Aada who owns the local store, and the company of other neighbours who remember a better time when the community was strong and thriving. It is as a testament to this better time that Aubrey is building a concert hall out of used bottles as a performance space for the Miss Portia White, the world famous singer who’d once lived in Africville and who, according to Aubrey, would be making a pilgrimage home now any day to help restore the community to its former glory.
The novel is meant to be told from Early’s perspective, though Malone refrains from the Faulkner-esque challenge of letting such a limited perspective wholly take over. Which makes Big Town a less challenging read, albeit one less narratively interesting. Malone plays with the ambiguity of Early’s point of view at times, but never so ambitiously, and the read between the lines is more obvious than it would like to be.
In many ways, Malone’s novel has more in common with a book like To Kill a Mockingbird, complete with its own Scout Finch in Early and Toby’s friend Chub, a girl who wants to be a boy and cuts her own hair with paper scissors. Though the story being filtered through the children’s point of view lacks the weight and nuance of To Kill a Mockingbird, however much that’s a high standard to hold any book to. The bleakness is also unrelenting– both Toby and Chub engage in self-harm, Aubrey is battling his own demons, Early’s father’s acts of violence against him are devastating; whither art thou, Atticus Finch?
Though that Malone proposes no saviour is wholly understandable, because certainly Africville never managed to be saved. And though at times I felt that the children’s perspectives were so limited as to simplify the story behind them, that story held fast my attention. Malone has made vivid a time and place thought lost to history, broadening the range of stories that we call Canadian.
November 30, 2011
The Vicious Circle reads Imagining Toronto
Last night, The Vicious Circle gathered in a the farthest reaches of the inner-city to read Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto (which was one of my favourite books of 2010). We’d braved torrential downpour to be there (which now joins a major snowstorm and a temperature of 50 degrees celsius as weather we’ve braved in order to be Vicious in 2011). Curling up in the world’s coziest living room, lined with books (as is every room in that house), and well-supplied with cheese, we sat down and gossiped, and gossiped some more, and then it was time to speak of bookish things.
Imagining Toronto left us wanting to explore Parkdale, and wanting to read The Torontonians. We loved the way Harris acknowledges how much Toronto’s neighbourhoods are at different stages of similar narratives. We talked about Kensington, the Union Station of Toronto neighbourhoods, and how much that neighbourhood had changed– apparently Sneaky Dees used to be a Pie Shop?
We loved the sense she creates of a walk around the city, the psychogeography. Learning the history of an area like Yorkville, whose reality is different from myth– Yorkville’s heyday wasn’t a long day. We liked the structure of the book for the most part, how she organizes by neighbourhoods. We note that Toronto books were how we learned about Toronto back when we were growing up in the suburbs and small towns. As Harris writes, a city unfolds from its telling, and culture emerges from narrative. We also realize for the first time that all of us grew up in the suburbs and small towns, none of us in Toronto at all. We note that we’re part of a homogenization of the city, in the age of “the myth of the monocultural suburb.”
Some of us took issues with categorical statements that framed the city in a way that was contrary to how we understand it. That the literary Annex is not dead, for one. Or that Little Italy is not the only neighbourhood in Toronto with connections to the Old World, when we’re thinking about Roncesvalles, Little Portugal, Corso Italia, and others.
We like how the book succeeds in doing what city books are meant to do– not describing the city, but recreating the city, becoming the city. We talked about Toronto as a city without an identity, and noted that it’s not that Toronto doesn’t have a creation myth, but that it hasn’t been immortalized. We talked about the nuances of the chapter on multiculturalism, and Harris’s ideas about multiculturalism being a process that begins with us engaging with tensions, acknowledging our own discomfort with one another.We felt the “Desire Lines” chapter was less successful, and wondered about its organization– parts about gay literature, sex work, pedophilia, and birth didn’t seem to fit together so well. We expressed discomfort with gay literature belonging with the rest, and also with the lack of nuance in the bit on sex work (and wondered why it didn’t fit into the chapter on Work). We wondered why the part about Anthony De Sa’s Barnacle Love and the the Shoeshine Boy might not have fit better into a chapter on Little Portugal. Why were these stories removed from the neighbourhoods in which they took place?
Imagining Toronto, we decided, functions as a remarkable starting point, and creates desire to go explore both the city and the its stories. We praised its balance of academic and accessible writing, and it was pointed out that Harris is writing about really complex ideas in this book, but delivers them in a way that is so readable and seems unconscious of their weight. We talked about this book being published by a small Toronto press rather than an academic press, and what an undertaking this must have been for Mansfield Press, and perhaps why the overall package is intimidating to behold– small text, no images. We noted that it must have been an undertaking for Harris as well, and that nobody had ever attempted to do this. We noted that Harris does it so well that even her footnotes were interesting. We wondered about books that were missing from the book, and the Toronto stories still to come. Some of us thought we’d check out the Imagining Toronto website, and we all look forward to seeing what Harris does next (and to reading Imagining Toronto Part II).
And then we started gossiping again, and soon the cheese was nearly gone.
November 29, 2011
Frog and Toad: The Letter
Without a bit of exaggeration, I promise you that “The Letter” by Arnold Lobel is the very best short story I’ve read lately. A chapter in Lobel’s book Frog and Toad Are Friends, “The Letter” begins with Frog coming along to discover his friend Toad sitting on his porch looking sad. Toad explains that this is his sad time of day, because it’s the time of day when he waits for the mail, but not once has he ever received a letter.
Toad, characteristically, is resigned to his sadness, but Frog wants to help his friend. So he rushes home and he writes Toad a letter, arranging to have it delivered to Toad by– and wait for it– “a snail that he knew.” And I’m not going to give away any spoilers here, but I suspect you can surmise where the rest of the story might go.
Frog and Toad is a recent discovery for us, part of the Classic I Can Read Books whose series include both Frances and Little Bear, who we love. All three series are simple in their language, but magic in their depths, in their strangeness, their child’s-eye-view of the world revealing such startling vision. The characters are all lovable, real in their foibles, and driven by a very human kind of motivation (which is remarkable, actually, when we’re talking about toads, badgers, and bears).
Frog and Toad in particular is philosophy and poetry, provocative, but also comforting. And they’re funny, on the surface yes, but also underlyingly so in a way that young readers won’t necessarily understand, but won’t feel foolish for missing either. Arnold Lobel never patronizes. What a truly masterful storyteller.
November 27, 2011
True Stories: My Canada Reads Addendum
CBC Canada Reads is tackling nonfiction for 2012, which got me thinking about true stories. One of the best things about lately barrelling through my unread books in author-alpha-order is that I’ve finally been driven to pick up the nonfiction I’ve been so long putting off, fiction always being what I turn to first. And so I finally read Christopher Dewdney’s Soul of the World, biographies of Elizabeth Bowen, Gertrude Bell and The Eaton Family. Nonfiction I’ve been compelled to read without prodding recently have been Maria Meindl’s Outside the Box, the biography of Virginia Lee Burton, Bring on the Books for Everybody, and Cinderella Ate My Daughter. So yes, there has been a lot of nonfiction to appreciate.
But to show my true appreciation, and in the tradition of me reading alongside and offside what CBC folks are doing, I’m going to rereading a truly great Canadian nonfiction book this winter. It’s like Canada Reads Independently, but it’s one book, and a lot less trouble. I’m going to be rereading Joan Bodger’s memoir The Crack in the Teacup: The Life of a an Old Woman Steeped in Stories, and I’d love it if you could read along with me. If you’re following along with Canada Reads, I promise that your experience will be richer if you include this book along with the other five (and that it will blow the other five out of the water, no contest.)
From my blog post about the book: “Joan Bodger’s life was never, ever boring, from the grandmother who was killed in a shipwreck, to her unconventional girlhood as the daughter of a sailor, her stint in the army working as in decoding, the terrible sadness of her family life, what she learned about story and its power to transform children’s lives (and what I learned about Where the Wild Things Are in reading about this), her fascinating work in early childhood education, the loveliness of her second marriage, her shamelessness (which is learned, and earned with age), her honestly, her passion, that she placed her husband’s ashes in the foundations of the Lillian H. Smith Library which was then under construction.”
November 27, 2011
Launch: Best Canadian Essays 2011, December 6
The Best Canadian Essays 2011 will be launching on Tuesday December 6 at the Dora Keogh Pub (Broadview and Danforth) at 7:00. I will be there and will be reading from my essay, and I’d love to see you there!
In other events, I’m also looking forward to hearing Rebecca Rosenblum (The Big Dream) and Anne Perdue (I’m a Registered Nurse Not a Whore) read this Thursday December 1 at the Lillian Smith Library at 6:30.
November 26, 2011
A pile of books
Today we went to a book and toy sale at Huron Playschool, where Harriet will attend next year when she is three (and “when I am a boy,” she has noted, intriguingly). The sale was to support a trust fund for the son of Jenna Morrison, who was killed in a cycling accident two weeks ago, and whose death has profoundly affected our community, even those of us who didn’t know her.
We got a pile of books, happy to be able to do something to help. We brought them home and began to read through the stack, which wouldn’t have made for a blog post normally, except that every single book that we read was so incredibly good. We got Silly Lilly by Agnes Rosenstiehl , Owl Babies by Martin Waddell and Patrick Benson, Paddington Takes a Bath by Michael Bond, A Difficult Day by Eugenie Fernandes, Beneath the Bridge by Hazel Hutchins and Ruth Ohi, and The Alphabet Room by Sarah Pinto.
