August 26, 2011
Our Best Books from this week's library haul: Big Wolf & Little Wolf and You're Finally Here
I do like my picture books to have a message, but one curled up so tiny in the core of the story that you don’t even notice it until you think about it. We don’t like our picture books to patronize, of course, and a little silliness is always welcome, but as a student of literature, I am accustomed to deconstructing the best books and coming up with something, something greater than the whole.
In Nadine Brun-Cosme and Oliver Tallec’s Big Wolf & Little Wolf, I suppose that something is a message about an older sibling’s fear of his place being usurped by a younger. I think a child who’s experiencing such fears could be led to some good conversations by discussing this book, but this is not the reason this is one of our favourite books this week. No, we like it because Brun-Cosme has named her two wolves Big Wolf and Little Wolf, and when you’re two years old, the big/little 
dichotomy is endlessly fascinating. Also, because when you’re two, you feel an affinity with “little” things. When Little Wolf (who’s moved into Big Wolf’s territory in a way that’s quite presumptuous) disappears, Harriet becomes very concerned. “Where is Little Wolf?” she asks on every page, and then when we finally catch a glimpse of Little Wolf way off on the horizon, she feels as though she’s done something heroic in locating him. It’s a story about friendship, love and sharing: “For the first time he said to himself that a little one, indeed a very little one, had taken up space in his heart. A lot of space.” And let’s face it, we all know what that’s like…
Bonus: Our bonus book of the week is You’re Finally Here by Melanie Watt, which we can’t take any credit for discovering because the librarian handed it to us. It’s a bit of a metafictional riff of Mo Willems’ We Are In a Book, except that the bunny rabbit here has no qualms about being a storybook character. He’s just bored, waiting for the reader to finally arrive, and then when we do, he can’t quite hold his tongue– What took us so long? Because he hates waiting, and it’s rude to keep someone waiting, and he so harangues us in a most amusing fashion with blazing text and fury that Harriet finds funny. And then his cell-phone rings, and we discover who’s the rude one after all…
August 25, 2011
The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe
I still haven’t watched the fourth season of Mad Men— I’d like to fix the world in order to have Mad Men perpetually before me. We recently rewatched Season 1 though, and got so much out of it– partly because we watched it first time around when Harriet was still so small, so concentration was limited, plus somehow we missed the pivotal “Babylon” episode, so no wonder I felt the narrative was a little out of sync. It’s an extraordinarily good show, no doubt about it now. Though I have feelings for Don Draper in a way that I haven’t harbored for any imaginary person since Dylan McKay in the early 1990s.
My Mad Men reading also continues– I’m still making my way through The 
Collected Stories of John Cheever. For literary illumination into Betty Draper, I had the pleasure of The Torontonians last winter. And I’ve just finished reading The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe, which is a little bit Peggy Olson, a little bit Joan Holloway, not to mention a book that Don Draper himself was seen reading once in bed. (He looks at Betty. “This is fascinating.”)
The Best of Everything is the story of a group of women working at a publishing company in New York City during the early 1950s. Their lives are not especially intertwined, the narrative follows them separately, but they each begin in the same place, working in the typing pool. Smart, beautiful Caroline Bender has been recently jilted by her fiance and is looking for a way to direct her life without him– she has her sights on becoming an editor, but her boss Miss Farrow knows it and is determined to keep Caroline from succeeding (because there is only so much success for women to go around, of course.)
April Morrison is a gorgeous girl from Colorado with no such ambition. She just wants to fit in, and she does after a while. Once she figures out how to reject the advances of her lecherous boss, that is, and reinvents herself with a stylish haircut and new clothes paid for on her charge card. When she lands herself a rich boyfriend, she figures she’s got it made, and it takes her a long time (and an abortion) to realize that he’s been stringing her along. Ever the optimist, however, she starts sleeping with every other boy who comes along in home that one of them will fall in love and make her the wife she yearns to be.
Caroline’s roommate Gregg only lasts at the publishing company a short time. She’s an actress, and she has promise, and she also has a prized contact in David Wilder Savage, the theatre director who becomes her boyfriend. Or he’s kind of her boyfriend– when they show up at the same parties, he always brings her home, but she can never stay. She longs to sew curtains for his bare kitchen windows, and in spite of the openness, there’s always more going on in his life than she is privy to. Eventually, he puts her at a distance and that begins to make do some crazy things.
Then there’s Barbara Lemont, who’s divorced and relies on her job to support her little daughter. When someone finally falls in love
with her, every single thing is right about him except that he is married. And there’s Brenda, who’s getting married, and Mary Agnes the office gossip, who is getting married too, and for those two, the job is a stop-gap. But then it never is entirely: “It’s funny, she thought, that before she had ever had a job she had always thought of an office as a place where people came to work, but now it seemed as if it was a place where they also brought their private lives for everyone else to look at, paw over, comment on and enjoy.”
It’s all a bit of a soap opera, and the endings are too easy, but it all culminates into something more than that, and the book becomes utterly absorbing. Fascinating too that these are the women John Cheever’s characters leave behind when they take the train to Westchester at the end of the day, the kind of women that Betty Draper and Karen Whitney wonder about, when Betty and Karen are the women these women long to be. Almost. And it reminds me of the thing I keep forgetting whenever I think about 20th century history, which was that people were having sex in the 1950s, and willy-nilly to boot. That the more things change, the more they stay the same, and why do stories of beautiful people with terrible lives always seem so incredibly appealing?
August 24, 2011
The Vicious Circle reads Hell by Kathryn Davis
There are some books that make us suspect rumours of the Vicious Circle’s awesomeness might just be overstated. And also that we chose our books back in March with a bit too much zeal and too little caution because, yet again, one of our books has conspired to kill us. This book was Hell by Kathryn Davis, whose cover made us think we’d love it, and we did love it, in parts, but in other parts it made us want to die, fall asleep, close the book and/or fling it against the wall.
One of us had a library copy of the book which featured a sticker on its spine that said, “Suspense”, and we figured that sticker had probably resulted in a lot of disappointment for some readers. “Part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story” says the back of the book, but we just didn’t get it. Long, long paragraphs of impermeable prose, and even when you took it all apart, the mechanics were generally unclear. Which doesn’t make it seem worth it after a while, to read those paragraphs over, and over, and over.
Some of us came to terms with this by reading it just once and letting Davis’ mesmerizing prose wash over with no concern with meaning. Others came to terms with this by not finishing the book. Those of us who finished the book positively hated the end, and resented Davis for taking the narrative away from the part of the story that most appealed. We liked the 1950s family story, which reminded she of us who’d just read it of Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels (except the people were less weird, and the narration was more so). We thought it was cool that this was a Hurricane Hazel story, because we’d never read one that was not Toronto-centric. Most of liked that the story was about the residents of an actual house and the residents of a dollhouse, and the lines between the two were always being blurred. Davis writes about the miniature, about the domestic and its detail. Did we know that medicine cabinets used to have slots in the back where used razor blades could be disposed of? And this is what a house is, an innocent-looking place until you get down between its walls and you find they’ve sliced open your wrist.
“Of course every house in the world, no matter how well-built, will eventually catch fire, blow up, wash away, get knocked down to make way for something new. No matter how durable a house, it isn’t immortal… For this reason the house is jealous of spirit and, as is often the case, becomes possessive. This is why houses are haunted and why, if you love the form of a thing too much, there’s really only one way out.”
There are many stories– the family with the alcoholic mother and philandering father, the eldest daughter who refuses to eat, and who yellow-eyed friend turns up dead due to mysterious circumstances. The narrative goes back and forth in time, and somewhere in time the father is elderly, incapacitated, and lying on the floor after having suffered a stroke. It also goes way back in time to a Mrs. Beetonish character called Edwina Moss whose daughter also refuses to eat and who is preoccupied by Napoleon’s chef. There is food everywhere, but it is disgusting. The domestic is much less heaven and hell, or it is heaven and hell, and the vision of hell is what makes us conscious of our own limitlessness, the magnificence of our construction, the nimbuses surrounding every single hair on our heads, whereas heaven is too finite. And if that doesn’t make any sense to you, know that it didn’t to any of us either.
But it did to somebody. There are readers who have loved this book, and express that it’s not going to appeal to everybody, and that it’s demanding, but the Vicious Circle failed to reap any of the rewards. Which made some of us shrug and say that if we can’t get it, it might not be a great book after all. Others are going to pick it up again sometime, because it might be one of those books that needs five or ten reads to be loved (Hello, Virginia Woolf! And you were worth it too!).
And then we threw our books down because it was still a summer night, the autumn chill distant enough that we can ignore the need for sweaters, and we poured another glass of wine and let talk drift away to other things.
August 23, 2011
P is for Park
Location: Centre Island
I don’t update my blog on the weekends, and due to travel, fun, family and houseguests, this past weekend seems to have leaked well into the week. Much fun has been had, many restaurants have been eaten at, but I’m slowly getting my act together (and finishing The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe. Can’t wait to post about this. Also the latest Vicious Circle recap). In the meantime, here is Harriet living the Big City Alphabet…
August 22, 2011
So let us be loving
“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.” —Jack Layton (1950-2011), August 20 2011
August 18, 2011
Hawaii Library
My friend Jennie just got back from a trip to Hawaii, and took this library photo for me. Not sure where it is exactly, but isn’t it everything you ever dreamed of a Hawaiian library being?
August 18, 2011
Question about The Wings of the Dove
Coming up soon on my list of books to read is The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. I really love A Portrait of a Lady. Fairly recently, however, I reread What Maisie Knew and wished I hadn’t. Where does Wings… lie on a spectrum of these two books, in terms of difficulty and enjoyment? Should I give this one a miss, or is it worth tackling?
August 17, 2011
I love books too
This evening was very upsetting for Harriet, because her balloon monkey with which she was besotted suddenly popped. We explained that this was part of the balloon’s natural life cycle, then consoled her with a gingerbread man whose arm fell off, and then I ate the arm, and then Harriet went insane, screaming, “I need new arm right now!” We explained that the gingerbread man was a cookie, and that she could eat the rest of him. She was having none of it, and finally her father constructed a prosthetic limb out of a chocolate chip cookie piece. The man’s a genius. Then Harriet forgot about the gingerbread man altogether, went to bed, and now the gingerbread is no more. He was delicious, but his kind will never darken our door again.
This evening Harriet also sat at the table like a superstar, however, and ate her pesto pasta with gusto. “I don’t like beets,” she told us though, and then I banished all talk of “I don’t like—” from our dinner table henceforth, because there is no conversation more boring. The beets were delicious. For afters, we had Barbara Pym with fresh strawberries from the market.
Harriet has become very good at issuing orders. “Stop talking, Mommy!” is a frequent shout, and she clearly doesn’t know me very well, because I’ve never responded well to that kind of guidance. “Stop dancing, Mommy!” was a bit devastating to hear one day last week when I was rocking out to The Kooks, and I fast forwarded to her teenage years and when she finds me totally mortifying. “Clean my diaper!” is another, and my thinking is that if you’re old enough to make a demand like that, you’re probably old enough to use the potty. But alas…
Harriet is currently in love with Curious George, and his curious pipe-smoking ways. If you ask her what her favourite book is, she’ll tell you Knuffle Bunny. We love Mo Willems’ new book Hooray for Amanda and her Alligator. She loves Corduroy too, and Alfie and Annie Rose, and anything else by Shirley Hughes (whose other characters we refer to as “Alfie’s Friends”). She has lately refused to read Sleeping Dragons All Around: “too scary,” she says. She can’t get enough of Murmel Murmel Murmel. And Mabel Murple rains supreme.
If I say, “I love books,” Harriet says, “I love books too.” Which was really exciting for a little while, until I learned (with “spinach”, “tomatoes” and “yak poo”) that Harriet will use that sentence construction to claim a love of anything. But she really does seem to love books, and outside (pronounced “asshat”), and painting, and popsicles, and sandals, and sandcastles, all her friends, dogs and cats, going on the subway, and eating ice cream. She has a hilarious English accent. Her favourite ice cream flavour is cherry, which is weird and we don’t know how she ever discovered that there was such a thing. She has an imaginary friend called Mimi who loves at the museum, and apparently her hair is blue. When we were there last week, Harriet seemed genuinely distraught not to find her there, but we’ll look again. There are dinosaurs in the meantime, and garbage trucks, and fire trucks, and the whole world is amazing.
August 16, 2011
Never Knowing by Chevy Stevens
I’m really not a snob, I’ve just got a problem with bad books, and this is why I struggle so much when I try to read popular fiction. Which is why I’m always so elated when I discover a book that proves that bad books and popular fiction are not synonymous, that finally I too get to be swept away by a thriller that holds me right to the end. And in this case, the book was Never Knowing by Chevy Stevens, a book I love with the same part of me that loves loves Laura Lippman (and also with the part that really loved Scream.)
Sara Gallagher has always believed that discovering the identity of her birth mother would bring her some closure, to fill in the missing pieces of the background of a life that has turned out pretty well. She runs a successful business, is well-loved by her young daughter, is engaged to be married to a man who she loves. But Julia, her birth mother, is cold and hostile when she finally meets her, and Sara senses there is more to the story than what she’s been told. With a little prying, Sara discovers that her birth mother is the only surviving victim of the notorious Campsite Killer, and that the Campsite Killer is her father.
When Sara and Julia’s identities are leaked onto an online crime forum, suddenly the whole world discovers the story, including Sara’s own parents who are angry that she never told them she was searching for the truth about her past. Even worse, however, the Campsite Killer himself, still on the loose and killing after all these years, finds out that he has a daughter, and is determined to make a connection. Sara is forced into a complicated situation as she must satisfy her own curiosity about the father she never knew, reconcile that she’s the product of a monster, assist the police in their investigation by forging a relationship with the killer, and also not let her self or her family come into danger. Sara is being used by the police and by the killer for their own ends, and the situation strains Sara’s own relationship with her daughter and fiance as her wedding date approaches.
With Stevens’ previous novel Still Missing, Never Knowing is structured in first person narrative, with Sara talking with her psychiatrist. The structure works, carefully controlling how the tension builds throughout the novel, and the narration never suffers from unnecessary exposition– it all unfolds quite naturally. Sara’s voice is strong and it makes her character clear. Stevens complicates the plot with domestic drama– Sarah has never seen eye-to-eye with her domineering father, she can’t stand one of her sisters, her fiance is jealous of the police officer who’s working closely with Sara on the case. Her daughter is acting out in response to all the attention Sara is paying elsewhere, and her daughter’s behaviour, as well as Sara’s own impulsiveness have her considering the possibilities of her genetic inheritance.
What I loved about this book is that Sara’s were responses were that of a real person, rather than a plot device. She keeps those around her informed of what’s going on, we don’t have to tell her, “Don’t go down into the basement!” because she knows better. She’s a smart woman whose wits are being tested, but she’s got her self-preservation instincts in tact, and her first priority is protecting her daughter. Which becomes more and more difficult as the Campsite Killer gets closer, and though it’s clearly never going to end well, Sara’s adamant that she’s going to end it nevertheless.
August 16, 2011
Baby Lit: Little Miss Austen
Here’s a tip for all you booksellers out there: stock the Baby Lit series, and the books will be snapped up by those of us with more money than brains. (And this is saying something. I don’t actually have that much money.) I don’t even like Pride & Prejudice, but I had to have this gorgeous board book, which is actually more worthwhile than its genius gimmick might suggest. It’s a counting book, P&P from 1-10– 1 English Village (with a green!), 2 handsome gentlemen, 3 houses, etc., and each item cumulates to tell Austen’s story (kind of). The illustrations are lovely, stylishly designed with floral detailing and demask backgrounds– you can see a couple of pages here.
From the publisher’s pages, the series (which, so far, also includes Romeo and Juliet, but I don’t think they die at the end) is “a fashionable way to introduce your toddler to the world of classic literature”. And heaven forbid you introduce your toddler to classic literature in an unfashionable way, or forget to do it until they’ve turned four and it’s already too late.
Qualms aside, the book is cute, and I’m a middle-class white person who lives in the city and buys artisanal cheese. Books like this were made for people like me. What else are you going to do?
