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Pickle Me This

October 16, 2024

Keep, by Jenny Haysom

I’ve been reading all over the place lately, out of necessity, sometimes seven books at at time, bits and pieces, and so it was quite delightful to fall into a novel for the first time in a long time, to read the whole thing in a day. I loved KEEP, by Jenny Haysom, a novel following her award-winning debut poetry collection DIVIDING THE WAYSIDE. KEEP is the story of two real estate stagers charged with packing up the life of Harriet, an elderly poet with dementia, who become entangled in the mess of her life. Although their own lives are not so tidy either—Jacob, in his early 20s, has just been dumped by the boyfriend he moved to Ottawa to be with, having tried and failed to conjure domestic bliss for them; Eleanor, 20-some years older, is dissatisfied with her own domestic arrangement, the small home she shares with her husband and three children altogether too confining, everybody relying on her labour to make it work, and she’s exhausting. KEEP is a novel about building home, about keeping house, about what life does to everybody’s best intentions, and the distance between the faces we present to the world and the realities we’re actually facing. The braided narrative is so well balanced, each character a vivid and engaging presence in the novel, and it’s interesting (and refreshing!) to encounter a book presenting three different generations together and the genuine connections between them.

October 16, 2024

Love is a Mixtape

At the turn of the century, almost all of the romantic love I had to give was unrequited, and the only problem with that (in retrospect) was that I never got to realize my dream of having a boyfriend come along to digitize my vast collection of mixed tapes, and then burn them onto CDs. And I suppose I could have done like Dalloway and digitized the mixtapes myself, but I didn’t have my own internet connection back then, let alone a CD burner, and besides, it used to take entire afternoons to download half a song, and burning a CD could take even longer, and the only people with patience for such projects were the kinds of emotionally stunted, technically-inclined dorks that I tended to have crushes on, and none of them ever cared about me enough to do so.

So my trove of mixtapes was lost to time, from “Britt’s Mix 93” to the ska tape our friend Laura made in 1997, that very random tape I made in Grade 10 that went from April Wine’s “I Wouldn’t Want to Lose Your Love” to Alannah Myles’ “Lover of Mine,” and that most iconic Summer of ‘99 tape whose Side B began with Sophie B. Hawkins’ “As I Lay Me Down” to Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” (and “Angels” by Robbie Williams in there somewhere).

And yes, it’s true that if any of those CD burner-owning boys I’d fancied had ever managed to love me back, the attraction might have petered out around the time they discovered the extent of my affinity for soft rock. The one guy I did go out with during this period didn’t have a CD burner either, but when I gave him a tape that included Heather Nova’s “London Rain (Nothing Heals Me Like You Do),” he was really mean about it, which should have been a red flag—nobody puts a track from the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack in the corner. (Full disclosure: his mixtape for me was really cool, introducing me to music I love to this day, but he was not very nice in the end.)

Mixtapes, for me, in the 1990s, were almost like a scrapbook, compiled in real time. My Sony Sports Walkman was always nearby, and I’d be listening to the tape-in-progress, removing the tape from my deck only to add to it, taping something off a friend’s CD, recording a song off the radio, or from somebody’s parents’ record collection. And then once the tape was complete, it would be titled and dated, a record of time, much of the music not actually contemporary, assembled by chance, but that would become my soundtrack as I made my way through the world, foam headphones ever-present on my ears (at least until I stepped on the headset and broke it, which happened all the time).

My husband never made me a mixtape. We met in 2002, and he’d already embraced the future, a never-to-be-obsolete technology called the minidisc (ha ha) and he brought me on board, for which he still regularly apologizes. He must have made me a mix-minidisc, but I don’t remember what was on it, mostly because there was so much else going on at the time, our separate lives converging, the beginning of forever. In 2005, under the impression of an iconic ad, we each purchased an ipod shuffle (catchphrase: “Life is random”), which was the start of the end of our relationship with physical media (although we still own an entire shelf unit of CDs).

But the ipod shuffle would not be the the end of us sharing music together, on road trips, in the kitchen doing dishes. My husband has a Spotify playlist called “The Kerry List” that is 2 hours and 26 minutes long, specially curated at the intersection of our tastes, and while there’s no Mariah Carey, every single track is one that makes me exclaim, “Tune!” at the opening strains, and to me there is nothing more generous.

Including “London Rain (Nothing Heals Me Like You Do).”

Love is a mixtape, indeed.

(Read on to find great mixtape book recommendations!)

October 16, 2024

BOOKSPO Season Two

7/10 episodes of the BOOKSPO podcast are up now (with more to come on the next three Wednesdays). I’m also so pleased to report that the podcast is now available on Spotify, along with Apple Podcasts, Substack, and (pretty much) everywhere else you get your podcasts.

Guests so far are Corinna Chong, author of the Giller-longlisted BAD LAND; Ayelet Tsbari, author of SONGS FOR THE BROKENHEARTED; Alice Zorn, author of COLORS IN HER HANDS; Marissa Stapley, author of THE LIGHTNING BOTTLES; Suzy Krause, author of I THINK WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE; Jennifer Whiteford, author of MAKE ME A MIXTAPE; and Anne Hawk, author of THE PAGES OF THE SEA. More to come!

October 15, 2024

Toxemia, by Chistine McNair

TOXEMIA‘s gorgeous cover (a collage by @rhinocerospoems) sets the reader up for what’s to come, the literary bricolage, a hybrid of memoir and poetry. “To Lady Sybil,” the book is dedicated, the character from DOWNTOWN ABBEY who died of pre-eclampsia in the show’s third season (after which I refused to watch any more because *how could they have done that?!*). Christine McNair blends high and low cultures, arts and science, words and images, memoir and research to tell the story of her life as a woman with a body, a body that is so often wrong or dangerous, her symptoms and experience disbelieved, disregarded. McNair’s experiences of pre-eclampsia during her two pregnancies don’t just have consequences for her mental and physical health in the years afterwards, but also tap into her experiences with depression, self-harm, and eating disorders. “I am now more afraid of telling doctors my history,” she writes. Though with TOXEMIA, she’s made art of that story, a moving and compelling narrative, strange and edgy, unsettling. Unputdownable.

October 10, 2024

The Accomplice, by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson

I will admit that I first picked up 50 Cent’s debut novel because I found the idea of a novel by 50 Cent really funny, but when I opened up THE ACCOMPLICE, I was surprised from the very first line: “Nia Adams doesn’t have a green thumb, but waters her garden diligently, cares for the soil, tends to the flowers, and tames the weeds. Her favourite perennial is the Lupinus texensis, the Texas blue bonnet. The bright blue petals are the showpiece of her front yard. The flowers thrive on full sunlight and damp soil and are resilient during dry spells. Like Nia, they’re survivors.”

With delight, I can tell you that I loved this book, the story of Nia Adams, the first Black female Texas Ranger, whose fate becomes bound up with that of Vietnam-vet turned thief Desmond Bell after a bank robbery goes very strange with nothing of value appearing to be stolen. The lines between good guy and bad guy, and right and wrong, becomes blurred as we learn more about Bell’s story and as Adams comes to understand her colleagues and the institution she works for.

Written in partnership with crime novelist Aaron Philip Clark, THE ACCOMPLICE is a deft thriller with proper twists and turns, and is absolutely gripping. The only thing that tripped me up was some fairly gruesome violence in a couple of parts, but thankfully the story doesn’t linger there, instead tackling big questions about history, race, power and the possibility of redemption. And 50 Cent even makes a cameo in the text, or at least his music does, when “P.I.M.P.” is being played on somebody’s karaoke machine—Desmond Bell unplugs it.

It’s all a little ridiculous, but I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t.

October 9, 2024

Gleanings

October 8, 2024

The Lodgers, by Holly Pester

“If you’re unsettled, you’re unsettling,” the narrator tells us in THE LODGERS, the debut novel by UK poet Holly Pester (and also the debut novel published by Assembly Press here in Canada). It was a novel I wanted to like based on its premise (a woman returns to her hometown to live in a sublet, all the while reflecting on the person who’s moved into her just-vacated previous quarters) and also based on its cover design (“For some reason I ate [the sandwich], I wasn’t happy. But as a result the triangular box was empty, with an inside that resembled, like sarcasm, the one I was in. I looked inside. It had a window too.”) but very styled slightly abstract fiction that refuses to show its hand isn’t always my favourite thing (so many cool books I tried to love, but couldn’t) so I wasn’t sure how THE LODGERS might go over. It isn’t that I don’t like being unsettled per se, but instead that I want my novels to add up to something, being cool is not enough, but this one does add up. Strange, disorientating, and indeed unsettling, but it has a hook for me to hang my hat, metaphorically speaking. Our unnamed narrator’s new sublet is around the corner from the home of her mother, Moffa, a home to which the narrator still has a backdoor key, letting herself in from time to time once she’s back in town, but Moffa is never there. And neither is Kav, the supposed inhabitant of the second bedroom in her sublet, whose arrival could come at any time, the narrator never able to relax into her new abode because of this anticipation. And meanwhile she addresses the new inhabitant of the room she’d left behind, a room that was only ever hers between the hours of 6pm and 9am because otherwise her landlady operating her massage business of the space, and the narrator found comfort in belonging to this home, however tangentially, and her connection to the landlady’s child, the suggestion of a stable domestic situation that our narrator herself has never known. This is a novel that goes in circles, the way the narrator’s life seems to be, every path leading back again to a home that never was, poignant, comic, and biting at once.

October 7, 2024

The Garden Against Time, by Olivia Laing

“How strange time is. The same patterns keep recurring, a helical sequence of war and sickness, from out of which emerged the same green-veined dream.”

For a book that’s about her own backyard, Olivia Laing’s THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME: IN SEARCH OF A COMMON PARADISE takes her reader everywhere and back through time as she tells the story of her restoration of an 18th century walled garden begun when she and her partner move to Suffolk in 2020, a year that becomes “that year.” As she moves through her own plague seasons, she draws connections to gardens in the minds of Milton (PARADISE LOST) and rural poet John Clare, changes and trends in English landscaping ( a word that, she tells us, began with art and paintings), of how the mid-Atlantic slave-trade was the foundation of so much wealth that shaped the English landscape (I am also reading Tanya Talaga’s THE KNOWING, from which I learn that those very same investors were reaping the rewards of the North American fur trades that would decimate the continent’s Indigenous peoples), and how gardens have also been at the forefront of movements committed to imagining better ways of organizing society, which seems especially pressing to consider in the sweltering summer of 2022 as parts of the UK burned and watering her garden, Laing thought, seemed like an irresponsible indulgence. And how new life took root in the brutal bomb sites of London after the Blitz, so many of these sites turned into parks, and she casts her mind too back to Mark Rumary, the famed UK garden designer who’d once owned her home (and lived with his partner back when, a neighbour tells her, “it wasn’t good to be gay”) and whose vision is everywhere in the garden still, Laing reflecting on her own childhood growing up with a gay parent in the 1980s, and what the garden must have meant to both of them as place of freedom and belonging. And there’s so much more than that, every single page bringing fascinating rewards and gorgeous insight, doses of hard reality coupled with vision and hope. The garden is never simply this or that, instead the garden is a place for both, and, and for the remarkable persistence of living things (gardeners among them).

October 3, 2024

The Possibility of Sweetness

It’s been almost a year now since unimaginable horror was unleashed, and members of my community put up different flags in response, divisions calcified. “I’ve already lost friends to this, and I’m not afraid to lose another,” somebody warned me on Facebook a few weeks later, and thankfully this person wasn’t actually my friend, see you later, but their comment made me reflect about how I want to respond in this moment that has stretched into a near-unbearable year. A year in which people have celebrated and/or shrugged indifferently at massacre and murder, extremism begetting extremism, monstrous disregard for human life, for international law, for the world order. I have seen photos of pieces of children. I have seen photos of pieces of children. I have seen. And I have felt discomfort with my reluctance to not stand with. I’ve felt conflicted about my decision to sign no open letters. I’ve been implored to be sure I’m on the right side of history, to perform it, but history has never been as tidy as that, and neither have I, and what I’ve really felt is that anything I do in such a wretchedly divided world to deepen divisions in my own community is to take a terrible thing and make it even worse, although making a terrible thing worse does seem to have been the main response of anyone with meaningful power at every turn this year, seizing the opportunity for hardening, hatred, and the impossibility for any other story.

It’s just that when I see peoples pitted against either, the endless human story, a thing I’ve never thought is, “We sure need more of that.” A line I can’t stop thinking about: “Both sides brought large speaker systems and screamed duelling chants at each other.” I don’t want to be part of that. I can’t be hard and resolute, not with my friends. Not with my neighbours. Which is not the same as making nice just to get along. Annoyingly, I can argue with every side of this issue, AND I HAVE, except maybe the side that declares that all human life is precious (every one a universe) and that if your politics is turning people into refugees, you’re doing it wrong.

This morning I saw a post from a journalist explaining that during the Jewish High Holidays, checkpoints are closed in the West Bank, which means that the people who live there are effectively under a curfew for three days. And I think of those people as I eat my apple and honey cake, the cake I bake every year because I am culinarily impressionable, and also because I enjoy celebrating a new year (which is to say: POSSIBILITY) anywhere I can, whether it be Persian, Lunar, Jewish. I think of people I admire (many of them Jewish) who have spent this year showing up for Palestinian freedom in loud, powerful and necessary ways. I think of my Jewish friends who have shown up in ways that are quieter and more personal, but no less essential. I think of everybody who has spent the past year with an aching heart, with a voice that’s sore from screaming, whose well of empathy has not yet run dry, all those people who can hold space for the mess of experience and reality and so many awful feelings.

A new year means faith, and hope, the possibility of sweetness.

I believe in this. I believe in us.

September 27, 2024

I Never Said I Was Brave, by Tasneem Jamal

There is so much to wonder about in Tasneem Jamal’s new novel, I NEVER SAID THAT I WAS BRAVE, a strange and compelling story of a complicated friendship between two women whose families were connected in Kitchener’s Ugandan-Indian community after arriving in Canada in the 1970s. Not least of all, what the narrator’s name is, as she takes us through the years of her friendship with Miriam, from their time together as children to their relationship as adults—the narrator flounders in academic, Miriam becomes an astrophysicist who studies dark matter. The narrator’s address is very intimate, her story seemingly meandering as she moves back and forth in time, and across the country too—but what is she hiding from us? What is left unsaid? Why does she frame her story precisely the way she does? How much can we rely on the narrator to tell us who Miriam was, as she describes her friend’s complicated relationships, the way she absorbed so much light, leaving everybody else in shadow. And why does she tell us so little of herself? In some ways, though this novel is far from gothic, I NEVER SAID THAT I WAS BRAVE reminded me of Daphne Du Maurier’s REBECCA, another novel of obsession in which the narrator obfuscates and hides.

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