September 6, 2009

Springing

I’ve been disappointed by quite a few books lately, which might be because reading doesn’t come so easy these days, ever since breastfeeding got convenient and doesn’t take up my whole life. So a book has really got to be worth my while, seeing as “so little time” has never been more true. I also continue to put books on hold at the library, and have about thirty books waiting to be read on my shelf. All this to say that I’ve got reservations on springing for a hardcover, but I still think I’m going to buy A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, because Lisa Moore’s review made me hungry to read it.

In other acquisitions news, today I bought Harriet Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

September 1, 2009

A Compendium of Literary Harriets

For my own interest, and compilation will be ongoing. Please feel free to add to the list via comments:
1) A Big Storm Knocked it Over by Laurie Colwin: Harriet aka “Birdie”
2) Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce: Harriet Bartholomew aka Hatty
3) Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet M. Welch
4) Harriet, You’ll Drive Me Wild by Mem Fox: Harriet Harris
5) Garbo Laughs by Elizabeth Hay: Harriet Browning
6) The Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers: Harriet Vane
7) The Gates of Ivory by Margaret Drabble: Harriet Osborne
8) Harriet Bean series by Alexander McCall Smith: Harriet Bean
9) Emma by Jane Austen: Harriet Smith
10) Coventry by Helen Humphreys: Harriet Marsh
11) Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley: Harriet de Luce (in spirit)
12) The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing: Harriet Lovett
13) “Harriet” (poem)by Charlie McKenzie: Harriet Michaels. (In the film So I Married an Axe Murderer, so this is a fictional literary Harriet).
14) Franklin the Turtle series by Paulette Bourgeois: Harriet the Turtle (Franklin’s sister).
15) The Little Friend by Donna Tartt: Harriet Dufresnes
16) Harriet and the Garden by Nancy Carlson: Harriet (who is a dog)
17) The Colour by Rose Tremain: Harriet Blackstone
18) Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym: Harriet Bede
19) The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larrson: Harriet Vanger
20) Mr. King’s Things by Genevieve Cote: Harriet the Owl (who was named for my Harriet!!)
21) After Claude by Iris Owens: Harriet (who has no last name)

September 1, 2009

September

September is the end of my self-imposed fiction writing maternity leave. Though no doubt the world would not miss my fiction if I never went back, I find that I miss it, and I have a feeling the experience of writing it is going to be different now that I’ve had a baby. So my goal is to write for fifteen minutes every day, which is a small goal but with my current schedule will some days be impossible. Therefore I should ideally do it before breakfast, right? Oh, but I’m not quite ready to sacrifice sleep, which is still far too precious. So we shall see.

September is also two literary events I’m looking forward to– first, the launch of Patricia Storms’ picture book The Pirate and the Penguin on September 12 at the Yorkville Public Library. Harriet and I are very excited, and not just because we’ve been told there will be cake. I can’t wait to get the book, and help to celebrate the work of such a marvelous lady.

And then the following week, we’re off to the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival! Terry Griggs! Miriam Toews! Mary Swan! Lynn Johnston! Zoe Whittall! Etc. etc. I am very looking forward.

(Also exciting is that today I’m wearing a pair of pre-pregnancy pants. I’ll sure miss elastic waists, but it had to happen sooner or later…)

August 28, 2009

Books for tactility

Of course, the point of books is exploration, and it was very exciting to see Harriet realizing that this morning. I’ve been helping her “read” her touch and feel books for a while now, but this morning she reached out and did it herself. I read to her all the time, and she seems to listen, and she looks at the pictures, but this was the first active response she’s ever shown to a book, and it made me very happy. Books are for touching indeed, and soon they’ll be for eating, and one day you’ll be reading and have the world in your hands.

August 28, 2009

RIPs

Must admit that fateful day that took Farrah and Michael had me rolling my eyes only, but it does seem a bit much that Wednesday saw the deaths of Ted Kennedy, Ellie Greenwich and Dominick Dunne, each of whom meant a lot to me. Kennedy by virtue of being a Kennedy alone, and there was a time in my life when I lapped up Kennedy bios like they were fiction (and they sort of were). I know Ted Kennedy was both a hero and a dastardly villain, but I’m most amazed by a story I once read alluding to about him having sex with a woman in a crowded restaurant. I could find no further details, but it’s the best story I’ve ever heard. As far as I know, Ellie Greenwich got up to no such thing, but her music has been part of the soundtrack to my life (“I met him at the candy store, he turned around and smiled at me. You get the picture?” “Yes, we see.”)

But since we’re talking literature here, let’s focus on Dominick Dunne. Which means we’re not talking literature with a capital L, but I loved his books. When we lived in Japan, we frequented Wantage Books, a used bookshop in Kobe. Wantage Books was an English bookshop, which was rare and wonderful, and we’d buy at least ten books per visit. (It’s odd to remember what a precious commodity readable books were then, and how easy it was to take them for granted again). It was at Wantage where I found Various Miracles, my favourite Carol Shields book, discovered Margaret Drabble, and bought up every Dominick Dunne novel in the store. Stuart and I were obsessed with them, and remember reading them on my train commutes to work, gripping mass-market paperbacks that fit perfectly into my purse. The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, and A Season in Purgatory (speaking of Kennedys), People Like Us, and besides, he was Joan Didion’s brother-in-law, so I felt better about the whole thing.

There was something about the foreigness of our every day surroundings that made Dunne’s novels like a tonic. American, and glamour, and scandal, and intrigue– we devoured it like the books were bad for us, and perhaps they were, but they satisfied. They were delicious. And then I remember, after a string of Dunne novels, reading something else finally and being confused when there was no fil*tio by page three. I’ve since adjusted back, but I’ll always remember how perfect his books were at the time.

August 27, 2009

Alternate Endings

“You know all those blank pages they have at the end of books? I always thought they were there so that if you didn’t like the way the book ended, you could write your own ending. I wrote rediculous alternate endings on those pages to pretty much every book I ever read as a kid… I pretty much made everything a happy ending. Leslie dying in Bridge of Terabithia was just a dream; Winnie decides to drink from the spring and run away with Jesse in Tuck Everlasting; Elizabeth returns to Frobisher Bay forever in The Other Elizabeth; Walter’s death in World War One was just a case of mistaken identity in Rilla of Ingleside. Oh, and the end of every one of my Nancy Drew books now features a love scene between Nancy and Ned. I was so frustrated that he was supposed to be her boyfriend, yet we never saw them kiss!”– Amy Jones from “Amy Jones in Conversation” by Katia Grubisic, in The New Quarterly

August 27, 2009

The Mem Keeps Coming

Sometimes one thing leads to another, or else it just leads to the same thing over and over again. The latter in this case, which is the case of children’s author Mem Fox, beginning with her book finding its way into my house quite indirectly. From reader comments, I discover that everybody loves Mem Fox, and get some further Mem recommendations. The next week at the Library Story Time (which was incredible, incidently, are we ever lucky to have the Toronto Public Library system available to us!), the librarian pulls out Fox’s latest Hello Baby, as well as Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes. (They are so good!) And then today I walked into a bookshop near my house and found a copy of Mem Fox’s Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever. Naturally, I bought it. Tomorrow I expect I’ll run into Mem Fox in the grocery store, never mind that she lives in Australia…

August 26, 2009

So lucky

Harriet is three months today, which means I’ve got every right to post baby pictures. And we’ve got some gorgeous ones, taken this weekend by our friend Erin who makes everything beautiful, as well as another one displaying the ever-elusive, always precious Harriet smile. This third month has been a very fine one, real life returned to us. Harriet sleeps in her crib now, and for such long periods of time that I’m a very spoiled mom. During the past week we’ve gotten so that I get to come back downstairs after putting her to bed, rather than just collapsing into bed exhausted.

I kept a journal of letters to the baby throughout my pregnancy, and my plan was to write it throughout the postpartum too, but I didn’t write a word until Harriet was nearly two months old. Which is interesting– I’ve thought so much about how there is so little record of what that period is actually like for anybody, but I know that for me, I had no desire to write it all down so in essence to live it twice. Once was most certainly enough. It is, like much of motherhood, I am learning, better just to get on with it.

But part of the struggle, for me, was that my feelings weren’t at all what I’d expected them to be. Not only did I not know how to articulate them properly, but I was uncomfortable even trying. I’d wondered if I’d see my baby and recognize her from the start, but I didn’t. Getting to know her has been a slow and involved project, and of course I have to say that of course I’ve always loved her, but it’s much more complicated than that, really. I’ve had to grow into this love, or perhaps it’s that my love for her is so entrenched within me that I barely recognize it. It’s way below the surface, is what I mean, so that I find myself staring at this tiny stranger and wondering who she is, and yet when we’re apart, she is the string of thoughts in my head. Meeting her needs is such a primal urge I’m scarcely conscious of it, and yet it’s overwhelming. When she’s sleeping, I want her to never ever change, and at the same time I’m so eager to mark her progress, to meet this person she’s slowly becoming. I can’t remember what I ever did before, who I was then, but I also don’t feel substantially changed. In that I’ve been Harriet’s mother forever and ever, is what I mean by that. Or something quite different at the very same time.

I’ve heard tell of complaints that Toronto’s had a very rotten summer, but I’ve missed the rotten, playing with my baby under shady trees, taking long walks, taking her to yoga, to the library, to the museum to sit on a bench and watch the fish swim. We’ve cut down on our evening walks now that the baby goes to bed early, but they were what got me through June and July when Harriet screeched on schedule, and I will remember the fresh air of those nights with fondness forever. Too many trips leading to ice cream, but it kept us happy and sane(ish). And now lately, we’ve had weekend trips away, a jaunt over to Toronto Island, and we’re going away this weekend too for a tiny getaway, just for fun, just for summer. The summer that I thought would be lost to me, because certainly I do not remember June, but it all comes back, slowly, it does. And we’re happy, if not always, and so lucky, always, always.

August 25, 2009

Thinking is not a performance

I’ve just started reading The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens, whose novel The Girls I loved so very much a while back. And I’m starting Amy Jones’ fiction in The New Quarterly, which makes me look forward to her forthcoming book What Boys Like. Online, Lawrence Hill discusses his problem with the overuse of To Kill a Mockingbird in schools. Writer Laurel Snyder on overcoming her Twitter addiction: ” It’s the idea that thinking is not a performance, hard as that can be for someone like me to accept.”

August 24, 2009

Define "tuffet"

“The conventional wisdom is that a precocious reader is a child in possession of a prenatural grasp of both the facts and features of the adult world. This may well be true of some, but was not true of me. My reading list didn’t grant me access to the particulars of adult life, but to its moody interstices, the dark web of complex feeling that apparently suffused life after grade school. Like a child reciting nursery rhymes, I was consumed by the music of the words, not the circumstances surrounding Miss Muffet and her actual tuffet. (Well, can you, even now, define “tuffet”?)” –Lizzie Skurnick, from Shelf Discoveries