February 5, 2009

Babies and reading

A few weeks back I was happy to discover that Kate Christensen has a new novel coming out in early June. I’ll be reading it, naturally, though when, I cannot say. If I do happen to be 41 weeks pregnant in early June, then perhaps a good book will be welcome company, though it’s just as likely I’ll be a brand new mother with just a week’s experience, so I probably won’t be reading much of anything.

There are mothers who read, of course– mothers of babies and mothers of toddlers. I know this mostly because I read their blogs, and these mothers provide me with a great deal of reassurance. That having my baby won’t require handing my brain in (or if it does, at least I get it back in a little while). I’ve been planning my summer rereading project already, as I always do, and it’s mainly consisting of easy, well-loved novels that won’t require a great deal of concentration– I’m thinking Good in Bed, Saturday, Happy All the Time, and, if I’m feeling brave, A Novel About My Wife. It would be nice to read maybe one a week? (At the moment I read about three, but then I also work full time.)

I was going to cancel my subscription to The London Review of Books, but I’ve since decided otherwise. I hope motherhood won’t be an excuse to just give up being challenged, and I certainly won’t have to read the whole of every issue. But the articles that interest me are just so interesting, and I learn so much from them. I will be cutting down on the number of periodicals that come into our house though, which probably would be a good idea anyway.

Anyone who has ever had a baby is probably by now hysterical with laughter at my naivete, but let me tell you that whenever I’m told something isn’t possible, I tend to get it done. My mother says that babies sleep a lot. If I remember correctly, Alice Munro has said something much the same, so I believe it. I am also determined to master nursing and reading, which can’t be impossible as I’ve already taught myself to floss and read, and knit and read, so this is just another challenge. But I will try to keep an open mind and my expectations only moderately high.

If by the end of the summer, I’ve read Kate Christensen’s new novel at all, I’ll consider myself not too far off track.

February 4, 2009

Good Egg

We maintain a list at our house of small businesses unlikely to weather the economic downturn well. Already, the pillow shop on Queen Street has gone out of business, and I don’t have high hopes for organic dog bakeries and fromageries. Though that our local tea boutique is flourishing means that Good Egg might stand a chance. At least, I really, really hope it does, because I liked the place a lot.

Another bookstore in Kensingston Market, and that this one specializes in cookbooks is only half the story. They’ve got display tables crowded with kitchen stuff, all your heart so desires but doesn’t especially need, which does nothing to negate that desire– perhaps I should have that ninth teapot. And though usually I’d think twice about any store that sells books and gifts together, Good Egg has selected their books with such obvious care that I really can’t help but forgive them.

The books take up about half the store, and aren’t just cookbooks, but food books, and all varieties of food books. Their children’s section is lovely, stocked with food-themed books for babies and up (I spotted Green Eggs and Ham, The Carrot Seed, The Giving Tree, though there were plenty more), as well as non-food books that are just delicious. Similarly are non-food books for adults stuck in amongst the other shelves, though I got the feeling that if I thought about them hard enough, I could discern how they might fit in with motif. Fiction fascinatingly scattered in the manner of a treasure trove around cookbooks from all over the world, food essays, chef bios, books on agriculture, and the Omnivore’s Dilemma. Every shelf yielding a surprise– an etiquette section, India Knight’s new book on thrift, a book on the art of letter writing, as well as numerous crafty delights.

The whole effect sounds a bit kitschy, but there was substance to it. (Oh, and aren’t Tessa Kiros’ cookbooks the most beautiful in the world?) Every single book in Good Egg had been selected so deliberately, arranged so artfully, and the entire place was a delight to explore just like every good bookstore should be.

February 3, 2009

A delight to live inside

I’ve got a lot to say, but Monday evenings deliver only the briefest window between pre-natal yoga and Midsomer Murders, and so alas. Let it be known that I’m now reading Revolutionary Road, which was a Zmas gift from my friend Bronwyn, and that I spoiled the ending today through wikipedian ramblings, which I’m a bit annoyed about, but I’m still enjoying the read. And that because the last couple of weeks (and more?) have been wrought with anxiety, tension and stress, this weekend was such a delight to live inside. I’ve been volunteering at the Children’s Book Bank since New Year, and have found it’s more than a pleasure to read stories one after another to eager children who then just want one more. On Saturday night, we hosted a small birthday gathering for the one-of-a-kind e. smith, with a special appearance from our beloved Sk8 who’s been in South America for the past two years. And there were cupcakes, oh yes. Then Sunday morning in Kensington, where cheese curds were had and sunshine was soaked and we held hands without mittens, and ice was melting everywhere. A glimpse of spring, which was the best thing. I arrived home with thousands of things to do, but decided to spend the afternoon asleep in my slanket instead. We had dearest friends over for a roast chicken dinner, and it was delicious, company was lovely. And best of all, that our baby is a kickboxer (sport of the future). The flutters have turned to thumps, and I think they just might be the more amazing sensation I’ve ever experienced. I could get kicked and kicked all day.

February 3, 2009

The latest postal haul

I arrived home today to a mailbox overflowing with literary goodness. The latest issue of The New Quarterly, a brand new Canadian Notes and Queries, as well as The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood by Rachel Power, which should still have been en-route from Australia by sea, but I suspect someone put it on an airplane by mistake– what a treat.

February 1, 2009

Pickle Me This reads Canada Reads: Fruit by Brian Francis

In Brian Francis’s not-yet-coming-of -age story Fruit, Peter Paddington is the hero of his own life. So successfully entrenched within his own perspective, he’s in the league of famed adolescent narrators Huck and Holden, though stylistically is most akin to the great Adrian Mole. Francis casts a spell with Peter’s voice, and not once does the spell ever break.

I want to protest only about how this book was sold to me, even in its quirky subtitle, “a novel about a boy and his nipples”. The first line of the blurb on the back of the book is, “Peter Paddington is a 13-year-old, fat, gay cross-dresser…”, which really didn’t immediately capture my attention, so as I read the book I was relieved to come to see that Peter Paddington is actually quite normal. Or perfectly normal from the point of view of anyone who spent a pretty tortured few (or more) years growing into themselves. Any of us who’ve ever had to work in the school library at recess in lieu of having friends, or who’d read that conditioning one’s hair with Hellman’s was a good idea, only to wind up with a scalp like a grease pit.

Peter Paddington may very well grow up to be a fat, gay cross-dresser, which is all fine and well, but the point is that his adolescent experience is pretty universal. Pretty awful too– he’s bullied at school, he’s longing for friends, he’s embarrassed about his body in general, and puberty is hardly doing him any favours. Where the book gets its humour is in the gap between Peter’s reality and his perception of it– a space so rich and brilliant, allowing the reader ample room between the lines to consider this young boy’s situation from an adult point of view. That Peter does not entirely understand his situation is his saving grace, though of course the book does suggest he is more aware than he lets on, but is working to actively avoid enlightenment.

It is this edge then than allows us to take Peter Paddington a little more seriously than we did the similarly hilarious Adrian Mole. Peter is not a caricature, and neither are the people around him– particularly his loving parents who try to do their best, but are just as helpless to help him as he is. The world around him as realistically rendered– Sarnia, Ontario in 1984, with all the pop-cultural touchstones that ring so familiar, and junior high school clique taxonomy.

But Peter’s voice is Francis’s greatest triumph. Peter taking himself so utterly seriously, prioritizing his own point of view in the way that real people do, and it is obvious that Francis gives Peter much the same consideration. Never breaking away from Peter’s vision to insert a bit of irony, to provide a wider perspective, to ensure readers know he’s writing something more than a YA novel FYI, and in never breaking away, Francis thus has created a voice that’s so extraordinary. Peter Paddington is a train wreck waiting to happen, and of course we can see that because we’re years older than he is and we know how the world works, but he really hasn’t figured it out yet. This gap being from where the novel gets its humour, but also from where it earns its most unsentimental poignancy.

And so here’s the part where, for Canada Reads sake, I argue that Francis’s Fruit is superior to Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes. Which is the strange thing about this whole set-up, apples to oranges and all. I will definitely say that Hill’s book might be more important than Francis’s, that The Book of Negroes is more educational, that it will broaden our perspective in a way that Fruit only takes us inward. But Fruit is a better piece of literature, more successful in its realization. With a scope far more limited, admittedly, but I felt Hill’s too-broad scope was actually his greatest limitation. Whereas everything Fruit sets out to do, it succeeds at absolutely.

Canada Reads Rankings (so far):
1) Fruit by Brian Francis
2) The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

January 29, 2009

On reading challenges

Over at the Descant blog, I’ve written a post about the fascinating world of reading challenges.

January 28, 2009

Difficulty is artistically desirable

“Gaming is a much more resistant, frustrating medium than its cultural competitors. Older media have largely abandoned the idea that difficulty is a virtue; if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable. It’s a bit of an irony that difficulty thrives in the newest medium of all – and it’s not by accident, either. One of the most common complaints regular gamers make in reviewing new offerings is that they are too easy. (It would be nice if a little bit of that leaked over into the book world.)” –John Lanchester, “Is it Art?”

January 28, 2009

Hardly Knew Her by Laura Lippman

Though I am not sure if Laura Lippman is so literary, it must mean something that from her writing I learned the word “postprandial.” Her novel What the Dead Know was absorbing, well written and a treat to read, so deserving of its many accolades. Unusual for a genre writer, Lippman has won significant mainstream critical acclaim, and the position of her books on various bestseller lists is a demonstration of her popular appeal. And perhaps my indecisiveness in regards to Lippman’s literary-ness is more to do with the vague boundaries of that genre than the genre Lippman herself is writing from.

The latter genre is crime fiction, detective fiction. Lippman is perhaps best known for her series of novels featuring Tess Monaghan, Baltimore P.I., though she’s written other strand-alone books too. Her novels are plot-driven, fast-paced, page-turners thick with popular appeal, and so (pardon my bias) I was surprised to find such substance there too when I read her What the Dead Know.

In his essay “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”, Michael Chabon discussed “the modern short story.” Pointing out the form’s roots in genre, in that, “As late as about the 1950s, if you referred to “short fiction”, you might have been talking about… the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, science fiction, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war or historical story; the romance story.” This as opposed to the kind of story dominating the form today, which he terms “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” (Whether or not his assessment is fair is an argument for another day.)

Chabon posits that many great contemporary novelists have “plied their trade in the spaces between genres, in no man’s land.” That some of the more interesting short story writers at work today are toiling away in similar locations. He writes, “Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, the short story must, inevitably, go.” (And if I remember some of the best of the Salon de Refuses correctly, the short story is often there-going already).

And so I was pleased, upon finishing Chabon’s essay, to remember that I had a book of Laura Lippman’s short fiction just waiting to be read. Though Lippman’s own straddling seems mainly just on the border between “genre” and “actually good,” this collection would be different from any other collection of short stories I’ve read lately. And I was interested to see how a collection with such decidedly popular appeal might serve to inform my thoughts on short stories in general.

Lippman’s Hardly Knew Her contains a novella, numerous crime stories, two Tess Monaghan stories, as well a fake news profile on Monaghan whose byline is Lippman’s, and is headlined “The Accidental Detective” in homage to Anne Tyler (who, like Lippman, lovingly renders Baltimore in fiction). The crime stories in particular are riveting, employing sleights of hand near-impossible to see coming. Most remarkable are Lippman’s ordinary narrators whose homicidal tendencies are as surprising to the reader as they must have been for the victims. The ruthlessness of these characters, complicated by the fact that we’re not always called on to sympathize with them, or we simply can’t, or (even worse) we find that we do! Suggesting the many ways in which ordinary people do terrible things in their lives, and that ordinary is just a veneer after all.

The thing about a book like this is that it takes the form right back to its roots, and could make any ordinary reader fall in love with the short story. The ordinary reader who thinks he doesn’t like short stories, doesn’t get them, hates being left hanging, how they’re not quite his money’s worth. (These people exist; we don’t hang out with them much, but I’ve met them. They’re the people not buying your latest story collection). But any reader seeking entertainment, amusement, distraction will find herself caught up in these stories, one after another, and perhaps realize the form is alive, vibrant, and altogether relevant to their reading experiences. Opening up the form, so perhaps the reader might seek some more of it, in admiration of the short story’s so neat and so sprawling containment. Of how every short story is really such a trick all along.

January 27, 2009

tolls like a bell for miles

“…because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other, more impressive motivations and explanations. I could uncork more stuff about reader response theory, or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could adduce Kafka’s formula: “A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.” I could go down to the cafe at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler about the power of literature off a mug. But in the end– here’s my point– it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles.” –Michael Chabon, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights” from Maps and Legends

January 26, 2009

Amazingly above-average

Today’s postal haul wasn’t huge, but was mostly amazingly above-average (or at least way not just bills and flyers). The Good: two letters, one from the Governor General and the other from The South Pole. The Bad: another issue of magazine whose subscription I’m definitely not renewing because, once again, upon perusing table of contents, I see the editors have forgotten that women can write.