March 11, 2008
It's not just me
My husband is now reading Nikolski, inspired by my exuberant praise for the novel last week. So of course I was a bit apprehensive: I had declared Nikolski “perfect”, what if it failed to measure up?
Last night when I came to bed, I tried to ease him into the story. Saying things like, “The beginning’s a bit strange, I know. It’s hard to tell what’s happening but it will make more sense soon, and you’ll get used to the writing style, and soon the prose will string itself right through your mind, and the fish!!” (For it happens that I am going through a period of being obsessed with fish).
And Stuart said, “I love it already. But be quiet, I’m trying to read now.”
It’s rarely such a pleasure to be shushed.
March 10, 2008
Digging Out
Heather Mallick on the fake memoir craze: “The phenomenon is interesting, but the reasons behind it are fascinating. Is it mere animal spirits? Or is it what P.G. Wodehouse called the craze for notoriety, the curse of the modern age?”
Ali Smith on Carson McCullers: “She was capable of reading so deeply that she wouldn’t notice her own house go up in flames around her, as once happened when she was lost in Dostoevsky. Unable as a child to stop reading Katherine Mansfield’s stories when she went to the store for groceries, she carried on as she asked for the goods at the counter, then under the street lamp outside. As a fledgling writer, she was sacked from her day job as a book-keeper for a New York company when the boss found her deep in Proust’s Swann’s Way under the big ledger.” (I am going to try this trick, and hopefully be sacked from my day job too.)
The Monsters of Templeton, which I adored upon reading, is called “a pleasurably surreal cross between The Stone Diaries and Kind Hearts and Coronets” in The Guardian. More on Alan Sillitoe on his 80th. Janice Kulyk Keefer’s wonderful novel The Ladies’ Lending Library is awarded (and you might recall I adored that one too).
And I am very excited because I just put Katrina Onstad’s novel How Happy To Be on hold at the library, as well as Rebecca Rosenblum‘s favourite novel Weetzie Bat, and Mom the Wolfman and Me (for old time’s sake). Now reading Zoe Whittall’s novel Bottle Rocket Hearts.
March 9, 2008
Underlining my point
Check out this photo (I assume it to be stock) from the front page of yesterday’s Globe & Mail. Yesterday at the Descant blog I wrote about the resonance of 1970s YA fiction, and the effect of writers like Norma Klein on our formative years. More of an effect than I imagined, however, if this photograph is anything to go by. But then Girls Can Be Anything was published in 1973! I wonder, are we holding onto these books out of nostalgia, or has nothing as good or better come along since then? I’ve not actually been paying attention, and hope indeed something else has come along. These are things that can’t get lost. Liberal propaganda it might have been, but then my own indoctrination into Free to Be… You and Me, for example, only ever had the effect of teaching me how to be happy.
March 9, 2008
Better late than nevah-evah
I’m now reading Michael Redhill’s Consolation, the book chosen for Keep Toronto Reading One Book 2008. Which, of course, was in February. I am never terribly good at these communal reads– like Canada Reads, just barely mentioned here though it went on last week (and was very well documented by others). Though I do delight in them– bookishly saturated media and all that– and so I’m a bit ashamed to never take part.
But then not ashamed enough to start (alas the Tournament of Books will have to go on without me.) I blame the weather, mostly. I use up too much energy trudging through snow and slipping on sidewalks to be so focussed. I suspect that any Bookish Extravaganza during sunlit months might enthrall me, but now I’m just too tired. Further, I’m pretty choosy about what I read. You may notice the overwhelmingly-positive nature of my reviews, which is a product of me never ever reading books I don’t want to read, or books I think I should.
Finally, my t0-be-reads are stacked to the roofbeams (note: oh wow, in my new bedroom roofbeams will no longer just be metaphorical!). I’m pretty inflexible when it comes to said stack (someone once loaned me a book without asking and I almost had a nervous breakdown). I don’t have a lot of space to play with bookwise, my life span being limited and the number of brilliant books out there decidedly not.
So yes, I am blaming my own mortality for me not having read Consolation when I should have. And indeed, I should have read it in February, not only because The Toronto Public Library is my world favourite institution, but because the book is wonderful. I was a bit apprehensive because I’d thought it was historical fiction. (I don’t like historical fiction. This annoys people, as does the fact that I refuse to read books containing dragons. I am way more willing to bend on the historical fiction, however.)
However Consolation turns out to be about the engagement between modernity and its history– my most beloved literary pre-occupation! (The reason I love British fiction). And you get so little of that stuff, really, in CanLit, perhaps there not being quite enough history yet to go around yet. (The few exceptions I can think of are books I didn’t like). Sure we are focussed on our past here– you can’t go 5 miles without falling over a pioneer house– but only in the sense that it’s “there”, set up behind a velvet rope. Whereas in Consolation, history is right here– almost literally, in my case. Which is something I find tremendously exciting.
March 8, 2008
Glorious Girls
To honour International Women’s Day, at the Descant blog I’m thinking about the girls in the feminist YA novels I came of age on.
March 8, 2008
How the world is to be saved
Perhaps somebody already thought of this, but it just occurred to me. How the world is to be saved, not by crackpot TV psychologists, or even books (particularly this one). If your self and spirit are in such dire straits, wouldn’t it do wonders to quit watching TV in the afternoon?
March 7, 2008
I don't want money
“By temperament I’m a vagabond and a tramp. I don’t want money badly enough to have to work for it. In my opinion it’s a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours– all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.” –William Faulkner, Paris Review Interviews Volume II
March 6, 2008
Tired of snow
Did you know I’ve never read Harriet the Spy? I don’t even know why, especially since I had this peculiar obsession with its sequel The Long Secret. Anyway, recent events have inspired me to give Harriet a try at some point soon. And Kate’s post has inspired me to add The Stone Angel to my list of summer rereads. I’m now reading Brighton Rock, and I get excited every time it mentions the hotel where I spent my honeymoon. Yesterday was Allan Sillitoe’s birthday and on why he’s still an angry young man at 80. (Indeed, his Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was one of the most powerful books I read last year.) And I am terribly tired, as well as tired of snow.
UPDATE: Holy Louise Fitzhugh! Lizzie Skurnick on The Long Secret. And then read more on our YA favourites. (This via Kid*Literary).
March 5, 2008
Collecting Pieces
The three of us kept these scrapbooks back in high school, called “Nothing Books” or “Anything Books”— an indication of their contents’ specificity. I was partial to transcribing copy from sportswear ads into mine, penning bubble letters in rainbow hues: “Seek the Goal” or “Run Fast in the Direction of Your Dream” which I thought was inspirational and I wasn’t even athletic.
Pop lyrics were prized like they were poetry— excerpts from “You Gotta Be” by Des’ree (“Listen as your day unfolds/ Challenge what the future holds”), the entirety of “Forever Young” by Alphaville. We preferred our illuminations encapsulated, entirely divorced from their contexts: lines from novels we’d not yet read by Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde. We had a thing for speeches by Kennedys, and Martin Luther King Jr. I had a quote by Sappho on the side of one page, and a lyric by Bob Geldof on the other.
And amongst all these wise words were pasted photographs of ourselves, and pictures cut from magazines of the dreams we hoped to one day embody, the kind of people we hoped we’d become. Also, ticket stubs from movies, plays and concerts. Shiny labels peeled off juice bottles. We’d make lists with such headings as “Things I Like” and “Future Children’s Names”.
We were partial to a premature nostalgia, this furious attempt to contain the present exactly as it was. Entirely self-absorbed, perhaps, but I would argue our scrapbooks were more about the world around us. Assembled more in homage to the future than to the present or the past.
Because in high school, although the world was just beginning to show its face, it certainly didn’t belong to us yet. There we were, as grown as we’d ever be (or so we figured), both capable of and yearning for real life, but with most of it still out of reach.
So in lieu of our lives and in lieu of the world, we turned to collecting the pieces instead. Life’s rule was chaos, as we were beginning to understand, but if we could write down its maxims, perhaps we might tame it. Imagine various butterflies, pinned by their wings, encased under glass, and such were our pieces of the world, these scraps and clippings— our desperate need to contain in order for understanding. But imagine scotch tape instead of the pins.
The truth was that apart from these sloppy collections of stuff, the three of us had nothing. Oh, of course there were the usual teenage trappings; we’d been born lucky, each of us blessed with bicycles and bedrooms. But so little of it was actually our own, things we’d chosen ourselves as reflections of our tastes. Usual trappings were all well and good, but we were after something more essential.
For we didn’t even have our selves yet, and perhaps we knew that. That in so many ways we were still in utero, and how terrifying it must have been to be alive and unsure of who we’d ever grow to be. Exciting too, but it made for constant insecurity, this explaining such lists as “Things I Like”. We had spent our whole lives ever-changing; our very souls only ephemeral, fluid, impossible. So it was no wonder that we self-defined in bits and pieces, down on paper in point form. When you’re sixteen years-old in the world, you see, you take what you can get.
Though of course over time we would get much more. Teenagedness was an affliction to be cured of, finally, as life started offering us three-dimensions. Bringing with it actual things, experiences, and none of it cut from magazines. So we could be living the life un-tape-downable, learning new lessons that couldn’t be contained on a page.
And though we are still not so old now, these days we’re old enough that it’s remarkable we’ve been friends for half our lives. Remarkable too, for it seems that between the three of us, somehow, we’ve acquired the trappings of adulthood. We have husbands and fiancés, a beautiful house, two cars, a dog, a couple of successful careers, six degrees and we’ve traveled to 20 countries. We’ve made a wealth of new friends, good memories, smart decisions, proud mistakes with lessons learned and stupider ones with stories.
Though none of this is entirely essential either; of course we know that. All these things we hold now— whether literal or figurative in their three dimensions— they might one day appear as insubstantial as our scrapbooks. We know that we’re probably still assembling our pieces.
But this makes them no less a creation, these lives of ours. Like the treasures our books were— how we’d marvel that we’d made them. Like the treasures the books still are, and how far they show we’ve come. So we can keep marveling at the world’s knack of making wholes out of pieces, and at friendship as the very foundation.
