September 27, 2024
Coming Up This Fall
I’m looking forward to some really cool fall events, kicking off this weekend at Toronto’s Word on the Street Festival, where I get to interview the author of one of my favourite books of the year!
September 29: WOTS with Shawn Micallef and STROLL
Stage C: Vibrant Voices of Ontario presented by Ontario Creates @ontariocreates
September 29th
2:15 – 3:00 PM
“Unofficial Mayor of Toronto” Shawn Micallef joins us to talk about the newly updated edition of his Toronto favorite book, Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto.
What is the ‘Toronto look’? Glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.
Join Shawn Micallef in conversation with local author Kerry Clare about meandering our city’s unique neighborhoods and celebrating a city in motion.
Presented by the Toronto Public Library @torontolibrary
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I’m excited to talk with these two great authors about their wonderful fall books. Event begins at 7:30pm.
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October 25: Toronto Library Virtual Event on Women in Piracy
From the ‘golden age’ of pirates to today, Women have played an integral, yet untold, role in piracy. In this special panel conversation, three leading experts on the legacy of Women in piracy discuss all the strange and scary real life adventures of Women living, surviving and thriving amongst pirates.
Rebecca Simon is a historian of early modern piracy, Colonial America, the Atlantic World, and maritime history. She is the author of Pirate Queens: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, The Pirates’ Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship and Why We Love Pirates: The Hunt for Captain Kidd and How He Changed Piracy Forever.
Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian and novelist. She is the author of A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself and The Penguin Book of Pirates.
Brittany VandeBerg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama, USA. She is the author of Women of Piracy.
Rebecca, Katherine and Brittany discuss Women in piracy with host Kerry Clare.
Friday October 1, 12-1 pm. Sign up here.
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October 27: The Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon
Once again, I’m taking part in the Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon to raise money for Rethink, in memory of my friend Melanie Masterson, who died in 2022 after living with metastatic breast cancer. I’d be grateful if you could support the campaign…or even sign up to take part yourself!
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November 5: Queen Books Event with Yvonne Blomer, Ariel Gordon, and Sue Sorensen
Details coming soon!
September 24, 2024
HUM, by Helen Phillips
In Helen Phillips’ HUM, as with her previous novel THE NEED, the most unsettling parts of the narrative are those that are most familiar, and I don’t even mean the post-apocalyptic backdrop that certainly draws on the possibilities of our present (the forests have burned, May’s children have never seen strawberries growing on a plant, unhealthy air quality is a baseline, the heat is unrelenting, and society is structured on a network of AI systems called “hums”), but instead the anxiety underlying every sentence, an echo of the title. This is not so much a plot or character-based novel as a vibes-based novel, and the vibes are bad. Desperate for money after losing her job, AI developer May agrees to undergo a slight facial modification procedure that she believes is part of a counter-surveillance movement in a society where everything is tracked, and with the payout she splurges for tickets for her family to three days at The Botanical Gardens, a Disney-esque simulation of the natural world she so longs for: “She had done it. She had borne them to a clean green place.” May leaves her phone behind when they leave home, and makes her husband and children do the same (the children, like all children, wear gadgets on their wrist called “bunnies”), and May dares to suppose her family might have a reprieve from the relentless tracking and advertising from the devices they’re all attached to, but she comes to regret her choice when things go wrong and there is a chance her children might be lost to her. None of this description really doing justice to what’s going on here, to the force that drives the story forward, to the accelerated beat-beat-beat of May’s anxious heart as she struggles to hold her family, her marriage, her whole world together. Any parent who has ever considered picking up Jonathan Haidt’s THE ANXIOUS GENERATION will see themselves in May, and while all this might not sound so appealing (who really wants a mirror-image of their most stressed-out self?), Phillips’ taut narrative reads up fast and is utterly gripping, and is rooted in that part of the maternal experience that’s even more essential than worry, and that is love.
September 23, 2024
AFAF in the Fall
“It was three o’clock in the morning, the two of them the only ones still awake, still buzzing after a night of drinking and fun. Their apartment had been full of people that night, still scattered throughout. It was near the beginning of their final year at school, it felt like they were at the centre of the world, sitting on Clara’s windowsill, dizzy and overlooking the rooftops. They’d been singing “Landslide” at the top of their lungs until someone from a neighbouring building had screamed out of the window for them to shut up.
Jess was smoking, which was mostly an affectation, but Clara didn’t call her on it because friends forgave each other these things, the same way Jess never said a word when Clara sang the wrong words to the songs on the CDs they played in the kitchen: ‘We sit here in our store and drink some toast…”
A book for all seasons! Have you picked up ASKING FOR A FRIEND yet?
September 20, 2024
Christmas in September
I have sore arms today after schlepping my haul around the Victoria College Book Sale yesterday for two hours, but it was so worth it (and the gains, bro!). But first—it seems I’ve been remiss at posting about the Victoria College Book sale on my blog, nothing since 2016 (which was the first time I’d attended without a baby or toddler in many years). I promise I’ve been showing up since, except for during the pandemic when the sale was cancelled. On Instagram I posted about 2017 (an EXCELLENT haul!), the beautiful Barbara Pym first editions I got in 2019, last year’s stack was particularly glorious.
Once upon a time I was so broke I could only go to the sale on half-price Monday, but I’ve moved up in the world and can now afford the $5 entry on opening day, which paid off so well, because I ended up with a pile of (North American) first edition Muriel Sparks, a pristine Dutton paperback of an Elizabeth Taylor, and a copy of William Trevor’s third novel (his early works are my favourite) that is SIGNED! Plus two beautiful Vintage Contemporaries, a beautiful Percival Everett novel to follow up my reading of James, and a Debo Mitford memoir that I’ve never read (though I do have her earlier book Counting My Chickens. I wouldn’t want you to think I didn’t…)
It was especially exciting to know that I’d see my friend Amy Lavender Harris there for our annual date, that we didn’t even need to make a plan for it. We started hanging out when our children were babies, and now they’re both in high school, which means Amy and I are unencumbered as we’re rifling through cardboard boxes of musty books, same as we ever was.
Today was a significant milestone in one way, however: my first Vic Book sale in which I encountered one of my own books, blessedly not inscribed to a beloved friend. (Phew.) Look at me right there with Douglas Coupland and last year’s winner of the Giller Prize (and two books from small presses that no longer exist. Sigh.)
I also ran into two lovely people who I worked with at the Vic Library 25 years ago, back when I was a student assistant and the world’s biggest idiot.
September 18, 2024
On Emily-Splaining
People are weird on the internet. A couple of weeks ago, a comment turned up on a post I published more than four years ago about rereading Emily of New Moon, and this commenter was not having it, unleashing a diatribe of scolding. And not even for having stolen a copy of the book from my school library (which would have been fair!), but for having understood Emily within the context of Anne, and for judging a book by its cover. Of my trouble with the drowned barn cats, they wrote “If your delicate modern sensibilities are disturbed by this, well — you need to read other books.” OMG, SERIOUSLY, COMMENTER: DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?? I have read ALL THE BOOKS. And then they proceeded to answer all the questions I’d posed in my post, which was really really annoying since these were actually the questions I’d had about the books when I was 9, and I’d actually worked most of them out by now. It was more than a little PATRONIZING.
But I’m not bringing this all up so you can be indignant along with me. (Okay, I am A LITTLE BIT). But instead because I also really understood where this annoying person was coming from—and perhaps this is why I’m especially indignant because I’m just the same. To ASSUME that you could explain L.M. Montgomery to ME! And I understand that there is a whole community of Montgomery scholars and historians, and they even have a society, and that’s fine, but I’m still quite sure that nobody there could have the connection to Montgomery and her work that I do. I’m entirely wrong about this, just in case that needs stating, but it doesn’t matter, because my connection to Anne and to L.M. Montgomery’s story feels so fundamental and so personal that it’s impossible to imagine that anyone else could precisely know what I’m talking about when I mention it. And of course they can, but there are parts of the story that were mine alone—my Anne of Green Gables clothespeg doll I bought in Fenelon Falls, the Anne of Green Gables Treasury I absolutely coveted from this folksy store at the mall and saved up for. When I was Anne for Halloween, the copies of the novel that were gifts from my Grandma. The time we were out on a boat with another family, and I asked my mom how Anne and Gilbert managed to make all their children because, according to Anne of Ingleside, they slept in separate bedrooms…
If that commenter is anything like me, they are possessive of their Emily. Other people might have their own Emily stories, but it’s not the same, and it’s the strangeness of these characters we got to know in our most formative years, the way it felt like they were speaking directly to our souls, but other readers were picking up the very same signals. The way that reading seems like such a solitary thing, a private universe, but there are so many of these, and the shock of realizing the connection may not have been quite so intimate after all.
September 16, 2024
The Opposite of a Void
My Pickle Me This Digest for September is out now, with a short piece about literary community and the role I’d like to play in it. Free for all readers, and you can read it here!
September 12, 2024
THE WEDDING, by Gurjinder Basran
Gurjinder Basran’s The Wedding begins with a Jane Austen epigraph, which had me supposing this might be an Uzma Jalaluddin-esque modern take on social mores, but set among Sikh-Canadian families instead of in the Muslim-Canadian community that Jalaluddin writes about, and while there’s a bit of that, there’s also none of the formality, which makes for a wild literary adventure, and I loved it. Each chapter moves between the perspectives of family members, neighbours, event staff, and those of Devi and Baby themselves, bride and groom, whose wedding marks the joining of two prominent families in Vancouver. And things are not going well—Baby’s dad is driving a cab to earn extra money to afford the lavish occasion, there are rumours of Devi having cheated on a trip to Las Vegas with a local gangster involves with a shooting that put Baby’s brother in a wheelchair, Baby’s not sure if he ever really loved Devi or if the wedding preparation has turned her into Bridezilla. Meanwhile Devi is considering if she’ll manage to avoid a trap like the marriage between her mother and abusive father. The wedding photographer’s mother has set him up on a date with Baby’s out of town cousin, having written a profile that falsely claims he’s an engineer. Local journalist Priya Deol is doling out love advice, but perhaps needs help of her own. The bigoted neighbour has concerns about the noise, as the wedding unfolds over days, characters considering the role of ritual and tradition, whether the why of it all matters, what it means to listen to one’s heart. A delicious page-turner, but also rich with depth and meaning, The Wedding is a terrific read.
September 11, 2024
Gleanings
- We all know the answers, but we need to hear them again and again. We need to listen to the work, our life’s work, most of all, because it tells us what we’re required to do.
- I’m half Pakistani, and occasionally I wonder if it’s odd that this expresses itself almost exclusively through food. Is it odd? Is it enough? Is it okay to only express part of who you are in a highly specific way?
- I know, some of us are the gatherers. The ones who reach out and invite and create the space. And some of us are the gathered. The ones that say yes, that show up, that ask, that listen, that learn. Our tables need to be filled with both. Maybe we need to try the one that’s harder for us … or not.
- In the breaks between death defying formation stunts; modern fighter jets screeching across the sky; the stately elegance of the Lancaster bomber; and lifesaving waterbombers scooping Lake Ontario and regurgitating it back, we discussed this weird fascination we share and how at odds it is with our environmental and political views.
- Nearly 100 years after Mrs. Dalloway was published, I sat on a bench and felt chills all over my body. What is this terror, what is this ecstasy. What was it? Something had happened to me beyond what was intellectual, and beyond what was emotional. It was, I concluded, so spiritual I could not put words to it.
- When my mom finally sold the house and the smell became very rare, I finally became able to smell it—there’s a few items and areas in my mom’s current place that contain it, certain cupboards I stick my head in and sniff and remember.
- This morning, at the beginning of my swim, a little silver trout jumped out of the water just beyond where I was heading, the curve of its body an opening parenthesis to my thinking.
- The cold, hard, truth about enjoying a spectacularly good day is that it is, simultaneously, someone else’s very worst day. Life’s Yin and Yang, our shared burden – knowing that the houses of joy and anguish both have revolving doors. Understanding that as we are born, someone is dying; that as we rise, someone is falling; that as we laugh, someone is crying and that, despite clinging to hope, we cannot end or even pause that cycle – we are all constantly trading places.
- I’m a very clumsy, generally inactive person but when I’m on the ice, I feel fast and light and strong. Let’s be clear: I’m a terrible skater! I haven’t figured out how to stop yet. But the feeling of being on skates is paralleled only when I’m in the water: where I suddenly understand the strength of my body and the joy in movement.
- Parents understand that the real New Year begins in September, and my mindset has shifted accordingly over the past week. My kids are back in school! The sun is setting earlier each day! What am I doing with my life?!
- What are the values we’ve internalized along the way? We are all part of our varied pasts and upbringing, but there are some values we all (or most of us) subscribe to and which are non-negotiable in our friendships and relationships. Apart from the Dream Big and Laugh out Loud type of superficial exhortations, I think the underlying message on the placard is: Be someone who others can respect and trust. Be considerate. Be genuine and kind. Be a person of integrity.
Will ‘we’ tolerate not having bananas? Will i be able to grow bananas in New England?
September 10, 2024
DEATH AT THE SIGN OF A ROOK, by Kate Atkinson
I didn’t know I liked detective fiction until I read Case Histories in 2005 (apparently purchased with a gift token I got for my 26th birthday!), following up my introduction to Kate Atkinson with her stunning, award-winning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum, but I have been devoted to Jackson Brodie ever since, and the book turned me on to the genre in general, a genre of which Atkinson is very aware in this latest Brodie instalment, Death at the Sign of the Rook. And it’s true that self-aware detective fiction is having a moment. Maybe it’s not a golden age, exactly, but I’m thinking about Knives Out and Glass Onion, and Richard Osman novels, Only Murder in the Building. Death at the Sign of the Rook begins with a murder mystery weekend at a great house, Brodie himself turning up (there has been a snowstorm and he’s stranded) along with the team of actors playing the parts, and can you imagine what it would be like to run a murder mystery with Jackson Brodie in the room? Atkinson has talked about writing this book in lockdown and her desire to have some fun with the experience, which makes this a lighter Jackson Brodie than we’ve encountered for a while. What leads to the great house begins with a series of art thefts in Northern England, Ilkley, specifically, which is one of my favourite English towns (and which I only visited in the first place because I’d read about Betty’s in a Jackson Brodie novel, and Ilkley is the closest Betty’s location to where my UK family lives. And on my first visit there, I learned about Ilkley’s wonderful Grove Bookshop, which shows up in the novel twice!). Private Detective Jackson Brodie takes the case, and it overlaps with another case in which his protege Reggie Chase has worked, both cases also linked by vintage detective novels left at the scenes by a Agatha Christie-esque author called Nancy Styles. There’s a wacky family of aristocrats (as well as a reference to eccentric Englishmen not being as great as they seem, and Hugh Grant having a lot to answer for), a mysterious elder-carer (with a big bag), a vicar who has lost his faith and his voice, two sets of twins, a former soldier with PTSD and a prosthetic limb, and a murderer on the loose. And like everything Atkinson writes, the scale and pace are Shakespearean, references range from classical to contemporary, everything is just a little absurd, everyone so achingly human. I loved it.
September 9, 2024
My Stacky Authors
This weekend, Kate Atkinson joined an esteemed group of writers when her latest, Death at the Sign of the Rook (review to come! RAVE!), found its place in my personal library, and I determined that it was time for Atkinson to get stacky, which is what happens to authors who I like too much. And I actually kind of hate it, that I don’t get the pleasure of seeing books by my favourite authors with their colourful spines all in a row, but space is at a premium and I have to make it work (although my husband did recently suggest replacing one of our bookshelves with a taller one! SWOON!), but the only way I can accommodate the necessity of having 13 books by Atkinson on my shelf (does not even include the two of her earlier novels that I didn’t love and got rid of, which rankled the completest in me, but what can you do) is by stacking a bunch of them into a pile.
Which frees up so much space!! Room to breathe!!! Room for more books!! To be one of my stacky authors, really, is one of the largest literary compliments that I could pay you. You’d be in the company of Kate Atkinson, Joan Didion, Margaret Drabble, Jane Gardham, Penelope Lively, Hilary Mantel, Sue Miller (SO MANY L and M AUTHORS!), and Iona Whishaw.
Carol Shields is on the list now (there is more room among the Ss), for the next time shelf space gets tight.
