August 7, 2006
the same, and leftover pie
The long long weekend has been spent with ease. I’ve read four books which has brought my total to 100. Also, soppy films, frisbee in the park, ice cream, Kensington afternoon, and we cooperatively baked a strawberry pie. I made the pastry and Stuart made the filling, and just as we were about to put it in the oven, Carolyn and Steve invited us over for a bbq, so we took the pie to their house and partook in a rooftop feast. It was wonderful. The pie was absolutely perfect and I was quite impressed with us. Today is more of the same, and leftover pie.
Germaine Greer on Brick Lane. Kate Atkinson has a new book out! Rogers loses millions due to misplaced comma. On why women read more novels than men do.*
My obsessive compulsive public library borrowing is interfering with my Great Summer Re-Reading Project. I just finished reading Circling the Drain by Amanda Davis. I’d read her Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons already, and I really loved this collection. Though, as it has been said, the parallels between the stories and Davis’s death were impossibly spooky at times. I do wonder sometimes, the extent to which we write our own lives.
As soon as the rereading project is done, I am going to read Laurie Colwin. Sometimes an author’s name just starts appearing so often, it must be taken as a sign from the universe. In a recent column, Heather Mallick mentioned having read one of her novels recently, and when I entered Margaret Drabble into the Literature Map, there was Laurie Colwin again. Until September, however.
In tacky billboard news, it would be fair to suspect that the turnout for “We Don’t Regret Our Abortions” would be way bigger than this crowd.
*Why I believe that novels are more effective than non-fiction to learn about the world (particularly in terms of current events): This is not a well-developed thought. There are gaps in my ideas here, particularly that I detest historical fiction, which makes no sense. (What a start!) I believe in novels for the same reason I disbelieve in the virtues of decisivesness, political alignment, and principles (except principles in theory- these are ok, and necessary). The world is complicated and stupid, and anyone who can sum up anything is leaving something out of the equation. I like novels for their hypothetical-ness, novels test out realities and one’s reaction to that reality. I feel that is a far more educative tool than a non-fiction book, which is primarily instructive and more obviously biased.
August 4, 2006
Behind the scenes
The best part about rereading Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum was a textual treasure unearthed. “Albert collected good days the way other people collected coins, or sets of postcards.” I love that idea, and for ages, I have been trying to remember where it came from. What a surprise when it fell right into my lap! I read this book last May, while we were living in England, more specifically during the week I spent in London. I think Bronwyn had signed it out of the library for me to read. I stayed with her and Alex that week, and Stu came down for the last few days. It was a week most notable because I was shopping for my wedding dress, and I spent all my spare moments scrambling to finish this book. It was a perfect candidate for a reread because I’d read it too quickly the first time, and also because the book has an element of mystery that is not made clear until the end, and so to read it mystery-solved is a completely different experience. It’s a bit spooky really. I loved this book when I first read it, but I think I liked it even better this time. Atkinson’s narrative will absolutely blow your mind.
Today was spent shopping for a black dress, which is much more difficult than one might expect. The sole highlight of that experience was Stuart and I being shouted at and kicked out of The Big and Tall Shop in Sears, after I tried on a golf shirt that reached my mid-calves and Stuart had found a pair of pants that were taller than he is. Laughter was dissolved into, as might be expected.
August 2, 2006
Catching a ride on the coattails of lit
I think that my favourite part of Writing Life was in Elizabeth Hay’s essay- “I live in a house full of books. I pull down one I love and read a page or two and invariably I’m absorbed and stirred and reaching for my pen. What I’m doing is catching a ride on the coattails of literature”. Beautiful. Today I bought The Atlantic Fiction Issue and I plan to enjoy it. Here for books that make you want to flirt with a stranger.
I’ve been thinking a lot about decisiveness. The Prime Minister has also been preoccupied with decisiveness lately. I guess sometimes I am decisive, just like he is. For example, I am decisive about the tragedy of people dying and the futility of war. But mostly, I am wary of decisiveness as a tool for dealing with complicated things, like, you know, people. And the world.
July 31, 2006
Longing
Oh, Great Summer Rereading Project, you have done me such good. But oh am I counting down to September, when I can delve into the two Hilary Mantel novels sitting on my bookshelf. I am finding Under the Volcano hardgoing. But I rather cheekily bought Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson on the weekend, just so I will be able to get my British lady novelist fix next. I read it early last summer, and it was brilliant. It’s nice to own it!
July 30, 2006
My fascinating self
The reason I haven’t finished a book in a few days is that I am reading three. I am reading Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, which I am too distracted from at the moment. I am also reading In Fact: The Best of Creative NonFiction, which has some brilliant essays (ie “Shunned” by Meredith Hall, but also others I skip over. And finally, I am reading the newest PEN Anthology Writing Life, which is the anthology to end anthologies. I can’t quite put my finger on why.
I can’t decide why this book should be better than the disappointing anthology I read a few books back. I suppose the fact that the essays are good means something, though the others weren’t bad. The writers here have all achieved a measure of success, and they have learned something in the process that they care to impart (as opposed to “what I learned in the process of just being my fascinating self” which seemed to be the theme in that other book). So many writers here are fiction writers, and what they say has more to do with literature than their fascinating selves. Nobody is whining. Each of the essays has taken such a different approach and tone, and I’ve not yet encountered repetition. And perhaps the “writing life” is just something about which I am passionately curious, and so I will go forth in my reading more readily, enthusiastically, than I would with a book about the “expensive shoe life, and how I lost my bestest friend on the way.” Anyway, the PEN anthology comes so entirely recommended. (Plus there is an essay by Margaret Drabble!)
This weekend we ventured out into the North York Countryside, where Stuart acquired 28 mosquito bites and I got none. We were attending a dinner party at the home of the wonderful Natalie Bay, who had organized a feast for “Unagi Day”. I didn’t know there was an unagi day. It was definitely oishi. We had a lovely time. And then yesterday, we baked our cakeular ode and spent the afternoon under a tree in Trinity Bellwoods Park. Bliss, obviously. Today will be devoted to reading, writing, working on Pickle Me This’s newest publication, and cleaning our disgusting house.
July 27, 2006
Remarkably Busy
I have suddenly found myself remarkably busy, and I don’t know why or how. But I have been writing, and reading. Just finished the wonderful White Teeth, which I didn’t appreciate enough when I first read it during the summer of 2001. Like many other books, I think its Englishness would have been lost on me then, and I don’t know if I would have had the patience for its detail. I liked it though, but I remembered next to nothing about it upon reading a second time. Which basically meant that I got to read it for the first time all over again, but with a better eye, and I loved it. What a feat, and no wonder Smith struggled with her second book, because this book is pretty much untoppable. It was funny, smart and fact-filled. White Teeth is Zadie Smith’s masterpiece, and she really could just put her feet up and watch TV now, if she wanted to. Though she’s better than that, but she could.
I read Lives of Girls and Women before that, and I didn’t love it. I haven’t read Alice Munro in years and so can’t compare it to her other work, but I got the impression that Lives was hammered together as a novel, and it didn’t function well in that respect. I was bored by the end. Each of the stories were strong on their own, but as a collection, this book was not devourable, which to me does not a novel make.
Yesterday’s Facts and Arguments essay on living abroad with a Canadian passport was a terrifically poignant response to all the murmurings going on about evacuations from Lebanon.
July 25, 2006
Hey, that's my (husband's) bike!
To the thief, then. Yeah, you with the wire clippers in the back pocket of your skinny jeans. All right then, take the bike. Steal it right off the porch with a guile I cannot fathom. I just hope you ride it under the wheels of a speeding bus. And you just keep on stealing bikes, again and again, rendering our porches eternally barren. But you will never manage to steal the bikes that live in our hearts; our inner bikes. The truest bikes, which you, of course you dirty bastard, will never ever know.
(Bonus points to whoever got my Reality Bites reference.)
July 23, 2006
Wknd
My story A Big Enough Army won second place in the 2006 Toronto Star Short Story contest, and is online today!
We’re in Peterborough this weekend, and I met up with friends today who I hadn’t seen in years, from when I used to be a delinquent. And in the most exciting news of all, the most wonderfully bookish woman alive (my friend Bronwyn) is getting married. Oh how the tears have been flowing. I am slowly regaining self-control.
July 22, 2006
Bookish News
Glee! Margaret Drabble’s new novel gets a great review in The Guardian. It comes out in Britain in August. Tragically, it’s not out in Canada until October. But I’ll be ok. On reading the right books in the right places. On how the middle class is letting down the public library.
