November 18, 2021
Time Squared, by Lesley Krueger
Okay, speaking of time, I have but fifteen minutes in which to write this post before I have to take my daughter to the dentist, and so I’ll dive right in and tell you that that novel, Time Squared, by Lesley Krueger, which I’ve loved more than I’ve loved than any book I’ve read in ages, could be billed as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life meets Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, if we wanted to underline just how badly you really ought to read it. And oh, you really do.
The beginning is kind of strange and discombobulating, but the reader eventually realizes there is good reason for that. Eleanor, a young woman in the nineteenth century, is being groomed for marriage, finds herself falling in love with Robin/Robert, the younger brother of the man her aunt is hoping she will marry in order to ensure security financial and otherwise. Robin is on the eve of leaving to fight in the Napoleonic War, and over the course of the novel, Eleanor, and her aunt, and her friend Catherine, and other members of their families and community, bide their time as battles prove inevitable, and Eleanor waits for the man she loves to come home.
Except that she keeps finding herself moving about curiously in time.
The plot unfolding, relationships growing, deaths, and heartaches, and other losses, but sometimes it’s the early nineteenth century, and sometimes it’s the Victorian age. Sometimes Robin is fighting in the Boer War, WW1, the London Blitz. Sometimes they’re in mid-century America against the backdrop of the Korean War, the war in Viet Nam. A few strange glimpses of even earlier times, the 14th century. 61 A in Londinum.
And Eleanor is getting these glimpses, seeing these visions which she cannot possibly understand, which are written off as migraines, or perhaps something more troubling. Accustomed—as a woman, as an orphan, as a person whose financial destiny is precarious—to being moved about by others as if a pawn, until finally she gets tired of being played, and makes the decision to finally confront her masters.
Oh my gosh, this book is excellent. It takes some time to find its way into, because its unstable narrative is the very point, but it’s always interesting, underlined by literary allusions in the most delightful fashion, but by about midway through, I was finding it very hard to put it down. Last night I had to stop reading around page 250, because I had to go to bed, but then I couldn’t sleep, my mind all wrapped up on the narrative and just where the narrative is going.
And it’s going somewhere so perfect, a story that cannot possibly just be a cheap gimmick in the end, and it isn’t. Oh the ending, I loved the ending, so absolutely perfect, that last sentence the most extraordinary gift and promise.
November 17, 2021
Gleanings
- Thank you for tolerating white board markers that never have enough ink, hours that never have enough minutes, and parents that never have enough empathy for what you deal with in a given day.
- This is NOT what I thought I was signing up for that summer when I decided I wanted to do this for a living.
- And tweeting small observations about the world around me, as well as lifting up others’ voices, is enough to keep me checking in.
- Can I hope we will meet in person someday, coffee cake or no coffee cake, to continue the conversation? GAH. Sometimes I miss people. In person. A lot. And I’m an introvert who loves being at home in her comfy pants!
- Women are like that, putty in their stylist’s hands. Hoping the blonde will darken in a few months, I will return to him, because I still believe in his skills. And yes, I want to look good, even while going grey.
- It’s as if that one remark moved us into something different, from strangers to fellow travellers, from small talk, into conversation.
- Our walks were how we connected with a city in lockdown and how we stayed close to nature, to ourselves and to each other.
- Why don’t you try something you haven’t done and why don’t you see where it takes you? Why don’t you.
- It’s funny how you can set your life up to be the way you want it to be, and then forget to appreciate it.
Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.
November 12, 2021
Wayward, by Dana Spiotta
I recently read Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward in one sitting, not necessarily because it was it was unputdownable, but because I’d chosen it for the Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon a few weeks back. And it turned out to be a perfect selection for such a thing, the novel utterly absorbing, although I read it kind of deliriously, now that I think about it. It’s a pretty intense novel with a whole lot to unpack, and so the affect of reading it all in one burst was a bit like being smacked in the head with a baseball bat, but in the very best way possible.
It’s a highly specific novel about something so many of us tend to speak about in general terms, namely what happened when the world went off the deep end in 2016. For Samantha Raymond—whose mother is ailing, whose daughter is coming of age, who suddenly finds herself unable to sleep at night—this surreal moment in the universe sends her life into a tailspin when she decides to leave her comfortable suburban home, and her marriage, purchasing a ramshackle historic home in a dodgy neighbourhood in Syracuse.
The first line of the novel: “One way to understand what had happened to her (what she had made happen, what she had insisted upon): it began with the house.”
“It began with the house” could well be the opening line to most novels that I love.
Wayward is a twisty, tricky novel, that’s also about mid-life, aging, about feminism, about white feminism, about cities, neighbourhood, community, motherhood, daughterhood, about notions of justice and what it means to lead an authentic life. As can be expected from the title, Sam’s pursuit of such a thing is not straightforward, usually ill-advised, and hers is a story of mistakes and wrong-doing, the inevitability of these, the impossibility of purity, of the possibilities of redemption.
November 10, 2021
Gleanings
- Baked in a disposable foil cake pan for easy door dropping and classic Deep n’ Delicious aesthetic, with frosting piped on with a star tip to complete the effect, I’ve baked this several times and it has been devoured each time – it’s wonderful, vegan or not.
- And then it gets weird. The Hong Kong avian flu introduced H5N1 to the world, a new and dangerous virus, transmitted from birds to people, causing fears of a worldwide influenza pandemic. The European Union experienced major floods, while a massive tornado stormed through Texas killing 27 people. Meanwhile, world leaders from 150 countries met in Kyoto to sign an agreement to address climate change.
- I am about halfway through You Look Good for Your Age: An Anthology, edited by Rona Altrows, and so the theme of aging—body and mind and soul—is clearly on my mind.
- A deliberate act of stopping, noticing, looking up, breathing deep, all in stillness – a necessity I am becoming more comfortable with, in this hunt for awe, whose closest companion, may just be gratefulness.
- I’ve got a lot of houseplants, dude. Each time a mood strikes me, I find myself holding a potted plant.
- Books have been a comfort to me since early childhood as I learned to navigate life in a world that expected much more from me socially than I would ever be able to give.
- I’ve had less flattering juxtapositions of “Taylor Swift” against other aspects of my identity, most noticeably in university when a Black friend pondered why a Black man would be listening to a “basic white woman”. The false description aside, my reason is simple: her themes embody the kind of writing I seek to create—emotive and universal, yet highly specific.
- I suppose what gets to me is this belief that we need to take classes to learn, to become perfect at something. What happened to just plain practicing? Why not sing, dance, paint, or write for the pure joy of it, rather than feeling like we need to be experts?
- It feels like the epitome of late fall to me, the kind of thing I can never resist on a lunch menu because isn’t it wonderful when someone else has already gone through the trouble of roasting squash?
- The power went out at 5:30 this morning, the small lights we are accustomed to at night–the shell nightlight in the bathroom, the glow of the modem in John’s study beyond our bedroom– extinguished
- What is a character without place? Even if it’s a place as small as a room or a country where the character does not feel she belongs.
- I’m miserable when I’m not writing in some form — so if I don’t write for too long, something starts to feel deeply off and so I keep coming back to this complex relationship.
Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.
November 10, 2021
Best Possible Time
I went away for the weekend—on an airplane. And I KNOW. What decade is this anyway? The experience a necessary one, I figured, when it was offered to me. An opportunity to think and rethink, examining my comfort zone in what has been a time where it’s been all too easy to hunker down inside it.
Something I’ve appreciated all along about living through the last 18 months, or at least tried to appreciate in the moments which such things were also kind of excruciating, is how interesting it’s been to be residing in a time of such abject uncertainty. Even though I really don’t like uncertainty, abject or otherwise, but it really is inherent to the experience of living—it’s just that most of time we have the luxury of pretending otherwise. Imagining our plans and arrangements are somehow in keeping with the order of the universe—and perhaps they are, sometimes, because we’re part of the universe too—but I just know that it’s been good for me to let go (or to begin to let go, or perhaps to ponder the beginning of letting go) of the notion of control. To be asking questions whose answers are far from fixed, if they’re even known.
The line from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which I really need to reread again: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
And of course it’s not the best, but I’ve been doing my best to learn from this time, to resist the way my own instincts are drawn toward certainty, rules, and constraints, even though that’s not really how the world goes. Last fall as families were making the call between in-person schooling and virtual learning, it was fascinating me that while we spend a lot of time posturing about there never being one right choice in regards to parenting, this really was one of those rare circumstances in which this was actually true. To the point where it really didn’t matter much what side you came out on, because nobody was sure of which was the right one, and all of us were just doing the best we could with the information that we had.
I have found it fascinating for there not to really be rules, for safety to be quantifiable. All of using the tools we have at our disposal to mitigate risk, to take those chances which are worthwhile for us to take. 18 months in, we know enough that this is finally getting to the point of being less frightening than genuinely interesting, license for each of us as individuals to think about what’s right for us. To be thoughtful and deliberate in our choices, and they don’t have to be the same as everyone else’s, and that’s really okay.
Because there’s no right answer, which also means there’s no wrong answer, and how often do opportunities come along like that?
November 4, 2021
The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour, by Dawn Dumont
I’ve gone back in my archives to remember when it was that Dawn Dumont, from the Okanese Cree Nation, became one of my favourite Canadian authors, and turns out it was 2015 when I read Rose’s Run, “a book that’s funny, breezy and heartwarming, and then manages to include a terrifying demon in the mix who feeds on the strength of women, so I was hooked in a cannot-turn-out-the-light-until-I’m-done kind of way, an I’m-going-to-have-nightmares kind of way (and I did!)…”
She followed up Rose’s Run, her second novel, with Glass Beads two years later, a novel in stories in which the demons were less literal, the narrative tracing four friends through decades of their lives, loves and losses, ups and downs, a novel that similarly irreverent if more realist, as well as heartbreaking and hilarious at the very same time.
Heartbreaking and hilarious is a tricky balance but in her fourth fiction release, Dumont has done it again. The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour is set in 1972 as food poisoning has taken down the Prairie Chicken dance troupe on the eve of their European tour, cowboy John Greyeyes reluctantly agreeing—even though he hasn’t danced in years—to lead a cobbled-together team of subs as a favour to his brother who’s Chief of the Fineday Reserve. (Politics factor large in all Dumont’s novels; she also served as a Liberal candidate in the September 2021 Federal election, something else on her CV now, in addition to novelist, lawyer, and stand-up comedian).
As can be expected of any novel that begins with diarrhea and features a hijacking within the first three chapters, The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour is indeed a string of madcap adventures, funny and ribald, over the top and unconstrained, and unrelentingly amusing. Greyeyes has to contend with a young dancer who flirts with anything that moves, her uptight Catholic auntie, plus a fourth member of their group who isn’t who he says he is, not to mention the original leader of the dance troupe whose stomach has finally recovered and is on her way over to Europe to take up the job that should have been hers to begin with.
The book is fun, but it also pulls no punches. Set in 1972, its main characters are survivors of residential schools in a country that has not even begun to reckon with this, living with the trauma and broken bonds of these experiences. Dumont showing too that every person who’s able to survive has their own way of doing so, which can be complicated, as is the case with Edna, who finds strength and solace in the Catholic church and whose processing of her experiences doesn’t immediately make sense from the outside.
But Dumont shows us each of these characters from the inside, deftly using fiction set fifty years ago to consider ideas and issues of racism, cultural genocide, and the possibility of reconciliation that have never been more timely. Using humour too to diffuse the pain, to create the chance for some kind of happy ending.
November 3, 2021
Gleanings
- Unvaccinated people didn’t just arrive in Toronto from Mars. They are products of a culture that over the last few generations has become increasingly individualistic, distrusting and focused on personal welfare over the larger community.
- It’s a very bizarre thing to find yourself squeeing in the middle of a gut-wrenching and upsettingly graphic story about the bubonic plague. And yet. Here we are.
- Last week we held a celebration of life for my mother and yesterday we hosted a baby shower for my oldest daughter.
- But somehow the days accumulated until yet another summer had passed, and I didn’t swim to the island.
- But why the maniacal drive for completeness? And what is completeness, anyway?
- So yes, I was today years old when I realised I was happy – definitely the best birthday present I could ask for.
- No bluegrass song has ever been written about freaking THROAT COAT TEA
- I think Beautiful World also offers a more affirmative response, though: that there is value in both love and art, that they are what can make the world beautiful, that they are worth believing in and standing up for, and that the novel (including this novel) is one way of doing that.
- (for the life of me i will never ever be able to keep a secret about myself. for others? til death. but myself? never ever. Is this a flaw? a strength? a quirk? idgaf. yes, that.)
- I think part of me thought it was too typical that a woman would write about food, and that I wanted to make my voice known on other topics. But somehow, I’m still hungry.
- But the history of kitchen cabinets and the appliances tucked in snugly between them is not pretty or seamless. It’s brimming with attempted liberation, deliberate oppression, Cold War marketing and feminist utopias founded on white supremacy. And it’s still stewing.
- Afterwards, when the street was quiet and the night was black, we blew out the candles in the pumpkin and brought him inside. I thought about how some things that we avoid actually turn out to be good.
- In his book, Williams uses the word whiplash to describe the sensation of going about one’s daily life until, without warning, one is confronted by a reminder of race and its implications
- So yes, I do aspire to be kinder, more generous. I aspire to give you what you want before you ever ask. But most deeply I aspire to be eccentric
- The coconut word triggered a few memories of instances when I felt misjudged or slightly vulnerable because of my skin colour.
- Asked what her first principle for detecting a good story was, Schoemperlen speaks in terms that echo Kennedy, albeit with fewer lethal connotations. “The stories to which I felt an immediate connection were the ones that just made me say, ‘Wow!’”
November 2, 2021
Good Burdens is here!
If my Blog School course had a textbook, Christina Crook’s Good Burdens would be it, a heartful and inspiring book about living a mindful and joyful digital life. After blogging for more than twenty years (and using my social media platforms as an extension of my blogging space), I know that the tools of the internet are capable of making our lives richer and deepening social connections, but that involves considered and deliberate practice, a willingness to go against the grain and serve ourselves (and each other) instead of an algorithm. And the payoff? A meaningful online life whose riches spill over into the real world in the form of friendships, inspiration, and creative work.
What is a Good Burden? Our good burdens are the work we do to that add meaning to our lives—partaking in a community project, putting dinner on the table where family will gather, sending a card or a letter to a friend. In a world where technology promises endless ease and convenience, it’s too simple to forget how much these kinds of gestures matter, both to our communities and to ourselves.
And in Good Burdens, Crook shows that the notion of good burdens can bring light and meaning to our digital experiences, and also to the rest of our lives. She urges her readers to pay attention to the world around them and to those things which deliver joy. What is joy and how do we find it? How do happy people use technology differently than other people? What makes a good life? How do you get there?
The book is a warm, inviting and engaging read, but also structured as a workbook with space for readers reflect and write down ideas, offering personalized approaches instead of one-sized-fits-all solutions, urging us to ask ourselves the right questions instead of promising answers. Good Burdens is about ideas that I think about a lot, but I still found it rich and inspiring—and really enjoyed the opportunity to talk with Crook on a recent episode of her JOMOcast all about the spaces where her ideas and my own blog thoughts overlap.
I first read this book as an advanced reader copy, and liked it so much I pre-ordered a finished copy, and then the publisher sent me a finished copy, so now I have two! If you would like the chance to win a copy of Good Burdens, make sure you’re signed up for one of my newsletters (sign up for the Pickle Me This Digest or the Blog School Newsletter) for a chance to win my spare copy. If you’re on my mailing list already, watch your inboxes—coming Friday!
And if you just can’t wait, you can go to your local bookstore and pick up Good Burdens today.
October 31, 2021
Hauntings: Books That Won’t Leave Me Alone
I loved this book, which I thought was going to be a smart and funny novel about modern dating and the phenomenon of “ghosting,” which it was, but it was also so much richer and more meaningful than that as Alderton’s protagonist comes to understand the different kinds of ghosts that are haunting her experience—ghosts of a past romance, of her childhood, and also of her relationship with her parents, which is changing and becoming more complicated as her father’s dementia progresses.
*
Reading the latest Laura Lippman is a summer holiday tradition for me and my husband. We love her, and her latest, a literary homage to Stephen King’s Misery, is a marvelous mindfuck. Lippman moves from crime fiction to psychogical thriller in this novel about an author who becomes confined to his bed and then proceeds to be haunted/hunted by a character from one of his novels. We loved it, and the meta elements of it all were delicious.
*
The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris
This one checked a lot of boxes for me—set in the publishing industry, biting social commentary, and twisty and weirder than you’d think, billed as “Get Out meets The Stepford Wives.” Naturally, Nella is pleased when the new hire at her office means she’ll no longer be the only Black girl at her publishing company, but her comradeship with Hazel turns out to have an edge. The novel is a statement on racism and feminism, the notion of how much progress is enough, and a culture of scarcity that means supporting others could mean hindering one’s own chances of success. But it’s also more than that, totally bonkers, involving an underground movement, and a fight back after decades of oppression.
*
Malibu Rising, by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Everyone keeps telling met that the The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is her best, but I haven’t read it yet. I did read Daisy Jones and the Six and liked it well enough, but I LOVED Malibu Rising, a holiday dream of a novel that I read in a single day and then forced until my husband who liked it as well as I did. Complicated family dynamics, Americana, California, and the sea. The novel had some furious momentum and I found it unputdownable. I can’t think of any literary ghosts in this one, but characters are indeed haunted—by lost loves, and the people they used to be.
*
A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes
We read The Odyssey earlier this year, and I ordered this book afterwards, inspired by that book and also events in The Iliad, though I confess that I wasn’t chomping at the bit to read it, figuring it would be difficult. Those Greeks, you know? But I loved it. Read it right after Malibu Rising and just as quickly while we were on holiday this August, and then my husband read it, and then our daughter did, and it brought these characters to life in the most vivid, devastating way, because this is a novel about death and loss and destruction after all. There is nothing heroic in these wars, which tell the story of how their experienced by many different women. I can’t wait to read The Iliad now
