August 16, 2024

Good Time

Am I having a good time because the books are so good, or are the books so good because I’m having a good time?

The proverbial question, one that seems more pressing when I’m in a funk and the books are terrible, but it’s worth asking too when I just keep opening one fantastic novel after another. And it’s true that our summer has been quite glorious, last week ending a string of four delightful getaways around Ontario, each one with reading as sparkling as the lakes were. A month ago, I was raving to you about Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a read that felt like the springboard to my summer, and now I’m back with another pick that read its way straight into my heart, so much so that I’m imploring everybody around me to read it, read it, read it. (So far, my husband and daughter have done so, and loved it too, along with Barack Obama, so I’m currently working on a 100% approval rating.)

I read Liz Moore’s novel God of the Woods during a camping trip to Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron, and I thought I knew what I was getting into. I’ve read books about missing girls before, you see, and I’ve read books set at summer camps, and I know how such a setting can be both creepy AND perfect for exploring class divides, and this is also a book about a great house belonging to a wealthy family—naturally the house has a name, and that name is, absurdly, “Self-Reliance.” I’ve read detective fiction before too—the detective working the case of the missing Barbara Van Laar in this book is a young woman eager to prove herself, whose talents are undermined by her colleagues. This novel, I supposed, would be just a book jam-packed with all my favourite literary elements. And it is, it really is, but what makes it so exceptional is what Moore does with those elements, how she manages to take these familiar devices and tell a story that’s suprising and subversive, like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. How the dripping blood on the cover is in fact dripping paint, is the kind of thing I’m talking about. A thumb to the patriarchy, wonderfully queered, and so fiercely feminist, plus it goes down a treat. It’s so fresh, and so interesting. (Read it, read it, read it.)

(This post was a Free Post on my Substack this week! Sign up to receive Pickle Me This directly to your inbox.)

August 12, 2024

The Holiday Reading Round-Up

If appears like I’ve spent the last six weeks mostly on vacation, YOU WOULD BE CORRECT, and what a trip it’s been, so many good books. And some of the books I read last week on our cottage holiday in Haliburton will be familiar if you read my July Substack Essay, “How to Build a Summer Reading List,” beginning with Family Pictures, by Sue Miller, who has only been a summer holiday reading mainstay for me only since 2020, but it feels like since forever. Like so many of her books, this one is a complicated family saga spanning decades, about a marriage that becomes derailed with the arrival of a son who is “different,” Randall, the third of six kids, eventually diagnosed with autism. The problem with this book is that Randall is a device instead of a character, the book and its characters pre-supposing any notion of Randall could be a person with his own consciousness, let alone narrative perspective. But it’s an interesting treatment of how autism was considered in the 1950s, and the ways in which mother were to blame for their children’s diagnoses. Even without Randall, the marriage in this story would have been a complicated one, however, and this nuanced treatment of family dynamics (especially from the point of view of their adult daughter who eventually comes to view her parents, and all their mistakes, with some sympathy) is what makes the story so interesting.

My next pick was Dominick Dunne’s A Season in Purgatory, a totally battered copy I bought for three dollars at The World’s Smallest Bookstore near Kinmount on the way to our cottage. I can’t remember when Dominick Dunne came into my life, but I think it was via his Vanity Fair columns, which then led to me obsessively reading his fun and trashy novels (which, like Sue Miller, I remember lying around our house in paperback during my childhood). I’ve not read him for years though, but I’m on wait-list to receive his son’s memoir The Friday Afternoon Club, so thought a reread would be meaningful in the meantime, and I loved it just as much as I ever did. What is most remarkable is that I have been totally oblivious and only learned a few weeks ago (while listening to Griffin Dunne on a podcast) that Dominick Dunne was gay, and I really can’t believe I didn’t get it, because in the book (whose narrator is a fictionalized version of Dunne) IT’S NOT EXACTLY SUBTLE, but I also can believe I didn’t get it, because I spent most of my life in the most heteronormative bubble….

Next I reread The Joy Luck Club, which came up for me when I published my own book about women’s friendships and someone mentioned it to me, and I realized I hadn’t read it since everybody was reading it in the early 1990s. When I was, of course, a literal child, and I see now how the most interesting parts of the story would have gone over my head at that point. There is a line from Elisa Gabbert’s new book about some books reading up best when you’re too young to really understand them—her example was The Catcher in the Rye, and I concur—but The Joy Luck Club was not one of them, a story of mothers and daughters, and women’s lives, and very complicated friendships. Rereading was a lesson in how much of my earlier reading life must have gone straight over my head.

Next up was A Kind of Intimacy, by Jenn Ashworth, an English writer whose depictions of Lancashire and the northwest have been really important to me. This is the fifth book by her that I’ve read, her debut novel, and it was as easy to read and absolutely uncomfortable (seemingly a contradiction) as all her novels are. This one is set in my husband’s hometown of Fleetwood, Lancashire, which gets described as “dismal,” which it can be, particularly if you’re any of the characters in this book. Annie is an unreliable narrator hoping to put the trauma and violence in her past behind her and make a brand new start, but she becomes strangely fixated on her new next door neighbour and things go awry in ways that will even surprise the readers who’ve seen her coming.

Next was another reread, Brother of the More Famous Jack, the 1982 award-winning debut novel by Barbara Trapido, which was like nothing I’ve ever read before, and so when I read it for the first time, I was mostly baffled. Trapido’s novels are ribald and theatrical, not exactly shaped like English novels at all, and this coming-of-age story unfolds over more than a decade, as daughter of a grocer Katherine becomes enveloped into the eccentric Goldman family. Absolutely nothing is above reproach in this novel, where characters joke about rape and the Holocaust, and the death of a baby and stay in a mental hospital are passed in a few paragraphs (albeit frightfully felt). Politically correct, this novel is not, but neither is it boring or derivative. Having read three other of Trapido’s works, I was finally in a place to properly appreciate it.

And Marian Keyes’ Again, Rachel, was a fairly fitting book to read after it, another ribald story that touches on infant loss, and oh my goodness, Keyes is brilliant. Such a sparkling sense of humour, but the books are containers for such difficult and weighty subjects, and she does such justice to them. There were so many threads in this novel that it seemed impossible she’d work them just right, but she did. These books are so wonderful, and complicated, full of nuance, and worthy of serious attention. They’ve got heft, but they’re also fun to read, which is the only remotely fluffy thing about them.

And then I picked up Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan, which touches on the same lack of regard for novels about women that I alluded to in the previous paragraph, except that this is a debut novel and Sullivan is trying to prove herself, wanting to be taken seriously, while Keyes has no fucks to give nineteen novels in. I’d read Sullivan’s novel Maine last year, a summery pick, and enjoyed this too, their contemporary feel but gesture toward a saga.

And finally, Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, by Claire Pooley, which was our audiobook for the drive, and we all loved it so much. It can be challenging to find a pick to suit readers from ages ranging from 11 to 45, and it’s mostly Agatha Christie books that get us through, but I was desperate for a book that wasn’t an Agatha Christie, so decided to take a chance on this one. Which, hilariously, begins with an Agatha Christie epigraph and some fascinating allusions to Murder on the Orient Express, which has been one of our faves. This novel is very different, of course, but we adored it, so utterly engaging, so laugh out loud funny, and I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an audiobook more. Warmhearted and a little edgy at once—we were all delighted.

And one more, because I can’t resist. We just passed the four year anniversary of Taylor Swift’s Folklore, an album that felt like such a gift during that very hard year and its cruel summer, and so we were listening again because it’s such a midsummer album, and also the song “August,” which has been in my head since the calendar turned. Swift is one of my favourite storytellers, the Bruce Springsteen comparison totally apt. Lines like, “You heard the rumour from Inez, you can’t believe a word she says—most times, but this time it was true.” Or, “Back when we were still changing for the better, when wanting was enough, to believe it was enough. To live for the hope of it all. Cancelled plans just in case you call.” Songs like “Mirrorball” and “Epiphany”—so much feeling. So many stories. We were listening again, when we weren’t listening to Iona Iverson, and I just felt so glad to live in a world where there is such thing as Taylor Swift.

August 1, 2024

SHARK HEART, by Emily Habeck

One of my most frequent experiences of nostalgia is biblio-nostalgia, the longing to be returned to a particular book in a time and place that felt especially sublime. The August I read MALIBU RISING at a rented cottage and could not put it down, the long weekend two years ago when I read Jennifer Close’s MARRYING THE KETCHUPS at the beach, the particular camp chair I was slumped in years ago as I was hastily turning the pages of Amber Dawn’s SODOM ROAD EXIT (lesbians, vampires and abandoned roller coasters on the shores of Lake Erie, oh my!). And yes, while it’s only been a month, I’m still not over having read Shelby Van Pelt’s REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES on our camping trip over the Canada Day long weekend and—especially as we departed on another camping trip last Saturday—I felt the desire to have it happen all over again, the perfect book in the perfect place and time. But this is the kind of experience it’s impossible to manufacture; it either happens or it doesn’t.

But it did, because en-route to our campsite on the banks of Lake Huron, we stopped for in the town of St. Marys, precisely because it was home to a bookshop I’d never visited before, Betty’s Bookshelf, and the town turned out to be wonderful, the bookshop itself just absolutely perfect, stocked with excellent picks (including my own novel!), and every single member of my family left with a title we’d never heard of before.

Which for me was SHARK HEART, by Emily Habeck, enthusiastically recommended by bookseller Wren, a book that MIGHT have been a hard-sell considering its premise (this is a novel about a newlywed couple whose plans go awry when the male partner is diagnosed with a rare disease in which he mutates into a great white shark, yup, really), but Wren promised me that this was a novel about love, and grief and life, and the mutation is a metaphor of sorts, and then I read the back and saw a blurb by none other than Shelby Van Pelt, and decided that this might be the closest I’d come to reading REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES for the first time all over again.

I will say that this is a very different kind of book, far more strange and lyrical, if similarly preoccupied by the desires of sea creatures and blurry lines between us and them, but it similarly hit just perfectly, and as I devoured it (I sound like a great white shark now; it was less bloody than that, I promise). Like Ann Patchett’s TOM LAKE, it’s also about a production of OUR TOWN, which I’ve now even read. This is a novel about the paths in life that take us places where our loved ones can’t follow, about how to face the unimaginable, about how some people are unlucky over and over, terrible patterns repeating, the unfairness of fate, the beauty that’s possible anyway.

I loved it. You should read it. Thank you to Betty’s Bookshelf’s Wren.

July 24, 2024

Summer Reading

Earlier this month I wrote a substack post (available to all readers) about Catherine Newman’s SANDWICH as an ideal beach read. You can read it here!

Paid subscribers can read my July essay, “How to Build a Summer Reading List,” which went up yesterday, and you can read it here. (Thank you to new subscribers! It means everything.)

And finally, there’s a Canadian Goodreads giveaway of my novel ASKING FOR A FRIEND, which makes for an ideal summer read, I must say. Enter before July 29 for your chance to win!

July 23, 2024

We Are Already Ghosts, by Kit Dobson

Imagine—structurally speaking—To The Lighthouse a century later, Woolf’s modernist masterpiece transposed from Cornwall to rural Alberta, the story of a family cabin, a summer idyll, one precious week a year in which time appears to stand still and nothing ever changes. Except, of course, the children are growing, and parents get older, marriages end and new loves begin, and babies are born, and people die, and all of this flurry of action—in Kit Dobson’s cerebral and tremendously moving first novel WE ARE ALREADY GHOSTS—takes place in the “corridors” between the narrative’s main sections, each corridor spanning a five year gap that brings us back again to the cabin that once belonged to Clare’s parents, where now she comes with her own family and those of her husband’s brothers. The novel begins in 1996 and returns us—at five year intervals—to the family at this place so removed from the world, and yet part of it enough that the world creeps in, and I’m thinking about the attraction of summer places like these, the places we return to, the illusion that anything can ever stay the same, or that any of us might outwit the human condition of being mortal, and how the reality of the matter can shock us every time. GHOSTS is an enveloping story of love and family, of parenthood, and also time, and CanLit tropes, and war, and history, and bears at the dump, and what it means to live on stolen land, and everything that’s eternal, and everything that isn’t, and I loved it all so much.

July 18, 2024

Olivetti, by Allie Millington

“Who uses typewriters anyway?” so once posed The Bard, though it is a different kind of antique typewriter nostalgia that drew me to Allie Millington’s middle grade novel, Olivetti—I bought it for my daughter, who loved it and implored me to read it too. And let me tell you, there was no such thing as antique typewriter nostalgia during my childhood, when my dad worked for Olivetti and sold typewriters all over southern Ontario. Nobody, including me, realized just how hipster cool that was, and we had antique typewriters all over the house, and I have such visceral memories of their tactility, the feel of the keys, how the key arms would get all gummed up, the smoothness of the roller, how strange it was to see the alphabet disordered, the freedom of unrolling a ribbon, the spool leftover with a hole just perfect for sticking my finger, the mess of ink. I don’t think it’s such a leap that the daughter of an Olivetti salesman becomes a writer, born with the tools of the trade at her disposal—but when I was little “Olivetti” was just my dad’s work, a name to which my friends responded with blank faces when I told them what he did, and so it’s strange now to realize it has resonance, that Olivetti has meant something to an awful lot of people.

In Millington’s novel, Olivetti is a sentient typewriter who (as keeper of the stories) holds the key to the mystery when Beatrice Brindle goes missing. Her troubled youngest son Ernest is the one who has to figure out where his mother has gone, aided by the savvy daughter of a pawn shop owner whom Beatrice has sold Olivetti to before she fled to who-knows-where. This is a novel about heavy stuff—the family has finally come through Beatrice’s cancer treatment, and they’re still not over the stress and anxiety, and all our expectations about narrative and how a life proceeds suggest that everything should be happy and easy now, but it isn’t because life is not a book (even within this book), all tidy endings.

Millington strikes a careful balance between comfort and reality—my kid who still finds sad stories upsetting thought this story (which ends on an uplifting note) was really compelling. I really loved it too, and was so happy that she shared it with me.

July 17, 2024

Gleanings

• Because parenting when everything is terrible IS THE REASON FOR THE MOTHERFUCKING SEASON. Because breaking the news that life is painful and beautiful and will break your fucking heart so we have to love each other as fiercely as possible while we canis the most important thing a parent can teach, model and personify for their child. I say this because it is perhaps the only thing I know to be true.
• I had heard A Month in the Country referred to so often, with such admiration, that I avoided it, rather cynically, for years, doubting it could live up to the hype. Now I wish I hadn’t.
• All to say, be weird, be exact, make your masterpieces, create good energy, inspire, uplift, conduct your magical weird operations, you know? Because maybe that is doing one other person some good in this world.
• Sometimes you think you’ve lost something and then you realize you still have it in another form. Another shape. A warm grassy slope, trees laden with fruit, wild violets and strawberries scattered in the grass like a medieval embroidery: gone. But what you have now is a close and domestic beauty, smaller, still with its own sweet promise.
• If I’m ever feeling stuck, either in my writing or in life, I just need to go for a walk; to feel the sunshine on my skin, to see the world in the light. I always come back from those walks with an answer.
• Opinions are not bad things to have, they make for interesting conversation, as long as one is open to discussion. But, do we need to have one on every single thing? Is it so out of vogue in today’s world to say: I don’t know enough about that to have a strong opinion on it? To admit that we lack the knowledge and facts to make an intelligent statement or comment?
• By which I mean I would so love for them to sit and watch raindrops.
• By 2019, I felt like a real camper! I, Margaret Lawrence Wizenberg, know how to camp. Every time we load up, I wish we had less gear, and every time we unload at the end of a trip, it was exactly the right amount.
• Our Carolinian Forest is just such a cathedral, only much more hallowed and sacrosanct.  After being housebound for a full week, standing in the shelter and comfort of this forest luxuriance, I felt my mind slow and my heart expand, knowing I crave no other architrave. 
• It’s reckoning with the possibility that all of our lives, no matter how long or how deep, how wise or purposeful, how clean or messy, big or small, how much we do or get right, say or don’t say, will always be perfectly unfinished, completely incomplete.
• As with any meaningful recovery, it took time for the orange tree to heal from the trauma of being moved outside –– to a weekend of thunderstorms and scorching sun –– with no warning. Acid yellow leaves turned a verdant green, and within six months, half a dozen plump oranges sprang from its robust branches.
• But in 2024, with abortion bans and trad wives and men’s rights activists and the racial disparity in maternal mortality rates and oh, did you hear it’s trendy to be skinny again? it is absolutely jarring to hear Perry telling us that it’s a woman’s world and we’re lucky to be living in it. Is it? And are we?
• When my children were very young, I was prone to joining cults. I use the word “cults” loosely, and what I mean is that I was very vulnerable to answers to the only question I was asking: how is one supposed to live?
• “With a growing family, we need a bigger house.” Can’t tell you how many times I hear this from mid-career professionals, occupying renovated three + bedroom houses in my suburban community of Weston.
• I’m pleased to report it’s raining. It started last night and it’s still going, on and off. The garden is that sort of luminous green you get only when a decent amount of rain falls. It’s very beautiful in the small pockets that I’ve been able to plant out. The existing grass is positively glowing.
• One of the distinct pleasures of interviews after publishing a book is the chance to chat with someone who’s read the book and asks questions about these imaginary friends you’re missing. 
• Not all fiction with a romance in it is romance fiction, just as not all fiction that includes a crime is crime fiction: maybe that’s really all that’s at stake here, that Nicholls has written about a romance, he hasn’t written a romance.

July 15, 2024

FUNGAL, by Ariel Gordon

Ariel Gordon is my favourite force of nature, a poet and essayist whose enthusiasm is a chief characteristic, matched only by her abundant generosity and community spirit. A spirit that extends to trees, as reflected in her previous essay collection Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forest, and now mushrooms in her latest, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest. Which is a book about seeing, and looking and finding, and making connections (another item in the Ariel Gordon skill set—in 2020 I ran a series at 49thShelf featuring brand new books with their authors and Gordon was cited as a mentor/supporter/champion/inspiration over and over again, when most other figures didn’t turn up twice), and taking wild leaps. My favourite part of the book (or maybe the part that most resonated) was when Gordon makes a soup from foraged verpas and is torn between a fear of poisoning herself and her aversion to food waste (spoiler: the latter wins. And Ariel lives). An essay collection about mushrooms, it turns out (no surprise, like essays about trees) is an essay collection about everything, about family life, riverbank explorations, about the TV series Hannibal, about mushroom kitsch, about not doing shrooms. Gordon meets other Winnipeg mushroom enthusiasts. She learns to grow her own mushrooms. She receives mushroom stuffies in the mail. She gets a job in a mushroom factory actually harvesting mushrooms. She feeds her book Treed to fungi, which grows mushrooms, which she gets to harvest and literally eat her own words. She collects mushroom lore, mushroom books. She speaks to Ukrainian immigrants whose own mushroom traditions can be replicated on the prairies. She sits in poison ivy, has to remove so many ticks, drives her car so far off-road in search in morels that the CAA won’t cover her towing-job, and these essays are foraged from all these adventures, all of them a fascinating delight to behold.

July 4, 2024

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books, by Kirsten Miller

‘”I think of every bouquet as a little story,” Betsy told her, “and stories are the most powerful things in the world. They can mend broken hearts, bring back good memories, and make people fall in love.”

“Or convince them to do the right thing,” Nahla added.

Betsy Wright shot Nahla a look. “Sometimes. But the trick is getting to know people well enough to tell their stories. You can’t just assume you know what they’re like. You have to pay attention. You got to watch and listen.”‘

Kirsten Miller, born and raised in North Carolina, follows up her bestselling The Change (which I LOVED!) with LULA DEAN’S LITTLE LIBRARY OF BANNED BOOKS, set in the fictional town of Troy, Georgia, home to a Confederate statue, a savvy postman, an elderly lawyer whose family are intent on her inheritance, and many other colourful characters, Lula Dean among them, who has organized a committee to remove “controversial” titles from school libraries, books considered corrupting for children, books about things like menstruation, gay people, the Holocaust, racism, history and rape. To promote her message, Lula Dean erects a little free library on her property and fills it with what she considers more suitable titles. The novels begins when somebody switches the books in Lulu’s library with the books she’s banned, but keeping the dustjackets so the titles appear innocuous. And as those contested titles make their way into the community, radical things start happening, dangerous things start happening, all of this underlining the power of books to shape the story of who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.

“I want to make it perfectly clear,” Miller writes in her Author’s Note, “that the issues addressed in this novel—book banning, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, etc.—are by no means unique to the South, These are American problems. Pretending the only occur in the South has allowed them to flourish unchecked elsewhere in the United States.” And so for the 4th of July, I bring you this funny, edgy and altogether timely novel, though I’m not sure the people who really need to learn its message will be the ones to pick it up. Maybe we need to switch up the cover with that of a novel by Newt Gingrich…

July 3, 2024

Camping With Bright Creatures

My family worked really hard to buy me a book for my birthday that I would like, but hadn’t directly asked for. This process required looking up titles in line with my interests, and then examining our bookshelves to ensure I didn’t own it already, and then carefully studying my reading log to ensure I hadn’t read it in the last two years. A chancy endeavour, this was, but they were fairly confident. “Either you haven’t read it,” my husband told me, “or you just hated it so much that you eliminated any and all evidence of ever having come into contact with it.”

Fortunately, it was the former, but then everybody was quite nervous to find out if I would actually ENJOY the book, REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES, by Shelby Van Pelt, a book that got lots of hype when it came out, but more on the periphery of my experience. This weekend, on our camping trip, I finally dove in….and I loved it so much. The kind of rich, absorbing reading experience I hope for when I’m on holiday. (My daughter said she was pretty sure I would like it because it sounded a bit like @amlaujo’s PEBBLE AND DOVE.)

And can I just take a moment to note how much the poor books we bring on camping trips have to go through? Look at that crumpled cover, not to mention bugs smushed between pages, the parts that end up waterlogged, the spills and dirt, and sand between the pages? Books on camping trips are some of the most hardworking, bedraggled books in the world.

Which is also to say that they are LOVED, and become irrevocable parts of the holiday memory, memories of reading as vivid and essential as those of the gorgeous sunsets, the indelible smell of campfire smoke, the sound of birdsong (very) early in the morning.