materfamilias reads

Reading for Work

2012-02-17T12:19:00.000-08:00

Much of the reading I've done so far this year has been work-related. I read an edited anthology of essays on West Coast writing in order to review the book (Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature) for an academic journal. I'll link to the review later when it appears in the journal, but the link will probably be limited access.

I also reread Timothy Taylor's Story House and Kathleen Winter's Annabel for my Canadian Urban Fiction class. Annabel might seem an unlikely candidate for that, set in rural Labrador as much of it is, but the city of St. John's, Newfoundland is an important site for the protagonist's reconciliation of his intersex gender identity and I find the play between rural, wilderness, and urban fascinating -- as, indeed, do my students. I was also interested in juxtaposing the two texts because they are on opposite outer edges of the Canadian geography (and, perhaps, of other Canadian affiliations as well). Like Annabel, Story House moves from urban to wilderness, although the context of those moves is significantly different. At any rate, the students seem to find potential in the comparison and our discussions have been lively and productive.
An added pleasure to this go-round's reading of both novels has been that, in response to my Tweeting #amreading, I got Tweets from both authors, very generous Tweets in which both offered to respond to student queries, and opened up the possibility of further discussion. Thanks to both of you, should you happen to read this.

I also read Daphne Marlatt's The Given as part of the coursework for the Canadian Fiction class -- a bit of a stretch as Marlatt's playing between poetry and prose here, between fiction and memoir. And she's so much more elliptical than my students are used to. They always surprise me by what they claim, at first, to find difficult, given how sophisticated I know they are in their deciphering of visual texts, films, etc. But I was really pleased to see how well the two students who presented on the excerpt from this book did with making sense of its rich, allusion-thick, pleasures.
And for myself, I'm pleased to finally have been prodded, through teaching the excerpt, to read the whole text. I've worked quite a bit with the two novels (Anahistoric and Taken) that The Given complements, and found the addition of an older woman's perspective to the exploration of a mother-daughter relationship (and that relationship's influence on the daughter's lesbian relationships, feminist poetics, and politics) quite satisfying.

Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke

2012-01-18T12:32:00.000-08:00

This year, I'm not going to put off recording titles until I get a chance to respond to them thoughtfully because I've learned that may never happen. Instead, I'll give a few quick impressions when I can, sometimes just note a title completed, and occasionally, if I find time, write a fuller response or transcribe a favourite passage. And I'm always thrilled to have a reader comment, perhaps beginning a dialogue about something we've both read.

So to begin as I mean to go on, I've already finished a few titles. First up, Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke, second in a planned trilogy that began with his captivating Sea of Poppies. If you have a limited understanding of British imperialism, particularly in the East, these two novels will shock you. Even those who know something of British mercantile responsibility for widespread opium trade may be disturbed by the damages inflicted on India and China's people by a country so proud of its laws and morality. That might sound as if the books proselytize, but this is not the case. Likeable characters abound, and even the unlikeable ones entertain.

And perhaps the most entertaining character of all is the English language, if English it can still be called after it has been stretched into the most astounding, rollicking shapes by the influences of the Indian sub-continent and even of the more limited interactions with the Chinese.

River of Smoke picks up with several of the characters we met in Sea of Poppies, in landscapes and seascapes full of adventure and intrigue. This second novel in the series moves from India to China where opium merchants are hoping to wait out the Emperor's determination to halt the destructive trade. Cross-cultural friendships; political manoeuvering; sea-roving collectors-- including a cross-dressing orphaned young woman--seeking botanic treasures; hearty, exotic meals described to evoke drooling; a love story staged on a colourful houseboat; a wonderful series of letters drawing every possible sexual pun out of a friendship built around drawing and painting lessons. . . thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining while being admirably instructive. I'm looking forward to seeing where the third novel takes me. Meanwhile, if you get a chance, I'd recommend reading these first two.

Books Read in 2011

2011-12-31T14:37:00.000-08:00

I did something clever in 2011, which made it much easier to collate my year's reading list: I simply started a post at the beginning of the year, and tried to remember to add each book title to it as I read, even if I didn't manage to get a post up for considerably longer. So that means that I'm ready to offer my list of Books Read in 2011, before the year is entirely gone. And it means I've got more time to read, rather than spending time trying to remember and collate . . .

And time to wish you all a Happy New Year. Here's to fabulous reading in 2012!

While it's not as visibly clear as I'd like, each of these titles has a link to a review/response post, however cursory that may be. Do click to read, if you're interested, and, as always, I'd love to get your feedback.
1. Kate Atkinson. Started Early, Took My Dog
2. Edeet Ravel. Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth
3. Lee Child. 61 Hours
4. Howard Jacobson. The Finkler Question
5. Kathleen Winter. Annabel
6. Minette Walters. The Devil's Feather
7. Patricia Cornwell. Port Mortuary
8. Keith Richards. Life
9. Sheila Watson. The Double Hook (reread)
10. Emma Donoghue. Room
11. Ross King. Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven
12. Gary Shteyngart. Super Sad True Love Story
13. Carol Matthews. Questions for Ariadne: The Labyrinth and the End of Times
14. Johanna Skibsrud. The Sentimentalists
15. Reginald Hill. Midnight Fugue
16. Gwenaëlle Aubry. Personne.
17. Anne Fadiman. Ex Libris
18. Val McDermid. Fever of the bone
19. Lee Child. Die Trying
20. Deborah Harkness. A Discovery of Witches.
21. Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary.
22. Christos Tsiolkas. The Slap.
23. Kate Atkinson. One Good Turn.
24. Timothy Taylor. Story House. re-read
25. Clyde Ford. Precious Cargo. re-read
26. Ian McEwan Solar.
27. William Trevor Love and Summer
28. Jeffrey Deaver. The Burning Wire
29. Edith Wharton. Ethan Frome
30. Elizabeth Bard. Lunch in Paris
31. Richard Wagamese. Dream Wheels
32. Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red.
33. David Adams Richards. Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul
34. Lee Child. Worth Dying For.
35. Molly Peacock. Paradise, Piece by Piece
36. Lionel Shriver. So Much For That
37. Robert McCrum. Globish: How English Became the World's Language
38. Kate Atkinson. Behind the Scenes at the Museum. re-read
39. Dionne Brand Ossuaries
40. Chevy Stevens. Still Missing
41. Bill Bryson. Mother Tongue
42. Sue Sinclair. Breaker.
43. Alex MacLeod. Light Lifting.
44. Siddartha Mukherjee. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
45. Marilyn Bowering. To All Appearances a Lady.
46. Elizabeth Hay Late Nights on Air.
47. Molly Peacock. How to Read a Poem
48. Jonathan Kellerman. Deception
49. Jonathan Kellerman. Mystery.
50. Christopher McDougall. Born to Run.
51. Anne Carson. Nox.
52. Colum McCann. Let the Great World Spin.
53. Stephen Scobie The Measure of Paris.
54. Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games
55. Suzanne Collins. Catching Fire
56. Suzanne Collins The Mocking Jay
57. David Orr. Beautiful and Pointless
58. Seymour Mayne. Ricochet
59. Mark Kingwell. Concrete Reveries
60. John Farrow. River City.
61. Joan Skogan. Moving Water.
62. Lee Child. Persuader.
63. Erin Morgenstern. The Night Circus.
64.Rosecrans Baldwin You Lost Me There.
65. Julian Barnes. The Sense of an Ending
66. Per Petterson. Out Stealing Horses
67. Michael Connelly. The Drop
68. Patrick DeWitt. The Sisters Brothers.
69. Jodi Picoult. Nineteen Minutes.
70. Adam Gopnik. The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food
71. George Martin. Game of Thrones
72. ADDED January 10th, 2012 Esi Eduguyan's Half Blood Blues -- I can't believe I forgot to list this 2011 read; useless to try and catch up a post about it at this stage. Suffice it to say I'd recommend it!

Currently underway: Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke and Craig Taylor's The Londoners, Douglas Gibson's Stories About Storytellers, and Amy Finley's How to Eat a Small Country.

and two I began but didn't want to finish (I'm giving myself permission)
1. Jean Auel. The Land of Painted Caves
2. Anne Marsella. The Baby of Belleville

A Miscellany of Titles, 2011 Clean-Up

2011-12-31T08:49:00.000-08:00

Last post of 2011, this will quickly sweep together those books I've finished but not responded to yet. Emphasis on "quickly"!

Seymour Mayne's Ricochet, a charming collection of word sonnets, English on one page, French translations by Sabine Huynh on facing page. Wonderful to see what can be done in 14 words and fascinating to compare the translations.

David Orr's Beautiful and Pointless, an entertaining, thoughtful exploration of the state of poetry today foregrounding questions of audience, accessibility, as well as thinking about what poetry is for, what it can do, what it does do. There's a 2 or 3-page potted history of 20th-century poetry that's especially fun.

Joan Skogan's Moving Water: I read this out of my research interest in West Coast writing, especially that which features boats. It's a melancholy, but lovely, meditation on Coastal life, on the marginal in more ways than geographic -- and it's surprisingly wide-ranging for a tiny book. Pulls together a collage, an archive, perhaps, of craft/artisan imagery, First Nations stories, local lore, marine superstition.

Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. Wonderful, magical, I'd like to share this with a few reading friends. It shimmers between steampunk, YA literature, mystery, romance . . . Morgenstern creates a world of beauty and intrigue and rich characters. Delightful.

Michael Connelly's The Drop. Not as good as the last Harry Bosch (Nine Dragons), in my opinion, but I'm seeing some potential in watching Bosch's relationship with his daughter develop -- this could push him in new ways that will be good for the series.

George Martin's Game of Thrones. After reading so many passing references to this on Twitter, I looked across at my husband one day to realize he was reading it. So I picked it up after he was done. It's a great book for sinking into during the winter break, one of those fantasy quasi-medieval worlds with romance, battle, intrigue, danger, and so many landscapes for the imagination to construct. So many words, though, that I'm not sure I'll spare the time for the rest of the series. If you have time, however, and are looking for a world to disappear into, I'd recommend it happily enough.

Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers. This is a page-turner, a Western that captures period aesthetics but with a very contemporary appeal. Sparse and odd, easy to imagine as a Coen Brothers film. There's a 3-page chapter -- ostensibly describing how one brother got his freckles -- that's one of the most compelling pieces of writing I've ever read. I gave a copy of the book to my son for Christmas and he'd finished 125 pages when he left on Boxing Day. It's that kind of book!

So there we go. Next post will be my Completed 2011 Reading list.

Londoners!

2011-12-29T17:12:00.000-08:00

Yes, I still have to complete my 2011 reading list, but just can't resist copying out this passage from Craig Taylor's Londoners. This is from the interview with civil engineer, Nick Tyler, who works with, and theorizes, London transport: After saying that "Maybe we need to design a city around making sure that stopping is part of it" -- a sentiment I heartily approve of, Tyler goes on to say,

Whenever I come back from a trip and we fly over the centre of London, this is what comes to mind: what a fantastically green place London is, what enormous history there is, what a huge variety as you fly over. . . . And I almost think as I sit on this plane, I want to tell you about this. Forget all this crap about seatbelts, I'm going to tell you! I'm going to tell you about this! This is my city and I'm going to tell you why I love it so much and what it's about. I wouldn't be able to, but that sort of magic about it maybe you can only see from the sky. We tend to see people who are living and working here as they get stuck on the Tube, on the buses, on pavements that don't have enough width, in traffic jams. They get stuck in that sort of detail and forget that actually all they're doing is moving around inside some sort of mythical philosopher's stone, which is this wonderful city. It's a phenomenal place to be. I find lots of places exciting places to be, but somehow London delivers that piece of fifth dimension of which how we move around it is part. (The underlining is mine -- I love that notion of city as idea, as philosopher's stone, wonderful!)

Adam Gopnik's The Table Comes First

2011-12-28T16:16:00.000-08:00

What's today? December 28th? And I'd like to complete my Books Read in 2011 post by this weekend, especially since classes start up again on Tuesday (remorselessly early!)

So . . . the book I just turned the last page of is Adam Gopnik's The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food. The "family" and "France" references in the title, I will admit, set me up to expect more anecdotes of the daily domestic as well as more, hmmmm, road trip tales? Not sure if that's precisely what I was hoping for, but it accounts for a slight reservation I had throughout. And yet, I found the book interesting, informative -- quite erudite, really -- and Gopnik's meditations are worthy, thoughtful, often engaging. The book constitutes an idiosyncratic cultural history of a specific stream of cuisine -- that which runs primarily from France through to America (by which Gopnik generally means the United States of) although with an interesting foray or two -- Barcelona, London. . .

Gopnik argues convincingly, if gently, with Jonathan Safran Foer (as that writer's food prescriptions represent the animal rights' movement) -- acceding some of his central points, but thoughtfully remonstrating with recourse to our carnivorous/omnivorous animal natures. He links other, broader and more historical politics to food, considering whether this or that movement in foodie culture is Right or Left-Wing, centrist or quietist, and he pays some attention to class and food. Race, ethnicity, and food beyond the Northwest hemisphere -- indeed beyond the trans-Atlantic trajectory from France to New York -- play only a small part in his meditations.

It's oddly obvious, isn't it, that I held some distance from this book, as much as I thought it worthwhile and even as I enjoyed Gopnik's observations. I suppose, overall, I found it too cerebral -- I can see why Gopnik chose to maintain this stance, eschewing the potentially gimmicky approaches of including recipes which might have brought readers closer to the family table (he writes fairly early in the book about his deliberations over this very concern). Still, I was most engaged when he moved closer to the stove or the chopping board. As much as the title announces that "the table comes first," he spends more time time surveying cookbooks than sitting around a meal.

Still, his survey is fascinating and convincing, if not always completely satisfying. I'd happily recommend the book, however, even if I pushed away from the table still a wee bit hungry. . .

Let the Great World Spin

2011-12-26T20:06:00.000-08:00

The year's almost done, and I have a huge stack of books I want to get to before the new term begins. The next few posts will be sad references to titles that deserve much better. But I bog myself down with built and obligations in so many ways, it seems unfair to add it to my reading life, no?

So I will merely tell you that if you have not yet read Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, you have a backlist treat. This fictional retelling of a real-life 1974 tightrope crossing between Manhattan's Twin Towers is a marvellous construction offering up quirky, moving characters with much compassion. Even better, perhaps, is the brilliant, kaleidoscopic (spinning, obviously) plotting -- somehow the leaps between the various narrative sections are executed so confidently that the reader simply knows that they will connect, although the threads seem so disparate long into the novel. I'm quite sure I could recommend this to almost anyone, and a reader would find something to savour here.

Light reading Round-up

2011-12-21T17:13:00.000-08:00

Let's see. . . Scanning my list of books finished but not yet blogged, I see a good-enough mystery by Jonathan Kellerman (Mystery) and another one by Lee Child, an earlier Jack Reacher novel that we'd somehow both missed (The Persuader).

I also picked up a Jodi Picoult that one of my daughters had left behind, Nineteen Minutes. While I'll admit that this was an absorbing read, I found it veered on turning the sensational into entertainment as much as it provoked much thought that might produce change. And the mothers were disturbingly flat characters for much of the novel. No question the woman can write though.

Much earlier (September? October?) I read John Farrow's River City. I've been waiting and waiting for Farrow to add to his Montreal detective Cinq-Mars series (of which this is only the third). The books are wonderfully written (Farrow is a nom de plume of Trevor Ferguson, a writer of "more literary" novels and plays. Presumably, he's rationing his mystery-writing time. . . too bad! ) River City has had mixed reviews, probably disappointing many fans who wanted more of Cinq-Mars' contemporary Montreal. Instead, the novel is a sweeping, if quirky, history of Montreal from its earliest days of colonization with a mystery that moves through the turbulent politics of separatist Montreal, particularly the early '70s. Farrow imagines some fascinating conversations featuring historical characters, Pierre Trudeau, Maurice Duplessis, René Lélesque among them, all caught up in the mystery of the (Jacques) Cartier dagger, a fictional weapon that confers on Montreal some of the intrigue Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code gave Paris. While I have to confess that I have never been able to get more than six pages into that novel, I stuck with River City through its 850 or so pages and felt rewarded for my perseverance.

There now, I've crossed 4 books off my finished-but-not-yet-blogged list, and might even get the list done before New Year's . . . we shall see. What about you? How's your end-of-year reading? Any gems to share?

Men, Ageing, and Memory

2011-11-23T20:48:00.001-08:00

I see that I began writing this post mid-to-late November. I ddn't think I'd been away quite so long, but it's been busy, as always . . .

I've squeezed some worthy reading into my days lately. Friday, with Pater away picking up our grand-daughter (we get to do a baby-sitting week, while her parents are away), with snow falling wetly outside, I stoked the fire and cuddled into my big green leather club chair to reread Kathleen Winter's Annabel, enjoying it at least as much as I did the first time -- although with some dismay at the idea of presenting some of its graphic images to my 1st-year class. Means to a worthwhile end, certainly, but it was more difficult than I'd remembered, and I'm sure some of them will be considerably challenged.

After working my way through those 450+ pages, I was surprised at my appetite for Julian Barnes' Sense of an Ending which I squeezed into Nola's naptimes as well as reading in the evening (our TV room doubles as guest bedroom, so her 2-year old bedtimes left long spans of reading time). Barnes' Booker-winning novel is a cunningly wrought, deceptively simple narrative, the confessional voice of its narrator, Tony, seductively reasonable. He's a much more self-aware (and self-deprecating) narrator than Victor of Rosecrans Baldwin's You Lost Me There but both narrators are concerned with the reliability of memory. Both are similarly in late 60s, examining a lifetime of relationships, confronting their own limitations. Victor seems less self-aware than Tony, less likeable even, and yet I became wary of Tony's confessional tone, his apparent transparent disclosure coupled with his controlling role in the narrative. Certainly, he seems to be as clueless as his once-upon-a-time love accuses him of being, but it's hard to tell if he's quite the blend of hapless victim and standup guy willing to accept responsibility for his shortcomings as he appears to be. I wonder, for example, if the distance between himself and his daughter couldn't be overcome with more sustained effort on Tony's part. Rather than complaining that she's making him wait 'til his grandson's old enough to watch soccer games with, perhaps if he insisted on showing up and being useful, engaged, and engaging, he'd close that gap. Similarly, rather than calling his ex-wife whenever he could benefit from her company whilst rather passively ignoring her hints at their holidaying together, he might reciprocate her helpfulness.

To add to those words from almost a month ago, I'll stir one more novel into the mix, another meditative, cleverly plotted confessional by a man in his late 60s looking back at his life: Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses, translated by Anne Born. What serendipity that these three ended up in my reading life within months of each other -- they complement each other so wonderfully. In all three, the narrators's movement in the present keeps pulling them back to the past, into which they spiral complexly, teasing readers with details about a mystery long obscured. Barnes' plotting is masterful; the mystery revealed finally continues to haunt, a lingering aftertaste that changes the reader's impression of the opening so that I want to go back and reread. Petterson's ending is also haunting but with even less resolution; so much is less revealed in this one, while so much resonates beyond the close.And while the plotting in Baldwin's novel is not quite as compelling, this promising debut captivates throughout and evokes the wisdoms and regrets of a still-vigorous but late-career man evaluating his relationships, loves, losses, and obsessions.

Each of the three also engage through descriptions of landscape, whether urban or East Coast beach town or remote cabin in a Nordic wood. And they all maintain a likeable, confessional, and thoughtful tone which successfully skirts the seductions of either nostalgia or melancholia. I must admit that this tone does much to endear me to the three novels, in contrast to Ian McEwan's Solar or Howard Jakobson's The Finkler Question, which also situate accomplished older men in a position of evaluating their past. I do think that the five, collectively, form a productive hologram of this position, and would rather like to imagine a conversation between the five protagonists.

It's December 18th, as I write this, a week from Christmas, two weeks left to the year. I have at least another ten books read whose titles have not yet made it into this 2011 reading record, so I will close now, regretful, as always, of all that I haven't found time to say. Let me close with two exemplary passages from Out Stealing Horses, in the hope that they might tempt you to pick up your own copy.

Now I have a dishwashing sink like everyone else. I look at myself in the mirror above the sink. The face there is no different from the one I had expected to see at the age of sixty-seven. In that way I am in time with myself. Whether I like what I see is a different question. But it is of no importance. There are not many people I am going to show myself to, and I only have the one mirror. To tell the truth, I have nothing against the face in the mirror. I acknowledge it. I recognise myself. I cannot ask for more. (90)

AND THEN THIS passage, from the following page:

It is important not to be careless about supper when you are alone. It is easily done, boring as it is to cook for one person only. There must be potatoes, sauce and green vegetables, a napkin and a clean glass and the candles lit on the table, and no sitting down in your working clothes. So while the potatoes are boiling I go into the bedroom and change my trousers, put on a clean white shirt and go back to the kitchen and lay a cloth on the table before putting butter into the frying pan to fry the fish I have caught in the lake myself. (91)

One last point: I should make a note that I read Sense of an Ending on my new KoboVox. And as much as I've come to appreciate some of the conveniences of an e-reader, I regret not having a physical copy of a book I admire. This will be a continuing problem for me, I know. I hope to find some time, eventually, to write about my response to the reading phenomenology involved in an e-reader (I have a 1st-gen Kobo and now a KoboVox), but that will have to wait until I win the Time Lottery . . .

Carson and Grief

2011-11-13T17:16:00.001-08:00

Is it really true? Did I last post here on October 19th? Almost a month ago?

By then, I had finished Anne Carson's Nox, a moving, puzzling, challenging, and powerful work -- which I suppose you could say of anything she's written (here's my response to her marvellous Autobiography of Red. Nox is particularly notable for its form, a huge box of a book

out of which unfold an accordion of pages.

The pages themselves purport to be facscimiles of Carson's personal journals, a collage of artifacts

representing her brother's life and her grief at his death. The frame-story, if you will, is her translation of the Latin poet Catullus' poem 101, an elegy for his brother who died, as did Carson's, far from home, in a distant land.
The left-hand pages offer, one by one, a lexicographic entry parsing the pronunciation and possible meanings and uses of each word in the poem, so that we see the work of translation as the work of mourning, grief layering centuries of grief. For me, having lost a brother suddenly when he was barely 19, myself 23, having -- with my family -- gone through his small collection of belongings discovering aspects of his life we'd scarcely intuited, the resonances of those griefs rangs loudly, folding me into their overtones.

Much has been written about this work; Meghan O'Rourke's New Yorker review here is a lovely essay in itself, placing Nox in the context of Carson's wider body of work. Here is O'Rourke's penultimate paragraph: Nox” is a luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of an elegy, which is why it evokes so effectively the felt chaos and unreality of loss. Instead of imposing baroque form on the material, Carson lets Michael haunt the work, writing into its lacunae, through the eeriness of his handwriting, of the airmail stamps he used. Her method is less to try to solve the mystery of his life and death than to enact it, to dramatize the mourner’s mind as it seeks to understand what happens to the vanished. “It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself,” she writes. “Nox” is that asking: a questioning, unsentimental excursion into the meaning of not understanding.

For me, limited in time, aiming my scholarship elsewhere for now (a poor apology, I know), the text gestures, both in its form (the accordion-unruly pages contained in the box, a child's toy, the jack-in-a-box) and in its approach (the painstaking effort, word by word, at translation of another's grief; the right-hand pages' effort as discovery, retrieval of the lost loved one) at the space between melancholia and mourning, the danger Freud pointed to of becoming stuck in that former stage. Grief is sanctioned by all cultures, but the expectation is that we move past it, that we find -- as psychological counsellors term it -- "closure." Yet those of us who have experienced loss know that the closure is willed and artificial, that the deeper melancholia persists, ready to spring out when the lid gets opened unexpectedly.

Nox is a commitment, this big book, and frustrating in many ways, too sad in others, but its rewards are many and its beauty inarguable. If you've read it, I'd love a conversation. If not, consider picking it up for a winter's sojourn with grief made deep, wondrous, and scholarly.

*My good friend Tanis MacDonald presented a paper on Nox at a recent symposium, the proceedings of which will be published as part of the Canadian Literature Symposium series under the title Material Cultures. The usual academic-publishing lag will apply but watch for this via U of Ottawa Press; the proceedings collection will be edited by Jennifer Blair and Tom Allen.

Catch-up: Three Titles

2011-10-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of posting, but the paid work does come first . . . and the reading itself which I'm unwilling to give up in order to be able to write about what I've already read. . .

Just popped in quickly to mention a few titles in the interest of at least recording what I've read since back in August:
Siddartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a marvelously humane and erudite record of humanity's awareness of, and engagement with, this illness that parodies healthy growth. I find any cultural history fascinating, and this one traces a long narrative of metaphysical and medical thinking, especially as those two are entwined with the politics of whatever day. The description of the 20th-century's empire-building and fund-raising, especially as the research bodies faced off against the tobacco industry, is a gripping tale and Mukherjee, himself a research and clinical oncologist, tells it effectively, often poetically. A big book, a tough subject, but well worth finding time for.

Also read my colleague Marilyn Bowering's To All Appearances a Lady, a historical novel set on my coast, telling the story of Vancouver Island's colonization against the backdrop of a very recent World War II. Ghosts, lepers, opium, stormy seas . . . much drama here and some illuminating correctives to history as it's been (un)told. I'm hoping to write a research paper on this, but that will mean clearing a patch on my desktop . . .
Alex MacLeod's collection of short stories, Light Lifting, is wonderful, every story a gem, a masterpiece of observation, hauntingly precise. Urban stories, generally of youth, my impression weeks and weeks after reading these is of weight, of hope worn down, but the startling insight -- into, for example, the thought process of a middle distance runner, the discipline and focus and sacrifice, measured in seconds, fractions of; or the constant dull labour of carrying bricks in heat. There's an image of a late-night dive, resigned, on a dare, the swimmer swirled beyond sight into the dark current . . . .

As always, I end by apologizing. These all deserve so much more than my simple litany of names, a few details, impressions. And as always, I invite your feedback should you read them.

Thinking About Cities. . . .and Books about Cities

2011-09-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

In contrast with my last post, the two books I'll briefly discuss here are much more subtantial. Both non-fiction, Stephen Scobie's The Measure of Paris and Mark Kingwell's Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City speak to/about our relationship with cities, albeit in very different ways.

Scobie (who was on my original dissertation committee, although he had withdrawn by the time I defended) has written a marvellous book on my favourite city, weaving memories of many happy visits there with his wife, Maureen, over several decades, with a larger attention to the city's representation in literature. (Maureen's death casts an elegiac tone, but also a compelling personal narrative, over the work as a whole, with several chapters tracing Scobie's footsteps, alone and with Maureen in the past, through the streets of the city.) Scobie's interest in the figure of the flâneur guides a work of literary criticism that I feel sure could be enjoyed by academics and non-academics alike. If you love walking the streets of Paris, you will be fascinated by Scobie's tracing of the cartographic work done by memoirists and novelists like, using the City of Light as setting. To use a literary term, Scobie points out the recurrent trope by which a protagonist records her/his progress through the city through a precise itinerary. As he notes, quoting numerous passages from a wide range of authors (Nancy Huston, Mary Welsh Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, John Glassco), the precision of these itineraries with their litanies of street names allow authors to display their knowledge of Paris, their expertise in navigating it. Doing so, as he says, "they appeal to the reader's sense of complicity with this knowledge. If the reader knows Paris, then s/he can mentally follow all of these routes, picturing every street as it is named" (69-70).

Scobie's discussion of maps and of the phenomenon of the flâneur is scholarly, yes, but it's accessible to anyone motivated. He keeps the discussion grounded through the concrete materiality of his own walks through the streets of Paris, his visceral dislike of some buildings (Montmartre's Sacre Coeur, particularly, for the distasteful political history it represents and its derivative and overblown architecture), the poignant memories of specific sites associated with his recently deceased wife. He lays his own "long poem of walking" (to use the Michel De Certeau phrase that Scobie quotes) over a network of literary mappings of Paris, framing his literary criticism within a personal, sometimes even emotional, narrative that never compromises analysis with sentiment, but is moving, engaging, instructive, and revelatory. And it was particularly enjoyable to read this book within a few weeks of seeing Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris: both book and film address "the whole discursive trope," Scobie says, "that I would here like to sum up as "Paris perdu" (Paris lost)" (3). Allen makes the point playfully through Owen Wilson's character's longing for the Paris of Hemingway, his muse's longing for the Golden Age that preceded that. Scobie makes his point more rigorously, pulling out quotation after quotation from writers through the centuries decrying the destruction of the city, its deterioration from the beautiful city of their memory.

Kingwell's book mentions Paris as well -- its pissoirs serve to illustrate a discussion of how cities deal with ordure. And while I'm obviously being playful in offering that example, it also serves to illustrate Kingwell's grounding of his reveries, his philosophical meditations in the concrete and the everyday. The book moves adroitly between actual cities, sewers and all, and ideal or imaginary cities. Above all, it's concerned with a very large project, considering the relationship between individuals and communities -- how does a city shape its citizens, and vice versa. What public spaces exist in a city and how do they allow for citizens to gather, to question, to inform, to protest, to build? And what about private spaces? Thresholds between public and private, inside and outside, safe and unsafe, clean and dirty. . . .how does contemporary architecture contribute to the determination of these thresholds?
Concrete Reveries was chosen as a Globe and Mail 2010 Best Book; I readily endorse this choice and would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in cities and in our responsibilities as citizens.

A Little Light Reading. . .

2011-09-07T16:46:00.000-07:00

The gap between what I've read and what I've written about here grows alarmingly wider, even as my chance of lessening it becomes very slim with the return of classes, the numerous obligations of teaching. Let me quickly list the three absorbing Young Adult novels of Suzanne Collins' trilogy The Hunger Games as an attempt to pinch those two distant corners (1.Already Read and 2.Have Managed to Write About) slightly closer together: The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and The Mocking Jay are light enough reading to gallop through in a summer hammock, but they grapple with coming-of-age issues as well as those larger questions of how to respond to injustice, how to live with dignity, where are our limits of tolerance and our potential for nobility. Much of the ground covered in Tolkien's universe, then, as well as C.S. Lewis' and, recently, Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling. The novels are well written, the characters convincing, and the insight into politics and/of resistance worthwhile. They provided me several welcome hours of summer escape reading, and on that basis I would recommend them as very enjoyable.

Not as satisfying, but also falling into the category of genre fiction (although mystery rather than fantasy, adult rather than YA) was Jonathan Kellerman's Deception. This one relies too heavily on characters whose interactions I'm now very familiar with. I read the mystery two weeks ago and, quite honestly, I have a hard time conjuring the plot, so non-memorable was it. A corpse found in dry ice, I remember, but the intricacies of the mystery are gone leaving only the vaguest contours. Kellerman writes well enough that his prose doesn't distract or irritate, but this one offered me an escape for several hours with no memorable after-taste. I wouldn't bother with this one, if I were you, unless you come across a free copy and have time to kill.

Two books by Molly Peacock

2011-08-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

When I was in Fredericton back in May, my friend Tanis MacDonald and I spent much of a happy afternoon wandering the amazing cornucopia of books that is The Owl's Nest Bookstore. Even though I kept saying I couldn't buy any more books because they wouldn't fit in my carry-on suitcase, I somehow left the store with a significant stack. After all, there is no more virtuous retail therapy around than book-buying, is there?

Top of my stack were two books by poet Molly Peacock. The one I began first, Paradise, Piece by Piece, was marked with that black felt-marker X that denotes a remaindered book, reminding me of the sadness of the disappearing backlist. So many books worth reading that fall between the cracks. So pleased I stumbled across this one and that its title somehow recalled a long-ago-read review. And Tanis seconded that recollection -- the woman was really no help at all in keeping my purchases to a reasonable quota!

Since I'm really supposed to be writing next week's ENGL 115 and 125 assignments and posting them to my newly-created Moodle shell, I won't say much about this book other than to recommend you grab a copy if you come across it. Although Peacock's memoir describes her dysfunctional childhood and family, she does so with such piercing, sometimes shocking, honesty and with such generosity and love and, especially, with all of a poet's descriptive powers and sensory, no make that sensual, observations that you will feel uplifted rather than troubled. Oh, and humour?! The how-not-to-fill-a-diaphragm scene is particularly memorable! More seriously, the memoir is important for the work that it does in outlining Peacock's very deliberate choice, made consciously in childhood by a precociously wise girl, to remain childless.

I copied out one passage which gobsmacked me with the recognition it evoked when Peacock spoke of her mother, Pauline, in her final, failing months. My mother did a much better job of caring for us than did Peacock's, and my family functioned reasonably well given our circumstances, but the little girl my mother's operating as in her (increasingly less mild) Mild Cognitive Impairment wanted to come out from the earliest days of her motherhood, if not before. Peacock writes that experience so clearly:

Who was the little one who'd crouched inside Pauline until the months before her death and arose, fully her little girl self, with confidence and demands? I didn't know. But I saw in her dying her final exercise of that child. In love of her, I was that child's servant. The clarity of my mother's childishness made me know for sure I had taken care of this little girl all my life. I was born as her grandmother. I had [my grandmother's] name, Molly. . .

The other Peacock I picked up is How to Read a Poem . . . and Start a Poetry Circle, and I grabbed it because I'm always looking for ways to walk my students toward some confidence in the poetry-reading process. It's not the page-turner that Paradise was, of course, thanks to its different goals, genre, but it's a lovely book to pick up and read a chapter. Each of those chapters is a case study taking the reader through an idiosyncratic look at one of Peacock's favourite poems. Not only might you be introduced to a new poem, but you'll also be offered Peacock's 3-part system for approaching one on your own: she suggests considering the system of the line, the system of the sentence, and the system of the image. I'm going to try this with my students this term as it offers a reassuring structure.

And I might even try it out myself on some of Peacock's own poetry . . . because it seems that having read her in prose and learned to love her voice, it's time to check out her regular digs, in the poetry section. . .

Sue Sinclair's Breaker

2011-08-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

I felt compelled to read her poetry after hearing Sinclair give a paper on Jan Zwicky this past spring in Fredericton. Handy that Kitty Lewis, the apparently indefatigable general manager of Brick Books, just "happened" to be there with copies of Sue's books available. And was flexible about invoicing me. Kitty is a wonderful advocate not only for Brick authors but for Canadian writing in general, an inspiring gem in our midst.

Anyway, on to Breaker which I've savoured over the past few months. The collection overall presents a universe of overwhelming beauty, the wonder at it always tinged with melancholy? resignation? almost, but not quite, the "surrender" of the first poem. Not quite, I say, because there is also, throughout, "the momentary triumph of the present." Still, wonder grapples throughout with loneliness, and the lone self under a night sky, rain, astronomical imagery prevail. Here, for example, a representative passage from "Dawn till Dusk": "Things rise up . in their dignity / and will spend the rest of the day / sinking back / as our minds start to lag / behind the visible, unable / to keep up with the ever-receding / horizon of what-is."

This comment on suburban bungalows in "Suburbs" mesmerizes me with its compassionate personification of the 20th-century blight that nonetheless houses so many hopes and dreams, its reining-in of an instinctive scorn:
"Vinyl-sided, slow-witted,
they insist they didn't mean for this to happen,
this sameness, shackled to their own kind
like cattle transported slowly nowhere
in a broken-down truck. This is what happened to them,
not what they are. And they know the privilege
of even this adequate existence. Ashamed,
they lower their heads as children do
who think they have done something wrong
in being born. You too bow your head,
wish you could divest yourself of scorn."

Another persistent, compelling image throughout the collection is that of a sinking into the ground, returning or digging down. These lines from "Homecoming" combine the pitting of lone self against night, of a star-filled universe, and of the move downward into earth:
"And when the sun fades and quiet descends, you're still there,
have outlasted the day's blunt heat. A thin armour of insects glitters
overhead as you linger on the porch, putting off sleep
like another task. The day is long but your mind is longer.
The night is deep but your mind is deeper. Stars creep over the horizon;
a fertile darkness sinks into the ground"

Many more images linger, many more poems for you to wander through and wonder with should you pick up this rewarding volume. As always, let me know if you do.

More Atkinson

2011-08-03T17:20:00.000-07:00

I recently reread Kate Atkinsons' Behind the Scenes at the Museum, some 13 or so years after I read it with a book club. This time, I was motivated by my friend Tanis who moved to it from Atkinson's wonderful mystery series featuring Jackson Brodie. We thought some tandem reading might be fun, and we even hoped we'd fit our discussion of the book into T's recent visit to the Coast. Alas, other topics plus food plus wine plus martinis plus dancing to Abba distracted us from our goal. We made up for it last week, though, with a 90-minute phone call covering the Atkinson and Dionne Brand's Ossuaries. I'd rather forgotten how satisfying a phone conversation could be, that medium having been replaced in my life, for the most part, by e-mails, FB chats, and the occasional in-person book chats. When's the last time you talked to a friend about a book over the phone? A sustained conversation?

What did we talk about? Well, we shared our delight in Atkinson's literary references -- beginning with the allusion to Tristram Shandy (the child sharing details of his/her conception) and the accompanying sly description of her father as being made "of stern stuff" (a test? will the reader get the Laurence Sterne nod?). The narrator's wry depiction of her parents' coital interactions takes on ontological weight with her evocation of Sartre as she speaks of "mov[ing] from nothingness into being." Given that the alert reader picks up these clues from a conversational tone filled with a comically detached yet observant tone, all on the first page, we know we're in for a page-turning fun ride.

Yet there is foreboding almost from the opening as well as Ruby wonders, in her adult-filtered childhood voice, why she has a "strange feeling [as if she's] being haunted by [her] own embryonic ghost?" And truly, the novel achieves a wondrous alternation of comic and haunted. As in the novels Nicola King reads in her brilliant study of how the self remembers and is remembered, Memory, Narrative, and Identity, narrator Ruby unrolls layers of family history to expose a traumatic secret. But Ruby doesn't know all, and one of the novel's pleasures are the footnotes that follow each chapter, the parallel narratives that let the reader in on secrets that Ruby and her immediate family are not privy to, but that inform their past.

Once again, I will back away from any attempt at a full book review, pleading the usual time constraints, but I will add three references before I close. First, another literary allusion, one that delights me as a knitter always on the alert for knitting imagery in literature. Ruby describes her mother Bunty "sit[ting] behind the counter clicking her number nine needles as if she's a tricoteuse at George's guillotine when she should be knitting my future" (17) -- a clear reference, surely, to Madame Desforges in Dickens' Tale of Two Cities.

The second, a hilarious indication of just how unsuitable Bunty is as a mother: "She hates cooking, it's too much like being nice to people" (24)

And then this lovely quotation, which really summarizes much of the novel's commentary: Ruby asking, after a series of devastating hits, "How can life be so sweet and so sad all at the same time? How?" (281).

How, indeed?
If you've read this one, I'd love to hear what you think. If not, I'm obviously highly recommend that you add it to your list.

Late Nights and Mystery

2011-07-31T12:16:00.000-07:00

Because I've been so far behind in recording my reading for so long, I haven't been grabbing impressions of what I'm reading at the moment -- Twitter is giving me a venue for doing so, in those 140-character bursts, and that's a start, but I'd love to do more weaving together of new and old reading, and of reading-as-it's-happening mucked in with my daily life.

Right now, for example, I'm about 100 pages into Elizabeth Hay's Giller Prize-winning Late Nights on Air, and while the novel is delighting me with its sketch of Yellowknife in the 1970s, while it's assembling a panoply of fascinating characters and setting up credible, seductive tensions between them, it's also reminding me how much this country has been a country of radio. Peter Gzowski's voice fills my memory, and before his, Don Harron's. Those were morning programs, of course, and it's been many years since my schedule has accommodated listening to radio, but oh, the interviews I got to listen to, the authors I heard read from their works. Hay scrolls us back even further on the calendar, taking us to those isolated, northern nights with families gathered 'round the radio in the livingroom or convalescent teen girls listening alone in their bedrooms. She makes me wish for another small lifetime, one with enough hours to explore the vast CBC archive, listening to the wondrous collection of radio plays with their rich mimetic soundscapes.

And she recalls the significance in Canadian environmental history of the Berger commission which I'll admit to having experienced as rather peripheral at the time. I was sympathetic to the resistance against the pipelines, but like most of us, I think, if I thought much about it I saw it as doomed and somewhat naive. Revisiting it through Hay's fictional lens, I'm tending to appreciate more how significant it was that a commission was set, and that such a respected, thoughtful, conscientious, and fair man was charged with listening to all the voices of those concerned, so many of them First Nations peoples who had rarely been listened to so carefully before.

So I'll dive back into the novel and see what else impresses me. Before I do, though, let me catch up my booklog by quickly recording that I read Chevy Stevens Still Missing. A gripping mystery set right in my own backyard of Vancouver Island, this debut novel by a young writer justifies the hype if you're looking for a fast-paced novel with strong, interesting characters and some psychological drama. Great beach book!

Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red

2011-07-27T21:16:00.000-07:00

July is almost over, and I have to be back on campus August 15th, which means my research leave combined with my summer vacation? almost over! And with it will go all hope of catching up my reading blog. So short and sweet (or quick and dirty) will be even more the practice around here for the next few weeks.

A quick nod to Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse which I read on the plane going to the conference in Fredericton back at the end of May. (since then, I've also been picking my way through her beautiful, sad, poignant,
scholarly
erudite, and colossal Nox, but that's another story/post).

The introduction alone is worth the price of admission here. Savour the humour of this opening sentence and its wry and extravagant understatement: "He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet."
In fact, these first four pages made me yearn to read them aloud to a first-year class. Indeed, I've promised myself that I will teach this to a 100-level class at some point, for the dubious pleasure of insisting that they work their way through such scrumptiously dense thinking, such keen analysis of language. For example, "What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives com from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitehton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top,' 'added,' 'appended,' 'imported,' 'foreign.' Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being."
Hmmmm? Just starts the wheels turning, doesn't it? Wonderful stuff.
And by the time she finishes explaining who Stesichoros was, what his long poem, recovered through fragments, tells us about a winged red monster killed for his herd of cattle, we are already captive, eager for her to carry on and offer her version of this ancient tale.

I could spend years in her version, wondering where and when I am, wandering the globe, the centuries, meditating on the artist's role, the lover's journey, the monster's place in the world. The pleasures of the word, in both sound and image, are myriad here. It's not an easy book to read, but these pleasures pull readers on through confusing, mysterious overlappings of space and time, and the love story is compelling. And the setting, the author's knowledge, will make you wish you'd studied Classics; at least, it did me.
So much more I could say "Had I but world enough and time" (to quote that seducer-poet, Andrew Marvell). . . .
Have you read this? Or any Anne Carson? If not, you're missing out. If yes, do tell, please . . .

Two Books on the English Language

2011-07-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

Many of you who took a 1st-year English course -- called something like Composition & Rhetoric or Writing for University -- will perhaps remember working your way through an anthology of essays -- to which you would formulate a response, learning in the process how to research convincing support for your thesis. At some point several years ago, I tired of using an anthology to teach this course. Either it was quite expensive for the number of essays actually covered or the timeliness of once-relevant arguments had faded (particularly true in those collections that aim at being more contemporary/relevant) or the number of flaccid essays in a collection outweighed the number I'd be keen to work with.

For several terms, instead of choosing an anthology, I simply had the students pick up the latest copy of The Walrus (a monthly magazine comprising essays covering a wide variety of topics: social, political, environmental, cultural; the closest Canadian equivalent to Harper's or The Atlantic), and they'd build their research topics from the wide range of articles, after we'd discussed several together. I enjoyed this approach, but again, there was an unevenness, as well as the big problem of requiring me to do much of my course prep as I went along.

Then three or four years ago, a fellow blogger, also an academic, enthusiastically mentioned Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, and I decided to try building the course around a single text, making students read the whole thing. The book (on entertainment technology/pop culture) generated some lively discussions and some engaging essays. Last year, I decided they really should be able to manage two texts during the term, and I added David Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 (included on my 2010 reading list, but never blogged here -- countering, with evidence, the usual complaints about how phone texting is ruining the English language).

But after teaching Johnson's text four or five times now, I can see the students' arguments coming. Not fair to them, really, so I decided it was time to switch it up. I'd read a review of Robert McCrumb's Globish: How English Became the World's Language and thought it might make a good basis for our explorations in research and composition, especially with the number of ESL students on campus. But I worked my way through the text last month and had to decide, reluctantly, that while the content is interesting enough, the writing style is unlikely to engage students. As well, the editing is frustratingly poor, not only at the copy-editing level (many errors that would give too much ammunition to students!), but also at the structural level. For any of you who want to trace the development of English from tribal times through to the present global spread, this is a solidly-researched, fascinating text, and it makes some convincing arguments about the future of English as Globish based on our language's rather global past. I'm glad I read it, but I had to reluctantly put it aside and turn to something else, with summer's clock ticking down toward my fall start-up.

So the book I've chosen to have my students read is Bill Bryson's Mother English. This considerably older (published 1990) text is, admittedly, somewhat out of date (for example, it barely considers the effects of e-mail, texting, and the internet in general). Nor does Bryson document his sources satisfactorily (yes, there's a extensive bibliography, but without any foot/end-noting so particular claims can't be traced back). However, the writing is lively and there are enough quirky facts to keep students engaged (I'm counting on the chapter on swearing to hold their attention as we get towards the saggy end of term). As well, I can point to our inability to examine his claims, the fact that he doesn't clearly bread-crumb his sources, as an example of why students must take care to document their own research papers. So while I have some reservations about both these texts, I can work with Bryson's. Whether or not the students can get as excited as I can about the long evolution of something we use so unthinkingly every minute of our days is questionable, obviously, but I'm determined to give this approach a good try. Bringing in David Crystal's Txtng again, I hope to get their attention by putting the whole "English is going to hell in a handbasket thanks to technological and social changes" argument into a much longer context.

Have you any recommendations for great books about English? Or any opinions after having read McCrumb's or Bryson's books on the topic?

Lionel Shriver's So Much for That

2011-07-18T16:02:00.000-07:00

I thought that Lionel Shriver's So Much for That might make a hat-trick, with these other two titles, of books I couldn't finish. The rants of one particular character -- against office and government bureaucracies, against taxes, against regulations, against social dependencies on state infrastructures -- become tedious beyond the making of any point. While this character is clearly being mocked, he has initially been one with whom the reader feels considerable sympathy, and both author and narrator (and certainly the protagonist) are at least partially aligned with some of his views. So many pages in the novel's first half (perhaps most of the second quarter, some of the third) are pedantic -- I wanted to scrream "I get it, I get it"! The US Medicare system is absolutely inadequate and unfeeling; bureaucrats are heartless; Medicine works too hard to "fix" the body at the expense of the patient's humanity; our society's rat race leaves no time to care for -- and learn from -- the sick and the disabled and the dying. Pedantic, proselytizing, and, perhaps even worse for me, most characters veered dangerously close to caricature through the first third to half of the novel, and while caricatures are useful in making a point, they rarely endear a reader to themselves.

But I persevered on the basis of Shriver's chilling We Have to Talk about Kevin. Someone so willing to write honestly about such a difficult topic, so able to bring a powerful lens to bear on issues we prefer to keep out of sight deserved a bit more trust. Just as I'd allotted her another 20-50 pages before I put the book down for good, she won me over. I still think an editor could have been more demanding, freer with the scalpel, but I would recommend this book for the possibilities it allows us to imagine. What if, when those we love are dying, we face their death together rather than insisting past their furthest weakness that they're getting better. What might we find out by embracing, rather than strenuously avoiding, death -- and even disability and illness-- as part of life? By the end of So Much, Shriver has made a compelling case. I hesitate to say more for fear of introducing a spoiler (and 'cause I'm so far behind, as usual, on logging my reading). But if you've read the book, I'd love to get a discussion going. . . .

Dionne Brand's Ossuaries

2011-07-15T17:37:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading Dionne Brand's Ossuaries, twice. That is, I finished this book-length (124 pages) poem, and turned almost immediately to the beginning to read it through again. It's stunning, difficult, tough, uncompromising, and wildly, unexpectedly, beautiful. The speaking persona, Yasmine, is unrooted, disconnected from the urban society that excludes her, unable to muster any sympathy at the tele-vision of the crumbling twin towers. She crosses borders of time and space, weaving together countless ossuaries of injustices around a central shocking event. A linear story can (barely) be assembled from the narrative, but to assemble it rather misses the point, and a reader does as well to pause regularly, startled by the most arresting images. The litany of collective nouns for kisses, for example, or the "rhetorical metatarsals," "the lit cigarette tip of the backbone." Despite the narrator's fierce despair about the poisoned state of planets, galaxies, the "fissile skies," she finds astonishing beauty, splitting syntax to express it.

The citation of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire in the acknowledgements at the end of the poem is a hint that this is not your Sunday lyric poetry. Although, Yas tells us, "the presumptive cruelties / the villages that nursed these since time, / it's always in the lyric // the harsh fast threatening gobble, / the clipped sharp knifing, it's always, in the lyric." Her despair at the constancy of cruelty throughout history and into the future is perhaps most pronounced in "ossuary xiii," the potential epistle to her younger self: "if only I had something to tell you, from here, ' some good thing that would weather / the atmospheres of the last thirty years." Instead, she laments, she could only say "the brilliant future doesn't wait, / forget this, / I've been wasted, look, the chest like a torn bodice." But if this is not an easily welcome "lyric," it is a poem that repays lavishly the effort of reading it. Indeed, the effort becomes pleasure if one reads aloud, although pleasure sits uneasily with the witnessing which is the reader's work here.

I will read this again now, working through to track down the many references -- Jacob Lawrence, for example, an African American artist whose cubist War (WWII) series are the focus of "ossuary xi." Probably have to track down the jazz pieces by Monk, Coltrane, Mingus, Bird. I'll raise a glass, as well, to toast Brand winning the (Canadian) Griffin Poetry Prize for this book. And I will begin to annotate my copy with the pencil markings that make a text my own. Can't do that with
an e-reader
my Kobo. *Thanks, commenter Fred, for the correction here
Nor asterisk favourite lines: "I, the slippery pronoun, the ambivalent, glistening, long sheath of the alphabet flares beyond her reach" OR "call it heron, great blue, long-legged migrating alone / north, it broke off, it took air, / flew into an apostropher, / heading to the wet marsh of another lake"
Nor put exclamation marks in the margins of the six virtuoso pages sans verb since "verbs are a tragedy, a bleeding cliffside, explosions , / I'm better off without" . . . .

For those of you who sometimes ask me to recommend Canadian literature, I'd say start here to defy any expectations of what that term might mean. And let me know what you think.

Again, please excuse the inadequacy of this response to a marvellous book, remembering that this blog is primarily intended for me to record my reading rather than attempt to review titles comprehensively.

Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater . . .

2011-07-04T17:17:00.000-07:00

I just can't do it. While I almost always make myself soldier on to the end of a novel, I've had to abandon two in the last few months. The first was the latest instalment in Jean Auel's prehistoric saga -- I'd read and enjoyed the first three decades ago and thought I'd enjoy e-reading The Land of Painted Caves. But although I hung in for many chapters, I've finally abandoned the book, although I haven't yet deleted it.

Anne Marsella's The Baby of Belleville grabbed my attention when I read a review of it on some Paris blog or other. And at first its quirky sentence-conscious prose, filled with enhanced-vocabulary word choices, was endearing, its whimsical treatment of Catholicism and Islam as they mingle in Paris's Belleville, was appealing. Perhaps Jane-ites will embrace it; perhaps they already have. But for me the quirkiness and whimsy teetered the balance right over into flattening out the characters, obviously caricatures and thus not finally engaging for me. There are certainly some wonderful moments, especially ones that new mothers will recognize, as for instance when Jane (ah-ha) comments to the reader, after her mother-in-law asks if the baby is getting enough milk, "The enough-milk question, as any nursing mother will agree, provokes in the maternal provider, that industrious twenty four-hour diner, a strong desire to slap the offender silly." Controlling her instincts, she cleverly answers, "Does the Lord get enough love? There is no way to measure that, but certainly He thrives." and advises the reader that "Putting it in catechism terms, as a matter held in the hands of faith, conveyed my point to Mathilde." Clever. Amusing. Yes, And there are numerous such moments. But finally, these happy instances could not tempt me past page 259.

So there. Life is simply too full of books to read and too short of time for reading them. And I'm old enough and wise enough to give myself permission.

So two questions for you? 1)Have you read either of these two novels and have any argument to sway my decision? 2) Have you abandoned any novels partway through recently, or ever?

Together Again: Wagamese and Richards . . . and Wharton?

2011-06-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

If I don't catch up by combining several short blurbs in one post, I'll never get to talk about a book while it's fresh with me. So, here goes, three from May:
1. I read Edith Wharton's Ethan Fromme to benefit from the astute and enlightening post written by Lisa's father, The Professor, and posted over at her website, Privilege. Will I shock you if I admit that it's the first Wharton novel I've read? Remember, I'm a Canadianist, and although I do have some familiarity with American Lit, it's primarily the more contemporary writing. I'll definitely make room for more Wharton after this introduction, especially now that The Professor has drawn my attention to the finer linguistic aspects of the dialogue. I'm also rather interested to compare the text's "coldness" (again, note what the Prof says about this) with some rather cold Canadian texts. The combination of social and meteorological coldness, especially against a background of class relations, though, seems rather particular. (Yet some of Sinclair Ross's stories come to mind, particularly for the social isolation.)
I was disappointed that I hadn't managed to view the film version of this -- especially since it featured a very good cast. But The Professor's impatience with it reconciles me to my failure, and I doubt I'll try to search out the video now.

2. I read David Adams Richards' Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul (a copy I had him sign after hearing him speak) as I flew back across Canada from New Brunswick, finishing it over the first few days back home. Surprisingly, it's something of a page-turner, as close to genre fiction--the mystery--as I can imagine Richards getting. Usually, I read his books with some mixture of fascinated horror and genuine concern for the one or two truly human individuals that tend to redeem the surrounding banal multiplying selfishnesses of the world he describes . . . his Miramichi a microcosm of humanity, but also a fascinatingly particular region, harsh, gothic, sometimes beautiful. I'm also generally horrified by, yet oddly admiring of, Richards' disregard for intellectual and literary fashion, for what I hate calling "political correctness" yet concede the term's usefulness. Richards writes about religion and race in ways that occasionally make me wince, yet excepting his narrators' overblown disgust with academe, I admit that he writes with intellectual honesty and rigour. And as particular as his works are to a small, rather remote region, he gets to the universal in a way that recalls those big Russian writers he favours (at least, they certainly come up in the interviews/articles I've read about him).

3. Richard Wagamese's Dream Wheels is a much more accessible novel, but linked to ~~Wagamese~~Richards' in a way through the small communities, the threatened ways of life, and the First Nations characters, a young man and his grandfather especially. Of course, in the current climate of mistrust for cultural appropriation (a mistrust I generally share), Wagamese is considered a more legitimate teller of such a tale, being FN himself. Yet his elder might sit down happily with Richards' old chief, the broken young rodeo rider find a sympathetic ear in the Miramichi FN police officer, Markus Paul. I've put Wagamese's book on my first-year reading list for the fall, and I'm hoping the students will enjoy the descriptions of rodeo life in the BC interior as much as I did -- I'm always fascinated by the particulars of any disciplined endeavour, especially when the description is researched well enough to be convincing. And I'm especially keen when physical discipline -- skateboarding, hockey-playing, gardening, whatever -- leads to spiritual awareness and emotional well-being.

I note that by some interesting coincidence, I have once again brought Wagamese and Richards together in a post. I wonder what that's about . . .

Three for the Big Armchair -- two mysteries and a Paris memoir

2011-06-13T16:05:00.000-07:00

Some recent light reading:

Jeffrey Deaver's The Burning Wire: Another Lincoln Rhyme's mystery, this one will have you flipping those light switches very carefully, keeping small appliances well away from water, and being generally very mindful of electricity's terrifying possibilities.

Lee Child's Worth Dying For: The man rides into town and single-handedly transforms an entire community. You've gotta love it!! I read in this past weekend's Globe and Mail book section that Malcolm Gladwell eagerly stalks his local bookstore waiting for the next Jack Reacher release. Me too!

Elizabeth Bard's Lunch in Paris: Packaged as chicklit, this is a well-written, entertaining memoir with some enlightening analysis of the difference between French and (North) American culture. There's also some interesting commentary on the "French women don't get fat" phenomenon, nicely balanced with a wealth of inspiring recipes. I so much enjoyed the copy left behind in our Paris apartment that I downloaded an e-version on my Kobo, primarily for the recipes (and most especially, for a chocolate soufflé that I've been saving to cheer up a rainy day).

Carol Matthews' Labyrinth book

2011-06-13T15:53:00.000-07:00

My friend and neighbour Carol Matthews has folded a lifetime's worth of wisdom into her slim book, Questions for Ariadne: The Labyrinth and the End of Times. The book is structured as a conversation with Ariadne, the Greek goddess, as Carol tries to puzzle her way, through the figure of a labyrinth, to some kind of understanding about life and death. Having moved into these years where we're increasingly aware of death's brooding, imminent presence, those of us "of a certain age" will recognize what Carol is grappling with. We see beloved friends diminished by disease, we guide parents whose memories -- and thus identities -- are compromised; and we wonder how we will face what we have to. One of Carol's imagined solutions is to swim out as far as she can, accompanied by her companion of the last almost five decades, husband Mike (whose voice grounds the book throughout, with a curmudgeonly freshness that allows the reader regular comic relief from the tough questions). This image is painful (and brave) for me, as I regularly view Mike and Carol, throughout our summers, determinedly plunging into the cold water for their daily (sometimes 4x daily!) swim. Carol lightens the image's poignancy, though, when she notes that every time she tries to visualize it, she and Mike swim out to the point where she is too exhausted to continue and, in her imagination, he changes his mind, turns back and swims strongly to shore. Not just comic relief, her imagined scenario reminds us that elements of our death remain beyond our control.

Two of these books are not like the other . . .

2011-06-06T17:48:00.000-07:00

I'm going to have to speed things up a bit, so you'll excuse some disparate pairings, I hope, and some very brief remarks.

Ian McEwan's Solar, while it is, as the Sunday Times apparently declared, "savagely funny," is not my favourite of his, and along with Howard Jakobson's The Finkler Question, it has reminded me that I'm not a huge fan of satire. Certainly, I see its usefulness -- indeed, the issue to which McEwan is responding (global warming/climate change) is so big, so disheartening, so drastically requiring some immediate consciousness-raising that satire may be the only response possible.

As with the protagonist in the Jakobson novel, I don't like Michael Beard much at all. However, as a vehicle for exploring the scientific community's response to global warming, alongside that of the marketplace, of corporations large and small, he works very well indeed. As my blogging friend Lesley points out, the book offers up some lively guffaws while exploring Beard's ego. It also pokes at the debate between the relative worth of the sciences and the humanities.

And the disparate pairing . . .
well that would be with William Trevor's gentle, delicate Love and Summer.

Trevor's novel is fairly slight. A newcomer arrives in a small Irish community, one of whose families has just lost (or been liberated from, depending on who's speaking) their matriarch. The arrival and the funeral together set up echoes from at least a generation back. A young woman who previously considered herself very fortunate in marriage begins to realize the possibilities she has relinquished in exchange for security. An older man whose mind has become unhinged by circumstances watches -- and appears to see the echoes as warnings of potential disaster, repetition of events long past. And although those outlines might suggest a tumultuous climax, choices are sorted out, decisions made, all in the most nuanced, richest shades of grey. It's quiet, this little book, but almost unbearably poignant at spots. Each character, no matter how much we're tempted to dislike them, or dismiss them for their selfishness, or deride their insularity, each one is revealed in an insistent humanity.

I often scold my husband for comparing works rather than simply exploring what each has to offer, taking it on its own terms. It seems unfair to hold one up to another as if there were an either/or situation. But I couldn't help comparing Trevor, as an older Brit writer (born in 1928 . . . Love and Summer was published in 2009), with Jakobson (1942) and McEwan (1948). Of course, the comparison is weighted by my lack of appreciation for satire. As well, though, I have to admit I'm simply less interested in the late middle-aged/early senior male perspective that Jakobson and McEwan write from, even finding it tiresome at times. In contrast, Trevor is able to illuminate, for me, a wider range of ages and to convincingly and sympathetically portray a female character. Hmmm, I can see why I chide Paul for comparing . . . I'm already wondering if I want to commit to these musings. Well, let them stand for now, and perhaps you'll tell me what you think. . .

More E-reading Mystery

2011-06-04T06:17:00.000-07:00

This is just silly! I'm falling so far behind, and every time I get pulled into a new book, get caught up in the reading of it, the gap grows wider.

So a bit of catch-up. It's probably almost a month since I read Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn, a mystery in her Jackson Brodie series. Delighted to realize that there was a Jackson Brodie book I hadn't read, I'd downloaded it onto my Kobo before we headed to Paris. I "saved" it during the trip, thinking I'd read it on the plane home, but then saved it a bit longer -- do you ever play such games with your reading self?

Atkinson's mysteries have a different, more thoughtful, more ambling pace than is common to the genre, and One Good Turn might be even more that way than the others. It portrays Brodie actually in a relationship -- with a melodramatic, somewhat elusive actress -- rather than in the other books of the series, which generally show him looking back at his relationships wondering where they went wrong. Atkinson gets inside heads, and she picks interesting heads to speak from -- at least, they don't seem interesting from the outside, but she shows us what's motivating the most ordinary-appearing, the mild-mannered (a lovely portrayal of a mystery writer who prefers to live in an earlier time, imaginatively).

Reading a mystery on an e-reader emphasizes a problem with the devices: if you like to know how close you are to the end of a book -- you know, so that you can either race to finish before turning off the light, or so that you can stretch out those last three chapters luxuriously or save them for your afternoon cuppa, you're out of luck. Yes, it can tell you that you've read 67%, but I'm not finding that to be quite the same as eyeing and feeling the diminishing number of pages on my right and comparing them to the increasing stack on my left. . .

Book-buying and The Slap

2011-05-18T13:13:00.000-07:00

If you follow my main blog, materfamilias writes, you know that we try to travel light, relying on carry-on luggage only. Besides shoes, the big challenge to this restriction is in the number of books I can bring back, especially when travelling to such a reader-friendly city as London. All those wonderful bookstores with remarkable backlists as well as all the latest offerings. And the prices reflect the dense market, very enviable indeed.

Yet I did manage to resist, mainly by doing my ogling through the store windows. One of these trips, I'm going to throw convenience to the wind and absolutely fill to the gills a honking big suitcase (that was a mixed metaphor surely, fish and geese are jumbled together) -- books, books, and more books. But given that I'd loaded up my new Kobo with a few titles, that we'd brought several real (i.e. paper) books to share, and that I knew there was a big stack of books waiting unread back home, I just walked on by, for the most part.

Finally, at the airport, though, having checked our carry-ons for a change, my hands felt too empty and there was a W.H. Smith singing the siren call of Buy 1, Get 1. I think I was a model of restraint, coming out of there with only four books. I think Pater disagrees. Whatever.

I read Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap on the plane. It poses an interesting question, albeit in exaggerated terms. The formula -- a group of friends and acquaintances whose stories overlap to form a prismatic whole -- is familiar, but managed quite well. There are enough sex scenes to make this a good summer beach read, but good enough writing and social analysis to elevate it to a rather literary beach book. That might make us feel better about packing it alongside the sunscreen, but while The Guardian thus fairly calls it the "must-read novel of the summer," The Daily Telegraph calls it the "ideal summer read; escapist, funny and clever," and the Daily Mail pegs it "as addictive as the best soap opera," I can't help but wonder what (Irish novelist) John Boyne's been reading that he proclaims, on The Slap's front cover, that it is "One of the truly great novels of the new millennium." Um, don't quite think it's there. That others disagree with my appraisal is suggested by the book being awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (and it was longlisted for the Man Booker, but that's quite a long list). My Scottish-French friend, Lesley, seems to agree with me, as this post suggests. What about you? Have you read it? heard of it?
And btw, how big is your stack of next-to-read or I'll-get-to-these-someday? And do you heed its perilous heights, or do you ignore it and plunge into any bookstore ready for more acquisitions? You know I love your comments, so do tell . . .

Rereading Timothy Taylor's Story House on the Kobo

2011-05-09T11:07:00.000-07:00

Before I left for our trip, conscious that I should be spending at least some time thinking about the conference paper I'm presenting this month, I debated which books to bring along for work. I knew I should at least re-read the two primary novels, but I really didn't want to cart them around, particularly because I wasn't willing to discard them, en route, in favour of new reading. So, Kobo to the rescue, I actually bought an electronic copy of Timothy Taylor's Story House, despite already owning it in hardcover. And then found, of course, that despite the undeniable convenience this copy provided, I had to write out any passages I wanted to note, since the Kobo doesn't allow me to highlight and save quotations.

I've already commented on this novel, three years ago when I first read it, before I started my reading blog. Given that I'm busy writing a paper about it, I won't bother saying much here. But I will share this thought-provoking passage that I couldn't resist reading aloud to Pater. The very bright, very logical Esther, determined always to move forward rather than to dwell on the past, is explaining to her husband, Graham (who is rather obsessed with understanding his deceased father) why personal experience is not the reliable guide he assumes it to be. For Esther, "The present is your only guide. What you know today is not only enough, it is all you know."
She goes on to offer "nine reasons why you should ignore experience" (and I would want to quibble here that experience, surely, is part of "what you know today"). The narrator repeats only three of these nine reasons, but I find these three a very compelling argument, despite my quibble. Here they are: "One: availability to memory. Your great reservoir of 'experience' comprises only incidents you remember. What of all you forget? Two: inherent bias. Your life delivers up a certain quality of experience, your reality being a subset of possibility, not the reverse. What of all you miss? Three: superannuation. Things change. The lessons of one's experience, such that they exist at all, have a stale-date" (99).

A Classic Discovery -- Madame Bovary

2011-05-07T14:57:00.000-07:00

Warning: this one's a quick-and-dirty response (not a review). . . .

Kobo, Kindle and other e-readers make a big deal of the free library that comes with one's purchase -- although there's no question these are all worthwhile reads and add some value to the electronic convenience, the list is not likely to influence the sale much. Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Mark Twain . . . all have long been available in Signet Classics or the like, very inexpensively, forever, and can be found even more cheaply at any secondhand shop. Indeed, one of my daughter's first questions on picking up her Kobo was how she might remove these "classics" which she saw as simply cluttering up available memory. I'll probably follow her lead and delete most of the titles.

Madame Bovary, however -- written by Gustave Flaubert and translated, at least in the Kobo edition by Eleanor Marx Aveling (and yes, she's related to that Marx -- his youngest daughter, in fact) -- is a book I have long meant to read and with it sitting electronically right inside my handbag during our trip, I had no reason to put off our engagement any longer. I found the reading timely for many reasons -- most obviously, I was in the country of its setting and of its writing (France, yes), but also, I could sometimes feel a certain Bovar-ism creeping into my own spirit. Sometimes I wanted and wanted, I was tempted to feel sorry for myself for not having, even as I was really in a very fortunate position. Emma at least had the excuse of her confinement in a banal, provincial domesticity whereas I, having been able to exercise so much choice in the shaping of my life, should know better than to crave the shallow satisfactions of consumer goods. While I was in no danger of flitting off behind Pater's back with the nearest cute marquis or viscount or, gasp, humble clerk, I did share with Emma the occasional pout at why some women could swathe thesmelves in Chanel and Hermès while I was stuck with my pilling black cashmere v-neck, the same annoying black skirt, and my too-heavy patent black brogues, victim of my carry-on wardrobe.

In the kind of synchronicity life so often deals out, I recognized settings appropriate to Mme. Bovary's wishful dreaming on the stage last weekend in the VOA production of La Traviata whose 1850s Paris ballroom would have fit, albeit with a little time-and-space shoe-horning, into the novel.

As I complained in my previous post, reading on the Kobo makes it more difficult to retrieve favourite quotations, but I copied this one into an e-mail and sent it to myself: "human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars."

Flaubert's meticulous portrayal of Emma's restlessness is surprisingly neutral and allows one to sympathize with Mme. Bovary's attempt to make something of her life within the constraints of the day's expectations for bourgeois women. At the same time, her shallowness and silly romanticism mean that she is no more a victim in this reader's eyes than is her rather blind, (often bland), somewhat plodding husband. And Flaubert certainly does not subscribe to any pious essentialisms about a woman's innate maternity!

Have you read Mme. Bovary? Studied it for a course? I'd love to hear your impressions. . . .

Bewitched e-Reader

2011-05-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

I finally bought an e-Reader -- the Kobo, which is Indigo/Chapter (the Canadian answer to Amazon)'s answer to Kindle. Besides acknowledging that it might be really useful on holidays, especially given that we travel with carry-ons only, I felt that I'd better get to know the way so many of my students will soon be experiencing books.

And I do like the sleek, lightweight design. You already know that I try to carry a book with me always, and with the Kobo, especially since I can have numerous want-to-reads loaded up at a time, this is easier than ever. The surface is just as readable as the pages of any book, and I can even adjust the print to a size that suits my eyes. Because I'm a fast reader, I worried at first that I'd be irritated by the micro-second hesitation of an electronic page change, but that's turned out not to be the case. And sometimes, as when eating or knitting, the flat surface is welcome, freeing my hands to do something besides holding the book open.

BUT. . . unless there are tricks I haven't yet learned, in this version of the eReader, at least, there are all the limitations I suspected. Several times, I've wanted to comparing what I'm reading with something on an earlier page, and this is much more tediously achieved than with a real book. As well, there is no way to comment in the margins -- not in the Kobo as I know it -- nor even to highlight and save passages. Having to carry along a separate notebook and copy out such passages negates much of the reader's convenience, and it will direct my students away from the kind of deep-reading habits I'm hoping to instil.

Similarly, pagination (the numbering of the pages) is unstable in the eReader -- a side-effect of being able to change the print size. Once I'd copied out the quotations I wanted to save, or at least enough to let me find them again, I was stymied when I tried to note the corresponding page number: instead, I'd have to write "Chapter 18 -- 1 of 20" or "Chapter 18 -- 1 of 24" or "Chapter 18 -- 1 of 17" -- all to refer to the same quotation!

If any of my readers have e-solutions to any of these problems, I'd love to hear. Does your Reader allow you to highlight, save, and even transport quotations? Could my Kobo, if I were a better Techie? Of course, even if I learn to use the eReader more fully, it will never record for me the inestimable layers of metadata that my books can. No ticket stub from a play seen on a London stage three years ago will ever flutter from its pages, nor will it hold its author's inked signature any more than be marked by the tea I spilled when my granddaughter bumped me. I can't compare my current impressions with those I'd jotted on the inside cover pages the last time I prepared to teach the book and, before that, when I read it for the first time. My students will no longer marvel to see how old my copy looks, how it's been loved like a Velveteen Rabbit, nor do they get to note that my cover has a different illustration than theirs.

What an ironic coincidence that the first book I loaded up to read on my Kobo should be Deborah Harkness' much-hyped Discovery of Witches. Not my usual fare, but I thought this book would be a great diversion while travelling, a juicy beach book, if you will, and I wasn't wrong. I'm not a fan of the supernatural; although I'm a huge Buffy and Angel follower, that's due to elements beyond the thrall of vampirism. But I got the impression from several reviews that this book would hit some of the same spots as Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian did several years ago. It does, although in an even lighter register. Perfect, as I say, for airplane or beach reading. There's a love story, family dynamics, intrigue, history, wealth, murder -- all set in contemporary Oxford where a young professor divides her time between poring over books in the library and rowing a racing scull down the river. Well, except for when it moves to rural estates in France and England, beautifully described, richly furnished old homes -- wonderful to be wandering through in one's imagination when the body's trapped in an airplane seat trying to carve a recalcitrant piece of chicken with a flimsy plastic knife.

Where's the irony, you ask? Well, the young professor is very concerned with real books and their metadata, as are the witches, vampires, and other demons who converge at the eponymous discovery. Those of us who love books will sigh at the libraries described, the "shush"-ing by librarians, the systems of book retrieval, the beautifully carved wooden shelves and the rolling ladders -- never mind the books themselves, their illustrations, their leather or board-and-cloth covers, even their missing pages. Especially, in the case of Discovery, their missing pages. The novel gets at the rich, historied, depth of a book, the specificity of an individual copy of a particular edition. It reminds us that one copy of a book is not the same as another -- a reality that may be disappearing in the levelling electronic environment of the eReader.

I'm going to keep using my Kobo, and will focus on the advantages of convenience that it offers. But I've got ten or twelve recently-purchased paper books to get through in the next few months as well. I hope that this transitional terrain we readers are treading now will not, eventually, mean an either/or situation which inevitably sees the analog book replaced by the digital. But I'm troubled . . . what about you? Still resisting? or are you a complete convert?

Reading in Paris

2011-04-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

Even on holiday, I'm juggling books as so many readers do. In an effort to envigorate my French, I've been reading Gwenaëlle Aubry's moving Personne, a meditation, after her father's death, on his lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder -- and its inevitable effects on herself and her sister. One passage was so poignant I read it aloud to Pater, despite its winding, complicated syntax, Proustian length, and my halting accent -- in it, she describes the gap she always felt between her use of the word père and others', the way she felt that difference separated her from the world. She brings to bear her broad and deep knowledge of philosophy as well as entertaining and thought-provoking references to cinema and literature (Robert Musil, Dustin Hoffman, James Bond -- the range is wide). And as we'd just been there, I was inordinately pleased to have a chapter set at Arcachon! Something else I recognized was her father's affinity with the clochards of Paris, although his condition pushed him to make this affinity complete, himself leaving behind his bourgeois comforts, walking pieds nus (the phrase that so haunts his daughter, then and to the day of writing long after his death), adopting the SDF (sans domicile fixe) label that renders him beyond the margins of the society to which he was born. Watching his daughter understanding and honouring the choices her father made is profoundly affecting, and my memories of our Paris apartment will forever be tinged with its wise sideness, but also with her father's efforts to leave behind the avoir and move toward être, towards, he hopes, la grande joie.

When I want something lighter and completely engaging in a different way, I've been turning to Reginald Hill's Midnight Fugue. I'm stretching it out, especially since I'm so enjoying the Aubry, but it's the kind of book many of you will want to devour in as few sittings as possible. Hill is such a masterful writer, and I've commented here before about his love of wordplay -- he's a writer's writer in that and in his play with structure. He often uses narratives within the overall narrative, and regularly composes these in other voices -- so that they read as a book or diary or series of e-mails that help to advance the plot. Because of this, and because there are a number of recurring, interesting characters, I've never come close to being bored with the Dalziel and Pascoe series. . . . Completing this post, over a week later, I'll add that Pater read the book after I did and enjoyed it also -- we both liked seeing how Pascoe and Dalziel's relationship is changing as they hid different parts of their respective careers. Some surprising twists in this one, but they make sense. Also always pleased to follow Wieldy's progress and I can't help chortle at Dalziel's politically incorrect (much as I deplore this term, it does articulate what I mean here quite clearly) pronouncements. The man would drive me nuts in real life, but he makes a brilliant fictional protagonist.

I've also been enjoyed a collection of essays, Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman, a new-to-me writer I'm happy to discover thanks to my Paris hotelier-friend, Jennifer -- this is a charming small book with meditations on the phenomenology of books and reading to delight any bibliophile. So far I've savoured Fadiman's narrative of reconciling herself to a library shared with her husband -- whose filing system to adopt, which doubles to keep, whose rules govern usage, etc., There's also a nice distinction made, in another essay, about those who want to maintain books in pristine condition, who do not countenance, for example, paper clips used as bookmarks, and are aghast at books left open, facedown, spines being stretched out of alignment . . . and those who like their books to display their reading history through turned-down page corners, penciled marginalia, even the odd catsup stain. Which camp do you fall into?

Light Reading and Not so Light . . .

2011-03-23T23:50:00.000-07:00

You know I struggle to keep up my reading record at the best of times, but it's even tougher to do so on holiday. Still, before titles are lost to the mists of bad memory, I'll quickly note that before leaving home I read Johann Skibsrud's Giller prize-winning The Sentimentalists. Interesting how that analogy of the dam flooding small villages pops up again here, as in Anne Michael's The Winter Vault and Michael Ondaatje's Desiderata. It's a potent analogy, and it also points us back to question why and how we make these huge, arrogant, engineering changes to living landscapes. Of course, I think back to the country in NE British Columbia that we traveled through last summer, all scheduled to be underwater if the Site C dam goes ahead. . .
Skibsrud's book is also interesting to those considering the long, sad legacy of the Vietnam war, its effects on the families of soldiers, decades and decades later. I have a colleague whose father was also damaged, and his consciousness of the war makes me think of the way Holocaust survivors'childrren inherit some of their parents' memories, almost at a cellular level (as in Edeet Ravel's Your Sad Eyes).

The contemplative way memory is filtered through various of the novel's characters and, I think, the gentle lakeside landscape, mitigate against the story's ultimate horror and sadness, but for a rather slim book, it truly lingers, and I know I'll re-read it. . .

Not so my airplane reading. That was perfect to kill several hours, but not one of my favourite Jack Reacher novels. Lee Child's Die Trying caught me up a few times so that all of a sudden the flight attendant was putting a meal in front of me and I realized I'd been somewhere else for half an hour. But it didn't add much to my storehouse of knowledge about Reacher's bio, and that's been part of the series' hook for me, trying to assemble a composite narrative of the guy.

More satisfying, if more gruesome, was Val McDermid's Fever of the Bone. Here, McDermid has a cast of characters to develop and move forward beside the main protagonists, Carol Jordan and Tony Hill. And she's hardly cranking the series out, instead maintaining the quality and the tension. Still, I'd only recommend these mysteries to readers who can tolerate forensic details or who can glance over them quickly as if looking through fingers at a gruesome scene on the movie screen (my modus operandi).

Now back to my holiday. I've picked up a French novel, Gwenaëlle Aubry's 2009 Prix Femina-winning Personne, which will compete with the French countryside for my attention when we train down to Bordeaux. . .

Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

2011-03-13T20:42:00.000-07:00

Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story is not only super sad but also both frightening and funny. It occurs in the very near future ("oh, let's say next Tuesday," the flyleaf suggests) when our portagonist, Lenny Abramov, is viewed with suspicion and distaste because he still owns, treasures, and actually reads from a large collection of, gasp, books. Most of his fellow citizens -- of a distorted, yet all too recognizable in its possibilities, US of A -- rely instead on their apparats, generally worn around their neck. These apparats continually scan and are scanned, projecting broadly visible announcements of the wearer's Credit index, Personality rating, and in an amusing extrapolation of so many (current, real-life) FaceBook users' predilection for sharing, their Fuckability rating. Lenny doesn't do too badly on Credit, but rates poorly in the other two indices.

The United States in which Abramov courts the beautiful young Korean-American woman he met while away in Italy is a United States scornful of the poor and elderly, seeing those whose Net Worth or Credit rating is low as verging on the criminal. Youth, or at least a youthful appearance is so desirable that Lenny screens applications for High Net Worth individuals who have put aside enough money for "dechronification" treatments (nanobots move through the bloodstream, resetting biological functions for optimum performance). Lenny himself has been saving for such a treatment, but feels the possibility slipping away, even as his hair begins to thin and he coasts towards middle age.

State security is augmented, sometimes simply replaced, by employees of large conglomerated corporations. Checkpoints require submission to intrusive questioning, and also demand that those who pass through them "Deny and imply"-- that is, deny that such a checkpoint, such intrusive security, exists at all and imply consent to the incident the questionee is denying. Shades of Orwell's doublespeak. . . .

Besides the chilling glimpse at an imagined trajectory of the United States, the novel can be enjoyably read simply for the "super sad love story" -- poignant, doomed, moving, hopeful, all the notes. As well, if you're a reader, fretting over the future of the written word, there's much to think about here, or to offer to others as a cautionary tale. In fact, of the books I've read so far this year, I'd put this high on the list of those I'd recommend. And, as always, should you read it, I'd love to hear your response.

Ross King's Defiant Spirits (about the Group of Seven)

2011-03-11T08:08:00.000-08:00

If you've read Ross King's wonderful The Judgement of Paris (about the Impressionist painters), you'll know how compellingly he puts together research to tell the story of a period of art history. In Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven, he tells a Canadian art story, putting it in the context of a broader world (I'd say an international one, but that was narrowly defined by the times -- Europe and the United States, primarily).

The Judgement of Paris moved back and forth between two painters: Ernest Meissonier, the pre-eminent French painter of the period immediately preceding and then overlapping the Impressionists, and Edouard Manet. Because of this structure, the book allowed (at least, so it seems to me in retrospect) more room for developing a biographical narrative. Given the number of artists in The Group of Seven (despite the name, the group did swell loosely from time to time, and members changed), I found it harder to get a clear sense of character. To be fair, the book isn't trying to be a biography, but the wealth of biographical detail tended to get in the way for me without quite sticking meaningfully.

That said, Defiant Spirits does a great job of sketching the cultural climate of the day. (It makes me want to go back and re-read Nick Mount's When Canadian Literature Moved to New York, which depicts a just-slightly-earlier period). The struggles these artists had against the conservatism of the day are inspiring; they're also somewhat amusing to read about now, when these Seven have become iconic representatives of Canada themselves -- and, indeed, often favoured by the conservative among us who eschew the work of today's strugglers. King neatly points out this shift, and he also points out the group's own emerging conservatism, as well as their masculinist, Eastern perspective, their preference for the heroic, their construction of an empty wilderness (ignoring First Nations) to suit their own mythologies. Still, he describes much to admire in their insistence that Canadian artists should find modes of expression that suit our own landscapes, find techniques that somehow paint our nationality into the work.

King weaves in a wealth of quotations from letters, newspaper articles, and journals. Perhaps most amusing are the words of the critics, which often verge on hysteria. Samuel Morgan-Powell, for example, apparently wrote of one artist's exhibition that his works were "travesties, abortions, sensual and hideous malformations" which "would shame a school boy. . . . disgrace an artist of the stone age." With most of the art-buying public taking their cue from critics such as these, A.Y. Jackson not surprisingly complained in a letter to a relative that as wealthy Canadians "buy only the works of dead artists, it's kind of hard on the ones still living." Given this climate, I was fascinated to see the effect of a few generous supporters in helping nurture important developments in the arts. A Dr. McCallum, in the case of the Group of Seven (indeed, McCallum helped out financially long before the Group thought of themselves as such) and Edmund Walker who championed these artists, buying their work for the National Gallery.

As a western Canadian, I could have wished for a more expansive consideration of what was going on out our way at the time -- especially given the connections later formed between Emily Carr, working against even more cultural obduracy and in even more isolation, and members of the group, Lauren Harris in particular. As well, I can't help regret all the First Nations Art ignored by the group and perhaps worthy of mention in a book that sets a context for our first collective foray onto the world's art stages. King does bring Carr in partway, if briefly, though, and the movement is primarily an Eastern Canadian one. It would be unfair of me to linger on such minor quibbles.

The book is a commitment at over 400 pages (not counting the very thorough and helpful endnotes), but it's well worth reading for anyone who wants to know more about Canada's early art scene. It also illuminates that period in our national cultural history when, especially because of our role in WWI, we were moving past our sense of ourselves as a colonial country and insisting on speaking up as a sovereign nation.. As well, for those who might generally limit their interests to European art history, the book offers a sense of how the influence of the Impressionists and post-Impressionists played out across the Atlantic.

Given the commitment, I suppose few of my readers will have picked this up, but do tell me what books you might have read recently about art and/or artists. And I'm also curious, as a Canadian wondering about our perception elsewhere, have you heard about our Group of Seven?

Emma Donoghue's Room

2011-03-09T11:30:00.000-08:00

I will admit that I resisted picking up this book for some time, despite reading numerous laudatory reviews, because of its subject matter. In case you haven't come across these reviews of the Booker-shortlisted novel, the first half is set in the small, locked room in which a woman and her small child are held captive. The child, Jack, conceived, born, and raised for five years while his mother is the sex slave of the man they call Nick, is a remarkable fictional achievement, a generous and credible and redemptive work of imagination. So all the reviews promised me, but I still felt I couldn't stand to spend any time contemplating the evil involved.

Donoghue, though, manages to put evil in its place. She doesn't deny it, but neither does she allow it to occlude the humanity it tries to destroy. Jack's mother protects her son's innocence remarkably without hampering his need to understand and deal with their reality, and she finds ways to keep their very sequestered, very limited life rich and full of intellectual, physical, creative, and emotional stimulation. This part of the book alone is worth the darkness entailed.

But there's so much more. Jack and Ma's re-entry into the wider world twists the reader's perspective in intriguing, entertaining, and informative ways. Despite the limitations of his previous home, Room, Jack has personified its spartan elements -- Bed and Wardrobe and Rug and Plant --to provide comfort as well as surprisingly rich fodder for his imagination. In contrast, children in the larger world (his newfound cousin, for example) appear dissatisfied and over-stimulated, less thoughtful and more demanding, with their surfeit of material goods and limitless activities. The media frenzy and audience fascination with mother and son similarly casts our society in a questionable light, particularly when Ma argues with her TV interviewer about the priorities implied in the sensationalizing questions.

Above all, the novel is redemptive and beautiful. Jack and Ma's relationship is tender and wise and accommodating. And has one of the most compelling representations of breast-feeding you will ever read.

I couldn't help but compare Jack to the rather terrifying young boy in the first section of Nancy Huston's Fault Lines, a young boy whose innocence his family believes in yet who surfs the Internet regularly trying to puzzle out images of violence and sexuality. In many ways, although Jack spends his first five years regularly hiding in the Wardrobe listening to Old Nick's phallic thrusts reverberating through his mother's bed, he is much more innocent than Huston's creation.

If, like me, you have heard about this book but are deterred by its subject matter, I have to say that you should at least try a chapter or two standing in the aisle at the bookstore. I know you'll be drawn to read more, and you'll be glad you did. Let me know . . . As always, I appreciate your comments and look forward to our discussions.

Sheila Watson's The Double Hook

2011-03-07T17:47:00.000-08:00

In retrospect, the contrast between Keith Richards' Life and the book I chose to read after it couldn't be more amusing. I'd say it confirms my eclectic range! From Richards' fat juicy romp of an ode to pop culture, I turned to a re-read (probably my sixth or seventh time) of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook. This beautifully spare -- austere, I'd say, except for the extravagant drama at its heart, and its marvellously contained narrative arc -- is a Canadian modernist classic. Perhaps make that the Canadian modernist classic. Bane of so many undergraduate students of Canlit, some students, myself included, come to admire the book's poetic and dramatic economy, while many more continue to shudder at its mention in any future discussions.

Once I'd had help discerning its structure and teasing out the richness hiding in its ellipses, I've been seduced back to the book many times, partly as a requirement in the field (part of comprehensive exams), partly in preparation for teaching, but this last time, strictly in response to a drive through the novel's landscape last summer. I came home itching to read it again with that beautifully bare, dry, elusive terrain still in my mind's eye, its dry heat in my skin, but then got distracted by the end of summer flurry and the preparation for new classes. Then several weeks ago, my friend Tanis Macdonald updated her FB status to note that she was reading The Double Hook again -- Tanis has been using FB to track her own reading at least partially, I think, in an effort to keep reading in the public eye, to remind the world that books matter! Her FB status reminded me of my earlier ambitions, and finally, last month, I appreciated this small wonder of a novel yet again.

I'd be very curious to hear of any of you who have struggled with the book. Although I can vaguely remember finding it opaque, challenging, elusive, it's hard to retrieve those difficulties with any precision now. Instead, knowing the plot, the characters, so well now, I delight in the language, and, especially in the structure of "figures cut in sacred ground" (to use Angela Bowering's characterization).

Also curious about what books you turn back to regularly. One of my daughters declares herself incapable of rereading a book, and I agree with her that she has too little time and too many still-to-read books. But I tell her that one day I hope she'll discover the wonders of what a second (and third, and fourth) reading can reveal. It's the best way to understand that a text -- a reading of a particular book by a particular person at a particular time under particular circumstances -- is unique, and that each book represents innumerable texts.

I'm also curious to know what books have resisted you (or vice versa) and how you've managed that resistance (turning away, or soldiering through, or putting off 'til you're more ready). And whether some books have surprised you by becoming much more accessible with time's passing -- I think, for example, of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children which seemed so difficult the first time I read it, but which subsequent readings (I've read it three times) showed to be a much more easily engaging novel.

Speak up -- I love hearing your thoughts about reading. It matters, you know?!

Keith Richards' Life

2011-03-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

Keith Richards' Life: what a lively romp of a book. I'm not sure how much Richards wrote and how much "co-writer" James Fox is responsible for. There are indications throughout, though, in excerpts from Richards' journals or letters, that the man has a way with words -- at the very least, at the level of a phrase or sentence. It's also clear that he's bright, creative, well-read, fairly thoughtful but also impulsive, and that he's both fierce and funny and very loyal. I can't imagine a lifestyle that includes so much of the drugs, the fast cars, and, especially, the fighting (I don't tolerate violence well), and even less can I imagine having a friend like Richards -- our lifestyles and social circles are so vastly different (mine would bore him silly). But I can easily imagine liking him, after reading his book, and I guess that surprised me. My biggest association with The Rolling Stones is the Altamount fiasco (more properly, perhaps, the Altamount tragedy, given that someone died), and I've always seen that as an outcome of the group's collective arrogance. My perspective has definitely been changed by this account.

Probably what won me over, despite an introductory chapter that seemed to enforce my original perception, is Richards' account of his childhood and early family life in post-war Britain. His working-class family, the council housing, the vigorous characters, the street and school life -- so much resonated here with my dad's background in northern England, although my dad was older enough that he joined the Merchant Marines in '42 as a 15-year old, the year before Keef was born. Still, the after-effects of WWII kept Britain on rationing well into the 50s, and although huge social changes were in the air, economic, material, physical, and technological changes were slower. Even in the 1960s visiting my grandma in Middlesbrough, I remember the Rag 'n' Bones man driving his scrap-laden cart, coaxing his horse from behind, calling out for scrap, "Rags 'n Bones, Any rags 'n' bones for me today." My father had no inclination to listen to The Stones, or rock'n'roll in general, but I would have loved to chat with him about episodes in Richards' childhood that I know would have resonated with him.

The description of the early audiences as "armies of feral, body-snatching girls" and of the genuine fear the band experienced trying to get into their cars and safely away after a concert is well worth reading -- as is Richards' analysis of the social phenomenon they tapped into:
It was like somebody had pulled a plug somewhere. The '50s chicks being brought up all very jolly hockey sticks, and then somewhere there seemed to be a moment when they just decided they wanted to let themselves go. The opportunity arose for them to do that, and who's going to stop them? It was all dripping with sexual lust, though they didn't know what to do about it. But suddenly you're on the end of it. It's a frenzy. Once it's let out, it's an incredible force. You stood as much chance in a fucking river full of piranhas. They were beyond what they wanted to be. They'd lost themselves. These chicks were coming out there, bleeding, clothes torn off, pissed panties, and you took that for granted every night. That was the gig. It could have been anybody, quite honestly. They didn't give a shit that I was trying to be a blues player. (138)

I also found Richards' analysis of the effect on popular music of recording technology, the way this gave access into the field to those who would have otherwise have been excluded by their inability to read or write music. Being able to listen over and over, to isolate and identify a technique, to match a note or a key, this, he believes -- and articulates credibly and thoughtfully -- made a huge difference.

Overall, in fact, Richards is very satisfying in his articulating of music -- the process of playing, or song-writing, or working with a band. How to finally master a riff, moving it from a sound heard to a technique mastered and then back to a sound, produced. The difference between musicians. The character of instruments.

Of course, as I say the book is a huge romp, filled with so many episodes far beyond the scope of my lifestyle, and a seductive read for that -- There's enough sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll to keep you page-turning, but there are gentle and convincing and moving character sketches as well. The drama of Richards' first marriage, his obvious love and respect and then frustration and pity and anger for his wife, the worries, sometimes just barely visible on the page, but a palpable tension between much other action, for his children. Then his love and partnership with model Patti Hansen -- I enjoyed, especially, the description of her family first being introduced to her new boyfriend!

And, since I don't have all the time in the world to talk about this juicy fat book (550-ish pages), I'll close with this illuminating passage about a songwriter's perspective:
You might be having a swim or screwing the old lady, but somewhere in the back of the mind, you're thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the hell's going on. You might be getting shot at, and you'll still be "Oh! That's the bridge!" And there's nothing you can do; you don't realize it's happening. It's totally subconscious, unconscious or whatever. The radar is on whether you know it or not. You cannot switch it off. You hear this piece of conversation from across the room, "I just can't stand you anymore" . . . That's a song. It just flows in. And also the other thing about being a songwriter, when you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer, you start to distance yourself. You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years, observing people, how they react to one another. Which, in a way, makes you weirdly distant. You shouldn't really be doing it. It's a little of Peeping Tom to be a songwriter. You start looking round, and everything's a subject for a song. (183)
His candidness about a songwriter's self-distancing reminds me of some lines in Derek Walcott's Another Life, when he speaks of an early love, a schoolgirl who makes his "head roar[] with hunger and poems," makes "his hand . . . trembl[e] to recite her name" -- so that even as he is adoring her, he is wanting to put pen to paper. You shouldn't really be doing it . . .

Finding Time to Read

2011-02-19T07:51:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago now, Hope left me this comment, ending with a question for me:

As a mom to two young kids (4 and 2), I've only just begun getting back into regular reading in the last 6 months or so. Though, it is a big challenge, I find that it helps to keep me from losing myself in being a mother and wife. I was always an avid reader as a child and thoughout my adolescence. My question to you is how do you make time for it with your busy schedule? And how did you make time for it as your kids were growing, particularly when they were young and in those demanding years?

The time lapse between her question and my answering post demonstrates those demands that impinge on all our schedules these busy days, but it's a worthwhile question and one I'll try my best to answer.

First, I'd like to acknowledge Hope's emphasis on the importance of preserving some sense of self during those years when we risk losing that to motherhood and being a wife, partner, employee, or whatever other identities we may be juggling. Because reading is such a solitary and inward journey, we might fear that it is selfish -- and it is, but in the best possible way. Nurturing a self, in considered acts of self-ishness, means there will be a self to offer others. My mother, who had twelve of us to care for and raise, insisted on a nap every afternoon -- I doubt she ever fell asleep during this naptime, but I know she worked her way through a prodigious number of library books, always stacked beside her bed. We learned to respect that small pocket of time she reserved for herself and learned that books were worthy entertainment for kids as well.

I followed my mom's example when I had my own. I had grown up dependent on books for entertainment and escape and solace and just generally learning about a big, exciting world, and I confidently assumed my daughters and son would be just as keen on reading. This proved to be the case, and we rarely went anywhere without a few books stashed in my bag for instant entertainment. Library storytimes were a weekly event, and I doubt a day went by that we didn't read four or five picture books together. Meanwhile, my own reading happened at naptimes and after the little ones went to bed at night -- I was very, very fortunate that our family sleep schedule was pretty consistent with pre-schoolers always in bed by 9 at the very, very latest, and all my kids afternoon-napped 'til kindergarten. Sorry, it's the truth. I'm not sure how I managed it, but it wasn't a gift horse whose teeth I checked, believe me! And I did my best not to clean while they napped -- this was me time, although, as argued above, I believe that ultimately translated into a benefit for the family. So that was a huge pocket of reading time, right there -- naptimes and those glorious hours between the kids' bedtime and my own.

Of course, I wasn't working outside the home -- I had a private music studio, but the hours were generally after school, so I didn't have to sacrifice precious kiddy naptime to anything as sordid as earning money. And that put me at a huge advantage over those moms who rush to get little ones ready for daycare drop-off in the morning, then work at their desks all day, before rushing to pick up little ones, feed them, play with them, bathe them, and finally fall asleep with them before getting up to start the whole thing again. My daughter does that routine right now with our two-year old granddaughter. Even so, Bronwen manages to keep ploughing through her share of books -- some she reads on the bus commute to work and back each day. I know she does what I used to do and she reads in the evening before falling asleep. And I haven't asked her, but perhaps she sometimes reads while eating her lunch at work -- I used to do that, even before kids, balancing the need for some social time with co-workers against the need for some time on my own.

Carrying a book everywhere is a simple way to salvage all those precious minutes lost to waiting -- something that's not too heavy, that's absorbing enough to shut out other cranky commuters. I'll often tote a mystery for that reason, saving reading that demands a more focused concentration for those times when I get a more protected quiet.

The other way to steal some minutes for reading is to think very carefully about just how clean and orderly your home needs to be. This is an intensely personal as well as family-specific decision, representing a melding of your own and your partner's family/home cultures. But in my experience, housework can be never-ending if you let it. Someone is always spilling something on a floor you've only just washed, or knocking over a pile of laundry you've carefully folded. For me, it worked to set some basic standards for hygiene and organization, figure out which weekly or bi-weekly hours could or should be devoted to achieving those, and then tolerate the slippage from those standards in the in-between times. If I knew that the toilets had all been scrubbed, for example, on Thursday morning, and would be again, next Thursday, I could ignore them on Wednesday in favour of my book, if I happened to find seven minutes because someone got picked up early for skating lessons and I was on my own.

But besides accounting for the difference between my working at home and a mom doing the daycare-work-home commute, I'd have to answer Hope that a huge difference between her experience and mine would be the competing technologies for her leisure time. Without an iPod, heck, without even a computer until my youngest was seven or eight (and even then, only with dial-up access and a text-only Internet environment), books had only to stand up against television's paltry offerings -- not much of a contest really. We didn't even own a VCR (old-school video player) until my youngest was in high school, preferring to rent occasionally rather than have the easy temptation so close at hand.

Now, even as committed to reading as I am, I spend hours daily on-line. And there's no question that much of this time is frittered away. When I talk to people who wish they could find time to read books, I'm generally tempted to ask them how much time they spend "plugged in" -- between e-mail, blog-reading, texting, youtube-watching, or time spent at the iTunes store, I suspect we could find them each at least thirty minutes daily -- time for a chapter or two, right?

I hope to get back to this topic in a future post, 'cause I'm not quite done yet. But I'd love to hear what solutions you've found for carving out time to read. . . . Did you read when your kids were growing up? Do you still? Any advice for Hope? Chime in, I'm listening . . .

Minette Walters, Patricia Cornwell . . .

2011-02-15T09:49:00.000-08:00

After a busy week finishing off my essay followed by my weekend's Half Marathon run, I'm now nursing something sinusitis-bronchitis-y, and one of the best methods for doing that, besides sleep, is reading, right? (Well, curling up on the couch with old Buffy DVDs helps as well).

I picked up Patricia Cornwell's Port Mortuary. Despite complaining about the quality of her recent Scarpetta books, I keep picking them up hoping they'll get better again. So far, this is not bad, although there's some very flabby repetitive writing that a bold editor might have taken out. And I'm surprised at the distribution of words on a page which makes a lovely thick-looking book to sink into out of what will actually turn out to be much slighter than suggested. . . .

A much better deal was the paperback edition of Minette Walters' The Devil's Feather, that I finished a few weeks ago. Walters never disappoints, except in refusing to write faster -- but that's probably part of her secret to success. That and the fact that she doesn't try to return to the same characters, although there have been several along the way I would have been happy to see more of. Some find her politics too strident, but perhaps because those politics are closely aligned with my own, I never find they get in the way of plot, character, or setting, and the relationship between the two female central characters here was intriguing and satisfying.

An interesting link in both novels was the reference to the Middle East and the military implication of Western governments (Britain and US) in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond -- the ways that that history is coming back to roost in the colonizing powers. More and more, I'm finding mystery novels used very convincingly to educate a reading public about aspects of our

engagement that we might not bother to read in other media (or that other media don't bother to cover). Lee Child has done this as has James Lee Burke. Have you noticed others? And do you find it worthwhile, interesting, distracting, what? Comments, please. . .

Kathleen Winter's Annabel

2011-02-09T17:01:00.001-08:00

I'm planning to write a post responding to Hope's question (at this post) about how I found time to read while raising my children, and how I continue to structure pockets of reading time into my life. But I've had to balance this against keeping up with recording my reading and with getting a piece of writing done to justify my Research Leave. That essay's just waiting for a good proof-reading now, so task #1, updating my recent reading list. Hope's response to come soon. Thanks for your patience!

I'm working my way through a stack of books that arrived before Christmas, and they've been very pleasurable, all. The first to tell you about is Kathleen Winter's novel, Annabel, which came to my attention courtesy of my neighbour, Carol, who I believe heard Winter read at the Vancouver Writers' Festival. When Carol mentions a book worth reading, I pay attention, and I was well rewarded with this rich story about a young hermaphrodite, surgically rendered male shortly after birth. Growing up in a small and remote Labrador community, Wayne is happy enough in his early years, close to his mother, trying to please his father, but increasingly feels himself alienated from his classmates, puzzled by something in himself that doesn't fit and especially by his attraction to an aesthetic appreciation the rough landscape and community doesn't easily support.

While it would have been easy to set up Wayne's father, Treadway, as a harsh and insensitive man, Winter makes it clear that he acts in what he believes are his son's best interests. Not until it is almost too late does he realize that he hasn't looked out, though, for his daughter (who comes to be known as Annabel). While it might be easier for us to condemn Treadway, the narrator refuses us such simplicity by detailing his nature-based spirituality, his commitment to reading and philosophy, and his appealing competence in caring for his family. The relationship between Treadway and his wife seems doomed after Wayne leaves for the city, but the narrator convincingly twists them back together, using those threads spun in the novel's early pages, merely unravelled by the strain of trying to meet their son/daughter's needs.

Labrador and its people are magnificently portrayed here in a harshness and a beauty I have not yet experienced but would now love to (although perhaps in summer, rather than winter!). Without saying enough to spoil the plot, I can say that the novel is, ultimately, redemptive, though not without considerable pain. Much of the redemption comes in other, smaller characters, in the realization that many people are better than we might first assume, and given the chance, may surprise us with their humanity. There is a spot or two in the book's first few chapters where the narrator veered a bit toward the pedagogic (commenting on the school system's rigidity), and I held my breath, prepared to be disappointed, but excepting those passages, the novel shows rather than tells.

I'm assuming (hoping) that the novel is based on either research or personal experience of the area (the author is, apparently, a long-time resident of St. John's, Newfoundland, although she now lives in Montreal) -- I want it to be true that many of the trappers who stayed out on their lines through the trapping season read such worthy texts as Pascal's Pensées in their cabins at night.

Although much of the novel is set in a tiny, insular community, that community is regularly contrasted with the possibilities of the wider world by two characters in particular, as well as by the yearnings of Wayne's mother, Jacinta. And while Treadway is not one of the novel's travellers, one of my favourite insights in the book comes when Treadway advises Wayne not to drive his van when he visits a friend in Boston. As he says,

You want to sit back and look out the windows at everything. You don't want the trip to be one road sign after another and a maze of overpasses. Trains and ferries will give you a real journey to Boston. Your van is a responsibility. Navigating is a chore. A train will take the weight of the world away. I think Via Rail could pay Winter for this passage, a lovely bit of persuasion toward train travel.

Above all, while telling a richly satisfying story and offering an evocative setting, this book makes us wonder why we insist so much on seeing physical and behavioural differences between the genders when there are, in fact, so many similarities we could focus on. Few of us mind that we can't tell at a glance whether a cat or dog or horse is male or female, yet many of us are disturbed if we can't identify someone as "he" or "she." And, of course, in European-based languages, we can scarcely think of individuals, let alone speak of them, without knowing what pronoun to use. Showing us the pain caused to a young child by the arbitrary application of a gender is a compelling invitation to open our thinking. I highly recommend this novel for your reading pleasure and would love to know what you think of it, should you read it or have already read it.

Howard Jacobson`s The Finkler Question

2011-01-24T19:37:00.000-08:00

So who's read the 2010 Man Booker-winner, Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question? I used to pride myself on reading the Booker winner and a few of the short-lists every year, but have missed a few in the past five. Trying again, though, so picked up the Jacobson from the (very decent) bookstore in the San Francisco airport.

I'll admit that the first third of the book, at least, I remained at a distance -- and felt quite justified given the pervasive sense of satire which, I think you have to agree, is a distancing mechanism. The characters are more caricature, and what they're caricatures of are middle-aged males specific to a British class-based context. This kind of male writing, no matter how good, tends to bore me even if it entertains me, even if I recognize clever, deft, stylish writing -- as is the case here.

Furthermore, while the central character`s fixation with suffering, even dying, women is as laughable as it is irritating (or should that be the other way `round), his fixation with Jewishness verges, I thought for the first third to half the novel, on the irrelevant as much as the comic. I puzzled over how different the British context could be for this to be the case. Although I know the Holocaust`s still-echoing effects must haunt Jews any and everywhere, Jewishness as any kind of social impediment at all seems unimaginable in my circles. I questioned why this might be so -- why, after all, is Jewishness so nearly invisible around me -- but at the same time, felt validated in some of my impatience when Treslove and his friend Finkler talked about the relative appearance of circumcised and uncircumcised penises -- the former apparently belonging almost exclusively to Jews. This is simply not the case in my geography, where the prevailing practise for at least 60 years has been circumcision for Jew or Gentile.

So I felt alienated from the novel`s central argument, wondering why I was so resistant to this protagonist in this setting when I`d been so sympathetic to Edeet Ravel`s Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth.

And then somewhere about half way in, the tone and the momentum and my engagement all began to shift. I`m still not sure how and why, but the turn coincides with the protagonist, Treslove, falling in love and moving in with Hephzibah. It also coincides with a series of escalating, apparently disconnected anti-Semitic attacks that begin to make Treslove`s Jewish friend Finkler (the titular synonym for Jew, in Treslove-speak) question his shame over Zionist imperialism. Characters whose absorption with what initially seemed to me a non-issue gradually convinced themselves, and me, that theirs was an unavoidable concern. As Treslove`s much older friend, Libor, a grieving Jewish widower tells him `There`s no escaping the Jews for anyone`(245).

By the end of the novel, I had been moved and saddened and convinced by the ethical struggles of these three male friends from whom the author had distanced me for so long at the outset. Were I to take the time to re-read this, I`d be watching for the exact point when this change of engagement began to happen for me. Should you read this, I`d love to hear if and when you experienced such a shift.

61 Hours of Winter Reading . . .

2011-01-20T10:54:00.000-08:00

While travelling, I read Lee Child's 61 Hours, a paperback I'd given Paul for Christmas. While I can sympathize with Tiffany's frustration with this mystery (I know she expressed this somewhere recently, but I can't find that where to link to) in terms of its emphasis on plot and logistics, I'm enough of a Jack Reacher fan not to mind. That said, there seemed to be more technical detail, more stage-setting, to work through at the front end, before one was well and truly hooked, so I could see readers new to the series not bothering to persevere. For those whodo, though, especially those that know Reacher, his relationship with an old woman he helps guard is interesting for the way she challenges some of the truths about himself and his life that he holds to be evident. I wonder if Tiffany will agree that the same old woman could happily inhabit the pages of one of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie mysteries. . . .

A good book to read in the deep cold of winter -- it will let you know how much colder it is elsewhere, and as you pull the blanket tighter, you'll be glad you're inside, by the fire, reading . . .

Edeet Ravel's Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth

2011-01-14T16:59:00.000-08:00

Isn't that a sumptuously melancholy title? So indulgent . . .

And yet the novel doesn't wallow in melancholy nor nostalgia, rather examining the past, remembering a bright adolescent Jewish lesbian girl's coming-of-age in 1970s Montreal. Not simply the Montreal whose religious provincialism was newly exploded by the free love and drugs of hippies and draft dodgers; not only that Montreal of growing and militant French separatism; but most powerfully, the Montreal of those Jewish immigrants who had survived Hitler's death camps and attempted to rebuild lives and families in a new language, in a new country. The 'post-memory' (Marianne Hirsch's term, I believe, for the powerful effect which the survivors' experiences have on their children who inherit the memories) which drastically shape the lives of Maya and her friends is in danger of seeming remote in 2011. Ravel's novel reminds me of how closely (at least, relatively so, at my admittedly advancing age) the concatenation of generations brings us to World War II's horrors. By a striking (to me, at least) coincidence, we were in San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum within days of my finishing this novel, and I couldn't help but notice what seemed to me an effort to tell different stories about contemporary Judaism. I wonder if that community doesn't worry about the risk of fatiguing the world with the Holocaust narrative and thus turn to other facets of Jewish life -- the fascinating lives of Margaret and H.A. Rey, for example, or the reciprocal relationship between Jewish and Black jazz musicians.

Ravel's own Tel Aviv trilogy shows her own investment in contemporary world, Jewish, and Israeli history and politics, but Your Sad Eyes demonstrates that she is also capable of telling a fresh story about the narrative that dominates the 20th century. I find myself thinking back, in the days after reading this, to three friends, all mid-twenties to early-thirties, I once went on a weekend camping trip with. One was a good friend whose Prussian father took the family to Argentina after WWII, and from there to Canada when she was in her early teens. The second was her friend, an early-thirties, Jewish math professor who joked wryly about clubs he was excluded from in 1970s Vancouver. And the third, also early-thirties, was a Japanese-Canadian who, I now realize, would just barely have missed the wartime Japanese internment camps, and whose family must have lost property and livelihood when they were displaced across Canada from the Coast.

In other words, I suppose I'm saying, Ravel's novel set me to making connections, prodded me to retrospective awareness. All while entertaining me with beautiful writing, thoughtful descriptions, humourous insights, and sad, wise recognition of the difficulties of becoming an adult.

Oh dear, I've just quickly read through what I've written and I realize the book sounds much more ponderous than it is. Delights include Maya's adolescent commentary on her self-directed study of literature, art, and music as well as vignettes of Montreal streets and architecture then and now. There's an old dog you'll love. Youthful exuberance, unrequited passion, rich friendships. The chance to listen in on a bright, inquiring, insightful mind observing and exploring the world and her place in it. What's that old commercial say? Try it, you'll like it . . .

Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog

2011-01-13T20:03:00.000-08:00

First book of the year was Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog --- title rivals Atkinson's last Jackson Brodie novel, When Will There Be Good News. I'm such a fan of this series (four so far) and can only hope that Atkinson is busy working on the next one as I prattle on here. (although I've just realized that I haven't yet read One Good Turn, even though I knew about it back here -- so that treat beckons . . .) No character here captured me as completely as did Reggie, the teenage girl in News, but there were some deft, tender character sketches. Indeed, Brodie himself is coalescing, as a protagonist but not at all a dominating one, through a series of sketches. I can't see any danger of Atkinson exhausting her interest in him because his role is so exploratory, so tentative. His detective efforts do move the plot along, but in every one of these books, he's been aided by others -- and by Chance, even Fate, if you will.

While Brodie shares many personality traits with those flawed-and-sensitive types who thus become gruff and drink too much and run afoul of the systems within which they work, he's much less predictable than the Rebuses and the Harry Bosches and Jack Reachers. He still seems to be puzzling out the world as he goes along, bumbling even -- hard to imagine Rebus or Bosch or Reacher getting dumped by the side of the road after picking up . . . oh, but that would be telling, wouldn't it?

English countryside, police procedural, Whitby and Leeds and other Yorkshire highlights from my relative-visiting youth . . .

A sadly convincing portrait of an older woman sinking into Alzheimer's . . .

Anyway, I'll stick to short here, but would be happy to hear from any of you who want to add your opinion . . .

2010 Reading List

2011-01-02T08:12:00.000-08:00

In case it's not obvious, clicking on the book titles will bring you to my post mentioning or responding to the book, except in the case of the unblogged titles at the end of the list.

If you've spent any time thinking about your reading for 2010 or planning for 2011 reading, I'll love your feedback. Comments always welcome!

1. Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood

2. Carol O'Connell. Bone by Bone

3. Penelope Lively, Family Album

4. Carol Matthews & Liza Potvin, Dog Days

5. Toni Morrison, A Mercy

6. David Adams Richards, The Lost Highway

7. Ian Rankin, The Complaints

8. Richard Wagamese, A Ragged Company -- re-read

9. Alan Bradley, Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

10. Jeffrey Deaver, Roadside Crosses

11. Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites

12. Clyde Ford, Precious Cargo

13. Seamus Heaney ed. and trans. Beowulf

14. Lee Child, Gone Tomorrow

15. Kim Goldberg, Red Zone

16. Muriel Barbery, Gourmet Rhapsody

17. Karen Solie, Pigeon

18. Reginald Hill, A Cure for all Diseases

19. Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key

20. Nancy Huston, Fault Lines

21. Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

22. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

23. Eva Hoffman, Appassionata

24. Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

25. Bill Gaston, Sointula -- re-read

26. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

27. Lee Child, Echo Burning

28. Michael Connelly, The Scarecrow

29. Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

30. Nicci French, Complicit

31. Jonathan Kellerman, Evidence

32. Anna Gavalda, Je l'Aimais

33. Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina

34. William Boyd, Restless

35. Philip Graham, The Moon Come to Earth

36. Michael Connelly, 9 Dragons

37. Andrew Davidson, Gargoyle

38. Diane Athill, Somewhere Towards the End

39. W.H. Collison, In the Wake of the War Canoe

30. Betty Lowman Carey, Bijaboji: North to Alaska by Oar

31. Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

32. Elizabeth George, This Body of Death

33. Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo

34. Ethel Wilson, Love and Salt Water

35. Lise Genova, Still Alice

36. Quentin Jardine, Famous Last Words

37. Doug Saunders, Arrival City

38. Robert Hough, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark

39. Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

40. Lorrie Moore, The Gate at the Stairs

41. Lee Child, Running Blind, unblogged

42. Alan Bradley, The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag, unblogged

43. Peter Robinson, Bad Boy, unblogged

44. David Bergen, The Matter with Morris, unblogged

45. Ilene Beckerman, Love, Loss, and What I Wore, unblogged

46. The 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology, unblogged

47. David Crystal, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, unblogged

48. Thomas King, A Short History of Indians in Canada, unblogged

49. Academic Monograph on Canadian Elegy, blind-peer-reviewed for university press, unblogged

50 Louise Gluck, Village Life, unblogged

Had to work a bit to squeak up to 50 this year, which surprised me somewhat as I made up this list -- it's been a busier year, even, than I realized. And I decided that rather than work frantically and guiltily to catch up the book-blogging for the last couple of weeks, I'd just list, as above. Bergen's The Matter with Morris really did deserve its own post, but we're packing for a week away and when we get back we'll be well into January and I'll have 3 or 4 2011 books to blog. Accepting limitations seems like a reasonable New Year's resolution, and I'm starting NOW.

Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs

2010-12-31T09:37:00.000-08:00

Lorrie Moore's short story "People Like That Are the Only People Here" has long been one of my favourite stories, so when her new novel was published, I was eager to read it. It doesn't disappoint. She has such a quirky-wise view of the world, an odd mix of melancholy and a certain optimism. Her sentences, lyric and narrative alike, fold in clauses describing the past, together with intricate, elaborate, conditional qualifiers -- all is contingent and considered. Her work is full of metaphors always grasping at the ineffable, trying and trying and trying to articulate -- signalling ever the escape of meaning, the separation of signifier and signified. For example: Mosquitoes with tiger-striped bodies and the feathery beards of an iris, their wings and legs the dun wisps of an unbarbered boy, their spindly legs the tendrils of an orchid, the blades of a gnome's sleigh. Their awfulness and flight obsessed me, concentrated my revulsion: suspended like mobiles, or diving like jets, they were sinisterly contrapted; they craved color; they were caught in the saddest animal script there was. (61) This description interrupts, or at least diverges temporarily from, the narrator's memories of her and her brother's shared childhood activities which memories, in turn, have interrupted her account of visiting with her brother on a Christmas trip home.

There are whole passages of this novel you'll want to grab someone to read out loud to, although appreciation of the sly humour perhaps better suits solitary savouring. The narrator's wonderful analysis of the rural, small-town speech she is particularly attentive to on her return from university is hilarious, at least to any reader who notices language: Prepositions mystified. Almost everyone said "on" accident instead of "by." They said "I'm bored of that" or "Wanna come with?" . . . And they used tenses like "I'd been gonna." As in, I'd been gonna to do that but then I never got around toot." It was the hypothetical conditional past, time and intention carved so obliquely and fine that I could only almost comprehend it, until, like Einstein's theory of relativity, which also sometimes flashed cometlike into my view, it whooshed away again, beyond my grasp. "I'd been gonna to do that" seemed to live in some isolated corner of the grammatical time-space continuum where the language spoken was a kind of Navajo or old, old French. It was part of a language with tenses so countrified and bizarrely conceived, I'm sure there was one that meant "Hell yes, if I had a time machine!" People here would narrate an ordinary event entirely in the past perfect: "I'd been driving to the store, and I'd gotten out, and she'd come up to me and I had said. . . " It never reached any other tense. All was back-story. All was preamble. The past was severed prologue and was never uttered to be anything but. Who else on earth spoke like this? They would look at the tattoo on my ankle, a peace sign, and withholding judgment but also intelligence, say, "Well, that's different." They'd say the same thing about my electric bass. Or even the acoustic one --That's different!--and in saying it made the samae glottal stop that they made pronouncing "mitten" and "kitten." (67)

While there is much humour, the tone of the book is more often of a pervasive sad knowingness, of wisdom acquired at the cost of pain, the journey from innocence to experience. I read this passage a few days after a similarly-aged colleague and I lamented together the changes we noted in social attitudes to reading and writing, a cultural shift this signalled being, we agreed, too accomplished, too large to continue kicking against: I suddenly felt like an old Indian chief, one who sees that the world has changed irrevocably, and that the younger generation would never know the old one, even the strongest, slumped on their horses at the end of some trail. (206)

The narrator later, responding to some truly bouleversant news changing her perception of people she thought she knew, comments that growing up she didn't really know what people meant when they said of themselves that they were "different people then." It seemed a piece of emotional sci-fi that a small town would not have allowed. (226)

And the final aperçu I garnered has to do with the nature of tragedies and stories:

Tragedies . . . were a luxury. . . . constructions of an affluent society, full of sorrow and truth but without moral function. Stories of the vanquishing of the spirit expressed and underscored a certain societal spirit to spare [The stuff of tragedy] was awe-inspiring, wounding entertainment told uselessly and in comfort at tables full of love and money. Where life was meagerer, where the tables were only half full, the comic triumph of the poor was the useful demi-lie. Jokes were needed. And then the baby fell down the stairs. This could be funny! Especially in a place and time where worse things happened. It wasn't that suffering was a sweepstakes, but it certainly was relative. For understanding and for perspective, suffering required a butcher's weighing. And to ease the suffering of the listener, things had better be funny. Though they weren't always. And this is how, sometimes, stories failed us: Not that funny. Or worse, not funny in the least.

Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown

2010-12-28T07:55:00.000-08:00

I do a fair bit of reading while riding the ferry to town in the morning and back home in the evening, even carrying a small light in my bag against the dark of winter nights and unlit ferries. Indeed, I almost always have a book with me for those inevitable moments waiting, those in-between minutes that add up to a potential chapter or two -- visiting a different time or place or character or worldview wards off impatience enjoyably, even productively. But what invites impatience are the inevitable questions and comments by those who are not so prepared to entertain themselves, those who clearly intend me to help them pass the time, who seem to see that as my responsibility. They ask questions such as "What are you reading?" and "Is that a good book?" and make comments such as "I used to read a lot, but I just don't have time anymore" (to which I darkly mutter inside my head, "you might if you'd only stop using it to pester me!")

Subjected to these questions and comments a few weeks ago while reading Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, I struggled more than usual with a response. This is definitely a "good" book, but it's a commitment. Or should that be "and it's a commitment" -- there shouldn't be a contradiction between a "good" book requiring work. Nor should a "good" book need to be "relatable" -- to use that horrid word that my students rely on far too much. Certainly, there were no characters that I could easily relate to in Shalimar. Rushdie's too-clever-by-half writing can sketch amusing or fascinating or compelling or grotesque or stunning or pathetic characters, but I've never felt particularly moved by any one of them. His plots, similarly, generally exhaust rather than intrigue me. He pulls together cultural and historical references on an encyclopedic, global scale that daunts rather than challenges -- arcane comic books jumbled together with descriptions of centuries-old Mughal paintings overlaying pop music from the 50s and 60s side-by-side with early cinema pastiched with real-and-apocryphal political figures and intrigues.

And he breaks down the walls between East and West that we didn't even realize were so firmly constructed in our mental armatures, obliquely ridicules the distinctions we've made between cultures, retells histories from perspectives that we acknowledge, grudgingly perhaps, make as much sense as those we learned in school. . .

Faith and love, heroism, terrorism, the various causes for which we (whoever we might be) fight. . . and somehow, steadfastness . . . I don't know, really, why that should be the word that floats to mind as I try to reduce this novel to a silly brief review, but it does. The word never occurred to me while I was reading the book, but it's there now. . . and perhaps you will concur when you read of two fathers, especially, and their daughters. What deserves this steadfastness? Why is it honourable in some cases and tragically foolish in others? How can it sit alongside compassion so impressively when its near-cousin, faith, obsessively distorts itself too often into hatred and destruction?

A few superficial comments, too many unanswered questions . . . my response to this book isn't much better than those questions and comments directed at my ferry-reading, is it? And if you haven't yet read Rushdie, I doubt I'll draw you to his challenging pages. But to give you an idea of what you're missing, of the stylistic power he wields, the witnessing he insists on, here's a passage that describes a once-beautiful Kashmiri village, Pachigam, caught up in military-political-religious struggle despite the villagers' best attempts to get along with those not of their faith:

Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who killed that youth? Who clubbed that grandmother? Who knifed that aunt? Who broke that old man's nose? Who broke that young girl's heart? Who killed that lover? Who shot his fiancée? Who burned the costumes? Who broke the swords? Who burned the library? Who burned the saffron field? Who slaughtered the animals? Who burned the beehives? Who poisoned the paddies? Who killed the children? Who whipped the parents? Who raped that lazy-eyed woman? Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed woman as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again?

Relatable? Thank God, not really. A "good" book? Not if you mean an easily-consumable page-turner. Worth the time it took me to read? Worth the disturbance?

I think so. Let me know if you do. . .

Robert Hough and Final Confession

2010-12-26T08:09:00.000-08:00

Almost a month since I've written, and less than a week 'til the end of the year round-up.

So, I'm obviously sticking with the short and sweet (or quick and dirty?!) reviews. . .

Robert Hough's The Final Confession of Mabel Stark -- a wonderfully layered, captivating first-person narrator, an old woman looking back on her travels through the 20th-century as a big-cat trainer. What would a lively, capable, initially innocent young woman do if left to her own resources and a first marriage delivered some shocks about "the facts of life"? What options existed beyond either marital boredom and domestic servitude OR a life of shame and ignominy? Mabel's adventures require her to develop a tough demeanor, but her yearning for love and some form of security are clear nonetheless -- perhaps accounting for the startling relationship with her favourite tiger. . . Novel seems firmly anchored in meticulous research, and there are convincing glimpses of hospital conditions and medical care, particularly nurses' contributions, from the earlier half of the 20th-century. The horrors of mental asylums and the helplessness of the women consigned to them during this period are revealed in all their scientific-objective details. But especially, the quirky and fascinating richness of circus life in the big travelling circus of early-mid-century North America. . . the friendships, the rivalries, the power plays, the dangers. . .

Always on the alert for knitting showing up in my reading, here's a Knitlit passage from Mabel (p. 88)

Having nabbed herself a rich husband and so able to leave the vagaries of circus life for comfort and security, Mabel perversely begins to chafe against the boredom, Deciding to knit herself a sweater, she got so intent on finishing I stopped bothering with the walks and started knitting on the front porch swing seat . . . . It took me a week to finish. I worked like my time on this planet was coming to an end. When the last pearl [sic] two was done I held the thing up to the light. Looked beautiful, it did, though at the same time something was wrong with it. Something peculiar.

Then I realized the damn thing was too small.

And not just small, but small, nowhere near big enough for an adult woman, even one of my slight proportions. I was astonished, for I'd followed the pattern to a T, and it'd come out looking exactly like it should except shrunk down. An eight-year-old would've had to exhale to get the buttons done up. I considered this fact for more than a minute, thinking maybe I really was crazy, when I recalled something Dr. Levine told me. . . . Seems we don't have one mind but two, one we know about and one we don't, and the one we know about isn't necessarily the one in charge. I kept holding up the sweater and scrutinizing it and thinking, What could this possibly mean? when suddenly my breathing went shallow and rabbit paced. Seems I didn't want to be knitting for an adult at all. I wanted to be knitting for a baby. I guess my two minds'd been duking it out the whole time, and the sweater had landed somewhere in the middle.

So knitting as an opportunity for our subconscious to express itself -- wonderful!

Three to Catch Up

2010-11-28T16:49:00.001-08:00

This is not getting easier, this keeping up with recording some thoughts about my reading. I seem to get further and further behind. For example, although I finished it over a month ago, I haven't told you about the surprisingly well written and very affecting Still Alice by Lisa Genova. Why surprising? Genova holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard and writes a column for the National Alzheimer's Association. This made me suspicious that her novel about a cognitive psych prof at Harvard who develops early-onset Alzheimer's would be able to move beyond the formulaic. It does, though. It's sad, terrifying, and rather beautiful in spots as well. And it speaks as much about long-term marriages and mother-adult child relationships as it does about Alzheimer's, as much about the resilience of the human spirit as about the gradual decay of a brilliant mind.

From that I moved to something much lighter, a mystery novel by Quentin Jardine, Famous Last Words. I've read a few of these Bob Skinner books and enjoyed them -- the father-daughter relationship takes an interesting twist here and Skinner shows himself to be very human in his responses. But the book's greatest fun comes from the play it makes with the setting of the Edinburgh Book Fair's collection of mystery writers and its borrowing of real-life writers' names for so many of its characters. For example, the phone is brightly answered at one point with something along the lines of "Hello, Peedy James, may I help you?"

Then I read Doug Saunders' important analysis of rural-to-urban migration in the late-20th and 21st-century, Arrival City. I highly recommend this for the way it integrates an impressive body of scholarship from numerous fields, particularly Human and Urban Geography, as well as Political Science and Economics. The breadth is global, as the topic demands, but personalized by individuals and their families trying to move, in one or two generations, from a rural village lifestyle to one which might seem squalid to us but which, Saunders convincingly points out, offers the hope of integration into an urban, educated, middle class. Interestingly, one of my 1st-year students right now comes from one of the cities Saunders discusses, Shenzhen, China. The student tells me that his family has made three major city moves in his lifetime from the rural village in which his parents were born, and they've been successful enough in Shenzhen that they could send him to study here with hopes that he will bring the family into the middle class. Looking at these various arrival cities through Saunders' eyes makes me feel slightly more optimistic than I previously have about global inequities -- that is, if the recommendations he makes (reinforcing, repeating those made by scholars both on the ground and in the academy) are adopted by policy makers and urban planners.

I'm still two novels behind, and I'll try to catch those up in the next week. What about you? Are the winter days and nights giving you more or less reading time? Of course, some of you are in beach weather right now, right? So any time for beach books? I'd love to hear what pages you're turning. . .

Ethel Wilson: Love and Salt Water

2010-11-09T06:30:00.000-08:00

The only reason I'm not further behind (right now only about four titles, I think) in this reading log is that I'm not finding much more time to read than I am to write. But I did find time a week or two ago to copy some passages about the arbutus tree (madrona, to my friends across the border) from Ethel Wilson's Love and Saltwater. I found a wonderfully well-preserved 1st edition hardcover in a local Used and Rare Books shop at the end of summer and pounced on it, already a big fan of Wilson's Swamp Angel, a BC, if not Canadian, classic. Saltwater was published in 1956, two years after Angel; the feminist inclinations of both are rendered more notable by the back flyleaf which gives a sense of the times in introducing Wilson as "the wife of a doctor who is a former President of the Canadian Medical Association." With no disrespect to Dr. Wilson, I have to wonder who remembers him now, when his wife's books are still regularly taught in Canadian Literature courses half a century after that blurb was written.

At any rate, if Wilson hadn't already captivated me completely with Swamp Angel, there was much to engage me in Love and Saltwater. Short on time right now, I'll concentrate on her treatment of the arbutus which I've loved since first becoming aware of its presence along our coast and on Vancouver Island. The novel also offers love, death, and some nautical derring-do along with its protagonist who so winningly struggles against her time's expectations of young women. It could have used a stronger editing hand, I'd say, with some odd jumps as well as what appear to be distortions of the narrative by some digressive bulges, too much attention to what matters too little overall. Still, listen to what she says about my favourite tree:

The arbutus tree grows, each year, a skin like bark; or, one should say more correctly, its smooth surface, of a green which ranges in a shade near chartreuse, becomes deeper in shade and hardens into a skin, a bark of glorious copper colour. When the morning sun strikes the smooth trunk of an arbutus tree the copper glows, and anyone looking up suddenly at the arbutus tree exclaims aloud; and remembers. This copper bark, as the year advances, splits, peels, curls, and floats away, revealing below it the young green again. Since the leaves of the tree become dry and fall fairly continuously for a time, the arbutus tree is not suitable for the ordinary garden unless the owner of the garden likes cleaning up after his pets every day for a season of the year that seems endless; and since the arbutus tree is difficult to transplant, one seldom sees it in the ordinary garden which is a good thing, as it there resembles the noble savage in a drawing-room. In such places as Victoria (only there are no such places) gardeners accept this pleasant toil, for the arbutus flourishes on the shores of Victoria which so often constitutes the rocky gardens of that charmer among small cities.

There is one more thing that should be said about the arbutus tree. It is, sometimes, more human than anything in the vegetable world and is certainly nobler than the mandrake. There is one arbutus tree on Aunt Maury Peake's point whose trunk is as large as a human body (the trunk is usually more slender); it divides as at a groin, a shoulder. The smooth curves, held firmly by the two hands, are like living sculpture of the human body -- copper thigh, abdomen, flank, muscle; you expect a life as of the tree's green breathing. (157-8)

Steven Galloway's Cellist

2010-09-27T18:12:00.000-07:00

Another quickie: Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo. I'll admit that while this has been on my horizon for a couple of years, I was deterred somewhat by the positive response to a book about war. I'm wary of books that purport to alert us to the horrors of war while simultaneously offering a satisfying narrative arc, a redemptive ending, an aesthetic compensation. Books about war, I'd say, should make us uncomfortable, and doing so is unlikely to land them on any bestseller lists.

But Cellist surpassed my expectations. While there's no doubt that it engaged and satisfied many readers, there should be little doubt it must have troubled them as well. The eponymous cellist is not able to redeem the horrors of war, although he does indeed go some way to aestheticizing the human response to these, to pointing out our potential for nobility.

What lingered with me from this novel, and seemed one of its better contributions to our awareness of war, is how the landscape can change from normality to inescapable daily terror. Geographies that had only registered with me for their association with news reports from military zones are rendered through memories of a rich, culturally-diverse and beautiful city. Such renditions disrupt my irrational rationalization (I know -- sorry) of this space as discontinuous with my urban life. If someone can one month be drinking coffee with friends in a public plaza, discussing literature and listening to music, and then several months later making terror-laden hours-long expeditions to get a week's supply of water, surely that is a shared human problem rather than one I can merely switch off news about.

And how would I behave in the myriad of ethics-defying situations the novel's characters confront. Would I scurry to safety in a barrage of fire or risk my life to drag a wounded fellow pedestrian to cover? No, this is not simply a book that uses wartime drama to heighten a narrative arc. It is troubling, and it demands the reader put it down from time to time to contemplate the questions it asks. Worth picking up.

Elizabeth George's This Body of Death

2010-09-27T17:04:00.000-07:00

I'm behind again, so will only say of Elizabeth George's This Body of Death that it is complex and satisfying and, ultimately, quite sad. Her novels generally offer social commentary although I've never found this intrusive. This time, there's a parallel narrative offered in the form of what appear to be a Social Worker's notes about a case which gradually reveals itself as modelled after the real-life disappearance and murder of toddler, Jamie Bulger, by pre-teen boys. What this has to do with the investigation of the still-grieving Inspector Lynley is difficult to know, but we trust George that the various threads will come together and they do, compellingly -- and, as I said, very sadly.

Meanwhile, I was entertained to learn about the ponies of England's New Forest and the perhaps arcane terminology surrounding them, their keepers, and their environment. Similarly, I was fascinated by the descriptions about thatching, the centuries-old techniques of making roofs from grasses.

Short and dirty, as a review, I know, but I've got three more recent reads I've got to post about and I've already started another . . . Some days, retirement looks pretty good!

Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado

2010-09-13T15:46:00.000-07:00

Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado, which won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, has been widely acclaimed. Charles Foran's review in the Globe and Mail convinced me to read it, and I must agree with much of what Foran says about its exuberance, its expansion of the novel's possibilities, its exploration of identities national and global, its folding together of the historical and the fictional.

I admire the novel's formal experimentation and play as well as the work it does in reconstructing the geographies of our global imaginaries, insisting on a webbing that pulls the globe tighter than ever those pink-stained maps taught me way back when. And there are occasional aperçus on relationships, on privilege, on irony that I enjoyed. Overall, however, I found I really could not care about either central character, the young narrator or the older erstwhile literary mentor whose biography he is trying to piece together. I'm not sure whether this is a gender or a generational gap at play, but whereas Junot Diaz Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao entertained and engaged and horrified me while it placed Dominican history under its lens, I experienced Ilustrado as a should-read, forcing myself to pick it up and continue, in order to cross it off my list and get onto the next book.

But I'm definitely in the minority on this one, if the critics are a fair indication. And I hope my reading wouldn't dissuade you from your own -- I'd love to be given a reason to take a second look, so if you disagree with me, let's hear it!

Bijaboji -- A Spectacular Rowed Trip

2010-09-05T16:30:00.001-07:00

I won't say you can't possibly understand how I felt when my mother arrived for a three-day stay here without a book to read. But you, of course, weren't there each afternoon all those decades ago when she insisted on our daily nap -- so that throughout twenty years with pre-schoolers keeping her company, she worked her way through hundreds and hundreds of books lugged home on several-times-weekly visits to the library. Many differences might separate us, but her love of reading was always a big link -- and a beacon as well.

That she loved reading so avidly, that we were introduced to the library from our earliest days as a place of delights and wonders, that reading could take us away from constant chores like laundry and dishwashing, could distract us from the social and academic rigors of the classroom -- all this made me a stack-of-books-a-week addict just like mom! And as strict as she was about what we wore, where we went, what we listened to on the radio and watched on the television, our reading was never, ever censored. Indeed, she agreed with the children's librarian that I would benefit from an adult card and free access to the entire library even before I hit my teens.

My dad would read the occasional mystery and, of course, the daily paper, but my mom was the one who led us into the bookworld, and every one of my siblings still inhabits that happy place regularly.

But mom's passport is in danger of expiring, although she keeps trying to make forays across the border. With the Mild Cognitive Impairment she's experienced over the last few years, she finds it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the novels she used to burn her way through. She told me, ruefully, that she still brings books home regularly but often returns them unfinished. I tried to reassure her by joking that there wouldn't be a test, but really, it's not funny at all, is it? I can't imagine not being able to enjoy reading -- and being conscious of that inability, still holding onto the desire for the experience--never mind the pleasures of the reading content--seems an especially cruel accompaniment to old age.

I've witnessed this gradually falling away from reading that my mother's been going through, but I never quite grasped its enormity until she sat next to us on the ferry, her travel bag on the floor beside her chair, her purse on the seat beside her, and failed to produce the reading material necessary to get her through the 95-minute sailing. Pater and I, of course, each had chunky books we were keen to sink into, although we divvied up the daily paper as an appetizer. But Mom just sat there, claiming she was content with the view. She did thumb through the paper idly as we finished with the various sections, but there was no evidence of any sustained interest.

Arrived at our house, I spread out some magazines which, with their pictures, caught her eye and entertained her for a while. Then I had the happy inspiration to pull out a pile of best-loved children's picture books that had survived our four and now waited our granddaughter -- and because these were so well-written and beautifully illustrated, she enjoyed paging through them.

But my real inspiration was a book I'd just finished, a travel-adventure narrative written in very readable, lively, straightforward prose. Perhaps because she didn't have to keep track of a complex plot with multiple characters, perhaps because she could relate so well to the time and the place, Mom finally settled on the couch for hours and hours, happily relaxing into another existence as she had so often in the past. The book was Bijaboji: North to Alaska by Oar, a fabulous "rowed-trip" narrative written by Betty Lowman Carey, edited by her husband Neil G. Carey, in their 80s about Betty's solo rowing trip in a dugout canoe from Anacortes, Washington to Ketchikan, Alaska in the summer of 1937. Unbelievable!

In her early 20s at the time, with college behind her, but future graduate studies and work as a journalist still ahead, young Betty Lowman prepared for her trip by ensuring she could swim ten miles in the cold waters near Anacortes, keen to show her father he should let her embark on her adventure. No wonder he withheld consent. Looking at the distance she covered on a map conveys no sense of the dangers she faced in storms, current-and-tide-churned waters, possible miscreants, never mind that she set out with supplies we would now consider inadequate for a weekend camping trip. Her delightful confidence and determination along with her journalist's powers of observation -- and memory, after her notes were destroyed through a nautical mishap -- make this a page-turner that inspires and uplifts. No wonder mom loved it!

Besides the tale of the 1937 adventure, I was also fascinated to see what Betty got up to in the years between then and the time of writing the book, in the early 2000s. And although those 60 years are compressed into a few pages, they were marked by an impressive career and interesting travels, across the US as a journalist and speaker, then crewing a schooner for an owner who couldn't find a male crew during wartime. Shipwrecked on that boat, she walked and hitchhiked 125 miles to Halifax (all this tossed off in a breezy paragraph!). She and her husband and son later moved to the then-even-more-remote Queen Charlotte Islands (now called Haida Gwaii), although not until Betty, at 49, and her beloved dugout canoe, Bijaboji, had completed the return trip from Ketchikan to Anacortes.

I don't know how many books will be able to keep my mother's attention as her memory and her cognitive abilities move further into old age. But I'm so glad that I thought to share this one with her, and that she was once again transported through print. I'm not sure how widely distributed Bijaboji is (published by Harbour here in BC), but if you can get a copy, I suspect you'll enjoy it as well.

Sensational Historical Adventure!

2010-09-03T15:11:00.000-07:00

A happy surprise for me earlier this summer was having a should-read turn out to be a considerable pleasure. I had put the heftily-titled In the Wake of the War Canoe: A Stirring Record of Forty Years' Successful Labour, Peril & Adventure Amongst the Savage Indian Tribes of the Pacific Coast, and the Piratical Head-Hunting Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, B.C., written by The Venerable W.H. Collison and published in London, 1915, on my reading list as part of some research I'm doing on British Columbia (BC) Literature. While I knew it would be interesting enough for what it yielded about our coastal history, I didn't think it could compete with some of the fiction I wanted to get to.

But the sensationalizing title should have alerted me that the subject matter, at least, if not the prose, would be lively. And, indeed, there are adventures galore here to marvel at. Having travelled by ferry numerous times, during the seven years we lived up the coast in Prince Rupert, through the waters that Collison describes, I am in awe of the bravery and/or foolhardiness required as part of his missionary work.

The title -- with its emphasis on "savages" both "piratical" and "head-hunting" -- instead rather put me off at first, warning of an exoticizing colonizer's perspective of the First Nations whom Collison wanted to convert to Christianity. But while he is never able or willing to put down the Christian missionary lens through which he views them, understandably enough given the time, Collison is often very sensitive to the difficulties colonization imposes on them as well as to some of their strengths. I was quite impressed with the competence he quickly acquires in the languages of his prospective parishioners, and with his astute realization of how language reflects their world view and metaphysics. At one point, he compares "the Tsimshean term for sunbeam, 'Ashee Giamk,' [which] signifies the foot or limb of the sun [with] the Haida term for the same, 'juie hunglth dagwuts,' [which] is literally the eyelash of the sun." He elaborates that "the Tsimshean . . . idea is that the sun is as a great body, the limbs of which extend to the earth" in contrast to the Haida conception "that the sun is a great eye, of which the rays are the eyelashes."

Of course, Collison's history must be accepted with a large grain of salt and the recognition that not only was his position biased, not only could he not always understand what he saw, but much would have been withheld from him. He is not able to find much good at all in the native spirituality, a rather predictable stance for a Christian missionary of his day. Still, he forms close bonds with the people to whom he ministers, he raises children who speak the language even more fluently than he does, he provides helpful medical care whenever possible, and he advocates for his parishioners legally. If there's a certain self-aggrandisement in his descriptions of hunting and paddling adventures, perhaps he's earned our tolerance for that.

At any rate, while this isn't for all readers, if you're interested in BC history, or more generally in that period of colonization and the difficulties of contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples, or if, instead, you crave some vicarious wildnerness adventure, this might be a book for you to check out.

Somewhere Towards the End: Diane Athill

2010-08-29T19:50:00.000-07:00

I've already quoted from Diana Athill's wonderful Somewhere Towards the End on my other blog, where I was talking about drawing and loved her observation on the subject.

But she's quotable on so many other subjects.

Not on the topic of sex and older women -- for that you'll need to pick up the book and read the two chapters which detail first, her assumption that her interest in sex had aged right out of her, a fact about which she was resigned, if wistful. Next, she describes her delightful discovery, in a new relationship, that her "life as a sexual being" wasn't done yet. And finally, she tells of how, after months and months of the gaps between lovemaking growing increasingly longer, she told her lover that "The trouble with me . . . is that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. My body has gone against it." It's obvious to her that he is as relieved by this decision as she is firm in stating it. After that, she says, there is "no reprieve" from a life without sex, but neither does she wish for one.

And it's hard to imagine Ms. Athill languishing among regrets (she devotes one chapter to outlining the limit of her regrets, and they are very reasonable ones, sensibly confined to the margins). Editor for the well-respected publisher, André Deutsch, she lived a fulfilling career among interesting and influential people. An independent thinker, she seems to me to have carried forward the best sort of values into the 21st-century, without falling prey to conservatism or nostalgia. An atheist from quite early in her intellectual life, she nonetheless acknowledges the strengths she drew from a Christian upbringing. Here is an example of her generous, rigorous honesty:

My kind enjoys an unfair advantage. In the Western world there are probably nowadays as many people without the religious instinct as with it, but all of them live in socieities which developed on lines laid down by believers: everywhere on earth men started by conjuring Powers into being to whom they could turn for direction and control of their behaviour. The mechanism was obviously a necessary one in its time. So we, the irreligious, live within social structures built by the religious, and however critical or resentful we may be of parts of them, no honest atheist would deny that in so far as the saner aspects of religion hold within a society, that society is the better for it. We take a good nibble of our brother's cake before throwing it away.

This is the kind of intellectual generosity that David Adams Richards was looking for, it seems to me, and it impresses me to see Athill be so free with it.

She impressed me in many ways, in this memoir (as she did in her earlier one, Stet, about her life in publishing), and she inspired me, by writing about both her own aging and that of her mother (whom she began caring for in her own early 70s). This week, I'm bringing Mom back home with us where she'll be able to work in the garden, and the prompt for this really is Athill's connection of the generations AND for her emphasis on what a difference it makes, in old age, to enjoy making things -- whether knitting, gardening, or, as for herself, writing.
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At the end of her 80s, she has yet to give up driving, but she writes convincingly about how important it is to her yet how aware she is of its dangers. She's very moving on what she is enjoying right now, as well as on what future joys she is unlikely to experience, and she's wise on how to reconcile the gap between the two.

The memoir is relatively slim at 182 pages, and yet I could write much more about what I enjoyed in it and about what will linger, what I continue to think about even after I've moved to other books and the various preparations for the new term. It's the kind of book I know I'll turn back to, a kind of guide to the landscape of a country I know I shall get to one day. I suspect you'd enjoy it as well.

Andrew Davidson's Gargoyle

2010-08-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

What a pleasure it is, when visiting my daughters' and son's homes, to see books that I want to borrow. After guiding them through childhoods and adolescences filled with books, carefully chosen, introducing them to favourite authors old and new, reading aloud as often as possible, it's such a treat to have them return the favour and introduce me to books I'd like to read.

Baby-sitting our granddaughter a few weeks ago, I had time to study my daughter's bookshelves while Nola napped, and I spotted a few books worth borrowing. One of them was William Boyd's Restless, which I wrote about a few posts ago. The other was a book I'd given B for Christmas a year or two ago: Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle. It promised to be one of those sumptuously satisfying big novels, perfect for the beach (although I'm not, quite honestly, a beach reader -- the closest I get is my armchair by the open window, from which I can see and hear the ocean . . .). I had hopes it might be as good to sink into as Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, with enough interesting research to justify all the guilty pleasure.

And so it was. The narrator experiences a perhaps predictable trajectory of positive transformation after enduring a horrific car accident, and the subsequent treatments for extensive, disfiguring burns. The Beatrice who guides him through this inferno is a possibly schizophrenic woman convinced that she knew and loved him in an early (medieval) life, and she funds their contemporary life together through her stonecarvings of gargoyles. Preposterous, yes, but also compelling, especially given the wealth of detail about medieval spiritual life, about book-making during that period, and about spirituality in general. And love. And pain. And joy.

Davidson uses the story-within-a-story structure cleverly, tying the numerous interior stories about love and pain (always interwoven) so that they are integral to the central narrative -- he affirms a favourite belief of mine that storytelling heals while it entertains, and he reminds us that while love and pain are so often interwoven in the most important stories we tell, they are so in innumerable permutations, each individual variation offering just a bit more illumination on the big mystery of life.

The contemporary cast of caregivers in the Burn Unit is also enjoyable, and I was fascinated and moved by the insight into the world behind disfigured, burnt skin. I've been considering a research project or two around skin imagery in film and literature, and this book could clearly contribute to that with its meditations on skin and identity, skin as boundary, skin and humanity and/or monstrosity.

Davidson is a Canadian writer, and The Gargoyle was his debut novel. Much hype was splashed about at the time about the novel, and I'm curious to know how well it became known internationally and at home. Have you read it? or heard about it? If not, I'd recommend getting hold of a copy should you want a satisfying book to settle down with some rainy evening this fall or frosty night this winter. Hard to imagine here, right now, but those rainy and frosty days are on their way . . .

Mysteries of the Mystery Series: Michael Connelly's 9 Dragons

2010-08-11T17:11:00.000-07:00

For too many hours of this past road trip, I thought I should keep Pater company while it wasn't my turn to drive. For some of that time, I read to him from a lovely book of essays about the year Philip Graham spent in Lisbon, The Moon Come to Earth -- this is a tradition we've established over the years wherein I read to him from travel literature and/or memoirs (the latter generally Foodie-related) as he's driving or, at home, when he's cooking.

But I finally realized that only one thing was going to properly distract me from the increasing discomfort my limbs and joints were experiencing as road hour piled on road hour: reading to myself. And I also realized that he wouldn't mind that at all, that my solidarity was strictly self-imposed, and he was quite happy to be in his own head watching the landscape roll by.

So I pulled out the most recent Harry Bosch in paperback, Michael Connelly's 9 Dragons. And very soon I was reading aloud to Pater again, with disbelief. Sentences such as "Dark thoughts once again entered Harry Bosch's brain." Really, the thoughts entered his brain? Through his ear, perhaps? Could he feel them? Did they hurt? Exert a gentle pressure?

Really, when I'm reading a mystery, it's absolutely imperative that I not be distracted by stodgy writing, especially not by over-writing, and definitely not by goofiness that I want to interrogate, sarcastically!!

Too bad, because the plot is quite decent, if you don't mind certain elements in Bosch's personal life gathering a momentum rather unjustified by perhaps 75% of the earlier novels in the series. I understand that writers must satisfy their publishers and it must be difficult to keep a series fresh when one has exhausted a character's depths. And heaven knows I want more Bosch. But unless the next novel is better written, I'm going to cross him off my list, sadly. Even the varying locales here (Hong Kong as well as L.A.) weren't enough to keep my interest, although some of the history about the origins of the Asian Triads was fascinating.

I know we've chatted about this before, but have you been disappointed with favourite series? And do you ever suspect that the writing is contracted out once the general outline is constructed? Especially, have you ever out and out abandoned a detective series you once loved?

On a happier note, I've just splurged (but 30% off, so not too bad) on Elizabeth George's latest -- this will be my summer mystery novel swan song. I've got another "more literary"novel or two to read first, and then I will be one with my hammock and Inspector Lynley . . .

William Boyd's Restless

2010-07-29T06:21:00.000-07:00

We're hitting the road today, with about 800 kilometres to cover before tonight's stopping point, AND it's my husband's birthday, so just a very quick post before he wakes.

I've been a bit frustrated because I've only got four weeks or so of free reading time left, and my book order from Chapters arrived WITHOUT any of the novels I want to read. The list of books I want to get to is so long that I'm leery of spending time on any others, but my daughter's bookshelf is always interesting, and she recommended William Boyd's Restless. He's been on my radar forever, but I've never read him, so this counted as a crossing-off of sorts (what a terrible approach to reading, I know!!! But there are so many books, and I can't keep up!).

I'm just finishing the last chapter now, so no danger of spoiling the ending for you. Most interesting about this novel for me was the WWII espionage, particularly the intelligence units that worked as/in Media, planting and manipulating "news" to deceive and influence the enemy. This struck me as very relevant to what's going on today with the WikiLeaks -- whatever the "truth" may be in the contemporary events, our reliance on, and susceptibility to the influence of, broadcast journalism is clear. Restless emphasizes the power wielded by this force -- a warning, albeit at this point a horse-out-of-the-barn one, of the dangers we currently face caught between ideologically- and/or profit-driven, budget-cutting Big Media and a plethora of independent bloggers whose identity and ethos are only virtual to us, whose sources equally virtual and anonymous.

The novel moves between its narrative present in mid-1970s Oxford/London and Wartime Europe/USA as a daughter learns about her mother's mysterious past through a series of writings her mother parcels out to her. My main quibble would be that any difference in writing style between the 3rd-person narrator of the 1970s section and the 3rd-person narration of the WWII sections -- supposedly written by the mother as an account of her past -- is not clearly discernible. I thought I caught a difference at the first switch, but then realized I'd moved several paragraphs into a new chapter without realizing I'd changed decades again. I paid attention for a while, thereafter, but really, the two sections seem to have the same narrator. I admire writers who can create a clearly distinct voice when they supposedly change pens (A.S. Byatt, for example, and in mystery novels, I think Reginald Hill does this brilliantly).

Boyd does a credible job of representing the two women, though -- I never found myself exasperated, thinking "No woman would think/act like that," as can happen when a less skilled male writer tries to speak from inside a woman's head. The revelation of the mother's fuller history, and thus personality, to the daughter is interesting, although perhaps more as a concept than as actually realized. But I like the suggestion that our mothers may have more to them than we imagine, and I like seeing the mother guide the daughter into action, teaching her new skills in a kind of solidarity as they bring a quarter century's history to culmination. Frustratingly, though, there's no sense of why their relationship has been as cool as it seems to be at the outset, other than the mother's choice to sell the family home too precipitously after her husband's death. Perhaps it's only my own role as a mother of three daughters, but the mother-daughter relationship needs more fleshing-out to convince me of its individual complications and richnesses, and I found this one suggestive but ultimately a bit disappointing.

He also depicts setting -- both time and place -- very satisfactorily, covering a breadth of territory very convincingly. Paris, London, Oxford, New Mexico, New York, Ottawa . . . if Boyd hasn't been to each of these places, he's done some decent research, and the novel takes the armchair traveller on a voyage.

So overall, while I wouldn't have gone out of my way to pick this one up, I don't regret the time I spent with it. If you're looking for a glimpse into women's lives in WWII and in the changing 1970s, and if you'd like that glimpse to take you 'round the world as well, you might enjoy this as well.

Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of California

2010-07-27T07:31:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you'll excuse me. Or perhaps you've learned not to expect too much here. We've had family visiting for the last ten days -- not much reading got done, never mind writing about it. So it's catch-up time again.

I can't go any longer without saying that if you haven't yet read Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, you really should. I'd been told that years ago, but never got around to it and then picked up a secondhand copy a few weeks ago when I found myself stuck in town without anything to read. (We don't have a decent bookstore in the downtown core of our small city anymore, sadly, although we had a brilliant independent for many years -- now there's a Chapters in a strip mall out by all the big boxes, and all those armchairs don't fool me at all. But we do have a concentration of very good secondhand--and antiquarian--bookshops just two blocks from where I get off the ferry, and if I weren't concerned about preserving some of my domestic square footage for moving around, cooking meals, and sleeping, I could be bringing great titles home daily.)

So back to Bastard. We've all read the novels with childhood abuse at their core, many of them very worthy, some slightly exploitative and even sensationalizing, that began hitting the bookshelves and even the bestseller lists in the 1980s and 1990s. These did important work, and the cultural landscape today, in North America at least, is much more attuned to the possibility that there are as many dangers for children in the home as there are outside. The attendant shame and silence that were such potent enforcers of secrecy have become less effective at protecting the abusers and victims can read of others who spoke out, were heard, accepted, even healed -- in theory, at least.

But some readers may have begun to find these books formulaic. Their numbers risked minimizing the horrors suffered by individuals into a cliché that sometimes had us beginning to thumb the pages impatiently, knowing what was going to be revealed as soon as we noted certain elements in the opening chapters.

Not so with Addison's devastating novel. There is not a single banal note here. Love and hate, pain and happiness, hopeful innocence and betrayed experience all mix together here in the voice of a woman remembering her childhood in a closeknit chaotic family in very poor Carolina. Her descriptions of place are compelling with a child's eye view that is utterly credible. The social analysis is trenchant but not intrusive -- while the abuser is clearly identified, clearly culpable, the social web in which he commits his crimes is outlined as well. Class, gender all play a part, but they're not simplistically separated or identified -- complexity rules, as in life.

And the ending -- well, I can't tell you too much, can I, since that might spoil the reading for you, but you'll realize quite quickly that you're not getting any Hollywood treat. I try to convince my students sometimes that redemption can be found in the very act of telling, writing -- that the aesthetic object (the novel) wrung out of painful experience can be "the happy ending" they want. Certainly, with this novel, there will be ample reward in the beautiful, powerful writing, in the insights it offers, the heightened awareness of children's intelligence and humanity and vulnerability to compensate you -- this is a book that will stay with you. Let me know what you think should you pick it up . . .

Vacation Reading

2010-07-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

Read on vacation:
Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities -- poor Pater, there were so many passages that I had to read out loud so that he could appreciate the hilariously dry wit along with me.
As a knitter, I couldn't help but pay special attention to Madame DesForges and the cryptic record she works with needles and yarn. As sinister as the knitting in Conrad's Heart of Darkness that leads from Europe to Africa.

Although I generally think I want lighter books for airplane, train, and hotel-room reading, and I know I want books I won't mind discarding along the way, I found Dickens a better-sustained distraction from the discomfort of travel than the mysteries I brought. I was entertained by (an older book in the series) Lee Child's Echo Burning and by Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow (which visited much of the same territory as Jeffrey Deaver has explored -- dangers of on-line identity theft), but after awhile, the corpses and detectives and plot twists become predictable.

Not the case with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. The paperback has already been released in England and I happily grabbed a copy -- a welcome companion on the train from Portugal to Paris. At some points, the complex background that is revealed in this novel weighs it down, and I found it less gripping than the earlier two. However, there are compensatory satisfactions for those of us who wonder about Salander's background, and overall, I happily recommend the whole trilogy. In fact, I was a bit annoyed that Pater brought along The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to read because I knew we'd sacrifice it for luggage space and it's one I will possibly want to read again, or at least lend out. Another testimonial is that he was willing to lug home the hefty Hornets'Nest rather than sacrifice it -- he couldn't/wouldn't read it there because he hadn't yet read Played with Fire.

I'm generally content with our choice of bringing carry-on luggage only, but confronted with London bookstores I do sometimes wish I could have an extra bag just for books. Many books that we're still only able to buy in hardcover are already published in paperback there, and there are many that won't hit North America for some time. Besides the independent bookstores which offer titles I haven't even seen reviews of, even the WH Smiths at the airport have fabulous deals -- 4 for 3 or 1/2 price -- that have me twitching, debating whether or not to buy a suitcase to cram full!

Instead, I settled for being able to navigate my own bag onto the plane and to manage the walk home from the SkyTrain Station -- one paperback only, a Nicci French I haven't yet seen here, one I know my daughter Rhiannon will be happy to borrow as she's also a fan of this husband-wife writing team. Complicit serendipitously takes place in exactly the area Pater and I walked last week -- Camden Town, King's Cross, St. Martin's Canal -- and it does that psychological thriller thing that the Brits do so well.

And today, with all sorts of more worthwhile material on my bookshelves, I picked up yet another mystery at the drugstore. What can I say? It's beach weather and the mysteries seem to suit the hammock. So my latest read is Jonathan Kellerman's Evidence, but I'm juggling it with Anna Gavalda's Je l'aimais which I picked up at the train station in Paris. And I'm making up an order for Chapters as well as checking my shelves to find something I can dig into.

What about you?

A Handful of NOT Reviews, Sorry!

2010-06-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

I'd hoped to do another post or two before my trip, but that's obviously not going to happen, given the list I'm still working my way down.
However, it's important to me to at least record the titles of books I've reading so here are the last few I remember:
Reginald Hill's A Cure for All Diseases -- Glad to see The Fat Man back in action but with Pascoe more confident about holding his own, under the approving stare of the wonderful Wieldy. A new character I quite liked and the surprising re-appearance of one I'm not so sure about. One of these days I'm going to go back and discover the early D&P's I've missed along the way. Every one is so well-written by someone who loves words!
Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key -- recommended by one daughter and then lent to me by another who, it turns out, had rec'd it as a Christmas gift from me (and I'd forgotten!). My reservations about this novel are in how it skirts the edges of chicklit -- setting in romantic Paris, details a marriage/romance/breakdown/possible other attraction -- while educating us about some of the horrors of the Holocaust. While I'm not entirely persuaded by Brecht's speculation that writing "about trees" in the wake of the horrors of the Third Reich, I'm uncomfortable with using such a packaged format to deliver knowledge that should be much less palatable. That said, the novel does meet its goal of remembering the children who were sent to the camps (and, ultimately, ovens) by the French, an event France does its best to forget. And both my daughters were moved by it and informed. Certainly, it's well written and the information is convincingly presented.
Nancy Huston's Fault Lines deals with a related subject but the structure she chooses is neither neatly packaged nor ultimately comforting. It is, though, absolutely brilliant. Oh, I wish I had more time! The way this four-part structure, each narrated by a child from a successively earlier generation in the same family (so part I, narrated by a young boy in contemporary USA, part II, by his father as a young boy living in first, US, then in Israel, then III that young boy's mother in 50s/60s US, and then her mother in wartime Germany) catches the reader up with the pleasures of a narrative and then frustrates, intrigues and destabilizes. More questions are raised than are answered, and the novel is haunting. I have put it aside to reread.
Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire. Oh, my! This trilogy is so very satisfying -- everything one might want in a mystery series. I'm intrigued by Lisbeth and by Blomkvist both, love the very fatness of the books, and am beginning to think about visiting Sweden.
Eva Hoffman's Appassionata This one I'm not finished yet, but will be trying to read quickly over the next day or two. It's hardcover so not light or disposable enough to bring on the plane with me, and I'd be loath to leave it unfinished for three weeks to try to pick up when I get back.

Haven't yet, but I'm hoping to pick up a secondhand copy of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities which would work well for this summer's Dickens project, since I'll be shuttling between those two cities AND have recently read Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety (history of French Revolution, focussing on the personalities of some of the major players, esp. Danton and Robespierre -- and the women in their lives) -- which, oh dear, I just realized I haven't blogged about yet either! I am way too far behind - should I even be bothering with this blog?
Also reread, in preparation for my Montreal conference paper last month, Bill Gaston''s Sointula, which stood up quite nicely to a second reading, although I ended up finding some parts of it as self-indulgent as its main protagonist, a woman who rather irritated me. It's always fun, though, to recognize one's own landscape (and waterscape, in this case).

Congratulations, Karen Solie!

2010-06-06T15:53:00.000-07:00

Huge Congratulations to Karen Solie, winner of the 2010 Griffin!
I've been waiting for Karen to win this since she was nominated for her first book, Short Haul Engine, back when we used to share an office (and a supervisor) as PhD candidates/sessional instructors at University of Victoria.
And I've been crossing my fingers as I read my way through Pigeon, over the past few months, altho' I haven't yet mentioned it here (I'm so very remiss on this blog!) -- you should all make sure you always have a slim book of poetry tucked into your bag all the time, the perfect way to enrich those waiting minutes in transit or in lineups or at a picnic table with your lunch. Pigeon would keep you entertained, thinking, provoked, amused, delighted, saddened . . . what I always enjoyed best about Karen's company was the way her rigorous thinking (based on a surprising breadth of reading, always approached analytically yet without depreciating the sensual pleasures of language) had a practical muscularity, punctuated by a world's-best giggle. She's the most interesting mix of farmgirl and streetwise Torontonian (adopted by Toronto, born on a farm). All of this comes through in Pigeon, although the giggle doesn't happen as often in this collection, and perhaps I projected it onto her work from spending some time with her -- I'd love to hear if you detect it, either in this book or, especially in Short-Haul.

One of my colleagues from Media Studies commented the other day on how ironic he thought it was that there were so many Literature prizes -- in a field that should no better than trying to determine a "best," -- and he wondered what I thought. I agreed with his concept, and I suspect Karen, who's judged on the Griffin in other years, might also point to awards in various years that could as well have gone to one nominee as another. However, I argued with/to my colleague, writers -- and poets especially -- have such a precarious financial existence, at the very least in the years before they make it in the market, that I'm thrilled, as a Canadian, that Scott Griffin established such a rich prize, not only for a Canadian poet, but also for an international one.

Now I'm off to get a copy of Eilean Ni Chulleanain's The Sun-Fish (she won the international prize with this book) and discover a new-to-me poet. Keeping in mind my colleague's argument, I'm going to put all the short-listed titles on my reading list and try my best to get to them before the summer is out. Shouldn't you choose one as well?

Muriel Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody

2010-05-11T19:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, seriously remiss here -- way back on April 17th I posted that I would "soon" say something about Muriel Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody. Meanwhile, I've been juggling a few books, and spending quite a bit of time in the French Revolution with Hilary Mantel (more on that later), but I am mindful that I should say a bit more about Rhapsody before it gets shelved.

If you've read The Elegance of the Hedgehog, you will already by predisposed to read this book and will be pleased to recognize the setting of a certain hôtel particulier in the 7th arr. on Rue de Grenelle. You will also, I assume, be a patient reader ready to linger, with Barbery, over moments, thoughts, qualities of light, eager to be amused by her skewering of the bourgeois Parisiens she describes.

If you loved Hedgehog, though, you will probably have done so because you loved at least one of three very likeable, original characters. And while you might have noticed some structural weaknesses in that novel, and a plot whose ending, while avoiding the saccharine knot-tying it seemed driven toward, was frustrating in its abruptness, you will have turned pages impatiently, curious to follow a narrative arc which possessed recognizable energy.

Neither likeable character nor narrative energy are evident in Rhapsody, and while I haven't seen the reviews that commenter Tiffany refers to in responding to my last post, I can imagine that many readers will find this novel a disappointment after reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

And yet . . . if you love words well wrought and if you love food, you will be richly repaid for your time with this fairly slight (<150 pages) book. On his deathbed, the primary narrator, a renowned food critic whose energies have gone exclusively to his work to the detriment of his family, tries to recapture an elusive sense, not quite a memory, of a wonderful, foundational dish/taste, retracing his experiences with meals beginning in his childhood. This leads to some delectable descriptions along with some culinary philosophy.
First, an example of the latter: There is no great cuisine, without evolution, without erosion and forgetting. Invention must constantly be invoked upon the countertop, and past and future, here and elsewhere, raw and cooked, savory and sweet shall all be mixed, for it is this inventiveness that has made cuisine into an art that thrives untrammeled by the obsession of those who do not wish to die.

And after describing his memory of watching an elderly bachelor uncle prepare his daily meal, a "little mouthful of paradise"which "every day he would take great pains to cook himself . . . unaware of how refined his everyday fare was, a true gourmet" -- a meal the critic "did not touch" but which nevertheless "remained one of the most delicious I have ever tasted in my life," the narrator offers this assessment: Tasting is an act of pleasure, and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast. Jacques Destrères's meal had all the perfection of a feast because it was not my feast, because it did not spill over onto the before and after of my everyday life, and it could remain in my memory as a closed and self-sufficient unity, a unique moment etched there outside of time and space, a pearl of my spirit released from the feelings in my life. Food for thought, indeed.

Remembering bread eaten on Moroccan beaches, he gives us this meditation on, and description of, bread's wonders: Bread, beach: two related sources of warmth, two alluring accomplices; every time, an entire world of rustic joy invades our perception. It's a fallacy to claim that what accounts for the nobility of bread is the way it suffices unto itself while accompanying all other dishes. If bread "suffices unto itself,"it is because it is multiple, not because it exists in multiple variants but in its very essence: bread is rich, bread is diverse, bread is a microcosm. Bread contains such stunning diversity; it is akin to a miniature world which reveals its inner workings as it is consumed. You storm it through an initial encounter with the barrier of crust, then yield to wonder the moment you are through, as the fresh soft interior consents. there is such a divide between the crunchy shell--on occasion as hard as stone, at other times mere show, quickly yielding to the charge, and the tenderness of the inner substance which lodges in one's cheeks with a docile charm--that one is almost at a loss. The fissures in the envelope are like unexpectd rural missives: one thinks of a ploughed field, of a peasant in the evening air; the village steeple has just rung seven o'clock; the peasant is wiping his forehead with the lapel of his jacket his labors done.

If I tell you that this description of bread goes on for another page, you will decide whether that is an incentive to read the novel or a warning against it. For me, the intricate analysis, the attempts to find ways to describe a subjective sensory experience in terms another can grasp, is captivating, but I admit that the series of metaphors can seem overwrought; they border on parody. Yet I can't help but be fascinated with this close, close examination of something we daily take for granted, as he continues: As you chew and chew upon the soft interior, a sticky mass is formed, which no air can penetrate: the bread adheres--yes, like glue. If you have never dared to take a mass of soft dough between your teeth and tongue and palate and cheeks, you have never thrilled to the feeling of jubilant ardor that viscosity can convey. it is no longer bread, nor dough, nor cake that we are masticating; it is something like our own self, what our own secret tissues must taste like, as we knead them with our expert mouths, saliva and yeast mingling in ambiguous fraternity. As much as it's difficult to read such a passage without seeing it as at least somewhat parodic (thrilling to a jubilant ardor at a mouthful of viscosity? Really?) the description's movement between the concrete and the abstract compels me.

I could give you more, but I'm starving. . . . It's almost 8:00, and I haven't had my dinner yet. I have some Thai-seasoned cauliflower and yam soup leftover from a huge batch I made last night, and I'm eager to heat it now, so please forgive me if I stop here.
So what do you think? Will you pick the book up, now, or avoid it? And if you do read it (or have done so already) let me know what you think . . .

And another . . .

2010-04-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

And no sooner had I posted the link to Bloomsbury's discovery of bookish necklaces, than I found Laura's post pointing us to wonderful classic-Penguin-book-cover postcards. Head over there and she'll show you how to get some for your own lovely self. . .

Bookish accessories

2010-04-21T07:12:00.001-07:00

You love books? You love necklaces? You really MUST check this out . . . (and there's so much else for booklovers at A Bloomsbury Life!)

Urban Poetry -- Kim goldberg's Red Zone

2010-04-18T15:03:00.000-07:00

Let's see now, what have I almost forgotten to record here . . .
Well, I mentioned earlier that I re-read Richard Wagamese's Ragged Company along with my students this term, primarily for its focus on home and homelessness. Same theme, very different approach, we also read a collection of poetry by local writer Kim Goldberg, Red Zone, her self-published approach to her growing awareness of the homeless around her in our own small city (she has a very small home-based press, Pig Squash Press). Students are often anxious about the way poetry can make them "feel stupid" if they don't "get it,"as they explained to me, and their first confrontation with some of Goldberg's work aroused this anxiety. But the book is marked by numerous "found poems" in the form of Goldberg's photographs, sometimes of the homeless themselves, sometimes of artifacts denoting their presence throughout the city, often of graffiti ranging from the witty to the poignant. Somehow the visuality reassured them and coaxed them into the aesthetic pleasures of the adjoining poems, although they're still too ready to assign a "deep meaning," seldom congruent with the words on the page. But then I had Kim come in to speak to them and to perform some of her work. They really began to "get it" at that point, realizing that beyond its meaning, certainly important to work towards, there was sound in its rhythms and rhymes and wordplay simply to be enjoyed.
As well, though, in the question-and-answer session following the reading, someone asked a question about the obliqueness of some poetry, about the difficulty of figuring out what it's about, and because they were captivated by the writer's integrity and open honesty, they seemed to take her answer to heart: important matters of life are tough to work out and she wants her readers to struggle with them, to puzzle them out along with her. She has little interest in, as she said, opening their heads and pouring her answers in. Hearing one of them paraphrase this response to me later in the term was so gratifying.

Another almost-forgotten recent read, Muriel Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody. I'll try to say a few words about that soon.

Another trio: Two Mysteries and an Epic!

2010-04-05T07:33:00.000-07:00

Some light reading: Clyde Ford's Precious Cargo, set on the West Coast just below the border -- I've been collecting representations of boats in West Coast literature, and this nicely-written mystery has them in spades. As well, it's got a very likeable detective who happens to be an amateur classical musician whose practise sessions resonated pleasingly for me with the Eric Siblin book I'd just finished on the Bach Cello Suites.

Next up was not so light but very enjoyable -- the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf read during a wild storm, as written about here.

And then over this past weekend, I got caught up in Lee Child's latest-in-paperback, Gone Tomorrow. I'm surprised by how much I enjoy this series, given how much of it is devoted to precisely-articulated descriptions of action, often graphically and disturbingly violent. I find Reacher's character fascinating in his self-sufficiency, I suppose, but also I'm intrigued by the way Child brings foreign policy back onto home soil (well, not my home soil, but still . . . ) and the way he convincingly sketches machinations of government and of politicians at work beyond the visibility of the average citizen.
Part of Reacher's appeal is his irreverence for any authority, often expressed with dry humour. As well, as I mentioned about an earlier Reacher novel, I was pleased to discover that he speaks French, having had a French mother. So here's an exchange I enjoyed in Gone Tomorrow, an exchange between Reacher and men he assumes are FBI:
"Are you Canadian?"
"Why would I be Canadian?"
"The detective told us you speak French."
"Lots of people speak French. There's a whole country in Europe."

Two Female Sleuths and a Cello Suite!

2010-03-21T18:56:00.000-07:00

I've made the most of no-marking weekends lately -- that's the end of them for a while, so I'm glad I did. Some good escape reading: Alan Bradley's Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This is rather like Nancy Drew or Trixie Belden, but for grown-ups "of a certain age." Nor is the protagonist, young Flavia, as "goodie" as those other sleuths. Adding to the fun is the period setting -- small English village, ancestral home, 1950s, wonderfully transitional time. As well, Bradley gives us all sorts of fabulous almost-esoteric information -- chemistry, music, literature, botany. Really, just fun, fun, fun AND the second book in a series of at least three is already published, waiting for me on the shelves of the local bookstore!

Also read Jeffrey Deaver's latest Kathryn Dance mystery, Roadside Crosses, a novel which carries on Deaver's critique of the internet's assault on our identities and our privacy, this time looking at social networking sites and, wait for it, blogs! As usual, Deaver's plot borders on the baroque -- I've learned to expect at least one more twist, and then another. I think he draws characters well, though, and I appreciate his tactic of moving from one series to another so that he doesn't appear weary or slapdash from burnout.

Right now, I'm working my way through Eric Siblin's charming (and prize-winning and well-reviewed) look at the history of Bach's Cello Suites (Siblin's book is called The Cello Suites). Siblin moves back and forth between Bach's biography and his composition of the suites, Casals' biography and his discovery and performance of these works for cello, and Siblin's own growing appreciation for the suites and, gradually, for Bach's work in general. As well, his narrative unfolds against the backdrop of world events, particularly the 2nd World War and the Spanish Civil War. I have a few more chapters yet to read, but I've already been inspired to download the Casals' recording of the suites into my iPod -- damn that iTunes store; it's too hard to resist! Yesterday morning Pater and I enjoyed a glorious morning reading our weekend papers in our big leather armchairs, fuzz and pop and beautiful cello sounds mixing together on the old recording (digitizing, luckily, never cleans all that messy sound up completely).

Richards, Wagamese, and Rankin

2010-03-09T19:10:00.000-08:00

Just time to record a few titles.
First, David Adams Richards' The Lost Highway -- the man can write! His novels are always dense and always verging on the grotesque, either through particular characters or through aspects of setting or, as in this case, through a gruelling inexorability of plot whose twists and turns begin to point towards certain catastrophe that horrifies us but that we can't look away from. As well, I always picture the narrators of Richards' novels as somehow weirdly idealistic misanthropes -- by the end of this novel, even the most apparently selfish, pusillanimous characters have their humanity revealed through vulnerabilities and secret generosities. And there are the "good" characters, those whose innocence and/or pragmatic kindness can be found in most of Richards' works as well. He's a puzzle. Why, for instance, do I keep reading him when he insults me so wholeheartedly -- that is, me as an academic, representative of a group he freely mocks and satirizes for pages on end -- the complexities he reveals in other characters apparently don't extend to anyone at university. He's certainly not predictable, nor fashionable -- he dares to have his characters explore the morality of abortion, and even as my feminist hackles rise, I have to admire the honesty of his probing. Similarly, he has characters face up to the consequences of their atheism (a consideration of religion that recalls his earlier non-fiction book, an excerpt from which was published in The Globe last year).
Not for the faint of heart, though, nor for the lazy reader. If you've read this one, or other Richards' novels, I'd love to hear what you think.

For a palate cleanser of lighter reading, my Reading Break treat was Ian Rankin's The Complaints which I've been waiting to read since Christmas (I gave Pater a copy). While I'm not yet reconciled to losing Rebus, I enjoyed the characters in this mystery, especially the relationship formed between a supposedly dirty cop and the main character, a member of the Complaints department charged with investigating him. Trust becomes an interesting motif, and overall, I thought the novel worked well.

I've just finished re-reading Richard Wagamese's Ragged Company because I'm teaching it to my first-year students. It's surprising how much I forgot in the year since I first read it. And if you're not in the habit of re-reading novels, you might be surprised at how rich an experience the re-reading can be -- once plot is no longer the driver, language can be savoured; patterns become more obvious (this time through Ragged Company I was more alert to the emphasis on words as words, a recurring emphasis I didn't pay much attention to first time 'round).

Toni Morrison's A Mercy

2010-02-25T09:27:00.000-08:00

Last fall, a phrase from something I read -- I thought it might have been from Ondaatje's Divisadero, but couldn't find it on a quick skim through; perhaps it's in Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault -- started me thinking about the concatenation of my reading, the way one book bumps up against another, creating resonances and reverberations neither would have had on its own.

Such is certainly the case for the particular concatenation of following Penelope Lively's Family Album with Toni Morrison's A Mercy. Reading backwards, it's possible to see a questionable mercy at the heart of Lively's novel. Primarily, though, much as I enjoyed Album and admired the shimmering hologram of family complexity Lively skilfully projects from so many points of projection, the novel's concerns and the contemporary obsessions they reflect appear trivial in the light of Morrison's novel and its exploration of a much more important history -- that of the slave trade. Still, the novels can work as useful complements in developing an understanding of how memory -- and history-writing and recovery -- work. What is true on a family scale -- that some members have a vantage point for representing their stories; that shame and silence have a powerful effect on the narratives we tell; that silenced, shameful memories have surprising ways of resisting and persisting nonetheless -- are manifestly, according to Morrison's work (not only in this novel, but in her overall oeuvre) true on a national (and international) scale as well.

I once saw an interview featuring Morrison. In it, she said something to the effect that if you are going to confront your readers with difficult truths, you need to give them some compensation for that confrontation -- the aesthetic delivery should provide some kind of payoff, reward, redemption even, for the ugliness of the narrative events. I'm paraphrasing crudely, but I think I'm capturing the spirit of what she said. A Mercy does, indeed, deliver the compensatory beauty, but what a terrible history the novel illuminates, a history that Morrison's work, overall, has insisted, book by book, that America acknowledge as its foundation. The novel's structure is a marvel, one requiring patience and a willingness to puzzle over ellipses, one that stitches together disparate characters and geographies and times until all coalesce in the final horror, the central mercy at the novel's heart, that given to, taken by a mother, which requires her to take solace in giving away her own child. We instinctively want to say "I can't imagine what that would be like." We should be so grateful that Morrison has forced herself to do just that.

Penelope Lively's Family Album

2010-02-21T19:25:00.000-08:00

Sigh! Here I am again, playing catch-up.
Penelope Lively's Family Album. Incisive sketch of a family from numerous perspectives. A technique that's been often used, of course, but Lively is a master and it's marvellous to watch the shifts she makes from one voice to another. The large family, of a certain class, time, and place, is introduced by an adult daughter who maintains a brisk and careful distance, letting us know that despite mom's apparent warmth and wonderful cookery and dad's scholarly eccentricity, despite the charms of a large, slightly chaotic, heritage house, skeletons will be found before the story's done. Layers are peeled away, character by character, with disorienting-yet-convincing shifts in time, and we find that the secret revealed is one that has always been "hidden in plain sight," just as we recognize the edge of horror hiding in the innocence of childhood games. Many of the same elements here, for those interested in large-family narratives, as in Anne Enright's The Gathering, but a very different tone than that earlier work -- crisp, amused, almost brittle in its satire rather than blisteringly angry in its honesty and revelation -- the secrets are nowhere near as dark; the redemption is more easily come by. Still, for me as the oldest of a very large family, both are fascinating in their attempts to capture the special pressures and solidarities of such childhoods. Particularly now, as my mother's memory fails and her siblings die (her brother and her sister died within the last two months), remembering family life looms large for me, and both these novels point out the challenges and the perils of retrieving the past.
Next post will be about a novel where the stakes are so much higher for memory-work. 'til then . . .

Starting the New Year off with Atwood and mystery and memoir . . .

2010-01-27T19:31:00.000-08:00

First novel of 2010? Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood, about which I think Puttermeister has pretty much articulated what I would say about the book (and she adds some interesting commentary about her longstanding relationship with La Atwood, and even describes a very recent reading she attended). I might add my own bemusement at the stance Atwood seems to maintain towards the earnest Gardeners in the novel, at once apparently mocking them, if gently, and crediting them with providing some small hope for humanity/the earth's continuance. She's such a captivating storyteller, I think it would be difficult not to be engaged by anything she's written, but it's not difficult, either, to find this a bit grating in spots.

And I followed up the dystopia with a nice little murder mystery, you know? Nothing to clear away visions of apocalypse like some forensic nastiness. . . Actually, the mystery was surprisingly close to fitting the description of "a cozy" -- those often-English-village-set mysteries where quaint characters interact and figurative skeletons are found in closets even as the literal ones are dug up from their shallow graves. This one, Bone by Bone by Carol O'Connell, set in a small American town, wasn't really what I expected from the author of the Mallory series (much more in-your-face violence and gore, generally, often perpetrated by serial killers). I've written before about the difficulties for mystery writers of having to turn out book after book in a series that's lost its lustre for the poor scribe, so I'm pleased for O'Connell that she got to do some palate-cleansing, but I am enthralled by Mallory and her retinue (why, oh why, hasn't a movie been made yet? I think Uma Thurman would be perfect!) and I hope she'll be back soon.

I've also finished Penelope Lively's Family Album and hope to say a bit more about it soon. I'm just at the last pages of a book of e-mails exchanged between my neighbour, Carol Matthews, and her friend (who's also a colleague of mine) Liza Potvin, while Liza was in India with her children for a year in 2001 and Carol (and her husband Mike) stayed here on our little island caring for the dog Liza's children had rescued the week before they left for India. Dog Years is a small gem of a book that has me quickly turning the pages but also causes me to pause often in thought (not to mention guffawing out loud in the breakfast line-up on the ferry the other day!). Both women are thoughtful, erudite -- widely-read creative thinkers, good writers, funny and wise. Liza lived with and taught English to Tibetan monks and embraced all the adventures India had to offer, and Carol grappled with her admiration for, and envy of, Liza's audacious spirit and worked to reconcile herself to her own appreciation of stability -- as well as to appreciate, through Liza's eyes, the strength she provides for others to found their adventures on.

And I've just begun Toni Morrison's Mercy. Such a wealth of wonderful reading out there, no?

What I Read in 2009

2010-01-22T07:56:00.000-08:00

Near the end of last term, I posed the same question to each of my three sections of 1st-year University Composition. We'd been discussing Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You throughout the term, and they had just finished reading what he says about, well, reading. Given that he's so gung-ho about the cognitive workout provided by video-games, there's a danger he'll be mis-interpreted as dismissive of the benefits of reading. So he spends some time outlining those benefits, pointing out that he's laid out his own argument in book-form, and that sustained, complex arguments require length to develop sufficiently. He outlines the benefits of reading, mindful that while we may all be reading as much in a screen-based environment, we tend not to be spending so much time with full-length books (in fact, he also points out, we're spending less time at almost everything, including, surprisingly, television -- especially the late-teens, early-twenties generation).

So what was my question? I asked my students how many books they read in a year. But rather than wait there, I prompted them a bit by suggesting a number. I picked a fairly random number that seemed reasonable to me -- How many of you read, say, 20 books a year? I asked them. Their response was almost comic -- there was the effect akin to a collective gasp, a drawing back, a shocked "Duuuuuude!" Apparently, 20 books a year is an astronomical amount of reading!

Of course, as the shock waves subsided and I phrased the question more carefully, it turned out that there were a few students who do read well over 20 books annually, but there are many more who read 5, and that would be optimistic. In each of my three classes were several who read one or less (discounting, obviously, their required coursework reading), and the average was probably between 5 and 10.

We had quite a productive discussion about the reasons for this -- many of them find it tough to choose books successfully, and given the investment required -- time searching for and buying the book, cost of the book (most of these students only use the library for assignments and then prefer on-line where possible) -- if the choice is a dud, there's a long-lasting deterrent effect. I was really gratified that one student asked if I'd mind providing a list of recommended books for them and others chimed in to agree they'd like that. I sent out a list by e-mail as classes ended, and was even more gratified to get e-mails thanking me for the suggestions and telling me of books they'd liked. As the song says, "The kids are alright!"

Of course, during the course of my questioning about numbers, a student asked me how many books I read. I had to answer, honestly, that I couldn't think of a year in my life, no matter what was going on, that I hadn't read at least fifty books. Shock and awe. Truly. And yet I know this number is quite typical among my reading friends. I asked my oldest daughter the following week how many books she thought she'd read in a year and she replied, casually, "Oh, probably about fifty," and added that several of her friends would have a similar number.

I was a bit nervous, then, to tot up my reading record for 2009. Would I find out that I'd widely overestimated my reading habits? In fact, I was pretty close -- 53 (would have been 54 if I'd included my re-reading of Johnson's Everything Bad, but I decided to leave it out). You'll note that there is a considerable number of comfort reading -- mysteries being one of the largest categories here. I'm not making any claims, though, about being any kind of intellectual. What I clearly am is a reader. . .

I'm curious to know: where do you fit in the numbers game? estimated annual reading? And what do you notice in the young folks around you? Would they like a bit of help from experienced readers in finding books they'll want to spend time with?

1.Dana Thomas' How Luxury Lost Its Lustre
2. Elizabeth George's Careless in Red
3. Edeet Ravel's Ten Thousand Lovers
4. Bill Gaston's Sointula
5. Rebecca Godfrey's The Torn Skirt
6. Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
7. Lawrence Hill's Some Great Thing
8. Timothy Taylor's Stanley Park
9. Michael Connelly's The Brass Verdict
10. Richard Wagamese's Ragged Company
11. Stephen Henighan's The Streets of Winter
12. Dionne Brand's What We All Long For
13. Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog
14. Kate Jacob's Comfort Food
15. Peter Robinson's Friend of the Devil
16. Mark Doty's The Dog Years
17. Kathleen Finn's The Sharper the Knife, the Harder You Cry
18. Julia Kristeva's The Powers of Horror
19. Adele Wiseman's Crackpot
20. Jonathan Kellerman's Bones
21. Randall Maggs' Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems
22. Harlan Coben's Hold Tight
23. Jeffrey Deaver's The Broken Window
24. Carol Windley's Breathing Under Water
25. Lee Child's Nothing to Lose
26. Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies
27. Fred Vargas' Un Lieu Incertain
28. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Knitting Rules
29. Michael Redhill's Consolation
30. Peter Robinson's All the Colours of Darkness
31. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield
32. Don Domanski's Poetry and the Sacred
33. Lee Child's The Enemy
34. Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger
35. Sandra Gilbert: Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve
36. Carlos Luis Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind

37. Miriam Toews' The Flying Troutmans
38. Abha Dawesar's That Summer in Paris
39. Susan Hill's The Vows of Silence

40. Minette Walters' The Chameleon's Shadow

41. Kathy Reichs' Devil Bones

42. W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants
43. Colm Toíbín's Brooklyn
44. Jeffrey Deaver's The Bodies Left Behind
45. George Pelecanos' The Night Gardener
46. Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta
47. Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero
48. Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault
49. Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma
50. Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce
51. Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence
52. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
53. Patricia Cornwell's The Scarpetta Factor

Finishing the Year: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Patricia Cornwell's The Scarpetta Factor

2010-01-17T13:39:00.001-08:00

Oh dear! Once again, I am woefully behind in recording my reading. At the moment, I'm reading Penelope Lively's The Family Album, having finished Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood as my first 2010 book. But I still haven't posted my Books Read in 2009 because there are still two outstanding for me to discuss.

As you might expect then, the discussion will be very limited.
First, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall was a delightful surprise. I'm not sure what I expected from a historical fiction, and a Man Booker prize-winner at that, but I didn't quite expect such immediately engaging and compelling reading. While the opening pages offer a rather daunting "Cast of Characters" suggesting a potentially dry and/or demanding commitment to names and dates, they should rather be interpreted as suggestive of the Drama they generally introduce. This is not dry history. What I was relieved to see was that neither was it a tendentiously revisionist history. While I'm politically very appreciative of feminist retellings, I often find them heavy-handed and tiresome. Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, for example, embraced by many of my book group friends, left me more irritated than entranced. Not the case with Wolf Hall. Here the revision is not particularly aligned with an ideological or political position other than the one that says the personal, the immediate, and the domestic, matter. It's more a question of bringing the lens in closer and of bringing it to places that tend to remain unseen. Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's trusted counsellor, is himself such a lens and is simultaneously its object.

Pater is going to read this book soon, after he finishes Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. He's primarily interested in it for the same reasons that The Sopranos fascinated him -- the study of leadership and the politics of management -- and I think he'll find the time spent with this hefty novel (650 pages) well worth the effort. I will definitely be tracking down other titles by Ms. Mantel -- have you read this one or others?

And to tidy up the year, I'll note that I read The Scarpetta Factor, Patricia Cornwell's latest, a Christmas treat as it was still in hardcover. Not as wonderful a treat as last year's hardcover mystery post-Christmas reading, it nonetheless provided several contented hours in my leather armchair, enjoyment supplemented by the occasional Christmas chocolate or slice of fruitcake. I was pleased to note that Cornwell seems to be continuing the upward trend I noticed in the last Scarpetta, enough to keep me interested in these characters' development, although I'm still not sure she will ever be able to regain the conviction with which she sketched them in the first five or ten of this series. Still, there are some lovingly detailed meals here, a feature that both Pater and I used to really appreciate in some of the early Scarpetta.

So there you have the last of my year's reading. The next post, I hope, should offer up all my 2009 titles, and by the end of January I should finally have moved myself into 2010. Meanwhile, I've got a literature-referencing post over at Materfamilias Writes, in case you missed it, and I'm going to include here the poem that I've posted over there, a P.K. Page poem I'd never paid attention to before, and only spotted while going through collections of her work after her death on Thursday.

Knitter's Prayer
Unknit me --
all those blistering strange small intricate stitches --
shell stitch, moss stitch, pearl and all too plain;
unknit me to the very first row of ribbing,
let only the original simple knot remain.

Then let us start again.

Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault

2010-01-14T07:27:00.000-08:00

If I hadn’t read Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault immediately after reading Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, would I have been so struck by what seem such strong stylistic similarities between the two writers? Perhaps not. Certainly, before feeling as if I could defend such an assertion, I would need to go back and reread Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces and perhaps Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter to see how tenable the claim is to their work overall. But what I see both sharing is a richly meditative lyricism shaped into long, gently declarative and descriptive sentences, diction and rhythm combining to colour the intimacy with a certain melancholy. Both, I would say though, avoid the indulgence and narcissism of real melancholy by their omniscient narrators’ ever-so-slight detachment, by an intelligence which is always making connections that hold emotion manageably at bay while nonetheless sketching its engulfing potential. The narrators of both share a fascinating (and I mean that almost literally) ability/tendency to bring disparate, almost-arcane events and information together and synthesize these to powerful effect, creating new narratives, new histories that argue “what matters." As one of the characters learns in The Winter Vault, "No two facts are too far apart to be put together."

I wrote the above paragraph a month ago and then haven't managed to write more about Fugitive Pieces. But let me now offer you an example of an intricately realized detail in this novel that I could easily imagine in Ondaatje's Divisadero. Jean, the female protagonist, is getting to know her mother-in-law for whom she feels an immediate affection. The older woman, Marina, tells of working, when quite young, for an old woman, Annie Moorcock, who needed help sorting through her immense private library. Over months, they worked together, cataloguing the books, slipping into them the neatly addressed slips of folded paper notes Annie had prepared, messages to Annie's daughters, son, and grandchildren. "We compiled her list for divesting each book," Marina tells the protagonist," planning the gifts and the accompanying notes "to provide a moment of solace or guidance or respite for the one who would open it some winter evening many years hence. 'Though I hope my rosy-cheeked Thea' -- who was only six at the time -- 'might never need John Donne, there is something about her, a little shadow, that tells me she might feel the want of these words some day.'"

An accumulation of fascinating, nearly-arcane details marks Marina's recollection of Annie's "astonishing collection of movable books for children." These are the details that pile up convincingly in an Ondaatje text as well -- here, Michaels has Marina recall a number of specific texts that I admit to Googling and thus seeing entire histories unfold. In the novel itself, the history of pop-up books is alluded to and some specific examples provided -- Vojtech Kubasta's Sleeping Beauty and Snow White "where the eyes of dogs roll around in their heads . . . and melancholic dwarves are suddenly restored to happiness by the agency of a tab, and where long, empty tables, are, in an instant, magically laden with food , a particularly welcome device in those years [wartime and post-war] of cravings and deprivations" (97).

Overall, this novel is suffused with sadness -- the title refers to the place where bodies are kept until winter releases its hold on the ground and burials can proceed; the terrain the characters traverse is marked by violence, whether military or environmental -- and yet there is such tender, tender love, in numerous forms. Numerous characters remember love and friendship, both that which they experienced firsthand and that which they observed or heard of. And centrally, of course, Avery, loving Jean, respects her need to move away from their love after the stillbirth of their baby. The sad beauty of her relationship with the wounded street artist, Lucan, the stories-within-stories he offers, and Avery's ability to recognize, even through his pain, that this relationship is restoring Jean to herself -- it's a sad beauty that resonates, an emotional landscape that's weighty enough to match the geographic landscapes destroyed by the damning and flooding of the St. Laurence and the Nile.

I have so many post-it notes marking beautiful or interesting or perceptive or arresting passages in this novel, but time eludes me -- this working for a living really gets in the way! This is a book you really must read -- one that you will want to read and reread. When you do, I'd love to hear what you think. Meanwhile, please be patient with my ever-so-limited review. I'll leave you with a haunting quotation.
Avery [an engineer working on the project to conserve/move the sacred temples at Abu Simbel prior to the damning of the Nile River] "spoke of the despair of space that the built world had created; waste space too narrow for anything but litter, dark walkways from carparks to the street; the endless, dead space of underground garages; the corridors between skyscrapers; the space surrounding industrial rubbish bins and ventilator shafts . . . the space we have imprisoned between what we have built, like seeds of futility, small pockets on the earth where no one is meant to be alive, a pause, en emptiness" (134-5).

The Enchantress of Florence

2010-01-02T16:43:00.000-08:00

17 or 18 years ago, in an undergraduate course in Commonwealth Literature (otherwise known as post-colonial lit.), I first read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. I'll admit to finding it a hard slog, at first, densely descriptive introducing politics and histories beyond my ken, but besides having to read it as a course requirement, I was soon captivated by the central character, the organizing premise, and by Rushdie's style, brilliantly crafted sentences and precisely evocative diction -- a style that managed, despite its brilliance, never to distract from the forward momentum of the story itself.

I've since re-read that novel several times and can no longer see what caused me any difficulty in entering the story that first time -- now I only see the vigor of the prose and the humour and power of the tale. I've read most of his other work since then -- a graduate course I took during my MA back in '94 guided me through everything he'd written 'til that point and up until a few years ago I'd tried to keep up as he added to his biblio. I'll admit that Rushdie's work is a stretch for me, something I probably read more for an intellectual/analytical challenge than for a simpler pleasure of recognition, of identifying with a character. I often begin his work with a sense of reading something I should read, a sense of getting to work, albeit pleasurable work -- a very different sense than sitting down with a new mystery, for example.

Interesting, as I write that last bit, to realize that this may be why so many people, who hear that I'm reading a demanding novel like one of Rushdie's, will make comments about my being braver or brighter or somehow more worthy than they are -- many readers want their reading to bring them more straightforward, more immediately and easily accessible rewards and pleasures. If you'll peruse my posts over the last few months or longer, you'll notice that my reading includes many of these quicker rewards, mysteries being among my favourite escapes.

Interesting, also, to realize that my reading self has those two voices: the one that says "Why are you reading this when it's so much more work for less immediate fun than these others?" and the one that says "But this kind of reading work is fun too, and rewarding in a more sustaining way." These two voices often continue to bicker a bit even as I'm working through a more challenging novel, such that I noticed, over the holiday that I was making deals with myself -- finish the Rushdie first and then I could read Wolf Hall. Then I slipped in a mystery novel, but with the proviso that I would be picking up Atwood's Year of the Flood next. Funny, this division into worthy and guilty pleasures, when I really only have to account to myself. My friend Mardel at Dooney's World alluded to a similar system of appraisal in a recent post -- different novels as examples but a similar yardstick applied.

Ahem. . . I seem to have followed a diverging path some ways along. Time to find my way back to naming, at least, the novel I came here to discuss: Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence. Since my preamble risks frightening readers away from this book, I should quickly state that there are wonderful stories within its covers, exotic lushly-painted landscapes and vibrant city scenes that brought to mind the Mughal paintings I was lucky enough to see at the British Museum this past summer. As in most Rushdie works, there is a picaresque character or two and the borders between the possible and the impossible shimmer compellingly. What I was perhaps most struck by was how Rushdie has, throughout all his works, exercised my imagination, making me see how constrained it was by my formative education. As he did in The Moor's Last Sigh, he illuminates a history of traffic between India and Europe that transforms the Europe of my 1960s school texts. I read compulsively, if not prodigiously, as a child and teen, but the books I was exposed to (and, really, during those formative years, books were the main window to any world beyond my circumscribed one in small-city daughters-of-the-empire West Coast Canada) did not show me a Europe whose history was intermingled with India's; did not encourage me to imagine the religions and systems of government as equal, if different; certainly did not point to European and Indian cultural and social practices as equally blending the magical with the scientific.

Rushdie does this. He makes me redraw my mental map of the world. He puts singular characters into both cultural landscapes and the reader comprehends relativism anew. Complexity is a value in a Rushdie novel and characters grapple with moral dilemmas -- when they make the "wrong" choices, the reader nonetheless sees their humanity, acknowledges the horns of the dilemma, rather than rushing to condemn at the behest of an overbearing narrator. Rushdie's narrators are generally ironically distanced and distancing, wry rather than warm, but not without sympathy for the human condition. They generally insist on the reader paying attention, analyzing, making assessments and judgements, and, perhaps, this is what I find work -- while the tales are always page-turners (Enchantress has love stories, near-death adventures, dramatic escapes), the narrator wants a thinking and alert reader who is not permitted to disappear into the story.

I know. A better reviewer would offer more specific reference to the novel itself rather than general meanderings about reading and about Rushdie's work overall. Sorry. I will say that this novel bears traces of an impressive body of research bringing alive both Florence's history (especially with the Medicis) and that of the Mughal empire. It also continues Rushdie's thematic interest in the imagination and creativity -- story-telling, magic, art. If you've read it, chime in -- tell me what you thought. Or what other Rushdie novels you've read and what you thought of them. I have still to read Shalimar the Clown. Perhaps I'll put that on my 2010 reading list. Have you made one yet?

Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce

2009-12-27T10:28:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a post about Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault, but meanwhile, a quick catch-up (story of my blogging life, truly) toward wrapping up this year's reading.

First, Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce -- an enjoyable and fairly satisfying novel, a follow-up to his very successful Three-Day Road. I think that I might have enjoyed Black Spruce more if I hadn't already read the latter -- as it is, knowing that Boyden's writing his way to making these two part of a trilogy, I wonder if he will rely on the same literary parlour trick. Both Spruce and Road feature characters who seem to speak directly to the reader through their states of unconsciousness while other characters who share the novels' pages with them must wait to discover their stories. And in both novels, other characters' stories are being told in parallel to the ones spun out of the coma. It's a structure that keeps a reader turning the pages, certainly, but the structural similarity grated, for me, ever so slightly. Still, as I say, satisfying overall, especially in the rich detail of the landscape and eco-system, and in what appears to be a credible and intricate accounting of survival skills, a recognition of a knowledge and wisdom that has not been given much credit throughout our history.

Again, though, there's a parallel structure that I don't think works quite as well in this novel as in the earlier one, a structure whereby a First Nations protagonist goes out into the world beyond his/her community into an experience that invites comparison of two values systems and finds the non-native one sadly lacking. In the earlier novel that larger experience is the horrific one of a World War; in the latter, the pull to leave the community is exercised by the New York city lifestyle of modelling glamour, accompanied by drugs and violence. Perhaps it's my own naïveté but the WWI story seems to reflect reality more than the latter which raises my skepticism about how quickly a young woman arriving in the Big Apple from northern Canada would find financial success as a model.

And final quibble: the various plots are resolved into a very neat bundle of happiness on many levels. While satisfying enough for those who like their narrative arcs straightforward, the story again strains credulity. Not that there haven't been losses along the way, and not that the novel denies life's vicissitudes, especially those challenges facing First Nations people in the 21st century, just that there's a bit too much here that hints at the possibilities of Hollywood. That said, I liked the various characters enough to be pleased that their difficulties have been so well managed. And I'm curious to see what Boyden does with them or, more likely, their descendants in the third and final novel he plans for the trilogy. I'm also curious to know if any readers have yet picked up either of these first two books, and I'd be happy to know what you thought about them.

Tomorrow, I hope to post about Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, and I still have to say a few words about Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and (even fewer) about Patricia Cornwell's The Scarpetta Factor. Meanwhile, I'm also trying to put together a list of my year's reading which will let me see how close I am to the 50 books I think I must have finished in 2009. And I'm carefully casting about among the possibilities ranged along my desk: which book will be the best choice to see the year out with tomorrow and bring in the new year -- which is a sufficiently pivotal package of words to turn the corner on the decade. . . We shall see . . .

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma

2009-12-14T19:48:00.000-08:00

Once again, I'm trying to catch up to my writing so that I can get on with my reading. And I'm reminding myself that my only commitment is to record what I've read; no demand that I do a full review.

Too bad, though because Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals could easily take up a post or four. After all, one of my brightest students commented that it has changed her life, and I can easily see how. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to respond to the challenge this book presents me -- it's going to require some accommodation, considerable commitment, and definitely some inconvenience, but then, look where convenience has got us. . .

Pollan's rhetorical strategy is very clever. The heavy loading, the rather daunting statistics and the depressingly bad news about the costs of our corn-based foodway is at the front end of the book. While this means that I've met one or two readers who got bogged down in this section, never to move beyond, it also means that once you get through the bad news about corn, you start to see that it might be possible to make some meaningful changes.

The part of the book I found most appealing, most galvanizing and hopeful, the part that made me think about how we might raise a few chickens and bees in the backyard and how we really should finally plant up those raised beds we filled last year and what about those fruit trees we've been talking about . . . this was the section on the grass-based farm, Polyface Farms. The brilliance of good old-fashioned common sense. The ingeniously simple methods for getting an abundant yield from the land while enriching it at the same time make me hope that we could save the planet after all. Seriously -- there is that kind of evangelistic optimism and it's tempered (even better) with the pragmatic admission that if we want this solution we need to pay for it -- Once again, good-bye to some of the conveniences we've become addicted to and hello to higher-priced food. But at least the costs will be up front rather than hidden only to surface later as environmental damage.

In the last section of the book, Pollan forages and hunts to put together a meal, confronting his meat-eating directly by shooting and butchering a wild pig. The honest confrontation with the troubling ethics of meat-eating takes the reader through a consideration of the burgeoning library of work on animal rights, speciesism, and so on. Pollan doesn't flinch from looking at his own hungers clearly and he admits the possibility that he's looking for a philosophy that accommodates those hungers. In the end, his rationalization for meat-eating articulates my own position so clearly that I'm very grateful. This alone, for me, is worth the price of the book.

I'm still debating the possibility of having my 1st-year classes tackle this one next year, but I suspect I'd be doing too much nagging for it to be worthwhile. The young woman whose life the book has supposedly changed wants me to go for it, but she admits that her peers are not as avid readers as she is. Instead, she suggests, I might consider his other book, In Defense of Food. Have you read either? How would you compare them?

And I'll leave you with a couple of quotations. This brief one struck me as particularly true: "It's axiomatic that the more weary you feel the more kindly you look on fossil fuel." I register the truth of this every time I get off the boat at the end of the work day and have to pedal my bike a mere kilometre (especially if it's raining).

And here's a longer one that seems important to me:
For most of us today hunting and gathering and growing our own food is by and large a form of play. That's not to say there aren't still subcultures of people, especially in rural places, who hunt some portion of the protein in their diet, feed themselves out of their gardens, and even earn an income foraging for wild delicacies such as morels or ramps or abalone. But the exorbitant price these wild tastes bring in the market-place is only proof that very few of us can be serious foragers anymore.
So though a hunter-gatherer food chain still exists here and there to one degree or another, it seems to me its chief value for us at this point is not so much economic or practical as it is didactic. Like other important forms of play, it promises to teach us something about who we are beneath the crust of our civilized, practical, grown-up lives. Foraging for wild plants and animals is, after all, the way the human species has fed itself for 99 percent of its time on earth; this is precisely the food chain natural selection designed us for. Ten thousand years as agriculturists has selected for a small handful of new traits suited to our new existence . . . but for the most part we still, somewhat awkwardly, occupy the bodies of foragers and look out at the world through the hunter's eye.
This is what I'm learning or remembering when I pick blackberries each summer . . .

Scarpetta and Divisadero -- an odd couple!

2009-11-14T18:22:00.001-08:00

We've had at least three days of Wind Warning here over the last week -- blustery rain-filled days just made for staying inside and reading. I took advantage of a break between marking to read Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta, of which I will only say that Ms. Cornwell has somewhat redeemed herself here -- her last few in this series have been very uneven, but there's more of Kay Scarpetta's kindness emerging here and some of Marino's humanity peeking through again. There's a character sketch that held my attention, and a reasonably interesting plot, but mainly I note an engagement and rhythm in the writing that has been missing. I haven't been able to develop an interest in Cornwell's other seris, so I'm glad to see these characters resuscitated for now.

The reading I've really savoured lately, though, is Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero. For those who want a straightforward plot, a story with a clear beginning and end, this narrative holds only disappointment, but if you're a reader who enjoys teasing out connections yourself, you'll find the novel satisfying. I think the following passage most clearly suggests the book's structure.

The primary narrator, who "came to France, in the thirty-fourth year of my life" speaks of her arrival there, of being met by a friend and then driving together "through the darkening outskirts" and talking through the night as they travel south, eating from a picnic hamper and drinking red wine as they drive. Along the way, they stop to view an old church belfry being restored. "Built in the thirteenth century, the belfry had been constructed like a coil or a screw. It had one of those unexpected, helicoidal shapes -- the surface like a helix -- so that as it curved up it reflected every compass point of the landscape." -- and the narrator's friend tells her that during the recent restoration there had been a fight in which a man was almost killed. They return to the car and drive the rest of their way.

As her description continues,
All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It's like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle's form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms, and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell. (136)

On the next page, remembering her sister, trying to imagine her sister's present life and her long-ago lover's future, she observes, "I am a person who discovers archival subtexts in history and art, where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story." I would argue that her story could equally be seen to spiral outward into a handful of strangers. Whichever, the traumatic injuries and triangles of passionate love and friendship, the odd coming-together of disparate strangers for intensely intimate periods, echo through decades, cohering but just barely. Memory. Trauma. Story-telling. Love. Friendship. Creative Work. Trademark Ondaatje themes in a book I'll happily read again and again -- the coloured shards that coalesce momentarily in his kaleidoscope.

7,000 words . . . and then some

2009-11-01T15:01:00.000-08:00

that title, you'll see, refers to the 7 pictures, presumably worth 1000 words each . . .

So it's three weeks or so since I last wrote here. Thanksgiving weekend, I burrowed my way through the Jeffery Deaver mystery The Bodies Left Behind, while I wasn't serving turkey, washing dishes, making pumpkin pie, or marking papers. Satisfying if not especially memorable, lots of tension and all the plot twists we expect from the author. No Lincoln Rhyme, but a very resourceful female character I quite liked.And sometime in October I also read George Pelecanos' The Night Gardener. Again, satisfying if not especially memorable. Pelecanos wrote and produced for The Wire, and I suppose I picked this book up hoping for an extension of that experience. Not a fair way to approach a new writer and it probably contributed to my ho-hum response -- I was looking for more of the series' density and complexity, and this book didn't give me that. I'd definitely read something else by him, however, but I'd probably wait to pay paperback rather than trade paperback format price.

Meanwhile, you might remember these books, from this post. I'm still waiting to read the Martha Grimes novels.And to read these, recent arrivals from Chapters.

I have been reading which can make me a somewhat tiresome companion for Pater, whom I try to convince of everything that is terribly wrong with this world, in this case a frighteningly distorted foodway.
and I've been reading Ondaatje's beautiful novel -- when I think of Ondaatje, I think of a certain haunting tone, beautifully bruised, circling the past from various perspectives, bringing to bear a mesmerizing wealth of apparently arcane data that turns out, surprisingly, to be precisely relevant. This time that data comprises gambling, the history and geography of California, French post-war gypsy lore, 13th-century architecture, just to begin. It's one of those novels in the middle of which one pauses to contemplate the next reading. Actually, I'm thinking I have to schedule time to read Ondaatje's oeuvre over a relatively compact period to let some of his bigger themes coalesce more clearly for me.

Meanwhile, though, I'm mostly reading these -- a set of summary/synthesis papers from my first-year students. About 80 papers at 750-1000 words, all to be marked, if humanly possible, within a week. Next week they hand in their proposals and annotated bibliographies for their final papers, and, again, I'll be aiming at a turnaround time of a week. But then that's the last marking I'll do until the research papers come in, three weeks away. So perhaps there'll be a little reading catch-up time. . .

What about you? Reading anything interesting?

Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn

2009-10-12T16:12:00.001-07:00

It was purely coincidence that the novel I read directly after I read Sebald's The Emigrants should be Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn, but the two invite some worthwhile comparison. Although the reasons for the diaspora of the Jews from Europe should never be minimized by comparison with widespread economic diaspora such as that from Ireland, Tóibín's novel does explore the sad terrain of emigration, however its title might suggest the draw of the new land. And while its narrative structure seems much simpler, more straightforward than Sebald's memoir-imitating work, it echoes some of the earlier work's techniques -- primarily, the focus on what I will call "the small," as well as in the layering of details to create an intimate effect that is, at the same time, surprisingly distancing. We get, for example, many details about the other boarders at Mrs. Kehoe's, the house that serves at em/immigrant Eilis' home in New York, and many details about the food she has there, the way her room is furnished, the store she works at, but we never feel especially invested in her life there.

In trying to think why this should be so, I have to speculate that while these quotidian domestic details build to grant us an intimate portrait of Eilis' life in Brooklyn, they also recall the details offered in the opening pages of her home in Ireland, her impatience with, yet loyalty to, her girlfriends from childhood, her admiration of her older sister, Rose, her wish that her brothers could come home from England where they've gone to earn their living, and her frustation with the stifling limits of her very small community. Wrenched away from this home by a loving conspiracy that sees her sent to try her fortune in a new land, unbearably homesick but determined to repay her family's kind sacrifice, Eilis will now always be divided. As she gradually builds a new life, doing her best in her retail position while taking courses at night toward eventual promotion, she has had to integrate some kind of compromise at her core. Some feelings have to be put away for others to flourish, and learning to put feelings away so thoroughly has consequences. Eilis learns to separate here and there, then and now, and when, after her sister Rose dies suddenly, she makes the dreadful Atlantic crossing again, the reality of her newfound happiness in America is subject to an odd metaphysics such that . . .

Well, I can't tell you that, can I?!

And what I am telling you suggests a rise and fall of plot which is certainly in the novel and which certainly does keep the reader turning pages, but there's something Tóibín does that mutes the drama. Small elements of apparent sub-plots--upsets in the boarding house, for example--get as many pages as supposedly important elements of the novel's romance. The courtship Eilis enjoys in Brooklyn is described alongside her progress at work, and her pursuit of law texts to help her better understand the college course she's taking is balanced by her visits to church and her work feeding and entertaining the displaced men at the church's social evenings. All these threads weave an image of Eilis as an independent, strong, thoughtful, moral, hard-working, and rather ambitious young woman -- teasing us, really, to expect, even to want, a Horatio Alger story for women. Not what we get!

To return, before I'm done, to my opening comparison, I also find something comparable in the tone of both novels, although The Emigrants is suffused with something more tragic than melancholy. But there's a gentle quietness in both; both employ loveliness to observe and to think, honestly, rigorously. Both deserve a second reading, on my part, and I recommend them for a first on yours. Let me know what you think once you've read either. . .

a little light reading? NoT!

2009-09-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

I hope to get to a very brief review, soon, of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, a wonderfully slow-and-careful examination of em/immigration that compares in some interesting ways with my last book, Sebald's The Emigrants. Have any of you read the Toibin? the Sebald?

A neighbour commented the other day that she'd found her way to my site, had seen the photo on the right of me at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and wondered if I'd gone there, as she once did, because it was such an important site in another book by Sebald, Austerlitz. In fact, I hadn't, and haven't yet read Austerlitz, but I will, and before long too, I hope.

Otherwise, around here, most of my time is caught up with prepping and marking for my 3 sections of English 115, a basic Writing for University course with a reading list of non-fiction (I'm once again using Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, hoping to squeeze one more term out of the prep I did for teaching with this text). But once again this year, I'm making time, one Friday afternoon a month, to attend a Literary Theory discussion group -- this year we're reading Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community. We met this past Friday to try to make some sense together of the opening few pages -- trying to come up with a workable notion of "whatever" and "singularity" and "particularity." I haven't read many, if any, of the texts which form the conversation Agamben is joining, nor have I read anything else he's written, so I am very much in the student position. I try to trust, as I ask them to, to process, simply putting the words past my eyes, then mouthing them, swivelling back over particularly difficult sentences, just accepting that I don't yet have a framework for understanding, but that it will begin to assemble itself if I'm patient enough. Sure enough, as I listened to those of my colleagues who are more versed in this particular conversation tease out the difficulties, the implications, the sense, I occasionally felt comfortable enough to express a tentative response. Sometimes I could articulate the difficulty I was having with a sentence -- which, I think, is a positive starting place. Difficulty can be productive, right?
I even made a connection with something I'd read in Zizek's Enjoy Your Symptom many years ago, and I had some thoughts about Limbo, drawn from my Catholic upbringing, that I think were useful in wondering what Agamben's recourse to theology was about.

I can't help but think of something I read many years ago in Nancy Mairs (was it in Remembering the Bone House?, I'm not sure . . . ). Speaking of having successfully defended her dissertation, she rejoiced that she never again had to "get" Lacan or Derrida or whomever, that now she was free to read them for whatever she was able to get from their writing. On a sunny Friday afternoon, with a beautiful scene of mountains and sea laid out before us, together with a few colleagues, students, members of the community, I have the chance to think-- ethically, rigorously, playfully, and productively -- about Agamben's words, trying to move as close as possible to what he means, but without anyone grading my understanding. At one point, I couldn't help but interrupt the play to say to my 8 or 9 conspirators, "Isn't this fun? Isn't this a great thing to be doing! I'm so glad I made time for this!"

In other book-ish news, I loved this post at Jane Brocket's blog wherein she contemplates how to arrange her books, what system might govern their organization. It's a dilemma I can easily relate to, and it's one that hasn't been dealt with 'round these parts. Maybe when I retire . . .

Sebald's Emigrants

2009-09-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

When I began this blog, it was primarily intended as a commitment to myself to take time to record and, hopefully, to reflect on my reading rather than simply to chomp through pages that I could soon only barely remember. But during the teaching year, this quickly results in an unhappy imposition -- reading, which is one of the ways I relax, now carries the obligation to write, and my free time is so limited these days . . . So once again, I'm behind with my recording and the books I have ready to read are piling up impatiently.

That preamble seems necessary today as context for how I can possibly review W.G. Sebald's very important The Emigrants (translated by Michael Hulse) as cursorily as I'm going to. Granted, there are so many places you can go to get a satisfactory account of this . . . novel? memoir? Nevertheless, I can't help but feel humbly apologetic as I record my few brief comments.

First, I'm struck by the title, struck at how the emphasis on emigration (a result of Germany/Europe's history, particularly during the Third Reich, but also throughout the 19th and 20th centuries) is so different from our experience in North America. Here we're much more likely to use the word "immigrant." Despite having read a fair bit around diasporic studies, I hadn't ever meditated on this difference, and this title's simple weight seemed to insist I do.

Having taught a course, last term, on the city in Canadian fiction, I was struck by a passage describing the narrator's response to a city he moved to in his youth, in 1952. He remembers finding in this city the "unmistakable signs of a new beginning" and thinking it "particularly auspicious that the rows of houses were interrupted here and there by patches of waste land on which stood ruined buildings, for ever since I had once visited Munich I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to the word city as the presence of heaps of rubble, fire-scorched walls, and the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air" (30). Think of a generation who make this link, "unambiguously": cities and war damage. Think, also, that this is not just history, but is the case in many of the world's cities today. Sobering, yet the linkage is made in the same tone of gentle, fact-recording melancholy that infuses the text.

Describing a photograph album he looks through in trying to retrace the life of his former schoolteacher, the narrator comments that since first looking at it he has, "returned to it time and again, because, looking at the pictures in it, it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them" (46). I've read widely on theories of the photograph -- Barthes, Sontag, Benjamin, Batchen, all the usual suspects -- and this comment adds something ineffable I want to hang onto.

The last narrative in the book is almost unbearably sad, but somehow not maudlin. The narrator's attempts to recover, for his last subject Max Ferber, the experiences of Max's mother, to follow her to the grave, so to speak, are marked by an infinitesimal attention to details, the details of materiality accumulating in layers as if to somehow balance the inexorable move to the nothingness of the graves -- yet the graves themselves are far from nothing. I know that hardly makes sense, but there is an insistence on details mattering, and on the matter of details, that sets a pace throughout the text. Perhaps this has something to do with the way Sebald's theory of memory so subverts that of Proust. In Proust, the madeleine moves one into the detailed richness of the past, and is part of a nostalgia for the time remembered. Here, memory defies the details -- they pile up, these specifics, but so too do the gaps. So many killed, so many moved away, so many separated, so many afraid to speak . . . In such a world, one would fear tasting the madeleine -- involuntary memories become something to guard against, rather than to invite . . .

So there it is, my inadequate response to Sebald's The Emigrants. Perhaps you've already read it and we could chat about it? If not, you truly need to -- I suspect it will be recognized as one of the, say 100, most important books of the last century. I'll definitely be re-reading it and will also be reading his other titles.

A Trio of Mysteries

2009-09-08T07:02:00.000-07:00

Now that classes have started, it's less and less likely that I'll ever get round to writing anything more than a mention of my most recent reading -- in the last few weeks of summer, I scarfed down some mysteries, just because I could!

What mysteries? Well, one of them you see in the photo above as part of the loot I found put out curbside by a fall-cleaning neighbour -- yippee! Besides the three books, I also scored the pyrex lasagna pan which will replace a 30-year old model I broke a few years ago. Both the Martha Grimes have been tucked away for future reading, but I couldn't wait to read Minette Walters' The Chameleon's Shadow, on my list for a while now. It was soooo satisfying -- her character development is always so nuanced with not-easily-likeable characters whose redeeming features nonetheless are gradually revealed.

Similarly, I was quickly caught up with the latest Simon Serrailler mystery by Susan Hill -- the relationship between Simon and his sister is enjoyable to watch, but both characters face some major emotional upheaval. The terrain of grief is tentatively explored here as it was in Elizabeth George's Careless in Red. Hill is also interesting for her willingness to introduce theology -- both the Anglicans and the atheists have room for their two cents here, as does a young lad caught up in a more fundamentalist version of Christianity.

After reading these two examples of very satisfying British mysteries, I found Kathy Reichs' latest-in-paperback, Devil Bones, competent but not particularly gripping. The main character seems much less complex to me than does Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta (at her best, at least) with her alcoholism-under-control struggle appearing a bit formulaic as does her on-again-off-again relationship with a Montreal detective. I wonder sometimes about the demands of publishers for another book in a bestselling series and what it must be like to keep these characters fresh and the plots satisfying. Walters is wise, perhaps, to have resisted writing the same characters over and over again. Much as I look forward to the character development that can happen over the broad canvas of a multi-novel series, I can understand why writers might want several years in between -- as George seems to take -- or why they might choose to focus on more peripheral characters in some books as is the successful approach of others (Connelly, Robinson, Kellerman).

I've also just read W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, which absolutely deserves its own post, however short that will be. Marvellous. Sad. Dream-like. More later . . .

Thoughts on Knitting Inefficiency

2009-09-07T17:33:00.000-07:00

I posted this over here, but also want it here as part of the record of my reading. Sorry for the duplication:

Last summer, I quoted from a BC Bookworld review of Shannon Stratton's essay "Getting Things Done: On Needlecraft and Free Time," published in Volume III of Craft Perception and Practice: A Canadian Discourse, edited by Paula Gustafson, Nisse Gustafson & Amy Gogarty. At that time I ordered the book, later received it, and then laid it on the coffee table from whence it has called me occasionally throughout the year. Finally last week I sat down and read the essay whose excerpts had so impressed me, and I was delighted to find how much relevance it has to my recent musings on my leisure activities.
Stratton places her discussion of knitting within the context of "slow activism" -- as she describes that term, "practices that counter fast-paced, turbo-capitalist culture with life practices that turn back the pace of living to a slow, methodical pace of enjoyment and sensory indulgence . . . privileg[ing] practice over product." To the better-known Slow Food and Slow City movements, she suggests we consider adding knitting, especially in its more public manifestations, as an activity that critiques and resists market forces. Stratton cites Michel de Certau's The Practice of Everyday Life which suggests that tactics arising in the domestic sphere provide opportunity for slow activism.
Perhaps it's merely self-serving of me to suggest that my own insistence on knitting, gardening, playing with my granddaughter, cooking for my family, and reading not-immediately-relevant texts are small gestures exercising agency against the current market rationalization of academe. Perhaps. As Stratton points out, it "is certainly too generous to claim all knitters are engaged in political activity directly through their handicraft." Whether or not the activity is subversive depends on its ability to "subvert hierarchy, specialization, and non-communication" and in "a capitalist culture, subverting that system requires the redirection of energy away from the (direct or indirect) production of capital. . . . public knitting. . . . demonstrates a redirection of energy, action and labour away from sanctioned activities--paid work, capitalist productivity or passive assent--and towards dissent." Similarly, by not only spending some of my time on non-sanctioned activities in a system that rewards only certain kinds of research and publication, but futher, by writing about this choice, worrying about it, and insisting that I'm" not giving up any more of myself to climb arbitrarily-assigned-or-chosen ladders, I like to think I share, to some small degree, the aims of slow activism.
Again, I say, possibly a self-serving rationalization. But serving my self, I suppose, is itself a subversive act. Reading Stratton, knitting, writing blog posts about my life beyond academe, all for myself, rather than reading the latest journal in my field or writing an article for publication. Stealing back bits of my life in a system that insists I "Publish or Perish."
Let me close with Stratton's words, some of which I quoted here last summer:
[Knitters] represent a broad group of people who demonstrate the value of their time and personal agency. Whether or not the popularity of hobby-craft provides widespread evidence of a general, conscious interest in slow-activism is debatable, but the surge of interest in needlecraft as a means to foster community and as a vehicle for political expression is notable.
Perhaps what makes knitting important is its stubbornness. It refuses to be pinned down. It is neither an economically efficient way to clothe people, nor are knitters overtly challenging oppression and stopping war with fuzzy scarves. But what it does undo, one stitch at a time, is the idea that efficiency is a cultural value. In the absence of being able or even remotely wanting, to return to archaic, pastoral time, knitting does reunite the body with the product of its labour and a sense of natural time. It forces the individual to slow down and savour each second in a stitch, watching something grow and evolve, and marking each minute. It makes tangible the actions of our hands in a way the keyboard for the average office worker, accountant, copywriter, lawyer or cashier will never do. As a form of symbolic agency, it points to a burgeoning desire for reconnection with the physical, a reconnection that provides an authentic, inalienable experience, despite being unable to completely transcend the market.
In a culture that expects us to be busy and productive, time is something that we are afraid to waste. Perhaps that is why public knitting has become a prevalent performance: on trains and in coffee shops, on park benches and in classrooms, alone and in groups, the exchange of ideas and patterns, advice and conversation both related--and unrelated--to the hat taking shape on the needles. Public knitting proclaims openly: 'If time has to be spent, why not be thrifty?" Why not increase the value of one's own time by marking and savouring it, changing the terms for and exchange value of our free time. Knitting may be one of the provisional solutions, a gesture for the here-and-now, which, while blatantly slow (or at least inefficient), savours time rather than spends it.