Pickle Me This

Moving Day!

2010-02-15T15:50:00.003-05:00

Hope you'll join us over at the new place: www.picklemethis.com. Please change your links accordingly.

New link

2010-02-15T14:56:00.002-05:00

For Canada Reads Independently, check out the new link here.

Books I found in various boxes along the sidewalk on my walk home from Kensington Market

2010-02-12T15:03:00.002-05:00

1) If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits by Erma Bombeck. 2) Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia. 3) Lost Girls by Andrew Pyper (personally autographed to boot, with many thanks, but I won't say to who). 4) hardcover of What is the What by Dave Eggers. 5) Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell

Why I love people...

2010-02-12T09:56:00.001-05:00

"The idea grew as Morrison considered ways to make the cake pans fly better..."

From the obituary of Walter Morrison, who invented the frisbee.

In three days...

2010-02-12T09:50:00.000-05:00

the new Pickle Me This will be unveiled!

Why I have business in the bedroom of Adam Giambrone

2010-02-11T21:20:00.009-05:00

I don't know if there are two things I like more than passing judgement and reading stories, and so I've been wholly absorbed by the perils of Adam Giambrone this week. I've long had my eye on the guy, if only to use his surname as verb in various contexts, which is always funny when I'm overtired, and so I've been paying attention since Monday, however much that's less than high-minded to admit.

I've been paying attention because I'm a follower of plot, of twists and turns, and wild leaps. Office couches, text messages, denials then tears at the press conference. The scintillating details, the text messages, and we're not supposed to care because it's his private life after all, but don't you care just for that reason? The kind of access to private lives that we usually have to read novels for, and perhaps it's why we read novels anyway. How can you turn away from it? I can't.

Of course, there are real people involved, real lives at stake. To which I posit that there aren't. Case in point, the picture above from The Toronto Star-- have you ever seen a more calculated chemistry? I could say I'm sorry for the wife, but I wouldn't really mean it. To pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. Giambrone himself has become a fiction, has probably long been one, but we know it now. If he were less lame, he'd be Jay Gatsby. And of course, there's a real Giambrone still deep down inside him, but that's not the guy upon whom I'm passing judgement.

The guy upon whom I'm passing judgement is an idiot. Not only does he think that women are disposable, but he dates the kind of woman who wouldn't hesitate to destroy his whole career in a heartbeat. The kind of woman who'd date him even though she thinks he lives with his parents, and he's 32. And-- though this population is larger than I'd initially suspected -- he dates the kind of woman who'd tolerate that haircut. He gets caught, and he lies about it. He someone who knows himself better than anyone else knows him and yet he sets himself up for this exact situation by pursuing public life (which, let's face it, most people don't do for really honorable reasons). Even the smartest guy would have trouble balancing his public face with a life that's a lie.

I'm not condemning Adam Giambrone for immorality, for that kind of thing is always a little bit subjective, but I think I'm allowed to call it as I see it-- he's an idiot.

I hate the word "peccadillo". Why do women never get to have those? A "peccadillo" trivializes all manner of sins, packs them up in a neat valise that rhymes with armadillo, and how convenient is that? And then someone will lecture me about casting first stones, but these guys get up to the kind of wrongdoing I'd never consider. I know I'm young, but I'm getting older every day, and I remain steadfast about this. And to suggest that I'm just naive then is an insult to men of integrity everywhere, and I've met an awful lot of these in my life. I just think we all deserve a lot better.

Can-Reads-Indies #3: Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

2010-02-10T21:46:00.007-05:00

I wasn't the only reader for whom the highlight of Canada Reads 2009 was Michel Tremblay's The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant, which was a book that we all should have read, that we were all better for having read, but I would never have picked it up otherwise. Sometimes the prospect of looking to the past for books we should have read is a bit like contemplating getting into Joyce Carol Oates-- where do we start, and how would we ever be able to stop?

So it's nice to get a bit of guidance, and I feel the very same about Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese, which I'd never even heard of until I encountered NCL obsessive Melanie Owen online. In its day (1925), Wild Geese was a bestseller, was even made into a film, and heralded a new direction in Canadian fiction (though I'm not sure who followed in that direction-- Sinclair Ross? Hugh MacLennan? See, with this early stuff, my knowledge is very sketchy. I read Ernest Buckler once. Anyway...)

Wild Geese takes place in a rural community in northern Manitoba. Schoolteacher Lind Archer arrives to board with the Gare family, and quickly realizes that something is amiss-- somehow Caleb Gare has got his wife and children stuck under his thumb, and they're terrified of defying him. He works them like animals on the farm, keeps them isolated from the community, wields his power with brute force, and he takes care to bully and blackmail his neighbours on the side. Caleb has met his match in daughter Judith, however, powerful in spirit and body (she reminded me so much of Jo March), who is desperate to get away from her tyrannical father and is inspired by Lind to finally do so.

"Powerful" is overused as an adjective to describe a book, and I wish I could coin a new way to describe exactly what Wild Geese does to its readers. The book was engrossing in way I've not very often experienced-- closest comparison is my Andrew Pyper nightmares. Usually I read at a distance from novels, keeping the literary world and my own sensibly divided, but parts of Wild Geese crept into my consciousness. I read the chapter where Lind comes home in the dark and keeps making out creepy shadows and shapes behind her and around her, and I read this in the middle of a sunny afternoon, but I was freaked out. Similar, the conclusion-- I absolutely couldn't take it anymore and had to skip to the final pages to prevent a heart attack.

I also had such strong feelings about Caleb's wife, Amelia Gare. Caleb had married her aware that she'd previously had a child out of wedlock, and he uses this knowledge to control her throughout their marriage. The control, however, comes from Amelia's fear that Caleb would tell her son of his background (which he had been blissfully unaware of, told he was well-born, by the priests who'd raised him). Amelia's feelings for this son are so strong that she is willing to sacrifice her other children for him, the spirited Judith in particular, and this absolutely enraged me as I read. Perhaps more than Caleb did himself.

Caleb Gare is a fascinating character, soft-spoken in the creepiest way possible. At first, I thought he was simplistic, his purposes far too blatent-- Ostenso has him rubbing his hands together whilst surveying his land, wondering, "what the occasion would be, if it came to that, which would finally force him to play his trump card, as he liked to call it... He firmly believed that knowledge of Amelia's shame would keep the children indefinitely to the land..."

But when I saw him interacting with members of the community with similar schemes and tricks, manipulating and blackmailing, this behaviour with his family began to seem very consistent. Caleb Gare is a completely unsympathetic character, and I am not sure this equals a lack of complexity in his moral make-up. We are tuned these days to see such characters as poorly drawn, but I'm not sure now. Ostenso has Caleb Gare making sense: everything he did was for his own gain-- he worked his family hard so that he wouldn't have to work as hard himself or pay anyone else to do so, he worked his neighbours to get his hands on their land and therefore expand his own power. He delighted in this power too, perhaps his only source of joy, save for his land, and there is a vital relationship between the two.

In addition to his sheer meanness, we are supposed to see Caleb Gare's connection to his land as part of the motivation for his behaviour, but this is a given, not wholly explored. Which I've found in a lot of books, actually. It's taken for granted that land can make a man do certain things, but I'm often left wondering exactly why. Ostenso does show that Gare (through using his family as slaves) is able to reap a bounty from the harsh northern lands in a way his neighbours are unable to do-- that his domination extends even to the crops he commands. But I would have liked to know more about why Caleb feels the way he does about his land. It could be, however, that we don't know how he feels the feels and thinks very little beyond his conniving. That Caleb is absolutely spiritually bankrupt, and this does seem to be the case.

Ostenso's treatment of the landscape itself is vivid, of the inhabitants, and elements of Norse mythology informing their lives lends to the spooky treatment. The depiction of the land is also remarkable for the way in which the delicate, lovely and elegant Lind Archer's contrast with it. Her presence as a foreign object in this strange brutal place is the catalyst for all that transpires, and also gives us a perspective on the Gares from without, which is most illuminating. Her relationship with Mark Jordan, another recently transplant (who is Amelia Gare's illeg. son! This is not a spoiler, however, as we're told from the outset) provides also provides necessary relief from the brutality of all other human relations.

In short, unlike much Canadian prairie fiction, Wild Geese didn't make me want to kill myself.

From about midway in, I was rapt by this book, but there is one big reason why it won't be top of my list of Canada Reads: Independently picks. Primarily, the way in which the prose of Wild Geese manages to sometimes reads like an undergraduate essay on Wild Geese. Such as when Lind Archer says, "That's what's wrong with the Gares. They all have a monstrously exaggerated conception of their duty to the land-- or rather to Caleb, who is nothing but a symbol of the land." There is something particularly ubsubtle about the book's structures, particularly when compared to the complexity of a book like Century.

Still though, it's a riveting read, pushes its language and imagery in challenging directions, is unafraid to shy away from uncomfortable or even horrifying situations, and tackles female sexuality in a beautiful way. (Yes-- Canadian fiction in which the woman gets to be the horse, for once.) If this book is underread, it should be no longer.

Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
2) Century by Ray Smith
3) Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

As long as it's not dangerous

2010-02-10T10:26:00.003-05:00

"The Cambridge History of English Literature was my constant companion, and it became infused with my cigarette smoke as I plodded through the pages. Almost all my women friends were smokers, some using cigarettes to affect a social ease and grace; others, more dependent upon them, becoming chain smokers. I myself was convinced that without a cigarette in my mouth I could neither study nor exercise any creativity. All unconscious of future revelations about nicotine, my mother would say to me, 'Why not-- as long as it's not dangerous.' And so I smoked my way through the Cambridge History of English Literature." --from Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern (which is wonderful)

Things India Knight likes

2010-02-09T20:16:00.005-05:00

Writer India Knight has long been included on a list of things I like, but today she has managed to drive me mad with ecstasy via her blog Things I like. Now with Search Button. In particular, her things to read tag, from which I found myself directed to Curious Pages, The Reading Weekend and Missed Connections. Pre-Miffy Bruna-- amazing. I now want a beautiful house in Brussels, a giant owl, and to be Tavi. Such a wonderful catalogue of marvelous things. Image from this post-- turns out Salinger's covers weren't always so enigmatic.

Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE 4

2010-02-08T09:28:00.006-05:00

I'm almost through Wild Geese, and though I've enjoyed it, it probably won't knock the other two I've read out of the top two spots. A review will be posted in a day or two. Julie Forrest posts her review of Hair Hat: "[W]hen it comes to Alice Munro-esque stories about ordinary people, I’m hard to impress. Hair Hat impresses". Buried in Print republishes an old Hair Hat review. Steven Beattie does too, though his is less complimentary (and I would suggest a reread and cessation of dirty tricks). WriterGuy on Moody Food: he was put off by the prose at times, but found the narrative compelling. My friend Bronwyn has reported that Century is her favourite book of the bunch. My husband Stuart liked Moody Food so much that he emailed Ray Robertson to tell him. In a recent conversation, writer Amy Jones reported she'd just started Ray Smith's Century and that she also was impressed. American Librarians' blog Librations is jealous of Canada Reads and the copies it has inspired (which is us and the National Post's). And I was fascinated by Charlotte Ashley's post which used more of her "uncontrolled bookselling research" to assess the New Canadian Library's rebranding: in two years, outside the context of university course lists, her bookstore has only ever sold two NCL titles and one of those was to Charlotte Ashley for our project's Wild Geese.

Furnishing a room

2010-02-07T23:07:00.005-05:00

Our house is currently in a state of upheaval as we begin the process of moving the baby into her own room. We've got a faint hope that it might help her sleep better, and after eight months of enjoying having her close, we want our room back. And no doubt she'll be joining us there most nights anyway (and yay for reluctant co-sleeping, which is much better than being awake).

Baby will be moving into the spare-room/ office/ library, however, so the books have had to migrate living-room-ward. Which at first I was sad about, that the books would be losing a room of their own, but now having them out in the world again, I realize that I've missed them. How little I visited our library, unless I had a reason to, and how nice the spines are just to stare at, and the journeys they could take me on from my seat here in the gliding chair.

And I realize that books have been missing from this room all along. It's so nice to be back among them. The aesthetic effect of their various colours and heights. How the walls were empty before, and the floor just too wide, and how the built-in shelf beside the fireplace was wasted before now. It's true, they do-- they furnish a room! And joyfully, because televisions don't, we're getting rid of ours, so just excuse the focal point in the photo in the meantime.

Reading in bed

2010-02-07T21:58:00.000-05:00

News and news

2010-02-04T21:52:00.003-05:00

My goodness, haven't things around here been anticlimactic since Family Literacy Week ended. You want to know the best thing about Family Literacy Week though? That it was totally made up. True story. Family Literacy DAY was the real deal, but I thought one day wasn't enough, so I dragged it out for another six, and then people started walking around thinking it was legitimate. At least two people that I know of! This is certainly not the first rumour I ever started, but it's probably one of the more productive ones. It was a very good week, and I am so grateful for everyone who contributed. And I am sorry if I misled you...

Since then, however, I've been busy with deadlines, and preparations, plus I've been exhausted thanks to this baby whose sleep habits are beyond appalling. Thanks to all of this (save the baby), however, we are on the cusp of some very exciting things. Amy Jones is coming over tomorrow afternoon for her interview (and I've baked scones for the occasion.) I'm starting Wild Geese tomorrow, and my Canada Reads Independently update will be posted this weekend. And sometime soon I'll be rolling out my gorgeous new website over at my own domain! I hope you'll all adjust your links accordingly, and follow me there. Stay tuned for the official announcement...

Of course, lately I've also been reading. Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings, and Canadian Notes and Queries. From the latter, I especially enjoyed Clark Blaise's story "In Her Prime", Seth on Canadian Cartoonist Doug Wright, Ray Robertson (of the Canada Reads Independently Moody Food) "In Anticipation". I've been reading Sylvia Plath's The Bed Book with illustrations by Quentin Blake, and The Tree of Life by Peter Sis on the recommendation of Genevieve Cote. I've been reading Annabel Lyon on writing and motherhood. Mark Sampson on email interviews. Steven Beattie's "The problem of sustained reading in a distracted society". Meli-Mello celebrated Family Literacy Week also last week, and this week she's talking about toys.

Embracing the Ego? A reevaluation

2010-02-02T15:06:00.002-05:00

I changed my mind, sort of. After thinking a lot about why we should read, and deciding (along with Fran Lebowitz and Diana Athill) that we should read in order to escape ourselves, I realize that reading is not so simple. That here I sit spouting nonsense about what reading is for from a position of enormous privilege (read: literacy, internet access, enough of my immediate needs met that I have time to sit here spouting nonsense) about what reading is for, but I'm missing most of the story.

It is annoying, I think, when people who spend most of their time gazing into mirrors anyway choose to see literature also as a reflective surface. This, of course, is what Fran Lebowitz called "a philistine idea... beyond vulgar." But I'm starting to realize that we're only talking about a fraction of the population when we generalize in this way. There are people with real problems (and I'm sorry quarter-life-crisis-ers, but I'm not talking about you!) for whom literature would be a most productive therapy, and also for whom this kind of personal engagement might be their gateway into books (which is splendid!). For anyone to devalue this kind of reading is incredibly patronizing, and stupid. (And perhaps to devalue any kind of reading is patronizing and stupid too).

I am learning more about the work done by Literature For Life, about their Book Circles whose participants have often never read an entire book before . The first book their groups read is The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah, selected for being plot-driven and for the way in which the story might relate to readers' lives. Confidence grows from just one book, and so does interest, so that someone who has only read one book before might go and pick up another. So that, yes, a reader is born, but also these readers can begin to address their own problems with the advantage of some distance, that they gain access to a new way of examining and understanding their own experience. Language becomes a tool for self-expression. Subsequent books read become more challenging, but all of them connect back to the readers' experience somehow, and I see now how much is right with that.

Perhaps what I find most fascinating about the Lit. for Life Book Circles (whose participants are pregnant and parenting teenage mothers) is that these communities of readers approach literature from a wholly different angle than what I'm used to. We all like to go on and on about the use-value of literature, which for most of us is theoretical, but these readers put those theories in motion. These girls whose lives are changed by the power of one book-- they are a testament to what literature can do. Those of us who take books for granted can certainly learn something from that.

Anyway, there will be more learning to come. I'm going to be doing some work with Literature for Life over the coming months, and I look forward to sharing those experiences here.

Foolscap is awkward to read in bed

2010-02-02T10:40:00.002-05:00

"'Will she expect a comfortable bed?' Rodney asked. 'Oughtn't we to break her into the world gradually?'
'I don't see what difference it makes,' I said.
'Wilmet, have you thought what books to put by her bed?' asked Sybil. 'You must make a careful choice.'
'I suppose some anthologies of poetry and good novels by female authors,' I said. 'Not devotional books, obviously.'
'We have just completed an interesting report on the Linoleum Industry,' said Rodney. 'I could let her have a cyclostyled copy-- the pages are bound together.'
'Foolscap is awkward to read in bed,' said Sybil. 'Arnold has just published a paper in one of the archeological journals-- that's a handy size for night reading and there are some excellent drawings of pottery fragments done by an invalid lady who lives in Dawlish.'"-- from A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym(!)

Meet the Smiths

2010-01-31T22:10:00.006-05:00

I've got a family of Smiths on my bookshelf. Probably you do too. Mine are diverse but an excellently harmonious bunch. There's Ali, of course, of The Accidental and Girl Meets Boy. And then Alison, of the poetry collection Six Mats and One Year. Next is Betty, who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Beside her is Ray, then Russell, and Zadie, who have brought to the library Century, Muriella Pent and White Teeth/On Beauty, respectively.

This is the largest clan in my library, save for the Mitfords who don't actually count because they're really sisters. And I'm not sure if this bunch is alike or unhappy in their own way, but I like how their jackets rub together anyway.

Raise high the roofbeam carpenters

2010-01-30T15:17:00.008-05:00

Phoebe Caulfield was Holden's nine-year old sister, plucky as a red-headed orphan, just lacking appropriate pigmentation and tragedy. Even Holden would affirm that, "if you don't think she's smart, you're mad."

Pheobe was a writer, composing the stories of "Hazel Weatherfield" in her multiple notebooks. As an actor, she was ecstatic to have the largest part in her class play, even if it involved playing Benedict Arnold. "Elephants knock[ed] her out." Phoebe Caulfield was a force to be reckoned with, pouring ink down the windbreaker of anyone who dare cross her path and she could recite Robbie Burns on command.

She was also a realist. While her brother Holden tried to deny his bleak reality, Phoebe made a point of thrusting the thing in his face. Not allowing him the luxury of his skewed perspective, sick of tirades about phoniness, she says bluntly, "You don't like anything." In contrast, Pheobe herself was able to make the best of her difficulties. Holden's drunken shattering of record he'd bought for her failed to hinder her enthusiasm for the gift: "'Gimme the pieces,' she said. 'I'm saving them.'"

A beacon in her brother's lonely existence, Phoebe's love makes clear Holden's real emotional capacity and the depth of his troubles. Upon learning that he'd been expelled from yet another school, hers is the first display of genuine, grounded concern anyone shows him. Her maturity outmatches Holden's, and his tender feelings towards her highlight his own vulnerability.

In Phoebe, Holden also sees the innocence he has lost, but elsewhere in Salinger's oeuvre is evidence that Phoebe Caulfield was wise rather than naive, and that her wisdom beyond her years ("Old Phoebe") might never have disappeared. I like to think that if Salinger had continued the saga of the Caulfield family, Phoebe would have grown up to be someone much like Boo Boo Glass.

Of course, the details of Salinger's salacious personal life widely reported him as something of a letch, and his stories contain their share of one-dimensional female characters. But he knew something about women, or perhaps something about sisters is more what I mean.

Boo-Boo appears in the background of Salinger's Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters. She also makes an appearance in "Down at the Dinghy" from Nine Stories, in which "[h]er general unprettiness aside," writes Salinger, "she was a stunning and final girl." Ever capable, Boo-Boo flew with the Woman's Air Force in World War Two, bravely tackled anti-Semitism in her marriage to a Jewish man, and mothered her young son with the same insightful sensitivity Phoebe provides to her brother Holden.

In a tortured world of Seymour and perfect days for bananafish, Boo-Boo stands on the side of justice, for all things bright and good, however much in vain. And I am insistent upon optimism, so for me, it is her spirit that pervades Salinger's best writing and makes me love it so. Her presence in Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters consists solely of a note left on the bathroom mirror of her brothers' New York apartment. "'Raise high the roofbeam carpenters... Please be happy happy happy. This is an order. I outrank everyone on the block."

(an earlier version of this piece appeared in the independent weekly on September 6 2001.)

Celebrating literacy in general, and those who promote it

2010-01-29T10:07:00.002-05:00

For obvious reasons, this is my favourite page in The Baby's Catalogue. Oh, children's books. They're as good as any book, but they've got pictures. And it has been a delight to celebrate them this week, to celebrate Family Literacy, and to find out that such a celebration is so contagious. That children's books are made to be shared.

Of course, we're preaching to the choir here. Anyone who'd be reading this blog in the first place (except for whatever curious person arrived searching for "sex with pickles") is probably well aware of the importance of family literacy. I bet we were all read to as children, that we read to any children we have, and that we even read to children we don't have.

And all of this, of course, is a luxury. Family Literacy Day is sponsored by ABC Canada, which promotes adult literacy through a wide variety of programs. We are fortunate that in Canada, illiteracy is rare, but less rare (and harder to acknowledge) are low literacy skills, which are experienced by 4 out of 10 Canadians. The implications of this are enormous, in particular at the family level, and at the workplace level, and through their programs, ABC Canada aims to provide adults access to the learning skills they require.

Another organization doing wonderful work for literacy is the Children's Book Bank in Toronto, which provides children in the Regent Park neighbourhood with free books and a terrific atmosphere in which to enjoy them. The space is absolutely beautiful, like the best children's bookstore you can imagine, and the books (albeit secondhand) are in good shape, excellently organized. It's a place that respects itself, and the kids sense that, and feel better about themselves for just being there, and their pleasure at choosing books of their own is absolutely palpable. They also often come accompanied by their parents, many of whom end of learning English literacy skills from the books their kids bring home from the Book Bank. The Children's Book Bank is a fantastic innovation, and I'd recommend it for anyone who is looking to get rid of good quality used children's books, or as a good recipient for a book drive.

A final organization in Toronto that I'm just starting to learn about is Literature for Life, which promotes reading to groups of pregnant or parenting teenage mothers, and publishes a magazine by these women and for them. It's an amazing idea, whereby not only do these women learn how reading enriches their lives, but they gain the skills to pass a love of reading on to their children.

***

Finally, I want to share my favourite Family Literacy Resources. Australian writer Mem Fox has an excellent website, including her instructions for reading aloud and her Ten read-aloud commandments (1. Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud.)

And more recently, I've fallen in love with Canadian author Sheree Fitch's website. Sheree Fitch is an inventor of words, and she's made up one called "thrival", which is as important as "survival", and is what literacy is necessary for. Read her excellent essay here. Her own list of literacy resources is here.

Family Literacy Recommendations from a Literary Mom: Carrie Snyder

2010-01-28T21:29:00.006-05:00

In between mothering her four children, writing fiction, a blog and a parenting column, and all the other things that people do, Carrie Snyder found a few spare moments to write this beautiful piece about reading with her children. Carrie Snyder is the author of Hair Hat (which is currently competing in Canada Reads: Independently). Her most recent publication was three stories in The New Quarterly 112).

My favourite picture book of all time is A Day with Nellie, by Marthe Jocelyn (the original version, not the board book, which cuts some of my favourite sections.) This book has been with our family since my eldest was a toddler. He and I read it so often that we had it memorized. Both of my daughters loved it, too, and my youngest is now 22 months and "Nellie!" is far and away the first book he goes looking for on our shelves.

The charm of this book is in its simplicity. A preschool-aged child goes about her day: from waking to getting dressed, greeting her friends (mostly stuffed animals), eating breakfast, and so on. She plays indoors in daddy's shoes. She plays teacher in the backyard--her students include the neighbours' cat. She makes mud, slips and falls, gets dirty, takes a bath. Each page subtly illustrates a new concept: textures on the breakfast page, emotions on the naptime page, numbers on the picnic lunch page, et cetera.

But what elevates this book to greatness is Jocelyn's original fabric artwork. It looks touchable. Each page is beautiful and colourful, and we could look at it for hours (and we have, and we do!). The pictures are full of narrative all on their own, which makes them perfect for the pre-reader. There is so much to point to and talk about in each picture. Nellie pouring water on her head. Nellie watching the big kids come home from school. (Particularly poignant for me, now, as I remember reading it with my eldest and watching out the window as the big kids walked home from school--and now he is one of those big kids walking home from school). I've never yet gotten bored of the book. And that's high praise indeed.

I also read chapter books out loud before bedtime. The older ones are able to read to themselves, now, but they still love cuddling in on the couch and being read to. I would recommend heading into Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series. The first book, with its terrifying panther stories, is not necessarily the best place to begin (Little House in the Big Woods); that book also opens with very detailed descriptions of a pioneer family preparing and storing their food for winter, including how to build a smokehouse. (In fact, there's a great deal of lost knowledge contained in these books, from how to make a door with no nails, to how to rig up a lamp from a button and some axle grease. I'm keeping them for further reference, because you never know).

The second book in the series is the best known and perhaps also the best place to start: Little House on the Prairie. The television series based on the books bears little relationship to them: there is no superficiality. This is the real thing. The writing is quite astonishing. It is straightforward, classic, and true. It amazes me every time I read it (I was about seven when my mother first read the series to us, and I've re-read it many times since). There is little to no analysis in her writing, no self-consciousness, just pure storytelling. That leaves room for questions, for interpretation, and it means that the experience of reading the books as an adult changes them: my perspective as a parent added new flavours and nuances to the story. Best of all, all of my children were drawn into her writing, even my eldest who is a boy. And it lead to many imaginary games of Laura and Mary and baby Carrie.

Reading to my children: I looked forward to it before becoming a parent, and it's one of my favourite activities as a parent. I rarely get down and play on the floor with the kids, but they're pretty much guaranteed to get my attention with a book (I'm picky, though, and they know it: Mama doesn't read Dora ... actually, there's a pretty long list of books Mama won't read; that's what Daddy is for; and literacy).

There are so many wonderful books out there, with whole worlds waiting to be discovered. When I read to my children, I get to travel into those imaginary worlds, too. We get to go there together.

Family Literacy Field Trip: To Mabel's Fables

2010-01-28T20:58:00.003-05:00

So it turns out there is a Mabel, and she is a ginger cat. And the place she lives is pure magic, with a bright pink door, and two floors of BOOKS! Upstairs there is a gigantic teddy bear and a princess chair, and downstairs are the books for little kids and babies, upstairs for the bigger ones, and there are even books for adults on the landing.

But perhaps the very best thing about Mabel's Fables, the wonderful children's bookstore in Toronto, is that Rebecca Rosenblum lives around the corner. So that we got to go to her house for lunch first, and she accompanied us on our first Mabel's Fables visit. (I've never been before because the store is not on the subway, and I have this impression that anywhere not on the subway is really far away. Turns out that it isn't.)

Harriet was pleased to be liberated from the snowsuit and seemed impressed by her surroundings. I was pleased to see so many of our favourite books and others I'd been coveting, and stuff I'd never heard of by the same authors, and a space that was such a celebration of childhood and children's books. We ended up getting our friend Geneviève Côté's new book Me and You, which is a gorgeous celebration of friendship, individuality and art. We also got The Baby's Catalogue board book by the Ahlbergs, because we love Peepo and Each Peach Pear Plum, and even though this isn't a story book, it's full of cool stuff for us to look at together and talk about, and there's a breastfeeding baby inside (and you really can't go wrong with breastfeeding in picture book art, oh no!).

Our final purchase was Sandra Boynton's Bath Time!, because Harriet loves bath books and we like Barnyard Bath very much already. All in all, it was a very successful shop, and you can see here that Harriet very much enjoyed herself. These photos were taken during a span of about thirty seconds, as I tried to get her to smile for the camera but she proceeded to just pluck books off the shelf and chew on them. I wrenched them away from her eventually-- I'm assuming Mabel's Fables operates on a "you chew it, you buy it" policy, understandably. "Come on," I said, pulling her away from the nummy bookish delights. "You've got plenty of books to chew on at home. " But I must admit to admiring her appetite!

Family Literacy Recommendations from a Literary Dad: George Murray

2010-01-27T17:55:00.010-05:00

George Murray’s new book Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms will be published this fall by ECW Press. His other books of poetry include The Rush to Here (Nightwood, 2007), and The Hunter (McClelland & Stewart, 2003). He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland is the editor of Bookninja.com.

He shared his best bets for books to read together as a family:

My boys are five years apart, so it's hard to find books they'll enjoy together. The older one (seven) loves fantasy stories (like those by Kate DiCamillo) and is a precocious reader, while the younger (almost two) loves rhythmic rhyming books and bright pictures of animals (Hands, Hands, Fingers, Thumb, etc). So in between those two, I'd recommend Scaredy Squirrel books by Melanie Watt. The baby likes the pictures and pace and the boy likes the jokes and nuttiness (pun intended). Watt's a fabulous writer and a delightful illustrator and I often find myself chuckling as well... At least the first 100 times or so...

Our Family Literacy Day Baby Literary Salon

2010-01-27T17:44:00.005-05:00

It's Family Literacy Day! To celebrate, we invited our favourite Mom and Baby friends to share some stories, and to sing some songs (as the theme of this year's Family Literacy Day is "Sing For Literacy"). The event was a resounding success, and not just because of the snacks provided. No, it was a success because the guests brought even more snacks, including delicious fudge, green tea shortbread and jello treats for the little ones. (Forgive me for fixating on edibles, but for breastfeeding women, this is very very important).

Margaret and her mom Carolyn brought family favourite Tumble Bumble, as well as Margaret's beloved book of the moment Boo Boo. Finn in particular enjoyed Tumble Bumble. His mom Sara came with a copy of one of her childhood favourites, the absolutely magical The Bed Book by Sylvia Plath. Who knew Sylvia Plath wrote a children's book? No, not I. But I liked the elephant bed the very best.

Leo's mom Alex brought along a copy of hardcore alphabet book Awake to Nap by Nikki McClure. The illustrations were beautiful, and "I is for inside" was the best one. Later, Alex read Margaret Atwood's first kids' book Up in a Tree, which was pretty delightful and might even impress the most avid Atwood-hater. Also remarkable was the character that looked like a baby Margaret Atwood, and was absolutely adorable.

I read Ten Little Fingers Ten Little Toes, as well as Harriet's fave All About Me: A Baby's Guide to Babies. And then, because of the singsong theme, we also read/sang Old MacDonald, Five Little Ducks and The Wheels on the Bus. The babies played quite happily together, and took turns playing with the best toy out of all the toys we own: a tin pie plate. Harriet fell down from sitting and now has her first bruise. Leo and Finn bonded over a set of plastic rings. Margaret showed us her mobility prowess. We listened to Elizabeth Mitchell, and drank tea, and ate delicious things, and in celebrating family literacy, we spent a splendid afternoon.

Guh-gung

2010-01-26T23:05:00.003-05:00

I have this terrible habit of finding certain things terribly funny in theory, but not considering the long-term consequences of following through on my actions. For example, when I was #143 on the holds list for Patrick Swayze's posthumous autobiography Time of My Life, it was a funny story. But that hold was going to come in sometime, and that sometime is today, and now, with all the books in my life to be read, I've got to add Time of My Life to the teetering stack. A book with such lines as, "It felt like an electric charge suddenly coursed through my body. I looked into Lisa's eyes, and it was as if I was seeing her for the first time. We moved together as one, and I felt a stirring deep in my soul." And then a few pages on, he woos her to the sounds of Bread's "Baby I'm-a Want You." When they finally have sex on page 46, "it was like a dam had broken and the flood came rushing in."

This is either going to be the best book ever, or the worst.

Expert Recommendations for Family Literacy Week: Author/Illustrator Geneviève Côté

2010-01-26T15:04:00.008-05:00

Geneviève Côté has illustrated books for children of all ages, working with a variety of talented authors, like Janet Wong, Gilles Tibo or Susin Nielsen-Fernlund. Her own picture books include Me and You (Kids Can Press 2009), What Elephant? (Kids Can Press 2006) and With you always, Little Monday (Harcourt 2007). Her editorial art has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, l’Actualite and other publications.  She has won several honours, including the Elisabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Award in 2005 and the General Governor’s Award for Illustration in 2007. She lives in Montreal, Quebec.

And she was kind enough to share recommendations for the following books:

1) The True Story of The Three Little Pigs! as told to Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith: Outrageous, funny to read aloud and to play-act

2) Penny Lee and her TV by Glenn Mc Coy: Funny enough to wean small kids from TV (at least for a while)

3) The Wishing of Biddy Malone by Joy Cowley, illustrated by Christopher Denise: A tale, rather classic in form, about learning the power of working for what you wish for (thanks to something akin to placebo magic), and therefore being actually happy when you do get what you wish for.

4) The Tree of Life by Peter Sis: A picture book biography of Darwin -who would have thought he would still be a controversial figure 125 years after his death?

5) Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans: Out of nostalgia, mostly, but hey, it worked for me, for my sisters, my niece, and her daughter!

6) Bonjour Madame la Mort by Pascal Teulade, illustrated by Jean-Charles Sarrazin: This one in French. Hotly recommended most of all for any kid mourning a grandparent, but probably many other kids as well. Death here wears a flannelette nightdress, plays cards with the old lady she's come to claim, and takes silly photographs. Cartoon-like illustrations fit the text - a perfect mixture of tender, sensitive and surprisingly funny. I'd be real interested to know what you think about this one, Kerry! I heard it caused a bit of a stir when it was published, but personally I find it very appropriate.

Author Interviews @ Pickle Me This: Patricia Storms (for Family Literacy Week!)

2010-01-25T20:32:00.010-05:00

I first encountered Patricia Storms through her blog Booklust, and I think I've only ever met her two or three times in person, but I feel as though I know her much better than two or three times would allow. She is a generous spirit who radiates such warmth and energy, she has a delightful sense of humour, and she's a talented illustrator (of books including The 13 Ghosts of Halloween, Edward and the Eureka Lucky Wish Company, and Good Granny Bad Granny) and now author/ illustrator (of her latest book The Pirate and the Penguin). I love her books, I think she's fabulous, and I'm so pleased that she's answered some of my questions about writing and illustrating picture books, and also about family literacy.

I: Funny, we call them “picture books”, but then the pictures themselves are so often regarded as secondary (that an illustrator might not receive the same credit as an author of the text, for example). What role do you think illustrations play in children’s books? And why do the illustrations get less respect?

PS: In my Utopian world, the writer and the artist would get equal-billing, since they are both so dependent on each other. Ideally, the artist (I would hope) would be more than just a hired hand doing grunt work and translating literal images onto the page from the words provided. In a good picture book, I see the illustrator as someone who takes the story to another level of delight, imagination and entertainment. The illustrator should be just as much of a story-teller as the author. But they should not be competing with each other. It makes me think of a couple in love, walking in the forest holding hands, each pointing to the different things they both see on their travels. Each person has a unique perspective, but they are still connected, and are grounded in the same environment (the story).

Perhaps 'get less respect' is a tad dramatic. (I know, I know I'm the one who used this phrase in a previous email conversation. Heaven knows, I can be a tad dramatic at times). That being said, I have on occasion encountered a certain lack of appreciation for what illustrators (and might I add, especially cartoonists) do for picture books. It can be small annoying things like every time I illustrate a book I have to send a special request to Amazon so that they will add my name at the top of the book entry, following the author. Or really shocking situations like when Madonna 'wrote' all those kid's books, and the illustrators didn't have their names on the cover of the book at all (of course that is a unique and hopefully never-to-be-repeated situation by any other author). Usually it just seems to me that in terms of promotion, the writer's name gets more coverage than that of the illustrator. And yet it is called a 'picture' book. But I have to be fair, here. It's the writer who comes up with the idea for the story, and yes, the words are usually crafted long before any pictures appear. As much as I would like equal billing, I must concede that the writer is steering the ship (am I using too much cheesy imagery here? This is the wannabe hack writer coming out in me). So perhaps it is assumed that since the writer is the one who has thought of the original idea and the story, then the illustrator will never be as 'creative' as the author, and is simply following the author's lead. I would rather not see the relationship of author and illustrator in this manner. And I am starting to ramble. Next question.

I: Over the course of your career, what have you learned about the art of illustrating children’s books that would have surprised you in the beginning?

PS: I had always assumed that when an illustrator was hired to draw the pictures for a picture book manuscript, that the story was completely polished and finished at this point. But this is not always the case, and the artist may go off in some interesting directions, while editors are still actually doing last-minute edits on the story. Sometimes art can change at the last minute because of this.

I was also very surprised to find out how much control the Marketing Department (in some publishing houses) has in terms of which artist is chosen for specific projects. But I do have to remind myself that as much as I may just want to create silly, adorable pictures for kids, it is, in the end, a commercial product, and well, publishers do appreciate making money (as do I).

One aspect of this industry which really surprised me was when I was told that some big box bookstores even have editorial control over potential manuscripts and art. They are consulted by publishers and can say yea nor nay on a project, if they think it will or will not sell. They can also recommend creative changes on book covers. Frightening.

I: You’ve recently made the leap from illustrator to author too, of your most recent book The Pirate and the Penguin. Would this be a natural extension for any illustrator? Was it a natural extension for you, and why?

PS: I don't think making the leap from illustrator to author is for every artist. Not every illustrator has a gift of the written word. Some just have no interest in doing it at all (and really, why would one willingly enter into another career that has the potential to do more serious damage to one's already delicate ego?)

Becoming a picture book author was a natural extension for me, though. I have always loved words just as much as art, and I think this has a lot to do with my enduring love of cartoons and comics. In fact, that's how I learned to read through cartoons, comic strips and comic books, in conjunction with picture books, of course. As a kid I wrote and drew countless comic strips, and as I got older, I enjoyed writing stories and poems and my own one-panel gag cartoons. Any chance I could get to not write a standard dull essay in high school English, and instead do something creative, I took it. (For example, in my grade 13 Canadian English course, I opted to write a musical based on Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz).

As much as I enjoy illustrating the words of others, I do have my own ideas that I would love to see come alive in a book. I sometimes have to pinch myself when I look at The Pirate and the Penguin, I can't believe I've managed to get this far with my dreams. I hope I may be allowed to write and illustrate more stories in the future. But I gotta be truthful for me, it's very hard, writing picture book stories. The writing is much harder to do than the art. So really, just ignore everything I was kvetching about in question one. What the hell do I know?

I: What were your favourite books as a child? What contemporary children’s books would you recommend now? And what about graphic novels?

PS: Favourite picture books as a child...hmmmmm....Dr. Suess, of course, and Harry The Dirty Dog, Curious George, Madeleine, and I adored the Nutshell Library books by Maurice Sendak. Oh, and everything by Ezra Jack Keats. I was also a big fan of Harriet The Spy, and devoured all the Freddy The Pig books. And there's a big place in my heart for Charlotte's Web, one of the most beautiful children's books ever written, I would say. I always associate the Paddington The Bear books with warmth, comfort and security. Roald Dahl, of course. And I read all the work of L.M. Montgomery many, many times when I was young. As much as I adore the Anne books, A Tangled Web and The Blue Castle are my favourites.

Books I would recommend now? I really enjoy picture books by Oliver Jeffers and Mo Willems, and Sara O'Leary's When You Were Small and Where You Came From are so lovely (and illustrated by award-winning artist Julie Morstad!). If you haven't read Carin Berger's The Little Yellow Leaf, then you must! The art and the story are so astoundingly beautiful, I nearly wept with envy when I read it. And I've been reading Rabbit & Squirrel: A Tale of War & Peas over and over again lately (written by Kara LaReau, art by Scott Magoon); I laugh every time. I'm not a fan of fantasy fiction (I've yet to crack open any Harry Potter); I tend to be drawn to more 'whimsical' books, things like The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall, The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry, and The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. Kate DiCamillo's The Tale of Despereaux and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane are definite must-reads.

I'd love to one day create a graphic novel, but I must confess, I need to read more of them I don't feel I know enough about them. I'm a big fan of the work of Posy Simmonds, but her graphic novels aren't really for kids. Heh.

I: What do you think are the best things that families can do to promote a love of reading?

PS: The best thing a family could do to promote a love of reading? Blow up the damn TV. Seriously, (and I know I'm going to sound like a pompous grumpy old lady) if you want to encourage your kids to read, then you've got to set a good example, and read in front of them, not just to them. Have plenty of books in the house. That's the kind of environment I grew up in. Books were everywhere. I always saw my mother reading at home (it helps of course, that she's a librarian). If parents do not place great value on books and reading, why should the kids? A child should have a library card at a very early age, and going to the library should be a family ritual, as should reading stories at home, and discussing books and authors. Video games, television and computer time should be limited. I know that's an old-fashioned attitude, but too bad. It takes discipline, care and effort, end of story.

I: And on a somewhat unrelated note, but because I always want to know, what are you reading right now?

PS: Right now I am struggling with A.S.Byatt's The Children's Book, of all things. It's a long novel, and there are so many characters, and the writing is at times a tad dull and plodding, as if I am learning a history lesson. But there are lovely and rich moments, too, and I am still very intrigued and curious, and I have been assured that it will get better, so I shall soldier on. I just finished Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, and I can't stop thinking about it. I found her discussions on writing and reading so clear and concise, and so very helpful. I highly recommend it. I also recently read Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and I can't stop thinking about that book either, but not in a good way. I'm so mad that I wasted time on such overrated pretentious pap, but part of me is also thankful for reading this mess, if for no other reason than to remind myself of what never, ever, ever to do when writing anything. And in the past few months, I have fallen in love with Philip Roth (his work, of course, not the man). I've also been enjoying a collection of old Punch cartoons, and I've always got a New Yorker issue on the go-- it's a must in my house!

Our Favourite Family Reads

2010-01-25T08:00:00.004-05:00

We're starting simple in our celebration of Family Literacy Day/Week. To kick it off, I bring you a list of our favourite books to read to our eight month-old daughter.

Though first, I'll have you know that she now has two favourite books of her own and they are Rainbow Fun and All About Me: A Baby's Guide to Babies. Sometimes she will only not cry if she is holding/eating/being read Rainbow Fun, and no other book will do. She laughs hysterically throughout A Baby's Guide to Babies. This absolutely kills me. Text is not foremost in either of these books though, so the books we like best to read to her are a little different. And they are as follows:

1) Peepo by Janet & Allan Ahlberg: I love the rhythm, I love the rhymes. I love bedroom mirror with its rainbow rim, and a mother with a baby just like him. And you could find something new hidden in the illustrations with every reread.

2) Where is the Green Sheep by Mem Fox: We've started banging on a drum during story time, and this book has the best beat poet vibe. I have given this book to every child I know. My favourite is the moon sheep and the star sheep, and Stuart loves the near and far sheep. It never gets old, or at least it hasn't yet.

3) I Kissed the Baby by Mary Murphy: It's short with strong drawings in black and white, which made it ideal for when Harriet was smaller. It's question/answer structure makes it fun to read in dialogue. I love to say, "Of course, I kissed the baby. My own amazing baby." Indeed.

4) Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers: Harriet always laughs at the "Every day, everywhere, babies make noise" page. We kind of like the book because it has same-sex families, and we get to feel liberal and superior to those who gave it one-star ratings on amazon for that same reason. It also has a wonderful sing-song rhythm to it, adorable pictures, and an ending that makes me cry, crediting baby-people for "for trying so hard, for travelling so far, for being so wonderful, just as they are."

5) Ten Little Fingers Ten Little Toes by Mem Fox: Though I fear that this book might alienate readers with six toes on one foot, or with three thumbs, anyone with twenty digits will find this Mem Fox/Helen Oxenbury collaboration completely adorable. Page breaks in all the right places allow for optimum emphasis, narrative underlines that babies are delicious the world over, and babies learn about fingers, toes, and then receive three little kisses on their noses.

5) The Paperbag Princess by Robert Munsch: We have an abridged, indestructable board book version that is perfect for story time. Hoping our daughter takes home the message of one enterprising princess, and how she "didn't get married after all."

6) Night Cars by Teddy Jam: We love this story of an urban baby who wouldn't go to sleep, and is the reason I can often be found warning garbagemen to "be careful near that dream." Stuart particularly likes that Dad is the primary parent in this one, and that it ends with Baby asleep in his arms, albeit in the morning.

7) Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown: This is the mommy version of Night Cars at our house. I love reading it, making the "shhh" sounds (though I am often frightened by the eerie lights on in the dollhouse). And the cow jumping over the moon picture, because that was Harriet's first nursery rhyme.

8) The Lady with the Alligator Purse by Nadine Bernard Westcott: A hilarious story of three-tiered healthcare, with pizza as the best medicine. It's weird and joyful, and we read it like a song.

9) Kisses Kisses Baby-O by Sheree Fitch: I love the "Shhh, hush time. Snuggle huggle..." page the best, which features a beautiful picture of a baby breastfeeding (though unlike my baby, that one doesn't appear to be biting). Fitch manipulates language in her signature style, and the result is sheer delight. Part lullaby, part poem, and all love song.

10) On the Day You Were Born by Debra Frasier: Because of the illustrations with strong contrast and bright colours, because everything in it is true, and because it puts Baby at the centre of the universe. My favourite is the promise from gravity "that you would never float away."

So those are mine. What are yours, for babies or kids that are bigger?

Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE 3

2010-01-24T22:19:00.003-05:00

So here at Pickle Me This, Hair Hat just nudges Century out of the lead, mainly because Century isn't a book that cares about racing.

Julie Forrest reviews Katrina Onstad's How Happy To Be, and finds that "while biting and satirical, it's also tender and sweet, and reads like a coming of age story (34 is the new 24, I suppose)."

Writer Guy reads Hair Hat: "What a wonderful work this is: whimsical, sad, profound, and it captures the not-so-ordinariness of many seemingly ordinary lives."

Charlotte Ashley is reading Canada Reads AND Canada Reads independently, and pairs Nikolski against Wild Geese. Her assessment of the latter: "Contemporary participants in “Canadian realism” should read Ostenso carefully. If you’re going to make your reader hurt, you ought to give them some kind of release, otherwise what you’ve created is nothing more than beautifully written suffering porn... Ostenso does not punish us in this manner, but instead offers us a very well-considered and beautifully executed climax and conclusion. I can’t recommend this one enough."

And Wild Geese's champion Melanie Owen chats with Julie Wilson about her own Canada Reads challenge, dropping a mention of our humble imitation:"Sometimes, I feel really nervous when people ask for book recommendations. I mean, how do I know the one thing that makes me love a book isn't going to be the exact reason someone else hates it: like my love for classic, the more depressing the better, Canadian literature? When Kerry Clare asked me to recommend a book for Canada Reads Independently, it took me forever to think of something that I felt I could defend because the book you recommend says a lot about you. And, of course, I want to be liked just as much as the book I am recommending."

Well, Wild Geese is up next for me, so we shall see, Ms. Melanie Owen! I actully suspect that I really am going to love all five of these books, which is not terrible of course, but brings with it certain complications. I think that Century and How Happy to Be are going to end up treated most harshly in the judging, due to their placements at the extreme ends of the accessibility scale. Hair Hat is indeed in the running for my favourite, but then it's not all up to me, is it?

Can-Reads-Indies #2: Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder

2010-01-24T22:01:00.001-05:00

Well-executed books of linked short stories such as Century or Hair Hat have the rare power of making the novel look mere. Mere as in only linear, one-dimensional, and narrowly focussed, which is nothing like life or like the world. Whereas the shape of a book of linked stories is like the world, or rather, like the world if it had edges-- polyhedronal. Multitudinous sides, perspectives, but only glimpses of these. And so perhaps the novel has the advantage of providing the reader with more satisfaction in its illusion of wholeness, but for the reader who is seeking something a little more true, linked short stories are as close as it gets in fiction.

The stories in Carrie Snyder's Hair Hat are linked by a man whose hair is cut into the shape of a hat. A creepy cut to ponder, and even someone standing immediately before Hair Hat Man declares the style only "plausible". Of course, I had to google it, and this guy seems to be the most famous Hair Hat Man on the internet. Carrie Snyder's Hair Hat Man, however, looks a little different. In fact, he looks a little different to everyone who encounters him, older or younger, shabby or less so, weary or sinister, friend or foe.

"Yellow Cherries" is told from the perspective of a young girl staying with her Aunt, Uncle and cousins while her mother is having a baby. A later story, "Comfort", is the Aunt's perspective of the same events, but the events subtly different, calling into question notions of memory, narrative authority and underlines the gulf between what adults and children understand about one another. "Tumbleweed" and "Third Dog" are both stories of motherhood, the first about a mother taking her children on a disasterous beach outing on the day her husband has (perhaps?) left them, and the second a grandmother taking her grandson for a walk one summer day, pondering her daughter's unhappiness as she relieves her of her maternal duties for a small time. A most vivid moment is the daughter upon their return home, (the narrative is in second person, spoken from granddaughter to grandson): "Give me the baby!" said your mother, running to the back door to greet us. "

It doesn't take much: the urgent nature of her exclaimation, that she is running, that it's the backdoor. Snyder uses her materials with such deftness that she almost makes prose look easy, and indeed Hair Hat is a breezy read. But each word, every sentence is weighted, to be considered. Such a wide range of characters, but Snyder is deliberate in showing the different ways that each one speaks.

The narrator of "Harrassment", for example, who speaks like he's spouting off, and then we realize he's erupting. He's one of several characters who are loners, for whom the Hair Hat Man is a point of connection. Queenie, the obese doughnut shop employee in "Queenie, My Heart" who has just lost her father is another, and on her second encounter with the man, on the subway, the beginnings of a romance are sparked. In subsequent stories, we view this odd pairing from afar, but there is something heartening about their relationship. We've only been watching Hair Hat Man from the periphery, observing him as an oddity, but we're beginning to connect with him too, and he's somebody we care about.

As the book progresses, we move back and forth in time to get closer to the Hair Hat Man's story. When we finally encounter him directly, he is so familiar that the hair is plausible, and perhaps the least remarkable thing about him. But still, this is only an extended glimpse. This story "Missing" is from the perspective of his long-lost daughter's own daughter now grown, given up for adoption and now returned to find him, Hair Hat Man, her grandfather. "I should have brought along a camera. I should have asked a passerby to take a photograph of the three of us. Next time, I thought. But next time is so rare. It's a hummingbird in the rose bushes: blink and its possibility is gone."

Not so much for a book, however, for like Century, Hair Hat is a book that begs for rereading. Unlike Century, it is also a book that I would have found my way to, even if not for Patricia Storms' recommendation. Carrie Snyder's book with its distinctive cover had been turning up before me increasinly often of late-- at the library, at the Eden Mills Festival in September at The New Quarterly booth where I entered a draw to win it but didn't win. Carrie Snyder had stories published in the most recent TNQ as well, and I was excited to read more of her work once I'd finished reading them.

All right, this ranking thing is terrible when all of the books in question are wonderful. Like choosing between your children, it is, when none of them have colic and they sleep for twelve hours every night. I am going to have to rank Hair Hat over Century, however, because for being less ambitious in its vision, Hair Hat realizes that vision with more success. Or perhaps that I'll have to read Century thirty-five more times before I get my head around it finally, or that no matter how many times I read it, I never will. For all my derision of readers "seeking the illusion of wholeness", perhaps I want a bit of it myself, and Hair Hat offers. But this doesn't mean, I promise, that I love Century any less.

Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder
2) Century by Ray Smith

Kettle from a headlight

2010-01-24T16:53:00.002-05:00

Today I loved Cut/Paste: Creative Reuse in Canadian Design, an exhibit on at the Royal Ontario Museum until the end of the month. Featuring a gorgeous quilt made out of ugly one size-fits-all t-shirts, a toaster fashioned illicitly in penitentiaries out of a cigarette tin, guitar string and a shingle, a lamp made out of a chair, jewelry made out of skateboard decks, and a coffee table made from a toboggon. But my favourite was the K-42 Electric (tea!) Kettle manufactured by GE in the 1940s. Materials were scarce due to wartime, so the kettle was made from a recycled car headlight, but it would set a standard for kettle design throughout the 1950s, and become iconic in kettlish realms. (Image taken from The Canadian Design Resource).

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

2010-01-23T11:41:00.005-05:00

In Alan Bradley's novel The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, our heroine, eleven year-old Flavia de Luce opines that, "Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week." So that it occurs to me that heaven must also be a narrator like Flavia de Luce, who is perfectly precocious in all the right places and suitably limited in others. The latter point being particularly important, because Flavia is the first fictional detective I've ever encountered who solved the crimes slower than I did. Not that she's stupid, oh no, not Our Lady of the Periodic Table of Elements, but hers is a refreshing perspective when her youth shows through.

And yes, in this, she's much like Harriet the Spy. Or rather, Flavia is a tribute to Harriet, though I wonder how consciously? At first glance, the connections could be coincidental. Flavia is sleuthy, and keeps a notebook, and that she's charged with the spirit of her late Mother, who was called Harriet. This last point I doubt Alan Bradley means for us to interpret as Flavia being of Harriet (M. Welch) born, mostly because I don't think male readers identify with Harriet that strongly. (And this, by the way, I'd love to be wrong about).

But I encounter the following paragraph: "I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did." And I can't help but think that Bradley was channeling his inner-Fitzhugh after all.

Flavia lives Buckshaw, a grand home outside the English village of Bishop's Lacey. Her eccentric father scarcely pays her attention, her older sisters torture her mercilessly, the entire household lives under a shroud of sadness from her mother's death, but Flavia contents herself mixing poisonous concoctions in her chemistry lab at the top of the house. When a dead bird lands on the doorstep, however, with a postage stamp stuck through its beak, and then then a body turns up in the cucumber bed in the garden, Flavia is aware that life is about to get interesting for the very first time. And when her father is arrested with murder, she becomes all the more determined to solve the crime herself and clear his name.

Bradley writes Flavia tongue-in-cheek, his novel a send-up of detective fiction, but he manages to create a rather intriguing mystery all the same. Involving philately, libraries, English reticence, postmistresses-- a whole host of infinitely nerdy pleasures. A whimsical book, Bradley writes gorgeous turns of phrase to match-- my favourite was when Flavia steps into her dead mother's long-undisturbed bedroom and feels as though she were "an umbrella remembering what it feels like to pop open in the rain."

The Sweetness in the Bottom of the Pie is a book built on a the back of other books, on the back of a whole literary tradition, and its charm lies in its references to a world already much beloved. The connections it draws and its own twisty plot make for a deliciously readable delight.

An admission and some understanding

2010-01-21T22:52:00.006-05:00

I have an admission to make, one that will win me no friends. And while usually I do not knock the books I hate here, this book is so well-loved, I think it can take it. I HATE The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. I got this book free out of a cereal box in 2003 (true story!), and have received it as a gift no less than three times since then. I read it once and found it so boring, I found it offensive, not credible as literature. And I know this will rankle many a reader now, because people love Precious Ramotswe and Alexander McCall Smith, but for the life of me, I could never undertand why.

Until now. I get it now! I still hate The Number One Ladies Detective Agency, but I think my love of Flavia de Luce and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is analogous to how other readers must feel about Precious and Number One... And not just because they're both books with colonial flavour, written by old white men in unlikely voices (whether they be those of Botswanan lady detectives, or eleven year-old English girls). I think neither book is meant to ring especially true, authenticity is not the object, that these books get by on their charm, and charming is most definitely in the eye of the beholder.

Stay tuned for a review of Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie from the perspective of this beholder. I loved that book indeed.

Escape the ego

2010-01-21T21:14:00.003-05:00

I was surprised to be impressed by Elizabeth Gilbert in her recent Chatelaine interview. I am one of those irritating people who has never read Eat Pray Love but holds strong opinions about it anyway, so the interview was the first time I'd ever been exposed to Gilbert directly (as opposed to via one of her ardent devotees). She seemed terrifically level-headed about the impact of her book upon her fans, noting that readers who'd decided to follow in her eating, praying, loving footsteps were probably insane. She had smart things to say about women and their expectations for relationships, for happiness. But what I noted most of all was the following: “I don’t think women today read for escape; they read for clues."

I loved that. Because it's exactly the way I read, I think, to break it down and enable me to see the world in miniature, as manageable. Which, however conversely, is to be able to look at the big picture and regard it all at once, perhaps for the very first time. Fiction is a study in the hypothetical, a test-run for the actual. An experiment. What if the world was this? And we can watch the wheels turn and this bit of sample life run its course to discover. And I don't mean that literature is smaller than life, no. Literature is life, but it's just life you can hold in your hand, stick in your backpack, and I'm reassured by that, because the world is messy and sprawling, but if you take it down to the level of story, I am capable of some kind of grasp. Of beginning to understand what this world is, how to be in it. Certainly, I read for clues.

But then Elizabeth Gilbert went and ruined the whole thing, continuing, "The criticism of memoirs is that people read them to be voyeurs. But a lot of people read them for help and answers and perspective.” So she wasn't actually talking about fiction, which takes the wind of out of my sails, and now she's relegated reading in general to the self-help rack. Which is boring, troubling, limiting. So there ends my love affair with Elizabeth Gilbert, perhaps because I'm skeptical of memoirs and the kind of truth any reader might hope to find there.

And then I came across this video of Fran Lebowitz on Jane Austen (who Lebowitz says is popular for all the wrong reasons). Lebowitz says, “To lose yourself in a book is the desire of the bookworm, to be taken. And that’s my desire... [which] may come from childhood. The discovery of the world, which I discovered in a library-- I lived in a little town and the library was the world. This is the opposite way that people are taught to read now. People are consistently told, 'What can you learn about your own life from the novel?' 'What lessons will this teach you?' 'How can you use this?' This is a philistine idea, this is beyond vulgar, and I think this is it is an awful away to approach anything… A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door.”

Which was something I could get behind. I was finished with Elizabeth Gilbert, and was about to jump on the Fran Lebowitz reading-wagon, when it occured to me, "To lose yourself in a book is the desire of the bookworm, to be taken." And is that not the very definition of "escape"? Escapism, which is all about stupid women reading pink shoe novels on the beach, with Fran Lebowitz alongside them? I couldn't see it.

But escapism is surely what she's advocating, however much "the world" is what she is escaping to. And it occurs to me that Elizabeth Gilbert's clue-seeking readers are escapists just as much, however in a far more literal sense. That they're plotting a way out of their humdrum lives, just as Lebowitz was doing back at that small town library. Searching for different kind of place for themselves.

Do I read for escape? I don't know. Does reading for fun count as escape? Does reading to relax? Interestingly, the books I'd read for fun or relaxation are those that would make me "lose myself" the least, which would make them the least escapist of all. I just finished The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, for example, which was fun and fluffy as you like, but Century is a book that's more taken me away of late. You wouldn't call it escapist though, because that's such a pejorative term, but now that I've thought about it, I'm not so sure it should be, and it's becoming increasingly clear to me that the divide is not so firm at all.

It's about time for a Diana Athill reference, I think. Though she's a memoirist like Elizabeth Gilbert, and one that people rave about with just as much enthusiasm, but for some reason I actually do plan to read Athill's memoir one of these days, and I trust the wisdom implicit in what she has to say. My impression is that by reading Athill, we learn about the world through her prism, where in reading Eat Pray Love, we get Elizabeth Gilbert over and over. (Forgive me as I speculate about two books I haven't read. And correct me if I'm wrong). Perhaps also it's important that Athill is old and has years of experience, while Gilbert just once took a really great vacation.

Athill is quoted as saying, “Anything absorbing makes you become not 'I' but 'eye'--you escape the ego.” And so is this the kind of escape we're talking about? What Lebowitz is after? That with the best kind of books we get the world, get out of ourselves for a while, forget our problems.

Perhaps reading is a bit like love. Just when we're not actively out looking for "help, answers and perspective", that's when we might actually stand a chance of finding it.

Apart from the soul

2010-01-21T10:20:00.002-05:00

"The fortunate thing about lab glassware is that it boils water at the speed of light. I threw a spoonful of black leaves into a beaker. When it had gone a deep red I handed it to Dogger, who stared at it skeptically.
'It's all right,' I said. 'It's Tetley's.'
He sipped at the tea gingerly, blowing on the surface of the drink to cool it. As he drank, I remembered that there's a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty's Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes-- or so the Vicar had remarked to Father, who had told Daffy, who had told me." --from The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Pre-Swiftian Love Story

2010-01-20T21:31:00.004-05:00

Poet P.K. Page, who died last week, has been eulogized aplenty since then, and I don't really have much to add to the chorus, except that she was certainly an extraordinary person (as demonstrated by this brilliant obituary by Sandra Martin at the Globe & Mail) and I'm glad I got to meet her once. Though I spent only a little time in her presence, that presence was unforgettable and she was everything they said.

Less eulogized, however, has been Erich Segal, author of the novel Love Story, who died the other day at the age of 72. When I was twelve, I found a library copy of this novel in a desk at school (checked out under someone else's name) and I stole it. Proceeded then to worship it through my unlovable teen years in hope that a hockey-playing, MG-driving, heir to a great fortune might just fall in love with me before I died of leukemia, even though I was neither Ali McGraw nor a musical prodigy. Even though I didn't love Mozart or Bach, but I did love The Beatles, and I would have loved Oliver too, given the chance.

I haven't read this book for quite awhile, but I read it so often back in the day that my original copy fell apart and I had to replace it (which wasn't difficult. Love Story is always readily available used, usually displayed along with poetry collections by Rod McKuen). I am pretty sure that Love Story was not a great book, but I really loved it, and I must give credit to the man who wrote the book I've probably read more often than I'll reread any other book in my life.

Though the book was wrong, and love does mean having to say you're sorry, as unromantic as that sounds, but seeing as Jenny was only 25 when she died, perhaps she just didn't have long enough to figure that out.

Egg on the face

2010-01-20T21:20:00.001-05:00

Book charm

2010-01-19T22:32:00.004-05:00

On an ordinary day, Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion would have been the most interesting book of any stack I picked up from the library. (I found out about this book from the Louisa May Alcott bio. It has the best cover I have ever seen. And that I am excited about a book with such a cover really does catapult me into a new league of nurd. Fortunately, I'll keep it to myself and no one will ever know...).

But today was the day I also came home from the library with the gorgeous Bothered by My Green Conscience, the less gorgeous might be stupid but it was sitting on a table so I picked it up Sleep is For the Weak: The best of the mommybloggers, and Sheree Fitch's book of poetry for adult readers In this house are many women.

And just when you thought books couldn't be anymore charming, I've just joined the league of people who've discovered Flavia de Luce. Now reading the Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, which I have a terrible suspicion might be a literary love letter only for me: literary Harriets, a nod to Harriet the Spy herself (perhaps not on purpose, but still...), references to tea, and to pie, and literary allusions, and libraries to get lost in, plus she has a bike called Gladys. When I used to have a bike called Gladys, pink with a basket when we lived in Japan. Anyway, the connections are uncanny, delightful, and maybe Alan Bradley and I are long-lost somethings. The book is wonderful. I'm zipping through it and will be posting a review in days to come.

Books in Motion #2

2010-01-19T21:17:00.001-05:00

Today was a girl in her twenties, carrying a shoulder bag with a picture of a golden retriever puppy on it, racing across Bloor Street on foot and then heading south on Robert Street. Didn't even stop to talk, and all the while she had her nose stuck in a copy of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne as if her life depended on it, and maybe it did.

Family Literacy ALL WEEK LONG

2010-01-19T18:22:00.003-05:00

Next Wednesday (January 27th) is Family Literacy Day, but we're turning it into a week-long celebration here at Pickle Me This. Stay tuned for lots of children's literature love, including an interview, a party and a fieldtrip. Check out their website to find an event where you can take part, or register your own.

Plenty of novels to choose from

2010-01-19T10:27:00.000-05:00

"As with most [Lorrie] Moore characters, her dialogue-- witty, allusive, never merely expository-- is less a reflection of how real people speak than how they should. (This is sometimes said as a criticism of Moore, but it shouldn't be. For readers who prefer their narrators to be drearily realistic mediocrities, there are plenty of novels to choose from)." --Deborah Friedell, "The Family That Slays Together" (review of The Gate at the Stairs) in the London Review of Books, 19 November 2009.

Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE 2

2010-01-18T10:11:00.003-05:00

I'm going to be reading Carrie Snyder's Hair Hat in just a book or two, which I'm looking forward to, particularly to seeing how another collection of linked stories compares to Century. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this kind of exercise is having to compare books that are worlds apart, and yet it is looking for commonalities that opens up all kinds of avenues that might not otherwise be explored. It is definitely, I think, a worthwhile exercise.

Though it's going to be tough-- last year, when I read the Canada Reads books, at least I had the benefit of hating one book, and not being terribly impressed by two others, which made deciding my favourite not altogether difficult. Probably my feelings towards this year's picks are going to be a little more passionate, and rankings will be infinitely more brutal to decide.

My other updates are fairly close to home-- my husband is currently reading and loving Moody Food. This week, my mom has read How Happy to Be and Wild Geese, and was pretty crazy about the latter. Steven W. Beattie dares to offer a bit of support to Ray Smith's Century with a wonderful comment on my review. Century champion Dan Wells' responds to my Century reaction. And I know some other marvelous readers with the Canada Reads Independently stack just ready to be delved into; are you one of them?

If you're reading along, do email me your reactions to the books and I'll include them in the weekly updates, or leave a comment on the blog. And stay tuned for details of how to vote for your favourite Canada Reads Independently pick to decide who comes out on top.

Kiss the Joy as it Flies by Sheree Fitch

2010-01-17T21:10:00.004-05:00

Two and half days of my last week were spent in the absolute bliss of reading Sheree Fitch's first novel Kiss the Joy as it Flies (shortlisted for the 2009 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour). I'd previously only read Fitch's wonderful children's book Kisses Kisses Baby-O!, but love it so much that when I discovered Fitch had written a novel for adult readers, I had to read it. Though I began reading with a degree of uncertainty: the story of Mercy Beth Fanjoy, who receives a troubling medical prognosis and decides to stage a clear-out of her messy life in the time she has left. This sort of formula could go either way, and very quickly in, I was pleased to find Fitch had gone in the right one, with sprightly prose and a narrative packing a punch. The novel is wonderfully original, although if pressed, I'd have to call it as Fannie Flagg meets Miriam Toews.

In Kiss the Joy as it Flies, it's not so much plot that accelerates as the language itself operating on sheer gumption, and the spirit of Mercy Fanjoy picking up speed as she comes into her own. Though things happen-- people die, hopes are dashed, love is born, battles are fought, illusions are shattered, triumphs are won, and lessons learned. The stuff of life with a wacky cast of characters who are constructed as types-- religious zealot mother, loyal friend, hippie daughter, enigmatic dead father, sex god-- but each of them excellently crafted with the most remarkable ability to surprise you.

Mercy Fanjoy is wholly embodied by Fitch's prose. The fact of the disease that lurks inside her, and her buxomness, and her sexuality, and when she expresses milk from her engorged breasts into the bathtub during a flashback in which she remembers her teenaged, single-mothered, basement-apartmented self. Two decades on, Mercy has come a long way-- she's reconciled with her difficult mother, earned a university degree, she pens her own column in the Odell Observer, has raised her daughter, bought her own house, teaches a creative writing course, and has maintained a lifelong relationship with her best friend Lulu. She still holds a grudge against horrible Teeny Gaudet (who has since gone onto fame as bestselling author of the "Burt the Burping Bear" series of children's books), but you can't win them all.

Over the week she seeks to put her life in order, Mercy finds herself becoming unhinged, and emerging from a rut she's been stuck in too long. In the end, just about everybody in her life surprises her, but she manages to shock them right back, tenfold. And while it's raw, we'll get our hearts warmed, and Fitch also pulls of a satire so slick, we can't help laughing, and I suppose that this is what she means by "the sheer mad joy of all of it."

Clearest, starkest brilliance #1: When Randy Bachman held my heart

2010-01-16T14:57:00.004-05:00

Harriet is pictured here in her very early days, back when a moment of daytime peace was worth a photo for posterity. But lately, actually, I've been thinking of a certain moment of nighttime peace, when Harriet was about five days old.

For the first few weeks of her life (how long exactly doesn't matter, suffice it to say, it was an eternity), we had to wake her every three hours for feeding, as she'd not yet returned to her birthweight. (This was when I was reading Tom's Midnight Garden and "Only the clock was left, but the clock was always there, time in, time out.") And once the alarm went off, we'd leave the radio playing while we fed her, and so we discovered that CBC at night subscribes to programs by other public broadcasters. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation at 1:00am, and 4:00am would be Swedish, and something uptight and BBC close to the morning.

This one night in particular was not so late, however, and I remember waking up to Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap. So there we were, up with our baby daughter in this weird, wide world that was the size of our bedroom's four walls and we hadn't thought outside of it in five whole days, which might have been a lifetime (and they were). So that, in effect, Randy Bachman was coming at us from the farthest reaches of outer space.

Fittingly, his show that night had a stars and planets theme, and Canada felt very small as Randy's wife Denise introduced the next track, by Randy's son Tal. Surprisingly, it was not "She's So High", and Denise reported that she'd always felt so envious of Tal's talent. And then after that they played music that wasn't by anyone related to Randy Bachman, which I think was "Blue Moon"(and according to the program log, I'm remembering this in the wrong order, but that doesn't change the way it was). They played "Good Morning Starshine", and we marvelled at the lyric "Gliddy glub gloopy, Nibby nabby noopy, La la la lo lo." It was midnight, but it might as well have been the middle of the night, and the baby was sucking sustenance out of a tube stuck to my husband's finger, but anyway, we were happy.

But no more so than when they played "Little Star" by the Elegants. Our own peculiar lullaby, to which we found ourselves relaxing for the first time in days. Twinkle, twinkle to a doo-wop beat, and the moment was so beautiful, it shone. We were a family. And I wouldn't take back any of the awfulness of those early days, if I had to give that song back with it, and what it was like to be listening, and finally not anxious, and to be connected, in touch with a calm, blissful world.

Can-Reads-Indies #1: Century by Ray Smith

2010-01-14T21:37:00.007-05:00

Its sombre cover coupled with my misunderstanding that Ray Smith had eschewed story for higher principles would have kept me from Century: A Novel, were it not for Dan Wells' recommendation. I thought this was a book that wasn't for me, not only in a "not my cup of tea" sense, but that it was meant for a more erudite kind of reader for whom the act of reading is not meant to be a pleasure cruise ("Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song... Wallala leialala").

So it is my surprise to find I love this book, that it contains everything I look for as a reader, including that most unfashionable self-contained universe. That Smith may have eschewed traditional narrative structure, but he has done so only to compress a 500+ page novel into his first 98 pages, to represent the disintegration and disorder present in the universe the book contains, to have Century be what it's meant to represent. And that his writing possesses a sympathy for and understanding of women that I found surprising, and striking, and even (dare I suppose in a book such as this?) somewhat heartening.

Heinrich Himmler didn't shock me. Perhaps I'm just being defiant in my reactions, but Jane Seymour, the young woman in 197o's Montreal who receives his ghostly visitations in her bed, the nightmares in which he touches her naked body (but oh, I was struck by the details-- "the buttons on the cuffs of his sleeve caught on the sheet when he reached under to touch...")-- there is context for her, precedent. Of course, her friends suppose that she has undergone a trauma, perhaps she has been raped, which has led to the visions, which leads to her suicide. And that may be so, but the whole thing is the extreme end, I think, of how ordinary girls become obsessed with Nazism, which manifests in more usual terms with an Anne Frank fascination and YA books about the Holocaust. As a kind of dangerous experiment in empathy, though of course the Holocaust is so sanitized in such literature, but there is a thin line there, and I just think that Jane Seymour has crossed it for one reason, or for many.

But now I'm off on a kind of tangent. Kenniston Thorson, protagonist of the latter half of Century (and perhaps Jane Seymour's grandfather) goes off on something similar, its conclusions more succinct than mine, but this result, he is told, "comes not from your mind wandering, but rather from your mind turning its subject round and round as a sculptor considers his piece". Which is a good way to describe a reading and/or consideration of Century for two reasons: one, because it has so many angles, perspectives that I don't think it could be taken in all at one time, as one thing; and two, because in reading Century, the reader does become sculptor, a book so fragmented requiring its reader to engage by putting the pieces together, thus coming to recreate it in their own way (so I am very sure that your Century will be altogether different from mine).

"The truth is to be found in the way many different things fit together in relation to one another. In a sense, because the relationship, not the parts, has the truth, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Though Century is doubly complicated in that its parts are so much apart, and yet this makes the relationships between them all the more remarkable. Between the first four stories in the book's first half "Family", which in various ways tell of Jane Seymour's family. The first story about the troubled Jane from the perspective of a male acquaintance who sees her problems as emblematic of women in general during these difficult times, the second story of Jane's brother and his reunion with his wife following a period of estrangement, the third of Jane's father after the death of his wife and at the end of a long career in African development and international diplomacy as he ponders what he has made of himself, and fourth about Jane's mother some years earlier and we learn that her husband truly didn't know her at all (and that though he suspects he didn't know her, he has no idea just how much).

The second half of the book "Continental" is in two parts, from the perspective of American Kenniston Thorson, in Paris 1892, and Germany in 1923. Written as a period piece meant to be Jamesian (and where all the women talk like women in TS Eliot poems, sometimes deliberately word-for-word), the pace is different here, story less the point. And though the concerns of Kenniston and other characters intriguingly overlap with those from "Family", I chose to see this part of the novel as a key to the first half. That is, in Kenniston Thorson's conversations and deliberations about art, music, history and even French Onion Soup, we achieve an understanding of what Smith is accomplishing in "Family", of how we might put its fragments together and regard them (or how we might choose not to and why).

But being a reader who seeks story, who traces plot, I did note the connection between Kenniston Thorson and Gwen Seymour, and I seized to that in order to steady myself. And though the plot was moving backward here, it didn't matter, for we look back at history in just this way. To see that Ray Smith has encapsulated a century (and not just "a" century, but "the" century) in a scant 165 pages, in the story of a family, of a marriage, of just one single woman.

And that woman doesn't even exist, "there never was a Jane Seymour." And as a reader who seeks story, who traces plot, this kind of trick didn't deter me one bit, because I am also a reader who tries with reading to make sense of the world, and such blurred metafictional lines are the best way to do so: "These encounters enable me to hold the phantasm and the reality in my mind at the same time; this is much more interesting than either one alone."

Century's is a pessimistic vision, "a world that bears too much truth". A world in which the weight of being a woman leads to suicide, where imaginary gardens are not enough to shore against one's ruins, where politics are an unchanging morass, and rapists are ordinary men, where "if man is only appetite: then all is barbarism..." And yet.

Always "and yet", because there is art at all made of it. Because at the beginning of the novel (which is close to the end in a sense, which is "now"), we find men and women finally not in opposition and that there is empathy; and because of the last line of the second story (which just might be the end, this is a novel in fragments after all and we can do with them what we may): "and they lived fairly happily for quite a while afterwards." Which is really the best we can hope for in this life.

And is Century a novel? I vote yes, because its truth indeed lies in how its pieces relate to one another. Because I read the Gwen story "Serenissima" on its own once upon a time, and it seemed to "just be another piece of improbable pornography", but it the context of the rest of the book, I knew everything about her and she broke my heart.

Anyway, it occurs to me that this response to Century has done it no favours. That its biggest problem is that no one is ever going to to say, "Hey, read this" with a snappy one-sentence reason why. That it raises questions without answers, and begins an engagement that is unceasing, and it's more like someone handing you pieces of a puzzle than recommending you a book. Except you get to rearrange the pieces over and over again, which is infinitely more interesting, but frustrating too.

It will be hard to compare this book to others, because its level of engagement is on its own kind of plane. I'm not sure whether this will be points for or against it when it comes time to rank it against the other books. Apples to oranges perhaps (though both are delicious). So I'm glad I read it first, and I'm glad I read it at all, and I do hope I'm passing something on of its spirit, and others are inspired to read it too.

Canada Reads Independently Rankings:
1) Century by Ray Smith

i hated wolf hall is it me

2010-01-14T21:25:00.003-05:00

I could write a post every day of strange internet search terms that bring folks to Pickle Me This. I don't do this every day, however, because it's lame, easy, and gets old fast. These terms are sometimes educational though-- it's only through my stats I realized that people are really interested in Leah McLaren's marital status and in Burmese sex. But could you please indulge me this one day? This one day in which people arrived searching for "masterful literary blogs" (oh, and have you ever arrived!), "i got an incident report at work how bad is it", and my very favourite (do you think they found what they were looking for?) "i hated wolf hall is it me" (and I doubt it).

A cacophony of strident contention

2010-01-14T10:20:00.003-05:00

"Some hours later, the ladies played out, Kenniston took a seat in the library and called for coffee and cognac. As he sipped, he perused several newspapers: how silly, vapid, and hysterical it all seemed somehow. He realized that politics is, of necessity, a cacophony of strident contention, but when one is not personally engaged in it, how unnecessary it all seems; and he threw down the papers in a heap."-- From Century by Ray Smith

The library is doing nothing

2010-01-13T14:11:00.002-05:00

The library is doing nothing to relieve me of my obsessive compulsive bookbuying ways. Instead, the library is widening my exposure to books I will DIE if I do not own. Lately, in this way, the following books have made their way into my library and into Harriet's: Kiss the Joy as It Flies by Sheree Fitch (about which more is to come), 365 Activities You and Your Baby Will Love,
Baby Sign Language Basics, Ten Little Fingers Ten Little Toes by our beloved Mem Fox, Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers, and How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad. And now I also really think I need a copy of The Sleeping Life by Kerry Ryan. I'm not going to mention the two novels I picked up at the used bookstore this morning (Small Ceremonies and Muriella Pent, borrowed from libraries year ago; how did I live this long without them?) because I don't want my husband to find out about them. (If he happened to, however, read this far in this entry, he'd be relieved to know at least that I've read both of them already so the to-be-read shelf has not grown at all.)

Anyway, that is it. I am cut off. No book buying until March.

CBC Book Club Interview

2010-01-13T09:06:00.001-05:00

Pickle Me This and Canada Reads: Independently are profiled in an interview by Julie Wilson at the CBC Book Club. Thanks, Julie!

Can-Lit and the Teenagers

2010-01-12T22:00:00.006-05:00

"Upon reflection, I wondered again why Canadian literature isn't able to connect with the teenage audience," wrote Michael Bryson on his blog a while ago, which I thought was an interesting thing to wonder. And certainly not anything I'd much wondered about myself, because I rarely think of teenagers very much anymore, except to be a bit intimidated when I squeeze by them on the sidewalk.

Oh, teenagers, ye of the famously undeveloped brains. Though why did nobody tell me then? When I was a teenager, full of angst, and pain, and feeling, I do wish that someone had pointed out the fact that my brain wasn't actually built and so nothing I felt really mattered yet. Which turned out to be quite true, in retrospect, but I might have been unwilling to face such a fact at that time. A time in which I was ready to die for the right to talk on the phone for six consecutive hours, and my favourite TV show was Party of Five.

The number of things that annoy me are legion, but up at the top would be people who carry with them any negative literary opinion formed by high school English class. No, worse-- people who claim they don't read because their high school English teachers broke down literature into such tiny pieces that they ruined the whole sport. (You can find evidence of this "breaking down" in any text annotated by a high school student, wherein each instance of "light" and "dark" is highlighted, for example. Or wherever there's a mention of "river" and someone has written "=life".) These people not understanding that high school is to teach you to learn how to learn first and foremost, and that perhaps all our closest-held opinions could serve to be re-evaluated once a decade or so.

Still, the greatest literary tragedy of them all, I think, is The Stone Angel as taught in Canadian high schools. Does this still happen? Is there a more inappropriate book out there? I reread it recently, and found it powerful (though far from Margaret Lawrence's best), but could not understand how it could be expected to resonate with a sixteen year old. An extraordinary sixteen year old, perhaps, but most of us were far from that.

So what would be better? What's a fully-grown Canadian book that could rock a teenage world? And don't just think any old book with a youthful protagonist will do-- a teenager can spot a phony a mile away. You know, the youthful protagonist who is always the cleverest person in the room (and in the book) so as to a) avoid complexities of character b) make sure we know the author is smart and not just writing YA pap c) reinvent the universe to realize ex-nerd author's youthful fantasies concerning triumph and domination of a just world.

Help Me, Jacques Cousteau by Gil Adamson might work though. Fruit by Brian Francis. When I was in high school, I thought Atwood's Cat's Eye is as wonderful as I still do. Maybe Stunt? Alayna Munce's When I Was Young and In My Prime? Rebecca Rosenblum's Once. I think Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are would be better than Lives of Girls and Women. The Diviners instead of The Stone Angel (if they could stomach Morag's stallion). And Lisa Moore's Alligator, perhaps? Lullabies for Little Criminals?

Or am I mistaken, to suppose that a teenage reader requires a protagonist with shared concerns? Could teenagers be smarter or dumber than they look? What are they (and we) missing? And I know I've got some high school English teachers among my readership of six, and I'd be interested to know your opinion, as well as that of anyone else who has one.

Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE

2010-01-11T14:22:00.005-05:00

Julie Forrest reads Wild Geese. Check out her (favourable) review here. And now she's got me excited to pick up this book that (I must admit) has been languishing on my shelf for a while now. Because it's bleak and the prairies, but perhaps what's best about anything Canada Readish is that it forces us to abandon such prejudices and pick up the books that scare us. Which for me continues to most of all be Ray Smith's Century, a book I'll be starting tonight or tomorrow. A book I'm afraid of in spite of Dan Wells' enthusiasm, because I read his "...Century blew everything open: it's as if Musil or Walser or Mann immigrated to Canada. It's an intensely moral, beautiful, horrifying, fearless novel. (If it is, indeed, even a novel..." and I can't help but wonder who Musil and Walser are. (And though I know of a Mann, I've never read him). I wonder if this book is truly over my head, and soon we'll all find out for certain.

UPDATE: It is the next morning. I still don't know who Musil and Walser are, but so far, Ray Smith has me hooked, intrigued, confused and wonderfully searching.

A recent bookish intersection

2010-01-11T14:10:00.005-05:00

"It is past midnight. One of the joys of marriage, thinks Roger, is this late night dissection of events in the privacy of bed, and the glorious intimacy, when the rest of the world is locked out and only you and she exist."

--from Penelope Lively's novel Family Album
**
all day

i wait all day
for these ten minutes
awake in our bed,
your minted breath,
lick of dark
across my eyelids,
and the little clicks
your glasses make
as they’re folded
and set on the nightstand

-- from Kerry Ryan's collection The Sleeping Life

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen

2010-01-10T23:00:00.000-05:00

I was confused every time I came across the name "Louisa" in Harriet Reisen's biography Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Woman. Louisa? Who was this "Louisa"? For I was reading about Jo, wild, topsey-turvey, irrepressible Jo March, of course. Jo, whose identity was claimed by Alcott unabashedly, because her fiction was an amalgam of her own experiences and dreams of better things. That Louisa May Alcott had to tone reality down a bit to make Jo's story believable, however, means that her biography is bound to be devourable. And in the most capable hands of Harriet Reisen (who writes like a novelist), the book most certainly is.

Admittedly, as Alcott's biographer, Reisen did have certain advantages. Louisa May Alcott left quite a paper trail, of journals and scribblings, and an enormous volume of work produced over a very prodigious career. She annotated her own journals over time. Her parents, siblings and many associates all kept journals throughout their lives. She was associated with characters such as Thoreou and Emerson who themselves are objects of great interest. And Reisen is following in the footsteps of other Alcott biographers whose literary sleuthing resulted in the uncovering of Alcott's pulp fiction and thrillers that were published under the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard.

Reisen's other advantage was that Louisa May Alcott was absolutely fascinating. The daughter of famed Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott (who Reisen contends made his greatest fame on the back of his novelist daughter's reputation), a peer of Thoreau and Emerson, Louisa grew up in a family guided by his eccentric whims. These whims make a storied tale, though their result was that the Alcotts were frequently destitute, desperate, much in debt, so that the four daughters had to work for a living from a very young age, constrasting them much from their mother's socially prominent Boston family.

Work, which became the name of one of Alcott's autobiographical novels, is one of the most interesting themes of her life. Seeking independence from and support for her family, she work as an invalid's companion, as a teacher, a governess, as a seamstress-- "Needlework offered one great advantage over teaching: 'Sewing won't make my fortune, but I can plan my stories while I work, and then scribble 'em down on Sundays.'" She served a nurse in the American Civil War, which was the subject of her book Hospital Sketches. And yes, she wrote, exhaustingly-- children's stories, fairy tales, thrillers and lurid tales, novels and sketches, and short stories-- earning enough to support herself, which Reisen notes was as rare for a writer then as it is today.

Of course, Louisa was not exactly Jo. Reisen reports of fans that flocked to her house and were disappointed "(sometimes to the point of tears) to find an old curmudgeon instead of spunky Jo". Alcott was subject to extreme moods, periods of ill health, and the positive outlook so prized by the Marches was more easily aspired to than attained. Her own childhood experiences had been mined of their most extreme hardship before appearing in Little Women, she'd given Jo a different type of father, the March family's was a much more just kind of world.

But Jo she was, nonetheless, just as her older sister Anna signed fan letters as "Meg"-- noting that she lacked Meg's good looks, but Louisa had decided that "someone had to the beauty". Louisa may have even referred to herself as "Jo" in her journals, or else her first biographer had made the error whilst transcribing the journals, which is emblematic of how the fact and fiction began to further blur.

Which means that Reisen had some literary sleuthing of her own to perform, and she did turn up long-lost transcripts of interviews Alcott's neice Lulu (who was one of the last living people to have known the author). Having such an enormous number of resources at her disposal must certainly have been an advantage, but to pick and choose and then join them so seamlessly would have been no mean feat, and Reisen proves herself up to the task. To have brought Alcott to life, in such vivid Jo-ishness is a remarkable achievement, a credit to the subject, and the whole book is absolute marvelous and inspiring to read.

Tricks of Perspective

2010-01-10T20:41:00.004-05:00

It's a strange trick of perspective, and I can never quite figure it out: is Harriet tiny or enormous? It changes from moment to moment, day to day. And I do like this picture, because I so rarely get to see her from a distance, for the individual person she is and will grow to be, as opposed to my forever appendage. She truly is one of the funniest and most interesting people I have ever met, through her staying-asleep skills are appalling. But how I admire her excellent posture and her perfectly round head.

Bookishly, my books to-be-read seem much less overwhelming today, mostly because I cleaned my house this week. I am not sure why there is a link between the two, but I'll take ease wherever I can find it. And in a similar trick of perspective to the paragraph above, I am now reading Kiss the Joy as it Flies by Sheree Fitch, because I'm altogether intrigued about what a novel would be were it written by the author of Kisses Kisses Baby-O (one of our favourite bedtime board books). And so far, it's as marvelous as expected.

I discovered Fitch had written an adult novel when it made the longlist for Canada Also Reads, The Afterword's response to CBC Canada Reads. It's an intriguing list, packed with many books I've loved before, including The Incident Report, Stunt, Come Thou, Tortoise, Girls Fall Down, Coventry, February, Cloud of Bone, Too Much Happiness, The Killing Circle, Bang Crunch, and Yellowknife. Looking forward to seeing the shortlist.

The Girl Who Hated Books

2010-01-08T21:21:00.002-05:00

A bit overwhelming

2010-01-07T21:22:00.003-05:00

"Maybe--", I said to my husband last evening. And then I couldn't go on, because to do so would be to put a name to the problem that mustn't be named (or at least not by me. Husband names it frequently, which is the problem). But I can't hold it in anymore: "Maybe there are too many books in my life at the moment." Because it's gotten a bit overwhelming. Would be less so if I could stop requesting books from the library all the time, and if the Toronto Public Library holdings didn't contain every one of my heart's desires. (I am now hold 34 of 161 for Patrick Swayze's autobiography. Yes, I too am not sure if this is really necessary).

I am currently reading Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen. I've also been reading the poetry collection The Sleeping Life by Kerry Ryan, which is pretty wintry so far, so it feels like the right book for now, though my life hasn't been very sleeping for a long time. Progress is slow on the Alcott book, which is no matter on one hand because the book is very good, but then I've got such a backlog of books waiting. Like the Canada Reads: Independently books, which I'm going to start shortly. Beginning with Ray Smith's Century, I think, because that is the one I'm most scared of.

And to make up for the dullness of this post, I give you a glimpse of me and technology circa 1987.

On my newfound trekker, newfound confidence, and the mystery of defensive mothering

2010-01-05T21:33:00.007-05:00

Oh, if I could go back seven months, what a lot of things I'd have to say to the me I was then. I would urge that shattered, messed up girl to, "Get thee to a lactation consultant" a week sooner than I actually did, and advocate better for myself and baby whilst in the hospital, and promise myself that life as we knew it was not gone, gone, gone forever more.

I would also tell myself to run out and buy a Baby Trekker. I know why we didn't in the first place-- I thought Baby Bjorn was the end in baby carriage, but that $150 was too pricey. Since then, I've learned that you get your money's worth, and that Bjorn's not where it's at anyway. We've had the Trekker for about three weeks now, and I've used it every day (it's snowsuit friendly!), whether to haul Harriet around the neighbourhood, or to cook dinner with her happily strapped to my back (and this has improved our quality of life more than I can ever describe).

If I could go back about six months, I'd tell myself to START PUTTING THE BABY TO BED EARLY. That she doesn't have "a fussy period between 7:00 and bedtime", but that she's screaming for us to put her to bed then. Of course, I wouldn't have believed myself then, and even once we'd figured it out, it took another six weeks to learn how to actually get it done. This, like everything, was knowledge we had to come to on our own. And most of motherhood is like that, I've found, and it seems to be for my friends as well, which is why all my well-meaning, hard-earned advice is really quite useless to them. But even knowing that we have it in us to do so, to figure it out, I mean, is certainly something worth pointing out.

Even more useful than my Trekker, I think, the best piece of baby equipment I've acquired lately is confidence. I had reservations with Naomi Stadlen's book, but she was right about this: "If [the new mother] feels disoriented, this is not a problem requiring bookshelves of literature to put right. No, it is exactly the right state of mind for the teach-yourself process that lies ahead of her." Though it actually was the bookshelves of literature that showed me I could go my own way, mostly due to the contradictory advice by "authorities" in each and every volume. (Oh, and I also read Dreambabies, which made it glaringly obvious that baby expertise is bunk.)

Solid food was the turning point though. I have three baby food cookbooks and they're all reputable, and each is good in its own way, but they agree on nothing. When to start solids, what solids to start on, and when/how to introduce other foods, and on and on. It was good, actually, because I found that whenever I wanted to feed the baby something, at least one of the books would give me permission to do so. So I decided to throw all the rules out the window, and as teaching Harriet to enjoy food as much as I have the power to do so is important to me, I decided we would make up our own rules. As we've no history of food allergies in our families, and Harriet is healthy, we opted not to systematize her eating. We've fed her whatever we've taken a fancy to feeding her, without rhyme or reason, including blueberries, strawberries, fish, chicken, toast, cheese, beans, chickpeas, smoothies, squash, broccoli, spinach, spaghetti, and cadbury's chocolate, and she's devoured it all.

Okay, I lied about the chocolate. But the point is that my instincts told me that this was the best way to feed our baby, what made the most sense, and so I tried it and we're all still alive. And it was liberating to know that the baby experts could be defied-- I really had no idea that was even allowed. That as a mother, there could be something I knew about my child and our family that an entire panel of baby experts didn't. And we can go onward from there.

What has surprised me, however, is that confidence hasn't done much to reduce my defensive-mothering. You know, feeling the need to reassert oneself whenever someone makes different choices that you do. How not going back to work, for example, makes me feel like a knob, and moms going back to work feel threatened that I'm not, and we keep having to explain ourselves to the other, in fitful circles that take us nowhere.

It's not just working vs. not working, of course. It's everything, and this past while I figured it was my own lack of confidence that was making me so defensive. The best advice I've received lately is, "Never be too smug or too despairing, because someone else is doing better and worse than you are." And it was good to keep in mind that any residual smugness was due to probably due to feelings of inadequacy anyway.

Anyway, it's not just inadequacy, inferiority. Even the decisions I feel confident about prompt defensiveness when other mothers do differently, and now not because I'm unsure of myself, but because I'm so damn sure of myself that I'm baffled when you don't see it the way I do. And there's this line we're meant to spout in these sorts of situations, to imply a lack of judgement. We're meant to say, about our choices: "It's what's best for our family", but that's the most sanctimonious load of crap I've ever heard. Some things, yes, like me not going back to work, are best for our family, but other things, the other "choices" we've made: I'd prescribe them to everyone, and that not everyone is lining up for my prescriptions drives me absolutely mad.

Mom-on-mom action continues to fascinate, nonetheless. There are politics like nothing else, like nothing in the world of men, I think. It brings out the best and the worst in me, and I don't think I'm the only one. And I doubt the action is going to be letting up anytime soon.

Avocado mishaps and literary avocados

2010-01-05T20:48:00.005-05:00

A mishaps during Sunday's trip to the grocery store led to me bringing home ten avocados when I really only meant to buy one, and so it's avocado city here these days, as we seek to use them up before they get riper than ripe (read: rotten). Which is sort of easy, because we have a baby, and avocados are nature's baby food, but even she doesn't need that much avocado, so we've also been indulging in avocado milkshakes, avocado pizza, avocado scones, and my new favourite discovery-- avocado bread, which might just be the best thing in the universe. I've adapted the recipe as per the reviewer's comment to add a bit more sugar, and then I forget about the sugar and pretend that this is a healthy treat, because avocado is the good fat, after all.

So the point is that I'm totally obsessed with avocados, and have been thinking about bookish ones. I remembered this piece from the London Review of Books about Californian agriculture and avocado orchards: "Avocados have always been the icon of San Diego’s countryside (which produces much of the US harvest) and if the remaining growers are forced to sell out, the past will become as inaccessible as the future will be combustible."

In terms of books, there is Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado (which I once wrote about here). The famously dirty Wetlands that had an avocado on its cover. We have a picture book called Avocado Baby by John Burningham. I wrote a poem about avocados during my Poetic April back in 2008. Googling, I found this ode to the avocado by Richard Wireck in a literary journal called r.kv.r.y. "O Avocado Avocado", in which the author asked to be slathered, buried "in God's sweet, gold pudding, the very butter of paradise." And YA author called Daniel Pinkwater wrote a book called The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. A further web search brings me to Avocado: Botany, Production and Uses, which sounds a bit boring, and Sex and the Avocado, which sounds less so, until you realize it's written by the author of 105-Plus Guacamole Dip Recipes.

Which is nowhere near enough. What other literary avocados am I missing? Forgive me for not coming up with more on my own, but I've got another loaf to bake.

L.M. Montgomery and The Blythes are Quoted

2010-01-05T10:23:00.002-05:00

My Quill & Quire review of Jane Urquhart's Extraordinary Canadians: LM Montgomery and Montgomery's The Blythes are Quoted (edited by Benjamin Lefebvre) is now posted online. I enjoyed both of these books immensely, and found The Blythes are Quoted fascinating to consider as a example of Montgomery's work in progress, though perhaps not a typical one as this book has something of a peculiar genesis. And the Urquhart biography is wonderful-- as enlightening as Mary Rubio's but in an accessible package for a more casual read. There is so much about Montgomery her readers don't know, and how much richer is her writing once they do.

Anyway, my review is here.

Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly

2010-01-04T22:54:00.004-05:00

As I received this book for Christmas and read it over a couple of days of bookish holiday bliss, my brain is far too mushy in regards to it for a formal review, but I don't want to miss my chance to let you know how wonderful it is. I read Karen Connelly's novel The Lizard Cage in 2007, it's stayed with me ever since, and it made a Burma a place that's important in my mind. I certainly thought of Teza as I read news coverage of the Saffron Revolution later that year (which was not really a revolution in the end, but for a while it was the promise of something). Connelly's novel was formidable in and of itself, but that a Canadian woman had managed to so well articulate the story of a male Burmese political prisoner was quite remarkable.

Connelly's new book Burmese Lessons is partly the story of how she came to write The Lizard Cage. I say "partly", because Burmese Lessons is "about" many things, strands of experience from that time in Connelly's life, plaited together in a gorgeous construction. The book is subtitled "A Love Story", and much of it is the story of Connelly's love affair with Maung, a Burmese dissident guerrilla fighter. But theirs is not the only "love story", strictly speaking. In the book, Connelly writes of her effusive love for the whole world, this one country in particular, and every corner of it, and its language and its people, and its beauty, and she seeks an understanding of its ugliness too. Her passion resonates throughout the text, whether she is describing the people she sees, the food she eats, those she conflicts with, the politics of Burma, the situation on the Thai-Burmese border, or sex with Maung (and there is much of the last one). Burmese Lessons is very much a story of the body, of sex, of violence she witnesses inflicted upon Burmese protesters, of the sick children she sees who are dying of malaria, of her own experience with malaria, of living in the jungle and not having a bowel movement for days and days and days. Connelly holds nothing back here, and her passion is clear with every line.

As well as a novelist, Connelly is a poet and a non-fiction writer, and her prose demonstrates such deftness. After more than a decade dealing with Burmese politics, she also knows her stuff, and holds nothing back either regarding the brutality of the Burmese junta, the realities of life in the Burmese refugee camps in Thailand, and the violence that human beings enact toward one another. This is not an easy book by any means, but its various strands are entwined so as to counter heavy with light, to enlighten and enliven, to make reading the whole thing in a day or two a serious delight.

If you haven't read The Lizard Cage, you really should. And then when you're finished with that, read this to find out everything else, what Connelly couldn't hope to contain in her other book. Which is to say that Burmese Lessons is a serving of leftovers of a sort, but it would have been a sin to have them go to waste.

My Canada Reads: Independently Reactions

2010-01-04T09:34:00.004-05:00

First, I'm glad my excitement has been a little contagious, or maybe this books list is just really good, because I've received a fantastic response to the Canada Reads: Independently lineup. I'm pleased that quite a few readers will be reading along with some or all of the picks, and I look forward to comparing responses.

I'm pretty pleased with the range of books we've got here. Of course, the list is stacked with books by men called Ray, but that's just par for the course, isn't it? Men not called Ray are always excluded from this sort of thing. I've only read one book from the list before (How Happy to Be) but I read it for fun and didn't review it, so to look at it a bit more critically will be a different experience. It is worth noting, of course, that my "celebrity panelists" are all friends of mine in some capacity, but I figured, who better than friends to ask for a favour? And finally, that the panel is entirely constructed of bookish people, which was quite deliberate, for the same reason I don't get my hair cut at the dentist.

We're friends of Biblioasis here at Pickle Me This (and friends of friends of Biblioasis), so it's not a big surprise that they've got two books on the list. Dan Wells is the publisher of Biblioasis and he's championing his own book, which might constitute a conflict of interest, but I decided that was fine. For really, what is more of a conflict of interest than loving a book, and isn't that the very point? If Dan liked Century enough to publish it, isn't that just another way of him saying that he really likes it a lot?

Being the Canada Reads Indies, we bent the rules to our heart's content. Dan touts his own book, Patricia Storms brings a book of stories to the table, and Rona Maynard's book I've already read. Happily, happily, anything goes, and I think the list is better for it.

My aim is to get through these by March, to post reviews on my site as I read them, to rate the books against one another, and then the week after Canada Reads is broadcast in March to reflect on these books in relation to one another, and to other peoples' reaction to them.

Should you wish to read along, go here for details on purchasing Hair Hat, and the other books are available on Amazon or your local independent bookstore. And how nice to suppose that I won't be reading so independently after all.

THE LINEUP (Canada Reads 2010: Independently)

2010-01-01T09:32:00.003-05:00

My gang of celebity panelists and their excellent picks below, in alphabetical order by panelist. I am very excited about every single one of these books, and I hope my excitement gets a little contagious.

The Champion: Steven W. Beattie

Steven W. Beattie is review editor at Quill & Quire, and administrator of the literary site That Shakespearean Rag.

The Book: Moody Food, by Ray Robertson

Rock and roll novels are difficult to pull off. It’s hard to capture on the page the unkempt spirit of the music – its energy, its anarchy, its ethereal, emotional immediacy. Which makes Moody Food, an extended booze- and drug-fuelled odyssey into Toronto’s Yorkville (and beyond) in the 1960s, a fairly stunning achievement. The novel tells the story of Bill Hansen, an employee at the Making Waves used bookstore, who meets an itinerant musician named Thomas Graham, an American transplant decked out in a “white cowboy boots and a red silk shirt, all topped off with a white jacket covered with a green sequined pot plant, a couple of sparkling acid cubes, and a pair of woman's breasts.” Graham (a figure loosely based on the real-life ’60s rocker Gram Parsons) enlists Bill and his girlfriend, Christine, to join him on his idealistic quest to create what he calls “Interstellar North American Music.”

First published in 2003, the novel is many things: a modern retelling of The Great Gatsby; a vividly realized portrait of Yorkville in the 1960s; and a metaphor for the disillusionment of the generation that came of age pursuing a heady mix of peace, love, and marijuana smoke. Robertson has said, "I believe that no matter what artistic pursuits you have, you want to be regarded like a rock star." Ambitious and ultimately highly moving, Moody Food is that rarest of all beasts: a great rock and roll novel.

The Champion: Rona Maynard

The first book that captured Rona Maynard's imagination was I Can Fly by Margaret Wise Brown. The most recent was The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. In between, she has edited Chatelaine, written the memoir My Mother's Daughter and contributed to the anthology Eye of My Heart: 27 Writers Reveal the Hidden Pleasures and Perils of Being a Grandmother. She speaks across the country on the life-changing lessons she's learned from difficult people, and blogs at ronamaynard.com. She believes that no one is ever too old to be enchanted by timeless words read aloud.

The Book: How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad

Ever since Katrina Onstad’s debut novel How Happy to Be kept me immersed throughout a cross-country flight in economy class, I’ve been urging friends to discover this neglected millennial spin on the mother of all stories, coming of age. Not that the jacket copy mentions that term. The adjectives scream modernity—hip, ironic, sardonic, sassy—as if the publisher doesn’t trust the Jaded Generation to give a snarky tweet for a young woman’s fumbling and belated struggle to start living like a grownup instead of a resentful kid.

Onstad’s journalist heroine, Maxime, is on the face of it a princess of irony—a pop culture maven with a perpetual hangover and an unsparing eye for the foibles of stars whose self-important pronouncements sell The Daily, “a paper so right that Hitler would have made the commute.” About to turn 35 and still partying like a commitment-phobe at frosh week, Max embodies the studied brittleness of a culture in flight from reflection and responsibility. She’s way too smart not to know it. A frequent guest on TV roundtables about the manufactured topic du jour, she sums up her requests this way: “Swing music is back, could you take an anti-swing stance? What do you think of Gap greeters? Is sex the new virginity? Virginity the new modesty?”

A former film critic for The National Post (speaking of right-wing papers), Onstad limns Max’s workaday world with deft comic flourishes that capture the navel-gazing nuttiness that’s now being packaged as news by aging hipsters in thrall to trivia. But there’s a lot more at work here than spot-on satire. Max’s studied cynicism conceals the fear and bone-deep loneliness of the still-unparented child she is at heart—daughter of a mother who died way too young and a feckless hippy father in constant retreat from his own grief. Among the many rewards of this incisive novel is the unsparing light it shines on baby boomers, whose own brand of narcissism paved the way for their children’s obsession with glossy nothings.

Max’s eloquently portrayed frustration with her trendy pastiche of a life makes her a poignant and compelling character. She knows exactly what she doesn’t want—the same old same old. But what can she embrace with her whole being? And does she dare take the risk? That’s the unspoken question posed by the return of an old boyfriend who would never fit in at a celebrity press conference. Max’s triumph—and Onstad’s—is that she makes the leap, and you root for her all the way. The best stories never do go out of style.

The Champion: Melanie Owen

Melanie Owen is a writer, editor and social media consultant living in Calgary, Alberta. Recently most of her days are spent chasing after her toddler daughter and drinking too much tea but she does manage to get some reading and writing done every day. She has an unhealthy obsession with collecting the New Canadian Library paperbacks that were published in late 1960s/early 1970s in an array of garish colours – and has since started a blog about reading her way through them: www.roughingitinthebooks.com

Melanie can also be found at www.meli-mello.com

The Book: Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

I told myself I wasn’t going to pick a New Canadian Library book for this but, lets be honest, what else have I been reading these days? Besides, I keep buying this book for people so obviously I love it and feel that if called upon to defend it I would be able to do so. I’ll be honest – this isn’t a happy book (no great NCL books are in my opinion) but it is good. I find that most people haven’t heard about this book or Martha Ostenso and they both deserve a lot more recognition. Published in 1925 this one takes into question the prudish morality of the day and is very much steeped in what was considered the Canadian realist literary attitude. There is a lot of - what I like to call - "nature going on", meaning: talking about nature/weather in a metaphorical sense - no Can Lit classic could be without that. But it also seems to me that is must have been interesting time for women to write say what they wanted to say without being shunned too much. Lind Archer, the lead character, is definitely an independent woman trying to hold on to some of her independence while still living acceptably in the small community around her. Apparently Ostenso wrote the novel in six weeks for a novel writing contest and it is said that she wrote it with her married English Professor lover - who later left his family to be with her - and so maybe she wasn't so interested in what the morality of the day was? Either way, it is a fantastic read and will stick in your mind for a long time.

The Champion: Patricia Storms

Patricia Storms is an award-winning cartoonist, as well as an illustrator and author of picture books and humorous gift books. She was the artist for the 2008 TD Summer Reading Club, and recently traveled to Nunavut as an author/illustrator for the 2009 TD Canadian Children’s Book Week. Her newest picture book, ‘The Pirate and the Penguin’, was published September 2009 by Owlkids Books. “Wonderfully expressive faces, hyperbolic cartoons and the occasional use of speech bubbles combine to make the illustrations both quirky and fun”, writes Kirkus Reviews. Patricia lives and creates in Toronto, with her husband Guy and two fat cats.

The Book: Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder:

Perhaps it’s unfair to pit a collection of short stories against a list of novels, but I couldn’t help myself – I am so smitten with Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat, it simply had to be my ‘Canada Reads 2010: Independently’ pick. The eleven stories in Snyder’s debut collection are charming, quirky, mysterious, and Snyder’s wry prose is sharp and spare. The teenager describing the adults who surround her at a summer barbeque: I hated them all, exquisitely. Or the young girl agonizing over her humiliation: I knew what my face looked like at that moment, the mouth in a stupid O, and I wished I could undo it and throw that face away. Tales of seemingly ordinary lives, subtly revealed to be discomforting and dark, are all delicately linked by a strange, mysterious man whose hair resembles a hat. People in these stories have secrets, are unhappy, unsettled, and it is the presence of the Hair Hat Man, like the lone stranger in a small Western town, who wakes them from their clouded slumber. In the story ‘Comfort’ the woman who finds the Hair Hat Man at her front door thinks to herself, “His presence, his hair hat, were uncalled for, an accident, a misfortune, a blemish on an otherwise clean, calculated day that should have held nothing but the ordinary reminders and warnings.” At first just a passing, quirky description, the Hair Hat Man moves closer into focus as the stories progress, until finally becoming fully formed in the second last story, ‘Missing’. Things are not always what they appear to be, people misunderstand, and are misunderstood; they lie to themselves and to others. The Hair Hat Man knows this only too well: “More people should be themselves; the world would be a different place.”

The Champion: Dan Wells

Dan Wells is a bookseller, publisher, editor, bookbinder and generally useless fellow who lives with his wife Alexis and two boys in Belle River, Ontario.

The Book: Century by Ray Smith

Ray Smith’s Century is one of the most important and neglected novels in our literature. First published in 1984 by Stoddart, it was immediately still-born, as the acquiring editor left the press and there remained no one to champion it. Books such as Century require a champion: if the Canada Reads institution – and surely it is, by now, an institution – worked, it would be books by the likes of Ray Smith, and not by already commercially successful writers such as Ann Marie MacDonald, which would get a bit of the limelight. The best thing about something like Canada Reads is the sense of discovery. But I digress…

Biblioasis re-released Century earlier this year as part of our Renditions Reprint series. Charles Foran wrote the introduction to the novel, arguing it is among the greatest works of Canadian literature yet produced. Beyond a bit of word-of-mouth excitement on Twitter, no one but Steven Beattie over at the Shakespearian Rag took any notice at all. Beattie wrote, in part,that: "... the experience of reading Century is bracing, even 23 years after it was first published. Its pervasive sense of melancholy in the face of a fallen world may even carry greater impact in our post-9/11 society. In any event, it remains sui generis: a strange, searing work by one of our finest literary practitioners."

Ray Smith has been at the literary forefront in this country since the 60's, and I think it’s shameful that so few people know who he is. His Cape Breton is The Thought Control Centre of Canada, along with Sheila Watson's Double Hook, heralded the introduction of the Canadian postmodern. His Lord Nelson's Tavern -- which we'll re-release as part of our Ray Smith Reclamation project -- raised the ante considerably. And Century blew everything open: it's as if Musil or Walser or Mann immigrated to Canada. It's an intensely moral, beautiful, horrifying, fearless novel. (If it is, indeed, even a novel. There are those out there who see it as a collection of stories.)

I'll leave you with the last words of Foran's intro: Ray Smith was, and still is, an artist of great seriousness and, I sometimes think, greater sadness still. Nearly a quarter century after its publication -- that word again! -- CENTURY continues to stand alone in Canadian Literature, apparently too singular, strange and unclassifiable. Out of this sad truth comes a happy one: the book remains to be discovered. Here it is.

As you do

2009-12-31T15:18:00.001-05:00

Behold, the weirdest thing I've read all day: "Carey tells of [William Golding's] drunken assault on a Bob Dylan puppet belonging to the writer Andrew Sinclair and kept in his house, in a bedroom used by the Goldings. Waking in the night, Golding mistook the puppet for Satan, attacked it and buried it in the garden."-- from "Theopany", Frank Kermode's review of William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies

The very best decision

2009-12-30T21:23:00.003-05:00

The very best decision I made all year was to choose Laurie Colwin's A Big Storm Knocked It Over as the first book to read after Harriet was born. Harriet herself and her birth having been that big storm that knocked it (me) over, and did it ever. Like everybody else, I had no clue how hard those days (and endless nights) would be, but somehow I knew that Colwin's lightness and humour would be a kind of balm. That this would be the kind of novel I'd actually get through at a time like that. And what a comfort it would be to read what Colwin wrote about motherhood, and its early days, attesting to the awfulness of it, validating my experience, but with a touch that assured me that things would get better. Underlining the joy that was there, and please, may I quote the passage again that said it all?

"Motherhood is a storm, a seizure: It is like weather. Nights of high wind followed by calm mornings of dense fog or brilliant sunshine that gives way to tropical rain, or blinding snow. Jane Louise and Edie found themselves swept away, cast ashore, washed overboard. It was hard to keep anything straight. The days seemed to congeal like rubber cement, although moments stood out in clearest, starkest brilliance. You might string those together on the charm bracelet of your memory if you could keep your eyes open long enough to remember anything."

Truly, truly, books can save our lives, and make our lives. All the very best for a joyous 2010.

Preview of Canada Reads 2010: Independently

2009-12-30T21:06:00.004-05:00

Please excuse the fact that one of these books is not actually one of these books, and instead get very excited about this being a sneak preview of the Canada Reads: Independently lineup! You'll find out more about these books and their champions in an official post this weekend, but I was too excited about this stack not to tell you about it right now.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

2009-12-29T22:25:00.002-05:00

I love a novel with a house at its centre, as its core. To the Lighthouse, most books by L.M. Montgomery, Rebecca, Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House, and I mean all that. I love a novel in which the house is the main character, and the rest is just rearrangement of the furniture, and how the house is the constant through history and time, changing and unchanging. The present, the future, and the past.

The house in Simon Mawer's The Glass Room (shortlisted for the 2009 Man-Booker Prize) is Landauer House, built on the eve of the 1930s for wealthy newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer. Set on a hillside overlooking the fictional Czech city of Mesto, Landauer House (which has a real-life precedent; see here) is a stark, modern building without adornment. Designed by an architect who doesn't call himself one: "'I am a poet of space and form. Of light... Architects are people who build walls and floors and roofs. I capture and enclose the space within.'"

To the Landauer's, and to everyone, their house represents modernity, which seems to be synonymous with "the future". In the newly formed Czechoslovakia, with the old order overthrown, to believe that now is the future is not entirely naive. Now is a time of idealism realized, when people live in glass houses, entirely trusting of peace, and live their lives in the open, with nothing to hide. In such an era of freedom and inhibition, the Landauers' marriage bonds begin to unravel early on. Viktor begins an affair with a common seamstress he meets on the streets of Vienna, Liesel's passionate relationship with her best friend Hana grows deeper. In the Glass Room of their house, overlooking the city, these two live a new kind of ordinary life that is without precedent.

History is the culmination of such quotidian details, however, and history eventually arrives to show how precarious their peace has all along been. Viktor Landauer, who is Jewish, pays close attention to political events unfolding in Germany and Austria, and though Liesel has protested that these events have nothing to do with them, Viktor is proven right when the Germans invade Czechoslovakia in 1939. However he's been squirreling money away to Swiss bank accounts and he and his family escape just in time, but they leave Landauer House behind, of course. And so the house continues through history without them to the present day and a satisfying (perhaps too much so?) epilogue.

The story loses some momentum once the Landauers and their associates have parted from it, but the house as an achor is compelling enough. The house is abandoned, used as a labratory by Nazi scientists, and then as a physiotherapy clinic during the 1960s and the Velvet Revolution (and here it begins to read like a Milan Kundera novel, but maybe I'd think that about any narrative containing a Tomas).

The prose is devourable, with smart dialogue, and interesting in that English is used to stand for a hodgepodge of languages and dialects spoken in that part of Europe at that time. Mawer is able to bend English to differentiate between these different ways of speaking, and apart from some conspicuous Britishisms, this is effective. (Or maybe it was only conspicuous because I don't speak British-English myself, but a few "bloodys" and "jolly-well"ish lines read a bit oddly for people who were supposed to be speaking Czech or German.)

I had reservations as I read this book-- initially, its characters seem all too conscious of their places in history. Of course, the personal is political, but never once did the Landauers or their friends have a dinner party conversation that didn't have massive implications. I sincerely doubt that anyone has ever uttered a line like, "Viktor, you are losing your nerve. It was you who wanted a house for the future and now you seem to hanker after the solid ideas of the past." There is no subtlety as to these characters' places in time (and let us just say that James Wood would hate this book). There is also a scene that eroticizes breastfeeding, which I've never seen before, and I just couldn't buy it. But maybe that's just me...

As I read the book, however, I gave up the reservations. Yes, its characters stood for too much, but that's why they're characters and not people, and this is a story after all. A story that sweeps, and it did it to me, and so I was enthralled by all its twists and turns and coincidences as I followed the Landauers through the years, through History:

"The coincidence might seem some kind of predestination but he knows that it is not so-- it is pure caprice. You can call it malicious if you like but in fact it is neutral. Things just happen. One country occupies another; people flee, scatter across the countryside, some here, some there, like thrown dice... What was one chance in a million suddenly becomes a certainty. Because it has happened."

Bookish Christmas

2009-12-29T17:17:00.003-05:00

Not only did I have a wonderful Christmas, but I received some wonderful gifts for Christmas. Not least of which were the bookish ones, including a gift certificate that will buy me several Barbara Pyms (exciting). In books unvirtual, I had several wishes granted: Penelope Lively's latest Family Album (which was one of the New York Times' notable books of the year), Bugs and the Victorians (which was my heart's desire), and Karen Connelly's Burmese Lessons, which I just finished reading and was everything I wanted it to be.

I am also going to become card-carrying member of the Barbara Pym Society. This is very, very exciting.

Adolescent Poetry

2009-12-29T10:02:00.001-05:00

"I don't know why Jung made such a big deal about dreams. The important ones are obvious. They are the adolescent poetry of the subconscious." --Karen Connelly, Burmese Lessons

Book of the Decade: White Teeth by Zadie Smith

2009-12-28T20:46:00.005-05:00

Mostly due to the fact that this decade has had no name, it never occurred to me to try to experience it definitively. And really, how could one define a decade that begins with one (not) drunk (enough), falling down, pissing in a doorway, and ends with that same one married to the love of her life, with a seven month-old baby, and plans for a quiet-night-in with old friends? A decade that contained three continents called home, two degrees, new friends made and old friends kept, writing and reading that has inspired me and made me proud, a variety of jobs in interesting places. The decade during which I most definitely grew up (so far); it contained multitudes. And I could not possibly sum it up in a list of ten things or more.

But if I had to choose just one book, for reasons personal and even wider, I'd pick Zadie Smith's first novel White Teeth. I first read this during the summer of 2001, and it was the first contemporary novel that I really got excited about. It was the first time that I really realized that amazing literature was being written right now, and by young people too. This novel was big, packed, funny, and gorgeous. Some people love to hate it, but most of them have never read it, and I maintain that it's a magnificent construction.

White Teeth is also important for the way it anticipated the decade-to-come. When I reread it during the summer of 2006, it was hard to believe that it had been written before September 11, 2001. The whole clash of civilizations thing as enacted by British-born youths was quite prescient, and the racial tension in general. That the book had come true and didn't read any less true was really something. That White Teeth was relevant even before it was relevant. And that it would even be a marvelous read, regardless.

Merry Christmas. Love, Me.

2009-12-23T17:54:00.000-05:00

Lately

2009-12-21T22:21:00.002-05:00

I've been making stuff lately. I've also been spending money at the Toronto Women's Bookstore which is in dire financial straits and accepting donations. And there's just three more shopping days until Christmas!

A great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot

2009-12-21T10:49:00.003-05:00

"And now"-- here he suddenly looked less grave-- "here is something for the moment for you all!" and he brought out (I suppose from the big bag at his back, but nobody saw him do it) a large tray containing five cups and saucers, a bowl of lump sugar, a jug of cream, and a great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot. Then he cried out, "A Merry Christmas! Long live the true King!" and cracked his whip and he and the reindeer and the sledge and all were out of sight before anyone realised that they started."-- from C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

On The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

2009-12-21T08:49:00.007-05:00

Though I suspect my aversion to all things science-fiction/ fantasy might be genetic, I can also trace it to having to watch a cartoon version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe during one rainy indoor recess back in grade one. That witch, the way one character spoke about "strangers in these woods", what a strangely terrifying thing is whatever is "turkish delight", and then when they cut the lion's mane off! I remember it all vividly, and with such a frisson of horror (and don't even get me started on the indoor recess where we watched The Neverending Story and the horse drowning in the quicksand).

I've had a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe sitting on my shelf for a while now, and this weekend I finally got around to reading it. Because it's a children's classic, and you can't judge a book based upon a cartoon adaptation you watched when you were six (as the adage goes). And I can see why I was creeped out all those years ago, but I did enjoy it and will pass it along to Harriet to read when she is bigger. Christian allegory or not, it was an absorbing story, I loved the role of the Professor who confirms that Narnia is not just the children's fantasy, the obtrusive narrator, the complicating nature of Edmund's treachery, connections to Lewis Carroll and Wonderland, and idea of a world where it is always winter and never Christmas (which sounds a little like February).

It was an absorbing story indeed. If I were ever to give advice on how to start a novel, I'd advise a writer to have a character discover a secret world ("ok, I'm intrigued), explore it, and very quickly return back and then discover the world's portal has shut ("ok, I'm reading this book to the end now just to figure out what this is all about"). It's a double-bait, and it's excellent.

I'm also now thinking much about book titles that are itemized lists of what the book contains. There are plenty with one item, many with two, but how many others with three items? (Off the top of my head, I can only think of an old YA book called Maudie, Me and the Dirty Book.) Such a title would hardly be inspired, would it? Though alliteration certainly works in its favour here.

I don't imagine I'll be reading further chronicles of Narnia, because not being a small child, I've come to these books much too late. But I'm glad I finally read this one, particularly in order to discover that (SPOILER ALERT) Aslan doesn't die!! Or he is reincarnated, or... something. I don't know how I missed that during Indoor Recess. Perhaps I was so traumatized by him being shorn of his mane that I missed the rest of the film? Nevertheless, I was much relieved by this happy ending.

Books in Motion #1

2009-12-17T22:47:00.003-05:00

I've long maintained that contrary to all signs of doom, people are reading all the time and everywhere. And now, in the tradition of the late, great Seen Reading, I want to drive that point home with a record of good books I see being read out and about. These are signs of hope, you see, these books in use. And today was the middle aged woman in the subway, white with brown hair, wearing a bulky winter coat (and weren't we all?) reading a battered copy of Who Do You Think You Are? So there. Now doesn't that make you feel better?

Why a bias towards fiction is essential

2009-12-17T21:04:00.002-05:00

Douglas Hunter's recent article on readers' bias toward fiction made me consider that literary non-fiction benefits from a reading public hungry for Wayne Rooney's autobiographical volumes, Sarah Palin's memoir, Eat Pray Love, The Secret, that book about the world's worst dog, Skinny Bitch Bun in the Oven, and Mitch Albom no more than literary fiction does. In fact, literary non-fiction (which, according to Hunter, is usually about ice and written by men called Ken) probably ends up worse off, because "literary non-fiction" is not a term so flung around anyway, and most of us fictionish folks do imagine the Kens basking out there in the glow of bestsellerdom, along with Mitch Albom. Non-fiction sells; everybody knows that, and we've just never cared to break it down any further.

Hunter's point that literary non-fiction gets short shrift is a valid one then, but I felt Canada Reads as his target was strangely misdirected. The point of Canada Reads is the novel, so it's unsurprising that a word of non-fiction has never been included. Perhaps that a similar campaign does not exist for non-fiction makes more sense to consider, and Hunter does go on to show the underwhelming amount of attention paid to the Governor General Literary Award's non-fiction nominees as opposed to the fiction, or to the Charles Taylor Prize compared to the Gillers.

But it is here that I want to stand up and state the importance of Canada Reads being about fiction, and the importance of fiction in general. Because there are certain instances in which a book is not just a book, and I think that a remarkable novel is one of them. There is an exercise in imagination necessary for fiction that non-fiction does not require, which is not to say that the latter is inferior, but rather that the effect of a group of people reading the former is a far more powerful thing. Reading not necessarily to learn, not to be transported to a place that has ever existed, sans political or cultural agenda (most ideally), to conjure a world that has been created out of air... and words. A book that exists for the sake of itself.

I think it's important that if as a nation we're to read just one book that that book be a novel. Perhaps my bias toward the authenticity of fiction is showing, but it has more potential to take us places together. One nation, one book, and that one novel will be a different book for everyone doesn't matter any less, for that's the very point of it.

Our Menagerie

2009-12-16T21:22:00.004-05:00

This morning at the library, I was excited to find a book called Animals in My House. "Finally," I thought, "a book that Harriet will be able to relate to." How disappointed was I then, when I discovered the book was about domestic animals, exclusively pets? And does anybody know a book we can use to help explain to our daughter the mice under the floors, the squirrel in the wall, spiders on the bathroom ceiling and that family of raccoons outside the door? Or is this just a board book begging to be written?

The Post

2009-12-15T22:24:00.004-05:00

If I had to pick just one thing about the English novel, I don't think I could, but if pressed to pick five things, one of them would have to be the post. Much in the same way that cell phones are pivotal to contemporary plotting, the British postal system is essential to the 20th century Englist novel. As are teacups, spinsters, knitting, seaside B&Bs, and the vicar, or maybe I've just been reading too much Barbara Pym, but the mail is always coming and going-- have you noticed that? Someone is always going out to post a letter, or writing a letter that never gets posted, or a posted letter goes unreceived, or remains unopened on the hall table.

My day is divided into two: Before Post and After Post. BP is the morning full of expectation, anticipation, and (dare I?) even hope. AP is either a satisfying pile on the kitchen table, or acute disappointment with fingers crossed for better luck tomorrow. In my old house I was in love with the mailman, but that love remained unrequited because I was in grad school then and he only ever saw me wearing track pants. When we lived in Japan, I once received a parcel addressed to me with only my name and the name of the city where we lived (and humiliated myself and was given a sponge, but that's another story.) When we lived in England, the post arrived two times a day and even Saturday, but the only bad thing was that when I missed a package, I had to take a bus out to a depot in another town.

All of which is to say that I love mail as an institution, as much as I love sending or receiving it. I once met a woman who told me that her husband was a mailman (though she called him a "letter-carrier", I'm not sure if there's most dignity in that), and I think she was taken aback when I almost jumped into her arms.

So when I read this piece in the LRB by a Royal Mail employee regarding the recent British mail strike, I had mixed feelings. I was troubled by the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Royal Mail of late, the compromise that comes from profit as the bottom line, the explanation of how Royal Mail is part-privatized already, their focus on the corporate customer. "Granny Smith doesn't matter anymore," this piece ends with, and they're not talking about apples, but instead their Regular Joseph(ine) customers. Those of us whose ears perk up at the sound of mail through the letterbox, at the very sound of the postman's footfall on the steps.

I took some heart, however, from the article's point that it is a falsehood that "figures are down". "Figures are down" appears to be corporate shorthand to justify laying off workers, increasing workloads, eliminating full time contracts, pensions etc. Apparently the Royal Mail brass has no experience on the floor, they're career-managers (and they've probably got consultants) who come up with ingenious ways to show that "figures are down". Mail volume, for example, used to be measured by weight, but now it's done by averages. And during the past year, Royal Mail has "arbitrarily, and without consultation" been reducing the number of letters in the average figures. According to the writer, "This arbitrary reduction more than accounts for the 10 per cent reduction that the Royal Mail claims is happening nationwide."

So yes, none of this good news about the state of labour or capitalism, but what I like is this part: "People don’t send so many letters any more, it’s true. But, then again, the average person never did send all that many letters. They sent Christmas cards and birthday cards and postcards. They still do. And bills and bank statements and official letters from the council or the Inland Revenue still arrive by post; plus there’s all the new traffic generated by the internet: books and CDs from Amazon, packages from eBay, DVDs and games from LoveFilm, clothes and gifts and other items purchased at any one of the countless online stores which clutter the internet, bought at any time of the day or night, on a whim, with a credit card."

This is hope! I do love letters, namely reading collections of them in books (and particularly if they're written by Mitfords), but I'll admit to not writing many of them. My love of post is not so much about epistles, but about the postal system itself. A crazy little system to get the most incidental objects from here to there. I like that I can lick an envelope, and it can land on a Japanese doorstep within the week. I like receiving magazines, and thank you notes, and party invitations, and books I've ordered, and Christmas presents, and postcards. I like that in the summer, Harriet received a piece of mail nearly every single day.

And I really love Christmas cards. Leah McLaren doesn't though, because she gets them from her carpet cleaner and then feels bad because she doesn't send any herself. I manage to free myself from such compunction by sending them out every single year, and in volumes that could break a tiny man's back. Spending enough on stamps to bring on bankruptcy, but I look upon this as I look upon book-buying-- doing my part to keep an industry I love thriving (or less dying). Yesterday, I posted sixty (60!) Christmas cards, though I regret I can no longer say to every continent except Africa. Because my friend Kate no longer lives in Chile, but my friend Laura is still working at the very bottom of the world so we've still got Antarctica, which is remarkable at any rate.

I love Christmas cards. I send them because I've got aunts and uncles and extended family that I never see, but I want them to know that they mean something to me anyway. And it does mean something, however small that gesture. These connections matter, these people thinking of us all over the world. Having lived abroad for a few years, I've also got friends in far-flung places, and without small moments of contact like this, it would be difficult to keep them. It's impossible to maintain regular contact with everybody we know and love, but these little missives get sent out into the world, like a nudge to say, "I'm here if you need me."

I also send them because I've got these people in my life that I'm crazy about, and I want to let them know as much. Particularly in a year like this when friends and family have so rallied 'round-- let it be written that it all meant the world to me, then stuck in an envelope and sealed with a stamp.

But mostly (and here I confess), I write Christmas cards because people send them back to me. I've never once received as many as I send, but the incomings are pretty respectable nonetheless. I love that most December days BP, I've got a good chance of red envelopes arriving stacked thick as a doorstop. And if not today, there will be at least one card tomorrow. I love receiving photos of my friends' babies, and updates on friends and family we don't hear from otherwise, and the good news and the hopeful news, and just to know that so many people were thinking of us. We display them over our fireplace hanging on a string. It is a bit like Valentines in elementary school, a bit like a popularity contest, but if you were as unpopular as I was in elementary school, you'd understand why strings and strings of cards are really quite appealing.

I love it all. That there are people in places all over the world, and they're sticking stuff in mailboxes pillared or squared, and that stuff will get to us. That at least one system in the universe sort of almost works, and that I've even got friends. And then-- this is most important-- what would the modern English novel be without it?

Bits and pieces

2009-12-14T23:12:00.003-05:00

I've got some good stuff in the works here, but I need a day or two for polishing before it's posted, so please bear with a little list of links instead of actual content. Oh, and also know that Canada Reads: Independently will be unveiled in the coming days. And further, that I just finished reading The Killings at Badger's Drift by Caroline Graham, which was the first Midsomer Murders book. I only read it to uncover Barnaby lore, but I enjoyed it. Realize I'm lazy at mysteries though, refraining from trying to put the pieces together myself. You know that chapter where the detective knows who did it, lays all the cards out on the table and his subordinate (and the reader) are expected to draw their own conclusions? I don't even bother. Puzzles make my brain hurt. I read these books for the plotting, so I'm hardly going to stop and think when I can flip over to the next page. I also read An Education by Lynn Barber, which I highly recommend. Less sensational than I'd been led to believe, but a wonderful record of a somewhat unconventional career in journalism.

Today at the Advent Books Blog, I recommend Cynthia Flood's The English Stories. I loved this list of Books my toddler loves for no good reason that I can work out. Canada Reads' official blogger defends the books selected for this year. The TNQ Cover story. And in case you missed it, Rebecca Rosenblum announces her second book.

Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo

2009-12-13T20:50:00.006-05:00

I once wrote a story in response to Carol Shields' story "Scenes" (from Various Miracles). The story was rather niftily structured as a "prose glosa" around four lines of Shields' story, and I fell completely in love with it. I submitted it only once for publication, however, receiving a rejection remarking upon how Shields' prose next to my prose only made clear that I was no Carol Shields. And that was sort of devastating, of course, though it was nothing I didn't know already.

There is something about Carol Shields, though. How her death seems to have left a conversation hanging, unfinished in the air. How impossible it seems to consider her work, and that we'll have no more of it. And this is the reason I've been so eager to get my mitts on anything that's been published about her since she died-- Eleanor Wachtel's book Random Illuminations, Blanche Howard's letters A Memoir of Friendship. To discover more about Shields is to gain deeper access to the work she left behind. This is also the reason why I so enjoyed using her work as a starting point for my own story. And all of this not just because we don't want her literary life to be finished, but rather because her literature is such that it never will be-- begging to be reread, picked apart and put back together, toyed with, read again, examined from a different angle, a few years down the line. With Carol Shields' signature generosity, she's created a legacy that refuses to be left alone.

Carol Shields: Evocation and Echo is a collection of reader responses to Shields and her work. Edited by Aritha van Herk and Conny Steenman-Marcusse and published throught the Association for Canadian Studies in the Netherlands, the responses range from critical takes on Shields' work and her feminism, to fiction and poetry using her work as a springboard. Susan Swann writes from the point of view of Mary Swann regarding Shields as her creator; one of my favourite pieces "Moving On" by Charlotte Sturgess has one of Shields' creations reporting to a rather inspired fictional bureaucracy called the Character Complaints Office; several writers created fictional amalgams of ideas presented in Shields' incredible collection Various Miracles, Alex Ramon advances the story of Larry Weller. Typical for a writer for whom the domestic and professional were so closely linked, two of Shields' daughter make appearences. Friends and associates have presented eulogies, some of which were first published in newspapers around the time of Shields' death.

As with my little prose glosa, a response to Carol Shields is a long way from Carol Shields, but these "evocations and echoes" are still very effective-- her spirit is evoked in these pieces, and her work opened wider by the echoes they've inspired. I particularly appreciated the European focus, writers and scholars who put a different spin on Shields than I'm used to, examining her outside of the Canadian Literature context. This curious scrapbook is a tribute to the engagingness of the work of Carol Shields, and a celebration of readers and reading.

A masterful essay by Rachel Cusk on women's writing

2009-12-11T23:10:00.003-05:00

Rachel Cusk's "Shakespeare's Daughters" is a masterful essay on women, women writers and women's writing. I've just read it and feel blown away by the craft of it, how she has articulated a muddle of thoughts that have been clouding my head for years. I urge you to read it in its entirety, and I've also copied some excerpts below:

"The future, of course, never comes: it is merely a projection from the present of the present's frustrations. In the 80 years since Woolf published A Room of One's Own, aspects of female experience have been elaborated on with commendable candour, as often as not by male writers. A book about war is still judged more important than a book about "the feelings of women". Most significantly, when a woman writes a book about war she is lauded: she has eschewed the vast unlit chamber and the serpentine caves; there is the sense that she has made proper use of her room and her money, her new rights of property. The woman writer who confines herself to her female "reality" is by the same token often criticised. She appears to have squandered her room, her money. It is as though she has been swindled, or swindled herself; she is the victim of her own exploitation....

It may be, then, that the room of one's own does not have quite the straightforward relationship to female creativity that Woolf imagined. She, after all, had by dint of circumstance always had a room and money of her own, and perhaps being the eternal conditions of her own writing they seemed to her indispensable. Yet she admits that the two female writers she unequivocally admired – Jane Austen and Emily Brontë – wrote in shared domestic space. The room, or the lack of it, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with writing at all. It could be said that every woman should have a room of her own. But it may equally be the case that a room of her own enables the woman writer to shed her links with femininity and commit herself to the reiteration of "masculine values". The room itself may be the embodiment of those values, a conception of "property" that is at base unrelated to female nature....

Some of the most passionate writing in The Second Sex concerns the ways in which women seek to protect their privileges and property under patriarchy by condemning or ridiculing the honesty of other women. This remains true today: woman continues to act as an "instrument of mystification" precisely where she fears and denies her own dependence. For the woman writer this is a scarifying prospect. She can find herself disowned in the very act of invoking the deepest roots of shared experience. Having taken the trouble to write honestly, she can find herself being read dishonestly. And in my own experience as a writer, it is in the places where honesty is most required – because it is here that compromise and false consciousness and "mystification" continue to endanger the integrity of a woman's life – that it is most vehemently rejected. I am talking, of course, about the book of repetition, about fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life. The sheer intolerance, in 2009, for these subjects is the unarguable proof that woman is on the verge of surrendering important aspects of her modern identity."

On book club questions

2009-12-11T17:24:00.004-05:00

I enjoyed this Guardian blog entry about why "back matter" in novels (author q&a, book club questions, suggested reading lists etc.) is "a waste of space". I've actually found some of this content worthwhile in my reading, but usually just author interviews or a list of the author's favourite books. In general, however, I skip over the stuff, and in particular when it's questions for book clubs.

Here's what I don't understand about book club questions-- doesn't the fact that someone else had to come up with them undermine your reading of the book in the first place? Surely if you read in an engaged fashion, you should be able to come up with your own? And if you aren't engaged enough to do so, that's either a discussion in itself or your book club is reading the wrong books?

In her blog piece, Imogen Russell Williams makes a good case for how limiting back-of-the-book book club questions can be-- one discussion topic requires readers to argue a particular take on an ambiguous ending, undermining the fact that the ambiguity itself is pretty remarkable. It seems these discussion questions seek to nail a book down rather than open it up wide, and therefore I can understand how such discussions could certainly be less than scintillating.

I'd probably quit that book club.

Pathos and other things

2009-12-09T21:52:00.005-05:00

If I look tired here, it's because I am! It's been a hard, hard, hard few weeks. I think I'm blaming it on teeth, as there are two teeth apparent but remarkably sloooow at coming in (it's been two weeks now, and they're just creeping past the gums). There's been a lot of screaming all the livelong day, and a lot of not sleeping all the deadlong night, and now I've just learned the joy of pushing a stroller along snowy sidewalks that people don't shovel. Today I was a lesson in pathos as I shoved my stroller up over snowy curbs, the rain cover ripped and flew up in my face, my boots were leaking, buttons dripping off my coat, and I got splashed by a taxi-cab. The whole thing was very sad. And I won't even get started on the middle of last night, when the baby would only stop crying when she was throwing up in my bed.

Motherhood is not always as romantic as I dreamed it would be.

There are good things: wonderful books to read, of course. I've been doing ongoing Christmas baking. I'm knitting Harriet a Christmas stocking. I finally completed a short story for the first time since Harriet's birth. My short story contest win. Friends to spend afternoons with. Yesterday's visit to the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books. That Harriet's intensive lessons in waving hello and goodbye are starting to pay off. Advent calendar fun at every turn.

Speaking of, I'm loving The Advent Books Blog. I love reading the recommendations for books I have no intention of reading even, I love that different kinds of books that readers are so passionate about, and I like the linky places the recommenders' biographies are taking me.

I love this post about Christmas shopping at the library. DoveGreyReader on readers vs. critics. Maureen Corrigan on passionate books for the holidays. Rebecca (delightfully) on names and naming. And I found this old interview with Allan Ahlberg, which was interesting. (Peepo is a favourite around our house.)

Now must go eat... something. And begin reading An Education by Lynn Barber.

UPDATE: For those who care, the second tooth is finally in, and we've got a bit of peace around here. Hurrah! I've also found a cheap second-hand jogging stroller online that will make my pedestrian life a little less pathetic this winter.

On reading in 2009

2009-12-09T13:12:00.001-05:00

It's been a funny old year for me, reading-wise and otherwise. I don't even know how many books I read in total, because my Books Read Since 2006 list was lost in the (Un)Great Hard Drive Kaputment in late June. I'd wager I've read about 100 books in total though, and I'm quite pleased with the fact that I've read 53 of them since my baby was born in May. Many of these books have frustrated me, however. Something has changed in the way I read-- either the books have gotten worse, or I've become more demanding/less patient. This has been ongoing since I first got pregnant, and all the books I read in the first trimester made me nauseous. Since then, I've had no time for a book that does poorly what it has set out to do.

I think there's a connection in that lately, most of my literary fiction (apart from big name authors) comes from small presses. Last year, I made an "indie list", that was sort of an off-the-beaten-track best ofs, but this year small press books make up half of the books I liked best. My impression is that the big publishing houses have been focusing less on literary fiction, in producing it and promoting it. And perhaps this been an opportunity for small presses to pick up their slack, or at least receive more focus on the wonderful books they've been publishing all along. It just seems remarkably clear to me for whom the bottom line is something other than profit.

I've also seen less incredibly polished popular fiction with a literary bent-- it's been derided, but last year I loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, or The Flying Troutmans and American Wife which managed to be delicious and literary at the very same time. The pop/lit. divide has seemed wider lately, much to the detriment of popular fiction in general.

Anyway, where have I discovered the books I liked best this year? I was been coaxed to read many after newspaper reviews-- Caroline Adderson on Lisa Moore, and Lisa Moore on Lorrie Moore in particular, neither of which disappointed. And then there are bloggers: I read The Spare Room after DoveGreyReader's review, and I read The Incident Report because of Melanie's review (which was before its Giller longlisting). I read The Children's Book after Steph wrote about it at Crooked House. The Lydia Peelle book after Lauren Groff recommended it on her blog. I only read The English Stories because I wanted to buy something from Biblioasis at Eden Mills, and that goes to show you never know, because it was one of my favourite books all year. Apart from that, my point is that bloggers sell books, oh, yes they do!

Surprising: so many short story collections here. I root for the short story, but I adore novels, but maybe short stories have better suited my focus lately. Unsurprising: all my favourite books were written by women. This doesn't mean the men are rubbish, but I think I've only read two novels by men in the last six months, so better broaden my focus in the new year.

This list doesn't mention The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon (which is called The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal in foreign lands like America). Read my post on it: the book was absolute magic and blew me away, but alas, as it was not published this year, it doesn't fit the bill. You should read it anyway, though.

My other favourite discovery was Barbara Pym. I can't imagine what my life would have been had I not picked up Excellent Women at the Vic Book Sale and discovered how incredible her novels are. They're so funny, smart and modern. I just finished read my second, No Fond Return of Love, and I liked it even better than Excellent Women. But I'll be writing more about that later.

Pickle Me This Top Books of 2009

2009-12-08T22:25:00.001-05:00

The Believers by Zoe Heller. From my review: "In The Believers, Heller illuminates the faith necessary to try to live a life without faith. The way in which politics and even family can become a surrogate religion, filling up the void. And also the faith required to sustain a marriage, to raise a child, to save the world, and the strange nature of the kind of belief in that such things are even possible"
Delicate, Edible Birds by Lauren Groff. From my review: "I will say, however, that this is a book worth judging by its cover, for the reader will not be disappointed. The cover's bird motif appearing throughout the collection, joining these stories otherwise so disparate by style, narration, location, characterization. But the birds are there, and so is water, bodies of big and small, and swimmers, and poolside loungers, and drownings and rain. So that to ponder all these stories together after the fact is to draw surprising connections, new conclusions. Here are nine stories that belong together, but not in ways that one might suspect."
The Spare Room by Helen Garner. From my review: "This is a perfect novel. It's also quite short, but... there is substance, layers and layers of. At its root about friendship, which Garner refers to here as a "long conversation". As well as family, and belonging, and imposition, understanding, and proprietorship of each other and ourselves. Garner's narrator fascinating to consider, her motivations, what her words and actions reveal. This novel is quiet in its force, and enormous for the space it gives to ponder."
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. From my review: "The Children's Book is a big book in which time passes quickly, and the reading is gripping. Similarities to Byatt's best-known work Possession have been made for good reason, though this doesn't mean the author is simply replaying an old game. She has embarked upon something sprawling here-- a story about the invention of childhood, about artistry and artfulness, about motherhood, and the status of women, all with an enormous cast of characters, most of whom are made to be tremendously alive. The novel also stands up as historical fiction, though I don't like to use that term about books I like and I loved this one-- there is nothing dusty, sepia-toned about it. The Children's Book is decidedly vivid and surprising."
February by Lisa Moore. From my review: "February is a novel about moving forward, about never letting go and doing the right thing. Its characters are vivid and wonderful, their thoughts positively "thought-like"-- twisting, interrupted, irrational-- as Moore's style continues on in the same surprising vein, her technical innovation perfectly realized. The story is as funny as it is sad, and that sadness has meaning beyond itself. It's a rare thing-- a perfect book. I would call it one of the best books published in Canada this year, but I'm taking my chances on it being one of the best books from anywhere"
The Incident Report by Martha Baillie. From my review: "Miriam's strait-laced recounting of library incidents is very often amusing, but also poignant, this underlined by Baillie's exquisite prose. The every-day becomes captured for its singular moments, its eccentric characters, and the library as a marvelous backdrop. Baillie goes further, however, with excellent plotting, this potentially gimmicky book distinctly a novel, with romance, mystery, suspense, darkness, and tragedy (oh god, the gasp I uttered near the end, I could not believe it, I wanted to turn back the pages and have it happen a different way, but alas, there is only going forward)."
The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. From my review: "Yesterday I went into the bookstore to check out Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. Another shopper saw me reading the back and said, "That book is amazing. Buy it." I said, "I'm going to. I'm reading her new book right now." She said, "That's just what I'm here to get," and I pointed her towards its spot on the new hardcovers table. "It's fantastic," I said, because flawed or not, it is. And that is the story of how I came to join the legions of those in love with Lorrie Moore."
The English Stories by Cynthia Flood. From my review: "With mere words (though there is nothing mere about her words), Flood has recreated a time and a place and an atmosphere so steeped, I could trace my finger along the patterns in the wallpaper (and she doesn't even mention the wallpaper). These stories are challenging, tricky, ripe with allusionary gateways to the wider world of literature. And so rewarding, for the richness of character, the intricate detail, and careful plotting that holds just enough back, keeping us alert and anticipating what's around every next turn."
What Boys Like by Amy Jones. From my review: "And how engaging is that, I ask? To read so far into a story, that it wraps itself around me, and then I get all wrapped up in it too, and the whole thing is an untenable knot? What Boys Like is a lot like its cover. Though its tone is not upbeat, the colours are so vivid that you'd never find these stories bleak. And yes, the girls are often steeley-eyed, dangerous, tough as nails..."
Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle. From my review: "Where Peelle is like O'Connor, however, is in these moments in which she digs in her knife and twists it, and then you realize that the story you've been reading is darker, its people more awful, what has happened is even more tragic than you've ever imagined. I mentioned the end of "Kidding Season" already, and can't get explicit or I'll ruin it, but Peelle manages to synchronize her readers' awareness of dawning horror with that of her protagonist in a way that is absolutely masterful. "Phantom Pain" has a similar impact. Everything is loaded."

"Georgia Coffee Star"

2009-12-07T09:14:00.002-05:00

My story "Georgia Coffee Star" has won first place in UofT Magazine's alumni short story contest. You can read it online here.

Then the worm turned

2009-12-06T21:32:00.002-05:00

"The seventh and eighth grades were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I've ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit. Seventh and eighth grades were a place into which one descended. One descended from the relative safety and wildness and bigness one felt in sixth grade, eleven years old. Then the worm turned, and it was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn't. One was no longer just some kid. One was suddenly a Diane Arbus character. It was springtime, for Hitler, and for Germany."-- Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

Laying down among the tea cups

2009-12-03T21:27:00.003-05:00

"At which point the much-tried Wimsey lay down among the tea cups and became hysterical."

I am adoring Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, which I'm reading because I'm interested in literary Harriets (Harriet Vane, in this case) and because of Maureen Corrigan's recommendation. At first, I supposed Corrigan having given away the ending might have ruined the experience, but it hasn't actually-- the thing about detective fiction is that even if you know the final piece of the puzzle, it doesn't matter until the rest of it is put together.

I do find it remarkable how difficult the book is, however. I thought there would be something of a breeze about it, and maybe it's just that I'm incredibly tired, but there are entire passages I don't understand no matter how I try. Part of it is that the book is bursting with allusion, the characters make a game of literary quotation, but I don't pick up the allusion at all or know where it came from. Who knew that detective fiction could make one feel wholly ignorant? Also, the novel takes place at Oxford University, which seems to be a foreign country for all its customs, rituals and own peculiar language. None of this is detracting from my enjoyment of the book though, but I must admit there has been some skimmage.

And also remarkable is how Sayers treats the "work" of writing. Maureen Corrigan wrote considerably of her own search for "work" in The Novel (whose characters are usually writers who never write and banks who work off-page, etc.). But here we find it-- Harriet Vane is a crime writer, though various circumstances have led her to be sleuthing on the side. And throughout the book as she seeks to get to the bottom of goings-on at her old Oxford College, she is plotting her latest novel. We see her actually working-- as well as being distracted by all the parts of being a writer that keep one from actually writing. For Harriet Vane, plotting is an actual occupation, sort of akin to moving furniture around a room, and it's so rarely that we see this kind of intellectual activity enactioned. It has been fascinating to encounter.

Oh, and yes. Like all the English novels I'll ever love, there are obligatory tea references. Delight.

Canada Reads 2010: Independently

2009-12-03T20:38:00.005-05:00

I continue to swear by the aphorism, "the best antidote to the disappointment of the literary life is to read", but the literary life must be something disappointing because this comes up a lot. Lately, it's the whole Canada Reads 2010, which I'm not going to knock because I love the spirit behind the whole thing, and I'm going to be following the campaign, but it just wasn't the reading list for me. What I wanted was what I found from (most of) the 2009 lineup-- book recommendations out of nowhere, books I'd never pick up otherwise, that challenge my sensibilities, and that I might just fall in love with.

And so in deciding to go seek those recommendations myself, I am thrilled to bring you Canada Reads 2010: Independently. In which I've enlisted my own awesome celebrity panel of five-- authors, illustrators, critics, publishers, editors among them (one of each and some of both) who'll each be selecting a book to champion. And I will be reading each of these five books, which I expect will be various, some out of my comfort zone, and examining them from my own critical perspective. Ranking them in order of my personal preference to pick my favourite of the lot. I am very excited.

I would love also if some others might follow along, as to find out how my tastes compare with other readers' only will enhance my own reading experience. I'll be posting reviews throughout the winter of the books I read, and I'd appreciate any comments.

I realize that my being excited and letting you know that in just two weeks my celebrity panelists and their picks will be revealed somewhat contradicts my earlier assertion that "anticipation will get you nowhere." Pickle Me This, however, makes a point of being inconsistent.

In this case, also, I really don't think I have much chance of disappointment. So stayed tuned. Cool things are indeed afoot. And thanks to my husband for the logo on demand.

Anticipation will get you nowhere

2009-12-01T16:44:00.007-05:00

Today was a smaller day than projected. First, we got to the doctor and found out that our appointment wasn't actually scheduled (which wasn't my fault, for once). And then the Canada Reads 2010 lineup was revealed, and I'm not so excited now. Though it's not all bad-- Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner is on the list, and I'm pretty passionate about that novel, so I'm pleased it's going to get wider exposure-- it was one of my favourite books of 2008, and you can read my review here.

But I find the rest of the lineup distinctly blah: I read Generation X years ago and might like to revisit it, particularly as it's such a reference point, but I don't know how satisfying that reread would be. I read Good to a Fault last year, and though many many people loved this book, I didn't. Which was odd, because its domestic realm is a place where I spend a lot of my literary time, but the story needed a good edit and didn't come alive for me. I have never read Fall On Your Knees, though I've started it a thousand times but never got very far in (oddly, however, McDonald's The Way the Crow Flies is a book I absolutely adore). The only book of the bunch that was new to me is Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony, which I'm going to read now.

Participating in Canada Reads this year would involve me buying two books I used to own but gave away, and that's never a good sign. So I suspect I'll not be taking part, and I'm really disappointed about that. Last dear I so enjoyed reading all the books, looking at them critically, attending the Canada Reads Panel at the Toronto Reference Library, and listening to the broadcasts in March. Last year, however, I was inspired to get involved by a list of book I had a genuine interest in visiting (or revisiting, in one case). In particular, I liked the inclusion of a quirky book from a small press (Fruit), and that I got to discover an important Canadian writer I'd been neglecting (Tremblay). I am not so convinced that year's list would reap similar rewards.

I'm also not convinced that any of these are books I'd recommend for all Canadians to read, though does any book, I wonder, hold such general appeal?

A Big Day

2009-11-30T20:47:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow is a big, big day. Biggest of all, Harriet goes to the doctor for her six month checkup, so she'll get shot up with powerful poisons and we'll find out how many point how many pounds of enormous she is. What this means, however, is that I won't be able to head down to the CBC to see Canada Reads 2010 unveiled. I'm honestly sad about this, and looking forward to finding out this year's books (which I may or may not read, depending on what they are). In related news, Julie Wilson is guest-hosting the CBC Book Club. In Julie Wilson-related news (and there always is some. I am sort of a Julie Wilson fanatic, actually), tomorrow also starts Advent Books-- a book a day to satisfy your holiday shopping-recommendation needs.

I am now reading Gaudy Nights, and I'm surprised to find that it is a fairly demanding read in terms of length and content. Maureen Corrigan also ruined the ending, but I think I'll still enjoy the ride.

Help Me, Jacques Cousteau by Gil Adamson

2009-11-29T20:36:00.003-05:00

On the back of Gil Adamson's success with The Outlander (a popular novel even before it became a serious contender for Canada Reads 2009), House of Anansi has republished her first work of fiction, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau (published in 2000 by The Porcupine's Quill). Which is kind of strange, actually, seeing as Help Me, Jacques Cousteau has little in common with The Outlander-- they're siblings a decade apart, after all. Somehow, I just don't see Nicholas Campbell getting behind this one, but the very good news is that I can. While The Outlander was not quite my cup of tea, I delighted in this story collection.

Essential to note, however, that Help Me, Jacques Cousteau is a linked story collection, which follows a character called Hazel from young childhood into her late teen years. And though episodic, these stories do come together to create a narrative arc that would satisfy a reader with a craving for a novel. A little bit like Emma Richler's Sister Crazy, but not quite as leaden in the end, and with a dash of the spirit of Adrian Mole, what Help Me... has in common with The Outlander is prose constructed with a poet's deft hand, attention to each sentence, and the paragraphs. Rhythm, cadence, alliteration, precise imagery and perfect word choice. Two sentences stuck together like these ones: "My mother is physically fantastic. She's long, tall, elastic."

But what Help Me... also has is wry humour, and a remarkable narrator in Hazel, who is blessed with remarkable powers of perception. Her voice is an anchor in this text of eccentric characters and bizarre goings-on, a voice unchanging as the world around her spirals out of control. This unchangingness works, however, because what does change are the things that Hazel perceives with her remarkable powers as she grows older-- eventually, her parents' fallibility, the strain in their marriage, that things fall apart, that no one (including herself) is quite who they're supposed to be.

Adamson attributes to Hazel a peculiar deficiency of long-term memory which keeps the collection from being an exercise in nostalgia. Also notable, that Hazel is not the stereotypical misfit, in that she has friendships (however fraught, but this is high school) and boys willing to make out her (plenty of them actually, which is a novel plot device for a poetry-loving teen) so that we're not taken down that familiar road that always ends with bulimia and somebody's initials carved in a thigh.

So though its formula is tried and tested, Help Me... is infused with originality. Hazel's family and her neighbours come to life through her eyes-- her fantastic tall mother, strong enough to open any spaghetti jar; her brother and his solar curtains; her experience pet-sitting for a neighbour in a house of tropical fish; a grandfather who frequently turns up unexpectedly, and makes himself comfortable in a bath; a bevy of uncles and aunties; a bed full of cousins; a father who rewires the house when he's anxious.

Help Me... begins with an epigraph from the Talking Heads' song "Heaven": "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." Hazel's life, on the other hand, is a place where something always does, and though Hazel might desire a bit of a reprieve, at least we get the good fortune of reading all about it.

On James Wood on Byatt, and the Universe

2009-11-27T21:21:00.004-05:00

Too many magazines come to my house, and after I had a baby in May, I didn't get around to reading any of them for ages. So it's only just now that I've read "Bristling With Diligence", James Wood's review of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book (because I'm superstitious about reading my periodicals and their contents out of order).

Like all of James Wood's reviews, this one was as fascinating to read as the book it pertained to. There was not a single point upon which I really disagreed with him (except for "Byatt is a very ordinary grown-ups' writer"), he got the book right on, and yet I loved The Children's Book and James Wood distinctly didn't. And this is where an objective approach to criticism breaks down, I think, or where I cease to understand it. Wood lets his evidence speak for itself, but what that it says something quite different to me?

I realize that Wood has an agenda of sorts, or rather an "approach" to fiction, and that I've not been paying much attention to what that is, so let us not make that the point. Instead, I want to point out the curiousity of Wood taking down Byatt for characters who are "dutiful puppets, always squeezed and shaped for available meaning." That as author, Byatt "dances, with leaden slippers, around the thought-sleep of her characters... [with] that teacherly, qualifying, authorial judgment." That "an atmosphere of historical typicality drapes the stories' individual forms." That "Whenever a detail could be selected at the expense of another one, Byatt will always prefer to buy both, and include the receipts". (I love that sentence. Honestly, that every book review could be so vital and engaging, but I digress...)

To all of which, I reply, "Yes, yes, yes! And isn't it marvelous?" Because it occurs to me that what I like best about fiction is not its realism (sorry, James Wood), but the way that a novel or story can be its own little universe. I confess: I like witnessing Byatt's manipulations. I like writers that move their characters around like pieces on a boardgame, and I like omniscience, and I like a guiding hand. Ruby Lennox at the beginning of Behind the Scenes at the Museum: "I exist! I am conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall." Realism, this isn't.

I like Margaret Drabble, her novel The Radiant Way, and how "an atmosphere of historical typicality draped... individual forms." Perhaps fiction is not so informed by history, but I think it works especially well the other way around. Also, I like how in Drabble's novel The Gates of Ivory, a character from The Needle's Eye appears out of nowhere, and how these novels are seemingly unconnected otherwise, the character is minor in both novels (which were written nearly two decades apart), but how this connection gives impression of a Drabbleverse, and that I am privy to it.

I think all of this is now old-fashioned, though it was once so modern they made an "-ism" of it. For I think Mrs. Dalloway was that kind of book, and so was To The Lighthouse. Whose characters stood for things, and knew things they didn't even know they knew (though Mrs. Ramsey did). I think Zadie Smith's fictional worlds are like this too (though I don't this has to do with Wood's "hysterical realism", but I could well be wrong. I often am about things like that).

By chance (or for some deeper reason as determined by a guiding force, who knows?), I read Wood's review as I was reading Penelope Lively's novel Cleopatra's Sister. Lively (who won the Booker Prize in 1987 for her extraordinary novel Moon Tiger) is a critically-underrated writer (which doesn't mean she doesn't get good reviews, but that is something different). Her novels-- and this one in particular-- deal with ordinary lives intersecting with history, the trajectory of destiny, teleology. Her recent novel Consequences is about what it sounds like; her pseudo-memoir Making It Up is a fictionalized autobiography, supposing different paths she might have taken in her life.

Cleopatra's Sister is about history as random or inevitable, and Lively shows that it is both or n/either as she brings her two main characters together through a series of events that begins with Gondwana (and rapidly does proceed to the present day, do not fear; Clan of the Cave Bear this book is not). "These events are chronological; they take place in sequence and are in some senses contingent upon one another. Remove one-- extract a decade, or a century-- and the whole historical ediface will shift on its foundations. But that ediface itself is a chimera, a construct of human intellect. It has no bricks and stones-- it is words, words, words. The events are myths and fables distortions and elaborations of something that may or may not have happened; they are the rainbow survivors of some vanished grey moment of reality."

Which has a double-meaning, of course, in that this is fiction, but reality as we make sense of it is only "words, words, words" too. Which makes the concept of realist fiction sort of absurd to consider.

Achieving reality itself as the goal of fiction is one thing, but I think the construction of a fictional self-contained universe (like the Drabbleverse, the Livelyverse) is just as noble a fictional pursuit. However, not so much in the realm of the fantastic (excuse me, my bias is showing), where in order to be authentic, you just make everyone sound a little bit Welsh. But rather, universes that so resemble this one, but which are consciously constructed. Because what marvelous constructions these are, I always think. The details required in such creation (which is exactly why Byatt would get both, and receipts). It's like rebuilding the whole world again, brick by brick, and guiding its people up and down the streets. Controlling traffic. And setting in play a chain of circumstances, like say, the New Years Eve during which Archie Jones tries to kill himself, fails, and then meets Clara, the Jamaican daughter of a devout Jehovah's Witness, and then we're off! for a few hundred pages.

Of course, all this, like everything, is a matter of taste. I was discussing Amy Jones' story collection What Boys Like with a friend the other day, and she told me that her least favourite story was "The Church of the Latter-Day Peaches"-- which had been one of the ones I liked best. (Note: We agreed our mutual favourite was "All We Will Ever Be", but I digress. Again.) My friend felt "Church of..." wasn't as strong as the rest of the collection due to its storiedness--its cuteness, its beginning, middle and end, such a tidy shape, the patterns, how it contained its own lore, how parts of it meant something other than what they were. That it didn't stand for life itself. And when all of that had been what I'd enjoyed so much about it-- there really is no accounting for other people, is there?

What I'm slowly getting around to then is questioning the assumption that fiction has to be real. Which is hardly original, I know, but I wish to point out what a feat still is an excellent novel without realism as its intention. That such a novel can be excellent, even, and The Children's Book-- while not flawless, and Wood had a point about the problem of its history-- is a tremendous book, even with its author pulling strings. That string-pulling is no small feat sometimes. That a book can be a book, and that can be wonderful in itself. And that it's still baffling that literature is supposed to be or achieve any one thing, because like a whitman, or the universe itself, literature (and fiction, and the novel) contains multitudes.

Pym Up A Ladder

2009-11-27T13:16:00.003-05:00

As I've written already, I'm having a terrible time finding Barbara Pym novels, and it seems I just have to wait for her fans to die because there's no other way they're going to let her go. I sort of fancied just walking into any old used bookshop and buying up her library for a dollar or two, but alas, no dice.

This is bothersome because I fell in love with Pym just a few weeks back (via Excellent Women), and then Maureen Corrigan kept going on about her, and now DoveGreyReader has just posted a marvelous ode. In which she notes Pym's A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters, which is available at Ten Editions Bookstore, at the end of my street, no less.

So I had no excuse not to go and fetch it, and why not the Pym novel No Fond Return of Love while I was at it? It was a hardcover, in excellent condition and with a gorgeous dust jacket (that put me in mind of Persephone Books) and not too expensive. So that's done, and it's fine, because I've shown excellent book buying restaint this past month. Except A Child's Christmas in Wales that I bought yesterday, but that doesn't count, because it's illustrated with woodcuts by Ellen Raskin and she wrote The Westing Game.

The very best part of all of this is not my purchases themselves, however, or even my supposed restraint, but that the books I bought today were to be found high up a ladder. The kind that slides along the shelf of course, and I sought permission before I felt free to climb it. Permission granted, and I've never found a book in such a fashion in my bookbuying life. Such a monumental moment, to be commemorated with a photograph of course. The whole thing was very exciting.

Six Months With Harriet

2009-11-26T20:16:00.008-05:00

Harriet is six months old today, which is older than she's ever been before. I remember when she was six weeks old, which I thought was ancient, and now I can't believe that she was ever that small, and fragile, and terrifying to consider.

We've been taking photos on each of her montheversaries of Harriet in the gliding chair with Miffy -- the strange wavy armed baby on the right is Harriet at 1 month. And from the progression of photos, it has become obvious that not only is the gliding chair now absolutely covered in puke, but that the baby has grown. Which is kind of what we expected, but I still can't quite get over how strange it is that right before my eyes, she has turned into this sturdy, hilarious, little person. And I didn't notice a thing.

Six months is really good. We spend our days doing the things that make Harriet laugh and smile (singing "Boom Boom, Ain't It Great to be Crazy", dancing stupidly, bouncing her up and down in the air, round and round the garden like a teddy bear) because Harriet's laughter and smiles are so absolutely gorgeous. And these days, she's even got her own sense of humour-- according to Harriet, there is nothing funnier than the chicken puppet. She is very discerning.

She's cutting her first tooth right now, once in a while elects to sleep up to four hours at a time, is in a rolling frame of mind, enjoys listening to Elizabeth Mitchell, Miley Cyrus, The Beatles and Vampire Weekend, listens also to a lot of CBC Radio 1, seems to attract lady-bugs, loves it when her dad gets home from work, eats books, eats food too (blueberries tonight!), likes to chew on her rubber duck and make it squeak, enjoys sucking on her toes, playing with her ball, is showing an affinity for Miffy, growing hair(!), likes to jolly jump, pokes eyes or gets her eyes poked depending on whether we're hanging out with other babies older or younger than she is, she goes from Wibbleton to Wobbleton (which is fifteen miles), pulls bookmarks out of books, wants to touch everything, and two weeks ago she ate the shopping list.

It's so hard. And I don't think it ever gets easy, but it gets easier. And then harder too, of course, in all new ways, but the whole thing is also totally worth it in a way I'm really beginning to understand now. Only beginning to, though, because it's an understanding I can't articulate or even make sense of to myself, and it's more a steady current inside of me than a feeling at all.

She is delightful, and fascinating, and amazing, and I can't remember a world in which Harriet was not the centre. Which is not to say that sometimes I don't wish for a different focus for a little while, but it would always comes back to her anyway. It always does. And it will forever, but how could it not?

We've all come a long, long way.

Remarkable

2009-11-25T20:51:00.001-05:00

That my library owns a DVD copy of the movie It's Pat is quite remarkable, but what's even more so is that sometimes the movie is signed out.

Leave me alone, I'm reading

2009-11-24T20:24:00.003-05:00

I spent the weekend enjoying Maureen Corrigan's book Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading. (My copy is an ARC I picked up at the Vic Book Sale, and may I say it makes me happy to know that an ARC can have its life extended?) Other than the fact that I'm into reading books about reading books (lately, Howards End is on the Landing and Shelf Discovery), before I picked it up, this book didn't hold a ton of appeal to me. I've never listened to Corrigan's reviews on Fresh Air, and her focus on detective fiction and Catholic martyr stories didn't exactly turn me on, but she's a wonderful writer and the whole book was engaging. Also, I realized I recognized the "Catholic martyr story" Karen and With Love From Karen by Marie Killilea, which I don't think I ever read, but I remember from the paperback rack of every school library I ever browsed through.

Like most books about a reader's relationship with books, the shape of the narrative was bizarrely (but pleasingly, I thought) random. Corrigan weaves the books of her life into the story of her life-- how women's "extreme-adventure" tales led her to her adopted daughter from China, how detective fiction helped her find her way out of the mire of academia, how she remembers her father through the WW2 history books he used to read. Also, how Maureen Corrigan finally found love, her quest for "work" in the novel, how a woman who reads for a living could be two generations away from a grandmother who never learned literacy. She also mentions Barbara Pym (whose books are proving hard to find used, by the way. Seems those that like her books also like to keep them).

As I read Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading, I had to keep going online to put books on reserve at the library-- in particular, and in transit to me as I write this (!), I am excited to read Gaudy Nights by Dorothy L. Sayers (which features a literary Harriet) and Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott. And Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym. After discovering Corrigan's reviews online, I'm also looking forward to reading The Man in the Wooden Hat.

I just finished reading Lost Girls and Love Hotels by Catherine Hanrahan, which was too gritty for my English old-lady tastes (though I am Canadian and thirty. I am just not cool). From that experience, I realized that I get incredibly irritated reading about people spiralling toward rock bottom, and that is just my sensibility. The ending of the book, however, made it for me. Shocking, gross, and brilliant.

Now I am reading Cleopatra's Sister, which is a novel by Penelope Lively, which means that I'm enraptured. (The book has a whiff of Moon Tiger about it, which has been my favourite Lively novel yet.)

Happy Birthday, Stuart!

2009-11-23T08:44:00.000-05:00

Every year around this day, or to be more specific, on this day, I get to say aloud what I think all the time, which is, "What a terrific man is this Stuart character I've somehow got myself hooked up with." Because he really is fantastic, and in seven years I've not even begun to get enough of his marvelous company, and I'm so proud of the thirty-year old man who's made a life for himself that that twenty-three-year old I met years ago would be in awe of. So grateful also that he's so unfailingly good to me, and for the life we've made together.

In short, he's fantastic, and during the past six months he's been put to the test, with his patience, caring nature, hilarious sense of humour, much relied-upon ingenuity, and his understanding rarely waning. And that they rarely waned rather than never did only shows he's human, but what an extraordinary one. Harriet and I are so very lucky, because he's an excellent husband and a wonderful dad. I love him very much.

Happy Birthday!

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle

2009-11-22T21:27:00.008-05:00

Perhaps Lydia Peelle's stories seem a bit old fashioned because most of them are so blatantly about something. So that I finish reading one, for example "Phantom Pain", exclaiming that the story was amazing, and when I'm asked what it was about, I can say, "A one-legged taxidermist and a mountain lion on the loose." And then, naturally, whoever I've been talking to wants to read the story now.

A bit of their old-fashionedness also comes from these stories' deep investment in history, and a focus on farming and the land. "The Mule Killers" is three generations contained in one single tale, which navigates changes in farming life (mule killers are tractors). "Sweethearts of the Rodeo" looks less far back, an elegy-that-isn't-an-elegy to a summer two girls on the cusp of adolescence spent working on a horse farm. "Kidding Season" takes place in the present day, but recounts a troubled young man's experiences working on a goat farm. In "Shadow On A Weary Land", a motley collection of characters (one of whom is apparently communing with the spirit of Jesse James) search for treasure buried by James' brother on property outside of Nashville that is rapidly being developed into subdivisions.

Peelle's agrarian history is no idyll, however. A seminal moment in the "Sweethearts of the Rodeo" summer involves the head of a dead pony in the jaws of a dog. The ending of "Kidding Season" is so sickeningly devastating, you'll read the final paragraph again and again, willing it to say something different. The narrator of "Shadow On A Weary Land" is an octogenarian stroke victim/former drug addict, and the yarns he spins are a product of his past.

"Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing" reminded me of Birds of America Lorrie Moore. The stories "Phantom Pain" and "The Still Point" paint the underside of the present day in stunningly vivid terms. "This is Not a Love Story" chronicles an abusive relationship, displaying a wonderful treatment of the "life as a flowing river" metaphor, when that river is a man-made lake that had flooded a town, and how there's nothing else to do but go around and around. This story in particular undercuts any notion of the good old days: "But wasn't it worth it?' she said. 'Wouldn't you do it all over again?'/No, it wasn't worth it, I told her. Not any of it./ Not one damn minute of it./Trust me."

Peelle displays some self-awareness in "This is Not a Love Story", her narrator a girl from Connecticut who in the early '80s decides to become a photographer and "move to the South, where I had never been and which seemed so mysterious: raw and dangerous and full of relics of a long-gone era." Peelle, a native of Boston, might have been similarly naive when she moved to the South, when she started writing about the South, but her stories show she's since learned that the dangers are elsewhere, that the long-gone era is an illusion, and relics aren't the things you might have chosen to last.

But writing about the South, she treads on a dangerous tradition, and thus come the comparisons of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. There are moments when it feels like she might be striving toward these voices, but on the whole I would posit that, as an outsider, Peelle comes at the South from a unique point of view, and hers are even less elegiac than these writers' non-elegies for a long-gone era that never was and never went.

Where Peelle is like O'Connor, however, is in these moments in which she digs in her knife and twists it, and then you realize that the story you've been reading is darker, its people more awful, what has happened is even more tragic than you've ever imagined. I mentioned the end of "Kidding Season" already, and can't get explicit or I'll ruin it, but Peelle manages to synchronize her readers' awareness of dawning horror with that of her protagonist in a way that is absolutely masterful. "Phantom Pain" has a similar impact. Everything is loaded.

I like this book for the lines it crosses-- Peelle's history isn't dead and buried, but keeps coming up again year after year (and kudos for that wonderful asparagus image in "The Mule Killers"). Which is perhaps where she gets her lack of elegy from, for its hard to elegize something so close to the surface. Peelle's stories mix urban life and farm life, they're stories of home and of the road (and neither of these so much like the home and road you read in books). I like that if you picked up this book, and read it straight through, you'd have a hard time telling whether it was written by a woman or a man, and in that ambiguity, I think, Peelle's writing takes on tremendous power.

This is a stunning collection that deserves to be read and celebrated, and I think the one only leads to the other.

The only proper way to breastfeed

2009-11-22T17:31:00.006-05:00

It's strange, I think, that while breastfeeding is so ridiculously revered in our society to the point where bottle-feeding can raise eyebrows, the image of breastfeeding itself might raise those brows even higher. Mostly because we never see it, in real life or in the media, which perpetuates breastfeeding imagery as taboo, and so it goes. So I've been eagerly keeping track of breastfeeding imagery during this last while, on television (Being Erica) and in children's books (lately, Busy Pandas).

But I especially like this picture, from Susan Meyer's Everywhere Babies (which acknowledges breastfeeding as being just one of many ways that babies everywhere are fed).

While we don't see enough breastfeeding imagery, even rarer is imagery of the only proper way to breastfeed-- with a book in hand.

It is telling, however, that the mother has fallen asleep. Some days are just too much for multi-tasking.

It had to be stories

2009-11-19T21:21:00.003-05:00

I just finished reading the short story collection Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing, which I finally picked up after having it recommended by Lauren Groff and seeing it was selected as one of The National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Fiction Selections for 2009. I am much excited about the book and its author, Lydia Peelle, and I'll be writing a review this weekend, but in the meantime, why the internet is great as follows.

Her book's playlist at Largehearted Boy. Her story "The Mule Killers" for your reading pleasure. Lydia Peelle interviewed by Gillian Welch, and in particular this:

"It is like making an album. A short-story collection is like an album in ways that a novel is not; your hope is for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. What you want is for each song or each story to stand on its own, but for them to say something greater when collected in one album or between the covers of a book. And sequencing is so important—as I know it is with a record—the way you order the stories; you think about the emotional arc to the whole book. I wouldn’t want a reader to skip around the book, but to read the stories in order. As for the stories, well, I knew it had to be stories …"

On Longing: Bugs and the Victorians

2009-11-18T21:45:00.003-05:00

After reading this review in the LRB, I am dying to read Bugs and the Victorians. My own interest in literary entomology (because believe it or not, I've got one!) arose via Virginia Woolf, who wrote about bugs a lot, and also wrote a wonderful fictionalized biographical sketch of Eleanor Ormerod in The First Common Reader. Ormerod was Britain's foremost entomologist during the late 19th century, which was a very important kind of scientist to be at that time, and that she was a woman is only one of the many remarkable things about her. She's mentioned in the LRB review, along with various surprising ways the study of insects influenced Victorian society.

Anyway, the book also happens to be $55, so I don't imagine I'll be reading it anytime soon.

Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the Experts

2009-11-18T21:24:00.008-05:00

I suppose it's not so different to those mothers that wish to see themselves in their children's books, that I've been looking for me in my own reading. Or rather seeking representations of my experience since becoming a mother, not because I'm so entirely self-interested, but because the politics of motherhood are hard to understand. And motherhood is politicized, the whole of it, which is natural in the case of any group of people lacking power enough to properly go around.

Mothers are also a group of people desperately trying to tame chaos, which makes them perfect targets for authority of all kinds. And these authorities, I've noticed, do tend to be men and childless women, which is probably because these are the only people unlearned enough to think that babies could be a science. In Mother Knows Best: Talking Back To The "Experts" (published by York University's Demeter Press, which also published Motherhood and Blogging: The Radical Art of the Mommy Blog), writers address this notion of "expertness", and discuss the impact of these authorities on modern mothering.

And it is "mothering", which the carefully benign "parenting" is usually an euphemism for anyway. Mothering a baby is scientific like the tide is, natural as anything, tied to the moon, but much more difficult to time by a clock. So that an expert will tell you that your breastfeeding pain is impossible, because Baby's latch is fine, but feeding makes you want to die. Another will tell you that babies don't get fevers whilst teething, even though you've had three children and it was the case for all of them. I read a book by a breastfeeding champion who said that babies do not require burping, that gulping does not cause gas, but he's obviously never met my daughter. A baby's poo (oh, of course I was going to talk about poo! Can you believe I waited until the third paragraph!), says the baby books, will always be yellow, but I've met mothers of the healthiest of babes with veritable rainbows. (And even worse, even the "experts" don't agree with one another. This is very confusing. In making any major decisions about my child's wellbeing, I've found the best solution so far is to throw the baby books out the window. They make a mighty thunk. What fun!)

All of this expertism serves to undermine a mother's instinct and confidence, and the idea that there is just one way to be a baby or a mom is what pits women against one another so mercilessly. The conflict is apparent even in the anthology-- in "Deconstructing Discourse: Breastfeeding, Intensive Mothering and the Moral Construction of Choice", Stephanie Knaak questions studies that find any difference between breastfed and formula-fed babies. In the next article, Catherine Ma begins "If the Breast is Best, Why Are Breastfeeding Rates So Low?" with "The consensus on the benefits of breast milk is undisputed on both institutional and individual levels."

So which is it? But in this anthology, that is not the point, which is instead to examine the politics of these ideas, which it does so effectively. And novelly as well, which is novel itself with arguments that have been rehashed over and over again. In "Making Decisions About Vaccines", Rachel Casiday writes about those parents who "know" that the MMR vaccine was behind their child's autism, just as that mother I mentioned before "knew" that fevers came with teething. Whether or not these parents are right is not the point either, and Casiday's thesis is that this kind of parental "knowledge" has to be taken into account by authorities regardless. These parents have their own particular brand of expert knowledge, and the dismissal of their concerns by authorities is what leaves other parents torn between experts (for it was a scientific study, however now debunked, that made the autism/MMR link) and wary of having their own children vaccinated.

Mother Knows Best also examines breastfeeding and attachment parenting, and how these inform ideas of "the good mother". How many feminists have embraced these practices, though they run so contrary to feminist politics. The fetisization of "the natural", to justify breastfeeding and attachment parenting, though these ideas are out of place in the society in which we live (and in America, in particular, where maternity leave is pitiful). I have become quite accustomed, in the liberal circles in which I run, to turning my nose up at sleep training and Nestle, but it was interesting to interrogate these ideas, and question where they come from. To consider whether it might be egocentric to forego a career to be there for your child, and assume your presence will make up for whatever material goods the child will lack. How ultrasound imagery renders the fetus subject rather than object. How pregnancy guide advice compares to actual women's experiences.

Though academic theorizing is odd to those of us outside the academy, I've found it quite useful to examine the politics of motherhood within this construct. Because discussions of motherhood get so personal, otherwise, and then defensive, mean and ridiculous. And all the experts who claim to come without agenda, but nobody is, so to take a step back is really worthwhile. An anthology like this is the closest thing to "the big picture" that I've been able to grasp yet of the big, big picture that motherhood is, and for that reason among many, I'm glad I read it.