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

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

Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE 4

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.

Reading in bed

News and news

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.

Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE 3

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

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

Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE 2

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.

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

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

A cacophony of strident contention

"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

CBC Book Club Interview

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

Canada Reads 2010: Independently UPDATE

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.

My Canada Reads: Independently Reactions

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)

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.

Preview of Canada Reads 2010: Independently

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.

Canada Reads 2010: Independently

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.