Thinking in circles, about big and small presses

As you might have been able to tell by my waffling tone, I was not altogether comfortable with my "Top Eleven Indie Picks of 2008". Not with the books themselves, for the books are very good, but with the very fact that I made such a list at all. As though the books by independent publishers that I'd read this year were a sideshow, "a subspecies", or do I even dare to say it, a ghetto? Because I don't mean to imply any of these things. No, I don't mean that at all.

The problem is this, I think. That my original Top Eleven Picks of 2008 was assembled in very vague terms. These were most certainly not "The Best Books of 2008", but rather a list of the ones I liked best, and I am conscious enough know that what I like best and what is the best is not necessarily the very same thing. Particularly because I'm the sort to fall in love with a book because it contains a teapot, or references the postal system, and these are two of my favourite things.

I like fiction that innovates, I like books that challenge what I feel or believe, I admire a book that attacks me like a pipe to the head, but I've just got this thing about books I can curl up inside like a warm blanket. Or books that recreate the world and let me walk around easy in it, as opposed to one that makes a whole new world that I've got to think a lot to discover. Perhaps if I didn't read corporate documents for eights hours every day, this would be different, but at the moment I like a book that grabs me and holds me, and even pushes me along. (If I only read books like this I would be in a coma, but I do require them on a regular basis.)

Which is to say that many (but certainly not all) of my Top Eleven books were old fashioned good reads, which is mostly what I talk about here at Pickle Me This. They may not have rewritten the book on how to write the book (though I'll argue for a few) but I loved them true, and that was sort of my sole requirement.

But I did so enjoy my year of more intensive reading of independent publishers, and when I reflected that I'd missed them in my picks, I was more than a bit regretful. But I was hardly going to just slot them in between the lines, and hope that nobody noticed. I loved these books for different reasons than I loved the others, and it wasn't so much that they couldn't play with the big boys, but rather they were playing a whole other game. Which, of course, is as dubious a statement as any other-- there is certainly nothing decidedly "Indie" to link each of these eleven books, but I couldn't help but think of them differently. Why? I'm not sure.

But I am not sure I'm totally wrong about this-- I'm still not comfortable, but I can't help but acknowledge a difference between fiction from big publishers and small ones. Just like how, try as I might otherwise, I read a difference between fiction written by men and that by women (for example). Always, always, there will be exceptions (I'm waving at you, Ian McEwan!), but I am thinking in general terms. I am thinking of the Orange Prize, and how instead of a ghetto, I see it as a celebration of something uniquely itself. Similar with the small presses then, instead of just a sideshow, although to imply that small press books couldn't make it on my main list is definitely offensive, and I see that now. Further, that these books were as good as they were but didn't get on my list is making me reconsider how I evaluate what I read.

Anyway, I expect to make full sense of this around the same time I finally read Anna Karenina. So probably don't hold your breath.

Interesting things included

Interesting things I read in newspapers this weekend included: a new anthology about fathers and daughters has this reviewer asking "Why do some writers treat the essay form like a therapy session instead of a piece of prose composed for a wider audience?" Which is the end too many anthologies have led me to, but then flipping through the original Dropped Threads the other day, I got the sense that the quality of essays contained there was much better. I could be wrong, didn't read it so closely, but I wonder if that these essays were written before the craze of anthologies and creative-nonfiction means that they were less self-conscious, less prescribed. Now so many nonfiction essays appear to be based upon the same template, and so mediochre (remember the anthology that made me want to die?) Anyway.

I really loved Sheema Khan's column this week, urging Muslim women to stand up against male domination. She closes with "Social injustices should be confronted head-on with spiritual conviction and the resolve to face stiff opposition. An echo from another era by a Canadian woman of faith, Nellie McClung, should inspire us: 'Never retract, never explain, never apologize - get things done and let them howl.'"

A fascinating piece Post 9/11 Fiction. On gay lit, the biggest ghetto since "women's fiction". A blog entry on Zelda Fitzgerald (who I spent my late-teens absolutely obsessed with), but as always don't bother with the comments (particularly the one in which the writer claims that F. Scott was not successful).

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains by Laurel Snyder

Laurel Snyder makes a point of sitting on fences, one in particular running between her two (of more than a few) careers as poet and children's writer. She's written on her blog and elsewhere of being caught in the middle of two nearly-disparate things. Of spending years becoming a poet, then suddenly finding herself quite successful at something different. A dream come true, but still, she writes, "I realized that I was afraid of becoming a genre writer in the eyes of other poets. Of being relegated to the ghetto of kiddie-lit. Of losing my identity, as silly as it was."

In terms of Snyder's writing, however, the fence itself becomes less important. I read her book of poetry The Myth of the Simple Machines back in April, and quickly found its echoes in her new novel for children Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains. From her poem, "Happily Ever After": "She's every wolf, every rib, every snarl./ No matter how she tells her story./ No matter what the frame looks like." I recognized Snyder's poetry in the prose at the beginning of Scratchy Mountains' second chapter: "Many years passed, because that is what happens, even when something very sad has taken place. It is the nature of years to pass, and the nature of little girls to grow."

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains plays the same kind of game with logic and reality as The Myth of the Simple Machines, similarly inventing a reality constructed in much the same way as our own is but to a different effect. Which is called a fairy tale, I think, the Scratchy Mountains being a part of the geography of the Bewilderness, which is a corner of the world wholly contained upon a tapestry. The kind of land that is bordered by edges, I mean, and populated by kings and princes, and rivers that flow upstream, and a milkmaid called Lucy from the village of Thistle.

Lucy, determined, brave, singular and loyal, is not Alice, the ordinary child who is quite extraordinary in Wonderland, but their journeys are quite the same in their sheer bewildering-ness. Though Lucy's journey is more deliberate, in search for her missing mother and out of anger at being excluded by her friend Wynston. She sets off with her cow and same apples, off to find an adventure when adventure finds her, but eventually meets up with Wynston, a Prince (but that's not his fault) who has come in pursuit of her. Not to save her, of course, as Lucy needs no such thing, but she could use his help, and naturally she could use a friend.

Between them, they encounter a ferocious prairie dog, a strange man stuck in a soup pot, a forest that must be knitted to be passed, and a town called Torrent where it always rains on schedule. Lucy and Wynston a bit like Gulliver in Torrent, with its strange emphasis on civility and following rules. Those two in particular finding rules difficult to follow, and so naturally there's trouble to be gotten into and out of. And then somehow, of course, they both have to find their way home...

Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains is a book to read aloud to someone who can almost read themselves. To any little person who appreciates a dose of fantasy, a bit of real, singing songs, playful language and a happy ending in the end.

Hi Curtis. Let's have dinner soon!

The latest Guardian Poetry Workshop Exercise is up. Writers on pictures of women reading here. Here for the places in Toronto that mattered to Jane Jacobs. An excellent piece here on the necessity of The Orange Prize. On a sidenote, I've given up being bothered by men not reading books written by women, because quite frankly, I haven't read a single novel written by a man this year (unless it was prescribed by school). This has not been done deliberately, and I do have David Gilmour's A Perfect Night to Go to China on hold at the library in order to begin rectifying this deficiency on my part. But there are just so many brilliant books being published by women writers lately that I am thoroughly engaged reading them, and I figure the women can't be doing all bad because it's a known fact that women buy more books than men, so perhaps they're selling more books than men too? Which doesn't mean the Orange doesn't matter of course. I'm just sort of starting to prefer the ghetto all around.

In the ghetto

My first response to reports like this is always anger. While women read literary-fiction by men and women both, men don't really do the same, though as this article notes now at least they pretend to dabble in authoresses. I get uppity at such imbalances. However. My favourite book, of one of my many favourites, is Unless by Carol Shields. I think this book handles the state of being a woman and becoming a woman with such a poignant acuity, but I don't think my boyfriend could appreciate this. He is one of the most brilliant people I know, but the storyline couldn't hold him and he'd only be reading it out of acquiescence to me, and that doesn't make him a bad person or a poor reader. I understand that, and I think he is not such an exception among men (in this area only of course). The same goes for my beloved Margarets Drabble and (some) Atwood. He did like Oryx and Crake- case in point. It's a mixture of style and substance that separates the kind of books he loves from the sort I do. I think he could read them, and even admit their brilliance but that wouldn't be fun for him, and then what's the point of that really? There are many books that we do read together, and books that I recommend to him, knowing they have a certain Stuartness about them. Juniper Tree Burning was one of those books, about a woman and so plot-driven and furiously paced that he would have devoured it, even as so much of the story was about various states of womanness etc. A.S. Byatt bristles at "ghettoization". I think that quality literary fiction is a ghettoised genre unto itself these days. Also, as good citizens/readers (which are often one and the same), all of us have an obligation to read important additions to the canon by men and women. But the fact is that most men are not going to pick women's fiction up at leisure, and this is why recognition from institutions such as the Orange Prize really is important, to help get these books into the public eye.

In summation, I guess it would be good if Stuart loved "Unless", but I understand why he doesn't. And a man not loving a book doesn't make it any less good.

A remaining question would be, why then are women able to read book by writers of either gender? Perhaps, is masculinity a more universal, less specialised condition, that even women can relate to to some extent? Perhaps, dare I say, there are not books being written about the state of being a man in the same volume as those about women? Or maybe there are, and I just haven't read them, and therefore things are balanced afterall. Is there a masculine counter to "Unless" and it's ilk? Please leave recommended titles as a comment if you think so.