Longing

Oh, Great Summer Rereading Project, you have done me such good. But oh am I counting down to September, when I can delve into the two Hilary Mantel novels sitting on my bookshelf. I am finding Under the Volcano hardgoing. But I rather cheekily bought Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson on the weekend, just so I will be able to get my British lady novelist fix next. I read it early last summer, and it was brilliant. It's nice to own it!

My fascinating self

The reason I haven't finished a book in a few days is that I am reading three. I am reading Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, which I am too distracted from at the moment. I am also reading In Fact: The Best of Creative NonFiction, which has some brilliant essays (ie "Shunned" by Meredith Hall, but also others I skip over. And finally, I am reading the newest PEN Anthology Writing Life, which is the anthology to end anthologies. I can't quite put my finger on why.
I can't decide why this book should be better than the disappointing anthology I read a few books back. I suppose the fact that the essays are good means something, though the others weren't bad. The writers here have all achieved a measure of success, and they have learned something in the process that they care to impart (as opposed to "what I learned in the process of just being my fascinating self" which seemed to be the theme in that other book). So many writers here are fiction writers, and what they say has more to do with literature than their fascinating selves. Nobody is whining. Each of the essays has taken such a different approach and tone, and I've not yet encountered repetition. And perhaps the "writing life" is just something about which I am passionately curious, and so I will go forth in my reading more readily, enthusiastically, than I would with a book about the "expensive shoe life, and how I lost my bestest friend on the way." Anyway, the PEN anthology comes so entirely recommended. (Plus there is an essay by Margaret Drabble!)
This weekend we ventured out into the North York Countryside, where Stuart acquired 28 mosquito bites and I got none. We were attending a dinner party at the home of the wonderful Natalie Bay, who had organized a feast for "Unagi Day". I didn't know there was an unagi day. It was definitely oishi. We had a lovely time. And then yesterday, we baked our cakeular ode and spent the afternoon under a tree in Trinity Bellwoods Park. Bliss, obviously. Today will be devoted to reading, writing, working on Pickle Me This's newest publication, and cleaning our disgusting house.

A cakeular ode to the greatest fruit.

Remarkably Busy

I have suddenly found myself remarkably busy, and I don't know why or how. But I have been writing, and reading. Just finished the wonderful White Teeth, which I didn't appreciate enough when I first read it during the summer of 2001. Like many other books, I think its Englishness would have been lost on me then, and I don't know if I would have had the patience for its detail. I liked it though, but I remembered next to nothing about it upon reading a second time. Which basically meant that I got to read it for the first time all over again, but with a better eye, and I loved it. What a feat, and no wonder Smith struggled with her second book, because this book is pretty much untoppable. It was funny, smart and fact-filled. White Teeth is Zadie Smith's masterpiece, and she really could just put her feet up and watch TV now, if she wanted to. Though she's better than that, but she could.

I read Lives of Girls and Women before that, and I didn't love it. I haven't read Alice Munro in years and so can't compare it to her other work, but I got the impression that Lives was hammered together as a novel, and it didn't function well in that respect. I was bored by the end. Each of the stories were strong on their own, but as a collection, this book was not devourable, which to me does not a novel make.

Yesterday's Facts and Arguments essay on living abroad with a Canadian passport was a terrifically poignant response to all the murmurings going on about evacuations from Lebanon.

Hey, that's my (husband's) bike!

To the thief, then. Yeah, you with the wire clippers in the back pocket of your skinny jeans. All right then, take the bike. Steal it right off the porch with a guile I cannot fathom. I just hope you ride it under the wheels of a speeding bus. And you just keep on stealing bikes, again and again, rendering our porches eternally barren. But you will never manage to steal the bikes that live in our hearts; our inner bikes. The truest bikes, which you, of course you dirty bastard, will never ever know.

(Bonus points to whoever got my Reality Bites reference.)

Wknd

My story A Big Enough Army won second place in the 2006 Toronto Star Short Story contest, and is online today!

We're in Peterborough this weekend, and I met up with friends today who I hadn't seen in years, from when I used to be a delinquent. And in the most exciting news of all, the most wonderfully bookish woman alive (my friend Bronwyn) is getting married. Oh how the tears have been flowing. I am slowly regaining self-control.

Bookish News

Glee! Margaret Drabble's new novel gets a great review in The Guardian. It comes out in Britain in August. Tragically, it's not out in Canada until October. But I'll be ok. On reading the right books in the right places. On how the middle class is letting down the public library.

Rainbow Styley

Listening to BBC Radio 1 every day has reawakened me to pop music, and I'm on quite a musical bent at the moment. I just bought "Let's Get Out of This Country" by Camera Obscura, and I continue to adore my last purchase, "The Garden" by Zero 7. In terms of singles, I love Happiness by Orson, Eleanor Put Your Boots On by Franz Ferdinand, All This Love by the Similou, America by Razorlight and Fill My Little World by The Feeling. Oh and the Paris Hilton single. Really.

Just cycled home from Ward's Island, where we were guests at a house party. How lucky is that? It's a beautiful evening.

On Watermelon

The website of the evening is www.watermelon.org- the online home of the National Watermelon Promotion Board. We are now devouring watermelon smoothies. And obviously, we are now quite happy.

I got In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction from the library today. I am approaching it for a few reasons; the first is that Annie Dillard wrote the intro entitled "Notes for Young Writers". Some of the best advice I've ever read, pointed and concise enough to be manageable. I like "Read for pleasure... Push it a little, but don't read something totally alien to your nature and then say, "I'll never be able to write like that." Of course you won't. Read books you'd like to write. If you want to write literature, read literature. Write books you'd like to read. Follow your own weirdness." I'd recommend thumbing through this book even just for this. The book itelf I might not even read, but I am going to give it a try. It will be interesting to compare it to the anthology I read last week, wherein my complaint was of the forced nature of the pieces. This anthology, on the other hand, was compiled after the fact, and it will be interesting to see if this makes a difference. I am also interested in Creative Nonfiction, and confess a bit to not really knowing what it is, and so it will be nice to learn.

And yes, the book came from the library; I am absolutely obsessed with the Toronto Public Library. In the town where I grew up, the library was underfunded, seemed to be closed four days a week and only open until 3:30 when it was at all, and was fundamentally unwelcoming. In years since, I've revelled in university libraries, which definitely have their good points but are overwhelming in their austerity. And then there is the library around the corner from my house, which has the ugliest carpet known to man and plenty of Catherine Cookson, but some really great works scattered about, is open late, has nice staff and I can request any book from the Toronto Public Library system be delivered there just for me! I was stupified to learn that such a process was even possible. I feel quite lucky to be able to benefit from it.

Via Bookninja, I read Misery Loves a Memoir: "Contemporary memoirists have taught us mostly how to survive. They haven't begun to teach us how to live." I am currently listening to a great podcast, Zadie Smith on On Beauty. She is a brilliant speaker, in terms of how she sounds and what she says.

Here and There

The Star Short Story Contest First Prize Winner is published here today. My story appears next week. I bought the Toronto Life Summer Fiction Issue yesterday, lured by Joan Barfoot and Margaret Atwood. Unfortunately, it's the last Fiction Issue- a sad state of affairs discussed here. Prince Edward County profiled here. The List-Loving Observer gives us 50 Albums that changed music.

The Beach(es)

Oh oh oh!

Summer fiction in The Guardian!

Mountain Top

It has been a week of high points. Because after twelve and a half months and a whole lot of trouble, my husband received his visa, and is therefore eligible to work in Canada. It's just a temporary work permit until his permanent residency is completed (which might take another year) and he still can't leave the country, but we won't quibble. He is now looking for a job.

I was a bit disappointed with the anthology The Friend Who Got Away, but perhaps my problem is more with anthologies in general than this specific book. The high points first- there are a few absolutely wonderful essays here, writing by Katie Roiphe and Ann Hood was particularly good. A few essays made me extraordinarily uncomfortable, but perhaps they were supposed to. But in all, this book did not meet my expectations. I think the problem with a book such as this is that writers respond to the topic, rather than the topic responding to the writing, and consequently, some of the stories seemed forced. There is the problem, as in all anthologies of late (and anthologies are very much of late), of how boring it is to listen to privileged women whine. Further, each piece is so liminal, so brief. Perhaps each of these stories could be a book in itself, but as an essay, they seem to skim a surface; like an "It Happened To Me" section of a women's magazine. I just didn't feel like this book taught me anything, and didn't really give me much to empathize with either.

You'd hide in a place that reminded you of hair?

On the obituary writers conference. Here for a library love story. On how technology tests our archives. I especially liked the 1986 BBC Archives contained on laser disc. And perhaps my favourite McSweeneys Pop Song Correspondences ever- Notes on "Sweet Child O' Mine," as Delivered to Axl Rose by His Editor. You won't be sorry.

Book News

I reread Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the weekend, which I read right before The Radiant Way in 2004 and which similarly became one of my definitively favourite books. I read it on the bullet train to Hiroshima for a weekend break at the beginning of that July, and I fell in love with it. I've read it again since, and expect to read it again and again regularly in the future. Because it's brilliant. The writing is just so purely good, and Didion can write about anything and make it mythic and when I have her cadences and rhythms stuck in my head, I am a better writer. I am not sure if that constitutes cheating, but it works. And so after I read this book, I decided to read Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley, which I thought was the most brilliant book in the world when I read it fifteen years ago. It was sort of Didionesque subject matter if you really think about it, but the writing was so not Didion, and I got to the fourth or fifth page, and, nauseated by Pris's burgeoning quivering sexuality in Junior High School, I just couldn't go on. And so I shut the book, which I rarely do. I think if I ever read it again, it will have to be a day when I'm sick in bed and can't be bothered to think. And so I moved on to The Bell Jar, which was brilliant. I hadn't read it for years. The narrative voice is so authentic, and much like The Catcher in the Rye, when I read it the first time, I gave the narrator full credit for the story and took it as presented. It's strange how willingly I did that once upon a time, and now that I am older, older than these characters especially, the books are entirely different. And following that, still riding an Americana wave (with a focus on neuroses), I took up Nine Stories by JD Salinger, and I am exquisitely happy with it.

News

The heights of today were insomnia well into the night and walking to work in a thunderstorm. Better things were to come along, however, in the form of the news that my story "A Big Enough Army" has won second place in the Toronto Star Short Story Contest. The story will be published soon and I'll link to it online when that happens.

A wide selection of cakes

We added another link to our chain of brilliant weekends. On Friday night, we went out for a patio dinner on College Street with Curtis, and capped the evening off with a trip to The Big Chill and a bit of porching. I woke up early Saturday to do some work, and after lunch we set out to see what we could see. And we saw the 25th Anniversary celebrations at The World's Biggest Bookstore, where we got complimentary snowcones. We checked out the Yonge Street Festival after that, and then ventured over to Nathan Philips Square for the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. A particular highlight was wading in the fountain. And then we went to see The City of Beaver Exhibit at The Design Exchange, and we absolutely loved that. And then finally, we caught a showing of Superman, which was everything we wanted it to be. Today was spent in absolute contentment at a pool party with a wide selection of cakes. Perfect, as you might expect.

The Radiant Way

I first read The Radiant Way nearly two years ago while we were living in Japan and moving house and I should have been packing but wasn't, I was so absorbed. I note from the inside cover that this book (a ratty paperback that required taping up upon rereading) cost me just one hundred yen from the English Used Book Shop in Kobe. (Technically, this was not my first book by Margaret Drabble, as I'd read The Millstone in 2001 but I had not really liked it at the time, and had forgotten about it by then.) I think I only bought this book because I knew Drabble was AS Byatt's sister and I had liked Possession. I had no premonition that The Radiant Way would create a Drabble devotee of me.

In my opinion, MD was at her peak around the time of The Radiant Way. The Middle Ground, which I believe preceded it, was also pretty fantastic, as was the Realms of Gold. (Oh don't get me started, I never met a Drabble I didn't like). Her early works are very interesting, but perhaps too fashionable, as forty years later, they're quite dated- perhaps the reason The Millstone didn't grab me first time around. By the late-1970s, MD was no less concerned with current events and society, but these issues become contextualized in a way that remains relevant. Her later books (since the mid-1990s) are more focused and deliberate and they're great, but I do particularly love the sprawling nature of The Radiant Way, and her other such books. When Margaret Drabble was trying to write the world. Here, there be England I think- another reason The Millstone mightn't have so appealed to me. There is particular Englishness about her works that I wouldn't have understood before I lived there- what it means to be "suffering from a case of the Midlands" for example, which I remember from a book I cannot remember which.

And so I finished reading The Radiant Way this morning before I got out of bed. It did not read so differently from the first time, as I read it only two years ago, though I have since read the rest of the trilogy and so I got to be all omnipotent and know how things turned out. And having since read all of Margaret Drabble's novels, it's interesting to see her peculiarities that I wouldn't have noted first time around. The Radiant Way is a wonderful book about ideas and history, and I am particularly fond of the narrative style. That Margaret Drabble has, through her works, created an entire universe and the ease with which she maneuvers her people within it is amazing. I also like that as readers, we are privy to the author's view in a way that characters are not. That two characters who are complete strangers pass one another in the street, and nobody else knows it but we do. That characters from her other books keep popping up surprisingly. That the narrator doesn't profess to make or know the story, just to tell it. To read as a writer, such a narrative is deeply humbling. Through the progression of Drabble's work, it is clear that it takes ages and ages to get this good, but the thing is so few people ever get this good.

Knot Physics

~One problem in tracing the history of knots is the belief by ancient civilizations that knots had magical powers. Tying any knot is an adventure in space-a single piece of cord or twine is used to create two of three dimensions. It is easy to see why they believed magic was needed~ Donna M. Lightbody in Let's Knot: A Macrame Book

Put Your Boots On

This review delves into the short story. And I've been wanting to read This Friend Who Got Away for a while now, and ordered it from the public library (!) after finding this old article on it. And I love Heather Mallick. As always.

I also love Franz Ferdinand's Eleanor, Put Your Boots On.

And Pickle Me This Press will be publishing a new book by summer's end! How positively exciting.