June 7, 2010
Another Part of Print Culture
The National Magazine Awards were given out this weekend, and the results were sort of depressing. The very first line of their website begins, “Despite a year of magazine closings, restructuring and layoffs…” and the recipients of the awards are largely the few hardy brands which remain: The Walrus, Report on Business, Macleans, Canadian Geographic. I know it hasn’t been a good year for periodicals in Canada, given that the Canada Magazine Fund and Publishing Assistance Program are about to be gutted in favour of the much more limited Canada Periodical Fund. The new funding program restricts federal funding to periodicals who distribute at least 5,000 copies a year – a exceedingly difficult number to reach for a magazine published 2 – 4 times per year as so many smaller publications are. But the new funding structure doesn’t come in until this year – our struggling but excellent little ecosystem of tiny journals and quarterlies ought to have been better represented in the NMAs. I love the Walrus, don’t get me wrong – but does highest-profile actually mean best?
This made me wonder what the rest of you are reading. During Book Camp’s Literary Grassroots session, almost every person in the room admitted to having a subscription to a print periodical of some kind. What are you subscribed to? Why? And how do your favourite magazines and journals hold up to the big boys?
I am positively addicted to periodicals. It’s the same neurosis that compels me to check my email every three minutes – I love getting mail. And there are just so many incredible publications out there! Not, sadly, ones which win NMAs – but here’s a look inside my mailbox.
“A Journal of the Printing Arts” from Porcupine’s Quill, DA is dedicated to all those things about the form of the book. The focus is decidedly Canadian. Rather than a series of smaller articles and features, each issue tends to zero in on, for example, one press, artist, or issue and really go over the subject in excellent, long-form detail. The journal is, needless to say, beautifully produced. My favourite bit is the “keepsakes” included in each issue – small prints done by or after the work of print artists like Frank Newfeld or Gerard Brender à Brandis. I’m always scumming garage sales for more little frames for these little beauties!
I wasn’t sure about this one at first. What I wanted was a Canadian version of British Notes and Queries, and that is exactly what this was once supposed to be. Over the years the mandate has broadened somewhat from a more scholarly study of books (not, necessarily, literature) to a more conventional literary review. Nevertheless it remains the place to go for a report on the Canadian book world outside of the Canadian publishing world. Honestly, that it is where David Mason publishes his essays was what ultimately sold me on it. The content is a little unpredictable, but that means it’s likely to contain some really excellent pieces. My only complaint is that they make it devilishly difficult to subscribe. For heaven’s sake, I don’t want to “print out” an order form and mail it in! I want to click on a button and enter my credit card information. Please, and thank you.
This is a British publication, but I love, love, love it! From their website: “Slightly Foxed is a rather unusual kind of book review, informal and independent-minded, and its readers tend to be independent-minded too – people who don’t want to read only what the big publishers are hyping and the newspapers are reviewing.” I picked up my first copy from the British Library in London and have never enjoyed so many successive essays in my life. It isn’t about is-the-book-good or should-you-buy-this-book, but what did this book mean to its reader, and how did it fit into the story he’s about to tell you. I came back from England determined to start a Canadian version of it. Coincidentally I had also just read Don Gillmor’s phenomenal essay My Life With Tolstoy, and I thought, this is the kind of thing I like to read. Needless to say my little idea never got off the ground, but I did subscribe to Slightly Foxed.
The Quill and Quire, The Times Literary Supplement and The Walrus
They who need no introduction. Let me talk about The Walrus for three minutes: I am only subscribed for Don Gillmor. Once upon a time I would read my Walrus cover to cover and be a better person for it, but I really think it has gone (a little) downhill, its 30+ NMAs not withstanding. For starters, reading Ken Alexander’s editorials was once the highlight of my month. The first editorial I read by current editor John Macfarlane was a plea for money unadorned by anything worth reading. They haven’t got any better. Somehow the articles don’t bite the way they used to. Yes, it still contains some excellent reading and I don’t think there’s a serious challenger for its status as the “Atlantic of the North”, but that speaks more to the lack of competition than any greatness on the Walrus‘s part. I remain subscribed because I want to support the project and, as I say, three or four doses on Don Gillmor per year are worth the price of subscription to me. I have hopes that The Walrus will have higher highs. Perhaps if the remainder of the Canadian magazine world can stay afloat, some competition will do it some good…?
May 31, 2010
Moving the Goal Posts
Don’t you hate it when you spend seven years on a manuscript and then one day some Hollywood hack coughs out some summer blockbuster containing some superficially-similar concepts, and all of a sudden elements of your story that were carefully planned literary allusions make the whole work look like fan fiction? And you could change those story elements, but then you lose the literary allusion and a lot of flavour that goes with it, and anyway YOU WERE THERE FIRST and THEY’RE the ones who should have to do a rewrite, right?
Yah, me too.
May 27, 2010
The Short Story and Me
Apparently it’s Short Story Month. I know this because The Afterword and Steven Beattie say so. I think this might be something The Afterword invented, to be honest I haven’t been paying a huge amount of attention because I don’t consider myself a big fan of short stories. But that alone should have been reason enough for me to stick my neck out. If the point is to encourage the reading of short stories, I am the perfect target market – an avid reader who for no particularly good reason avoids the form.
The last two short story collections I read were Joyce’s Dubliners and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find, both of which I read for a class on modern literature. Because, I think, of the context, I have no fond memories of either book. And, because they are considered to be two of the finest examples of the short story in the English language, I assumed that since I didn’t really like them, I wouldn’t really like any short stories. This was five years ago – I don’t think I’ve read a short story since.
But it wasn’t always this way. When I was a kid – 11, 12 years old – I had subscriptions to Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s and Fantasy & Science Fiction. I read The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror every year from 1990-1998. For years I felt Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s collections of “adult fairy tales” (from Snow White, Rose Red through Black Heart, Ivory Bones) were the reading highlight of my year. And Charles de Lint’s first collection of Newford stories, Dreams Underfoot, was probably responsible for changing my life.
I know, that’s sad from a literary standpoint. Some teens latch on to Holden Caulfield or Jack Kerouac or Nietzsche; not me. I was living in a small down up the Ottawa Valley, hating every minute of my life there. I didn’t have the patience or the focus to channel my frustration into anything useful, but I did have a grab-bag of strange and various talents, and a vivid imagination. In de Lint’s stories I met folkies and artists and buskers who were living, as far as my 16-year-old self was concerned, the perfect life. I was already a talented violinist, so I decided to take up fiddling, and jumped ship to Toronto at my earliest convenience. I wasn’t quite done high school and I didn’t have anywhere to live, but I was determined to find the community of like-minded de-Lint-ian vagabonds who would, I was sure, be my best friends forever.
Suffice to say it didn’t end up quite like that. Still, Dreams Underfoot moved me to Toronto and motivated me to have some of my more memorable adventures. Once the busking season ended and winter started making itself known I dabbled in the more indoor – but nevertheless de Lint-inspired – career path offered by the University of Toronto’s Celtic Studies program. Failing this I meandered through a similarly inspired and equally brief film career, still determined to find the faery artists of de Lint’s world. Even now, years later, when I muse about the cozy bookshop I’d love to someday own, my mind calls up Mr Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery, a de Lint creation.
This is probably the other reason I’ve shied away from short stories: I’m afraid if I go back to them I’ll find they weren’t nearly as good as I thought they were when I was 14. Looking back at what moved us as young people is bound to be an embarrassing exercise.
This week I thought I’d meet my 14-year-old self half way. Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu is supposed to offer magic and fantasy in the vein of John Crowley, which is to say, with style and skill not often found in genre writing. I did quite like her full-length novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. And serendipitously, Ladies of Grace Adieu is illustrated by Charles Vess, who I met earlier this month at TCAF, and who illustrated so many of the Charles de Lint books of my youth. Fate? Anyway the book has been sitting unread on my shelf for four years now. It’s time.
May 14, 2010
The Other Thing I’ll Be Doing This Weekend
(Because, you know, BookCamp T.O. isn’t enough to keep me busy. I need another major book event the next day!)
The twice-yearly Toronto Book Fair and Paper Show will be this Sunday, May 16th and me, I have a mission: to find and acquire any of the works of George Taylor Denison III. Why him? Who’s he? He’s my great-great-great uncle (fun fact: he is also the great-grandfather of Oberon Press founder Michael Macklem, making Macklem my 3rd cousin, once removed – did you know they have calculators for this kind of thing?)
Uncle George (George Taylor Denison III)
The politics of George Taylor Denison stand in stark contrast to my own, but nevertheless he was in his time a fairly influential politician, military officer and writer. His works ranged from the polemical (Canada, is she prepared for war? or, a few remarks on the state of her defences, pamphlet, 1861) to the historical (Reminiscences of the Red River rebellion of 1869, Toronto, 1873) and contain a good amount of local Toronto flavour (Recollections of a police magistrate, Toronto, 1920). It’s this latter title that set me on my search.
The Toronto Book Fair and Paper Show can be, in a lot of ways, a sad little show, but there’s no question it’s a brilliant place to find works of local history. I have always known I had “writers in the family”, so to speak – family legend has it that the library of Rusholme (the old “family estate” which would have been bounded by what is today Dovercourt Road, St. Anne’s Road, Rusholme Street, and College Street) contained not just George Taylor’s works but those of my great-great grandfather, Frederick Charles Denison (Historical record of the Governor–General’s Body Guard, and its standing orders, Toronto, 1876). But by the time Rusholme was sold and bulldozed in 1953 the library had vaporized. Certainly my family retains some books as well as other keepsakes – I’m sure the same can be said of other descendants – but as for a comprehensive collection there is none.
At last year’s book fair I happened to stumble across a copy of Recollections of a police magistrate. It was inscribed by George to some unknown, and priced at $60. I was sure someone in the family had a copy so I let it pass, thinking I’d just track down whoever it was that inherited Uncle George’s books and take responsibility for them. Silly me. The family seems largely agreed that if any books had remained at Rusholme by the time Uncle Harold (Harold Edmund Denison, son of Frederick Charles) sold it, they were either sold or absconded with by some distant and unscrupulous relation. Nobody has any copies of anything. Suddenly that $60 Magistrate looks like one that got away.
But if collecting were easy, it wouldn’t be any fun. After a year’s reflection I’ve decided to get snapping and track the family books down in some shape or form. Any copies would be nice, but wouldn’t it be fine to find the family copies from Rusholme? I’m seized with the thrill of the hunt. In any case, I feel after my unfriendly review of the Book Fair last year I owe it a second go. It’s worth mentioning that Heritage Antique Shows has lowered the entrance price from $7 to $5 – maybe they read my post? Perhaps this indicates some thoughtful planning on the part of the show organizers. So off I go, in search of my bookish heritage.
April 28, 2010
Reading the “Romance” Pt. II
Disclosure: I am a religious, fanatical, avid and loyal reader of Romance novels.
That Alexandre Dumas is worshiped in my household as a sort of hearth-god should have been your first hint; that I’ll blather for twenty minutes uninterrupted about War and Peace to anyone who gives me an opening should be the second. I have space in my heart for Walter Scott, Robert Lewis Stevenson, – maybe not Ryder Haggard -, Hardy and George MacDonald. If a book has conspiracies, chases, sword fights or similar swashbuckling, oaths, irrational acts of honour, betrayals, daring escapes or rescues, I am very likely to read it and love it. Any confusion between my Romances and the Romance novels pulped out by Harlequin can be settled with an assurance that my darlings are also terribly romantic, so the word can be interpreted either way if you like. Or at least they are terribly romantic to me.
I complained a while ago about the lack of romance novels out there for those of us with half a brain. As it turns out there’s plenty of brainy romance available for those of a particular romantic disposition, unluckily I am differently disposed. I said this in front of a room of romance readers recently and they immediately jumped to the conclusion that I was looking for something kinky. This isn’t the case, and I’ve had some trouble putting it into words until now. But my recent reading has clarified the issue.
Queen Margot, the 1994 film - admittedly, some of the best eye-candy ever put on film.
I’ve been reading what are collectively known as The Valois Romances, three novels by Alexandre Dumas set in the late 16th century and the Louvre of the Valois dynasty (Francis I through Henry III, roughly). The individual volumes are known by a variety of titles depending on the edition or translation, but the most famous of these is probably the first, known best as Queen Margot. It is best known, probably, because of a very well-received recent film of the same name, La Reine Margot (1994).
The differences between these books and the film align very well with the differences between my expectations of a romance novel, and the Rest of the World’s expectations. The plots of both are similar, if not identical: Marguerite of the Valois, youngest sister to the king, Charles IX, has been given away in a political marriage to Henry, King of Navarre. The kingdom is, at this point, destabilized by conflict between the Catholic institution and the Huguenot population, and Marguerite’s marriage to Henry, king of the Protestants, is supposed to create some kind of stability. It is a loveless marriage, with both parties agreeing to turn blind eyes to the other’s love affairs. Amidst a storm of politics, massacres, and intrigue, Marguerite falls in love with and carries on a passionate affair with a Protestant nobleman named la Môle. As in all of Dumas’ novels, nothing ends well for anyone.
La Môle’s devotion to Marguerite in the novel is complete. Marguerite, in typical Romantic style, is flawless in every way, a paragon of femininity and queenly-ness. At first blush the feminists here roll their eyes, but the Romantics were more fair to their heroines than we are today: Marguerite is cunning, calculated, educated, intelligent and in control, and these are all considered virtues. She is, after all, the Queen of Navarre, and Queens are second to no one. La Môle describes himself as “first of her subjects” and by this he doesn’t mean “the best of them”, he means “first in line to serve her”. And that’s what he does, up to the minute he is killed (sorry, spoiler – but as I say, no hero of Dumas ever escapes this fate!)
The Marguerite of the film is a more complex woman, certainly, but the means by which they’ve “problematized” her are off-putting. Flaws abound. Marguerite is known as the whore of the Louvre, and has been sleeping with (or raped by) all three of her brothers. Unable to secure a lover on her wedding night, she wanders the streets of Paris in a mask posing as a prostitute and eventually “picks up” the film’s la Môle, who boffs her in an alley. She’s uninterested in politics except in so far as they endanger her life, but becomes hysterically moral (and ecumenical) in the wake of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (the Marguerite of the novel is indifferent to the massacre, except in so far as it has shaped politics). But never mind, because the massacre has reunited her with her back-alley-romp, la Môle, with whom she is now smitten. Her past sexual promiscuity is somewhat explained by la Môle’s poetic insight: “She loves as though she is seeking revenge.” In a scene which spoke volumes to me, Marguerite muses that la Môle is now her “subject and Master”. La Môle has a little emo moment over this, and eventually proclaims he is not her subject. This seems to please her, and they go on making love. (???)
What has happened here is the nature of the romantic relationship has been completely upended. In the novel, la Môle worships Marguerite and ultimately gives his life up for her cause. His only desire is to belong to her. In the movie, Marguerite needs a strong hero to save her from her victimized past and la Môle seems is happy to take command of the situation in his strong, usually bare, arms. She belongs to him.
This difference is epitomized in this example, but seems present in some form accross the board. In my Romances, heroes fall in love and spend their books performing great deeds for their ladies, and seem happiest when they can be of some service to them. The women are beyond reproach for anything (except in cases of misunderstandings, which the men with happily flaggelate themselves over later). The drama exists in the plots, intrigues, battles, conspiracies and wars – events in which the women frequently participate. In modern Romances, the women fall in love, spend a lot of time agonizing over some dude, and ultimately are happy when they win the right to be “protected” and commanded by said dude. (At least in my Romances, there’s real stuff to be protected from – kidnappings, assassinations, insults, sword-thrusts…) The women are all kinds of flawed, though the men are not, and the drama is in navigating the relationship. And maybe most typically, in my Romances the ultimate end for a hero is to be allowed to fall on his sword for his love, while the modern Romance has to end happily ever after.
An easy explanation offered to me was that my Romances were written for men, while the modern Romance is written for women. But what does that mean? The women of my Romances are perfect. Who doesn’t want to be perfect? And the men move heaven and earth for them (the Duke of Buckingham starts a war just to get to see Anne of Austria, for heaven’s sake) – isn’t that desirable too? I fail to grasp how nailing down a strong, protective husband beats these as the stuff of day-dreams.
What’s going on here? I can’t decide who needs the literary head-shrinking: me or everyone else. Hopefully the answer won’t be democratically obtained…
March 12, 2010
A Quick Aside:
You’re a bookish bunch, and I know at least one of you is Buried In Print – what do you do when you need to purge your library? Do you sell your books or give them away? To who do you give them, or sell them? Does it matter to you if they find good homes?
December 14, 2009
The Mind of [my] 17-Month-Old
Buying books for toddlers is, I have discovered, a bewildering enterprise. It isn’t so much that there is a gap in the literature for the youngest toddlers – books tend to be “for babies” followed by 2-5 year-olds – though that can be frustrating. And it isn’t that there’s any lack of authoritative bodies to offer recommendations for parents without the time (or ability – spending time in the children’s section of a book store with an actual child in tow is an invitation to a disastrous shelving incident) to browse, for everyone from local library associations to awards bodies have lists for handy reference. It’s that toddlers have the most unexpected preferences. My 30-year-old brain can’t anticipate her 17-month-old one. I have had to resort to quantity over quality, in the hopes that if you swing enough times one is bound to connect with the ball eventually.
In the hopes that I can save even one of you from the same bewilderment I am experiencing, I have compiled below a list of recommendations and vetoes, based not on my literary expertise but instead on my child’s actual preferences.
5 Books My Toddler Loves For No Good Reason I Can Work Out
M is For Moose: A Charles Patcher Alphabet by Charles Patcher, Cormorant Books.
I really thought Patcher’s art was a bit high concept for a 1.5 year old. I mean, Elizabeth Simcoe? Margaret Laurence? Who is the target audience here? But colour me wrong, she loves this damn thing. We read it three times at a sitting. It might be the combination of photo-realism and bright, stark colours in Patcher’s art. It also might be the ducks and moose. See below.
A Barbecue For Charlotte by Marc Tetro, McArthur & Co.
This book was actually a gag gift to myself, bought long before Miss Margaret was conceived. Charlotte the Moose wants to play with the boys but THEY all have antlers and she doesn’t, so she wears a barbecue on her head to fit in. It’s sort of the story of my life. The writing is… well, not exactly clear and well thought out. The pictures are bright and shiny though. I thought that might be why Maggie likes it, but she really gets into the story nowadays, yelling “NO!” when we learn Charlotte doesn’t like pretty bows, and giggling with the other animals when Charlotte first puts the BBQ on her noggin. Go figure!
10 Fat Turkeys by Tony Johnston, Scholastic Books
I won’t lie to you, I don’t like this book at all. It’s highly annoying. It is a library book to us, and after it goes back I won’t be getting it again. My big pet peeve with kids books right now is lazy poetry. This one tries to get away with rhyming “down” and “none” as well as “dance” and “fence”. But man, Maggie loves it. Does she even have any idea what on earth all those turkeys are doing? I doubt it. But she likes the refrain – “Gobble gobble wibble wobble”. Fine. Whatever. But never again!
Have You Seen My Cat? by Eric Carle, Aladdin Books
Maggie is an Eric Carle fiend, which I suppose many children are. I don’t blame her, his books are simple and pretty. But this one in particular I don’t see the appeal of. It’s repetitive without being musical – “Have you seen my cat? This is not my cat!” over and over again. And can a 1.5 year old really tell the difference between a panther, a cougar, a cheetah and a leopard? Does it matter? She seems to grasp which ones say “meow” and which ones say “rawr”, at least!
Snuggle Puppy: A Little Love Song by Sandra Boynton
Okay, I admit I know why she likes this one. It’s based on a (totally uninspired) song off her Philadelphia Chickens album which I picked up at a garage sale for 25 cents, and so I “sing” rather than “read” this one, complete with hugs and kisses. So what’s not to like? Well how about THE BOOK? Boynton seems to have banged off this one on a weekend. There are hardly any pictures and the song is boring. I like Boynton when she’s at her best (Hippos Go Berserk, But Not the Hippopotamus, Moo, Baa, La La La) but the board book versions of her crummy songs all seem like cheap money grabs.
***
5 Books My Toddler Should Like, But Doesn’t
The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, Harper Collins
I remember loving this book as a kid, but the young Miss does not. Of course reading it as an adult, I’m sorta glad: this is the tale of a young spirit stiffled and smothered by an overbearing parent. Maggie’s complaint with it seems to be the dry black-and-white pages… she hastily turns ahead to the paintings. But even they are not enough of a draw to make her ever want to actually read this one.
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, Harper Collins
Okay, yes, this isn’t age-appropriate, but neither are a lot of the books we read. There is less text in this book than in many that she loves. The book is tolerated until we actually come to the place where the wild things are, and then she yells “NO NO NO” and shuts the book. I think the monsters are a tad too aggressive for her – we will revisit this one in the future.
Anything by Dr. Seuss
I started with Fox in Socks, because I enjoy reading it. We tried Cat in the Hat because it had more of a narrative. We downgraded to Hop on Pop and One Fish, Two Fish and finally, in desperation, tried the abridged pocket version of There’s a Wocket in my Pocket, but we’ve had no luck. Perhaps it’s that the critters are too strange looking, or that the books are too long, but she has absolutely zero interest in the works of Dr. Seuss. This makes me a sad, sad mother.
Have You Seen my Duckling? by Nancy Tafuri, Harper Collins
Have You Seen My Cat redux, right? Wrong. My best guess is that Maggie doesn’t know what to make of the many pages with no words. I tried to make up a story for her on those pages but she seems to know that something’s up, maybe because the story changes every time. She also can’t find the duckling, so the hide-and-seek format is lost on her. Instead she “finds” the other seven ducklings standing right there and wonders why the mother duck is such a bone-head. Sigh.
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, Harper Collins
This is a no-brainer. Maggie LOVED this book up until a few months ago and now it (along with the Going to Bed Book) is the great enemy. Because Goodnight Moon means we’re going to bed, and that is a BAD THING. Even if we love to find the socks on each page, and the mouse and kittens are great old friends – no. I ‘m wise to your tricks, mummy. I know you’re trying to put me to bed and I won’t have it! Poor maligned Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. Still I keep it on the night stand just in case. At the least, yelling at Goodnight Moon has become part of our bedtime ritual. I’ll take what I can get!
December 1, 2009
Canada Reads 2010 Quickie Thoughts
I won’t be back on this subject for months now, but I have to quickly state my apprehension at this year’s Canada Reads books.
For starters, I own four out of five of them already. Of those, I have read two (Generation X and Fall On Your Knees), gave up on one because I found it very, very dull (Jade Peony) and was anxiously looking forward to reading the fourth (Nikolski). So I suppose that makes this year’s list very inexpensive for me to acquire (here I come, Good To A Fault).
I will give Jade Peony another try I suppose, but the Coupland & Macdonald are headscratchers. I could read Generation X again to refresh my memory, though I don’t remember liking it enough to actually want to. Meanwhile Fall On Your Knees still lives in my mind as the single most painful thing I’ve ever read. I didn’t dislike it; it was quite good. But do I really want to live through that read again? I mean, eek. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I doubt anyone would claim it is a pleasant read.
Interesting, though. Hm. Yes, hm.
November 30, 2009
Book Prizes and Book Recommendations
I can’t overstate how excited I am about tomorrow’s Canada Reads 2010 announcement. I have it on my calendar and plan to stay home from Miss Margaret’s drop-in centre in order to hear it, pen and paper ready to scribble down my order list. While the competition aspect of Canada Reads is definitely good fun, what I love best about it is simply receiving the recommendations. Does that sound strange? I find it very difficult to get reliable literary recommendations. It isn’t that there aren’t enough recommendations flying around out there, it’s that there are generally too many.
The seasons’ Best of 2009 Picks are a case in point as far as I am concerned. Every publication with a book reviewer publishes a “Top X Books of the Year” right around Christmas, and I find these lists utterly useless. 100 best books of the year? How are there even enough books published in a year for 100 of them to carry the title of best? I am not a prolific reader as far as bookish folks go – at best I might read 40 books in a year, more often I read 20-25. I can’t absorb 100 books in a year, or even decide which of them to dip in to. I need a short list. Best book of the year. If you read one book this year, make it this one.
That, of course, is something literary prizes can be good for. The Booker Prize winners for the last few years have been decent reads, but I’ll admit it’s pretty clear to me that the Giller juries and I have very different opinions on what makes a good book. Canada Reads is different. Although they’re limited to Canadian books, the wider sweep of time reaches more nooks and crannies than a conventional annual book prize. Because of the populist focus of the competition, they seem to go out of their way to represent a bit of everything: something small press, something funny, something a little strange, something that was overlooked the first time around, something classic but forgotten. And probably most importantly, they aren’t trying to find the best book under any technical criteria, they just want to pick a book they’d feel safe recommending to just about anyone. Be still my heart, recommendations actually intended for reading pleasure.
I even have this thought that I might bundle up Miss Margaret tomorrow and head down to the CBC building for the little meet-and-greet at noon. I’m sure I’ll have at least one of the chosen books on my shelf already, and it’s always fun to have signatures inscribed. Does anyone else have a similar thought? I started this blog last year after having a great time discussing Canada Reads 2009 all over the bloggosphere – I’d love to do the same this year, and maybe meet some (more) of you.
Glee!