March 9, 2010
Canada Reads 2010: Day Two
I tell you what, lasting a whole day without reading anyone else’s thoughts on Canada Reads is hard! An unexpected toddler nap schedule has allowed me to watch the broadcast online today and so I am able to get this post up sooner than yesterday – all I can say is THANK GOODNESS. I look forward to being able to actually read your blogs!
I’d forgotten that they won’t announce the eliminated book until tomorrow, so this post might come out a little thin. Has anything changed from yesterday? It doesn’t look like it to me. Some thoughts:
– Perdita Felician is a FIERCE competitor! I don’t know if she has a literary chop to her name but she’s relentless, passionate and articulate. I think it’s going to be hard for anyone to vote against her.
– Michel Vezina is my hero. This man gives the show literary cred and humour to boot, and I think he will no matter what happens to his book. I wonder if his books are available in English? Seems like his books might be more interesting than anything on the table.
– The discussion of the books so far has been, frankly, thin. We’re speaking mostly in rhetoric and adjectives and nobody has managed to single out any incidents or passages yet for detailed scrutiny. I get it, the books are important or brave or passionate or complex or whatever – can we talk about specifics please?
– Am I the only one who found Good To a Fault full of moral pablum? How could none (okay, one; under duress) of the panelists have singled out Dickner’s characters as favourites? They were the best thing about his book!
Anyway, as of today I’m afraid it looks like Generation X is on the chopping block. Rolly, you brought this upon yourself by coming out the gate so defensively! Do what Samantha and Michel are doing: pretend your book doesn’t exist and hope the other panelists forget it’s there. Gen X and Fall are Tall Poppies. Good luck!
March 8, 2010
Canada Reads 2010: Day One Thoughts
This will be brief, because I am a poor working mother with very little time between a 7:30pm broadcast of the debates, a toddler’s bedtime and a blog post! This was easier, let me just say, when I was on Maternity Leave. Oi!
I read 4 of the 5 books for these debates. I skipped Fall On Your Knees because I read it already some 5 or 6 years ago. At the time I put the book down and sighed to myself “Well at least I’ll never have to read that again.” Despite some wavering in December, that conviction stuck with me.
Now don’t get me wrong. It pains me to admit it, but I think Fall On Your Knees is the best book of the batch this time around. I also think it is unequivocally the least deserving of the Canada Reads 2010 title. For me, anyway, the prize is about discovering a forgotten or hidden gem, and recommending it to people. Fall On Your Knees needs discovering the same way I need a third armpit. If there are five people left in this country who haven’t read it already I suggest that’s entirely intentional and I doubt those people will run out and buy it at the end of this week no matter what happens.
I didn’t love any of the books this year, but I’ll grudgingly stand up for two of the books: Jade Peony, because it was good and I think most people would enjoy and be bettered by an encounter with it even if it was a little boring; and Generation X because it’s clever and different, even if it drove me a little crazy. I don’t think Good to a Fault or Nikolski were particularly good as novels, though both authors are obviously quite adept with words. Sometimes – AHEMGilAdamsonAHEM – it takes more than an agile vocabulary to tell a good story. That’s what I think.
Now the other thing about Jade Peony is I thought it could sneak a win thanks to being pretty unoffensive on all counts and being defended by a passionate and intelligent panelist. Thought, because after listening to the debates I now wonder where this is going to go. I thought Fall On Your Knees would be eviscerated for it’s overexposure & Tall Poppy status, and I thought Perdita Felicien’s lack of a literary background would make her a easy target.
But man, this year’s panelists are a bunch of hippies. What love for everyone’s books! What soft pitches! The elephant in the room that is Fall‘s Oprah endorsement was totally unmentioned while Generation X of all things took knocks for popularity. Everyone loved Nikolski and Jade Peony and Fall and Good to a Fault. The pitches and defenses were downright sentimental, as if none of our panelists had any literary training. I now fear for both my adopted charges because Jade Peony was greeted with polite but unenthusiastic praise and Rolly Pemberton’s Generation X pitch sounded petulant and defensive right from the get-go.
But maybe I just don’t read poker faces very well. Perhaps they’re giving Fall an easy ride because they’re all planning to give it the boot anyway and don’t want to be obnoxious about it. And maybe Jade Peony will slip through to the finals by traveling the middle road! Suffice to say I think this is still anyone’s game. Perhaps tomorrow daggers will be drawn!
(And yes, for me, 600 words is “brief”…)
March 5, 2010
Reading Canada: Generation X vs How Happy to Be
Ding ding, Round 4! Douglas Coupland and Katrina Onstad have occupied my last week and a half with their respective contributions to Canada Reads and Canada Reads Independently. And, I’ll be honest with you, one other book wedged itself in there with them due to its overwhelming relevance:
Presented, for the time being, without comment.
I enjoyed both these books; their cleverness, their laugh-out-loud humour, their irony. These make-believe worlds of painfully intelligent twenty-or-thirty-somethings were alluring, tempting and familiar. After all, in my daydreams my friends and neighbours are this smart, funny and colourful too. It’s a great place, these dreams, where being disaffected and quirky is just a magnet for other quirky and eccentric people with no real downside except a lingering sense of disappointment with the rest; of the world who have failed to live up to the standard we imagine ourselves to hold – but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Coincidentally, I am of roughly the same age as the characters in both books, as are most of my friends. And we share with these characters a sense that we’re over-educated, too smart, or had expectations too high for where we actually find ourselves. Shouldn’t we be further along by now? Is this really where we thought we’d be? Weren’t we destined for something more? We’re poor and overworked; the most successful of us employed in IT on the basis of skills we picked up as 14-year-olds or else, at least, married to and supported by someone bearing that description. The majority of us are in school again, still, for our third-or-fourth degrees; desperately upgrading skills in the hopes that we can, maybe, someday merit a salary – salary! – or an hourly wage that pushes us up over the mythical $25k mark.
But unlike the characters in these books, our status as marginal is actual and not chosen and therein, I think, lies my ultimate annoyance with both these books. Their dissatisfaction was so privileged, so bloody twee that I couldn’t buy into their personal demons. Coupland’s three protagonists all quit good, real-adult jobs because of some vague spiritual dissatisfaction in order to “slum” in Palm Springs, an ascetic “poverty” that doesn’t, apparently, preclude chain smoking, drinking, car ownership, impromptu vacations and roommate-free living. It’s hard to ignore Andy and Claire’s rich-kid backgrounds, or Dag’s forsaken Marketing money. Coupland seems quite aware of the rich-white-kid-spiritual-crisis phenomenon, but is in no way critical of it. On the contrary, I think we’re supposed to see some kind of virtue in how they’ve turned away from The Man to pursue their own pleasures.
Now I’d like to register a difference of opinions with some other reviewers who’ve read the book for Canada Reads – I think part of the problem may in fact be that this book was written fifteen years ago. Part of Andy/Dag/Claire’s disaffection seems rooted in a sense that history is over, that there’s nothing to fight for or against anymore except banality. Well, that was 1995. What, I wonder, would they have thought of the post-9/11 world? Causes, real crises are a dime a dozen today. The world, if you care to look, is opening itself up in new, unprecedented ways. It would be hard for anyone with a social conscience to look around North America today and see nothing but the decaying remnants of the 1940s-70s. This, I think, is exactly why Coupland wrote Generation A. History has restarted. To drop out isn’t the saint’s path anymore – today our generation is expected to do something about it.
Katrina Onstad’s heroine Max, meanwhile, had at the very least some personal demons. A dead mother, a distant father and a drinking habit we’re supposed to buy as a serious dependency. She seems hyper-aware of the hypocrisies of her industry but completely ignorant of her own motivations – nevertheless, privileged again to hold a very enviable bylined position with a major Canadian newspaper. We can shrug off the ludicrousness of her “poor-me-my-job-sucks” line because she does seem to have some real, actual baggage to deal with as well – perhaps this poor little rich girl really does deserve our sympathy.
And I was with her, I was! Right up until the end. The final crisis (and I will try hard not to spoil the book here) prompts her to wander right back home, find herself a cozy nest in a west coast cottage, vault over her alcohol-and-nicotine addictions as if they were afterthoughts, reconcile with everyone in her life and in the end, tah dah! It All Works Out. She goes from lost to found in about thirty pages.
This completely trivialized the rest of the book for me in one way, but in another way I actually kind of get it. The figure of the girl who is directionless and out of control until motherhood finds her and gives her some purpose is not without precedent (I’m thinking Natasha from War and Peace, or in some ways myself). But by the same token, it made me feel that Max’s issues earlier in the book were not really that “real” after all, and all her whining and confusion was really just self-absorbed adolescence drawn out too long and she just needed to grow up. Maybe this was what Generation X lacked – the characters didn’t grow up.
Both books, however, were paradigms of the phenomenon that Hal Niedzviecki describes in his 2005 non-fictional Hello, I’m Special. Individuality is a remarkable phenomenon that has been fetishized into the must-have accessory of the 21st century. The quest for specialness, for destiny at, it seems, the expense of any satisfaction with simply living a life is at the heart of the characters in Generation X, and to a lesser extent Max as well. The obsession with celebrity culture that all the characters exhibit is certainly an obsession with specialness, with uniqueness. No matter what else they might have going for them, they can’t seen to find satisfaction without feeling as if they’re destined. And that, in my opinion, is simply selfish.
I’m sorry to say I don’t think I’ll be able to post the 5th of these – while Century by Ray Smith is definitely going to be my next read, I really can’t stomach the thought of reading Fall on Your Knees again. Next week I look forward to dual debates, some flip-flops, reflections and changes of opinion, and perhaps a some congratulatory book sales. Good luck all!
February 21, 2010
Reading Canada: Jade Peony vs Moody Food
Alright, Round 3 of my attempt to get through all ten books on the Canada Reads and Canada Reads Independently lists by March 1st. It’s going better than I thought! Not only am I making actual headway (though with 4 books to finish in the next week it might not look that way) but the order I’ve chosen to read the books in, based on a complex grab-the-book-nearest-you system, is causing the books to form neat little pairings that bring out like themes.
Jade Peony and Moody Food, for instance, both turned out to be books for boys. I’ve always been sensitive to gender roles in literature, probably because I’ve always felt that my favored brand of tough-girl heroine-ism is chronically underrepresented. I go into every book looking for that strong-headed, righteous girl to cheer for and follow, and in both Nikolski and Wild Geese I certainly, refreshingly, found it. By Good to a Fault and Hair Hat I’d descended into the realm of prissy and confused self-victimized women, and now in Jade Peony and Moody Food I find women have vanished altogether into the background. Don’t misunderstand me: both books are perfectly fair to women in most respects, but it isn’t really about them. These are books about boys.
Jade Peony, set in Vancouver’s Chinese community in the 1930s and 1940s, depicts life as seen through the eyes of three Chinese-Canadian kids who are forging new hybrid identities. Aside from the perils of the immigrant experience coupled with the usual agonies of adolescence, we have extra tensions provided by the Second Sino-Japanese War followed immediately by World War II. Though issues of immigrant identity and coming-of-age are certainly boy’s and girl’s issues, the addition of the wars into the mix fixes the characters’ focuses into men’s territory: Us vs Them, Politics and Enemies, Upheaval and Independence. The three major women in the book, Jook-Liang, Poh-Poh and May, all have great potential as leading literary ladies but instead they are the sacrificed, the aspects of society which have to bend and give in the wake of war.
Liang’s story was probably the weakest of the three for this reason. She is told she is good for nothing and though she resolutely resists the idea of limitation she nevertheless is treated by Choy as a tiny innocent lens through which to tell the story of the Elders of the community. She has no agency whatsoever in her story’s climax, when her Monkey Man is taken from her to play a basically political role in returning bones to China. For the remainder of the book, she is relegated to the background where she lives an apparently typical teenaged Canadian life.
Her grandmother, Poh-Poh, is certainly a stronger force in the book but nevertheless represents the outgoing traditions and beliefs. She is briefly vindicated as a ghost in Sekky’s story, but it still took her death and disappearance to bring that about, and ultimately her death is the catalyst that brings Sekky out of the woman’s realm and into the bad world of boys, fights, soldiers and adventures.
Poor May is the ultimate casualty of the boy’s world. I won’t utterly spoil the book for you, but her fate hardly seemed to be her own. Instead it was the byproduct of the fights, the enmity, the side-taking and the wars.
I did, however, love the book.
I can’t say as much for Moody Food. This book was so far off into the boy’s world that I seriously considered somewhere around page 60 handing it off to my father to read for me. I felt very strongly right from the beginning that this wasn’t a book intended for me. “Buckskin” Bill and Thomas Graham’s descent into drug-fueled musical ecstasy was, right from the beginning, a teenaged boy’s fantasy taken too far. To Robertson’s credit , the only people who seem unaware of how utterly immature Bill and Thomas are being are Bill and Thomas. The supporting cast are rolling their eyes from the very beginning. Late nights, early mornings, drinking binges, wacky hyjinx, harder and harder drugs and, through it all, the search for musical epiphany – man, I knew these guys in high school.
But Robertson didn’t invent the genre and what he’s portraying seems to be an actual decade of male hormones allowed to run rampant. This book drove home for me why I’ve never really liked the idea of the 60s. For a decade that spawned so much positive change – women’s rights, minority rights, environmental awareness, social liberalization, individual freedom – the actual stories on the ground so often seem to be undermined by the participants’ inability to actually understand what they were doing. The positive changes seem like afterthoughts of the central experiment, which was to live a life of hedonism. The great hangover of the 60s seems to have come when a generation of teengaers finally woke up one morning and realized they had to actually work for change. And so most of them hung up their hats and gave up – because effort, puh, yah right.
So my distaste for the setting was not Robertson’s fault. But I have at least one bone to pick with him, and that is over the treatment of Thomas and Heather’s relationship. At first it’s pathetic and seems doomed to fail, but as the book turns darker the relationship grows abusive. Only once does the narrator takes his eyes off the thrilling story of Thomas long enough to cast judgement on what he’s doing to his girlfriend, and the result is two airy half-pages of reflection and no action before we go back to the story. And this is before Thomas starts Heather on the road to hard drug dependence. Where is everyone else? Okay, we can buy that Bill is too strung out and spineless to stand up to his idol over the treatment of “his” woman, but Christine? Kelorn? Slippery? What’s going on here? Why is everyone content to let this woman be the sacrifice to Thomas’s musical genius?
Moody Food is definitely at the bottom of my list for this challenge so far. It was engrossing, a genuine page-turner, and uncomfortably evocative of a seriously messed-up time. But so very not my thing.
Counting down the days and pages – two more pairings to go!
February 10, 2010
Reading Canada: Good to a Fault vs Hair Hat
Welcome to Round 2 of my Reading Canada marathon in which I attempt desperately to read all five Canada Reads 2010 books, as well as those for Kerry Clare’s Canada Reads Independently over at Pickle Me This! I’m actually half way there, have previously read two of the remaining books, and am about to take an 11-day vacation by train out to the East Coast – so things are looking good! I may hit that target yet.
Good to a Fault and Hair Hat were both books that, not long ago, I would have found off-putting. I came to think of them affectionately as “the two books starring a lot of people I hate”, but this is in no way criticism. Endicott and Snyder are describing people in painful, vulnerable, warts-and-all detail that highlights the best of the novel writer’s craft.
Carrie Snyder showed an especial talent for directing me to the very heart of a character with a mere observation of his or her lifestyle – “sandwiches made with fluffy white bread, cheese and iceberg lettuce that hadn’t yet gone brown in the crisper”. Or the man who leaves six cents tip every day, convinced it must add up to something – he’s not sure what, but something. These throwaway details spoke volumes about the people she carves. I am not a devotee, typically, of the short story and so perhaps this ability to cut to the heart of the matter with expert thrusts is typical of the art. But for me it was refreshing.
Also refreshing was the length of the book. I don’t mean this, again, as criticism, but instead as an eye-opening observation. I’m used to reading long, dense books which so envelop the reader that by the time you’re finished with it you feel like you’ve been in a three-week long coma. Snyder’s short, sparse book sparkles by comparison. I didn’t get caught up or lost and put the book down with the same feeling of discovery that I started it out with.
Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault painted a different kind of portrait of unlikable people. On the one hand we have the Hard Done By Family, tied firmly to your heartstrings by three children who, despite their upbringing and background, are innocent bystanders in life, capable of barely credible feats like repeated re-readings of Vanity Fair at age ten – something we are to suppose any kid could do if only given the opportunity. On the other hand we have the Meek and Boring Spinster who takes on responsibility for the Hard Done By Family in a reflexive act of something, possibly Goodness. To make sure we don’t get too Hallmark an impression of her characters, Endicott deconstructs Clara’s goodness as a kind of selfishness and the Gage family’s vulnerability as somewhat self-inflicted, by pride if not by deeper faults. Then, once we feel both sides are thoroughly blemished with Humanity, she props them both up with a kind of pragmatic gumption and lets you think they might all be Good after all.
I enjoyed the book, though not, I think, because of Endicott’s moralizing but instead because I never believed in an objective goodness in the first place and could just enjoy the simple story of three kids getting a better kick at the can than perhaps they might have got to begin with. For me, this was a satisfying story of money put to good use. Clara wasn’t using it, and I found her “hardships” pretty petty compared to the improvements made for the kids. Maybe this was my inner mommy taking over my reading, but once the children were introduced, everyone else’s personal drama ceased to have any relevance.
I’d like to now address my confusion with its blurbs and reviews. I have heard several people refer to the book as a “painful read” and the quote from Elizabeth Hay on the front cover of my copy also led me to expect the kind of story that makes you wince with sympathy for the main characters: Hay tells us we’re about to embark on a discovery of the fine difference “between being useful and being used”. I find this assessment baffling. If anyone was using anybody, Clara was using those kids to get some meaning in her life. And it seemed to benefit them, so who loses in this scenario? Seemed pretty win/win to me. I wonder if maybe I was supposed to feel that Clara was more hard done by than I did? Was I supposed to feel bad that she had sleepless nights and a dirty living room? Or that her phone card got charged up when she herself refused to cancel it? I missed it, in any case. I didn’t see any “being used”, just “being useful”. There was no Fault in the Good done in this book, as far as I can see. This is one book I look forward to hearing the official Canada Reads debates on – I really wonder if I missed the point.
This was an enjoyable two weeks of reading! Jade Peony is off to a off to a good start as well, and I think I’ll dip into Moody Food over my vacation. Until next time!
February 5, 2010
The New Canadian Library Experiment
I’m fond here at Inklings of reporting on uncontrolled bookselling research I’ve engaged in. It makes me feel as if I’m contributing something – data – to the debate while hiding my sometimes abrasive opinions behind lightly biased but more or less substantiated findings. And this, certainly, is a subject I’ve had passionate opinions about in the past which I seek to see vindicated in numbers.
The New Canadian Library (hereafter, NCL) was founded in 1958 at McClelland & Stewart during Jack McClelland’s famous (infamous) regime as a response of sorts to the cheap and portable classics serieses available of American and British backlists. The idea was to provide cheap reprints for, largely, the college market, in order to support and further the study (and therefore legitimacy) of Canadian literature. I won’t give you too thorough a history; an excellent history of the series’s early years is available from Janet Friskey, New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978, while Roy MacSkimming’s Perilous Trade also contains a good account.
What concerns me is the recent history. In 2009, McClelland & Stewart relaunched NCL, putting the old pocket-sized and inexpensive editions out of print and replacing them with fancy new trade paperbacks at a significantly higher price point.
Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising - $12.95
The launch was celebrated as a Very Good Thing in honour of NCL’s 50th birthday, but I can tell you that from this corner of the world at least, the transition was a source of a great deal of anxiety. It wasn’t clear right from the beginning what would be kept in print and what would be vanishing, and for a period of about a year it became difficult to get any kind of quantity of some very important titles as they had been put out of print in the old edition but hadn’t yet made it to the new one. The increased price on the edition was also not something the academic community wanted to hear about. These editions were intended right from the beginning to serve university students who don’t want to pay 50% for a fancy redesign. Over a flurry of emails and phone calls we gathered that someone felt that a redesigned prestige book would get better face time at the big book chains, and would add to its saleability in the general trade market. We academic types would have to just suck it up because the people wanted prettier books.
Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising - $19.95
These titles have been on the shelf now for roughly two years. We dutifully stock every single title available. Let me tell you how the new adventure is working out for us.
We have only sold two copies of any NCL title outside of the context of a university course: Two Solitudes, and Wild Geese. The Wild Geese, by the way, was sold to me for my Canada Reads Independently reading. You read that right. One “real” sale in two years.
The books are, however, still stocked to supply Canadian Lit course lists. These are unquestionably the bulk of our NCL sales. I am looking right now, in fact, at 45 copies of the giant new Diviners by Margaret Laurence which have been sitting unsold since September. Our sales of this book this year have been abysmal. In 2007, we sold about 150 copies of the old, $12.95 edition to classes totaling 290 students. That’s about 52% of the students – a typical number for a book which is widely available in used book stores.
This year? We’ve sold 30 copies of the new $22.95 edition to a class of 120. That’s 25%. Now, there’s no way to know why the students are so shy this year – it could be any number of things. But I know they take one look at that big purple tome and turn ashen. Students have breaking points when it comes to buying books – how hard they look for another way to find a text is directly related to the price & weight of what they’ve been told to get. A little, cheap book they’ll buy without too much thought, but throw a big fat expensive book at them and they balk, pull up their socks and get out there to find an alternative.
Who wins under this scenario? My impression is nobody does. The very admirable aims of Roughing It In The Books not withstanding, I don’t see an NCL trade paperback able to compete with the trade front lists of McClelland & Stewart’s parent company, Random House of Canada. They are more expensive, the print quality is lower (they look good in .jpg, but they’re printed on the same cheap newsprint paper that Penguin’s cheaper classics are on), and they get basically no advertising whatsoever. I can’t believe the publishers don’t know this, which leaves the possibility that they’re just trying to milk more money out of the market they did have, the universities. But they’re kidding themselves if they think both the professors and the students aren’t counting pennies. They can just assign fewer books, or use the libraries. There’s a sweet spot in academic pricing and “in line with frontlists” isn’t it.
This is on my mind with our year end (and returns season) in sight. I find myself wondering how things look to McClelland and Stewart. Are Chapters, Borders, Indigo and Amazon carrying more copies of the series? Are they selling them? At the mouth of Canada’s largest university serving a large percentage of the Canadian literature students in the country, I feel confident saying they’ve hurt their college sales. Was it worth it, guys? And Canadian Literature, that beleaguered old underdog, is it stronger or weaker for it?
January 20, 2010
Reading Canada: Nikolski vs Wild Geese
This year I have decided to tackle not one, but two Canada Reads projects – CBC’s mainstream Canada Reads 2010, as well as Kerry Clare’s Canada Reads Independently over at Pickle Me This. This is less ambitious than it sounds. As I have mentioned more than once, the CBC’s picks this year were for the most part books I had read before and was indifferent to, so there was room in my reading schedule for a book club marathon which might actually introduce me to some undiscovered Canadian gems. It also helped that I won a full set of all the Canada Reads books, so I had all this budgeted money to spend!
I started this year with one of each in my reading queue. In Nikolski and Wild Geese I had, in order, a book I expected to love and a book I expected to hate. “Quirky magical realism” describes the ultimate in literary enjoyment in my world, while “bleak realism” is pretty much the bane of my existence. I imagined I’d take time out of the book I didn’t like to indulge in the one I did. But for better and for worse, neither book conformed to my expectations.
Nikolski is a wide favourite for the Canada Reads 2010 title, as far as the blogosphere seems to suggest, in any case. It’s fairly obscure (though it DID win the Governor General’s Award for translation as well as a host of awards in the original French), quirky and just a little experimental. The writing is good, the characters are likable and the imagery is whimsical and evenly-hued, like a Coen Brothers film.
Nautical imagery and themes seep into everything, often, to be frank, at random. “Spot the ocean metaphor” is an amusing game to a point; that point for me was when I asked why we were being asked to play. I didn’t find the novel as a whole evoked “the sea” with any particular success. More success was had in casting the whole episode as An Adventure With Pirates! which I followed with excitement, waiting for the big swashbuckling finale that makes the whole exercise clear. But, as others have already pointed out, no finale was to be found, no denouement or climax or even conclusion. The book ends abruptly, something which struck me as simply lazy. Where some books leave you hanging with a purpose, I got the impression Dickner simply wasn’t sure where he was going with his nautical language game and called it to an end when his time expired.
I didn’t hate the book, but I was certainly disappointed. Dickner shows great aptitude with words and I really loved his characters – Joyce and Arizna in particular – but I really felt that he didn’t have a lot of control over this work. Perhaps it was some first-novel syndrome. He has some cute ideas and some great turns of phrase, but he lazily ended with that, as if some hazy themes carried for a brief time by directionless characters constitutes a story. The “three headed book” was a particularly interesting meta-presence, but as with much in the book, it failed to realize anything significant.
Meanwhile, Wild Geese was a simply masterful work. “Bleak” is an unfair assessment of it. It’s true that Ostenso creates in Caleb Gare a truly terrifying presence, someone who manages to oppress every page of the novel without having to raise a hand or even his voice. Ostenso’s feat is even more astonishing today, given that all the tension, leverage and oppression in the book is rooted in societal norms which on the whole no longer exist. But despite the iron-clad tyranny of Caleb’s regime, the reader is given a lifeline in the form of his youngest daughter Judith, another incredibly crafted, strong female character. Judith’s strength carries enough hope to the reader that the book is compelling rather than depressing.
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. Sometimes I feel that “bleak” novels amount to little more than a contest to see who can compare life to the most inescapable pit-trap. This is neither realistic nor fair, nor do I think it tells us anything about the human condition, unless you already believe that life is an inescapable pit-trap. In any case, 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.
Upwards and onwards! I’m half way through Marina Endicott’s Good To a Fault and about to start Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat – so with luck I will be half way through by Canada Reads mountain by this time next week. Wish me luck!
January 6, 2010
Reading by the Inch
On final tally, I determined I read exactly 21 books last year – not an impressive total. Speaking with a coworker I identified another part of the “problem” – my fatal attraction to epic, dense, 1000-page door-stoppers rather than more modest reads. My coworker likes her fiction “sparse” and blew through most of J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre last year, by comparison. Such choices mean she out-paced my reading 2 works to 1, while still keeping to worthwhile literary reads.
Naturally I resolved this year to read shorter, but still worthwhile, books. I have been meaning to read more Martin Amis, Coetzee, Julian Barnes, Orhan Pamuk, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe and whathaveyou. How slight an investment, after all, to read a book which actually fits in my purse.
This resolution lasted about ten minutes. I can’t help it. The books that really turn me on are best measured in pounds. I want to read Wolf Hall, The Children’s Book, Foucault’s Pendulum and Don Quixote. A University of Toronto professor is offering a very tasty course in romanticism this term and I’m already drooling at the thought of reading Lorna Doone and The Laodicean. I’ve been waiting all year for the paperback release of Dan Simmons’ Drood. It has been a full year since I’ve read any Dumas, and I have been itching to read La Reine Margot. Not a volume under 500 pages among my treasures.
My saving grace is Canada Reads Independently, the Canada Reads alternative cooked up by picklemethis’s Kerry Clare. Having read most of the CBC’s picks, I was thrilled to have five genuine discoveries to play with. Only one – Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso – could be found on my bookstore’s shelves, but it appears to be of a reasonable length. With luck the other four – ordered as of this morning – will share the trait and intersperse the otherwise epic year of reading I have ahead of me. With luck I’ll get through more than a dozen books this year.
I know numbers don’t matter and it isn’t a contest, but it’s still disheartening to see everyone around me chewing through 50+ books in a year and feel myself out of the loop with my handfull. This is a pep talk for myself, this post. Maybe I’ve read fewer books than some, but I bet I am in the running in terms of sheer yardage. A reader by the foot, that’s me.
January 6, 2010
2010 Reading List
Though I don’t have a “theme” to my reading this year as I did last, I am still participating in John Mutford’s The Canadian Book Challenge 3 over at The Book Mine Set. Canadian books are marked with an [*].
Novels:
Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso [*]
Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, tr. David R. Slavitt
Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott [*]
Hair Hat by Carrie Snyder [*]
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, tr. Grossman
Jade Peony by Wayson Choy [*]
Moody Food by Ray Robertson [*]
How Happy To Be by Katrina Onstad [*]
Generation X by Douglas Coupland [*]
Century by Ray Smith [*]
Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel [*]
Margaret de Valois by Alexandre Dumas
Chicot the Jester by Alexandre Dumas
Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography by Roger Lancelyn Green
The Forty-Five Guardsmen by Alexandre Dumas
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James de Mille [*]
The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke
The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk
In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Breakwater House by Pascale Quiviger [*]
The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov
Starclimber by Kenneth Oppel [*]
A Study in Scarlet / The Valley of Fear by A. Conan Doyle
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
The Secret Life of Owen Skye by Alan Cumyn [*]
Drood by Dan Simmons
The Gladiators by Arthur Koestler
The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Stories ed. Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio
Maps & Legends by Michael Chabon
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson [*]
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod [*]
The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema [*]
Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and other Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perroult by Angela Carter
The Price of a Bargain by Gordon Laird [*]
Truth & Bright Water by Thomas King [*]
Graphic Novels:
Order of the Stick Volume 4: Don’t Split the Party by Rich Burlew
Y the Last Man Vol. 1: Unmanned by Brian Vaughan
Y the Last Man Vol. 2: Cycles by Brian Vaughan
Y the Last Man Vol. 3: One Small Step by Brian Vaughan
Y the Last Man Vol. 4: Safeword by Brian Vaughan
Y the Last Man Vol. 5: Ring of Truth by Brian Vaughan
Y the Last Man Vol. 6: Girl on Girl by Brian Vaughan
Y the Last Man Vol. 7: Paper Dolls by Brian Vaughan
Y the Last Man Vol. 8: Kimono Dragons by Brian Vaughan
Y the Last Man Vol. 9: Motherland by Brian Vaughan
Y the Last Man Vol. 10: Whys and Wherefores by Brian Vaughan
Bone Vol. 1: Out From Boneville by Jeff Smith
Bone Vol. 2: The Great Cow Race by Jeff Smith
Bone Vol. 3: Eyes of the Storm by Jeff Smith
Bone Vol. 4: The Dragonslayer by Jeff Smith
Bone Vol. 5: Rock Jaw by Jeff Smith
Bone Vol. 6: Old Man’s Cave by Jeff Smith
Bone Vol. 7: Ghost Circles by Jeff Smith
Bone Vol. 8: Treasure Hunters by Jeff Smith
Bone Vol. 9: Crown of Horns by Jeff Smith
The Rabble of Downtown Toronto by Jason Kiefer [*]
KENK: A Graphic Portrait by Richard Poplak, Alex Jansen, Jason Gilmore & Nick Marinkovich [*]
Quarter-Life Crisis by Evan Munday [*]
The War at Ellsmere by Faith Erin Hicks [*]
Mercury by Hope Larsen
Gunnerkrigg Court Vol. 2: Research by Tom Siddell
Drop-In by Dave Lapp [*]
Afrodisiac by Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O’Malley [*]
Skim by Mariko & Jillian Tamaki(s) [*]
The Complete Essex County by Jeff Lemire [*]
Sword of my Mouth by Jim Munroe & Shannon Gerard [*]
December 31, 2009
Three Quick Reviews
I’ve been lax in reporting my reads this season. I’ve been lax in reading as well – I think my final total for the year is something like 25 books. I have three excuses: 1) a small child who does not like to share my attention 2) a heavy schedule of school-related reading and writing and 3) once again I managed to get stonewalled by some long, boring book that I couldn’t manage to read more than 2 pages at a time of. I need to learn to abandon books sooner! On the one hand there’s the question of discipline, of needing to try extra hard to get through dry, long or difficult books. But really that doesn’t give any old book the right to torture me for long hard months. I have some right to be engaged, don’t I? If I put in the time and the effort to give it a fair shake, I should be allowed to finally throw it down guilt-free. Perhaps this should be my New Year’s resolution. I resolve to not feel guilty about giving up on books that I’ve given a solid chance to.
Anyway, here are the last three books I’ve read:
This book here (Hunter’s Oath by Michelle West) was exactly as good as it looks. It came hesitantly recommended by a coworker of the author’s. I was, at the time, looking for undiscovered gems of Canadian fantasy. This was not one. I have a longer post to make about how fantasy as a genre has missed the point of magic as a literary tool, and this book will make an excellent example of what not to do. For a simple fantasy novel, this book took me an extraordinarily long time to read because I was continually bored with it. Oh well.
The book on your right (Airborn by Kenneth Oppel), on the other hand, was wonderful. Set in a slightly alternative past where the rich fly in luxury zeppelins rather than steamships like the Titanic and where the Lumiere Brothers were triplets, Airborn is everything you would want in a book to recommend to a younger person, or an older person who enjoys the freshness and optimism of young adult literature. Loved it to pieces!
And finally, on the left you will meet the book that stalled me out for two months, The Hanging of Angelique by Afua Cooper. This was a tremendous disappointment. There’s no question as to the value of the scholarship here, but the presentation, especially coming from an author with experience as a poet, was utterly lacking. The book felt long, repetitive, and boring. We know right from the get-go exactly what will happen: A slave, Angelique, will set fire to her owner’s house causing the big Montreal fire of 1734. She will be arrested, tried, tortured and hung. So what does the book add in the telling? Some details, often tangential. Archival evidence and some history. No drama, revelation, insight. I can see the value of this work to research, but heavens it lacked as a straight-ahead read. I almost wish she’d just approached the material differently, maybe saving us the details of the event for a “climax” of the story, rather than giving us everything we need to know in the first two chapters and leaving the rest of the book to serve as an itemized list of evidence.
So there you go, a little catch-up. I am still reading Nikolski as well as Eleanor Wachtel’s More Writers and Company (a purchase from last year’s Trinity College Book Sale). Both will warrant longer thoughts – but will have to wait for the new year!