To books in 2010!

Over the past 2 weeks, Andrew and I have logged about 4000 kilometres. We started in Montreal and visited various points in the Maritimes (Moncton, Halifax, but mostly Cape Breton where we spent Christmas) and then made a last minute decision to visit dear friends in New York City, driving through Maine (which always feels like the wilder, more remote cousin of Vermont to me) and Connecticut. In Cape Breton, we spent a lot of time doing what you're supposed to do at Christmas: eating. And I relaxed too, and breathed in a lot of clean, country air, and I read Ghosts by Cesar Aira, a novella set in Argentina. It's the holiday season in that book too, New Year's Eve actually, and a Chilean family is living in a construction site that will eventually be luxury condos. Ghosts live in the building too, and they fly around naked and covered in dust and do things like chill bottles of wine for the humans and invite the oldest daughter to a party at midnight. I also started reading Charles Portis' Dog of the South, and it's an amazing thing, this book, funny and strange, all these details about characters who get into the weirdest situations (another man has stolen not only Ray's wife, but also his credit card and car, and Ray sets out to track down the two lovebirds in Mexico), an aimless, sparkling road novel.

Once we left Nova Scotia, there wasn't as much time to get absorbed in a novel, but whenever I go to New York City I make sure to visit The Strand, the bookstore famous for having over 18 miles of books. The Strand is overwhelming and always packed with so many people and there is something about seeing so many books that sometimes makes me wonder what the point is of ever bringing another book into the world because they're all there already, shoved into talls shelves or piled on tables, and the prices! The discounts! But that feeling is fleeting and I will amble through and pick up books, put them down, pick up others and usually try to cap the amount I buy at 4 or 5. This trip I emerged with 2666 by Roberto Bolano, another Aira novella, Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace and a copy of Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem which I've read, but decided I wanted to own. These books, along with books I got for Christmas (Ovid's Metamorphoses, Virgil's Aeneid, 2009 Best Short Stories) and a book of essays about photography that I purchased at the Aperture Foundation gallery make up my reading list for the next few months.

I'm excited to read more books in 2010, to discover something that will make me feel feverish and excited or simply understood, that quiet, humming content you get when you read the right thing at the right time. Screw being overwhelmed by books at The Strand - we need all of those books, and more of them, because there are too many moments in our lifetimes and everyone else's lifetimes that should be documented or reflected or heightened.

Top 10 Favourite Things About 2009

1. My favourite books read in 2009 were Lorrie Moore's "A Gate at the Stairs" and Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives". I read many good things this year, but those are the ones that stuck with me the most.

2. One of my favourite reading memories was the morning of my thirtieth birthday. That weekend Andrew and I had been in Toronto for my bridal shower at my parents' house, and then we took a long detour back to Montreal through New York. We stopped in Ithaca for the night and the next morning, my birthday, I woke up absurdly early and read Karen Solie's "Pigeon". It was quiet and sunny and peaceful.

3. The two readings I did in 2009 were so fun. I wrote about the reading at the TZL already. The reading at Le Pick Up was also fun and probably the oddest setting for a reading that I've ever done. Depanneur Le Pick Up is not just a dep by name - it's really a dep, with shelves of cereal and toilet paper and fridges full of beer and pop. But, it's a little different because you'll also find things like vegepate and soy milk, and there's a zine rack by the door, and the lunch counter serves pulled pork sandwiches (real pork and vegan equivalent). It was set up so that the reading was done in the back corner, next to the ATM machine, in front of a few shelves of tampons, near the fridges.

4. I stuffed three seasons of Mad Men into one year and as a result feel more in control of my career and wardrobe.

5. I bought an Iphone after I unceremoniously dumped a bottle of Vitamin Water on my Ipod and couldn't stomach the thought of music-less commute to work. Instead of spending money on another Ipod, I decided to consolidate my phone and mp3 player into one device. It was probably my favourite purchase of 2009. I also now understand the appeal of e-readers. I'm definitely not in the market for something like a Kindle (I don't need any more electronic devices), but it's nice to have certain books loaded on my Iphone to read when the book I have in my bag isn't cutting it.

6. I quit my job and started a new one, and it felt good.

7. The songs I listened to the most did not come out in 2009, but I listened to The National a lot, and Neko Case ("Middle Cyclone" was a 2009 release!), the Pixies and Julie Doiron (especially "I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day" and, recently, the folky side project Daniel, Fred and Julie).

8. Cafe Comme Chez Soi was my favourite brunch find of 2009, followed by The Sparrow. Boite Gourmande wins for consistency, reliability and lots of good sunshine.

9. Istanbul was strange and beautiful. We walked everywhere and I stopped and petted nearly every stray kitten we passed (many). I got pummelled in a steamy Turkish bath. We drank a lot of tea. We took a ferry to Asia. Michael Jackson died and we watched many MJ videos in our hotel room. We sat on the roof of the hotel at night and listened to prayer calls from all of the mosques surrounding us. I should've bought more scarves, but it was hot and I didn't have enough foresight. We ate a lot of food.

10. Getting married was so much fun, but intense too. We gathered people we loved and went to Greece and did things like rode scooters around the island and went swimming in blue salty water and drank lots of weak white wine and ordered Greek salads. On our wedding day it rained, but then it stopped, and my girlfriends did my makeup and my hair and made sure I looked pretty, and I cried a lot, and Andrew and I danced to "Northern Sky" by Nick Drake, and the bottom of my dress was muddy from the rain, and my mother accidentally locked us up on the roof, and Andrew and I read each other poems we wrote for our vows and they were embarrassing and personal and so full of love, and wow, yeah, it was intense.

So, 2009: an intense, full year. A great year. But I'm ready for 2010 to start and I have big plans for this upcoming new year. I'm excited to share them with you.

So after The Odyssey, I wasn't kidding about reading something less epic. Instead of launching into another novel, I've been reading short stories, selections from various books, dipping in and out as I please. It's a bit of a refresher course: sometimes I just need to be reminded how stories work. I've been revisiting many of my stories and I sometimes get lost in them, wondering, does this need to be longer? Or shorter? Is this interesting? This is SO not interesting. How do I make it better? One evening I stood in front of my bookshelf and pulled some of my favourite collections off the shelf. Curiously, in the pile of books I had selected the authors were overwhelmingly female. I love the dudes of course (those classic C-men: Chekhov, Cheever, Carver), but when I think about the stories I am most influenced by, they happen to be written by women.

Sometimes I think it would be fun to make a mix tape-like list of some of my favourite stories. If you could amass a series of stories to give to a friend, what would you include? When I'm working on my own stories, I'm inspired by the following:
"Heaven" Mary Gaitskill (from "Bad Behaviour")
"Terrific Mother" Lorrie Moore (from "Birds of America")
"Sister Crazy" Emma Richler (from "Sister Crazy")
"Diegesis (World of a Fiction)" Masha Tupitsyn (from "Beauty Talk & Monsters") "When We Were Nearly Young" Mavis Gallant (from "In Transit")**
"Bread" Rebecca Brown (from "What Keeps Me Here")
"Nipple of Paradise" Lisa Moore (from "Degrees of Nakedness")
These are from books that are sitting next to my computer - I'm leaving out a lot. But, still, seeing these stories in a list makes me realize that they all have the same kind of themes (motherhood, sisterhood, coming-of-age-girl-style). It's no surprise that these are the ones I'm gravitating to most these days since many of my stories deal with the same themes.

** After writing the list above, I got to thinking about this particular Gallant story and why I liked it so much. At first it seems like a wisp of a story, a short collection of musings about the narrator's life at a specific point in her life. It's personal, but detached. But it's the kind of story that sticks with you - maybe it's the way it ends abruptly? The way the narrator and her "friends" seem so gripped with fear? Wanting to find some analysis, I stumbled upon The Journal of the Short Story in English. It's an academic journal that discusses the short story and it appears that they've put the full text of their back issues online. This appeals to my thwarted English major side. This essay, "Genre transgression and auto/biography in Mavis Gallant's "When we were nearly young"", confirms why this story is so weighty. There's a lot going on.

I haven't updated what I've been reading for a long time, mostly because it took me forever to read "The Odyssey". I read the epic poem in high school when I took Saturday morning Greek school. We were somehow supposed to understand the ancient Greek version, but considering that I had only recently mastered the alphabet, some verb tenses and basic vocabulary, I just borrowed an English translation from the library and followed along (this just reminded me that my Greek OAC exam was the day after my high school prom. I remember sitting at that desk at Burnamthorpe Collegiate and pulling stray bobby pins out of my hair). I filed the book away in the back of my head, and then didn't really think about it until a month or two ago when I went to the John William Waterhouse exhibit that's currently on display at the Musee des Beaux Arts. Waterhouse does those dreamy, pre-Raphaelite paintings - you recognize them as soon as you see them, pale ladies with long flowing hair, lots of lush nature scenes, etc. I wasn't particularly interested in going to the exhibit, but Andrew and I have memberships to the museum and were feeling guilty about not taking advantage of them. Once I was there I became absorbed in the paintings and was especially taken with those devoted to the Odyssey. For instance, "Ulysses and the Sirens", where Odysseus (or Ulysses) orders his crew to cover their ears so that they won't be tempted by the Sirens, who are depicted as ridiculous/frightening birds with female heads. I had forgotten this detail from the story. When you read something so sprawling, you end up forgetting a lot. I remembered Penelope continuously weaving and unweaving her shroud and Odysseus challenging his wife's suitors to an archery competition, but I forgot about many of Odysseus' crazy adventures, like his encounter with the cannibal that ate his crew mates one by one or his stay on Circe's island (where she turned the men into a bunch of pigs - ha!).

So, the exhibit inspired me to read The Odyssey again, but this time I read one of those modern translations (it was a good translation, but I've now returned the book to the library and can't seem to find the author online). It's probably a cop out, but I knew I would be distracted by the epic poem format, and I wanted to revel in the pure story, all those gods and godesses and betrayals and backstory, so I stuck with prose. It took me awhile to read through all 24 books and I'm already forgetting many details about it, but this time I took notes along the way. It was such a pleasure to read, although now I'm ready for something a little less epic.

1) I was in Toronto last weekend and did an afternoon reading at the Toronto Zine Library. Hallowzine featured a bunch of great zine writers, like Alex Wrekk (Brainscan), Jeff Miller (Ghost Pine), Chris Landry (Kiss Off) and Suzanne Sutherland (My Bad). I felt a little sheepish reading at a zine reading considering that "Cement, Flour, Saints" is now 2 years old and is not going to be reprinted, but I seized the opportunity to read "We Should Make Things", the essay about zines that I wrote for the Shameless anthology. It was great reading it to a group of people steeped in zine culture. They knew what I meant when I talked about long-armed staplers and glueing stamps. I've only done a handful of readings, but this was my favourite, I think. The vibe in the library was warm and cozy, the audience was engaged and it was a wonderful way to spend a few hours on Halloween afternoon. Super big thanks to Amy for being an adorable MC and for inviting me to read.

Setting up for the reading - Chris is stringing up pumpkin lights, Amy is in kitty-cat ears and Suzanne has a beard on. Just your typical Halloween day reading.

Here I am reading. I didn't wear a costume, but I did wear all black for the occasion.

2) Soon after working my way through those Cavafy poems, I happened across a flyer for "Cavafy: Passions and Ancient Days", a one-man reading/play by Yannis Simonides that was going to be performed at Montreal's Hellenic Community Center. I reserved the night for myself and went this past Friday. It's been awhile since I've been to a Greek community event. When I was growing up, my father was heavily involved in the community and I spent many childhood evenings in auditoriums like the one I was in on Friday. It felt the same: the old ladies with their haispray-stiffened hairdo's, that blend of Greek and English, the vague smell of coffee from the coffee makers in the back of the room.

Simonides' performance was an homage to Cavafy, and jumped from biographical facts about the poet, Simonides' own reflections on his work and influence, and then to Cavafy himself, reciting poems. It was surprisingly seamless: Simonides was wondeful at switching between the two roles of himself, the playright, and Cavafy, that famous Alexandrian poet. Cavafy was such an interesting, complex person and Simonides touched on everything that made him who he was: his eccentricness, his homosexuality, his sense of Hellenism (Cavafy always insisted that he was a Hellene more than a Greek, and that if he was a Greek, he was an Asian Greek), his love of Alexandria, his work life (30 years as a government clerk in the irrigation department!). The show was billed as a bilingual reading, but other than the poems which were first read in Greek before being translated, it was in English, to the dismay of some people in the audience. The woman next to me poked me once after I'd laughed at a joke and asked me if I understood what was going on. I said yes, and then she sniffed, "This is like a university course." I guess not everyone was as impressed as I was.

Doris #26 - Cindy Crabb: Today was one of those days, those simple, perfect ones. The weather was beautiful: Indian summer, a little cool, but still warm enough to eat breakfast on a picnic table in the sun. Andrew and I went to the market and bought eggplants and coloured peppers and avocadoes and the man in Tortilleria Maya spoke to me in Spanish, and then we went downtown to the Antiquarian book fair at Concordia and I bought a book called "Science and Psychical Phenomena" and then we went and sat at a sunny table at Reservoir and drank beer and ate fries and then, AND THEN, when we walked down Duluth there was a strange puppet show going on in the window of a cafe. We stood with the small crowd and watched a vaguely demented show about a girl who ate everything, starting with cupcakes and cookies and then moving on to cats and bicycles. And as she kept eating her belly (a balloon) started getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it exploded in a big pop and everyone laughed except for the one child in the audience who burst into tears. Her father hugged her and laughed and explained that it was okay and it was really very adorable. And throughout the day I would sneak peaks at the zine I had purchased that morning, the latest issue of Doris and this is one paragraph I particularly loved: but i think hope is like a crush. not the resigned hope, like - i hope things get better - but the hope that feels like suspended disbelief. where spaces open up and everything is possible again, and you're pushed to adventure, pushed out of your regular boxes, pushed to show off, to be the person you want to be the most, working hard to show your best sides, your secret scars your hidden dreams. And I think that's how I'm feeling these days, hopeful. It's a worthy feeling to aspire to. What I did today has nothing to do with the zine, but the zine was a part of the day, you know? It made it better. Doris always seems to have that effect.

You can order Doris straight from Cindy or from Paper Trail distro. If you're in Montreal you can pick it up from the zine rack at Le Pick Up (7032 Waverly), which is run by Jeff Miller of Ghost Pine fame. He has a great selection of zines. While you're there you can also get a pulled pork sandwich or a really great breakfast bagel.

A Gate at the Stairs – Lorrie Moore: There has been so much buzz about this book that there’s hardly anything left to write about it. Everything I'd say has already been phrased perfectly and published.

For example:

Here’s Jonathan Lethem doing the gushing that I don’t have to do anymore, plus it’s totally legitimate because he’s all "published novelist" and "New York Times reviewer" and I’m just some half-hearted quasi-blogger who’s only published a handful of stories and essays in magazines hardly anyone will read. Thanks, Jon: ...Moore may be, exactly, the most irresistible contemporary Ameri­can writer: brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm; seemingly effortlessly lyrical; Lily-Tomlin-funny.

Or here’s Lisa Moore elaborating on how well Lorrie Moore does that funny-sad thing I love so much (Bonus: one of my favourite writers discussing another favourite writer! And they have the same last name!): Language in Moore's stories and novels is reversible, like those clever garments that can be worn inside out, or outside in; she shows that language can point at itself and at the same time expose – always unsentimentally – human pain and hope, vulnerability and strength, what's funny, and what's not funny and how everything, eventually, is both.

Getting down to the details of the book itself, it's about a 20 year old girl, Tassie, who starts nannying the newly adopted mixed-race baby of a married couple in her college town. Along the way she meets her boyfriend in her Intro to Suffism class, watches as her brother graduates high school and enlists in the army, and plays her bass. In one of the more perfect details, Tassie talks about how she's figured out how to play Sleater Kinney songs on her bass. “Huh,” I thought when I read it. “Funny!” But, Carrie Brownstein’s reaction was even better: Reading my own band name within the book's pages was like having a movie character turn toward you, say your name and confer with you on the plot. It was a personalized fortune cookie. It was having a park named after you without first having to die.

And here's Lorrie Moore herself on why she decided to use Tassie as the filter for this story: Here’s the thing about being 20 years old. It’s actually the universal age of passion. It’s the age at which nature and form come together and your individual passion achieves its final shape and expression. When, later in life, when you’re older, you feel furious, it’s the fury of a 20-year-old. When you fall in love, it’s the love of a 20-year-old. It’s articulate, it’s visceral, it’s platonic. It’s the pure form of the emotion. When you observe the hypocrisies and injustices of the world, and feel shocked and betrayed by them, you’re actually being 20 again. And yet, you’re just shy of being able to drink. How perfectly completed, and thwarted, at the same time.

I didn't expect the novel to go the way it did, and I didn't expect to feel so gutted by it. I admittedly felt a bit emotionally manipulated (here's a blog entry that has some criticisms I agree with) but the writing was so good and Tassie was such a great character - nerdy and earnest, trying so hard to do the right thing, but still fucking up the way 20 year olds do - the perfect kind of heartbreaking.

My favourite thing I've read this year.

Ladies and Gentleman, the Bible! - Jonathan Goldstein: To tell you the truth, I was a little worried about this book. I love Wiretap and I had enjoyed listening to little snippets from the book on the show. I even went to Goldstein's Jian Gomeshi interview at Blue Met and laughed a lot. But I was worried that the book would feel too gimmicky, that the jokes would be too predictable, that making fun of the bible was best handled via deadpan monologues on radio shows. But, no. The thing about this book is that it’s not just poking fun at the inherent silliness of religious stories, it’s also pointing out that they are good stories, that the characters are interesting and complex. And it’s funny; the jokes are good. So, yes, no disappointment here.

Holding Still For As Long As Possible - Zoe Whittall: I was looking forward to this book enough to splurge on the spendier hardcover version while visiting Toronto a few weeks ago. My mother accidentally ran the lawn mower over the telephone cable lines and we didn't have phone or Internet for a portion of the weekend, which meant that I began reading almost immediately. The book is told from the perspective of three main characters and the story knit them together with enough foreshadowing to keep me tense as I approached the ending. I perhaps enjoyed the lead up more than the inevitable conclusion, but overall I loved the book and thought it was a great, solid follow up to "Bottle Rocket Hearts". And as a former Torontonian, I loved seeing references to my hometown, ones I hadn't seen in books before, like The Beaver or The Red Room.

On not just writing what you know

Selected Poems - C.P. Cavafy: On my way to Istanbul, I picked up a copy of Constantine P. Cavafy's Selected Poems at the Athens airport. Cavafy is one of modern Greece's most celebrated poets. Whether he's writing about Hellenic historical events or homosexuality, his poems have a kind of cool, elegant detachment, kind of like the marble statues you might find in an archaeological museum. The thing about Cavafy is that he didn't live a Rimbaud-esque tortured poet existence. He worked for 30 years at the Ministry of Public Works, and spent a large portion of his life living with members of his family. So, his body of work didn't necessarily follow that creative writing standby of "writing what you know". In fact, this is from the introduction to the book: In an early ars poetica he wrote that the notion that a writer derives most profit from "personal experience is undoubtedly a sound one; but were it strictly observed it would limit termendously literary production". Thanks for that reminder, Constantine.


I was also struck by the poem below - it's a kind of warning for our over-sharing generation, all our blogs and twitter and flickr and facebook chatter (guilty on all counts).


As Much As You Can
If you cannot fashion your life as you would like,
endeavour to do this at least,
as much as can: do not trivialize it
through too much contact with the world,
through too much activity and chatter.


Do not trivialize your life by parading it,
running around displaying it
in the daily stupidity
of cliques and gatherings
until it becomes like a tiresome guest.

Twilight

I kind of missed the Harry Potter boat. I read the first book on a flight to Greece a few years ago and ended up feeling cheated. It didn’t seem clever or cute; I had been expecting more. I’ve been told many times that the books get subsequently better and I believe this, but ugh, all those books and pages – I know it’s an easy read, but I just never felt like committing myself to the series just to be up to date with the cultural zeitgeist. And then I read the His Dark Materials trilogy two Christmases ago and loved it so much. It gave me what I had been looking for in HP - magic, good writing, complex themes, sweeping adventures. I cried when certain characters died and cheered when things worked out. The ending was surreal and dreamy and perfect. I didn’t feel that way, or even get an inkling of that feeling with Harry Potter, so eh, maybe I’ll read the series one day, right after I finish “War and Peace” and “Remembrance of Things Past”.

This is how I felt about the whole Twilight series too – I was just going to let it pass. I had picked up enough pop culture references to get the gist of what it was about and to decide that I didn’t feel like reading it (Human-vampire romance! Robert Pattinson is really hot! etc). But then I saw the book at a friend’s house and couldn’t resist. At the time I was trying to read “Infinite Jest” as part of the Infinite Summer challenge and needed a break - I wanted something page-turny and easy. I tore through “Twilight” kind of breathlessly and in spite of myself. I devoured "New Moon" immediately afterwards. I sheepishly wrote to my friend and asked her to bring the last two books when I saw her next. I consumed the entire series within 2 weeks, cumulatively more pages than "Infinite Jest" but requiring 99% less brainpower to digest. (And I still haven't cracked the first 15% of Infinite Jest. I suck.)

Stephenie Meyer is a bad writer, but she writes the way a teenager first writes, all melodrama and brooding, so I wasn't so distracted by it - I was familiar with that type of writing. She's good with plot, although isn't so good at filling in the details (which might explain why there is so much Twilight fanfic; it's practically begging for it). As a whole, "Twilight" was the best - it had romance, an awkward, angsty, lovestruck underdog teenaged girl, hot vampires with skin that sparkled in the sun like diamonds, frantic cross country travel and unequivocally evil vampires. It worked. "New Moon" was supposed to further Bella's relationship with her main squeeze werewolf, but I failed to see why she fell for him so hard so fast. And then things started to get kind of unhinged. "Eclipse" was basically thin plot and lots of backstory (which paves the way nicely for plenty of prequels, other possible movies, etc). And then the final book, "Breaking Dawn" was just so off-the-wall it was almost embarassing. Because of its pure wackiness it was my favourite - vampire pregnancies, vampire sex, weird vampires from all over the world, werewolves falling in love with babies, humans learning forbidden secrets. It was VC Andrewish in its perversity, but without any incest. So much fun!

So, yeah, it was a fun read and I ultimately enjoyed reading it. And now I will move on to Proust or something.

Wedding festivities are officially over and I have hundreds of digital photos to prove it. I also have some Polaroids that, when stacked together, look like a pack of baseball trading cards. I understand now why Polaroids won’t (or at least, shouldn’t) die out – it’s not the immediacy of a printed photo, it’s the fact that a Polaroid photo is tangible evidence of a memory plucked from your brain – all hazy and dreamy and kind of diffused. A good Polaroid can distill particularly magical moments to their essence. So when I look at the ones I’ve snapped over the past two months, I can see why I found it so hard to concentrate on books – there were too many people around, too many things to experience and devote myself to. In Greece I wouldn't even bring a book with me to the beach because I knew I wouldn't be able to really process the words.



So, I read things that could be processed in short chunks. Right before I left, nogoodforme.com did their amazing style icon series and this post about Marguerite Duras inspired me to grab "Practicalities", a collection of her very personal essays. Her writing was the right blend of nostalgia, wisdom, ex-pat musing and artistic process rambling for the kind of trip I was on. I couldn't deal with much fiction so I also read John Gardner's "On Becoming a Novelist" and enjoyed it the same way I enjoyed "Practicalities" - he was reassuring in his firm advice. He would quote his own writing to prove a point. He knew what he was talking about, even if I didn't always agree with it.



In Istanbul I wanted to read something kind of fantastic and different, sort of like the place I was in. I hadn't brought much to read with me, so we went poking around Istanbul looking for the right book store. I was sadly disapointed with the Old Book Market in the Grand Bazaar (mostly Turkish textbooks and overpriced Orhan Pamuk). We found a decent place on the tourist hell strip of Divanyolu Caddesi in Sultanahmet, and quickly found more stores with reasonable prices and better selection across the bridge in Beyoglu. Then, during a quick afternoon rainstorm, found even more charming places in Kadikoy, the Asian side of Istanbul (only a 1.50 lira ferry away). Anyway, the book I eventually chose was "Life on the Golden Horn", Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's collection of letters detailing her of travels through Turkey and Constantinople in the 1700s (she was penpals with like, Alexander Pope). Her experience was a bit more lavish than mine.



And now that I've settled into more-or-less normal life again in Montreal, I've been devouring books again, so I'll have more to write about shortly. To begin with, I've decided to wade into the teen girl market and check out Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. Let's just say that recently I've been that person you see in mall food courts at lunchtime dressed in business casual, eating some kind of crap fast food and reading those big thick books. Sue me.

A list

For reference, since I've been really bad at documenting this - books I've been reading in 2009:

The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano: It took me forever to finish, but it was amazing. But everyone already knows this.
Pigeon - Karen Solie: I read most of this collection on my thirtieth birthday and it made me realize that Solie is my favourite Canadian poet.
Enduring Love - Ian McEwan: Fascinating.
The Principles of Uncertainty - Maira Kalman: Beautiful and whimsical.
February - Lisa Moore: This book better win all kinds of awards this year because it was fucking awesome. Some of Lisa Moore's stories absolutely gut me, and I was a little disapointed when that feeling didn't translate to her first novel, "Alligator". But man, this one did. It's gorgeous.

Stripmalling – Jon Paul Fiorentino: God, this book is funny. It kind of has everything: a mix of personal essays, dispatches, reminisces, jokes and comics. Jonny once worked at a Shill Station in Winnipeg, fooled around with his drug dealer, dated, moved in and had a baby with a fellow stripmaller, moved to Montreal, had an early-thirties life crisis, etc. And there's more! You should read this.

See You Later - Christopher Pike: Shut up. Yes, that is the Christopher Pike you may remember from your youth. In the spirit of documenting everything I am reading in 2009, I couldn't not mention a book I read while in Toronto a few weeks ago, visiting my parents and, therefore my childhood book collection. Usually when I’m home I like to flip through my old things, and this trip I chose “See You Later”. This was my favourite back then and I wanted to see if it stood the test of time. IT TOTALLY DID. Christopher Pike wrote some fucked up shit (Um, "Whisper of Death"? Or "Scavenger Hunt" where it turns out that two of the students were LIZARDS?, and then he started doing weird sequels of books, which I never got into), but "See You Later" was sort of sweet compared to the rest, and more sci-fi than horror. When these characters go on dates they eat ice cream and ride oil rigs. And there are characters from the future and telepathic aliens and most of all there is a love story. So yeah. A good one.

Watchmen - Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: While on that same trip to Toronto, we caught a screening of "Watchmen". I wasn't expecting to love it so much, but I did. The characters fascinated me (I can't decide who I liked more: the serene yet disconcerting blue-glowy Dr. Manhattan or Rorschach, with his shape-shifting mask and unwavering conviction). I bought the comic soon after and tore through it. I think the movie was an excellent adaptation of the comic - there were some panels that were recreated perfectly in the movie. Surprisingly, I preferred the movie ending to the book - the movie was just more powerful to me - but they are both equally excellent.

So, thumbs up all around! Maybe next I will finally write about "The Savage Detectives", which I am absolutely loving, but for some reason taking forever to get through.

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table - Molly Wizenberg: Orangette is my favourite food blog. I have always loved Molly's writing and delicate, clean photos and, most importantly, her recipes are consistently killer. Her braised brussel sprouts are a standard in my winter dinner meals, and I've made her lemon yogurt cake countless times. I was excited when I found out she got a book deal, and bought the book almost immediately after it was released. As I thumbed through it in the bookstore, a girl approached, leaned forward and pulled another copy off the shelf. "We have the same book," I said, pointing to mine. We laughed and talked about the blog. "She's just lovely," the girl said. The book has a format similar to the Orangette blog - a story followed by a recipe - but, unlike other books I've read by bloggers, it doesn't have that annoying "bloggy" feel. It's more cohesive than that. She writes a lot about her family, especially her father, who died of cancer when she was in her mid-twenties. She also writes a lot about her husband, who she met through her blog. Some people have been throwing around the MFK Fisher comparison, and she is entirely deserving of it. So yes, like the girl in the bookstore said, Molly is lovely, and so is the book.

I don't mean maybe.

Fool the World: The oral history of a band called Pixies by Josh Frank and Caryn Ganz: A few days ago I was looking at our bookshelf and found this book, which Andrew had purchased a while back. I didn't care much for it at the time, but like I mentioned earlier, I've suddenly become a huge Pixies fan. I took it off the shelf thinking I would flip through it idly, pick out a few pages, whatever. In general I don’t read many books about music. First of all, unless you’re a big fan of the band or musician, it’s easy to feel like you’re filling your head with worthless facts. Or, often the writing in music books is just so-so. It’s a hard balance. Anyway, so this book? I got really into it. It’s an oral history, so it just jumps back and forth between various people speaking, and as someone who only recently got the Pixies switch flipped in their head, there’s satisfaction in reading this book while listening to their albums. It also does away with the bad writing problem in music books because it's so chatty. It's the ultimate in liner notes. Plus, it helps that they were charming or at least interesting, especially Kim Deal. I like knowing that Claudia Gonson of the Magnetic Fields auditioned to be their drummer, and I like reading Kim Deal describe her adolescence (“I'm like 15, 16, 17, talking about why "Dominance and Submission" is a better Blue Oyster Cult song than "Godzilla" ever was. Just doing shit like that, just pouring over the record collection. Smoking pot. Snowing, constantly snowing, and doing drugs."” Also, she was a cheerleader.) And I like reading about how everyone thought Charles Thompson/Black Francis/Frank Black was really “feminine” at first. I didn't even know his real name wasn't Frank Black. And he broke up the band via fax (kind of) and that U2 only paid the band $750 per gig when they toured with them?! Etc. Useless facts, yes, but I had a lot of fun reading the book.

The Pale King

There's a powerful and heartbreaking article about David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker that gives frank details about his last few days and discusses the unpublished novel that will be coming out next year. I hadn't heard anything about "The Pale King" prior to this article and was surprised to read that it's about a group of employees working for the I.R.S (funny, considering that I pointed out that accounting-related footnote when I read "Brief Interviews".) From the article:

As Michael Pietsch points out, in choosing the I.R.S. as a subject Wallace had “posed himself the task that is almost the opposite of how fiction works,” which is “leaving out the things that are not of much interest.” Wallace’s solution was to overwhelm his seemingly inert subject with the full movement of his thought. His characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the robust sincerity of his writing—his willingness to die for the reader—would keep you from condescending to them.

and

Wallace began the research for “The Pale King” shortly after the publication of “Infinite Jest.” He took accounting classes. He studied I.R.S. publications. “You should have seen him with our accountant,” Karen Green remembers. “It was like, ‘What about the ruling of 920S?’ ” He enjoyed mastering the technicalities of the I.R.S. bureaucracy—its lore, mind-set, vocabulary.

I'm an accountant, but not a tax accountant by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, most people are surprised to learn that an overwhelming amount of accountants know very little beyond the basic tax facts (that's why we have a tax department at work! that's why there are people who actually specialize in tax accountancy!), but I totally understand what he could see in focusing on it as a jumping point for his book.

The article is here.

And you can read an excerpt from The Pale King too.

Am currently reading “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” by David Foster Wallace. The blurbs on the back make it seem like it’s a veritable laff riot, but it’s actually pretty bleak. But I guess all of his writing is like that, a complicated mix of fun and misery.

This is just a small inconsequential portion of a footnote in the story “Octet” that does not have any special meaning out of context from the story, but I would’ve been that one person out of a thousand, so I’m gonna point it out (in the footnote DFW is doing the meta thing and talking about what he was trying to do in the story and stuff he could’ve done if it hadn’t fallen apart):

“The second part of the “Q” part of the Quiz spends five lines constructing a possible analogy between the world’s joy/misery ratio and the seminal double-entry “A = L + E” equation of modern accountancy, as if more than one person out of a thousand could possibly give a shit.”

I would’ve gotten a kick out of that.

John Krasinski (aka Jim Halpert from The Office) adapted the collection of short stories into a movie, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it turned out. The trailer is available over here.

How Not to Write a Novel - Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman: I love writing books. It's vaguely embarrassing, I guess - there's something a little uncouth about admitting to reading writing books, kind of like saying you read self-help or new age or whatever - but, they're fun and sometimes helpful. I read an article about this book on the Guardian, and it made me giggle. I realized they had it in stock at the bookstore down the street from my office, so I picked it up one day at lunch. It's a hilarious thing, the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud on the metro or while eating McDonalds in the food court (uh, not that I did that or anything). The book is littered with wisdom like, "Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half a kitten. It is not as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess." or reminders like, "An unprincipled gold digger who gives twenty dollars to a beggar is enchanting. A crusading human rights lawyer who volunteers at an animal shelter and also pauses on his way to court to give twenty dollars to a beggar makes us gag." I mean, this is stuff that we as writers know deep down (or should know), but still sometimes give in to. Maybe not on the exagerated level demonstrated in the book, but in little ways that can still fundamentally sabotage the book you're working on. Definitely recommended for those of us with a novel hiding somewhere in our computer files or head.

Anagrams – Lorrie Moore: I read this book a few years ago, loved it, and then had to return it to the library. I found it in a bookstore in Vermont this past weekend and bought a copy for myself. I couldn’t stop myself from rereading it, even though I’m currently in the middle of two books. Lorrie Moore is most successful at short stories and one of the reasons I love this book so much is that she’s managed to really integrate the short story format into a novel. Moore is also the queen of funny/sad, although upon second reading, I was especially struck by the sadness of the story. The book is an approximation of an anagram, different characters refracted into different situations. Almost an anagram, but not quite. You’re never quite sure what’s really happening and what’s being imagined and even when you’re told up front that certain characters are imaginary, you’ll probably cry when they have to leave. Lorrie Moore is definitely in my top 5 list of favourite writers; I’ve learned so much about writing from her books. And, after a few years of not publishing much, she has a novel coming out in 2009. I’m psyched.

Drown – Junot Diaz: I’m in the middle of reading “Pride and Prejudice”, but it’s slow going. I needed a little reading boost, so I devoured “Drown”, Junot Diaz’s first book, a collection of short stories. I took the advice of the scores of Best of 2007 lists that declared “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” best book ever, and read it this past summer (in 2008). I really, really loved it. And this collection of short stories has the same elements I loved about Oscar Wao – great pacing, freshness, a style that’s not distracting from the stories, heartbreaking details, etc. I think the title story “Drown” is my favourite, or maybe “Fiesta, 1980”. While doing some Internet searching, I found this youtube video from the Google campus. Turns out they get authors to come by at lunch to read and talk about their work (there are also videos for folks like Michael Pollan and Anthony Bourdain). Yet another reason to wish you worked at Google too. I would much rather listen to Junot Diaz than dial into a “lunch n learn” conference call about revenue recognition. (P.S. I think it's funny that the Google employee describes "Drown" as "super excellent").

Wisdom - Andrew Zuckerman: It's kind of unfair to say I've "read" this book, since it's really the kind of book that you work your way through slowly, picking and choosing. Caroline gave me this gorgeous, huge book for Christmas, and I've had it by my bed since then. Sometimes I flip through it to look at the photos, and sometimes I open to random pages and read. It's a meditation on wisdom, different people (everyone from Dame Judi Dench to Desmond Tutu to Graham Nash) giving their take on wisdom. It's especially good to have nearby on days when I'm feeling kind of down; it gives perspective.

My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals - Melanie Dunea: This is another fun book to leaf through (also, a Christmas present, this time from Andrew's parents. Basically, books are the perfect present for me.) When you take 50 famous chefs and ask them to describe their ultimate last meal, you're going to get a variety of answers, but you're sure to find foodies standbys like foie gras and caviar and truffles in the mix. The accompanying pictures are amazing (yo, there's Anthony Bourdain, naked, except for a strategically placed marrow bone) and there are even recipes for elements of the chef's meals. Incidentally, my Last Meal would probably involve a bacon cheeseburger and an ice cream sundae. No need for foie gras. And it would be eaten outdoors, in the summer, with a glass of cold white wine, even though white wine totally doesn't go with bacon cheeseburgers.

In which I start documenting books I read in 2009

In which I will keep track of books I read in 2009

Magic for Beginners – Kelly Link: Les gave me this collection of short stories for Christmas, and it was a great thing to read while I was on vacation in Toronto, the snow falling, comfy in my pyjamas. I think there is something extra-special about reading surreal, fantasyish stories over Christmas (last year it was the Phillip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy, which was coincidentally also a present from Lesley!). Kelly Link’s writing could be described as fantasy: there are stories about enchanted handbags (you step into the bag and disappear into another realm), haunted houses, people who inherit telephone booths from their dead relatives, etc. Her writing is fresh, quirky and hip, without being as annoying as all of those adjectives might lead you to believe. I still find myself flipping through it for inspiration as I write.

Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan: Sagan wrote this novel when she was only eighteen and that air of super-confident, slightly petulant adolescence infuses the book. It’s a slim enough volume that I read most of it on subway trips around Toronto and I loved getting lost in the world of beaches in the South of France, beautiful and sly French ladies and handsome and clueless French men. It’s the kind of book that makes you wish you looked good in a Jean Seberg haircut and a stripey shirt, that you could smoke cigarettes all sexy, have a part in killing someone, atone for it, and study philosophy like it was all totally natural, whatever, c’est la vie.