Wrinkled pink poppy with raindrops, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008. These gorgeous poppies are at the corner of Third and Fourth in New Westminster.
I've been on a book buying binge recently. It seems nowhere is safe - there are books everywhere (yay!). At London Drugs I encountered Laurie Viera Rigler's Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and kicked myself for not buying it there, until I remembered I spend quite enough money at London Drugs as is and that I want to support the local Black Bond Books in the Royal City Centre (if only to ensure the mall retains a bookstore). It's already made me giggle several times and I'm only on page 30. The premise is basically the same as that of the Diana Gabaldon books: a modern young woman (this one hales from 21st Century LA) is transported back in time to the Regency period, having just ended her engagement. So far she's had to use the chamber pot, flirted with a footman and submitted to being bled. Good thing it's not the Victorian era or she'd be having her insides squished by a variety of corseting devices as well.
I reread Nancy Friday's My Mother, My Self over the course of two long and painful months. How a book I've alread read with only thirteen chapters being read theoretically at the rate of one chapter a day could have taken eight weeks and incurred almost $5 in library fines I'll never know. But can you and Dr. Freud say resistance? I had such mixed feelings when I finally got to the end of it. For one very interval shortly after my mother died last summer I felt I had been reborn. That faded so quickly. While there are numerous criticisms to make of Friday's book (including that her perspective is not really broad enough to be convincing - by focusing on only two generations of women, those who came to adulthood during World War II and their offspring, and by limiting herself pretty much to North America), there is such great sadness in the acknowledgement that we seem predestined to be so much more critical of our own sex than we are of the opposite sex, and that, no matter how highly skilled or highly trained we are, we can only rarely set aside our own emotional needs during the separation and individuation process.
Having read Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air in and around the Nancy Friday, I was impressed by her description of Justice Tom Berger's extensive community and stakeholder consultation regarding the proposed construction of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. Late Nights on Air is not the book A Student of Weather is, but it's a good read nonetheless. Wanting to learn more about Berger, I got a copy of A Long and Terrible Shadow from the library, Berger's thin discourse about five centuries (1492 to 1992) of European atrocities committed in the name of progress in the Americas. I only read about half of it - the numbers were too much for me, the stories of betrayal, slavery, the decimation of entire peoples and the sad realization that superior technology can be more seductive than either wealth or beauty.
I've plunged into Michael Redhill's Consolation, a novel set in dual time (late 1990s and mid-1850s). Hailed as 'the' book about Toronto (I've always thought of Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle and Life Before Man as being the definitive Toronto books, but I was curious), I'm loving it and am having to ration myself to one part per day. The segments alternate between the two time periods as a widow and her family attempt to prove her late husband's theory that some of the ships that sank in the Toronto Harbour have been covered by landfill and that one, in particular, contains an amazing photographic archive of Hogtown in its earliest days. Redhill has an uncanny gift for describing some very subtle familial interplay - the things we say and do that set each other off. He's worth reading for that alone.
I picked up a copy of Sherwin B. Nuland's The Art of Aging one day. One of my pet peeves is that we are forced to take health classes as part of our participation in the public education system, and yet those classes focus on puberty and our burgeoning sexuality. I know all I need to know about those things, thank you very much. It would have been nice to know that one starts to lose to muscle tone in one's 40s. I realize that's a mere statistic and that the odds can be beaten, but knowing what to look out for is helpful. (A simple truth such as, as you age, you will find you need to pace yourself and if you don't want damaged body parts to ache you really do need to get upwards of six hours' sleep a night would have been most useful, for instance.) It wasn't the Nuland book that made me buy the new collection of Nora Ephron essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck. It was my sentimental fondness for her witty titles and my remembrance of the brilliant how to fake an orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally that sold me. I have been vainly hunting for my copy of Wallflower at the Orgy to see if Ephron's humour was always so brittle and superficial, or if this collection marks a change in my attitude or in her writing. Sadly, it hasn't jumped off the bookshelf at me. Still, a quick and amusing read if you're in the waiting room at the dentist and not interested in last year's Maclean's or Time magazines.
Next up is this year's Canada Reads selection, Paul Quarrington's King Leary. Having read Civilization a couple of years ago, and having been a fan of Quarrington's comic novels for years, I'm swallowing my iconoclastic tendencies and am going to read it (my attitude is usually, fine, if everyone else in Canada is reading it, I don't have to, do I?).
After that there's the new Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife. I admire her greatly, but I don't have a good track record of actually finishing her books - I think the one on menopause is the only one I've actually managed to consume. Still, I like to think I'm supporting her continuing endeavours by generating a royalty payment or two. I can only be grateful that she chose to write about Shakespeare's wife rather than the wife of the English author whose life I hope to turn into a novel some day. And I suppose if I really want to be able to say, 'but it was my idea first' I should be open about it here on the blog, but I'm not going to be.
While at Black Bond on Sunday picking up the Rigler novel, I was seduced by three other novels and slunk home with what felt like ill-gotten gains: another copy of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, since I'm obviously never getting my own copy back; the mass market paperback edition of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Carol Shield's Unless. I am not a huge fan of Shields' work - I wasn't blown away by either The Stone Diaries or Larry's Party. But The Republic of Love, recommended to me years ago by painter and former bookseller friend Barb Symons, was a very fine novel, and on the off chance this one is as good, and because it was selling at the ridiculous remaindered price of $7.99, I bought it. The spectacular cover didn't hurt either.
I am still looking for a copy of Thomas Wharton's Icefields, another of the contenders in the 2008 Canada Reads contest. Haven't been able to find it anywhere (although I confess I haven't looked with my usual diligence). In the meantime I read his next novel, Salamander, a strange but intriguing fantasy of a printer, a mad baron, and, ultimately, of two men and their daughters.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment