Who's Reading What

Issue 114: To List Is Human

A voyeuristic peek into the bedside reading habits of the literary-minded contributors, editors, and board members of TNQ, CanLit journal extraordinaire.

CARIN MAKUZ, "Girl in Red Running Shoes, et al."

I've been having a Lisa Moore festival recently. After reading and loving February, then Alligator, I thought I'd continue the backward progression and look at the collected stories in Open. I don't often immerse myself in one writer for stretches, but there's something addicting about Moore's writing, like being led in a hardly-know-it's-happening kind of way to a place that feels both natural and astounding.

I get the feeling Moore likes to play with the theme of intimacy in all its connotations: good, bad, real, imagined, lost---taking us to these shockingly tender places through what appear to be mundane circumstances.

In one of the Open stories, the narrator says: Nothing exists until it is worded. That's what Moore does---she words. She creates whole worlds not with sentences but with perfectly chosen fragments, familiar images, reminders that we're all the same just facing different circumstances with different tools from different vantage points.

brown dwarf Kim Aubrey, "Two Found Poems"

On K.D. Miller’s Brown Dwarf In the wee hours of this morning, unable to put the book down, I read the last few chapters of K.D. Miller’s novel, Brown Dwarf. Miller expertly builds and maintains the tension in this concise psychological drama until the very end. The plot involves a serial killer, a long missing girl, and the narrator, Rae’s, need to put to rest an old guilt that has plagued her since childhood. By walking the routes she used to frequent alone and with her Seventh Grade best friend, Jory, Rae also revisits the emotional terrain of her middle school years, and discovers something she always knew—that the monstrous resides in each of us, along with the potential for compassion.

Best European Fiction 2010 Diane Schoemperlen, Issue 114 Guest Editor, "For the Love of Lists", "A Nervous Race"

I've just finished reading a wonderful and exciting new anthology called Best European Fiction 2010, published by Dalkey Archive Press, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, with a Preface by Zadie Smith. It includes work by 35 writers from such various countries as Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Poland, and Portugal. Most are short stories, a few are novel excerpts. A few are relatively well-known European writers, most appear here in English for the first time. Aleksandar Hemon begins his Introduction with the statement "Not so long ago, I read somewhere that only three to five percent of literary works published in the United States are translations." And he says: "Moreover, there appears to be a widespread consensus among the all-knowing publishing pundits that short fiction is, yet again, well on its way to oblivion, dying in the literary hospice room adjacent to the one in which the perpetually moribund novel is also expiring...frankly, we think that all that death and demise talk is nothing but a crock of crap." Hear, hear! Plans are to make this anthology an annual event and I will be watching for the next one. Reading this book, I felt an immediate sense of connection and inspiration that made me wonder why my own literary antecedents would seem to be European when I've never been there in my life. In addition to the usual contributors' biographies at the end, each writer also makes a personal statement about their own work. These alone are reason enough to buy this book. George Konrad of Hungary writes: "Speaking from a certain distance, everything that happens to us in our lives eventually becomes fictionalized, a fiction: Our minds fictionalize our memories, which are not as much chronological as they are geographical. It's as if what we remember are only islands of oil floating upon the surface of a sea of everything that has ever happened to us."

Olive Kitteridge Kim Jernigan, TNQ Editor

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

This 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of linked stories set in small-town coastal Maine was loaned to me by a friend who warned that it would break my heart. She was right. The character at its shifting-centre is a formidable high school math teacher, a wife, and a mother who seems to have a knack for pushing away those whose love is potentially most sustaining. As a reader, I, too, was put off by Olive--by her brusque manners, her too-easily wounded pride, her quickness to judge, her resentment of her more affable and generous husband. But the astonishment of the book is in how we are drawn, in the end, to a compassionate connection to her, not only because we see the counter-currents in her own personality--her unexpected and often life-saving sensitivity to the wounds of others, the clear-sightedness which sometimes follows on her moments of greatest self-justification and self-delusion, her fierce love of life--but because we recognize ourselves in her and hope (the one bit of consolation in a tale of compounding loss) that we too can be forgiven our trespasses.

Ali Smith- Boy Meets Girl Richard Cumyn, "There Will Be Locusts"

I am currently reading Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy. First sentence: "Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says." Scottish writer, daft, brilliant, tears the covers off. And has so much fun doing it!

Fruit Brooklyn Jones, "List Found In the Oversized Purse"

I am currently elbow deep into Fruit: A Novel About a Boy and His Nipples by Brian Francis and just came off of reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. I am most definitely finding similarities between the two. Both are told from the perspectives of adolescent boys encountering adult worlds and experiences that are new and frightening. The strength of voice in both novels is believable and original, and I find myself getting lost in their worlds--immersing myself in the protagonists' journey and rallying with them as they discover new things about themselves. I do not enjoy reading books that are hard work and will never "struggle through it" until the end. That said, I don't particularly enjoy fluff either. I believe a book should teach you something and challenge your thinking, if it is uninteresting or dull, I will toss it aside. Needless to say, I found both books to be highly entertaining; they have kept me engaged and eager to finish-- a great escape during my lunch break!

Demon and the Angel Madeleine Nattrass, "Inventory"

I've been reading a book about "duende" by Edward Hirsch, titled: The Demon and the Angel; Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration. It's a wonderful exploration of Lorca's "duende", that elusive quality or "soul" that surfaces in artistic expression, whether it be in poetry, music or painting, etc. While in Mazatlan this winter, I saw a Flamenco performance. One of the female dancers did a solo that screamed "duende". It made me want to learn more about it. Hirsch explores that creative impulse in depth and cites examples of it. He also provides an extensive reading list and discography to guide further exploration. He describes it as "...a catalog of studied pleasures, of recommended readings, visual guides, and crucial soundings"( p. 279), an intriguing list that will surely bring me much more pleasure.

Prismatic Publics Sandra Ridley, "An Incomplete List of Charms"

I'm currently reading Prismatic Publics, an anthology of innovative writing by fifteen Canadian women; including poetry and poetic-prose by Margaret Christakos, Daphne Marlatt, Erín Moure, Sina Queyras, and Nathalie Stephens. Each selection of work is paired with an interview or, rather, an in-depth conversation on theory, identity, and poetics/craft. I am also re-reading Nicole Brossard's The Blue Books--a collection of her first three novels ('A Book', 'Turn of Pang', 'French Kiss, or A Pang's Progress'). Post-modern or not, anti-narrative or not, the way she uses language creates sensuous layers of explorative text. Her lines tease the body and the intellect--such a pleasure to read.

10 Things to Ask Yourself in Warsaw Pat Leech, "Joan List"

Right now I'm reading Barbara Romanik's Ten Things to Ask Yourself in Warsaw and Other Stories.

Solar K. D. Miller, "Daily Bread"

I just finished Ian McEwen's latest novel, Solar. It is the story of a man who is slated to profit from the global warming crisis, and whose present success derives from questionable actions in the past. As usual when I put down a novel by this author, I wonder if he is even capable writing a bad book. I can't recommend Solar highly enough.

Bog People Ben Murray, "Things to Do"

Aside from background research, I've been doing on archaeology for a novel, including The Bog People, by the appropriately named P.V Glob (!), I recently read Anne Michael's new novel The Winter Vault, one of those gorgeously written and shaped books that makes you want to get down on your hands and knees and propose to the author, regardless of their gender or marital status. Right now I'm reading Edna O'Brien's In The Forest, which is masterfully building a sense of dread and impending violence. Lastly, for nostalgia's sake, I've been dipping into my treasured collection of Tintins. Tintin for Prime Minister! For once Canada could be proud of who resides at 24 Sussex Drive, and Tintin is infinitely more animated and ethical than the current resident.

The Book Thief Sylvia Stopforth, "An Annotated Bibliography of Lies"

Markus Zusak's The Book Thief has made it difficult for me to get much done for a few days now. His protagonist, Liesel Meminger, is nine years old when we first meet her, and enroute to her foster parents' home in a small town outside Munich, Germany, in the late 1930s. Soon war breaks out, and as the death toll rises the lives of Zusak's characters shrink. The possibilities available to them contract, and the choices that remain carry more weight than a person can bear.

Zusak spins a fine yarn, and his use of language is shamelessly original. As the novel draws to a close, the narrator--who happens to be Death --muses, "... I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both." (p. 401)

Words in Air

Brian Bartlett, "Walt's Facebook Updates: A Selection"

My favourite way to read novels, even mammoth 500-pagers, is in concentrated chunks of time. Pesky demands of life sometimes interrupt, then I take a month or more to finish a novel. That sort of experience often feels more diffuse and less satisfying than reading the book in under a week, yielding to its pacing and language for an hour or two each day.

Two absorbing books I'm currently reading, however, are ones I've consciously avoided finishing. Neither are novels. Both were published in 2008. Both were written (at least in part) by Elizabeth Bishop. And both I began reading over eighteen months ago. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell and Poems, Prose, and Letters (the Library of America edition of Bishop) carried me through hundreds of pages before I put them temporarily aside; they're so engaging, enlightening, funny, and vivid that I knew I'd regret finishing my first reading of them. The final section of the Library of America volume is nearly 200 pages of Bishop's letters, and a year ago I paused after 50 pages or so of the letters. This week I picked them up again. With the Bishop-Lowell letters, I read nearly 550 pages before deciding to wait a few months before reading the final 250 pages. The book is now back at my bedside.

A lot of statistics here, but they help explain a pattern of reading I'd never adopted before. "I didn't want it to end" is a praising cliché from the mouths of readers. Until my postponing of finishing these two Elizabeth Bishop books, however, I'd never acted upon the feelings expressed in that cliché.

A Year on the Wing Joanne Page, "Riding the Rails"

A perfect spring book: A Year on the Wing: Four Seasons in a Life with Birds. Its author, Tim Dee, has been enchanted by birds and poetry his entire life and knows buckets about both. He worked for the International Council for Bird Preservation before his current job making features for the BBC. His references sent me to Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time to hear its clarinet solo evoking the blackbird and making notebook entries of, among other things, "starlings from Shetland that use sheep as towels, and another there drowning in a bowl of custard."

I am rereading Phil Hall's White Porcupine in order to get a shot of pure imagination, to hear the sound of approaching caravans and mischief.

For sheer astonishment, Janet Frame's first novel, Owls Do Cry. Written in 1957, this is a work of unmatched heartbreak and courage. Frame's eventual fame would be marred for her by the persistence of critics to tie her work to so-called mental health issues. Her work soars above such analysis, speaks for itself.

Mark Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is a reverie of the sort only a fine poet can furnish, that one commentator described as a combination of "lucid attention and acute insight." It is a must-read for anybody who ever fell in love with a painting. Doty celebrates the power of an artist to imbue an object with radiance so as to stop a person in her tracks. Part memoir, part elegy, the examination of still life is, oddly, packed with gentle drama.

Airstream Land Yacht Jill Jorgenson, "A Poem"

It's never a good time to ask me what I'm reading. Or, it always is. More often than not there's an awful lot on the go. These days, though, it's almost exclusively poetry, or about poetry. Three books I'm spending time with most right now are Ken Babstock's Airstream Land Yacht, Paul Muldoon's The End of the Poem, and Poetical Works of Longfellow. All of which kind of blow me away. Ken Babstock has a way with words (- and thought, and thought-as-words), nuff said. I find his work varyingly brilliant or cryptic, or both; cryptic never fails to leaving me feeling, well, rather less than brilliant (and never mind the fessing up to it, in print no less); but mostly I like him.

Muldoon's book is a collection of his series of essays at Oxford, each one delving--and I mean delving--into a poem by one of eighteen poets (Yeats, Hughes, Frost, Bishop, Dickenson, Lowell, Auden, the likes). If you like exploring a work of poetry, and a studied and informed speculation into the poet's writing of it, and the degree and specificity of possible/probable influence of other poets' on said writing and said poet, and the vice versa influence, and introducing cross-reference after cross-reference--check out this volume. It's fascinating. It challenges my now-apparent (and transparently so) shallow breadth of poetry learnedness. Am thoroughly enjoying it though. Worth a reread at a future date, no doubt.

And this little Longfellow book: a recent birthday gift from my parents, it was my grandfather's, and it's really old. You can picture--a small thick burgundy soft-hardcover, gold embossed print and flourish on the spine, yellowed fragile-edged pages. Depending on whether you're looking at the spine, the frontispiece, the page before the frontispiece, or the top left of every page of text, the book is called Poetical Works of Longfellow, or Poetical Works / Longfellow, or Longfellow's Poems, or Longfellow's Poetical Works. This astonishing absence of consistency, as well as the fact that there is not any indication whatsoever of a date of printing, nor, if you can believe it, any mention at all of Longfellow's first names or even initials, might tell us something of the age of the book. It was printed in England, my granddad would be a hundred this year, he brought it when he came over from England to Canada when he was sixteen. His fountain pen handwriting signs his name on the first blank page. That's about all I know about it. That, and, that it is managing to touch in me, to illuminate for me, some timeless thread of humanity, a thread of connectedness. Imagine--imagine!--writing something that speaks to, and will be read by, a reader 170-odd years in the future:

And thou, too, whosoe'er thou art,

That readest this brief psalm,

As one by one thy hopes depart,

Be resolute and calm.

Oh, fear not in a world like this,

And thou shalt know erelong,

Know how sublime a thing it is

To suffer and be strong.

Wow.