Who's Reading What

LEESA DEAN, "Hotel Paris"

Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

Warning: this book of short stories is addictive. I can't seem to stay away, as a reader and a writer. The prose is beautiful and infuriating, as are the meandering, oddball plots. The characters are people you would never want to meet in real life, but between the pages, you somehow care what happens to them. Or, sometimes, you want to reach through the pages and punch them in the face.

Certain lines will burrow into your mind and haunt you. You may even find yourself inadvertently stealing them and slipping them into conversation with friends, passing off Johnson's cleverness as your own. I know I've done it. There's a passage in the first story, Car Crash While Hitchhiking, that has been in my head for about a decade: "What a pair of lungs," the narrator states. "She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere."

DREW McDOWELL, "V-I-P"

Despite the hard labour that comes with pursuing a grad degree, I still find some time to read for pleasure.  My taste in books is eclectic. Currently, I juggle Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, Learning From Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, and although it may not exactly qualify as a "book" (codex), I am also reading Anne Carson's incredible Nox: An Epitaph for My Brother.  Of course, writing this statement makes me realize that I am not reading any fiction whatsoever.  I will have to remedy that by cracking open The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, an amazing book of stories that I dip into periodically.  

REBECCA ROSENBLUM, "Downtown"

I'm in the middle of the new issue of Rampike (19.2) which has a beaufiult set of poems called The Canonical Hours by Eugene McNamara, and a really interesting interview with Terry Griggs, among other things. Before that, I read The Turn of the Screw for the (embarrassing) first time. I really loved it, though I am not a big ghost story person. James does the suspense of layered narrative/unreliable narrator quite well. I'm dying to discuss the ending with someone--I have a theory about it.

PEGGY McCANN, "True Detective"

I am reading things I really dislike for a story I'm working on, so as a powerful antidote I'm rereading books I've loved. My favourite George Eliot, The Mill On the Floss, for the third time; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, in the wonderful translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; and my favourite detective, Dashiell Hammett's nameless, fat and aging Continental Op. He's not much of a detective, actually; you come to that conclusion after several of the stories. His preferred method is "wheels within wheels", setting events in motion then waiting to see who's left standing. Sometimes he's nice to women, but that never turns out well. The stories (two volumes, The Continental Op and The Big Knockover) and a masterpiece of a novel, Red Harvest, were written in the 1920's but they're as fresh as if they were written yesterday and as hard and clear as diamonds. Eliot, Tolstoy and Hammett: it doesn't get better than that.

ANTONY Di NARDO, "After Purdy: When the world was bush"

For the moment I've put fiction aside. Poetry and poetry collections have overtaken my rooms and I've been going back and forth among several slim volumes. Steven Heighton's Patient Frame is a testament to word craft.  I've been enjoying his subtle ironies, syntactical gymnastics and especially his syncopated lines that make it clear that we use words to sing. As he puts it in a poem, "what good the words/if not to sing." I'm beginning to read John Ashbery's latest oeuvre, Planisphere, and re-reading his April Galleons. His poetry has always fascinated me--difficult and cryptic as it is, I'm possessed by his diction and surreal turns of phrase. There's much to learn from him about how language and the sentence works, not unlike what Frank Sinatra can teach a vocalist about phrasing.  Finally, I'm enjoying my good friend, Susan Briscoe's book, A Crow's Vow. I heard her reading from it at Knowlton's Wordfest in Quebec's Eastern Townships and she had me swaying on the hammock of her lyrics, images as delicate and sturdy as spider's silk. Written in a series of linked, ghazal-like poems her book assigns those small, barely perceptible changes within the seasons to the dissolution of a marriage. For me, summer going into fall is a good time for concentrating the mind on the broken line.

GRACE E. WELCH, "Thirst"

I've loved science fiction and fantasy since I was a girl reading A Wrinkle in Time and The Hobbit.  Even still, I missed some classics along the way. So this summer I'm reading The Great Book of Amber.  It includes all of Roger Zelazny's ten Chronicles of Amber novels in one hefty volume. I became so hooked that I opted to take this monster paperback with me on a recent business trip.  It's so big it wouldn't fit in the seat pocket on the airplane!

DOUGLAS GLOVER, "The Possum"

I'm reading Witold Gombrowicz's Diary Volume One (1953-1956). Before that I read his memoir A Kind of Testament. Gombrowicz lived in Argentina starting just as the Second World War broke out, then eventually, in the 1960s, moved to France and married a French-Canadian woman and died soon after of asthma. In the diary, which isn't really a diary--it was more like a blog, written regularly for publication in a Polish magazine, he's funny, confessional, awkward, arrogant and amazingly smart. He compulsively turns and returns to various motifs: Poland and expatriates, Polish writers, the realm of the interhuman, and the deformation of form. The Polish material resonates in my mind because, of course, for various reasons having not much to do with choice--mostly circumstance--I live outside my country. Gombrowicz thinks this is okay. Being outside your country puts you at a distance from which you can see more clearly. Also, in the end, you realize your country is in you--this is where your art comes from. He's also very good on the communal construction of the self in the interhuman. For centuries and right up to the Existentialists, we have too blithely taken the existence of an integral self for granted. But Existentialism is a reductio. At the moment of decision, self-creation, the self disappears (this is very clearly described in Camus' novel The Stranger). Better, as Gombrowicz says, to accept that much of what we call a self is created through the desires of others and through communal forms and expectations. Only if we accept this do we have a chance to forge a new and firmer sense of self not based on blindness and denial. And finally Gombrowicz is a kind of formalist who makes himself as an artist (and a person--he liked to chase boys in Buenos Aires parks) by rejecting form (often in parody).

TERRY FALLIS, "Taking Flight"

I'm in the middle of reading Val Ross's oral biography of sorts on Robertson Davies, called A Portrait in Mosaic. I am thoroughly enjoying the insights and firsthand accounts of "Rob" as he grew up in small town Ontario and went on to become such a giant of Canadian letters. His novels have always held a special place in my heart and head, so to get underneath the cloak, the natty clothes, and flowing beard has been wonderful.  It is a shame Val Ross did not live to see how well her book has been received by Davies fans across the country. I'm certainly grateful for her final work.

DAVID HELWIG, "Al Purdy: Unconventional Angles"

I am currently reading Gore Vidal's novel Julian. It's intriguing to look into it shortly after finishing Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean, and to wonder how much the difference in texture in the treatment of the ancient world is the difference in subject, Aristotle and Alexander as against Julian the Apostate and a couple of his teachers and friends, how much the difference in the sensibility of the writer--Lyon seems a little closer to the earth--and how much of it may be a difference in the way fiction is conceived and conveyed now, as against the way it was conceived fifty years ago.

STAN DRAGLAND, "Unsettled With Margaret Avison"

Mining Possiblilties: A Manual For Writers and Readers From Ken Sparling's Book, Pedlar Press, 2010

The strength in openings, the delight of a new opening, the potential inherent in all openings, this is what leads us to open again and again. Can I get an Amen?

Is the non sequitur a kind of failure in a world where sequence is everything? No, it's a kind of mimesis. After all, the world is all encompassing. Unfathomable existence sets no rules for proceeding. Everything in life is a detour. Everything we can know is an idiot's dream, and translation takes faith. Each word is a trigger for something you can gauge, but never predict.

What this one sees in it is something like a forest, one with no obvious path, just little clearings and breaks in the bush that you might or might not use to ease your passage. But, he says, never read into these breaks a system of authority. Is it the same with any series of progressions and configurations, any series of shapes and trajectories? Probably. Likely. Let us undertake to read no system of authority into any series, any pattern of breaks. For offering us this liberty, Mister, and for expanding the limitlessness of the void If by tearing it from its narrative root, setting it adrift, many thanks.

Still, writing is a manner by which to discover meaning. Poetry seems most prepared for this. Poetry seems to come upon meaning as it moves across the page. But don't imagine that poems will do you any good. They won't give you something to talk to your neighbour about. They won't provide something to think about when your head hits the pillow at night and you hear the wind in the trees outside your window and you smell the threat of rain. Rain a threat? Rain? Rain is no . . . Oh. Deterioration into a rain of meaning. Rain or chain, because Somebody here wants to break the chain of meaning, Somebody prefers not to cater to any hunger for a story. Some fucking lie that has a beginning, a middle and an end. And a resolution. Because what people call resolution might be something an author proffers at the end to stop the fall. To stop the fall. Right. Have you ever looked at words and seen how they fall one after another, but then not been able to figure out how all this falling culminates in what it culminates in? Have we! Plenty! And been content. With partial knowledge, like the man said. Gentle readers no longer, what we do now is we up and grab hold somewhere and help Mr. Sparling move the damned thing into position. Fill the empty intonation of the falling with substance.

All right, but what about the sense of organization we hunger to feel? After all, we are called upon to hold things together.

We are commanded to imagine our way. Good answer. Good answer. So here we go a-traipsing, within the woods tra-la. No breadcrumbs. Shiny stones. Because this guy wants to write things that disappear as soon as they get read, or that aren't even there in the first place. Somebody likes a challenge! So? So do we al. Fierce reader, pass it on, to hustle and scratch, because under the story, beneath it, on the paper under where the story sits, there is something hidden. Some secret. Therefore, people, be ready. Be a pit. Be a fallow field. Be empty. Be nothing. So as to know what it's like to be in a world where words look like meaningless symbols.  It can be a beautiful place. Frightening. But beautiful. And after all, no matter how far into the world you go, you'll always be here, on the edge of nothing.

And yet, listen: Rising in the mist is a heavy silence. Everything the woman is now, everything she ever was, everything she is ever going to be, rises up in that mist. The mist is silence. The silence, a sort of nothing, is really a sort of noise. Therefore, if silence is to fall, and fall it must, let it fall (let silence fall) like a fucking sonic hatchet.

But not just yet. Listen: She was undoing the clasp on her sports bra. When you get those out, he said, bring them over here, will you?

Listen: Sometimes you will hear some music that stops you in your tracks and for a moment the pain of being alive will fade and you will feel yourself inside the glow of who you are.

And rain? Remember what I said. But rain is no mere metaphor. Rain is the thing itself. So ask: is it not still possible for us to encounter the object anew? It is possible. It has a mystery where he comes in writing. So chip a poem onto a stone tablet and give it to the world. Listen quietly. Watch rain to find an opening. Find someplace to enter passion. Fill the empty intonation of the falling with substance.

Finally, folks, don't take any of the wooden nickels. Here's one; test it with narrow teeth: reading is lonely, because, no matter how skillfully we do it, we are each of us alone at the end. Believe that, you're reading Book wrong.

JEANETTE LYNES, "Enlightening Fetish", TNQ EXTRA

I just read Lisa Moore's novel February and it moved me so deeply,
both in terms of artistry and emotional depth, that I don't think I'll
read another novel for quite awhile. I've spent lots of time in
Newfoundland, and the novel brought back aspects of place I'd
forgotten. I've also read and enjoyed strong new poetry collections by
Phil Hall, Jennifer Londry, and Andrew Stubbs. I'm always re-reading
the 'classics' as well: The Great Gatsby, The Stone Angel, Great
Expectations, anything by Alice Munro. I've had a novel by Roberto
Bolano on my shelf for ages, The Savage Detectives - I will read it, I
will, I will. I'm also looking forward to The Golden Mean by Annabel
Lyon and Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay (I can't believe I
haven't read it yet). I'm addicted to American poet Tony Hoagland, all
caught up and eagerly awaiting his next book.

KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER, "Wide Open", TNQ EXTRA

I am mostly reading non-fiction this summer, long essays. The Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, is extended and in-depth contemplation on the history and place of human quietness. It is one of those books that changes one's world view. Sara Maitland will be coming into my online course Writer's Talk: Writing Through Reading with The New York Times. I also read former Edinburgh bishop, Richard Holloway's The Monster and The Saint. This is a thoughtful essay on the division of the human spirit, in a sense our mind-body split, which I found provocative, if sometimes flawed. Regarding fiction, I bought a copy of Kidnapped for one of my sons but instead I am reading it. I like it less than Treasure Island but who can fault Robert Louis Stevenson for lines like these: "That one good Scotch word, 'birstle,' was indeed the most of the story of the day that we had now to pass. You are to remember that we lay on the bare top of a rock, like scones upon the girdle; the sun beat upon us cruelly; the rock grew so heated, a man could scarce endure the touch of it; and the little patch of earth and fern, which kept cooler, was only large enough for one at a time."  

PASHA MALLA, "A Night at the Theatre", TNQ EXTRA

Every few months I'll read something that completely upends what I'd
thought a novel could do and be. Last month, it was Halldor Laxness's
Under the Glacier, a weird, hilarious, poignant story about a
bishop's emissary sent 'to a remote Icelandic village to find out if
the town's dead are really being stuffed into the glacier. Or
something like that. The novel shifts seamlessly between absurd comedy
and deep theological and philosophical inquiry, with touches of
fabulism and surrealism -- oh, and there's a ghost story element, too.
Think like maybe, um, Beckett and Dostoevsky and Edgar Allen Poe, all
bundled into one wacky Nordic masterpiece.

ISABEL HUGGAN, "Reflecting on Mirrors", TNQ EXTRA!

The Complete Works of Michel Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame, Everyman's Library. It must be the zeitgeist, but I know I am not alone in my pursuit of Montaigne... at least three other friends are doing as I do, dipping into this book from time to time to savour his curiosity and wit, and to more fully understand how the essay form has evolved from his personal explorations.

How To Live, A Life of Montaigne, by Sarah Bakewell, Chatto and Windus. I admit that these two are an exception to the rule of random arrival. This delightful book is a foray into Montaigne's life by means of asking the question "how to live" and answering it in 20 different ways through reference to his work. Even if you've never read Montaigne, this is an entirely enjoyable and charmingly written biography. I just finished, so it's still in the pile.

A Reader on Reading, by Alberto Manguel, Yale University Press. I love this new collection of essays, reviews and speeches by our most distinguished bibliophile, and it sits very well with Montaigne. A book for opening when I want to have my mind taken in some surprising directions, to discover authors and ideas I might not have done on my own.

The Mourner's Dance by Katherine Ashenburg. Having had two close friends die in the past year, I have found it difficult to cope with their absence. I thought perhaps this examination of grieving patterns might be useful, and indeed it is -- not a "self-help" book, it nevertheless helps. Why this should be so, I don't know, but I think that reading "about" the subject of sorrow gives me a calming sense of objectivity.

The Peregrine by J.A. Baker, New York Review Books. A good friend who is a bird-watcher gave me this beautiful book, and although I've read it, I keep it by my bed to look at now and again, knowing that whenever I do I will find a line that stuns me with its lyrical beauty.  Even recalling that long-ago favorite Tarka the Otter, I've never encountered such a finely detailed examination of another creature - in this case, a hawk dwelling in the East Anglia region of England - and its place within a landscape. Baker spent years watching these birds of prey so closely he began to identify with them, describing their daily lives with passion and precision. I see the natural world more clearly now, having his eyes in my head.

Dream Work by Mary Oliver, Atlantic Monthly Press. An Australian novelist, with whom I exchange books of poetry, sent me this wonderful collection-- now nearly 25 years old -- especially for its poem entitled  "The Journey" that begins, One day you finally knew/what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you/kept shouting/their bad advice.... I keep it nearby for frequent reference.

The Lost Gospels by Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Brick Books. Last week I sent this collection to my Australian friend, knowing it will please her enormously. This is my current choice as "the book with which I close at night", so that I can drift to sleep in the company of poetry and intelligence. Often, I just turn to the first page, to lines that I have already come to love:  Open your throat before/the sun pulls down the afternoon, and the leaky boat of language leaves/the safety of the shore. Start by naming everything you tried to resist..../You know/sorrow is memory's sister; everything calls out your name.

Strange but true, underneath the Lost Gospels is the The New English Bible. Not my usual fare, but a result of my need to go back to primary sources after reading The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman, who has been one of my heroes since the trilogy His Dark Materials. Although this new book - a clever reworking of the Gospel story, this version features twins - disappointed me in the end, I also had to admit that my recollection of Biblical lore has grown misty over the years, and so I pulled out The Bible from the shelves. Pullman is only dealing with the New Testament, but I started with Genesis for the total backstory. This project may take years.

Unread, but waiting in line, are The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, Vintage Press  (a gift from a friend who knows of my admiration for Holmes as a biographer and my interest in the cultural history of science), and the only fiction among the lot, Sactuary Line, the new novel by Jane Urquhart, to which I look forward with happy anticipation.

RONNA BLOOM, "To Be With Strangers", TNQ EXTRA!

I am reading Apocrypha: Further Journeys by Stan Dragland. I read tiny amounts at a time because I don't want it to end. This book follows his Journeys Through Bookland which I adored and which made me begin, again, to try to write about journeys of my own. His voice is so friendly and humble and smart and funny and quiet. Feels like he's sitting in the kitchen talking about writers and writing and living. Now in Ontario then Alberta now Newfoundland. Moving to this bar, that party, this conference, that chair. Thinking about (among others) Matt Cohen and Agnes Walsh and Bronwyn Wallace and what they wrote and said and gave. It feels like a public, personal conversation. Here he is: "But I digress. That's the way I am. Rather than look at you and talk to you I jump away into the words of others, those distances I love. It keeps me standing still in the very socks and shoes I told you about." And I want to say, 'Thank you. Keep going. Do you have to leave so soon?'

HEATHER BIRRELL, "Confessions of a High School (Student) Survivor", TNQ EXTRA!

Research reading for the novel I'm working on includes Babies Without Borders by Karen Dubinsky - it's a compelling academic study of the stories we tell ourselves (as individuals and nations) about rescuing and stealing children.  Also a novel called Ruins by Cuban-American writer Achy Obejas, set in Havana in 1994, with a hapless, loyal idealist at its centre - he's on a quietly important quest, and I like the pace and mystery of it.  Short stories:  Emerald City by Jennifer Egan.  I found the book in a charity shop in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides for 20p.  I read an excerpt of her newest novel in Granta but couldn't quite bring myself to commit.  But so far, so very good with the stories.  Poems:  The Certainty Dream by Kate Hall.  I love the combination of intelligence and dreaminess here, and the ways the writer uses the safety of sentences to push at the boundaries of sense-making.  Finally - picture books!  I've been reading the Katie Morag books by Mairi Hedderwick to my two year old.  The text is a bit sophisticated for her, but the watercolour illustrations are witty, intricate, and evocative of the Hebrides, where they are set.  I would highly recommend!

Who's Reading What Archive

Issue 102: The Long and the Short of It
Issue 103: Natural Histories
Issue 104: The Real Estate Issue
Issue 105: Adventures in Verse
Issue 106: The Montreal Issue
Issue 107: The Salon des Refuses

Issue 109: For Some Unknown Reason and Anyhow

Issue 110: Last Poems

Issue 111: I Think I Should Go Home

Issue 112: Travellers In A Strange Land

Issue 113: Matters of the Heart

Issue 114: To List Is Human