Who's Reading What
Issue 109: "For Some Unknown Reason and Anyhow"
A voyeuristic peek into the bedside reading habits of the literary- minded contributors, editors and board members of TNQ, CanLit journal extraordinaire.
DAN YASHINSKY, "Chaucer By Heart"
I've just finished Tahir Shah's "In Arabian Nights", which is a very amusing, and sometimes moving, account of how the oral tradition sustains Moroccan culture. This is a place where professional storytellers were an important part of life until fairly recently, and where everyone Shah encounters seems to have a good folktale on the tip of the tongue. Before that: "Silent Thunder", by Katy Payne. It's a study of how elephants communicate. I'm doing a year-long project about how we imagine listeners in life and literature, so I'm reading about oral culture and about bio-acoustics (i.e. listening to nature).
W.J. KEITH, "A Poet on Poetry and Its Discontents"
I am currently reading John Cowper Powys's superb novel, "A Glastonbury Romance", first published in 1932.
MARILYN GEAR PILLING, "Guest in the House"
The best books I read in 2008 were Carl Wilson's "Let's Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste" (a unique approach to the subject of taste and tackiness); Robyn Sarah's "Little Eurekas. A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry" (insights wonderfully enfleshed by the poems she uses as illustrations) ; David Abram's "The Spell of the Sensuous" (the body and the natural world - allowed me to place myself as a writer); Elizabeth Strout's two novels and one short fiction collection a(as a writer of fiction, she does many things superlatively well). The biggest single discovery of '08 was Robert Macfarlane's "Mountains of the Mind" and "The Wild Places". Macfarlane (British) writes like a poet and gets at the meaning of landscape. Both books gave me several hits a page. I have taken several people by the scruff and rhapsodized about these books; each was as mesmerized as I by Macfarlane's work.
JEAN VAN LOON, "Noah's Dive"
I just finished reading "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls. It’s a memoir about a family of four children brought up – so to speak – by parents who are charming, highly intelligent, creative, committed to each other, caring in their way, and totally incompetent as providers and parents. In vivid, non-judgmental prose, Walls shows how this family had access to financial resources but lived in abject poverty, without a stable home base, frequently on the verge of starvation. How otherwise negligent parents taught their children a love of learning and books and a sense of self-worth. It is fascinating, difficult to put down and a book I’ll not soon forget.
Before that I read two wonderful short story collections – "The Girl with the Flammable Skirt" by Aimee Bender and "Cowboys Are My Weakness" by Pam Houston. Both use wonderful style and lively humour to tell heartbreaking stories.
ANNE FLEMING, "The Last Thing", "Soyez Blisse", "Anyhow (Afterword)"
I love reading “Who’s Reading What” lists. I always compare my current reading with theirs, usually favourably, because that’s the sort of person I am: someone who needs to boost themselves up by saying, I’m reading more! I’m reading more eclectically! I’ve always wanted to be asked so I can show off. But now that I am, I’m not sure my list this week is all that good. Which of course is not the purpose. No. It’s not a reading competition. It’s a way to cotton onto titles you’d never know of otherwise. It’s a reminder that people’s real reading habits are not the ones you imagine by reading book pages in newspapers.
Okay. So. I am reading The Old Curiosity Shop, which needs no elaboration; Let’s Talk About Love, A Journey to the End of Taste, by Carl Wilson, an examination of the nature of taste via the music of Celine Dion – funny, smart, ironic and deliberately not ironic, it asks questions about aesthetic judgement that I am always asking myself; Bella Coola Man, by Clayton Mack, a First Nations elder; The Journey Prize Stories 20 and 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel, by Jane Smiley, both for classes I am teaching. How Fiction Works, by James Wood; Strange Blooms, by Jennifer Porter, subtitled “The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants”; Break it Down, by Lydia Davis (I read one story a week or so); and The Pepins and their Problems, by Polly Horvath, the children’s book of the week.
Oh. Hm. Not bad. And I am not even bullshitting.
AMANDA JERNIGAN, "On Peter Sanger's 'Sea Horse'"
The book I'm currently reading is *The Year of Magical Thinking*, Joan
Didion's memoir of the months leading up to and following the death of
her husband, during which time their daughter was also critically ill.
The kind of grief of which Didion writes is unfamiliar to me: but I
have seen it in others, and the book helps me to understand what I saw
there. Also, while I cannot relate to Didion's loss, I can relate to
her manner of dealing: 'In time of trouble, I had been trained since
childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information
was control.' When I picked this book up from the bookshelf, I was not
thinking about a recent spate of illnesses in my extended family. Yet
reading that passage I immediately recognized what I was doing: 'Read,
learn, work it up....'
DAVE MARGOSHES, "The Farmhand", "The Barking Dog", "The Family Circle"
I'm just about done with Niceman Cometh, by David Carpenter. It's not that long a read, and smooth as olive oil on the eyes, but I've been at it for a few weeks, reading slowly like a kid nursing a jaw-breaker, just allowing myself a chapter at a time - I'm enjoying it that much, I just don't want it to end. It's a wonderful novel, filled with vivid characters and jump-off-the-page writing - Carpenter handles multiple POV like a rodeo cowboy twirling a lariat. He's such a good writer it's a crime he isn't better known. This novel, published last fall, has pretty much been flying under the radar. Two other books, also largely unnoticed, that I really enjoyed in the last little while are A Crack in the Wall, a terrific first story collection by Calgarian Betty Jane Hegerat, who is a comer, in my view, and Journey Without a Map, a moving and hilarious memoir about growing up Italian by Sasakatchewan's Donna Caruso - talk about smooth as olive oil!
ROSALYNN TYO, TNQ's Crackerjack Managing Editor
Last Sunday I closed the blinds and my bedroom closet doors to shut out the sun and the overflowing laundry hamper—reproaches that might have triumphed over a lesser book—and spent the whole day reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.
Yes, I know it’s now a Major Motion Picture and no, I haven’t seen it. In fact, the trailer did not make me want to read it or see the movie: somehow, I got the mistaken impression that it was a ‘returning soldier’ story. I’ve nothing against the genre in itself—it’s that I developed a deep aversion after force-reading far too many WWII-era novels in university. Funny how over-exposure can make you dislike most anything.
Anyway, as it happens Revolutionary Road contains so many of the things I love to read about that I probably would have liked it even if Yates’ writing style were not exactly to my taste—but it is, so. I’m afraid that if I elaborate I’ll confuse people who are about to see the movie and/or start to sound like a love-struck teenager, god forbid, so I’ll just say this. Please, read this book.
