Who's Reading What
Issue 111: I Think I Should Go Home
A voyeuristic peek into the bedside reading habits of the literary- minded contributors, editors and board members of TNQ, CanLit journal extraordinaire.
ADRIAN KELLY, "The Exact Imagination"
Happenstance--always reliable--has led me to the Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner. I had never read them before. What a lack!
Stegner's stories are honest, and real, and beautiful. No gimmicks. No cynicisms, and little ironies. Neither is Stegner "merely" a rural naturalist. The stories range from rural Saskatchewan to Los Angeles to Cairo. His settings, in any case, don't matter as much as the clear and cadenced prose. I'll be reading and re-reading both his stories and his novels in the weeks and months to come.
TIMOTHY MARSH, "Impetus for a Sketch"
At the moment I am rereading three bizarre books by the late American counterculture writer Richard Brautigan. The books have been collected in a one-volume omnibus edition and contain two of his lesser known novels, The Abortion and So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, plus his lone collection of short stories, Revenge of the Lawn. Brautigan is best known for his book Trout Fishing in America, which established him as a literary icon of the 1960s. His experimental poetry-prose fusion narratives made him one of the more innovative and emulated writers of his time. As I read Brautigan's work the word "athletic" comes to mind; a porse style that runs, jumps, leaps, and vaults into the ear, a language with a particular set of physical skills as rare as they are impressive. His collection of stories, Revenge of the Lawn, is an odd forgotten forefather of the flash fiction form, and a vigorous example of the type of peculiar prose stylist one needs to become to be a readable short-short writer. Simply put, these books are fun. Like all fun books they move quickly. They are not page-turners in the sense of suspense. Rather it is the curious dance of Brautigan's language and his acrobatic descriptions that bring me easily to the end of each story. Any student of poetry or prose, any admirer of language and wordplay, would enjoy some time with this author's work.
JEFF LATOSIK, "How The Tiktaalik Came On Land", "Toronto Island, Summer", "Misfortune Drove a 1965 Buick"
Right now I'm reading Jose Saramago's The Cave. I'm sort of playing fiction ping-pong with Saramago and David Foster Wallace. Poetry ping-pong between Wislawa Szymbroska's Selected Poetry, and since seeing him read at his book-length dinner, the genius that is Dennis Lee. In between all this time, finding time for some music journalism, at the moment a book put out by ECW about Radiohead. Who knew Pablo Honey was a Jerky Boys reference? Blast from the past on all counts.
AMY JONES, "Twelve Weeks", "All We Will Ever Be", "Church Of The Latter Day Peaches"
I can't really call myself a poetry lover. But I do love Adrienne Gruber's This Is The Nightmare (Thistledown Press, 2008) so much that I have been carrying it around in my laptop bag so I can read (and re-reread) excerpts out loud to friends, family and random strangers I encounter on the subway. It's a slim book, but at this rate, I'll be reading it for years.
BETSY STRUTHERS, "Relay"
As a summer project, I'm reading through my poetry library, revisiting old favourites, and re-reading books that I read too quickly the first time and can now savour. Piled by my hammock are Mary Oliver's New and Selected, John Gould's Kilter: 55 Fictions, KI Press' Types of Canadian Women, Roger Bell's You Tell Me, and Carmine Starnino's This Way Out. And on my bedside table for distraction a stack of mysteries by Henning Mankel and Mark Billingham, among others.
ROLLI "Charles, You Are a Peach of a Man", "Aunt Gray, Octavius and I"
ROLLI (www.rolliwrites.blogspot.com)
Short Fiction- Bradbury's recent, The Cat's Pajama's, picked up at a thrift shop. If it isn't particularly good, or even, the strongest are worthy, and the man still has my vote for best living writer.
Poetry- nothing of late, which is odd - as I'm accustomed, on a weekly basis, to extracting, in one go, like a mad surgeon, a whole shelf of volumes, and going through them - as a reader, I'm hasty, and particular - in a sitting.
Fiction- was midway through a reread of David Copperfield, when the book was eaten, apparently by my sofa—which happens all too often.
Non-Fiction- some black hole stuff. Pretty interesting business. Also, a book about pirates.
Periodicals- looking into new and back issues of The Feathertale Review, which I think very close to the best—and certainly the best-illustrated, and funniest—journal in the country.
