Who's Reading What: Issue 102 

Compiled and edited by Julianna Varga

Carolyn Pegg TNQ Board Member

I just finished reading Smoke (the One Book, One Community program's choice in Waterloo Region) and after that In the Castle of the Flynns by Michael Raleigh. Both were set in the 50's and both had wonderful characters. However, my most recent favourite is Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman, a series of personal essays on why reading is an interesting, valuable activity and also fun.

Marilyn Bowering Author of "Metaphysics II" (Issue 102: Poetry)

I'm reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow, the story of a poet who visits the isolated town of Kars, Turkey, to write a piece about 'the suicide girls'--young women who are killing themselves rather than obey the state directive to remove their headscarves. Having just returned from Turkey myself, I'm grateful for the nuances Pamuk brings to contemporary Turkish issues. This is a wonderful, beautiful and important book with its mix of politics and literature, and perspectives on belief.

Avi Silberstein Author of "Ruth" (Issue 102: Postscripts)

I just finished Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder. It is a biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, a brilliant medical anthropologist who is in the process of redefining the way the global health community views life and disease in developing nations. Farmer's deep compassion towards other humans and his unshakeable pursuit of fairness are captured by Kidder's seamless narrative.

 Elisabeth Harvor Author of "Men of a Certain Age" (Issue 102: Fiction) Read excerpt

I've just begun reading Jenny Diski's Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America With Interruptions, which actually begins at sea. She is sitting on a small deck, "like a veranda, at the back of the ship," and she quotes Conrad on the "magic monotony of existence between sky and water." I'm hoping for that same magic monotony, but between sky and land this time, once she has disembarked and is looking for a train from Savannah to Phoenix, the lulled reader dreaming of watching the lulled writer as she endlessly observes land and sky....

Rebecca Rosenblum Author of "Fruit Factory" (Issue 102: Fiction) Read excerpt

An hour ago, I was lying on the lawn outside the library reading Michael Winter's story collection, One Last Good Look. It's so sharp and weird, devastating and funny: "Three ginger hens have spent the night roosting in a spruce near the goat. They look large and ridiculous in the tree, but they wear an expression that says, We are wild chickens, do not laugh at us." No one else writes like that. Now I'm at work and keep finding grass in my hair. Totally worth it.

Sarah Selecky Author of "This is How We Grow as Humans" (Issue 102: Fiction)

I'm reading Neil Smith's collection of stories, Bang Crunch. My favourite story--I've read it a few times now--is "Isolettes." It's a story about a tenuous triangle: a premature infant named B, her mother, An, and the sperm donor, Jacob. B lives in an incubator, filled with tubes. As An and Jacob watch B struggle to live, An struggles to love. The end of this story is breathtaking. "The B9ers" is a story about a support group for people with benign tumours, and "Funny Weird or Funny Ha Ha?" is about a woman who carries her husband's ashes around in a curling stone for support as she kicks her alcohol addiction. This is unexpected, inspired writing. Every story is an examination of love in some way; as I was reading these stories, I was often hit sideways by an emotional angle I didn’t see coming. I love that.

Amy King TNQ Intern

I'm reading Villette by Charlotte Bronte, in addition to many different copies of The New Quarterly, of course. Villette is the story of a woman who, after the death of her mistress, impulsively decides to leave the area of England that she grew up in for London and then Villette, where she receives help from a handsome man she describes as "manly but not overbearing." That's as far as I've read, but with lines like "Our globe...seems at such periods torn and disordered; the feeble amongst us wither in her distempered breath, rushing hot from steaming volcanoes," I'm definitely hooked! I love reading literature with so intoxicating an atmosphere that I feel the world of the story years after having read it. If that sounds appealing, and, if for any reason any of TNQ's seasoned readers have not read One Hundred Years of Solitude or Wuthering Heights, I highly recommend them, even though they aren't Canadian. I think (and hope) that Villette will soon evoke a wonderfully vivid atmosphere that will hurl me away from Waterloo!

Vanessa Farnsworth Author of "Except for That" (Issue 102: Postscripts)

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. I have a stack of beat up old Kurt Vonnegut paperbacks on my bookshelf that I like to pull out whenever I get to thinking I have the least bit of talent.  Then I curl up in a fetal position for three days afterwards, wondering what in God’s name I’m doing with my life. Mr. Vonnegut’s recent death has inspired me to dip into the pile again, so it looks like it’ll be a non-productive summer for me. Good news for my family, who will actually get to see me on occasion. I’m just hoping I can remember what all their names are.

Steve McOrmond Author of "Strait Crossing" (Issue 102: Poetry)

Monty Reid’s Disappointment Island is one of the finest collections of poetry I’ve read in years. In several long sequences of precise lyrics, small songs and “narrowed prayers,” Reid casts a paleontologist’s eye on the accumulations of everyday life, the remains of the near and distant past. Objects, those accretions of memory, are taken down from the shelving and dusted off by a mind hungry for meaning and transcendence. This is a poetry that asks the big questions: What survives, and what may be revealed by listening to the “erotic murmur of material things” (The Shelving”)? In so many of these moving poems, time is telescoped and small human figures are set against a stark backdrop of barrens, desert places, stones and “an excess of bones” (“Kwei”). There are meditations on the arrogance of seeking such emptiness, and also on the various places and provisional dwellings we come to call home: a cabin fastened into place “by sticking the chimney into the mist,” a crumbling Cuban love hotel and “the faintly luminous tents that have gathered like so many eyes / around the fire in the desert…” (“‘Outside the Mouth’”). Here be wonders.

Julianna Varga TNQ Volunteer

I’m currently reading Peter Stanford’s The Legend of Pope Joan: In Search of the Truth, an engrossing investigation of the claim that a woman, disguised as a man, was once head of the Roman Catholic Church. A small decorated shrine in Italy inspires Stanford’s search, converting him from lounging Roman tourist to intrepid detective dedicated to finding the She-Pope. Informative and precise, the book delves into Church history, highlighting the religious roles of women time forgot. Really, The Legend of Pope Joan is a grounded Da Vinci Code with purpose, a thoughtful rebuttal contesting the “No Girls Allowed!” sign posted outside the Vatican's doors. I highly recommend it.

Scott Randall Author of "No Longer With Us" (Issue 102: Postscripts)

I just finished Rachel Cusk's The Lucky Ones, a short story/novel hybrid that is splendid for its studies of conflicted parenthood, but even more admirable for its technical ambition and dexterity. I always get a big kick out of the control that such a book requires and love seeing all the different threads come together: the central characters in some stories appear elsewhere as secondary or minor characters, the plots of different stories are linked by overlapping moments and coincidences, and a common theme is explored and expanded upon throughout. Cusk's connections become so increasingly complex that the implications of the early stories are fully revealed only as background in the later stories, and only when I got to the end of the book did I understand just how much the individual stories ultimately depended upon one another all along. Really clever.

Kim Jernigan Editor, The New Quarterly

I've been reading storyteller Dan Yashinsky's Suddenly They Heard Footsteps, an account of how he became a storyteller, what he learned from each of his mentors, the role of storytelling in family life, and how he adapts traditional stories to contemporary circumstances. He ends with a gathering of stories he likes to tell. It's wonderful  to be in the company of someone who is passionate about his craft, plus I happened to have it with me when attending my father's bedside in the wake of a sudden and serious surgery. Because Dad didn't have much energy for conversation, I spent time reading aloud to him from Dan's book, a touching demonstration of how books sometimes let you broach the deep subjects slant.