Who's Reading What: Issue 105

Compiled and edited by Julianna Varga

Patricia Robertson Author of "The Poetics of Prose" (Issue 105: Essays on Writing)

I'm reading The Essential Rumi in the translation by Coleman Barks and Annemarie Schimmel's Mystical Dimensions of Islam. And I'm just beginning This Blinding Absence of Light by the Moroccan-born novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun, based on the experiences of a prisoner in one of King Hassan's underground jails.

Stephen Henighan Author of "Road Accidents" (Issue 105: Close Calls: Fiction On the Edge)

I'm currently reading Mozambique Mysteries by Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, a riveting memoir of adapting to a new life in the bush in northern Mozambique. I'm reading it because Lisa St. Aubin de Terán has been one of my favourite writers for many years, and also because in August 2006 I had the opportunity to visit her in the bush encampment described in the book.

Souvankham Thammavongsa Author of "My Father's Scrapbook" (Issue 105: Adventures in Verse)

I am reading Gil Adamson's The Outlander because it is good.

Tanis Macdonald Author of "Welcome to Waterloo County" (Issue 105: Essays on Writing)

Poetry: I am reading Miranda Pearson’s stark and lovely The Aviary.  The verse style is elegant, and Pearson’s mercurial poetic self-construction is a delight. The Aviary engages the lyrical tradition while refusing the romanticism of it.  Pearson’s wry take on the secular sacred (the family, love, gender, genealogy) makes this book worth returning to again and again.  In a different vein, I recommend K.I. Press’s Types of Canadian Women, Volume II, which is not only breathtakingly original and audacious, but a roller-coaster ride (in petticoats ) through Victorian femininity in the Canadian wilds. It is both not what I expected and everything I like: hilarious, horrific, playful with convention and politically responsible.  And inquisitive, endlessly inquistive.

Fiction: I am rereading Helen Humphreys’ Leaving Earth, her amazing novel about two aviatrixes in 1930s Toronto who attempt to break the record for longest amount of time spent in continuous flight. It’s quietly furious, feminist, and freaking fantastic. Humphreys’ The Lost Garden was a big success a few years ago, but I think Leaving Earth is her masterpiece.

Daniel Griffin Author of "Martin and Lisa" (Issue 105: Close Calls: Fiction On the Edge)

I just finished Border Crossing by Pat Barker and before that read Double Vision.  Truth is I’ve been reading everything I can by Pat Barker lately (although I squeezed Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited between the last two). Sunset Limited was advertised as a novel, but turned out to be a “novel in dramatic form.” And last night I cracked open The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, a memoir of an unusual childhood.

Madhur Anand Author of "Words Penned On a Napkin" and "Two Poems" (Issue 105: Adventures in Verse)

I am reading Don McKay's Strike/Slip. I know, I know. It is a bit late, and well, almost fashionable now that it has won a big award. However, I really meant to read it when it was first published in 2006, but gave away my copy to a dear friend as I was leaving Sudbury for good. The first and only poem I managed to read at that time was "Precambrian Shield," and it so hauntingly captured my sense of impending loss, I had to give it away to this friend. This December, I finally bought myself another copy during the pre-Christmas rush at the Bookshelf in Guelph. The older gentleman behind me in line was curious about the book I made a mad dash for while he saved my spot. I showed him the slim volume and explained that it was poetry. I glanced down at his hands in polite reciprocation. He turned the face up, and smiled. It was a gift for his son, he explained. Gee, he said, this must be the complete opposite, if such a thing exists, to your book. His title? Business Plans for
                                 Dummies. We laughed.

Steven Heighton Author of "Four poems" (Issue 105: Adventures in Verse)

As usual, I'm reading several things at the same time. I like the way the books overlap, their elements mixing in my mind to create unlikely new compounds and symmetries. Right now it's Wade Davis' ethnobotanical journey One River (he's especially interested in hallucinogens used in Amazonian native rituals), Les Murray's selected poems Learning Human (I revere the one from the POV of a cattle herd), Robyn Annear's The Man Who Lost Himself (about the Tichborne Claimant, a notorious 19th century impostor -- which in turn induced me to rent the DVD of The Return of Martin Guerre, a marvelous film I first saw twenty years ago), and John Prebble's brief yet magisterial history Culloden (he focuses on the lives and plights of common people rather than on princes and generals).

Kate Wringe TNQ Volunteer

I am not reading Before Green Gables, the prequel of Anne of Green Gables by Budge Wilson. I refuse to be seduced by the special 100 Years of Anne edition that features the cover art from the first edition of Anne of Green Gables. I have nothing against the award-winning Budge Wilson. There is just something about the idea of someone else writing a book about Anne Shirley that makes me want to start a book burning. I haven't read the book. I haven't read any reviews to prejudice me against it. And no organizations (that I know of) are warning parents not to let their children read it. I haven't even seen Before Green Gables on the bookstore shelves yet, although I have seen it advertised. I know that my reaction is irrational, and what's worse is that I can't explain it.

I've wholeheartedly accepted other people's interpretation of Anne -- from musical, theatrical,and television adaptations. So why can't I embrace Wilson's adaptation? Perhaps it is because Wilson has dared to use the same medium as Montgomery -- the book. We've come to acknowledge and expect differences when one form of art is translated into another medium or genre. Though I want it noted that I'm not keen to watch the forthcoming television series, Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning by Sullivan Entertainment, also a prequel to Anne of Green Gables. (It is unclear whether Wilson's book has any connection with the new television series).

No, my distaste of Before Green Gables has, I believe, more to do with nostalgia -- a desire to hold on to those fond memories of falling in love with Anne Shirley and Lucy Maud Montgomery. Memories that include reading late into the night, waiting impatiently for the earlier Sullivan mini-series Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel, and listening to audio tapes during a brief stay in the hospital.

Wilson's book is a reminder that the world and childhood have changed. Children will not experience Anne in the same way that I did; they will have a new book to read and cherish.

Kim Jernigan Editor, The New Quarterly

Readers of The New Quarterly will be familiar with Caroline Adderson’s stories, with the way she can wrest humour where you least expect it, with her fearlessness about all things visceral, with her ability to bring disparate narrative strands together in surprising ways. I read the new American edition of her novel Sitting Practice before Christmas. The subject matter, a newly married couple dealing with their changed relationship following an accident which leaves the wife paralyzed from the waist down, sounds like the stuff of melodrama. But in Adderson’s hands, it is a warmly, sometimes heartbreakingly funny story about the circuitous ways in which love (and lust) will out. I mourned for days after finishing it so badly did I miss her characters.