Category: reading challenges

#1 – Dracula

For the majority of my life, I’ve associated with Dracula (the character) with scary things I’d rather not imagine thank you very much. “I vant to suck your blood” refrains and the truly awful Francis Ford Coppola movie that I remember seeing in the theatre did nothing to help the cause. Bram Stoker’s (pictured left) book was mentally filed, “never going to read.”

And then.

#1. The Undeath Match happened.

#2. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die happened.

#3. The Strand happened (and I fell a little in love with the TP edition I found sitting a top a pile of totally unrelated books).

#4. “My RRHB read the book in one sitting and wouldn’t stop talking about it” happened.

Which meant I simply couldn’t ignore it any longer.

And rightly so. It’s an excellent novel. Echoes of one of my all-time favourite books, Frankenstein, are found within the epistolary format; the novel contains a truly kick-ass female heroine (why was that never portrayed in any film who actually stands up and fights both for her life and for her friends [in a totally appropriate 19th century way, of course] in a way a certain, modern character [ahem, starts with a “B” and ends with a “hella” er “ella”] never does); and there are some really fun, creepy scenes of Dracula making his way to England (the boat, ahhh, the boat) that actually made me shudder and I flipped the pages. Put all of it together and I’m kind of shocked to say that I’m really glad I finally finished Dracula.

If I have but one criticism of Stoker’s work, it would have to be the bits of the book told in colloquial dialogue. I found Van Helsing’s sections hard to understand and the way he spoke to be kind of silly and affected (not his character; that’s exactly the opposite of this). But I got over this quickly as the book’s action and pacing ripped me along on another part of the adventure. The story’s so rich, so layered and so utterly engaging that my own preconceptions about affected speech/dialogue in novels can be set aside.

Also, it’s pretty neat to see the literary evolution of the vampire from the sort-of beginning. I’m sure there were earlier moments in terms of the vampire appearing in literature, but I like thinking about all the moments in pop culture that has sprung from this particular text. Annywaaay, I just loved it.

READING CHALLENGES: 1001, baby.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Reading The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, Clean by Alejandro Junger, the first Sookie Stackhouse book and Sometimes a Great Notion. Yes, we’ll see which one I actually finish first. Your guess is as good as mine.

#67 – Little Black Book of Stories

Have you ever noticed I generally start all of my reviews with some long, rambling introduction? Today will be no different.

I’m reading about 4 different books right now (What Should I Do With My Life, The Law of Dreams, Slowing Down to the Speed of Life; can you sense a theme there?), including the only one I’ve finished so far, A.S. Byatt’s engaging short story collection, Little Black Book of Stories. Monday was spent in transit (doctor’s app’t, to and fro from work), which ensured I had a few spare moments to read (and by spare I mean an entire hour in the middle of the day waiting for the damn doctor).

We were at a birthday party this summer when the sister of a friend of mine was telling me the book that she had most enjoyed reading so far in 2009 was A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book. As I don’t have a copy that book in my possession, when I found this book just sitting on my shelf, I thought, “yes, that’s it for this week.” Because if you can’t have THE book why not at least try A book by one of the year’s most celebrated writers?

Comprised of five lengthy short stories, Byatt’s expansive imagination coupled with her never-ending quest to aptly describe human saddness (or longing, that might even be a better word), the book reminded me a little of Too Much Happiness. Every single character in the stories has been marred emotionally by their lives — happiness isn’t expected and nor is it gained. Life is rough, untidy, difficult and downright miserable in places. But because Byatt’s an exceptional writer, the undercurrents running through each story, the little bits of lives that exude joy, are there as well. She also has some lovely fantastical elements in each — the stories themselves tend a little toward fairy tales for adults.

My favourite of the five would have to be “Body Art”: an aging doctor released from an unhappy marriage but not his religious convictions finds himself entangled with a young (apparently almost-homeless) artist charged with “brightening” up the ward. Universal questions like how and why is art important to a life are, of course, raised, but the unlikely relationship between the two resonates even more. The central tale, “A Stone Woman,” has lovely fantastic elements, and “The Pink Ribbon” too — even if that story is achingly sad (it too reminded me of Munro, specifically, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”).

On the whole, this collection was far more satisfying to read than Nocturnes. Because, holy cow, what a snoozer of a book that was.

READING CHALLENGES: Cleaning Out My Closet — a book from the dark corners of my bookshelf, for once. And because this book just feels so British (along with A.S. Byatt being born in England), I’m tagging it for Around the World in 52 Books too. My only reading challenge for next year? To keep up with all of my other reading challenges. Or maybe even finish one or two.

#63 – Nocturnes

Even before finishing the first story in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, I had a sinking feeling that I shouldn’t have started another book of short stories so soon after finishing Too Much Happiness. Overall, Nocturnes reads and feels like a bridge — not a structure that connects two pieces of land, but that instrumental section in a song that marks a transition. The entire book feels like something Ishiguro has written in between major works. I missed the exacting, perfectly balanced narrative from Never Let Me Go, and had a hard time believing the characters in many of these stories. In places, the dialogue seemed forced, pitched in because it needed to be there and not because organic and/or interesting things were happening within the scene. And two of the middle stories were so, I don’t know, cliched and almost forced, that I almost didn’t finish the book. The last story, as I detail below, was a saving grace.

Sometimes, stories about music and the people who play and/or create it, never capture the true essence of the experience. You always feel as though it’s not real — the bands are made up, the musicians are made up, even when the author uses actual music to ground the story in some form of reality. In a sense, a lot of these stories read like those “ripped from the headlines” episodes of Law and Order where they take a real scene, Puff Daddy and J-Lo involved in a shoot out at a club, use no-name actors and tack on a murder to take the whole drama up a notch. Overall, this collection felt a bit like that, not utterly authentic, and I was disappointed because I firmly believe Ishiguro to be one of the world’s best living writers.

The first story, “Crooner,” follows a young guitar player who has emigrated from an Eastern block country to Italy where he’s making a living. He meets a very famous singer, a kind of “great one” who came up in the days when crooning lead to fortunes being made in Vegas at a time when the original Ocean’s Eleven was released into theatres. The aging crooner hires the young guitarist to accompany him as he serenades his wife. The performance, for many reasons is bittersweet, but the contract between the young and the old, their very different lives, what the crooner meant to the young man (who grew up with his mother listening to all of his albums), is poignant. Things are never as they seem, lives are never what they appear, and music doesn’t always have the meaning it suggests.

The other three, and especially “Come Rain or Come Shine,” are somewhat forgettable. There’s a ridiculous element to that particular story (“Come Rain or Come Shine”) that I didn’t find believable, and despite liking the main character, a fellow who teaches English in Spain (who’s kind of trapped in this transitory life), not a single secondary moved beyond a level of caricature. The tenuous connection to music wasn’t enough to keep me interested in the mess the this fellow finds himself in as he visits two, married, university friends. Yet, even when I don’t find the situation or the characters particularly engaging, I can still respect Ishiguro’s talent — a bad Ishiguro story is still better than most. There just didn’t seem to be enough emotional consequence in any of the stories to keep me interested throughout the read.

The other story worth mentioning, the very last piece in the book, “Cellists,” that was, by far, my favourite of the five. A young cellist starting me make his way in the world finds himself a teacher in an American tourist. They develop a deep and lasting teacher/student relationship over the course of a summer. She’s running away from a relationship she can’t quite decide if she wants to be in or not, and he’s trying desperately to live up to both his talent and his potential. They each take something different from one another: she believes she’s a genius, like him, and he believes his work is getting better simply through the power of her words, her explanations of what’s wrong with his playing.

The narrator of this story, a bandmate and friend of the cellist, tells the story with a detached sense of wonder, in a way — he sees the cellist years later, better dressed, nicely groomed, and is reminded of the strange summer they spent together. The last paragraph of the story might just be the best of the entire book — it’s pitch perfect in its assessment of both what happened to the cellist and how potential, or any kind of gift really, can easily slip away. It was utterly, heartbreakingly, authentic.

READING CHALLENGES: Ishiguro was born in Japan (even though he’s lived in the UK since he was 5 or something), so I’m counting it as Around the World in 52 Books, which might just bring me to, oh, five books read for that challenge this year. Pathetic!

#59 – The Year of The Flood

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood was a slow burn kind of book for me. It took me ages to read, I think I finished five other novels while I was reading this one, but that’s not a comment on how much I enjoyed this book. A companion piece to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood is a wholly satisfying story about a world hit by a waterless flood, and those people within who survive. I may be wrong, but I’d classify the book as speculative fiction — it takes place just far enough in the future to make you second guess how we’re living our lives and treating the earth, but it’s familiar enough not to seem too out there (if that makes any sense).

The novel moves back and forth between life pre- and post-flood. For a time, the main characters, Toby and Ren, one older, one younger, despite the different ways they arrived, live together in the Gardeners commune, where traditional religion that we’d recognize as Western in its influence mixes with holistic approaches to health, the earth, and life. The Gardeners, lead by Adams and Eves, don’t put chemicals in their bodies, they eat food that they grow, and many of them survive the waterless flood because of these skills.

At first, Toby resists the world of the Gardeners. She’s survived this long by going underground, as dangerous as it is, and becoming a part of a community wasn’t something she thought she needed to do. But slowly, as her skills as a naturalist, a healer, a beekeeper both evolve and are discovered, it’s apparent she’s found a place where she can belong — whether or not she wants to become Eve Six.

Ren, however, doesn’t have it so easy. As a young girl, her mother drags her away from her father’s house — safely ensconced in the highly programmed, chemical world — as a result of an affair she has with one of the key Gardener men. She’s a flake, there’s no getting around it, and when the relationship goes sour, Ren’s dragged back into the sterile world of her father’s people, sent off to university at Martha Graham, and then out into the workforce, perhaps not in the job she would have once imagined for herself in high school. High school and the Gardeners define Ren (oh how this happens for so many people, ahem) and without these key people in her life, she’s a little lost, a little heartbroken (over Jimmy, you’d remember him from the previous book — Snowman). But both Toby and Ren are survivors and their stories, when woven together, are equally compelling.

There’s nothing to do but be in awe of Atwood’s imagination. But if I were to make one slight criticism — I wasn’t as inspired by the “poems” that started off each of the Gardener sections — they seemed a bit contrived to me, but then, when you look through a hymn book in church, the sentiment is much the same, so perhaps I should just take them at face value. It’s a sad book, a book that makes you appreciate the fact that you can still put a seed in the ground and have it grow into a plant that could feed you, the birds, and the butterflies. And one that perhaps sets a new standard for saint-like worship of unconventional heroes, especially those that survive.

READING CHALLENGES: The Year of the Flood is my third book in this year’s Canadian Book Challenge.

#53 – Drop City

When I bought my second-hand copy of Drop City by TC Boyle, I knew nothing about the book except for the fact that it’s on the 1001 Books list. My copy cost $3.99 and I bought from a now-defunct bookstore in Stratford, Ontario one snowy winter day my RRHB and I were out exploring my Irish roots in Millbank, Ontario. It was a great day. Then, like so many of my books, it sat on the shelf, and sat on the shelf, and sat on the shelf.

But once I started this book I resented anything taking time away from the reading of it. Drop City provides a refuge for anyone who wants to drop of out of society. A commune on an idyllic plot of land in California where hippies of all sorts call home, Drop City’s inhabitants don’t go for the Man’s version of how they should live their lives. But when he comes calling in the form of an injunction (coupled with some back taxes and compounded by more than one run in with the law), their fearless leader decides that the only free place left on earth is Alaska, and “Let’s go!”

Interspersed within the story of the caravan of hippies abandoning their commune (complete with a few goats strapped to the top of a merry-making old bus), is the other side of “dropping out.” The very real people who already make a life in Alaska by truly living off the land. There are benefits to both ways of life, but to say that the hippies are prepared for the harsh Alaska winter would be an understatement.

Ronnie (aka “Pan”) and Star had travelled across the USA to get to Drop City. They abandoned their education and their livelihoods (she was a teacher) for a chance to live a real life among truly free people. And they do find free love and a free life, if only for a fleeting moment before the reality of life, and their disparate personalities gets in the way of their idealism. Star’s soon left Ronnie behind for Marco, a violent drop out who is on the run from the law and from his entire identity (it seems), who represents a different kind of life and love for her by the time the novel reaches its conclusions.

Interspersed with the idealistic, even indiotic (at times), hippies, are the real societal “drop outs.” The people who live on the cold, permafrost borders of Alaska hunting, trapping and camping in cold wooden houses not meant for much more than a temporary stop along the way. The dramatic difference, not necessarily in idealism, but in common sense, between the Drop City band of ragtag, Ken Kesey-like bus people and the actual Alaskan settlers causes the necessary friction the book needs.

I can’t stress enough how engrossing this novel is from beginning to end. It’s one of those books whose narrative drives along at such a breakneck speed that you barely even register the fact that you’ve already read 150 pages, the sun’s gone down and you’re fingers are freezing from holding the book so tight. T.C. Boyle has a way of slowly building steam that will eventually boil, both within characters and situations, that overshadows the entire work with a sense of forboding. This isn’t a bad thing — it’s more that the novel knows its outcome already and you, as the reader, need to catch up as quickly as possible. Parts of this novel just made me cringe too — the idea of free love equalling the utter objectification of some of the women, that the mother among the bunch openly gives her children acid to prove they’re “turned on,” and the asumption that you can simply head to Alaska with little more than the goats on top of your broken down bus and expect to survive, all of which add to the dramatic tension of the most basic themes found in literature: humanity versus their environment.

I know I say this a lot but the 1001 Books list hasn’t let me down with Drop City. I’d highly recommend it. I’d loan you my copy, but I’m sending it to a friend as we speak.

#48 – Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Sometimes, you need a little lightness in your life. After a hard summer and an even harder year, I’m happy to say that there are a couple of things I’ve watched and read over the last couple weeks that just make me smile. Glee (Freaks and Geeks meets Fame meets Election) equals bliss and belly laughs, but it’s only one once a week. So over the last few weeks I was reading Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day only at the cottage and only before I went to sleep just to make it last that little bit longer.

I adored this novel.

Miss Pettigrew finds herself on Delysia Lafosse’s doorstep after a particularly trying last assignment as a governess. In fact, Miss Pettigrew has found herself sent off on a number of trying assignments as she attempts to make her way in the world. Plain (by her own standards), practical, and quite downtrodden, if this job doesn’t work out, Miss Pettigrew will find herself out on the streets. Only when Miss Lafosse opens up the door to usher Miss Pettigrew inside, there’s been a mixup — she’s not there to take care of any children but be a maid (of sorts) for the vivacious young actress/singer who finds herself in quite a pickle when it comes to her love life.

Over the course of the day Miss Pettigrew fixes, fiddles, meddles and generally makes herself indispensible to Delysia and her group of friends. She puts love affairs right, makes sure Miss Lafosse flies in the right direction and even spares some fun for herself. As the minutes and hours tick by, Miss Pettigrew evolves from the unconfident, unhappy, unsuccessful governess into a bright, witty, attractive woman who remains in charge of her station in life. It’s a simple Cinderella story in a way — but that doesn’t take away from the charm and utter bliss of this book.

When I was reading a little about the author, Winifred Watson, I learned that she wrote the majority of her first novel while working in an office as a sectretary. Her first books had darker themes and when she submitted Miss Pettigrew, her publisher rejected it (Lionel Shriver can relate). It’s a familiar story — publishers and agents rejecting books that find resonance, win prizes and get made into equally delightful Hollywood films (yes; I’ve seen the film version that starts Francis McDormand and Amy Adams). I’m so pleased that Persephone exists and a little ashamed that this is the first of their novels that I’ve read. It certainly won’t be the last.

READING CHALLENGES: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is one of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die, and while I did actually buy it vs pull it off my shelf, I’m counting it anyway. Also, high props to Rachel for recommending it to me. She’s a gem.

#43 – The Wife’s Tale

Lori Lansens has yet again written an all-consuming kind of novel. Just like her two previous books, Rush Home Road and The Girls, The Wife’s Tale, from start to finish, remains the kind of novel that once you’ve read the first sentence you don’t stop until you’ve finished the entire book. When the whole appendicitis turned from bad dream into nightmare, I’m not ashamed to admit that The Wife’s Tale was a big part of holding on to my sanity that second week I spent in the hospital.

The novel opens with Mary Gooch on the cusp of celebrating her 25th wedding anniversary. She married her high school sweetheart but they’ve drifted apart over the years. And the losses, personal, professional, have manifested in her psychological and physical self. Borderline agoraphobic (she still leaves the house) and morbidly obese, Mary has tightened up her life in such a way that it couldn’t be any smaller. Her menial job at the pharmacy in town is a means to an end (and a chocolate delivery) and her husband Gooch’s isn’t much more satisfying. Once a golden boy, Gooch isn’t apparently unsatisfied with his life, but when he disappears leaving nothing behind but a fat bank account, Mary must face life for the first time alone.

In a way, it’s a novel of discovery for Mary, a long, rambling Chaucer-like adventure that transforms her in ways she never would have imagined. The narrative keeps tight to Mary: you’re on the edge when Gooch doesn’t come home, you feel her pain when she finds herself completely lost without him, and when she takes the steps towards becoming her own person you can’t help but cheer her on. Lansens has a way of writing this character, this woman who could be the butt of so many jokes, without any caricature. While she may come from a small town, she’s not a hick; she’s not a stereotype, and her transformation is kind of movie-esque magical.

There are unsatisfying elements to the story that I’m not going to spoil here. I’m going to leave off with my first impressions of this book, remembered now a month after reading: it takes a hell of a writer to take such a Hollywood plot, “woman abandoned on her 25th anniversary, obese, unsatisfied and unhappy” and turn it into moments that bring tears to your eyes for their honesty, originality and utter good-heartedness. 

READING CHALLENGES: I’m counting The Wife’s Tale as the second book in my Canadian Book Challenge. While I haven’t done my “official” post about the theme I’m going to try just yet because I honestly haven’t decided what I want to read for the rest of the year, I still think a year that includes The Wife’s Tale and February can only be counted as inspiring. 

#42 – February

Hands down, Lisa Moore’s excellent February might just be my favourite Can-lit book of the year. When I read it over about 24 hours in the hospital I couldn’t help but admire both Moore’s storytelling abilities, how her plot drifts around like clouds but with all the purpose of the weather behind them, and her emotional resonance, how each of the characters carry their sadness and happiness around with them in almost equal measure.

In 1982, almost at the start of their lives together, at the very least within the first, happy, happy years, Helen O’Mara’s husband Cal tragically loses his life in a major oil rig accident. Over the course of the novel, moving backwards and forwards from the past to the present (sometimes even within the same paragraph), Moore reveals Helen’s life. How she raised her four children almost by herself, how they grow up, stay or leave, and relate to her as both a mother and then a grandmother. But the astonishing truth about the story isn’t just Helen’s ability to get on with her life while at the same time being utterly unable to forget Cal, it’s more how she manages to fit all of the pieces in without completely breaking down outwardly.

The sharp contrast between the Helen that lives inside her mind and the reality of Helen’s world ensures February endlessly (and easily) drifts between the two pulling the reader closer and closer to the character. It’s impossible not to get emotionally involved with Helen’s life, with the loss of her greatest love, with her difficult relationship to her equally difficult son, with the glimmer of hope when the chance for happiness comes around.

In short, I guess you could say that I loved this novel. And I can’t think of a better book to start off my latest Canadian Book Challenge. That’s one down. Also, I was reminded of Marilynne Robinson’s equally excellent Home while reading February. They both have similar plots in the sense that a son must return home to face up to the consequences of their lives…if you enjoy Robinson’s writing, you would enjoy Moore’s latest.

Summer is Short. Read a Story. (#s 32-33)

I am very excited about a fun campaign we’re running at work called “Summer is Short. Read a Story.” Celebrating much-beloved but hard-to-sell short story collections for the summer months got me thinking about two books I finished recently: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Gil Adamson’s Help Me, Jacques Cousteau. Both books contain a series of linked short stories that have female protagonists: the former centred around an aging (and then retired) 7th grade teacher (the Olive Kitteridge of the book’s title) and the latter around the ever-growing Hazel. Authors Adamson and Stout (who just won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge), while different in terms of their style and substance of their stories, have uncanny talents for characterization. They can sum up a character — their habits, their emotions, their intentions — often with just one heartbreaking sentence that seems to epitomize good writing. It’s something I admired while reading both books over the past week.

Olive Kitteridge lives in a small-town in Maine, her husband was a pharmacist and her son grows up to be a podatrist, and neither truly lives up to her expectations. People in town are as kind to Olive as they are critical, and she’s a presence in every single story, whether it’s from the point of view of her husband or her neighbour. Each perspective adds a little bit more to her character, unravelling Olive like an onion until the final sentences of the book open her up to the core.

Echoes of small-town life can be found in Gil Adamson’s stories as well, Hazel, who we see grow up from a young girl into a young woman, copes with the pressures of family life. Whether it’s crazy uncles, oddish grandparents, fathers who can’t stop tinkering or mothers who feel that they made a wrong turn somewhere, she grows up with a wild and unwieldy cast of characters who inevitably shape who she is as a person.

My reaction to both of these books was emotional — I fell a little bit in love with these two main characters, Hazel for her rough and tumble time with adolescence and the pains that accompany growing up, and Olive for her tough-talking, no-nonsense approach to life that ultimately ends up alienating her from so many people that she loves. Modern life bleeds so many different colours, from rationalizing long-term relationships, their success or failure, from expectations we have for ourselves and how they change to the complex relationships between parents and children, and these two works explore these themes with a keen and affecting eye for detail and determination.

Highly recommended reads.

READING CHALLENGES: Help Me, Jacques Cousteau is the 12th title I’ve read for the latest Canadian Book Challenge. And, well, Olive Kitteridge is an award winner so maybe I’ll create a new challenge for those, unless on already exists?

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I’ve started Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move, Frances Itani’s Leaning, Leaning Over Water and am halfway through Sarah Waters’s latest novel, The Little Stranger. But Vanity Fair also beckons — somehow I can’t resist spoiled rich kids in Sofia Coppolla-inspired photo joints coupled with the Kennedys and more Bernie Madoff revelations. I mean, I’m only human people.

#21 – The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Also #s 22, 23, 24 & 25)

Somehow, I feel like starting off this post being hyper-critical of myself: I should really be blogging more. I should keep writing even though I don’t feel like it. I should do a lot of things. I know that Michael Pollan isn’t purely being self aware with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but the introspective elements mixed in with his philosophical discussion of ‘a natural history in four meals’ definitely makes you think. The book hums along like any good documentary should — it’s rich in investigative journalism, full of interesting points of view about the current state of the food industry, and never fails to try and observe a situation from every angle possible.

Broken into three sections (although subtitled ‘four’ meals), Industrial, Pastoral and Personal, The Omnivore’s Dilemma unearths many real and even some invented debate (his whole rationale for eating meat in the third section I found a little hard to stomach) behind how food is brought to the table. The first section of the book, where Pollan discusses and takes apart the industrial food chain, straight from a fast-food meal eaten in the car to the fact that by-products of corn are in just about every processed item in a grocery store, was utterly captivating. One part Fast Food Nation, another part 100-Mile Diet (which I haven’t read all of yet), the sheer force by which farms have become industrialized combined with the unknown and ever-reaching ramifications made me hunger even more for the weather to heat up so I could get seeds in the ground for vegetables.

I also found Pastoral, where Pollan visits and works on a farm that lets animals be animals by having developed a very real, yet still domesticated (is that the right word?) ecosystem that not only feeds the people who live there, but also supplies many restaurants and customers in the area with fresh meat and vegetables, compelling. Never doubting the value of farmers, especially ones practicing organic and more ethical ways of reaping value from the land, The Omnivore’s Dilemma points out dramatic differences between industrial farms and smaller, independent outfits.

The third section, as I mentioned above, lagged for me — probably because, while notable, the idea of hunting and gathering my own food (that which I have not cultivated in my backyard), honestly has me stumped. I couldn’t imagine heading out into the woods with a rifle and shooting a wild pig. Yet, I can understand why Pollan felt it necessary, especially with the level of scholarship around which he answers the question: “What should we have for dinner?” Also, I really hate mushrooms. Perhaps this isn’t something I should hold against the book.

All in all, I spent much of Easter weekend reading this book. I had to pause for a moment because we had our Fall 2009 sales conference (for which I read two of the best fiction titles I’ve read in a long, long time: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and The Financial Lives of Poets by Jess Walter, #s 22 & 23; and one truly fantastic YA novel called The Amanda Project, #24) and there was much reading to be done (and shared), but managed to get right back into it once we were through last Friday. There is no way that I will ever think of corn in the same way again. There is no way I’ll think of tofu in the same way again. There is no way, in fact, that I’ll think of dinner in the same way again, if I’m being honest. And isn’t that a most powerful thing for a book to do — take a mundane and utterly human aspect of one’s life and turn it inside out.

Annnywaay. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been under the weather, mentally, physically, but I’ve managed to keep the garden going (loads of flower seedlings coming up; everything that needed to be planted before the last frost is in), and keep my head above the metaphorical water enough to still read. Writing, however, still remains a challenge.

Oh, and #25? I finished up Marjorie Harris’s delightful Ecological Gardening and learned many, many good tips. Not the least of which was a) that I shouldn’t be watering at night (oops!), b) that I should really figure out a way to compost and c) that companion planting (nasturtiums here I come!) is really my friend.

READING CHALLENGES: I’m adding The Omnivore’s Dilemma (which is actually the only book I’ve completed) to The Better You Read, The Better You Get Challenge. One down, nine to go. It’s going to be a long year of self-improvement, I think.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I’m halfway through Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die (Buffy is playing the lead in the film adaptation; I’m excited to see what she does with it, although I’m finding it hard to imagine how they crafted dialogue out of the author’s heady narrative).