The Canadian Book Challenge 2008

So, after much thought, I’ve decided that I’m going to read 13 books by Canadian women this year. I’m calling it “for the ladies.” I’ve got 10 books at home on my shelves just waiting to be read and have chosen three more that I’d like to tackle all before this time next year. In no particular order, the books for my Canadian Book Challenge 2008 are:

1. Runaway by Alice Munro
2. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
3. The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele
4. Once by Rebecca Rosenblum
5. Away by Jane Urquhart
6. Help Me, Jacques Cousteau by Gil Adamson
7. The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan
8. The Sad Truth About Happiness by Anne Giardini
9. The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels
10. Whetstone by Lorna Crozier
11. The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews
12. Quick by Anne Simpson
13. A Hard Witching by Jacqueline Baker

It’s late so forgive me if I’ve spelled anything incorrectly. With our summer hours, who knows, maybe I’ll tackle one this weekend and actually get a jump start on this year’s challenge.

The Canadian Book Challenge (#42, #43, #44)

You’ll just have to take my word for it that I finished on time (4 PM on June 30th) for this year’s Canadian Book Challenge. I had one province (New Brunswick) and one territory (Nunavut) left and was pleased with exactly one of the two. Here we go:

#42 – The Lost Highway – David Adams Richards

I don’t know why I do it to myself. Keep reading Adams Richards, that is. I know he’s a lauded Canadian author who’s won piles of prizes and even more acclaim, but his work is just not for me. This book was beyond hard to get through and I wouldn’t have finished it had it not been for the challenge. The repetition contained within his writing style makes me crazy. It’s as if he finds two or three key elements to each character and continually reminds the reader of them over and over again as the novel progresses. One part murder-mystery, one part typical East Coast depressing drama, and two parts nothingness jammed in to fill up the pages, The Lost Highway is about a warring rural New Brunswick family (there’s a shock) living in a town that pretty much runs the length of, you got it, a road.

The patriarch, a misery of an old man named Jim Chapman, metes out punishment to all around him, including his bumbling, quasi-lost nephew, Alex. A former student of philosophy who can’t seem to do anything right, Alex gravitates from hating his uncle to loving his uncle, from brash irresponsibility to regret, from whimsical romance to stalker, from bumbling fool to calculating criminal throughout the novel. And every five minutes, we get a lecture on what it means to be ethical from the “narrator” who makes a confusing appearance at the end of the novel. I found the setup to be preposterous, the writing tedious, and the story unbelievable. I was captivated for about fifty pages somewhere in the middle of the book where the action heats up, but for the rest of the time I plodded my way to the end trying to find any spare moment so I could just get through the damn book. I know I like to find good things in every book I read, and I just need to remind myself that it’s not that Adams Richards isn’t a good writer, it’s just that his books are for another kind of audience (that doesn’t include the likes of me).

Alas, but all pages do lead somewhere and so I cross New Brunswick off the list.

#43 – Unsettled – Zachariah Wells

Wells’s undeniably charismatic and utterly engrossing book of poetry, unlike the above, held me tightly all through my reading of it. I spent most of Monday with my nephew, a gregarious, spirited little guy who kept me on my toes all day (and who refused to nap). And even though I was tired, I sat down and read the entire book in one sitting, and then went back and re-read a lot of the poems a second time because I liked the titles so much. Having never been to the North, I think the part of his poetry I enjoyed the most is the clash between how you imagine the landscape to be and the writer’s human interaction within it. I also enjoyed the “freight” poems and could definitely see the Milton Acorn comp from the book’s back blurbs. His talent feels raw but the words are obviously chosen very carefully, and that’s my favourite kind of poetry, pieces that feel tossed off by the tips of ingenious fingers that read so easily but you know there were most likely draft upon draft before the author came to the final incarnation. All in all I can’t say enough how powerful I felt the poems to be and if I hadn’t left my copy at home I’d put in some quotes (to be added later).

Huge props to Kate S. for suggesting it and super kudos to Insomniac for sending it priority post so I could take care of Nunavut by the Canada Day deadline.

So that’s it for this year! Now I have to do some thinking about next year’s challenge, which is technically now this year’s challenge because it’s July 3rd today. So. Yeah. Thirteen more Canadian books by this time next year. What to do, what to do.

I do think I’m going to count Night Runner as my first (it’s a YA novel we’re publishing this fall that I read on Canada Day eve and Canada Day after finishing Unsettled) because it’s a book I just adored from start to finish (#44). Anyway. An entire list tk.

Lame-Ass Updates

We’re off to the cottage. I’ll be up north until Canada Day. I’m closing in on my Canadian Book Challenge. I’ve been awake for about a bajillion hours. Today I went to the dentist (gross) and discovered that I’ve been brushing my teeth the wrong way my ENTIRE life. You think someone would have told me by now. Oh, and I need to floss. But who doesn’t, right?

Annywaaay. Life doesn’t seem to be slowing down and I have little time for anything these days, no posting, no reading, nothing except working and travelling, or so it seems. Maybe there will be wireless at the cottage at long last.

Then you guys will get sick of me.

#41 – Chasing Harry Winston

My reading table has been heavy with chicklit these days because I’m working on a new project with Scarbie. And for reasons that probably have to do with too much bottled plane air and consistent movement, my concentration has been nil. Enter Chasing Harry Winston. The perfect book to read on the subway into work because you’re too lazy to pump up your bike tires. The perfect book to read before bed because you don’t really miss that much by only getting through 2.5 pages before falling utterly asleep. The perfect book to read without concentration, well, because it doesn’t need any.

Lauren Weisberger has achieved a level of lit stardom few writers achieve. It’s funny, that the US lit stars are all men writing serious fiction, the Jonathons, the Eggers, and the ladies who sell those kinds of numbers are all either British, Irish or Lauren Weisberger writing bland books of a certain genre that will probably never end up on the 1001 Books list. In the end, though, if someone enjoys the book, does any of that stuff even matter? I’ll read anything by anyone, the popular stuff, chicklit, literary fiction, commercial fiction, because all that really matters to me is a good story. And right now, I’m really wondering if chicklit writers can come up with something original. To wit it seems that the purpose of books like Chasing Harry Winston is to make a movie about them two or three years after they’re published. In a sense, couldn’t they save the trees and just skip right to the cinematic version and save us all the trouble?

That said, Weisberger’s latest novel attempts to pull itself up and out of the cliches of its cover (a furry spiked heel with three gorgeous rings stacked from tip to mid-inch). Considering the title is more Plum Sykes than what the actual book is about, and the characters more Sex and the City than anything else, it’s an interesting bit of shoe not entirely fitting the foot, I’d say. Three characters, Emmy, Adriana and Leigh, navigate the final year of their thirties while living and working in New York. Only one of them, Emmy, is truly chasing the married with children dream; the other two look a little deeper in terms of self-satisfaction, Leigh in the form of where she’d like her career to go and Adriana simply needs to grow up. Bits and pieces of the story are told from each girl’s perspective and the characters are well-drawn, quite engaging and utterly trapped by their circumstances at the moment. Weisberger plays the role well, they wear “the latest” Chloe shoes, are cognizant of trends and fashion, but you can feel her writing trying to pull away from the cliches as she attempts to be a little less “chick” and a bit more “lit.”

There are conflicts, petty jealousies, and the reader wishes again and again for the book to delve a bit deeper into the idea of female friendship and less into silly “pacts” and false start-ups to plot. In the end, I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy the book, because I did, and I can’t say that Weisberger isn’t a talented writer, because she obviously is, I just hope that her next book abandons all pretense of Harry Winston and lets her spread her wings a little.

Bits And Pieces Of The Past

It’s been a busy Saturday. I got up early with my RRHB as he went off to work for about the hundredth weekend in a row (save for the last one when we were in NYC), watched Swingtown, which I’m enjoying more each week, ate some yoghurt, and decided it was now or never in terms of the gardening.

Wait. Does everyone know how much I hate gardening?

K.

So it’s me against the weeds that grow in between the gross patio stones on our front yard. The outside of the house will be the last to get fixed up and because I never see it when I’m inside and the renos are making me mental, I don’t usually bother with it. Like, at all. But today I was out there pulling all the weeds out and sweeping. And then I tackled some of the back where our neighbour had planted some vegetables. Seeing as I want to eat the lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes, I thought I had better do some weeding out there too. I lasted about an hour and a half, all tolled. By then I’d had enough.

Back inside to make some toast while I watched the bits of The Departed that I like. At which point I felt guilty for watching TV and started puttering.

Wait. Does everyone know that I love puttering?

I’ve been trying to search down some old writing to see if there’s any value in trying to finish the two serious books I started before the one that’s currently with my editor friend. But since I have only hard copies of everything, and they’re spread from here to who knows where, I went through piles of old writing today. Here are some things I discovered:

1. The clinical “our plan” notes from my shrink when I was bonkers about 10 years ago. They are awesome. From basic things like: “try to eat 3x/ day” to “if feeling very depressed, out of control, suicidal, etc, come to Emergency Department.” Can I just say that about 2 weeks later I took a whole pile of sleeping pills, not to kill myself, but simply because they had stopped working and I wanted nothing more than to sleep. It’s the craziest the prednisone has ever made me. Coupled with my own inner-wackiness, I am lucky to a) have survived and b) to have had a doctor that was kind enough to give me this plan that pretty much saved my sh*t at the time.

2. A note from Deborah who used to run Chicklit.com that says: “I thought you’d toss off a couple of pages, not sweat blood onto paper.” Aw. Oddly, I have no record of what I actually wrote to illicit such a reaction.

3. A really excellent map to my cottage.

4. A recipe for vegan banana blueberry muffins that I will give to Sam for Sadie.

5. “The Night, The Porch” by Mark Strand that contains these lines: “…why even now we seem to be waiting/For something whose appearance would be its vanishing…”

6. The photocopy of a print from Alciato’s Book of Emblems that represents Hope and Nemesis that says the two “are together at the same time upon our altars, clearly that you may not hope for that which is not lawful.”

7. A print-out of this article from the NY Times because it mentions my RRHB. I have to admit, I recycled this — there’s an online archive.

8. The “how to retire rich” article that our old VP from the Evil Empire photocopied and gave to everyone in the department before he set up a meeting with his insurance broker. He was an awesome boss. The article is full of things he’s underlined and notated. I wish I were lying.

9. The YES checklist. A 12-step program for writers and other bits of wisdom for scribes. And a note that Peter Mansbridge was born in Churchill, Manitoba and this quote: “I’ll never lie to you but don’t think that means I’m telling you the truth.” My take-home from a day-long writing seminar.

10. “Art,” Ken Kesey said, “is a lie in the service of the truth.” Don DeLillo: “Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer knows when he finally gets there. On one level the truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and the poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.”

#40 – The Book Of Negroes

There are few books these days that can honestly be called epic. Many that aspire to be so, and many writers who set out to be “epic” without really understanding that it’s not just page count that matters when a book stands up and marks its place in time. Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes is epic and it surely marks its place in time.

Over the past weekend when we were in NYC with my RRHB’s parents, he was the Author of the Year at the Libris Awards. That says a lot, it’s an award decided upon by booksellers and not a jury. Last year, Ami McKay won for her haunting, beautiful, and uplifting The Birth House. The books that win please readers and booksellers alike, a little bit commercial, a lot literary, and with a story that seems endless in its scope and telling, I’m not surprised at all that The Book of Negroes, and Lawrence Hill, won this year.

The novel finds Aminata Diallo, a young African girl aged about eleven, growing up as many generations before her have grown up. She has a mother, a father, a religion (she’s Muslim), a village, and is in training to follow her mother into midwifery. But everything changes the moment she’s captured by traders and sold into slavery. Transported by ship to the southern colonies before they’ve become the United States, she barely survives the journey. After she arrives, she’s branded, sold, and taken under the wing of a woman who ensures she comes back to health. And the story simply doesn’t stop there, she’s sold to a Jewish man who treats her well, but keeps her enslaved.

More skilled than many, especially other women, Meena, as she’s known, can write and read. Skills that serve her well and help her to survive the many injustices life tosses her way as easily as paper carries on the wind. The second half of Meena’s life finds her freed, a member of the new loyalist colony in Nova Scotia. Still unhappy at the crown’s treatment, a group of Nova Scotians travel back to the motherland and settle in Freetown, on the coast of Sierra Leone.

I read this book to satisfy my Nova Scotia requirement of the Canadian Book Challenge. I had planned on reading a Lynn Coady novel, but once this novel won the Commonwealth Prize, I figured I should probably read it sooner rather than later. And wow, what an achievement for Hill, it’s a wonderful and important book. The sadness of Aminata’s story is tempered by her own words, her strength and her amazing sense of herself in the world. Despite the hardship, despite her children being taken away from her at different stages in the book, despite being bought and sold and then bought again, despite the aches in her bones, she tells her stories again and again, all in aid of ending the terrifying and awful trade in humans.

Honestly, I enjoyed every moment of this book, even if it did take me three weeks to read. Now, I’ve got two provinces/territories to go before July 1st and only one slight problem. Anyone have an idea about reading Nunavut?

#39 – The Importance Of Being Married

First, a confession. I adore Gemma Townley. Personally, I think she’s one of the best writers working in chicklit these days. Her characters are never cliched beyond repair, her stories are always original while remaining within the bounds of the genre, and even if the girl always get the boy at the end (even if it’s not the boy she thought she’d end up with), how she gets there is consistently original and charming.

Jess, the main character in Townley’s latest novel, The Importance of Being Married, doesn’t believe in marriage. But when a combination of pure goodness and luck leaves her with an inheritance neither expected nor necessarily appreciated (at least at that moment in time) considering it comes with a caveat. The lawyer handing over the property thinks she married. And why does he think Jess is married? Because she told the kindly old lady she’d be visiting in the home a very long, detailed story about how she married her gorgeous, successful and utterly charming boss. Oops.

So, Jess and her roommate quickly sum up a plan called operation marriage or something of the like, as if it’s a project to be managed, and work on getting her married by the time the two-week deadline to inherit arrives. Hilarity ensues. As does a little old-fashioned honesty. It’s a happy ending. I’m sure that’s not a spoiler, it’s chicklit after all, and I’d be curious to see what Townley would come up with if she wasn’t sticking to a rigorous book-a-year publishing schedule and stepped outside the genre just a little. I’m sure we’d all be pleasantly surprised.

So…

We’re still in NYC. Our flight was cancelled. Bad weather on both ends and bam, we’re SOL in terms of getting home. A few panicked phone calls later and we’ve secured a hotel (with a shuttle service).

It’s funny. I am beginning to think I might be cursed when it comes to getting home. Paris. Mexico re-routed. Now a cancelled flight.

Annnywaaay. We’re in Long Island City New York. It has its charms, which includes a bird’s eye view of the LIE and Harp on tap. Two pints and a hotel room for the 4 of us. Life is nothing but an adventure.

We spent the morning on Coney Island. When we arrived, the place was shuttered, iron grates on the doors and nothing opened. But soon, as the haze disappeared and people shed their layers, it opened up.

We walked through Central Park, rested, and then made our way to the airport. Now, it’s 5 hours until we’re back at the airport to try and get home.