Literary Dealbreakers

This is a cute post from Paper Cuts, about the literary dealbreakers when it comes to personal relationships. I recommend a lot of books — it comes with the territory when you work in book publishing. Everyone is always asking what they should be reading, and for the most part, I like to pride myself on my book matching acumen. But I had never thought of the consequences in terms of dating.

Back in the day, I gave my RRHB a lot of books before we lived together, well before I knew what he actually liked to read, and I think the worst present I ever thrusted upon him was Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Thankfully, he married me anyway.

However, I am a complete Judgey-McJudgerson when it comes to what other people are reading. For example, I will think wickedly awful thoughts if you carry around quotations from Eat, Pray, Love in your handbag. I just will. And if you tell me that The Da Vinci Code is your favourite book, like, ever, I can’t help but relay the fact that I threw that book across the room after trying to get through it for my now-defunct book club. Literary snob? Yes.

It’s just like Rebecca Miller says: “…Mr. Lee reserved his special disdain for those who thought they were better than other people just because they read books.” People who read books are better than people who don’t. I won’t cookie-cutter it, but I save my own particular disdain for people who choose to read bad books. Harsh, but true.

#21 – The Outcast

For a first novel, Sadie Jones’s The Outcast is remarkably accomplished. However, I’d say that the novel is much richer in character development than in plot, which wasn’t necessarily cliched, but it was a bit predictable. Regardless, Jones’s tale remains captivating from start to finish. It caught me enough to keep me awake one night far, far into the hours of the early morning, and the book’s amazing ending (which I will not spoil here) made me cry so much I had to go back and read it again the next day to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

Set in England in 1957, the outcast of the title is Lewis Aldridge, a teenager just out of jail, and the back story about how he got there in the first place, and what happens upon his return, fills in the richness of his tortured soul. With as much of the story taking place behind the closed familial doors, where personal tragedy seems to reign supreme for all of the characters, The Outcast richly imagines the social constructions that worked to keep it there in the decades where the novel takes place.

I don’t want to say much more except the book is definitely worth reading, and I’d be curious to see if other people were as taken by the ending as I was, feeling like it’s the hardest part to write of any bits and pieces, and getting it right must just seem like such an accomplishment.

READING CHALLENGES: I have this book down as England in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, and really feel like Jones captures the spirit and essence of the setting extremely well. You could feel the upper-crust clutching to their conventions, feel the classicism that almost destroys not one but two families, and it made me wish my grandmother was still alive so we could talk about the book together.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Considering I read this book a couple of months ago but couldn’t blog about it until it was actually in stores, I’m halfway through The Age of Innocence and absolutely obsessed with Wharton’s masterpiece at the moment. Then I might take up Denis Johnson’s massive Tree of Smoke, simply because I think it’ll become my book for the USA in the aforementioned challenge.

Feeling Sorry For Myself

For those of you who aren’t the least bit interested in hearing me whine about myself, please skip this post.

I don’t know what it was about today, about the last few days actually, that have turned out to just crush me in their path. Not one, not two, but three or four friends have openly made comments about how I’m being too hard on myself, how I need to stop thinking so negatively, and funny how it’s just sucked me right down into the mire. As if I need more criticism about how I criticize myself. Kind of ironic and funny, no?

And I’m nervous and scared about the next steps with the book, which involve ripping it apart and putting it back together again, and I feel like I can’t rip myself any more apart. And I’m nervous and scared about this stage of my life in general. What the disease has done to me, to how I look, to how I feel, to what can happen in my life, to make me give up all of the things I’ve wanted so bad, and some days like today I hurt so far down that I think it’s all this crap that’s actually rooting my feet in place, and not my nice shoes, not my sunny disposition, not my endless optimism. Sometimes it’s impossible to pull out enough confidence just to walk out of the house in the morning.

Argh. Now I’m going to be all blotchy when I meet Alicia to go see the play. Damn you stupid head.

Another In A Long List Of Embarrassing Things

1. Having the hiccups in a crowded elevator.

More news that’s list-worthy:

1a. NPR.org rocks, literally, I’ve been listening to SXSW concerts all day long.

2. We went out for dinner last night with a couple friends. The restaurant looked like an old dive bar from the outside but the food was fabulous. One friend: “If you tell anyone about this place in your blog I will kill you.” So, shhhhhh.

3. My RRHB bought Harp yesterday. It felt like the cottage. I miss the cottage.

4. The sunshine is not matching the temperature. And I switched coats this morning, which means I’m essentially going to be very cold as I walk home.

5. I started reading the book last night and wanted to rewrite it all from the first sentence. Crippling self-doubt makes a comeback.

6. Peanut butter and lettuce is an awesome combination. I don’t care what anyone says. And it makes me think of my mom.

7. Still hiccuping.

8. Rebecca Miller is an amazing writer. Take this sentence for example: “Delia Shunt was 34. She had fine, dirty-blond hair and a strong, heavy ass which looked excellent in blue jeans.” So it’s no surprise that I am absolutely devouring her new novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, that we’re publishing in the summer.

9. A pen broke open on my hands and arms this morning, which means I look blue.

10. Bubblegum will always put me in a good mood. Even if it’s the cause of #1 and #7.

EDITED TO ADD: That I wish someone would describe my ass that way. Heh.

#20 – The Turning

How have I made it this far in my life and not read all of Tim Winton’s books? Seriously? I don’t think there was a single story in The Turning that wasn’t ridiculously successful, and his writing is so full of angst and ambiance that it’s impossible not to get a sense of both character and place, often within the first few sentences. I’d have to say my favourite stories were “Family,” “Boner McPharlin’s Moll,” and the title story, “The Turning.”

While not all the stories are linked, some have characters that appear in more than one, and many take Angelus, a small town on the coast in Western Australia, as the main setting. One of the neat technical aspects to the collection that I enjoyed was how Winton ordered the stories. We’d read about one character as an adult, and then the next story would be him as a child, exploring how something in childhood led him to the man he was, but in reverse. I also felt like it takes a deft, dedicated hand to describe adolescence so well, and this is a quality The Turning shares with Winton’s excellent new novel coming out in a few months, Breath.

I read Winton for Australia in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. And I have not note that I’ve had such a visceral reaction to both of his books that’s kind of akin to how I felt after finishing Peter Carey’s ridiculously good Theft. Winton’s writing is so urgent, so driving, so gut wrenching that I think it’s impossible not to relate to it on that kind of level. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I would crawl up into bed with any of these characters, I could certainly understand why Jackie gets in the car with Boner McPharlin, and how it turns out exactly the opposite of what she wants and needs, scarring her for life.

One line from “Commission” sent a rock-and-roll-style reverb right through me: “Drunks and junkies take everything out of you, all your patience, all your time and will. You soften and and obscure and compensate and endure until they’ve eaten you alive and afterwards, when you think you’re finally free of it for good, it’s hard not to be angry at the prospect of dealing with the squalor again.”

See? Angst and ambiance. Brilliant.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I’m at work this morning so a book cover will have to do. Love the colours and the image of the surfer.

READING CHALLENGES: As I said, it’s all about Australia, and the novel does encapsulate a world that I’ve never been to, which makes it rich for the imagination.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

#19 – The Sea

While not at all typical in its writing style or its telling, John Banville’s The Sea is a book with a familiar story. An older man suffers a tragedy that stops his life short and in the process looks back at a particular point in his youth, another moment that he realizes far too late that defines him. It’s the story Richard B. Wright told so well in October, that Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses explores so deftly, and that Banville toys with in The Sea. His protagonist, Max Morden, has just watched his wife die from an insufferable illness and simply can’t cope. He leaves his life (and even refuses to go back to the house they shared together) and returns to the small sea side town where he used to vacation with his parents before they split up.

The small village of Ballyless, miles away from a town ironically called Ballymore by Max, holds sway over him. It was the site where he fell for his first love, a tempestuous, temperamental and even bullying tomboy of a girl named Chloe. As Max grieves for his wife, he rolls back over the motions of his life, the summer he spent with Chloe and her (I’m assuming autistic) brother Myles, their governess Rose, and their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Grace. Much more than a symbol, the sea itself governs all of his actions that summer, he shows off swimming, they play at the seaside, and every character changes during the time they spend by the water, some for better, some for worse.

With both of his defining relationships now behind him, his marriage and his definitive first love, Max seems unable to move beyond either. Moored to both experiences as a boat to a dock, he can’t cast himself off from the past, even though his daughter desperately wants to save him from himself. An art critic, he can’t help but look at everything with the same discerning eye he would apply to a painting, pulling his life apart strip by beautiful strip, setting it under the same disturbing light he applies to his professional life.

I dogeared so many of the almost-200 pages of this novel and constantly wondered about Banville’s impressive vocabulary, his superb ability to create suspense within a story without the reader ever expecting the tale’s many twists, and how he packed so much into such a short novel. I can absolutely see how and why he won the Booker for this novel in 2005.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The book sitting on top of my book, that I printed out in its entirety yesterday, shocked and kind of thrilled at the size of the manuscript.

READING CHALLENGES: Tackling two lists: Around the World in 52 Books, The Sea counts toward Ireland, and it’s also a 1001 Books book.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Tim Winton’s The Turning.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

Yesterday, I planted a window lavender garden in a pot, did the laundry, went grocery shopping, tidied the house and, oh yeah, finished up a major portion of my novel that I’d been working on the past two weeks. I’m about 30 pages away from being done a complete first draft, which is three years in the making. I’m tired, but excited.

And I’m celebrating St. Patrick’s Day by reading John Banville’s utterly brilliant and truly hefty (although swift of page count) novel, The Sea. This quote totally caught me off guard, the protagonist, having just found out his wife’s dying, notes:

Helplessly I contemplated her. For a giddy second the notion seized me that I would never again be able to think of another word to say to her, that we would go on like this, in agonised inarticulacy, to the end.

Drunken Self Portrait 101

Perhaps coming home after one glass of wine and two pints is not the time to decide to pause for all time what bad hair I’ve had over the last few days. Good times were had by all at dinner, the first time in a very long time I’ve actually been out for dinner because the RRHB and I are squeezing every penny out of ourselves for the home renos. Have I mentioned we’ve booked the hardwood floor? Yay! Poor Meredith had a hell of time coming down to meet me on the TTC where she was semi-accosted by a man masturbating beside her. Sigh. Let’s just add that to the long list of how annoying it is to travel on the TTC these days. Where’s a “special constable” when you need one?

Annnywaay, as I said one glass of vinegar-wine and two grand pints later, drunken hair self portraits. Goodness I lead a rather embarrassing life after all.