#19 – Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

As anyone can plainly see from the myriad of book entries, I don’t really read a lot of non-fiction, and I read even fewer memoirs. Trust me, then, when I say that Barbara Kingsolver’s lovely and amazing Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life both surprised, delighted, and scared the crap out of me.

Kingsolver and her family (husband, two daughters) packed up their life in Arizona and moved east to Appalachia, where they owned a farm, used mainly for their summer vacations. The impetus for the move? A dedicated and inspirational move towards eating food that grew on their land and/or animals that were raised on their farm. In short, they gave up being dependent upon fossil-fuel run foodstuffs and decided to try their hand at being self-sufficient.

No stranger to farming, Kingsolver, her husband Steven L. Hopp, and her two daughters, Camille and Lily, commit to one full year of eating locally. Not just food grown from their gardens, but produce bought from local farms, meat raised and butchered by their neighbours, and making a priority to purchase anything else (like coffee) from fair trade organizations.

Seems idyllic, doesn’t it? Or even ambitious? The idea of local eating had already caught fire in my virtual world as I was eagerly awaiting The 100-Mile Diet, but as I left before the book was published, I was actually surprised to hear about Kingsolver’s own experiment at eating locally.

The memoir, which also contains seasonal eating advice from Kingsolver’s elder daughter Camille and relevant essays in each chapter by her husband Steven, is very much a family affair. The chapters, arranged chronologically from one March until the next, in addition to documenting their local food trials, each deal with a particular issue facing the world, farmers, environmentalists and anyone who might be concerned about what’ll happen to the next generation.

The main thrust of the book being that many, many people don’t know what out of season means. We have no idea that the poor cantaloupe has travelled upwards of 3,000 kilometers to land from its farm to our tables in or out of its own growing season. Many people buy bananas from the grocery store and pay no attention to the fossil fuel that’s been used to get them there. A girl I used to work with would say that was the joy of living in our modern society: being able to get pineapple whenever and where ever she might like. While it’s hard to disagree that’s true, what’s even harder is to imagine a world where we’ve used up all the gas to get the pineapple from one place to the next without ever thinking in terms of the costs beyond the ding-ding of the grocery clerk’s scanning machine.

It always feels a bit melodramatic to claim that a book has changed your life. But in this case, Kingsolver’s book brought a lot of things to light that I hadn’t maybe thought of before (how much are those bananas I’m addicted to hurting the earth?) and made me think that it’s not a bad idea to plant up a section of our backyard into an urban garden. I also signed us up for Green Earth Organics so that we can better support our local farmers, as neither of us has time to shop at a farmer’s market proper.

My favourite parts of the book involve Ms. Kingsolver helping her heritage turkeys to breed (as natural mating has been bred out of turkeys) and the adventures of using up pounds and pounds of zucchini. All in all, I would highly recommend this book as the natural companion to what’ll certainly become a media darling, The 100-Mile Diet.

Can Con Go To List

A pen-pal friend of mine has inquired about a go to list for Canadian fiction. If you were introducing someone that doesn’t live in Canada to our homegrown talents, which books would you feel absolutely needed to be in the top ten?

Of course, Atwood, Munro, Shields, and Ondaatje are givens, and in choosing their titles I’d probably pick Cat’s Eye, Runaway, Larry’s Party and In the Skin of the Lion, what who else should be on the list?

Margaret Laurence, of course, and I’d pick the utterly brilliant A Bird in the House and then The Diviners, as they are two of my all-time favourite books. We mustn’t forget Timothy Findley, especially his Not Wanted on the Voyage and The Wars. However, I’d also like to include books that have obviously evolved from those titles too, like Clara Callan (see A Bird in the House) by Richard Wright or the brilliant Three Day Road (see The Wars) by Joseph Boyden.

And then don’t forget Urquhart, whose The Stone Carvers brought tears to my eyes and gave me pause when I visited the church that she based the novel upon. I’d also like the list not to read like a version of a high school syllabus. But sometimes, that’s unavoidable, for example, should everyone read The Watch that Ends the Night by Hugh MacLennon? Maybe. But it’s a familiar book on Canadian Fiction 101 course calendars.

Plus, we can’t leave out classics in the making like The Colony of Unrequited Dreams or Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing. How would you create the list? Or pare it down to just 10? It’s a loaded question: but what’s your quintessential go-to Can Lit book?

Consumption Redux III

Baby Got Books writes a kick-ass review of Consumption and also highly recommends the novel. See, it’s not all in my head peeps. It’s a great farking book. What are you waiting for? Honestly.

Go.

Now.

Read the book. And then tell me what you think.

What are you waiting for?

It’s almost spring — that’s the perfect time to be reading a book about all of the changes in the Arctic.

Hurry up. I’m waiting…

TRH Movie: The Namesake

On Sunday, after a manic morning of attempting to clean the house because my writer’s group is coming over tonight, I escaped for an afternoon to the movies with Tara. We ended up seeing Mira Nair’s The Namesake, which got a great review in EW this past week.

The filmed adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel manages to keep all of the good bits of a novel by utilizing a series of vignettes to tell the story. Within these smaller scenes, the larger narrative, the lives of the members of the Ganguli family, unfolds. I didn’t finish the novel, I think I had 10 pages to read when I abandoned it, because it hadn’t grabbed me entirely, so I knew what in essence was going to happen. But regardless, the film still managed to be engaging and utterly heart-stopping.

Gogol Ganguli (Kal Penn), named for his father Ashoke’s life-saving obsession (he had the book in his hand when he survived a terrible train crash) with the Russian author Gogol, grows up in conflict: the push and pull between his world, his American lifestyle, and the world of his immigrant parents. It’s a familiar story but Nair infuses both worlds with elements of the other highlighting the differences in truly inspirational ways, which is just part of why this film works so well.

Ashima (Tabu), on her first morning in a suburb of New York after marrying Ashoke (Irfan Khan), has a bowl of Rice Crispies with no milk, a bit of curry powder and some peanuts. She agrees to marry Ashoke because she likes his American shoes. Ashima’s son, Gogol, finds his calling (he becomes an architect) while visiting the Taj Mahal for the first time on a trip with his parents to India. But then moments later, he’s fallen in love with an upper crust American girl named Max.

It was wrong of me, I know, to expect Harold and Kumar playing unsuccessfully against type from Penn, but his turn as Gogol is career-making. Penn runs the gamut in age from a dope-smoking teenager to a man who not only weathers the tragedy of life, but wears it open on his face like a heart on a sleeve (how mixed up is that sentence from a metaphorical POV. Heh.). He’s utterly striking in this film, and Nair’s ability to craft subtle nuisances from scenes where the majority of the action is left out, makes an impact that’s in your imagination, much like a novel.

Goodness me I loved Monsoon Wedding with its subtle sexuality and bold swashes of marigold, and The Namesake too, takes the best of both worlds, the opportunity and magic of an old-school American dream and builds into it the traditions and honour of an Indian lifestyle. Neither are things I know a lot about, being a Canadian girl from Toronto, but I felt the film gave me an insight into both, from the eyes of Gogol, of course, but also in the majestic Ashima, who changes intrinsically from the beginning of the movie until the end.

And how wonderful is it when a title fits so perfectly into the story itself? I guess it’s what every writer dreams of? And that’s enough gushing for one Tuesday morning.

Call Yourself A Blogger?

Like most mornings, I start my day off by reading various different newsletters. There’s an article in the Globe today about being a blogger, and it attempts to answer the standard five ‘good reporting’ questions about the topic. One thing caught my attention though, as it’s an article that’s pretty much for the people who have been, well, living in a virtual cave the last couple years, and that’s the idea that blogging isn’t so much the thing as it is the thing that allows you to do the thing.

So let’s say you’ve been reading all about blogs and blogging and bloggers, and now you’re interested in trying it yourself — despite how ridiculous you feel when you say the word “blog,” or when you try to imagine introducing yourself by saying: “I’m a blogger.”

Don’t feel bad. It is kind of a ridiculous word, when it gets right down to it. But it’s really just a tool, like a typewriter, or a computer. The word “blog” is just a term for what happens when you use a piece of software to publish your thoughts about a topic (or topics) on the Internet for others to read. Try telling friends “I’m a publisher,” and see how that feels.

For some reason, I had never thought of it as a tool, but as the end product, and this point of view sort of changes the philosophy of blogging in a way: it’s no longer about what you publish but about how you publish (ie, it’s the software you use, not what you’re writing about that defines you).

I had always been under the assumption that by blogging you are therefore a blogger (I blog therefore I am), and regardless of which software you choose to self-publish, it’s the content and the message that’s most important. The above kind of derails all of that, and moves thought about the internet back into pre-web 2.0 (and yes, I am loathe to use that terminology, but it fits dammit, it fits!) in the sense that stripping the content from the blog effectively reduces the software to yet another function of our digital world.

Not everyone who uses a typewriter is a writer, not everyone who uses a computer is a programmer, but everyone who blogs should be (if they are active) by definition a blogger. And why is it a ridiculous word? How is it any more ridiculous than ‘journalist’ other than the fact that the word’s etymology has had a few more hundred years to evolve.

Am I right? Or am I just being too sensitive on the morning after a time change when my brain is perhaps working in blogger overdrive. Or maybe it’s just another example of mainstream media trying to derail the whole concept of self-publishing by negating its very real ability to, ahem, make a point?

The Sweater

Well, I’ve finished my very first sweater. Coming from a long line of knitters (mother, grandmother), I feel kind of guilty it’s taken me this long to pick it all back up again. Regardless, I’ve finished a project that’s bigger and more complex than a scarf. Who knew it was possible?

Now that I’m all confident and cocky and sh*t, I’ve started a St. Bart’s Mini from Twinkle’s Big City Knits by Wenlan Chia. Overall, the book is for more advanced knitters, and I’m still referring to books in terms of how to read a pattern, but this ‘dress’ (which I’ll wear as a sweater, natch) is fairly simple (except for the bobbins, which I’ll not be doing) and a lot like the last pattern I just did, so hence the attempt.

#18 – Getting Rid of Matthew

The first thing I found out about Jane Fallon’s Getting Rid of Matthew had nothing to do with the novel and everything to do with the author’s personal life. For Jane Fallon lives and loves UK comic sensation Ricky Gervais. Ah, The Office, how awesome you are. She’s also a successful British television producer in her own right and this first novel, in my opinion, gives Gemma Townley a run for her money in terms of being my self-appointed queen of British Chick Lit.

Now, not to disparage Gemma, of course. Because no one can actually replace the soft spot I have for Gemma in my cold, Canadian heart; but for a first novel, Getting Rid of Matthew, while it’s about 100 pages too long and has a real problem with switching POVs, was actually charming, witty and somewhat surprising. Fallon takes a fairly stereotypical soap-opera plot (husband-stealing woman finally gets her man) and sort of turns it on its head.

The main character, Helen, has been having an affair with the Matthew of the novel’s title for four years now. Married with two pre-teen girls at home, he finally, after Helen sort of breaks up with him, leaves his wife Sophie. But life with Matthew around 24-7 is very different from life with Matthew three times a week for a quick shag.

Almost as soon as he’s arrived on her doorstep, Helen decides it’s just not right. After a number of slapstick attempts at getting him to leave on his own, Helen takes some pretty drastic measures: she befriends his ex-wife (at first by accident) and works from the inside out to get them back together. Of course, as it tends to, all of Helen’s plans go tits-up before the novel’s conclusion.

Why did I like it? Because despite Helen making exceptionally bad decisions, she manages to change her life from the inside out. She’s a character you can relate to, a character that has flaws, and one that truly grows from the beginning of the novel to the end. Like I said, it’s chicklit, so it’s graded on the curve, but it’s not as predictable as say a Sophie Kinsella novel, which is already a plus in my books.

Perfect for subway and/or beach reading. Also perfect when you’ve see every single Sandra Bullock movie, are tired to death of Drew Barrymore’s rote comedies, and need a dose of girlish fun that Gilmore Girls can certainly no longer supply.

Oh, and the cover is awesome, by the way. Check it out when you’ve got a chance on Amazon.