Posts Tagged ‘reading’

Joan Aiken

Wednesday, June 5th, 2013

Hello, friends. Well, I didn’t with the Arthur Ellis Award last week. That honour went to Shane Peacock for Becoming Holmes, the final book in his series, the Boy Sherlock Holmes, and he accepted the prize very graciously. All was not lost, however! Someone pointed out that there was no name engraved on the trophy, and we hatched a plan to rush Shane in the car park and, er, relieve him of his burden. Sad to say, we were all so distracted by wine and chatter – and the fact that there was no car park – that Shane eluded us, not unlike his sleuth. And thus ended the Night of the Peacock.

However! After my friend Sarah lent me a copy of Joan Aiken’s The Stolen Lake for the journey home, I’ve become utterly enamoured of her books, once again (re-enamoured? Somehow, that’s kind of deflating). Mine was an Aikenless childhood, and I’m so sorry for that. I love Aiken’s bold alternative history, the narrative pace she sets, which is both sweeping and unhurried, and her brave, shrewd heroine, Dido Twite. And after poking around the official Joan Aiken website, I’m beyond excited to learn that Edward Gorey designed some of her book covers!

We already have a book storage problem. For a while, I had a very strict one-in-one-out policy, before it lapsed and the books began, once again, to pile up on the back of the piano. I was thinking of starting it up again. But I think an exception must definitely be made for the Gorey covers of the Wolves Chronicles. And I’d better hurry. My children will soon be ready for chapterbooks, and I’m determined that Joan Aiken will be part of their childhoods.

Have you read Joan Aiken? Are you one of the lucky fans who first read her in childhood?

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Art and life

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Mea culpa, friends. I missed my usual blog post last week (long, boring story: sick children, sick parents, no babysitter). This week, I was planning to write about some of my recent reading, and then the Amanda Berry story broke. I’ve been debating all morning about whether to go ahead with my post because the subject matter is so grotesquely timely, but I think I will.

Last week, I picked up a second-hand copy of Room, by Emma Donoghue. It was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2010.

I had planned to read it some time ago, but other books intervened. This time, I opened the first page and fell right into its clutches. If you’re not familiar with the book, its narrator is a five-year-old boy named Jack who lives, with his mother, in captivity in the place he knows as Room. I couldn’t believe what effective use Donoghue makes of Jack’s voice, his limited and incredibly clear-eyed comprehension of the world. It was beautiful and terrifying and utterly compelling. And then I read the news about Amanda Berry’s recent escape.

I don’t want to capitalize on someone else’s tragedy. But I will say this: at one point, after Jack and his mother are free, a smirky journalist asks them, “So after your rescue…” And Jack’s mother corrects her: “Escape.” Jack’s mother is braver, smarter, and tougher than one can easily imagine, and that’s because she has to be, in order to live. The only other point I want to make is that Room works because it’s the least exploitative telling imaginable of a story that shrieks horror and taboo. It’s about Jack and his mother, their bond, and how they negotiate their worlds.

I’ll talk about other books another day, I think. For now, I just want to remind myself that it’s possible to think about Amanda Berry, Gina deJesus, and Michelle Knight outside the news cycle: without prying questions, without salacious speculation, and with hope for their future. They are more courageous than we can know.

 

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Furnishings for the Middle Class

Wednesday, March 20th, 2013

Hello, friends. This past weekend, we learned that Turk’s, our favourite antique-y store in Kingston, is closing. We’re really crestfallen because over the years, we’ve ended up buying most of our furniture there. Turk’s (est. 1902 by J. Turk) filled an important gap in Kingston: older wooden pieces in decent condition. They were never serious antiques (there are some scarily high-end antiques dealers in town), and thus they were often in our price range. Our decision-making process went like this:

1. We need X. Can we make one, thrift one, or do without? If no, proceed to Turk’s.

2. Is there anything cool at Turk’s? Yes, there is always something cool at Turk’s.

3. Do we really, really like it? If no, return to step 2. If yes, approach item with caution.

4. Does it smell musty? If yes, return to step 2. If no, find price tag.

5. Is it the same price (or less) as an X from Ikea? If yes, purchase. If no, return to step 2.

I’m so sad to see the end of this era. But as we were poking around in a mist of nostalgia (Turk’s has some vinyl and a few books, too), Nick found an amazing (and ridiculously appropriate, given the circs) book for me! It’s called Furnishings for the Middle Class: Heal’s Catalogues, 1853-1934. I am beyond excited to have a bound volume of so much mid- to late-Victorian aspiration, complete with prices and illustrations. I could read it all day.

What’s immediately intriguing about the catalogues is that they tend to begin with the least expensive items: “Plain Beds for Servants”, for example, or a White Beech Bedroom Chair. You have to keep reading before you get to things like the “‘Princess Maud’ Suite, painted white, with Louis XVIth enrichments, consisting of 3ft. Wardrobe with Plate Glass Door, 3 ft. Dressing Chest and Glass, 2 ft. 6 in. Washstand (Marble Top), Chamber Pedestal, 2 Chairs” for £10 10 0 (that’s ten pounds, ten shillings). And I’m now restraining myself from typing out even more furniture descriptions. Instead, here’s an advertisement from the end of the century.

I also found a photo of the interior of Turk’s as you walk in, here. Yes, those are the original pressed-tin ceilings. Farewell, Turk’s. And thank you for everything.

 

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Winter, redux

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

First, there was birdsong. The light changed. There was even a big thaw. Today, we have… big fat snow flurries? Sigh. Ontario winters get me every time.

The only reasonable thing to do at this point is make another massive curry (I can’t recommend this one highly enough) and crack open a fat book. Nick started David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet last night, and I embarked (it really does feel like an embarcation, in the best possible way) on Judith Flanders‘s Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. It starts well. Book report to follow.

How are you? Is it spring, where you are? And if so, could you please take a deep breath and blow a little zephyr this way?

 

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2012 in books

Wednesday, December 26th, 2012

Hello, friends! If you celebrated Christmas yesterday, I hope you had a blissful, delicious, festive day. This year, I included brussels sprouts in the meal (using this recipe) and they were superlative – the highlight of the meal for me. Unlikely, but true.

But I’m not here to talk about cruciferous vegetables. I wanted to share my absolute favourite books of 2012 with you:

Non-fiction

You saw this one coming, didn’t you? I’ve already blogged about Charles Dickens: A Life twice (once at the start, and again on finishing), and raved about Claire Tomalin many, many times. It was splendid. Highly, highly recommended.

Fiction

May I jump on the Hilary Mantel bandwagon? And yes, isn’t it a rather crowded bandwagon? Nevertheless, my favourite two novels of 2012 were Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Each book haunted me for weeks after reading it, and every time I casually open the book to a random page, my eye lands on a perfectly pitched, devastatingly good sentence.

Picture book

Am I the only person in the world who hadn’t heard of Jon J Muth? Nick picked out his telling of Stone Soup quite by chance, in a busy bookstore a couple of days before Christmas. It’s the Stone Soup story you already know, transposed to historical China, featuring three Zen monks. The illustrations are profoundly beautiful – this cover image I grabbed doesn’t begin to do justice to the light in the paintings – and the story is deeply, solidly rooted in a love for China and Zen Buddhism. It’s one of the few picture-books I want to gaze upon for a long, long time.

And these are my end-of-year selections. What were your favourite books of 2012?

 

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The inimitable (redux)

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

Hello, friends. I’ve been enjoying Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life so very much, and I was deliberately slowing down towards the end so as to spin it out a bit longer. (Anybody else do that?) But I finished it last night with an immense sigh of satisfaction. And I’ve been thinking about Dickens’s reckless, utterly driven pace of life and death.

It was clear that his death was approaching. He’d had a stroke, was increasingly weak, and unable to walk at times, but he persisted in keeping up a demanding schedule of public appearances. In his last, dying days, Dickens:

- met with Queen Victoria, rather reluctantly, and fumed about her “preposterous” book, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, behind her back

- gave a final series of public readings, in which he couldn’t pronounce “Pickwick”. It came out, variously, as Pickswick, Pecknicks, and Pickwicks

- dined with the American ambassador and Disraeli, and breakfasted with Gladstone

- advised his daughters in an amateur theatrical they were putting on

- supervised extensive renovations to his country house at Gad’s Hill

- made an inventory of the spirits consumed at Gad’s Hill House: rum, sherry, brandy, and “Very Fine Scotch Whiskey”

- and, of course, worked on his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood

As Tomalin points out, there’s a huge amount of contradiction here. Even as Dickens acknowledged his mortality with a farewell reading tour and getting his will and other papers in order, he was also renovating his house, worrying about how much whiskey remained in the cellar, and writing instalments of another full-length novel.

His last days stand in sharp contrast to those of Jane Austen, who also knew she was dying. Austen’s priority (apart from her family) was to finish her last, masterful novel, Persuasion, and I’ve always been convinced by arguments that Persuasion ends so rapidly because Austen was working against time.

Tomalin’s final paragraph is a brilliant compression of the major themes and ideas she develops through the book. It’s too long to quote here, but if you’re at all interested in Dickens as a writer, I urge you to read this bio. It does everything a good biography should: expanded and enhanced my appreciation for the subject, inspired me to read more about people and things related to Dickens, and galvanized me to start re-reading the novels.

I think I shall begin with Great Expectations.

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Monsters of entitlement

Wednesday, November 14th, 2012

Hello, friends. I’ve been reading a light, slick, funny book of cultural observation and enjoying it very much. And it’s a – gasp! – parenting book. Doesn’t that seem like a contradiction in terms?

It’s Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman (in the UK, it’s called French Children Don’t Throw Food). It was published earlier this year, to a predictable squawk of gossip, defensiveness, and some reluctant concessions that Anglo-American parenting is imperfect. (This review is somewhat typical – much more about the reviewer’s own experience than about the book.) It seems that we don’t like to think about a parenting culture that’s not “child-centred”.

What I loved about this book (and which I haven’t yet seen mentioned in a review) is Druckerman’s distillation of what seems to underlie what she calls French parenting. It is the assumption that babies are small people with an immense capacity to learn, right from the beginning. Amazing! Druckerman traces this attitude all the way back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 book Emile, or On Education.

In practice, this means that instead of reorganizing their lives around children’s desires, French parents start to teach children how to be rational members of a society from a very early age. Instead of “discipline”, they talk about “education”; instead of “development”, they use the term “awakening”. They take pride in being strict. They allow children immense freedom within a strong framework of rules. They speak politely to babies, because babies are individuals, too.

To me, this doesn’t sound uniquely French. As my friend S at Waldorf Yarns observes, it’s familiar to Waldorf parents (S gives a sample list). S also theorizes, “I can’t help but wonder if some of what is presented as ‘the French’ way of parenting may be European and may have infused into Waldorf education before it was transplanted into our corner of North America.” I’d just add that Druckerman’s “French” parenting also sounds a lot like Maria Montessori’s philosophy of education. It’s no accident: both Waldorf and Montessori education  are founded upon the idea of respect for the child.

As you can tell, I’m a believer. Do I think French parenting (or any single method or ideal) is perfect? Mais non, pas du tout! But it’s a beautiful, rational, and sane starting position that gives me hope that we can raise thoughtful, compassionate citizens, not monsters of entitlement.

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It was a dark and stormy night.

Wednesday, November 7th, 2012

Hello, friends. I was just tinkering with what I think will be the first chapter of Rivals in the City and thinking about Elmore Leonard’s dictum, “Never open a book with weather.” (There’s a ton more writing rules here, if that’s your sort of thing.) And I’m not at all sure weather should be forbidden, let alone the first thing Leonard chooses to condemn.

The infamous “It was a dark and stormy night” is often cited as a bad beginning and an example of purple prose, but really, it’s perfectly all right. It’s a clear and straightforward sentence. It creates mood and promises action in seven words, none of which is extraneous. And its author, Edward Bulwer Lytton, was a successful Victorian novelist whose public apparently enjoyed his having started with the weather, as well as the very ornate sentence that follows it.

And I was recently reminded of the power of starting with the weather in the opening chapter of Dickens’s Bleak House. Here’s the full first paragraph:

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

I can’t imagine a writer pulling this off now, but it’s a splendid beginning. It begins like a telegram or a bit of news reporting (“London. Michaelmas term lately over…”), then immediately turns the weather into an adversary (“implacable”). From this terse economy, it suddenly springs into science fiction cut with absurd comedy (a Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill), horror (“the death of the sun”), and disease (“a general infection of ill-temper”). After coating the world and its contents with filth and mud, Dickens introduces the theme of money (“accumulating at compound interest”) that circulates through the book. Quite a feat for a paragraph that’s all about the weather, hm?

Now, I’m not even considering comparing myself to Dickens or Elmore Leonard, but my point here is, let’s lighten up with the writing rules, shall we? Because sometimes, it really is a dark and stormy night.

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The Inimitable

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

Hello, friends. Yesterday, I began reading Claire Tomalin’s latest biograpy, Charles Dickens: A Life. I had extremely high hopes for this book, so much so that I worried that my hopes were unreasonably high and I might inevitably be disappointed. But it begins beautifully, and this week I just want to share some of my glee with you.

The biography starts with three maps and a Cast List – essential in a book as jammed with places and personalities as this one. One of the reasons I love this kind of front matter and pore over it for ages before launching into the actual book is because they reveal so much about the author’s interests. Her voice is as strong there as anywhere else in the book, and diving into a list like that is a perfect way to get acquainted (or reacquainted, in this case). I’ll show you what I mean:

On the map called Dickens in Central London, the Garrick Club is described thus: “Dickens a member from 1837, resigning and rejoining frequently”. A perfect window into the man, in four words!

Here are a couple of the extremely varied people he associated with:

“Cooper, Louisa… sent to Cape, returned 1856, bringing D[ickens] an ostrich egg…”

“Elliott, Frances… heiress with rackety marital history… persuaded D to intervene in her difficulties in 1860s, questioned him in vain about his private life”

And Tomalin’s judgement on others:

“Morson, Mrs Georgiana… matron of Miss Coutt’s Home [for reformed thieves and prostitutes] from 1849 to 1854 when she remarried. A pearl.”

“Townshend, Chauncey Hare… rich, Cambridge-educated hypochondriac… dedicated poems to D, who dedicated Great Expectatiosn to him, gave him manuscript – huge reward for foolish friend”

Also, Dickens gave his kids really florid names! They often seem to be modified versions of the names of famous people, as in “Walter Landor” (why skip the “Savage”?) and Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson (really? He chose to interrupt Alfred Tennyson’s name with “D’Orsay”?). Other times, he went for the full homage, naming two of his sons “Henry Fielding” and “Edward Bulwer Lytton”.

I’m hooked.

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For once in my life, I am part of the zeitgeist

Wednesday, October 17th, 2012

…in a bookish way, of course. As you probably know, Hilary Mantel is now the first woman to win the Booker prize twice. And she’s done it with linked works of historical fiction! If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know how much I adore Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and you know how thrilled I am.

I’m also excited on a more personal level, because of a small package that arrived in yesterday’s mail, containing this:

 

This is the German paperback edition of A Spy in the House, which will be published on November 1, 2012. Isn’t it lovely? It’s entirely different from the hardcover:

And I prefer it. It’s clean, dramatic, a bit younger-looking, and it reminds me in the happiest possible way of Stephanie Burgis’s delightful UK covers for her Kat, Incorrigible series. I’m so grateful to my German publisher, DTV, for this exquisite re-imagining! The Agency series is called Mary Quinn, Meisterspionin in German, and DTV have also created a wonderful mini-site, www.meisterspionin.de, to go with it!

What do you think? And do you have a favourite cover?

 

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