Last month I miraculously snagged one of the Early Review books from LibraryThing. And it finally arrived from the University of Michigan Press.
It’s a beautifully illustrated biography: Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist. So far I’ve only peeked at the illustrations and wiggled in anticipation. This afternoon I think I’ll start reading it in earnest.
I’ve made my way through Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out: How Two Million Survived Without Men after the First World War, wide-ranging survey of a generation of English women. While Nicholson’s prose is sometimes dull and often repetitive (especially as she transitions from one subject to another), reviews of the book have been mostly upbeat, the result of the strength of the material she’s working with.
As this review point out, Nicholson’s command of historical interpretation is not as strong as might be wished: Nicholson leans too heavily on the millions of "surplus woman" canard. Demographically there were roughly the same number of "surplus" women before the war as there were afterwards.
Never mind that though. What Nicholson does well is tell the stories of the unmarried women she surveys whether they were clerk typists or engineers. And she has a knack for selecting good photographs–the snapshot of Victoria Drummond holding up her hard-won Chief Engineer’s certificate will stay with me as long as the more formal portrait of a group of grim veterans each with one or more amputations.
It’s the sort of book that is simultaneously annoying and pleasing: annoying because it tells snippets of so many lives and pleasing because it leads in so many directions. I’ve already ordered a biography of Drummond (how exactly does a goddaughter of Queen Victoria manage to wangle an apprenticeship in a Dundee shipyard?) and wouldn’t mind hunting out more stories about Caroline Haslett of the Electrical Association for Women or Florence White of the National Spinsters Pension Association
Heather
Though I haven’t been reading as much as I usually do, my year end count is about where it always ends up–not quite a hundred. Sometimes this number appalls me until I remember that I’m no longer in grad school. This year, though, a couple of new patterns are emerging.
Mystery novels are losing out to graphic novels and fantasy/science fiction. I’m finding Terry Prachett’s silliness more engaging than a stack of the mysteries; watching Pratchett spend 200 pages building up to a bad pun has become more satisfying than the unfolding of another puzzle with violence. Literary fiction is starting to lose ground to non-fiction: a mix of books for work, books about Canadian commies, and books about health issues. For a month or so this fall, I’d bring stacks of novels home from the library, read the first 20 pages, and decide I couldn’t bear to read the rest of it. (You’d be amazed at how many novels deal with memory problems and dementia. They just seemed to pop right into my hand.)
Odd to think that out all the books I enjoyed this year there are only a couple that will lead to more reading in the new year: Martha Gelhorne’s The Stricken Field and Michael Frayn’s Toward the End of the Morning.
I’m dithering about defining reading resolutions for 2008–I see them in other blogs and they look very shiny, very attractive. My “should read serious stuff” side wants the shiny resolutions but my “just have fun wandering about” side will probably win out in the end.
Heather
Okay. I can’t even fool myself this week. I’ve come out even in the CD department (a Serena Ryder swapped for a Wilco) but I’m backsliding in the book department. In the over-ambitious, what was I thinking department I’ve borrowed a 500 page + biography of Lenin even though I still haven’t finished the Canadian CP history. Then I added in Denise Mina’s latest Paddy Meehan mystery, The Last Breath and Paul Auster’s latest and blessedly short novella, Travels in the Scriptorum. I rounded this all out by borrowing the 100 Mile Diet which has to be returned in seven, no make that six, days.
I’m giving myself false comfort by silently pointing out that I have actually finished Spook Country, never mind that I’ve been so distracted that I probably can’t give a credible account of its plot or merits.
Heather
I think I was actually fairly restrained. I dropped off 4 and picked up 3. No that’s not right–there was a CD too.
I’ve already finished the one the with most pressing promise–No More Kidney Stones– and, as you might expect, it tells me to
The CD was Serena Ryder’s If Your Memory Serves You Well which is covers 1970s pieces. It had Douglas singing along, and for some undisclosed reason, he knows all the words to "Good Morning Starshine". I suppose it’s a good thing that there are stlll surprises after 25 years. All the same, I am not prepared for an onslaught of 60s and 70s musicals which all this singing along portends.
In the novel department, I picked up Gibson’s Spook Country which has been prolifically reviewed. I’m 30 pages in and so far I’m enjoying it. If it goes the way of LeCarre novels by 100 pages in I’m going to be struggling to remember all the characters and subplots.
The other novel is a mystery by Christopher Brookmyre--One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night. I’d never encountered Brookmyre before but I’d read the opening lines of his most recent novel at Book World and was intrigued. If the idea of a wee Elastoplast as a cure all hadn’t hooked me, the titles of his books would have: All Fun and Games Till Somebody Loses an Eye, A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away, and Boiling a Frog are all oddly familiar turns of phrases.
Next week’s library run goal: return more than I take out.
Heather
This seventies stack of concrete is my regular library branch:
Carlingwood Branch
It’s closed for renovations until mid-September October (looks like something went wrong in the reno schedule). Last year they replaced the carpets upstairs and for a couple of weeks the heady smell of glue distracted me from the rearrangement of the stacks. Not so sure what they’re tackling this year but I suspect that it’s self-checkout machines.
So far the reno caused a weird disruption in my schedule. I’m no longer shopping at the mall next to the library so lots of small errands are piling up and money is going unspent. More striking though is the change in my borrowing habits.
Instead of dashing in to pick up the books I’ve requested, now I go to the main branch to pick up requests. Not so bad, really, in terms of transit time. The problem: the main library has many, many more books and I’m hauling home 6 or 7 each week. It’s murder on the back and shoulder and I’m not getting through them all. So this weekend I decided a temporary moratorium was needed: library run until I catch up a bit.
I’ve given up on the John Bell and have finished a stack of novels. Serendipitously the McCaughrean and the Brockmeier arrived at the same time and both feature Antarctic (sub)plots. White Darkness does a good job of teasing out adolescent female attraction to unattainable figures, in this case Lawrence Oates. Oddly I thought the non-Antarctic half of Brief History of the Dead stronger and more compelling than the re-capitulation of the Cherry-Gerrard journey to Cape Crozier.
The Deaver and the Ferris were amusements that didn’t leave much of a mark.
Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl–a mix of novel and comic–was compelling but not exactly pleasant in it’s unflinching account of 1970s adolescence. It’s horrors are more typical than Lynda Barry’s Cruddy but there’s something similar about the underlying tone.
That puts me about half way through the borrowed books and leaves me still way behind on reading what’s on my own shelves.
Heather
It’s time for me to take Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur back to the library. (There are a dozen other people on the request list.) It’s a quick read and web chatter about it is easy to find. It’s a very loosely argued book with wild swooping analogies that fall apart when prodded slightly.
Keen has a sanguine understanding of the publishing and newspaper business. These two bits made me giggle.
When an article runs under the banner of a respected newspaper, we know that it has been weighted by a team of seasoned editors with years of training, assigned to a qualified reporter, researched, fact-checked, edited, proofread, and backed by a trusted news organization vouching for its truthfulness and accuracy.
Before the Web 2.0, independent media content and paid advertising existed separately, in parallel, and were easily distinguishable from each other.
Keen posits a golden age of reasonable, authoritative discourse, one that the Internet has destroyed, “flattened”, “corrupted” in its “shameless”, “narcissistic”, “shrill”, “embarrassing”, and “unseemly” antics. The target is different and the terms are less gendered but the rhetoric is near kin to that used in the late eighteenth-century to denounce novel reading, especially women’s novel reading. Novel reading, according to more conservative writers of the period, was dangerous and needed to be carefully regulated since it led to bad, bad things like challenges to paternal authority, diversion of energy, revolution, and, worst of all, sexual knowledge.
Some things, I suppose, never change.
Heather
December gift giving folly is a long way off I suppose. But is it really so far away that I can’t hint that this might be a nice addition to the oddly growing pile of crow-related reading material?
(via Bookslut)
I’m still on the look-out for this one, but I don’t need this one or this one.
Why crows? Probably my father’s fault since he liked to claim he was going off to shoot crows when he and his buddies were headed into the woods to drink beer. And if it wasn’t crow shooting, it was porcupine shooting. And when porcupines or crows weren’t to hand, there was beer can shooting or floating bleach bottle shooting. The advantage of beer cans and bleach containers, I suppose, was that people wouldn’t complain that the kids where murdering animals. (Um, yes, lots of target practice. Um, yes, lots of different types of guns. Um, yes, we were all pretty good shots by the time we were 10. And, um, yes, it’s not that hard to make your own ammunition.)
Since I’ve been a bad bad blogger, I thought I might be able to dig myself out of this hole by looking at a month’s worth of reading—you know, the stuff I was doing when I could have been blogging.
Let’s see.
There was a clutch of mysteries and I think I’d recommend Mina’s Dead Hour over Rankin’s Naming the Dead. (Wonder if she can do unto Glasgow what Ranking has done unto the literary tourism trade in Edinburgh). Seriously though, Mina’s work is worth the read—they’re character-driven mysteries and the protagonists aren’t cops or detectives or middle class. (And I’m compelled to cheer on anyone who used the money she was supposed to use to complete a doctorate to write novels).
Then there’s a clutch of science fiction. Well, fantasy. Well Pratchett. I’m late to Pratchett and now I’m worried that I’ll run out. His comic punning novels are perfect anecdote to corporate angst—silly but not stupid. I’ve polished off Thud and Night Watch and Thief of TIme is tempting me from the shelves.
There’s a surprisingly large stack of comics and graphic novels.
The storyline of The Professor’s Daughter is less compelling than the images but there’s something interesting about a book that merges Holmesian imagery, mummies, and a romance plot. There’s a failed romance plot or two in Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You and graphically it’s far more spare than Guibert’s work. As an antidote to some I read some of Roberta Gregory’s Life’s a Bitch—well purgative might be a better term for the protagonist’s roiling anger. Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa’s Jokes and the Unconscious is more subtle and would repay a second reading. Ormond’s SquareCat was an antidote to the antidote and Osamu Tezuka’s Kapilavastu was puzzling in the way that works just outside your cultural references are. Must read more manga. And a Delisle—my guess is he’s never getting back into North Korea. What else. A book for work—Made To Stick—a quick read with some straightforward suggestions.
What else? What else? Oh yeah, a stack of books from the shelves. One of the dire things about being a book buyer and a book borrower is that’s wildly common for a book to be bought in the heat of interest and then to languish for months while the borrowed books are read immediately. I finally read Faith Johnson’s biography of Dorise Nielsen which I bought at a reading several months ago. Nielsen was the first Communist elected to the Canadian Parliament in 1940. She ended up living in China from the early 1950s through the Cultural Revolution to her death in 1980.
Then I tackled a stack of first novels mostly from my shelves. Martha Gellhorn’s A Stricken Field was her first novel—she was a short story writer and a journalist to that point—was good even if it occasionally shows Gellhorn’s struggle with a new form. Heather Doherty’s Goody Bledsoe, blurbed by David Adams Richards, turned out to be less interesting than Ivan Coyote’s Bow Grip.
Bow Grip, like A Stricken Field, is the first novel of a short story writer but it shows less strain. They’re very different types of books though: Gellhorn was writing in 1940 about the political and moral failure of the 1938 Munich Agreement that lead to Hitler’s rolling over Czechoslovakia. Bow Grip has a much smaller scale as its protagonist struggles with getting a grip after his life has fallen apart (good interview with Coyote here and you can get a sense of her reading style here. )
That’s about it I think except for Linda Little’s Scotch River which I’m still mulling over. You can read Lynn Coady and ChristyAnn Conlin talk about the difficulties of reading works written about a place by incomers here. McKay’s Birth House has gotten more attention but I suspect Scotch River is the better novel.
Now, off to make supper and read some more.
Heather
A three or four weeks ago I read Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006) which I enjoyed. It’s the type of book you have to take your time with: if you expect great lashings of plot or endearing characters you’ll likely be disappointed. But it you like steadily-paced social satire you might like it. (The New York Times review has a good summary of the book’s themes and there’s a roundup of mostly glowing reviews here.) The novel is drawn to a close by the events of 9/11 as the characters see themselves and the world as permanently changed. I’m uneasy with the positioning of that one day as life-altering but I can’t quite put my finger on the reason. My reaction has something in common with my negative reaction to Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a novel that takes place in London on the day of the February peace march. I’ll have to re-read The Emperor’s Children in a couple of years to see if I can figure it out.
Anyhoo. I thought Messud’s writing was interesting and picked up The Hunters (2001), a collection of two novellas. And while they’re technically accomplished, they didn’t quite work for me. Partly I suppose the problem is that I prefer longer fiction and usually impatient with novellas and short stories. I can see, though, that there’s a thematic connection between the the two books: In "A Simple Tale" Messud is interested in the ways in which large, historical events like the Holocaust shape (or fail to shape) lives. It’s the stronger of the two pieces and makes some pleasing gibes at Canadian and Torontonian smugness. The second story, "The Hunters", seems on first reading to be a technical exercise–can she tell the whole story without revealing the gender of the first person narrator. A patient person, perhaps someone who liked the Turn of the Screw, could probably go through the text and make a case for first one gender, and then the other. Me, I’m not so patient.
Heather
