The View from Saturday

So maybe for real this time.

2009-01-13T21:48:00.002-05:00

Hey did you guys know they have the internet for your HOME now? I have undergone a bit of a technological renaissance and I think I might bring back the funk. Or maybe just bring back the blog and hope that the funk follows. Who knows? It's 2k9, guys. Anything is possible.

Whatever. I think this might be the return of my internet career. It's gonna be a little bit more bitter this round.

It's BACK.

2008-06-02T16:32:00.001-04:00

laaaaast christmas, i gave you my heaaart

2006-12-06T18:21:00.000-05:00

Jane asked me to tell you about my top ten CanLit books, or maybe it was top five, I can't remember. Anyway, I'm not going to do that right now anyway because I don't feel like it. But I promise, at some point, some day, that list will exist, and it will not have any mention of Margaret Atwood on it, at least not for any of her novels (sorry Jon, that's how I roll). Instead, I'm going to tell you about Christmas books I like, because as anyone who has ever met me will know, I have a low-grade obsession with the birth of our Lord and Saviour, mostly just for the baking and the TV specials. And the amazing children's stories.

Father Christmas by Raymond Briggs is a wickedly funny story with a real comic book feel--it's a picture book but all the text is in dialogue bubbles, many of which are filled with Santa cursing and getting cranky as he gets ready for his Christmas Eve trip. Raymond Briggs does such wonderful figures, all rounded and cozy looking, and his take on Santa is curmudgeonly and dry. Kids' minds will be blown with the idea of Santa as more than just a one-dimensional toy factory. Raymond Briggs' other winter classic is The Snowman, a textless book that always makes me cry and wish for a huge fluffy blizzard.

On Christmas Eve by Peter Collington is another wordless book and probably one of my all-time favourite picture books. It follows a girl on Christmas Eve as she falls asleep and the amazing things that happen as Santa makes his way to her house. I won't give anything away but I will tell you that it involves little fairies bearing tiny candles and will make any 4 year old girl swoon with excitement. The illustrations all have a snowy muted quality and you'll want to read this one over and over to explore all the details and the stories going on in the background.

Morris' Disappearing Bag by Rosemary Wells is classic Wells. And if you know what that entails, you're as dorky as I am. Morris is a bunny who gets annoyed on Christmas morning when all his siblings get better presents than his lame teddy bear--till he discovers the extra package behind the tree. Rosemary Wells has a quirky, simple style that makes you laugh without quite knowing why, and her bunnies are always so incredibly human, especially in the complex and annoyed relationships between brothers and sisters. You'll never find a better illustrator of bunny facial expressions, I guarantee it.

Sweet lord, I could go on and on with this one. Look forward to more installments as the month wears on. And happy Santa Lucia...if there are any Swedish chicks reading this, be careful not to set fire to your hair.

East Side West Side: CAGE MATCH.

2006-12-01T15:07:00.000-05:00

Dear Ottawa,

Why are you acting so messed up towards me? Is it something I said? My constant grousing that Vancouver is a way more hospitable place (well, maybe not during the last few weeks, but STILL)? Is that why I can't hear myself over the ice pellets pounding on the roof? Can I make it up to you or whatever?

How about if I tell you how much I love Ontario writers? Alice Munro? KILLER. Though I just couldn't get into her newest book, The View from Castle Rock. The general consensus seems to be that the first section is pretty dense, and I'm sorry, but if I don't love something within 50 pages, I move on. But I still remember reading Progress of Love when I was about 13 and pretty much losing it over her insight, her plainly descriptive language, the way she sees into the hearts of her characters in a way that makes you re-evaluate your life and your relationships through the reflections of these made-up people.

I've cheated on you, Ontario. I admit it. I got caught up in the granola-infused authors of the West Coast, and I'm sorry. But seriously, man, check them out. Carol Windley's amazing book Breathing Under Water and her new short story collection Home Schooling are addictive. She has this knack for the slightly supernatural, for sticking creepy ghosts and imaginary children in backyard corners and under the ocean, this way of describing the below-surface details of life on Vancouver Island that pull you right in. She juxtaposes her characters' somewhat depressing daily lives with the humbling, terrifying beauty of the mountains and the ocean and that green green landscape that's almost too much to handle.

It's a coastal cage match of epic proportions, I know. I don't know whose side I'm really on. The fact that Brian Doyle lives right here in Ottawa might be the tie-breaker; I was mildly obsessed with Angel Square and Up to Low as a kid, his dryly witty poetic language and his funny-sad stories. There's a tenderness in Doyle's writing that's all the more pronounced because it's found amid such weird, hilarious metaphors. I read Mary Ann Alice last year when I knew I was moving to Ottawa, and his description of the Ottawa Valley made me feel less sad to be leaving the mountains behind. Not to mention the way he captures the raw vulnerability of a teenage girl; Mary Ann Alice's voice is so earnest it almost embarrasses you to read it. In a good way.

There's beauty wherever you plant your roots in this vast country of ours. Except right now, in the parking lot of the Library of the Future, where my poor little car is slowly turning into an ice block. At least we can drink the tap water.

TGIF.

2006-11-24T17:08:00.000-05:00

Best title pun found while weeding the romance section today: Tender is the Knight.

Even better: When I was searching amazon to find the cover image (which only helps increase the hilarity of the title) I found that there are actually 2 books with this title.

Here they are.

As you can see, I am getting a lot of reading done these days.

November Resolutions.

2006-11-14T13:24:00.000-05:00

Given my madcap sense of timelines and the fact that I am not bound by the traditional strictures of start-over periods like New Years and Back to School, I'm giving myself a November rebooting of epic proportions. Not really, though. But lately I have been reading all manner of crap, from Martha Stewart Living to cookbooks, instead of REAL BOOKS which are IMPORTANT for LITERACY. I have also been doing a lot of messing around, which is something that we do not usually do here in our nation's capital. So in the spirit of positive change, I give you...

November Resolutions for 2K6! (Tara, how scary is it that 2K6 is nearly done...remember when it was only 2K5? Where does our youth go?)

1. Find a better hobby than lying on the floor listening to You Never Give Me Your Money by the Beatles on repeat. Acknowledge that this is in fact the greatest song ever recorded, then move on.

2. Brush up my Shakespeare. Seriously, kids come in all the time asking for help and in spite of the fact that I took like a million drama classes in undergrad, all I can do is stand there and stick my finger in my nose and say "Sonnet? Whaaa?" I feel like I squandered a whole lot of knowledge there. BBC DVD production of King Lear, here I come!

3. Start living my life like the protagonist of The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank, arguably the best literary chicklit ("relationship novel") I have read in the last few years. She also wrote The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which I adored when I read it a few years ago. Her style is dry and unbelievably funny, and she will totally make you feel like less of a singleton loser and give you an amazingly strong, self-deprecating heroine to emulate. Plus it takes place in New York City. The Wonder Spot follows Sophie from adolescence to her mid-30s and frames episodes of her life with her female friendships and her botched-up boyfriends, her bad apartments and weekend trips out of town, all anchored by her awesome brothers who are everything a brother should be--protective and funny and annoying and encouraging (just like mine). If you like family fiction or just a clever, thoughtful story about an average life, you will love this book.

4. Sleep more. Aaaaand, I'm done.

My brother's a rock star...does that make me cool?

2006-11-10T09:56:00.000-05:00

Yup, the Ride Theory are on the road, and the People's Little Brother is kicking ass and taking names on the West Coast. I am so proud. Check out their kickass tour blog at http://www.creativecreature.ca/almostfamous.

In honour of all things rock, here's my number one music-related book pick. On a Cold Road by Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics is by far the greatest of the road story/tourbus/poetic travel memoir genre. It's chock-full of Bidini's trademark deadpan writing and beautiful, troubadour-like storytelling about his life with the Rheos, all leading up to an amazing climax in his description of their opening show with the Tragically Hip at Maple Leaf Gardens. It's made people who were at that show CRY for god's sake (sorry to give you away, Freya, and also sorry for exagerating if you didn't actually cry, I just know you liked it). The book's also full of Hidden Track memories from other CanRock veterans, from Goddo to Trooper to that scourge upon humanity, the Guess Who (impeach Bachman). Try it. You'll rock it.

you've lost interest, haven't you.

2006-11-09T17:45:00.000-05:00

An open letter to the four people who read this stupid blog...

Dear Comrades,

Sorry for never updating. I have a sinking feeling you totally don't care but that's okay, I'm still sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I have been working hard to become a better reader and I even attended a professional development workshop to help me be a more knowledgeable recommender of romance books. It was one of those scenarios in which you wonder how you ended up in the spot that you are in, carefully writing notes about which time travel love stories are the best.

ANYWAY, the one thing the facilitator said that really made me think was that everyone has a sort of finger-snapping moment with reading, a book they read when they're little that is so good that it shapes the rest of their reading life. I pathetically realized that for me, this would have to be either The Babysitters Club series (as evidenced in a previous entry), or the books of Beverly Cleary, especially Ramona. Seriously. The Ramona books are all about love in the face of mundane disasters like parental unemployment and breaking an egg on your head and fighting with your siblings and being a misunderstood 8-year-old kid who loves to play with tin can stilts. I defy you to find more universal literary themes than those. Mostly though, the Ramona books are about family, and as Tara will confirm, I love things about families, from Seventh Heaven (a never ending font of sensible wisdom, although the new season kind of sucks. and no, I'm not afraid to admit I watch it.) to Beezus and Ramona to all those amazing books by Carol Shields and Anne Tyler (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant will always be in my top five) and Bonnie Burnard. I feel cozy just thinking about them.

And now I'm being pulled from my cozy feeling by a library full of rowdy teens. Dear kids, please stop playing violent YouTube clips on your speaker-enhanced cell phones and sit quietly with a copy of The Amber Spyglass or something.

Okay! In the interests of interactivity, tell me about your own "YES GUY!" reading moments!

I love you all.

The Big Smoke.

2006-10-16T12:22:00.000-04:00

I just spent the weekend in Toronto. While most of my time was taken up with eating Rodney's Oyster Bar out of house and home and drinking wine spritzers at a rate that would make me an excellent understudy for Jack Lemmon in The Days of Wine and Roses, I also did other things that exercised my brain as well as my liver. We hit galleries and restaurants, and I came to the realization that Toronto isn't ALL bad. It may be the poor man's NYC, but I defy you to find a better hollandaise sauce than that of Over Easy, which is pretty much our living room whenever we visit. Plus the view of the ravine off Mount Pleasant is very pretty. And handsome waiters abound.

I drove home yesterday in my now-incredibly-inappropriately-nicknamed car and plowed through part of one of my favourite Toronto-centric series, Scott Pilgrim by Brian Lee O'Malley. These wicked comic books are a tribute to manga and the Toronto scene and are full of fun visual references to various spots all over the city, from Honest Ed's to Toronto Ref. Anyone who's spent time in the city will love these books, and anyone who hasn't will still appreciate the ubiquitous CanPop tidbits and smart yet silly writing. Scott Pilgrim, who is named after a song by Plumtree, who no one will remember except me and Heather, is a feckless musician dude who has to fight his hott new lady friend's seven evil ex-boyfriends in order to win her heart. This premise is shockingly entertaining, I promise.

And while we're on the whole Toronto thing, my favourite poem about the city is "A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum" by Margaret Atwood. It's the third poem in this pdf version of her Selected Poems and it reminds me of the unsettling feeling of going to the ROM when I was a kid and pretty much having a panic attack in the bat cave. Enjoy.

A Literary Cornucopia.

2006-10-04T19:28:00.000-04:00

It's an eatin' time of year, from delicious pies baked with apples from a sketchy apple tree to pink squares to stuffing that hasn't been stuffed in anything except a casserole dish. It is, to put it one way, harvest time. In honour of the twenty pounds of cheesecake I will be packing away this weekend, and in tribute to everyone's favourite cooperative board game, here are some of my favourite books about food. And sharing. Okay, maybe we'll scratch the sharing part.

Julie and Julia by Julie Powell really grew on me. It's the story of a sketchy gal from Long Island City who decides that she'll cook every single recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a way to fill her unemployed days. This book is as much about her turning-30 crisis and the resulting existential crisis as it is about the sheer magnitude of Julia Child's amazing, culture-changing cookbook. The fact that a girl in a divey apartment with a malfunctioning stove could muster up things like beurre blanc and osso bucco is, to a single girl with a sketchy kitchen like me, comforting. She also swears a lot. I like casual swearing.

Home Cooking and More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin are books that make you homesick, especially if you come from a home like mine where there is always something on the stove and someone wonderful to eat it with. Laurie Colwin started out as a sketchy gal in a crappy apartment (is there a pattern here?), cooking things like eggplant parmesan on a hot plate and doing her dishes in the bathtub (again, I relate). Over the years, she became an amazing novelist and food writer for the New Yorker, and these collections of her columns are funny, and personal, and totally delightful. You'll never think of lemons, or gingerbread, or chocolate cake, the same way again. My favourites are the piece on what to serve to someone with jetlag and the one about Halloween dinner. (Halloween dinner! This woman is a genius!) My mom passed these books on to me after Laurie Colwin had died, and I tell you, I was so sad when I realized she'd never write anything more.

Happy Thanksgiving, kids. Be kind to your turkeys.

kicking vegetarianism in the pants.

2006-10-02T11:47:00.000-04:00

So my friend Sarah informed me this morning that yesterday was World Vegetarian Day, and she wanted to know what I'd done to celebrate. This holiday could not have come at a worse time for me. Instead of joining hands with other like minded fans of Tofurkey sausage (I actually ate this last week and it was NOT THAT BAD) and planting crap in a community garden, I spent my day of meatless empowerment barrelling down the 401 in my brand new Honda Civic, emitting fossil fuels and listening to Heat by Bill Buford, a book that is not exactly vegetarian in focus. At one point as Bill recounted losing his shit and travelling to Tuscany to apprentice with a master butcher, I found myself thinking, "huh, cured rendered pig fat spread on a slice of bread actually sounds kind of delicious!"

Butcher talk aside, it's a really wicked book for anyone who loves dining out and is mildly obsessed with the whole celebrity chef phenomenon. Buford spends over a year working at Babbo, a NYC restaurant owned by Mario Battali, who's the quintessential fiery celeb chef, and his stories about everything from continuing to work after he's sliced the tip off his finger to the surprisingly difficult art of making pasta are hilarious and compelling. The book on CD was fun to listen to, although it made my driving snack of Diet Coke and grapes seem a little lacklustre. I bought and made some tortellini as soon as I got back home, but without the pig fat, it was a little meh. This could be the next step down the slope toward meat eating, which, as we know, began during the infamous Scottish Spring Roll Debacle of 2006. By the end of the week I may be eating turkey and wiping my mouth with a hamburger or something.

Boys, boys, boys.

2006-09-26T18:28:00.000-04:00

I recently watched High Fidelity for the millionth time as part of a poorly-executed attempt to get out of a state of despair. Note to self for future reference: When trying to remind oneself why it's fully okay to be a lone reed, watching John Cusack play the world's most adorable, likably fallible, well-listened boyfriend is probably not a great strategy. Oh well. It only confirmed what Chuck Klosterman has already proven: John Cusack ruined relationships for a whole generation by virtue of his sheer perfection--girls expect their one true love to be Lloyd Dobler, and guys can never hope to be so romantic. (Incidentally--and Freya, I know you'll back me up here--Chuck Klosterman has kind of ruined my Man Ideal too; you read his books and you fall in love with his prodigious knowledge of everything from Kirk Cameron's weird Christianity to pro sports to LA Guns and you fall in love a little; you turn to the back flap of Killing Yourself to Live and expect to fall in love a little more; and then you see this dorky dude staring out at you from the author photo in an ill-fitting T-shirt and, to quote Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, "Your heart dies.")

High Fidelity did put me in the mood to read some more Nick Hornby, though, and when I couldn't get my hands on his latest novel, I settled for The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his bitchin' essays on reading from The Believer. Any book nerd should have to read this book. I am infintely envious of his reading tastes and the fact that people, like, SEND him BOOKS for his OPINION. I wish people would do the same thing for me. And when he picked up on a creepy similarity between sections in Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger and Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, I knew I had found a man as truly anal in his reading as I aspire to be. This is also a book that fits neatly into a tote bag alongside dirty tupperware and twelve chapsticks and the other random crap I travel with, and is much less cumbersome than the stories of John Cheever, which I hauled home last night before realizing it was too big for transit reading.

And finally, because I'd planned to make this a post about books for boys, here is one of my favourites: Matthew and the Midnight Turkeys by Allen Morgan is one of my favourite picture books. It is totally off the wall and if you're looking for a book that kicks Walter the Farting Dog's ass, this is the one.

dear John K. Sampson: Will you marry me?

2006-09-19T17:00:00.000-04:00

How not to get out of a funk:

1. Spend a disproportionate amount of your weekend at work.

2. Spend an equally disproportionate amount of your weekend listening to the music of the Weakerthans. Develop unattainable crush on John K. Sampson.

3. Read Mother Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier. What a powerful, disturbing, stark graphic novel. Hornschemeier shifts his style a few times, and some of the passages look like a child's drawings, while others are full of depth and detail and incredibly emotive faces. The story is told by Thomas Tennant, a young boy who struggles to come to grips with his mother's death and his father's growing emotional instability. HEAVY! It's a lot to grapple with, but Hornschmeier never sentimentalizes the subject matter or glosses over difficult feelings and ideas. The book opens with a strange, seemingly senseless section in which a slightly off version of Thomas' dad floats over a creepy dream landscape. I was almost put off by the opening, but I promise, if you keep reading, the odd language and disconnected images will make sense. It might not put you in the mood for, say, getting dressed and leaving your house to be part of mainstream society, but it's a must-read for any graphic novel afficionado.

Sigh. If anyone can recommend a very very happy book to me, please do so before I turn into the human lady manifestation of Eeyore (according to Freya this has already happened).

Remember the Babysitters Club?

2006-09-16T14:58:00.000-04:00

Man, fiction for girls has gotten out of hand in recent years. Oh sure, series that feature the Olsen Twins may sell books, and that new Dear Dumb Diary set actually seems kind of cool. But where's the heart? Where's the carefully-developed character writing, the lightly-handled social issues? Where, I ask, is the Babysitters Club?

Scoff if you want to, but author Ann M. Martin is no Cathy East Dubowski (and if anyone catches THAT reference, I will buy you a coffee for being even more into mass-market kids' publishing than me). She won the Newbery a few years ago for the very heartfelt A Corner of the Universe, which explored the now-popular trope of the child getting to know a mentally unstable adult as more than a scary stereotype with sincerity and grace. Waaaaayyy back in the day, she also wrote such classics as Ten Kids, No Pets and collaborated with Paula Danziger on P.S. Longer Letter Later, one of the books that helped spawn the current trend toward epistolary novels for kids. That's why the Babysitters Club books were so damned good--they were written by an AUTHOR, not a publishing house lackey.

There was something for everyone in the series. All my friends had their favourites. Mine alternated between Claudia, the artist with junk food hidden all over her room and clothes that seemed exotic and daring at the time but now sound more like the rags of an escaped mental patient, and Stacey, a New York City transplant, Claudia's best friend and a sophisticated gal who shopped at The Limited before anyone knew what The Limited was. She made me wish I had diabetes so I could be as cool as her and learn to give myself insulin shots. I also had a soft spot for Dawn, who ate weird health food and had long blonde hair, but I thought Kristy was a total bossy bitch. But you have to hand it to her--it WAS her big idea to start the club in the first place. The rest--Mary Ann, Mallory, and Jessi--I could take or leave. I know they introduced some new Club Officers (yes, they were actually called Officers) later in the series, but by that point I had lost touch (or else I was, like, nineteen years old and had realized that I could no longer check these books out from the library without looking like an asshole).

And what a club it was! Three meetings a week, free snacks from Claudia (meetings were at her house because she had her OWN PHONE LINE--LUCKY!), responsibility and innovation...no wonder it spawned a board game and a horrible movie (which inexplicably stars a couple people who actually became semi-famous...if you count being in Orange County as fame, which I DO). The board game was wicked, though. Danielle and I used to play it at sleepovers and it was far more fun than Girl Talk--no embarrassing "zit" stickers to wear, just killer trivia about our favourite books and the occasional poorly-executed truth or dare question ("What was the last thing that made you laugh out loud?" OMG, SCANDALE!).

The Babysitters Club ruled because it had all the qualities of pop preteen lit that girls love--an exclusive clique (conveniently devoted to a socially responsible cause), a cast of characters wide enough for everyone to identify with at least one, and lengthy descriptions of clothing, malls, and dates--combined with quality writing and problem plots that never seemed heavy-handed. Martin struck gold with the series, and I, for one, miss it a lot. I feel sad that girls today won't have these books in their lives. Instead of learning about how eating disorders are a bad thing (like Jessi did in her ballet class), they're learning to emulate girls who treat anorexia like a character trait. On the plus side, the series is now being morphed into graphic novel format. I've had a look at the first installment, and while it doesn't quite suit me, I hope it'll bring a new generation of readers back to Martin's series, so that they, like me, can learn about the joy of readerly guilty pleasures. And about how to know if a kid is being abused. Or how to stand up to your dad so you can choose your own clothes. And what to do if you're getting weird phone calls on the job. And how to deal with your parents' divorce. And how to manage diabetes. And what to say when a boy calls you on the phone. GOD, I learned a LOT from those books.

SUPERFUN SASSY EXTRA CONTENT!!!! (and Blake Nelson.)

2006-09-14T18:32:00.000-04:00

Hello, jerks.

Okay, so in my ongoing efforts to heroically waste as much of my employers' time as possible, I've now started cataloguing the books I review here on LibraryThing, a superfun website that you should totally use if you are looking to procrastinate instead of

a. writing your thesis
b. moving to the country
c. helping get a great leader elected
d. getting a sex-change in chile
e. helping first-year university students find articles on Chinese foot-binding and its impact on Communist movements in the hinterland when really they'd rather be getting shittered
f. feeding baby triplets
g. painting your porch

ANYWAY, if you click on the My Website link from the Profile page, it'll take you right there. Or just click here like a lazy chump.

Typing the word "Sassy" in the title made me nostalgic for the days when Sassy was in fact an amazing magazine for teenage girls, full of good short stories and real-size models and features that had little or nothing to do with the prom. It was in Sassy that I first read Blake Nelson's writing--it was a short story that eventually became his novel, Girl, which remains one of my very very favourite books. Freya recently pointed out that it's basically a novelization of My So-Called Life. (She also once told me that watching My So-Called Life "explained a lot" about me. I chose to take this as a compliment.) What she failed to realize is that it is also a love letter to the early 90s rock scene in Portland and thrift store shopping and teenage confusion, all written in the best stupid-smart girl first person narration ever executed. I read this book about once a year and remember how wicked it was to be intensely into my friends' bands and pretend to skateboard and wear ratty cardigans. You should too.

Incidentally, Blake Nelson's latest book, Prom Anonymous, just came out. I'm sad to report that he, like Sassy, has fallen into the prom trap. I'm a little disappointed. Also, there's a picture of him on the back flap, and he's not nearly as cute as I'd always imagined he'd be. Another adolescent literary crush bites the dust. Oh well. At least I still have young J.D. Salinger. And with his current recluse status, the odds of seeing a spoil-the-fantasy recent photo are happily slim.

Desperate times.

2006-09-14T17:38:00.000-04:00

Any of you who are in Canada (hello, I have a readership of like FOUR, and probably none of you even read anymore anyway because I haven't updated in weeks...the shine wore of THIS apple pretty fast) have likely heard about the sad, weird, sobering event yesterday in Montreal. I'm not going to be Captain Blog Hero and wax philosophical about violence in society and how goth kids are fucked up; I'll leave that to greater windbags than I. What I WILL do, though, is tell you that you should run right out and read Hey Nostradamus!, by Douglas Coupland, if you want a lovely little book that will make you think about school shootings, lost love, and the total randomness of the world. It's my favourite of Coupland's books, probably because it's his most emotionally sincere, and because it deals with loss and recovery and the inexplicable end to relationships that seemed to be going just fine.

Nostradamus opens with an eerie first-person account by Cheryl, a secretly-married highschool girl who describes the day she died in a school shooting with creepy foreboding. We're in the present and the future the whole time, aware that tragedy is going to strike. After it does, the rest of the book is spent jumping from Cheryl's distraught husband, Jason, who struggles to make sense of the event that ripped his life apart, to Heather, Jason's much-later, estranged girlfriend, whose desperation to find Jason leads her into a sketchy situation with a would-be psychic, to Reg, Jason's too-religious dad. My favourite of these later sections was Heather's; as she tries to piece together the reasons why Jason might have left her, she reconstructs the off-beat, particular world they inhabited, the characters they created, the ongoing jokes that became their reality. I don't know--it struck a chord with me. Coupland is at his most thoughtful in this book, but his characters are still as weird and wonderful as ever, with personalities, and hearts, a little larger than life, floating a little bit outside the world they inhabit. Also, Heather refers to herself as Eleanor Rigby at one point, which, in retrospect, is a coy little jab at Coupland's next novel (haha, I'm so good at picking out intertextual references...thanks, U of T.).

Yup.

In other news, I love the dinner hour...all the rowdies go home and I am left in peace to help the keen kids learn how to use an index. Good times, my friends. Good times.

Attencion, Hordan.

2006-08-31T19:02:00.000-04:00

Jordan, I am reading a book and it makes me think of you. It's called Lost Girls and Love Hotels, by Catherine Hanrahan and it's about a girl who teaches English pronunciation to a bunch of Japanese flight attendants in training while trying to come to grips with, and run away from, her past. Not that Jordan is doing either of those things (although, really, we're not sure WHAT he is doing down there in Chile, beyond eating avocadoes by the bushel and taking photos of Bilz y Pap). But this line jumped out at me because it seemed like something he would say...

"For some reason, in Japan, I always expect things to happen like they do in cartoons, for giant red hearts to erupt from people's chests, for connect-the-dot lines to appear when lovers' eyes meet."

I don't know why.

Come home, Jordan. Get on your white pony and ride back to the only hemisphere that matters.

Highschool Confidential.

2006-08-31T18:59:00.000-04:00

The end of summer always reminds me of this one year when I was about 17, living back in Hamilton and waiting to start my last year of highschool. My boyfriend's dad was away and we spend the last week of August smoking hash in his backyard, dreading the start of term. Everyone had the same navy blue hooded sweatshirt. The air had that Hamilton smell, smoke and factory fallout mixed with humidity and mountain ash. I didn't want to go back to school; no one ever did, even though at the very least, going back meant you had something to do with your days, not to mention the possibility of someday getting the hell out of Steeltown. I've never understood people who say they were happy in highschool. And yet, I always think of that nauseatingly cliched time in my life, when all I thought I needed was a boyfriend and my parents' car and an inkling of some future responsibility.

And with that, I give you...

Top Four Books that Make you Nostalgic for a Time That Actually Sucked

Blankets--Craig Thompson

I have a horrible habit of getting really unreasonable crushes on graphic novelists, and I got supercreepyobsessed with Craig Thompson's cartoon version of himself after reading this stunning story, a sprawling 542-page epic that chronicles Thompson's childhood, his struggle between religion and art, and his first love, a girl named Raina whose total goodness started to piss me off a little toward the end of the book. Don't fall for her, Craig, come to Ottawa and I will make you dinner and stun you with my wit and my pretty hair ribbons. Thompson's style reminded me of those Little Golden Books from the 50s, all charcoal-y and full of doe-eyed characters. And the way he draws his characters' hands and limbs is so eerily real. This whole book reminded me of "Calendar Girl" by the Stars, which 1. shows you what a huge loser I am that I compare songs and books and 2. is unusual because I hate the Stars. Sort of.

Teen Angst? Naaah...A Quasi-Autobiography--Ned Vizzini

Speaking of unreasonable crushes, if thise whole librarian thing doesn't work out, I intend to move to Brooklyn and marry Ned Vizzini. The guy started publishing essays in mags like the New Yorker when he was a young teen...I love the precocious youngsters. This book is his first collection of essays, and details his highschool years in all their mortifying glory. My personal favourites are the one about him lying to his parents so he could sneak out and play Magic cards all night, the one detailing the rise and fall of his extremely untalented rock band, and the one about him almost seducing a hot older editor at a press event. He's like the World's Little Brother: engaging, endearing, funny, and a bit of a dork. His new book, It's Kind of a Funny Story, has a wicked hipster cover and a photo of the author, which only fuels my obsession. He is a shrugged-shoulders, hoodie-wearing, dark eyed man with the soul of a poet...if anyone needs me, I will be walking the streets of Brooklyn like a crazy woman.

Prep--Curtis Sittenfeld

The teenage girl experience writ large, and played out in that most Teen of settings-the elite New England boarding school. Sittenfeld's dry humour shines through in the voice of Lee Fiora, a displaced Indiana girl who discovers, on arriving at Ault, a prestigious prep school, that maybe she's not part of the upper crust at all. So many boarding school stories about teen girls are full of over the top pranks and dumb love sub-plots. Instead, Prep focuses on the horror and the awkwardness of adolescence, the melodrama of failed relationships, the feeling that you're at the centre of the universe and it's exploding all around you.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower--Stephen Chbosky

This might be my favourite book of all-time. It's an epilstolary (50 cent word) novel, told through 15 year old Charlie's letters to an unknown reader, following his life through highschool in the late 80s as he discovers the Smiths, makes mixtapes, finds friends that aren't assholes (no mean feat, as in most North American highschools...gahhh, so bitter), and eventually comes to terms with a pretty awful experience from his past. This topped the American Library Association's list of frequently banned books in 2005. It's a book that is at once sweet and scary, and expresses what it's like to be a teen outside the popular group.

In other news, I fully figured out how to add links to text, which is not that hard, but I'm proud of myself. YES GUY.

Hi, Tara.

2006-08-29T16:07:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's in-depth Anne Tyler review really took a lot out of me. I've decided that from here on out, it's going to be nothing but short, to the point, completely unreasoned reviews based entirely on personal preference. Because she's probably the only one reading this and because I adore her, here's my first top five list...

Top Three Books to Tell Tara About that I Keep Forgetting to Tell Her About When We Talk On The Phone Because We Are Too Busy Hating Ourselves And Talking About Making Over Our Lives

1. The Thurber Letters--James Thurber
Tara has probably already read this but when I think of James Thurber, I think of her and a story she told me once about how she brought a book of his to the Aveda Salon in Vancouver and was trying to read it quietly as some young biscuit cut her hair but the chick just kept asking unreasonable and uneducated questions and it really pissed her off. This might be an amalgam of a few stories involving Tara and Aveda but I don't care. Anyway, we just got this lovely new edition in at the biblio, and it is very pretty. Till I figure out how to edit the html on this bad boy you're going to have to make do with long amazon links.

http://www.amazon.com/-Thurber-Letters-Wit/dp/0743223438/sr=8-1/qid=1156888843/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-2344763-5295266?ie=UTF8

2. Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack--M.E. Kerr
During library school, making Tara read YA and kids' books was my most time-consuming hobby (after watching Gilmore Girls and cake baking, of course). She took it in stride and only hated about half the books I forced down her throat. I know she will love Dinky Hocker because it contains in-jokes about librarians, references to McCarthyism and the failure of 1960s radicalism (and it was actually written in the 1970s, so it is, like, TIMELY), articulate young people, and hilarious 70s Brooklyn diction that has not stood the test of time and is therefore endearing. Kind of the book version of The Squid and the Whale in some ways. M.E. Kerr is still a really wicked and relevant writer, but her earlier books are sometimes forgotten. I hope Tara will help me choke a new generation of teens with this one. Literally and spiritually.

http://www.amazon.com/Dinky-Hocker-Shoots-Smack/dp/0064470067/sr=1-1/qid=1156890263/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-2344763-5295266?ie=UTF8&s=books

3. Caddy Ever After--Hilary McKay

I haven't read this one yet but one of the great successes of me trying to make a children's lit afficionado out of Tara was my introducing her to Hilary McKay. Tara fell in love with her because her wonderful series, The Exiles, features numerous very precocious, verbose female heroines. The follow-up series about the children in the Casson family, which began with Saffy's Angel, doesn't have quite the same magic, but the books are still drier than a stiff martini and gloriously sarcastic, given that they're intended for the 12-15 set. They've just rereleased these books with swishy new covers; if you haven't read them before, you should begin at the beginning, as apparently you need the back-story to follow this latest installment.

http://www.amazon.com/Caddy-Ever-After/dp/1416909303/sr=1-1/qid=1156891014/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-2344763-5295266?ie=UTF8&s=books

I also wanted to include all of the Ottawa Public Library's holdings on raw foodism (foodism! it's a word, apparently!) on this list because I have been reading them, against my better judgement, and they remind me of the days when Tara and I would check out the whole vegan section of the Kitsilano Branch of the Vancouver Public Library and sit around our living room reading them while we noshed on chocolate cake and slices of non-organic cheese. Those were the days.

Monday Morning Reviews: Digging to America by Anne Tyler

2006-08-28T10:26:00.000-04:00

Okay, one of the pages just handed me a book to be recatalogued and it is called The Tailchaser's Song and it has a really crudely drawn picture of two cats on the cover, one of whom is apparently coughing up a hairball onto the other. This magnum opus by the venerable Tad Williams is the story of (AND I QUOTE) "Fritti Tailchaser, a ginger tom cat of rare courage and curiosity, a born survivor in a world of heroes and villains, of powerful feline gods and whiskery legends about those strange furless, erect creatures called M'an." The back-cover teaser goes on to invite us to "join Tailchaser on his magical quest to rescue his catfriend Hushpad--a quest that will take him all the way to cat hell and beyond."

This is not a children's book, by the way. It is a book intended for grownups. Scary, scary grownups. Anyway, reading this stellar summary inspired me to start writing reviews of my own. I think this will help me feel like I am contributing something to the world of professional readers' advisory. Furthermore, it will remind me that I didn't just get my Masters to help people log into msn Messenger properly. So here we go.

I blame Anne Tyler for my long-enduring, completely unfounded interest in visiting Baltimore, Maryland. I started reading her character and relationship driven novels on the advice of my local librarian when I was about twelve, and was immediately drawn in. Tyler has that rare gift of being able to create a world that is at once universal and particular (those of you who know me will know that I have been VERY BIG on the universal meeting the particular ever since I was a doe-eyed undergrad obsessed with Virginia Woolf). Most of her books take place in Baltimore, and while they are definitely grounded in their setting, there is also the sense that the story could be unfolding anywhere--in your own house, with your own demented but lovable family. Tyler's characters are complicated and endearing and unintentionally funny: Digging to America's Bitsy Donaldson, for one, wears nothing but black and white clothes for the first year of her child's life because she has read that children can't process colours and organizes a Binky Party to create a tradition out of her daughter getting rid of her soother.

Digging to America tells the story of two families who meet by chance at the Baltimore airport, waiting for their newly-adopted daughters to deplane from Korea. What follows is the intergenerational, multicultural version of the Odd Couple: The Iranian-American Yazdans and the slightly left of centre WASP Donaldsons are linked for life by the coincidence of their children's arrivals. Tyler traces their stories from the points of view of several members of the two families, but always comes back to the psyche of Maryam, the Yazdan grandmother, an assimilated American whose ongoing struggle to determine her identity as an Iranian and an American, a traditionalist and a modern woman, expresses the cultural and emotional complexities that echo through the voices of all the characters.

Like most of Anne Tyler's books, Digging to America broke my heart in the nicest possible way. A description of a recently widowed man as feeling "as lonely as God" is just one example of Tyler's simple but powerful command of metaphor and simile (hello, English major). It's a book about belonging, about family, about making your way in a world that isn't always familiar. Her stories walk the precarious line between happiness and sadness, always mindful of the fact that any good is tempered with bad, that the balance of our lives is always teetering toward one end of the spectrum or the other. I love the way she incorporates familiar events into the story without sermonizing --things like 9-11 and the 2003 hurricane on the Eastern seaboard are woven into the narrative so seamlessly that the story's currency never feels forced. Some of Tyler's recent books--The Amateur Marriage, for one--have been panned by critics and readers alike, and she's been criticized for falling into a rut. With Digging to America, though, I think Tyler is back on her game in a way we haven't seen since her earlier works like Saint Maybe and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (my personal favourite). Whether this is your first taste of Tyler's writing or you've already read a lot of her books, any fan of familial fiction and emotional interiority will love this story.

...and with that, my sincerity for the day is tapped out. Now back to yelling at kids for running, helping people perfect their resumes, and googling people I used to date. It's a good life if you don't weaken, folks.

Caitlin Intends to Read. part one.

2006-08-26T16:31:00.000-04:00

Given that I am 1. a librarian and 2. a big dork and 3. living in a new city where my second best friend is a kitten with intestinal problems (don't worry, Arlo, we're going to the vet on Tuesday to get you all sorted out) (my cat can't read, why am I writing to him), I get a lot of reading done. I keep losing my teeny lists of books I'd like to read, so I'm going to start recording them in cyberspace because that is what we Information Professionals do.

In other news, the very loud and poorly enunciated French closing announcement just came on in my library and took five years off my life.

to reeeeeeeaaaaaad...

1. Alan Moore's various things--Batman, the Maxx, etc.

2. Water for Elephants--Sarah Gruen

3. A Dirty Job--Christopher Moore

4. Black Swan Green--David Mitchell

Those last few are only because they're nominated for the Quill Awards, a consumer-choice literary award based out of the states. Their wicked-varied shortlist can be found in this cbc article...http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2006/08/22/quill-awards.html . I am a big fan of pop fiction, and I'm stoked to see such a well-rounded bunch of nominees for so many cool categories. And that last sentence is the reason why I'm going to go home tonight, heat up a can of Chef Lonelyheart's soup, and continue teaching Arlo to fetch and return paper balls ripped from the pages of old New Yorker issues. Hello spinsterhood, you're looking fetching tonight.

More reading to come.

First (past the) post.

2006-08-26T11:45:00.000-04:00

Sigh.

It's a long hard road to the liberry (a technical term) on Saturdays, especially with the SuperEx (Ottawa's saddest fairground exhibition) on my bus route, causing veritable tens of carnies to mill around my usual stop like a bunch of dirty, chain-smoking pigeons. I'm almost too tired to be embarrassed by that pigeon metaphor. I'm definitely too tired to be depressed about the fact that I, like every other two-bit newbie librarian, am starting a lame blog that no one will read except other two-bit newbie librarians. No matter; I am a lone reed, unconcerned with the reality that no one needs the badass book reviews and pointless anecdotes to be contained herein. Mostly, I keep forgetting to carry my notebook with the photo of the poodle in a cheerleading costume on the front of it around with me to record things like what I've read and what I'd like to read and my thoughts on the CBC's summer programming--you know, really weighty stuff. Putting it all out there in the ether of the interweb is more about the convenience than anything else. This is not a public record. This is definitely not for the ages. You might as well stop reading right now. Seriously.