Happy Earth Day

So if I'm writing on my unplugged laptop during Earth Hour, is that ok? Well I suppose it'll have to be since that's exactly what I'm doing. I figured I'd be skipping Earth Hour this year because I was going to be out in Mississauga with the parental unit. But I made good time on the way home, so I walked in the apartment door just around 8:20 - plenty of time to light a few candles and prepare myself for this hour where we pay tribute to our lovely planet Earth. (I know, it's easy to be cynical about the idea of turning off the lights for one hour out of the year, but I'll resist the temptation. For one, my footprint is pretty tiny for much of the year anyway as I'm not a huge energy consumer.)

My week of reading neglected New Yorker short stories has turned out quite well. (There were also a couple of non-fiction pieces that I had set aside, so it was good to complete those.) I was able to throw into the recycling bin about seven issues, not to mention enjoying some wonderful stories in the process. One, "Awake" (available free online, and not even from the New Yorker) by Tobias Wolff, was, amazingly, from an issue way back in 2008! I have no idea why I've held on to it for so long - not to mention how since I was living in a different apartment back then, meaning I must have moved the issue with me. What folly! There were two glorious pieces which I'm glad I hadn't discarded before getting around to reading them (and both, interestingly, appear to be novel excerpts): "The Gangsters" by Colson Whitehead (whose fantastic novel The Intuitionist was one of my favourites from a few years back), and Jennifer Egan's "Ask Me If I Care." Egan is not a writer I've read before, but based on the strength of this fantastic piece of writing, I'll be seeking out more of her work. And I most certainly will read both the Whitehead and Egan novels.

It actually was a good New Yorker week all around for me as I was lucky enough to deal with one of the editors of its book blog, Book Bench. Results of my help/work should appear sometime in the coming week. It was quite heady for me to deal with someone that carried the newyorker.com e-mail address, not to mention the anticipation of seeing my small contribution appear online. I've been a New Yorker magazine fanatic (and oft subscriber) for about 20 years, so it's always been a dream to have some contact or connection with it. (In my early 20s, it was my dream to one day work at the magazine.) I'm actually quite giddy about it! It allowed me to end the week - which was already a pretty darn good one, what with seeing both Norah Jones and Catherine MacLellan in concert, as well as catching up with an old high school friend - on a wonderfully high note. (And adding to the general excitement is that I'll be back to being a city cyclist, courtesy of my parents who have given me an old but rarely used bike that was taking space in their condo locker. It just needs a few modifications: new tires, fenders, a bike rack, and some front and rear lights. I should be up and running - and thus freed from the Toronto Transit Commission - by the end of the week. Happy days indeed are here again.)

This and that

(Of course I started writing this post yesterday morning, but only now - on Tues. - am I actually getting around to finishing it and posting...)

Not sure I mentioned this at the beginning of the year, but I've decided to keep a list (and, thus, a tally) of the books I'm reading this year. It's something I've never done - and, as a result, whenever I'm asked at the end of the year by various literate friends (it's a small list...) how many books I've read over the course of the year, I usually do a best guess-estimate. But I figure by compiling a list of completed books - I'm also maintaining a list of books I haven't managed to finish, as well as a film list - I'll be armed with meaningful, irrefutable stats!

I was steaming along quite nicely through the first two months of the year, completing about (I'm not at home as I write this, so I don't have access to the list) 11 books. (I think there were two books I started but never finished.) But I seemed to have slowed down considerably since the beginning of March. For example, just this past weekend, I turned the final page on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which took me a full two weeks to read. It's not even *that* long of a book, but I had quite a bit of social stuff over the past couple of weeks that took me away from my reading couch. And this week, I'm not going to start a book until toward the end of the week, which will slow down my progress. Good thing I'm not obsessed with the final tally.

But why no books this week? Well, I'm presenting myself with another reading goal: to (finally!) get through about eight or nine New Yorker short stories that have been piling up in the apartment. It's funny, when I first subscribed to the wonderful magazine as a teenager, I used to begin with the fiction. However, since I resubscribed about three years ago, I've mostly devoured the excellent journalism, and left the fiction until last. (Except those rare occasions when one of my fave authors, such as Bolano or Murakami, would have a story.) But since it usually takes me the full week to get through an issue, another would arrive in the post before I had a chance to read the fiction. (It might also reflect my current reading interests: I seem to be more partial to longer fiction than shorter.) As a result, I've been stockpiling issues with the intent of eventually reading the short stories. Since I've been in purge mode, the accumulated magazines are getting on my nerves! (I'm a good candidate for an e-reader, as long as the New Yorker offers an e-subscription - which I'm sure it will.) Thus, I feel it's finally time to reduce the pile. I'm aiming to read one story a day - so basically a week or so to be done with the pile - before I start a novel.

In the queue (courtesy of the TPL, where both are "in transit"): Bolano's Monsieur Pain and the new  Ian McEwan, Solar.

Rearranging

So I spent part of yesterday doing what I call the "big purge": essentially, attempting to clear out the clutter in my apartment. I'm actually not much of an accumulator - when I moved almost two years to this place, I was fairly merciless in chucking stuff out while packing. In an ideal world, I'd pare my life down to about six or seven boxes. I like the concept of minimalism, of only having the bare essentials on hand. (I'm also partly inspired by the performance artist's Marina Abramovic's living spaces, gloriously photographed recently by the NYTimes.) Yet, it ain't easy! I look around my home office and I still see stray pieces of paper, books, ticket stubs, business cards, vinyl LPs - what the heck is all this stuff doing in here?

I began the purge with my bookshelf. I'm a reader, but I'm not a collector of books. I once was, and had two full-to-bursting bookshelves to offer up as proof. But when I moved out of the living space I shared with my then-partner M., she said she wanted to keep the books that she had accumulated from her participation in a monthly book club, many of which I had bought and also read. She had an emotional attachment to the books, so I left a whack of them with her. My new apartment wasn't so accommodating with space, so that's when I first started to get rid of books. My philosophy was fairly simple: I would truck the books that I had still yet to read with me, as well as books that personally meant something. Still, even a few years later, the messiness of my one bookshelf was a constant annoyance. So I engaged in yet-another book sort and purge yesterday.

Basically, I'm holding on to a handful of books from authors who mean something to me: Philip Roth, Roberto Bolano, Haruki Murakami, Iris Murdoch, John Updike, J.D. Salinger, Mavis Gallant, Milan Kundera, Margaret Laurence (well, just one Laurence: The Diviners, a book I've bought several times for a number of different friends; even today I still have two copies), along with a few "one offs" like Anna Karenina and James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime (perhaps the sexiest book ever written). These are the authors and books that have inspired me and, dare I say (for fear of hyperbole), changed me. I'm also holding on some non-fiction, primarily journalism that originally inspired me many years ago to be a magazine writer: a couple of Gay Talese books, Ian Brown's fantastic Man Overboard, two Joan Didion collections, among a few others. I also have some books of poetry and books about writers and writing on a shelf above my desk, as well as some music books (biographies of jazz musicians primarily) in the office, but I'm not "counting" those right now since I'm toying with the idea of purging those as well. (But not yet - I'll admit to struggles with nostalgia...)

Interestingly, I still have one entire shelf of my main bookshelf to deal with: it's the reading queue. These are books I've accumulated over the last few years, largely from secondhand sales, that I've been meaning to read. (Some, like a couple of the mysteries, are earmarked for a camping trip I'm sure to do at some point this summer.) I'm hoping to get through them eventually, but even those might have to be dealt with in a purge moment if I don't get to them in the next year or. This is how that shelf looks:

But let's be serious: am I really going to be reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest?

the poet

Came across this decade-old quote from Alberto Manguel the other day while at work: "In our time, the role of the poet has declined from that of fearful soothsayer to that of eccentric provider for the remainder tables."I'd say it's even worse today - that one is lucky to find poetry books in the shops at all, let alone the remainder tables. So that will be my book-buying goal of the month: to purchase at least one book of poetry, preferably a Canadian poet.

Not much to report otherwise (hence the paucity of posts). About a third of the way through Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (it's a classic!), a book I originally read when I was in high school. I long pointed to C&P as the first "serious" book I read on my volition - that I picked it up from the library simply because I wanted to read it, and not because it was part of my schoolwork. However, I'm not entirely sure I ever finished it. So technically this doesn't come under the banner of re-reading (a theme from last year, and one I hope to continue through 2010). It's been a fun ride so far. One forgets how much of a page turner the big Russians novels can be!

Wanted: One clever person

I know my readership isn't massive - not to mention I've asked this question to at least two people who I know read my blog (neither of whom could help me; not that they're aren't clever in their own right, of course) - but maybe a stray, smart reader can help me decipher this cartoon in the current issue of the New Yorker. I mean, sure, New Yorker cartoons aren't necessarily supposed to be bust-a-gut, laugh-out-loud hilarious, but at least they tend to be on the droll side. And, at the very least, comprehensible. But this one has me totally stumped. Can anybody help?

Reward to be considered. Not to mention my gratitude (which, if you think about it, is a reward in itself).

Katrina Onstad's How Happy to Be: A mini-review

There was an online review - and I apologize, I'm not much in the mood to seek it out (lazy city!) - that compared Katrina Onstad to Nick Hornby. How apt, then, that I read Hornby's Juliet, Naked just prior to reading Onstad's How Happy to Be. And it's true, there are comparisons to be made between the two. Both write in an easy, breezy and accessible (in a very good way) style. Both also write sharp, snappy dialogue, and there's an overall attentiveness and care to the craft of writing. In short, both are wonderful and natural writers. They are very easy to like.

Like most Hornby books I've read - with the exception of High Fidelity, which still remains a touchstone for me (although that might also be because I love the movie so much, although the circumstances of reading the book - on a long-haul Paris-to-Toronto flight - are also memorable) - Juliet, Naked was fun and entertaining, but largely forgettable. It had the requisite (stock?) Hornby characters, who function largely as caricatures. Moreover, I'm not sure he really "gets" women - his female characters seem to be one dimensional - but my more-astute female friends are more than welcome to disagree with me. It was good to spend 300 pages with Hornby, but I was also ready to move on when done.

I hadn't intended to dip into the Onstad this past week, but was instead prepared to read Wild Geese as my next Canada Reads Independently book. But it was a whim pick up last Friday, when I realized I had a long-ish commute ahead of me and no book in my bag for the trip. I read the first 20 to 30 pages on said commute, and thought, "Geez, there's no way I'm going to finish this." It didn't seem very serious or astute: did I really want to read a novel that centred around a boring national newspaper with a self-absorbed and unappealing narrator that covered the deadly dull topic of popular culture? It immediately reminded me of my attempt last year to read Russell Smith's How Insensitive - and a poor attempt it was, as I only made it through 40 pages. My head space just isn't into novels centred around un-selfaware, immature and shallow twentysomethings. I lived that life a decade ago, and it's not something I really wish to revisit.

Ah yes, but the narrator Maxime isn't in her 20s, but is in her early 30s - quelle difference! In truth, I decided to persevere because it was a Sunday morning where I was not in my own apartment and near my bookshelf, and thus had nothing else to read. I was trapped. And then, miraculously, about 60 or so pages in, I got hooked. The novel moved away from the world of pop culture - it started to mock it as well, which always helps - and the navel-gazing realm of the Toronto newspaper media (which I was once part of, albeit mostly peripherally) and began to develop more depth and complexity. If it wasn't for the gold medal hockey game that afternoon, I would have finished this book in one sitting (save for that original Friday commute).

As other reviewers have remarked, this is a coming-of-age story - and it's true, one can experience epiphanies in their 30s (I certainly did; I still experience them, in fact). This is a novel that perfectly captures the early (pre-twitter, pre-iPhone, pre-9/11) 21st century: the dot.com boom is about to go bust, and most of us (I include myself here) are avoiding commitment of any sort. Maxime is drifting through life: she hates her job, she's lost her long-term boyfriend, and she hasn't yet confronted her childhood "demons" (I put that in quotes because they aren't really demons, but issues). The novel becomes a story about self discovery and, ultimately, redemption.

This is not a perfect book by any stretch. (What book is?!) The narrative, particularly as it hits the halfway point, becomes overly conventional, and the ending is pat and predictable. There are scenes toward the end which shout "Here's the catharsis!" Still, I kept reading - and, really, I hate to nitpick on matters of plot and structure since I'm an amateur and hardly one to judge - and wanted to know how it would all unfold. I "got" Maxime, maybe because I could understand her dilemmas, her struggles. Ultimately, however, what makes it shine is Onstad's prose: she's a natural, seemingly effortless, writer. It's easy to forgive and forget certain plot contrivances when the writing is skillful and fun.

I'm not sure when I'm going to read Wild Geese. I read the first few pages and wondered if it's up my alley. I may read a couple of books in the interim. In the end, getting through four of the five Canada Reads Independently books feels somewhat like an accomplishment. I'll pat myself on the back.