2007-04-21

the cool table

Thank goodness I'm not afraid of being late to the cool table. Or missing it altogether.

By this, I mean that I often am the last one to know what is cool. For example, every Christmas my brother and his partner have to introduce me to new and cool music.

(Side note, last week my sort-of sister-in-law introduced me to a local band. In Edmonton. She and my brother live in Ottawa. This is really but a window to my uncoolness.)

For example, I was years behind everyone else in getting to A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews and The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger -- two novels that changed the way I want to read books, two narratives that struck me by how gently one can and should handle the characteristics of love and childhood.

Another example: despite my love for Atwood's stories, The Blind Assassin still sits, unread, on my bookshelf, seven years after I purchased it in hardcover. Alongside it is Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which incidentally has been very popular over the last, say, century and a quarter.

And I still don't know why the caged bird sings. Even though, again, my brother and his partner have tried to show me.

All this does come around to a point -- something else that is new for me but likely old to everyone else. A blog about London's Tube. I know it must be old to everyone else because it's included in blogspot.com's list of must-reads. But I only just discovered it -- and it's very cool.

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