where Atwood meets Mad Men

I'm reading The Edible Woman -- Margaret Atwood's first novel, published in 1969 -- and I'm utterly struck by her main character, Marian McAlpin. Specifically, how Marian, in her struggle to be feminine and not be feminine, to be a career girl and not to be a career girl, is something of a blueprint for Peggy Olson.

I know, it's a terribly shallow comparison. But just 100 pages into the first part of Atwood's novel, there's such an obvious disconnect between who Marian is and who she thinks she should be, that a person who is obsessed with Mad Men can't help but draw a parallel.

If you haven't read this book at all, or not in a few years, please do pick it up and let me know if I've drawn a horrifying or appropriate conclusion.

Meanwhile, the last bit of millennium poetry I'll offer from Chasing Shakespeares:

"History is a point of view, over the same city, perhaps, but from a thousand eyes, not one. Wait five minutes, the light has changed, a wall has been demolished, a new window set in place, and from the top of the wheel another set of eyes are looking out over a different city. There's no one map, one story, one way to get to one truth; there is no single London and no single Shakespeare, no fact as sure as a story." (p. 329)

where are you reading in Creston?

You'll find this picture's sister image here.

And you'll find great coffee in this small town here.

a sense of place

"London is a manuscript, a square mile scribbled over by two thousand years of Londoners; it is parchment scraped clean and used again. But around London Wall the streets still curve, and the Tower and Westminster Abbey still stand. And Shakespeare is as big as the London Wall. Shakespeare left traces." (p. 78)

A coworker once told me reading Dickens and other fictional works informed his mental map of London; he needed nothing at hand to know the city's streets or the way to the Thames.

I, on the other hand, very much need detailed, indexed maps. In fact, when reading a novel, I tend to skip over detailed descriptions of land and streets. At least, until I've been to the places being written about -- Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air never made so much sense as after I had returned from Yellowknife. Now, on a second read of Chasing Shakespeares, I know all the places Sarah Smith writes of, and I appreciate how the main character, Joe Roper, wants so badly to see the the history of the city come to life.

under the sun

I'm in full-out summer-read mode. You know? The kind of reading where you have options -- you could invest an entire afternoon in a story about hot summer nights in Florida, or you could read like two pages of a story before falling asleep.... The point is, this is the kind of reading where your brain is just not working too hard. I think of it as resting before all the reading I'll be doing this fall.

So on that note, I've just finished reading Alice Hoffman's Turtle Moon. First published in 1992, it's a classic Hoffman outing -- lots of passion, hitting the road, crime and crime-fighting, ghosts, mixed up kid logic, anthropomorphism.

I have a half-theory about Hoffman's writing in the 1990s versus the last decade. Frankly, her early works are a little more adventurous, a little more fun. Around the time she published The Blackbird House, it feels like she inserted a distance between herself and her characters. Does that make sense? I'm not sure if it's because her more recent books tend to break into shorter stories that are loosely connected versus following a string of characters through a plotted story. There's a chance this is merely a reflection of Hoffman's development, and I'm so shallow I can't fully embrace that.... For example, The Ice Queen and Turtle Moon both follow a small number of characters through stories with strong plots. But where Turtle Moon has characters you can believe in -- young, divorced mothers, lost children -- The Ice Queen was wonderfully fantastical and fairy tale-like, but the main characters are inherently unlikable.

In other notes....

You should read "Comic Sans," a short story in The Incongruous Quarterly. I admit to being particularly fond of this story because of my own time on a university student newspaper. But it's a really fun read.

I wouldn't say Jennifer Weiner's new book about the female members of a politician's family (after the politician publicly and grossly cheats on his wife) is getting the best reviews.... I fully plan to read Fly Away Home. While at the same time wondering why American writers are so obsessed with philandering politicos. (See: The success of The Good Wife.)

I'm re-reading Chasing Shakespeares. I first read this one while still at university, and I remember it being this adventurous romp through modern-day London in search of Shakespeare's true identity.... So you can see why I'd pick it up again. So far? I forgot how bogged down by neuroses the main character is. I mean, he's a master's student obsessed with writing a new and interesting biography of Shakespeare. But at the start of the book he's sort of disappointingly and depressingly combing through Elizabethan-era letters and transcripts, all of which are actually fake.

The startling thing I had forgotten about this book is that it reads like a story written by an academic. Which is not necessarily a bad thing (see: A.S. Byatt), except the novel is first set in the United States. And the main character, Joe, is a working-class sort of guy. In keeping with her idea of how such a person might speak, Smith sometimes assigns really weird style to his conversation. For example, describing his vehicle as a "pile-o'-shit truck." Or, one summer while working for a window-installing company, his coworkers apparently said, "Some book you got, Joe, ain't even got tits and ass on it, what's it good for?"

It strikes me as so odd, to be honest.

But then there's the good (if equally unbelievable) parts. Joe had the measles when he first read Macbeth. The part where Lady Macbeth has died, and Macbeth is grieving her, apparently elicited this response:

"That speech took me somewhere a nine-year-old kid had no business going. It was a place that could swallow me up and not even notice. Like the woods beyond where the roads go, where grownups get lost. I put my head down on my arms and cried, and it wasn't just I had the measles, I knew that place was out there. But I knew, when I got there, I'd recognize the place and I'd know a man who had been there too." (p. 4)

sullying the slate

Last night -- or yesterday morning, I guess -- I shared some of my favourite novel beginnings.

Today, I share some of my least -- although I admit to leaving out some of the worst, like Gone With the Wind or Wicked, because I love those novels too much to complain about them and their opening graphs are too long for me to transcribe tonight. This morning. Whatever.

(By the way, if the thought of the puddle lying half a block away from my building has been bothering you, I'm sorry to report it is still there. Mostly dried, but still aromatic and orangey.)

At first, I thought I would study art. Art history, to be exact. Then I thought, No, what about physical anthropology?--a point in my life thereafter referred to as My Jane Goodall Period. I tried to imagine my mother, Sarah Bennett-Dodd (called Sally by everyone with the exception of her mother), camping with me in the African bush, drinking strong coffee from battered tin cups, much in the way that Jane did with Mrs. Goodall. I saw us laid up with matching cases of malaria; in mother/daughter safari shorts; our hands weathering in exactly the same fashion.

This is the opening graph of Whitney Otto's How to Make an American Quilt. For the record, I like this book partly for Otto's ability to tell intertwining stories of women over the course of decades. Mostly, I bought it and loved it because it was the basis for a movie that featured my favourite actors and actresses of the mid-90s, like Winona Ryder, Jared Leto, Claire Danes and Samantha Mathis. (Only when I found a used video at the Wee Book Inn would I realize it also featured Anne Bancroft.)

Anyway, this opening graph definitely sets the tone for the book. Unfortunately, it kind of hits me now as dry. Why should I care? Okay, I get it. Finn's one of those wandering grad students who doesn't really plan to graduate from school ever, so she keeps picking away at whatever gets her attention for longer than 3.5 seconds. And she's quirky, so she thinks about dragging her mother into the jungle with her.... But if I weren't lulled by the film and memories of summer skies and swimming pools and old-school pickup trucks, not sure I'd buy the book....

A long night staggered into day. It was four a.m., the witching hour of the daily production schedule, and the crew was divided.

The opening of Leah McLaren's The Continuity Girl goes on from there, about things not being in sync and it being one of those days, etc.

I know exactly why I bought this book, and it had everything to do with the name of the author. I genuinely like McLaren's weekly columns, and nothing really could have stopped me from purchasing this novel if only because I was so curious about it the whole time she was writing it and dropping hints about writing something....

But she's a journalist. Or a columnist. She could have done better with the lede.

That day I was just about to lose my vocation, my job, my good sense, probably my mind, but what I thought I was losing was Mary Catherine O'Connor.
"You shouldn't go," I said to Mary Cat.

Oh, Sarah Smith. Your romp through London in Chasing Shakespeares is so well-crafted. It's like an adventure, perhaps even a Choose Your Own Adventure (not really), based on Shakespeare's works and manuscripts.

But the start.... Why should I care about this Mary Cat person? And when will Joe lose his mind? Maybe these were the questions that spurred me to buy this one in hardcover (or maybe it was the awesome discount at Perfect Books). And I harbour no regrets. I just long for a better start.

Of course, I have been disappointed by awesome starts before.

something easy

There's something about summer. The heat sends you back in time to nights at the drive-in, the sun setting slowly over the mountains, and some really bad music blaring over the car stereo.

I'm listening to Offspring's Pretty Fly for a White Guy right now, sending me right back in time to Grade 11 or 12. Around the same time my best friends and I used to to be in love with a guy that worked at the Dairy Queen. Is there anything better than ice cream and crushes? Well, we weren't all in love with him, just one of the girls was, but I'm fairly certain we helped his ego along as a group.

Anyway. Summer is a tough time to concentrate on anything, let alone blogging or excellent novels or well-written books examining important issues.

Half the time, summer is really when I start re-reading all the "classics" on my bookshelves.

Like this gem, described as "a jaunty tale of love and murder" by Publishers Weekly. No concentration needed at all for a slightly naughty, always hilarious book of one woman's perfect life reduced to a cheating husband who is murdered, the lusty return of her high school crush, and gentle battles with her eight-year-old daughter. I love Crusie for the women she creates, who don't need to be saved and don't want to be married, who embrace themselves before all others.

For those who long to travel at this time of year, I offer up Sarah Smith's Chasing Shakespeares, an adventure in Shakespeare and academia. I know, sounds a little dry. But the dialogue's quicker and wittier than A.S. Byatt's Possession, and it's more a romp than a love story. And who doesn't want to romp when it's this hot? Besides, it makes one imagine a time when London would have been all muddy and dirty and 1600s-ish.

Last of all, for my friend Erin, I submit Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a touching story that frankly makes me think more of snow and winter boots than summer (thanks to the movie, really), but is perhaps the best of all romps. Yes, a comment on the American Civil War. But also a tale of love and decision-making and doing what's right for you, not what people expect you to do. Who did not want to be Jo? I wished my brother would dress up with me and play out the ridiculous stories I created. (My brother wished that I would participate in his band. We met halfway by turning the fridge box into a newspaper office.) I loved her pre-feminism feminist mom. And I wished for Laurie -- especially when I realized he looked like Christian Bale. I cried and cried at the end.

What to read now? Something cheap and paperbacky....