1. How glad am I that blogger.com doesn't allow you to see how many people read your stuff? When it comes to this little space in the world wide web, I'm pleasantly clueless as to who really reads my posts. A couple friends, my parents.... I'll never know and I'm totally cool with that. My work blog, on the other hand, presents a dashboard that makes me absolutely crazy. I am bizarrely driven to load stuff onto the site in hopes of watching numbers go up, not down. This must be -- almost -- what it's like to be a TV reporter and have to live through sweeps. Gah.
2. Less about my neuroses, let's look at other people's.
3. This bookshelf reminds me of Lost. Only 46 more days until the season premiere!
4. Reading Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, I'm struck by how fake most descriptions of the Depression are when written by people who didn't live it. Sorry, that's a little unfair. Elizabeth Hay's A Student of Weather certainly speaks to a sheer grittiness of the times, and Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan covers off a sense of hopelessness. But Laurence's work is something else. You can almost smell the times in the pages. No one in Morag's childhood is beautiful, not even a little bit. Laurence does not put makeup on these people, she does not make them better than they are. She gives them massive fault lines that you could absolutely sink into if not for the fact she brings you back to her present (the 1970s) again and again.
5. I think we'd all like to know a little bit more about how this blind date ended. Because I'm thinking it couldn't have lasted very long. Perhaps Quebec's best friend called her on the phone to make sure she could escape after 30 minutes if things weren't going well. Yes, girls do do that.
6. More poetry, please. It's what a good life needs.

yet another book club

http://www.cjob.com/station/blog_adler_bookclub.aspx

Thanks to a friend for pointing out this link.... Now we can all take a moment to wonder at the effects of celebrity on private radio broadcasters listened to mostly by people who drive trucks. (At least it's not Rutherford? Whose first book, I assume, would be The Prince, and whose follow-ups might include the latest Harper biography?)

"Adler nation." ".... truly privileged in being part of something new and very special." (Because no one has ever come up with this broadcast-book concept before. Not some lady in Chicago and certainly not a national public broadcaster.) ".... one of the planet's top publishers."

Sigh. Okay, I'll stop picking now. Turns out yesterday was Grouch Day. But today I have no excuse.

(Top 5 books I would list should I ever become a radio personality/minor celebrity in charge of a book club and somehow bettering the nation's literacy:

1. Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood -- hah, you thought I'd pick Handmaid's Tale, eh? Too obvious. This tome is a better think piece on femininity.
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen -- super obvious. After asking people to read Persuasion last autumn, I'm afraid of further ruining Austen for anyone who's never read her.
3. The Stone Carvers, Jane Urquhart -- a romantic, startling reflection of First World War-era Canada.
4. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle -- an excellent children's novel, possibly my all-time favourite. Publishers turned down the novel several times, making L'Engle re-write it and re-write it, honing it to perfection.
5. A new entry, and, I think, a starting- or end-point for a paper on the Jewish-American woman's experience in literature. I'm not sure if it's the start or end because, frankly, I'm not overwhelmingly familiar with how much Jewish-American women's literature there is out there. The Guy Not Taken, Jennifer Weiner.

Okay, that's enough for today. Surely all my choices will change tomorrow, or within the hour. Like, immediately I want to switch Urquhart for David Bergen's The Time in Between. Or Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan. And maybe L'Engle should be replaced by The Time Traveller's Wife? And do I really want to end the list off with a group of short stories by Weiner? Even if I did think "Swim" was absolutely gorgeous, does Weiner belong on the same bookshelf as Austen? Even if I was impressed by her notes at the end of the book, which explained how she came to write each piece, and in what year?)

a late ode to Canada Day

In honour of our 140th birthday (ha ha! we secured Confederation before Germany or Italy!), I offer up my Top 10 picks for best Canadian books.... Recognizing, of course, that this is a rather sad, English-only list. But taking pride for a moment that it's also a rather woman-heavy list.

1. Anne of Green Gables. Long before I fell for Tennyson, we were kindly introduced by L.M. Montgomery. Was there a girl more imaginative than Anne Shirley? I wanted curly red hair. And freckles. Without any real understanding of what a gingham dress might be, I longed for one. I wanted a group of little girl friends who would join me in my story-writing and play-acting. I wanted a Gilbert Blythe of my very own....



2. Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. If Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was a harrowing look at where humanity could go -- in its worst-case, women as little more than baby-producing cattle, way -- then Oryx and Crake is a worst-case tale of where science could go in a world poisoned by man. And woman. This is not a book of lyrical feminism but achingly dirty and ego-driven masculinity. A world where one needs lots and lots of sunblock. And hope. For something.



3. I just finished reading a story as told through the eyes of a very young girl. And while admirable, it was no A Complicated Kindness. Miriam Toews gently imbues her tale of a young woman living in a small Manitoba Mennonite community with angst and confusion and hope and hopelessness. For example: "Travis told me that when I was dying to get high was when I was the most together and brilliant. Well, I said, it's the dying part that makes me feel alive."



4. There are moments when Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees feels like the worst kind of melodrama. They are tiny glimpses of moments buried amongst all the overwhelmingly excellent prose. Her The Way the Crow Flies, however, may be a little shorter on the poetic prose and a little longer on the excellent story-telling. Maybe it's because my mom grew up on an Air Force base, maybe it's because there's a hopefulness and news-worthiness to her tale of Madeleine McCarthy -- an eight-year-old girl accidentally drawn into the biggest news story of her time, whose ripe fear keeps her silent -- but I would have to say MacDonald's second major novel outshines her first.



5. Remember when Maclean's was really really good? And you always read the back page first? Fotheringham's Fictionary of Facts and Follie is an ode to that time, an ode to the days when you ran to the post box on Tuesdays, eagerly awaiting that week's periodical. And then you laughed and laughed.



6. If I was astounded by Atwood's ability to depict a man gone wild in Oryx and Crake, I was far more blown away by Richard B. Wright's tale of two sisters in Clara Callan. Was Clara a realistic, representative small-town Ontario woman of the 1930s? I still can't decide. She was daring in her silence, in her privacy, in her life choices.... More daring, really, than the sister who pursued adventure in the United States. Clara is a tragic anomaly, and Wright created her so perfectly.



7. Rilla of Ingleside is the somewhat melodramatic final tale of Anne of Green Gables. Rilla is Anne's youngest daughter, a girl so feckless and unimaginative she is completely unlike her mother. Instead of the bouncing chapter-to-chapter fun of L.M. Montgomery's first novel, Rilla's story speaks to the author's last wishes for peace and love in this world. I have long loved Rilla, even for her self-centredness. Her tale brings the whole story to a close -- a close that allows us to remember Anne forever as an adult, too, a mother who hurt and cried and laughed and loved....



8. Okay. This list is making me gross sentimental. Time for some harsh come-uppance. Cue Naomi Klein's No Logo. I don't think there's any Canadian between the ages of 20 and 30, who went to university or college at some point during that time, who doesn't remember when this book came out. When it kicked ass (depending on your opinion). When it made you feel guilty (again, depending on your opinion). When it made you want to make a change in your world. (Come on!)



9. No list of top Canadian books is complete with Timothy Findley. (I'm sure people would say the same about Mordecai Richler. I'm not one of them, but I respect the opinion.) I offer you the mystical, sepia-toned tale of The Piano Man's Daughter.



10. In The Strangest Dream, Merrily Weisbord tells tales of Canadian communism. Of sweatshops in Montreal and the Cold War. Of spies and treason and, yup, I'm going to say it again, hope. I have almost as many folded-over corners and drawn-in stars and arrows in this book as I do in More's Utopia. Perhaps that says more about me than the book.... "What now? What do we believe now after the death of what was at once the most noble dream and a soul-destroying nightmare? Is global capitalism all there is? What remains of the impulse for social justice? What, if anything, is the legacy of the strangest dream?"