for starters

I think I become obsessed with Edmonton's streetscapes when I am working night shifts. If I believed in being lonely, perhaps I would blame loneliness. Instead, I think my curiosity or fascination stems from the quiet of Edmonton's downtown streets at night. Men curl up on the sidewalks to sleep, and taxi cabs slow way down to encourage you to take a lift.

There is really nothing special about my walk home each night. I suppose I could be walking home along any street in any city anywhere in the country. Last night, I was greeted by the sweet scent of the river valley. Tonight, a puddle of orange puke waited half a block from my apartment building. The puddle was actually there this afternoon, too, but in the hours since I last saw it someone placed a plastic bag atop. This does nothing to hide the smell but hopefully the street cleaners will have their way with it.

I know, I know. Not a lovely streetscape. I hope I'm not doing any particular injustice to Edmonton; it really is a lovely city, marked by the same problems as any other place.

So, a totally different subject....

I've been thinking a lot lately about proper starts. Books are not like newspaper articles; they do not have a lede, per se. But there is a certain expectation of having them start off on the right foot. They should draw the reader in with something special, some little curiosity that makes a person keep going.

You're probably thanking me for being Capt. Obvious now.

But I wanted to share some of my favourite starts, pretty randomly pulled from my book shelves. (While pulling, I grabbed a bunch of other books I expected to have bright starts, and was sorely disappointed. Perhaps tomorrow I will share the worst bunch in another blog entry.)

From John Irving's A Widow for One Year:

One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking--it was coming from her parents' bedroom. It was a totally unfamilliar sound to her. Ruth had recently been ill with a stomach flu; when she first heard her mother making love, Ruth thought that her mother was throwing up.

From Amulya Malladi's The Mango Season:

Don't kill yourself if you get pregnant, was my mother's advice to me when I was fifteen years old and a classmate of mine was rumoured to have committed suicide because she was with child.

From Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle:

I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it. My life had a tendency to spread, to get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls much praised by fashion magazines when I was fifteen. No trumpets, no megaphones, no spangles, no loose ends, this time. The trick was to disappear without a trace, leaving behind me the shadow of a corpse, a shadow everyone would mistake for solid reality. At first I thought I'd managed it.

And, perhaps the simplest of them all, from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451:

It was a pleasure to burn.

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?)