Words on Words – December 2016

I did it.

I set out at the beginning of 2016, green and naive, with a commitment to myself. I would find more time to read this year. Not wanting to be vague and allow myself off the hook, I set a number: 50. I promised myself I would read 50 books, and monthly reflect on the things they had taught me. On December 29th, with two days to spare, I read the last page of my 50th book. I did it.

If there was ever a year in which I needed to have a reading project around which I could contextualize the things going on around me, 2016 was it. So many things happened this year. In March, I got engaged to the love of my life, Angela. Brexit and the U.S. election changed the way so many people think about the direction our societies are headed. Dear friends had children and started families. The world responded lukewarmly to a major humanitarian crisis in Syria. I began a new job, which has reinvigorated me in many ways. A torrent of icons and difference makers passed away. But through it all, I have had this project. It has been a frame, a lens through which to grapple with, escape from, and hopefully understand the things around me this year.

If you read any of these reflections, thank you. If you read a book based on my thoughts offered in these posts, I hope you liked it. Next year I have a different project in mind, which I will elaborate on below. But for now, let’s say goodbye to 2016.

Here are the books I read in December, in order, and the words therein that stayed with me:

#48

“‘When any civilization is dust and ashes,’ he said, ‘art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.'” – Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

It is somewhat strange to me that I had never read this novel before now. I like Margaret Atwood well enough – she is a Canadian icon and a prolific novelist, surely. And I certainly read The Handmaid’s Tale in high school. But for whatever reason, I never got around to Oryx and Crake until now.

On the whole, I liked it. It was neither the best nor the worst book I read this year, and neither by a good distance. It was squarely middling; dystopian fiction is very tired, though this was a well-crafted and exquisitely imagined dystopia; parables can be tiresome, though this one was light enough at times not to seem heavy-handed. Its real redemption, though, was its author. Atwood is so brilliant that you almost don’t notice that you are reading the same old tropes that post-apocalyptic fiction has always relied on, because she fills it with her own wondrous observations on the human condition. I do not think that Oryx and Crake, the story, says much new or noteworthy about the human condition; Margaret Atwood, however, says plenty. The reflection above, on the semi-permanence of art, is not original, but it has seldom been posed so eloquently. Of course, even art passes away eventually. But for much longer than the span of any individual life, the imaginative structures we create are the ways in which we will be understood by those who come after us. And if Oryx and Crake is how Margaret Atwood makes semi-permanent record of her time on this planet, well, she could have done a lot worse.

#49

“That Tom Thomson’s painting has become part of the national identity, one of the types of symbols that Canadians share as part of their common language, is a grand legacy for a man who had little art training, but who took the greatest pleasures in life from painting out under the open sky.” – The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson by Gregory Klages

Speaking of the art you leave behind as record of your existence… Tom Thomson has long been a fascinating and intriguing figure in Canadian history for me. Any regular reader of this blog knows that Algonquin park holds a very special place in my heart – Angela and I travel there every summer, and are even planning to honeymoon there this September. Tom Thomson, both his art and the story of his mysterious death, are an intrinsic part of the mythos of Algonquin. Few artists have ever managed to capture the beauty of the park as he did, and few mysteries have captured the imaginations of more Canadians than his drowning death on Canoe Lake.

In this essay, Klages does a tremendous job comparing available evidence with colloquial tales and rumours concerning Thomson’s death, to try to bring some clarity to what happened the day the artist and accomplished outdoorsman drowned in Canoe Lake. It is exemplary as an historical investigation, but also pays excellent tribute to an artist whose work became immortal only after he was able to create no more.

#50

“All of these thoughts unsettled Bo and he would have liked to ask someone, but adults hated to be asked questions they could not answer.” – All the Beautiful Things by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

It always frustrates me when I hear people ten years younger than me talk about reading the same books in high school that my parents read when they were that age. I have nothing against the classics; I just feel that our endless fixation on the same works published 50 or more years ago creates in some people a belief that nothing worth reading, worth really getting into, is being written today. This book is the perfect proof that that is not so.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer has written a masterpiece of Canadian literature. My heart soared and plunged with Bo as he navigated the already perilous waters of growing up, all the while having to look after (and later find) his layabout mother and a sister suffering birth defects from Agent Orange. Kuitenbrouwer writes with an innocence and grace that allows the purity of Bo’s heroism to shine. There is so much good stuff here: wonderful, eloquent prose; delicate family dynamics balanced on the edge of a knife; lessons about life and adolescence; a distinct and unabashed Canadiana.

Highly recommended

*****

So there you have it. 50 books, and words from each that will stay with me beyond this year. Thank you to anyone who took a moment to check in along the way, either by reading the blog or just asking how it was coming. Thank you as well to the people who recommended each of the books I read this year – I selected very few of the 50 myself, and your taste was impeccable. I wanted to read more broadly and diversely this year, exploring genres and authors I never would have chosen for myself, and in that I think I was successful.

Words on Words – Short Story Advent Calendar 2016

A bonus blog for the end of the year! I will soon be posting the final Words on Words of my 2016 reading challenge; however, my December reading involved a LOT more than just the 3 books I needed to get to 50. My incredible fiancee, Angela, got me an amazing gift: the 2016 Short Story Advent Calendar! I had never even heard of the collection before, but she found it online and surprised me with it. I can’t imagine a more perfect of personal gift; thank you Angela! Created, edited, and designed by Canadians Michael Hingston and Natalie Olsen, this beautiful box set featured one individually sealed short story per day for each day in December, right up to Christmas day. The authors were a wide range of published and new writers, many of them Canadian, a few of them quite well known indeed. Each story was deliciously different in style and content. Some were wintery or Christmassy in theme, but most were just beautifully curated samples of the tremendous potential of short fiction.

25 short stories are far too many to offer full reflections on, so I have merely pulled a quotation that stood out to me from each. My 5 favourite stories are marked with a * – if you have a chance to read any of these, do not miss it! Here are the 25 short stories I read in December, and the words therein that stayed with me:

1. Hunger Strike – Kevin Wilson
   

“I think higher education creates an atmosphere where semi-intelligent people do really fucked-up things.”

2. Under the Taps: A testimonial – Anakana Schofield
   

“Forty years can lapse in a paragraph, where forty minutes cannot ever lapse in life.”

3. Just Like Us – Vanessa Hua
   

“It aged you, to stay still. Like the twin paradox I’d read about. One twin rocketed at the speed of light and returned to earth younger than the twin who remained behind. Your life was set before you had a chance to figure it out.”

*4. Bestiary – Thomas Wharton

“The nineteenth-century British naturalist and mystic Joseph Whitecroft once wrote, ‘To every living thing you see, say we.’ His journals express wonder, and even a kind of spiritual dread, at what appears to most of us as the merely obvious: how every creature that is alive in the world at one time is alive now, and it is the same now.”

5. Pet – Deb Olin Unferth
   

“She’ll always have a question no one can answer and a long list of people to ask.”

*6. Cure – Gina Ochsner

“‘That’s the trouble with seeing clearly and understanding what you saw,’ she said. ‘It stays with you.’”

*7. Deep Wells, USA – Chris Bachelder

“Literary stakes-raising gimmicks include: War; Bad Step-Parents; Cancer (some forms); Toxic Airborne Events; Infidelity; Lame Horses; Thwarted Things; Unrequited Things; Delayed Things; Mercutio’s Death; Babies in Wells; Babies in Mine Shafts; Babies in Sewer Pipes; Babies under Futons”

8. Treading – Charles Demers
   

“And you know nine times out of ten even just a walk is the most important exercise you can do in your life.”

*9. Dream Girl – Katie Coyle

“There are different kinds of love. There’s no better than the kind that lets you look at yourself and see someone better than you are.”

10. Two Minutes, Five Minutes, Ten – Manuel Gonzales
    

“It’s possible. Any of this is possible. None of this is written in stone. But we won’t know.”

11. Crazy Life – Lou Mathews
    

“Right, Chuey, I think, la vida loca. The crazy life. It’s the explanation for everything on 42nd Ave.”

12. Oneness Plus One – Aimee Bender
    

“We will go where we go together.”

13. Obscure Objects – Caroline Adderson
    

“Then it came to me, my ending, surprising and inexorable.”

14. Blue Light, Red Light – J. Robert Lennon
    

“Were the parents stupid? Did they believe that the light itself protected them? The boy’s fears deepened. The parents were incompetent.”

15. Minus, His Heart – Jedediah Berry
    

“‘Is my end before me?’ the boy queried. ‘As always,’ Minus said, mistaking fear for philosophy.”

16. The Heaviest Dress – Mereille Silcoff
    

“I thought if an old movie, where a poor street girl is transformed into a lady. She is instructed to imagine herself wearing a crown, attached to the heavens by a string, always pulling up. It was like Elainey’s string had been cut.”

17. I Hate You – Daniel Handler
    

“Be my friend, Brad thinks, or hate me, lovers or friends, friends or strangers we’re all strangers.”

*18. A Follower of Aeromat – Sheila Heti

“Every story ever told is the story of a person who is trying to tell the truth, but cannot.”

19. Baby’s On Fire – Missy Marston
    

“She wants to get filled up with rock and roll and walk out into the spring evening feeling like she might get lucky.”

20. Defamer – Shane Jones
    

“Without smashing, there’s no us.”

21. Circumstances of Hatred – Laura Trunkey
    

“Don’t worry. These men are not the first to be released.”

22. At Christmas Time – Anton Chekhov
    

“He believed in his old woman who had brought him there, and in Yegor; and when he had mentioned the hydropathic establishment it could be seen that he believed in the establishment and the healing efficacy of water.”

23. The Lunacy of Gumbo – Padgett Powell
    

“A man, unless he is a Frenchman, has only a couple of foods that command his attention.”

24. Being Mary – Marina Endicott
    

“Mary Magdalene I felt I needed more worldly experience for.”

25. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle – Arthur Conan Doyle

“Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward.”

*****

Find out more at the Short Story Advent Calendar website! I hope they make one of these every year! It created a great excuse to read every single day in December, undeniably the busiest month of the year. To the creators, thank you! To my Angela, thank you for finding it! Check back soon for my final Words on Words of 2016, and other thoughts on An Awfully Big Adventure!

Words on Words – November 2016

November has been a fairly effective microcosm of the 2016 as a whole. I have tried to remain apolitical in this series of posts, and to simply reflect on words which struck me as significant or memorable, and which I think deserve to be read. So I will not rage against the political and societal events of the past month; this is not the time nor the place. I will merely say this: this month, I was especially glad for my family, my beautiful fiancee, and the escape offered to me by a good book.

Here are the books I read in November, in order, and the words therein that stayed with me:

#44

“That’s what’s different about kids: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.” – The Troop by Nick Cutter

I read Nick Cutter’s second novel – The Deep – last summer, and was deeply enamoured with it. Cutter is often compared to early Stephen King, which is high praise in my eyes; high praise decidedly earned. The Troop is spooky. It gets under your skin in ways that will only become clear if you read the book. Cutter’s titular Scout troop check a lot of the boxes for classic adolescent tropes – the brain, the athlete, and the basket case at least are represented here. But in spite of their cliche character molds, the evolving group dynamics as the Troop confronts an unknowable horror are as appealing as the page-turning suspense. I read the whole thing in two marathon sessions, and was left, as I often am at the end of a King novel, wanting desperately to remain in the world the author had created.

But besides being a really, genuinely good story, Cutter’s novel is deeply insightful. A million books could be (and have been) written on the value of youth. Longing for perpetual youth, children succeeding where adults would fail, a child’s imagination illuminating the darkness surrounding a stodgy grown-up; all of these are well-trod paths in fiction. They are rich veins, surely (Peter Pan is my all-time favourite work of fiction), but many authors simply regurgitate what has been said time and again before. And often that still makes for engrossing literature. Cutter, however, manages to navigate the familiar roads while also laying down new brick. He adds something to the conversation around the inherent goodness (or lack thereof) of youth, and the peculiar ways in which the young are capable of so much more than adults allow.

The quotation above comes at the end of a longer passage, where the author essentially argues that children are able to confront horror in ways an adult never can because their minds are pliable enough to allow for the existence of horror along with good. Adults have set their mind like flint, and lost their imaginations; there are no monsters under the bed, no horrors populating their day-to-day. Thus, when confronted with horrifying realities, an adult’s brittle mind will break; but a child, forever fighting imagined monsters and vanquishing them, can face horror and triumph. The Troop may not be King’s IT, but it builds on the genre and tradition of that great book and for that alone it should be read and adored.

#45

“Unlike the presidents they served, whose every statement and movement was recorded and studied, very little was left behind to tell us about the lives of the slaves whose work allowed these men to reach for greatness through the wealth that human slavery brought them. Only by reading between the lines, and scouring letters, diaries, and documents left behind by their white masters, can we begin to piece together the lives of the enslaved African Americans who took care of the president and his family while the president took care of the United States. They deserve the attempt.” – The Invisibles: the untold story of African American slaves in the White House by Jesse J. Holland

The Invisibles promises a story begging to be told – the story of the slaves owned by pre-emancipation presidents of the United States. When I first saw this book advertised, months before its release, I immediately added it to my “to-read” list; as a history lover, and in light of current racial tensions and injustices, I was excited to dive into the lives and words of these forgotten men and women. The book does not quite deliver, however. It turns out that very few books and essays have been written about the subject because very few reliable primary sources exist to document the presidents’ slaves. The closer the book gets to the Civil War, the better records were kept at the time and the more sources are cited; however, the earliest parts of the book, and the parts that hold the most intrigue for me, personally, are based mostly on supposition and conjecture. Holland paints an interesting narrative picture of America during the Revolution and the subsequent generation-and-a-half, but the historical basis for these early chapters are shaky at best.

I still quite enjoyed the book, to be sure; it is an important essay, and has been made even more so since the U.S. presidential election. It is a demonstration of the importance of history, of looking back to look forward. And Holland himself admits in his conclusion that he hopes to find more sources and update the book for future versions, fleshing out the stories of these forgotten Americans. The book was highly readable, and I would certainly make time for an expanded edition, should one ever appear. The places in which the book falls short – primarily in its sourcing – are overcome by the intent: to tell the story of those who deserve, after all this time, to be remembered.

#46

“The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a – a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop  – to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr. Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice, and frustration.” – The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

As a lover of classic noir fiction in the tradition of Stoker and Shelley, an admirer of English class drama a la Austen and Dickens, and a reveler in the delights of a good mystery from Christie or du Maurier, this book was a literary smorgasbord. Waters writes in a voice from the past, forgoing today’s popular colloquialisms for the refined English of 19th and early 20th century English writers. And it is this narrative voice that sets the tone for one of the best, most satisfying ghost stories I have ever read. Supernatural elements aside, the tragedy of the Ayres family’s fall from grace following WWII is an engrossing, fully explored look at the fall of the British aristocracy. It would be an engaging and worthwhile novel on its own. But the fact that Waters manages to wrap this countryside drama around a thoroughly unsettling tale of the shadow in the corner of your eye makes it as un-put-downable a book as I have read this year. The quotation above draws a lot of parallels, really, to a central theme of Cutter’s The Troop; the germination of a darkness, a disease of the body or of the spirit, until it becomes all-consuming. Waters is in no hurry to jump the shark – like the shadow-self, she is happy to let her dark tapestry weave itself slowly, until it covers you. This is one I will come back to again and again.

#47

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” – The Gunslinger by Stephen King

Upon hearing that this was the next book on my list, an old friend remarked that he couldn’t believe I hadn’t read it, being a Constant Reader of King’s other work. And to be honest, I am not sure why I have always been apprehensive about The Dark Tower. I am an avid fan of the author, and I read epic fantasy abundantly; but for some reason, I couldn’t imagine an amalgamation of the two. Silliness now, in retrospect. Of course King’s incredible storytelling ability (which is what I admire most in his darker work) is perfectly suited for the worldbuilding required of truly great dystopian fantasy. I loved The Gunslinger, and I am excited to hopefully have time to continue the series.

There is just so much GOOD STUFF here, starting with the very opening line, above. King so quickly establishes hero and antagonist, setting, tone, and pace. In twelve words, you are hooked. And like so many of King’s published works, you can read it episodically; the parts of the novel are connected but different, clearly first published in pieces and assembled later. Each part has a slightly different feel, different atmosphere, different tone, that all contribute to the growing realization of this world that is not quite our own. As in all great fantasy, there are larger questions being asked of morality and fate – questions that, judging by the length of the series and the amount of time it has taken to be written, will be fully explored by the time all is said and done.

King never fails to surprise, delight, capture, and satisfy, and this book is no different. I don’t know why I ever feared it might be.

*****

Eleven months down. One month and three books to go! Check back every month for more Words on Words and other thoughts on An Awfully Big Adventure!