The Library Girl

No Concentration

I’ve been sick at home for the past two days. You’d think that I’d have gotten all sorts of reading done, having not much else to do and not really being allowed outside despite the onset of glorious spring weather. I’d have thought so too.

There were many obstacles standing in my way though, not the least of which was the sleep demon. Funny thing about sick bodies – they really want quality rest. Reading is pretty slumber-inducing anyway, especially if you are bundled up and warm. I think I took no fewer than three naps per day, discounting regular bedtime snoozing. Since my eyes killed from pulsating sinuses, I thought I’d even attempt listening to an audiobook. It would have worked if I'd lasted longer than the first two tracks. Sure made for interesting dreams, though…

I also started quite a few books, but completely lacked the concentration to get further than 100 pages into any of them. Each page took twice as long to read too, because my eyes kept skipping from word to word, none of which were in a row.

One pretty good solution I came up with was to read a graphic novel, in this case Michel Rabagliati’s Paul Has a Summer Job. The author/illustrator, part of a vibrant local comic book scene, is pretty big in Montreal. I really liked it, which happily surprised me. I’d not normally classify myself as a graphic novel person (unlike, say, my hubby, who is a comic book freak). This one got to me.

The story takes place in the summer of 1979, and is about a fellow named Paul, who drops out of high school and tries to find a job. He ends up working in a summer camp for disadvantaged children. While he’s immature and seemingly out of place at the start of the season, by the end, he’s grown up, found love and (forgive the cheesiness) ‘inner peace’. I can’t wait to get to the other ‘Paul’ books when I finally get back to work.

I do believe I’ll be heading back tomorrow, despite the fact that I can neither talk nor swallow. Good thing blogs are silent.

Happy returns

This is the first week that I didn’t make my challenge - not even close. Considering that the PLA conference was about nothing but books for four days straight, it seems perverse, but there you have it. I managed to read exactly 26 pages the whole time I was away.

As for the conference itself, it was AMAZING. You must imagine 11,000 public librarians descending upon a city the size of Boston (population 590,000, according to the municipal website). They were everywhere, and I daresay people were playing the ‘spot the librarian’ game (I know I was… it is how I found my way out of the airport). Tomorrow I go to work and turn it upside down. There is much to be done…

The one book I did finish hit the spot, I tell you. It’s been on my shelf for months, and was recommended by one of the Dewey Divas. Only today was I finally in the mood to take it down, and I'm glad I did. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters' Club was terrific (the follow-up to it, Closed Circle, came out last year). If you like Nick Hornby and Brit Lit in any kind of way, then this book is for you. It also qualifies as ‘lad lit’, and I shall definitely be passing it along to my hubby.

Basically, the story takes place in working class Birmingham (England), where a group of adolescents struggle to find love, friendship, belonging, and a future. What I really liked about the book is the vivid picture of 1970s Britain it paints. Political turmoil is interwoven with the personal lives of the characters. You are in the centre of it all: IRA bombings, union strikes, the emergence of punk-rock, racism, and the dawn of the Thatcherite era. I can’t wait to read the next one.

Until then, I am completely knackered. Things should all go back to normal in the days to come, at least in terms of reading and posting. Cheers to all of you. It’s good to be back.

Somewhere in a War-Torn Country…

Every now and then, I make a point of reading books that remind me of how ugly humanity can be. I am most grateful that neither terror, nor war, nor utter loss, have as of yet crossed my path. At thirty years old, I’ve never even seen a real-life gun. That is lucky. Millions upon millions of people aren’t so fortunate, and such a fact should never be forgotten. Violence is ubiquitous and innate, and we are unable to prevent it from recurring. Today’s reading selections, although both fiction, serve as brutal reminders of what can happen when it goes unchecked.

Uzodinma Iweala’s first novel, Beasts of No Nation, takes place in an unnamed West African country torn by civil war. The narrator is a young lad whose father is killed and who gets picked up by militants who turn him into a soldier. At first he fondly flashes back to his previously peaceful existence; his love of books and family, and his desire to go to university. After he takes his first life with a machete at the behest of his commander, he turns into a killer and things fall apart. He can never go back.

Language is what makes this book so remarkable. Rather than simply reading text, we hear the voice of the speaker, in the words and accent he’d use were he telling this tale in person. It makes everything he says more powerful and disturbing, since we witness first-hand his innocence falling away.

Gil Courtemanche’s Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali (A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali) has a similar sense of brewing tension and terror. The protagonist is a Canadian journalist named Bernard, stationed in Rwanda to get a television service off the ground. He falls in love with a local named Gentille, but they are doomed by circumstance to not be together. Compared to what is taking place all around them, the loss is seemingly anticlimactic.

Although the 1994 mass slaughter of Tutsis takes place in the novel, the focus of the text is on sex rather than genocide: desire, the AIDS epidemic sweeping the country, prostitution, and vicious rape, among other things. This book is distressing, but excellent nonetheless. As readers, it is good - even necessary - to step out of our comfort zones once in a while.

I won’t be posting until next weekend, as I'll be in Boston for the Public Library Association Conference. When I return, you have my word that I’ll discuss lighter books.

Hero

I love Benjamin Franklin. When I was a kid, I used to take out The Value of Saving: the Story of Benjamin Franklin over and over again from my school library. Today, I have a bust of him in my home office (not to mention a totally cool action figure). More than ever, I wish I could be a fraction of the person he was, with one tenth the accomplishments.

In a short paragraph, it’s hard to fully express what it is that I admire about the man, whose life was so full that there was very little he didn’t do. First and foremost, I’d say it was his sense of civic duty, the need to serve in a public capacity in every way: politician, businessman, printer, postmaster, founder of a lending library and fire brigade, inventor of the money-saving Franklin stove, and member of countless societies and clubs, among other things. He was also a man of letters in its purest sense, producing thousands of written works. An insatiable curiosity led him to excel in the realm of science, for which he was internationally recognized. On top of that, he played a huge political and diplomatic role in Pennsylvania, the Colonies-turned-America, England, and France. People classify him as stodgy and square; to that I reply that they’re just jealous.

Edmund S. Morgan’s biography, simply entitled Benjamin Franklin, is the first on his life I’ll be reading this year (which happens to be the 300th anniversary of his birth). This highly renowned American history scholar skips most of Franklin’s childhood and personal life, cutting straight to his Philadelphia career and beyond. Although the work is somewhat academic, it is still highly readable. The author has a clear and profound respect for his subject, though he does point out Franklin’s failings when merited. If he wanted to demonstrate one thing, it was Franklin’s deep dedication to a greater public interest. He succeeds masterfully.

Contrast this work with David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. The book is an anecdotal explanation of how Bobos (Bourgeois Bohemians) have taken over the upper echelons of society, reviling the values of thrift, industriousness, and reliability so embodied in the person of, you guessed it, Benjamin Franklin. I actually liked this volume even though it lacks teeth in terms of evidence (you can tell the author is a journalist and not an academic). One has only to hang out in any hip downtown core to find exactly what he’s talking about: SUV-driving millionaires in khakis and hiking boots drinking fair-trade coffee whilst discussing killer business deals on their cell phones. I especially liked the chapter on “Intellectual Life”, which seethes with cynicism.

I think I’ll be giving a lecture on BF sometime in the not-too-distant future. He may be un-hip, and hard-working, and practical, but he’s still my hero.

Jack Me Up

Reading four books a week seems like a lot until you think about the number of books that actually get published in a year, not to mention how many millions already exist. If you read a book a day (which is very possible if you don’t work), you’d only get through a mere 365 books a year - a drop in the literary bucket. More books than that are produced in Montreal alone in that amount of time, which is paltry next to the figures for New York, London, or Paris. It’s a cliché to say it, but “so many books, so little time”. Actually, there’s a great volume about this very subject by Gabriel Zaid, called So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance. I recommend it.

Very often I ponder what it would be like to get books ‘jacked’ into my brain, à la Matrix. How awesome would it be to sit in a chair and download book after book into your memory? Whoa. You’d get started with the classics, I suppose, and then move on from there. While it’s true that the tactility of the experience would be lost, it would be worth it to be familiar with that vast a number of titles. You might even end up feeling like Harold Bloom.

I don’t think speed reading is the answer to this quandary, since I love language too much to not give it proper consideration. That said, I find it very difficult to be able to read only at the rate I do. If I got imprisoned in my house for some freaky reason, it would still take me five years at four-a-week to get through my personal library.

I guess I know how I’ll be spending my retirement. Too bad it’s several decades away.

Random Selections

This is definitely one week that I would not have read my four books had I not been committed to this challenge. The combination of a flurry of activity at work and feeling a bit under the weather nearly prevented me from reaching my goal. Nearly.

There were really no selection criteria for the titles I read these past few days. Literally, I just picked up the books from the pile on my coffee table closest to the chair I sit on. At the moment, there are five such stacks in formation, discounting the magazine bunch on the floor close by. Sloth prevented me from reaching further. I ended up with quite a mixed bag.

Mary Roach’s Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife was the first book of the week. Despite its being witty and clever, I preferred Stiff, although I know of several people who would argue that point, including my husband. I suppose it’s a matter of preference according to subject: either bodies or ghosts hold more appeal. Sorry Casper.

Second was a French book by Carol Allain entitled Génération Y: l’enfant roi devenu adulte, about Gen Next. Often Xs and Ys are lumped together in conversations about employees/citizens/consumers of the future. In terms of attitudes, values and behaviour, however, we stand miles apart. As an Xer and employer, I’m pretty adamant about that. The same has probably been said for every single generation and its predecessor (Read Boom, Bust & Echo for an exemplary, if slightly dated, discussion on the topic), but as part of the bust sandwiched between the abundant Boomers and their (according to Allain) generally spoiled offspring, I think about and pay attention to generational differences pretty often, as do most of my peers. I find this topic downright fascinating and distressing all at once and could go on and on about it. I’d better get off this issue right now, before I do.

Completely changing channels, let me move on to book three, Shashi Tharoor’s Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers. A collection of essays about the literary life and Indian writers in particular, I found it, above all, revealing. Besides producing novels, the author works for the UN, which gives him a more globalized and politicized outlook than most. I liked his discussions on such giants as Salman Rushdie and poet Pablo Neruda, as well as his reflections on what it means to be Indian, and his long-lasting love of P.G. Wodehouse.

Finally, I polished off Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co., by Jeremy Mercer, about a journalist’s experience living in the legendary Left Bank Parisian bookshop along with other would-be writers. I didn’t much care for the author himself, but I greatly enjoyed reading about daily life in such a unique and bookish environment. The man who owns the store, George Whitman, makes all his boarders read a book a day. You’ve got to respect a guy like that. I wish I could do the same…

That’s all for tonight. I haven’t picked out my menu for next week yet, so many books are there to peruse. I think I’m in more of a fiction mood, but we’ll see what comes along.

If you can't read the book, then read about it

If a book excites me, you know all about it. So do my friends, family, colleagues, patrons, and sometimes even strangers (in bookstores), if I can manage it. I wave my arms and get flushed and grinny. “Take this,” I say, “It’s faaabulous!” I try to speak about said books in my programs, and get others to discuss them in their book clubs. I have no trouble shamelessly plugging what I love.

As a person who can’t get enough of books, ‘what I love’ (besides, of course, reading, buying, and discussing them), is reading about them. There is a terrific little magazine for those of you who don’t already know about it, called Bookmarks. When I say it’s nummy I mean it. This is a mag for book people in every sense. It’s got short reviews for checking out the latest releases, features on classics, book group information, award-winners, and so much more. I discovered it serendipitously at a newsstand and then went crazy when I got home. Before I even finished the first issue, I subscribed. Then I subscribed my library. Do check it out.

An equally good book periodical in French is Entre les lignes. Any magazine that asks the potential subscriber, in the sign-up form, how many books s/he reads a year is my kind of publication. I love knowing that about people. It’s just beautiful, too, as an added bonus.

We can never read all the books we want. I can’t even read all the books in my house. If that must be the case, then we should at least be able to indulge (and keep up with the literary scene) in delicious magazines.

Collection

Despite my avid love for books and the acquisition thereof, I wouldn’t exactly classify myself as a ‘book collector’ in the prevalent sense of the term. I do enjoy owning books, and appreciate their aesthetic quality and value as objects, but I don’t hunt them down in the manner of, say, Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone.

I’ve mentioned this couple before (see “Little Books, Big Joy”) and today’s title, Slightly Chipped: Footnotes in Booklore, is their second bibliomemoir. I must confess that I liked the other two better (Used and Rare and Warmly Inscribed), but that’s not to say that I didn’t think this one worthwhile. I pretty much take pleasure in whatever the Goldstones write, about books or anything else. They give the reader a nice combination of anecdote, history, book biz information, literary tidbit and travelogue, and they know their writers.

It was completely unplanned that the second title I read today was Objects of Our Desire: Exploring Our Intimate Connections with the Things Around Us by Salman Akhtar. I didn’t even notice the day’s collecting theme until I set down in front of my laptop. My subconscious seems to be speaking to me again. Perhaps it wants me to visit a bookstore soon.

This book brought up some interesting points to think about in terms of our relationship with objects, and the kinds of things that appeal to different people. The author, a psychiatrist, addresses everything from nostalgia to clutter. He could have left out the female body chapter (it seemed out of place), but overall, this title is worth taking a gander at, especially if you like ‘stuff’. For the record, I sure do.

Waves

Although it seems not to be the case lately, my reading patterns usually follow what I term ‘obsessions of the moment’. I used to, until recently, set up subjects of study for the semester (I am unable to shake a lifetime of school patterning). Past topics have included everything from French post-war intellectuals to globalization; poverty to Harry Potter.

I still go through waves of interest of sorts, and one of the current ones is Quebec. I know it seems unsexy, as most state or provincial politics would, but I am truly captivated, not just by the history, but by the culture as well. Anyone visiting here could immediately see how it stands apart from the rest of North America. I will admit that I wasn’t at all interested in anything to do with Quebec when I learned about it in school many years ago. Lately though, (in no small part thanks to an old friend), I can’t get enough. Bear with me.

A related title I finished this week, Watching Quebec: Selected Essays by Ramsay Cook, was good but incomplete. He assembled his writings, the bulk of which are from the 1960s. Many crucial issues, like referenda, were barely touched upon, detracting from the overall impression of the book.

This phase, I assure you, will eventually pass, but it’s not my only one anyway. I can feel other interests bubbling on the horizon including Benjamin Franklin, about whom I will post in the near future, civic duty, and science (note the link between the three).

I will sign off for the evening with a wholly unconnected recommendation, for Harriet Russell’s Envelopes: A Puzzling Journey Through the Royal Mail. This clever British author/artist decided to test out the Royal Mail service and send herself a variety of, well, envelopes. The thing is, each one contained a puzzle which had to be solved in order to render it deliverable. Believe it or not, most carriers actually took the trouble to fill in her crossword puzzles, connect the dots, figure out word problems and follow maps. It’s just amazing. I love this creative and eccentric woman, and I adore this book.

What Traffic?

I’ve been doing a lot of driving this week, and had for company Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, a most wonderful audiobook. The story itself, about the Jewish and eccentric Naumann family, is terrific. Nine year-old Eliza, an average kid by all measures, discovers that she has an extraordinary talent for spelling, a penchant that leads her straight to the national spelling bee competition. Her brother Aaron, now neglected, turns to the Hari Krishna to feel a sense of belonging. Their father Saul spends most of his time in his study in search of mysticism, and Miriam their mother, spends hers stealing objects to fit into her ‘kaleidoscope’. The family slowly unravels, each member into his or her own isolated world, with thin threads still connecting them.

The novel is read by the author herself, and she does an amazing job of it, better than some actors. This book is filled with great turns of phrase, its best but not only quality. By now you know how much I love character development, and Goldberg’s is superb. I’d recommend this book to anyone.

Out of curiosity, I’d be interested in hearing if any of you have actually gone out and read a title suggested in this blog, and if so, which one(s).