review

Reading Round-Up: April 2023

/ Christine Pennylegion

April reading brings May rehash: let’s get right to it, shall we?

  • The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England (Brandon Sanderson)
  • Ramona the Brave (Beverly Cleary)
  • Negotiating with the Dead (Margaret Atwood)
  • The Princess Diarist (Carrie Fisher)
  • Standing in the Rainbow (Fannie Flagg)
  • Lex Operandi, Lex Credendi (Christine Pennylegion)
  • Stranger Planet (Nathan W. Pyle)
  • Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (Fannie Flagg)
  • Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven (Fannie Flagg)
  • The Whole Town’s Talking (Fannie Flagg)
  • These Old Shades (Georgette Heyer)

First this month was BrandoSando’s delightful The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, a slightly bonkers multi-dimensional-travel blank-room novel; by “blank-room” I mean that when the book opens the protagonist has no idea who or where he is, à la Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir) or Memory (Lois McMaster Bujold). John wakes up in what appears to be medieval England — except that magic appears to be real, as are the Norse gods. Mistaken for an aelv, he’s captured by the local lord and things only get crazier from there. It’s funny; I enjoyed it. This was the second release from Sanderson’s four-book kickstarter campaign last year, and so far I’ve been very glad that I bought in!

Ramona the Brave is a bit of an outlier on this list. I’ve been reading through the Ramona series with the kids at bedtime, and normally I don’t keep track of the books I read to the children, because that list would get out of control very quickly. But I enjoyed this one so much that I read ahead about five chapters on my own to finish it, so I think that counts! Cleary’s books hold up very well, and it’s been a pleasure to share Ramona, companion of my childhood imagination, with my own kids.

Negotiating with the Dead is one of Atwood’s nonfiction offerings, a book about writers and writing that was constructed around a series of lectures she gave about twenty years ago. I think I’ll be buying a copy of this one at some point; it’s a retrospective on her own career, but it’s also a fascinating meditation on the writing life and the writer’s social role (or lack thereof). There is also a very interesting discussion of the duality of authorship — of being at the same time the “Margaret Atwood” of literary fame, and the “Peggy Gibson” of her regular life. Fascinating stuff.

Also a memoir, albeit of a very different sort, Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist revolves around the filming of the first Star Wars movie and her long-rumoured love affair with Harrison Ford. It contains excerpts from the diaries she kept at the time, along with a lot of terrible teenage poetry (no shade; I’ve got a few piles of that myself). More interesting to me, however, were her accounts of growing up in the shadow of her parents’ fame, and the ways that celebrity has affected her own life and sense of self, for good and ill.

About midway through the month, I was paging through my book log — or perhaps it just fell open, I’m not sure — and I found my list from April 2019, which included a couple of novels by Fannie Flagg, which reminded me how much I enjoy novels by Fannie Flagg. (My poor working memory is about 80% of the reason that I keep this log.) So I read some! Standing in the Rainbow and Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! were both new to me, and I accidentally read them out of order, which honestly didn’t matter particularly much. Both these and the two others (Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven and The Whole Town’s Talking) are set in the fictional town of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, although a good part of Welcome takes place in NYC. They’re definitely character-driven books — I mean, they have plots, but the plots are certainly not the narrative driver — and I’ve enjoyed seeing how Flagg further opens up the interior and exterior lives of Elmwood Springs’s inhabitants with every sequel. The timelines in each book overlap with the others, and it’s a pretty deft trick to interweave them without too many inconsistencies. (There were several errors in The Whole Town’s Talking, which Flagg’s copyeditor should have caught, but none of them were of narrative-ruining size.)

When I was preparing Lex Operandi, Lex Credendi for publication, I must have skimmed through it half a dozen times getting the formatting and everything set up. But it had been many years since I actually sat down and properly read it straight through, as if someone else had written it. It might not have been since after my thesis defense, in 2016, now that I think on it. Anyway; I read through it and I thought it was pretty good. Ha.

Stranger Planet is Nathan W. Pyle’s second comic collection featuring the “Beings,” a charming race of aliens who live in a world very much like our own — but different. The kids love these comics, especially Anselm, for the way Pyle makes the ordinary stuff of our lives whimsical and unfamiliar through clever renaming. Toast? That’s a twice heatblasted doughslice. Smoke alarm? That’s a hot danger screamer. Coffee? Hot jitter liquid — not to be confused with my beverage of choice, hot leaf liquid. Kissing is mouthpushing. Salad is a leafbucket. It’s all wonderfully silly; here’s the (very relatable) comic that started it all.

To finish off April, I read Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades, which takes place somewhat earlier than most of her novels, in this case, in Paris and England during the reign of King Louis XV. Lord Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon and notorious for his debauchery, is quite literally run into in the street by a peasant urchin fleeing a difficult family situation. Instantly captivated by Léon’s distinct colouring, Alastair buys the youth into his service — setting off an insane chain of events involving mistaken identity, kidnapping, unrequited love, and all sorts of nefarious plots. It’s quite the romp. These Old Shades is the first in a series of four; the next book, Devil’s Cub, takes place about twenty years later and features Alastair’s son. I didn’t realize it was a series, and in fact I read the third book, Regency Buck, many years ago. Perhaps it’s time to revisit it.

Reading Round-Up: February 2023

/ Christine Pennylegion

It’s spring! The dwarf irises are blooming in my garden (always the first flowers up, by a considerable margin) and it’s well past time to take a look at what I read last month. February was particularly fruitful, I felt, in part because I’ve hit on a reading mode that really works for me: nonfiction books on paper, and fiction on my phone. I love the portability of ebooks and the ease of borrowing them — instantaneously! — from my local library. But for some reason that I haven’t bothered to parse, on-screen reading doesn’t seem as suitable for nonfiction texts, at least for me. Maybe it’s because I approach the text differently if I can hold it in my hands; maybe it’s just nice to differentiate long-form nonfiction from the constant stream of emails, blog posts, and articles I’m already reading on my laptop or phone screen. Whatever the reason, this method of separation seems to work.

Here’s what I read last month:

  • A Single Thread (Tracy Chevalier)
  • Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (Mary Roach)
  • At the Edge of the Orchard (Tracy Chevalier)
  • Several People are Typing (Calvin Kasulke)
  • The Long Haul (Finn Murphy)
  • Dear Mr Knightley (Katherine Reay)
  • The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories (P. G. Wodehouse)
  • Draft No. 4 (John McPhee)
  • Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
  • My Salinger Year (Joanna Rakoff)
  • Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
  • So You Want to be a Wizard (Diane Duane)
  • Deep Wizardry (Diane Duane)
  • High Wizardry (Diane Duane)
  • A Wizard Abroad (Diane Duane)
  • The God of the Garden (Andrew Peterson)

Let’s do the fiction first.

I read Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring a few times about a million years ago, back when everyone was reading it, but hadn’t at all kept up with her work after that. Both A Single Thread and At the Edge of the Orchard are historical novels: the former examines the lives of the “surplus women” of Britain’s post-WW1 demographic crisis; the latter, American expansion to the West in the early/mid-19th century. They’re both immersive and richly detailed; I enjoyed learning about cathedral embroidery (what we would probably call needlepoint now) and the British gardening craze for exotic American trees like California’s giant redwoods. At the Edge of the Orchard used a number of dialect variations to differentiate between point-of-view characters, which I found somewhat distracting the first time it shifted but worked well overall. I will note, however, that (as with Girl with a Pearl Earring), attempted and/or actualized rape was used as a plot point in both novels, which, at this point, just seems lazy.

From the historical we move to the extremely contemporary, with Calvin Kasulke’s delightful, absolutely bonkers Several People are Typing, an absurdist novella told entirely through workplace Slack conversations. It was blurbed as “where WFH meets WTF,” which strikes me as entirely accurate — and includes some literary Easter eggs if you’re paying attention (watch for how Kasulke uses excerpts from Yeat’s “The Second Coming”). I read this in a single evening when I had been feeling extremely blue about something — I don’t even remember what — and it was just the ticket. It’s bananas.

One of the advantages of keeping a reading log is that when you’ve read something previously, or think you have, you can actually go back and look for it. The first time I read Dear Mr Knightley was in the summer of 2014; I was massively pregnant with Anselm and house-sitting for one of our professors, on whose shelves I found a copy. That’s long enough to have forgotten everything about it except a general positive impression. Dear Mr Knightley is epistolary almost in its entirety, following former foster-kid Samantha Moore, who deals with her trauma by sublimating herself in 19th-century novels, particularly the Austen oeuvre. She is granted an anonymous scholarship to a prestigious graduate journalism program, on the condition that she writes letters to her benefactor, keeping “Mr Knightley” informed as to her progress. It’s a sweet narrative despite Sam’s inherent, um, annoyingness. As with many romances it’s necessary to consciously suspend some disbelief, but in the end Sam finds a forever-family as well as a love interest (the former is admittedly more satisfying), and all’s well that ends well.

Speaking of Austen — skipping Wodehouse for the moment — last month I finished both Pride and Prejudice (for like the 30th time, and as an audio version in this case) and Sense and Sensibility. Reading the latter was a very strange experience. I was sure I had read it at some point, perhaps as a teenager, but as I went on I realized I had no idea where the plot was going, except I could remember some things, or thought I remembered them — I think I must have seen the movie, or bits of it, and that combined with a general sense of what happens that I’ve just picked up here and there somehow convinced my brain that I had read this novel. Reader, I had not. And I probably won’t again because, whew, it could definitely stand to be chopped down by a good 50-80 pages… also I hated everyone but Elinor, who marries (imho) the wrong man at the end, anyway. I was profoundly disappointed that when Austen afflicted Maryanne with fever she did not take the obvious opportunity to kill her off, and really, the whole lot of them ought to go jump in a lake. Perhaps Sense and Sensibility would not have disappointed me so much had I not been reading it right at the time I was finishing up listening to Pride and Prejudice, which is such a sparkling delight; the comparison was not flattering. (It’s odd that they’re so different in quality, too, because they were published less than two years apart, and Austen seems to have been revising them both around the same time.)

The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories is a wonderful collection. Wodehouse is best known for the Jeeves and Wooster novels, but he wrote short stories as well, all of them with his trademark wit and humour. I especially enjoyed the two stories told from a dog’s perspective, although I cannot just now remember their titles.

Finally, wonderfully, engrossingly: the first four installments in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series of young adult fantasy novels. I just tore through these! In the first one, So You Want to Be a Wizard, young teenager Nita is drawn to a mysterious book of the same title on the shelves of her local library, and finds herself drawn into a world of magic, powered by the Speech that holds the universe(s) together, where wizards unite in the fight against entropy and its champion, the Lone Power. It’s terrific stuff, and though Duane’s books aren’t religious per se, and she draws from many different mythologies, there’s a lot of really interesting theological things going on in the underpinnings if you’re willing to look for them. The only real caveat is the series timeline, which is woefully complex and contradictory, due in part to the span of time over which they were published. In the second book, A Wizard of Mars, Nita’s younger sister Dairine gets a top-of-the-line home computer that is essentially a lightly-disguised Apple II; only a few books later, they all have cell phones and ipods (and Dairine, notoriously, has aged a few years backwards). If you’re willing to accept that the books are set in some sort of “eternal now” — rather like comic strips, I suppose — then it works, but once I noticed the discrepancies I found it them hard to overlook.

On to the non-fiction!

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law is another one of Mary Roach’s fascinating, one-word-titled (Bonk, Stiff, Spook, Gulp, Grunt), long-form explorations of unusual topics — in this case, the conflicts, legal and otherwise, between humanity and the animal kingdom. It’s absolutely typical Roach: engaging, funny, and full of weird facts I never knew I needed to know.

The Long Haul is Finn Murphy’s memoir, centred on his life as a long-haul trucker; more specifically, as a cross-country professional movers. We hired movers for our second-to-last uprooting (a ten+ hour drive and across an international border) and it was a very interesting experience; kind of weird to have other people doing so much with our stuff, and of course requiring a great deal of trust as they took off with it once all of the packing was finished. I found Murphy’s narrative fascinating; it’s always cool to get an insider’s-eye-view of an industry. People! Doing things! My friends, the world is infinitely fascinating.

Also on the memoir menu, I read Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year, her account of a year spent working at a NYC literary agency of some prominence during the mid-1990s. Rakoff is older than I am, but not by so much that I didn’t resonate with many of her cultural touchstones. The book is revealing — of an agency struggling against modernization (her boss grudgingly allowed one computer to be purchased for the entire office, which had to be used in a public place), of the ways the ways that we bend ourselves to try and fit a mold we think we want or need, of Rakoff’s own coming of age. It was highly engrossing. (You can figure out which agency she worked for with an internet search or two; I wonder what they thought of it?)

John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 is partly a memoir, I suppose, although it’s really about writing and a life spent doing just that. McPhee writes long-form nonfiction — articles that come in at 40 or 50 thousand words — and I found his remarks about structure to be especially illuminating. The whole thing is just chok-full of tidbits, really, and obviously written by a master of his craft. This was a library copy but I plan to purchase my own.

Finally, I closed out the month with Andrew Peterson’s beautiful The God of the Garden. Peterson seems to do a bit of everything: he writes both fiction and nonfiction, he sings, he founded an artists’ community… The God of the Garden is a meandering memoir written over the lockdown year of 2020, about faith, gardening, creativity, place and rootedness, theology, and the wonder of trees. (I too often wonder at trees.) It was beautiful, and made me more eager than ever to get my hands in the dirt again this spring.

Bodily work

/ Christine Pennylegion

All three kids are coughing today, which meant no church for us; coupled with their long sleeps engendered by the time change, this left me with an unexpected chunk of unscheduled time this morning. I decided to pull out my sewing machine. We bought new curtains for our dining room and den — oh, months and months ago, maybe more than a year at this point. They look great but are far too long, and have spent that time haphazardly pinned up or dragging on the ground, and occasionally stepped- or sat-upon by the small set. I had already figured out the amount I needed to trim some weeks ago, so all I had to do was measure, cut, and hem.

Out came this beauty:

I think I’ve blogged about my machine before: a Singer 403A, passed down by my grandmother, that’s about the same age as my mom. I’ve had to replace a few small plastic parts, but it runs extremely well (especially now that I’ve corrected the small, crucial, error I had been making while threading it). Since I needed room for all of the curtain fabric, I hauled it downstairs to the dining room table — stopping in the bathroom on the way, out of curiosity, to weigh it. Eighteen pounds! Without the case at hand, I had to cradle it closely, like wearing 2-3 newborn babies in a sling at once.

I find great pleasure these days in the thing-ness of things, especially mechanical things. Using this machine is such a tactile experience: the weight and texture of the fabric, the smell of hot steel and machine oil, all the satisfying whirrs and snicks and thunks of the moving parts, the whisper of the thread unspooling. I tell the machine what it must do by manipulating a series of levers and knobs. To make it go very slowly, I use my hand to turn a wheel. To make it go quickly, I press a pedal with my foot. If I want to switch to a zig-zag or scallop stitch, I open up the top and insert a little disc that changes the movement of the mechanisms below. So satisfying!

It’s satisfying in part just because I think mechanical things are clever and cool (don’t even get me started on doorknobs). But anything that engages our bodies and our senses also offers a refreshing contrast to the way that so much of our work and pleasure is mediated to us via screens — and even when that work is good and useful, often it still only engages our bodies to the extent of giving us backaches and carpal tunnel syndrome. The screen provides a way of being in and interacting with the world that leaves me, on the whole, deeply ambivalent.

I’ve just finished reading Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir detailing her time working in Silicon Valley — itself a profoundly ambivalent narrative. Wiener chronicles techbro culture from the inside, from a position that’s both critical and complicit, and there’s a lot to unpack inside — but in light of this morning’s activities I was forcefully struck by this passage:

I sometimes wondered whether there was a unique psychic burden shared by people who worked in technology, specifically those of us building and supporting software that existed only in the cloud. The abstractions of knowledge work were well documented, but this felt new. It was not just the cognitive dissonance of how lucrative and powerful tech companies had become, when their tools did not physically exist, but that all software was vulnerable, at any time, to erasure. Engineers could spend years writing programs only to have them updated, rewritten, and replaced. […]

My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick; self-administer a breast exam. Whenever I wrenched a piece of self-assembly furniture into place, or reinforced a loose button, I experienced an unfamiliar and antiquated type of satisfaction. I went so far as to buy a sewing machine, like I was looking for ways to shame myself.

I wasn’t alone. Half the programmers I knew between the ages of twenty-two and forty, mostly men, were discovering that their fingers were multipurpose. “It feels so good to do something with my hands,” they said, before launching into monologues about woodworking, or home-brewing or baking sourdough. […]

I envied Ian [a roboticist], who was trained to think in terms of hardware, the embodied world. He stared at a computer all day, too, but the laws of physics still applied. His relationship to the internet was different from mine: he didn’t have accounts on any of the social networks, was unfamiliar with memes and unattuned to the minutiae of other people’s lives. He didn’t stand up at the end of the day and think, as I did: Oh, right—a body.

Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley, pp. 218-9.

Note the adjectives modifying “satisfaction” there: unfamiliar, antiquated. Obsolete. And that is the techbro mindset in a nutshell, maybe: the work of the body outmoded; the body itself an obstacle until hacked and gamified; the solution, to everything, more technology. (And here is Wiener’s ambivalence on display, as it often is in Uncanny Valley. Even as she recognizes the psychic hazards of Silicon Valley’s bodiless work to create a bodiless world, she is still at least partially under its spell.) But I would suggest that the satisfaction that she felt in putting together furniture or reinforcing buttons, and the joyous bemusement of her programmer coworkers discovering physical hobbies, in fact points to the great truth that our bodies are not obsolete. They matter, in fact, very much—the things we (can) do with them matter, and our satisfaction in using them is natural and appropriate.

Anna Wiener bought a sewing machine to shame herself. She might do better just to sew some curtains.

Reading Round-Up: May 2022

/ Christine Pennylegion

I completely forgot about last month’s round-up. We’re 23 days into June so this will be an interesting exercise in whether I actually remember anything about the books I read. Shall we begin?

  • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksander Solzhenitsyn)
  • You’ve Been Volunteered (Laurie Gelman)
  • At the Water’s Edge (Sara Gruen)
  • The Office BFFs (Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey)
  • Glittering Images (Susan Howatch)
  • Class Mom (Laurie Gelman)
  • Yoga Pant Nation (Laurie Gelman)
  • Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain)

First off, I thoroughly enjoyed Laurie Gelman’s “Class Mom” series, even though I accidentally read it out of order! You’ve Been Volunteered is actually the second novel (Class Mom is the first), and while I definitely missed some background stuff, it stood well enough on its own that I didn’t realize it was part of a larger series until I had just about finished. These books are funny, irreverent mom-lit centered around the drama of an elementary school PTA and the parents who make it up. They’re fun.

Glittering Images is the first novel in Susan Howatch’s six-book “Starbridge” series. All together they span about thirty years, the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, with a cast of characters whose lives all revolve around the Church of England’s (fictional) Starbridge Cathedral. In Glittering Images the Rev. Dr. Charles Ashworth, a bachelor theologian at Cambridge, is sent by the Archbishop of Canterbury to discreetly investigate the private life of the charismatic and controversial Bishop of Starbridge, Dr. Alexander Jardine. Needless to say, he finds more than he bargained for. Susan Howatch is deeply wise about psychology, spiritual pitfalls, and the healing of psychic/spiritual wounds. Even if they don’t want to read all six novels (which is a commitment; they’re dense) I think that ordained or wanting-to-be-ordained persons would really benefit from reading this and the concluding novel, Absolute Truths.

Here’s a fact: I love The Office (the American version). It’s a perpetual rewatch show for me, something I throw on for background noise or when I need something familiar and comforting. I’ve read most of the books written by cast and crew of The Office, I listened to both of Brian Baumgartner’s Office-centered podcasts, and since mid 2020 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed listening to Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey’s rewatch podcast, Office Ladies. It’s lighthearted and chatty, and I like to throw it on while I do chores. It feels like I’m just hanging out with some friends, gabbing about a show we all love. The Office BFFs is their new book, another behind-the-scenes look at the making of the show. Unlike Baumgartner’s disappointing Welcome to Dunder Mifflin (essentially just a transcript of his podcast episodes), The Office BFFs was about 90% new material as far as I could tell, and included a lot of Jenna and Angela’s personal stories and photographs. If you’re also an Office fan, this is a great one.

At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen (made famous by her debut novel, Water for Elephants) is set mostly in Scotland during the second world war. American socialites Maddie and Ellis Hyde are cut off from Ellis’s father’s fortune after embarrassing the family in a drunken New Year’s debacle; determined to redeem himself in his father’s eyes, Ellis brings Maddie and his best friend, Hank, to the Scottish Highlands in the middle of the war. His goal? To succeed where his father failed, in hunting and capturing the famous Loch Ness Monster. Although Maddie is an adult through the whole book, it has a real bildungsroman feel as she struggles to find her place in this new milieu. My one criticism is that by the end of the novel the villain felt a little too villainous — other than that, it was a well-written and engrossing read.

Kitchen Confidential is a crazy look back at the coke-and-booze-fueled restaurant kitchens of the 80s and 90s. It’s funny, it’s grim, it’s fascinating… mostly though, by the end it left me feeling sad, just because of knowing how Bourdain’s life ended. Throughout Kitchen Confidential you get the impression that’s he’s been looking his whole life for — something — but in the end, I don’t think he ever found it.

And last but certainly not least, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn’s fictionalized account of an ordinary day in a Siberian gulag. I first read this novella back in high school; as the books got passed out and we opened them up for the first time, a heavy snow immediately started falling outside our classroom window, which provided an excellent segue into a discussion of the pathetic fallacy. A few images had stayed with me from that first reading, but by and large I was able to appreciate this book with fresh eyes. It felt especially poignant to be reading it against the background of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the kidnappings/deportations and “filtration camps” currently happening in Russia-controlled territories. Plus ça change…

Percy Jackson and the Sûreté du Québec

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

A quick glance through my reading log — yes, I started keeping one again, albeit in a considerably simplified form — shows that my covidtide reading has taken a hard turn toward fiction. In more regular years, I usually read pretty close to 50:50 fiction/non-fiction. Over the past few months, it’s been closer to 80:20. There are good reasons for this, of course; well-written fiction offers an unparalleled retreat from These Uncertain Times ™. And if the general pandemic stuff wasn’t enough, we’re also still well in the midst of our un-planned renovations (oh ho ho ho ho, what could be more fun).

Even more than the general state of the world and the unfinished state of our house, however, I place the blame for my de-balanced reading squarely at the feet of two people: Rick Riordan and Louise Penny. I doubt they’ve ever met each other but they have one giant trait in common: I absolutely can’t put their books down.

Rick Riordan is the author of the Percy Jackson series. Beginning in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Riordan crafts an alternate earth where the Greek pantheon, relocated to the current heart of Western civilization in New York City, is still around — still meddling in human affairs, still pursuing their own eternal goals, and still bearing and begetting demigod children. These children, raised by their human parents, can go incognito until they reach puberty, when their powers manifest to the extent that monsters (also still around) can sense them. Refuge awaits them at Camp Half-Blood, a secluded New York summer camp watched over by the centaur Chiron — if they can make it there alive.

For those counting along at home, I’ve read fourteen Riordan books since July: all of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, all of the Heroes of Olympus series, and 4/5 of The Trials of Apollo. I just collected the fifth book in the latter series, The Tower of Nero, from the library yesterday and I can’t wait to dive in.

Also on my “can’t wait to dive in” list are the Inspector Gamache mystery novels by Louise Penny. I’ve gotten through fewer of them, in part because they are considerably longer, but also because they are perpetually checked out or on hold! The series follows Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté du Québec (the provincial police force), his team, and a strong cast of secondary characters mostly located in the Anglo village called Three Pines, just south of Montreal. The mysteries themselves are innovative and engrossing — I really do love a good fictional murder — but where Penny really shines is in her deft handling of red herrings, her insights into the human psyche, and her long character development arcs.

They are, without question, the best mysteries I have read in a long while, and Louise Penny has shot to the top ranks of my ‘favourite authors’ list. I just finished the sixth book, Bury Your Dead, and have the next two waiting in my to-read pile. I will note that each book builds on the last and highly recommend reading them in order; the first is Still Life.

Rick Riordan has two more (shorter) series… serieses… well, you know, that are waiting for me when I finish The Tower of Nero. There are still ten Gamache books I haven’t read. And after that? Well, after that I simply don’t know what I’ll do.

Everything loose is traveling

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

This is an enigmatic and compelling little book. I love it.

 

You may be familiar with the genre of “found poetry”, where a poet takes something like, say, a newspaper article and removes all the words she deems extraneous, leaving a poem behind. Aug 9 — Fog, I think, belongs to that tradition as well, only this time it’s not found poetry but found prose. Here is Kathryn Scanlan’s account of how it came to be, starting with the purchase of a stranger’s diary from a public estate auction:

The diary was a Christmas present to the author from her daughter and son-in-law. The author wrote her full name and address on the front page. She resided in a small Illinois town. She was eighty-six years old when she began recording in it. […]

At first I loved only the physicality of the diary — the author’s cramped hand, the awkward, artful way she filled the page. I liked its miserable condition. Its position was tenuous — yet here it was. I didn’t try to read it. I kept it in a drawer. I assumed it illegible.

But then I did read it — compulsively. I hunched over it, straining my neck. I read it front to back — perhaps a dozen times by now.

As I read, I typed out sentences that caught my attention. Then, for ten years, off and on, I played with the sentences I’d pulled. I edited, arranged, and rearranged them into the composition you find here. (vi-vii)

The result of all this editing, arranging, and rearranging is very beautiful and strange. There are recurring characters (Vern, D., Mildred, Maude) as well as others who make only single appearances; since the diarist was writing for herself we are left to make educated guesses about their relationships. I thought “Vern” was almost certainly the diarist’s husband, but then I found an entry referring to “D. & Vern’s anniversary”, so perhaps they are the daughter and son-in-law. But I don’t know. It’s a little off-balancing.

The writing is spare; the diarist uses many short forms (“nite”) and omits most of her “to be” verbs. The pages are spare, too; Scanlan has set the text for each day in a sea of white space:

“I painting. Clouding at noon.” Indeed.

This is a library copy but I think I may buy one of my own. It feels like the kind of book I’ll go back to, maybe precisely because it’s so… I’m not even sure how to describe it. Because it’s so the way it is. A few of my favourite pages:

The wind:

Terrible windy     everything loose is traveling. (33)

It come so nice:

A grand rain, it come so nice. Sun looks good. Fire feels good. D. & Vern out on their bicycles. (47)

The roads:

All kinds of roads. Dead end roads, roads under construction, cow paths & etc but had good time, a grand day. (51)

Decline of Vern:

Vern confused. Vern awful confused. Vern confused one of the girls with D. Vern bad nite. Vern bad. (95)

This is a quick read, only 110 pages and most of them white space. You can easily get through it in a sitting, or in bed before sleep. And when the wind blows, maybe you too will note that everything loose is traveling.