TBR piles: What’s in yours?

Where do you pile your books? My hubby and I have piles on our bedside tables mostly, then some in the living room, the kitchen, the dining room…and they all live in the basement library/movie/party room (technically the ‘family room’).

The other day I was tidying the bedroom, and emptied the already-read and not-going-to-get-read-soon books off the two bedside tables:

Putting books away...

Then, I pulled books from the living room and kitchen to complete the tidy:

More books being put away..

This post for your voyeuristic enjoyment.

Some Canadian Books

I’ve bleated on enough about the last package of books I received to review, so I won’t go into that again.

Without further ado, in no particular order (other than the order they are piled on my desk), here are some Canadian books published in 2008 that you should keep your eyes peeled for:

Anything by Shauna Singh Baldwin. I have in my pile two books of short stories — the re-published English Lessons and Other Stories (with Readers’ Guide), and a new collection called We are not in Pakistan. Both are wonders of cross-cultural exploration, lovely stories of very real people. I see from her website that she has also written two novels…worth checking out.

Under the Holy Lake: A memoir of Eastern Bhutan by Ken Haigh is a highly readable introduction to Bhutan, a country that the average person knows little about. Haigh spent a soul-searching 2 years teaching in Khaling, a small village in the far eastern reaches of an already inaccessible country. This book will leave you with a lasting impression of the country and its people.

Shirin and Salt Man by Nilofar Shidmehr is a book that takes you by surprise. [By the way, a note to all authors...ensure that you or your book has its own dedicated page somewhere -- in the Internet age, you need to stand out and be linked to!] It’s a novella in poetic form, tying the legends of Iran to the modern day. I read it through the first time, fascinated by the poetry and the images; the second time, fascinated by the story; and the third time sent me to the Internet to research the legends of Shirin and the discovery of the Salt Man in the 80s.

I’ll leave you there, with more to come. Plus, I will point out a couple of books to avoid…there are days when I despair at the state of Canada’s publishing! (Do I despair or rejoice in the knowledge that anyone can get published?!?)

Sekou Sundiata: 1948-2007

I realized this morning that the world had lost yet another artist — spoken word artist Sekou Sundiata. (The Chicago Tribune) [Weird, the editors of Wikipedia waste not time in updating their entries.]

I first heard his work in the Bill Moyers’ book The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (Here’s a discussion group page.) That book has a companion audio format — I’m not sure which came first, the audio or the book. I, luckily, have both.

Listen to him on Salon Audio, or on the NPR Fresh Air podcast, a compilation of interviews held with him over the years.

Art lives on.

A Beat Education

I found this link ages ago, put it in my blogworthy list, and there it has sat, to wait for a day, like today, when I should be outside, enjoying the sun.

[Living life to the fullest. Thinking new thoughts, maybe even writing some poetry, instead of rehashing other people's ideas. It's Easter Sunday...if nothing else, for this atheist, a day to signal the true beginning of Spring. So, a quick blog post, and then I'm outta here!]

Ginsberg’s Celestial Homework — Your site of the day…essentially a:

Specialized Reading List for “Literary History of the Beat Generation,”
a course taught by Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute during the summer of 1977.

This “celestial homework” is the reading list that Ginsberg handed out on the first day of his course as “suggestions for a quick check-out & taste of ancient scriveners whose works were reflected in Beat literary style as well as specific beat pages to dig into.”

This is a very great list…with some rather nepotistic choices — many of his contemporaries, like Neal Cassady‘s autobiography The First Third. (Cassady had died almost 10 years before, tragically young, so I’m not really surprised by Ginsberg’s choice.)

I think I’m going to grab some poetry and a beer, and sit on the grass to read aloud.

TTFN

A memoir with a great first line

“I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.”

So begins The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, one of my Christmas books, well-chosen, I think, by my husband.

Opened it this morning, and before I’d finished my first cup of coffee in bed, I was 77 pages in. Stopped there so I could savour, not devour, it.

And blog on it.

I’ll update you all when I finish it.

Biographers’ Dilemma

Just this morning, lying abed, cozy under my covers, two cats in attendance, a cup of coffee brought to me by my love, I finished reading Truly Wilde by Joan Schenkar. The scene was apt, as luxuriating in bed was one of Dolly Wilde’s greatest pleasures, as Schenkar illustrates by quoting Wilde’s letters.

But what a biography! Dolly Wilde was, by all (surviving) accounts, a very vivid woman who lived in the shadow of a truly (in)famous uncle, and died in a swirl of her own infamy. Could this woman’s life have been treated to the traditional biographical form? Being a playwright, Schenkar draws on her narrative proclivities to describe the virtually indescribable…a character who left only clues to her history, whose conversational style people remember, but not her bon mots…

Schenkar describes her version of the biographic genre:

“In finding ways to tell her story, I allowed Dolly’s own passionate interests to guide me: her feel for inventive imagery turned me to the vivid enlargements that metaphor permits; her contempt for time gave me the intense concentration that thematic — rather than chronologic — treatment enables; her unalloyed romanticism lead me to the ‘recreations’ that make up the next chapter of this book, etc., etc. From time to time, I have used different styles of writing in different settings to suggest Dolly’s own changing — and very elusive — states of being.”

And it is effective. Dolly is now haunting my thoughts. Her social circle, I see now, has reached its tendrils out to me many times, in my reading about salons, in my interest in authors of her time. Virtually everyone involved in Dolly’s life is someone who was someone, or was connected to someone. For a quick overview, look at this loving tribute site to Natalie Clifford Barney & her women-centered literary and social salon of the early 1900s.

I will leave you with Joan Schenkar’s final words of her acknowledgements:

“And I thank everyone who has ever saved a scrap of handwriting, an old love letter, or a fragment of photograph from the half-forgotten life of an unusual woman in the hope that it might be important; in the hope that she might be important.”

With that in mind, the future of biography is both more overwhelming, and bleaker, in light of the changes in technology. Passwords to blog & email accounts lost, forgotten, or not able to be found in the event of death. Hard drives erased, backups corrupted.

Or worse, having to sift through all of the random tripe we spew every day, because it is so easy, electronically.

“Merry Bookmas!”

Luckily, I’ve married into a bookish family, and my man is bookish, and his friends are…and my mother has been trained to give me a book gift certificate every year.

Books and consumables are the best presents (consumables…you know — wine, cheese, cookies, jam…).

This year was a nice mess of books:

I found The Art of Blacksmithing by Alex Bealer for Metro. He’s always talking about how he’d like to learn more about it, etc. Well, now he can.

Metro’s sister found him John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise.  An odd book of satirical essays and the like…perfect.  The same sister sent me the Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

I put a lot of browsing time to use in my local 2ndhand bookstore…made my husband a list of books that were there, that he could pick up for me. And he took me up on it, and bought me the rather unusual Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece by Joan Schenkar. I’ll have to blog on this book individually one day, soon.

Metro also got me two more books — I feel spoiled! The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls was one. New York Times bestseller, winner of various awards…I think that’s the next book I’m reading. He also bought me Think: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t be Made in the Blink of an Eye by Michael R. LeGault. The interesting thing about this book is that LeGault wrote it in reaction to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink…Blink essentially glorifies the decisions we make subconsciously, in the moment, while I believe LeGault’s point is that we need to put more thought into our decisions. I’ll let you know more when I’ve read LeGault’s book (I’ve already read Gladwell’s).

Funny thing, is that our friends sent us some books too…one is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, and appropriately enough, Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels — from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe by Anthony Arthur. His sequel will have to include Gladwell & LeGault.

The final book on the list is Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. This one is also from the same friends…and again, a good call. We bought this for Metro’s mother last Christmas, so it’s been on our radar for awhile.

So, leave me a comment to tell me what books you got for Christmas!!

“Shake Hands with the Devil”

I listened today to Terry Gross’ (of Fresh Air, NPR fame) interview with Lt-Gen Romeo Dallaire, UN Force Commander during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. I have his book, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda…I’ve read part of it. I had to stop once his description of the genocide really got going.

Much like I had to stop, when, in Grade 5, I was reading Roots by Alex Haley. I couldn’t get past the slave ship sequence. Put it aside for 6 months, went back, all was fine.

So, I think it’s time to pull out Dallaire’s award-winning book again.

It is truly a significant, moving book. He writes in a very spare style, focussing his words, and energy, on detailing the recorded facts of the events. If he gives an opinion, be it negative or positive, you can bet it is backed up by evidence.

I once heard his editor, Anne Collins of Random House Canada, read a section of this book to us — a group of wanna-be publishers at SFU’s Book Publishing Immersion Workshop (two of the most intense, but rewarding, weeks of my young life!). It moved us all to tears.

Now, go and read an excerpt of the interview with Terry Gross here. If it moves you, go on to listen to the interview (about 50 minutes long), conducted 10 years after the horrific events in Rwanda.

And perhaps, join me in reading the book.

“It was on this day in 1940…”

“It was on this day in 1940 that Bugs Bunny made his
debut in a short animated film called “A Wild Hare”.
He was modeled on Groucho Marx, with a carrot rather
than a cigar. Mel Blanc gave him a Brooklyn accent.
The story line of the cartoon involved Elmer Fudd
hunting rabbits, only to have Bugs thwart him at every
turn. Bugs Bunny’s first line in the cartoon, when he
meets Elmer Fudd, is, “What’s up, doc?” It was a
phrase that one of the writers remembered people
saying where he grew up in Texas.”

Ah, that ‘wascally wabbit’ turns 66, a nice round number.

Thanks to my man for pointing this out to me, from his daily visit to the Writer’s Almanac. A big kiss, dear!

Bugs is truly one of my heros. Yeah, I know, he ain’t real, but just pause and consider his attitude. Here is a rabbit whose lust for life gets him into all kinds of scrapes, so he has to use his joie de vivre, quick wits, and sense of humour to extracate himself.

Plus, he has those wonderful magic pockets in his fur, where he always finds the correct tool for the job.

On a side note: Is anyone interested in buying my enormous collection of Bugs Bunny paraphenalia?!?

Free e-books!

For another couple of weeks, the World eBook Fair is allowing free access to their collections, celebrating the beginning of the Internet online library:

July 4th to August 4, 2006 marks a month long celebration of the 35th anniversary of the first step taken towards today’s eBooks, when the United States Declaration of Independence was the first file placed online for downloading in what was destined to be an electronic library of the Internet. Today’s eBook library has a total of over 100 languages represented.

A lot of these books are actually available through Project Gutenberg, at least the ones the average person is going to want, so look for the ones that aren’t available for free elsewhere. Links to audio books, video archives…and the Children’s eBook Collection which is scans of original books — very cool.