0 Books v. cigarettes

George Orwell's Books v. cigarettes is a recent volume in Penguin's "Great Ideas" series. I'm a fan of Orwell's essays and, between the eye-catching title and the old-style Penguin cover design, I couldn't resist this slim volume of them. It contains a couple of my favourites, including "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," which I've quoted from here in past posts, and some I'd never read before, such as the title essay, "Books v. cigarettes." In the latter, Orwell sets out to prove that the buying and reading of books is not "an expensive hobby" that is "beyond the reach of the average person." I don't think it will ruin the suspense to tell you that he succeeds, and that he makes many entertaining observations along the way. Here's a snippet:

It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. 'Books' includes novels, poetry, textbooks, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost in terms of money, may be the same in each case.

That final bit would make a fine meme don't you think? List: 1. A book you read over and over again; 2. A book that has become part of the furniture of your mind and has altered your whole attitude to life; 3. A book that you dip into but never read through; and, 4. A book that you read at a single sitting and forgot a week later. I'll have to think a bit on which book or books I'd list under each category. In the meantime though, I recommend Orwell's Books v. cigarettes as a book for dipping into and reading all the way through (and I note that at $9.99 Canadian, it doesn't cost much more than a pack of cigarettes!).

Detail: Books v. cigarettes

0 More Library Loot

It's been another good week for me at the library. Here's a list of the books that I've picked up so far:

Andrew Carmellini and Gwen Hyman, Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories From a Life in Food: I bought this one for my dad for Christmas and I confess that I had a good flip though his copy over the holidays. Now it's time to try a few of the recipes for myself and, if they're a hit, I'll buy myself a copy too.

The Coffin Trail by Martin Edwards: This is the first in a mystery series set in the Lake District featuring Daniel Kind (an Oxford historian attempting to escape to a quieter life in the country) and DCI Hannah Scarlett. From the jacket copy description it sounds like just my sort of mystery, and I note that it got an enthusiastic blurb from Peter Robinson, one of my all-time favourite mystery authors.

The Trick of It by Michael Frayn: Nick Hornby's discussion of this one in Housekeeping v. The Dirt piqued my interest. It's about a professor who meets and marries the novelist whose work has been the central focus of his career as a literary critic. How could I resist a novel premised on a marriage between novelist and critic?

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky: This one appeared on Eva's list last week, and I immediately ordered a copy from my library. It struck me as an excellent complement to some of the other reading on poetry that I've been doing lately.

A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo: I put a hold on this many months ago after seeing an interview with the author somewhere, and this week my name finally reached the top of the list. It's a memoir of Rotolo's years with Bob Dylan when he was in his early twenties making the transition from obscurity to fame, and she was a teenager finding herself in the cultural and political hotbed of Greenwich Village. She seems to have a very engaging voice and I'm sufficiently interested in the time and the place that I don't need the Bob Dylan hook to draw me in. But that aspect of it did bring to mind another New York memoir that I loved, Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir.

Yes, I am having trouble keeping up with my reading.

Detail: More Library Loot

0 Library Loot

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Alessandra in which they encourage bloggers to share the books they've checked out from the library. Now, I don't need much encouragement to share my enthusiasm for the library and the glorious stacks of books that I cart home from it on a regular basis. And this week was a particularly good one. Here's what I got and why:

J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country: A brief post at Books, Inq. pronouncing this novella "a minor masterpiece" sent me in search of it. Plus, I've yet to encounter a book published by NYRB not worth reading.

Barbara Caruso, A Painter's Journey: Volume II 1974-1979: Some of you may remember that volume one of Caruso's journals was one of my favourite reads of 2006 and I'm keen to continue through the rest of the 70s with her.

Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt: It seems to me that this second collection of Hornby's "Adventures in Reading" columns from The Believer has been soundly panned by a number of my favourite bloggers. But I thoroughly enjoyed the first volume (The Polysyllabic Spree), so I'm giving it a go all the same.

Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American: I read a number of newspaper reviews of this one that piqued my interest when it first came out. And I recall that Litlove and Ms. Smithereens, each of whom has led me to many a fabulous book, have praised other Hustvedt novels highly. So, it seems time I acquainted myself with her work.

Dennis Lehane, The Given Day: I'm curious about the shift Lehane makes here from crime fiction to historical fiction. And, as a former resident of Boston, I'm partial to fiction set there. Plus it got a good review from Ragdoll, another discerning blogger whose recommendations I trust. I've got the audiobook version and will be relying on it to keep me occupied for many hours of subway riding to work and treadmill running at the gym.

Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon (translated from the German by Barbara Harshav): This one caught my attention when I read a description of it on a "best of 2008" list in a newspaper, I've forgotten which newspaper. Plus it will further my quest to read more fiction in translation. (I was going to say that it might be my first foray into Swiss literature, then I remembered Joanna Spyri's Heidi—a childhood favourite that I don't dare revisit as I fear it would come off as dreadfully moralistic to me now.)

Ali Smith, The First Person and Other Stories: Smith's The Whole Story and Other Stories is one of my all-time favourite short story collections, and her latest appears to be in a similar vein—stories about telling stories that nonetheless succeed as stories.

These should keep me occupied for a couple of weeks...

Detail: Library Loot

0 Today's Library Finds

I stopped in at the library on my way home today and found this tantalizing haul awaiting me on the hold shelf:

Nemesis by Jo Nesbo: I’ve not yet read any Nesbo, but I’ve developed an affinity for Scandanavian crime fiction, and his Norwegian mystery series featuring Detective Harry Hole (of which this is the most recently translated installment) comes highly recommended by Danielle.

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan: Pollan’s In Defence of Food was one of my favourite reads last year, and I’m keen to catch up on his earlier work.

Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America by Harvey Levenstein: I think that Pollan led me to this one as well via the footnotes in In Defense of Food. I’ve got a lot of food books on the go these days, and this history should help set the context for many of the others.

Loose Girl: a memoir of promiscuity by Kerry Cohen: A review by ragdoll at My Tragic Right Hip put this one on my radar and I'm looking forward to diving in.

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff: I can’t remember where I heard about this one, likely a newspaper review given the amount of buzz it appears to have generated. In any event, the marvellous Victorian style silhouettes on the cover catch my eye every time I walk into a bookstore, and the description on the book jacket has me thoroughly intrigued:

"In the wake of a wildly disastrous affair with her married archaeology professor, Willie Upton arrives on the doorstep of her ancestral home in storybook Templeton, New York, looking to hide in the one place to which she swore she’d never come back. As soon as she arrives, though, a prehistoric monster surfaces in Lake Glimmerglass, changing the very fabric of the town. What’s more, Willie’s hippie-turned-born-again-Baptist mother, Vi, tells her a secret she’s been hiding for nearly thirty years: that Willie’s father wasn’t the random man from a free-love commune that Vi had led her to imagine, but someone else entirely. Someone from this very town. As Willie puts her archaeological skills to work digging for the truth about her lineage, she discovers that the secrets of her family run deep when past and present blur, dark mysteries come to light, and the shocking truth about more than one monster is revealed."

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert: I spotted this one in a random bookstore browse but showed uncharacteristic restraint in noting down the title and ordering it later from the library rather than buying a copy then and there. It’s a very thought-provoking book by a psychologist on how poor human beings are at predicting what will make us happy. It fits in nicely with some of the reading I’ve been doing lately about the mind and the brain. Plus the author is very funny and it’s already proving a pleasure to read.

If you’re getting the idea that I’m on a bit of a non-fiction kick these days, you’d be right!

Detail: Today's Library Finds

0 My Reading Year

I confess that I haven’t kept thorough records this year. My list of books read in 2008 totals 75 titles, but I suspect that there are more that ought to have been included on that list that I failed to note down. That partially explains the significant dip from the 100 books per year that I’ve averaged since I started keeping track in 2005. What else might explain the deviation? It’s been a very productive year for me in academic research and writing which has meant lots of time devoted to reading articles, cases, and bits and pieces of books rather than books cover-to-cover. I’ve also been very scattered in my reading of late such that I find myself now surrounded by ten partially read books, some of them 500 plus pages, most of them more than half read, all of them very good books that I plan to finish, but not before the new year rings in. But enough about the books I didn’t finish. What of the ones that I did?

Of the 75 on my list, 62 were fiction, 11 non-fiction, and 3 poetry. They were nearly evenly split between male and female authors: 38 written by men, 34 written by women, 2 co-written by a combination of both, and one written by a pseudonymous author whose sex has not been revealed. The list is dominated by English-language authors from Canada, Scotland, England, and the U.S., but it also includes books by Australian, Chilean, Czech, French, Japanese, Norwegian, and Swedish authors. Eight were translations. I’d like to be reading more works in translation than that but, nevertheless, it’s a marked improvement from the one or two translations per year that I was averaging before I started seeking them out in connection with my 2007 “Reading Across Borders” challenge.

In fiction it was a genre-heavy year, with 40 of the 62 fiction titles falling into the category of crime fiction, and a further 7 into the category of fantasy (the latter a testament to my continuing love affair with Terry Pratchett’s discworld novels). In non-fiction, there was the usual smattering of biography, memoir and books about writing and/or reading. But also a number of books on running (my antidote to Olympic withdrawl) and on nutrition and food politics (always an interest but now, I think, elevated to a preoccupation). The poetry books were all contemporary, small press titles by Canadian authors. Three sounds like a scant number, but given that I rarely read poetry books cover-to-cover, opting instead to dip in and out, that number doesn’t accurately reflect the amount of poetry that I read.

One unusual feature of this year’s list of books read is the number of authors that made repeat appearances on it. The list includes seven authors by whom I read anywhere from three to six books in a single year. This can be accounted for by a combination of happy discoveries (new-to-me authors whose work I liked so well that I immediately sought out and read more of their books) and binge reading (it’s common-place for me to read several instalments of a mystery series in quick succession).

One all-too-usual feature of the list is that it has a resolutely contemporary tilt. It breaks down into 59 twenty-first century titles (18 of those published in 2008), and 17 twentieth century titles, with nary a one from the nineteenth century or earlier. (Yes, if you recall any of the bold resolutions that I made this time last year, that does mean that I didn’t finish War and Peace, or Les Miserables, or Don Quixote.)

If I were in a mood for making resolutions, I’d resolve to expand my reading horizons in 2009 by seeking out books from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and endeavouring to read at least a few pre-twentieth century titles. But I’m not in a mood for making resolutions. I may take my reading in those directions, but I’m not making any promises in that regard to myself or anyone else. I’m going to read whatever I feel like reading whenever I feel like it. My only bookish resolution is to blog more often, or at least more consistently, in 2009.

Detail: My Reading Year

0 Les Misérables: Take Three

Three times I have resolved to read Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.

The first was when I visited Hugo's tomb in Paris at the age of seventeen. It seemed a properly writerly thing to do to visit his tomb, but I did recognize that it would have been a more meaningful pilgrimage if I had actually read the man's work.

The second was a few years later when I stumbled upon a black and white film adaptation on late night television that thoroughly piqued my interest in the character of Jean Valjean. (I think it was this version, but I'd have to watch it again to be sure.)

The third was earlier this year when Danielle proposed reading it en masse.

Alas I did not follow through on occasions one or two. I don't think I even got as as far along as checking the book out of the library. But I feel sure that the third time will be the charm with me and Les Misérables, particularly now that Danielle's suggestion has crystalized into a formal group read with its own blog home, Into the Parisian Underworld, set up by Ashleigh. I'm confident that the enthusiasm of my fellow bloggers for the enterprise will buoy me up if my own flags.

I concede that the early passages about the bishop aren't exactly gripping. (Is it sacrilege to say that I understand why the movie didn't begin with him?) But the odd line has made me laugh out loud and I'm sure things will liven up when Jean Valjean enters the narrative.

So look for more posts on Les Misérables as I progress through it. And please join us at Into the Parisian Underworld if you fancy reading along. I anticipate much interesting discussion of the book among the group read participants.

Detail: Les Misérables: Take Three

0 Robert Lecker on the Responsibilities of Criticism

Robert Lecker on the responsibilities of criticism:

I began to see that there were responsibilities attached to criticism. If you were going to be really honest, you would have to show how the reading process could throw you off track, take you away from what you were supposed to be focusing on, run you around and around until you saw all the routes you could take that you weren't taking, all the things you should know that you didn't. You could keep all those inadequacies and detours out of the reading, or you could take the risk that maybe a few other people might be interested in the problems posed by reading, and not just the reading itself. For it was the problems that made the process interesting and valid as an aesthetic pursuit.

From Robert Lecker, Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit (2006).

Detail: Robert Lecker on the Responsibilities of Criticism

0 Canadian Reading Habits

The Globe and Mail reports today on “an ambitious, 102-page study of Canada's retail book sector conducted for Canadian Heritage” which “provides a panoramic survey of the industry.” I’ll have to read the study in its entirety to absorb its full implications, but in the meantime the Globe’s summary offers some food for thought. Clearly the report contains disturbing news about the state of bookselling in Canada. But it also provides encouraging statistics about Canadian reading and book buying habits including the following:

average time spent reading: 4.5 hours a week;
average number of books read each year: 17;
percentage of Canadians who buy at least one book a year: 81.

Those numbers seem to me to provide a nice rebuttal to ubiquitous claims about the death of reading.

For the Globe and Mail article, click here, and for the full report, The Book Retail Sector in Canada, click here.

Detail: Canadian Reading Habits

0 The Weekend Book Pages and My Ever-Expanding TBR List

I began my day with what was, during a less frenetic time in my life, a Saturday morning ritual: reading the Globe and Mail’s weekend books section cover to cover. Here’s what caught my attention this morning:

Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes by Andrew Lycett (reviewed by Clifford Goldfarb): I’ve long been intrigued by Arthur Conan Doyle’s early life in Edinburgh but, due to a dearth of documentation, previous biographies have had little to say about it. The situation has changed thanks to several hundred letters by Conan Doyle which have only recently been made available to scholars. Apparently Andrew Lycett has taken full advantage producing what Goldfarb pronounces “the best biography we have had” of Conan Doyle. I may have to dash to the bookstore immediately for this one.

Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett (reviewed by Charles Foran): Certainly I’ve heard of Ronan Bennett but I have not yet read any of his novels. According to Charles Foran this latest novel doesn’t measure up to the best of his previous ones, but the description he provides of Zugzwang has me keen to read it all the same:

     With his latest, the setting is Russia in 1914. Dr. Otto Spethmann is a St. Petersburg psychoanalyst drawn against his every instinct into anti-czarist intrigue involving a cast of revolutionaries and reactionaries, along with their various henchmen. A high-profile Jew in a gleefully anti-Semitic society, Spethmann is vulnerable to attack even before he opens his office door to the patients seeking relief from their torments.
     Through that door walk Anna Petrovna, a beauty from the St. Petersburg aristocracy with a powerful shadowy father, the damaged Bolshevik leader Petrov, rakish Polish pianist Kopelzon and unstable chess genius Rozental, as well as various undercover cops and state assassins. Additionally, the widower Spethmann has a fiery teenager daughter, whose dalliance with a poet has gotten her father involved in the mess.

There’s no way I can resist psychoanalysis and poetry and chess in Russia in 1914.

Falsework by Gary Geddes (reviewed by George Murray): Although I’m a keen reader of poetry, my knowledge of the form is not very broad, and I always learn something from George Murray’s reviews, particularly from the deft fashion in which he sets each work in context. In this review, Murray assesses Gary Geddes’ Falsework as an example of the book-length sequence of poems, and also against Geddes own previous work. It’s not a rave review, but it’s piqued my interest all the same. Here’s the description that precedes the critical analysis:

Mixing verse and prose, Falsework presents a patchwork of character voices and narrative exposition that revisits the mid-construction collapse of Vancouver's Second Narrows Bridge in 1958, a disaster that killed 18 workers and left a traumatic scar on the psyche of the city, the province and the young poet himself.

André Alexis on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: This is the second instalment in a year-long series for which the Globe and Mail has assembled an international panel of experts to select “the 50 Greatest Books ever written.” This was my introduction to the series as I somehow missed the first instalment last week (though I quickly flipped back to last week’s edition to check it out: Martin Levin (Globe Books Editor) on Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). I don’t put much stock in such lists, but I do enjoy the discussion and controversy that attempts to compile them generate. And what I find particularly appealing about this rendition is the slow unfolding of the list over the course of a year in the form of a detailed exploration of each book. One of the limitations of newspaper books sections that is often remarked upon in the litblogosphere is their nearly exclusive focus on newly published books. I’m very much looking forward to the prospect of seeing half a page of the Globe books section devoted to a classic work, often from the distant past, each week. I will be following the series with interest throughout the year.

More reviews of small press short story collections: I did not fail to notice that this is the second week in a row that the Globe has featured group reviews of small press short story collections (this week A Grave in the Air by Stephen Henighan and Incidental Music by Carol Matthews reviewed by Marianne Ackerman, and last week three collections reviewed by Cathy Stonehouse, a link to which is unfortunately no longer available). I’m always happy to see more review ink devoted to small presses and short fiction. Of course, I’d be even happier if it was my short story collection being reviewed in the Globe and Mail, but you can’t have everything!

Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed my Saturday morning. Did the weekend book pages prompt you to add any new titles to your TBR list this week?

Detail: The Weekend Book Pages and My Ever-Expanding TBR List

0 Reading Plans

I’m not going to freight my reading plans with the weight of the word “resolution.” But I do have some plans and this might be the year that I bring them to fruition.

Big Books

I’m a great fan of the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Chekhov’s short stories, so the recent publication of their translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace seems like reason enough to embark on it at this juncture. I already cracked it open earlier today and I’m excited about spending a good bit of this winter inhabiting this book.

I had intended to read Don Quixote last year along with a group of fellow bloggers but I never got past the prologue. This spring I’m going to give it another go.

Series

Only after I picked up a copy of Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room at a book sale last year did I realize that it was part of his 12-volume “A Dance to the Music of Time” series. I recalled having come across several glowing mentions of this series by Terry Teachout and OGIC at About Last Night, and I decided that I ought to read the whole series in order rather than beginning in the middle. I’ve borrowed the first book (A Question of Upbringing) from the library and I’m ready to begin.

In 2005, after a six-month campaign sponsored by the Scottish Book Trust, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Sunset Song, the first volume in his “Scots Quair” trilogy, was voted the best Scottish book of all time. It’s past time that I read it, and the rest of the trilogy as well.

Scottish Literature

I regularly read a lot of Scottish books, but now that I’m armed with Robert Crawford’s Scotland’s Books: the Penguin History of Scottish Literature, I’ve taken a notion to explore Scottish literature a bit more systematically. I’m not entirely sure yet what form this project will take, but I expect this year I’ll take some steps in this direction. Perhaps I’ll even resume my Scottish Gaelic lessons.

World Literature

Last year, I dramatically increased the number of works in translation that I read and in so doing encountered some marvellous writers. I plan to continue to expand my reading horizons; in particular, I plan to seek out more works by writers from outside of North America and Europe.

I'm looking forward to all of it.

Detail: Reading Plans

0 Year End Tally

I read 118 books in 2007. That’s more than usual (in 2005 my total was 109, and in 2006 an even 100). I’m not surprised though, given what a busy and stressful year it’s been. That may sound counterintuitive, but when I’m crazily busy and stressed out, I’m much more likely to spend my non-work hours reading than, for example, out socializing. Under such circumstances, I relish, indeed require, the time I spend inside of books that much more.

101 of those books were fiction, and 17 non-fiction, continuing a trend away from non-fiction that I first noted last year. Perhaps in 2008 it will begin to tilt back? The fiction breaks down into 97 novels and 4 short story collections. This is many fewer short story collections than usual and I’m not sure how to account for that. If I added in all the individual stories that I read in anthologies, literary magazines and collected or selected works, the balance wouldn’t be quite so far off. Still. I think now is a good time for The Short Story Reading Challenge! The genre breakdown of the fiction is as follows: 28 literary or general fiction, 29 mystery, 25 children’s or YA, and, the surprising development, 19 fantasy. How did a genre that was scarcely a blip on my radar in previous years come to figure so prominently in this year’s reading? It’s all down to my newfound infatuation with Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels—so funny and smart and politically astute. The non-fiction titles covered a range of subjects including biography, memoir, essays, travel, history, and health.

My year’s reading took on a decisively contemporary slant with 83 books from the 21st century (a full 27 of those first published in 2007), 35 from the 20th and a paltry single volume from the 19th. As is the case nearly every year, the sole 19th century author that I read was Robert Louis Stevenson. I think in 2008 I’m going to have to resolve to stretch further back in time more frequently.

My reading continues to be dominated by authors from England (42) and the U.S. (40), but with a respectable number of books by Canadians (14, a lot fewer than normal) and Scots (8) appearing in the final tally. But thanks to The Reading Across Borders Challenge, I did much better this year in reading works in translation: 11 works in translation read, rather than the usual token one or two. These eleven works were translated from Icelandic, French, Spanish, Polish, and Czech.

I usually read more books by women than men, but not this year: 64 by men, and 54 by women. Finally (and I note this here because it might explain how the male authors rocketed into the lead this year), there were a number of authors by whom I read multiple books but two in particular that dominated: Terry Pratchett (19!) and Paul Auster (8).

All in all, it was a very satisfying year’s reading.

Stay tuned for my list of ten favourites which I will post later this week.

Detail: Year End Tally