Category Archives: Reading

Clover’s Luck

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My Insklingers writing group compatriot Kallie George has a new book coming out after Christmas, called Clover’s Luck. It’s the first in her Magical Animal Adoption Agency series, published by Disney/Hyperion in the U.S. and by HarperCollins in Canada.

maaa

Kallie was kind enough to give my 10-year-old an advance copy, and here’s my daughter’s review:

I thought this was a really good book. I love Clover and the whole M.A.A.A. I especially liked the part when Clover turns green in the witch’s potion and she realizes she is lucky. My favorite characters are Clover and the dragon. I felt bad for the poor unicorn that lost its tail. If I had a unicorn (and if there was a witch disguised as a princess trying to steal my unicorn’s tail), I would kick that princess/witch off the face of the earth! I’m not such a fan of princesses anyway. It was a really good book, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series!

I am not such a fan of processes either, but I’m a big fan of Kallie and Clover. I think the entire series is going to be… well… magical.

Hearing voices

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I’m talking to myself this morning, practicing to be part of YA: The Trilogy at the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library tomorrow. There’s a whole slew of local YA writers presenting and reading, including Sara Leach, Carrie Mac, Melanie Jackson, and current VPL writer-in-resident Gabrielle Prendergast.

In the afternoon session, I get to talk about taking non-fiction “outside the box.” But mostly, this morning, I’m thinking about my first presentation, which must fit under the category “What IS Young Adult Literature and Why Should I Read/Write It?” My plan is to talk about voice and how it stems partly from place, then read a little from both Anywhere But Here and my newest work-in-progress.

I have 10 minutes or less in each session to be funny or enlightening or both. Totally doable, right? (Don’t answer that.)

I read an amazing YA novel over the weekend, which is part of what has me mulling about voice. The book is Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern, and one of the protagonists is Amy, a girl with cerebral palsy. Because Amy is bright, and has spent much of her life with adult aides, there’s a wonderful adult quality to her thoughts. One of my favourite scenes in the entire book is one in which she points out to fellow student Sanjay that his talk of “conquests” may actually be a problem in the girl department.

saywhatyouwill

Amy is struggling with all the emotions every other teen faces, and so, despite her educated and adult thoughts, she still agonizes about clothes and kissing and her big crush — all in maybe even a younger-than-teen way. The two sides of Amy make her an entirely unique character.

But enough about Amy. Let’s go back to talking about me, and how I’m going to ensure I sound like an adult at the podium tomorrow. How does one pronounce “pedantic” anyway? Did you know I had an argument with an urban planner last week about whether one was supposed to pronounce detritus as “dee-tree-us” or “dee-trite-us”? The urban planner won.

You see why my solo practicing is necessary…

Feel free to stop by and say hi at YA: The Trilogy! And tell me if I pronounce things wrong.

How Shani Mootoo got me married

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I just picked up Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab from the library. And it’s reminded me that Shani Mootoo may well be responsible for my marriage.

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Min and I met at a couple large-group events. We had dinner a couple times. Then he began inviting me to sports events.

Beach volleyball?
I have no idea how to play volleyball. There should have been public service announcements at my high school saying, “you must learn volleyball now or your social life will be forever stunted.” But there weren’t. So no, I would not be playing volleyball on a beach.

Soccer?
Um… can you play soccer with your arms over your head, ducking whenever the ball passes by? I think not.

Ultimate?
I was getting worried by this time, so I went to at least watch the ultimate game. Min’s friend Glenn walked up and grabbed his water bottle. “I’ve drank two of these today and I’ve only pissed once,” he said. I began to worry about this entire situation.

When I complained about the issue at work, my friend Robin said, “You know what? You should take him to a poetry reading.”

Aha! This was a fantastic idea. If I was going to spend time far outside my comfort zone, then Min should have to spend time outside his, right?

I got a Georgia Straight and looked up the literary events for the week. No poetry, but a presentation by three women at the Vancouver Public Library, all speaking about weaving immigrant voices into their work.

We went.

We listened.

We laughed… a lot.

As I remember, there was much talk about overprotective mothers, and Min could relate. He loved it. He even made friends with another writer in the row behind ours.

As for me? I sat there beaming, because I’d found a guy willing to sit through a literary reading. AND, he’d paid for dinner. I decided to overlook the sports thing.

I can’t remember who the other two speakers were. But thank you, Shani Mootoo.

Writer in pieces

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I’m on the final pages of Ellen in Pieces, the new grown-up novel by Caroline Adderson.

elleninpieces

Isn’t the cover the most fabulous thing ever?

I say the new “grown-up novel” because I know Caroline more as a kids’ writer. She lives nearby, we attend CWILL BC meetings together, and I’ve read her chapter books. So I knew she was smart-funny.

But I didn’t, until this week, know that she was sharp-funny, wicked-funny, or raunchy-funny. And it turns out she is. Also, capable of writing scenes of chest-crushing sadness.

I’m going to look at her in a whole different way now! And I’m also going to look up her backlist…

The wacky factor

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I was in the middle of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam last week when I went to see the Douglas Coupland exhibit at the art gallery. Now, I know that Margaret Atwood and Douglas Coupland are rather different. You would never mistake the work of one for that of the other. But I couldn’t help but notice a few similarities.

They are both students of the Canadian identity.

The are both experts at digging into the scary parts of our present and taking those parts just one step further. Not a hundred steps further, into Isaac Asimov territory, but one step — which is a much more chilling thing.

They were both recognized early in their careers for their mix of insight and general wackiness. And, thus encouraged, both have continued to grow more cutting and more quirky.

If you combine these three things, what do they say about us, the Canadian readership/audience that has given these two such iconic status? Obviously, we value smarts. We’re willing to gaze (okay, at least glance) into the dark side. But we also have a well-honed appreciation for the wacky.

Would you agree?

In summary…

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I’ve been reading (and loving) MaddAddam.

I’ve been a huge Margaret Atwood fan ever since high school, when my friend Suzanne lent me her big sister’s copy of The Handmaid’s Tale. If Margaret Atwood ever turned up at my door and said, “Tanya, I’ve decided we need to run away and start a commune together, before civilization disintegrates around us,” well… Min might be cooking his own dinners that week.

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This particular trilogy is a winning combination of twisted and incisive. But my favourite thing about the third book, MaddAddam, is not even the story. It’s the summaries, in the opening pages, of the first two books in the series.

As a writer, no matter what your status or calibre, you create synopses of your books. You write them for grant applications or project pitches. You write them for media interviews. You even write them for yourself, when you forget where the heck your story’s supposed to be going.

Most of us work very hard to make our synopses perfect. We want them highly intelligent, imbued with subtle humour. We want our characters to seem real and our plots irresistible.

But apparently if you’re Margaret Atwood, you’re allowed to write synopses that sound like big servings of cray cray. Let me give you a small example, from the summary for Oryx and Crake:

The Crakers mate seasonally, when parts of them turn blue. Crake tried to rid them of symbolic thinking and music, but they have an eerie singing style all their own and have developed a religion, with Crake as their creator, Oryx as mistress of the animals, and Snowman as their reluctant prophet. It is he who has led them out of the high-tech Paradice dome where they were made to their present home beside the ocean.

Now, can you IMAGINE if I submitted a synopsis like this? The publisher would send me a prescription for antipsychotics instead of a cheque.

But that’s because I am not Margaret Atwood.

If you haven’t yet done so, you should go out immediately and buy all three titles. They’re hilariously brilliant. You will never smile so often while reading about the end of the world.

My Lynn Coady kick

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I read Hellgoing last week and fell in love with Lynn Coady.

I’d been procrastinating about reading it because (a) short stories aren’t my favourite and (b) it’s called Hellgoing, and I wasn’t in a going-to-hell frame of mind. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. There’s nothing hellish about the book, except in an anxiety-ridden, “why am I in this handbasket?” sort of way.

hellgoing

People keep telling me I’ll like gardening better as I get older, which has proven completely untrue. However, maybe I am liking short stories more. I certainly loved these ones. Especially the one that coincidentally mentions Creston.

Most of all, I love Lynn Coady’s ability to focus a page on what seems like a mundane moment, and reveal it as hilarious or heart-crushing. Or both.

I’m reading her novel The Antagonist now, and the entire book is already worth it because of one paragraph about drunk guys and outdoor sofas.

Boys with sticks

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I was sorting through a few of my daughter’s old chapter books yesterday, when I realized something. They’re all about the daily dramas in the lives of girls. Friendship issues and birthday parties and small school embarrassments. Even the ones featuring spies or detectives are set firmly in the day-to-day.

They’re not so different from the play narratives my daughter and her friends were enacting at that age. “You be the mean girl, and I’ll be the nice girl, and you be the teacher getting us in trouble.”

ivy and bean

Contrast this with the books my son is reading — most recently the Zac Power series — and there is no day-to-day. Zac spends about two paragraphs getting ready to do something normal before he’s whipped away to another top-secret mission on a glacier or in dense jungle. And all my son’s books are like this. Characters zip away to outer space, or get sucked into video games, or find themselves transformed into ninjas.

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This has made me wonder if writers must turn to otherworldly scenarios because boys have no actual narratives in their day-to-day lives. Maybe when my son and his friend are throwing sticks, they’re just throwing sticks. Maybe when they’re digging, they’re only digging.

I outlined this theory for Min, and he said: “Right into adulthood, baby.”

The reading check-in

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I hit 50 titles over at The 50 Book Pledge, just in time for my mid-year check in. So far, the stats are looking thus:

Middle Grade
Good Night, Maman, by Norma Fox Mazer
Love that Dog, By Sharon Creech
Hate That Cat, by Sharon Creech
End of the Line, by Sharon E. McKay
Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry
Count Me In, by Sara Leach
Because of Winn-Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo
Better Nate than Ever, by Tim Federle
I’ll Be Home Soon, by Luanne Armstrong
Tinfoil Sky, by Cyndi Sand-Eveland
One Year in Coal Harbor, by Polly Horvath
Mimi Powers and the I-Don’t-Know-What, by Victoria Miles
Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, by Chris Grabenstein
Son, by Lois Lowry
Violet Mackerel’s Remarkable Recovery, by Anna Brandord

Young Adult
Boy 21, by Matthew Quick
Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
Year of Mistaken Discoveries, by Eileen Cook
Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets, by Evan Roskos
The Diviners, by Libba Bray
Pirate Cinema, by Cory Doctorow
Homeland, by Cory Doctorow
Take Me There, by Carolee Dean

Classics
An Old-Fashioned Girl, by Louisa May Alcott
Gritli’s Children, by Johanna Spyri

Fiction
The Woefield Poultry Collective, by Susan Juby
Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan
The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion
The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin
Irma Both, by Miriam Toews
All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
The Shadow Queen, by Sandra Gulland
Blindness, by José Saramago
When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Open Secret, by Deryn Collier
And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini
Story House, by Timothy Taylor
Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Good Luck of Right Now, by Matthew Quick
The Wind is Not a River, by Brian Payton
The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

Non-Fiction
War, by Sebastian Junger
What Now?, by Ann Patchett
Manage Your Day-to-Day, ed. by Jocelyn K. Glei
Still Writing, by Dani Shapiro
The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin
The Sports Gene, by David Epstein
Why We Write, ed. by Meredith Maran

I’ve always loved the essay called “A Rake at Reading” in The Merry Heart, by Robertson Davies. He says:

So — I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me — if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time.

Exactly.

Of the books on this list, 12 were passed along to me (with insistence) by my daughter and two by my son. Six were given by friends, two were written by friends, and another two were recommended by friends, including my fiction pick of the year thus far: The Goldfinch. (Thank you, Rachel, for that suggestion.)

My non-fiction pick so far is Still Writing, a lovely collection of meditations. If you’re a writer, I highly recommend it.

Onwards to the second half of the reading year!

Potter-mania

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My daughter has read one Harry Potter book every six months since she turned seven. Min and I proposed the schedule as a way to space the books apart, because we didn’t think she could or should read the whole series at seven. Now, three years later, it’s turned into a traditional birthday reward.

This year my son decided he, too, should read a Harry Potter book on his sister’s birthday, so he started book one on my Kindle. This morning, he was immersed in Harry’s first trip Diagon Alley.

harry-potter

He couldn’t stop reading. He BEGGED to take my Kindle to school.

That didn’t seem like the best idea, so we trudged across the street early and asked the school librarian for the book, despite the “no new check-outs in June” rule. She signed it out under her own name, and my son headed down the hall with his prize.

Since my daughter carried her book to school, with her finger marking her spot the whole way, she’ll probably spend the day reading as well.

Which is probably not the most convenient thing for their teachers.

But it’s pretty darned adorable.