Summer Book Club Week 7: Why Libraries Rule

Guidelines for the Summer Book Club: if you’ve read this book, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading this week? Please comment, or post on your own blog and link in the comments below.

starrI began and tossed aside a number of books this week.  The only one I read through was Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead.  I wrote about Shipstead’s Astonish Me two weeks ago, so I won’t elaborate on Seating Arrangements, except to tell you that one of the biggest problems in my life right now is that Shipstead has published only two novels.  I will also share two snippets with you.  Snippet One:

“I understand why hippopotamuses spend so much time in water.”

“Hippopotami,” corrected Livia.

“You can say hippopotamuses, can’t you?” said Daphne.

“You’re the bride,” Livia said. “You can say whatever you want.”

Daphne eased down into her chair.  “Dominique, don’t they have hippos in the Nile?”

“They do.  I believe the plural is ‘scary fuckers.'”

Snippet Two:

“It’s so cold in this restaurant.  I don’t know why you chose it.”

“I didn’t choose it,” Winn said.  “Dicky and Maude did.”

“They wouldn’t have.  They know I don’t care for the cold.”

“Maybe,” Winn offered, “you’re feeling the chill of approaching death.”

She gave him a long, gloomy squint.  “This family is falling into the middle class,” she said.

Dear Maggie Shipstead: please write another novel soon.

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Abandoned after considerable investment: The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb.  I know that the reader’s antipathy toward the narrator is part of the point.  I soldiered on for 100 pages, and then I was like, Sorry, man, I cannot spend one more minute in your self-righteous enraged company.  I’ve made a bunch of attempts at Wally Lamb’s novels on friends’ recommendations and it’s just never taken.  He’s a very good writer, but not for me.

Abandoned after minimal investment: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.  I’m sure this is a good book.  However, I started reading it with a sick cat sleeping on me, and a kitten dies in the first chapter, so that was that for that.

Abandoned before investment set in: a bunch of well-reputed murder mysteries.  Something in me really wants to love reading murder mysteries, and I almost never do.  I write a lot about my love of simple, invisible prose; this is usually a problem because I want to enjoy novels that critics/all my literary friends are raving about and then I find myself yelling “WILL YOU PLEASE STOP WAVING AROUND ALL THE WORK YOU DID ‘WRITING’ THIS AND JUST TELL THE DAMN STORY”.  However, I also have the opposite problem: I get a few lines into a book and start yelling “OH GOD THAT IS A TERRIBLE TURN OF PHRASE” and “YES I KNOW WE NEED TO KNOW THIS INFORMATION THAT YOUR CHARACTER IS SO BALDLY LAYING OUT IN UNNATURAL EXPOSITORY DIALOGUE BUT I JUST CAN’T.”  I know; my life is hard.  But summer is short, and I’m not going to waste it reading books that get on my nerves even for a second.

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Epiphany of the week: my longstanding habit of buying piles and piles of books is actually detrimental to my life as a reader.  It means I try to joylessly plow through books I don’t like because I’ve spent money on them, instead of saying Screw you, book I don’t like, and moving on to something I will love.  This summer, I’ve rediscovered one of my greatest childhood joys: the public library.  Free books!  And what’s more, it’s way better than my childhood public library because I live in Montreal now so I have a city-wide network of public libraries and they will send me any book they have.  The time I used to spend searching for books on Amazon (and then buying them, and then maybe not liking them) can now be spent searching the Montreal Public Library network for every book that’s ever been on my Amazon wishlist and reserving them all and then receiving awesome telephone calls telling me that my book is waiting for my just up the street.  GO TO THE LIBRARY, PEOPLE.  YOU WON’T BE SORRY.

Have you read Seating Arrangements, or any of the other books I attempted this week? If so, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading?

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Posted on by Siobhan Curious 11

Summer Book Club Week 6: Still Life With Bread Crumbs

Guidelines for the Summer Book Club: if you’ve read this book, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading this week? Please comment, or post on your own blog and link in the comments below.

Cover Image - Bread CrumbsDon’t get me wrong: Anna Quindlen’s Still Life With Bread Crumbs is a good book.  The prose is beautifully invisible, just as I like it.  The characters are, with one exception, convincing, and the structure is odd enough to keep things interesting.

In terms of plot, though, my alarms started going off early.  Still Life With Bread Crumbs is a middle-aged-lady romantic fantasy, and my antipathy to such fantasies may be a symptom of my own self-loathing.  I am, after all, a middle-aged lady.  I am in good health and of relatively sound mind, and some people find me pleasant and/or interesting company.  However, I feel quite certain that, if my husband runs off with … whoever, men twenty years my junior will not be mooning around about my extraordinary mouth, or whatever my equivalent is to Rebecca Winter’s odd sixty-year-old embouchre.

Maybe I’m wrong about this – what do I know about men and what they moon about? – and, if so, I apologize to Anna Quindlen, and men, and middle-aged ladies everywhere, for my incredulity.  However, the character of Jim Bates is a classic romance novel hero, and I’m not a fan of the genre.  Of course we middle-aged ladies would like to believe that men like he exist, men who can fix the roof AND survey local wildlife in their spare time AND  bring us packets of their fresh-killed venison because they sense we might need it AND still find time to be a bit distracted because there is something about us that they just can’t shake free of.  I have less life experience than Anna Quindlen or her heroine; also, if Quindlen’s bio photo is any indication, I am considerably less attractive at forty-four than she is in her sixties.  So maybe she knows things I don’t.

Nonetheless, the passages from Jim Bates’ point of view prompted me to say, “Oh, come on,” more than once.  Out loud.  Lines like “every time Jim Bates looked at her lower lip he had an impulse to take it gingerly between his front teeth” would be interesting if they were complicated by some sort of ambivalence or even menace, but instead, they seem to be expressions of a tender manly (read: Harlequinesque) desire for a woman old enough to be his mother that I just can’t swallow.  Do I think men in their forties can be sexually attracted to women in their sixties?  Of course they can.  Do I think that attraction manifests itself the way Quindlen portrays it?  I don’t, and she didn’t convince me.

That said, I held my nose and kept reading, because there’s so much else going on here.  Rebecca isn’t a straightforward Mary Sue; she’s difficult, bruised, and mostly realistic in her assessments of herself, particularly her fall from art stardom to poverty and mediocrity, and the demise of her pretty nasty marriage.  Her portrait of her relationship with her ex-husband is delicious, full of observations like

Rebecca forgave him nothing.  She told herself that this was not because he had betrayed her but because he had betrayed his son.  This was one of those statements that sounded sensible until you compared it against actual human psychology.

or – and this one just kills me:

Peter would do something…and she would gather up her shreds of dignity and respond with the silent treatment.  Except that Peter liked the silent treatment – he found it restful.

I mean, that is one beautiful line.  There are more.  I kept considering tossing this book aside, and then something like that would come up, and I’d think, Wow, and I’d keep reading.  I’m not sorry.  I’m not able to suspend my disbelief enough to truly enjoy  traditional romances, but Quindlen’s exemplar is an impressive one.

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Also read this week: Megan Abbott’s Bury Me Deep, while I wait for The Fever to be available at my library.  I took a stab at Abbott’s Dare Me a few years ago, and felt like if I could get past the demanding prose at the beginning, I would probably find it riveting.  (I’ve said it before: i like my prose invisible.  Anything showy puts me off.)  Being short on time, I didn’t push on. Bury Me Deep gave me the same trouble, but it’s summer now, and I made the effort, and was rewarded.  It’s a wonderfully rich little pot-boiler, and I can’t wait to get Abbott’s other novels.

Abandoned this week:

  • The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion.  I wanted to be charmed by this book.  It’s clear that Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, one of my favourite books, is an important influence.  However, about 1/4 of the way in, I began to suspect that The Rosie Project is about how someone with Asperger’s syndrome can learn to be a delightful romantic hero by just trying harder, and my gut reaction was “No thanks.”
  • Delicious! by Ruth Reichl.  I probably didn’t give Delicious! a fair shot.  I love Reichl’s memoir Tender at the Bone; I teach it in my memoir class, and a lot of my students like it too.  It became apparent after a few pages that Delicious! is nothing like Tender at the Bone, and the exposition contains a lot of clunky dialogue, so I moved on.
  • The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton. See above re: showy prose.  Don’t like it.  This is my third stab at The Rehearsal; I keep being seduced by the cover and the promise of a story about high school sex scandals and precocious artistic teenagers.  People keep telling me I should read The Luminaries instead, but seriously, look at the size of it.

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Have you read Still Life With Bread Crumbs, or any of the other books I read/attempted this week? If so, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading?

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 12

Summer Book Club Week 5: Astonish Me

Guidelines for the Summer Book Club: if you’ve read this book, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading this week? Please comment, or post on your own blog and link in the comments below.

astonish-meAccording to the jacket flap, Maggie Shipstead’s Astonish Me is about “the nature of talent, the choices we must make in search of fulfillment, and how we square the yearning for comfort with the demands of art.”  To me, though, this is a novel about unrequited love.  It is not about one particular unrequited love story, but many: about the myriad shades of unrequited love, and the way it shapes all of us and makes us do both foolish and tremendous things.

I loved this book.  LOVED IT.

Like a lot of little girls, I was obsessed with ballet.  I took classes, and dreamed about going to the National Ballet School, but mostly, I read books about ballet.  I loved Veronica Tennant’s On Stage, Please, about a girl’s first years in the dance world, and must have read it ten times. When I was a teenager, I compulsively read and reread a pulp novel called Ballerina.  This story of two friends following their ballet dreams is a big pile of garbage, but I wanted to live in its pulsing, backbiting, sexy world all the time. (I didn’t imagine I’d be able to confirm the title, or even the existence, of this book, all these years later – it seems like something that should have vanished long ago into the mists of trashy book history – but check out this wonderful review by someone who was similarly bewitched by it.)

Astonish Me has all the intensity and glamour of those books, but it is masterfully crafted literary novel for grownups.  In 1975, Joan, a member of the corps in a New York ballet company, helps a gifted premier danseur defect from the Soviet Union.  She loves him, but it’s clearly never going to work.  Things unfold from there: Joan’s roommate, Elaine, loves the gay artistic director of the company; Joan’s high school best friend loves Joan and eventually marries her; their son Harry loves their next-door neighbour’s daughter Chloe;  everyone knows how everyone else feels and just muddles along, taking what they need when it is offered, and offering what they can in return.

This central theme – that relationships are never balanced, that devotion is never equal, but that we can connect with each other anyway – unfolds through beautiful, convincing dialogue and a series of quiet yet disquieting events.  The characters are intelligent and self-aware – they know themselves, but in a way that seems entirely real and not precocious.  The teenaged Harry, for example, sitting next to Chloe in a dark theatre watching a musical, “imagines how one day he will be the best dancer and Chloe will want to dance only with him.”  How many of us, watching someone do something astonishing on a stage or a racetrack or a screen, have imagined ourselves into the body of the star we are observing, and have imagined the love we would inspire in someone we can’t seem to reach in any other way?  The title of the book calls out to this yearning.  “Astonish me,” we imagine the other is thinking.  “All you have to do is astonish me, and then I will love you.”

I wanted this book never to end.  I can’t wait to get my hands on Shipstead’s earlier novel, Seating Arrangements.  If you have ever been in love with ballet, or the idea of ballet, or any other art, or a person who didn’t love you back, or the idea of a person who was really someone else entirely, I hope you’ll read this book.

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Also read this week: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. This is a spooky little romp; I read it in an afternoon.  The choppy semi-stream-of-consciousness style is not really my thing, but it’s a good story and I was T-boned by the ending.

Abandoned this week: Joyce Carol Oates’ Carthage.  I try again and again to read Oates, and I just can’t do it.  Her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is one of my favourites of all time, but I have found that I can tolerate about a short-story’s worth of each her novels before I’m overcome with despair and have to go watch a sitcom to pull myself together.

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Have you read Astonish Me, or either of the other two books I attempted this week? If so, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading?

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 9

Summer Book Club Week 4: The Other Typist

Guidelines for the Summer Book Club: if you’ve read this book, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading this week? Please comment, or post on your own blog and link in the comments below.

theothertypistI had issues with Suzanne Rindell’s The Other Typist.  It appears that I liked it, because I finished it.  I have no compunction about abandoning books if I don’t feel more driven to finish them than I do to, say, watch another episode of House.  I was driven to finish this book, but all along the way, it bothered me.

I was bothered by the occasionally on-the-nose dialogue, by the broad everyone’s-a-villain characterization, which is equally broadly complicated by our early understanding that our narrator, Rose, is not reliable. Characters burst out with proclamations like

Now, Rose, that’s not called for.  Best to mind your own business, else people might get the wrong idea about you and the Sergeant.  Don’t tell me they neglected to impart a proper sense of professionalism to you at the typing school…

or

I can assure you, Rose, no one will give you trouble about your breeding here.  I can see that even though you are just a woman, you know very well how to make yourself useful, and your industriousness will not go unappreciated in this office.

To be fair, there are clues that not all the dialogue is truly taking place. Rindell uses quotation marks in some spots and yet italicizes dialogue in others, as if to show us that the italicized dialogue might or might not be in Rose’s head.  (Or it might just be that dialogue in flashbacks is italicized to distinguish past from present.  I still hadn’t figured this out by the end of the book, and this also bothered me.)

Rose herself is sometimes exasperating in her attempts to win us over.  The seams in the author’s craft are visible, as though she wants us to notice how cleverly her narrator has been constructed.  For example, Rose shows us bits of her diary, an effusive and painstaking list of the charms and foibles of Odalie, the titular “other typist.”  These snippets are full of superlatives and exclamation marks, like a twelve-year-old’s descriptions of  her crush, but Rose then insists that there is “no great anomaly in my interest, only in my methods.” The story is full of these moments that fairly scream “I am self-deceptive! Look how self-deceptive I am, and how aware I am of my own self-deception!”, and they were jarring to me.

It wouldn’t be difficult to render these thoughts and conversations more artful, and therefore more satisfying.  Rindell does so elsewhere.  For example, in an early memory, Rose reports an overheard exchange in which the milkman describes why he doesn’t flirt with her as he does with all the other girls in her residence: “There’s something not right about that one…Can’t put my finger on it exactly, but it’s like the milk: Even when it’s not yet spoiled, you just know when it’s getting ready to go off.”  Not subtle, but nicely put.

Enough about what I didn’t like.  (I won’t get into the ending.)  The fact is, these moments of awkwardness bothered me because they pulled me out of an absorbing story.  It’s 1923.  (I’ll stop saying I’m not a fan of historical fiction; this clearly is no longer true.) Rose is a typist at a police precinct, and when Odalie is hired to join her, Rose becomes obsessed with her.  Odalie becomes her “friend,” and draws her into an unfamiliar world: speakeasies, lavish hotel rooms, beach holidays at grand estates on Long Island.  Of course, Odalie’s motives are suspect, not only to us but also to Rose, who can’t extricate herself despite her doubts.  What will become of them both?

When I found out…well, like I said, I won’t get into the ending.  (I’m not sure whether the problem is with it or with me.) Nevertheless, it’s a good ride, and I closed the book wondering if I should reread it someday to see if I can understand its story and techniques better.  This would suggest that I trust Rindell enough to doubt my own criticisms; in fact, I wish I could write such a compelling story.  My nit-picking may be jealousy.

I’ll read Rindell’s next novel.  If you like a fun, creepy, plot-driven thriller, you should probably read this one.

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Also read this week: Drama by Raina Telgemeier (a graphic novel about a middle school theatre production; lovely) and Me Before You by Jojo Moyes (loved it; might write about it later, so won’t say too much.)

Have you read The Other Typist, or either of the other two books I read this week? If so, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading this week?

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 7

Summer Book Club Week 3: The Signature of All Things

Guidelines for the Summer Book Club: if you’ve read this book, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading this week? Please comment, or post on your own blog and link in the comments below.

sigofallthingsSometimes I think I just don’t like reading any more.  Then I pick up a book like The Signature of All Things.

If Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love and other fine stories, hadn’t been the author, I wouldn’t have given this novel a chance.  There are several strikes against it.  First, it’s a big fat book (499 pages long). Given how short an interlude I have between the end of all my work responsibilities (I finished my last major tasks last Thursday) and their return (the middle of August), and the difficulty I have reading anything for pleasure during the school term, I’m rarely tempted by long books.  Second, the story begins with the birth of the protagonist, Alma Whittaker, in 1800.  I don’t usually care for historical fiction, so this was enough to put me off immediately.  Third, Alma is a botanist, and a lot of the story is about plants.  Now, I love to garden, and I love reading gardening how-to books, but “nature writing” has never been my bag.  (Don’t get me started on Annie Dillard.)

But you don’t have to care about plants, or the 19th century, to love this book.  You just need to care about being told a good story, no matter how long and rich and sprawling it is.

If Jane Austen were writing now, and writing historical rather than contemporary novels, she might write a book like The Signature of All Things. After Alma’s birth, we learn about the life of her father, a plant theif-cum-entrepreneur whose experiences help shape Alma into the scientist she becomes.  We learn about her loving but troubled relationships with her father, her mother, her sister, her mad best friend, and the various men who float in and out of her life.  At the centre of the story are a few  subjects that are both timely and timeless: the opportunities and limitations a woman faces when she is brilliant and homely; the complicated and unexpected forms that love can take; the precarious balance between one’s own happiness and that of others.

The force that drives the reader forward is Alma, who is wonderful: self-possessed and yet self-questioning, perceptive but occasionally shamed by her own blindness, determined to learn about both the natural world and the humans who live in it.  She is surrounded by other wonderful characters, like Hanneke the housekeeper, the only person Alma trusts with her deepest fears and griefs, because Alma knows that sobbing in Hanneke’s arms will bring about real consolation and not empty soothing:

“But I loved him,” Alma said.

Hanneke sighed. “Then you made an expensive error.  You loved a man who thought the world was made of butter.  You loved a man who wished to see stars by daylight.  He was nonsense.”

“He was not nonsense.”

“He was nonsense.“

The prose is stunning: precise, transparent, fast-moving, meticulous, and often surprising.  Gilbert describes Alma in one of her writing frenzies as “like a besotted drunk – who can run without falling, but who cannot walk without falling” – this made me laugh out loud.  Portraying the cool childhood relationship between Alma and her recently adopted sister Prudence, Gilbert explains,

Unkind words were never once exchanged.  They respectfully shared an umbrella with each other, arm in arm, whenever they walked in the rain.  They stepped aside for each other at doorways, each willing to let the other pass first….Prudence made for Alma [at Christmas] an exquisite satin pincushion, rendered in Alma’s favorite color, aubergine….”Thank you for the pincushion,” Alma wrote to Prudence, in a short note of considered politeness. “I shall be certain to use it whenever I find myself in need of a pin.”

The novel is riddled with these exquisite moments of characterization, and for this reason, I couldn’t put it down.  Which just goes to show: when it comes to reading novels, it is essential that we put aside our prejudices for the first fifty pages or so, because we never know what we might find.  You might think you don’t like long novels, or historical novels, or novels about the history of science, but maybe that’s because you haven’t yet read The Signature of All Things.

Have you read this book? If so, what did you think?  What about Gilbert’s other work; if you’ve read Eat, Pray, Love or any of her other works, are you a fan?

If not, what are you reading this week?

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 13

Summer Book Club Week 2: The Chairs are Where The People Go

Guidelines for the Summer Book Club: if you’ve read this book, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading this week? Please comment, or post on your own blog and link in the comments below.

chairs2Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? was one of my Top 10 Books of 2012.  I described that book as “exhilarating, befuddling, and inspiring…self-absorbed and miniature in detail, yet huge in scope.” The Chairs are Where the People Go is an entirely different sort of book. It still sounds like Sheila Heti, but it isn’t, really; it’s her friend Misha Glouberman, channeled through Heti’s typing hands.  It’s neither exhilarating nor befuddling; it might be inspiring, but I’m not sure.  It’s not self-absorbed, nor is it miniature, really, and its scope is – medium-sized.

In the introduction, Heti says that she finds Glouberman so interesting that she tried to write a novel about him, and failed, because her imaginary Misha just didn’t measure up to the real one.  So instead, she decided to spend a lot of time with him, ask him a bunch of questions, and transcribe his answers.  The result is this book, a collection of mini-essays on topics ranging from charades to neighbourhood associations to monogamy to absenteeism.

Some of it is boring.  I studied improv as a teenager, and so should probably be intrigued by Glouberman’s insights into how to improvise correctly, but I’m not.  Performance, as art and as metaphor, is the subject of a number of chapters, and I feel that it wears thin. However, the good thing about brief chapters is that if you don’t care for this one, the next one could be (and in this case often is) a nice surprise.  Let’s look at a couple of observations that I like.

I had certain ideas about what kind of person my girlfriend might be.  I met Margaux and I was pretty fascinated by her.  She’s a remarkably unusual person…I was with her for a while and I kept thinking, This is so not like the person I’d imagined. And at the same time I thought, once the relationship got at all serious, Well, I’m kind of stuck, because there’s no way in the world that I’m going to be able to find someone who’s sort of like Margaux but better, because there’s no one like Margaux.

Or this:

Margaux and I [watched] some terrible monologues being performed at some club in New York.  I was so angry and outraged that they thought that it was fair to make the demand, I’m going to talk now and you all have to shut up and listen.  I told Margaux, You have to be really sure that what you are saying is worthwhile and good before you ask that of people. She thought I was wrong…If the contract is that you have to be absolutely certain that it’s going to be worth people’s while, nobody would do anything…I think she’s probably right, but I can’t help feeling this way.

These little moments where you stop and realize “I’ve thought things like this but didn’t even know I was thinking them” are masterful.  They sneak up on you, like a neighbourhood cat who’s always around, but whom you don’t notice until he’s sitting in a different driveway.  Glouberman is opinionated but self-questioning, and that’s my favourite sort of person, so hanging out with him and listening to him hold forth on random stuff is…fine.

One difficulty is that the back cover and some other reviews I’ve read describe this book as funny, but I don’t find it funny at all.  And I think I’ve figured out why not.  Glouberman is the straight man, and the world around him is the funny guy.  I think his serious, rather naive tone is what people find amusing.  For example, in a chapter on preparing a bar audience for a performance, Glouberman explains,

One of the very last things I do when I give people instructions on how to enjoy the show is that I encourage them to shush other people if they are talking.  I give them some different techniques for doing this.  I tell them if they want to be direct and aggressive, they can turn around an shush the person angrily, or if they prefer a more passive-aggressive style, they can cover their mouths with their hands so no one will know who did the shushing….Inevitably during any show in a bar, people eventually do talk, and instead of me having to reprimand them from the stage in some authoritarian way…a number of people in the audience do the shushing….As a performer on stage, this saves you the terrible indignity of having to ask the audience every five minutes to simmer down and listen to you.

Is this funny?  I suspect it’s funny.  It isn’t funny to me.  Why?  In my life, I’m the straight man.  (I happen to be married to the funniest person alive, so this works out pretty well.) What Gloubernan’s describing here is, as far as I’m concerned, an excellent idea.  It sounds like something I’d do if I thought of it.  In fact, I might even start using this technique in my classes so that students will shut each other up.  This has been happening throughout my reading; I think, “Well, sure.  That’s a good idea,” or, “Yes, exactly.  Isn’t that how everyone sees it?” And then I think, “Why am I reading these incredibly ordinary thoughts?”

Glouberman is a lot more intelligent and articulate and experienced than I am.  He does a lot of brave things that I would never do, like teaching classes in charades or becoming a neighbourhood residents’ rights activist.  However, his view of the world is more or less mine, and  he is, much like me, very serious about his view of the world.  This may be entertaining to people who find him odd, but is not terribly entertaining to me, because I don’t find him odd at all.

I’m 115 pages in, and I feel like I could take or leave the last 60, but I have the sense that maybe something I don’t expect is going to happen, so I may follow through.  Have you read this book?  Would you recommend I finish it?  Have you encountered any of Heti’s or Glouberman’s other work?  If so, what did you think?

If not, what are you reading this week?

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 14

Summer Book Club Week 1: Rutu Modan’s The Property

Guidelines for the Summer Book Club: if you’ve read this book, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading this week? Please comment, or post on your own blog and link in the comments below.

a50f6e32da351bI recently finished The Property, the latest book by Rutu Modan, the graphic novelist responsible for one of my other favourite books, Exit Wounds. I love graphic novels, but they are sometimes self-indulgent and demanding.  Modan’s books take difficult subject matter and make it often funny, sometimes oddly sweet, and always powerful.  Modan’s art is meticulous, delicate and bright; I tend to barrel through graphic novels because I’m visually lazy, but with Modan’s work I have to slow down and savour and smile.  This book feels like a dense, multi-coloured jewel.

Mica insists on accompanying her grandmother Regina to Warsaw, where a mysterious family property is located and maybe is waiting to be reclaimed.  It’s soon clear, though, that Mica doesn’t know what she’s gotten herself into, and that her understanding of her trip, her family and her grandmother’s past is partial at best.  Regina is ornery and secretive, Mica is long-suffering and a bit stubborn herself, and along the way they meet a number of characters whose motives are suspect but who might be friends.  Romance, both past and present, is an important part of  both women’s stories, but their relationship with one another is what matters most: if Mica didn’t love her grandmother, her life would be a lot easier, but what are you going to do?

I devoured this book in an evening, and now have to go back and read Exit Wounds again.  Have you read either, or any of Modan’s other work?  If so, what did you think?  If not, what are you reading this week?

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 11

Summer Book Club: What Are We Reading This Week?

1368361_28917487I love the idea of book clubs, but the last thing an English teacher needs is more assigned reading.  So I thought: what if we had a book club where we all just talk about whatever we’re reading right now?  That way, we can read whatever we want!  And talk about it!

Once a week, I’m going to post about a book I’m reading, or have just finished reading, or would really like to read next.  It would be great if you guys would chime in.  If you’ve read the book I’m posting on,  you could comment on that, and we’ll discuss.  But you could also comment on a book you’re reading right now, and we could discuss that.  Or you could write on your own blog about a book you’re reading, and link here. Maybe I’ll ask you some specific questions about books I’m reading and books you’re reading, and you could respond to them here or elsewhere.

If no one wants to chat about books, I’ll just post about the books I’m reading anyway.  This will be a way for me to keep in touch with you all, but maybe it’ll also mean I’ll spend more of my summer reading books, and less of it watching Project Runway on  YouTube and playing Fishdom.

In the next couple of days, I’ll post on the book I’m reading now, and thereon in, I’ll try to post on Wednesdays.  I hope you’ll tell me about your summer reading too!  Here’s to books we read just because we feel like reading them!

Image by pear83

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 28

Science, Art, and the Myth of the “Discipline”

oENpvxkI’m always delighted to read about college teachers who are are taking unusual approaches to pedagogy.   Jailson Farias de Lima is one such teacher.  In an article published on ProfWeb yesterday, he describes an innovative project he has designed for his chemistry students, challenging them to express their understanding of scientific concepts through art-making.  Science teachers may be particularly interested in this article, but I think anyone who is a little skeptical of the divisions between what we call “disciplines” will appreciate the efforts Lima is making to integrate skills and knowledge from various arenas.

What do you think?  Does Lima’s project appeal to you?  Do you make efforts to make links between your course content and other subjects, or do you have memories of teachers who did so?  What are the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach?

Image by Dez Pain

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 7

Blog Hop!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAApparently a “blog hop” is a thing.  I’ve been invited to participate in this one by my friend Anita Lahey, whose fascinating blog Henrietta & Me is all about the books she’s reading and the people in them.  Anita is a poet, essayist and journalist; her poetry collection Out to Dry in Cape Breton was an indelible reading experience for me (I will never look at a clothesline the same way again), and her latest book, The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture, is on my to-read-as-soon-as-my-end-of-term-grading-is-done list.

I’ve chosen to answer these questions wearing my education-writer hat and not my fiction-writer hat, as education writing is what I do on this blog.

What am I working on?

My M.Ed. thesis: an investigation into tools teachers can use to encourage/nurture lifelong reading habits in college students.  As a first step, I’m working on a literature review addressing the question “Is reading for fun really all that important?” (The upshot so far: probably.) I hope to produce a thesis that is of interest to a general audience, or at least to teachers in general, and not just to post-secondary academics and researchers.

How does my work differ from other work in its genre?

In this blog, I reflect on my own teaching practice.  I do this because I believe that almost any experience will be of interest to someone else if it is examined with attention and expressed carefully.  (I guess this is one of the basic principles that drives people to write things.)  The title Classroom as Microcosm is a good indication of what I want the blog to be about: I’m writing about school, but school is a great metaphor for a lot of other stuff.  I hope my attempt to link the little world of school, and in particular MY little college-teaching world, with the greater scheme of things makes this blog unique.

Why do I write what I do?

I started writing Classroom as Microcosm because I was ready to quit my job.  My resentment of my college students and their bad behaviours, my uncertainty in my role as an authority figure, and my disillusionment with the teaching profession and the education system as a whole were making me miserable.  I was also floundering as a fiction writer.  One summer day in 2007, as I poured these troubles out to a friend over coffee, she said, “I think you need to start keeping a blog.  It will be a place to write without the isolation.  Maybe you should start blogging about teaching.”  So I did, and it’s no exaggeration to say that this blog saved my career.

I’m a less productive blogger these days in part because I have come to a much more solid and self-confident place as a teacher.  That said, there are other things I want to explore here now, so this summer, I hope to start posting more about reading, literature and the place of books – especially narratives – in our textually fragmented world.

How does my writing process work?

In my most productive years, I posted twice a week during the school semester: a new post on Monday and a reprise of a popular past post on Thursday.  These days, I post only when I’m powerfully inspired, but I’d like to return to that more diligent schedule.  I try to view writing of any kind as a professional obligation: churn it out, edit it meticulously to make it as good as you can, and then just get it out there without thinking it to death.  Blog writing is an excellent platform for this approach.  I’ve been working on a novel manuscript for thirteen years because I have become mired in self-doubt; this blog is an excellent reminder that the real goal of writing is to communicate with people.  You have to let your writing travel out into the world.  If a particular piece doesn’t speak to anyone, write the next thing.

Next week on the blog hop:

My friend and colleague Stacey DeWolfe, who, in addition to being an inspiring teacher, blogs on teaching, food, music, books, dogs, and lots of other important things.

My high school and college crony Rebecca Coleman, who knows everything there is to know about social media, but also keeps a terrific blog on things she likes to cook.

 Image by Michal Zacharzewski

Posted on by Siobhan Curious 9