Bibliomama! Is! Canadian!

This post comes from Mary Lynn via Dani Girl who posted about Canada Reads 2011 on CBC. Apparently this is a list of the 'best novels of the 2000s', winnowed from a list of 400 'after a hot online discussion and campaigning by both readers and writers.' 

I'll be honest. I'll whore myself out to anything for an easy blog post. But in the words of one of my dear book club friends while declining to participate in a 'Survivor: The Book Version' game at our year-end dinner, "I think this is stupid." There's nothing wrong with discussing great books, and our society is one that cherishes its top ten lists. (Oh my god, I totally just typed it's instead of its and then ALMOST MISSED IT. The horror). But really, what does saying that these 40 books are The Best of the Decade even really mean? I guess campaigning by people who wrote the books is okay, because it wouldn't be any more 'objective' than if it was decided by some jury of people who weren't the authors or friends of the authors.

But like both DaniGirl and Mary Lynn, I was surprised to realize how many of the authors on the list I had never even heard of, let alone read their book. I was also struck, as I commented on Mary Lynn's post, how these types of lists always seem to demonstrate short memories. At least two of these books are so recently published that it would be almost impossible to have read them unless you purchased the hardcover, which I rarely do (I did get one sent to me by the publisher to review, which is the only reason I have already read it). So I appreciate the list for its reading suggestion value, if nothing else. 

I put the titles I've read in bold and the ones I've never heard of in italics. 

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews *

Bottle Rocket Hearts by Zoe Whittall 

Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright 

 Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant 

Conceit by Mary Novik 

 Crow Lake by Mary Lawson 

Drive-by Saviours by Chris Benjamin

 Elle by Douglas Glover 

Essex County by Jeff Lemire

Far to Go by Alison Pick 

 February by Lisa Moore 

 Galore by Michael Crummey

 Heave by Christy Ann Conlin

 Inside by Kenneth J. Harvey

 Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay 

Life of Pi by Yann Martel 

 Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill 

  Moody Food by Ray Robertson 

  Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

 Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

 Room by Emma Donoghue

 Shelf Monkey by Corey Redekop 

  Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki 

 Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb 

The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis 

 The Birth House by Ami McKay 

 The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre 

 The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou 

 The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill 

 The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan 

 The Fallen by Stephen Finucan 

  The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon

 The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe 

 The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart 

The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald 

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood 

Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden

 Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden

 Twenty-Six by Leo McKay Jr.

  Unless by Carol Shields 

Dani Girl and Mary Lynn mentioned the notable absences of Douglas Coupland, Alice Munro and Nikolski by Nicholas Dickner which actually won Canada Reads last year. I would add Michael Ondaatje as someone I would think might be on this list -- maybe he just hasn't published recently enough. I haven't looked at the list of 400 though. I also think it's kind of silly when an author has two books on a list like this -- I mean, if there was such a thing as an objective list of this sort, then I guess it could happen, but there isn't, so why not give two other authors a slot? 

I did start reading Lullabies for Little Criminals, but I couldn't make it to that book club meeting, and I just didn't like it enough to keep reading. It's still on my shelf, but it's moved way down the list.

I do think Canadian literature has come a long way in the past ten or twenty years. When I studied it in university lo these many years ago, most of what we studied was of the Painfully Obviously Canadian variety -- you know, long lonely stretches of prairie and accompanying long lonely stretches of prose, Hugh McLennan's book on the Halifax Explosion, pastoral poetry. One year in book club we did quite a few Canadian novels and then had to declare an incest moratorium for the next year's list. Since then, I've discovered Lynn Coady, Lisa Moore, Miram Toews, and other Canadian authors who I'm too lazy to click over to Goodreads to remind myself of, and was relieved to discover that a Canadian novel can be funny, profound, passionate and lively without a hint of Gothic overtone or existential despair (okay, I'm not averse to a sliver of existential despair). 

The Bishop's Man and Sweetness in the Belly have both been on my bedside table for the past few months. I might have spent all tonight reading both of them if I wasn't going to post this immediately, just to boost my total and beat Mary Lynn. But I am going to post this immediately, so I guess I'll have to take the honourable course. I'm so Canadian.

Guns, Germs and Exploding Peas

Last night at book club we were discussing Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. It's a great book, an important book, one that takes a very complex subject and renders it comprehensible to the layperson. Tomorrow I will talk about the huge and far-reaching issues addressed by Diamond. Today I'm feeling shlumpy and under-the-weather and I'm just going to be a smartass. Because one of the great joys of this book was wading through paragraphs including weighty analyses of "politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies" and "autocatalytic processes" and then coming across phrases such as "Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops" or "archaeological evidence of chickpeas".

This splendid paragraph comes from a section on how domesticated plants often varied significantly from their wild progenitors:

" A clear example involves peas, whose seeds (the peas we eat) come enclosed in a pod. Wild peas have to get out of the pod if they are to germinate. To achieve that result, pea plants evolved a gene that makes the pod explode, shooting out the peas onto the ground. Pods of occasional mutant peas don't explode. In the wild the mutant peas would die entombed in their pod on their parent plants, and only the popping pods would pass on their genes. But, conversely, the only pods available to humans to harvest would be the nonpopping ones left on the plant. Thus, once humans began bringing wild peas home to eat, there was immediate selection for that single-gene mutant. Similar nonpopping mutants were selected in lentils, flax, and poppies." 

Exploding peas! Nonpopping mutants! One of my book club friends watched the DVD version, in which she said Jared Diamond was actually the star. She said the DVD was even further simplified than the book, which I guess was necessary for time constraints but also because geez, could you say any of that stuff with a straight face?

Oh! Oh! The animals! Apparently if you didn't have the good fortune to be born on a continent which housed a good number of domesticable large mammals you were basically screwed. An important distinction must be observed between tamed animals and domesticated ones -- Hannibal crossed the Alps on tamed elephants, not domesticated ones. Domesticating animals entails breeding them selectively, producing animals which are different from the wild breed. Unfortunately, a good many large mammals prove to be stubbornly resistant to domesticating. For this reason, the aforementioned Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops did NOT overthrow the Roman Empire. But then Diamond throws in some anecdotal stuff about the New Guinea villages where he has spent years, and how the people there keep pets such as kangaroos, possums and ospreys; "New Guineans even regularly capture chicks of wild cassowaries (an ostrich-like large, flightless bird) and raise them to eat as a delicacy -- even though captive adult cassowaries are extremely dangerous and now and then disembowel village people". Zebras are also apparently singularly ornery critters, who have the "unpleasant habit of biting people and not letting go", and are actually responsible for injuring more American zookeepers every year than tigers (why do tigers get the bad rap? As far as I've heard tigers usually only maul stupid drunk people who vault into their cages in the middle of the night).

In a section on various organizations of early civilization: "A fact further diffusing potential problems of conflict resolution in tribes is that almost everyone is related to everyone else, by blood or marriage or both. Those ties of relationships binding all tribal members make police, laws, and other conflict-resolving institutions or larger societies unnecessary, since any two villages getting into an argument will share many kind, who apply pressure on them to keep it from becoming violent. In traditional New Guinea society, if a New Guinean happened to encounter an unfamiliar New Guinean while both were away from their respective villages, the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other". Imagine the conversation: 'So your Great-Uncle Henry canoed the rapids with my fourth cousin twice removed George? Awesome -- this spear no longer has your name on it -- high five!'  Not only is Jared Diamond a kickass writer, I think I'd really like to have a beer with him some time.

(Thank God it's) Wordless Wednesday: Fall-ing

Good thing she doesn't know about child labour laws yet:


Banzai!





This was totally spontaneous and not coached by me AT ALL:


Aaaaand heartwarming moment over:


Payback's a bitch:

Short and Sweet. (And you can't really fault him on the logic).

Me: "What's that thing you call me sometimes? Bowl full of nuts?"

My husband: "No. What I call you sometimes is 'honey bunches of oats'. What I think about you sometimes is 'bowl full of nuts'.

Fair enough.

Smells like a Funny Friday

I actually slept last night, which means several things seem funny this morning that wouldn't have for the last few days. Like Elvira Kurt doing the cultural hall of shame on Q this morning -- talking about Willow Smith, Will Smith's daughter and her insanely catchy new song: "she's nine! Twenty is like the new ninety now. Parents everywhere are telling their kids 'put down the juicebox, get up from naptime and get to work on your brand!" 

Okay, I probably would have found that funny anyway. How about this? Our first Halloween party of the season is tomorrow night and we're all being Greek god/desses. Eve has decided that she is Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty -- we're just leaving the whole sex part out for now, especially after the other day when I finally gave it to her dead straight about making babies, after she said "I understand how I can get things like loving books from you, but I don't get how I can get things from Daddy." "Well, the seed comes from Daddy." "But how?" "You sure you want to know?" "Yes." "It comes from his penis. It goes in my vagina. It fertilizes the egg and then grows into a baby in my belly." "----- okay, I'm so grossed out now I can't look at you and I have to go away for a while. I'm going to try to forget that you told me that, and if I ask you again, DON'T TELL ME." 

My costume says Athena. Goddess of wisdom. And war, but apparently she disliked fighting for no reason and tried to settle disputes with wisdom. I'll have to remember that the next time I feel like saying "quit kicking the table leg or I'll beat you senseless!" and say something like "please stop kicking the table leg or I will beat you with my senses" instead. Angus wanted to be Poseidon but the only costume was Hercules, so I guess we can just glue a dead fish to his shoulder and maybe drape some seaweed over him. Matt's getting the leftovers of the other three costumes -- I'm thinking cross-dressing Dionysus or something. 

Not funny enough? You know that awesome old spice commercial? Have you seen the version done by this handsome fellow? And if you haven't seen cat vs. printer with translation on Facebook yet, it seriously does a body good. Although I'm not sure how the cat or the printer made out.

Regarding Cynthia

This is my friend Cynthia's most recent Facebook status update:

Cynthia (Blank): ' Word07 would like me to replace the word "spline" with "spleen". My sentence now reads: "...this data set was calculated using a multivariate cubic spleen interpolation." '

This reminded me of the time I was updating my résumé (which I just typed six different times with and without accents and it looks equally stupid both ways, so clearly I'm just having a moment, like that time when I was nine and there were a few hours where I couldn't say the word 'closet' without feeling really strange) and trying to type that I had volunteered at a camp for children with oncological diseases, and the word processing problem kept trying to substitute the word 'ontological'. Because yeah, the camp wasn't for kids with cancer, it was for kids who wonder why we're here and what it's all about.

Cynthia is cool. And pretty. And smart. She almost has a Ph.D. She calculates data sets using her spleen (and possibly her liver). She won triathlons all over the world, then her feet got unhappy and now she wins bike races all over the world. However, this is not why I love her. I love her because when Eve was being bullied last year she wrote on Facebook "Don't worry. Eve will grow up to be happy and successful and the other girl will grow up to be a crack whore. No wait... crack whore's assistant." That's fabulous, is it not?

I also love Cynthia for giving me a blog post that isn't only about the weird shower I had this morning, where I felt a little short of breath so tried to take a deep breath, then abruptly started sobbing huge, ludicrous, face-contorting sobs, then started laughing at the same time when I realized I couldn't even unscrunch my face enough to wash it. The medication switch has been going better than I expected, but this morning was a little rocky. Anybody want to start a camp for emotionally volatile people who periodically feel suspicious of the word 'closet' with me?

A real man?

Forget flowers and romance and remembering our anniversary and shit like that (he never remembers our anniversary. I don't either. We're pretty sure we got married at some point and it was a great party and we're both good with that). Forget knowing if you like iced tea or red peppers (he always asks me if I want iced tea in restaurants even though I have never ever ever in the twenty or so years he's known me ordered iced tea, and the other night while he was assembling dinner plates I heard from upstairs as he asked my kids 'does Mommy like red peppers?' -- I don't). Forget putting his damned socks in the laundry (on the floor by the couch. on a kitchen chair. on the bedside table --bleaaaah).

A real man? A real man will hear you say 'shit!' in a loud whisper when you finish reading at 11:30 p.m., attempt to take off your glasses and lay them on the table and have the left lens fall out due to a tiny little screw coming loose in the frame. The real man will open his eyes, roll over, assess the problem, go down two whole floors to the work room in the basement, find a tiny little screwdriver, and proceed to tighten the tiny little screw back to the point where the frame will hold the lens, so his near-legally-blind wife will not have to stumble around in a featurelessly blurry world the next morning. All while his hair sticks up around his cute little bald spot. Said real man will then go back to bed with you and let you warm your freezing feet on his legs.

Roses? Phffttth.