Welcome to Scrivner, a one stop shopping centre hard-wired to what remains of my brain. Enjoy, laugh, read, comment, pick your nose. No one is looking anyway. Go ahead.
Scrivner is based on a Herman Melville short called “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (spelling changed for posterity and my own laziness). Look it up sometime and see if you read Off Broadway comedy all over it.
Okay, summer is here officially. Non-officially, there was snow in Calgary only three weeks ago. Anyway. Time for getting caught up on books. (And homework, eee.). Here are some books I’m going to try and tackle this summer:
1. Harry Potter 6 & 7 – I completed these over the last two weeks. THe movie is coming out soon and I’m all turned around. What happened to a November release? Methinks there is a Christmas DVD conspiracy release afoot!
2. Watership Down- I love this book. It’ll be a re-read. It’s my procratination of attempting to read Lord of the Rings again.
3. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley – This is a bit of a cheat since I’m reading it right now. I’m still trying to get my head around the Pulitzer Prize part of this book.
4. The Guersney Library and Potato Peel Society – Somehow this book keeps getting mentioned on recommendation lists to me. No idea what’s it is about and I don’t own it.
5. I have no idea. I just read what I haven’t yet on the shelf…..
okay I’m continuing this list now that I actually checked what is on the shelf….
6. Sylvanus Now by Diane Morrissey
7. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
8. Anything my daughter has on her shelf by Gregory MacGuire, starting with Wicked (She informed me the other day that my bookshelf contained ‘our books’. Funny how I still have to ask to borrow ‘her books’.)
9. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Phillip K. Dick which is in one of my list books.
10. In the Skin of a Lion by Micheal Ondaatje.
11. The Birth House by someone Canadian, Amy McKay maybe?
I think I had better stop this list since I only read one book every two weeks and there are only 8 weeks in summer. Sigh for lack of summer fun.
I was thinking that perhaps we should name trees according to the reactions they produce in allergy season. Maybe this would cause people to think twice before they buy a Red-Eyed Poplar, or a Snotty Willow. Itchy Ash? Try Preparation ‘Don’t Plant It’. Need a remedy for an I-Can’t-Breathe Elm? Try an axe.
Hey, I am all for trees. I love this planet as much as anyone. I’d just like to go outside and enjoy it in the month of June. And plant a Sneeze-Free Apple Tree while I’m at it.
(Next article: Naming Foods by the Reaction They Produce. Tooty-Broccolli anyone?)
Monkey is a post-cubist deconstructionist kung fu story told in a lyrical Gertrude-Stein-like style.
(I hoped you laughed as hard as I did.)
I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
the wee children screeching in the summer woods
doesn’t end under nightly nine.
that’s when the zombies
arrive. their unstuffed grunts of hilarity
in the piney poplars
precede the bonfires, prelude
the beer bottles,
and preface the singular dirty sock
found on the pathway next day
as an exclamation to the moon cabbage moon.
we’ve tried calling the cops.
they tell us to keep our children inside.
we tell them the zombies were our wee children
once
last summer.
Actually finished this one last Sunday but can’t stop thinking about it. This book was a Giller prize winner and my lucky find at the recent Calgary Reads booksale ($1 trade paperback wow!).
I usually start reading a book not knowing what exactly the book is about. I’m pretty awful for going with what I’ve recognized (popular, but in a more literary sense. I’m not exactly a Clive Cussler kind of person. Not that there is anything wrong with that…), or I will more than likely pick up a book that has won a major prize of some kind. Book snob, yes, I’ve been called that before. This one I was intrigues by the cover only. Maybe I was subconsciously taking in the red Giller circle on the jacket, by probably not. The cover the an Asian lady in a white long shirt riding a bicycle. You can’t see most of her face.
I seem to be quite attracted to the Asian story for some reason and not as attracted to the Indian story for the most part. Strange, though, as India is in Asia. Besides the point.
This story was set in Vietnam, mostly, and outside of Vancouver, a bit.
I’m not sure I’ll ever understand this whole story. I suppose that’s why I like it.
Here’s the gist, spoilers ahead. Husband, 3 kids, wife leaves him for another man. He goes and renovates a caboose and lives in that in the mountains outside of Vancouver. Youngest 2 kids are twins, Jon and Del. Oldest girl is Ada. The Dad loves her the best, but not in a cruel way. The youngest girl, Del, takes up with a local, rich artist down the road and at 16 moves in with him.
That’s about it for the Vancouver side of things.
Dad goes to Vietnam to try and work through being over there when he was 18 and in the war. It ends up being a different Vietnam than he really remembered. He takes up with a married ex-pat but doesn’t really love her. He drowns himself midway through the novel. Dead.
Jon and Ada come to search for him. Ada is quite concerned about finding him, Jon is more concerned about having a good time. Jon takes up with the other half of the married ex-pats, not knowing that his father had slept with the wife, he with the husband. Ironic twist. Ada becomes ill and frantic. She ends up falling in love, kinda, with an artist friend of a friend her father had made there named Vu. He, too, is much older than her.
Jon goes to Hanoi. Ada sleeps with Vu a lot then goes to Hanoi to get her brother and bring him back to the small village where she is. Jon is having too much fun. Ada comes back. Vu is not home. She leaves the bike he gave her.
Yen, a character that keeps after Ada throughout the time still is in Vietnam, comes back. He asks why she didn’t fall in love ith him. He is younger than her. She punches him in the face. He leaves. She goes to find him. She can’t.
The end.
It was a pretty horrible ending, I must say. I was quite mad with it.
But the books is written beautifully. Beautifully! There is so much space in the sentences that you can really find your own meaning. I love that.
I love stories where there is no resolving it, too, either though my North American mindset tells me things should wrap-up nicely. And what do you do with a main character who offs himself halfway through the book? That’s gutsy.
Read this book. Then give it to your friends.
I don’t think The Who intended for “No Sugar Tonight” to become my diet theme song.
a. Studies show you have an almost 58% chance of getting a mutiple choice answer right if you do not go with your first ‘hunch’ and change your answer.
b. You have a 20% chance of being wrong twice.
c. You have almost the same chance of going from the right answer to the wrong one.
Or, d. I’ve spent too much time reading psychology textbooks this afternoon.
e. If two answers above are correct and ‘all of the above’ is an option, choose it without reading further.
It seems as if hot air popcorn poppers are becoming antiquated. Who knew popcorn had an evolutionary lifespan?
Since the Calgary Reads booksale was such a great deal last year, went again this year. Well I went tonight, I should say because I might go again tomorrow. This was the first time they’ve done a Friday night opening and it was lined up down the block!! And we parked three blocks away!
I’m still a bit choked about the $2 ‘donation’/entry fee but my daughter pointed out that it might stop some of the browsers from attending. What browsers? the books are a dolla’ …holla’. Word. Lots of them.
So, here’s what I bought tonight (alas, they were unable to take credit cards just as I got to the teller so I had to put some back):
1. Roses Are Difficult Here by W.O. Mitchell. This dude is a prairie standard and I’ve never, ever read one of his books. I took a writing course with his nephew, though, if that counts.
2. The Spire and The Paper Men by William Golding. I’m just going off of Lord of the Flies here. I hope they’re good.
3. The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Stories by Mark Twain. This is a wee, tiny, odd shaped, little square book with a giant title. Plus, I really like Mark Twain. Plus, I might send this one to my friend B. because it would fit into a regular envelope. The recesion is effecting my book choices now.
4. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. I have a sneaking suspicion I might already own this book but the cover price was 75 (the original list price) and the cover is so cute and it is in super condition for having been printed in 1958. Wow! I should really stop judging a book by its cover….(but I’m good).
5. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. I think this is on one of my lists of books toreads before I croak or break a hip or something. I recently bought her non-fiction title 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. Yeah, haven’t started that one yet.
6. The Time in Between by David Bergen. This was my find of the sale. It was on the Canadian Authors table for $1. It was also in hardcover on the Bestsellers table for $5. I got the $1 one, whoot! Recession strikes again!
And that’s it! The books I had to put back since that other $20 bill I thought I had in my wallet mysteriously disappeared (I think I spent it, no mystery there) were: Kim by Rudyard Kipling, Labryinth by Kate Moss, and The Tiger’s Claw by Shauna Singh Baldwin. Oh well. Next time I’ll tell my kiddies that a book about High School Musical movie is not as important as classic literature but since they actually let me look for nearly 10 whole minutes, I’ve forgive them this time.
