Much Depends on Dinner, Margaret Visser

Before Michael Pollen, before Eric Schlosser, Margaret Visser investigated the relationship between food, industry and our dinner table, and did so with wit, insight and simplicity. She has us imagine an 'everyday' meal of chicken, rice, corn, salt, butter, lettuce, olive oil and lemon juice, with ice cream for dessert, and then tells us the history, right up to present day industrialized production, of each item on the menu. When I say "present day," I mean 1986, before genetics entered the argument, but let's face it, the argument hasn't changed much in the last few decades: the people who made the last generation of technology, things like fertilizer and pesticides, are now into genetics anyway, so even the players are the same, and none of it takes any more consideration of flavour, nutrition, the environment or workplace safety than it did then. Anyway, this book isn't an indictment of the food industries, this is a book about dinner, about what we eat, how we get it, and how our choices affect the world; because in many ways we are what we eat.
     I got this copy when I was living in a Zen temple uptown that made most of its annual budget from two big rummage sales a year, and I confess I excused myself from the fifty cent cost penciled on the first page. I recognized the name of the author as someone I had known as a kid, so I picked it up and found it fascinating.
     I'm really torn about this one. Because I read it in the monastery, it carries along some waft of its chilled dawn silence and incense, and that is the kind of memory you keep things to preserve, so I'm holding on to her.
Score = +3 (5 released, 8 saved)

Consolation, Michael Redhill

I do love books that take the time to explore my city, how it was built and who built it, and documenting the city is a big part of this novel, running parallel to a present-day story of a dying man and his loves. Together they express themes of love and death and release and the ways our stories intertwine so that we must tread with tender attention to others, past, present and future. You could use terms like exquisite and poignant to describe this novel and it has a strong staying power because of the vividness of the images, but it is the unseen that haunts it, since it is the story of a photographer and his creations, lost in a wreck in the now-infilled harbour which is under excavation for condos and may enshrine them in concrete. A novel about photographs is uniquely evocative, since the reader has to bring so much past experience to make sense of the images, and that means that we have to step into the story in a more intense way because it is painted with our own palate, in a sense. Death plays the same role in the parallel story of the present day; it is unseen, anticipated, but without any certainty, and the reader populates it with our own fears. Just as we let our minds be the silver plate on which these stories develop, so we infer our fears of death into the dying man and walk in his shoes in his quest for a dignified death, even as his bewildered family mistake his needs for their own, time and time again in their quest to keep him.
   I bought this copy remaindered at Book City (see earlier entries for proof of love) because I liked another of his books, Martin Sloane, which has similarly powerful descriptions of what almost amounts to a parallel world, and is also wonderful, about finding ways to make unbearable sadness bearable, but it's sad. Maybe it depends on mood, but I really do like stories to have some ray of light, some direction for the characters to go with dignity. I guess books like that become a kind of haven I can moor my storm-tossed bark in to bear witness to lives well-lived under heavy odds, and remember how much of suffering is optional. I read it here, in this library-soon-to-be-half-library.
   This book is big. I really liked it, and I'll remember it fondly, but, I can part with it.
Score = +1 (6 saved, 5 released)

Don't Look Now, Daphne DuMaurier

This is a set of stories so compelling that I hunted this copy down over years so I could read them again. I love Daphne DuMaurier and her misty worlds redolent of purity and insidious danger, and these stories have the same tang, but... twisted, somehow. Just for example, the title story is about someone who has a vivid dream, and in the process of trying to understand the meaning of the dream, inserts herself in a crime so convoluted that nothing else could possibly cause her to be involved. Curiosity killed the cat, in other words. That story just stuck with me, and the same is true of her other short story book, The Blue Lenses, in the titular story of which the lenses make the post-operative eyes of the protagonist see only the animal within his visitors, not the human faces they once seemed to wear. The short story form seems to have forced DuMaurier to condense her already dense prose, so that these stories have all the fraughtness, plot and conflict of her spacious period dramas, but distilled, like bog-whiskey.
I hope to meet this book a third time some day, but I'm going to let this one go again now I've re-read it. And once more, thank you, old friend.
Score = +2 (6 saved, 4 released)

Twig, Elizabeth Orton Jones

I may have read this book more than any other in my whole life; not this specific copy, this one was found for me by my brother at a big Board of Education Library book cull in the Seventies. I don't know what happened to the original, maybe I read it all up. I think it was my mother's, and it had a green cloth cover, like this one does under the dust-jacket and library plastic. Gotta hand it to the library folks, this book is still in fantastic shape thirty years after being dumped.
   In the story, Twig, who has nothing and lives among people who have nothing, meanders down the stairs of her tenement building meeting her neighbours, all of whom give her something that is useless to them, but which Twig incorporates into the little world she builds in the dirt yard below, and which they all populate in miniature, after a fairy pops by. The story is a heroquest, in a sense; a descending into another world and finding a way back home renewed, but it's also about the microcosm and the macrocosm: what is true in the one is true in the other, so, wherever we are, whoever we are, if we all just give a little, we can make a loving and supportive world. It was a story simple enough that I could understand it, but complicated and intricate enough that it bore many readings, and it was structured in a cycle, since she starts and ends in the same place, and everything in the world above appears in the tiny world below. Thinking about it as an adult, and why it was so compelling to me long ago, I can't help noticing the theme of childhood, as Twig parents herself with whatever the adult world provides, but without any guidance. As a result, we never know if some fairy spell made her small enough to ride on a sparrow's back, or she's just playing in the dirt, but whatever she's doing, she's making her own lovely world from the leftover, picked-apart ratty-ass bits she is given. And that still inspires me.
   This book runs in my blood. It was a haven of hope in a weird world. You don't fling those away.
Score = +3 (6 saved, 3 released)
  

Selected Poems, T.S. Eliot

This is one very battered book! It's hard to explain, even to myself, but there was a time about twenty years ago when I opened this book every day, carried it with me everywhere, through Central America, on the subway, everywhere, every day for years. I had this big purse back then, huge really, a ten-inch wide tube that I slung over my shoulder and kept stocked with objects even as large as full-size cans of air-freshener, multiple books, and a copy of Eliot, of course. I'd joke about it- "Never leave home without your Eliot", I'd say, but I can't remember why I thought it was so important, except now, reading it again and hearing its howl of impotent despair, it does feel cleansing, cathartic. It's like we ride Prufrock through the half-deserted streets of his dark mind, down dead-end lanes, tortured but resigned because we know, somewhere, somehow, there is utter beauty, and it is forever denied us. But he leaves us with a tiny taste of that beauty, and it is divine.
I bought this copy new, I think at the World's Biggest downtown. It was an integral part of my life, In fact, I found it stuffed with photos of my first niece as a baby, so I think I'll hold on to it.
Score - +2 (5 saved, 3 released)

Grendel, John Gardner

This is one of the few books I've managed to keep over the, maybe, twenty moves I've made since I left the home of my youth. My father was an English professor, and very much against television, so my siblings and I had story-readings every night till high school, and that meant lots of Shakespeare and other early English literature, Beowulf among them. Grendel is the retelling of that, the earliest story written in this language, from the perspective of the monster who, through no fault of his own, is caught up in the fate of the Danish warrior. From the view of the beast, ours is a world devoid of reason, controlled by fates and forces unimaginable, all weighed against this one lonely animal who just wants to snack on Danes and sleep on moss in a snug cave with his mom. When the spell of immortality he had come to rely on suddenly is lifted and his role in the story of Beowulf is at an end, his shock and bewilderment at fate's betrayal is truly heart-sickening, the way so many things are when they can't be put into words. Grendel did no wrong to earn his violent death, he was a monster and did as monsters do, but he was caught up in Beowulf's tale and for that he paid with his life. Beowulf's glory, from another perspective, is an outrageous and bewildering injustice. I read this story really young, and it was the first time I got the feeling that stories contained other, undeveloped stories, and that those stories might have different heroes and villains.  And that maybe the heroes in one are not so civilized and noble in the other.

    I've had this copy for decades, and I'm pretty sure I bought it in one of those old used bookstores on Yonge Street that had shelves so full, they'd stack the paperbacks in towers in the corners and you could smell the foxy paper from the door. 

   This book has stuck with me since I was twenty something, and it still has some valence of those long days of thinking and seeking and making a world. I think that's worth keeping.

Score - +2 (5 saved, 3 released)

Brazzaville Beach, William Boyd

If someone asked me what I thought was the best novel in the world, I'd say this one; it's desert island material. Rooted in a bizarre historical event, the story branches off to address the horrors of academia, the complexities of madness and sanity, the identical nature of human and animal, and the mad beauty of the organic world, but this story goes far beyond its probing themes and fits itself together in a structure so satisfying that I felt grateful to the author for his care and craft. The main character, Hope, walks like a ghost through a vivid world bursting with loud, demanding people. She is almost breathtakingly unaware of herself, but catalogues the world around her like the scientist she is, missing the meanings until they explode, and so is in a constant sort of Hejira, always retreating to keep her integrity. And she does keep her integrity, and so we are carried along in the chaos of her life, making sense of outrageous fortune, and then, finally, just seeking an honest path to tread.
This is one of the books, like The Risk Pool, that I got in Slovakia, so I read it there, for the first time. (See that entry for details). An American woman with Slovak parents came to teach at our university. She'd been planning and saving for that trip for years, but then someone back home took sick and she only got to stay a couple of week, and that meant that she didn't need the cache of books she'd brought. She had I Claudius and Hotel Du Lac and I don't know what all, but it was a feast for my hungry mind, in a town where it was a rare treat to have a conversation in English. This is not that exact copy, though. This is another of those books I never have around because I keep giving them away, but there was one on the free desk in the library, so I picked up and read it again with relish about a year ago.
I think I need to hang onto this a little longer. Maybe it find a proper home.
Score - +1 (4 saved, 3 released)

Rush Home Road, Lori Lansens

I bought this book because it was written by my neighbour. I'd been meaning to have a look, but you know how it can be. You don't always get around to things like that. I don't actually remember buying it, but it has a store sticker on it in pounds, so I must have bought it in Britain, and maybe its being so out of context made me notice it more and finally buy it. That, and you always need something to read on the road. Whatever the case, I bought it while traveling, my neighbour wrote it and its name comes from a street in my neighbourhood, Rusholme Road. All this is to say, that my meeting with this book was fraught with tiny dramas not really relating to the story it told, but none of them detracted a bit from its subtle glory. She finds joy in such small places that her characters and their lives become radiant with small beauties, even as they creak and bend under their outrageous afflictions. This book made me happy. It makes me happy just thinking about it; that there are people somewhere who have found a way in a hard world through dignity and kindness.
I think I'm not ready to let this one go yet. I just love these guys.
Score - 0 ( 3 saved, 3 released)

All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren

As you can see from the cover, this is one well-read book. I read it for the first time during or just after high school, and its poetic gravity touched me on a cellular level, shaped my sensibilities. That's really what it's like, one effortless poem woven around a dramatic saga of the rise and fall of an honest man. Based on the life and political career of Louisiana politician and man-of-the-people, Huey Long, the novel tracks the long, slow corruption and sad demise of Everyman, Willy Stark, and explores the tectonic forces within the walls of power, the twisting and eroding of even the purest of intention and the most upright of characters. The story is populated by characters so fulsome that any one of them could qualify for a social insurance number. So lovingly does he sculpt them that they protrude half off the page like bas relief. Each one has deeply endearing idiosyncrasies, dark and deep secrets, and the driest of humour.
I've had this book for as long as I can remember, and before that, it belonged to my father. It is deep and full and lovely and I'm going to keep it

Absolute Friends, Jean LeCarre

This book made me understand how you can turn an idealist into a terrorist. The plot is quite complex, so you can make full sense of all the Idealist's actions, but the end result looks very much like a plot for mass destruction. It's very interesting to see how fine the line is between idealism and fanaticism, innocence and rage, and I've kept this copy as a talisman to remind me how closely a thing can resemble its opposite. So aside from being a great story, it takes the reader through a complex idea and leaves us wiser, if more jaded.
A friend from work gave me this book, rightly thinking I'd find it interesting, and I read it up there in the library/guestroom, where there will soon be a desk, once enough books are gone.
This is a really good novel to have read, and it changed my understanding of the way politics and morality hinge together, and I'm grateful for that. So, now it's time to pass this insight on to its next destination.
Score = -1 (6 saved, 7 released)

The Watch that Ends the Night, Hugh MacLennan

This is not only a deeply moving novel of enduring love and all its costs, it was published in proper paperback form, the old style: small enough to fit in your pocket and to prop open with one hand; but mostly, this is a great story with living characters. These aren't cuddly people, not at all, they are strong and honourable and decent, though buffeted by fate and uncertainty, but more than that, they are people who are attracted to greatness, and that comes with its own hardships. This novel is a tour through Montreal life in the Thirties, as the Spanish Civil War galvanized morality in the lettered classes and pushed many an idealist to take up arms for the preservation of democracy in a foreign land. The book was written three decades later, and so is about its own time as much as it is about the thirties, and the still-pertinent issue, reflected today, among other things, in record-rate suicides among returning troops: it is on the homefront, among the ones we love that real courage is needed. This is a beautiful, quiet story about long love.
I somehow made off with this book from a high school I taught at fifteen years ago, and I read it then, in the little house I shared with my old bud the year before I got married and she had a baby. This is a great story, but I can manage without it.
Score = 0 (6 saved, 6 released)

The Truth about Lorin Jones, Alison Lurie

I fell in love with the characters in this book. I gobbled up multiple Lurie novels after this one, so I know character is her specialty, but that was not all that animated this novel. The real star is creativity and the creative process and how loud and quiet they can be. There are some lovely creations in this story; poetry, paintings, marriages, lives, and they all required honesty and discipline, so in that way, this is a manual of how to create what you need to be happy. Among Lurie novels, this one stands out for its gorgeous imagery of art and nature as well as the loving treatment of character which is the hallmark of her writing. This novel is rich in beauty and captures the interplay between the broad and narrow strokes, the way small choices lead to big changes.
I got this copy from our beloved and mourned Balfour Books on College which, though diminished, is still alive a few blocks over.
I read this a few times and and enjoyed it, but I think I don't need to read it again. I'll remember it well and fondly.
Score = 0 (6 saved, 6 released)

Atonement, Ian McEvan

The movie makes this book into something else, but this is the story of a little girl making sense of what she sees, a little girl who sees something beyond her understanding which takes her years to comprehend, accept, and then, finally, atone for. This story is laden with rich detail in setting and thought, beautifully told with unflinching compassion, a story of forgiveness; not easy lovey, "it's all good" forgiveness, but the gritty hard-wrought kind that you fight your demons for, that takes a piece of you with it. This was my first Ian McEwan and it hit me like a cricket bat, so maybe that's why I find the rest of his novels pale by comparison, it's often that way, but I do feel that. I gobbled up three of his novels in a row, looking for that vivid, almost sparkling froughtness of this book. All of them are compelling, but none of them is quite as complete as this one.
I bought this copy on College St. at She Said Boom, which has a pretty good selection of fiction and humanities as well as movies and music, and a table at the front where you can always find something really good. I read this here in the city at our old place, on the green sofa, with a pillow on my stomach.
I savoured this book, I really did, but now that it's come time to decide to keep it or not, I find I'm kind of mad at it. It's just that there's this guy, and he's so... wrong. I know that's part of the point, but I really I want him out of the house now that I think of it.
Score - -1 (2 saved, 3 released)

Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy

I read this book when I was 19 years old in my first year of university. I started out at a 60's-style school where everyone had to take a social sciences course that focused on world literature, and we covered Franz Fanon and stages of colonialism, Uncle Tom's Cabin and gender and race issues... this is decades ago now, so I don't remember all we read, but this book stood out from even that list of carefully selected prose. This is not the copy I read at the time, that copy was the old smaller paperback size that actually fit in a pocket, and had a green cover with a ragged sketch of a figure on it, not this cheesy rose watercolour that has nothing to do with the story. This should be the cover of her novel He, She and It, where roses really do appear, as symbols of human feeling and fragility. Weird. Anyway, between the title and the cheesy cover, you might be put off, so blame the publisher for that, not the writer.
   Woman on the Edge of Time is the story of a bruised and marginalized woman who finds herself in the future, somehow. Neither she nor we can be sure if her experiences are real or imagined, and since she spends a large portion of the story in Belleview Psych Hospital, there are plenty of doubters around her to support her uncertainty. We never know whether the future worlds Connie sees are solid or hallucinations, but that doesn't stop them from being compelling, thought provoking, and even inspiring. This is a story of Power and the Powerless, and the ways they defeat each other; of paths to the future and where they will take us; and of the immediate present and the ways we address it. I've read this book half a dozen times, every few years, really, because it gives me a little hope for the future and a few new lessons on how to work toward a good one.
I don't know what happened to my first copy, but I lost a lot of books to mold in a storage room I left them in to go traveling, so I might have lost it then. This copy, I got from my favourite bookstore for unused books, Book City. I sought it out many years after I lost it because the future worlds and the characters that inhabited them stuck with me, and I found myself describing them to people sometimes when we talked about politics and the world and what we should do. This book became part of my worldview, and what better good can a writer do?
Now that I've said all that, it seems wrong to let this book go, but I've read it so many times, I could probably recite it, so I guess I'll let this one go, along with my heartfelt thanks to a great teacher. And in retrospect, I see thanks are also due to the professor who included this book in her syllabus, Ms. Banerjee.
Score - 0 (2 books saved, 2 released)

The Patron Saint of Liars, Ann Patchett

This isn't my first Ann Patchett, or even my favourite, but it is so compelling that I shouted at my husband when he tried to interrupt me before I found out how one scene played out: "He hit his head!" I wailed, as though it was as plain as day that I couldn't respond to his petty request while there was a guy, a wonderful guy, lying bleeding on the basement floor. [**Spoiler alert, he comes out alright]. My point is that these are real people, and we love them like we love real people: because of and despite all that they are, their endearing gruffness, their flailing hope. That's what Ann Patchett is about: characters so real and enchanting, we miss them like friends when they're gone. And that's the reason I don't have my favourite of her novels, Bel Canto, because I keep giving it away. I've bought more than a dozen copies over the last five years, sometime two at a time, but I still don't have one, in fact, if I know you, you probably have one of them.
My sister-in-law introduced me to Ann Patchett when she gave me Bel Canto for Christmas one year, for which I'm grateful, and The Patron Saint of Liars, I bought at Book City on Bloor, which is a great store for novels especially, but loads of other stuff- travel, languages, Humanities- two floors of it.
This one I read very quickly, hungrily, on the couch in this room I am in, this room full of all these books; this little reading sanctuary, soon to shift and divide and make a small place for creating.
I'm not sure I am ready to let go of this one. Unless I really have to.
Score - +1 (2 saved, 1 released)

All He Ever Wanted, Anita Shreve

This shelf is my favourite novels, so there are a lot of 'first of' books. This one is my first Anita Shreve, and while quiet devastation is a hallmark of hers, this one is as subtle as a scalpel; a portrait of a love so convoluted, it is weaponized, and it is that ultra-soft touch that makes this tragedy bearable, even beautiful; fascinating, the way a Devilfish is.
I read this on a long bus trip to find someone who didn't want to be found after rehab gave up on her, and the sad human frailty and colourless world this novel describes corroborated the rusty towns and shabby roadside inns that lay along the path of my sorry quest. Maybe I felt better just because I wasn't them, but there was something deeper, like a purging, a lancing too, and I felt cleaner, clearer, than when I began reading. It was painful, but it was bearable pain, and that somehow made my pain more bearable.
I bought this at the homey Balfour Books on College Street, one of our last local bookstores, recently manhandled into smaller quarters further down the way. I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank them for being a consistently reliable source of great books.
I love this one, but there is still a lot of Anita Shreve I haven't read, so I'm letting this one go.
Score - 0 (1 book saved, 1 book released)

The Risk Pool, by Richard Russo

The Risk Pool was my first book by Richard Russo, but I've plowed through almost everything else since then. I got this book while I was living in Czechoslovakia, while there was such a thing, because there wasn't by the time I left, but while I was there, any fluent English speaker (and there were only about five in the whole town) would pass on to any other English speaker, any and all reading material, and so I lived in a small river of excellent fiction. I taught for a year there at the Vysoka Skola Dopravy a Spojov, in case you're ever in the neighbourhood, just after I got back from Africa and home wouldn't look the same anymore. This was the first book anyone lent me after I got there, and the lender was my roommate, Andrea from Vienna, whose inexplicable affection for Charles Bukowski did not spoil her palate for more flavourful characters. There are a few books so compelling that I've just turned them over once I finish and read the whole thing again, and this is one of those books. Part of the reason may be that reading and hearing English words was so refreshing in a place where I heard so little, but mostly, I just wasn't ready to let go of the people. I just liked them all so much, and it hurt me to have to lose touch like that, never find out how their lives worked out.  I miss them still.
Not sure I can let this one go.
Score +1 (1 book in, 0 out)

Day One: The Decision

I have a lot of books; loads of novels, texts on philosophy and religion from school, dictionaries and teach- yourself language books in Irish, Latin, German, Greek (Ancient and Modern), and Slovak. I love them all like unborn worlds, but I rarely open them, and the time has come when I could really use the space they now inhabit. I railed against letting them go, thought of donating some of them to a nearby library so I could still visit them, touch them, and remember what they have been to me. Then it occurred to me, maybe I should do that first, remember what they have meant to me, and then tell the world about them and why I have kept them by me all these years. Maybe then I can let them go out into the world, still keeping some part of them around to visit when I need to.
So I'm going to write a little memorial for each one, where we met, where we have been together and what each one has taught me. And I encourage your response, if you have read, meant to read or specifically not read one of these books, and think it belongs in a small collection.
So, thank you for coming to visit, and I hope you enjoy your stay.