Shhh! I'm Reading.

Recently, I leant a friend a copy of Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding (which is amazing and I highly recommend by the way). He made it through 350 of its 500 odd pages and then gave it back saying “I loved it up until that point but the characters just got so pathetic so I stopped.” What the fuck is that about? This is a perfectly intelligent individual whose tastes are cultivated and whose literary sensibility I have the highest regard for but really? After 350 pages you’re packing it in? I don’t have it in me to quit after that kind of investment. It would send me on a sneaky shame spiral. I’d be asking myself “what kind of weak willed person are you?” I’d be having a psychological tug-of-war with myself. Anyway, that was all before I bought Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. And I think maybe I get it now. There is an empty spot on my bookshelf that calls to me in a consoling voice saying “give in, why struggle, just put me back and enjoy how pretty my dust jacket is.” I’ve heard it called the world’s most disastrous masterpiece. Indeed. Alternately, literature’s most beautiful failure. There are the typically boring Murakami characters (I mean that in the most complimentary way; the alluringly dull characters are the chief reason to read a Murakami novel) and then there is the shoulder pad swaddled assassin who is ballzy and self-sufficient on the one hand but laments the size of her cleavage on the other (huh?). Oh and there are elves or little people or something. But tally ho! I will finish the bloody thing even if it means I have to suffer the little people and the cleave talk and the annoying teenage literary prodigy.

I finally picked up Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven this week because he is a genius and basically the best comic writer around (maybe along with Jeff Lemire). In Ice Haven, there is this little kid named Charles who is like me but a boy and I dunno, 8 or something. Charles and I should be BFF’s. Also, there’s a comic book critic named Harry Naybors (ha!), a married couple who are PI’s, Leopold and Loeb and Jon Benet Ramsay’s ransom note. It’s hilarious and suburban and weird in that wonderful Clowes way. Like Ghost World but more entertaining.

I can’t seem to let New Orleans go. I dream about this certain redfish dish at Bayona. I should probably just move there. In the meantime, Tom Piazza keeps me company. I read Why New Orleans Matters while I was in NOLA (as only the most dorky, Commander’s Palace frequenting tourist would). And of course, there’s Treme, on which he’s a regular writer. Lately I’ve been deep in his collection of essays on music and America and life and yes, New Orleans, Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America. I am learning things I didn’t realize I wanted to know about Jimmy Martin. I’m buying expensive box sets of blues records by people like Charley Patton and Son House. My bank account wants a word with Tom Piazza.

Top of my list of best bibliophilic events in Toronto are the wine and cheese nights Nicholas Hoare Books puts on with its eponymous owner who, clad in bow-tie and brass buttoned blazer, whizzes through a dangerous number of book recommendations; pithy anecdotes and witty asides included. Nicholas Hoare is a British gentleman who has family ties to people like Allen Lane and has an intimate knowledge of myriad country piles; all of which would be sort of insufferable if he wasn’t such a lark. In reference to a children’s book about caterpillars, he observes with delight “and the little ‘pillies ate the denrobiums!” Ha! Without fail, I discover a truckload of titles I’d never heard of but which, on account of Sir Hoare’s enthusiasm, are suddenly essential. My favorite kind of bibliophilic encounter. It was here that I picked up Joshua Knelman’s Hot Art and Calvin Trillin’s Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin. I also nabbed a copy of Nobel winner Tomas Tranströmer’s Selected Poems: 1954-1986 which I’d been searching for all over town.  

Oh, and one more. I squirreled up a copy of Petrograd at The Beguiling over the weekend. It’s about Rasputin and some spies and is full of Tyler Crook’s gorgeous inky illustrations. Fun!

(art by Daniel Clowes via Hey Oscar Wilde!)