Not that long ago there was an interesting discussion on Twitter about how (or if) knowledge and experience with the setting of a novel affected the way you connect with the story being told. (If you aren't on Twitter and this seems to go against everything you've heard about the medium, let me just say that it all depends on who you interact with and that, yes, there are a lot of interesting literary discussions being hashed out in 140-character bites.) Personally, I love finding a book that's set somewhere I'm familiar with. Reading Ami McKay's The Birth House, for example, was a thrill partially because it's set in my home town (albeit nearly 100 years before I lived there). Likewise, as I become more comfortable with the idea that I now live in Toronto, books set in neighbourhoods I'm familiar with pop out at me in way they perhaps would not have five years ago. Nonetheless, the geography of a novel is, in some ways, incidental to whether or not I'll enjoy it, because even if I'm reading about somewhere I'm familiar with, I'm still experiencing it through the eyes and emotions of a fictional character, which means, in a way, that my experience doesn't matter. I had to remind myself of this a few times while reading Grace O'Connell's gorgeous debut novel Magnified World, though, because not only do her descriptions mimic the way I remember certain places, but her character Maggie feels wonderfully familiar, as if I've bumped into her before.
Magnified World is set, since we're on the subject, mostly in Toronto's West Queen West/Trinity Bellwoods neighbourhood. Queen Street, certainly, figures into the story a lot, as does College Street and Kensington Market. If you are familiar with these places, reading O'Connell's descriptions offers a warm buzz of recognition; if you aren't, though, be assured that this is not an insider's look at Toronto: the descriptions are vivid and accurate in the way that lets you unconsciously map out a character's movements, without feeling overwhelmed by comings and goings. It's my favourite way to read about cities, really – detailed without becoming clinical.
I don't think I ever realized it before, but reading a hardcover vs. a softcover really changes the way I read a book. In large part, I think this is because I do most of my reading during my commute, and therefore tend to take off the dust jacket so it doesn't get ruined. This strips a hardcover of most of its distinguishing characteristics, including its cover design, plot synopsis, blurbs and little author bio. If I take the dust jacket off before I've properly read all of this, and before I've started the book, then I end up starting to read blind, with no pointers as to what's coming in the story or biographical clues as to the narrative. Usually I have a pretty good idea of what a book is going to be about, and then in suspenseful moments I can return to the blurbs to reassure myself. When reading Vincent Lam's The Headmaster's Wager, though, all I had were bright red covers and a black spine to turn to when the intensity shot up, forcing me to catch my breath and return to the story without any idea whether things were going to be okay or not.
The Headmaster's Wager is set in Vietnam, beginning right around the beginning of the Vietnam War. I think it would be impossible to live in the West and not have had your notions of the war consist mainly of images from American movies (my formative ideas about it come, I'm sorry to say, from Forest Gump). Lam, however, positions you on the other side of the conflict; not with the Viet Cong, but with a Chinese immigrant living in Saigon. Headmaster Percival Chen runs an English academy, and although many of his students go on to work with the Americans, he is unconcerned about the war, and actively works to learn nothing about what's going on. He is Chinese, the war is about Vietnam, thus, it does not concern him. This nationalistic streak proves dangerous, however, when the government decrees that all schools must teach Vietnamese. Percival refuses, both on principle and because he is trying to demonstrate his Chinese pride to his son Dai Jai. This small act, coming right at the beginning of the novel, becomes the fulcrum for everything that follows – a small act of defiance that changes everything.
When we were kids, my sisters and I devoured Archie comics. We literally had bags of them. People gave them to us as gifts, my mum would buy old ones at flea markets – we had hundreds. We read enough of them that now we can refer to specific Archie adventures when playing games like Taboo and not have it seem obscure. Eventually, though, we started running into more and more reprints and began to grow out of Riverdale. Archie is kind of a gateway comic, I guess, and after years of reading about his friends I moved on to Gary Larson's Far Side comics. After I got through those (probably around Grade 6) I didn't really read any comics (besides the ones in the newspaper) until I discovered webcomics a few years ago. Of those, Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant was one of my most favourite, and when she put out a book last year I was thrilled.
I am making the distinction here between comics and graphic novels, because Beaton's pieces are comics in the sense that they're written in strips. She has some recurring characters, and often does several strips on a particular theme, but her book is much like Larson's in that you can open it at random. Even reading it cover to cover is a little like opening at random, since you can go from several comics about Lester B. Pearson, to a few pages about "sexy Batman," and on to a strip about Queen Elizabeth at Tillbury. Clearly, Hark! A Vagrant is a little different.
If you read this blog with any frequency, you will have noticed (I'm assuming) that I don't give books rankings. I don't rate books with stars or out of 5 or 10, or in any other way compare them on a fixed scale. Lots of blogs do this; Goodreads does this; I decided not to from the get-go. I was not good at marking on a bell curve when I marked assignments as a TA and I'm not good at it as a reader. How does Roald Dahl compare to Michael Ondaatje? Does a 2/5 ranking mean a book isn't worth reading? How much better is a book that rated a 3/5? Ultimately, my fear is that I would compare a book to the ones I had recently read to try and find a numerical value for it, and if I were coming of a string of truly excellent reads (as I am now), it just wouldn't be fair; likewise, sometimes I pick up a book at exactly the right moment and it suits my mood perfectly, whereas reading the same book at the wrong time would leave me feeling very differently. Suffice to say, I'm glad I don't rank books because I would have a tough time deciding what to do with Adam Marek's short story collection Instruction Manual for Swallowing.
This introduction probably makes it sound like I didn't like this book, but if you've read my About page, then you would know I don't bother writing about books I don't like. (Is that disingenuous? I don't think so.) Anyway, Marek's collection of stories is weird. I tend to like weird, as I've said before, and indeed, I liked many of the stories in Instruction Manual for Swallowing. Take, for example, the first piece in the book, called "The Forty-Litre Monkey." It is a bizarre little story about a man who goes into a pet shop looking to buy a pet for his girlfriend. Her pets have both recently died: the cat tried to eat the lizard and then choked on it, so they effectively killed each other. Weird and darkly hilarious (my mum used to say we couldn't have birds/fish/rabbits, etc. because it wouldn't be fair to the cats, now I know why). In the pet shop, the man is enticed by the owner's description of the animals not my weight, but by volume, and when the owner invites the man to come and see his "forty-litre monkey" (no, that is not a euphemism), he takes him up on it. What follows is a look into the (fictional, I hope) world of competitive monkey rearing. The story is weird and dark and takes you somewhere unexpected: it sets you up for a lot, is what I'm saying.
I do most of my reading on my commute, which is long enough that I can generally read a book a week without breaking a sweat. To get to work (and then get home again) I take a streetcar, a subway, and a bus – the holy trinity of Toronto transportation. It can be tempting, sometimes, to complain about how long it takes, or how many transfers I have to make, or how I pretty much never get a seat, but really, it's an hour and half of designated reading time, and how can I complain about that? Sometimes people approach me to ask about what I'm reading – how I like a certain book, whether I would recommend it, how I found it, etc. – and I often glance up from the page to scope out what else is being read in the vicinity. Clearly, I am not the only one who does this, although, unlike Julie Wilson in her new book Seen Reading, I've never kept good enough notes to construct lives for my fellow transit readers.
Seen Reading is a book of microfiction – think one-page short stories – that is entirely inspired by the readers Wilson encounters on her own Toronto commute. She takes notes of the reader's gender and appearance, what book they're reading, and what page they're on, and then uses these details to build a small story, sometimes with a clear connection to something about their appearance and book choice, sometimes not. As a premise, it's gold, but in lesser hands this slim collection of stories would fall flat, or become repetitive. It's a definite testament to Wilson's imagination and the constraints of a one-page story that make Seen Reading an engrossing little collection.
I recently realized that, although I've read a lot of books, I rarely get the chance to read multiple books by the same author. It's kind of weird, actually, because I distinctly remember choosing books specifically because of their author when I was a kid: Janet Lunn, L.M. Montgomery, Jean Little – all authors whose catalogue I plowed through with delight. I'm not sure when that stopped. I might be just that I'm reading more contemporary authors now, so there's less of a back-catalogue to devour, or, perhaps, that I find myself increasingly drawn to first novels. Whatever the case, when I was reading Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay I was struck by the fact that it's the third book of hers I've read, and that it's felt like a while since that was the case, and that being familiar with an author changes the way you read his or her work.
The last Hay novel I read was her Giller-winning Late Nights on Air(the first was A Student of Weather), which also gave me the opportunity to interview her for the Journal (the Queen's student newspaper, which I was very involved with as an undergrad). Hay has a lovely voice – simultaneously soft and strong – a fact I would never have remembered except that when I began reading Alone in the Classroom it took up residence in my head. It wasn't quite as if Hay was reading the novel to me (I didn't talk to her long enough for that to happen), but every once in a while, a bit of description would so remind me of Late Nights on Air, or the way she talked about writing, that there it was. Anyway, none of that really says anything about the novel, I suppose, but perhaps it's part of why I responded so well to it.
It's Easter this weekend, and even though ours isn't a family prone to big family get-togethers (we're too spread out), it is nonetheless a holiday steeped in family memories of egg hunts time together, so perhaps that's why I've been feeling the family nostalgia lately. When we were kids, for example, my parents, and my dad in particular, used to tell us stories about when they were little kids. Even now when we get together with our extended family from one side or the other, the evening or weekend or whatever inevitably (and wonderfully) becomes all about retelling the same big stories and, if we're lucky, a new one will slide in amongst all the familiar ones. A lot of these stories are ones I know so well that I'm sure I'll tell them to my kids, albeit in a heightened, more exaggerated form, because that's what tends to happen when family stories get passed down. In Touch, Alexi Zentner's debut novel, he ups the ante of the family story in dark and thrilling way to tell a story that is both familiar and completely his own.
Touch is set in the backwoods of B.C., in the (I assume) fictional gold rush/mill town of Sawgamet. The story is told by Stephen Boucher, now in his mid- to late-40s, who grew up in Sawgamet, left for Seminary school at 16, and has now returned to replace his step-father as the Anglican minister and to bury his mother, who is on the verge of death. It's winter in Sawgamet, but not the kind of cruel, punishing winter he remembers. Things have gotten better in Sawgamet, in part thanks to the demand for lumber instigated by the Second World War, which is raging in the far-away background of this novel (Sephen served as a chaplin during the First World War, but that details doesn't figure much into the novel). Stephen has returned home, and as his mother lays dying and he and his wife and their three daughters begin to settle into the rectory, he is understandably drawn to memories of his childhood and the family stories he heard growing up.
