Ah, the season of lists… Here’s to curling up with a good book! Happy reading…
In this annus horribilis, I took refuge, as so many did, in books, both audio and print. My pleasure was to take out both versions of a title from the library: if I fell asleep listening, I could catch up by reading the text. Commentary was mostly quotes I loved from the books, so I have included only a few; scroll down.
Poetry highly recommended: Some of my favourite prose this year: all by Canadian women!:
An eclectic collection! I’m surprised at the gender balance in books I’ve read over the last two years: I would have thought I’d read more women. You can tell I go on author-binges… Most books came from London Library, with my thanks
Comments below.
May 2022 be shimmering!
Books Read
Garous Abdolmalekian; translated from the Persian by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey. Lean against this late hour
Jordan Abel, Nishga
Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies
Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind
André Alexis, The Night Piece: Collected Short Fiction
Madhur Anand, This red line goes straight to your heart: a memoir in halves
Gail Anderson-Dargatz, The Almost Wife A Novel
Raymond Antrobus, The perseverance
Marianne Apostolides, I can’t get you out of my mind: a novel
Rae Armantrout, Conjure
Katherine Ashenburg, Her Turn
Margaret Atwood, Dearly
Oana Avasilichioaei, Eight Track
Fredrik Backman, Anxious People
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café
John Banville, Mrs. Osmond
Pat Barker, The Women of Troy (Women of Troy #2)
Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat
Sebrastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
Gary Barwin, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy
Billy-Ray Belcourt, A history of my brief body
Matt Bell, Appleseed
SJ Bennett, The Windsor Knot
Nina Berkhout, Why Birds Sing
Frank Bidart, Half Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
Heather Birrell, Float and scurry
Yolanda Bonnell, Bug
William Boyd, Trio
Rutger Bregman, Humankind: a hopeful history
A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree witches: a novel
Nic Brewer, Suture
Nicole Brossard, Museum of bone and water; translated by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure
Carol Bruneau, Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis
Cathy Marie Buchanan, The Day the Falls Stood Still
Cathy Marie Buchanan, Daughter of Black Lake
Gabriella Burnham, It Is Wood, It Is Stone
Catherine Bush, Blaze Island
Rhonda Byrne, The Greatest Secret
Julia Cameron, The Listening Path, The Creative Art of Attention (A 6-Week Artist’s Way Program)
Anne Carson, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy: a version of Euripides’ Helen
Louise Carson, The Cat Possessed
Jody Chan, Sick
Mary Jean Chan, Flèche
Victoria Chang, Obit: poems
Deepak Chopra, Total meditation: practices in living the awakened life
Don Mee Choi, DMZ colony
Jillian Christmas, the gospel of breaking
George Elliott Clarke, Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
Joseph Coelho, The girl who became a tree: a story told in poems
Henri Cole, Blizzard: poems
Bridget Collins, The Binding
Maryse Condé, I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem
Eduardo C. Corral, Guillotine: poems
Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt
Rachel Cusk, Second Place
The Dalai Lama, Advice On Dying, translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins
Joseph Dandurand, The East Side of It All
Edmund de Waal, Letters to Camondo
Abigail Dean, Girl A
Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha
Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial love poem
Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays
Cory Doctorow, Radicalized
Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface
Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
Naoise Dolan, Exciting times: a novel
Dom Domanski, Bite down little whisper
Avni Doshi, Burnt Sugar
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
Marilyn Dumont, The pemmican eaters
Klara du Plessis, Ekke
Kim Echlin, Speak, Silence
Francesca Ekwuyasi, Butter honey pig bread: a novel
Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise
Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport
Síle Englert, The lost time accidents
Mariana Enriquez, The dangers of smoking in bed: stories
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
Annie Ernaux, A girl’s story
Annie Ernaux, Hôtel Casanova: et autres textes brefs
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Untie the strong woman: Blessed Mother’s immaculate love for the wild soul
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype
Sebastian Faulks, Snow Country
Elana Ferrante, Incidental inventions; translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Richard Flanagan, The living sea of waking dreams
Carolyn Forché, In the lateness of the world
Aminatta Forna, The Window Seat: Notes From a Life in Motion
Tana French, The Searcher
The Trespasser Dublin Murder Squad Series, Book 6
Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
Benjamin Garcia, Thrown in the throat: poems
Gary Geddes, Out of the ordinary: politics, poetry and narrative
Doireann Ni Ghriofa, A Ghost in the Throat
Camilla Gibb, The Relatives
Chantal Gibson, How She Read
Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
Louise Glück, American originality: essays on poetry
Louise Gluck, Faithful and virtuous night
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa: animal life and the birth of the mind
Seth Godin, The practice: shipping creative work
Seth Godin, Linchpin
Carol Rose GoldenEagle, The Narrows of Fear
Ariel Gordon, Treed: walking in Canada’s urban forests
Mary Gordon, Payback
Amanda Gorman, The hill we climb: an inaugural poem for the country; foreword by Oprah Winfrey
Vivian Gornick, Taking a long look: essays on culture, literature, and feminism in our time
Catherine Graham, Æther: an out-of-body lyric
Adam Grant, Think Again
Richard Greene, The unquiet Englishman: a life of Graham Greene
Lauren Groff, Matrix (William Heinemann)
Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl
Robert Hass, Summer snow: new poems
Cate Haste, Passionate spirit: the life of Alma Mahler
Natalie Haynes, The ancient guide to modern life
Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships
Richard Heath, Sacred geometry: language of the angels
Steven Heighton, Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos
Amy Hempel, Sing to it: new stories
Gay Hendricks, The big leap: conquer your hidden fear and take life to the next level. Gay Hendricks.
Tara Henley, Lean out: a meditation on the madness of modern life
Catherine Hernandez, Crosshairs
Carl Hiaasen, Squeeze me
Anne Hillerman, Stargazer
Edward Hirsch, Stranger by night: poems
Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers
Alice Hoffman, Magic lessons
Alice Hoffman, The Book of Magic
Eva Holland, Nerve: adventures in the science of fear
Bettany Hughes, Venus and Aphrodite: a biography of desire
Helen Humphreys, Meditations on a year at the herbarium
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf: The Dark Star Trilogy, Book 1
Natalie Jenner, The Jane Austen Society
Amanda Jernigan, Groundwork: poems; with wood engravings by John Haney | Biblioasis
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life.
Donna Kane, Orrery
Patricia Keeney, Orpheus in the World
Kaie Kellough, Magnetic equator
Kaie Kellough, Dominoes at the Crossroads
Thomas King, Sufferance
Barbara Kingsolver, How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons
Theresa Kishkan, Euclid’s Orchard & Other Essays
Rachel Kushner, The Hard Crowd
Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts
Kevin Lambert, You will love what you have killed; translated from the French by Donald Winkler
Shari Lapena, The End of Her
Mary Lawson, A Town Called Solace
John le Carré, Silverview
Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader
Amanda Leduc, The Centaur’s Wife
Jessica J. Lee, Two trees make a forest: travels among Taiwan’s mountains & coasts in search of my family’s past
Donna Leon, Transient desires
Jonathan Lethem, The Arrest
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
Deborah Levy, Things I don’t want to knowDeborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything
Ada Limón, The Carrying
Penelope Lively, Family Album: A Novel
Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
Randy Lundy, Blackbird Song
Annick MacAskill, Murmurations
Tanis MacDonald, Mobile
Carmen Maria Machado, In the dream house: a memoir
Margaret Macmillan, War
Alberto Manguel, Fabulous monsters: Dracula, Alice, Superman, and other literary friends
Hilary Mantel, Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
Daphne Marlatt, On the Threshold of the Page
Daphne Marlatt, Then Now
Bobbie Ann Mason, Dear Ann
Meg Mason, Sorrow and bliss: a novel
Francesco Matteuzzi, Mark Rothko: the story of his life
Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were: A Novel
Karen McBride, Crow Winter
Susan McCaslin, Heart Work
Susan McCaslin, Cosmic Egg
Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations
Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves
Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum
Hollie McNish, Nobody Told Me: The Poetry of Parenthood
Tessa McWatt, The Snow Line
Sandra Meek, Still: poems
Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King
Meg Mason, Sorrow and bliss: a novel
Francesco Matteuzzi, Mark Rothko: the story of his life
Sue Miller, Monogamy
N. Scott Momaday, The death of Sitting Bear: new and selected poems
Lorrie Moore, Bark
Virginia Morell, Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic
Valzhyna Mort, Music for the Dead and Resurrected Poet
Walter Mosley, Blood Grove
Sarah Moss, Summerwater
Paul Muldoon, Frolic and detour
Téa Mutonji, Shut Up You’re Pretty
James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
Alice Notley, For the ride
Sigrid Nunez, What are you going through
Okezie Nwoka, God of Mercy
Barack Obama, A Promised Land
Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
Susan Orlean, On Animals
Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Identity
Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness
Louise Penny & Hillary Rodham Clinton, State of Terror
Louise Penny, The Madness of Crowds
Charlie Petch, Why I was late
Marlene Nourbese Philip, Blank: essays & interviews
Jodi Picoult, The Book of Two Ways
Signe Pike, The forgotten kingdom
Michael Pollan, This is Your Mind on Plants
C.L. Polk, The Midnight Bargain
Vasko Popa, Vasko Popa: selected poems / selected and translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Charles Simic
Richard Powers, Bewilderment
Beth Powning, The Sister’s Tale
Francine Prose, The Vixen
Ian Rankin, A Song for the Dark Times
Iain Reid, I’m Thinking of Ending Things
David A. Robertson, Black Water
Lisa Robertson, Baudelaire Fractals
Eden Robinson, Return of the Trickster
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
Marilynne Robinson, Jack
Marilynne Robinson, What are we doing here?
Monique Roffey, The Mermaid of Black Conch
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
Matthew Rubery, The Untold History of the Talking Book
Muriel Rukeyser, The collected poems, 1913-1980
Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa
Kay Ryan, Synthesizing gravity: selected prose; edited and with an introduction by Christian Wiman
Kay Ryan, The best of it: new and selected poems
Sadhguru, Karma
Jennifer Saint, Ariadne
Mark Sampson, All the Animals on Earth
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
Sara Seager, The Smallest Lights in the Universe
Vijay Seshadri, That was now, this is then: poems
Hana Shafi, Small, broke, and kind of dirty: affirmations for the real world
Hana Shafi, It begins with the body: poems & illustrations
Robin Sharma, The Everyday Hero Manifesto
Lionel Shriver, Should we stay or should we go: a novel
Daniel Siegel, Aware
Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering How the Forest Is Wired for Intelligence and Healing
Goran Simic, Immigrant Blues
Sue Sinclair, Heaven’s thieves
SJ Sindhu, Blue-Skinned Gods
Richard-Yves Sitoski, No Sleep ‘til Eden
Richard-Yves Sitoski, Brownfields: poems
Richard-Yves Sitoski, No Downmarket Oldies FM Station Blues
Jake Skeets, Eyes bottle dark with a mouthful of flowers / poems by Jake Skeets
Johanna Skibsrud, Island
Danez Smith, Homie
Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses
Dani Spiotta, Wayward
Mirabai Starr, Wild mercy: living the fierce and tender wisdom of the women mystics
Edward St. Aubyn, Double blind
John Elizabeth Stintzi, Junebat
John Elizabeth Stintzi, Vanishing Monuments
David Stones, sfumato: new and selected poems
Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
Graham Swift, Here We Are
Arthur Sze, Sight Lines
Lisa Taddeo, Animal: a novel
Katie Tallo, Dark August
Jordan Tannahill, Liminal
Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Jeff Vandermeer, Hummingbird salamander
Katherena Vermette, The Strangers
Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides: A Novel
Sara Wainscott, Insecurity system: poems
Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep
Natalie Zina Walschots, Hench: a novel
Jo Walton, Or what you will
Phoebe Wang, Admission Requirements
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Awakening the Sacred Body
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing
Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key
Marina Warner, Inventory of a life mislaid: an unreliable memoir
Bryan Washington, Memorial
Elizabeth Waterston, Railway Ties 1888-1920
Elizabeth Waterston, Plaid
Phyllis Webb, Selected poems: the vision tree
Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words: A Novel
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs: Maisie Dobbs Series, Book 1
Kathleen Winter, Undersong
Peter Wohlleben, The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing Our Ancient Bond with Forests and Nature
Elana Wolff, Swoon
Yi Lei, My name will grow wide like a tree: selected poems /; translated from the Chinese by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi Yi, Lei, author.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Prince of Mist
Julia Zarankin, Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder: A Memoir
Lindsay Zier-Vogel, Letters to Amelia: a novel
Kathryn Aalto, Writing wild: women poets, ramblers, and mavericks who shape how we see the natural world
Caroline Adderson, editor. The Journey prize stories: the best of Canada’s new writers
A very few comments
The foodie mystery series I love are by Louise Penny (of course!), in Québec Donna Leon in Venice and Martin Walker in Provence.
I love how books, movies and dreams find one another in corresponding themes.
Peter Kingsley, Reality: Profound and beautifully written. This book will shift your perception of the whole of Western culture from Plato on!
Portrait of a Lady on Fire: After reading Undersong, I watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire: so interesting on the female gaze sans men, the artist’s gaze. Marianne, a painter, and Héloïse, and the countess’s maid Sophie: Orpheus and Eurydice live! Director: Céline Sciamma
The Spanish Princess: Watched while reading Hilary Mantel’s Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books. Her one word for Philippa Gregory: minced!
Feeling isolated? Then read Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, and you’ll feel much better. Or worse. How fiction plays out: in the Netflix movie, Denzel Washington will play his namesake, George Herbert Washington. Amanda even comments that they look alike: “Has anyone ever told you that?” Well, yes.😜
Reading Tanis MacDonald’s Mobile directly after Madhur Anand, This red line goes straight to your heart: a memoir in halves is a scrumptious act of apophenia: “gratuitous pattern-finding in random data”. How I loved the play of form in free fall, O bricoleuses! After Gavin’s death in September, I’ve been mired in bureaucracy and practicality, removed from poetry, even from reading. Then MOBILE! Mad MacDonald hurtled me back to poetry. “From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.” W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”. How I loved the Jane poems: Jacobs would have too! Tanis spun so many words in the air, O Juggler, that I caught the drift and wrote all that I could not say about this huge transition (well, a start…) So, gratitude for your verve, and hugs in the swerve~
I didn’t think much of Natalie Haynes’s-A Thousand Ships but enjoyed Pat Barker, The Women of Troy (Women of Troy #2): a feminist take indeed! Briseis: “elation is one of the many faces of grief…Like savages, we ingest our dead.”
Gary Barwin, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy: Begin at high noon, as Motl might suggest, and you will be still reading long into the night, impelled by plot and even more by language to conclude. A picaresque, quixotic triumph.
Here’s celebrating all the balloons Gary keeps suspended in the air… and makes manifest! I must have known (but didn’t!) that it was your birthday, having started your novel on June 22, and then read that was the day the Nazis invaded Lithuania! It’s a master work, hovering between tragedy and the humour you bring to all your work… very like Indigenous writing in that good regard! The novel reads like Salmon Rushdie on a very good day in its exuberant inclusivity… but the writing is so much tauter than Rushdie’s rush, and it never totters. Nor does it falter in its picaresque but sure dash toward safety, somewhere, surely!
“those three dots in a row…Ellipses. They mean something’s missing. If you erase them, you have to put them back in to show you’ve erased them. We’re like that. We’re the absence of absence. We didn’t have a future, but we’re going there anyway.”
SJ Bennett, The Windsor Knot: Yep, watched The Crown. Speaking of the monarchy, I loved The Windsor Knot: the Queen at 90 as detective at Windsor Castle, portrayed as a Superior Being. The audio captures her clipped voice to perfection. Really fun and fascinating. A new series!
A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree witches: a novel: I think you’d enjoy Alice Hoffman’s The Book of Magic: herbal fun and sweet plot. I followed it with A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree witches: a novel. This book gives context and historical accuracy and is much better written and also heavier!
Nic Brewer, Suture: You think as an artist you sweat blood? SUTURE literalizes the metaphors! Should be on every creative writing course as a warning 😊
Completely wrapped up in Carol Bruneau’s Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis. Thanks for shining this light in dusty & dark corners. Such a tender, illuminating book! In this #pandemic, #publishing is tough & #selling #books even tougher. So when we #read something grand, it’s glorious to #SpreadTheWord! @ValueCdnStories
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Cathy Marie Buchanan, Daughter of Black Lake: It’s a marvellous re-creation of such little-known history! By chance (which means when the book is due back at the library!), after finishing Signe Pike’s The forgotten kingdom, I open the evocative, moving Daughter of Black Lake and couldn’t put it down. Women healers who foresee Roman invaders, a few centuries apart!
Catherine Bush, Blaze Island @goose_lane: On the BEST BOOK List! Oh & a mysterious birder searching for irruptions at the start of the marvellous Blaze Island novel :et in Newfoundland but with The Tempest ever present, including a young Miranda on a remote island. Thanks for this glorious, essential work that makes a riveting novel out of necessary science. Redolent, relevant, and haunting, it’s still gleaming in my mind. Have been recommending it to everyone.
We live in such synchronicity. The night before I began your novel, I dreamt: A sparkling blue lake and sunshine. I run along over the hills, looking for the Island out in the water, looking for the ferry. But have I overshot the city? There are no signs of anything urban, though I have trekked miles, back and forth over the terrain of woods and fields. Have I travelled back into a pre-colonial paradise? There’s no Indigenous presence either. Nothing human here disturbs the natural cycle. How shall I return to my friends? I’m happy here in this other dimension, but will I be able ever to step back?
One of the advantages of the Pandemic is how many of us are outside, even in the cold. And there are bald eagles in London ON, swooping down the river!
By chance, right after Blaze Island, I read Montreal fantasy writer Jo Walton’s Or what you will. Also playing with The Tempest and another Miranda:), it really bridges that mean-spirited gulf between genre and literary fiction (even if it needs a bit more tweaking). I think of Jung’s precognitive (what an interesting word, pre cognition!) apocalyptic dreams of a flood of blood, pre-WW1. We surely are herd animals, and thoughts of dread and fear sweep through into stampede. My work these days is to stay alert to what is mine and what is communal… to expand to a plane beyond fear into spaciousness.
Victoria Chang, Obit: I write down her name as Change.
“Who would want to speak prose over such poems,” cries Jorie Graham. Jorie Graham hosts today’s powerful readings live now and up later on https://www.youtube.com/c/TheBrooklynRail/videos
“The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.”
For Black History Month, I read Maryse Condé, I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem.
Speaking of cattails, I loved Rachel Cusk’s new Second Place, , set in marchland: by far her most interesting and based on Mabel Dodge, D.H. Lawrence:)! And by far her most interesting and based on Mabel Dodge, D.H. Lawrence:)!
Delighted in the new Rachel Cusk, Second Place. Mabel Dodge and D.H. Lawrence:) in second place, second phase! Truly remarkable perceptions, by far her best work…. no longer that detached null-at-centre narrator of the trilogy. I think Cusk has learned from Joan Didion’s concision in remarking on the peripheral that has not yet been articulated! Fascinating re art, and the background Laurentian story…. Highly recommend Paul Fulcher ‘s reflections in Goodreads, comparing Second Place with Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos. Dodge ‘s book has a new half-life, a palimpsest… a second Second Place, with a wet Norfolk marsh replacing dry New Mexico.
If you enjoyed Cusk’s trilogy, I can’t wait for you to read SECOND PLACE! Individually, I’d assign four stars to each of the three books. But they are so interesting as a formal whole, that five stars works.
Lauren B. Davis, Even So A paean to the Sisters of St. Joseph and the work they do!
Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean
“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience,” Joan Didion
“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions – with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating –there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space” Joan Didion, Why I Write
afterthought, the saddest story.’ Well, he would not have to fail at writing them, either.’”
the shimmer of her writing! I think Rachel Cusk has learned from Joan Didion’s concision in remarking on the peripheral that has not yet been articulated!
Delighted in this collection of essays, tracing “Why I Write”. You can breathe easily and trust Didion’s perspicacity, her wry wit and oblique perceptions that so clarify a worldview that is unflinching. To quote her on Hemmingway: “the very grammar of a Hemmingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching”
“ ‘Now he would never write the things he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well,’ the writer in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ thought as he lay dying of gangrene in Africa.
Reading the riveting and essential Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface. The whole issue of moral compliance, complicity and compartmentalization, with Masha the expert in same. How to use one’s talents throughout life? “we weren’t trying to use technology to open up a space to change the system… to organize political change.” Afterword by Ron Deibert, Citizen Lab at U. of T.
Don Domanski, Bite down little whisper
As I write about Don Domanski’s Bite down little whisper I dream Don as tufted lynx! What a loss to the poetry community. But we have his words:
“Quietude is called returning to life Lao Tze says
…chocolate irises
gleaming outward from their arterial darkness
with the unborn standing high up in the trees
like cemetery angels
one finger pointing to heaven the other to earth”
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Kim Echlin, SPEAK, SILENCE
What a powerful, lucent book to read as Canada mourns our own shame. Mothers and daughters, intergenerational trauma. Kim, your words are inscribed in me.
Kim Echlin’s SPEAK, SILENCE is essential reading. Long ago, I coined a neologism, SIOLENCE to express exactly what this book delivers, in its title and its text. SPEAK, SILENCE should be hollered to the mountain tops. Written in Kim Echlin’s lucent prose, SPEAK, SILENCE rings as clear as a bell, tolling for thee. Mothers and daughters, intergenerational trauma expressed with eloquent clarity and compassion. Listen to these women and you too will be inscribed by their stories.
Quotes that inspired me
“I am interested in metaphor, that is where I get my fix of transcendence,” Anne Enright, The New York Review of Books, February 20, 2021
“What if the fantasies of our childhoods, mixed in with childhood’s grief, are the obscuring coil around our adult lives?” Madeleine Thien
“Mêtis was the Greek term for cunning, skillfulness, practical intelligence; and especially for trickery. It was what could make humans, at the most basic and down-to-earth level, equal to the gods. Mêtis might sound like just another concept. But really it was the opposite of everything we understand by concepts. It meant a particular quality of intense awareness that always manages to stay focused on the whole: on the lookout for hints, however subtle, for guidance in whatever form it happens to take, for signs of the route to follow however quickly they might appear or disappear.” Peter Kingsley, Reality
Everything you might need to know about writing fiction! “Artists talk a lot about inspiration, but perhaps they ought to talk more about filing.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/04/hilary-mantel-wolf-hall-mantel-pieces
“To be a poet is to have a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.” George Eliot, Middlemarch
“In one direction, we’d reached the border at which clairvoyants stand gazing into the future, and in the other we’d gone backward to the zone where the present turns ghostly with memory and yet resists quite becoming the past.” Stuart Dybek, “Paper Lantern” #sundaysentence
“I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight! I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing!… I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of the cloud across the sun’s disk!” Alexander Graham Bell #sundaysentence
“A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.”
Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle #sundaysentence
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Antonio Gramsci #sundaysentence
“Does one become a visionary or, rather, is it not that one has been blind until then?” Alexandra David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929) #sundaysentence
“All of a sudden he has that sensation he kept getting…an intense awareness of the spread of the dark countryside all around his house; a sense of being surrounded by a vast invisible web, where one wrong touch could shake things so far distant he hasn’t even spotted them.” Tana French, The Searcher #sundaysentence
“Leaves learn to fly at the end of their life.” Rilke
“I have a close relationship with silence, with things withheld, things known and not said.” Colm Toibin
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Penn Kemp 