Perfect Summer Reading
Pickle Me This Digest for August
Am I having a good time because the books are so good, or are the books so good because I’m having a good time?
The proverbial question, one that seems more pressing when I’m in a funk and the books are terrible, but it’s worth asking too when I just keep opening one fantastic novel after another. And it’s true that our summer has been quite glorious, last week ending a string of four delightful getaways around Ontario, each one with reading as sparkling as the lakes were. A month ago, I was raving to you about Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a read that felt like the springboard to my summer, and now I’m back with another pick that read its way straight into my heart, so much so that I’m imploring everybody around me to read it, read it, read it. (So far, my husband and daughter have done so, and loved it too, along with Barack Obama, so I’m currently working on a 100% approval rating.)
I read Liz Moore’s novel God of the Woods during a camping trip to Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron, and I thought I knew what I was getting into. I’ve read books about missing girls before, you see, and I’ve read books set at summer camps, and I know how such a setting can be both creepy AND perfect for exploring class divides, and this is also a book about a great house belonging to a wealthy family—naturally the house has a name, and that name is, absurdly, “Self-Reliance.” I’ve read detective fiction before too—the detective working the case of the missing Barbara Van Laar in this book is a young woman eager to prove herself, whose talents are undermined by her colleagues. This novel, I supposed, would be just a book jam-packed with all my favourite literary elements. And it is, it really is, but what makes it so exceptional is what Moore does with those elements, how she manages to take these familiar devices and tell a story that’s suprising and subversive, like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. How the dripping blood on the cover is in fact dripping paint, is the kind of thing I’m talking about. A thumb to the patriarchy, wonderfully queered, and so fiercely feminist, plus it goes down a treat. It’s so fresh, and so interesting. (Read it, read it, read it.)
Another Great Summer Book
Imagine—structurally speaking—To The Lighthouse a century later, Woolf’s modernist masterpiece transposed from Cornwall to rural Alberta, the story of a family cabin, a summer idyll, one precious week a year in which time appears to stand still and nothing ever changes… (Read the rest)
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Another Book at the Beach
One of my most frequent experiences of nostalgia is biblio-nostalgia, the longing to be returned to a particular book in a time and place that felt especially sublime. The August I read MALIBU RISING at a rented cottage and could not put it down, the long weekend two years ago when I read Jennifer Close’s MARRYING THE KETCHUPS at the beach, the particular camp chair I was slumped in years ago as I was hastily turning the pages of Amber Dawn’s SODOM ROAD EXIT (lesbians, vampires and abandoned roller coasters on the shores of Lake Erie, oh my!). And yes, while it’s only been a month, I’m still not over having read Shelby Van Pelt’s REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES on our camping trip over the Canada Day long weekend and—especially as we departed on another camping trip last Saturday—I felt the desire to have it happen all over again, the perfect book in the perfect place and time. But this is the kind of experience it’s impossible to manufacture; it either happens or it doesn’t. (Read the rest)
Wonderful Books My Children Recommended to ME!
One of my favourite things about the Big Kid stage of being a parent is receiving book recommendations from my children. Rosena Fung is already a big name in our house, her middle-grade debut LIVING WITH VIOLA one of many titles my younger daughter is forever leaving in random locations around our house (which is how you know a book is good), and now her older sister has ecstatically received her YA graphic novel, AGE 16, demanding that I read it too. (Read the rest)
“Who uses typewriters anyway?” so once posed The Bard, though it is a different kind of antique typewriter nostalgia that drew me to Allie Millington’s middle grade novel, Olivetti—I bought it for my daughter, who loved it and implored me to read it too. And let me tell you, there was no such thing as antique typewriter nostalgia during my childhood, when my dad worked for Olivetti and sold typewriters all over southern Ontario. Nobody, including me, realized just how hipster cool that was, and we had antique typewriters all over the house, and I have such visceral memories of their tactility, the feel of the keys, how the key arms would get all gummed up, the smoothness of the roller, how strange it was to see the alphabet disordered, the freedom of unrolling a ribbon, the spool leftover with a hole just perfect for sticking my finger, the mess of ink. (Read the rest)
Latest Holiday Reading Round-Up
