First Quarter Performance Review - 3 mos, 6 books read
I decided in January that 2024 is the year to bring my writing up a notch. Part of better writing is more reading, we’re told, so I set a modest target of finishing two books a month. You know from a previous blog, my TBR pile was due for a winnowing, so this performance goal ticked two boxes. And what a great group of books I had on deck!
I kicked the year off by finishing American, Barbara Kingsolver’s, Pulitzer winning novel, Demon Copperhead. Full disclosure- I started reading it in December 2023, but it’s a long one so I think it’s fair to include it in the 2024 accomplishments. Twenty years ago, I’d been on a little Kingsolver blitz, tearing through Poisonwood Bible and The Prodigal Summer but then I went off her. Not sure why because her plots are as engaging as her language is readable. This latest one was on the reading list for a literary lecture series I subscribed to this winter at Yorkville’s Heliconian Club.* The Heliconian crowd pick great books, among them, Demon Copperhead. The character, Demon Copperhead, is a modern day David Copperfield. Instead of struggling to survive in the Dickensian London of late the 19th century, Kingsolver has set this in the Appalachia of the oxycontin era. Demon is a sympathetic character who falls for the allure of painkillers after a football injury. While the parallels to Dickens original novel were largely lost on me - it’s been decades since I soldiered through it - I loved Demon and I loved this book. It’s so accessible proving the point that good writing doesn’t mean you have to target just the literary crowd. Gives me some comfort since, well, obviously I’m not a writers’ writer.
When I can, I support Canadian writers so I moved next to Kerry Clare’s latest novel, Asking for a Friend. I learned of Clare when I took her blogging course in 2021. Pickle Me This is her blog in which she sometimes samples from others, including sometimes mine. I had not, until now, read any of her books though. The novel chronicles a friendship between two women who met in university. I’ve had a few female friendships that have intensified and receded as life has taken people in different directions. The two women in this story are no different although, unlike my friendships, much of Clare’s plot centres around the reproductive choices of her characters. While Clare must be a decade or so younger than I am, the cultural references were close enough to mine and the Toronto setting resonated with me too. It was a good read.
The Heliconian list then got me reading my first, but definitely not my last, novel from Newfoundlander, Michael Crummey. The Adversary is a Cain and Abel type story about a brother and sister who compete fiercely against one another in the 19th century fishing business of a Newfoundland outpost. They couldn’t be more different and the enmity between them, significant. There’s no hero here though - each is as unlikable as the other. Indeed, there are no sympathetic characters in this novel at all. But the language! Oh my god, the language is stunning. At his Heliconian lecture, Crummey disclosed he relied heavily on the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, described as “a dictionary of buckish slang, university wit, and pickpocket eloquence.” If you’re the sort who gets bogged down looking up every word you don’t know in a text, The Adversary will drive you mad. Just sit back and read for the context. If you’re like me, you’ll be so drawn in, you’ll be compelled to read the companion novel, The Innocents, a brother/sister duo of a different sort entirely. I am keen now to find his other books.
All this clever Heliconian fare had me searching for something lighter, and somewhere on my COVID walking travels I’d picked a novel, The Secret Wife, out of a Little Library. Its writer, American Gill Paul, has several historical novels to her credit and I’m sure has sold more than any Canadian author can ever imagine. This could easily be described as a beach read. The story builds on the mythology that one of the Romanovs survived the 1917 Russian revolution and ended up, eventually, in the US. It’s the 2nd historical fiction book about Eastern Europe I’ve read in the last six months and they both use the same trick: modern day characters research their ancestors through whose story history is told with the narrative switching back and forth between the two eras. Very entertaining. Not literary. I released it back into a Little Library, where one person’s castoff book is another’s find, if only temporarily.
February being Black History Month prompted the Yorkville ladies of the Heliconian to read Finding Edward, a novel by Hamilton-based writer, Sheila Murray. Set surprisingly in Weston (where I live), this is the story of a young biracial Jamaican man who comes to Toronto to study and ends up researching the life of another biracial man who lived decades earlier. Through the life of Edward, our protagonist, Cyril, learned about the link between race and trade unionism in Toronto in the 1920s, the important role of the Black sleeping car porters who worked on Canada’s railway, and Africville, the Halifax Black community dating back to 1848 that was demolished in the 1960s, despite being denied the services other Haligonians enjoyed. Like The Secret Wife, the narrative switched between the past and the present in the style that is apparently today’s literary fad. Once you get the hang of it as a reader, it works.
On the Ravine by Toronto-based medical doctor, Vincent Lam, rounds out my March reading. Also a Heliconian pick, this one is not for the faint of heart. Our primary character, Dr. Chen, is an addictions counsellor as well as a pharmacological researcher who depends on drug addicts as subjects. Claire is a violin prodigy who, injured, starts down the path to drug addiction to relieve the pain that restricts her bowing arm. There are some very graphic scenes involving, among other things, intravenous drug use, as there were in Demon Copperhead, that are well outside my experience. But the Claire character, a middle class white woman, makes her descent more relatable and therefore, perhaps, more horrifying. Or horrifying in a different way. If you have the guts to read it, please do.
That’s the score: 3 mos, 6 books read. But still 0 written. I’m refocusing my attention this quarter and hope to share with you some news in the next few months about my current idea for publishing something full-length. Stay tuned!
* Those lectures deserve their own blog one day. Suffice it to say, I’m the youngest in the crowd by a decade or two and I haven’t sipped tea from a blue willow pattern china cup since mom sold her house.
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