Why Novels?

An intriguing question was brought up lately by Jeff at Bearcastle. Why do people read novels, he asks, as opposed to other forms of writing. His conclusion is:

people are endlessly fascinated by people. My notion, then, is that people read stories about people because people capture our interest. Short stories and novels have plots and devices and structures and language and voice and all those technical bits, but above all they must have interesting people to succeed.

What do you think? What draws you to novels? Do you read to learn about a place or a way of being, for the structure and ideas alone, for a clever plot? I think Jeff is right; I'll read almost any genre if the characters are gripping. I am also drawn to atmosphere; an interesting and vibrantly evoked setting plus multidimensional characterization is more important than a plot, for me. Although plot is good, too, as long as it is supported by the other elements.

But the reason I choose fiction over factual reading, most of the time, is because I want to get inside other people and see the world from their perspective. It's the fascination of seeing things differently, of learning different ways to puzzle out the world, that I find enlivening in fiction. And that is why I will never run out of new novels to read.

The Oracle of Google

This is quite an amusing meme making the rounds; I found it over at Petunia's and thought it would be fun. Rules are:


1. Go to Google.com
2. Type your name and the word ‘needs’ in quotes in the search engine and hit the button.




Melanie needs no introduction
One can only wish...

Melanie needs to find a happy medium

I like this idea; I hope a happy medium will be able to foresee a better fortune for me

Melanie needs to become somewhat flexible
Does this mean I have to try yoga again?

Melanie needs to eat. Like, a lot.
Always. I do love my food, and eating together with friends is one of my favourite ways to visit.


Melanie needs to start adjusting to a life behind bars
What is this about?


Melanie needs to keep those glasses on all the time
Google Oracle is spooky. How did it know that I can only see about 8 inches in front of me without my glasses?

Melanie needs a strong fanbase
Yes, please read and link to me! ;)


Melanie needs to accept that no one is self-sufficient all the time
I think I could have figured that one out for myself...


Melanie needs to stop now before she gets worse than she already is
Alright, this is a hint that this meme indulgence must end.

Shakespeare's Will

For anyone who has always been bothered by the niggling question of why Shakespeare would have willed his wife, Anne Hathaway, his second-best bed, there is now an answer for you. (One answer, anyhow; I have my own theories!) I was fortunate enough this weekend to see a performance of a newish play by Canadian playwright Vern Thiessen, called Shakespeare's Will.

The play is a monologue by Anne Hathaway. As it opens, she is returning from Shakespeare's burial, with his will in her hand. She has not read it yet, and puts it off by reminiscing about their lives together. She begins with how they met, how they married and produced children, how they arranged their marriage to suit them both - an explanation of why Shakespeare lived in London for so long, separated from his family. She reports on her relationship with her own father, with her children, with Shakespeare's sister Joan ("Your sister is a bitch. I'm sorry, but she is.") She also refers to her relations with other men, and Will's with other men as well. The play is approximately 90 minutes long, and when she finally opens the will and reads it during the last few minutes, it is a moment so moving that I was strongly regretting not bringing any kleenex.

The power of the play was amplified by this staging. It is a tour de force for Seana McKenna; she captivates with her ability to populate the stage through her imagination. When she is talking about the first time Anne and Will met, you can nearly see him lounging nearby as she provides a dialogue between them. When she reveals her father's reaction to her marrying Will ("Jesus Christ! With child, and a Catholic, and a Shakespeare!") you can feel the force of an angry father storming around the stage. Her evocation of having to deal with her first child alone and uncertain of how to care for her is heartwrenching, as are a few other moments that I will not spoil for anybody who will want to see it or read it. The stage was simply set, with a bench and a set of stairs and small platform that she ranged over. Much of the scene-setting was done with lighting and sound effects (the sea, rain, children laughing or crying) as she moved into her memories. She talks for 90 minutes, and does not permit the audience's attention to flag for a moment. A beautiful, beautiful performance, one that you should not miss if at all possible for you to see it. If it is not, well, try to read the play. It is thought-provoking, funny, touching, and looks at Shakespeare from a different angle. Well worth the effort for anyone interested in Shakespeare and bemused by his will.

Smart Weeping

I've just reread the tiny book by Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. (on the suggestion of Yann Martel) This was a poetic novel she penned based on her passionate love affair with a married poet, George Barker, whom she fell in love with through his poetry. Smart was from a fairly well connected Ottawa family, who were sensitive about their social position. When she first published this (1945) her mother was horrified and used her connections to officials to have publication banned in Canada; any copies that slipped in from elsewhere were sought out and burned.

I read this first in university, lo these many years ago, and reading it again was quite a different experience. I read it the first time for the story of overwhelming passion and self-pity, love and loss; this time around it was much more about the language. It is an extended prose poem, with echoes of the Song of Solomon recurring throughout, and the title drawing on the Psalms. When I was 19 I was swamped by her longing, her agonies of love; this was passion, I thought. Upon rereading at an more advanced age, I realize I just wanted to smack some sense into her. "He's not worth it!" I wished I could yell at her. He was older, married, and much practiced at seduction. I imagine his Frequent Philanderer points were sky high. He seemed to be an addiction for her; he was a heavy drinker and so was she when she was with him. As it happened, it was a typical but long-standing affair; promising to leave his wife, he never did. Smart had four children by him.

That sordid summation is not really what the book is about, however. It is about how it is written. Smart (or her narrator) seemed to want someone to act as the focus of her infinite capacity for love; she decided upon Barker. The language is baroque in its ornamentation, pulling in the whole world, natural and literary, to describe and reflect their passion, glorious and squalid simultaneously. Read it as a poem and it carries you along on waves of emotion. The images crowd in upon each other, and some of them are startling, catching the eye like a diamond in the setting of golden prose.

Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour.

My heart is its own destructive. It beats out the poisonous rhythm of the truth.

But I have become a part of the earth: I am one of its waves flooding and leaping. I am the same tune now as trees, hummingbirds, sky, fruits, vegetables in rows. I am all or any of these. I can metamorphose at will.

For an extended vision of the interior life of a woman in the throes of an unquenchable passion, read this cult classic. Admire her facility with language, if not with life.

Update: over at DoveGrey Reader, she talks about an essay by Ali Smith:

Relating the tale of Angela Carter's inclusion on the editiorial committee of Virago Books in the mid 1970's and the reason she gave for joining, "by the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to write By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, exquisite prose though it may contain. By Grand Central Station I Tore off His Balls would be more like it I should hope"

Remembering the bones

Remembering the Bones / Frances Itani (Harper Collins Canada)
Sept. release date


I received this as an ARC at Book Expo, and began reading it while waiting in line for Frances Itani to sign it (which she did, delightfully). I then picked up 2 bags full of other books throughout the day, but when I got on the train to go home, this is the book I couldn't keep away from. I read it all the way home, and then stayed up to finish it. It drew me in and I did not want to let Georgie or her family go. It is wonderfully written; I think it will be one of my favourites this year. (n.b.: this is a Phyllis Bruce book, so I knew I was in good hands from the start. Phyllis Bruce is an editor with her own imprint; I bow to her!)


Georgina Danforth Witley has been invited to tea with Queen Elizabeth II, along with 98 other Commonwealth citizens who happen to share her Majesty's birthday: April 21, 1926. Georgina lives in Ontario, Canada, so all she has to do to get to her rendezvous with royalty is drive to the airport and hop her flight to London, where she intends to stay for ten days and see the sights as well as Queen Elizabeth. Georgie has followed Elizabeth's career since childhood, and has all sorts of memorabilia of her coronation, her marriage, her children. However, in her excitement over the upcoming events, Georgina makes an split-second driving error and her car goes off the road where it tumbles to the bottom of a ravine, ejecting her. She lies injured at the bottom of the ravine, where to keep herself alive she goes over the facts of her past, telling herself stories of her family and going over the names of the bones in the body as she evaluates her injuries.


Her old habit of naming bones stems from her younger days of reading her grandfather's 1901 Grey's Anatomy. He was a country doctor who died young, in WWI, but Georgie fosters a sense of closeness to him by resting in his dark cool library and reading his medical books. She is so fond of Grey's Anatomy that she gives the diagram of the skeleton a name: Hubley. She recalls this as she lies in the ravine, hoping that somebody will see evidence of her car's escape from the road before she becomes the female counterpart to Hubley. On first hearing the synopsis of this book, I was a bit sceptical that an 80 yr. old woman would not be missed while she lay there stranded. To Itani's credit, she gives a wonderful explanation of the reasons why it is entirely probable. At one moment, Georgie reflects that "on Wednesday the 19th of April, the day of the Queen's Lunch...the Queen will be the only person in the whole world who will know I am missing."


Throughout her ordeal, Georgie lyrically recalls her grandparents, her parents, her sister, her own marriage and children, all alongside the Royal Family's parallel lives. The story weaves in and out of the past; WWI, small town Ontario, the Windsors, modern theatre, houses and husbands. She draws on the strength of her mother and grandmothers to keep herself conscious and hoping for rescue. She worries about the effect her death might have on her daughter and her sister, but simultaneously worries about the breach of protocol in missing the Queen's tea and hopes they don't think badly of her for it.


I really loved the writing, so crisp and yet with so much power in the vagaries of recollection. Georgina is a strong, complex character who fully inhabits her life; even as she lays aged and hurt in a ravine, her memories of her childhood and young adulthood feel contemporaneous. Itani captures the essence of the youthful soul which remains even as the body ages. She takes her place among the constellation of writers featuring old women looking back on life, which seems to be a theme in Canadian literature, and she stakes her claim very convincingly.


The proposed cover is the only difficulty I see with this novel (and this is really the only iffy thing). My ARC has a lovely, spacious cover image, with the Queen edging in on the sky and a silhouetted tree. The cover I see in the HarperCollins catalogue, on the other hand, is mustard yellow with an orangey bird and flower shapes stamped on. It has no relevance to the story nor any appeal to the eye. I hope that it is not the final cover, because I can't believe that it will have anything but a negative effect on sales; it expresses exactly nothing about the deep fascination of this story. This is a perfect novel to give to those Royal watchers you know, a novel for women wanting to read about a very female oriented life, a novel of family ties to give to friends & relatives of all description - come on, guys, put the Queen on the cover! Even my husband's eye was caught: "Is that the Queen?" he asked and picked it up to read the blurb. Perhaps in Canada it has more of a direct link to our past than in the US, but I don't think she would be utterly unrecognizable to US readers. This is one occasion where I must strongly advise you not to judge a book by its cover, but to buy this as soon as it is available. You will not regret it!

The Long Reach of the LongPen

At our recent bloggers meeting we discussed, among other things, Margaret Atwood's LongPen. Over at Bookninja, they point out that Norman Mailer has pleaded the "Three A's" - age, asthma, & arthritis - and is going to use the LongPen to sign at Edinburgh's literary festival. I'd like to hear the results; are people going to use it? Are they going to find it satisfying?
An alternate use for the LongPen has been suggested, one which I find most appealing. Imagine the possibilities...

Challenged and Overbooked

Alas, I must admit that I am not going to meet the requirements I so optimistically set myself way back in January for the Chunkster Challenge. Sigh. 6 books over 600 pages in 6 months, what was I thinking? I should have been warned off by the confluence of sixes...
I still have just under half of Kristen Lavransdattar to go, plus the entire Sir Charles Grandison. I do not think I can read more than 1000 pages in two weeks. You never know, but I'm betting against it. I still intend to finish both by the end of 2007,as I am actually quite enjoying Kristen, and Sir Charles is an epistolary novel, which I do love reading. But I know with all the new books I've just come home with, these two are not going to be finished in time. Still, I've been spurred forward by this Challenge and have finally read some of the books on my TBR; though of course looking through other people's lists has just refilled those few blanks on the TBR!

Spelling Bee

Too cool. I saw this over at Kate's Book Blog and couldn't resist.

Book Expo Redux

This is the third year I've been to BEC, and as many people have commented over the past while, it was a reduced version of itself. The vibe was a lot calmer and it was less packed than last year, but I really enjoyed it. There were lots of wonderful new books by some of my most admired authors, like Frances Itani, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Susan Juby, Lesley Choyce and Helen Oyeyemi. I also encountered some very amusing authors who signed their book for me with great flair; Michael Winter comes to mind. There was quite a poetic splash-out by Brick Books, featuring a table of three poets signing their beautiful new volumes. I ran across a few of my fellow bloggers, too. Another personal benefit of BEC is the yearly meeting with old friends from Montreal over at Vehicule Press and AEALQ. It is such a pleasure to hear what people are occupied with and how things have been going over the past year.
I could only attend one day of the tradeshow this year, so I am sure I missed seeing authors I would've enjoyed on Day 2. Still, I picked up a number of ARCs that I am eagerly devouring one by one, and am being continually amazed at the varied yet wonderful writing of so many people. Even with the recent questioning of the purpose and results of BEC, I can say I had a wonderful day there and hope to be able to experience it again.

What a Weekend!

This weekend was a wild and woolly book festival in itself. I went to TO for the blogger's meetup arranged by Sassymonkey. What a grand initiative - it was loads of fun. Gelato on a hot day with simpatico company and lots of bookish, writing-related, genealogical and geographical discussion, plus a nip in to Nicholas Hoare's tempting bookshop; even all the dogs outside at Woofstock were not so bad! :) I distance myself from all the photos over at Patricia's blog. Do I really look like that?! For a full report, check out the write-up at BiblioHistoria. She has us covered.
It was a wonderful idea, so thanks again to Sassymonkey for being the Queen of Organizers. It was lovely to meet Karen, Robin, Deanna, Kate and Patricia in person and be entertained and edified!

I agree with Patricia; there is so much to blog about from this weekend at BookExpo. It was a tiring day, in a very good way. The company of all those book fanatics - authors, illustrators, publishers & their people, booksellers, librarians, bloggers! - reinvigorates my love of the bookish life. I've finished one of the ARCs I picked up already, and have a huge stack to draw from next. Lots of reading and reporting to come in the next few weeks... :)

Musical Interlude

While my sister was visiting we saw the opening performances of two plays; one a musical and one a modern Shakespeare. The first was Oklahoma! and it was a lot of fun, if a bit dated in theme: singing and dancing cowboys with lariats, jealous lovers, giggly girls, a strangely incongruous Middle Eastern peddler. But, the singing and the dancing were extraordinary and made it into a fun spectacle. The musical performers at the Stratford Festival are wonderful, and this one showcased many, many of them. It put me in mind of the large cast which would be necessary to do Seven Brides for Seven Brothers - also a bit of a dated play but one I would love to see put on. I love, love, love the movie and wonder how it would translate to the stage. Maybe someday...

The other was Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. I enjoyed it, more so than my sister as I'm more of a Shakespeare girl. But this one was only slightly stuffy - in fact there were so many gags, a literal song-and-dance routine, a live dog on stage, directorial self-referential jokes, etc. etc. that it felt more like vaudeville than the Shakespearian stage. Not to say I didn't like it; I found parts quite funny, with Bruce Dow as one of the Dromios exceptionally notable. Perhaps if you are able to 'get' the in-jokes it would be funnier. It feels like a big wink at the whole tradition, and although some people got their knickers in a twist over it, I thought it was entertaining, which is kind of the point of this type of theatre, to me. Although I am just a blogging audience member, not a critic... As a friend of mine said, the critics will hate it but it will sell out; he has certainly been proven correct in his first prediction!

Theatre-going made for a couple of entertaining evenings. We also spent an evening or two watching movies, such as Music & Lyrics which we found hysterical since we both spent our formative years in the 80's. Hugh Grant is simply hilarious as a has-been music star and Drew Barrymore is sweetly scatterbrained. I would watch this one again just for the mock 80's music video it opens with. Very amusing and witty screenplay.

I have many comments to catch up with, and much reading to report on. I'll have to catch up a little later, after Book Expo Canada , and a visit with fellow Toronto area bloggers this weekend. Looking forward to a busy and bookish weekend!

Coming soon

Hi all; it's a busy week for me here. I have family visiting and so my reading & blogging time has dropped. In between the visiting, tourist efforts, and theatre, I'll have a lot to say next week.

Until then, I'm reading some Jacques Poulin, Elizabeth Smart, Cathy Day, and a bunch of short stories. Reports will follow.