Hooray for you, Mari Sasano.

I don’t want to spoil it, so only a brief and very vague review:

It’s great. Todd only gets better with this one, his writing unforced, funny, gentle, and melancholy. And hopeful. Toby: A Man poses a question that has been plaguing me for years, now: what are you, who are you, when the things that are supposed to define you are taken away? What is truly enjoyable in life? Is it possible to seek out and do things that aren’t necessarily going to further your career? Should you? How do you want to be remembered? Do you know the people you love well enough? Who are your people? Are you serving them?

That’s all.

This weekend has been especially fruitful for reading. I’ve finished Margaret Atwood’s retelling of the Odyssey story from the point of view of the women left behind, and started on Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

The Penelopiad is a quick read, simple and witty as we expect from Atwood. It demonstrates the anguish of modern feminist readers of classic texts– they are great works, no doubt about it, but there are so many absences and silences from our ancient counterparts, we can’t help feeling a little mournful, particularly when it’s so clear that, aside from putting them on pedestals for whatever reason, women really got the short end of it back then.

Penelope is portrayed as an intelligent woman who both admires and resents her husband. She hasn’t been granted the same privileges as Odysseus: the adventure, the power, and often the credit for her partnership in the relationship. But she’s no victim, from the underworld she observes her life only apparently objectively and analytically, and it’s really interesting to see how Atwood plays with rumour, lies, and reliability.

For there are also dissenting voices to Penelope’s tale, too. Her twelve maids, who are executed for consorting with the suitors, appear regularly to add their two cents, in the form of a traditional Greek chorus, musicals, and courtroom drama. Are we still watching these stories play out? It seems the case.

I haven’t picked up an Atwood novel since Cat’s Eye, and I can see now how much I’ve missed her. She has a reputation for being kind of a bitch, but as I get older, it’s obvious that you only get that way because you’re too smart to suffer that experience as a victim. So bitch on, Atwood. Here’s hoping we all get there.

I am getting lots of reading done during my break! And I have finally finished Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, which was a birthday present from last year.

It’s good; quirky characters that still manage to be human beings. We follow the obsession of Alex Li Tandem, an autograph collector since boyhood, who has been writing letters to a forgotten starlet named Kitty Alexander. His friends, one a rabbi, another a video store owner/Jewish mystic, and another autograph collector kind of hover around him, dealing with various aspects of his life: a stalling relationship with one friend’s sister and the death of his father being the most pressing.

Lots of ideas here: the fetishization of image and artifact, private obsessions, and other things that prevent one from engaging fully in life and relationships. Something like that– since I don’t have to officially review it anywhere, I galloped through it, which is a rare luxury.

Finally, I read it.

And it’s good. Lots of familiar stuff here. You know, these Alberta boys who are smart and well-educated but still drink too much and find elaborate excuses to avoid dealing with emotional stuff so they end up doing stupid shit like fighting all the time.

I’m sure it’s the same for men everywhere. I really feel for them, these scared and hurt boys who grow up to not being able to feel free. I mean, with women we just kind of worked it out as well as we could, and along the way discovered that the System holding them back was a fraud. We’re lucky. It gave us an opportunity to reinvent ourselves because no one figured we could. But men– I know that so many of them feel trapped behind their eyes, watching the world and never feeling at home in it. And it’s not OK to admit that you’re scared, even though everyone else is.

Oh, men. No wonder you’re so angry.

Instead of reading my assigned book to review, I spent the weekend finishing Ted Bishop’s Riding With Rilke. It’s been on my reading list for ages, but I never got around to it. And then, in the past little while, I’ve run into him a couple times and I figured now’s probably a good time, before it starts to get embarrassing!

It’s great, starting with a crash and winding its way down to Texas and back. Anecdotal and funny, mostly in a self-deprecating way (is there any other way, for an academic?), it then whips you back into shape with musings on literature, library studies and archives, and the idea of the material of the Book. Extremely readable, it fails to alienate with excessive and technical talk about machines nor literature, but manages to do both justice. I’m afraid that this will make Paul get a motorcycle, though I am perfectly safe due to my dread of high speeds and poor driving skills.

I don’t know why I didn’t read this sooner. Now, onto my next gross omission: Choke Hold. Sorry Todd. Did I mention how great The Book of Stanley is? It is. Great!

I got to review Douglas Coupland’s latest novel for the Journal. You can read the long version on Sunday, but here’s a preview:

it’s good! I have to admit that I’ve never fully read any of his books. I suspect I was assigned it because they suspect that I’m young but not TOO young, and since Todd’s busy writing his own novel, I will have to do. I have no such encumberments, therefore I am desperate for work. Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

I did see a Fringe show of Life After God (the book must be good…) and I read all of the sidebars from Generation X once. So in a way, I’m the ideal reader. JPod is funny, mostly due to its being self deprecating/reflexive/mythologizing. And again (if I understand Coupland) he’s hit upon the funny-cause-it’s-true thing, this time being at a game developer company in some crappy Vancouver suburb. It’s kind of a more sophisticated Office Space. Plus, that hilarious precipice of cool/uncool that we see folks in their late 20′s teetering on.

It’s new, I think. Or at least we are made to feel that a more genuine cool was achievable in the past that isn’t possible today, due to the overwhelming saturation of instant marketing and the co-option of young people into that machine. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be the first to break whatever new trend in whatever locale you happen to be at?

And who (in Edmonton, anyways) hasn’t felt that mild disappointment the first time you were in an actual Big City that sense that it’s not measurably more exciting in those places, it’s just that things are more abundant and expensive?

Same deal. We are the victims of all trying too hard to be there first to be the most unique, the most something– and therefore we are all constantly losing. And feeling kind of crappy about it, while at the same time quietly trying harder.

The book is only something like that. I digressed into another personal rant. Anyhow, JPod is agonizingly stylish and funny.

I have a twin sister. As many of you know, our relationship is strange. I always thought I would write a novel about twin sisters, one from the perspective of one sister and then tuuurn the book over, and it’s the same story told from the other sister’s point of view.

Someone has done this. It’s Lori Lansen’s The Girls, and the only real difference between the book that I wanted to write and never got around to writing it and hers is that her twins are conjoined at the head, and that she intersperses the viewpoints of her two narrators linearly, using different fonts.

It’s excellent. I’m glad she wrote the book, so now I don’t have to. She really gets the whole twin thing, the being the same, yet different. The loving each other but totally resenting it. My own sister, you may have noticed, doesn’t like to hang out with me. And sure, I’m, like, a total boring loser, but still. Why does she act so ashamed of me?

And yet, I know that if I really need her, she’ll be there.

On second thought, no I don’t. She may just let me die. See? Complicated.

Kazuo Ishiguro is awesome.

I read Remains of the Day in high school or maybe it was during my undergrad. In either case, when I was quite young, and then I had my book drought when his next couple books came out. I think I’ll go back and have a look, based on Never Let Me Go, which I picked up on a whim while killing time waiting for a movie.

It’s about a young woman who is being raised to be an organ donor. In this fictional mid-’90s Britain, clones are raised through to adolescence in order to donate until they are dead. Ishiguro’s narrator, Kathy, is an uncertain, detached, yet eagle-eyed observer whose brief life manages to encompass the same kind of bittersweet combinations of victories and regret that made Remains such a tearjerker.

Because when I’m reading or watching a movie for fun, I want to cry. And I did.

It’s true that reading is a superior form of entertainment. And I’m so glad to be back to reading fiction!

You see, after I finished my M.A. (in 1997! I am so old!) I kinda went postpartum and couldn’t read anything more substantial than Entertainment Weekly. This went on for years! In fact, it’s only for the past month that I’ve started to prefer reading to TV. Isn’t that insane?

So, I will start listing the books I have read and, because I can’t help myself, write a short review.