Because I didn’t want to do work today, I thought I’d look at books that I’d ranked five stars since 2007, when I started keeping track of what I was reading again (I had previously, but stopped formally in 1995, only ranking books now and then on Amazon before I moved all my rankings over to LibraryThing in 2010). I can read all sorts of diverse books but it’s interesting to see my subconscious bias in what I really loved.

So…

• I have 189 five star rated books on LibraryThing
• 41% are by women;
• 26% are by POC (I kind of want to popularize AOC as Authors of Colour but I don’t think it’s going to catch on);
• 4% are by GLBTQ authors.

So, ouch. Especially GLBTQ – even if this number is an underestimation (not everyone’s sexuality is openly divulged on wikipedia entries so unless it was explicitly stated somewhere I didn’t include it), that’s still pretty poor. If anything, since many of my favourite books are ones I read growing up, especially in what is now considered the YA genre, it shows how white, male my reading growing up was. That I didn’t even get to 50% women also makes me feel squicky inside.

So my internal bias needs to be overcome. Obvious solution, read lots of women, POC, and GLBTQ authors to find more favourites amongst those groups. Expand my mind! Expand my tastes! As always, recommendations welcome.

Geoff: That review you posted was pretty scathing.

Me: Really? Was it?

Geoff: Parts of it were mean, like about the secondary characters.

Me: I could have been meaner. (here I list off a bunch of really mean things I could have said)

Geoff: You know that because you could have been meaner doesn’t negate the fact you were mean.

Me: Like if I punched you in the face and then said Hey, at least I didn’t murder you!

Geoff: You’re going to punch me in the face, aren’t you? (interestingly, a few days later, Geoff accidentally elbowed me in the eye, which is very similar to being punched in the face.)

Me: Well, let’s see how long until the author emails me to complain like that other guy.

Geoff: When he does, just tell him at least you didn’t murder him. That should go over well.

I think I’m going to do it.

Something I haven’t done in six years or so when one day I was reading a book about Sudan, the next day I went into labour, and the day after that I had a baby and my focus switched somewhat.

I think I am going to stop reading a book.

Book in question (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath). It is too thick for me to read while laying down and hurts my wrist to hold it. I forget from the top of the page to the bottom who the people are, with the exception of Sylvia Plath herself (I’d probably remember Ted Hughes too, but we haven’t got there yet). The endnotes are strangely all marked by an $$n$$, each and every one, rather than increasing numbers and they’re endnotes rather than footnotes so I’m always flipping back and forth. I love the writing, but without plot, I just flounder. Geoff and I talked about this in the car by Aulac last week, my need for story telling (there’s a bunch of Douglas Coupland quotes I could put here about that, but with kitten on lap, I’m not getting up to look for them). It’s why I don’t read much non-fiction, especially philosophy texts. Geoff loves philosophy and has a minor. I have a vague idea that Plato came after Socrates. That’s about it. And I have one philosophy joke:

Q: Can I borrow your copy of The Critique of Pure Reason?

A: No, I’m sorry, you Kant.

But I need narrative and a journal’s narrative is navel gazing and circular and second-guessing.

I’m two hundred of seven hundred pages in. I don’t know whether to read twenty pages a day (takes about an hour) until I finish, or give up and return the book to the library now so that a better person can glean something from the fact that Sylvia Plath uses the word rape more frequently than I would have suspected. Let’s see if I can make a poll.

[poll id=”2″]

I’m all about the plugins this week.

I have a sleeping kitten on my lap, so no matter what, life’s pretty decent today.

So I’m currently reading Sylvia Plath’s diaries and I just finished a non-fiction book about undocumented immigrants, so if anyone wants to suggest some more positive books to me, that would be greatly appreciated.

After posting my list below, while I have a 60/40 male/female split, I have a 80/20 white/POC split (or 90/10 depending on how Mischa Berlinksi self-identifies). Not particularly diverse, so I decided to think of a list of Ten Books That Stuck With Me: POC Edition. Even having read thousands of books as a child, this list is harder and is composed almost entirely of books that I read aged twenty-one and up; much like my 80/20 white/POC split in the previous list, we have eighty percent of the list below was read once I achieved adulthood. Brief tangent: In five years of high school, we read zero books by POC and only one plus epsilon books by women: To Kill a Mockingbird and some Emily Dickinson poems. Then, as we were Canadian, our education system deemed that the one and only Canadian novel in the entire fire year syllabus be set in the US: Shoeless Joe. I need to channel my inner Kat arguing with the English teacher and invent a time machine and go back and complain more in high school.

Still, I lived with the Internet since 1995 and a library card since I was a baby. I could have looked harder for diverse literature and didn’t. I can only blame so much on the education system (as much as I would like to blame everything). So these are the Ten Books That Stuck With Me: POC-penned edition, most of which I read in my twenties since I read pretty white before that.

• White Teeth by Zadie Smith: I saw this book for an entire summer in 2001. We’d go to the bookstore, that Chapters with the escalators down by MuchMusic that I don’t think is there anymore. I wasn’t buying contemporary fiction that summer. I bought Gunter Grass and Doestoevskii and stacked them up next to my bed instead. I only twigged to this book because Vision TV was played the miniseries a few years later and I was visiting my grandmother and read about it in the TV guide that comes free with the newspaper. TV Times I think? Does that still exist? I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper since 2000.

  For a long time, White Teeth was my favourite book. It isn’t any more, but it’s in the top five. I’ll likely never be as talented as Zadie Smith or have such a cool name as Zadie and it hurts to recognize that, but every now and then I reread White Teeth and figure that’s okay. At least Zadie Smith is out there, even if I can’t be her myself.




• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor: In grade nine, we read To Kill A Mockingbird in school. That was a waste. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is the book you should read in grade nine about race in America: a book about racism in the south written by an African-American. How revolutionary is that! (end sarcasm).

  
  
  




• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry: This is a book about how sometimes things come together in a way that they could never come together again. Think of the book’s ending when they walk by each other, the awkwardness. You can’t step in the same river twice. I read this book after coming back from Costa Rica (the first time in 2005, not the most recent trip in 2013) and Costa Rica was all about one moment in time where I was emptied out.

  
  




• Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Mordechai Richler: As a child in England, my mother made sure we read this book and that we knew that, like the characters in the book, we were Canadians living in London. We were not Londoners or Brits or anything but Canadian. We weren’t allowed to say Telly unless in reference to the muppet. This was the bulwark she put up against forgetting Canada, even though we had non-posh British accents where th‘s are pronounced like f‘s.

  When we had moved back to Canada, my aunt gave us the sequel for Christmas. It wasn’t the same.




• A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar: This book I heard about in Bitch and was surprised the library had a copy. The parts in the Middle East are far stronger than the American ones, and the novel goes from lazing to ultra-super-sonic-fast-forward once they get to the US. Still, sitting on a balcony in Alexandria staring out at the sea. A whole book could be written just on that scene. I waited until my niece was old enough and then bought her a copy. I’m the weird relative who sends books that I’m sure no one reads.




• The Good Women of China by Xue Xinran: This book I read the first month I moved to Halifax, taken out from a library that no longer exists. Another random selection. I walked into the library and picked it off the shelf, along with a book on happiness that advocated quite strongly about taking illegal drugs to achieve that state. The happiness book I didn’t finish (although perhaps if I had, I’d be a happier person). Ten years later, I still think of the stories, two in particular: a girl squashing flies into an open wound to keep it infected so she doesn’t have to return to her sexually abusive parents and women in a remote part of China who, when given disposable menstrual products for the first time, don’t use them themselves; rather they are given/taken by the men of the community to wear as adornments. Another book that made me sad.




• Choose Me by Evelyn Lau: I talked earlier this year about Choose Me, how I read it and at the time I read it, it was one of those books that made me want to write, but reading it again now, as an adult, it’s easier for me to see the flaws I didn’t see when I was younger. Still, this is one of the books that made me want to be a writer and will always have a spot inside me just for that.

  
  
  
  




• Look For Me by Edeet Ravel: I always think this is the third book in the Tel Aviv trilogy and whenever I re-read the trilogy, I always read this one last. I don’t particularly like the actual third book, and while the first one is likely a better novel, I identify with Look For Me the most. The full page ads in the newspaper saying I will never ever ever ever forget you or stop looking. The entire miscommunication of the plots between everyone. This novel always hurts, no matter how often, how many times I read it.




• The Banquet Bug by Geling Yan: I picked this book up randomly from the New Acquisitions table at Keshen Goodman without having heard anything about it. I don’t even think I read the jacket synopsis or any of the blurbs. I don’t even like the cover, so I was definitely not judging the book by that. I was tired and had a new baby and was grabbing whatever I could to get out of there as fast as possible. I probably wanted dim sum too. I miss dim sum. I want a big steamed bun with red pork inside and I want a savoury pancake with duck sauce. That is what I want.

  This is a book about a man who forges journalism credentials to sneak into free banquets given by companies/governmental departments in China, which is a pretty audacious concept for a novel. I read the synopsis on Amazon just now, and I don’t remember anything of what that synopsis says. Instead I remember food and concept and sneaking into free Chinese banquets, which is what I would like to do.




• The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brandon Skyhorse: I’m not usually a fan of the intertwined short story collection. I like all random stories or novels, which is somewhat hilarious as the only way I’m every going to get to novel length is to do the interconnected short story thing. But these interconnected stories, bit by bit, reveal the whole picture, and at the end, it’s like your neighbourhood. You know these people. They are with you always.

Because right now, all I’ve got to do is keep my kitten alive, so why not?  I will also impress you since I can remember where and when I bought most of these books, yet somehow cannot remember to buy butter when I go to the grocery store.

• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace:  This was actually Geoff’s book, an Ed recommendation.  He read is back around 2002, after buying a second hand copy at Old Goat Books.  I then proceeded to use it as a doorstop until 2011, when I figured that maybe I should read it rather than continuing to have the cover bleach from having sat face up in the sun nine years. Initially, I made the mistake of trying to bring the book to work, to read on the O-Train. After one day, and a sore back, I gave up on that and put the book away. Still feeling guilty, a week or so later I started again, this time just in bed. I read the first hundred pages and put the book down. Then, on a bunch of bunch of connecting flights to a work conference, where the flight attendant saw it and asked me whether I was reading a medical textbook, from the small font and footnotes, I read the first hundred pages again. Then a third time. Convinced I was good to go now, I read more during a ten hour wait at the San Diego airport. I read more in Jamaica, on the porch while being bitten by mosquito after mosquito. I read more in the hotel waiting for my grandmother’s funeral. At one point, having been given money to buy food, instead I went to the only book store I could find to see if they had any more David Foster Wallace. Basically, if you don’t know I live this book, then you haven’t been reading this blog for very long. Bonus: Infinite Jest Found Poetry!




• A Time of Darkness by Sheryl Jordan: This is not a good book. I’m not going to try and convince you that it is, except to say that twelve year old me thought this book was the most mindblowingly amazing book ever written. I was going to name my kids after the characters in the book, and, considering they were named Rocco and Ayoshe, that’s a pretty big commitment right there. Not being very outgoing (and hence not very popular) in middle-school, I would stay in my bedroom and read and re-read this book over and over again. I must have got it from a Scholastic order or the book sale at my school. I still have my copy. Maybe I’ll read it again to marvel at how far my tastes have progressed since tweendom.




• The People’s Act of Love by James Meek: I don’t actually own this book. Even though there’s a scene near the beginning that makes me all quesfyefeflj all over (and not necessarily the scene one might expect; mine involves toe nails), I take it out of the library every now and then and think I should really buy it for all the times I’ve read it, but I haven’t yet. When I mention it to people, most think I’m talking about The History of Love and then talk to me about that book instead, a book I didn’t like. This one is like reading Doestoevskii without the time commitment.




• Restaurant at the End of The Universe by Douglas Adams: This is my favourite Hitchhiker’s Guide book. I read it again and again in high school, not bothering so much with the prequel or sequels. The big Don’t Panic smiley on the back of my copy was helpful to bring around during exam time, when I would get super stressed. I’d bring it in and prop it up on the desk in the gymnasium for whatever exam I was writing (except OAC Economics, which I wrote in the Cafetorium). I struggle to write humour and I don’t laugh much. But I laugh at this. I guess I like absurdity. Or maybe I just dislike reality.




• Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinksi: This is a library book that I think I just picked up randomly from Keshen Goodman and brought on vacation with me when Geoff and I did our France/London/Slovenia trip of 2008. It’s a world-building novel that is neither fantasy nor sci-fi but literary fiction, completely imagined but realistic, about an anthropological/sociological study of a tribe in Thailand. I read this on the spare bed in a hotel room in the Hôtel du Golf while Geoff was at a conference. Do Not Disturb hung on the door and stealing rolls of toilet paper from the housekeeping cart left by the elevators. I ate eight types of cheese one day and fell in and out of sleep while reading. I’ve never met anyone else who has read this book.




• How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu: So this is a world-building novel that is sci-fi, but less sci-fi as it’s focus and more sci-fi as that’s the way the story fell; it’s about the people in the sci-fi universe rather than the sci-fi universe itself. It’s another of my You should read this books that only one person has ever taken me up on.






• Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding: This I got from the discount pile at a Chapters in Waterloo. The sticker’s still on my copy: $5.99. I had a period in 2003 when this was the only book I read. I’d start, finish, then start again. It’s less satirical than the first Bridget Jones but nowhere near as shlocky as the third Bridget Jones. If anything, it can be read as a warning against becoming an unwitting drug mule in Southeast Asia.




• Le Petit Prince by Antoine de St-Exupéry: This was one of the first French books that I read all the way through (excepting the abridged-to-seventy-pages books we read in late French Immersion, like Les Misérables abridged to seventy pages, which was quite a feat; Javert didn’t even die in the version we read). I feel sort of silly admitting to how much I like this book, since it’s a book written explicitly to tug at your emotions, but I can’t help it. I like it. I like looking up at the sky and imagining a Prince and his rose on a tiny planet far away.

  Anyone remember The Little Prince TV show? It used to be on TVO before Belle and Sebastian? I think my love for Anime stems from those two shows.




• Adrian Mole: From Minor to Major by Sue Townsend: This I bought in a bookstore in Kingston, Ontario, but I’d read and read and read the first two books in compilation before, having taken them out of the library and surprising my mother, who’d read them and watched the TV series when we were in England. I guess she didn’t think Adrian had made it across the pond. But this bigger Adrian Mole collection, I’ve read it so many times the binding is coming loose and every single page has either had its corner folded down or something spilled or dropped onto it. I suspect I was a bit like Adrian – thinking myself to be intellectual when, in reality, all I was was naive. Case in point: When I went to visit Geoff’s relatives, who, at the time lived near Leicester, I asked them if there was an Adrian Mole statue in Leicester I could go visit. There isn’t. That was an awkward way for me to introduce myself to Geoff’s relatives.




• Rules of Engagement by Catherine Bush: This book has a dual – an actual dual with pistols in 1990s Toronto. It’s a pretty quintessential Can-lit novel with characters walking around the leafy Rosedale/ravine-esque parts of Toronto and also ex-patting to London. Apparently (just checking now to see when it was published), I bought it from Amazon on January 1, 2004. I could have sworn I bought a used copy. Perhaps the amazon one was for a gift? I can’t recall. I do know I read a review of the book in a newspaper (The Ottawa Citizen maybe, back when they did book reviews. I don’t think they do anymore) and then thought about it for years before I managed to read it.

  Amazon is temporarily unable to display my orders, so I can’t tell how/why/who the 2004 copy was purchased. This is one of the books that I wished I wrote.

So that’s that. Books sticking with me. Now off to bake cookies and do some writing exercises.