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.
