March 2015

I read:

Thoughts:

• Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald: Too frenetic a pace and too close to home to really enjoy it as much as I thought I would.
• Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce: Finally finished!
• I Am Malala (Young Readers Edition) by Malala Yousafzai: Slightly frustrating because it had American spellings (gray) but then British terms (nappies). Be consistent.
• The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks: How jaded am I? Only one truly gicky part even though the guy I borrowed it from told me I’d be shocked, Shocked, SHOCKED!
• Brueghel Moon by Tamaz Chiladze: Review here.
• Under The Skin by Michel Faber: I actually like the movie better, but the movie is more restrained than the book, and less internal. I just didn’t really need to hear any of Isserly’s thoughts — they aren’t that interesting.
• Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah: Reviewed here.
• So Sexy, So Soon by Diane E. Levin, Ph.D. and Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D.: Oh goody, yet another pitfall added to all the things I have to be wary of raising Tesfa. She’s so perfect and I don’t want to screw her up.
• Great American Short Stories edited by Wallace and Mary Stegner: Last month I said that these were the stories that made you hate short stories. Yeah, I’m going to stick with that. But I’m keeping up with the idea of reading of a short story a day because why not? Geoff’s dad was saying one should savour short stories, read them slowly, bit by bit. So I’ll try that.
• White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon: Reviewed earlier this month.
• Up The Pier by Helen Cresswell: So end of the British empire feeling. People take trains that get in forty three minutes past the hour and people vacation in little houses by piers and the sea.
• Nobody Cries at Bingo by Dawn Dumont: I wish I could write funny.
• The Best Is Yet To Come by Anne Mazar: It’s really hard to want to continue reading a book to Tesfa when the “weird” family in the book does the things we do as a family (calls parents by first names, kids get to decide what to wear, no forcing of eating food – although I feel I should have a caveat here – we don’t force Tesfa to eat dinner, but if she doesn’t like what we’re eating, we don’t make her anything else.) And they make fun of a girl’s clothes. This book is mean.
• The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank: I remember way back in the nineties when this book came out, all the comparisons to Bridget Jones. Why? This novel is nothing like Bridget Jones other than (a) written by a female and (b) female main character and her relationships. For some reason I also thought this book took place in Minnesota; don’t know why.
• Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín: Reviewed here.
• Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel: So someone cut out a bunch of pages (consecutive) from my library copy! What the hell is up with that? I really liked the book but I also had a hard time staying focused. I wish I loved it.
• Uzumaki Volume Two by Junji Ito: So creepy, the snails chapter, ugggggg.
• Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk: A hard book to convince yourself to pick up and a hard book to convince yourself to put down and get back to life.
• The Juggler’s Children by Carolyn Abraham: I know that the idea of non-fiction lately includes personal stories and the vanishing of distance between the documentor and the subject, but I rarely feel in books like that (and like The Juggler’s Children) that I get as much out of it as I would if the bias was disguised better. Also, there were ghosts. FMRL (Fuck my reading life).

Favourite book of the month:

Oh, I liked this book. So funny.

Most promising book on the wishlist:

I’ve been trying to cut back my wishlisting. So I didn’t have a lot to chose from and am not super inspired this month. So nothing.

I watched:

I wrote:

A story about cutlery. Slushed it out. New story came out at Found Press. Feeling middling about writing as a whole. Had some nice compliments from a neighbour and from Geoff about my writing, so I’ll keep going for now.