Mele Kalikimaka is a wise way to say Merry Christmas to you.
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Alexis and Melanie have started Roughing It In The Books. I love the tagline, “someone always dies in the end.”
Roughing It In The Books is what I love best about the internet. Here are two women who love books, reading, writing, publishing and are having an online conversation about it that we can all follow and/or join.
The site focus is on Canadian Literature.
Quote: I don’t know anyone who reads the classics anymore, not the Canadian Lit. classics anyway. Ask Canadians about them and they roll their eyes and mutter something about Roughing it in the Bush, which, unless you have actually taken a University level Canadian Lit. course you probably haven’t read. Susanna Moodie’s whiney tale of life in the New Country is the quintessential Canadian novel people love to hate. Ask a non-Canadian and their reaction would probably be, “Canadian what?”
So true!
When you talk to people who haven’t studied Canadian Literature, they really have no idea that we live in a land full of amazing writers. And the reference to Roughing It In The Bush by Susanna Moodie is another clever inside joke. Even those of us to studied Canadian Lit. were steered to Sinclair Ross (1908-1996), Ernest Buckler (1908, 1984) and Susanna Moodie (1803-1884). All great authors for many reasons, but they just don’t stir up the same connotations as their English or American counterparts. There’s even something sexy and unknown about Australian Lit. or Caribbean Lit.
I’m enjoying the current updates on the Canada Reads Challenge.
At the moment, Vancouver is trapped in a snow globe. It’s nice, but really, isn’t this quite enough?
The view from Canada Place.
Drinking Sahleb with Ayala and friends.
Finding the car.
Wallpaper* City Guide: London 2008
Phaidon has a great series of city guides. I used the Cairo one on my trip and it was fantastic for restaurant recommendations and for giving a different perspective on the architecture, art and culture of the place.
I highly recommend these as supplemental guides. Not a great replacement for your full-blown guide book, but definitely necessary reading in advance of the trip, good for nightlife planning, and perfect as small, pocket-sized gems that you can easily cart around while on tour.
A full range of stars for these city guides.
Fugitives by Suzanne Jacob is a novel translated by Sheila Fischman, who must be the best French-English translator in Canada.
Suzanne Jacob is a major voice in Quebec fiction and I wanted to read her latest (the 7th) novel. Fugitives is the story of four generations of women who are trying to escape the madness of their families. These are children who are taken advantage of by adults, children finding their way sexually, children finding their place in the world.
The chapters switch between different points of view and although it is evokative and mysterious, I didn’t quite get into this story. It’s a novel of the mind, in this case the minds of four women.
A worthwhile read, but I did have to stick with it.
Fugitives by Suzanne Jacob
translated by Sheila Fischman
published by Thomas Allen Publishers
THE SURFACE OF MEANING: BOOKS AND BOOKS DESIGN IN CANADA by Robert Bringhurst
CCSP ISBN 978-0-9738727-2-9
$60.00 hardcover
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From the Raincoast Books newsletter:
Quote: Robert Bringhurst takes us on another of his walking tours, this time through the bramble of English and French-Canadian books and book design, from the mid-18th Century to the present day. Along the way, he discovers a true “image trove” of identity, culture and history.
And he does what no other work on books and publications does: He creates a truly national survey of Canadian books by bringing Canada’s long history of Aboriginal story-telling into a context of “book”. It is a context that goes into the depths of our prehistory, far beyond the printed page.
I am a big fan of Bringhurst and a fan of book design. Penguin by Design by Philip Baines was a favourite read a couple of years ago.
Today was a snow day so we went for high tea at T Bakery.
