Category Archives: Books

Book Recommendations for Mother’s Day

This morning, I happened upon a tweet by Jael Richardson who expressed that she’s not too keen on what she’s seeing on book recommendations for Mother’s Day. I responded, interested in what she would recommend.

Richardson’s point is that she wouldn’t make a different recommendation to mothers than she would for anyone else. She writes, “My favourite books for ‘mothers’ are my favourite books for people.” Yep, true. She objects to the spring time covers and so on, and is asking people to think about what the marketers think a “Mother’s Day book” is. It’s a good and important point to make.

Cover of (M)Othering, a new anthology edited by Anne Sorbie and Heidi Grogan

Some of the other tweeters on the thread point out that Mother’s Day recommendations can be triggering, and this is so true for people who struggle with infertility or who have lost a child or children or have experienced any of the myriad things that can happen. Anne Sorbie, editor of the upcoming (M)othering Anthology with Inanna in Spring 2022 (with Heidi Grogan) has as inclusive an approach to mothering as I do and says in her tweet, “All people are and do (m)other” to capture that inclusivity. I had recommended her upcoming book in my reply because, well, I’m in it, and I think it’s a logical Mother’s Day book recommendation. I am certain it will be inclusive and wonderful.

The flip side of Richardson’s point is that books about mothers are good for people.

I can’t help thinking that sometimes readers are looking for books that reflect their reality. Sometimes, it is helpful, (and not to be too dramatic) even life-saving, to find someone else who captures something of your experience with their words. A colleague of mine, Diana Gustafson, edited a book called “Unbecoming Mothers: The Social Production of Maternal Absence,” which was groundbreaking and, if it weren’t so darned hard to find now, would be a great Mother’s Day recommendation. It’s about the stigmatization of mothers who come to live apart from their children, for whatever reason. Mothers who give up, surrender, or abandon their children are among the most stigmatized.

What we do to mothers. (Shakes head.)

So, while the recommended books for Mother’s Day may be problematic, it is part of a bigger problem: Mother’s Day itself is problematic. It’s not literally a Hallmark Holiday, but it might as well be. It’s easy to create a situation in which people feel excluded and judged. It becomes the opposite of celebratory. Most problematic of all is the way our culture thinks about mothers, limits them, expects too much of them and offers very little by way of support. Even the notion that mothers are women is, thankfully, being deconstructed as we challenge gender constructs and stereotypes. All of this is welcome.

I also can’t help thinking that marketers are gonna market. Any opportunity to recommend books will be seized. Let’s try and be thoughtful about it.

Top Ten books

I keep a running list of the ten books I would have if I could only have ten books. This year, I’ve replaced four books, so this has been a pretty remarkable reading year.

Or, I’ve changed.

It’s probably a little of both.

These books are like friends, and I have to be able to call on them at a moment’s notice. Just knowing they are on the shelf makes me feel better.

Here’s the current list:

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (So much wisdom and kindness that helps me to see a way to be in the world with gratitude and reciprocity.) *

The First Free Women, Matty Weingast Ed. (It’s like a companion book for me now, with such wisdom, and it feels so good in my hands. It’s missing from the picture because I’ve given it away–AGAIN–this time to a friend who just lost her mother. It’s the kind of book that can help with that.) *

Season of Fury and Wonder, Sharon Butala (Which replaced Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning, and thankfully, I don’t really have to choose between these two books since this list is not necessitated by lack of space or the need to keep everything I own in a back pack.) *

When I Was Young & In My Prime, Alayna Munce (Gosh, I loved it. I have to read it again, but for now, it’s on the list because–again–of the kindness that is evident throughout and the insight into the frailty of humans. *

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout (Oh, how I love a difficult woman.)

The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (I’ve studied it backwards and forwards, I wrote my MFA craft thesis on it, and never tire of it. A complex telling, a fascinating character, and such insight into the human condition. What is not to love?)

Fall On Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald (An epic, multi-generational story in which the plot twists and turns. The characters live on in my heart.)

Pathologies, Susan Olding (I return to this book time and again in amazement.)

A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (I have only read it once and have always meant to read it again, but now I am afraid that I won’t love it as much as I once did, that it will seem inevitable to me, and somehow tired, but it stays on the list.)

In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje (It’s the hometown setting–Toronto in all it’s glory, the historicity, the complexity of the telling and the flaws, the beautiful flaws, which in the hands of a writer like this makes one wonder if they are flaws at all.)

(* new addtions this year!)

Late addition: How could I have forgotten The Summer Book, Tove Jansson? My MFA mentor, Sandra Scofield, had me read it and I am so grateful. I just took it down from the shelf to read again as summer ends. It is lovely. So make that eleven books.

What am I reading? Alayna Munce and Joan Thomas

It’s such a pleasure to read a good book. I’ve got two to recommend: Alayna Munce’s When I Was Young & In My Prime and Joan Thomas’s Curiosity.

I don’t know what the heck I was doing in 2005 that I missed When I was Young & In My Prime. I’m trying to think back. Oh yeah, I was recovering from cancer. So I guess that explains it. But this book is everything I love—a multi-generational tale told in multiple points of view. This is exactly what I studied throughout my MFA, and how I missed it then is another puzzle. It will forever be listed in the same category as The Stone Diaries and Fall On Your Knees. So it’s THAT good. But it just goes to show, some of the best books just don’t get onto our radar.

What do I love about this book? Munce is a poet and it shows in her exacting and evocative prose. She allows her characters to make mistakes, to grow, to fall back, to grow again. They are so real. There is such a great depth of kindness depicted here. For example, the main character has a job bathing seniors in the nursing home. It is the every-day-ness of kindness that I love in this book, the call to deep human connection and the depiction of the frailty of it. I love the failure of the characters to always know exactly what should come next. This is to true to life.

Munce also has an interest in how memory works in this book, a a particular obsession of mine having lost most of it. The way she depicts the loss of memory, both from an individual’s mind and from collective history is thought provoking and so very real.

I had a friend recently say, “We don’t know how to die anymore.” She meant that we have forgotten or lost sight of the rituals around death. We don’t know how to let someone go. We’ve lost the grace in it. Munce is a writer who knows that grace. I feel the loss of the main character’s grandfather as though he were my own. To create empathy so skillfully is a true accomplishment.

And on the FAF scale (feminist as fuck scale) it ranks a 5 out of 5.

Joan Thomas’s latest novel, Five Wives is what I should be reading, but I had to go back first to Curiosity. This book slays.

Image of Hardcover of Curiosity

It is the imagined story of real life Mary Anning, who sold curiosities from the sea that she found in the cliffs by the town of Lyme Regis. It is set in the time before Darwin’s theories were accepted and her discoveries are inexplicable given the understandings of the day. Ammonites and other fossils are sold as charms, with equally charming stories about what protections they offer the buyer. A particular find referred to as “Devil’s toes” is a favourite of mine, and I have no doubt that it is also historically accurate. That is the kind of faith Thomas earns in the reader.

What Thomas gives us is a ripper of a tale: an impoverished girl making her living, making her way, going beyond her station—however you want to put it—within a world where men continually use her discoveries and her knowledge for their own advancement. She is never given proper credit. As Thomas notes in the Author’s Note, the effort to establish Mary Anning’s scientific credentials did not begin until the 1930s. Yet she emerges as a figure more worthy of the reader’s respect than any of those “scientists” in the fields of geology and “undergroundology” that are all around her. She dreams of being recognized by the Royal Society, but such recognition will never happen and she becomes a kind of Pygmalion character, too fancy in her learning and speech to be fully accepted by townsfolk and too poor to ever be accepted by the upper class.

The book gets a five star FAF rating from me. Like all the best historical fiction, it is oddly contemporary in its concerns. Women still struggle for the recognition their work deserves. And the class issues gives it that “intersectionality” that is part of real life. The author has a sociological eye that I appreciate. Her characters are set in a society in a time and place and we learn what the rules are and how they are all constrained by them.

What is particularly compelling to me is the way in which Thomas weaves the details of her research into a compelling story that never feels weighed down by that same research. From the use of common terms of the time and the occasional drift into contemporaneous dialect, to the research of figures like Lamarck and the actual letters and imagined letters of Henry De La Beche, to the explication of theological issues of the day, it all serves to move the story and enrich our sense of the characters. It is a tour de force.

I have had this book in my possession since 2010, but it was not until now that I read it. This happens sometimes. Now, on to Five Wives! But first I have to edit my own book. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take me ten years to get back to Five Wives.

The Plague and the pandemic

I’ve been reading The Plague by Albert Camus. I’m reading the Penguin Modern Classics edition, translated from the original French by Stuart Gilbert. The parallels between the plague imagined by Camus and our pandemic today are not perfect, but they are striking.


As the plague begins, the people of the town of Oran are not taking precautions. The narrator notes, “Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others, they forgot to be modest—that was all—and thought that everything still was possible for them: which presupposed that pestilence were impossible.” (34) What an interesting word—modest. The narrator goes on, “They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.”

What a thought. Fancied yourself free, did you? A plague will put that to rest. So will a pandemic.

The last time the people of Oran said goodbye to their loved ones, their friends, their colleagues, or anyone at all, they had been quite sure they would see them again soon. They were “duped by our blind human faith in the near future and little if at all diverted from their normal interests” by early evidence of the plague. (57) Sounds familiar.

I can’t help wondering about my last leave-taking of my daughter. Was it good enough—that is, good enough to see us through our current exile? But how could it be? Love is an every-day thing, a minute-by-minute grace. It can’t be hoarded and then meted out by the teaspoonful, hoping to make it last until more love is available. It’s not like flour or bananas or toilet paper.

And that is why, perhaps, Camus philosophizes about the nature of love as the novel starts, about the very purpose of our lives. His townsfolk sleep-walked through their lives before the plague. “The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, ‘doing buisness’. Naturally they don’t eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, sea-bathing, going to the pictures. But, very sensibly, they reserve these pastimes for Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and employ the rest of the week in making money, as much as possible.” (5-6) And then they “fritter away” the rest of their lives at amusements. Perhaps his most damning condemnation of them is when he says that they “love each other without knowing much about it.” (6) The narrator takes pains to explain that, aside from some unique geography, the town of Oran could be any town in it’s banality and complacency. And so, Camus gives a description of all of us.

What really strikes me about the book is how well Camus captures the early days of the plague, days much like what we have been through in the past two months. The townspeople “were in a quite exceptional state of mind and, though in their heart of hearts they were far from recognizing the enormity of what had come on them, they couldn’t help feeling, for obvious reasons, that decidedly something had changed. Nevertheless, many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits, as yet. Plague was for them an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come. Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn’t yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence; when they forgot the lives which until now it had been given them to lead. In short, they were waiting for the turn of events.”

We all know people like this. The refuseniks. The ones who won’t socially distance. The ones who keep arranging dates on Bumble. Think of Georgia, reopening barber shops and bowling alleys. Think of the zombie-like crowd pounding on the doors of the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, demanding…what? Demanding an end to the pandemic? Demanding their government ignore the pandemic and allow them to continue on with life as usual?

Camus saw it all, way back in 1947.

He writes, “At first the fact of being cut off from the outside world was accepted with a more or less good grace; much as people would have put up with any other temporary inconvenience that interfered with only a few of their habits, but, now they had abruptly become aware that they were undergoing a sort of incarceration under the blue dome of sky, already beginning to sizzle in the fires of summer, they had a vague sensation that their whole lives were threatened by the present turn of events, and in the evening, when the cooler air revived their energy, this feeling of being locked in like criminals prompted them sometimes to foolhardy acts.” (85)

Another startling correlation to today in The Plague is that those who speak truth, those who speak cautiously, those who ask for restraint, are condemned. As Camus notes, “there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.” (111) And so we see in our own time how the knives come out for the scientists. Dr. Tam is pilloried and subject to racist attacks. Why? Because she dares to say that two plus two equals four. Meanwhile, the provincial government sends out its recommendations in increments, afraid to be the bearer of the terrible news that, “No, school will not reopen this year.”

In terms of what the plague means, it has no clear meaning. If anything, it means “the same thing over and over again.” (134) Our days are the same, our activities limited. But if we are honest, weren’t they always? This is the point Camus makes at the start: we live repetitive lives, confined by the dictates of forces around us we fail to recognize. We swim in David Foster Wallace’s water and fail to even notice that we are drowning in it.

In the fictional plague, it seems that regardless of precautions, “sooner or later contagion did its work.” (145) I can’t accept the nihilism of that particular observation. We have proof already that we can limit the damage. But like the townsfolk of Oran, we whine. Can we re-open? Can we go back to normal. We assume, wrongly, that normal is there waiting for us. But normal is gone. Normal is something we can’t go back to. We behave like children in the back seat of the car, hitting our brother and whining, “Are we there yet?” No, we are not.

“The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.” (148) It will not end soon. We are a year or more from a vaccination, if there ever is one. Meanwhile, as Camus says, “the only means of fighting a plague is–common decency,” which the character of the doctor describes simply as doing his job. (136) If there is one thing I believe in, it is common decency. So I must do my job. That is, stay in. Socially distance. Don’t whine.

We are a long way from the doom that ultimately descends on the townsfolk of Oran. After months of plague, “only shadows remained to them of what their love had been and meant, they now came ot learn that even shadows can waste away, losing the faint hues of life that memory may give…. In this respect, they had adapted themselves to the very condition of the plague, all the more potent for its mediocrity. None of us was capable any longer of an exalted emotion; all had trite, monotonous feelings.” (149)

The struggle, our sturggle, is not merely to remain indoors, to socially distance, to obey the best policies laid down by public health officials, (although that is a struggle to be sure). The struggle is to remember all that is truly good and important in life.

There were flaws in our lives before the pandemic. We were, as the townsfolk were, lost in some kind of neo-liberal fantasy. The bubble has been burst. The pandemic has shown us ourselves, our failure to care for the most vulnerable, the utter foolhardiness of our notions of economic strength. It has shown us what was wrong with how we were. As Camus notes, “destruction is an easier, speedier process than reconstruction.” (218) We took our normal lives apart fast–faster than any of us could have imagined. When we put them back together, lets all take care to ensure we build something we actually want. We have time–right now–to imagine what that might be. Let’s take it.

History Wrapped in Art and Craft: The Hungry Grass by A. Mary Murphy

A. Mary Murphy’s The Hungry Grass is gorgeous. It sweeps me up with its vivid images. It has altered, forever, my ideas about the Irish potato famine and those who lived through it, died in it, or fled it. Gone are the dry, two sentence descriptions of faceless Irish I was given in school texts. Murphy has given me something so much better. She has given me history wrapped in art and craft. She has brought these people and their world to life. The Hungry Grass

The book length poem is 2295 lines, each with seven syllables. I don’t pretend to understand poets and what would possess a person to submit themselves to such a strict form; I only enjoy the incredible result. Murphy mixes Irish dialect with English and seamlessly embeds meticulously researched details into the work which describes fifteen years in the lives of her ancestors. In the first pages, we see the life of Irish Tenant families before the famine, carried through each season with its particularities, its work, its religious observances, and its customs until a full year passes. Life before the famine is hardscrabble but it is also full of joy. The narrator marries in the spring and by the next spring, gives birth to a child, her little life so precarious and precious. The reader knows what the stakes are here. Love is love, whether it is in 1834 or 2016. And so is hunger.

Although the details place us firmly in the Irish potato famine, the poem’s richness cannot help but tie it thematically to all famines, all mass migrations, all displacements, all droughts, and all victims of soulless and intransigent governments.

The poem starts, “And it is how it happened / before fields of hungry grass / grew up over all the world / pinching us with starvation” and I am hooked. “Pinching” is such an excellent verb to attach to “starvation.” I feel it in my body, in my stomach. I read on and am shown the thousand-year churchyard, the neeps and nettles, the furrows in the soil ready for planting, the Liecester rams, cormorants, perch and corncrakes crying in the meadow and even a trespassing goose. I am fully immersed in this world of the past and given a close up view as it falls apart.

I was fortunate to hear Murphy read from this book last week at an Inanna Publications event at Owl’s Nest Books in Calgary. Hearing her read, hearing the lilt of the Irish, and experiencing the flow of the language coming seven syllables at a time was a delight. Murphy makes use of all the senses to put us in this time and place. I hear the birds and feel the breeze. I am, like Murphy was during her research, in the bog. And I am hungry.

Thank you for this book, A. Mary Murphy. This is art.

Ill Nature by Joy Williams

Joy Williams is a writer I feel I should learn more about. This is an odd impulse for me. I never know much about the personal lives of the writers I love unless they happen to write memoir. I would rather focus on their writing than on them and let the writing stand on its own. I was listening to wonderful interview with John Irving recently on CBC in which he says “I have lived almost entirely in my imagination and have been free to do so because my own life has been staggeringly boring, much as I hoped it would be.” Writers should be allowed to be as dull as anyone else. Nevertheless, many of my writer friends study the lives and habits of writers they admire and even know about their agents and publishers. Last night a colleague told me that a casual email exchange I was in the midst of was with the agent of a group of particularly famous writers. I had no idea. Would knowing have altered what I said? I like to think not. I like to think I write and speak to everyone with the same measure of respect, but I admit I went back and reread the exchange with a new eye and winced over a typo. Oh dear. But I always wince over typos.

Anyway, back to Joy Williams. All of this is to make clear that I know very little about Joy Williams except that I joy williams ill naturefell in love with her essays in Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals. Kirkus calls it “savage, serious, hilarious, passionate, loving, and lyrical.” The book jacket says the writing has guts and passion, two things I admire in any writing. Her wit is sharp and scathing. As with A.K. Hellum’s Listening to Trees which I considered in my last post, the essays demand that we become more connected to the natural world. Perhaps I cannot help loving writing that dedicates itself to this theme.

But it is more than that. Look at three opening sentences (and also take a minute to revel in the titles of these essays). From “Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp”: “I don’t want to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately–that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much.” Of course, she is talking about herself. Saying she isn’t simply reminds us that she is. The shift to second person is brilliant, enabling a kind of dissociated state from which we can see and judge ourselves, and do so harshly. Such capacity for harsh judgement, having been built, stays with us far beyond the first essay when the second person is no longer in use. Williams is no enabler. There is no mollycoddling, no “We’re all doing what we can,” because we’re not. We’re doing nothing like what we can.

Look at this opening sentence from “Neverglades”: “That the Everglades still exists is a collective illusion shared by both those who care those who don’t.” I read this essay and other works by Williams about Florida before my own visit there. It altered my vision. I knew what I was seeing was a sad shadow of what used to be, a pathetic remnant of a once glorious world “so depleted of its original abundance and ecological function that it was no longer the Everglades at all. The gentle, natural, rain-driven sheet flow that once sustained it had been replaced by erratic pulses of water, which came in gorged polluted flushes, too much or too little, and always in the wrong season.” So much is conveyed in so few words–specific detail, the concrete comparison between past and the present, loss, even grief.

And from “Sharks and Suicide”: “There’s something out there waiting for us, and that’s the truth.” The essay captures our paranoia, our fear. “Wasps or abandoned refrigerators. Dehydration, myxedema, and the three-hundred-year-old elm on the curve. Explosions, and wrecks and electrocutions. Funny-tasting meat treats.” Zeroing in on sharks, she notes that sharks are “known to create concerns out of all proportion to the amount of injury or loss of life incurred statistically.” Sound familiar? Isn’t this sort of like what’s got us all taking our shoes off at the airport and having our hand lotion seized? But wait. This was published in 2001. Williams is not only scathing, savage, hilarious and all the other adjectives; she is prescient.

Is this about Williams or is it about the writing? Is my distinction artificial? Probably, especially when it comes to personal essays. It’s impossible not to learn about a writer who writes personal essays. I will move on to her novels now. I’m particularly interested in a work called The Changeling, a novel published in 1978 that went out of print and was finally reprinted thirty years later. The internet says that it got scuttled by a particularly bad review in the NYT but that it was ahead of its time. I’ll get back to you. I have an idea that it probably was.

Joy Williams. Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals. New York: The Lyons Press. 2001.